A lovely summer day in the Temperate Zone. Working and being outdoors is not a problem.

Just Talking About…Our Temperature Sweet Spot

March 21, 2021.  You know how, sometime in late spring or maybe early summer, you step outside without a coat on, feel a certain gentleness in the slight wind brushing your face, see the optimistic sunlight slanting through fresh green leaves on trees overhead…and suddenly washing over you is a sense that all is right with the world?  Well…chalk that up to your evolutionarily-inherited climate preferences.  You can thank the weatherman for his forecast, but you can thank our ancestors’ physiologies and choice of where to live for your contentment standing outside at 72° Fahrenheit.

Turns out that, for 6,000 years, the webs of travel and communication networks among our dense settlements—call the whole thing “civilization” if you want—emerged and has existed where the mean annual temperatures have been 52-59° F (11-15° C).  Yes, it might snow in winter and a day in mid-summer might make you sweat, but the average conditions over a year are “temperate”—as in the “Temperate Zones” at mid-latitudes in the north and south hemispheres of the planet.

Temperate is such a flexible word.  A person’s temperament can be temperate, you can hold your temper and temperately argue with a fierce opponent who, by comparison, comes off as a hothead.  The Temperance Movement was organized by women in the late 1800s to cut off the supply of demon rum to hard-drinking, wife-beating husbands.  The word “temperature” has the same Latin root—temperare, meaning “restraint.”  Temperature is a restraining force in the world—a limit above or below which we can live only if we prepare ourselves.

But on that lovely late spring day, we are content, for we need not prepare.  Just walk outdoors and there you are—comfortable, calm, and looking forward to the day.

In 2020, just 20 million human beings—in a world population of 7.6 billion—lived outside that 52-59° F annual range.  That is a human’s ideal temperature for existence, our temperature sweet spot.  Fifty years hence, if settlement patterns and densities stay the same, 1 billion humans will live outside the temperature sweet spot—not because they moved to less comfortable climes, but rather because the comfortable climes will have moved away from them.  The heat of the tropics will have migrated northward and southward towards the planet’s poles, engulfing portions of the Temperate Zones and driving people to the air-conditioned indoors.  For all the details, read the article published here:  https://www.pnas.org/content/117/21/11350.

Dr. Xu and his colleagues predict a global shift in temperature zones to the north and south. Green areas will become more comfortable for people to spend time outside year-round, and red areas less comfortable. Source: Xu et al. 2020 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Of course, people won’t just tolerate their new climate.  They’ll move to where things are like they used to be, following the temperature sweet spot northward and southward.  The green areas on the map here show where mean annual temperature will improve, red and orange zones where it will shift beyond the sweet spot, and yellow where things will stay as they have for millennia.  That migration has begun—for example, farmers from Central America arriving at the USA’s southern border are escaping not just violence but also crop failure due to changing weather patterns.

Where people want to stay put, air-conditioned indoor spaces will make it possible.  With its oil wealth, Saudia Arabia and the nations bordering the Persian Gulf will be able to cope, though at great expense.  Here in Minnesota, winters will become milder—though hated ice storms more frequent—and snow and lake ice less reliable.  That beautiful late spring day when I step outside and feel completely alive and content—that, too, will change.  It will come earlier as the Temperate Zone inches northward toward the Pole. – Kim

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The most famous dreamed bird, a phoenix, imagined by F J Bertuch in 1806, as the documentation of real birds was well underway.

May 24, 2020.  There are many birders, but fewer life-listers.  The former are serious enough bird watchers to stop dead in their tracks and look up when they hear the call of an uncommon bird passing overhead.  I’ve done that hundreds of times—just yesterday, in fact, while on a bike ride, and heard the call of a nighthawk.  I braked hard, looked up and scanned the sky—there it was, a small, undulating dot, giving off its buzzy “BEER” call after every upward slide of its roller-coaster flight path.  Second one I’d seen this year, and with its population dropping a couple percentage points each year, a member of that tribe was worth pausing for, just to appreciate its existence.

Then there are the life-listers.  The name says it all—life, list.  They have a written record of every different species of bird they’ve seen:  what, where, when, how, with whom—but not why.  The why is understood.  The thrill of the chase, the satisfaction of achievement, and, naturally—as is natural for our species and all others—to be better than the rest.  It is a competitive sport, this life-listing, as much as ping-pong, singles tennis, golf, and any individual contest against another.  I’m sure there are team life-listers that vie with rival teams, but the archetypal life-lister is a solitary act, planning the next weekend jaunt to the yet-unvisited state park or more arduous expedition to the Galapagos Islands.  Since there are some ten thousand species of birds on the planet, it would certainly take a lifetime to see them all—if you had time and money enough, and could track them all down, given the rarity of so many.  The world’s top life-lister is Claes-Göran Cederlund, a Swedish physician, who’s seen 9,675 of the world’s birds.  He is 72 years old.

