Death Before the Fall (eBook)

Introduction

As a child growing up to missionary parents in Zimbabwe not long after its independence from the apartheid regime of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, death in nature was something I had been exposed to from an early age, albeit not in everyday life. My family’s home was in a quiet suburb of the serene and modern city of Harare, famous for its well-groomed golf courses, botanical gardens, and wide boulevards lined with jacaranda and flame trees that bloomed spectacular shades of purple, white or orange depending on the season of the year. Here the most deadly animal one might encounter was a mamba, boomslang or other poisonous snake, although sightings of even these were extremely rare. Urbanization and farming had long since driven Africa’s famed wildlife far from the places most Zimbabweans lived. Harare was, at least to this child’s eyes, a tranquil paradise with endless adventures to be had with my classmates on sunny afternoons as we roamed the city on our bicycles after shedding the gray knee socks and cramped black shoes of our school uniforms—the cruelest legacy, I callowly assumed at the time, of British colonialism. I had much to learn. Often, though, my parents would load my two sisters and me into our mechanically challenged diesel Mercedes sedan, and we would leave the temperate plateau on which Harare sits to camp some 250 miles to the north at a place known as Mana Pools.

Mana Pools is a remote wildlife preserve and UNESCO World Heritage Site with some of the most spectacular game viewing anywhere in Africa’s southern hemisphere. It was one of my family’s favorite retreats during the years we lived in Zimbabwe. After passing the final tsetse fly control station on the main road—a low mud hut from which a man in a crumpled khaki uniform would sleepily emerge, armed with a rusty tin canister to spray the undercarriage of our car with a noxious-smelling liquid intended to prevent the deadly insect from returning with us—we were truly into the wild, or into the bundu, as it is called in bantu slang. (One of my prized possessions during my elementary school years was a worn copy of the 1967 classic survival manual Don’t Die in the Bundu, by Col. D. H. Grainger of the Rhodesian Army. I never had any reason to put into practice the lessons in this book, but they provided rich fodder for fantasies of heroic feats of a young boy alone against Africa’s elements armed with nothing more than his trusty Swiss Army knife.)

The final leg of the journey into Mana Pools follows a desolate, unpaved track surrounded by thick brush and dotted by colossal baobab trees that look like the remnants of a lost Jurassic Park. One might drive for hours on this path without spotting another vehicle or human being. The first time my family entered this dusty road, however, we had not gone far before we encountered a fresh lion kill. Three young females had taken down a Cape buffalo, which they had not yet dragged into the cover of the bush. Its legs were splayed at odd angles and its side was opened, exposing an impressive rib cage in shades of white and crimson. The lions were feasting on the carcass in the middle of the road, panting heavily as they tore into its body, their chests and muzzles soaked in blood. The air was filled with the stench of death. My father turned off the car engine, and we sat in awed silence watching them feast at a distance of several meters. At last we continued on our way, dipping into the sandy shoulder of the track as we navigated about this scene of beautiful carnage. The lions paid us little notice. I was nine or ten years old at the time, but the memory is still vivid.

It was usually late in the afternoon when we would at last arrive at the Mana Pools campsite, which lies beneath a grove of acacia trees on a high bank overlooking the Zambezi River. After darkness had settled, someone might shine a powerful spotlight or “torch” over the nearby marshy inlets, and we would watch the gleaming eyes of the crocodiles blink and then eerily vanish beneath the water like dying stars. We would lie still in our tents as the campfire dwindled to embers and listen to the haunting cries of jackals in the distance.

There is another distinct sound I remember from those nights as we lay in our beds in the bundu. There were no fences or walls in Mana Pools, and wild animals often made their way through camp. Our most common visitors (apart from the kleptomaniac vervet monkeys always seeking a chance to seize unattended food) were herds of elephants. We could often hear their soft tread and breathing just the other side of our tent flaps as they picked up the pods that fell from the acacia trees we slept under. They would frequently pass close enough to step on our tent ropes, although even in the black of night they had an uncanny awareness of the lines and never so much as grazed them. Before dawn, my parents would already be waking my sisters and me for a new safari, since the early hours of the day when the air was still cool and crisp were the best time to spot rare animals. All around us was a world that was deeply mysterious, untamed, dangerous, beautiful and good, waiting to be explored. And the danger was part of its goodness and its beauty.

