For Earth Day I Wrote a Letter about the Keystone XL Pipeline (Instead of Signing a Petition)

A Little about American Quakers

"You mean you folks are still around?"…"Aren't you like those people that dress in old-time clothes and have horses and buggies? Yeah, the Amish, that's right."

Every so often I encounter this kind of reaction when I let it be known that I am a member of the Religious Society of Friends, in other words, a Quaker. Yes we are still around, no we are not the Amish and furthermore, after over 350 years we are still upholding our peace testimony. American "unprogrammed" Quakers still do not have paid clergy, a church hierarchy, or a set of orthodox doctrines and creeds. We continue to meet weekly for silent worship. We continue our rich tradition of living our testimonies as we are able, which, considering that we are devoted to peace and non-violence, individually and as a group, has landed a surprisingly large number of us in jail: for refusing to worship state religions; for helping slaves go free; for according women equality within our community and working to achieve it in general; for refusing to fight in wars; for objecting to the use of weapons of mass destruction; and most recently for opposing the Keystone XL Pipeline and what it stands for.

Read "Cranes and Kenosis" at City Creatures Blog

Happy Earth Day!

I’m pleased to say my piece about whooping cranes, "Cranes and Kenosis” has been posted today at City Creatures, a blog published by the Center for Humans and Nature. These are the folks who co-produced the Green Fire, the documentary about Aldo Leopold, and they do other interesting work as well.

You can read "Cranes and Kenosis" here.

Related Posts:

Sandhill Cranes!

Sandhill Cranes and Spring Resolutions

The Wild Things Conference (2011)

Walt Whitman, Deep Ecologist

Poetry Month 2013 

 

My respiration and inspiration....the beating of my heart....the passing
     of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore
     and darkcolored sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belched words of my voice....words loosed
     to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses....a few embraces....a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along
     the fields and hillsides,
The feeling of health....the full-noon trill...the song of me
     rising from bed and meeting the sun.

For a long time I resisted Walt Whitman—the lists, the grandiosity, the boasting, the loose lines, the ellipses--yikes! Was he for real or was he a fraud, an American huckster? No, Emily Dickinson and her intense compression were what counted as real poetry. So I neglected Whitman, much as I suspect much of America neglects Whitman. So many of our poets are “great,” are “classics,” are easily Googled and largely unread. To read serious poetry seriously is to risk having mundane reality crack open: maybe all kinds of things will look radically different--worse, possibly, but also better.

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin
     of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and the sun....there
     are millions of suns left,
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand....nor look through
     the eyes of the dead....nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

It happens that my father died recently and it was my job to write a eulogistic piece to be read at his memorial service and also to be sent to distant friends and relations. This remembrance took some time to write. While working on it, I was led to reread Leaves of Grass, the original 1855 version, which is what I found lying around the house. (E-version is here.) This edition is Whitman at his most exuberant, before his Civil War experiences, coupled with his increasing fame, took him in more serious, sometimes sententious, directions.

Swift wind! Space! My Soul! Now I know it is true what I guessed at;
What I guessed when I loafed on the grass,
What I guessed while I lay alone in my bed . . . . and again
     as I walked the beach under the paling stars of the morning.

My ties and ballasts leave me . . . . I travel . . . . I sail . . . . my elbows
     rest in the sea-gaps,
I skirt the sierras . . . . my palms cover continents,
I am afoot with my vision.

Why Leaves of Grass, I don’t exactly know. Whitman on the page (to say nothing of his life) is a little like the overenthusiastic, slightly gauche cousin who wins you over almost against your will. My dad was nothing like Whitman in manners, social class, sexual orientation, education, beliefs or way of life. Yet my dad shared with Whitman—at least the persona—a certain embrace of experience, an expansiveness of spirit, an extravagance of expression that is the opposite of cool. Neither my dad nor Whitman employed irony as a structure with which to organize and then express his worldview. This is not to say Whitman (or my dad) wasn't humorous.  And it’s not the same as lacking self-consciousness or a sense of self-importance. That Whitman, at least, has in spades; and he is playing a deeper game than first appears.

I tramp a perpetual journey,
My signs are a rain-proof coat and good shoes and
     a staff cut from the woods;
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, nor church nor philosophy;
I lead no man to a dinner-table or library or exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooks you round the waist,
My right hand points to landscapes of continents, and a plain public road.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.

