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The Ecological Kinship of Trees and Humans

Autumn skies on our farm glow with the burnished leaves of cottonwoods, alders, and willows that provide refuge for the deer taking up residence here as winter approaches. Some over a century old along our irrigation ditches, these beautiful trees shelter squirrels, owls, red-tail hawks, and smaller birds of all kinds, as they also shelter us, creating the beneficial ecosystem in which we grow our food, find haven in our home, and thrive in the splendor of their exuberant growth.

In ecobiography, a sense of affiliation between cross-species inhabitants of shared or differing ecosystems can be called an “ecological kinship” in which connection to an aspect of the natural world imitates or even replaces the human bonds of family, friend, teacher, or mentor. Ecobiography can explore such kinship relations by considering mutual needs, common behaviors, reciprocal actions, and joint survival strategies that cross biological, geological, or geographical differences to create a union of diverse species.

In my latest essay, “Bones Beneath Bark: The Ecological Kinship of Trees and Humans” (featured here in Hawk and Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability), I discuss the importance of trees to human existence, particularly regarding health, and describe several of my own foundational experiences with trees. I hope you’ll read the essay here and view the wonderful photographs by internationally renowned photographer Joyce Tennyson with which it is paired.

Writing Exploration: I’ll explore the concept of ecological kinship in further blog posts, but, to start thinking about your own ecological kinships, write about an animal, plant, element, or landscape with which you feel a particularly deep or meaningful connection. What characteristics attract you to this non-human being or place? What role does it play in your life? What do you have in common? What differences must you cross to form a connection? How is reciprocity manifested between you? And how far would you go for this relationship not only to thrive, but survive?

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Alaska, August 2018

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Alaska is a vast land of deep forests and wild oceans that provide habitat for some of the world’s most charismatic creatures and livelihood for humans rugged enough to weather its harsh climatic and economic conditions. On a nine-day cruise of the Alaskan Inside Passage with family to celebrate my parents’ 60th wedding anniversary, I was continually struck by the disjunction between the fierce beauty of the natural environment and the manufactured consumerism of the gigantic ship on which we traveled. Like all tourism to areas of ecological preservation, Alaskan cruises are paradoxical in that the boat is invasive and even destructive of the very thing upon which it depends: Alaska’s wildness.

I call this picture “What are these people looking at?” As family members are looking, in fact, at the sea and sky at the southern end of the Inside Passage, I caught the gorgeous golden glow of the setting sun reflected against the ship.  While they peered through the viewers, I noticed the light’s intensity and quickly snapped the shot. I haven’t done anything to the camera or photo to get these colors. Even though it all looks artificial, the air, light, and water form the natural environment engulfing the ship, an eerie juxtaposition.

My own participation in the tourism paradox made me uncomfortable, but I went on the cruise to be with my parents, who at 80 needed the comfort of the boat to travel to a state they had long wanted to visit. I loved being on the water but not on the ship; stops at the ports of Ketchikan and Skagway for hikes and tours outside the established tourist consumer areas were highlights for me, although these encounters were still tourist “excursions,” as they’re marketed, and therefore still part of a manufactured experience.

As I write about my time in Alaska, I’m trying to differentiate between my discomfort with the ecologically unsustainable aspects of the trip (not only the waste from the ship, but the ship’s very presence in Alaskan waters) and my gratitude for the opportunity to witness a small part of the state’s ecological wonders, maintained and supported by the indigenous knowledge and customs of its Native peoples that provide yet another—and more ecologically beneficial–juxtaposition of human and nature. This seems a big undertaking—but it’s a big state.

Writing Exploration: Write about your own observations of disjunction between the natural and human-built environments. How were these environments different or in conflict? And how did you experience your own participation in these paradoxes? What insights do you draw about your position with/in such ecological frameworks?

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Return to Wonder

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I had to look up a lot of things last week. It’s amazing how much, at middle age, I still don’t know. For example, what do you call a group of butterflies? According to the internet, possible collective nouns include a flight, a flutter, a swarm, or, more poetically, a kaleidoscope.

All of these answers evoke the lovely assembly of color and movement displayed by butterflies, but when my grandson and I were encircled by orange and black fritallaries on the Nighthawk trail of rabbit brush and yucca framed by red Colorado buttes, “cloud” was the word we chose. Sweeping and brushing above and around us as if we weren’t even there, dozens of butterflies accompanied us thirty feet down the trail, alighting only long enough for a five-year-old to touch a wing with the gentlest of fingers while I snapped a few photos for future ID.

