Himalayan Romance and River Dragons
High up in the Himalayas lives a society of svelte birds, the black-necked cranes. Each fall they cross the sky-scraping range from the highlands of Tibet to the north, and settle in for winter among the alpine valleys of Bhutan, Nepal, and India to the south. There are only around 11,000 individuals, and it seems to have always been this way. No human interference has caused this; they have a small population by nature. When the cranes come soaring in flocks from those deep blue heavens, the swift silky air quietly bears their chamber-timbred gawking down as they recongregate and gradually return to terra firma in wide circling turns. One place they like to end their migration is beside the Gangteng Monastery, on a little hill in the Phobhjikha Valley of Bhutan. They grace the valley with their cloud-white black-fringed wings, their slender black necks and heads, red crown, and glacier-clear eyes.
The Bhutanese people have long considered the black-necked cranes sacred, as do other cultures with their own cranes, the red-crowned cranes of Japan, for instance. They represent longevity, prosperity, fertility, hope. The cranes are widely thought to form long-lasting pair bonds, which they elegantly display by their annual winter dances. In these dances, there is no competition. Females seeking a suitor do not watch one male’s performance and then swipe left or swipe right. No, they pair up and dance for what seems to be the joy of sharing love with their already selected life-partner. Furthermore, there is no sexual dimorphism in Grus nigricollis, so it is not clear whether the male or the female tend to initiate. It also seems to be the case that all breeding pairs, young and old, will perform the dance, meaning it isn’t something only newcomers will practice to forge their wedding vows. Moreover,—and this one’s the real kicker—they lay their eggs in late spring, early summerish, so they mate in late winter-early spring, yet they can be seen dancing not only late in winter, but also in the fall, when they are not mating at all! Black-necked cranes do not dance for some natural utility, to select a mate or as a necessary measure of foreplay to perform the behaviors of reproduction. They experience love as something more than a means to survival. Objections to this claim I will address in a few paragraphs. For now, let’s talk about the crane dance, shall we?
After casually putting some space between themselves and the flock, one of the pair begins to hop and squak, encouraging the other to follow suit. They start eagerly strutting, stretching their wings, stooping, swooping, craning (I had to), jumping up with a flap, all the while exulting in call and response—they will even take to the air and continue their courting elsewhere. They do this in perfect synchrony—well, some of the time. When they are in sync, it’s magnificent. It’s as if their steps and wingbeats and heartbeats even were connected through invisible linkages of simultaneity. However, this is often interrupted, and endearingly so, by one of the birds (and who knows if it’s the male or female) becoming über-eager and getting ahead of the other one finishing their steps. They might be getting into a cycle when one of them breaks out of beat, maybe modifying familiar patterns from the year before or from culturally shared dance moves (birds of numerous kinds have been known to develop local dialects and songs and share know-how about tools and resouces) or out of sheer birdy spontaneity. It’s not clear what exactly is going on when they break form; but it is absurd to not observe how clearly the one breaking form is gushing with unabashed excitement. They are in love! (For pete’s sake, just call it for what it is!) When this happens, there is no appearance of scrubbed mistakes or stagefright, or of a predetermined schedule of footwork to be kept, nor does the other bird stop to retrace the other one’s steps along the new path.
For me, the mating dance of the Bhutanese cranes is of the most romantic things in the world. It is also one of the purest things in the world. I can’t help but see a profoud playfulness, compassion, and wisdom in their love ceremony. They demonstrate difference and togetherness and sameness with no appearance of rivalry or competition between each other or comparison against other birds. Both birds are committed to dancing their heart out and to mirroring each other. They are concerned with the expression of their individual motions nonexclusively with the conformance to their partner’s behaviors. Their dance is individuality and collectivism hybridized. What better picture of love than a dynamic union which excludes no difference? They jump and frolick and sing to the sounds of their love regardless of how long they have been a pair, renewing and revitalizing their intimacy with ceremonial regularity. Black-necked cranes engage in behaviors which seem to defy commonplace conceptions of natural selection.
Avian extravagance in courtship—such as male birds-of-paradise making elaborate displays with their calls and over-the-top tropical plumage, or male bower-birds constructing little art galleries for the drab females to peruse, or the humble male gentoo penguin offering his crush a pebble—can usually be ascribed to the particular fetishes of each bird species, as being their uniquely unnecessary evolutionary byproducts, even as being a little prudish. Avian monogamy can also be subsumed under some stubborn English naturalist dogma, spoken through the conjoined larynxes of David Attenborough and Richard Dawkins: “It is only for the added likelihood of raising young and passing on their genetic code that these birds mate for life and reforge their parental bonds with dancing behaviors.”
