*This is, of course, a variation on the common adage to “make like a tree and branch out,” and the less common adage, used primarily among canines (the dogs, not the teeth), “make like a tree and bark.” Puns about leaves will not be tolerated.

___________________________________________________________________________

Professor Percival P. Pennywhistle despises children and loathes nature, which often gets on his shoes and under his fingernails, but he recognizes that both are important enough to be addressed, and so he writes poetry and other things for children, some of it about nature. Bits and pieces of his work can be found here, and he can also be reached on Facebook and via email at pennywhistlestop@gmail.com. The poems published on WIZ come from Poems for the Precocious and Alphabet Stew: Poems in a Particular Order. Other projects in development include Mythiphus, Me Grimms and Melancholies, Kid Viscous and the Mysterious Substance, Jonah P. Juniper and getting Ben Crowder to be his illustrator.

Coming soon to a mailbox (or computer) near you: Dialogue’s environmental issue.  Several Wilderness Interface Zone contributors are included therein–congratulations, friends! Frequent WIZ contributor Steven Peck guest edited this issue.

Table of contents:

Page     Author     Title
Mary Toscano     Front Cover
Inside Cover, Title Page
v     Edwin Firmage, Jr.     Letters
1     Steven L. Peck     Why Nature Matters: A Special Issue of Dialogue on Mormonism and the Environment
6     George B. Handley     Faith and the Ethics of Climate Change
36     Craig D. Galli     Enoch’s Vision and Gaia: An LDS Perspective on Environmental Stewardship
57     Bryan V. Wallis     Flexibility in the Ecology of Ideas: Revelatory Religion and the Environment
67     Jason M. Brown     Whither Environmental Theology
87     Bart H. Welling     ”The Blood of Every Beast”: Mormonism and the Question of the Animal
118     Mary Toscano     A Perch, A Foothold, A Float
119     Patricia Gunter Karamesines     Why Joseph Went to the Woods: Rootstock for LDS Literary Nature Writers
134     Adam S. Miller     Recompense
143     Ron Madson     Grandpa’s Hat
148     Sarah Dunster     Gaius
150     Harlow Soderborg Clark     Easter Sermons
152     Jon Ogden     Seasonal Ritual
153     Jonathon Penny     Winterscape: Prairie
154     Karen Kelsay     Mother Willow
155     Sandra Skouson     Girl Without a Mother to Her Big Brother
156     Mary Toscano     The Tightrope Walker
157     Hugo Olaiz     The Birth of Tragedy
161     David G. Pace     American Trinity
177     Benjamin E. Park     Image and Reality in the Utah Zion
180     Polly Aird     Not Just Buchanan’s Blunder
190     Rob Fergus     Scry Me a River
196     Mary Toscano     Wherever He May Go
197     Peter L. McMurray     This Little Light of Ours: Ecologies of Revelation

Can’t wait to get my copy.   I’m very happy to see so many WIZards’ work appearing in the issue, including poems from WIZ’s 2010 Spring Poetry Runoff.

Only complaint: The cover girl or boy polar bear is cute, but I would have put hummingbirds up front.

Just sayin’.

He stood wondering about the strings
of which some say he was made

Of what tidal forces were they drawn?
What sort of other moon forced him
into existence by its orbit around . . . what?

He placed his foot in the sand
it felt cool, rough, and yielding

What are these qualia, ‘cool’, ‘rough’,
‘yeilding’, and why such pleasantness
bubbling up in the vibrations he has become?
How do vibrations, causing vibrations, ponder
those vibrations?

Becoming? Vibrations becoming?
Vibrations becoming him?

Before the deep waves had twisted into
just the right harmonies to
create this self, this himself,
what was there? Nothing? Abyss?
but then . . .
How? Why? How why now?

So there is the moon—a bolus of strings
bouncing light waves from an even larger
solar knot of strings, exciting waves
in neural bundles packed within her eye,
passing through intricate
webs of waves upon waves in intricate and
complex tangles and astonishing frequencies,
which finally erupted into

a pleasant night, on a beach, watching the
ocean move.

__________________________________________________________________________

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.  Steve blogs at bycommonconsent.com and has a faith/science blog called The Mormon Organon.  For other poems by Steve, go here and here.

