Category Archives: conservation

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Celebrating 50 Years of Wilderness Protection

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“It’s a time for celebration! 2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the 1964 Wilderness Act, the landmark conservation bill that created a way for Americans to protect their most pristine wildlands for future generations.  The 1964 Wilderness Act…created the National Wilderness Preservation System, which protects nearly 110 million acres of wilderness areas from coast to coast. This anniversary is a wonderful chance to celebrate all that’s been achieved for wilderness in the past 50 years and remind Americans of all that we can achieve in the next 50.” (from The Wilderness Society website, http://www.wilderness.org)

wilderness

I read this call to celebration with great delight. My partner Steve is also turning 50 this fall. We’d been searching for a way to live out the next half of our lives more intentionally embodying all that we’ve come to value. He’s been reading up on ‘Deep Ecology’ lately and examining his own philosophy of land ethic, relationship to the Earth, and living responsibly. It can all be a very thick soup to me, but at the mention of “WILDERNESS”, I began to find a kind of clarity. Images, feelings, an intuitive sense of freedom and sanctity began to emerge from the murky definitions and contradictions. Yes, I value ‘wilderness’. I need it. I know this, deep in my soul. What is this recognition about? What does ‘wilderness’ mean, and what do I learn from it?

“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” The Wilderness Act of 1964

tent

What is our relationship to wilderness – or to Nature, for that matter? Are we visitors? Are we managers, stewards, masters? Conquerors? I hear the ‘beep, beep, beep’ of construction vehicles in reverse and the thud of jack-hammers that are currently tearing down the green space near my home and widening the interstate highway to create a Research Park, and I know that a large part of my culture is dedicated to conquering and altering the land and calling it ‘development’.

playing house

I am drawn to the prairie, to the woodlands, to green space wherever I find it, but I don’t want to be a mere visitor. I belong to this planet. My ancestry is here. When I was a little girl, I used to play in the Forest Preserve across the street from my house. I would duck beneath the shady boughs of a bush and sweep out some floor space with a stick. I would set up rooms and fashion utensils of twig and bark. I played House for hours on end, staking my claim, perhaps, to domesticity within that habitat. I want to live on the Earth, with the Earth, not in dominance or enmity, but in peace and harmony. In order to live in peace, however, I have to know when to leave well enough alone. I know this in my relationship with people, and I know this in my relationship with animals. It’s called Respect. Why shouldn’t this be true of my relationship to land and sea and air as well? Let it do what it wants to do. Let it enjoy autonomy, as I do. Let it be “untrammeled by man”.

 If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.” – Lyndon Baynes Johnson, President who signed The Wilderness Act into law.

secondary wilderness forest

Is it naive to think that there exists any place on Earth that is truly pristine? Perhaps. And that need not be grounds to dismiss the idea of wilderness with a cynical roll of the eyes. I believe there is merit in creating what I call ‘secondary wilderness’ by allowing areas that have been previously used and even exploited to return to a more natural state. There is much to be learned by observing what time and non-human agents will do in a particular environment. Steve and I found a section of secondary wilderness right here in Wisconsin. Although most of the 110 million acres of federally designated Wilderness is west of the Mississippi in mountains, deserts, and Arctic tundra, there are forests in the North that have been abandoned by logging operations and allowed to return to wildlands. The Headwaters Wilderness in the Nicolet unit of the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest is 22,000+ acres of previously logged forest that has been left wild since 1984. There are 2 Forest Service roads that divide the area into three sections, but enough contiguous acreage to qualify still for wilderness status. Backpacker Magazine’s site has given it the distinction of “deepest solitude” within that Forest. We headed there just after Memorial Day.

wilderness map

wilderness:(1)  a tract or region uncultivated and uninhabited by human beings (2) :  an area essentially undisturbed by human activity together with its naturally developed life community (Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary)

We found a dispersed campsite across the road from the designated wilderness on the banks of Scott Lake. As we set up camp, we were greeted by two trumpeter swans on the lake, a raucous chorus of frogs and a host of mosquitoes. That night, we had a bit of rain. In the morning, a bald eagle perched high in a dead tree on the far side of the lake, illuminated by the rising eastern sun. Staring at him through my binoculars, I imagined him enjoying an aerial view like ones I’d seen in pictures of Alaska. Could I really be in the wilderness, finally? My rational brain convinced me of the disparities, but my romantic soul glowed. Even here, in Wisconsin, there can be solitude, common-union with nature, and a wild hope.

