Forewarnings: Poison and Atrophy (does it have to be this way?)

Last night my friend and I went to the hearing in Duluth, a first of three around the state of Minnesota, about the proposal to let a big mining conglomerate, Polymet, leak sulfuric acid and a mess of other toxic overflow into the Lake Superior watershed in order to get at the copper, nickel, platinum and other mineral wealth that underlies this area our hearts draw sustenance from. She said we were witnessing a piece of history. It's left me with the same feeling I think I remember from when I first heard on TV that people are warming up earth's climate, or when as a girl I first heard my dad say the builders were coming sooner or later to put apartments in the pasture. Selfish, said one of the men who testified at the hearing last night, critiquing the motive of everybody taking a stand on whichever side of the debate, but I mostly disagree; I think everyone who takes a stand in a public controversy feels like a representative for some group of others who aren't vocal or privileged enough to be there. The others naturally are people but, as importantly, are also the manifold living things with whom we don't share a language.

The non-profit organization WaterLegacy in a brief emailed review of the hearing pointed out that about two thirds of the testimony given was from opponents of the mine, and that while many opponents cited specific flaws or gaps in Polymet's supplemental draft environmental impact statement, the supporters just called on their faith or intuition that the review, the future mining technology or the industry in its great professionalism could be trusted to guard the watershed. I was glad of the evidence that somebody else had been keeping track of opinions for and against the project, since I had been keeping my own tally on paper during the testimonies my friend and I heard from about 7 p.m. till nearly 10:00. For most of the evening I found that the opponents led by nearly two to one, but as the room emptied it seemed more and more the boosters for local mining were the people remaining.

At the crux of the proposed mining scheme is that the various ores termed sulfides, including copper, gold, nickel and platinum become toxic, turning to sulfuric acid, when exposed to air and water after being dug from the open pit mines. I say mines because Polymet's proposed mine located near the Embarrass and Partridge Rivers, which would wash the pollution into the St. Louis River and thence Lake Superior, is not the only proposed sulfide mine. Twin Metals is a joint venture between a Canadian and a Chilean company that wants to dig another mine barely three miles from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area near Ely, Minnesota. Yet-to-be-named venture capitalists are and will be watching. To them, sulfuric acid is a risk factor, an abstract liability in a bright-eyed betting game.

Not vinyl, not clay, not metal set in the ground to hold the drainage in storage ponds or divert run-off from towering piles of dug-up rock, wood rubble and dried-out peat will keep the acid waste water from where we don't want it to go. The soils are largely sand and peat, boulder and gravel. The questions are when, how soon and how much effluent will make its way where-all and how far. No company, whatever formal arrangements it puts on record, will retain squadrons of river guardians or pit watch personnel past its own dissolution, or past all caring once the blue coldwater lakes of legend or the fishing streams are discolored or pretty well devoid of healthy aquatic life.

Arguments made by citizens in favor of mining are that we need Minnesota's copper, that no other mining region of the world has the robust environmental oversight found among this state's natural resource agencies and that we have to at least let Polymet give it a first try, ostensibly to see how well they do protecting water and air. Most persuasively, there is the loudly proclaimed and very real need for high-paying jobs in northern Minnesota. The first point is moot; copper mines crowd the southern two thirds of Arizona, and are also found in New Mexico, Utah, Montana and Michigan. As for oversight, in any area of the world, whatever underlies a mine pit is more or less permeable by water, and no matter what is practiced in the westerly copper mining districts, a place like Minnesota, girded underneath by sands and the soft stuff making up peat bogs, and abundantly snowed-on many winters, creating vast movements of water, is hugely vulnerable to the transfer and pooling up of chemical toxins.

Where resources, whether renewable or finite, material or abstract are concerned, most of us probably base our hopes and expectations on some version of the best conditions we have ever known. Fantasy of course governs a lot of our private projections. In any case, conditions surrounding the whole planet Earth are perceptibly changing, with cataclysmic potential for systemic failures in our world according to strict scientific modeling of the basis for climate. The outcome, translated as flood-related, heat-related and drought-related shock and privations, sooner rather than later will overwhelm ever larger sectors of our agriculture, manufacturing and other industry.

A recent news item in the New York Times says that global carbon emissions, at a record high in 2011, are predicted to jump once measured for 2012 and 2013 since coal is still such a heavily relied upon fuel at too many electric power plants around the world. As carbon emissions escalate and we fail to meet the international goal in which global warming stops at 3.6 degrees F, disruptions in our living, our commerce, our food production and the whole economy are liable to make everything we do on a grand scale falter. Corporate enterprises like mining, smelting, shipping and manufacturing in their own due time will become haphazard or stop. What if closures due to major market slowdown happened within the lifetime of Polymet and/or Twin Metals? Polymet's own estimate for their mine's lifetime has been 20 years, with the capacity to employ 300 people.  Meantime, during and after the inevitable bust cycle that follows in the northland, as inhabitants in their degrees of hunger and desperation forage fish, hunt and fruit and salad crops from the land, what if the few fish left are full of mercury, another  pollutant released by sulfide mining--or arsenic, or both?

And what about carbon emissions from the heavy equipment and land disturbances normal to mining? One source, an Anishinaabe native people's on line tract titled Protect Our Manoomin (wild rice,) says sulfide mining will have an annual carbon footprint of 767,648 metric tons annually. Credit for the facts and figures is given to sources including WaterLegacy, Friends of the BWCA, and Lake Superior Mining News.

Indications along with carbon-induced climate change--the drawdown of water tables on all six inhabited continents, the ever more rapid rate of extinctions, the depletion of arable soils where farming has been longest and most intensive--are that the earth is weary of our self-justified domination. Excuses that we need to grow all our industry for the good of everyone will hold up less and less, except as the bases for ecological havoc. What would sustain us in a bid for survival, even prosperity, along the ages to come would be containment of our growth and of our urge to modify more and more of what's under our feet or over our heads to our use. A hopeful thought in my mind is that a goodly majority of my fellow human beings don't want to rob the earth and infest it with more, always more synthetic structures inhospitable to all but ourselves, they just tolerate it or resent it happening around them.

