Just found your substack today, because it was recommended by the "The Climate According to Life" substack, which I'm subscribed to. Beautiful writing! I have spent enough time in the Redwoods to feel the truth of your words, so eloquently chosen. Looking forward to reading more.
Thank you for taking a look! I am happy you're here, and happy Rob Lewis sent you this way. His work is fantastic. I look forward to chatting with you here on Substack about trees and more!
How incredible it must have been to experience all the wild beauty of the world before these profane and gut-wrenching destructions. You put me there. xo
Muir Woods is such a special place. I think we could have a lot of it back again someday -- not in our lifetimes, but something looking like a real redwood forest again in 100 years. Check out Save the Redwoods League if you haven't, and their campaign called Redwoods Rising if you want a little burst of hope!
This is so beautifully written. The metaphors and imagery will stay with me.
I gather that the measure of biomass doesn't tell us much about numbers? That is, there are still many more wild mammals than domesticated ones, but they tend to be smaller than the domesticated ones —? I missed the biomass element at first, and thought that we were talking proportionality of numbers, so was relieved in a sense. But then realized that I actually wasn't sure what the biomass measurement captures, or why it is used.
On wolves: I grew up reading Farley Mowat and that was my dominant storyline about them forever. Now I live in a rural area where they're making a comeback, which I wholly applaud; but in truth, every time I read of a sighting nearby I realize that the Farley Mowat story in my head has been temporarily replaced by older, ancestrql ones from sources like the Grimm brothers…
It happens. I was watching a Disney movie with my daughter the other day and reflecting on how nearly every Disney film has a frightening encounter with ferocious wolves as a dramatic driver. Not sure what Walt Disney had against wolves, but his work sure continues to set up a subconscious terror in the minds of generation after generation who watched his company's films when small.
So lovely and heartfelt. Yes, our orca are starving because the salmon are disappearing because the rivers are dammed and the forests ruined. Millan Millan also showed how those coastal forests were key to inland moisture, as they helped create upland rain during the dry season.
I've always considered our leanings as children to be the windows into our true selves. With the modern institution of public school having been engineered primarily for the purpose of squashing this true self in order to make us maleable to commericial goals. Which a love of the land and its other-than-human inhabitants is always going to place us at odds with.
I think it's important in contemplating the abject ecological catastrophe our modern model has turned out to be to remember that none of the catastrophic part of it was intentional. Arguments that it is or somehow was that point out all the horrendous things we've done have some merit in pointing out we should not do horrendous things, but those things alway went on, native peoples committed vast numbers of horrendous acts as cultural norms. One of the reasons the native peoples here for instance remained sustainable was because they suffered constant baseline attrition due to their love of homicide, they loved to kill - and when time permitted torture - one another to the degree that it was a significant limiting factor on their populations, already limited by constraints inherent to the hunter-gatherer model. The European colonizer is decisively not "the most destructive force ever unleashed on earth" granting that this is a very fashionable portrayal today that will always find favor in the current crowd. Rather, by far the most destructive force ever unleashed on earth - destructive on a scale equal to asterorid strikes now - was oil. The unleashing of the vast energy it contains. The invention of the machines capable of unleashing that energy. Oil contains, represents, millions of years of the stored energy of the sun, and we unleashed the lion's share of those millions of years of sunlight energy in signficantly less than a single century, most of it in fact since 1990, despite immense damage having already been done by this unleashing prior to that date. There's a statistic to shock one to the core. This is what has made our scale what it is, and our scale is what's at the root of our ecological catastrophe today. Our approach is lamentable, yes, and has been for a long time. But without our scale having become what it is, nature could readily absorb enough of what we were so as to remain healthy in the balance. She can't absorb what we are at the scale oil has allowed. This is the bottom line today. Our 8 or 16-times overshot dimensions. The accident of oil.
This is extraordinarily beautiful and so heartbreaking. Thank you so much.
Oh my goodness, thanks for stopping by and reading. I appreciate your words so, so much. 💚
Just found your substack today, because it was recommended by the "The Climate According to Life" substack, which I'm subscribed to. Beautiful writing! I have spent enough time in the Redwoods to feel the truth of your words, so eloquently chosen. Looking forward to reading more.
