Roses are red;
Their odor is heady.
LONNOL month’s here–
Are your Valentines ready?

It’s Love of Nature Nature of Love Month on Wilderness Interface Zone, and we’re looking to publish love abroad.  Do you have a message of friendship and love you’d like to send someone? WIZ is looking for original poetry, essays, blocks of fiction, art, music (mp3s), videos or other media that address the subject of love while making references to nature.  We’ll also take the flipside: We’ll publish work about nature intertwined with themes of love.  Besides original work you’re welcome to send favorite works by others that have entered public domain.  So if you have a sonnet you’ve written to someone dear to your heart–even and perhaps especially your pet hamster Roley Poley or faithful horse Old Paint–or perhaps a video Valentine or an essay avowing your love for a natural space near and dear–please consider sending it to WIZ.  Click here for submissions guidelines.

Besides rolling out a (hopefully) heart-embroidered carpet of love-art, we’ll also be running two WIZ, nature-laced, romantic DVD giveaways, Typhoon, starring Dorothy Lamour and pre-Music Man Robert Preston, and a Pre-Hays Code movie, King of the Jungle, starring scantily clad Buster Crabbe as Kaspa the Lion Man.

We hope you’ll join the celebration.  Let’s warm up February with fond feeling.

It snowed today, for the first time. October 6th.

When my family moved to southeast Idaho, we knew that Winter was one of the by-products we were choosing. That “W” is capitalized, because winters here are real winters—you couldn’t survive without shelter. In Utah Valley, where we’ve lived the last ten years, you likely couldn’t either, easily… but there’d be a chance. Some random steaming garbage pile might keep you warm at nights if you found yourself homeless.

Not here.  We now live in Idaho’s Siberia. You’d think that, farther north in places like Sandpoint, it would be much colder, but no. The carryover from Washington state’s more temperate coastal climates makes the panhandle and other, more northern places a much easier place to grow things like tomatoes, for instance.

Here in Idaho’s Siberia there are miles of landmass and ridges of mountains to keep us from any friendly ocean breezes. In January it dips down toward negative twenty. And the winds are to be reckoned with—tearing in from the southwest, lifting sod off the fields before the ground freezes, withering the branches of any non-hardy fruit tree.

You plant your Polly peaches northeast of your house, here in southeast Idaho. The Honeycrisp apples and sour pie-cherries and, perhaps, the pears and plums might survive (all these are currently imaginary—a vision dancing in husband’s head and mine.) But not the peaches.

Our new home is hyper-insulated. Six-to-ten inches of polyurethane foam keep the elements away, and our body heat, so far, has been enough to keep us toasty and warm, even at that lethal six-o-clock hour when bare feet hit concrete floors and children shiver through showers.  But it’s coming. I know it is. My Viking blood is waking up, warning me, prompting me to drag out the giant tupperwares full of snow rompers and wool socks and mittens and hats and thermal underclothing.

We have neighbors close by who warned me that the key to life in our new little city is to “live it up in the summers and fall. Take every second you can and enjoy them… because when winter hits, everyone shuts themselves indoors. You don’t see anybody. And it drags on so long… the snow. The cold. The isolation.”

I asked him, don’t you go out to play in the snow.

He shrugged. “Yeah. But it gets so cold. Cross-country skiing and sledding just aren’t fun in below-freezing weather.”

Of course, he’s part Samoan and part Jamaican—he’s not used to this. Well, neither am I; I grew up in Northern California. But my Viking ancestors will jeer at me from the other side of the veil this winter if I don’t make the attempt…

Winter and I are going to be friends. I’m determined.

So this morning when the first snow started slanting down, soaking our alfalfa field and bringing out the sweetness of it’s purple smell and swelling the gutters with puddles, I shook it off. I  piled coats on my kids, snapped the baby into her fleece bear-hoodie and we walked to our homeschool co-op.

On the way home, two of my children slogged through a puddle. They were chattering by the time we got home and whimpering a bit. They will learn about winter, that the friendship has boundaries.

I fed my kids lunch and made my year’s first pan of cottage-friend potatoes, the most wintery of foods. My husband came home from work tonight and spent eight hours prying the lid off the boiler that heats our house and examining the rusty innards. I sense    already that his friendship with winter will involve more of a wary respect. And I admit I’m nervous. For me, friendships can be awkward at first. I get overwhelmed. I have my moments of despair: Did I say the right thing? Did I do something that revealed too much of my vulnerability, too soon?

Today I watch the snow fall through the big French doors and the windows that look south, east and north from our kitchen/dining room. I pretend nonchalance and think of the flakes as gifts. I allow the excitement to well up inside me at the prospect of four-foot drifts, of building a sled hill in the backyard, of cross-country skiing on the groomed trail by the icy-jade river that runs through our town. Of family snowball fights and cozy evenings cuddled around a TV screen watching movies that aren’t too scary but are scary enough to send my five year old shuffling to our room in the middle of the night, asking to be kissed and tucked back in.