I'm afraid that society as I know it in the wider world will refuse the chance remaining to leave the raw material in the ground that it's a part of, because our technocratic culture just doesn't agree to leave things well enough alone where financial wealth is at stake. The ones who can will amplify their rationale for extracting everything possible, and they'll persuade enough of the others that life will be better for them too as a result. This is how one more territory blooming with virgin thickets and swamps, rivers and lakes, still with their historic complement of fishes and frogs, birds and wild fur- bearers risks becoming another piece of everywhere else, with tired water and particulate-blown air.

If I could, I would like to shout the mystique of the snow country in all of its seasons so as to chase away all planning to tear it open and bleed out its byproducts in how ever controlled or uncontrolled a series of processes. I would like to show the industrialists the little plants that would die into even greater obscurity, in the awareness of industry tycoons and those they've brainwashed, when streamlets and springs carry sulfuric acid through the adjacent soils. If hand-drawn visual art of our wild heritage could help to reverse the schemes for destroying the haunts of wolves, pine martens and spruce grouse, I would give all my time to it and barter my work for all I need to live on.

  Butterwort, a carnivorous plant, on Lake Superior Cliff, watered by surf spray

https://www.etsy.com/listing/100466348/watercolor-flower-on-cliff-background?ref=shop_home_active_18


Go here to officially comment on the Polymet mine.

O My Darlings...Lost and Formed Anew

A piece in Audubon magazine's last issue of 2013, titled "Climate Change is Causing Some Mixed-up Wildlife" by writer Katherine Bagley, left me feeling especially lucky to have added thirteen bird species to my life list this year, plus the wolf to my list of mammals. The article is about animals including birds, butterflies, whales and bears cross-breeding in our times, engendering hybrid creatures better adapted to habitats that are shrinking or blending together. The animals are adapting to loss of habitat and seasonal patterns brought about by climate change, probably the most sweeping symptom of people-pressure on the earth.

Small fliers like birds and butterflies might likelier interbreed, in theory, since most at the mercy of the winds, they can blow into each others' nesting range. Habitats blending and becoming more generic through our heavy use of the land generate new incentives for birds or insects of species whose numbers are declining to settle for what they can get, including mates from species other than their own.

But some of the news was startling: grizzly bears in the Arctic are breeding with polar bears? In the midst of all the other documented hybrids in Ms. Bagley's article--assorted kinds of whales, seals and porpoises less than familiar to landlocked natural history buffs like me--the bears especially stood out. I have heard of  North American timber wolves interbreeding with coyotes. But a white female polar bear getting bred by a hump-backed brown grizzly early out of his den. Custom and part of the bedrock of my imagination are being eroded here, even if I accept the evolutionary process known as speciation and reject fundamentalist religion's creationism in which everything is sacrosanct with fixed name, form, repute and coloration.

Studying the wild plants and animals over time we realize that their taxonomy, or very identity as species, is loosely set and fluid. Extinctions occur, traditionally over long reaches of time, and new species come of cross-fertilization and of local populations, isolated from others, morphing into new sub-species and eventually, cut off from the habitat of distant cousins, becoming recognized as separate species. As per the article, when animals hybridize, results can vary from sterility in the hybrid offspring to a hastened rate of extinction in an ancestral species that's faring poorly in its ability to compete so it can eat and reproduce. The author grants that speciation has gone on as long as the  animal kingdom itself existed. The article stresses that hybridization in the wild animal kingdom today, like the escalating rate of extinctions, is driven by the take-over of earth by ourselves and by our chemical overflow into air, freshwater and oceans.

We're of course each of us free to consider the issue of cross-breeding, as well as the disappearance of species, however we like. People who are emotionally removed from wild parts of earth where they might encounter uncommon animals will ask what is the loss if one kind of creature goes away to be replaced by another that's faster, bulkier, hardier, etc.

Lately I was introduced by good friends to a fictional work, The Place of the Lion, by the British theologian, poet and novelist Charles Williams. Animal archetypes figure into that narrative in ways that must have so many parallels in the New and Old Testaments and other Judeo-Christian writing that I could search and list for weeks if I wanted examples to cite. Archetypes are defined as symbols, images of our human nature and the experiences that we share universally as human beings, in the sense of a 'collective unconsciousness.' The Place of the Lion in Biblical and pre-Biblical tradition uses animals like the lion, the serpent and the unicorn to express lofty principles and virtues.

Here is a quote from page 53: "that this world is created, and all men and women are created, by the entrance of certain great principles into aboriginal matter. We call them by cold names; wisdom and courage and beauty and strength and so on, but actually they are very great and mighty Powers. It may be they are the angels and archangels of which the Christian Church talks... And when That which is behind them intends to put a new soul into matter it disposes them as it will, and by a peculiar mingling of them a child is born; and this is their concern with us, but what is their concern and business among themselves we cannot know.... In the animals they are less mingled, for there each is shown to us in his own becoming shape; those Powers are the archetypes of the beasts, and very much more..."

That each creature stands for a principle or virtue, while each new person represents a commingled recipe of these same powers, deserves pondering. I think there will always be room in my imagination for angels in winged or other guise, personalized or vague and faceless. But if, in ancient human collective consciousness, the lion stands for strength, the lamb for innocence, the serpent for subtlety, or even if not, I'd still like to recognize the animals according to species as I've confronted them from my own beginnings with the help of the books that named and differentiated them. The books or today the apps are known to all of us who have referred to them. Each species stands for a place whose conditions gave rise to it, and the place was also recognizable as a realm of certain principles or virtues re-characterized in each animal, also in each plant. In that sense they are nature's works of art, which we can stand in front of to admire or emulate.

