Santa’s Answer

 

On  Christmas eve, an unexpected gift came to me from high in the sky.  With a bit of serendipity added to the mix, it was a welcomed addition to the prosperity of my spirit.  I was sitting in my hot tub with its panoramic view of  the Salmon River, where I often read and bid farewell to the days last fading light…and then…

Having just finished a passage in a book by a guy who recorded his three-month long canoe journey down the  Columbia River from top to bottom, where he was describing why he was doing it, I closed the book and looked out to view the sun’s last light on the far hillside. Just then my peripheral vision caught movement that directed my attention to the sky. Looking up I spied a bald eagle, shining brightly in the cobalt blue background of sky with glimmering brown wings and body, separated by a stark white head and tail. Then another one appeared, making two adults circling around my little hot tub world.

Wow, I thought, as I had just finished the solo river traveler’s revelation about seeing various wildlife, and comparing it to how it affected his education. He compared his book learning about nature, to the actual experiential  observational one, and how much profound the real encounter with nature is to the abstract book learning way. And, I couldn’t agree more, as I watched the eagles circle over head. After all, I have learned from seeing them many times before, (mostly on their morning hunts) that by waving my arms it could attract their attention, as does most movements impact wild things that depend on such for food and survival.

Often the lords of the sky-world  would be enticed to circle longer, to check out what my movement was connected to, as they again did tonight. But unlike the dull early morning light I normally watch them in, this light was of the golden variety indicative of a setting sun. They were high enough to catch those last rays and the thermals it aroused,  so were able to use it to advance farther upward.   And as the two adults continued their circling,  a juvenile appeared from downriver and flew up to join them.  The natural drama was spectacular as gorgeous light played on their forms. Did I mention the  contrasting  brown feathers between the glorious white heads and tails?  Ok, that image burned a lasting impression in  the furrowed portions of my brain.

Their concentric circling sometimes over-lapped like rain drops do when they hit flat water and spread out in all directions.  Then the uniform waves get interrupted into chaos emanating out willy-nilly everywhere.  Similarly, my thoughts began to ripple around, too. They drifted into questioning how  it was that events  like this are still possible, knowing that at one time eagles were taking a sharp decline and once an endangered species. Basically, two reasons for being able to observe such wonders:  1) I go outside and open my eyes. 2) eagles have made a comeback due mostly to the courageous action of Rachael Carson. She was the wildlife biologist who wrote Silent Spring and took on the task of challenging the giant pesticide companies using the chemicals (DDT) that were causing the decline of many birds of prey, besides just our iconic national symbol.

Her efforts rippled outward, just like that “raindrop effect” and made a huge impact as to how things turned out for the eagle. To me, it brought home how important it is to honor our ancestors, as she is now, but her spirit carries on. That dimension of life that we may not see, but now permeates throughout  the natural system.  Like the spirit of Santa Claus and the idea of gifting it represents, it is important to keep the idea of giving back to nature, including our own human nature, in order to pass the torch of compassion forward for co-existence of all life forms.

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.”    –Norman Maclean

 

Dear Santa – Grandfather Frost of the North Pole

To me, it always seems a bit of an oxymoron to be an un-natural writer of natural history, always stumbling with grammar like trying to put together some complicated jig saw puzzle so the picture looks right when complete. Thus, since it is in the appropriate spirit and time of year, why not ask Santa for some new ideas and tools to make my stories easier to piece together. Oh, and perhaps some ways to help improve my guidesmanship – maybe as some sort of apprenticeship with Santa. After all, whom better to have  as a mentor for learning the delightful art of gift giving. (that is, teaching me how to be better at  opening other  people’s eyes to the gifts of nature, every where, all around).

