Degrees of Separation

“Non-Indians will never have western eyes so long as they cling to the Man versus Nature dichotomy. Four hundred years of this thinking gets you a civilization of people lost in shopping malls, coast-to-coast take-out windows, a culture that has lost it’s connection to the natural world. That is the ultimate poverty for all men, and no amount of money can ransom that sadness.”~Raymond Cross (Chief Attorney for the Arikara, Hidatsa, & Mandan Native Nations).

I accompanied a friend to our “local” REI outlet this past weekend as I was closing in on the ending of Paul VanDevelder’s excellent Coyote Warrior . Quotes like these were bouncing all over my head. Other quotes from some of my favorite American Indian literature (like Bury Me Heart at Wounded Knee) involving beehives and white modernization were sifting in with my recent readings on this topic of American Genocide. Both of which serve another addition to the canon of America’s horrendous relationship with the Western Hemisphere’s first citizens. It guides you through the aforementioned Mr. Cross’ literal trials and tribulations in the 40 year fight for his people’s retribution against the Garrison Dam which flooded his hometown of Elbowoods, ND. It’s a fantastic book for anybody searching for historical context to our government’s abhorrent decision making on the DAPL.

I’m not set to write about the DAPL, for that is a job best left to paid professionals who have been to the Standing Rock Spirit Camps and do investigative reporting for a living. I include that pretext because Mr. Cross’ words reflect on a philosophy of thought I’ve developed in the past few years of my field work in the remote backcountry of Idaho’s verdant wilderness. My work has sent me over treacherous mountain passes and through careening river valleys in the name of correctly assessing wilderness occupancy rates of certain types of habitat. Raymond’s notions towards the pervasive American paradigms of “Man vs. Nature” serve as excellent pretext for one who seeks the truths that the Earth used to whisper into the ears of its sovereign citizens of the primitive world.

If you’ve ever caught yourself in a certain mood of self loathing after having scrolled up and down your smart phone for a discrete amount of time you can’t recall, you’ll be able to relate to the desire to step down out of the frenzied pace the hive of our modern and industrial world operates at.

Degrees of Separation is the concept that you occupy a plane of existence that is a measurable distance from the land upon which you stand. These degrees are measured by the literal layers between your feet and the ground. Your shoes serve as a degree. Your flashlight guiding you through the night serves as one. Your GPS unit telling you where to go is one. The wheels on your vehicle serve as a gigantic one. The CO2 that is subsequently launched upwards into the atmosphere is also a degree. Edward Abbey elaborated on this in his passage about turning off his flashlight while walking through the dark in his legendary work of Desert Solitaire. To continue to create a list of qualifiers would limit the appeal of what I’m attempting to communicate. I trust that you understand what I’m working towards if you’ve made it this far.

One facet of Conservation Biology that doesn’t receive it’s fair share of academic attention is the growing distance between our hyper-economized society and the resources that allow said societies to function and operate. This disparity has all types of subliminal ramifications that make conservation biologists want to rip their hair out. The disconnect between nature’s impossibly dense web of life and our layman understandings of it is what continues to drive our worst ideas about how wildlife and land should be managed. This includes all of the propaganda that’s spun by the Rooseveltian Conservationist’s ethics about apex predators and how our game populations need to be managed. Which of such ultimately pulls a complete 360 back to what Raymond Cross is talking about with his assertions in regard to our modern Man vs. Nature paradox. The idea that the health of wild nations can be solely maintained by the hunter’s trigger finger is another direct result of the discrepancies created by an increasing amount of Degrees of Separation between the thinker and their natural surroundings.

Our Earth was never meant to be managed by NEPA’s and EIS of infrastructure projects that serve to produce energy for millions of Americans who are born without a fighting chance of genuine connection to their native planet. That is why our climate is setting itself up to self-regulate to rid itself of the parasitism of our modern ideas of industrialization. The dense literature of our Governmental Agencies should serve as direct evidence to our consistent incompetence in how to relate with the Earth. The only laws that nature follows are that of physics and entropy.

When the first encounters between Christian Missionaries and Native Nations were playing out in the 1800’s, tribes were baffled at white men’s desires to stay in one place for the entirety of a calendar year. The idea of a permanently placed home was completely alien to their culture. Indigenous Nations possessed the same inherent wisdom that migratory birds do. It gets difficult to live in adverse winter conditions in the far north. The audacious idea that you stay in the same place all year is another display of our modern ineptitudes surrounding our paradigms involving nature. We believe that nature is a force to be tamed and harnessed (which comes out in our ideas of home ownership); which is one of the principal ideological gaps that modern society posesses in the context of Degrees of Separation.

