Die Wohltemperierte Schreibmaschine

Yesterday, NPR revealed that coyotes have been discovered hiding out in our cities, with one researcher estimating that more than 2,000 coyotes live undiscovered in the city of Chicago in particular. I’ve lived in Chicago myself, and the city looms in memory as a mass of brick, asphalt, and concrete, so it’s nigh unfathomable to consider that coyotes were my neighbors. For instance, one of Chicago’s coyotes was discovered next to a post office, something the researcher marveled at: “There were literally hundreds of people walking a few feet away from an alpha female coyote without ever knowing it.”

This is great news, because as we all know, coyotes and other wildlife are losing habitat at incredible rates, if nature documentarians such as the BBC and (newly joined to the club) Disney are to be believed. Last April Disney released a feature-length documentary titled Earth, an edited re-hash of footage previously broadcast by the Discovery Channel and the BBC for their Planet Earth series. In the piece, Disney worked to treat the subjects of habitat loss and global warming with the gravitas appropriate to a family-friendly, inoffensive film. Footage of bird behavior, waterfalls in Africa, and animals dying were all narrated by James Earl Jones with an insipid script that was designed to stay inside the polite boundaries of political discourse. This is because Disney has two somewhat contradictory goals in mind, according to the New York Times:

The company wants to depict nature in an unflinching manner, partly to attract top-notch documentarians to future projects and partly to foster environmental awareness. At the same time, Disney’s goal is to create hit entertainment. While producers have tried not to anthropomorphize the animals in “Earth,” the movie does turn them into characters with story arcs devised to tug on viewer emotions.

Further, as noted in the review, most of the footage contained in the film (60 percent) has already been shown elsewhere for free, so while the film purports to be an awareness-generating mechanism, drawing attention to the issues our planet’s wildlife faces, it is also an ingenious way to capitalize profitably on the genre of ecological entertainment.

The BBC has been doing this for years, albeit somewhat more respectfully. Using lavish vistas, ambitious footage and writing filled with superlatives about the animal world, the BBC has spent years producing a string of respectable and successful nature documentaries. They’ve done Planet Earth, Blue Planet, and the Secret Life of Birds, not to mention …Mammals, …Insects, etc.

These films, all narrated by David Attenborough, have been popular in my household, but they are not free of ideological errors that can sometimes perpetuate the problems they claim to address. For instance, one of the hallmarks of the original BBC series Planet Earth were vignettes that narrated the processes used to obtain footage of extremely elusive and rare animals. In one of these pieces illustrating their footage of the snow leopard, David Attenborough describes the harsh conditions and wild terrain that must be traversed in order to capture the rare snow leopard on camera. The problem is that Attenborough’s description loses sight of a few important details: the snow leopard is increasingly rare because of habitat loss due to human encroachment. Further, the emphasis here is on the difficulty involved in getting footage, but this emphasis perpetuates the myth that there are still wild places, places untouched by human wanderers, workers, or residents (something this video footage expressly contradicts). Finally, the snow leopard and other rare animal footage serves to propagate another older and altogether more startling myth, that not only do wild places still exist, but they’re also still surmountable, if not by hunters, warriors and adventurers, at the very least by cameramen and women, people who act as stand-ins for the adventurers and explorers of old.

And yet this ideological response, the will to dominate and subsume the natural world with our cameras if not our weapons, is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place. The will to live and feed anywhere, to travel the world and film rare animals in action, is the same human ambition we lament when we describe the fall of the North American bison.

For their part, the coyotes have made an interesting point. As they thrive in our cities unnoticed, they’re adapting to the human world, now more dominant than Nature, and in doing so they’re pointing to the kinds of things wildlife must do to thrive in the new Earth: they’ll have to avoid us on our own ground, eking out niches of urban wilderness, soon to be the only kind of wilderness left outside of nature documentaries.

A Cape Cod coyote captured on film by flickr user Chris Seufert

(The last few weeks have seen disruptions to my weekly writing schedule, but I should be free for most of the rest of the year to find stuff to say, as long as the world promises to stay interesting.)

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