The New Indictment: Humans Are Polluting Wildlife’s “Senses”

Humans have created another world crisis. The new buzzword is “umwelt.”

Latest bulletin from environmentalism: Humans have created another world crisis. The new buzzword is “umwelt.”

The lead article this month in the Atlantic Monthly, by Ed Yong, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for “explanatory journalism,” is “Our Blinding, Blaring World: How human-made light and sound are confounding animal senses—with potentially catastrophic results.”

Yong explains (at length) that human activity, specifically light and noise, is screwing up the sensory systems of bats, moths, prairie dogs, manatees, birds, and sharks.

This field of science, which deals with the “umwelt,” seems surprisingly well advanced.

This field of science, which deals with the “umwelt,” seems surprisingly well advanced. I did not know that it existed. Coined in 1909, the term Umwelt, German for “environment,” is from ethology and refers to the world as a particular organism experiences it. Not surprisingly, the worlds that species perceive, their umwelten, are all different. The world as experienced by bats using sonar is different from that experienced by birds aware of magnetic fields and both are different from that experienced by sharks aware of electric fields.

Environmental scientists have been out electronically tagging bats, measuring effects of light on migrating birds, recording ship propeller noises that confuse fish, and measuring the impact of traffic noise on the vulnerability of prey to predators. It is all highly quantified and suggests that human light is “polluting” the night over much of the world, human noise is polluting the oceans with propeller and other noises and also polluting “wild” areas with traffic and other noise.

Who would have guessed that environmentalists are up nights measuring how the lights of parking lots are distorting the umwelts of bats and moths? There is a certain fascination, here. Each species is in touch with that world relevant to its survival and its senses have evolved to perceive only that relevant universe. And so, bats can echolocate nearby objects like insects to within a millimeter in front of their noses by emitting cries that are the fastest vocal activity of any mammal species anywhere—some 200 screeches per second.

But when the night is “polluted” with noise, bats must screech louder to get the job done. When the night is “polluted” with light, another aspect of the bat umwelt—absolute darkness in which it is fitted to hunt—is screwed up and makes the hunting bat prey to other predators.

Moths in their hundreds of millions, sensitive to natural light to navigate, are attracted to “polluting” human light, hovering there for hours till they drop from exhaustion or are eaten by predators.

The mating of some bird species is screwed up because artificial “polluting” light messes up their perception of color so female birds get the wrong signal from the color of male bird plumage.

The list is long and fascinating. Mr. Yong is indeed a talented explainer. The two intensely powerful beams of light projected into the sky in New York City on several nights around 9/11 to represent and commemorate the destroyed Twin Towers attract thousands of birds migrating by night to avoid predators. Apparently, these columns of intense light trap birds as surely as wire cages. With their umwelt totally disabled by this light “pollution” the birds fly around for hours, bumping into one another, exhausting themselves, too weak by morning to continue their long migrations.

By now, you get the idea. The phenomenon is a nice illustration of the nature of the senses, which all perceive the same objective world but different aspects of it by different means in different mental forms because the sense organs have different identities.

The only exception, it appears, are humans. Humans, of course, do have sense organs with a particular identity that perceive aspects of existence by different means (light waves, sound waves) and in different psychological forms (color, sound). And humans too have an umwelt limited by the nature of their senses. Humans cannot echolocate like bats or navigate by sensing magnetic fields like birds.

But humans alone can understand, imagine, and vicariously experience the umwelten of other species.

But humans alone can understand, imagine, and vicariously experience the umwelten of other species. And only humans using reason can transform the world in ways that change huge swathes of the reality to which species’ senses have adapted over millions of years to increase their chances of survival.

In short, as this lead article in the Atlantic concludes, humans once again are screwing up the planet—big time. Their eyes do not see in the dark, so they want to light up the night everywhere. Since the end of WWII, transoceanic shipping has doubled and redoubled again and again making the oceans so noisy that whales won’t sing, crabs won’t feed, and sharks cannot detect their hiding prey.

An Atlantic editor writes: “Through modern technology, humans have explored the sensory worlds of creatures throughout the animal kingdom––we have made the invisible visible and the inaudible audible. ‘This is a profound gift,’ Yong writes, ‘which comes with a heavy responsibility. As the only species that can come close to understanding other Umwelten, but also the species most responsible for destroying those sensory realms, it falls on us to marshal all of our empathy and ingenuity to protect other creatures and their unique ways of experiencing our shared world.’”

