Freedom [110]
“Here are the maps,” Lalitha said.
“Yeah, these show the fragmentation,” Walter said, handing Katz two laminated maps. “This one is undisturbed habitat in 1900, this one’s undisturbed habitat in 2000.”
“Prosperity will do that,” Katz said.
“The development was so stupidly done, though,” Walter said. “We still might have enough land for other species to survive if it wasn’t all so fragmented.”
“Nice fantasy, I agree,” Katz said. In hindsight, he supposed it was inevitable that his friend would become one of those people who carried around laminated literature. But he was still surprised by what an angry crank Walter had become in the last two years.
“This was what was keeping me awake at night,” Walter said. “This fragmentation. Because it’s the same problem everywhere. It’s like the internet, or cable TV—there’s never any center, there’s no communal agreement, there’s just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. We can never sit down and have any kind of sustained conversation, it’s all just cheap trash and shitty development. All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off. Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli.”
“There’s some pretty good porn on the internet,” Katz said. “Or so I’m told.”
“I wasn’t accomplishing anything systemic in Minnesota. We were just gathering little bits of disconnected prettiness. There are approximately six hundred breeding bird species in North America, and maybe a third of them are getting clobbered by fragmentation. Vin’s idea was that if two hundred really rich people would each pick one species, and try to stop the fragmentation of their strongholds, we might be able to save them all.”
“The cerulean warbler is a very choosy little bird,” Lalitha said.
“It breeds in treetops in mature deciduous forest,” Walter said. “And then, as soon as the babies can fly, the family moves down into the understory for safety. But the original forests were all cut down for timber and charcoal, and the second-growth forests don’t have the right kind of understory, and they’re all fragmented with roads and farms and subdivisions and coal-mining sites, which makes the warbler vulnerable to cats and raccoons and crows.”
“And so, before you know it, no more cerulean warblers,” Lalitha said.
“That does sound tough,” Katz said. “Although it is just one bird.”
“Every species has an inalienable right to keep existing,” Walter said.
“Sure. Of course. I’m just trying to figure out where this is coming from. I don’t remember you caring about birds when we were in college. Back then, as I recall, it was more about overpopulation and the limits to growth.”
Walter and Lalitha again exchanged glances.
“Overpopulation is exactly what we want you to help us with,” Lalitha said.
Katz laughed. “Doing my best with that already.”
Walter was shuffling through some laminated charts. “I started walking it back,” he said, “because I still wasn’t sleeping. You remember Aristotle and the different kinds of causes? Efficient and formal and final? Well, nest-predation by crows and feral cats is an efficient cause of the warbler’s decline. And fragmentation of the habitat is a formal cause of that. But what’s the final cause? The final cause is the root of pretty much every problem we have. The final cause is too many damn people on the planet. It’s especially clear when we go to South America. Yes,