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Nature

Sunflowers, Umpteenth Edition.

Yes, this time of year again. A few years ago I paired the real flowers with the painted ones (see below). I figured this year we just look at the real thing, the surround where they grow and the words they bring to mind.

Got Sunflowers?

So walk with me, and bring a bucket, since the farm where I went near Hillsboro allows you to pick all things ripe. Grapes were beckoning – the vines laden – or is it loaded? Whatever, lots of grapes. Still dry on Wednesday, the day before the rain came.

But I had come for the sunflowers – equally attracted by the buds,

the blossoms,

This one had a drop of water in the center like a jewel

the stems and the leaves. Intent to paint with the camera:

Emil Nolde would have been proud of me – except I am not proud of him…

Daily wildlife made an unanticipated appearance. It pays, if you are old and walking slowly, so that critters like these are more curious than frightened. S/he put on quite the show.

The makeshift tents to protect against the sun had their own structural beauty, folded and unfolded, plastic, metal rods, netting all claiming attention.

I can never decide if the poem below is full of wisdom or soppy (or both.) But in August, with the annual radiance of sunflowers, it speaks to me. (Although I’d prefer to embrace the present rather than reveling in memory. Move forwards. not backwards.)

You Can’t Have It All

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man’s legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who’ll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,
it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,
but there is this.

by Barbara Ras

The sky filled with clouds, the rain would appear in force the next day.

Music today played by the talented Sol Gabetta, who was seemingly dressed in a cloud, but her cello sounded more like thunder, appropriately Shostakovian. If that’s a word. They seem to be reticent today!

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Drought

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

― Adrienne Rich The Dream of a Common Language (1978)

“I HAVE to do this: believe that there is the possibility of reconstitution. I have to be sure of the fact that there will always be those who are already engaged and can be joined, so no one has to go it alone.” Such were the thoughts on my hike last week, when assaulted by the heat and the views of so many oak trees either diseased, or dying, or dead.

The grasses will recover.

So will the wild blackberries, although the fruit dried on the wine, hard little balls of no use to perusing wildlife.

The trees, though, are suffering.

Eventually I made it to sturgeon lake, now just a puddle. Small California sunflowers lined the shores where there is usually water, a golden band screaming: beauty!

The herons and egrets joined the pelicans, some of them roosting in the trees behind the water.

A flock of Western sandpipers, really a murmuration, undulated as a cloud in the air, and looked like blossoms on a tree, in a particular spot. They were miraculous, shimmering, moving hard in the hot air. They are difficult to photograph and to detect, just look closely.

I had to sit down in a shady spot twice during a hike that I used to do briskly, without any sense of fatigue then. Yet, I am still hiking. I am still casting my lot with those who love nature and try to raise consciousness about the climate crisis. I still believe change is possible. And the birds still signal wonder.

Music today is the same mix of sadness and resilience that colored this week – from Poland with decidedly Jewish melodies perfect for the upcoming High Holidays, I’ve been listening intently.

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Green thoughts in a green shade.

In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

On Auden’s grave marker, in Kirchstetten, Austria.

***

Their Lonely Betters

As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made, 
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.

A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew, 
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.

Not one of them was capable of lying, 
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.

Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters; 
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep: 
Words are for those with promises to keep.

by W.H.Auden

Our cucumbers

W.H. Auden’s 1951 poem depicts him thinking out loud in the garden shade, less praise and more lament, in my opinion. At first sight, the poem is presumably about language, which makes us “betters” as a sign of evolutionary development, but also introduces lying and consciousness about how much our days are numbered. Is language something that improves our existence or is it a curse, and we would be better off to be like plants and critters, who thrive in the absence of language?

Our tomatoes

Underneath it is, as so much of Auden’s poetry, about love. The one we wait for, the one which is withheld, the absence of which is felt as loneliness. Words manifesting in broken promises. Auden was known to connect over and over again to Freud’s writings in  ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’, which posits a negative relationship between how civilized we are and how happy we might be. The rule, Freud claims, is that humanity will show increasing unhappiness the more civilized we become. Human progress, and note I am oversimplifying his claims here, is closely linked to increases in loneliness and depression. So, there is this whiff of sadness lingering around Auden’s words.

