Life Without People

"We're all out here 'cause we ain't all there."

Since I departed Alaska in 2007, the state has become a popular destination for reality television shows. I sometimes have the unsettling image of the region crawling with the casts and crews of reality shows, all aching to give viewers snug in the suburbs a glimpse of wild, pristine nature and the oddballs who live on its fringes.

Lately, two of my favorite television programs are "Life Below Zero" and "Where the Wild Men Are", both on BBC Earth. The first program follows some people ("four households") living rough in the Alaskan wilderness and the second, hosted by Ben Fogle, goes to places all over the world where people have abandoned their successful, conventional lives in the city (London, New York, Sydney, New Delhi) to go and live in some godforsaken outpost in an African desert or on a tropical island in Panama or the Philippines, or in the frozen north of Sweden. When Ben Fogle visited an older married couple living in the Alaskan wild, they assured him that they hadn't chosen the life because they don't like people. But it seemed to me they were simply trying to dispel a somewhat obvious conclusion about them. 

The BBC often opens the program with an warning: "The following contains scenes of animals being killed for food. Parental discretion is advised." The killing of the animals (caribou, moose, fox, lynx, etc.) doesn't bother me so much as the license with which they are killed. It's evidently federal land that these people are living on (except for a lone woman living in Kavik, close to the Arctic Sea). I'm sure they have all the applicable hunting and fishing licenses, but the strangely proprietary way in which they slaughter the wildlife is unsettling.

At first, like everyone else I suppose, I was fascinated by people who turned their backs on the life we all live in society, dependent on people we don't even know - farmers and fishermen - for our survival, working for someone else to make a living. They have developed skills that simply have no value in society, like how to build a shelter out of trees felled by themselves, how to set traps or snares to catch anything from a muskrat to a wolverine, or how to skin and gut a caribou to get at the meat that can keep them alive for weeks in the winter.

But the longer I watch the program, the more disenthralled I've become by these people and the things they are compelled to do, like destroying portions of the plant and animal life around them simply because they're there to be exploited. Having visited the Alaska Bureau of Fish & Game in Anchorage, and knowing how strict the hunting laws of the state are, I take it for granted that the people featured in "Life Below Zero" have valid licenses to hunt and fish. But who or what (in a broader sense) authorizes them to take as much as they please from the environment around them? I'm not arguing that they're putting any measurable dent in the population of fish and game, but where do they get the belief that it is all theirs for the taking? The animals are only being taken because these people are there to take them. It's acceptable if they are natives, whose people have been living that way for thousands of years. One episode features a seal hunt in which only natives are allowed to take part. But only one of the households in "Life Below Zero" is inhabited by natives.

Two of the "households" that the program depicts are inhabited by one person, living in total isolation in an environment that is not just indifferent to their survival but actively hostile to it. When you have to worry about where you're standing outdoors, about whether you're upwind or downwind from an apex predator like a bear, a wolf, or a wolverine - when you realize that you're a potential meal for these creatures, your perception of that environment changes drastically. Besides, thinking about the sheer amount of solitude that such an isolated person endures, with such a storehouse of memories of all the things they've seen and thought and no one to share them with exposes the ultimate uselessness of such a life. George Orwell was right when he asserted that, if Daniel Defoe had actually been a castaway on an island, he would never have written Robinson Crusoe.

At certain points in every episode of "Life Below Zero" someone says something like, "this is better than a 9 to 5 job," or "it's better to hunt and kill your own food than buy it at the supermarket." Having repudiated the responsibilities of living in society, these people have also forsaken its obvious advantages. Very often when they go hunting, we see these people come away empty handed. There are either no moose or caribou to shoot at or they're out of the range of their rifles. One of the show's regulars has a modest arsenal of firearms but obviously, even with telescopic sights and a tripod, couldn't hit the broad side of a bear at 50 yards. When I cash my steady paycheck and go grocery shopping in the market, I never come away empty handed.

It was impossible for me to watch the resourcefulness of these people surviving - some of them thriving - in the wild without being reminded of Christopher McCandless [see photo], whose sad story of failing to survive in the wild was told in Sean Penn's film Into the Wild. This evidently intelligent young man died in the Alaskan wilderness after eating a poisonous plant that he mistook for an edible one. He had to eat the plant because he was starving to death, having failed to find and kill any wild animals that he hoped would provide him with sustenance. 

Reviewing a film on a similar subject, Werner Herzog's documentary Grizzly Man, Stanley Kauffmann wrote:

"The places that are relatively untouched by civilization [the film implies] are the best treasures of that civilization and must be preserved. We might think, however, that it is only the existence of civilization that makes these places attractive - for some. Most of the thought and energy of the human race has aimed at taming the wilderness."(1)

I think the presence of these individualists on America's Last Frontier is probably transient. In one episode of "Life Below Zero," one of them comes across a cabin that had been abandoned - he estimated - for thirty years. It showed signs of having been ransacked recently by a bear, which strew the cabin's contents, some of which were still usable and valuable, all over the ground outside it. There were no indications of what might have become of the person or persons who built the cabin. Perhaps it was a structure constructed to provide shelter for a season by someone just like the man who discovered it thirty years later? 


(1) The New Republic, October 3, 2005.


[Postscript October 13: Since writing the above post, my views about the exiles in the wilderness chronicled in the BBC Earth program "Life Below Zero" have hardened considerably. I am by now far less sympathetic to them and their imperious relationship with nature. Occasionally - though not at all consistently - they will pause for a moment over the dead carcass of whatever wild animal they have harvested for their larders and mutter some mumbo-jumbo about the "spirit" of the animal as a kind of tribute before they are disemboweled. I think such dubious ceremonies are ridiculous and hypocritical. I would believe them if they were native Americans, who believe that animals have spirits that need to be placated lest the hunter's luck be removed. But coming from Anglo-Saxons who were expelled from paradise a thousand or so generations ago, it sounds downright silly. 


I mentioned the film Grizzly Man, made by Werner Herzog, which makes a point about how nature is not to be trifled with or underestimated, and how even the greatest animal lovers are, under the worst circumstances, nothing but another meal for an apex predator. If the people in "Life Below Zero" wanted to give something back to nature, I think they would do a lot worse if they followed the example of Timothy Treadwell, who gave his life (and his girlfriend's) and the meat on his bones back to nature. It would, I think, be a more noble end than the one I predict for more than one of them: being found frozen to a tree stump with a look of rapt surprise on their faces. I, for one, wouldn't be at all surprised.]