LIFE EVERLASTING The Animal Way of Death
BERND HEINRICH
2012
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CONTENTS
Introduction ix
I. SMALL TO LARGE
The Ultimate Recycler: Remaking the World 37
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II. NORTH TO SOUTH
Northern Winter: For the Birds 61
The Vulture Crowd 77
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Ill. PLANT U ND ERTAKERS
Other Worlds 157
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V. CHANGES
Metamorphosis into a New Life and Lives 175
Beliefs, Burials, and Life Everlasting 185
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Acknowledgments 199
Further Reading 201
Index 219
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INTRODUCTION
If you would know the secret of death you must seek it in the heart of fife.
- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
• . . . Earth's the right place for love; I don't know where it's likely to go better. - Robert Frost, "Birches"
Yo, Bernd -
I've been diagnosed with a severe illness and am trying to get my final disposition arranged in case I drop sooner than I hoped. I want a green burial - not any burial at all - because human burial is today an alien approach to death.
Like any good ecologist, I regard death as changing into other kinds of life. Death is, among other things, also a wild celebration of renewal, with our substance hosting the party. In the wild, animals lie where they die, thus placing them into the scavenger loop. The upshot is that the highly concentrated animal nutrients get spread over the land, by the exodus of flies, beetles, etc. Burial, on the other hand, seals you in a hole. To deprive the natural world of human nutrient, given a population of 6.5 billion, is to starve the Earth, which is the consequence of casket burial, an internment. Cremation is not an option, given the buildup of greenhouse gases, and considering the amount of fuel it takes for the three-hour process of burning a body. Anyhow, the upshot is, one of the options is burial on private property. You can probably guess what's coming. . . What are your thoughts on having an old friend as a permanent resident at the camp? I feel great at the moment, never better in my life in fact. But it's always later than you think.
This letter from a friend and colleague compelled me toward a subject I have long found fascinating: the web of life and death and our relationship to it. At the same time, the letter made me think about our human role in the scheme of nature on both the global and the local level. The "camp" referred to is on forest land I own in the mountains of western Maine. My friend had visited me there some years earlier to write an article on my research, which was then mostly with insects, especiallybumblebees but also caterpillars, moths, butterflies, and in the last three decades, ravens. I think it was my studies of ravens, sometimes referred to as the "northern vultures," that may have motivated him to write me. The ravens around my camp scavenged and recycled hundreds of animal carcasses that friends, colleagues, and I provided for them there.
My friend knows we share a vision of our mortal remains continuing "on the wing?' We like to imagine our afterlives riding through the skies on the wings of birds such as ravens and vultures, who are some of the more charismatic of nature's undertakers. The dead animals they disassemble and spread around are then reconstituted into all sorts of other amazing life throughout the ecosystem.
This physical reality of nature is for both of us not only a romantic ideal but also a real link to a place that has personal meaning. Ecologically speaking, this vision also involves plants, which makes our human role in nature global as well.
The science of ecology/biology links us to the web of life. We are a literal part of the creation, not some afterthought - a revelation no less powerful than the Ten Commandments thrust upon Moses. According to strict biblical interpretations, we are "dust [that shall] return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it" (Ecclesiastes 12:7); "thou return unto the ground; for out of it thou wast taken; for dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return" (Genesis 3:19).
The ancient Hebrews were not ecologists, however. If the famous lines from Genesis and Ecclesiastes had been stated with scientific precision, they would not have been understood for two thousand years; not one reader would have been ready for the concept. "Dust" was a metaphor for matter, earth, or soil. But in our minds the word "dust" suggests mere dirt. We came from and return to just dirt. No wonder early Christians belittled our physical existence and sought separation from it.
But in fact we do not come from dust, nor do we return to dust. We come from life, and we are the conduit into other life. We come from and return to incomparably amazing plants and animals. Even while we are alive, our wastes are recycled directly into beetles, grass, and trees, which are recycled further into bees and butterflies and on to flycatchers, finches, and hawks, and back into grass and on into deer, cows, goats, and us.
I do not claim originality in examining the key role of the specialized undertakers that ease all organisms to their resurrection into others' lives.
