The Ivory-billed Woodpecker has been all over NPR this week. It's made me smile everyday on my way to and from work. This morning the big bird made the NY TImes editorial page. And fitting for Arbor Day, the American Chestnut tree's coming return to our backyards and forests made the NY Times Op-Ed page on the same day.
Oh, what welcome news!!
These two creatures are with us today, not by chance, not even by a "miracle", but by years of tireless hard work on the part of regular people just like you and me. These two triumphs of effort, committment and passion prove what can be done when just a few people decide to CARE, not just SAY they care.
The Ivory-bill has been heard in a couple of remote places in the south, but it's recently been spotted in a vast semi-swampy region of near wilderness that has been vigorously and fanatically protected by those wacky environmentalists and quiet, sandal wearing conservancy groups. Their aim? To give a bird a chance, even though it looked hopeless. Fifty years ago, this bird was not on the endangered list - it was on the EXTINCT list.
The American Chestnut was killed off at least a half century ago. But it and other trees now suffering similar disease and pest induced die-offs (dogwoods, American Elms, Hemlocks, etc.) are being saved by the work of dreamers who've never in their lives worn a suit and tie to work or worried about how shiney their car rims are, or even if they have car rims. :)
They don't do their work for credit or gain. They do it to make a difference. They do it to right a wrong.
They don't do their work because it's easy. They do it because it's hard. Odd ducks, they are, indeed.
But, all that just goes to show ya, it really does "take all kinds" - all kinds of creatures, all kinds of humans. Without diversity, our world turns beige and our human race goes the way of the dinosaur.
So, make the effort to thank an environmentalist today.
Why not send a small donation to your local Nature Conservancy group? Last I heard, ours was called the Triangle Land Conservancy (www.tlc-nc.org). These groups buy swatches of land locally (usually land with rare or endangered plants, birds, trees or unique eco-systems and such) to save from future development and they set those lands aside as wild natural places. They have several plots of land in the area - maybe one right down the road from you that you don't even know about.
So, tell 'em you care, too. Send 'em a few bucks and a thank you note.
www.tlc-
-Leslie H
April 30, 2005
NY Times EDITORIAL
The Lord God Bird
Here are the reasons to be impressed by the ivory-billed woodpecker, which has emerged like a feathered ghost from the Big Woods of eastern Arkansas more than a half-century after its presumed extinction.
It's huge and beautiful. "A whacking big bird," Roger Tory Peterson wrote, nearly two feet long with a three-foot wingspan, black and white with a streak of red on the male's pterodactyl crest and a fearsome glint in its yellow eyes. To see an ivory-bill left people thunderstruck; their exclamations inspired its nickname: the Lord God bird.
It's alive. The word miracle is overused, but what else explains the survival in the 21st century of an animal considered lost to history so long ago? The ivory-bill was mourned as a mythologized victim of intense predation and habitat loss, of hunters and collectors, of the leveling of millions of acres of Southern forests into pulp and sawdust. Somehow it has endured.
It is an environmental wonder worker. The ivory-bill has had an awesome hold on people's imaginations, to the immense benefit of the environment. In the 1970's, after an Audubon official reported merely hearing the bird in a South Carolina swamp, the state spared 10,000 acres from clear-cutting. More recently, an unconfirmed sighting led to a logging moratorium in Louisiana. The ivory-bill's return is especially sweet to conservationists in Arkansas, where it could help protect the rivers and swamps in the Big Woods, a poor but lush part of Arkansas that one local environmentalist calls "our Everglades, our Yellowstone."
The struggle to preserve the natural environment is one of crushed hopes and excruciating wistfulness. But not always. The ivory-billed woodpecker is a living monument to the stubbornness of all creatures that refuse to be erased, despite all our blundering and destructive habits. Its odd nickname is a fitting tribute: not "Wow," "Geez" or "Check it out," but "Lord God," two words that capture the moment when the eyes widen, the muscles go slack and the mind reels at the wondrous things with which we share the world.
April 30, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree
By SUSAN FREINKEL
San Francisco
TO celebrate Arbor Day yesterday, President Bush added a new tree to the White House grounds - an American chestnut. At first glance it may seem an odd choice, since chestnuts have been largely absent from the American landscape for more than half a century. Yet if any species can help us see the importance of trees to humanity, it is the American chestnut, and its story makes it the perfect emblem for Arbor Day.
