Category: Misguided Man

Another Form of Bigotry-Human Prejudice Against Wildlife

©Marlene A. Condon

March 5, 2019

When you put out unsecured trash cans, you are responsible for enticing wildlife to create messes. Even worse, you endanger it, because animals sometimes swallow food-scented plastic, which clogs their intestines. Photo: Marlene A. Condon.

Bigotry does not apply just to people’s attitudes towards other people. Defined by Merriam-Webster as “obstinate or intolerant devotion to one’s own opinions and prejudices,” it certainly has a valid connection to the way folks tend to view certain kinds of wildlife.

Although society may still have a long way to go as regards addressing the many forms of prejudice exhibited over the eons by humans towards one another, it can still be said that we’ve come a long way from days of yore. Not so for our attitudes towards wildlife.

The generally accepted negative attitudes towards such animals as rats, bats, coyotes, and raccoons is exemplified by the Virginia Department of Game & Inland Fisheries. No wildlife agency should ever refer to the critters under its watch as “nuisance” animals. Such language further solidifies the bad feelings citizens already hold towards them.

Of course, DGIF is not the only party guilty of implanting unfavorable attitudes about wildlife. We ended 2018 and began 2019 with a local publication writing about rats on the Downtown [Charlottesville] Mall.

The writer made sure to point out that “the term for a group of rats is ‘mischief’,” which was news to me. In all my years of reading and talking with folks, I have never heard anyone use this term, which the writer undoubtedly employed to remind readers that she was speaking of animals likely to cause us trouble. Is this true? Not necessarily.

In real life, wildlife is not much different from the cats and dogs that people most often choose to make their pets. I know, because I had a pet rat when I was young, and he was quite companionable. He was a pretty, black-and-white lab rat that my father found for sale at a pet shop. I already owned white mice (also of the kind used for lab work, I am sad to say), so I guess my father figured I would enjoy a new addition to my menagerie—and I did!

My rat was named Melvin, the name of a friend of my oldest brother, but I don’t really recall now where his moniker came from. What I do remember explicitly is Melvin walking up my arms and onto my shoulders, and never once biting me while being handled.

He was not at all fearsome, and here was the value in my having been given mice and a rat when I was a child: I learned that there was no reason to fear rodents, despite the cartoons that so often depicted people (especially women) up on chairs screaming as a harmless little mouse ran around on the floor. Can you see the silliness of fearing mice to that extent?

But what about rats that are deeply despised in our society? The truth is that they get a bad rap from unusual events that garner biased publicity, and because they can carry diseases to people who attract them with their garbage. 

In the previously mentioned article about Charlottesville Downtown Mall rats, the reporter pointed out that, in a “very unscientific survey” [her words, not mine], “[c]ommonly mentioned problem areas include restaurant patios, tree grates, and garbage pick-up sites.” She didn’t point out that the reason there are rats in these areas is because people view the outside world as a garbage dump.

Sure, it’s an inevitability that folks are going to drop food on the ground near their table when eating outside; accidents happen. But if the person running the restaurant made sure the patio was cleaned at the end of the business day, he or she wouldn’t have rats performing nightly janitorial services. If mall patrons didn’t treat mall grates as unofficial garbage bins, rodents would not be attracted to them either.

As for the official garbage pick-up sites, why not work on reducing the amount of food waste in the first place? It’s a well-known fact that this country throws away an enormous amount of food, much of it from restaurants serving way too much for most people to eat at one sitting. Restaurants don’t need to dispose of more than 50 tons of organic waste every year.(www.turningclockback.com/restaurant-food-waste-facts)

They could offer patrons a choice of meal sizes so each person could order only the amount he knows he’d be able to consume. And when someone asks for mayonnaise, salad dressing, or butter on the side, why does he tend to receive enough for several sandwiches or salads or slices of bread?

The reason it’s so difficult to get folks to implement commonsense suggestions lies in inherent human laziness. It’s a chore to clean inside restaurant premises as required by law; who wants to make the effort to clean the patio outside? When walking along the mall, who wants to bother to carry unwanted food to an official disposal site when you can just throw it into a nearby grate?

When people don’t take responsibility for their actions, our wildlife suffers horribly. The writer of the article on rats suggested a New Year’s Resolution for readers: “Get the city’s rat stats in line with actual rat sightings…when it comes to rats—on the Mall or anywhere else—if you see something, say something.”

I doubt she realizes that she’s advocating for more poisonous bait traps that cause intense agony to animals that don’t deserve to die that way simply because they were doing their job. Yes, rats (and all organisms) have important jobs to do. One of the environmental services provided by these rodents is recycling organic matter back into the soil, ultimately for the benefit of growing plants. If you don’t want rats (and other creatures, such as flies and cockroaches) to perform this task, then people need to do it.

Societal rules must begin to include the demand for composting bins at restaurants and any establishment that sells food. And, of course, individuals need to clean up their act. If you don’t leave waste food lying around, you won’t attract rats and the other organisms that exist to recycle it. It really is quite that simple.

Wildlife shouldn’t be made to suffer inhumane deaths because people don’t live in agreement with nature. It’s time for folks to recognize human prejudice against wildlife for what it is: the last bit of bigotry that has yet to be addressed in society.

Stop falling into the trap of viewing certain animals as “vermin” to be exterminated by government officials or pest-control companies. Look at our world objectively and see wildlife for what it truly is: the cogs in the machine of life that supports mankind. 

