Happy Earth Day

Live like it's Earth Day every day!

The Vacant Lot (a.k.a. The Wonderful Urban Armpit)

Last weekend my son Kai and I had an hour to kill between a basketball game and band practice.  We weren’t really sure what to do with ourselves.  If we went home we’d have just enough time to turn around and leave again.  We’d already eaten lunch.  It was sunny outside, the air fresh after a couple days of rain…

“Hey, you want to go see a vernal pool?” I asked.

“A what?”

“It’s like a big puddle.”

He looked skeptical.

“There might be tiny shrimp in it.  And frogs,” I added.

“Sure.”  Kai loves frogs.

Large parts of our home town, San Diego, are built atop mesas.  And once upon a time those mesa tops were littered with countless seasonal wetlands called vernal pools.  Mud puddles really.  Super cool mud puddles… to those who stop and really look at them.

These pools form because rainwater perches atop a clay layer in the soil, unable to percolate.  And in years when we get enough rain, these pools come magically to life in the winter and spring—filled with plants you don’t find anywhere else, giving life to tiny fairy shrimp, hopping with frogs, providing habitat for birds.

Sadly, most of these pools, which once stretched across acres and acres of raw land that my great grandparents knew, have been plowed under, paved and converted to strip malls or corporate headquarters.  In fact the pool Kai and I went to see last weekend sits in the middle of a vacant lot adjacent to the office complex where I work, a weedy patch of land surrounded on all sides by offices, parking lots and industry.  But for those of us who’ve nurtured a childish curiosity (not to mention an unsuppressed habit of climbing fences and venturing where we’re not supposed to go) this vacant lot provides a glimpse into the complex web—the wet, green, crawling, rotting, flowering, reproducing, frenzy of biology that makes life—our lives—possible.

Kai and I parked at my office, pushed our way through a cluster of scratchy shrubs, climbed a rusty fence, dodged the stinging nettle and walked through the weeds, picking stickers out of our socks and watching for snakes.  Vernal pools don’t really look like much at first glance, some slightly stagnant water with weeds poking out, and when I announced our arrival Kai just kind of stood there and stared at first.  But then we crouched, scooted closer so that our shoes got muddy, and really looked.  And the more we looked, the more interesting this little patch of world became, the more curious and childish our minds grew, the more we smiled, the more discoveries we exclaimed out loud to each other—fairy shrimp, tadpoles, frogs, frog eggs… even two pairs of mallard ducks.

We spent thirty happy minutes exploring this mud puddle, this urban armpit of a vacant lot, fenced off from the rat race of a community we call home, a little patch of earth explored and known by very few.  And when we left, life felt even better than when we’d arrived (and we’d already been having a good day).  There was a spark in Kai’s eye, like he’d been let in on some sort of secret, like he now knew the funky handshake that would allow him to get past stupid fences and become a member of San Diego’s secret frog society.

I hope he always remembers that funky handshake.  I hope he never stops climbing fences and getting his shoes muddy.  I hope he never stops stopping, never stops looking, never stops wondering… never stops caring.

There are wonderful urban armpits in your community too.  I know it.  So please take your kids out there, climb the fences, sit in the mud, and watch the world happen.

To learn more about San Diego’s vernal pools check out the California Chaparral Institute’s website.

Cheers!

Bring Down the Barriers!

Richard Louv nails it again.  I couldn’t agree more!

“In the 21st Century, our Great Work – as Thomas Berry put it – must be the creation of a new, restorative relationship with the rest of the natural world. It’s time to envision that future. It’s time to bring down the barriers, including these — which are not only between people and nature, but also between people.”

Read Richard Louv’s discussion of 5 barriers contributing to Nature Deficit Disorder HERE.

Unhassled, Unhurried, Unscheduled—Kids Need Opportunities to Know Nature

There was a time, not all that long ago really, when most children grew up close to nature.  In 1900, 40% of the U.S. population lived on farms, and even city dwellers had relatively easy access to undeveloped open spaces.  By 1990, less than 2% of the US population lived on farms, and too often modern city dwellers must fight traffic for an hour or more to reach remaining patches of wildlife habitat.  That’s a big change in a relatively short period of time.  Our connections to rural places are dwindling, and I often find myself wondering what effects these changes have on our kids.

