Wild as it Gets: Wanderings of a Bemused Naturalist

By Don Pinnock

What's your cat up to when you're not around? Do dragons exist? Are clouds alive? Why did three men risk their lives for a single penguin egg? These are just a few of the questions and stories puzzled over by award-winning travel writer and naturalist Don Pinnock in this collection assembled from years of wandering around Africa. A funny, entertaining and thought-provoking book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Jul 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780624079033

Don Pinnock

Dr Don Pinnock is an investigative journalist and photographer who, some time back, realised he knew nothing about the natural world. So he set out to discover it. This took him to five continents - including Antarctica - and resulted in five books on natural history and hundreds of articles about his travels. His other books include Gang Town, which won the City Press Tafelberg Non-Fiction award, and a biography of the journalist Ruth First. He has degrees in criminology, political science and African history, and is a former editor of Getaway magazine.

Book preview

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WILD

AS IT

GETS

wanderings

of a bemused naturalist

don pinnock

Tafelberg

To Justin Fox,

good friend and fellow traveller,

and

for elephants

introduction

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If there’s a social hierarchy in heaven, I hope biologists get compliant angels, bottomless research grants and the residential equivalent of Bishopscourt, Houghton or Hampstead. Maybe I’m biased. But to me they seem, above all others, to perceive, through the myriad actions and processes of countless creatures, the vast and magical implications of life. They have a capacity for entrancement.

That’s not a word used much these days. In the fast-moving world in which most of us live, we seldom have time for entrancement beyond the gaze with which we regard the flickering screens of our entrapment. There are, however, those who regularly become fixated by the bark of a tree or a bug on a leaf or an animal doing very little at all. Or maybe a puddle or a platypus.

They tend to say things like if the DNA in one cell of a mouse were placed end on end and magically enlarged to the width of ordinary wrapping string, it would extend over 900 kilometres. Or did you know, there are over 500 species of friendly bacteria living symbiotically in your mouth and throat? Or to conserve biological diversity is an investment in immortality. Or I hate a man who skins the land.

There are giants among them without whom the world in which we live would be much less interesting. Think of life without Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Carolus Linnaeus, Jane Goodall and EO Wilson, for starters. They were and are all afflicted with what the American entomologist and father of sociobiology, Edward Wilson, calls the naturalist’s trance. It’s the prerequisite of genius.

My admiration for their craft and their insights is the product of my ignorance. As an amateur, I have no training in science so it became my hobby. For many years I would return from a library or bookshop with treasures under my arm gathered simply because of the cool pictures on their covers. Many of these writers used arcane terminology that had me scurrying to a dictionary. Not infrequently I gave up and reached for another book or wandered through Google instead.

But gradually it all started making sense. Science wasn’t impenetrable to non-scientists, it was just written in a language you had to learn. The best part has been dealing with scientists themselves. For years, emboldened by a good number of books and journal articles, I pursued them, bothered them with uninformed questions and benefited from their good grace and patience.

I’d ask them about their passion and listen intently. They’d do the rest and seemed gratified that someone was interested. That’s their charm, really. Whereas I’m always indebted to them for sharing their knowledge so freely, they seemed grateful for being heard by someone who, while not in their discipline, was genuinely interested in what they had to say. It worked, and wonderful worlds of biology, botany, geology and other natural disciplines unrolled for my awed regard.

About this book, then.

I was having a discussion with a friend who’d been deeply religious but had abandoned his belief. Given the vastness of the universe, he reasoned, how could there be a god transcendent to all that? If there was, it was silly to think he or she would have any interest in us. I agreed, but suggested a different angle.

I’ve walked alone through the sweat of the earth’s rainforests, travelled over the skin of her deserts, looked deeply into the eyes of her wild and beautiful creatures and heard the planet humming in the ice fields of Antarctica.

This has left me convinced that earth is a living thing: Gaia – the idea that the living and nonliving components of earth function as a single system – and that we’re part of its being. We’re not separate, unique, special in any particular way. We’re simply part of earth’s awareness of itself and, if we need a god that made us and cares, it’s all around us. This planet is our mother, our father and our lover.

It occurred to me that this love affair had been going on for some time in columns and stories I’d been writing for magazines like Getaway, Travel Africa, High Life, Africa Geographic and many newspapers and websites. Fortunately, I’m fastidious about electronic filing, so I began trawling through stories to see if they fitted into some sort of pattern. The result is this book.

outrageous stuff

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It may have been the pedantic drone of the high school science teacher, but the period labelled General Science was dead boring. Paraded before us were rules not ideas, absolute statements of fact and not the intrigue of what wasn’t known.

Another problem was the assumption that science was difficult so you had to start with little facts and work up to the big ones (which never arrived). Instead of the mind-blowing volume of the universe, we measured the volume of liquids in a beaker. Rather than exploring the woods for yet undiscovered creatures, we dissected a sad frog that had probably never seen a wild pond. We talked about atoms as though they were tiny marbles rather than almost completely nothing (nearly the entire volume of an atom is empty space).

