Ask Not What Your Ecosystem can Do For You

It's raining this morning, and it is dark and murky outside. But yesterday was a sunny, warm day, and I went for many walks  on my property.

I was going to invite my readers to go hiking down the trail with me, but then I remembered that I can't seem to upload longer clips any more, so I settled for a full turn that allows a view in every direction. This is the five acre plot of land that could become Bow's island someday. It is full of rich vegetation and is well on its way to becoming wooded, but it is still just a savanna at the moment. Perfect for chimpanzees.

Bow on the blooming dogwood tree in 2005

One of the things I used to ask myself, and still do sometimes, is how would the trees and shrubs and flowers in my pasture survive the onslaught of the destructive forces that Bow would unleash. I used to limit Bow's time in the backyard, because I worried that if I left him to play unchecked, he would destroy the dogwood tree. He used to break off branches as if... well, as if they grew on trees! And I kept thinking: "We only have one dogwood tree. Who knows how long it took to grow to this size! I can't let Bow destroy it. We're not rich."

My Maternal Grandparents, Sarah & Isaac Minkowitz

I had grown up with the idea that trees are rare and expensive and took a very long time to grow and needed massive cultivation. My maternal grandparents were farmers in Israel. They made the desert blossom by the sweat of their brow. With that example in mind, I tended to think of trees as a very expensive commodity. But have you ever asked yourself how that land of milk and honey had come to be a desert in the first place? Could it be because that was the cradle of civilization and the spot where agriculture first flourished in place of the nomadic herding life?

Sword (right) and a friend in walking down the path in the pasture in 2005

 I also believed that European settlers were guilty of cutting down forests in North America, and that what we needed to do was plant more forests. How naive I was! The Europeans prevented forest fires and caused the savanna to be replaced by forest. But the fact is that it was four years into my ape language experiment, and I had been keeping my pasture unmown, and yet no trees were growing in it. See the picture of  Sword and her friend walking down the path? I was still thinking at the time that maybe I needed to plant a few trees in the pasture!

Bow and I 2005

Bow played outdoors every day, but he spent most of the time riding on my back indoors, where he could do the least amount of mischief. In the picture above, you can see that Sword and a friend were playing hopscotch out in the back yard, in the area where the outer pen now stands, while Bow and I are in the sun room, which is now the inner pens. I was protecting the environment from the destructive force that Bow is! I was afraid no tree would remain standing if I let him play out there all day. And trees cost money, right?

Mulberries growing on a tree in our pasture yesterday (June 2015)

Fast forward ten years. Trees planted themselves. Right now in the pasture, there are mulberries ripening on branches of fruiting trees that I never planted and never watered, never sprayed against insects and never shooed the birds away from. And yesterday, in that pasture, I picked a few berries for myself.

 What would happen to all the new trees in the pasture if Bow lived there? Would he denude the land and leave it sandy and bare, the way the fertile Middle East became a desert once agriculture was practiced there for a while? Would he create a new Dust Bowl where he lived, the way the American farmers did in the Great Depression because they were growing too much wheat to sell to Europe? Just maybe, by cutting down some of the trees, Bow would actually be making a valuable contribution to his ecosystem. He would be ensuring that  the savanna would not turn into a forest. Because it's not supposed to be a forest, it turns out. It's supposed to be only moderately wooded. There should be tall grasses growing and waving in the breeze. Who knows, maybe even poison ivy!

Milkweed growing freely in a field of poison ivy

What if everything the conservationists have been telling us is wrong? What if they are actually infected with the protestant work ethic, which suggests that it is by the sweat of our brow that we make a paradise out of a desert, when in fact the sweat of our brow makes deserts out of paradise?

A Great Spangeled Fritillary Butterfly enjoying the milkweed

I have been obsessed with the milkweed flowers and the butterflies lately. What especially confuses me is how people tell me we should plant milkweed to help the Monarch butterfly, because that is all the Monarch caterpillar can eat, and the Monarch butterfly will go extinct if we don't help it. But what exactly is the Monarch butterfly doing to help itself? How come I never see it sitting on the milkweed flowers and pollinating them? How come it leaves all that work to the Great Spangled Fritillary Butterflies, the bumblebees, the honey bees, the beetles and the nameless bugs that I have observed there? Every insect I know enjoys the milkweed bloom. But not once a Monarch!

The Idle Monarch Butterfy never sits on the Milkweed Flower
Source: The Elusive Monarch Butterfly

The one time I spotted a Monarch, it flew in circles, mocking me,  and did nothing to pollinate the milkweed. Freeloader! I wanted to shout at it. After all, if all it does is eat the flesh of the milkweed and expect other people to grow it, what is the Monarch's contribution to the ecosystem? Why is everyone so concerned that it might go extinct? Who cares? It's not like the honey bee (and all the other kinds of bees) that we need to pollinate our fruit.

