Most Welcome Squatters On My Property

 

There is a loud rustling on my front porch, so I arise to see if the chipmunk has returned to the bird feeder. As I look out the window a large squirrel lands with a crash on the porch railing, no more than a yard from where I stand inside the house. This frightens the feeding birds to flight and, truth be known, gives me a bit of a start as well. But the squirrel is not there for the bird food, at least not immediately. He is there to slake his thirst, which he does by climbing entirely into the water bowl my wife has set out and diligently fills. Sensing my presence, he jumps out before I am able to snap a picture, but he soon leans back into the water bowl to drink his fill.

As I watch the squirrel on the porch, I notice the chipmunk moving below on the ground. No doubt he has designs on climbing up to the little basket that sits below the bird feeder to catch what the birds so messily drop. I have no idea how he manages to get up there, but I admire his determination. He for his part seems to have little fear of us, and when I come back from a walk to find him in the basket, instead of fleeing for his life, he simply engages me in a staring contest. Even the 90 pound Great Pyrenees that accompanies me on my walks holds little concern for the chipmunk.

A rabbit hops in my backyard, but I am too slow and he is too wary for me to take a good picture. I am amazed that a rabbit is willing to enter the boundaries of my property at all, seeing as it must contain within it evidence of a large though admittedly not so fierce dog. Surely it must know that no dog other than Snoopy is a friend to bunnies. But perhaps it is because he smells the scent of other animals here that he feels safe. Perhaps dog urine is less offensive to his senses than the sort of chemicals people use on their lawns in order to kill the clover that keeps the honey bees alive. Or perhaps it is the vegetables my wife grows which make the rabbits willing to risk being chased by a canine.

My wife does all the work of making our property more hospitable to plants and animals. She grows milkweed, cone flowers and black-eyed Susans for the butterflies and lemon balm and bee balm for the bees. I do my part by being too lazy to use chemicals or pesticides. I only participate in no-mow May because it gets me out of having to cut the grass. But my laziness has enabled the flowering weeds to grow, much to the delight of the bees.

Recently I managed to muster up the energy (or perhaps it was shame) to rake up a patch of Creeping Charlie, inconveniencing a bee intent on sucking nectar from its tiny blooms. I informed him that we would be planting clover on the space where I was now removing the weeds, but he merely buzzed his disapproval. I informed him that I had let some dandelions standing in the backyard for him, but he was rather unwilling to let go of the little purple flowers.

A week later, on a hot day, I was out watering the same area in hopes of summoning forth clover from the seeds we had scattered. A robin alighted nearby, and I couldn’t help getting the impression that she was hoping I would turn the hose on her. Using the mist option, I allowed the fine drops to fall upon her and she did not move away. In fact, I have to believe she appreciated and understood I was replying to a request she had made.

I have come to suspect that the little property that surrounds our houses have some purpose beyond impressing our human neighbors. That our responsibility is not to maintain human standards of aesthetics so much as make them little havens for the plants and creatures we evicted from the neighborhood when we decided to tear up trees in order to build homes and pave streets. Furthermore, I don’t think we do all the lawn work we do just to impress the neighbors but also because we feel we are being judged by them. As for me, I don’t care if the neighbors judge me on the quantity of dandelions in my yard. Ask any chipmunk, squirrel, or robin, and they’ll likely say “Ah, he’s kind of lazy, and he’s not much of a picture taker, but I guess he’s all right.”

The Road I Travel

A Drive To Work

(If you are a writer, you write about anything you experience.)

I now drive 40 minutes to get to work every day. As an environmentally inclined person, I feel bad about that, but I do need to make the house payments. And despite the fact it takes a bite out of my day, I enjoy the ride. It’s through rural areas, and a good stretch of it is along Lake Michigan.

What I notice most is the number of dead animals lying on the road: deer, racoons, skunks, opossums. Once, society took the time to remove the bodies from the road, but now we leave them there. We no longer have the resources available to do such things, no longer have the political will to do much of anything. Everything that is done is done through the market now, and the market doesn’t care about animals, dead or alive.

