Spring—the season of birth and change: Spring is the season when the unmistakable odor of new life emerges from all the little, hidden places where it survived Winter. There is a new and gentle warmth in the sun’s light, and the faint perfume from opening flower and unfolding leaf is carried softly on the breeze. Buttercups of the valleys are among the first flowers to cast their yellow faces toward the sun, while avalanche lilies of the high mountains focus their yellow blooms toward the awakening earth. These delicate symbols of Spring are starkly surrounded by the various shades and hues of green and brown worn still by last Autumn’s grasses and herbs. The sudden appearance of the new among the old is both the surprise and the eternal promise of Spring. To these newly emerging colors are added the long-silent melodies of birds, and Spring becomes a song in the heart to be sung in the fullness of life, for this is the formative season.
Summer—the season of exuberance and dreams: Summer is the time of year when warming breezes carry the perfume of flowers and the pungent odors of mature leaves. It is a time of butterflies and buzzing bees, of fluffy clouds and warm nights.
Summer is a comfortable time, a time when the young of the year experiment with life in the keen anticipation of unknown adventures lurking in each day. Summer brings a different cast of characters into one another’s experience as the young animals of Spring leave their birth sites to seek places of their own.
Summer, like Spring, is its own special season, a season not only of increasingly hot days and clear, starry nights but also of a growing sense that the tempo of the world is in full swing, urging youth to mature even though most young animals were just that—young. To me, however, there is also a sense of preparing to endure the mid-day heat that withers the flowers of Spring, hardens once-tender leaves, and often sends me to some cool, shady place.
Autumn—the season of gathering and fulfillment: As Summer draws to a close, I awake one morning and know it is Autumn. The morning stars are a little brighter, and there is a crispness in the air. Oh, some of Summer’s things still lingered, but Autumn has arrived; I can feel it. Feeling Autumn is like touching the Earth and suddenly knowing it is getting ready to sleep.
Autumn is the season of maturing and harvest, of beautiful spider webs, and southward-bound geese. It is the time when living things get ready for Winter.
Autumn in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, where I live, is heralded by crisp nights and warm days, by foggy mornings and smoky afternoons as fields of stubble following the harvest of ryegrass are set ablaze by farmers. Here it is a time of pungent aromas from Queen Anne’s lace, senile grasses, and ripe sun-warmed fruits. It is a time to contest the eating of a fallen apple or pear with a league of yellowjackets, ants, and bald-faced black hornets, each claiming the same prize.
In the mountains, on the other hand, Autumn is a time of chattering squirrels and bulging elk, of floating spider webs, cerulean asters, and bright sunny afternoons. It is a time of cold nights when the twinkling stars seem close enough to touch and of hoar frost at dawn that reflects the sun’s light in a million sparkles before it melts in the gathering warmth of a maturing day.
Autumn is a time of transitions, a time when the flow of water in streams may slow to a trickle and occasionally dried up altogether, a time of dying for many of Summer’s flowers and grasses, and a time of maturing seeds. With the onset of increasingly chilly nights, trees and shrubs begin turning a brilliant hue. As the winds blow colder and harder, dying leaves of yellow, orange, red, and brown break loose their bonds of Spring and Summer to bump, bounce, joust, and float to earth. Others, clinging stubbornly to dormant twigs, rattle in the teasing wind. Each passing day sees more leaves collect, forming a brittle, crunchy blanket over the ground.
Winter—the season of reflection, senility, and death: Winter is a season of leafless trees and bare-limbed shrubs, of withered, bygone flowers and dead grasses. It is a time for hibernating, for being snug and sleepy in a cozy nest as wind-driven rain and sleet and snow buffeted the outside world. Winter is a time of gray skies, swollen creeks, and flooded rivers, of howling winds and drifting snow, of ice-covered lakes and hunched over trees covered with mammoth capes of white. Winter is the time write of Spring, Summer, and Autumn—and, yes, of Winter too.
If you want to contact me, you can visit my website. If you wish, you can also read an article about what is important to me and/or you can listen to me give a presentation.
I wrote the following account of my June, 1992, trip to Slovakia shortly after my return: Having just returned from eastern Slovakia, where I was asked to help a group of concerned citizens to evaluate the ongoing management-created destruction of their forests, I’m again reminded of the thin line a visiting, so-called “expert” must walk. I can’t give advice, because my advice, by definition, is good only for me. What I can offer is the benefit of my knowledge and my experience, but this must be a gift of ideas only, a gift of possibilities. Here a guest’s responsibility ends. It’s for the people to select what works for them and what does not.