*contest entry*

He walks slowly, his back more straight than not,
his gait timeless. Strong.
Still, there is something hesitant and
questioning about his steps, as though
he were feeling his way through the stony-bottomed
stream of a shallow river. The wide path allows him
to cherish his granddaughter’s hand as they walk
abreast at a pace that suits them both, supporting one
another in more ways than one. They move, talking
contentedly, toward the pond where the ducks and
geese await to scramble for the stale bread these two will
toss from the Wal-Mart sack.

He remembers this pond when it was part of a working farm,
rather than imbedded here among the groomed
greenways of these condominiums. Trespassing fences, he
swam here long summers ago where he also
caught brim and bluegills. He ditched
school to have adventures far more important
than the pale things he might have learned in a classroom.

His granddaughter will not swim here. There are signs
posted. The water is murky green with algae and
likely filled with strange and exotic bacteria. It’s home now
to clipped-wing ducks and hungry bright orange and white koi.
Fishing is not allowed.

Even so, this year wild wood ducks nested in this unlikely spot,
their small bright colors a reminder that there is still
hope for this girl to know the world right—as can only
be taught on summer days while playing hooky.

___________________________________________________________________

For Steve’s bio and more of his poetry, click here.

Existence was
worth it
if only for
the timbre
of untamed
water
splashing
beneath the fragile
white-crystal coating
of mid-winter ice.

___________________________________________________________________

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.  Steve blogs at bycommonconsent.com and has a faith/science blog called The Mormon Organon.  For other poems by Steve, go here and here.

The twentieth century has gone down in history for a number of ignominious as well as heroic events, but certainly one of its more troubling legacies is its treatment of rivers. As agriculture gave way to industry and massive development of cities, water was victim to an increasingly private and individualistic conceptualization of property. Consequently, rivers suffered greater transformation than in the previous ten thousand years. They were straightened, diked, and dammed, and where I live water was transported from less populous areas and fed into the Provo, all to provide more space for homes, more safety from floods to homeowners, and reservoirs to ensure the perpetuity of modernization. And as Donald Worster reminds us, the Mormons played no small role in this harnessing of water’s wild and unpredictable ways, seeing dams and dikes as the way of the Lord. Several small hydroelectric dams were built on the Provo early in the century, and then two major dams were built, one in the 1940s and the other in the 1990s.

Within a century of the arrival of the white man, 95 percent of the native species in the river and of Utah Lake went extinct, this despite the fact that it had been the meat of the native fish of the river and lake that provided for humans for thousands of years and saved the lives of the pioneers in those early, hunger-ridden years of settlement. But this is only the most overt and measurable of consequences. Aquatic species worldwide are going extinct at much faster rates than terrestrials. When the fish go, that means the invertebrates, zooplankton, plants, and whole swaths of life go, too.

Rivers are unruly by nature, of course, especially when they are subject to the ebb and flow of snowpack in mountain wilderness and when they drop quickly and sometimes with crushing violence. In the case of the Provo, what was once a meandering, braided series of cuts and turns that increased in variety, biodiversity, and breadth as the river fell from high elevations and grew and spread across each flatland with increasing strength and claim, is now in the lower regions what one local restoration ecologist, Mark Belk, calls a “moving bathtub,” a straight shot of water with decreasing biodiversity.

In the middle of the century, the Army Corps of Engineers did their level best to teach the river to behave with a series of dikes that riprapped it like some intransigent adolescent who, accustomed to slouching at the dinner table, is forced to wear a back brace. This was done perhaps not out of any overt malice but in profound ignorance of what a river is and what it does. We now know its health must be measured in terms of the entire watershed over the course of its dynamically changing shape through time, upstream and downstream, from the surface to the subsurface, and by its relation to the riparian communities it spawns alongside.