The Blue Ridge Naturalist: Another Form of Bigotry— Human Prejudice Against Wildlife

The Future is Now: People Submit to Computers

©Marlene A. Condon
January 4, 2018

Futurists (people who make predictions about the future based upon current trends, especially with regards to technology) often suggest that machines will eventually take over the world. They typically see machines as somehow attaining the ability to think and act of their own accord, ignoring—if they so desire—the commands of people.
The futurists are right about machines taking over, but it will not happen because of innate intelligence on the part of computers. It will happen (and is happening already) because people put so much faith into the competence of computers that they are extremely unlikely to contradict these machines.
Last year I had the misfortune of having to replace my washing machine and a heat pump. Despite having spent way more money than I would have liked, I encountered months-long problems with these appliances, each of which depends upon a computer for proper functioning (an idea I dislike intensely).
Each computer informed the technicians that certain components needed to be replaced, which they dutifully took care of without question. Yet the original problem persisted. Following months of basically refurbishing my two brand-new pieces of equipment, I insisted that the computers had to be the problem. I could not believe what a hard sell this idea was!
People so believe in the infallibility of computers—even though they are no better than the people who make and program them, not all of whom possess enough skill to do a good job—that no one wanted to accept that they could be spewing incorrect diagnoses! But, yes, they were.
Once the computer was replaced in my heat pump system, it worked fine. However, even after the computer was replaced in the washing machine, it continued to put out error messages later found to be incorrect. In the end, the manufacturer had to replace the entire machine for me.
Do you think that after this experience I would want to place my life solely under the control of a computer? Absolutely not. What I witnessed was several perfectly capable technicians doubting their own competence and refusing to make their own informed decisions because of the supposed superiority of a machine.
Indeed, kowtowing to computers can be very dangerous. On May 19, 2017, the “man who saved the world” died at his home in Moscow with little fanfare. Yet if this Soviet military officer of the Cold War era hadn’t had the courage of his convictions, nuclear war could have ensued.
During the early hours of September 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov’s computers identified five U.S. missiles headed towards Moscow. Mr. Petrov had only twenty minutes to act. Based upon my local experience, I believe most, if not all, people in his position would have warned the military of an impending nuclear attack. Instead, this man—unafraid to use his own intelligence—informed his superiors of a system malfunction.
In a 2013 interview with the BBC’s Russian service, he said that he had all of the data to suggest an ongoing missile attack, and if he had sent his report up the chain of command, nobody would have said a word against it. “The siren howled, but I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the big, back-lit, red screen with the word ‘launch’ on it.”
An investigation later found that Soviet satellites had misidentified sunlight reflecting off clouds for intercontinental ballistic missile engines. In 1999 Mr. Petrov told The Washington Post that he did not rush to start a war because “We needed to understand, ‘What’s next?’” His gut feeling was that people don’t start a war with only five missiles. The New York Times reported that he said his decision to stand down was at best, a “50-50 guess.”
But Stanislav Petrov employed common-sense analysis, undoubtedly saving the world from a catastrophe. How sad that the death of such a brave man should have received so little notice, the significance of his decision basically unrecognized and underappreciated.
While life-and-death decisions do not comprise most situations, the inability of people to act because of their reticence to contradict a computer certainly results in time and money wasted for everyone involved. It can also result in serious consequences for humans and their environment.
Consider the water situation in Charlottesville at the end of the summer of 2017. On September 30, local news agencies reported that water levels at area reservoirs were lower than normal, but the water authority was not expecting to declare a drought watch. Why weren’t they?
After all, the director of the state climatology office at the University of Virginia had reported below-normal precipitation since May, and area temperatures had been above normal for much of September. It would be surprising if these two factors did not produce drought conditions, and indeed, they had.
Because I get my water from a well, I worry about groundwater when drought is threatening. Therefore, I had been keeping an eye on the streams in my area, and I witnessed one after another drying up. I wondered why no authorities were discussing the drought we were so obviously experiencing, and instituting water-conservation measures.
When the stream at the end of my road dried up on September 29, something that I had not ever seen happen until the serious drought of 2002, I knew groundwater was in poor shape. Finally, on October 5, the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority (RWSA) issued a drought warning. Why were they so slow to get folks to limit their water usage?
A major reason is that people today have somehow been made to feel inadequate when it comes to using their own reasoning ability. Thus, numerous straightforward decisions that governmental agencies should determine for themselves are instead farmed out to “experts” who, it is presumed, are better equipped to make them.
Hence, the RWSA, instead of sending someone out to look at streams to see what was happening, instead paid a contractor to run a computer model to predict a probability of a shortage of local water. (dailyprogress.com/news/local/water-levels-are-low-but-drought-watch-not-expected/article_e196c0da-a639-11e7-910c-9b50322f67c0.html)
However, a computer program is not better able to indicate the likelihood of drought than simple observation of local conditions.
We have been deluded into thinking that computers are infallible, and our naivete leads us to make our lives ever more dependent upon them. When I am exercising, I commonly get asked for directions from deliverymen because their GPS device has led them astray. This would never happen if they relied on a good old-fashioned map, which many younger people no longer even know how to read.
Therein lies the real danger of entrusting computers to take care of so many things in life. When they fail, people are helpless.

Blue Ridge Naturalist: The Future is Now: People Submit to Computers

“Look Deep into Nature and You Will Understand Everything” (Albert Einstein)

©Marlene A. Condon

January 4, 2019
After a raccoon kit fell out of a nest box located on a radio tower in the author’s yard, its mama had to work against gravity to carry it about 30 feet straight up—an arduous task, indeed! Photo: Marlene A. Condon.

When I wrote my book in 2005, I mentioned that no matter how many precautions you took, you would get scratches, and I dutifully pointed out how important it was to keep tetanus shots up to date and to clean your wounds with soap and water. However, I did not dutifully mention applying antibiotic ointment to them. 

When my editor read this section, he called to ask why I hadn’t suggested using these ointments that are so widely recommended for cuts. I told him that when washing with soap and water was not possible, or my cut not serious enough to make me take the time to get into the house to wash it, I had always applied my saliva to the broken and bleeding skin instead. I had never gotten an infection in all my decades of gardening, so I had never personally found the use of antibiotics to be necessary.

I explained that during my life, I had observed numerous kinds of mammals. I’d noticed that when an animal had a wound, it licked it—sometimes a lot—suggesting to me that saliva must have antibiotic properties. Just as form follows function in architecture and animal anatomy, I realized that in life, behavior follows necessity.

