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During the last week I have heard snowplows scraping pavement on more than one occassion. This is not a Sandwich Mountain Farm sound. This is a Tamworth Village sound. While snow plows do pass by the Farm, the packed gravel of the Sandwich Notch Road rings differently, and because the Curious Gourds Studio is farther from the road, it is muted. Our home in the Village is on Main Street, close the road and close to other buildings. The sounds of passing plows are a regular contribution to winter dreams.

When a plow enters my dreams it almost wakes me. In this in-between place sound paints vibrant pictures and sends me along a trail of association. Previous plowings accumulate and layer in memory not so dissimilar from snowfall itself. A scene immediately rises in my mind: I see the plow pushing accumulated snow and headlights driving forward accumulated darkness. Hazard lights spin and spatter red and yellow in the midst of this moving bubble of light. This is what I see from what I hear, but If I crack my eyes I witness red and yellow revolve around my bedroom like frenetic planets, an accelerated celestial show for a sleepy sun. Falling snow obscures the form of this rushing envelop like interference in a poorly received analog television signal — “snow.” As quickly as the plow appears it disappears, and even I who am still curled up in bed and have closed my eyes again can “see” this movement through both increasing and diminishing sound and a very slight change in pitch, a rising and falling as the plow’s iron bow plays a Doppler fiddle tune on the single string of road. My ideal plow is always responding to a storm of some magnitude. In my mind, after the plow has passed, an imaginary morning comes with the world buried in snow. The plow can’t keep up, and while banks on either side of the road grow ever higher, the road itself is never free.

The sound of the plow is a sign, pointing the way to the plow itself. If I look at this semiotically, I need the third element, myself, someone to interpret the sign. And so we have the classic triad suggested by Charles Pierce: the sign (the sound of a plow), the signified (the plow itself), and a signifier (Nat curled up in bed bringing the two together in his mind). However, the relationship is not so simple. A sign can refer to something fictional, like “Hamlet,” just as easily as it might apply to an object in the world. More importantly, the sign may belong to a cascade of associations that go beyond the accumulation of snow.

In my mind a plow signifies more than a flurry. The world must be whited, streets and road buried. It’s like a blanket that warms and calms me because I know I am being embraced and told to stay home: the pressure to drive to work or school disappears and I think of stoking the woodstove, the heart of our home in the winter, itself a sign for comfort and radiating heat. After a storm colors inside become more vibrant in contrast to the bright white of the outside. The outside world initially comes to me through framed windows that are at once passages and barriers — a barrier to bitter cold, a passageway into a soft, white and gray world. Snowshoes in the corner beckon me. While our cats do use the windows during the summer to hop in and out, I use the more traditional threshold, the door, to cross into the outside (though I have been known to climb through a window).

I am outside sinking deeply into the snow even with the snowshoes. I come to the river nearby and see that it has succumbed to the storm and all that is left are little hillocks where rocks sleep beneath the snow. I return home and pass again through the door that presents me with not just a difference of color, texture and temperature, but also of scent. To my inferior nose (compared to Siri), almost all scents are buried while outside after a snowstorm. One exception is the woodsmoke that rises, falls and disperses, some small part making it to my nose. In contrast, inside there is the smell of breakfast cooking: waffles perfumed with vanilla, or maybe a spiced omelet, or potatoes, onions and garlic. Coffee and cocoa mix in, and also the fragrance of woodsmoke, the bit that slipped out while stoking the stove, an indication (sign?) that the inside and outside worlds are not entirely closed to each other.

The pictures go on as long as I doze— notice they are pictures even when they includes scent and sound? Yes, I am still half asleep in bed, though my dream of the perfect storm was so vivid I am not sure it is a dream. Siri licks my face and I pull myself out of bed while it is still dark. No storm, just a few inches of snow.

But that was two days ago. Today I wake at the Sandwich Mountain Farm to a dusting of snow as winter continues to tease us. Pink skies in the morning — sailor’s warning?

I am not dressed for the cold — the temperaure hovers at zero Fahrenheit — so I return to the studio.

I awake in darkness, as has become my habit during these days that are the darkest. The light within this darkness comes from the stars and moon, of course, and I have been enjoying the familiar shapes of constellations, which also makes me recall nights stargazing with Hans Rey. The the pattern of stars remain the same, at least during our life spans. Nights of star watching accumulate in a bin of memory,  returning us to moments that differ in temperature or clarity of sky; a moon comes and goes, waxes and wanes; with planets gyrating, comets flashing and asteroids sparking. But these are minor compared to the familiarity of the shapes that spin around the pole star.

