I watch my four-year-old daughter as she crouches naked up to her shoulders in the San Francisco River. Her head is dipped down as she drinks the cold water in quiet gulps while her hair falls in wet ropes around her face. She is effortlessly comfortable and completely aware, surrounded on all sides by the rich riparian green and raw red cliffs of the Gila Wildlands. A single vivid blue damselfly rests tentatively on one small brown shoulder. Rhiannon stops drinking and, with intent eyes and a huge grin, motionlessly watches her visitor. She waits until the damselfly takes flight on its own before she whirls in wild circles, growling and howling in wordless delight.
While I am watching her I cannot help but think that this must be the original and intended state of being: perfectly present and aware, a blissful extension of the land itself. This wild-eyed child is the embodiment of bliss. And I also cannot help but feel my own bliss, constant here as it never has been before--bliss not defined as a sense of carelessness or temporal happiness but as a deep-seated knowledge of oneness with land and purpose, as a sense of no longer being lost or lacking for any needed thing.
I have not always been able to claim such a state of being. For most of my life I have wandered, searching and discontented, all too aware of every trouble and misery ever visited upon me. It was a revelation to me, then, when I discovered that life was not inherently ugly or burdensome, it was not even meant to be a mediocre tedium. Instead, I found that life was meant to be beautiful, a celebration and prayer manifest in every action and movement.
Unfortunately, it is the attitude of futility and cynicism that is most common. We are born into a culture that seems to believe there are certain sets of rules that must be followed--that life is a multiple-choice test and that we must choose one of the pre-selected answers. What I have discovered is that truth and contentment (much less bliss) never come as prefabricated answers. The only valid option is to invent a new answer and to realize that oftentimes the question itself is a fallacy. If the question is How can I get through life as comfortably as I can? or How can I succeed just enough to get by?, then the question needs to be thrown out completely. The question should be more along the lines of What gives me the greatest joy?, What passion/purpose could I dedicate my life to?, and/or What do I need to be whole? If we are honest with ourselves we will find that the answers to these questions have very little to do with societal standing, monetary status, or even comfort level. The answers to these questions will often frighten us because they will show us just how far we are from our own passions and needs. The questions will creep into our dreams and our internal conversations, regardless of our denial, until answered with affirmation and action.
We've all heard of finding your bliss, but in reality, bliss is not something that we can find. Bliss exists within us as an expression of the beauty and joy of Gaia. We need not search for it; we need only to acknowledge it, to embody it. But what does it mean to embody bliss, to own it completely? To not see it as something outside of and separate from ourselves? How to recognize and realize ourselves as extensions of Gaia, extensions of her beauty and bliss?
The answers are simple but never easy. What came easily to us as children will require work and focus to reclaim. To embody bliss is to take every step with intention, to be fiercely and fully awake.
And what does it mean to dance with the broken heart of Gaia? It means rejoicing in the beauty of that little girl in the river even as we recognize and feel the pain of our people, of our planet. It means dancing with the joy and with the pain. It means being strong enough to experience everything completely--to take the agony and the joy as currents of the same body of water. It means knowing that it is better to suffer than to feel nothing at all. It means waking up every morning welcoming the dawn, knowing that our lives have meaning and purpose and that our connection to our Mother is well nourished.
How can we embody bliss? Once again, we must understand that bliss is not something outside of us, not something we can earn or seek out. It is something already alive within all of us. It is unfortunate that most of us live lifestyles that are far removed from the wildness or natural beauty that teaches us bliss through example. We must re-learn what we should have known from the very first breath.
The most essential ingredient in embodying bliss is a highly refined awareness. Although this heightened awareness is something all of us are born with, the time between then and now has often dulled that awareness into a numb complicity, and skills that should have been honed in childhood have atrophied into near uselessness. If any proof is needed, observe the habits of both a domesticated housedog and a dog that has either gone feral or was born wild. The difference in alertness, intelligence, and instinct are remarkable. A house dog unaccustomed to being outdoors without a leash or to fending for itself will wander into traffic, ignore potential prey, and nearly starve before it becomes aware enough to take care of itself. In the same way, those of us who have been conditioned by a normal American upbringing have been taught to ignore our feelings, stifle any tendency towards childlikeness, and confine physical consciousness to the gym or sex. We have effectively crippled our instinctual wildness. Our awareness will have to be awakened from dormancy and carefully nurtured in order to keep our senses alive.
The easiest and quickest way to engage our bliss is to seek out the little girl (or boy) that is inside us all. Usually, she is fast asleep or lost and wandering somewhere in our interior landscape. We all get occasional glimpses of her when we allow ourselves to eat a messy dessert with our hands, stomp through a mud puddle, or lose ourselves completely in a beautiful piece of music. But for the most part we force her to keep her mouth shut and mind her manners. We still hold onto that antiquated Victorian saying, children should be seen and not heard. We've been taught to keep her under tight control and careful surveillance to avoid those curious glances and critical words we earn when we're caught (grown women!) climbing a tree in the city park or singing off-key in the rain on our way to work. Part of bliss is being able to ignore the onlookers and quiet the critics through our total focus and engagement in play and experience.
Joy originates in the heart of the child and all of our wildness waits for us there. We need to find that little girl, let her sit in the flowerbed in the backyard and contemplate the animal shapes of passing clouds. We need to give ourselves license to play again.
We all know how easily innocence is lost, how simple it is to thoughtlessly embrace cynicism and the humdrum monotony of what we call everyday life. What many of us have forgotten is that we have the ability to reclaim that joyous sense of freedom and intensity. I grew up in a home where my childhood was virtually nonexistent, I was an adult with all of the weight the adulthood carries in our culture before I even hit puberty. For too long I saw the bitterness and tiredness of my mother and her mother when I looked in the mirror--a woman who had seen too much hardship and not enough joy, play, or laughter in her life. I knew there was something terribly wrong when I noticed that I woke up every day steeling myself to face the morning instead of celebrating the beauty of each new dawn.
Only as an actual adult, in my early twenties, was I able to properly give voice to that little girl. It was only then that I could give myself permission to spin in the dew-wet grass in the predawn morning hours--to allow myself to spend whole afternoons sitting in the tall grass watching a carnival of insects parading around me without feeling guilt at what I wasn't doing or self-conscious that someone might see me playing. It was only when I found that little girl that I was able to become the woman I was meant to be.
Another way of embodying our bliss is to be open to our own feelings and experiences--to pay close attention to how our daily lives affect us. The overwhelming joy we feel when our child greets us by throwing her arms around us, or the peace and satisfaction we feel when finishing a project or meeting a goal, or even the horror we experience when we watch the evening news each night--we need to tend to and honor these feelings. It is the depth (or lack thereof) of our emotions that gives us the capacity to fully experience bliss. If we play down our feelings, even when they are negative feelings such as disappointment or pain, then we are numbing ourselves down. The less we feel, the less alive we are. Many of the most alive and blissful people I have ever known were terminally ill. They were determined to experience and feel everything, to be hyper-aware even to pain in order to be aware of the razor-edged preciousness of life. It can be hoped that not all of us need a time frame placed on the days left to us in order to be that open to our experiences.
Perhaps the best way to open up to our own experiences is to realize that our feelings are not isolated and limited only to ourselves. To acknowledge that we are extensions of the Earth and that to deepen our connection to Gaia is to deepen our connection to ourselves. It's important to be aware that the connection works both ways. The less separation there is between us and the Earth, the more we will feel what the Mother is experiencing as well, including the enormous amount of pain She is suffering at the hand of our own species.
There are countless ways to solidify our connection to the land. It can be as simple as appreciating the amazing taste of locally grown fresh fruit or as complex as searching out and dedicating ourselves to that certain place that is home to us. The direct result of a deep connection with the Mother is an immediate and personal knowledge of how we are linked to each other and all other life. This eradication of separation from the Earth is the mainline to bliss. As long as our spirit and life are based in our love for the land we will never have any shortage of joy or awe in our lives.
In order to really own our bliss we must acknowledge that it is a state of being that we deserve. Too many of us get right up to the edge of everything we've ever wanted and turn around and walk away. Often this denial is triggered by guilt or a sense of not being enough to deserve joy or contentment. What we have to tell ourselves over and over again is that bliss is the state we are born into. It is not found and it is not earned. It is the birthright of every human being and it is only our imagined separation from the land, ourselves, and each other that creates the illusion that we should ever exist in any state except bliss.
My daughter dances on the riverbank, arms open wide and spinning. I pick her up and I dance with her. We dance with the broken heart of Gaia in a world that is wounded and yet unfalteringly beautiful.
To embody bliss is to know our blessedness. It is to know that there is so much beauty in the world that we are unable to contain it, that it overflows and floods the world. When we open to the bliss, we are carried by it on an undeniable current that delivers us back to the center of our own beings: wild, awake, and authentically ourselves.
Kiva Rose is an intuitive and challenging counsel, and codirector of The Earthen Spirituality Project & Sweet Medicine Women's Center, as well as an impassioned poet and author, wife and mother, and lover of the land. Her home is a restored river canyon sanctuary in the enchanted Gila wildlands of New Mexico where she hosts the most focused and intent women for Gaian teachings, wilderness quests, the annual Wild Women's Gathering, retreats, and resident internships. Details on available writings, opportunities, and events can be found on their website, www.earthenspirituality.org, or write: PO Box 820, Reserve, NM 87830.
