and the bulk of those taking place today is one of consciousness: this
time, however passively they may occur, they still amount to voluntary
acts. Simply put: we know better. This is not an opinion, or a moral
judgment; it is a fact. And yet, just as the tiger has not evolved to
understand that contact with modern humans and their possessions is
generally fatal, we have failed to grasp the fact that we can no longer
behave like small bands of nomads who simply move on to the next
valley—or oil field, or foreign market—when the current one is
exhausted. It is in this context—the meeting of immediate needs versus
long-term self-preservation—that the inherent similarities, and
limitations, of tiger nature and human nature reveal themselves most
starkly. In the case of the tiger, this is less surprising.
To be fair, ten thousand years is an astonishingly short time for a
species to fundamentally remake its relationship to the systems that keep
it alive. But humans are astonishing, and that is precisely what we have
done: by mass-producing food, energy, material goods, and ourselves, we
have attempted to secede from, and override, the natural order.* Now
with the true costs of this experiment becoming painfully apparent, we
must remake this relationship yet again. In this, the tiger is a bellwether
—one of thousands of similarly vulnerable species, which are, at once,
casualties of our success and symbols of our failure. The current moment
is proof of our struggle to evolve (perhaps “mature” is a better word)
beyond outmoded fears and attitudes, to face the fact that nature is
neither our enemy nor our slave.
So how does one remake this relationship in the Russian Far East—with a
tiger?
One could start by restoring oversight in the form of well-trained and
well-funded agencies like Schetinin’s Inspection Tiger. In addition to
protecting tigers and leopards, these agencies would protect the prey
base, not just for big cats, but for human hunters, too. One might then