Category: Haupt’s Crow Planet

The “Essential Wisdom” that Haupt promotes in the second chapter of her book is one I’ll have to admit I probably often overlook. Because I’m a lover of Nature, I’m afraid I too am guilty of romanticizing Nature as Haupt points out:

ln his essay Home Economics, agrarian writer Wendell Berry defines nature this way: “What we call nature is, in a sense, the sum of the changes made by all the various creatures and natural forces in their intricate actions and influences upon each other and their places.” In other words, for humans, how we live where we live is what makes us part of a natural ecosystem. It is also the source of our most profound impact on the more-than-human world. We love our vision of untouched nature and cling tightly to images of pristine wilderness or desert or ocean as solace for our souls, as places of peace and transcendent beauty to which we can turn as a diversion from our cluttered, material lives. We believe ourselves to be intimately connected to wild places, as indeed we are.

When I think of Nature, I do envision wildernesses I’ve hiked and backpacked in the last forty years not my backyard. I imagine most people do. I’ve donated more money to organizations like the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, or The Nature Conservancy than to organizations like Environmental Defense.

I suspect that Haupt herself has occasionally been guilty of seeing Nature this way:

Too often, though, nature is romanticized as the place out there, the place with all the sparkly trees in the Sierra Club calendar, the place we visit with a knapsack and a Cliff Bar, where we stand in awe of the beauty and refresh our spirits. But it is a kind of hubris to pretend that we come to such places unencumbered, that we can leave behind the snares, entanglements, and activities of our everyday lives and return to a kind of purity when we drive our SUVs (or even our hybrids) up to the hills for a subalpine-meadow hike, no matter how far we walk. Such sojourns are nourishing and necessary, but it remains our daily lives, in the places we live, that make us ecosystemic creatures; these are the seat of our most meaningful interactions with, and impact upon, the wider, wilder earth. We are connected by the ways that we choose, consume, and share water, food, shelter, and air-just like all the other animals. We cherish the few, sweet days we manage to escape to places we consider true wilderness, but the most essential things we can do for the deeply wild earth have to do with how we eat, how we drive, where we walk, and how we choose every moment of our quotidian urban lives.

This almost makes me feel guilty about wanting to visit parts of the country I haven’t managed to see before, i.e. my recent trip to New Mexico and Arizona. However, I’ve long been aware that the way I live, the economic choices I make, affect the world I live in. My son referred to me as a “granola” when he was in high school, and I was proud to claim the title. A life-long city gardener, I discovered Rodale and organic gardening nearly forty years ago and started recycling long before it was collected along with the garbage. My Honda CRX got fifty miles per gallon long before people seemed concerned about gas consumption.

I still have a hard time thinking of Tacoma and Seattle as “Nature,” but I agree with Haupt that our everyday life plays a critical part in altering, destroying, or consuming nature:

When we allow ourselves to think of nature as something out there, we become prey to complacency. If nature is somewhere else, then what we do here doesn’t really matter. Jennifer Price writes in Flight Maps, her eloquent critique of romanticized nature, that modern Americans use an idea of Nature Out There to ignore our ravenous uses of natural resources. “If I don’t think of a Volvo as nature, then can’t I buy and drive it to Nature without thinking very hard about how I use, alter, destroy, and consume nature?” In my urban ecosystem, I drive around a corner and a crow leaps into flight from the grassy parking strip. We startle each other. If nature is out There, she asks, then what am I?

My camping and hiking trips stand out in my memory, but the time I spend doing those things is dwarfed by the time I spend driving my car back and forth to the YMCA, the grocery story, or the mall. And that is dwarfed by the time spent on my computer or watching television. It’s naive to believe that the time I spend NOT camping or hiking doesn’t determine my overall effect on the ecosystem.

When I wrote about Lynda Lynn Haupt’s Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds in October of 2006 I ended my discussion with this quotation:

E. 0. Wilson wrote in Biophilia, his classic text on the innate human connection with the wider, living earth, “Every species is a magic well,” a window onto all others. As an urban dweller I am forced to come to grips with the idea that I might turn to the starling as easily as any other species for lessons in living with and alongside birds and the natural world. I consider the unique landscape of the Pacific Northwest to be my wider home, but every day I live in an urban cottage, not an ancient forest, a coastal prairie, or a heavenly alpine meadow. Those places surround me, they are my authentic home, inhabited by the lives of astonishing birds. I like to think that in the widest sense we are in the presence of all these birds, always. But today, we start where we are.

Little did I realize then that this passage presaged her next book Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness. In Crow Planet she uses the ordinary crow as a “magic well,” a window into her relationship to the world. It’s a delightful, thought-provoking work that reminds me of old favorites like Thoreau while leading forward to new discoveries like Aldo Leopold.

The first chapter entitled “Crows and Kairos” focuses on the ecological challenges that our world faces. She uses the Greek word “kairos” to describe our present situation:

There are two Greek words for time. One is chronos, which refers to the usual, quantifiable sequential version of time by which we monitor and measure our days. The other word is kairos, which denotes an unusual period in human history when eternal time breaks in upon chronological time. Kairos is “the appointed time,” an opportune moment, even a time of crisis, that creates an opportunity for, and in fact demands, a human response. lt is a time brimming with meaning, a time more potent than “normal” time. We live in such a time now, when our collective actions over the next several years will decide whether earthly life will continue its descent into ecological ruin and death or flourish in beauty and diversity.