There must be no judgment of how the people use the gift. There must be no “you should do this” or “you should do that.” Such admonishments are self-serving only to the guest’s ego or to the guest’s hidden economic interests. I have seen such hidden economic agendas all too often. If fact, while attending a meeting on the environment in Presov, eastern Slovakia, I listened to an American who was clearly giving the Slovakian people a sales pitch for his product, a certain kind of plastic with which to line waste dumps, and he was not, as far as I could tell, even slightly interested in the real well-being of the people. When asked if his company had any programs to educate the public about recycling, he said, “Why would I do that? My business is built on the production of waste, and it needs more and more to grow. Increasing waste is how I make my money.” Here, before my eyes, was the epitome of the “Ugly American.”
A person thus enters a country (or in our case another state) as a guest and tells the host people what they should do, and each “should” has hidden within it either a favorable stimulus for the guest’s ego or a secret financial benefit for the guest’s business. Each stimulus or financial benefit is, in turn, a point of compromise with that which is truly best for the people.
If a guest is really detached from the outcome of his or her visit, the guest must at times tell their hosts things for the host’s benefit that they don’t want to hear. Such was my task in eastern Slovakia. Even as I was speaking, however, I had to remind myself that I was guest in another’s country and that such ideas as I might offer were suggestions only, and that was as it should be.
In was invited to eastern Slovakia, to evaluate the condition of the native forest of Cergov, which is primarily European beech ( Fagus sylvatica ) with an admixture of white fir (Abies alba). The native forest is being rapidly clear-cut and replaced with plantations of such non-native species as Norway spruce (Picea abies), larch (Larix spp.), and pine (Pinus spp.). The biological errors of forestry made in Germany, the United States, and Canada are all being repeated in the forests of Cergov and for the same reasons—short-sighted, immediate economic gain.
All the economic and ecological errors I’ve seen and written about are being made again. But, even as I write this, I must remember that the foresters of eastern Slovakia have been forcibly hidden from the world for decades behind the Communist wall of silence and obsolete ways of thinking, and it’s neither reasonable nor rational to catapulted them suddenly into a different reality—one I might take for granted—and expect them to be able to accept all the new ideas instantly and at once.
With the above in mind, I’m going to share with you a little of what I told the people of eastern Slovakia, where state land is suddenly coming under private influence:
I’ve been asked to share some ideas with you. Before I do, I want you (the people of eastern Slovakia) to understand that ideas are meant to be a gift from one person to another and from adults to children. And a gift is free. A gift is given with no conditions attached to it. If, therefore, I say something that feels good to you, you may keep it. It is yours to use as you wish. If nothing I say feels good to you, that too is alright.
I am a guest in your country. It’s very important for you and me to understand that. It’s also important for you to understand that I did not come here to criticize what you have done or what you will do. Nor did I come here to give you advice. I don’t know what’s right for you to do within your own culture. That’s for you to decide. I can only point out the ecological consequences of some of your actions. If you elect to live with them, that’s your choice and it’s your children’s inheritance.
I was asked to look at forest of Cergov and to make recommendations for it’s biological health and sustainability based on what I saw, on my years of experience as a research scientist in forest ecology, and as a person who has lived and worked in other countries.
To prevent anything I say from sounding like a directive, I will tell you what I would do if I were suddenly made chief forester and told that my job was to maintain Cergov in a condition of biological health and sustainability into the future for seven generations of children. This, of course, is no less than the moral and professional charge of all foresters.
In fact, anything less than a biologically sustainable forest steals the hope from the souls of our children, their children, and their children’s children. The forester who allows this to happen will surely pay, if not in this lifetime, then in the next.
A forester’s charge is to be a trustee of the forest for the children of the future, because the great and only gift we have to give our children is the right to chose as we have chosen and something of value from which to choose. As a trustee of the future forest, the greatest virtue a forester must have is humility, because every forester is confronted daily with the unknown and the unknowable.
Here I must offer you a caution. Once cultural desires, such as economics, become intertwined with ecological principles, it’s easy to loose sight of a sound ecological perspective.
For example, I was told by a forester that it was inevitable that the old trees of Cergov would be clear-cut and that plantations of spruce would replace them. I asked: Why? There was nothing inevitable either about clear-cutting the old trees or about planting spruce in rows. It was simply someone’s choice to maximize immediate economic gain.
The forester then told me that clear-cutting was necessary because the ground was too steep for logging with horses. This statement I find to be particularly interesting because the forest had been logged with horses for many decades before the chain saw and log truck became available. So again, I asked: Why? All the clear-cuts I saw would have been easy to log with horses. In addition, I used to work on a cattle ranch high in the Rocky Mountains of the United States, mountains that are very steep. So I know what a good horse can do. People who respect their horses and work with them as a team can do amazing things.
