Nature, Culture, and Two Friends Talking

Superior North Shore colors from Mount Oberg. Photo K. Chapman

October 19, 2015. I recently spent a tawny fall weekend on Minnesota’s North Shore.  It was the last possible weekend to see any color—already many of the trees were bare, and the birch leaves had achieved that sere, deep yellow-gold that is almost turning the corner to brown, though they still dazzle when a shaft of sun hits them.  My wife and daughter and I hiked a trail that follows the Split Rock River up one side to a waterfall and then back down the other side.  It is a trail we always love because it has views of so many rushing cataracts, scarred cliffs, and quiet pools overhung by gnarled cedars.

However, as we walked I was paying attention not just to the fall leaves and the applauding river but also to the various trail structures that were put in place to protect the slopes from erosion.  The boardwalks and wooden stairways and little bridges are all hand-crafted from unpainted lumber that has aged beautifully and which has tended to settle into the landscape in pleasing ways.  These structures have a kind of Japanese aesthetic—simple, unadorned, carefully fitted to the terrain.  Scarcely anyone gives them a thought, yet they are architecture.  Someone designed them; someone tried hard to make them serviceable but also discrete.  I thought of Japanese shrines, which often commemorate some Shinto earth spirit, and which have a similarly weathered and rugged look.  I realized that our parks are just that—temples to our worship of the powers in the landscape—even though we take great pains to deny the landscape is inhabited by powers.  Any alien from another world, however, would be quick to point out what we are doing.  A trail like this is a little pilgrimage walk to a holy site over structures lovingly maintained by the temple priests.  I wonder if the members of the park service trail crew have ever thought of themselves that way? – Jim

Spring Peeper in terrarium.

September 28, 2015.  Today was a big day for us: my daughter Pippa released the two Spring Peepers she has raised from tadpoles.  It was a beautiful fall day, warm and sunny.  We took them to a patch of woods and opened the terrarium and watched them hop out and away!  Pippa decided to let them go so they could hibernate: they burrow down in the leaf litter and freeze solid.  In spring they will thaw out and be good as new.  We look forward to walking by that spot in spring and hearing the sound of peepers peeping. – Jim

Spring Peeper making a getaway.

Spring Peeper about to burrow down.

I was sure I could boil 40,000 words down to 1600…but, alas, I couldn’t do it.  So here’s the third installment of my musings on the Pope’s Encyclical, “On Care for our Common World.”

What is it, then, that will steer us away from a “compulsive consumerism” which the Pope says is “based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods…”?  Francis arrives at a solution to the ecological crisis little different than the one that Jesus taught two millennia ago to heal the wounds of society—an “interior conversion.”  Simple gestures of kindness, a generous spirit, and tender feelings, practiced daily, will push back, says Francis, against the juggernaut consumerist engine and the media and markets that power it.

This is no large program, no marshalling of resources and manpower, no call to arms—it is something that each person must experience for him or herself.  In the end, he says, it is a question of our dignity.  Jim Armstrong, in the last essay of our book, Nature, Culture, and Two Friends Talking, points out that future generations will look back on this moment in history and wonder at our ignorance and unwillingness to break with “the logic of violence, exploitation and selfishness” as Francis calls it.

That is why it is no longer enough to speak only of the integrity of ecosys­tems.  We have to dare to speak of the integrity of human life, of the need to promote and unify all the great values.  Once we lose our humility, and become enthralled with the possibility of limitless mastery over everything, we inevitably end up harming society and the environment.

The opposite of the world view that Francis critiques is one where the joy of being alive is embraced by everyone, understood by us as something we have in common with all creatures, and is part of “a splendid universal communion.”  The hard part is getting there—because it can only happen one soul at a time, as each one of us figures out what smoothes our furrowed brow, defeats our inner demons, and frees our spirit so that we, as if children again, find wonder and beauty in the people and world around us.  Such an old idea—strange how easily it is forgotten—or unlearned more like it.

Toward the end of the Encyclical, Francis takes a side trip into the practice of saying grace before and after meals.  For him this little ceremony that hits the pause button in our busy lives, embodies the spirit of thankfulness for life and creation and unites us with those who produced the food—a literal source of life—and helps us to remember those who each night go to bed hungry.  I believe it—in our household we pause at the beginning of each formal meal to acknowledge a break from what goes before and after this moment of communion which, at its heart, satisfies longing for and enjoyment of a life as best as it can be lived.  A life with less food than the body craves, or food that is not enjoyable to eat, is a poor life indeed.

I love this simple phrase of his:  “Nature is filled with words of love….”  For me, truer words were never spoken.  In several essays and poems in our book, Jim and I give voice to this idea.  There is a mystical experience at the center of living, but it is drowned out by the distracting cacophony emanating from our culture’s workings.  Whether you believe in God or not, everyone senses something very large at the central emanations of the universe when they find connection to something in nature, or with another creature, a beloved, or even a stranger in a momentary courteous exchange.  I can only explain it as, life wants itself.  Life drives all before it, gravitates towards other life, and will not be extinguished.  Even if only dimly felt when gazing at millions of stars, watching a bumblebee energetically rummaging around in a gentian, seeing a bluegill defending its nest in shallow water, or your pet dog saying something to you with his eyes—it is all about life talking to itself, wanting to be surrounded by itself.

Francis feels the connection between God and all living things as essential to living a full life.  That’s because it is all about relationships—people to God, people to each other, people to nature.  Forming and nurturing relationships makes a person grow up.  Anybody with kids knows that, or with an elderly parent to care for, a dying friend—even an old Greek Revival house or a pet helps us to mature.  Why?  Because attention must be paid, the pace must be slowed, care must be taken, consequences weighed—or it all goes to hell.  Mistakes were made, is a common afterthought when one doesn’t do the right thing out of concern for the common good.  In the end, each of us cannot act in even small ways without creating society’s future.  I think that’s the Pope’s main conclusion, and as an ecologist, I agree.

What do you expect from an Argentinian priest who spent much time with the poor, refused to move into the opulent papal residence, and lectured his colleagues on the contradiction of their lavish lifestyle?  He is a revolutionary, of course, as Jesus was, and just as Jesus did, he is making some with a stake in the outcome of this debate uncomfortable.

The Pope’s views are stirring the pot.  David Brooks and a number of other commentators, while praising the overall thrust of the Encyclical, took Francis to task for his criticism of the economic system of capitalism—“the greatest engine for lifting people out of poverty that has ever been.”  This and similar thinking—a friend of mine pointed out the Pope’s opposition to carbon credit trading and his failure to mention the more effective carbon tax approach to reducing CO₂ emissions—signal a distrust of capital-driven free-market economics.  His popularity is taking a hit for this and other ideas.  In a Gallup poll taken a few weeks after the Encyclical was released, support among Protestants and conservatives had plummeted from the year before.

As Pope Francis works out an expression of “authentic freedom” through his writings, his poll numbers drop, according to Gallup.

For my part, he gets high marks.  I think the Pope has got it right.  In the last essay of our book, Jim and I come to the same conclusion as Francis—it’s all in our heads.  Without that “interior conversion” to a new way of thinking and feeling about nature, other people, and our own life’s course, collectively we will remain trapped in the technological-economic bubble we have created over the last couple hundred years.  Steering toward an ecological way of living, let alone lifting up the less fortunate among us, is simply too big a challenge, even for committed united groups of people, unless everybody on the planet rows the boat toward the same distant shore. – Kim

Everybody loves Pope Francis it seems.  His defense of the least defended of humanity’s billions, his scolding of those who pursue wealth and power for its own sake, his surprising tolerance of the human condition despite his own Church’s tradition of bigotry, with a little house-cleaning thrown in—all of these things make him one of us, one of the “little guys” trying to get a fair shake in an economic and cultural realm not of our making.  To have such a powerful person in our corner at last is a breath of fresh air.

His Encyclical on “Care for our Common Home” is no different.  As I said last time, he is calling for a new form of ecology, one that embraces all human existence and seeks to help us see that everything is connected to everything else.  Embracing this type of ecology would put leaders and those with power and influence in an unfamiliar position:  stewards and caretakers, rather than defenders of ideology and economic interests.

In this little offering, I’ll paint a picture of what Francis thinks is the solution to a 200-year old crisis in the making, as he considers it.  He admits himself that the Encyclical offers no detailed solutions, no framework of strategies.  Rather, in broad strokes he suggests that leaders of the planet must, in a holistic way, pay attention to food and energy production and use, transportation and urban planning, forests and the life in the seas…even to “biodiversity”, the total store of species, ecosystems, and genetic variety on Earth.

