The Field

April Cleanup: bones; bad news at the fox den; help from my niece

So this is what the field looks like when I go three months without cleaning.  Well, I suppose it’s nice to be needed.  Not really.  Picked up 4 fat bags of trash today, 7 golf balls.  I spent about three hours just working on the hill, which I might usually spend thirty minutes on.  On the hill, I found what appears to be a cow femur.  Odd, since the nearest cow is at least one or two miles away.  It’s mostly clean and white, yet not desiccated, so it’s somewhat fresh.  One end was broken, the marrow eaten out, and it’s clearly been gnawed on.  I can’t imagine a coyote bringing down a full grown cow; perhaps one died by some other means, and the coyotes simply didn’t let it go to waste, and one strong-necked coyote decided to trot one all the way over here.

Under the stump of the tree wreck, I found the skull belonging to the animal whose bones I described some months ago.  I had found the mandible previously, but not the skull.  Now, it was just laying there.  It must either be a fox or a raccoon skull.  I thought a fox, but perhaps the nose is a bit short.  At the same place, beneath the cottonwood stump, I also noticed tiny, delicate bones, and found the inch-long jawbone of a field mouse (or some similar small rodent).  The fallen tree almost seems like a graveyard of some sort, a hallowed spot.  Later, as I walked toward the center of the field to grab a conspicuous bag, I was surprised to see another skull on the grass.  This one had a relatively short nose and large eyes.  Perhaps it was a raccoon, or a domestic cat, although I thought it was rather large for a cat.  These are the only skulls I’ve ever seen in the field.  (I didn’t take them, of course, as I think it’s better and more respectful to leave them in nature.  I took pictures of them.)

As the afternoon wore on I worked my way across the hill, west to east, and came near the fox den.  I hadn’t seen them lately, and wondered if there were any kits this year.  Kids have sledded on the hill very near the den this winter, crushing down all the tall grass, and I wondered if the lack of cover might have convinced them not to use the den this year.  Instead, I happened to stumble onto the den itself, a place I’ve always avoided before out of consideration for the foxes, and I worked the hill.  What I found outraged me.  Some bastard had plugged two entrances to the den with large rocks and wood.  A third hole, a little removed, was still clear.  Who would do this?  The sentiment I’ve seen in the past is positive, even protective, of the foxes and their cute little ones.  Who would want to get rid of our foxes?  Hopefully they weren’t in there when the exits were plugged.  What kind of person would do that?  I suppose the foxes just had to den somewhere else this year.  Thanks a lot, jerk.  It only takes a few malicious humans to mess things up.  I hope the foxes come back. I unplugged the den.  I’m sure something will move in; it’s too nice a hole in the ground to remain vacant. 

As I was finishing up the hill, I was called home to look after my niece while my folks went out.  She was sitting close to the TV, pouring honey into the palm of her hand and eating it.  After Spongebob and yet another episode of some very not-funny children’s sitcom, I got her to put on some jeans and come out with me.  She didn’t seem to mind – she was very helpful and even energetic.  I showed her the skulls and we hypothesized about what they might be.  We picked up near the prairie dogs and along the creek, past the playground, which she didn’t even seem interested to go play on – I think she was actually engaged in tromping around the creek and picking up trash.  She was surprised at the number of pop cans, wondered where all this stuff comes from, and started finding golf balls, which we counted.  We got a lot more done than I thought would be possible before dark; she quickly and thoroughly picked up several sections of the creek.  By the time we got to the old bridge over the creek, though, it was nearly dark.  And the place was a mess, dozens of pieces of Styrofoam littering the little water hole there, and teenager associated garbage over by their little spot under the trees – even a garbage can.  We picked up what we could before it got dark and headed back.  I had needed to open another bag as we worked along the creek, so I picked up that one as we went back, and she volunteered to carry the lighter bag, though it looked too big for her.  It was dark as we headed home, but I felt I’d done something good by getting her out from under the TV for a while, and she didn’t seem to mind.  And the field is four bags cleaner.