As chief forester, my first obligation is to protect the soil. Therefore, in order to give the forest’s soil maximum protection, my general working ethic would be that any land too steep to log with horses is too steep to log under any circumstance because of soil erosion. My second obligation is to protect the quality of the water used by people in the towns so buffer strips will be left along all streams. My third obligation is to protect the biodiversity of the forest to ensure, as far as possible, a biologically healthy and sustainable forest for the generations of the future. To this end, a generous representation of all habitats will be protected at all times. And my fourth obligation is to maintain, as far as biologically possible, a sustainable supply of quality wood for industry’s mills, and so long as I’m chief forester, the mills will have to adjust to such volume of wood fiber as the forest can sustainable produce after all the other necessities are accounted for.
Remember, whether to log or not to log an area and how to log it is only a choice. It’s a choice of short-term economics balanced against long-term ecology. It’s a choice of the present generation balanced against those of the future. In the end, therefore, it’s a moral choice—as all choices are. And it’s your choice for your children and for your grandchildren!
What did I learn in Slovakia? I learned much that I cannot put on paper or even explain, as is always the case when I visit another culture. There are, however, three things that I learn over and over when I travel:
The first thing I learned, as I always do, is what I don’t know. It’s therefore with a great deal of humility that I accept being a guest in another’s country—and in my own country for that matter, because I am no more than a guest on this planet.
The second thing I learned is that to be able to see an issue clearly and to be able to frame the issue so others can understand it, I must detach myself from the emotions of the moment and focus on the present choice of action in terms of the consequences for the generations of the future. This means, if I want something to change, that it’s incumbent on me to determine how I must behave to have the best chance of bringing about the outcome I see as desirable. Here the choice of thought and action is my responsibility and mine alone. I am thus a large factor in the projected resolution of the issue. I have a voice. I am neither powerless nor a victim. I am therefore responsible for the relationship I foster with those whose views I may oppose.
And the third thing I learned is that change is an ongoing process and that any perceived finality to someone’s concept of a victory in point of view is but an illusion of a stationary object in the fluid continuum life. Because there is nothing static in the Universe, we, each and every human being, bring to life a point of view that is but a continual adjustment in the perceived reality of the cosmos. We are each part of the great process of change, which in itself is the outworking of choice and consequence—equal partners in the power to create and the responsibility for that which is created. This being the case, every choice made by a human being is a decision based on our individual senses of morality, and that is something we cannot escape anymore than our children can escape the consequences of our actions.
If you want to contact me, you can visit my website. If you wish, you can also read an article about what is important to me and/or you can listen to me give a presentation.
My first fire was intensely spiritual and private, known only to me and to the silent forest. The wisp of fir smoke, the heat, the tiny licking flame became part of my spirit. It still is. Since the days of my youth, fire has warmed me during cold winter nights of interior Alaska and during chilly desert nights in North Africa. Fire has cooked my food in the jungle of northern India and in the Himalayas of Nepal. Fire has lifted my spirit on days of seemingly endless rain and shrouding fog. As I gazed into the flames I see even today the dancing light of some ancient fire on the walls of a cave when the first humans learned to remove the darkness and its terror.
Eons of fire have molded the spirit of the land. Each fire is a reflection of the past, of the beginning, of the dawn of humanity, for it was with fire that humans began to interact purposefully with Nature’s landscape. It was with fire that humanity began to actively change the landscape to suite the needs of an evolving sense of culture.
Today, however, we must recapture our vision of fire as sacred for too often is it seen as an enemy of the common person and of society. Most people abhor a forest fire because it kills commercially valuable trees. But the fire that kills the trees was also responsible for the health of the forest in the first place—that is, until we interfere with fire as a process of creation.
If you want to contact me, you can visit my website. If you wish, you can also read an article about what is important to me and/or you can listen to me give a presentation.
As a young man wandering the high-mountain trails, I fished, hunted, and trapped much of my food—and sometimes, even with the quarry in the sights of my rife, I went hungry.
Shortly after I was discharged from the military at 18 years of age, I headed for the high country. I had been alone in the mountains for a almost two weeks and had been subsisting on fried grasshoppers, crayfish, and trout. Game seemed to have vanished, taking their tracks with them. Finally, after three days without food, I found the fresh sign of a deer, and without hesitation, I began tracking it. Following its trail was easy. Being quiet was difficult, however, because the country was so dry that everything crackled underfoot even though I was wearing moccasins, which muffled the sounds of my steps.
I track the deer for several hours as its trail led me up through the spruce-fir forest into clumps of subalpine firs interspersed with small meadows. It was late afternoon when I slipped into a clump of subalpine firs and, peering through their boughs on the far side, saw the deer, a magnificent buck. I stood motionless, watching it, feeling the warmth of the sun, seeing the wispy clouds sweeping clean the great, blue vault of the sky. Somewhere a Swainson thrush called, its liquid melody drifting on the soft breeze. Flies buzzed. A hawk screamed. I stood in a moment of Cosmic perfection, a moment in which I disappeared into the nothingness from which all creation comes and into which all creation returns.