Even these familiar friends can succumb to a more complete darkness as the stars and all thing celestial are hidden by clouds. This morning the clouds have parted and the sky clear. The world has also frozen up. There is talk of snow. So it has been for a few days now with only occasional meandering flakes in sight. When light finally does come this morning there is a steady flurry, but it is still only a tease of winter: the ground is dusted white, but there is no accumulation beyond this thin cover that lets tufted grass through and barely graces selected branches. The longest night, the darkest day, is nearly here; still we wait for winter.

Despite the brevity of light and the pre-winter bite, these days are some of my favorites for exploring nearby forests and crags. I like to do this off-trail, though the meaning of trail becomes ambiguous as I head out: paradoxically, I almost always follow trails when I am off-trail. The woods are full of the tracks and traces of various creatures passing through — moose, beaver and mountain bikers being the most common hereabouts. Non-living (but animate) things also leave their mark, such as seasonal streams that dry out but leave a clear path to follow.  Often there is a relationship between these kinds of trails made by geophysical or biological action: most trail tending gets down to grappling  with the synergy of soil compaction from hiking or biking and the erosion that surely follows: we make new seasonal streams by walking. There are other unexpected combinations in trail making. The best of plans for a low-impact or nearly no-trace trail can be turned upside down by unintended “users.” Such was the case when I found that the most frequent travelers on the “winter-only wilderness route” I advocated for Lost Pass were moose who paid no attention to the season and mucked up the wettest parts of this traverse. Similarly, many trails that were built to be used only as ski or snowshoe trails are now frequented by mountain bikers. Grassy ways have become muddy pits.

Yesterday Siri and I began our tramp on what was designed as a backcountry ski trail, but is now primarily a mountain bike track. The ski trail is located on a deconstructed U.S. Forest Service logging road (all brook and drainage bridges were pulled) that itself is based on an older New Hampshire pioneer-era farm track: tracks upon trails upon roads upon tracks; our traces build on each other. What surprised me were the number of very defined beaver trails came off of this corridor. “Busy” doesn’t do justice to what must be feverish nocturnal activity. They also left behind plenty of spiky stumps that could impale a stumbling tramper.

Most of what I know of beavers comes from their signs — gnawed and felled trees, amazingly indestructible dams, domed beaver lodges, flooded terrain, scat, tracks, and finally their trails. Beavers are largely nocturnal, so seeing one is a rare treat. I usually spot beavers by the rippling water trails they leave behind as they swim, and am familiar with the warning slap of a tail reverberating from a pond surface. These sightings are rare, however.

Beaver trails emerge from ponds and travel through the wetlands around ponds. Since beavers often make shallow mucky areas as much as they engineer true ponds, these trails often take the form of networks of carved out troughs through wetlands that allow beavers to travel in a something between a waddle and a swim. When the trails emerge from these waterways onto relatively dry land, they maintain a gentle “u” shape. My guess is that beaver bellies slide across the ground and gradually compact the soil thereby molding this form. These meandering and interconnected paths lead to areas where beavers are doing the hard work of felling and processing trees into appropriately sized dimensions for dragging to a dam or lodge. However, beavers often tackle trees with circumferences that exceed what appears to be the standard 2-4 inch diameter for construction. Sometimes felling projects are abandoned and one will come across a 2-3 foot diameter trunk that is gnawed partway through. Trees are food as well, so perhaps this is snacking.

When I lived in Costa Rica I was impressed by the trails left by leaf cutter ants, though I critiqued their trail tending (I never saw a miniature waterbar, drainage ditch or soil retainer). Leaf cutter trails converge on massive nests that can be many feet in diameter and six feet high. The ants march constantly to and from these mounds on a mission to bring back vegetable matter to feed their underground fungus factories. Their trips back to their nest after cutting a bit if leaf to lug home collectively present a line of merrily bobbing green fragments grasped in the pinchers of rusty orange insects. Occasionally one will see a solider ant with a massive head (in comparison to his fellows) or a tiny rider scrambling on the traveling leaf fragment performing janitorial duties by inspecting and cleaning the leaf to make sure no errant mold or parasite is inadvertently brought into the nest.

Another ant trail that became familiar to be during my years in Cost Rica was the army ant march — I always questioned how these creatures sneaked into a country without a military. In the forest one would come across streaming black rivulets that branched and remerged as they flowed across the forest floor consuming all matter of insect or other creature that could not escape the merging and splitting mass that passed. Army ants regularly came through our home, which was on the edge of the forest. While being somewhat inconvenient — we had to avoid the main flow and reaching black tendrils that reached into the corners of our house — their visits were generally welcomed as a house cleaning service: scorpions and cockroaches were swept up, dismembered, carried away and consumed.

