Coyote Crossing

With enough distance now from the marriage, the dog, and the last of my gardens, I have been able the last few days to summon the fortitude to sort through old garden writing — much of it previously published in a proto-e-book entitled The Irascible Gardener about six years ago — for publication in an actual dead trees book in the next couple of months.

As the book mainly concerns gardening and related activities and subjects in the San Francisco Bay Area — though I suspect many of the themes and topics therein will be universal enough that people in New Jersey might find the book worthwhile — I’ve stolen taken inspiration from a fragment of song from the Ohlone people, native to the Bay Area, for the working title: Gardening on the Edge of The World.

The book consists of essays and articles I wrote between 1990 and 2008 or so, a few of them on this blog, but most in print publications both regional and not.

Here’s an example, first written for the Contra Costa Times.

Helen

My ferns seem to have made it through the winter outside. There are three of them. The two birds’ nest ferns are sending up new flat fronds through a nest of winter-killed foliage. The third, a staghorn, barely hangs on in its favored spot on the fence beneath the juniper. Houseplants all, I exiled them to the elements in October.

This was tough love. A few months of careful cleaning had failed to rid the ferns of their infestation of scale. Small armored relatives of aphids and mealy bugs, scale are one of a fern grower’s worst enemies. Insecticides capable of killing the insects are often dangerous to ferns’ tender foliage. Besides, I don’t particularly want to breathe the stuff in. So out they went, in the hope that one of California’s many scale-eating insects would do the job.

We acquired the ancestors of our current crop of scale five years ago, in an Aglaonema — a so-called “Chinese evergreen.” The plant was a memento of a former neighbor. When we took it, we didn’t know about the stowaways beneath the leaf stems.

We were a little distracted.

Our neighbor Helen was in her thirties, lithe, blonde, and compassionate. She’d moved in after a string of noisy tenants. Her tranquillity was a relief.

We never became best friends, but in the year and a half we knew her, we appreciated the kindness she showed and did our best to return it. Sometimes our dog Zeke would howl in anguish in our absence; Helen would speak comfort to him through the wall. When she felt too ill to go out, we’d bring back groceries for her. She never asked for much, in errands or in the rest of life. The last time I talked to her we talked about unattainable wishes. Hers brought me up short: simply to live with her daughter in a real home.

Helen was not our neighbor’s real name. AIDS is an unpopular disease, and the families of its victims still contend with public fear. Helen’s mother, when we’d meet her dropping off her toddler granddaughter for a short visit, was self-conscious and uncomfortable. When Helen died, she spent no more than a day sorting her daughter’s things, taking a few heirlooms for the toddler, then asked a few neighbors to take what we wanted before the trash people came. Becky took a plain white bowl and the Aglaonema.

I once bought a blue VW beetle from a friend, a law school graduate heading overseas. The car ran perfectly until he handed me the key and left, at which point the engine welded together. Friends said the car died of grief over John leaving for Tibet. So it was with that Aglaonema.  They’re among the easiest houseplants to maintain, as long as you don’t let their feet stay wet. But once Helen was gone, this plant was done for. Over the next three years I tried my hardest to keep that thing alive, but to no avail. Each new green leaf would bring a surge of hope, which withered as the new leaf yellowed from the base. Eventually, I hardened my heart, told myself the memories were what mattered, and tossed the plant on the compost heap.

In the meantime, the scale had jumped from the Aglaonema to various other houseplants.

Scale are tenacious insects. Like their more vulnerable aphid cousins, they live by inserting a tube into a plant’s leaves or stems and drinking sap. They look, to the untrained eye, like drops of wax. Small and mobile when young, they find likely spots on a plant, insert their feeding tubes, and secrete a waxy shell that protects them from most enemies. It also cements them in place.

This is no hindrance to reproduction: scale reproduce parthenogenetically, without males. Every so often, baby scales will crawl out from under their mother’s armor, and begin life on their own.

Plants generally have sap to spare, and a few scale should pose no particular threat to a healthy Aglaonema. It’s the volume that makes a difference. Each adult scale can produce hundreds of offspring. Under such an onslaught, even a healthy plant will suffer and die.

A simile looms, but I’ll resist it. Scale spreads far more easily than AIDS, and to far less effect. No need to trivialize people’s suffering with cheap literary devices. Besides, contagion is what life does. Living things find places to live, and do their best to live there. There’s no real insight in that statement: it’s essentially a tautology.

The problems arise when one side wins permanently.