Back from our hike, we loaded the photos onto my laptop and pulled up my go-to page for “butterflies of Boulder County.” I have to admit I’d never heard of fritallaries before, so we had to search by individual photos rather than type. Once my grandson and I zeroed in on the fritallary family, we found 10 to choose from, each with a different pattern of spots and stripes on both sides of their wings. Comparing each species with our photos, we decided the butterflies circling us were Northwestern Fritallaries. We had to look up how to pronounce their name, too!

Five-year-olds are all about understanding their world, whether through books, play, or jumping with both feet into whatever curious mud puddle of a situation presents itself, despite the appropriateness of their boots. Children of that age take time to ask questions to help them learn how the new and often odd things they encounter line up with what they already know. My grandson stops me when I use a word he doesn’t yet know, or asks me what something means when he’s reading on his own. He favors non-fiction, but he’s always up for a good story like My Side of the Mountain. His favorite area of inquiry is the animal kingdom, which extends to insects when confronted with those of particular interest such as butterflies swirling alongside as we hike.

Five is a powerful age for blending fact and fiction, magic and science. On the trail where we saw the frittalaries, my grandson also glimpsed the back side of two retreating mountain lions in the scrub oak, members of the feline family, as he reminded me, I wasn’t quick enough to see. When in imagination mode, he often pretends he’s an animal himself. After our hike, he gave me a “bear” kiss. “That’s the best bear kiss I’ve ever had,” I said. To which the little bear replied in his growly voice: “I don’t think you’ve had very many others.”

Our next hike was at a place we call Heron Ponds since a heron rookery, or heronry, is located nearby and we often spot great blues on our walks there. This time, we spotted a bird neither of us had noticed before, a black bat-winged duck with an orange beak and long neck down which it was struggling to swallow a very large fish. We watched duck and fish in their mortal tug-of-war for ten minutes before the duck won, its neck stretched fish-shaped as the prey slid down its throat. Was the bird a loon? A grebe? We weren’t sure, so again we turned to an internet source for Boulder County and quickly found our duck was a double-crested cormorant, an increasingly common resident to our area because of the shared heronries.

But that wasn’t the only interesting animal we encountered at Heron Ponds. Out in the depths of one of the ponds lurked a dark shadow from which thin branches protruded. “There’s a hippotamous!” my grandson cried.

“Really?”

“Yes, I see it.”

“Maybe so,” I say. “Don’t they usually live in Africa?”

“Yes, but it might have walked here.”

“Across the ocean?”

“Yes, it walked underwater,” he says, although the giggle in his voice shows this idea doesn’t quite square with his knowledge of how the world really runs.

The next time we drive by the ponds, my grandson says we should call them “Hippo Ponds” instead of “Heron Ponds.” He still insists he saw a hippo there, and I don’t disagree. Instead, I suggest what we really saw was a “Hippopondamus,” a hybrid creature blending a hippo and its adopted habitat, the pond. Hybrids are a new interest for my grandson. After we’d looked up the cormorant, we watched a video about strange animals like the “tion,” a combination of tiger and lion bred in captivity, and the “groler,” a grizzly/polar bear mix that has occurred in nature as a warming climate brings the territories of these creatures together.

Clouds of butterflies, fish-necked ducks, and animals from another continent taking up residence in our own backyards. I know my grandson realizes that no such thing as a “hipponpondamous” exists, but we like to say its name and tease each other about it. When we’re together, I remember the planet is too amazing to worry about what’s scientific and what’s imaginary. The world is big enough for both. Everything we experience is curious and beautiful and alive. Five-year-olds remind us that nature is full of wonder. Just look around and you’ll see.

Writing Exploration: Ecobiography is a way of writing about who we are and how we live through our relationship with/in the natural world. As adults, we’re trained to look with the eyes of science in which facts are true until proven otherwise and imagination is relegated to fancy, magic, or art. But by only looking through the lens of a so-called rational system, we may miss out on how incredible the world can be.

What might we see if we suspended the science we already know to look at the natural world with fresh, five-year-old eyes? A leopard lurking in spotted shadows? A winged tornado? Trees that grow upside down?