Trails represent movement, whether it is the deliberate movement of living things or the result of biogeophysical processes. Here it’s worth distinguishing between a living or active trail versus the mark left behind: a trail of army ants is different from a path littered with scorpion parts. A babbling brook is a sort of trail, but it is distinct from the dry bed of a seasonal stream. I am most concerned with the later sort, a trail as trace or mark. In the case of ants, urinating dogs and trail tenders slapping paint on trees and building cairns, marks can be deliberate signs that provide information to the observant passersby. Ants and dogs use scent, while more visually oriented humans prefer to see their cues.  What is left behind can also be inadvertent, but equally important in providing information. While I cannot discern the odors left by my footsteps, Siri can. This fact caused a small trauma during one of our jaunts when on the return journey I diverged from the trail we had originally taken. Siri, nose to the ground and charging ahead, continued on the original trail while I on a whim decided to explore a spur trail. I noticed our divergence shortly after Siri did as a result of the terrified yelps of puppy separation anxiety. Fortunately, a quick whistle and Siri’s ability to backtrack and precisely retrace my most recent steps resolved the crisis.

My explorations these last few weeks have used another sense — touch — to read another inadvertent trace left behind on some trails: soil compaction. I have been mostly following the myriad of informal mountain bike trails that surround the Sandwich Mountain Farm. Since these trails are now covered with a fresh layer of autumn leaves, it is difficult to see them, but not too difficult for a seasoned trail tender to feel them: my feet can discern the difference between springy loam and hard-packed soil. Like leaf cutter ant trails, these trails lack drainage work, so in some sections they become small streams after a rain. This is a result of compaction as well: because it lacks the absorbency of springy loam, rainwater flows down the harder surface of the trail, even when it is hidden by a layer of newly fallen foliage. This can be witnessed in action, as the actual flow of water, or as a sign, leaves clumped and a hard surface revealed. Here we have a sort of conversation between biological beings and geobiophysical forces that are recorded on the landscape.

While most of these traces or marks are only visible (or smellable and touchable) up close, some can be seen by gazing from a mountain summit or peering at a Google Earth satellite image. Roads, which are a sort of trail, not only leave their own mark, but also are accessories to adjacent development that smatter the land with buildings and parking areas.

Unlike the nearby Interstate 93, the Sandwich Notch Road is barely visible in areal photos. Ground reconnoissance and forest forensics are required to see the signs of what was: 40 farms, 3 school houses, and inn and tavern, and four generations of families. Two remain with less than twenty cultivated acres. The skeletal remains of stone walls and cellar holes are most of what is left on the 8 miles of the Sandwich Notch Road. The barn on the Sandwich Mountain Farm is one building still standing, its hand-hewn Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) timber frame keeping its share of carbon sequestered, out of the cycle for a while.

***

As I conclude writing Acteon Ridge and Sandwich Mountain are visible with light blue sky chalk dust clouds above. Sandwich is dusted as well and the craggy peaks, Jennings and Sachem, shine white. The world is very silent.

Morning. A broil of cold cloud clinging to the ridge between Jenning’s Peak and Sandwich Mountain slowly dissipates. Background clouds glow orange before cooling white. A sleety-snowy mix covers everything with an icy, white crust. A good day to burn the brush pile.  Left too many years, the pile combined some new blueberry and apple pruning on the top with a heart of woody compost with layers and various stages in between. So, it’s been leaking carbon for a while, yesterday speeded up the process.

Saturday, 11-27

A little ice age takes hold in the night, freezing the water for ducks, chickens and goats, hard as quartz. Winter shows itself with squally snow (and squirrelly retreat). The layer of ice dusted with fine powder.

Sunday, 11-28

The day begins bright, warms and ends with iron-gray skies, but the night clears things up again.  A sky full of stars as the day ends: to the west, Orion, moving north, the Twins, Big Dog, Little Dog, the Charioteer, Big Bear…

Monday, 11-29

Morning. Jupiter hangs in dark branches to the west. Mountains are shadows, ridges rimmed by soft blue that rises and graduates to gray-blue smoke, then night blue.  Time passes, but Jupiter stays, its sky a soft purple. How many colors of blue can I see before sunrise? I anticipate day.