I, on the other hand, was sitting in my garden chair in the shade, too hot to venture anywhere else, eternally grateful for words. They made it possible to read Auden and noticing the link to words written in the 17th century by another poet,  Andrew Marvell, in his renowned poem, The Garden. Here is my favorite line:

“(To) a green thought in a green shade.“

Salvia on its way out

The next stanza after this line describes a paradisal state (and he refers indeed to the biblical paradise) until it becomes clear in the stanza after that that a solitary existence won’t do – and things go downhill from there, with Eve’s appearance. But let that wait for another day, for now let the soul glide into the boughs.

Zillions of zinnias

Pictures today obviously from my garden, with eternal gratitude to our friend M. who donated all the tomato starts. We now have regular salad nights with homegrown lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes, unless the deer got to the beds first. Speaking of which – one of them, plunked under my plum tree, surely had green thoughts in a green shade, of green plums shifting to a sweeter blue, most likely.

And given that we prefaced this today with an exhortation to praise: I am so eternally grateful for a tree- lined place in the heat, and my heart goes out to the houseless who fight this on asphalted streets and dusty roads. We are so privileged.

The three dahlia plants that survived

And here is some jazz in the garden…

Japanese Anemone just starting to bloom.

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Musings on a hot day.

Walk with me, in the wetlands around the Tualatin River, during almost 90 degrees at 10 am on a quiet Sunday morning. That was before we had 104 degrees. Wetlands? Dry lands, with a bit of water now shared by creatures in close proximity.

Some still have the energy to show off in front of a mate.

Much of the water is covered by a carpet of duck grits, or algae, enough to reflect the shadows of adjacent vegetation, greeting you with the most saturated chartreuse imaginable.

A lot of plant life is dry, on verge of crumbling, leaves, grasses, a wistful beauty.

Birds still out to find that morsel, before the full heat of the day. A Cedar waxwing, a brown creeper, perfectly camouflaged and an osprey showing off above me, flying from his perch directly to the space above me, so I get some footage even with the small camera, since I couldn’t schlepp the large lens in the heat.

Yet the views I was most enthusiastic about were the thistles. At this time of year you have all stages visible at once, still some blossoms, some flowers, and then all going to seed. The ground is carpeted with the fluff. It flies in the air, like little ghosts swarming the fields. It shimmers silvery, I believe gossamer is the word, something delicately spun, not by spiders, but by the plants that use air currents and weightlessness to propel their offspring to new worlds where they can settle and sprout. The next cycle begins.

In German I would say: “sie begeistern mich,” a word indicating an enthusiastic approach to something or someone. Literally translated it means, they fill me with ghost(s), but it is used in the sense of something touching your soul, or activating joy. Incidentally, you could also say “ich schwärme four see,” I adore them. The term literally means to swarm, like bees forming a swarm or swarming out – just like these seed fluffs do. The medieval usage turned from the verb associated with insects to one describing the ways of religious sects, deviating from the pre-determined church requirements to think along traditional paths and becoming free thinkers instead, around the 16th century. In the literary developments of the 18th century, the term became a commonplace for all kinds of wild enthusiasm and phantasmic thinking.

Why do I bore you with the etymology of German words? For one, because it is quite similar for English, when you look at the roots for the word enthusiasm. The original meaning had to do with religion, transferred from the Greek enthousiasmós, from enthousiázein “to be inspired or possessed by a god,” around the 17th century. Secondly, because I have been wondering what it means to be strongly, enthusiastically preoccupied with, in my case secular, matters all the time and expressing those feelings with abandon. Since childhood, really, I was easily excited about so many things, adored them, absorbing them as well as treating them with enthusiasm. Does that make you less critical? Impede judgment? Is it going to be interpreted differently by others, because I am a woman, seen as overly emotional rather than in possession of a trait that has components of both, affect and cognition?

As it turns out enthusiasm predicts satisfaction in life and positive relationships. If you’re up for it, here is an extensive but well written review of what we know about the cumulative effects of experience, interpretation, and regulation of positive stimuli and emotions that ultimately lead to the experience of happiness, life satisfaction, and wellbeing. The paper gives an overview of how wellbeing and happiness were defined across the centuries and how contemporary psychology is now looking at the underlying physiological processes that are at work – or that are missing.  “Experiencing positive emotions (like enthusiasm) benefits psychological and physical wellbeing in numerous, intersecting ways, including modulating neurophysiological correlates within the central and peripheral nervous systems.”

