Tag: conservation

I get a base, primal satisfaction from actually just doing something, no matter how insignificant.

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From spring until late fall, when winter weather drives me indoors to the treadmill, I spend 20 minutes each morning after my run around the Back Cove in Portland, Maine, walking the shoreline, picking up garbage. Every day is Groundhog Day — I gather plastic cups, syringes, food containers and cigarette butts the same as the morning before, and the same as the morning before that.I should almost certainly feel despair battling the daily fallout as late capitalism enters hospice care. But instead I get a base, primal satisfaction from actually just doing something, no matter how insignificant. We’ve forgotten, maybe, as the virtual world has slowly co-opted our lives, that we are meant by nature to move through and manipulate, to lift and carry and sort and transfer. Simple acts, I’ve found, have an outsized effect on the worrying over abstractions that otherwise takes up so much of my time. […]

The satisfaction I get from this habit is not uncomplicated. Sometimes I take paradoxical pleasure in getting dirty with other people’s trash, and other times the surprise dollop of last night’s honey mustard sauce on my shoe is enough to send me directly over the edge.

But the daily practice has taught me to be on guard against my own vanity — to notice and discard the smug feeling that sometimes arises when I see others enjoying the cove but doing nothing about how blighted it is. Instead I am confronted each day with my own fallibility, tininess and hypocrisy (as just one more trash ape among billions, I contribute to the problem simply by existing). And instead of puffing myself up, I check myself and reach for more garbage. […]

I go and gather garbage by myself most days. And occasionally something will occur that happily disproves my dim view of humanity. People will notice me, and wonder what I’m doing all sweaty and breathless down there among the marsh grass and the rocks. I present an intriguing enough figure for them to stop, in the midst of their preoccupations with the day, and take the time to discern what I’m up to. And when they figure out that I am, in fact, picking up garbage, sometimes — not often, but occasionally — they’ll come and join me. We’ll chat or, more likely, we won’t do much other than exchange hellos, or simply nod. Just a couple of strangers doing something small and futile together, for no other reason than that it’s right. The kind of modest, workaday miracle that feels like it could, with any luck, lead to something bigger.

It seems near all but certain that we are, as a species, too shortsighted and distractible, too enamored of dividend checks and retail therapy, to really turn this ship around. But, then, despair and idealism are two sides of the same cop-out, and I’ve indulged in both more than enough in my time. So I’ll keep splitting the difference, keep picking up trash — and keep hoping that simply setting an example can be meaningful.

— Ron Currie, Jr., excerpts from “This is What Keep My Eco-Anxiety in Check” (NY Times, October 23, 2023). Ron Currie Jr. is the author of the novel “The One-Eyed Man” and a writer for film and television, most recently for the series “Extrapolations.

Walking. Touched by a Terrapin.

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Here we go. 1,153 consecutive (almost) days on this daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.

I’m off.

71° F. Humidity? One billion % and climbing.

Mimi, in her FB comment: A brooding kind of beauty —  and even the birds are holding court in silence.”

And they were silent. A Great Blue Heron. A pair of egrets. A Yellow-Crowned Night Heron.  Gulls, and their wings.

Just another morning at Cove Island Park.

I walk.

But, the Mind isn’t here this morning. Yes, it’s certainly here at Cove Island Park, but meaning not Here, and Now.

It drifts back 10 days or so. I’m at the end of my walk and there under the bench sits a Diamondback Terrapin turtle. No, I didn’t have a clue it was a Diamond Terrapin Turtle, Google Lens did though: “The Northern diamondback terrapin is the only species of turtle in North America, including Connecticut, that spends its life in brackish water…and they are most abundant in tidal estuaries west of the Connecticut River.”

Like who knew? Most abundant in tidal estuaries in Connecticut. Brackish water. This sticks.

I’m staring at this creature, at the intricate designs of its shell, and wonder what he’s doing so far away from brackish water.  “Injured? Lost? Resting? Kid dragged you from the water, and had a little fun with you.” Not sure why that last disturbing thought crossed my mind, no, please, not that. Continue reading “Walking. Touched by a Terrapin.” →

We belong here, possum and person alike

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The Virginia opossum who has taken to sleeping beneath our family room may likewise have only one surviving baby, but the one we have seen seems to be having a grand time figuring things out. On our trail camera, we see it climbing onto our back deck from time to time. My husband, who likes to sit out in the dark backyard and look at the moon, once heard something stirring at his feet. When he opened the flashlight app on his phone, the young opossum was sniffing a box of crackers that my husband had set on the ground.

I’m not anthropomorphizing here. To understand that we all exist in a magnificent, fragile body, beautiful and vulnerable at once, is not to ascribe human feelings to nonhuman animals. It is only to recognize kinship. We belong here, possum and person alike, robin and wren and rabbit, lizard and mole and armadillo. We all belong here, and what we share as mortal beings is often more than we want to let ourselves understand. We all have overlapping scars.

