A Look Back at Life and Death in the Age of Covid

“In the 50,000 years that followed — a time four to eight times shorter than the entire length of time the Neanderthals existed — the replacement crowd not only settled on almost every habitable speck of land on the planet, they developed technology that allowed them to go to the moon and beyond.”

— Svante Pääbo

It is loss which teaches us the worth of things, Arthur Schopenhauer once said, and he may have had a point that reaches back to the earliest origins of humankind.

The dead were buried in a cave, more than a quarter-of-a-mile from daylight. DNA analysis has dated them back some 430,000 years, which would make them — if not the oldest exactly — certainly among the oldest found evidence of burial rituals. They were Homo heidelbergensis, our evolutionary cousins, an extinct subspecies of archaic humans. Some researchers believe heidelbergensis gave rise to Homo neandertalensis — the Neanderthals. The site, in Spain’s Sima de los Huesos “Pit of Bones,” an archaeological site in the Atapuerca Mountains almost equidistant between northern Portugal and the French border, is the final resting place of some 28 early humans, fractured into more than 5,000 pieces. Palaeontologists found the remains buried among bear fossils, plenty of mud, and a 15cm (six-inch), teardrop-shaped hand axe, which they dubbed, with a wry wink and a nod no doubt, “Excalibur.”

Sima de los Huesos has accounted for some of the most valuable discoveries known to science, and the knowledge continues to have far-reaching implications, even in the Age of Covid. The Neanderthal ancestors may have perished during the Middle Pleistocene period but the presence is very keenly felt today. 

A recent essay in Discover magazine asked, rhetorically, when it was that ancient humans began to understand death — one of those existential questions that keeps both philosopher and scientists awake at night.

Early chimpanzee studies — by Jane Goodall and others — have observed a wide range of

reactions to death among apes, but it wasn’t until the past year that researchers at Japan’s Kyoto University collected all the known data into a single review and found that, with experience and age, apes learn death is final. A dead ape will not wake.

There is not the same evidence to suggest, though, that those same apes know that all animals — themselves included — will die one day.

“Whereas we, fortunately or unfortunately, are aware of it,” Kyoto primatologist and study author James Anderson told Discover.

Conscious of mortality, our ancestors created ways to remember the dead and the concept of the afterlife was born. The tradition of returning to a burial place again and again took hold, as a way of staying connected with the  past, reaching out to the ancestors in perpetuity.

These are unsettled times. The SARS-Cov-2 pandemic, which has reached around the globe and affected virtually every person’s life and daily routine, has revived interest in ancient humankind and burial/death rituals, not just among the researchers who study palaeontology and anthropology for a living but for ordinary, everyday people who suddenly find themselves caught up in unpredictable and uncontrollable events.

That’s entirely understandable if you choose to believe, as many researchers now do, that our collective awareness of mortality may have evolved before we did. To the well-organized mind, J.K. Rowling famously said, death is but the next great adventure.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/when-did-ancient-humans-begin-to-understand-death

©Andrew Martin-Pixabay

Big and Small: My Own Personal Picks for a New Big 5

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

— Margaret Mead

The cycle of life goes on, in the wilderness. Look closely, though, and you’ll notice that In the background, ecotourism and the relatively small community of wildlife photographers have gone quiet. The long rains are dissipating in the world-famous — and heavily trammelled — Maasai Mara in the Mara-Serengeti ecosystem but, this time, when the wildebeest migration passes through the dusty plains during the dry tourist season of July through October, visitors will be notable by their absence.

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and attendant travel warnings and societal lockdowns has led to an inevitable spate of poaching, as desperate people resort to desperate measures to feed themselves and their families.

The calculated, clear-headed view — to anyone who’s willing to read the science — is that the old world order, economically and financially, won’t return for five years. If at all.

Nature and wildlife photographers are staying close to their home bases, looking inward, going over old archival files and thinking outside-the-box to come up with new creative projects. Today, most traditional galleries remain in lockdown, starved of visitors and starved of conversation, except online, where the conversation has rarely, if ever, been livelier.

The New Big 5 — a modern-day reworking of the traditional Big Five of big-game hunting in Africa, a concept that hit its peak in the early 1900s and has been losing public favour ever since — is a case in point. No one would begrudge the lion, the elephant, the rhino, the cape buffalo or the leopard their rightful in the canon of wildlife photography, hunting or no hunting.

These are complex times, though, and the very best of nature photography has always focused on issues rather than aesthetics — images with deeper meaning than mere pretty pictures. Conservation photography, of the kind practiced by Cristina Mittermeier, Nick Brandt, Steve Winter and combat-photographer and photojournalist Brent Stirton, is the new calling.