But the problem with the black-necked cranes is that they are engaging in behavior so eerily familiar to us: dancing in a quiet spot with a lover. We might more easily gawk at paradise bird displays as pretty byproducts of females with fussy—I mean tasteful aesthetic expectations selecting showier and showier males. We can only wonder what a cloacal kiss is like anyway. It is all over and done with in a few seconds. Birds have such strange behaviors. We don’t dress up for colorful parties and then have one-night stands, or stoop before females and present them with rocks as gestures of courtship. These are all petty animalistic behaviors. The cranes, with their inferior bird brains, do not have the capacity to notice (or for that matter hold onto) prolonged conflicts with their mates, and they are jumping around out of happy and innocent reproductive instincts. Animals are blindly determined by the laws of physics. Humans, on the other hand, have reasoning souls. Or, to put it more factually, even though it is a tremendous and improbable gift to be alive, humans and birds are reducible to a bundle of predetermined machinery subject to the forces of nature, despite what our deluded imaginations suggest. The problem with thinking this way is that our “deluded” imaginations actually play a causal role in real decisions, and so what seems “subjective” is actually not, by its being subjective, false. Neither is it not real; subjectivity can be realized or unrealized, actual or not actual. Nightmares are real things, real as dreams, and they should not be suppressed in juxtaposition to the “real world.” The reality is that dreams are part of our reality, and insofar as we belong to the world of real objects, so do our dreams. Thus our imagined realities are integral to nature. Descriptions of animal behaviors that cut out everything but the bare rules governing natural phenomena are actually missing parts of the picture, not because nature considered through science without art alongside it is cold—“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind” (Einstein, 1954); “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (Kant, 1787)—but because nature is not fundamentally cold and lifeless to begin with. That our imagination is central to all sentient experience, waking and dreaming, shows this must needs be so. Even when we’re thinking in terms of bare rationalism, our reasoning is guided by the tides of our underlying desires, expectations, memories, and tendencies. We see through a mirror dimly. The fact that direct language is scientifically powerful does not mean we should make a precise language cult. One should not overlook syntax as a unit of meaning. The schemata we understand the world through are governed by a schematism, the faculty of joining together rules of possible experience in diverse and sundry ways. And the fastest way to access the nature of our schematism is through what our imagination constructs in dreams and visions. If we don’t recognize this, we’ll be implicitly damning people and animals according to the rules of our intrapersonal reality, by its being unobserved within us. Nature cannot therefore be considered as a mechanistic reality, for insofar as our understanding of the objective world is subjective, so too nature is inherently embued with a glow and flow of which our imagination, intuition, emotions, and unconscious are an extension.
I have been harsh on logical positivism, and rightfully so. There are too many who take science as an archetype of truth. They think that the true nature of the world is only described by breaking it down into little bits and pieces, according to specified rules. This manner of thinking has the shortcoming of being empty, missing the intuitive relationships between things that give them significance in the first place. Yet there are also too many who take science as an archetype of materialism. To speak of nature mechanistically does not by its own rights reduce the essence of nature to something small. (Nor does talking quickly through rational concepts, skipping over lots of details, mean the mind behind those words is small.) If one expects abstract representations to map one-to-one onto the world, then you would need more words than atoms in the universe to be correct about anything. Words do not, in their being themselves little things, mean that their scientific use makes nature out to be composed of little things. Words can be used in reference to qualities emerging from things (as in, “Do you remember how good that lemonade was yesterday afternoon?”), in reference to emergent relationships between things (as in, “On their own, Sally and John are pleasant companions, but put them together in a room and it’s a nightmare”), and in reference to rationally irreducible things (as we do whenever we call someone by their name—a name is a placeholder far more than a descriptor, if a descriptor at all). It is therefore quite possible and familiar to reason along the lines of words being open-ended (i.e. as endless hermeneutics). Put more forthcomingly, although reasoning is an interpretative process reducing percepts into proposed concepts, it does not by its being reductive mean the substrate of reality is necessarily congruent with that reduction. To assert such a congruency is, by this very observation, inappropriate, for then the substrate of reality would necessarily be an embodiment of underlying mental processes we engage in, which would place analytical