The eeuenynge maad, ye seien, It shal be cleer, for the heuene is lijk to reed; and the morwe, To day tempest, for heuen shyneth heuy, or sorwful

— from Matthew XVI in the Wyclif Bible

Mist covers the fields and it’s another frost-free morning, though two days ago the frost was heavy and I broke through ice in the greenhouse water tank. This crisp weather was preceded by a stint of warm and sunny days. Yesterday was mitten weather, but today it is relatively warm again and despite the damp, uninsulated gloves will do for the morning chores. Back and forth, undecided. Autumn is the time of year when one is not sure exactly how cold or warm it should be. Winter must be cold and snowy (except for a single January thaw), summer warm and hopefully not too hot too often, spring both cool and warm with a frost or two before June. Never mind that weather never behaves so well in practice, that is how it should be, though climate change seems to be encouraging a more misbehavior… Autumn is between times, with summer on one side and winter on the other, and I am never sure whether (weather?) to expect summer warmth or winter bite. Then there is what we call Indian Summer, what can seem more of a trick on us than the January thaw that results in wet feet and swollen rivers but does not make us believe we are perhaps in some other season.

Indian summer is curiously named. Putting aside that Indians properly reside on another continent, why should we call this retrospective meteorological phenomenon “Indian?” While the origins of the expression are obscure, one explanation is a sad commentary on intercultural misunderstanding, and is perhaps a cautionary tale. When European settlers, the same ones who came up with the name “New England,” encountered people already here, they sometimes attempted to purchase land from these “Indians.” We can recognize the Abrahamic concept discussed in my previous post: land is a commodity to be bought and sold. The misunderstanding begins. The Indians [Native Americans, First Nation People? — naming can be confusing, I'll stick to the misnomer Indian for this essay] were sometimes ready to share land for hunting, fishing, gathering and agriculture, but this was not selling “property.” For the Europeans it was (and for us is) possible to transfer away all rights of use, what is known in property law as alienation. Doing a bit of word chasing, we can track this word to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: key to the idea of private property, whether it is land or some other “thing,” is the ability to completely give it over to someone else, severing all connection. The German word entfremdung can also be translated as “estrangement.” Marx, of course, took this further, but we don’t need to go very far to see how the Indians might find the idea of estranging themselves from the land a bit strange. Indians dwelled on land, passed through land, hunted, fished, and gathered on land, even farmed, but they did not see themselves as being able transfer these activities away from themselves. Perhaps they could lose this access through battle, but not voluntary selling. When Indians continued to live, pass through, hunt, fish, gather, and farm on land that they had presumably “sold,” the result was conflict. The term Indian giver — someone who demands back what they have given to you before — reflects this fundamental cultural miscommunication. So, Indian summer takes on a dubious association: the promise of a second summer rudely taken away.

During this coming week when are asked to give thanks, I’d like to see “Indian giving” returned to what it should be: something that indicates generosity, the desire to share with others what you yourself are blessed with. That includes the meal we will share with others this week, and it includes the land as a whole that we share, unparceled, providing us with the water we drink, the air we breath, the forests we walk and work, the gardens we sow and reap, home to our fellow creatures great (the moose!) and small (the mouse!).

Yes, in our culture we take a bit of the land to live and work on for the time we are here, and it is good to respect this, to protect the rights of people to a home of their own and the fruits of their labor on the land. Despite Leopold’s caution, I’ll not object to people having deeds nor to the laws that keep them intact, but it’s worth remembering that air blows, water flows and wildlife wanders across the boundaries we etch on our maps. Our ownership of the land is a much a responsibility and a trust as it is ours to use for this while. All the other species of the world, our fellow humans across the globe, and future human generations count on us.

Another confusion for the European settlers and Indians may have been the difference between reciprocity and formal exchange. In our times we are used to the exchange of things, either through trade or with money. Our estrangement is complete: we don’t expect anything beyond the immediate terms. However, we are also familiar with other ways that goods and services move through our lives: mutual aid, helping out a neighbor with a chore with the expectation that if you ever need it, his helping hand will be there in return; gift giving (holiday presents that we expect and well as offer to others) is also reciprocity; lending a tool with the expectation that we will get it back sometime, and maybe borrow one ourselves someday. (By the way, do you have a cup of sugar I could have?) Reciprocity is giving and receiving without alienation: one stays connected, to the things themselves sometimes (loaning a tool), and certainly to the people. One gives, but with an expectation of return, though not right then and there with goods, services or the abstraction we call money, and according to ability and need.