A looming mass extinction — it will be the planet’s sixth, the first human-made and already dubbed the Holocene or Anthropocene extinction — has inspired renewed energy and human inventiveness among those who have vowed to spread the message through photography, whether it’s a polar bear trying to find food on an ever-shrinking ice cap or a dead rhino with it’s horn chainsawed off to feed the lucrative black market in traditional medicine. (Despite its debatable properties, and they are debatable, keratin, the

primary substance of rhino horn, is not a cure for cancer, nor a reliable treatment for Covid-19, but that hasn’t stopped the black market from taking after it like a Sinaloan drug cartel onto a less costly, more profitable mix of marching powder.

If I were to choose my own New Big 5, I would focus on those animals that are both iconic and recognizable to the public at large, to better and more effectively promote the message of conservation not just to Europe and North America but around the world. My newly revised Big 5 would feature the lion, the tiger, the elephant, the polar bear and the mountain gorilla.

The New Big 5 project itself (visitors to newbig5.com can choose their own picks) is encouraging people to think more creatively, not by focusing only on the sublime and the beautiful but on the overlooked and taken-for-granted, to find a deeper meaning. The world’s remaining wild places, and the wildlife within, are those that fill us with wonder and gratitude for the beauty which has been created from nature. Philosophers of the digital age have written of the power of the photograph to reach beyond the formality of technological reproduction to evoke in the viewer feelings of genuine emotion: anger at what we’re doing to the natural world, and hope for a better, wiser future.

If asked to look beyond the obvious — as much as I grew up admiring lions and tigers and elephants and polar bears — and compelled to choose five lesser-known  animals that represent the issues and concerns facing species survival in the early 21st century, in the Age of Covid, my New Big 5 would look somewhat different than the norm.

I would focus, in no particular order, on the pangolin, the African hunting dog (aka painted wolf), the red colobus monkey, the honey badger (or its northern equivalent, the wolverine), and the ring-tailed lemur.

Luminaries who have weighed in on their own personal picks for a New Big 5 include Djimon Hounsou, Joanna Lumley, Virginia McKenna, Jane Goodall and Moby, whose eclectic and highly original picks include the coyote, the bobcat, the rattlesnake, the black bear and the common, ordinary, everyday rabbit, a favourite of children’s literature and arguably one of the most taken-for-granted animals on the planet.

Perhaps that’s the point.

Choose your own, at newbig5.com. Results will be revealed later in the year, pandemic or no pandemic, lockdown or no lockdown.

©Alex Strachan

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A New Big 5 for a New World

“We can heal some of the harm we’ve inflicted.”

— Jane Goodall, NewBig5.com

When in Africa, do as the Romans do. That, at least, was the way of the world until the animals started dying out, and the idea of Africa’s so-called “Big Five” of big animals  became the focus of increased scrutiny.

The Big Five — and this is the part tourist guides in Africa seldom tell you — are not the five largest African mammals, as is widely assumed, but rather the five animals most difficult to hunt. That’s why the hippo and giraffe — “big” by anyone’s measure — were left out, and the cape buffalo and relatively small — though elusive and breathtakingly beautiful — leopard made the list.

With people’s horizons expanded in the new media age, and with wildlife photography going through a creative renaissance, thanks to digital technology and mirrorless cameras as quiet as a breeze through tall grass, the idea of hunting big game for the trophy wall has gone the way of black-and-white TV and printed morning newspapers.

Today, the very idea of shooting a buffalo and mounting its stuffed head on the den wall seems like a relic from a past age.

So now, a group of the world’s leading wildlife photographers, with the blessing of leading conservationists and field biologists like Jane Goodall, have proposed a new “Big 5” — the most cherished and representative iconic species to photograph, not just from Africa but from around the world.

The vote is by public acclimation and anyone can vote, by visiting https://www.newbig5.com  and casting a ballot. The site has helpfully compiled a list of candidates — just tick the appropriate boxes — or you can make your own suggestion.

The site is no mere Twitter poll, though. The site features essays from many of the world’s leading nature photographers (Brent Stirton, Tom Mangelson, Ami Vitale, Tim Laman, Nick Brandt, Joel Sartore and others) and conservationists (Goodall, Iain Douglas-Hamilton), news, a lively podcast (hosted by UK project director and wildlife photographer Graeme Green and available on iTunes, among other services), interviews and photographers' galleries.

It’s exhaustive in scope, a life-affirming project that, to cite the project’s mission statement, doubles as a celebration of wildlife and wildlife photography and a gentle, show-don’t-tell reminder that we can indeed save the world’s wildlife provided we act now.

