“introducing the World’s First Smudge Stick! Check out the advertisement we created for it. We’re pretty sure the owners of the house we smudged are really happy to see their home smudged. And you can be happy too! Just Smudge those windows you’ve cleaned with Windex and keep them dirty and good looking”

I saw this commercial as I was watching TV this afternoon and found it comical and at the same time disturbing. What this commercial fails to advocate for this that most birds that run into glass windows do not survive. These birds are in a sense advocating for their lives by advertising these “smudge sticks.” I think if groups like The Audubon Society and The National Bird Conservancy saw this they would be utterly disturbed. Humans who are ignorant to the issues of birds constantly flying into windows would view this advertisement as funny, when there is a much bigger issue at hand.

The second video I found when I searched for this commercial on Youtube was even more disturbing. They mock the movement to protect birds who fly into these windows through an advertisement for glass cleaner. If I was the member of a bird conservation group I would be boycotting windex.

“While the total amount of lumber and fuel wood consumed continued to rise with population growth until the peak year of 1906, per capita lumber consumption had by then already begun to drop. Growing use of coal, oil, natural gas, and electricity reduced demand for wood as fuel. Also, aluminum, steel, and, later, plastics began to be substituted for wood in building construction” (Sterba 39). 

I would like to take this passage, as well as other statistics about this fuel transition, and shove it in the faces of those who doubt that our economy can transition away from fossil fuels. In the early 1900’s, people & the market realized that wood was becoming a scarce resource and that other, more sustainable technologies had the potential to direct us away from depleting a scarce resource. Sound familiar???

“The hares were very familiar. One had her form under my house all winter, separated from me only by the flooring, and she startled me each morning by her hasty departure when I began to stir,- thump, thump, thump, striking her head against the floor timbers in her hurry. They used to come round my door at dusk to nibble the potato parings which I had thrown out, and were so nearly the color of the ground that they could hardly be distinguished when still. Sometimes in the twilight I alternatively lost and recovered sight of one sitting motionless under my window. When I opened my door in the evening, off they would go with a squeak and a bounce” (Thoreau 304). 

Thoreau includes many encounters with animals present in the winter in this chapter, but I was particularly drawn to this one. Although it could be because of my affinity for rabbits/hares, I think how his description models the movements and mannerisms of the hares is remarkable. I love how he points out how deceptively they can blend into the ground and be difficult to notice until they move.

“The first task for settlers was tree removal– that is, unless he was lucky enough to find and pay a premium for a beaver created meadow good for growing hay and pasturing, or Indian-cleared field for planting crops. Trees were an impediment” (Sterba 25).

The history of the timber industry and deforestation is something that concerns me because it seems to not have stopped , or slowed down– and this is how it all began; it simply has moved elsewhere following that path of least resistance theory. How can we switch this mentality of tree conservation and stop forest degradation that now has stricken South America?

“Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings, with buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thimble-berries, hazel-bushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny sward there; some pitch pine or gnarled oak occupies what was the chimney nook, and a sweet-scented black birch, perhaps, waves where the door-stone was. Sometimes the well dent is visible, where once a spring oozed; now dry and tearless grass; or it was covered deep — not to be discovered till some late day — with a flat stone under the sod, when the last of the race departed” (Thoreau 168).

I think to me this passage is another reminder of this constant fight between humanity versus time and nature. It seems humans cannot win in that fight because eventually the land will result back to its original form because a life only last years and nature carries on almost infinitely. In this passage I am visualizing a ruin of an old cabin, buried almost entirely in the earth with an almost defeated personality being emitted.

“At this season I seldom had a visitor. When the snow lay deepest no wanderer ventured near my house for a week or fortnight at a time, but there I lived as snug as a meadow mouse, or as cattle and poultry which are said to have survived for a long time buried in drifts, even without food” (Thoreau 171). 

This passage I can completely understand his critique about winter solitude. When it is cold I enjoy staying inside, reflecting on myself, and not really seeing anyone. It may have something to due with the winter weather, but to me is a good rotation between seasons. In the Spring/Summer/Autumn your social and in the winter a step is taken back and your always a bit more quiet and solitary. I do not know why this is, yet I noticed it happens.

“His trade here was that of a ditcher. Napoleon went to St. Helena; Quoil came to Walden Woods”

In our reading from Walden, Thoreau talks about a man Hugh Quoil, who supposedly fought in the Battle of Waterloo. He references Napoleon’s exile to St. Helena. I thought Quoil got the better end of the deal since he wasn’t stranded on an island in the middle of the Atlantic.

But really he ends up meeting the same fate as Napoleon, but maybe a little less spectacularly, too. Quoil dies on the road and has his house at Walden torn down. Whereas when Napoleon died on St. Helena, the great Emperor’s funeral was attended by millions in Paris.

I thought this passage was trying to speak to the fleeting nature of our lives in these places. But he has another line that seems like he, as someone who is living in a place previously uninhabited, to be the oldest one in the village.

“A complicating extension of the idea of man the despoiler was a resurrected belief that the natural world was a benign place in which creatures lived in harmony with one another. The idea was in striking contrast to the amorality of a Darwinian nature that was indifferent and random, its creatures living in a world of predators and prey, struggling to war, reproduce and survive” (Sterba xvii).

“‘After seeing Bambi nobody wants to kill a deer'” (Sterba 110).

“They argued that people had invaded the habitat of the geese with their subdivisions, malls, and sprawl, so people had a special obligation to live in harmony, or at the very least coexist, with the birds” (Sterba 125).

“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.