I do believe, however, that many readers are willing to examine taboos and to bring this topic into the open as something relevant to our own species.
Our role as hominids evolving from largely herbivorous animals to hunting and scavenging carnivores is especially relevant to this topic; our imprint has changed the world.
The truism that life comes from other life and that individual death is a necessity for continuing life hides or detracts from the ways in which these transformations happen. The devil, as they say, is in the details.
Recycling is perhaps most visible— as well as dramatic and spectacular - in large animals, but far more of it occurs in plants, where the most biomass is concentrated.
- Plants get their nutrients from the soil and the air in the form of chemicals - all bodies are built of carbons linked together, later to be disassembled and released as carbon dioxide -but nevertheless they are still "living off" other life.
- The carbon dioxide that plants take up to build their bodies is made available through the agency of bacteria and fungi and is sucked up massively and imperceptibly from the enormous pool of past and present life.
- The carbon building blocks that make a daisy or a tree come from millions of sources: a decaying elephant in Africa a week ago, an extinct cycad of the Carboniferous age, an Arctic poppy returning to the earth a month ago.
- Even if those molecules were released into the air the previous day, they came from plants and animals that lived millions of years ago.
- All of life is linked through a physical exchange on the cellular level. The net effect of this exchange created the atmosphere as we know it and also affects our climate now.
Carbon dioxide, as well as oxygen, nitrogen, and the other molecular building blocks of life, are exchanged freely from one to all and all to one daily on a global scale, wafted and stirred throughout the atmosphere by the trade winds, by hurricanes and breezes.
Molecules that have long been sequestered in soil may be exchanged within the local community over a long time. Plants are made from building blocks derived from centipedes, gorgeous moths and butterflies, birds and mice, and many other mammals, including humans.
The "ingestion" of carbon by plants is really a kind of microscopic scavenging that happens after intermediaries have disassembled other organisms into their molecular parts.
The process differs in method from that of a raven eating a deer or a salmon, whose meat is then spread through the forest in large and not yet fully disassembled packets of nitrogen, but it does not differ in concept.
DNA, on the other hand, though made mainly of carbon and nitrogen, is precisely organized and passed on directly from one individual plant or animal to the next through a fabulous copying mechanism that has operated since the dawn of life. Organisms inherit specific DNA molecules, which are copied and passed from one individual to another, and so it has continued over billions of years of ever-conservative descent, which has branched through innovation into trees, birds-of-paradise, elephants, mice, and men.
WE THINK OF the animals that do the important work of redistributing the stuff of life as scavengers, and we may admire and appreciate them for providing their necessary "service" as nature's undertakers.
We think of them as life-giving links that keep nature's systems humming along smoothly.
We tend to distinguish scavengers from predators, who provide the same service, but by killing, which we associate with destruction. But as I began to think about nature's undertakers, the distinction between predators and scavengers became blurred and almost arbitrary in my mind.
A "pure" scavenger lives on only dead organisms, and a pure predator on only what it kills. But very few animals are strictly one or the other. Ravens and magpies may be pure scavengers in the winter, but in the fall they are herbivores eating berries, and in the summer they are predators living on insects and mice and anything else they can kill.
Certain specialists, however, some with unique abilities, spend most of their time finding food in one way. Polar bears usually catch seals at their breathing holes in the ice, but on occasion they will find and eat a dead one. A grizzly bear will relish a dead caribou as well as one it has killed, but most of the time it grazes on plants.
A peregrine falcon is a swift flyer that captures flying prey, while a vulture would not as a rule be able to capture an uninjured live bird, so it has to rely on large, already dead prey.
Indeed, vultures, ravens, lions, and almost all of the animals we typically typecast as "predators" just as readily take the ailing and half-dead and the (preferably fresh) dead; they will not enter a fight for life with another animal unless they have to.
Herbivores too take those organisms that are least able to defend themselves. Deer and squirrels, for instance, munch on clover and nuts but will gladly eat any baby birds that they find in a nest. Strictly speaking, herbivores take the most lives; an elephant kills many bushes every day, while a python may ingest but one wart hog a year.
