For Immediate Release
Media Contact: Talon Brings Buffalo
406-404-9131
Stephens Creek Trap, Yellowstone National Park
March 16th 2018
Hours before dawn on Friday March 16th, two members of the Wild Buffalo Defense collective arrived at the gate of Yellowstone National Park’s Stephens Creek Buffalo capture facility. They blocked the gate with three 55 gallon drums filled with concrete, locking their arms inside the barrels. The three 1000 pound drums blocked access to the facility, preventing livestock trucks from taking the wild buffalo to slaughter. This action came in the wake of a similar event last week at the Stephens Creek Trap, where two buffalo protectors locked themselves to the hydraulic squeeze shoot using a metal pipe.
Wolf, the first individual locking down, described why he was taking the action: “My father is from Michaocan, Mexico, so I have both native and colonizer blood. Since I wasn’t raised in a native setting, this is my way to give back to the native community. I’m from Illinois — it’s called the Prairie State, and there’s less than one one-hundredth of the prairie left. It’s all strip malls and corn fields…I don’t like seeing just concrete and steel. Seeing how peaceful the buffalo are and how strong they are, they go through enough hardship in their lives in the forest and the plains and then with what Yellowstone National Park is doing to them they still carry on. They inspire me to keep going.”
Coyote, the other individual blocking the gate, said: “I’m doing this to get a better understanding of what is really going on and to protect the buffalo and the lands that they roam. I feel like I have been lost inside…but now that I’m here I feel more combined with myself, with others, and with knowledge and understanding. Whenever I’m with the buffalo I feel like my heart runs with them. When I’m with them they already know the questions, they already know the answers, and I don’t have to respond because they already know. I think it’s a good thing for people to learn. There’s not a day in this world where you’re not able to learn something. What we’re doing is something we love to do and we only live once so we should do what we love to do and if anybody wants to come out and join and learn this experience then they should.”
The barrels were painted with two phrases, “Protect the Sacred” and “Honor the Treaties.” The words highlight the fact that Buffalo are sacred creatures to the Plains Indians. Blackfeet and Lakota prophecies say that when the wild buffalo return, the people and the earth will be healed. Yellowstone National Park currently captures and slaughters about 25% of the herd every year. If this mismanagement of the population continues, these prophecies will… [press release ends].
An hour before sunlight on march 5th two members of the Wild Buffalo Defense collective named Cody and Crow descended from the hills onto Yellowstone National Park’s Stevens Creek buffalo trap and using a steel pipe, locked themselves to the bars of the “Silencer”, a hydraulic squeeze shoot that holds buffalo for testing, shipping and slaughter. In freezing temperatures the individuals blocked the buffalo processing facility and prevented the park from shipping wild buffalo to slaughter.
When asked why he was taking this action Cody stated, “I am standing with the plains Indians as a member of the Ojibwe tribe in Minnesota, I have a Blackfeet friend who helped me protect my territory from the line 3 pipeline and now I am here for him and the buffalo. I have a love for the people. That’s what my mom passed down to me. And I have love for the environment and animals and I feel like I have an obligation to protect them. If I have to put my body on the line to do so I will.”
The two Yellowstone buffalo herds are the last free ranging, genetically pure, plains buffalo in the United States. These buffalo are decedents of the 23 that survived the buffalo extermination campaign that the US government implemented in the 1800s to starve the plains Indians into submission.
Today the Stevens Creek Buffalo Trap costs the Yellowstone Parks Service 3 million dollars per year to maintain and despite years of public opposition continues to operate their capture-for-slaughter facility within the park boundary. Activists and tribes allege that the Montana cattle lobby controls how the Parks Service manages of the wild buffalo. Crow, the other individual who locked himself to the facility stated “They say they need to kill the animals to stop the spread of Brucellosis, but the wild elk have Brucellosis and they are allowed to roam free because the cattle industry is not worried about elk competing for grass and the state receives income from the elk hunting permits.” Every year the facility captures and sends roughly 1000 animals of the 4000 wild buffalo population to slaughter.