First, some back-story.

The original concept of the Big Five came out of Africa, an unnatural side effect of the big game hunting that drove early European explorations of the so-called Dark Continent, as mapmakers of the time liked to call it.

Africa was — and is — unique, in that it’s one of just two places on Earth (the other being southern Asia) that remains home to  much of the world’s megafauna — the big animals — like elephant, lion, buffalo, rhino and leopard.

As palaeontologists, zoological archeologists  and other earth scientists have warned, other continents had their own megafauna, but a

successive wave of mass extinctions over the past 50,000 years wiped out everything from mastodons and sabre-tooth cats to, in Australia’s case, echidnas the size of sheep, marsupial tapirs and giant, short-faced kangaroos.

Climate change and other natural causes were a major cause of these early mass extinctions, but as humanity developed it became clear that the more recent extinctions followed with the arrival of humans. That was no coincidence.

Today, right now, the survival of the natural world’s remaining iconic animals depends not on big-game hunting and those who would argue that hunting helps pay the bills for conservation (it doesn’t) but rather on ecotourism and wildlife photography.

Wildlife photography is critical to the 21st-century equation because it brings nature into the homes of those who, either through economic or practical circumstances, might otherwise never have the chance to see a lion or elephant in its natural environment. The best nature photography inspires and incentivizes us to get involved, whether it’s by private donation or simply living a greener, more environmentally friendly life, in order to help save what’s left.

The original Big Five is a throwback to a past era an era where Ernest Hemingway’s green hills of Africa were thick with game, but that era, like Hemingway himself, is in the past. Big game hunting is a relic of the first half of the 20th century and has no more place in a 21st-century world than black-and-white TV and printed morning newspapers.

The New Big 5  — the numerical “5” is more marketable and packs a bigger visual punch — takes at least part of its inspiration from the World Wildlife Fund’s famous panda logo. In terms of the bigger picture, it’s about the bigger picture: the “world” in world wildlife. The Sixth Mass Extinction, which ecologists, field biologists and zoologists warn is already upon us, is a world-wide event, and will affect virtually every remaining species in the wild world. The New Big 5 focuses not just on Africa but on Asia, northern Europe, the polar regions, Australia and the Americas. Even in Africa, though, there are critically endangered iconic species that could use the attention, from the cheetah, the  world’s fastest land mammal and genetically one of the oldest predators on the continent, to the African cape hunting dog, recently renamed the painted dog or painted wolf, perhaps the closest spiritual relation the continent has to Old World wolves.

The year so far has reminded us that life is tenuous and the future uncertain. The world’s remaining wild species — indeed every species on Earth, including we humans — face a critical 10 years. What we choose to do now may well determine the fate of life on Earth. More than a million species face extinction, from iconic animals like the lion and cheetah to the “unsung heroes” that include rare and endangered frogs birds and lizards.

The New Big 5 project posits that it’s not too late — yet. Change is possible. Provided, that is, we find the collective will.

©Alex Strachan

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Night at the Museum, in the Age of Covid

“We must stay six feet apart from each other, but not from the Earth.”

— Christina Nichol, author, Waiting for the Electricity

Airline travel has ground to a halt, together with all the grubby side effects associated with it — the kabuki theatre of airport security; 300+ passengers crammed into a departure lounge designed to comfortably accommodate 40 or so; hostile flight attendants working cattle class as though it were a prison shift; the passenger in the seat next to you spewing germs like a bad scene out of 12 Monkeys, and so on.

That said, technology is allowing just about anyone with a working internet connection to visit virtually anywhere in the world the blink of an electronic eye. Searches for the phrase “virtual tour” jumped sevenfold between February and March, from 1,300 to more than 10,000, according to Google’s Keyword Planner, which is a lot of searching to ease the boredom of lockdown.

And while London’s Natural History Museum failed to make Forbes’ largely US-centric list of the world’s 15 most-visited virtual tours — though the National Gallery, also in London, did clock in at No. 10, no pun intended — there’s something about nature that proves especially appealing during these times of lockdowns and sheltering-in-place.

The Natural History Museum was already well on its way to digitizing its eye-filling displays long before Covid-19 unleashed itself on an unsuspecting world in late February. 

The august museum, first established in 1881 and now residing in sprawling heritage buildings at the corner of Kensington and Chelsea in London SW7, launched an online programme dubbed the Urban Nature Project late last year, alongside a five-year plan to renovate and redesign the museum’s five-acre outdoor gardens. The idea is to create a scientific “living lab” that will focus on urban wildlife. The project involves both education and research, which will be shared with scientists and other museums around the world. The project is due for completion in 2023, Covid or no Covid, and has the backing of not just museum donors and the board of trustees but a coalition of museums and wildlife organizations from Australia to Zimbabwe.