He cites political corruption—personal economic interests that enslave officials—as an opposing force, and he asks that the full costs of a development project, including harms to local people and nature, be integrated into project planning from the beginning.  More pointedly, he asks that the burden of proof for showing that no harm will come from a project be shifted to the project’s developers and off the backs of locals and conservation-minded people who must prove a project’s harms.

It is clear, though, Francis believes that a response to the ecological crisis begins with how we think and feel:  “…our indifference or cruelty towards fellow creatures of this world sooner or later affects the treatment we mete out to other human beings.  We have only one heart…”  Reading this passage, I was reminded of Edward Hicks’ famous series of paintings, “The Peaceable Kingdom,” depicting harmony among people, between other species, and between them and us.  I like this particular one quite a bit—the little girl in her Sunday best with the disheveled boy riding the back of a lion—quite a contrast.

The Peaceable Kingdom, one of at least 62 renditions by Edward Hicks, circa 1820.

The Pope identifies the source of not only worldwide damage to nature, but also to the Earth’s people, as a limitless but hurried and unrealistic vision of the future created in part by “economists, financiers, and experts in technology” in partnership with politicians who make the laws and decide how to spend public money.  Lacking a mindset of “patience, self-discipline and generosity,” society’s leaders fail to take actions and spend money in ways that enlarge the public good.  In the spirit of integral ecology, this would mean taking an ecological approach with a social agenda—“combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature.”  In the Pope’s words…

We have to accept that technological prod­ucts are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shap­ing social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups.  Deci­sions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build.

I don’t believe Francis is guilty of Luddite thinking—the idea that technological change must be resisted.  Rather, he is saying that technology and the money that creates and spreads it should not define humanity.  Just as some economists have broken with their discipline’s ideology that people’s choices about what serves them best are always rational (and winning Nobel prizes for it), so too should we stop thinking that any technological breakthrough is always a good thing.  Being able to choose among forty brands of toothpaste or two hundred brands of car does not make you free, says Francis.  Instead, he insists that humanity’s destiny should be tied to “authentic freedom” and a new definition of prosperity—which is really a very old definition.  Libertarians and the Pope agree on this point—we can’t get there with laws and regulations—they are just temporary stop-gaps.  – Kim

July 9, 2015.  Staying on the seventh floor of Chicago’s Water Tower Place Hilton, I found a printed note on the desk:

We request that you do not open your windows in your suite during this time to avoid the annual migration of High Rise Flying Spiders…

Bridge spider, an orb-weaving high-flyer, on a bridge in Germany (Photo Sarefo)

…Lake shore high rises, Willis Tower and John Hancock are noticing the annual influx of flying spiders spinning mini-masterpieces as high as 95 stories.  Baby spiders release silk from their spinnerets to create a balloon-like contraption.  The spiders then use the balloon to hitch rides on uplifting air currents from the lake.  The spider is Larinioides sclopetarius, an orb-weaving spider found throughout the Northern Hemisphere.  In natural environments, these spiders live on rocks overhanging water.  In the city they have found the next best thing:  tall building and high-rises.  What makes high-rises so appealing, perhaps, is the light shining on windows.

Even now, bridge spiders are flying around the Wrigley and Tribune towers in the heart of Chicago, at Wacker Drive and Michigan. (Photo Kim Chapman)

Two things are remarkable here:  first, that a spider has been so adaptable, and second that the Hilton has chosen to inform its patrons so thoroughly and so eloquently.  The note seems to elicit admiration for the spider’s abilities—one way to calm people down who are frightened by nature’s eruption into their world.  Arachnophobia is the number one phobia in America, so it is likely that patrons of the hotel have been freaked out to see spiders the size of fifty-cent pieces crawling about in their rooms, or even just dangling from webs out their windows.  But rather than sweeping the problem under the rug, or declaring war on the spiders, the hotel has chosen to live with the spiders and work around their habits by educating hotel guests.  No doubt the arachnophobes shut their windows and shudder, but I wanted to see one (I found a picture on the web, here.)

