Consider the Frogs
Extinction; psychoactive drugs; the importance of amphibians; Gaia hypothesis; what is it like to be an animal
“At the foot of the mountain the old man found himself in a broad glade grown thick with rushes, a small stream looping placidly over shallow sands stippled with dace shadows, the six-pointed stars of skating waterspiders drifting like bright frail medusas.” -Cormac McCarthy, “The Orchard Keeper”
You ask someone to name an animal that went extinct and they’ll probably say the passenger pigeon or the dodo bird, as if these two are the outlying mishaps from our absurd primacy. And their extinctions are tragic. Estimates of populations of the passenger pigeon range up to five billion birds, darkening the skies like a cascading all-consuming eclipse as they would fly by. They lived some fifteen thousand years amongst the natives of North America, believed by the Wyandot people that the souls of the dead were turned into the birds every twelve years during the Feast of the Dead, and then hunted and eaten. The dodo was so unique, it led the British merchant Peter Mundy to inquire about the strange bird’s evolution 230 years before Darwin made his scientific case.
But our illiteracy about who the victims were in the ruins of our ransack is exegetical to the ransack itself. There are countless others. The Costa Rican golden toad is gone. The Yunnan Lake newt that once lived along the Kunming lake in China is gone. The gastric-brooding frog, which carries (or carried) their eggs in their stomach and gave birth through their mouth, are gone. The mostly vegetarian cave bear is gone. So is the cave lion, one of the great apex predators of Pleistocene Eurasia. The eskimo curlew, which migrated in huge flocks from Alaska to Argentina, was hunted into oblivion. The great auk and the giant moa are both gone. The Pyrenean ibex, the eastern elk, the atlas bear, the bluebuck, the auroch, the Syrian elephant, the Irish elk, the stag-moose, they were all killed off. The Stephens Island wren was a flightless bird on a small island off of New Zealand, obliterated by house cats. (Domestic cats kill somewhere between 1.3 and 4 billion birds a year in the United States alone, as well as between 6.2 and 22.3 billion mammals. Cats have contributed to the extinction of 63 species, mostly birds. They are malevolent prissy big-game hunters, the animal version of tweed-wearing English aristocrats who kill giraffes from the safari wagon. They are evil incarnate, and you should not own one.)
It’s our self-isolation from the feedback loops of the natural world that have opened a void for the technological advances to try to desperately fill. Or is it the advances that created the void?1 A chicken-and-egg paradox hammering the heads of starving residents bent on self-immolation for fun. We gave up the relishing tapestries of wild prairies and jungles, and replaced its awe and splendor with a Jeff Koons painting that one of his slaves painted in a warehouse. You think about the human mark as a whole, its physical imprint on the world, its legacy, what comes to mind? We build glistening monuments to ourselves, huge metallic and glass cocks that reflect the sun like beacons of triumph. Cities and roads and cul-de-sacs with awkward families huddled behind their alarm systems. Billboards of celebrities mimicking an orgasm face while they show you the perfume they’re selling. Sports arenas for our greatest athletes to perform in front of drunk and drooling fans. Museums to categorize and archive the most important historical paraphernalia we’ve been able to collectively muster. But our real legacy is the heap of extinctions. The Mongols used to pile up the bodies of their victims into mountains so others that would pass would see the magnitude of their power and ability. We should be doing the same, so the cows and chickens and pigs in their cages see how good they have it.
A month into the pandemic, I moved from the foothills of Hollywood to a relatively quiet beach canyon.2 In those first days and weeks, after driving home from work in downtown Los Angeles, I used to sit in my car, in the dark, parked at the edge of the creek with the windows rolled down, listening to the chorus of frogs, decompressing from the churning gears of the city. And it made you wonder about their strange world, only croaking together at night when a storm has brought with it sufficient rain.