 

swans 2

“…in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind…I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock, spruce or arbor vitae in our tea…” Henry David Thoreau, “Walking” 1862

We found a hiking trail into the edge of the wilderness, marked by a series of white diamonds on the trees. The trail was maintained, after a fashion, but not with meticulous interference. I preferred it to those wide, paved “trails” in city parks where cyclists, boarders and baby strollers whiz by all weekend.

The inevitable down side of climbing the wilderness mountain is returning to ‘civilization’, re-entering the spaces that humans have altered and asking a million critical questions about our involvement. Was this action necessary? Was this change beneficial and for whom? How is this decision going to effect this environment, this habitat, this life? How do I take responsibility when my ignorance is so vast? How do I do my best to learn and choose and be aware? What do I do when I see individuals or systems causing destruction?

I learned the 4 pillars of Environmental Education while volunteering at a local Nature Center: Awareness, Appreciation, Attitude and Action. My experience in the wilderness took me on a journey past those milestones: being aware of the solitude, of the multitude of interconnected lives as well; being awed by the variety and majesty of all that I saw; feeling a deep desire to protect, to respect, and to serve Life; and finally, deciding to make changes and choices in my own life and lifestyle, to learn to embody the experience, not just as a vacation or a change from habit, but as a daily practice.

wilderness sunsetSteve & I are planning to attend the National Wilderness Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico this October. We are eager to explore the sacred space of our common ground, the Earth, with like-minded people who are also interested in fostering the understanding of our life in proximity with each other and with the life around us. I look forward to feeling the refreshment of wilderness in my soul and encountering new ways of expressing the spiritual aspect of this quality of life in art, morality and intellectual discourse.

Please consider this an invitation to join me, if not at the Conference itself, in the exploration of Wilderness as a part of our humanity. Please share comments here and likes here.

“Ben Jonson exclaims: ‘How near to good is what is fair!’ So I would say, How near to good is what is wild! Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest-trees. Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.” Henry David Thoreau, “Walking” 1862

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© 2014, essay and photographs, Priscilla Galasso, All rights reserved

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Dialogue

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Today’s prompt says, “With an intuitive approach, I considered the photos’ subject matter and graphic attributes and chose those that resonated with each other, creating cross-dependencies and visual analogies. They’re combinations that tell a story.

The resulting dialogue — they story they tell — is the creation of each viewer’s individual perception.

It’s your turn now: for this week’s challenge, bring together two of your photos into dialogue. What do they say to each other?”

 

Two photos (you can view them in larger format by clicking on them):

What’s in your dialogue?

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Happy Earth Day!

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Where were you in 1970 when Earth Day was first celebrated?  I was 7 years old.  My particular corner of Earth was a suburb of Chicago where I played in a Forest Preserve across the street from my house.  I learned to recognize wild flowers like violets and Jack-in-the Pulpit and animals like squirrels and blue jays.  I picked up litter that motorists had thrown out their windows or that picnickers had left in the woods.  I’d often find broken beer or Boones Farm Strawberry Hill bottles near the concrete structure off the trail, within the circle of the remains of a campfire.  I could never understand why people would just leave their trash behind.  My parents would not tolerate that kind of disrespectful behavior in me, and I was incredulous that adults could get away with it.  I would come home and tell my mother (a Girl Scout leader) that I’d found evidence of people not “leaving the place cleaner than they found it”.  I can still feel my girlish outrage.  When I was in 6th grade, I joined an Eco Club and volunteered to help pick up trash in the playground after school.  I think I was the only one.  I remember being alone with a big trash bag, meandering the grounds and talking to myself.  I was very happy feeling that I was contributing to the Ecology Movement.  Now that I’m 50, the scope of my awareness has outgrown the patch of land I call my neighborhood.  I still feel outrage; I still hope to be part of the solution but on a more grown-up scale.  How to do that as an individual is perplexing.  There is not one easy button to push to do it.  It is a network of decisions, with threads crisscrossing from recycling to teaching to voting.  To stay engaged, to keep up the effort, to put energy into learning and practicing responsibility is the way of Earth friendliness.  How is your friendship with Earth going today?