So there. I enthusiastically photograph thistles, marveling at their beauty. I also enthusiastically welcome the latest news out of a courthouse in Georgia. I enthusiastically watch the video clips of a grandchild learning to crawl. I enthusiastically count the hours until the thermometer lands on something under 90 degrees. (Luckily I can count that high. Turns out, enthusiasm is also a prime motivator for learning, so having had that in my tool kit for various forays into schooling was not a bad thing.)

Then again, I unenthusiastically read what Merriam-Webster had as an example for the use of the word enthusiasm on their website:

The criminal charges appear to have done little to dampen Republican voters’ enthusiasm for Trump, who remains the leading candidate for his party’s 2024 nomination for president.—The Salt Lake Tribune, 8 Aug. 2023

Let’s enthusiastically hope that on this August 16th things have changed! (Fat chance.)

And here is a passionate piece of music. Hard to believe it was composed during WW I, in 1916.

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A Bird came down the Walk

A Bird, came down the Walk – (359)

BY EMILY DICKINSON

A Bird, came down the Walk –
He did not know I saw –
He bit an Angle Worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,

And then, he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass –
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass –

He glanced with rapid eyes,
That hurried all abroad –
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought,
He stirred his Velvet Head. –

Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers,
And rowed him softer Home –

Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim.

***

I’ve been hanging out in the garden far too much, not able to brave the heat for more adventurous excursions. But I shouldn’t complain, given the number of visitors happily parading in front of the camera, as long as the plants provide sustenance or I bring out the bird seeds….

Quite a few youngsters,

and one of the butterflies makes my heart beat faster, since he comes every day, a relentless survivor given that someone ate half of his wings.

Squirrels now letting me come so close I could practically give them a manicure, or is that a pedicure?

Bees, in contrast to last year, are leaving me alone, too busy in the lavender.

An occasional newt

Summer. An oasis. Not even a slug to fight with. I feel blessed.

Then again there is always a mouse that needs transport far away from my basement….lest it comes back the next day.

Music matches the mood – maybe Mother Goose comes down the walk next. In the meantime, the chickadees get fed.


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Thoughts about war, again.

Walk with me, on a hot day of wispy, white clouds and lines of dry grasses.

It was sparse in the bird department, because I unwittingly managed to pick a day at the refuge where landscape restoration was in full progress, chainsaw noises and large number of workers driving them into hiding. Or maybe the smoke from the nearby wildfires had displaced them, the smell still lingering.

For every missing bird there were about ten dragon flies and a hundred mosquitoes, at least in the more wooded areas of the Columbia River Delta.

There were butterflies galore,

but the real magic came from the air – it was filled with wisps of cotton seed and thistle down, flying about like snowflakes, in literal clouds drifting before a soft wind and getting caught on the vegetation eventually.

Seeds clung to plants, thoughts clung to seeds. In particular, the effects of war and greed on the seed repositories of the world. How will the increasing temperatures due to the climate crisis affect the Swalvard Seedbank, assumed to be safely storing humanity’s survival crops in permanent frost? You can now take a virtual tour of the vault here, by the way.

How will farmers recover their seed stocks when war manages to destroy seed banks and generally disrupt food production? Think of seed banks this way:

Seed banks represent genetic reservoirs of adaptive traits. By knowing the conditions under which the seed’s ancestors had developed, botanists can identify characteristics signaling where else a plant might thrive.For instance, wheat from regions getting only a few rains a year might point to some form of inherent drought tolerance. Similarly, strains of legumes that offer bounty crops when others succumb to blights might signal natural disease resistance. Those that fruit early may prosper where growing seasons are short. Those whose fruits ripen in cool to cold environments might survive high altitudes. And those with deep roots may anchor erodible hillsides.

As climate changes or communities begin extending a crop’s production into new areas, growers may need to find existing cultivars that match their current environment–or breeders may need to develop news ones by crossing varieties with a mix of desired features.

For each case, calls to the regional library of genes, a seed bank, may be in order. (Ref.)

