The Accident IV - Chronicles of the Cosmopolitan Chicken

RING NUMBER SEX RACE BIRTHPLACE COLOUR PARENTS

105 2012 MSG (M. SENEGAL TYPE) MALE ♂ MECHELSE SENEGAL crossing (16th generation) DAKAR - ÎLE DE GORÉE (SN) MULTICOLOURED MECHELSE FAYOUMI (CCP) × POULET DE SENEGAL (Senegal)

THE ACCIDENT CHRONICLES OF THE COSMOPOLITAN CHICKEN DECEMBER 2013 #IV

THE ACCIDENT

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EVOLUTION IS HYBRIDITY

This is the 4th edition of The Accident. We agreed the magazine would only come out to mark important steps in the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project and the Open University of Diversity.

These are some of the recent milestones: the chicken on stage amidst the technological innovations at the Golden Nica for Hybrid Art in Linz, Documenta (13), and the three international awards I received.

This Accident focuses on hybridity, on tearing down the boundaries between science and art; between cultures, technologies, viruses; between people and animals; past and present. Its focus, in other words, is contact.

I am convinced that a society that focuses on biological and cultural diversity can evolve to redefine its identity in an ever-changing world.

Whenever a new idea arises, in whatever form, it transforms very soon into a repetitive clone. This is necessary to secure widespread support and survive.

However, over time, such a clone quickly exhausts himself and becomes infertile. To survive, it needs to be manipulated by its surroundings - it needs consumption. This leads to random mutation and to evolution.

Genuine evolution is in fact a series of mutations, by manipulating/consuming seemingly contradictory and irreconcilable ideas and organisms, and synthesizing them into a new paradigm.

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In visual terms, there is a vertical movement - up or down - that kickstarts a new spurt of growth, and is in itself ready to be consumed again. This process may be positive or negative. It is our duty to be vigilant about what we consume, and how.

These processes are eternally occurring and recurring, at various levels. Our memories of what we have forgotten are the measure of the change.

As an artist, I am constantly looking for the intersections where manipulation and mutation kickstart evolution. Confronting art with its surroundings - whether human or animal - is a way to comment on society at large.

The biological and cultural force of change is hi-tech.

Evolution is hybridity.

Koen Vanmechelen

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THE ACCIDENT

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AN OPUS, A SYMPHONY, A TEMPLE

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WELCOME TO THE FRANKENCENTURY

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PANDORA’S BOX WILL BE OPENED

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AN URUGUAYAN BURNING MIRROR

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THOSE FEET IN ANCIENT TIME

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SURVIVAL OF THE PRETTIEST

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HUNTING THE LAST CROCODILES

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ONE FLEW OVER THE DODO’S NEST

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THE GEOPOLITICS OF BATHING

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COCK UGBON-ALELE AM I

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“THE ZIMGOLEM WILL GIVE THE KIDS WINGS”

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THE GREEN PRIEST OF LUZON

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AN OPUS, A SYMPHONY, A TEMPLE It’s a thin line between love and fear While the Prix Ars Electronica gave the CCP international credibility, its scientific and technological foundations expanded considerably. “Over the past two years, The Open University of Diversity became a force to be reckoned with”, says Koen Vanmechelen.

Linz, Austria, September 2013. The finals of the Prix Ars Electronica for Hybrid Art. The audience is presented with an unforgettable scene. On display on the podium are the best artworks out of a competition including 568. One hi-tech installation after another: a sound-translating machine, a blind robot, an architectural mushroom, a biotechnological pancreas… and a caged chicken, the newest hybrid from Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen’s Cosmopolitan Chicken Project (CCP). The chicken wins the prize. The jury is unanimous and lauds Vanmechelen’s hi-tech bio installation as a ‘transdisciplinary investigation of universal themes’, such as biocultural diversity and identity, forging ‘art, science and technology into a highly individualistic and unique oeuvre’.

For Vanmechelen, 2013 was a year of international awards. Apart from the Austrian accolade, the CCP received recognition in Berlin, with the ISMB/ECCB best artwork Award and at Venice’s Biennale, with the Pavilion 0 Global Artist’s Award. But the best is yet to come. On a planet expecting massive losses of biocultural diversity, the CCP will carry its message to all corners of the earth. Starting in 2015 with Cuba, followed by Surinam. Vanmechelen: “Every organism needs another organism to survive”.

The CCP has been in the international spotlight for many years now. What were some of the key moments for you?

The Prix Ars Electronica for Hybrid Art was enormously important. This award confirmed the global nature of my project. It acknowledged that the CCP is digging deeper and deeper. The project follows its proper course, its structures appear at the surface. My chicken has become so much more than a chicken. It is an opus, a symphony, a temple. It is the sum of many ingredients, starting with a breeding process: picking the eggs, 20 years of crossbreeding, the collecting of DNA, 3D printing knowledge and the conversion of chromosomes into 3D prints. This work combines so much knowledge and wisdom”.

Explain ‘knowledge’.

“The project is drawing in and inspiring brilliant minds from all over the world. In the formative years, it gathered knowledge. Now it is generating it. This is what I call hybridity. I was invited, for example, at the Poultry Genetics Symposium in Venice to give a speech to poultry scientists and geneticists. In Austria, I talked to quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger, elected by the British newspaper New Statesman as one of the “10 people who could change the world.” And we will work together. There are the scientists from Hasselt University and the University of Leuven, like geneticist Jean-Jacques Cassiman and fertility specialist Willem Ombelet. And independent researchers such as implant specialist and oral surgeon Luc Vrielinck, who opened a gallery dedicated to my work in the city of Genk”.

And the CCP’s three sub-projects have ‘nested’...

“Indeed, thanks to the Open University of Diversity. This site externalises what CosmoGolem, Walking Egg and CC®P have to do. The creation of this focal location clarified what is happening in the creative vortex generated by my work. Now at last one can distinguish the project’s constituent concepts: diversity, fertility and immunity. It confirms OpUnDi as my lab”.

Which moments do you remember as significant since the last Accident?

“There were some highly successful expositions: the Venice Biennale with the Open University of Diversity as a library; the expo in Guangzhou; Documenta in Kassel; the Golden Nica in Linz and the installation Evolution of a Hybrid at the Bozar Electronic Arts Festival. Concerning lectures: the one I gave at the Austrian Auslandskulturtagung”.

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And your travels?

“Beirut was a new experience. Every situation there was unexpected: driving in a van protected by bodyguards, the continuous threat, the sense of urgency. Making a work of art for the jet set visiting the Beirut Exhibition Center surrouned by a world of misery and debris was confrontational - a first-hand experience of the blatant difference between the uncaring rich and the unmistakable aggression and military tension. I remember Hamas touring around in their vehicles, the Turkish woman I could not shake hands with, the table dancing at night. I have been in conflict situations before, for example in Nepal, but Beirut was different. In Nepal, everyone was poor, and Kathmandu was a garrisoned city, dead at night.

But in Beirut life went on despite the war”.

At one point, you witnessed extreme poverty in Surinam one day, and were the focus of a jet set party in France the next day.

“It is something you have to face as an artist if your work deals with concepts such as borders, identity and diversity. Across these fault lines, there will be stark contrasts, and I feel them more strongly and clearly than ever. Around me, structures are also constantly shifting. I never stand still, I move things”.

What do you learn from that?

“Passion is endemic to me. That is why I attract both opposites that are comprised in passion: love and fear. In my dealings with people, it becomes clearer to me who has fear and who has love. The fear people can evolve in two directions.

Either their fear can change into love, a beautiful evolution to witness, or it changes in something negative. Of course, I feel those two opposites in myself too. I fear because it is clear that I am occupied with things that are much larger than myself. There is also the fear of being unable to realise that, of making a wrong choice, etc.”

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10 Does it keep you awake at night?

“No, I am not even able to worry about this. The decisive moment is not mine because my work takes the decisions. I make something and observe that it is like this or that. The intensity with which this happens is increasing. Together with the forces and people that challenge and oppose me. This happens openly now, which is better. I like transparency”.

Have the events of the last years changed you?

“That depends on the definition of transformation.

But I guess I’ve remained the same man, with the same passion and the same desire to open Pandora’s box. My immunity, fertility and diversity, however, have increased. In that way, I have changed. I have become more resilient”.

You’ve become a public figure, are omnipresent in social and news media. Is that hard?

“Not really. What is difficult is that I am often questioned about things that preoccupied my mind years ago. People keep on asking the same questions, despite everything that has been said and done over the past two decennia. My thinking has evolved, so my answers sometimes skip lots of logical steps. That is extremely difficult.

If people question me, they often go back to the simple story: man meets chicken. They want to see my work on a literal level and miss the point.

I do not produce a story, I am always one step ahead. So my answers are usually no answer to the question (laughs)”.

Give us an example.

“Diversity is an issue I have been tackling for twenty years. My reflections and answers are meant for the near future and are not about the past”.

Which works do you regard as seminal?

Modified Spaces (Guangzhou), Evolution of a Hybrid (Brussels), Nato a Venezia (Biennale), Salvator Globe (Düsseldorf), Unicorn (Hasselt) and my installation at Documenta. Six top works.

Combat was also gratifying if you see it as one giant installation, but it was also too comforting.

It confirmed people in their biased opinions about what an artist should do and be”.

The biocultural diversity on our planet, the central theme of your work, is declining as we speak. Are we, as Stephen Emmott says in his book Ten Billion, ‘fucked’?

“I am not that pessimistic. Climate change leads to a mentality change. If the situation is shouting for mono, something multi or diverse happens.

And vice versa. Too much diversity leads to fear, and too little diversity to desire. The change in our environment is evolving to mono so we will become diverse in our thinking. Also, the human animal will become hybrid in order to survive. This development always leads to winners and losers.

Nature will adapt and endure. But the fate of mankind looks less promising”.

THE ACCIDENT

Are you still looking at history in a Hegelian way: thesis, antithesis, synthesis?

“I think in concepts. What strikes me for example is that our forebears inherently were as bright as modern man. It all starts with inspiration being mixed by the ingredients of the era you live in. If the ingredients are camels, Arabs and Jews, then the concept is built upon them; the ingredients are fed by inspiration and create a story. It is necessary to translate that concept to our times using the ingredients of today. Such as chickens, lamas, etc. Thus making a new story that will be fed by inspiration”.

Do you see yourself in one of these stories?

“Yes, and I convert these concepts in time and space. It is important to discover the concepts.

But by doing so you become part of society, a public figure. ‘They’ will try to put a frame around you, to cage you. In my case, to reduce me, for example, to the material I use and call me a chicken artist. Part of me will always revolt against that. I won’t be caged. I’ll always challenge the boundaries”.

CCP started at the crossroads of science and art, now technology has joined in.

“This year I started to realise that the chicken is the greatest technology ever invented on the planet. Genetically speaking, it is pure gold. Its output, through crossbreeding and diversity, is colossal. Every minute 50 billion chickens are born, and yet there are less than 20 breeding lines, owned by 5 people. Chickens are of vital importance to the food industry and to the survival of many countries like China and India. Chickens are a dangerous miracle”.

Why dangerous?

“Abuse this technology and you are in serious trouble. It’s the story of Frankenstein: the chicken is a potential monster, a T-Rex. One genetic glitch can generate global destruction”.

What did you learn about migration after so many artists from all corners of the planet stayed at the OpUnDi for your Immigrantes project?

“That every society must be able to make its own rules. And that some make, and some take.

Not everyone wants to participate. The essence however, in all communities, is survival, despite cultural differences. In every possible way.

Everyone has their own criteria. Can art transcend this? I guess the answer is yes. So I discovered that the 42 people I invited were not all artists (laughs). And I learned that you can never know what a person is carrying in his rucksack”.

Are true artists rare?

“Most certainly”.

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WELCOME TO THE FRANKENCENTURY Philip Ball dissects the myths that obscure our view of tomorrow’s engineered human Why do many people fear genetically engineered embryos, cloning, designer babies and cyborgs?

In his book ‘Unnatural’, Philip Ball investigates how ancient myths feed our aversion to life sciences and reproductive technologies.

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Humanity’s role as transformer of nature already is one of the main themes of the 21st century. But the top story of this age will be the engineered human. Over the next decades, genome and tissue engineering, stem cell technology and chemical memory manipulation will lead our species back to its Garden of Eden.

But here is a paradox: while genetically engineered humans and clones feature prominently in mainstream entertainment, they have vanished as subjects of public debate. What little debate remains, rages on in the rarefied air of academia. The Journal of Medical Ethics, for example, devoted a large part of its March issue to the moral status of ‘post-persons’.

That is the term with which the American philosopher Allen Buchanan refers to people with enhanced physical, psychological and emotional capacities.

Soon, they will exist. And the advent of the first human clone, genetic doppelgänger or ‘pimped’ person will doubtlessly re-ignite the public debate.

In his new coffee table book ‘Journey of the Future.

Life in the Year 2100’, the American physicist and techno-optimist Michio Kaku offers a glance at some of the ethical hot potatoes of the coming decades.

