Category: Nature/Ecology

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Learning from the ivorybill


Drawing by Mark Bowers, from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service website
(link via The Daily Blatt)

1. Mr. Wile E.

A week ago, when I heard the news about the rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker, I was – as I mentioned – afflicted with a sudden and unaccustomed surge of joy and hopefulness about the state of the planet. After a couple hours of reading on-line articles and corresponding with my two birder-brothers about it (my parents being on vacation and out of e-mail reach), it occurred to me to send a message to the listserve of the Pennsylvania Biodiversity Partnership in my capacity as co-chair of the Public Lands Committee of the Pennsylvania Chapter of Sierra Club. After a link to the Cornell Lab and a few other remarks, I concluded, “The message for Pennsylvania is clear: Recover It (old-growth forest) And They Will Return.”

Yes, that’s right. Even in the midst of my jubilation, I couldn’t resist putting my own spin on things. And in fact, it bore satisfactory results: it sparked a good discussion of old-growth on the listserve, and my reaction against my own opportunism led to a half-decent poem two days later.

But Coyote wasn’t fooled. I neglected to mention this at the time, in part because I figured y’all might suspect me of making it up. But it’s true. It was about nine o’clock that evening, and I had been listening to some of my favorite country blues cassettes (remember cassette tapes?) while drinking three or four celebratory bottles of homebrew. (It was, unfortunately, too cold to sit outside.) Then I got hungry, and remembered some leftovers up at the other house, in my parents’ refrigerator. The night was dark. Just as I got to the top of the hill, a coyote let loose from the middle of the field – less than a hundred yards away. The hair stood straight up on the back of my neck. He or she howled a couple of times, then barked like a dog: Har! Har! Har! Har! Har! I scuttled inside, grabbed the highest-powered flashlight I could find, and shone it back and forth across the field, hoping to pick up the eye shine, but the animal had already slipped away.

Now, to appreciate this incident, especially if you’re from out west, you have to understand a couple of things. First, that eastern coyotes don’t vocalize nearly as often as their western counterparts. Second: the eastern coyote is, depending on which biologists you believe, either a brand-new animal here in the east, or a once-eradicated species that reintroduced itself in the latter half of the 20th century. The latter theory postulates that European settlers, being unfamiliar with the North American coyote, simply mis-identified it as the “brush wolf” – which they then proceeded to wipe out as quickly as they could. The problem with that theory is that coyotes are virtually impossible to eradicate. Since they have always played second fiddle to wolves, it makes sense that they would evolve an extremely flexible population ecology: the more you persecute them, the faster they reproduce. Gray wolves, having evolved (at least since the demise of the dire wolf) as top dogs, have no such resilience.

But canids speciate as much by culture as by genetics, which is to say that species boundaries are readily crossed, and only mutual hostility and fear of being eaten prevent interbreeding – 99 percent of the time. A DNA analysis of eastern coyotes did strongly suggest that interbreeding with timber wolves – the smaller subspecies of wolves inhabiting eastern Canada – had occurred in the recent past. But who knows? Perhaps there were a number of regional subspecies in 1600. Some biologists argue that the Pennsylvania “brush wolf” was neither gray nor timber wolf, but the red wolf of the southern Appalachians.

Does Coyote care about all this? I think not. This new/old wild canid has figured out that frequent howling in the densely populated east is not advantageous. Nearly every hunter in this state owns a powerful spotlight, and coyotes may be shot anytime as a varmit. The easiest way to do this, I’m told, is by playing tapes of their howls. Meanwhile – and very anecdotally – I hear from folks in Vermont and West Virginia that an even larger coyote is beginning to appear. It’s probably only a matter of time before wild canids in the northeast switch from opportunistic predation to direct reliance on our hugely over-abundant white-tailed deer herd. I hope.

Of more direct relevance to the ivorybill rediscovery is the fact that the presence of coyotes in the state was officially denied for years – decades, in fact. Even as sightings grew more frequent and the evidence more and more overwhelming, spokespeople for our state wildlife agency continued to deny the obvious. The name of this agency might tell you why: it’s the Pennsylvania Game Commission. It derives almost all its funding from the sale of hunting licenses, and all license increases must be approved by the state legislature. Game Commission folks knew that the interval between official acknowledgement of the coyote’s presence and demands for its eradication would be about two or three nanoseconds, so they stalled as long as they could. When it finally became impossible to deny the obvious – some fifteen years ago now – they announced it as a wonderful new addition to the state’s already impressive roster of legally trapable and shootable critters. They made it sound like such a good thing, in fact, that to this day they are regularly accused by more credulous members of the hunting fraternity of having deliberately introduced the animal, as part of vast and sinister conspiracy between anti-hunters, the Audubon Society, and the United Nations. These are, of course, the same anti-hunters who want to slaughter all the deer in the state. As Dave Berry would say, I swear I’m not making this up.

In fact, I know this guy who knows a guy who drives truck, and one time about fifteen years ago, after a couple beers, he says to my buddy, “You won’t believe what I got in the back of my truck…”

2. How much old-growth is enough?

One of the first two responses to my e-mail to the Biodiversity Partnership listserve raised some interesting questions:

I have been told the ivory-billed woodpecker has been seen by outdoorsmen in the Arkansas area for years. No one of any “authority” believed the people who saw them. Now that some upper-shelf person saw one, it is now for real. Great, but the same can be said for other animals in the eastern US: cougars, badgers, wolves, lynx, Allegheny wood rat etc. come to mind. It is time we get our heads out of the sand and put a little effort into documenting other animals in our midst.

The author, Gene Odato – chief of the Rural and Community Forestry section of the Pennnsylvania Bureau of Forestry – responded to my spin with some of his own. If some of these supposedly endangered or regionally extinct species are, in fact, present, then what do we have to worry about? If anything, we have too much old-growth – and not enough young forests.

I would like to know more about the nature of that forest in the Cache and White River bottoms: year last cut, degree/type of management, etc. That would be very instructive to us all.

I would also like to know more of the management details of the land the woodpecker inhabits. As for PA or any other state: How much old-growth is enough without damaging the lives of the people who depend on the wise use of the forest? The public land such as the national forest and in particular the state forest of PA already manage 30% to 50% of the forest as old-growth. How much more do we need without sacrificing the habitat needs of hundreds of wildlife and plant species that depend on early successional forest, poletimber-sized forest?

I asked my brother Mark to do some digging – something which, as a geographer, birder and conservationist, he didn’t have to be asked about twice. In fact, even before he headed over to Arkansas last Saturday, he fired off a preliminary e-mail in response to some of Gene’s concerns.

All I can say at this point is that Arkansas appears to be quite a bit more advanced than Pennsylvania – after all, its motto is “The Natural State” rather than the “Keystone State.” Arkansas parks are some of the most impressive I’ve seen. It takes some guts or gall to block a bridge across the Mississippi River from this county (Bolivar), the epicenter of cotton production in the US, across to Ark, but they did it years ago to avoid destroying the White River Refuge. Thanks to the White River National Wildlife Refuge, there is no unbroken road along the Mississippi River on the west side of the river through Arkansas. (Where this bird was rediscovered, however, is right off the Interstate, well north.)

I’m just not quite convinced that people up in the northeast can conceive of the size of some of the wildernesses down here, nor understand that the old-growth was logged as recently as the 1940s, and never really completely, at least in Arkansas and Louisiana (Mississippi is a different, sadder story, of course) – the Big Forest, like this side of the river, was mostly wilderness until the end of the 1800s, so analogous to the Big Thicket [in Texas]. There are still several million acres of flooded bottomland hardwood forest in the lower Mississippi River Valley, and probably the single highest biodiversity indices, as well as biomass production. The Mississippian civilizations arose here; Poverty Point mound civilization, living with and off the untold millions of waterfowl and fish and etc. and so forth.

The point is that the region has been all but forgotten by most conservationists – sort of like living in Brazil and forgetting the Pantanal or whatever. The Mississippi, White, Cache, Pearl and other rivers are still free-flowing and undammed. There are still virgin canebrakes (bamboo forests) on private land. I’m already getting a bit impatient at urbanites who pay attention to areas only when Audubon or the Conservancy make them into big destinations. I wrote about listening to local voices in my book on Honduras. Almost no one does that here.

3. Accomodating a “magnificent misanthrope”

The White River flows south, joining the Arkansas just above its junction with the Mississippi in the middle of a huge roadless area comprising some 125,000 acres, much of it still in private hands. The White River National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) stretches north along the river from there, joining with the Cache River and its attendant NWR just south and for many miles north of Interstate 40. It was to the latter location that Mark and family headed last Saturday after motoring up the fabled Highway 61, unable to simply cross the river at Rosedale due to the State of Arkansas’ atavistic dislike for Progress.

