Category Archives: Planet Earth

Have you thanked a tree today?

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October color in Evanston

All summer the leaves of the maples have taken in my breath (carbon dioxide) and given me theirs (oxygen).   Now their photosynthesis grinds to a halt, the chlorophyll unmasked, and the leaves turn sunset colors before they fall.  Turns out that those vivid colors are their true colors, revealed, like for so many of us, after the mass conformity of adolescence abates.  What do we owe these trees for their beauty?  It’s more than we can say, much less keeping account of all else they do.

Trees in New York City in 1994 removed about 1,821 metric tons of air pollution, absorbing and processing the gases with their leaves, at an estimated value to society of $9.5 million (according to the EPA).  Ecologist Yvonne Baskin wrote in The Work of Nature: How the Diversity of Life Sustains Us, “Most industrial societies tend to disregard and devalue ecosystem processes, opting instead for a technological fix whenever environmental services falter.  Lost services are replaced not with natural mimics but with engineering solutions: dams, reservoirs, waste treatment plants, air scrubbers, air conditioners, synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, and water filtration systems.”  Economists have tried to put a value on species and natural processes as commodities.  Baskin states,  “None of these categories, however, gets directly at what it is worth to have species work together within ecosystems to generate the life-support services that make the earth habitable.”

Now the maples take my breath away, not to give me oxygen, but to open my senses to the many shades of orange, the smell of the earth, and the crunch of leaves underfoot.  As a canopy climber at http://www.treeclimbing.com said about being with trees: “All your senses come alive.”

I can thank the maples in person, in my own Evanston neighborhood, after a breakfast involving delicious maple syrup.  Other trees I have to go find.  For instance, I happen to love Paul Mitchell’s tea tree shampoo.  It smells minty and wonderful and is somehow refreshing and soothing at the same time.  Tea tree oil (Melaleuca) is a natural disinfectant and has been used for centuries by Aboriginal people of Australia to treat skin ailments.  Luckily I found some tea trees at the University of California Santa Cruz Arboretum a few years ago.  I inhaled their mintiness and told them what they meant to me.

Another oil I use a lot is tamanu from Tahiti.  Pacific Islanders use its wood for the keels of their canoes and its nuts for oil.  In order to meet those trees in person I would have to travel to the Tropics.  Hmmm… that would be crazy, right?  Crazy or not, I am getting old enough to show my true colors as an incurable, tree-hugging nature-lover who talks to plants.  I tell them thank you.

Love Shack

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There is another shack in Baraboo besides Aldo Leopold’s (see the 9/18/10 “Land Ethic” post) that is well-known to environmentalists: the shack from which George Archibald, co-founder of International Crane Foundation, wooed Tex.  On September 25, my daughter and I heard George tell stories about those days as he opened the “George and Tex” exhibit at ICF.  It was a love story, at least on the part of Tex, a female Whooping Crane.

The Crane Foundation has a captive breeding program to help increase the numbers of Whooping Cranes.  The whoopers, along with Sandhill Cranes, are the only cranes native to North America and their numbers at mid-century were pitiful.  The beautiful, white birds were almost extinct.  Tex came to ICF already imprinted on humans, meaning that she failed to identify with cranes and only wanted to be with humans.  Particularly dark-haired, male humans.  Especially George.  She chased away any females who came near them.

In order to put Tex in the mood to “breed” (be artificially inseminated), George built a small hut inside her pen and stayed with her during the breeding season, acting, for all practical purposes, as her mate.  Sometimes he read and got work done inside the tiny wooden house but he was always available to dance with Tex, as all cranes like to do, to establish their bond.  In 1982, Tex laid an egg that hatched into a chick named Gee Whiz that, to this day,continues to contribute to a healthy Whooping Crane gene pool.

You may have heard of ultralight aircraft being used to teach birds migration.  That is where some of the ICF cranes go, to Necedah National Wildlife Refuge a bit north of ICF in Wisconsin, to live in the wetlands and learn a migration route to Florida.  Being as it’s Wisconsin, land of the Cheese Heads, the eleven Whooping Crane chicks raised at ICF this year were all named after cheeses, such as Ricotta, hatched on my birthday, June 10.  (There are also seven whoopers that hatched in the wild at Necedah and two survived, to be joined by those hatched at ICF.)

