Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Sixth Letter from Far South
Encounters in the Field
John Cameron
This essay is one of a series of “occasional letters” that retired environmental educator John Cameron will be writing from his home on Bruny Island, just off the southeastern coast of Tasmania, the island state to the south of mainland Australia. For earlier letters, see EAP, winter and fall 2008; spring 2009; and winter and fall 2010. The accompanying images are by Cameron’s partner Vicki King; the first is a scarlet robin; and the second, white-bellied sea eagles. The third image is King’s atmospheric black-and-white photograph of a wedge-tailed eagle, the remarkable bird Cameron encounters in this letter. Images © 2011 Vicki King. © 2011 John Cameron. Jcameronvking@optusnet.com.au. Originally published in EAP, vol. 22, no. 2 (spring 2011), pp. 11-10.
Six years have passed since we first encountered our home on Bruny Island while canoeing on the d’Entrecasteaux Channel that separates us from mainland Tasmania. The action in the first five of my “letters” takes place within 100 meters of the shore, but most of our 55 acres consists of steeply sloping, bare paddocks that have increasingly required my attention. Initially, we would have been happy to own only the coastal portion, but through the work of regenerating and restoring the hinterland, a different dimension of being on the land has opened for us.
Ecological restoration is a difficult concept because it is hard to know what vegetation actually existed prior to settlement, or to restore fully ecosystems that have been damaged. Environmental repair often involves undoing the strenuous efforts of previous generations, an action that sometimes can be contentious.
Ecological restoration is
also claimed to be psychologically beneficial for
participants. Roszak, Kanner, and Gomes’ text on
ecopsychology is subtitled “Restoring the Earth, Healing the
Mind” [1]. Elan Shapiro drew on her experience of running
restoration projects to conclude that “This art and science
of helping the web of life in a particular place heal and
renew itself can serve as a mirror and an impetus for
individual and community renewal” [2].
Increasingly, as I cast my mind over the last four years of our efforts at land regeneration, I reflect on what its effect has actually been for our land, my partner Vicki, and myself. When we bought the place initially, a local grazier was grazing his sheep here, which was fine by us [3]. Our nearest neighbors a kilometer away emphasized the importance of keeping the grass down for fire protection; the sheep readily did that. In the first year when we were coming to Bruny only on university holidays, it was good to accustom ourselves to being here without worrying about maintaining the land.
The arrangement quickly unraveled, however, when we moved here full time. The few native trees the previous owners had planted had either died or were struggling to survive the constant nibbling by the sheep. I started walking the paddocks to familiarize myself with our new land and noticed that the sheep ate bare large patches where they tended to congregate. Their trails were conduits for spreading thistles and eroding the soil. We delighted in the wallabies grazing quietly in the evening next to the house and were dismayed to hear that the grazier had been shooting them in our absence. It came to a head one night when we were disturbed by high intensity beams of light flashing across our windows and the sound of gunfire close by.
The next morning we confronted the grazier, who retorted that it was his right to control the wallabies that were in “plague proportions” on the island and eating all the grass meant for his sheep.
The episode crystallized matters. It was no longer tenable to enjoy the serenity of the shore and the wildlife in the woodland while disregarding what was happening in the paddocks. We had to take responsibility for all our land, not just the beautiful parts. As far as we were concerned, the grass was primarily for the wallabies and other native animals. They were here first, after all. If wildlife was what we appreciated, we needed to create the conditions for it to thrive. Vicki mentioned the word “sanctuary,” and I immediately responded to the idea: “This land is tired, it hasn’t been treated well,” I commented. “It needs rest and recuperation.”
*******
Much of North Bruny Island had been over-cleared in the past; the adjacent bare headland was called “Woodcutter’s Point” because of early timbering. One of the previous owners had been “too fond of the bulldozer,” ripping out most of the remaining trees. Our neighbors, long-time residents of the island and now dear friends, told us that our land had been ploughed up many times, once to establish an unsuccessful apricot orchard, and other times for lucerne hay.
The week after the wallaby “culling,” we asked the grazier to remove his sheep and not to shoot wallabies on our land any more. He departed, muttering that very shortly our land would be a “bloody mess” if we didn’t keep sheep on it.
