Tag Archives: Climate change

Homelessness, Houselessness or Habitatlessness?

Posted on by under Climate change, Environment, Habitat loss, Nature

Skunks were an important part of night-life when I was a kid in the 1950’s spending idyllic summers in a sleepy community on the Rhode Island shore.  Any trip outdoors after dark – to fish on the beach, visit friends or look at the stars – was accompanied by whistling or gently repeating “Here I am, Mr. Skunk” to avoid startling these typically peaceful cohabiters.  When my mother spent summers there alone after my dad died and I was away at college, she regularly left a few food scraps for them in our small yard.  “They’re my guard dogs” she’d respond, if asked why.

 My dad had built a three room cottage on piers when land was cheap after the area had been ravaged by the Great  Hurricane of 1938. Thickets of viburnum, beach plum and even Japanese honeysuckle remaining in the salt-ridden soil were celebrated by those fearless or foolish enough to rebuild.

Now, of course,  the area is cheek-by-jowl spacious second homes.  The crawl spaces underneath the modest open-stud, unheated summer cottages have been replaced by concrete foundations and cellars housing central vacuums, water softeners, air conditioners, furnaces and playrooms.  It is the rare resident who doesn’t have landscapers maintaining their property and keeping it manicured and brush free.

The skunks, of course, are gone.  There are no longer open, dry crawl spaces or cozy brush piles in which they can sleep, make nests or raise their offspring.  They’ve all moved on, and in all likelihood met their fates crossing a strange road or at the jaws or talons of a predator as they wandered, exposed, in unfamiliar territory.

It is difficult to pick up a newspaper these days without being faced with a headline about our housing crisis.  The accompanying article typically details tent cities, blocked sidewalks, and heart-breaking human interest stories. Please notice and reflect on the words “our” and “human interest”.

The irony is, of course, that ours is far from the only species experiencing a housing crisis.  And while it may be difficult to get an accurate count of the number of homeless Homo sapiens in a city or state, it is hugely more difficult to even begin to count the number of other species, let alone individuals of a species, made homeless by habitat loss. But when an investor buys a 1000+ acre tract of open land with the intent of erecting 4000+ homes surrounding a golf course and connected by paved roads and sidewalks, virtually no publicity is given to the hundreds of thousands of birds, arthropods, annelids and mammals to be, at best, displaced and, more likely, to be disappeared.

Until I outgrew it, I was an avid bird hunter.  Shortly after I moved to Reston, Virginia in the 1960’s I made friends with a fellow hunter who knew the local hot spots.  One weekend he took me to his favorite quail covert. That was the only time I got pinched by a game warden. 

At the time, Reston was at the western edge of Washington, D.C. sprawl and the covert was a couple of miles to its west in the area now heavily built up around Dulles Airport.  We parked beside a large excavator which we were later to learn was obscuring a  “Private Property, No Hunting” sign and spent a fruitful afternoon terrorizing coveys of bobwhite quail. On return to the car we were greeted by a game officer.  “I see you fella’s can’t read.” he said,  pointing to the sign.  Despite our protestations we were both issued citations. 

The following spring, as I drove by the site, several other pieces of heavy equipment had joined the excavator – all of it now mercilessly tearing up the habitat.  The No Hunting sign had been replaced by a large poster advertising “Luxury Homes in a Happening Neighborhood” A couple of hundred Homo sapiens were going to render an untold number of other species – including lots of quail –  homeless…… and reduce the quality of life of two avid sportsmen.

“Home” is a tricky concept. Is it the place we grew up, the place that is currently sheltering us, the place where we raise a family, all of the above? Robert Frost gave this some thought in his classic “Death of a Hired Man” In it, a woman talks about an itinerant and apparently unreliable old hired man’s return:  “He has come home to die.”  In response, her rather more hard-hearted and cynical husband scoffs: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”Verlyn Klinkenborg in Smithsonian Magazine comes at it from another direction: “…..it’s more than just a place. It’s also an idea—one where the heart is.”  Leaning into it a bit more, Klinkenborg points out that a vireo’s true home is her habitat while her nest is “merely a temporary site for breeding”.

As generalists, our species can make our home in so many different habitats, as can our usual coinhabitants – rats, pigeons, starlings and English sparrow – that speaking of a human habitat feels off.  Climate change, however, is making clear that even our generalist nature does not protect us from habitat loss, as waves of immigrants risk their lives to escape increasing desertification or inundation.  Viewed in this light, climate change exposes the typically overlooked truth that we are just another species – not some unique life form deserving special treatment by a benevolent greater power.  The sooner we learn that lesson the better for all of us – and here “we” refers to we human beings and “us” refers to all living species – “we humans” included !

There is an award-winning children’s PBS series called the WildKratts which features a pair of brothers who visit a variety of habitats.  Each of its 225 short animated episodes showcases a species dwelling in that habitat and that creature’s special creature power.  A tiger’s ability to hide in the tall grass of its habitat is, of course, its stripes.  For orb weaving spiders, living in habitats with stiff vertical structure, it is their amazing ability to spin sticky silk so strong that, if scaled up to the size of a pencil, could stop an airliner at its landing speed of 80 meters/second. For grasshoppers living in open grasslands, it is their ability to jump many times their body length.  You  get the idea.  Of course each of these creatures has additional supportive but not unique powers – for tigers, teeth and claws; for spiders, immobilizing venom, for grasshoppers, their coloration and supplemental wings.  But what each episode highlights is the starring specie’s unique, or at least unusual, power developed to the extreme.

As far as I know, the Kratt brothers have not yet taken on the super power of Homo sapiens.  Were they to do so, I suspect it would involve our extraordinary brains and their ability to see the utility of so many foods and  materials around us and figure out how to extract their energy or fashion protection and comfort from them. Yuval Noah Haran in his wonderful children’s book Unstoppable Us describes this as storytelling – one dimension of which is the ability to use our brains to visualize an as yet only imaginary future.  

E.O. Wilson, the brilliant myrmecologist turned evolutionary biologist, has offered a variation on this train of thought.  Wilson suggests that like ants, we have a nearly unique ability to be altruistic towards members of our particular tribe or group while also being fiercely hostile against members of our own species who are not members.  Robert Boyd and others writing in PNAS suggest that culture – the ability to learn behaviors from one another – is an important supportive, though not unique, superpower.  

Possession of this combination of unique and supporting super powers has made Homo sapiens the most powerful as well as one of the most prolific species on earth.   Unfortunately, it has also led to the extraordinary crises the present generation faces – global warming, consumption of all the resources upon which we and the rest of life on earth depend, and perhaps even (despite its histrionic tone) the eventual extinction of virtually every current life form on the planet.


The critical questions we humans now face are 1. Can enough of us use our special powers of imagination to foresee the impoverished future towards which we are headed in order to build a culture within which we and the rest of life can live?  2. Can we figure out how to sustain ourselves without consuming every calorie the earth’s arable land and fertile oceans produce?  And 3. Most importantly, can we be sufficiently altruistic to share the habitats and resources of planet earth with the incredible variety of non-human species we have not yet driven to extinction?  More and more of us seem to be answering these questions with a resounding “yes” and a growing number of those seem to be rolling up their figurative sleeves and taking whatever action suits them best to turn those imaginings into reality. They are our bonafide heroes and leaders.

Sky Diving, Snakes and Body Odor

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 Photo : Michelle Johnston @ michleajohnston

 

 

I have a friend who coaches football when school is in session.  In the summer, he rebuilds New England stone walls and he has the physique and temperament for both jobs.  Unfortunately, however, snakes terrify him and snakes tend to live in stone walls.  My friend is aware of this and knows full well that almost all snakes in New Hampshire are entirely harmless, but on lifting a rock under which a small garter snake is sleeping peacefully, he inevitably screams, drops the rock, and leaps away;  then looks around sheepishly to see if anyone saw his reaction.  

He shouldn’t be ashamed.  To one degree or another, all of us are wired this way.  Big spiders move us to action.  So does being suddenly confronted by a threatening face.  The sound of footsteps behind us on a dark night gets our attention. And most of us, surprised by a snake, would react as my friend does. 