These distinctive creatures crossbreeding will cause varying reactions in each of us according to our values. For me any species diminished by the expedience of blending its identity with a neighboring species will represent a loss of something sacred. It was sanctified by the place it came from, that place itself likely in danger of transformation to something less. For someone else, the new hybrid form is the new species. For some other people species doesn't matter, it's all an illusion, and what matters is the energy, divine if they allow for divinity, that drives the creature across the field of vision in the dramas that figure in all our lives.

This all adds up to a myriad of creatures for the artist to conceive and work with. For me, the time I have lived within has its huge spread of fauna, named and classified, which we all ought not to dare diminishing by our actions. In my home region there are coyotes, foxes and wolves, who follow their own paths of advantage. In the spring when warblers come back to the woods maybe at long last I'll get more than a glimpse at the Connecticut, out in one of the swamps, in spring dress on nesting territory true to its kind. But any other human being may prefer, ultimately, to skip over the losses implicit in die-offs of scientifically, historically documented species, and entertain oneself with fabulous cross-bred beasts much newer conceived than the unicorn, the manticore and griffon of Europe's Middle Ages, and then, as in another dimension, chosen beasts of fantasy will come to populate a page or a screen--or a note card: 

https://www.etsy.com/listing/122474637/whimsical-bird-art-quail-mixed-media?

Echoes, Glimpsed Faces, and a Rising Wind of Transformation

Since my oldest memory, dating from maybe as far back as 1962, I have loved winter fields especially with the quiet low light of evening or of a cloudy day. The reasons connect with the secure country home my parents kept for us, and my good health all those years, a robust build of body that resisted cold, and the abundant snows of those winters when I was just starting school, having the countryside to come home to. It was cheery there, indoors and out, so the frozen lands never symbolized the dreary to me but the wondrously forsaken, where noise was stifled and drama had been erased into the crisp framework of dead and living plants, cushioned and unified by snow. Their colors were varied and subtly reminiscent, bleached versions of what had been and what in just really a few weeks would be. The shadows were blue; the highlights were now and again the hot tints found in fires. Nowhere else felt so safe or, at the same time, so invigorating. All of our small family at some time or other went enthusiastically into these places.

Now that I'm graying and stiffening a little with the years I look to the loss of these places with many questions as to what in fact was or may have been. It might have been around 1970 when I first heard, on a National Geographic TV show, about the greenhouse effect and how it would steal more and more from the experience of winter. I've never gotten over my dismay about that, though there have been many honest-to-goodness winters north of where I grew up, spectacular on ski trails, with snowdrifts, whiteouts and early blue dark. Inevitably I've broadened my view on climate change to include it as one in a cluster of symptoms that we are, in our numbers and demands on the earth, getting to be too much for it and will be forced to change the ways we do a lot of things.

While the news brings us an ever-lengthening list of weather and ocean cataclysms like ice floes as big as Singapore breaking away from the Antarctic, typhoon Haiyan, the most powerful sea storm ever recorded, smashing the Philippines and once in a lifetime November mega-tornadoes or June downpours besetting the central U.S., local and unscientific observers like me compare past seasons to more recent ones and notice tree hardihood and winter rain versus ice versus snow. Those of us living in the northern countryside still drive into whiteouts, freeze our fingertips and worry about our our engines starting on frigid mornings. But our winters trend shorter at both ends. A long cold winter now is what an average winter used to be to the generation older than us. Today's real temperatures tend to be warmer than the ones we heard in yesterday's forecast for today. Warm spells last a lot longer than the cold snaps. One of the personal questions that looms especially large for me is: if I live to be close to a hundred, what will I see of change to the places I cherish along the U.S.-Canadian border as climate change escalates? Likely I will see fires burn away huge stretches of the resinous boreal forest after it's been too hot and dry for too long. Projections are that oak savanna and grassland will grow up in its place.

An interview one recent morning on Democracy Now, with guests Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows-Larkin, climate scientists from England's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, affiliated with the University of Manchester, stressed the need of "radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the United States, EU and other wealthy nations." I was electrified to hear this report because the meltdown of our four-season climate and disappearance of its hallmark trees and creatures has so long been a sadness, like a known-of disease in someone I love. Just two examples given of de-growth strategies were sizing down the refrigerators used in the United States, where evidently fridges are manufactured and sold bigger than in the rest of the world, and abandoning the habit of a daily shower, or even a twice-daily shower, that requires so much hot water, using tons of fossil fuel in affluent countries. Such adaptations are called for because, per Mr. Anderson, the developed countries of the world have ill-advisedly forsaken opportunities to shift their reliance to full-scale renewable energies and the impending changeover will take place too slowly to safeguard the climate we accept as normal for purposes of keeping sea levels below coastal city street levels and harvesting food crops every year.

The urgency of the climate crisis is described among researchers like the two from the Tyndall Centre in degrees of warming. Two degrees Celsius or 3.6 degrees F. are in our time thought to be the limits of further survivable global warming for civilization. But according to Alice Bows-Larkin the rate of emissions for carbon and other heat-trapping gases puts us on track for something more like four degrees Celsius; a listener/reader easily senses that she discreetly refrains from hinting that it could be even more than that. Two degrees Celsius was also the cap agreed upon by the Copenhagen Accord in 2012, and earlier, among the Group of Eight summit meeting of largest nations, in 2009. But as indicators of inhospitable climate, these measures have no real coordinates in the realm of what it would take to force civilization into some mode of living in which we release so little carbon or other heat-trapping gases that offsets come into play for what we do emit, and we become neutral in how we affect the atmosphere. What drives people to change their ways is pain, not readily measurable, which can be sub-classified into grief, bodily misery (hunger, thirst, illness, agony) and economic loss. For many people, impending pain in one or more of these categories will breed change--and by impending pain I naturally mean confronting painful conditions in a state of honest fear. Degrees of planetary heating can't be uniformly matched with degrees of the different forms of pain or fear brought to bear on people in stressful times for the purpose of broad policy-making, but segment by segment of civilization we will have to try our best.