We chose winter, and so winter will be a highlight of our year. We will make friends with winter. I’m determined.

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Sarah Dunster is an award-winning poet and fiction writer. Her poems have been published in Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought, Segullah Magazine, and Victorian Violet Press. Her short fiction piece, Back North, is featured in Segullah’s Fall 2011 issue. In addition, Sarah’s first novel Lightning Tree will be released in spring of 2012 by Cedar Fort. Sarah has six children and one on the way and loves writing almost as much as she loves being a mom.

On May 14 of 2008, Dirk Kempthorne, the Secretary of Interior, followed the urgings of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dale Hall and placed the polar bear species (Ursus maritimus) on the endangered species list. Hunting bans were implemented to prevent the importing of hunted polar bear hides.

Before this, a powerful controversy had been developing in the scientific world and continues even now. Environmentalists and many scientists believe that, due to global warming, the ice habitat of the polar bears is receding and endangering them and that in a matter of several decades they could possibly become extinct.

Other scientists believe this to be incorrect. Prominent Canadian biologist Mitchell Taylor views the receding ice not as a danger to the bears but as a possible advantage as it frees up more territory for bears to find prey and possibly render polar bears’ environment less harsh. He points out that polar bear populations have increased from 5,000 in the 1960s to between 20,000 to 25,000 individuals in the 2000s. They’ve survived even more extreme climate changes in the past, he says.[i]

Andrew Derocher, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and a member of the World Conservation Union, has an opposing view. He believes that the retreating ice will impact the bears harshly through important habitat loss. The regulations governing trophy hunting the bears and their prey have contributed to the polar bear’s population rise, he claims, not the retreating ice.

The Inuits, the native Eskimo people in Canada, Alaska and Greenland, side against the hunting ban. An Inuit spokesman, Duane Smith, says, “I don’t see how listing it as threatened will compliment the sustainability of the population. It’s the climate change that’s the problem, not the sustainable hunting of the polar bears.”[ii]

The Inuits believe that the polar bears are hunted at levels that do not put the population at danger. The Inuits have lived in Alaska, Canada and Greenland for more than a thousand years, coexisting with the polar bear.

In papers and articles discussing the pros and cons of the hunting ban, the most noted interest of the Inuits in this conflict is the annual one and a half million dollars that is brought into small Inuit communities by the polar bear hunts. Some people argue that the reason the Inuits oppose the ban is because they’ll lose the trophy hunt profits. But a 2010 study released by the Humane Society International and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, “The Economics of Polar Bear Trophy Hunting in Canada”[iii],  shows that perhaps this is not such an important thing, because

o       As much as two-thirds of all Inuits communities do not host and lead polar bear hunts, in spite of the urging of the government.

o       The sum of polar bear hunts only supply one tenth of one percent of economic earnings of Nanavut.

o       For 98% of polar bear trophy hunting communities in Nanavut and the Northwest territories, the trophy hunts provide only 2% or less of average income for residents.

o       Only in 3 of 31 polar bear trophy hunting communities in Canada earn more than 2%, and even then it does not exceed 10-13% of average income for the communities.

o       The polar bear trophy hunting makes an economical income difference for only several dozen individuals, at the most.

However, the polar bear’s importance to the Inuit is more than economic. The polar bear—or “Nanuq,” as the bear is know to the Inuit—is the Inuit’s most sacred animal. In traditional Inuit legends, the bear is a wise and powerful beast and is even almost human. There are some legends of polar bear men: beings that walked upright, talked, and lived in igloos, shedding their fur skins in the privacy of their homes.

The polar bears are also one of the most important resource animals to the Inuits. The meat is a substantial food source and the hide is used as material for clothing, especially women’s boots. Only the liver is thrown away, a part of the bear that will make even sled dogs that eat it violently sick.

The Inuits, who have lived with Nanuq for over a thousand years, insist that the polar bears are not in danger and are in fact increasing in number. Perhaps they’re right. Scientists squabble and political forces argue, each of them clinging to their own island of ice. Some people see gain in the rise or fall of the polar bear, and others are determined to honestly help the magnificent beasts. Only further studies and the passing of time will yield answers to help settle this controversy.

[ii] Article: “Polar Bears Are The Wrong Target Say Inuit”.  Clive Tesar.

[iii] Article: “Study Finds Little Local Economic Value in Trophy Hunting: Polar Bear Hunts are of Economic Importance Only to a Handful of Individuals”. March 5, 2010.

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Val K. is a 14-year-old writer who lives in a corner of Utah with her parents, two siblings, and assorted pets. She has written three novels, two of which are part of a fantasy series. Besides writing, she participates in such activities as reading, drawing, weaving, biking, hiking, catching snakes, and chores.

To read Val’s other work published on WIZ, go here and here.

To read Part One, click here.

