Natural Grace
by William Dietrich
About the
book
Introduction
You animal, you.
Please don't take offense. I'm well aware we humans pride ourselves on the
obvious differences from the creatures around us. Genesis concludes with people
as the finishing touch, flawed but still at the top of the heap. The scientific
name for our species is Homo sapiens sapiens, which translates from the
Latin as "wise, wise us."
Accordingly, we say we struggle to curb base instincts, to avoid barnyard
manners, and to rise above animal behavior.
Well. What do animals have to say about that?
I hope the essays in this book help persuade you that if actions speak louder
than words, animals -- and even plants -- are eloquent on this subject,
demonstrating in all their variety an easy self-possession, nobility, natural
grace, hardiness, ingenuity, and endurance we would do well to match. Some
animals are beautiful, some comic, and some pitiless from our point of view, but
all have that elusive star quality we call presence: the integrity of
having evolved to fill their niches in nature, to be comfortable in their roles.
Can many of us say the same? After all, we humans are animals too. To be
compared to the creatures with which we share the planet might just help us to
become wise, if we can learn to take a broader, more generous point of
view.
Our rapidly changing view of nature is the unspoken theme of this collection
of natural history essays, adapted from articles first published in the
Pacific Northwest magazine of the Sunday Seattle Times. Even as
progress separates us from nature, there is increasing interest in relearning
our connection to, and our dependence on, the natural world. The topic is
timely. At no point in history has our ethic toward our fellow creatures been
more critically important than at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
Why? Because we, and nature, are victims of our own species' spectacular
success. The world's human population has increased sixfold in the last two
hundred years. Here in the Pacific Northwest the increase is more than one
hundredfold. These numbers, coupled with technology and urban growth, have
produced the greatest environmental change in this region since the last Ice
Age.
The good news is that we humans are physically better off and have more
opportunity than at any time in human history. The bad news is that a third of
our wetlands, more than half of our marine estuaries, and most of our lowland
old-growth forest and sage-steppe desert is gone. More than a hundred salmon
stocks -- runs of a particular river with a distinct genetic imprint -- are
already extinct, and many of the surviving stocks are on the endangered species
list. Other saltwater species from herring to hake to rockfish have collapsed in
numbers. Shellfish beaches have closed due to pollution. We've introduced
hundreds of species both useful and noxious, paved more land that we've saved as
cathedral old-growth, and planted more trees than we've chopped. We've gardened,
cut, sprayed, fertilized, plowed, gouged, and healed. And at the rate of growth
experienced in the year 2000, the Pacific Northwest will add the population
equivalent of a new city of Seattle or Portland every three years. Every three
years! We've come to regard such growth as normal, inevitable. Yet it poses a
critical question. Having conquered nature in the Pacific Northwest, can we
still coexist with it? How do we conserve the natural world that drew us to the
region in the first place?
This is not an environmental policy book. I have no quick, glib answers for a
topic so complex that it goes to the very root of our civilization and its
assumptions. Rather, it's an awareness book, arguing that we risk losing
something profoundly worthwhile. Its point is not that animals and trees are
necessarily lovable, but simply that they're interesting, and because of that,
their lives add immeasurably to our own. I suggest that one useful thing we
could do with our lives is work toward saving theirs.
As traditional Northwest occupations such as farming, fishing, and logging
employ a shrinking percentage of our population, the whole notion of what it
means to be a Pacific Northwesterner has become fuzzy. Many of us have become
tourists to our own landscape, weekend outdoorsmen no longer dependent on
working the land to make a living. Comfort has drained us of pioneer color.
Globalization has robbed us of regional distinction. In retrospect there's a
certain historical inevitability to all this -- the homogenization of global
culture has gone hand in hand with the acceleration of technology for three
hundred years -- and nostalgia for the past runs the risk of not only myopic in
its selective memory but pointless, even pathetic. There was little romance to
the polluting plumes of long-gone wigwam sawdust burners. There is little regret
that most now escape chainsaw "white finger" and other debilitations of outdoor
occupations, little complaint that hydroplanes and rodeos are no longer the
premier sports events in this fourth corner of the United States. And yet . . .
With the explosive growth of this region has come an insidious loss of our
sense of place. During our short recorded history, what has made the Pacific
Northwest distinctive is mountain and Sound, tree and trail, river and range.
Yet this Pacific Northwest is increasingly a place that most of us have to drive
miles to find. Time pressures add anxiety. Species have to be spotted in an
afternoon or not at all. Nature seems more remote, more mysterious, more
romantic, more misunderstood.
