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Global Warning - Mar 29, 2005 - Printable Version
- An Odyssey of Irrelevance
by Robin Buckallew
This past week has been a rollercoaster ride for me. It all started with a passing comment in the Faulking Truth guestbook, which had a profound and altogether unanticipated effect on me. It got me to thinking about my own irrelevance in the world. It plunged me rapidly into a downward spiral into despair. It forced me to face up to my own limitations as a scientist, as a member of the environmental community, and as a person. And in the words of David Bowie, "You ask if the truth hurts.it hurts like hell". For the past three years, I have been working on a biodiversity project on a property in northern Texas. This property is owned by the United States Army Corps of Engineers (COE), and is managed by the university I work for. This property is being managed for the multiple purposes of education, restoration and wildlife habitat. Although it is easy to feel remote and wild when one is in the middle of this property, it is actually located in the middle of a large and sprawling urban area (the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex). This creates a number of unique and difficult management problems. It also creates a number of unique and interesting management opportunities. I was brought into this project because of my background in plant ecology. My mission, if I chose to accept it, was to survey and describe the existing plant communities, map the property and make management recommendations. I chose to accept it. As a result, there have been several occasions on which I have nearly begun to self-destruct. There have been many times when I have truly believed that the mission I have accepted is impossible.
Restoration and preservation of our nation's wild places is not the primary mission of COE. For many years, their main purpose was building the very large dams that have changed the course of all the waterways in the nation, and filled the west with numerous man-made reservoirs that collect the water in a more easily accessible form for human use. In recent years, however, dam building has come to a screeching halt. This is due in part to public perception and environmental activism, but is also due in large part to the fact that few, if any, undammed and feasibly dammable waterways remain. The COE is now part and parcel of the community that has been assembled in a giant coalition to preserve and restore the public lands. It is, however, a fact of life that COE is composed predominantly of engineers, and not ecologists. The engineering approach to restoration is not always compatible with the ecological approach. This is the issue upon which I have begun floundering in my own irrelevance. You think you can't fight City Hall? It's a piece of cake compared to fighting the COE.
There are two schools of thought in restoration. One school of thought is that we should rebuild things from the ground up. We do the engineering. We build the ecosystem. We choose the plants and the animals that we want, and place them there through physical means, by force if necessary. Mother Nature will eventually come around to our way of thinking, and the ecosystem will be beautiful, practical, useful and human friendly. This way of thinking is embodied by the COE, and indeed has been the principal method of restoration for several decades. The other way of thinking is that one should first do no harm. The best restorations are those which are the least invasive, the least intrusive and the least technological. For those systems that are heavily impacted (as this one is) there will be the need to do a certain amount of physical restructuring to undo the century of abuse that this property has been subjected to, the seeding of positive species, but for the most part, minimal tampering and just allowing nature to do the restoration. All we do is giver her back the necessary tools, the tools that we took away when we began farming or grazing. In this project, this way of thinking is embodied by - me. I stand in opposition to the wishes and desires of the managers of the property. As a graduate student, I have no power, no authority and no hope of being listened to. I am, in short, irrelevant.
