Zero-Sum Game

Remember those stories, from what seems like a century ago, about dolphins swimming in the canals of Venice? I fell for them, even though they were absurd. Why would dolphins want to enter those narrow canals when they have the entire Adriatic to disport themselves in?

But the reason that so many of us fell for the story is that it corroborates the consoling idea that Nature, given half a chance, immediately begins to recover. In fact, many cities are seeing cleaner air as a result of stay-at-home rules. Here in Vermont, with traffic noise drastically reduced, I’ve never heard so much bird song. It’s an anything but silent spring.

While coyotes roam the empty streets of San Francisco and Chicago, around our cottage the foxes are flourishing. Yesterday evening I watched one kill a squirrel right under our bird feeder, and head up the hill to his den across the road. I told myself that his wife and four children would eat a good dinner, but the violence of the killing, although it was over in seconds, stayed with me.

I stood at the sink washing my hands for the umpteenth time and repeating my hand-washing metta: may all beings be safe, may all beings be healthy, may all beings be content, may all beings live with ease. But for whose safety and contentment was I praying, the fox’s or the squirrel’s? I couldn’t have both: if the squirrel is safe, the fox goes hungry; for the fox to live with ease, the squirrel must die. And it doesn’t stop there: when the squirrel eats the acorn, the future oak perishes. When the fox dies, its flesh melts into the earth and feeds the tree.

Everything comes at a cost. The clean air of the city is paid for by the cab drivers with no fares, and by the mountains of packaging materials overflowing the dumps. In factory farms across the country, thousands of pigs are being reprieved, while the workers who would have butchered and processed them at the now-closed Smithfield plant in South Dakota sicken and grow poorer by the day.

Is there no way out of this zero-sum game? Not, I think, as long as there are so many of us on this earth. And even if by some miracle all the visions of Margaret Sanger, Bill McKibben, Al Gore, and Rachel Carson were to come true at once, death would still be the necessary condition of life.

But to be human means, almost by definition, living with the illusion that we are exempt from the turning of the wheel. In our frantic culture, normal life allows us to maintain that illusion. But in this spring’s eerie silence (except for the birds), distractions are harder to come by.

And so between watching the fox on the prowl, and worrying about the sick and the unemployed, I strive to accustom myself to the image of my flesh dissolving and my molecules gently dispersing for the benefit and nourishment of something or someone. Does this seem morbid and medieval? I don’t think it is. Rather, I suspect that getting comfortable with this vision is where true ease and contentment lie.

Life Before Plastic

When the first factory-made men’s shirts arrived from America to Quito, Ecuador in the late 1950s, they came in clear plastic bags. I don’t know which of my classmates first realized the potential of the bags as ultra-modern, super-cool book carriers, but when she showed up in school with her books neatly encased in one of those bags, we all longed for the day when we too could discard our hand-tooled leather satchels and replace them with plastic bags.

When my mother finally bought one of those shirts, she let me have the bag. I remember carefully sliding my books and notebooks into it, and admiring the effect of my school things neatly contained by a material that, like Cinderella’s glass slipper, simultaneously protected and revealed them.

But my plastic bag was as fragile as the glass slipper, and after a while the corners of my books made holes in it. I didn’t much care, however, because by then my parents and I were packing our suitcases for our new home in the land of plastic, America.

Before those bags, for the first thirteen years of my life, in Spain and later in Ecuador, I had lived a plastic-free existence. The objects that surrounded me were made of wood, metal, glass, stone, wool, cotton, clay, paper, straw, rubber, or celluloid.

Other than paper, very little was ever thrown away, and objects like the red clay pan in which the maid washed the dishes, or the long bag of unbleached cotton in which she brought the bread home from the bakery, had been around since before my birth, and I thought of them as sort of second-class members of the family.

Other than as containers for dried flower arrangements, who uses baskets anymore? But all through my childhood the eggs, almonds, cherries and sausages that my grandmother shipped to Barcelona weekly from her farm came by train in a deep two-handled wicker basket covered with burlap, and both basket and burlap were piously preserved and returned to her by that same train.

When my mother went to the fish market she carried a flatter basket, its handle looped over her arm. I had a basket of my own, a smaller version of my mother’s.

