Santa Teresita, Buenos Aires: The pictures show a jostling crowd of adults and young people, shirtless and in swimsuits, standing on a subtropical beachfront. A thin band of staticky ocean behind them. Most are men and boys. People wince in the hard light. One or two toddlers, lofted onto shoulders, clutch fistfuls of sweat-wetted hair. Within the interlinked shove of forearms and frantic, out-stretched palms, all effort lunges toward a center point.
There, amid the crush, a sunburnt, barrel-chested man holds up a dolphin. He hovers it in one hand. The dolphin is small, pudgy, and pin-eyed; its mouth hangs open. Just a few feet long, with little flippers: a baby. No one looks directly at the camera. Not out of shame; their focus is elsewhere. Many wave smartphones. These are photos of people filling their phones with yet more photos: a panoply of unseen images, retained in private, or since deleted. Something darker than glee steals across their faces. A hunger. The bulky man presses his thumb, possessively, into the underside of the dolphin’s head where its flesh rucks into a fold. People grab for its tail.
The animal encircled by the crowd is an immature La Plata dolphin, one of the smallest cetaceans and known locally as a Franciscana dolphin because the species’ biscuity color recalls robes worn by mendicant Franciscan monks. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the La Plata dolphin as vulnerable and declining: There are thought to be only 30,000 alive. It is unclear what has brought this dolphin to the tourist beach in Argentina. The force of a tropical depression, perhaps. Misguided, maybe abandoned by its pod, did it wander within reach of the shoreline, or was it, in some way, seeking help? I scroll down; maximize a different image. Most shots are low resolution and slightly too reddened—still frames of newsreels, captions fixed on the Chyron. What seems evident in the pictures is damned by the headlines: Baby Dolphin Killed by Selfie-Seeking Tourists.
When I think about the trouble of loving the natural world and its animals today, I find myself returning to these images. I try to look past my own disgust—a knee-jerk response. The reasons anyone would be drawn to pet a dolphin; these, I can understand. I am searching, instead, for a dispassionate answer to the question: Why didn’t they stop? How does the urge to exhibit care, grief, and attachment, overwrite the imperative to help the creature that triggered those feelings? What I see, there on the Santa Teresita beach is, I think, a tormented love. Antithesis to John Cage’s maxim: “Love equals making space around the loved one”—a need to connect, so dire, that it smothers the beloved. How to speak of this violent tenderness? Where, on our side of the human–animal divide, has it come from?
In the early 1980s—a time when the internet was scarcely a set of communication protocols, and a plaything for computer scientists—the American socio-biologist Edward O. (E.O.) Wilson coined the term “biophilia” for the innate affinity that compelled all humans, or so he argued, to attach importance to other life-forms, living systems, and natural environments. In infancy, the scientist observed, humans move toward animals and plants in preference to inanimate objects. Wilson saw biophilia as, very likely, a “part of the program of the brain,” and cause for optimism. In effect, biophilia amounted to a psychological factory-setting, predisposing people to care for the environment. Biophilia put a thumb on the scale for nature.
The magnetism of shared liveliness functioned, in Wilson’s view, as prologue for the many cultures that populated the natural world with myth and lore. Preserving nature therefore safeguarded more than the wild: It shored up an emotional taproot of awe, humility, story and wonder. Wilson wrote: “Every species is a magic well. The more you draw from it, the more there is to draw.”
Each new discovery about an organism—a mouse, a whale—suggested further levels of inscrutability to be inquired upon, down to the marrow, the molecule, and further, into the gene. People sought to defend nature not because it made them feel at home in the world, but for the reason that nature promised to always exceed imagination; to be eternally strange and surprising.
Antipodal to nature, according to Wilson, were machines, which intervened between person and environment to “tear apart the paradise” and alienate humankind. Yet over 30 years after Harvard University’s 1984 publication of his book Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species, people’s enmeshment in the digital sphere—and their attachment to the hand-held computers that capture and tabulate it—has not partitioned humankind from nature as Wilson once feared, though the machines we have since devised have generated new sorts of fixations on wild places and creatures.
If technology was once, in Wilson’s formulation, the intercessor that divided people from nature, by the late twenty-teens technology had become the driver, pushing people toward nature too much. Nature was going viral. On photo-sharing platforms, most notably. A great deal has been written about how digital systems underrepresent the reality of people’s lives, but less so on how the compulsion to create idealized versions of nature shapes nature, where it is encountered, raw and real.
