Thoughts while hiking near Reno, NV

It’s hot enough you can feel your breath evaporating the second you breathe out, and I’m still walking. We set off from a house outside of Reno, following no trail, wandering across the public lands that comprise 85% of Nevada. The day gets relentlessly hotter and there is no shade for miles and miles. The endless geology of basin and range is spread out before me, each hill identical, indistinguishable, insurmountable. I’ve moved past dehydration into madness, my steps zigzagging nonsensically through an ocean of sagebrush. I no longer try to preserve my legs; they brush through briars and thorns, so covered in scratches that they look white. Up and up and up, each step a fresh battle, willing myself to continue. I make promises I know I can’t keep—on top of this ridge is ice water, a cold shower, peppermint iced tea. Up, up and I break all of my promises, reaching the crest to reveal an identical mountain in the distance. The downhill should be relief, but my knees protest and it’s as much work to keep myself from running uncontrolled down the mountain as it was to walk up the rise. I find myself wishing once again for the slow trudge towards heaven, where the end is always just a little bit further. Here, I can see the full extent of what I have yet to accomplish. Down, down and there’s dust in my nose, in my eyes somehow despite the glasses, choking me, trying its best to consume me and turn me into a dry mass of uniformity. I push on, resisting with the knowledge that I am mostly water, some part water, at least enough water to separate me from the dust. Down, down, so tired I no longer care if I survive, one foot in front of the other and suddenly flat. No more slope, flat ground, just step, step, step. I see the house on the horizon. How far, I no longer care. It’s flat, and I step on through the dust and sagebrush, still crazy with heat and knowing that this, I could walk forever.

Biotic potential and existence value

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Baker National Forest, Baker County, Oregon

Today, we cut willows to plant by the creek tomorrow. Willows remind me of biotic potential. They’re the natural source of salicylic acid; they’re the reason humans discovered aspirin. I’ve always been a bit wary of drugs. I’ll take hardcore things for serious problems—horse pills of ciprofloxacin when I got sick in Ghana—but I’m not a fan of NSAIDs (aka non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) in general. I feel irrational, because I’d gladly take a tincture of willow bark to relieve pain. Chemically, there’s no difference. So why the hesitancy? Part of me just wants to be a hippie, and part of me is a competitive masochist who wants to push through the pain and let it wash over me. I had to re-evaluate this philosophy over the summer, when my cramps got so bad I couldn’t stand up and was on the verge of passing out at work. I took two tiny pink pills and magically felt better. I felt good, amazing, but it seemed like I was letting the pain win and forgoing the humility I was supposed to learn. It’s healthy to know we’re human. It’s healthy to feel out of control sometimes. To feel weak.

But humans don’t like to feel weak. We always want to be in control, both as individuals and as a culture, a civilization. The most common reason I hear for preventing species extinction goes back to that same willow. If we lost another plant, frog, insect or fungi, we lost their unique DNA. We lose the opportunity to study them, to reproduce and mass produce their compounds, We lose the cure for cancer, the keys to medical progress, the fountain of youth. All this and more, lurking unsuspectingly in the Amazon or the great trenches of the Pacific Ocean. How many lives could we save, if only we brought back the habitat?

This defense reeks of arrogance and pragmatism. We have a long and bloody history of assuming we’re the only species that matters on this planet. Even those who’ve gotten past that idea act as though we have a right, a responsibility, to manipulate nature as we see fit.

I want to cry foul. The rainforests aren’t here to cure our diseases. I think most of us know that. But to expect people to care about things for their own sake—how far can we get with that? We care about things almost perfectly based on how much we will be affected. Even Ed Abbey spoke of wilderness as a place for men to retreat from civilization, a place to wage guerilla warfare against a fascist government. People cry over our disappearing rainforests, so charismatic and colorful. People care about polar bears, pandas, tigers, wolves. Who loses sleep over endangered snails or spiders? Who cries for the lichen?

And should we care? It’s easier to say that a polar bear has an intrinsic right to exist. Does a tree have that same right? How far are we willing to extend it? Until it interferes with a human life? A human’s ability to make money? Or merely dislike and distaste? If the planet we make is one we can support ourselves on, does anything else matter for its own sake?

