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Nature

Bleeding Hearts

The doves are back. Parading in front of my window, giving me stern looks that I have not put out any seed, puffing up when the cold breeze strikes. Next week is supposed to have 76 degrees one day, snow the other. Crazy.

The song sparrows are singing their little heart out, perched on my pear tree, about to blossom.

The wood violets are exploding.

The trillium are in full swing.

Maple and elderberries are stretching to the light.

Bluebells hiding in the shadow.

And importantly, the bleeding hearts are back. Just around the corner, clusters in the woods.

These are wild flowers, Pacific Bleeding Heart (Dicentra Formosa,) not the cultivated ones that you find in English cottage gardens (shown below).

There’s a somewhat timely story as to how the name, Bleeding Heart, got transformed into an insult along the lines of “such a bleeding heart liberal…”

As early as the 14th century, the phrase referred to a sincere emotional outpouring, found in poems by Chaucer, for example (Troylus and Chriseyde):

That nevere of hym she wolde han taken hede,
For which hym thoughte he felte his herte blede.

Later, so Merriam-Webster dictionary tells me, the term was associated with religious iconography, referring to the bleeding heart of Christ. It was connected to his teachings and compassion for the poor, sick or struggling.

Leave it to a right-wing American newspaper journalist, Westbrook Pegler, a nasty Senator, Joe McCarthy, and a Republican President, Ronald Reagan, to turn a thought of brotherly love into an insult.

Pegler was a hater. The list was long: Communists, fascist, Jews, liberals. In the context of a new bill before Congress, he coined the term bleeding-heart liberal in 1938. The bill? Aimed to curb lynching.

Pegler argued that lynching was no longer a problem the federal government should solve: there had only been eight lynchings in 1937, he wrote, and “it is obvious that the evil is being cured by local processes.” The bill, he thought, was being “used as a political bait in crowded northern Negro centers.” (Ref.) He, by the way, became too right-wing even for the John- Birch -Society, which threw him out eventually.

The term found full attention when picked up by Joe McCarthy in the 1950s who called Edward R. Murrow one of the “extreme Left Wing bleeding-heart elements of television and radio.” Leave it to Ronald Reagan, then newly elected Governor of California, to make it his own in the 60s: “I was quite the bleeding-heart liberal once,” he told Newsweek.

Let’s co-opt the term! I am a proudly caring, compassionate, social-justice oriented bleeding-heart progressive! There! The world needs us.

Oh, and the lynching bill? Finally, passed this March after a century or so. It failed on 200 (!) previous attempts. The Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which was introduced by Rep. Bobby L. Rush (D-Ill.) in the House and Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Tim Scott (R-S.C.) in the Senate, is named for the 14-year-old Black boy whose brutal torture and murder in Mississippi in 1955 sparked the civil rights movement. The three no votes: Republican Reps. Andrew S. Clyde (Ga.), Thomas Massie (Ky.) and Chip Roy (Tex.) Glad they were not on the jury during a contemporary lynching victim’s trial, Ahmaud Arbery.

(Sacral) Music is from 18th Century Ukraine today.

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Renewal.

Join me on a walk? Take your rubber boots – the Pineapple Express has arrived, an atmospheric river that transports moisture from the tropics to the northern areas of the planet in great masses. In simpler words: it has been pouring.

And this is the foot path …..

I needed to get out yesterday to get away from the news, so many horrors all at once. Nobody able to predict what will happen next, how to approach a situation where the unchecked power over weapons destroys lives, a people, potentially the world as we know it. The reactions in favor of greater militarization in Europe are understandable but go so against the grain of what a nation – Germany – has tried to do for decades in acknowledgement of its history. All of a sudden there are billions available to fill the coffers of the weapons industry, when poverty and houselessness and lack of social services are unabated. Let me hasten to add, I do not have a clue what the right thing is to do, with the stakes so insane. And I do understand that you cannot defend yourself against unlawful, imperialistic military invasion with bare hands.