©2005 Talking Leaves
Spring 2005
Volume 15, Number 1
Family Values
An Interview with Dave Bontrager by Chris Roth
Dave Bontrager is an ornithologist and ecologist who has educated and inspired many fledgling (and no-longer-fledgling) birders and nature-lovers for the past three decades. Twelve years ago, he and his wife Charlotte moved from southern California, where Dave had been stationed at Starr Ranch Audubon Sanctuary, to a forty-acre site just three miles up Lost Creek from us. Since their move, he has continued teaching classes at Starr Ranch, commuting south for multiple-week courses. For the past three years, he has also offered regular bird identification and natural history classes to local Dexter and Eugene-area residents. I've enrolled in every one, for good reason: Dave's knowledge, insight, and enthusiasm for his subject have enriched my life and greatly accelerated my own learning about birds and natural history.
On the day before the following interview, a group of four of us visited Dave to help him plant native shrubs and trees in a formerly blackberry-infested creekside floodplain, as part of the ongoing habitat restoration and diversification work that he has done for the past twelve years. (Last year he and Charlotte were awarded the Fish and Wildlife Steward Award for Non-Industrial Forest Lands in Northwest Oregon by the Oregon Departments of Fish and Wildlife and of Forestry.) This interview was conducted the following afternoon, February 9, 2005, sitting in sunshine next to the creek not far from our planting site.
I first asked Dave about what led him to study birds and other wildlife.
DB: When I was in high school, I took a biology class, and I liked it a whole lot. I told the teacher, "You know, I think I'd like to teach biology some time." Because I'd shown that interest, he arranged to have me taken out of study hall and assist him in his class during that hour. It was really neat. He gave me some old textbooks. I was sitting at home--this was in northern Indiana, in winter--and I was looking through this book, and I came to the page that showed twigs in winter. It had all the parts labeled. And I found that kind of amazing. I had thought, "What could be left? The leaves are gone and it's just this twig." I took that book out and I went to a Chinese elm tree that we had in our back yard, and I found most of those structures. That was when I realized that books can give you answers about nature.
I had been out in nature from an early age. I lived in a rural area with lakes and creeks, and my parents were willing to give me a very free rein. So I connected with nature at a very young age. The bookish part came later and it felt like the natural thing to do. I didn't really know what I was interested in; I only knew I was interested in being outdoors, and this put it within some sort of framework, some organization. That's when I decided I wanted to be a biologist. I didn't know what I was going to do with it, but I studied biology in college.
There was a short period of time, though, when I wasn't sure I was going to be a biologist. When I got my bachelor's degree, it was 1967, and I felt, "You're not helping people by being a biologist," so I went to work as a social worker for several years. Like a lot of other young people at that time, I wanted to save the world, I guess. It was a totally invaluable experience; I wouldn't trade it for one day of biology. It really made a difference in my life. But I decided I needed to get back to biology after that.
I started doing mammal field work. That's when I really discovered birds, because where I was doing my thesis had an incredible array of birds. As soon as I finished my Masters on mammals, I started doing research on birds. Then I began teaching in '77. My first classes were bird classes, and then after several years, I started teaching a class called field natural history and ecology, and then a native plant class, and others like that. You can't study birds without knowing about the plants, and so I suddenly realized I was at a point where I could teach these other classes.
I had told Dave that I wanted to interview him about "family values" among birds. Not surprisingly, however, the main part of our conversation encompassed much more than facts about bird behavior. Dave started by offering some reflections on the concept of "family values" itself:
DB: The term "family values" can have all kinds of meanings. To me, that's become a loaded phrase, and maybe you've chosen it purposely. And when you take words like that, which now have such a deep and emotional meaning to humans, and you apply them to wildlife, you're not only taking the usual risk of anthropomorphizing wildlife, you're adding this new meaning into the equation too.
As a biologist, I--it depends on what audience I'm in front of--if I'm in front of one of my classes, I reserve the right to anthropomorphize at the drop of a hat. But I do need to stop occasionally, just in case someone is misunderstanding, to say that we are applying human values and judgments to these animals, and you can never understand them if you do that, as far as I'm concerned. It's impossible to look at an animal from any perspective other than a human being's, but as a biologist I know that if I say I'm really doing science, I need to do everything under the sun not to humanize wildlife. And incidentally, I realize that many of your readers may take exception to this.
It's been said that the moment we become an observer, we change the situation. In other words, it's impossible as human beings to not bring ourselves into the equation. All we are is humans; that's all we can use to interpret animal behavior; but they're not humans, and so perhaps we can never really understand them.
CR: I did deliberately choose the term "family values" because it has so many different interpretations. One reason I thought of looking at birds or other wildlife was that it seems as if there's a wide range of acceptable behaviors, or just natural behaviors, for different species. To learn about those may be somewhat of a challenge to someone who is used to judging a certain set of behaviors as correct or showing "good family values," with other behaviors being not good. Perhaps learning to see what is among animals will encourage people to suspend their judgment a little bit more, even in regard to people, and to try to understand, rather than immediately judge. But it's also tricky, because we're still applying human terms when we're talking about the animals.
DB: And they're not talking to us, and telling us the right way of describing things.
CR: I was curious: while trying not to anthropomorphize, what are some of the variations among bird species in their relationships to their families, particularly in the areas of mating and parenting?
DB: Well, maybe the place to start answering that is to look at the various types of pair bonds. We were joking the other day...hummingbirds probably have as short a pair bond as you could ever have. If the pair of birds has seen each other before, it's probably only been in circumstances that were mainly aggression, because if the female happened to be on the male's territory, and she were too close to food plants, then he would just chase her away. But at some point, it's the right time of the year, and hormones kick in and start influencing that behavior. The male does a display--hummingbirds do have pretty elaborate displays for small birds--and the female is receptive or is not receptive. She is the one that makes the choice--as is true in almost all birds, people now believe. And when she makes that choice, there's copulation. He may stick around, do some more displaying, they may copulate a second or third time, but then that is literally it. They've been together for a matter of maybe several minutes, and that's the extent of that.
Some other birds are also that way, but those tend to be in the minority. At the opposite end of the spectrum, some of the larger birds, particularly, bond for life. Geese are well known for this, and humans get very anthropomorphic and emotional about it. I think most humans find that bonding for life is a positive thing; it's what you're supposed to do. But the reality is, once you start studying birds and learning about them, there's really not a lot of romance or...well, let's put it this way: when one of those birds dies, it's not as if the other one pines away the rest of their life. Assuming they're not so old that they're not attractive to another bird, then they form another pair bond, and presumably don't sit around thinking about the one that has passed away.
So even when you hear the term "mate for life," it really means "have a pair bond until one of the birds dies"--and then a new pair bond will be formed. Part of what's believed to be behind the formation of pair bonds, and one bird accepting another, is that there's some inner instinctive drive to pass your genetics on into the future. It's a pretty cold interpretation of things by human standards. It's not romance, and it's not love, and all of that--it's pass your genes on to the next generation. And that's why pair bonds are quickly filled or replaced if a bird disappears.
There is such a thing--and this word is even used a lot in biology; some biologists hate to hear this word, but others use it freely--as divorce. Divorce happens; there is an existing bond and one of the birds leaves. Most of the time it's the female that leaves, because, at least in songbirds, it's the male that's tied not only to a particular female but to a place, since the males are the birds that principally defend the place. But the female, trying to pass those genes on, for whatever reason--I'm not sure how a female perceives this and then makes the decision to leave--but it's as though she thinks, "This is not working. We're not going to produce young," and so she may leave and wander around until she finds a male that doesn't have a mate. I've seen that many times during my research, where I've had color-banded birds so I knew exactly who's where and with whom. It's pretty interesting stuff to follow.
CR: Why would it be in the interests of the species to pass on genes by having exclusive pair bonds, as opposed to having as many different choices as possible?
DB: I believe it's similar to why birds have territories. When you study birds for a while, songbirds let's say, you're amazed at how organized everything is. There's a lot of flexibility, but there's still this incredible organization out there, and you come to understand how important that really is. For a little animal to successfully reproduce takes an incredible amount of energy--particularly for the female. She's not only trying to get enough food to keep herself going, but she needs to be eating a lot of food because she has to produce these eggs, and she's going to be spending more time on the nest, not out feeding like the male can, and then later on she'll be feeding the young, which the male may or may not do. But the male also, on the other hand, if he's defending the territory, has to be fit. I don't know how else it could be organized or disorganized, but if there weren't territories, you can envision these birds just wandering all over the place, probably expending a lot of energy against each other, whereas if you set out these nice territories, you're not eliminating conflict, but you're reducing it dramatically.
CR: The territories go along with the pair bonds; they're part of the same system.
DB: Yes.
CR: So what would you say is the percentage of birds that have that system as opposed to some other system? I guess there's the hummingbird system, but they still have territories, right?
