Saving Tarboo Creek

by Scott Freeman

  And then there are tads. We begin looking for egg masses in April—gelatinous blobs that cling to sticks and leaves in the ponds’ shallows. The black specks inside are eggs. At hatching, the froglets work their way out of the jelly into the open water and begin feeding on bits of organic debris, microscopic crustaceans, and tiny algae. When they metamorphose—losing their tails, growing fore and hind limbs, and remodeling their gills and lungs and skin to make air-breathing possible—they are still tiny, perhaps half the size of a dime. At this stage they disappear into the wet grasses near the ponds and are lost to us for weeks. But sometimes in late summer they reappear in numbers. We never know why, but some years are froggy; the shores of the drying ponds are alive with thousands of little tree frogs, green and black and brown. It can be hard to walk for stepping on them. We sometimes just sit there, marveling and watching.

  To understand what the big deal about frogs is, then, you have to develop a connection—a sense of the ecological and spiritual bond among everything that is or has been alive.

  〜

  Snakes, since the time of Eve, have been a particularly hard sell for people. Alexander Skutch, considered one of the first great tropical ornithologists, killed them on sight. But even people with debilitating snake phobias can be treated—by exposure.

  Western Washington is not snaky—the cold and damp make fungi, mosses, and spiders the local celebrities when it comes to biodiversity—but garter snakes are common. Our older son is expert at catching them and has been since he was three. He quickly learned to get a second hand on them and hold the wriggling rope away from his body, as garter snakes spew a noxious blend of feces and slime when they’re grabbed by a predator.

  One afternoon several years ago we were out walking the pond’s edge checking for tree frog babies and other aquatic life, not actively looking for snakes. A couple dragonflies were whizzing about; some water boatmen were bobbing up and down in the shallows; and then, apropos of nothing, a snake’s head popped up in the middle of the pond and began periscoping around. Off and on I could see the rest of the body undulating in the water. Then the snake expertly plunged back below the surface. Seconds later it reappeared, a yard or two off. It was hunting tadpoles. I’d never seen the behavior before.

  I’ve had other close encounters with garter snakes. When I was in college I went running through the arboretum adjacent to campus on an early spring afternoon and surprised a red-tailed hawk that was standing on the ground. It had been thrashing about but stopped to look at me. Its beak was bloody, and it quickly flew up and away before I got closer. When I went up to where it had been standing, I found two large slabs of limestone with a shallow slit under them lined with old leaves and writhing with hundreds of garter snakes. It was a hibernaculum, where snakes gather to sleep away the winter. Apparently the hawk had discovered the cache as the first few chilly, drowsy snakes were beginning to emerge. Now the ground around the mini-cave was strewn with bloodied pieces of snake. The hawk had gone into a killing frenzy—stomping at the snakes with its talons and slashing at them with its beak.

  At Tarboo I once killed a garter snake accidentally by driving a truck over it. When I picked up the body to examine it, I noticed a head sticking out of the cloaca—the single opening near the end of the tail. By running my thumb down the body, I was able to deliver seven baby garter snakes, unfortunately all stillborn. Among snakes and lizards, it’s common for populations in northern or high-elevation habitats to give birth to live young rather than laying eggs. The most compelling explanation is that in cold environments, females do better by producing smaller numbers of larger young, protected inside their bodies, versus a larger number of eggs that have to brave the cold on their own. It’s a quality-versus-quantity trade-off. And if the growing season is short, better-developed young have an increased chance of getting big enough in a summer to make it through their first winter. In general, larger animals are also better able to cope with cold temperatures than smaller individuals—they have a heat-retaining volume that is large relative to the heat-losing surface area. I’d known these things for years but hadn’t realized that garter snakes give live birth until I saw the young emerging from that dead mother’s body.

  And I will never forget the time a ten-week-old black lab puppy—one we were raising for a service dog agency—discovered a snake. It was early March, and the puppy found the first snake I’d seen that year. The snake was moving slowly on the cold ground; otherwise it would have disappeared at the first sight of a dog, even such a little one. As it slithered away with agonizing slowness, the puppy sniffed and pawed at the tip of the snake’s tail, trying to figure out what it was. The puppy was both fascinated and frightened, cautiously lowering its head to give a tentative sniff and then jerking backward at the first twitch. I stood by, smiling. Puppies and small children help you see the world with fresh eyes.

  Exposure, along with an open, inquiring mind, is the start of understanding the bonds among tree frogs, garter snakes, and people. The key is to understand those bonds well enough to feel their presence.