To read any of today's spokespeople for the movement to curb climate change, such as Bill McKibben, is to see an implication of the extractive industries, chiefly the fossil fuels oil, gas and coal, and of the other industries that ally themselves around oil, gas and coal, like automotive manufacturers. The comfort-filled, fast-paced ways of life that are established courtesy of industries enabled by gasoline and diesel-powered transport are so taken for granted that any public statement that these modes of living could be the death of civilization is dismissed as doom and gloom but is most of all kept out of the mainstream news. The internet, if you google articles on climate change is full of written pieces which soothe the glancing reader that fears about global warming are overblown. The fossil fuel and auto industries have been notorious for funding coalitions that dismiss the urgency and/or the reality of what our heat-trapping gases are doing ever faster to our one and only home planet earth.

Doom and gloom scenarios have often filled and taken over people's imaginations. I've taste-tested a bit of literary doom and gloom in recent months, significantly when I read Margaret Atwood's novels Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, and most lately as I finished Stephen King's novella The Langoliers. Margaret Atwood's two late novels are futurist, revealing to her readers a world where genetic engineering is in its heyday, cloned and hybridized animals, wild or feral, forage in open country and corporations rule a world in which nations get no mention. The most secure of the citizens are the corporate work force, protected inside gigantic company-owned dorms. North America is hot year-round and tornado-prone daily, with a cool breeze perceptible as far north as, she suggests, Moose Factory in what was Canada in the remote past, no dates given.

The Stephen King story, like others of his, features time travel. The Langoliers, as it progresses, switches scenes from the cabin of a 767 passenger jet cut off from all sight and signals of life on the ground to a deserted Bangor International Airport in Maine. King's tale challenged my imagination by segregating the notion of time eroding backward from a duly consequential reversal of history on the ground. If time were to peel backward then the techno-industrial landscape should sink and crumble, the forests should flourish and shrink back under ice caps, land and sea rise, fall and intermix. In the story however the land below the jet, forced on pain of the travelers' death to take off anew from Bangor and return west, is scorched away by runaway balls of searing red and black which have no explanation, in their wake leaving nothing but a breathtaking abyss. It worked well in the story as a nightmare vision of doom. But it's not the doom that we in our materialist mania for ever more growth are likeliest to spread in a series of spin-off reactions, one health and environmental crisis or several at a time, across the breadth of the continents still holding above sea level.

Crossing St. Louis County, Minnesota daily in the little old Toyota I recognize that it's bound to be the car itself that's my number-one source of carbon output, even though it's a hybrid. It still burns gasoline and emits carbon. To the extent that we all share in the responsibility--to our offspring and to our wild warm-blooded and cold-blooded and plant kin--to stop dumping carbon into the air, won't at least some of us try to reduce the worst that we're putting out, on our commutes, errands and longer trips? And that is the question I have trouble imagining an awful lot of people asking themselves, skeptics that so many still are about the idea of winter ever being conquered (cold weather is their enemy) and earth's whole climate flip-flopped by our very selves. What will it take, leaving out some of the most agape-filled, civic-minded, devoutly spiritual ones like those who buy carbon offsets or especially those who demonstrate and go to jail, for a majority to say:  I'm tired of knowing I help upset the water cycle and the mountain glaciers, ruin the summers and the cool green forests, escalate the rash of extinctions, and endanger the very weather that feeds our food crops? Somehow, it would have to be a loss of all other choices. And it's been said that whole nations at some stage have rushed to co-ordinate schemes for wholesale safety from a crisis when leaders and public alike finally become overwhelmed by a sense of urgency.

From the 20th-century author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who lived in and wrote about interior Florida in pioneer times and the Depression era (before it was discovered by second-home developers) my sense of what we have lost in America has been heightened, as I equated her 1930s' springs and summers to my corresponding seasons experienced thirty years later, with their clamor of crickets, whippoorwills and tree toads. Here is her passage from Cross Creek, in a chapter titled 'Toady-frogs, lizards, antses and varmints;' "I have lain through a long moonlit night, with the scent of orange blossoms palpable as spilled perfume on the air. and listened to the murmur of minor chords until, just as I have wept over the Brahms waltz in A flat on a master's violin, I thought my heart would break with the beauty of it. If there is not a finished tune, there are phrases, and there is assuredly a motif, articulated, reiterated." I've never been in Florida, but reading in my own time about hordes of amphibians lost to rain-borne toxins and abrupt seasonal change, I wonder if modern people in Marjorie's Florida still get to hear frog symphonies as lavishly poured forth.

Everything wild that I can remember may be dwindling sooner or later like frogs, toads and salamanders on so many continents, or the bobwhite quail our family would hear in my youth across most of the months in a year. It's another reason to draw and paint the places just in the ways they have haunted me, because as memories they are precious as the most revered ancestors and infants all rolled in one, tender and self-renewing, strange yet still fabric of our thoughts and emotions, our muscle and nerve fibres.  Here's bait, if you like, or a friendly invitation: if you relish and buy this art or  this organic fair-trade chocolate you are helping us, in our depleted and depopulated locale, to stay there and do our work without having to start our cars to work somewhere miles off that requires day to day gasoline burning to get there.

Rolling in amid a Pack of Wolves - (They Scattered)

Timber wolves still prosper within stretches of the U.S./Canadian border region, mostly with great reluctance to show themselves to human eyes. Coming and going now daily from Duluth, Minnesota in my spry little old hybrid car I look for wolves whenever there's daylight to expose any, just as I peer before me in the night lest anything four-legged, or a rogue car with dark headlights catching the shine of my lights, cross my path or come at me. In years past, only two wolves, to my knowledge, had crossed a road ahead of my car.

On a recent Friday morning with an overcast deepening all the November drabness, I could see ahead of me two or three or more animal forms, tails flowing out behind them, brownish altogether on the grey monotone of the roadsides. Beasts the size of big dogs crossed playfully to and fro, north or south in both blank lanes. The boreal bog land spread uninterruptedly back to each side.

