Make Meat Special

Posted on May 28, 2015 by Roger Gosden

Feeling carnivorous or vegetarian, or somewhere in-between?

Is it okay to be carnivorous? Is it natural (whatever that means)?

I asked these questions when I was a teenager, like many other people who love animals. For a while I half-heartedly courted vegetarianism as an ideal, but it would be hard for Mum to prepare separate meals for a lettuce-loafer. Grown-ups never replied to my questions, except with blank looks. I still think they are good questions.  Had I asked Aristotle’s pupil, the Father of Botany Theophrastus, he would have declared that eating animals is immoral, but I can’t fully agree. There are health concerns and spiritual reasons for becoming vegetarian, but it is not for everyone.

Rich man, Poor man

Meat used to be a luxury only the rich and powerful could afford. Royalty and noblemen kept hunting preserves and woe betide the peasant who turned poacher to put venison or rabbit on his family table. The greater the amount and variety of meat consumed the higher the status of the eater. On April 4, 1662, the diarist Samuel Pepys proudly recorded: “We had a fricassee of rabbits and chickens, a leg of mutton boiled, three carps in a dish, a great dish of a side of lamb, a dish or roasted pigeons, a dish of four lobsters, three tarts, a lamprey pie (a most rare pie), a dish of anchovies … to my great content.” This was not a banquet but a feast shared with a few friends, and it took a massacre to prepare.

Meat is no longer the privilege of the few, but still a luxury in many places. In the New Guinea Highlands friends subsist on sweet potatoes and other vegetables while pigs, their most valuable possessions, are reserved for eating at weddings and other special occasions. But where animals and birds are now raised for food industrially and the fishing industry can efficiently hoover whole shoals of fish, flesh has become plentiful, cheap, and ordinary. Then it is undervalued.

Carnivores and calories

Average Americans eat a half-pound of meat per day. That represents a larger fraction of protein and calories than eaten by bears, badgers and raccoons, which are all members of the order Carnivora.  Animal classification looks wonky when you consider that orders are defined by a trunk, hoof, blow-hole, egg-laying, brain size and opposable thumb. For carnivores, it’s the presence of butcher’s teeth that matters. Dracula apart, our dentition excludes us from the Carnivora, but neither is there an order called Vegetaria nor Omnivora which would fit us better. Taxonomy has no traction with the diet of our species.

Yards of gut

But you can tell if an animal is a true carnivore by looking in its mouth and along its gut. It will have:

  • long canines for grabbing prey and carnassial teeth for shearing meat
  • a gaping mouth and large throat for swallowing food unchewed
  • a large stomach with very acidic gastric juice for sterilizing raw meat
  • a relatively short small intestine
  • and a small colon

On the other hand, a strict herbivore will have:

  • small, stumpy canines and flattened, tightly-packed molars for chewing fiber
  • sideways movement of the jaws for chewing
  • an enzyme in saliva for starting to digest starch
  • a stomach of variable size with up to four chambers
  • less acidic gastric juice, especially in ungulates for allowing microbial fermentation
  • a long small intestine
  • a voluminous and baggy colon and cecum where cellulose is digested

The contrast is most obvious when guts are measured. The small intestine of carnivores is no more than three times as long as the body (head plus trunk), whereas in herbivores it is ten times the length. A short, simple tube is adequate for digesting meat, whereas cellulose takes much longer to break down to sugar available for absorption. Since the rabbit’s gut is not long enough for this process it swallows “soft pellets” as soon as they are evacuated from the rectum for a second pass through the system.

Our anatomy is closer to herbivores, though lacking the specialization in ungulates for a fiber-rich diet. We call ourselves omnivores because of a mixed diet, but frugivore is a more accurate rendering of our origin. Our early ancestors probably subsisted on tropical fruits and berries with some animal protein when available. Our primate cousins still enjoy the same. But when and how did we acquire a large appetite for flesh?

Paleo diet

Fred Flintstone was more carnivore than trail-mix muncher, although the opposite may be closer to reality in the deep past. There was more big game in Paleolithic times, some now extinct, but hunting with spears was inefficient and dangerous before bows and arrows were invented (maybe 60k years ago). Our diet was then plant-based. The controlled use of fire goes back further (most authorities estimate since 500k years ago), and cooking followed. Red meat was probably a rare meal before cooking was discovered because we are poorly equipped for eating and digesting it raw.

Early humans were of course locavores. As they fanned across the world, they had to adapt to unfamiliar local foods in different climates and environments. As the plant foods changed so did the animal populations they supported. Animal protein and fat came from fish, shellfish, bird eggs, and insects (yes!), supplying essential fatty acids and vitamin B12 before serious hunting was able to garner more meat and offal. Animal domestication arrived only around 400 generations ago and changed everything.

It is surely one of the mysteries of human evolution how our species was pre-adapted to subsist on a wide variety of diets, for without that flexibility our story would be different.

It should be no surprise that that herbivore can manage a meat meal. Chimpanzees do; after inquiries into the cause of mad cow disease we know that cows can too. But carnivores don’t have the specialized gut needed for tackling plant fiber, except in the world imagined by Isaiah where: “The lion shall eat straw like the ox.”

Our physiology is flexible but urges modest amounts of meat, if any. Being designed for fruits and green leaves, our stomachs are not sufficiently acidic to kill Salmonella and other bugs in raw meat. And when the diet is rich in protein, and particularly purines, our lack of an active uricase gene can lead to painful joints if uric acid crystals accumulate. Carnivorous animals have active copies of the gene, so it is surprisingly that “Sue”, a T. rex from Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, had a touch of gout.

I guess that meat-eating was a necessary adjustment when people migrated to northern lands. Seasonally abundant vegetables disappeared in winter whereas most native wildlife remained, and some were good to eat. Much later, herds of sheep, goats and reindeer provided more food security than by hunting, although further north nomads depended on meat and blubber from marine mammals.

The modern paleo diet claims to bring food choices in line with our genes, which are assumed to have changed little since Paleolithic times. But there was no standard caveman diet across the world, and contemporary hunter-gatherers in Africa and South America eat only what they can catch, according to where they live. Besides, a standard can’t be offered without a matching lifestyle and age span. Early humans have to live strenuously to survive, and few lived to what we now call middle age. Backers of the paleo diet can’t insist on those changes. Some plants eaten in the past have come down to us as crops but they have been genetically altered by selective breeding or even genetic modification, and the microbes in our guts have probably changed too.

It’s a fallacy to believe we can copy the nutrition from bygone eras, but a more cogent reason for rejecting the paleo diet is that it aggravates the environment by reinforcing or even promoting more meat consumption.

The Price of Meat

MeatongrillIn a world of soaring population where 30 % of usable land is already devoted either directly or indirectly to raising livestock the meat industry is on an unsustainable trajectory. Our appetite for red meat impacts virgin rainforests which are converted to ranches, production of greenhouse gases, vast subsidized cornfields, water consumption and pollution, and antibiotic abuse for animals confined to feedlots. Cattle are not the only species to beef about, but the growing middle class in Asia has a greater appetite for white meat which is produced more efficiently. Fish farming helps to relieve pressure from ocean harvests, although not without its own problems.

Our ability to produce ever larger quantities of animal protein will finally be capped by the carrying capacity of the environment and the unchallengeable Laws of Thermodynamics. The problem is illustrated by a pyramid representing an ecosystem where energy is transferred from bottom to top by a thermodynamic “hand-shake:”

  1. At the base plants absorb solar energy for growing
  2. Herbivores occupy an intermediate level where they gain energy from plants
  3. Carnivores on top of the pyramid dine on herbivores below

The biomass diminishes sharply higher up because energy is transferred between levels with only 10% efficiency.  Sometimes, there is a fourth level of super-carnivores (sharks, tuna, and T. rex) feeding on lower carnivores, but there can be no more because less than 0.01% of the original energy remains.

We don’t eat carnivores because they are relatively rare and considered unpalatable. But herbivores taste good to us, and we eat lots of them. There are perhaps 1.5 billion cattle in the world today, and countless other beasts and birds farmed for meat. But if crops grown to feed animals were switched for direct human consumption much larger numbers of people could receive their daily ration of 2,000 Calories.

For example, the 10% rule-of-thumb predicts that 20,000 Calories of corn has a net yield of only 2,000 Calories of cow because most energy is lost. The same amount of corn could support several people, though perhaps not quite as many as ten. Beef has higher quality protein than in corn, but the example stands an argument for swaying food choices and policy. One government actually took a swipe at national food consumption.

Less is More

In World War Two, German U-boats blockaded shipments of food from North America to British ports triggering a fear of hunger because the country was not self-sufficient in food. The British Government secretly commissioned two Cambridge nutritionists to find out how many home-grown Brussel sprouts and sausages the public needed to keep in good health (no Bratwurst, only patriotic British sausages.)

Elsie Widdowson and Robert McCance fed subjects in their clinical trial 1 lb of meat, 1 egg, and 4 oz of fish per week, plus 5 fluid oz of milk a day, and unlimited amounts of vegetables and wholemeal bread, which together would meet dietary requirements. After the subjects w remained in excellent health months later, the meager rations were rolled out as government policy with only a fraction of the meat consumed in Britain today. Family health was said never to be better; infant mortality fell and life expectancy rose (discounting deaths from hostilities), and the only downside was a “remarkable” increase in flatulence.

Since then, Britons have been eating more and more meat, following the prosperous example of America. There are plenty of sound reasons for cutting back on meat consumption, and some people are, but short of a national catastrophe or an environmental calamity policy-makers won’t go further than offering bland health advisories. The only other potential check on growth is the market, and producers won’t forgo sales while demand exists. So it remains for individuals to make up their own minds and hope to make a difference.

Cutting back may be the first step to cutting out, but often the hardest to make. A trade-off can make a step easier, and there is none better than trading quantity for quality. They generally pull in opposite directions. Forcing the productivity of farm animals, like the breeding of high-yielding fruit and vegetables, pleases shoppers by lowering prices but comes at a cost. The cost is mainly elsewhere and unseen (on land and water), but we notice differences in flavor, and wonder if the host of biochemical differences have consequences for our health.

Away then with factory farming, away with corn feedlots. Bring back more grass-fed beef; bring back pastured chickens and eggs from happier animals; bring back flavors that old-timers still remember.

It would help if instead of casually tossing packs of steak, pork or chicken in our trolley as mundane shopping, we remember that meat is special. It costs the earth more, and it demands the sacrifice of animal lives. Eating less but better seems an excellent exchange for the half-pound steak that never inspired any note in a diary. Samuel Pepys was inspired to celebrate tasty food, but he might have curbed the temptation to eat to excess had he known it contributed to his gout.

But cutting back seems to run counter to the America tradition as a land of plenty where self-denial can appear eccentric. A 16 oz steak, or even a Flintstone-sized 32 oz, is emblematic of that life, but maybe carnivores can be satisfied with less. I dream of a new Marlboro ad on a billboard showing a man standing beside a barbecue grill, beckoning to us, “Come to Where the Flavor Is.” Outsized steaks have been vaped. He turns over with his fork a smoking nugget of grass-fed beef.

Next Post:  Virginia Nature Journal for May

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Virginia Nature Journal for April

Posted on May 4, 2015 by Roger Gosden

Algernon Swinburne

Smells arouse old memories, good and bad. The coconut bouquet of prickly gorse bushes evokes memories of ranks of jasmine blossom on the chalky downs of the Isle of Wight where I was born and Algy Swinburne grew up. Oh, to be in England, now that April’s there (Robert Browning). But here in Tidewater Virginia, the scent of pine resin at this season conveys no particular emotion for me, nor can it trigger flashbacks.

Crabapple tree blooming in April

Crabapple tree blooming in April

I read that memory is less aroused by sound than by smell which owes its potency to a handshake between our olfactory bulbs and the hippocampus. But when I hear the lazy phrases of a blackbird, my mind is transported to a remembered English garden where one sang every afternoon announcing its territory from a perch in apple blossom. But here, where brown thrashers, wood thrushes and mocking birds are better musicians, the chorus of woodland songsters never evokes the same emotion, perhaps because some neural networks close after childhood.

And yet less emotion does not mean less care for the birds that choose to make a home in our yard. In a landscape where native plants of Virginia are retreating before the advance of so many inedible aliens, they need us when food supplies reach a nadir. The bird feeder was not full for very long and never empty during the winter. Long before our neighborhood birds started looking for nesting sites I made a batch of boxes for them, one for every acre. They are luxury condos made of durable white cedar with green shingle roofs and a critter-guard against snakes, raccoons and squirrels.

WelcomeEggs_smallThe boxes were designed for bluebirds, which are surely in the top ten for popularity. Cavity nesters depend on these artificial homes because cautious park officers and yard owners fell dead trees which might have offered them a home. Apart from untold numbers of nest-boxes in gardens, there are 230 boxes around public trails and golf courses in James City and York counties that are monitored weekly by local naturalists. It is exciting to find a clutch of 4 or 5 bluebird eggs (sky blue, of course), and experts assure us that a brief inspection does not affect breeding success.

The program has reversed the steady decline in their population, and now there are more bluebirds in the area than at any time in living memory. Over 700 of them fledged from these boxes alone last year. The Virginia Bluebird Society collects breeding data from across the state, and at summer’s end we will know what impact the hard winter had on their population.

Chickadee nesting in bluebird box

Chickadee nesting in bluebird box

There were bluebirds in our yard until the deep freeze started in February, but we saw few afterwards. There are reports of birds found dead in nest-boxes where they were roosting. Drinking water was frozen for several weeks, and there were few berries or other natural foods at the end of winter. Perhaps the hard weather explains why a chickadee took up residence in one of our bluebird boxes, a tufted titmouse in another, and Carolina wren is building a nest in a third. One box is vacant where a pair of bluebirds raised two broods last year.

Bluebird laying recordBluebirds are nesting elsewhere, but they started late this year, although no later than in the past two years. Our records for 2012-15 suggest their breeding schedule is flexible, so that hungry fledglings are not hatched before insects are abundant again. In the warm spring of 2012, the first eggs were laid three weeks early.

The great horned owls breeding on Jamestown Island don’t have to be respecters of temperature and weather because their prey is ever present. They were sitting on eggs in January, and their owlets were almost ready to fly when the bluebirds were starting to gather straw and down to line their nests.

Red-shouldered hawk on nest

Red-shouldered hawk on nest

Besides the vagaries of weather, bluebirds face the daily challenge of evading predators. They have little to fear from nocturnal species like owls, but a pair of red-shouldered hawks has taken up residence in our woodlot, and I guess they have chicks sitting on the untidy matt of sticks in the fork of a loblolly pine. Their breeding schedule coincides with the re-appearance of frogs and reptiles and when baby rodents set foot out of the nest and naïve baby birds flutter out of theirs. We hear the hawks screaming kee-rah all day long to scare birds out of cover or before taking a dive at them on the bird feeder. I feel no special sympathy for an English sparrow in yellow talons, but there would be a rush of emotion if I noticed a splash of blue on prey feathers.

Next Post: Cuisine for Carnivores

 

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GM Human Eggs Have Arrived

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Roger Gosden

We heard confirmation last week of rumors that scientists at Sun Yat-sen University in southern China were trying to change the DNA of freshly-fertilized human eggs. This “first” in science was greeted with horror, hand-wringing, and a storm of criticism. Why the fuss?

They were testing a new technique in abnormal embryos donated to research by an in vitro lab. Their goal was to avoid a common, heritable disease by correcting a faulty gene. The target was the beta-globin gene because it codes for oxygen-carrying hemoglobin, but causes beta-thalassemia when it is mutated. Four per cent of people in south-east Asia have one or two copies of this mutation; over 55,000 affected babies are born with beta-thalassemia every year worldwide. Those babies die without monthly transfusions of matched blood or a bone marrow transplant, if they can get them.

Curing this genetic scourge would be a big deal. First, it would break mutations from cycling through the generations of affected families, although treatment will never eliminate the sporadic risk of a fresh mutation. Second, a breakthrough could be a model for challenging other genetic diseases, especially when the fault is confined to a single locus.

If this background sounds so positive and worthwhile, why is it excoriated instead of celebrated as a life-saving technology?

The news was a déjá vu moment for me. While working in Edinburgh in the 1990s, I was seized by a controversy over ovarian transplants while colleagues who cloned Dolly the sheep across town were caught up in a media whirlwind. The language used to describe those efforts was the same as in current media reports and interviews, seasoned with bogey-words like Playing God, Dr. Frankenstein, Gattaca, eugenics, slippery slope, GM designer babies, genetically-engineered human race, etc.

I presume the Chinese researchers were not motivated by those nightmares, but focused on the hope of curing a dreaded disease. There are, of course, plenty of examples where a discovery has had unintended consequences, including radioactivity and DNA itself. We are still juggling with their consequences, but few will deny the net benefits, and we can never turn the clock back to un-discover something that is abused. Admittedly, when genetically-modified (GM) humans are conceived in the future by so-called germline modification, biomedicine will cross a Rubicon because changes in the DNA of a fertilized egg are inherited by every cell in the body, including the gametes which pass the changes down to children and to children’s children. When that happens, our species will begin evolving on a self-determined path and bioethics will face its sternest moment.

Meanwhile, a debate boils over a study that made such a small contribution to knowledge that it was rejected by two top journals. The media hype will no doubt rouse some hastily scrawled letters to Members of Congress urging them to stop mad scientists! Congress, of course, has no powers over foreign research and federal regulation of American labs (one at least is reportedly engaged in similar research) is highly unlikely because we still don’t have laws for regulating in vitro labs (although federal funds for human embryo research are banned). In hindsight, the uproar we experienced in the 1990s was wasted heat, because ovarian transplants now enable former cancer patients to conceive healthy babies naturally and the prospects of cloning human babies are still remote.

For many years, GM or “transgenic” mice have been engineered using a complex, transgenerational process to introduce or remove harmful mutations. But that technology could never be applied in humans, as I explained in Designing Babies: the Brave New World of Reproductive Technology (1999):

“Nowadays, extremely precise genetic changes can be made in the laboratory. Every week we hear about mice that have been given a gene before birth to replace a defective one or have had another one knocked out by a mutation to see what will happen. Many people have heard about the famous “oncomouse” which develops cancer after an induced genetic change, though most heritable changes are not so adverse. Immense benefits are flowing from this technology as it provides a better understanding of how diseases develop and can best be treated … experiments with mice have shown that it is possible to reverse a natural mutation by introducing a correct copy of the genetic flaw to make the mouse completely well. There are many such revealing examples of genetic engineering in animals. If these changes can be made so accurately in a mouse, why not in a human too?” (page 121)

The Chinese researchers have answered me using a new gene editing tool called CRISPR/Cas9, which was discovered as a defense against viral infections in bacteria. CRISPR/Cas9 is a molecular duplex consisting of a targeting and a cutting module, and this toolkit has been adapted for deleting or replacing short segments of DNA in mouse embryos, human cell cultures, and now human eggs. It works like a programmable search engine to locate a highly specific sequence of DNA letters in the genome for cutting out and splicing in new letters. It is remarkably precise and so simple to use that staff of in vitro labs have the training and apparatus to try it. That is a concern.

in vitro fertilization

Healthy human egg with two pronuclei (marked)
Courtesy: Lucinda Veeck Gosden

This first trial of CRISPR/Cas9 in human eggs mostly failed to make the prescribed changes in the genome, but created alarming numbers of unintended or “off-target” mutations that might put future health at risk. Perhaps the results would have been better if healthy eggs been used instead of abnormal ones that were fertilized with two sperm. For a study that generated no significant advance in knowledge it stirred a lot of controversy, and the paper concluded with one of the great understatements of the year: “clinical applications … may be premature at this stage”

Do we need this technology? A few years ago when I was a visiting professor at Sun Yat-sen University one of my Chinese associates was developing an alternative technology called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (P.G.D.), which tests for genes for beta-thalassemia in embryo. This is now widely accepted by couples planning a family, and genetic modification has no place in it.

P.G.D. was originally introduced for screening other mutations, when it was roundly condemned as the road to designer babies with superior brains, beauty, and brawn! Some critics misunderstood the limitations of selecting for those kinds of desirable traits from the very small number of fertilized eggs available when couples undergo in vitro treatment. Here’s the rub—it’s great for those who can afford it because treatment is expensive, but unlikely to be more costly than when we can correct mutations in eggs.

Far more exciting and much less controversial applications of CRISPR/Cas9 technology to gene therapy have been overlooked in the recent fuss. Bad news and horror stories grab most attention from the media. After years of disappointing trials and a few serious upsets, there are fresh prospects for gene therapy for a wide range of inherited diseases and cancer, and even for agriculture. There is no ethical impasse because future generations are not committed to a man-made genetic change since eggs or sperm in patients are unaffected by treatment, although P.G.D. will be needed to safeguard health of future children. With gene therapy for all ages and P.G.D. to break disease cycling through generations of families, the argument for germline modification is stretched.

Nevertheless, true believers will endeavor to create a safe and effective technology for fertilized eggs, and, provided ethical standards are upheld, why shouldn’t they use discarded cells that can never create a human being? Besides, shouldn’t we admit that public attitudes and ethics shift, or wonder if future generations will mock us if we banned a field of basic research? In mid-Victorian times, anesthesia was sometimes denied to women in labor for theological reasons, and only in recent years has in vitro fertilization become accepted as a standard treatment for infertility. Who can predict the brave new future for humanity, except that it will be very different to present?

“The future is biology, of course. Everybody thinks the future is the computer, but the future is really the gene, the nucleus, the egg, and the embryo. And do you know why? Because all you can do is improve the computer. But you can really f*** with biology. I mean you wouldn’t believe what biology will withstand. You wouldn’t believe what you can do to it, and then what you have to do to it, because you can, because you have biology’s permission.” (Tom Junod in Esquire magazine in 1998)

There will be more condemnation of the Chinese experiments. We will see hubris from a few scientists claiming a medical revolution is at stake, and perhaps some crazy doctors craving attention will make false claims that GM babies have already been born, as they once did about cloned babies. Such a furor discourages responsible researchers from entering the field and will possibly send others underground or overseas where regulations are less stringent. Until more people realize that this research is still in its early infancy and GM babies are unlikely in our time, the theatre will continue and bioethicists will enjoy full-employment.

Next Post: Virginia Nature Journal for April

 

 

 

 

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The Naturalist Spirit

Posted on April 17, 2015 by Roger Gosden

Does any vocation have a more open and welcoming door than natural history? To be a naturalist, you don’t need a high school diploma or a university degree; there is neither an age barrier nor a physical fitness test. Plenty of societies exist for fostering interest, but membership is optional because it is okay to belong to your own club of one. It helps to have keen senses and a memory for identifying species, but curiosity and passion about nature are the defining characters of a naturalist. No higher qualifications are required.

“There’s a bunch of naturalists,” someone exclaims at the sight of one straining through binoculars for a bird or flipping through a field guide to identify a plant or butterfly. But they can be recognized in countless other ways and places too. Some volunteer for conservation work, some express their love of nature through art or photography, some compose essays or poetry to celebrate it, while others choose the simple joy of a country walk. Everyone is welcome at nature’s table.

It’s a mystery why this passion germinates in some people but not in everyone. Nature casts its spell over the human psyche at every age, but in childhood it is often nurtured by parents, friends and teachers, and nourished by visits to wildlife parks and the spectacle of museum dioramas. Summer camps may bring it to full bloom in adolescence, but what next? There are jobs for naturalists as conservation officers and rangers, but for most of us it is a lifelong hobby, and there’s the rub.

In an age that prizes academic qualifications and technical know-how, natural history is often regarded as little more than a casual pastime. It deserves greater honor. All the early naturalists were amateurs, but many of them plowed personal wealth into their endeavors, and sometimes took great risks. Naturalists like Alfred Wallace was famous for trotting around the globe describing, collecting, and illustrating specimens; others like Charles Darwin never ventured further than his home turf after disembarking from the Beagle, yet he laid the foundations of modern biology and geology. Some of the greatest minds in history starting with Aristotle were naturalists, and the scientific disciplines most closely-related to natural history today—ecology and evolution—are intellectually rigorous.  Aristotle has been called the first naturalist and the first biologist, but are those labels interchangeable? Not exactly.

Naturalist was coined around 1587 whereas the closely-linked words, biologist and scientist, were Victorian inventions. This vintage word is sometimes muddled with metaphysical naturalist (someone who holds a materialistic philosophy), or with naturist (nudist) when someone goofs in a spelling bee!

There is more confusion because of the broad dictionary definition: “the study of living and non-living things, and of how plants and animals are adapted to their environment.” A list of American naturalists expanded the meaning even wider by including the astronomer Carl Sagan, perhaps because he speculated about “little green men” in other worlds! So much diffusion of meaning usually diminishes the value of a word, but I argue the opposite.

The contributions of amateurs to ecology, geology, and astronomy are more important now than ever before. Unlike heroes in fashionable biomedicine who have deep pockets for research and can win Nobel Prizes, amateur naturalists go uncelebrated as they step forward for voluntary conservation work with the satisfaction of “making things good” as their only reward. Last month, our local chapter of the Virginia Master Naturalist program celebrated the graduation of 23 new members. There are 28 other chapters in the State and similar programs nationwide that are growing rapidly. It is quite inspiring to watch these naturalists quietly giving their time and sharing expertise as they survey wildlife, improve habitats, and monitor weather patterns. These unpaid services help to improve the biological quality of nature parks and waterways and make huge contributions to knowledge in an era of environmental stress.

Virginia Tech Naturalists

Virginia Master Naturalist program celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2015

Amateur naturalists and professional biologists look like natural twins to outsiders because they have so much in common. But like twins, they occasionally fall out. The Romantic Poets who idealized nature were early critics of science before the Industrial Age got underway and before the storms over animal vivisection and so much more to come.

Wordsworth_Tables Turned

Naturalists who regard their role as defenders of the planet can turn scornfully on developments that threaten biodiversity, spread pollution, and release genetically modified organisms. Activists have launched hundreds of environmental organizations—the Ocean Conservancy, Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network, Sierra Club, and the R.S.P.B. to name a few. Those who straddle as biologists by profession and naturalists by vocation feel uncomfortably dissected, like chimeras with two talking heads. This is not a clash between sentimental naturalism and hard-headed science, but about values and attitudes. Care, respect, even love, characterize the naturalist, whereas honesty, patience and caution are watchwords for the professional biologist.

Wordsworth’s poetry contains faint echoes of pagan deference to nature, but it also nods towards the New Age movement that emerged more recently. There have always been people for whom nature is spiritually refreshing, and some found joy in it when the rest of their world looked desperately bleak.

“The two of us looked out at the blue sky, the bare chestnut tree glistening with dew, the seagulls and other birds glinting with silver as they swooped through the air, and we were so moved and entranced that we couldn’t speak.”  Ann Frank writing from a secret annex, February 23, 1944

Since mainstream religions always claimed to be guardians of spirituality and morality leaders, I wonder where they were in the debate about care of the environment. They were stuck in medieval theology for a long time.

When Darwin enrolled in Cambridge University, his intention (at least his father’s) was to enter the priesthood where there were many parson-naturalists. The Church of England offered a comfortable living for gentlemen, and enough spare time to pursue nature studies. Charles’ circumstances changed so he could pursue his first love full-time, but what were the attitudes of his contemporaries who took up holy orders? They rarely used the pulpit to preach stewardship of the creation, nor would Charles had he donned a cassock and surplice because apocalyptic visions of environmental collapse would have sounded bizarre even to ardent naturalists before the 20th Century. The long struggle of civilization to tame wild nature and meet human needs and wants was not yet over. Nature was scary. Besides, both Saints Paul and Augustine had elevated the doctrine of Original Sin to the center of theology, and the whole environment was caught up in this theological “corruption.” Much less attention was paid to the God of Genesis I, who expressed joy in his creation which was “very good.”

So many years later when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) was published and a Green Movement was sprouting, there were young naturalists sitting in the same church pews who wondered if the church had at last a change of heart. It hadn’t. The clergy found so much more biblical exegesis for instructing us on the care of our fellow humans that it forgot to say anything about caring for the natural systems that support us. Perhaps the Commandment Thou shalt not steal comes closest to an environmental ethic, if it is construed as a call to responsibility for the sake of future generations.

Church of Scotland magazine

Young naturalists look out on a changing landscape – and to an uncertain future. From Life & Work 1989

As nature and church were dear, I found the clerical vacuity embarrassing and alienating. My frustration exploded in 1989 when I published “What on Earth does the Kirk think about Ecology?” in the Church of Scotland magazine Life and Work. Of course, a layman cannot stir up the church hierarchy, but there was a consolation when invitations to speak at the Women’s Guild meetings rolled in.

There has been dramatic greening of churches since those days, and thoughtful books from writers representing all the Abrahamic religions. This late flurry looks like a rearguard action to critics who suspect that churches are struggling to gain authority on a vital topic, but the new focus is nonetheless welcome. There is even a “Green Patriarch” heading the Orthodox Church, and an encyclical about climate change is anticipated from the Vatican where Pope Francis has already brought fresh attention to the subject.

“The vocation of being a “protector”, however, is not just something involving us Christians alone; it also has a prior dimension which is simply human, involving everyone. It means protecting all creation, the beauty of the created world, as the Book of Genesis tells us and as Saint Francis of Assisi showed us. It means respecting each of God’s creatures and respecting the environment in which we live.” March 19, 2013.

Judging by action and behavior, most of the public is deaf to calls from governments, scientists and activists to live more carefully with nature. A Canadian environmental psychologist, Robert Gifford, calls our excuses the “Dragons of Inaction,” which include: “I’m only one, so my effort is a drop in a bucket/ Why should I bother when richer folk don’t/ I’m tired of the publicity/ I’m too busy in my job…” and twenty-seven other excuses where the pronoun “I” is dominating.

There is plenty of speculation about the future legacy of Pope Francis, but his call to be “protectors” of the earth could be the greatest. It is an appeal to people who have faith and others who have none, to those who are heads of state and industry and others who are powerless. Its scope is global because we face an uncertain future together, although the rich world still insulates itself from disasters that affect others, such as rising sea levels forcing emigration from oceanic islands, depletion of fishery stocks, crop failures, drought and desertification.

We have low expectations of progress or agreement between nations because of the drag of vested interests. When science, our best hope, fails to persuade or is befouled in politics what hope, what straws, are left? Perhaps only spiritual ones.