I’m not advocating for stripping down naked and wandering through the desert for 40 days in search of food and water. Nor am I advocating for our continued trends of applying increased degrees to our already voluminous separation from the natural world. I am, however, advocating for leaving your phone in the car the next time you go for a hike. I am advocating for turning off your headlamp on a clear night. The creatures of the night can hear (and see) you, and will avoid you accordingly. If you’re considering visiting a National Park this summer in revolt to Trump’s environmentally regressive administration; I hope that you are willing to push yourself and hike over the ridge out of range and experience our most beautiful places the way they are meant to be cognitively processed, in solitude.

Decreasing your personal Degrees of Separation is detrrimentally important for the future of our civilization. As atmosphereic CO2 & CH4 ppm’s continue to increase at unprecedented rates, there is absolutely no time to waste. It is our demands in unsustainable energy that capitulate us towards a future of dystopia dominated by corrupt oligarchs set on destroying the Earth’s health in the name of corporate profit. You can get closer to your food by eating out less, which subsequently reduces interstate traffic of food products. You can stop eating meat, which will serve to drastically reduce deforestsation practices in the Amazon Basin by our most deplorable animal agriculture producers. You can opt to walk or bike that mile to work instead of drive (which cuts out automation; which is probably the single largest degree we’ve developed). There is a multitude of other outlets of information that touch on ways to reduce your carbon footprint. I, personally, reccommend cutting meat out of your diet. Which is the easiest way to reduce the amount of fresh water wasted to maintain our modern lifestyle.

Decrease your Degrees of Separation in a multitude of creative ways with nature next time you go out and I can personally guarantee you’ll enjoy it that much more. It may not be immediate; but you’ll feel like a new human if you opt to hike instead of drive. Your brain’s alchemy will thank you with dividends you never thought were possible. I’ll be sure to write more about this predicament of modern life in the future here!

 

Reconciliation for (and in) 2017

“In the end, says the Western writer William Kittredge, reconciliation will be America’s only way out of that legacy of dishonor, the only sensible path to a future worth living — our Last Chance Saloon.”

That was a quote from a great reflection piece on Standing Rock that touched on some topics very near in my personal moral stratosphere.

I look and feel around and 2017 feels like as good a time as ever to put our money where our mouths are in terms of white reconciliation in America. Reconciliation towards people of all colors, genders, religions, sexualities, and lastly, people of all species. Expand your personal constitutions of morality and decency. Consider that the person across the table from you at the gas station has actually had a potentially tougher day than you. Consider that somebody who doesn’t look like you may have that mere fact follow them around everywhere they go, regardless of how they act in demeanor or where they go.   

The American Government brutally murdered and enslaved a lot of forgotten people to get to where we are today (still does). You are trapped in a modern predicament of ignorance if you don’t believe that America currently isn’t great. You dance on those indigenous graves without abandon. And, in all honesty, I take pity on you if you believe that America isn’t great. Because it doesn’t get any better anywhere else.

Honor thy native neighbor. We’ve been dishonestly treating them ever since we arrived on this continent. Inform yourself before you go and form opinions about what the #NoDAPL is striving to accomplish. Because, as climate change continues to mangle our prized societal infrastructure and systemically commit genocide on our specialist species all around us; water will become the single-most important resource on the planet. There won’t be any clean water left for any of us to drink if the DAPL is successful in it’s completion and sets the precedent for corporate brokering going into the fragile future.

 

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”, and the injustices of Eminent Domain are a threat to all of us. Because lobbying is considered a form of free speech and corporate lawyers are very good at their jobs. They’ve literally cultivated a political culture where corporate profiteering interests trump the sovereignty of the nation’s natural resources and drinking water so pipelines are installed “in the public’s best self-interests”.

If you really want to actually help the Standing Rock Spirit Camp and can’t personally be there: drive less, walk and ride your bike more, use your phone less, look up more, use public transit, eat less meat, and promotion of an indigenous way of thinking are all great starts. You can also just listen to their stories!

In several different native oral traditions, there is the spectre of a tale in the ominous Black Snake. The Great Black Snake will be the death of us all if we continue to worship it in our everyday American lifestyles.

Trump’s Lesser Known Big Fat Lie

Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that environmentalists don’t talk about green energy’s impacts on birds. This quite simply isn’t true. I can fetch you the minutes from any Idaho-related conservation organization and I’ll link a prominent article contradicting Mr. Trumps neofascist oratory of propaganda. Unlike Christianity, science insists upon it’s own peer-reviewed maintenance in order to be considered soundly correct in contemporary studies. It just also happens to be great nonprofit journalism! HCN is always a stimulating read full of vitality. 

