Economics Takes a Leading Role in the Biodiversity Story

March 8, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Someone starts telling a story so that those who are listening can start imagining.

We need stories that challenge us with new ways to find political consensus, to confront climate change, to learn from the triumphs as well as the shortcomings of our common past.

Without the liberation of stories like that, we can be paralyzed when confronting the hostility of our politics, the inevitability of a rapidly degrading earth, and the unfinished work of our imperfect but often noble forebears.

And sometimes, as with this particular story, no less than Prince Charles, Boris Johnson and David Attenborough were invited to play bit parts on the story’s opening night (more about that below).

These very different men stood front and center for a few minutes because this story had already invited them into it. When a storyline is bold and surprising, curiosity often finds famous listeners before it blossoms into broader engagement and we’re sharing it with those that we care about too.

A report presented earlier this month begins to tell such a story, skillfully deploying economic theory to get our juices flowing in new directions.

– It admits what we already know: that humanity is taking more from the earth—extracting more of its minerals, fishing more from its seas, destroying more of its diversity, undermining more of its climate patterns, polluting more of its habitats—than the earth can replenish, correct or restore on its own.

– It wonders out loud—in a flight of real-world imagination—about what might happen if we treated Nature’s systems and productive capacity not as “free” for the taking (as we still do almost everywhere today) but as “economic assets” that we must start “investing in” (like we invest in the homes where we live) and managing, as we would any “portfolio.” We’d utilize concepts like “asset value” that acknowledge not only the price that a natural asset commands in the marketplace (its so-called “use value”), but also its “intrinsic value” as part of an ecosystem “that is greater than the sum of its productivities” and contributions. Similarly, we’d account for the “depreciation” of these assets so we could understand their diminishing value to us and their systems as we continue to rely upon them.

– It’s a story that begins to tie “the regeneration of the biosphere…to the sustainability of the human enterprise” (or our economic activities on this planet) in a way that’s never been told before.

– It’s a story whose drama comes from the uncertainty of our survival because, given the current rate of Nature’s depletion and imbalance, the Earth will be unable to sustain life as we know it into the foreseeable future.

This story, formally presented earlier this month by the U.K.’s Treasury Department, was written by Cambridge University professor Partha Dasgupta and is called The Dasgupta Review on the Economics of Biodiversity. You can read an abridged version of it (around 80 pages) or his full Review (at 600 pages) by downloading them here.

The Dasgupta Review begins with the simple observation that: “We are all asset managers.” Professor Dasgupta then describes how we all must learn to manage Nature’s limited and deeply-troubled portfolio of assets in ways that an economist might:

Nature’s goods and services are the foundations of our economies. They include the provisioning services that supply the goods we harvest and extract (food, water, fibres, timber, medicines) and cultural services, such as the gardens, parks and coastlines we visit for pleasure, even emotional sustenance and recuperation. But Nature’s processes also maintain a genetic library, preserve and regenerate soil, control floods, filter pollutants, assimilate waste, pollinate crops, maintain the hydrological cycle, regulate climate, and fulfil many other functions besides. Without those regulating and maintenance services, life as we know it would not be possible.
Biodiversity is a characteristic of ecosystems. It enables ecosystems to flourish and supply [this] wide variety of services… [J]ust as diversity within a portfolio of financial assets reduces risk and uncertainty, so biodiversity increases Nature’s resilience to shocks, and thereby reduces risks to the ecosystem services on which we rely.

As breathtaking a view of “a new world” as Tolkein’s (in fantasy) or Asimov’s (in science fiction), Dasgupta’s storytelling perspective invites us to imagine how governments, businesses, and individuals whose work depends on the vibrancy of Nature’s goods and services, along with the rest of us who enjoy the quality of our lives on this planet, can begin (at last) to sustain “the economic value” of the Earth’s biodiversity for everyone’s benefit. As surprising as it might seem, there has never been anything quite like The Review before.

