Reflections on Ecology

This page is an assortment of interesting, inspirational and insightful writings on things ecological.

I hope you enjoy these occasional contributions!

10. A poem by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

contributed by Frances Cincotta

A Considerable Speck

(Microscopic)

A speck that would have been beneath my sight
On any but a paper sheet so white
Set off across what I had written there.
And I had idly poised my pen in air
To stop it with a period of ink
When something strange about it made me think,
This was no dust speck by my breathing blown,
But unmistakably a living mite
With inclinations it could call its own.
It paused as with suspicion of my pen,
And then came racing wildly on again
To where my manuscript was not yet dry;
Then paused again and either drank or smelt–
With loathing, for again it turned to fly.
Plainly with an intelligence I dealt.
It seemed too tiny to have room for feet,
Yet must have had a set of them complete
To express how much it didn’t want to die.
It ran with terror and with cunning crept.
It faltered: I could see it hesitate;
Then in the middle of the open sheet
Cower down in desperation to accept
Whatever I accorded it of fate.
I have none of the tenderer-than-thou
Collectivistic regimenting love
With which the modern world is being swept.
But this poor microscopic item now!
Since it was nothing I knew evil of
I let it lie there till I hope it slept.

I have a mind myself and recognize
Mind when I meet with it in any guise
No one can know how glad I am to find
On any sheet the least display of mind.

 

9. The Poor Poor Country – many thanks to Julie Gittus for alerting me to this wonderfully apt poem by the Australian poet John Shaw Nielson.

Oh ’twas a poor country, in Autumn it was bare,
The only green was the cutting grass and the sheep found little there.
Oh, the thin wheat and the brown oats were never two foot high,
But down in the poor country no pauper was I.

My wealth it was the glow that lives forever in the young,
‘Twas on the brown water, in the green leaves it hung.
The blue cranes fed their young all day – how far in a tall tree!
And the poor, poor country made no pauper of me.

I waded out to the swan’s nest – at night I heard them sing,
I stood amazed at the Pelican, and crowned him for a king;
I saw the black duck in the reeds, and the spoonbill on the sky,
And in that poor country no pauper was I.

The mountain-ducks down in the dark made many a hollow sound,
I saw in sleep the Bunyip creep from the waters underground.
I found the plovers’ island home, and they fought right valiantly,
Poor was the country, but it made no pauper of me.

My riches all went into dreams that never yet came home,
They touched upon the wild cherries and the slabs of honeycomb,
They were not of the desolate brood that men can sell or buy,
Down in that poor country no pauper was I.

The New Year came with heat and thirst and the little lakes were low,
The blue cranes were my nearest friends and I mourned to see them go;
I watched their wings so long until I only saw the sky,
Down in that poor country no pauper was I.

8. Daybooks of discovery – maintaining a tradition of nature writing and recording.

I recently came across a fascinating reference to a book entitled Daybooks of Discovery: Nature Diaries in Britain, 1770 – 1870 by Mary Ellen Bellanca. Here is a brief excerpt:

” … the nature diary includes any diaries or notebooks that contain a substantial amount of information about the natural world, that have a record-keeping aspect, and that are structured by the day. The category takes in many kinds of prose stylings, from the proto-scientific journals of Gilbert White and Charles Darwin’s diary aboard the Beagle to the more personal ruminations on nature in the diaries of Dorothy Wordsworth or John Clare … But it is a testimony to the interest the book engenders that one wishes for an account of the origin of the nature diary as it appears in some British newspapers today:  the  newspaper  column  that  records  daily  observations  of  nature meant  for popular voyeuristic consumption. The newspaper after all is the genre that bears the closest resemblance to the diurnal nature diary. Daybooks of Discovery provides a back-history not only to the avidity with which we approach contemporary environmental writing, but more poignantly to those obscure journalistic notations of the first daffodil of spring or the spring’s first sighting, just as Gilbert White recorded on 13 April 1768, of the house swallow: “Hirundo domestica!!!”

It struck me some time ago that environmental blogs have the potential to maintain the Victorian tradition of natural history observation and recording. The writings of observers such as Gilbert White are now seen as precious  insights into environmental changes associated with forces such as human settlement of the landscape and climate change. I would encourage those with more than a passing interest in their surroundings to consider adding to this valuable record.

