Category: Environment

Millions are grieving the death of Lewis the Koala but his legacy will live on,  writes End Animal Slaughter contributor LYNLEY TULLOCH.

Ellenborough Lewis – or Lewis for short – has died. The rescued koala received substantial  burns in the bushfires in Australia and was rescued by a passerby. Taken to Port Macquarie Koala Hospital, Lewis was treated for burns and dehydration and given pain relief. Unfortunately he was just too badly burned. Port Macquarie hospital uploaded a post on Facebook saying he needed to be euthanized as he would not be able to recover from the burns.

Just yesterday I wrote an article about Lewis on this website, believing that he would live.   But today, all hope is lost.   Lewis could not survive the burns to his hands, feet, arms and the inside of his legs, so was humanely euthanised.   Lewis had nowhere to go when his home burst into flames. Neither did the hundreds of others who did not make it out of the Australian bushfires.

Koala Conservation Australia President Sue Ashton has been quoted as saying “We think most of the animals were incinerated – it’s like a cremation. They have been burnt to ashes in the trees.”

It’s a devastating thought, and brings a whole new meaning to the quote ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. Personally, I don’t care much for such quotes. I know we must all come to an end someday, but no one deserves such a horrific death as being cremated alive.

As a child, I lived in Australia for some years. Koalas always fascinated me. They blended into the environment so perfectly, so intricately connected with their home. They are a unique part of the Australian landscape. Reports of them becoming ‘functionally extinct’ are devastating.

It’s difficult to know how to write about such a tragedy without reducing it to platitudes. The bushfires raise so many issues that need to be addressed. Climate change and the increasing risk this poses for bushfires; loss of the diversity of life on the planet; the human impact on the natural environment as we encroach on wildlife habitat. These issues are all so significant in the wake of the bushfires.

I come back to myself as a child, experiencing the koala with all my senses, the way children do. I return to my memories at a time when hope was a natural way of being.

I also keep coming back to Lewis. All animals have an inner life that is often not recognizable to humans. They are conscious of their existence and experience a range of emotions with intensity. They are not ‘lesser beings’ than us. They are our fellow Earthlings, and many of them have been here a lot longer than we have.

As I watched Lewis’s story unfold, along with millions or others, I hoped for his survival. I hoped the little guy would have another chance at life. I hoped life would rise once more from the ashes.  That is one thing that is so great about both humans and nonhuman animals – we have hope. We have poetry in our hearts, and songs in our veins. We have life. We are all interconnected and yet we all experience the world in our own way.

Lewis had his own way of experiencing the world, it was unique and special to him. He was an individual and once we named him, we felt that he was one of us. We thought we knew Lewis. We cared about him and his life, like we would never have if he was ‘just another koala’ sitting in a tree. Once the poetry died in Lewis’s heart, we died a death too.  

Somewhere deep inside us, we know that life would not be so special without our fellow Earthlings alongside us for the journey. We know that life’s poetry requires diversity to thrive and to have meaning.

We must not let hope die. For Lewis, let’s honor his memory by fighting against koala habitat destruction so they do not become extinct. Stuart Blanch from WWF Australia has said that while koalas may become functionally extinct in some areas, there are still large areas with viable koala populations. They will only go extinct, he says, if we make them.

And so our hope resides with people who work to save koalas. Blanch goes on to say that koala habitat will regenerate and this reforesting will build their numbers again. One of the main threats is humans encroaching on their habitat and clearing land. Blanch says: “You can bring more koalas back if you stop bulldozing trees and start letting trees regrow.”

To Lewis, I dedicate life’s song. For Lewis I cry. For Lewis I hope.  Thankyou to Toni Doherty, the compassionate grandmother who rescued Lewis, and to the staff at Port Macquarie Koala Hospital who tried so hard to save his life.  You are our heroes, our Heroes of Hope.

Ellenborough Lewis, b 2005?- d 2019

Loren Eiseley  (September 3, 1907 – July 9, 1977) was an American anthropologist, philosopher and natural science writer.   During his lifetime he received many honorary degrees for his accomplishments.   A ‘scholar of imagination and grace’,  dubbed ‘the modern Thoreau’,  he taught and wrote from the 1950s through the 1970s.

Eiseley’s reputation was established primarily through his books, including The Immense Journey (1957), Darwin’s Century (1958), The Unexpected Universe (1969), The Night Country (1971), and his memoir, All the Strange Hours (1975).

