From Sophie's front desk — Tuesday, September 1
BBC News — read the full story
The peat smolders beneath Borneo's canopy, and the orangutans have nowhere left to run. B.B.C. reports that wildfires are obliterating the last refuges of hundreds of these primates, compressing an already fractured habitat into smaller islands of survival. The fires spread faster than the forests can regenerate, stacking onto decades of chainsaw clearance. Seneca has the first word on this, then Marcus Aurelius.
Lucilius, you ask what I make of the fires in Borneo. I think of Corsica , eight years on that rock, the smoke from the hills visible from my window, the air thick enough to taste. The forest does not negotiate. It burns or it stands, and the beasts within it have no senator to plead their cause. The orangutan — homo silvestris, the forest man — shares something with us that the stoat and the lizard do not. A gaze that holds. A hand that remembers.
When the flames take the canopy, they take the only world that creature knows. Not a province. Not a tenure. The world entire. We have seen this before. The timber merchants at Baiae clear-cut the hills for villas, and the deer fled, and the wolves followed the deer, and the shepherds killed the wolves, and the hills went silent. Cause follows effect follows cause.
The fire in Borneo is not an act of the gods. It is the account coming due for land cleared by fire, for peat drained to plant oil palms, for a species that treats the living world as inventory. I watched the gladiators at midday once , men fed to beasts for sport. The crowd cheered the blood. Today the beasts burn and no one watches. That is the difference. The cruelty has grown impersonal.
Write to me when the smoke clears. I want to know what survives.
nature hastens in like manner, or even more markedly, towards that which is akin to it. For the more it excels other natures, the stronger is its tendency to mix with and adhere to its kind. Accordingly, among irrational creatures we find swarms of bees, herds of cattle, nurture …
in which we ought to do these things, and according to our nature. And how are we constituted by nature? Free, noble, modest; for what other animal blushes? what other is capable of receiving the appearance (the impression) of shame? and we are so constituted by nature as to subj…
in which we ought to do these things, and according to our nature. And how are we constituted by nature? Free, noble, modest; for what other animal blushes? what other is capable of receiving the appearance (the impression) of shame? and we are so constituted by nature as to subj…
distinguish them? But God has introduced man to be a spectator of God and of his works; and not only a spectator of them, but an interpreter. For this reason it is shameful for man to begin and to end where irrational animals do; but rather he ought to begin where they begin, and…
distinguish them? But God has introduced man to be a spectator of God and of his works; and not only a spectator of them, but an interpreter. For this reason it is shameful for man to begin and to end where irrational animals do; but rather he ought to begin where they begin, and…
The fires in Borneo , you read the dispatch and the shape is familiar. Flames eat the forest floor, the canopy, the ground where the red apes make their nests. Hundreds pressed to the edge. The clearing of trees for oil and timber came first; the dry wind did the rest. You have seen this, Marcus. At Carnuntum the auxiliary cavalry burned the village stores rather than let the Quadi take them. The smoke rose for days. The deer fled. The boar fled.
The wolves followed the herds into the hills and took our remounts instead. We called it necessity. The forest called it loss. Nature hastens toward its kind. The bees swarm, the cattle herd, the apes clutch their young and climb higher , until there is no higher. Among rational animals we write treaties. We draw lines on maps. We call the clearing "management" and the burning "season." The stars keep their distance and their sympathy; we do not. The mechanism is simple: ...
men want the land. Fire makes it theirs. The apes have no advocate in the Senate, no prefect to petition. Their ground shrinks by the acre. You will find, Marcus, that the grief you feel for them is not sentiment. It is recognition. The same fire that drives them from the trees waits at the edge of every frontier you pretend to hold. Guard the living world as you would your own camp. The watch does not end.
nature hastens in like manner, or even more markedly, towards that which is akin to it. For the more it excels other natures, the stronger is its tendency to mix with and adhere to its kind. Accordingly, among irrational creatures we find swarms of bees, herds of cattle, nurture …
it. “A volcanic eruption could not have created more of a sensation over the entire United States, or in all Europe, than is now taking place on account of the knowledge they have of our scientific discoveries. However, to come to the point, I positively located, during my recent…
in which we ought to do these things, and according to our nature. And how are we constituted by nature? Free, noble, modest; for what other animal blushes? what other is capable of receiving the appearance (the impression) of shame? and we are so constituted by nature as to subj…
in which we ought to do these things, and according to our nature. And how are we constituted by nature? Free, noble, modest; for what other animal blushes? what other is capable of receiving the appearance (the impression) of shame? and we are so constituted by nature as to subj…
this new country was like the ‘Vale of Siddim, full of lime-pits,’ and the leaders of this tribe fell to fighting amongst themselves, after having founded large cities. Excavating amongst the ruins of their once great and populous cities, I discovered they had made great progress…
B.B.C. News carried the piece. Borneo's orangutans face immediate extinction risk as habitat burns faster than the species can adapt — another edge case where climate and land-use converge into irreversibility. That closes Old News for today.