The potential ramifications of recycling are almost as varied as the number of species. I hope to provide a wide view, and I give examples from personal experiences everywhere from my camp in Maine to the African bush.
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Ch 1 SMALL-TO LARGE
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Conclusion
BELIEFS, BURIALS, AND LIFE EVERLASTING (pp185-197)
I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly
more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my
own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer
than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose.
—J.B.S. Haldane, Possible Worlds
In our family, there was no clear line
between religion and ftyfishing.
- Norman McLean, A River Runs Through It
WE MAY THINK OUR SPECIES GENETICALLY UNIQUE, AND INdeed it is, as every species is. But the mix of our DNAs is really an amalgam of all life's DNA, and in many and varied ways that mix reaches back to a common origin in the dawn of life.
One example of most recent common origin comes from our hunter ancestors, whose skill and knowledge were pivotal, as we've seen, in the recycling of animal carcasses.
Since those carcasses were derived from formidable live animals, which the hunters had to get to know well in order to hunt them effectively, we became empathetic.
We learned that the precious, mysterious gift that we call "life" may disappear suddenly when the animal is punctured with a spear or arrow. In no area did we know less and need to believe more than in that period after death, when a body is little changed and yet suddenly bereft of life.
Where has "it" gone, and where did it come from and why?
We invented stories about human creation to try to make sense of our life and our fate, stories that specified our relationships to each other and to the earth, which then nurtured our morality.
The knowledge to create these stories was short then, but the belief anchoring that knowledge had to belong.
Metaphors helped explain the unknown in terms of the known. For the metaphors to seem true, they had to touch truths of our existence, and if they made us feel good they were more readily accepted.
To the Egyptians, the dung scarab beetle (probably Scarabaeus sacer) represented Khepri, the sacred scarab that rolled Ra, the sun god, up into the sky in the morning.
Ra, believed to be the creator of all life, created himself out of nothing every day and was rolled across the sky, then returned back to nothing in the underworld at night.
Scarab models were made by the millions as amulets and were placed on the heart of a mummified corpse in its preparation to enter the afterlife.
Further instructions for human afterlife appeared in what came to be called the "Books of the Dead" (which the ancient Egyptians called "Books of Coming Forth by Day"), vignettes in hieroglyphics on papyrus scrolls illustrated with pictures of people, animals, demons, and gods.
These papyrus scrolls accompanied the mummified corpse with its scarab beetle on the heart and were intended to instruct the spirit for continuing the earthly pleasures.
The most famous vignette, preserved in exquisite detail, is of a man named Ani, who lived at the time of Rameses II, around 1275 BC.
We see Ani and his wife bowing toward the gods as his heart, the presumed seat of intelligence and the soul, is weighed by the jackal-headed god Anubis. Ani's soul is instructed to speak to his heart.
The feather of truth is a counterweight on the other side of the scale. Toth, the ibis-headed god of wisdom, records the verdict.
Ammit, "the Devourer" (a monstrous chimera that is part croco-dile, lion, and hippopotamus), awaits the outcome of the weigh-ing, which will determine whether Ha, Ani's soul, will continue to experience earthly pleasures during its daily journeys out to Ra, the sun god.
After making his daily rounds, Ha returns to the mummified body at night. If the weighing of Ani's heart tips the verdict to indictment, Ammit will swallow his soul.
The Egyptians believed they could influence the gods, and they had to adhere to rules, practices, and conventions to prepare for their afterlife.
Those beliefs were strong enough to build the pyramids, whose purpose was to facilitate the afterlife of the powerful people who could afford the costs of construction.
But the pyramids were also, as the ancient Greek historian Herodotus notes, emblematic of a time of horror for the masses, who were enslaved to build them to ensure others' afterlives.
We don't believe this story of the afterlife anymore, in part because we understand it to be a toxic one that robs the poor to feed the rich.
We want everyone to have the same chance at life and happiness.
The problem, however, is that with so many religions, by definition every believer of just one is a heretic to many others.
