Putting plastic squares on a fence

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Lava Lake, Idaho

context: We spent a week on the property of Lava Lake Lamb, a sustainable sheep ranch that’s trying to do research on wildlife migration through their land. We had just come from Nevada, where we listened to anti-grazing activist Jon Marvel describe the problems fences pose for wildlife migration. He told us that anytime we saw a fence in the west, we should tear it down. But as part of our work for Lava Lake Lamb, we helped them make their fences more “wildlife-friendly”.

So we put up plastic squares along fences that Jon Marvel says shouldn’t be there to stop sage grouse that he wants listed as endangered from hitting them. I don’t mind fences out here—it all looks the same to me; fences are part of the landscape as I’ve come to see it. But fences keep wildlife from moving, and I realize I’ve stopped looking at sagebrush as wild and started assuming grazing when I see it. I worry about the plastic—so many biologically pervasive toxins in them, molecules that get inside you and stick, invisibly, until you try to reproduce or are diagnosed with cancer. But I doubt those small squares will disrupt many endocrine systems. Is this what it means to see landscapes whole? To see the scars too, to always have a rejoinder starting with, “But…” whenever a solution is proposed? Can I go back to Moab senior year, when I didn’t know cattle grazed on public lands and the desert was just beautiful, even at Hidden Splendor*? Driving in Nevada, I look out the window and I see Harry Reid, gold mining, Los Alamos, the Manhattan Project, Hiroshima in September 1945, Owens Valley, the Superfund site list, cyanide, cows and climate change. Is there an off switch for this vision? Will I ever be able to see a sunrise unaffected again?

Oh, hyperbole. And yet, with everything I know, it’s still beautiful out here. Finding beauty in a broken world…almost easier, in a way. The contrast is starker. Or maybe it’s that things seem more beautiful because they’re broken—imperfect, yet still present. You acknowledge the imperfection and you work to make it whole. You put tiny white plastic squares on barbed wire fences, and they shudder like tree leaves in the breeze.

*Hidden Splendor is a site in the middle of nowhere—the San Rafael Swell in southeastern Utah. It’s where much of the uranium for the Manhattan Project was extracted, and the old mine shafts are still there. It’s also possibly the most gorgeous place I’ve ever been.

Dispatch from the West

Our latest assignment is to write a dispatch from the West, 250 words or less on one of four topics: wolf at the door, aspen, incised channels or water out of place.


Incised Channels

We were raised by a generation that doesn’t know what a stream looks like. We were taken hiking and told: this is nature. We were lied to.

They’re spread out like scars across the dried skin of meadows and desert sagebrush. In summer, heat evaporates moisture and the skin cracks, but there is no blood. The channels run straight and dry, banks trampled by cattle, aspen eaten away by elk. The groundwater is thirsty, praying for rain, but it doesn’t rain in the desert. When the snow from distant mountains finally melts, the water runs quickly, hurried without sinuous curves that used to slow it down. The stream is our journey West, the frenzied rush to build railroads and conquer the continent. We called it Manifest Destiny, and it manifested itself in beaver pelts, smallpox blankets and dams. It’s been a long time since beaver ponds told the water to slow down, stay a while. When you’re trying to squeeze profit out of dry land, water gets squeezed out too. A cow pie, a solitary puddle at the bottom of a canyon and acres of cheatgrass: this is our destiny, manifested.

We see the lie. We walk across the scars under the heat of a desert sun and fall asleep dreaming of the breeze playing with a yellow aspen leaf as it falls onto the surface of a pond built by beavers, the only animal that has ever been successful in its efforts to bring more water to the desert.

Uncomfortable truths in Nevada

Las Vegas is still growing. Las Vegas is in the middle of the desert. Las Vegas is running out of water.

Cows graze on almost all the public lands in Nevada. Land grazed by cows is easy to spot, covered in invasive grasses, cowpies, stream banks cut deep and straight with muddy hoof prints all the way to the bottom. The cost to run a cow and calf for a month on these lands is $1.35. On the allotment we visited today, 15,000 cows graze and the Bureau of Land Management takes in about $22,000 per year from the permitee. A recently constructed irrigation trough and pipeline on this land cost $400,000, paid for by the BLM. It’s full of algae with a dead bird wing buried somewhere under the muck.

Las Vegas wants to build a pipeline to Spring Valley to pump water from an underground aquifer. This water will go to feed its green lawns and the rainforests built inside casinos.

Nevada has a Senate seat up for reelection this fall. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, will face off against Sharon Angle. Reid has consistently supported gold mining in Nevada, pushing hard against reform of the General Mining Act of 1872. Because of this act, prospective gold miners can acquire a claim for $5 an acre on federal lands. If gold is found, they pay no royalties to the government.

Between 1951 and 1992, there were a total of 1,021 test of nuclear weapons conducted at the Nevada Test Site. One hundred of these were above ground. The radioactive fallout blew downwind into Utah and southern Nevada. Some of it ended up in Spring Valley.

In the East, where is rains, you measure land in cows per acre. In the West, where there is a desert, you measure in acres per cow. The math will give a solution between 25 and 150 acres.

A dumptruck full of gold ore will yield about one ring’s worth of gold. To get it out of the rock, you use cyanide. The waste from this process sits in ponds, sometimes lined, sometimes not. If the original prospector goes broke or can’t be found, the government pays to clean up the mining waste.

If Las Vegas takes the water out of Spring Valley, the land will dry up. The soil will become dust and the dust will become airborne. The dust is volcanic soil and is full of a carcinogen as potent as asbestos. The dust blew into the valley as fallout from the Nevada Test Site. The dust is full of tiny particles which have a knack for working their way into the moist linings of human lungs and staying there.

Sharon Angle, the Republican challenging Harry Reid for Senate, has called the separation of church and state “unconstitutional”.

Cows need water to drink. Cows need hay to eat and hay needs water to grow. You get water in the West by damming rivers or pumping it out of the ground.

Las Vegas is the fastest growing city in the United States. The Strip is covered in homeless men too resigned to ask for spare change. The neighborhoods outside feature fences topped with barbed wire and billboards advertising attorneys who can fight DUIs.

As climate change occurs, the West will become hotter and drier. Reservoirs will evaporate faster. River and stream flows will decrease because the glaciers on the mountains that feed them are disappearing.

About ninety percent of the population of Nevada lives in Clark County, where Las Vegas is located, or in Reno. You can’t get elected in Nevada unless you support what Clark County and Reno want. And right now, they want their pipeline.

Cows trample biotic soil crusts. These crusts are made of mosses, lichens and microorganisms. They hold soil together, retain moisture, increase the productivity of adjacent plants and fix nitrogen and carbon into the soil. Without them, the soils blow away and water evaporates faster. Without them, the land becomes more desert and less water. Cows need water. Las Vegas needs water. The people of Spring Valley need water.

What can I eat?

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Jackpot, Nevada

context: We spent this week camped on public lands in Nevada learning more about grazing. Our week included a visit with Jon Marvel, the director of the Western Watersheds Project. Jon is fiercely anti-grazing on public lands and has a reputation as a bit of a bully among ranchers in the area. We also visited Steve and Robin Boise, ranchers in the area who are practicing rotational grazing and limiting the number of cattle on their allotment to allow the land to recover.

I have no idea what I can eat. Well, that’s not strictly true. I know I can go to farmer’s markets, pay $6 a pound for Thundering Hooves ground beef, ask my food producers questions and eat relatively sustainably.

Buy how do we feed the world? If ranching means incised channels and toxic waste runoff from feedlots and wheat means methyl isocyanate and Monsanto’s patented genes, what on earth are my customers, coworkers and family members who live on food stamps supposed to buy? How do we change this system from the ground up? Because changing it top-down will never work as long as ranchers control Congress and agribusiness contributes 132.7 million a year to them.