As his e-mail indicated, the verified ivorybill sightings reported in Science were all along the Cache River, within a very short distance of the interstate. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service folks at the Cache River NWR were very forthcoming and were able to answer all his questions, he said: he and his family were virtually the only visitors to arrive there all day. The wildlife refuge had designated special observation points beyond which it intends to restrict access – 5,000 of the refuge’s 60,000 acres have been closed. All the high officialdom were there, braced for an onslaught of crazed birders that never happened. It seems the word had gone out over birders’ listserves to stay home and leave the ivory-billed woodpecker in peace.

The only problem, Mark said, is that no one really knows what disturbs an ivory-billed woodpecker. Various theories are circulating about why the bird has proved so darned elusive for the last half-century. Perhaps, as my brother Steve suggested last week, it has learned and inculcated in its young an extreme wariness toward human beings – “a magnificent misanthrope,” he called it. Mark replied that this seemed plausible – at least based on his experience with some rare birds and mammals in Central America – but added that the White River area, which is now presumed to harbor a breeding population of ivorybills, is formidably remote and difficult of access. Ivory-billed woodpeckers don’t migrate, and the literature says that their breeding territories can be quite small for a bird of that size – no more than a couple square kilometers.

So presumably the male sighted up near I-40 is a dispersing juvenile looking for new territory. What makes this area attractive? It harbors the oldest known stand of bald cypresses in the United States, Mark said – trees over two thousand years old.

Mark went on to say that – contrary to the essay by John Fitzpatrick that I quoted here last week – the forests down there were never completely cut-over. According to the Cache River NWR managers, many patches of older forest remain, though none of them may be “virgin” – the oaks, pines and other valuable trees were, indeed, all taken at some point, but many stands of bald cypress and black gum were not. Thus, the ivorybill probably never ran out suitable nesting trees.

The limiting factor, then, back during the most severe bottleneck period following the end of the timber boom, would have been food. As a woodpecker, the ivorybill has a very high-protein diet (though it does eat lots of fruit, too). According to stomach-content analyses performed in the early 20th century, most of its protein was derived from one family of insects – longhorn beetles. The larvae of these beetles live in the wood of standing dead trees, including oaks and pines – the species that were high-graded out of the swamps some eighty years ago. There must have been some awfully lean years for an awfully small and secretive remnant population of ivory-billed woodpeckers.

Now these trees are recovering – and even better, they’re dying and being left to rot in place rather than being “salvaged,” as would probably happen if it were a Pennsylvania state park or forest. Mark noted that floods and beavers are part of the natural disturbance regime of Mississippi floodplain forests; high waters regularly kill pines and oaks without bothering the true swamp species – cypress and black gum. The NWR managers told him that they adopt a passive management approach to reforestation. The Cache River website lists “Protect and restore the bottomland hardwood resources of the basin” as one of the four, main Refuge Objectives. Management Tools include public hunting and “Water management for waterfowl, wading and shore birds.” In Dahomey NWR on the Mississippi side, Mark said, this includes the occasional dynamiting of beaver dams.

This area of Arkansas – the Big Woods – is wild. It’s home to a healthy population of black bear, and panthers are moving in. The human population is low and dropping at about ten percent a decade, Mark said. The Fish and Wildlife Service people told him that the local reaction to news of the ivorybill’s rediscovery seemed mostly positive, and this isn’t surprising – wildlife watching, hunting and fishing already make a substantial contribution to the local economy. It’s a myth that public opinion changes more slowly in rural areas than in supposedly more progressive urban and suburban areas, Mark said.

4. Disturbing conclusions

Lessons for conservation elsewhere may be more elusive than either Gene or I were originally willing to acknowledge. The fact is, every bioregion is unique; ecologists have learned the hard way that forest succession in the east, where most canopy replacement occurs as a result of single-tree or small stand mortality, is more the exception than the rule. The so-called edaphic climax model first developed in the northeast United States still seems to be a pretty good fit for our region. But in areas of complex physical geography like the Appalachians, natural disturbance regimes may change radically over very short distances – nothing like the broad, virtually flat and geologically uniform floodplain of the Mississippi. And while we do have a few possible old-growth obligate species, present or extirpated – northern flying squirrel, pine martin, sugar maple longhorn beetle – the list is much longer for species that simply do best in mature forests, or in forests with many old-growth characteristics. Features such as standing dead timber, downed woody debris, multiple age classes – including many 150-year-plus specimens – and a healthy humus layer provide optimal habitat for many of Penn’s Woods’ most treasured species, including: winter wren, Acadian flycatcher, black-throated green warbler, blackburnian warbler, magnolia warbler, Swainson’s thrush, brown creeper, blue-headed vireo, cerulean warbler, yellow-bellied flycatcher, brook trout, goshawk, barred owl, fisher and lynx; many slow-dispersing spring ephemeral wildflowers, such as painted trillium and dwarf ginseng; most lungless salamanders, which can take over a hundred years to re-colonize a clearcut; and unknown numbers of native ferns, mosses, liverworts, lichens, fungi and invertebrates.

Actually, this situation is not atypical of forest ecosystems anywhere in the world. At least among charismatic megafauna, the number of species completely intolerant to human disturbance is very small, but the number that depend on the continuation of something very like what they evolved in is – as one would expect – very large. Many advocates for the timber industry like to point to studies that show edge and early-succession species declining, but in some cases these are species native to the Midwest whose ranges have expanded only in recent times as the land was cleared. In other cases they are species that might have been naturally rare, dependent on natural clearings resulting from the occasional stand-clearing ice storm or tornado.

Concerns about balancing the needs of humans with those of other animals are very appropriate. By why should one species monopolize 90 percent of natural resources and dominate virtually every bioregion? There’s something awfully depressing about the idea that every species and natural community on the planet persists only because human beings have decided they can tolerate its presence. This is a far, far cry from the view of Creation expressed by the Voice out of the whirlwind in the Book of Job. To pretend that we can and should manage all of nature is sheer hubris. And a narrow, species-by-species approach to conservation not only misses the larger picture, it ignores the magnitude of what we have lost in terms of sheer plant and animal biomass. The forests of pre-Columbian North America – lightly managed by human beings for millennia, mostly through fire – teemed with wildlife. Seventeenth-century explorers and settlers were nearly unanimous in their astonishment at the great numbers and diversity of fish, foul and game, even though to some it seemed forbidding, a “waste and howling wilderness.” Somewhere along the line, the Biblical vision of wilderness as a place of testing and transformation had been replaced by a fear and hatred of the untamed that haunts us to this day.

Everyone likes nice, park-like woods with great big trees and very little messy understory. Pure stands of old-growth hemlock or spruce can certainly inspire reverence, but they don’t come close to satisfying the ecological definition of old-growth, which includes trees of all ages and conditions – and much more besides. Conservationists err in putting too much emphasis on protecting stands of big trees and not enough on the need to recover old-growth forested landscapes – the natural condition for at least ninety percent of Pennsylvania and most other eastern states.

How much old-growth does wildlife need? All it can get. We need to relearn humility and begin to heed that Voice out of the whirlwind. We need to welcome natural disturbances and recognize them as blessings in disguise rather than “natural disasters” ripe for “salvage.” Many more insect outbreaks and some wildfires on public land could be allowed to run their course. Public and private land managers could do a much better job at grouping and connecting stands of “legacy trees” within timbered areas. Herpetologists tell us that uncut buffers around wetlands of all kinds should be measured in the hundreds of yards rather than in the tens or hundreds of feet, as is currently the practice (if we’re lucky). Most forested headwater areas should never be cut to protect hydrology and downstream organisms, such as our increasingly beleaguered native mussels. And all this presumes success in controlling the biggest on-going scourges of Pennsylvania forests: white-tailed deer overbrowsing, air pollution (including acid rain), and fragmentation from roads and sprawl. I don’t think any of these problems are anywhere near as severe in the Big Woods of Arkansas. But unless and until we address them, biodiversity here will continue to decline.

One way or another, it’s almost a given that Coyote – patron of unforeseen consequences – will have the last laugh.
__________

UPDATE: Mark just e-mailed me with a couple corrections (which I have made), and added the following thought:

The geography of the lower Mississippi valley alluvial swamps (bottomland hardwood forests) is similar in character to the varzea of Amazonia, though of course with the leveeing of the Mississippi River and side rivers, flooding is not nearly as extreme as it once was. However, the geomorphology is very similar, and includes huge oxbow lakes – the largest in the Americas north of Amazonia are in the Delta.