Wild animals, like humans, get hurt, but unlike humans who have salves they can apply, wild animals need a way to help their injuries to heal without infection. It was obvious to me that because wild animals do not waste energy (every behavior can and must be explained in terms of benefit to the organism), they would lick their wounds only if it were beneficial. I saw no reason why that rule of thumb would not also apply to me when I suffered a superficial cut.

My editor found this fascinating. It made sense to him, and he pushed very hard for me to include this information in the book. However, I demurred. Knowing how litigious our society had become, the lawyer in me thought better of making any recommendations regarding human health without an official study to back me, even though the scientist in me knew I must be right.

Indeed, just two years after my book was published in 2006, researchers in the Netherlands confirmed what I’d told my editor, and went even farther than I did:

“A report by scientists from The Netherlands identifies a compound in human saliva that greatly speeds wound healing. This research may offer hope to people suffering from chronic wounds related to diabetes and other disorders, as well as traumatic injuries and burns. In addition, because the compounds can be mass produced, they have the potential to become as common as antibiotic creams and rubbing alcohol.” [Licking Your Wounds: Scientists Isolate Compound In Human Saliva That Speeds Wound Healing] sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/ 080723094841.htm

I wasn’t surprised by these findings. For man to have survived on this planet for as long as he has, I would expect the human body to be able to heal itself, at least to some degree, when a person emulates wild-mammal behavior that results in healing. By living in close association with nature, we can pay attention and thus learn important life lessons that empower us to make wise choices.

I’ve watched many kinds of critters raise their young, and this activity provides valuable mentoring for anyone who’s a parent. Wild animals raise their offspring to be self-sufficient within the timeframe allotted them, and then the young are sent out into the world to make their own way.

Humans should copy this blueprint, but parents do not always properly prepare their young adults to set sail on their life’s journey. Especially in today’s electronic world, children are unlikely to be taught the basics of survival.

Such things as knowing how to grow your own food; how to cook, clean, and sew for yourself; as well as how to behave in human society to keep it functioning properly are critical skills that are no longer viewed as particularly important or essential to life. Yet if our civilization decays into chaos, as so many ancient civilizations have done before us and as currently seems more likely every day, the only thing of value will be your ability to perform the tasks necessary for survival.

One type of behavior you don’t see in the natural world is helicopter parenting. Although a degree of oversight is necessary to prevent your child from getting seriously hurt, some parents stifle their children by hovering over them and denying them any independence. But a degree of self-determination is necessary for youngsters to learn about the trials and tribulations they are likely to experience. 

I once heard a baby animal crying and looked out the window to see a Common Raccoon frantically running around in circles, obviously terrified. I then noticed its mom coming down from the den to rescue her kit that must have fallen out of its home high above the ground. She calmly picked up the little animal in her mouth and, although it was quite an effort, carried it upwards about 30 feet. I’m sure that baby learned a valuable lesson about the necessity of exploring its world in a more cautious manner, as it never again fell out.

Birds can teach us valuable lessons. In many species, males of mated pairs not only help to raise chicks, but also take care of the female as she is incubating. A male Carolina Wren, for example, brings his mate food. A male Eastern Phoebe perches nearby the nest site all day to warn his mate if predators are around and to try to drive them off. Women would do well to find men with these qualities!

Mother Nature is a wonderful teacher, and you can apply her wisdom to your own life by paying attention to what our fellow inhabitants of the planet are doing out there. Best of all, there’s no tuition to attend this school where the learning never ends. 

Blue Ridge Naturalist: “Look Deep into Nature and You Will Understand Everything” (Albert Einstein)

Consequences

©Marlene A. Condon

A tick waits patiently on a grass stalk with its front legs out, ready to grab onto any large mammal passing by. Photo: Marlene A. Condon.

Thought experiments can be extremely useful when making decisions about how to manage the natural world. They can allow us to confidently predict a future outcome within specified parameters by employing knowledge of current, similar situations. 

For example, we know that one of the reasons the deer population exploded in the eastern United States over the past few decades was because the main predators (wolves, cougars) of these hoofed mammals were driven to extinction by humans in this part of the country. We also know that tick numbers increased as a result, along with Lyme Disease. 

By employing this knowledge, we can work through a thought experiment to predict what will happen when the efforts to bring back the American Chestnut (Castanea dentata) have reached fruition. It may make us rethink whether this effort is as good an idea as it might seem.

The American Chestnut, ecologically, culturally, and commercially significant, was infected by an Asian fungus first noticed around the beginning of the 20th century. Within 50 years, chestnut trees from Ontario, Canada (the northern edge of the species’ range) to its southernmost distribution in the eastern United States were virtually gone—the consequence of people’s interest in acquiring exotic plant species, some of which carry pathogens our native plants have no ability to coexist with.

Many organizations and scientists have since worked hard to breed a resistant American Chestnut. For decades, researchers have been crossbreeding a naturally resistant Asian species of chestnut with the American species in the hopes of creating a plant with the American Chestnut qualities that made it so valuable. However, it takes years for these trees to reach sexual maturity, making the entire process very slow, and no trees have been bred of extremely high resistance to the fungus.

But scientists have a new “trick” for improving resistance. American researchers are hoping to bring the American Chestnut back as a genetically modified organism, abbreviated as GMO, a term you may be familiar with. Many food crops are now GMOs, a tinkering with nature that some folks think is great, but which others have concerns about—and with good reason. “Transgenic” organisms (those with the genes of a totally different species within them) could possibly alter the genetic blueprint for others of their kind in the wild, with unknown consequences. Once the genie is out of the bottle, there is no putting it back in.

People tend to dismiss such concerns when they want something, and people want to bring back the American Chestnut. Researchers from the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry have engineered highly blight-resistant saplings by splicing a gene from wheat into the tree’s genome. Wheat and other grasses carry a naturally occurring gene that produces an enzyme that lessens the effects of oxalic acid, the main “weapon” of the fungus infecting our native chestnut.

