Getting Closer

A special conservation project took a step closer to fulfillment this month.

In late 2019, I blogged about a proposal to expand the Davis Creek Wildlife Area Unit, a piece of Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) land very close to my heart. Happily, the proposal was accepted a few months later, and WDFW began looking for funding to make the land purchases that would support the project.

At its most recent meeting, the Fish and Wildlife Commission approved the purchase of a 94-acre parcel, which represents about a quarter of the total proposed 416-acre addition to the Davis Creek Unit. Additional parcels will need to be purchased before the entire project is complete, but the acquisition of this piece is great news. The exciting vision of preserving this area now feels closer to reality.

Any conservation effort is important to me. However, because of the close connections I talked about in the 2019 post, adding to the Davis Creek Unit touches me just a little more. It's also a special experience to see this project develop from a proposal to the acquisition phase.

I would like to thank the Fish and Wildlife Commission for allowing the expansion of the Davis Creek Unit to move forward.

Not Much Left to Say and Little Time to Say It

Reading news of the latest climate report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change left the impression that not much remains to say about global warming.

It's here now, and its impacts compound as we speak, but we're long past the point of talking. As this article by the National Audubon Society explains, nine percent of species will face extinction within a decade if nothing is done...

The Non-Human and an Expanded Notion of Social Change

Perhaps social change in this era needs a change in what we think about as social. Two recent examples of individuals connecting with the non-human world provide clues for how that might happen.

Without question, we face some massive and serious social and environmental issues. These include our ability to address global warming, mass extinctions, increasing poverty, and a deterioration of the social bonds and institutions that bring people together and build communities.

At the same time, we struggle to generate the kind of momentum that produces the changes required to address these issues. In fact, the breakdown of social bonds and institutions likely feeds into that struggle, creating a vicious circle of unsolved problems and declining abilities to solve them.

After reading about two individuals who discovered strong connections with the non-human world and went on to become important forces for change on both social and environmental issues, the thought occurred to me that one of the obstacles impeding change might be that our definition of what is social should be expanded to include the non-human world. In other words, issues like global warming are so far-reaching that to address them adequately, we must bring all hands, paws, wings, roots, and whatever else on deck.

Connections with the non-human world can provide the kind of spark necessary for successful social change. The stories of Rodney Stotts, a falconer from Virginia, and Bob Russell, a landowner in rural Washington state demonstrate the power these connections have. In the case of Stotts, an early experience with conservation and a subsequent connection with birds of prey inspired him to centralize conservation in his life and help others enjoy and benefit from the same kinds of connections. His work has allowed people to rethink their place in the world and find second chances and catharsis. For the 63-year-old Russell, a chance encounter with a determined salmon on his property in November 2014 launched his commitment to conservation and prompted him to become an advocate in his community.

Importantly, the efforts of Stotts and Russell indicate how inspiration from and connection with the non-human world can serve as catalysts for actions that help rebuild the social bonds so crucial to the process of social change. Many factors currently limit our ability to produce social change, but one that isn't often talked about is that we might not be considering how vital non-human entities are to the effort. Possibly, these non-human entities can become partners in the process, helping us begin, facilitate, and optimize the activities that generate social bonds, form communities, and yield the changes we need.

From now on, when we think about what is social, we would do well to think about more than just humans.

Double Coverage

Maybe it was all the twos in 2022, but when this year began, my management of the Facebook page for the Black Hills Audubon Society hit a fitting milestone.

On May 22, 2019, I started managing the page. At that time, it had amassed 364 followers in a little more than seven years. By January 1, 2022, that number had doubled to 728.

To add to the excitement, January 2022 has given the page a good start toward the next 364. Already this month, the page has 21 new followers.

The growth during the last 32 months means a lot to me. It is great to see my work having an impact, and it is equally satisfying watching the organization's Facebook coverage expand.

You could say it's twice as nice when achievements like this go toward a good cause.

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.