Response to “The Unjust War against Population”

In this essay Jacqueline Kasun argues that the popular belief that human population growth endangers human wellbeing is overblown, that the arguments for it are irrational and not supported by evidence, and that, in fact, population growth is a good thing.  She says that contrary to dire predictions, economic growth and standards of living have only increased as the population has increased, and that mineral and energy resources are essentially unlimited, not growing scarcer.  She says that arguments for population control are socialist in nature, and that market economics provide a better way of dealing with scarcity.  She also chides those who fear increasing populations for being misanthropic – rather than too many people, “what the population alarmists really mean is that there are too many other people for their tastes, or for those who prefer solitude.”  Hunger is not a serious problem and the earth is capable of supporting many more people – 35, or 40 billion, perhaps 100 billion on a Japanese diet.  Human labor and ingenuity are resources that increase with population, and the economy benefits in many ways.  If natural resources are limited, “The limits are so far beyond the levels of our present use of resources as to be nearly invisible.”  Not only is there no problem, things are going great, and will only get better.

Kasun’s essay is provocative, and lays out the Cornucopian argument well.  If she’s right, then there’s really no need for me to attend my Environmental Ethics class or have any concern for the environment because everything is just going extremely well.  More people equal more resources for generating wealth, so things couldn’t be better!  The problem I see in the cornucopian view is in the economic abstraction of its argument.  She talks about absolute volume of humans versus absolute volume of resources on the earth’s crust and sees no problem.  Everyone could fit into Texas, or even have standing room in an area smaller than Jacksonville, Florida.  But what does that mean?  Does a figure like that have any relevancy whatsoever?  I know I’m not moving to Texas.  We spread out, and we affect a much larger land area than we actually occupy – resources are extracted from unoccupied lands, the disturbance from building a road extends over a much broader area than the road itself; our pollution travels through the air and across the world’s oceans, currents carry our trash to the shores of uninhabited islands, etc. 

The rosy prediction of preserving nearly half the world’s land area while supporting a population of 35-100 billion does not say which lands would be preserved or used.  It would seem the protected 50% would have to be the most unproductive and uninhabitable regions – Antarctica, Greenland, the Sahara (regions which also happen to support the least biodiversity) because that many people would require most of the world’s tropical and temperate land for settlement and agriculture.  Would there be any forests or grasslands remaining?  True, there is enough coal that we could burn it for another thousand years or more.  But burning coal throws mercury, among other things, into the atmosphere, which ends up on the land and in the water and accumulates in animals – there’s already so much of it in fish that eating certain species has become inadvisable for children and pregnant women. 

Kasun’s argument (and the cornucopian viewpoint in general) doesn’t even mention endangered species, because doing so would mean admitting that we are causing real problems, that population growth is creating habitat destruction and over exploitation of many species, and that their purely anthropocentric model would lead to the extinction of most of the worlds endangered species (if not most of its animals and plants in general) many of whom require large, relatively undisturbed wildernesses to survive.  And what quality of life could humans expect in such a world?  A maximum agricultural output across the globe might be able to sustain that many people, but at what standard of living?  Having lost most of the beauty and diversity of nature, would people be happy with SUV's and iPods, and could such items even be produced for so many without creating such an overload of pollution and environmental devastation that even the people of the global megalopolis would not be able to survive? I think the question is not so much whether we could generate 100 billion humans, but whether we should want to. 

Coyotes in the field

It's a travesty that I haven't been down to the field in the last month, whether to clean or just walk around.  I blame school.  There's probably a new generation of foxes playing around the den, but I wouldn't know!  I do know, however, that there are coyotes in the field, because they've been howling up a storm late at night.  It's amazing how many different animals can inhabit such a small field, whether permanently or transiently.  I'm sure that the coyotes, like the foxes, use corridors to move through the neighborhood and developed areas to get to undeveloped "islands" like the field.  If they can help support mammals as large as a coyote, little fragments of open space like this may be even more valuable than I'm always saying.  I don't doubt that they spend more time at larger nearby open spaces, like Westminster Hills and Standley Lake, but there's no doubt that they're benefiting from the field right now.

I have been thinking about posting some stuff I've written for school...