Midweek Meditation

“The song of a river ordinarily means the tune that water plays on rock, root and rapid.  This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all.  To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of the hills and rivers.  Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand.  Then you may hear it—a vast, pulsing harmony—its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.” 
— Aldo Leopold 

THE WHOLE CHILD: A Pediatrician Recommends the Nature Prescription

Photo by Angela Lee & Children and Nature Network

This is a great article by Lawrence Rosen M.D. — THE WHOLE CHILD: A Pediatrician Recommends the Nature Prescription

"Kids are being diagnosed with anxiety, depression, ADHD, irritable bowel syndrome and migraine headaches at all time high rates.  Whatever labels we want to use, the message is clear – our children are suffering from stress...  Getting kids back into nature is a key part of the solution to keeping kids healthy and truly creating wellness."  Read the full article HERE.

Isabella's Voice — What I Love About Nature

I love seeing the sun shine through the trees.

I love hearing all the little birds talking to each other.

I love walking in the forest with my fellow N.B.O.G.ians.

I love swimming in the freezing rivers.

I love climbing a tall tree and looking down at the forest below.

I love running in the soft brush of the forest floor.

I love watching a little squirrel scampering up the side of a tree.

i love NATURE.

p.s. N.B.O.G. = Nature Based Ongoing Group - the class i go to every Friday.

N.B.O.G.ians = the awesome people who do it, too.

Isabella

Age 10

Santa Cruz, CA

The Clock of the Long Now

A while back I read about a clock being constructed within a limestone mountain near Van Horn, Texas.  To reach it, visitors will have to climb 1,500 feet above high desert scrub and find an entrance hidden in a rock face.  Those who know where to look will find a jade door, rimmed in stainless steel, and a second door beyond that, serving as an airlock and keeping out dust and animals.  At the end of a long passageway, they will find a 500-foot vertical tunnel with spiral stairs winding up along its edges.  As they climb, they will pass the giant clockworks—counterweights, a winding station, massive gears—before finally reaching a chamber containing the clock’s face, which will measure the hours, days, years, centuries… millennia of our future.

The 10,000 Year Clock.  The Clock of the Long Now.

I love this thing.  I love the dreams it stirs inside me.  I love the way dreaming about it slows me down, makes me stop, stretches my mind into a future that I don’t reflect on nearly enough—a distant future in which there will be children—real, living, breathing, feeling children who are tied to me in a chain of parental nurturing and human experience that stretches back through the ancient plains of Africa and into some forgotten primordial soup.

I love that a group of individuals are building this thing for that very purpose and nothing more, to inspire people like me to step outside the hurried patterns of our daily lives and ask that crucial question once posed by Jonas Salk.  “Are we being good ancestors?”

The Long Now Foundation was established in 1996 to counterbalance today's accelerating culture and encourage long-term thinking.  Its founders, a group of intellectual heavyweights, include polymath inventor and computer engineer Danny Hillis, cultural pioneer and biologist Stewart Brand, and British composer Brian Eno.  The clock is being built on property owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.  These are people that have played a real role in shaping culture, and I love that they’ve taken it upon themselves to build this modern day Stonehenge for the rest of us, to remind us that there is something bigger than our own fleeting lifetimes, our daily appointments and hassles.  We are stewards in a long line of people who have always inherited the present moment, and someday our descendants will also inherit this Long Now. 

As Danny Hillis explains it, “I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it.  I know I am part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me.  I sense that I am alive at a time of important change, and I feel a responsibility to make sure that the change comes out well.  I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks.”

10,000 Year Clock

I like to think that 10,000 years from now some small group of people will journey up the mountain to visit this clock.  The morning sun will warm their skin.  They will spot a scrub jay, flashing through the brush in a blue-gray streak.  The air they breathe deeply into their lungs will be clean, scented by sage. Perhaps they will stop to look out over the plains and pass around a container of clear water to wet their throats.  When they reach the passageway leading into the mountain they will walk quietly, reverently, thinking about the ancient ones who built this place of mystery, thinking about their own offspring and children who will inherit the earth even further on our journey towards eternity.

Of course, it won’t happen exactly like that.  I’m imagining.  But I do hope that 10,000 years from now Earth is still a place that human beings call home, and that it is still a beautiful and wondrous place, full of life and worth living in.  I hope somebody hears the clock chime and thinks about the descendants we’ll share with them, living in some future even more remote and unimaginable.  I hope the clock succeeds in its mission to foster responsibility in the framework of millennia. 

But will it?  Will people really live on this planet in 10,000  years?  Or will we have fouled our nest and flown the coop into oblivion?  I have to admit, I sometimes lose hope when I see the current trajectories of extinction, human population growth, and chemical pollution in the atmosphere and biosphere. 

Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon pondered this very question, and I like his answer.  “But in having children—in engendering them, in loving them, in teaching them to love and care about the world—parents are betting, whether they know it or not, on the Clock of the Long Now.  They are betting on their children, and their children after them, and theirs beyond them, all the way down the line from now to 12,006.  If you don’t believe in the Future, unreservedly and dreamingly, if you aren’t willing to bet that somebody will be there to cry when the Clock finally, ten thousand years from now, runs down, then I don’t see how you can have children.  If you have children, I don’t see how you can fail to do everything in your power to ensure that you win your bet, and that they, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished by creatures whose imagination for perfecting it is limitless and free.”

10,000 Year Clock

Just knowing that the 10,000 Year Clock is being built, that there is a group of people alive right now who care enough to create this thing, gives me hope.  In fact, there are a lot of people, working in their own ways to make human existence sustainable.  And their stories lift me.  They inspire me to cast off the dark robes of apathy and rise to the occasion.

I watch my sons Noah and Kai at the beach and in the mountains—exploring tide pools, finding crabs, climbing trees, staring awestruck at a sky full of stars, discovering and falling in love with their astonishing world—and I cheer for the Clock of the Long Now.  I’m glad it will be here in the world with me, inspiring me to step away now and again from the hustle and insignificant emergencies of daily life and instead keep time with the rocks and the wind. 

I’m with Michael Chabon.  I’m betting on my kids and the 10,000 Year Clock.  I’m doubling down on the Long Now.

J.S. Kapchinske is the author of Coyote Summer.

Coyote Summer

Coyote Summer is HERE!

Heath always looked forward to summer visits at Grandpa’s—long days in the wild Rocky Mountains, fishing with Dad on the Piedra River, and nights sleeping on the screened-in porch.  Plus this summer, Dad promised to finally tell him the secret about old Mrs. Baylis, a mysterious Native American woman living down the dusty dirt road…  But now, after Dad’s accident, it can never happen that way.  Heath and his mother go to Grandpa’s, but only to spread Dad’s ashes in the river.

In the beginning, Heath feels like he's been swallowed by the raging Piedra, held upside down in some dark and unforgiving eddy.  But one day, wandering along the riverbank, he meets Annie, a wild-eyed tomboy who shows him a hidden cave with a litter of orphaned coyote pups.  Together they discover the cave holds another secret—one that might help them figure out the mystery of old Mrs. Baylis.  During that summer in the mountains, Heath comes to realize there is both beauty and ugliness in the world, sometimes all tangled together.  By opening himself up to Annie and the coyotes, he rediscovers hope and joy in this big, beautiful, mixed-up world.

Download your copy today!  And please tell your friends!  Thank you.

Midweek Meditation

Who are you, little i

(five or six years old)

peering from some high

window;at the gold

of november sunset

(and feeling:that if day

has to become night

this is a beautiful way)

— e.e. cummings

The World of Lewis and Clark

© Mschalke, Stock Free Images

Recently, my boys and I watched Lewis & Clark: the Journey of the Corps of Discovery, a great documentary film by Ken Burns—and I was struck by the fact that their adventure didn’t occur all that long ago in the whole scheme of things.  They set out in 1804, just a bit more than 200 years ago, a handful of generations, yet they experienced a world that has all but disappeared. 

After leaving Camp Dubois, Illinois, the Corps of Discovery traveled through more than 4,000 miles of wilderness to reach the Pacific coast—a journey that took them a year and a half.  And they encountered things we can only imagine today:  endless herds of buffalo, flocks of birds so large they darkened the sky, rivers that ran untamed for thousands of miles, thriving societies of native people that had called this vast landscape home for millennia…

© Lclie, Stock Free Images

Growing up in Colorado, on the western edge of the Great Plains, I often tried to image what my home must have looked like to the Ute Indians, herds of wild animals covering the sea of grassland that stretched endlessly from the foot of Pikes Peak.  But less than 200 years earlier, Meriwether Lewis didn’t have to imagine.  He witnessed the herds.  On April 22, 1805, he wrote, “"I ascended to the top of the cut bluff this morning, for whence I had the most delightful view of the country, the whole of which except the valley formed by the Missouri is void of timber or underbrush, exposing to the first glance of the spectator immense herds of buffalo, elk, deer, and antelopes feeding in one common and boundless pasture."

© Jeffbanke, Stock Free Images

When Lewis and Clark crossed the Great Plains, they experienced one of the world’s largest wild grasslands, rivaling Africa’s Serengeti.  The prairie spread from Indiana to the Rocky Mountains, from southern Canada to northern Mexico.  It accounted for more land than any other ecosystem in North America.