 

A lot of people my age care more and more about systemic injustice thanks to the benefits of hindsight and the internet’s lesser visited sites like Wikipedia and the Documentaries on Netflix. I like to think that some, if not, a lot, of us are pretty damn mad about this whole ordeal of continuous defense of him on cable television and his “déplorer” of a soul. Hopefully we’re probably also mad about the fact that we’re in deep student debt and there’s no legitimate job market for anything besides mortage loan specialists at Wells Fargo unless you get a master’s degree (which probably means more debt!). We didn’t, for a great majority of us, vote for this guy. I’m sure you already knew all this and more, though.  

 

Don’t fall into the seductive traps of false equivalence by thinking that wind turbines are as bad as DDT and oil spills in order to rationalize what humans do to the earth in order to make money, pursue lifestyles of gluttonous comfort, and travel faster in order to make money faster. Pure environmentalism keeps it’s ear to the ground on conservationism and what conservationists are saying. A lot of us are saying things that the public doesn’t want to hear. That having an iPhone means you’re forever indebted to mining. The glaciers’ polar bears just keep on melting away right along with them. That twitter is the free market’s ultimate monopolization of the human attention span. That human overpopulation is the greatest problem we will face in the ear of an altering climate. This with a whole lot more of tasty dinner conversation points.     

P.S. AI exists! 

Footprints

In this modern century; a working conservation biologist must forge ahead in more and more alternative ways as more people around me pursue their subjective interests of private wealth accumulation. This means engaging in seasonal winter work of which is in complete with my more invested summer seasonal work. I was lucky in finding such a path that put me outdoors in the beige foothills of Boise running packages door-to-door in light of the holiday season. White running up and down paved driveways for eight hours a day, clocking in well over 5 miles a day as the season turns to white; anecdotes for friendliness like, “‘tis the season” and, “happy holidays” are occasionally uttered to me as somebody apprehensively tries to not let any more heat escape out of their house. These interactions consistently remind me of our modern desires to remain comfortable; since we’ve come so far in achieving such a status.

I, personally, don’t care too much for submersing myself too much in such a satiated culture full of technology and combustion engines. That’s why I spend my summers alone in the verdant wilderness. For me, inspiration comes out of discomfort; and I know this isn’t unique. Out of that discomfort, whether it be on the summer’s mountain, or in my bedroom, is what gets me out of bed in the morning. Such qualities are invariably brought to life by the wildlife I’m privileged enough to witness everyday while I ride around slinging cardboard packages to their destined doorsteps. The mere fact that the California Quail still flush out of the brush every damn time anybody should approach them in a kneejerk response to their genetics in a world where their indigenous homes have been since been replaced with the homesteads of humans fortunate enough to be able to afford to cultivate a life up in the mansion on the hill in a capitalist society tells me an entire story of a million aeons in a few short seconds. It is a story of survival. Of coexistence. Of tolerance. Of a mindset more humans could stand to adopt substantial pieces of testament about.

Numerous driveways and porches display the inhabitant’s affinities towards the wildlife that has managed to survive after the floods of concrete poured over their homes and foraging grounds. Gone are the mountain quail and the mountain lion, and here to stay are the white-tails and the starlings. I’m not insinuating that I’m particularly upset every time I see a blight of house sparrows zipping between the treetops; but such a presence stands as empirical evidence to the rise of the modern American monoculture of human inhabitancy. Our lands are simply becoming less diverse as more and more zoning laws are penned for new housing subdivisions up in more inaccessible areas for steel and concrete. I periodically hear of folklore concerning the megafauna of the old great American west. Endless bison and elk managing to exist with the wolf packs vanguarding their prey’s territories. How mountain quail used to peck at the cracked corn left out by WMA employees in the Boise River drainage system. How our brethren black bear used to accidentally, and sometimes tragically, find themselves in the backyards of many. One of the most obliging domains of thought I try to inhabit are those that look forward past my own mortal boundaries. This romanticism is best left in books that were written in frontier era. New forms of it must be conceived in order for what’s left of it to endure the swelling human population.   

I’m ossified by the personal conjectures that humans in a hundred years won’t even know what a yellow warbler or a common loon looks or sounds like. Friends and relatives try to steer me from melancholia, which I usually do a decent job of on my own accord. But, the fleeting wildlife are usually the folks doing the heavy lifting for me in order to do so. I can transport myself to personal transcendence the easiest when in the wildest of companies. So, will that wildlife in the wildlands they inhabit still be there when they’re needed most in the next century? If yes, great, that would implicate that the few wilderness defenders still freely expressing their human rights are still populating their traditional posts of political influence. If not, which I believe to the more plausible outcome, where will the weary American hang their head in the face of personal hardship? This vastly invisible barrier of human empathy, to strive to leave behind a place worth living in, is of utmost importance for the wellbeing of humankind’s future. As Abbey famously penned in his tantamount novel, Desert Solitaire, “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”

