The Sacred in the Wild - Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of

“The Sacred in the Wild”
Rev. Kristin Maier
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Northfield
February 15, 2015
On Valentine’s day in 1884, 25 year old Theodore Roosevelt lost his mother to typhoid fever
and he lost his wife who had just given birth to their daughter two days earlier. He was
devastated. He was a New York State Assemblyman, but he was also Teddy Roosevelt, so he
had just bought a cattle ranch in the Dakota Territory. It was there that he took refuge. In his
grief filled days, he traveled through the wild landscape hunting and meticulously recording
what he saw. This is what he wrote about prairie dogs.
Prairie-dogs are abundant all over the cattle country; they are in shape like little
woodchucks, and are the most noisy and inquisitive animals imaginable. They are never
found singly, but always in towns of several hundred inhabitants; and these towns are
found in all kinds of places where the country is flat and treeless... They are very noisy,
their shrill yelping resounding on all sides whenever a man rides through a town. 1
Teddy Roosevelt would not have known it then, but biologists now understand that prairie dog
alarms are highly sophisticated. Prairie dogs use a unique call for each predator; a hawk,
coyote or dog will elicit a distinct alert.2 They can even vary their calls based on the color of
clothing that a human is wearing and whether that human has been threatening in the past or
not.3 Prairie dogs are highly social creatures that look out for one another.
"Around the prairie-dog towns,” Roosevelt noted, “it is always well to keep a look-out for the
smaller carnivora, especially coyotes and badgers...and for the larger kinds of hawks.
Rattlesnakes are quite plenty, living in the deserted holes, and the latter are also the homes of
the little burrowing owls...”4
It was no accident that Roosevelt observed so many other creatures near the prairie dog towns.
Prairie dogs are understood to be a “keystone species” for grassland ecosystems. 5 Prairie dogs
provide food for hawks, badgers, foxes, and coyotes, and are the only food that wild black1
Theodore Roosevelt, Hunting Trips of the Ranchman: Sketches of Sprot on the Northern Cattle Plains, (New York:
Random House, 1996), 203.
2
C. N. Slobodchikoff, Bianca S. Perla, Jennifer L. Verdolin, Prairie Dogs: Communication and Community in an
Animal Society, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 92.
3
Slobodchikoff, 77.
4
Roosevelt, 205.
5
See, John Hoogland (ed.), Conservation of the Black-Tailed Prairie Dogs: Saving North America’s Western
Grasslands, (Washington, DC: 2006).
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footed ferrets will eat. Prairie dog burrows create critical habitat for other species like
burrowing owls and desert box turtles.
Yet early on, Roosevelt learned from other ranchers that prairie dogs are pests. Ranchers saw
them as competing with cattle for grasses and blamed them when areas became over-grazed.
In Roosevelt’s day, cattle ranchers were puzzling over how to exterminate them.
What they didn’t know but recent studies have established is that prairie dogs play an
important role in keeping grasslands healthier and actually improve the quality of grazing
territory for cattle and wild herbivores. Prairie dogs play the role of earthworms [really big
earthworms], aerating and improving the soil by loosening it, turning it and fertilizing it. They
do reduce foraging vegetation for cattle by a small amount, but the vegetation that is there has
more nutrition and variety, which cattle like. Their burrows even act as mini aquifers, retaining
moisture during sometimes very arid conditions.6
Unfortunately, ranchers in the 1880s didn’t understand these benefits. Even today, many still
don’t. Human beings have been enormously successful in solving the puzzle of extermination,
so that now prairie dog populations are down to 2% of their former numbers. Of the five
species of prairie dog, one is endangered, one is threatened and the others are greatly reduced
in number. The black footed ferret which hunts only prairie dogs was at one point reduced to
only 7 breeding pairs. Through captive breeding the numbers have increased to around 500,
but they are still endangered and their fate unknown.
The story of the prairie dog is a common one in our world today. Human beings fundamentally
misunderstand the interrelatedness of nature and the importance of any one species to a larger
ecological whole. Thus we inadvertently (or not-so-inadvertently) drastically reduce a species
and then witness the ecological fallout that eventually affects us or something we do care
about. Even then, we are slow to see this damage and reluctant to change our own
mythologies that created it.
