History and responsibility, and hope

© 2010 Joshua Stark

If you are expecting some reflection on yesterday's election, it ain't happening here.  I'll gladly give my opinion if people want to read it, but not unless there is some email outpouring lamenting the dearth of talking-head spinmeisters.  The only thing I will say is that I completely and totally gave up on the federal government doing anything for climate change in 2009, and I'll keep my focus on California and regional attempts to do right by their people, considering the latest changes in federal vs. state government. 

But this post is another reflection from reading "A Sand County Almanac." No politics.  This is about history, and more specifically, the importance of knowing history and acknowledging and reflecting on our good and bad past deeds.

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to sit on a panel at the BlogHer Food '10 Conference (for my take on that great event, read here).  During my short time at the conference, I had a number of fascinating conversations with people well versed in all things culinary.  One of these conversations involved hunting snipe (Gallinago gallinago), which included the typical snipe-hunting conversation - five minutes of swearing up-and-down that they do, in fact, exist (hence, the link on the name).

Then the conversation moved to the notion that the snipe is the last of the legally huntable shorebird game species (okay, there's timberdoodles, but if I mention them, then nobody will believe any of these exist).  Someone showed surprise that shorebirds had been eaten at all, the concept being so foreign, and the cultural knowledge of these supposed delicacies having been removed by law decades ago.

But shorebirds were heavily hunted by Americans for many, many years.  The end of shorebirds appearing on menus and in cookbooks happened because of the efficiency of the market hunter and the flocking nature of most shorebirds, coupled with a new-found awareness that we must protect our wilds, lest we lose them all.

This morning, then, when I read 'May' in Aldo Leopold's wonderful work, I was reminded just how close we came to losing so many birds.  Leopold writes,

"There was a time in the early 1900's when Wisconsin farms nearly lost their immemorial timepiece, when May pastures greened in silence, and August nights brought no whistled reminder of impending fall.  Universal gunpowder, plus the lure of plover-on-toast for post-Victorian banquets, had taken too great a toll.  The belated protection of the federal migratory bird laws came just in time." 

One hundred years ago, the demand for plovers was so great among households and restaurants that market hunters nearly ended them all.  

And the same is true for many, many species.  Egret feathers no longer adorn hats.  Buffalo tongue and wild grouse are no longer on the table as regular fare or ingredients.  Most sadly, there is no longer a popular pigeon pie, because that great biological phenomenon, the passenger pigeon, was shot, netted, and clubbed out of existence. 

Thank goodness for the wisdom, if belated as Leopold put it, of legislators who thought past mere economic efficiency, and looked at the value of things from other perspectives.  

Maybe this is a political post, then.  Perhaps I'm still hoping for that human trait to make a comeback, and for our leaders to note the value of our wild places, the value of what we put in our bodies, the values that we teach our children.  I can hope that our leaders will look past their political affiliations from time to time, and recognize the need for us to directly manage and protect our wilds.  We've done it before.  

Maybe I haven't totally given up hope.

Aldo Leopold, & why I don't see a difference between my hunting and environmentalism

© 2010 Joshua Stark

This morning, I read some of Aldo Leopold's, "A Sand County Almanac" to my son (he is one month old).  If you are interested in understanding just why I cannot comprehend how hunters and fishermen don't consider themselves as brothers and sisters to environmentalists, or indeed, environmentalists, themselves, then please read the first three paragraphs of Mr. Leopold's foreword.

The spirit conveyed in this work, so beautifully put in those first paragraphs, lays bare the reasons that many of us hunt and fish. 

The only thing separating us into different communities are other politics, and that is a crying shame. 

Thoughts?

On Goose Music

© 2010 Joshua Stark

The famous chapter in Aldo Leopold's "A Sand County Almanac" on Goose Music always moves me, in particular because I grew up right smack in the middle of a major landing place for waterfowl in the Pacific Flyway, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (for a great excerpt, check this out).  
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The photo I've added above, for example, was taken in East Isleton, at the end of the street where I grew up, about 100 yards from where my parents still reside.  Those are snow geese coming down in a neighboring field. 

Nearly every Winter of my life I've lived with calls from overhead.  I remember laying in bed at home in the middle of the night, hearing swans call to each other as they passed over town in the fog, flying so close that, with the window cracked a bit, I could hear their rhythmic breathing.  I remember hearing the amazing, trumpeting calls of sandhill cranes, only a few when I was a boy, but more and more each year so that now we watch huge, swirling flocks come down in August and September.  And I remember geese.

It seems that everybody has a neighborhood gaggle of honkers nowdays, and as Tovar Cerulli recently pointed out, there is at times something strange about the ease with which they can interact with our world. We have a flock passing over many mornings and evenings, and their calls still stir me, even if I know they are flying out to and back from their golf-course feeding grounds (no better use for a golf course, anyway).  But I grew up close to wild geese, and I was blessed with the widest variety of big waterfowl around.  Honkers of all sizes, swans, cranes, snows, blues.  And specks.