It may take two to four years for the researchers to obtain permission from U.S. and Canadian regulators to distribute their GMO. If they are successful, their trees would be the first genetically modified organisms released into the wild for the purposes of reintroducing an endangered species. Recent tests have shown their genetically modified trees match or surpass the resistance of Asian trees to the fungus.

However, there will be consequences to bringing back the American Chestnut that people have not considered. Although many folks fall easily into the trap of believing that there couldn’t possibly be anything wrong with trying to restore the natural world to a former state, there can be plenty to be concerned about, especially in this case.

Today’s world is not the world of more than a century ago. When the chestnut dominated the forest canopy, it fed billions of Passenger Pigeons (Ectopistes migratorius) with the copious amounts of nuts it produced annually.

According to an 1813 account written by the renowned painter and naturalist, John James Audubon, “The air was literally filled with Pigeons…The light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse…” At the end of that day, these now-extinct birds were still flying by in the same numbers—their flight continuing throughout that night and into the next day and the next!

But thanks to humans, the population of Passenger Pigeons went from billions to just one within a hundred years of Mr. Audubon’s experience. A victim of overhunting and deforestation, their numbers dwindled until only Martha, a solitary female in a cage at the Cincinnati Zoo, was left (she died on September 1, 1914).

Fred Paillet, a University of Arkansas geoscientist, wonders whether it’s possible for the chestnut to someday be viewed as “invasive”, a problem, he writes, that he “would gladly live with.” [Winter 2010 issue of American Forests magazine] But he obviously hadn’t thought through that sentiment. 

Without the huge numbers of Passenger Pigeons that had coexisted with the American Chestnut, what will become of the superabundance of nuts that every mature chestnut tree will drop every year? They will be eaten by birds (such as jays, crows, and turkeys) and bears, increasing their numbers and making these animals a nuisance when they more frequently cross paths with people who will want more of them killed.

Deer and numerous kinds of rodents will increase in number, but the numbers of snakes (including venomous species) that could limit mouse populations may not increase, thanks to the overabundance of people who are living just about everywhere already, many of whom believe that the only good snake is a dead one. (Put this comment into a search box online and you might be horrified, as I was, to see the videos showing pointless cruel treatment of snakes.)

When folks refuse to coexist with these reptiles, snake populations do not keep pace with rodent populations, leading to a superabundance of mice and the ticks dependent upon them for a part of their life cycle. The ticks can reach adulthood and easily increase in number, thanks to the chestnut-fattened-up deer whose numbers will be virtually unlimited because people refuse to live with the predators that should be here. The associated diseases that ticks carry will then infect many more people than currently occurs.

The reality is that, in the 21st century and beyond, a world teeming with the imposing American Chestnut would be a world all out of whack and upsetting to people. Although it’s easy to fall for the allure of feeling virtuous by trying to recreate the natural world as it once was, that is an impossibility. You should be careful what you wish for, at least if you haven’t first considered the consequences. 

Blue Ridge Naturalist: Consequences

Resurrecting Faith Requires Connecting with Nature

©Marlene A. Condon

 

Photo: Marlene A. Condon.

The word “Easter” is not in the original scriptures. It originally referred to a pagan feast day of renewal and rebirth that honored the Saxon goddess Eastre. Because this holiday fell about the same time as the traditional memorial of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, early missionaries merged the two when they converted the Saxons to Christianity.

To disassociate church services that day from pagan ties and the commercialization of the holiday, some Christian churches now refer to Easter as Resurrection Day. It’s an appropriate name, not only for commemorating Christ’s resurrection, but perhaps also for a discussion of resurrecting faith.

The Millennials—those people born between 1980 and 2000—comprise the largest generation in American history, and according to research by the Pew Research Center, they are less likely to say they believe in God. They are also less likely to be affiliated with any religion, and they are not alone.

The Pew Research Center found that adults of all ages have become less attached to religious institutions since the beginning of the 21st century, but Millennials are at the leading edge of this social phenomenon. Why might that be?

Being the first “digital natives” (a term coined by writer Marc Prensky)—the initial generation to grow up with the Internet, mobile technology, and digital social media—they are also the first generation of “nature aliens” (coined by this author)—the first generation to grow up distanced from the natural world.

Millennials, generally speaking, are deprived of a connection to nature. And that deprivation is a direct pathway to a loss of belief in God. Spending an abundance of time within the virtual world of computers—a creation of man, not God—leads to the worship of Man, not God.

Thus, it is not surprising that in the quarter-century that the Pew Research Center has been polling on the topic of religious affiliation, the Millennial level of religious disaffiliation is at or near the highest levels recorded for any generation. But does living in the digital age preclude an attachment to the natural world?

A large part of the problem lies in the ease of mis/disinformation that can be so easily disseminated by way of the Internet. Anyone with a digital device and an Internet connection can post information (whether it be wrong, untrue, or blown all out of proportion to reality), and it is delivered instantaneously to what seems to have become an accepting and non-analytical public.

Thus, for example, we currently live in a world of germaphobes, people who fear so much the thought of getting a germ on them that they behave somewhat irrationally. They use disinfectant wipes on public surfaces, such as shopping cart handles, even though adults are highly unlikely to get sick if they don’t bother to do this (especially if they would just keep their hands away from their faces). The problem with using disinfectant wipes is that they help to breed supergerms.

How did we get to this point? A variety of culprits are responsible, from the engineers who come up with ever-more sensitive devices to tell us things we don’t really need to know, to the scientists who count the microorganisms and then inform the press to get publicity for more funding, to the news organizations that sensationalize their finds.

Unfortunately, no one applies critical thinking to the situation, which would tell them these miniscule creatures have been there all along, will continue to be there forever, and that humans have been able to coexist with them because our bodies are made to deal with them!

Worse, this compulsion to sanitize the manmade world has inevitably led to the idea of sanitizing the natural world. The number of “pest control” companies and the over one billion pounds of pesticides used yearly in the United States attest to this fact.

