My
Home Stands On A Wooded Bench, set back about two hundred feet from the
north bank of the McKenzie River in western Oregon. Almost every day I go
down to the river with no intention but to sit and watch. I have been
watching the river for thirty years, just the three or four hundred yards
of it I can see from the forested bank, a run of clear, quick water about
350 feet wide. If I have learned anything here, it's that each time I come
down, something I don't
know yet will
reveal itself.
If it's a man's intent to spend thirty years staring at a river's environs
in order to arrive at an explanation of the river, he should find some
other way to spend his time. To assert this, that a river can't be known,
does not to my way of thinking denigrate science, any more than saying a
brown bear can't be completely known. The reason this is true is because
the river is not a thing, in the way a Saturn V rocket engine is a thing.
It is an expression of biological life, in dynamic relation to everything
around it - the salmon within, the violet-green swallow swooping its
surface, alder twigs floating its current, a mountain lion sipping its
bank water, the configurations of basalt that break its flow and give it
timbre and tone.
In my experience with field biologists, those fresh to a task - say,
caracara research - are the ones most likely to give themselves a deadline
- ten years, say - against which they will challenge themselves to know
all there is to know about that falcon. It never works. More seasoned
field biologists, not as driven by a need to prove themselves, are content
to concentrate on smaller arenas of knowledge. Instead of speaking
definitively of coyote, armadillo, or wigeon, they tend to say, "This one
animal, that one time, did this in that place." It's the approach to
nature many hunting and gathering peoples take, to this day. The view
suggests a horizon rather than a boundary for knowing, toward which we are
always walking.
A great shift in the Western naturalist's frame of mind over the past
fifty years, it seems to me, has been the growth of this awareness: to get
anywhere deep with a species, you must immerse yourself in its milieu. You
must study its ecology. If you wish to understand the caracara, you need
to know a great deal about exactly where the caracara lives when; and what
the caracara's relationships are with each of the many components of that
place, including its weathers, its elevations, its seasonal light.
A modern naturalist, then, is no longer someone who goes no further than a
stamp collector, mastering nomenclature and field marks. She or he knows a
local flora and fauna as pieces of an inscrutable mystery, increasingly
deep, a unity of organisms Western culture has been trying to elevate
itself above since at least Mesopotamian times. The modern naturalist, in
fact, has now become a kind of emissary in this, working to reestablish
good relations with all the biological components humanity has excluded
from its moral universe.
SITTING BY THE RIVER, following mergansers hurtling past a few inches off
its surface or eyeing an otter hauled out on a boulder with (in my
binoculars) the scales of a trout glistening on its face, I ask myself
not: What do I know? - that Canada geese have begun to occupy the nests of
osprey here in recent springs, that harlequin ducks are now expanding
their range to include this stretch of the river - but: Can I put this
together? Can I imagine the river as a definable entity, evolving in time?
How is a naturalist today supposed to imagine the place between nature and
culture? How is he or she to act, believing as many do that Western
civilization is compromising its own biology by investing so heavily in
material progress? And knowing that many in positions of corporate and
political power regard nature as inconvenient, an inefficiency in their
plans for a smoothly running future?
The question of how to behave, it seems to me, is nervewracking to
contemplate because it is related to two areas of particular discomfort
for naturalists. One is how to keep the issue of spirituality free of
religious commentary; the other is how to manage emotional grief and moral
indignation in pursuits so closely tied to science, with its historical
claim to objectivity.
One response to the first concern is that the naturalist's spirituality is
one with no icons (unlike religion's), and it is also one that enforces no
particular morality. In fact, for many it is not much more than the
residue of awe which modern life has not (yet) erased, a sensitivity to
the realms of life which are not yet corraled by dogma. The second
concern, how a person with a high regard for objectivity deals with
emotions like grief and outrage, like so many questions about the
trajectory of modern culture, is only a request to express love without
being punished. It is, more deeply, an expression of the desire that love
be on an equal footing with power when it comes to social change.
It is of some help here, I think, to consider where the modern naturalist
has come from, to trace her or his ancestry. Since the era of Gilbert
White in eighteenth-century England, by some reckonings, we have had a
recognizable cohort of people who study the natural world and write about
it from personal experience. White and his allies wrote respectfully about
nature, and their treatments were meant to be edifying for the upper
classes. Often, the writer's intent was merely to remind the reader not to
overlook natural wonders, which were the evidence of Divine creation.
Darwin, in his turn, brought unprecedented depth to this kind of work. He
accentuated the need for scientific rigor in the naturalist's inquiries,
but he also suggested that certain far-reaching implications existed.