Much mud carried by the fast stream

The refugee situation is raising ambiguous feelings as well. It is great how hundreds of thousands of fleeing Ukrainians are welcomed in neighboring nations. It is horrifying that people of color have been treated very differently, not just in general (think Polish treatment of Syrian refugees) but in this particular instance – Black and Brown students studying in Ukraine not allowed across the borders, pushed out of trains and busses, humans of a second order. The internet is full of suggestions that Africans make it immediately to Romania which is set for flights to Ghana, Nigeria and Zimbabwe.

And then there is the situation of the Jews whose fate is so tied to the history of Ukraine, the unspeakable terror against them during WW II, whose Holocaust memorial at Babyn Yar has been bombed by Putin yesterday. Their status as refugees, outside of Israel, has been a double edged sword. Or even within Israel – it is the occupied West Bank that will house the influx of Jewish Ukrainians, complicating things for the Palestinians.

I was thinking back to an essay describing the experiences and difficulties of Eastern European Jews emigrating to Germany in the 1990s when Germany accepted a contingent of Jewish refugees to polish its own image, to signal repentance of past deeds.

I also remembered Hannah Arendt’s words, so applicable to the moment. In the link, her short essay We Refugees is printed in full after her portrait.

Windfall

But lest we forget, there are also people in Russia whose life will take a devastating turn as we speak, who have few choices for protest or action to change what is decreed from above. Here is a short essay from 2 days ago by a young Russian Jew who is grieving.

And then there is a novel about a survivor of another war in Ukraine, that comforts us with a tale of resilience. Here is an excerpt of Kurkov’s Grey Bees.

Nature on my walk pretended that nothing had happened. Ignored the fact that it was so warm that everything seemed to explode in growth spurts several weeks early. An unstoppable push towards renewal.

A few of the small birds were happily chirping along, including a female ruby crowned kinglet, a miracle to catch with the camera since they move at lightning speed. (Below are Towhee, song sparrows, a female junko, killdeer and the kinglet.)

The geese did their thing, coming and going.

The wild currants joined the chorus of plants in a landscape that defiantly put up some color against the grey sky.

As did the rest of the flowering beauty:

The pussy willows, in different stages of growth, seemed to suggest that tears can be beautiful adornment, and that they will roll off by themselves – well, my mind prone to anthropomorphising suggested that, but I did not complain….

Spring is all about renewal. Renewal is also humanity’s highest good, enshrined in democracies who are willing to take risks, accept the unpredictable, renounce the statism that aristocracies or authoritarian regimes want to enshrine. Renewal is about a livable future, not an oppressive past. It is upon everyone of us to support that project of renewal, within and beyond our borders.

When the rain got too hard I found a shelter, and some earlier visitor had left something behind. At least the kids here can still assume that nothing has happened and engage their fairy worlds. Wish it was true for every child in the world.

Here is Ukrainian composer Lysenko.

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The Year of the Tiger

Two billion people across the world celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year tomorrow, 2/1/2022, the Year of the Tiger. Last week I went down to Lan Su, Portland’s Chinese Garden, on a cold, sunny day to marvel at the decorations as I do every year. If you expect me to write exclusively about tigers, though, you should know better by now!

It has to be about hippopotamuses as well. I could stretch to find a connection, hippos being fierce (like the Chinese Zodiac sign of the tiger,) or semi-aquatic, linking to the fact that 2022 is a Water year for the Chinese Zodiac.

But in truth, even the hippos are just a part of today’s topic: how science approaches the (re)introduction of species to places from which they have vanished, or never lived before.

I was alerted to the issues when hearing about the hippos who were left to fend for themselves when Drug Lord and all-around-evil-guy Pablo Escobar was killed by Columbian police in 1993. He had a private zoo next to his mansion that hosted 4 hippos which escaped into the wild when the estate was left to itself. Here we are now, 30 years later, with an estimated 80-100 hippos congregating along the neighboring Magdalena River. That number might swell to another 800-5000 hippos in the next 30 years, depending on who is doing the estimating (Ref.) Hippos have no natural predators in Columbia, nor are their numbers culled by droughts as they would be in their native countries in Africa. They happily procreate.