Maybe you, too, had the impression that the networked apparatuses of social media, many of them mobile, were busily assembling a nebulous new Pangaea—an idyllic supercontinent of pastel vistas, sunset monoliths, alpine lakes, powdery beaches, meadows, and waterfalls. Which were, where? These places, scattered across both hemispheres of the planet, (but concentrated more-so in the north), conjoined online in the ambience of various high contrast filters. Online, the natural looked vividly beautiful. Nothing was threatened in any of these images, and nothing was threatening. You could tap into the super-saturated everywhere, from anywhere, with the barest gesture of thumbs. You flicked through it as though your presence were no more disturbing than wind, vapor, light.
A series of studies, begun decades ago, showed the preponderance of people surveyed remembered their dreams as being screen-colored. Adults who grew up watching black-and-white television tended to report dreaming in monochrome for the rest of their lives. By the 1960s, after Technicolor, 83 percent of dreams dreamt by the dreamers surveyed contained at least some color. Now I wondered if the gentling tones of the environments I scrolled through online were imprinting on my sleeping thoughts; touching-up the nature I slumbered within. A hypnagogic nature cleaned, intensified, brightened. A nature that made the world beyond look, in truth, a little dull.
Millions of cute wild animals populated this digital world, their smallness and their appearance of tameness seeming to exist, in inverse proportion, to the unchecked vastness of the system that contained them. Furred things, big eyed. Was someone—some agency?—collating big data on these mini-mammals, manipulating their appearance for clicks and mentions? Would work like that amount to the hijacking of biophilia, or was it something else entirely? Where the animals were from, and what they were called, had little bearing on their popularity. Their new habitat was the internet.
Outside, the brunt was born by public lands, natural monuments, and national parks, which saw huge influxes of tourists bearing camera-phones. By 2016, American parks were taking in 330.9 million visitors (which, as journalists for The Guardian noted, was a number near to the extant population of the entire United States). In Australia, eco-tourism rose too—by 30 percent between 2014 and 2016 in New South Wales, to isolate one statistic.
The rise in tourism created traffic jams, and incited petty acts of aggression at the outlooks: Fist fights broke out in woodland car-parks. Whale-watching ventures purchased faster boats to outrun one another, offering a greater return on the cost of a tour (more chances to see passing whales in less time)—around 15 million people, worldwide, booked whale-watching tours each year. Sanitation workers swept through postcard landscapes on daily shifts, removing the squattage of human waste. In the US, wildflower ‘super-blooms’ got trampled by small-time celebrities sprawling, for portraits, in the pollen-clouded rainbows, while hundreds of citations were issued to recreational drone operators, who hassled the wildlife and buzzed the serenity. Off New Zealand, a woman struck out into the sea to be filmed swimming freestyle alongside several killer whales.
Meanwhile, park management authorities reacted to the pulse of internet tourism with a series of contradictory initiatives. Signs were erected asking tourists to refrain from geo-tagging their photographs and thus drawing ever larger crowds to once-lonely sites of wonder. But, too, visitors were offered scanners, along with the frequencies of radio-tracker collars worn by wild animals within the grounds—they were told they would be able to drive right up to where the wild things were. Additional mobile-phone towers were installed, poorly disguised as very tall, very straight trees. Wi-Fi networks got threaded across the back-country and through alpine ranges.
All this seemed a striking turnabout. More and more, people went to wilderness not to seek solitude, but to connect with each other online. And when they got there, many found that it was increasingly difficult to take shots implying they were peaceably alone. One thing that united the digital crowd was their preference for beautiful places “off map.” Places of autonomous leisure testified to a person’s self-sufficiency and their resourcefulness—though, in the past, this might have meant having the wherewithal and liberty to battle the elements, now it equally stood for an aspirational lifestyle that could be monetized via product placements and promotional deals (a different kind of self-sufficiency).
So people pushed on. They crept further out on the overhang, and trod dangerous parts of the atoll, battered by huge waves. They fed the local wildlife from their chip packets and yogurt pots to draw the animals closer. Then they stunned them with the little twangs of their camera flashes.
A Russian man employed on a deep-sea trawler posted photos of thousands of pulpy, moon-eyed creatures he held out in the palms of his hands: things glaucous, glistening, and strange, and mostly destroyed by being pulled up suddenly, from great pressure. The eyeballs bulging out of their heads only made these weird fishes look more cartoonish, and cuter, though this was the effect of gases expanding inside the creatures during their rapid ascent in a net. It was the kind of juxtaposition that made for shareable content: this grotesquery of weird and squashy bodies, inset with bobbly, bizarrely humanoid eyes.