In 2008, some psychiatrists and bioengineers at Stonybrook University in New York taped gauze pads to the armpits of individuals about to take their first tandem sky-dives.  Immediately after the neophyte divers hit the ground the gauze pads were collected and sealed in containers designed to prevent  desiccation  and bacterial growth. Later, armpit sweat was collected the same way from the same individuals after a vigorous treadmill run of the same duration as the flight.  Subsequently, a different group of volunteers were asked to sniff the stuff and then rate how threatening a series of ambiguous facial expressions were and also undergo MRIs.  A whiff of the post-skydive armpit sweat registered a greater likelihood that a facial expression would be interpreted as intensely fearsome as well as more MRI activity in parts of the brain known to be related to emotional intensity.   

You don’t have to be an evolutionary biologist to make sense of this.  Fear, after all, is adaptive.  If suddenly confronted with a creature  which has been killing our forebears since they swung from branches, it makes sense that we are programmed to leap away before putting our rational mind to work considering the probabilities.  And a good simultaneous scream warns other troop members to be en garde. At the same time, electric impulses shoot through sympathetic nerves, speeding up  heart rate and telling your adrenal glands to dump all the adrenalin it has into your bloodstream to prepare you to fight or flee.  All very reasonable.  So why not add to the armamentarium a blast of chemical signals saying “Yipes, danger!”

With climate change, however,  it’s another story. No serpentine forms. No loud noises.  No scary surprises.  No big creepy crawlies.  Merely a steady slow-motion march towards the destruction of all life on earth!

You would think that prospect would terrify and spur us to action but we just don’t pay much attention to things happening at that speed.  Trees grow like that.  So do children.  And to some extent that’s the rate at which we age.  Imperceptible from day to day; but look back ten or fifteen years and those white pine seedlings have become big trees;  that eight year old grandchild is in college; and when did my nose hairs start to grow out instead of in?

 The evidence that we are headed to big trouble is everywhere – except, of course, when we’re in the comfortable fabricated indoor environments we’ve created for ourselves or in the climate controlled cubicles where the majority of us spend most of our working hours.  In those two spots we are essentially removed from the “real” environment and have grown  accustomed to the one we have created for ourselves.  Four walls and a roof fend off the elements, our HVAC servo-systems keep our environment right in the middle of our comfort zone, and the vast majority of us are fully confident that our next trip to the grocery store will find every shelf full. Nothing even vaguely close to being startled by a snake.

But if you’re old enough, and have lived in the same spot for most of your life; if you are a gardener, or a birder;  if you’ve got a streak of the hunter gatherer in you and like to forage for morels, pick mussels from the rocks at low tide or cast a lure for striped bass on their fall migration or you’re a weather junkie who has kept your own record of meteorological data and catastrophes over the years, you don’t have to plough through geophysical research papers or even believe the lay press to know that radical changes are afoot. The morels appear earlier, the bass head south later and we keep breaking temperature and hurricane records.   If you combine those two sources of “knowing” –  if you have been a reasonably careful observer of the world outside your office and home for six or seven decades and read the lay press and an occasional scientific report –  then you are probably ready to scream in terror like that scared football coach.  And unlike being suddenly startled by the surprise appearance of a harmless snake, applying your rational mind to the problem of climate change makes you more terrified, not less.

In the past decade, there have been no publications replicating this study of frightening body odor nor any which have sought to isolate the offending compound.   The small print of the 2009 article reveals that the work was funded by the U.S Army.  One can only wonder if there is not now an active research program in some top secret military lab working to mass produce a substance which can be sprayed on the enemy to precipitate panic and retreat.  Of course, a better use of such a material would be to include it in mailings by organizations trying to motivate people to vote for legislation to promote sustainable energy, keep fossil fuel in the ground and prevent the release of greenhouse gases!

Globalized Corporate Capitalism: Good, Bad or Just Ugly?

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Maxfield Parish, The Fisherman and the Genie

Before the pandemical pandemonium struck I attended a symphony concert that sent my heart and head spinning, as music often does.  How do those combinations of vaporous vibrations reach so deeply into our being? What neuronal maze do they electrify? What mysterious auras fluoresce in the mists of our souls?  And what process coordinates the strumming and plucking and huffing and thumping and sawing of all those individual artists? What creative magic gave the music birth in some genius composer’s mind, and what about the legions of genius minds before that which conceived of the notation that lets all those musicians read that dead composer’s mind simultaneously?