Richard Louv posed the question well in his book Last Child in the Woods.  “Nature is imperfectly perfect, filled with loose parts and possibilities, with mud and dust, nettles and sky, transcendent hands-on moments and skinned knees.  What happens when all the parts of childhood are soldered down, when the young no longer have the time or space to play in their family’s garden, cycle home in the dark with the stars and moon illuminating their route, walk down through the woods to the river, lie on their backs on hot July days in the long grass, or watch cockleburs, lit by morning sun, like bumblebees quivering on harp wires?  What then?”

Too many of our remaining open spaces are shrinking, often disappearing entirely as the human population keeps growing, requiring more resources, more housing tracts, more strip malls.  The result is often increased pressure and overuse of the few open spaces that do remain, and this increased pressure often leads to new rules aimed at protecting these resources.  Today more than 57 million Americans live in homes ruled by some type of condominium or homeowner’s association, and many of these groups have strict covenants that ban or discourage kids from playing in landscaped or natural areas.  City ordinances also often restrict children’s access to open spaces or limit the activities they can engage in while playing outside.

The intent of these rules is generally good—protection of a shrinking resource.  But discouragement of natural play has been a sad and unintended consequence.  Many remaining pockets of urban open space are now strictly set aside to be seen—not touched.  Too often, there is no room left for free, unorganized, outdoor play.  And this creates unfortunate consequences for kids.  In too many communities there is nowhere left for them to wander off the sidewalk, build forts of fallen branches, construct rock pools along streams, catch snakes, find out what wild onion tastes like, or lay on the earth in the dappled shade of an oak tree, unhassled, unhurried, unscheduled, simply reflecting and dreaming.  As these quintessential outdoor childhood moments fade, I can’t help but worry that there is some important aspect of being human that fades along with them.

In the not too distant past, a basic familiarity with and understanding of the natural world was seen as an important character trait.  As Robert Michael Pyle explains, “George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were both excellent naturalists.  A lively, experimental curiosity in plants and animals was nothing unusual, it was simply one component of the engaged citizen’s life.”  In their day, and for more than a century afterwards, natural history was emphasized in schools and universities as an important area of study.  And before that—for millennia—understanding the life we shared this planet with was essential knowledge.  Bill McKibben states it perfectly.  “You pass a hundred different plants along the trail—I know maybe twenty of them.  One could spend a lifetime learning a small range of mountains, and once upon a time people did.”

Now, however, fewer students are being trained to identify plants and animals, to understand their life cycles, their unique ecological positions and interactions.  As a result, even while our population is skyrocketing, there is now a far smaller proportion of human beings with the ability to recognize, let alone understand, a significant number of the living things we share this planet with.  At a time when conservation of biodiversity is most urgent, we are losing much of our capacity to train and employ people with the right knowledge to sustain Earth’s ecosystems.

Why does it matter?  If we know something, if we’ve grown up with it, engaged with it, we’re more likely to care about it.  But if we’re not familiar with the plants and animals around us, then we won’t recognize when they disappear.  We won’t make the changes needed to sustain them.  Ignorance breeds indifference.  The less we know, the less we notice, the less we care, and it’s a downward cycle.  We’re already losing our natural neighbors, eroding the ecological processes that sustain life on this planet, and in the end it will come back to bite us.

However, each of us, you and I, can start turning the cogs in reverse.  We can get to know the living things in our own communities, and if we share these things with children, we’ll all benefit.  Playing in nature, whether young or old, stimulates a sense of wonder, creativity, imagination—and it helps us develop and nurture a sense of place.  Taking the time to notice and experience nature, even urban remnants, even the tiniest patches of garden, helps us realize (and remember) that we’re part of everything, made of the same elements as earth, water, air and all living things.  We’re all just pieces of the greatest puzzle, and we need to pay attention to how the pieces fit.