This was written 10 years ago when the Afghan seed bank was destroyed by thieves. (To add insult to injury, the robbers took only the plastic and glass containers, emptying seeds, collected for decades, indiscriminately onto the floor, making them unusable.) Not having cataloged seeds that indicate their usability for a certain region is particularly dire in a country where so many farmers were displaced due to the war, and now have to work in regions unfamiliar and without seed starts that would flourish or at least survive there. How will Afghan farmers, now fully back under Taliban rule, get the seeds that were provided by NGO’s for the last decade, now barred from the country? I had written at length about a comparable situation not so long ago, if you recall, in regards to Syria, where at least scientists managed to save some catalogued repositories, smuggling them to safer countries.

I was reminded of it all due to this week’s report on Ukrainian losses from the Russian invasion. Last year Russian missiles destroyed part of an enormously precious Ukrainian herbarium at the University of Kherson. It served a vital role in the study of species extinction, invasive pests, and climate change The collection held specimens that can only be found in Ukraine and that are now at the brink of extinction. After all, about a third of all protected Ukrainian areas have been destroyed by bombing, burning, and military maneuvers. According to the non-profit Ukraine Nature Conservation Group (UNCG, whose Logo I adore, ) Russian troops have scorched tens of thousands of hectares of forests and put more than 800 plants at risk of extinction, including 20 rare species that have mostly vanished from elsewhere. And because they mined large swathes of land, scientists won’t be able for decades to see what can still be rescued, should this war ever stop.

What was left of the herbarium was rescued under somewhat harrowing circumstances by two devoted botanists this January, and moved to a different university in the country, some 1000 km away – also not entirely safe under war conditions. You can read about the efforts here.

I am usually not a fan of Eliot A. Cohen, but his deliberations on the West’s need for admitting Ukraine to NATO, a step severely curtailed by the U.S. and Germany during the recent summit, strike a chord with me. As he wrote in The Atlantic yesterday:

The only security commitments that can give Ukraine some prospect of peace are those that guarantee the active and effective support of Europe and the U.S. in the event of a renewed invasion. Bilateral guarantees, however, simply take the burden off America’s NATO allies and are hostage to the vagaries of American domestic politics. Far better to achieve the same result by bringing Ukraine into NATO as soon as possible. Let it be remembered, too, that in the three-quarters of a century it has existed, NATO has had a 100 percent success rate in deterring conventional Russian attacks on its members, including postage-stamp-size Estonia and other states that, like Ukraine, were once subject to rule from Moscow.

The noise of the chain saws stopped during lunch break and the quiet was noticeable, encouraging the deer to emerge, close enough to where I was resting in the shade that I could see the hair in their ears.

I was thinking about how war changes both, the soundscape of the environment and the way people are listening, with silence often more threatening than actual sounds, heralding an anticipated attack, the moment before the (fire) storm. It was interestingly an aspect of war that both of my parents were willing to talk about (in contrast to abiding silence on many others), from the perspective of living in Berlin during bombing raids (my mother) and the battlefield (my father.) There is a fascinating literature emerging on the issue – you can download an edited volume about the Sounds of War and Peace published a few years ago, of interest to me in its relation to memory research. A groundbreaking book by Joy Damousi, Sounds and Silence of War, is on my list to read about the topic from a cultural historian’s perspective. And now we have artists and historians record the sounds experienced in Ukraine, during the war, at very different locations and occasions. I am linking to the description of the project here, and it is worthwhile reading the essay. Some of the links to the sounds (found in the bolded titles) are working, others not so much, I believe the acoustics.net server might have limited capacity. Worth a try, though.

Here is music by a young Ukrainian composer. One of her new scores was chosen to be among the ones played by the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra for the 2023/24 season after an open call for scores this January.

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Seeking Distraction

Walk with me. Walk, I said, not run, I can’t keep up.

Running would make me tired, though, helping with sleep. Too many thoughts intruding, among them repeat disbelief when thinking about the filmed German interview of average people in an average small town wishing for the return of the NSDAP (National Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei – Hitler’s Party) while planning to vote this weekend for the right wing extremist AfD candidate in local elections. Apparently they are not extreme enough. When confronted with the question” What about the 6 million Jews murdered during the NSDAP’s rule, they shrugged. Literally shrugged. The AfD now shows 20 % in national polls.

