Headline: Girl’s heart devastated by tree

BY Cedar deArbol, Staff Writer

A tree was felled today, and it broke a little girl’s heart.

The girl blames her mother for making the decision and her father for wielding the chainsaw. The parents blame the poor landscaping decisions of previous owners.

“It’s mother nature,” claimed the girl in her teary argument. “You don’t cut down mother nature.”

Though ardent conservationists and environmentalists, the girl’s parents are baffled. “We’ve always made it clear when we go to get firewood that we only take dead or downed wood. But this is not something we’ve ever said to her,” says the father.

“We want her to learn respect for the natural world, but we’ve left out a lot of that other stuff. She needs to learn to love the world, not worry about its destruction just yet. She’ll learn a lot of that rhetoric later, probably from us. But it has no place in the life of small child,” adds mom.

The culprit turned out to be the girl’s preschool teacher.  Other parents have even commented, “I came in with a plucked flower one morning and a small boy came up and started yelling at me that that was mother nature and I shouldn’t do that.”

In order to prevent the entire class from picking all of the flowers off a bush that stands next to the path to the playground, the teachers have impresed upon the children that the flowers are part of mother nature and need to be left for other people to enjoy.

The tree, a northern white cedar, was chopped down while the little girl was napping. Even though it provided little to no shade for the house it stood next too, the girl was heart-broken to find it missing when she awoke.

The girl’s mother is disturbed because she could come up with no good arguments to counter her daughter’s request not to cut the tree down, except for the parents joint decision to widen the existing stairway leading from the deck to the yard.

The father is convinced that his daughter will never forgive him for dealing the death blow to her favorite tree. He says he is awaiting the bill from her therapist.

My daddy is Bat-man

Towhead is not a normal kid. How could she be with parents such as us? She is bombarded with useless details about politics and local wildlife, cooking and physical science. Yet she is so much a stereotypical three and a half year old that, if asked what her favorite animal is she’ll respond with a fervent, “Snakes! But only pink ones.”

Sometimes I try to put myself in her shoes . . . a restrictive and dangerous proposition. But I do wonder what it would be like, as a kid, to have mom respond to the question “Where’s daddy?” with “Playing with bats,” “Chasing birds,” or “Getting a deer out of someone’s basement.” And I imagine I would respond the same way she does. “Can I see?”

I think bats are fascinating. First of all there’s echolocation – how cool is naturally-developed sonar! They eat insane amounts of night-flying insects like moths, beetles, mosquitoes, termites, and flies – also very cool.

Spokane County Parks and Rec does an annual class on Bats of the Inland Northwest. It involves a 20-minute lecture on bats and bat ecology followed by a trip down into a canyon where biologists from BLM (Bureau of Land Mgmt) and WDFW (WA Dept of Fish and Wildlife) capture bats in mist nets and harp traps, and then bring them down the canyon where people from the class can watch them being processed (ie mesured, weighed, etc) and released. Mr. A helped out last year, after getting his rabies vaccine of course. (I teased him no end about getting rabies shots. How can you resist an opportunity like that?)

Mr. A was asked to help again this year, so when the opportunity came up for me and Towhead to register for the class and check it out Mr. A and I figured  Towhead is old enough to stay up that late and has shown some interest in bats, so why not?

First came the 20-minute “class” on bat ecology. What I got out of it:

• Bats are the only flying mammal.
• They make up 25% of the mammalian species on earth. With ~4260 species of mammals of earth this means that in the mammalian version of the United Nations (United Mammals?) we get 1 vote, bats get 1065.
• Some bats can live up to 30 years.
• A very small percentage of bats are infected with rabies but there are still certain safety precautions you should take, and certain behaviors to watch for to identify a bat that is infected (see this handout for details).
• Bats often capture insects when flying by scooping them into their tail or wing membranes, and then putting the insects into their mouth. This results in the erratic flight most people are familiar with when they watch bats feeding in the evening.
• Large quantities of bats on the east coast are being wiped out by White-nosed syndrome, a fungus that infects winter hibernacula (an area where bats hibernate) and kills entire colonies.

What Towhead got out of it:

• Bats do neat things and are not as scary as they look.

The next three hours involved watching a biologist from BLM handle bats right under our noses.

The War Effort

I was researching an article proposal I’m writing and I stumbled across this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The message of this poster, “If you don’t need it, don’t buy it” seems appropriate with the current economic crisis and the impening holiday rush. I like making Christmas more about family than about material goods anyway. But it feels like many people are just waking up to this concept of only buying what you need and can afford now that their stock portfolios have lost nearly half their value if not more.

Ironic that this economic crisis has put many Americans in a wartime mindset. Hang on. Aren’t we in a war now?? Wait, make that two wars. And do we hear those with their hands on the reins asking us to conserve in a time when our nation’s resources are being stretched to the max. Nope. Bush’s mantra (albeit quieted now because of increased attention to the absurdity of it) is go about your business as usual. Spend money. By going into debt you are helping our economy. A message companies like AIG and others took to heart.

The irony and sadistic humor in it all, is that in some ways Mr. A and I couldn’t be happier. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve lost money and are strapped for cash just like everyone else. The future does not look rosy in our eyes, but the upside is that we see more people paying attention to their actions. It has forced us to start using our bikes and taking the bus more than we used to. We are cutting back, trying to spend within our means, wasting less and conserving more. And so are more and more people. Isn’t this the message environmentalists and conservationists have been preaching for over a decade?? I’m sad it took $4/gallon gas to really make hybrids and public transporation so popular but I’m glad it happened nontheless.

In looking at a lot of these WWII era posters, both American and Canadian, I was struck by how much the messages are pertinent and useful now. Like the fashions of the 60s, 70s and 80s, even messages like these seem to be coming back into style.

    

The Ohio Historical Society remarks that, ”Posters, such as these, helped mobilize the nation for World War II. They called for sacrifice and participation. Citizens were asked to contribute time and money, to produce products, to conserve resources, and to contribute to the war effort in personal ways.” What happened to this attitude? Are we so insulated by material goods that the concept of sacrifice has become alien and scary? Posters like these and the others listed with them make the phrase “Support the Troops” take on a whole new meaning, and leave the yellow ribbons I see decorating the rear end of SUVs a lot more empty.

And it makes me appreciate all the more the attitude of unity and change that President-elect Obama is trying to promote. I listened to his victory speech from Grant Park with the admiration a writer has for a well-written piece, and the hope of an American that wants to see a change – in our politics, in our foreign policy, in our attitudes toward war, our Earth, and the needs of our citizens at home. In his words, “So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember that [. . .] in this country, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people.”

I don’t want another war, I don’t want a bigger war. I don’t want our nation to be as desperate and strapped for resources as we were during the first and second World Wars. But the idea of sacrifice and conservation don’t need to be such scary things that we’ll spend ourselves into bankruptcy to avoid them. Maybe I’m trying to convince myself that tightening our belts is not a bad thing. Maybe I’m trying to understand why our government continues to reward overspending (and overspend itself), and is so afraid of asking Americans to change the lifestyle they’ve become accustomed to that they’ll do anything to maintain our status quo.

In looking at a lot of these posters Mr. A and I wondered what the reaction would be if we started posting some of them around town. We figured that this one might turn a few heads,

but that the more modern parodies might be a bit more pertinent and possibly get more attention (be it positive or negative. Call me a devil’s advocate but does anyone have the money to rent billboard space? Could be fun to see the affect it has

“Mary had a little lamb . . . but I ate it.”

For Mother’s Day Mr. A and I decided to do something we’ve been wanting to do for awhile but haven’t had the time. And no, I’m not talking about sex. We went on a birding trip with the Audubon Society at a conservation area south of Spokane called Slavin Ranch. It was bitterly cold for a May morning but the area is fantastically beautiful with coniferous forest and sprawling wetland rushes and ponds. And the wildflowers are beginning to bloom (which makes it very hard for me to keep my attention on the birds)

While we were walking we got in an interesting conversation with a couple of people in the group about hunting and conservation. One man posed the question, “What gives someone else the right to hunt my animals? If they are on public land they are, by right, part mine. So what gives other people the right to hunt them?” With Mr. A working as a game and non-game biologist, this is a relevant issue for him and a question he not only wants, but needs to have an answer to.

Mr. A’s first and probably most obvious response was “Yes, but as public land it belongs to all of us.” Public lands are held in trust for the American people by the federal government and were set aside with multiple use mandates. There is no one public opinion and therefore no single public use of these pieces of land. Many public lands are set aside as wilderness areas, and the values and uses of these areas are outlined in the Wilderness Act passed in 1964 (I could digress and examine the language in this one document alone. It makes for an interesting analysis, but maybe another day).

Management agencies like the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park’s Service, and federal and state fish and wildlife departments have a responsibility to maintain the health of these lands, particularly wilderness areas, and hunting selected species is often one tool used to keep populations under control. So, for the sake of argument, let’s say that the man mentioned earlier (I’ll call him Bob) is right. The public does not have a right to hunt animals that have been trusted to the rest of the general public. How then do federal and state managers control populations? Bob was speaking specifically of deer hunting so I’ll use that as my primary example. Mr. A and I figured there are a couple options.

Option 1: Reintroduce native predators like wolves. Problem: Deer specifically tend to wander through populated areas. There are enough problems with wolf reintroduction in uninhabited areas. Wolves wandering through the suburbs creates a whole new set of problems.

Option 2: Managing agencies could thin the populations based on need themselves. Problem: Transparency. If a state agency, or any agency for that matter, were to harvest animals there is too much potential for abuse by the members of that agency. There would be public outcry over the whole process. Best solution to this problem? Let the public harvest the animals whose populations need to be controlled. You see the circularity of the problem.

Option 3: Don’t hunt. Problem: Starvation, disease, habitat degredation, general unsanitary conditions from dead deer carcarases littering the countryside.

These arguments seem pretty obvious to me and I’ve heard them numerous times before (though it does help in thinking through the problem.) The best explanation that Mr. A and I settled on boils down to a question of biology.

We are mammals and omnivores. For better or worse, we eat meat. There are several ways we can obtain the meat we consume. One is through commercial farms and dairies (and these range from the local organic farm to the mega-corporation that have crowded and sometimes inhumane conditions). Another is through hunting.

With more and more people becoming conscious of what they eat, both for health and environmental reasons, there has been a growing interest in organic and locally-grown food. While preganant and since the birth of Crazy Towhead, Mr. A and I have begun to learn more about our food and where it comes from. A large source of our learning has come from our involvement with a CSA (community-supported agriculture) while we were living in the Great Basin. This program delivers a weekly basket of organic and locally-grown vegetables and fruits to people who live in town. The subscribers are connected to the farmers via a newsletter and an end-of-the-season “day at the farm.” The “think global, eat local” concept, also popularized as the Slow Food movement, has been explained eloquently and persuasively by Gary Paul Nabhan in his book Coming Home to Eatand in Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, MIracle. The underlying idea in all of this is to know where your food comes from, how it was grown/processed, and to lessen the distance it travels to get to your table. In this way consumers can eat healthier food, support local economies and small-scale agriculture, reduce their carbon footprint, and it encourages people to be more concerned about the health of their own ecosystem since that directly affects what they eat.

Whether people approve of hunting or not, there is no better way to know your own food and where it comes from than to go out and harvest it yourself. When fruit comes from Chile or Mexico we don’t think twice about it but what do we know about the water supply in that area? The vast majority of people eat meat but a small fraction of those know where that meat came from, what that animal was fed, and thus know very little about what they’re eating. Most don’t want to know. And that’s OK. There are parts of biology and anatomy that are not all that appetizing. But as Mr. A said, “The only person who I think has a right to object to me, or anyone, hunting is a vegetarian.” And we do have a number of vegetarian friends. Ironically a large number of them will eat game meat. We’ve jokingly dubbed them “gametarians.” Perhaps this is because most of the vegetarians we know don’t eat meat because they object to the way meat is raised and processed in this country. But most of them don’t object when they know the animal lived a life in the wild, who shot it and how it was processed.

 Given the consumption rate of first world countries, the US in particular, it seems to me that we have an ethical responsibility to choose (when possible) what we eat and how that food is produced. Whether they exist on public or private land, isn’t hunting selectively better than eating meat from a corporate farm that potentially abuses the animal, or kills it an inhumane way, and pollutes the surrounding environment by the concentration of animals it packs into a smaller space (ie feces concentration in the local water supply)?

So Bob, the answer Mr. A and I came up with is this: It is more than anything else a question of biology - we eat other organisms to survive.  If we are concerned about our environment and the species that co-exist with us then we should be more concerned about where our food comes from and how we harvest it. And if that’s the case the main ethical question should not be whose land it’s on or whether we should kill other organisms in the first place, but how do we better connect with what we eat. How do we change our habits so that our bodies, our deer, and our ecosytem beneft from a necessary biological exchange?