[The Bronx Zoo] is managed by the Wildlife Conservation Society, which boasts of running more than 500 projects in sixty-five countries through global field offices whose employees work to advance sustainable development; address issues of global climate change, health and well-being, and natural-resource use; and pursue other noble-sounding objectives that attest to the totality of man’s dominion over the lesser beasts.I'm not entirely sure what the zoo is acting as a metaphor for in this article, but it's an interesting read.
On the wall of Breheny’s small corner office is a painting of a leopard massacring a pheasant. There is also a fish tank stocked with tropical fish. I am left with the impression of a grown-up boy whose mental age is approximately seven.Yeah, this did not fill me with optimism. Is this supposed to be droll? Cutesy? It just comes across as tone deaf and shitty. While there are a few moments of genuine humor and even some insight in the article, there are at least as many of these narrative turds to step around.
- "Joe works nights at the zoo commissary with his friend Quincy Banks, a sweet baby-faced man with brush-cut hair and a solid build who doesn’t mind the long hours the two men spend delivering food to zoo animals. It is safer to be inside the zoo at night than out on the streets, he explains, adding, without rancor, 'Animals eat better than us.'" [This is the least distracting to me.]Is the author really going to walk around the zoo taking random swipes at social safety net policy, the emptiness of suburbia, and gentrification? "Oh, crickets -- that reminds me of something else that's wrong with society!"
- "She enters the room with a tray of crickets, whose loud night chirrups terrified me as a child more than the police sirens of lower-middle-income Brooklyn did before my parents moved us to the greener pastures of northern New Jersey, where the streets were as empty at night as they were during the day."
- "The process by which the unwitting doves raise their progeny might serve as a useful parable for the wimpy urban parents of high-achieving kids who have displaced the native residents of my old Brooklyn neighborhood and driven real estate prices into the stratosphere."
"The idea that the earth has become a functional extension of humankind... is a new beginning of biblical proportion in which the old outmoded human concept of nature has no place. As inhabitants of a new epoch, which geologists have named the Anthropocene, we should properly understand nature as a sequence of enclosures like parks and zoos that provide their inhabitants with graduated levels of protection from toxins, diseases, and other man-made threats. The yearning for contact with a nature that exists outside ourselves, like the desire for love, may be hard-wired into our brains, a fossilized remnant of a prior stage of human evolution that no longer helps us navigate the world in which we live.I wonder if author David Samuels will feel relieved in some way by climate change ("nature exists outside of human control after all") or if he thinks that it proves his point ("even the climate is now human-controlled"). I'd guess the latter, since part of the Anthropocene theory is that toxins are now worldwide, and he considers drought to be evidence of human control.
...[A]t the Bronx Zoo...giddy amusement-park tricks offer a measure of relief from the knowledge that nature is only another man-made illusion." [My emphasis to help with skimming]
In this way, designated wilderness areas become prisons, in which the imperium incarcerates unassimilable wildness in order to complete itself, to finalize its reign. This is what is meant when it is said that there is no wilderness anymore in the contemporary world, in the technological imperium. There is, or will be soon, only a network of wilderness reservations in which wildness has been locked up.If the concerns in that article are partially what bothers him, maybe it will come as a partial relief when weather itself comes to feel quite Other? It will be increasingly obvious that wild nature doesn't exist only inside wilderness preserves but that we live within it.
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Pretty sure this is the saddest sentence ever.
posted by Fizz at 11:18 AM on January 20 [9 favorites]