The P-Words

Obviously, the pandemic has defined the last two years for most everyone on the planet. However, as I look back on that time, some other p-words also come to mind.

While the pandemic made its impact, I couldn't help but notice the plundering and pillaging that was happening simultaneously. From the corporate bailouts and the giveaways of federal land for oil and gas drilling that plundered the country to the pillaging of natural resources in the Pacific Northwest, the pandemic-era has left its mark far beyond the arena of public health.

To all of this, I might add a fourth p-word: paralysis. The failure of the United States to protect its people during the pandemic has been paralleled by an alarming inaction on important issues like global warming even as heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, and increasingly powerful storms pound our country and the world more frequently.

All I have left to say about this state of affairs is that it's pathetic!

Connecting the Lynx

Piece by piece and cat by cat, Canada lynx claw a foothold in the Kettle River Mountain Range of northeastern Washington state, helping reestablish a population that will connect lynx in the Rocky Mountains with their counterparts in the Cascade Mountains.

A unified effort led by the Colville Confederated Tribes, the Okanagan Nation Alliance, and Conservation Northwest has worked to bring lynx from healthy populations in Canada to the Kettle Range, a move intended to bolster the species' population in the United States where it is listed as threatened. By reestablishing a breeding population in this part of the lynx's historical range, the partnership will bridge the gap between lynx in the Pacific Northwest and those that live along the Continental Divide.

The project also features a unique element. To catch and relocate the lynx from Canada, the partnership has enlisted trappers. However, instead of being paid for the pelts of dead animals, the trappers receive money for the lynx they catch in live traps. It's another example of boundaries being crossed for this worthy cause.

During a period of about five years, as many as 50 lynx will be moved to the Kettle Range. For more information on the project, click here.

I look forward to seeing the population gap in the Kettle Range filled with lynx in the future.

Legal Roots

An important case, one that could return the Evergreen State's definition of "state forest" to its roots, reached the Washington State Supreme Court this month.

Upon earning statehood in 1889, Washington state received a land grant for state lands from the United States Congress. The land came with the stipulation that "all the public lands granted to the state are held in trust for all the people."

For years, Washington's forests have been managed to produce timber harvest. The proceeds of the logging are then applied to funding for the state's schools. Conservation Northwest is challenging this approach, arguing that it fails to live up to the expectations of holding the land in trust for all the people.

If Conservation Northwest prevails in the case, the outcome will alter how the state manages its forests. Such changes could plant the seeds for using forests in Washington to sequester carbon. It would also seemingly return the forest-management process to its roots, allowing the original intention of the land grant to be fulfilled. For more information about the case, click here.

Let's hope the Washington State Supreme Court doesn't cut down Conservation Northwest's case.

Wild Assumptions

The human tendency to insist that animals or other non-human parts of the environment lack some trait or ability happens so frequently that even people who have challenged it sometimes end up doing it.

Our assumptions about what is human and what is wild or wilderness have deep roots. Consequently, they can guide our reasoning no matter how much we try to overcome them. In addition, they tend to result more from our own limits in perceiving the world around us than from the shortcomings of non-humans. This creates major problems for the conclusions we reach because flawed assumptions constrain our ability to assess questions about non-humans and the environment sufficiently. Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-human World, a new book by Emma Marris, provides an example of this.

Marris makes an admirable and good-faith effort to challenge dominant ideas about the relationships between humans, other species, and the environment. However, the discussion presented in the book about the idea of intrinsic value contains some arguments that require further examination. They are limited by the same constraints about the traits and abilities of non-human entities that Marris works so hard to challenge.

Those who support the idea of intrinsic value argue that the value of something exists independent of the valuation of a valuer. For example, a tree has value in and of itself regardless of what value humans might put on it. This idea is used to support arguments that non-humans have the right to exist and that human activity jeopardizing that right is unethical.

While allowing that individual non-humans have intrinsic value, Marris questions whether species as a whole and entire ecosystems have it. This argument centers on the assumption that species and ecosystems are not conscious agents trying to survive. At this point, Marris begins to exhibit that old human tendency to discount the capabilities and characteristics of the non-human.

According to Marris, "The individual living things alive today are here because their ancestors survived and reproduced. And thus each one has inherited many ways of surviving and reproducing. Their goal-directed nature is a product of the brute force of evolution. Individuals that don't try to live and reproduce don't have babies. Those that do, do, and pass on their 'trying' genes. Sometimes selection can act on tightly coordinated groups, like ant colonies, when the whole colony survives or dies together. But 'species are too diffuse and their individual members too uncoordinated and independent from each other for them to constitute an entity on which selection might operate,' (Ronald) Sandler says. They have no goals. If they have no goals, they can't be helped or hindered." Then, Marris applies the same logic to ecosystems, arguing that they lack goals, including the desire to persist.