The next question was how to give practical expression to the idea of providing sanctuary for wildlife in the midst of sheep country. How could we transform degraded, overgrazed paddocks into habitat for birds and animals when neither of us had any training or experience in ecological restoration? Clearly we needed help.
The right sort of help arrived in the form of Desley, a softly-spoken, unassuming native plantswoman, who seems to have made it her life’s mission to revegetate North Bruny Island. If we were going to make our paddocks more attractive for wildlife, we needed trees and lots of them. Desley spent a blustery spring day with us identifying the tree species we had, collecting seed, and advising us on what to plant. She was firm that we should only plant local provenance, native plants, a plan that was perfectly in accord with our approach of making do with what Nature provided [4]. We ordered 400 trees from Desley, who would germinate the seeds, grow the seedlings over the summer, and deliver them for planting in early winter.
The next part of our plan emerged from the visit of Andrew, a specialist in native grasses. The legacy of a century of plowing and grazing was an abundance of introduced pasture and only small patches of the native grasses we wanted to encourage for wildlife. Andrew and I spent the day traversing the upper slopes, collecting and identifying dozens of introduced species and only three native ones. Standing in a sea of thigh-high grass, I felt overwhelmed at the task we had taken on.
“What is your advice?” I asked plaintively.
“Well, you’ve already done the best thing you could by getting rid of ‘the land lice’,” he replied.
“The what?”
“Sheep. Their hard hooves and heavy grazing have destroyed many an Australian native grassland. The land can start to recover now. Don’t panic, but you’re going to get an ecological response to the removal of the heavy sheep grazing pressure. In a couple of seasons, this place will be covered by every weed and thistle known to man,” he said breezily.
“What’s the best way to control the weeds and thistles? What about all this long grass?” I asked anxiously.
“You may have to poison the thistles for a few years until you get on top of them. You don’t have to do anything about the long grass. You can experiment with slashing or burning if you like later. In the long run, it’ll come right. You don’t actually realize it yet, but you’ve just traded in your university job for that of land manager. Look at it this way: What better thing could you do with your time?”
*******
Andrew’s words proved
prophetic on all counts. The following year, California
Thistles (Circium arvense) sprang up everywhere. The
last thing we wanted was to put chemicals on our land, so I
thought I’d try the old-fashioned approach. One spring
morning, I set off up the slope, whistling, with a mattock
over my shoulders. As I set about
digging out each thistle, I was surprised at just how many
there were lurking in the grass. I didn’t whistle for long.
As time for lunch arrived, I surveyed with aching back and
forearms the pitifully small area I had weeded. A quick
calculation indicated that at this rate, it would take over
three years of continual digging to remove this year’s
thistles. I needed another plan.
By the time I had exhausted other possibilities and outfitted a four-meter spray boom and tank on the back of our four-wheel-drive ute, the thistles had become dense thickets over a meter high [5]. I also needed a backpack unit to spray between our newly planted trees and to reach those rocky and scrubby areas inaccessible to the ute. But even the seemingly endless routine of spraying had its rewards. In my notebook entry of April, 29, 2008, I observed:
One side-benefit of the backpack spraying is that I’m getting to know every square foot of these acres—back and forth, back and forth. I can feel it in my feet even when I can’t see the ground itself. Where once appeared blank uniform expanses of grass, now there are hollows, different tussock types underfoot, slight changes in slope, rock outcrops. All this is becoming known, in my legs.
*******
If I had thought 400 trees was a lot to take on in one year, Vicki had other ideas. The following year, she said with a gleam in her eyes, “Let’s go for double that.” I protested, remembering that a crowbar had been necessary to dig half the holes because the ground was so hard. I also worried that the more trees we planted, the more maintenance and watering and the more backpack spraying I would be doing.
But Vicki had an ally in Desley, who said that we could probably be included in a habitat program to plant trees for endangered North Bruny bird species, and we could get volunteers to help with the planting. The prospect of free trees and free labor was too good to ignore, so I agreed that we would put in 850 native trees the next season.
Ecologists told us that if we were going to provide habitat for the two most endangered bird species in our area, we needed to plant Eucalyptus viminalis for the Forty Spotted Pardalote (Pardalotus quadragintus) and E. globulus and E. ovata for the Swift Parrot (Lathamus discolor). The eucalypts required faster-growing casuarinas and wattles as “nurse trees.” As an understory, we needed banksias, hop bushes, and low wattles. A diversity of eucalypts, blackwoods, and prickly box trees would be best for the other wildlife. In working toward ecological restoration, we should at least roughly simulate the patches of open woodland surrounded by grassland that were probably here prior to European settlement.
But where exactly in the paddocks should these tree clumps go? I reasoned we should let Nature be our guide: Where the thistles grew the highest should be the best ground for planting. I had read that deep-rooted thistles perform a valuable ecological function by “mining” the subsoil, bringing nutrients to the surface and improving soil structure. So I mapped out the areas of greatest thistle concentration and outlined two dozen clumps, which had a pleasingly random yet organic look to them.
*******
It turned out to be a major logistical exercise, distributing 13 different plant species over each clump and supplying water, native plant fertilizer, and tools to some 20 planters. Because the volunteer “Green Corps” had an educational component, the organizers asked me to talk during rest breaks about our intentions in planting and the intercultural history of Blackstone Bay [6]. In particular, they wanted me to emphasize that, of their own initiative, private citizens undertook major environmental work on their land; nature conservation wasn’t just something that governments did.
As I spoke to the young trainees sprawled on the ground, I reflected on how quickly a private undertaking can become more collectively held. Some of our volunteers have subsequently asked us how the trees are faring, and quite a few locals comment regularly on the growth rate of the trees close to the road, clearly deriving pleasure from their progress. Others do not, however. The local grazier is reportedly upset by our putting trees back on the land that his forebears worked so hard to clear. One man’s restoration is another man’s destruction of what he holds precious.
We have now planted over 3,000 native trees and 1,300 native grasses, a figure that I would have deemed impossible when we started. Vicki’s ambitions have been vindicated—we now have the foundational plantings completed, if I can keep them alive through the summers until they are established [7]. The previous two years were the driest for North Bruny since records began a century ago, requiring me to hand water the trees for five months of the year. It usually takes a morning to water and maintain 50 trees. With a desiccating northwesterly wind battering them, I often wondered whether my efforts were too puny to make a difference. But at the end of last season, after some providential rains, only about five per cent of the trees we had planted the previous winter died, compared with 50 per cent losses suffered by landholders unable to water their trees.
*******
It’s been intriguing to see the huge variations in growth and survival rates across apparently uniform paddocks. Small differences in northerly aspect that I wouldn’t have noticed before have resulted in more growth for the eucalypts but not for the casuarinas. Even when the surface soil is dry, there seem to be underground water movements sustaining the trees in some places. It was gratifying to see some of the stakes around the trees immediately used by birds as vantage points to catch insects and become white with encrusted guano, while other stakes remained untouched, giving me a sense of the more promising bird habitat areas.
Tree planting also brings with it a larger time scale [8].The eucalypts we have established in the past few years won’t mature and provide full wildlife value until they are 50 years old and may last 300 years [9]. To put this much effort into something that won’t reach fruition while I’m alive brings mixed emotions. I hope that I’ll live long enough to see swift parrots or pardalotes feeding in one of the trees we planted. I imagine a more wooded landscape bearing my imprint after I’m gone.
Because we’re in a race against time, however, I may not have the luxury of such a gentle, long-term perspective. Climate- change scientists are clear—southeastern Australia can expect much hotter, drier conditions in future decades. The only chance we have to improve things for local wildlife is to establish enough trees now that can grow their roots deep enough to survive the hot, dry times ahead. The whole enterprise is risky—a bushfire any time in the next decade would kill the young trees. The changed climate might mean that never again will the land be able to support an open eucalypt woodland.
*******
I’ve fallen into a regular yearly cycle of activity: Spring and autumn are the time to control thistles and weeds; winter is planting season; and summer requires watering and tree maintenance. It is not always so neatly compartmentalized. As I write this letter, there are still weeks of backpack thistle spraying to be done; the ground is dry enough for me to begin watering, and most of last year’s tree guards and stakes need repair. As Andrew predicted, I could spend all my time “managing” the land, but I’ve resisted, evolving a daily cycle in which I spend the mornings on the land [10], the afternoons writing and working on Bruny environmental issues [11], and the evenings in our vegetable garden or engaged in other domestic activities.