While the two individuals locked themselves to the shoot, some activists gathered at the gate of the facility with banners reading “Wild buffalo slaughter = cultural genocide.” Their signs spoke to the connection between the culture of the plains tribes and the wild buffalo, suggesting that by exterminating the last wild buffalo, Yellowstone is effectively attempting to do the same to the culture of the plains tribes. The non-violent direct action came in the wake of a decision by the Montana department of livestock and the animal plant and health inspection service to deny the Fort Peck Indian reservation the right to receive wild buffalo from the park.
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Featured image: A single mom with seven calves who she is caring for. More than likely, only one of these calves are hers, and the rest of these babies are buffalo she adopted after their mothers were killed by hunters. BFC photo by Stephany Seay.
It’s just below zero as we trek through freshly fallen snow on an unusually windless early morning, in the high hills above the Gardiner Basin. Taking advantage of the calm air that won’t rock our scopes and cameras, our patrol is on the way to a lookout spot high above Yellowstone’s Stephens Creek buffalo trap. The trap is miles away. The spot we’re at is one of the few places that we can see even a far-away glimpse into the industrial size monstrosity that has entrapped more than 450 of the gentle giants in the past couple of weeks. Yellowstone initiates a massive seven-mile public closure around their trap, obviously wanting to hide the horrible things they are doing to this sacred species, our national mammal. On our way to the lookout, our footsteps squeaking through the freezing cold snow, one of our crew shouts out, “wolves!” We all stop dead in our tracks. To the south of us, we can hear them, the beautiful, haunting serenade of a wolf pack, singing blessing songs to the morning, or, more like mourning songs to the travesty unfolding before us. The wolves know. We get to the lookout spot and it’s as bad as we thought: hundreds of buffalo in the trap, huddled together, eating hay rations, trapped on death row. Four park wranglers on horseback, and a white SUV are coming into the northernmost paddock of the trap which holds approximately 60 of the country’s last wild buffalo. This paddock is the veritable end of the line before the buffalo go in even deeper, to places they will never return from.
“Genocide,” our Blackfeet brother says. We nod in agreement. The U.S. Government continues the systematic destruction of the sacred buffalo, and for the same reasons, too. Only, these days, instead of Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Cody, they call it “management” and the killers are the so-called guys in green: Yellowstone National Park. Donning buffalo on their uniform badges, they are the very ones who are obligated to protect the buffalo — the buffalo who are the main reason this park even exists, that people even come here. These “caretakers” are facilitating all of the trapping and most of the killing. As we watch through our scopes and binoculars, eyes teary from the blistering cold, or the pain in our hearts, the wranglers go in for the attack. It’s just another day in the park. Frantic, the sixty buffalo run away from the wranglers, but the only path open to them is the dark corridor that leads into the labyrinth of the trap, towards the bull pen and the squeeze chute, towards the end of freedom and family, into the tiny holding pens where they will spend their last hours in feces and fear, before being loaded onto livestock trailers headed for the slaughter house. The mournful howling continues. The wolves know. We join in.
A bird’s-eye view of Yellowstone’s Stephens Creek buffalo trap. The massive closure is an attempt to keep the public from seeing what Yellowstone is doing. BFC photo by Stephany Seay.
Anticipating shipments to slaughter, the next morning we rise even earlier to get our sites on the trap before the trailers arrive. We are well ahead of schedule. Our presence, our vigilance is the only way for anyone to know what is taking place here, for anyone to know what is really happening to the buffalo. Once posted up, we send one patrol high into the hills for an even better birds-eye view. Even so, both lookouts rely on the powerful magnification of spotting scopes to see anything, and tiny-dot-anythings at that. With the naked eye, the trap and it’s happenings are hardly visible at all. The trap is so strategically located that Yellowstone’s shame and desire for secrecy are apparent. Just before dawn, multiple vehicles start arriving to the trap. The unmarked rigs of the wranglers, a few park service law enforcement officers, Yellowstone’s bison biologist, Rick Wallen, and others, get ready for another day of wild buffalo abuse. Then the stock trailers show up, flanked by law enforcement escorts. It takes less than an hour for them turn wild buffalo from sacred, free-born beings into “pounds on the hoof” headed for the slaughter house.