I loved the fishwives, goddesses who sat enthroned above their displays, wearing blood-spattered white aprons decorated with broad bands of lace.

Fish of all sizes and colors, squid, octopuses, mussels and clams were arranged mandala-like on round wicker trays, and gleamed as brightly as the rose window of a gothic cathedral. After my mother had made her choice, the peixatera would wrap up for me a single iridescent blue sardine, to carry home in my own little basket.

The Mediterranean of my childhood was crammed with fish, one of the few reliable bounties in those hardscrabble, post-civil war years. Now it, like the rest of the waters on the planet, is having the life choked out of it by millions of tons of plastic—fish-ensnaring, habitat-poisoning, indestructible plastic, most of it in the form of plastic bags.

The plastic bags that had seemed so rare and precious to my schoolmates and me in 1958 have become the banner of environmental destruction. Things must change, and soon. In the words of Joanna Macy, “While the agricultural revolution took centuries, and the industrial revolution took generations, this ecological revolution has to happen within a matter of a few years.”  (quoted by Richard Rohr)

The scope of the disaster is so enormous that I often want to just give up. But if optimism is the only moral choice, then I must act as if my efforts count. So in my own small battle for the survival of the planet, I keep my flag—a well-worn New Yorker canvas bag—in the back of the car, and proudly fly it when I walk into a store.

Birds And Cats

First, a confession: I am the previous owner of several outdoor cats. I believed I was doing the right thing. My cats were neutered. They had food, shelter, and regular vet visits. They were free to climb trees and chase butterflies. I loved to watch them stalking in the garden like miniature tigers.

When the first one, black Grendel, came back from one of his nights on the town with one ear and half his face torn off, I rushed him to the vet, who managed to sew him back together. Soon after that, Grendel went away again and never came back.

The next one, an orange kitten named Gato, somehow broke his leg while playing in the garden. The vet put it in a cast. When the cast came off, Gato went exploring, and we never saw him again.

Mitsou was an exquisite chocolate-point Siamese. Her head and face were round, a throwback to the days before anorexic-looking, sunken-cheeked cats reminiscent of runway models became fashionable. In love with her looks, and tired of losing cats, I kept her indoors, where she ruled the household, especially the dogs, for seventeen years.

I adopted Pascal, a black and white kitten who had been abandoned by his mother, before his eyes opened. He had to be fed every two hours, so I put him in a cardboard box and took him to the office. After each feeding I would take him to the bathroom where I would enact a mother cat’s attentions by wiping his nether regions with a washcloth dipped in warm water.

As Pascal grew, and grew, so did his affection for me. I could not sit down without huge, rangy Pascal flinging himself on top of me, purring and kneading and drooling, eyes half-closed in bliss. If I had left the back door open, I doubt that he would have chosen to leave my side. But I didn’t. Pascal was an indoor cat.

But then we moved to a suburb of DC and I had a long commute, which meant that we had to install a dog door so the dog could let himself out to the fenced-in yard during the day, which also meant that Pascal became an indoor-outdoor cat.

He had a grand time, and became an expert hunter of moles, something that neither his mother nor I had ever taught him. His record was nine moles in a single evening, which he laid in a row next to my lawn chair while I sat watching the sunset.

But within six months he was dead--poisoned, we think, by licking antifreeze off somebody’s driveway.

You see where this is going?

While many an indoor cat lives as long as twenty years, the average lifespan of an outdoor cat is two to three years. Needless to say, my present top-predator-in-residence, Telemann, lives strictly indoors.

But Telemann’s safety is only half the reason why I keep him in the house. The other half is the welfare of the innocent chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, rose-breasted grosbeaks, goldfinches and woodpeckers who come to our feeders.

There is no doubt in my mind that, despite his exquisite diet of raw turkey, given five minutes in the yard sweet Telemann would turn into a bird-killing machine. According to the Bird Conservancy, in the U.S. cats kill approximately 2.4 BILLION birds a year. This makes cat predation the largest human-caused threat to birds (human-caused because we’re the ones who let the cats outside).

