Big cats and stuff

There is an extract in today’s Guardian taken from an upcoming book by George Monbiot, called Feral. Judging by the Amazon review, it seems to cover a similar area to Mike Davis’s essay Maneaters of the Sierra Madre, from his Ecology of Fear (civilisation-nature, environment-consciousness etc). The extract is about big cat sightings in Britain.

There is no big cat population in Britain. Though there may be feral big cats loose in the countryside at any point in time they will be individuals. Big cats are elusive. The most commonly described cat resembles the black leopard – a very shy creature. They also are creatures of habit. There are no signs, nothing out there, carcasses, dung, urine, footprints and so on, that suggest big cats exist in any number. But there are still 2,000 sightings a year. Many communities have a legendary cat. The majority of sightings though are almost certainly of slightly larger than normal domestic cats. 

Humanity of course arose in East Africa. Monbiot suggests there would be an evolutionary advantage to quickly recognising the feline form. Perhaps there is a Cat Exaggeration Gene, but then Monbiot also suggests big cats represent a reaction against domesticity and an urge towards wildness. While he may be on to something I should think that urge is stronger in George Monbiot than Average Joe. I would think it’s more specifically to do with a process that has its basis in an alienated civilisation.

The ancients lived with a natural world that was far beyond their ken. Human cultures tend to personify phenomena beyond its human control, thunder is the wrath of god, comets and eclipses are ominous portents, the forest or the outback becomes a dreamland; these are just examples.

This has been complimented by human civilisation, which now musters forces not only far beyond individual reckoning but perhaps even eclipsing the combined forces of nature. Man-made phenomena are often naturalised. Examples: recessions are regarded almost as bad weather to be endured, there is a “natural” rate of unemployment, deracinated youth are “predators”.

In Ecology of Fear, when confronted by natural phenomena that are not supposed to happen, middle and upper class Southern Californians, having bestialised the working class, recapitulate ancient thought, transforming mountain lions into serial killers, coyotes into gang members, and living in dread of “Africanised” bees.

Where nature does undergo sudden transformation there is usually human agency behind it. Whether this is recognised depends on the degree and type of alienation (fellow Londoners – we live among parakeets). The modern city is uncanny in many ways. Not only does the city seem to have no basis in nature, the post-industrial city seems to have no basis in economics either. The energy that goes into daily sustaining human civilisation must surely tear the social relations it’s based upon apart – yet capitalism goes on.

No wonder strange creatures stalk our borders, nature lurking and repressed but ready to return.

More supernature

There’s a book review in the Guardian that gives a spotlight to a fascinating idea – shadow ecology, a stealth biosphere based on an alternative organic chemistry, undetected, right here on Earth, not even imagined until now.

This idea is perfectly congruent with natural selection. At the point when life was formed on Earth there was a lot of biochemistry, energy and time. Most of the history of life on Earth is dominated by single-cell life. By many measures bacteria are still the dominant mode of existence. Multi-cellular life is the comparative exception. There would be no currently available niches for multi-cellular shadow life.

Our conception of life has expanded. Life has been discovered at the bottom of the ocean living in endothermic ecosystems, in extremely acidic or saline conditions, under ice sheets and in deserts. But this life uses the same basic chemistry as our own. If a shadow biosphere exists why have we failed to find it after a more century of biological science? It might be because scientists have been suffering from a lethal theoretical conceit but it might be because it’s not there.

The link between theory and reality is investigation, and there are some tests being proposed to test for possible shadow-life. An example, life as we know it uses the left half of DNA strands as code. “Right-handed” organisms in a culture should respond to right-handed amino acids. Finding creatures using entirely different replicating molecule would be even more exciting.

If found it means something very interesting. We compare how photosynthesis, which evolved once, to the eye, which evolved 50 to 100 times. It is assumed that life arose once on Earth, but maybe it evolved twice, three times, many times. This improves the chances of life arising elsewhere in the galaxy.

Supernature

Cryptids are a fascinating branch of the monster family. Cryptids are unrecognised, often mythical plants or animals, though some cryptids go on to become recognised species (the Okapi was once a rumour, later to be proven true). Here is a Wikipedia list of cryptids, everything from extinct creatures to out and out hoaxes.

The fascinating ones are of course the myths, the true monsters. There are a few themes; human/animal hybrids, water dwellers and beasts in the forest. These are respectively ancient sublimations of the outlaw, the foreigner and awe in the face of nature. Water and the forest serve in morality tales: drowning in water = sorrow, losing one’s way in the forest = madness.

Cryptids are part of rural cultures around the globe. Nature has been largely expunged from daily life core capitalist countries, especially the daily life of the upper classes. When nature reappears it often seems like a violent invasion, a natural disaster or a premonition. There’s an interesting chapter in Mike Davis’s Ecology of Fear. Strange things have begun to happen in suburban California as houses have been built increasingly not on farmland but in wild chaparral and desert. The result is brown bears in hot tubs, coyotes in dustbins, mountain lions stalking people on mountain bikes.