August 2010 Archives

Here in the foothills of the northern Rockies, summer - while far from over - is beginning to wind down. Wild roses along the creek have hung their seeds. Along the edges of the woods harebell blooms are beginning to fade, leaving only the goldenweed to muster any sort of flash, its small, daisy-like flower heads looking fiercely yellow.

Just to the south, higher in the mountains, it's less a matter of summer slowing down than of coming to a screeching halt. On two different days last week, it snowed. Frequently, dawn now breaks over a tundra covered in frost - miles and miles of pincushion plants and loose scatters of arctic willow, wearing thin tissues of ice.

Some of my neighbors are feeling a little cheated by the fact that the last few months have been often wet and cool. Living this far north, it's hard to be robbed of the one time of year when you get to walk out into the afternoon and feel the sun deep in your bones. As for me I'm not so much bothered by it, happy to have dodged (at least so far) what earlier in the year had all the makings of a brutal fire season. If I do complain now and then it's only on certain mornings, when the temperature gets stuck in the lower 40's. Mornings when autumn seems impatient. When you can feel it out there somewhere, agitated, like somebody pacing. Like somebody on the shoulder of the road, anxious for a ride.

The news worth noting is that it's news at all. On Monday of this week, the main front page story of the New York Times focused on a team of scientists researching the idea that being outdoors, completely unplugged for a time, may have profound benefits for cultivating both attentiveness and creativity.

What they don't say is that the basic wisdom of disconnecting from excessive activity was planted long before cell phones and IPods, in the wake of the industrial era of the late nineteenth century. By the early 1900's such thinking had become part and parcel of a number of growing psychological and educational traditions, touted by academics from G. Stanley Hall to John Dewey. Later still, in the early 1990's, wilderness therapy researchers began documenting the striking benefits of quiet time in the outdoors for helping teens struggling with, among other things, attention deficit disorder.

True, we now have shiny new instruments with which we can see such shifts, tracking them as expressions of electrical activity in the brain. But beyond such whistles and bells, the thing most worth noting is that a major American newspaper has chosen as breaking news the merits of unplugging life now and then to head outside. Poet Robert Frost, it turns out, had it right: Most of the changes we think we see in society, he once remarked, are in fact just old truths, coming in and out of favor.

While the vast majority of my writing is meant as a celebration of the earth's last wild places, as I mentioned in my post of July 25^th - The Lessons of Loss - life on this planet simply can't be segregated into "things wild and safe," and "things at risk." Much of nature will not survive a careless society. And at the same time, much of humanity cannot survive in a severely compromised natural world.

Which brings me once again back to the topic of food. This time, to the rampant use of antibiotics in industrial livestock production. Many years ago producers discovered that adding small amounts of antibiotics to the food or water of confined sheep, cattle, chickens and hogs promoted faster growth. The practice seemed to offer the added benefit of protecting against many of the illnesses so easily spread in crowded confinement operations. But now we have a problem. By all indications, this heavy use of antibiotics (over half the antibiotics sold in America are used for livestock), is prompting the rapid evolution of drug-resistant strains of bacteria. What's more, the resistant strains that are appearing first in animals are likely connected to the growing problem of drug-resistant bacterial strains in humans. For example, recent studies of large hog confinement operations in Iowa found that not only more than 70% of the pigs, but over half the workers tested positive for a powerful staph infection known as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), currently responsible for more than 17,000 human deaths annually.

There are alternatives. Denmark, for instance, banned antibiotics to promote growth in livestock some twelve years ago, instead allowing their use only in treating animals that are actually sick. Use of the drugs has dropped more than 40%, while the industry seems to be doing just fine.

It's just one more opportunity to think about the notion of interdependence. One more chance to understand that what we do to the least things of this earth, we do to ourselves.

August slipped into Greater Yellowstone last night under a waning gibbous moon - the final act of full-blown summer in the high country. A time of blue sky mornings, heartbreakingly beautiful, pushing from the earth paintbrush and harebell blooms, turning the lupine flowers to seed. And on a great many afternoons, a time of spectacular thunderstorms, full of wonder and violence: Sheets of hail ripping through the aspen leaves. Creeks turning to mud. And high above the valley, spears of lightning poking at the long fingers of the tundra, sending hikers running for their lives.

Most of the elk are in the nosebleed seats now, feeding in the alpine meadows. Wolf pups, meanwhile, are no longer tucked away in so-called rendezvous sites, protected by relatives while the other adults are out hunting, but are instead starting to travel with the packs. Bears are one step closer to hyperphagia - a kind of eating frenzy that will begin in a few weeks, part of a frantic attempt to put on as much fat as possible before the onset of denning.  

Just last week, on hot days I was prone to cowering in the woods, hiding under the branches of the lodgepole and Douglas-fir. But in August, knowing that a far different season is just around the corner, I'm walking as much as possible in the full light of the sun. And when my muscles and bones feel warm and long and loose I head to a certain mountain spring I'm fond of, get on my knees and cup my hands and drink. I know the taste by heart. It will be with me for months to come, even as the mountains are again buried in snow.