 

A stirring musical event exemplifies our amazing ability to work collectively.  Of course we’re not the only species to thrive because of our unusual ability to cooperate.  Ants, bees and a few other mammals share it. But as far as I know, there are no ant symphonies.  By synergising cooperative behavior with imagination, forward thinking and other forms of intelligence we’ve become uniquely able to concretize one another’s imaginings.  And the fact that a concert performance can then twitch the insides of a batch of microphones and instantaneously reproduce the concert in thousands of living rooms a continent away gobsmacks.  What a species we are! Little wonder people have trouble believing we descended from apes.

 

But we did.  Once upon a time a few globs of protoplasm obtained a competitive advantage over their peers by clumping together and coordinating their activity.  The great evolutionary clock ticked onward and a couple of billion years later the survival advantage of group hunting by those who could rein in their selfish instincts and work together to implement a group plan  surely made it easier to put a mastodon haunch on the table and assure the survival of one’s offspring. It doesn’t take much imagination to attribute the subsequent development of centralized government, nationalism, team sports, symphony orchestras and the modern-day corporation as steps along that same trajectory.  Combine that with a concatenation of ideas, culture, global diffusion and an economic system which pools resources, promises profit, protects investors from consequences and gives that abstraction personhood before the law and the colossus of corporate capitalism is born!

 

The benefits have been uncountable. When a group of us humans see benefit and profit in a common goal it is as good as achieved.  From health to welfare, from tawdry entertainment to profound intellectual stimulation, from convenience to comfort, we have been reaping those benefits.  Look what we’ve done to scourges like measles and poliomyelitis and what we no doubt will one day do to this damn coronavirus; how we fly around the globe in hours pushed by solar energy stored in distillates of the goop of rotten leaves hidden underground eons ago until we found a way to suck it out; how we’ve doubled our lifespan; shrunk suffering; warm or cool ourselves with the flick of a switch; and –  instead of having to make every implement we want or need by hand – we simply pluck it off the shelves at WalMart and soon will be 3D printing it in our homes!  

 

Unfortunately, like the loaded phrases buried in telecommunications contracts, there have been hidden costs. Like the creeping decrepitude of aging, they’ve been accumulating silently, at a speed just below our perception threshold.  Then one day we walk by a reflective storefront and don’t recognize the stooped old guy walking next to us.  

 

Once the scales fall from our eyes, the unintended consequences of our cleverness are everywhere. Some we’ve recognized early and been able to mitigate.  Let’s stop drenching our fields with DDT before all the hawks and eagles are gone. Get thalidomide out of the pharmacies pronto. Don’t attribute the bone marrow failure and jaw necrosis those radium girls are dying from to their “loose morals”; instead, stop asking them to lick their brushes in order to get delicate lines of radium on watch faces.   But there are many more consequences for which the solution remains elusive. The diffuseness, power and anonymity of the perpetrators are so great; the engines fueled by those thousands of points of self interest so powerful .

 

Climate change, of course, is the poster child of these creeping consequences.  Granted,the industrial revolution led to generations with steadily improving standards of living but we’ve known about the coming crisis for over a decade and the smokestacks and tailpipes keep spewing. The incredible promise of plastics foreshadowed in the single word of advice given to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate has borne incredible fruit but by 2050 the stuff is projected to exceed the weight of fish in the ocean and now,  with no knowledge of the consequences, we unwittingly slurp down microplastic particles in the flesh of every shellfish we consume without a clue of the consequences.  Enormous dams power millions but in the process trigger cultural, ecological and geophysical tsunamis that extinguish salmon populations, reduce forest floor fertility,  destroy ancient cultures, threaten orca extinction, and even cause polar drift and speed up the rotation of the earth! 

 

We need to rethink the  grand scale with which we produce and do things because now  (Warning – here comes a bouquet of mixaphors)  it’s looking more and more as if we’ve been making some pretty big Faustian bargains and the bill is coming due. Let’s admit we sorcerers’ apprentices have lost control of the Frankensteins we’ve conjured up.  It’s time to pay the piper or else our goose, and most everything else, including us, is cooked! 