For two days, I was plunged into the despair that often comes to us when we are forced to face unwelcome truths about ourselves. I remember a couple of other occasions when I was forced to face my own irrelevance. On April 19, 1995, a bombing in downtown Oklahoma City leveled the Murrah Building, owned by the Federal government, and plunged Oklahoma City into a depth of gloom and despair that had never been seen before. That afternoon, I remember driving along the highway on my way to work my volunteer shift at the American Red Cross. The day was bright and beautiful. The birds were singing, the grass was green with its spring colors, the sun was shining. It seemed so anomalous. How could the world be so beautiful on a day when such tragedy had struck? On a day when I, and millions of other Americans, were feeling a deep gloom and a deep sense of loss and foreboding? It seemed almost grotesque. Then, September 11, 2001, tragedy struck again. The Twin Towers in New York City had been the target of a terrorist attack, and many lives had been lost. Once again, despair and depression were the norm. We knew, all of us, that the world had changed forever. Nothing would ever be the same. That afternoon, as I was walking out of my room, I noticed that it was a beautiful day. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the fall grasses were blooming just as they had been the day before. Nothing was any different - except everything was different. How could this be? How, when it was such a dark and despairing day, such a day of foreboding, could it be so beautiful? It was at this moment that the recognition of my own irrelevance in the world hit me square in the face. The world had changed, yes. The human world. We would not be the same again. But the rest of the world, the world that goes on below our notice most of the time, did not change. My world, my pain, my anger, is irrelevant to the birds and the bees. They don't even notice it. I can hurt, I can cry, I can die and I will never be missed by the universe. Only by that portion of the human world that I have touched. The world did fine without me before I was here, and it will continue without me when I am gone. Not only is it not all about me, actually very little of it is about me. I am in most avenues of life totally irrelevant and unnoticed.
Back to my odyssey of this week. While lost in my reveries of despair regarding my inability to make any difference in the thinking of the COE, I still managed to rouse myself long enough to continue my survey. Taking my tools and my talents (such as they are), I accompanied a colleague back out to the property to place some more sample plots. I didn't really feel like going. I felt like crawling in under a rock and staying put for the rest of my irrelevant life. But my dad raised me to have a strong work ethic, so I showed up as scheduled, survey stakes and flagging tape in hand. Our trip that morning took us across the railroad tracks, over a fence, and down into the sloshy, slippery muddy water of a swamp. What images come to mind when I say the word swamp? Creature from the Black Lagoon? Swamp thing? Mosquitoes and malaria? The tent that was the focal point of the TV show M*A*S*H? I invite you, come with me to the swamp. I will show you a version of swamp that TV and the movies ignore. A place of beauty and life.
A swamp, or any other form of wetland, is a teeming community filled with diverse life forms. The plant life is unique, as only a fraction (fewer than 1%) of flowering plants can survive in the water. The animal life is unique, as most land-dwelling, air-breathing mammals tend to find it somewhat suffocating to live under water. Even the soil is unique, not firm and solid like the soil we usually walk on, but soft and squishy, squeezing between our toes in that delicious sliminess that we loved when we were kids. The wetlands of the world support an amazing variety of life, and manage to support more biomass than most terrestrial systems can accommodate. It is almost like an alien world, filled with extra-terrestrial creatures that don't look like what we see when we keep ourselves confined to a dry system. Is it any wonder that so many science-fiction films have been built around creatures that came out of swamps? It is mysterious, frightening, and stunningly beautiful. It is quiet and restful, yet filled with a music that knows no equal in the finest symphony orchestra. Bullfrogs make their presence known. Birds sing their mating songs, hoping to attract the most desirable mates. Insects chirp and twitter. The swamp is at once art, music and poetry combined. The very strangeness of it renders it exotic and enticing.
In fact, it was this mysterious nature of swamps that very nearly proved the death of the wetland. For centuries, man has been scared of swamps, marshes, bogs, fens, and most other forms of still, quiet water. He has viewed it as a place of death. And he has dubbed it a wasteland. Land that can't be plowed. Water than can't be drunk. Wasted (remember, wasted in this context means of no obvious use to humans). So the wetlands of the world were drained, diverted, and otherwise destroyed to make room for the plow and the cow. It has been estimated that 56% of wetlands have been lost in the United States alone since European settlement. Worldwide, the problem is even more massive. But we need the land, right? So what's the beef? After all, those animals aren't really that important in the grander scheme of the universe. They are just animals. We are man.
