Eating Off the Floor

I am not sure why bottom feeding in suckers is often ill-considered. It is almost as if some people assume that suckers are swimming along slurping sludge from stream bottoms. Interestingly, the native Brook Trout of the central Appalachians commonly feeds on aquatic insect larvae, particularly those drifting downstream in the water column. Everyone likes Brook Trout, but few like suckers. It is almost as if feeding on drifting insects versus feeding on bottom-dwelling insects is equivalent to eating on a table versus eating off the floor.

— Stuart A. Welsh, Hornyheads, Madtoms, and Darters: Narratives on Central Appalachian Fishes

Not Purely to Please Us

An actively coppiced wood is full of edges and full of light. The dark interior of an undisturbed wood may seem a dull place by comparison but it may contain just as much diversity, though the species will be different. The creatures that shun the edge are often drab and boring compared to the bright butterflies and song birds of coppice. The stag beetle is top of the range for visual interest. We often wax lyrical about the wildlife of coppices but who are we to say that fritillaries and chiffchaffs have more right to exist than some greyish grub that lives in dead logs and few of us has ever seen? Everything has a right to life and wild creatures are not there purely to please us.

— Patrick Whitefield, How to Read the Landscape

How Old Is the Countryside?

The Old Men of Moccas give me a tangible feeling of how old the countryside is. We gaily toss about words like Medieval and Neolithic, and hundreds of years run off our tongues like grams in a cake recipe. But these old, old trees, fuller of dead wood than live, sitting there, growing by tiny rings each year or perhaps dying a little bit more than growing, give a real visual experience to the word ‘age’. And when I saw the ridge and furrow under their feet I had some tangible idea of just how long ago it was that those men and oxen made those ridges and furrows.

— Patrick Whitefield, How to Read the Landscape

The Plant Revolution

A plant that lives where it should not is simply a pest, but a plant that thrives where it should not live is a weed. We don’t resent the audacity of the weed, as every seed is audacious; we resent its fantastic success. Humans are actively creating a world where only weeds can live and then feigning shock and outrage upon finding so many. This mixed message is irrelevant: there is already a revolution taking place in the plant world as invasives effortlessly supplant natives within every human-modified space. Our impotent condemnation of weeds will not stop this revolution. We aren’t getting the revolution we want: we’re getting the one that we triggered.

— Hope Jahren, Lab Girl (2016)

Comparatively Innocuous Chemicals

Indeed one of the most alarming aspects of the chemical pollution of water is the fact that here — in river or lake or reservoir, or for that matter in the glass of water served at your dinner table — are mingled chemicals that no responsible chemist would think of combining in his laboratory. The possible interactions between these freely mixed chemicals are deeply disturbing to officials of the United States Public Health Service, who have expressed the fear that the production of harmful substances from comparatively innocuous chemicals may be taking place on quite a wide scale. The reactions may be between two or more chemicals, or between chemicals and the radioactive wastes that are being discharged into our rivers in ever-increasing volume. Under the impact of ionizing radiation some rearrangement of atoms could easily occur, changing the nature of the chemicals in a way that is not only unpredictable but beyond control.

— Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)

The full text can be found here.

The Conservation of Variety

The key to a healthy plant or animal community lies in what the British ecologist Charles Elton calls “the conservation of variety.” What is happening now is in large part a result of the biological unsophistication of past generations. Even a generation ago no one knew that to fill large areas with a single species of tree was to invite disaster. And so whole towns lined their streets and dotted their parks with elms, and today the elms die and so do the birds.

— Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)

The full text can be found here.

The Web of Life

The earth’s vegetation is part of a web of life in which there are intimate and essential relations between plants and the earth, between plants and other plants, between plants and animals. Sometimes we have no choice but to disturb these relationships, but we should do so thoughtfully, with full awareness that what we do may have consequences remote in time and place. But no such humility marks the booming “weed killer” business of the present day, in which soaring sales and expanding uses mark the production of plant-killing chemicals.

— Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)

The full text can be found here.

Reservoirs and Water Sports

It is an extraordinary fact that the deliberate introduction of poisons into a reservoir is becoming a fairly common practice. The purpose is usually to promote recreational uses, even though the water must then be treated at some expense to make it fit for its intended use as drinking water. When sportsmen of an area want to “improve” fishing in a reservoir, they prevail on authorities to dump quantities of poison into it to kill the undesired fish, which are then replaced with hatchery fish more suited to the sportsmen’s taste. The procedure has a strange, Alice-in-Wonderland quality. The reservoir was created as a public water supply, yet the community, probably unconsulted about the sportsmen’s project, is forced either to drink water containing poisonous residues or to pay out tax money for treatment of the water to remove the poisons — treatments that are by no means foolproof.

— Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)

The full text can be found here.

Neck Deep in Realities

There is an old saying that we should farm as if we are going to live for a thousand years. The idea is that we might protect our natural resources better if we had to face the long-term consequences of our actions instead of passing on a mess for someone else to sort out. I find the thought of a thousand years in the future rather daunting and impossible to comprehend. Who is rich enough to be that holy? A few aristocrats or large conservation organizations, perhaps? No one with any sense doubts the need for change. The statistics on the decline of wildlife on British farmland in my lifetime are damning, and the climate is doing weird, terrifying, unprecedented things. We know that change is needed, but we have to work out what that change should be, and how we can deliver it — when we are neck-deep in the realities of this age.

— James Rebanks, Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey

A Continuous State of Change

Functionally, worms really do only one thing: they digest. They live in their food source and their own waste is not repulsive to them; in fact, the bacteria in earthworm castings help to build the kind of soil community where they can thrive. I suppose any kind of digestion is transformative: any food source that is eaten becomes something else. Any environment, any single life is in a continuous state of change. This is just more obvious when you pay attention to earthworms. Their work may seem unspectacular at first. They don’t chirp or sing, they don’t gallop or soar, they don’t hunt or make tools or write books. But they do something just as powerful: they consume, they transform, they change the earth.

— Amy Stewart, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms