Read an Excerpt
Hope's Horizon
Three Visions for Healing the American Land
By Chip Ward ISLAND PRESS
Copyright © 2004 Chip Ward
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61091-086-6
CHAPTER 1
Keeping Track, Watching Hawks
There is nothing so intimate or immediate as being eaten. This possibility increases dramatically when you dwell among large predators without the advantage of rifles, scopes, whistles, high-beams, hard walls, or pistols. On the other hand, there is no way of death that leaves more time for reflection than starvation. Prehistoric people paid close attention to animal signs and tracks because their lives depended on it. They lived in a world where it was well understood that all living creatures feed on and, in turn, are food for others.
In food webs, the insect eats a mite and is eaten by the fish that is eaten by a human who gets eaten by a bear. The bear, of course, is eaten by a flea that is being consumed by bacteria. Ask our indigenous ancestors to identify a bird, fish, insect, or mammal, and it is likely they would have provided a name, imitated its call or movement, told something unique about its behavior, and then described how to prepare it for dinner. To live is to feed. From fish eggs to frog legs, from larvae to hog heads, almost nothing is out of bounds. To be human is to find life tasty.
To know signs and tracks of wild creatures, you must be a patient observer. Our ancestors would not have called the attentive observation they practiced "natural history" any more than they would have called cave paintings "art." The word "nature," like the word "art," implies a separation from the subject one is naming. Ask a fish to define water. Humanity's formative generations who lived close by the wild earth observed the varied behaviors, patterns, relationships, and cycles of the living world not from outside a context of connection and belonging, but from within its embrace. Food was found locally, personally. It was a gift, and the wise person respected and honored the giver.
It is different today, of course. The mammal du jour is on sale at Wally World. Our food is fast or frozen. We consume millions of mass-made "personal" pizzas. Even our water is shipped, bar-coded, and shelved. We put seascapes and alpine vistas on our screen savers, but nine out of ten of us don't know what phase the moon is in or why we might care. We track data, not deer.
Except for people like Sue Morse, who is still tracking wildlife the old way—though not to eat it, but to save it by saving the habitats that sustain it. Sue is a co-founder and leader of Keeping Track, a Vermont-based group working with individual landowners, land trusts, public land agencies, and conservation organizations across the country to gather data on specific habitats and creatures that people want to conserve and understand. In the process, Keeping Track also teaches people about the role and value of biodiversity in a compelling, firsthand way.
A desire for better civic planning spawned the organization in 1994. As a rural planning commissioner, Sue discovered that the information available to those making decisions about land use was woefully inadequate. State and federal agencies were not producing maps that included animal populations and details of their movements. A map of the interstate migratory routes for geese and raptors, for example, might tell you they would pass through your backwoods, but not where they might stop to rest and feed. Even conservation organizations were not making a systematic effort to include animals in the descriptions of land that guided planners and civic leaders. From local zoning boards to state legislatures to the feds, decision makers were working in the dark. Sue decided to turn on a light, at least in her own corner of the land.
She was well suited to the task. As a kid exploring the Pennsylvania woodlands on her grandfather's farm, she had found wildlife fascinating. In college she studied forestry but switched to Shakespeare. Then she had a tracking epiphany that fused her love of wild animals with her penchant for interpreting lyrical passages. Out one snowy day, shortly after she moved to Vermont, she realized she could look at tracks and "see" the animals that made them. Their relationships and stories could be interpreted, just as a literary passage could be: "Here is where the bobcat crouched and waited. Here it advanced and crouched again. These are the tracks of the hare it was stalking, and the nibbled leaves where the hare stopped to eat. This is where the bobcat attacked, and here is where it dragged and ate the hare."
Sue was hooked. She, in turn, hooked my friend John Derick. John was interested in building a trail system around the pretty college town of Middlebury and wanted to know where the trails should go and what could be seen. He now conducts his own tracking sessions, offering insights and inspiration to local residents and college students who accompany him on weekend outings. They, in turn, get hooked on tracking and pass their knowledge and enthusiasm to others. Ironically, Sue and her colleagues at Keeping Track have found a way to help laypeople develop a broad and inspiring ecological perspective by simply getting them to focus on the ground immediately under their feet.
At first Keeping Track focused on projects in Vermont and New Hampshire. The idea was simple. In communities where information was needed and desired, Keeping Track taught citizen volunteers the skills they needed to go out on the land in question and record what they found. As it turned out, there were always lots of volunteers, including local conservationists, school groups, hunters, landowners, hikers, and curious retirees. They were provided with guidebooks for tracks and scat, some on-the-ground instruction and experience, and a few tools such as clipboards, specialized rulers, and cameras.
Groups were usually given a key local species to focus on—a species whose presence and vitality was linked to the well-being of other species in the area. In New England, the focus was often on bear, mink, fishers, otters, weasels, or bobcats. As Keeping Track's reputation grew and the organization expanded to places as far away as Arizona and California, the focus turned to cougars and coyotes, among other species. Deciding which creatures to focus on introduces ecosystem literacy into the mix; participants are invited to think about relationships they may not have considered. Why, for instance, does removing a bear, bobcat, coyote, or other large predator from a landscape's food web mean an increase in smaller predators like foxes, skunks, and house cats—which, in turn, leads to decimated songbird populations?
Once trained, the citizen scientists would divide into teams to look at specific transects—sections of ground sixty feet wide and two miles long that can be defined using handheld satellite links to global positioning systems. Although GPS devices are used for accuracy, designating transects is not a geometry problem: participants must again look at land as habitat and see relationships to identify which transects are worthy of attention. Transects are visited at least once each season, year after year, until the data that are collected resolve into clear patterns of animal life.
Beyond the satisfaction of collecting useful data, participants gain firsthand experience with creatures in their backyards that they may have never seen or even suspected were there. And almost all of Keeping Track's volunteers find that experience exciting and uplifting. If, as acclaimed sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson believes, love of our natural world—what he calls biophilia—is an evolutionarily programmed feeling in humans, then Keeping Track is like a matchmaker that leads citizens to the big wet 'n' wild kisses they've been dreaming of. But you don't have to eat granola to come to the love nest—the backgrounds of Keeping Track's participants are diverse, ranging all the way from farmers to hunters.
On this morning, Keeping Track included me as well. I had come to the green forests of Vermont all the way from the tan deserts of Utah. As an activist there working to keep the desert from becoming an enabler for some very toxic collective behaviors, like the abandonment of chemical wastes and spent nuclear fuel on the desert floor, I came with a burning question. "In Utah we are willing to trade environmental quality and integrity for jobs, profits, and revenues," I had said in a hundred interviews, "but we may also be trading public health." After I organized a community health survey in my town that indicated widespread cancer, birth defects, and chronic illnesses, this was my litany as an advocate for precautionary policies. "We know how to make the land pay—how it can be used to make wealth. What we don't know is how the land generates and sustains health. At what point do the wounds we inflict on a landscape get translated into human sickness and suffering? That is the fine print in the deals we are cutting, and we have not learned how to read it."
Sue Morse might not answer those questions for me, but I hoped her insights would be helpful. Also, I had always wanted to learn how to track skillfully. When I arrived in the American West as a young man, I could track a bulldozer if it had an oil leak, but that was about all. After living for some years in the wildlands of southern Utah, I had at least learned to distinguish between common coyote tracks and cougar prints, which to the untrained eye look similar. I once tracked a mountain lion up a snowy canyon until the tracks disappeared in the rocks, only to find fresh cougar tracks behind my own when I returned. The experience was humbling. A full-grown cougar, after all, can bring down a bull elk in two seconds, and there I was playing Daniel Boone and tempting fate.
Sue Morse and John Derick were now taking us over land near John's Vermont home. John and his neighbors, including the leader of the local Audubon chapter and the manager of a lakeside summer camp, were walking over a transect to record what they found. My companions were involved in land use planning through land trusts, conservation organizations, and local governments, and it was important for them to understand what was going on there before making recommendations about how the land should be protected to conserve habitat.
The citizen trackers were particularly interested in signs that black bears might have left behind, like the claw marks in beechnut bark that are left when a bear climbs a tree looking for the tasty nuts. The branches of those trees are sometimes tangled together in telltale patterns, the result of a perched bear pulling the surrounding branches down and stripping them of their food, snapping off branches and stuffing them in the crotch of some limbs. Sue can recognize the tracks that distinguish one animal from another—dog from coyote from wolf from cougar, for example. Before she can make such distinctions, however, she must know where to look for them—she has to know what their makers eat and when, where they nest and den, where they seek water, their needs, likes, and dislikes.
Sue understands the routes they choose. Who would think to follow a ridgeline looking for teeth marks on a birch tree to know whether a bear had dropped into the beech trees down below? Bears, she explained, are not very social, and humans are not the only creatures who set boundaries. A jaw-sized signature in softwood serves as a warning to be read by other bears that a stand of beech trees is occupied. The other bears can tell if the bite is fresh or old, and can gauge jaw size to get a handle on how big the potential competition might be.
Sue Morse reads habitats. Animals leave memos in the mud for her. There are bulletins in the bark. Tracks are her texts. Hair and scat are punctuation.