With a pane of glass between them, however, Telemann and my birds coexist peacefully. It didn’t take long for the birds to figure out that the kitten swatting at them just inches away from the feeder was prevented by some invisible magic from catching them.

For Telemann, the birds outside the window are just another joy in the joy-filled life that we strive to provide for him. When they are eating, he leaps from windowsill to windowsill to get the best view, looking fierce and waving his tail like a tiger on the hunt.

And then there are the squirrels, gray like him and almost his size, bold enough to “touch” noses through the glass. They are the big game, the zebras and wildebeest of Telemann’s savannas.

Is Telemann frustrated because he can’t crunch on the neck of a titmouse, or sever a squirrel’s spine? Probably. It is in Telemann’s nature to enjoy killing things, just as it is in mine to enjoy eating the flesh of lobsters boiled alive. But I don’t, and I survive the deprivation, and so does he. Telemann and I already have almost too much pleasure in our lives.

But the birds, those little harmless beautiful bits of Nature, are threatened everywhere by the loss of woods and fields and bugs and wildflowers. They suffer from sudden and bizarre weather events. And they are eaten by the small tigers that we love. They need all the help they can get. 

So Telemann does his bit by staying inside, and I do mine every morning, when I clean his litter box.

Yak Glovelettes

Shopping for clothes these days is complicated.  It used to be that all I had to worry about was finding something that looked and felt good on me, but now when I buy so much as a t-shirt I worry that on its way from the farthest corners of the globe it has consumed its weight in fossil fuels and left polluted rivers and impoverished villages in its wake.

So I am grateful when designers demonstrate awareness of ethical and environmental matters.  Gudrun Sjoden offers "Swedish design with a green soul."  Eileen Fisher's site showcases a collection of progressive corporate practices, encompassing employee health and happiness, environmental responsibility, and efforts to empower women in developing countries.

Why then did I snort with derision at a certain item in Eileen Fisher's latest flyer?  The model is wearing a jacket of boiled wool and made-in-the-USA organic cotton jeans, and her hands are warmed by fingerless "glovelettes."  The glovelettes are "encrusted with crystals...[and] knit with yak herded by nomads."

Yak indeed.  And not, God forbid, feed-lot yak, or yak herded by people who go back to their village every night, but yak herded by nomads.  Remember the three wise men crossing the desert on camels with their cargo of gifts?  It used to be you had to be the Son of God to rate such exotic goods, but now all you have to do is point and click.

I mean, really.  It's just a pair of gloves.

And yet, I know that nomadism as a way of life is disappearing from the planet, and soon highways and suburbs and slums will obliterate the high pastures where the nomads wandered with their herds.  So maybe buying gloves knit from nomad-herded yak is not just silly, but an act of kindness to the nomad and his yaks and the grasslands with their earthworms and their bees.

Can it be that shopping these days has become a spiritual act?  I think it has, and that's o.k.  In this cold and soulless world, we have to take our spirituality wherever we can get it.

Department Of True Confessions: My Fur Coat

It's hanging in the entrance closet, under a tailor-made cover with my name embroidered on it.  I've had it since the year I turned forty, a gift from my spouse.

It was supposed to signify that I had finally attained maturity, intellectual ripeness and maybe even common sense, and that he and I, together, had by sheer dint of sweat and some tears excavated the basement and were now adding floors to the house of our marriage:  children on the verge of adolescence, careers on the upswing, future looking o.k.  It was the 80s, and people wore fur then.

The coat wasn't a surprise, since it had to be fitted and adjusted to my measurements.  We shopped for it together, over a period of months, going from fur store to fur store in Baltimore.  We'd walk into those silent, carpeted rooms and were instantly attended by a salesman (never, for some reason, a saleswoman) while I tried to exude a self-confident urban chic that my academic weeds belied.

The salesman would look me over, then disappear and return holding what looked like a large animal limp in his arms.  Holding the coat by the shoulders he would sweep it insouciantly over the carpet and then  ruffle the fur the wrong way with his hand, in the exact gesture that cats despise.

I felt terribly nervous.  What were we doing, proposing to spend x amount of dollars on a winter coat?  Didn't I already own a perfectly serviceable parka?  But, hey, I was turning forty, and it was the 1980s.

