Another year older and deeper in debt

Actually, no one will let me get deeper in debt, so that's ok. Just older. Me and Pearl Harbor, down in infamy.

A couple nights ago, we got our first lasting snow. The next morning, I threw snowballs which the giant pit bull/black lab jumped up and caught in his mouth. It appeared that he chewed them, but his mouth is so big he may just have swallowed them whole.

Yesterday a friend and I visited Winslow Farm, which fortunately turned out to be much less slick than I thought it might be. The melted snow made it more of a muck rather then slick experience. Despite all the rescued farm animals, highlights turned out to be a talented border collie who followed us around insisting we throw items--first a ball and when that disappeared pine cones were an acceptable substitute, and a cat who climbed me and curled up on my shoulders, something neither of the ones I lived with ever did. We finished off the day with a delicious orzo and roasted vegetables meal.

A much more memorable day than my visit to Boston Friday--I wandered the Arboretum and Emerald Necklace and was struck by how small and manicured everything seemed after living in much wilder Duluth for so many years. I felt like a kid returning to the childhood home where everything now seems so much smaller. If something works out as I hope in the spring, Duluth may seem just as small and tame the next time I return there. (I just had to add that bit of suspense for the benefit of my walking blogging friend.)

The less I write, the more nice things people say: First here, and now in a review of writing blogs from the Nature Blog Network. Check out the other blogs there and see if you find any new favorites.

The People Conservancy

I don't usually read Outside magazine--it manages to achieve the unlikely combination of being both too macho and too glitzy for my taste. But I had some time to fill at the library a few days ago and noticed this article about some nature/wildlife groups becoming more people focused.

I was particularly disgusted by the comments of The Nature Conservancy's Peter Kareiva at the end of the article.

For Kareiva, that's what it comes down to: a matter of rights. "For me at least," he wrote on TNC's blog this spring, "the rights of people for self-determination take supremacy over any species or biodiversity tally." When I asked him about that, he brought up a riddle, an impossible dilemma first posed by conservation biologist Michael Soulé.

"You're down to one snow leopard, and that leopard is a pregnant mom," Kareiva said. "And if she lives and has a litter of four or five, you could maybe recover the whole species. And you're up on a ridge and she's creeping up and about to kill and eat a small two-year-old child. You have a gun, and you have a choice: You can either kill the leopard and save the child's life, or you can sit by and watch the leopard kill it. That's your only choice. I would save the child."

Put me with Watson, Abbey, Muir, Jeffers, and all who've chosen to belong to something bigger than their own species. Kareiva's values and choice demonstrate the exact cause of the problems these groups supposedly existed to fight against. As long as people consider themselves superior to and distinct from all other life, as long as one human is considered more important than an entire species, there is no hope.

Today's Quote: Sacred Texts

"On a number of occasions in green enclaves I have heard activists speak of Thoreau's writings as sacred texts; writings by others evoke similar reverence, typically those by John Muir and Aldo Leopold but also increasingly those of Rachel Carson, Joseph Wood Krutch, Edward Abbey, Loren Eiseley, and a number of others."
--Bron Taylor, Dark Green Religion

I'm approaching the halfway point of this book and greatly enjoying it. It's nice to at least get my mind back into what I care about while I'm temporarily sleeping in suburbia and doing most of my walking on sidewalks with automobiles zooming past. Ugh! One way or another, I expect to be back closer to nature in April or May. Details to eventually follow when I know them.

It's a very wide-ranging book which I'll eventually review on Amazon. There's a 20 page appendix of Thoreau quotes backing up the author's claim of eight themes in HDT's writing which are common in dark green religion (defined as nature being considered sacred with intrinsic value and worthy of reverent care). I'm currently on a chapter about radical environmentalism; still to come, predators, the arts, the United Nations, and surfing. I told you it was wide-ranging.

Today's Quote: A Beautiful Ruin

OK, so I'm very frustrated by limited computer time, the poor quality of the library computers, and my resulting inability to offer the type of writing I most like to do here. But perhaps an occasional short quote or note.

"I do not fear our extinction. What I really fear is that man will ruin the planet before he departs. I have sometimes thought, looking out over the towers of New York from some high place, what a beautiful ruin it would make in heaps of fallen masonry, with the forest coming back."

Loren Eiseley, letter to Hal Borland, The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley.

The Final Nail

During the past couple weeks, I've been working on a long post which included a walk in Concord, Thoreau quotes, my review of Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism, The Belief System that Enables Us to Eat Some Animals and Not Others (I met the author last weekend at the Boston Veggie Fest), comments on the reviews of the book on Amazon, and other things going on in my life.

It was probably going to be my last good post, maybe even one of the rare damn good ones by the time I got done. But the format has been getting messed up between sessions and yesterday Blogger and the library computer combined to send the whole thing into oblivion. So between that frustration and not being in a very creativity condusive place in my life at the moment anyway, I'm done posting, for at least a long indefinite period, quite possibly permanantly. I'll try to do some occasional housekeeping of links here and visit your blogs when I can.

Expert Advice

I hate to give you a junky post like this. If I had more computer time, I'd tell you pretty tales of swan bathing (neck under water, then rubbed on back, vigorous flapping and splashing), Indian pipes, startled wood ducks, turtles, lots of acorns (I've missed the oak woods), loud beaver splashes, mushrooms from ground and trees, dragonfly orgies, clumps of pine needles shooting out in all directions from my sappy soles, frogs, beautiful New England fall days with rings of red leaves encircling ponds, a fin whale and a half dozen humpbacks (including two who repeatedly surfaced near the boat), and how I automatically but unsuccessfully looked for raccoon scat on an eyelevel horizontal tree trunk near water.

I'd post extended versions of my latest Amazon book reviews, and I'd tell you that Walden the cat is doing well back in Duluth (where I've already missed the season's first snow). I'd also tell you about the dog I'm living with who made me gasp when I first saw him, supposedly a mix of pit bull and black lab who looks more like a mix of pit bull and bull, and who sounds like a galloping horse when he runs. A couple days ago I threw tree branches (which get chewed into wood chips) for him to fetch, but I wouldn't dream of trying to take one away from him. I'd report that a coyote ate a couple of my friend's chickens, and that while she's sad about the chickens, she was excited to see the coyote.

Coming up this weekend is an open house at a farm animal sanctuary (click Sanctuary in the list of posts to the right to read about my last visit) featured in the new version of Peaceable Kingdom with guest speaker Harold Brown, one of the stars of the original version, whose story of the cow who changed his life gets to me every time I hear it. I haven't spent much time in Boston yet, or made it to Concord.

On one of my local walks, I saw a red pickup truck parked on the sidewalk ahead. There was no room in the driveway because of all the other motorized recreation vehicles. As I walked around it, I noticed the sticker "If you object to logging, try using plastic toilet paper". There was no doubt about it, here was an asshole authority.

A sharp-shinned hawk in the hand...

...is worth more in the air.















Photos from Hawk Ridge.

Until we blog again...