Now there is another type of life-lister I just learned about.  At a socially-distanced dinner outdoors with friends on a chilly night in early May, one of them told us about a friend who is a dream-lister.  “What is that?” we asked.  Our friend explained.  While you are asleep, if you encounter a bird in a dream that is unlike any you’ve ever seen—a phantasmagorical creature, a chimera, something put together from parts of other birds you know but never before imagined until you, yourself, dreamed it—you must, upon waking, write down a description of the dreamed species and record its name, both common and scientific.  It is as if you were Alexander Wilson—a less-famous 19^th century ornithologist than J.J. Audubon, but more scientifically-accomplished—and had shot a Tennessee warbler around Nashville in order to name it, describe it, and bring it to the attention of the scientific world in a publication that all could read.  (Wilson did, in fact, publish the first scientific description of the Tennessee warbler in 1811.)  So, just like Wilson and the welter of taxonomically-driven naturalists from Linnaeus to the present, the dream-lister documents and reports the new species of bird encountered in the dream, as if coming upon the pass in Darien, Panama, from which Balboa saw the Pacific Ocean, the first European to do so from its eastern rim.  (It was not Cortez, as Keats wrongly stated in his famous sonnet about the power of art:  Upon First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.)

More questions from our dinner party….  How many birds has he dreamed?  Over three hundred.  But there’s another dream-lister we heard of who’s up to five hundred imagined birds.  (Raised eyebrows all around.)  Are there any rules?  Yes, you must name the bird while dreaming, or it doesn’t count.  (Protests all around—you’d have to be a lucid dreamer, one of us complained, to pull that off.  I can’t even remember my dreams, let alone remember the name I gave an imaginary bird.)

You could say that the dream-lister is just a life-lister gone too far.  You could say that he or she has an extraordinarily competitive urge.  Neither is a charitable nor deep interpretation of what is going on.  Not having talked to a dream-lister, I don’t know the real reason, but I can, I think, relate to the impulse.

I remember one morning in graduate school waking to my wife laughing.  “What’s so funny?” I asked.  She told me that she and I had had a conversation that night, while I was asleep.  I’d been learning the names of insect families for an exam in entomology—repeating them in my mind while conjuring an image of a typical member of the family so that, when I saw the specimen in the lab, I’d know which family it belonged to.  Tenebrionidae, the darkling beetles, Corixidae, the water boatmen, Muscidae, the flies, and so on.  I can still remember them.  So immersed was I in that world of naming the world that it became as commonplace to me as the names of my schoolmates from grade school through college.  So that night, according to my wife, I sat up in bed and stared out into the darkness.  That woke her up and she sat up, too, then looked at me.  I asked her, “What family are you in?”  She knew I was studying insects and to humor me replied, “Diptera,” the flies.  I corrected her, “That’s not a family, that’s an order.”  “What family are you in?” she countered.  As she tells it, I paused and said firmly, “The Chapman family.”

I tell this story because it is funny, but also indicative of how deeply engrained the natural world can be in people like dream-listers, or frankly anyone who, day in and day out, focuses on one thing.  The author of a novel, a young car mechanic learning the trade, a farmer at planting or harvest time, the student of entomology learning families.  The subject matter just bubbles up from the unconscious, where it is simmering, fed by the fuel of daily exposure to the subject.  And the dream-listers?  Well, they just go with it.  If a never-before-described bird shows up in a dream, then, in the long tradition of taxonomists everywhere, you had better describe and name it.  The strange thing is, nobody will ever see the bird, and very likely neither will you again.  I would add that to the list of reasons—it is ephemerata of the most ephemeral kind—something dreamed that doesn’t exist, and, after falling back into the world, the dreamer must accept it for what it is—only a memory that will fade.  So naturally, you must write it down. – Kim

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Coyote watching the watcher in San Francisco, February 2016. Photo Frank Schulenburg

February 18, 2018.  Taking a walk through Graceland Cemetery at Clark and Irving Park in Chicago we watched a coyote watching us.  At a distance of a hundred yards and in poor light, we could only see its outline—in profile like a German shepherd without the rear end slump, maybe a little like a husky in the head.  It looked quite regal and, except for its moving, fit quite nicely among the various cenotaphs and monuments to the dead.