Such as the question of how a majority of ordinary persons will deal with a minority of Superman-like ‘post-persons’. Should we all start sharpening our knives?

Philip Ball is a renowned British science writer.

‘Unnatural. The Heretical Idea of Making People’ is Ball’s 15th book. It suggests that scientists, bioethicists and researchers can prepare for these coming ethical storms by learning from the past.

I meet Philip Ball in Dulwich, an affluent London suburb south of the Thames. As Ball (49) observes the steaming cafetière in a local coffeeshop, he explains his fascination with pre-scientific thinking: “I’ve always been interested in alchemy, more specifically by the relationship between the artificial and the natural. What fascinates me is the way scientific ideas and discoveries are played out in culture in general”.

Cue ‘Unnatural’, in which Ball offers an impressive, delicious and fascinating cultural history of the anthropeia - Ball’s neologism for all the myths and stories about the artificial creation of humans. Stories like the homunculus of medieval alchemy, the golem of Jewish legend, but also Frankenstein’s monster, 19th-century automata, androids and Edison’s talking dolls. Closer to our times, we have Aldous Huxley’s ectogenesis in ‘Brave New World’ and Margaret Atwood’s living wombs in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. Ball explores what these fables reveal of contemporary views on life, humanity and technology in this century, the first to see the creation of genetically engineered humans.

“Our objections to new reproductive technologies are based on mythical thinking, not on rational arguments”, he tells me. “Most debates on these hypersensitive topics reflect our deeply held ideas, prejudices and fears. Unless we recognise that, we’ll have a replay of the simplistic and polarised public debate of the past. Are stem cells good or evil? Do clones represent the beginning of the end of the family? Only if we recognise the ancient roots of these discussions can we distinguish mythical thinking from the genuine concerns about the impact of new reproductive technologies”.

The popular response to post-persons is predictable: human hubris, unnatural creations, ban it!

“Indeed, and similar to the response elicited by the birth of Louise Brown, the first IVF baby. Or

by Dolly, the first cloned animal. But the friction between the natural and the artificial started only in the 19th century, after the discovery of the common origin of all species. Until well into the Middle Ages, anthropeia was not seen as a problem. It was generally thought that anyone could create lower forms of life. Averroës, the Muslim physician and philosopher, had no deep moral objections, for example. He thought that organisms created through ars were only fake and lacked a soul. But that was no problem”.

This argument about the soul is still very common.

“Humans have always been horrified by the idea that they were manufacturable. What has protected them against it all these centuries is the concept of a soul - a mark of our authenticity and privilege, as God’s creation. Each era then interpreted the prejudices and archetypes around the artificial person from its particular scientific and cultural perspective. In the 19th century, the ‘soul’ was a different concept than in the Middle Ages. Think about Olympia, the living doll in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s early 19th-century story ‘The Sandman’. Or consider Edgar Allan Poe’s zombie in ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’. At present, robots and clones are still described as soulless, but in a modern interpretation of that term: they are cold, without love or human feelings. They are spiritually empty”.

For a very long time, people believed humans could be created from clay. Some people still do.

“That is interesting, because it tells us that belief in anthropeia, like the belief in astrology, reflects deep and ancient desires and fears which cannot be easily refuted. They keep emerging in debates on genetic engineering, embryo research, designer babies and cloning. Even among scientists. They will continue to influence our thinking in the future”.

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16 How? “The template of the imagined futures where all these technologies are real is ‘Brave New World’.

But that doesn’t help us, for that book was a response to the threat of totalitarianism. Our reality is completely different. By being afraid of the wrong threats, we are ignoring real ones. And that’s a problem”.

So what should we be afraid of?

“Not the exploitation of these technologies by totalitarian regimes, but by the market. Producing people will not be magic, demonology, perverted anatomy or industrialised totalitarianism. It will be business. This implies that a market will be created for new reproductive technologies, human cloning and ‘enhanced humans’. But first it will need an ideological base, a plausible and addictive story. This happened for IVF. It is now perfectly normal to say that everyone is entitled to a child. That has neutralised the initial distaste for in-vitro fertilisation”.

People seem to adapt quickly to the altered ethics that new technologies imply.

“True. But all those old fears just move on to the next thing. Anxieties about artificial insemination in the 1930s and 40s, about IVF in the 1960s were similar to our current fear of reproductive cloning.

The stages are always similar: horror, suspicion, guarded acceptance, then full acceptance”.

Shouldn’t we be worried about cloning or genetic engineering then?

“A public debate is always necessary. Without regulation, new technologies can lead to disaster and suffering. Genetic enhancement has the tremendous potential to correct defects and disorders. But how do you define those? If an IQ under 130 is a defect, then most of us have a problem. But again, we see the old mythical thinking resurface. Intelligence is multi-faceted.

Genetic manipulation of intelligence might be useless. We must guard ourselves against genetic determinism”.

How should we tackle ethical debates about genetically engineered people?

“We shouldn’t lose ourselves again in ancient myths and taboos, however tempting they might be. We need new moral structures and institutions to tackle ethical considerations around new technologies in a humane way. And we need to formulate answers to specific and likely scenarios.

Case by case”.

Apart from ‘Brave New World’, the most entrenched modern anthropeia myth is that of Frankenstein…

“Taken together, both are often not merely viewed as myths, but as predictive stories, warnings that anthropeic technologies will inevitably lead to a dystopia. Hence terms like Frankenfoods, Frankenbugs, Frankenfuels, etc. But that is wrong.

Myths are a descent into the human psyche, not manuals on how to live”.

It is very difficult to define the human species scientifically, you write, because life itself is not a scientific concept.

“There is no blueprint for a human being. Nature is not a librarian or a computer programmer. So it’s not useful to have a definition, because that will always include things you don’t want, and exclude things you do want”.

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In the past, alchemy and science have always had close ties to science. You see today’s artists as precursors to major scientific changes.

“One invariably thinks of Leonardo da Vinci, the artist-inventor. He tried to show the artistic reality behind the surface of things. Some artists today are able to deal with new technologies in a nonjudgmental way. These artists force scientists to think about difficult topics. For example, how do we deal with the fact that each cell in our body can be used to make a clone?”

What is the relationship between alchemy and science?

“Mainly a technological one. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, alchemy was how you made things, even if its rationale is clearly wrong in scientific terms. But so what? Even if its thinking was only proto-scientific, it attempted to provide a rational framework for the world.

Take for instance the transmutation of the elements. There was no reason to believe this shouldn’t be possible. And we don’t appreciate how persistent this belief was. Even Michael Faraday was influenced by it. Alchemy is part of our intellectual and technological history. There is nothing mystical about it - in spite of Paulo Coelho’s dreadful book. ‘The Alchemist’ dragged thinking about alchemy back into that morass of spirituality”.

Did you find a similar aversion of anthropeia in non-Western cultures?

“I purposely left this out of the scope of the book.

To be able to write about a culture, you should be part of it. Nevertheless, it strikes me that the attitude towards cloning and reproductive technology in the Far East seems much more relaxed. My suspicion is that cultures where reincarnation is part of the ideology look at this issue differently. It’s no coincidence that some of the major breakthroughs originate there. Think of Hwang Woo-suk, the pioneer of cloning. He may have been discredited by his fraud and misappropriation of funds, but his groundbreaking research was genuine”.

The million-dollar question: Will we be able to afford making artificial humans?

“That’s a difficult subject. Even reproduction by sexual means is disputed. It’s not clear to me what rights people have in terms of reproduction when it comes to these new technologies. How widely should they be made available? Should they be private or public? If you leave it up to the marketplace, the result will be discrimination and exploitation. But to create the impression that they are a right is potentially very dangerous too”.

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PANDORA’S BOX WILL BE OPENED In his book ‘Spillover’, David Quammen sketches the world wide front against the next global pandemic.

“The danger comes from disrupting biodiversity”, he says.

Invariably, it starts with mystery and violence. A Dutchman dies after being infected in a Ugandan cave; an Australian horse trainer passes away unexpectedly from organ failure; a batch of chimpanzee meat kills two dozen Gabonese; a Canadian grandmother drops dead after a trip to Hong Kong; a Malaysian swineherd expires suddenly after a painful headache. Scientists struggle to define the infectious disease, its vector and host. They identify the killers by names that quickly become infamous: Marburg, Nipah and Hendra, Ebola, Sars. But the viruses keep changing their structure and strategy. In ‘Spillover’, the American science journalist David Quammen details the hunt for humanity’s most unwelcome compagnons de route.

It includes the increased risk of a pandemic, enabled by globalisation, habitat encroachment by humans and the prevalence of bushmeat. “Pandora’s box will be opened. It’s inevitable”, he says.

The one issue people take away from your book, judging from the reviews, is the worry about the next pandemic, the Next Big Thing.

“Yet this is a book more about the dynamics of zoonotic diseases than about the Next Big One. Some people read this book and jump to the conclusion that humanity will be wiped out by a disease. But that’s completely missing the point of the book. Humanity is very numerous and genetically diverse. The ‘NBO’ will be devastating, but it will not kill everyone. There are always individuals with natural defenses”.

Zoonosis, the spillover of a virus from animal to human, is your word for the future.

“It’s destined to enter the vernacular. ‘Zoonosis’ is an indispensable word to describe an increasingly frequent occurrence. The outbreaks we hear about in the news - Ebola in the Congo, Hendra in Australia, West Nile virus in Greece and Texas, Hanta in Yosemite - are not isolated events. They form a pattern that reflects what we are doing around the world. The drivers behind these outbreaks are all caused by humans. And they will occur more frequently, with an increasing likelihood that they will spread to an epidemic, or go global to become a pandemic”.

What are these drivers?

“Disruption and connectivity are the two main ones. Disruption of animals in extremely rich ecosystems, most of all tropical forests, exposes these pathogens - viruses and other bugs - to humans, giving them the opportunity to spill over into humans. That is happening more frequently.

Humanity’s density and connectivity then provide the pathogen with an opportunity to spread globally. Many of the over 7 billion people live in extremely large and dense cities. We travel faster, farther and more often than ever before. Diseases have never travelled so fast”.

Spillovers happen remarkably easy. Mother Nature is the best bio-terrorist.

“Spillover events are indeed occurring constantly.

An example: a Filipino man brings in a truckload of infected chickens to Manila. It takes him a day to travel from his village on the outskirts of a forest to the market in Manila. A European tourist in that market touches a dead chicken, then his eye. Next day he flies back to Brussels. That’s how it starts.

Easy”.

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What determines whether a zoonotic disease successfully spills over?

“Viruses don’t have agendas. Spilling over is an accident, and an opportunity. Chance determines whether a virus will succeed in a host. Humans are exposed to many viruses, but most have no effect. Every time you eat a salad, you consume uncountable quantities of plant viruses. They are unable of infecting humans, though. But sometimes a virus does accidentally leap across, from non-human primates for example, where it has been living in an environment similar to ours.

Or it comes from an animal a bit more unusual, like a bat or a rodent. If it finds itself capable of living, replicating and thriving in its new host, the virus wins the sweepstakes. Like HIV, the pandemic virus that crossed over in Zaire from a single chimp to a single human.

Complicating the research into zoonosis is the fact that the so-called vectors obstruct the hunt for the disease’s host.

“Through the vectors one must find the host.

Vectors are the vehicles that carry diseases from one host to another - blood-sucking insects for example. West Nile, dengue and yellow fever transmit this way. But transmission is complicated. The virus must replicate in sufficient quantities in the host’s blood to produce severe viremia, a flood of virions. Then the vector must bite the host, slurp up virions and carry them away. The vector must be a hospitable host, producing more virions that make their way to the mouth, ready for release. Then the vector must drool virions into the next host it bites”.

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21 Controlling these viruses implies a better understanding of their ecology and evolutionary biology.

“Yes, because it buys us time when they spill over again. This type of knowledge led to a solution in Malaysia: once they knew the Nipah virus is carried by a giant fruit bat and pigs that were a vital amplifier host of the virus, the officials separated pigs from bats. No more extensive pig farms with fruit trees hanging over them.

It worked: there hasn’t been a Nipah outbreak in Malaysia since 1998. No such luck yet in Bangladesh, where outbreaks continue. The transmission works differently there: not via pigs, but by bat droppings in palm sap. The authorities have tried to discourage people from drinking raw palm sap. They’ve also introduced small bamboo screens to shield the tapping points on the trees.

But this hasn’t had any effect yet”.

So, more natural diversity means more danger for humans?

“The danger lies in how much we intrude upon that diversity and disrupt it. Diversity itself exists in the vast tropical forests and elsewhere and the more we interact with it the more situations we create for spillover. Obviously it is difficult for us as a species to leave these ecosystems alone.

We have an increasing population and people are hungry, they need space for agriculture. None of this is new. I have been hearing this for 35 years.

But now we are starting to understand there is another reason why we should not tear down the tropical forest and drive a lot of species to the brink of extinction: because of the potential for spillover. The more we disrupt those places, the more we present ourselves as possible hosts.

We offer viruses the opportunity to become our disease organisms.”

Just how many types of viruses are there?