One thing I was sure of:  I did not want mink.  Mink was of my mother's generation, and I wanted a fur that was more hip.  Coyote and fox were too dog-like.  Sable was out of our price range, as were marten and ermine.  That left--and I am beating my breast as I write--seal.

Not the pure white coat of the baby seal, but the deep, even, chocolate brown fur of the adult, short and velvety and delicious to the touch.  Its raised collar caressed my cheeks like a butterfly.  Its cuffs tickled my wrists.  And from shoulders to mid-calf I felt enveloped in a softness that was at once cool and amazingly warm.  We bought the seal coat.

What makes us do these things?  I have no idea.  All I can say is that, while I would not have bought something made from an animal that I knew to be endangered, such as an ocelot, I wore that seal coat as unthinkingly as I ate hamburgers at McDonald's or put newspapers in the garbage.  Those were the days.

But they didn't last, thank goodness.  By the time the decade was over, the horrors of the fur trade had been made public, and urban fur-wearers were routinely spattered with paint the color of blood.  On cold days I found myself reaching for a wool jacket, or my trusty old parka.

It's been a quarter century since I last wore that coat.  Although it makes me uneasy to see it hanging in my closet--I should do something with it, but what?--I'm glad that things have changed.  I'm glad that nobody--nobody I know, anyway--wears fur anymore.  I'm glad that many people think twice now before eating industrially-produced beef.  I'm glad that almost everybody recycles.

And on days when I feel that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, when the climate is warming and Egypt is exploding, I think of the fur coat languishing in my closet and say to myself that, at least in some things, we have made progress.

Crime Against Nature

At this time of the year, apple growers around here are out of fruit.

Conventionally-grown apples are at the top of every list of foods you should not eat, so today at the grocery store I bought four organic apples.  They were not cheap, and they probably came from out West somewhere, but at least I thought I was doing the right thing--safeguarding our health and supporting organic growers, wherever they might be.

Back in my kitchen, imagine my surprise when, about to take a bite of my apple, I noticed the little sticker on it.  It said:  Argentina.  My apple had traveled ten thousand miles from Argentina to Vermont.

From the orchard it had gone by truck to the farm house, then by another truck to the packing plant, and finally another truck to the airport, where it had been put on a plane.  It had flown over the dwindling Amazon jungle, over the Caribbean where the coral is dying, and then over endless  American suburbs to finally land in Albany, NY.  From there more trucks had taken it  through the farm country of Washington County to our supermarket near the border with Vermont.  Its last trip was in our gray Subaru.

I ate the apple anyway.  It was delicious, sweet and crisp, as good as the ones I grow myself.  But was it really worth all those trucks, and that ten-thousand mile flight?

Here I was, trying to do the right thing and ended up committing a crime against Nature.  I hope She understands that my intentions were pure.

The Education Of Women

"The education of women is the best way to save the environment."  E. O. Wilson

Plastic Nations

When I was in middle-school in Ecuador, in the late 1950s, it became fashionable among the girls in my class to carry books in transparent plastic bags.  Even among the privileged classes--many of my classmates' families owned huge tracts of land and had dozens of servants--plastic was scarce and prestigious.

You know how it is at that age--whatever the cool kids are doing, you want to do it too.  We were in the country only temporarily, owned no land and had only one live-in maid (in Ecuador even maids had maids in those days).  For months I longed for a clear plastic bag until my father happened to buy a ready-made shirt and let me have the bag it came in.

I thought I was just being cool at the time.  I didn't know I was recycling.

The other day I learned that Americans throw away 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour.  Even if some of those are recycled, that is a lot of bottles.  So many in fact that, along with assorted debris and contributions from other nations, they are forming big islands of floating garbage in the oceans.  UNESCO recently announced its plan to recognize one of these islands as a new state, "Garbage Patch," just to make a point.

A while ago I took stock of the plastic consumption in our house.  We didn't use many bottles, and most of those could be recycled.  But plastic bags--that's where we sinned.  I'm not talking about the occasional bag that we put our groceries in when we forgot to take along the New Yorker canvas tote, but about the dozens of thick plastic freezer bags that I used while carrying out my most earth-friendly endeavor:  preserving veggies from my garden.