Ever since I watched, from my elementary school playground, a big flock of specks take flight in 20 mph winds, and, buffeted, swing right overhead, I've been amazed by them.  Their call is distinctive, too, often a higher pitched, two-note number, and it means that Fall fell, and Winter is here.  Or, it means that Spring has sprung fully, and it's time for them to head up North to have babies, so they can come back home, here on the Delta.

Night before last, in my back yard, while I was putting the ducks to bed (I have three yard ducks), I heard a flock of specks passing over.  As it was night, and mid-April, I knew they wouldn't be back for a few months.  And although the arrival of Spring brings its own greatness, there is always a hollow in my heart, an empty space to be filled only with that two-note cry, now wending its way on North.

A wonderful, contemplative post on environmental ethics

© 2010 Joshua Stark

But, not from me.  Chad Love at the Mallard of Discontent has a great post on the loss of our amazing, native prairie birds.
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One criticism often thrown at the hunting side of the environmental community is that they only care about their specific issues, places, or species.  And judging by the way we've organized ourselves in that community, there is little doubt that this criticism contains a grain of truth.  Consider the following hunting organizations' names:

Ducks Unlimited
California Waterfowl Association
Mule Deer Foundation
Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation
Pheasants forever
Quail Unlimited
Snipe United for Free Worms for All

Okay, I threw that last one in there, but I believe my point stands:  although we've stressed the importance of habitat - watersheds, plants, other species - we maintain a focus on particular species, and sometimes this means that we leave out others, to our detriment.

One problem is, of course, the time dedicated to supporting individual species means that less time gets devoted to understanding the complex systems in which they thrive, and also that we may tend to overemphasize artificial "restoration" of populations, rather than supporting self-sustaining systems.  But, Chad points out another problem:  the potential for trends to ignore species, which may cause a sort of vicious cycle - as hunters stop hunting them, the species declines from a lack of funding or care.  They fall all the way until somebody notices that they may need protection, if they are lucky.

Unfortunately, right now we don't seem to have any consistent mechanism for catching species before they hit that last stop on the way to oblivion, the Endangered Species Act.  Thank goodness for that act, too, because it does express our desire to understand our negative impacts before we lose all the pieces (see Leopold's First Rule of Intelligent Tinkering).

Good Cazadora post, then a bit on Leopold

NorCal Cazadora has a great post about some books that have influenced her as a hunter. The reason I post this here is because these almost invariably include thoughts on the ethics of hunting. The comments section includes some other good works, so click on those, too.

I'd like to point out her first book, a Sand County Almanac, at a time just prior to the split between the environmental and conservation movements. Mr. Leopold was one of those great thinkers, a man who marvelled in the intricacies and connectedness of ideas. To environmentalism he elucidated a number of important concepts, including the First Rule of Intelligent Tinkering, and he moved forward the notion of ecology as a legitimate school of thought at a time when science was focused laser-like on breaking everything into its component parts. And this same man who waxed poetic about the loss of life and diversity, who founded the Wilderness Society, was also the man who waxed poetic about building your own bow and arrows to hunt, about hunting great blue herons with peregrine falcons. Leopold understood that humanity's relationship to the land and ecosystems was amazingly intricate, profound, and that our future depended on a true understanding of our place in the land.

It is often the influences of current society to take apart historical figures, to look down on them with condescention at their simpler, simplistic ways, and, in the supposed light of our greater wisdom, to separate out those attributes which we dislike from those which we admire. In so doing, we show ourselves as the simpletons, forgetting the constant winds of time and thought, forgetting that we can almost never know the intricacies of eras past, and losing the subtle nuances when we are lucky enough to catch a glimpse. We lose the ability to truly learn from those past experiences, and, like much of science in Leopold's time, we lose the ability to see the true connections that make for a rich, often profound existence, regardless of era.

Of the most influential ideas in my life, Aldo Leopold brought me to a conscious understanding of a land ethic and its need. If you get some time, please click over to that link and read his own words on the subject.

Calling out a disgusting comment, and then talking ethics

There exist many great websites about the outdoors. My interests and questions have led me to a number of hunting-related sites, where I find lively forums (fora?) filled with interested and interesting folks, most of whom are very mannerly and helpful. My tastes being more eclectic, I usually find myself in forums related to traditional archery (recurves, longbows, and selfbows) or subgauge shotguns (I shoot a 20 guage). However, two recurring themes stand out in these forums that I want to address - one directly related to hunting, but the other possibly a shared trait in other forums.