Dear Santa,

This time of year people are always talking about the “spirit” of the season, which is similar to other times of the year when I hear much about the spirit of this or that as it relates to the environment or human sociobiology.   So, I was wondering if you might be able to build me some sort of “spiritiscope” which would allow me and other people to see spirits.   After all,   scientists have made microscopes which allow man to see  complicated micro structures like a flies eye, and telescopes to see the vast complexities of a faraway galaxy.   The spirit of nature is often felt, and seen in terms of how things are affected by it,  but never in the raw essence of what form it takes.  That is, if it should take any form, at all. Maybe the spiritiscope could allow us to see the spirit world of many things magical. For magical thinking requires a magical instrument to see those magical things.

Many of the inventions of mankind, that have allowed us to develop  sophisticated technologies, are the result of our science and enlightenment.  Learning that the earth is not flat and that it revolves around the sun, and not the other way around, comes from science and the enlightenment that enabled it, and/or vise versa. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Circular thinking has no beginning or end.  But early on it was the things of wild nature that inspired various legacies of supernatural mythologies that often precipitated science out of the mix to give us real things to measure.   While the underlying ideas may have been written in and by the stars, for man to eventually make sense of, it was still the ability of being able to dream big dreams to be the very catalyst to turn imaginary things  into reality.

The one thing prevalent in America is that famed ability to dream big.  Basically, as a country known as a melting pot for all people’s seeking the “American Dream,” it is important to nurture along what we dream with a dose of grounded truth.  For the real gift of nature is the inspiration it gives to people whom open their eyes to it.  When it corrals our dreams of the seemingly impossible, to the actual workings of nature, it does allow some things to manifest that at first seemed impossible. But, it is with the right ground truths in place that some of those dreams can be made possible.

In my dreams and request of you, Santa, for a brand new spiritiscope, I know it is as real as you are.  Each year you return and remind us all, no matter our age, how to believe in things we cannot see or touch, like love, which permeates through out all of nature through all life creatures.   It can be as simple as a snow flake, or as complicated as the water cycle, but it is  all those natural entanglements that inspires us at different levels to help perpetuate our appreciation for  things far greater than ourselves.  Yet, it also allows us to see how we are a part of it, while simultaneously being hitched to everyone and everything else which is inherent to the whole. Community is the foundational mechanism  upon which all relationships functions in nature, no matter the tribe, clan, or species.

So to all you folks  reading this out there in the cyberspace community, hoping your holiday is filled with good spirits. Part of my gift to you, are the following river and nature related quotes to help lift your thoughts,  inspire minds, and incite more dreams:

“We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.” – Carl Sagan

“The hope of the future lies not in curbing the influence of human occupancy – it is already too late for that – but in creating a better understanding of the extent of that influence and a new ethic for its governance.” – Aldo Leopold

The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented
complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts which every woodsman faces daily, but against which civilization has built a thousand buffers – Aldo Leopold

“Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we
regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” – Aldo Leopold

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever
since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.” – Aldo Leopold

“Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.” – Aldo Leopold

“If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to
each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.” – Rachel Carson

 

“ The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.”  – Rachel Carson

“First, there is the myth that ignorance is a solvable problem. Ignorance is not a solvable problem; it is rather an inexplicable  part of the human condition. We cannot comprehend the world in its entirety. The advance of knowledge always carried with it the advance of some form of ignorance.” – David Orr

“The biggest adventure you can ever take is to live the life of your dreams.” – Oprah Winfrey

 “The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new
experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. – Jon  Krakauer

Cheers
Gary & Barb 

And finally, go to this link for a video that represents
the guiding spirit of Wapiti River Guides:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUQcMZLZpx8

Ecological Cogs – What is Education For?

River trips are more than just an engagement with the water.  Our boats are vessels  into a world full of exciting mystery where something new can be learned at every  bend.  Adventure is more than a “doing, ” it is a way of  “being.”  And we can only “be” by the “becoming” that additional knowledge helps create as we move along the course of the river.