For your ecobiography, write about a childhood discovery of the natural world. What did you observe and how did your evolving sense of the world help you understand what you saw? Write it from the perspective of a five-year-old, too, to bring an even greater sense of wonderment into your writing voice.

Or go to the natural world and try to recreate a child’s view. How might you look at nature’s habitats and creatures differently by forgetting taxonomy or biology? How might your imagination create a new story about the world swirling around you as you walk?

 

 

 

 

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Bee-In for Earth Day 49

John’s been hard at work this spring getting hive boxes and frames ready for new bees, the first of which were introduced to their snug home on Friday. As you’re probably aware if you’re reading this blog, bees are struggling. We lost most of our hive last summer to a bear in early June—much earlier than bears normally roam—and the remaining bees died during a very cold snap in February because they couldn’t generate enough heat to protect themselves and the brood they had recently laid. Between chemical pollution, habitat loss, invasive pests, and a changing and unpredictable climate, it’s tough to be a bee, and tough, too, to be a beekeeper. So far, our new hive is off to a great start and will be joined by others soon.

I’ve written about Earth Day before, including in this video excerpt from A Bushel’s Worth, so for this blog I’m sharing tips below for writing about your own Earth Day experiences. But for now, get out and enjoy this beautiful 49th Earth Day!

To write about your Earth Day experience, start by recalling details through consulting a photograph, journal entry, newspaper account, or website, if you have them. If not, memory will do.

Record the facts: jot down when and where the experience took place, who organized it, and who took part, as in this example from “The First Earth Day . . . and Still Counting” in my book, A Bushel’s Worth: An Ecobiography: “On April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day, I was a student in Mr. Osborn’s fifth grade class at Sherwood Elementary. . . . [We] decided to join the first Earth Day celebration by turning the hard dirt outside our classroom into a beautiful garden of grass and flowers.”

Next, fill in the setting with a little more context about the event’s origins or goals. Tell us why you or other organizers decided to celebrate Earth Day in that particular way: “Between the Vietnam War and the dawning awareness of environmental degradation in the late 1960s, sometimes the world seemed a pretty dark place. But in Mr. Osborn’s fifth grade class, we students felt the hopefulness of a world blooming with new and exciting possibilities. . . . All it would take, we thought, were some shovels and a few seeds.”

Now add what happened by recounting the actions taken. Whether the celebration was an organized public event or a private, informal occurrence, what exactly did participants do? Take us there, including dialogue, if relevant. In my story, for example, I write about showing up to school with tools (the girls even got to wear pants, normally not allowed in 1970’s Greeley, Colorado!): “With rakes and hoes in our young hands, we scratched tiny furrows in the soil to plant our hopeful seeds. A little water, a little weeding, and we would have our first Earth Day garden.”

Following the story of your own event, consider what your Earth day celebration meant to you. What did you learn about the environment and the ecological challenges facing the planet? Moving from the close-up scene of your own event to a wide-angle view of the world in which your event took place, consider issues or problems that provided a background to your Earth Day. Even within a global perspective, individual campaigns like banning plastic straws or limiting meat consumption target localized actions. Write about how your actions and attitudes fit in the larger Earth Day mission.

If you have participated in more than one Earth Day event, compare and contrast them. This year is the 49th Earth Day! How has it changed over nearly half a century? What themes or projects have garnered public awareness? For example, at the first Earth Day, water and air pollution and endangered species took center stage, while today, human actions leading to a changing climate are seen as a much bigger threat to the earth than anyone could have imagined in 1970. Another shift can be traced from an emphasis on preservation to adaptation? How have you seen Earth Day change? And how have you changed your awareness and advocacy over the years, too?

Finally, reflect on Earth Day itself. Given the immensity of the problems facing the planet, should anyone bother to celebrate Earth Day anymore? Should its goals be educational, scientific, political, and/or adversarial? Does commemorating Earth Day just once a year change policies and attitudes toward the environment and our role in it? Or is it a feel-good event that allows us to look away from the planet on the other 364 days of the year?

Whatever your story, think about how you might share it as personal memoir, testimony, or political opinion. Whether you write for yourself or for others, your Earth Day story is part of a planetary record of living here on earth.

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If You Were a Bird, Where Would You Nest?

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I’m not a birder, but I love observing the many species of birds that take up residence or make a migratory stop on our farm. When I see a bird I can’t identity, I consult one of our talented birding members like our young friend Joel, whose photographs of birds in the wild are as much portraits as they are ornithological research.