“Some are particularly relevant. The singlestranded RNA-viruses are very common among zoonotic diseases. They are thus the most likely candidates for future zoonotic diseases.

They include the influenza, corona (Sars), felon (Marburg and Ebola) and paramyxa (Nipah and Hendra) viruses. So we know where the geographic hotspots are. Mostly places with high biocultural diversity and a lot of contact between humans and wildlife. Some people point in particular to places where there is a lot of variety of non-human primates. I think the new diseases will come out of southeast Asia - indeed an area with a great variety of non-human primates and very close contact with humans. By means of all these monkey temples. Tourists feed them by hand…”

We are opening Pandora’s box.

“Human curiosity, needs and simply hunger are all trying to open this box. Because there are seven billion of us, we are dealing with very sizeable forces”.

Should we kill all the temple monkeys?

“That would be stupid and probably counterproductive. Similarly, some say that if bats carry so many diseases, we should get rid of them. A famous Australian horse trainer suggested this to me when we were discussing the Hendra virus. But that would be ethically wrong and ecologically destructive. Bats have a very important role in their ecosystems. They help manage insect levels. Eradicating reservoir hosts means killing the messenger. Much better leaving these reservoir hosts alone”.

Is it true that we only know 1% of all viruses?

“Yes, but it’s a rough estimate. Ian Lipkin said that if we consider how many different species of animals, plants, fungi and bacteria there are on Earth, and that each of them may have a virus unique to it, then the number is staggering. There could potentially be millions of zoonotic viruses out there waiting to be discovered. But maybe it’s better to leave their hosts alone, and leave some of those viruses undiscovered”.

What is the effect of infectious disease on wildlife and plant populations?

“There is a serious concern about that. Eco Health is concerned with that in particular. The slogan is ‘one world, one health’. Because of this great interconnectedness, we cannot meaningfully worry about human infectious diseases separately from wildlife infectious diseases and vice versa.

There are populations of wildlife that are highly endangered, like the mountain gorillas. The more we reduce their populations, the more they might be exposed to an infectious disease. It might kill off the rest of this species”.

What is your main conclusion after six years of research?

“The more I learned about this subject the less I worried about it. Study turned my irrational fears into rational concerns. Experts are trying to figure out where the next diseases may spill over into humans and how to spot them when they emerge.

The key to forecasting and preventing the next pandemic is understanding what they call the “protective effects” of nature. In the Amazon, for example, an increase in deforestation by some 4% increased the incidence of malaria by nearly 50%. Mosquitoes, which transmit the disease, thrive in the right mix of sunlight and water in recently deforested areas. Eroding biodiversity is getting rid of species that serve a protective role”.

A lot of zoonotic spillovers are the result of our domestication of animals.

“Domestication meant direct contact with animals, and the start of sharing disease pathogens with them. Some of these pathogens still come from domesticated animals. Q-fever, for example, or H5N1. Bacteria can still be very problematic when they spill over from livestock into humans. In a Darwinian way, these viruses made us stronger as a species - by naturally selecting the strongest of us for surviving them. The human species has a high level of genetic diversity. Each time a disease pathogen burns through the population, it may kill a lot of people. But those who just got sick will be resistant. And those with natural genetic resistance will have been unharmed”.

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AN URUGUAYAN BURNING MIRROR History is a fable about the takeover of our planet by male human animals. In Mirrors the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano restores the balance by seeing history through the eyes of common people, the unknown, unheard and forgotten: women, slaves, the conquered.

Mirrors consists of a mosaic of 600 mini-histories, which cast a different light on the times and civilizations they are reflecting. Together they form a Archimedes’ burning mirror shattering the traditional canvas of history. The following 13 fragments relate in one way or another to Accident IV. Origin of the hen Pharaoh Tuthmosis was returning from Syria after completing one of the crushing campaigns that extended his power and glory from the Nile Delta to the Euphrates River. As was the custom, the body of the vanquished king hung upside down on the prow of the flagship, and the entire fleet was filled with tributes and offerings. Among the gifts was a female bird never before seen, fat and ugly. The giver had delivered the unpresentable present himself: “Yes, yes,” he confessed, eyes on the floor. “This bird is not beautiful. It does not sing. It has a blunt beak, a silly crest, and stupid eyes. And its wings of sad feathers have forgotten how to fly.” Then he swallowed. And he added, “But it sires a child a day.” He opened a box where seven eggs lay. “Here are last week’s children.”

The eggs were submerged in boiling water. The pharaoh tasted them, peeled and dressed with a pinch of salt. The bird traveled in his chambers, lying by his side.

Word Smugglers Yang Huanyi, whose feet were crippled in infancy, stumbled through life until the autumn of the year 2004, when she died just shy of her hundredth birthday. She was the last to know Nushu, the secret language of Chinese women. This female code dated from ancient times. Barred from male language, which they could not write, women founded a clandestine one, out of men’s reach. Fated to be illiterate, they invented an alphabet of symbols that masqueraded as decorations and was indecipherable to the eyes of their masters. Women sketched their words on garments and fans.

Origin of insecurity Greek democracy loved freedom but lived off its prisoners. Slaves, male and female, worked the land, built the roads, mined the mountains in search of silver and stone, erected the houses, wove the clothes, sewed the shoes, cooked, washed, swept, forged lances and shields, hoes and hammers, gave pleasure at parties and in brothels, and raised the children of their owners. A slave was cheaper than a mule.

Slavery, a despicable topic, rarely appeared in poetry or onstage or in the paintings that decorated urns and walls. Philosophers ignored it, except to confirm it as the natural fate of inferior beings, and to sound the alarm. Watch out, warned Plato. Slaves, he said, unavoidably hate their owners and only constant vigilance can keep them from murdering us all. And Aristotle maintained that military training for the citizenry was crucial, given the climate of insecurity.

Hypatia “She’ll go off with anybody,” they said, to denigrate her freedom. “She is not like a woman,” they said, to praise her intelligence. But numerous professors, magistrates, philosophers, and politicians came from afar to the School of Alexandria to hear her words.

Hypatia studied the enigmas that defied Euclid and Archimedes, and she spoke out against blind faith unworthy of divine love or human love. She taught people to doubt and to question. And she counseled: “Defend your right to think. Thinking wrongly is better than not thinking at all.” What was that heretical woman doing giving classes in a city run by Christian men? They called her a witch and a sorcerer. They threatened her with death. And one March day in the year 415, a crowd set upon her at noon. And she was pulled from her carriage and stripped naked and dragged through the streets and beaten and stabbed.

And in the public square a bonfire disposed of whatever was left of her. “It will be investigated,” said the prefect of the city.

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Amerigo Botticelli’s Venus was a girl named Simonetta, who lived in Florence and married not Amerigo Vespucci, but his cousin. Lovesick, Amerigo drowned his sorrows in seawater rather than tears. And he sailed all the way to the land that now bears his name. Under a sky of stars never before seen, Amerigo found people who had neither king nor property nor clothing, who valued feathers more than gold, and with whom he traded a brass bell for a hundred and fifty-seven pearls worth a thousand ducats. He got along well with these untrustworthy innocents, though he slept with one eye open in case they decided to roast him on a grill. And he also feared losing his faith. Up to then he had believed, literally, in everything the Bible said. But seeing what he saw in America, Amerigo could never again believe the story of Noah’s ark, because no ship, no matter how immense, could hold all those birds of a thousand plumages and a thousand calls, and the outrageously prodigious diversity of beasts, bugs, and brutes.

Leonardo When he was twenty-five, the watchdogs of public morality known as the Officers of the Night took Leonardo from the workshop of his teacher Verrocchio and plunked him in a cell. Two months he spent there, unable to sleep or breathe, terrified by the prospect of the stake. Homosexuality was punished by fire, and an anonymous tip accused him of “committing sodomy in the person of Jacopo Saltrelli.” He was absolved for lack of evidence, and restored to life.

Then he painted master works, nearly all of them unfinished, which were the first to make use of sfumato and chiaroscuro, he wrote fables, legends, and recipes, he sketched the organs of the body perfectly for the first time, having studied anatomy from cadavers, he proved that the world turned, he invented the helicopter, the airplane, the bicycle, the submarine, and potions into the fire, alongside lascivious paintings and books that exalted the libertine life. At the end of the fifteenth century, Savonarola too was tossed into the flames. Unable to control him, the Church burned him alive.

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26 Origin of Ecology That strange and valiant German was concerned about sustainable development long before it came to be called that. Everywhere he went he was astounded by the diversity of the natural world and horrified by how little respect it commanded. On the island of Uruana in the Orinoco River, Humboldt noticed that the Indians left behind a good part of the eggs the turtles laid on the beach so that reproduction would continue. But he saw that the Europeans did not follow that wise custom, and warned their greed would endanger a rich resource that nature had placed within reach.

Why was the level of Venezuela’s Lake Valencia falling? Because the native forest had been leveled to make way for colonial plantations. Humboldt said the old trees had delayed the evaporation of rainwater, prevented soil erosion, and kept the rivers and lakes in harmonious balance. The murder of those trees was the cause of the merciless droughts and relentless floods: “It is not just Lake Valencia,” he said. “All the region’s rivers are drying up. The mountains are deforested because the European colonists cut down the trees. The rivers are dry for much of the year, and when it rains in the mountains they become torrents that destroy the fields”.

Euroeverything On his deathbed, Copernicus published the book that founded modern astronomy. Three centuries before, Arab scientists Mu’ayyad al-Din al-’Urdi and Nasir al-Din Tusi had come up with the theorems crucial to that development. Copernicus used their theorems but did not cite the source. Europe looked in the mirror and saw the world. Beyond that lay nothing. The three inventions that made the Renaissance possible, the compass, gunpowder, and the printing press, came from China. The Babylonians scooped Pythagoras by fifteen hundred years. Long before anyone else, the Indians knew the world was round and had calculated its age. And better than anyone else, the Mayans knew the stars, eyes of the night, and the mysteries of time. Such details were not worthy of Europe’s attention.

Grandparents For many peoples of black Africa, ancestors are the spirits that live in the tree beside your house or in the cow grazing in the field. The great-grandfather of your great-great-grandfather is now that stream snaking down the mountainside. Your ancestor could also be any spirit that decides to accompany you on your voyage through the world, even if he or she was never a relative or an acquaintance. The family has no borders, explains Soboufu Somé of the Dagara people: “Our children have many mothers and many fathers. As many as they wish.” And the ancestral spirits, the ones that help you make your way, are the many grandparents that each of you has. As many as you wish.

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Columbus Defying the fury of the winds and the hunger of ship-eating monsters, Admiral Christopher Columbus set sail. He did not discover America. The Polynesians had arrived a century previous, and the Vikings four centuries before that. And three hundred centuries before them all came the oldest inhabitants of these lands, people whom Columbus called Indians, believing he had entered the Orient by the back door.

Since he did not understand what they said, Columbus was convinced the natives did not know how to speak. Since they went about naked, were docile, and gave up everything in return for nothing, he believed they were not thinking beings. Although he died insisting his travels had taken him to Asia, Columbus did begin to harbor doubts on his second voyage.

When his ships anchored off the Cuban coast in the middle of June 1494, the admiral dictated a statement affirming that he was in China. He left written evidence that his crew agreed: anyone saying the contrary was to receive a hundred lashes, be fined ten thousand maravedies, and have his tongue cut out. At the bottom of the page, the few sailors who knew how to write signed their names.

Stone When triumphant Catholics invaded the Córdoba mosque, they smashed half of the one thousand columns and filled the edifice with suffering saints. The Córdoba Cathedral is now its official name, but no one calls it that. It remains the Mosque. This forest of stone columns, the survivors, is still a Muslim temple, even though prayers to Allah are prohibited. At the ceremonial center, in sacred space, lies a boulder, large and unadorned. The priests allowed it to stay.

Mark Twain Some months after invading Iraq, President George W. Bush said he had taken the war to liberate the Philippines as his model. Both wars were inspired from heaven. Bush disclosed that God had ordered him to act as he did. And a century beforehand, President William McKinley also heard the voice from the Great Beyond: “God told me that we could not leave the Filipinos to themselves. They were unfit for self-government. There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate them, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.” Thus the Philippines were liberated from the Filipino threat, and along the way the United States also saved Cuba, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Colombia, Panama, Dominican Republic, Hawaii, Guam, Samoa … At the time, writer Ambrose Bierce revealed: “War is God’s way of teaching us geography”.

Europe’s Legacy When Belgium left the Congo, a total of three Congolese held positions of responsibility in government.

When Great Britain left Tanzania, the country had but two engineers and twelve doctors. When Spain left Western Sahara, the country had one doctor, one lawyer, and one specialist in commerce. When Portugal left Mozambique, the country had a 99 percent illiteracy rate, not a single high school graduate, and no university.

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THOSE FEET IN ANCIENT TIME Will genetics shed light on the untold, unorthodox histories of human migration?