DB: Yes, the male has a feeding territory that he defends after reproduction. That can be several large shrubs that happen to have a lot of flowers on them, or it can be many shrubs spread out over a large area. The female hummingbird defends an area around the nest from other hummingbirds.
CR: Are there cases of "multiple relationships"?
DB: Yes, there's some really interesting stuff that goes on. Monogamy is definitely the most common type of bond in most birds, but there is polygamy, and that's the term that's used.
In polygamy, one male may mate with multiple females. This can occur with, for example, the house wren, which was one of the birds that I studied. We saw this happen: a male house wren has a territory, and within that territory, if he's a very fit male and it's large enough and he can defend it, he can have two or three females. He'll do his best to mate with every one of those if it's possible. There are vast geographic regions where house wrens are monogamous, and then there are other areas where there's a little bit of polygamy, and then there are some places where there's a lot. Where I was studying them there was some, but not a lot. On a study area that was about thirty acres, there were an average of sixteen to twenty males, meaning territories, and in a given year there might be two or three of those males that were polygamous, and all the rest were monogamous. They're cavity-nesters; they build nests in holes all over the place. When the females arrive--because the males almost always come first in the case of migration--the male literally shows them where the nests are. A female selects the one to be used, and then the pair bond is cemented. Except he's always wandering around looking for other females, and taking them to other nest cavities. We never had more than two active nests at one time on a territory, but that was interesting to watch. You're over here at this tree, and there he is, defending the area around the cavity, and then later you're off doing something else, with a different species, and you have a house wren nest there, and you look at it and you go, "Oh, that's red-green, the same one I saw over there a half an hour ago." He's making the rounds, defending nest sites and females from other males...really interesting.
In polyandry, another form of polygamy, one female mates with more than one male. Not real common; it's probably more common in shorebirds than in any other group. It's very unusual in songbirds, which is the group I know the most about.
CR: In terms of parenting...when you were talking about the lack of romance or attachment to a partner when the other bird dies, I was thinking about the movie Winged Migration. In one scene, a young penguin was killed by a hawk, and the parents seemed to be mourning; there seemed to be quite a bit of distress. Is that just anthropomorphizing on our part, or do you think there was a lot of distress there? How attached do parents get to their kids?
DB: That's a tough one. I've seen some pretty amazing things...a western bluebird nest that was predated by a striped racer, which ate all the kids, and the parents were still taking food to that nest cavity the following day, in the middle of the afternoon. They had been in the cavity dozens and dozens of times since all of the young were taken, so they knew the nest was empty, and every time they went into it they saw that. But there is this instinctive drive that was set in motion initially by hormones, that helped create this bond between these birds. Again, it's hard for me to believe that the birds came together for the reason that humans do, for the companionship, for sharing love and the satisfaction of raising young, and all of those things. I don't believe that birds think in these ways. This sounds so cold, but I think chemistry and instinct are what's driving their behavior. However, I want to be real careful what I say because this could end up on a piece of paper, so I don't want to go overboard.
I usually don't talk to people about this, but...the more I learn about an individual bird, the more I may form an emotional bond with it. That's the danger of trying to do biology: at the end of the day, when you're writing the report, you're not talking about that bond, and you're trying to keep it from influencing your results. And I've had interesting experiences that I rarely talk about, where it felt like something was going on between me and the animal...
I've seen many birds going absolutely crazy when there are predators at their nests, but is that the result of loving their young and wanting to protect them, and is it because they're feeling emotion like we might? I really don't know.
CR: Of course, some scientists might say that human beings are really only running on instincts and chemistry too, and have created these elaborate stories for some instinctual or chemical reason to make it romantic--that emotions are all chemical, and...
DB: But being a human being, you're studying human behavior your whole life, without realizing that you're doing it. That's how you learn this is someone that you want to be around, or don't want to be around, or that's bad behavior, that's good behavior. I do tend to think that culture and learning play a much more important role in humans than they do in wildlife. It's really interesting that when animals that seem to form more of a society are studied, it's as if they have a culture--we see this in Jane Goodall's work with chimps, and Diane Fossey's with gorillas. And I don't think it's any coincidence that those are primates, and we're primates; it's something that happens with primates for sure. All you have to do is go to a zoo and look in the face of a gorilla or orangutan--to me it's almost overwhelming. We're not that far apart. Science is still science, but in primate research, it somehow seems that anthropomorphism is more acceptable. I guess it's because we're so much more closely related to these other primates than we are to birds, reptiles, and other wildlife.
But I'm not convinced that those penguins were mourning the attack on their young. On the other hand, I don't think I would say that there isn't some possibility that something like that could be in play. But I do generally believe that the thing that elicits that behavior is determined by instinct and chemistry.
CR: I remember that with the Lazuli bunting, every individual bird creates its own song out of bits and pieces...
DB: It combines something of its own with parts that it borrows.
CR: So that seems like a cultural thing, rather than just an instinctive song. It's something that they've learned and invented.
DB: Or you could take the colder approach and just say that natural selection is involved: that there's some advantage to doing it that way, and that advantage ultimately translates itself into producing more young who then exhibit those traits because they got them from their parents.
CR: How can you decide where to draw the line about where to apply a colder approach, and where to apply a more...
DB: Human approach?
CR: ...yes, a more human approach, a more emotional or spiritual approach? Can that line be drawn?
DB: I'm not so sure it can. It's kind of regrettable to say this, but I think that the more a person learns about wildlife, the less they believe that other animals' behavior is driven by the same things that humans are. Even if you don't want to believe that, when you just see what's going on out there...
Or maybe it's more than that. Maybe it's that, if you're taught the way that you should be, you're told endlessly about the importance of the scientific method--not only because you want to do your best to produce the truth, but because it's very important to science that non-scientists believe that scientists are doing everything they can to produce results that are as close to the truth as a human could hope to get. People are very skeptical of science--the general person on the street, you know? More and more these days, they distrust science, and actually I probably distrust some of the same things they do, the genetic business and all that.
I think that has something to do with where my head is today, because you know how--I don't know if it was this way for you, but I think it was for me--when I first started getting into research and all the education that goes with that, I didn't know what I was doing. I wanted to do the right thing, and so I listened to what the authorities around me told me. Then I worked to do what they were telling me I should do, whether it's the approach to use in research or whatever. And one of the things that you learn there: boy, those people will bleed all over your papers if you start getting anthropomorphic. It'll look like a bloodletting. So you learn that you can't be that way, your results can't be that way--it's science, you know.
But in my case I tend to be an emotional person. After years of research, I think it's easier for me now to conduct research and get emotionally involved but still produce a result that is science, because I know the difference. So, if I write it down, I know I've got to filter all of that stuff. But I can be that way when I'm out in the field and when I'm seeing these things. And it's just wondrous, the things that I've seen.
I had an experience once that I have yet to really try to explain, partly because I don't think I can, maybe, and also because I think it might somehow diminish the significance of it. But I got a leave of absence from the college I was working at after I graduated, and ended up having about fifty consecutive days on this study area. I actually lived there, in a sleeping bag, and fixed my meals out there. That whole period of time, I went into civilization maybe four or five times, for supplies. And when you spend fifty days in a thirty-acre area and you watch the same individual birds day after day, it's just amazing. I guess it's kind of like meditation: you disappear. You go for long periods of time before you realize, "Oh, yeah, I'm Dave, and I'm out here doing this study."
It was pretty amazing stuff, and the shocking part of this to me was that I made observations after a while that told me that some of my previous interpretations were incorrect. I saw that there are relationships in nature that may not reveal themselves without extended study. Almost no one in science can do that kind of extended study, especially these days. That certainly was an emotional experience for me, but that emotion did not get in the way of me seeing things. I came away doubting some results in scientific publications, including my own.
You read a study, and someone's had a limited budget or limited time, or both, and so they've gone out to a couple of sites for a few days separated by long intervals, and they think the sample size is large enough, and I'm not so sure it is. Maybe it's the twelfth day when you start to figure this out, and they've only been out there for three.
Anyway, that was a profound experience, and it's probably never going to happen to me again, but I really wish it could. (Laughter.) I have never been so connected in my life as the last part of that experience. Amazing...
CR: You were talking about the importance placed on the scientific method, which is supposedly very objective, even though we've found out that the observer always influences the experiment. The people training you were saying that you need to hold to this method because otherwise you won't be credible. But there's a huge amount of distrust of science, and particularly science that goes along with this kind of method, without including some sort of bigger story around it. Look at the number of people who believe that the Bible's story of creation is literally true, because it seems to have more oomph or meaning to it than something that seems to be so dry. And I think about native cultures that had a scientific understanding in many ways--an ecological understanding--but also had some myth associated with it that gave the story meaning. Is it time to introduce a little more emotion and story back into science?
DB: Oh, I believe that, absolutely. And there's a handful of people who can do that. I don't know if you've read any of Berndt Heinrich's writing--he does the science, the journals, peer-reviewed papers, all highly regarded, and he also writes books for the layperson that are read just as much by other scientists. They're wonderful. He's the kind of biologist I wish I could be. I don't know how he got where he is. He can do science, but he would have been just as comfortable, and fit in just as well, in Darwin's days, because he's a natural historian too, and you really see that when you read his books. There's a handful of people who can communicate like that. The group I'm talking about isn't really what you would call nature writers; that's another group. This is a group that truly are scientists, and nature writers. They can write for all of us, and do it in a pleasant, readable, sometimes emotional way, without selling out the science that they're supposed to believe in. I don't think it's very easy to do. Actually I don't think nature writing, or writing in general, is very easy to do either.