There is an interesting blog The Natural History of Selbourne – journals of Gilbert White where you can view the daily records from 1768 – 1793 – it is a magnum opus!

7. ”Good Luck” – the following is an excerpt from an editorial to the journal Pacific Conservation Biology by esteemed ecologist Harry Recher. Thanks to Todd Soderquist and Frances Cincotta for suggesting circulation.

ON last night’s (11 November 2009) ABC Television, I watched Sir David Attenborough being interviewed for the 7.30 Report by Kerry O’Brien. Sir David is a household name throughout the English speaking world, if not universally. Since the beginnings of television, David Attenborough has brought the world of nature into our homes. He has probably seen more of the Earth’s wild animals and untamed places than any known traveller in modern history; a compassionate, intelligent, thoughtful and articulate man, Sir David’s views on the future of the wild planet merit respect and careful consideration. In this interview, three things stood out. First, Sir David commented on how humanity has been separated from the world of nature, saying:

“Oh, there’s no doubt that we are becoming increasingly divorced from the natural world. There are lots of people who spend their lives in cities and never see a wild thing unless it’s  [a]  pigeon — or maybe a rat. So you lose touch with the rhythms of the natural world. You lose touch with the realities of a natural world. I don’t want to get too pretentious, but you lose touch with both life and death, with both how life is created and how death is inevitable.”

Anyone living in Australia and who is knowledgeable about the Australian environment will know immediately what Sir David meant. Outside of naturalist colleagues, I meet few Australians of any age who have any knowledge of the wild plants and animals they share the continent with. Not only do most Australians no longer come in contact with nature, but natural history is no longer considered a worthy subject for study at any level from kindergarten to post-graduate university. Losing rhythm with the natural world means that nature conservation is not an issue worthy of government consideration. I cannot think of any Australian politician, current or past, who has demonstrated a knowledge and understanding of the rhythms of nature let alone being prepared to protect those rhythms. As a nation, Australia is divorced totally from nature.

To read the rest of the article click here to download.

6.  Act now to save our birds……….Margaret Atwood The Guardian, Saturday 9 January 2010

Birds have always been endowed with symbolic portent – from Chekhov to Hitchcock to Twitter. We ignore their decline at our peril. There are glimmers of hope, but only if we act now urges Margaret Atwood.

How to justify the ways of men to birds? How to account for their attraction for us? (For, despite Hitchcock’s frightening hunt-and-peck film, The Birds, it is mostly an attraction.) Why is Chekhov’s play called “The Seagull” instead of “The Sea Slug”? Why is Yeats so keen on swans and hawks, instead of an interesting centipede or snail, or even an attractive moth? Why is it a dead albatross that is hung around the Ancient Mariner’s neck as a symbol that he’s been a very bad mariner, instead of, for instance, a dead clam? Why do we so immediately identify with such feathered symbols? These are some of the questions that trouble my waking hours.

For as long as we human beings can remember, we’ve been looking up. Over our heads went the birds – free as we were not, singing as we tried to. We gave their wings to our deities, from Inanna to winged Hermes to the dove-shaped Holy Spirit of Christianity, and their songs to our angels. We believed the birds knew things we didn’t, and this made sense to us, because only they had access to the panoramic picture – the ground we walked on, but seen widely because seen from above, a vantage point we came to call “the bird’s eye view”. The Norse god Odin had two ravens called Thought and Memory, who flew around the earth during the day and came back at evening to whisper into his ears everything they’d seen and heard; which was why – in the mode of governments with advanced snooping systems, or even of Google Earth – he was so very all-knowing.

Some of us once believed that the birds could carry messages, and that if only we had the skill we’d be able to decipher them. Wasn’t the invention of writing inspired, in China, by the flight of cranes? Thoth, the Egyptian god of scribes credited with the invention of hieroglyphic writing, had the head of an ibis. In the ancient world, an entire job category grew up around bird reading: that of augury, performed by seers and prophets who could interpret the winged signs. When Agamemnon and Menelaus were setting out for Troy, two eagles tore apart a pregnant hare and ate the unborn young. The augur’s prediction was victory – Troy would fall – but an ill-omened victory with a heavy price to be paid; and so it turned out. “A bird of the air shall carry the voice,” says Ecclesiastes, with impressive gravitas, “and those that have wings shall tell the truth”; and we can bet that those bird-borne truths were momentous.