I want to say yes. I believe in those rights, at least until they interfere with human safety. But it’s so hard to see the world from the perspective of another species. I hope we can get there. Because we need to wake up, and I don’t want to live on a world of only us and the things we immediately need.

Getting past the hurdles

After nearly two weeks in the field, I’ve reached the first bump. This is the stage of the program where I desperately want to be back in civilization. All my underwear smells disgusting. I’ve been wearing the same shirt for five days. It’s pouring rain again. My sleeping bag keeps freezing at night. I haven’t had a proper shower since we left.

Except I think it’s also at this stage where small things start to become really amazing. I splashed creek water on my face today and it felt like the best bath of my life. The view this morning was absolutely gorgeous because it rained all night—mist and fog in the distance, a mosaic of blues and greens across the forest and pasture in the distance. Eating apples has become the best snack in the world—I’m trying to break my addiction to processed sugar.

Somehow, at the end of the day, it all evens out. I know I sleep better and longer here than I ever have at home or school. I eat better, I feel better, and even my perpetually angry stomach has calmed down. Sometimes, I wish we had real shelter, a heater, a shower. But sometimes, I think the whole rest of the country would be better off with less.

I want to be an ecologist

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Baker National Forest, Baker County, Oregon

context: We watched a documentary about a few OSU ecologists doing field work in Yellowstone National Park and documenting the way streams have recovered after wolf reintroduction, because wolves keep elk populations in check, preventing them from overgrazing stream banks.

God, I want to be an ecologist right now. It’s the cheesy music. The cheesy music always get me. And the wolves, the pictures of wolves running through snow and the hope that if I live long enough, I might see that happen someday. I love the way nature works so well. Ecology is like peeling back the layers of an onion. Today, it doesn’t seem scary. All we need to do is bring back wolves and cougars and lynxes and everything else will come back. It seems to beautifully simple and happy. Until you get to the people, and the politics. That screws everything up. Why did I have to pick ES-politics? ES-Bio is full of the possibility of redemption. Politics makes for good papers, good thinking and studying but no optimism. I’ve watched C-SPAN, and even on issues everyone agrees are important, half the things people stand up and say are ridiculous, tangential or obstructive. What chance do wolves have?

I love the fact that you can’t replace wolves. We can try to mimic their ecological functions, but we can’t impart that same fear in elk populations. We shoot indiscriminately, construct fences and do our best to be seen as the top predator, but we can’t pretend to be wolves, try as we might. Wolves live because of elk. The two are intimately intertwined in a way we could never hope to equal. Which is why we need them, so much, to keep that ecological balance.

And I hate the idea of shooting wolves. It pains me so much, viscerally, to think of that bullet piercing through layers of grey hair, the wolf falling, bleeding onto the ground. But I think that hunt might be necessary for wolves to live with ranchers. If you take control away from people, they feel powerless. They act on their own. I think, I hope, that allowing a hunt will help bridge that divide. I hope those few wolves that are shot will help the rest survive. I hope wolves will learn to fear humans, to run at night, to make themselves invisible. I know, if we let them, they will survive. They’re fighters by nature.

Seeing cows

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Baker National Forest, Baker County, Oregon

Today, I went running without my glasses on. I saw the same landscapes I‘ve been seeing all week, but without the sharp focus I’m so used to. Somehow, I think that blur makes it easier to see. Sight becomes a matter of color and pattern, general characteristics spread out across the entire skyline. The specific details tend to fade. A black dot on the horizon moves closer and closer, until suddenly you realize it’s a cow ten feet from you. And then you feel vulnerable, realizing that the cows of the world, organized into reasonably sized herds, could wrest control of everything from people if they put their minds to it. A single cow could trample me to death, leaving my body bleeding in the road until someone noticed I hadn’t come back from mg run. Yet they eat so placidly, wander our public lands and follow each other calmly to slaughter in an industrial warehouse. Tick. Slit the carteroid artery. Tock. Dripping blood. Tick. A resigned moo. Tock. The line keeps moving.

Cows seem almost to belong in this system. They’re thoroughly domesticated, stubborn perhaps in insignificant matters, but complacent as cogs in the wheel of industry. I don’t know this for certain; I’ve never spent time with a cow, birthed a calf or played my part in the slaughter. But looking into a cow’s eyes, I don’t see the wild. They’ve had it tamed out of them.