Well into the 1970’s, we almost universally believed that human ingenuity could free us from Nature’s constraints and limitations. They were the days of “the Green Revolution” which brought rapidly increasing crop yields to smaller and smaller plots of land. They were the days when concerns about “over-population” (such as those voiced by Paul Ehrlich—a contributor to The Review) seemed grotesquely exaggerated. Until quite recently, we’ve acted like the Earth’s ability to fuel our continued “economic growth” and improve our living standards would be inexhaustible as long as human genius helped it along. Today, as we approach the environmental brink, we’re not only confronting our hubris but also beginning to storyboard our way out of the dead-end street where we currently find ourselves.

Even the abridged version of The Review will familiarize you with Dasgupta’s artistry when he identifies Nature’s asset classes and how they impact one another, how the planet’s stakeholders need to “re-invest” some of their profits into portfolio replenishment, and how all of us need to learn more about Nature’s “webs of interrelatedness” so that we’ll be more personally invested in managing these assets in our backyards and beyond them.

The Review is too rich in detail to summarize here and I hope you’ll to read it. But if you need more encouragement, an hour-long video-introduction to its findings, an overview teed up by the forenamed personalities, might convince you.

Why limit your exposure to Britian’s royals by watching another episode of The Crown? For example, I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d heard the real Prince Charles talk about anything important, but he puts himself garumphingly behind the findings of The Review in this film clip. Then, in a startling juxtaposition, there’s a wild-haired Boris Johnson putting his government behind proposals that have easily-imagined economic consequences for his voters (much like an American president announcing “exciting new taxes”), but here he is doing precisely that. And if you need even more convincing, the beloved naturalist David Attenborough writes the introduction to The Review itself.

As a storytelling exercise, here are perhaps the keys to how we can start imagining and then protecting the Earth’s biodiversity. In his video remarks, Professor Dasgupta says the Review’s contributions include:

[a new] grammar for understanding our engagements with Nature, how we transform what we take from and return to it, why and how in recent decades we have disrupted Nature’s processes to the detriment of our own and of our descendant’s future, and what we can do to change that direction.
What then is to be done to direct humanity to a sustainable mode of living, to reducing the gap between what we demand of Nature and what Nature is able to supply on a sustainable basis? It requires that we reduce our demand and help to increase Nature’s supply. It will require measured but transformative change for the task is to so change individual incentives that they direct the choice of our actions to actions that align with the common good.

This will require an implementation effort that easily dwarfs the Marshall Plan after World War II. Sometimes, the scale of The Review’s efforts to marry economic with environmental dynamics can take your breath away.

While economic incentives will be utilized locally to sustain the planet, an international equivalent of the WTO or World Bank will also need to be created to address (say) far-flung extraction practices in the Arctic and Antarctic, in the seas beyond territorial boundaries, and in places like the Earth’s rainforests, all of whose economic benefits are continental if not global in nature. As a piece in the New York Times observed when The Review came out:

International arrangements are needed to manage certain environments that the whole planet relies on, the report says. It asks leaders to explore a system of payments to nations for conserving critical ecosystems like tropical rain forests, which store carbon, regulate climate and nurture biodiversity. Fees could [also] be collected for the use of ecosystems outside of national boundaries, such as for fishing the high seas, and international cooperation could prohibit fishing [and other kinds of resource extraction] in ecologically sensitive areas.

New governance bodies that will monitor and value global assets while also collecting and re-distributing asset-related payments and fees in a kind of global clearing house are difficult–but still necessary–to start imaging, particularly at a time when competition among nations instead of international cooperation is on the rise.

The Review’s recommendations are also built upon a staggering number of economic checks and balances that will need to be administered locally.

A little more than a year ago, because I was unable to wrap my mind around a global model of this complexity without a “grammar” like Professor Dasgupta’s, I tried to imagine how economic incentives might support biodiversity closer to home. I looked at current research on lobster trapping in the Northeastern U.S., how the harvest impacts migrating whales, and whether the lobstermen could be reimbursed for changing their harmful trapping practices by monetizing the whales’ broader ecological value. A 2019 post called Valuing Nature in Ways the World Can Understand was my attempt to comprehend the economics of sustainability in a situation that had a smaller number of stakeholders and far fewer asset variables.