CR: But there's not only writing. I'm thinking of the last two walks I went to at Mt. Pisgah Arboretum, or your bird classes, where there's an obvious, great, infectious enthusiasm and love of the subject. Even though it is science, it obviously has meaning to the person--who just loves it...
DB: Can't live without it...
CR: ...and yet, somehow, it seems that that's not really the scientific method, to be so enthusiastic about your subject. There's some way in which you were taught not to...
DB: ...be emotional.
Well, I'll tell you, when I got involved in the California gnatcatcher... If you know what it was like when the spotted owl became a big deal here, it was just like that in southern California when the gnatcatcher controversy started. I was right there on the ground floor at that point, and I made a decision that really upset a number of friends of mine. I decided that I was not going to get into the political side of this, because I had already been told by two developers and a person at a government agency that if you want people to believe your research results, you can't be out there leading protests; people won't believe you if you do that; we won't believe you if you do that. Well, I think their motivation was pretty sh-tty, because they didn't want the guy who at the time--for that very brief period of time--was the world's expert on the California gnatcatcher--they didn't want him parading around in the streets.
But I happened to believe what they said, even though their motivation maybe wasn't so honorable. And I think, in the end, that I did the cause more good by not getting involved politically. People stopped coming to me to talk about the political side of things. If they wanted an answer about gnatcatchers, I could give that answer to them. That was a situation where staying out of the emotional side of things was beneficial, and just trying to be a scientist gave me more credibility as a scientist. It still remains to be seen whether the gnatcatcher is going to survive, but it definitely was a help to have that data that would be accepted not by everyone, but by some important people who would have rejected it otherwise.
The day that I decided that I was going to stop studying gnatcatchers was a very traumatic day, because it was also the day that I chose not to renew my federal permits. In order to study an endangered species, you have to have these permits, and when you let them go, getting them back is very difficult. I let them go, and that's when I started looking back on all of that research. The research that I have enjoyed the most was the research that I did at Starr Ranch in the '70s and '80s. There was no politics. There was no funding. It was just me doing what I loved to do. The gnatcatcher thing was not fun, because there was too much politics involved in it, and I do have an emotional response to all of this.
There's a line Andy Goldsworthy says, right at the beginning of Rivers and Tides: "The land"--and I would include the wildlife, and he would too--"I have to have it, I have to..." He's saying, I cannot live without this. And that's the way that I feel. That's why for the first twenty-some days probably, when we got this piece of land, and I would walk around on this land, I would weep, because I could not believe this, that I had the fortune of having this...that this pileated woodpecker was where I live, and all these other birds...Andy and you and I, we can't live without this, we have to have it, and that's pretty emotional.
CR: That might bring us back to family values. It seems as if the connection to the land is a value that traditionally was very tied in with family. But that's something that's not really discussed currently when people talk about family values.
DB: Not at all; I haven't heard anything like that. (Laughter.) Family values, family values...
Birds don't have good family values, I don't think.
CR: According to the standards of what's talked about as family values?
DB: Well...
CR: Wouldn't a family value be supporting and continuing a family in the best way that you can, in which case all of their reproductive strategies would be family values, and supporting their young until they're ready for independence, and then supporting them to become independent...
DB: You can say that; I don't think I would quite say that. Well, I might say it to you, Chris, but I certainly wouldn't stand up in front of a group of scientists and say it, even though I know that probably about forty percent of them feel exactly the same way. That's how they got into science: they loved being out in this and doing stuff.
It feels almost as if there are two separate beings here, with me. I've never really even thought about this, I don't think, or examined it. You can't separate yourself out, obviously, but in a sense, it feels like there's this one person who has done this science and has a few publications, and that's science, and then there's this other one that's talking about bawling his head off when he walks around on this piece of land. They are the same person, but the latter person certainly doesn't show up in that first, in those papers. I don't know, I haven't really examined this in any detail. But you won't hear me using the term family values applied to wildlife...at least I think. Maybe now I might, slip of the tongue... (Laughter.)
CR: We might need to reclaim that word.
DB: Well, I could get away with saying that in front of the classes I teach now, and nobody would argue about it, but you know I also feel a certain responsibility... We pride ourselves at Starr Ranch, whether with six-year-old kids that start with our junior biologists' program, or with the adults that I teach, in giving them science-based study. I think that's important; I think we have a responsibility to do that. Obviously, particularly with kids, you've got to have some fun out there. But we're teaching six-year-olds the scientific method, though they don't really understand that's what it is...I find that exciting, because we also firmly believe that every day those kids come out there, they need to leave having really enjoyed that. If the instructors feel that that's not happening, that's when they get concerned and want to examine that closely and make sure that it does happen. So I could say "family values" in front of these classes now, but that would probably be the fun side of it.
CR: Back on the subject of parenting, I read an article in Smithsonian about California condors that were being raised by humans using puppets. The first round of attempts to raise the young didn't go very well, because the humans were being too nice to the young. The puppets that were supposedly the parents were being very gentle with the young, and so the young, when they grew up, didn't have certain survival skills. They kept getting killed or dying in various situations. And then condor parents were observed being pretty tough, and beating up their young, to try to make them scared enough so that they could survive. From then on, that's what the humans did with the puppets, and the survival rate of the condors they were raising went up dramatically.
DB: Tough love, huh?
CR: Tough love, yeah. So I'm wondering about the range of parenting styles that you've observed or know about among birds.
DB: The birds that I have studied the most are songbirds. With the female gnatcatcher, the average clutch size is four. She lays three eggs and starts incubating after the third. They hatch thirteen to fourteen days later, and then the parents feed them for thirteen to fourteen days, and then they're out of the nest. If it's early in the season, they feed them out of the nest maybe seven to ten days and then that's it, and they go on and try it again.
I think it's more difficult to find emotion and all of these human traits and characters in that family, because that family is here and gone; the young are fledged and gone. At least by our standards, it's not much of a family; it's a very short-lived situation in birds. If you were studying chimps or gorillas, that's another thing altogether.
CR: With the larger migratory birds in Winged Migration, it seems to me that there was a longer-term family association.
DB: Yes, there is. Generally the larger the bird, the longer the association. And then look at penguins and ostriches. They have crèches where the young are herded together in one great big bunch and are cared for by an alternating group of adults. That's kind of interesting when you look at it through human eyes.
CR: Communal parenting...
DB: And those are young that take a long time to mature. Most songbirds are gone in a flash compared to that.
CR: Among humans, some ways of thinking about "family values" exclude certain kinds of behavior. One area this applies to is sexual orientation. Are there cases of homosexuality among birds?
DB: The sexual orientation thing is interesting. There are these exceptional things that happen once in a while. We had it happen with gnatcatchers once, where two females laid in the same nest and shared incubation. There were no males anywhere. There obviously had been males; it was later determined that at least some of the eggs were fertile. But at some point before hatching, the females stopped the nesting process and abandoned the nest. But that was real interesting. It always gets people's attention when you talk about something like that.
CR: You never see two male ducks, or two female ducks, swimming around together?
DB: No, no. And I'm trying to think of any other situations with birds at least. These aren't male-male or female-female pairs, but occasionally you see what's called reverse mounting, or reverse copulation, where maybe initially it's the male on the female, which is what you expect, and then the male gets off and they're sitting on the perch, and the female mounts the male. That's probably not rare, but I don't know what that means, what that's all about. I guess I would just say, if I were trying to interpret that, that there is an excitement that goes along with copulation even in birds. They're both in an excited state, and this might be an outgrowth of that. It's obvious that it's not going to work that way, if they're talking about producing eggs.
CR: And what about the use of consciousness-altering substances? Now I know that birds will get drunk on certain fermented berries...
DB: I think that might be exaggerated a little bit, but yeah, it does happen.
CR: It's not common? Birds are not usually trying to alter their consciousness?
DB: I don't think it's that common. I think I've seen it once here. It was with blackberries, and maybe cascara. There were robins and varied thrushes and hermit thrushes, and they stayed in this one area for a couple of days. There was a lot of activity and a lot of aggression. It's hard to draw the line between how much of that was because they were getting stoned, and how much of it was because there were so many of them at this rich source of food, and there was a lot of defense of that area going on. If the question is, "Do you think that birds would purposely feed on this to get some pleasure or some other kind of experience?"--I don't think so. Saying this in human words, I don't think they have that kind of time, or luxury for that. In the world they live in, given that there are so many things around that want to eat them...I'm just thinking about all those times when I was stoned, if there had been a lot of predators around, I wouldn't be here today, because the last thing on my mind was, "Ooh, I've gotta be alert and watch for something that's going to try to eat me."
CR: That behavior doesn't have a high survival value.
DB: Natural selection would probably take care of that situation.
To learn about Dave's upcoming classes, contact him at [email protected].
