Sandhills

It’s frosty this morning.  The bleeding hearts are bent and wilted, as are the wolfbane and some of the daffodils.  But birds are singing and the first brood of goslings have cracked their shells and are unquestionably enthusiastic at the prospect of living. Winter, it seems, is finally giving up after a few months of never being sure of itself.

For the past several weeks a pair of sandhill cranes have been hanging out in the muck field behind the house.  The beavers have built strategic dams across Spring Creek, impounding a few acres of mixed open water and vegetation. It’s the ideal environment for nesting sandhills which have not nested here before.  They are reserved in their presence and keep largely hidden.  Only an occasional raucous squawk or brief sighting tells us they're here.  It's entirely possible an egg or two has been laid and the pair are now sharing incubation duties.  They mate for life and tend to return to the same nest site year after year, so we're hopeful this is the start of something good.

On the world front things are much the same.  Most everyone is holed up, awaiting the outcome of the pandemic.  There is a palpable restlessness.  Social media is alive with innovative responses: creative games, exercise routines, musical performances stitched together via technological wizardry. Home schooling and e-learning have become the norm for millions, television viewership is off the charts, the arts of painting and crafting have acquired new students, essays and poems are being written, creative juices are at an all time high.  So is boredom.

Where is the line between boredom and laziness?  In these days of social isolation we can choose either and claim total compliance with civic duty.  But laziness carries a sinful connotation so those who practice an extended period of rest may be haunted by guilt.  Steinbeck defends laziness as “...a relaxation pregnant of activity.  A sense of rest from which directed effort may arise… We do not think a lazy man can commit murders, nor great thefts, nor lead a mob.  He would be more likely to think about it and laugh.  And a nation of lazy contemplative men would be incapable of fighting a war unless their laziness were attacked. Wars are the activities of busyness”.

I once watched a beaver building a dam.  It's movements were sluggish: tuck a stick here, pat a blob of mud there, stop and survey surroundings, back slowly into the water, repeat.  Somehow they make tremendous progress in short order.  Slow and steady changes a water course and builds a new ecosystem.  In beaver culture there is no laziness, no apparent boredom, and remarkable accomplishments are gained in leisurely fashion.

In grad school Lee and I did a project surveying wildlife use of beaver flowage areas. The results were impressive, with numbers and varieties of mammals and birds rising dramatically as beaver impoundments were approached.  The behavior and efforts of one animal creates living requirements for a host of unrelated and diverse characters and all live in relative harmony.

The BaYaka Pygmies are a people who occupied the once-intact forests of the Republic of Congo.  As recently as the late 1990’s they were still enjoying a primitive hunter gatherer lifestyle.  Jerome Lewis lived with them as part of his Ph.D. research. He was taken aback by the sheer joy of BaYaka existence, their comfort, their generosity towards each other and oneness with the forest. To misuse or disrespect the forest was to misuse or disrespect oneself.  For 55,000 years they lived in total harmony with their environment.  Their world has since been dismantled and upended by logging, or in some cases, by conservation organizations who considered the BaYaka people detrimental to sustainability objectives.

If today the BaYaka pygmies were enjoying their primitive lifestyles, they would be essentially immune to COVID-19.  Their infection would likely be zero and their economy, what there is of it, would be unscathed.  They would be as unconcerned and untouched by the COVID threat as the myriad of creatures that shared their forest.

There has been much written in recent years on the benefits of locally produced food and localized economies.

What would our civilization look like if growth had been dictated by an earth first ethic?

Ben Hewitt writes a blog on life from his home in northern Vermont (lazyhillmillfarm.com).  In a recent post he is reflecting on the virus, wondering what its impacts will be, how it will be remembered. Then he puts another piece of wood on the block. “It’s ash, and it splits so easy it’s almost as if it were waiting to fall apart.”

So here we sit with fresh activities to occupy our time and extra hours to entertain random and sometimes useless thoughts.  While a growing faction exhibits restlessness and demands a return to a destructive normalcy, the earth spins, sandhills nest, goslings hatch, and beavers exhibit no urgency while building a world that promises benefits far beyond themselves.  It’s a novel concept.