Human Nature

Human Nature?

Ryan Atwell, Ames

“Wolf!”

We had been watching expectantly for an hour, but the eerie reality of the spoken word sent shivers down my spine. I knew all about wolves, but I had never seen a real wolf before.

“It was black…moving left to right, through those trees.”

“There, a gray one, moving in the same direction.”

“Three of them, I just saw three of them.”

“Four…five”

“Whoa…they’re starting to come out of the trees!”

“…eight.”

“Look at ‘em’ all—forming up into a V, like geese.”

“…eleven…”

“I’ve never seen anything like this before. This is…wild”

Our words trailed off. As the Yellowstone sky relaxed into dusky pastels, I forgot about numb fingers and frozen toes. We all stood transfixed behind spotting scopes—at once in belief and unbelief.

I am being hurtled eastward with the jetstream at 32,000 feet, and my nose is making a greasy mark on the plane window. I have never understood how frequent flyers can close those little shades and retreat into their business portfolios. Do they not understand our true power? This manmade aluminum tube puts us with the gods in the heavens, and the kingdom on which I gaze is changing under our power. Sinuous roads wind their way through the most improbable mountain crags. Damned rivers and the circular green scars of irrigation systems give life to crop fields in the cold desert. As Wyoming mountains become Nebraska rangelands become Iowa cornfields, the patterns on the land straighten. My species, homo sapiens, has won a battle of sweat and tears to subdue the natural variability of the streams and the soils that sleep below the sarcophagus roadmap of my home state.

It is a common-sense theory of wolf behavior—wolves test the herds for weak animals. But I’d never imagined it could look like this. The wolves were not, at first, carefully stalking or even running hard. They were jogging, playfully. As they moved in and out of elk-spotted hillside parks, both wolves and elk seemed to exert only a half-hearted and nonchalant effort.

Then, suddenly, everything changed. A herd of elk went berserk, exploding from behind some trees. Elk and wolves were everywhere—thighs heaving in one hundred percent effort. When the picture settled, one cow with an obvious limp emerged from the fray. Five wolves were on her tail, six more spread out in pursuit.

The ensuing minutes are drawn out into a half-speed, full-length drama in my memory. Ghosts dance and strain through fir and willow. Hoof beats thunder. The cow’s mouth hangs open in panting terror. She is getting closer to us and we can hear her breathing. Wolves nip at neck and buttocks. Death is very close now. Life hangs by a thread…SPLOOSH. When water clears, the cow stands safe in the middle of The Lamar River. Safe. For tonight, safe.

I hang my favorite poster of a life-sized gray wolf on my new kitchen wall. The wolf is covered in weather—snow blowing sideways. But she is strong and content. Her deep wolf eyes shatter the silence of my climate-controlled environs. The caption of the picture reads, “In Wildness is the Preservation of the World.” I believe in that poster.

The edges of this poster are by now ragged from many hangings. In my nomadic, post-college life, I have dragged it with me everywhere alongside other tattered “essentials” like: a family picture, my copy of the Holy Bible, a real feather pillow and my yellow childhood security blanket. But why the wolf? Why the wild? I am an Iowa farm-boy from a safe, fiscally conservative, Christian home, and that poster has often troubled me even as it comforts.

And I am doubly troubled today. I have left an idyllic four year stint teaching field science and conducting wildlife research in the most wild and intact ecosystem in the lower forty-eight states. I am returning to my homeland of Iowa for graduate school. I second guess my decision daily. Iowa has the least natural vegetation remaining of any state, and its landscape is endlessly petitioned into the mile-square sections of industrial agriculture. Wild Iowa? But on a visit home last year a few strands of uneasiness wove their way into clarity and then resolve.

The uneasiness had been brewing. An ecological education had shattered the naivety of my romance with wildness. I saw that if wildness meant self-sustaining natural systems, free of human influence, then wildness was gone. My “wild” life teaching nature seekers in the parks and preserves of Wyoming was entirely supported by sustenance from ecological sacrifice zones such as the agricultural fields of Iowa. Even in Wyoming, the dilemmas of human encroachment and the need for active human management to maintain the integrity of what wild remained became increasingly clear. Either I must abandon the wildness by which I had been touched, or my definition of human nature had to metamorphose. But where would I turn?