Additionally, people have a propensity to embrace negative ideas about nature, as if it’s their enemy. Considering that the natural world is literally our life-support system, this nonsensical attitude results from people viewing nature from a skewed perspective.

Consider ticks. These small arachnids are well known, thanks to Lyme Disease, a serious illness caused by a bacterium ticks can transmit to humans. Many people are terrified to go outdoors during the warm months of the year because, with the amount of publicity ticks get, people think the probability of getting Lyme Disease is extremely high. 

But compared to the other activities people engage in without worry, the risk of getting Lyme Disease is relatively low. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 11 people per 100,000 were confirmed to be infected in Virginia in 2013. With a population of about 8 million people, this works out to about 80 cases of Lyme Disease, which is treatable by antibiotics. On the other hand, 740 Virginians died in a car crash that same year.

Should people be more afraid of spending time outdoors than getting into their vehicles to drive the roadways? A rational person can see that, with the number of Lyme Disease cases about 11 percent of the number of vehicular deaths, the answer is, “Obviously not.” And yet they absolutely are. Why?

People tend not to fear the things they are familiar with, especially manmade objects such as cars, which can be quite deadly. Instead, they tend to fear the wildlife they don’t see often and thus are unfamiliar with. Worse, they pay more attention to and believe stories that exaggerate the dangers posed by wildlife.

How do we get people to connect with nature instead of holding onto a distorted view of it? Unfortunately, this situation is extremely difficult to rectify because people are bombarded 24/7 with a huge amount of misinformation, much of which originates with scientists.

Because these professionals tend to look at nature only through the lens of human experience, theirs is a biased view of the natural world in which organisms seem to be either “good” or “bad.” It is a subjective perspective, and thus not accurate.

Humans must learn to recognize the importance of coexisting with other life forms, which means understanding how to live in agreement with nature instead of fighting it. Every creature exists for a reason, and that reason is to assist in perpetuating life on the planet by helping to keep the environment functioning properly.

Yet the war on nature has never before been fought so vigorously, nor more powerfully, to kill all manner of creatures, from insects to mammals to plants. Satan himself could not have devised a more devilishly fiendish scheme to divorce man from God. 

 

Blue Ridge Naturalist: Resurrecting Faith Requires Connecting with Nature

 

The New Ecology

© Marlene A. Condon

A burgeoning human population places serious strain upon natural systems as well as manmade ones. Photo: Marlene A. Condon.

 

There is so much talk these days about sustainability that you are probably tired of hearing that word. However, a recently published book—The New Ecology: Rethinking A Science for The Anthropocene (Princeton University Press, 2017)—provides extremely valuable insight to what sustainability is truly all about and why it matters so much to each and every one of us.

Yale University professor and author Oswald J. Schmitz furnishes us with numerous in-depth examples of how human behavior can alter ecosystems (the communities of living things interacting with their non-living environments) so much that they can no longer support us. He does a superb job of making clear why humans must learn to take into account the natural world when deciding how to live their lives.

For example, codfish off the coast of northern New England and Canada were once so plentiful that they sometimes stopped the progress of ships! When discovered by European explorer John Cabot in 1497, no one could have imagined that the commercial cod fishery that would develop from these stocks would end 500 years later in a devastating collapse that would not be possible to resuscitate.

The story of this fishery provides a historically detailed case study that illustrates how human exploitation of a resource species can lead ultimately to an alteration in the proper functioning of the ecosystem and thus to disastrous consequences for humans. The inability of cod to recover by the end of the twentieth century resulted in serious economic and social consequences for the coastal communities of New England and Eastern Canada, as well as Europe.

Portuguese, French, Spanish, and English fishermen started harvesting cod off Newfoundland in the 1500s, when they mostly caught inshore fish by trawling baited long-lines or by casting small nets from rowing or sailing dories. The cod was salted and dried throughout the summer, and the fishermen would return with the preserved fish to Europe in the fall.

With the building of permanent settlements along the seacoast from Newfoundland to New England, however, fishing became a major enterprise. Larger ships, known as schooners, carried dories to harvest cod in offshore waters as well as inshore. Size-selective fishing began, with the largest fish (90-100-pound range) being valued more highly than middle- (60-90-pound range) or small-sized (less than 60 pounds) fish.

Increasing societal demand meant major American cities as well as European and Caribbean markets received fish, increasing the need to catch ever more cod, preferably the largest ones. With the development of the factory ship that could catch and hold larger quantities of fish, the small-scale 450-year-old inshore fishery was doomed to extinction as cod fishing became an industrialized activity.

Gigantic vessels employed emerging sonar technology (a product of World War II inventiveness) to electronically pinpoint the locations of codfish. The ships trawled huge nets behind them that could capture large amounts of fish in a single sweep.  Factory fishing led to a rapid increase in harvests, which dramatically crashed in the mid-1990s, halting the entire northern cod fishery, probably forever.

The takeaway from this situation is that humans cannot just increase or decrease their “withdrawals” from the environment based solely upon changes in human demands or prices without any regard whatsoever to their effect upon the harvested population. When harvest levels fell, fishermen should have backed off to allow the cod to reproduce and rebuild their numbers. Instead, the fishing effort increased, and people added insult to injury by taking the largest fish.

By taking the largest individuals, people reduced the productivity of the cod because larger fish reproduce better than smaller ones. But it was not just the cod’s inability to reproduce their numbers as quickly as they might have that drove this fishery to extinction. No, it is more complicated than that, which is why understanding the life histories of our fellow creatures is so vital to our ability to sustain their existence as well as our own.

The larger codfish were top predators in their ecosystem. They fed upon mid-sized predators, such as squid, crab, and mackerel that feed upon small-bodied larval and juvenile cod (as well as other kinds of tiny animals).