His beautiful prose was written with a sense of reverence before the natural world, and the mysteries of life.  Eiseley was an evolutionist, and both understood scientifically, and felt intuitively, the interconnectedness of all beings.  

‘THE STAR THROWER’

The famous ‘Starfish Story’ is based on an original story by Eiseley called  The Star Thrower’,  which appeared in his book ‘The Unexpected Universe’.  Here is an excerpt:-

I have caught a glimpse of what man may be, along an endless wave-beaten coast at dawn. It began on the beaches of Costabel. I was an inhumanly stripped skeleton without voice, without hope, wandering alone upon the shores of the world. I was devoid of pity, because pity implies hope… I concealed myself beneath a fisherman’s cap and sunglasses, so that I looked like everyone else on the beaches of Costabel, which are littered with the debris of life. There, along the strip of wet sand that marks the tide, death walks hugely and in many forms. The sea casts them repeatedly back upon the shore. The tiny breathing pores of starfish are stuffed with sand. The rising sun shrivels their unprotected bodies. The endless war is soundless. Nothing screams but the gulls. In the night, torches bobbing like fireflies along the beach, are the sign of the professional shellers. Greedy madness sweeps over the competing collectors, hurrying along with bundles of gathered starfish that will be slowly cooked and dissolved in the outdoor kettles provided by the resort hotels for the cleaning of specimens. It was there that I met the star thrower. As the sound of the sea became heavier and more menacing, I rounded a bluff into the full blast of the offshore wind. Long-limbed starfish were strewn everywhere, sprawling where the waves had tossed them as though showered down through the night sky. The sun behind me was pressing upward at the horizon’s rim ~ an ominous red glare amidst the tumbling blackness of the clouds. Ahead of me, over the projecting point, a gigantic rainbow of incredible perfection had sprung shimmering into existence.

 

Toward its foot I discerned a human figure standing, as it seemed to me, within the rainbow. He was gazing fixedly at something in the sand. He stooped and flung an object beyond the breaking surf. I labored another half a mile toward him and by the time I reached him, kneeling again, the rainbow had receded ahead of us. In a pool of sand and silt a starfish had thrust its arms up stiffly and was holding its body away from the stifling mud. “It’s still alive,” I ventured. “Yes,” he said, and with a quick, yet gentle movement, he picked up the star and spun it over my head and far out into the sea. “It may live if the offshore pull is strong enough,” he said. In a sudden embarrassment for words I said, “Do you collect shells?” “Only ones like this,” he said softly, gesturing amidst the wreckage of the shore, “and only for the living.” He stooped again, and skipped another star neatly across the water. “The stars,” he said, “throw well. One can help them.”

‘THE JUDGEMENT OF THE BIRDS’ is another famous Eiseley work.

Original watercolour ‘SPARROW’ by Alex L. Scott

I have said that I saw a judgment upon life, and that it was not passed by men. Those who stare at birds in cages or who test minds by their closeness to our own may not care for it. It comes from far away out of my past, in a place of pouring waters and green leaves. I shall never see an episode like it again if I live to be a hundred, nor do I think that one man in a million has ever seen it, because man is an intruder into such silences. The light must be right, and the observer must remain unseen. No man sets up such an experiment. What he sees, he sees by chance.

 

You may put it that I had come over a mountain, that I had slogged through fern and pine needles for half a long day, and that on the edge of a little glade with one long, crooked branch extending across it, I had sat down to rest with my back against a stump. Through accident I was concealed from the glade, although I could see into it perfectly.

 

The sun was warm there, and the murmurs of forest life blurred softly away into my sleep. When I awoke, dimly aware of some cornmotion and outcry in the clearing, the light was slanting down through the pines in such a way that the glade was like some vast cathedral. I could see the dust motes of wood pollen in the long shaft of light, and there on the extended branch sat an enormous raven with a red and squirming nestling in his beak.

 

The sound that awoke me was the outraged cries of the nestlings parents, who flew helplessly in circles about the clearing. The sleek black monster was indifferent to them. He gulped, whetted his beak on the dead branch a moment and sat still. Up to that point the little tragedy had followed the usual pattern. But suddenly, out of all that area of woodland, a soft sound of complaint began to rise. Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny parents.

 

No one dared to attack the raven. But they cried there in some instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as though to point their wings at the murderer. There was a dim intangible ethic he had violated, that they knew. He was a bird of death.

 

And he, the murderer, the black bird at the heart of life, sat on there, glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable.

 

The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged. For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song pass-ing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang, from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were the singers of life, and not of death.