The secular environmental activist community of which I was a part in Wyoming had injected healthy invigoration into the austere piety of my Midwestern upbringing. But my mounting disgust with the poor environmental track record of western Christendom was slowly being overwhelmed by something even more profound and terrifying. From my childhood, it was my farmer grandparents who had taught me how to plant a seed and watch it grow. In an old country church I was first overwhelmed by the delicate position of the human creature, at one responsible to both the gods and the earth. Now, suddenly, the world of wounds into which my ecological education had incarnated me was crying out for humans to till and to keep, to have dominion, to care. Wildness, I realized was asking something unique of me as a human being.

On this visit, at my grandparents’ farm, my now well-trained eye caught increasing glimpses of biodiversity bursting forth from every fallow creek and fencerow in the agricultural edifice. A giant Oak left a ring of savannah grass in the overgrown timber. A meadowlark sang on a cornstalk beside a waterway. My ten year old cousin caught a crawdad in the creek.

On this visit, I also stood in the middle of Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge and, looking in four directions, saw nothing but prairie. In my minds-eye, the semi-free-ranging bison and elk easily mixed with the wolves and wilds of Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley. I was haunted. Iowa was prairie only 150 years ago, a mere blink in evolutionary time. So close you could almost taste and touch and see and hear it. The prairie ecosystem is extinct, gone forever. And yet this restoration project, the first fruit of a crazy human vision that nature is never spent, was conjuring up the ghosts of prairie past. What kind of hope and hard work and love must it take to drive such an impossible effort? For the first time I saw clearly our human place in nature. And my heart skipped a beat as I glimpsed a phoenix fly over the once lost prairie.

I was traveling on snowshoes in at the end of a line of enthusiastic seventh graders. It was snowing hard, and we were following coyote tracks backwards along Ditch Creek. The tracks were blown in, but we could still see that they had been laced with blood. As I looked off over the heads of my students, the hair on the back of my neck suddenly stood on end. About fifty yards away in the direction that we are traveling, a hillside was trampled with crowded and busy tracks. In an otherwise “pristine” wilderness this could only mean food, and death. I held my breath as we follow the tracks in. Closer…closer…

We all saw it at the same time. Fur and blood, hide and bones strewn around. In the middle lies what is left of an elk, completely devoured. We stand for a moment in frozen silence for a life ended, then reverently inspect the fascinating anatomy of the remains. My students have mixed reactions. Some are eager to poke and prod, others are repulsed. One notices that snowflakes still melt as they land upon the thick hide. While a couple are busy recreating the story, another begins to cry. All are thoughtful. Coyotes cannot kill a moose, nor could they finish off a carcass so quickly. We later learn that wolf howls were heard last night—the first time so close to school. The re-introduced wolves of Yellowstone are spreading.

And in the midst of their chorus some harmony emerges that we never thought to see before. Nutrient-rich willow is a favorite food of many herbivores. Growing in dense tangles along lowland waterways, it is also a great place to hide, or to get caught. Elk—a herd species who rely on sight, speed and communication for protection—avoid willow when under threat of predation. Moose, on the other hand, gravitate towards willow. These larger, more solitary herbivores can formidably fend off a wolf attack. Tight thickets of willow offer moose camouflage and make it hard for a wolf pack to work together. Without wolves, the tens of thousands of elk that overpopulate Yellowstone’s hills have for decades been decimating key shrub species such as willow. Perhaps as a result, moose populations have also been dropping. Wolves were re-introduced to Yellowstone in 1995. Already in 2006, research shows that populations of willow and the moose, beavers and song birds that depend on them are on the rise in wolf country.

Humans are a part of this complex dance of life and death. But what part? And how do we deal with the death? And to what extent are we capable of nurturing life? I came back to the human dominated landscape of Iowa in the hope that I could learn something about these questions. In Wyoming, I was a vegetarian and ate soy-tofu and felt good about it. But something about watching wolves eat things didn’t compute. We humans eat things too. And it affects the system. In Iowa, soybeans are a culprit, and grass-fed beef can make for a good low-impact food source. In Iowa, I can see more clearly where my food comes from, and what I see is myself as a predator. All predators inflict pain and have drastic effects on the food webs in which they are enmeshed. The romantic notion of nature as separate from humans is attractive, in part because it demands nothing from us and leaves us naively innocent. But humans are consumers, and if we follow the threads far enough, like wolves, our consumption is fueled on death. We can make choices about how and what to consume and how and where to kill. But to live, we must kill. We are not, cannot be separate, innocent. We can only be blind.