(c)2005 Talking Leaves
Spring 2005
Volume 15, Number 1
Family Values
An Interview with David Orr by Chris Roth
For more than a decade, I have had the privilege of knowing David Orr, Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and author of the books Ecological Literacy, Earth in Mind, The Nature of Design, and The Last Refuge. The visionary force behind Oberlin's state-of-the-art ecologically-designed Environmental Studies Center (see "A Building Like a Tree,"TL 11.1), David is also a widely traveled speaker at conferences, and an influential contributor to such journals as Orion and Conservation Biology. He has been a leader in the reinvention of environmental education, advocating the incorporation of ecological consciousness into all areas of the curriculum and into all aspects of education itself, including the physical settings in which students learn. Increasingly in recent years, his interests have turned toward politics; The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror (reviewed in TL 14.3) is a treatise on the inseparability of ecology and politics, and a call to action to reclaim both from the hands of those with little apparent respect for either. Every winter, on my visit to my parents' home just a few blocks away from David and Elaine Orr's in Oberlin, our families get together for a meal and visit. This past winter, I also arranged a separate interview, which took place in David's family room late on the afternoon of January 4, 2005.
Per David's choice, we talked mostly about politics. I started by asking him to reflect on the role of the political and religious right in present-day American politics, and how the rest of us might appropriately respond.
DO: Let me run the clock back to 1980, when the Carter administration left office. It had published a document called the Global 2000 Report, which got a lot of attention but which also coincided with a right wing counterattack led by Julian Simon. Had the United States acted on that report, and other documents and studies available at the time, we would not have been nearly as vulnerable to terrorism and disruption from malfeasance or acts of God as we were on 9/11.
I think we've lost sight of this point--that the environmentalists all along have been right. Our batting average on the big issues of the time is extremely good. If we had followed those recommendations, the United States would be much more secure today. Our recent behavior in the world would have been much more just and much less erratic, had it not been driven by the need to guard our lines of supply in the Middle East.
What has happened over the last several decades in this country has been something of a coup d'etat. In the early 1970s, Louis Powell, who was a Richmond attorney appointed as Supreme Court Justice by Richard Nixon, wrote a memo which argued that corporations had to counter left-wing views about the war and society and civil rights and consumerism and other movements of the '60s and '70s. This memo became the main strategy document of the right-wing counterattack. The estimates are that right wing foundations put together about $3 billion to create a network of organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute and Rush Limbaugh's radio network of 600 stations. It took them thirty years to finally pull it off, and they did it successively, but at the end of thirty years we can look back and say that they've been hugely successful in their counterattack, that they've taken over the country.
You asked about the religious right. The religious right is a bit of a mystery to me because I have a hard time understanding what they believe relative to what I believe. The importance that the right wing churches have given to the Book of Revelation as compared to, say, the Sermon on the Mount, is instructive. The Book of Revelation is all full of verses about rapture and violence. Tim LeHay made a lot of money and gained a lot of notoriety for his twelve-volume series of books on the Rapture. There's actually a website, rapture.org, where you can go to and see how close we are to the event itself.
One of the curious things here is that the right-wing Christians and conservation biologists are in agreement that things are bad. Where conservation biologists look at climate data and believe that to be a sign of the unraveling of things, and therefore bad, Christian fundamentalists look at it and say, "Yeah, well that's cool, Jesus is about to come back." It's possible to read the data of dismemberment and decline and see radically different things in it.
But their power in society is largely derivative of the corporate takeover, and I think, frankly, that right-wing Christians are being shamelessly used. The right-wing corporate world that Dick Cheney represents will tell them, "Yeah, you want us to ban abortion, sure, we'll do that; and you want us to ban flag-burning, yeah, we'll do that; you want prayer in schools, sure, we can do that; whatever you want, but just vote for us." And then of course what they get are tax cuts for the wealthy, endless wars in the Middle East, and the corporate takeover of the entire planet. So I think that they're being used and not able to see that their confederates are some of the sleaziest political forces ever in American history.
I said in an article that will be in the paperback edition of The Last Refuge that this is James Madison's nightmare: it's the takeover of power by a single faction, which Madison warned against in his Federalist Paper #10. It's worse than he thought, because now that same faction controls the press, the intelligence agencies, and a good bit more. And it is a complete and total takeover. Whether this society can be brought back to some kind of Constitutional balance or not remains to be seen. It is clear that Madison's fears have finally, after 215 years, come to pass.
CR: How did the right wing manage to co-opt the ideas of populism and conservatism, and claim the moral high ground, while in reality their policies are totally the opposite of these things?
DO: Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter with Kansas? is an attempt to answer that. In that book he argues that if the Democratic Party or any other party does not represent the interests of poor people and working people, then all you have are kind of surrogate Republicans. Given the choice of "lite" Republicans or full-strength Republicans, people are going to vote for true Republicans. They'll find these wedge issues, and they'll vote single issues, unless Democrats give them real bread-and-butter issues.
I'm not as convinced about that view. It's a wonderful book and it's got a compelling viewpoint in some ways, but I think there's something else at work. In the late '80s there was a change in the rules of the Federal Communications Commission which permitted television or radio stations to hold a license to the public airwaves without having to meet tests for "fair and balanced" presentation of issues, to coin a phrase. And that ruling, by Ronald Reagan's FCC, was upheld in a two-to-one appellate court case in which the two votes for it were Anton Scalia and Robert Bork, right-wing judges of some note. Add to that the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed media conglomerates to own multiple radio and television stations and newspapers in the same media market, and you begin to see the outlines of a takeover of US media that is really quite chilling.
You look at the dials now, there is no liberal media left. The New York Times certainly can't describe itself as a liberal document. You've got some fringe publications, The Nation magazine, American Prospect, The Progressive, and a few others, but they have nowhere near the power that the right wing now exercises with Rush Limbaugh, who talks every day to twenty million Americans, and Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly, and MSNBC, and Scarborough and all these right-wingers. No one ever fact-checks them, they're free to say whatever they want, and they confuse the public because their opinions become "news."
So in addition to Tom Franks' argument--that the Democratic Party has become a lukewarm party relative to the interests of most Americans, which I think it has--there's also the problem that people just don't know much. After the election, the Bush voters apparently believed in large numbers, seventy-some percent, that Saddam Hussein was involved with Osama Bin-Laden in the planning of 9/11. Even though the president had admitted that there was no connection, to keep the fig leaf in place covering US policy in Iraq, right-wing media had continued in all kinds of ways to propagate the idea that there was a connection. If you studied, if you read much at all, you knew that there was no connection, and that it simply was implausible.
But Americans have become badly misinformed, and the reasons have to do with the takeover of US media by corporate interests. When Ben Bagdikian wrote his book Media Monopoly back in 1980, there were still fifty or fifty-one major media outlets. We're now down to six. If the internet steps in as a major countervailing information source, then maybe it will be ok, but eighty percent of Americans say they get their news from television, and television is badly corrupted, either cowed or bought. If you listen to Fox News, it's nothing more than a mouthpiece for the extreme right wing of the Republican Party. So I'm inclined to think, yeah, the Democrats have failed the spine test, by not having one, and the media takeover means that most Americans then are to one degree or another badly informed or misinformed.
CR: How did the Democrats come so close to winning?
DO: I think there are a lot of people out there like you and me, and I'm not entirely convinced that the Democrats lost. I think the Bush administration has played hardball. They don't rely on democracy; these people are not into democracy. I think if we could know the whole story, we'd find that the vote was manipulated. Whether it was enough to turn the election... In Ohio, the vote difference between Bush and Kerry was 118,000 votes. Was there 118,000 votes worth of chicanery? Probably. In Florida I think the same thing. Everywhere there were aberrations, huge discrepancies in the results, they always fell to the Republican side, and the odds of that happening... somebody at the University of Pennsylvania put that at one in 250 million. Is there chicanery here? Yeah, I think there was. Could you say that it was a national conspiracy? Well, it could be party zealots in a particular precinct, it could have come out of Ken Blackwell's office here in Ohio, the Secretary of State, I don't know. All I know is it's not likely to get investigated because the Republicans control everything there is to control.
This is Madison's nightmare, and so if there's malfeasance... In Florida in 2000 Tom DeLay's staff people and Trent Lott's staff people acted as thugs to stop the recounting of ballots in Miami-Dade County. The press didn't find that interesting at all. I think the level of intimidation ought to be of concern to everybody concerned about democracy, because we've become something that we weren't. It's happened progressively, but the election or the "selection" of 2000 was a turning point in this country.
And it takes you to 9/11, and then there are lots of questions about 9/11. It's time for people to begin to ask hard questions, and to press elected officials to answer those questions. But you asked how did we come so close? Assuming it was close and not a victory that was perverted... Apparently 57, 58 million Americans understand what has been going on, and don't much like it, and least a large fraction of the 59 million that reportedly voted for Bush and Cheney voted out of misinformation. They didn't know what they were getting, and this administration has been absolutely expert in confusing the public, with the Clear Skies Initiative, and Healthy Forests, and all these wonderful-sounding phrases concealing policies exactly the opposite.
CR: Do you think that those people are likely to start questioning, the more they find out?