We memorised the spectrum, never realising there were millions of colours in between, listed the planets without being aware of the Big Bang, glanced at the moon without being told it was probably the result of a massive collision with a Mars-size object that re-melted the earth. It was all pretty depressing and I viewed those periods with dread.

Instead I devoured science fiction: writers like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C Clarke, Philip Dick, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Ursula le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut – and, of course, JRR Tolkien for pure (and impure) magic. They provoked huge questions that, in asking, earned me the displeasure – actually thinly veiled enmity – of the science teacher.

Years later travel and the prompting of a magazine editor led me back to science fact. To my delight, it was as wildly unlikely as science fiction. The stuff all around me, in me and everywhere was … outrageous. I vowed that if I ever wrote a book about all this, it would begin in the deep end. Big, wild, freaky, monstrous, miniscule, crazy and fun. It would be stuff that – as citizens of a small planet circling an average star at the edge of an insignificant galaxy that was born from a singularity the size of a marble – we really ought to know. And cheer. So here goes …

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Big ideas the easy way

On a mountain, in a forest or at the seashore the wonders of nature are self-evident. Everything looks beautiful, smells good, feels fine. But the truth is you’re seeing only the thinnest skin of the wonders, like peering at a circle of torchlight in a Serengeti night. The rest is decidedly odd and pretty near unimaginable.

The best language to explain what’s beneath that skin is mathematics, but it’s one few understand and many of us instinctively avoid, weighed down as it is with memories of incomprehensible school calculus and whiteboards full of squiggles.

There is, however, another language that opens the door to the unimaginable and that’s analogy and metaphor. We have minds that make more sense out of stories than cold logic. We think by association, take short cuts, find the links between things. Without analogy you simply can’t grasp the very big, the very small or the unbelievable things that are, however, true. Here’s a bag of them to boggle over.

The very big

•  The sun burns through matter at a rate equivalent to the nuclear energy contained in a million elephants every second.

•  If galaxies in the universe were peas, there would be enough to fill a soccer stadium – that’s about 140 billion peas.

•  The most distant galaxies are so faint that trying to spot them with a telescope is like trying to spot a firefly on the moon. The Hubble space telescope has a resolution that could see the date on a R1 coin at two kilometres.

•  The blue whale’s tongue weighs as much as an elephant and its song can be heard for

1 600

kilometres.

•  Unchecked, a dividing bacterium could produce more offspring in two days than there are protons in the universe.

•  If the entire history of the earth were compressed into a day, the dinosaurs would have appeared at 22h46 and the first cities a tenth of a second before midnight.

•  In a single day a major hurricane generates enough electricity to power the whole of South Africa for several years. A regular thunderstorm could provide several weeks’ electricity.

•  Space dust adds the equivalent of a cruise liner to the earth each year.

The very small

•  Atoms are pretty small. In a 1-millimetre thick slice of typical household copper wire there are as many atoms as all the grains of sand on earth. Five trillion could fit on the full stop at the end of this sentence.

•  If an apple was enlarged to the size of the earth, a hydrogen atom would be the size of an apple.

•  At least a billion of the atoms in your body once belonged to every other human being who ever lived – and a good few dinosaurs.

•  If every molecule in a quarter of a cup of table salt were a grain of rice, there would be enough to cover South Africa to the depth of 158 metres.

•  If you blew up the smallest living organism on earth to the size of a football, the blue whale (the biggest) would be two and a half times bigger than the earth.

•  If earth was an apple, its deepest mines would not have broken its skin.

The real you

•  If your body was converted entirely into energy, you would become an explosion equivalent to 30 huge hydrogen bombs.

•  If all your DNA was joined together to make one strand, it would be long enough to stretch to the sun and back

1 000

times. You could fit 50 million strands through the eye of a needle.

•  It would take a person typing at 60 words a minute for eight hours a day 50 years to type the human genome.

•  Being your heart is like using a cup to empty a bathtub in 15 minutes, then doing it continuously for the rest of your life. It would take your heart less than 18 days to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool and, in your lifetime, it could fill three super tankers.

•  If your bones were made of metal you could be four times taller, 64 times heavier and would be able to eat rocks.

•  If sperm were the size of a salmon, its journey would be more than 14 kilometres. It swims towards its target like a man in a swimming pool of molasses but unable to move any of his body parts faster than one centimetre a minute.

•  A rat with the same number of brain neurons as a human would weigh 50 tonnes.

Etcetera

•  If a spider’s web was as thick as a pencil, it could ensnare a jumbo jet.

•  In terms of speed per body length, a humming bird is faster than the Space Shuttle during re-entry.

•  If you squeezed the water out of a typical cumulus cloud it would only fill a small bathtub.