Can there be honor in a kill like this? Can the predator kill its pretty without the delicate dance between the two that has existed since time immemorial? I don’t think our slaughterhouses and pastures honor that dynamic, but perhaps they honor what the animal is, in itself. This seems like a better medium, though we’ve raised them to be that way. I’ve never killed a cow. I’ve never killed any mammal at all. In fact, I believe the most highly evolved murder I can be held responsible for was boiling a moonsnail and eating it whole on a breach trip freshman year of high school. And yet, I eat meat, after eleven years of refusing. I eat it happily, relishing the taste of flesh, overenthusiastic after so many years of trying to live what I believed was a better way. I eat is uneasily, feeling insincere in my excitement because I’ve never proved to myself that I know what it is to nourish myself with the flesh of another living being. I eat it hoping of a better world, where food is transparent and I won’t have to worry that the labels I’ve decided to screen my food by don’t actually mean anything about the health of my body, the animal, the ecosystem, the planet. I eat it, and I feel nourished. This feeling is what I go back to when I have nothing else to make it ok.

Wolves revisited

My relationship with the wild has always been intimately tied to wolves. I went on three week-long wolf tracking expeditions in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho during high school, and those three weeks did much to solidify my love of spending time outside, not showering and sleeping under the stars. Even after camp ended, I followed the wolves’ political situation intensely, especially when US Fish and Wildlife began to talk about removing the Rocky Mountain reintroduced populations from the Endangered Species List (wolves were reintroduced in Yellowstone National Park and Central Idaho in the mid-1990s after being driven to extinction by humans). I wrote letters and tried to get other to do the same. When they made the decision to delist wolves, I cried. Their removal from the list meant wolves would have a hunting season and could be shot by anyone with a permit—something akin to sacrilege in my mind.

This week, I got to understand the other side of the wolf story. I thought I understood the opposing views well enough. Conservation groups wanted wolves back because they were a fundamental part of the natural ecosystem that our actions had carelessly removed. Ranchers objected because wolves might kill cattle, but coyotes already killed cattle, and Defenders of Wildlife had set up a fund to compensate ranchers for wolf depredation. Hunters objected because they wanted to hunt elk, but elk populations had overshot the ecosystem’s carrying capacity and were overgrazing. Obviously, conservationists had the better set of arguments, and everyone else could learn to adapt to wolves.

Of course, it isn’t that simple. I knew it wasn’t, but I never heard the other side of the story from someone who’s lived it, not just from the Defenders of Wildlife website. But yesterday, we got to talk to a group of five ranchers in Wallowa County who have seen the effects of wolves on their cattle (wolves have now migrated into Eastern Oregon from Idaho, with about 14 wolves in two packs). As it turns out, depredation is only one of the many ways wolves cause losses for ranchers, and even when compensation is available for livestock losses, it seems laughably inadequate. One rancher told us last year, wolves killed 20 calves out of the 450 he had out (typical losses for ranchers in this area are about 1%). He was able to get compensation from Defenders of Wildlife for one of those animals. In addition, calves often weigh less due to stress from increased predation. In total, he estimated losses per cow from all wolf-related sources at $250 per head—a large chunk of income for a rancher barely making ends meet. Another rancher pointed out that by far the largest losses experienced with wolves in the area were property losses on the ranch itself, because no one’s interested in buying a ranch with wolves in the area.

Listening to the ranchers speak, I was reminded of salmon. Salmon have been driven to the brink of extinction by a variety of sources—dams, habitat destruction, overfishing and cattle grazing in spawning grounds. Every time a new dam is proposed, environmentalists say this is it, this is going to be the straw that breaks the salmon’s back. For ranchers, that straw is wolves. The American cowboy is a dying breed—the average age of a rancher in the US is 58. Ranchers are subject to ridicule and hate from almost every environmental group in the country over their use of public lands for grazing. They have to comply with environmental regulations about salmon habitat and riparian areas. They’re often booed when they go to meetings about policy to give their perspective or barred from participating in the first place. And even when they don’t have to deal with the politics of ranching, they’re lucky to break even by the end of the year. So naturally, they feel threatened.