Every year at harvest time I used to buy several boxes of freezer bags in pint and gallon sizes.  And whenever I took spinach or chard or kale out of the freezer, I would throw the bag away, until I realized that there was no reason to.  Only veggies blanched in water go into these bags--no oils or grease or meat.  Why couldn't I reuse them?  I began rinsing the bags thoroughly, drying them, crossing out the old labels, and storing them in a drawer until summer.  I've done this for the past year, and we haven't died of botulism yet.

Every few months I make a six loaves of zucchini or rhubarb bread, which I freeze in gallon bags.  After I take one of these loaves out of the freezer, I put the empty bag back in, crumbs and all, to await the next batch of bread.  The bags stay constantly frozen, and it hasn't done us any harm to reuse them in this way.

Recycling, I often think, is the last moral act left to those of us who who haven't sold all we have to go feed starving babies in Haiti.  I try to remember this every time we load up the car with a couple of months' worth of consumerist detritus and make our way over rutted back roads to the nearest dump.  I imagine myself on my death bed, looking back on my comfortable and essentially selfish life.  And I hope that I'll be able to take consolation from knowing that I did my best not to add to the territory of those floating plastic nations.

Frog Update

Frogs, and amphibians in general, are among the most endangered animals on the planet. They suffer from climate change, habitat destruction, and environmental pollution and are afflicted by a multitude of ills, among which are some pretty horrible physical deformities.

Our frogs, on the other hand, are doing just fine. These are the frogs that came out of the woods behind the house and started moving into our fishpond the same day the builders departed. They came by twos, then by threes, and now are too numerous to count. And they are growing in size--when they first showed up they were brooch-size, but now some are too heavy to sit on a lily pad, and when they jump into the water they make quite a loud plop. Otherwise they are very quiet frogs--possibly because their breeding season is over--although occasionally I have heard something that sounds like a croak.

These frogs are so tame that sometimes I worry that there's something wrong with them. I used to worry that they would get caught and mangled by Bisou, whose frog obsession continues unabated. Fortunately, all Bisou seems to want to do is bump them with her nose, again and again and again.

Wattle Fence

Sometimes I'm visited by inspirations that leave me gasping, such as the wattle fence.

When we moved to our Vermont house, I was fixated on the idea of having goats and chickens again. Forget the landscaping: I wanted critters! So we built a goat-and-chicken shed attached to the garage, and surrounded it with "livestock fencing"--wire fencing one step up from chicken wire, about 5' tall to hold in the goats.

Even when the goats were still here, I hated the look of that fence and the green metal posts that supported it. At one point I got my husband, who thought there was "nothing wrong" with the fence, to cut a bunch of saplings which we then attached to the posts. We also laid sapling trunks horizontally from post to post to give the whole a more rustic look.

But now that that the goats are gone, and we have had the woods behind the house cleared, and I am pooper scooping the yard, that wire fence gets more offensive every day.

At the same time, we are faced with the neat piles of brush that Our Forester cut and left in the woods. The plan was to leave the ones by the trail to provide shelter and food for the wild critters and eventually melt into the forest floor. The piles closer to the house, on the other hand, would be moved to an open area and burned, preferably while there is still snow on the ground, an operation that would take a couple of days.

This morning, as I was pooper scooping in my pajamas and rubber boots, I looked at the wire fence, I looked at the brush piles, and the two ignited into a single thought: a wattle fence!

Wattle fences have been around for millennia, to keep in livestock, to keep out predators, to define the boundaries of settlements. They consist of evenly spaced upright sticks with smaller sticks woven horizontally in between. These days they are fashionable among cottage gardeners and the environmentally inclined.

For me, a wattle fence is nothing short of divine inspiration. Here I have an ugly fence that I cannot afford to replace with something more aesthetically pleasing, and nearby, piles of sticks destined for a fire that will further pollute our atmosphere. I can take the sticks from the piles and weave them into the wire fence, and after a week or two of intensive labor, behold: no wire fence, no stick piles. Instead, with no financial expenditure, I will have a quaint wattle fence, and pristine woods. Could anything be greener and more satisfying to the contemporary soul?

I'll let you know how it turns out.