  〜

  One of the great values of working on Tarboo Creek is exposure. If you’re out planting or removing invasives or pruning saplings, you notice things—or things happen to you. I was sitting on a stump once, taking a break from thinning trees, and realized that three black-tailed deer were standing 10 yards away, staring at me with bulging eyes. I stared back. There were two does and a young buck, its little rack of antlers in summer velvet. The three sniffed and peered even more intently, trying to decide if I was dangerous. But the situation was difficult for them, as I was downwind. Finally, the closest doe decided I was indeed one of the two-leggeds and ran off. Actually, she stotted away—in the stiff-legged, bounding, thumping jumps made famous by the Thomson’s gazelles of East Africa. Tommies stot when they see a predator approaching, long before the cat or hunting dog is actually within striking range. It’s a signal thought to communicate “I’ve seen you and am well away—don’t waste your time, and my energy, giving chase.” White-tailed deer will do an analogous display, lifting a stumpy white tail and waving it like a flag, taunting you as they saunter away. I’ve also seen white-tailed deer tuck their tails flat against their thighs when I’ve surprised them at close range and they’re running for their lives. But I’d never before seen a deer stot. I felt privileged.

  These exposures remind me of one of the fundamental messages of ecological research: all organisms are connected. Sometimes the connections are intimate, as with the human hunters who feed their families venison sausage, or the fungi that wrap themselves around spruce roots, or the bacteria that live inside alder nodules. And sometimes the connections are as direct as the food chain that links water bugs with tree frogs with garter snakes with hawks. But even if the connections are loose, they are present. We buried a family dog under a cedar tree at Tarboo Creek. By now, most of the nitrogen atoms in her body have been transported up the trunk to help make new leaves, where they lived for a year or two before dropping back to the soil. Someday soon those same atoms may wash down Tarboo Creek to Puget Sound; decades hence a salmon may swim them up a watershed in northeast Siberia. The idea that any organism lives and acts independently of others is a myth. The realization that all organisms are connected is a profound insight.

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  Ecologists study both the biotic connections among species and the physical connections between organisms and the abiotic environment—the air, soil, weather, and water. But species are connected by common descent as well. This is a fundamental message from research in evolutionary biology. To the best of our knowledge, all organisms living today are descended from the same common ancestor. There is no such thing as an unrelated species; we are all blood relatives.

  The proteins that repair damaged dna, and that can predispose people to skin cancer when they’re not working properly, were initially discovered and studied in the bacterium Escherichia coli. The proteins that regulate cell divisi
on, and that predispose people to cancer when they’re not working properly, were initially discovered and studied in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The similarities aren’t accidental—they’re the products of shared evolutionary history. E. coli, S. cerevisiae, and humans all share a common ancestor that had these dna repair and cell division proteins.

  The realization that all organisms are related is fundamental to understanding our world. But there is a second, equally important, result from evolutionary biology. For thousands of years, perhaps beginning with Aristotle, philosophers and scientists had imagined that organisms exist in a hierarchy—a ladder of life, also called the Great Chain of Being. The idea was that some species were lower because they were judged to be simpler or less developed. Even after the advent of evolutionary biology, people clung to the idea that there are higher and lower organisms, even using sloppy language like “less evolved.” In the late 1800s this kind of thinking was used to justify colonialism and slavery, because it was assumed that well-educated people of western European ancestry were at the top of the ladder.

  Evolutionary biologists have shown that this type of thinking is incorrect. There is no such thing as a higher species or a lower species, because different types of organisms aren’t arranged as rungs on a ladder. Instead, species are twigs on a tree of life. Humans aren’t at the top of a ladder, we’re just a twig among twigs—one species among many millions. To drive this point home, consider what you’d discover if you traced the past few generations of your family tree back further and further and further. Eventually you’d connect to the common ancestor of all humans living today. Keep going and you’d connect that ancestor to its ancestors. At the base of this tree, all organisms trace their ancestry back to the same initial life form. Researchers call this organism luca, for last universal common ancestor. If you look at people and at the E. coli living in the guts of people, and if you trace the ancestry of each species back to luca, you’ll realize that the same amount of time has passed—both have been evolving for billions of years. They are not higher or lower than one another; they are simply adapted to different environments and ways of life. So evolutionarily, there’s nothing special about human beings. We’re just a species among species.

  And as for you and me? We are links in a chain: part of a single, enormous family tree that dates back billions of years and includes all life forms, living or extinct.