Here at Wapitiland, we like to think of ourselves more as navigators and facilitator for people to help expand more understanding about our natural world. An ecological education is fundamental not only for the benefit of human growth, but also to the ability of humans to live more harmoniously with everything else in the world. Why is it so important to know more about the basics?  Perhaps a few quotes and wisdom from some highly respected pillars of the academic  community are in order here:

“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a
whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”  – Aldo Leopold

“The question is, does the educated citizen know he is only a cog in an ecological mechanism? That if he will work with that mechanism his mental wealth and his material wealth can expand indefinitely? But that if he refuses to work with it, it will ultimately grind him to dust? If education does not teach us these things, then what is education for?” – Aldo Leopold

The other reason any kind of education is important, is because, as Mahatma Gandhi put it: “A man is but a product of his thought, what he thinks, he becomes.”  What we become determines where we go and what we stand for. And if we don’t stand for something, we will fall for anything, a famous song line warns.

Closed eyes are as good as no eyes, and only leads to a blindness in the mind. So it pays to keep eyes open, so the brain can see better.  Yet, as Carl Sagan once said: “it pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.”  This is why critical thinking is so important when it comes to evaluating any new material that comes before you.

So what is the cost of a good education? Well, it is far less than the cost of ignorance.  And to us in the Wapiti Clan, the real value of education is that the more you understand of nature, the more likely it is that you will help protect it. It is after all, the foundation of our home, no matter where it is.  More importantly, as Einstein warns: “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything”.

One of the fundamental survival mechanisms of any biological organism is adaptation; how something adapts to a situation to increase the likelihood it will live on. So when it comes to how we deal with ecological processes of the natural environment, we might do better to question how we can become good adapters.  Or perhaps, more  appropriately, as the educator David Orr once said:  “It makes far better sense to reshape ourselves to fit a finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to fit our infinite wants.”

What to do?  Finding truth and understanding is no easy task. This is made all the more difficult in the  massive information-swamp created by the internet and social media.  As the country with the highest rate of natural resource consumption on the planet,  comes the highest order of making responsible choices.  Like trying to find gold, you have to move a ton of dirt  just to find an ounce. Such is it to sift through the vast sea of information to find that tiny ship of facts.  Not easy, but necessary if you plan on  making a good decision.

Even with all the facts it isn’t always easy to reach a good understanding or know which direction to lean. However, an old native tale of truth and wisdom story might most aptly apply here:

“An old Cherokee is telling his granddaughter about a fight that is going on inside himself. He said it is between two wolves. One is evil: anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego.  The other is good: joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith. The granddaughter thought about it for a minute and then asked her grandfather, “Which wolf wins?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one I feed.”

 

Reading about how to track a wolf , is not tracking  the wolf. You have to first go into the wilds for that.   Simply reading about nature, is just not the same as knowing it.  You have to go to know, and there is no better place to go than to the river. That is where the essence of the wild resides.  It is, as stated by the signature phrase of Sherlock Holmes fame: ” Elementary, my dear, Watson, elementary.”

“Only those who partake of the harmony within their souls know the harmony that runs through nature.”

-Paramahansa Yogananda

At least, if we are but a mere ecological cog, then why not an enlightened one should we not aspire to be. Which wolf inside, will you choose to feed?

Remember, holistic thinking sees the forest, while individual thinking sees the tree. But, you can’t have one without the other, because all ecology is a system that requires interaction between the two.  But, you have to start somewhere. Where?  One link, that’s all: www.doryfun.com  for confronting new experiences and ideas pushed  to a greater depth of appreciation.

Pushing the River’s Last Frontier – Looking Back

Being human on planet earth contains a yin and yang dynamic during the process of living.  Unfortunately, living life is time limited. That can be  both good and bad.  The bad thing is that the older one gets the closer they get to the terminal end.  The good thing is that the longer one lives, the  more experiences and stories are gained to better appreciate acquiring potential wisdom along the way.  As each additional experience accumulates to the total sum,  the more meaningful becomes the big picture of existence.

Looking back over my career of river guiding, enough time has now  elapsed to allow me a chance to see a broad spectrum of change over the years.  Unfortunately, meaningful does not always equate to better.   Like any antipodal position, anything can be seen with  an optimistic or pessimistic  worldview, depending on which way is chosen to look at the glass when it is at the half way point.  However, it is rare that the glass if at the half way point and in any case the more water that we drink, the less there is to satisfy our thirst.