Then there are those times when we have a big dinner where we lay out a spread of food and drink and bring together extended family and friends. For the hosts, this is largely a redistribution of earned bounty (whether earned through the labor of the harvest or bought with cash in the market). These are times when we share our relative abundance. Thanksgiving is such a time, and in my childhood nuclear family we always had my father’s stray students and visiting colleagues. Since my father’s work is in nutrition, and in particular, world hunger and hunger related disease, these were often international students, mostly from “third world” countries and familiar with the reality of severe malnutrition. My father felt it necessary to lay the Pilgrim story on thick in order to introduce our guests to New England culture. Pretty schlocky stuff that on one occasion prompted my then 90-year-old grandmother to interrupt and declare, “Nevin, sometimes your just to conventional!” She then launched into her own Buddhist-Bahai-Atheist-Unitarian version of Thanks. With stories of Pilgrims came also Indians, and once passed a discussion of the likely nutritional deficiencies suffered by the Europeans during that first terrible winter, came the appreciation for Squanto and his instruction. Without the miraculously English speaking Indian giving tips on how and what to grow, there would have been no harvest or celebration that year of 1621. Then there is the fact that the Indian guests outnumbered the Pilgrim hosts 92 to 53 and seemed to bring most of the food. I guess that’s Indian giving. I can’t help but imagine those first Pilgrims as Squanto’s foreign students, brought to the harvest table for celebration after barely passing an arduous oral exam.

Another legacy of growing up my father’s son is to have traveled around the world and seen not just the sort of persistent hunger that is unfortunately now common in our State of New Hampshire, but also severe malnutrition and the accompanying infection that results in death or permanent physical and mental damage. These terrible images may be from away, but hunger is here too, and I do what I can here and now by participating in a shared community meals that include reciprocity, redistribution and even a little exchange. To Give Thanks is not just to thank a deity for one’s own bounty, it is to actually give to others and receive from others, as the Indians taught us.

The word “blustery” explodes from my lips and rolls off my tongue this morning: “its blustery.” And warm for this time of year. The bright weather of a few days ago eventually gave way to a morning of torrential rain yesterday (delighting the ducks again), but relative warm continued. No frost this morning.  Above the dark shape of the Acteon Ridge scudding steelblue clouds drive relentlessly east.  A washed-out babyblue sky squeezes between these somber, marching clusters, a blue sky faded almost to white. Too many washings, maybe? Suddenly a touch of fire above Sandwich Mountain! Are my impatient clouds entering into a battle with the sun? As suddenly as it appeared the fiery pink vanishes leaving me to wonder the outcome. Time drags as I anxiously wait. Has sunrise ever taken so long? The in-between babyblue brightens. Perhaps it has not been through as many washings as I’d thought…   Acteon Ridge looses its shadow character as it emerges with color and contour, eastside slopes splashed with sunlight, including Sachem Peak. Clouds gain dimension too, billowing white above gray undersides. The babyblue has matured as well, still youthful, but with a growing vibrance that suggests adolescence instead of infancy. Still no sun.  I know its coming, all signs point to it.  If there had been a cloudly combat, and the clouds had prevailed, this brightening could not be. Acteon is now bathed in light. All that’s left of the darkness are west slope shadows. Through trees, to the east, just above Mount Weetamo’s northern shoulder, a single cloud burns white. Usually hidden from me as I write in the Studio, I can now see this ridge through a tangle of dark branches that have dropped their leaves.  A solitary spruce, which will maintain the weight and density of its foliage through winter, stands behind the others, to the side, older, wiser, waiting with me.  The clouds have scattered, but I now I see it, white and sending out sets of long, bright shards in the pattern of a compass rose (an artifact, I suddenly realize, of the screen behind the window, what was invisible to me a moment before).  It’s now too much, a white-hot ball that has broken whatever glass globe held it, scattering more shards in a circular explosion.  I can no longer look at it, even through the window, through the screen, through the trees. I look away and dark spots dart about in front my eyes and my head aches.  It’s here, the sun.

A glance through the window shows light slowly draining into the landscape. The Acteon Ridge, only a silhouette, disappears into cloud cover as it reaches toward Sandwich Mountain. The earlier starless sky suggested clouds, and I can now see an overcast, gray ceiling. The continued flow of light is evident through the gradual emergence of color and definition: what seemed only the shadow of mountains becomes smudgy blue with feathered foreground trees. Birches and poplars, bare of leaves, reveal pale trunks and ever-so-slightly reddish limbs, while spruce, fir and pine stand resolutely dark, but also with emergent color, a deep green, a veiled green, like moss seen through layers of swift water in an inundated stream. Perhaps it isn’t light flowing into into the morning landscape, but darkness draining away after the flood of night.

One of the constellations that has gripped my eye and mind is the Water-bearer. In late-early morning these days (4:00-6:00 am)  the Water bearer appears in the eastern sky, just above and over the shoulder of the constellation Orion. He or she pours her container seemingly right into Sandwich Notch, and if it is light she pours, that might explain sunrise.

I feel a connection to the Water-bearer’s burden.  When I first lived at the Sandwich Mountain Farm Jenny and I used to haul our water from the old farm spring.  I still haul water to the farm animals each day.  These chores, as all chores really are, are Sisyphean in nature: just as Sisyphus was condemned to forever roll a rock up a hill (a task that is all to familiar to me as a trail tender), we must always refill our buckets. Quenching never lasts for long.  Some of us delay the necessary act of refilling our water containers by pondering, “is the glass half empty or half full?”