2018 03 01 03 003 Update3 Buffalo Field Campaign Stephany Seay 2018 800 Two stock trailers drive through Yellowstone, and groups of buffalo, taking buffalo who were captured at Yellowstone’s facility to slaughter on Wednesday morning. BFC photo by Stephany Seay.
The dominant culture — not even those who might care — can’t bear to look into the face of the reality of its actions. It views the human supreme; born out of a cold arrogance lusting for control, enabling the conversion of the living into the dead for profit. Forgetfulness, mindlessness – “with guns and laws and truth that lies” – help grease the gears of the machine; numbness is the key to conducting wildlife “management.” It is said that once you see, you cannot unsee. A self-inflicted blindness enables it —to see would break their hearts and force their souls wide open. So, with brutal efficiency, the government workers keep their blinders on, do their jobs, and hold fast to the agreed upon Interagency Bison Management Plan.
Approximately 450 wild buffalo have been captured in Yellowstone’s trap, and nearly 250 have been killed by hunters just across Yellowstone’s boundary. By Yellowstone and Montana’s own standards, the middle-end of their 600-900 kill quota — in place to appease Montana’s cattle interests — has already been met. After the last few weeks of extremely unsavory ‘hunting’ along Yellowstone’s north boundary, very few hunters have come to kill buffalo this week. Many have left here utterly disgusted, vowing never to participate in such a slaughter again.
With their enormous, shaggy heads, buffalo face into a storm. We have much to learn from our relatives, the buffalo. BFC photo by Stephany Seay.
Before and after bearing witness to this insanity, we are reminded of the real reason we are here. Other buffalo, who were not in the trap, gave us the gift of remembering and connection, the honor of being in their presence and living in the moment. They help us remember who we are fighting for — and with — and why. The buffalo help us connect with their humbling ancient wisdom; a truth so incredibly sacred because of its gentle simplicity and rightness.
The blizzard came in quick and heavy, and the buffalo moved right along with it as they always do. With their heads into the storm, grazing and walking, sparing and goofing around, they look up at us for moments with the eyes of god, the faces of ghosts, awakening memories of ages past and future potentials. Still here. Still present. Still doing what they have always done since buffalo time began. Where they walk, ravens feast on the gut piles of their recently killed relatives, strewn across the landscape at Beattie Gulch, a beautiful place that has become synonymous with death. And, yet, the buffalo still come, still offer life, staying among the living. Obstacles be damned. These ancient beings have survived Ice Ages; now the question is: can they survive the U.S. government? In the joy of sharing time and place with the buffalo, in our pain and anger fueled by management plans, being in the company of friends both human and buffalo recognizing each other, committing to each other again; in our solidarity among our comrades we understand that all of these things come from love. Profound love. The buffalo and their wildness, their teachings of sorrow and joy, their obligation to the earth, and ours to them. These realities keep awake our spirits, reaffirm and strengthen our vow: yes, you will survive, and we will give ourselves to make sure of it; fighting for you, along side you.
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK / GARDINER, MONTANA: Yellowstone National Park has initiated wild bison capture operations in their Stephens Creek bison trap, and plans to send hundreds to slaughter in coming weeks. Yellowstone asserts that these actions are necessary to appease Montana’s livestock industry which claims wild bison pose a threat. Bison were recently bestowed with the honor of being designated as the United States’ National Mammal.
“Bison were recently granted national mammal status by the U.S. Congress because they embody such monumental significance in this country, as a symbol of the wild, untamed land, as the true shapers and stewards of native grasslands and prairie communities, and for their profound cultural importance to many indigenous tribes,” said Stephany Seay of Buffalo Field Campaign. “Yet here we have the supposed care-takers of the country’s last wild, migratory herds shipping them to slaughter to cater to the whims of producers of an invasive species – the domestic cow.”