And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England’s mountains green? In perhaps his most famous poem, William Blake explores the legend of Jesus’s visit to Glastonbury during his ‘hidden years’, accompanying his uncle Joseph of Arimathea, a tin merchant, on a business trip. While the story is apocryphal, it refers to a genuine, if completely forgotten trade link between the Mediterranean basin and the British Isles, known to the ancients as ‘the Tin Islands’. History is rife with tantalising footnotes like these, folk memories of improbable journeys and ancient migrations. Not only do these stories add depth to our one-dimensional version of humanity’s past, they also counteract the increasingly ‘separatist’ readings of our origins. Will recent advances in genetic analysis enable us to use DNA to confirm some of these fascinating legends?

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Much of the social unease, not to mention the political hysteria, that pervades the Western world today arises from a static, purist concept of human population distribution. And yet, mass migration, intercultural osmosis and genetic ‘mongrelisation’ have been constants throughout human history - not just limited to the century of Völkerwanderungen that preceded the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, or the waves of settlers that left Europe in the wake of the discovery and colonisation of America, Australia and other European colonies.

That is the accepted version of human migration, not coincidentally a very Eurocentric one.

In the past century, it has been challenged by a growing number of alternate migration stories, dug up from age-old folklore or, more literally, from the sheltering earth itself. In 1862, archaeologist José Melgar y Serrano discovered a colossal stone head in the Mexican town of Tres Zapotes. Apart from its size, he was immediately struck by the monument’s facial features - clearly African. Since then, 17 such stone heads have been discovered, all ascribed to the Olmec culture, the earliest civilisation to blossom in Mexico (1500 to 400 BC). Presumably portraying Olmec kings, most have clearly recognisable African features.

Some archaeologists claim the Olmec heads are clear proof of a prehistoric migration from Africa to Central America. The most ardent proponents of the theory have found corroborating evidence in linguistic, cultural and genetic correspondences between Central America and West Africa. The ‘African connection’ remains very much a minority view: most scientists discount the statues’ negroid appearance as artistic idiosyncrasy, and dispute the other clues.

Wishful archaeology Nevertheless, the Olmecs - perhaps because of their antiquity and obscurity - have become the medium of other controversial claims. The Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, for example, asserted a link between the Olmecs and Northern Europe.

Even if this was an example of ‘wishful archaeology’, Heyerdahl is rightly famous for demonstrating another pre-Columbian link with America. Heyerdahl’s most memorable feat is his 1947 expedition with the KonTiki from Peru to French Polynesia across 8,000 km of Pacific Ocean. The idea for the trip was prompted by local legends of and archaeological clues for cultural exchange between ancient South America and Polynesia. The success of Heyerdahl’s 101-day voyage, in a traditional Inca raft made from balsa wood, proved that long sea voyages were possible in pre-modern times, and that distant, seemingly disconnected cultures could have been in contact with each other.

As in the case of the giant Olmec heads, linguistic, genetic and other evidence corroborating Heyerdahl’s thesis has been found, but is contested by mainstream science. The South American sweet potato, for example, has been familiar in Polynesia since pre-Columbian times; and Heyerdahl himself noted similarities in architecture and folklore. But geneticists still contend that most evidence points to links between Polynesia and Asia, not South America.

Diffusionism Still, the voyage of the Kon-Tiki is seen as a turning point in the history of anthropology, opening the door to ‘diffusionism’ - the theory that similarities between ancient civilisations, be they religious, cultural, genetic or other, might not just have sprung up separately, but could result from contact between them, however distant they may be.

In truth, such theories were not new - but before the (relatively recent) arrival of secular anthropology, they were often framed in religious terms. Stories of ‘white Indians’ in North America (the Mandan tribe in Dakota, for example) were connected to the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel - an exciting campfire tale later consecrated in Mormon theology. Similarly, the British at the height of their Empire justified their role as ‘God’s chosen people’ by a doctrine known as Anglo-Israelism, which held that they descended from those Ten Lost Tribes.

In 1970, Heyerdahl switched oceans to repeat his historical achievement, crossing the Atlantic from Morocco in a papyrus boat modelled on ancient Egyptian drawings. He reached Barbados in the Ra II. Improbable vs. impossible In other, land-bound projects as well, Heyerdahl explored his diffusionist vision. Similarities between rock carvings in Azerbaijan and Norway led him to speculate that an advanced civilisation in the southern Caucasus had corresponded with Scandinavia, using foldable boats to navigate the waterways of the Russian interior. Controversially, Heyerdahl claimed that the Norse god Odin was based on a historical figure - an Azeri king. Heyerdahl later moved Odin’s putative birthplace north, near the Sea of Azov.

An outlandish theory? Perhaps. But as the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Speculation on ancient migrations takes place in a vast grey area outside the historical record.

Still, Heyerdahl took pains to frame his claims in the verifiable language of science, giving them the aura of the improbable rather than the impossible.

UFOs and aliens Yet some might say that the difference between Heyerdahl’s theories and the crackpot ideas of Erich Von Däniken, generally considered to be the world’s most prominent pseudo-archaeologist, is merely one of degree. Von Däniken’s books are as reviled by mainstream science as they are popular with the general public - think Dan Brown, but replace angels and demons with UFOs and aliens.

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31 In Chariots of the Gods (1968), the Swiss former hotel manager explains supposedly anomalous elements of the archaeological record by suggesting ‘paleocontact’ between ancient cultures and extraterrestrial beings. He cites numerous prehistoric carvings of ‘astronauts’ and ‘spacecraft’ as evidence of such visits. Other evidence includes the Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge and other giant structures that ancient humans would have been unable to build without extraterrestrial help.

Mitochondrial DNA Because the findings of authors like Menzies, Von Däniken and Heyerdahl are so easily dismissed by established science, the critical observer risks throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The result: traditional views are reinforced, inoculated against necessary change. The monolithic view of history is confirmed. And yet, the roadside of the human highway is littered with evidence of paths once taken, but later forgotten.

Von Däniken’s work has been criticised - among many other reasons - as a fundamental belittling of human ingenuity. And yet, Von Däniken’s own ingenuity (even if it is in storytelling rather than archaeology) may be his greatest legacy. Some of his ideas on the ancient genetic engineering of humanity by aliens have inspired other artists - most notably perhaps Ridley Scott, who has stated publicly that some of the concepts in his film Prometheus were borrowed from Von Däniken.

But we have learned to read our own DNA, and are still deciphering its deeper codes. The Genographic Project is analysing the mitochondrial DNA (which is passed down the female line) of thousands of volunteers to piece together a route plan of humanity’s migrations out of Africa, starting about 60,000 years ago. It has already yielded a few interesting surprises: humanity’s main migration out of Africa didn’t just occur via the Sinai peninsula; DNA analysis shows that a considerable stream of migrants chose a southern route, across the Bab-elMandeb, the Red Sea strait that separates Djibouti from Yemen. And the huge amount of genetic variation found in India suggests humans have lived in India longer than anywhere else - except Africa itself.

A giraffe from Mogadishu Completing the triumvirate of prominent writers on anomalous history, Gavin Menzies created waves with a couple of books on China’s maritime expeditions across the globe, well before Europeans sailed to India or discovered America.

Menzies’s first book centres on the voyages of Zheng He in the early 15th century. This Chinese admiral’s seven naval expeditions to South Asia, the Middle East and Africa are well-documented, if previously little-known examples of China’s logistical prowess.

A single expedition could consist of as many as 250 ships (some of them the largest wooden ships ever built), number over 25,000 men, and bring home tribute from over 30 kings, including, once, a giraffe all the way from Mogadishu. Had Chinese imperial policy immediately after Zheng He’s expeditions not shifted dramatically northwards, to face the Mongol threat, China could have been the global naval power that Europe’s seafaring nations soon thereafter became.

Improving on Zheng He’s known record, Menzies in 1421: The Year China Discovered the World claimed the admiral had in fact also visited the American continent, and circumnavigated the globe, beating Columbus and Magellan respectively by several decades. Some ships Zheng He’s successive fleets also supposedly discovered Australia and Antarctica, and even circumnavigated Greenland.

Beautiful failures The scientists unfolding the narrative in our DNA have, perhaps subconsciously, started reframing their findings in the mythological language of our older, religious origin stories. DNA analysis has allowed scientists to retrace our common ancestry to a ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ - the most recent common ancestor of all humans alive today, who lived in East Africa between 140,000 and 200,000 years ago.

Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes used DNA analysis to write The Seven Daughters of Eve, portraying the seven ‘clan mothers’ to which all modern Europeans can trace their ancestry. He is now working on a similar project, defining the ‘nine clan mothers of Japan’.

Rapid progress in DNA analysis is opening up the exciting prospect of science being able to put legends about human migrations and populations to the test.

A revised, more detailed story of our own migrations - with all its beautiful failures and forgotten successes - will be an excellent tool as we attempt to ascend the steep learning curve towards our own survival.

Menzies’ sources were ancient maps seemingly showing as-yet undiscovered lands, certain archaeological finds, and DNA evidence among populations visited by the Chinese fleets.

Nevertheless, his vision too has been discredited by mainstream scientists as “revisionist history”.

The one place where his narrative strikes a chord is - perhaps unsurprisingly - China itself, where Menzies holds an honorary professorship at Yunnan University. Even more controversial was Menzies’s follow-up book, in which he claimed that the Renaissance was kickstarted by a Chinese fleet that visited Italy in 1434.

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SURVIVAL OF THE PRETTIEST Our planet is beautiful. This is not a coincidence, but the result of aesthetic selection, claims David Rothenberg. “Evolution is not just survival of the fittest, but also of the prettiest, weirdest, coolest, most amazing and most extreme�.

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Rothenberg, an American natural philosopher and interspecies musician, saw the light during an expedition to the Australian rain forest when he bumped into a nest of male satin bowerbirds. The nest was not your regular breeding ground, but a complex construct adorned with blue flowers, blue shells and the blue feathers of rollers and parakeets.

For Rothenberg, it was an unexpected natural extravaganza.

“To be precise, it was a shock”, Rothenberg recalls.

“Clearly, this beautiful work of art was the male bird’s way of attracting a female. But why construct such an elaborate, time-consuming love nest? Darwin’s theory of evolution, focused on natural and sexual selection, provided no satisfactory answer to the splendour of this creation”.

Back home, Rothenberg discovered that Darwin had failed to comment on the beautiful anomalies of nature. Why are bees the only species with a system of symbolic communication - dance? Why do squids use different colorations to communicate? And why do butterfly wings exist in such a beautiful variety of patterns?

“Darwin wrote that the peacock tail made him sick”, says Rothenberg. “The tail does not add to the male peacock’s potential to be fitter to survive. But maybe the female peacocks have their own thoughts on the matter. Because natural selection didn’t explain the peacock’s feather, Darwin fell upon the concept of sexual selection. The female determines which genes will contribute to the next generation. But that theory failed to satisfy biologists, who over the following decades came up with all kinds of adaptationist stories”.

But even random mutation and adaptation can’t really explain the beauty and the mystery in nature, Rothenberg claims in ‘Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science and Evolution’. In this important book, he launches a new concept: aesthetic selection.

Rothenberg positions art and beauty as essential to evolution: “The female bowerbird just chooses whichever male it thinks is the most beautiful. I believe that all animals, not just humans, have an innate appreciation for beauty”.

Rothenberg explores a similar theme in his recent book ‘Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm and Noise”, but from a musical perspective. It’s about how chance connects art and nature, man and beast. And how the world’s first musicians - insects - influenced our sense of rhythm. “Music has roots in life”, says Rothenberg. “Nature is always more than we make it out to be: more complex, more beautiful, richer… We have good reason to be humble”.

Bowerbird bird art or not, many scientists believe genetics explains everything.

“That’s what I call genetic theology. These scientists don’t believe that animals can be creative and paint too many species with the same brush. Birdsong, a narwhal tooth, the nest of a bowerbird: to them, all this exists solely for genetic and procreative reasons.

“As a consequence, they ignore the incredible variety and diversity of the animal kingdom.

The fact that we share 99% of our genes with chimpanzees yet are so clearly different from them, that says it all, no? Genes are not the whole story”.

A blind spot in scientific thinking?

“We often forget the huge amount of controversy in science, especially in biology. Many theories sound deceptively simple, but really don’t explain all that much. And a lot of facts are ignored because they don’t fit a particular theory.

Consider the example of the Lesser Water Boatman, a half-centimetre-long underwater bug endowed with ‘the loudest penis in the world’”.

Say what?

“It is as noisy as a whale or a rock concert.

An amazing fact, but completely ignored by science because it does not fit any of the existing theoretical frameworks. Like many extraordinary traits and behaviours. Nature is more than a functionalist utopia”.

Why can’t sexual selection not explain diversity in nature?

‘Sexual selection explains animal desire, but not why females prefer certain male attributes. For Darwin, sexual selection was a slap in the face of natural selection. But mainstream biology now considers sexual selection as part of natural selection. I don’t agree. The aesthetic as evolutionary force cannot be ignored”.

Does aesthetic selection fit the Darwinian framework?

“Absolutely. Sexual selection alone doesn’t make any sense. There is no correlation between the fitness of a male animal and its greatest quality.

Sexual selection is not a clear indicator of health or genetic quality. A peacock with a huge tail is not necessarily healthier than another peacock.

