On Control and Participation

And a matter of owls

Barred Owl (left) and Northern Spotted Owl (right). Barred Owl - Judy Gallagher, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. Northern Spotted Owl - public domain.

We humans – some of us at least – like to have control.  Pest control.  Weed control.  Flood control.  Disease control.  Invasive species control.  Control is a statement that says “the world will be this way and I will make it so, resisting all forces to the contrary.”  Control requires continuous effort and inevitably becomes more difficult over time.  Pests evade our traps and weeds evolve to resist our poisons.  Reservoirs fill with silt until they can no longer buffer the floods.  River channels clog with the sediment that would have been deposited across the floodplain, forcing levees to be built ever higher.  Great river deltas settle as the active channel rises and extends seaward, forcing ever-more-heroic control measures to keep the flows where we want them and to keep seawater out of our cities.  Bacteria trade genes to resist our antibiotics, and those species we call “invasive” adapt, fill niches, resist all attempts at eradication.  Control is an approach that comes from separation, from standing apart, from a perspective of domination or superiority, from a war mentality of “man against nature.” 

The alternative to control is not passive surrender, simply giving in and surviving as best we can.  The alternative to control is participation: taking small actions that change the weaving of the pattern, that ripple and magnify outward, that engage the forces and flows and beings of Earth rather than resisting them.  All species participate, in larger and smaller ways.  Fungi share minerals with plant roots and are fed in return.  Bacteria inside of us digest and transform our food, and we offer them a safe environment.  Beavers participate by building dams, and the water does the rest of the work.  Humans participate by introducing fire to landscapes, by selecting plants that offer more food, by sowing seeds, by encouraging wild wolves and cats and horses to become our companions, by building windmills and waterwheels that transform the power of wind and water to grind grain and generate electricity.

Sometimes we participate in ways that we did not intend, such as when we move plants and animals and insects to new habitats where they take root and thrive and change the ecology and displace native species.  When that happens, many of us who would call ourselves environmentalists embrace those same control measures that we would normally decry.  We pay immigrant crews to walk our “restored” prairies and savannas in rubber suits on hot summer days, spraying poison on thistles and blackberries.  We idealize a “pre-settlement” ecology and seek to re-create it by brute force with chainsaws and bulldozers and herbicides, investing immense resources into small islands of habitat that must be continuously sprayed and mowed to keep the “invasives” from “taking over.”

And sometimes, in the name of conservation, we shoot owls. Lots of owls.  The United States Fish and Wildlife Service has a plan to kill 500,000 barred owls over the next 30 years in the interest of preserving the Northern Spotted Owl, which competes with the barred owls and seems to be losing.  Barred owls are close evolutionary kin of spotted owls, occupying a similar ecological niche in forests of the eastern US.  We don’t entirely understand how our actions led to this competitive imbalance – whether we enabled barred owls to migrate westward or whether our fragmentation or alteration of western old growth forests changed their competitive dynamic or something else entirely, but we have, apparently, decided that spotted owls must be preserved at all costs and so barred owls must die.

Who cooks for you?  Who cooks for y---

Bang.

Splat.

The wildlife managers say that it’s OK and they have a consulted an ethicist who implores that it’s not really about killing owls but about preserving species, allowing two species to survive instead of just one.  Never mind that their control plan will only reduce the barred owl population by 30% and will leave us right back at square one thirty years from now, recruiting a new generation of sharpshooters to haunt the dusk woods.

I am grateful to the environmentalists of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations who were appalled by rivers so polluted they were catching fire, by acid and mercury raining from the sky, by eagle eggs collapsing from DDT, by the wholesale destruction of ecosystems and who took to the streets and statehouses demanding change.  And so it was that we came to have the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act.  And thanks to these laws, a great deal of destruction and pollution was halted and rivers flowed cleaner and power plants scrubbed their exhaust gases and eagle populations recovered and logging of remaining old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest largely came to an end.  Because those forests contained Northern Spotted Owls, and logging them would drive the owls to extinction.