Bison once roamed most of North America, numbering tens of millions strong. They were nearly driven to extinction in an effort to subjugate Native Peoples and to clear the land for livestock grazing. Yellowstone National Park boasts the last stronghold of continuously wild American buffalo in North America. The roughly 600,000 bison who exist in the country today are largely privately owned and ranched as domestic livestock, or intensively managed on public lands. The migratory wildlife species is ecologically extinct throughout its native range, with Yellowstone and small fractions of neighboring Montana being the last place they continue to survive.
Capture operations at Yellowstone’s Stephens Creek bison trap began Saturday, January 7, 2017. BFC field patrols in the Gardiner Basin report that forty-four wild buffalo are currently being held. Yellowstone and other bison managers plan to slaughter or domesticate — if a controversial quarantine plan is approved — upwards of 1300 wild bison this winter, all in an effort to appease the powerful Montana livestock industry. Livestock interests claim that wild bison may pose a threat of spreading the livestock bacteria brucellosis back to cattle, something that has never happened in the wild. Livestock proponents also claim that Yellowstone’s bison population is too numerous for the land base, yet Yellowstone’s grasslands are thriving, and wild buffalo have never come close to overreaching sustainability within the Park.
“Montana’s livestock lobby continues to play deadly political games with this keystone species which is not in the least guilty of the crimes cattlemen blame them with,” said Seay. “In truth, invasive cattle have left death, pollution, and destruction in their wake across the lands of the West, and only wild, migratory buffalo can heal these injuries. Only wild buffalo can restore the grasslands and prairie communities, which are some of the most threatened habitats in the world.”
In addition to capture, wild buffalo face other fatal dangers if they migrate out of Yellowstone’s boundary into Montana. Like other migratory ungulates bison must leave the park in order to survive Yellowstone country’s harsh winters. Less than a mile from Yellowstone’s trap, just outside the boundary, hunters wait, ready to shoot any who leave the park.
Capture operations are going to interfere significantly with state and treaty hunting, which is currently in full swing. Wild buffalo are being hunted along Yellowstone’s border by hunters who hold Montana tags, and by four Native tribes — the Confederated Salish & Kootenai, Nez Perce, Shoshone Bannock, and the Umatilla Confederacy — who hunt buffalo under treaty right. Hunters are upset that Yellowstone has begun capturing so early, and most are adamantly opposed to the capture and slaughter of wild, migratory buffalo.
“In one direction lies the trap, in the other the gun, and these attacks last for months on end without respite,” said BFC’s Seay.
While BFC does not agree with the way buffalo hunting is currently taking place, given the limited landscape, small buffalo population, and firing line-style, we do hope that we will strengthen our common ground with hunters and bolster solidarity efforts aimed at ending the trapping of wild buffalo for good. Unfortunately, the limited landscape where buffalo are allowed to roam facilitates highly unethical hunting practices which not only manifest in the gunning down of wild buffalo at Yellowstone’s borders, but forces the buffalo to flee back into Yellowstone and become trapped by park officials.
“Buffalo are bottled up in the Gardiner Basin and have no escape. Hunters at the Park’s boundary are in competition with each other, and also in a race against the trap,” BFC’s campaign coordinator Mike Mease. “In the midst of such management madness, wild buffalo have nowhere in the Gardiner Basin where they aren’t being shot by hunters or captured for slaughter by Yellowstone officials.”
At a fundamental level, Montana and its livestock industry are responsible for the buffalo slaughter. Buffalo Field Campaign is working to change and challenge the status quo of the Interagency Bison Management Plan. Wild bison advocates must work to repeal MCA 81-2-120 and remove the Montana Department of Livestock’s authority over wild buffalo, and also insist on a new plan that respects wild buffalo like wild elk in Montana.
“Any action that does not fight this intolerance and excessive killing, or that fails to advocate for the buffalo’s ability to live freely on the lands that are their birthright, poses a threat to the buffalo’s long term survival and evolutionary potential,” said Stephany Seay. “Montana has played its cards so slyly that they aren’t feeling much of the heat anymore; instead, all the entities who should be the strongest allies for wild buffalo — Native Peoples, subsistence hunters, Yellowstone National Park, buffalo advocates — are pointing fingers at each other. It’s the same old game of divide and conquer.”
Buffalo Field Campaign exists to protect the natural habitat of wild migratory buffalo and native wildlife, to stop the slaughter and harassment of America’s last wild buffalo, and to work with people of all nations to honor the sacredness of wild buffalo.
Recently walking up Main Street in Park City, Utah, I saw in the Visitor’s Center doorway what looked like a man holding a great-horned owl surrounded by children. As his voice carried across the street, I heard the man explain that this owl had been found with an injured wing after being struck by a car.
I love owls. I love the haunting sound of their hoots in the darkest hours before dawn. I love the joy that accompanies the lucky sight of a splash of brown feathers against newly-fallen snow when an owl makes the rare decision to reveal herself in winter daylight. I love how owls’ mysterious nature have made them omens in so many cultures’ imaginations. So, when I saw what I thought was a great-horned owl, I automatically crossed the street with a feeling of anticipation.
Many of a great-horned owl’s characteristics were observable in the creature the man held. There were beautiful, downy brown and white feathers flecked occasionally with yellow. There was a sharp, curved beak. There were powerful wide wings – though they were tightly-clasped as this creature hugged herself for comfort.
From a distance I could see her eyes had the same shape and colors of a great-horned owl’s – big and round with an orange ring circling black. I recalled the eyes of the great-horned owls I have seen watching me from the tops of ancient juniper trees in the chilly foothills of the Great Basin. The orange in their eyes flamed and blazed. Sometimes, the black reflected impenetrable depths of wisdom. At other times, the black became a pool reflecting the silver notes of stars in the Nevada sky. And, at still other times, the black became the night soaking up the shadows before lifting with flight to disappear into clouds.
As I approached, I saw that the man’s right forearm was wrapped in leather. Two steel rings pierced the leather. Connected to the rings was a chain, about two feet long, made of still more steel rings tightly wound and welded together so the chain would never break. The chain was wrapped around and tightened to the left leg of what I had mistaken for a great-horned owl.
This was no owl. Not anymore. An owl is so much more than her eyes, beak, and talons, than the small space she occupies, than the blinking, swaying, and beak clacking she is famous for. An owl is more than the physical collection of her feathers and bones.
An owl is the rabbits, hares, mice, and voles who become her body when she eats them. An owl is the tree she sits in, the sky she descends from, and the wind she rides on. An owl is the meaning revealed in her nature. An owl is an expression of all the relationships creating her. An owl is wild. An owl is free.
Stolen from the wind, kept in a cage, and chained to a man, this creature was no longer an owl.
For a brief moment, she lifted her eyes to connect with mine. And, I was horrified by what I saw.
The orange and black in her eyes were only echoes of color. Not even the faintest trace of light remained in them. It would have been better, easier to accept if sadness or anger or even desperation was found there. But there was nothing. Nothing, but emptiness.
I knew these eyes well. These were the eyes of a creature pushed beyond pain into numbness, overwhelmed with despair, and fading into the void. These were eyes I have seen on the street. These were eyes I have seen in zoos, in aquarium tanks, and in cages. These were eyes I have seen in prison, in psyche wards, and at funerals.
I knew these eyes because I have seen them reflected in the mirrors I have peered into before trying to kill myself. I knew these eyes because I have seen them in myself.
Disturbed and overcome with sorrow, I fled in horror.
***
What is the precise nature of the horror I saw in those eyes?
