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.

Ecology scares me

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

Ecology scares me. It’s like seeing who’s pulling the strings, except when you peel back the curtain, you discover an intricate device, a perpetual motion machine and part of it’s been smashed by some careless old white man and now a bunch of people are trying to rebuild it to work but they don’t know what it’s supposed to look like except of one grainy photo from the 1930s that only shows half the machine and is a bit out of focus.

Sometimes, I forget why I care about ecosystems. When fixing them seems impossible, I convince myself they’re pretty, but we’ll be ok without them working perfectly like they did before. Sometimes I wonder if I could be right, but I know I’m not. Sometimes I wish I was.

I wish every position in the Forest Service was elected by salmon, wolves, beavers, cows, ranchers, aspen, hippies, mice, cougars, grasshoppers and bears. I wish the Secretary of the Interior was subject to review by a panel with more than one species on it.

I like science and cross sections. It’s nice to do real work and be outside instead of just complaining about the very real fact that the world’s going to hell.

Learning ecology

We’ve moved camps to the other side of Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, near Baker City. This week is the first week of our ecology field course, and we’re working with a hydrologist from the Forest Service collecting data about the degradation of riparian habitat. It’s been really cool to get out in the field, and really interesting learning how ecosystems are so intimately connected.

Before wolves were removed from the ecosystem here, they hunted elk and deer. Now, without predation to keep them in check, ungulate populations have grown. They can graze without fear of being hunted, and as a result, they’re overgrazing aspen stands significantly. Aspen which previously would have grown into trees are stunted and don’t get above shrub height. And beavers build their lodges and dams out of mature aspen and other trees that grow along streams. So now beavers are having a harder time making dams, and they’re being trapped out of entire areas. Their dams allow streams to expand across a floodplain when water levels get high, and without them, streams are eroding at their own banks, creating deep channels that move too quickly and narrowly to recharge groundwater. Whole areas that should be flooded are dry because beavers aren’t here anymore. And now, cattle graze in these areas, further contributing to erosion and eating some of the species beavers rely on.

Everything depends on everything else. With beavers back in place, we’d see less flooding, more groundwater recharge, fields which wouldn’t need so much irrigation, fields where more grass could grow. Theoretically, it would benefit everyone in the long run, because there would be more grass for cattle, more for elk. But it’s still legal to trap beavers in Oregon, without limit, regardless of location.

This is what an ecosystem is. You move one thing, seemingly insignificant, and the ripples cascade outward, changing everything in their path. This is why we worry about upsetting natural balances. This is why we want the wolves to come back.