reasoning on the same playing field as the speculative imagination. What would life be like if that condition were true? It would mean that whenever we reason through something, external reality is simple and reducible, and whenever we let our minds wander through all the possibilities for why he/she isn’t responding to me, all of the possibilities are true. Your worst nightmares would be realized instantly. At the same time, you would also be able to understand and control anything. But you would have to choose at any moment between the power of knowledge and the power of realizing possibilities. (Please, somebody make a game or a story about that tension…) This tenant has some interesting merits—it shows us that different cognitive modes, although they are apperceived by one person (usually), sort of have different rules of reality implied by them—but the fact of the matter is that if there is a unified reality, then we should not expect an objective system for describing reality to, at bottom, have logical contradictions. “Unified” here does not mean that everything has to share some common ground or end-goal, nor that it looks like the self-portrait of an obsessive-compulsive librarian; it means there exists an aggregate of everything we can experience and thence know, which by its allowing for our experience has the result of being translatable between cognitive modes via the imagination. In other words, everything that can be experienced is unified as experience, no matter how tenuous those experiences may be, and by that same token allows for the possibility of description. This is HUGE. (The elephant in the room is that imagination holds together sense-faculties and the understanding, that it is the faculty of the subjective experience.) The consequences of this huge elephant being in the room are that everything in the room should be moved to accommodate her—or she will move them herself.
All that’s to say: although analytical reasoning relies upon cogent language, it is not inherent to science to worship cogent language, one does not have to let efficient strings of language be one’s schematism. No insight becomes of an analytical schematism; and this is what religious people are getting at when they push back on the clever rhetoric of angry atheists. Abstract reasoning is not false for the sake that words are simple things nor is it a merely useful heuristic for the sake that intuitions express something more fundamental to our cognitive experience than words. Words in their simpleness and specificity can be used to describe a reality that is mediated by and thence contingent on processes beyond what reasoning alone represents. And therefore we can justifiably say, the birds are in love.
November 11th is the day of the black-necked crane in Bhutan. They celebrate with religious rituals, chanting, food, and with people dressing up like the cranes and dancing in a circle to music. I had always loved the day for its simple mirroring of eleven-eleven, one-one:one-one, but now I have a really good reason for it. November Eleventh is officially Bhutan Black-Necked Crane Day. I originally learned about the Grus nigricollis watching an episode of The Wild Thornberries on Nickelodeon as a kid. The Wild Thornberries was a great cartoon about a family travelling the world doing nature documentaries, and one of their daughters, Eliza, had gained the magical ability to talk to animals. In every episode, Eliza would be the catalyst for bringing humans and animals to help each other. Looking back, the show had a deep effect on me, among other things. The episode in which the Thornberry family travelled to Bhutan to watch the cranes stuck with me in particular. I don’t really know why it did, and I didn’t remember the plot at all, but ever since then I held Bhutan in a special place of curiosity and wonder in my heart, as an island of tranquility in the Himalayas, and I knew about their cranes.
Now that I am an adult and now that laptops are a thing, I have both the volition and the means to research Bhutan. As I’ve been working on my poem project, A Vespers for Our World, I started to weave a theme around “The Three Rooves of the World,” the roof of the cathedral Notre-Dame du Paris (collapsed by fire, 2019), the Arctic ice cap (collapsing), and the glacial plains of Tibet (also collapsing). It’s about how the sky is falling and how once it falls we’ll find out that there are still plenty of things on the ground to do, and that since the ceiling is gone now we can actually look out into the sky. More on that to come. Seeing that Tibet was close to Bhutan, that place of mystery for me, I looked Bhutan up! There was a recent TED talk by their current prime minister, Tshering Tobgay, about how Bhutan is carbon-negative. He spoke of how they do not use Gross Domestic Product but Gross Domestic Happiness as the final word in governing their country. He spoke of how the Bhutanese king imposed democracy on his people. He spoke of how in their constitution it is written that at least 60% of the country shall be covered by forest for all time, and how they have connected all the forests together by wildlife preserves so the animals can transit throughout their entire nation. Most of their energy comes from rivers. For all this, the country is not just carbon-neutral: they are carbon-negative—and the only country to do so in the world. They were ignored for this in the G10 UN Climate Summit, but were more recently heard and honored for it.
