Search

This question of ecological certainty, patriotism, or the egotistical aggrandizement connoted by the manufacture of images involves conundrums of psychology, of speculative realism, panoramic endemism, picturesque escapism, those postcards and billboards, the rational and irrational, potential and actual, underlying principles of identity, integrity, and place. Ultimately, the landscapes of mind, those myriad, wistful losses of physical identity into the greater miasma of an aesthetic swamp that is the photograph, leave us ecologically stymied. There could be no stranger paradox than that of a landscape photograph. Judgments are not part of the aesthetic questions.

For nearly a decade as court painter to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612), Belgian-born, Netherlandish painter Roelant Savery (1576–1639) produced an astonishing body of work at Rudolf’s limitless castle in Prague, particularly focused upon paradise images and an unprecedented array of life-like animal portraitures, including several of the Dodo, arguably painted from life. The relationship between Rudolf and Savery, and that of the Dodo and its eventual iconic extinction, poses an insoluble mystery, ever tragic, and almost formulaic with respect to humanity’s paradoxical relationship with birds, and Nature in general.

Miguel de Cervantes alone suggests that the creative imagination is humanity’s response to its own annihilatory impulses. That is not to say that creativity does not exist in every living organism. It does. But the degree to which Don Quixote himself must “dream the impossible dream” is evidence enough to render a formal commentary. Our motives are mixed, as Shakespeare most probingly delved. But it can easily be argued that our compulsion to rectify and ameliorate; to save and be saved; and to restrain, exert tenderness, speak of compassion, formulate town halls, vote, assist, and engage in all those actions of kindness with which our myriad prophets and saints have been absorbed dates most recently to the quixotic in human nature.

The Anthropocene has caught up the history of philosophy in the worst paradox of all: ecocide purporting to seek ethical balance between fundamental logic, common sense, classical pillars of reason, and the search for some ideal that exists only in the languages of art, science, and mathematics, but not in life herself. Our consciousness is not unaware of this inherent contradiction. If all other tools have failed us in one exercise after another to rectify the clarity of our crisis, what is left? Clearly the path to activism heralds an unblemished pathway.

Even by modern comparisons, the stakes for humans involving the novel coronavirus of 2019 have now radically changed at a level not seen since the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918, caused by the H1N1 virus, of avian genetic origin. Meanwhile, researchers currently search for over 1.6 million other suspected animal-borne viruses. And it would appear all but certain that at the heart of this global human tragedy is a singular, ecological verity: the likely vortex of this epidemic, and more to follow, is humanity’s most sincerely ill-advised obsession with killing other animals and eating them.

Environmental epidemiologists have endeavored to both track and offer ameliorative solutions for an age teeming with depression. The US Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF), for example, describes eight primary tests utilized in the diagnosis of human psychological morbidity. But the characterizations scarcely account for what appears to be an unambiguous response to a massive set of ill-boding and self-imposed ecological circumstances. Yet, for several thousand years, our species has felt the pangs of loss, of self-infliction on others, and the inexplicable dilemma of being human amid biological whorls of chaos; a condition perhaps most assiduously studied in the annals of Jain ethics, and its remarkable culmination in the all-encompassing philosophy of ahimsa, nonviolence.

This chapter highlights the ecological significance and discusses the conservation requirements of various species of birds, reptiles, fishes, parasites, and arachnids that are critically endangered and threatened. Various etiological factors and threats to the endangered birds are also discussed at length to provide scientific basis for the conservation importance of the endangered species.

Ultimately, to transcend the double-bind which, inherently, recognizes the philosophy of bioinvasives—whether a virus, a feral cat, a flea, or a human being moving from continent to continent—we are condemned to the paradoxical embrace of some version(s) of biological chaos in the name of community, renascence, and re-evolution. Is this a betrayal of evolution? Our second-guessing of natural selection involves more than chance and wagers, and, rather, goes to the core of our species’ singular edifice of millennia-long manipulations.

The worlds and community interactions of all other species, including eusocial insects, appear to rally free of the stultifying commands and controls that have worked against our re-uniting in some manner with them, for reasons we have no clue. This is particularly the case with respect to an absolute freedom to exist everywhere outside human consciousness; to engage the world at a level of reciprocity between species—the very reality of which has given rise in our minds to the natural sciences, to the perception, and accompanying theories, of interdependence, the most crucial element in the worlds of both Mahavira and Buddha, that source of true reciprocity potential among humans and other species.