Entanglements. People, too, he said, were biological, subject to the same
forces of mutation as the finch. A hundred years further on, a man like
Aldo Leopold could be characterized as a keen observer, a field biologist
who understood a deeper connection (or reconnection) with nature, but also
as someone aware of the role wildlife science had begun to play in
politics. With Rachel Carson, the artificial but sometimes dramatic divide
that can separate the scientist, with her allegiance to objective,
peer-reviewed data, from the naturalist, for whom biology always raises
issues of propriety, becomes apparent.
Following Leopold's and Carson's generations came a generation of
naturalists that combined White's enthusiasm and sense of the nonmaterial
world; Leopold's political consciousness and feelings of shared fate; and
Carson's sense of rectitude and citizenship. For the first time, however,
the humanists among this cadre of naturalists were broadly educated in the
sciences. They had grown up with Watson and Crick, not to mention sodium
fluoroacetate, Ebola virus ecology, melting ice shelves, and the
California condor.
The modern naturalist, acutely even depressingly aware of the planet's
shrinking and eviscerated habitats, often feels compelled to do more than
merely register the damage. The impulse to protest, however, is often
stifled by feelings of defensiveness, a fear of being misread. Years of
firsthand field observation can be successfully challenged in court today
by a computer modeler with not an hour's experience in the field. A
carefully prepared analysis of stream flow, migration corridors, and
long-term soil stability in a threatened watershed can be written off by
the press (with some assistance from the opposition) as a hatred of
mankind.
At the opening of the twenty-first century the naturalist, then, knows an
urgency White did not foresee and a political scariness Leopold might
actually have imagined in his worst moments. Further, in the light of the
still-unfolding lessons of Charles Darwin's work, he or she knows that a
cultural exemption from biological imperatives remains in the realm of
science fiction.
IN CONTEMPORARY native villages, one might posit today that all people
actively engaged in the land - hunting, fishing, gathering, traveling,
camping - are naturalists, and say that some are better than others
according to their gifts of observation. Native peoples differ here,
however, from the Gilbert Whites, the Darwins, the Leopolds, and the
Rachel Carsons in that accumulating and maintaining this sort of
information is neither avocation nor profession. It is more comparable to
religious activity, behavior steeped in tradition and considered essential
for the maintenance of good living. It is a moral and an inculcated
stance, a way of being. While White and others, by contrast, were
searching for a way back in to nature, native peoples (down to the present
in some instances), for what-ever reason, have been at pains not to leave.
The distinction is important because "looking for a way back in" is a
striking characteristic of the modern naturalist's frame of mind.
Gilbert White stood out among his social peers because what he pursued - a
concrete knowledge of the natural world around Selbourne in Hampshire -
was unrelated to politics or progress. As such, it could be dismissed
politically. Fascinating stuff, but inconsequential. Since then, almost
every naturalist has borne the supercilious judgments of various
sophisticates who thought the naturalist a romantic, a sentimentalist, a
bucolic - or worse; and more latterly, the condescension of some
scientists who thought the naturalist not rigorous, not analytic, not
detached enough.
A naturalist of the modern era - an experientially based, well-versed
devotee of natural ecosystems - is ideally among the best informed of the
American electorate when it comes to the potentially catastrophic
environmental effects of political decisions. The contemporary naturalist,
it has turned out - again, scientifically grounded, politically attuned,
field experienced, library enriched - is no custodian of irrelevant
knowledge, no mere adept differentiating among Empidonax flycatchers on
the wing, but a kind of citizen whose involvement in the political
process, in the debates of public life, in the evolution of literature and
the arts, has become crucial.
The bugbear in all of this - and there is one - is the role of field
experience, the degree to which the naturalist's assessments are
empirically grounded in firsthand knowledge. How much of what the
contemporary naturalist claims to know about animals and the ecosystems
they share with humans derives from what he has read, what he has heard,
what he has seen televised? What part of what the naturalist has sworn his
or her life to comes from firsthand experience, from what the body knows?
One of the reasons native people still living in some sort of close, daily
association with their ancestral lands are so fascinating to those who
arrive from the rural, urban, and suburban districts of civilization is
because they are so possessed of authority. They radiate the authority of
firsthand encounters. They are storehouses of it. They have not read about
it, they have not compiled notebooks and assembled documentary
photographs. It is so important that they remember it. When you ask them
for specifics, the depth of what they can offer is scary. It's scary
because it's not tidy, it doesn't lend itself to summation. By the very
way that they say that they know, they suggest they are still learning
something that cannot, in the end, be known.
It is instructive to consider how terrifying certain inter-lopers - rural
developers, government planners, and other apostles of change - can seem
to such people when, on the basis of a couple of books the interloper has
read or a few (usually summer) weeks in the field with a pair of
binoculars and some radio collars, he suggests a new direction for the
local ecosystem and says he can't envision any difficulties.
IN ALL THE YEARS I have spent standing or sitting on the banks of this
river, I have learned this: the more knowledge I have, the greater becomes
the mystery of what holds that knowledge together, this reticulated
miracle called an ecosystem. The longer I watch the river, the more amazed
I become (afraid, actually, sometimes) at the confidence of those people
who after a few summer seasons here are ready to tell the county
commissioners, emphatically, what the river is, to scribe its meaning for
the outlander.
Firsthand knowledge is enormously time consuming to acquire; with its
dallying and lack of end points, it is also out of phase with the
short-term demands of modern life. It teaches humility and fallibility,
and so represents an antithesis to progress. It makes a stance of awe in
the witness of natural process seem appropriate, and attempts at summary
knowledge naïve. Historically, tyrants have sought selectively to
eliminate firsthand knowledge when its sources lay outside their control.
By silencing those with problematic firsthand experiences, they reduced
the number of potential contradictions in their political or social
designs, and so they felt safer. It is because natural process - how a
mountain range disintegrates or how nitrogen cycles through a forest - is
beyond the influence of the visionaries of globalization that firsthand
knowledge of a country's ecosystems, a rapidly diminishing pool of
expertise and awareness, lies at the radical edge of any country's
political thought.
OVER THE YEARS I have become a kind of naturalist, although I previously
rejected the term because I felt I did not know enough, that my knowledge
was far too incomplete. I never saw myself in the guise of Gilbert White,
but I respected his work enough to have sought out his grave in Selbourne
and expressed there my gratitude for his life. I never took a course in
biology, not even in high school, and so it seemed to me that I couldn't
really be any sort of authentic naturalist. What biology I was able to
learn I took from books, from veterinary clinics, from an apprenticeship
to my homeland in the Cascades, from field work with Western biologists,
and from traveling with hunters and gatherers. As a naturalist, I have
taken the lead of native tutors, who urged me to participate in the
natural world, not hold it before me as an object of scrutiny.
When I am by the river, therefore, I am simply there. I watch it closely,
repeatedly, and feel myself not apart from it. I do not feel compelled to
explain it. I wonder sometimes, though, whether I am responding to the
wrong question when it comes to speaking "for nature." Perhaps the issue
is not whether one has the authority to claim to be a naturalist, but
whether those who see themselves as naturalists believe they have the
authority to help shape the world. What the naturalist-as-emissary
intuits, I think, is that if he or she doesn't speak out, the political
debate will be left instead to those seeking to benefit their various
constituencies. Strictly speaking, a naturalist has no constituency.
To read the newspapers today, to merely answer the phone, is to know the
world is in flames. People do not have time for the sort of empirical
immersion I believe crucial to any sort of wisdom. This terrifies me, but
I, too, see the developers' bulldozers arrayed at the mouth of every
canyon, poised at the edge of every plain. And the elimination of these
lands, I know, will further reduce the extent of the blueprints for
undamaged life. After the last undomesticated stretch of land is brought
to heel, there will be only records - strips of film and recording tape,
computer printouts, magazine articles, books, laser-beam surveys - of
these immensities. And then any tyrant can tell us what it meant, and in
which direction we should now go. In this scenario, the authority of the
grizzly bear will be replaced by the authority of a charismatic who says
he represents the bear. And the naturalist - the ancient emissary to a
world civilization wished to be rid of, a world it hoped to transform into
a chemical warehouse, the same uneasy emissary who intuited that to
separate nature from culture wouldn't finally work - will be an orphan. He
will become a dealer in myths.
What being a naturalist has come to mean to me, sitting my mornings and
evenings by the river, hearing the clack of herons through the creak of
swallows over the screams of osprey under the purl of fox sparrows, so far
removed from White and Darwin and Leopold and even Carson, is this: Pay
attention to the mystery. Apprentice to the best apprentices. Rediscover
in nature your own biology. Write and speak with appreciation for all you
have been gifted. Recognize that a politics with no biology, or a politics
without field biology, or a political platform in which human biological
requirements form but one plank, is a vision of the gates of Hell.
Barry Lopez is the author of Arctic Dreams, for
which he received the National Book Award, two collections of essays,
Crossing Open Ground and About This Life, and eight works of fiction,
including Winter Count and Field Notes. His most recent book is Light
Action in the Caribbean (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.)
My
Home Stands On A Wooded Bench, set back about two hundred feet from the
north bank of the McKenzie River in western Oregon. Almost every day I go
down to the river with no intention but to sit and watch. I have been
watching the river for thirty years, just the three or four hundred yards
of it I can see from the forested bank, a run of clear, quick water about
350 feet wide. If I have learned anything here, it's that each time I come
down, something I don't 