Limits to Growth

I know a half-full grain bin can be a dangerous thing, at least for a mouse.  I accidentally discovered a sure-fire mousetrap. Leave the lid of the grain storage container slightly ajar (just enough so a mouse can slip in) and come back the next morning and see what you find. Most mornings I find an engorged and deceased mouse: having slipped into the container, the mouse is unable to climb the vertical, slippery walls, and so finds itself trapped in a place of unimaginable bounty (for a mouse).  It is too much for the mousely appetite; it eats until it dies.  Too much of a good thing.

We are told that the dismal science of economics is fundamentally an analysis of scarcity: things are valued to the extent that there aren’t many of them — if I bring to the farmers’ market a load of zucchinis just when every other farmer and backyard gardener has zucchinis overflowing their gardens, I won’t get much for the green beasts and may even be hard-pressed to sell these overgrown cucumbers at any price.  Want a zucchini in January, however, and you’ll pay a pretty penny for a small one in the super-duper market.  Of course, the key word is want: both supply and demand do their dance to give us a price. So much for the fundamentals of classical economics.

Malthus, who is most responsible for the “dismal science” moniker,  took scarcity one step further. Malthus suggested that starvation is what we have to look forward to as an ever-growing population outstrips the food supply.  This doesn’t seem to help much with the mouse — our mouse over rather than under ate…

With a little bit of twisting we can ferret-out a parallel.  The mouse is subject to entropy like everything else.  Derived from the second law of thermodynamics, entropy is the drumbeat that drives our inevitable march toward disorder and dissolution. Life appears to be a putting off the inevitable as it makes and maintains a complexity of bodies, ecosystems, and landscapes, and in the case of humans, minds, cities and societies. However, closer scrutiny shows us that Life simply moves the process along at a faster rate.  Mice, and all other living things, keep the disorder part of entropy at bay by constant self maintenance, what Chilian biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela call autopoiesis.  In order to maintain our biological selves we eat and drink and take in a little sunshine.  There must be balance here. Too little self maintenance and we prematurely succumb to dissolution; too much eating and we do the same. Malnourishment goes both ways, as is evidenced by the current global epidemic of obesity, sometimes called “globesity.”

Taken all together, living things form one, large and shared household, nature’s economy, the earth.  This complex system is not static.  Species evolve and so does the whole biophysical mishmash. Change is sometimes catastrophic, as when a tree falls (whether it makes a sound or not), a volcano erupts,  an asteroid smashes into the planet, or disease ravages a population, as well as with famine and starvation. Sometimes catastrophe occurs because the exuberance of life itself goes beyond limits: grazers over-graze, hunters over-hunt, cancerous cells consume a body… or a mouse eats itself to death.  This — the mouse thing — is just what we are experiencing with anthropogenic climate change: our collective appetite is an expression of an earthly excess, evolution giving the world a creature too smart for its own and the globe’s good. Like some hybrid between an unsupervised child in a candy store and a bull in a china shop, our civilization engorges itself on what seems an endless bin of grain. This results in smashed and collapsed ecosystems, degraded landscapes, and species extinction at a rate not see since the Cretaceous–Tertiary event.

Ecological Economics

You’d think that a civilization that is based on an ideology that has scarcity at its heart might do better, but it is precisely those things that are not part of the scarcity equation that are causing problems. The fancy word for these are externalities: things that are neither recognized by producers or consumers as being part of the cost of production. The environment, as a large category, is full of these slippery critters.  For example, until recently, the ease with which a factory could dump waste into the adjacent river (which both powered the plant and as well as carried away that waste), was neither recognized monetarily as a benefit, nor as having a negative impact on and cost to folks down river. The river is external to the market.  As long as the water flowed freely by, it was there for the taking and dumping into.  Government has now stepped in, with clean water regulations and fines for not sticking to them, but still, with this approach there is no direct payment for the protected watershed that makes the factory’s power possible.

Ecological economics attempts to bring these externalities into the market by casting a dismal net around the environment. Paying a fine for pollution, or bearing the cost of cleaning up the factory, is all fine and good, but what about the value of the watershed, not just for watershed protection, but also for its carbon sequestration and oxygen respiration, biodiversity, and dare I say, its beauty? For an ecological economist this is “natural capital” (well, maybe not the beauty part), something that we have neglected to measure and factor into our marketplace higgling and haggling.  The fresh water we drink and that may power our home or factory is an “ecosystem service” that should be valued and paid for.