Every creation (Being) harbors an unwavering proliferation of microcosms (e.g., bacteria, follicle mites, tens of trillions of cells) whose interactions—which are translatable at some distant levels of ornate mathematical aphorism—are most relevant to deep biology, something entirely different than deep learning, as it is commonly applied to algorithms, machine intelligence, and neural networks. Deep biology preserves in consciousness the readiness, willingness, and reciprocity potentials of the conscience. It extends from nerve endings, and all those trillions of individuals within us, to the external world of mice and spiders and whales. To companion animals and woodpeckers.

This chapter looks at contradictions in protective network comparisons, rankings, and their overall place within a biosphere whose vulnerabilities continue to be exploited by one species. The dialectic at the heart of ecological paradox is unsparing. Since October 1945, when the UN was founded, the human population has soared over 300%, from approximately 2.5 billion to over 7.8 billion.

This chapter examines diverse and troubling landscapes (sacred and profane) which invoke an ambient mosaic of contradictions. As our species struggles to redeem ourselves in favor of all those kindred spirits everywhere in the world, we must re-invent an enchanted and pragmatic ethic that generously confers sovereignty to all those Others and their habitat—a lasting tenure of coherence, that will rise to the occasion of down-to-earth, non-violent policies for everyone. This human geography and geopolitical challenge is elucidated in places like the sacred cliff monastery of Taktsang, in the Paro Valley of Bhutan, at Mount Everest, and elsewhere.

There are precious pictures of Nikos Kazantzakis and Albert Schweitzer enjoying a forest picnic together somewhere in Europe, long ago. Both men seem to be grinning. They know something. Neither the author of Zorba the Greek nor the Doctor who spent much of his life in West Africa helping people and other animals was a nihilist, not at all. They believed in the ability of our species to act with compassion, intellect, and heart. Schweitzer was convinced that Homo sapiens had what it takes to make things right. Kazantzakis, for his part, at least by some interpretations, seems to have been unsure. But he was intent upon the very optimism that is life itself. Kazantzakis’ unprecedented literary oeuvre, schooled by one of the most remarkable biological hotspots within a hotspot, Crete, is—in every sentence and impulse—a paean to ecological integrity and endurance; and to the human spirit which figures in that great Cosmic drama of earth.

Divisive evolutionary forensics, including great riddles of taxonomy and phylogenetics, may not simply be a complication of consciousness: a flaw in the mathematical space harboring, somewhere, the conscience, even as the picture postcards would all deny the mayhem of survival and extinction, in favor of the Mona Lisa’s smile. Somehow unmiraculously, we perpetually fail to favor one constant over the other. While bad news punctuates headlines, leaving the soft murmur of the peaceful largely unheralded, the tallies of destruction will never outweigh the totality of quiet footprints of all those who remained pacifist bystanders beside the fury.

Human conservation success stories with species like Przewalski’s horse, gray whales, black rhinos, Boeseman’s rainbowfish, the Madagascar fossa, the Apollo butterfly, and Jamaican iguana convey an impression that our species’ previous penchant for ecocide has somehow subsided. It hasn’t, and the stark contrast between ourselves and all others, particularly those viruses with whom we are at war, suggests a long way to go ethically and rationally, if Homo sapiens are to every truly rally to the ecologically critical impulses of biophilia.

Acknowledging that neither mathematics, cosmology nor personality equal personal destiny (no matter how eloquent Plutarch, Ovid, Shakespeare, and Saul Bellow were on the topic), the mere desire, even firmly fixed hope, to deflect catastrophe does not add up to tactic. Our life-strategies are not fixed in any biological code.

Logicians speak of “hyper-contradictions,” levels of truth, and the very logic itself of paradoxes; a set of propositions, both proven true and proven false whose outlines involve semantics, mathematics, physics, and ecology. But ultimately, their Medieval Clouds of Unknowing—Insolubilia—remain. Throughout the biological sciences, paradoxical frontiers meet every fact head on. Survival itself proves to be the most vulnerable of all statements of fact, and thus is central to paradoxical thinking. This includes what have been described as “parallel worlds,” “Schrodinger’s cat,” and Russell’s Paradox.