By the 1950s, when I was what’s now called a young adult, respect for birds had dwindled considerably. Birds might still be thought to carry messages – “a little bird told me,” we were fond of saying – but these messages were no longer from the gods, and they no longer concerned the deaths of kings and the fates of nations. They were more likely to be from the girl who had the locker next to yours, and to be about who just broke up with whom. “Bird-brained” meant stupid, and people with too obsessive a knowledge of birds were considered geeky and ridiculous. Bird-watching had become an increasingly popular pastime – a trend spurred by Roger Tory Peterson’s 1934 publication of the first Field Guide to the Birds – but one of the effects of this growing popularity was the appearance of parody versions of such guides, filled with cartoons of silly-looking people in pith helmets with names like “The Spectacled Drone”, who were watching girls in halter tops and short-shorts captioned “The Rosy-Breasted Nutcracker”. There were also various puns on the slang word “bird”, meaning either an attractive girl or – cf Frank Sinatra – the male genital organ. The supposed light-mindedness and frivolity of birdy activity is mirrored today in the name of the popular Twitter site, with “tweet” being the term for a tiny info-tidbit.

But times change, and we’re heading back towards an older way of reading the birds. It’s Fates of Nations time again, and ill omens seen through birds in flight – or the absence of them – and deadly prices to be paid for getting what you want. The birds have something to tell us again, and the truths are not comfortable ones.

I’ve always lived in the birdy world. I grew up in it – my parents were early conservationists and naturalists – and I can tell you from personal experience that small children have a limited tolerance for sitting still in canoes for hours on end being gnawed by mosquitoes, to see if the Very Rare Blur will deign to do a flit-by, when they won’t see it anyway because they were making the more controllable ant crawl up their arms. But early training does sometimes bear fruit, and I reconnected with the bird world once everyone, including me, realised that I was nearsighted. I needed special help with the twirly thing on the top of the binoculars, at which point the Very Rare Blur resolved into something I could actually see.

Birds of a feather flock together, so I eventually ended up with another bird-oriented person – Graeme Gibson, more recently the author of The Bedside Book of Birds and the chair of the board of the Pelee Island Bird Observatory. Sitting in a canoe being gnawed by mosquitoes while waiting for the Very Rare Blur is a lot better if you yourself are in charge of the timetable – as in, “Let’s have lunch now” – so we did a lot of birdwatching. Graeme had the zeal of a recent convert, I displayed the nonchalance of the born denominationalist, but our shared pursuit took us to many unusual places in the world. Some of our sightings were not heroic – the distant never-before-glimpsed-by-human-eye prehistoric Mexican enigma turned out to be a brown pelican, the snowy owl was actually a white plastic milk bottle – or was it the other way around?

Back in the 70s and 80s and then the 90s, however, you could depend on the birds to be more or less where they were supposed to be, more or less when they were supposed to be there. Failures to see them were bad luck or lack of skill on your part: the birds themselves were surely just around the corner. If not this time, then next; if not this year, then next. But all that is changing, and it’s changing very rapidly. The suddenness of the decline – not only in threatened species, but in relatively abundant ones, such as the neotropical woodland warblers – is very worrying. No bird species can any longer be taken for granted.

In February 2006, Graeme and I accepted the position of joint honourary presidents of the Rare Bird Club within BirdLife International. BirdLife describes itself as “a global partnership of conservation organisations working for the diversity of life through the conservation of birds and their habitats”. Sometimes it subtitles itself “Working for birds and people”. Under that broad umbrella, it supports an impressive number of activities carried on by its country partners all around the world – everything from running a Preventing Extinctions programme focused on birds at risk, to studying international migration flyways in order to remove thoughtlessly-built man-made hazards, to monitoring toxicity that kills birds fast and people more slowly. (A hint: if birds are dying in the water, don’t swim there.) BirdLife’s many projects are implemented on the ground through its country partners – over a hundred of them, and growing – but the secretariat that does much of the science and manages the overall network is located in Cambridge, and it has the same problem all conservation organisations have; it’s easier to attract donations for individual projects than for overall management.

The Rare Bird Club’s task is to support the secretariat, and to fundraise for it. Graeme and I agreed to take this on, not because we had time on our hands – we didn’t – but because we knew about the crisis in the life of birds, and also about the connection between a healthy ecosystem and a healthy human population. “Canary in the coal mine” – which comes from a time when miners knew that if their caged canaries toppled over it meant imminent asphyxiation for them – is not an empty phrase: where birds are dying now (through poisons, habitat destruction, and famine), people will die later. The die-off in seabirds, for instance, signals a die-off in sea life, including fish. It doesn’t take a very smart augur to read that kind of bird omen.

