Impossible Owls: Essays

by Brian Phillips

here in the eco-lodge our terminology was that of London and Delhi and Los Angeles; we were closer in every important respect to Paris than to the village a few hundred yards away. In Paris, Hermès had dedicated part of the previous year’s collection to the big-cat organization Panthera, founded by the billionaire investor Thomas S. Kaplan, whose foundation’s website credits him with a “strong passion for wildlife conservation.” This was the language we spoke. We, too, felt a strong passion for wildlife conservation. We, too, wished to preserve nature for the next generation. We saw this as a matter of initiatives and campaigns, fund-raisers launched at Sotheby’s, outcomes measured in pure numbers and broadcast through mailers declaring “a rare success story.” We believed in cautious optimism but much work left to do. This way of thinking, it seemed to me, quickly ran the risk of making the object of reference so abstract as to be unobservable even in its presence.