By the time I tossed Helen’s plant, the scale had killed a previous staghorn fern, several Pelargoniums and a Philodendron. I battled them with rubbing alcohol, which strips the wax and dehydrates the insects, and with brute force, crushing them with my fingernails. I’d win long campaigns, only to be surprised when reinforcements appeared from beneath the leaves of my ferns. Eventually, I sent the ferns out into the yard.

They’ve survived. And they’re not the only things that have survived. Among the bright green fiddleheads are bright tan scale, looking tanned and rested after a long dormant season. We have another year of combat to look forward to.

This is not necessarily a bad thing.

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In our addiction to irony we denigrate the emphatic impact of beauty on the soul, distance oursevles from the immediacy of the esthetic experience. Beauty is a sudden, surprising opening of the boundaries of the universe, an identification of the perceiver with the object perceived. One is struck by a line of music, a stormy sunset, the shiny elytra of a Japanese beetle, and for a moment the center of the universe is no longer securely contained within one’s skull. The flower becomes the center of the universe.

We counter the compelling by demoting it to “information.” Use that value-neutral term rather than “art” or “craft” or “poetry” or “thought”, and the danger is reduced. And if that evisceration proves insufficient then irony serves as a further defense, the jaded ridiculing of the beautiful and good so as to reduce its ability to knock us from our safe seats in the centers of our worlds.

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We’re going to be leaving the desert at some undetermined but not too-distant point in the future. We’re discussing where to go next. The Bay Area heads the list. We have to make it work, of course, so some of our plans will depend on the results of job hunting.

Regardless of where we land, I won’t be giving up desert activism — though I might not be doing it full time if I find a job that isn’t doing desert activism. I’ve done desert commuting from 400 miles away before, and I can do it again. In fact, there’s some important work to be done in the Bay Area educating people about the value of the desert: The Bay Area, after all, is the headquarters of the Sierra Club, as well as Brightsource, First Solar and a few other organizations that urgently need their priorities straightened out vis-a-vis the deserts.

But we just haven’t been able to make it work here for us, professionally or personally. And it’s time to work on cutting our losses.

So now you know. Let me know if you have the perfect job for either of us.

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The news from the Bay Area is full of remembrances this past week. Twenty years has passed since the big Oakland Hills fire. A lifetime, really.

More than a lifetime.

It doesn’t seem that long ago. I was working a dead-end job answering a phone that only rang when people called to complain about my employer. My ex- wasn’t yet a teacher. She was working a dead-end job filing copies of insurance policies for commercial real estate holdings owned by an equity investment firm. She was young, and so from time to time she took her job in stride, but I was not young. I was 31. I remember walking down from our dark, mildewy apartment to the Nature Sanctuary at Lake Merritt, seeing that someone was working in the visitor center there explaining the various species of birds that could be found there, and feeling bitterly jealous, feeling as if I had wasted the best years of my life not getting jobs like hers. What had happened to me? A drudge unable to rescue my failing landscaping business — sole proprietorship and undiagnosed ADD are not always the best partners — and now chained to the recycling hotline, bringing in eight dollars an hour. Becky and I loved each other, but neither of us loved ourselves, and our relationship increasingly consisted of shouting across a widening rift. I learned some years later that she was building up her resolve to leave, seeing no future between us. I was sullen. She drew cartoons in her journal of herself jumping out office building windows, not plummeting but soaring off to somewhere better. We didn’t know how to talk back then. We never really learned.

Twenty years ago this week I came home from an excruciating weekend staff meeting and found Becky and her bicycle gone from the apartment, which was two miles downwind of the fire.  In that day before ubiquitous mobile phones I had no way to find out where she was, and so I fretted, but then told myself she’d hardly have pedaled toward the fire and I felt better. I was wrong: she’d headed straight for the fire, kind of: she’d gone shopping at the Rockridge Safeway, probably a half mile from the fire. She coughed for the next week or two.

Twenty-five people died in the Oakland Firestorm of 1991, including May Blos, a close friend of a close friend. 3,354 single-family dwellings were destroyed in the fire, including one owned by my friends Tim and Rhonda — though I wouldn’t meet them for another decade. Of condominiums and apartments the total units destroyed numbered 437. One of those units, in the “Parkwoods Apartments” complex near the fire’s point of origin, was rented by Becky’s high school friend Suh.

Suh was away during the fire, but her cat Oliver wasn’t.