I am visiting the ISU hog confinement center as part of a class. My biases are towards free range and seeing animal confinement is a hard thing for me. I have a strong gut feeling of sorrow for the animals. Perhaps it is because I hate confined spaces and only really feel alive when I can move around and have fresh air. And pigs—because they are not ruminants, but rather scavenging omnivores—are naturally much more active than bovine animals. Therefore, tight confinement leads to great gains in diet. But this confinement also seems very psychologically challenging condition for an animal used to a broadly active lifestyle. In less diplomatic and more viscerally honest words, in my opinion you could not pick a more perfect form of torture for a pig. But on the flip side, in a climate controlled and medicated environs there is less death, more piglets survive to maturity.

One alternative method of hog production in Iowa is many pigs in an open-ended, open-air hoop house with a little mud, hay and an indoor-outdor space to interact and roam? A few days after viewing the confinement our class visited a hoop house pig farm. On first glimpse, my first impression was, “No. Not really much better at all. Too small.” Yet, when I see the pigs, I reconsider. I have now spent a lot of time watching wildlife and their movements and behaviors are becoming ingrained in me. I have come—to a very elementary degree—to learn to read their communication. As our class approaches the small, muddy, outdoor/indoor pig lots, I have this strong and distinctive impression that these pigs are much happier than those indoors. Perhaps it is just the fact that I am not separated from their grunts by thick panes of glass. Perhaps it is because wind was blowing in my own hair. But these pigs are taking pleasure in the mud, in chasing each other, and exude an impression of relaxation. The scientific research on the best way to raise pigs is mixed. Of what value are my observations and feelings?

As part of my graduate education, I go out and talk with farmers all over the state and listen to their perspectives on what the Iowa landscape should look like. I ask them what they like about Iowa and the land and farming. One farmer has a large confinement hog operation, and he smiles whenever he talks about his animals. I ask him why. He pauses and looks at me thoughtfully. “Well,” he says, “my farm is like a circle. My job is to keep everything in balance. I take pride in trying to raise just the right amount of crops and raise the right amount of hogs so that my land feeds my hogs and my hogs fertilize my land. All the hogs that I sell to market are born here on my farm. It is a tricky balance to keep it all working right, and I guess it’s my job to try and understand and adjust and keep it all in balance.” Wow, I have mixed feelings about confinement operations, but that is unmistakably wild! Of what value are this farmer’s feelings and observations?

I’m at a meeting with a bunch of environmental advocates and natural resource managers. We are talking about what it would take to make Iowa more wild. Part of what we do is to make computer maps to try and identify how several natural preserves could be connected with corridors to achieve ecological and recreational benefits. But there is a lot of farmland out there in Iowa, and many farmers and farm owners are suspicious of what they see as unrealistic and unpredictable demands of environmentalists. Are rural people the enemy of wild Iowa? If not, how do we connect with them? One agency leader shares a vision of coffee groups across the state where advocates of wildness simply spend time talking to farmers and rural residents about what they value, and what it means to conserve.

As I interview more and more Iowa farmers, I find that this approach is as important as it is inefficient. When I take the time to get to know rural residents on their own terms and listen to their stories, almost all have an important connection to both the Iowa landscape and rural communities that they want to talk about. When I don’t take that time, farmers are suspicious and see me as an outsider from the university with a lot of big ideas and little common sense. Farmers views of what the Iowa countryside should look like are sometimes different than mine. But this is good. I have learned much about wildness this way, often where I least expected to find it.

Wyoming wolves and Iowa farmers have taught me that wildness cannot be based simply on my own personal observations and feelings, or my personal quest for beauty, identity and fulfillment. Wildness is not just about the feeling of inner peace that often accompanies my observations of nature…although that is certainly a part of it. Rather, like the struggle of the wolf pack and the elk herd, wild must be based in the real, contentious life and death struggle of community, interdependence, death and new life. To be wild, we must be willing to regularly leave our comfort zones and continue the struggle to survive. And as humans, much of our struggle to survive is the hard work of learning to work together across political and ideological boundaries. It is only through taking the time to listen and learn from our earth and its creatures, human and otherwise, that we humans can be wild.

Seeking wildness in Iowa has taught me that the human self can only truly become wild as it is immersed in the circle of life. The unique place of our species in this circle is defined by uncomfortable and exciting life and death decisions and relationships. In order to best steward and consume the resources of our planet with creativity and humility, we must make such decisions and nurture such relationships daily. If we re-wild with boldness, tenacity, and minds open to the unexpected, the spirits of the prairie past may bless the future landscapes built on our deep, black Iowa soil.

I am a graduate student in ecology at Iowa State University and aspire to teach in field setting and organize community conservation efforts. For fun I nordic ski, trail run, do yoga, kite surf, sit in the woods, watch birds, eat good food with friends, and explore ties between faith and nature.