“What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground, – and to one another; it is either winged or it is legged” (Thoreau, 305).

“Beaver dams create swamps, or wetlands, which are beneficial to countless other species of fauna and flora. These wetlands are lodes of species diversity, the “rain forests of the North.” By chewing down trees and maintaining their dams to keep the water level behind them fairly constant, beavers slow moving water, allowing sediments in it to fall out to create rich layers of soil and, eventually, broad lowland meadows that serve as breaks from the surrounding forest. Beaver dams filter pollutants, help control seasonal flooding, and reduce erosion” (Sterba, 64).

“As the tundra warmed, seeds of woody plants invaded from the south (so did mammals, including man) and within a few centuries – a mere snap of the fingers in geologic time – a vast forest appeared” (Sterba, 65).

“The state’s beaver population had grown to an estimated eighteen to twenty thousand, and although damage complaints hadn’t grown to levels deemed unacceptable, wildlife officials believed that the beaver population’s social carrying capacity was near. In contrast, biological carrying capacity means the point at which the beaver population (or any other species) reaches the limit of food and other resources that its habitat can sustain. Its adjunct, ecological carrying capacity, is the point beyond which a species adversely affects its habitat and the flora and other fauna within it. Social carrying capacity is more subjective. The phrase was coined to designate the point at which problems or damage caused by a wild population outweigh its benefits in the public mind” (Sterba, 75).

“It came as a shock when I finally realized what the grapes were trying to tell me: ‘We were here first.’ The trees were the newcomers. The grapes were a remnant of a very different civilization that had existed not that long ago. They were like a hand reaching out of a grave in a last, desperate signal of an old way of life about to be snuffed out by the new forest” (Sterba, 8). 

I thought this was beautifully written. The imagery itself was as shocking as the message it delivered. The forest we see today in the eastern U.S. is not remnant wilderness. It is regrowth after generations of alteration to our landscape. I had never considered this before. Especially not in the following terms:

“Concord had been a relatively civilized place for thousands of years – a great expanse of forest shaped and improved by Indians alongside a meadow left in the wake of a retreating glacier and occupied and fashioned by beavers. The Indians called it Musketaquid (Grass-Ground River). This landscape had fallen into disrepair relatively recently, after epidemics of European diseases in 1616 and 1633 killed off most of the Indians” (Sterba, 20).

I find Sterba’s account of the impact of Indians and beavers to be fascinating. He discusses how “meadows and fields [were] created by ‘wilde beasts and wilde men,’ namely beavers and Indians” (19). I certainly never really thought of beavers as key shapers of the environment prior to European settlement. However, this makes me think back to a previous blog post in which I discussed Tallamy’s statement, “We feel completely justified in sending those plants and animals that depend on those habitats off to make due someplace else…partly because, until recently, there always has been somewhere else for nature to thrive” (No Place to Hide, 23). I actually discussed an example of beavers altering the environment and causing trouble for the Great Smoky Mountain landowner with dam creation and flooding. Sterba discusses the “comeback of beavers, an animal once virtually extinct in the Northeast, and the mounting conflicts between beavers and people” because “‘the habitat is back and now full of people'” (Sterba, 2). In the case of the beaver you can see the layers of wilderness, development, and regrowth.

Sterba calls for readers to imagine the contiguous United States before development and regrowth:

“Kellogg estimated that in what became the contiguous United States, 71.7 percent of the nation’s forested lands in the year 1630 were in the East. That is, they extended from the Atlantic Ocean  westward, petering out in the prairie, or Great Plains. By Kellogg’s estimate, the twelve states along the Atlantic coast out to and including the Appalachian Moutains were, on average, 93 percent forest covered in 1630” (Sterba, 25). 

By 1907, the US lost 43% of its forest “with anywhere from 40 to 70 percent stripped away in the Northeast and Midwest, depending on the state” (31). Then came the era of regrowth. It is absolutely mind-boggling to think of the transformation of the American environment.

Today at 8 PM I was walking down to the gym and happened to look down. Almost camouflaged into the gravel was a dead bird. After hearing Professor Brandes talk about this in class and after showing my ,somewhat horrifying, video of a bird flying into a window for GORP I had finally seen it in real life. I have no idea what kind of bird this is but I’m assuming its a Hummingbird because those are most often the ones that fly into our windows? And I am assuming that this window at Kirby Sports Center is the culprit. After seeing this in real life it really stuck with me how awful this trend is. This seems like something that we can really fix, who cares about our campus architecture?!? There are birds dying out their because of our selfish actions!!!

If only I had a plastic bag handy I could have brought this victim into class and shown us all that this problem is real and just how horrific it is.

“‘You’re not going to kill it, are you?’ It was a question he tried to deflect by saying that the beavers were being captured alive in cage traps… His customers, on the other hand, usually didn’t ask. Asking would result in an answer they didn’t want to hear. They wanted to assume that the animals causing their problems would be removed by LaFountain and then relocated to some place where they could live happily ever after.” (65)

This passage illustrates the widespread ignorance towards environmental problems. While environmental issues are gaining recognition around the country, many still refuse to acknowledge human impact on our ecosystem and climate. Sometimes it is because of a fundamental difference in opinion, but more often than not, we can’t accept the impacts of our actions because we are too scared to acknowledge any wrong doing or any negative result.