Twelve days later Becky and I took the bus from our apartment in downtown Oakland over to Berkeley, to the neighborhood where I worked. I no longer remember what we were doing there, whether we were there because I had to do something at work or we were shopping for something in the neighborhood. I can’t honestly think of why we might have been there. Except that we found ourselves outside the Berkeley East-Bay Humane Society, and I suggested to Becky that we see if Oliver was in there. I do remember that part. “Maybe a window broke and he got out!” I said. Becky was extremely dubious, but she didn’t spend a whole lot of time talking me out of things back then. We went in.

And so the reason that I have been altogether useless for the last week or so is that in a little bit more than a week from today, November 2 2011, is the twentieth anniversary of our meeting Zeke. On November 4, after thinking things over, I took him for a walk out of the pound and he never went back.

Twenty years.

How can that seem only a moment ago, when it seems like an eternity since I saw him last? Going to the front end of the blog to find that post I linked to the phrase “took him for a walk” just above, I scrolled through the pull-down list of monthly archives for a very long time until I reached the months in which I was writing about him with him still sleeping next to me. I had to scroll past 57 of those months, in fact, to get to the month in which he died.

And of course because I pay attention to anniversaries, I paid attention to this one in Zeke’s last few months, which means that November 4 also marks five years since the day Zeke and I last got in the car, drove a ways to a nice place outdoors, and went for a walk. Though to be honest he didn’t walk much. He stood on this beach for twenty minutes and gazed out across the Bay.

Twenty years ago was before I started writing. It was before I knew that I had a career waiting. It was before the “Chris and the desert” thing, mostly. It was before the white in my beard and before I had spent more than a hundred hours on the Internet. It was also before Becky and I owned a car, and I remember wondering, as I walked Zeke six miles home across Berkeley and Oakland past sidewalks and concrete walls still smudged with fallen ash, what the hell I was doing. I spent some of the next years in a slow panic that I would get things wrong, fail to take care of him, fail to protect him.

A couple months later Becky wrote a passage in her journal describing how having Zeke around made her decide to stay with me. She drew a little picture of Zeke next to the entry, flying through the air encaped, with the legend “Zeke to the rescue!” And of course, within a year of his death 15 years later we were done. For a long time I romanticized his keeping us together during (what I thought then was) the great crisis of our marriage, but it wasn’t heroism. It was only pack cohesion. Of course he kept us together. It’s what they do.

Twenty years. There are people who were not yet conceived when I met Zeke, since born and grown and schooled and married with kids, or killed in wars, or both. And I look back at what I’ve done in that time and I see precious little of importance. So many late nights spent working, so many stupid hours spent composing rebuttals to bad-faith internet arguers, so many weeks spent on the road without him, and for what? I shoved him out of the way when he was insistent, and for what?

Since he died I think of those moments and feel a twist in my gut. I wish they were held in a bank somewhere, those cumulative hours - days - months of his I wasted. It is probably best I didn’t keep track, because tonight I would be tallying them all, finding the sum, and making calculations with the total span of my life the dividend.

I am about as over him as I am ever going to get at this point. The memories of Zeke that float to the top of my mind are for the most part happy ones. And yet I see my future clearly — at least in this one respect — and it involves a man of advanced years seeing the calendar, remembering a walk of 35 years prior, and being immobilized for a moment by grief as fresh as ever.

This is as good as it gets.

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I noticed that this article, which was published in the Summer 1999 issue of Earth Island Journal, has fallen off the Journal’s website archives. So I’m putting it up here. It’s badly dated, and there are things I say with assurance here that I would now nuance to hell and back were I rewriting this. Some aspects of this piece have been superseded by a decade of new information, and some I understand better now, and some are a bit from each column. But it’s probably worth saving anyway, so here it is.

Extinction and Health [May 1999]

No part of earth is undisrupted by humankind’s acts, from the sea floor to the interior of the most remote land. Only those species that thrive on our disturbance have benefited. The rest are at least beginning to decline. Some have vanished forever. For decades, environmentalists have warned that our planet stands on the brink of a mass extinction. More and more scientists have joined the warning chorus.

Environmentalists often refer to the current frightening situation as “unprecedented,” going on to predict a biologically sparse period lasting millions of years, or however long it will take for the surviving rats and starlings to evolve into antelope and albatross equivalents. In the meantime, we will live in a world that is immeasurably, if intangibly, poorer for lacking wild things.

But our predicament is not unprecedented. To think it is unprecedented deprives us of the opportunity to learn from past extinctions what we may expect of this one. And one conclusion we can reasonably draw is that in the wake of this extinction, our lives will be more unpleasant in a very tangible way. The coming extinction may make us sick.