Describing our precarious position as “an opportune moment” may motivate some readers who have been numbed by the constant environmental warnings to renew efforts to preserve a world they may well love as much as Haupt does.

Calling it an opportune moment, however, does not alter the magnitude of the challenge facing us, which Haupt also readily admits:

We live on a changing earth where ecological degradation and global climate change threaten the most foundational biological processes. If the evolution of wild life is to continue in a meaningful way, humans must attain a changed habit of being, one that allows us to recognize and act upon a sense of ourselves as integral to the wider earth community. … In spite of the string of magazine covers announcing the contrary, we all know that ten simple things will not save the earth. There are, rather, three thousand impossible things that all of us must do, and changing our light bulbs, while necessary, is the barest beginning. We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define our individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want.

Perhaps the true extent of our problem is indicated by the fact that many who claim to love Nature most feel it’s necessary to drive to National Parks in gas-guzzling Motorhomes and run generators all night long to cool/heat the monstrosity so they can watch television on their DirectTV or sleep comfortably. If this is the best we can manage the environment is in serious danger.

Don’t be confused. This book makes no attempt to suggest direct solutions to our environmental problems. It does, however, suggest changes in attitude that are necessary before the problems can be solved:

In the environmental classic A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold proffered a touchstone by which to judge human activity, one that most first-year ecology students have memorized: ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Eco-philosophy has come a long way in the sixty years since Leopold, but no one has managed to improve on his simple measure. In his use of the gentle, open-ended word tends, Leopold recognizes that such things are not cut and dried. But he does realize that we cannot judge the leanings of our actions, whether they tend toward preservation or otherwise, from a vantage of pure abstraction, from an urban existence cut off entirely from the cycles of nature. The reckoning Leopold asks of us requires the cultivation of insight based in attention, knowledge, and intimacy. It asks that we pay loving attention to the places we live, to understand their intricate net of connections with the wider earth.

It is this “loving attention to the places we live” that Haupt hopes to generate through her book, though she has chosen an unusual way to try to generate it, as even she seems to realize. Admitting that the crows seem to have chosen her and not the other way around, she argues that we have much to learn about our “urban wilderness” from crows:

Crows can show us how certain wild, nonhuman animals live-what they need, how they speak, how they walk, and how they tip their heads in that special sideways manner to sip the slenderest bit of rainwater. They make us notice just how many of them there are getting to be, to realize that as humans generate the conditions that allow crow populations to grow, many other wild animal species, birds in particular, are present in far fewer numbers and others are gone completely. Crows are wild beings in our midst, even as they point to the wildness that we cannot see and have lost. Their abundance holds a warning but also a promise: no matter how urban or suburban, how worldly-wise and wilderness-blind, no matter how drastically removed we as a culture and as individuals may have become from any sense of wilderness or wildness or the splendid exuberance of nature, we will nevertheless be thrust, however unwittingly, into the presence of a native wild creature on a near-daily basis. This means that, if we are willing to tolerate our crow-related uneasiness and accept certain lessons, there is hope. Hope that we can renew our sense of natural connectedness and integrity. Hope that we can learn another kind of attention that is deeper, wilder, more creative, more native, more difficult, and far more beautiful than that which has come to be accepted as adequate.

As I’ve noted before, I’ve long been a crow fan, not to mention a Raven and Magpie fan, so Haupt didn’t have to sell me on them, though I learned more about them from reading her book than I would probably have learned from a lifetime of personal observation.

I think since I took about birding recently I’ve already discovered that the Puget Sound is a zoopolis,

Crows remind us that we make our homes not in a vacuum, but in a zoopolis, a place where human and wild geographies meet and mingle. They press us to our own wilder edges. They may step along our sidewalks, but in the next moment they fly off the path. If we want to watch them well, we will have to leave our own accustomed paths, the cultivated places, the neat edges of our yards and minds. We will find that our lives are not as impoverished as we’ve been told they are; the sidewalk is not as straight as we thought.

and that discovery has certainly enriched my life connecting me to this place in ways that I’ve never felt before, or, at least, not since I was a child.

Despite what many may interpret as a pessimistic introduction, it seems to me that the real power of this book is that it’s inspirational for Haupt ends her book with:

I am no ecological Pollyanna. I have borne, and will continue to bear, feelings of wholehearted melancholy over the ecological state of the earth. How could I not? How could anyone not? But I am unwilling to become a hand-wringing nihilist, as some environmental “realists” seem to believe is the more mature posture. Instead, I choose to dwell, as Emily Dickinson famously suggested, in possibility, where we cannot predict what will happen but we make space for it, whatever it is, and realize that our participation has value. This is a grown-up optimism, where our bondedness with the rest of creation, a sense of profound interaction, and a belief in our shared ingenuity give meaning to our lives and actions on behalf the more-than-human world.

The book, like birding itself, inspires me, reminding me of the wondrous world we live in while making me want to share that wonder with others. Needless to say, it seems impossible to feel that way without wanting to preserve that source of wonder.