By contrast, the story told inThe Review is both top-down and bottom-up, envisioning at its horizons a dizzying array of parts that will eventually move in a synchronized fashion, but Professor Dasgupta ends his narrative with the same dilemma that probably led me to my post about lobsters and whales. We will never protect the Earth’s biodiversity until we understand the value of protecting it much closer to where we live and work. As he astutely notes, that’s because no international or local enforcement system can protect the diversity of life on this planet. That’s our job.

[U]ltimately, we each have to serve as judge and jury for our own actions. And that cannot happen unless we develop an affection for Nature and its processes. As that affection can flourish only if we each develop an appreciation of Nature’s workings, [my] monograph ends with a plea that our education systems should introduce Nature studies from the earliest stages of our lives, and revisit them in the years we spend in secondary and tertiary education. The conclusion we should draw from this is unmistakable: if we care about our common future and the common future of our descendants, we should all in part be[come] naturalists.

It’s a point that bears repeating. We will only treat the natural diversity that’s around us like an asset when we’ve gained “an affection” for it. Some of us gain that affection naturally but most of us—particularly in the developed world–have to learn it. A story like this one about imagination and survival invites us, both elegantly and engagingly, to do just that.

This post was adapted from my February 21, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe too by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Nostalgia Can Help Us Build a Better Future

October 29, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

There is a widespread consensus that we’re on the cusp of a workplace revolution that will automate millions of jobs and replace millions of workers.

Among the many questions is whether these displaced workers will still be able to support themselves because technologies that are on the rise, like augmented and artificial intelligence, will spawn millions of new jobs and a new prosperity.

Those fearing that far more jobs will be eliminated than created have argued for fixes like a universal basic income that would place a minimum financial floor under every adult while ensuring that society doesn’t dissolve into chaos. How this safety net would be paid for and administered has always been far less clear in these proposals.

Others are arguing that the automation revolution will usher in a new era of flourishing, with some new jobs maintaining and safeguarding the new automated systems, and many others that we can’t even imagine yet. However, these new programming and maintainence jobs won’t be plentiful enough to replace the “manual” jobs that will be lost in our offices, factories and transportation systems. Other “replacement jobs” might also be scarce. In a post last January, I cited John Hagel’s argument that most new jobs will bunch towards the innovative, the most highly skilled, what he called “the scaling edge” of the job spectrum.

On the other hand, analysts who have considered the automation revolution at McKinsey Global Institute noted in a July, 2019 report that automation will also produce a burst of productivity and profitability within companies, that employees will be able to work more efficiently and reduce their time working (5-hour days or 4- day work weeks) while gaining more leisure time. With more routine tasks being automated, McKinsey estimates that the growing need to customize products and services for consumers with more time on their hands will create new companies and an avalanche of new jobs to serve them. At the same time, demands for more customization of existing products and services will create new jobs that require “people skills” in offices and on factory floors.

As we stand here today, it is difficult to know whether we should share Hagel’s concern or McKinsey’s optimism.

Predicting the likely impacts at the beginning of a workplace revolution is hardly an exact science. To the extent that history is a teacher, those with less education, fewer high-level skills and difficulties adapting to changing circumstances will be harmed the most. Far less certain are the impacts on the rest of us, whose education, skill levels and adaptability are greater but who may be less comfortable at the “scaling” edges of our industries.

Then there’s the brighter side. Will we be paid the same (or more) as we are today given the greater efficiency and productivity that automation will provide?  Will we work less but still have enough disposable income to support all of the new companies and workers who eager to serve our leisure time pursuits?  Maybe.