Perhaps it was only ever a matter of cosmetics anyway. Perhaps we were just lying to ourselves about how a technologically advanced society treats the natural world. We didn’t want to know what our need for speed was doing to the rest of God’s creatures, or the planet, so we hid the evidence. And now that we have come so far, we no longer care. We’ve grown used to it, like the factory farm I drive by that smells of animal waste, where semi-trucks daily haul out milk in shiny metallic tanks to be packaged in little cardboard containers imprinted with pictures of cows in a pasture.

A veneer of trees obscures much of the crops that grow behind them. Once I imagined vast forests lay beyond, now I know they are mere barrier walls for crops of corn to feed the cows to feed the people.

I reach the lake and soon I am driving past the closed nuclear power plant. Within its depths somewhere, God knows what is stored in God knows what kind of containers. There is no plan to deal with the radioactive waste, and so they sit and will gradually become forgotten about. It is part of our mental makeup to forget about things, no matter how important and dire they may be, if we don’t have a good way of dealing with them.

Not far past the mostly-abandoned nuclear station, I see several signs on people’s property warning about the health risks of wind turbines. I am incapable of understanding the degree of disconnect required to not notice the irony.

Working nights, I drive home in darkness. It seems I have encountered thunderstorms almost nightly this summer. I can never remember a summer so full of thunder. One becomes aware of such things when one has a skittish dog and a long drive at night.

I’ve become aware of the weather of late. It almost seems that nature itself has become unnatural. In late August, I noticed the moon was just a tiny sliver, but that sliver was more red than I ever remember seeing it. A harvest moon, I know, but still it seemed an omen to me. Perhaps it is just me. I know it is foolish to look for signs in the sky. And yet, the desire to do so is deeply imbedded in our species. Perhaps, like animals who can sense impending natural disasters, human beings too are capable sensing danger without being able to understand why.

Nightly I drive home and encounter the wildlife that must contend with traffic while crossing the road. I see a chipmunk speed across, a frog taking large jumps to cross as quickly as possible. I see a deer peering at me from a ditch, a couple of raccoons who, once committed, seem unable to turn back even with my car speeding right into their path. I brake and the disaster is narrowly averted.

My eyes are wide open, my mind alert. I do not want to hit anything, not even a frog. And yet there is something within me urging me to go faster. I need to get home, back to my life I’ve had to abandon in order to do my job to earn money to afford my car payments, car insurance, and gasoline. There is a subliminal urge too great for my conscious mind to control, and my foot applies a little more pressure to the gas pedal. Time is precious. I’ve calculated that driving even 5 miles an hour less should be sufficient to prevent an accident should something jump out in front of me, but somehow every time I look at the speedometer, I’m going faster again. Have to race my coworkers, have to beat them home, win the race.

What is wrong with me? Why do I love nature and yet not only drive so far to work, but drive so quickly from it? It is technology, it enables me to do what objectively I would never wish to do. It is like being home with a box of Twinkies: I would never imagine gorging myself sick on unnatural food, would certainly not go out of my way to do so. Ah, but if it is already there… If bad behavior is effortless and satisfying in the short term, it makes it far more difficult to do the right thing. If all it takes is pushing my foot a little harder on a gas petal, why not go faster? If gas is so damn cheap that I suffer little by polluting the atmosphere and endangering God’s little creations, it does make it more difficult to do the right thing. I do want to do the right thing.

The answer is to fashion a world in which it is easier to make good decisions. We’ve done a poor job of that. We’ve made a world where advertisement is constantly telling you to buy what you do not need, consume what is not good for you, trust in the system advertisers perpetuate. We are told that progress is our only good, and that progress means continually pushing further down on the accelerator.

We are, each one of us, driving down the road at too great a speed, heedless of the damage we cause to the natural world we ultimately rely upon for our survival. We must be reminded again and again that not only are we in control of the gas pedal, but we also have a brake.