Three snapshots: two summers ago, we were with some Rare Bird Club members in the high Arctic. We were watching a polar bear finishing the remains of a seal, while nearby two all-white ivory gulls waited to pick over the bones. Everyone present knew that all the main elements of this scene – the feeding bear, the gull, the ice itself – might soon disappear from the earth like a mirage, as if they had never been. This could happen, not in centuries, but in years. It’s was global warming, not as a theory, but in a very concrete form.

Much further south, on an island off the coast of Georgia, we stood on a beach and watched a large flock of red knots – named originally for King Canute – feeding along the surf line. They were busily at work there, but we knew that further up the coast people were “harvesting” the horseshoe crabs that spawn on the beach, thus eliminating the crab eggs the birds depend on to sustain them during their long migration.

Further south still, at the bottom of New Zealand’s South Island, we went out one night to see kiwis – those flightless balls of feathery fur with long curved bills we first met, as children, on tins of shoe polish. Sometimes not a single kiwi is sighted on such trips. But we were favoured; we saw five: young, mature, male and female. None of these had fallen prey to those scourges of ground-dwelling New Zealand birds – the cats, the rats and the dogs – but many of their kindred had. All flightless and ground-nesting New Zealand birds are under threat. The carnage since the arrival of people on New Zealand has been brutal.

That’s the key: “Since the arrival of people.” Most of the time, we don’t kill birds on purpose. We kill them by accident, or at second-hand through our technologies, our pets, or our fellow-traveller pests.

Here are a few statistics. In the United States, power lines kill 130 to 174 million birds a year – many of them raptors such as hawks, or waterfowl, whose large wingspans can touch two hot wires at a time, resulting in electrocution, or who smash into the thin power lines without seeing them (think piano wire). Cars and trucks collide with and kill between 60 and 80 million annually in the US, and tall buildings – especially those that leave their lights on all night – are a major hazard for migrating birds, leading to between a hundred million and a billion bird deaths annually. Add in lighted communication towers, which also kill large numbers of bats, and can account for as many as 30,000 bird deaths each on a bad night – thus 40 to 50 million deaths a year, and due to double as more towers are built. Agricultural pesticides directly kill 67 million birds per year, with many more deaths resulting from accumulated toxins that converge at the top of the food chain, and from starvation as the usual food of insectivores disappears. Cats polish off approximately 39 million birds in the state of Wisconsin alone; multiply that by the number of states in America, and then do the calculations for the rest of the world: the numbers are astronomical. Then there are the factory effluents, the oil spills and oil sands, the unknown chemical compounds we’re pouring into the mix. Nature is prolific, but at such high kill rates it’s not keeping up, and bird species – even formerly common ones – are plummeting all over the world.

One more statistic: according to Al Gore, 97% of charitable giving goes to human causes. Of the remaining 3%, half goes to pets. That leaves 1½% devoted to the rest of nature – including the crisis-ridden oceans, the eroding, drying, or flooding land and the shrinking biosphere on which our lives depend. How crazy are we? We’re a lot like those old cartoons in which the foolish character is sawing off the same tree branch he’s sitting on, while beneath him is a sheer drop to nowhere. It makes you want to stick your head in the sand, like – apparently – almost everyone else, and just eat a lot, watch old movies from the time before things got so scary, and go shopping. Or, as James Lovelock keeps warning us: enjoy it while you can, whatever “it” is, because it’s not going to last much longer.

Despite such gloom – or perhaps because of it – there are many intrepid individuals and organisations out there, hurling themselves on to the tracks in the path of the speeding EcoDeath Express. There are international organisations, national ones, local ones; all are understaffed and overworked, like hospitals during pandemics. As I’ve said, my own connections are with BirdLife International; I attended its international convention in Argentina last September. These conventions happen only every four years, and they bring together the representatives of BirdLife’s national partners from around the world. The energy and enthusiasm were contagious, and it was clear from just a few glances around that the days of the 50s stereotype of the harmless, nerdy Spectacled Drone was gone forever.