The added veracity of climate change to Abbey’s words makes them bear that much more weight. Our greatest carbon sinks lie in the winding river valleys of Idaho, the alpine ridges of Wyoming, the granite slopes of Colorado, the endless boreal of Canada, and all the other beautifully untouched places that still remain in North America. A modern conscience in reaction to the slated future of biodiversity desperately needs to be achieved by more than just the few biologists paying close attention to it. To be able to docilely simplify Leopold’s words of his inantiquated Land Ethic to fit into a new dialogue is a skill that is going to be needed more than banking or bioengineering heading into the future.

As far as I can tell, the modern American political system is about as effective as the passive-aggressive post-it notes left on the kitchen refrigerator when it comes to bringing people together in consensus for what’s important to the empowerment of the earth and those who rely on it. Identity politics manages to divide us in incomprehensible ways that hurt us all if he hope to drink clean water in 100 years. The American opioid epidemic thrives off of modern materialized privacy; and the clearest path forward for us is to begin to talk to our neighbors again. Conservation’s best hope is also for a new grassroots awareness right alongside the drug conversation to combat the exploitative endeavors of those who profit the most off of what lies beneath the ground. This awareness of a modernized land ethic begins by expanding our social comfort bubbles. By conversing with our neighbors and strangers alike about their ails and yours. More than what we know is “all-in” on such a new type of public discourse.   

Conservation biology, in a crudely rudimentary definition, is the harmony between land and the humans that live on it. This is a concept that the indigenous tradition had down to a cultural science. It was not A way of life — but rather — THE way of life. Now, we’ve managed to displace ourselves from those sustainable traditions in a multitude of fashions. Ranging from the furnace to the pavement. I’m no better than my wintering neighbor when it comes to this in the Boise North-End. I know this. The biggest thing I’m doing for myself right now is constantly asking myself how I can do better for the earth. The social pathway that has yet to be built, which my winter employment hustling around the upper class’ expanse has made obvious to me, is a transcendence of classism in the American Conservation discourse. Most of our richest neighbors are also the most destructive ones. Granting themselves more than their morally allotted water allowances in a continuously arid west, building their homes in the most susceptible of habitats, costing the most carbon in transportation expenses. All this and much more is what happens every single solar cycle.

I’m not writing here to vilify the upper class, but rather, attempting to establish what needs to begin being said more consistently. That, proper and effective conservation requires compromise on all ends, and the most obvious starting line is to begin civilly asking those who have compromised the least up to this point to begin doing their parts to leave behind a world worth inhabiting. For wildlife and humans alike.                     

INTRODUTIONS

There was a restlessness inside of me. Inside of what most would consider a ‘slum’ of sorts near downtown Boise, Idaho, a twitching urge tingles beneath my thin skin. I attempt to conceive of notions to placate these etchings of discontent in my psyche, but the only solution was simply to talk aloud to myself as I had so many nights prior up in the great wilderness of North Central Idaho. Of what I was going to do next. Or of what I wasn’t going to do next. I couldn’t resort to technology to absolve me of my breaches of personal decorum. It was the visceral imagery of an endless summer’s tweedling of Swainson’s Thrushes into the twilight that ultimately arrested my mania that night. I was allowed to awake anew the next day, inspired, to express such simple joys upon my fellow earthly residents.

You’d be so inclined to think that venturing alone into the massive verdant abyss of the woods for an entire summer would be enough to drive a great man insane. Alone. No cellular reception. Nobody else around for miles. Nobody really knows where you are (with the exception for a selected few who receive nightly safety messages). It is in the vast nothingness of true nature where you can truly find yourself. Where nobody cares of your presence. The forest people of bark, fur, and feather have their own incessant hungers to attend to. Observe them from a respectful distance, and a world’s worth of wisdom will present itself unto you. Universal truths will be carved into the blithe air you breathe with the right pair of eyes. The trees will whisper in your ear truths of which they bore witness 150 years ago when the great Indigenous Chiefs and their peoples were delocated from their spiritual homes. The timeless tweeting in the depths of verdancy will reveal the true architects of human culture as they hop about the shrubbery and treetops.

Their lives are as much in danger as ours are so long as the death cadence of endless black snakes intertwine themselves into the fibers of our only planetary home. Once they’re gone, so will be the scriptures encoded by and through the aeons of human evolution. There is nothing that scares me more than the notions of a silent world.

I’m still learning from what they’re all telling me; and I’ll never stop listening to them. This is where I’ll attempt to interpret what they’re telling me.

 

 

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