Ecological thinker, J. B. Mackinnon, points to what he sees as one big mythology on the part of
humans. He argues that we humans have “rendered nature as an easy god to worship.”7
Mackinnon tells us that we have developed a spiritual notion of nature that leaves little to no
room for what is truly wild. We have reduced nature to a false sense of the pastoral; nature is
safe, tame, and free of deadly often painful and frightening struggle. Somewhere in the
process of subduing the land and its creatures, especially those that pose some threat to
humans, we have come to forget that nature is wild. He tells us,
6
Great Plains Restoration Council, “Prairie Dogs and Soil Impacts,” http://gprc.org/research/prairie-dogs-thetruth/prairie-dogs-and-soil-impacts/#.VN0ZZPnF-2F, (2/12/15).
7
J. B. Mackinnon, “False Idyll,” Orion, May/June 2012, https://orionmagazine.org/article/false-idyll/, (2/11/2015).
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We have turned a fierce and ambiguous nature into a place of comfort, and if we
embrace the result as a sanctuary of the soul, to be visited every second or third long
weekend, then we may ultimately see little purpose in returning to a deeper and more
risky engagement.8
Mackinnon believes romanticizing nature makes it hard for us to do real conservation work. He
says, “the way you see the world determines much about the world you are willing to live in,
and the spiritual lens has failed us as a tool for seeing clearly.”
Having devoted my professional life to the spiritual lens, I’m not sure I would agree that it has
failed us entirely, but I would agree that when it comes to nature, our lens has been too
narrow, too focused on our needs.
Mackinnon poses important and challenging questions. To what degree has our ideal of nature
led us to preserve it [to the extent we have] in ways that ultimately still serve our needs first?
In making nature safe for ourselves, how have we misunderstood and disrupted nature’s own
ancient processes honed over millions of years? If we were to truly allow nature to restore its
own cycles of balance, might we have to learn to embrace the wild and allow nature a far
greater license free of human control?
There is a movement afoot amongst conservationists to do exactly that, to “rewild” the earth.
In just the last two decades, the “rewilding” movement has taken off – a movement to reestablish natural ecosystems that can sustainably support the whole range of biodiversity,
including large predators.
There are a few essential elements required for rewilding. The effort requires a large, core
reserve of strictly protected land. If an area is too small, it will simply be too fragile and species
will not be able to survive natural cycles of drought, ice, disease, etc. 9
These core areas need to be connected to one another by corridors of habitat. Corridors
between large areas allow groups to interbreed and strengthen genetic diversity and allow
wide ranging species the territory they need.
Finally, keystone species need to be present in adequate numbers to support a broader
biodiversity. Big carnivores like wolves, bears, big cats, play a critical role in shaping the
behavior of other species. When they are not present, there tends to be a biotic simplification
and species loss. [That is counterintuitive; one might think fewer predators would mean
8
Mackinnon.
Michael Soule and Reed Noss, “Rewilding and Biodiversity: Complementary Goals for Continental Conservation,”
Wild Earth Vol. 8, No. 3, Fall 1998, http://www.michaelsoule.com/resource_files/167/167_resource_file1.pdf,
(2/10/2015), 22.
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greater biodiversity, but that is not what research shows.]10 Not all keystone species are
predators. Tiny prairie dogs and giant elephants don’t hunt other animals, but both
dramatically alter their landscape in ways that improve biodiversity in their habitat.
What would it look like to re-establish wild places on earth – not just fragile pockets but large
thriving wildernesses connected to large thriving wildernesses?
Conservationist, Dr. M. Sanjayan has been traveling the globe in search of hope that such a
rewilding can happen. He is the host of a PBS series called Earth: The New Wild. He has caught
on film some of the fragile and fledgling ways that rewilding is starting to happen.
Dr. Sanjayan traveled to the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. Only 20 square miles in
size, the Gombe Stream is a small and fragile strip of chimpanzee habitat, made famous by the
work of Dr. Jane Goodall. Chimpanzees share 98% of their genes with humans, but they are
unmistakably wild creatures, as Dr. Sanjayan witnessed when he watched a group of them
aggressively hunt a red colobus monkey. Chimpanzees hunt other primates. They have even
been known to [tragically] take human babies.