Well, not much longer. Since it is legally forbidden to kill them, after a public outcry when the first of these escaped beasts was shot, the Regional Autonomous Corporation of the Negro and Nare River Basins (CORNARE) is now culling the herd by sterilizing the animals. They deliver doses of a contraceptive vaccine to the hippos which works on both males and females, via dart guns. The reason for a comprehensive sterilization program lies with multiple threats to the environment if the hippo numbers increase unchecked. Their grazing for food is intense and prevents other herbivores to get to the nourishment they need (a single adult hippo consumes about 88 pounds (40 kg) of grass per day.) The amount of poop deposited in the river is a threat to some aquatic plant and fish populations. And hippos can be quite aggressive if too close to human contact, with inevitable violent encounters in shared space with the fishermen.

It is easy to visualize how a foreign species hurts the balance of an ecosystem. Or what re-introduced species do to environments that have changed so much over the millennia as to not be recognizable given the landscape fragmentation. But scientists have started to look not just for the negative aspects of rewilding or new (if unintended) introductions, but to catalogue the positive trends associated with animals in new places. It looks like they just might serve some ecological functions that were earlier offered by now extinct species. New folks picking up the slack!

Here are the principles that the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) established:

Take the hippos. Their daytime grazing habits are similar to those of now extinct giant llamas that lived in Columbia in the Pleistocene. Their defecations bring nutrients to rivers that extinct semi-aquatic creatures of yore provided. But the numbers need to be monitored and if necessary, constrained.

Northern Australia lost its giant marsupials. They are in some ways replaced by grazing water buffalos, the largest herbivores since the extinction, whose feeding habits reduce the frequency and severity of wildfires, mitigating the effects of climate change.

Feral hogs, whose rooting in soil increases tree growth and attracts bird flocks, are replacing ecological work done by extinct giant peccaries in North America. The original American horses, which died out about 12,000 years ago, are now replaced by feral mustangs and burros in the American West who engage in well-digging behavior like their forbears, protecting water resources.

These are just a few examples. More details can be found here.

And guess who is rewilded in China? Yup, South China tigers. They are taken from Chinese zoos, the only place where they exist now, and reintroduced to open terrain in wild life preserves in South Africa. Once they have learned to live outside of captivity they will be released back in China. May the Year of the Tiger see an improved coexistence of humans and nature!

Here is some traditional Chinese pipa music. Happy New Year to those who celebrate!

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Witches Butter

None to be found, neither witches, nor butter. Hope defied, again!

Well, it was a trail name, referring to an orange-colored jelly-like fungus that is parasitic on fungi that inhabit decayed logs. (Tremella mesenterica.) That fungus did not make an appearance on my last hike either, but many other beautiful things did during my first excursion to Chehalem Ridge Nature Park.

The 1260 acres park opened a few months ago about 40 minutes southwest of Portland, near Cornelius. The land had been subject to housing developments before the market crashed. Then Metro stepped in in 2010 and purchased the land from a lumber company, with funds coming from the Trust for Public Land, the $6.1 million its largest acquisition. Since then smaller adjacent properties have been added.

Over the last 6 years the park was developed in earnest, by down-cutting the Stinson Lumber’s monoculture of fir trees where possible, planting native shrubbery and conifers, and giving remaining old growth of oaks, cedars and madrona trees room to breathe.

There is a 10+ mile system of trails, some wheelchair accessible, that is shared by hikers, horse riders and bikers in some places.

The parking lot has functional buildings and covered picnic areas, tons of space for kids to romp around. Pets are not allowed in the park, though, to protect sensitive wildlife.

Trails are clearly marked, and in the more crowded areas at the beginning there are plenty of benches so people can rest when needed.

Several view points offer stunning views of the coast range mountain and the Tualatin valley stretching out into the misty clouds.

Many of the trail names come from the Atfalati language, spoken by the Northern Kalapuyas, a tribe among the many that suffered a horrific fate when the colonialists arrived. With the settlers came the diseases. Malaria, transmitted by mosquitos, the potential vector Anopheles freeborni common in western Oregon until the early 1900s, was brought to Ft Vancouver by traders and spread from there. It reduced the tribal populations in the valley within three years, 1830 – 1833, by 80% (!), an apocalyptic loss. It hit the White settlers as well, but they knew to treat it with Quinine and had the remedy available, if in limited quantities.