 

We’ve been attempting to rein in the apocalyptic cayuse of corporate capitalism since the Interstate Commerce Law of 1817  followed by the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, The Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 but those were just directed at minimizing  economic injury to consumers.  Now, as grandiose at it may sound,  we need a second go at taming this beast if we are to salvage life on earth as we know it – including our own.  We need the hard working naturalists who are each documenting the decline of the species du jour, the geophysicists warning about the reconstitution of our atmosphere, the climatologists measuring the global temperature rise, the oceanographers following sea acidification, the multitude of reporters dishing this up in lay language we can all understand, the environmentalists working away in their NGO’s for a fraction of the salaries they could earn in the private sector and – yes, and, – every single one of us doing our share to generate the political will to take back control of the system we’ve brilliantly created.  We also need radical new ideas. 

 

How about an FDA-like body to oversee a thorough study of the possible unintended consequences of every industrially produced chemical  before it leaves the manufacturer’s door .  How about really considering all those cost externalities – maybe require plastic manufacturers (Exxon Mobil is the world’s largest producer) to be responsible for fishing a certain number of tons of plastic out of the ocean before they issue a stock dividend.      How about taking down the legal walls protecting CEOs’ personal fortunes from destructive blunders their companies make whether or not they covered up the problem. Sound like crazy pie in the sky? Social Security and Workmen’s compensation did before they were passed into law. So did women’s suffrage.   And you can be sure those snake oil salesmen squawked and hollered to try to block the establishment of the FDA.

 

We face a big challenge.  How do we unstick ourselves from the tar baby we’ve unwittingly smacked.   What twelve steps will lead us away from our addiction to comfort and convenience and the incredible power we’ve harnessed?  I don’t have an answer, but I take hope in a wonderful poem a dear friend sent recently:

 

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

                                                     Wendell Berry:  Standing by Words, 1983

 

Most of us will get through the corona crisis, but in the rear view mirror  it will look like a trivial bump in the road compared to the cataclysmic climate crisis we’re hurtling towards.  Between now and when that Big One becomes unbearable we’ll get back to going to concerts and watching all those hardworking musicians create music.  But to succeed at the troublesome task ahead we are going to need extraordinarily effective leaders, like orchestra conductors, who can get us all working together.   Coaxing the genie back into the bottle and all those furies back into Pandora’s box is going to be nowhere near as easy as it was to let them out. We’re going to need to work in an unprecedentedly cooperative and coordinated way and use all our creative and intellectual gifts, be they god-given or the product of evolution,  to turn things around.

Walt Kelly:  Pogo, 1970

Consider the Mussel

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Consider the mussel.  Not the invasive zebra or quagga mussel – those freshwater invasives that plug sewers and ruin turbines in the midwest – nor the foul tasting ribbed mussel that buries itself in salt marsh mud and tastes just like it.  No, consider the blue mussel, Mytilus edulus –  “edulus” from the latin: edible.

 

So edible, in fact, that Moules et frites  is one of Belgium’s national dishes.  A Belgian restaurant in Washington D.C.  we ate in once had what seemed like dozens of delicious-sounding variants on the menu. Moules marinière, Moules natures, Moules à la crème, Moules parquées, Moules à la bière, Moules à l’ail, etc. – the blue bivalve seems to electrify the culinary imagination.

 

Once steamed open, there are two distinctly different types of blue mussels – yellow and orange.  They taste identical and there are about equal numbers of the two colors. Turns out that the creamy white ones are male while females are described as being of a “warmish orange”.  It makes one wonder if our species’ propensity for racial bigotry might evaporate if the sexes of us humans were similarly divided by color.  