It is also possible to imagine scenarios where millions of people lose their livelihoods and government programs becomes “the last resort” to maintain living standards. Will vast new bureaucracies administer the social safety nets that will be required? Will the taxes on an increasingly productive business sector (with their slimmed down payrolls) be enough to support these programs? Will those who want to work have sufficient opportunities for re-training to fill the new jobs that are created?  And even more fundamentally, will we be able to accommodate the shift from free enterprise to something that looks a lot more like a welfare state?

While most of us have been dominated by the daily tremors and upheavals in politics, there are also daily tremors and upheavals that are changing how we work and even whether we’ll be able to work for “a livable wage” if we want to.

As I argued recently in The Next Crisis Will Be a Terrible Thing to Waste, the chance to realize your priorities improve significantly during times of disruption as long as you’re clear about your objectives and have done some tactical planning in advance. As you know, I also believe in the confidence that comes with hope OR that you can change things for the better if you believe enough in the future that you’re ready to act on its behalf.

Beyond finding and continuing to do “good work” in this new economy, I listed my key priorities in that post: policies that support thriving workers, families and communities and not just successful companies; jobs that assume greater environmental stewardship as essential to their productivity; and expanding the notion of what it means for a company “to be profitable” for all of its stakeholders.

From this morning’s perspective—and assuming that the future of work holds at least as much opportunity as misfortune—I’ve been not only thinking about those priorities but also about things I miss today that seemed to exist in the past. In other words, a period of rapid change like this is also a time for what Harvard’s Svetlana Boym once called “reflective nostalgia.” The question is how this singular mindset can fuel our passion for the objectives we want—motivate us to take more risks for the sake of change—in the turbulent days ahead.

Nostalgia isn’t about specific memories. Instead, it’s about a sense of loss, an emptiness today that you feel had once been filled in your life or work.

Unlike the kind of nostalgia that attempts to recreate a lost world from the ruins of the past, reflective nostalgia acknowledges your loss but also the impossibility of your ever recovering that former time. By establishing a healthy distance from an idealized past, reflective nostalgia liberates you to find new ways to gain something that you still need in the very different circumstances of the future that you want.

Because the urge to fill unsatisfied needs is a powerful motivator, I’ve been thinking about needs of mine that once were met, aren’t being met today, but could be satisfied again “if I always keep them in mind” while pursuing my priorities in the future. As you mull over my short list of “nostalgias” and think about yours, please feel free to drop me a line about losses you’d like to recoup in a world that’s on the cusp of reinvention.

MY SHORT LIST OF LOSSES:

– I miss a time when strangers (from marketers to the government) knew less about my susceptabilities and hot buttons. Today, given the on-line breadcrumbs I leave in my wake, strangers can track me, discover dimensions of my life that once were mine alone, and use that information to influence my decisions or just look over my shoulder. Re-building and protecting my private space is at the core of my ability to thrive.

I want to own my personal data, to sell it or not as I choose, instead of having it taken from me whenever I’m on-line or face a surveillance camera in a public space. I want a right to privacy that’s created by law, shielded from technology and protected by the authorities. The rapid advance of artificial intelligence at work and outside of it gives the creation of this right particular urgency as the world shifts and the boundaries around life and work are re-drawn.

– I miss a time when I didn’t think my organized world would fall apart if my technology failed, my battery went dead, the electricity was cut off or the internet was no longer available. I miss my self-reliance and resent my dependency on machines.

If I do have “more free time” in the future of work, I’ll push for more tech that I can fix when it breaks down and more resources that can help me to do so. I’ll advocate for more “fail-safe” back-up systems to reduce my vulnerability when my tech goes down. There is also the matter of my autonomy. I need to have greater understanding and control over the limits and possibilities of the tech tools that I use everyday because, to some degree, I am already a prisoner of my incompetence as one recent article puts it.

One possibility is that turning over [more] decisions and actions to an AI assistant creates a “nanny world” that makes us less and less able to act on our own. It’s what one writer has called the ‘Jeeves effect’ after the P.G. Wodehouse butler character who is so capable that Bertie Wooster, his employer, can get by being completely incompetent.