Despite needing back-up for the Western Tanager I spotted on a crabapple tree, I do recognize some stand-outs: Lesser goldfinches pay an annual visit to our farm when autumn leaves start to turn, while bald eagles are regular visitors here, along with red-tailed hawks and a pair of great-horned owls that sometimes nest in our trees. Common birds like house wrens, mourning doves, blue jays, magpies, and starlings are in residence, too, some building nests in inconvenient places like tool racks, downspouts, and barn walls.

Once, a robin built a nest on the bristles of a push broom leaned upside-down against the tractor barn, the tip of its wooden handle balanced on the slim edge of a pail. We assumed that the nest was attached to the rough wall against which it rested. Everyday when we passed that broom, we wondered when the whole contraption would fall. We worried about the eggs so precariously perched as the mother flew protectively to and from the nest.

While we watched the robin nesting for days on that broom, we shared a parent’s concern for the future of its young. After the babies hatched and fledged, we were relieved. Then we discovered the nest was simply resting on the broom, not affixed to the wall in any way. How easily that nest might have blown down in the wind or fallen as the fledglings pushed off on their first flight. The happy outcome seemed to attest to the robin’s skill—and some luck that we wouldn’t need our broom or pail.

The answer to the question, “If you were a bird, where would you nest?” depends on what type of bird you choose to be. According to their habitat and breeding practices, birds build as many different kinds of nests as there are species. Most birds nest once per year, but robins may have 4 or 5 nests during a breeding season (maybe because they build nests in precarious places?).

In fact, not all birds build nests or live in them regularly. Some birds lay eggs on the ground or on ledges. Others, like cuckoos, lay eggs in other birds’ nests. Around our farm, birds often nest inside tall trees. We see the holes pecked by flickers and downy woodpeckers, but not the nests or young. For birds, nesting has one purpose: breeding to produce the next generation. Nests provide a place for eggs to be laid and hatched and to keep chicks safe until they are ready to fledge.

Humans have borrowed the idea of nesting to mean making a cozy home. Humans don’t “nest” just to breed, although expectant or expecting-to-be-expectant parents might fix up their homes to make them more suitable for raising children. Often, nesting is related to décor and the desire to make one’s home a refuge from the busy, workday world. I found over 800 shops with “nest” in their name on the crafting and vintage platform etsy.com alone. Looked at that way, nesting is about creating a habitat conducive to survival for humans and birds alike.

Nesting is a reverse example of anthropomorphizing, the term for placing—some say imposing––human characteristics on other-than-human objects, creatures, and landscapes. Anthropomorphizing can be a form of privileging human actions and agency over all others and reducing the intelligence and consciousness of other beings to what is only observable or understandable by humans.

Scientists have generally denigrated the practice of anthropomorphizing as lacking objectivity or overlaying behaviors with conscious intent, but more recently some scientists have acknowledged that animals may exhibit the kinds of emotions or intentions associated with humans. Further, emotions like empathy between researcher and animal are recognized as important to the understanding of animal capabilities and conducive to the research relationship itself.

In borrowing the idea of nesting from birds, we could say nesting is a human concept that has been ecopomorphized from an animal practice. As the opposite of anthropomorphizing human characteristics on other beings in the natural world, ecopomorphizing adopts the habits of animals or plants onto human behaviors. This adaptation may be practical, experiential, or metaphorical, but all begin with an other-than-human trait.

By recognizing the basis in nature of ecopomorphizing relationships, humans hopefully learn to empathize with other-than-human beings through gaining insight into their needs, habitats, and characteristics. Through ecopomorphizing we can also expand our care for and about the natural world through acknowledging our mutual interests with creatures, plants, soil, rock, water, and air.

Which brings me back to our broom-nesting robin. When I told a friend the story, he said, “We can learn a lot from that bird.”

“Like how to build a nest!” I joked, but I didn’t mean to be glib. Nest-building is an admirable skill, requiring the ability to find the right location and materials, as well as knowledge of construction techniques to ensure strength, safety, and warmth.

But nest-building means more than that. My friend was right. From that robin, we realized our mutual concerns for protection of habitat and family. Even our need to use the broom and bucket was superseded by our empathy with the bird and its chicks. Our kinship may have been temporary, but in our shared space, we went about our daily lives, coming and going, crossing paths, trusting that the land could support all our nests in kind.