 

George Archibald's shack at International Crane Foundation

 

 

Female Whooping Crane at ICF

 

All the chicks at ICF are now raised by aviculturists, interns, and volunteers dressed in white outfits with a crane-head puppet on one hand, speaking not a word.  No more imprinting on humans!  With no more need for George’s shack, it is on display as part of the “George and Tex” exhibit–a testimony of Tex’s devotion to George and, even more so, of the Crane Foundation’s devotion to the protection and continuation of cranes.

A Square Inch of Quiet

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New kinds of listening

I am learning lately to listen more carefully and preserve  peace and quiet when I can.  I recommend Listening Below the Noise by Anne LeClaire and One Square Inch of Silence by Gordon Hempton and John Grossman because those authors have helped me listen deeper, more frequently, and with fresh ears.


For Gordon Hempton, listening is his practice and silence his therapy.  Unlike a monk in silent retreat, Hempton goes forth to take full measure of his adversary—noise pollution.  And he does it while crossing the country, from Washington state to Washington, D.C.,  in a 1964 Volkswagen van he calls “Vee Dub,” a car that is a character in its own right.

Hempton’s other constant companion is his sound-level meter with which he takes a noise profile of the United States from one end to the other, with many side trips to places recommended to him as quiet.  The results are not good.  Rarely can Hempton find the peace of nature (with its diversity of sounds) for more than a few minutes without the intrusion of man-made noise.  Those pervasive noises from airplanes, cars, and oil rigs can grate on us in ways we don’t even realize, adding an undertone of stress to an already stressed-out country.  As Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden, noticed, “Men have become the tools of their tools.”  The racket those tools are making is drowning out our opportunities to pause, appreciate, regroup, and reflect.

Gordon Hempton is an Emmy award-winning acoustic ecologist who records sounds for everything from movies to video games.  His book is called One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World (2009).  He even includes a CD of nature sounds with his book, which, sadly, was missing in my library copy.  His listeners have let him know that they find joy, solace, and healing in the music of birds, water, and trees that he records—soundscapes where humans felt at home for thousands of years.  Soundscapes now almost impossible to find.

Part memoir and part manifesto, the writing in this book can be a bit rambling at times, just like his trip.  Yet there is something compelling about the story and his efforts to inform—and ultimately confront—federal officials who, on paper anyway, are mandated to protect citizens from unmitigated noise.  His main pleas are to the park service and the Federal Aviation Authority.  If we could restrict airplane travel over the national parks, that would help preserve the very peace and quiet that visitors seek there.  Hempton is not hopeful about winning that battle because it is too late.  Both commercial flights and sightseeing flights go over the Grand Canyon, for instance.

But Hempton has staked a small claim to silence and that is the one square inch of the book title, a red stone he placed on a log in the Olympic National Park in Washington state.  That area of the northwestern United States has very few planes flying over it and he would like to keep it that way.  He invites anyone at the Park to hike to the stone and leave him a message in a jar he put there.  He likes to know that he has allies in his often lonely fight to be conscious about protecting natural silence, the silence that we don’t  even know we’re missing till we get under the rumbling threshold of noise that has become the norm.

The book by Anne LeClaire is Listening Below the Noise: A Meditation on the Practice of Silence (2009).  For almost two decades now, LeClaire has taken two days of silence a month.  Doing so, she has found a source of renewal and peace that helps her remain true to herself in the midst of a busy life.  I was fortunate to spend a weekend with her and take time to listen to myself and nature more attentively than ever before.  Both Hempton and LeClaire remind us to pay attention, both within and without, and treasure the silence.

Anne LeClaire’s website is http://www.anneleclaire.com.  Look for her Sacred Silence workshops.  Also see http://www.onesquareinch.org and, if you can, take a walk in the Hoh Rainforest, find Hempton’s stone, and sit a spell.

Land Ethic

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How did a hard-boiled forester, hunter, professor, and fisherman become one of our most eloquent spokesmen for loving and caring for the land? Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) was a pioneer conservationist who is well known for his book of essays, A Sand County Almanac.  He credits a wolf in Arizona and a shack in Wisconsin for his personal transformation and the evolution of his ideas.

As a young forester in Arizona, Leopold killed a wolf.  In a section of his book called “Thinking Like a Mountain,” he remembered, “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.  I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes–something known only to her and to the mountain.  I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise.  But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”  Part of his transformation in the Southwest was that he ceased to merely act on his environment and began to act with it, listening to wolf and mountain, tree and stream.