My point is that humans have lived and farmed Amazonia, and seasonally the varzea forest, for millennia, using swidden rotation (slash and burn) which involves small clearcuts. This does not mean the Amazonia (or the Peten in Guatemala, for that matter) are “second-growth”; it means that human populations are low enough that human disturbance regimes are simply another form of forest modification. Indeed, swidden, the world’s oldest form of agriculture (or horticulture), is successful in that it mimics natural treefall dynamics, widely believed to be the disturbance regime that is most important in helping create the awesomely high biodiversity of the Amazon.

When human populations swell and elite/capitalist greed enter into the equation, forests are wiped out. It is all in the temporal and spatial scale at which the destruction is taking place, however: this can quite rapid, or over decades or even centuries. Essentially, does the local human population absolutely depend on a healthy ecosystem, or not? Economics and governance are at the heart of it.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The gatekeepers

serpents_b&w_3

It’s after-hours at the reptile zoo. The last echoes from the last child’s excited shrieks have died away and the endless loop of jungle music has been switched off, along with the softly hissing fluorescent lights. Imagine what sounds must populate the stygian darkness, as Edgar Rice Burroughs would’ve called it: a slow whispering of scales against scales, the creaking and shuffling of homesick tortoises still trying to locate the bole of some coconut palm. The leaf-tailed geckoes’ suction-cup feet make faint popping noises as they climb the walls. A cricket chirps once, twice. A sudden scrambling from the cages of live mice and three dozen forked tongues crackle like static. Something small and deadly plops into a pool. An alligator takes its once-a-minute breath.

gators_b&w

“More sophisticated interpretations of Genesis regard the serpent as mediator of understanding: human beings must be expelled from the Garden, which they have enjoyed unconsciously, in order to return to it with conscious appreciation in a perfected state… It is notable that both Kundalini and Christian imagery represent the serpent as gatekeeper of extraordinary power – be that power conceived as energy or awareness. The two snakes intertwined around the caduceus, symbol of the medical profession, evoke the serpent as gateway to healing.”

Ellen Crist, “Serpentes, the Ultimate Other,” in Wild Earth special issue, “Facing the Serpent,” Summer/Fall 2003

serpents_b&w_2

“The [human] brain evolved into its present form over a period of about two million years, from the time of Homo habilis to the late Stone Age of Homo sapiens, during which people existed in hunter-gatherer bands in intimate contact with the natural environment. Snakes mattered. The smell of water, the hum of a bee, the directional bend of a stalk mattered. The naturalist’s trance was adaptive: the glimpse of one small animal hidden in the grass could make the difference between eating and going hungry in the evening. And a sweet sense of horror, the shivery fascination with monsters and creeping forms that so delights us today even in the sterile hearts of the cities, could keep you alive until the next morning. Organisms are the natural stuff of metaphor and ritual. Although the evidence is far from all in, the brain appears to have kept all its old capacities, its channeled quickness. We stay alert and alive in the vanished forests of the world.”

E.O. Wilson, “The Serpent,” in ibid.

serpents_b&w_1

“Although I’ve been taught that scientists are supposed to be dispassionate observers, I’ve had problems living up to that ideal. It is impossible for me to view nature as a collection of unfeeling objects. I’m not just interested in living organisms and curious about their lives – I really love them. I especially adore the eastern diamondback rattlesnake (Croatus adamanteus), the ‘king of rattlesnakes,’ as Manny Rubio calls it in his book, Rattlesnake. Just why I have an affinity for this creature I can’t say…

“My most memorable experience with a diamondback was a seemingly telepathic one. I was walking slowly along a transect in San Falesco Hammock, near Gainesville, conducting early morning bird surveys for my dissertation research. I was gazing up toward the treetops, listening for songs and calls, when suddenly the image of a diamondback came into my head, like a daydream. I glanced down, and right at my feet where I was about to step was a large diamondback in a resting coil. The strangest thing is that neither I not the diamondback were the slightest bit alarmed by this state of affairs. I sat down cross-legged about a foot from the snake, and for several minutes we silently communed, the snake slowly flicking its tongue and I just watching. I then stood up, stepped around the snake, and continued my survey.”

Reed F. Noss, “Another Dead Diamondback,” in ibid.

green_mambas

“Sadly, snakes are disappearing from many parts of the globe just when we are starting to understand their place in the world.”

Chris Mattison, Snake: The Essential Visual Guide to the World of Snakes, DK Publishing, 1999

“Green, how much I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches….”

(Verde, que te quiero verde.
Verde viento. Verdes ramas….)

Federico Garcia Lorca, “Romance Sonambulo” (Sleepwalker’s Ballad)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Of dragons and princesses

boa_touching

My five-year-old cousin Morgan has wanted to be a princess ever since she was old enough to talk. At the wedding reception, she’s agog: the bride was right there in the bathroom! Morgan circulates among the tables telling everyone she knows in what is presumably intended to be a hushed whisper.

*

The princess may seem capricious, but her whims are predictable: If it moves, make it stop. If it doesn’t move, poke at it with a stick. Try stepping on it. Not enough to really kill it – just so it stops moving. Then give it a new identity, complete with a sanitized version of events. “You shouldn’t be trying to sting people, Mr. Wasp!”

*

At Clyde Peeling’s Reptiland we get to watch the mangrove viper eat. The keeper removes the back wall of its small green world and dangles a white corpse – a pre-killed mouse – in front of its nose. The trick rope comes alive as quick as lightning. It tries in vain to swallow the mouse tail-first, works it around in its mouth for five minutes until it ends up pointing in the right direction. Then with a sudden gulp, the mouse turns into a lump that makes the blue-black and yellow scales ripple as it moves rapidly toward the stomach. Now the viper can’t stay still: even without legs it paces, impatient for Food #2. When the keeper opens the wall this time, the snake seems ready for larger prey. The mouse does a frantic dance of death at the end of the three-foot tongs.

*

After the viper feeding, Morgan tugs on her mother’s sweatshirt. “Can I have a mouse, too?” Who’d have thought that mealtimes could ever be anything but a dull game played with fork and spoon? They go into the gift shop, and she picks out a plush purple frog with legs as long and bendable as snakes.

*

No tawdry roadside menagerie, the zoo turns out to be a real class act, dedicated to endangered species conservation and environmental education. I can’t decide whether to be pleased or disappointed. No one will ever wrestle with these alligators. We’ll never get to place bets on a match-up between the eyelash viper and the poison arrow frog. I crouch in front of the chameleon exhibit, watching crickets trying to burrow into the bark chips. The chameleon rolls its gun-turret eyes – one at me, the other at a doomed cricket.

*

Adults don’t come to Reptiland, it seems, unless accompanied by children. School groups thunder through like wildebeests. So important to set a good example for the children, we tell ourselves as the handler holds the boa constrictor for everyone to pet. Morgan is delighted. Only one child refuses to touch, mute with terror or intransigence. While everyone around her admires the silky-smooth scales, she stares at the hand clamped over its mouth and keeps her fingers coiled tight against her chest.

*

An outdoor pen contains the only token birds at Reptiland: five emus, to illustrate the link with the dinosaurs. Victorian feather dusters never looked quite so vengeful, but still… “We are not emus!” I say severely as they eye us up.

*

That evening we watch two cartoon movies, the world twice saved from certain cataclysm. Morgan seems bored, starts to wander off. “Sit down, watch the movie, and be good!” her father commands. During the intermission, she finds a dead ladybug in the corner of the living room, sets it on top of a block of wood and pushes it back and forth with her index finger. “Be good, ladybug!” I hear her whispering.

viper_mouse_hands

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Vireo solitarius

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us
Sonogram image adapted from the Royal BC Museum.

The blue-headed vireo chants endless variations on a few, key ideas. The bird guides all speak of a kind of deliberation – one could just as well say thoughtfulness – in his delivery of short, robin-like phrases designed to carry a couple hundred yards through deep forest. His repertoire includes no more than twenty distinct phrases, but he seldom repeats a given sequence. Whether you choose to call this improvisation or shuffle play says more about you than it does about the vireo, who doesn’t care whether you view him as an artist or a machine.

The variations aren’t random, though: he consistently prefers some phrases to others. Some are drawn from a shared stock of blue-headed vireo folk material, so to speak, which varies from region to region. But each bird also has a few phrases that are unique to him. This vireo calling from a witch hazel branch on the first of May in a maturing chestnut oak-heath understory forest in central Pennsylvania sings a song never before heard in the three and a half billion years of life on earth. When he dies, it will die with him. Listen well.