Frogs come from the order Anura, literally meaning without tail in Ancient Greek. They don’t have lungs, but rather oxygenate their blood by absorbing it through wet skin, as to why they can breathe underwater. But they are evolutionary totems, casually moving through the strain of metamorphosis from their old form to new, doing in one or two weeks what the span of evolution took millions of years to do. As if there were a knowledge learnt, from when they live and swim entirely in water, and then sprout legs and lose their tail, becoming amphibious, taking the first evolutionary steps onto dry land before retreating back to the soggy home that lets them breathe. Frogs are like a fully-formed memory from the sprawling eons of miracle that brought life to the form and function it is now. Its beginnings as a tadpole, resembling a man’s sperm under a microscope, seems only appropriate that it’s the beginning physical form of a complex sentient creature.
Their chorus of croaks emit some life-assuring symphony. It is the males croaking loudly, to attract mates, and to claim their territory. But I want to believe it’s more than that. Maybe it’s also meant as the sound of the creek at night, the sound that the woods are healthy, that the rains have filled the dry beds, and these unassuming lifeforms have wiggled their way out from way underground and begun their short life. Because a quiet forest is a dead one, a dried up and brittle one. And maybe the collective song is not just a reductive exchange of biologically demanding groans, but perhaps an exclamation that’s woven into the forest or creek itself, like a call to prayer bellowed to all the townspeople.3
The ancestors of today’s frogs and other amphibians emerged 400 million years ago, well before the dinosaurs, when all the Earth’s land was its original Pangea mass. There’s over seven thousand species of amphibian, on every continent except Antarctica, with different species adapted to dry desert climates and others able to survive winters frozen solid underground. “Amphibian” comes from the Greek, meaning “double life,” like butterflies unfurling themselves into better versions of their last selves. The ancient Egyptians believed frogs were manifested during the annual flooding of the Nile, when the water and land joined. They weren’t wrong. Frogs were a constant deity through our history, a hallmark of strange dexterous allure. Frog amulets were often worn to ensure fertility, as they were similarly mummified and worn with the dead to ensure rebirth. Heqet was the Egyptian goddess of childbirth and fertility, depicted as a woman with the head of a frog.
At my old house I had a small pond where I kept some lilies and other water plants in. And one day a hundred or so tadpoles showed up. I watched them everyday, growing larger, slowly sprouting their miniature legs, swimming around in aimless zigzags. I put in a ramp for them, giving them a way to climb out once they became frogs. And then one day, they were all gone. The pond was empty. I don’t know if they were all eaten by a blue jay who discovered them, or they crawled out and made some heroic pilgrimage down to the creek. I don’t know enough about frogs. But watching them in my small pond, growing legs in real time, like a cinematic fast-forward version of evolution, was enough. I now live on another property nearby, where I recently built myself a writing studio where I’m writing now. Later, I will resume digging, and lining it, and adding a melange of water plants, and stalking the creek to find clumps of tadpoles to bring up to my pond. Because to be near one, to look at them closely, is almost enough to transport you into their world.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a paper titled, “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?” in which he ponders the obvious: if instead of our senses we were given echolocation and wings, and flew around in the dark emitting echoed chirps that came back to us like a series of boomerangs, and we were able to pinpoint walls, or insects, or predators, or the chaotic shrubbery of a forest’s edge, with incredible accuracy. His conclusions are unsatisfactory because they are inconclusive—he says it is impossible to imagine “what it is like,” because of the phenomenological limitations of a subjective experience. He more or less gives up and says we can’t imagine because of the challenges of the mind-body problem and the limits of our own conceptual understanding, like trying to imagine one of the countless colors that a lobster can see that we can’t. However, in Kathleen Akin’s response, “What Is It Like To Be Boring and Myopic?” she criticizes Nagel only for his own limitations of imagination and serious inquiry, being too rushed to throw his hands into the air and say we’ll never know. Akins states that much of the neuroscientific physiology of a bat, such as its cortical state of slow fluctuation in the collective activity of a group of local neurons, remains to be discovered, and similar to how we don’t understand what creates human consciousness yet doesn’t mean we won’t eventually.