Larinoides sclopterius is more commonly called a “bridge spider,” for obvious reasons.  Its parachuting talents have spread it across the globe.   In a nonhuman world, it would spin its webs on cliff faces, but it is perfectly happy to use our urban structures—it doesn’t see a difference between nature and culture.  And a good thing too, since cities are full of bugs that need to be eaten by somebody.  Architects and engineers think of the physics of a building, but of course there is also always going to be the biology of a building; animals will be our neighbors whether we like it or not.  (A simple solution here, by the way, would be to put screens on the windows.)

I could envision an annual flying spider festival on the lakeshore:  kids dressed up as spiders, free parachute rides, etc.  There is a marketing opportunity here. – Jim

The Split Rock Light stands guard on a rocky headland of Lake Superior’s North Shore, warning ships away from dangerous waters. (Photo Dennis Adams)

June 27, 2015.  I just got back from a family vacation to the Split Rock Lighthouse State Park—a perfect example of the interconnections between nature and culture.  The park is at one and the same time a shrine to the heroic age of industrialism, a recreational center for kayakers, hikers and campers, and a refuge for all the many native species of plants and animals that need undeveloped land to thrive.  The park commemorates a lighthouse built in 1910 to warn ships away from a dangerous shoal off the north coast of Lake Superior.  At that time, the Iron Range of Minnesota was busily shipping millions of tons of rich iron ore to the blast furnaces farther south.  According to the Minnesota Historical Society’s website, by 1901, U.S. Steel Corporation had 112 bulk ore carriers, making it “the greatest exclusive freight-carrying fleet sailing under one ownership in the world.”

The park visitor center is an excellent place to contemplate how natural wealth is turned into human wealth.  Iron-rich rock which welled up from the earth’s crust a billion years ago was dug up in the late 19th and early 20th century and, using fossil fuels, turned into steel which was then used to build the rails and bridges, ship hulls and boilers, and the driving wheels of a new civilization’s transportation infrastructure, as well as the skeletal structure of its rising cities.

It is also a place to contemplate the stochastic fury of weather.  Even coal-powered steel freighters were no match for a devastating November storm in 1905, when 29 ships were sunk or driven aground in western Lake Superior.  As a result, business interests lobbied the government and the U.S. Congress allocated $75,000 to build a new lighthouse, perched on the top of a billion-year-old chunk of anorthosite and looking out over the vast expanse of America’s largest and stormiest freshwater sea.

A hundred years and some change after it was built, the lighthouse has been made redundant by radio beacons, automated lights and radar and sonar navigational equipment.  But it provides a different kind of safety now.  It is a haven for animals and plants which need protecting from the rapid development which has proceeded apace since the construction of Highway 61 in the 1920s.  Just yards from the roar of that highway, hikers and campers have a chance to view original inhabitants of the land, such as flowering bead lily, columbine, the American toad, the grey tree frog, or the tiny boreal chorus frog.  (My daughter Pippa, a budding herpetologist, spent every evening down on the rocks by the lake, tracking down frogs by their calls and taking their portraits—all these photos are by her).  – Jim

Bead lily (Clintonia borealis) at the North Shore MN (Photo Jim Armstrong)

Wild Columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) at the North Shore MN (Photo Jim Armstrong)

American toad in mosses at Lake Superior, Split Rock MN (Photo Pippa Armstrong)

Boreal chorus frog between bursts of song at Lake Superior, Split Rock MN (Photo P Armstrong)

Gray tree frog in ephemeral pool on rocky Lake Superior shore, Split Rock MN (Photo Pippa Armstrong)

June 30, 2015.  This is a blowfly on my milkweed plant in front of my house.  Culturally, we associate milkweed with the regal Monarch butterfly, whose story fascinates us:  the beautiful orange butterfly makes a heroic journey every fall, travelling thousands of miles over mountains and plains to spend the winter in forests in the highlands of Mexico or in Southern California.  Because it is so charismatic, the Monarch has many human fans—there are Monarch gardens, Monarch preservation societies—Monarchs have even been bred on the International Space Station!  In fact, the reason I have milkweed in my yard is because of the sad decline of Monarchs, due in part to the decline of this plant, their larvae’s major food source.