I braked and braked as I quickened inside with exhilaration. These canines looked at least the size of German shepherds, though some wolves stand as high in the rump and shoulders as deer. Their response to the car seemed semi-practiced, as though they had an action plan--in case of a car coming the As go north and the Bs head south--yet at the same time they looked nonchalant like teens making way for a car in a game of street hockey. I slowed to a stop. Probably the wolves could hear the electric hum of the hybrid car system.

However that was, one animal remained in sight, shoulder-high in grass and seedlings on my right. It had a picture-perfect wolf face, with blunt muzzle, head and shoulders gold-tinted on white with black tips, a bit of pink tongue forward, ears much neater to the head than a coyote's. The exchange of glances was real yet ultra-brief, a reward from out of the wild, something I had hoped for over all my remembered years. I gathered from that glimpse a fellow-animal's cautious curiosity, mixed with the same ambivalence as that of the pack-mates crossing and re-crossing the road within the past half-minute. The wolf was crouched, viewing me at a distance of twenty feet or so for one second, gone like a magician's handkerchief in the next. My foot quivered on the pedal as I got back in motion beyond that scene of deeply reactive and clannish movement.

There is a hunting season in Minnesota on wolves now, with a quota or 'target harvest' of 220 kills for the months included. Recently I heard or read an official with state government talking about wolves with what may be the stock Department of Natural Resources middle point-of-view, that yes, wolves are intelligent, sensitive creatures but that no, they don't merit the bleeding heart defense coming from people who say there should be no wolf hunts. That's just romanticism. They are legitimate game animals. But, making a stretch from out of the wild into human affairs, if you were to ask me I'd say that the point of view that abortion of human fetuses should be made illegal is romanticism of human fetuses--babies, of course, since babies is always going to be the word of choice. Comparing the meager level of sensory development of most aborted babies with the same in a full-grown adult wolf shot and killed calls into question whether the elective abortion or the wolf kill is the act of greater cruelty to the victim.

I take this viewpoint not out of hatred for babies of my own kind but out of a desperate love for the other creatures whom our endless expansion is crowding out their own territory since we always need to clear more land, dig it, farm it and build over it. We seem not to be able to shake the notion that people should multiply till the whole earth and every possible other place is taken up by our civilization, as if nature could be managed to become nothing but a grand human life support system, or as if we would really want to live in a universe completely of our own construction, with maybe a little relic forest, brush or desert like a decorative border. Taking the religious perspective about either matter will not convert me to your religious view, I have my own.

I would prefer a world that holds the values belonging mainly still, I suspect, to aboriginal peoples: that human beings have no greater importance than any other species we neighbor with, and that we live peaceably in motley forms and adaptations, sometimes learning and modelling each others' magnificent expertise to each others' greater glorification. I believe the creator God of the universe would approve. The wolf in its solo resourcefulness and social graces, with its muscular power and embrace of landscapes just as those places evolved, makes a fascinating model for creative and nurturing human interactions with our common earth.

I'm a great fan of Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf, in which the author worked as a biologist for the Canadian Wildlife Service and lived alongside a pack of Arctic wolves in the Keewatin District north of Churchill, Manitoba. His wolf neighbors gained his admiration on a whole series of levels: first of all, their resourcefulness in eating oftenest what was near at hand, especially mice, when their reputation among the white hunter constituency of Canada was that of voracious deer-slaughterers, helping denude the tundra of caribou. But also the wolves had a sense of fair play among themselves and extending to the lone researcher living at the edge of their territory in a tent. An unmated male wolf baby-sat for the mother whose litter of pups had exhausted her with their rambunctious bouncing and biting, letting them bounce all over him. The alpha male, father of the pups, immediately respected the scent boundaries that the man had made, wolf-fashion with squirts of his own urine, along a line of shrubs. The adult wolves lined up along a ridge to gape, in apparent amusement, at the man as he tumbled down the slope of crumbling sand and dislodging rock, overloaded by his own gear; they never made a move to pile onto him. He learned that the native Eskimo people had no wolf prejudices like those of European humankind, and knew each of these wolves as individuals from long acquaintance. He learned to relax and drop the idea that he'd better have his rifle or revolver at the ready when the wolves were near.

Wolves are clever, retiring and seldom seen, by comparison with many of the other creatures that share their realm and their exuberance in the atmosphere that sustains them. We all, it seems proven by people's observations time and again, have emotions of joy, curiosity, respect for others who pass by and do us no harm, bereavement, fear, foreboding, anger and vengefulness when hatred was levied against us. The northern lands that are hold-outs of today's remaining wolves have their smaller life forms that sing, whirl with unfathomed mixes of passion and enliven the people, probably the hawks and other birds, the foxes, the deer and other four-legged community members who witness them.

Along with the occasionally heard and seldom-seen wolves, I savor the sight of birds everywhere. The gaiety of birds is confused again and again with their evasiveness, a drive to save their own lives from airborne predators. In the northern U.S. and Canada one intensively social bird, full of bounding travel-zest and pale wintery tints of white, dawn-pink and dark, is the redpoll, which sorts into at least two distinct species, the common and the hoary. The animus of wolves romping, galloping, lurking and howling is echoed by the redpolls foraging along the paths we travel and swirling into flight, diverging and converging as they leave the scene to re-group somewhere else.

Here is a link to the redpoll note card, a frameable item at 5x7 inches or 12.7 x 17.7 cm. Like most of my others, the card is blank inside with a little descriptive text on the outer back flap. A Redpoll Explosion on a Winter's Morn

Real Chocolate and Other Gifts of the Trees

In the northern latitudes extending onto the belt of Arctic tundra you enter a realm of birches, various species giving way to each other as longitudes, soil types and land masses change. The northernmost in the family are shrubs, and there is a yellow birch, a black or sweet birch, a silver birch, and American paper birch, best-known of the clan to Americans, with its white bark curling loose to expose salmon-pink inner patches. The peelable bark has provided generations of craftsworkers with material for canoes, rafts, baskets, cookpots, shelter, footwear, writing paper, toys and fire starter.

