The Scale of Our Fealty <em> On Elizabeth Kolbert’s Life on a Little-Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World and the Banality of Radicality </em>

I want to talk about scale. Scale as in proportions, scale as in comparative size, and scale as in the changing nature of things at various extremes of existence.

To begin (and I apologize for its length), a quote from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense:

It is pleasant to observe by what regular gradations we surmount the force of local prejudices, as we enlarge our acquaintance with the world. A man born in any town in England divided into parishes, will naturally associate most with his fellow parishioners (because their interests in many cases will be common) and distinguish him by name of neighbor; if he meet him but a few miles from home, he drops the narrow idea of a street, and salutes him by the name of townsman; if he travel our of the county and meet him in any other, he forgets the minor divisions of street and town, and calls him countryman, i.e. countyman: but if in their foreign excursions they should associate in France, or any other part of Europe, their local remembrance would be enlarged into that of an Englishman. And by a just parity of reasoning, all Europeans meeting in America, or any other quarter of the globe, are countrymen; for England, Holland, Germany, or Sweden, when compared with the whole, stand in the same places on the larger scale, which the divisions of street, town, and county do on small ones; distinctions too limited for continental minds.

The farther we move from our origins, the larger our identity becomes. 

Now let’s scale this in both directions. If we imagine this “man born in England divided into parishes” traveling beyond the limited distinctions of interplanetary minds to distant galaxies, we can assume that his identity would expand to include the whole of Earth. Thinking of this, I immediately recall the scene from Avengers: Infinity War when Iron Man and company run into the Guardians of the Galaxy and Tony Stark asks Peter Quill if he’s from Earth. Quill responds, “I’m not from Earth, I’m from Missouri.” To which an annoyed Stark says, “Yeah, that’s on Earth, dipshit,” and the mood immediately changes. They forget the minor divisions of the solar system and galaxy and call each other…Earthmen? Earthlings? Terrans? Not sure the best term, but you get the idea.

From this perspective, if we imagine a society that stretches beyond our planet and into the fathomless expanse of the universe, we might be tempted into believing that an individual planet among the billions and billions of extant ones no more deserves our collective preferential protection than a tiny hamlet merits more resources and effort than does the whole of Earth. If scaled in such a way outward toward infinity, Earth might lose its special significance to us. Perhaps, if we extended our notion of existence so grandly, our identification with Earth could seem positively parochial.

Now let’s go the other direction: the infinitesimal. The smaller the scale, the weirder things get. Classical physics breaks down as quantum mechanics takes over. Impossible—or at least unimaginable—rules apply there. For example, the position and speed of electrons, both of which cannot be measured at once; we can know where an electron is, but if we know this, we can’t know its speed. Conversely, if we know its speed, we can’t then discover its location. This makes no sense to us, just as electrons and other atomic particles are unobservable for us.

Let’s scale things a bit less to see the way scaling downward shows us something vital about life. Have you ever noticed that the highest hurdle a horse can jump is similar to the height a dog can jump? And what if I added that a squirrel can also leap as high as both horse and dog? The YouTube channel Veritasium puts it like this: “As you scale down, weight decreases faster than strength, and as a result, smaller animals have greater strength-to-weight ratios.” Taking this to its logical next step, we might assume that miniature versions of ourselves would possess Ant-Man-level superpowers. But this isn’t the case. Our hearts, it turns out, would not be able to generate enough force to pump blood throughout our bodies, and, moreover, as Carl Zimmer explains, “You can’t fit 86 billion neurons in a nickel-sized volume. You can’t scale cells down either. Cells are cells.” 

Now back to universe-sized scale. Turns out, as things get larger, they also get stranger. The macroequivalent to the mysteries of the micro is the black hole, an entity that, like quantum particles, defies the laws of physics as we know them. Subverts them, might be more appropriate. Everything we know—everything we’ve spent centuries wrenching out from the maws of the seemingly inexplicable—fails us at the extremes of scale.

Which suggests to me that scaling has its limits. Thomas Paine was right when he described how distant journeys increase the size of the community we identify with, but such expansions of the self—not unlike the contractions of the infinitesimal—lose their unifying collectivity at too far a remove. After all, what does one’s identity matter when the governing rules from which such identities arise no longer apply?

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I kept returning to thoughts of scale as I read Elizabeth Kolbert’s clear-eyed Life on a Little-Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World, a collection of essays, articles, and profiles mostly from The New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 1999. In her profile of entomologist David Wagner, one of the world’s experts on caterpillars, she quotes from Howard Ensign Evans’s book that gives both the article and Kolbert’s own book their titles, Life on a Little-Known Planet from 1968, smack dab in the midst of the space race. “Is it sensible,” Evans wrote, “to poke about for strange beings in space while we blindly exterminate those about us?” I’m not against interstellar exploration, but I can also see how the political symbolism of besting the Russians, coupled with the staggering costs required to do so, seems like a major failure of scale.

