The air feels tense and thick with the sounds and smells of life, as I shift my weight onto my right foot- gaze fixed on the 20 or so cattle huddled under an ancient bay tree- a remnant of a forest that once was, or a harbinger of a forest that is yet to be? I catalogue the thought for future musing. And in this moment of distraction My hat brushes against a low limb at the edge of the clearing sending a flush of mourning doves winging out of the canopy. The baldy yearling, all black with a face like a mime and an upside down red ear tag, who I have been watching, bobs his head nervously and saunters off a few steps before looking back at me.
I retreat several paces and pause until his ears droop slightly and his head lowers a few inches, and then continue towards the group meandering back and forth, casual, watching intently for signs that I am about to enter their flight zone, the invisible circle that surrounds each animal which, when crossed by a perceived threat, compels them to move. I play with this tension, moving in and out of each animals circle until the hottest ones begin to move away. I stop, releasing the pressure for a few moments, teaching them that when they move in the direction I want them to, they get relief. This lesson will be applied again and again over the course of the season, until a trust is built between us and we both learn the steps to a dance that is inscribed in our DNA.
Five years ago, I was sitting under fluorescent lights at 7pm on a Friday night, teetering on the edge of a breakdown as I checked my email, waiting for confirmation from our CEO that we had placed a Big Data Manager at a digital currency startup. I couldn’t sort out how I had ended up here, and I didn’t know how to leave. All I knew is that everything I loved about myself was slowly withering behind the light of three glowing monitors.
The circuitous, beautiful, and completely unexpected path between these two scenes could fill a book, in fact it fills 6 black leather bound journals stashed in a storage container beneath my trailer. But at its impetus was an assumption, shattered, and a question that continues to drive me.
Since I can remember I’ve been aware that this world is falling apart. That glaciers are melting, that forests are shrinking, that there is plastic everywhere. It’s a strange weight for a child to bear: that things are getting much worse, quickly, and that it probably won’t change. I remember seeing a time lapse of the night sky over the last 60 years as lights crept across the darkness of our globe and thinking “we are a disease, a parasite on a host we are rapidly consuming.” Paraphrasing Edward Abbey, I would relay to those who would listen that “infinite growth on a finite planet is the ideology of a cancerous cell.”
What did that mean to have your existence predicated on destruction, to live in a place that would be so much better without me, without any of us? I didn’t have an answer, so clad in the righteousness of misanthropy, I gave up: drawing a modicum of satisfaction in the penance of my own discontent. At least I saw this truth, at least I knew how fucked it all was.
What I want to write about, what I need to share with you, is how wrong I was. How myopic and eurocentric that perspective has turned out to be. My despair was predicated on assumptions, that humans have always been this way and that all humans today act in this way. Based on such axioms, the only logical conclusion is then that there is something inherent in human nature that leads us to destroy the world in our attempt to provide for our own needs. This is simply not true. But I believe that this assumption, whether or not it is explicit, whether or not we can articulate it, plagues so many modern people. I believe it is why we need constant distraction, why we need to always go further, faster; why we seem to always be searching for solace that lays just beyond our grasp. All of it to avoid stopping and looking dead on at what our existence has done to the world. But if we are able to slow down, and look long enough, we can see that there is another way.
Anatomically, contemporary humans have been on this earth for two hundred thousand years. For the first 190- 199,900 (depending on where we evolved or settled) most of us lived in relative harmony with the rest of creation. This is not to say we did not engage with the world, did not have an impact on the land that sustained us. Indigenous people on every continent, through the ways in which they provided for their own needs, shaped and tended a landscape that was more abundant, diverse, and productive than it would have been in their absence.
This has been meticulously and compellingly documented in books like M. Kat Anderson’s “Tending the Wild” Bruce Pasco’s “Dark Emu”, Bill Gammage’s “The biggest estate on earth” and in Charles Man’s “1491”. The connection to and knowledge of the complexity of the ecologies that these Original Peoples participated in would shame any contemporary biologist. And their descendants are still here, holding and preserving this world view in the face of continued oppression, exploitation, and genocide.
A keystone species is one which has a disproportionate effect on its natural environment, relative to its abundance. Think of Salmon, who bring nutrients from the ocean miles upstream, feeding bears and eagles, whose droppings nurture the growth of riparian trees and grasses, whose roots hold in place the banks of the very rivers the salmon breed in, keeping sediment from obscuring the gravel the salmon need to lay their eggs. In their absence, the entire ecosystem changes.
There is no inherent value judgement as to that effect of keystone species, and by such a definition, contemporary humans unequivocally earn the title. We, more than any species before us, have altered every aspect of the lands we call home, making them less resilient, less biodiverse, and less abundant. We bare a deep responsibility as a keystone species for the wellbeing of the other beings we share this world with, a responsibility we have eschewed for far too long. So then, how do we learn from salmon, from beavers, from wolves?
What does it mean, in a world so impoverished by civilization, to step into this responsibility, this birthright. That is my question.
I am a White American middle class man, with all of the privileges and limitations that such an identity entails. It would be arrogant and presumptive to pretend to speak from a position of authority or expertise about how to reinhabit our rightful place as a Keystone species in our ecologies.
In sharing my inquiries into this question, I hope to highlight others who are exploring and practicing what it is to live a life, build a business, and create, revive, or uphold a culture that supports thriving productive ecologies. I hope to share thoughts and anecdotes from my life that feel pertinent to this exploration. I hope to remain humble, open, and grounded.
My invitation is this: join me in these questions, live into them as best you can, as imperfect as our attempts may be. Wake up to the sound of birdsong, enthralled by possibility, excited to try again.
Amazing! Just beautiful!
Well said good fellow.
The past years my heart has been heavy with all of the crucial undoing that needs to be done in our human world. It’s overwhelming, despairing, to constantly be focused on how wrong we were to get here, how wrong we are to continue with business as usual; not only in the treatment of the earth but in the treatment of one another; the continued deep disrespect and insane abuse of indigenous peoples, people of color and women- the ones with ways of knowing that are crucial to our continued existence, to the liberation of all of us.
The dominant narrative continues to be what NOT to do. But people aren’t inspired by what not to do. When we take something away, we need to replace it with something better.
Rather than just undoing the systems that oppress life, how can we use our human creativity to be the kind of keystone species that helps perpetuate life?
We are learning but also remembering. And it’s good to remind each other to keep an eye on the horizon- and if a Cooper’s hawk flies by, to revel in the elegance of its flight.