But he is more beautiful. That beauty should be discussed for its part in the role of natural selection”.

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34 Evolution cannot explain human art, you claim, yet art is important for nature.

“People never needed art to survive, contrary to what philosopher Dennis Dutton claimed. They do need art to understand the world. The patterns and lines of abstract art have opened our eyes to the art present in nature. This lets us see the basic forms among the different externalities.

Nowadays, we find order and beauty where once we only saw chaos. We see true art in the wilderness, where until recently we only saw an attempt at art or primitive art. We understand the art of the bowerbird much better than a hundred years ago because we have artists that work with the same materials. We understand more and more that the beauty around us is no coincidence”.

Nature increasingly resembles art.

“Abstract art has broken our visual impairments.

The imprint left by a drop of water on a rock resembles Jackson Pollock’s spatter patterns.

The song of a lark can finally be seen as music. The hunt of the heron is a dance. Art is everywhere, even in the zoo. Art does not belong to man alone”.

Art in the zoo - how?

“Think of the young Asian elephant Siri. Her trainer David Gucwa discovered in the eighties that she was making drawings in the dirt in her cage. He encouraged her by supplying her with pencil and paper and later paint. Gucwa left her completely free in her creations. Her wonderful drawings seem to stem directly from the canon of 20th-century minimalist art”.

Where do humans fit into all this?

“They don’t, and yet they do. People don’t entirely belong to this natural system. From an evolutionary point of view, we are a strange species with many abnormalities. Theoretical frameworks are not easily applied to people”.

Why does something appeal to us aesthetically?

“That is a result of the way our brain is structured.

Nature has provided us and other animals with specific preferences. The basic laws of mathematics, physics and chemistry produce a limited number possible of shapes and patterns in nature. But the human cultures leave a lot of room for aesthetic diversity. I think those preferences are culturally determined”.

Do you have an example of that limited palette used by evolution?

“The song of the nightingale, its tones, patterns and rhythm; and that of the humpback whale have a perplexing similarity. Moreover, the discovery of this parallel is the beginning of my book.

Unfortunately, the existence of similar sound and song patterns is hardly subject of research. In terms of recurring visual patterns, some scientific work has been done, among others by Ernst Haeckel and D’Arcy Thompson”.

So it’s no coincidence that art and science have found each other?

“Both knowledge systems have fertilised each other for ages. Over the last century, it’s mostly been science that has affected art. Now it also works in the other direction, because good contemporary art provokes sophisticated thinking. This can lead to profound insights. Art can make the impossible possible. That is why I work together with neuroscientists to analyse the musical structure of birdsong. I want to explore how science can affect art to the maximum”.

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In your book, you mention ‘evolution devolution art’, evo-devo art for short. What is that?

“It’s a term the American biologist and artist Anna Lindemann uses to refer to the art she produces: a combination of art and biology, with a link to evo-devo, or evolutionary developmental biology.

That is the field of biology that compares the developmental processes of different animals and plants in order to understand the relationship between organisms and the evolution of their developmental processes. It tries to build a bridge between the biology of evolution and the development of individual organisms”.

What does evo-devo research?

“For example: the reason behind the eyespots on butterfly wings. Or how animals develop legs.

Or feathers, for that matter. Etcetera. Alongside the science, evo-devo art reflects on all these aspects. It deals with the beauty of life”.

Talking about beauty in strange places: your last book examines the link between insects and music…

“Insects are the world’s first musicians. The stridulation of crickets, the tap-tap-tapping of treehoppers, the tymballing of cicadas and the humming of bees are rhythms that have connected us to the landscape for millions of years. I think they are responsible for the human interest in rhythm, in resonance, in beats and in noise. We love noise. Music and noise connect us to the past, as the voice of the prehistoric Earth. That’s why I wanted to make music with the cicadas”.

Why cicadas?

The book was published in June 2013, just before the Magicicada septendecim in the northeast of the USA emerged from the ground in their millions - having spent 17 years underground. Surely this is phenomenal! I have played with them on my clarinet. That was no easy matter. I had to learn to appreciate their music, which at first seemed to me to be just monotonous noise. But music is as diverse as the life on our planet and insects are evolved music machines”.

Our ancestors must have noticed that too.

“The ethno-entomologist Keith Kevan, former Director of the Lyman Entomological Museum at McGill University in Montreal, has written a magnificent five-part compendium about that. It consists of three hundred pages of references to singing insects in literature, from antiquity to the present day. It makes me humble”.

Are you spiritual or religious?

“I think I am spiritually affected by nature. It is worth believing in. Nature and its beauty are accessible. It’s moments of art combined with science that I am most touched by it. We live in a truly amazing world, yet I don’t feel the need to talk about God. We would manage the Earth better with great care, respect and love. It is a shame how one species can destroy nature and I think more and more people are realising that. I wasn’t confident about my place in the world until I got connected to music, art and science”.

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HUNTING THE LAST CROCODILES If the Philippine crocodile has not yet vanished from the face of the Earth, that is largely due to the Mabuwaya Foundation. In one of the world’s ecologically most valuable areas, they are the croc’s last bulwark against extinction.

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In 2000, crocodiles were observed on 18 different locations throughout the Philippines. Even in Metro Manila, the nation’s capital region, there was a place where you could run into a croc. But 13 years on, only 5 croc habitats remain - 4 of which are in the north of the country’s largest island, Luzon. Here, crocs live along the foot of the Northern Sierra Madre, the Philippines’ longest mountain range. In the most rugged parts of the country, the Mabuwaya Foundation is racing against time to rescue one of the world’s most endangered species. Less than 100 adult Philippine crocs exist in the wild. Filipino specialists and Dutch researchers have joined forces with the local community to save the croc from extinction.

It’s 8.30pm and dark as hell, but it’s still scorchingly hot. Our team is looking for crocodiles hiding somewhere along the 11-km-long Dinang Creek.

It’s not the saltwater crocodile we’re looking for, the giant who can grow up to 7 metres long and lives in the great lakes, rivers and mangrove forests of the southern Philippines. We seek its little brother, the Crocodilus mindorensis, a native of rivers, lakes and creeks. It is a freshwater species that only grows to a maximum of 3 metres. For years, this croc has been on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

It is on the brink of extinction and may become the first species of the crocodile family to disappear as a result of human activities.

We set off from Lumalug, a remote village in the Northern Sierra Madre, one of the world’s most ecologically diverse areas, and make our way towards one of the five areas where the rare reptile is still observed in the wild. The area is a rich variety of natural wetlands, mangroves, estuaries, rivers, swamps, small lakes and creeks, and ruled by the seasonal comings and goings of monsoons and typhoons. Covering almost 360,000 hectares of Isabela Province’s coastal and inland zones, this is the largest, most diverse protected area in the Philippines. Lumalug’s 58 bahay-kudobie, or cabins, are located in a long-drawn-out ribbon sandwiched between Iluaguen River and Dinang Creek, which has the biggest local population of adult crocodiles - no more than 10…

Lumalug is bang in the middle of the ancestral lands of the Kalinga, an indigenous people that has coexisted peacefully with the crocodiles for millennia. “They used to believe that crocodiles are the embodiment of their ancestors”, whispers my guide Arnold. “But most of them have converted to Christianity, and they have become a minority, lost much of their ancestral lands, and now are reluctant to talk about their beliefs and traditions”. Traditional values don’t survive the onslaught of chainsaws, guns, TVs, schools, markets and cars, Arnold explains, while bugs and moths attack my face, drawn in by my headlamp. “The Agta and Paranan are other minorities, marginalised in their own ancestral lands, often by selling their land to Ilocano and Ifugao immigrants. Those recent arrivals have no ancient bond with the crocodiles”.

Dutch biologist Merlijn van Weerd has studied the situation for years, and concludes that although the park may be vital for many other species, it also remains vital to humans. Indigenous peoples depend on the park’s resources for their livelihood. About 25,000 migrant farmers and fishermen live within the park; they, and the 2 million living in Cagayan Valley, depend on the ecosystem provided by the park: “As the population increases, the habitat of the last of Luzon’s crocodiles is increasingly under threat.

Creeks have been converted into ponds, ponds and marshes into rice fields. Rivers are dammed, mangrove forests cut. Deforestation erodes the river banks, as mining pollutes the rivers themselves.

The double whammy of water pollution and loss of ripuarian vegetation decreases the prey available to the crocs. Fishing - by dynamite, electricity and pesticides - further depletes prey availability”.

Even a small, remote village like Lumalug shows the effects of the population explosion. “Between 2000 and 2011, the number of families living and farming next to the creek increased from 10 to 54”, says Arnold. “More land is being cultivated or turned into grazing land for cattle. The buffer zone along the creek, supposed to be 20 metres on both sides, usually is no more than 3 metres. In some places, no vegetation is left at all. People use the creek for washing and bathing. Pigs, chickens and dogs roam free. Crocodiles are unwanted here”.

I watch the only road through town with eager anticipation. During typhoons and at night, crocs cross this dirt road on their way between the creek and the river. Occasionally, they snack on the go on a poor pig or dog. “Despite all our efforts to provide these people with pig pens, some newcomers insist on keeping their animals near the water. That’s a temptation no hungry croc can resist”, Arnold knows.

An eerie quiet hangs between the houses of Lumalug as we descend toward the creek. A remote light suggests a bar where locals buy their Red Horse beer, or hard liquor like Fundador and Imperador.

Alcohol abuse is rampant. There are no shops, so people distill their own, cheap brandy.

Lumalug is a three-hour drive from the Mabuwaya Foundation’s rearing station in Minanga. The Filipino NGO has an eight-year track record in saving the Philippine crocodile and other species endemic to the area. “It’s not easy”, admits Tess, the station coordinator, before we went croc hunting. “We bring hatchlings to the rearing station and keep them for about 18 to 24 months, when they’re large enough to survive on their own. We have some success. But few animals reproduce”.

Croc aren’t the only local source of danger. This remote area of Isabela, one of the country’s poorest provinces, is partly under control of the New People’s Army. The army struggles with these Maoist rebels for control of the exact area where the Mabuwaya projects are located. Local communities are caught up in the conflict. Ecotourism is impossible.

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As we continue our journey, the fragility of man’s symbiosis with animals is almost palpable. From the undergrowth comes the deafening roar of an invisible choir of cicadas. Fireflies are dancing about.

Indignantly disturbed, a wild boar runs off into the forest. I’m less than comfortable with this nightly adventure. I’m sweating profusely. My headlamp trawls the water surface and bankside bushes, vainly hoping to light snakes or crocodiles. As we cross the creek, I wish I’d brought my sandals.

Two years ago, this village made the national news.

Glenda Arribay, a pregnant local migrant, suffered severe crocodile bites. Not being a Kalinga, she had not known that disturbing a croc in a creek nearly fished empty is tantamount to suicide. The incident set back the entire Mabuwaya Foundation. Extensive media reporting suggested a better solution to the croc problem: eliminate them. “The incident confirmed some people’s worst prejudices”, says Arnold. “We feared it would kill political support for the programme. In the end we survived, but it did take us long to restore the faith”.

Fortunately they did, for the Philippine crocodile is one of the most endangered species on the planet - as rare as the Chinese alligator or the Siamese crocodile. The crocodiles were idolised for millennia by the local population. The Filipino Revolution of the 19th century was a turning point, the beginning of the end for the crocs. Suddenly, there were guns galore.

In the 20th century, it was hunted almost to extinction: for the skin, as food, from fear, for pleasure. Crocs were attacked with electricity, explosives, bullets, cyanide and pesticides. Adding pressure was the rapid population growth, which reduced the freshwater wetlands that are this species’ preferred habitat. “In truth, protected areas like this one exist on paper only”, says Arnold. “Many people don’t even know the crocodile is a protected species. Also, local politicians are often not interested in the project.

Don’t forget illegal logging is still making lots of money for some people here”.

San Mariano is a town in Isabela province roughly the size of Greater London. Back in 2000, it was shared between 40,000 people and just 40 crocodiles. Now, about 100 animals are estimated to live there in the wild.

“In 1999, I first heard of a crocodile in Lumalug”, remembers Maritess Balbas, coordinator of Mabuwaya. “I could not believe my ears. We eventually discovered that there were more crocodiles there”. Mabuwaya developed a programme to protect them, and different projects to raise awareness in the communities involved. “Our aim is to instil the locals with a sense of pride for the Philippine crocodile and the related cultural traditions. Making this connection between the species and the culture and identity of the people could save the crocodile”.

“Three crocodile and 11 fish sanctuaries have now been delineated. All are co-managed by local communities. The conservation programme, a blend of scientific knowledge and ancient wisdom, is entirely community-based. Without local approval, nothing happens”.

In San Mariano, the Philippine crocodile population is slowly recovering. But the human population is growing much faster, and that is creating more conflicts. Since 2000, there were three humancrocodile incidents. Merlijn van Weerd is predicting many more. “Actually, it’s remarkable how few problems we’ve had, considering the proximity of humans and wild animals. But if people stop respecting animal habitats, problems arise. They need to stay away from nests, keep pigs and buffalo away from water, observe the green buffer near the river, and not leave children unattended in the water”.