DO: I think it's a test right now: how many body bags have to come back from Iraq, how much turmoil has to happen, how bad does the US economy have to get, how low does the dollar have to fall? And I think the bad news for the country at this point is that the election of Bush and Cheney, legitimate or otherwise, has set us on a course for disaster. The question is how that's going to be played out. I don't think there's a thing that can be done to stop it now. I think we're at the point that within a year or two we'll see massive civil disobedience, we'll see the deployment of secret police and democratic intimidation the likes of which we've never seen before. They do control the power; this is Madison's nightmare. And it's our unfortunate fate to live through it. It's also an opportunity for real citizens and patriots...
This will be the second American revolution, to see if it's possible to take America back from corporations, the very agents that Jefferson, and Lincoln, and every Democrat until recent times feared, and for reasons that they only dimly understood. But this is the second American Revolution. Instead of King George we now have a different King George and he is the representative of corporate America.
CR: Where would you suggest people put their energies: into reinvigorating the Democratic Party, or starting an entirely new approach?
DO: I don't know. If you look at the things that were successful...MoveOn.org in a matter of a couple of years has become hugely successful, and it mobilized millions of people and millions of dollars. That's one place. ACT turned out to be pretty potent also, and there are websites--Common Dreams.org, and Truthout.org, and lots of others--that are helping to balance the lies and distortions of a right-wing and mendacious media.
But I don't have any suggestions as to where people ought to put their energies. If people are inclined to work within the Democratic Party, fine; let's take the Democratic Party back. I think the theory that the Democratic Party ought to move even further to the right is a form of insanity at this point. You might as well join the Republican Party and throw in the towel. But there are a lot of heroes out there. Paul Krugman has become one of my heroes. He's one of the few people who from the very beginning of the Bush administration was telling the truth about what it was doing, and there are people like Molly Ivins, and there'll be lots more.
I think we're going to see a massive unraveling of the Republican administration. It is fragile beyond belief. They're going to have their day and their celebration, they're going to spend their forty million dollars to party and whoop it up, but they're going to run into unsolvable problems of their own making. Climate change isn't going to go away for them, and the trouble is it's going to be a catastrophe for everybody. But as people begin to realize it, then I think it's possible to change it. The Iraqi war...and the idea that the United States can dominate the world is a crock of BS that is almost inconceivably stupid. You'd have to go back a long way to find smart people doing dumber things. The US economy is very fragile; it depends now on the lifeline of support being thrown up by people willing to buy US paper, and as US debt grows and the dollar declines, that is going to diminish. I think that the Republicans are going to crash it though, and the question is what's left to pick up. You can't run the world on lies, distortions, violence, control, domination...that's completely nonsense. That might have worked for a time in the previous century or the century before, but not the twenty-first century.
CR: Here's a question I'd written down, and this seems as good a time as any to ask it: Are we simply a civilization and possibly a species in decline, who have overexploited our resources and sealed our own doom? Are the apocalyptic directions of world governments simply a manifestation of our species' own self-destructive nature?
DO: (Laughter.) Yes. (More laughter.) You can't run the film fast-forward on the present story line and come out with a happy ending, and yet on the other hand let me be an optimist for a moment. The environmental movement is now a global movement. In the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunamis there is this outpouring of support and sympathy and money and so forth. We find out--again nature reminds us--that we're a pretty fragile little enterprise. And if a tsunami had hit, let's say, New York City or Washington, the East Coast of the United States, the devastation would have been even greater. We're all vulnerable.
Before the Iraqi war started, 650 million people reportedly protested in various cities around the world. You couldn't imagine that thirty or forty years ago. Something like an ecological enlightenment is happening, and the evidence is all around, it's in thousands of organizations--yours, and hundreds of others on the West Coast and all over the world totaling millions of people involved. But whatever name you put on them--cultural creatives, progressives, whatever--there are a lot of people who know the score.
I also have to believe that the support for the Republican Right and the corporate world is diminishing pretty rapidly. You can't run the world like that. And even in the corporate world, it's dawning on lots of people that we are at the end of the fossil fuel era and we have to make a pretty rapid transition to something else: renewable energies in various forms. That's coming clearer to lots of people.
So if the human experiment is about to go belly-up, and you and I really believed that, we wouldn't be sitting here talking, we'd be down at the Feve [an Oberlin coffeehouse/bar] on our fifth bottle of wine by now. In our bones, I don't think we believe that it's the end time. I'm not ready to give up.
Is it technically necessary that we can't provide energy, food, shelter, employment, and so forth, for people? No. We know too much; the technologies are there to do it. It's the political will that's lacking. But we on the progressive side, at least in this country, have been nowhere near as ruthless, well-organized, or well-funded as a much smaller right-wing group that has taken the big megaphone. They control the media, they now control this country in virtually all respects, and they are a ruthless bunch. I think we would be fools to underestimate them. They've demonstrated what they'll do. But time will not be kind to them. They can't pull this off, because they're swimming upstream, or they're working against the laws of historical gravity, or whatever metaphor you want to use, but they can't pull it off. They can make a mess for a while, maybe for a long time, but they can't win in the end.
CR: So is there a place for people on this side to be equally ruthless?
DO: I don't like the word ruthless as a strategy. I think single-minded and dedicated is a better one.
But it is a problem that if you take Christianity seriously, and the whole idea of "turn the other cheek," and "blessed are the peacemakers," and so forth, it does cripple you. And of course one of the paradoxes of the Christian Right--there's James Dobson and all these people out there on the Christian Right--is that they are pretty darn ruthless, and they use the Scripture very selectively. I mean, they're going to be damn lucky if Jesus doesn't come back, because it would be a rude awakening for them. This isn't what he had in mind. You don't have to be too adept with the Scripture or well-read to realize that this is anything but Christianity playing itself out.
But no, I don't think we need to be "ruthless." I think that we have to be more truthful, more dedicated, smarter, better strategists, have a bigger picture, a better story, and work as hard or harder. And I don't think that adds up to the word ruthless, which implies a kind of willingness to run over whatever gets in your way, including the truth.
Bill Moyers has said this over and over again: one of the problems right now with the right wing is that they will just lie, lie, lie, lie...it doesn't make any difference; they will say whatever. And this is Karl Rove's strategy, and as long as people are too ill-informed to understand they're being lied to, it works. But it's like a balloon of hot air: all it takes is one pinprick, and it all comes undone.
But getting back to your point about the election, I think people were starting to sense that they were being lied to. The body bags come back, and there were no weapons of mass destruction, and we were told that the Iraqis were going to greet us as heroes out there, and nothing that the administration predicted has come about, and so now it's a race between circumstances and people waking up.
CR: In the presidential debates, Kerry made the point a few times that Bush was presenting things in black and white, focusing on being "decisive" and operating by the principle that "you've just got to stick to one position, and then people will trust that." Kerry was saying, on the other hand, that it's not always clear-cut, and sometimes people make mistakes, and admit it, and change their approach. But it seemed as if that didn't appeal to quite enough people to make a difference. It seems that people want something more black and white.
DO: I have a lot of respect for John Kerry. He's a very good man. He would have made a good president, but oftentimes in the history of Presidents, people who were really good presidents were bad communicators. Thomas Jefferson was a disaster as a speaker. Abraham Lincoln never would have lasted on television. Roosevelt wouldn't have made it on television--he was a cripple. Some of our greatest presidents had all kinds of liabilities that would disqualify them now. But with Kerry, I wish that Kerry hadn't voted for the Iraq war. And then when asked, "Would you do it again?," the right response was to say, "No, I voted for it once, based on a lie. I trusted the president, and the president didn't tell us the truth. I wouldn't do it again." You go from being called a flip-flopper to saying "he's a liar." Simple thing. But the media picked that up. On the Swift Boat guys, these nutcases that went after Kerry's war record, Kerry's right response was to get his crew behind him, go right before the camera within twenty-four hours of the first ad, look the camera right smack in the eye, and say, "Look, you can believe whatever you want to believe about what I did in Vietnam, but the record shows I was in the line of fire and I got hit. Where was George?" Get "Where was George?" out immediately. It's not rocket science. On so many of these things, Kerry's right response was a very direct and angry response. Make it simple, keep it straight, look right straight into the camera, and be done with it. And he didn't do that.
In the Vice presidential debate, the last question Gwen Iffel asked was "Why do you suppose the country's so divided, and so angry about things?" Dick Cheney said, "Well, I don't know why it is." John Edwards missed an opportunity; he should have turned to the Vice President and said, "You don't understand? Well, I'll tell you why the country's so divided. You govern only half of the country. You govern for your base, and more specifically, for the wealthy people that pay your bills." And then give specifics: environment, war, lies, and so forth and so on. "I'll tell you, Mr. Vice President, let me help you with this, let me coach you a little bit." And they didn't do it. They had the facts, the logic, and the data all on their side. They had a bona-fide war hero. They allowed the right wing to do what they had done in Georgia with Max Cleland, a triple amputee. But this other side is utterly ruthless and absolutely without shame. If it requires bringing down a legitimate war hero, they'll do it. If you show courage on a battlefield, well that's cool, but if you show moral courage after the battlefield, no, that's bad, you can't question anything.