“My brother,” I whispered quietly, “today I go hungry, for today is a day for you to live. If I see you tomorrow, I will feast on your body, but not today.” I then turned and walked away without the deer’s ever knowing I was there. I never saw it again.
If you want to contact me, you can visit my website. If you wish, you can also read an article about what is important to me and/or you can listen to me give a presentation.
It’s mid July, and it’s hot. Except for the whine and buzz of insects, the forest hangs limp and still in the noon-day heat. Although I can hear the river racing from the shoulders of the Olympic Mountains toward the valley, it’s too far below the trail to reach easily; so I continue to climb toward the alpine meadows of swaying grasses and multi-colored nodding flowers.
The sun, suspended in space like the fiery core of a blast furnace, is relentless in its glaring heat through which I’ve been walking for hours with a heavy pack clinging to my sweaty back. Rounding a bend, I see through an opening in the trees a patch of white glistening in the meadow above the trail. From the edge of the meadow, I see a deep bank of snow part way up the slope. The snowbank has a tunnel penetrating its length through rushes a stream, and in the middle of the stream just below the tunnel’s entrance is a boulder. Dropping my pack at the edge of the water, I wade to the boulder and sit on its hunched back.
The sun’s heat falls away as the breeze from the tunnel cools me. The breeze, heated by the sun, gives up its heat to the icy walls of the stream’s tunnel making them hard and shiny. And yet, there are places in the tunnel were the ice is melting and returning via the stream as water to the sea.
Here, in this instant in time, wind and water and fire and ice are together with me in a relationship that will happen just once in forever. This instant will never again be coordinated as it is today.
Water, technically “defined” as a clear, colorless, nearly odorless and tasteless liquid, H2O, essential for plant and animal life, is the most widely used of all solvents. But what is water? How did the two hydrogen and single oxygen atoms happen to be here in this particular time, in this particular place, under this particular circumstance to form water, snow, and ice? Where did the atoms come from before they joined to become water, snow, and ice? How long will the atoms be recognizable as water, snow, and ice before they will be recycled through the atomic exchange system of the universal to become something else, and then something else, and then something else again, ad infinitum?
What was the rock on which I’m sitting one, two, or three million years ago? How did it come to be in this place at this time? How long has the light and the heat from the sun been traveling through space to reach this tiny place on Earth? It has taken me over seventeen years to get here for I am just three months shy of my eighteenth birthday.
That instant on that day so long ago was perfect and sacred in its being, and in all of time there will never be another like it.
If you want to contact me, you can visit my website. If you wish, you can also read an article about what is important to me and/or you can listen to me give a presentation.
While working in Egypt in 1963-64, I—who as a very young 24—wanted to go to a particular “black hill” I had been told about because the hill had blackish geckos living on it, and I wanted to study them. The hill was in the desert about 300 miles southwest of Alexandria. The desert in this part of Egypt is flat and sandy with vast areas of desert pavement that stretch for hundreds of miles in all directions.
We had traveled by jeep a couple of miles when my Bedouin guide told me to steer about three inches to the right. This sounded ridiculous. What difference could three inches possibly make? He didn’t even have a map!
Nevertheless, I was finally persuaded to make this “insignificant” correction when my guide suddenly yelled: “Stop! Land mine!” That got my attention because there was scattered evidence of long-hidden mines scattered throughout the miles of desert in the form of shattered camel skeletons.
Three days later we were at the black hill, and my guide told me to get my map. I spread the map on the hood of the jeep and learned about humility. My guide drew a triangle and showed me that a correction of three inches near Alexandria had saved us about 50 miles worth of fuel and water on our way to the black hill–fuel and water we didn’t have to spare.
If we had gone my way, we would either have had to stop short of the black hill and turned back, or our bones would still be bleaching somewhere under the desert sun. And so I learned that the further we predict into the trackless future, the more conscious and clear we must be of our vision, goals, objectives—and our data.
All available data must be used, and planning, which is done in the invisible present, must be carried out far enough into the future to show the probable consequences our actions have set in motion, as exemplified by my trip to the black hill. Else, we leave the future blindly to the future.
In this sense, we talk about our responsibility to the future, but that is not enough. We also need to act in such a way that we ensure, to the greatest extent humanly possible, that all generations of the future have the ability to respond to the legacy of options we leave them. It’s therefore imperative that we understand and account for the short-, mid-, and long-term ramifications of our decisions, which can only be done by taking them seriously in thought, accounting, and action.