 

Writing Exploration: In answer to the question “If you were a bird, where would you nest?”, write about aspects of nesting you share with birds in making your own home. How might starting with an actual bird’s habits and habitats influence how you think about home and shelter differently? To learn more about the birds around you, consult the Audubon Society or other birding organizations’ websites for your area.

Next, think about examples of ecopomorphizing with which you are familiar. Nesting, rootedness, and hibernation are a few. Describe the ideas or practices borrowed from nature you recognize in your own life. How does acknowledging them open new perspectives on mutual needs and concerns shared with others in the natural world?

 

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Walking the Ditch

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Stonebridge Farm is crossed by three irrigation ditches: the Palmerton near the house, the Highland to the east, and the Rough & Ready in between. Melting snow from the Rockies runs through these ditches from spring to fall. Before the 2013 flood, some water or ice could be found in the ditches in the winter because the old head gates from the St Vrain river leaked, but following the flood, more efficient head gates were constructed that keep water out of the ditches after shut-off in late fall.

An empty ditch in summer means drought, an alarming sight for a farmer. But an empty ditch in winter reveals a new view of the riparian ecosystem that supports our farm with water, shade, soil, plants, and animals. With its slanted light and bare outlines, winter exposes the natural world in intriguing ways: trees tower over head as the ditch becomes an open road. For our five-year-old grandson on a winter day, an empty ditch needs exploring.

            The night before our ditch adventure, we read Signs Along the River by Kayo Robertson, a children’s book about using the five senses to find the evidence creatures leave behind like tracks, trails, bones, and, to put it plainly, poop. With these clues in mind, we set out the next morning from the bridge over the Rough & Ready to see what we can find. That bridge is next to our swimming hole, a place we often see muskrats paddling when the water’s flowing. Not far from the bridge we find the mouth of a burrow and imagine cozy muskrats in hibernation up inside the ditch bank behind the hole.

            The topography of an empty ditch is a meeting of curves and lines as the flowing water follows the natural limestone walls created over thousands of years, exposing textures of grass, sand, and roots along the ditch’s perimeter. A tree too close to the edge that was felled before our time left a tapestry of tangled roots that now fortifies the bank from erosion.

            Near another bridge, my grandson spots tracks in the dry sand along the ditch bottom, with many tracks in one spot as if an animal were circling. “What do you think it was?” I ask him. “Coyotes,” he guesses, and he is right because next to the tracks we are delighted to find coyote poop. Coyotes are a constant at the farm; it’s no surprise they run the empty ditches as winter highways.

In snowy patches further down our walk, we find deer tracks crossing the ditches, also not surprising since mule deer are in residence in our fields this winter, eating the cover crop and what’s left of the winter kale and chard. We discover a place where deer bed down in tall grass along the ditch in a spot farther back from the cultivated fields, a place we think of as “wild” because we don’t walk or farm there, in part because the trees form a small forest along that stretch of our northern boundary. The empty ditch allows us access into the heart of this place and now we can see how its wildness creates a refuge for the deer.

My grandson and I walked the Rough and Ready from one end to the other and back again, stopping to explore whatever caught our eye, including an aluminum baseball bat half-buried in silt and grass, a relic of the flood, perhaps, like the eight-ball we exhumed from a different ditch last spring. In the 20-some years I’ve lived at Stonebridge, I’ve never walked the ditch from end to end before. Seeing it from the inside out was like opening a door to a new room in my house that I hadn’t known existed and realizing that life went on there, with or without me. Now I know that the winter ditch is something I’ve been missing.

 

Writing Explorations: In ecobiography or ecology-based memoir, I’m always interested in how humans live alongside and amid other forms of life. We write about the places that bring us in contact with the natural world, especially on a regular basis, and we reflect on what we can learn about ourselves through the plants, creatures, and elements around us.

But before we can write of these interactions, we must notice them. A change of season, weather, or situation—as in the empty ditch—provides a wonderful opportunity to look with new eyes at a familiar place. In fact, deeper exploration of our relationship to nature can be inspired by the lens of change as routines are altered and what seemed normal or ordinary is exposed as cyclical or distinct.

In a short essay or a journal entry, write through the lens of winter. Right now, how do the places you inhabit or visit look different in the winter? What does the starkness of a winter landscape reveal to your curious eye? What surprises do you find in the dormant world that are hidden from view in the growing season? What do these details show you about your place in a wintry ecosystem?