Yesterday my friend Cat sat and watched the quail loll about on the beach.
Wait, what?
Cat lives in Joshua Tree, a community in the High Desert of California that has been at or above 100 degrees daily for weeks now. Under the scorching daytime heat, the wild quail on her property were shifting about trying to find shelter in the shade. So, Cat and her husband put out a bowl of cold water in a cool(er) patch of yard, and the quail bobbled over to hunker down near the little oasis. She said the scene reminded her of a bunch of ladies whiling away an afternoon at the beach.
I love this sweet image—of the sheltering quail and the humans nearby who acted on their empathy for them. As I know too well from personal experience, empathy can be a path to unhealthy boundarylessness, a willingness to put others’ needs before one’s own. But it is also a path to greater appreciation, a willingness to see others in their own right, through their own eyes, or at least what we, in a cross-subjectivity effort, imagine to be their vantage point. This will be increasingly important as more and more species come under intense stress and threat of extinction as the planet continues to warm beyond a natural equilibrium.
It was out of, first, empathy, then a nagging sense of obligation that I figured out how to convert parts of our property to pollinator seduction sites. I had read enough about the growing threats to native bees in the Rocky Mountain West as a result of habitat reduction, drought, parasites, and other factors to figure I should at least give it a shot. We already had a bunch of pollinator-friendly xeriscape perennials in our front yard, but we dug out a large oval on one side of the back lawn to create a denser habitat with water sources, raw dirt, and deadwood for bees to winter-over in.
This is only the second season for the backyard plot, but I’ve been stunned by the way habitat co-creation has made me newly observant, interested in insect behavior, and scouring the web for resources to help me identify and understand my new winged friends’ needs. I haven’t memorized all our scientific labels for them yet, but now I can tell the difference between several different breeds of bumble bees, whose markings and personalities I’ve begun to distinguish. I’ve marveled at the opalescent sheen of little green bees, who delicately ply the center of daisies and cosmos; and I find myself irate when the strange, hovering grey bees stalk and knock honeybees away from their pollen sites. (Why do they do that? Should I intervene? Or is this just some copacetic order of relationships?)
I also am learning about a host of other creatures working in sync with the bees—the wasps, hornets, and ladybugs that peruse the plants for aphids, the grasshoppers, waiting like spies for me to knock them off a leaf. I don’t entirely connect with beetles, but I’d like to try. And when a big swallowtail butterfly flutters down from on high to alight on the Jupiter’s beard, I feel giddy like a teenager recognizing a rock star on the street. My partner laughs at what a goober I’ve become, but she, too, has been drawn into this new wonderworld living alongside us.
The pollinator gardens have, I guess, rendered me nature-struck. But woven into the growing sense of interrelatedness I feel as the gardens grow me it’s hard not to notice an invisible thread of something growing from me to this little microsystem. Is that love? It feels weirdly like love. And perhaps it’s one of many threads upon which our collective survival depends. Increasingly, species survival requires us to intervene on animals’ behalf—not just the beloved elephants, polar bears, and lions from our picture books, but also ordinary bees, frogs, fish, sparrows. And as climate conditions worsen, this co-identification, this feeling not just for but with, will surely need to happen on a scale far beyond the efforts of professional conservationists. As Aldo Leopold described it in his famous writing on the need to develop “land-ethics,” to address the damage we’ve done to nature, humans must navigate a massive conceptual shift, from the mental position of conqueror to the “plain member and citizen of the land-community.” This means cultivating respect for fellow members.
Ordinary people will need to help provide stopgaps, assistance, measures of care, and in the process, we are bound to begin paying new kinds of attention, to learn what so many of our “advanced,” resource-exploiting cultures have forgotten. How will we come to know these beings as we reach toward them with greater empathy? How will we come to know ourselves?