True, we cannot foresee all the cumulative effects of our actions, and we cannot wait until everything is known before we act. But there definitely are some potential affects that can be projected, based on available data, which we all-too-often persist in stubbornly ignoring.
If you want to contact me, you can visit my website. If you wish, you can also read an article about what is important to me and/or you can listen to me give a presentation.
The great irony of this story is that while the Shoshonean People used the pupfish for food, the European-American invaders stole that source of food by displacing the Shoshonean People from their ancestral home. Having removed the Shoshonean People in whom they saw little or not value, the European-Americans, who were so destructive in their exploitation of the land they stole, ultimately turned around and responded to the pupfish through protection, scientific study, and enjoyment.
The Ancient Ones
As the last glacial stage of the Pleistocene Epoch, which began about seventy thousand years ago, reached its maximum development, subarctic plants and animals occurred as far south as what today are the states of Virginia and Texas. During the height of the glacier’s development, the Bering-Chukchi platform (also called the trans-Bering land bridge) between the continents of North America and Eurasia was exposed because the sea was approximately 328 feet below its present level. When fully exposed, the Bering-Chukchi platform was a flat isthmus about a thousand miles wide between what is now northeastern Siberia and Alaska. It remained open to migrating plants and animals—including the Ancient Ones, the ancestors of today’s aboriginal North Americans—until rising seas again inundated it as the climate warmed and the last glaciers melted, about ten thousand years ago.
These Ancient Ones were hunters of big game. As millennia passed, the hunters gradually became nomadic foragers who subsisted by gathering, fishing, and hunting small animals. In more recent times, the nomadic foragers settled into semi-permanent and permanent communities and finally became agriculturalists whose economy depended on farm crops as well as hunting with spears and bows and arrows, gathering, and fishing. They also made pottery, which was a sign of their evolving culture and of their commitment to a place.
The Valley And Its People
While the Ancient Ones were migrating south and east out of what is now Alaska between twenty thousand and fifteen thousand years ago, the valley that today is known as “Death Valley” was lush and green with streams feeding through interconnected lakes into a huge lake six hundred feet deep. In these streams and lakes lived a tiny fish, about three inches long, today called a “pupfish.”
Then, about nine thousand years ago, approximately a thousand years after the close of the last ice age, the Nevares Spring People moved into the valley. The earliest known inhabitants, they camped near springs, some of which are now extinct. These springs were found on fans of gravel from the erosion of surrounding mountains washed by water into the valley.
These wandering hunters were armed with spear and atlatl, which is a special stick forming an extension of one’s arm so as to increase the power of a thrown spear. Using spears and atlatls, these hunters ambushed big game, which was most likely plentiful in the well-watered valley where extensive marshlands surrounded the big lake and where juniper trees covered the lower mountains. Somewhere in time, the people left the valley, probably because the game animals disappeared as the climate became even warmer and drier than it is today, which means summer temperatures ranged anywhere from 110 to over 130 degrees Fahrenheit and the average annual rainfall was about one and a half inches or less.
Around five thousand years ago, the Mesquite Flat People came into the valley. They arrived during a wet period and once again lived as wandering bands of hunters who camped low in the valley and on the fans of gravel above the valley’s floor. Like the Nevares Spring People before them, they hunted with spears and atlatls.
They augmented their diet of meat by gathering wild plants and by grinding seeds with stone mortars and pestles. The people inhabited the valley for about two thousand years until 1,000 B.C. They live in the valley before the final lake dried up and formed the flat, saltpan one sees today on the valley’s floor.
The Saratoga Springs People came into the valley around 900 A.D. and stayed for about two hundred years until 1100 A.D. The climate during this time was much like it is today, although there were brief periods of wetter weather. Being of the desert, the Saratoga Springs People camped near the same springs we use today.
Big game was scarce, but the people brought the bow and arrow with them into the valley, which was an advantage in hunting. In addition to big game, they also hunted and trapped the abundant small rodents and lizards. The Saratoga Springs People augmented their diet with plants and with seeds ground into flour between smooth rocks.
A few Saratoga Springs People may have been living in the valley when the first Shoshonean People arrived about 1,000 A.D. The Shoshonean culture appears to have been more diverse than those of their predecessors. Although their tools were simple, the people possessed great skill. The women, for example, had a highly developed art of making baskets.
The Shoshonean People were the seed gathers of the desert. Much of the year they lived among the sand dunes in simple shelters of brush where they harvest beans of mesquite. But when the pinyon nuts ripened, they camped in the nearby Panamit Mountains for the harvest. They also gathered what other seeds they could and like the people before them used smooth flat rocks to grind seeds into flour.