By 1811, Percy Shelley had begun to put his map of the human psyche together for himself in a way that would spell out a charged sequencing of humanity’s shortfalls, particularly as they triggered political injustice and animal abuse. By 1813, in his most famed and trenchant epic, “Queen Mab,” Shelley spelled out A Vindication of Natural Diet that would also be published separately, setting forth the moral, philosophical, and scientific rubrics for the animal rights revolution in the UK and elsewhere.

By whatever surrogate form of logic or unreason one approaches religions or spirituality, what is undeniable is the Christ Passion itself. Which, it must not be underestimated, has inspired much of the most enduring aesthetic articulations ever produced by our species. The fact of unfathomable suffering in this world has lent to us the heart through which to see, to hear, to touch, to feel, to affiliate with and protect so much beauty; and to reciprocally recognize the fragility and very sensory organs of biodiversity herself; of every sentient being; and the consequential role of humanity in either continuing to perpetrate the psychopathology and unbearable madness of the entire crucifixion, or halting it, once and for all.

This chapter highlights some of the most important discussions on the ecological significances and conservation needs of the threatened species of plants in Bhutan that prioritizes 13 critically endangered, 20 endangered, and 15 vulnerable and the under-represented or lesser known bryophytes and the timber species of Bhutan. As assessed in the previous chapter, a total of 35 vascular plants species were either critically endangered or endangered with extinction that warrant immediate conservation actions, comprising ten species in Orchidaceae, three species in Asclepiadaceae, two species in Papaveraceae, two species in Rosaceae, two species in Scrophulariaceae, and one species each in the following families: Acanthaceae, Rubiaceae, Schisandraceae, Actinidiaceae, Aquifoliaceae, Boraginaceae, Cyperaceae, Fabaceae, Hypericaceae, Labiatae, Polygonaceae, Primulaceae, Solanaceae, Taxaceae, Thymelaeaceae, and Valerianaceae. A monolytic species Brugmansia suaveolens (an herb) also known as Datura suaveolens under the family Solanaceae is considered extinct as discussed earlier; and the extinction of such species appears to be driven by low genetic diversity (Spielman D, Brook BW, Frankham R. Most species are not driven to extinction before genetic factors impact them. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 101(42): 15261–15264, 2004). However, there are reports from India that some species that were considered possibly extinct actually re-emerged in different locations, even after some 80 years of the plant having been presumed extinct (Yadav SR, Chandore AN, Nimbalkar MS, Gurav RV. Reintroduction of Hubbardia heptaneuron Bor, a critically endangered endemic grass in Western Ghats. Curr Sci 96(7): 879–880, 2009). Such records certainly provide possibilities of re-emergence of the one extinct orchid species Eulophia stenopetala Lindl and the other narcotic species (extinct in wild) normally used as ornamental plant Brugmansia suaveolens (Willdenow) Berchtold & Presl. The extinct orchid species used to be found in the dry hills of Thinleygang area in Punakha District at 1800 m elevation used to be flowering in May (Pearce NR, Cribb PJ. The orchids of Bhutan: flora of Bhutan volume 3 part 3. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and Royal Government of Bhutan, Edinburgh and Thimphu, p 57, 2002), while the species that is extinct in wild, Brugmansia suaveolens (Willdenow) Berchtold & Presl, used to be located in southern Bhutan at low elevation and subtropical climate, previously spotted in Samchi District Chipuwa Khola) and Sarbhang District in Surey village of Geylegphu area (Grierson AJC, David Long DG. Flora of Bhutan volume 2, part 3. RBGE and RBG, Edinburgh and Thimphu, p 1068, 2001).

Graphically, we look at one easily fathomed outcome of the Anthropocene: personal nihilism and its untoward and ineffective cul-de-sac, namely, suicide. Cornered, losing out to the far more powerful social norms, the conscience is indeed trapped, even as it clings to ideals it knows, from a rash of empirical data sets that could set things right. This is the psychoanalytic struggle to somehow break free of the logical corollaries of a worldly ecocide with oneself.

In treating briefly of Russell’s Paradox, we come upon the anthropic breakdown into logical types. Their mathematical notations initiate suggestion that Homo sapiens, certainly in recent generations, have become so irrationally destructive as to render a most fitting paradoxical category in which we, alone, are the inhabitants of that unique logical type—without any ameliorative endpoint.

This section presents discussions and recommendations for developing conservation strategy action plans for those critically endangered, endangered, under-represented, or lesser known species of wildlife species of animals. The information conveyed is largely derived from the results of various gap analyses of threatened species in Chap. 5 of this book. However, this chapter does not discuss those conservation strategies of wildlife species of animals already in place; the recommendation of conservation strategies for plant and other species is provided in Chaps. 7 and 8.