The first is the disgusting term, "sss" popping up with alarming frequency every time somebody talks about predators, in particular mountain lions in California. "sss" stands for, "shoot, shovel, shut up", which the person is suggesting someone do when they find a mountain lion. Currently, mounain lion hunting is illegal in California, and many hunters are upset about it, so when somebody posts a topic saying, "hey, I got a great picture of a mountain lion while deer hunting", somebody inevitably posts just those three letters in response. But, regardless of a person's position on this law, suggesting to another that they willingly break it in a web forum is inappropriate, ill-mannered, and unethical.

I have written a short piece alluding to laws and ethics on this blog; if you care to read it click here. I stopped visiting a couple of forums because of the prevalence of this practice, and I encourage hunters everywhere to consider, at least, the implications of suggesting illegal activity to someone who may be a minor and/or get caught in the act and pay a large fine or do jail time. In a future entry I'll attempt to cover the argument in the conservation community over the role of predators in our dramatically altered ecosystems, but for now I'm just going to stay on solid ground and condemn "sss" as a practice, and especially as a suggestion on web forums.

Considering this activity, and considering that the person receiving such "advice" may be a fifteen year-old with no other hunting role models, I'd like to consider ethical advice on forums in general. Of course, I love conversations about ethics (hence the blog). And very frequently people give their ethical views on many topics in the forums I frequent. Ideas like appropriate shooting distances, the nature of hunting preserves, and crossbows during archery season are all very important ethical topics about which many people disagree.

However, when somebody asks to hear others' ethics on a topic, even in the most mundane and calm way, the response is most frequently a defensive claim that ethics is personal, and people should stay out of folks' business. This claim then quickly gets caught up in other peoples' attempts to answer the question, and the ensuing conversation can get nasty. Two ideas come to mind when I come across these conversations: 1) Any of these people could be a child, and many reading it probably are; & 2) Do the people telling the questioner to butt out understand that they are making an ethical claim? The second bears explaining:

Statements with 'should' or 'ought' are ethical claims, in that they tell someone how to act. Telling a person that they should not interfere in anothers' ethical decisions is an ethical statement. The fact that this form of mannerly behavior is so deeply ingrained in our libertarianism does not separate it from ethics, it just makes it a predominant ethical claim, and one, therefore, easier to claim in public.

Granted, this ethical claim has helped make for an amazing, dynamic, diverse and wealthy country, especially when it goes hand-in-hand with our 1st Amendment rights. However, using it as a cudgel to bludgeon others' speech has its problems, not the least of which being the spirit of the 1st Amendment. In the context of web forums, I have a suggestion:

Remember that one of your readers is twelve years old, or fifteen, and forming their first views on hunting (or whatever your topic may be). Include in your description the idea that a person's ethics are individual and are to be respected, if you believe it. But, also include your ethics about hunting tactics, laws, and the like. If it were just you and this kid out in the field, would you do any less? Don't shortchange others' of your ethical perspective. You don't have to preach, though sometimes it'll sound preachy (I know), but in the end, the people who read it will take what they will.

Sure, this last advice is an ethical claim, but, as I'm not bound by relativism, I'm okay with that.

Just diving right in...

There seems to be a problem with discourse about the environment these days, born of polarized politics, the onslaught of irony and technology, historical foundations of race, class, religion, gender and place, and the urbanization and suburbanization of our nation. The very words used to describe humans' actions in this world are hijacked by political innuendo, religious and social connotations.

Our current social climate places strict constraints on the nature of people's views about the environment. We are forced into one of a few rigid schools of thought, and we are often bound by other political affiliations that have little to do with nature's reality. One school of thought believes in the environment effectively as a stand-alone entity, where people can and should "leave no trace", where animals have rights akin to the political rights of people, where humans presence is almost always a sin. Another camp believes in humanity's divine right to dominion over nature, its flora and fauna to be processed and managed into usable products and services for people, its threats to be completely eliminated. A third camp sees the environment as a medium through which one class' excesses and hatred are borne by an underclass, in the form of air and water pollution, toxic wastes, landfills and ports.

But, by far the largest group are those who know little and therefore care little for whatever the environment may be. To them, it is a place beyond them, one they may visit to look at from time to time for entertainment, like a theme park or the mall, or perhaps the best analogy, a television set. It has no real value to them beyond this. They never feel an interactive attachment to this place; it is "outside", it is somewhere they go to see, not some place in which they live.

This was not always so. From the turn of the century through to the early 60's, there grew an amazing, nuanced, clear-eyed view of the environment and humanity's place in it. At the same time the masses marched toward the suburbs, and automated production developed near-unimaginable (and unmanageable) capacities, a small, thoughtful group of people struggled to understand and develop an ethic towards nature. These observations, set down through the writings and actions of people like George Grinnell, Aldo Leopold, and Margaret and Olaus Murie, illuminate truths about humanity in nature, our creations of illusions like "urban" and "rural", the profound interconnectedness of our actions and places.

This blog will attempt to be one small voice for continuing the tradition of honestly looking at humanity's place in the physical world, and our responsibilities toward it.