Bhutan is a country of mountain forests, Vajrayana Buddhism, small farms, and cottage industries; they have no railroads, and their per capita income is a little more than $2,200. Many majestic and endangered species take refuge in that swath of land rising from 660-ft above sea level in the south to over 23,000-ft in the northern mountains: cloud leopards, snow leopards, bengal tigers, sloth bears, Himalayan black bears, Himalayan wolves, Himalayan musk deer, sambar deer, takin (the national animal of Bhutan), water buffalo, red pandas, golden langur, and many others. Yet for being a Shangri-La of sorts they feel the rush of global warming: all of their thousands of mountain glaciers are melting, causing flash floods that wipe out their fragile towns and which will continue to pose a challenge in the decades to come.
Yet for all this, the cranes are still dancing. They come to this country in the clouds to winter, and then come spring they soar up on over the tallest peaks on the planet into Tibet, the legendary land of Buddhism, where almost everyone lives above 14,000-ft. In the summertime, the Tibetan alpine meadows and wetlands serve as an excellent breeding ground for the cranes. They lay one or two eggs, and oftentimes their chicks do not hatch or the hatchlings die before reaching maturity. The cranes face a harsh reality, and they dance. Sometimes blizzards come in the spring or are harsher than usual. In these times, kind elderly women will hike out into the snow and toss kilos and kilos of corn for the cranes to eat. Human compassion keeps the crane population up. In fact, the millennium of agriculture that has taken place on the Himalayan Steppe has been such that the native wildlife have come to depend on the human presence there. Nomadic shepherds and cattlemen allow the snow leopards to eat their livestock with no retribution. Leftovers from grain harvests provide a significant portion of the crane’s diet. Ironically, many nomadic Tibetans believe water spouts and thunderstorms are actual dragons and yet their lifestyle has preserved the surrounding ecosystem far better than most rational scientists could ever hope.
It is this pure land of hypoxia, icy rainbows, and prayer flags flapping themselves into thin air that provides an enormous portion of China’s water supply. Glaciers in the Hindu Kush and Himalayan ranges (HKH) (as well as their closely neighboring ranges) store an enormous amount of fresh water, so much so that the region is called the “third pole of the world.” The snowmelt from the HKH provides water for a bit more than 200 million people. The countries affected directly by the HKH water supply include Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and China. The ten major river systems of the HKH are the Amu Darya (which used to flow into the now aridified Aral Sea—nope, it no longer exists; excessive agriculture did it), Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy (there is a dolphin with the river’s namesake), Salween, Mekong, Yangtze (the Baiji, the Yangtze river dolphin, is now officially extinct—blame pollution and dams), Huang He (Yellow River), and Tarim (this one’s landlocked in the Taklamakan Desert, which is next to but not the same as the Gobi Desert; the Tarim quenched the thirst of anyone travelling the old northern Silk Road). There are 2-billion people who call those mighty river basins home—that’s one fourth of the human population.
China annexed Tibet and the western high desert regions many years ago, and now contains within its borders the sources to six of those rivers. Three of them—the Huang He, the Yangtze, and the Mekong—are situated relatively close to one another in the lands along the northeast corner of the Tibetan Plateau, in the eastern section of the Kunlun mountains (which demarcate the vast plains of Tibet from the deserts to the north). Not only does China benefit from the great flow of water descending from Himalayan Steppe, they also have access to many of the glaciers in the mountains there. For China, the HKH is their “water tower.”
Historically, China’s environmental bane has been flooding (in the early 1900s, tens of millions of Chinese died because of floods). Now it is water scarcity. Cause: agricultural aridification and industrial pollution. Although China has 21% of the global population (~1.5 billion), they only have 7% of the global fresh water supply. 50 years ago, there were 57,000 some odd rivers throughout China; now there are only 20,000. People are draining up the rivers for agricultural and commercial use, and this is having challenging consequences. The once lush farmlands west of Beijing have gradually turned into a dusty desert through poor acquisition of the water table, and now sandstorms sweep into the cities. Moreover, about 190 million Chinese citizens become sick each year from water pollution. Many of the rivers are not even safe to touch from the industrial waste. As the Chinese population is expected to peak around 2030, and as industry continues to change the landscape, the pressure of global warming on their water needs will be felt acutely. Rising temperatures means less snowmelt and greater amounts of evaporation. Moreover, if the HKH glaciers were to melt, China would lose its water tower, putting them at greater risk for water shortages.
