Wild Things, Wild Places

by Jane Alexander

  Wildlife Services is at work eliminating most of the existing Mute Swans on the East Coast—these are the beautiful big white birds of picture postcards and swan boats. The bird is designated an “invasive species.” It “invaded”—that is, was brought in from Europe for its beauty—more than a hundred years ago, which trumps its other designation of “protected species.” So much for being special. In the Chesapeake Bay the voracious appetite of these swans resulted in the decline of the aquatic vegetation that shelters the crayfish, spawn, and crabs on which the economy depends. What is often not mentioned is that the real culprit is polluted runoff from pesticide- and herbicide-soaked lawns and farms that line the shores of the bay, putrefying the vegetation. People first.

  Wildlife Services does no service to wildlife at all; it is in the pocket of people who have no respect, much less patience, for wildlife. The list of victims in 2014 is the size of a small book and includes 454 River Otters, 250 Barn Owls, 5,000 vultures, and 8,971 ravens, one of the most remarkable and intelligent birds in the world.

  There are always more humane solutions to be had. The irruption of Snowy Owls from Canada in the winter of 2013, when they could be found from Maine to Idaho, caused problems on the open terrain of airport runways, which mimicked their tundra home. New York killed three of the Snowy Owls and was about to slaughter a dozen more at JFK airport when the New York Audubon Society asked its members to get on the phone. We bird lovers knew of a successful program at Boston’s Logan Airport begun decades ago by one thoughtful man, Norman Smith, who personally wrangled each and every Snowy Owl and released them in safe territory. In 2014 he safely released 120 of the runway owls. Audubon was successful in halting the New York owl slaughter in a similar way. That is, until 2016, when a court ruled that airports had a right to kill them.

  Four million animal deaths at the hands of government programs may pale in comparison to the number of birds alone killed by cats and windows, but as taxpayers we have their blood on all our hands.

  Wildlife Services, hunting, cats, and windows take an enormous toll on the lives of birds and other animals. But it is loss of habitat that is the primary and most insidious killer of wildlife. The human population keeps expanding despite predictions only forty years ago that it would level out when women of the world had enough education and economic security to take control of their bodies. It has not worked out that way. The First World countries of Europe and North America have reduced their populations, and some populations are even in decline, although with the infusion of immigrants from other parts of the world the numbers will rise. But women are still repressed the world over, refused education, enslaved, and provided little health care. Until the political and spiritual lives in these repressive countries change, the human population will continue to grow, and the animal population will decline.

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  When we first moved to Nova Scotia in 1998, I would sometimes forget the speed limit was in kilometers per hour, not miles per hour. I have always owned a convertible, loving the wind on my face and hair and the sight of a full arching sky where raptors circle and clouds pillow on the horizon. I joyously gunned my Audi convertible one day on a lonely stretch of Canadian highway until the speedometer registered close to 100. The speed was exhilarating. Only later did I realize that speed sign meant 100 kilometers per hour, not the 160 kilometers I was driving, and how lucky I was not to have been arrested by a Mountie.

  Cars are amazing inventions. I would be bereft without mine. I understand why everyone in the world wants one. China has created a huge middle class in the past decade with wealth enough to buy not only ivory but also cars. The number of cars in the cities of China will probably pass the 189 million in the United States by 2020. The infrastructure is not in place to handle the number of roads necessary or the carbon emissions from exhaust pipes. One Chinese traffic jam in 2014 extended for several days and more than sixty miles. Pollution in Beijing has become so deadly that on the U.S. embassy rooftop it has measured 886 parts per million, more than twice the most extreme measurement in the United States and considered highly toxic. Yet the population keeps growing and solar-powered vehicles are still in the design stage.

