William H. Funk • Journalist | Documentarian | Environmental Attorney
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  • Portfolio
    • Aliens Among Us
    • Berea College: Radical Equality in Appalachia
    • Birds, Blades, and the Brutal Business of Clean Energy
    • A Century of Conserving Virginia's Wildlife Resources
    • Climbing the Last Light: An Afternoon of Hawkwatching
    • Corruption and Lack of Law Enforcement Threaten the Last great Apes of Africa and Asia
    • Eden Besieged: Amazonia's Matchless Wildlife Targeted by Traffickers
    • Epiphany on Pilot Mountain: How the Raven Set My Soul to Rights
    • From Cheetahs to Wood Ducks
    • A Fundamental Freedom: Retaining Hunting Opportunities Through Land Conservation
    • Gallinaceous Grand Slam: One Man’s Cross-Country Obsession with Quail
    • Glimpses of Seasons: A Pilgrimage to the Birthplace of Robert Penn Warren
    • Guns & Roses
    • Grub Street Revisited
    • Hearts of Darkness
    • Hemlock Woolly Adelgid & the Race to Save the East's Old-Growth Forests
    • A Hunter's Paradise That Pays for Itself
    • Highways of Death, Corridors of Life
    • In the Forests of the Night: The Great Horned Owl
    • Like Him We Prey; Like Him We Slay: A Call for Shark Conservation
    • Look What's Killing Our Oldest Trees
    • A Master Archer Channels the Past
    • A Most Patient Predator: North Carolina's Resurgent Alligator
    • Nature Needs Half
    • The Night Riders: Sacred Fire & Revolutionary Justice in the Black Patch
    • Old Man of the Mountains: The Northern Raven in Virginia
    • On the Hunt for Appalachia's Secretive Golden Eagles
    • Preserving the Real World
    • Retaining a Geography of Hope: How Conservation Easements Preserve Virginia's Family Farms and Wildlife Habitat
    • Return of a Native: The Virginia Elk
    • Room Enough for All: How Farmland Preservation Can Help Wildlife Thrive
    • A Sad Tale's Best for Winter: White-Nosed Syndrome Casts an Icy Shroud Over the East's Bat Populations
    • Scavenger Angel: The Turkey Vulture Reconsidered
    • Some Reflections on Frog Hunting
    • The Territory Ahead: A Bobcat's Tale
    • Five Easy Pieces >
      • The Anthropocene: Mankind’s Grim Legacy Writ in Stone
      • Bee Fences Reduce Human - Elephant Conflict
      • Loss of Matriarchs Means the End of Elephant Memory
      • Of Lynx, Rabbits, and a Warming World
      • South Sudan's Precarious Profusion of Wildlife
    • An Unnatural Silence: Colony Collapse Disorder and the Pollination Crisis
    • What the World Would Look Like If Humans Hadn't Killed All the Animals
    • With What Time Remains: Land Conservation in North Carolina
    • Virginia's Black Bear: Saga of a Survivor
    • Photography & Film >
      • Commercial Fishing Harbor, Wanchese, North Carolina
      • The Least of These
      • Return of a Native: The Atlantic Puffin Comes Home to New England
      • Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, Weston, West Virginia
    • Metinic Island in the Gulf of Maine
    • Book Reviews >
      • Abbey, Edward • Desert Solitaire
      • Abbey, Edward • The Fool's Progress
      • Bass, Rick • The Lost Grizzlies
      • Bonner, Raymond • At the Hand of Man: Peril and Hope for Africa's Wildlife
      • Bunker, Michael • Surviving Off-Grid: Decolonizing the Industrial Mind
      • Capstick, Peter Hathaway • Warrior: The Legend of Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen
      • Chappel, Steve • Confessions of an Eco-Redneck
      • Cokinos, Christopher • Hope is the Thing with Feathers
      • Crosby, Alfred • Ecological Imperialism
      • Devall, Bill and George Sessions • Living as if Nature Mattered
      • Elton, C. S. • The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants
      • Freyfogle, Eric D., editor • The New Agrarianism
      • Fuller, Lon • The Morality of Law
      • Maehr, David, Reed F. Noss and Jeffrey L. Larkin, editors • Large Animal Restoration
      • Manes, Christopher • Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization
      • Matthiessen, Peter • The Birds of Heaven
      • Matthiessen, Peter • Men's Lives
      • Matthiessen, Peter • Wildlife in America
      • McKibben, Bill • The End of Nature
      • McNeely, Jeffrey A. • Economics and Biodiversity
      • Nabhan, Gary Paul • Enduring Seeds: Native American Wild Plant Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation
      • O'Brien, Dan • The Rites of Autumn
      • Paehlke, Robert • Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics
      • Reisner, Marc • Game Wars: The Undercover Pursuit of Wildlife Poachers
      • Shafer, Craig L. • Nature Reserves: Island Theory and Conservation Practice
      • Todd, Nancy and John Todd • Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, City Farming: Ecology as the Basis of Design
      • Weber, Michael L. • From Abundance to Scarcity: A History of US Marine Fisheries Policy
      • Weidensaul, Scott • Living with the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds
  • Under the Sun Blog
  • About Me
    • My Regular Blog Posts for the African Wildlife Foundation
514 Marquis Street
Staunton, Virginia 24401~4667
540.292.8581
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​williamhfunk@pressfolios.com
​@WilliamHFunk
Picture
Matthiessen, Peter. Wildlife in America. New York: Viking, 1959.