With regard to species, these claims, especially the quote from Sandler, are incredible. It is difficult to accept the assumptions that species are not "coordinated" and "have no goals" after watching geese migrate, European starlings fly as one big mass, insects mate over streams in the tiny window of time in which they live, or salmon return together from the ocean to spawn. In fact, when the Elwha River was dammed, the individual salmon would constantly bump into the base of the dam in an attempt to follow their instincts to continue upstream. This behavior continued for decades until the dam was finally removed. Clearly, the salmon had a goal in mind. This goal could not have been the result of uncoordinated, individual decisions because the individuals that returned to the river decades after the dam was put in place had no personal knowledge of what was past the structure. Rather, the goal was the product of a species coordinating itself through collective instincts in its drive to survive, a drive that propelled individuals to the point that they would repeatedly throw themselves against solid concrete in vain. The quote from Sandler also seems to disregard the research showing that dolphins possess a social intelligence that allows them to experience each other's experiences, a degree of connection that humans can hardly imagine. And therein lies the central problem of these claims from Marris and Sandler about intrinsic value: They are limited by the human ability to perceive and imagine what is happening in the non-human world. These limitations constrain the conclusions the two writers make.

Demonstrating how assumptions can lead to flawed logic and questionable conclusions, Marris seems to use the claims about intrinsic value to invert the process of evolution. Positioning reproduction as the "product" of evolution, which the writer refers to at other points as a "selector," creates the impressions that evolution is (1) the driving force (rather than a result of reproduction and adaptation to environmental conditions) and (2) an omnipotent agent with the ability to decided the fate of species. In other words, Marris, who is reluctant to grant agency and consciousness to species and ecosystems, apparently has no problem granting these things to evolution. First, evolution is a human concept that is used to explain how species develop and adapt within their environment. It is not an agent of that environment. Second, evolution is the product, not the driver. As life adapts to the planet's different parameters through reproduction, species evolve. No omnipotent "selector" determines this process. Instead, it's a continuous interaction between life and environmental parameters. I would further argue that species play a central role in this process by supplying the drives that organize migrations, mating, and other social interactions. The species are trying to survive. Otherwise, their individual members would be so uncoordinated that life on this planet would have likely been dead on arrival.

Proving intrinsic value in ecosystems presents stronger challenges. Because of human limitations, it is quite difficult to see how entire landscapes might be coordinated and trying to survive. This is why Marris can say ecosystems do not move as units. On this issue, the work of Suzanne Simard, which can be read in Finding the Mother Tree, proves useful yet again. (I previously blogged about that book here.) In showing how entire forests are linked in consciousness and communication through fungal networks, Simard provides strong evidence for the kinds of agency, coordination, and desire to survive that Marris denies to ecosystems. The connections Simard describes go beyond a particular species and far beyond individual members of those species. Furthermore, they show how entire ecosystems respond to environmental signals, sharing resources and information that allow for decisions meant to facilitate survival. As Simard demonstrates, these decisions can even include the ecosystem moving as a unit as changes in the climate make one area unsatisfactory or turn other areas more favorable. Trees moving beyond what once was the tree line represents one such example, and of course, the species linked to those trees follow. In addition, dying trees will share their accumulated knowledge of how to survive with other trees before they die, and such sharing can involve more than one species. These phenomena sound a lot like coordination and a desire to survive that extend to the level of ecosystems.

In Wild Souls, Marris raises important points about animal rights and human attempts to control the entire environment. However, the arguments the book presents about intrinsic value are central to its overall message and need further attention and development before they can be accepted.

All told, it is always worth keeping in mind how human assumptions about the non-human world influence our perception of and perspectives on it.

The Child and the Mother Tree

As a child, I had the fortunate experience of receiving my first bits of education from a forest; years later, I'd discover the science of that knowledge in Suzanne Simard's Finding the Mother Tree.

Because the teachings of the forest reached me before social constructs about the non-human world had much chance to mold my perspective, I was free to imbibe that information without a strong human filter. Put simply, I just experienced what was happening in the world around me. It didn't seem weird at all to think of trees as conscious and connected.

After being exposed to more societal ideas about what trees represented to other human beings, I struggled to reconcile the fundamental differences. It just seemed like other people were experiencing something completely different when they couldn't imagine trees as more than lumber growing out of the ground for human consumption. The more I heard what others had to say about trees, the more rare my perspective appeared to be. Such isolation can create doubt, and I wondered if my sense of the forest came largely from my ability to anthropomorphize.