What do you thirst for? Thrills and adventure? Security and certainty? On a planet  defined by multiple boundaries, we live in a world that might best be described by containing a limited supply of  glasses.  Even concepts contain boundaries and are limited by our thinking, so lets just say one of those glasses holds our thoughts.

If the earth contains ten full glasses of water, where each glass represents a frontier and water its natural resources, then the more glasses we drain, the less frontiers we have left. Once empty it is gone forever. Water is a closed system, which means there is always the same amount of water. However, how humans appropriate  that resource determines how much is usable.  Exploitation results when natural resources are victimized and extracted beyond sustainability.  Aside from human behavior, our own population numbers can also accelerate the rate of resource decline.

Each time a glass reaches empty, we must find another full one to satisfy our thirst.  The more people we add and glasses we drink, the less chance of living longer we have. Even concepts like undeveloped and unpeopled areas, where we can still go in search of unlimited opportunities to  engage nature and experience new things, is diminishing at a faster rate in our modern times.

Each human we add to the equation, acre  paved over, tree  cut down, element mined, soil tilled, fish caught, or animal killed, at a rate where mortality exceeds recruitment, resources diminish until eventually extinction results. Likewise, concepts like frontiers are also not exempt  from total exhaustion in this same process of diminishment.  In my example, the tenth glass is the Last Frontier.  What will be do with it?

In the early days of river running, I often went alone, exploring uncharted waters or rivers  that escaped the exodus of mass transit  wilderness travelers. Even when I eventually began guiding, we often had the drainage to ourselves and we certainly had only the most rudimentary of equipment.  Anyone and everyone that traveled with our own group, was an integral part of making a success of the shared adventure.  Unlike the more passive corporate rafting of today, we engaged raw nature eye to eye.

These days what passes for adventure, is more of an illusion and artificial experience.  Many guides are becoming more like glorified baby sitters. With the aid of modern highly advanced technologies and hyped up, but non-engaged type of encouraged zombism, trips today perpetuate more of a filtered experience.”  The entire affair is often dominated more by its entertainment value – where inactive participants can view the show as they would from a recliner with a bowl of popcorn.  Corporate guiding has become more like a magic show, where guides do everything for people and fool them  into feeling they are getting something which they aren’t.

Nature deficit disorder is promoted by this kind of trickery.  It also describes  how much of our educational system works, or more aptly, does not work in today’s world.   When we get absorbed by our highly sophisticated technologies we ignore the real world at a perilous expense.  Biology and ecology are never not real, and  abra-cadabra won’t ever make artificial things anything other than what they are.

In the business world today in our country, everything  possible is done to reduce every possible risk because our culture has become so litigious. The entire system feeds itself and encourages more people to become less responsible. It is an atrophy of accountability at its nadir. Corporate rafting is a highly regimented,  overly scheduled, and extremely organized  to reduce risk and potential lawsuits.  In some cases, it reminds me of rafting with a straight jacket on.

No amount of technology can replace understanding raw nature. The real beauty of education is that the more you learn and understand something, the more likely it is that you will work at protecting it.  Peeling back the onion, that is, disrobing ourselves from the machinery of sophisticated contrivances will better  reveal the center of the onion.  That is where the essence of an onions onionous resides.

Why is knowing nature more intimately, important?  What if you are in the middle of a wilderness area and your gps breaks down  or loses power?  And you have no compass. What then?  What if your guide falls out of the boat, never to be seen again, then what? Will you panic or keep your wits? Throw your arms up and run, or sit back and relax to give your brain a chance to work more coherently?

Do you know how to read nature so as to determine which way to go and how to get out? Can you start a fire, find safe water, make a shelter, crudely net a fish, navigate rough terrain, and have enough self-reliance to get yourself back home? Not that this would happen on one of our adventures. But at least, with us you will build confidence by actively living in nature for a brief pardon from the busy, hectic, high paced  world. There is no substitute for real world experience. “Good judgment comes from experience, and  experience comes from bad judgment.”