Then again, this week saw the extremist group ˆMoms for Liberty” posting a Hitler quote in one of their newsletters. This is the group trying to get their members on every school board in the country, known for harassment campaigns against teachers, educators and parents. The group has backed bills banning transgender women and girls from playing women’s sports, and encouraged book bans. Their annual summit this year will feature multiple 2024 presidential candidates, including Donald Trump, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Also this week we have yesterday’s Supreme Court 6 : 3 decision Jones v. Hendrix, written by Clarence Thomas, that has been called a tragedy, and I cannot detect a smidgen of exaggeration. Basically you no longer have recourse in this country when you were sentenced to prison for a crime that turned out to be no crime, or for a time period that exceeds a legal limit. Habeas Corpus proceedings to correct the errors made by federal courts have been effectively denied by the right wing of the court. Justice Jackson wrote a powerful dissent, worth a read.

Meanwhile in Texas, Governor Abbot made sure that my insomnia continues: signing a new law that deprives outdoor workers of water breaks, undermining any safe guarding of the health of manual laborers. With temperatures up to 122 degrees ( 50 Grad Celsius!) this week, it is no surprise that the first workers are dying from heatstroke.

Death by maritime creatures was also on the table this week: BBC reports that the Russians have doubled their population of dolphins, trained to attack divers and/or spy, at their naval base on the Crimea naval base, that part of Ukraine they annexed illegally in 2014.

A video from 2020 is going viral again: California Kayakers getting swallowed by a humpback whale and then spit out again…. they survived. How is that going to help getting to sleep, when your kids kayak in CA???

In D.C., in the meantime, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is received with all the bells and whistles of a government courting the business opportunities and strategic relationships with the Indian Subcontinent, particularly in view of recent developments involving China. Never mind that Modi has abetted mass murder, is yielding an iron fist against any form of resistance, engages in religious persecution and has forced, bribed or persuaded mass media and social media to prevent access to any information critical of him and his government. Here is a short essay by Arundhati Roy in The Guardian that fills in the facts. I am also re-upping a link to a lecture she gave this March in Sweden on the issue of Freedom of Speech and failing democracy – a masterpiece of political thought.

And talking about democracy, before we all despair, here is some good news: last week the Michigan House and Senate both passed a package of eight election bills implementing large parts of Proposition 2, a constitutional amendment that called for numerous pro-voting changes within the Michigan Constitution. Elections matter!

In times of irritation there is always the cop out of Positive.News, a British news website that tries to make you less upset, I guess. This week I learned that a zero emissions shuttle service debuted at Glastonbury, UK, an AI pollution-preventing ‘crystal ball’ was launched to help alert swimmers in Devon when the water is too dirty, Sea Watch celebrated the return of minke whales and 60 percent of Brits now carry a reusable bottle, compared to just 20 per cent eight years ago, giving plastic bottles a shove. And no, dear British Readers, I am not making fun of this effort. Just documenting how desperately one has to look for something, anything good to counterbalance the upsetting in the world….

I also learned here that “Sleep matters for the grey matter,” with researchers from the UK and Uruguay asserting that daytime napping may help to preserve brain health by slowing the rate at which our brains shrink as we age.

That’s what I’ll do: nap. Thinking of June meadows, counting lazuli buntings and swallows instead of sheep, dolphins, humpback or minke whales.

Sleep WILL arrive. Or a shriveled brain. One or the other.

And here is a summer symphony.

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Phantom Forests

Walk with me. This time on the northern side of the Columbia River, at Catherine Creek. It is a beautiful short loop offering wide vistas to the East and West along the river, as well as impressive cliffs on the southern side straight across from where you hike.

Plenty of wildflowers around, the annual explosion of poppies,

bachelors’ buttons (in German “grain flower” or Kornblume, since it used to grow at the borders of the wheat fields,) immediately catching your attention.

Buckwheat, fork-toothed ookow and cream bush abound, intermixed with dill and bindweed.

Swathes of sweet peas.

Then there are the beautiful cluster lilies (Brodiaea elegans.)

And one of my favorites, fool’s onion.

I had come to photograph the oaks, still in fresh greenery, for my Columbia Gorge art project. What drew attention instead, or in addition, were the many dead trees. I saw mostly pines, felled by drought, which brought up thoughts to fire, no coincidence given the photographs from the East Coast, with horrendous smog drifting south from the Canadian fires this week.

