By Jerry Sullivan
At the time almost no outsiders came anywhere near the Kalahari, so nobody interfered with the deal the Bushmen and the lions had worked out. The Bushmen had no weapons of much use against a lion. They relied on arrows dipped in a slow-acting poison for hunting, and anybody facing a charging lion needs a poison that acts really fast.
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But there was more to it than that. There was also in the cultures of both parties a mutual understanding that they would respectfully avoid one another. What should we do, the Marshalls asked the Bushmen, if we come face-to-face with a lion? The correct technique, according to the Bushmen, was to walk at an oblique angle past the animal. Keep it in view out of the corner of your eye, but don’t stare. Walk at a steady pace, but not too fast.
The stable relationship has ended during the past 40 years. Settlers have moved in with cattle, and lions do eat cattle. Fires have been suppressed, so brush is taking over the grasslands. And the Bushmen have been removed from their ancestral lands.
We can reconstruct a history that begins with one windblown flock of finches landing on the Galapagos and finding whole islands full of rich opportunities. As time went by, the birds began to specialize. Some became ground feeders; others fed in the cactus branches. Some specialized in small seeds; others went after larger seeds.
A second selection event, a season of abnormally heavy rainfall, pushed the population in the opposite direction, favoring small birds accustomed to eating small seeds. We can imagine the status quo on the Galapagos being maintained by such alterations. A long stretch of drought or an extended period of heavy rainfall could send the whole process into a permanent change.
No crop is more dependent on pesticides than cotton, and Weiner points out the choice irony that most cotton produced in the United States is grown in states where hostility to the ideas of Darwin is widespread and powerful. While the legislatures look for ways to keep evolution out of the schools, the cotton farmers spray more and more poisons and are constantly surprised to find that the chemists can’t come up with anything more than a series of stopgaps. And even the chemists, supposedly trained scientists, imagine that someday they will find a poison that natural selection can’t defeat. We declare nature to be a servant or an enemy, insist that we properly have dominion over it. And then wonder if it is safe to leave the Land Rover.