Despite the clear threat of this wave of extinction, our species is accelerating our damage to the biosphere. As you will read in the articles that follow in this special issue of Earth Island Journal, humankind is embarked on an unprecedented project of destruction of the natural world. We are scouring the seafloor. We are systematically killing off most animals larger than a German shepherd. We are reducing the amount of habitat available to other organisms - such as the migratory songbirds and amphibians whose declines are described here - and eroding the integrity of the habitat that remains, by means ranging from climate change to the introduction of invasive species.

Some of the evidence of decline, like that in the breeding bird surveys, is ambiguous. Some damage, such as that done by clearcutting, is devastatingly obvious. Regardless of the degree of certainty in any one area, however, it is clear that the cumulative effect of our actions - wiping away habitat, poisoning the air and water, tweaking the climate and “harvesting” whole species out of existence - will (or has already) set in motion what biologists and paleontologists call a mass extinction, in which 20 to 95 percent of the species on the globe die off completely in a relatively short time.

We are not, in all likelihood, seeing that yet. Despite the dire statements of some environmentalists, we have not yet caused the level of damage seen in mass extinctions for which we have fossil evidence. Paleontologists identify five mass extinctions in the fossil record, and a host of smaller extinction events, the least of which wiped away 20 percent of living genera. The great-grandmother of all extinctions, which took place 245 million years ago at the end of the Permian, saw the disappearance of 75 to 96 percent of all species alive at the time. Sixty percent of all genera in the world didn’t make it past that period. More than half of all families (the taxonomic category just above the genus) died out. We talk about critically endangered species, such as the cheetah, or subspecies, such as the Siberian tiger; imagine not just those but lions, pumas, cervals, bobcats, lynx, and Sylvester all dying out and you are still picturing an extinction event orders of magnitude less devastating than the Permian. Compared to the old-fashioned mass extinctions the planet used to have, our current unpleasantness ranks only slightly above the apparent background extinction level. We have certainly not extirpated anything near a double-digit percentage of existing genera. Our destructive proclivities may be unprecedented, but the current wave of extinctions is not - so far.

Fits and starts


As our situation isn’t unprecedented, we can look at previous mass extinctions to see what we can expect if we cause another. To do so, we must take a look at the mechanics of extinction and evolution.

Unless you went to school very recently, you learned of evolution as a slow, arduous process. Minor, almost imperceptible variation enters the genetic pool of a species, through mutations. With enough time the genepool may become modified enough by accumulation of beneficial (or merely benign) mutations to constitute a new species.

Despite popular mythology, the process does not imply increasing perfection. A recent study of the famous Galapagos finches is a case in point. Researchers Peter and Rosemary Grant found that the finches are, indeed, constantly evolving, but in response to cyclically-changing environmental conditions. A dry spell might mean large, hard-shelled seeds are the only available finch food - other plants fared poorly. Thus, finches with big strong beaks reproduce more successfully. When the dry spell ends, there are more small, easily-opened seeds available, and the big-billed finches find it harder to handle this food than do their smaller-beaked cousins. Succeeding generations show a trend toward smaller snoots. Cycle after cycle, the finch populations evolve to adapt to shifting environmental conditions, at a remarkably rapid pace: one or two generations, as opposed to eons. In environmentally stable times, the goalposts of that evolution are constantly shifted by the regular cycles of the environment: drought and flood, warm and cold, perhaps even - for organisms as short-lived as bacteria - night and day.

If Galapagos finches are nothing special and other organisms evolve in basically the same fashion, one would expect to find two consequences in the paleontological record. First, that when ecological changes were cyclical and relatively gentle for long periods of time, we should find a fair amount of stability in species, that generational oscillation in a characteristic such as beak size would appear to us as a very stable range of variation in the fossils of a species.

Second, we would expect that where change is sudden, marked, and non-cyclical, as is the case during and after a mass extinction event, such change would generate dramatic evolutionary changes in the species surviving. If, as is thought, a comet smacked into what is now the Yucatan at the close of the Cretaceous, killing off the dinosaurs and ammonites and pteranodons with a global cloud of sulfur and dust, the stable cycles of environmental change would have been seriously disrupted, meaning that species would be pressed to adapt to abruptly different environmental circumstances. One would expect a sudden flourishing of diverse and innovative new species.

In fact, paleontology confirms exactly these conclusions. The bulk of the fossil record shows stable species, with a low background level of extinction and a similarly low background level of new species arising. But after the double handful of extinction events for which we have evidence, new species appear remarkably suddenly, diversify, and split into more new species. Then the lineages solidify and the biosphere becomes relatively stable again, until the next comet hits.

