From the standpoint of the world’s biota, global travel represents a
radically new phenomenon and, at the same time, a replay of the very old.
The drifting apart of the continents that Wegener deduced from the fossil
record is now being reversed—another way in which humans are running
geologic history backward and at high speed. Think of it as a souped-up
version of plate tectonics, minus the plates. By transporting Asian species
to North America, and North American species to Australia, and
Australian species to Africa, and European species to Antarctica, we are,
in effect, reassembling the world into one enormous supercontinent—
what biologists sometimes refer to as the New Pangaea.
AEOLUS Cave, which is set into a wooded hillside in Dorset, Vermont, is
believed to be the largest bat hibernaculum in New England; it is
estimated that before white-nose hit, nearly three hundred thousand bats
—some from as far away as Ontario and Rhode Island—came there to
spend the winter. A few weeks after I went with Hicks to the Barton Hill
Mine, he invited me to accompany him to Aeolus. This trip had been
organized by the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, and at the