H. is unwilling to give up and is looking more closely at the little hole we might be able to climb in. I back up and find a passage behind a fallen slab about the size of a pancaked SUV leaning against the wall of rock. I tell H. and he looks and we decide it is worth a try. He goes first (again, being the less timid) and wiggles his way through on his belly. He yells that it ends at a drop off about seven feet high. I hear grunting, huffing and puffing . . . ”If I can just twist around . . . I can go feet first . . .” More grunting then an exclamation, “I’ve done it!” I then belly through the birth canal and emerge scratched up but smiling. We continue. The canyon is very narrow now. We cannot face forward in some places without each shoulder touching the wall. Two more places require us to chimney to get down similar seven-foot drops, but they are coming more often and getting trickier to negotiate.

Down one, H. says, “I’m going to go see what’s ahead.” I wait above our most significant drop yet. He’s very quiet and I worry a little at the silence. Then his voice returns, “We’re stopped. Do want to come see? Or just believe me and I’ll come up. There is a big drop ahead.” I want to see. Not that I doubt him, but I want to stare the beast that defeats us in the eye. It’s a matter of desert pride. I climb and chimney down. He points down canyon and I pass him in a wide space and stare down at about a fifty-foot drop. “If someone put a gun to our heads, I think we could get down,” I say. He says, “I think so too.” But neither of us is really suggesting that we go on. It’s just an observation. We could not get back up it, likely. We also note that our eighteen-year-old-kid-and-spouse-free selves would have continued on.

How strange that as we reach this boundary, this stopping place, I am forced to confront temporal boundaries that seem to intersect with these physical boundaries. The barrier before us is not just a physical boundary, but one created by who we have become since our youth. The cliff marks a combination of transitions in our life—like growing older, gaining ‘grown up’ responsibilities, and becoming a new self marked by temporally conditioned boundary markers such as marriage and having children—and the geological history of the canyon. It is not either one alone that stops us from going on down the canyon, but the united coming together and mingling of our history and the history of the canyon.

The way back is much harder than we thought. Getting up some of the things we got down are much more difficult than anticipated. The seven-foot climb up to the hole turns particularly difficult. H. puts up a knee, slaps his thigh and says, “Step on my leg, then when you get up you can pull me up.” I don’t. I’m pretty sure my kind of weight would separate his knee like the joint of boiled chicken being boned for soup. Well, I’m stretching. More likely it would just leave him with numerous knee operations and a lifelong limp. Or maybe, he’d be fine. But I refuse. I grab some handholds and with major grunting, pulling, and some fine rockwork for a lumbering middle-aged man, I get up to the hole. I try and pull him up. It’s hopeless, so he does the same as me. Our stopping rules proved wise. There is no way we would have made it up the fifty-footer if we had gotten pinched off between drops—seven feet almost leaves us stuck. Embarrassing but true.

Finally, after some hard scramble, with constant back and forth mutterings between us of, “I don’t remember this? Do you remember this?” we wend our way back up the slot. We finally reach a nice rock shelf and stop for sandwiches. It’s been about two hours since we entered the rift.

As we eat, I’m struck with a sense of insignificance. The boulder we climbed over might have been stuck there since Europeans arrived. Or it could have been lodged there yesterday. I cannot tell. Next to us is an old twisted pinion. Its branches yet full of living green and flourishing exuberance—as wide in trunk girth as any I’ve ever seen. We speculate, it might be two hundred years old. Maybe six hundred. I wonder how time passes for a thing that was likely old when I was born.

And the canyon itself. There is a presence here. I cannot describe it. I’ve tried to write it, but it won’t come so I yield. Not a sense of watchfulness, because I don’t matter here. I feel small. Nothing. I sense I am but a fleeting thing, like a fly on the hand, which lands then disappears. Around me are old, old ancient things. They seem present and godlike. It does not surprise me that once people fell to their knees before it. But now I just feel like a minor thread in a grander tale.  This seems like a sacred place suddenly. An old holiness. I think about Çatalhöyük, a large Neolithic ritual center in the Anatolia region of Turkey occupied from 7500-5700 BC. Found in the ruins of these structures were platforms and panels decorated with etched bulls and bull-horned pedestals. Presumably rituals took place there. Animal or human blood was found on some of the altars. Why this comes to mind, perhaps, is that the entrance into the sacred space required a formal transition from outside to the inside. Archeologists Lewis-Williams and Pearce describe entrance into this ritual center like this:

Access between rooms was afforded not by full-length doors but by small porthole-like openings through which people were obligated to crawl . . . Entry into a complex of rooms thus entailed, first, descent into a dimly lit area; secondly, having descended, people had to crawl or bend low in order to move from one walled space to another and thus deeper into the structure.¹

In other words people had to transition from the secular, ordinary world of day-to-day, to the world of ritual. Sacred spaces had to be entered formally. This holds for later civilizations as well. Ancient Israel. Egypt. Most ancient ritual centers unearthed by archeologists all over the world, even those which predate civilization and domestic crops, like Göbekli Tepe from the 12 Century B.C., seem to provide openings and borders that allowed a prescribed transition into sacred space. Is that what we did here? By crawling and bowing through this slot canyon have we transitioned from secular to sacred time? Something feels right about that. There is a sense of sacracy here. We have entered a portal of sorts that combines consciousness and place.