I’ve always fetishized the idea of being a bumblebee for a day. To fly around with an innocent ravenous charge for flowers, to find a good one and vibrate inside its pink or golden cup of intoxicating nectar and pollen, to only be there for the nectar for yourself, but really being there for the pollen unbeknownst to you. One of my closest friends is a scientist in pollinators, mostly studying the effectiveness of mason bees in apple orchards. One night out camping in the woods in Norway, he took a large dose of mushrooms and his subjective sensory experience turned into that of a moose, his enormous snout of glands sniffing in every filament of data. He didn’t have to imagine, he didn’t try to get into the mind of a moose, it just catapulted upon him. One time on LSD I stepped foot into my own brain, watching the vast incomprehensible complexity of patterns similar to a beehive, neurons on the same pathway head butting each other into conclusive avenues so there was sensible order. Another time on mushrooms I became an entire rainforest as a single collective being, its roaring symphony of birdcalls and colors and pulsing neons of kopek trees and rubber trees swelling like miniature supernovas, sounds of dew drops dripping from the tips of leaves like thunder. I’m weary of these examples because they can easily be grouped up as “drug experiences,” but also the vividness and realness of them were undeniable, and while I understand the reasoning of a reductionist scientist like Richard Dawkins to wave all this off as an illusory fabrication happening only inside your own brain, he’s also never had one of these experiences, and the experience of becoming a moose for an hour or two is real because it’s happening inside your own brain.
Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, begins with the documentation of the massive loss of amphibious life in central Panama. Although no background extinction rate has been performed for amphibians, partly due to fossils of them being so rare, Kolbert notes that “one amphibian species should go extinct every thousand years or so.” Today, they are the most endangered class of animals, calculated that their “extinction rate could be as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate.” Amphibians are the first class of animals that show us the fate of the others, known as indicator species, haunting foretellings of what is to come as a torrent of cascading death. Other groups are approaching these amphibian extinction rates: Kolbert notes that “an estimated…one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion.”
5-MeO-DMT is by far the strongest of all psychedelics, showing you worlds and dimensions and gods you could never imagine. You shouldn’t really try to talk about your experience because you’ll immediately bastardize whatever experience you had, whether it’s being vaporized into crystal infinities, the death and rebirth of yourself, the parallel universes you became for eons packed into those short fifteen minutes. The drug’s only known natural origin is the secretions from the glands of the Sonoran desert toad. And of course, like any other profitable industry, the frogs are being hunted and captured for their magical secretions. Whatever the case, it demands the obvious question of why do these elusive unremarkable toads in the desert secrete a strange goo that sends you into a mystical oblivion?
Frogs stand at the vulnerable doorstep to the rest of the natural world. I don’t want to have to rely on mind-altering substances to be reminded that there’s vast arenas of other experience out there, in the coruscating rivers working as conclaves of artery systems, in a jungle’s screaming symphony working together in effulgent displays of organization, in the suffocating orgiastic violence of prey and predator standoffs. Animals are creatures looking out to you from another world. But they were thrown into this one, without any choosing of their own, like you and me, and stammer haphazardly amongst each other as competitors.4
Ardent capitalists point to Darwin’s statement of “survival of the fittest” for justification of their own psychopathic frenzy of corralling as much wealth as possible while shoving families out of their small business to go live on the sidewalk and sell meth for a living. But as a whole, there’s a strange, far more abstract sense of cooperation within the natural world. Countless flowers and bees evolve together. Pistol shrimps and gobies, coral and algae, oxpeckers and large mammals—they and countless others live in codependent arrangements. Those are easy to comprehend, because it is a two-person dance of co-evolution and cooperation. But, there’s a larger, far more involved and complex tapestry of interwoven parts, as articulated under James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, now referred to as Earth System science (ESS), which brings the sciences together in what The Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College defines as “transcending disciplinary boundaries to treat the Earth as an integrated system.” Lovelock described the Earth as operating like a single organism. So, superficially, every organism on the planet wants to conquer the world—trees want to devour other trees for the most sunlight—but in a larger more holistic sense, everything is unwittingly working together, and therefore biodiversity and stability has increased over time (until we came into the picture of course).
