Turning imagination, necessity, and desire into reality is a human function. We do it all the time, but some do it better than others. Disney, for example, prides itself on its inventiveness and extolls the work of its “Imagineers.” The company has some cause for its pride. Look what Disney has built in Florida and California. In Florida, Disney has put together a village of many cultures in the World Showcase of Epcot that includes, for example, replicas of Venice and Paris. In Animal Kingdom, the Imagineers have created an artificial savanna and even an artificial planet Pandora, both park segments containing both real and artificial plants and animals. Walt Disney and his Imagineers have reshaped the reality of central Florida—for real. But isn’t that what we humans have always done? Every inhabited area is the product of reshaping, even one in which residents claim to be living as “one with Nature.” With regard to Florida, the Imagineers created an Asian-African-Pandoran world within Animal Kingdom, a place where Park visitors can see nonnative animals from around the world in a seemingly natural setting.
Nothing new to report here. Walt wasn’t the first to reshape Planet Earth. Take golf courses as an example. Regardless of where they are located, golf courses are hummocky. But some places aren’t naturally hummocky. Coastal North and South Carolina and much of Florida are flatland—except for the golf courses. Why? Why do people choose to make hills on flatland? John McPhee has the answer in his book In Suspect Terrain. McPhee quotes geologist Anita Harris, who says, “Golf was invented on the moraines, the eskers, the pitted outwash plains…of Scotland…All over the world, when people make golf courses they are copying glacial landscapes” (10). * But, of course, it isn’t just landscapes that people change. We’re also good at changing ecologies by introducing nonnative plants and animals. Landscapes and ecologies? How about lakes? Look at the Aral Sea, the eastern part of which is now called the Aralkum Desert, its water gone, siphoned off by Soviet irrigation projects that reduced the onetime fourth largest lake to little more than a pond now under one-fifth its former size.
Although I have long known that individuals have imported nonnative plants and animals, I have to confess I was unaware until recently that Pablo Escobar had introduced hippos and other animals to Colombia. After he died in a gun battle, the government moved his exotic animals to zoos—except for the heavy hippos. Left to fend for themselves, the hippos now inhabit Colombia’s Magdalena River, where they are changing the ecology as their numbers increase. Because Escobar amassed his personal fortune through the sale of cocaine, I could argue that all who bought his drugs participated in transporting the hippos to South America and bear some responsibility for the hippos and, by extension, participated in the reshaping of the Magdalena River banks and river life.**
Where humans are involved there is no preservation of a “natural state.” We live; we alter. It’s our nature to do so, our de facto function. Tell me that you haven’t altered the planet, and I’ll tell you that you’re mistaken. You and I have both altered it, reshaped it.
In one sense, many have been “Pablos,” people complicit in the reshaping of a landscape or region. No, not in the drug trade (though those who used his cocaine were complicit in that trade), but in importing nonnative species that start out confined and then become invasive, disrupting the ecological status quo, just as the importing of cocaine has changed the face of society. Those who move any organic matter from one continent to another can effect a change that outlasts their lives. Rabbits in Australia. Pythons in the Everglades. Brown snakes in Polynesia. European starlings in North America. Take the last as a good example of an invasive species. Starlings abound in the United States because of a nineteenth-century “Pablo” named Eugene Schieffelin, a guy who wanted to introduce birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays to North America. Since the time of Schieffelin’s release of 100 Starlings, the birds have multiplied into a couple hundred million birds, their migratory flights blotting out patches of sky in graceful, rapidly shifting dark clouds.
We live; we alter. Sometimes indirectly; other times directly. But altering is one of our prime functions. We do it consciously and unconsciously. You might point out that particular human function to children the next time you take them to a Disney park, to a city zoo, or even to a miniature golf course with its tiny artificial hills vaguely reminiscent of the hummocky ground in Scotland.
*Farrar, Straus and Giroux. New York. 1983.
**If that argument holds, then those who bought his drugs also participated in all the deaths along the trail of drug traffic.
Nothing new to report here. Walt wasn’t the first to reshape Planet Earth. Take golf courses as an example. Regardless of where they are located, golf courses are hummocky. But some places aren’t naturally hummocky. Coastal North and South Carolina and much of Florida are flatland—except for the golf courses. Why? Why do people choose to make hills on flatland? John McPhee has the answer in his book In Suspect Terrain. McPhee quotes geologist Anita Harris, who says, “Golf was invented on the moraines, the eskers, the pitted outwash plains…of Scotland…All over the world, when people make golf courses they are copying glacial landscapes” (10). * But, of course, it isn’t just landscapes that people change. We’re also good at changing ecologies by introducing nonnative plants and animals. Landscapes and ecologies? How about lakes? Look at the Aral Sea, the eastern part of which is now called the Aralkum Desert, its water gone, siphoned off by Soviet irrigation projects that reduced the onetime fourth largest lake to little more than a pond now under one-fifth its former size.
Although I have long known that individuals have imported nonnative plants and animals, I have to confess I was unaware until recently that Pablo Escobar had introduced hippos and other animals to Colombia. After he died in a gun battle, the government moved his exotic animals to zoos—except for the heavy hippos. Left to fend for themselves, the hippos now inhabit Colombia’s Magdalena River, where they are changing the ecology as their numbers increase. Because Escobar amassed his personal fortune through the sale of cocaine, I could argue that all who bought his drugs participated in transporting the hippos to South America and bear some responsibility for the hippos and, by extension, participated in the reshaping of the Magdalena River banks and river life.**
Where humans are involved there is no preservation of a “natural state.” We live; we alter. It’s our nature to do so, our de facto function. Tell me that you haven’t altered the planet, and I’ll tell you that you’re mistaken. You and I have both altered it, reshaped it.
In one sense, many have been “Pablos,” people complicit in the reshaping of a landscape or region. No, not in the drug trade (though those who used his cocaine were complicit in that trade), but in importing nonnative species that start out confined and then become invasive, disrupting the ecological status quo, just as the importing of cocaine has changed the face of society. Those who move any organic matter from one continent to another can effect a change that outlasts their lives. Rabbits in Australia. Pythons in the Everglades. Brown snakes in Polynesia. European starlings in North America. Take the last as a good example of an invasive species. Starlings abound in the United States because of a nineteenth-century “Pablo” named Eugene Schieffelin, a guy who wanted to introduce birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays to North America. Since the time of Schieffelin’s release of 100 Starlings, the birds have multiplied into a couple hundred million birds, their migratory flights blotting out patches of sky in graceful, rapidly shifting dark clouds.
We live; we alter. Sometimes indirectly; other times directly. But altering is one of our prime functions. We do it consciously and unconsciously. You might point out that particular human function to children the next time you take them to a Disney park, to a city zoo, or even to a miniature golf course with its tiny artificial hills vaguely reminiscent of the hummocky ground in Scotland.
*Farrar, Straus and Giroux. New York. 1983.
**If that argument holds, then those who bought his drugs also participated in all the deaths along the trail of drug traffic.
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