My real-life analogy is this. Even though I’ve had access to a calculator for most of my life, it’s still valuable for me to know how to add, subtract, multiply and divide without one. As tech moves farther beyond my ability to understand it or perform its critical functions manually, I need to maintain (or recover) more of that capability. Related to my first nostalgia, I’d meet this need by actively seeking “a healthier relationship” with my technology in my future jobs.

– I remember a time when I was not afraid that my lifestyle and consumption patterns were helping to degrade the world around me faster than the world’s ability to repair itself. At the same time, I know today that my absence of concern during much of my work life had more to do with my ignorance than the maintenance of a truly healthy balance between what nature was giving and humankind (including me) was taking.

As a result, I need greater confidence that my part in restoring that balance is a core requirement of any jobs that I’ll do in the future. With my sense of loss in mind, I can encourage more sustainable ways to work (and live) to evolve.

-Finally, I miss a time when a company’s success included caring for the welfare of workers, families and communities instead of merely its shareholders’ profits, a model that was not uncommon from the end of World War II through the 1970s. I miss a time, not so long ago, when workers bargained collectively and successfully for their rights and benefits on the job. I miss a time when good jobs with adequate pay and benefits along with safe working conditions were protected by carefully crafted trade protections instead of being easily eliminated as “too expensive” or “inefficient.”

While this post-War period can never be recovered, a leading group of corporate executives (The Business Roundtable) recently committed their companies to serving not only their shareholders but also their other “stakeholders,” including their employees and the communities where they’re located. As millions of jobs are lost to automation and new jobs are created in the disruption that follows, I’ll have multiple opportunities as a part of “this new economy workforce” to challenge companies I work for (and with) to embrace the broader standard of profitability that I miss.

+ + +

Instead of being mired in the past, reflective nostalgia provides the freedom to seek opportunities to fill real needs that have never gone away. With this motivating mindset, the future of work won’t just happen to me. It becomes a set of possibilities that I can actually shape.

This post was adapted from my October 27, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

The Work That Our Fragile World Needs Now

October 21, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

After 9/11, I had a two-part image in my head.

I recall the strikingly clarity and vividness of that morning as if it were yesterday. A storm had swept the Northeast the day before, giving rise to a rare meteorological phenomenon known as “severe clear.” I remember looking up while I was walking Rudy and just diving into its photorealism, inhaling everything that was rejuvenating about it. I know where I was standing when it hit me.

But then, like a punishment, the clarity and wonder almost got dashed by the weeks and haunting years that followed, but still I remembered the daybreak that started it all, and how different its offering was.

Maybe because both branded me so powerfully, both have stayed—conjoined in my head—down to this morning. Promise then punishment. Hope then pain.

Has that ever happened to you, where opposites find themselves standing side-by-side and it becomes impossible to forget their inevitability?

That you should never fall for the one because there’s always the other.

As it’s turned out, there was another terrible prophecy in that cerulean blue sky 18 years ago, and it’s two-part disharmony is proving equally indelible. It’s the daily splendor I see outdoors together with all that our failures of stewardship have wrought, as Greenland melts into the sea and hot spots pop up in Rhode Island and now, right across from me, in New Jersey.

I live in a kind of arboretum that frequently astonishes me with its beauty–whether it’s Rudy or now Wally who lets me stop and look up at it, down and all around at it every morning.

In my mind’s eye, I refuse to harness the promise of “severe clear” or even of more dappled mornings to the degradation that almost daily seems to be marching my way.

When I see the one I no longer want to see the other. But it takes daily acts of faith, hope and love to break them apart.

A Deeper Future Than Man Can Make On His Own

When I read Robert MacFarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey last summer, I responded to it with notes, markings on the page and, at least twice, with a “Wow” and exclamation point. The book chronicles MacFarlane’s intrepid wanderings through caves, excavations, sink holes, labyrinths, the quietest tunnels of bedrock, and some of the world’s remotest places. I regularly wondered “why” he was seeking out these claustrophobic and often dangerous destinations and his answer always seemed to be: because he was somehow drawn to them.