A co-worker recently posted that as a child he was afraid of birch trees. I can imagine the child-version of myself, hypothetically, getting the creeps from a crooked white trunk in a night-time woods. Once, long ago there was a contest on the radio with a cash prize for the person who dared the strangest stunt. The winner was a man who ate a whole birch tree, leaves, twigs and all, I can only presume. Size of the tree didn't enter into the story when my sister first told me of it.

A birch was her choice when an art client commissioned me to design a family tree as an anniversary gift for her parents, who live here in birch country where they raised her and two siblings. The project was illuminating on many fronts, triggering a sense of how a tree's form and physics can resonate metaphorically with a family's traits. The listing in my Etsy shop for a family tree made to order asks that the customer choose a favorite variety of tree along with any of the other specifications to depict their family. Trees after all are vital fellow-beings, as individuals and as functioning types on this earth. Moving into abstract realms there are family trees, phone trees, coat trees; they are all symbols of an organization having a common root.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/166374294/custom-family-tree-made-to-order-use

 

Here is homage to the birches from my own writing of 1988, titled The Education of Trees (in Memory of Scott Starling:)
               "Seeds of the birch tree chose rockfield, pocked with bog;
                 Betula lutea (Yellow Birch) peeled a gold rind;
                 Betula papyrifera (Paper Birch) traced cold humus to the Arctic, wrapping its trunks
                 in white lapels, its badges darkening it as its descendants eked from dells on
                 the tundra, recommending reclining postures, which Betula minor (Dwarf Tundra Birch)
                 mastered."
The aesthetics or poetics of these graceful white-barked, orange-barked, silver-and-gold or black-barked trees have been outstanding to generations of people.

Moving to a still larger perspective, where would civilization be without tree-fiber, tree fruit and flavoring, medicinal extracts, shade and of course oxygen, from the full complement of trees ever found on earth?

The tree that bears cacao beans (for chocolate) is described as small, especially in its cultivated state, with white wood and frail branches. The leaves are large, glossy, red at immaturity before changing to green. Picking the pods requires long-handled knives to reach high in the tree, machetes well suited for harvest among the lower branches. Fragile branches and shallow roots typical of the trees used for commercial chocolate prevent climbing to get at the crop by any means. Though most of today's chocolate harvest comes from African countries, another third or so comes out of South America where cacao originated and appears to have been first enjoyed by the Mayans and the Aztecs, its human history going back more than two millennia. Theobroma cacao, the tree's Latin name, means food of the gods.

This household's Meadowlands Chocolate Company offers bean-to-bar chocolate in four varieties, each from a distinct part of South America--Belize, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Each variety has a sub-flavor of its own, in contrast with the chocolate of major brands offered in vending machines and convenience stores or the luxury chocolate offered for Valentine's Day and its equivalents. Meadowlands Chocolate is not candified by dollops of added sugar, or by milk or emulsifiers; instead the unadulterated terroir or unique regional flavor can be discovered and recognized, the taste of the very soil that fed the beans, much the same as with fine wines. My own favorite is the Venezuelan Amazonas, with a warm drawn-out quality that seems a perfect blend of chocolate, sweetness and subtle forest mould. Beans for this product are brought by canoe from within the Amazon region where harvest by hand takes place using the patient methods described above.

Organic cane sugar and organic cocoa beans are the only two ingredients in Meadowlands Chocolate. The bean supplier carries only certified Fair Trade and other certified organic products. Organic certification, in its quest to promise ongoing harmony between the crop plant and its retinue of harvesters, pollinators and land supervisors, clarifies the connection between the artisans and the tree that is their source.

From another perspective, there is a whole jungle of motley crops and beauties and supportive strengths for endless art, music and feasting once you step to the threshold where the tame confronts the wild.

In Fall, Singing Two Heroic Herbs of Summer

In September it was time to start a move, and when apartment-cleaning, daily work, a commissioned art work and then the move itself began to overwhelm me I began acknowledging the warning tickles of  a cold. In my midlife I've grown susceptible to bronchial congestion that would bloom into pneumonia if left untreated. Prescription antibiotics in the years I'd been insured would squelch those symptoms within hours, but the leftover cough and residue linger way deep. All in all I find I'm vulnerable to bronchitis after more and more of the colds I catch, though I've never smoked. In fall 2013, doing without health insurance and facing the move and my usual Canadian travels in the month to come, I felt the clampdown of familiar challenge in sore throat and fatigue. My house-mates (not the first but the second set of friends to make the same claim) urged that raw garlic would kill the infection and sent me away to Duluth with two whole bulbs of garlic, suggesting I eat it like pills.

So I gulped the cloves one at a time or broke them over the midday meal, while the infection developed because I couldn't afford to spend days lying down to sleep it off. I must have breathed garlic scent on my nearest co-workers, since whenever I burped I burnt the end of my nose with garlic gas. But the usual congestion never caught hold inside me. This cold instead remained the gentle kind I remember having as a schoolkid, a day or more of sneezes, then a three-days' cough toward the end. I ate up one whole bulb of garlic, then let up when the cough had run its course, and skipped that build-up of bronchial residue that reinforces warnings not to rely on antibiotic pills whenever infection strikes. Now I'm a convert to garlic in no matter what formulas it might be prescribed by practiced healers. What seems true is that the benefit may all be in the timing of when you load your system with it.

A friend and peer in Indiana years ago gave me The Herb Book by John Lust, Benedict Lust Publications ©1974. In this book garlic is ascribed a range of healing properties with beautifully arcane names: anthelmintic (a worm-purge,) carminative (a fart-starter to relieve belly gas,) cholagogue (a bile promoter,) antispasmodic (a spasm and cramp-dampener,) and expectorant (hastening the expulsion of mucous from the breathing passages.)