“Cumulative evidence suggests that cultural unfamiliarity with the new diseases—that is, people did not know how to treat them—and the lack of effective medicines may have been as or more important than biological resistance, genetic or acquired, in accounting for the high mortalities. The loss of population resulted in abandoned and consolidated villages, the breakdown of social and political structures, and the loss of cumulated knowledge possessed by specialists (in a culture without written records), making the epidemics cultural as well as biological disasters.” (Ref.)

The Kalapuyans lived in tribal territories containing numbers of related and like-speaking, but basically autonomous villages. They were extremely versed in ecological management, treating the land for 4000 years with controlled, low intensity fires in the fall to create open oak savannahs and mixed forest growth.

This maximized the landscape for the products they needed most – seed, textiles, wapato, and forage for game.

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In addition to the wood land trail, I hiked the short side trails of ammefu, which means ‘mountain’ in Atfalati, ayeekwa referring to bobcats,

Bobcat or coyote scat?

and mampał, which means lake and could be a reference to Wapato lake, currently under restoration for a national wild life refuge after having been converted to onion fields by farmers.


 

Despite the January date, spring was in the air. It must have been the light green, bordering on chartreuse, everywhere. The forest floors covered with the invasive shining geranium,

the moss carpeting stumps, trunks and branches of the trees,

the first leaves of foxgloves, grass, lupines and even some fresh life among the Great Mullein.

The park also seems a magnet for piles. Piles from reforestation

piles from land management

piles from lunch

piles after lunch.

There is so much to appreciate in the land known as the Outside Place (Chehalem) by the Atfalati people. It speaks to the tenacity of life, even under hard conditions.

And if you are lucky you get to walk for a while behind goldilocks, who appreciated her Dad’s lesson on hibernation as much as I did. So much to learn, everywhere you turn. You just have to show up!

More vicarious walks for you all will be in the offing!

In the meantime here is an old Kalapuya prophecy, translated in 1945 by Melville Jacobs.

Long ago the people used to say that one great shaman in his dream had seen all the land black in his dream.
That is what he told the people. “this earth was all black (in my dream).”
He saw it in a dream at night. Just what was likely to be he did not know.
And then (later on) the rest of the people saw the whites plough up the ground
Now then they say, “that must have been what it was that the shaman saw long ago in his sleep.”

And here is a musical depiction of forest moods from a different continent….

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Wanderlust

Essential Meaning of Wanderlust: a strong desire to travel.

Full Definition of Wanderlust: strong longing for or impulse toward wandering. – Merriam Webster

If you check the definition for wandering on Merriam Webster you’ll notice that it includes “meandering, not keeping a rational or sensible course, or movement away from the proper, normal, or usual course or place.” Anything but hiking which the original German term “wandern” refers to.

Wanderlust was at its root about hiking, a desire to get back into nature, explore the natural world during the period of German romanticism. Artists from the 18th century on tried to find new inspiration beyond the cities and experience or express their feelings rather than simply depict scenes. That was true for visual artist as much as composers and authors. The fear of nature, as represented by forbidding mountains or cliffs or the vagaries of the seas transformed into fascination, even awe.

Thomas Cole A View of 2 Lakes and Mountain House, Catskill Mountains, Morning. (1844)

Later, and perhaps connected to the European system of artisan apprenticeships and journeymen, Wanderlust took on the meaning, probably more familiar to us, of the urge to roam anywhere but home, the longing for seeing the world at large and confronting unforeseen challenges.

Albert Bierstadt Giant Redwood Trees of California (1874)

It was all about the hero in nature, made small by awe (just look at these tiny figures in their immense surroundings), or seen big as conquering the obstacles encountered. It was about deceleration and a certain longing for glorified older times. It was also about the larger story of finding meaning in life, or allegories of a life’s progression, or expressing one’s relative take or standing in the natural order of things, a rise in individualism. And often it was linked to nationalism and pride of the beauty of one’s country.