What the heck is a coyote doing in the middle of Chicago, city of big shoulders, hog butcher for the world, 2.7 million human souls swarming, even more cars, trucks and buses, at a cemetery surrounded by three major roads and the screeching El bulging with commuters?

Among the monuments to the dead in Graceland Cemetery, the coyotes run free. Photo Kim Chapman

You hear of urban wildlife—the much-watched red-tailed hawk nesting on a building overlooking New York’s Central Park comes to mind (at least, to my mind).  I myself have seen eagles nesting in people’s backyards along the Mississippi River.  A pileated woodpecker recently caught my attention outside the neighborhood liquor store, and a short while later in my neighbor’s green ash tree.  Then there was that lone (and lonely?) turkey in the back yard last month—standing on the porch staring at our storm door.  I almost let it in the house.  Bears wander periodically through some Minnesota towns, policemen have shot a cougar along the Minnesota River by the airport, frantic deer have smashed through a family’s front picture window in my neighborhood, red-tailed hawks watch the morning commuters from lampposts across the Cities…I could go on.

I guess the basic idea is this…if given half a chance, nature finds a way into the human domain.  Some find that frightening, some merely irritating.  There are a few for whom the idea of nature and people mixing it up feels just plain wrong—undoing our centuries-long American project to bring nature fully to heel.  But I take heart in the evidence that these old ways of thinking are fading.  So many cities and neighborhoods are making wild places ordinary.  So many are assessing their open spaces and realizing that there’s not a lot of it left—and what’s left needs to be protected as the rare natural resource it is.  Park departments, city planning departments, urban redevelopment teams—I have worked with them all and see in many a recognition that frequent and close contact with the natural world completes the human experience.  My own opinion is that so many of our behavioral and social ills found in urban spaces, especially poorer ones, would be helped by more green space.  I encourage you to read Richard Luov’s Last Child in the Woods if you’d like to learn more.

Coyote making tracks and a beeline to its destination. Photo Kim Chapman

Back to the cemetery coyotes…knowing they are there doesn’t faze my daughter and son-in-law, nor me for that matter.  They watch us from a respectful distance—although my daughter told me that on one stroll a coyote seemed to be trailing them.  Coyote attacks on people, mostly children, happen but are several orders of magnitude less likely than getting hit by a vehicle in the Loop.  As with any wild animal, caution is in order.  Still, my heart gave a little leap when I saw that coyote…or see any wild thing out of place in the human world.  That turkey, for instance, roosting in our red pine, or a Swainson’s thrush with its flutelike song that I count on hearing in spring migration—ah, happy am I that the world is full of other life and I am in it! – Kim

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Black-eyed Susans blooming on July 1. Photo Kim Chapman

September 26, 2017.  Last summer my neighbor and I conspired to turn our shared boulevard (the strip of land between the sidewalk and the street in our Winona neighborhood parlance) from a crabgrass herbarium to a prairie.  We covered the sod in plastic to solarize the vegetation, then turned it over, burying the mostly dead weeds.  Finally in late fall we sowed a short statured prairie mix which had been recommended for city use—the plants would not grow so tall as to frighten the neighbors.

Come spring, not much happened.  A lot of weeds returned, spurges and queen Anne’s lace the like, but we didn’t see any sign of the prairie plants we had been hoping for.  When I asked Kim about this, he said to be patient—it takes up to three years for a prairie to establish itself.  We were about to give up when, mid-summer, suddenly we had a plethora of black-eyed Susans and our weedy boulevard was transformed into a riot of yellow blooms.

Jim’s prairie displaying the yellow of black-eyed Susans less than a year after it was seeded. Untidy for some, but rich in resources for others. Photo Jim Armstrong.

I have included photos comparing the boulevard prairie to the standard Winona grass boulevard.  Looking at them, you might prefer the grass version: so much more neat and tidy.  Our nascent prairie is a confusing welter of vegetation (and there is a rather intrusive milkweed on the right which is actually obstructing traffic—I tied it back with twine).  The grass boulevard is also easily traversed by those who park their cars by my house and wish to access the sidewalk.  One can certainly see why the city has regulations about care and upkeep of these spaces.

Tidy but ecologically impoverished boulevard in Winona, Minnesota. Photo Jim Armstrong

However, the grass boulevard is a desert.  Its abstract sameness (so convenient to humans) is of no use to any other species.  One of the reasons my neighbor and I wanted the prairie is that we are concerned about the plight of pollinators.  Once you see your personal landscape as a shared space with other species, you begin to have a different aesthetic.  What I see when I look at the untidy prairie space I’ve created is the intense activity it supports: bees, birds, butterflies all visit regularly to harvest its nectar and pollen.  For example, I have seen goldfinches perched delicately on my black-eyed Susans—a brilliant yellow-and-black bird swaying atop a whorl of yellow petals, pecking seeds from the black center.  My urban space is a source of nourishment and sensual delight, not just a monochromatic mat board with which to frame my house.

Another factor to consider is the effort involved.  My prairie is very low maintenance.  Once it fully gets going I will only have to cut it once a year.  Because it is used to extremes, I don’t have to water it or replenish nutrients by fertilizing it.  My grass boulevard, however, has to be regularly groomed and wetted.

Ironically, emptiness takes work—nature, as the ancients say, abhors a vacuum.  Reduced diversity is against the inclination of the natural world, which is why agriculture—and by extension lawn care—is endless work.  Labor omnia vicit / improbus says the poet Virgil—steady work overcomes all things.  But nature’s motto is more like Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign slogan, “Stronger Together.”  The goal should be a richer community, not a simpler one. – Jim

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A squirrel-fest of apples on the apple tree.

October 18, 2015. We have an apple tree in the backyard. In spring, apple blossoms and their scent fill the eyes and nose, in summer, leafy shade gives cool comfort, and in the fall—ah, in the fall—apples in abundance. More exactly, apples in abundance every other year—because this apple tree is a Haralson, a variety bred at the nearby University of Minnesota and named for the leader of the breeding effort. One year lots of flowers, the next, many fewer. This year was a bumper crop—a couple hundred apples festooned the branches, weighing them down until some were only four or five feet from the ground. I had to duck when mowing the lawn.

Where there are apple trees, there are also squirrels. Our squirrel, of the gray squirrel tribe that is very much at home in eastern forests of the country, really likes apples. He spends a lot of time in the tree, although usually before or after we are up and about. His daily practice, almost a religion it seems, is to rummage around the tree and knock apples to ground, to which he descends eventually in order to take one in his mouth, retire to a comfortable spot, and eat in leisure. Those spots are crooks in trees, horizontal branches on the pine, roof gutters, and Adirondack chairs. Once I found an apple on the wooden painting ladder we left out overnight, and another time spied one thirty feet up in the pine tree, uneaten.

Adirondack chair serving squirrels for over fifteen years

Sometimes he eats most of the apple, but usually he chews a section away and leaves it. Most of the apples he knocks down have been touched in some way by this squirrel, so you might think, “Well, at least he’s using them.” But of course, he’s using them improvidently, throwing away eighty or ninety percent of most of them. Particularly irritating to me, though, is his habit of taking a few bites out of apples on the tree and leaving them there. Many times I’ve reached for an especially appetizing-looking apple—ruby red, perfectly rotund, without the dimples left by apple maggot flies we have here and about—and on the backside of the apple, facing the tree—squirrel teeth marks, like a beaver’s gnawings on wood. That is the only time I curse the squirrel—when he takes, without taking, something I want.

My squirrel’s behavior got me thinking about greed and abundance. (I’m not talking just about my improvident squirrel.) I suspect it is basic animal nature to take as much of a needed resource as one can get when it’s available, and the more abundant the resource, the more an animal tries to take. My mind now drifts to stories of the massive plundering of North America’s wildlife at the edge of the frontier in the second half of the 1800s—bison, passenger pigeon, deer, geese, you name it. If it existed in abundance, people took it in abundance until, of course, it was no more. They often took it wastefully…startling for me is the fact that hundreds of thousands of bison tongues were taken for discriminating East Coast palates, with the rest of the beast left. Lest we think it was people of European descent alone doing the taking, there are dozens of cliffs and narrow ravines where people have discovered piles of animal bones—the leftovers of mass killings and industrial-scale processing of wildlife by Indians. Wildlife laws in North America and Europe are protecting the four-footed wildlife today, but the finned wildlife of oceans and the planet’s large lakes are known as “open resource fisheries”—meaning, the guy with the most boats and biggest nets catches the most fish. Not surprisingly, hunted fish species are falling like dominoes, one after the other as each species is discovered, set upon with industrial scale intent, and reduced in numbers until it is not profitable to take that species—and the fisheries find another species to work on. Waste is here, too—bycatch, it is called—the thousands of individuals in a net not meant to be caught, which are dumped back in the ocean where most die from the trauma of being netted and man-handled.