A honey bee on a milkweed flower

And then it struck me: maybe the Monarch butterfly is just like Bow! Maybe it's supposed to keep the milkweed population in check. Maybe destroying milkweed plants is the Monarch's job. Ask not what your ecosystem can do for you, ask what you can do for your ecosystem! What if we are each designed to do whatever it is we do best? And what if destruction is just as important as creation in the cycle of life?

Bow lounging around this morning while it rains outside

When Bow was little, I used to have these arguments with my interns about whether Bow was creative or destructive. We would give him a toy, and he would tear it apart, and the interns, always politically correct, would say: "Maybe he's not destroying. Maybe he's creating something new." But he didn't build something new out of the ashes of the old thing. He pounded it till it was pulverized! He smashed it to smithereens!

A Painting I created to Taunt Vegetarians

And maybe that's not always such a bad thing. Maybe we are not all supposed to be creative. Maybe we are not all supposed to conserve every little thing in our environment,  like packrats. Maybe forest fires and locusts and plagues and chimpanzees serve a purpose, too! Maybe if we just let things sort themselves out, it will all work out for the best.

We are surrounded by conservationists who are vegetarian. But if they really want to conserve nature, why don't they acknowledge the part that one creature preying on another plays in the natural cycle of life? Why do they sound like farmers when they tell us we should plant trees to save the animals and milkweed to conserve butterflies -- and why won't they ever just leave well enough alone? They make taking care of trees and butterflies and wildlife sound like welfare work. Like we are supposed to feel sorry for the wildlife and plant trees to assuage our guilt. But in paradise there is no guilt. There is only pleasure and internal compulsion to make everything work. And with no central planner.

Late yesterday afternoon, I came across an odd looking turtle. At first I thought it must be very young, because it seemed somehow unformed.

I could not understand what was so odd about it. It seemed as if someone had forgotten to fashion part of its face. All I could think of was some lines of Omar Khayyam as translated by Fitzgerald:

And strange to tell, among that Earthen Lot

 Some could articulate, while others not

And suddenly one more impatient cried:

"Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?"

On one side of its face it seemed perfectly normal.

But if you looked at the other side closely, you could see there was nothing where the eye should be.

How did this happen? How could the turtle survive when it could not see anything from one side?

My friend Pam says this is a male who is about thirty years old. From the domed, pyramid-like rear  of the shell, she deduced the turtle may have been kept in an aquarium as a pet for some portion of its life. I felt a little sorry for it, so I went to get it some food, but by the time I returned it was gone. Even with its disability, the turtle was not looking for a handout.

Creatures in nature are as tenacious and stubborn as a Great Spangled Fritillary butterfly clinging to a milkweed flower in the wind. They know what they are supposed to do, even though they never consider how it fits into the great scheme of things. I was told as a child that I should not pick the flowers, because what if everybody did that? But maybe we're not supposed to consider what would happen if everybody did what we do -- because not everybody does! Not everybody is a turtle. Not everybody is a flower. Some creatures are born to build, and others are made to destroy. And it all comes out all right in the end, if you let it.

Conservationists are so busy worrying about species losing their habitats, that they sometimes forget to ask what the species contribute to the ecosystem they depend on. If we really believed in natural balance,  though, we would not be too quick to intervene.

I had been so preoccupied with the milkweed plants in the field all day yesterday, that I almost forgot to check whether the  yucca had bloomed. So it was past sundown when I finally went to see. Sure, enough, it had, and already there were bugs crawling all over the flower. Should I do something about that? No, I don't think so. I think I will let it sort itself out.

Our Changing Landscape

When I bought this property, the grass in the pasture, about five acres, was mowed short with only a few oak trees and the big twin pines standing out of what otherwise seemed like a very flat field.

You might say that it was an artificially induced oak savanna. According to the wikipedia, before Europeans came to this area, oak savannas were a dominant part of the landscape.

 Fires, set by lightning or Native Americans, ensured that the savanna areas did not turn into forests. Only trees with a high tolerance for fire, principally certain oak species, were able to survive. On sandy soils, black oak (Quercus velutina) predominated. On rich soils bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) was the major tree in Midwestern North America. These savanna areas provided habitat for many animals, including American bison, elk, and white-tailed deer. European settlers cleared much of the savanna for agricultural use. In addition, they suppressed the fire cycle. Thus surviving pockets of savanna typically became less like savannas and more like forests or thickets. Many oak savanna plant and animal species became extinct or rare.

Now that is a story you don't usually hear. I always imagined that the European settlers cut down trees and destroyed forests to create farmland. But instead,  they seem to have created too much forest by preventing brush fires. What would Smokey the Bear say about that?