The man on the trawler had half a million followers. It went largely unobserved that his artistic subject was an ecology that had to be broken in order to be looked at—that every by-catch ray and rosaceous sea-slug pictured at the surface represented a rip in the ecosystem below (not to mention the haul of more quotidian fish that went un-photographed). “I know who it is, and you?” ran the text beneath a picture of a shark-egg; a leathery, flat pocket, withering out of water. Did anything have the right to go unseen?
There was a sloth craze, a sugar-glider phase. Dedicated fans of dolphins. Big baby elephants in baths too small. Frenzied hearts on fennec foxes, slow lorises, and tiger geckos. Real animals were a new category of kitsch, and kitsch was, again, compelling. People groomed the conversation pieces of their online collections—their animals in cubes.
A report commissioned by the Worldwide Fund for Nature declared 60 percent of vertebrate life—mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles—had disappeared off the face of the Earth since 1970. French biologists estimated 130,000 species (including invertebrates, excluding sea-creatures) were already gone. The UN said marine pollution had increased tenfold since 1980, and a million species now inched toward extinction. The total earthly biomass of wild mammals dropped 82 percent. Comparatively, the biomass of agricultural species soared: Seventy percent of all the birds on the planet were revealed to be poultry. Livestock (cows and pigs), now made up 60 percent of all Earth’s mammals.
These are almost impossible numbers to wrap your head around, I know. When I hear them I feel as though someone has thrown a handful of dead batteries, cold and skittering, into a space inside my chest.
The truly wild things have today been redacted into ever wilder, ever more inaccessible hotspots. Delicate moths, caterpillars like Day-Glo litter from a rave, beetles, and bees are all vanishing, while swarms of more pernicious insects—snake-worms, ticks and stinkbugs—slide in beneath drying forests, or between the wall cavities of houses on urban fringes. One study calculated that three-quarters of the flying-insect population had disappeared from German nature reserves. In the rainforests of Puerto Rico, bug life declined sixtyfold.
Researchers talked of “the windshield phenomenon,” a shorthand expression to capture how ordinary people were made aware that insects were disappearing when they remembered back to cleaning smeared bug-life off their cars in previous years and decades. Road-trippers used to have to stop every few hours, to wipe away the obscuring streaks of so many dead grasshoppers, flies, thrips, and midges. Driving in agricultural country or alongside a forest, the windscreen became an increasingly virtuosic orchestral score of wings, legs, and antennae. This was within recent memory, but now the glass stayed un-smirched. Though our computer screens filled with animals, windscreens—another interface between us, nature, and an older technology —emptied of them.
It wasn’t that all the insects had become road-kill, but rather that inadvertently killing them with our vehicles had once made their sheer abundance visible. The insect eradications were the result of multiple interacting causes: herbicides and pesticides, habitat loss, shifting and intemperate seasons. Yet even as nature was breaking, (maybe because nature was breaking), people’s emotional connection to nature intensified.
Hiking and mountaineering associations in Europe implored visitors to stop scattering the ashes of their loved ones on famous peaks, because the phosphorus and calcium of so many incinerated bodies had changed the soil chemistry on which fragile high-altitude plants depended. In the shallow oceans some 14,000 tonnes of sunscreen was thought to have rinsed off sightseeing snorkelers and divers, contributing to the collapse of reefs. (Common ingredients in sunblock had been discovered to cause coral bleaching at very low concentrations). The rush to see reefs still neon and jumpy, had inadvertently sped up their decline.
In many other places around the world, people’s urge, en masse, to express their love of nature was throttling subtler gradations of life. Mountain grandeur threatened tiny alpine flowers; the vibrance of reefs jeopardized gloopy coral larvae. Being discreet and lacking splendor, some life was overlooked—though the problem was not that individual people couldn’t be made to care about spawn or tundra, exactly, but that the aggregate harm was done collectively and across long swathes of time. Stood atop a ridge line with an urn of cremains, it didn’t behove you to imagine all the people who had done this before, or would do so after. In that moment you were not an organism in the ecosystem; you were a person in pain.
Just as the natural world had begun to appear more halcyon—lusher, and less trashed —on the web, so digital iconography also crossed over into the nature we beheld before our eyes. Piles of flat stones called cairns or “fairy-stacks” for one thing—rocks artfully balanced atop one another to be photographed. “Cairn,” a Gaelic word, was Scottish, but now you saw the pebble stacks everywhere: along stream banks, on beachfronts and on the waysides of trails.