In this passage, the people hiring LaFountain want to protect the trees around their house for their own aesthetic benefit. To them, the beaver is an enemy, but when they see it trapped in the cage, they are forced to accept that they are selling the animals life so that they can have a nicely landscaped property.

Every so often, a bunch of relevant things will align to create an incredibly ironic, yet meaningful, moment. While scrolling through Facebook, I came across this status posted by a good friend of mine:

So I turned around and saw this:

A bright and ever so appropriately spooky moon was creeping over Farinon. I replied to Colin’s status, implying how perfectly the moon fit the upcoming holiday. The following comment thread continued:

I found Colin’s first reply comment painfully ironic for the fact that Halloween, like most holidays with deep historical roots, is based off of the seasonal changes in the natural world. This prompted me to think “no, Colin, nature does not ‘know’ about Halloween and then, to keep in theme, decorate itself with an incredibly spooky, cloud covered moon” and consequently reply to his comment by flipping it around. Then, in a moment even more relevant to our class, Colin claimed that my correction made no sense! To me, this represents a phenomenon that is present throughout Nature Wars: despite the fact that we still live in the forest/nature, we often forget or ignore that nature has always shaped human culture and will continue to do so!

To further explain myself, I cited a page about the history of Halloween to prove that Halloween ‘knows about’ nature because it would not exist without the progressions of nature. (Aside: I have a tendency to include sources in my Facebook comments when I’m trying to argue with someone. Some find it annoying, I find it essential to any good internet disagreement.) Some may even argue that Halloween is the most appropriate example of a holiday that exists because of how nature interacts with and affects civilization. Our modern traditions still reflect the death that came with the beginning of the cold season in the representation of zombies, ghosts, and various spooky/scary/undead symbols of Halloween. We trek through corn mazes and carve pumpkins and make scarecrows out of hay. Exploring the history of Halloween could actually make for a great analysis of how human culture interacts with nature because Halloween knows about nature.

“By mid-1990s, Michigan’s whitetail population had exploded in the southern third of the state, where millions of acres of cleared cropland had gone out of production, grown up with trees, and been converted to deer friendly sprawl.”(104)

Sterba spends a major portion of this book discussing the species such as the whitetail deer and beaver that have returned as farmland becomes forest. What he does not address is that certain species such as the deer have thrived because they are tolerant of living on the edge of human development in these fragmented forests. As we have learned in my conservation biology class, most species are unlike the deer and do not do well in fragmented forests that come in contact with humans. These edge sensitive species are not likely to do well in any of these regrowth forests surrounded by humans and the ecosystems will not have much biodiversity, simply the few species that thrive on the edge.

“As people left the land, pines and birches and blackberries crowded into the neglected pastures and forests sprang up in old corn fields. Many of the homes, barns, schoolhouses, and wooden fences collapsed, leaving only their more durable remnants in woods that are now crisscrossed with trails descended from an abandoned network of rural roads” (44)

Extremely powerful imagery.

“Although the environmental damage was great, the words environment and ecology were not familiar at the time and weren’t a big concern. Far more important was the scary idea that the population might run out of trees”(31)

“Hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men” (19)

It is very interesting seeing how the collective mindset has shifted and changed over time.

After reading about how forests in the United States have changed since European settlement, I was curious about how that image would look from above. While looking for some sort of image that might demonstrate the trends Stirba discussed I found this image from NASA that shows exactly what Stirba was talking about. Based on satellite data, NASA has noticed as well that forests are regenerating and it is different growth. They have been able to observe this regenerative growth is different than what there was before as the forests have different albedos (reflectiveness of forests changed- different growth, lighter colored, different reflectivity) than they did in 1650.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/AncientForest/ancient_forest6.php

The idea of suburban and exurban sprawl presented by Sterba was quite an interesting historical relationship, so I did some further exploration on the topic.

“Data collected for the 2000 Census had revealed a demographic tipping point: For the first time an absolute majority of the American people lived not in cities, not on farms, but in an ever-expanding suburban and exurban sprawl in between. Never in history have so many people lived this way” (46). 

Today, suburbs are so incredibly common. If you ask someone where he or she is from, the answer is generalized to say the Philadelphia, New Haven, Rochester, Newark, etc. area, referring to a suburb of a major city, where his or her parents probably work.

“‘If you looked down at Connecticut from on high in the summer, what you’d see was mostly unbroken forest,’ he said. ‘If you did the same thing in late fall after the leaves have fallen from those trees, what you’d see was stockbrokers.'” (52).

This passage resonated with me because I am from Connecticut. I know that many people in the state live there for (slightly) more affordable living than New York City and for a reasonable commute into the city. If not New York City, many people will work in the few larger cities in the state and live just outside of the city. While this trend is a common one across the country, the passage seemed to sum up the state well.

http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/habitats/urban-sprawl/

The article above made me reflect back on the reading in Nature Wars as it discusses the irony of urban sprawl. The article notes that people living in developments may ask incredulously whether the adjacent farmland will be developed, which is quite ironic considering the land that these people live on was previously similar farmland. This makes me wonder whether people are really so unaware of how these idyllic suburban neighborhoods have developed across the land. People see their fulfilled American Dream in these homes, but it took a lot of destruction to get to that point. Although the article is a long one, it offers worthwhile commentary on urban sprawl.