Mabuwaya uses targeted campaigns to change mentalities throughout the 25 villages of the Northern Sierra Madre. “We develop posters, calendars, murals, billboards and dance performances with local and foreign students at Isabela University.

We’re specifically targeting school children, with school lectures, booklets, educational trips and workshops for their teachers. We’re also maintaining

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close contact with local communities, with village consultations, festivals celebrating the release of young crocs. We’ve also created an environmental manual. But ignorance still kills - a fisherman drowned a captured crocodile out of sheer lack of knowledge”, laments Van Weerd.

Arnold keeps feeding me information while his team tries to find me just one croc: “We do lots. Mabuwaya supplies materials for pig pens, our water pumps reduce the risk or crocodile contact and deliver clean water, fish reserves provide extra fruit, as do fruit trees, which also prevent erosion. Plus, we pay local communities cash for each crocodile counted, for every living newborn they find and for every tree that survives on someone’s land in the buffer zone towards the water”.

We’ve been walking for three hours now, and still no sign of a crocodile. I’m longing for a bed to sleep in, and almost sleepwalk into the creek. But Arnold saves me. “Look”, he says: “Crocs! See the red dots above the waterline, just over there? That’s all you’ll see of them… Young crocs!”

I don’t see a bloody thing, but I don’t want to disappoint Arnold: “Yes. Finally a croc”. I could do with one of those bottles of Red Horse.

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ONE FLEW OVER THE DODO’S NEST The general public has no idea of the staggering scale of the avian extinctions taking place right now, in spite of the fact that their own species is to blame.

Fortunately, Homo sapiens is also learning how to bring some of those species back from the dead.

“Every year, from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, hundreds of millions of songbirds and larger migrants are killed for food, sport, profit, and general pleasure”: this summer, American author Jonathan Franzen’s article in National Geographic sounded the alarm. The scale of the bird holocaust boggles the mind.

“The very idea of a bird becoming extinct is quite startling”, writes extinction expert Errol Fuller in the introduction to Extinct Birds, a brilliant, shocking compilation by Julian Hume and Michael Walters of our information on recently extinct birds. “After all”, Fuller speculates, “birds are such symbols of life, movement, vitality and freedom”.

Laysan Crake The last known live specimen of the Laysan Crake was seen on Midway Island in June 1944 or ‘45.

The species was killed off by that invincible duo - man and rat. In 1943, a US military landing craft had inadvertently introduced rats to Midway. They promptly overran the island, and two years later, the last of the crakes was gone. The crake was native to Laysan Island, and later introduced to other islands on the Hawaiian chain. In 1903, there were 10 million crakes on Laysan. In 1911, they were down to 1 million.

Guano digging and the release of domesticated rabbits, Belgian and English hares and guinea pigs ruined the ecosystem.

The last millennium has seen humanity’s impact on the natural world accelerate out of control, at a rate unprecedented in Earth’s long history. No vertebrate group has suffered more than birds. The sheer number of birds already extinct is shocking, but the future is even grimmer: “[Not only are there many more recently extinct species known only from subfossil remains await[ing] description, […] a number of critically endangered species will probably disappear within the next decade or two]”, Hume and Walters claim. The worst, it seems, is yet to come.

Heath Hen Booming Ben was last seen on 11 March 1932 on Martha’s Vineyard. He had been the last of the Heath Hens since December 1928. None has been seen since. The island had been the species’ last stronghold. Once, it ranged widely across eastern North America. It was very similar to the Greater Prairie Chicken, but slightly smaller. Two other prairie chicken subspecies exist today: the Lesser Prairie Chicken and Attwater’s Prairie Chicken; all are considerably reduced in range, and threatened with extinction.

Yet there is also some good news. Scientists are on the verge of bringing some species back from the grave. Advances in genetic sequencing, synthetic biology and cloning can be combined with selective backbreeding to revive long-dead species. This new discipline is called ‘revival biology’ and scientists engaged in it are currently trying to reanimate the Passenger Pigeon, the Dodo and the Carolina Parakeet - reintroducing some variation into a rapidly de-diversifying ecosystem. And there are a lot of other avian species whose revival would enrich our planet. We list a selection of such creatures, lifted from the death registry that is Extinct Birds.

Huia The Huia was the largest member of the wattlebirds, an avian family endemic in New Zealand. Its range was confined to the North Island, and its origins are as mysterious as those of the moas and kiwis. The bird was sacred to the Maori, and hunting it was severely restricted. But then came the introduction

by Europeans of non-native species, which dealt a serious blow to population figures. The fashion for Huia feathers in Europe made matters worse.

Planned reservations were never created. The last confirmed sighting of a Huia was on December 28, 1907.

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The Great Auk The last breeding pair of Great Auks was killed on June 3, 1844 by fishermen who had been commissioned to collect specimens. The female’s egg was smashed. This largest and most penguin-like of all the auks ranged along the shores and islands of the North Atlantic and around the Mediterranean.

Flightless and clumsy on land, the Great Auk was perfectly adapted for life at sea. The extensive breeding population on Funk Island was hunted to extinction between 1785 and 1800. By the turn of the 19th century, wasteful egg-harvesting and killing for food and skins reduced the population to a few hundred. Geirfuglasker, a volcanic island near Iceland, was the last breeding stronghold.

Syrian Ostrich Last recorded between 1940 and 1945, the Syrian Ostrich inhabited the deserts of Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The bird was common in the deserts until the First World War, when precision rifles were brought to Arabia. Following the introduction of motor vehicles, the birds became easy targets. Arabs had hunted Syrian Ostriches on horseback, using falcons to corner them; this had a significantly smaller impact on numbers. The eggs were prized by the Arabs, who considered them a delicacy. The shells were also used for decoration, and were often found hanging in mosques.

Tasmanian Emu The Tasmanian emu wasn’t considered a species distinct from the Australian mainland emu until the early 20th century, when it already was extinct.

It differed from its mainland cousin by the lack of black feathers on the throat and front neck, these parts being totally white. Tasmanian emus were both persecuted as a pest and hunted for food. The extensive use of fire to clear open grassland and scrub for agriculture made them very rare by the 1830s, and extinct some time later.

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46 Passenger Pigeon The Passenger Pigeon was once considered the most numerous species on Earth. There were so many of them that the skies darkened when they flocked, and tree branches collapsed under their collective weight. Yet just before 1pm on September 1st, 1914, Martha, the last specimen, died in Cincinnati Zoo. The dramatic extinction was the result of continuous hunting during their migration and nesting periods.

They were killed for food, fertiliser or pleasure.

Their fate was sealed by deforestation and human disturbance.

Carolina Parakeet The Carolina Parakeet was North America’s only endemic parrot. Its range was the eastern United States, from where it disappeared as European settlers moved westwards. The bird was shot in large numbers because of crop damage. As the Carolina Parakeet became rarer, capturing live specimens for profit intensified. The last known Carolina Parakeet was a male called Inca. He died in Cincinnati Zoo on February 21, 1918.

Mauritius Blue Pigeon Originally called the Dutch Pigeon (possibly on account of its red, white and blue plumage, the colours of the Dutch flag) this species lived on the island of Mauritius and on the Mascarene Islands.

It was driven to extinction by deforestation. By the mid-1820s, it had become extremely rare, and the last known specimen was captured in 1826. There are sightings until 1837, but nowadays, the Mauritius Blue Pigeon is as extinct as the forests it lived in.

Giant Elephant Bird Standing 3m tall and weighing up to 440kg, the flightless Giant Elephant Bird is the heaviest bird known to science. It was endemic to Madagascar, where it was last recorded at the end of the 17th century. This giant bird laid the largest egg of any vertebrate, living or extinct (even larger than dinosaur eggs). Giant Elephant Birds were plentiful until humans arrived on Madagascar, about 2,000 years ago. They were driven to extinction by a combination of habitat destruction, over-hunting, and possibly climate change.

Pile-builder Megapode Megapodes are chicken-like terrestrial birds that incubate their eggs by burying them in mounds of decaying vegetation, volcanic soils or hot sand.

This made them particularly vulnerable to hunting, over-harvesting of eggs and predation by introduced animals. The date of extinction of the Pile-builder Megapode is unknown, but probably shortly after the Polynesians arrived on New Caledonia, Fiji and Vanuatu.

Himalayan Mountain Quail The last Himalayan Mountain Quail was spotted in June 1868 by Captain J. Hutton, who promptly shot it.

The bird was only encountered in winter, and it could only be made to fly when flushed by a dog or trodden on. Some suggest it was a migrant from the betterwooded south-eastern part of Tibet. Very few birds were taken by humans, and it is unlikely that hunting caused their disappeareance. In fact, some might still survive in the foothills of the Himalaya.

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Levant Darter The Levant Darter lived around Amik Gölü (Lake Antioch) in south-central Turkey and in the marshes of the lower Tigris and Euphrates. The drainage of their Turkish marshlands reduced their habitat to Iraq, where the almost complete drainage of the Mesopotamian marshes, following the 1991 Gulf War, resulted in their probable extinction. The marshes are now being re-irrigated, but it’s probably too late for the Levant Darter; the last recorded sighting dates from the 1990s.

Haast’s Eagle This giant eagle lived on New Zealand’s South Island.

The only evidence we have are bones. Haast’s Eagle may have been sexually dimorphic: the two sexes may have had different movement patterns and hunted different prey. Haast’s Eagle was 30% heavier than the world’s largest living eagle, the Harpy Eagle from South America, with estimated weights of 11.5 and 14kg, and wingspans up to 2.14 and 2.43m (for males and females respectively). Haast’s Eagle is believed to have died out between 400 and 800 years ago, primarily due to the extinction of large prey species, a result of human-driven environmental change.

Chatham Islands Fernbird Not seen since 1900, when the last specimen was shot by a collector on northern Mangere Island. Apart from on that island it also lived on Pitt Island and in the Chatham Islands, New Zealand. The natural vegetation there was devastated during the latter part of the 19th century, when the islands were settled.

This was partially accomplished by burning and partly by the grazing of rabbits and goats. Before that, the introduction of cats, weasels and rats had killed the birds off gradually.

Dodo In September 1598, the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius was claimed for the Netherlands by the VOC, the Dutch East India Company. Some time between 1662 and 1693, the last Dodo died on Mauritius. Most other large terrestrial vertebrates on the island also became extinct during the Dutch period. Direct hunting by humans has long been cited as the main cause of the Dodo’s extinction, but that is probably an overstatement. The black rats, pigs, goats and possibly monkeys introduced by outsiders were all direct threats to eggs and chicks, and competitors for food. They are the likely executioners of the Dodo.

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THE GEOPOLITICS OF BATHING How I learned everything I know about geopolitics from soaking in the bathtub Everything I know about geopolitics I learned while soaking in the bathtub. Watching tufts of foam swirl around each other on the surface of the bath, I decided that each was a separate country, or a wayward province, or at least an individual tribe. I must have been around 10, and already seriously addicted to atlases.

Propelled by the movement of the water, those bubbly little conglomerates were in a constant state of flux: some shrank and disappeared; others merged and expanded; yet others, through the repelling force of capillarity, resisted absorption and maintained their independence in the maelstrom of nations.

If history moved too slow for my liking, a jerk of the knee or a flick of the toes would set my pretend map in motion again. Some states I rooted for, others I didn’t care about. I admit that sometimes I tried to influence the outcome by generating turbulence, but - as George W. Bush would later also learn geopolitics is not as easily engineered as an election outcome.

If too few states remained, I poured some more of the soapy stuff in, adding some hot water - the bath had gone cold from all that geopoliticking going on at the surface. At which point mother would yell to ask what the hell I was doing up there. I was a very clean, very wrinkly ten-year-old.

Impermanent ephemera The main lesson those bathtub experiments taught me is that states and borders are impermanent ephemera of history - little flecks of foam floating on the bathtub of time. And yet, from the mortal perspective of our own lives, geopolitics seems a bit like geology: moving so slow that you could be forgiven for thinking that immobility is the rule, and movement the exception.

But just like tectonic plates never stop churning against each other, there’s no such thing as dormant geopolitics. Each country is a temporary construct, each border like a dike thrown up in an ultimately hopeless attempt to stop the steady march of time.

That’s a lesson we ignore at our peril. Just like building a city at the foot of Vesuvius comes with its particular risks, so does placing our trust in borders and states as the ultimate source of our identity, prosperity and security.

That message is rather grim. But if we do learn to treat our geopolitical surroundings with the knowledge that its permanence is illusory, that could also be construed as liberating - especially against the current resurgence of nationalism, and the nostalgia for ‘strong’ borders.

That message might already have been internalised by the age cohort old enough to remember the

collapse of communism, plus the subsequent deaths of the Soviet Union, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, and the births of a dozen new states.

Visigothic Kingdom But history is littered with the corpses of defunct states. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the ratio of existing states (about 200, although counts differ) towards extinct ones is even more imbalanced than the relation between species dead and alive (1,000 dead ones for every live species).