For more than 15 years now, I have been writing about the relationships between landscape and the human heart. What began as a wish to solve a personal mystery — why I was so drawn to mountains as a young man that I was, at times, ready to die for love of them — has unfolded into a project of deep-mapping.

These “relationships” between landscape and the human heart are richer and more complicated than Nature gives, on the one hand, Man takes or Man destroys, on the other. In ways he couldn’t always explain, MacFarlane was convinced that there was more to it than that, and whatever was calling out to him might be found if he climbed higher, probed deeper and kept better maps. He described his current motivation this way:

Our ‘flat perspectives’ feel increasingly inadequate to the deep worlds we inhabit, and to the deep time legacies we are leaving

With his “why-question” in mind, my first Wow came towards the end of a chapter called “The Understorey (Epping Forest, London)” about the extraordinary subterranean connections that fungi make to unite the trees into the organism of a forest. MacFarlane finds the modern words that we have—our human-centric words–inadequate to describe what the trees and the fungi have accomplished here, so he looks to a Native American language. (“In Potawatami, not only humans, animals and trees are alive, but so too are mountains, boulders, winds and fire.”) Acknowledging the life around them and their almost intentional roles, native language always made humans integral to the world but never at the center of it because all these other intentionalities have their priorities too. If we’re to restore the relationship between landscape and the human heart, we need to look deeper than the language-based understandings we have today.

The real underland of language is not the roots of single words. but rather the soil of grammar and syntax, where habits of speech and therefore also habits of thought settle and interact over long periods of time. Grammar and syntax exert powerful influence on the proceedings of language and its users. They shape the ways we relate to each other and to the living world. Words are world-makers—and language is one of the great geological forces of the Anthropocene [or Age of Man].

As we consider the underland of today’s language amidst the trees of Epping Forest, MacFarlane suggests that we can reshape, with words, the world that we experience into one of interdependence or symbiosis—create what one philosopher has dubbed “the Symbiocene”—instead of furthering a language-driven age that is dominated by human imperatives alone.

Another Wow came towards the end of a harrowing rite of passage. It delivered MacFarlane to an ancient cave on a remote Norwegian island that had been decorated with paintings of people dancing in the fire that had by brought by pilgrims since the dawn of time.

His Norwegian hosts, only too familiar with the environs, ask him why he is so driven to travel there alone in a dangerous, storm-tossed season, but his “reasoning” seems “weak” to explain it, so he doesn’t even try. It’s likely because the pull of a “thin place” like this, where “the borders between worlds or epochs feel at their most fragile,” is deeper than either reason or emotion, buried in heredity, like some instinct to find a better way to survive. And indeed, it’s the very different life force of our ancestors that MacFarlane manages to encounter deep in a cave in Lofotens, Norway.

At first, depleted by the penitential route, he can’t even see the cave paintings. But in his battery’s light:

when I open my eyes and look again, there is—yes, there, there—the flicker of line that is not only of the rock’s making. The line is crossed by another, and joined by a third, and there, there, yes, is a red dancer, scarcely visible but unmistakable, a phantom red dancer leaping on the rock. And there is another, and another, here, a dozen or more of them, spectral still but present now, leaping and dancing on the rock, arms outstretched and legs wide, forms shifting and tensing as I blink.

Their red is rough at its edges, fading back into the rock that made it, blurred by water and condensation, and all of these circumstances—the blur, the low light, my exhaustion, my blinks—are what give the figures their life, make them shift shapes on this volatile canvas in which shadow and water and rock and fatigue are all artists together, and for once the old notion of ghosts seems new and true in this space. These figures are ghosts all dancing together, and I am a ghost too, and there is a conviviality to them, to us, to the thousands of years for which they have been dancing here together.

MacFarlane’s story–about risking your safety to see what ancient joy and celebrating life might have looked and even felt like–ends with a modest claim about its significance. He even lets someone else make the necessary comparison.

