Living with and against nature
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My friend Rick, who lives in the middle of our town, routinely shoots squirrels with a .22 to keep them from messing with his garden.
Taking a more peaceful approach, Rebecca lathers our birdhouse pole with Vicks VapoRub. We’ve never heard our brown and black friends cough.
Two years ago, we built a small screened-in porch in our backyard. The first photo shows the outside view.
Here’s the scene from the inside.
This perspective has gotten me thinking about my place in nature.
Especially when the skunk showed up.
Our Neighbors
We sit among deer, bats, bees, flies, gnats, beetles, and Mr. Skunk.
He surprised us as we watched him stroll across our yard under our human neighbor Hazel’s deck.
I wanted to rush outside to take his picture, but I didn’t for obvious reasons.
When Hazel, 92, called the police, she was given the number of an animal relocation service.
She called Dan, the city’s Animal Relocation Officer.
Why does our human community of 8000 need a Dan?
This photo will help you understand.
Decorah is surrounded by forest and dissected by the Upper Iowa River. The arrow shows you where Hazel and I live. Critters follow a creek bed about two blocks from our home to enjoy our garden offerings and company.
An open borders policy!
Dan traps unwanted animals and takes them outside town.
The skunk escaped two weeks of trapping, but not so for five raccoons, including this one.
An expectant mother, said Dan, as he took her away. He told Hazel the skunk likely would not return, and she would find a new trapped raccoon every morning. So, she decided to put lattice panels under her deck.
Living with and against nature
It’s not easy living with others, human or otherwise.
Is it?
Exactly who is the intruder?
Is it the skunk? Or us?
In a terrific book, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education, Michael Pollan writes about the woodchuck, his garden’s nemesis:
He was part of a larger, more insidious threat: he labored on behalf of the advancing forest. Not only the animals, but the insects, the weeds, even the fungi and bacteria, were working together to erase my garden — after that my lawn, my driveway, my patio, even my house…The forest is normal, everything else — the fields and meadows, the lawns and pavements, and the gardens — is a disturbance, a kind of ecological vacuum which nature will not abide for long.
Before I read Pollan’s book, I sometimes sat on the porch and apologized to the deer I had just shooed away from our bushes. Or the grass I refused to let grow. In the best line in a book complete with excellent writing, Pollan calls our American lawn “nature under totalitarian rule.”
Well, what I do to these guys would put Stalin to shame.
Japanese beetles were on the leaf of one of our nine little birch trees. A garden shop expert told me it was the beetles or the trees. One tactic involved a solution absorbed by the root system that, over time, will help the tree develop its defenses, like a moat around a castle.
The other tactic was slaughter with a pesticide, think machine gun.
Pollan’s magnificent book is a rationale for what he calls “a middle space between forest and parking lot.”
Nature and humans can live together without us, the ultimate intruders, either acquiescing or dominating.
Twenty-five years ago, two days after I purchased this property, I cut down a healthy apple tree. I didn’t want the rotting apples or the bugs they would attract.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
For a quarter century, I’ve been doing penance. My self-imposed punishment was planting 13 trees and three small gardens.
Come to think of it, not so self-imposed. It’s probably no coincidence that my northeast Iowa community, surrounded by forests, has developed a very environmentally friendly culture.
My community, according to Pollan, has encouraged me to act
Like a sane and civilized human…a creature whose nature is to remake his surroundings and whose culture can guide him on the question of aesthetics and ethics.