*

“Some males sing slowly when foraging between incubation bouts… Near nest with eggs, song often reduced to repetition of only 1-2 phrases,” says the most authoritative source (Ross D. James, “Blue-Headed Vireo,” in A. Poole and F. Gill, eds., The Birds of North America: Life Histories for the 21st Century, Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and the Academy of Natural Sciences, No. 379 [1998]). This one chants four phrases, fixes his beady eye on me, then hops right into a beautiful little nest suspended from the branch of a mountain laurel bush some six and a half feet off the ground. It’s about the size of a teacup, the outer layer woven from what appear to be short pieces of bark from wild grapevine; dead leaves; white paper, presumably from some scrap of wind-blown litter; and gray paper from a hornet nest – probably that one over near the edge of the field that blew out of its tree during the high winds of March. Finer material used in the lining – dry grasses, rootlets, fungal mycelia and the like – protrudes slightly above the rim of the cup.

Like many nest builders, vireos are gifted at improvising with materials at hand. Spider web or the silk from last year’s caterpillars supplies the mortar that holds the whole construction together and fixes it to the branch. We tend to forget just how much silk persists in field and forest over winter. Several times this past winter and early spring I’ve been out when low sun was at just the right angle and was amazed by how many gleaming strands of gossamer still stretched between twigs and along the ground, even after the snow had melted.

These vireos have only been back from their winter sojourn in Central America or the Caribbean for three weeks, at most. They’ve wasted no time in pairing off, setting up house and, from all appearances, laying eggs and beginning to incubate. Like many neotropical migrant songbird species, they raise a single brood each season, though their early return gives them enough time to try re-nesting if a predator wipes out their first clutch. This is much more the exception than the rule, however, especially for the northern subspecies Vireo solitarius solitarius, which migrates the farthest.

And there are plenty of predators: crows, snakes, raccoons, gray squirrels – even normally vegetarian white-tailed deer have been observed eating songbird nestlings. This nest seems high enough to avoid the deer, and squirrel numbers are down following a couple of harsh winters and poor acorn crops. Then, too, the blue-headed vireo often nests “near small openings or edges of wetlands and lakes,” says Ross D. James, so it may have evolved more defenses toward edge-dwelling predators than other forest-interior specialists such as wood thrushes and scarlet tanagers, whose numbers are in decline throughout their range.

But the blue-headed vireo, too, likes large tracts of mostly unbroken, mature forest. This makes sense, because it’s the environment in which most of these neotropical migrant songbirds have evolved: “areas where extensive forest predominates . . . with trees that are middle-aged to mature, with high percent canopy closure (usually >75%), and where there is some (but not dense) understory of shrubs and saplings.” The blue-headed vireo displays more flexibility in habitat selection than some of the more specialized passerines, nesting in everything from northern conifer forests to dry oak forests like ours to the mixed mesophytic forests of the southern Appalachians. But the monograph warns that “Extensive clear-cutting is detrimental. Even partial clearing may be serious…”

The recent rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker suggests that some species may be more resilient than we once supposed. But the rapid regeneration of southern swamp forests that were never completely denuded of all their oldest stands of bald cypress in the first place should not allow us to become lured into a false sense of security about the long-term survival of interior-forest specialists in the east. Around here, most forests were clearcut twice in the 19th century, back in the charcoal iron era, and at least once more in the early 20th century during the chemical wood era, before the petrochemical revolution gave the woods a break (while of course accelerating the degradation of nearly all ecosystems worldwide). But the reprieve thus granted forest-dwelling species is probably over. In the last couple of decades, economic and cultural forces have pushed the frontiers of year-round human settlement farther and farther into areas that were once thinly dotted with poor farms like ours or with hunting cabins. Deep woods habitats are disappearing.

A number of morbidly fascinating things happen when once-intact forests are fragmented by roads or subdivisions. As the proportion of edge to volume increases, secure refuges from artificially numerous habitat-generalist predators and barriers to the spread of non-native invasive species dwindle and disappear. While habitat edges or ecotones are often areas of concentrated biodiversity, they are very much a double-edged sword. The Great Eastern Forest once accounted for at least ninety percent of the land cover east of the tallgrass prairie; openings were small and temporary. The loss of naturally occurring forest openings in over-managed or too-young forests cannot fail to have negative impacts on species specializing in those kinds of environments. And the establishment of unnaturally long-term or permanent edges is thought to compromise essential functions of forest ecosystems through (for example) increased light and wind levels, which conspire to degrade the depth and quality of humus for hundreds of feet in from the edge. Keep in mind that the humus layer, where the base of the food chain is concentrated, contains the keys to the whole ecosystem. Air and water pollution – also greater along edges – can wreak havoc on soil chemistry, with probably dire consequences for the delicate balance of mostly unclassified microbial life.

The ripple effects from damage to the base of the food chain can take decades to register in the loss of what conservationists call “charismatic megafauna” – the mammals, birds, and occasionally reptiles and amphibians around which conservation campaigns tend to be built. DDT is still found in the tissues of many North American songbirds, and contrary to what one might suppose, levels are highest among non-migratory species in the United States, where use of the chemical was ubiquitous up until forty years ago. Who knows what its effects on songbird reproductive success might be? Acid precipitation leaches calcium from the soil, with negative consequences for land snails – one of our most numerous and biodiverse families of forest invertebrates. Ground-foraging bird species such as wood thrushes and ovenbirds eat a lot of snails, especially when they’re laying eggs and need the calcium. An on-going study in upstate New York has found a correlation between acid precipitation and nest failure among wood thrushes. Acid precipation is most severe and its effects most deleterious in ridgetop forests with unbuffered soils – which describes well over half of the intact forests in central Pennsylvania. And snails are also among the forest litter-dwelling organisms most likely to impacted by edge effects.

Some birds and mammals are highly adaptable to sudden change; many other organisms are not. The effects of habitat fragmentation can take a while to show up, because local and regional population collapses as a consequence of inbreeding depression don’t happen overnight. And how much time has to go by before anyone even notices and documents the change? The vast majority of scientific studies go on only as long as it takes a graduate student to earn a degree; institutional support is rarely forthcoming for the kind of long-range studies needed to compile comprehensive life histories of single species, let alone to disentangle ecosystem functions – a matter of guesswork for virtually every natural ecosystem on the planet. My mother recently told me about an expert on chickadees who once said that if she had halted her study after only two years, she would have ended up with different and in some cases directly opposite conclusions from those she arrived at after several decades of field observations and experiments.

*

This kind of conservation message may seem a bit removed from the ordinary fodder here at Via Negativa, but it’s very close to my core motivation in launching this blog a year and a half ago. More than once I’ve quoted the ecologist’s mantra, attributed to Frank Engler: “Nature is not only more complex than we know, it’s more complex than we can know.” Knowing that we don’t know has always struck me as an extremely valuable insight, central to ancient and indigenous belief systems the world over. Shouldn’t the recognition of existential ignorance foster humility and reverence toward the objects of our unknowing? Indeed, as the epigraph from Rene Char says, “How can we live without the unknown before us?”

But as I said the other week in my post about the black snake, the most important mysteries are those that lurk within the scrim of the allegedly ordinary, the unique and unrepeatable details of particular beings and events. Hence the poetry, the ruminations, the daily cartoon, the attempts at fiction and photography; hence my fascination with the scatological and the bizarre. I refuse to leave anything out.

Now the digital camera gives me one more way to pile up evidence for what is, to me, a self-evident truth. This camera isn’t very good at close-ups or depth of field. A still photo tells you little about context and motion and nothing at all about sound or odor. The wind rocked the branch; a ten-second rain shower pattered down. When the sun came out, the vireo’s white-ringed black eye seemed more beady than ever as his head stretched and swiveled in all directions. I walked slowly within flash range, then even closer, snapping away. He never left the nest. Hours later, when I returned with my mother, we stopped short some fifteen feet away, concerned that our scent trail could lead predators to the nest.

We felt privileged to have seen this much, the male bird having seemingly showed me his nest for reasons that are difficult to imagine. The Birds of North America monograph claims that the species is “very sensitive to close human attention at time of pairing and early nest-building; female readily abandons nest and even [her] mate. However, may nest in or near campground with unobservant traffic. Much more tolerant once eggs are laid. Sensitive again when large young are in nest…” “Tolerant” hardly begins to describe that male’s behavior. Mom says a hooded warbler did the same thing to her last year, in another part of the property: sang until she noticed him, then hopped into his nearby nest.