Part of the mystique that this past summer held for me included my first-ever acquaintance with another much scarcer herb, in some locales considered threatened unless propagated, the native North American queen of the prairie or Filipendula rubra. Nothing I've read so far connects it with any medicinal or salad-making properties, though  it's hard to believe that for all the eons of human foot-travel our ancestral gatherers never collected queen of the prairie or tried it out for whatever health-boosting it might be worth.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/165825104/pink-meadow-wildflower-queen-of-the?

I wanted the painting to honor not just the plant in its wind-swayed weirdness--a rose with a foam-like or plume-like floral structure, its leaves subdividing like the fingers of a spread-open hand but saw-toothed along all edges--but also the day on which I sat before it, with the wind ushering a complex of clouds from west to east into ever new sprawls and pile-ups. Wisps of rain cloud would complement plumes of pink flower. The day was of a distinct cool summer type, and the mixture of plants deepened and wove itself into green and greenish black fibrous shadow. The mixture forced me into abstraction. The queen's precisely developed leaves might only bare glimpses of themselves through ever-differing green-shadow, losing itself into scratchy black-green.

A great share of my joy on that scene came of knowing I would soon be living just down this road from this plant colony of chilly-water fens, within a mile of the middle reaches of the St. Louis River. I would come home there as I did today into the impending autumn, which would yield to the first spurts of winter, the vanguard of cold weather with its walls of drear against the horizons. In these ramparts of dark cloud overhead just now I sensed no menace, but a wink of old tomorrows and yesterdays, gold-trim along edges revealing jolly blue. High, low, openings here, there, and beyond them streaks of rain, smears of snow held way aloft. There was nowhere else I would prefer to be. 

The queen of the prairie painting on the featured card is about earth's profusion of waters, sky-borne and ground-channeled, engendering a profusion of plants and moving lives. Along these very roadsides  caraway, a member of the parsley family escaping into the wild from long-forgotten herb gardens, can also be untangled. Though in a separate family, as a garden escape it seems akin to the garlic, wild or domestic. Every plant I remember finding along this roadside with the queen of the prairie figures in, from the standpoint of art, to the living thatch-work of green through the power of visual suggestion.

A Memorial Testament to a Fellow Forager - Gisela - Who Set an Ageless Example as to What Matters

Here's my tribute to an older girl buddy who was my mentor, friend Gisela Schlueter Terrell who stunned me by dying late this spring, just a few weeks after a last e-mail passed between us. She was a librarian in the first ten years of our acquaintance, at Butler University's Irwin Library in Indianapolis, where a two-year grant had funded the opening of a Rare Books and Special Collections department in what must have been 1979. Gisela had come from the Lilly Library at Indiana University Bloomington, an hour or so's drive to the south, to stock and catalogue the new rare book room. Meanwhile I was employed as a typist and file clerk in the main cataloguing department downstairs. Apparently she saw a likely characteristic in me that suggested I needed guidance, as Gisela was a great rescuer and guide where there was any possibility of a mutual benefit. What she saw must have had to do with a colorless propriety that pervaded that bright, white library, designed with row upon row of closely set arched windows, the design of a world-famous Seattle-born architect, Minoru Yamasaki, in 1963.

The rare book room in Gisela's time was way up at the top floor of the building and was not a popular place, long and lavish as it was with ranks and ranks of stacks, ancient volumes and boxed documents behind a locking wooden door. As such it made a special refuge for a naive and impractical girl aged nineteen, full of visions of northern horizons and all manner of romance, however/wherever it happened into her grasp of a situation. The sturdy German-born librarian, with long black ponytails and teasing blue eyes, had skin as brown as ancestors from other land masses, other latitudes documented far back into time. I would talk to her of my obsessions and fears, all very abstract, and she would listen, listen and sympathize or starkly critique me in her dark European voice full of inflections and frequent snorted chuckles. Sometimes she would be swiftly harsh in her opinions, yet unfailingly discreet, as much given to scoffing as to reverence, toward me or whomever and whatever was the subject. Her judgment came of wide experience, since she had been a classroom teacher in Germany, a gymnastics instructor, an orchestra violist and music teacher, and later, in America, had been involved in 1960s political demonstrations. With two or more PhD degrees she was mentally quick in her reasoning and conclusions while gifted with strong intuition, which made her a decisive critic as well as a giver of apt suggestions where art, writing, cooking, plant propagation or a love or friendship were under discussion.

She had a little house with a quince tree, a hammock in the yard, and gardens with beans and rhubarb, root vegetables and cucumbers, strawberries and medicinal herbs such as comfrey. Off in the hardwood forest of surrounding Owen County, Indiana grew pawpaw trees and the occasional persimmon, black gum and sycamore, eastern cottonwood, black walnuts, oaks and maples and tulip trees. Ginseng and golden-seal were two scarce herbs that could be foraged there, which Gisela would harvest sparingly and sell at local marketplaces where they would be shipped off to end-users in Asia. At week-ends down at her house I tasted a green persimmon (so bitter I could taste it with imaginary taste buds seated on my teeth) and breakfasted on guinea-fowl and duck eggs from a neighboring small farm, shared in the task of making butter with a vintage glass butter churn that operated with wooden paddles inside, assisted in the hourly pressing of wild honey out of a section of tree trunk placed on the hearth to loosen the honeycomb that was hardened by December's cold, and later one June heard and saw the only Kentucky warbler I have ever encountered, a few steps away down her county gravel road.

The house, including its few acres of backwoods, was something she had just managed to buy out of earnings from the IU Lilly library half an hour's drive away. This house had only two rooms with a back bathroom, and had a root cellar which, if I remember correctly, Gisela had hand-dug under a few square feet of the main room, opening with a trap door. A rear sun porch with translucent green vinyl siding and roof was more of her own handiwork. Cats lived out on the front porch, which was open sided, but were not allowed indoors; in later years domestic geese gained residency around the entire yard and gardens, which they patrolled with shrill vigilance. In June of 1980 as a guest for my first time I spent the night in the hammock that hung from two trees, hearing no end of whippoorwill cries from the forest floor in each direction. Sultry heat, sung by cicadas with that pulsating intro and ebbing buzz that speaks to me Indiana and equivalent latitudes, a song I've yet to hear in Minnesota where by now I've lived most of my life, made up the soundstage of those summer or early-fall days. The forest's leaves, crisp and darkly green, as long and broad as shoe-soles, encircled the yard on three sides, for Gisela had left the the woods alone where ground for pathways or gardens or a bit of light and air current had not needed claiming.