Most religions recognize this serious problem, and the traditional remedy is conversion to the "one" religion, if possible, and imposition of that religion, if not.
For the ancient Egyptians, as for other cultures, ideas about immortality were related to religion. These ideas often included a belief in recycling in the universe as it was configured at the time and that often involved, as is still the case in some areas, large carrion-eating birds.
In the Tsawataineuk tribe in Kingdom Village, British Columbia, a chief's soul returns to the village in the form of a raven. The raven is still a powerful symbol of the afterlife, as the letter from my friend at the beginning of this book attests.
After I received that letter, another friend of mine told me he was trying to figure out how to get eaten by ravens after death: "I'm going to get cremated and have my ashes mixed with hamburger and fed to the birds:'
In ancient Egyptian beliefs, the mother goddess, Mut, was a griffon vulture, the medium to birth into another world. However, the dung-ball-rolling scarab beetle played an even more important role in beliefs about the afterlife.
The dung beetles' life cycle apparently served as nature's verification of the afterlife and provided a model for humans of ways to prepare for it.
As I mentioned, the beetles bury themselves in the earth to rear their offspring. People planting or plowing land may have found their apparently lifeless pupae with the rigid impressions of the legs and other body parts pressed to the sides.
They would have seen no internal organs, only the apparently lifeless body encased in a shell that included food for the animal's future life after metamorphosis. Observers then as now would have seen how one day a live beetle - a shiny new incarnation - emerges from this apparently lifeless pupa, comes up out of the earth, and flies away. They would have noted that this new beetle really "is" identical (in appearance) to the one that burrowed down into the soil a year earlier. The ancient Egyptians thought that this beetle had only one sex, which must have been an offshoot of the belief that a live one was resurrected directly from a dead one.
A civilization that had the means and power to build temples and pyramids, make fine fabrics, and fill libraries, one in which animals were configured as gods and beliefs were powerful enough to induce the building of pyramids to secure the afterlife, would have examined dung beetles and known some of their habits and life histories. They wanted to know about these animals that were relevant to achieving the afterlife.
The ancient Egyptians managed to weave an amazing number
of facts from nature into their creation story, but they had it all wrong: the proverbial devil is in the details. We now possess new knowledge of dung beetles and of much more, and we are writing a new creation story. To achieve the afterlife we no longer need to wrap the human body to make it look like a scarab beetle pupa, nor provide it with food in a dark, concealed chamber with a long tunnel (such as that dug by the scarab beetles) leading in or out so that the eventually resurrected life could fly and frolic.
The ancient Egyptians' beliefs concerning the recycling of human remains to achieve an afterlife are striking, but they are no more imaginative than those of other, earlier people, who were similarly ignorant of what went on beyond the flashy and arresting façade of nature. The first civilization as we know it in terms of cities, monumental structures, and centralized activities arose more than 2,000 years ago in what is now Iran. Before settling in cities, the people in that area were hunters living in villages. They probably worshiped vultures, ravens, eagles, and cranes or at least were impressed by these large birds. Vultures and eagles would have used the animal remains that were regularly available on village refuse heaps. These birds were apparently emblematic; we know their wings were used in ritual dances that might have been celebrations of life and death. Wall decorations at catal Hüyiik, a Neolithic town in Anatolia, from 4,000 to 5,000 years earlier, depict almost life-sized vultures with short necks and neck ruffs (probably cinereous vultures, Aegypius monachus) feeding on headless human bodies. The anthropologist James Mellaart, who excavated the site, considered this depiction "proof of burial:' Another wall decoration shows two griffon vultures (G-ypsfulvus) with human body parts. The dwellings contained human skulls and sometimes jumbles of bones from incomplete skeletons. Did the people have places where bodies were deliberately set out for the vultures? If so, then the birds would have left de-fleshed skulls 189 and some bones, perhaps those interred in the dwellings. Skulls found in Jericho had cowry shells inserted with clay into the eye sockets. Perhaps they were kept as mementos of the departed.