Shortly after the Nazi death camps were liberated during World War II, the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux, France were discovered: an extraordinary counterpoint about the nature of humanity. Fifteen years later, when an escalating nuclear arms race was foreshadowing a different kind of doom, philosopher George Bataile went down into the Lascaux caves. When he returned to the surface, MacFarlane quotes him as saying: “I am simply struck by the fact that light is being shed on our birth at the very moment when the notion of our death appears to us.”

MacFarlane’s job as a writer is to connect the underland of his instincts and intuitions with his readers’ world. As we’re pressed each day with the “inevitability” of a dying, unsustainable planet, he shows us that there are deeper ways to envision our future in the language that we use as well as in the ways we can recapture our truer natures beneath the cerulean sky.

It’s embedded within us. We’ve done it before. There are maps that can help us find it.

A Modern Photo Arc and Additional Irrational Acts

Joel Sartore is a National Geographic photographer who has been documenting the world’s captive animal species. Many of them are on the verge of extinction or are endangered or may soon be. He’s already photographed around 9,000 out of around 12,000 in captivity, and his pictures—which are taken in special sets to highlight each animal’s unique characteristics (a story in itself)—are strikingly beautiful at the same time that they engage us with their plight.

To Santore, the zoos where he takes his pictures are no longer warehouses or curiosity shops but conservation centers providing hopeful bridges from where we are today to where we may be headed. As Sartore recounted in a 2017 interview, by the turn of the next century we could stand to lose half of the earth’s current species and many of his photographs could merely be reminders. Or maybe far more than that.

His project is called the Photo Arc. His photos are featured in a series of books, in magazine articles and on his website. They glow like votive candles.

More than a documentarian, Sartore is also a storyteller with an eye for the funny or moving details that make his critters come alive when he talks about them. (He is the man that you hope will bring out the armadillo to meet your children at the zoo.) But as wonderous as the Photo Arc project—his protecting on film these animals that may soon be lost—it was not nearly as compelling to me as what he and some of his fellow naturalists are also doing right now to sustain the animals that still remain.

As Sartore heralds in his interview, one of these Noahs is Tilo Nadleer, who was an electronics specialist but now runs a primate center in Vietnam. Nadleer noticed that the police who were capturing animal smugglers had nowhere to put the animals they also recovered (baby primates, mostly) so they would euthanize them. It seemed unthinkable, but what could he do? So he took on the job of caring for these orphans himself, eventually building huge enclosures, feeding them with native vegetation from an adjacent national park. Nadleer tried to release them back into the wild but his primates kept getting shot, eaten or captured by smugglers again, so he now has successful breeding colonies, with a big percentage of the world’s population of three or four species. Sartore calls him “a time capsule.”

He started a project that he knew in his lifetime would never be complete. He is buying time for many of these animals, hoping that people will quit shooting them and people will leave the forests intact,

His work is an act of faith, hope and love.

Don and Ann Butler’s work at Pheasant Heaven in North Carolina is too. They’re breeding species of pheasant that are extinct in the wild. And then there is Santore himself, call it his second job. He bought land in Nebraska, where he lives, that included “alkaline wetlands and really steep uplands” where a rare breed of bird (long-billed curlews) along with other migrating species, like avocets and sandpipers, happen to breed. “I just wanted to save a little piece,” he said, “to save a little corner, protect something,” not really knowing whether it would make a difference, but feeling that he had to anyway.

These aren’t coins in a wishing well, but counter-testimony that Nadleer, the Butlers and Santore are giving (without breast-beating or fanfare) so that their actions are also recorded in the record of degradation and destruction around them. What else could they do? Well, they could do nothing because there is no assurance that their work will even begin to turn the tables. But they’re doing it anyway.

As Robert MacFarlane might put it, they’ve chosen to deepen the relationship between landscape and the human heart. And that, just that, might end up making all the difference.

This post was adapted from my October 20, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.