Some time after I was gone away to study and live in the north, first to London, Ontario and subsequently to Minnesota, Gisela met, fell in ecstatic love with and married the son of a neighbor, Clyde Terrell, among other descriptions a pond-builder with carpentry skills, an appetite for history and back-country lore who owned a bulldozer and wanted release from an unhappy marriage. Gisela, who had known marriage, desertion and widowhood all three, destitution and hunger and a few of the personal dangers that can confront young foreigners who are obviously on their own, helped him with the process of getting a divorce, since each of the new couple had independently longed to move west to the mountains. They lived for a few years together in Owen County, then in the early 1990s left to scout Wyoming and Montana for a homestead. They found land they could buy within the Bighorn Range, in Sheridan County, Wyoming, in the village of Story, where they established a cabin and gardens and kept horses during what must have been about eleven exhilarating though financially challenging years. With the approach of 2005 Clyde, nearing the age of 70, was diagnosed with lung cancer. Gisela, as she told me last year, was 'under no illusions' as she cared for him, driving him to and from Denver for treatments, till his death on Labor Day week-end of that year.

So in this dignified aftermath of a dream pursued, met and lived, and heartbreak, and many mountain afternoons spent alone or with Clyde following trails, at trout streams and in dells below the sheerest of peaks, snow-cooled and re-baked by desert heat, and following many orchestral concerts in which Gisela played her viola for weddings, wakes or reunions, and rehearsals in donated space or lessons given in her living room, I met my old friend again after twenty-one years of irregular contact limited to phone, letter or email. This was on the third of June, 2012, as I followed her printed directions off westbound I-90, past Buffalo, nearing but not yet as far as Sheridan.

The log house where I found her was strange yet familiar, a transformation of the old clapboard shack in Indiana, having the same dark interior, jovial signs painted and hung in bathroom or kitchen, dried herbs dangling from the ceiling, and floor to ceiling book cases. Now, minimized in their midst, was also a computer. In the yard stood ponderosa pines and, out back, well-spaced aspen and narrowleaf cottonwood that provided a flickering shade.

We spent most of one week visiting, sharing evening or midday dinners that included heart of deer and bear meat pot roast (friends and neighbors had traded or given her the wild game, though she shot and dressed a deer per year on her own land for the venison as Clyde had taught her how to do) and taking car trips into the highest elevations of the Bighorn Range, seeing moose and marmot, summer snowpack, mesas, torrents within red canyons and sagebrush flatlands. All alone at the top of a Douglas fir one day I heard the song of an Audubon's warbler, the western version of our yellow-rumped warbler found east of the prairies, impossibly wistful and ringing between rock heights like the sincerest utterance of forlorn hopes.

Once as we hiked a road together I noted that Gisela, who long ago had exceeded my height by a couple of inches, but had acquired a hunch in her shoulders, now stood a tad shorter than me. But her stride made me hurry my fastest to keep up--even though she was nearly seventy years of age to my fifty-two and a smoker who'd smoked little brown cigars for as long as I'd known her. The gardens, the old sheepdog Mya and the attraction of mountain slopes not very far in the distance, a backdrop to all errands into the yard, kept her constantly stepping, striding, stooping, hauling, mixing, toting, bowing, tuning, summoning, often braving spasms of arthritis. She had grown stringy, stooped with constant busyness, on a diet centered around lean meat and her own fruit and vegetables. Her ways were the ways of our forebears on six continents.

In my mind she's a persistent survivor, to the extent that I wonder when if ever I'll accept her as a mortal human being truly dead. From most of what she ever said to me I think she believed she'd live to a ripe old age well beyond seventy, and so, had she lost the desire and outlook to attain great age, especially as a veteran tobacco user? At this stage I expect never to learn how she died, if it was sudden or long premeditated, attended by someone or in solitude, eminently influenced by Clyde's death at the same age of seventy years or coincidentally over and done with by that age.

A book I'm currently enjoying, Old Border Road by Susan Froderberg, Little, Brown and Company ©2010, has in its middle the quotable lines: "And do not the dead surely lay their claim? Perhaps more so than the living....Do as commanded or elsewise live in fear. Girl, I tell you this--death is but one less day to be afraid." And so, with the certain sense that the dead do live on inside those of us who knew them best or longest, I rest and act upon the discernments phrased by Gisela--that life is not easy, that it goes back on you just when you're lifted up by your fortunes, that mullein is safely gathered alongside highways and railway rights of way with today's pollution-control technology in cars, trucks and locomotives, that on meeting a cougar in open country you must simply stand your ground and make yourself look as big as possible.

I remember her AMC Gremlin down in Indiana, its rusting body held together by flowers and caterpillars, raindrops and other beautification painted up and down it in different colors of enamel, and the Ford Fiesta that succeeded it. I remember the days she didn't come in to the library due to car trouble, or the summer day she had to stop at every creek between Indianapolis and the town of Spencer to re-fill the radiator with a bucket. I remember the day we came upon car thieves dismantling vehicles beside a shallow pond in a pasture, and she made me stand aside while she passed them at close range to be sure they saw that she saw. (Later, they murdered her young dog Troll with a shotgun blast at close range, and were subsequently rounded up and flushed out of Owen County for good by outraged rural neighbors who showed up in a group with an ultimatum on hearing of what had happened.)

She was a person as large as all humanity, whose code of ethics and acceptance of other traditions she had pieced together from life-ways variably old and much forgotten, civilized American, native American, civilized and pre-civilized Eurasian--that is my best assessment of Gisela. But by now she's no longer in a position to argue with me...