After a time, we make it out and find a jeep trail. That sense of the sacred seems to dissipate. We are back in secular time. The path joins a well marked dirt road which we follow. We reach the top of a slickrock knoll and sit for more apples. As we sit there, a shiny yellow jeep drives past. A shirtless man in a cowboy hat, his head out the diver’s side window as he negotiates the rock, sees us. We wave, two characters grinning like hobbits on a stroll. Silly looking, if the pictures we took from that knoll with the La Sals in the background, target our aspect in any way aright. He does not wave back but gives a slight reluctant nod as if we spoil his manly pursuits. He roars past and we hear his engine a long time after. Finally, the sound of the wind returns and we rise and start our walk back to the main road.

We have aged. Our joints are complaining and we both comment that we will likely be sore in the morning. How did we reach middle age? It was only yesterday we were eighteen. Heck, in my head I’m still eighteen. It’s only the rest of me that protests its age. Unexpectedly, I remember a poem from Tennyson that brings out a smile and causes me to straighten my back a bit and step forward with a little more verve. I end with those lines remembered in part then, but here repeated:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.²

Transitions will continue. Both of life and landscape. And I smile and am lifted that I can continue to participate in crossing life’s ecotones.

Notes

[1] Lewis-Williams, David and David Pearce. 2005. Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods. Thames & Hudson. New York. p. 105.

[2] Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson, from http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~keith/poems/Ulysses.html, Accessed May 14, 2011.

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Steve Peck is an ecologist at Brigham Young University. Creative works include a novel: The Gift of the King’s Jeweler (2003 Covenant Communications); a self-published novella A Short Stay in Hell (reviewed here and here), a short science fiction story: The Flaw in the Lord Harrington Scenario, published in HMS Beagle (online journal by Elsevier); poetry in Dialogue, Bellowing Ark, BYU Studies, Irreantum, Red Rock Review, Glyphs III, Tales of the Talisman (in press), and a chapbook of poetry published by the American Tolkien Society called Flyfishing in Middle Earth.  His new novel, Scholar of Moab, is due out this fall from Torrey House Press.  Steve blogs at bycommonconsent.com and has a faith/science blog called The Mormon Organon.  “Crossing Boundaries” was first published on By Common Consent as “127 Minutes.”  For more of Steve’s writing published on WIZ, go here, here, here, here, and here.

Every year an old friend and I undertake an adventure. H. and I are middle-aged now. Past our prime and youth when our adventures were bolder and more carefree. I can remember when we then, full of laughter, took his new pickup and rubbed its shiny sides against aspens for luck while searching out some secreted beaver dam in which to toss a fly. Now we fuss and fret. We worry endlessly about our kids and their kids and temper our exuberance with caution, having faced too many sorrows and misfortunes since. We are stressed and plagued with the press of the day to day, and we both in demeanor have that worn edge that cheese graters achieve when used on granite.

But once a year we become eighteen again. We plan a day and fashion ourselves into grand explorers and take to the environs of our youth. His wife drops us off on a dirt road. In pictures she took, we cut a pair of comical figures. Camelbacks, pants, and trekking poles make us look like a pair of amateur bird watchers more suited to a stroll along a paved parkway than two bold men (in our minds at least) out for rugged adventure. In one of the pictures, one of us points to the desert. It is a hint that today we are not taking to common trails.

We are making for a deep valley. On Google Earth it runs like a scar from a plateau that skirts the La Sal Mountains, to the Moab Valley. There are no roads or trails that access that Valley, only dim memories of my friend and the secret knowledge, rumor, and arrogance that tiptoes through Moab natives, and makes us think that there is a hidden slot canyon that runs to that willow-lined Shangri-La. We will try to find it. To do so we will cross many boundaries, roads, geological formations, and transitions in soil and vegetation.

In ecology, boundaries, or ecotones as they are called, are often marked by physical transitions. Sometimes abrupt: as in water to land, or rock to earth. Sometimes they are more gradual: as in chemical gradients in soil, or as in elevational changes as you move up a mountain. There are lots of examples: forest to grass lands, coral reef to open sea. There are also landscape-level changes like that from desert to Sahel. In Hawaii there is a transition zone from rain forest, near the Kilauea Volcano crater, to the Ka’ū Desert where it rains only very infrequently. This transition zone is only a few hundred yards wide. Ecological boundaries are always boundaries ‘for something.’ Something specific. For a snake, a freeway may be an impassible boundary that for a bird treats as nothing at all. But whatever it is, it usually involves bringing in the perceptual awareness of ‘someone’ marking the boarder. Borders can have very well-defined areas, like the trout locked into a stream from which it cannot move, or bears that have fuzzy territories, marked by their awareness of the presence and signs of other bears.