Chestnuts were once so plentiful along the East Coast that according to legend a squirrel could travel the chestnut canopy from Georgia to Maine without ever touching the ground. The trees grew tall, fast and straight. Many considered it the perfect tree: it produced nourishing food and a rot-resistant wood that was used for everything from furniture to fence posts. Chestnut ties were the sturdy foundation of the ever-expanding railroad lines; chestnut poles held up the lengthening miles of electrical and telephone wire.
Then in the early 20th century a deadly fungus imported from Japan hit American forests. Within 40 years this fast and merciless fungus spread over some 200 million acres and killed nearly four billion trees. The blight brought the chestnut to the brink of extinction. Even today new sprouts continue to shoot up from the roots of seemingly dead trees only to be attacked again by the fungus before they can flower and reproduce.
But, in memory at least, the tree endures. That's particularly true in Appalachia, where the chestnuts were vital to the local culture and economy. The sweet nuts that appeared every fall sustained people and their livestock. Families built their homes from chestnut logs, marked their property with chestnut fences and brewed home remedies for burns from chestnut leaves.
I recently spent several days in the heart of the tree's historic range: southwest Virginia, where old chestnut rail fences still snake across the land and memories of the tree remain sharp. One 92-year-old man pointed out an empty hillside that once held a grove of chestnut trees. Each fall he collected the small mahogany nuts in a tin bucket for his mother to sell at the general store. Chestnuts paid for school supplies, sugar, shoes - things they couldn't make for themselves on their farm.
A retired schoolteacher showed me a photograph of the tall chestnut that bordered a field on her family's farm when she was a child - the "sentinel" that meant she was nearing home. The elderly owner of a country store recalled how locals would cart in thousands of pounds of nuts to be hauled on horse-drawn wagons to railroad depots for shipment to cities like Richmond, Boston and New York, where they'd be sold hot and roasted on the streets. The last time he tasted an American chestnut, he said, was from a squirrel's stash he and his little sister dug up on June 7, 1928. The date is etched in memory because his sister died the next day.
Their stories paint a picture of another time - of dirt roads, log cabins, fragrant haystacks and cool springhouses shaded by majestic trees. Whether the memories draw on direct experience or stories told by parents or grandparents, they are filled with a love and a longing that transcends mere nostalgia.
Chestnut blight showed North Americans just how devastating an invasive species could be to trees. Now with the explosion of global commerce, forests nationwide are battling foreign pests and pathogens. The current patient roster includes white pines, beeches, ashes, butternuts, Eastern hemlocks and Port Orford cedars, as well as the newly designated national tree, the oak.
It is not yet clear whether Americans have the will or a way to preserve the many threatened species of trees that have helped define our communities. But the chestnut, which has inspired valiant efforts to pull it back from the edge of oblivion, suggests we might. The American Chestnut Foundation has been patiently interbreeding the American chestnuts with its blight-resistant Asian cousins to come up with a hybrid that looks like an American chestnut, but fights the fungus Asian-style. The foundation says it hopes to have its first crop of blight-resistant nuts ready by next year for trial plantings in forests. The White House chestnut tree is one of these hybrids.
The United States Forest Service has agreed to work with the foundation to get chestnuts back into the wild. Experts involved hope the project will be a model for saving and restoring other endangered trees. Of course, the best protection for our forests is prevention: stanching the influx of invasives with tighter controls on imported nursery stock and rules like those requiring anti-pest treatment of wood crates and pallets that have carried unwelcome stowaways like the gypsy moth. The more we do to improve the health of our forests - using controlled fires to clear brush and thin the woods, for instance - the better trees will be able to withstand any new onslaughts.
There are good economic and environmental reasons for bringing back the chestnut: it's a fast-growing source of good timber, a boon for wildlife and an efficient way to draw carbon and pollutants out of the atmosphere. But many of the people I have met would save the chestnut simply for its own sake, as a welcome companion.
When the blight hit southwest Virginia in the 1920's, the elderly shop owner told me, folks predicted the tree wouldn't be beat. "They said it would be back in 100 years," he recalled. The chestnut probably couldn't have staged a comeback on its own, but thanks to the efforts of a devoted few, chestnuts and people may yet have a future together.
Susan Freinkel is a fellow with the Alicia Patterson Foundation and the author of a forthcoming book on the American chestnut.
Sunday, May 01, 2005
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