For children, pockets of nature render a canvas for countless types of creative play—opportunities for control and mastery, construction of special spaces, manipulating loose parts, moving in a wide variety of ways, taking risks, solving problems, and finding stillness.  In the words of Stephen Kellert, Ph.D., “Play in nature, particularly during the critical period of middle childhood, appears to be an especially important time for developing the capacities for creativity, problem-solving, and emotional and intellectual development.”

In this, it seems the Scandinavians have gotten it right.  The Norwegians have a word, Friluftsliv, which translates to “free air life”—a concept that promotes direct experience in nature.  In Norwegian culture it is viewed as a prerequisite for learning.  The link between nature and learning is also emphasized in Finland’s education system.  And it’s an informed approach.  A growing body of research has shown that multisensory experiences in nature help build the cognitive constructs necessary for sustained intellectual development.  Finland consistently ranks in the top three countries worldwide for academic performance (the United States ranks far below at 20 according to recent United Nations Study).  Finland pays higher teacher wages, allows more independence for teachers, has shorter school hours and emphasizes the value of unstructured outdoor play time.

We also know that spending time in nature enhances well-being and provides positive mental health benefits.  Time and again, research has shown that nature-based experiences reduce anxiety and stress, improve self-esteem, mitigate depression, alleviate attention disorders, and even lead to positive behavior changes.

How can spending time in nature help with all these things?  In nature we tend to engage in the types of activities and thought processes that enlist and strengthen the brain’s right hemisphere, and this has been shown to restore harmony to overall brain function.  It helps to think of the brain as being capable of two types of attention—directed attention and involuntary attention.  Our culture has become more and more focused on directed attention, leaving less time for involuntary attention.

Why does this matter?  Directed attention is what our kids use for hours at school or while doing homework.  It’s important, but it causes fatigue, and too much directed attention leads to agitation, impulsiveness, irritability and difficulty concentrating.  Involuntary attention, on the other hand, is more automatic and can be thought of as fascination.  Involuntary attention is what we often experience in the outdoors, and it gives our brains a much-needed break from the rigors of directed attention and helps restore brain performance.  In fact memory and attention span have been shown to improve by an average of 20% after just one hour of interacting with nature.

I think most of us in the modern world could use an extra dose of involuntary attention in our daily lives—and we can find it by walking in the woods, growing a garden, watching the sunset… getting mud on our feet.  Even though 98% of us now live in cities, we can find, create and cultivate the pockets of nature around us.  We can share these places with the kids we care about—and if we do they will benefit!  So will we.

Are you looking for natural spaces near your home?  Check out this Where to Go site from Discover the Forest or this Nature Findsite from the National Wildlife Federation.

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

The Security of Nature

I enjoyed this essay by Sarah Walker, a member of the Board of Directors for the Child and Nature Alliance of Canada.  She makes a great point.  In many ways we are teaching children to be afraid of the world.  We need to counterbalance those messages by helping them find places in the natural world where they feel connected, secure and confident.  We need to help them understand life is good.  Here is a snippet from Sarah’s essay:

“Today’s kids live in world where society largely believes that leaving the backyard to play is too dangerous, walking to school is too risky and exploring the small river in the park is a health hazard. The only place to be absolutely safe is inside…  

However, there is something that we can do to make sure this generation of children reaches adulthood feeling secure and safe in their individuality and surroundings. Take your child outside; let them discover at what height they can jump from before it hurts, or how fast they can run down a grassy hill before they fall. Let them explore the fascinating world that is nature, let them watch a caterpillar turn into a butterfly and understand that their potential has no bounds.”

Read Sarah’s full article HERE.  Then take your kids outside and help them fall in love with the world they live in!

More Doctors Order Kids to Get Outside

A growing number of pediatricians are giving children a new type of prescription—GO OUTSIDE AND PLAY!

I have to admit that it makes me sad to be living in a time when doctors have to order kids to get outside and play.  But at least these doctors are taking action.  They see the problem, they understand it, and in some cases their prescriptions are having positive effects.