 

Blue mussels epitomize the word sedentary –  spending their adult lives stuck fast to the surface they first settle on – but “sedentary” doesn’t do justice to the tenacity with which they adhere to structure.  Wresting them off the rocks to which they typically anchor themselves can be nearly impossible thanks to a two part system involving a unique glue laid down at the ends of multiple thread-like structures known as “the beard” to mussel eaters and byssus to marine biologists.  For eaters, the beard is a bother. It feels like a foreign body in the mouth and tastes and feels like chewing on sewing thread. Attached to a muscular organ in the muscle’s innards it needs to be forcefully removed before the mussels are cooked. But to bioengineers and inventors, what byssus is made of and how it is formed is a beckoning path to fame and fortune.   The threads are unique among fibers since they combine bungee cord elasticity (stretchable to 160% of original length) with Herculean strength (5 times stronger than the human Achilles tendon) – an extremely unusual combination of fiber properties. https://www2.clarku.edu/departments/biology/biol201/2002/LBrentner/byssal_threads.html,https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124319594

 

How byssus fibers adhere to rocks has been another active focus of scientific investigation. There are mighty few good glues that can be used under water, yet mussels know how to make an excellent one.  Sadly, they never patented the process. Now, after slicing, dicing, crushing and otherwise murdering to dissect bushels of mussels, bioengineers from Genex and Bio-polymers have done just that. Soon heart  surgeons may have a glue to close bloody wounds, the U.S. Navy may be doing underwater glue repairs and we may someday see a ruptured Achilles tendon replaced with a byssal cable stuck to our heel and calf muscle with mussel glue!  Stockholders in Genex and Biopolymers will smile but it’s unlikely that marine ecologists studying mussel dieoff will see big grants based on mussel royalties.

 

We H. sapiens are not the only ones with a taste for Mytilus edulus. Like our own species, a blue mussel typically spends its youth drifting around aimlessly – though these little mussel trochophores, veligers and pediveligers face armies of filter feeders ranging from sunflower seed-sized crustaceans to schoolbus-sized  whale sharks. And even after they settle down and stick themselves fast to a huge chunk of granite they remain vulnerable to being harvested and boiled alive by us, swallowed whole by diving ducks, crushed by the toothy jaws of blackfish, drilled into by dog whelks,  or subjected to the dismal fate of being pried open by a starfish’s arms and then hosting that creature’s whole stomach which the echinoderm has everted onto the mussel’s newly exposed innards.

 

As a child, summering on the Rhode Island coast where the rock-drop from receding glaciers makes perfect mussel habitat, I could pick a meal’s worth in half an hour.  That was well before they started showing up in supermarket seafood cases in the ‘70’s followed soon after by appearances in NYTimes recipes. Since then, I’ve watched their price steadily increase and their numbers among the rocks steadily dwindle to the point that a summer supper of wild mussels is now almost unheard of.

 

Speculation about the causes of the decline includes over-harvesting, pollution, ingestion of microplastics, higher water temperature, excessive non-human predation, degradation of native DNA by the escaped gametes of coddled farmed mussels, a mussel epidemic or some villainous mix of all these usual suspects.  Scientific consensus seems to be settling on the fact that the decline’s causes are multifold and man-made, a fate now being suffered by untold numbers of other species. One peer reviewed paper documented that the southernmost edge of the blue mussel’s range drifted 350 km northward from Cape Hatteras North Carolina to Lewes, Delaware between 1960 and 2010.  In Rhode Island now, if we find any they’re hidden in deep crevices on the northeast side of rocks – protected from the intense heat of the afternoon sun. And now when we bring home a meal’s worth of mussels, they come from farms in colder Canadian waters.

 

It’s humbling to consider the mussel while watching surf crash on  the Rhode Island boulders where a few still remain . Here is a species that seems to have been around for about 200 million years.  It spends its infancy drifting defenseless in the ocean currents. Then after two or three months when it finally decides to settle down it typically chooses a spot regularly bashed by three or four foot waves every 15 seconds and by twelve or thirteen foot rogue rollers whenever an angry coastal storm comes along – and apparently loving it.  The fact that this hardy creature is now in trouble, as are so many other fellow travelers on spaceship earth is telling us something.  

 

Credible investigators  https://www.livescience.com/24805-undiscovered-marine-species.htm put the number of different species in the ocean at about a million, with about three quarters yet to be discovered!  Meanwhile we go on turning up the ocean heat with our greenhouse gasses and producing plastic from fossil fuel at a geometrically accelerating rate with annual production rising from zero to 400 million tons between 1950 and today https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution.   One can only wonder what kind of miraculously useful substances like byssus and mussel glue will come from those yet to be discovered marine creatures if we can just get to them before warmer oceans cooks them out of existence  or we clog them to extinction with plastic. 