  Stephen Hawking has a sobering perspective: “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.” We may never know if we are alone in this vast universe, or whether we are superior or inferior to creatures on other planets in other solar systems, but we do know where we rank in the hierarchy of our own planet at this point in time. We are dominating all existent life-forms. As the most adaptable mammal in the world we could in theory feed and house all of us satisfactorily if we had the will to make it happen. We also could coexist with our fellow creatures if we had the will. But we have hurled ourselves headlong into destructive practices, heedless of the consequences to Mother Earth and to ourselves. Stephen Hawking says everything could perish in the twenty-second century.

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  It was springtime in the woods of northern Pennsylvania, the expansive and deep forests that go on for hundreds of miles. We looked down on the “little grand canyon” of the state, a lovely glacial ravine with excellent trout fishing in the Pine Creek–Susquehanna River, which meets up with the Allegheny and Genesee to form the continental triple divide. Each river takes a different course, the Allegheny heading ultimately to the Gulf of Mexico, the Genesee to the North Atlantic, and the Susquehanna to the Chesapeake Bay.

  My birding friends from Pennsylvania Audubon and I were listening to courting warblers in the oaks and pines when we finally saw the fire-engine red of the Scarlet Tanager as it skirted the treetops, burbling its lazy robin-like song. We have only four bright red birds in North America: the Northern Cardinal, the Vermilion Flycatcher, the Summer Tanager, and the Scarlet Tanager. They dazzle the eye in their breeding plumage.

  Male Scarlets arrive in the forest to scout nesting sites in May, singing from a spot high in the canopy. Although they are a common bird of the eastern United States they can be difficult to see so high up. Tanagers need large tracts of forest; they are secretive and try to hide from Brown-headed Cowbirds, which parasitize other birds’ nests by placing their eggs in them. But Cowbirds rarely venture deep into the forest, preferring to do their skulduggery near forest edges where they can see the comings and goings of different birds and then dash in to make a deposit. Pennsylvania’s extensive oak forests are coveted habitat for Scarlet Tanagers, and it is estimated that 10 to 13 percent of the entire population nests there. The Scarlet Tanager needs four to eight acres of unfragmented forest for breeding.

  In a twist of fate, 1.5 million acres of the glorious Pennsylvania forest hosts the lucrative Marcellus Shale beneath it, the pot of gold for natural gas extraction, now expedited by hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” The Department of Conservation and Natural Resources is charged with managing “the state forest system for many uses and values—including natural gas development—all the while protecting its ecological integrity and wild character,” says the state website. Tell that to the Tanagers.

  Pennsylvania has a long history of drilling. It took advantage of massive oil reserves throughout the twentieth century. Hydraulic fracturing for natural gas seemed a natural and exciting new development for the state and an answer to economic depression. By 2015 the state had more than six thousand active fracking wells and was planning to increase that tenfold.

  I wanted to fly over Tioga County to see what fragmentation of the forest was occurring with the well pads. Anyone who has ever flown over a mine, logging, or drill site has seen the wounds made by extraction. Even the cleanup later, if there is any, reveals a pale place with little relationship to what once was. Half a mountaintop blasted away to reach veins of coal is covered over with grasses and lines of trees that rarely entice original inhabitants back in the next twenty or a hundred years. The complex relationship of the soil to the plants and insects
that are born from it is compromised forever.

  Extraction always takes its toll on the body of the earth, as it does on the body of a human being. The extractive practices of timbering, mining, and drilling are surgical operations: remove the wart, the tumor, or the organ and sew it back up. Fracking is like injecting gallons of water and chemicals into a main artery to explode the blood vessels and suck out the blood. There is hardly a corpus left after the operation. The damage inside is extensive.

  Our single-engine plane began its journey over the pristine forest, which covers almost 60 percent of the state, sheltering the great rivers, which cut into the bedrock lining the steep mountainsides. There is wildness to it, a comfort in the belief that wild things are safe even though you cannot see them. Black Bears, White-tailed Deer, Opossums, Porcupines, and other common denizens of the northeastern United States are plentiful and have had little to fear in the past except hunting season.