Gustave Castan Landscape with Hiker (1870s)
Gustave Castan Gewitterstimmung im Rosenlauital (date unknown)

The quotes convey it well: “The things one experiences alone with oneself are very much stronger and purer.” (Eugene Delacroix.) “Amid those scenes of solitude… the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.” (Thomas Cole.) “I must stay alone and know that I am alone to contemplate and feel nature in full. I hav to surrender myself to what encircles me, I have to merge with my clouds and rocks in order to be what I am.” (Caspar David Friedrich.)

Karl Eduard Biermann Das Wetterhorn (1830)

A few years back Berlin’s Alte National Gallerie had an exhibition of paintings ranging from romanticism to expressionism that focused on landscape and the wanderers within. Some of today’s paintings are from that show, some are personal picks from other encounters, and they leave out the more familiar ones. They do show a trajectory, though from the early romantic leanings to more expressionist offerings that de-emphasize the human/landscape interaction. This was the first painting you saw when you entered – and the only woman of the bunch…

Jens Ferdinand Willumsen Die Bergsteigerin (1912)

However you frame it, I was bit by the Wanderlust bug since early childhood, and felt suffocatingly stifled when first Covid made travel impossible in 2020, and then health issues put a curb on hiking as well in 2021.

Vincent Van Gogh Man with Backpack (1888)

I am therefor thrilled to report that on the very first day of 2022 I managed part of a hike, in snow no less, that reprised my last one in 2020 before things fell apart. I had reported on it here.

Emil Nolde Der alte Wanderer (1936)

Today’s images are a comparison between July and January conditions of the very same sights on the trail up to Mirror Lake, OR (I did not do the full hike up to the top of the Tom Dick and Harry mountain on New Year’s Day.) Or I would have looked like this.

Ferdinand Hodler Der Lebensmüde (1887)

It is hard to explain why hiking feels so empowering – beyond the stress relief of physical exertion and the pride to pull it off (even in slo-mo and across much diminished distances.) I have no spiritual inklings when out in nature (have I ever?) but an endless appreciation for the beauty around me and the sensory input that reaches from smell to sound to visual reflections of light and shadow. I cherish the resilience of the landscape that surrounds me and, I guess, take it as a model. I like to observe change, when revisiting familiar sights over and over again, as long as that change is natural and not imposed by human interference. Drives me up a wall, when parks are closed for remodel…. no matter how much environmentally sensitive reconstructions are warranted – I feel deprived! And, I admit it, I like the “hunt” with my camera for wildlife of all sorts, the sudden gift of sightings, hoped for, but never guaranteed. I hiked long before I took up photography, though, so that’s just a bonus. Maybe it is the freedom that Hardy (below) describes, to move away from daily anchoring by duty.

So grateful that at least day hikes are back on the menu!

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Freedom 

Give me the long, straight road before me, 

A clear, cold day with a nipping air, 

Tall, bare trees to run on beside me, 

A heart that is light and free from care. 

Then let me go! – I care not whither 

My feet may lead, for my spirit shall be 

Free as the brook that flows to the river, 

Free as the river that flows to the sea. 

by Thomas Hardy (1840 – 1928)

I’ll hike to that! While singing Schubert’s ” Der Wanderer.“

One should not forget, though that there are serious alternatives to hiking, in case you are housebound – read this fascinating piece and consider!

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This Season’s Gift

In true appreciation of your continued reading, encouragement and critical interaction my gift to you for the holidays is:

No politics today.

No social justice issues today.

Nothing complicated or sad today.

A poem about how to be hopeful with the help of nature.

Here’s a collection of images from a hike up Wahkeena Falls last week, into the mist with a sprinkling of snow. There was beauty and the reminder that there are always more chances. If you had told me in the hospital at the beginning of the year that I would hike some miles up the steep hills of the Gorge by the end of it, I would have declared you insane.