All the objectionable elements are still there—yet somehow on this reading they they make new contextual sense. April is a fine time to read what Whitman later named “Song of Myself,” the lengthy opening…well, he called his poems "chants." “Incantation” is another term that comes to mind. The poem is worth savoring over several days. It calls upon, expresses and is mimetic of the great uprushing, untidy bursts of growth that occur during spring. Whitman’s boundless appreciation of and identification with all that exists extends deep into the natural world and out into the cosmos, ranging from the insistently material to the transcendentally mystical. The powerful catalogs of animals, plants, human activities and other things he finds good must be experienced in their entirety, washing over you in waves, so can't really be quoted.

If you would understand me go to the heights or water-shore,
The nearest gnat is an explanation and a drop or the motion of waves a key...

"Song of Myself" becomes songs of ourselves and a hymn to the connections between all things, a long, earthy, bawdy, egotistical, half-crazy, half-embarrassing, mystical, loving compendium of life on our planet, life in all its myriad parts. Deep ecology, indeed.

Smile O voluptuous coolbreathed earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset! Earth of the mountains misty-topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!
Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!
Far-swooping elbowed earth! Rich apple-blossomed earth!
Smile, for your lover comes!Smile O voluptuous coolbreathed earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset! Earth of the mountains misty-topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!
Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!
Far-swooping elbowed earth! Rich apple-blossomed earth!
Smile, for your lover comes!

Snippets don't do the poems justice. You just have to give Whitman a chance. He might win you over. He might lead you outside to have a look at things for yourself. As I write, it is raining and the birds are singing.

Note: Written during a "significant rain event" that has closed schools, caused flooding in the Des Plaines watershed and effectively ended the drought, which was improving anyway. Written at the time of the situation in Boston, a tragedy. All quotes are from the 1855 version of "Song of Myself." The Hudson River School painting is at the Fenimore Art Museum. Whitman wrote some journalistic pieces about the Hudson River School.

Related Posts:
April is Poetry Month (2011)
National Poetry Month in the Garden (2010)

Creating a Hummingbird Habitat

Hummingbird and columbine
(Josh Haas, Auduban Guides)

According to Journey North's map, the ruby-throated hummingbirds are pretty far  south, held up by cold weather--but they'll be in the Chicago region soon. I wrote the following short piece for a start-up magazine that never got going.

***

In summer, I love to sit outside and watch the resident hummer. She might perch in the pagoda dogwood and preen, disappear, reappear by the scarlet runner beans, hover at the feeder, then zip up to the honey locust tree across the alley. It seems quite miraculous.

Hummers didn’t always frequent my backyard. Not one had been seen on my block for decades when, in 2008, my next door neighbor Muriel and I decided to try attracting them. We already had native-plant-based gardens; attracting hummers meant learning their needs and then adding hummer-specific elements. Muriel put out two feeders and we both planted tubular red flowers, which suit hummers’ long bills. To our delight, two ruby-throats showed up that August.

We were were practicing what evolutionary biologist Michael Rosenzweig calls “reconciliation ecology” in his book Win-win Ecology. Reconciliation ecology is “the science of inventing, establishing and maintaining new habitats to conserve species diversity in places where people live, work and play.” Further inspired by citizen-science hummingbird project, we gave informational fliers to our neighbors. Several planted appropriate flowers and vines and one or two put up feeders. Our whole block has become hummingbird habitat. 

About ruby-throated hummingbirds

There are approximately 350 species of hummingbird, a bird native only to the Americas; only one species, the ruby-throated hummingbird, breeds in the upper Midwest.  Ruby-throats winter in southern Mexico and Central America and fly north in the spring, reaching the Chicago area in late April to early May. A remarkable part of their migration is their non-stop, eighteen-hour, approximately 500-mile flight across the Gulf of Mexico. They follow the same routes and tend to return to the same places, one reason maintaining habitat is very important.  They find suitable habitats by sight, which is why clumps of bright red flowers as well as feeders help attract them. 

Incubating (Dorothy Edgington, Journey North)

Ruby-throats often arrive too early for many flowers and survive by drinking sap and eating trapped insects at the holes yellow-bellied sapsuckers have drilled in trees. The females construct their tiny, walnut-sized nests on branches about twenty feet up. Once they’ve mated, the females lay two pea-sized eggs and raise their young alone. A mating cycle lasts about 45 days, and there can be two clutches a season. Their job done, males sometimes start back south as soon as July; females follow somewhat later and juveniles later still, up to the first frost.

Hummers can live up to twelve years, though the average is three to five years. To fuel their speedy metabolisms, ruby-throats must consume up to half their bodyweight in nectar each day, making use of at least thirty species of native plants as well as many garden flowers. At least nineteen native plants such as jewelweeds and columbines depend on hummers for pollination. Because nectar has no protein, small, soft-bodied insects and spiders make up one fourth of their diet. 