I think the ever-present threat my wild neighbors live with must tell us something about the nature of joy. The fallen world — peopled by predators and disease and the relentlessness of time, shot through with every kind of suffering — is not the only world. We also dwell in Eden, and every morning the world is trying to renew itself again. Why should we not glory in it, too?

— Margaret Renkl, from “The Nature of Joy” (NY Times, June 26, 2023)

DK Photo of White-Tailed Deer, 5:30 am. June 25, 2023. More photos from morning walk here.

Quiet, please. We are not alone.

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Spring unfolds each year in color, yes, but also in sound. And, regrettably, in noise — some of it emanating from our gardens.

When Nancy Lawson, a Maryland-based naturalist and nature writer, speaks about the voices of frogs or birds, she uses the word “sound.” When she refers to humanity’s voice — the din of mowers, blowers and chain saws — she describes it as noise, specifically “anthropogenic noise.”

Her definition: something that is “disrespectful of all the other sounds and runs roughshod over them,” she said, with “often unnecessary rudeness.”

These days, we’re not just driving one another crazy with the racket that fills most neighborhoods. We’re “smothering some of the opportunities for animals to communicate through their senses,” she said, “to perceive the world through their senses.”

That means communications are masked and predator alarms and other critical life cues are stifled.

The challenge she poses for us: “Let’s think about the fact that these are our neighbors, too. And they can’t just run inside and put on noise-canceling headphones.” […]

In other words: Easy does it.

“If you treat the local environment like the homeland it’s meant to be,” she writes in “Wildscape,” “you’ll be exposed to more cultures and ideas and ways of life than if you visited with people from every country in the world.”

Sometimes, she said, that’s not about doing something, but the opposite: Stop mowing so often; stop leaf blowing. “Stop these sensory disruptions,” she said.

Even with actions we know can cause harm, like using pesticides, it’s not just the direct damage that she alerts us to.

“It turns out that putting out scents into the world that cause odor pollution can disrupt flower fragrances, and bees’ ability to find the floral resources that they need,” she said of an often unnoticed violation of the Scentscape.

Noise has unexpected effects, too, like reducing the nesting success of bluebirds and tree swallows, and decreasing the foraging ability of owls and bats.

Or this: As cars drove past, Ms. Lawson noticed a monarch caterpillar flinching upward from the milkweed it was feeding on near her roadside. A paper she found cited the same reaction — and how traffic-stressed animals even bit the researchers, something they had never documented before.

Quiet, please. We are not alone.

— Margaret Roach, from “Quiet, Please: You Are Not Alone in Your Garden”

Notes:

Some events are simply too big for us to fathom.

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Some events are simply too big for us to fathom. Bird migration, for instance, happens twice a year on a planetary scale that bruises the brain, so we’re forced to look for evidence in the traces around us: Skeins of geese and vanguards of vireos in the sky; a four-day mob of warblers passing through the neighborhood on their way from somewhere to somewhere else. A waxwing slain beneath a living-room window, its biannual journey stopped dead by the sky in a pane of glass. The Baltimore oriole that arrives in the yard next to mine every May 1 or 2 and starts advertising his availability for a mate. Up to 3.5 billion birds and more than 600 species migrate across North America each spring, mostly at night, but usually we can see them only looking up from the ground.

BirdCast lets us look down from above, and that changes everything. A joint project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Colorado State University and U. Mass Amherst, it’s a website that lets us see them from a vantage point hundreds of miles above Earth, capturing each night’s continental migration as collected by over 140 radar stations across the country — data gathered about birds on the wing. The site went live to the public in 2018, around the time my own birding was deepening from a lifelong side project into something more personally, even spiritually, necessary — a way of being in the world that I had trouble finding elsewhere. After 40 mostly satisfying years as a film critic, I began to feel all those imagined visions closing around my head. I yearned to shake them off, to return to reality; birding has come to seem one of the more graceful ways to do that. […]

To me, the nightly BirdCast map has come to mean a great deal, not least a corrective to our human-centric view of the planet. BirdCast reorients us in both space and time. It shifts our understanding of ecosystems from the narrow — the street, the neighborhood, the town — to a vast globe that birds traverse twice a year because they must. Looking at that ceaseless neon flow forces a viewer to acknowledge patterns that long predate our appearance on the stage and, unless we succeed in our drive to kill everything on the planet, could long outlast us. Within this epoch the thing that matters — a bird setting out on a journey a thousand miles long, not data but feather and bone — is still here. But BirdCast helps us see that one creature and ourselves as fractals of a larger picture in which we are infinitely smaller yet bound by conscience and consciousness to obligation.

—  Ty Burr, from “Trying to Find Your Place in the World? Try Birding From a Different Angle”. (The New York Times · April 18, 2023)

Notes:

  • DK Photo: April 9, 2023, 6:30am Cove Island Park. More photos here.