Nature and Humanity Theme Analysis

“We are hybridizing the planet,” author Jonathan Weiner writes of humanity’s impact on the natural world in his book The Beak of the Finch. In other words, Weiner is implying that modern humans have forever changed the face of the earth in many irrevocable ways. By exploring how human evolution, migration, and industrialization have impacted the natural world, the book suggests that because of humanity’s remarkable (yet often destructive) progress, the world’s plants and animals have come to a unique and critical point in their evolutionary processes. Ultimately, Weiner argues that humans have a responsibility to recognize and assume responsibility for the impact they’ve had on the natural world. 

The book explores how humanity’s long journey toward industrialization has impacted the natural world. Humanity’s power to impact the natural world—and the evolution of species—is fact, not hypothesis. Author Jonathan Weiner cites an example from the height of the Industrial Revolution to underscore the realities of humanity’s impact on other species. In 1848, an English lepidopterist (the word for a person who studies butterflies and moths) noticed that, in the city of Manchester, a species of moth that had previously been whitish with small black spots was turning black. But moths of the same species in rural parts of the country weren’t changing. The “black mutants,” it turned out, were turning black in order to blend in with their increasingly grimy, soot-stained urban surroundings. This anecdote illustrates how the activities of the human species have the power to change the evolutionary patterns of insects, plants, and animals. Because, as the book also shows, nature’s ecosystems are delicately and profoundly interconnected, changing the behavior or appearance of even an animal as small as a moth has cascading consequences throughout the world’s bionetworks.

Climate change brought on by human industry is yet another way that humanity has impacted the natural world. Global warming, for instance, threatens the integrity of the current patterns of the oceans’ currents—currents that bring seasons to places like the Galápagos. Shifts in the weather patterns of the Galápagos will certainly impact the evolution of the animals that live on the island, or whether the islands cease to be habitable for those animals at all. Because of climate change, whole species could be eliminated—and because every ecosystem on earth is delicate and interconnected, whole species’ evolutionary patterns and relationships with other species could be wiped off the map.

The book suggests that because humans have forever changed the face of the planet—and because humans are the only species on earth with full consciousness of the correlation between action and consequence—humanity has a responsibility to invest itself in the preservation of nature. “Never before was such havoc caused by the expansion of a single species,” Weiner writes in The Beak of the Finch. “[And] never before was the leading actor aware of the action, concerned about the consequences, conscious of guilt.” Here, Weiner suggests that though humans have caused immense “havoc” on and damage to the planet and its many species, humanity is also unique in its ability to understand that it should feel some “guilt” about its actions. That guilt, the passage implies, should be a motivating force that compels humanity to take responsibility for its actions. Weiner goes on to observe that, “for better and for worse, this may be one of the most dramatic moments to observe evolution in action since evolution began.” Now that humanity has changed the face of the planet and pressurized certain selection and evolution events (such as in the case of the Manchester moths), it can absorb the gravity of its actions. Humans shouldn’t only feel guilt—they should marvel at the planet’s capacity to change, and work to take actions that will nurture positive selection and change rather than continuing to feign ignorance as to how human activity impacts the planet’s many species.

After Britain enacted clean-air legislation in the mid-20th century, the moths in Manchester began to morph back to their original forms—the frequency of the black mutant dropped from seven in ten months to fewer than one in ten. The Beak of the Finch makes the case that humanity has the power to assume responsibility for how its activities impact nature, and to ensure that we are conscious, careful, and deliberate in our actions.