I still think wolf reintroduction is important. I think wolves have an important role to play in the ecosystem. But if we want to keep wolves, we might have to compromise. We might have to move slowly. We absolutely have to listen. I don’t like the idea of hunting wolves, but if they need to be hunted to stay here, I might be able to live with that. I don’t know what the life of a wolf is worth, or how you measure it against the life of a cow, the lifestyle of a rancher or the value of a living ecosystem. I know there aren’t easy answers to these questions, and I know things are never as simple as they seem between the walls of a classroom.

Wolves and ranchers

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Salt Creek Summit , Wallowa National Forest, Wallowa County, Oregon

I learned to love the wilderness because of wolves. In high school, after I tired of the gossip and judgment I always seemed to find at summer camp, I decided to try something different. I signed up for a week-long wolf tracking expedition run buy Wilderness Awareness School in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, a few hours outside of Boise, Idaho. On our first night, the counselors asked our group of twelve to sit in a circle with our eyes closed.

“I want you to think about the wolves,” our counselor said. “Now, I want you to feel them. Feel yourself connecting with the wolves and point in the direction you feel them in.”

Skeptical as I was, a part of me felt pulled. I pointed, extending my left arm in a tentative line.

“Open your eyes,” we were told.

I looked around and saw our entire camp (except my best friend, who was never one for hippie-inspired exercises) pointing in the same direction. That night, the stillness of the meadows was regularly punctuated by howls. And the next morning, we saw an entire wolf pack in that same direction.

By the end of the week, I was a convert. I’d dissected an elk kill, made plaster casts of tracks and heard the story of the fight over wolf reintroduction in the Rockies. I came back for two more summers, then continued to follow the wolves’ story religiously. When US Fish & Wildlife began to talk about delisting wolves, I wrote pleading letters to members of Congress and federal bureaucrats, begging them to reconsider. When I found out the decision had been made, I cried. The idea of hunting wolves seemed more than just repugnant; to me, it bordered on sacrilegious. I understood why wolves were controversial. I knew ranchers and hunters had legitimate reasons for wanting to keep wolves from living near them. But the physical act of picking up a gun and deliberately setting out to kill a wolf was utterly incomprehensible to me.

I had come to equate wolves with wildness, freedom and hope for the future of all threatened creatures. Wolves were a symbol of redemption, proof that we could atone for out past wrongs and restore wild places to what they were before we came along to pillage and conquer. Killing a wolf would be violating that commitment to right our past wrongs; implementing a policy allowing hunting would allow no respect for the life on an individual wolf.

That was before I learned about how we respect individual wolves. In a single season, the take for wolves in Idaho was 188 wolves, a small but not insignificant percentage of the state’s total population. In that same period, the state killed over 200 solves for various reasons, mostly related to depredation. Even in the eyes of the agency reintroducing them, the life of an individual wolf appears to carry little weight.

But should it? Does that wolf matter as much as I thought it did? Is it as important as a cow? A person’s ability to make a living?

I thought I had clean answers to these questions, but as it turns out, wolves are tricky animals. While native to most of the United States, the populations in the west are in a sense artificial, brought here by humans. They’re natural, but they wouldn’t be here without us. Of course, without us, they never would have gone extinct in the first place, but their status seems to hover somewhere between “native species” and “experimental population” in a way that defies easy answers.

And then, of course, we met the ranchers. They told us about regulations they have to comply with to keep from hurting salmon, and as they talked, they seemed to have a lot in common with the fish. Salmon have been driven to the brink of extinction by a large variety of factors—overfishing, habitat destruction, and of course, dams. Would cattle crazing near spawning grounds by the straw that broke their back? Ranchers fear for their existence just as strongly as environmental groups fear for the salmon. They have to comply with regulations about grazing on public lands, have to keep cattle out of riparian areas, all while seeing their children grow up and move to the big city to find a job where you don’t have to work seven days a week starting at four-thirty in the morning. They work hard all year and barely turn a profit, and they do it all while being demonized by people who believe there shouldn’t be any cattle grazing on public lands. Still, they survive, but barely, and if you listen to them speak, they’ll tell you—wolves are going to drive the American rancher to extinction.