•  If the 2.3 million blocks used to build the Great Pyramid were laid end to end, they could entirely encircle France.

•  There’s so much space junk that if it were a landfill site it would have overflowed long ago, much of it travelling faster than a high-calibre bullet. Nasa estimates there to be

19 000

objects larger than 10 centimetres across, half a million between 10 centimetres and 1 centimetre and tens of millions smaller than a centimetre.

•  Two billion videos are watched on YouTube every day and around 247 billion e-mails are sent. There are 640 Twitter tweets a second. And, if Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest on earth. Users upload almost

2 000

photos a second, 40 million a day. These statistics are changing every second and could be double by the time you read this.

How little we know

Let’s say you’re sitting comfortably 10 kilometres above the ground in a sophisticated piece of technology called a Boeing. I wouldn’t want to worry you. But I ought to tell you that nobody on earth, absolutely nobody, knows how you manage to stay up there and why the plane hangs together at all.

If you get any scientist in an arm-wrestle about the underpinnings of their science, they’ll admit they don’t have the foggiest idea about why the things that really matter work. Most of it is invisible and, the closer you look, the more it disappears.

You can see the stars but we don’t know what holds them apart or pulls them together. And if you look at the sub-structure of matter, there isn’t anything there except a sort of fuzzy energy. The engines out on the wing allow you to temporarily defy gravity, but we don’t know what gravity is or why it’s there – it’s the least understood of all forces.

You have no idea what’s in the mind of the person sitting next to you, however close you snuggle. We don’t even know what consciousness is, which is why artificial intelligence is such a problem for computer geeks.

Almost every cell in your body is replaced in seven years (your taste buds every 10 days) so what’s the ongoing thing you call yourself? While thinking about that, you might like to know that you have fewer genes than rice and fewer chromosomes than a potato or a gorilla.

You can’t see the future or the past. We’re driven by the clock but don’t know what time actually is – there’s a strong scientific tendency which says it doesn’t really exist.

You can’t see an atom and we don’t know what holds them together so we have no idea what’s keeping your aircraft in one piece. You can’t see electricity and nobody understands it. What we do know is that is moves down a wire at about the speed of spreading honey.

The biggest thing we can’t see is what we don’t know. Thomas Edison once said we don’t know one per cent of one millionth about anything. Enjoy the flight.

Very deep and extremely dangerous

An astronomer was travelling in a rural area and, one evening, he crossed paths with a peasant woman. They greeted and fell into conversation.

‘What is it that you do?’ the woman asked him.

‘I study all that,’ he said, sweeping his arm across the glittering sky. ‘How earth, stars and galaxies work.’

‘Ah yes,’ she replied, ‘I know how they work.’

He was surprised. ‘You do? Tell me.’

‘Well, the earth is a flat plate balanced on the back of an enormous turtle.’

‘Oh yes?’ he said, amused. ‘Well, can you tell me upon what the turtle is balanced?’

‘Ah! Mr Astronomer,’ she said, ‘you can’t catch me out. It’s turtles all the way down.’

The story has much in common with an idea the philosopher Daniel Dennett had when he was a schoolboy. He and some friends hit on the idea of universal acid. What if there was such a thing? It would be a liquid so corrosive that it would eat through anything – all the way down.

The problem would be how to contain it. It would eat through plastic, glass, stainless steel, ceramic or lead. Where would it end up? Could it eat all the way down to the centre of the earth? What would be left?

A similar ‘what if’ thought was used by the writer Kurt Vonnegut in his book Cat’s Cradle. In it, a fictional polymorph of water, Ice Nine, is invented. It melts at 45.8°C instead of 0°C and when it comes into contact with ordinary water, it acts as a seed which instantly crystallises it into frozen Ice Nine. The plot, of course, is to keep it out of the sea.

These substances, which fortunately don’t exist, utterly transform everything they touch. But there are things that exist that have a similar effect: certain ideas. And the dilemma they cause has been considerable.

In a deeply religious world dominated by the Vatican, Galileo Galilei ground lenses and produced a telescope that could magnify 30 times. Through it he observed the moons of Jupiter, the movement of the planets and the stars of the Milky Way. We were, he wrote, on a planet moving around the sun.

This could not be, said the Catholic Church. Psalm 93:1, 96:10 and 1 Chronicles 16:30 states that ‘The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved.’ Ecclesiastes 1:5 notes that ‘The sun rises and sets and returns to its place.’

Galileo was found ‘vehemently suspect of heresy’, for having held opinions that ‘the sun lies motionless at the centre of the universe, that the earth is not at its centre and moves’. He had, furthermore, held and defended an opinion which had been declared contrary to Holy Scripture. He was required to ‘abjure, curse and detest’ those opinions and was placed under house arrest until the day he died.

As we know, he was correct and his view, which prevailed, was to utterly dislodge humans and earth as the centre of the universe. Albert Einstein