Ecological systems are also complex and this complexity grows as new layers of complexity fold into, and blossom from, other layers. Life expands in evolutionary time to fill new niches and, in so doing, creates new niches. For example, as plants left the oceans onto a barren world of land they created a new level of complexity of habitats, that were soon exploited by insects, which in turn created more complexity allowing vertebrates, then birds, then mammals, then us (our physical form anyway), to enter into these complex dances as natural selection explored these spaces of possible life-types in creative ways. These new niches in turn allowed more complexity to arise and more niches to unfold into the world. Boundaries are created in this process and they are always both temporal and spatial in nature. These things come to mind as we prepare to launch ourselves into the landscape. A patchwork of such boundaries.

We abandon the road and take to navigating through, around, and between the Navajo sandstone fins that slice through the high-canyon desert as we try to make our way to the valley. We are careful not to damage the cryptogrammic soil, wending our way through the frozen dunes fashioned from late Triassic river delta deposits. We wander for a couple of hours, weaving between this rock formation and that, until at last we find ourselves on the precipice of a great cliff. Thousands of feet below us, we see the wide stream of the creek bed lined with ancient cottonwoods. Our objective.

A wind blows hard and cool and we step cautiously away from the edge. There is no obvious way down there. We see several slot canyons entering the wide ravine below, but everything looks as if it ends too far up from the valley floor. We sit down and eat some apples. We realize if we hike about a quarter of a mile forward, we will be on a higher rill from which we may see more of the valley. So we climb up that steep redrock and see hope. There to our left (I cannot give ordinal directions as we are without either GPS or compass—being from Moab we are gifted with a sixth sense) is a slot canyon that may work. It is a slice in the rock like the narrow gouge of a sawcut in a pine plank (on Google Earth you cannot even see it from above—it looks like a small grove in the landscape). Actually there are two canyons side by side. Either one looks like it will get us into the valley.

“We should have brought field glasses,” H. says.

I nod. I think it will work. To get to the place where the narrow canyon begins requires another half-mile scramble but we find it and start down. It is steep and soon we are in deep shadow as we scramble over the debris and push our way through patches of sometimes-thick holly. The grade grows steeper. We decide on some stopping rules. One danger in these canyons is you scramble down something you can’t get back up, and then after come to a drop you cannot get down. You are stuck between drops. You get rescued or die. We decide that if we reach something we are not sure we can get back up, we stop. Ok?

We are crossing into a new ecological zone as we enter into the canyon. I think about the deep time that has structured this new assemblage of plants and animals. And how this canyon marks out something new. I recall that ecological boundaries also always have historical contingency. They exist because certain features have unfolded in the ways that they have in time because of physical processes, or additional ecological complexity. This historical contingency also means that each ecosystem is unique in ways that is not duplicated. They exist for a time, emerging on the stage or Earth life for a moment (perhaps a geological moment), never to be duplicated exactly or repeated. This canyon is such a moment—marked out of deep time.

We’ve gone a long ways down. Thousands of feet of rock rise above us. Although it is mid-dayish it is dusky and dark. We’ve been scrambling down a while when we reach our first decision point. A large boulder has fallen into the crack we are lumbering down. It is wedged in the slot. There is a small hole that will take us under it, and a rocky scramble above. I crawl forward over the boulder, edge along a sandy shelf, and find myself rock-bound. It’s only about a twelve-foot drop, but I can tell if we go down here we can’t get back up. The sandstone is crumbly and we may have transitioned to Kayenta Formation, much less stable. I try to make my way along a ledge that looks like a possible descent. But I don’t see one. H. wants to look and I back up to where he is and he edges forward. He thinks it looks like he can get down, but I argue that we can’t get back up, it’s too loose. I am the more faint-hearted and skittish and talk him out of trying. Also, when we thought it would be easy, we both foolishly threw our trekking poles down there. We back away and look at the little hole that leads under the boulder. Could we fit through that? Not likely.

To read Part Two, click here.

For the second year, we’re making February “Love of Nature, Nature of Love” month on Wilderness Interface Zone.  To celebrate Valentine’s Day, all month long we’ll publish poetry, essays, blocks of fiction, art, music (mp3s), video or other media that address the subject of love while making references to nature.  Or it could go the other way around: We’ll publish work about nature that also happens to give a nod to love.  That presents a wide field of possibilities.  We’re seeking submissions of original work or you can also send favorite works by others that have entered public domain.  So if you have a sonnet you’ve written to someone dear to your heart–even and perhaps especially your dog–please consider sending it to WIZ.  See the submissions page in the navigation bar above.