Our value of animals is often understandably ranked by our relatability with them. Seeing a Japanese macaque (those snow monkeys you see in natural hot springs) look around their environment, picking lice from each other’s heads, their eyes absorbing the world like a sagacious old man, we project onto them a contemplative monastic personality. Lions maybe a bit less, but the apex predators still rank high for us as species to protect because we can see an intelligence and facial features that are close enough to our own that there’s a personhood inside. And yet still, the animals exist in another world, looking out at us with a strange and ancient familiarity, as if they know we used to be there with them long ago, and then became too occupied with our own fruitless desires to participate in the natural order ever again.
Frogs, toads, salamanders, newts, and other amphibians are ambassadors of a fragile mysticism still barely hanging on at the fringes of our world. I’m lucky enough to live in a place where they still seem to thrive, at least to my ignorant awareness. But every day that passes, the world becomes a more hostile and uninhabitable one for them, a place that is mean and unhinged, a place that makes them cower under our neon whorish sphere. I don’t want to always rely on pessimism, but their prospects don’t look good. But we can remember to make space for them. I’ll have a little pond for a few of them soon, and maybe they will stay a while. Maybe they’ll remind us where we are, for now, the starlit hearts of sky looking down on us, defining who we are.
For Deleuze and Guattari, in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, their schizoanalytic thesis is that our investments of desire overwhelm our familial ones. They used Richard Lindner’s painting “Boy with Machine” as an example, which depicts a rather plump boy in tight clothing tying himself into the haphazard levers and wheels of a machine. “The turgid little boy,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “has already plugged a desiring-machine into a social machine, short-circuiting the parents.” This is equally true of us as a species. We short-circuited ourselves out of the equation with the rest of the natural world, and became schizophrenic with achieving impossible libidinal desires of wealth or glory or fame. We’ve killed the parental order, as it were, and became crazed with a success that didn’t exist even conceptually before.
The owner of the property, a 92-year-old Native American named Henry, lived another hundred stairs up from me, about two hundred total from the road, and he’d hike up the stairs regularly, carrying a five-gallon bucket of birdseed in each hand. He used to come down to drink tea with me and tell me the stories of Charlie Manson coming by, right before Manson’s family killed someone two houses up from us. I made a small garden of hanging succulents and ivies, hidden under sprawling oaks and a redwood tree Henry planted from a tiny sapling. And the butterflies and bees returned when the flowers opened up; and the bees drank from the edges of the birdbath like waterfowl at a watering hole. And these four young foxes used to come down and eat scraps from a chicken carcass my roommate and I would leave outside.
The Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss defined his belief of the intrinsic value of all living and non-living subjects of the natural world in what he called deep ecology. The failure of the broad environmental movement, in Næss’s view, was due to prevailing cultural archetypes not fulfilling any value to the natural world from the beginning. If everything was instead rooted in the interdependence of biological diversity, we might stand a chance of building a legacy that didn’t ruin everything. The anthropocentric prescription of a thing is our chronic despair failing the life-support system.
Immortality is only abstractly woven into the sphere of the animal world, through the procreative instinct that encompasses everything they do. But there’s an acceptance of their death when it comes to them that us humans couldn’t fathom, as we spend family fortunes trying to get a few more gasps of air before the lights go out for good. Our immortality is more through a material monumental legacy: buildings, wars, nations, corporate dominance. The frogs have their primitive squabbles of dominance, but it’s tethered to the natural order.
Great read 🐸