Things have been changing on my land since I showed up and stopped mowing the pasture, and the savanna is heading toward forest. It's a savanna still, but unless we have a fire soon, the trees that I never planted will grow into a forest. That is a strange thought for me. I don't want to mow, and I don't particularly want a fire. But fires are natural, and they are part of the life cycle of the land.And yet that does not seem to be direction in which things are headed at the moment.

Trees I never planted

It rains almost every day now, and when it does not rain, the sky is full of clouds and the air is full of mist and so a spontaneous fire is unlikely to get started. If anything, we seem about to grow a mighty rainforest.

Did you know that one of possible outcomes of our changing climate would be that the African savanna may turn into a forest? According to a letter by Steven I. Higgins and Simon Scheiter published in Nature, atmospheric changes in carbon dioxide can force abrupt vegetation shifts locally, but not globally. High accumulations of carbon dioxide actually shift a change from savanna to forest. It all comes out in the wash. So the destruction of the Amazon rainforest would be compensated for by the change of the African savanna into a rainforest. Devastating for local wildlife and people in both areas, but it's the case of the earth's ecosystem balancing itself.

Don't cry for Mother Earth. Cry for yourself. That seems to be the overarching theme.  Sustainability does not necessarily mean local stability, when you look at things from a long term global perspective. And I think this is one of the many ways that the average tree hugger fails to consider the inexorable rules of nature.

When people talk about sustainability, they sometimes seem to envision a kind of stability that is not too different from stagnation. When they see change they think that if we caused it, it must be bad. But nature itself changes things all the time, in a none-too-gentle way. A wildfire is a devastating event that kills everything in its wake. And from that death emerges new life. But if you insist on putting out all the wildfires, then nature will find another way to balance things out. "Only you can prevent forest fires!" says Uncle Sam, the central planner, dressed in a bear costume. How arrogant is that?!

In my savanna/soon-to-be-rainforest, I have been keeping track of the milkweed population. Above is a photo of the purple milkweed in its usual spot. It has been flowering there for the past three years. You can see the old dried out seedpods right next to the fresh new flowers about to bloom. But that area is overrun with poison ivy, and there is no way to kill the poison ivy without also killing the milkweed. My common milkweed that grows by the oak in the pasture has already been strangled by poison ivy.

This is where the common milkweed used to grow
from this blogpost: Selective Stewardship

This year, I have looked in vain, and all I can see in that spot are very tall poison ivy plants. I am thinking that if the trend continues, the same will happen to the purple milkweed in its usual spot. However, the good news is that the purple milkweed has also propagated itself in a new spot with very rich soil: the little oasis of the Something Else Flowers.

In this part of the pasture, every flower blooms a darker, richer, brighter color than anywhere else.

The purple milkweed is just that much more purple here. The Something Else Flower is a  richer shade of pink.

What is the secret that makes this ground so fertile? I think it has something to do with the leaves composting on the ground.

Don't stop watching the video of the insects enjoying the flower above until you have also seen the leaves on the ground and the ants swarming among them. If you want to see how an ecosystem really works, don't mow your pasture for fourteen years! Then you'll understand that change, not sustainability, is the first rule of nature!

In disturbed areas, such as by the side of the road, we see the most beautiful, delicate flowers bloom. This puff of a flower, which I have always called a mimosa, is also quite aptly named the sensitive briar, I learned from my friend Kathy.

The pollen on the edges makes the flower look like a lit firecracker or fireworks in the sky on the fourth of July. It grows there at the edge by the outer fence, and not in the middle of the woods, because every once in a while the mowers come and cut everything down by the side of the road.

It is also at the side of the road, where things are periodically mowed, that the purple milkweed is already blossoming, attracting bees, other insects, and an occasional motorist.

If we want to maintain an environment that is most inviting and sustaining for certain plants, then we have to destroy others. But destroying those others sometimes entails periodically killing off also the flowers that we most desire to foster. You can't get rid of poison ivy without getting rid of milkweed. It's only after the general devastation of a fire or a mowing that the milkweed gets a leg up over the poison ivy.

To create anything, you must first destroy something else. Our very lives are an unsustainable jaunt from birth till inevitable death. Civilizations rise and fall. Only a mighty oak survives the periodic brush fires that keep the entire wood from becoming a deep, thick black forest. But even oaks can be felled, sometimes brought low by the tiniest insects that prey on them.

Each flower fends for itself

It would be so arrogant to think that we control anything but the smallest part of our environment, or that any mistakes we make will be devastating to anyone but ourselves. Local devastation is not a global problem. It never was! Each flower fends for itself. And the balance of nature is quite inscrutable to the tiny ant.