I tied a few ribbons of surveyor’s tape on the way back to the old woods road we use for a walking trail, one of several such – relics from the original clearcutting of the mountain circa 1815. I’ll leave it to the resident naturalist’s discretion whether and how often she wants to revisit this nest. For my part, I’ve seen enough. If before I was still a bit fuzzy on the difference between the blue-headed and red-eyed vireo songs, now I wonder how I ever could have confused them. Minimal as it may be, the importance of this kind of knowledge should not be underestimated: it’s what makes us feel at home in a place, knowing the names of our neighbors and some of their habits.

Later in the afternoon I sat out on my porch for a few minutes and listened to another blue-headed vireo singing up in the woods, probably defending the next territory down from the one that I’d watched. Maybe by the end of the summer I’ll learn to tell them apart, these two singers. And maybe I’ll learn something from the effort. A few ideas, endlessly repeated in endlessly novel ways: it’s no more or less than what I’ve always strived for in my own attempts to tell the world what’s what.

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Posted on by Dave Bonta

The finding

Stop this chattering
about what it means, or
might mean. When you first
heard the news, what
was your reaction? Deafness.
Two mornings ago
I played the strange phone
message from
my brother in
Mississippi – Don’t know
if y’all heard yet, but they’ve
discovered the [….]
right across the river
from Rosedale – heard
the tremor in his voice,
but my mind, fearful
daylight creature, failed
to fill in the blank.
I listened again: still
couldn’t make sense
of it. Oh
well, I thought, probably
some archaeo-
logical thing.
And didn’t give it another
thought until mid-
afternoon, when
my other brother sent
around the link. Ivory-billed
Woodpecker Rediscovered.

I would like to
be able to say that I
got up then & wandered
outside to listen
to the birdsong, aware
suddenly of all the notes
inaudible to the human ear.
Perhaps I did sit
a little straighter
in my chair. I kept reading
e-mail, & at some point
I found myself shaking
with silent sobs. I wrote
in my blog. I grabbed
a beer from the fridge.

The next day when
I played that phone
message for
the third time, it was
perfectly comprehensible.
The Ivory-billed. What else
have I failed to hear because
I was trying too hard
to fill some blank that
was never really blank?
Today
I’m off to
a cousin’s wedding
& for once I’m not
thinking gloomily about
what world their likely kids
will find themselves in.
All might
not yet
be lost. It’s raining,
it’s April, &
the goddamn birds
are singing like
there’s no tomorrow.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

A few words from the Original Nittany Lion™

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Meow, fuckers. That’s me-fucking-ow. I’m sure glad I can’t see my own reflection here in the glass. Talk about a ridiculous taxidermy job!

But I am the original Nittany Lion, and don’t you forget it. That’s Mount Nittany rising behind me in this cheesy fucking diorama. And here I am, believe it or not, crouching in the exact spot where Beaver Stadium will someday be built. Has been built. Whatever. I’ve been dead for like a hundred and twenty-five years, O.K.? My mind ain’t what it used to be.

Plus, I mean, this is bullshit. A lion at Beaver Stadium. Does that make sense to you? Me neither. Plus, I never set foot in the area. My ass got shot in, like, Pike County or some shit. 1880-something. You can feel up the buttons on the handy touch-screen interpretive thingy there to the left of the display case, if you’re real curious.

Hey, get your mouth away from the glass, kid! You’re scaring me!

Beavers? Yeah, we lions used to have ’em for breakfast. Not much to my taste – kind of oily, you know? Except for the tails. Those were choice! But here’s the thing: back when y’all still had mountain lions – or painters, as you inbred cow-bangers liked to call us – the beavers weren’t nearly the nuisance they are now. Not that there were any less of them – hell, there were more! It’s just that they kept to the water when they knew that there were lions and wolves in the neighborhood, just waiting to get all predacious on their ass. And more beavers packed in closer to the water – think about it, if that’s not too much to ask. More dammed creeks means more marshes and eventually more wet meadows, right?

Image Hosted by ImageShack.usCan you see where I’m going with this? No? What the hell do they teach you kids nowadays? I was like the plant cop, y’all! And all the birds and dragonflies and whatnot – I was their superhero protector, know what I’m saying? And it was that way everywhere, every habitat you can think of. Way up on the rocks, on just about every one of these ridges, you got – or had – a critter y’all call the Allegheny wood rat. Not too common anymore. Can’t find ’em on Nittany Mountain, the Seven Mountains – hell, they’re just about gone from this neck of the woods. Why? Too many mid-sized predators – especially those fucking raccoons. They go everywhere now, carrying their lousy roundworm with them. Act like they own the place. Ha!

And deer? Y’all are talking like it’s just a matter of over-population. As if the way y’all have fucked up Pennsylfuckingvania – more roads than any other state, houses and shopping malls out the wazoo – as if that has nothing to do with it. It has everything to do with it. That, and the fact that you wiped out all of us lions and wolves.

It’s just like with the beavers. It ain’t like we killed that many. But we kept ’em scared. They lay low all year round, not just during the couple months of the year when you send your pumpkin-colored Nimrods out to fire at anything that flashes a white ass. When deer are lying low, guess what? They’re not eating much. And guess what else? When they do go to eat, they do it very, very cautiously – no hanging out in forest openings and on riverbanks and whatnot. You think it’s a coincidence that your native streamside and forest plants are disappearing? Think again.

Yeah, so here I am at this fucking cow college on steroids, the Original Nittany Lion, stuck in a display case at the library. The real-deal mascot, he’s carved out of stone. Looks all heroic and shit, not a sad sack like me. Hell, that thing got so popular they completely forgot I existed. I spent half the last century on loan to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, stuck in a basement storeroom with the moths and the spiders. The only complete specimen of an Eastern Cougar, out of the hundreds of thousands that were killed for bounty, and I didn’t get any respect whatsoever.

Image Hosted by ImageShack.usBut we’re comin’ back. Yeah, I know, there’s a lot of dumb-ass white folks who think there’s a cougar behind every tree – just like Elvis Lives and the space aliens abducted Aunt Minnie. But some of these mountain lion sightings in places like Maine and Missouri – they got it on video. Not to mention those inbred fuckers down in Florida. Plus, they found roadkilled cougar kittens in Kentucky three years ago, folks. They did a DNA analysis: one parent was from North America, one from South America. So the new Eastern Cougar will not be genetically pure, but who the hell cares? Long as we get the job done. Like that cat down there in suburban Chester County, Pennsylvania. A release or an escape, who knows? But the fact is, he survived in the not-so-wild for years till they finally drug him in.

See, we don’t need the Big Woods, we just need a prey base and a few good places to digest a meal in relative peace. The females like wilderness to raise their families in, but we’ll take what we can get. Including little Jimmy – yum! But I don’t think you need to worry too much about that. When’s the last time you saw a kid outdoors? Except for those fat fuckers on their ATVs.

I got two words for ATV riders: fast food. If you got housecats, you know what I’m talking about: there’s nothing a cat enjoys more than a nice, moving target!

But someday soon the oil runs low and it’s no more free lunch time, no more shipping food halfway around the fucking world, no more chemical fertilizer and all that. All you fuckers will come here to study farming – you know, like growing food? But there won’t be no more hunters ’cause the little fat kids never learned how, so you’ll be up to your ass in white-tailed deer and then you will thank Whomever for any free-roaming lions you can find. You’ll be so fucking grateful to us, you’ll probably even send out a virgin now and then just to keep us happy. That stone statue at the Nittany Lion shrine? They’ll start finding, like, blood on it and shit. Hell yeah.

Put that in your pot pipe and smoke it. Then you can sing about loving Mother Earth all you want, go hug your fertilizer-enhanced trees and play hacky-sack on Penn State’s world-famous, genetically engineered, poison-laden turf grass. Happy Earth Day, fuckers.

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Posted on by Dave Bonta

Anti-Byzantium

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The old barn is no ersatz cathedral, no skyscraper struggling to free itself from all ties to the earth. Built near the low point of this farm at the head of the hollow, it replaced an older structure that had been destroyed by arson. Its design came from drawings made by the wife of the then-owner; a master builder on work-release from a near-by prison oversaw its assembly. Many of its timbers are clearly recycled, bearing the mark of an adze and sporting square holes at odd places where a mortised joint had fit in a previous life. Others were clearly milled afresh. Some even retain their bark, a pattern unfamiliar to me: American chestnut, perhaps? The barn is full of ghosts.