For many centuries, humans and wildlife species have co-existed through domestication and protection of habitats. However, because of competition due to a perception of limited natural resources, the Human-Wildlife Conflict (‘HWC’) has become a serious global issue, including in Bhutan, posing a grave concern to the conservationist, agriculturist, public and policy makers worldwide. This chapter provides a situational analysis of the HWC in the global context, and its specific importance to the prevailing circumstances in certain parts of Bhutan, pertaining to the policies and strategies, preventive, mitigation, and response measures of such conflicts. Simultaneously, a detailed study of the HWC was conducted at Jomotshangka Wildlife Sanctuary, which encompasses three types of vegetation. Assessment of a global literature review and good practices, and results of a case study have been used to develop a road map of the HWC resolution in Bhutan using non-violent deployable techniques and Buddhist perspectives as preventive and mitigation measures.

Our fanciful notions of destiny that have girded one doomed civilization after another form the full circumference of a uniformly irreligious distress. Within the orbit of those enduring anxieties, the natural disassembly of the body, external causes of injury and mortal wounds, there will always emerge some Symeon the Stylite (390–459) to cheer us up. The saint and his pantheon of prayers bolsters the great ash tree, the formidable ziggurat in every dream of Nature; the dialectic out of which God grows and plays fanatically with the credulous.

They are by far the most persecuted, tortured, and slaughtered terrestrial vertebrate on the planet. Humans, for the most part, despise chickens, eating them without the slightest pause. This may be the most historically documented facet of the madness and perversion of our species, who have singled out and killed nearly one trillion chickens in the past 40–50 years. What this says about chickens and their perdurable forgiveness is nothing less than transcendent, spiritual. What it must say about ourselves is something else entirely.

Notwithstanding obscurity, his deeply observational traits deliver a wealth of biological data that—as an everyday metaphysic, or Farmer’s Almanac, is to the fanfare of country life—understood as a great chain of being that every age group of every species partakes in, with all its poignancies, good-humor, ill-humor, the sum total of interdependencies, mostly focusing on food, nests, and the political and ecological right to exist. And by this vastly illustrated reckoning of nature with herself, a man named Aesop, hailed by Plato and Aristotle, painted by Diego Velazquez, looking like a world-weary wiseman, everyone of Rembrandt’s final self-portraits, conveying to parliaments and presidents, to kings and farmers, and most of all to childhood, the message of love and tolerance between all beings, great and small.

The calamities and stubbornness driving us toward biological negation is a problem in reality as much as one in mind. If we believe despair and annihilation to be inevitable—every sign suggests just that—then we cannot awaken ourselves in time to fix it. If citizen science, environmental law, and ecological ethics are taken up by so meager a percentage of our kind as to be statistically irrelevant, then that by itself speaks to our species’ elimination in the vaster scheme, which is running out of all patience with our illegitimate and petty species-claims to tenure. However, we are firm in our resolve that there remains a critical mass of goodwill, informed science, inspired activists, and the mechanisms for collaboration inherent to human common sense and proven generosity of spirit, which leave a wide margin for planetary amelioration.

In a stunning translation and exposition of Mipham Jamyang Namgyal Gyamtso’s (1846–1912) Commentary on the Ninth Chapter of “The Way of the Bodhisattva,” The Wisdom Chapter, we read a breathtaking overview of Nagarjuna’s deconstructivist understanding of Reality—the embrace of sunyata, of zero—as he is thought to have interpreted original Buddhist wisdom literature, the Prajnaparamita Sutras. As Nagarjuna himself apparently warns, “the path is fraught with dangers so great that even the Buddha himself hesitated to teach it….”

The Lamb dominates the final book of the New Testament, “Revelation,” (apokalypsis), particularly the final chapters 14–22, wherein atop Mount Zion the Lamb, with 144,000 disciples, sings untranslatable praise for the creator, “a new song before the throne….” That throne is the world, but it is also locatable in Ghent, Belgium, where the van Eyck brothers’ all-enduring masterwork “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb” c. 1421–1431 belies the harshest of contradictory truths. A city, 600 years later, that celebrates the Lamb of God, but also, with the exception of Thursdays—when the city prides itself on trying to go largely vegetarian, like India’s city of Pushkar—thinks little of its slaughter.