The Boston Globe highlighted the use of such prescriptions in one Massachusetts community.  “Many kids today don’t get outside enough, especially those without generous backyards or parents eager to lead them on nature walks.  So area pediatricians are increasingly writing prescriptions to encourage kids and teens to spend time outside, particularly during the summer months, when the weather is good and the lack of structured activity can lead to weight gain.”  Read the full article HERE.

Do what the doctor ordered.  Get outside.  Take your kids.  Get mud on your feet!

Let ’Em Eat Dirt

Here's another great article.  This one from the New York Times.

"Somehow, we’ve arrived at a moment when a kid playing by himself, Internet-free and helicopter-parentless, is a surprising thing. Huck Finn may be deep in the American DNA, but he’s disappeared from the summer landscape, replaced by the boy in the bubble. No dirt, no unplanned moments, and no time for discovery."  Read the full story by Timothy Egan HERE.

Let's bring Huck Finn back.  Now there's a kid who knew how to get mud on his feet!

Why so many kids can’t sit still in school today

This is a great article from the Washington Post.

"The problem: children are constantly in an upright position these days. It is rare to find children rolling down hills, climbing trees, and spinning in circles just for fun. Merry-go-rounds and teeter-totters are a thing of the past. Recess times have shortened due to increasing educational demands, and children rarely play outdoors due to parental fears, liability issues, and the hectic schedules of modern-day society. Lets face it: Children are not nearly moving enough, and it is really starting to become a problem."  Read the full article by Angela Hanscom HERE.

Let's take a page from our own long-ago childhoods, when we were given the time and space to roam a little, to play freely, to create our own games, our own rules, to enter the magical worlds of our imaginations.  Remember how fun and liberating those times were?  Let's give that our kids.  Let's help them get mud on their feet!

Green spaces deliver lasting mental health benefits

New research from the University of Exeter Medical School demonstrates that green spaces can provide long term mental health benefits to communities.

"Green space in towns and cities could lead to significant and sustained improvements in mental health, finds a new study published in the journal of Environmental Science & Technology.  Analyzing data that followed people over a five year period, the research has found that moving to a greener area not only improves people’s mental health, but that the effect continues long after they have moved.  The findings add to evidence that suggests increasing green spaces in cities - such as parks and gardens - could deliver substantial benefits to public health."

Read more HERE.

Midweek Meditation

Photo courtesy Algalita Marine Research Institute

“Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.” 
— Aldo Leopold 

The Big, Blue… Garbage Patch

Imagine turning yourself into a thumb-sized plastic action figure and squeezing inside an empty soda bottle. Then imagine some dimwit tossing the bottle out of a car window and into the mighty Columbia River. Where would you go? What would you see?

After getting thrown hither and thither on roiling rapids and drifting out to sea, you might expect to wash up on a tropical island with sandy beaches and a lone palm tree. More likely, however, you'd wind your way around the mighty Pacific Ocean for days, weeks, and months to end up in a giant, twisting, floating… garbage dump!

That’s right. Those vast, wild bodies of water we call oceans are filling up with plastic garbage.  Our garbage—old shopping bags, flip-flop sandals, water bottles, coat hangers, cigarette lighters, fishing nets… and on and on. In fact, the National Academy of Sciences estimates that 6.4 million tons of litter enter the world’s oceans every year, and many researchers believe this estimate is far too small.

So what’s causing this trash to accumulate in floating garbage dumps? There are three main parts to the equation. First, in our quest for a light, durable, malleable material to make things out of, we invented plastic. And we use it a lot—so much that in the past several decades plastic pollution has transformed the face of our planet—reaching every ocean and the most remote shorelines.

Courtesy of Algalita Marine Research Institute

The second part of the equation—many of us discarding our trash—isn't actually new. Our ancestors dumped trash for ages before us. Long ago, however, everything people used came straight from the natural world. So their trash was biodegradable, which means that microorganisms decomposed it relatively quickly. Plastic is very different. It isn't biodegradable. Instead, it is photodegradable, which means that sunlight breaks plastic into smaller and smaller pieces. Eventually a piece may be broken into individual molecules—but even then it doesn't go away. Living things can't digest plastic. Plastic is forever! 