Earth Day© 2014, essay and photographs, Priscilla Galasso, All rights reserved

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Street Life

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street sceneThis is a story of urban development.  This picture was taken from the Milwaukee County Grounds about 2 years ago.  This land surrounds the abandoned Poor Farm and Insane Asylum that I wrote about in this post.  The area to the south and west of those abandoned buildings was identified as a migratory monarch butterfly trail and maintained by a local group who call themselves The Park People.  In the last 9 months, this area has been raked over by bulldozers, trees cut down, and the habitat reduced from 239 acres (in 2005) to just 11 acres…which may never recover from the disturbance and resemble this photo again.  The construction project was undertaken in order to create “Innovation Park”, UW Milwaukee’s research accelerator and business campus.  In addition to this construction, the freeway you see in the background has been re-routed and upgraded to accommodate more traffic.  Massive construction vehicles – earth movers, tree destroyers, and jack-hammers – can be heard around the clock from my bedroom window.  This had been the largest green space in the county for many years, and I counted myself lucky to be within walking distance from it.  But the life of the street, of urban expansion, has depleted the life of the wild and taken over its habitat.  In the words of a famous song, “We’ve paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.”  The metamorphosis on display now is not the caterpillar changing into a butterfly.  It’s Caterpillar Construction Company changing green space into concrete and steel.  Try telling that one to the school children when they start their first grade science class.

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Planet Love

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The Bardo Group, which mercifully counts me as a contributing writer and core team member, has invited its visitors to share Valentine’s Day posts in celebration of our love for this awe-inspiring planet.  Planet Love has been on my mind for a week now; I’ve scribbled phrases and ideas on scraps of paper at work and engaged in ardent discussions with Steve about it, but until now I haven’t had time to sit down and write.  “You don’t have time for the planet!” Steve jokes.

Au contraire.  I AM the planet.

I have been thinking about the nature of my Planet Love. It starts with the obvious. Duh!  I depend on the planet. I need it desperately – the water, the air, the energy from edible sunshine.  Without it, I would die!  My survival depends on this environment that birthed me and sustains me every breathing minute.  I am an infant, perhaps a parasite, a needy lover hopelessly driven by biology into the thrall of her.  She is my EVERYTHING! 

But my ego shrinks from this debasing posture. I would much rather be the poetic admirer, the worshipful devotee who praises her and charms her, caressing her with ardent words of love. I would describe her in vivid, pleasurable detail. My senses delight in her. I rub against her textures: sand beneath my feet, bark under my fingertips, meadow grass against my back. I inhale her fragrance: sea air and pine and sulfurous volcano. I taste her bounty and drink in her landscapes, satisfied and still wanting more. I strain toward the whisper of her winds and dance to the rhythm of her tides. Her specific excitements are too numerous and various to be composed. She is more vast than my words. The vaulted roof of the cosmos lifts away, and I am exposed. 

Suddenly, I realize that the cosmos is not only endless, it is edgeless.  There is no ‘It’ and no ‘Not It’.  It is integrated.  And here I am.  Not ‘I’, not ‘It’. WE.  We are. The planet, the cosmos, and me – together.  We are. What kind of love is this, without borders? Without egos? Is this perfect love?  Perfect love casts out fear.  I am not afraid, not of death, not of survival. But I know suffering.  We suffer.  We suffer desecration.  Everywhere the planet is fouled, I am wounded.  I am sad.  I feel a lover’s pain. I stand with her in this pain and take my vows.  We are one.  We must be at one.  At-one. Atone. Heal. Integrate. Become whole.  Forgive my ignorance.  Forgive my ego. Forgive my parasitic need.  I will love without borders.  My life, my time, my energy is cosmos – and I will remember that. 

Sky over Lapham Peak

© 2014, essay and photographs, Priscilla Galasso, All rights reserved

     

 

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Advent Day #2 – Air

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Look!  Up in the sky!  It’s a bird…it’s a comet….it’s ATMOSPHERE!

