Saving Tarboo Creek

by Scott Freeman

  To put these numbers in perspective, Americans spend more than $6 billion per year, or about $70 per person, on Halloween costumes, cards, decorations, and candy. And Halloween represents the smallest expenditure on any major celebration; total spending on holidays is $228 billion per year. Although data on sales of pornography are notoriously difficult to collect, a 2001 study by Forbes magazine gave a conservative estimate of annual sales at about $2.9 billion. If so, Americans spent more on pornography that year than on land conservation purchases and easements.

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  Something about the way human beings are wired makes us love dichotomies. We are asked to choose between economic growth and environmental quality. Depending on the region involved, politics are defined by hard-edged extremists on the left and the right or marketed as a stark choice between the security promised by despots and the chaos and sectarianism of emerging democracies. In pop psychology, personalities are type A or type B.

  In my own field of evolutionary biology, a dichotomous nature-versus-nurture debate raged for more than fifty years. The question was whether the variation we observe in human behavior is due to variation in our genetic makeup or to variation in learning and other aspects of the environment that we experience. The issue spluttered out when researchers finally realized they were arguing about a nonquestion. In the history of life, no gene has ever been expressed in the absence of environmental influences. These environmental influences, in turn, come in two distinct but interacting types: a genetic environment created by the unique combination of fifty thousand distinct alleles in every person, and an external environment with thousands of factors—temperature, disease, nutrition, learning experiences, social milieu, and so on—that influence whether a gene is expressed at all and if so, when, where, and how much. Likewise, it’s not possible for experience, learning, training, or other aspects of nurture to create a trait in the absence of the structures and potentials created by gene products. There is simply no such thing as nature versus nurture.

  Most dichotomies are just as sterile and misleading. So even though we adore our ors, reality is really about ands and boths and degrees. We need to explore positions on a continuum and seek balance. Aristotle understood this when he called the golden mean golden.

  It would be naive and counterproductive, for example, to claim there is a stark choice between experiencing economic well-being and enjoying a healthy environment. No one wants to promote poverty, and no one wants to live in a place where soils, plants, and wildlife have been destroyed. A quick glance around the world should convince you that poverty thrives in places where the soils, native plants, and wildlife have been obliterated.

  Still, it’s not difficult to find evidence that something is badly out of balance in the current version of the good life—the one based on consumption.

  According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (cdc), more than 11 percent of Americans age twelve and up are taking prescription medications for depression—a serious, sometimes life-threatening, illness. Physicians recommend these drugs in response to combinations of the following symptoms:

  • persistent sad, anxious, or empty feelings

  • feelings of hopelessness or pessimism

  • feelings of guilt, worthlessness, or helplessness

  • irritability or restlessness

  • loss of interest in activities or hobbies that are usually pleasurable, including sex

  • fatigue or loss of energy

  • insomnia or excessive sleep

  • overeating or appetite loss

  • thoughts of suicide

  • difficulty with concentration, remembering details, or making decisions

  The cdc’s 11 percent estimate doesn’t include people who are self-medicating for depression with alcohol or street drugs. The U.S. National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence (ncadd) reports that about 20 percent of people age twelve and older use prescription painkillers, sedatives, and stimulants for nonmedical purposes; in addition, more than 8 percent of American adults abuse alcohol, and 8 percent of individuals over the age of twelve use street drugs. If you live in the United States, you are almost undoubtedly in daily contact with dozens of people who are drug dependent.

  In addition, a small but growing body of research suggests that some people are using food to self-medicate for depression and anxiety. Although studies on the extent of food addiction and its causes are just beginning, early data from Europe and the United States indicate that symptoms of it occur in 10 percent of the general population and almost 40 percent of obese individuals. The global obesity epidemic itself is well documented: the most recent data indicate that worldwide, rates of overweight condition and obesity have increased by 28 percent in adults and almost 50 percent in children since 1978. In the United States, about one-third of the adult population is obese; rates in China and India are not far behind.

  Obesity is complex, but at a fundamental level it is a disease of excess. Depression and depression-induced alcohol and drug abuse are also complex diseases, but they don’t simply reflect economic poverty; the rates reported by the cdc and ncadd are from the wealthiest society the world has ever seen. Instead, we are suffering from diseases that are rooted, at least in part, in a poverty of values. We have conflated being well-off with well-being.

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  People study happiness. To date, one of the most robust conclusions from this research is that income matters—but only up to a point, and a relatively modest one at that. In the United States, measures of emotional health improve as annual family incomes rise to the $50,000-to-$75,000 range, then level off. Given the messages we are bombarded with in electronic and print advertising, this result is surprising. The message from ads and pop culture is that wealth is the key to happiness and that extreme wealth is the ultimate source of good feeling and self-worth. But the message in the data—in what people actually experience, instead of what advertisers want us to think—is that happiness starts with having your basic needs met and achieving a moderate sense of financial security and independence. After that, pursuing intrinsic goals like spiritual growth, healthy relationships with family and friends, and rewarding work—in contrast to extrinsic goals like fame and fortune—is what creates happiness, meaning, and fulfillment.