The third part of the equation is as natural as sunshine, seaweed, and sandy beaches.  Ocean currents—and in this case, circular ones, called gyres. In fact, there are nine continent-sized gyres in the world’s oceans. They rotate clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise south of the equator. All nine of these gyres are accumulating plastic waste.

So after you (an action figure in a soda bottle) drift out to sea, you would likely reach one of the largest gyres on Earth—the North Pacific Gyre. Its circular currents would draw you toward its center, where you would bob about mingling with other discarded junk (sorry to call you junk). And there you would stay for a long, long, long time.

Courtesy of Algalita Marine Research Institute

Eventually, your bottle would photodegrade into pieces too small to support your weight, and you would have to catch a ride on more recently arrived garbage. A worn-out fishing float would work just fine. One thing is certain: you'd have plenty of trash to choose from.  Research has shown that there is six times more plastic by weight than plankton in the North Pacific Gyre, and more is accumulating all the time. Charles Moore, a research scientist who studies plastic pollution in oceans and the founder of the nonprofit Algalita Marine Research Institute in Long beach, California, describes his first time in the gyre this way: “I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic.”

Where does all this garbage come from?  It might start as litter thrown from a school bus window. It might blow from a landfill on a windy afternoon. It may be dumped from a fishing vessel in the Sea of Okhotsk or spill from a cargo ship in the Gulf of Alaska.  Even if you live in the mountains of Colorado, plastic that you don't dispose of properly could eventually make its way down storm drains, streams, and rivers to end up in the ocean.  After every heavy rain in Southern California, many tons of plastic trash flow from rivers into the Pacific.

Stomach contents of a dead Albatross on Midway Atoll
Courtesy of Algalita Marine Research Institute

And there is an even more sinister side to this plastic garbage than just making our oceans and beaches ugly. As you drift about the North Pacific Gyre you would witness sick sea animals—and many dead ones—because of all this trash. 

According to the Marine Mammal Commission, garbage in the world’s oceans affects at least 267 species, including 86 percent of sea turtles, 44 percent of seabirds, and 43 percent of marine mammals.  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that well over 100,000 marine mammals die each year because they get tangled in discarded plastic fishing nets. And some sea animals inadvertently eat plastic, thinking it's food. Charles Moore says that the stomach contents of dead albatross often “look like the cigarette lighter shelf at a convenience store.” To make matters even worse, toxic chemicals often coat plastic trash in the ocean, causing deadly poisoning and disease in sea life.

Stomach contents of a dead Albatross on Midway Atoll
Courtesy of Algalita Marine Research Institute

As a plastic action figure, you would survive in the North Pacific Gyre a long time. Parts of you, your feet or ears perhaps, might photodegrade, but overall you'd observe the ugly gyre for a good, long while. Perhaps you'd even beat the odds and eventually wash up on a distant beach. After decades of floating around the sea on pieces of long-forgotten junk, you'd likely have many thoughts about plastic trash and the environmental problems it causes. You'd likely have some ideas about how we could all help to make our oceans a little bit cleaner.  What would your solutions be? What would you tell people to do differently?  Please share your thoughts with us below.

To read several scholarly articles on the effects of plastic on health and the environment, see this theme issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Plastics, the Environment and Human Health

A Few Simple Things Can You Do:

1. Try to buy products that don't use plastic packaging.
2. Maintain and fix the products you own rather than throwing them away to buy new ones.
3. Recycle the plastic products you consume.
4. Buy recycled products.
5. Dispose of trash properly.
6. Tell your friends, family, and community leaders about the problems associated with plastic pollution.

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

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.

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.

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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.

               

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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.