The second gift in my December calendar of counting blessings is air.  The blog entry I posted two years ago is about an encounter with duck hunters.  Ironically, I met a duck hunter yesterday.  He came into my daughter’s home with a mallard drake dangling from his fist, took it out to the back yard, and began to pull back skin and feathers to reveal a dark red breast.  If you’ve never eaten duck, this may conjure a shocked response.  If you have (and enjoy it as much as Steve does), you may shrug your shoulders and think, “Okay, that’s how we get duck meat.  Yum!”  My daughter came into the house minutes later with a collection of feathers in a plastic bag and announced, “Everyone’s getting feather earrings for Christmas!”  My daughter makes and sells jewelry.  Her designs are beautiful, I think. 

So, natural resources…we use them, we share them with everything on the planet.  We breathe something like 19 cubic feet of oxygen each day.  Our air quality affects every breath we take, every bird and animal and plant as well.  There’s an air quality exhibit at Discovery World where I work, so I am reminded of this several times a week.  We will use the resources; we will affect the web.  The question we must continue to ask is “How?”  Are we mindful?  Respectful?  Wasteful?  Grateful?  Entitled?  Do consider before acting.

Now, the reblog…

Make Way for Duck Hunters

I’m new around here.  To Wisconsin, that is.  People here shoot animals at state nature areas.  And the DNR is okay with this.  They post helpful signs that indicate which recreational activities are allowed and that includes the hiker dude whom I recognize, and a hunter dude whom I don’t.  Well, I recognize him now.  I’ve been seeing more of him lately.  He’s up there next to the binoculars.  I can’t figure out how all these things coexist, though.  If you’re in a wildlife refuge area to view wildlife and hike around, and other people are there to shoot at the wildlife, what’s the etiquette for getting along?

Steve and I walked in the Vernon State Wildlife Area on Wednesday.  This was our fourth visit.  We’ve seen so many different kinds of animals there: birds and frogs and turtles and fish and muskrats.  I wanted to see how the place was changing with the season.  We walked down the gravel trail alongside the railroad tracks and heard 3 shots.  When we got to the other parking lot, we saw 4 pickup trucks with gun racks.  One of them had a sticker that said, “P.E.T.A. – People Eating Tasty Animals”.  Gun deer season was just over, I thought.  We walked out on the dike and saw decoy ducks on the water in several different places.  As we got nearer, people in camouflage gear appeared in the cattails.  I had my binoculars and my camera.  They had guns and a dog.  Steve and I were talking in low voices, wondering to each other, actually, what the protocol was for this seeming conflict of interests.  Were the hunters harboring ill will for us, thinking that we were maybe scaring away the ducks and geese?  Were we harboring ill will for them, thinking that they are killing the wildlife we’ve come to enjoy?  Were the water birds harboring ill will for all of us, wishing we’d just let them be?  We nodded greetings.  At one point, some birds flew over in formation while the hunters tooted away on their duck call devices, but apparently, they were too high up to shoot.  If they were any lower, would they have shot anyway, while we were standing there on the path??  I just don’t know how this is suppose to work.  Are we supposed to stay away during hunting season?  It’s not posted that hikers can only be there on certain dates.   We heard shots as we walked back to our car.

I’m still puzzled about this.  I have heard a few more stories from folks I’ve met about deer hunting.  People have great family memories about hunting traditions.  I imagine my favorite postal employee out there in the field, waiting 8 hours to spot a deer, and I suppose it’s kind of like fishing.  You get to sit quietly in nature and forget about business at the post office.  No one bugs you for hours at a time.  And if you see a deer, you aim and shoot.  If you hit it, you get to be all physical and field dress it and carry it away.  Sounds like a complete departure from stamping packages all day long.  I appreciate that.

As if Andy Goldsworthy had been here

There’s a particular stark beauty in the late fall landscape.  Trees are skeletal.  Light is low and angled.  Ice forms in geometric patterns.  It’s rather post-modern feeling.  It makes me moody.  So does the hunting scene.  In a way, it fits, though.  I guess I’m coming to a kind of ambiguous acceptance of it.  Survival, mortality, an uneasy coexistence with everything.  In the summer, this same drama is played out, except it’s covered in fecundity and green light.