How to attract hummingbirds

Sometimes people will put up a feeder and then get disappointed when hummers don’t show up. But, like humans who can’t survive only on sports drinks,  hummers need more than sugar-water alone. If you develop a generally bird and insect pollinator-friendly garden habitat that includes hummingbird-specific features, you’ll probably have more success than planning only for hummingbirds. If you get your neighbors involved, you’ll strengthen the whole neighborhood ecosystem. That’s reconciliation ecology in action. 

What ruby-throats need

• Places to perch and nest. Like many other species of backyard birds, hummers prefer layered edge habitats, with trees, shrubs, flowers, grasses and a water source. When planting choose at least a few hummingbird-attracting varieties. Hummers also find hanging baskets attractive. Plant flowers in groups of at least three or more of the same kind, and plan for a long bloom period by planting early, mid and late-blooming varieties of flowers.
• Tubular red flowers. Native species often offer more nectar than nursery hybrids and single blossoms offer easier nectar access than double blossoms. See list here. Scented and composite flowers, while good for insects, aren’t as useful to hummers. Non-tubular flowers often don’t have as much nectar. Very diverse flower areas are best—the more species of flowers, and thus pollinators, the better!

• Nest-building materials. Hummers use fuzzy plants such as cinnamon fern, pussy willow and “weeds” like thistle and dandelions for nests. Hummers use lichen from tree bark stuck on with spider silk to camouflage nests.

• Feeder. Put out a hummingbird feeder in spring and keep it filled with sugar water until fall. Use a solution of one part sugar to four parts water which has been boiled for no more than two minutes. Clean and refill the feeder frequently (every two days in hot weather). Saucer-shaped feeders are easier to clean. Making extra sugar water solution to store in the fridge and keeping two feeders in rotation reduces work. There's no need to hang out more than one feeder: sugar water is not nutritious, so plantings should provide the most nectar.

• No chemicals. It’s best not to use any insecticides, herbicides or chemical fertilizers in your yard (this includes chemical lawn care). A healthy garden ecosystem starts with living soil, nourished by organic material, that supports a complex, dynamic web of life: beautiful in the elegant way it naturally functions, as well as the way it looks.
  
  Related Posts
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Backyard Phenology

From Susan Clotfelter, The Denver Post

One day snow all over the ground, the next day muddy grass sprinkled with snowdrops shining in the morning gloom. Rain. A solitary robin appears, nearly black among the flowers and flies to a tree branch where it sits, silhouetted among the leafless tangle. This is phenology. I know by these signs that it's time, past time, to start paying attention, serious attention to what's going on outside, that is, to turn from observing shapes, colors and weather--those clouds, these tan grasses drooping along the path, that maple's shape--to keeping a sharp lookout for stirrings, returns, expansions. Time to, every day, go check the area where the bumblebees tend to emerge, notice how far the buds on trees and bushes have expanded, see what perennials are turning green at the base--and so on and so forth. Time to pay attention to details. There's a lot to do, it's a big job, this noticing, keeping track, celebrating. And then recording in my gardening notebook.

In my backyard, the snowdrops have always told me when to start my phenological year. When the first ones appear is when I begin making notes on plants, birds and pollinating insects, scanty at first, working up to a sustained crescendo and then diminishing with cooler temperatures and greater darkness. When I began doing this, at first just with flowers, the early snow drops generally bloomed in mid to late February. Looking through my notebook, I see I was pretty haphazard: some years I didn't get past June in my efforts, as though only spring-blooming flowers had appeared. In 2009, only the snowdrops are recorded--March 1. What happened that year that pulled me away from the garden? Only in the last several years have I gotten more comprehensive, as my understanding of garden interactions has grown; but I despair of ever being truly methodical or scientific.  All this time I've been paying attention, though writing not much down.

 For two reasons I've gotten more serious about record-keeping. One is coming to a greater understanding of Aldo Leopold and his emphasis on phenological notation. Another is that I signed up to observe for the USA National Phenology Network, whose mission includes tracking phenology in order to monitor the impacts of climate change. Thousands of people nationwide are contributing their observations to USA-NPN's online program, Nature's Notebook; these data are used in turn by scientists researching climate change effects. Our observations form an invaluable resource that would be unobtainable any other way. I like to think the records of my completely unremarkable lilac bushes are contributing to the common good.