Squirrel-bitten apple still hanging on the tree

I suspect that, to take as much as one can get, and to take more than one needs when providence presents one with abundance, is the natural way of the world. That’s how individuals of a species get ahead, and that’s how a species gets ahead, building up its numbers on the foundation laid by successful individuals—perhaps those greediest and most successful at harvesting nature’s bounty.

That is a depressing thought, perhaps, because it is so mechanistic and full of “nature red in tooth and claw” pessimism, but maybe it’s just meant to be a sobering thought. Do we not have a couple millennia of philosophical teachings that gave us such phrases as “share and share alike”, “do unto others” and “now play nice”? Yes, and laws that attempt to damp down our natural tendency toward selfish behavior, which in our millennia-long march towards freedom and security for individuals and families might now be called anti-social behavior? Is that also a natural impulse—to order our social interactions in a way that allows each individual to have enough to meet their needs, without compromising the ability of others born and unborn to meet theirs? Is not the impulse to be a shepherd, a caretaker, and a good steward also engrained in our species’ genetic blueprint? The discovery of “mirror neurons” a decade or so ago indicates a large capacity for empathy in every healthy human, which is sung out in chorus by movie-goers when good triumphs over evil or lovers finally reconcile, to name two of the most applauded and sighed-at endings. More informed people than me have discussed these two sides of human nature for centuries and have provided directional arrows that have penetrated the social fabric, producing laws that the majority agree are worth having.

What I find most interesting about the present moment, though, is how the tug-of-war between those who want to protect the right to take as much as one likes, versus the permission to take only what is reasonable—that battle never seems to end. If the world were unlimited abundance, an eternal cornucopia, a place where scarcity is impossible, and where ecosystems have not lost their capacity to deliver maximum output of nature’s free goods and services, it might work for everybody to take as much as they can get. But the signs are there that such behavior is not really adaptive any more and may, in fact, do more harm than good. – Kim

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Pope Francis greeting his flock in Korea in 2014

What Francis has done in this “dialogue with all people about our common home,” is to lay out the case for two big ideas.  First, that we are embedded in and arise out of nature, which is a divine creation.  Therefore we have an obligation to treat it with tenderness and love.  Second, that the last two hundred years of technological and economic progress have severely damaged the earth and harmed large groups of people.  To secure the future well-being of the planet and humanity, Pope Francis calls for an “integral ecology.”  He models this kind of ecology after the integrative science of ecology, and extends it to our cultural, economic and technological systems.  I’ll talk about the first big idea, and next time, about the second.

Francis says a few things about people’s proper relation to nature that took me by surprise, but which he maintains are neither unusual nor new statements by the Catholic Church.  In fact, he argues that the way the Biblical directive to subjugate and have dominion over the earth has played out in the minds of believers is a misreading of the intent of those passages.  We have no absolute right to land ownership, Francis says, but simply mortgage it while we’re alive, then pass it down to those who have just as much right to receive it in equally good condition as we had received it from those who went before.

You can see this idea at work in property taxes—we pay property taxes not just to maintain roads and schools, but as a sign that we do not own the land forever and must share its benefits with subsequent generations.  Zoning ordinances limit what we can do with land and water that we temporarily own so as to preserve the rights of others to a safe and beautiful environment.  Timothy Beatley, in his book Ethical Land Use, points out that the US Supreme Court has upheld the right of society to guard the common good—that is, the land’s potential to be productive and beautiful for others, including those coming after us—by enacting good land use rules voted on and approved by the community.  So according to traditions and practices of western society, the individual does not have an absolute right to do whatever he or she wishes to do with the land, regardless of what libertarian-minded people think.

Overall the Pope’s Encyclical is a beautiful and sensible expression of the impulse to care for nature that many of us have felt, and which echoes ideas in American Indian philosophy about animals being our brothers and sisters, or Hindu ideas of intergenerational and interspecies connectedness through reincarnation, or the Buddha’s compassion and reverence for all life.

But what is most delightful about Pope Francis’ letter is his quiet certainty about a fundamental truth—every species on the planet, including us, is part of a woven living fabric across time, and what people do to each other and other species reflects their small daily acts of kindness and love, or contrarily, acts of cruelty, anger, and hatred.  In other words, says the pope, the earth and society are as we behave, and what we see represents how much goodness or evil we bestow upon nature and culture.  I think he is rocking some boats with this kind of ecological talk:

If we approach nature without this openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs.  By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously.

http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html

Up next…what does Francis think we ought to do to make things better?  — Kim

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