A Roadkill and a Dream of a Better World

The call came after dark on a cold and rainy November evening: there was a road-killed deer south of town, ours for the taking. When we arrived a squad car was directing a spotlight on a buck lying at the base of a slope, several yards off the roadway.  It was a big deer, well over 200 pounds, wearing a headdress of eight polished points. The investigating officer had to put the animal down. 

There was little external sign of injury except a rear leg broken at the knee. Field dressing and processing would show there had been a spinal injury, enough to disable the deer’s hind quarters.

It was an unfortunate end to a beautiful animal, just entering the prime of life. Tooth wear indicated the buck was two and a half years old. A deer in the wild can live up to 10 years, though few do, particularly males which are selectively targeted by hunters. 

Almost immediately after a deer dies there is a dramatic change in its eyes— an attentive and alert gleam gives way to dullness.  It is common among mammals, explained by a lack of blood flow and a breakdown in neurological function. But it can seem that something bigger has happened, something grand and ghostly. 

The native Americans embraced a belief in animal spirits, and most world religions make reference to a sentient if not a spiritual existence among nonhumans.  The question begs consideration at that somber moment when the light in the eyes of a whitetail fades. It persists, days later, as meat is meticulously cut from bone, packaged and frozen.  It returns when the backstrap is searing on hot cast iron, when preparing steak fajitas, meat balls, smoked summer sausage, shepherd's pie. 

In a world where most wild populations are in steep decline, white tailed deer are holding their own, sometimes thriving to the point of nuisance within city limits and protected parks.  Over much of their range they are the only significant big game animal, observed frequently, almost universally appreciated.  They rely on instinct, wit, and learned behaviors to find their way. They are given little consideration if their habitat is lessened or destroyed by urban sprawl, infrastructure or agriculture.They, like all wild species, exist mostly on the shirttails of man’s ambition. Their forced objective is to survive in spite of us. 

I don’t think much about the animal that provides my morning bacon. A grunting, rooting, coarse-haired ungulate is less endearing, despite its proven superior intelligence. But appearance and intelligence has little influence on our demand for pork chops, barbecued ribs, ham, and sausage. Almost one and a half billion hogs are slaughtered annually worldwide.

Before reaching the killing floor, before the light fades from their eyes following a short life, the vast majority of hogs are raised in an environment far removed from what they would have chosen.  Advocates say that animals raised in factory farms are pampered relative to their wild counterparts, fed rations developed by nutrition scientists, given easy access to water and shelter. If they get sick, a licensed veterinarian is standing by.

In a recent airing of NPR’s Living on Earth, author Frances Moore Lappe talked about the high environmental costs of meat production and the urgent need to adjust our diets to one that is more plant-based.  According to Lappe, our food system globally contributes almost 37 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and about 40 percent of that is from the livestock sector.  Of equal significance, industrialized agriculture, as it stands, will not feed a planet of eight billion people and counting (https://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=22-P13-00046&segmentID=1).  

There are new, promising technologies. Our grocery shelves may soon include meat that is biosynthetically produced using selected animal cells, grown without a living animal that requires food, water, and housing. A California firm is one step closer to earning USDA approval using the technology (https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/food-and-farms/climate-friendlier-meat-just-got-a-step-closer-to-your-plate).  

There is also work being done with Precision fermentation, a refined form of brewing, where microbes are multiplied to create specific products.  One method uses microbes that feed on hydrogen, water, carbon dioxide and fertilizer to manufacture a flour containing 60 percent protein, compared with only 37 percent found in soybeans, and the process requires 1700 times less land mass (https://apple.news/A9dWnaLjHSCmZGYh0EbhPhg). 

Millions of acres now used to grow animal feeds might soon be producing foods we consume directly, with much improved efficiency. With more corn and bean acreage up for grabs, hemp may finally be brought to scale, providing a superior alternative for manufacturing paper and fabric and building materials that are actually carbon negative, all from a crop requiring little or no chemical inputs. Even more exciting, with less demand on acreage for food production, rewilding could enter the mainstream and bring with it our greatest hope for storing carbon, controlling climate disruption, and halting the sixth great extinction. 

Maybe there’s a world in the near-future free of confinement livestock operations and killing floors. In that world, perhaps they’ll be autonomous vehicles so advanced that collisions involving deer will all but disappear. It’s an encouraging possibility. But for now, there is a hundred pounds of fresh venison in the freezer from an animal that will be long appreciated. His spirit, or whatever it was that put the spark in his eyes, lives on. 