These concepts may seem nonsensical or heretical to a neoclassical economic orthodoxy, but little Costa Rica in Central America (the geographical size of New Hampshire and Vermont put together and with a population 4.5 million) not only has functioning universal healthcare, it also has managed to pioneer Payments for Environmental Services, or Pago Por Servicios Ambientales (PSA). For example, the Monteverde Conservation League, which has bought and continues to protect The Children’s Eternal Rainforest, an area a bit larger than the Pemigewasset Wilderness Area (54,000 acres verses 45,000 acres), gets an annual payment from a hydroelectric plant for the service of protecting the upland watershed.

The difficulty with PSA’s and natural capital is how to value the capital or a service.  The free market works just dandy without this added burden. Why muck it up with confusing calculations made by pointy-headed intellectuals trying to figure out what something is worth. There’s the rub: markets easily determine price when it is just consumers and producers in the game and the environment remains outside.  Since the ecosystem itself doesn’t clammer at the factory gate demanding payment, it must be represented by someone or some process: the government through law and regulation and maybe an ecological economist furiously entering numbers on a spreadsheet to rationalize monetary value.  The invisible hand starts to materialize,  frightening neoclassicists to the capitalist high heaven.

Tragedy of the Commons

Free markets are excellent at valuing things on the short term, and lousy with things that require a long-term perspective,  like ecosystems.   (This is not mention issues such as worker safety, healthcare or dealing with crises of unemployment that are a “natural” result of the business cycle.)  Paradoxically, this is why the hand of government is so essential to ensuring the survival of a “free” market: someone must clean up the mess so that selfish, rational actors can have their cake.

In the late sixties Garret Hardin introduced us to the “tragedy of the commons” in an article of the same name. Echoing the arguments of the 18th century enclosure movement, though not its conclusions, Hardin describes how multiple individuals acting in self interest will eventually deplete a shared and potentially sustainable resource. In an interesting twist, Hardin’s conclusions call for greater public control and management of such resources, while the enclosure movement took land out of common use (usually grazing) and “enclosed” or fenced-in these areas, effectively making land private property for the first time. The enclosure movement eventually led to land being bought and sold like any other commodity, and thus, I would argue, reintroducing the tragedy of selfish, rational actors depleting underlying natural resources: Aldo Leopold’s *Abrahamic concept of the land. What seems to be free and abundant (and external) becomes, through its internalization in the market, depleted and scarce. It seems we really can’t have our cake and it it too. Or, if we do, we’ll end up an exploded mouse.The problem, I believe, is our assumption that we belong to the species Homo economicus, rational economic man. This is a useful fiction, but a fiction nevertheless. This is not to say that we don’t have some Homo economicus in us, that we are purely Homo reciprocans, but just as we have built a civilization on the logic and calculus of selfishness, there have been societies founded on other human qualities.  In this Age of the Mouse in the Bin we need to reconsider our assumptions.  As Leopold asked us to do, we must “make a shift with things as they are” and bring **ethics into the discussion, recognizing that human behavior is also affected by another kind of value, value based on our values. These vary from culture to culture, person to person, and differing ethical and cultural traditions will mark the land in different ways.

The Flood

The Water-bearer is sometimes depicted carrying her burden, and sometimes he is pouring water.  In The Stars: A New Way to See Them Hans Rey depicts the Water-bearer as someone leaning forward, almost seeming to trip while pouring water.  The Water-bearer is also known as Aquarius, the Greek God of Water,  who inundated the world.  This is just one of many flood stories that seem to crop up in various mythologies, including the story of Noah’s Ark. Closer to home, the flood is associated with the Algonquin hero/trouble maker Tcakabesh (who is also credited for ensnaring the sun,  which almost results in the sun never rising again — it’s worth noting that a mouse saved the day in this story by chewing through the snare and freeing the sun).

In flood stories the world is effectively destroyed and somehow the land or earth must be brought back into the picture.  While in the Noah’s Ark tale the waters simply recede, other stories require a more active role for a god or culture hero. Like flood stories, the current environmental debate can be apocalyptic, and I have criticized this in the past: if everything’s going to hell in a hand basket anyway, maybe we should party while it lasts! Or, perhaps we are just in the End Times and should go with the flow, so to speak. I’ve thought it better to envision a sustainable future rather than lament a lost past. However, things are getting serious, and its hard to argue that the flood isn’t coming.

Bill Mckibben has been one voice that has consistently warned us that our world is threatened by human deluge. In his first book, which burst onto the environmental scene in 1989 like a breached levy,  we are informed of  The End of Nature (put simply, he argues that nowhere on earth can you escape finding the influence or impact of humankind).  In his most recent book, Eaarth, Mckibben continues to work this trope by suggesting that we no longer live on earth, that our world has been so radically changed by humans that we must recognize we are living on a different planet: Eaarth.