First, I was witnessing the aftermath of the destruction of an owl. Captivity deprives an animal of what makes the animal an animal. Principles of deep ecology confirm this. Deep ecology is the recognition that life is an ongoing process sustained by healthy connections between living beings. Through this recognition, deep ecology teaches that each living being is best understood as a specific collection of connections with other living beings.
A captive animal is no longer an animal when humans physically cut off the animal’s connections. Neil Evernden, a foundational deep ecologist, describes how this happens to a gorilla kept in a zoo in his brilliant work, The Natural Alien: Humankind and Environment. Evernden writes: “[An animal] is an interaction of genetic potential with environment and with conspecifics. A solitary gorilla in a zoo is not really a gorilla; it is a gorilla-shaped imitation of a social being which can only develop fully in a society of kindred beings.”
Evernden goes on to undermine one justification for keeping animals in zoos (preserving their genetic legacy) and in the process explains further why a gorilla in a zoo is not really a gorilla. He writes, “To attempt to preserve only a package of genes is to accept a very restricted definition of animality and to fall into the trap of mistaking the skin-encapsulated object for the process of relationships that constitutes the creature in question.”
In other words, an animal is not an object. An animal is an ongoing process of relationships. To destroy these relationships by restricting an animal’s physical ability to engage in the relationships that sustains the animal, you destroy the animal. When I saw the creature on the chain, I recognized how the driver who struck her and the man who chained her isolated her from the specific relationships that sustain owls. She had been reduced to the “skin-encapsulated object” Evernden describes.
It was impossible to see the creature on the chain and not think of all the creatures on chains, in theme park pools, and in zoo cages. I thought, specifically, of the way a growing amount of media attention is being given to the captivity destroying individuals of two species sharing many similarities with humans: orca whales and elephants.
Orcas are family-oriented and relatively long-lived. They speak a complex language and pass down traditional knowledge such as hunting techniques from generation to generation. These characteristics coupled with the history orcas have of protecting humans from sharks creates a special bond with them in the minds of many humans.
Dr. Naomi A. Rose, in her study “Killer Controversy: Why Orcas Should No Longer Be Kept in Captivity,” states the obvious, “Orcas are inherently unsuited to confinement.” To support this claim, Dr. Rose explains that orcas have significantly lower annual survival rates in captivity than in the wild. In fact, the annual mortality rate for orcas is more than two and a half times higher in captivity than in the wild.
Dr. Rose demonstrates how captivity attacks the bodies of orcas explaining that one of the most common causes of death in captive orcas is infection. Infection-caused mortality is linked to immunosuppression and, as Dr. Rose describes, pathogens that the immune systems of wild orcas would successfully manage become fatal to captive orcas due to chronic stress, psychological depression, and even boredom. So not only does captivity act on an orca’s mental health it attacks an orca’s physical health through the mental disorders it causes.
Elephants provide another example. Elephants, like orcas and humans, live in large, extended families, they develop complex social relationships, and they require large spaces to serve as their home ranges. With a similar declaration to the one Dr. Rose made about orcas, Ed Stewart – president of the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) that operates three wildlife sanctuaries in Northern California – explains the situation for captive elephants in a piece for National Geographic, “No Ethical Way to Keep Elephants in Captivity.”
To demonstrate why there is no ethical way to keep elephants in captivity, Stewart describes what captivity does to elephants: “The inadequacies for elephants in captivity will always be a source of disease and suffering for elephants. Cramped enclosures and hard surfaces cause a variety of problems, including deadly foot disease and arthritis, infertility, obesity, and abnormal repetitive behaviors such as swaying and head bobbing.” These “abnormal repetitive behaviors” are of, course, psychological disorders.
***
With my history of mental illness, when I learn about the psychological effects captivity has on orcas and elephants I wonder if there are connections between human mental health and other animals’ mental health.
