A Birdsong in Every Bite

We had a rainy spell in late June.  It was unusual.  Near constant cloud cover and daily rains for a week.  The mercury hovered around 90 every day and the humidity hung like a wet blanket so the air seemed to have literal weight.  Tropical rainforests had nothing on the Midwest. 

The wild raspberries loved it.  They fattened and ripened and drew us into the brambles under conditions that were less than ideal but the rewards were handsome.  Thirty pounds of berries, and counting.

We had visitors from the great state of Colorado.  They live outside Boulder where the canyons sing with snowmelt and magpies flit among pines and the Rocky Mountains arch their bare jagged spines through forests that seem endless. It's a fine place to visit and probably an even better place to live.  

I remember a college professor describing his reaction to seeing the Rockies for the first time.  He looked skyward, his mouth wide open, and without saying a word summed up the experience perfectly.  I thought of him years later when an acquaintance was on a guided tour of Denali.  As is typical, the summit was shrouded in clouds, but my friend was enjoying his time at the base, reveling in the smells and sights, knowing he was in the presence of greatness.  Then he looked up and couldn’t believe his fortune as the clouds parted and there lay the summit, snow capped against a backdrop of azure blue.  He was standing, awestruck, when the guide moved in quietly and whispered, “That’s not the summit,” then pointing straight up said, “That is.”

There is an appeal to mountains that is almost universally shared, and rare is the person not humbled by them.  The Rockies, the Cascades, our beloved Sierras, need no introduction.  When among them we speak in whispers, as if in a grand cathedral, because we are.  Grandeur has that effect.  

Midwest cornfields generally do not elicit similar emotion. When they extend uninterrupted to the horizon they carry a beauty reserved for industrialized farmers.  But when a cornfield is interwoven among wooded draws and brushy fencerows where the soil has been undisturbed a different story emerges.  It lacks the splendor of a snow capped peak but offers a cacophony of birdsong and a symphony of life that nonetheless commands attention.  Biodiversity flourishes where deep and nutrient rich soils underlie the landscape.

The other day I shot a video of something outside and sent it to a friend.  His response was not of the footage, but the background noise: a riotous blend of varied and incessant birdsong.  Mountains, especially those in the west, are often incredibly quiet.  The same is true in the wild lands of northern Ontario or the desert Southwest where, on windless days, the silence can be deafening.  And what all these places have in common are relatively thin, poor soils.  The Yosemite area illustrates how little soil is actually required to grow trees.  Walking through a mature stand of pines rooted in the cracks and crevices of bare granite is a mind blowing experience: a forest with trees separated by clean, weather-smoothed rock.  

Lee and I and the dog spent a night in our backyard in a tent set close to the pond.  It was an interesting night but not a restful one.  A beaver in close proximity repeatedly slapped its tail in alarm, raccoons chattered, coyotes howled, deer snorted, the dog bounced off the tent in an attempt to investigate it all, and with first light we were awakened by birds.  It was a fitful night of wild disturbances exceeding anything we’d experienced in national forests or wilderness areas. 

Rich soils allow wild populations to be more diverse and productive, with physically larger individuals found in greater densities than on poorer soils.  So here in the heartland, where a cottontail might need a packed lunch to make it to the next bit of brambly cover, a rich assortment of wild species and the hint of a fully functioning ecosystem can still exist given half a chance.

We need cropland to grow food, but popular methods of producing most crops, by anyone’s assessment (USDA included), results in soil degradation and loss.  Management strategies refer to a “tolerable” loss of soil, which is a way of feeling good while describing a loss that becomes intolerable over time.  There are new methods employing permaculture principles with extensive use of cover crops that offer tremendous hope in preserving and restoring valued organic matter to topsoil while lessening reliance on pesticides.   These methods promote biodiversity, and of critical importance, store massive quantities of CO2.  Agricultural lands everywhere hold a critical key to addressing climate change and the rapid loss of biodiversity now sweeping the planet. 

Today I learned the heat wave gripping British Columbia has resulted in the death of more than a billion seashore animals, and 75 percent of the crops have been literally cooked on the vine. Wildfires in that province are three times the normal with two thirds of them burning out of control.  Temperatures reached 121 degrees in a small village within the Canadian temperate rainforest, and within days 90 percent of the town burned in a wildfire. The haze from western fires is influencing our weather.  We’re talking a lot about climate change, promising technologies and practices, but global emissions continue to rise. We’re planning trips, rebuilding our economy, getting back to normal following a pandemic that might not be over. The oceans are rising and there will be mass migrations of people away from coastal cities probably before their new 30 year mortgages have matured. Most of us lack the mental construct to know what we’re in for. It’s just too much to process.

The magnificent mountains of the west aren’t going away. Their glaciers will disappear, their flanks will turn to tinderboxes, and when fires pass through, their forests may not return and another critical carbon sink will be lost.  The Midwest is losing topsoil, and what remains is becoming less functional.  But soil can be rebuilt, and the Midwest’s value in supporting a vast array of diverse life can be improved.  We can all play a role.  We can choose foods that are produced using sustainable, soil and life enriching methods. Think of it as a birdsong in every bite. The onus is on us.