These are truly wild creatures, but they are also in danger of dying out even within their
protected habitat. When Jane Goodall began her work studying chimpanzee behavior in 1960,
the Gombe Stream habitat was surrounded by forest. She says, “When I first came this was all
forest [around the stream], only a few clearings.” 11 Then, in 1992 Dr. Goodall was flying in a
plane over the park and saw the almost complete loss of trees outside the park. The human
population had grown rapidly. People had fled wars in neighboring countries. They needed
trees for fuel and land for agriculture which led to deforestation, soil erosion, and depleted soil.
People were suffering and the chimpanzee habitat had become completely “penned” in.
Because there was no longer any forest linking them to other chimpanzee habitats, they had
become genetically isolated. If that didn’t change it would only be a matter of time before the
effects of inbreeding would make this population terribly fragile.
Jane Goodall and the institute she established began working twenty years ago on solving this
problem. The foundation is staffed mostly by national Tanzanians working with the local
population to meet real human needs in environmentally sustainable ways. They addressed
access to water, efficient cooking stoves, family planning, HIV education, improved sanitation,
education for girls. They helped farmers plant sustainable crops and border grasses to prevent
erosion. And, they paid farmers to plant trees at the edges of their land. These trees create
10
Michael Soule and Reed Noss, “Rewilding and Biodiversity: Complementary Goals for Continental Conservation,”
Wild Earth Vol. 8, No. 3, Fall 1998, http://www.michaelsoule.com/resource_files/167/167_resource_file1.pdf,
(2/10/2015), 22.
11
“Home,” Earth: A New Wild, Ep. 1, http://video.pbs.org/video/2365415393/, (2/11/15).
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patches of habitat that will one day stretch into corridors connecting Gombe Stream with other
forests.12
The forests around Gombe, while not what they were in 1960, are coming back, enough so, that
just recently one chimpanzee from another community found its way through that patchy
corridor and into Gombe. Jane Goodall said, “this one chimpanzee coming in from outside is
like a vindication. It can happen.”
There are other stories that Dr. Sanjayan tells on Earth: A New Wild. Maasai cattle ranchers of
Shompole, Kenya are living side-by-side with all kinds of wildlife, including prides of lions. This
group of Maasai are nomadic herders who each night bring their cattle into an enclosure made
of thorn bushes, to keep them safe from the lions that hunt freely at night.
The Maasai work hard to protect their cattle from the lions, but also respect the presence of
the creatures. They know the predators keep the other wild grazing animals in balance. They
also keep them on the move, which prevents over-grazing. Without the pressure of predators,
wild grazers will eat the grassland into a desert.
To protect their own livelihood, the Maasai use their ancient practice of erecting thorn
enclosures. And, they also track lions who are wearing radio collars with an aerial antenna and
a jeep. They track their movement at night so they know when they need to protect or move
their herd.
Lion conservation groups have also been working with Maasai communities in Shompole.
Compensation programs have started paying herders to replace cattle killed by lions so that
herders do not kill lions in retaliation. New mobile fencing is being designed and subsidized to
help protect herds. And, populations of wild prey (zebras, antelope, etc.) are being built up,
which allows lions to thrive and reduces the number of cattle killed. 13
While lion populations across Africa continue to decline, the Shompole region has seen steady
growth in lion numbers.14 Eight years ago there were 10 lions in that area and now there are
60.15 That’s pretty good for what one scholarly article calls a “conflict prone species.”
12
http://www.janegoodall.org/gombe50/faq2, (2/14/2015).
“Rebuilding the Pride,” SORALO, http://www.soralo.org/rebuilding-pride/, (2/14/15).
14
Shasta Bray, “Uma, Kya, Will and their Wild Lion Cousins,” Cincinnati Zoo Blog,
http://blog.cincinnatizoo.org/2015/02/12/uma-kya-willa-and-their-wild-lion-cousins/, (2/14/2015).
13
15
Christine Charlson, “Cincy Science: From Tri-State to Africa, the Cincinnati Zoo joins with Kenya to save lions,”
WCPO News, February 9, 2015,
http://www.wcpo.com/news/science/cincy-science-from-tri-state-to-africa-the-cincinnati-zoo-joins-kenyasmaasai-to-save-lions, (2/14/15).
