When a predator is introduced into an ecosystem, everything changes. Prey move faster and avoid certain areas, soil composition shifts, and water flows in new patterns. Scientists call this the Ecosystem of Fear. For example, when wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park, the scent of their urine told prey where and how to graze, and adrenaline produced by this fear altered the chemical makeup of their waste, which returned to the soil, water, and air, until nothing, breathing or unbreathing, was left untouched. It’s about diffusion, inputs and outputs.
In one famed experiment, the scientist Robert Paine spent years tearing sea stars off rocks and hurling them into the ocean, to see what effect their absence would have on nearby mussel colonies. In another, Oswald Schmitz glued spiders’ mouths shut to observe the reactions of grasshoppers in the surrounding area. I wonder if the mussels and the grasshoppers were more afraid of the hurling and mouth-gluing than they’d been of the stars and spiders. If so, it would be impossible for scientists to study any natural system without confounding every factor with the fear produced by the human presence there.
There’s a photograph of me kneeling on the shoreline as a kid. While my mom collected sea glass and my brother hunted crabs, I crouched in the shallows, motionless, peering down, with the tip of my nose balanced on the surface of the water. Soon after the silt settled around my feet, tiny ripples appeared in the sand where hermits and periwinkles burrowed. They emerged one leg, antenna, or eyestalk at a time, and peered around, treading carefully. Sometimes minnows darted past, and fish poked their heads out from hiding spots in the rocks. Whole days were spent engaged in this observation, in this watching and being watched. If I shifted an inch, the creatures scattered in a panic, and I had to start again. I imagined I was building up some kind of trust with them. At this time, I did not have a stake in observation.
It’s interesting to consider how the ecosystem of fear might function in the city. Artists always talk about the energy of New York, so much so that it’s become cliché to reference or write about. Since I’ve been here, the art I’ve seen or made or thought about has felt charged by something. It’s conducive to panic and eccentricity, a spectrum of creating that I haven’t experienced anywhere else, but this is a dangerous argument to make. Admitting your best outputs depend on a place that can anchor you to it. Once, a professor told me that art is just a medium for passing your obsessions on to other people. New York City has certainly been passed around enough times, rotated to and from and repeat. Inputs and outputs. I wonder if the energy that everyone talks about is just another word for fear.
I have not looked closely for a while. I know that mice nest in the medians of the road, and cats live in the lot beside my building. There are fettered horses, muzzled dogs. Dead starlings under glass windows. The ducks in the park are probably doing okay. I’ve focused instead on the not-living but still natural things: the rain turning in wind or wind visible in rain, patterns of refracted light, the tea bag floating in my cup with leaves levitating inside it like tiny fish swimming or birds hovering. I diffuse selectively and am therefore complicit.
I’ve focused instead on memories, such as the old condominium on the beach that my family used to visit. More than the beach or the ocean, I recall the complex itself, the sun-bleached parking lot and peeling walls, the ant piles and weeds in the cracks of the shuffleboard court. There was a library that I walked into sopping wet, and I remember the kiss of air conditioning and how strange it felt to touch carpet with sandy feet and turn pages with damp fingers. Indoor, outdoor. There was the smell of books and salt.
I’ve focused instead on people, their selves and their obsessions, and we’ve become a system here of our own, but I still can’t help but think we are four, five, six levels removed from our original inputs, the wide or unseen spaces, and those we have forced to hide.
When I come home from the city and return to the beach, it looks overexposed, and I glimpse people out of the corner of my eye. I turn and find no one there, and the whiteness of the sand and wind has a static quality, and I feel seven or eight levels removed from that original function. I notice there are no footstep sounds on the sand and no breathing sounds over the crashing of the waves, and I still hear murmuring from time to time, but there is no one. I don’t approach the water and instead sit between two dunes so that there is no periphery. It is so hard to sit still! The dry grass of the dunes brushes against my neck. It trails over my shoulder and into the sand, where it adds to a series of markings. The wind changes direction. I take photographs because I now have a stake in observation.
SGP is a writer from St. Petersburg, Florida now living in Brooklyn, NY. She is interested in how storytelling may function to increase environmental literacy and inspire collective action.