“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.  When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”  To enter the community Leopold made his own, at least on weekends when he could get away from his work at the University of Wisconsin, I drove to the Aldo Leopold Center near Baraboo, Wisconsin (www.aldoleopold.org).  At the Center, a gorgeous pine and stone building with two kinds of geothermal systems, I talked with an intern named Anna and she gave me directions to the secluded Shack and loaned me a bicycle to get there.  Following a paved road and then a grassy path, I arrived at the place that inspired so many of the essays in A Sand County Almanac.

When Aldo, his wife Estella, and their five children bought their property in 1935, it was a sandy, over-farmed field near the Wisconsin River, with only an old chicken coop left on it.  The family shoveled out the dirt and manure and made that coop livable for their many visits from Madison.  (One son built an outhouse they called the Parthenon.)  For Aldo, it was an experiment in renewing the land.  He and his family planted thousands of trees and wildflowers, making it a lush, green place.  A place to listen to the land.

“A land ethic,” Leopold wrote, “reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land.  Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal.  Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.”  He did that with his own hands, and died trying to extinguish a brush fire on his neighbor’s land.  His daughter, Nina, still lives near the Shack and has kept the green fire burning.

In 2012, look for the documentary on PBS, “Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and the Land Ethic in the 21st Century.”

I biked to the shack where Leopold wrote Sand County Almanac

Turtle Breath

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Chelydra Serpentina

How can aquatic turtles stay under water so long?  I’m watching one in Crystal Lake and she (?) is staying on the bottom of the lake for a long time.  I’ve been watching her for a while and I’ve decided to call her Jacqueline.

I was going to go kayaking but then I saw the turtle next to the dock and didn’t want to disturb her.  I sat down on the dock and began watching.  I’m starting to think this is pretty boring.  How can I just sit here staring at a ten-inch circle snuggled into a patch of seaweed?  In truth, the lake environment is neither bored nor boring.  It is my problem that I’m losing interest.  I remember a comment I made at a study group a few days ago: Ask questions of the material and your curiosity will guide you.  The question that comes to my mind now is about turtle respiration.  How do they do it?  The question gives me a time frame: Watch Jacqueline until she comes up for air.

She is a snapping turtle with a blunt, diamond-shaped head and a shell covered with algae. The algae looks like a fur coat and I want to pet it.  (Snappers came by their name for a reason, so this would not be wise.)  A sapphire dragonfly zips by and reminds me to pay attention.  I look up and see a bald eagle flying toward me across the lake, making high piercing calls before landing in a pine tree.

The book I’m reading lately, One Square Inch of Silence by Gordon Hempton, comes to mind and prompts me to listen more carefully.  Hempton is trying to help preserve natural quiet in a square inch (and beyond) of the Olympic National Park in Washington state, and elsewhere.  He is a professional listener and recorder of sound who is troubled by the increasing pervasiveness of man-made noises.   I let my ears lead me and notice that I can hear vehicle traffic from time to time.  Someone across the lake is cutting wood and then hammering it.  A flag flaps in the breeze and children splash into the water.  The cars from the county road could be considered noise pollution, but the rest doesn’t bother me.

Still, the turtle hasn’t come to the surface.  I think of my yoga teacher, Laura, saying “If you haven’t breathed lately, now would be a good time to do so.”  Does it make me anxious to see an oxygen-dependent being  under water for more than twenty minutes?  Oddly, it gives me a sense of peace, of being still and grounded.  I take a breath.  After another ten minutes or so, I see the tiny tip of Jacqueline’s nose break the surface and bubble a bit, breathing with the least effort imaginable before she snuggles back into her seaweed bed.  It’s time to go kayaking.

Later, checking the Encyclopedia of Earth online, I find out that snappers and some other types of turtles use the soft tissue in their mouths like gills, extracting oxygen from the water.  That’s how they obtain enough air to stay alive while hibernating for months at the bottom of lakes.  It is not enough air for active daily life, but it is something.  My questioning mind is somewhat satisfied, though I am still amazed at Jacqueline’s ability to stay submerged for so long.  I’m just glad that my turtle neighbor, with her ten round inches, gave me an excuse to be quiet, watch, and listen for the duration of a breath.

For the Love of Wolves

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We came from Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri, and as far away as Arizona, all for the love of wolves.  Our group of eight women and two men wanted to see wolves, to howl with them, to get to know all about them and, maybe, help find ways to protect them.  That’s why we flew and drove hundreds of miles to the far-north outpost of Ely, Minnesota June 11-13, 2010.  It was a “learning vacation” at the International Wolf Center with a side trip to the Vince Shute Bear Sanctuary.

When Jess, our IWC representative, asked why we were there, many of us admitted–outright–our love of canis lupus.  The couple from Arizona started to explain what it meant to them to be there and the husband stopped speaking mid-sentence as tears sprang to his eyes.  Oh, yes, we were smitten before even seeing the objects of our affection.

We also had a general love of nature (biophilia, as E.O. Wilson calls it) that drew us to one of the most wild and refreshing places in the United States, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.  As Kim, a retired teacher said, “I just love the Earth.”  During our weekend we saw eagles, deer, loons, woodpeckers, and fourteen wild black bear cubs and their mothers wandering through the bear sanctuary.  The forests and lakes provided the sweetest air you can find anywhere.

Staying at Wintergreen Dogsledding Lodge, we also saw sled dogs having the summer off.  Paul Schurke, arctic adventurer and keeper of the Lodge, made sure that we got to visit with the new pups, only two weeks old.  Whenever I stopped by the kennels, the dogs sent up a howl in reply to my greetings.

As for howling with wild wolves, we tried.  Jess took us to a remote location and led us off with her impressively tonal howl.  We joined in with our best vocalizations but got no response.  We did manage to locate a female wolf the next day, however, by radio telemetry.  We didn’t see her but we knew where she was on the map and we knew by the frequency of her radio collar that she was a member of the Madden Lake Pack.

The five wolves that indulged us with their presence were the ambassador wolves kept at the International Wolf Center.  Though they have more than an acre to roam, they stayed near the viewing windows for much of the time.  One named Grizzer approached the window only a few inches from the woman from Arizona.  They had a wonderful moment of connection.  I chose to observe Aidan, a two-year-old male, and did some deep listening exercises on my side of the glass to see if we could communicate.  I felt connected to him in a meditative way and thanked him for his presence and all we can learn from him and his species.  When we visited the pack after hours, we heard them howling full tilt, triggered by some unseen presence or distant noise.  That was an experience to remember, even if the wolves we heard were in captivity.

There is a book by Julia Cameron called The Artist’s Way in which Cameron suggests having an “artist’s date” on a regular basis to activate your creativity.  This is a date with yourself to go somewhere inspiring, such as a museum or simply a colorful fabric store, as a way to keep your artistic self alive.  Being in northern Minnesota was like having a “planet date,” a reminder of why I love the Earth so much and want to tend to nature, in both the sense of caretaking and as in “attend,” paying attention to the wildness around me.

Sometimes a long-married couple needs a romantic outing to renew their relationship.  “Oh, yes, that’s why I’m crazy about you.”  I recommend a wilderness date with something in nature that interests you.  Maybe it will be wolves, even Aidan, my special fellow, or simply a flower in your yard.  It is too easy to get distracted and forget the bounty of woods, beach, field, mountain, and sky.  But, I guarantee, once you are out there, you’ll fall in love all over again.

I’m pretty sure that all of us at the Wolf Center did.

Turtle House

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It is such a lovely day that I am taking the kayak out for the first time this year.  Some of the birds also seem to be enjoying our warm April day, calling to each other and finishing their nests.  (I have seen an Eastern Phoebe lately, sculpting a deep pocket of moss and grass by our  cabin door.)  Distant woodpeckers hammer on trees.

As I paddle along the shore, I scare up a Canada Goose and it flies away.  Bass slide by my boat and minnows frisk in the shallows.  The lake is thawed and everybody in this house of water is waking up.

So where are the turtles?  I reach the opposite (east) side of the lake and drift quietly, looking.  No turtles.  I paddle north to the boggy end of Crystal Lake and–voila!  There are two big turtles basking on the dome of a muskrat den, and they slide into the water  as I appoach.  Then I see several tea-saucer-size snapping turtles perched on roots and they bellyflop into the lake at the sight of me.  They are almost cute at that size, even with their ridged, armor-like backs.  Soon there are five heads sticking up from the water, watching me glide by.

In the basement of the lake, lily pads reach for the surface, most of them still curled up like oversized cowry shells.  The ones that are unfurling underwater are as orange and red as maple leaves in autumn.  I never knew they started out that way, so colorful.  On the shore, two mud turtles keep each other company, the domes of their shells glowing happily in the afternoon sun.  I begin to understand why the turtles like this end of the lake; there are few trees to block the light.  Bees land on my lazy, yellow kayak, so I pick up speed and head for home.  The bees return to land, where yellow means pollen.

At our dock I still don’t see any turtles, but now I know that the whole lake is their house.  Our bit of shore may be a bedroom for a particularly big snapper (see previous posting, “Turtle Trails”), but the north end of the lake is their sun room.  Soon it will be adorned with vibrant water lilies and green landing pads for frogs.

Turtle Trails

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I went down to the dock to take a swim but got distracted by the wildlife.  There was a green heron on the swim raft.  A green heron!  I’d never seen one up close before.  They are described in The Sibley Guide to Birds as the most “solitary, secretive” heron and yet this one stayed put even as I walked to the end of the dock to get a good look at him.  (I say “him” because he looked like a hunched-over vicar wearing a cape of dark feathers.)  I talked to him as he marched about, lifting his legs higher than necessary, as if he were wading.

“Hello!  Are you the one who’s been pooping on our swim raft?”  He did not deny it, preening his rufous chest feathers with his long, black beak.  “Well,” I told him, “I won’t take it personally.”

As I sat on the dock, I noticed our resident turtle swimming under the wooden slats.  The huge snapper settled his turkey-platter of a shell in the seaweed and became almost invisible.  Then I noticed a smaller turtle swimming nearby.  A relative of the ancient one under the dock?  The dinner-plate size turtle stuck her(?) head out of the water and watched me, so I talked pleasantly to her and wished her a safe winter in the mud at the bottom of the lake.

“Blessings to you, turtle,” I said and was surprised to hear a low growling noise from the turtle as she submerged and swam away.  Brown blobs followed after her, flowing right toward me, and I realized she was moving her bowels as she went.  An editorial comment?  I tried not to take it personally.  And I decided to wait till spring to go swimming in that Wisconsin lake again.

Stones, Part 1

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I was conflicted, not so much about getting married, but about moving to Chicago.  It was hard to imagine myself living in a big city.  So I went to the Oracle.

By a traditional Sioux quarry in southwestern Minnesota there is a grandfather known as the Oracle, a profile of a face in the low hills of what is now called Pipestone National Monument.  Whether other people talk to it, I don’t know.  All I know is that I went to the 282-acre park still sacred to the Lakota and other First Nations, went on a walk with questions in my heart, and found a craggy face to listen to my troubles.  It was in 1982 and I was 26.

I saw that other folks besides me sought this place.  George Catlin visited the site in 1836 and ended up having the workable, red mineral named after him.  Joseph Nicollet was there two years later, stopping at Winnewissa Falls to carve his name on a boulder, a bit of history that caught my eye when I was there.  But I was looking for something much more ancient, something found in the rocks themselves and nurtured by each offering of tobacco, each song and blessing, each pipe made into what is essentially a portable altar.  I was at a fork in the road.
“What shall I do?” I asked.  “How can I move to Chicago?  I am not a city person.”  Yes, I had gone to schools in New York City, Vancouver, and San Diego, but I was essentially a small town girl from Northfield, Minnesota.  Not that I felt at home there, but I was accustomed to forays into the country and long summers up north at the lake.  I lost my shape in the city, pounded by concrete and noise into a flattened version of myself.  Marrying Donald meant moving to his apartment in Rogers Park, the north part of Chicago.  I had a job I liked, but he had a real career going, so we figured I should be the one to move.  Was that enough reason to compromise myself?  Surely, this elder of the Earth would tell me to stay close to my roots.

But no.  “Change is okay.  Change can be good,” I heard.  “Be of the Earth.”  I guess the Earth included Chicago.

(See part 2 tomorrow.)

Earth Blog

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Rock art, Boynton Canyon, AZ

Rock art, Boynton Canyon, AZ

In this weblog, I am writing about the need for nature and the way we learn from plants, animals, and others.

Started out with 3 degrees in psych., trying to comprehend human behavior. Found the best alternatives to our collective neuroses by going outside my own WASP upbringing into other cultures, particularly by learning about Native American and Eastern philosophies.

Take all that intercultural learning, the subject of my dissertation, one step further and I find myself fascinated by inter-species learning. An elder asked me to try it and and I was amazed at what I “heard.”

Would be interested to know your experiences with nature.
So this is my first blog. We are, indeed, connected and of the Earth. Thich Nhat Hanh says “We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.” We are all related.  I just may benefit from getting outside and paying attention more often, and I’ll write about it here.