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There are more big efforts underway to “rewild” our planet. The Yellowstone to Yukon
Conservation Initiative works to preserve wildlife, native plants, wilderness and natural
processes between the Yukon and Yellowstone National Park. A central focus is on preserving
the wilderness necessary to support grizzly bears, as a keystone species.
Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada is in that giant corridor and has been the focus of some
of Y2Y’s work. In Banff six wildlife overpasses and 38 underpasses have been built in the last 20
years. These overpasses and underpasses allow wildlife to safely cross the busy Trans-Canadian
highway. There have been 140,000 documented wildlife crossings, including many big
predators 16 and an 80% decrease in roadkill.17
The American Prairie Reserve in Montana has set a goal of acquiring 500,000 acres of land that
will knit together 3 million other acres of public land in order to provide habitat for wildlife and
corridors for migratory species. So far, they own or manage 305,000 acres.18 (And, they do not
allow hunting of prairie dogs on that land.)
I know that the overall picture of biodiversity is grim, but these are wonderfully hopeful
initiatives that are already working.
Of course, none of these conservation initiatives can be successful if we do not address the
biggest conservation effort of them all. To save any of these places, to save any of these
species, we are going to have to save the whole planet from climate change. The changes that
have been brought on by human impact on the climate have already begun to affect wildlife
species and populations. Migration patterns for birds and butterflies have already begun to
change. Scientists believe there are already species in decline as a result of changing climate.
With our polar ice caps melting at unprecedented states, our arctic wildlife is looking at a
particularly dire future.
J. B. Mackinnon argued that our spiritual lens of conservation and nature has failed us. Perhaps
it has thus far; but if so, it is because we have not dug deep enough into our spirituality. Can we
love this planet enough, fear FOR it enough, that we will do whatever we can, whatever we
need to do to save it? We may have tamed nature, and in doing so endangered it. Our real
question now is can we tame ourselves? It is not the wild out there we need to fear as much as
the wild in here – in humanity. Nature restrains itself through ancient cycles of life and death.
We need to restrain ourselves now.
16
Andrew Evans, “The Alberta Story: Wildlife Crossing in Banff,” National Geographic, August 23, 2013,
http://digitalnomad.nationalgeographic.com/2013/08/23/the-alberta-story-wildlife-crossing-in-banff/, (2/14/15).
17
“Conservation Successes,” Yellowstone to Yukon, http://y2y.net/about/our-story-1/successes, (2/14/2015).
18
http://www.americanprairie.org/aboutapf/faqs/
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Can we dig down into our love for our fellow human being, our [collective] children and
grandchildren? For the poor and vulnerable communities who have the least resources at their
disposal to survive these upcoming changes? If not for them, if not for us, can we love the
prairie dog and burrowing owl, chimpanzee and lion enough to finally do what we need to do?
I know something as vast as climate change can feel overwhelming, but we are not in this
alone. UUs across the continent will be focusing on climate change this spring. Other preachers
across the country today are also preaching about climate change as part of a multi-faith
national preach-in against climate change.
There are so many ways that we can choose to live our religious and ethical values right now.
We can begin to think about the impact of climate change with every decision we make. What
food we buy, from where. How we travel from point A to point B – in what vehicle, if we have a
choice. If we drive we can drive less aggressively. We can support solar and wind energies. We
can change our light bulbs, insulate our windows. We can walk and bike more, buy energy
efficient everything. Live more simply. We can wear a sweater and turn down the heat. We can
turn on a fan and lay off the air conditioning.
Maybe most importantly, we can turn up the heat on our politicians. We can tell our
government that we know addressing climate change is going to cost us some money, but we
also know that not addressing it quickly will surely cost us more. And we need to make our
voices louder than the voices of those putting profit ahead of the welfare of the entire planet.
110 years ago Theodore Roosevelt acted boldly; when he was president he saved 160 million
acres of wilderness, ticking off his own political party while doing it. Can we act boldly now?
We can if we do it together.
We can if we love this world and each other and each creature enough to change ourselves.
We can if we wake ourselves and act now – choose something to do today. Choose one more
thing to do tomorrow. Demand that those who represent us do the same with the power we
give them.
Make no mistake, this is a race. We are starting behind. Let’s go! This wild, beautiful planet is
counting on us to truly look out for it and one another.
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© 2015, Kristin Maier