In addition to gathering plants, they hunted such small animals as rodents and lizards and even ate adult insects and the grubs of beetles. The ability of these people to find and utilize whatever foods the desert offered was the key to their survival.
The One Species Becomes The Many
As the climate began to warm and dry in the time of the Nevares Spring People, the waters connecting the lakes went from perennial streams, to intermittent streams, to dry beds, and the lakes began to evaporate and shrink, becoming saltier as they did so. Thus, the contiguous population of pupfish inhabiting the originally connected waters of the valley became increasingly fragmented and isolated until they evolved into nine separate species.
By the time the Shoshonean People arrived in the valley, by now the hottest, driest place in North America north of Mexico, the pupfishes were already clinging to existence in completely isolated fragile habitats, some in deep holes, some in salty creeks, and some in warm springs. One of these habitats is Salt Creek.
Salt Creek comes out of deep springs and flows on the surface for about two miles during the relatively cool months of winter and spring before evaporating. In the intense heat of summer, however, the creek shrinks back to the pools of its source.
Salt Creek is the home of the Salt Creek pupfish, which in the entire Universe is found only here. During winter, when the water is cold, the fish are dormant in the mud of the bottom and are virtually impossible to find. They become active, however, when the water warms in spring, and by March hundreds of fish are visible. As the days get warmer and evaporation increases, the creek and the majority of its pools dry up, and most pupfish die. Only a small percent survive the summer in the deep springs that form the creek’s source.
Humans And The Salt Creek Pupfish
As the land changed over thousands of years, the single species of pupfish became the many species. In addition, various human cultures would enter the valley each in its turn and somehow interact with the pupfish. Although the cultures before the days of the Shoshonean People each had a relationship with and an effect on the pupfish simply by sharing its habitat, it’s during the time of the Shoshonean People that the Salt Creek pupfish is known to have been become food for humans. In spring, when the fish became numerous, the people collected them in large porous baskets. The fish were then baked in layers between tule reeds and hot ashes and eaten.1
In 1933, Death Valley National Monument was established, and a different kind of relationship began between the Salt Creek pupfish and humans. Recognizing the pupfish as a distinct species occurring only in this one, tiny creek, the people of the National Park Service devised a method of protecting the fish’s habitat, while at the same time allowing thousands of visitors to experience the uniqueness of this fish in its own place in the Universe.
Each of these people, in their own way, have gained something and have given something through their sacred participation with the Salt Creek pupfish. The Nevares Spring People, the Mesquite Flat People, and the Saratoga Springs People shared the pupfish’s habitat in the mutual relationship of life in the valley. The Shoshonean People (some of whom still live around Death Valley) took from the fish its life as food in the great mystic cycle of death feeding life, for which they gave thanks. The people of the National Monument, protecting the fish to ensured, so far as possible, its continued existence, are giving the pupfish a gift of human consciousness and taking with them a sense of moral ascendancy. And the tourists who visit Salt Creek receive from the fish a sense of spiritual enrichment, ecological awareness, and the wonder of Nature while simultaneously affecting the fish by their presence in observing it.
ENDNOTES
The discussion of the Shoshonean peoples and the Salt Creek Pupfish is based in part on: Clark, W.D. 1981. Death Valley, the story behind the scenery. KC Publ., Las Vegas, NV. 45 pp.
If you want to contact me, you can visit my website. If you wish, you can also read an article about what is important to me and/or you can listen to me give a presentation.
A candle has but a tiny flame with which to pierce the darkness. It is delicate, faltering at times perhaps, and yet it has strength beyond our understanding, for a candle cannot be diminished of its light by lighting another candle. The effect of its light can only grow stronger with each light added.
We are human candles—candles afraid of our own flame; candles with a sense of history but no sense of destiny; candles afraid to burn with a sense of purpose, with a sense of dignity, with a sense of possibility, with a sense of vision. If, however, the darkness of intolerance is to be lifted, if human dignity is to become the true foundation of a sustainable society in a sustainable environment, then we must become candles aflame with purpose, aflame with love, hope, and charity. And we must dare to share our light, for the world can be lighted only by candles of the human spirit—one, by one, by one—beginning with me and with you.
And how, you might ask, can we begin to share the light of our national candle? With this question in mind, it would be well to ask ourselves what we as a nation can do right now, this minute, to begin the necessary change in our thinking if we sincerely want a more peaceful and sustainable world. We can begin by adopting a peaceful national anthem that in fact reflects the “American Dream” as it is embodied in our Bill of Rights and our Constitution, instead of clinging to the outmoded, unmitigated violence of the war song “bombs bursting in air.”