Adventures In The Not So Great Outdoors

There’s something about doing yardwork that gets me thinking. Perhaps it is just my mind telling me I should get out of the sun and back to my writing. It’s just that nature in any degree is inspiring and as a writer I get so little of it.

I’m not a big fan of bugs, especially when they are inside my house. Oh sure, I do try to shoo them out the door if at all possible, but I’m not above smashing them when necessary. When they enter the house they become intruders, and thus they become my enemies.

But I don’t see why we need to be natural antagonists. Bugs have their role to play, and in the long run they are probably much healthier for the planet than we humans. Which is why once outside my home I suddenly feel as though I am the interloper in their domain. I was picking weeds from my driveway today and as I did so, I seemed to cause a great deal of commotion among the little creatures that lived within the cracks. A colony of ants was all in a flutter as I ripped a handful of green growing plants from over the top of their little ant colony, and I couldn’t help see things through their little ant eyes. I placed myself in their little ant shoes and saw the catastrophe as something comparable to an earthquake or tornado. Their little ant world was being turned topsy-turvy and I couldn’t help wondering how this would seem to them. This event might someday be described by grandmother and grandfather ant to their little ant grandchildren as something comparable to Pompeii, might be written about and discussed for ant millennia to come.

Perhaps I anthropomorphize their behavior a little too much. Bugs surely experience things differently than human beings, but on some level it must have been traumatic. Not the ants only but some smaller version of bugs I know only as rolly-pollies were evicted from their homes like old ladies living where Donald Trump wants to build a parking lot. It left me questioning what it means to be a homeowner.

See, the whole idea of homeownership is merely a convention created by humans. Nobody owns anything, we merely inhabit a piece of earth for a while. Like every other creature on God’s green Earth, we’re just passing through. We don’t own the earth, we are part of it. From it we are born and to it we will return. Along the way we share the ride with everyone and everything we encounter. But we’re not in charge and we don’t really own anything.

It’s just our tiny little egos don’t know that. Believing we are something, we then need to feel we are something more than that little thing we actually are. We are not simply our corporeal body, we are the domain we inhabit. The very earth outside our abode is an extension of us, each blade of grass an expression of who we are. They need to appear orderly, in the same way we need to have our hair combed neatly so the world knows we are sanitary and worthy of human interaction.

I think it stems from worrying about what other people think of us. We have such a deep feeling of insecurity that we spend more time worrying about the perceived opinions of our neighbors than we do thinking about why we do what we do. The second we start caring more about how our lawn looks to others than our relationship to the nature closest to us, we have surrendered our autonomy as individual agents. So while we stake a claim to a larger area of ground that we believe we are in control of, what we are actually doing is making our domain smaller. Our lawn is no longer ours since we cannot do with it as we will.

So we douse our lawns with chemicals, in the same way men in the 40’s greased their hair or women in the 80’s sprayed theirs into submission. It was not bad enough that we waged war on nature on a broad front, we now feel compelled to dominate it on a micro level as well. The actual health of our yards be damned, it was how it looked that was important.

The problem is that we still seem to feel we need to master nature, rather than live with it, be a part of it. We are nature fascists, determined to dominate rather than coexist. And dominance, after all, is a very natural tendency, in species other than just man. But it is a primitive notion, something perhaps suitable for chimpanzees and gorillas but not for a species capable of creating nuclear weapons and global warming. At some point, we as a species must learn a different way to view our relationship with the outside world if we want to continue to enjoy the privileged position we now have.

As man encroaches more and more upon the last unspoiled portions of the world, it is more than ever important that we regard the nature within our small realm of influence with respect and reverence. In these encounters with the smallest of God’s living creations, we must cultivate a true appreciation for life in all its forms. For all that we wish to feel superior and dominant, such an attitude does not in the end lead to satisfaction and happiness. It requires an initial feeling of insignificance on our part to let go of such notions, but in the end we are deeply awarded for doing so. For in the admission that we do not own anything, we discover that we are in fact part of everything. I cannot imagine any possession that could provide as much happiness as that revelation.

Darwin, Capitalism, and the Rise of the Economic Stinkbug

Here you see a man with enough money to hunt endangered animals on other continents. This man assuredly views himself as a lion in the economic sphere, which only goes to show what a perversion of nature our economy has become. If this is what we regard as an example of human nature at its peak, then humanity shall swiftly pass from the face of the earth, and justly so. Evolution will not long permit such an aberration.

The laws of the market determine different winners than the laws of nature. And what happens when a man lives according to laws contrary to nature’s laws? He becomes unnatural. Inferior men are thrust into positions of power they themselves know they do not deserve. Unlike a natural man, an unnatural man senses he is a fraud and feels always on the brink of being discovered. Like a wounded animal hiding its defect, he becomes defensive, more prone to lash out lest anyone discover the hidden flaw. He acquires more and more as a way to convince himself and others that he is as great as he feels he needs to be. He becomes cruel, indifferent to the pain of others. The natural man will kill in order to sustain himself and his family. The unnatural man kills because he comes to enjoy it, or because he no longer accepts that he himself has any role to play in the death of others. He has re-written the natural rules, the universe is his to define. It is the law of the market that speaks, and morality has no part in it. The market dictates that you take whatever you can, whether you need it or not.

A lot of people say that capitalism is simply taking the law of the jungle, survival of the fittest, and applying it to the world of finance. That is not true. Capitalism uses one principal of the jungle, yes, the ruthlessness, but it removes tooth and claw and brute strength from the equation. It substitutes instead the attributes of the worm and the mole, the gnat and the mosquito.

Jonathon Swift once said: “If you ever find an intelligent good looking aristocrat it’s probably the coachman’s son.” The best offspring of the capitalist class are spawned in torrid affairs but it is not the bastard offspring that get the benefit of the wealth but the lesser ones that are hatched in a financially constructed household. To them are the nests feathered with hundred dollar bills while the hardiest of the breed are lucky to get a college education. Thus the wealth of a capitalist society, like that of the royalty of days past, is inevitably concentrated in the hands of the mediocre inbreds.

But money does a good job disguising bad genes. Acne medicines, plastic surgery, liposuction, well-tailored suits all go towards making an inferior product look appetizing, like a well-waxed apple. And a Harvard degree, made possible only because your father went there and could afford to send you, is more important than intelligence. Just look how smart the Scarecrow seemed once he got his diploma.

What physical strength is necessary for the capitalist? None. Intelligence? Only a rudimentary amount. Too much is counter-productive. A mind interested in maximizing profit should work only on the economic level. To them existence is only comprehended in the economic sphere. All of mankind’s great ideas are lost to the man of money.

His eyesight need only be good enough to see the bottom line, his hearing need only be able to hear the cash register ring.

His attributes are no doubt refined, but like the whippet or the aardvark, are useful only in limited applications. The intelligence of the capitalist can best be witnessed in the likes of Donald Trump, an idiot-savant who nonetheless is able to succeed extraordinarily well with what few talents he possesses. You only need enough intelligence to learn a sucker’s game, like three card monty, and then play it over and over again. Too much intelligence and you would soon be bored with the game.

Most of all, learn to serve your master, whether he be your boss, you prospective client, the masses, whoever has cash they’re willing to part with. Identify the teat with the most milk and do what ever it takes to get it flowing.

The traits of the capitalist are these:

Monomania

Sociopathy

Ability to hide your sociopathic traits

To a lesser degree, work ethic

And there you have it, the traits of the 1/10 of 1% These are not traits of a lion, but those of an ant or chihuahua. Persistence wins over strength, intelligence, or worth to one’s fellow creatures. To pass on these genes is to pass on traits unhelpful to the species as a whole, not to mention the planet. Too much a love of money in ones genetics is as harmful to oneself as a predisposition for alcohol, and much more harmful to others. The worst harm a drunk has ever caused that I can think of is the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which while awful, pales next to what the oil industrialists are doing overall.