Thank you for taking a look! I am happy you're here, and happy Rob Lewis sent you this way. His work is fantastic. I look forward to chatting with you here on Substack about trees and more!
How incredible it must have been to experience all the wild beauty of the world before these profane and gut-wrenching destructions. You put me there. xo
What a beautiful but heartbreaking essay.
I visited Muir Woods when I was a child and was awed by the Redwoods, how tragic that so much of that forest has been destroyed.
Muir Woods is such a special place. I think we could have a lot of it back again someday -- not in our lifetimes, but something looking like a real redwood forest again in 100 years. Check out Save the Redwoods League if you haven't, and their campaign called Redwoods Rising if you want a little burst of hope!
This is so beautifully written. The metaphors and imagery will stay with me.
I gather that the measure of biomass doesn't tell us much about numbers? That is, there are still many more wild mammals than domesticated ones, but they tend to be smaller than the domesticated ones —? I missed the biomass element at first, and thought that we were talking proportionality of numbers, so was relieved in a sense. But then realized that I actually wasn't sure what the biomass measurement captures, or why it is used.
On wolves: I grew up reading Farley Mowat and that was my dominant storyline about them forever. Now I live in a rural area where they're making a comeback, which I wholly applaud; but in truth, every time I read of a sighting nearby I realize that the Farley Mowat story in my head has been temporarily replaced by older, ancestrql ones from sources like the Grimm brothers…
It happens. I was watching a Disney movie with my daughter the other day and reflecting on how nearly every Disney film has a frightening encounter with ferocious wolves as a dramatic driver. Not sure what Walt Disney had against wolves, but his work sure continues to set up a subconscious terror in the minds of generation after generation who watched his company's films when small.
Here's an explainer on the biomass question that I found helpful in thinking about what these numbers mean: https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
And here's a link to one of the followup papers. I found it to be written in fairly accessible language, for a science paper. :) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2204892120
Thank you! Will look at these.
Oh this is so soul-stirring. Grieving and living and flailing!
So lovely and heartfelt. Yes, our orca are starving because the salmon are disappearing because the rivers are dammed and the forests ruined. Millan Millan also showed how those coastal forests were key to inland moisture, as they helped create upland rain during the dry season.
Thank you for sharing this again and giving us the chance to read and learn. Your points are powerfully made.
A very powerful essay. Thank you for sharing it.
Gutting. I feel this. Thanks for making connections of what it is we’re losing.
I've always considered our leanings as children to be the windows into our true selves. With the modern institution of public school having been engineered primarily for the purpose of squashing this true self in order to make us maleable to commericial goals. Which a love of the land and its other-than-human inhabitants is always going to place us at odds with.
I think it's important in contemplating the abject ecological catastrophe our modern model has turned out to be to remember that none of the catastrophic part of it was intentional. Arguments that it is or somehow was that point out all the horrendous things we've done have some merit in pointing out we should not do horrendous things, but those things alway went on, native peoples committed vast numbers of horrendous acts as cultural norms. One of the reasons the native peoples here for instance remained sustainable was because they suffered constant baseline attrition due to their love of homicide, they loved to kill - and when time permitted torture - one another to the degree that it was a significant limiting factor on their populations, already limited by constraints inherent to the hunter-gatherer model. The European colonizer is decisively not "the most destructive force ever unleashed on earth" granting that this is a very fashionable portrayal today that will always find favor in the current crowd. Rather, by far the most destructive force ever unleashed on earth - destructive on a scale equal to asterorid strikes now - was oil. The unleashing of the vast energy it contains. The invention of the machines capable of unleashing that energy. Oil contains, represents, millions of years of the stored energy of the sun, and we unleashed the lion's share of those millions of years of sunlight energy in signficantly less than a single century, most of it in fact since 1990, despite immense damage having already been done by this unleashing prior to that date. There's a statistic to shock one to the core. This is what has made our scale what it is, and our scale is what's at the root of our ecological catastrophe today. Our approach is lamentable, yes, and has been for a long time. But without our scale having become what it is, nature could readily absorb enough of what we were so as to remain healthy in the balance. She can't absorb what we are at the scale oil has allowed. This is the bottom line today. Our 8 or 16-times overshot dimensions. The accident of oil.