Mist

It amazes me when mist 
chloroforms the fields 
and wipes out whatever world  exists 


and walkers wade through coma 
                              shouting 
and close to but curtained from each other 


sometimes there’s a second river 
lying asleep along the river 
where the sun rises 
               sunk in thought 


and my soul gets caught in it 
               hung by the heels 
               in water 


it amazes me when mist 
                             weeps as it lifts 

 
                 and a crow 
calls down to me in its treetop voice 
       that there are webs and drips 
and actualities up there 


and in my fog-self shocked and grey 
               it startles me to see the sky

by Alice Oswald (elected as the first female professor of poetry at the University of Oxford in 2019)

Here is to crows, blue skies and actualities. I will see you in the – happy – new year.

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And in case you still need more support to get through these next weeks, I urge you to try the following relaxation exercises. If Bruno Pontiroli’s models can do it, so can you! Possibilities abound!

That’ll be me!

Since all the animals reminded me of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival, here is his Christmas Oratorio, equally enchanting. Merry Christmas.

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Hope is a discipline

Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or fear or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism. Hope is a discipline… we have to practice it every single day.” – Mariame Kaba

I will write about the amazing scholar, prison abolitionist and activist Kaba on another occasion. Today I want to use her guidance, quoted above, to offer a few recent examples out of my “hope exercise bag,” so we can enter this week with a smile on our faces.

  • Over 40 camels barred from Saudi “beauty contest” over Botox! Organizers of the 6-year old competition are on top of tampering! All 143 attempts! No more inflated body parts, stretched with injections or rubber bands! No more braiding, or cutting, or dying the tail of the camel! Camels were x-rayed, subjected to ultra sounds and genetic analysis, to ensure true beauty wins fairly (to the tune of $ 66.000.000 no less.) There’s hope!

  • Delay wins the day! Hundreds of thousands of bees survived being buried under volcanic ash for over 50 days after the volcanic eruptions on the Canary island of La Palma. The owner of the hives had not yet collected the summer honey before the volcano erupted last September. The bees were able to sustain themselves with their own honey, after sealing themselves in by creating a resinous material called propolis. This “glue” is created by mixing saliva and beeswax with secretions from sap and other plant parts. There’s hope ! Procrastination isn’t always bad and spit, wax and honey can save you. Be prepared!
  • The cure for seasonal depression discovered! Acquire a Moomin rug and all else will fall into place (or at least you land on something soft if you fall…) There’s hope! My Moomin addiction is constantly served by new creations. (And no, I do not own this rug; it was meant symbolically. I do have a Moomin bag, though!)
  • The antidote to hate in this world is remembering its victims as one way to prevent more harm. This is not the funny kind of hope, but the real hope I strive for when practicing the discipline. In awe of the film maker Güzin Kar, with gratitude to the New Yorker that picked the short film up in this country. There is hope when people remember. (And this one probably one that Mariame Kaba would approve of.)
Remembrance (The Refugees’ Dreams – 2016)

Or at least there are glimpses that we can, should, must hold onto until real hope returns, as instructed by Adam Zagajewski, who died last March. A huge loss to the poetry community.

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

BY ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

TRANSLATED BY CLARE CAVANAGH

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

What’s Left Behind (The Refugees’ Dreams – 2016)

There is your Monday grab bag, now go and look for the silver lining, your song of the day!

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Conifers

Conifers are a group of ancient plants that include cedars, firs, cypresses, junipers, kauri, larches, pines, hemlocks, redwoods, spruces and yews. I notice them most during the fall season, perhaps because the surrounding hues of yellow in the gardens intensify the blue shades of the trees and the mist in the air gives them a silvery sheen. The structure of their branches, the various arrangements and patterns of their needles start to stand out, garnering attention when surrounding competing flowers are gone.

Conifers flourished in the region in and around Berlin, where this photo of my maternal grandmother, my aunt and my mother (in front) was taken in 1929. And here’s your’s truly with my mom, in front of yet another pine forest around 1955.

Berlin has one of the highest percentages of remaining forests within the city limits, almost 20% compared to say Hamburg or Munich which range in the 5% league. The forests are currently under extreme duress because of drought, heat and unmanageable pests like pine bark beetles. The city government is now planting 329.000 (!) trees, mostly elms and oak trees which are displacing the fragile pines.