Of course, there are. Just like psychological disorders open the way for other health problems in animals like orcas and elephants, mental illnesses like depression dramatically increase a human’s risk for other illnesses. Psychiatrist Dr. Peter Kramer notes in his book Against Depression that humans suffering from depression are four times as likely as those without to die from cardiac disease, five times as likely to die of coronary artery disease, and four times as likely to die from angina, coronary artery bypass surgery, and congestive heart failure. As a poet with major depression, the power of the metaphor created by the way depression literally attacks the heart is not lost on me.
I am certainly not the first person to investigate these connections. Since about 1980, westerners investigating these connections have called themselves “ecopsychologists.” Meanwhile, traditional peoples have worked to understand these connections since time immemorial.
Theodore Roszak, in his essay “Where Psyche Meet Gaia” written for the anthology Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, explains the history of ecopsychology. It is not new. He writes, “…in fact [ecopsychology’s] sources are old enough to be called aboriginal. Once upon a time all psychology was ‘ecopsychology.’ No special word was needed. The oldest healers in the world…knew no other way to heal than to work within the context of environmental reciprocity.”
While it appears that the incidence of mental illness in traditional societies is drastically lower than in civilized societies, perhaps we would do well to “work within the context of environmental reciprocity” as the oldest healers in the world have always done. Viewing human mental health through the lens of deep ecology is one way to do this.
The late Paul Shepard’s 1982 book Nature and Madness is a foundational text in ecopsychology. Shepard wrote the book to answer the simple question, “Why do men persist in destroying their habitat?” His answer is psychopathology. Or, in his words, “a kind of failure in some fundamental dimension of human existence, an irrationality beyond mistakenness, a kind of madness.”
How did some humans develop this madness? Shepard calls on a concept from biology – ontogeny – to explain the madness. Ontogeny is the development of an individual organism from the earliest stage to maturity. Shepard makes the simple, but brilliant observation, that to understand human behavior we must understand human development.
Ontogeny is most often studied as it pertains to animals, but Shepard is quick to note, “Anyone who thinks the human creature is not a specialized animal should spend a few hours with the thirty odd volumes of the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child or the issues of the Journal of Child Development.” Ontogeny, then, is as appropriate in the study of humans as it is in other animals.
Shepard goes on to explain that the ontogeny of traditional peoples “who seem to live at peace with their world” is healthier than that of civilized peoples. Shepard writes: “Their way of life is the one to which our ontogeny has been fitted by natural selection, fostering cooperation, leadership, a calendar of mental growth, and the study of a mysterious and beautiful world where the clues to the meaning of life were embodied in natural things, where everyday life was inextricable from spiritual significance and encounter, and where the members of the group celebrated individual stages and passages as ritual participation…”
So, humans require certain things to mature from children to adults. Human children need to be immersed in the natural world where they can interact with non-human others that will reveal to them the meaning of life. They also need intact communities with elders who understand the passages of human life to help the young celebrate through rituals. And, ultimately to become elders themselves. I am reminded, again, of Evernden’s statement that an animal is “a social being which can only develop fully in a society of kindred beings.”
Spend any time with children outdoors and you will see them find deep meaning in natural things. This is healthy human development. Shepard explains, “Animals have a magnetic affinity for the child, for each in its way seems to embody some impulse, reaction, or movement that is ‘like me.’ In the playful, controlled enactment of them comes a gradual mastery of the personal inner zoology of fears, joys, and relationships. In stories told, their forms spring to life in the mind, represented in consciousness, training the capacity to imagine.” This “gradual mastery of the personal inner zoology of fears, joys, and relationships” is essential to a human’s full development.
Shepard goes on, “The play space – trees, shrubs, paths, hidings, climbings – is a visible structured entity, another prototype of relationships that hold.” Forming relationships with trees and shrubs, then, is another essential element of human development.
***
My four-year old neice, Layla, and my nephew, her one-year old brother, Thomas, teach me that the ecopsychologists are right:
Photo by Will Falk
Beneath a cloudless mountain sky in late autumn, Layla kneels on a wooden bridge above a clear pool collecting where a beaver dam slows the cold Snake Creek in Midway, Utah. Mesmerized, her face is drawn slowly downward until a blonde strand escapes from the mess of hair made tangly by an afternoon of play to brush the pool’s face. Barely aware of her own motion, she brushes the wet strand back into place behind her ear. The icy drops that run down the back of her neck and disappear behind her jacket collar do not break her concentration.