  As we veered south, the well pads for the drills and the cleared ground that each pad needed came into view, neatly cut out of the forest, or nestled beside farms like blocks on a chessboard. Every well site, or “pad,” for fracturing needs three to seven acres, leveled so trucks and drills have open access. There may be as many as 150 contiguous well pads covering 1,000 acres, with numerous compressor stations in between. The drill is bored into the ground vertically for a mile under the enormous pressure of a million gallons of water and chemicals. It then bores horizontally through the shale, fracturing it to extract the gas. What is not seen from the air is the destruction below the earth, the crisscross of pipes and the blasted shale rock extending for miles underground.

  The natural settling of the earth’s mantle is compromised by fracking. More than a thousand earthquakes occurred in 2014 in Oklahoma and Texas alone because of the lubrication of fault lines due to fracking. The noise from constant drilling for weeks on end at a well pad is enough to drive most mammals and birds from the area, and the seismic activity underground must displace as many creatures below. Trucks by the hundreds rumble through the roads day and night delivering equipment and removing waste while the stacks of fire burning off methane light up the night sky. Local streams, lakes, and rivers are often used to cart or pipe the million or more gallons needed for each well, depleting natural flow and water levels. Wendell Berry’s environmental golden rule, “Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you,” holds no sway with frackers.

  Imagine this fracking site multiplied by 1,000 or 100,000 contiguously and you understand what a fragmented forest is.

  I could not imagine the Tioga County landscape with the 60,000 to 100,000 well pads planned by 2030. The local people put up with the stygian scene because many get a healthy check for leasing their land. The sensitive Scarlet Tanager doesn’t have a say in the matter. People say it won’t go on forever. But will it? The toxicity of the chemicals used may be with us for many generations.

  Fracking took off in 2007 when an exemption—not a coincidence—to the Clean Water Act called the Halliburton (or Cheney) Loophole was passed by Congress giving companies the right to withhold information about injected chemicals. The Environmental Protection Agency’s 2004 report stated that “the injection of hydraulic fracturing fluids into…wells poses little or no threat to USDWs [underground sources of drinking water] and does not justify additional study at this time.”

  More than six hundred different chemicals have been tried in fracking fluid, including concentrations and compounds of chloride, bromide, strontium, barium, benzene, methane, and the NORMs (naturally occurring radioactive materials—uranium, radium, and radon). These chemicals have all been suspected in the injection of wells and have been found in the “flowback,” the fluids that return to the surface of the wellhead during fracking. The chemicals also live on in the slurry of water and shale after the gas is siphoned out, and in the air. They infiltrate streams and drinking water to the point where methane in tap water can be lit with a match.

  The chemicals are toxic to animals and plants. People living near well pads have reported an increase in nosebleeds, abdominal pains, headaches, rashes, and diarrhea. Scientists have found a correlation between a rise in hospital visits and that of fracking sites in three counties in northeastern Pennsylvania. The number of chemicals impacting human and animal health increases with each new study. These chemicals can have very long lives, especially the radioactive ones.

  My Nebraska grandfather, Dr. Daniel Quigley, went to visit Madame Marie Curie in France in 1913. He returned to Omaha with two small chunks of radium, and opened the first Radium Hospital west of the Mississippi to treat cancer. My dad told me that the radium was kept in the icebox in their kitchen. Its volatility was known, but not the creeping deadliness of its poison. My grandfather lost his middle finger—the one he used to place radium on cervical cancers—and his skin was the color of a bad sunburn for the rest of his life. He almost glowed in the dark. My grandmother developed a tumor and half her brain was removed. She never functioned fully again. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

  As our little plane circled back toward the airport and the view of well pads spotted the landscape to the horizon, Tioga County’s planning director, Jim Weaver, in the seat behind me, said through the earphones, “You are looking at the last gasp of fossil fuels.”