Herein lies the central riddle of this book. One might, of course, imagine other worlds in other universes without predatory creatures such as crocodiles and lions, and these might be very good and very beautiful worlds as well. But the particular goodness and beauty of Africa’s wild places that were such an important part of my childhood were inextricably linked to cycles of birth and death, as well as suffering, ferocity and animal predation. One need not subscribe to seventeenth-century German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz’s claim (satirized by Voltaire in Candide) that the world as we know it is “the best of all possible worlds” to nevertheless see that adjectives such as evil and cursed, when applied to the realities of life and death in the animal kingdom, somehow just do not ring true. Mana Pools was very good—its lions, jackals, leopards, fish eagles and cobras included. Yet Mana Pools, as a microcosm of nature as a whole, was also an untamed and even unremittingly harsh world, a sealed economy in which all of life was, in the final analysis, sustained by the deaths—often in spectacular and prolonged ways—of other creatures. There is a doubleness to all of animal existence, extending right back to the very beginning as far as we can tell, with birth and death, comedy and tragedy, suffering and grandeur, appearing as the interwoven and inseparable aspects of a single reality that defies easy moral categorization.

For believers in the God of Jewish and Christian Scripture, this poses a grave theological and moral dilemma that is different in kind from the problem of evil arising from the exercise of human free will. It also distinct from (if perhaps related to) the problem of “natural evil” posed by geological upheavals that take human lives, such as the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the tsunamis in Indonesia and Japan. Simply stated, the trouble is this: Animals, as far as we know, do not have the capacity for anything approaching human moral reasoning and will never be able to comprehend their own suffering in metaphysical or theological terms that might give that suffering meaning for them. Why, then, would a just and loving God—not the impersonal spirit of Hegelian idealism that achieves its final ends through the violent dialectics of “history as slaughter-bench,”1 nor the divinity of Hindu belief who is at once Brahma the creator and Shiva the destroyer of worlds, but the undivided and good Creator God of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament—require or permit such a world to exist? This world is one in which the harrowing suffering of innocent creatures through the violence of other creatures appears at once fraught with terrible savageness and at the same time part of an order that is delicately balanced, achingly beautiful and finely tuned to sustain tremendous diversity of life. If there is a rationally discernible “intelligent design” to the natural world as some believers claim, should we not conclude that the design reveals a pitilessly indifferent if not malevolent intelligence? Why is it that creationists who read “design” from the surface of nature never rhapsodize about the wondrous, irreducible complexity of AIDS viruses, or tapeworms, or serrated shark teeth tiered five rows deep? “It is as if the entire cosmos were somehow predatory,” writes Eastern Orthodox theologian David Hart, “a single organism nourishing itself upon the death of everything to which it gives birth, creating and devouring all things with a terrible and impassive majesty.”2

The pervasiveness of terrible, impassive and majestic forms of predation in nature extends from the great carnivores at the top of the food chain—the prides of lions that have been captured on film killing baby elephants in scenes of such protracted agony that I find them impossible to watch—to the tiniest of insects in the most seemingly tranquil English garden. Aphids would multiply exponentially to unfathomable numbers if not devoured continuously by other creatures. Parasitic wasps hatch thousands at a time to feed with ravenous hunger inside their hosts. Death in nature “is more than extravagance,” Annie Dillard concludes, “it is holocaust, parody, glut.”3 Dillard recounts the “unholy revulsion” of devout nineteenth-century French naturalist J. Henri Fabre after he observed a macabre drama unfold between a bee, a Philanthus wasp and a praying...