THE ROOTS OF HEAVEN ARE THESE: Freedom, Justice, Dignity Dr. Lorin Swinehart
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an is destroying the forests, poisoning the oceans, poisoning the very air we breathe. The oceans, the forests, the races of animals and mankind are the roots of heaven. Poison heaven at its roots, and the tree will wither and die. The stars will go out, and heaven will be destroyed.” These words spoken by the elderly naturalist Peer Qvist in French author Romain Gary’s 1956 novel The Roots of Heaven are more frighteningly relevant today than when uttered. The Roots of Heaven is an aging volume, now gathering dust on the back shelves of public libraries or perhaps moldering away in long forgotten card-
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board boxes in attics or basements. Its characters should resonate with anyone today who is concerned with the destruction by poachers and others of the last wild African elephants, with the abuse and slaughter of all endangered and threatened species of wildlife. The story, a parable for our time, deserves to be rescued from its current obscurity. Romain Gary led a checkered life as author, soldier, diplomat, adventurer. He served as a pilot with the Free French during World War II and was either shot down or crashed on more than one occasion. He was a prolific writer, but Roots of Heaven is perhaps his most enduring work, his master-
El Ojo del Lago / August 2021
piece. His works do not provide happy endings but reflect less desirable realities. It may be that all stories in the realworld end in loss and sorrow. Perhaps there are no truly happy endings. The protagonist of Gary’s story is Morel, a former dentist who survives a lengthy incarceration in a Nazi concentration camp, partly by imagining herds of wild elephants trudging freely across the African veldt. To Morel, elephants symbolize freedom, and freedom must be defended. His first act upon being released from the Stalag is to free all the dogs from a dog pound and then to burn the establishment to the ground. Afterward, he sets out for Africa. Morel says that man is a lonely creature, that he needs animals as companions. Dogs and cats are insufficient. Man needs larger animal friends, like elephants. For some time, Morel lives a hermitlike life among a herd of wild elephants, causing the collection of European expatriates and outcasts, most of them wallowing in nihilism and despair, who inhabit the bar inside a night club in nearby Fort Lamy to suspect him of misanthropy, terrorism, even being in league with Communists and terrorist groups like the dread Mau Mau, who were causing an uproar in Kenya at the time. In contradiction to all these misunderstandings, his activities seem innocent, even naive, as he goes about toting a brief case and urging people to sign a petition banning elephant hunting. Finding his simple idealism rejected, even scoffed at, he decides upon a more drastic course of action, a sort of non-lethal terrorism, and begins actively defending the peaceful herds from their human tormentors. Leading a band of what we might call monkey wrenchers today, composed of societal rejects, misfits, opportunists and fervid idealists like himself, Morel begins to do serious battle with those who prey upon Africa’s defenseless pachyderms. Apparently a crack shot, he knee-caps one hunter as he is about to shoot an elephant. When he spots another about to execute an agonized mother as she attempts to rescue her trapped infant who is headed to a life in a zoo, Morel, sends a high powered rifle round into the man’s posterior, causing him to repent of his earlier sins against creation and express sympathy for his attacker’s views. To Morel, elephants stand as living contradictions to the communal, industrial, mechanistic society that is wreaking havoc across the natural world. He openly reiterates that elephants are the only thing he cares about, that he has no other agenda, political or otherwise. Others attempt to co-opt his simple, honest quest to their own agendas, African nationalism, for instance. At first,
only a handful can even begin to grasp the purity of his motives. There is a hint of something almost Christ-like about the role Morel plays. He wears a Cross of Lorraine pin, attesting to his role during the Resistance. It is, after all, a Cross. He defends creatures that are without sin, who cannot possibly deserve the treatment they too often receive from humans. All the while, white men perceive elephants as mere sources of ivory, and local Africans see them only as walking chunks of bloody red meat. There is even a Mary Magdalene among Morel’s entourage, a beautiful German woman named Minna, a singer, stripper and sometimes prostitute who has been repeatedly raped by members of one wave of conquerers after another. Minna’s love for Morel becomes starkly evident as the story progresses. There is a sort of Judas, a young man named Youssef who has been inserted into Morel’s small group with orders to assassinate him rather than ever let him be captured and be discovered not to be a symbol of African independence. A Jesuit priest modeled after Father Teilhard de Chardin, accuses Morel of elevating elephants over the needs of the African people, a tired and trite but all too common view among those who refuse to recognize the essential role played by every creature in the food chain, the chain of life on earth itself. Morel’s activities become too effective to ignore as he roams the bush, firing well placed rounds into the most vulnerable body parts of elephant hunters. Tensions heighten when his group sentences and subjects one notorious female elephant killer to a public flogging. His activities include burning down the houses and shops of elephant hunters and those who profit from their bloody activities. At the same time, his quest gains him a global following, composed of those across the world who are in sympathy with his love of nature and passion to protect it. British naturalist Sir David Attenborough’s latest publication, A Life on Our Planet, offers some hope for the future of biodiversity on our island home. He notes that nature possesses great power to heal itself and offers as an example the present-day Ukrainian town of Pripyat, devoid of human presence ever since the April,1986 explosion of the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant. No human has dwelled there since. However, Attenborough points out, other species have come to call the place home; foxes, elk, deer, bison, bears, even wolves. The area is now a wildlife preserve. While there is no excuse for rosy colored optimism, and Attenborough Continued on page 40