Simard's research in forest ecology dispelled my doubts. Several years before her book's publication, I read a news article that explored how she had produced evidence that trees communicate with each other through fungal networks. For someone with the childhood experience I'd had in the forest and an interest in using environmental communication to break down barriers between humans and the rest of the environment, the research clicked with me; so as soon as I saw that Simard had published Finding the Mother Tree, I bought it.

Reading the book was like having the pieces of my earlier experiences in the forest forged together in solid confirmation. I realized that much of what Simard found through her research closely resembled the lessons my childhood self had absorbed from the trees around it (maybe it was a powerful and unmitigated form of learning through direct experience, or perhaps their fungal network had reached me too). I learned a lot from Simard as well and breezed through the book.

If you are like me and have suspected since you were young that forests included more than a collection of individual plants, or if you are looking for information that can expand how you think about our environment as a whole, I highly recommend Finding the Mother Tree.

Dreams on the River of Restoration

The conservation dreams about the Chehalis River in southwestern Washington state continue to grow bigger with more and more groups and organizations supporting preservation and restoration projects in the river's basin.

At first, conservation projects on the river popped up piece by piece. For instance, I previously blogged about the plan by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) to purchase the Davis Creek Addition, which sits along a portion of the Chehalis in eastern Grays Harbor County. Then, a larger conservation framework began to develop in the form of initiatives like Conservation Northwest's Cascades to the Olympics program.

Another part of the framework is taking shape under the restoration program orchestrated by Pacific Northwest conservation group Forterra. By specifically focusing on the Chehalis River Basin, Forterra is bringing the river to the forefront of Washington's conservation efforts. A recent announcement of the organization's purchase of a 23-acre property along the Satsop River, a tributary of the Chehalis, demonstrates the far-reaching nature of the dreams to protect and restore the latter river. What these conservation groups are doing goes well beyond the banks of the Chehalis, linking the river to mountains and other streams in the watershed.

Although these different projects and programs come from various organizations and have some unique objectives, they also have the potential to combine for a massive and profound conservation effort. Each piece helps, and the gathering momentum points toward a lot more possibilities in the future. It's the kind of scale on which all dreams of conservation must be executed.

Perhaps the best part of this work is that it's no longer just a dream. The reality is beginning to match the visionary ideal.

Hot Enough

Now that we've turned the Pacific Northwest into Nevada with temperatures in the 110s and chronic, widespread drought, I wonder if it might be a good idea to address global warming.

Just a thought.

Go North, Young Fisher

The effort to reintroduce fishers to the North Cascades achieved a major milestone last month.

For the first time since the species was eliminated from Washington state in the middle of the 20th century, a female fisher was recorded with kits in the North Cascades on April 18.

Reintroduced to the area starting in 2018, fishers appear to be thriving in their northern surroundings. Watch a video of some of the fishers being released in 2019:

Hopefully, the recently born fishers flourish in the North Cascades just like their parents did and continue bolstering the local population.

Climbing Back to Forever

The destruction of orangutan habitat in Sumatra can't be undone overnight, but the Sumatran Orangutan Society (SOS) has forever in mind as it replants a crucial forest.

In 2018, I wrote about the SOS campaign to buy a palm-oil plantation. The organization planned to restore the land to rainforest. Happily, the campaign succeeded, and the restoration process has begun at what is now called the Forever Forest.

Along with replanting the area, the restoration project builds relationships with local people to ensure the communities in the area can help protect the forest into the future. Check out a video of the progress so far:

The Forever Forest project involves many positive aspects. Besides the restoration of a rainforest destroyed by palm oil, the securing of orangutan habitat, and the sound strategy of forming relationships with local people, the overall plan helps protect an adjacent national park and gives many species threatened with extinction an expanded area to call home.

Forever might seem like a long time, but forests and projects like this one should have all the time in the world.

A Radical Book

For those interested in communication about the environment, Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World by Jonathan Bate is pure poetry.

When I first read William Wordsworth's poetry as an English major in college, it clicked with me. I understood what he was saying, and beyond that, I recognized a perspective on the world that meshed with mine. My mind couldn't help but attach green colors to his words and images. As a result, when I found out about Bate's biography of the poet, I bought it instantly.

Along with focusing on Wordsworth's most revolutionary work, the book revisits earlier definitions of the word radical to expand our sense of the poet's impact. In particular, the definition of "implanted by nature" contains great importance for students of environmental communication. The biography certainly gives a sense that much of Wordsworth's power as a poet sprang from his feelings of connection with the environment.

Bate makes clear that among the other radical tendencies and sentiments exhibited and expressed by Wordsworth in his early poems, the way in which the poet depicted the environment became his most revolutionary and lasting effect on the world. Wordsworth didn't just challenge dominant understandings of our relationship with the environment, questioning portrayals that granted people power over nature or separated them from it entirely; he prompted us to see connections to all aspects of the environment, no matter how small or obscure. In Bate's estimation, the poetry set the groundwork for movements that promote animal rights and conservation, including the creation of national parks.