Pines and in particular junipers are also an essential part of the Lüneburger Heide, a large area of heath, geest, and woodland in the northeastern part of the state of Lower Saxony in northern Germany close to where my paternal grand parents lived. One of the perennial highlights of our visits was a hike with my Opa to the Ahlftener Flatt, a large pond created by constant winds scooping the sandy loam. It was surrounded by various types of conifers, which we had to identify dutifully in order to make it to the water, the real magnet: time to hunt for frogs and grasshoppers! Or skating in the winter. Only in retrospect have I realized, how much I owe to these nature walks, including my love for birds, whose calls and songs my Opa was whistling to perfection, ever the musician even without his stand-up bass.

My Opa Eduard as a young man and below, me in center between him and Oma Dora
Some years later, with my sister.

The heath has been a National Park since 1909, one of, if not the oldest in Germany. The sandy loam makes it ideal for junipers to grow. They dot the landscape, their dark green offsetting the purple of their surround, when the heather is in bloom. Large flocks of sheep are grazing year round to keep the heather plants in check. You can watch it here.

Considered beauty there yet a curse here, in Oregon, Idaho and Nevada. Juniper used to grow only on rocky surfaces and steep slopes, where they were protected from fires, since little fire fuel grew around them. When settlers started to graze their cattle in the 1870s, native grasses, food for fire, disappeared from the plains as well and so the junipers took root everywhere. The problem? They outcompete grasses and shrubs, killing habitat for wildlife that needs those. They also serve as hiding places for mountain lions, allowing them to stalk pronghorn sheep and antelopes more easily. They use a lot of water, which in turn dries out nearby streams and springs – all of which then affects cattle farmers who have not enough grazing and watering resources left.

Most threatened by junipers, though, are the sage-grouse. Not only do junipers wipe out the sage grass on which the grouse depend. The birds also give anything over four feet tall a wide birth, since a taller tree could host predator birds. The places, then, where they met and mated are now feeling unsafe due to stands of large juniper trees and so they abandon the region without finding suitable replacement. The Bureau of Land Management has undertaken juniper control projects spanning tens of thousands of acres in Oregon alone, and millions of acres across the West, trying to eradicate them by pile burning.

“Several federal and state agencies offer grants to help ranchers tackle invasive juniper on private land. And the BLM coordinates juniper eradication on the vast swaths of public land it manages. One recently completed project in southeastern Oregon spanned 70,000 acres, and another, in the Burns area, aims to clear about 50,000 acres. Past monitoring has shown that the growth and productivity of herbaceous plants like grasses do in fact rebound after juniper is removed, and ranchers have reported increased flow in springs and streams.” (I’ve summarized a longer, beautifully photographed essay on this problem, found here.)

Don’t try it yourself, though: the old trees are protected, they might live for more than a thousand years—some known to be dated at 1,600 years. These trees are irreplaceable, and cutting one down on public land is punishable by a fine of $100,000 and up to a year behind bars.

It is such a complex issue in interdependent eco systems where the arrival of non-native species, or human interference with the natural-set up of a region can bring looming catastrophe.

Let’s revel in the beauty of the various conifer species I photographed last week, though, thoughtfully planted in a garden where they do no harm to larger expanses of wilderness.

Music has to be The Juniper Tree from the bitter Grimm Fairy Tale.

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Nature’s Bounty – For All

Today’s photographs are views of fall’s bright yellows. The woods and meadows are not just full of color but also teeming with plants that are edible, mushrooms at this time of year first and foremost (I offered their photographs already last week.)

I was taught about edible plants in a podcast on foraging, the search for food in the wild, or your back yard, or the town commons, take your pick. A young Black woman from Ohio, Alexis Nikole Nelson, provided in equal measure food for thought and references to food for our stomachs.