A river is water, yes, but it is also soil, plant, and animal life—a watershed. Seeing it requires something more than merely historical or aesthetic lenses. It requires the poet’s eye. Zooplankton, invertebrates, fish, mammals, vegetation, fowl, all respond to and even depend on a river’s unpredictable and uneven flow, its fluctuations in temperature, and its moods of violent overflow, as well as its vulnerability to drought. So, too, the invisible and larger supply of groundwater beneath our feet. Variety in contour is the rule of water left to run its own course as it spills over rocks, carries dead wood and plant life, turns back and braids itself around slight elevations. Its life, in other words, depends on chance, even chaos. This enhances the differences in temperatures, velocity, and volume of flow that provide habitats for a broad diversity of life.

But tolerating a river’s unpredictability is like tolerating the bald facts of mortality itself. Consider the two meanings of Isaiah’s recompenses: God’s gift of grace of a blossoming desert—the earth as home, as paradise—and God’s vengeance on a wicked world—the earth as exile, as wilderness. It would seem necessary to learn tolerance for the fact that we are never far from either one. We need an imagination of deep time, but try selling the merits of deep time to the homeowner on a floodplain or to the politician running for election on a platform of economic progress. It was only thirty years ago that some Utahns entertained the proposition that the Provo River could deliver its water more effectively if it were piped underground, which is sort of like deciding to forsake food in order to get your daily nutrition intravenously or with pills. It took the work of Robert Redford and Sam Rushforth, an ecologist at BYU at the time, and others to convince people of the shortsightedness of the proposal, not to mention its aesthetic impoverishment. But this new practice of environmental repentance, the deep art of ecological restoration, is more than preservation; it reshapes rivers to their complex serpentine forms and allows life to go about its business of promoting habitat diversity and mitigates against the effects of climate change. A way of saying, no, not yet, not here. Mark Belk, for one, believes it is not merely his scientific duty but his Mormon stewardship to be, as he wryly puts it, “out to save the world, one trash fish at a time.”

Human developments have also placed limits on the progress of such efforts, but ecological restoration at least signals a penitent response to Malachi’s threats. Repentance begins with recognition of sin but ends when self-loathing is overcome by love. If every species is a creative response to a particular environment, protecting species is protecting the integrity of a system as it moves through evolutionary time. Ecological restoration, unlike the work on the Sistine Chapel, is not a scraping away of time’s effects on the surface of a static work of beauty; it is instead a stepping into the flow of time and watching the diversity of life our restitutions spawn. It is a fundamental recognition of ongoing creation, something unimaginable within a theology of an ex nihilo creation.

Creationists, in their shallow temporal reckoning, cry foul since a seeming snap of the fingers is enough to explain the young and static world around us. Not for Joseph Smith whose understanding of the creation as organized matter accrues in potency with increasing understanding of the emergence of a world of complexity, extravagance, and beauty in deep time: “The pure principles of element are principles which can never be destroyed; they may be organized and re-organized, but not destroyed. They had no beginning and can have no end.”

The audacity of the prophet Joseph is his claim to have restored an original form of Christianity, and that would have to include Christianity’s original ecological understanding. Was there an ecological apostasy? Are we perhaps just beginning to understand the ecological principles he restored? If the creation bears witness to a creator, it would seem that even the eternity of God and his works are inherently temporal. Spiritual work this is, this patient assent to what is. A working back along the path that first led us away from this ticking earth. Healing the earth, yes. But a restoration of ourselves, too.

_______________________________________________________________________________

George B. Handley is a professor of humanities at Brigham Young University.  He has been writing, teaching, and lecturing throughout Utah and internationally on the intersections between religion, literature, and the environment for the past decade.  As an activist, he has argued for the protection of wilderness, legislation to mitigate climate change, and smart growth in Utah.  He is the author of two books of literary criticism, Postslavery Literatures of the Americas and New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott.  His book, Home Waters, published in 2010 by the University of Utah Press, is a creative non-fiction narrative that argues for a sustainable sense of place in the West by exploring the environmental history of the Provo River watershed, Mormon theology, and his own pioneer and family history in Utah Valley.  He lives in Provo with his wife, Amy, and their four children.

He is also a member of the LDS Earth Stewardship group, a community of LDS writers, teachers, artists, scientists and others advocating deeper, more responsible human relationships with God’s creation, the Earth.

Citation. The above excerpt is taken from Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River by George B. Handley.  Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2010, pp. 127-130.