This pattern is utterly different from what I envisaged when we first moved here from the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. I imagined that Vicki and I would bicycle regularly to the next village to play tennis, I’d join the local cricket team, and we would spend weeks at a time exploring Tasmania. I’m learning from being here at Blackstone that when you commit to a place, it will show you what needs to be done. The consequences of our decision to remove the sheep from the land are still unfolding, but I am grateful for the effect it has had on how I live my life here.
Yet regenerating the fields has proven more complex than I was led to believe. Late in the second year, I realized that the thistles had an underground ally. After I had sprayed and watched the native grass return in a few months, bare patches started to appear and spread until a third of some paddocks was devoid of vegetation. Alarmed, I made inquiries. “That’ll be Corby grubs,” a local told me. Apparently, in its larval stage, the scarab beetle Anoplognathus rugosus eats all the grass roots. These larvae flourish in dry conditions, since only a heavy rain will flush them from their holes so they can be eaten by birds. Once the ground is bare, it is colonized by thistles after the next rain, and the cycle begins again. The only control is heavy application of insecticide, which we could not contemplate, since so many of the birds we cherish are insectivorous. I’ve had to accept that progress toward my dream of swathes of native grass between trees will be uneven at best.
*******
My experience in the fields has been enriched by the recognition that I am the object of other creatures’ attention. On my first day back after a recent overseas trip, I was out in the windy, wintry weather counting trees that had died so I could reuse their stakes and guards for the next planting. At the crest of a high ridge, I had my head down trying to determine whether there was still a live tree amidst the tall grass when I sensed movement in front of me. I looked up and gasped. I was eye-to-eye with a wedge-tailed eagle (Aquila audax) no more than five meters in front of me and only two meters off the ground.
“Crikey, he’s as big as I am!” was my first startled thought.
The eagle was not at all disconcerted by our making eye contact and remained where he was. In fact, I was the one who was disconcerted when he glided directly over my head, still only five meters away. It was a stiff breeze, blowing the grass stalks flat, so there was plenty of lift off the ridge top, enabling him to stay motionless for a long time. A very long time. Does he regard me as a threat or as a potential lunch, I wondered, realizing that, from directly overhead, I wouldn’t look any larger than a mature wallaby, and I had already seen a wedge-tail pursuing a fleeing wallaby aggressively.
The eagle rose and abruptly dropped down even closer to my head. Instinctively, I lifted up my hand holding my clipboard of planting notes, and his talons grazed the top of the board. My heart was pounding. Surely he wasn’t going to have a go at me? He repeated the maneuver, and again I raised my hand to ward him off. With a glance in my direction, he tilted his right wing downward slightly and effortlessly sailed across the face of the wind a 100 meters or so. Then, as if to prove a point, he came sailing back across the paddocks to stop precisely above my head. His control in this buffeting wind was utterly remarkable.
For the next hour, we each went about our business, keeping an eye on each other. Questions whirled in my mind. Was this something I should be seriously concerned about? Was I a threat? Was he trying to communicate something I didn’t understand? As I headed down the hill for lunch, feeling greatly enlivened and wanting to know more about eagle behavior, he flew directly over my head and down to Woodcutters Point.
The first thing I discovered was that an eagle that size was almost certainly a female, since they are up to one-third larger than the males. With a wingspan of up to 2.5 meters, she was indeed larger, since I measure 1.75 meters from fingertip to fingertip. One interpretation of the eagle’s behavior was provided by an Aboriginal man familiar with our land who considered that the eagle was my totem and she was making that clear to me. A more prosaic explanation was provided by a wildlife expert who said that the eagle was simply being curious: I was certainly not under threat nor would she regard me as a threat.
The eagle has hovered above my head on several occasions since, and each time I have met her fierce gaze as directly as I can. My pulse still races and the skin on the back of my neck still tingles as I hold all possibilities for the encounter open. It’s another shift in attention, I realize. I’m so accustomed to being the one who is checking things out. It’s odd to let myself be the object of a wild creature’s curiosity when she is clearly unafraid of me. The eagle is calling the shots, not me; she decides how long she will remain poised over my head.