Two hundred years ago, as many as 70 million bison, 40 million pronghorn antelope and 5 billion prairie dogs lived on those wild plains.  The prairie dog villages created habitat for scores of other creatures, like the black-footed ferret, ferruginous hawk, and swift fox.  As many as 100,000 grizzly bears lived throughout the West.  The sheer numbers of wild animals alive in North America at the time is almost unfathomable.  Even for someone like me, a biologist with an overactive imagination, it’s almost impossible to picture such masses of wildlife.  It must have been wondrous!

Equally unfathomable, is how quickly the animals disappeared.

By 1883, less than 80 years after Lewis and Clark completed their journey, the boundless herds of buffalo had been reduced to a few hundred individuals!  Buffalo were nearly extinct.  In fact, we owe the survival of the species to the creation of Yellowstone National Park, where some of the remaining animals took refuge and made a comeback.  Today, there are approximately 200,000 buffalo in the United States, but only a small fraction of them are wild.

© Rwharr, Stock Free Images

Similarly, hunting pressure and habitat fragmentation decimated pronghorn antelope and bighorn sheep by the turn of the 20^th century.  In his journals, William Clark described great numbers of Audubon bighorn sheep along the upper Missouri River.  That subspecies is now extinct, and all remaining bighorn sheep have been reduced to small populations in scattered mountain habitats.  Barely 1,000 grizzlies remain in the lower 48 states, all of them reduced to small pockets of wilderness in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.  Prairie dogs are still being poisoned and shot as varmints, even though the villages they create are crucial to the survival of raptors, badgers, swift foxes and black-footed ferrets.  Even the endless grasslands themselves have been reduced by more than 90 percent, the vast majority of the Great Plains now cultivated, the remnants of native prairie found only in scattered islands of habitat.

© Digital94086, Stock Free Images

The rivers have changed too.  Lewis and Clark explored thousands of miles of truly wild rivers, undammed stretches of free-flowing water that flooded seasonally, enriching soils, feeding wetlands, and providing habitat for countless animals.  When they reached the Columbia and Snake Rivers, west of the Rocky Mountains, the Corps of Discovery was astounded by the number of fish they observed.  William Clark estimated that 10,000 pounds of dried fish was stored by the native people they met.  In fact, for thousands of years the fish had sustainably supported large populations of native people in the Pacific Northwest, and they provided a nutrient foundation for the entire Northwest ecosystem. 

Not that long ago, 16 million salmon returned to the Columbia River system to spawn each year.  That number has now been reduced by 99 percent!  Even as late as 1896, the total catch of chinook, coho, sockeye, chum and steelhead was 3.3 million.  By 1990, it had been reduced to 257,000.  Some runs of coho, chinook and sockeye are already extinct.  Twenty-one runs of fish in the system are threatened and 5 are endangered.

Dams now block the rivers.  Irrigation draws water away.  Industrial logging muddies streams with sediment, while runoff from agriculture, mines, and cities pollutes the water.  The upstream homecoming for adult salmon and the downstream journey for smolts are now fraught with peril.  Overharvesting by commercial fishing operations and diseases from fish farms provide further threats.

© Alptraum, Stock Free Images

Even the mighty Missouri that Lewis and Clark struggled up for more than a year has been converted to shipping channels and submerged beneath reservoirs.  Two thousand miles of levees edge the river, which is now only a third as wide and 127 miles shorter then it was in 1804.  It has been channeled and dammed, robbed of its ability to dissipate flood waters, deposit silt, nourish the soil, and support fish and wildlife.

And the people Lewis and Clark encountered, the more than 50 Native American tribes they came in contact with…  We all know how that devastating story played out.  By the late 1800s, almost all of their ancestral homeland had been taken, countless individuals had been killed, and the survivors were confined to reservations.  Each time Lewis and Clark met a new group of native people, they gave them a peace medal, which showed Jefferson on one side and two hands clasping on the other.  Sadly, this was just the first in a long string of promises to be broken.

               

© Asiavasmuncky, Stock Free Images

That’s a LOT of change in a relatively short time.  That’s a lot for all of us—for the world—to lose. 

But there are many people making great efforts to bring back elements of our ecological heritage, to restore the types of habitats and wild creatures that Lewis and Clark encountered.  And you can get involved too.  Groups like American Rivers are working to restore and protect rivers and other water systems.  The Nature Conservancy and other organizations are working hard to protect the world’s remaining wild places and the animals that depend on them.  You can even make a difference in your own backyard with small actions like those promoted by the National Wildlife Federation’s Garden for Wildlife program. 

The incredible 8,000 mile journey of Lewis and Clark was completed by stringing together millions of small steps.  Every step, even things that seem too small to matter, add up and make a difference.  So take a step.  Get mud on your feet.

J. S. Kapchinske is the author of Coyote Summer.