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.

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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.

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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.

Midweek Meditation

"We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.”

― Wendell Berry

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.

John Muir Trail

Why would you want to hike more than 200 miles with your kids?  It’s a question I’ve been asked more than once when I tell people about my family’s plans to hike the John Muir Trail this summer.  And it’s a fair question.  200 miles is a long distance.  Kids whine sometimes.

But it’s been a hard question for me to answer—not because I don’t know the reasons, but because my reasons are so deeply intertwined in my own childhood wilderness experiences and the abstract ways those experiences shaped me.  Long before I could walk miles over rugged mountain trails, my own parents carried me into wild places on their backs.  As I grew older, we ventured higher onto mountain peaks and deeper into old-growth forests, and I’m so grateful for the things I found there—the smell of rain on unspoiled earth, the whispering of summer wind through aspen leaves, a sky so black and full of stars that it swallowed me… and, most importantly, deep feelings of peace, connectivity, and meaning that will stay with me forever.

I want my kids to know those things, not just on some superficial level but deep in their bones and in the mysterious recesses of their souls.  I want them to experience wildness for weeks on end, to become a part of it.  I want them to sit under the dripping branches of a pine tree while lightning tears across the sky and thunder shakes the ground beneath them.  I want them to stand on the highest mountain within a thousand miles and witness their amazing world stretching out before them with all its endless possibilities.  I want them to know the peacefulness and simplicity of sunshine spilling across a wildflower meadow.  I want them to understand that they’re a part of all that—small and fleeting but utterly and magnificently alive.

I agree that 200 miles is a heck of a hike, especially through the high Sierras where we’ll climb a combined total of 46,700 feet during the course of a month.  But I want my kids to know they can accomplish big things.  I have faith in them.  On some deep level down in my guts I know they can do it, and I know they’ll emerge as better human beings for the experience—more confident, more at peace with themselves, more certain of their connection to the world and their ability to navigate its uncertainties.

Sadly, when it comes to outdoor adventure and physical endurance, I think we often underestimate our kids.  We tend to set the bar incredibly low and then hold them back because we’re afraid of bears, boogiemen, and whining.  But kids are biologically designed to move and challenge their bodies.  We give them opportunities to do this for short periods through organized sports—which is great—but modern kids rarely have chances to push their physical limits for long periods of unstructured, outdoor adventure the way our ancestors did for thousands of generations.  Our ancestors moved, kids included, often covering several hundred miles each year—and our bodies are designed for it.  Walking long distances over difficult terrain is good for us.

Perhaps most importantly, I know there will only be this fleeting moment in my life when my sons are on that teetering edge between childhood and adolescence—old enough now to venture bravely into this magical world they inhabit, yet still young enough to hold my hand occasionally, to sit with their bodies snuggled against me and stare entranced at a sunset burning orange and red across alpine ridges… young enough still to want to spend a month in the mountains with their old mom and dad. 

I want to seize this time with them and do something big with it.  I don’t want to watch it slip quickly past, disappearing forever into the murky shadows of memory, without grabbing it fully in my two hands and charging into the beautiful briefness—my eyes wide open to every shift of light and color, my heart open to each and every one of life’s crazy, wonderful, mixed-up feelings.

An adventure will be good for all of us at this point in our lives.  I know I need one, and I think Pam does too.  Our lives are blessed, and we’re thankful for all the gifts we’ve been given, but more than a decade of careers, parenthood, and the inescapable routines that accompany them have numbed us somehow, or at least worn us out a little.  And I feel a deep need to do something large, something that will stir an old fire that still smolders somewhere in the marrow of my bones, something that will slow me down while waking me up, something to shake away patterns of living and enliven all my senses to the mysteries of being.  I want my kids to know that person—dive into an alpine lake with him, sleep uncovered beneath an endless, star-filled sky with him, stand on top of the world with him and shout because life is just so damn wonderful!

Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “I have known some great walkers and had particular accounts of many more; and I never knew or heard of one who was not healthy and long lived.”  Years later John Muir wrote, “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.”  I want my kids to understand and appreciate the important scientific and environmental legacy of heroes like these, so I’m taking them walking.  They may whine.  In fact, I’ll be amazed if they don’t.  But I know for certain they will also find some new magic in living, and I can’t wait to share it with them.

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.