*******
I’ve also had avian encounters of a different kind in the fields. At first, I couldn’t work it out. Strange whitish streaks started appearing on the wing mirrors of the ute. Then late one morning, I was returning from maintaining trees when I saw a male Scarlet Robin (Petroica multicolor), his brilliant red breast fluffed out, perched on top of the ute door. He attacked the mirror in a frenzy, again and again until he was exhausted, sat on top of the wing mirror to recuperate, relieved himself (hence the white streaks), then began the cycle again.
I laughed. Clearly the robin, failing to recognize himself in the mirror, was attacking what he saw to be another male infringing on his territory [12]. The metaphor was apt. As it happened, I had spent the morning obsessively returning in my mind to a conflict we were having with the neighboring grazier and constructing suitable retorts to the arguments I imagined him making. I was sparring with my own projections of what might happen, instead of being there in the field with the young trees, the wind, and the wildlife. The robin sparring with his reflection was a mirror for my own mental state.
*******
Some of the tensions in working with the land have intensified this spring. After the best rainfall we’ve had in a decade, the thistles shot up to unprecedented heights. When I went out with my backpack sprayer, it wasn’t just the young trees that were dwarfed. In some clumps, I was greeted by a thicket of thistles seven or eight feet high. As I waved my spray gun at these giants bristling with spines, I felt like Saint George wielding his sword against the fearsome dragon, a role I once played as a ten-year-old in a primary school play.
It has been a roller-coaster ride of expectation and disappointment, clarity and confusion. Some seasons, the native grasses seem to be out-competing the weeds, and my hopes rise that we’re over the worst. But then the thistles and the Corby grubs stage a comeback. Andrew and other land management experts subsequently have assured me that I will prevail if I keep spraying, but my reservations about continued chemical use have recently been supported by the work of a farmer named Peter Andrews, who has been highly successful going against the conventional wisdom of agronomists. Among other things, Andrews recommends that farmers not kill thistles: “The fact that thistles are growing in a paddock shows … that the paddock lacks fertility and needs to be regenerated. Thistles do the job perfectly” [13]. At the very most, they should be slashed when they reach maturity and left on the surface as mulch.
I find it intuitively appealing that thistles are there for a reason and should be allowed to fulfill their purpose. On the other hand, I have noticed weeds and thistles infiltrating well-grassed areas, and then smothering the grass until nothing grows beneath them [14]. I would be jeopardizing four years of strenuous expensive effort if I ignored the thistles and let them go to seed. After wrestling with this dilemma all year, I’ve decided to do a small experiment on one patch of ground—slash mature thistles without spraying them, do the same next season, then see what happens.
*******
It is noteworthy, once things became difficult, how quickly I reverted to the mindset that thistles were the enemy and needed to be eradicated. Even though Peter Andrews was a reminder that the situation is far more complex, the habit of mind that oversimplifies land management into a battle was still strong. I’m learning to disentangle my emotions from the condition of the land and to take a more appreciative attitude toward the thistles as I go out to spray, remembering their role in bringing soil nutrient to the surface. I listen to the dry rattle of the wind through the thistles and admire the vigor with which they cover bare ground, but it might be a while before I’m able to contemplate a full Goethean encounter with a thistle [15].
It’s not simply a dualistic view of plants (native trees and grasses, good; invading species, bad) that impedes this possibility. There is also what one might call the tyranny of scale. Large numbers of any plant can dull the instinct for appreciation, even the trees. My notebook entry of December 18, 2008 reads:
After all the broad-scale work in and around the trees— spraying around them, dealing with the 1,200 we planted this year—it’s been a great pleasure this morning revisiting last year’s plantings up by Killora Road. One guard was so full of grass that I thought the tree in it had died, but I found a little prickly box (Bursaria sp) still alive, teased the grasses away from its roots, compacted it down. Really lovely to give individual care and attention.
The broader-scale work requires just as much care for the land but is not as personally sustaining as time spent with an individual plant. Goethean science is a striking example of that.
*******
From an ecopsychological perspective, how has my experience corresponded with the processes of renewal and restoring of the soul that Shapiro describes? By engaging in a very “active and embodied” way with the physical work of restoration, I have felt a deeper affiliation with the land, getting to know it with my legs and my hands as well as my eyes. Shapiro writes that “restoration work involves people as partners in a mature collaborative relationship with the natural world,” and there have been several examples of collaboration [16]. Most broadly, the place has shown us what needs to be done, but it has required me to relinquish my own ideas and dreams of what I would be doing on Blackstone.