Is there really, however, a basis for drawing a connection between “gifts” with which individuals are born—or species are endowed—and unchosen “responsibilities”?  From whom do these “gifts” come? We did not request them, obviously. Is the world “shared” as we are taught in nursery school to share our toys? The world is occupied by all species, by definition, but the sharing is at best metaphorical.

The valid human perspective on nature is not environmentalism, a vaguely defined moral responsibility for all living things.

The valid human perspective on nature is not environmentalism, a vaguely defined moral responsibility for all living things. It is conservation, protecting those resources, including animals that are values to human life. The Atlantic article unquestioningly assumes the environmentalist credo; the chief benefit held out to humans is that they will save the planet. To the fashionable parade of planetary disasters of overpopulation, habitat extinction, natural resources limiting growth, and climate change, welcome the umwelt.

The article sets out a new agenda for humans. Surprise! It is going to cost a lot of money and outlaw a lot of technology. Blue light, an element of much illumination, must go. White light is better, but red light is best. Buildings are going to have to turn off their lights at night if no one is there. Ships must be redesigned both in shape and engine power to be quieter. People in national parks and other wildlife areas must stop using their cellphones. Farmers are going to have to give up chemicals that disorient bees and other pollinators.

The concept of the “umwelt” is the ultimate refutation of “environmentalism. There is no “environment.” The concept is meaningless. Each species has its own relevant environment: that slice of reality its senses can perceive and in which it must survive or perish. Human senses, too, are limited to a certain umwelt, but reason, and the tool of science, are not. Reason, as Ayn Rand argued, makes mankind in the view of environmentalists “the freak of the Universe.”

“Freak” or master of the world, our reason is the faculty of choice. We can choose to employ our knowledge, including of the umwelten, to argue that our endowment as a species makes us indentured caretakers of the environments of every other species on the planet. Or that it is our nature as a species to use reason to adapt the natural world to our needs. Do the environmentalists want to argue which species have a right to their nature and which do not?

Ed Yong takes the position that the long march of species evolution has culminated in a species that by its nature is obligated to consider and to serve all other species. The duty of that species derives from its superior ability. Altruism is the credo of sacrifice of all values to need.

There is no justification in reason, no logic, for this obligation of our species.

There is no justification in reason, no logic, for this obligation of our species. Our evolutionary endowment is reason. It does not come with an obligation to be caretaker of the planet. But it does come with capacity to understand our world and how its vast, enormously complex nature can fulfill human needs. Not just now, in one generation, but far into the future of mankind.

How are the resources that support us today, and delight us in nature, to be perpetuated and nourished? Certainly, that should be on the agenda of science, and it will include the challenge of the umwelt. But all calculations based on this knowledge should be in terms of conservation, not environmentalism.

At some point, politicians around the world will meet to set deadlines for saving the sensory systems of moths, bats, prairie dogs, crabs, whales, sharks, birds, and fish—species.

An article of this prominence in a mainline periodical is an announcement to the public and politicians of the beginning of a new environmental agenda. We can do it!  “Two years ago, the world inadvertently addressed sensory pollution when it was hit by the coronavirus pandemic. Roads were closed, cruises were docked, and people stayed home––making for darker nights and quieter spaces.” And hey, so far it has killed off 6.4 million polluting humans!

Government funding of research on the effects of human light, noise, and other “pollution” will begin to pour out of Washington. Legislation is already being conceived to regulate the new “pollutants” of the umwelten.

At some point, politicians around the world will meet to set deadlines for saving the sensory systems of moths, bats, prairie dogs, crabs, whales, sharks, birds, and fish—species identified in the article as threatened with “catastrophic” “mass extinction” as their sensory worlds are altered by human activity.

You will be hearing more about this.

Related Posts:

1. The Case for a “Natural-Law” Humanism
2. Who Will Shift the Overton Windows?
3. Transcript: The Culture of Liberty and the Power of Fiction

   

About the Author: Walter Donway

Walter Donway has written and edited for Savvy Street since its inception in 2014. His essays and interpretative commentaries on breakthrough books have dealt with philosophy, politics, literature, science, history, psychology, and personalities. His new novel, "Retaking College Hill,” became Amazon’s #1 bestseller in political fiction. This year, the Atlas Society published his Pocket Guide to The Fountainhead and Romanticism Reborn--essays on the Romantic movement in literature and its 20th Century revival in Ayn Rand's novels. His collections of essays and short stories and his "Collected Poems" are available on Amazon. He lives in East Hampton with his wife, Robin.