For all the good that the Endangered Species Act has done, however, there is a distortion, an artifact of separation, within it that leads us to our current conundrum.  Species is a strange concept on which to place the greatest conservation value.  Species represents a grand attempt by the human, separate mind to impose a rational, logical structure on the grand and dynamic evolutionary diversity of life and thereby crystallize it into a static form.  Taxonomists spend lifetimes of work cataloguing differences and now analyzing gene sequences to document relationships and to assign every life form into species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, domain.  And the Endangered Species Act implores by rule of law: we must not allow species extinction.  Never mind that extinction and speciation are ongoing processes, that our participation is contributing to both, and that more that more than 99% of species that have ever lived are now extinct.

So it is that environmentalists fought and won in the courts to halt old growth logging not because we intrinsically valued old growth forests which could never be re-created in our lifetimes, nor because we valued their unique ecology and the way they hold carbon and store and purify water and release it slowly through summer drought, but rather because they contained Northern Spotted Owls which were approaching extinction which according to the Endangered Species Act must not be allowed.

Critics of the Endangered Species Act have long found it strange that it leads to intensive protections for some creeks but not others, some forests but not others.  And I would tend to agree with them.  I want to see us love and protect and nurture all of our streams, all of our forests, not just those containing threatened or endangered species.  And I find it highly ironic that the old chants of “save a logger, shoot an owl” have morphed in three decades into an accepted policy of “save an owl, shoot an owl”.  However many owls those frustrated loggers may have shot, it was nowhere near the numbers now targeted for destruction with nary a peep from the environmental lobby.

I could write about our propensity to poison our lawns into a monotonous monoculture of monocots, or our strange desire to obliterate moss, or the massive deployment of herbicides and fumigants in industrial agriculture, and all of my readers would agree.  So why must I critique the conservationists, the ones who care about oak savannas and old-growth forests and spotted owls? 

I do so because to me it is still the same paradigm, the same separation, the same entitlement that says we are the ones who must manage, who must control, who must right our past wrongs by poking and prodding ecosystems into a pre-settlement form, who must reasonably make the choice to kill some so that others may live. 

I have done much of that myself, in my younger days: spraying thistle and cow parsnip out of Minnesota prairies, buzz-cutting buckthorn and dabbing blue poison on the stumps, rooting out all but the oldest oaks from a mixed woodland to re-create savanna.  Twenty years later, a new crew is still out there doing the same work.  The result is beautiful to our eyes and supportive to native species, but it is transient.  We cannot in any meaningful way undo our past participation, send the English sparrows back to England, un-mix the melting pot of species that has accompanied our global migrations.  There are no backsies. 

I can no longer abide the judgment that says these are good owls, those are bad owls.  These can ethically be shot so that those may live.  I see the same spark of divinity, the same awareness, the same living presence in starlings and swallows, English sparrows and bluebirds, and especially in the wise eyes of owls.  All owls.  And although I would be saddened to see the thread of the Northern Spotted Owl come to an end in the great weaving of life, I would at the same time be heartened to visit the same old growth forests and be serenaded by very similar and equally majestic owls who bear bars instead of spots on their chests, who are so closely related that they fill the same niche and even interbreed.

Ethics aside, all control is temporary.  In the name of saving the Northern Spotted Owl, we can blast their barred brethren into oblivion until we run out of dollars or bullets or guns or people willing to shoot them, and still ultimately we must surrender and allow the same weaving, the same dance of life that gave rise to us to write their story.  We can preserve forests and habitats, plant seeds, participate to restore diversity, and still ultimately the fate of species is not in our hands, nor should it be.  We who would have been destroyers of the biosphere cannot now be its vigilant guardians, its all-powerful overseers.  We can only be participants, collaborators, co-creators.

We whose ancestors invaded this land, or arrived fleeing famine or persecution, or were captured and carried into servitude, must now become native here, must find a way of belonging.  We are not going to be declared invasive and shot, nor is anyone going to send us packing.  I think it is high time we understood that the same is true for the English sparrows, the starlings, the endless acres of blackberry brambles, the buckthorn, the reed-canary grass, the barred owls.  All who are here will be woven into a new tapestry of place, new harmonies, new ecosystems, new speciations. That is the way this planet works. 

I hereby declare that I am done with control, that I will give no more of my energy to any effort that seeks to create a desired result through continuous battle, no matter how well-intentioned.  I aim instead to participate, to be present, to sow seeds, to work with and alongside the forces and flows rather than against them.  That is what brings me the greatest joy.