Ironically, my theory is that often concentrating hard on what not to do, may  have more of a chance of making what you are trying to avoid actually materialize. Also, the more responsibility you to give people for their own actions, the more they will pay attention to what they do and their own well-being.  Inclusion, adds to group strength, exclusion reduces it. This in turn reduces risk in potentially harmful activities.

Different rivers and rivers at different times provide various moods that affect experiences of those whom choose to travel these waterways to adventure. Having lived long enough to have floated far and wide, with a gazillion oar strokes along the way, I have been fortunate to have witnessed a lot of natural beauty “the river” always reveals. I’m also stubborn when it comes to keeping things simple, and focusing on sharing the essence of active engagement with nature to  more fully appreciate our common world.

So, if you would like to join with us in an old-fashioned, more traditional, unadulterated, dance in the untamed wilds of otherworldly river adventure, give us a call:

Wapiti River Guides – 800-488-9872 or if by cell phone, call 208:628-3523. For more info see: www.doryfun.com and our facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/Riverdoryfun

Philosophers with more wisdom than us have offered more profound words that better describe the mysteries and experiences you may feel on one of our trips:

“You cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run. “

–Alan Watts

from The Wisdom of Insecurity

“Life is like a river. There is no precharted way; there are no maps to be given to you which are to be followed.  Just be alive and alert, and then wheresoever life leads you go with full confidence in it. ……Allow it to lead you, don’t force it. Surrender to it and allow it to lead you towards the sea. Just be alert, that is all. While life leads you towards the sea just be alert so that you don’t miss anything.”

 -Osho

 You’ve been walking in circles, searching. Don’t drink by the water’s edge. Throw yourself in. Become the water. Only then will your thirst end.

-Jeanette Berson

What Is The Frontier?

Which frontier? The last frontier? The first? Yesterday’s, today’s, tomorrow’s?  No matter what kind of frontier one might think about, the one thing they all have in common is “place.”   Whether physical or mental, they represent a special place that we can go to.  They all provide great value because they are bound by horizons, which help define a goal of where we can travel to and push understanding forward. Each boundary has an edge where the “event horizon” falls off into the unknown. So frontiers might best be appreciated by their representation of where we can go to ponder the unknowable. Beyond the edge is where potential for new knowledge resides: a transition zone for transition zone where ignorance can be changed into understanding.

Not knowing, is the carrot that keeps us jumping for that shinny object of our obsessions. It is innate curiosity that propels us through life, always wondering what the next event will be, or when we will reach our final one. Then what?  We may cross the line into the knowable, and then again, perhaps not. Only when we die will we know, or not know.  By definition, the unknown is precisely that. Something that can never be known. Knowing the unknowable does not qualify. The real unknown can never be reached or appreciated by those who know.

What does it matter if we know or not? Or that there is or is not any kind of frontier? Some people might claim that it matters for its own sake. That is to say, like  mountain climbers who say they scale the mountain because it is there. Or people who say it is wise to save animals from extinction even if they seem to have no value to humans, but for their own sake. As I was thinking about the value of saving wildlife for their own sake, a lone coyote began howling in the wind. It seemed to be speaking directly to me and I was reminded of my synchronicity project with those sentient others whom I share the environment with.

I write down the timing of natural events that happen simultaneously, or nearly so, with my own thinking that seems to be  linked to some kind of meaningful message.  Is it confirmation bias? Possibly. Does it matter? After all, are we not all biased towards many things in our lives?  No one can stand at the tip of their tall forever, they must succumb to some kind of lean eventually.  The important thing is to question our lean and the why of which direction it is in. Are the messages from god, nature,  myself, or nowhere at all? And what difference does it make?

The more number of people that can find themselves leaning towards the green of nature, the better is the potential for us to save the blue  planet from the more nefarious side of ourselves.  Any kind of frontier is a concept, and out there, somewhere.  How we choose to engage it matters. Do we gobble it up, or only eat part of it and leave more for others and the future? Our treatment of “place” has consequences. Every voice counts, as much as any rock can start an avalanche.