The pics accompanying are unfortunately not as fine as I’d like, but adverse conditions–high winds for the photo shoot, swarms of biting gnats, a dark work space–conspired against us in all our attempts.  We did what we could under the circumstances, which are always somewhat haphazard at Casa Karamesines.

William and Katherine Morris’ mother Linda actually conducted the interview.  It was a great pleasure to meet the source from whence sprang these two unique and talented blogging associates of mine.  I’ve known William (whom I’ve never met)  for several years now and often wondered where in the world he came from.  At last, more clues!

At WIZ’s companion blog A Motley Vision, I’ve posted, at Katherine’s suggestion, three questions and answers cut from the interview to trim length.

“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.

__________________________________________________________________________

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.

Gabriel Aresti Jr. for his three poems, “Spring-Eh-Field,” “Nospringland,” and “What the Mormons Taught Me About Spring and More”

Travis Burnham, for his poem “The Morning View”

Tyler Chadwick, for his three poems “Te Kore,” “Pacific: Mateu, Matem,” and “Across the Hokianga (Tanka)”

Harlow Clark, for his found poem “Easter Sermons”

Nani Furse, for her two poems “Spring Outing” and “At the Enterprise Reservoir Dam”

greenfrog, for his spring haiku

Warren Hatch, for his poem “Pruning the Blood Plum Tree”

Arthur Hatton, for contributing his song “You’re Better Than That”

Karen Kelsay, for her three poems, “Handmaidens of Spring,” “In the Sweet Alone,” and “Waiting for Spring”

Lance Larsen, for contributing his poem “Rough Translation”

Mary-Celeste Lewis, for her poem “Happy”

Nathan Meidell, for his poem “Softer Joy”

Alan Mitchell, for his poem “Winter Relapse”

Angela Morrison, for her poem “Sonoran Atonement”

Davey Morrison, for his three poems, “February,” “Like Urban Tumbleweed,” and “You Rustle Me”

Jon Ogden, for his poem “Seasonal Ritual”

Polly Parkinson for her poem, “milkweed”

Sandra Skouson for her three poems, “Beginning to Rain: At Monument Valley,” “Girl Without a Mother to Her Big Brother,” and “Naming Spring”

It has been an honor and delight to meet and work with each of you.  Feel free to continue to contribute nature-themed work to WIZ and to visit often.  Also, tremendous thanks to WIZ’s readers, to those who contributed haiku to the haiku chain, to commenters, and to all those who participated in the voting.  Come back anytime and throw another log on the fire.

The 2011 vernal equinox arrives Sunday, March 20th.  We’ll be running next year’s Spring Poetry Runoff Celebration starting on or around Friday, March 18th,  so keep that date in mind and plan to join next year’s versefest, either as contestants or non-contest contributors.  Music and other work poetry-related will also be welcome.  The contest will never be a formal affair, its intent being to provide a place for a communal celebration of spring’s arrival rather than apply the starch of an academic event.   Perhaps one day I’ll have more blog members to argue with over choices of winners, but ’til then it’ll just be lil’ ol’ me.  My hope is one day to be able to offer more prizes and other incentives for participation, as per the Navajo tradition of gifting all participants with thank-you baskets and other goods.  Currently, WIZ is on a (very limited) budget, so we give what we’ve got.  This year the poets were the ones spreading a generous and shining banquet.

Excellent work all, and a wonderful show of public interest and support.  As I believe the condition of human language to exert important influence upon the condition of the Earth, I appreciate the creative, engaging, possibility-producing qualities of the words offered here as good acts of stewardship on each participant’s part.  Very heartening.

Daffodil has become again
small-pusher-of-earth-and-snow,
light-out-of-stone,
seawater-turned-sunshine.

This morning has its own name,
separate from all other mornings,
fire-in-the-clouds
waking-in-the-folds-of-mountain,
joy-of-long-shadows.

And now spring has brought
mist-in-my-breath,
shining-on-the-rocks,
quick-and-noisy-in-the-canyon,
to make soft soil in the garden
where I kneel for the first time
on the almost-warm-gift-to-growing
and work my spade toward summer.

_____________________________________________________________

For Sandra’s bio and other poems submitted to WIZ’s Spring Poetry Runoff, click here and here.

*Contest entry*