Blowfly on Milkweed (Photo J Armstrong)

But Monarchs aren’t the only pollinators of milkweed.  The humble blowfly, more famous for its disgusting association with corpses than for its life cycle or its looks (though it is a cool metallic green), also visits the plant.  The blowfly has few fans and nobody wants to preserve it—actually it is usually considered a pest.  But in truth, the blowfly has an important role in flower pollination.  Flies precede bees in evolution:  along with beetles, they were the original pollinators of the first plants.  Today they continue to visit flowers for their nectar and in so doing carry pollen from bloom to bloom.  They prefer flowers that are dull and dark brown to purple in color—I suppose because these look more like rotten flesh than more colorful flowers.  And these darker flowers like skunk cabbage and red trillium have even evolved putrid odors to attract flies.

This milkweed in my yard smells delicious, not corpse-like, but it is sort of dull and purple, so it makes sense that a blowfly is busily probing its blossoms.  Researching the question “why a blowfly?” has made me re-evalute my anti-fly prejudices (somewhat).  And it is another fascinating example of the complex interrelationships that weave the fabric of our common world.  – Jim

May 29, 2015.  Reading in today’s Detroit News that the food industry—comprised in growing part of growers who deliver not just fruits and vegetables for which Michigan has always been famous—but also meats, salsas and sauces, pickles and breads, honey and jellies, and a product of which we are particularly fond, craft beer—Michigan’s food industry employs one in every four workers.  The article purported that this industry’s “protective diversity”, as Jim put it long ago, is due in large part to microclimatic effects and a variety of soils found here.  Having worked in Michigan for a dozen years, studied its peaty, acid bogs abounding in highbush blueberries, the expansive wet meadows that became the muck farms supplying urban areas with fresh vegetables, and the moderating influence of Lake Michigan’s weather, I agree.  Michigan is uniquely positioned to be a food giant, and in fact, is number two after California—with $100 billion worth of food products, processing, and services, according to the Detroit News.

Corn to the horizon in Spring Lake Twp., Minnesota–as across the Corn Belt of the Midwest (Photo Kim Chapman)

Years ago I took an ecology course and had my eyes opened to the fact that the modernization and industrialization of agriculture was necessary to feed a burgeoning population…then about 4.5 billion worldwide, now about 7.3 billion.  Well…other information makes me doubt that to some extent.  For example, you could could give the entire Des Moines region—about half a million people—all the protein and calories it needed on 50,000-500,000 acres, depending on the amount of meat eaten.  The entire state has only 3.1 million folks, and the land base to sustain them would be paltry.  So, I would ask, why is 86% of the state’s 36 million land acres dedicated to food production?  For that answer, read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  There you would read that a) Iowa and other Midwestern food-producing states abandoned the idea of feeding themselves when, over the last few decades, they began growing mostly corn and soybeans, b) all but possibly a tenth of that harvest is actually eaten by people, c) the rest feeds instead a vast industrial production machine consisting of converters of carbohydrates to protein (pigs, cows, chickens, turkeys), converters of carbohydrates to fuel (ethanol), and converters of carbohydrates and other parts of the plants to industrial and food necessities—oils, starches, sugars…an amalgam of chemical constituents destined for the production line of modern living.

Peppers for sale at the Winona Farmers Market

Pickles for sale at the Winona Farmers Market

Meanwhile, the local food movement grows, a throwback to an older time in America, or a modern time in France, maybe.  The two models of how to grow and use the fruits of the land exist side by side—and I wonder, toward which direction will the wind blow in the next twenty years?

In our essay, “Out of the Darkness, Light,” I refer to one of the solutions to our current dilemma:  “…the idea of conservation rooted in local community concerns. In order to supply the needs of people who, for multiple generations, have lived in one location, a different view of living is required. Communities and individuals across America are experimenting with techniques based on principles of self-reliance and local control. Examples abound: buying fruits and vegetables in season from nearby growers, revitalizing brownfields made worthless and discarded in a previous fit of economic endeavor, preserving green space amid congestion, valuing and conserving the plants and animals that elevate a mere city or farm to an intriguing bastion of biodiversity, and so forth. Really, this is nothing more than a return to the “Neolithic village” of our origins, where everything you valued was of necessity found within traveling distance on foot—long-distance trading in exotic materials being a tiny fraction of the economy of the day. It doesn’t matter that this village is located in the heart of New York City: it could and should operate to the benefit of the people living there, who control their own environment and destiny.”  – Kim