Joshua Trees, Giant Sloths, and Climate Change

© Jimfeliciano, Stock Free Images

I’m a big fan of the Joshua tree.  Granted, it’s not much for climbing.  You wouldn't fasten a tire swing to it, or lean against its trunk to read a romance novel and sip sweet tea.  But just seeing a Joshua tree takes you somewhere... a place far off and long ago, when giant reptiles ruled the earth and our ancestors were just sniveling, naked fuzz balls hiding in dark holes.

I've enjoyed some wonderful trips to Joshua Tree National Park with my wife and kids, and every time we drive into the park I get this feeling that I’m entering some other world—some landscape from the distant past, maybe even the rocky surface of a far-off planet.  It’s a cool place, and the trees bring it to life.

But get this—there could come a time, within the next 60 to 90 years, when Joshua trees no longer grow in Joshua Tree National Park.  Already, the climate in this part of the Mojave Desert is becoming too hot and dry for the trees to flourish, and there is growing consensus that the Desert Southwest will experience some of the greatest future climate shifts, with temperatures increasing 6 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit this century. 

Research suggests that unless humans substantially reduce carbon emissions, Joshua trees could disappear from as much as 90 percent of their current range within my children’s lifetimes.  Already, drought conditions have caused the trees to stop reproducing within the park, and the area is only expected to get hotter and drier.  Someday, when my sons bring their own children to the park, the trees could be gone.

And here’s a kicker.  The trees may not be able to spread into areas with more suitable conditions as the climate shifts—because the animal that historically dispersed its seeds was hunted into extinction by humans some 13,000 years ago.  The Shasta ground sloth ate the seed pods of Joshua trees and dispersed them across large geographic areas.  Now, only a handful of small animals eat the seeds, and they do not travel long distances. 

In fact, during the Pleistocene, Joshua trees had a much larger range throughout the Mojave, Colorado and Sonoran Deserts.  But about 11,500 years ago, Earth’s temperatures rapidly increased as the Younger Dryas Period ended.  Of course, by this time humans had already stalked the Shasta ground sloth into oblivion, so Joshua trees were unable to disperse.  The trees died throughout their historic southern range, managing to hang on in pockets of what had been their northernmost limits.   

© Justinmetz, Stock Free Images

Now, thanks to human emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gasses, we are entering another period of rapid climate change—far more rapid than anything the planet has experience in at least half a billion years.  The Joshua tree, already reduced to a fraction of its potential range, will be further decimated.  Unless people take an active role in collecting the seeds and planting them in more suitable locations as the climate warms, the Joshua tree will only survive in small refuges at the northern edges of its current range—many miles from Joshua Tree National Park. 

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

We've Got Some Big Feet!

The global human population has topped 7 billion people.  There are more than 315 million of us living in the United States alone.  Those are big numbers.  They’re hard to wrap your mind around.  What are the implications of that many people running around the planet?

Here are a few facts to chew on:

• In the United States, each of us will throw away approximately 29,700 pounds (almost 15 tons) of plastic food packaging during our lifetimes.  We’ll each drink our way through an average of 43,371 soda cans.  Together we throw away 60 million plastic bottles and 100 million aluminum and steel cans every day.  That’s enough cans to build a new metal roof over New York City every single day!
• The average American will send 64 tons of waste to landfills over the course of a lifetime.  As a nation, we generate 246 million tons of landfill waste every year.
• The average baby in the United States uses 3,796 diapers.  If you consider the ingredients that go into manufacturing those diapers, then each child’s diapers alone are responsible for the consumption of 1,898 pints of crude oil, 715 pounds of plastic, and 4.5 trees.  Each year, we throw away a combined 18 billion diapers in the United States alone.  That’s enough diapers each year to stretch around the world 90 times.  And the average diaper will take more than 500 years to degrade.
• The average American will use 285 tons of coal in a lifetime.  The United States accounts for approximately 5% of the world’s population, but we use more than 25% of the world’s energy.
• By our first birthday, those of us born in America will already be responsible for more carbon dioxide emissions than a person in Tanzania will generate in a lifetime.  We are responsible for 5 times more carbon emissions than the average Frenchman and 20 times more than the average Indian.
• We burn through more than 10,500,000 barrels of oil a day just to run all the cars in the United States.
• Over the span of an average lifetime, we’ll lose more than 93 million acres of open space to development in the United States.  That is a chunk of land equivalent to the size of Montana.  We lose approximately 2 acres of open space every minute of every day.
• If everyone in the world lived like Americans, we’d need more than 4 planets to meet our natural resource needs and absorb our waste and pollution.
• Earth has been around for more than 3.8 billion years.  Humans are no more than newborns in comparison.  If we imagine that the planet is one day old, then humans have existed on it for just a few seconds.

