The Book of Eels, Patrik Svensson [bill gates best books .TXT] 📗

Jesus promises his followers eternal life, which is why the most important miracle is the resurrection. That Jesus dies and is raised is the heart of the Christian message. Without it, faith becomes meaningless. Faith can’t be only about this life; it has to transcend it. Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.”

Only a fool would believe in the resurrection, but I’ve sometimes wished I were a fool, and I think Dad wished for the same thing. Because what is resurrection? If taken literally it means a person (or an eel) can die and then live again. But Paul also talks about something else in his letter to the Corinthians. “The last enemy to be destroyed is death,” he writes. Death is inevitable, but there are, according to Paul, ways to handle it. Further on, Paul talks about change, about how death isn’t an ending but rather a kind of metamorphosis: “We shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.”

So a person (or an eel) can die and then be transformed in the blink of an eye and come back in imperishable form. No, that’s not true. That’s a simile. But a simile can carry within it its own truth, of course. You don’t have to believe the miracle to believe the meaning of the miracle. There are many ways to be a fool. And you don’t have to believe in the Gospel (or the eel) in a literal sense to believe what is at the heart of their message: Those who die stay with us in some form.

Nana believed in God, but Dad and I didn’t. That being said, much later, when Nana was dying, I sat by her side and she cried and said, “I will always be with you.” And I obviously believed her. I didn’t need to believe in God to believe that.

And that is, at the end of the day, what Jesus promises his followers. “I am with you always, to the close of the age,” he says when he reveals himself to his apostles, three days after his death.

And that is, of course, what we hope for when we believe. Whether in God or an eel.

17The Eel on the Brink of Extinction

The last enemy to be destroyed is death. That’s true not only for people of faith, but also for those who prefer knowledge. It’s certainly true for all the people still trying to understand the eel.

Because the eel is dying out, and at an increasing rate. There are data that suggest that the eel population began to shrink as early as the eighteenth century, which is to say around the same time science first took an earnest interest in the creature. More reliable data showing a decline in eel numbers are available from the 1950s at least. And during the past few decades, the problem seems to have accelerated significantly. According to most research reports, the situation today is more or less catastrophic. The eel is dying, and not just in the expected way, as the natural end to a long life full of changes. It’s becoming extinct. We are losing it.

This is the latest and most urgent eel question: Why is it disappearing?

It may be appropriate as a starting point to place the extinction of the eel within a larger context. Life is changeable; that’s the first law of evolution. Life is also transient; that’s the first law of life. But what’s happening now with the eel, as with so many other species, is far beyond the normal progression of evolution and life, in terms of both character and extent.

Rachel Carson was one of the first to realize this. Her final book, and the one that she’ll forever be remembered for, was Silent Spring. It was published in 1962 and is one of the most influential works ever written about humanity’s ability to destroy what it claims to love. Silent Spring is about the devastating use of DDT and other synthetic pesticides, about how the thoughtless spraying of fields and forests kills not only insects but also all other forms of life: birds, fish, mammals, and in the end, humans. Through a combination of thorough scientific research and her inimitably beautiful and visceral language, Carson was able to both illustrate the extent of the problem and describe what it actually meant in practice.

What she foresaw was a time when life is no longer seen or heard around us, simply because it has disappeared from the world we perceive, because it has ceased to exist. She foresaw a silent time, springs without the whirring of insects or singing of birds, without fish jumping in rivers or bats flitting through the moonlight at night. She saw an ongoing destruction of large swaths of the life we were so used to having around us, and she knew why it was happening: “As man proceeds toward his announced goal of the conquest of nature, he has written a depressing record of destruction, directed not only against the earth he inhabits but against the life that shares it with him.”

By identifying with the animals, with something beyond herself, Rachel Carson was able to arrive at a greater understanding of what was happening. From that sprung a feeling of desperation that eventually grew into courage and a conviction that it was her right, even her duty, to bear witness to what she knew. And that time was short. In June 1963, while Silent Spring sent ripples across the world, she appeared before the US Senate’s subcommittee on environmental hazards; she began her statement by saying: “The problem you have chosen to explore is one that must be resolved in our time. I feel strongly that a beginning