Larger-sized adult cod are better able than smaller cod to assist their offspring to reach adulthood by limiting these mid-sized predators. In other words, it is now much more difficult for young cod to reach adulthood, which limits the numbers of adults to reproduce, which limits the numbers of young cod, and so on ad infinitum.

Because humans did not recognize cod as part of a system of interdependent species, they created a series of cascading effects that keeps the cod from recovering to harvestable levels, despite the now-decades-long moratorium on fishing. Accepting the reality that species are part of complex food webs that humans need to respect and work within is what sustainability is all about.

Professor Schmitz includes many other such narratives in his book, including a fascinating one explaining the importance of termites to such large animals as zebras, buffaloes, impalas, and wildebeests. (Who knew?) These accounts should probably be required reading for students and adults alike as they make the concept and importance of sustainability easy to grasp and to truly appreciate.

However, I feel the thesis of this book is seriously flawed. Professor Schmitz seems to believe that environmental problems wrought by people can be solved simply by teaching folks about the relationship of organisms with each other and their environment, which will, he hopes, lead to people choosing to live in a more thoughtful (i.e., sustainable) manner.

But even if people got the message and reacted accordingly, a burgeoning human population makes sustainability impossible. All organisms, including humans, must be limited in number because that is the only way in which the environment can function properly. Organisms need space, food, and shelter to live among us, but it is exceedingly difficult to get people to provide habitat for wildlife. Government does not help, what with regulations and tax laws that discourage appropriate landscaping.

Humans have significantly altered the world we live in, which some folks may believe is a good thing. But the diminishing capacities of the Earth’s ecosystems to sustain their proper functioning is cause for concern that must be addressed if we expect human life to persist on Earth.

Blue Ridge Naturalist: The New Ecology

Opinion/Letter: Nature should be natural, not chemical

Dec 14, 2015
The Dec. 1 gardening column by Mary Stickley-Godinez (“Gardening: Chemical warfare common in nature,” The Daily Progress online, Nov. 30) perpetuates the mistaken beliefs that humankind must constantly fight nature and that nature fights itself.
These notions — which every horticulture student learns and that virtually all garden writers, extension agents and nursery workers relay to the public — are wrong.
The horticultural industry is based upon experiences out of context.  The difficulties encountered inside a greenhouse, or in an equally unnatural setting such as the monocultures created by farmers, occur precisely because these environments are artificial constructs out of sync with the natural laws governing nature.
The columnist’s comment that it’s “war out there” originates from the nonsense put forth by scientists who themselves work in an artificial environment of Petri dishes instead of the real world.  Allelopathy — the concept that some plant species can hinder or prevent germination or growth of others by releasing chemicals into their environment — is dogma very much akin to that regarding “germs.”
Because scientists now possess the means to count the huge number of microorganisms that exist on surfaces that we touch, health hazards are suddenly deemed to be everywhere, when in fact, the effect of these organisms upon us is minimal. The preponderance of experiential evidence should tell us the truth, but people prefer to ignore facts in order to bash the natural world.
The concept of allelopathy, easily disproved by direct observation of the natural world over time, begs the question: If plants are capable of fighting their own wars, why do humans need to step in with yet more chemicals?
Truth be told, in gardens that support predators to prevent plant-feeding critters from overpopulating, the plants — which, by the way, exist to feed animals — do not need to chemically defend themselves.
Folks should learn to live in agreement with nature by growing a nature-friendly garden.  It doesn’t require chemical warfare by plants or people.
Marlene A. Condon
http://www.dailyprogress.com/opinion/opinion-letter-nature-should-be-natural-not-chemical/article_0b647e06-a25a-11e5-b5ed-87b903a33a66.html

Tallamy’s Oak

 

 

LUNA-MOTH-LIGHT-IMG_4740adjtrimARTICLE-541x420
Planting an oak to support caterpillars that feed birds is useless when ubiquitous and overly bright nighttime lighting keeps so many moths (such as this Luna Moth) from mating. (Note the numerous dead insects at the bottom of this light fixture that burned for days when the absent owner forgot it was on.) Photo: Marlene A. Condon.

©Marlene A. Condon

January, 2017

Seed catalogs are arriving in the mail now, exciting gardeners with visions of the beauty they can enjoy during the upcoming growing season. Whether you are planning your next garden makeover or your first garden ever, I hope you are giving the natural world due consideration.

When you create a nature-friendly garden, your reward is extra beauty and excitement from the numerous kinds of critters that will visit or make your yard home. You can feel proud that you are providing desperately needed wildlife habitat.

If you are interested in helping wildlife, you may have heard and taken to heart Doug Tallamy’s advice to plant an oak tree. This University of Delaware ecology professor has been working hard to encourage folks all across the land to plant one.

Unfortunately, his message has been lost in translation as garden columnists and bloggers tend to misinterpret the advice and spread misinformation to the public. They often tell readers that planting an oak will provide food for over 500 species of Lepidoptera (moth and butterfly) caterpillars, which will provide an abundance of food for a chickadee (a cute bird anyone would want to assist) and its chicks.

However, a single oak tree is not going to live up to that expectation. Professor Tallamy is referring to the entire genus of oaks, comprising about 60 species of these trees in the United States. Your lonesome oak is only going to support a fraction of the species total promoted by the professor.

Should you still heed this ecologist’s advice? In many cases, the answer would be no, even if one tree did indeed host that many species of caterpillars.

If you own a small yard, it is never wise to plant a tree that is going to attain great height and breadth. As the tree grows ever bigger, its expanding area of shade will severely limit your ability to grow a variety of plants on your property that would create a thriving habitat. One tree does not a habitat make.

If you own a large property that can easily include one or more oaks without shading most of your land, is planting an oak tree the best thing you can do to bring nature home? Again, the answer is no.

Although Sudden Oak Decline (brought on by stressors, such as severe drought or ill-timed frost) has been occurring in the United States, we still have plenty of these trees in our area to feed the moth larvae and the few species of butterfly larvae that need them for sustenance. (You can verify this fact by visiting a forest near you.)