What was the point of these? In the twitchy tumult of nature pictures, it seemed that it was no longer enough to have witnessed tranquillity. People sought to record how nature composed them; how it calmed their mental state. The quietude found in assembling a tower of little stones was visual proof of a meditation that otherwise couldn’t be seen. The cairns, as it turned out, were found to disrupt bird nesting grounds, to dislocate populations of inching invertebrates and cause soil erosion. In England, stone stacking resulted in the piecemeal dismantling of certain heritage-protected walls that had stood, undisturbed, since the Early Neolithic.
Documenting a hike, in the information age, had the power to erode the landmarks that made it distinctive. An ancient culture, a minor nature, pillaged for the construction materials of a new photographic tradition.
Bill McKibben, author and pioneer environmental activist, wrote once that, “that without Kodak there’d be no Endangered Species Act.” Wildlife photography and documentary remain powerful tools for generating the public’s attachment to animals, but today these important communication projects nestle into a historical moment when photographing nature has the power to destabilize conservation. A time when safari operators in Namibia require tourists to wipe the metadata from their images before uploading them, fearing the poachers who are thought to rely on social media as a proxy to track rhinos (the rhinos are hunted for their horns, powdered for medicines, demand for which is generated and met in marketplaces online). A time too, when the average French citizen is presented with more than four “virtual” lions, per day, in adverts and electronic images: thus seeing many times more of the animals, in one year, than exist in the whole of West Africa (and readily misestimating how threatened living lions are). At this juncture when, only recently, a group of tourists are said to have patted a dolphin to death for a close-up.
The images from Santa Teresita: With a toughened heart, I turn back to them. To be so near but unable to touch the dolphin, appears, from the expressions of those on the periphery of the crowd, to be the source of terrible suffering. You can almost see the blood-heat loud in their ears; the crisis of their unexpended loyalty. I think, This must be the agony of loving the disappearing. Tableaus of devotion are recalled by these pictures. The struggle toward worship. As in: The masses ford the holy river braced beneath their icons. The sick at Lourdes; Kumbh Mela pilgrims thronging the Ganges; insurrectionaries in old religious wars. Or else, a fresco of toil and piety by a Flemish master—the gloomy glory of some alpine church. As Barbara Ehrenreich once wrote, contact with wild animals today provides something “people have more commonly sought through meditation, fasting, and prayer.”
I look, again, at the large, maroon man holding up the flaccid dolphin: its specks for eyes. In the crook of his other arm, I notice, he is also supporting a small girl, perhaps three years old, hugged into his torso. The girl’s hair is pulled into a fountain ponytail. She reaches for the dolphin with a fist, peering at it sidelong, her head tilted against the man’s meaty neck. In other photographs the baby dolphin is lowered to allow people to stroke it, which they do, many of them all at once, but the kids do it shyly, snapped mid-motion, wiping an index finger along the dolphin’s forehead or tapping it up and down with a cupped hand. Their gentleness is excruciating. On the verge of tears, a boy in a blue t-shirt desperately, disbelievingly, glances back to a man he must know—he has reached the dolphin! With his palm he very tenderly covers its blowhole.
The distance between hospitality and hostility is so short at first. If biophilia is hardwired from birth, we must still be taught how to restrain ourselves from stifling what we love. These children can’t know their menace.
In the lee of 20th-century psychology, the suffix –philia has come to mean not just affection, but an abnormal attraction. Attraction that takes on an unmerited ardour, defiling that which it seeks to cosset, or cosseting the wrong thing—that which it would undo us, debase us, to get close to. For this generation—my generation and those younger—living through the slow emergencies of mass extinction, biodiversity loss, and defaunation, is there not also something weirdly thanatophile (death-loving) in the biophile? We find ourselves possessed by a savage urgency in relation to the animals we adore: we care more than we can stand. An animal’s rareness—fear of its imminent decline—draws us closer.
Performing our love for nature, can, for some, seem more important than not causing harm. The austerity of restraint (“take only pictures”) has, after all, failed to remedy the crisis. Neither does restraint show how hurt we are: Only a demonstration of love does that. Outsized love; a terrible glamour. A love that disgusts, but from which we cannot desist.
The grief is so immense, in the absence of any official, collective, mourning protocol, individualising our connection to it demands a damaging proximity. As the Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Silko once wrote, attempts to get closer to nature through rendering its features iteratively, and in particular detail, may betray deep feelings of disconnectedness rather than intimacy. So perhaps the dewy, digital Pangaea is not a place to hide out, a place in which to pretend that what is happening to nature, isn’t. Rather, the lush proliferation of idealized environments—that nature of our making, and the flocks of cute animals found there—might describe the diverse melancholia of our lost connection. Our unprocessed, inchoate loss, fruits gorgeously online.