Regular readers of this column (is there anybody out there?) will perhaps have noticed the high regard with which the present author holds the late novelist and naturalist Peter Matthiessen, an artist whose personal dedication to the redemption of a free and living earth is unparalleled in the current literary field.  Here on the eve of another Independence Day, it seems appropriate to reflect on the uniquely American concurrence of wilderness and freedom as seen through the somber lens of Matthiessen’s seminal Wildlife in America.

We’ve been told that wilderness without wildlife is mere scenery.  Wild creatures, particularly those whose continued existence in some way challenges the primacy of economic hegemony, recall our formative national experience on the frontier, while reining in the tendency toward total conquest of the natural world that much of our history has made manifest.  The will to retain large carnivores, for instance, or seemingly inconsequential populations of fairy shrimp or louseworts in areas of great financial potential, casts a far brighter glow upon our essential character than could another overbearing recitation of the Gross National Product.

In 1958, Matthiessen loaded his convertible with food, books, clothing and weaponry and began a roaming tour of every national wildlife refuge in the country, intent upon experiencing and imparting to us his vision of a fading wild America.  The concentration of purpose, the classical clarity of prose style—permeated as it is with an aching sense of what has already been lost—and the inherent nobility of his enterprise makes Wildlife in America an experience worthy of frequent rereading.  The 1985 hardcover reprint from Viking Press includes a collection of glossy prints by Catesby, Audubon, Fuertes and other masters of natural history painting; current paperback editions reprint the excellent line drawings of wildlife artist Bob Hines.  Matthiessen’s ringing lucidity and coolly reflective style makes his approach immediately discernable; better to let his magnum opus of America’s struggle with its natural inheritance, and the untenable link between extinction and extraction, be represented by a few of the more representative passages to be had here:

“The wildlife of America, pinned in or chivvied out of its last redoubts by the convulsions of blind progress, is finding its most potent defenders among individuals, or rather in those groups of individuals banded together in defense of the natural environment—wild flowers and trees, wild shorelines, swamps, savannas, deserts, wild rivers, mountains, forests—as a non-material need.  That the need seems to be felt so commonly is only partly the achievement of those who, ever since the first warnings of [early American naturalist] Alexander Wilson, have worked painfully toward the illumination of their countrymen.  It is also the reaction of a people entrapped by the apparatus of their own progress, and seeking a passage back to more permanent values, to the clean light of open air.  The wild creatures of the open spaces, of clear water and green northern wilds, of gold prairie and huge sky, embody a human longing no less civilized for being primitive, no less real for being felt rather than thought.”

*          *          *

“One imagines with misgiving the last scene on desolate Eldey [a stony islet near Iceland, home of the last great auks in existence].  Offshore, the longboat wallows in a surge of seas, then slides forward in the lull, its stem grinding hard on the rock ledge.  The hunters hurl the two dead birds aboard and, cursing, tumble after, as the boat falls away into the wash.  Gaining the open water, it moves off to the eastward, the rough voices and the hollow thump of oars against wood tholepins unreal in the prevailing fogs of June.  The dank mist, rank with marine smells, cloaks the dark mass, white-topped with guano, and the fierce-eyed gannets, which had not left the crest, settle once more on their crude nests, hissing peevishly and jabbing sharp blue bills at their near neighbors.  The few gulls, mewing aimlessly, circle in, alighting.  One banks, checks its flight, bends swiftly down upon the ledge, where the last, pathetic generation of great auks gleams raw and unborn on the rock.  A second follows and, squalling, they yank at the loose embryo, scattering the black, brown, and green shell segments.  After a time they return to the crest, and the ledge is still.  The shell remnants lie at the edge of tideline, and the last sea of the flood, perhaps, or a rain days later, washes the last piece into the water.  Slowly it drifts down among the sea-curled weeds, the anchored life of the marine world.  A rock minnow, drawn to the strange scent, snaps at a minute shred of auk albumen; the shell fragment spins upward, descends once more.  Further down, it settles briefly near a littorina, and surrounding molluscs stir dully toward the stimulus.  The periwinkle scours it, spits the calcified bits away.  The current takes the particles, so small as to be almost invisible, and they are borne outward, drifting down at last to the deeps of the sea out of which, across slow eons of the Cenozoic era, the species first evolved.”

“The finality of extinction is awesome, and not unrelated to the finality of eternity.  Man, striving to imagine what might lie beyond the long light years of stars, beyond the universe, beyond the void, feels lost in space; confronted with the death of species, enacted on earth so many times before he came, and certain to continue when his own breed is gone, he is forced to face another void, and feels alone in time.  Species appear, and, left behind by a changing earth, they disappear forever, and there is a certain solace in the inexorable.  But until man, the highest predator, evolved, the process of extinction was a slow one.  No species but man, so far as is known, unaided by circumstance or climatic change, has ever extinguished another, and certainly no species has ever devoured itself, an accomplishment of which man appears quite capable.  There is some comfort in the notion that, however Homo sapiens contrives his own destruction, a few creatures will survive in that ultimate wilderness he will leave behind, going on about their ancient business in the mindless confidence that their own older and more tolerant species will prevail.”

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