Still, the universe is a complicated tapestry, as Steve said last night – a magic carpet stretching in all directions forever.  I look for a perch from which to see as much of it as I can.

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Mensch sighting!

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In my post a few days ago, (Oh!  The Humanity!) I sent out a plea for examples of admirable human beings as an antidote to the kind of internet sensations who fail to inspire and instead make me nauseated.   You know what I’m talking about, right?  The rampant  dumbing-down of our species, “urgent” stories of greed and fear and violence and stupidity and pettiness and the like are probably a dangerous toxin to our culture.  Where are the role models who will help us do better and why aren’t we using our advanced media to promote them more often?  For every “Who Wore It Better?”, we could be viewing 5 “Who Lived It Better?” stories.  Why not?

I have enjoyed a morning at work in the kitchen and with the book business while listening to the music of my Mensch of the Day.  This is an artist who has inspired me since my pre-adolescent days, and I’ve only just discovered this live recording from 2 years before his death.  He is the recipient of the 1993 Albert Schweitzer Music Award and the only non-classical musician to be so distinguished.  His humanitarian efforts supported the National Wildlife Federation, Friends of the Earth, The Cousteau Society, and the Windstar Foundation.  The CD I have was a concert for The Wildlife Conservation Society’s 100th anniversary.  Ladies and gentleman…….John Denver: a singer and songwriter whose lyrics ring with authenticity and passion, whose music spans genres from country to pop to blues to rock, and whose commitment to peace and preservation permeated his career.  As a cultural ambassador for the U. S., he visited China, Viet Nam and the Soviet Union and recorded a duet with a Soviet artist, becoming the first American to do so.  In my mind, he follows in the footsteps of another hero of mine, Pete Seeger, who, at 93, is still active in the same kind of musical ambassadorship that promotes cultural tolerance and environmental responsibility.  I did have the privilege of hearing him give a concert for children when I was in my single digits. 

Who will carry the torch when he passes away?

To read more about the Schweitzer Award, see http://www.anchor-international.org/07.html.  For more about John Denver’s career, see http://learningtogive.org/papers/paper349.html.  For a good listen, go to “You Say the Battle Is Over”.

 

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Making Good the Resolution

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Yesterday’s post was about the weekly photo challenge prompt: Resolved.  I stated that land use research and getting outside were goals for this year.  Yesterday afternoon, we ventured into moraine country and found a preserve managed by the Nature Conservancy.  I’m excited about this discovery as a place to revisit in the different seasons and a starting point for understanding what preservation, restoration, and conservation mean to a particular area.  Here are some photographs, then, of the Lulu Lake preserve outside of East Troy, Wisconsin:

They might be giants

They might be giants

Steve pointed out this small formation for me to photograph

Steve pointed out this small formation for me to photograph

Invitation to walk on water

Invitation to walk on water

 

 

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Green

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Like Kermit says, it’s not easy being green.  It’s not easy building green, either.  My son has a degree in Construction Management and is interested in green design.  He’s having a hard time finding an entry-level job in this field, but it seems like a very useful career in the long run.  7 billion human beings generate a lot of construction; we need to be wiser about how and what and where and when we build because it makes a huge impact on our environment.  That’s common sense.  What does it look like when that is taken into consideration?  It takes time.  It takes money.  It takes intelligence and skill.  So, “forget it” is the conclusion many construction companies take.  Fast, cheap and easy…up goes another WalMart with a parking lot the size of an inland lake. 

I’ve visited two LEED certified buildings here in Wisconsin.  (click on the links to read about their energy-saving and environmentally responsible features) The Schlitz Audubon Nature Center was certified on the Gold level.  It houses a pre-school, among other facilities.  The Aldo Leopold Legacy Center was certified on the Platinum level.  Built where Leopold died while fighting a brush fire, it houses office and meeting spaces, an interpretive hall, an archive, and a workshop organized around a central courtyard.  I took some pictures for my son at the Aldo Leopold Center, and this prompt is the perfect opportunity to post them and share!