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.

Taking a side

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: After a week in Wallowa County, where we talked to ranchers about the negative impacts wolf reintroduction has had on their livelihood, we moved to Baker National Forest to do a week of ecology-related fieldwork with Suzanne Fouty, of the US Forest Service. Much of our curriculum, centered on the importance of having wolves in ecosystems to maintain natural balance between wolves and elk, which in turn keeps streams healthy. Also the coldest week of the semester—slicing cantaloupes for breakfast in 15 degree weather, anyone?

It’s about 9:30pm and there’s already ice on my sleeping bag. FML.

Anyway…now we’re hearing the other side of the wolves, and whole ecosystems, and I wonder what we want to accomplish. Is our goal, as young people, to take in as much information as possible so we can eventually form a firmly held opinion and be split into a side in the debate? Or do we learn this to learn the art of compromise, so we can make half changes and accomplish things without having that fire burning inside us? I guess it’s not that black and white, and I hope more than anything else that we’re learning how to be good people, even with our convictions. I want that fire, but maybe without the certainty. I’m not sure that’s even possible, and I feel too in flux to say anything certain about what I believe. Some days, I think a creative team of economists, environmentalists and politicians can save us from our own hubris. Some days, I think Western Civilization is going to collapse under the mountain of trash we’ve been building. Some days, I wish I had a chainsaw and dynamite so I could fight. Other times, I give up, go back to ordering drinks in single-use cups and running the AC in my car. Some days, I think eating real food is the most holy thing I can do, and some days I’d just rather be a person, with all of the privileges that entails. And no matter what, I’m never sure.

Ranchers and self-sufficiency

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: After a week of learning about ranching, wolf reintroduction, and the tensions between ecologists and ranchers in the area, we invited a bunch of ranchers to dine with us on our last night in Wallowa County, Oregon. Todd Nash is one of the ranchers who came to the dinner.

So yesterday we had our 41 person dinner with the ranchers and the environmentalists and biologists and whoever. I wasn’t a huge fan of the serious group discussion, but I had a really great conversation with rancher Todd Nash and Elli about USDA approved slaughterhouses and food production in general. I asked Todd what he thought about grass-fed meat, and he said that’s all he used to eat as a kid, and organic produce because his family grew it all themselves, and it was really weird for him to see people start wanting those things as consumers because it was just how he grew up. I wish I knew how to make a living off the land like that. I wish more people in general did. I feel like we lost all this knowledge about how to take care of ourselves sometime in the last fifty years and now there’s a growing movement to re-learn it. I wish I were more like Dana—baking bread and buying fruit by the tree and canning stuff. I suppose I can always learn, but I wish I’d learned as a kid from Nonny or Grandma or something. I wish parents cared as much about their children knowing how to garden as they did about their children doing well on the SAT. I feel like providing for yourself like that builds good things—self-reliance, a work ethic, a sense of community…I’m sure I’m romanticizing it a bit, but I see something different in the way those ranchers talk. It’s not a hobby or even just a job for them; it’s a way of life.

Quick update

I took my first shower yesterday. Really, it was more like half of a shower, because the shower bag ran out of water before I got around to washing my back or hair (fortunately, I hadn’t put shampoo in yet). But I don’t even care that I’m not totally clean. It’s enough just to be outside and not smell terrible. We’re meeting the County Commissioner to talk about wolves, so Phil encouraged us to look nice. Consequently, I took off my Beer Mile shirt and put on a dress over jeans and under two tank tops with a cowboy hat. I feel like quite the outdoorsy fashionista.

I’ve been really into photography the last few days. I haven’t felt this inspired to just get out there and shoot in a while, so I’m hoping to have a good visual record of the semester, in addition to some nice shots of people and scenery. I took a few good close-ups of other Westies, and I’ve now decided my goal for the semester is to get a “glamour shot” of everyone on the trip. So far, I have six. I’m pretty excited about it. I hope eventually we’ll get enough bandwidth that I can post some photos here, but I’m not holding my breath on that one.