These fires are raging in Quebec tree farms that are counted as carbon offset. These mono crop plantations are much prone to catastrophic burns. This year a combination of contributing factors created the catastrophe: warming temperatures led to earlier snow melt and little spring rain made the ground dry. Occasional freezing rain had weighed the trees down, with broken branches littering the forest floor, perfect tinder. Reforestation with mono crops has been the norm for remote areas previously damaged by mining, because it covers up the destruction and it generates income more quickly than waiting for a natural forest to re-emerge. “Reforestation” also enables claims that states are honoring their emissions reduction pledges in the IPCC framework.

Alas, that led to further contemplation – with an advance apology to my dear friends who have devoted part of their lives to replanting clear-cut swathes of land in order to help the environment – of a new report out of the Yale School of Environment that points to the problems with reforestation across the world.

“High-profile initiatives to plant millions of trees are being touted by governments around the world as major contributions to fighting climate change. But scientists say many of these projects are ill-conceived and poorly managed and often fail to grow any forests at all.“

The upshot of many studies says that afforestation is failing for a variety of reasons, but those failures go undocumented because there is no official follow-up to the PR actions that these plantings satisfy, and that they amount to little more than “greenwashing.”

“Cynical PR is one thing, but phantom forests are also increasingly sabotaging efforts to rein in climate change. This happens when planters claim the presumed take-up of carbon by growing forests as carbon credits. If certified by reputable bodies, these credits can count toward governments meeting their national emissions targets or be sold to industrial polluters to offset their emissions. Many corporations plan to use their purchase of carbon credits as a means of fulfilling promises to attain “net-zero” emissions. So the stakes are rising.”

If you have time to read the article, there is also a discussion on Oregon fires and general issues associated with the increased fire danger across the Western U.S. and problems with the credibility of our carbon offsets.

Heavy fare, I admit. But hey, at least this week brought some good news, with two Supreme Court decisions regarding voting rights and some guardrails for Medicaid included!

And there is always the option not to think at all and cherish the fact that the cherries are in season!

An blackberries not far behind.

Music from the Depression era reminds us of people’s resilience! Life is a bowl of cherries….

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Of love and revenge.

Alternatively, today’s musings could be titled “Of avenging orcas and lesbian gulls.”

Orcas: by now you have probably heard that parts of the Mediterranean are plagued by pods of orcas that have taken to disabling the rudders of sailboats, damaging the ships to the point where crews need to be evacuated and some boats having sunk. These are not isolated events – over 50 occurrences have been reported in just the last few months, involving a growing number of these mammals (it is believed there is only a total of about 60 orcas inhabiting that region.)

What on earth is going on in the Strait of Gibraltar? Some scientists believe that the killer whales are simply playful. A speaker for the organization OrcaIberica.org, for example, pointed out that the orcas don’t approach the boats with signs of aggression, nor display aggressive behavior during their attempts to break the rudders. They leave the people who evacuate into life boats in peace. The species is known to play and pursue fads in the process: there was a time when they all started to carry dead salmon on their heads for a while, and another one where they increasingly imitated the noises of sea lions.

Researchers at the University of St. Andrews, on the other hand, believe that a female who was hurt by a sailboat’s rudder in 2020, is modeling revenge, with more and more orcas now participating in the attacks where they bite, bend and break off the rudder, fighting off a perceived common enemy.

“Notions of collective self-defense in cetaceans (aquatic mammals including whales, dolphins and porpoises) are far from outlandish. We have accounts of sperm whales rising to each other’s defense when orcas attack, for example.”

It is assumed that the behavior spreads through social learning. What makes this so problematic, other than humans being thrown into the sea by a bunch of huge, toothed marine mammals, or destroying expensive boats, is the fact that this particular species is critically endangered. Political efforts to protect them will not be helped if people see them as actual “killer”whales, and if boat operators loose tourist income if they are simply asked to leave the marine habitat alone. Demands to cull the orcas are already emerging.

They are smart cookies. Captive orcas learn to regurgitate fish to use as bait for gulls, which they apparently prefer to eat over the fish, for example.

Which brings me to gulls – and the thought-provoking theme how science depends on societal approval, not just for funding, but even for research findings to see the light of day.

