©Joe Medieros
STANISLAUS CONNECTIONS
Working For Peace, Justice, and A Sustainable Environment
November 2003
Living Lightly
Rivers
of Birds, Forests of Tules: Central Valley Nature & Culture in Season
2. Thunderwings and Mightyfins: Nature on the Move
Enter
the season of high drama and expectation. As I tap out these words, Chinook
salmon are gathering in San Francisco Bay to await the right conditions for
entry into their natal streams; the air in the wetlands is electric with
California darners; suddenly you can hear sandhill cranes overhead at night or
see them circling in small families over the parks; the killdeer are back in the
schoolyard; and, if you have a few valley oaks or other native plants in your
backyard, you may soon be playing host to visiting thrushes, waxwings,
goldfinches, bush tits, or a variety of warblers. While you sleep, cranes and
geese, ducks and shorebirds, hummingbirds and hawks honor the ancient traditions
of the Pacific Flyway singly or in flocks, some of them numbering in the tens of
thousands. There is something deeply stirring about these pulses and about the
hard work of migration, its drama and lyricism.
In
his book, Crossing Open Ground, Barry
Lopez tries to describe the quickening he feels when he sees three hundred
thousand white geese at Tule Lake in Northern California:
At
first one thinks of it only as a phenomenon of numbers….What a visitor finds
as startling, however, is the great synchronicity of their movements: long
skeins of white unfurl brilliantly against blue skies and dark cumulonimbus
thunderheads, birds riding the towering wash of winds. They rise from the water
or fall from the sky with balletic grace, with a booming noise like rattled
sheets of corrugated tin, with a furious and unmitigated energy. It is the life
of them that takes such hold of you.
The
words synchronicity, energy, life
express the dazzling and purposeful movement from north to south, mountain to
foothill, ocean coast to inland lake, Arctic tundra to Valley wetland. They come
to feed, to loaf, to carry back within them the eggs they will incubate in the
northernmost reaches of the continent. If you stop for just a moment, look and
listen, you will notice nature all around you, winged and finned, on the move,
flying, swimming upstream, hovering, diving, feeding, fighting the current,
making epic journeys, offering itself to you as food and metaphor. And this
movement does take hold of you, especially if you are not a visitor but a
resident of the place to which the tired and spent travelers come. You want to
be hospitable and welcoming. You want them to have a few safe islands and
sufficient food. You want to reciprocate for the beauty, for the quickening, for
their fidelity. “Geese are traditional, one could even say conservative,
animals,” writes Lopez. “They tend to stick to the same nesting grounds and
wintering areas, to the same migration routes, year after year.”
Those
who have witnessed hundreds of cranes sailing into the Merced National Wildlife
Refuge at dusk, a wheeling tornado of Ross’s and Snow geese overhead at San
Luis, or the simultaneous rising of 15,000 Aleutian Canada Geese at the San
Joaquin National Wildlife Refuge, have had one of the quintessential Central
Valley experiences, always breathtaking. They begin asking questions. What
brings them here? Why do they come in such great numbers? Why do they keep
coming when the islands of wetland habitat are shrinking? In trying to piece
together the answers, residents may learn a lot about the natural history of
geese, pelicans, or tundra swans but, surprisingly, even more about themselves.
They discover that, like the editors at The
New Yorker, they “are sorry to disappoint.” Their lives need the
punctuating rhythms of migration. They need to see the struggling, dying salmon,
fighting steelhead, opportunistic eagles, napping cranes to sort through their
own small griefs and grievances.
Of
the four million acres of historic wetlands, the Central Valley has barely four
to six percent left. Of roughly a million acres of riparian gallery forest, we
may have under ten percent left. Is there any way to reconcile nature on the
move with people on the move? In a witty essay (“Don’t Move!”) written a
few decades ago, Gary Snyder urged folks to stay put and cultivate a bioregional
awareness, that is, to value the land, water, flora and fauna of their
particular watershed and to become the voice of whatever didn’t have one. It
seems that someone did show up at the next council meeting in his bioregion to
speak on behalf of Doug Fir. We, for example, could use a few voices for the
beleaguered Valley Oak, so that our junior high students (and their parent
accomplices) would see the remnant, heritage oaks as worthy of something more
celebratory than a ritual toilet-papering.
Try
to get out. Out of the house at night to listen to the passing cranes, out of
the car at local wetlands to take the short hikes to viewing platforms at dusk
(when the heat and mosquitoes die down a bit), out of the classroom and into the
parks, out of the speed of your daily routine and into the rhythm of millennia.
Stop so you can see what’s moving. And, if you have time, take a gaggle of
children to a freshwater marsh or the banks of the Stanislaus or Tuolumne River.
Let them observe the kindness of mud, the importance of gravel, and the healing
power of kinship.
For a list of U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service wildfowl tours at the San Joaquin, San Luis & Merced National Wildlife Refuges (all within close driving range of Modesto), contact John Fulton, Refuge Operations Specialist, Visitor Services, 209 826-8508; john_fulton@rl.fws.gov
Read
Part 1, "A walk in the vanishing wonderland of oaks"
Modestan
visits Amazon Rainforest
By
LEE RYAN MILLER
Fourth
in a series
January
to May 2003 I lived on a ship that circumnavigated the globe. I was teaching
political science on Semester at Sea, a program run by the University of
Pittsburgh. Some 650 students participated, visiting nine countries and ten
ports.
In
this series I present excerpts from my journal and commentary on the societies
that we visited. This month I continue my description of how people live in the
Amazon rainforest .
February
7, 2003
The sunrise was a beautiful display of reds and oranges. After breakfast we hiked for several hours into the rainforest. Above us stood a canopy of tall trees blocking out the sun, while dense foliage clung to us as we made our way down a narrow, muddy trail. Some of the plants and animals we saw included tiny leaf-cutter ants carrying leaves many times their size, and a tree whose sap was as flammable as kerosene. Our guides taught us some jungle survival skills, such as building a shelter, laying a snare for animals, finding water, and making fire without matches.
When we got back to the boat, we bathed in the river, then visited a village on a hill overlooking the river. We climbed up an enormous flight of steps. Our guides explained that the river floods for several months each year, and much of the forest lies under water during that period. The silt renews the soil, but it makes habitation difficult. If one lives on higher ground, the soil is shallow, and the nutrients get depleted after just two or three years. People tend to clear new land by burning the vegetation, a practice responsible for much of the destruction of the rainforest. When we reached the plateau, we noticed an acre or so of land still smoldering.
It was raining. The cool rain soaked our clothing, cooling us off after the strenuous climb in the hot, muggy weather. We walked along a muddy trail through the village whose inhabitants all wore western clothing. We met a man who was cooking manioc, the root of which is the staple food of the Amazon region. Most students wore sandals, and many got bitten by ants, which was as painful as a bee sting.
Afterwards, we played soccer with the men of the village who all wore Brazilian soccer jerseys. Most villagers and students alike played barefoot. After beating us badly, the villagers gave Brazilian soccer jerseys to a few of our best players, and we presented them with a couple of soccer balls.
The following morning, we went piranha fishing using chunks of raw meat as bait. I caught three things: the bottom of the river, a tree, and my own shirt. Two students each caught a piranha whose razor-sharp teeth gave the little fish a fearsome appearance. A single piranha can bite your finger off, while a school of them can strip your bones of all their flesh in just a few minutes.
After lunch there was a powerful rainstorm. Being all hot and sweaty, we put on our bathing suits, lathered up and rinsed off in the pouring rain.
We sailed back to Manaus that evening. The city had its share of poor people and run-down buildings like elsewhere in Brazil, but seemed to lack the grinding poverty apparent in Salvador, Rio, and other major cities. Manaus is located in the middle of the rainforest, far from any other large cities, and some 800 miles from the sea. Despite this, it is a major port, and the river was crowded with container ships. Our guides explained that Manaus was something of a boom-town, and had a very low unemployment rate, unlike most other Brazilian cities, because of government tax incentives provided to lure lots of foreign investment.
We attended a performance of the Boi Bumba, a regional dance, then we took a bus to an outdoor blues club. It was around midnight, but along the way we noticed lots of people jogging, bicycling, and skateboarding. I imagine that people exercise at night to avoid the intense heat and humidity of the day. That was the only indication that we were actually in the middle of a tropical rainforest.
Depending upon whom you ask, the Amazon rainforest is either a fantastic repository of biodiversity needing protection, or else a land of enormous natural resources that can lift millions of people out of poverty. Most inhabitants of rich countries hold the former view, while most Brazilians hold the latter. I left Brazil with a better understanding of both viewpoints.
The majority of Brazilians live in such extreme poverty that getting enough to eat easily trumps environmental concerns. While I was enchanted by the beauty of the rainforest, I also recognized that it is unrealistic to expect the Brazilians to protect it from development when they see such development as their only means of survival. The only way to protect the Amazon rainforest is for the rich countries like the United States to pay for it. This will require enormous expenditures of money to create the sort of ecologically sustainable development that will both protect the rainforest and reduce the level of poverty in Brazil. Are the taxpayers in rich countries willing to pay for this? Only time will tell.
Next month: the author explores the legacy of apartheid in Cape Town, South Africa.
Read
installment 2, Modestan
observes poverty and inequality in Brazil
Read Last
month's installment, part 1 of Modestan
visits the Amazon Rainforest
Learn more about Semester at Sea. Visit www.semesteratsea.com
Read more stories by Lee Ryan Miller at www.LeeRyanMiller.com