  Ecology tells us we are part of a community; evolution tells us we are part of a family. Earth is the only place in the universe where life exists, as far as we know, and all of that life is unified: through our interactions in a common environment and through sharing a common history. We are not separate or isolated—we are part of a whole. Listening to tree frogs on a warm spring night or seeing a black-tailed deer stot through a forest affirms that unity. It also reminds me that humans and other living things are connected emotionally as well as ecologically and evolutionarily.

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  There is a parallel between what ecological and evolutionary research has revealed about the nature of life and what the events of the last hundred years have revealed to people. After thousands of years of conquest and exploitation, of emphasizing the differences among nations and races and ethnic or cultural groups, the people of the world have never been so closely connected. Economically and politically, we are more intertwined than at any other time in history. Our world has shrunk; today no woman, man, community, or nation is an island.

  We are also entwined genetically. Research since the mid-1990s has shown that the genetic or biological differences among human races are trivial compared with what is routinely observed among populations of other animals and plants. To understand why, you have to look at data from the fossil record and genetic analyses. Both sources of evidence agree that humans originated in Africa, then colonized the Middle East and then either the Caucasus and western Europe or, in a separate wave of emigration, southern and southeastern Asia, then northern Asia and the New World. In effect, a subset of humans left Africa, and subsets of that subset broke off to head north or east. Along each major corridor of human expansion, some individuals stayed and some moved on to new areas over time. Each group that emigrated was a small genetic sample from the group that stayed, and an even smaller sample from the group that originally left Africa. As a result, there is still more overall genetic diversity among people in Africa today than there is in the rest of the world combined. As researcher Svante Pääbo points out, genetically we are all African.

  It is true that novel genetic differences arose as humans evolved over time, in Africa and elsewhere. Worldwide, the genes involved in hair coloration have versions—or alleles—that code for blacker or browner or redder or blonder hair. But the handful of alleles responsible for the differences among us in facial features, hair color, and skin color are dwarfed by the tens of thousands of alleles that we share by common ancestry.

  Genetic differences among the human populations that scattered over the globe were small to begin with and are beginning to disappear as we emigrate, immigrate, and intermarry. The degree of genetic distinctiveness among human populations probably peaked several hundred years ago and is being erased by a biological fusion.

  As the fall of the Iron Curtain and other political movements indicate, an economic and cultural fusion may also be in its very early stages — one based on free trade, democratic governance, a commitment to education, embracing differences in religious belief and cultural practice, and equal rights for women and ethnic minorities. People who benefited from the old order are fighting this change bitterly and often violently. They will continue to fight. But it is possible that an enduring bond can be built among peoples and nations, and it is possible that it will be based in part on the tasks we do together to preserve biodiversity and mitigate climate change. Stewardship and restoration—a commitment to the value of wild things—could be part of a great common work that reinforces the evolutionary and spiritual bonds among peoples, and the ecological and economic bonds among nations.

  It is possible. But is it probable?

  A Natural Life

  Newscaster and author Tom Brokaw called Carl Leopold and his peers the Greatest Generation, with good reason. They survived the Great Depression, fought a world war that defeated fascism, sponsored the Marshall Plan that laid the groundwork for a peaceful and united Europe, funded the largest expansion of public education and scientific research in history, endured 441/2 years of a Cold War that eventually brought down communism and freed Eastern Europe, unleashed the power of nonviolent protest to end legalized racism, and built the most prosperous economy the world has ever seen.

  The values that Carl’s friends fought and sometimes died for in Normandy and Guadalcanal were simple: dignity and self-determination. They fought against tyranny and for liberty. But after enduring the privations of a depression and the horror of a world war, the Greatest Generation reacted by pursuing a different value: comfort. After sacrificing their youth and risking their lives for others, they wanted to focus on their own well-being. The American Dream morphed from its original conception—which historian James Truslow Adams had articulated as a quest for personhood, self-fulfillment, and citizenship—to consumerism. This new and extreme emphasis on the individual and the material led their children, the Baby Boomers, into gated communities where three-car garages were required by zoning regulations. Writer Tom Wolfe called the children of the late 1940s and ’50s the Me Generation, with good reason.

  This new version of the American Dream was exported. As the economies of India and China boomed in the early 2000s, their expanding middle and upper classes wanted to live like Americans—the ones in the gated communities. Worldwide, the good life wasn’t being defined by goodness. It was being defined by consumption.

  〜

  One way to diagnose what’s important to a community is to look at how it spends its money. The most recent analysis of spending for land conservation in the United States showed th
at in 2001, federal and state government agencies spent about $2.74 billion on the permanent protection of land. Conservation biologists estimate that this total would need to at least double to create an effective network of strategically preserved areas, meaning the lands that give the highest return on investment in terms of preserving biodiversity.