Think about it. Those who would never waste the time nor money on an art degree are the very same ones who own the world’s greatest art. It hangs on walls of rooms seldom visited. And when looked at, it is not appreciated as art, but is there rather as a trophy, next to the head of a lion they shot while on vacation. This is not natural, it is a perversion of nature that needs to be rectified. 

A Lamb To The Slaughter

WARNING: There are images of animal violence on this post which most human beings—no, all—will find disturbing. To find this not disturbing would mean that you were something less than human.

     We’ve all seen the videos, haven’t we? The dog and the elephant as best buddies, the dog and deer cavorting around the yard, playing as if they were litter mates, the cat and the crow. There’s even a video of a dog trying to splash water on a fish out of water. So often are we inundated with such images that we forget how cruel nature can be. Even among domesticated creatures, savagery lurks just beneath the surface. What you are about to see may be shocking, but it is a necessary reminder that animals are not to be left alone with other animals of a different species. While they may play together and behave as though they are best of friends, cruel instincts can be brought forth in an instant.

     Here you see Lola and Lamby in a quiter moment. They seem like natural buddies, don’t they?

     Introduced to each other when they were both young, they were inseparable. Lola was fond of carrying Lamby around as if she was one of her children, while Lamby was content to lie by Lola’s side.

     But my wife became too comfortable with the relationship, trusted Lola’s basic tame demeanor over her carnivorous ancestry. The abuse began as rough play, but nobody noticed. And then came the day my wife thought it a good idea for Lamby to keep Lola company in Lola’s kennel while my wife went to work. It was then that the tragedy occurred. Again, I must caution you about the pictures you are about to witness. You might want to have the children leave the room before you scroll down any further.

     My wife returned from work that evening to find this:

     So badly mauled was poor Lamby that we would have had difficulty identifying her had it not been for the trademark Santa hat she was so fond of wearing.

     It is obvious by the photos there was nothing we could do for poor Lamby.

     We gave her a fitting funeral in the trash can. And while we closed the lid on her poor mutilated body, I’m afraid we will never be able to close the lid on the images that will forever haunt us.

     So please remember that however friendly your pets are to each other, there still lurks in the hearts of many natural predators an instinct to hunt and kill, an instinct that no amount of nurturing will ever rid them of. Never leave your pets together unattended like we did. Learn from our tragedy. Do it in Lamby’s memory.

Unnatural

I like to think I was wise by the age of five. Perhaps not, but I had already perceived something about the world that even today helps form my personal philosophy of life. I was born in 1966, so by the time I was five the United States was near the peak of its interest in the ecology movement. There was a sense that the way we were living was taking us in a dangerous direction and that we’d better do something about it if we didn’t want to be living in a world transformed by industrial waste. There was a sense, unlike in the 50’s, that technology was not an unqualified good, that science could just as well lead us to our doom as it could to our salvation. And somehow, even at that young age, I could detect the difference between natural and unnatural, and it felt to me the difference between God’s will and sacrilege. It was not an ideology but a feeling, as though the difference between what was healthy and what was not was obvious. What I could not understand was why the world was so willing to embrace that which was so wrong.

I remember seeing an advertisement on the back of a magazine that scared me even though I didn’t know what it meant. It was a picture of a man hooked up to a variety of machines. I asked my older brother what it was, and he told me it was about euthanasia. He said the person was being kept alive by all the machines attached to him and that some people thought that people like that should be allowed to die. I remember my brother asking if it were my dad if I would want him to be kept alive in that way. It was a horrible thought, my dad being in such a state. It was more horrible still, imagining that it was my decision to keep him alive or allow him to die. But I remembered I came to the decision quickly: if my dad were ever in such a position, I would allow him to die naturally than force him to live a mockery of an existence. Many years later, my dad approached me about his living will and asked me if I felt comfortable signing the form. After many years with that image in my mind, I knew that I could do what would be asked of me. I loved my father, but not to the degree of keeping him alive at any cost. To allow him to die was the right thing to do, I believe that now as I did at the age of five, when I was really too young to be contemplating the idea at all.