  Commentator Arthur Brooks points out that in terms of pursuing happiness, we are wired for the wrong things. Biologically and psychologically, our predisposition is to love things and use people. Reviewing data on deforestation, overfishing, habitat loss, and extinctions, I would rephrase his summary slightly: we’re predisposed to love things, and use people and natural resources. But research in sociology, psychology, and economics shows that to actually live well we should flip the order of our proclivities: we should love people and nature, and use things. Used in moderation, things are a means; in excess, they are an end.

  In terms of being based on rigorous research, these conclusions are new. But they are also ancient. They are the guiding principles of the Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Native American, and other enduring spiritual traditions, as well as the foundation of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic. Jesus Christ was particularly explicit. It is harder, he said, for a rich person to achieve humanity’s true goal in life—entering the Kingdom of God—than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. When he preached on this point, he repeated it for emphasis. It was the only time he did so, according to the teachings recorded in the Gospels.

  Every generation has to find its own way of fighting our materialistic nature and reminding its children of the values that matter and endure. We are born to take, but we learn to give.

  So we have work to do.

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  If you are entering adulthood right now, you will need to find a balance between the consumer life that dominates global media and advertising and a more natural life. To do so, you will need help from elders—parents, grandparents, teachers, and mentors. A more natural life is a braver choice, because it doe
sn’t conform to the values that pervade popular culture. In that sense, Thoreau was correct in saying that people as a whole don’t yet lead a natural life. But it is more than possible to start, by joining the thinking community working toward that goal. One of your first steps could be to surround yourself with people who organize their lives around four beatitudes.

  be engaged. A natural life includes work that connects you to the land and to friends and family who care about the land. That work may be hunting or fishing for some of the food you eat, or gathering or growing it, or doing citizen science, or planting trees or saguaro cactus or bottle gentians, or giving time and money to organizations that do good work for people and the land.

  A natural life is active. It is one in which you invest time, energy, skills, and money on behalf of people in need and the conservation of living things. This is our primary focus at Tarboo Creek. It’s our place to engage in work that can help heal a damaged landscape—a place for us to give back and, by so doing, increase in wisdom, happiness, and understanding. The work works at two levels: saving salmon and trees, and sustaining personal growth.

  A natural life isn’t something you talk about. It’s something you do. If you choose the path that leads to a more natural life, one of your first steps may be to find your own Tarboo Creek.

  be simple. It takes self-confidence to choose a natural life, because you have to define yourself by who you are instead of what you have. You may have to resist what advertisers want you to want, and avoid comparing yourself to others who have bigger, newer, or more things than you do. One of the great ironies of having this self-confidence, though, is that you will probably live better by living more simply. It’s common, for example, for people to put a large dream home at the top of their list of life priorities. An acquaintance recently bought his; to afford the required square footage, he had to move far from his former home. He now drives ninety minutes to work each way instead of the thirty minutes he used to walk and bus from an apartment. The house is costing him two hours of commuting every day, or ten hours per week. Each year he is giving up five hundred hours that he could be spending with his family. It’s as though he were offered twelve and a half weeks of extra vacation per year, every year of his working life, but turned it down.

  There are a million other ways to practice simplicity besides living in a comfortably sized space. Aldo Leopold was famous for pulling most of the building materials for his family’s Shack out of the Wisconsin River—rescuing orphan boards that floated down and stuck in sandbars. He even wanted to name his book Great Possessions, because its core message was about the richness of living a life focused on your relationships with people and the land instead of trying to create meaning by acquiring things. As his daughter Nina used to say, “The Shack was nothing, but it was everything.” It wasn’t a life of denial. It was a life of fulfillment. The family possessed great happiness there.

  Being simple is a commitment to reducing the importance of the material, physical parts of your life and increasing the importance of your friends, family, community, and spiritual growth.

  be real. The opposite of a natural life is an artificial life—one that is marked by posing. An example parks outside my home every morning in the form of a large sports-utility vehicle that an employee at a nearby store uses for commuting. The advertising campaigns for this suv picture it in mountainous terrain or towing hunting boats. It costs $50,000 new; a typical five-year loan pushes the price to $55,000, including interest. A natural life avoids this type of spending, which economist Thorstein Veblen called conspicuous consumption. If you actually are a rugged outdoorsperson who climbs mountains and hunts or restores habitat, you don’t need a vehicle like this to pose as one. If you are true to yourself, you don’t need to spend money on highly visible badges of status that are meant to let everyone know how wealthy you are or who you wish you were. Those types of badges simply aren’t important to you.

  Living a natural life should provide the peace of mind that comes with being yourself instead of adopting an advertiser’s image of what you should be. I remember Carl Leopold praising a friend by saying that she was “comfortable with herself.” The quiet self-assurance he was commenting on is a quality of people who understand and accept themselves. But this type of humble self-assurance can be rare. In 2014, the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery reported that Americans spent more than $12 billion to get their breasts, faces, or waists altered. The ten most popular interventions alone totaled more than 8.1 million procedures, all with the goal of helping people pose as someone more beautiful—usually as defined by fashion models or celebrities.