Listening to ranchers on this trip, I like them. They’re good people, people I’d want to have as neighbors. Robin and Steve, Todd Nash…it’s so hard to listen to them and say, “Too bad.” It’s so hard to remember that they’re wrong about some things. Listening to Jon and Suzanne, I don’t get that feeling of neighborliness. They’re not the sort how make you feel at ease. They’re not easy to listen to. But I think more of the truth lies on their side of the fence. How do I speak what they say and sound like a rancher? I don’t want to manipulate statistics the way Jon does—2-3% of cow weight is very different than 2-3% of cows raised on public lands. I don’t want to be frenzied and upset, but it’s so hard not to when you’re seeing things that are unspeakable and no one else will listen to you about them. I guess mostly I want to work with people, not against everything, not with corporations and not from inside the groups causing the problem or tacitly allowing it to continue. But compromise with ranchers seems easy. I can’t see myself a ranching activist, and compromise with the LA Department of Water and Power or Monsanto seems so much harder. Steve and Robin are people, but Exxon-Mobil might as well be Satan. Maybe this is where I take a lesson from Mike*, who helped get some lake back. After all, I still don’t really want to blow up a dam. Maybe compromise is our best hope. God, that’s a scary thought.

*Mike Prather, an activist who has worked to restore Owens Lake in California, after LA’s Department of Water and Power pumped it dry for their municipal water supply. Now, the lake is a series of square pits filled with water, technically designated as a construction site (we had to wear vests and hard hats to go birdwatching). But a lot of migratory birds have come back to the area.

Harry Reid's pipeline

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Jackpot, Nevada

context: We spent the day before in Baker, Nevada, a tiny town with one intersection, no grocery store and no stoplight. Baker is home to groundwater that is desperately wanted by Las Vegas to feed their growing city, so a pipeline has been proposed. Senator Harry Reid is very in favor of the pipeline, given that he needs urban votes to get re-elected.

There is so much political intrigue here. I wish Nevada had a better Democrat than Harry Reid, someone who didn’t have an interest in gold mining, someone who cared about the land. He’s a politician to the core, and I suppose he’d have to be to be Senate Majority Leader, but I can’t help but think that his principles are largely based on majority rule in his electorate, not actual principles. That makes him so political, and I suppose it’s not a bad thing necessarily. He stalls Yucca Mountain more out of NIMBY than any true environmentalism, because if he cared about the earth or public lands much, he’d stop gold mining and the Las Vegas pipeline. Utilitarianism would dictate that the line be built, I think—how many people live in the area in question? But utilitarianism of that sort ignores non-humans and the fact that cities in deserts aren’t sustainable. I’ve heard it argued that even cities aren’t sustainable, though I’m not entirely convinced. But Ed Abbey had it down. There’s no shortage of water in the desert unless you try to build a city where no city should be.

A day in the life

So, it’s occurred to me that in all my excitement to muse about the Sierra Nevadas and LA’s water supply, I have utterly neglected to describe a typical day on Semester in the West. I thought about this and realized that it’s probably impossible to describe “typical” on a program like this. This week, we’re doing ecological research in the forests of Utah, so I’ll settle for a typical day of ecology. We’re working with Mary O’Brien, a botanist/activist who works with the Grand Canyon Trust. She’s largely focused on documenting the problems with cattle grazing on public lands and trying to get the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to change some policies. I’ll probably talk about grazing a lot more in future posts. But anyway, here’s what our days look like.

0630—wake up, notice time, contemplate getting up, notice frost on sleeping bag, go back to sleep

0700—cook crew starts making breakfast (we have five cook crews of four people, so everyone cooks every five days)

0715—alarm goes off. get up, put on fleece booties, fleece pants and down jacket. hang out and read Cadillac Desert or check email.

0800—breakfast is supposed to be ready

0810—breakfast is actually ready, cook crew rings breakfast bell

0830—finish eating. Mary explains our work for the day, which sometimes takes up to an hour because it turns into a discussion about grazing and work she’s done with the Grand Canyon Trust.

0930—cook crew finishes dishes/cleanup. everyone packs sack lunches and reconvenes. By this time, people are starting to shed layers and look less like obese snowmen.

0940—a more specific explanation of our work, including dividing into teams, explaining for the fourth time that we should be nice to the GPSs, issuing data sheets, mass confusion about sampling methodology, lots of questions, more clarification and making sure teams are divided in such a way that each Suburban has a driver in it

1030—pile in the Suburbans (we have 3, each with 7 people) and head out

1031—Suburban 3 fails to make contact on radio check. Lots of gesturing out the window finally gets them to turn their radio on.

1032—sing-along to Dynamite by Taio Cruz, which we have unanimously voted to re-name “Galileo”

1035—recounting of traumatic childhood experiences and general bonding

1045—arrive at field work site. break up into groups and work, which could include counting cows, taking pictures of aspen, recording types of vegetation along a 200’ transect line or recording prevalence and height of aspen and willow plants along a stream with beaver dams

1500—finish field work and return to camp

1505—discover that returning to camp involves executing a 20-point turn on a Forest Service road. panic briefly.

1520—return to camp safely. enter data, have beers, hang out, read

1700—dinner cook crew starts

1800—dinner is supposed to be ready

1830—the smell of burning bacon wafts into the trailer

1930—dinner is ready after some improvisation. the dinner bell is rung. everyone gathers and dinner crew read a “humble”, which could be a poem about cows, Ed Abbey ranting about tourism, a description of regional geology or a lyrical description of land by Terry Tempest Williams, depending on who’s doing the humble. people eat, talk about shared cultural experiences (homestarrunner.com, Harry Potter, adventures in the TKE basement back at Whitman…)

2030—everyone crowds into the trailer to finish data entry, GPS photo linking and to study for our test on Sunday, which involves deciphering two journal articles about grasses in the West

2130—get into sleeping bag

2132—realize I have to pee, get up, pee, get back in, shiver briefly, read

2200—turn headlamp off and realize the full moon might as well be a spotlight. burrow into sleeping bag.

0200—wake up, realize I’m wearing a) not enough, b) too many or c) a good amount of clothes and a) put on an extra fleece and socks, b) lament the fact that my layers are going to be sweaty and gross in the morning or c) smile and go back to sleep

One month in

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Fish Lake National Forest, Utah

And today, we’re at a month. I’ve been sleeping in a sleeping bag since August 11. I haven’t taken a “real” shower since we left Johnston Wilderness Campus. I have five t-shirts and twenty-three people, and they don’t change. And I’m so incredibly happy. The most stressed I’ve been out here barely registers on an at-school scale—it’s never even come close to a typical Sunday night. I love food again—no feeling stuffed and guilty, then starving and broke in alternating cycles all day long. I don’t mind the dust so much, unless it gets in my eyes. And it’s not like some trips, where they’re fun in part because you know you have civilization waiting for you when you come home at the end of the weekend. Weekend trips, you can wear yourself out, trash your gear and eat whatever unhealthy crap you want. Here, you’re living. You have to take care of yourself. Right now, I feel so balanced. I’m full, I’m warm, I’m outside breathing clean, clear air. I’m in no rush to return home, however I define it. This could even qualify as home for all I care. Clive would be a nice addition, but I’m fine without him. I miss Seattle and edible sushi, but I miss that in Walla Walla anyway. I’ve barely ever felt this good and happy—for a bit in Costa Rica, backpacking around Glacier Peak—and when I do, it’s always when I remove myself from Western Civilization. What does that say about Western Civilization? Maybe it says more about me, that I can’t let go and let myself relax unless I have an excuse to only communicate with the outside world on my own terms. Maybe that’s something I should work on. When I get back, I want to go through my closet and be merciless. I want to try to stay in mental detox—less TV and YouTube, more time at Discovery Park, even if it is winter. More time with my cousins. More time getting up early and writing. Probably less time washing my hair.

Pando Clone and conservation

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Pando Clone, Fish Lake National Forest, Utah

context: The Pando Clone is a giant stand of genetically identical aspen trees, making it the largest organism on earth. It’s also declining steeply due to disease and climate change (warmer winters mean that parasitic organisms which used to be killed off survive the winter to prey on the trees). We were divided into two groups—art and science. As part of the art group, I spent half a day wandering around taking pictures of the trees.

Aspen trees are gorgeous, especially now when the leaves are starting to turn. I’m so glad I got to see and photograph that and spend a day relaxing somewhere so beautiful. Is it bad that seeing beauty like this makes me care more about restoration? It’s such a stark contrast with yesterday, where we saw trampled streams and cowpies everywhere. The healthy trees here are beautiful, striking, even worthy of a postage stamp. But sometimes, what’s right ecologically doesn’t look as impressive aesthetically. So many exotic species were introduced because someone thought they would look better. How can we get people to care about more than appearance? How can we fight for the endangered dung beetles and seaweeds of the world when everyone’s focused on polar bears and tigers? I’m biased towards those charismatic megafauna just as much as everyone else, but I’m not even sure about ecological roles. I suspect large mammals generally play fairly key ecological roles, so perhaps our focus on them isn’t entirely misguided. But I don’t know that for a fact. Either way, they need research and money and habitat and PR, so maybe a public concerned about baby polar bears is better than a public indifferent o eubacteria or rare Amazonian lichens. But I want to believe we have more options than that. I want to get people to care about everything and the whole ecosystem, more than the sum of its parts. I want them to care because these things matter, not because they’re beautiful or they have potential for pharmaceutical research. But isn’t any kind of caring better than apathy? I’m not even sure why I care anymore, except a vague notion that my life depends on a planet in balance. I’m starting to think that balance is more subjective than I thought. I see balance in enclosures, but not the whole forest. Balance in the US, but not Brazil. How much balance do we need? How many functioning ecosystems? Is it ok to sacrifice the rest once we get there? In August, I would have shouted, “NO!” Now, I say no quietly, a bit hesitant. So many things I don’t know…

Coming home

Today, I feel lonely. I had free time and called a bunch of family and friends. It was nice to hear what everyone’s doing, but sometimes I feel like I have less and less in common with the people I’ve left behind. When I get back, sleeping inside is going to feel foreign. Having running water will be an incredible luxury, bordering on being unnecessary. Showering more than twice a week will seem wasteful.

I don’t want the power of my life out here to fade when I come home. For some people, outdoor living is a necessary evil required to go backpacking or climbing. For me, it’s enjoyable in and of itself. I like the freedom of not having to do anything but put contacts in when I wake up in the morning. I love seeing blurred dots of light above my head when I fall asleep. I love working a bit harder to do basic things like shower or make breakfast, because it makes the result that much more exciting.

Living like this for so long is making me think about things I want to change when I get home. I’m probably going to shower every other day, quickly, and only wash my hair every four or five days. I’m thinking about things like composting toilets in my future. I know a lot of my friends and family shrug things like this off or chalk them up to my hippie-ness, but I want to be taken seriously. I don’t want people to shake their heads at what they perceive as quirks or think that eventually, I’ll “get used to” civilization and forget how I feel out here. Living outside has its challenges, but it also makes me feel more whole and present than I ever do when I’m being civilized.

Going back to “real” school will be a challenge too. My mind will be occupied with issues of land management, ranching, fire policy, and climate change. I’ll have faces and personal stories associated with all possible sides of these issues. I’ve seen ranchers moved almost to tears describing what wolves are doing to their livelihood, and I’ve seen ecologists break down thinking about the devastation of riparian ecosystems. How can I go back to a textbook after experiencing this? How could a politics class hope to capture the essence of an issue in lectures and readings?

I’ve had culture shock before, returning home from wolf tracking after a week to find myself so perplexed by walls that I spent an hour sitting on my bed crying and wanting to go back to the forest. I couldn’t explain how I felt to anyone else, and my adjustment over the course of the next day was one of the loneliest days of my life. Coming home from two and a half weeks in Guatemala, I immediately left for England and found myself sickened by the excesses of being a tourist in a rich country—throwing away restaurant food, driving all over the country and showering every day. Once again, I felt isolated, powerless to explain how strange the world I found myself in was to the people around me.

I hope that by blogging, emailing and calling people I know, my return home won’t be as painful. I’m hoping to give people some idea of what life is like out here, a glimpse of how simple it is to be happy because of a full moon, a cozy sleeping bag or a delicious dinner of sweet potato and bean burritos. But I know there’s so much I don’t know how to convey, so many things I’ll never be able to show anyone else. And I worry that without that common ground, I’ll be left adrift, not able to recreate this experience, but not feeling home with the people I’m with and the places I’m in. So tonight, as I fall asleep under a full moon, tucked in the folds of a dusty silk liner, I pray someone will understand when I come home and don’t want to sleep inside.

Grazing: learning to see

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Escalante, Utah

context: During this week, we were working with Mary O’Brien, an ecologist with the Grand Canyon Trust. Mary was one of several ecologists we met who believed that cattle grazing on Western public lands was an environmental nightmare and is working to reduce the amount of land that’s grazed. Today, we went out on an actual grazing allotment to count cows and see what the land looked like.

I think today, I get it. I’ve seen Suzanne cry and Mary rant about riparian habitat and grazing. I’ve seen cows and incised channels. But today, wandering across a few miles of moonscape covered in hoof marks and cowpies, I saw a bit of what they see. The fence, built perhaps to keep cows away from part of the stream and the juniper bushes, was in decent shape, but the cows had access to the stream on both sides because they’d managed to erode a path down into the gully. The water was muddy and trampled to death.

I’m still having trouble being angry about it. Maybe because it’s hard to pinpoint a source. I don’t fault the individual rancher trying to make a living, though I have no sympathy for absentee billionaires or giant corporations who run cattle. Cows are far too docile and placid to be the objects of anger. And the political and bureaucratic clusterfuck seems difficult to pin on any particular person, law or agency. It’s a beast of its own, independent of individual human desires, although a product of them.

But I know it needs to change. I’m not as strident as Mary, though I feel the truth in her statement that some jobs or lifestyles cannot be justified because the cost to the earth is too high. I know absolutely that a rancher should be able to graze fewer cattle than an allotment allows for and should be able to sell it for conservations purposes if both parties are willing. But beyond that, it’s so hard to untangle. I worry about imperialism and outsourcing of negative consequences. If we eliminate the 2-3% of beef grazed on public lands here (and 2-3% of American beef is still a ton of cows), demand won’t follow the drop in supply. So we’ll import from Argentina or Brazil and eat cows with a huge carbon footprint grazed on pasture that used to be Amazonian rainforest before it was clearcut. We’ll have our land back and some smug satisfaction or feeling of grand victory, but I worry we’ll just be outsourcing the problem. So what, ethically, should I be eating? If I add a no-public-grazing clause to my vegetarian meat-eating ethics, I might as well just go back to no meat at all. I want to be healthy, which means no more tofu if I can help it, and I’m not the kind of girl who can live off of lentils. I love dairy, but that’s a curtain I’ve barely started to pull back, and I know I won’t like what I find. Someday, I want a house in Seattle with a backyard big enough for chickens and a goat. But until then, I still think I’m doing better eating cheese, raw milk and Thundering Hooves beef.

Manzanar

As I mentioned the other day, we did a day excursion last week to Manzanar, one of about a dozen Japanese internment camps which were open during World War II. Manzanar is near the town of Lone Pine, California, in the shadow of the Sierra Nevadas. There’s a guard tower and some reconstructed barracks which are supposed to resemble the ones present in the 1940s. There is also a plaque describing the site, which, quite uncharacteristically for the National Park Service, describes internment clearly as a mistake and a demonstration of inhumanity. Because of this, the plaque has been cut with knives and shot multiple times, and another plaque has been posted on the private land directly behind it affirming the courage of American soldiers.

Seeing the site reminded me quite a bit of my visit to a slave fort in Cape Coast, Ghana. There, thousands of captive Africans waited packed like cattle in tiny, dark and filthy rooms, until they boarded a ship for a journey across the Atlantic which one-third of them would not survive. Japanese internment isn’t quite as unfathomable in its scale and inhumanity, but it still brought tears to my eyes to think about the things we’ve done to fellow people during the worst moments of our history. I read several pages of the visitor’s log, and there were several entries which said something like, “This is my first visit to Manzanar since I was released in 1945.” What really got to me was the exhibit about Japanese soldiers during World War II, including one man who dove on top of grenade to prevent it from killing his entire squad. He was killed and awarded a medal for valor, while his mother and the rest of his family was locked up in Manzanar.

I realized, walking around there, that so much of our history involves fencing away things we don’t like. The West especially has been defined and controlled by fences. Systematically murder Native Americans, then fence the once who survive in reservations. Dam rivers, fence them into reservoirs, so Los Angeles and Las Vegas can continue to grow. Put Japanese people in camps during the war because they might hurt the war effort. Anything contrary to growth, Manifest Destiny, war, America or God, we put inside a neat little fence and forget about. And now, it’s gotten to the point where we fence off the things we want to preserve. Fence the stream so cattle can’t trample the willow and aspen. Fence off the vegetation so it can keep growing undisturbed. Fence off Yellowstone and Yosemite to assuage our guilt as we mine uranium and clear cut forests everywhere else on our public lands.

I hope that we can take a lesson from history and never do this again, but our reactions to 9/11 suggest otherwise. Still, I hope next time we’re confronted with a crisis of national security, our first reaction isn’t to deprive people of their Constitutional rights.

Night in the desert

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Escalante, Utah

I love this time of night in the desert. Or semi-desert, since I’m surrounded by National Forest land and cowpies. I feel like I’m seeing a whole other world, being awake after everyone else is in bed. It feels like this is when life is truly still, relaxed, with no expectations. Right now, I could be anyone. I can go for a walk, read, pee in the middle of an open field. In the city, anywhere where humans have permanently settles, this time brings anxiety more than anything. Step outside and you risk encounters with potential rapists, murderers, drunk homeless men, drunk frat boys and police. Here, I’m safe—it might rain and I might smell like cow shit, but I know I’ll be alive in the morning.

Grazing policy with Mary O'Brien

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Escalante, Utah

context: During this week, we were working with Mary O’Brien, an ecologist with the Grand Canyon Trust. Mary was one of several ecologists we met who believed that cattle grazing on Western public lands was an environmental nightmare and is working to reduce the amount of land that’s grazed.

Once again, we talk about grazing. It’s crazy how we get so invested and involved in these problems that it’s hard to see scale. We’re busy discussing ways to make public lands ranching sustainable and public lands only produce 2 or 3% of American beef. I find this issue more interesting than almost anything else except water rights because it involves so many issues—ecology, politics, economics, cultural myths, American history, land management…it seems like one giant puzzle. Mary asked why we’re willing to ask so many questions about how to preserve grazing but not about how to preserve sage grouse or riparian habitat. Partly, I think it’s that intersection—not just ecology, but so many things to think about. Though that’s true of habitats too; it’s not just science, there’s advocacy and politics and legal precedent that all get mixed in. So why do we care about ranchers? Anthropocentrism—I feel more for hardworking American left jobless than a sage grouse who can’t find enough to eat. Partly, I don’t think I have a sense of urgency—unlike climate change or water shortages, I don’t see much in the way of serious consequences on a larger scale. I don’t live here, but I do have to live with the laws passed by the Republicans ranchers vote for because they think my camp is anti-ranching. That’s a very selfish and probably incomplete analysis, but I’d be willing to bet it’s not entirely wrong.

Choosing a career

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Escalante, Utah

context: A group of paleobotanists were camped near us, so after a hard day of vegetation transects, we visited their camp at night to talk about their work excavating dinosaurs in the area.

Paleobotany seems so cool. No, that’s a lie. Digging up dinosaurs sounds cool. It reminds me of being a little kid, when I read each issue of Dig and Muse with bated breath, trying to decide if I’d rather dig up ancient civilizations or dinosaurs. That was also when I figured I could do one of those things for a year or two, then switch to something different—before I really understood what grad school was. I love meeting people who are experts in their fields and who are so knowledgeable and passionate about their work, but I can’t help feeling like I’m too young to choose. I want the freedom I had at five back. I was going to fight fires, lead expeditions to find artifacts from the Titanic, study chimps in the jungles of East Africa, unearth dinosaurs and be a mom. And damn it, I was going to be world famous for all of it! I feel simultaneously too old and too young to have this amount of freedom. So many of my peers from high school are studying so specifically, to become architects, physical therapists and writers. I’m dating a civil engineer, and the best I can offer when asked about my future is that I’d like to do the Peace Corps and have a job where I’m helping the planet not die and get to be outside. I have a major I’m not even sure about—I love politics, and I follow elections the way some people follow football or March Madness—but I don’t want an office job, I couldn’t be happy as a lawyer and I hate dressing up. I went to the DNC, I’ve seen politics from the inside, and I know that’s not me. I’d rather be a scientist or journalist during the week and an activist and community member when I can. But I still want it all. We have yet to meet anyone who works in a lab synthesizing biodegradable compounds to replace plastics and also writes for High Country News. Plus, climbing on the weekends. Sooner or later, I’m going to have to pick, and I feel like it’s easier to study science and do into journalism or advocacy or policy than to study policy and end up a wolf biologist. Which I also want to do. When am I supposed to figure this out? And how have so many other people beaten me to it?

I have a feeling none of this is what I’m supposed to write about. Vegetation transects were cool, though a bit tedious. I love knowing what plants are. Greasebush tastes pretty cool, too—very distinctive, like a not-quite-ripe blueberry in a good way. I wonder from reading the study about voles—how many other ecosystems could be fixed or greatly improved by something so simple and non-invasive? I love the idea of managing by leaving something alone or removing stressors, but not actively killing invasive species. It seems much more cautious and healthy, and at least here, it’s working, which is great. I love it when progress seems so clear and attainable.

Quenching LA's thirst

So I’ve been so busy writing I haven’t gotten a chance to say what we’re actually doing. Currently, I’m near Escalante, Utah starting week two of our field ecology course. I don’t know what exactly we’re doing, research-wise, but here’s a sample sentence from our reading, which we have a test on later in the week: The differentiation of tillering mode, whether extra or intravaginal, may have been in itself a seminal event in the evolution of grasses in response to ungulate interaction.

That’s right, people: we’re learning about grass vaginas. I didn’t even know grass had vaginas. And that’s among the easier-to-understand points in the article, which is eighteen pages. It’s going to be another late (post-10pm) night.

Up until yesterday, we were hanging out in the Eastern Sierras being inspired by mountain epicness. When we weren’t writing, we had meetings with a variety of people about water issues in the Mono Lake and Owens Lake areas. It’s a pretty interesting history, so I’ll summarize it here.

Mono and Owens Lakes are both terminal lakes, as is the Great Salt Lake. They have no streams flowing out of them, which means they’re very salty, alkaline and full of minerals. Because of this, they’re inhospitable to most life, including fish, but very important for a few select species. Mono Lake is home to a species of brine shrimp found nowhere else on earth. Owens Lake has several creatures evolved to tolerate the salt and alkalinity of the lake. But the selling point of the lakes is the important role they play in bird migration. They’re incredibly important stops for birds en route to South America for the winter and back north in the summer. Birds will arrive and double their body weight in a matter of days feasting on shrimp and other creatures in the lakes. Some species of birds stop at one of the lakes, eat, then continue on to Bolivia without stopping.

Meanwhile, several hours away, a large city called Los Angeles was growing. Since LA was built in the middle of a desert, they’ve always had water issues. In 1913, the city completed construction of an aqueduct which took virtually all of the water out of the streams feeding Owens Lake. By 1924, the lake was completely dry and the birds that relied on it were gone. In 1941, the aqueduct was extended to take water out of the streams feeding Mono Lake, and by 1982, the lake had lost 31% of its surface area.

LA’s Department of Water and Power (DWP) was taken to court by a grassroots group called the Mono Lake Committee, and in 1994 a judge ruled they had to allow enough water into the lake to let it rise 20 feet. So far, it has risen nine, and significant bird recovery has already been observed. Owens Lake has also been somewhat recovered after a compromise between DWP and activists. However, it will never again occupy its former area.

LA has been a leading city in conserving water over the years, and they now use scarcely more than they did in the 1970s, in spite of a population growth of about a million people. I’m really grateful that conservation efforts have been undertaken and that DWP was able to compromise with activists. But I worry about how long these cities in the middle of deserts can be sustainable. Invariably, the populations of Phoenix, LA, and Las Vegas will continue to grow. Climate change is causing glaciers to melt and the reservoirs that feed them to evaporate faster. Once all possible water conservation has been implemented, what will these cities do?

Many environmentalists (and other analysts) have predicted future wars will be fought over water, and I suspect they’re very right. I wonder if these cities will hang on stubbornly, propelled by the fact that they’re situated in the richest country on earth. We have the military might necessary to secure water rights wherever we need them if it truly comes to that, though I doubt it will. Maybe desalinization technology will keep advancing until it’s cheap enough to let LA grow forever. I hope we go that route (cheap technology, hopefully not LA growing forever). But I worry. Water is recycled, yes, but it’s a finite resource in some senses. Only a certain amount can be used at a time. Groundwater is rapidly being depleted worldwide and the aquifers we pump from can take thousands of years to recharge, making them a very finite resource. We might solve climate change, and ignoring all the arguments about environmental justice and the right of species to exist (both of which are very important issues), some people somewhere will survive climate change relatively unscathed. But we truly can’t live without water, and in some ways, water shortage worries me more than a hotter planet (though the latter obviously contributes to the former).

I’m looking forward to learning more about water in the West, though. And yes, I know I need to read Cadillac Desert (currently on page 20).

We also went to Manzanar, a former Japanese internment camp, while we were in the Sierras, and I hope to write about that in the next few days.

The importance of water

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Escalante, Utah

I feel like I’ve been so busy writing I haven’t had time to journal. I wish we had a longer segment on water, though I suspect it will come up again. Water and grazing seem to me to be the defining political issues of the West—almost everything else that gets people riled up can be tied back to one of those things.

I read books about dams—A Story That Stands Like a Dam over the summer, and now I’m starting Cadillac Desert. I find it so hard to imagine growing up in a world where there was no environmental conscience, yet I look at and listen to the Reclamation boys and politicians during the dam-building frenzy and I have to conclude they had no sense of looking at ecosystems or of seeing things in a way not tied to human industry and profit. Even the conservationists saw wildness and wilderness as spiritual refuge for men, a place not to be civilization, a place to calm our troubled and overworked souls. I don’t think the word salmon was mentioned once in the things I read, though I’m also not sure they live in the Colorado. But some other animal, plant, ecological function must have been imperiled when they closed the floodgates in Page. Why did no Rachel Carson spring up? Or if they did, why did history not remember them? I suppose the movement had to progress in a certain way. Maybe no one could conceive of ecology until we’d idolized wilderness as a spiritual refuge. Maybe no one thought to listen for the birds or count the salmon. But I have a hard time believing that’s the case. Native Americans, who fished the salmon, knew runs were declining precipitously, and so did other in the Northwest. And I don’t know enough about the ecology of Glen Canyon to say what anyone noticed when.

I’m worried about water, though. More than climate change, though of course they’re related. Some people somewhere will do just fine on a hotter planet, and because I’m among the rich and the privileged, because I live at 48˚N, I will be saved. Not that it’s not important to fight and mitigate, and not that we shouldn’t all be thinking about climate justice. But I’ve never felt that fear or panic that I’m supposed to. Where I get that fear is water, and once again I’m grateful to be on the west of the mountains. But Cali makes my food, and it does so artificially, pretending it’s not a desert by drawing on the Colorado and irreplaceable groundwater. When there’s not enough water to irrigate California, what do I eat? When we run out of topsoil from erosion, where will my food grow? These are the things that keep me up at night. Climate change will accelerate them, too. We can survive heat, tornadoes, hurricanes, cold winters. But we need water to live.

Playing with fire

After a week of writing in the Sierra Nevada mountains, we had to come up with an epiphany—a personal essay about something we’ve learned or realized on Semester in the West. We spent all of today reading them out loud to each other, and it’s been fantastically interesting to hear what everyone’s been thinking about. Here’s mine.


Playing With Fire

In Wallowa County, I saw a forest that wasn’t a forest. A century of fire suppression had created a dense understory, with Grand Fir shrubs blanketing the floor and threatening to overshadow the pines. With nature left to its own devices, lightning strikes would have reduced the green brush to ash, nourishing the soil and triggering a release of seeds from the seratenous cones of the lodgepole pines. In the forest, devastation gives way to new life. Nature is a phoenix, constantly being reborn and reinvented after each blaze.

Humans, naturally, are uncomfortable with fires. Fires leave charred landscapes in their wake, interrupting our serene nature walks with the intrusion of death. More often than not, people who claim to love nature means that they love lush riparian vegetation or snow-covered alpine slopes. Fires burning out of control threaten safety and aesthetics. We want the wild, yes, but we want it safe for RVs, families, wheelchairs, God and scenic photos.

The Forest Service has come to recognize fire is needed, but also knows that uncontrolled, it poses a danger to human communities. Current policy in Wallowa-Whitman National Forest is to suppress all fires immediately unless they’re in a wilderness area. Forest management includes fuel removal and prescribed burns designed to mimic the effects of natural fires.

I saw several forests that had been treated to reduce fire danger during our stay in Wallowa County. Although they looked healthy, they concept of “managing” nature makes me uneasy. Past attempts to control nature and make it “better” have included hunting wolves to extinction in the lower 48 and building enough dams on the Columbia to make salmon passage nearly impossible. Underlying management is the assumption that we understand how ecosystems function, even though our knowledge is a process, constantly being changed, revised, updated and contradicted. Current strategies focus on restoring balance to the natural world rather than exploiting it for human use, changing us from blind destroyers to benevolent engineers. Though this outlook is an improvement, it relies on the unspoken assumption that we are separate from, different than and above nature. We have the power to bend natural forces to our will. We can put out fires, dam rivers, kill off and then reintroduce wolves. We are gods, and trees, bison, rivers, salmon and wolves are mere mortals.

Practically speaking, letting fires run their course is impossible. There is too much wood to let it all burn, too many people living nearby to risk a full-scale forest fire. Humans have sought to change nature and bend it to our will as long as we have existed, and controlling fire is no exception. But I see a separation in our current management that troubles me. A farmer, rancher or homesteader putting out a forest fire does so for immediate personal reasons—their entire livelihood will be reduced to ashes unless they act. They live with nature, aware of its destructive potential, but also know that it sustains them. The Forest Service putting out all fires as a matter of policy strikes me less as an act of self-preservation and more as a capitulation to the timber industry, which would rather not lose valuable board-feet, and to tourists, who would rather not see charred plant skeletons during their sojourns in Eden.

In the natural world, beauty and destruction dance dangerously around each other, opposing forces that could not exist independently. There are no snow-covered mountains without crevasses and avalanches. The sleek fur of a wolf is nourished by the blood and bone marrow of elk, slaughtered out of necessity and with indifference. The healthy forests which support thousands of reptiles, insects, shrubs, mammals and trees would cease to exist without fire. We cannot have one without the other. A farmer understands that the rains which nourish his crops today can bring floods which destroy his house tomorrow. A city dweller who backpacks during summer weekends may not understand that the blackened trees he sees are necessary to sustain the green forest he finds so beautiful.

Forested lands are managed for multiple uses, including timber, mining, grazing and recreation. I would ask only that habitat be added to this list, as an equal consideration. Natural communities have a right to exist, a right which must be weighed against the rights people claim to cut down trees, suppress fires and otherwise control nature for their own benefit. A healthy, functioning ecosystem includes periodic fires; if we suppress all fires, we deny trees the opportunity to thrive and animals the chance to live in a balanced ecosystem.

I do not believe fires should never be put out. People living in and near forests are understandably concerned about their homes, property and livelihood. However, people need to be realistic about the risks inherent in living by forests before they build vacation homes in the middle of wild areas. Fires can and do happen. Firefighters should not be expected to risk their lives for a house which was unwisely placed in an at-risk area, or for the future profit a private timber corporation hopes to make off of public lands. Some fires may need to be put out for public safety, but others can and should be left to burn.

The Oldest Tree on Earth

A few days ago, we got to go to the bristlecone pines groves high in the Sierra Nevada mountains. These gnarled trees are the oldest on earth, with some dated to about 4900 years. Hiking around at 10,000 feet, I remembered a story I’d read a while ago about the oldest tree on earth being cut down after a researcher got a tree corer stuck in the tree. I did some research and talked to the ranger, and discovered that tree was another bristlecone in Great Basin National Park. Because that tree was cut, the oldest living tree on Earth is now here, in the Sierra Nevada, a mere two miles from where we were. Our task was to write something as we pondered the bristlecones, so here’s what I came up with.


The Oldest Tree on Earth

When I was nine, I read a story in Muse about a researcher who cut down the oldest tree on Earth. Trying to age the bristlecone pine, his tree corer had gotten stuck, and the Forest Service gave him permission to kill the tree to retrieve his equipment. When the tree had fallen, its age was finally revealed. Reading the story, I put down my magazine, fighting back tears as I wondered about the thing we choose to value.

Now, as I see these ancient trees for the first time, I realize the story I read tells more than I originally thought. Suppose the corer had gotten stuck in another tree, not quite so old, perhaps a younger sibling. The trunk would have succumbed to the same chainsaw, the thousand dollar piece of equipment saved from its entrails. No one would have seen fit to write an elegy for a tree only 4000 years old, not quite holding the all-important record. The incident would have been written off, forgotten. No one mourns the second-best.

Still, my mind tries to fathom the sequence of events that ranked a mass-produced piece of scientific equipment above one of the oldest trees on Earth, for surely the Forest Service was not ignorant of the age bristlecones live to. Where were the conservationists and concerned citizens offering to donate money to replace the corer? Where was the conscience of the student, the bureaucrat who once loved trees before he was trained to see them as a commodity? How do so many of us, knowing trees are alive, refuse to see them as living? Some loggers have sworn they’ve heard trees scream as they’re pulled from their roots, torn apart and hacked into pieces.

Walking through the bristlecones, I take pictures. Frame after frame, taking and taking with tears in my heart because I have nothing to give. I wonder what these trees have seen over the years. I wonder if any of them screamed when they lost their oldest brother. I want to apologize for hubris and capitalism, but it is not my apology to give, nor theirs to accept. I walk on, my heart heavy, and I hear nothing bul silence from the oldest trees on Earth.

Conquest and civilization

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: near Lone Pine, CA

context: We visited Manzanar, which was an internment camp during World War II for thousands of Japanese-Americans. It’s now a National Historical Site, sitting in the shadow of the Sierra-Nevada mountains.

When will we ever learn? I’ve been to Cape Coast, Ghana, seen the fortresses where thousands of Africans lived like cattle before setting off to cross the sea. One-third would never set foot on American shores. This land, before it was home to whites keeping Japanese-Americans prisoner, belonged to the Paiutes, just as the rest of the West belonged to people with no concept of owning the space between ground and sky.

The history of Western Civilization is written in conquest. I reap the benefits; I don’t want the guilt. My legacy is written with barbed wire, chains, whips and blankets full of smallpox. We declare grand conquests—conquer the plains and prairies, Manifest Destiny—and fence off, lock up, kill and bury anything and anyone that stands in the way. We put things in boxes—this is nature, this is where cattle graze. This is (white) America, this is your reservation.

How can I apologize for actions I never chose? How can I justify the benefits in my life that have come at the expense of another’s freedom, self-determination or life?

Managing nature

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Lone Pine, California

We seek to control nature, but we’ve forgotten how to live here. In ignorance and with hubris, we slaughtered the wolves and drove away the beavers. We took fires out of forests and replaced them with prescribed burns. We plowed prairies, killed the bison and planted wheat, assuming the rain would follow. When it didn’t, we damned and diverted rivers to feed cities in the middle of deserts.

It’s not that people have never changed nature. But we’ve never done it on this scale with this attitude. Native Americans set fires and built dams, but they also understood themselves as part of the natural world. They knew that a relationship based on taking what they could from the earth would not be sustainable.

Our culture is beginning to understand this. We know wolves are needed for functional ecosystems, so we’re reintroducing them. We write Environmental Impact Statements to get funding to burn parts of forest which should have been left to burn naturally. Some people are even starting to talk about taking down the dams.

These solutions will help restore ecosystems. They are vital, necessary and absolutely should be done. But they still leave me with a bitter taste in my mouth. Can we truly restore nature without learning to live in balance with it? If the extent of our land ethic is that we go from ignorant destroyers to benevolent engineers, what are we telling ourselves about our relationship to nature?

I think back to a book I read called Thought to Exist in the Wild: Awakening From the Nightmare of Zoos. The author, Derrick Jensen spoke about the human cruelty and arrogance which underscores the idea of a zoo. Living in a cage, an animal loses its soul, its wild essence. You may go up to the bars, see the sign telling you you’re looking at a grizzly bear, Ursus arctos, or a wolf, Canis lupus. But until you’ve seen that animal in the wild, where it was born, where is knows how to life—you’ve never really seen a bear or a wolf. You’ll always be looking at a shadow, a prisoner.

I think back to Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, and it seems like a similar shadow. We’ve taken something wild—a forest—and tamed it to suit our needs. We preserve it under multiple use, but somehow habitat and intrinsic value never make it on the list. We’ve been doing this for so long that no one in living memory knows what the forest was like before cows came and industrial timber took over.

I know it’s naive and idealistic, but I want that forest back. I want our land ethic back, one based on balance and give and take, not rape, pillage and plunder. We need practical solutions to problems, so for the moment, I accept the need for radio collars, prescribed burns and fuel reduction. But we’re going to need more than that to carry us through in the long run. We’re going to need girls growing up knowing the plants two jackrabbits might eat if they got hungry hiking through a desert covered in sagebrush*. We’re going to need grandparents teaching their grandchildren to hunt deer and make jam out of wild blackberries. We’re going to need people willing to work hard to take care of themselves, people who are ok being a little too war, or cold and walking places they need to go. None of this will be easy. This isn’t about fifty simple things you can do to save the earth. It’s not even about fifty difficult things. It’s nothing less than a shift in the entire way we perceive our relationship to the natural world. We’re not gods, and we’re not meant to control everything. The sooner we accept that, the more likely it is that earth will survive with us.

*This was a reference to an essay that writer Michael Branch read to us at his home in Reno, Nevada, where we camped for a night. The essay was published in the January/February 2011 issue of Orion and can be found here.

Potatoes in Ontario

We’re in the middle of a writing week in the Eastern Sierra Mountains right now. Our camp is gorgeous, sandwiched between the highest mountains in the lower 48 and overlooking a valley of granite pillars that look like great climbing.

Our first assignment was to write a poem inspired by Richard Hugo’s Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg. We were supposed to take a town we’d driven through and write based on what we saw, inventing stories from a thirty-second glance. So, here you go:

Potatoes in Ontario

Potatoes move through here like the river
before it dried up and farmers found
themselves buying onions in the
gas station parking lot. Those tracks come from
Idaho, where thirty years ago
potatoes sold with pride at the local
farmer’s market. They board a train west
mixed into freight cars with the dreams of
migrant brown hands and a young boy dropping
coins into his piggybank to someday buy a tractor.

Haven’t you eaten these potatoes? Sliced
deep-fried packaged frozen in the plant
at the other end of the rail line. Can’t you taste
the desperation in them, the girl working
graveyard terrified of mailboxes, letters
from the Army and all she’s ever wanted
is to wear her grandmother’s white dress.
Do you remember the days before
food meant smokestacks, Hazmat vans parked outside?

The river used to know, the farms dried up
too. The only restaurant in town
serves stale toast with three kinds of jam made
from Iowa corn. Pregnant women
are advised not to drink the water.
The only chef is old and the only
dish he remembers is regret served
with a side of potatoes.



It’s inspired by Ontario, Oregon, which has a single Ore-Ida plant and not much else. I’ve driven through there three of four times, and every time I do, I start inventing people and life stories that revolve around that plant. So it was nice to get some of that on paper. More writings to come…we’re doing our first epiphanies this week as well.

Playing in the forest

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Schulman Grove, Inyo National Forest, California

                        

Sometimes I wonder about the wisdom of separation. The bristlecone in front of me would make the perfect fort, tree house or pirate ship for adventurous kids. As a child, I loved playing outside but got bored visiting national parks, where everything worth doing was fenced off. Ed Abbey didn’t learn to love the desert by reading about it on a taxpayer-funded National Forest sign.

And yet, we must preserve, so we stay on the trails. Perhaps there are simply too many of us to use the wilderness without harming it. Abbey wanted his deserts and canyonlands preserved, but not so thousands of other people could come raft down the Colorado. Even non-industrial tourism can be carried to excess. Even the most well-intentioned among us can do damage.

But I hope we never forget this, in our quest to keep ourselves separate from nature in order to save it—children need to play outside.

Camp life on SITW

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Big Pine, California, near Mono Lake

Out here, my body feels like my own. When I’m hungry, I eat and feel full—no deluding myself past hunger with a half-meal of potato chips, plain rice or the remnants of a two-day old stir-fry pilfered from the dining hall. Two hours later, my stomach remains calm—no mysterious pains, no unexplained bouts of diarrhea. I drink tea every day in such quantities that I pee like I’m supposed to—more than twice a day, clear and copious, making the dusty ground smell like it’s just rained. I sleep as close to the sun as I ever have in my life, and when it’s not too cold, my liner and sleeping bag feel more cozy and perfect than the most luxurious bed I’ve ever slept in. Even now, when I’m bleeding, I can barely tell—the cramps that have paralyzed me past the point of walking are completely absent.

Living outside, you feel everything. If it’s cold outside, you’re cold. If it’s warm, you’re hot. If it rains, you get wet. And it’s always dusty, a fine layer coating you, your clothes, books and even choking its way inside your nose, turning your boogers black for weeks at a time.

Here, small things trigger emotions. A single lump of brown sugar dissolving in my mouth or a particularly beautiful sunrise feels like heaven, or at least as close to it as I’m ever likely to be in this life. Similarly, heat or a side glance from someone can ruin my afternoon, causing me to become grumpy, brood and generally refuse to be happy. The good, of course, comes far more frequently and keeps me in a near-constant state of contentment and excitement, alternating between the two sinusoidally as the content of my belly grow and shrink. Out here, food is a constant source of joy. Food nourishes you, leaves you feeling more than just full. Food keeps you going, keeps you human, keeps you humble.

Thoughts while hiking near Reno, NV

It’s hot enough you can feel your breath evaporating the second you breathe out, and I’m still walking. We set off from a house outside of Reno, following no trail, wandering across the public lands that comprise 85% of Nevada. The day gets relentlessly hotter and there is no shade for miles and miles. The endless geology of basin and range is spread out before me, each hill identical, indistinguishable, insurmountable. I’ve moved past dehydration into madness, my steps zigzagging nonsensically through an ocean of sagebrush. I no longer try to preserve my legs; they brush through briars and thorns, so covered in scratches that they look white. Up and up and up, each step a fresh battle, willing myself to continue. I make promises I know I can’t keep—on top of this ridge is ice water, a cold shower, peppermint iced tea. Up, up and I break all of my promises, reaching the crest to reveal an identical mountain in the distance. The downhill should be relief, but my knees protest and it’s as much work to keep myself from running uncontrolled down the mountain as it was to walk up the rise. I find myself wishing once again for the slow trudge towards heaven, where the end is always just a little bit further. Here, I can see the full extent of what I have yet to accomplish. Down, down and there’s dust in my nose, in my eyes somehow despite the glasses, choking me, trying its best to consume me and turn me into a dry mass of uniformity. I push on, resisting with the knowledge that I am mostly water, some part water, at least enough water to separate me from the dust. Down, down, so tired I no longer care if I survive, one foot in front of the other and suddenly flat. No more slope, flat ground, just step, step, step. I see the house on the horizon. How far, I no longer care. It’s flat, and I step on through the dust and sagebrush, still crazy with heat and knowing that this, I could walk forever.

Reno: the real West

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: outside Reno, Nevada

Finally, I feel like I’m in the West. I mean, we’ve been west since we left, but this is West. It’s a quality now, not a place. For me, West is defined by an awkward balance between wilderness and civilization, and I mean this on a purely personal level. When I’m in the West, I’m traveling in cars with iPods, a phone with patchy reception and sometimes a computer. I go through places with electricity, running water and free-standing houses. But I’m always half-wild—a shower within the last week and a half, but more than three days ago. A dirty, dusty sleeping bag to call home. I’m exploring, playing in the dirt and I’m in school, taking notes on forestry. I’ve grown to love these contradictions. A gas station stop on the way from A to B does nothing for me. But the same stop on a trip, a roadtrip in the West, holds so much promise. Bathrooms, not cat holes! Toilet paper! Candy! Mirrors! Everything is cause for celebration. Everything could be your last chance for a day or a week. Last chance for running water, for ice cubes, for processed snack food! And we pile back in the suburbans, still dirty, a bit tired, but so incredibly alive. 

Showers

I took something resembling a shower today. It fulfilled all the supposed functions of a shower—my body and hair are clean and smell like a variety of synthesized compounds designed to mimic flowers in nature. But I’ve come to realize that a shower isn’t really defined by its practical function. It’s a cultural ritual, something we have a host of other associations with. Showers mean steam, a mirror fogged up, a bathroom smelling like soap and shampoo. They mean getting warm after a cold, rainy day. They wake you up at the beginning of a long day of school, they rinse off the sweat of competition, they cool you off on summer evenings.

Here, in the outdoors, a shower has none of these associations. I can’t relax and think about how to spend my free evening. I can’t plan an essay while slowly rubbing soap across my skin. I can’t breathe in the faux-floral mist when I get out. Stripped down to its bare essentials, bathing is an unglamorous process. I strip. I realize how dirty I am. I dump cold water over my head, praying it doesn’t start raining again. I lather up, rub shampoo in my hair. I wish the shower nozzle worked properly, but it doesn’t, so I dump freezing water over my head a second time. I shake off, towel dry and put on clean underwear and a shirt I’ve only worn for two days instead of six.

I find myself town between pragmatism and savoring the moment. If everyone took showers like we do, the world would need much less water. But I love the cultural values and experiences that go along with taking a long, warm shower inside. I’d never really thought to separate the two experiences in my head, but they are fundamentally different. I don’t have any profound lessons to draw from this. Just something I realized when I was naked and shivering in the middle of a forest. Though I think no matter how you do it, the end result—clean hair—is fantastic.

Biotic potential and existence value

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Baker National Forest, Baker County, Oregon

Today, we cut willows to plant by the creek tomorrow. Willows remind me of biotic potential. They’re the natural source of salicylic acid; they’re the reason humans discovered aspirin. I’ve always been a bit wary of drugs. I’ll take hardcore things for serious problems—horse pills of ciprofloxacin when I got sick in Ghana—but I’m not a fan of NSAIDs (aka non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) in general. I feel irrational, because I’d gladly take a tincture of willow bark to relieve pain. Chemically, there’s no difference. So why the hesitancy? Part of me just wants to be a hippie, and part of me is a competitive masochist who wants to push through the pain and let it wash over me. I had to re-evaluate this philosophy over the summer, when my cramps got so bad I couldn’t stand up and was on the verge of passing out at work. I took two tiny pink pills and magically felt better. I felt good, amazing, but it seemed like I was letting the pain win and forgoing the humility I was supposed to learn. It’s healthy to know we’re human. It’s healthy to feel out of control sometimes. To feel weak.

But humans don’t like to feel weak. We always want to be in control, both as individuals and as a culture, a civilization. The most common reason I hear for preventing species extinction goes back to that same willow. If we lost another plant, frog, insect or fungi, we lost their unique DNA. We lose the opportunity to study them, to reproduce and mass produce their compounds, We lose the cure for cancer, the keys to medical progress, the fountain of youth. All this and more, lurking unsuspectingly in the Amazon or the great trenches of the Pacific Ocean. How many lives could we save, if only we brought back the habitat?

This defense reeks of arrogance and pragmatism. We have a long and bloody history of assuming we’re the only species that matters on this planet. Even those who’ve gotten past that idea act as though we have a right, a responsibility, to manipulate nature as we see fit.

I want to cry foul. The rainforests aren’t here to cure our diseases. I think most of us know that. But to expect people to care about things for their own sake—how far can we get with that? We care about things almost perfectly based on how much we will be affected. Even Ed Abbey spoke of wilderness as a place for men to retreat from civilization, a place to wage guerilla warfare against a fascist government. People cry over our disappearing rainforests, so charismatic and colorful. People care about polar bears, pandas, tigers, wolves. Who loses sleep over endangered snails or spiders? Who cries for the lichen?

And should we care? It’s easier to say that a polar bear has an intrinsic right to exist. Does a tree have that same right? How far are we willing to extend it? Until it interferes with a human life? A human’s ability to make money? Or merely dislike and distaste? If the planet we make is one we can support ourselves on, does anything else matter for its own sake?

I want to say yes. I believe in those rights, at least until they interfere with human safety. But it’s so hard to see the world from the perspective of another species. I hope we can get there. Because we need to wake up, and I don’t want to live on a world of only us and the things we immediately need.

Getting past the hurdles

After nearly two weeks in the field, I’ve reached the first bump. This is the stage of the program where I desperately want to be back in civilization. All my underwear smells disgusting. I’ve been wearing the same shirt for five days. It’s pouring rain again. My sleeping bag keeps freezing at night. I haven’t had a proper shower since we left.

Except I think it’s also at this stage where small things start to become really amazing. I splashed creek water on my face today and it felt like the best bath of my life. The view this morning was absolutely gorgeous because it rained all night—mist and fog in the distance, a mosaic of blues and greens across the forest and pasture in the distance. Eating apples has become the best snack in the world—I’m trying to break my addiction to processed sugar.

Somehow, at the end of the day, it all evens out. I know I sleep better and longer here than I ever have at home or school. I eat better, I feel better, and even my perpetually angry stomach has calmed down. Sometimes, I wish we had real shelter, a heater, a shower. But sometimes, I think the whole rest of the country would be better off with less.

I want to be an ecologist

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Baker National Forest, Baker County, Oregon

context: We watched a documentary about a few OSU ecologists doing field work in Yellowstone National Park and documenting the way streams have recovered after wolf reintroduction, because wolves keep elk populations in check, preventing them from overgrazing stream banks.

God, I want to be an ecologist right now. It’s the cheesy music. The cheesy music always get me. And the wolves, the pictures of wolves running through snow and the hope that if I live long enough, I might see that happen someday. I love the way nature works so well. Ecology is like peeling back the layers of an onion. Today, it doesn’t seem scary. All we need to do is bring back wolves and cougars and lynxes and everything else will come back. It seems to beautifully simple and happy. Until you get to the people, and the politics. That screws everything up. Why did I have to pick ES-politics? ES-Bio is full of the possibility of redemption. Politics makes for good papers, good thinking and studying but no optimism. I’ve watched C-SPAN, and even on issues everyone agrees are important, half the things people stand up and say are ridiculous, tangential or obstructive. What chance do wolves have?

I love the fact that you can’t replace wolves. We can try to mimic their ecological functions, but we can’t impart that same fear in elk populations. We shoot indiscriminately, construct fences and do our best to be seen as the top predator, but we can’t pretend to be wolves, try as we might. Wolves live because of elk. The two are intimately intertwined in a way we could never hope to equal. Which is why we need them, so much, to keep that ecological balance.

And I hate the idea of shooting wolves. It pains me so much, viscerally, to think of that bullet piercing through layers of grey hair, the wolf falling, bleeding onto the ground. But I think that hunt might be necessary for wolves to live with ranchers. If you take control away from people, they feel powerless. They act on their own. I think, I hope, that allowing a hunt will help bridge that divide. I hope those few wolves that are shot will help the rest survive. I hope wolves will learn to fear humans, to run at night, to make themselves invisible. I know, if we let them, they will survive. They’re fighters by nature.

Seeing cows

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Baker National Forest, Baker County, Oregon

Today, I went running without my glasses on. I saw the same landscapes I‘ve been seeing all week, but without the sharp focus I’m so used to. Somehow, I think that blur makes it easier to see. Sight becomes a matter of color and pattern, general characteristics spread out across the entire skyline. The specific details tend to fade. A black dot on the horizon moves closer and closer, until suddenly you realize it’s a cow ten feet from you. And then you feel vulnerable, realizing that the cows of the world, organized into reasonably sized herds, could wrest control of everything from people if they put their minds to it. A single cow could trample me to death, leaving my body bleeding in the road until someone noticed I hadn’t come back from mg run. Yet they eat so placidly, wander our public lands and follow each other calmly to slaughter in an industrial warehouse. Tick. Slit the carteroid artery. Tock. Dripping blood. Tick. A resigned moo. Tock. The line keeps moving.

Cows seem almost to belong in this system. They’re thoroughly domesticated, stubborn perhaps in insignificant matters, but complacent as cogs in the wheel of industry. I don’t know this for certain; I’ve never spent time with a cow, birthed a calf or played my part in the slaughter. But looking into a cow’s eyes, I don’t see the wild. They’ve had it tamed out of them.

Can there be honor in a kill like this? Can the predator kill its pretty without the delicate dance between the two that has existed since time immemorial? I don’t think our slaughterhouses and pastures honor that dynamic, but perhaps they honor what the animal is, in itself. This seems like a better medium, though we’ve raised them to be that way. I’ve never killed a cow. I’ve never killed any mammal at all. In fact, I believe the most highly evolved murder I can be held responsible for was boiling a moonsnail and eating it whole on a breach trip freshman year of high school. And yet, I eat meat, after eleven years of refusing. I eat it happily, relishing the taste of flesh, overenthusiastic after so many years of trying to live what I believed was a better way. I eat is uneasily, feeling insincere in my excitement because I’ve never proved to myself that I know what it is to nourish myself with the flesh of another living being. I eat it hoping of a better world, where food is transparent and I won’t have to worry that the labels I’ve decided to screen my food by don’t actually mean anything about the health of my body, the animal, the ecosystem, the planet. I eat it, and I feel nourished. This feeling is what I go back to when I have nothing else to make it ok.