 

 

Our internalized frontiers are affected by what we say to ourselves, and are important because they give rise to what we externalize and thus ripple out to impact the natural frontiers.

 

Salmon With Feathers

If one was to track down the DNA of a salmon, that is, it’s true signature, they would be astounded by where all it has been and eventually ends up.  It might seem that when a spawning salmon dies, the river bed is where if finally  ends up. Wrong. The salmon becomes food for many organisms once it is dead and is far more reaching than one might first imagine.

How so? Well,  dead fish often end up in other places than just  the waters from where they came.  For example:  when a bear eats a dead spawned out salmon, it may drag it into the woods.  So, the carcass of the dead fish itself then becomes food for land organisms that may also eat on it.   Or a bear may  defecate  in the woods, leaving nutrients that plants eat to make berries.  In turn, the berries are eaten by birds.  Interestingly, new genetic studies indicate that feathers of birds can contain some dna chain of the salmon’s signature.

So a salmon’s signature can be found in many places.  Simplifying natural processes comes with great difficulty when  deciphering ecological tracks and using various tools to measure them by. But now, with the science of genetics, we have yet another tool to help trace movements of fundamental elements that are vital to keep ecological cycles pure and functioning properly. With more sophisticated technologies comes ever more simplified revelations of the elemental. We may use telescopes and microscopes to see beyond the naked eye, but in the end everything is simply just a part of something else.

Law of the Jungle

All actions that take place on planet earth revolve around the Law of the Jungle. Eat or be eaten is the relationship game, no matter how tiny or sophisticated any given species becomes. Man often forgets his place in the scheme of things, elevating himself above the fray into  a false sense of security. All life systems function the same under nature’s law.  No exceptions.

While some animals are called apex predators, by their position at the top of the food pyramid, it is a marvelous deception.  Because they too are food for those at the very bottom.  Microbes turn even the biggest of brutes into nutrients to recycle through the broad range biological spectrum again.  Predator-prey relationships is the foundational dance of all earthly entities that ultimately define the struggle for life and death.  One feeds the other in perpetuity.

Even folks who go to the supermarket to buy food are hunters. They are looking for what they want, weaseling here and there when crowded stores create competition for limited resources on the shelves.  Trophy shoppers buy gourmet products while meat hunters look for cheaper ways to feed their families.

In the natural world on a finite planet ecology is a closed system. Populations of any given species goes up and down in response to the supply and demand of various elements in the natural economy.  Equilibrium occurs between predators and prey  only when they pass each other on their way up or down, depending on which direction each is heading at the time the board is the same distance from the ground on each side.

Politics functions under much of the same rule, with each side trading places over time in who is up in power, and who is down. Unfortunately, the decisions of the elite whom supposedly represent the masses, are often out of kilter with reality. Their board has fallen off the fulcrum when decisions are made that may sound good on paper, but cannot be supported by ground truths.  Archeologists whom have studied all major cultures have noted this dire of circumstances common to all great civilizations,  when carrying capacities have been undermined by misinformation,  denial, and/ or distortion of the truth.  Good solutions require facts, not fiction. Poor judgment comes from  faulty reasoning and ignorance.  Not knowing and ignoring are two different forms of ignorance. One is vacant of facts, while the other pays them no attention. Both lead to the same wrong answer to any question about natural resources.  There is no escape from the Law of the Jungle.

When ivory towers tumble, grass again begins to grow. Grass root efforts essentially undermine the highest of sky scrapers that ignore their own foundational shoring. Once the foundations crack, no technology or ideology of man is immune from crash and burn atrophy. When man is out of sync with natural processes, harmony is disrupted and progress heads off into helter-skelter land ruled by nature’s whip.  It is her way of discipline in maintaining earths  Law of the Jungle.