Letting the dense thistles be the guide for where we planted is a strange type of collaboration because it implies the progressive elimination of my “guides,” but it has been a great success in terms of tree growth. I do have the strong sense that as the birds in the fields check out our planted trees, the ladybirds and skinks take refuge in the tree guards and some self-sown eucalypts begin to appear now the sheep have left, we are working in partnership with the regenerative forces of the land. Is this an example of “witness action” that I raised in a different context in my last letter? It may be the beginnings, but it still remains difficult to maintain much receptive awareness in the midst of such intensive physical activity.
It is frequently observed that Nature can serve as a mirror and metaphor for personal processes, especially when one is doing land restoration. As the Scarlet Robin demonstrates, however, for a mirror to serve its function, the perceivers have to be able to recognize themselves in the reflected image. In this instance, I was able to “see” in the robin’s behavior my obsessive thought patterns attacking a chimera, but how often do I miss such opportunities?
Shapiro asked her volunteers to pull out Scotch broom weeds, and then midway through that process, she began pointing out the good qualities of the invading weeds. She describes how “we all continued to pull out the broom plants with gusto when we returned to the slope, but with a balance of attention that increased our empathy and sensitivity to the experience of taking their lives. In so doing, we were ever so gradually uprooting the mental patterns of polarizing and putting down that keep us split off from the deeper currents of restoration” [17]. The phrase “ever so gradually,” however, does not do justice to my experience of understanding that the thistles were as much allies as enemies, yet forgetting that in the next season’s outbreak, “getting” it again, then losing it as conditions changed. Getting and forgetting, the descent into complexity; perhaps this is how it works, but perhaps it is just my own idiosyncrasies.
My experience of “restoring the Earth, healing the mind” has been much more erratic than the literature suggests. One reason why Shapiro’s conclusions seem more straightforward might be that her evidence comes from discrete external projects undertaken by groups. Over a relatively short period of time, she consciously interweaves physical work with “the psychospiritual work of reclaiming the disowned parts of the inner world” to create an intense learning environment away from participants’ home lives [18]. Without such a clear structure, my learning seems more provisional and equivocal. It is part of my daily life, though, an integral part for which I am grateful. It is a marked contrast with my earlier years, when I would struggle to integrate powerful experiences I would bring home from wilderness trips and spiritual workshops.
*******
Some of the trees we have planted are thriving, already taller than I am. But at times, when the thistles or Corby grubs have been on the rampage, the paddocks have been, as the grazier predicted, a “bloody mess” and not at all like woodland and native grasslands in the making. Sometimes, too, I have felt like a bloody mess, veering from high hopes to despondency over the thistles at the same time as battling self-doubts over my technical abilities and the relationship complications of our living quite reclusively in continual proximity in challenging conditions [19].
The messiness, though, does feel necessary. The paddocks were in a suppressed state when the sheep were grazing, dominated by closely cropped pasture grasses. Mixed woodland and native grassland have much more biological diversity, and maybe they can’t be recreated without some apparent chaos. Similarly, in moving from full-time employment and a semi-suburban lifestyle to a lack of externally-imposed structure on large amounts of land, I have had to acknowledge and confront mental habits that I had previously suppressed. This in turn has allowed my partnership with Vicki to deepen and mature.
Shapiro suggests that it’s a journey of individuation, reclaiming our whole selves, becoming imprinted by and identifying with the inhabitants of a place. So far, it has been less about reclamation of the self and more about learning about my adversarial cast of mind, how to persevere in the face of setbacks, and to keep paying attention as I progress through the repetitive tasks of planting, weeding, spraying, and watering.
There have been several processes at work in my relationships with the inhabitants of the fields. One is gradual enmeshment through working the land. I notice how the relationships between soil condition, grass cover, tree growth, thistles, and insects are in constant flux, and it matters to me more and more. I feel it viscerally when the rains don’t come or I find expanses of bare earth. There has been a corresponding shift in my attitude toward the paddocks. No longer mere backdrop to the coastal woodland and shore, the grasslands have become fully included in my appreciative gaze. I enjoy watching the way the wind works its way across a grassy slope, the rhythmic darkening of the surface as it flattens the pale heads of grass, just as the passage of a southerly squall across the Channel is marked by dark ruffled patches of water.
The other process is abrupt and discontinuous. I recall the eagle hovering above me and what it was like to be seen through wild and curious eyes. It was the shock of unexpected contact with an Other, being lifted out of my human-centeredness. Perhaps I am becoming “imprinted.” No doubt it’s a little too early to tell, but I feel too much respect for the other-ness of eagles, their wildness complete in themselves, to be able to say I identify with them.
*******
Restoring the land is unlike restoring a piece of old, damaged furniture to its former glory. The past is only a partial guide to what needs to be done. The advice of ecologists has been useful in designing our plantings, but climate change means that the same range of plants won’t be able to grow here. There is no knowing what will survive the droughts and storms to come.
Nor have I been on a simple journey toward wholeness and restoring the psyche. Taking on the custodianship of all our land, not just the coastal woodland strip, has involved messiness, uncertainty, and complexity. At the same time, the effort has given me meaningful physical and mental work, a sense of collaborating with the land’s regenerative forces, and the company of eagles, peregrine falcons, and other wild creatures. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Notes
1. Roszak, T., Gomes, M. & Kanner, A., eds., 1995.
Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind
(San Francisco: Sierra Club Books).
2. Shapiro, E., 1995. Restoring Habitats, Communities and Souls, in Roszak et al., pp. 224–39 [see note 1].
3. “Grazier” is the local term for people who graze many sheep or cattle on their own land and often on neighboring land. The American equivalent would be “rancher.”
4. This philosophy developed as we attempted to live within our ecological means on Bruny; see my Fourth Letter from Far South (EAP, 21, 1).
5. “Ute,” short for utility vehicle, is the Australian term for a pick-up truck.
6. See Third Letter from Far South (EAP, 20, 2) for this history.
7. By “foundational,” I mean that, at maturity, we should have the 25-30-per-cent tree cover that visiting ecologists have suggested would be best for this particular land.
8. Inhabiting different time scales has been an on-going theme of our life on Bruny. In my Second Letter (EAP, 19, 3), I explored the juxtaposition of geological time scales and the human lifespan; in the Third Letter (EAP, 20, 2), I considered the presence of several hundred years of intercultural history; and in the Fifth Letter (EAP, 22, 1), I wrote about a 500-year-old grasstree that serves as a constant reminder of the longer perspective on our activities.
9. By “full value,” I mean providing habitat (tree hollows that require at least 50-year-old trees) as well as offering a food source.
10. In some ways, I’ve come to see my morning commitment to maintaining the land as analogous to the Buddhist practices I used to engage in; this parallel will be the subject of a future essay.
11. Last year, a small group of environmentally-oriented people, including myself, formed the Bruny Island Environment Network to co-ordinate the wide range of environmental activity occurring in Bruny’s forests, fields and waters.
12. Interestingly, not all bird species make this mistake. By coincidence, I was reading the March 2009 issue of Wingspan, the magazine of “Birds Australia,” which included an article about European Magpies able to recognize themselves in the mirror and peck off spots of paint placed on their bellies by researchers (p. 43). These magpies join other non-humans (including great apes, elephants, and dolphins) that have been shown to have self-recognition.
13. Andrews, P., 2006. Back from the Brink: How Australia’s Landscape Can be Saved, p. 128 (Sydney: ABC Books).
14. I’ve also been influenced by the ongoing struggle our local Killora Coastcare Group faces with controlling boneseed (Chrysanthemoides monilifera), an invasive shrub. Entire coastal hillsides have such dense boneseed cover that no other species can grow.
15. See my Third and Fifth Letters from Far South (EAP, 20, 2; 22, 1) for accounts of doing Goethean science—an intensive sensory and intuitive investigation of local natural phenomena.
16. Shapiro op. cit., p. 227.
17. Shapiro op.cit., pp. 232–33.
18. Shapiro op.cit., p. 226
19. Particularly with regard to generating our own power—see my Fourth Letter from Far South (EAP, 21, 1), 1–3.