Those now involved in bird conservation are serious and gutsy people – much more Seven Samurai than Jerry Lewis. They know their stuff, and the stuff they know can be pretty edgy. We heard tales of how the Ecuadorean organisation, Aves&Conservacion, had fought illegal habitat destruction and tree piracy with online posts, and when these generated death threats, it had posted the threats as well, until it had finally forced its government to act; of how the Maltese partner, BirdLife Malta, had finally stopped the devastating, and – in the EU – illegal spring bird hunt on this key migration island with the help of the European Commission, which had taken the island to court. There were death threats involved in that action, too, and car bombings as well; but with the support of more than 70% of the island’s residents, the cause had finally been won. We heard about the compilation of the Guide to the Birds of Iraq, an enterprise that involved great danger for those doing the work. The conservation movement has its leaders and its foot soldiers, but also its martyrs: there have been human deaths as well as bird deaths.

A large part of BirdLife’s energies are directed towards mapping important bird areas and attempting to protect them, and in cataloguing rare birds and monitoring them. In this way, rare and endangered birds that live in such areas and never leave them can be saved. But what about migrating birds? They run the gauntlet: if every stopping point but one is made safe, it’s the one unsafe point that will kill the species. This is where international networking can help.

Consider the albatross. Nineteen of the 22 albatross species – the literary bird whose corpse was hung around the neck of the Ancient Mariner “instead of the cross,” to symbolise a non-human sacrificial being – has been under threat for years from long-line and trawl fishing. The hooks – as many as 1,000 per line – are dragged along behind the boats, and the bait on them attracts fish, which in turn attract albatrosses, which then get snagged on the hooks. The fishermen don’t mean to catch the albatrosses; in fact, it’s a disadvantage to them. As for the albatross, the breeding cycle is very long and typically only one chick is reared at a time, so it’s been very easy to kill more birds than can be replaced by the species themselves. Before 2005, hundreds of thousands were dying annually. The albatross is a circumpolar bird, living mostly at sea, so trying to monitor it and help it cannot be the work of any one country.

In view of these difficulties, BirdLife established an international albatross task force in 2005 to work in seven countries, with a mandate to help both fishermen and birds. The task force placed specialised instructors on the fishing boats, to teach the simple, effective, and money-saving solutions – mere changes in fishing techniques – to the fishermen themselves. The result has been that thousands of albatrosses are now being saved. For instance, in the south Chile seas, the accidental capture of seabirds has been reduced from 1,500 a year to zero, with a close to zero rate having been achieved in Argentina. Despite these gains, 100,000 albatrosses are still being killed in fisheries every year, and 18 albatross species are facing extinction. But there’s a glimmer of hope: the task force has shown that with a lot of will and with ridiculously small amounts of money, the death trend can be turned around. But it’s a matter of time, and extinction is forever. Human beings, it seems, are like little children, who never do quite believe that “all gone” means there isn’t any more, at all, ever.

Still, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” wrote Emily Dickinson. Too often, these days, it isn’t. But in the case of the albatross, it is, if we’re reading the bird signals right. Or at least it could be; which is the nature of hope.

5. From Henry David Thoreau’s 1846 book The Maine Woods, a journal of Thoreau’s travel across northern Maine by foot and bateau and his climbing of Mt. Katahdin:

“Strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives
and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light, – to see
its perfect success; but most are content to behold it in the shape of
many broad boards brought to market, and deem that its true success!
But the pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards
and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a
man is to be cut down and made into manure. There is a higher law
affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a
dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man. Can he
who has discovered only some of the values of whalebone and whale oil
be said to have discovered the true use of the whale? Can he who slays
the elephant for his ivory be said to have “seen the elephant”? These
are petty and accidental uses; just as if a stronger race were to kill
us in order to make buttons and flageolets of our bones; for everything
may serve a lower as well as a higher use. Every creature is better
alive than dead, men and moose and pine-trees, and he who understands
it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

Is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine,
stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best? Is it the tanner
who has barked it, or he who has boxed it for turpentine, whom
posterity will fable to have been changed into a pine at last? No! no!
it is the poet; he it is who makes the truest use of the pine, – who
does not fondle it with an axe, nor tickle it with a saw, nor stroke it
with a plane, – who knows whether its heart is false without cutting
into it, – who has not bought the stumpage of the township on which it
stands. All the pines shudder and heave a sigh when that man steps on
the forest floor. No, it is the poet, who loves them as his own shadow
in the air, and lets them stand. I have been into the lumber-yard, and
the carpenter’s shop, and the tannery, and the lampblack-factory, and
the turpentine clearing; but when at length I saw the tops of the pines
waving and reflecting the light at a distance high over all the rest of
the forest, I realized that the former were not the highest use of the
pine. It is not their bones or hide or tallow that I love most. It is
the living spirit of the tree, not its spirit of turpentine, with which
I sympathize, and which heals my cuts. It is as immortal as I am, and
perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.”