When I thought about the small screens through which this glossy nature was encountered, I also thought, again, about the “windshield phenomenon”—how the vanishing of the insects became evident when you recognized the legion of bugs you, yourself, hadn’t dispatched with your car. What had been killed, indirectly by pollution and climate change, had ceased to be only within your immediate sphere of action—the kill-space extended out in front of you, and behind you, for miles, and for years. Even after hours of driving you could still see the horizon clearly. There was no mess. The insectless future you approached lay, chillingly clear, up ahead.
It reminded me that one other thing we pursue in ourselves, when we seek contact with wildlife now, is absolution. An amnesty for the harm we and our kind have caused, but have failed, until now, to see.
The dolphin on the beach in Argentina died. Writing of the crowd that had surrounded it, the Polish-American philosopher Margret Grebowicz refers to “cute aggression”—a violent impulse toward pictures of adorable animals, described in a study undertaken by two Yale University psychologists in 2013. The words of one researcher summate the findings: “Some things are so cute that we just can’t stand it.” Participants in the survey admitted to wanting to squash, squeeze, and throttle loveable creatures. When the researchers gave the study’s subjects bubble-wrap to pop and then showed them a succession of endearing animals, the participants mashed the plastic in their fists.
Cuteness, as the cultural theorist Sianne Ngai has best detailed, is not merely a matter of smallness, softness, the cartoonish and the infantile. All cute things invite fondling, but nothing is cuter than when it’s vulnerable, helpless, or pitiful. Sloths are dear, but sloth orphanages are dearer. Being hobbled or injured, engaged in pratfall or blunder: that’s cute. A baby dolphin is sweet. A baby dolphin that has stranded is sweeter. It needs us. It needs. The little dolphin has had a little accident. A diminutive object with an “imposed-upon aspect”—this is the sweetest thing of all. But such creaturely objects (for cute animals are objectified) can cause us to grind our teeth. Ngai writes that cuteness “might provoke ugly or aggressive feelings, as well as the expected tender or maternal ones,” inciting “desires for mastery and control as much as [a] desire to cuddle.” Cute things should be soft and twistable, because they need to be capable of withstanding the impulse to violence they arouse (think of the aggression young children sometimes display toward their toys). When cuteness, a quality of products and pictures, is turned back onto the natural world, then the impulse to squash animals—to touch, pinch, and squeal—is amplified.
Grebowicz attaches this feeling—cute aggression—to technology. The need to connect, she argues, extends in two directions: The desire to be closer to animals, and the desire to make meaningful contact with other people. A selfie with a darling animal might be one of the few remaining digital forms in which a demonstration of heightened pure emotion, and enthusiasm, is freed from irony. Miniature intensities, these pictures make a show of relinquishing power to the animal’s untroubled virtue, its goodness. The animal is artless: It can’t pose. It doesn’t know what a camera is for. That kind of authenticity is currency, online. Yet, the crowd on Santa Teresita beach, I keep coming back to the violence of their impulse: what looks like a loss of control, rather than a carefully staged exercise of it.
I would like to grant these people some reprieve, in fact. I can shut my eyes, and imagine the crowd from the beachfront, dispersed later that night. Let’s say it’s a hot night, and they’re pacing through the dusky evening. The westering sun is prolonged in slats between buildings. Winged insects stir and scintillate through each tunnel of light, like threads of saffron in hot water. The mood of that evening is, in some sense, a formation of the insects, which make no audible noise, but dramatize, by way of their brightness, the colors pooling behind shopfronts and hotels, lending to the outdoors the closed intimacy of the indoors. I see the people after the Santa Teresita photos, strolling barefoot or in sandals, a slight swagger in their bodies, heading down the empurpling driveways of recently built holiday complexes planted with waist-high trees. Their skin tightens with goose-bumps, forewarning of the sunburn that sharpens beneath their clothes. Maybe they have bundled up a little washing for the coin laundry, or they pop the top off a bottle, and then each sits, on the kerb, to swipe through the photographs of the dolphin from Santa Teresita. Only this time, their faces take on a cast of alarm. They see themselves as they will be seen. They see that what was done as a crowd, would never have been done alone.
Excerpt from FATHOMS: The World in the Whale, by Rebecca Giggs. Copyright © 2020 by Rebeccca Giggs, reprinted with permission from Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
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