Although I'm spending most of this year in south Chile, I kicked my time in South America off with two weeks in the marshlands of Íbera, in northeastern Argentina.  Doug and Kris Tompkins (who I described in my intro post as "American entrepreneurs-turned-conservationists/ organic farmers/ environmental activists") have embarked on a major conservation effort in this enormous and biodiversity-rich wetland.  Their fantastic and inspiring team works on reintroducing extirpated species, such as the giant anteater and Pampa deer, creating models of ecologically-sound ranching, protecting the wetland system from illegal infringement, promoting a local ecotourism industry, teaching kids about conservation, and much more.  I wrote this post a few months ago, but hope it still contains something of interest-call it my first introduction to biodiversity-oriented conservation.

My whirlwind time in the marshlands of Íbera has come to an end-and to summarize, this swamp of all swamps impressed me far more than I expected it to.  There's nothing sublime about the landscape of a vast bogland, largely because no feature in particular catches the eye.  When you look out across it-whether "it" is swampy lake, lakey swamp, grassy marshes or marshy grass-your first reaction most likely falls more into the "huh..." category than the "omg wow!!" one.  Yet the subtlety of this ecosystem gradually becomes one of its most beautiful features: no one element jumps out at you because so many are mingled together, in just the sort of soupy conflagration that entices myriads of animals to set up shop. 

I've heard Doug and Kris talk often about biodiversity as the measure by which to judge human impacts on the ecosystem, but the idea often struck me as somehow cutesy.  Deeming cries of "Save the (fill in the blank with the charismatic macrofauna of choice)" the territory of little old ladies, I imagined energy policy and sustainable development as the cutting edge of environmentalism.  Resorting to animal-based appeals might work as a tactic for fighting climate change or preserving land, but I rarely considered the merit of the cause itself.  Wandering around the wetlands, where land, plants, and animals flow together as essential elements of the landscape, led me to realize two things: first, conserving the richness of life on earth represents a far more complex, scientific, and urgent cause than simply saving one species; second, this cause has been drastically under-recognized.   Why? Well, seeing both the quantity and the quality-unafraid of humans, seemingly content-of the wildlife there helped me appreciate how sadly unique places of such richness of life have become.  Part of the problem, I started to realize, comes from us never realizing what we're missing, and what we stand to lose.

I took to running out toward the marshes around dusk, not only because the sunsets proved spectacular day after day, but also because the combination of boiling heat and a decent amount of work made this the practical time to head off.  This turned out to be a lucky situation, because if there are sublime moments in this place, they certainly come with the vivid colors and dramatic lighting of sunset.  In flaming colors, the landscape literally comes alive during these brief end-of-day moments: various animals, from cute-faced foxes (that's the scientific name, of course!) to vizcachas (stripy prairie dogs) emerge from their nooks to poke around and socialize.  The wizened, half-dead, full-of-other-bits-of-plant-life trees look dramatic, and almost spookily human.

The scale of this place, or how a human feels in it, perplexed me. The vastness of the horizontal, spreading out almost terrifyingly far in all directions, gets checked by the very human size of the vertical.  Unlike a barren desert, the grasslands surrounding the marsh tend to have enough trees, and large enough ones, that you can't necessarily see huge expanses in all directions.  But few elements of the place tower above you, in the way that forests do, so there's little sense of shelter or enclosure.  Maybe this strangeness of dimensions compounds the usefulness of the horse: the bit of riding I did gave me a glimpse of the different perspective you get when just a little higher off the ground.  In any case, the process of placing myself within the scale of this landscape deepened my appreciation for the unusualness of this vast project, in an ecosystem teeming with life.

At the end of a day full of the confusions of a new job, I headed off on a run but gradually realized I felt more like sitting down and looking around than hithering and thithering about.   So when I saw a little plank set across a pretty dinky intermittent stream, I thought: nap time!  Safe on the insect-free plank (despite my high bug tolerance, I didn't find lying down in the marshes all that appealing), I listened to how loud it was around me-not at all the silence of the wilderness, but a bustling and endlessly rich cacophony of animal noises.  In my just-about-to-dream state of mind, this reminded me of watching the water of a rapid, which seems to be the same, all in one pattern, until you start paying attention more carefully.  Then there's endless variation and unpredictability, but of a sort that you can't will yourself to pay attention to.

This whole week, I kept thinking back to A.R. Ammons' meditative poem "Corson's Inlet," even though the Esteros of Íbera have absolutely no sand in sight.  Lines from this poetic rendition of walking and seeping into a dynamic landscape would surface in my mind, almost to the rhythms of my footsteps.  I would plunk the whole poem right in here, but that might overwhelm eyes / attention-spans.  This musing on noticing without forcing an understanding sticks with me, an essential companion to lessons in conservation biology:

                      the possibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness: 

              the "field" of action  

              with moving, incalculable center:     

              in the smaller view, order tight with shape:  

              blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed: carapace of crab:  

              snail shell:          

                            pulsations of order          

                            in the bellies of minnows: orders swallowed,  

              broken down, transferred through membranes  

              to strengthen larger orders: but in the large view, no  

              lines or changeless shapes: the working in and out, together          

                            and against, of millions of events: this,                   

                                          so that I make                   

                                          no form of                   

                                          formlessness:

Flying low over this watery landscape in a tiny plane, the dynamic, inscrutable "orders" of this landscape appear in clumps of grass giving way to lake, trees on higher ground blending into tall grasses.  Hidden springs create almost-perfect circles of swampier vegetation, ringed with a shining moat of water: more like land-art more than natural form.  I can observe all the varied characters of the landscape taking root in odd patterns, according to the particularities of each nook-but could never predict from the geography what forms of life would flourish. 

There's a paradox here: the intricate, vivacious complexity of this system of life simultaneously provokes a tranquil joy and a gnawing anxiety: joy that unfathomable richness remains on earth, and anxiety that this very complexity dooms it as the order of man invades those of nature.  Returning to the terrain of Ammons' poem complicates this paradox-the anxiety that natural abundance produces stems not only from fear of human destruction.  Whether a product of human nature itself or a particular cultural mindset, we're programmed to seek order, a realm in which we can live and comprehend our surroundings.  Order itself may not wreck havoc on nature-caring for working landscapes requires neatness and discipline-but the drive toward human order certainly tends to lead away from respect for the mysteries of natural systems.  Romanticizing nature softens this tendency-much as Romanticism countered the order-seeking reason of the Enlightenment-but preserving ecosystems requires injecting some scientific understanding into blissful appreciation.

"Biodiversity" as a concept appears to package this paradox, in wrapping the acknowledgment of natural complexity in scientific terms and quantifying concern in number of species, number of individuals.  Our concern stems from the declining populations of animals, the pollution of water, deforestation, this framework informs us, quite correctly.  But sitting on my plank, confronted with this new landscape, I think about the internal, personal roots of ecological anxiety.  How to study, and work to restore, this landscape without presuming a total understanding? The struggle begins well before the "saving" step.  Even conceptualizing what lies behind the token animal faces requires stretching the mind.