Every aspect of life is contingent upon the cycles of daytime and darkness, the joules and electron volts representing the energy of photons, and the implicit equations involving the speed of light and Max Planck’s constant. Ultimately, to the uninitiated, light and dark are Biblical, poetic, the source of our gardens, our fears, our demons, and delectations. Everything that gives us ourselves to behold, grapple, imagine, and vanish with.

From nation to nation, hamlet to megacity, our encultured codes of survival have changed little from our earliest documented desperations and visions. Throughout the history of science and human philosophy, we keep asking the same questions. Nor have our answers changed. Only the baseline, the very Weltanschauung, the world’s context, has been seismically altered in relation to the extent of pain in the world, and the unnatural cruelty meted out by our kind. What this clears the way for is a constellation of improved choices by our kind, just as Dante’s Inferno had its mirroring pinnacle in Paradise.

The variables of the underlying contradiction have been discussed for thousands of years, involving such fundaments as life and death, the soul and matter, senses and reason, change and permanence, being, becoming, yes, no, here, there, not and why not, etc. These contraries, antonyms, oppositional forces, knowns and unknowns are no less intriguing and mysterious than those same combinatorial effusions which highlight poetic function, form, beginnings and ends, throughout the biochemical world we think of as earth, which translates and transliterates every inkling of DNA, every cell, molecule, and atom.

Humanity’s colossal ecological crisis is an explicit function of our architectural and socially enforced spaces of occupancy, plots of arrogation, the places in which we choose to live, altering our surroundings, inventing and constructing “our” possessions. This is an entirely ephemeral habitation, obviously, which has only its ancestors, or futurist scenarios and pictorial cosmologies, to cling to, or benefit. Between the environmental impacts of a naked ascetic in India, and a Taj Mahal or Viennese Schonbrunn Palace, our predilections as a species have laid claim to the earth in ways that obviously and emphatically deviate with enormous percussion from the bionarratives of all other species.

Contrary to natural selection, as the overarching explanation for all that humanity has both accomplished and inflicted, there is unquestionably an impetus, independent of any seemingly solidified traits, evolutionary, or hereditary constraints, to see a paramount merging of ideals, all borne out by the prolifically diverse ethos of tens of millions of species that continue to enshrine the biosphere.

Biologists speak of the C-value paradox that recognizes far greater amounts of DNA in what most had taken to be, for example, a simple unicellular Polychaos dubium (freshwater amoeboid) genome. In fact, nearly 99% of our human DNA is non-coding, meaning that our proteins, amino acids, and genes are largely redundant, or outright “junk.” Not so throughout the rainforests of Yasuni. Here, 98% of DNA is indeed meaningful, perhaps purposeful. But to what end? Some simply immerse, grow still and revelatory. No other motive or thought.

Our species, as it painted lost worlds at the end of the upper Paleolithic period of the Stone Age (50,000–10,000 BCE), depicted its own separation from previously related constellations of other sentient beings. It is as if Homo sapiens had become trapped upon one or other rim of a great canyon whose walls had separated over geological time. It happened with the break-up of Gondwanaland, of mountain building coming to whole continents, fracturing biosemiopatric communities into exclusive domains where previous collectives had known only participation with one another. Unable to reverse the irreversible, incapable of further hominin hybridizing, no cross-bred humanity would ever likely again emerge.

The longing for an end to longing; for implosion whose self-destructive image can somehow manage the hat-trick, moving philosophically and painlessly from inaction to the iconic stamping out of the entire passion play that is human existence, with its order of magnitudes as concentrated as the instantaneity of an electrical current. In such remote contemplations, this is where metaphysics and natural history converge, pivoting upon the question of human worth among the animals. Of the whole sequence of events following upon the Garden of Eden and expulsion of its first two hominins.

The history of museums may be likened to the labyrinthine twists and turns of evolution itself. Accept that by the time we arrive at, say, Rome’s resplendent Galleria Doria Pamphilj, we cannot help but meditate upon the anomalies of the human presence as expressed within the multitudes of artistic artifacts of self-reference—objects of passing devotion (even in The Eternal City that is Rome) whose creators are no less impermanent than the paintings and relics of their devotion. Such ensembles of energy and inspiration are, themselves, exhibits to all that we strive to understand, overcome, even outlive—against biological odds impossible to calculate.