One of the çatal Hüyük murals shows a human swinging something around his head. Mellaart thought that the person was trying to chase the vultures away. However, two vulture experts, Ernst Schüz and Claus König, posit that the person is trying to attract vultures. They base their hypothesis on observed customs in Tibet. One of the first Europeans to enter Tibet, the German explorer Ernst Schafer, reported in 1938 that vultures there had been conditioned to approach when the ragyapas professional body dissectors - swung a sling; the ragyapas would then distribute the body parts for quick removal by the vultures. When the birds had finished feeding, the ragyapas returned to crush the bone remains until almost nothing was left. This sky burial was a convenient, fast, and inexpensive way to dispose of the dead, and ideas of the afterlife could naturally then be incorporated into rituals and religious customs.
Vultures, ravens, and eagles soaring high in the sky would eventually be seen as mere specks, which would then disappear from sight. When these birds descended from the heavens in great spirals, with the wind fluttering through their great pinions, and took the bodies of the departed, it could have seemed logical that they had come from and would return to the home of the spirit world, carrying something vital.
MOST OF US want to remain part of the physical world for as long as we can, and we want another life we can believe in. The strength of our belief in another life depends on what we think we know. Few of us question the nature of the familiar world around us. And yet modern science is revealing our physical world to be more and more incomprehensible and mysterious the more we try to understand it. Most of us are consciously aware of our direct connections to the biological world and how they link us to history and time. Yet as the physicist Stephen W. Hawking explains in A BriefHis-tory of Time, ever since Albert Einstein challenged the notion of absolute time in 1905, we have had only a vague notion of what space is. We don't even really know what time is, yet it affects all of space and hence all matter. From a physicist's perspective, the universe is "curved" and has no beginning and no end. As a result, asking what came before the Big Bang could be meaningless because, as Hawking remarks, "It's like asking what lies north of the North Pole."
The little that we know brings some of our perceived connections to the physical world into the realm of metaphysics, and current science affirms the notion of mysterious connections. A note by Adrian Cho in the May 4, 2011, issue Of Science reports that a $760 million NASA spacecraft mission has confirmed Einstein's theory of general relativity, "which states that gravity arises when mass bends space-time." Get it? I think I do: namely, the universe as we know it is a function of time, but we do not understand time, mass, space, or gravity. But that is what we are made of, what we are a part of.
Nature is indeed incomprehensible at that deep level: there is more in our connections to it than meets the eye - and more than may ever be configured by our brain, even with its hundred billion neurons. I try not to be a sucker to our natural tendency to seek pleasure and satisfaction, which causes us to believe almost anything that makes us feel better and then deem it "right?
But I cannot exclude the possibility that there may be other dimensions to the world aside from the familiar ones and that something lives on beyond my physical self. If so, when I pass on, it will be a celebration for some other beginning and not an end. Even if that is not the case, I have lost nothing and gained much.
Just as space-time connects the cosmos, and the molecules that make up our bodies connect us to past exploding stars, we are connected to the cosmos in the same way we are connected to earth's biosphere and to each other. Physically we are like the spokes of a wheel to a bicycle, or a carburetor to a car.
The metaphor that we are part of the earth ecosystem is not a belief; it is a reality. We are tiny specks in a fabulous system, parts of something grand. We are part of what life has "learned" from its inception on earth and has genetically encoded in DNA that will be passed on until the sun goes out.
Beyond the most obvious physical-biological connections, we are an amalgam of past lives. This is true for all animals, but it seems especially relevant to us because we can in part consciously direct the trajectory of this inheritance. We know from personal experience, as well as from cognitive science, that we are what we experience and remember; we are a symphony of experiences. Almost every significant turn or change of direction in my life had a mentor behind it - someone who cared and to whom I was bonded and who opened my eyes or instilled spirit.
During my first year as a runner, when I was a junior at the Good Will School in Maine, I was mediocre at best. But by my senior year I had made a dramatic turnaround. The first meet that year was against the much larger Waterville team, and this time we faced their varsity, not the JV team we had raced against before. I won the race, and we trounced them. I was also first overall in our second race, against Vinalhaven, and we again trounced the competition. In each of the next seven meets I was the first man in. How was this possible? What had happened in the intervening year? I think I know: I was no longer the former Bernd Heinrich. Even my body was not the same; it now held the life spirit of a man named "Lefty" Gould.
