wealthy and, increasingly, the middle class have sought products that are
exotic, precious, and rare, often at great cost to the environment.
Alligator handbags, tropical woods, waterfront property, caviar, and
diamonds are just a few examples of this. In terms of its impact on nature
—and on us—our appetite for oil is infinitely more damaging than our
appetite for tigers.
An unanticipated side effect of our ravenous success is that we have
found ourselves in charge of the tiger’s fate. This is not a burden anyone
consciously chose, but it is ours nonetheless. It is an extraordinary power
for one species to wield over another, and it represents a test of sorts. The
results will be in shortly. In the meantime, the tiger will not survive as an
ornament hung on our conscience. In order to appreciate the true value of
this animal—the necessity of this animal—humans need reference points
that mesh with their own self-interest. Probably the most compelling of
these, beyond the sublime image of a tiger in the wild, is the fact that an
environment inhabited by tigers is, by definition, healthy. If there is
enough land, cover, water, and game to support a keystone species like
this, it implies that all the creatures beneath it are present and accounted
for, and that the ecosystem is intact. In this sense, the tiger represents an
enormous canary in the biological coal mine. Environments in which
tigers have been wiped out are often damaged in other ways as well: the
game is gone and, in many cases, the forests are, too.
A vivid example of what is left behind after the tigers go can be seen
from a train window between the Russian frontier and Beijing. Should a
passenger turn her attention from the seatback instructional video
demonstrating how to make a cell phone lanyard from her own hair, she
would see a landscape in which the Marxist vision of nature has been
fully realized. With the exception of a swathe of forest along the Chinese-
Russian border, what used to be the shuhai—Manchuria’s ocean of trees
—has been largely stripped away. Every square yard of arable land
appears to have been made useful with a vengeance—scraped off, plowed
up, altered in one way or another. There is virtually nothing left in the
way of animal or bird life. A magpie is an event. Every wild thing larger
than a rat appears to have been eaten or poisoned. Stunted scrub oak still
ron
(Ron)
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