That's my story, anyway. As a newspaper reporter and author I've spent too
much time writing about the environment and not enough experiencing it. Which
helps explain the origin of this admittedly self-indulgent book.
I was born and raised in Washington State and have watched its population
more than double in my lifetime. Like many Northwest natives I've grumped with
dismay about the disappearance of old-growth forest, the collapse of salmon
runs, the clogging of highways, the crowding of campgrounds, and the escalation
of housing prices. Yet I was a Tacoma kid who knew little about the landscape
where I fished, hunted, and hiked. It was green, and pretty, and I was all for
the Environment, with a capital E, but it was something to be crossed instead of
inhabited, a weekend destination instead of home. I hardly knew and didn't care
which tree was which, or what kinds of lives animals might lead. The outdoors
was scenery, background, wallpaper for an urban life.
This began to change with age, observation, and my own experiences as a
journalist. Witnessing the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 while I was
working at the Vancouver Columbian upset any assumptions I had about the
permanence of nature. Encounters with rural poverty and the decline of fishing
and logging cured me of excessive back-to-the-land romanticism. Clearcuts,
pollution, and plug-ugly development convinced me that wise, wise us could be a
bunch of wise guys of blind and bullying ambition. Coverage of the environment
and science for the Seattle Times introduced me to scientists who viewed
the same landscapes I did with a completely different level of understanding.
The more I learned, the more I realized how ignorant I was. Here was an outdoor
world fluid with change, intricate in its Byzantine alliances and rivalries,
cruel and magnificent, funny and tragic, monogamous and faithless, cyclic and
yet never entirely predictable. And the more I learned, the more I had a jarring
sense of unexpected self-recognition. Again and again, these plants and animals
reminded me of . . . me . . . you . . . us.
Eating. Reproduction. Rivalry. Territory. Succession. Opportunism. Nesting.
Here were office and grocery store, career and courtship, restless travel and
cozy home, human society in all its instinctual beginnings.
This is not to say that humans are merely animals (or that animals are as
complicated and nasty as people can be). We people are unusual in our social
systems and global dispersal, and we have a peculiarly restless intellect that
clearly sets us apart, for better and worse.
What I am saying is that our understanding of nature is useful for
understanding ourselves; that our office politics, hapless romances, adolescent
angst, ambitions, vanities, fears and longings have some parallels in the life
cycle of the natural world. People, we are taught in the news business, are
primarily interested in people. If so, the creatures around us offer a different
way of looking at ourselves. Why else do we go to zoos but for the partial shock
of self-recognition?
Additionally, we only care about what we know. We only safeguard what we fear
could be lost. As a writer trying to write something useful about the
environment, I've concluded that enthusiasm and commitment begin from learning
just how marvelous this place is: Passion has to precede purpose.
In my introduction to the series in Pacific Northwest magazine, I
wrote: "Our intent is celebration, not a sermon. We want to inspire determined
optimism, not nostalgic regret." That's still true. No matter what your
environmental politics, I hope you find these neighbors of ours both instructive
and entertaining. I hope your relationship with them is joyful, not guilty or
annoyed. Such coexistence is not always simple. Like any neighbors, animals and
plants can sometimes be intrusive or pesky. Nonetheless, good and patient
stewardship is vastly simpler than trying to get back to Eden once it is lost.
So, the first step in taking care is caring, and the first step to caring is
knowing. Dip into these stories at will, read them in any order, and supplement
them with a good field guide, please. I hope to make you laugh a few times, not
weep.
And I hope to encourage you to expand your curiosity beyond the most obvious
and famous creatures. The seductive sirens of the natural world are what
wildlife biologists wryly call "charismatic megafauna." Nature's celebrities are
big, glamorous creatures that people get excited about -- eagles, cougars,
whales, and the like. The last section of this book looks at these stars. In
nature, however, such animals are often bit players in an ecological opera
dominated by plant and animal species so common, so important, and so
unglamorous that we often hardly notice them. Accordingly, the first section of
this book focuses on species so ubiquitous as to be taken for granted. Part Two
explores a few of the microscopic or tiny creatures that matter immensely, and
Part Three surveys some of the natural processes of weather and geology that
influence us and the creatures that live here.
All, of course, are reflections of the greater whole. I hope the following
essays encourage you to learn more. And then, I hope you go outside and work to
protect this beautiful, marvelous, and fragile corner of the world.
Copyright
� 2003 William
Dietrich |
