Still more on violence: there will be blood

The other day, I stopped my car to chat with neighbors (a frequent occurrence in our chatty neighborhood). We quickly got to the topic of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and its spreading devastation. D. told me that he’d heard an interview on National Public Radio with a worker at an oil and gas pipe factory in Youngstown, Ohio, after President Obama had spoken there to promote his economic policies. This worker was notably unimpressed with the president’s moratorium on offshore drilling. (According to the transcript on the NPR website, the worker, Larry Collins, actually said, “I’d like for [President Obama] to say it’s a go and let’s start drilling. The more rigs we have out there drilling, the more demand for our product.”)

To D., I snorted something snarky about Mr. Collins’s self-centeredness and shortsightedness and then realized in the midst of sneering that I had left my car running while we were chatting. Once I got home, I turned off lights that had been left on all day, presumably so our dogs and cats wouldn’t need to use their reading glasses. I remembered my father doing the same thing during the energy crisis of the 1970s, usually while asking, “Do you think your daddy owns the electric company?”

I recount this unremarkable scenario as part of my ongoing musings about violence and our usually invisible participation in and promulgation of it. In light of Martin’s last post, this seems like a precious way to continue the conversation about our individual and collective violence footprints, but after turning off the ignition and the lights, I realized that Mr. Collins and I had more in common than I had initially acknowledged. Am I prepared to examine my energy consumption—from the mechanical pencils in my desk drawer, to the food I eat, to the trash I throw away, to the investments I make—and change my expectations and habits? Am I Just Saying No to habits that keep drilling an attractive option to companies like British Petroleum? Well, no, not really. I keep hoping someone will invent something that will painlessly neutralize my energy cravings, sort of like those diet pills advertised in women’s magazines. But as Bill McKibben points out in an article in the latest issue of The Christian Century, we are addicted to cheap oil: “You think maybe, just maybe, that the needle BP stuck into the bottom of the sea flows straight into our veins?”

To me, one of the most appealing facets of the American character is our buoyant sense of optimism. Our hopefulness attracts hopeful people of all other nationalities, like Saul Griffith, featured in The New Yorker’s May 17 “Innovators Issue.” Born and raised in Sydney, Australia, he came to the United States in 1998 as a doctoral student at MIT, initially to work on electronic ink – the idea which eventually became the Kindle. The author of the New Yorker article, David Owen, describes Griffith thusly: “His hair, which is reddish brown, is usually an omnidirectional mess, and he often looks as though he had dressed from the bottom of the laundry pile.” I love that “omnidirectional,” which apparently describes Griffith’s brain as well as his hair: in 2004, he won the $30,000 prize awarded to the MIT student who shows great promise as an innovator, and in 2007 he received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” Since then, among other things, he has been thinking about and working on energy efficiency.

My favorite anecdote in the article describes Griffith, who now lives in San Francisco, riding to his lab on the prototype of an electricity-assisted tricycle he had designed. The tricycle included an enclosure for carrying cargo, and on the rainy morning in question the cargo was his infant son Huxley. The rain caused a short circuit in the tricycle’s wiring, resulting in a small fire under Huxley’s seat, which Griffith extinguished after hauling the baby off the trike. Writes Owen, “Huxley had reacted placidly to the crisis, as though, at eight months, he was already accustomed to life as the child of an inventor.” Genetic buoyancy and hopefulness at work here, clearly.

But the article charts Griffith’s growing disenchantment with technology as a means of avoiding the ecological disasters lying ahead. The things that he and his colleagues produce, while ingenious, often aren’t addressing the actual problems, because the problems aren’t fundamentally technological in nature. Griffith believed, for example, that waste from discarded cellphones could be reduced by the production of hand-cranked cellphones, using technology developed in the 1920s. But the problem of discarded cellphones isn’t technological, he realized, it’s cultural; people discard their cellphones because they want the latest model, not because their old phones stop working.

Griffith also notes that the nations with the lowest energy needs and highest standards of living, like Portugal, built their infrastructures long ago, when energy was much more costly than it is today. Houses built before the advent of cheap coal and oil were (and remain) energy efficient because they had to be; they are small, with small windows and thick walls. So here’s the kicker: “Such low-tech ideas are crucial to forming viable environmental strategies, Griffith believes, because implementing more complicated technologies... would consume natural resources and generate greenhouse gasses at unsustainable rates.” Griffith currently lives in what he describes as a “thermodynamic nightmare” of a house in San Francisco’s Mission District. “If I were building a house from scratch,” he says, “I could totally design a thermodynamically amazing, almost zero-energy house—but a huge amount of energy would go into building it, just in the materials, and right now most of that energy would come from burning fossil fuels.” In other words, in trying to use technological innovation to solve the problems of our increasing demand for energy, we’re more often than not acting like Wile E. Coyote, busily sawing off the branch of the tree we’re sitting on.