I am so fascinated by her behavior that I almost let Thomas jump from my arms to join his sister on the bridge’s edge. Thomas is fascinated, too. I lower him down and let him find his balance with his new walking muscles as his little hand tightens around my right pinky and ring fingers.
We approach Layla as fast as Thomas’ legs will allow. “What are you doing, Layla?” I ask.
She still has trouble pronouncing the short ‘I’ in my name and says, matter-of-factly with a touch of annoyance that I cannot see the obvious, “Playing with the fish, Weel.”
She does not move her gaze from the water and when I get close enough I see what she is watching. There is a small, four inch, rainbow trout, facing upstream gazing right back at Layla. The wide beautiful blue in Layla’s eyes join with the sharp obsidian black in the trout’s eyes. From under a brown stone on the creek bed, a much bigger trout, fourteen inches or so, circles around the smaller one – as clearly curious as I am. The small trout, like my small niece, pays no attention to the approaching adult.
And then I understand what Layla means by “playing.” When Layla leans to her left, the trout whips her tail and swims to the right. When Layla leans to her right, the trout whips her tail and swims to the left. Layla is, obviously, playing with the fish.
Later that night, Layla is taking a bath. Layla’s mother is at the health clinic where she works as a physician assistant. Layla’s father is busy feeding Thomas and he asks me to check on Layla. When I walk into the bathroom, she quickly ducks under water and splashes around. Eventually, she must come up for air and I make the mistake again.
“What are you doing, Layla?” I ask.
Again, she is annoyed. “I’m not Layla, Weel,” she explains. “I’m a fish.” And, she ducks under water once more. I laugh and shake my head. Who am I to disagree?
***
Finally, I understand the precise nature of the horror I felt looking into that chained creature’s eyes: I saw myself, and so many like me, reflected in her eyes.
Just like an owl on a chain is no longer an owl, an orca in a theme park pool is no longer an orca, and an elephant in a cage at a zoo is no longer an elephant, humans cut off from the natural world are no longer human. We are animals and animals are an ongoing process of relationships. When those relationships become impossible, we lose ourselves.
I do not believe I go too far when I write, “We are no longer human.” By “we” I mean civilized humans who live much like I do.
I exist without most of the relationships that have made humans human throughout our history. I woke up this morning in a bed two-stories above an asphalt floor. I do not know how much asphalt I would need to dig through to reach soil. When I opened my eyes, before the sunrise, I did not see the dark, eternally mysterious forms of clouds traveling across sky. I did not see the pale courage of morning stars holding on to the coldest hours before dawn. I saw a ceiling made from the flesh of once-living, once-wild trees.
When I rolled out of bed, I did not pause at the edge formed by the warmth inside my home meeting the chill of a December mountain morning to enjoy the original pleasure in sensory diversity. I cursed because I let the heat in our apartment dip below 62 degrees Fahrenheit. I did not walk down to a river bank to draw my day’s water. I did not stop to watch the burning glow of the rising sun spread across the river’s face. I stumbled into the shower where I pulled a plastic handle and water stolen from rivers held captive behind dams was heated by the remains of ancient forests ripped from their resting place deep beneath the earth.
And, this was only the first five minutes of a day I have repeated over and over again in 30 years of life. If Shepard is correct, and a stunted ontogeny produces stunted humans, then I, and so many humans like me, are stunted. This does not make me sad, it makes me angry. And that anger feels like an animal reaction to an insane world. I know, as well, it is not too late for Layla or Thomas. It is not too late for their children and their children’s children. In many ways, Layla was right. She is a fish. She is a puppy. She is an eagle. She is all the relationships I have seen her form with the creatures she imitates. And, to protect her, we must protect them.