  A natural life begins with loving yourself for who you are. Posing has psychological, physical, and spiritual costs that you avoid in a natural life. Being simple is a commitment to using fewer resources; being real is a commitment to self-affirmation and self-acceptance.

  be present. Being present in the here and now is a major goal of prayer, meditation, worship, yoga, and other forms of spiritual practice. Religious people have strived to immerse themselves in the present for centuries.

  Becoming alert to the present has always taken focus and effort. But it is even more difficult to achieve now, because of the distractions offered by our electronic devices. I was working in our garden recently and noticed a small procession coming my way. It was led by a little boy wearing a brand-new bicycle helmet and riding a tiny two-wheeler with training wheels. A gray-muzzled golden retriever trotted by his side; a dad brought up the rear and held the dog’s leash. It was a beautiful, sun-splashed spring day, with crocus peaking and daffodils opening for the first time. I looked up to say hello but couldn’t catch an eye—the father was staring at a phone he was holding about 8 inches from his face. He would walk a few paces, stop to read a message, walk a few more steps, stop, and scroll to the next message. The boy and the dog had to start and stop with him, over and over. I watched as the little family went around the corner and disappeared, the father still stopping and starting, transfixed by his phone.

  You can see a similar phenomenon at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City every Friday night, when admission is free. Hundreds of people pack into the galleries, surrounded by some of the greatest paintings ever made. But almost no one is looking at them. Instead, all but a handful of people spend their visit taking stills or videos of the art. If there is a particularly famous work like Van Gogh’s Starry Night or Picasso’s Three Musicians in the room, one person after another will have their photo taken standing next to it, then move on.

  When the Leopold family was working at the Shack in the 1930s and ’40s, they practiced being present by recording phenology, or the timing of natural events. They would document the first goose flocks to arrive in spring, the first Baptisia flowers to open in summer. Nina Leopold made parallel observations when she retired to the property thirty years later, and she subsequently co-authored a scientific paper showing that many events at the Shack property, including dates of first flowering and dates of arrival for migrant birds, were speeding up—presumably in response to global warming.

  Aldo Leopold was also famous for gently challenging himself and students or friends or family members to look hard at what was around them when they were out walking, and to read the landscape. “Who do you think made this track?” “What could’ve made this tunnel through the grass?” “Is this deer scat new or old?” At Tarboo Creek, our younger son practices being present by taking a short walk in the restoration area every evening, by himself and without his phone, before he goes to bed. Even in the heart of the city, you can be aware of cloud formations, the phases of the moon, the flow of a local river.

  If you are present, you can and will notice things—about the world and about yourself.

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  The good life, as a natural life, is ecological in outlook and practice. The overriding principle is to be part of a community—to belong to something larger than yourself and participate in it. A natural life
focuses on minimizing how much you take from the land and other people, and maximizing how much you give. It is a life of humility.

  To prevent a mass extinction and widespread human suffering, the generation that is entering adult life now will have to be the greatest generation of all. The path we have followed for centuries has led to resource depletion, deterioration of soils and water, climate change, and extinctions triggered by human overpopulation. If you are beginning your adult life, or mentoring a young person starting theirs, this book is a call: please, help us find a new way.

  Acknowledgments

  I treasure the advice and encouragement I received from readers of early versions of the manuscript: Owen Fairbanks, Ben Freeman, Peter Freeman, Teri Hein, Allan Kollar, Konrad Liegel, Jim Smith, Sarah Spaeth, and especially Lorraine Anderson, Deborah Easter, Linda Gunnarson, and Mary Kollar. Susan Leopold Freeman has been my partner in life and in work—almost everything we do at Tarboo Creek is done side by side.

  References

  introduction: noticing things

  Christie, P. J., D. J. Mennill, and L. M. Ratcliffe. 2004. Chickadee song structure is individually distinctive over long broadcast distances. Behaviour 141: 101–124.

  Diamond, J. 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin Group.

  Goodale, E., and S. W. Kotagama. 2008. Response to conspecific and heterospecific alarm calls in mixed-species bird flocks of a Sri Lankan rainforest. Behavioral Ecology 19: 887–894.

  Harrison, N. M., and M. J. Whitehouse. 2011. Mixed-species flocks: An example of niche construction? Animal Behaviour 81: 675–682.

  Magrath, R. D., B. J. Pitcher, and J. L. Gardner. 2007. A mutual understanding? Interspecific responses by birds to each other’s aerial alarm calls. Behavioral Ecology 18: 944–951.

  Soard, C. M., and G. Ritchison. 2009. “Chick-a-dee” calls of Carolina chickadees convey information about degree of threat posed by avian predators. Animal Behaviour 78: 1447–1453.