On Not Heating With Wood

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Heading home after an early morning meeting on  a recent wet, raw October day I found myself looking forward to building a fire in the wood stove. Then I recalled that we were planning to avoid wood fires for a while to see if it made any difference in the symptoms of a family allergy.  So I’d just have to rely on the oil burner.  But  I was surprised by how disappointed I felt.  What was the trouble?

 

It wasn’t entirely the cost.  It wasn’t one of those ten below zero days when the furnace would grind away ninety percent of the time to keep the house tolerable.  It would only take a few minutes to warm up the place, and because of all the weatherization we’ve done over the years it would remain warm for quite a while before the thermostat called for more heat.  And anyway the price of fuel oil is way down because of all the shenanigans of the marketplace.  I do admit to being pretty thrifty but it wasn’t all the cost.

 

And it wasn’t guilt, even though  I’m plenty concerned about climate disruption and the environmental degradation from burning fossil fuels.  After all, I drive a Prius, I look for Energy Star appliances whenever one needs replacing, and, thanks to my wife’s urging, we have lots of solar panels.  I also try to do my part to persuade our elected officials to ignore all those bogus arguments and huge campaign contributions from the oil, gas and coal folks.  So a couple of pints of heating oil on a raw fall day won’t tarnish my crown in heaven too much.

 

It took me a while to figure out what was going on, but I think I finally did.  I was disappointed because I like the process of firing up the woodstove and feeling the results of what I’ve done.  I like crumpling up the newspaper – not so tightly that it resembles a log, but loosely enough that the ratio of air to compressed wood fibers permits rapid combustion.  I like laying on just enough kindling – not enough to smother the burning paper but enough to sustain the fire as I lay on larger wood. I feel competent when I do those things and as I do, I am reminded that the wood came from a local tree which has a set of its own amazingly efficient small green solar panels that capture the sun’s radiant energy and store it as chemical energy in the covalent bonds of cellulose being laid down silently all summer right beneath the tree’s knobbly bark – no associated air pollution, no multimillion dollar XL Pipeline, no terrorist threats.   Thinking about all that as I make the fire is better than watching some morning TV talk show.  But missing that process, it turns out, is only part of my disappointment.

 

Another part, I think, has to do with having a broader understanding of my world and where I fit in.  When I build that wood fire – and this is especially true if I’ve cut down the tree and worked up the wood myself – I understand some of the implications.  I know, sort of, how long it took that tree to grow.  I think about how big my woodlot is and whether the steady growth of the hardwoods is greater or less than the rate at which I am taking trees down. In short I have a pretty good idea of whether my woodburning is sustainable.   I also know that by harvesting a tree when I do, instead of letting it die in place, that tree will no longer provide a home first for woodpeckers and then, perhaps a kestrel;  that I’ve messed with the ecology of my woodlot; that it’s not quite as rich a habitat as it would have been were the tree  left standing.    I understand those tradeoffs in a much more immediate way than the tradeoffs involved in opening the Arctic Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.  And I also have a pretty good idea about the real costs of staying warm through a whole New Hampshire winter – how many person hours it takes to get that wood down, cut up, split, processed and moved into the cellar before the snow flies.

 

But I’ve saved the best ‘til last.   I realized that the biggest reason I was disappointed by not building a fire in the woodstove when I got home is that I am a control freak. I like to be in charge. I like knowing how to do stuff and calling the shots on how it is done.

 

So, aren’t I in charge when I turn up the thermostat?  Well, no, not really.   I  don’t have much of an idea about how to find oil – though I do know that it sometimes involves setting off underwater explosions which risk blowing out the eardrums of some of earth’s biggest and most mysterious creatures .  I don’t have a clue about how to drill for oil – though I am aware that doing so creates some pretty ugly international relations and often involves opening up pristine wilderness.  I don’t have any idea where to buy a drilling rig or how to set it up or where to hire the crews to man it or who to schmooze with to get the best price when and if the stuff finally comes up out of where it’s been for the last hundred million years.  I don’t have any idea about how to hire a tanker, or determine whether or not the tanker skipper is likely to be drunk when he approaches some reef.  I just know that when I call up my oil company they deliver some oil so my burner comes on when I turn up the thermostat.  All the rest of the stuff is under somebody else’s control and I just don’t like it.