Also, February 24th is WIZ’s birthday.  We’ll be two years old—a toddler now.  To celebrate, a couple of posts will offer presents to our readers.  Because without you, dear readers, where would we be?

There’s more than a slight hint of thaw in earth and air.  The light is growing longer.  The first waves  of the Canadian geese migration are rolling through the southern Utah county where I live.  Hen-and-chicks and stork’s bill are beginning to preen.  The coyotes are pairing off.  February is a good month to warm things up.  Got love?  Celebrate it here on WIZ.

Please, please, don’t be a litterbug.
Please, please, don’t be a litterbug.
Please, please, don’t be a litterbug
‘Cause every litter bit hurts.

In the 60s, a chorus of children’s voices sang this song during television and radio public service messages that were part of a national campaign against littering.   Even after decades of higher education and adult distractions, I remember not only the jingle’s words but also its tune.  I recall in detail, too, Richmond’s Own Snooty, a cartoon vacuum-cleaner creature who appeared on billboards along Virginia’s highways and admonished children and adults not to toss trash out the windows of their cars.

It was a simple message that worked.  There really is a lot less litter along roads, in parks, or sullying the landscape in general than there was when I was a kid. One reason is that, as part of the anti-litter campaign, more trashcans appeared on the land to collect cast-offs that people shed constantly.  Another reason: Signs sprang up beside highways informing would-be litterbugs of steep fines they’d pay for their slovenliness were they caught red-handed.

I was born in the late 50s at the dawn of the contemporary environmental movement.  I grew up in an era of comparatively straight-forward, mostly nonprofit drives to raise public awareness to the growing plight of all sorts of habitats, including human ones.  I lived with reportage that tallied the ever-growing list of newly discovered harmful effects from water and soil contamination and the inclusion of toxic and otherwise problematic ingredients in household products (lead in paint, phosphates in laundry detergent).  I remember “uh-oh” moments when research connected the dots between the use of some pesticides and troubling pathologies in people and other species.  The emergence into public discussion of direct and collateral damage resulting from easy fixes, unchecked exploitation and ignorance of the finer details of our relationships to the world and to each other was, overall, a good thing.  It has led to—is leading to—discovery of layers upon layers of intertwined relationships, many of which are forming even now. Many we’re still struggling to find the language to perceive, explore, and bring to light.

Nowadays, environmental discourse is a given in today’s society, so much so that some of its purlieus have morphed into rhetorical Las Vegas Strips, like that wanton display of gaudiness I woke to in the detergent aisle at City Market.  Some might think that stumble into opportunism ironically contrary to environmentalism’s expressed ideals.  But the qualities of language that make it so sexy to the human mind also make it one of this world’s most exploitable resources.  Words well composed snag the finest threads of our attention. They provide a medium–perhaps the most enlivening one–to create, examine, support and reform society.  They play the central role in humankind’s passion for narrative (one’s life story, for instance).  Fine language can touch and perhaps even kindle human consciousness.  Likewise, poor language affects people in the way that poor nutrition harms the human body and mind, rendering folks vulnerable to all kinds of trouble.  In general, language’s influences upon belief and behavior run deep.  How deep, nobody knows yet.  Naturally, those beckoning depths capture the imaginations of intrigantes.  So the unsavory behavior of gold diggers, claim jumpers, cattle and land barons, and opportunists of every ilk in human language’s raw fields of unimaginable wealth isn’t such a surprise.  Of course eco-lingo’s achieving hot status makes it a popular target for schemers.

The Federal Trade Commission recently issued new guidelines regarding this troubling of eco-speak’s waters.  The 2010 Green Guide (last one issued: 1998) warns against obviously misleading use of the emerging green lexicon.  The guide instructs that manufacturers of goods “… should provide specifics about the materials and energy used in manufacturing, to make sure customers aren’t confused.”  (Note that the article reports the guide to say that manufacturers should provide specifics, not must provide.)

But my recent adventure in the laundry detergent aisle and months-long analysis of my Pure Life bottled water specimen suggest strongly that, where manufacturer’s labeling practices are concerned, confusion is exactly the point.  On Pure Life’s label, above the “Embrace the Pure Life” slogan, is a yellow highlighted box touting Nestle Corporation’s environmental conscientiousness: “This lighter bottle and smaller cap contain an average of 20% less plastic than our original 0.5L Eco-shape bottle and cap.”  What exactly we are to understand from this language is unclear.  Its meaning has been stripped out to just trace levels.  Without actually saying anything, the words give the product an appearance only of complying with industry standards’ … um, suggestions? … to display to the public eye “specifics about the materials” (and implications about process) used in the manufacturing of Pure Life and its packaging.