I see four primary strategies for China to approach its water shortage crisis, which may or may not occur in tandem. For one, they have tried to reverse aridification by channeling water back into the dried floodplains; however, this did not work. The water table has become too low for most plants to obtain moisture, and rerouting water into the desertified fields only creates pools of moisture rather than infiltrating the regional soil. China has also been working on its South-North Water Diversion Project, which is the biggest aqueduct project in human history; the project is to channel water from the more lush Yangtze river northward hundreds of miles to the Yellow River. The project is still underway. Thirdly, China can better protect the environment by placing tighter restrictions on industrial and agricultural water uses, by protecting the Tibetan highlands, and by fighting global climate change. After about twenty years of research and development, China has set aside for conservation a large swath of land in the alpine meadows of the Himalayan Steppe: it is called Sanjianguyan, “The Source of Three Rivers,” the three rivers being those mentioned earlier: the Yellow River, the Yangtze, and the Mekong. Sanjianguyan is slated this year to officially become China’s first national park. It is a noble effort to protect both the wildlife and water ecology there from overuse and aridification, and will prove to be a great achievement in Chinese environmental policy. Preserving the HKH means not only protecting the environment for the sake of those directly dependent on its pristine water, it also means protecting the glaciers that store immense quantities of China’s fresh water. Should there be an unprecedented crisis of water scarcity, China would be able to draw upon their glaciers as a resource. But if the glaciers continue to melt and become small, then they will no longer be a viable resource. This critical case could precipitate a need for the fourth strategy: armed conflict, most likely with their lush neighbors to the south.
Thus to protect the black-necked crane habitat could very well mean preventing World War III. (The converse is not quite as true.) I do not know much about Chinese mythology, but I do know that dragons have been part of their cultural lexicon for thousands of years. Dragons can be portents of good luck or of destruction, depending on how one behaves toward them. It is not too far-fetched to consider rivers like dragons, winding their way from the mystic thundering heights, bringing both life and turbulence to the valleys below. It makes sense that China has worked to harness their water supply, for doing so has allowed them to become a great industrial power and to better protect their people from disasters like floods and droughts. But in the process of conquering the river dragons, they are now facing their fiery breath. Or perhaps one should not try to slay a dragon, lest they become one themself. Dragons are ancient, possessing eons of wisdom, and so taking its dominion too quickly can have diastrous consequences. If one does not cooperate with a dragon, it will become angry.
Global warming, elegant Himalayan cranes, water scarcity in urban China—these are the makings of an epic story. Imagine a city threatened by the burning fury of a great dragon, and there is a damsel in distress wandering deep within his draconian territory. The city attacked the dragon because they mistakenly thought he took their princess captive. Far from it, their princess ran away from the greedy city because she wanted to go back to her alpine homeland. Upon finding her weeping amid the ruins of her people’s alpine village (the people of the city pillaged the town sometime after when she left it as a child; they promised peace to the town, but turned their backs and attacked it), she declares to the knight she would rather die in the wilds than return to that deplorable city in the valley. But in attempting to persuade her return, she mentions her people’s beautiful dances, now gone for all time. In her anguish, she teaches the knight her dances, and he falls in love with her. He tells her that although the glory of her people has been destroyed, they can rebuild and start anew. By coming back from the mountains she could persuade the people to not only stop fighting the dragon but also change their ways for the better. She would have an audience now. The princess consents and they race back to the battle scene over the city. By presenting her and her case before the people, they cease their war against the dragon, and he, his fury abated, returns to sleep in the mountains of the Tibetan sky. Thenceforth, the city makes it a priority to live in harmony with nature, and the capital is moved to the ruins of her mountain village. And just think: there is also a damsel of the psyche who has fled the ruinous materialism and determinism of bare reason, and now the dragon of the wild threatens to pillage the townsfolk. Shall we conquer the dragon blindly or find the spirit-princess and honor her on her terms? Will we traverse this Silk Road wearing a rainbow’s humility or bearing the torches of wrath?
March 24/25, 2020
San Luis Obispo
Resources on Black-Necked Cranes:
https://www.audubon.org/news/saving-sacred-black-necked-cranes-bhutan
Resources on the HKH and China’s water scarcity:
https://www.thethirdpole.net/en/
https://www.icimod.org/who-we-are/the-pulse-of-the-planet/
https://news.mongabay.com/2017/05/chinas-first-national-park-an-experiment-in-living-with-snow-leopards/
http://chinaindiadialogue.com/sanjiangyuan-source-of-life