 

So as soon as we figure out that those allergy symptoms aren’t related to the wisps of smoke that occasionally escape while I’m stoking the stove, I’m going back to heating with wood.

Tilting at Windmills

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I was discussing renewable energy a while back with a neighbor.  His politics are a bit more to starboard than mine, but he’s a thoughtful fellow and has reached the conclusion, as have I, that climate change is a significant threat.  We both agreed on the need to develop a portfolio of non-fossil energy sources.  As we enumerated the costs and benefits of each type, we got to wind.

“Now there’s a technology that has a lot of promise.  Cheap, clean, and plenty of it to go around.  But I read the other day that there’s a noisy lobby against it.  Seems there’ s a bunch of people afraid that windmills are going to kill too many………” he paused dramatically and then his face contorted into a look of astonished disbelief   “……birds!   Can you imagine?  Holding America’s energy needs hostage because windmills may knock off some…….birds!”

Here was a tough choice.  Take on a set of values very different from mine and risk ruining the conversation, or move on to solar.  Coward that I am, I chose the sun.  But it got me thinking.

What is it, after all, that made the tradeoff such a no-brainer for my neighbor.  Was he unaware of the mountainous havoc our species is inflicting on Earth’s biodiversity?  Should I tactfully suggest he might enjoy reading  The Sixth Extinction in which Elizabeth Kolbert makes a powerful argument that our impact on the planet’s flora and fauna  is comparable to the asteroid collision of the Cretaceous–Paleogene era which wiped out three quarters of earth’s species and, irony of ironies, allowed Homo sapiens to evolve and flourish in the resultant vacuum?  Might information like this shift his values?

Or is it more a matter of religion?  Is he following his God’s directive to “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”  If that’s the case, I should have steered the conversation towards what “having dominion” means.  Common parlance would have us think of mankind lording it over the rest of creation but there is clearly an element of husbandry and protection in that word.  After all, if rulers fail in their responsibility to keep their charges safe they don’t remain rulers for very long.

Or perhaps an economic argument would have appeal.  One of the things taken for granted about birds – bats as well – is the prodigious amount of pest control they perform – at no cost to farmers and no increase in the health risk or the price of food to the consumer.   An article in the March 2013 issue of the Wildlife Society Bulletin, researcher K. Shawn Smallwood estimates the number of birds killed by wind turbines in the US in 2012 at 573,000.  And in the December 2013 issue of the Journal BioScience researcher Mark Hays, in a peer reviewed article, calculates current bat deaths from wind turbines in the US to be between 600,000 to 900,000 individuals.  That translates into a lot of boll weevils, corn borers and fat green tomato hornworms still munching away.

And then there’s  the contribution to the national economy of all those birdwatchers buying binoculars, birdhouses, spotting scopes and sunflower seeds.  That might have some sway, especially if my neighbor has some stock in Nikon or Bushnell

Of course none of these pragmatic considerations gets at the heart of what bothers me about  those half million plus birds getting smacked out of the sky each year.  For me and, I think, a good many similarly-wired folks, it’s a bit as if a bunch of Van Gogh paintings were tossed in the dump, or copies of The Sun Also Rises got burned, or the Olympics got cancelled one cycle, or TV programming was reduced by a couple of hours a week – stuff like that.  If one of those batted birds happened to be the brilliantly sun-struck black and gold oriole whose bell-clear note sails down at me from a tall tree as I walk out my door in May,  my world would definitely lose some of its richness and beauty.  In fact, now that I think of it, I’d even be willing to pay a couple of cents more on my electric bill each month so long as that oriole keeps coming back.

There’s an interesting difference between the paintings, the books, the sports accomplishments, the programming coming from a big flat screen TV and that oriole.  Those first four things are all creations by us, and their subjects, for the most part, happen to be……us.  The oriole, on the other hand……. but that’s a subject for another blog.