Synchronicity Update:

Extraordinarily, just after I posted this essay, I ran into some very disturbing information concerning predator prey relationships still being carried out by our Dept of Ag through an agency called Wildlife Services.  (misnamed to be sure). It reveals an ideology and practice that still  permeates a segment of our culture that needs to be changed.  As ugly and disturbing as this video is, it is important to watch, if you really do care about our wildlife legacy:

http://www.predatordefense.org/exposed/

Remember: ignor-ance comes with a high price tag. In this case, to wildlife.

Fair Chase and Willful Blindness

Do Animals Really Care About Fair Chase?  Dead is dead. Only survival matters before that.  Pursuit and manner of death is only significant to those who give chase. Human killers attain value and meaning by applying ethics and morals to their own behaviors when reducing other life forms to possession.

It is these very ethics and morals that underscore major competition for various quarry that heavily influence the bio-politcs in our halls of bureaucracy  However, on a finite planet with limited carrrying capacities, sustainability of resource extraction and unlimited growth patterns is of far more concern than bickering between myopic user groups.

Access is the name of the game for hunters and fishermen. In the caligraphy of who gets what, when, where, and how, it is ever-more rule books and regulations to meet the rising tide of interest. It’s all math in the end.

Ground zero to determine who gets what, and by what means, is the ethics we use to promote which voice gets listened to the most.  Morals is more about what guides us  as to which species deserve to live or die, especially when it comes to the predator-prey dance.  Calibrating importance is all relative to ones’s perspective and personal history.

In the animal world, just living another day is the main law of the jungle.  Which is fastest or more cunning is the critical factor to them.  To humans, what fundamentally matters is that there is always a viable population of something to optimally maintain. Otherwise, there will be nothing left to ethicise or moralize  over.

Unfortunately, ethics is the battle-club of the various user-group gladiators when fighting for a  bite from the only resource pie in town. While the science of wildlife management is about ecology and population dynamics, distribution of the pie is more related to sociology and the politics of consumption. Basically, ethics and morals is the dominionists architecture for the Manifest Destiny of man over nature.

As a conservationist, environmentalist, or hunter concerned about ethical behavior, there is an ever-present  danger to mount a high horse of morality.  It is too easy to fall into the jaws of the “holier-than-thou” personal value trap. Such a hubris high horse throws  a mean buck  to those with little tolerance for others and ends up with an ugly landing.

Should a rifle killed elk during the rut be listed in Pope and Young?  Do we keep or release fish? Use bait or fly, single hook or treble? Hunt with gun or bow? Trap, snare, or poison? Trophy or meat hunt?  Float in, or jet?  Go by foot, horse, or atv? Allow survellience by plane or drone?   On and on.

How much effort we exercise in using collaboration and cooperation when competing for limited resources, will help define our behavior and what agreements we can make as we go about extraction.  Methods we use to get what we want also matters, because magnitude of impact is highy varied by which type of big stick we use.

Each carries a different potential and variance in the severity of harvest regulations and seasonal length that can result.  Animal behavior is greatly modified by human endeavors  and equity between users is thus ripe for squeaky oil favoritism and much strife.

However, while we struggle to divvy up the resource, the bigger threat is always about what happens to the habitat. Every time we lose more ground, that reduces carrying capacities and essentially the very fish and wildlife resources we wish to save.  The pie never gets any bigger.

Preindustrial people’s had a hard time appropriating land use and often undermined their own carrying capacities because of limited knowledge and tools. We don’t have that excuse with today’s sophistication, so to deny ecological science and continue depleting resources that also escalate climate change is a blantant and wilfull blindness to the future. Nature never loses sight. Only man’s arrogance and choice of apathy does that.

It is far better to join forces to fight for habitat, clean air and water,  and to rein in our own numbers than to squabble over fairchase and have turf wars, while the hungry lions of industry are busy consuming the land. Such action is more like rowing upstream to keep from going over a waterfall when a giant Sequoia is falling toward your backside.

As we try to keep our boat of natural resources right side up, perhaps we should pay closer attention to our science and saddle it with a more appropriate attitude:

Gary Lane
Wapiti River Guides
http://www.doryfun.com