By tracing today's language about the environment back to Wordsworth and through the people he influenced such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir, Bate lends great support to his contentions about Wordsworth's importance to the modern environmental movement. He goes so far as to argue that national parks, which have long been called "America's best idea," were actually Wordsworth's idea, and the case Bate builds for this claim is compelling.

I would argue that Bate could have gone even further in establishing Wordsworth's impact on environmental communication. More than simply generating the language to advocate for national parks as basic conservation, Wordsworth preceded the later discussion of national parks as places of ecological importance, which has only gained momentum in recent decades. In addressing the role of every single part of the environment, including the elements we don't typically think of as grand, charismatic, or influential, Wordsworth pushed us to think on a larger scale, and his pen strokes can probably be seen in things like the studies showing wolves' impacts on stream bank erosion in Yellowstone National Park.

Bate might also have extended the discussion of Wordsworth's radical repercussions by examining the poet's influence on Emily Brontë. Scholars such as Stevie Davies and particularly Edward Chitham have shown how Brontë read heavily from Wordsworth's works and often took up his themes. In analyzing the epitaph Wordsworth wrote for Samuel Taylor Coleridge's son Berkeley, Bate looks at language that echoes in Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Describing someone in a grave, Wordsworth writes, "No motion has she now, no force / She neither hears nor sees / Roll'd round in Earth's diurnal course / With rocks, & stones, and trees!" The imagery brings to mind Brontë's depiction of Catherine Earnshaw in her grave, and the words are strikingly similar to those used by Catherine when she compares her love for Heathcliff to "the eternal rocks beneath." Given the argument I made last year about Brontë using imagination to turn the grave imagery into a transformative experience of the connection between people and their environment, I have to conclude that Wordsworth's poetry planted some seeds for such ideas from a woman who arguably surpassed him in radicalness.

Even though I wish Bate would have taken up the points about Brontë and the ecological aspects of the national parks, his biography of Wordsworth is very good, and anyone interested in the environment should check it out. To borrow some popular 1980s language, it's radical!

More Birds of a Feather

Facebook pages of bird-watching groups don't have followers; they have flocks. And the flock following the page for the Black Hills Audubon Society (BHAS) grew a lot last year.

In 2019, I started managing the BHAS Facebook page. As I reported last year, the page saw some encouraging results in the first eight months.

I am happy to report that the trend continued in 2020. From February 1, 2020, to February 1, 2021, the number of followers went from 472 to 619, an increase of 31.1 percent. Furthermore, from my first day back on May 22, 2019, the followers have increased 70.1 percent. Page likes show similar trends, increasing 29.5 percent (417 to 540) from February 1, 2020, to February 1, 2021, and 57.4 percent overall from May 22, 2019.

Despite having fewer birding events in 2020 because of COVID-19, the BHAS Facebook page continued attracting attention. I am proud of the results and look forward to continued growth in 2021.

I'll do my best to keep people flocking in.

An Intimate List

My 2020 birding list fell quite short of past efforts, but along with its abbreviated nature, it also carried an intimate feeling.

A Bewick's wren, one of three
wren species I saw in 2020.

After logging 118 species in 2019, 139 in 2018, and 120 in 2017, I only recorded 81 in 2020. Faced with COVID-19 restrictions, I never traveled far and didn't attend any outings with birding groups. Instead, I concentrated on my local populations. All that meant a smaller total of species for the year.

As it turned out though, I felt a special closeness to the birds I did see. They were around all the time, and I didn't have to work to see them. Of the 81 total species, 79 of them were seen in a four-mile radius, and the other two were within a 20-mile radius. What is more, I didn't add any species to my life list, and I saw all 81 in familiar spots. That might sound bland, but it wasn't. Rather, a bond developed: These birds and I shared the same habitat, and we could count on seeing each other. I think it gave me a deeper understanding and appreciation of life in my immediate area.

Even with a list full of the usual suspects, I can single out some highlights. I saw three very different owl species: the northern saw-whet, the great horned, and the barred. Also, I tallied five species of woodpecker, including the red-breasted sapsucker, the pileated woodpecker, the hairy woodpecker, the downy woodpecker, and the northern flicker. In the same field, I logged both a tundra swan and a trumpeter swan. I had opportunities to see Townsend's warblers and hermit warblers in my yard. These were among seven species of warbler I sighted. Additionally, I had three types of flycatcher in the area.

I may not have set any records or broken new ground with my 2020 birding list, but I certainly got to know my closest avian neighbors, and they are a big part of how I'll remember last year.