In the swamp, earlier this week, I once again came face to face with my own irrelevance. This particular swamp is a new one. The hydrology of the area has recently changed, and this previously dry area is now covered with knee-deep water. It is an amazing place, full of strange and unexpected sights - unexpected even for one used to wandering around in swamps, and well versed in swamp culture. Imagine my surprise when I found a community of prickly pears growing in the middle of a swamp! A desert species, a species not adapted to a watery world, and yet growing and thriving. I also saw Hawthorne trees, another species not adapted to live in water. Yet there, in the midst of all the usual wetland vegetation, the Hawthorne tree. Also apparently prospering in its unfamiliar surroundings. Somehow, in spite of their usual expectations of their environment, these two hardy survivors had found a way to live and grow where they found themselves. All the other species that didn't like "wet foot" had perished, making room for more water-friendly inhabitants. But the natural resilience of these prairie species had allowed them to continue making their living in an unfriendly environment. Contrast that with man. Man, when faced with an environment he doesn't understand or isn't used to, has one simple response - he changes the environment. He remakes it to suit him. He feels entitled to do this, no matter what other life might suffer, because he is unable to easily adjust to the new surroundings. As a result, the world of man has become warped, bent, and twisted out of shape, unrecognizable and hostile to the rest of the natural world.
In the swamp that day, face to face with my own irrelevance, my mood lightened. My spirits lifted. I felt an enormous burden drop from my shoulders that I had been carrying for the past couple of days. You see, this swamp doesn't need me. When wandering in a place like this, ones irrelevance takes on a new meaning. Nature is bigger than I am. Nature is more resilient than I am. And for all the pushing and prodding and bending and twisting we do, nature will survive, whether I do or not. Man seldom stops to contemplate his own irrelevance in the vastness of the universe, or even in the more immediate surroundings of the natural earth. He never recognizes that he is only one species in several million. And this will ultimately be his undoing.
This is not to propose that we quit preserving, or we quit restoring. There are some basic rules man needs to follow in dealing with the rest of the earth. The most basic rule? First, do no harm. Anywhere we pave, plow, bulldoze, mine or drill, nature is going to have a difficult time recovering. If we remove the basic tools of her trade, she will not be able to heal herself. She can absorb and eventually detoxify some pollutants, but many of the pollutants we are now foisting on her are totally unfamiliar, synthetic creations of her most ravenous tenant. And we are dumping them in massive quantities. Then, when we finally realize that restoration is desirable or necessary in a given area, the treatment we inflict on her can be likened to a domestic care center that treats abused women who arrive at its doors by beating the hell out of them in the name of recovery. We would never stand for that. Such a center would be closed down, or reopened under new management. It is time that we cease from abusing nature in the interests of recovery. Sometimes, we just need to step back and let her lick her wounds in peace. Other times, we may need to make some alterations, to remove particularly harmful things we have introduced into the system. On those occasions, we should attempt to do this in a way that is as unobtrusive as possible. Overall, the success rate of restorations has been poor. We are not making as much headway as we like. I believe that is because we are trying to impose our will on a world that has its own agenda. We are not asking nature what she wants, or what she needs, in order to be happy, healthy and fully functioning. We are assuming our wishes and desires are in some way relevant. That is my final rule of restoration - we need to get over ourselves. We need to face up to our own irrelevance, and recognize that the world doesn't need us. There was a fully functional world for several billion years before man came along. There will no doubt be a fully functional world once man disappears. Once upon a time, the mighty dinosaurs were the alpha species. They ruled for over 100 million years. They disappeared, along with 99% of the other species that have ever lived. When the dinosaurs disappeared, the world didn't mourn. It just went on spinning, and spun a fascinating network of new creatures that filled the empty spaces. It is unfortunate that one of these creatures, an interesting, useful and eminently busy species, became so convinced of its own importance that it now threatens the fabric of the world that gave rise to it, and threatens its own existence to boot.
I celebrate, gloriously and happily, my own irrelevance. I wallow in my own irrelevance. Don't look at me, world, I don't matter that much. Look at the world as a whole. Join me. Celebrate your own irrelevance. Get over yourself, as I got over myself.
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