  I believe him. Our reliance on fossil fuels is coming to an end. Economically it will not make sense much longer, when the cost of holding down carbon emissions exceeds the costs of extraction. Yet as it sputters out we continue to inflict damage on our earth, air, and water, without calculating the cost to human and environmental health. Our country is at last independent of foreign oil and gas and is riding the wave of prosperity and cheap prices at the pump like a rodeo cowboy on a Brahma bull holding on for as long as he can, heedless of the crash to come.

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  It was a cool February day. Something large caught my eye above the ball field of my granddaughter’s school. Two large birds seemed to be in some form of deadly combat in the sky. As they plummeted toward the ground I saw they were two Bald Eagles, their talons locked in ritual courtship behavior as they spiraled around and around together like a gyroscope before landing lightly on the ground.

  This was one of the more remarkable sights in my lifetime of bird watching, made all the more remarkable because the Bald Eagle was almost gone in my youth and made an astonishing comeback when the chemical DDT was banned and the bird’s eggs were finally viable again. We human beings made the difference; we turned things around. I feel proud and as deeply grateful as I do when human lives are saved through an act of courage.

  Pope Francis, in his eloquent 2015 encyclical on climate, wrote extensively about the connectedness of all living things and our interdependence. The web of life is so complex that the whole is not possible to grasp and we must take it on faith that even the lowliest of us, the insects, microbes, and fungi of the world, have a place and a purpose. This is as much a secular and scientific argument as it is religious. There are things we must keep sacred.

  When Rachel Carson’s own encyclical on deadly consequences, Silent Spring, was published in 1962, calling for an end to DDT and the spraying of other chemicals that infiltrated our water systems and our bodies, there was hope that this was an end to these practices, that the lesson was learned. It was not. DDT was simply repackaged for poor countries abroad and chemists came up with new ones for us to use here at home. More than fifty years later we are more reliant than ever on chemicals to kill pests, create new fabrics, and “protect” us from cradle to grave.

  This is the century when we need to learn better ways to heat our homes, light our buildings, and keep our water pure in the face of enormous climate challenges, but we continue to infuse seeds, food, waterways, and the atmosphere with “quick fixes,” polluting the very life forces on which all living things depend. The incidence of disease is increasing and new undiagnosed ailments are everywhere.

  D
r. Frederica Perera, a molecular epidemiologist with the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health, has been doing long-term studies on young people from infancy to adolescence. She has found significant changes within the molecular structure of their bodies due to chemical exposure. Our homes are inundated with chemicals in everything from flooring to fabrics, soaps to salves. The endocrine system can take only so much before it begins to make changes, either destroying tissue or altering it in an effort to thrive.

  Some creatures cannot take the assault at all. Pesticides such as neonicotinoids, used mainly on crops, cause disorientation in the homing systems of many insects, including bees. Neonics began to be used widely in 1996; two neurotoxins especially, imidacloprid and clothianidin, proved to be highly effective killers of just about any bug you can name: aphids, Cane Beetles, cockroaches, carpenter ants, termites, fleas, Japanese Beetles, thrips, and locusts, to name some of the undesirables. If these hardy insects can be leveled by the neonics, what do these poisons do to the legions of beetles that spade the earth, to the wasps and butterflies that pollinate the flowers, to the spiders that catch flies, and to all the microscopic creatures that E. O. Wilson calls “the little things that run the world”? Manufacturers claimed that neonics were less toxic to birds and mammals. How can that be when many birds and small mammals eat insects, even dying ones?

  A huge eighty-year-old hickory tree that dominated our Putnam County lawn was blighted by Gypsy Moths one summer, killing the leaves and reducing the nut crop to nothing. A reputable tree company promised me that spraying the tree would not affect the fish in the lily pond beneath it or the animals that came to drink from it. They lied. All the Goldfish and Bullfrogs went belly up within hours, dragonfly bodies draped the lily pads, while earthworms desiccated on the stone walls. I never used a pesticide again, or a herbicide on my lawn, flowers, or vegetables.