The real problem is not a dearth of oaks, but rather an overabundance of lights. They burn at night inside and outside of buildings (including homes), in parking lots, along roadways and walkways, and in many public parks. These lights attract moths (that comprise the majority of the 500-plus species mentioned by Professor Tallamy) that do not then fulfill their destiny of mating and producing the next generation.

Artificial lighting has been disastrous for these insects, which are such a hugely vital component of a properly functioning ecosystem throughout the various stages of their life cycles. As light pollution has increased, moth populations have plummeted.

Moths are practically nonexistent nowadays compared to when I was a child. When you have a dearth of moths, you have a dearth of caterpillars for those chickadees—no matter how many oak trees you plant.

Furthermore, in most people’s yards, Professor Tallamy’s oak becomes, essentially, nothing more than an invitation to reproductive failure for many kinds of moths and butterflies. Although some lepidopteran species manage to escape the effect of our artificial lighting to mate successfully, they leave behind offspring that overwinter underneath leaf litter that many people habitually remove.

When people take away the protection afforded by the fallen oak leaves, these caterpillars and pupae do not make it to spring when they would have transformed into adults. So again, when fewer adult insects exist to mate, fewer caterpillars will exist to feed those chickadees—no matter how many oak trees you plant.

If, as a society, we are to increase caterpillar numbers for the benefit of our birds (and other critters), we must alter many of our life practices. To accomplish this goal, you must recognize what is truly important in life (maintaining the health of the environment) and what is not (removing leaves from underneath trees and excessive artificial lighting).

If your yard is large enough and you can keep the leaf cover where it belongs, you might want to plant an oak tree as part of a multidimensional nature-friendly garden. However, living in agreement with nature is not quite as simple as Professor Tallamy suggests.

Please do not let yourself be fooled into believing that all it takes to make a significant difference in the numbers of moth and butterfly caterpillars is to plant an acorn.

Blue Ridge Naturalist: Tallamy’s Oak

A Black Vulture a Day Keeps Disease Away

 

VULTURE-OTIS-_MG_7549copy
The Black Vulture’s preference for feeding upon putrefying (bacteria-ridden) carcasses makes it extremely important to our own health. (Photo: Otis Sowell, Jr.)

©Marlene A. Condon
March, 2016

Many farmers have decided that the Black Vulture is a predator that takes newborn calves and lambs. And when a problem arises nowadays that involves wildlife, the attitude of most people is to simply kill the offending animals.

However, that knee-jerk reaction can bring about much more serious problems in the long run because all organisms provide services that are vital to our own well being.

For example, the value of vultures to our waterways is largely overlooked. They help to limit health hazards throughout the 64,000 square miles that comprise the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Some 150 major rivers and streams, plus innumerable smaller tributaries, deliver water to the bay, and I have observed vultures performing their important purification services along my own local river.

One day as I was exercising, I noticed vultures perched in the trees up ahead of me. They were overlooking the river that the road parallels, and I knew their presence was a sure sign that there must be a dead animal somewhere in their vicinity.

When I got closer, I could see several of these big birds standing on a dead deer that was lying in the river. It’s likely the deer was hit by a car but not immediately killed, and then managed to reach the river just a short distance away where it then died.

It’s also possible the deer was ill before it perished in the waterway. Although most wildlife is healthy, sometimes animals get sick, just as we do, and a severely ill animal often makes its way to water. It knows it will continue to require this vital substance to remain alive, but unfortunately, it may then succumb to its illness in or near the water it had sought.

When carcasses end up in or along waterways, they can contaminate them if not removed in short order. Indeed, when vulture populations plummeted in South Asia, it led to a proliferation of rats and a rise in infectious diseases as a result of carcasses left to rot on the ground. (http://www.birdlife.org/datazone/sowb/casestudy/156[birdlife.org])

When an animal dies, it begins to decompose almost immediately. Particular species of bacteria work to recycle the dead creature and in the process produce bio-toxins. These natural poisons can sicken or kill people and most animals other than vultures.

Therefore a vulture is the ultimate sanitation worker to provide carcass removal services because it’s able to metabolize the noxious substances found in decaying flesh. It’s protected by highly acidic stomach liquids.

Wildlife conflicts between vultures and people must be resolved by the Wildlife Services division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture because these birds are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. But farmers haven’t been satisfied with the federal handling of their complaints, so they talked a state senator into introducing a bill this legislative session to make it easier for them to kill Black Vultures.

Because vultures reproduce very slowly and would be unable to quickly rebound in numbers, killing too many of them could impact the health of waterways and subject the bay to yet another stressor. Additionally, disease would be allowed to linger in our environment.

A female Black Vulture nests only one time each year, laying one to three eggs that take over a month to hatch. The young remain in the nest for two to three months, which comprises most of the breeding season.

Senate Bill 37 (SB37) to allow farmers to kill Black Vultures is quite likely to become law, but it shouldn’t. The crime the Black Vulture is accused of—killing lambs and calves—doesn’t make sense. This bird is not designed for hunting.

American architect Louis Sullivan wrote, “Form ever follows function, and this is the law [of nature].” With flat, weak feet and blunt talons that are not capable of grasping (form), the Black Vulture is clearly designed for scavenging (function).

So how and why is this species killing newborn animals instead of feeding only upon dead ones? When animals start behaving unnaturally, there’s a logical reason for it. The answer to the vultures’ strange behavior in Virginia is obvious if you’ve been paying attention to our environment over the course of the past 20-30 years.

Many farmers have done away with hedgerows, the mix of shrubby and herbaceous growth that had served as protective windbreaks as well as habitat for wildlife, such as Northern Bobwhite Quail that have disappeared in Virginia along with the hedgerows.

Today’s farm is typically wall-to-wall fescue (grass) with a few large trees. This unnaturally barren land has not only destroyed wildlife habitat, but has also done away with a “birthing room” for cows and ewes where they can safely give birth.