Gulls: I will summarize what you can hear on a fascinating RadioLab podcast in full. Lulu Miller, one of the hosts of RadioLab, wanted to showcase same-sex pairings in nature for Pride Month. She offers sea gulls, and many other species – and their sounds – as examples: “gay bonobo yelps usher in squeaking manatees; homosexual Amazon dolphins that love cuddling screech alongside male bottlenose dolphins who have sex (with each other) roughly 2.4 times per hour. Queer rattlesnakes and marsupials harmonize with homosexual bats who have sex upside-down while flying.” Many of these species are bisexual, but there are also small percentages of some species that are exclusively homosexual.

In the course of perusing the literature, she found how, across centuries, the scientific documentation of homosexuality in nature was suppressed. A 1999 compendium by Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, revealed to her how much evidence was omitted from the scientific publications. Suppression also almost happened to the sea gull study by George and Molly Hunt, that showed about 10% of birds nested in same sex (female) pairs, having large clutches of eggs that they cared for together. Finally published in Science in 1977, the Hunts were condemned because of the study’s implication that homosexuality was, in fact, natural. Congress intervened, temporarily blocking the National Science Foundation budget because it had partially funded the Hunts’ research.

The (religious) denial that queerness exists in nature happens even in the face of findings that homosexuality can have adaptive advantage. (Well, I guess any concept associated with evolution is suspect…) For black swans, for example, heterosexual pairings experience a 30 percent cygnet (baby swan) survival rate, while homosexual pairs fledge 80 percent. Male-male pairs tend to commandeer larger pond territories, leaving them with more and better space for rearing their clutch. (Ref.) Miller, the podcast host, suggests that

“It’s not just swans who experience a version of this bisexual advantage. In many species, sexual fluidity enhances “conflict resolution, stress relief, hunting alliances, social fitness, pleasure, and survival rate of offspring.”

Let’s imagine, though, just for sake of thinking it through, that these scientific observations were different. Let’s imagine, perhaps, that we found that homosexuality was only observed in our species, Homo sapiens. That would not for an instant shake my view that condemnations of human homosexuality are offensive and utterly indefensible. In other words, the value judgment here has (and should have) roots that are deeper, more resolute, than the scientific findings! The science is intriguing, and may deepen our understanding of many points, but on this issue (and many others) human values about differences, inherited or chosen, need to have their foundation in immutable principles, not in the scientists’ observations of similar differences in the animal kingdom.

In case all this depletes your mood on a perfectly fine Monday morning, do I have the antidote for you: this clip of a flying squirrel getting out of a pickle made me laugh out loud. Nature at its best. (Of course, I couldn’t help but wonder: is this AI generated? We’ll never know.)

Music helps us dream of the seaside.

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A Lover of the Meadows and the Woods…

…Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

Meadows filled with daisies.

Walk with me while we can figure out the remainder of the (loooong)William Wordsworth poem Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey. Just as his title points to a familiarity with a specific place, so you should recognize one of my perennial go-to places: the meadows along the Tualatin River. (Do read the poem, it is bitter-sweet and remarkably un-sentimental reminiscing.)

The meadows were in bloom, covered with daisies, sprinkled with lupines, mallow, morning glory, dog roses, clover and whatever else coloring the world in loose, saturated carpets.

The birds were about, as were the musk rats, chasing annoyed ducks.

Killdeer

Robin with lunc

Red winged black birds and kestrel.

Gosling wherever you looked, with very attentive mothers.

And two herons chasing each other, until one gave up and the other landed right in from of my nose and camera. Yours truly, perhaps not a sufficiently moral being, but at that moment a very happy one.

Farmers tilled the dusty soil, reminding us once again what is at stake in an increasingly heated world (it was 73 degrees yesterday during this walk, first day of June, in Oregon, need I say more?.)

Yes I need to say more: how on earth did Manchin get his dirty pipeline deal expedited into the debt ceiling bill? What was it that made President Biden cooperate on this demand? So much for the administration’s promises to support clean energy rather than fossil fuels, along with allowing cuts or restrictions to food programs and other assistance for vulnerable Americans.

I will not spell out what I hope Manchins’ and his ilk’s destiny will be, but here are the Norns weaving a thrilling hope for destiny…. (from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung)

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