And Kerry wasn't clear enough about it. He kept talking about, "I'm going to fight for you in the middle class." Well, that's cool, but it didn't get anybody's blood going. There were some very direct responses I think he should have made and put the burden back on George. I mean the real question was not whether Kerry was a hero or not, it was "Where the hell was George? Why won't he tell us?" They do not tell us. It's all this fabric of Bush lies and distortions and the result is that we have a fourth-rate, but very single-minded, ideologically-driven person as president, who has neither the intellectual grasp or the personal wherewithal...
Also, the thing about the housewives that voted for Bush because they thought that their kids would be much more secure with him in the White House...the right response there was to say, "Look, who was on duty on August 6 when the clearest warning that's likely ever to be given to a president was given in a memo, and where was George? He was on his thirty-seventh day of vacation, down chainsawing his brush in Crawford, Texas. Well, hell, we can hire somebody to go chainsaw his brush, we need somebody on duty in Washington that happens to read those memos and those warnings and can act on them." But they didn't do that. This administration--assuming the best about them--were a bunch of Keystone Cops--and then they came out with their bull-in-the-china-shop foreign policy, and got the whole world upset with the United States, and for good reason. It will take us years, decades, to restore, if we ever can, what they screwed up.
Say it, in as many words, just say it--and they didn't do it. But you knew they wanted to. They didn't believe that the American people wanted straight talk. But if you look at the campaigns that worked around the country, Democratic populists running in Republican areas who won, every one of them was a straight talker. What we need is a kind of Harry Truman strategy. You know, "Who the hell are you clowns running this country? And look what you've done, you screwed up, you got a warning on August 6, you had warnings from the Germans, French, Russians, the Israelis, the British, you didn't act on them. Three thousand Americans died as a result. You want to claim the right to run the country on the grounds of competence? You've got to be kidding." And you know John Kerry knew that.
CR: I read or heard somewhere that there is a reason that very few Senators have actually succeeded in being elected president. The nature of being in the Senate for that many years means that you're constantly compromising and constantly not speaking the truth, just as a survival mechanism.
DO: Well, I think it's called politics. And Republicans have spent forty years denigrating politics and government. And these clowns come out here from governors' offices--clowns is too strong a word--but these folks come out of the background of being governors, where they're more like CEOs. George Bush has this command style--he's used to giving orders, and people see that. And the trouble is, a Senator voting on legislation is going to compromise, is going to vote for things and against things. You get a bill that has a rider that you don't like, so you vote against a bill you otherwise would have voted for, and then eventually in a political campaign, somebody says, "Well, look, you voted against such-and-such," and so it's hard to then go back and explain everything about your record. The minute you try to do that, you're dead meat; you can't do it. Even somebody who's been governor for a long time...Bush's record as a governor for six years was pathetic. Of all modern governors, he executed more people than anybody, and often on grounds that we now know should have been questioned.
But again, without an active press, you don't know these things. The internet is kind of a wild card in this, as are Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, because they talk to millions of people every day and they go out and they can lie through their teeth as they do routinely, and there's no fact-check. Nobody comes along behind Rush Limbaugh and says, "Well, OK, no, look, let's check what he said: here, well that's wrong, and this is wrong, and this is wrong, and this is completely off the planet"--nobody does that.
CR: There were a couple contenders in the Democratic primaries--Dean was the most well-known, Kucinich--who were more straight-talkers, and who didn't win the primaries. In retrospect I'm wondering if a lot of Democrats are thinking, we should have gone with someone who was more that way...
DO: Well, I don't know. I liked all the Democratic candidates; I was proud of the Democratic Party. You listen to those debates, and they were good debates, they were good people, they were asking good questions. And I don't know what you do to win. I don't think Dean would have done any better than John Kerry. He could have done worse.
The Republican Party isn't the party that it was under, say, Dwight Eisenhower, or even the party that it was under Ronald Reagan. It has cannibalized its moderates. So now it's a group of extreme right-wingers who are extremely disciplined. The campaign is run by Karl Rove, who is extremely ruthless. When Rove says he'll do whatever it takes, take him at his word, he will do whatever it takes, including dirty tricks, voter fraud, and whatever. We know that collectively, they will use their friends in the Supreme Court to get things done. And I think the country needs to face the fact that we've turned our governance and the conduct of our public business over to a group of fanatics. They have an agenda, and it isn't just abortion stuff. I mean, all that I think is being used.
These are people determined to take over, to loot the country as much as they can. And tax cuts for the wealthy, corporate tax breaks, Halliburton's no-bid contracts, war in the Middle East where it just so happens the oil is...and we're asked to believe that this is a fight for freedom? Give me a break. How dumb can we be? We've been dumbed down. Television is part of this, and the takeover of the media is part of it. Anybody who talks about issues seriously gets hammered--anybody who admits, "My God, the world is complex, well, fancy that..." I wish George had known that before he bumbled himself into Iraq. At least thirteen- or fourteen-hundred young Americans that have come back in what the Pentagon now calls transfer tubes would have had adequate reason to wish that George had known more than he knew--George and his neocon advisers who obviously blew it. They didn't know what they were getting into, and whether Dean could have surmounted all that, I don't know. I'm giving you really incoherent answers; I've gone back into my little zone of anger about the election. (Laughter.)
I have never been as angry about anything as I find I'm angry about this...I mean, it's something that I find everybody I talk to is angry about. And anger morphs over into depression and I don't know what that's going to morph into.
But the starting point is to get the name of the disease right, and this is a coup d'etat. We don't know where it's going to end. We don't know what they're going to do this time around. They've now had this quote "mandate" that they believe that they've got. But George Bush governed the first time around like he had a ten million vote mandate. It didn't make a bit of difference that he had in fact lost an election. He governed like he had been anointed by God himself, or herself, as king...
CR: Well, that's what he believed.
DO: And that is genuinely scary...that we now have the union of political power and religious zealotry. There is no good example historically where those things have been joined. It doesn't work out well. It leads to a kind of fanaticism, a stupid kind of fanaticism...
And on that note, David and I realized that my mother was waiting for us to come to dinner. Our mealtime conversation was considerably lighter and genuinely optimistic in tone, focusing on the youngest members of our respective families...who are both perhaps our best reasons to care about the future, and also our best hopes for that future. In the days which followed, David wrote an essay, "The Imminent Demise of the Republican Party," which became the most-forwarded article on the Common Dreams website for three successive weeks. More recently, he wrote a follow-up Part II on the same topic. Obviously, David's anger has morphed into something productive, resonating with many of us who have not given up hope for a better future. Find those essays at www.commondreams.org.
(c)2005 Talking Leaves
Spring 2005
Volume 15, Number 1
Family Values
This past spring, I discovered what it's like to parent my own parents. I was living overseas for a year and after much persuasion, my parents agreed to meet me in France for a week. It was the first family vacation in years and I was nervous. Suddenly it was my responsibility to read subway signs, order meals, and make sure all four Harmons were on a train together with validated tickets. When my dad had an emergency dental situation, I took him to a dentist, explained the situation to the receptionist, sat with him during the procedure to translate, and even managed to have it billed through my French medical insurance. Was this how my parents felt when I was growing up? The constant pressure to make sure everyone was taken care of was wearing. But my understanding of love was greater. I wanted them to have the best trip possible, and I was willing to do whatever was in my power to see that happen. The choices my parents made for me while growing up came from that same place of unconditional love.
Let's assume that my blood family had been meeting my need for unconditional love in my daily life. Given my choice to live geographically far from them, daily involvement is no longer an option. If my blood family members aren't part of my daily life, who are the people that are with me every day?
I want to talk about Amanda. Amanda and I met during college through an ex-boyfriend of mine (to whom I am eternally grateful). Our various paths brought us together to be housemates and eventually roommates our senior year. As months passed, we began to share more and more parts of our lives with each other. We shopped for groceries together and shared chores. Sometimes we even brushed our teeth together. We began to act as family.
I'd like to express my frustration with the English language. I see a lack of sufficient words to describe my experiences of family. Classic fairy tales, modern magazines, and the Bible all talk about families with words like "marriage" and "divorce," "separation," or "breakup" to identify what's happening within a family. The connotation of these words applies to male/female relationships. Defining who Amanda is to me has become increasingly complicated. I could call Amanda my "best friend" but those words feel inadequate. I had a best friend in first grade, one in eighth grade, and another in high school. Best friends are seasonal but Amanda is not. I could call her my "sister" but risk being misinterpreted. We didn't grow up together and we both have our own unique parents and brothers. Branching away from common language use, I could call her my "heterosexual life partner." It sounds more accurate but politically correct or technical. "Soul mate"? Perhaps "girlfriend"? For now, I've settled on "clan sister." This term suggest a familial bond but not necessarily an immediate blood family connection.
Our culture allows for one choice outside of the family one is born into, and that choice is a spouse. Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella were ill fated in their families of birth but thankfully, they each got to choose their Prince Charming and live happily ever after. Frankly, I'm not buying it anymore. I don't see that choosing one person will meet all my needs for family for the rest of my life. I want to see more options than one. I want to choose to have Amanda as part of my family, as my clan sister.