This is the heart of “punctuated equilibrium,” a model of evolution first proposed by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould. Each extinction, whether caused by comet or climate or just dumb luck on the part of the last fertile members of a species, changes the environment of its neighbors, providing both the opportunity and the impetus to evolve. The more extinctions, the more subsequent evolution. Even after the Permian extinction, when life was nearly wiped out altogether, species evolved to fill the new gaps very quickly.

Planet of plagues


So mass extinctions have, in the past, been followed by a burst of rapid evolution in which new species take advantage of whatever opportunities are available to them for survival. We face an impending mass extinction caused by our own actions. Despite the apocalyptic pronouncements of some environmental activists, our species is almost certain to weather the wave of extinctions. There are so many of us that even if nine-tenths of the people in the world died all at once, it would make little difference from an evolutionary standpoint. We can survive with bone awls and axes on glaciers; we can thrive in the bleakest, driest deserts; we breed successfully amid the rats and pigeons and carcinogenic soot of our large cities. We aren’t going anywhere. On the contrary, unless we experience a species-wide shift in our approach to the rest of the world, Homo sapiens will continue to dominate the biosphere post-extinction.
Logic, then, would dictate that the majority of evolutionary job openings in the post-holocaust world will be associated, to some degree, with humans.

In the excellent article “Planet of Weeds,” published in the October 1998 Harper’s, David Quammen describes some of these opportunities. In the wake of ecological disruption, Quammen notes, species that are pre-adapted to take advantage of disturbed ecosystems are thriving. He forecasts a world dominated by the equivalents of rats and starlings, crows, buffelgrass and kudzu, with species dependent on stable wild ecosystems increasingly displaced.
Quammen’s article is relatively optimistic. Annoying and pestiferous as starlings and tumbleweeds may be, such species will generally respect the boundary of our skin, the occasional rat bite or star thistle prick notwithstanding.

A hint of a worse future hit the front pages early this year, when researchers determined that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) originated in wild populations of chimpanzees. Chimps’ habitat is shrinking, and wild bands increasingly come into proximity with human beings. Somehow, through bushmeat hunting or other close contact with chimps, a human contracted HIV. The subsequent human death toll may have passed 12 million as you read this.

Microorganisms rule the world, as they have since life began. The majority of biomass on the planet consists of single-celled organisms. We may notice their presence only when they make us sick or leaven our bread, but we could not live without them. They are the foundation of the nitrogen cycle: only bacteria can take nitrogen from the air and change it into usable form. It’s a safe bet that there is no animal that could survive without its internal flora of microorganisms. Every moth, wildebeest, or aardvark bears a specialized community of germs, some of them so fitted to their host species that they are found nowhere else.

When these animals vanish, their internal flora either find new hosts or go extinct. Most of them will die out. Some will find a convenient alternative organism to inhabit. Humans are likely to be convenient fairly often. Many of these organisms will be relatively benign. But some, like HIV, the Ebola virus, and hantavirus, will interfere violently with the workings of the human body.

This is as bad for the pathogen as the host: if you die, most of the germs inside you die. Less-deadly forms of the pathogens survive more reliably, thus reproducing more successfully, thus being selected for in an evolutionary sense. There is some evidence that HIV is becoming less-virulent with the passing decades, and you yourself may well harbor Ebola Reston, a benign strain of that frightening virus.

As habitats are destroyed and their resident species obliterated, humans face the prospect of a series of plagues. At first, some of these diseases will kill lots of people, then they’ll settle in to making life unpleasant, but not quite killing their hosts. They may take many forms: a growing range of complaints has been recently linked to infection by microorganisms. Fifteen to twenty percent of human cancers are now known to be infectious in origin. Ulcers and kidney stones have been linked to pathogens, and some postulate a schizophrenia germ. The plagues may be here already, unrecognized.

If there is an upside to this frightening trend, it is that the threat of emerging diseases provides a concrete reason for preserving biodiversity. Environmentalists have long appealed to aesthetics or morality to enlist support in protecting the wild, or dangled the elusive promise of miracle drugs from mysterious rainforest herbs. These moral and utilitarian arguments are persuasive, but incomplete.

Emerging diseases give us a compelling reason to preserve what we can of the myriad wild habitats we’re now threatening: self-defense. Better to keep the next millennium’s diseases where they belong: in the coral reefs and rainforest canopies and bloodstreams of limestone-cave bats. We can try to stem the next extinction, keeping the billions of strains of microorganisms in check, or we can provide those microbes with inadvertent wildlife refuges in our bodies.

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