Pregnant females actively seek a spot away from the rest of the herd or flock where they can hide from predators while bringing new life into the world. But a field devoid of cover forces them to give birth out in the open, where they can be easily seen by predators and vultures that, like any hungry animal, will take advantage of a situation that presents the opportunity for an easy meal.

In this case, the vultures have learned that the afterbirth (the placenta, which is the membrane that transfers nutrients from the adult female to her young in the womb) will be expelled shortly after the birth takes place and they wait for it. As for the claim that Black Vultures deliberately kill newborn lambs and calves, I believe people are misinterpreting what’s actually happening.

Newborn lambs and calves are covered in mucus, a mixture of water, sugars, proteins, and other substances that are just as appealing to vultures as the afterbirth. These scavengers could be simply trying to feed upon this mucus, rather than intentionally trying to kill the newborn animal.

Additionally, Black Vultures are often getting blamed for killing newborns when, in reality, the young were born sickly and abandoned by the mother or succumbed to the cold. The natural time of year for most mammals to give birth is spring, but farmers often manipulate births to occur in late fall or winter, which is unnatural and thus inappropriate.

The difficulty that farmers are experiencing with the Black Vulture is a relatively recent development that mirrors the growing disconnect between humans, their environment, and their livestock. When people refuse to live within the context of the natural world, it invariably creates problems.

Farmers have a duty to take reasonable steps to ensure the welfare of their animals, and they should use their intelligence to accept, and work within, the constraints set by the natural world, rather than trying to ignore real-life limitations on their actions.

Blue Ridge Naturalist: A Black Vulture a Day Keeps Disease Away

The Unloved Slug

 

seal-slug-300x225©Marlene A. Condon
May, 2016

If you are like most gardeners, you probably hear the word “slug” and are instantly repulsed. Visions of slime and eaten plants may come to mind.

But slugs deserve far more respect than gardeners and others give to them. These invertebrates have the very important job of helping to recycle organic matter, returning it to the soil ultimately for the benefit of growing plants.

If you think that these critters exist to destroy your plants, then you have been misinformed. Unfortunately, it’s easy for that to be the case. University extension websites across the country perpetuate this very mistaken notion, and a book was even put out several years ago titled 50 Ways to Kill a Slug.

I read a review of this book that, in my opinion, should never have been published. It was totally out of touch with the real world of slugs and what they do.

The reader was told that slugs “are guaranteed to infuriate, [they] parade through the garden, munching on tender plants and leaving slimy trails that will always seem to be concentrated in areas where your bare hand will be most likely to touch the greatest surface area of slime.”

In spite of having gardened for more than half a century, I cannot relate at all to these comments. Why is that? What makes my gardening experiences so totally different from those of other long-time gardeners?

The answer is not a mystery. Simply put, I live in agreement with the natural world.

I love nature and I have embraced it virtually all of my life. Spending as much time as possible in the out-of-doors as a child and as an adult, I have seen first-hand, and often documented by way of photography and handwritten journals, the roles that various organisms play in the natural world.

If you took one of my classes or attended one of my slide presentations, you would stop thinking of slugs as “pests” and instead recognize them for the very important animals that they truly are: Mother Nature’s recyclers.

It’s vitally important for all organic matter (the remains of organisms that were once alive) to be recycled back into the environment. That’s because all living things, including us, are composed of recycled organic matter. This is the reason discarded vegetative scraps and inedible animal parts should never be sent to a landfill where it will be locked away and wasted rather than reused.

Slugs feed upon all kinds of things, from dead animals to sickly plants to animal droppings. By doing so, they recycle nutrients that your garden needs to grow well. In other words, they fertilize your plants so that you don’t need to spend time, effort, and perhaps money to do so.

Yet gardeners are constantly told to kill all—yes, I said all—of these lowly-yet-oh-so useful animals. This advice is nonsensical, so why does the gardening community take it to heart?

The problem is that the study of horticulture does not include learning about the natural world. Therefore gardeners are often not familiar with the actual roles that all organisms play to keep the environment—including their gardens—functioning properly.

The reality is that unless you understand how the natural world works, you simply cannot garden well. Gardening involves knowing about the lives of the animals out there so you can comprehend how they interact with plants and each other.

A slug—there are many species—is typically a fat little animal that looks damp. It reminds me somewhat of a miniature seal, only without the feet. And like seals, slugs are usually found where it is wet.

These animals will die if they dry out. Thus they tend to avoid direct sunshine, staying among and underneath plant debris on sunny days and only venturing forth into the open on cloudy or damp days.

If someone tells me that he has a slug problem, I tell him that he must be keeping his garden too wet. In nature, cause and effect is always logical. But in order to determine what is causing the effect observed, you must investigate exactly what the gardener is doing and how that affects the behavior of the animal in question.

For example, sometimes a gardener over-waters his garden, or perhaps he has applied so much mulch that it never dries out. When organic matter remains constantly wet, it starts to rot. That means microorganisms have begun to recycle it.

If plants are growing so close together that they don’t have enough air circulation to dry them off, they too will start to rot because conditions aren’t right for the plants to remain healthy. Mother Nature wants to remove such plants from the environment as quickly as possible because they are not likely to be able to reproduce. If plants are not going to help perpetuate life, they are wasting precious real estate.

Therefore Mother Nature sends in slugs that can recycle the rotting, sickly plants more quickly than the microorganisms are capable of doing. This action opens up the space sooner for new plants to grow that may perform better than the previous plants in that location.

Sadly, gardeners see the slugs and blame them for destroying their plants when, in reality, the slugs are correcting a cultivation “wrong” performed by the gardener. So this is why we have slugs: They tell you to change your gardening ways so your plants can grow well and strong instead of sickly and weak.

Don’t buy into the gardening prejudice against these fine animals that demands they be put to death instead of thanked for the work they do and the advice they provide you—if you pay attention and learn to speak the language of Mother Nature.

Blue Ridge Naturalist: The Unloved Slug