Lefty was the postmaster of the one-room post office in the town of Hinckley. I saw him twice a day when I brought him the school mail in a leather pouch. After he had removed the contents and inserted the incoming mail, I carried the pouch back to school and deposited it at the administration building. To Lefty I was not a bad kid, even though I was a mediocre athlete, had criticized my housemother, splashed red paint on the water tower, earned bad grades, and been booted out once. He was on my side, and he saw that I liked to run, just to be running. He, on the other hand, could barely walk. Whenever I came to the post office, he leaned on the sill of the window through which we exchanged the mail and talked to me as though I was someone who had worth. I think he saw me as an underdog who had gotten a raw deal, as he had, although he would never suggest such a thing.
Lefty told me that he had been on his way to becoming the welterweight boxing champion of the world, and I had no doubt that he was telling me the truth. He told me how many pushups he used to do per minute, how many miles he ran every day. But fate intervened; he fought with the army's Eighty-second Airborne Division in Europe and North Africa and had one leg almost blown off in combat. It was a miracle that enough of it was saved (by a German doctor after he was taken prisoner) that he could, just barely, walk despite all the metal in his body. Sweat would roll off his forehead as he told me of his experiences in the war. I could not believe he was telling it all to me!
I started running harder, faster, longer, even if it hurt, to show Lefty what I could do. He would never know, or even suspect, that part of his spirit would live on beyond his death. But it does. His belief in me and his mentoring are an inheritance from him. Every good race I have run, every running record that I have set, traces back to my last year in high school. Through our bonding, Lefty unknowingly set my wings and pointed me in a direction that led me to college and then to the opening up of the world.
We leave a legacy through our relations with people, mostly our parents and those who become in some way close to us. We are given much but must also receive actively. My father wanted me to carry on his lifelong collection of ichneumon wasps. At the time that seemed like becoming an extension of him, not a real interest in me. Yet much of him is in me. He gave me a masculine, vigorous love of nature, which at this moment is being expressed in my writing this and was a factor in all my previous work. It is the end result of countless excursions into the woods and fields collecting his wasps, listening to his stories, chasing rare birds in far-off, exotic lands, his taking me for a year into the African bush and its jungles. I disappointed him in not becoming an ichneumon wasp taxonomist, but deliberately or not, I took what he did offer.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized the obvious. We are not just the product of our genes. We are also the product of ideas. The shape of my body, the very oxygen-carrying capacity of my mitochondria, the physical circuits in my brain, and the chemicals that move me were in part shaped, if not determined, by others' ideas and thoughts. Ideas have long-lasting effects on us, as surely as, if not more than earthquakes, droughts, rain, sunshine, and other quirks of nature.
In springtime I walk on the snow crust formed at night after the daytime sun has thinned it to a fragile wafer, the ravens fly into the tall pines and build their nests of freshly broken-off poplar twigs and line them with deer fur and lay blue-green eggs After the snow melts away, a not of flowers - purple and white trilliums, sky blue hepaticas, yellow and blue and white violets, and snow white star flowers - bloom suddenly and disappear just as quickly. Meanwhile, ovenbirds call at dawn, the hermit thrush pipes at dusk, then the woodcock sky-dances over the clearing, and the barred owl hoots its maniacal cries from the deep woods Summer brings the tiger swallowtails sailing through the woods and the fuzzy bumblebees to the yellow goldenrod in the fields. Come fall the Red Gods call me to the hunt of the rutting white-tails, and I look forward to the tranquility of drifting snowflakes covering all in white and sealing it in for another year, leaving a palette for the tracks of the tiny shrew and the mighty moose. Tiny kinglets with crimson and bright yellow crowns cavort with nuthatches, and brown creepers and chickadees flit among the red spruces, where they shelter from howling winds in blinding blizzards as the winds whip the trees. It's all in there - the Life - and I experience it and remember it and so become a part of it. You can't argue with nature. It is the primary context for living and for everything alive.