As we hiked along, Sue found subtle signs of animals everywhere—a bit of fur here, an odor there, a claw or antler scraped across tree bark, teeth marks, blood from killed prey, a stone turned over for the insects underneath, and barely discernible footprints. Tracking is not a simple matter of memorizing signature shapes. Tracks made in the shade differ from tracks made in sunlight. The condition of the snow can distort a track so that it appears different in powder, slush, or crust. Tracks reveal an animal's gait, which is a clue to its body shape. A fox, for instance, has a narrow body and can put its feet in a straight line, one in front of the other, while a broad-shouldered dog makes more parallel footprints. The pattern of tracks also tells whether a creature was running or just ambling. If running, there may be clues that indicate whether it was chasing something or fleeing.
I was as excited as a first-grader learning to sound out letters. Powerful trackers, I learned, must be attentive, receptive, and honest to find tracks in the first place, and then intuitive and knowledgeable because they have to interpret what they're seeing while trying to supply what is missing. And there is always something missing. Tracks themselves are a sign of absence: the animal was once there but isn't now. Often Sue came across subtle signs that were ambiguous, prompting her to proclaim the guiding rule of tracking: "When in doubt, follow it out." We would then try to backtrack in search of crisper signs, a distinctive gait, signature scat, favorite foods, likely habitats, and telltale odors.
Standing aside, watching my fellow trackers, I found their attentiveness familiar. I often saw my dad, an ardent fly fisherman, in a similar trance while he watched glassy currents in mountain streams and fed fishing line into the air in a fluid S above his nodding fly rod. The more you learn to listen, the more you hear the world whisper, "Pay attention." Absent-minded rock climbers can literally get carried away. Even birders lose themselves while looking through binoculars and listening for calls. (Do they lose themselves or find themselves, then wake up singing a different tune?) Birds are like verbs in a grammar. To find them you must fit habit to habitat until the language of a landscape emerges.
Hearing that language is deeply satisfying. It's not just awe and wonder; it's a reassuring feeling of belonging. I never had much luck "going inside" to find myself, unless that needy and noisy voice that begged to be distracted or anesthetized was the real me. My "self," it seems, is not some organism without an environment but a process that feeds on inclusion, a kind of reciprocal, sensual dance I do with the world I am in. There is terror out there, teeth in the dark, but also sweet joy and magic.
We came across tracks pressed into glassy mud along a stream. Their crisp edges told us they were fresh. Raccoons, deer, mice, and beetles had left their marks. As I studied the varied calligraphy of bird feet in wet clay, I wondered if I was looking at some kind of precursor of the pictographic symbols I had seen on ancient clay tablets displayed in museums. At some point, did our species realize we too could mark mud and later papyrus with our own symbolic tracks, which would indicate in the present the onetime existence of something no longer here? I expressed this thought to my companions and speculated that our proud print culture, which so distinguishes us from the animal world, might even itself be a gift from that world to us. They smiled, nodded, and went on as if my conjecture was not so much thought-provoking as mildly annoying, even embarrassing. One person's revelation is another's evidence of brain damage. I put my eyes to the ground and resolved to keep it simple.
Months later I read the works of Paul Shepard, a patron saint of the deep ecology movement, and realize that my speculation about the animal contribution to our cultural development was not so far off. Shepard makes a compelling case that our brains, eyes, ears, and limbs evolved to hunt and gather. They were called into being by a wild habitat and the activities necessary to survive and thrive in that habitat. We learned about the world by observing our fellow animals so we could find and follow them. We gained consciousness while immersed in relationships with animals whose flesh we ate, whose skins we wore, whose antlers and bones we used as raw materials for our tools. Their feathers and claws adorned us. We admired their keen sight, speed, and strength, and their nonhuman capacity to disappear into the earth or soar high above it. Their powers seemed magical compared to our own. They permeated our dreams and were the subjects of our folklore and mythology. We sought their allegiance and were grateful for their gifts. Our rituals, dances, and art were created to attract them, appease them, and thank them. Our music imitated theirs. And our current "madness," as Shepard calls the modern condition of humanity, is in large measure the consequence of the serial amputation, over time, of our formative relationships with them.
Indigenous peoples across the globe commonly accept that knowledge is inherent in all things and that wild animals in particular convey meaning and teach. Even today we are fascinated by them, although we are more likely to encounter them on television shows than in the flesh. Wild animals live lean. They are naturally elemental and integral in ways we are not. We admire how, undistracted by cell phones, divorce lawyers, beer commercials, and a million and one of the other artifices we suffer, they live life directly. Although incapable of Socratic dialogues, they also have no hidden agendas or commercial interests. Their eloquence is in their behavior. Today's domesticated animals, according to Shepard, are inbred feedlot "goofies" we manage chemically and kill remotely, or pets that we turn into our alter egos.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hope's Horizon by Chip Ward. Copyright © 2004 Chip Ward. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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