Prairie Mary Guest Post

My reading has been giving me some sharp jolts and new thoughts lately.

One came from a random remark on 2blowhards.com that at the time the United States were uniting and declaring independence, the people of India -- then under British rule -- were dying by the millions because of famine brought on by mismanagement. The suggestion was that this would have motivated our founding fathers to get out from under such systems.

Another came from the Schultheis book, “The Hidden West,” which hit the reader with the realization that this whole continent is ecologically dependent on the water left from the melting of the glaciers, which is nearly exhausted. It is the last remnants of the glaciers in the mountains and the great underwater storage aquifers from that historical water source that we are using up right now. When they are gone, there is no source of renewal. Burning switchgrass will do us no good.

And the third comes from “Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier,” by Jeffrey A. Lockwood, now being remaindered for $5 at Hamilton Books and other sources. In the 19th century great clouds of the insect descended as a Biblical plague on the Great Plains, eating even the clothes on people’s backs and plunging huge numbers into desperate poverty. This coincided with the Prairie Clearances that plagued the Native Americans. Whatever resources a struggling nation had -- and they were small -- went to homesteading people in dry country, which partly explains why commodities and relief supplies meant for the Indians never got to them. Little enough got to the homesteaders. In typical “blame the victim” fashion, the politicians hinted that the starving were just improvident and incompetent, much the way they did during the Dust Bowl.

Lockwood starts his book quietly in a “history of science” way, introducing those who studied the locusts, their devastating periodic recurrence, and ways to get rid of them. Some of these early locust experts were oddballs, some were demogogues, and some were truly scientific. Lockwood hopes to prove that he’s among the latter but by now the problem is -- ironically -- lack of locusts to study. But there is some idea that a few of the big swarms have landed on glaciers to be entombed in ice for decades. Off he goes with hardy helpers. They are both “explorers” and “naturalists.” Adventure ensues.

The way one proves one has a true locust is by taking a look at their penis sheaths, which are internal but uniquely shaped so they will only plug into the proper type of female. (Is this an advance or a fall-back position?) Mandible shapes also help. So after a lot of mountain climbing in dangerous icy but melting terrain, the scientists must collect some mushy specimens and then carefully dissect them to see what they’ve got. Kind of a paradigm for scientists.

A major goal is to discover why all the locusts just disappeared, seemingly without human intervention. For decades the farmers poisoned, plowed, flooded, dug trenches and ran stock into areas where locust egg beds were found. Evidently the farmers themselves occupied all the places the locusts would lay eggs, in the loamy bottoms along water courses, ideal for crops. Alfalfa put paid to locusts, partly because of the plowing and partly because alfalfa is not a good food for baby locusts.

Then Lockwood turns to meditation on the meaning of sanctuary, which is what those riverbottom meadows meant to the species of locust, and -- this is going to be a stretch for some -- the meaning of loss and suffering, even if it’s only a bunch of bugs dying out. He steps from the secular cause-and-effect of science, to the larger philosophical problem of what it all means, what lessons can we learn, where it’s all going. Like, are we extinguishing our own sanctuaries by converting all the oil to global warming exhausts? Are we creating, even now and with all innocence, the key to our own extinction? Maybe the chemical in Teflon pan linings? Maybe a food additive? Maybe a prion in a cow or a virus in a chicken?

Scary stuff. It begins to be a religious question -- the kind of religious question that people in the West, including the first ancient guy to boat-hop his way along the California coast and decide to start a village, have asked all along. The West has always answered the question by suggesting a sanctuary: a new untouched place where we can hide ourselves or at least protect the grizzlies and bison.

What’s new is understanding that this is global -- life is a steady flow of molecular information constantly in motion over the globe and appearing as plants and animals. It is that FLOW of molecules that evolves, not the beaks or branches of living things. The molecules are exquisitely sensitive to the chemicals of the macro-environment -- circum-global atmosphere, oceanic contents, the dusts that blow from Africa to North America, from North America to China, and back the other way again.

Ted Turner can fence his property and stock it with buffalo, Yellowstone Park can haze the buffs back inside “boundaries” arbitrarily established, people can establish little commonses and enclaves where buffs are not shot. But if the right bit of DNA (virus) shows up, there is no way to protect them.

The much-admired trout of the West, also icons of skill, beauty and freedom, which people dry-fly with great pride in their skill and their lifestyle, have been afflicted by whirling disease and are now developing some tiny snail imported from another part of the planet -- probably on the hipboots of the fly-fishermen. Pogo warned us and so did Guthrie.

As I interact a bit with prominent conservators and environmentalists, I begin to realize that they don’t know this. They still think they can buy a piece of land, put a fence around it, and control what happens inside -- which will make them better people. They think the enemy is hunters or a corporation-dominated legal system. But that’s not it. They need to follow Lockwood’s example and look for “it.”

There is always famine on the globe somewhere. We’re told it’s not lack of food, but a problem with attitude and awareness. Management, like India in 1776. Famine starts wars, secessions, plagues, destruction, contamination. So now what?