While I have never been entirely comfortable with earth-ending apocalypse analogies for in environmental discourse, Mckibben does what needs to be done: warns of the consequences of Mouse in the Bin behavior, and in Eaarth, also provides us with a vision and hope for the future.  There is a way to ride out the flood, but we have a lot work to do, and at this point the waters are still rising. We need to keep in mind that breaking water is the also sign of an imminent birth.

Balance

Carrying water is hard work. For one thing,  water weighs a lot! In many parts of the world, including my birthplace, Guatemala, women carry water balanced on their heads. It is a marvel to watch a gracefully swaying figure keeping a container from falling without using her hands, only a light touch now and again.  I am not so graceful and require a little more help. When I carry a lot of water I balance my load in a different way, using a yoke that rests on my shoulders with two buckets hanging on either side. Keeping the buckets roughly filled to the same level is key.  Fill one more than other and one becomes unbalanced and it is impossible to proceed.

Along the path toward a sustainable future we need to keep balance: work and play, humor and seriousness, practicality and idealism, action and rest, solitude and sociality…  a forest in which there is a graceful clearing.

***

A few Aldo Leopold quotes from a Sand County Almanac:

* Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the esthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture.

** That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that the land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten.

]]> http://reyfriends.net/gnats/2010/11/15/water-bearer/feed/ 1 43.8802643 -71.5730972 http://reyfriends.net/gnats/2010/11/09/ursa-minor/ http://reyfriends.net/gnats/2010/11/09/ursa-minor/#comments Tue, 09 Nov 2010 14:05:34 +0000 Nat Scrimshaw http://reyfriends.net/gnats/?p=219 Continue reading →]]>

It’s been a wet fall. Barn boots mandatory for the Curious Gourds environs. These last days of rain and near-rain have the kept the pattern up. Time to stick to hard-packed logging roads and stay away from the saturated trails: we need to give soils a break.

I begin writing in early morning dark as I resist both the sun’s arcing away to the south and the commandment to “turn back the clock.” As much as the steady decline of average temperature, it is the changing incline of the arc of the sun that reminds me that seasons take sharp turns here in New England.

The sky lightens (light comes) and lightens (night lifts its weight of darkness). On an apple tree bare of leaves (but with messy signs of bear beneath) golden apples persist like yellow stars in the tangle of dark branches. Rising mist in the Smarts Brook valley. At last some blue sky! The first sign of the rise of a firey sun is a touch of pink glow on Welch and Dickey Mountains.

Hours pass and a lingering rainbow brightens and dims and shifts for some of these hours.  It is warmer now in the afternoon.  The early promise of a sunny day gives way to persistent cloud cover and light, almost misting rain.  It is warmer and I shed my jacket working in the barn.

Night.  Awake again at predawn and this time I see stars. Before I write this morning I grab my ancient left Limmer from Siri, my new puppy. Siri is short for Sirius (or Siria, feminine), the dog star and the brightest star in the night sky (she has a little star on her chest and her left back paw, between the claws). She is also Seriously black like the Harry Potter character Sirius Black when he turns into a black dog. Siri can also be derived from an Indian word which means, “Goddess Lakshmi; Wealth; God’s gift of love,” a Scandanavian word which means, “Beautiful and victorious,” and a Swahili word which means, “Secret.”

Sirius is in the constellation Canis Major, and perhaps Siri’s name should derive from Canis Minor at this point. Siri is a puppy after all, and one of Canis Minor’s two stars, Procyon, is also very bright, and its companion is no sloucher either.  While Canis Minor shows great  potential as a constellation, its one dimensionality — only a line can be drawn from the its two points — makes me pause (paws?).

In The Stars a New way to See Them, Hans Rey comments on Canis Minor: “Its two bright stars defeat all attempts to show it as a dog or even a puppy.” Beneath its diagram is the wistful caption “no shape…”  On the other hand, Hans draws Canis Major as a very active figure (see above), though I worry about its appearing to jump up, a behavior I am trying to train Siri away from…

* I hesitated to write “only a line” when in a line, as the Greeks explored, we can find so many kinds of numbers. There is this from the film Smilla’s Sense of Snow:

The number system is like human life. First you have the natural numbers. The ones that are whole and positive. Like the numbers of a small child. But human consciousness expands. The child discovers longing. Do you know the mathematical expression for longing? The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you’re missing something.

I am not sure agree, but its a great line…  (I need to reread the book to see if there is something similar). Lines can also be tied in knots, a twisting and overlapping that extends the line into other dimensions. Think of the Seven Bridges of Königsberg.

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