I suggest a poem—“America the Beautiful”—written in 1893 by Katharine Lee Bates during her first trip out West. Bates, an English Professor and alumna of Wellesley College, published her poem in 1895, which, after a long search, was set to the music of Samuel Augustus Ward. Later, Bates would say that the poem simply came to her on Pike’s Peak, in Colorado, and would insist that she “was its scribe rather than its author.”
Although “America! America! God shed His grace on thee” is a familiar line of the song, Katie Bates’ lyrics include: “celebrate not the military hardware but the hopes and ideals of people who love this country.” In her second stanza, she writes: “America! America! God mend thine every flaw/ Confine thy soul in self-control/ Thy liberty in law!” And in her third stanza, she writes of “heroes” who “more than self their country love/ And mercy more than life!” This is what the true “American Dream” (true democracy employed as a verb, instead of simply enshrined as a noun) must become in practice if liberty, sustainability, and justice for anyone is to be anything more than a wistful declaration of paper.
And what, you might inquire further, do we do about the infernal bureaucratic red tape required to officially dump the glorification of war and violence of the past in favor the hope for real peace and beauty in the present, for the present and the future? It so happen that another poet, a German, Johann von Goethe has the answer:
Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too . . . whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.
The choice is ours. Do we continue to focus our national soul on the ugliness, brutality, and futility of war that crowned the 20th century? Or, shall we choose to shift our focus to the beauty, sustainability, and hope for peace in this, the 21st century? If we dare to choose the latter, when do we begin to act?
In honor of Ellen Goodman, a columnist for The Boston Globe, who implanted the idea in my heart.
If you want to contact me, you can visit my website. If you wish, you can also read an article about what is important to me and/or you can listen to me give a presentation.
We are an inseparable part of Nature in that how we participate with Her in creating our environment is a choice of motives, thoughts, and actions. That we have ample freedom with which to choose our motives, thoughts, and actions can be the saving grace of human society. But we must reevaluate our current choices, because we too often assign a price to something and thereby come to know its material cost and loose sight of its intrinsic value. In so doing, we are learning the cost of everything and the value of nothing. A thing’s intrinsic value thus becomes its imprisoned splendor.
I have, for example, heard people express their awed at the use some early American Indians made of the English language, and wonder why they can’t speak in their own tongue with such eloquence. The answer seems simple enough. The Indians were not speaking English. They were speaking their own language—the thoughts of their hearts—through English words. They were speaking of sacred participation with the Earth, while the European invaders were speaking about exploitation, ownership, and monetary gains. Put another way, the Europeans spoke of peace on Earth and good will toward men, whereas the Indians spoke of peace in and among people and good will toward the Earth.
What makes our union with Nature and life either sacred or profane is how we choose to participate—our attitude. It’s not, in this sense, so much what we say and do but how we say it and do it. The sacred is the expression of value enthroned in one’s heart, which is straight, open, and simple. The profane is the cost/benefit rationalization of the intellect, which is convoluted, guarded, and nebulous. Where the sacred shines with the crystalline purity of intent and an innocence of execution, the profane is clouded with murky undercurrents and the jagged edges of greed and competition.
Although we have no choice but to participate with Nature simply because we exist in and of Her, we can and must choose how we participate, because participation is the active part of relationship. And everything exists in relationship.
That we are the products of our motives, thoughts, and actions, those elements of our behavior that determine the quality of our participation with life and Nature, is illustrated by an old man talking to a youth who had treated him rudely because the youth saw little to value in the wrinkles of age. “Son,” said the old man, “as you now are so I once was. As I now am so you shall one day be.” This is but saying that how we treat something or someone to which we are related in the act of life so we shall one day be treated.
The sacredness of our participation with Nature and life is based on the level of consciousness we have of our relationship with both Nature and life. We can, for example, built our cultures to exploit Nature or to help oversee the welfare of Nature through understanding, enjoyment, appreciation, respect, and caring for Nature and Her processes.
Whatever we do, we cannot simply bestow value on Nature without Nature also conveying value to us. After all, when we speak of valuing Nature we really mean that we find an array of values in Nature—values such as: live support, economic, recreational, scientific, aesthetic, medicinal, and spiritual.
In addition, we are, so far as we know, the only creatures that can survey the world as a whole. As such, we may be the only creatures in the world that must make a distinction between a moral response and a behavioral reaction. Instinct is not morality. If we therefore continue to insist that nonhumans react only out of instinct, they cannot be held accountable for their behavior, regardless of what it is. If we, on the other hand, reserve the notion of morality exclusively for ourselves, then we, by definition, are morally accountable for our every action.