Assuming that Griffith has a broader perspective on the issues of energy use than I do, I am coming to lose some of my American optimism. I’m thinking that if, like Mr. Collins in Youngstown, I as an individual and we as a nation continue to take a short-sighted, self-centered view of our energy needs, I and we will, in effect, be demanding that BP and its cohorts keep taking the kinds of risks for which the Gulf of Mexico and the countless beings in, around, and over it are now paying in blood. What do we consider acceptable losses? What will make us change before we kill what is most precious to us, including our sense of hope?

I’ll try to write something cheerier next time, I promise.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
Martin: Terry Teachout, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong

More on violence: a death in West Austin

Last Thursday got off to a grisly start in our West Austin neighborhood, bringing a stark reminder of the violence inherent in the way we humans live on the land. We usually attempt, more or less successfully, to keep this violence implicit—behind the walls of slaughterhouses, say, or with the cleanup crews who scrape the roadkill off our highways—but every once in a while it bursts forth in explicit, unimaginable horror, demanding to be acknowledged, as in the aftermath of oil spills. Or, on a much smaller scale, on our street last Thursday.

It was about 6:45 a.m. and Chula the Goggle-Eyed Ricochet Hound and I had just set out on our usual two-mile morning perambulation. As we turned the corner to climb the first big hill I saw S. and A., two of our neighbors, standing in A.’s front yard. The light was still tenebrous, and my eyes were still filled with morning blear, so I asked them, stupidly, if everything was okay.

In response, A. gestured at the spiked black steel fence that encloses his back yard and said, “Deer caught on the fence.” I looked again, and sure enough there was a young buck hanging from the top of the fence by one back leg, kicking occasionally in an attempt to get free. Since Chula was getting increasingly agitated, I pulled her away and continued up the hill.

When we returned, some time later, A., S., and the buck were gone. I allowed myself to hope that all had turned out well, but then I heard the unmistakable pop of a gunshot—an unusual sound in our part of Austin—and then another a few seconds later. When we got to the bottom of the hill, I saw a small group of men gathered around something by the curb.

I put Chula back inside and went to investigate. The object by the curb was the buck, his mangled hindquarters covered by a tarp, his eyes rolling around in his head, which thrashed and clattered against the pavement in his death agony. An astonishing amount of blood rolled down the gutter toward the storm drain.

A. filled me in on what had happened in my absence: while S. had gone to fetch a pistol to dispatch the creature, the buck had worked his way loose from the fence, but not before hopelessly mangling both his back legs in his frantic efforts to free himself. He somehow dragged himself across one street and two front yards (including ours) before they caught up with him again. S. fired once and missed, then fired again from point-blank range; unfortunately, as they discovered later, the second shot merely went through the buck’s cheeks, causing him to get up and haul himself across the street, where he finally collapsed in the gutter.

Unwilling to fire any more shots, S. and A. asked C., the neighbor in front of whose house the buck had collapsed, if he had a hunting knife. C. went back inside and got what A. later described as “the world’s dullest hunting knife.” S. hacked at the buck with the knife until he finally slit his throat, but, as A. said, “waiting for the buck to bleed to death became too much, so S. was able to sever its windpipe, which quickly—and thankfully—brought the deer’s life to an end.”

It was at this point that I wandered up. I’d been standing there only a few moments, trying to take in what I was witnessing, when A. looked over my shoulder and said, “Heather doesn’t need to see this.” I turned around and saw her walking toward our little group, and headed back to intercept her. As we walked back up our driveway, I noticed several spots of bright red blood, signs of the buck’s last agonizing procession toward its death. There were more bloodstains on our front walkway, and indeed all across our front yard.

Later, as I hosed some of those stains off, I thought about the other deer which had gotten hung up on A.’s fence last year, another beautiful young buck who managed to gut himself on one of the spikes and hung there, head down, slowly dying. It had been difficult not to think of Jesus hanging on the cross while looking at the helpless creature.

A. and his family had been out of town on vacation, and no one knows how long that buck had been hanging there before someone found him. None of the neighbors who were there that day had a gun—we keep all our family firearms out at Madroño—and eventually we called our local veterinarian, who finally came and administered a lethal injection. We carefully lifted the dead buck off the fence, and a man from the city parks department took the body away.

Deer have been living in close proximity to us—and sustaining us—for centuries. They are associated with Artemis/Diana in Greek and Roman mythology, and four stags feed on the world tree in Norse mythology. St. Hubertus, the patron saint of hunters, supposedly saw a crucifix on the head of a stag he’d been pursuing, and St. Giles (depicted above), the Greek hermit, lived with a doe as his only companion. The indigenous Huichol people of Mexico make offerings to the Deer of the Maize and the Deer of the Peyote, and in Shinto, deer are considered messengers to the gods. In Austin, many of us are accustomed to virtually tame deer foraging in our gardens. But the deer that died on A.’s fence, like the countless dead squirrels, raccoons, possums, and deer we see on our roads, remind us of the violence inherent when urban, automotive humanity impinges on wild (or even semi-wild) nature, or vice versa.

It’s silly to think that without us these animals’ lives would be free from suffering, pain, and terror; they all have numerous natural predators and parasites, after all, and those predators and parasites don’t go out of their way to kill humanely. (Sometimes I think it ironic that humane derives from the Middle English word for human, but the fact is we do have a choice in how we kill the animals we use.) And Madroño Ranch is, after all, in the business of selling bison meat, one of the requirements of which is first killing the bison, and we do derive income from hunting leases during deer season. But there’s something about the useless and prolonged horror of the way these deer died that hits me very hard. They weren’t shot for their meat; instead, mutilated by a symbol of human territoriality, they died slow, agonizing, gruesome deaths—victims, in effect, of our notions of private property. Where’s the redemption in that?

—Martin

What we’re reading

Heather: Michael E. McCullough, Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct
Martin: Glen David Gold, Sunnyside

Madroño’s mythical bison

We spent last weekend at Madroño with Shawn and Susanne Harrington of Asterisk Group, who are designing a visual identity for the ranch suitable for use on business cards, website, food labels, letterhead, gimme caps, T-shirts, coffee mugs, bumper stickers, etc.

Since so much of what we hope to make Madroño stand for is based on a very specific sense of the place and its unique qualities, we wanted to give Shawn and Susanne (and their son Oliver) a tour of the ranch. They especially wanted to get a first-hand look at the buffies, thinking that they’d be an ideal image for the ranch, but unfortunately, as far as the Harrington family is concerned, the Madroño bison remains a mythical beast, more rumor than reality.

It was a gray and drizzly Sunday morning when Robert Selement, our trusty ranch manager, came by and picked us up in his big ol’ pickup. Robert may love showing the place off even more than we do, and Shawn and Susanne oohed and aahed in all the right places, even though the misty weather meant that we had to imagine the normally breathtaking views from up top.

The high point of the tour, of course, was to be a close-up view of the bison, complete with newborn calf (or perhaps calves, as several of the cows seemed to be on the verge of dropping babies). So imagine our chagrin when, after driving all over the ranch for two hours, we failed to get even a single glimpse of them.

You might think it would be hard to lose a herd of thirty or so critters, each weighing in at a thousand pounds or more, even on a place as big as Madroño, but, as Robert said with some asperity, “We’ve got buffalo poop, buffalo hair [where they’d rubbed up against convenient tree branches], and buffalo tracks, but no buffalo.”

Bison are interesting animals. With a dearth of natural predators, they once roamed the North American prairies in untold millions, and were vital sources of food and other necessities for the Plains Indians. Then the railroads started building across the continent, and the real slaughter began. One of the notable things about bison is that they don’t run away when they hear a gunshot or see one of their fellows fall. Instead, they tend to wander over and nose the corpse of their fallen comrade, in a manner that can seem uncomfortably close to mourning.

This, of course, is one of the reasons they were almost eradicated by nineteenth-century buffalo hunters, but it most assuredly does not mean that they are in any way tame. In fact, they retain a distinct whiff of wildness, even on a ranch; a sublime atavism shines from their dark eyes. When we were in New York last month, we met a rancher from Pennsylvania at the Union Square Greenmarket who told us, astonishingly, that he invites school kids on field trips to wade into the midst of his herds and pat his bison. Just the thought of that made all the hair on our heads stand straight up. (It was quite a sight.)

As if their immense size and somewhat, er, unpredictable temperament weren’t sufficient encouragement to treat bison with a healthy respect, they’re also astonishingly fast and agile. They can jump into the bed of a pickup (or so we’re told; fortunately, we haven’t yet seen that firsthand), or across a cattle guard, or over a four-foot fence (when, that is, they don’t elect simply to go through it). They can work up a substantial head of steam—up to thirty-five miles an hour, in fact, which is faster than even Robert’s trusty pickup can go on Madroño’s steep and rocky roads—and they can move as fast backward as they do forward, which is why they’re sometimes used to train cutting horses. And, as we learned last weekend, they have apparently evolved the ability to turn invisible when they want to.