A Connecting Thread

We are driving 650 miles north, to a cabin in the Algoma wilderness. For 23 years it’s been our escape from the routine, a place of solitude, a link to the boreal forest and its maze of rivers and lakes.  A colleague once said unless his travels took him beyond the eastern deciduous forests he really hadn’t gone anywhere. I’m inclined to agree. 

The cabin overlooks the Michipicoten River, less than 20 miles from where its tannin-tinged waters empty into Lake Superior. Upstream, by way of a chain of lakes, rivers, and portages, a wilderness traveler eventually heads downstream to the great James and Hudson Bays. In a different era the voyageurs loaded with furs and trade goods would have passed the very spot we see from our cabin window. Today the route is interrupted with hydroelectric dams and water control structures, but the wild country— a land of cedar, pine, fir, spruce, birch and aspen— remains as a million square miles of contiguous forest stretching from Alaska to Newfoundland. 

It’s quiet there in November, almost eerily. In an entire day the silence may be broken not more than once by the chatter of a chickadee or a raven’s raucous squawk. But there is solace knowing that bears, moose, lynx, and wolves are in proximity, and there are an array of songbirds every spring. The forest stores 208 billion tons of carbon, critical in a world where atmospheric CO2 has reached concentrations exceeding anything humans have ever experienced.  

There is a wholesomeness in hauling water by the bucketful from the river, in warming a chilled cabin with heat from a crackling wood stove, in finding ourselves unplugged from the world except for two radio stations whose broadcasts reach us. There’s value in having the essence of fir and spruce fill our lungs with every breath, with letting the wind and water steer our skiff as we drift downriver, in landing a 30-inch pike following a hard fought battle. Time spent in the north is contentment grounded in the simple and uncomplicated, where daily living is reduced to the basics, where an eagle soaring overhead or a beaver cruising upriver is entertainment enough. 

Our stay is short, and too soon we’re back home, plugged into our devices, drawn into political battles and a world of crises. But still fresh in our memories is a place of reverence and simplicity, a place that lifts our spirits, resets our priorities and refuels our resolve to focus on worthy causes.

This morning I heard a white-throated sparrow sing. He’s left his seasonal home in the north to overwinter here. His experience, the quality of habitat he finds, will determine whether or not he’ll return to his breeding grounds next spring. He sings in the spruce-fir and he sings in the oak-hickory and both destinations are crucial to his existence; two ecotypes explicitly connected by a traveling songbird. 

No place and no thing is truly isolated. The fish we catch in the north contain levels of mercury, emitted from industrial sources and carried hundreds or thousands of miles on air and circumpolar river currents. Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment warns of eating more than one meal of fish per week. Whitetail deer in Maine and several other states have meat tainted with dangerous levels of PFAS, forever chemicals used in household products such as cosmetics and detergents and non-stick cookware, that follow a connecting thread from contaminated soil and water to wild ungulates. PFAS are not restricted to deer— they are widespread in our water supplies, in the soil and some of the foods we eat, in the air we breathe— we carry them in our blood. 

A coral reef dies from ocean acidification and 25 percent of marine life is disrupted. A warming climate melts glaciers and influences weather patterns, threatening water supplies in some regions while flooding others. Midwest farmers, homeowners, and turf managers, send nitrogen and phosphorus down the Mississippi and 6000 square miles in the Gulf of Mexico become lifeless. The Living Planet Report from the World Wildlife Fund and Zoological Society of London shows a nearly 70% decline in vertebrate wildlife populations since 1970 due to such things as habitat loss, over harvest, pollution, and climate stress. Declines send ripples if not tsunamis across ecosystems and are never without consequence. 

We talked about these things on a still November afternoon as we sat next to a fire on the Canadian Shield. Accepting that nothing acts alone or independently is a way of making the earth a smaller, more intimate space, where a flippant or less than reverent regard for the environment should never exist. But that is not our history, and even as we better understand our place in the ecological community, our response to the damage we inflict remains far from adequate.

The wind shifted overnight and is blowing straight in from the north.  I convince myself I detect the essence of spruce-fir flanking the Michipicoten River, and take a deep breath to feel the connection.  If it’s all in my head, there is still a sparrow singing in the back yard that is truly linked to a place where simplicity reigns and contentment is found in the rudimentary. The connection spans 650 miles then continues on, linking an entire planet with common fiber, binding everything together with magnificent purpose.  Nothing is unattached.