Back to the snowdrops. Usually in my backyard they've bloomed in mid to late February. Last year, the no-winter year, they appeared earlier--my note says February 1. This year, even though we've had more of a winter with a nearly average amount of snow, the beginnings were mild. The snowdrops started shining under the pagoda dogwood in mid-January--the earliest I've seen them there. What else is happening? I'd better get outside and look.

Related Post:
Something New to Do with Your Lilacs

In Praise of Miserable Weather

Any person who has lived in the Chicago region for any length of time knows miserable weather. The temperature hovers at around 32 degrees, a damp wind angles right in your face the mix of snow/sleet/rain/ice pellets descending from the flat, dull-aluminum-colored sky, and slushy snow slumps on the ground. Our winters are famous for this. Residents moan and complain. People migrate south to escape. Not for us the pristine whiteness, the invigorating crispness of the northern or mountain winter.

I've missed this weather.

Last winter and the early part of this one I've waited and worried, sulked, even; but now, at last, we've got it--all of the above plus the added bonus of occurring when the snowdrops are blooming and it should, as meteorologists inform us, be heading towards the 40s.

It's the kind of weather I imagine they were having in Japan, the old Japan of wooden and paper houses and no central heat when a traveler, I think American, in a story I once heard, complained of the cold. He was wishing for sturdy walls and a roaring fire and wondering why on occasion they opened the doors to view the snow--and an old woman replied, "it's winter. You're supposed to be cold." She was perhaps wondering why this person was so ignorant as to not understand that one is supposed to endure the cold, yet appreciate the aesthetics of miserable weather.

So I go out for snow walks. Yesterday I found myself by the pond at Thatcher woods in a landscape of black, white and gray. I stood in the quiet, looking around as a fresh breeze bearing ghostly precipitation came off the not-quite-frozen water, slushy with rotten snow. I heard a woodpecker, then saw it fly to a snaggy oak, where it commenced its bobbing vertical walk.

Basho, the great Japanese poet, wrote many haiku about winter. Here is one (translated by Robert Hass):

Winter solitude--
in a world of one color,
the sound of wind


***

Related Posts:
Meteorological Winter
Gardeners' Work

Two Books that Shed Light on Our Present Predicament: Arcadia and The Dog Stars

Dickens, to Begin With

It is a truism that certain aspects of life in present-tense America are best understood by reading Charles Dickens. Pick up Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey & Son or any of his other novels: they all vividly depict the effects of extreme income inequality and the sickness of an overly stratified society in which the rich reap the rewards of empire while the poor live physically miserable lives. Alternatively, care to know what life might be like in a western society without electricity, or modern conveniences and medicine? Read Dickens and understand that, while love and friendship can be found under even dire conditions, without the material benefits of fossil fuels life will not be as lovely as some utopians would like to believe. Death abounds.

Dickens inhabited a pre-peak-everything world. For him, heir to the Romantics, nature in all its parts was an inexhaustible matrix from which life—and his novels—emerged. In his fully realized fictional world, all those descriptive bits that high school students yawn over when forced to read, say, Great Expectations, are completely integral. For how else would one get such a sense of people existing completely within nature—out walking or riding in heat and cold, in snow, wind, rain, a balmy spring morning, under trees and among flowers; and how else would Dickens be able to use weather and landscape as outward expressions of his themes and his characters’ emotional lives? In his novels, nature is eternal, abundant and taken for granted, the world still large enough to contain humankind and all our sins, our cruelties, our wastefulness, and our glories, to little deleterious effect.

However dystopian, Dickens’ was a society on the way up, in which the full effects of the tech/fossil fuel revolution were yet to be realized. We moderns, on the other hand, are living on the downslope, learning to our sorrow that, keep pushing nature’s limits too far and dire consequences inevitably accrue. The times are out of joint—ours is an uneasy age, haunted by memories, in many cases not our own but told to us, of “before,” when there was still a "freshness deep down things,” earth systems had not yet had to adapt to our manifold excesses, and whatever trashing we did could easily heal. Nature may still be vast, but no longer is there a sense that it forms an abiding cradle for human civilization.

Two Novels Worth Reading

There’s no shortage of modern writers who are exploring our modern dystopia by, as someone has put it in a different context, “remembering forward.” Recently, I happened to read two such novels back to back, both quite fine and both illustrative of that something in the zeitgeist that makes our grinding apocalypse worth writing about. Neither is a techy, sci fi, plot-driven novel such as those of William Gibson or Paolo Bacigalupi, nor are they fully akin to sociological horror stories such as 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale. They are less didactic than World Made by Hand or The Road.