Perhaps the idea was already in my head because I watched more than my share of horror movies. Horror movies were always good at pointing out the dangers of going contrary to the laws of nature and God. My favorite was Frankenstein, and I knew that there were boundaries not meant to be crossed. Men attempting to create life, to play God, inevitably ended up creating monsters. While I sympathized with the monster, even the creator, I knew there was an inherent wrongness in such attempts. I loved the idea of scientific progress and dreamed of being an astronaut and exploring other worlds, but you just weren’t supposed to go tampering with human beings.

The idea of tampering with man’s nature has been the subject of many a Kinks song, and the first one that came to my awareness was Apeman. Admittedly, I was only four when my brother came home with the 45, so the reason I liked it was that it mentioned both Tarzan and King Kong. But at some level I connected with it. Somehow I knew we were children of nature and that it was not a good idea to start thinking otherwise. I’ve seen so many people adapt to whatever environment they were in, so willing to abandon the essential truth of what they are. Many years later I heard another Kinks song, Artificial Man, and it really brought home to me ideas that had been implanted in my head so many years ago by Ape Man as well as other influences:

Tell the world we finally did it.
Modified the population,
Put your senses and your mind
Under constant observation
Even when you're dreaming.
Replaced your nose, heart and lungs,
So shake me with your artificial hand.
We went and built a master race
To live within our artificial world.

 

But as bad as it was to modify humans, somehow it seemed the greater sacrilege to change nature itself. If man wished to alter himself—even if it was wrong—he was the victim of his own actions. But it seemed to me then as it does today that mankind is always trying to create some cheap copy of the real thing in order to sell it to the masses. We pollute lakes by building massive parking lots for water parks. I was still young, no more than eight or nine, when I had a dream I was at my favorite beach, a gorgeous stretch of lakeshore along Lake Huron, in the town of my mother’s birth. We were beginning to wade out into the deeper waters, the waves gradually getting us used to the cold water to come. When suddenly it occurred to me as I looked out towards where the great lake reached the sky along the horizon that they had done something to this spot that was so sacred a place to me. The water stretched out beyond me for perhaps another 40 feet, but at the end of it was merely a scene painted on a brick wall to simulate the sky and water that should have been there. They had converted this place of natural beauty into an indoor water park so that they would not have to take care of the lake that was beyond it. They had turned it into something fake and unnatural because that is what they tend to do. They could charge people for access while at the same time hide from the public the damage that they were doing to the larger world. I’m sure I could find song lyrics from the era to describe how that dream made me feel, also. Something like: “tear down paradise, put up a parking lot”.

I grew up in a time where it seemed the problems that mankind was causing through technology were beginning to be addressed. It seemed that people were beginning to look beyond the small worlds they lived in and see the repercussions to the larger environment that their actions caused. Man had lost his connection to nature, and the results could be catastrophic.

But unfortunately, it seemed that not much followed upon the initial awakening that occurred in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Some laws were passed, and some things changed, but then society seemed to turn its attention to other interests. People’s awareness shrunk away from the broader implications of their actions, focused more on the near at hand and the immediate present. We are increasingly becoming lost in little worlds of our own, unaware of our relatedness to the entire earth we inhabit. But we can only stay safe within our little bubbles for so long before the consequences of our actions come smashing through. We look away from the big picture, but it is only a matter of time before our own backyards are affected by ripples that our lifestyles produce. It’s sad to think that adults can hide from truths that are so obvious that even a child can see them. I guess it takes a child’s eyes to see the obvious, and an adult’s mind to be able to train oneself to not see what is so very natural.

Happy Earth Day, everybody.