That’s all for now, since we have to load up the suburbans. I promise a more substantial update later, but in the meantime, check out the Semester in the West website: http://semesterinthewest.org/

Wolves revisited

My relationship with the wild has always been intimately tied to wolves. I went on three week-long wolf tracking expeditions in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho during high school, and those three weeks did much to solidify my love of spending time outside, not showering and sleeping under the stars. Even after camp ended, I followed the wolves’ political situation intensely, especially when US Fish and Wildlife began to talk about removing the Rocky Mountain reintroduced populations from the Endangered Species List (wolves were reintroduced in Yellowstone National Park and Central Idaho in the mid-1990s after being driven to extinction by humans). I wrote letters and tried to get other to do the same. When they made the decision to delist wolves, I cried. Their removal from the list meant wolves would have a hunting season and could be shot by anyone with a permit—something akin to sacrilege in my mind.

This week, I got to understand the other side of the wolf story. I thought I understood the opposing views well enough. Conservation groups wanted wolves back because they were a fundamental part of the natural ecosystem that our actions had carelessly removed. Ranchers objected because wolves might kill cattle, but coyotes already killed cattle, and Defenders of Wildlife had set up a fund to compensate ranchers for wolf depredation. Hunters objected because they wanted to hunt elk, but elk populations had overshot the ecosystem’s carrying capacity and were overgrazing. Obviously, conservationists had the better set of arguments, and everyone else could learn to adapt to wolves.

Of course, it isn’t that simple. I knew it wasn’t, but I never heard the other side of the story from someone who’s lived it, not just from the Defenders of Wildlife website. But yesterday, we got to talk to a group of five ranchers in Wallowa County who have seen the effects of wolves on their cattle (wolves have now migrated into Eastern Oregon from Idaho, with about 14 wolves in two packs). As it turns out, depredation is only one of the many ways wolves cause losses for ranchers, and even when compensation is available for livestock losses, it seems laughably inadequate. One rancher told us last year, wolves killed 20 calves out of the 450 he had out (typical losses for ranchers in this area are about 1%). He was able to get compensation from Defenders of Wildlife for one of those animals. In addition, calves often weigh less due to stress from increased predation. In total, he estimated losses per cow from all wolf-related sources at $250 per head—a large chunk of income for a rancher barely making ends meet. Another rancher pointed out that by far the largest losses experienced with wolves in the area were property losses on the ranch itself, because no one’s interested in buying a ranch with wolves in the area.

Listening to the ranchers speak, I was reminded of salmon. Salmon have been driven to the brink of extinction by a variety of sources—dams, habitat destruction, overfishing and cattle grazing in spawning grounds. Every time a new dam is proposed, environmentalists say this is it, this is going to be the straw that breaks the salmon’s back. For ranchers, that straw is wolves. The American cowboy is a dying breed—the average age of a rancher in the US is 58. Ranchers are subject to ridicule and hate from almost every environmental group in the country over their use of public lands for grazing. They have to comply with environmental regulations about salmon habitat and riparian areas. They’re often booed when they go to meetings about policy to give their perspective or barred from participating in the first place. And even when they don’t have to deal with the politics of ranching, they’re lucky to break even by the end of the year. So naturally, they feel threatened.

I still think wolf reintroduction is important. I think wolves have an important role to play in the ecosystem. But if we want to keep wolves, we might have to compromise. We might have to move slowly. We absolutely have to listen. I don’t like the idea of hunting wolves, but if they need to be hunted to stay here, I might be able to live with that. I don’t know what the life of a wolf is worth, or how you measure it against the life of a cow, the lifestyle of a rancher or the value of a living ecosystem. I know there aren’t easy answers to these questions, and I know things are never as simple as they seem between the walls of a classroom.

Fire and the unnatural

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: Starvation Ridge, Wallowa National Forest, Wallowa County, Oregon

context: We spent a few days this week learning about fire and forest management practices in National Forests. Fires play an extremely important ecological role in forest ecosystems—tall trees are resistant to ground fires, and some species have cones which are triggered to release seeds by extreme heat, ensuring the survival of the species after the fire. Periodic fires eliminate much of the understory in forests. The vision we’ve grown up with—forests with a thick, dense understory—is actually artificial, a byproduct of the Forest Service’s policy of fire suppression. In an attempt to reserve some of the ecological damage caused by fire suppression policies, the Forest Service now deliberately removes fuel from forests—to prevent catastrophic crown fires—and also selectively burns some areas of forest.