When a connection with another person grows so strong that no action can break it, family is born. My connection with my family began before I was born. My parents, ready or not, were there to provide for my needs regardless of my actions. I cried so they held me, fed me, or tended to my dirty diapers. They had a choice and they chose for their love to be unconditional.
When I accept others for who they are and don't hold ideas of how I want them to be or act, that is unconditional love. Support and encouragement of a unique path is another part of this love. As my family chose to unconditionally love me, I too have this choice about others. I choose to unconditionally love the family that I was born into and the family I have chosen.
Sarah Harmon is an intern at Lost Valley. She has coordinated the Lost Valley kitchen together with Amanda since the fall of 2004.
©2005 Talking Leaves
Spring 2005
Volume 15, Number 1
Family Values
Pretty soon, I realize what it is: another issue of Talking Leaves. There are worse monsters to be shadowed by. I'm not sure how I ended up in charge of this one--I think it was part of a group adoption plan, and some of the co-parents were soon adopted by other monsters. Luckily a number of other people do take an interest in it, so I am not entirely alone. But ultimately, this monster slows to a standstill if I am not leading it forward--and for monsters, a prolonged standstill is not an option. Sometimes it really, really needs to pee. If I don't take it out, it will pee all over my floor.
Taking care of a series of monsters also has its rewards. I meet other monster-lovers, who see their value and agree to help groom them or take them to the movies or the vet. I hear that these monsters have had the most unexpected effects on some people who have encountered them. When immersed in the day-to-day tasks of monster-care, I forget that monsters can make a positive difference in the world. Ultimately, every bit of attention lavished on a monster can pay itself back many times. Monsters can change the world.
I am hoping that this monster and its cousins are becoming more independent and self-sufficient, and that I can release some of my responsibilities. Each monster like this one needs uncles, aunts, surrogate parents, mentors, guides. Someone needs to enroll it in business school, sell its services to the monster-deficient, or at least teach it how to promote itself. Someone needs to help it rent out the unused rooms in its lair.
It takes a village to raise a monster. Right now, the village raising this monster is a little overextended, and many of the co-parenting roles could stand to be fleshed out some. If you would like to be part of that village (which need not entail living at Lost Valley--some of our most dedicated copy-editors and proofreaders, for example, live off-site), please contact me. Especially in the "business" arena--and in others as well--an eager monster may be waiting to hear from you.
I've been trying to put this particular monster to bed in the midst of many other activities. A warm, dry winter and early spring have set the garden season into high gear well before what used to be considered normal. Our ever-evolving community and nonprofit have continued to stimulate (if not absolutely require) an elevated level of involvement from all of us. At any moment, it seems as if there are five or ten important activities I could be engaged in. When the horses are pulling logs out of the woods as part of our sustainable forestry project, when the garden weeds are growing and the vegetables are asking to be harvested, when the sun is shining and new songbirds arrive every day, when intriguing workshops are being planned or held here, when my email box is overflowing, and when the "Lost Valley Crickets" are getting ready to jam--it is very difficult to decide that putting together a magazine is the most important thing for me to do. But I know what happens when a monster pees on my floor. And I believe in this monster. For now, I need to help it get out into the world.
Establishing the article order for this issue presented particular challenges. I am indebted to Hannah McCargar and other readers for helping to create some semblance of organization to what follows.
Every article relates in some way to the theme of "Family Values," but since our theme is so slippery, it's no surprise that the path from one piece to another is slippery as well. Each contribution does directly relate to what precedes and follows it; however, discerning the nature of these relationships may be accomplished more effectively through non-logical than through logical analysis.
We start by looking at family values among non-human creatures, and how these might relate to our own family values. We get into the nitty-gritty of several individuals' experience of family, including both traditional and nontraditional approaches. We examine how family values play out in the larger social and political spheres, and witness different, equally passionate responses to the times we live in. We see how different families approach the integration of childrearing with the rest of life. And we hear about what's valued by various musicians within the extended Talking Leaves/Lost Valley family.
Amidst all the hustle, bustle, and demands of monster-care, I never did get around to writing an article on family values myself. There was too much I wanted to write on the subject. And after a certain number of words juggled around on this screen, everything started to blend together. I found it far more important to send birthday presents to my brother, nephew, and mother, attend community meetings, stay in touch with friends, contact potential garden interns, get this year's crops started, welcome the return of spring birds, and watch new buds become leaves and flowers than to write a treatise on family values. Hopefully this does not mean that I have none.
This monster becomes much easier to deal with when it is well-fed by many people. Please send your written, artistic, and monetary contributions. Thank you!
©2005 Talking Leaves
Spring 2005
Volume 15, Number 1
Family Values
And nature has provided us with a blueprint and the stories to find ourselves back home. All you need is a pair of wings and an unbroken connection to your ancestral knowledge. The intrepid wheatear is a fine example. This sparrow-sized bird, whose family heirloom consists of more than a genetically imprinted map of where home is, possesses homing instincts complete with a readiness equal to that of a great athlete and explorer combined. As the eastern Canadian population of wheatears heads off on their migration, they follow their internal map towards open water for a trans-Atlantic crossing to England and then on to home to Northern Africa.
Equally awesome is the blackpoll warbler. I first heard about this voyager from a talk given by the famous birder Ken Kaufman, who began following his own internal map as a teenager (his idea of adventure was to see more species of birds than anyone else, and so he has). According to Kaufman, the blackpoll warbler stuffs itself full with berries and insects until it suddenly decides that now is the time. Taking off from the coniferous forests of New England, the warbler heads out to the Atlantic and turns south, flying non-stop to Venezuela, over 2,500 miles away. This bird, which weighs about half an ounce, uses all of its energy reserves, flying for three days and two nights (on average) until it reaches its destination. This puts the stress of holiday travel in its place.
Especially for the juvenile birds that have never made this trip before, but are more than willing to give in to the instinct to fly thousands of miles to a place they have never been beforeŠblessed are those who have not seen, but believe.
It is not just the physiological prowess that makes this journey home so noteworthy; it is the fidelity to the ancestral routes, the homing instinct. It is the continuum of homing to ancestral feeding grounds, not just to the place where one was born or raised, but to the place where one belongs.
Scientists know so much about the homing instinct of animals: Bees orient to polarized light. Salamanders steer by lines of geomagnetic force. Garter snakes find their winter den by smelling out their bloodline, kin that they may not have ever met. Pigeons use the position of the sun. Songbirds follow stars. They are all drawn to a place proven to be safe by the hard, undeniable fact of their own existence. However, in this exploration of homing instincts, we have forgotten to look at our own. What will draw our own children home?
Do we have an internal map, which draws us unerringly to the place of our ancestors, to home? In his book The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram describes the map or songline of the Aborigines of Australia, whose songline begins when the mother feels the first movement of the unborn in her womb. She knows that the spirit child of that specific place has worked its way into her womb. In this manner, every Aboriginal person at birth inherits a particular stretch of song that is his title to a stretch of land, which leads to his conception site from which his life comes. It is that place on earth where he most belongs, and his essence, his deepest self, is indistinguishable from that terrain. Even more inspiring is that the Aborigines' gods have left tracks and names across the landscape which aid the person to create his songline.
Outside of adopting the methods of the Aborigines and asking our mothers where they felt us kick first (which might lead us to the uninspiring place of a grocery store, a movie theater, or heaven help us, a fast food restaurant), how do we tap into the genetic and/or spiritual storyline written by our ancestors, our life essence, our god, that will lead us home?
Perhaps our children's homing instinct is driven by traditions: Thanksgiving dinner, family camping trips, a religious affiliation. Maybe it is driven by sensory input: the smell of warm bread in the oven, clean bed sheets, the wetness of the family dog, the sound of the ocean waves, or the safeness felt while sitting next to a hot fireplace while listening to the approach of a thunderstorm. It may manifest later as sundowner's syndrome, seen so often in convalescent homes, where displaced elders of various stages of mental capacity want to go home when the sun has set. They want to go home, the one that exists in the memories of their hearts.
While we don't necessarily need to find out the exact place where we first moved our bodies, maybe the Aborigines have it figured out--their culture has given them a place to begin, and a belief that we have a song to sing and a life to lead. The practices of the Yequana, an indigenous South American tribe, suggest that throughout our lives we need to develop a concept of a continuum, a natural mode of growing and learning which is fostered at the time of our birth. When our family, our community, and our culture as a whole support that ancestral lineage, our map, our songline then, becomes much clearer.
Fortunately for us, the tracks that may lead us home are still there. Is it a coincidence that the Aborigines used the term songline, and the songbirds still have their ancestral connection? Many intact, healthy cultures on this earth have demonstrated their close ties to the earth, as well as powerful elements of their specific cultures which have led their own children home for generations. Our myriad healthy cultures, our ties to the earth, can furnish us with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; they should allow us to find values which will be our map. Our songline through life should make us spiritually rich, loving to live in the moment wherever we are, whomever we are with. It should teach us what is important: how to live and how to die.
Mark Batcheler is an educator and naturalist. He recently received his Masters degree at Prescott College in Arizona.
©2005 Talking Leaves
Spring 2005
Volume 15, Number 1
Family Values