I hope the Pope will remind us of collective guilt for generations of aggressive handling of this wonderful heritage. If shaming is the first lesson, the second must be preaching the stewardship of care. He needs to inspire spiritual zeal that breaks through the old cynicism and the apologies of the Dragons of Inaction to a vision of a world order that is kinder to the environment, more just to the powerless, and considerate of human needs not only in his flock, but all.

The early church fathers had a Greek word, koinonia, which roughly translated means “communion.” They had in mind a fellowship of believers, but it is an apt expression for the “protectors” who Pope Francis is calling for.  There is something deeply spiritual in this idea. At the beginning of this post, I defined the word naturalist in a broad way, not restricting it to a clique of birders or voluntary conservationists, but embracing everyone who loves nature, even if they live their whole lives in the city. My definition includes the ladies I met in the Women’s Guild though they never strung binoculars round their necks, and Ann Frank who never hugged her chestnut tree. Everyone who cares about nature has the heart of a naturalist, because they share a passion for the earth.

Next Post: Pantry for Paleos

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Virginia Nature Journal for March

Posted on April 4, 2015 by Roger Gosden

Daffodils stanza 1

DaffodilsThe poem was inspired by thousands of wild daffodils blooming in woods around Ullswater in the Lake District of England in the spring of 1802. I imagine Wordsworth on horseback in a tightly-fitting frock coat, pantaloons and hessian boots, while his sister, Dorothy, rode side-saddle in a redingote and floppy hat. When he came to compose Daffodils two years later, he drew from her journal entry, though it was the remembrance that inspired a reviving experience:

Daffodils stanza 4

They are pretty lines that schoolchildren have read ever since they were published. We love them because daffodils herald the joyous season when nature is reborn.

Wandered lonely as a cloud continued

The yellow trumpets looked like a friendly crowd of people nodding and dancing as the pair rode past them on the lakeside path. In previous centuries, the woods and countryside almost everywhere were regarded as fearful places where highwaymen lurked and superstitious people believed goblins would trap an unwary traveler. But the poet was making a fresh and romantic connection with the spirit of nature, just as the cheerful days of spring follow the dark, northern winter. Wild plants, birds, and animals were not aliens after all, but fellow creatures that celebrate rebirth in their own ways, just as the Wordsworth family would at Eastertide in St. Oswald’s Church, a few steps from home in Grasmere.

The Wordsworths lived during the Little Ice Age which began after the Medieval period and lasted until about 1850. A diarist of the time wrote that just three years earlier, “No vegetation in the fields, nor blossoms upon the fruit trees, on the 7th May, 1799. The skins of upwards of 10,000 lambs, which perished in the spring, were sold in this town. The weather was cold and wet all through the year.”  The weather is particularly fickle in the Lake District, even by British standards, and then as now there was much variation from year-to-year: the years 1800 and 1802 were much warmer and drier. It’s hard to make sense of climate change from a few sample years, or predict what the next year will bring.

The month of March is a time when people living in the Northern Hemisphere look forward to the first blossoms on plants and trees. Unfortunately, the dates of blossoming have not been recorded as assiduously over the centuries as temperature (continuously logged in the UK from 1659), yet they are vital for monitoring whether seasons are changing and for anticipating impacts on agriculture. Phenology is the name of the science that records blooming and ripening times, and when animals migrate and start breeding. Think of cherry blossom in Washington DC and California poppies on the West Coast.

We mark this month on our calendar for planting in our veggie garden, or moving a coffee table outdoors or cleaning the barbecue grill. The natural world is no respecter of the calendar, but watches the auspicious cues of daylight and weather to make a more sophisticated calculus than an old farmer’s almanac. Project Budburst draws on this natural wisdom  by recruiting citizen scientists across the United States to collect “phenophase” records of when the first buds burst, flowers open, and fruit ripens in their locality. As the database swells, an impression is gained of nature’s “sensibilities.”

 

Weeping cherry, Williamsburg VA (April 4, 2015)

Weeping cherry, Williamsburg VA (April 4, 2015)

Spring burst upon us suddenly up and down the eastern seaboard after a cruel winter. Our weeping cherry tree blossomed today like an Easter bridal veil, a full ten days later than after the mild winter of 2010. Likewise, the daffodils that are often finished before Easter, are today still bright and cheerful with only a few trumpets curling in the sunshine.  Yet nature often fools us because bloom dates do not always conform to our perceptions of what the weather has been like or where climate is heading. As one of spring’s harbingers, daffodils will contribute to the unfolding of science, but will always provide “jocund company” for poetic hearts.

Next Post: Naturalists called to the wild side

 

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