Chicago Wildlife News: The Nature of DuPage: Human activity is not all that bad for nature

The Nature of DuPage: Human activity is not all that bad for nature

(POSTED: 1/24/11) Winter reduces the landscape to its simplest appearance. Gray and brown plant stems, with a few exceptions, stripped of their green leaves are stark against the white, snow-covered ground. The buzz, flutter and squeak of animal activity is reduced to its lowest level. Wild places seem abstract, almost idealized. Likewise, winter is traditionally a time when people pause and reflect about things. There might be a danger in looking out at that winter landscape, idealizing it or thinking it is simpler than it really is. I am thinking of examples I have observed in the past:

* Advocates of “letting nature take its course” who oppose wildlands restoration.
* Birders, accustomed to finding particular species in particular places, are disappointed when restoration processes or processes of ecological change result in changes to bird life.
* On the other side, a restoration worker eliminated a population of a plant growing on a hilltop because he had learned to associate it only with low, wet places. That thriving population didn’t fit his idea of that plant.
* Some restoration workers are anxious to see all signs of past human activity removed from their sites.

These instances have in common an idealization of Nature, conceptually separating the places and processes of the wild from those of people. There is the implicit assumption that human influences inevitably are corrupting. Furthermore, the view is static, containing the idea that once a wild place is established or restored, it will stay as it is, and any spontaneous changes that might occur are a perversion and should be corrected.

A review of our area’s history is in order. The last time our landscape had no people in it was when it was covered by a sterile glacier. By the time the glacier melted away and the first colonizing vegetation and animal life had become established 14,000 years ago, people were here. A butchering site of that age recently discovered in the southeast corner of Wisconsin and scattered flint spear points all around our area testify that those people were thoroughly interacting with the animals and plants and were directly dependent upon them for survival. The emerging scientific consensus is that those early hunters were largely responsible for the extinction of the megafauna, large animals from mastodons to horses to giant sloths, that once filled North America. The early hunters didn’t have to wipe them all out, just kill them faster than they could reproduce themselves (large animals typically breed slowly.)

Ours is a flexible species and in the wake of the megafaunal extinctions, North American culture shifted to a hunting-gathering lifestyle that was more or less stable for thousands of years. It was only within the past 1,000 to 2,000 years that spear throwers gave way to bows and arrows, and agriculture spread out of Mexico into our part of the world. Within a few hundred years, this new agriculture supported a vast civilization centered in downstate Cahokia. If the Cahokians believed they had become independent of Nature, they were mistaken. Drought may have been the key to their culture’s collapse and, like the extinction of the megafauna, this would have been an unpleasant awakening.

The oxygen we breathe is produced mainly by wild plants. The water we drink comes from lakes or rivers or underground aquifers. Our shelters are built of wood, stone (including extracted metals), and derivatives of fossil plants (plastics). Our foods are either wild animals or plants, or varieties domesticated from them in the not so distant past. It is an illusion to think we are separate from Nature. For the most part, ideals of wilderness free of human influence are illusions, certainly in northeast Illinois.

You no doubt realize that this is an opinion piece. So, what am I advocating?

* First, let’s appreciate that the land as we experience it has a history of both human and non-human influences. The combination needs to be understood if the landscape is to be known.
* Second, the important work of restoration needs to be based on clearly stated goals rather than abstract ideals. An example here would be maximizing biodiversity. Another would be creating a habitat mosaic. These can and should be informed by all the historical information we can assemble, for instance restoring prairies and woodlands where those communities were growing before large scale agriculture and urbanization came along.
* A third point of emphasis is the recognition that nature is not static but dynamic. A bird such as the yellow-breasted chat prefers ephemeral breeding grounds that are transitioning from herbaceous plants to scattered shrublands. As the shrubs fill in and trees emerge, chats lose interest and move elsewhere. Management plans that include a mix of successional stages will keep chats in the landscape, but they will be hopping from place to place.
* And finally, let’s accept that restoration itself is a process that wasn’t invented in the past hundred years. People were deliberately setting fires for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, shaping the land that the original survey teams described in the 19th Century. People are part of nature, and their management actions are fully a part of nature taking its course.

Beauty is, as the saying goes, in the eye of the beholder. A comprehensive understanding of the land and all its historical influences can broaden the beauty we find in it.

By Carl Strang, who has been an interpretive naturalist for the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County for more than 28 years. He holds a Ph.D. in wildlife ecology from Purdue University. Carl has won awards from the Illinois Wildlife Federation and from the National Association for Interpretation. He is the author of the book, Interpretive Undercurrents, on the art of natural history interpretation. His weekly radio spot, "Wild Things," is broadcast from the College of DuPage radio station (WDCB, 90.9FM) on Monday evenings between 6:00 and 6:30. Current research interests include distribution and ecology of singing insects, and winter movement patterns and social structure of Canada geese.

0 comments:

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Quick Hits -- Updated Regularly

(MARCH 24) "I was standing at the edge of the frontier."

ChicagoWildlifeNews.com

Featured Image

Reader Support

Featured Column

Featured Links

Categories

0 comments:

Leave a Reply

Welcome to Chicago Wildlife News

Quick Hits -- Updated Regularly