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It’s a classic Pennsylvania barn with a projecting forebay on the side away from the weather and an earthen bank entrance to the second floor. Like all barns, it was built to keep rain out but let the air flow through. A legend of the former owners said that unless both haymows were kept filled to the rafters, the wind would lift the roof right off. So several generations of tenant formers mowed and raked and hauled grass in from the orchard, sweaty work. The owners showed up for a couple months of the year to play farmer as only nouveaux riches can do. One year they brought a circus elephant back from Chicago by train, led it up the hollow and kept it penned on the threshing floor all summer. The gardens must have flourished for years on elephant dung.

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All we ever kept were hogs – a pair a year for three years running – and Muscovy ducks. A few feral cats still drift in and out – barn cats from the valley – but without livestock now there are no rats and probably too few mice. The winter before last a cat died in one of the old stalls; I found its mummified corpse sometime in May. A gray squirrel makes his nest in an old pipe, runs along the beams and up and down the walls as if the barn were still a forest. Phoebes sometimes nest in the basement and barn swallows in mud nests plastered against the roof beams. We have never had a barn owl.

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My parents would like to have the barn painted, but I love it as it is, every year a little more weathered. In some places the original red paint still hangs on; elsewhere, the later white gives way to golden brown knots and amber waves of grain. And while we’ll never know how much if any of it was milled from trees felled here on the mountain, there’s no question that the foundation stones are autochthonous, hauled down from the ridges.

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The barn faces southeast rather than due south because that’s the orientation of the whole farmstead: parallel to the ridges. On early autumn mornings we look to the barn roof for the first signs of frost, as if it were some high Alpine peak. Replacing this roof was one of the first things my dad did after my parents bought the place in the early 1970s. Our then-neighbor Margaret later told us that one of her hunter friends had watched from the woods as Dad wrestled rolls of tarpaper up the extension ladder and nailed the roofing down from a jerry-rigged scaffold. That’s when she realized we were here to stay.

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Unlike so many other refugees, we didn’t bring the city with us. But like nearly everyone, our stock of possessions expands to fill every available space. This barn built for hay and livestock now harbors machinery and junk, piles of scrap wood, a graveyard of lawnmowers, bottles of DDT. Forty-year-old sacks of lime have dissolved into a gray mountain looming at the back of the basement. I’m reminded of a train station somewhere where the trains have stopped running, leaving the last travelers stranded at the end of the line. A place to sit and watch thin fingers of sunlight playing with the dust, wait for empty mangers to once again cradle some infinitesimal portion of the sky.

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Posted on by Dave Bonta

Recycling the future

After the communal riots that followed the partition of the Punjab, the government in Delhi commissioned the architect Le Corbusier to design a new administrative capital for the Indian part of the Punjab, to design not only the public buildings, but the urban layout, the residential dwellings, even the furniture. The architect was not to incorporate traditional Indian motifs; Nehru said the new city of Chandigarh would be turned wholly to the future.

Alphonso Lingis, “Coals of Fire,” Abuses (University of California Press, 1994)

Unlike [Albert] Mayer [the original designer of the city], Le Corbusier had never set foot in India until the Chandigarh project first brought him to the country in 1951. In February of that year Le Corbusier and his colleagues camped in a rest house at what is now called Chandimandir. In four days of feverish activity, they redesigned the city. The leaf-like outline of Mayer’s plan was squared up into a mesh of rectangles. Le Corbusier was ready to “come to grips” with the project. In his words: “To take possession of space is the first gesture of the living, men and beasts, plants and animals; the fundamental manifestation of equilibrium and permanence. The first proof of existence is to occupy space.” …

While [Mayer] preferred a naturalistic, curving street pattern without the rigidity of a sterile geometric grid — [Le Corbusier] was adverse to “solidification of the accidental”. For Le Corbusier the straight line was the logical connecting path between two points, and any “forced naturalness” was superfluous. …

Le Corbusier liked to compare the city he planned to a biological entity: the head was the Capitol, the City Centre was the heart[,] and work areas of the institutional area and the university were limbs. Aside from the Leisure Valley traversing almost the entire city, parks extended lengthwise through each sector to enable every resident to lift their eyes to the changing panorama of hills and sky. Le Corbusier identified four basic functions of a city: living, working, circulation and care of the body and spirit. Each sector was provided with its own shopping and community facilities, schools and places of worship. “Circulation” was of great importance to Le Corbusier and determined the other three basic functions. By creating a hierarchy of roads, Le Corbusier sought to make every place in the city swiftly and easily accessible and at the same time ensure tranquility and safety of living spaces.

If “circulation” was the dominant function, then of all “bodily elements”, it was the “head” — that is the Capitol — that most completely engaged the master architect’s interest. Le Corbusier always looked for a chance to make a dramatic statement: in the context of Chandigarh, that was the Capitol — in this, the priorities of the Indian government and Le Corbusier’s natural inclination converged. …

The Periphery Control Act of 1952 created a wide green-belt around the entire union territory. It regulated all development within 16 kilometers of the city limit, prohibited the establishment of any other town or village and forbade commercial or industrial development. The idea was to guarantee that Chandigarh would always be surrounded by countryside.

Enunciating the spirit of the city, Le Corbusier said: “The sun, space and verdure are the ancient influences, which have fashioned our body and spirit. Isolated from their natural environment, all organisms perish, some slowly, some quickly, and man is no exception to this general rule. Our towns have snatched men from essential conditions, starved them, embittered them, crushed them, and even sterilised them…. Unless the conditions of nature are re-established in man’s life, he cannot be healthy in body and spirit… ”

Chandigarh, Official Website of the Chandigarh Administration

In 1965 General Ayub Khan, who had seized power in Pakistan, commissioned the American architect Louis Khan to design new public buildings for Dhaka. Made of bricks and with techniques available locally, laid out with the sun and wind in mind, the American-designed administrative capital [of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh] was to be not only beautiful and monumental, but the model for construction throughout Muslim Bengal. You were told at the desk it was some seven miles across the city from the hotel. You took a rickshaw. Every few blocks there was a huge square pit filled with stagnant water choked with the masses of water hyacinths, their inedible thick leaves bright green, their flowers and unhealthy pale violet, thick with flies. Some of the pits were being dug; men and women were spading out the thick clay into wooden forms for bricks, which they put out to bake in the blazing sun. The city is made of these bricks, roofed over with sheets of corrugated metal, palm-leaf thatching, or sheets of plastic or tarpaper. The rain is continually wearing down the bricks, draining in yellow rivulets back into the pits. In the bands of earth about the houses vegetables are grown; along the railroad tracks, the canals, there were pineapple thickets, the knobs of cabbages, cucumber vines. There were clumps of banana trees, like sprawling mutations of the grass, betel, coconut, and oil palms, great mango trees and papaya trees that were just stems with a few leaves spread over heavy hanging fruits. Along the road vendors sold strong tea, milk, and fruit and sugarcane juices in unbaked clay cups which were smashed on the ground when emptied. The rains would reduce them to mud, and with time level the mounds. There were piles of decaying vegetable scraps and husks, vibrating with hornets and butterflies. Beggars, children, dogs furrowed over the mounds; men scooped up the decayed muck into sacks to spread between their plantings. Girls wandered down the road collecting in baskets cow and ox dung, which would be slapped on the walls of the houses in round cakes to dry; they would be burnt for cooking. Under trees kerosene cans were being cut apart and pounded into pots, lanterns, spoons; old truck tires were being cut into sandals; bottles were being refilled and caps bent again over them. Small children were scavenging for cigarette butts; they will be opened and new cigarettes rolled around the wads of wet tobacco with strips of newspaper covered with Devanagiri script.

Alphonso Lingis, op. cit.

Many of my friends and colleagues live in fear of the federal government turning into Big Brother tyranny. I’m skeptical. Once the permanent global energy crisis really gets underway, the federal government will be lucky if it can answer the phones. Same thing for Microsoft or even the Hannaford supermarket chain.

All indications are that American life will have to be reconstituted along the lines of traditional towns, villages, and cities much reduced in their current scale. These will be the most successful places once we are gripped by the profound challenge of a permanent reduced energy supply.

The land development industry as we have known it is going to vanish in the years ahead. The production home-builders, as they like to call themselves. The strip mall developers. The fried food shack developers. Say goodbye to all that.

We are entering a period of economic hardship and declining incomes. The increment of new development will be very small, probably the individual building lot.

The suburbs as are going to tank spectacularly. We are going to see an unprecedented loss of equity value and, of course, basic usefulness. We are going to see an amazing distress sale of properties, with few buyers. We’re going to see a fight over the table scraps of the 20th century. We’ll be lucky if the immense failure of suburbia doesn’t result in an extreme political orgy of grievance and scapegoating.