The Covid crisis has jumpstarted a comprehensive redesign and reboot of the museum’s online service, complete with an interactive guided tour conducted by longtime patron David Attenborough of the museum’s famed Hintze Hall, where visitors gather under a 25-metre skeleton of a blue whale, the world’s largest mammal, suspended in the air, before moving on to other halls in the museum. Among the interactive highlights: a mock-up of an American mastodon, the elephant’s Ice Age ancestor, a rock as old as the solar system, a 122-million-year-old Mantellisaurus and one of the most complete dinosaur fossils ever discovered, and fossilized trees that span hundreds of millions of years of our planet’s geological history.

It’s the blue whale, though, that’s likely to draw the most attention, in person and online, in part because it’s still with us today, albeit in dwindling numbers, and in part because, of all the world’s animals, it perhaps best represents Attenborough’s still-beating heart. (The blue whale’s heart itself weighs some 182 kilograms  or 400 lbs., and beats about 13 times a minute. That’s noteworthy because research scientists working managed to capture the first recording of a blue whale’s beating heart only last summer, by attaching a heart rate monitor to a whale swimming and diving in California’s Monterey Bay. This isn’t junk science, either; the research team’s findings were published in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.)

The best online experiences are playful and light-hearted, as well as educational and edifying. Here’s Sir David playfully introducing the Night at the Museum-inspired trailer to his IMAX feature Natural History Museum Alive.

It’s not the same as being there. It never is. In the early days of the Sixth Mass Extinction, however, during the Age of Covid, it’s perhaps the best any of us have a right to expect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWS-lDLQmmA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4sp5XLavos

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Creativity Doesn’t Wait for That Perfect Moment. Cue Covid.

“Your grandparents were called to war. You’re being called to sit on your couch. You can do this.”

— @SaraJefry, Twitter

Tussen Kunst, Dutch art curator extraordinaire and self-admitted bored dude, came up with a nifty idea to while away the time during ongoing the coronavirus lockdown — an idea Los Angeles’ Getty Museum and others enthusiastically embraced.

Or about as enthusiastically as social distancing will allow, that is, in these unsettled, and unsettling times.

The Getty Museum, while not the first to pick up on the idea, helped it grow in popularity by posing a creative challenge to their followers.

We challenge you to recreate a work of art with objects (and people) in your home, the museum posted on its Instagram page.

1. Choose your favourite artwork.

2. Fine three things lying around your house.

3. Recreate the artwork, using those items.

For his part, Kunst added a fourth request — share at @tussenkunstenquarantaine, aka “Tussen Kunst in quarantine,” in case the direct translation eluded you.

Naturally, the idea has gone, erm, viral. And not just in North America. A wildly popular Facebook group in Russia has people recreating famous paintings as well, while in isolation. The coronavirus quarantine, far from putting a damper on creativity, has instead done the exact opposite: The creativity, the artistic talent — and yes, the humour too — has been dazzling to see. 

The influence of Covid-19, aka SARS-CoV-2, has weighed heavily on some would-be artists, with toilet paper and facial masks playing a prominent role in some recreated artworks. Isolation art challenges are now a thing, judging from a surprisingly long — and growing — list of quarantine art clubs who use hashtags like #DrawFromADistance and #QuarantineArtClub. (The hashtags are so others can join in.)

There’s the Emily Balsley Illustration Studio’s @emilybluestar Instagram page, as well as @wonderfall (Portland, Oregon illustrator Sarah Beth Morgan); @carsonellis (“Drawing and drawing and drawing”); @thejealouscurator, (#30dayartquarantine by Danielle Krysa, a 30-day art challenge “brought to you by the coronavirus”); and Mo Willems’ “Lunch Doodles with Mo Willems,” who describes himself playfully as the Kennedy Center Education’s “Artist-in-Residence at Home.” Always think of your audience, Willems counsels, never think for your audience.

Tell the Russians!

If nothing else, this goes to show that even during a pandemic, in the age of social media one is never truly alone.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/izoizolyacia/

https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/getty-artworks-recreated-with-household-items-by-creative-geniuses-the-world-over/

https://www.instagram.com/tussenkunstenquarantaine/

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@TussenKunstEnQuarantaine/Instagram

@TussenKunstEnQuarantaine/Instagram

@TussenKunstEnQuarantaine/Instagram