A very select few are listed in Vanished Kingdoms (2011) by Norman Davies, which provides elaborate epitaphs for 15 extinct states, plus a chapter attempting a general theory of State Failure.

The book reads like a boy’s own adventure story - if you are a boy who plays geopolitics with his bath foam, that is - conjuring up the spectres of nations that have gone the way of the dinosaur and the dodo, but that could still be with us, had the dice of history rolled differently. In which case we might find the Visigothic Kingdom of Tolosa in an atlas, could drop by the embassy of Sabaudia or Borussia to obtain a visa, and Burgundy would have its own flag and army as well as a reputation for good wines.

Perceived from the humdrum banality of our own vantage point, each of those bygone nations is a romantic notion, its attractiveness lying precisely in the fact that it is unreachable, unvisitable. Theirs is an interesting, and altogether rare perspective. History is written by the winners. Looking back on its own past, any country will see itself prefigured in history.

France, for example, will derive its self-image from the history of the Kingdom of France, not from Tolosa, Burgundy or other, rival entities that once held sway over parts of its current territory; moribund states only to be defeated, absorbed and assimilated. In the same vein, Etruria - both the ancient competitor or early Rome and the short-lived Napoleonic kingdom - are merely footnotes in Italy’s history books. Interestingly, a similar, ‘Belgifying’ vision on the history of the Southern Netherlands, once the

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orthodox view in the early decades of the Belgian state, was gradually replaced by a narrative stressing regional identities - even if they, too, had to be largely invented.

Over the last century, Belgium must top the list of states the imminent demise of which has been predicted, and yet it is still on the map, with a new king and even a pretty decent football team. So there’s a chance that the rush towards extinction of the little kingdom by the North Sea might be overtaken by the slightly bigger United Kingdom across the water. With a referendum on Scottish independence scheduled for September 2014, and the opinion polls slowly turning in favour of a Yes vote, the 300-year-old Union of England and Scotland could be a thing of the past pretty soon.

A vote in favour of Scottish independence will answer one question, but raise a few urgent ones of its own.

Will Scotland retain the Queen as its figurehead, or become a republic? Will it automatically become an EU member, or will it have to join the queue (behind Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro, among others)?

Will it stay in NATO? Use the pound or the euro?

Will it allow Scots living in England to vote for its elections, and if so, how will it determine who is Scottish? Do you need to be born north of the border, or do two Scottish grandparents suffice? And will Scottish independence accelerate or reverse the British - sorry, English - drift towards an exit from the European Union?

Other separatist movements, in Catalonia, northern Italy, and yes, in Belgium, will be anxiously following the developments in Edinburgh. It’s an exciting time to be a bubbly bit of foam in the stirring waters of the European bath…

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COCK UGBON-ALELE AM I Cock Ugbon-alele am I. I obtain this nickname through The crown on my head And my generosity…

And the great help I give men.

I offer myself for their sacrifices And I measure the day And night into equal parts And tell them the time For labour and for rest.

I meet my wives In every public place, I am Cock Ugbon-alele The great.

Richard Ayeberemo Freemann (1972) Nigerian storyteller

When did man’s best friend arrive on man’s first continent? We still do not know with certainty.

The oldest Gallus gallus remains, all wild animals, have been recovered from 12,000-years-old deposits at Nanzhuang in Northern China. At least 5,400 years ago (Chishan site, Hebei province, China) the chicken was domesticated from wild Red Junglefowl populations in Southeast Asia. The species quickly gained cultural and religious significance and spread from Asian domestication centres through trade to Island Southeast Asia, the Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. The first documented movement of a chicken between two domestication centres was in 1.400 BC when Chinese monks brought a chicken home from India. The dispersal out of Asia began before 3,000 years ago and involved the movement of chickens both westwards to Europe and eastwards into the Pacific.

The earliest evidence is found in the XIX Dynasty (Ramesside period, 1307–1196 BC). The earliest archaeological evidence is mid-seventeenth century BC in Sudan, compared to 800 AD in coastal Kenya and in Akameru and Cyinkomane in Rwanda. The chicken reached West Africa during the middle of the first millennium, archaezoological evidence confirms. Chickens have been excavated from the Iron Age site of Jenne-jalo in Mali, (AD 500–800). In East Africa, they are recorded from two Iron Age sites in Mozambique, and in southern Africa at the eighth century Iron Age sites. Ethnographic and linguistic evidence from West African languages however suggest that chickens have been introduced much earlier on the continent.

Chickens are deeply embedded in West African culture, and that is shown by the linguistic variety used to name them.

Its arrival in Africa, where the species is widespread, still remains a puzzle. Some scholars have suggested that chickens were first introduced via Egypt from where they dispersed southwards into East Africa following the Nile River basin. Others consider an introduction directly from the Indian subcontinent and South-east Asia to East Africa through trading networks. Recent research by the Centre for Genetics and Genomics in Nottingham seems to confirm this, at least in the Horn and the East African region.

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54 TYARC TYER DJAFE OGOK UGOK ATEKE EGOKA ATSOGO

KUDURIK KAGWURO KAGURO GAGARE THAGIRO WARO KAKARO TÉGÉ MAA TÉÉ TEGENA TIE TUGE SISÉ TÉ NON KOO KO KW KE KELE KEERE ME SE PAN PAMBI GANAAR TYARC PABE PABET GERTOGAL DJUA LOOL RASA CRK

ISOK SOG TENI TE TO SISOK SOG OKUNA OKA OFONI KIRIO AMAO A AMA O ENE ENJE ESA ENDYE SIDA HABE SOO SO NUNU KOKO KOWE KOKE KOKOJO KOSE

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GOA KOLO KOL KOKOLO KOKURO KUL KUKOL KOGE NUA LULE NOVILE NOBIL KORG KOGA KALEMURE KAMBIRE KYE KYOLO GIME GIMEN ZALA KULU GOPA KONANGO LIMI SEM NKULO HU

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“THE ZIMGOLEM WILL GIVE THE KIDS WINGS” They will call it the ZimGolem. From 2014, the first Cosmogolem in Zimbabwe will assist Chido Govera in teaching AIDS orphans to take care of themselves.

And never to lose hope.

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57 Her surname, Govera, means passion. She was 7 when her mother died of AIDS. Despite poverty, hunger and abuse - at the hands of an uncle and a cousin – young Chido at the age of 12 learned and perfected the craft of farming mushrooms. She persisted not just for her own survival, but also that of a younger brother and blind grandmother. “I was angry and wanted to prove I could do it. I hoped for a better life”, she says. “I decided not to be a victim, not to focus on the bad things”.

Chido refused to get married. When she was adopted

by Gunter Pauli, a Belgian businessman, her world opened up. She became an international expert in mushroom farming. She has transferred her skills to over 1,000 women in Zimbabwe, Congo, Ghana, Cameroon, Tanzania and South Africa, and taught in schools and communities across the US and Europe. The goal is to give these women a shot at financial independence. Similarly, her foundation The Future of Hope guides women and orphans in Zimbabwe towards strength, maturity and financial independence, while maintaining their dignity and caring attitude.

“In December 2013, we’ll open our first centre in Zimbabwe to train 25 young orphans to find food, develop hygiene, and have the emotional intelligence to withstand hardship and abuse”, says Chido. “From February 2014, the centre will host 10 young orphans to become trainers in the ‘Orphans Teaching Orphans’ programme. We have started our preparation for building our ZimGolem in partnership with a Belgian school”.

Who are these orphans?

“We’re targeting the 11- to 18-year-olds. I like 11, because that was my age when I started reaching out to people beyond my own family. We’re also focusing on children with leadership or teaching potential, so we can develop a strong team for our ‘Orphans Teaching Orphans’ programme. Most of the children I work with are orphaned because of HIV and AIDS, and in many cases they’ve also been abused by their immediate family. A lot of them think they can never be anything better than what their childhood environment has led them to believe”.

But they can.

“When I worked at an orphanage and talked with the children, one question kept coming back: ‘Do you think we can outgrow the names we’ve been called, and the bad things we’ve experienced?’

I didn’t have an answer. Instead, I told the kids my own story. In the following days, the kids all started going to school. When they were asked what they wanted to become when they grew up, they said they wanted to be like their sister Chido”.

So how do we turn these kids around?

“Let’s stop treating them like victims, or charity cases. We need to give these children wings of their own, so they can learn to fly for themselves.

I hope this is what The Future of Hope will do. I want them to know that the world out there needs them to take charge of their own lives, but most of all: to be citizens who are responsible for their own welfare - and for the world at large”.

How can the Cosmogolem contribute?

“Looking at the Cosmogolem’s head, you immediately ask yourself why it is open. Of course, the idea behind it is that it will ‘open’ your own head. So the Cosmogolem will give a face to the work of The Future of Hope. We encourage people to stop being victims, to be expressive, and to serve themselves and the world around them. The Golem presents that invitation without manipulation or bribe”.

How exactly?

“The ideology behind the Cosmogolem invites people to look at the intrinsic value of their possessions and experiences, and to consider what might happen if they allow new life and new ideas to flower. The Cosmogolem is a powerful medium of non-confrontational communication and expression. That is crucial in dealing with orphans and poor women everywhere, not just in Africa. The philosophy of the Cosmogolem is an important reminder of the vitality of hope. Hopeful people are open to the lessons and inspirations of life, in whatever situation”.

How do you think the children will react to the statue?

“I’m not sure. But I’m going to expose them to it.

I remember my own reaction when I first saw the statue, and heard the story. I wished I had heard about the Golem in my childhood. I was so taken by it that I was sure it would enrich my work. Since then, I have passed on the Golem story to some of my friends, and it moved them deeply”.

Aren’t you worried the kids might react differently?

“Not at all. I am open to any response. I’m just so excited that the Golem, being the mover it is, will change people’s lives. If a child says she doesn’t like the Golem or what it stands for, I’d be happy too. Even then, the Golem has given her a voice.

That divergence of reactions is exactly what we want from the Golem”.

What can a place like Harare contribute to the Golem?

“Well, our Golem will spend most of its time in the countryside, and will only visit Harare on special occasions (laughs). To be honest, I am also highly curious about what a city like Harare might contribute to the Golem, especially because of the strong Christian culture there. I am guessing a place like that can create a wealth of opinions, expressed in very varied manner”.

So the children are not from Harare?

“They’re from different parts of Zimbabwe.

Our December training will be with kids from Marange, the village where I grew up, and from Manicaland, which is where I went back to school when I was 16. We might have some kids from Matabeleland as well, and then of course also from Mashonaland. But not from Harare”.

Many of the children have suffered abuse. Will the Golem enable them to start over?

“A lot of orphans are unable to move beyond the experiences of abuse and neglect. But this is what we want to change, and for which we work so hard. My personal experience has shown me that, given the right support, one can break with the past and start anew. The Future of Hope aims to create a safe haven, a fun place, where the necessary healing can begin. Only then can we hope to break through the enclosure erected by abuse and neglect, which is especially difficult in women and children. More than most people, I am aware how much courage and faith these breakthroughs take”.

The Golem defended the Jews of Prague against enemies that came in the dark of night.

“You could think of HIV and AIDS as modern equivalents of those enemies, but even more so the abuse and poverty that result from HIV and AIDS. They do most harm: prompting abused kids to run way from home, hungry kids to sell their bodies for food. HIV and AIDS are the least of their worries. The Golem will stimulate a necessary conversation about the real problems, that cause AIDS to be such a deadly enemy for African children. The combination of dialogue and training, made possible by the Golem, will help protect the children from their real worst enemies: poverty and abuse”.

#IV

Will you work only with girls, or also with boys?

“While there is a big difference between boys and girls, I don’t believe we can leave the boys out. For some time, organisations empowering girls and women have been signalling the value and urgency of action for boys. It’s crucial that we bring boy and girl together again, so they can learn to be together, instead of widening the gap between them. This is why I decided to target my work with children at communities as a whole”.

How do you start something like that?

“We start with training boys and girls separately, so I can learn more about each group. Then we will integrate them, starting in the communities.

Boys and girls need to learn how to interact, each becoming what they want to be - but together.

The greatest gift we can give them, and future generations, is the knowledge to live together in harmony”.

Is it hard to empower the kids? How do you get them to stop being victims?

“They will show me how. The most effective way to start the process is by addressing the problems they know most about. Hunger and pain are the first places to start. The rest will follow. First, we create a safe place where they can learn a skill to provide for their own food, then we send them back to their communities where they can start earning their way. When the community is feeding them, we start addressing the wider issues that affect them, via communication mediums like the Golem”.

Do Zimbabwean folktales have anything like the Cosmogolem?

“No, nothing that I have come across! But perhaps that’s just because we’re such a closed society at the moment. It is my hope that the Golem will help us find out whether our folklore has comparable figures”.

Do you think the developed world cares too little about your country’s orphans?

“Yes. There is indifference to the fate of orphans in need worldwide. But something else as well: some people want to treat you as a case of charity only. For too long, the ‘developed’ world has nourished the feelings of self-pity and victimhood of poor and uneducated people in the ‘developing’ world. I know, I have experienced it first-hand”.

For example?