Therefore, we dare not assume that what is good for a nation is necessarily good for the whole of the world any more than we can assume that what is good for a company is necessarily good for the nation. In this sense, morality must exceed legality because morality infuses the whole, be it a nation’s security or a company’s bottom line profits, with our duty as trustees of planet Earth as a living trust for all generations—present and future. Neither a nation’s security or a company’s profits can be gained at the expense of Nature’s health and evolutionary adaptability to changing conditions if human society is to survive with any degree of dignity and well-being.
If we accept the above notion about morality, then everything in Nature must be “good,” because we enter into an impartial relationship with Nature, where morality is solely a human commitment. Then, if morality is extended into spirituality, as we enter one of Nature’s surrounding scenes, it enters us. There is a two-way entrance and resulting fulfillment. A scene may spiritually uplift us even as we give it conscious acknowledgment. Such awareness is part of the whole, not apart from it, because Nature triggers imaginative thoughts of discovery and, depending on our cultural preconditioning, an adventuresome openness, all of which constitutes the reciprocity of partnership.
Consider also that God (however you choose to think of “God”) is the Spirit that moves in and through all things, be it a rock, a mountain, a fire, a building, a bridge, or a human being. If the rock contains radioactive uranium, it is the impartial outworking of Nature. But if the uranium is extracted from the rock and used to make a bomb to kill people, it is the purposeful outwork of human morality. If the bomb is dropped, it wounds the Earth and murders millions of living beings beside the people the bomb is intended to kill. We chose to make the bomb and to drop it; we are therefore solely responsible for the outcome.
Ours is the moral choice of how we participate with Nature and with one another—in a manner that is sacred or profane. Let us choose wisely.
If you want to contact me, you can visit my website. If you wish, you can also read an article about what is important to me and/or you can listen to me give a presentation.
The wind is the breath of the world. Constant in its blowing, it carries the fragrance of south sea islands to the polar ice, the dankness of steaming jungles to the baking deserts. Wind caresses the land and buffets it, moistens the land and parches it. Wind, the divine messenger, is never still. It follows the sun westward, then leads the sun eastward. It pushes Spring northward, then pulls Winter southward. Free since the birth of the Universe, wind has blown through all the eons—never to be still.
To sleep with the wind blowing over my face is to have my Spirit take wing . . .
In Spring, my Spirit dances over the land on the fresh winds of renewal—the season of birth and change.
In Summer, it soars to the stars on the gusty winds of youth–the season of exuberance and dreams.
In Autumn, it floats in moonlight on the mellow winds of maturity–the season of gathering and fulfillment.
In Winter, it whirls through dark nights on the tempestuous winds of old age—the season of reflection, senility, and death.
And in Spring, my Spirit dances over the land on the fresh winds of renewal—the season of birth and change.
To sleep with the wind blowing over my face is to have my Spirit take wing . . .
I love the wind. I’ve always loved the wind. It stirs the joy in my soul and sets my imagination to wondering from whence it comes and whither it goes. I’ve been at sea in winds so strong I could barely stand on the ship’s deck, and I’ve had winds of spring caress my cheek as gently as an angel’s kiss. I’ve known the winds of winter high in the Rocky Mountains to drive the cold like a million icy daggers into the marrow of my bones, and I’ve felt the hot, drying winds of the Sahara Desert suck life’s moisture from my body. And still I love the wind.
For me, there have always been two dimensions to the wind, that of my soul and that of the land. Although I’ve wandered the deserts and ocean shores of distant lands, seen the starlit nights of deep winter in the far north, and felt the tropical heat of the jungle, it was to the mountains that I always turned when the wind in my soul became restless or tumultuous. For it was in the high mountains, where rocky ridges, bold cliffs, and jagged peaks resist the wind and in so doing give voice to the notes of its song, that the wind of my soul and that of the land sang in harmony. And it was there, where ridge, cliff, and peak coalesce into the keyboard that gave melody to the winds, that I learned, bit by bit, a few of the different ways of being in life.
Now is a wondrous time for me as my seventieth year fades gently into memory. It is a time of reflection, a time of assimilation, where knowledge gleaned in the past and experiences lived in the present give spiritual portents of the future. It is a time to be, simply to be in the fulfillment of life. And it is a time to reach back and grasp the lessons of my youth, the seasons of my life, and put them in order. I have traveled so far, thought so much, and experienced so deeply and all I have done is come full circle to that sacred place called ignorance, wherein is born the never-ending wonder and awe of the mysteries of life and questions about their meaning.
From ignorance I have learned that answers are elusive creatures until we know the relevant questions to ask, at which time they become tricksters who guard well their secrets while leading with glee from one question to another question, each redefining the original query. Thus, while I find no pat answers from my years of travel, I am, perhaps, beginning to understand a few of the questions.
If you want to contact me, you can visit my website. If you wish, you can also read an article about what is important to me and/or you can listen to me give a presentation.