4. NATURE KNOWS US – DO WE KNOW NATURE?

Doug Ralph contributed this piece written by Satish Kumar, President of Schumacher UK, Editor of Resurgence
and Director of Programmes at Schumacher College.
From the September/October 2005 edition of Resurgence:

“RECENTLY I WAS talking with Kay Dunbar, the founder of Ways with Words,
a literary festival which takes place every year at Dartington, UK. Kay
said, “In urban and industrial civilisations people are increasingy
losing Eco-intelligence.” The moment I heard the word ‘Eco- intelligence’
it rang a bell. I realised that the article by Paul Stamets, ‘Mushroom
Magic’, is exactly about that: mushrooms are intelligent. So are trees,
rivers, oceans, animals and all the creatures of the Earth. We belong
to a living Earth in an intelligent universe. Intelligence is not a human
monopoly. The universe is made of intelligence and consciousness. Planet
Earth is a self-organising, self-managing and self-correcting living organism.
Wherever there is life there is intelligence and consciousness. Eco-intelligence
means the eco-system is an intelligent system.

Humans are intelligent, but people in urban and industrial societies
are mostly living in human-made, technological and artificial environments:
air-conditioned homes, cars and offices hold us within a cocoon which
is disconnected from the eco-system and the natural world. Young people
in our schools can recognise more than fifty logos of business corporations,
but if you take them into the woods, very few will be able to name ten
varieties of tree – not to mention insects and other creatures. We cannot
read the book of Nature. Knowledge of the natural world is mostly obtained
from TV channels. People are afraid of cold, heat, rain, snow, thunder,
lightning, and the roar of wild animals. This disconnection and alienation
from the biosphere leads to severe intelligence deficiency. The great
universities of the world are full of people who have technological and
academic knowledge but are ignorant of the real world. Universities are
no longer the centres of intelligence and knowledge – they have become
the citadels of ignorance. They need eco-literacy and eco-intelligence.

It is the work of poets and writers of the imagination to expose our
ignorance and challenge the mindset which places the natural world out
of human reach. Adam Thorpe, a novelist and a poet, expresses his anger
and frustration at the way we are destroying the natural world and discusses
what artists can do to redress this. Christopher Lloyd suggests that if
the Conservative Party wishes to earn the trust of British people, it
has to regain its intelligence by connecting with people, planet and future
generations – in other words become ‘True Conservatives’ and start conserving
the Earth and perennial human values.

The whole raison d’être of Resurgence is to recognise the intelligence
of the Earth and to inspire people to return to their own intelligence
about the Earth. These two aspects of eco-intelligence are paramount to
a sustainable future. Tony Juniper, Director of Friends of the Earth, is challenging us to realise that huge problems such as climate change cannot be addressed unless we understand and establish a symbiotic relationship with nature. Nature is not out there as an object to be manipulated and exploited. Humans are Nature too; ultimately life is one, manifesting itself in millions of forms”.

Satish Kumar

3. THE OLD TRACK by Bob Brissenden (1921-1991)

The old track is still there, hacked like a ledge
Into the sheer hillside. Fallen trees
Block it, saplings and young cycads spring
Out of its crown, each year
The rains gouge deeper gutters from its banks.
Soon even the maniac trail-bike boys of summer
Will let it die. Creepers veil one corner.
Part them and you can walk
Onto the hill’s high shoulder, and there from shadow
Look through columned gums down to the sun-lit
Water, darkly blue, Grasshopper Island’s
Forelegs fringed with surf,
The sea-birds wheeling like tiny pieces of torn
Paper, the beach – and beneath your feet, too steep
For the loggers, the gully, where the cabbage-tree palms
Like green fountains rise
Out of its secret tangling pocket of rain-
Forest, seeking the sun. All as it was
When, half our lives ago and wild with love,
We saw it first together.