The new Green Guide “cautions” against too-loose use of new terms such as “renewable materials,” “renewable energy,” and “environmentally friendly.”  But as the linked article points out, these guidelines are not legally enforceable.  The FTC can and will warn a company whose misuse of language they deem “unfair or deceptive,” issuing cease and desist orders to manufacturers that push matters too far.  Then, if a manufacturer continues those violations, the FTC will impose fines—which some businesses will simply write off as the cost of doing business.

But determining the point where a company crosses a line takes us onto squishy ground. Marketing lexidigitators conjure up a tricky array of sleights of labeling that they can argue meet the letter of law.  Bare compliance on manufacturers’ parts shifts the responsibility for interpreting product labels  squarely onto the shoulders of product buyers.  Other strategies such as  packaging colors (color affects many people’s minds profoundly—an effect exploited voraciously in the movie Avatar), labeling and advertising’s co-opting of highly valued words or phrases to attract heightened attention, the distracting “entertainment value” of a product’s advertising stance, and carnival-hawker-style equivocation in claims all place the burden of proof on “consumers” and thereby disperse responsibility.

The Green Guide’s stated intent, however, is to mitigate as a practical matter consumer confusion resulting from the green gold rush, not to protect the emerging eco-argot or the human rhetorical environment in general.   When it comes to the recognition and advocacy of human language as a teeming but sensitive environment, we lag far behind the “Save the Planet” movement.  We still behave in the logosphere–the world of words–more or less the same way we did in this country’s wide open spaces 50-150 years ago: As long as our we don’t knowingly kill anything we don’t want dead, or as long as nobody discovers in how we word ourselves grounds to sue us, anything goes. Overuse and misuse of the logosphere are not only commonplace but also are expected to continue as basic perks of freedom of speech, especially since language appears to be an endlessly self-renewing resource.

Unfortunately, this rhetorical free-for-all places the environmental movement in a Catch-22.  Success in raising awareness and inspiring better behavior toward Earth depends heavily upon the effectiveness of the language that environmentalists and nature writers use to get their messages across. But the cogency of environmentalists’ particular narrative approach depends in turn upon the quality of the overall rhetorical environment hosting it, similar to how the success or failure of a species depends upon the health of its habitat.  And human rhetorical environs are as heavily exploited, silted up and contaminated from unwise mining and dumping practices as any on-the-ground ecosystem. Beautiful, vibrant regions of its expanse—like the language we human beings have developed over centuries to describe and involve ourselves in the natural world—have been deforested, over-farmed, over-built, warred over, and co-opted for high-profit marketeering and other forms of gain.  We exploit this primary habitat for human thought, relationship, and maybe even evolutionary potential in the same way we treated this planet half a century and more ago and continue to treat it today: as an assortment of things or an array of materials that we use however we like until we get bored with them, break them, or empty them of value.

Language is much more than a thing like a tool or a toolbox filled with clever gadgets we ply to work meaning into place or chisel out what we want.  But even at the level of this common misconception of language as a thing that we make use of or even own, if we approach the subject of how to behave better in the logosphere as a matter of how to treat our “things” better, we can find ways to rehabilitate spent ground and act with the common good in mind.

To read part four, click here.

“Look, here’s Fezzika,” my mother said, bending down to point out the Woodhouse toad tucked under the garden stone. We had discovered the amphibian’s house a few days earlier, and I was fascinated by the placement choice. She had dug into the soil under a cornerstone edging the flowerbed beside the main path through the garden. The stone is flat, shaped a little like a boomerang, wide and bent in the middle, providing a convenient entrance and shelter.

The first one or two years we lived here we simply dug plots of soil to plant our garden in and sometimes hired someone to till up an area we chose. But the second time we tilled, my mother discovered two toads that the tiller blades killed. One had missing limbs and made it as far as the surface of the tilled soil before dying. It was heartbreaking that these benign creatures had been injured in our yard where we tried to protect and encourage toads and other creatures.

My mother decided to try things a different way. We went up to a nearby gravel pit and gathered rocks from there, transporting them to our yard. Using these stones we built raised beds to plant our garden in, making an almost-grid around the new flowerbed and then shoveling soil into the beds, mixing manure and compost in as well. With this new approach to the garden, we had no need to till the plot.

Soon after that, toads readily swarmed to the garden, coming out of secret holes at night and hopping through water puddles that the sprinkler left. They squatted in the plastic container of water my mother placed at the south end of the garden, a little “toad spa”. Some nights, there would be two or three toads soaking in the water at a time. When any of the family walked through the garden at night, we had to be careful that we didn’t step on a toad sitting in the path. Oftentimes I went barefoot, partly so that I would feel more easily if I disturbed an amphibian.

Over the six years we’ve lived here, the behavior of the toads in our garden has changed. They accept our garden as an ideal environment, traveling to stop at our water puddles, foraging in our area, burrowing under the black plastic and wandering around the garden. What my mother did not expect was that the toads would begin making permanent homes under the stones of the garden bed. This year, when my mother was in the garden, she realized that one of them—Fezzika—had dug a homey burrow to live in. This toad is an especially large female Woodhouse toad, as jumpy as any other when we walk around. My mother decided that we could name her “Fezzika” in honor of the giant in The Princess Bride because the toad is so large.