* * *

What is natural? What is unnatural? And is the natural inherently better? These are the things I find myself wondering as we learn about forestry. I wish humans had never interfered with forests on the scale we have, and I wish that, left to their own devices, forests would return to the way they were. I’ve read entire books deriding forest “management” as a euphemism for authorizing clear cuts, but I don’t think it’s really that simple. Is there value in these cuts, designed to restore the ecosystem to a past point in time? The ecologist, the environmentalist in me, wants to see spaces free from human interference. They want to let the fires burn and restore the natural order. If our version of nature involves spending millions to suppress fires and millions more to reduce fuel and deliberately set select areas ablaze, what do we become? I see arrogance in the notion that we can “manage” nature, anthropocentrism in the idea that we should. I’m having trouble letting go of wilderness as other, trouble justifying our meddling by saying it’s nothing new. I can’t decide what to accept as given. Timber harvest on public lands? The timber industry? Capitalism? Civilization? On any given day, all four of those might be fundamentally unsustainable. Tomorrow, we have no limits to growth. The next day, civilization itself it the culprit, choking the life out of nature. If timber is a given, the management we heard about today seems to make sense. But I want spaces for nature too. Is that too impractical, too idealistic? Aside from my human values, does nature have an independent right to exist, and if so, to exist free of human influence? People have always shaped their land; it’s not the concept so much as the scale that keeps me up at night. What would a wolf say? A lodgepole pine? A bird? Am I too emotional for asking these questions?

I read Grassland over the summer it had someone quoted saying, “I can’t imagine a more boring world than one made just of people and what they eat.” If we reduce everything in our world to serve us in some way, to produce for our benefit, what do we lose? If we bend nature to our will, sand down its rough edges to suit our society, what does that make us? We control what grows in the soil. We stop floods and fires. We heat and cool our buildings far beyond the limits of nature. We are not a natural people. And if we lose that connection, what do we become?

Get naked

It’s official: there’s no better way to get to know a group of people than getting completely naked in front of them. Usually, this is accomplished by playing bonding games like step into the circle, where a statement is read (eg. “step into the circle if your parents are divorced”), and everyone the statement applies to steps forward. Sometimes, you get naked by reading poetry in front of strangers or having a discussion about your love lives at 3am. I’m a big fan of all of these methods. But sometimes, you have to cut to the chase.

Here on Semester in the West, we prefer a direct approach. Thus, I am pleased to report that yesterday afternoon, about half of the Westies shed their clothes in broad daylight to participate in an age-old adolescent bonding ritual often known as “skinny dipping”. It started out innocently enough: we went on a hike on a fairly cold day up a stream in the Eagle Cap Wilderness. We reached a place where the stream widened enough to constitute a swimming hole, and our arrival coincided with a small break in sunlight. The possibility of swimming had been mentioned, and I scoffed at the idea, since it was obviously far too cold to even contemplate getting wet. I soon discovered that half of my peers didn’t share my views on this topic, and I stuck my head over the edge of the rock to peer below at the brave few. And to my surprise, I saw about twelve buck naked people shrieking and jumping around in the ice cold water.

So of course, I had to join them. I reached the makeshift beach after most everyone had gotten out. I shed my clothes slowly, until I was down to a sports bra and spandex. I glanced around. Four guys were standing, arms outstretched, drying off in the sun. None had put clothes on. None seemed to mind I was looking at them. And that was enough. I stripped off my underwear and dove in. I came up screaming and hyperventilating and swearing at the freezing cold water. I ran back out and stood, arms spread wide, shivering. I looked around at the naked Westies around me, and I felt what it means to be truly free.

Wolves and ranchers

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: Salt Creek Summit , Wallowa National Forest, Wallowa County, Oregon

I learned to love the wilderness because of wolves. In high school, after I tired of the gossip and judgment I always seemed to find at summer camp, I decided to try something different. I signed up for a week-long wolf tracking expedition run buy Wilderness Awareness School in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, a few hours outside of Boise, Idaho. On our first night, the counselors asked our group of twelve to sit in a circle with our eyes closed.

“I want you to think about the wolves,” our counselor said. “Now, I want you to feel them. Feel yourself connecting with the wolves and point in the direction you feel them in.”