Introducing…SEMESTER IN THE WEST!

Well, since I’m off for Whitman in a little less than two weeks and leaving on Semester in the West shortly after that, I thought a bit of reflection and panic would be appropriate.

The West has been a place of self-discovery for a while. People have written entire libraries about how its majestic landscapes mirror their personal struggles and searches for self. And right now, that seems very appropriate. Everything I’ve taken for granted in my life for the past year seems uncertain. My job might be waiting for me when I get back, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll have space for me or that I’ll have time to work in the spring. My relationship, now at the sixteen month mark, is going on hold so both of us can step back and explore other possibilities. My environmental studies-politics major, which I was so sure about that I declared a year early, seems suspect after I spent half the summer reading books which convinced me that politics will never solve the environmental problems we face. Even my long-cherished vegetarianism is crumbling under a growing mountain of evidence that eating meat under certain conditions is far more sustainable than relying on monocrop agriculture to feed me.

It seems appropriate, then, to spend a semester thinking it all out with epic desert scenery in the background. I’m hoping that removing myself from most of the things I take for granted will help me focus on those things that are truly important in my life. I won’t be able to drive myself crazy by triple-booking every waking second of my day, and while I’ve heard that Semester in the West is no picnic in terms of free time, I also know that no program could overschedule me to the degree I overschedule myself when left to my own devices.

Naturally, I’m also slightly terrified. This feels like going to college all over again. When I set out for Whitman at the end of last summer, I was saying goodbye to friends I’d had since 4th and 5th grade, a city I love, a school I knew I could excel at and a very large and supportive extended family. I was reassured by the constants in my life–Western civilization, access to the Internet and phone in case everyone at Whitman hated me and I needed to talk to friends from home and the knowledge that home was only a four hour drive away.

Semester in the West is a similar departure from the familiar. I’m leaving my new friends at Whitman to have a semester of adventures without me. I’m leaving both of my homes, my family, friends, boyfriend and Western civilization behind. My potential friend pool has shrunk to about twenty-five people, and god help me if I don’t get along with one of them.

But in a way, the lack of constants is reassuring. With everything I usually hide behind stripped away, I’m forced to depend on myself for everything. If I don’t get along with someone, I can’t retreat to the safety of my room. If I feel stressed and need a break, I can’t call a friend from home or zone out in front of the TV. And I’m hoping three months of living without the barriers I usually put up will make me a better person.

I’m hoping to update on a regular basis from the field, both with descriptions of what we’re doing, as well as more personal reflections and such. For interested parties, here’s our rough itinerary as of now:

August 25-27: Orientation, Johnston Wilderness Campus
August 28: Depart for Wallowa County, Oregon
August 29-September 3: Wallowa County, Oregon
September 4-9: Baker County, Oregon
September 10-11: Dufur, Oregon/Bend, Oregon Area
September 12-13: Mono Lake Area, near Lee Vining, California
September 14-18: Owens Lake Area, near Lone Pine, California
September 19-26: Escalante, Utah area
September 27-29: Wells, Nevada area
September 30-October 4: Hailey, Idaho area
October 5-8: Dinosaur, Colorado area
October 9-12: Paonia, Colorado
October 13-15: Aspen, Colorado area
October 16-19: Green River, Utah area
October 20-23: Bluff, Utah area
October 24-25: Four Corners area, TBA
October 26-30: Near El Valle, New Mexico
October 31-November 4: Bandelier, New Mexico
November 5-9 Southern New Mexico, TBA
November 10-11: TBA
November 12-13: Yucca Valley, California
November 14-16: Tejon Ranch, near Bakersfield, California
November 17-19 Travel, stops in SF Bay area, Bend, Oregon
November 19 or 20: Arrive, Johnston Wilderness Campus, begin work on final projects
November 25: Thanksgiving at JWC
November 30: Western Epiphany Presentations, 4pm
December 1: Western Epiphany Presentations, 4pm

If you’re reading my entries on a regular basis, I’d love to hear comments and thoughts about the stuff I post or just thoughts about the issues I’m talking about in general. And of course, random emails and texts and phone calls are always welcome.