The action in the years ahead will be in renovating existing towns and villages, and connecting them with regions of productive agriculture. Where the big cities are concerned, there is simply no historical precedent for the downscaling they will require. The possibilities for social and political distress ought to be obvious, though. The process is liable to be painful and disorderly.
The post cheap oil future will be much more about staying where you are than about being mobile. And, unless we rebuild a US passenger railroad network, a lot of people will not be going anywhere. Today, we have a passenger railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of.

Don’t make too many plans to design parking structures. The post cheap oil world is not going to be about parking, either.

But it will be about the design and assembly and reconstituting of places that are worth caring about and worth being in. When you have to stay where you are and live locally, you will pay a lot more attention to the quality of your surroundings, especially if you are not moving through the landscape at 50 miles-per-hour.

James Howard Kunstler, “Remarks in Hudson, NY, January 8, 2005” (previewing his new book, due in May: The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century. For more on Kunstler, see here.)

Nek Chand believes that in Nature everything is used, even fallen leaves go back to enrich the soil, similarly the waste of a city should be recycled back into use once more. He had moved to Chandigarh in 1951, after losing his home and native village in the 1948 partition of India, to work on the vast construction of the new city designed by Le Corbusier. In this process a mass of waste was created by the demolition of over 20 villages, and numerous other buildings, to clear the ground for the new town.

In 1958, Nek Chand, who was working as a Roads Inspector for the Chandigarh Public Works Department, made for himself a little clearing in the thick undergrowth outside the city and began to collect together the stones and the waste materials that he knew he would be using, storing them in a little hut he had built. … He had access to waste dumps in his Department and after his working day he brought materials and stones back to his clearing on the back of a bicycle… By 1965 he was ready to begin his kingdom. The land he was working on was not his own, but a Government area where no development or building of any kind was permitted. Unlike other Indian cities, Chandigarh was carefully planned and only authorised development was permitted.

Nek Chand set his stones around the little clearing and before long had sculpted his first figures, made of cement with an outer skin of broken bangles. Gradually the creation developed and grew; before long the sculptures and stones covered several acres. After his working day as a roads inspector ended, he worked alone in the undergrowth. He cleared the land and built his environment. Day after day, and at night by the light of burning tyres, he worked in total secrecy for fear of being discovered by the authorities. Apart from his wife Kamla and a few trusted friends nobody was aware what Nek Chand was doing.

When in 1972 a Government working party began clearing the jungle they came across acres of stones and statues. Almost two thousand sculptures of various sizes inhabited the undergrowth. Amazed by what they had discovered, local government officials were thrown into turmoil. Nek Chand’s creation was completely illegal – a development in a forbidden area which by rights should be demolished. Within a few days of his discovery everyone in Chandigarh knew about the extraordinary creations in the forest. Hundreds flocked to see them and Nek Chand received his first reactions from the world.

Although many city officials were outraged, local business men offered Chand free materials and transport and with this extra assistance he was able to embark on the First Phase of the environment proper. He formed a series of small courtyards to display his natural rocks and sculptures. As his creation developed so did the support and interest of the citizens of Chandigarh. By 1976 the city authorities were forced by public opinion to relieve Chand of his duties as Roads Inspector and give him a salary to continue with his environment on a full time basis. Nek Chand’s kingdom was officially inaugurated as the Rock Garden and administered by the City of Chandigarh.

Chand was given not only a salary but also a work force of fifty labourers and a truck to continue with his work. Electricity and water were at last available. He was now in a position to start work on the Second Phase, a series of large courtyards, many coated in a mosaic of natural stone or broken ceramic linked by winding paths and low archways. He developed complex and extensive methods of waste collection with many different collection points to form one of the largest recycling programmes in Asia.

The armatures for much of his sculpture were made from old cycle parts; saddles became animal heads, forks became legs, frames became bodies. For his extensive areas of mosaic he used not only broken crockery and tiles but whole bathrooms. He has built walls of oil drums, electric plug moulds and of old fluorescent tubes. His figures are clothed in thousands of broken glass bangles, in mosaic, or in foundry slag, even feathers.

In addition to the cement and concrete creations he also produces great quantities of animals and figures out of old rags and discarded clothing. These giant rag dolls are usually full size constructions with strong metal armatures. The interiors consist of hundreds of tightly bound rags, giving a rigidity and strength unusual in this medium.

Not only has Nek Chand transformed urban waste into beauty but he has also utilised a range of natural materials in the Rock Garden. He has made vast sculptures from the roots of upturned trees, built an extraordinary complex of interweaving waterfalls and placed several thousand strangely formed rocks, all collected locally, around the garden.
Nek Chand’s kingdom is set in a total area of twenty five acres and the vast Third Phase, started in 1983, is due to be completed by the end of 1995. …

In his days as a Roads Inspector he was completely involved in the Chandigarh project. Although he never knew Le Corbusier personally, he observed his building methods closely, especially his imaginative use of concrete. One of the features of the Le Corbusier buildings in Chandigarh are the flowing curves of concrete, constructed with complex shuttering to hold the liquid material. Chand has developed Corbusier’s techniques in the Rock Garden by using a large array of shuttering arrangements; from oil drums to sacking he has produced his own organic masses of concrete with a huge variety of different textural surfaces.

Chand knows Corbusier’s buildings inside out. He can explain the hidden vaulting on the roof of the High Court or the construction of the Assembly Building. Chandigarh has more Corbusier buildings in one place than anywhere in the world and it is extraordinary that one of the greatest architects of the Twentieth century should have had such an influence on one of the greatest contemporary Outsider artists.

John Maizels, Nek Chand’s Wonder of the World (Phaidon Press, 1996), excerpted here (via Marja-Leena Raathje)

No guide book gives a just description of The Rock Garden in Chandigarh. Built of industrial waste and thrown-away items, it is perhaps the world’s most poignant and salient statement of the possibility of finding beauty in the unexpected and accidental. It expresses the fragility of the environment, the need for conservation of the earth’s natural resources, the importance of balancing industrial development and sound environmental practices. It attests to the ingenuity and imagination of the people of Chandigarh and their awareness of these global concerns. Above all, it is a community’s testament of appreciation for art, expressing ideas and problems in a universal language.

Carl Lindquist, “Chandigarh and The Rock Garden”

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Returning to the drey

I’m out on the porch with my coffee a little later than usual this morning. It’s about 6:30 and almost fully light, though still overcast and threatening snow or rain. I’m watching a gray squirrel at the edge of the woods with increasing interest. When I first notice her, she’s in the top of a tulip (a.k.a yellow poplar) tree, gathering a great wad of something long and stringy and stuffing it into her cheek pouches. I don’t have my binoculars with me, but I can see that the small, nearly horizontal branch she’s on has stuff dangling from it, and she’s grabbing strips of it – presumably the soft, inner bark of the tree. I’m guessing that it was recently exposed by the porcupine that lives in the crawl space under my house, though I don’t see its tracks in the snow.

The squirrel races back to her nest near the top of a slender black cherry tree about seventy-five feet from the tulip, quickly empties the contents of cheek pouches into it, and returns for another load. What with going up and down tree trunks to reach suitable lateral branches, it looks as if she travels about 150 feet for every fifty feet of straight-line distance. It’s at this point that I start getting really interested, thinking rather self-reflexively about the way my own mind works. I’ve often thought that, for North Americans, the Buddhist phrase “monkey-mind” should instead be translated as “squirrel-mind.” This morning, I see that while the branches are a given, the route is not.

I watch her make four trips before I get too cold and have to go inside. Each time she takes a slightly different route through the mid-level branches, and once she returns from nest to tulip by a completely different route, higher and farther back from the wood’s edge. In typical gray squirrel fashion she often uses her own weight to bridge a gap, small branches bending down to the point where she can leap the last couple feet to the twig-ends of the next branch. Since it’s not quite fully light, some of these smaller branches are invisible to me, which makes her progress appear even more death-defying and miraculous. However, I’ve watched enough squirrels to know that this spirit of experimentation and play seems to infect much of what they do. I don’t think that’s simply the affective fallacy on my part. If playfulness makes one avoid doing the same thing the same way twice, one is less likely to end up as someone else’s lunch. Predators are, by and large, a fairly single-minded lot.

Each time she returns to the same, small branch in the tulip tree and strips off more of the long, dangly stuff. She takes so much, she can’t even close her mouth. I figure she must be a female with babies on the way. What else could be so urgent as to require the gathering of new bedding material first thing in the morning, before breakfast?