“Take my interaction with the people of project Chido’s Mushroom in Berlin. They simply could not accept that I had grown into a young woman with her own goals and ambitions, able to make her own decisions and choose her life’s direction for herself. They were keen to tell the world how they were helping this African orphan. But that provided zero benefit to me, or to my work with women and children in developing countries”.

Aren’t some of the children you try to help beyond hope of rescue?

“It is true that for some kids, it may be simply too late, or too hard to save them. But that doesn’t mean we don’t try. We will always show them what’s possible, and let them choose. There is always hope…”

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THE GREEN PRIEST OF LUZON Back home in Belgium, nobody knows John Couvreur. But in the Philippines, the Flemish Scheutist is an environmental hero. Over the last two decades, ‘Father John’ has led the fight against the destruction of virgin forest on Luzon Island.

“You really don’t know Father John, sir? The green priest? But he’s Belgian, like you. Everyone knows him”. Amid the majestic Sierra Madre of Luzon, hours from so-called civilisation, I am dumbfounded.

Guides of the Mabuwaya Foundation are helping me locate the last endemic freshwater crocodiles in the Philippines. But here is one of them - a guide, not a crocodile - singing the praises of a fellow Belgian, a local hero, and I have never heard of him.

Six months later, I shake his hand… while he argues with the driver of my tricycle: You’re a swindler, asking 300 pesos for a trip from Santiago to Quirino!

John Couvreur, now 67, has been in the Philippines for 40 years. For the last 20, he’s struggled to safeguard Luzon’s last bits of tropical rainforest.

Couvreur has done this with such ‘environmental heroism’ that in 2008 president Gloria Arroyo presented him with the prestigious Satur Neri Award.

In the large rectory of his St. John the Evangelist parish, Couvreur introduces me his team, who provide 80 poor students with a daily meal. As he walks me to the church next door, he indicates the 600-plus trees on the 10-acre campus: “Planted them all myself! Our municipality is number one in the Philippines for reforestation”.

It’s over 32˚C out here, but Couvreur insists on wearing a Nordic sweater. In a few months’ time, he’ll be diagnosed with a fatal disease.

Typhoon The Scheutists have missions all over the world.

Why did Couvreur pick the Philippines? “Two events shaped my life”, Couvreur says. “As a seminarian, I met Roland Marzan, a 12-year-old boy whom I watched die following the abuse by his stepmother.

He asked me to take his piggybank back to the Philippines, to help poor kids. The other was my accident in Bambang, on Luzon, on 26 May 1976. As my car was crashing down the ravine, I asked God to let me live until 40, so I could do something valuable with my life. I got more than I bargained for”.

Couvreur’s current parish Quirino is in beautiful Isabela province. Together with Cagayan province, also in the northeast of Luzon, the largest islands of the Philippines, it is one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, home to endangered species like the Philippine Eagle, the Philippine (freshwater) Crocodile, the Philippine Eagle-Owl and the Philippine Dwarf Kingfisher. They compete for space with 2.6 million humans in an area four-fifths the size of Flanders.

Couvreur’s upcoming book deals with his 15 years in Gamu, the next 10 years in San Mariano and the last decade in Quirino. In Gamu, he battled as a veritable Don Camillo against the local Peppone, fighting corruption and defending the common man. “In Gamu, my opponents began to die off one by one: the son-in-law of the mayor, the judge who publicly attacked me, a corrupt military officer, and a few others. In the end, the people thought I could magically shorten their lives”.

The Flemish Scheutists arrived in 1907. Couvreur is one of the last. Comparing historical maps to current ones, he shows how drastically the Philippines has changed. Since the 16th century, when Spain colonised these 7,000 islands, over 80% of the forests have disappeared. Brown has replaced green as the dominant colour. Less than 7.5 million hectares of woodland remain. The Philippines are hit by an average of 20 typhoons per year; without trees, they have free rein. Mudslides and floods claim more and more lives. Biodiversity is declining fast.

The fight in Gamu was hard, but only the beginning.

In 1993, Couvreur unleashed a pack of devils when he stood up against illegal logging in San Mariano.

The law that prohibited logging in 1991 had hardly changed anything in the area - legal logging simply became illegal logging. “The church told me not to get involved. This fight could only cause trouble, they said. But I couldn’t help myself. The care of Mother Nature is as much a part of my mission as the care for the poor and oppressed. Why should so many suffer for the gains of so few?”

The Philippines is selling off its natural riches.

Chinese and Taiwanese mining companies scoop out riverbeds and haul away entire beaches, enabled by the rich dynasties that control Filipino politics and steal land from the poor. Entire regions are militarised, then sucked dry. Activists, whether journalists or lawyers, priests or park-keepers, are dealt with Filipino style: a passing motorcycle, a bullet to the head. Since 1992, over 70 journalist have been murdered. And 21 forest-keepers since 2011.

Father John became a green priest, and something of an example to other priests. It is remarkable how much the Catholic church in the Philippines, in conjunction with NGOs and environmental organisations, now struggles to save the country’s last virgin forests…

Don Camillo John Couvreur wants to write a book about his 40 years in the Philippines. For the love of his people: “Every three years, I fly back to Belgium. And every time, I miss them already when I’m at Manila airport.

But even after 40 years, I still have issues with their mentality. They talk values and collaboration, but don’t act on it. They need more discipline! And better education”.

THE ACCIDENT

Narra wood Over lunch, in the rectory’s large kitchen, Couvreur recalls how he got involved in the struggle for the forest, after the typhoon of 1993: “That storm swept thousands of illegally logged trees down the hills expensive narra wood. The trunks were earmarked for the rebuilding of San Mariano. But the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) also claimed them. My parishioners wanted action.

I then realised I was not alone in my struggle. So we gathered 400 people in small trucks, jeepneys and tricycles to block the transport. With the help of the governor, we kept 40% of the wood for the municipality. At the end of 1994, we set up a committee against illegal logging”.

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#IV

60 And it worked: “We built our own motorboat. Our night patrols on the river blocked illegal truck transports. We reported several corruption cases to the DENR. Their forest-keepers were all paid under the table. Everybody knew that their checkpoints were cashpoints…”

“But we had to disband the committee because we refused to involve the DENR. After that, illegal logging restarted. So, with some help from the bishop and a few priests, we created a diocesan action group for the protection of the environment. This freaked out the illegal loggers”.

Illegal logging is usually instigated by well-off captains of finance, who make huge profits out of it. Their workers are kept on a short leash, and on a tight budget. “So we target the financiers and the middlemen, not the poor workers”.

Couvreur’s successful raids generated vicious blowback. “During my stay in Gamu and San Mariano, I escaped 9 attempts on my life. Once because, by chance, I was out buying cigarettes.

Another time, a kid had overheard two contract killers mention me. There was that time when the son of the mayor put a €400 price on my head, but gave it up when he heard I was a priest. Later, in San Mariano, the price on my head was €25,000. In 1999, the mayor himself took a shot at me. His son saved me from getting hit. I have a wonderful guardian angel”, laughs Couvreur. “But had I been a Filipino priest, I’d have been killed a hundred times over. Killing a foreigner means more international attention for the issue, and they don’t want that”.

Slash and burn In 2002, Couvreur finished his pastoral stint in San Mariano. His order sent him to Rome to coordinate the task force for Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation.

“But I wasn’t cut out for it. I would much rather be back in the Philippines, helping people. So I accepted an opening in Quirino, 25 miles from San Mariano. When I arrived, there were whole areas without a single tree. We’ve changed that, by planting 400 hectares (almost 1,000 acres) of forest already. A further 60 hectares had to be reforested after a fire. But, as is typical of the Philippines, no thought is given to forest maintenance. There is no fire department, and this in an area still plagued by slash and burn. Of course the fire destroys the trees.

Incredible!”

THE ACCIDENT

As head of the environmental board of Ilagan diocese, Couvreur continues the fight against deforestation.

“Corruption remains entrenched on all levels of Filipino culture. Former president Arroyo lined her pockets with billions of pesos. Imelda Marcos, who plundered the land when her late husband Ferdinand was president, is back in Congress; her son is in the Senate and her daughter is a governor. When I tell Filipinos I don’t understand this, they answer back: We’re a very forgiving people, Father!”

Many might consider Couvreur an activist, but he doesn’t. The word has negative connotations in the Philippines, almost as bad as ‘rebel’ or ‘communist sympathiser’. “We did not start a revolution. We’re against violence, against weapons”, says Couvreur.

“Our mission is to give voice to the voiceless, to inform people of their rights and responsibilities.

Many who are unaware of their rights are afraid: their dignity is continuously being trampled upon. That’s why my patron saint is John the Baptist: he lost his head for truth and justice. I too am ready for this”.

Logging Prohibition “The people of San Mariano are thankful for the struggle, in some of the barrios we see new trees and corn instead of grass. Some illegal loggers return to farming, cultivating instead of destroying. One logger told me that after 15 years in the business, he was still as poor as when he started”.

In spite of this, and of the president’s prohibition of logging, illegal tree-harvesting continues: “It’s 5 minutes to midnight on the doomsday clock. In 20 years’ time, not a single tree will be left”.

But the Scheutist is not disheartened: “I am grateful that my work has achieved something. Young people are joining the cause, and there is movement on the political front. Since 1993, over 80% of illegal logging has ceased. Some come here to learn from us, to see how it’s done. And soon we’ll be up in the air, to map illegal logging and catch the perpetrators redhanded!”

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THE ACCIDENT

63

CAPTIONS

COVER AND BACK

©Koen Vanmechelen Cosmopolitan Chicken Project Mechelse Styrian - CCP17, Galerija Kapelica, Ljubljana (SI), 2013

3

Evolution of a Hybrid, portrait Koen Vanmechelen, 2013

5

©Koen Vanmechelen L.O.C.K. – OpUnDi, 2013

6

©Koen Vanmechelen Sketch, 2012

9

©Koen Vanmechelen CC®P – The Cosmopolitan Chicken, Cyberarts Festival, OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz (AT), 2013 Leaving Paradise, ConnerSmith, Washington (VS), 2013

11

Pavilion 0 Global Artist’s Award, Evolution of a Hybrid, Pavilion 0, Signum Foundation, Biennial of Venice (IT), 2013

12-13

©Koen Vanmechelen Evolution of a Hybrid, BEAF, Bozar, Brussels (BE), 2013

14,17

©Koen Vanmechelen Coming World – CCP, Art Festival Watou, Watou (BE), 2012

19, 20, 22-23

25, 27

30 32, 35

36 38-39

43

44-45

©Koen Vanmechelen Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, In-Vetro, MediaRuimte, Brussels (BE), 2011 ©Koen Vanmechelen Hybridity in Art and Science – CCP, The Worldly House, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (DE), 2012 ©Koen Vanmechelen Vienna (AT), 2013 ©Koen Vanmechelen Frantic – CCP, Vrouwenkuren, Museum dr. Guislain and Katho-Ipsoc, Kortrijk (BE), 2013 ©Koen Vanmechelen Pro-Historic – CCP, ArtCologne, Keulen (DE), 2013 ©Koen Vanmechelen Intersection, Open University of Diversity, Hasselt (BE), 2013 ©Koen Vanmechelen Protected Paradise, Guy Pieters Gallery, Saint-Paul de Vence (FR), 2013 ©Koen Vanmechelen Grale – CCP, Kortrijk Vlaandert, Kortrijk (BE), 2013

47

©Koen Vanmechelen Cosmopolitan Fossil – CCP, taxidermy studio Bouten & Zoon, Venlo (NL), 2013

49

©Koen Vanmechelen Mechelse Styrian – CCP17, Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, 2013

51, 52-53, 55

©Koen Vanmechelen The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project - Innovations and adaptation, Dak’Art Biennial, Dakar (SN), 2010

56

©Koen Vanmechelen Painting (no title), Open University of Diversity, Hasselt (BE), 2013

59

©Koen Vanmechelen Unicorn, Open University of Diversity, Hasselt (BE), 2013

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COLOPHON Special thanks to the CC速P Foundation for making this publication possible.

PUBLISHED BY Publisher Koen Vanmechelen Managing editor Goele Schoofs Chief editor & Senior writer

Peter Dupont Contributing writers Frank Jacobs, Ruland Kolen, Grete Bollen Photography Mine Dalemans (p. 3, 13 top ) Koen Vanmechelen (p. 9, 14, 17, 25, 27, 30, 35, 43, 47, 56) Yu Chen (p. 11, 22-23) Mark Machiels (p. 12-13 below ) Stoffel Hias (p. 19-20, 32, 36, 41, 44-45, 51, 52-53, 55) Philippe van Gelooven (p. 38-39, 40, 59) Alex Deyaert (cover and back, p. 49) Graphic design Geoffrey Brusatto Website www.koenvanmechelen.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright.

THE ACCIDENT

RING NUMBER SEX RACE BIRTHPLACE COLOUR PARENTS

33 10500 2012 NL-H-16 FEMALE ♀ STYRIAN (Slovenia) SLOVENIA (Sl) / LJUBLJANA BROWN-BLACK STYRIAN (Slovenia) × STYRIAN (Slovenia)