Beyond introducing (real) food stuff, teaching about biology and botany and creating amazing recipes, she reminds the listener of how Black people had a relationship to foraging during slavery, and how their traditions and knowledge were cut off with the hardships and legal or customary exclusion from nature following emancipation. Proprietary rights of White landowners were harshly enforced, once they had no gain from people’s survival, a survival that depended on supplementing the meager scraps of food they received on plantations.

Nelson has by now over 3 million followers on TikTok, and I must say that I got drawn into her videos, getting used to the intensely lively quality that many of them display – after a while it becomes infectious, or less noticeable, can’t say. The content is what convinced me, so much to learn in ways that obviously appeal to a HUGE number of people who are now equipped to bring food to the table even when funds are short. She is a gifted teacher beyond her culinary skills and adventurous spirit.

Here is a link to her site, where you can choose among so many interesting offerings (you don’t have to sign up, just click on any of the videos.) She talks about food as a way to connect to people, a way to show love and and way to express creativity – available for free to all if you know where to look in our eco-system. This is a key point for learning how to forage in a society where 50 million people are food insecure – not knowing where their next meal is coming from.

Black populations were, of course, not just prevented from accessing naturally occurring food sources that grew on private or local lands. There is now a public conservation about how access to nature in general is inherently more difficult for Blacks than for Whites.

If you are tempted to join the chorus that protests: “Public trailheads are open to everyone. Campsites are not segregated. Rivers belong to all!” I urge you to familiarize yourself – as I had to do, since I was clueless about the severity of the issues – with what is happening in real life.

The range of obstacles is vast.(Ref.) – It starts with the experience that you are singled out as someone unusual on the hiking path (borne out by statistics that show how enormously underrepresented Blacks are in outdoor recreational activities,) and beyond that hypervisibility often made to feel the you don’t belong. It continues with being told directly or indirectly not to trespass on traditionally White activities like fly fishing, or entering a space that was meant as an escape for people from “crowded urban centers,” often a euphemism for poverty, crime and POCs. Most frighteningly the range includes attacks on your property and physical safety, from slashing tires and tents, to actual attempts at lynching. If you don’t believe me, read up in such publications as the Sierra Club Magazine, not known for hyped-up commentary. Or the local Washington State news. Or stories about Black birders in Central Park….

The history of public park systems – culturally segregated even after legal segregation ended – and current day prejudices against non-Whites interact. POCs are three times more likely to live in places where they have no immediate access to nature, and lacking the funds or time to travel far. That is not a coincidence, given the historic structural issues around racism in the National Park movement, claims Myron Floyd, dean of the College of Natural Resources.

“The underlying rationale for creating parks was this idea of U.S. nationalism, to promote the American identity, and the American identity was primarily white, male and young. …..It was really trying to distinguish the American identity from the European identity: being a separate, more mature nation in the mid-19th century.”

John Muir, who is credited with the creation of the National Park System and the conservation movement, was recently called out for his long history of racism by the Sierra Club. For Muir, who co-founded the organization in 1892, Indigenous people “seemed to have no right place in the landscape” despite the fact that they had lived there for thousands of years. He also believed that Indigenous peoples’ villages and their ways of life should be destroyed in order to have “unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.” 

Other important figures in the conservation movement, like Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, held racist beliefs and believed that parks were created for Americans of only Northern European descent.

Some months ago the American Trails organization published a list of new organizations that hope to increase participation in outdoor activities by all those traditionally excluded. It did so in the context of a historical perspective on racisms in the outdoors, a short read that I highly recommend.

One of my favorite essays this year describes how another question of access to nature plays out in our own back yard. Strongly recommended reading. It is about the urban rural divide in Yamhill County and how a proposed hiking path was torpedoed by the extreme Right. It was a locally supported trail project that all of a sudden became a hot button in the “culture wars,”now dominating election campaigns for local office, dividing a community, enhancing bigotry and extremism. Spoiler alert – the 12 mile trail project got successfully killed by conservative forces that did not want urban “trash” to blight their landscape. Its remaining proponents are receiving death threats.

Here is an upbeat musical offering to fall – with leaves rustling and colors shimmering, before ending in a pensive mood that goes with today’s discussion of continued inequities.

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