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I often warn people about my normal style of discourse: even my digressions have digressions. Watching this squirrel thus feels strangely validating. The shortest distance between two points may be a straight line, but who says that’s the best way to go? Much as we may envy and admire the single-mindedness of a hawk or an eagle, most of us are more like squirrels. The sooner we recognize this, it seems to me, the easier time we’ll have identifying and isolating the true predators among us.

Chris Clarke of Creek Running North shares a truly harrowing tale from his past, describing the serial killer his mother dated one summer when he was a young man. As always with Chris, the writing is exceptional – not one word too many or too few. His mother and a brother, both bloggers themselves, weigh in with their own recollections in the comments.

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I think it’s safe to say that the government of the United States of America now constitutes the largest and most dangerous predator the world has ever seen. In addition to launching unprovoked invasions of largely defenseless countries for the express purpose of stealing their oil, it has built a worldwide gulag archipelago of secret prisons where its enemies disappear without a trace. (Thanks to Newsdesk.org’s “News You Might Have Missed” e-newsletter for these links.) From a realpolitik perspective, indefinite detentions and systematic torture of suspects make little sense. The questionable value of intelligence gained under torture is surely not worth the strains with allies or the surge in Al Qaeda recruitment that such flagrant violations of the Geneva Convention tend to promote. Some have argued that it’s all about lowering the bar, so that in the future, similar or even more heinous actions will be tolerated by American voters. But I believe it’s mainly about power – reinforcing that strange feedback loop that links pleasure with oblivion. Why drill in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge when the ecological and political costs are so steep and the likely rewards so negligible that even the big oil companies don’t think it’s worth it? Why antagonize countries like Iran and North Korea when it’s O.K. to buy off Libya and Pakistan? Why pursue what even the GOP refers to as the “nuclear option” in the U.S. Senate? To those of us who mainly think squirrel thoughts, these sorts of things will always remain darn near incomprehensible.

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In a comment to my post about the American flag, British blogger Dick Jones of Patteran Pages writes,

I can’t help thinking ‘only in the States…’! I recall (dimly, as with an old man’s fading vision) there being something of fuss when The Who went national with the mod fashion of clothing made out of the Union Jack. But it was no more than a sort of choral clearing of throats from the retired colonel brigade. After that the symbol of Britain’s imperial pride was up for sartorial grabs & has been ever since.

So this sanctification of the Stars & Bars is fascinating & only partially explained by Mr Turner’s characterisation of symbols as both ‘social & normative’ & ‘sensory & affective’ (I bet THAT explanation went down like a cup of cold sick with the second big guy). Further reflections on the cult of the flag from commenters would be illuminating.

I responded by admitting that the U.S.A. is “one of the few countries where one sees the national flag flying everywhere – kind of like the ubiquity of portraits of the Great Leader in places like N. Korea and Turkmenistan.” But I was clueless about the origin of U.S. flagolatry.

So if you have any ideas about how to explain this to a non- or un-American, please leave a comment in the string attached to this post (less confusing than going back to the original flag-burning essay, which is a ways down the page now). Thanks.

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Over at the vernacular body, Elck raises some interesting questions of his own, which directly relate to (and are perhaps partly responsible for) my concern with circuitousness this morning. “Our home, our city, our world, our life is now a supermarket for the satisfaction of the senses,” he writes.

We could binge on Peking Opera if we wished, or read nothing but Uruguayan poets, or fill up our Netflix queues with films from Japan and Japan alone. And, in addition to the available range, there’s also the issue of portability (paperbacks, mp3s, fast downloads), the convenience of mail-order, and the existence of blogs making transglobal stimulating discussion of these interests possible.

This situation creates a number of dilemmas, among them:

We risk finding out the hard way that things too cheaply obtained are poorly attended to. We don’t necessarily take the time to immerse ourselves in the best that culture offers us. For example, how does having a stack of DVDs (or a Netflix queue) affect our experience of a film like Andrei Rublov or Fanny and Alexander? Would we watch the film with different eyes if it were the only thing we had seen on the screen in several months, if the viewing of it were a sacred, set-apart experience, rather than something to be gotten through before popping the next disc in? Is the surfeit of product (even of good product) dulling our senses?

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Even as a plan for satisfying the senses, I think the typically American, consumption-oriented approach falls short. We are taught to be direct and goal-oriented, and not coincidentally, I think, many people complain of being unsatisfied, sexually and otherwise. As K. of A Happening wrote last month in a post called the last taboo,

[W]e live in a culture that … does not know how to appreciate physical beauty unless it’s seen on a playing field. As Americans, we don’t know how to enjoy the naked human form for what it is. Our fear of sex has made it impossible for us to understand the possibilities for variety in sensual experience and in the experience of eros. In our linear thinking, goal-oriented society, if it’s naked we have no idea what [to] do but fuck it. And because most of the time the object laid before our eyes is not really available, we feel compelled to satisfy this desire in some other way. Usually by buying something.

Quite apart from the question of who has the time to sketch, make music, read and write poetry, or what have you, I wonder how many even retain the ability to appreciate the subtler wonders that surround us every day? One of my favorite quotes – and one of the very first things I ever posted on this blog – suggests that this crisis is neither new nor distinctly American. The Baal Shem Tov, 18th-century founder of the Eastern European Hasidic movement, is said to have exclaimed, Alas! The world is full of enormous lights and mysteries, and man shuts them from himself with one small hand!

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In her latest post, Andi of Ditch the Raft announces, “I’ve decided to become a seeker after Mysteries.” On a recent family visit to Finland, she watched a Lenten mass in Helsinki’s Uspenski Cathedral.

Once again, I noticed the prostrations. Not so different from a Tibetan half-prostration, the “grand metanoia” came after each congregant had crossed him- or herself. The word “metanoia” means “to turn,” as if turning away from something, such as sin and evil. I like to keep this in mind when I do my own prostrations. I like it, in part because it implies a circular movement within the self, rather than a linear one. We do not progress out of sin, toward sinless-ness. Instead, we are constantly turning within ourselves, seeking the light which guides not necessarily on a straight path, but simply around, like the Zen circle, to our true selves.

For those unfamiliar with Ditch the Raft, it may help to know that Andi is a committed Buddhist (of the Korean Zen variety) and is preparing to enter the monastic life in May. I encourage everyone with an interest in the ostensible focus of this blog, the via negativa, to go read the rest of her post, which includes an illuminating interview with a Greek Orthodox deacon back in the States. I can’t improve on her conclusion.

One other quote from Andi brings us full circle, back to squirrel-mind. This comes from a comment she left in response to a recent post of Dale’s, over at mole. In Today’s catch, Dale shares “some of the weirdly false thoughts I’ve captured on the wing, today… Answering these thoughts is not exactly rocket science,” he writes. “They’re infantile, mostly. Fatuous. My life is being run by thoughts that would do no credit to a six-year-old.” Andi responds:

[It’s] funny how we want to say that the most basic part of us is infantile, or small in some way, when it’s actually the common denominator, the glue of the mind, the mundane fears and worries that underpin so many of our actions. Seeing them as basic is wonderful! – we stumble upon the unhidden truth, that we’re simple at heart, run by things that, the longer we look at them, appear more and more like exaggerated shadows than mountainous objects. Simple fears also mean simple joys, wonderful love over the small things of life, nothing grand: just a beautiful day, a smile from our lovers, the laughter of our children…

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Squirrel-mind excels in the construction of circular nests, or dreys. Winter dreys are more elaborate than those built for summer use. Though they often appear fairly messy from below, they are in fact quite compact and, from all reports, rather cozy. According to The Natural History of Squirrels (John Gurnell, Facts on File Publications, 1987),

They are waterproof and made of an outer coarse layer of interwoven twigs, which the squirrels usually remove from the tree in which the drey is built (often with leaves still attached). There is a softer inner lining consisting of moss, bark, leaves, fur, feathers, lichens and similar material, and dreys which are used by females to rear young tend to be very well-padded…. A squirrel takes from one to several days to construct a drey, and they will maintain it and add to it as and when required.

So this morning was I watching normal nest maintenance, special refurbishment, or something else entirely? The same source refers to the inner bark of several tree species as a food item for squirrels, not just a nesting material, so it’s possible the individual I was watching was simply doing her grocery shopping. In any case, the weather was threatening; it’s now begun to snow. A good time to snuggle deeper into the nest, tail curled over head, and dream of spring. For busy as they may seem, most of what squirrels do during the long, lean months is sleep.