She wasn’t the only toad who moved in. Not long after we found Fezzika, we discovered that another toad had similarly excavated a spot under another flat stone in the herb bed. Slightly smaller than Fezzika, it had dug a sideways tunnel against the rock only a few inches away from our lemon thyme. It also seems that some of the toad homes are community burrows. A couple years ago, there was a gopher hole under one of our peach trees. Not only one toad lived in here. There were one or two others, and even a tiger salamander that shared the burrow with them.

Before Fezzika had moved in, the toads had generally only dug into the softer soil of the garden, first in the tilled soil of the old plots, then into the shovel-turned soil in the raised beds. They sometimes hibernated in the beds, and they liked moving in and out from beneath the black weed barrier. We would often find holes in the beds where one had spent the day in a burrow. Our garden was clearly a good environment for them, with plenty of water and insects to support their diet. The only slight downturn was that our cats prowled the garden and sometimes batted at them, but our felines usually left the toads to themselves. They certainly never ate them.

One reason the cats leave the toads alone (besides our chastisement) is that toads produce a gland toxin called bufotalin. This toxin is stored in large sacs slightly behind the Woodhouse toad’s eyes. It’s a milky substance that, if it enters the bloodstream, can cause increased heart rate or other heart problems because it has effects like digitalis, or Foxglove. It also has a distinctly bad taste.

Female Woodhouse toads are generally bigger than the males, and they can be as long as four inches. Once, when I was at a pond with some friends and we were catching toads, I caught a large brown toad that was possibly a Woodhouse. It had the characteristic light dorsal stripe but was a brown color, something I had never seen in Woodhouse toads before.

Just down the street from us is a large pond formed by runoff from the irrigation sprinklers in the alfalfa field above. From March to July, we can hear the male Woodhouse toads in the pond. The males emit a long, wailing call that can be compared to a sheep with a serious cold. The males use these calls to attract the females to ideal breeding waters.

Woodhouse toads deposit long strings of eggs numbering from twenty to forty eggs per strand in relatively still waters. Once these hatch, the tadpoles feed on debris in the pond, gradually maturing as they grow legs, lose their tails, and finally become tiny toads, no bigger than the nail of my little finger. From there, it takes three years for the toad to fully mature into the sizes of those amphibians now inhabiting our garden.

Unlike frogs, toads have a thicker skin that they can absorb water through. When the toads sat in the plastic container of water during the night it was to have a drink through their skin. Once they mature from tadpoles, the toads can wander as long as they like, being sure to stop at puddles and ponds to stay hydrated.

Now that the toads have come as far as digging rock-roofed homes in the garden, it doesn’t seem likely they’ll leave. My mother hopes that sometime we’ll be able to build a pond of our own, a little piece somewhere in the backyard that will encourage the toads even further. They’ve become year-round neighbors for us and interesting creatures to study. Toads eat a large assortment of insects in our garden, everything from flies to slugs, when slugs appear. Their presence is a welcome addition to the garden ecosystem.

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Val K. is thirteen years old and lives in a house in the Utah desert with her family, her carnivorous plants, a dog, five cats, and several toads. In between the times she spends writing, she works on crafts involving building, embroidery, gardening and more and also takes time to read incredibly long epic novels. She spends what is left of her free time writing fantasy stories and has a book written and a sequel in the works.

Okay, maybe they’re not doing it like that.  (But oh, what I could have and would have done with such technology in my wild child days!)  In fact, maybe they’re not going out into the Mystery much at all, if Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods gives an accurate account of how children and nature have fallen out of love.  But there must be some kids still getting out there, developing lightning-fast reflexes from chasing lizards, solving the whole-body puzzle of climbing a tree, honing their future driving skills by walking on logs across creeks, etc.

It’s in the hope that nature children still exist somewhere that Wilderness Interface Zone is issuing a call for nature poems and short essays written by children.  The works may address any aspect of nature and the child’s relationship to it.  Poems should be 50 lines or under and essays 150-1000 words.  If you have a budding nature photojournalist in your family, we will consider posting his or her photos.  Children ages 6-18 are invited to submit work to pk.wizadmin@gmail.com from July 6, 2010 to July 31, 2010.  Depending on how many submissions we get, we’ll post them in batches off and on July-August.  Parents and kids: Please review submission guidelines here before submitting.

Th.
Nephi Anderson (via Th.’s gravelly voice)
Mark Bennion
Tyler Chadwick
greenfrog
green mormon architect
Elizabeth R.

And, of course, many thanks to WIZ’s loyal readers and commenters.

I appreciate each writer’s help keeping People Month on WIZ interesting and fun.  We’ll do it again next year (maybe earlier), so start drawing up your People Month writing plans now.