The first part of Kolbert’s book focuses on “Creatures Great and Small,” from sperm whales (so called because the oil they produce looks like semen) to bees. No matter if the animal in question is the size of a bus or a dime, humanity’s relationship with them is either one of destruction or indifference, save for a small band of devotees working on the margins. Marine biologists (that fabled job so many children dreamt of doing but clearly never achieved) David Gruber and Shane Gero hope to translate the “codas” (“quick bursts of clicks”) of sperm whales, while numerous scientists and apiculturists try to figure out why the colonies of honeybees are collapsing. These are vital matters.

In a society mired in economic instability, a government repugnantly rampant with crass corruption, and a system designed for the wealthy and powerful, the language of a giant whale might seem like small beans. After all, what material benefit might emerge from solving the mystery of their clicks? Still more questionable—from this perspective—is Kolbert’s third section, “Big Ideas,” in which one of the essays asks if the natural world should have rights. First suggested by Christopher Stone (son of intrepid reporter I.F. Stone) in the early 70s, the idea goes like this:

This extension of rights, Stone argued, was needed to address an otherwise insuperable problem. So long as “natural objects” were valued only in terms of their worth to humans—“for the use of ‘us’”—they could, quite legally, be destroyed.

The occasion for this piece was a lawsuit filed by Lake Mary Jane, Lake Hart, the Crosby Island Marsh, “and two boggy streams” against a developer seeking to “convert nineteen hundred acres of wetlands, pine flatlands, and cypress forest into homes, lawns, and office buildings.” In the past, lawsuits like this focused on the human element, as in, to use Stone’s example, people living near a polluted stream suing the polluter for damages. In such a case, while the human victims may receive some kind of financial compensation, “the waterway and the species dependent on it would never recoup their losses.” 

Most people mistreated by large corporations or other powerful entities will never see their day in court, so the suggestion that lakes and rivers should have theirs before we do might, to those steeped in the colossal catastrophe of today, come across as a misuse of resources. Shouldn’t we make sure that humanity is taken care of before we worry about the planet that will surely outlive us no matter what we do to it? What’s the purpose of a well-kept home if nobody’s there to live in it? 

These are all, in their ways, matters of scale. “We live in an extraordinary time,” Kolbert writes in her introduction, and it is certainly true that there seem to be more conflicting forces operating today than ever before, each with incompatible aims and complex infrastructures. From the wild advancements in high-level physics to the rise of the manosphere, from the tragically slow cultural acceptance of gay rights to its befuddlingly backward rejection of trans people, from addictive social media platforms to humanity’s repeated genocides—these all careen around us via the constant swell of content cascading from every cranny of any and all communication tech. Who, in such a miasmic glut of formidable forces, feels like they’ve got the handle on where our resources ought to be directed? Who decides? And who decides who decides? And amidst such staggeringly multiplicity, it’s hard for fatalistic futility to set in. I sometimes hear the words of Bo Burnham echo in my head when I confront these issues. In his song “All Eyes on Me” from Inside, Burnham sings, “You say the whole world’s ending? Honey, it already did.” What if this, right now, already is the whimper?

The word radical appears numerous times throughout Life on a Little-Known Planet, which shows us something of the magnitude of what’s required of us and future generations if we hope to address any of our problems, let alone all of them. Once, in “The Lost Canyon,” about the lowering water level of man-made Lake Powell (created by the construction of Glen Canyon Dam, the focus of the title environmentalist group’s ire in Edward Abbey’s seminal 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang) and the paucity of solutions therein. “We’re facing big challenges,” Anne Castle, an expert on the subject, told Kolbert, “and so I think radical ideas need to be on the table and be examined.” In another piece, “Mr. Green,” Kolbert uses the word to describe the ideas of Amory Lovin, a trailblazing environmentalist who advocates for things like “ultralight cars made of carbon fibers, vehicles that generate electricity when they’re not on the road, an economy powered by hydrogen.” 

But the most poignant use of radical appears in the article about the rights of the natural world. Chuck O’Neal, the co-plaintiff of the litigious bodies of water in Florida, said this to Kolbert: “I often hear the word radical. And I’m, like, all right. Radical comes from the Latin word radix, for ‘root,’ and that’s exactly what this is: change at the root. Does nature have rights? That concept, I agree, is radical.”

To paraphrase President Andrew Shepherd in Rob Reiner’s optimistic portrait of national government, The American President: We have radical problems to solve, and we need radical people to solve them. Sometimes I wish more radical people were writing these articles, instead of merely being the subject of them. Reportage on such luminaries, despite any veneration, still functions to distance their solutions to the radical margins. If desperate times call for desperate measures, those measures are no longer desperate but vital. We’re long past the stage of defining our future survival in terms of degree, in the language of scale. 

Space is too big, and atoms are too small. We are Earth people. This is more than our home—it is our body, our spirit, our life-sustaining nucleus. We owe it the same degree of fealty as we do our brains, our hearts, our souls, our roots. To quote another romantic film directed by Rob Reiner (since his death, I, like everyone, have rewatched and re-appreciated his incredible run of classics): “Anyone who says differently is selling something.”