Wow!  We’ve changed the planet in a big way in a relatively small amount of time.  But we can learn to reduce our footprint.  For some ideas on how to start, check out these tips from the Center for Sustainable Economy.

The facts listed above are demonstrated in National Geographic’s video Human Footprint.  It’s worth watching.

As always, go outside and get mud on your feet… just step lightly.

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

A Great Article by Richard Louv

This is the opening paragraph from a great article by Richard Louv, Co-Founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Children and Nature Network.

Young people care about the future, and many are leaders in the fight against global warming. Organizations such as Energy Action Coalition have galvanized thousands of students in an impressive effort to build what it calls “the youth clean energy and climate movement.” The success of future environmentalism also depends on connecting more people personally to the natural world. Especially children.

To read the entire article on the Children and Nature Network blog click here.

Kids and Nature—The Connection Matters

We humans have become an unprecedented force on the planet. 

It took nearly all of human history—hundreds of thousands of years since Homo sapiens first strolled onto the savannas of Africa—for the human population to reach one billion early in the 19^th century.  After that, it took a mere two centuries for our numbers to skyrocket past seven billion.

Seven billion!  And growing fast! 

It takes a lot of land, water and other resources to keep this growing mass of humanity alive.  And we’re dramatically changing the biological, chemical and physical characteristics of the world to meet our lifestyle expectations.

Each year we destroy swaths of forest totaling the size of Panama.  Estimates project that 90% of Earth’s original forests could be lost by 2030.

Since the 1600s, we have destroyed more than half of the historic wetlands in the United States.

The Pacific Ocean now contains 3.5 million tons of trash—floating garbage swirling in an area the size of Europe.

Inside the tissue of our bodies, we carry a mixture of metals, pesticides, solvents, fire retardants, waterproofing agents and by-products of fuel combustion.

Add it all up—some scientists estimate that we’re driving 150 to 200 species to extinction every day!  Extinction!  We’re talking about living miracles that took millennia to evolve and will never be seen again.  Never.

That’s one heck of a footprint.

And that’s why now—more than ever—we need to help our kids connect to and understand the natural world.  Earth’s biosphere is their home.  They rely on its plants, animals, air, water and soil far more than we teach them.  Far more than we even admit or understand.

Our children’s future depends on us helping them develop a deep appreciation for the natural world, humanity’s place in it, the myriad connections between the oceans, forests, air, soil and countless living creatures.  But we’re not doing enough to help them understand and connect with wild places.  In the words of David Suzuki, “We’re in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone’s arguing over where they’re going to sit.”

Stop arguing.  Jump out of the car.  Slamming into that wall is going to hurt no matter where you sit.  Turn off the engine and start sharing nature with your children.

But where do we start?  Where do we take them to learn?

Outside.  Let them climb that tree.  Encourage them to swim in that creek.  Smile when they pick up that slimy frog.  Allow them to get dirty.  Sleep with them beneath the stars.

In the words of Richard Louv, “Passion does not arrive on a videotape or on a CD; passion is personal.  Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart.  If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature.”

That’s where the learning starts.  That’s how their innate curiosity will be fostered into a deep connection and appreciation.  The quality of their future depends on it.

So get outside.  Take the kids you love.  Share with them the joys of getting mud on your feet!

Coming soon:  numerous scientific studies demonstrate a positive connection between nature experiences and mental health in children.