Today, alone, I gazed out at the sea,
Feeling the forest breathe around me, systole
And diastole of life and death, of love
And the harsh fight to survive.
Native violets, golden hibbertia and small
Pink star-flowers shone among the maiden-hair
Beside my feet – ruthless blind possessors
Of their patch of earth, their measure
Of air and light. Ants ate the eyes of a dead
Bird; a gannet folded its wings and dropped
Like a homing missile into the wave; a vine
Silently strangled a tree:
Slow agony, unending pain, a myriad
Soundless cries of death filling the bright
Day loud with the confident joyful choir
Of everything that lived.

We heard that note of joy: our blood pulsed
To its music when beneath the trees, bare
To the sun and summer air, caught in the timeless
Dance, we spoke our love.
On that bright day we heard the melody.
Now, trapped in this treacherous, clumsy, ageing
Beast my body, I hear the undersong:
And know that death is a part
Of love, a part of life, as pain is a part
Of joy. The dead skin flakes from my fingers,
The dry bark strips from the tree, the leaves rot
In the teeming forest floor.

The moon has risen. Under the old track
Seeds stir. Owls flex their talons. Lover, friend,
Adversary – I give you now, as ever,
My imperfect love.

“R.F. Brissenden was the author of six collections of poetry, published between 1971 and 1990….his work reflects a profound love of nature alongside his abiding interest in jazz and literature. A conservationist as well as a writer and teacher, he is considered one of the pre-eminent poets of the Australian coastline and of the rainforests”.

From “Suddenly Evening The Selected Works of Poems of R.F. Brissenden” (McPhee Gribble 1993)

2. Wendell Berry is an American farmer, poet and conservationist who has written some of the most compelling and insightful works on the intertwined history and future prospects for agriculture, landscape, community and the environment.

In a commencement address delivered in June 1989 at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, Berry gave some advice that to most modern graduates would sound old fashioned, indeed backward. But the advice he gave was timeless, and his reminder seems apocalyptic in view of the world’s current environmental crisis and, as Berry sees it, America’s cultural crisis. In a sense, Berry’s deliverance of such a critical message parallels Moses’ deliverance of the Ten Commandments, for Berry’s advice is also a prescription for cultural healing through the imposition of a set of laws. The laws Berry delivers, however, seem to be Nature’s laws. He closed his address (later published in Harper’s as “The Futility of Global Thinking”) with a series of ten commands, which, he said, “is simply my hope for us all”. These instructions are at the heart of Berry’s personal and literary world, and collectively they express the thesis informing all of his work, a canon now in excess of thirty books of essays, fiction, and poetry:
1.Beware the justice of Nature.
2. Understand that there can be no successful human economy apart from Nature or in defiance of Nature.
3. Understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale.
4. In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else. Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour.
5. Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.
6. Put the interest of the community first.
7. Love your neighbors–not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.
8. Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us.
9. As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighborhood, and household–which thrive by care and generosity–and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.
10. Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.

Wendell Berry – “The Peace of Wild Things”

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

1. John Muir

There was no one like “poetico-trampo-geologist-botanist and ornithologist-naturalist” John Muir. No wonder then that he styled his own brand of rhapsodic prose.

For Muir, the natural world deserved all of the praise and glory usually reserved for royalty. In a letter probably written in 1870, he makes his exuberance felt.

“Do behold the King in his glory, King Sequoia! Behold! Behold! seems all I can say….Well may I fast, not from bread, but from business, book-making, duty-going, and other trifles, and great is my reward already for the manly, treely sacrifice….I am in the woods, woods, woods, and they are in me. The King and I have sworn eternal love – sworn it without swearing, and I’ve taken the sacrament with Douglas squirrel, drunk Sequoia wine, Sequoia blood, and with its rosy purple drops I am writing this woody gospel letter.

I never before knew the virtue of Sequoia juice….I wish I were so drunk and Sequoical that I could preach the green brown woods to all the  juiceless world, descending from this divine wilderness like a John the Baptist, eating Douglas squirrels and wild honey or wild honey or anything, crying Repent, for the Kingdom of Sequoia is at hand! “

John Muir’s letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr was posted Squirrelville, Sequoia Co. and dated “Nut Time.”

To read more about John Muir www.colongwilderness.org.au/CelebratingWilderness/CW_TheBook/Macfarlane.pdf