Leatherback Turtles, Bulldozers and Human Nature

Maybe it’s because I’ve just finished reading Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” but this week’s news about the disastrous deaths of thousands of young and still incubating leatherback turtles in Trinidad reads like something out of a dark comic novel, a gross parody of a cascade of bad decisions resulting in an epic disaster.

A developer builds a small hotel right by an important turtle-nesting beach on a tropical island. The hotel becomes a magnet for eco-tourists flocking to see baby turtles emerge from their nests and heroically struggle to evade predators and make it to the sea. A river that crosses the shore near the hotel starts to shift course and threaten the hotel. The hotel owner asks the government to redirect the river to protect his property and the beach. The government sends in bulldozers whose clueless drivers crush thousands of turtle eggs and hatchlings and expose thousands more to be devoured by vultures, as horrified tourists look on.

Yeesh. Who could think something like this up? Alas, it’s a terrible little real-life allegory for the way we interact with our environment in general.  We chip away at an ecosystem, weaken it without even thinking, or even while telling ourselves that we’re trying to help it, and then something totally unanticipated comes along with disastrous consequences and everyone’s horrified. But if you stand back and look at the sweep of events, it’s clear we were just inviting disaster. 

Hurricane Katrina was the classic example of this—an ever more complex web of environmental insults to New Orleans and the surrounding landscape of southern Louisiana making the city ever more vulnerable to a single, calamitous event. The events in this little town in Trinidad are just a much more modest reminder of a process that we can’t seem to help ourselves from repeating again and again.

This is why we create things bigger than each of us—laws, social institutions, ethical and religious systems—to restrain our sometimes misguided and often selfish impulses, to look at the bigger picture, to ask and try to answer the questions each of us don’t ask or can’t answer. These can help, depending on how resilient and well-thought-out they are, how flexible each of us is, and the particulars of the situation. But can they ever help us break out of this pattern altogether? Probably not as long as we keep doing things with an imperfect understanding of the consequences of our actions. That is, probably not as long as we remain human.

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