Skeptical as I was, a part of me felt pulled. I pointed, extending my left arm in a tentative line.

“Open your eyes,” we were told.

I looked around and saw our entire camp (except my best friend, who was never one for hippie-inspired exercises) pointing in the same direction. That night, the stillness of the meadows was regularly punctuated by howls. And the next morning, we saw an entire wolf pack in that same direction.

By the end of the week, I was a convert. I’d dissected an elk kill, made plaster casts of tracks and heard the story of the fight over wolf reintroduction in the Rockies. I came back for two more summers, then continued to follow the wolves’ story religiously. When US Fish & Wildlife began to talk about delisting wolves, I wrote pleading letters to members of Congress and federal bureaucrats, begging them to reconsider. When I found out the decision had been made, I cried. The idea of hunting wolves seemed more than just repugnant; to me, it bordered on sacrilegious. I understood why wolves were controversial. I knew ranchers and hunters had legitimate reasons for wanting to keep wolves from living near them. But the physical act of picking up a gun and deliberately setting out to kill a wolf was utterly incomprehensible to me.

I had come to equate wolves with wildness, freedom and hope for the future of all threatened creatures. Wolves were a symbol of redemption, proof that we could atone for out past wrongs and restore wild places to what they were before we came along to pillage and conquer. Killing a wolf would be violating that commitment to right our past wrongs; implementing a policy allowing hunting would allow no respect for the life on an individual wolf.

That was before I learned about how we respect individual wolves. In a single season, the take for wolves in Idaho was 188 wolves, a small but not insignificant percentage of the state’s total population. In that same period, the state killed over 200 solves for various reasons, mostly related to depredation. Even in the eyes of the agency reintroducing them, the life of an individual wolf appears to carry little weight.

But should it? Does that wolf matter as much as I thought it did? Is it as important as a cow? A person’s ability to make a living?

I thought I had clean answers to these questions, but as it turns out, wolves are tricky animals. While native to most of the United States, the populations in the west are in a sense artificial, brought here by humans. They’re natural, but they wouldn’t be here without us. Of course, without us, they never would have gone extinct in the first place, but their status seems to hover somewhere between “native species” and “experimental population” in a way that defies easy answers.

And then, of course, we met the ranchers. They told us about regulations they have to comply with to keep from hurting salmon, and as they talked, they seemed to have a lot in common with the fish. Salmon have been driven to the brink of extinction by a large variety of factors—overfishing, habitat destruction, and of course, dams. Would cattle crazing near spawning grounds by the straw that broke their back? Ranchers fear for their existence just as strongly as environmental groups fear for the salmon. They have to comply with regulations about grazing on public lands, have to keep cattle out of riparian areas, all while seeing their children grow up and move to the big city to find a job where you don’t have to work seven days a week starting at four-thirty in the morning. They work hard all year and barely turn a profit, and they do it all while being demonized by people who believe there shouldn’t be any cattle grazing on public lands. Still, they survive, but barely, and if you listen to them speak, they’ll tell you—wolves are going to drive the American rancher to extinction.

A bird's warning

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: rim of Hell’s Canyon, Wallowa County, Oregon

Today on our hike, a bird began frantically chirping, sounding an alarm as our group passed by. I wanted to reassure it that we posed no threat to its existence. We weren’t there to hunt or log or extract precious metals. We bore it no ill will, no desire to conquer nature via the death of an inferior being. But I had to stop myself, because I realized we pose a much greater threat. Our existence as a species directly threatens everything that bird has ever known. We’ve created a civilization so complex and so blind that we’ve fundamentally altered our planet past the point of repair, and our actions have and will continue to impact the habitat of every single living thing on earth. A few months of years from now, the forest will be a different place—slightly warmer, with thinner trees and more beetles to eat their bark. The bird will do its bets to adapt to its new habitat, one it never evolved to live in. Will it survive? Will its children and grandchildren continue to live here? Or will they be added to the swelling masses of human and nonhuman climate refugees? I might never know the answers. Neither will that bird. But maybe it can sense that something is different. Maybe it can see the changing tide. Maybe, just maybe, it cried out in sorrow, asking one last futile time for us to wake up.