Shawn and Susanne were pretty good sports about it, and Oliver just wanted to play with an old ammeter that was rattling around in the back of the truck. (It’s hard to predict these things with any certainty, but Oliver at age five seems bound for a career as an electrical engineer.) But I know Robert was concerned; the fence that can keep bison in when they want to go out has yet to be invented, and we feared that they might have decided to pay a social call on the neighbors. Again.

This is always an awkward situation, not least because you can’t really compel bison to do something they don’t want to do—like, for instance, return to your property. Fortunately Robert has conditioned them to respond to the rattling of a bag of feed cubes, and can usually tempt them back from wherever they’ve strayed with the promise of treats. But having several tons of ornery meat invade the place next door is not exactly the way to foster neighborly feelings. (In March the foreman of a West Texas ranch shot fifty-one bison that had gotten loose on his property from the place next door. The fact that the place next door was a hunting ranch, and the bison would otherwise have ended up as little more than targets in a shooting gallery for rich Texans, didn’t make the story any less shocking.)

Fortunately, our neighbors have thus far responded with patience and good cheer, even when the bison cornered a herd of their terrified cattle—it must have looked a little like a scene from one of those old Westerns in which a gang of outlaws menaces some frontier town.

By the time we had to leave, late Sunday afternoon, Robert still hadn’t tracked them down. We lamely told Shawn and Susanne that we hoped they’d come back another time to see the buffies (who finally turned up above the trout ponds, safe and sound and on our side of the fence; I’m quite sure that if bison could snicker, they were snickering at us). I mean, they couldn’t possibly pull that disappearing act twice in a row, could they?

Well, could they?

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Katherine Howe, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
Martin: Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

The devil’s bargain: on gardening and violence

I spent last weekend at the ranch planning a new garden – or, rather, watching our dear friend Glee Ingram, an Austin landscape designer; Steve Diver, a horticulturist with Sustainable Growth Texas; and Robert Selement, Madroño’s redoubtable manager, plan a new garden as I poked at bugs, stared at the sky, and occasionally said, “Huh?”

Despite me, we made good progress. Using Glee’s initial design, we flagged the perimeter of a beautiful labyrinth-inspired shape. We thought about armadillo-, feral hog-, bison-, and raccoon-proof fencing (ha!); permaculture; gates and traffic patterns; rainwater collection; hoop-house placement; compost systems and leaf corrals; how to integrate the activities of the residents of the adjacent Chicken Palace; planting fruit trees as wind barriers; and soil and amendment ratios. We (well, some of us) got really sunburned. We felt that we’d really earned that cold beer on the porch as we watched the afternoon light turn golden while scores of swallows dove and swooped around us.

If this makes Madroño sound like Paradise and us like laborers in Eden, well, that’s what it felt like. At the same time, however, these things also happened: I watched a hungry red-tailed hawk flying low over the Chicken Palace, hoping for yet another carry-out chicken dinner. I awoke at dawn’s first glimmering to operatic squawking from the Chicken Palace but, unable to find a flashlight, had to wait until it was light to investigate. (Robert has killed more rattlers this spring than in his seven previous years at the ranch combined.) In fact, there was a dead hen, but we’re not sure what killed her; she may have been egg-bound. During my morning perambulation on the road above the lake, a dozen buzzards wheeled just overhead. I couldn’t smell anything dead, nor could I see the focus of their activity, but I remembered the shrieking white-tailed doe I’d heard at this same spot last spring. It was a heart-stopping noise. I glimpsed her thrashing through the underbrush on the cliff below me but was unable to find her again when I returned with reinforcements. Paradise it may be, but Madroño’s beauty is woven with the warp of nature’s potential and actual violence.

A good friend emailed me after my last post, saying, “I have read that if all the ants were eliminated from the planet it would cease to exist. My thought is that if all the humans somehow disappeared the earth would flourish.” I’ve had that thought as well, but I also think that, with or without us, earth’s flourishing has always involved violence and suffering. Predation, disease, floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tornadoes, and drought preceded human enviro-tinkering and will continue once we’re gone.

Given that humans are part of the natural order, it’s also a given that we will engage in violence. My definition of violence is idiosyncratic and personal: I define it as existing on a spectrum involving the imposition of one being’s (or group’s) will on another being (or group). So when you order your lollygagging child to stop staring at the ceiling and put on her school clothes, you are, according to my definition, moving into the realm of violence, albeit at the lowest possible vibration. If, as in this case, the imposition of said will is done to enable or assist the flourishing of the one imposed upon, maybe you get a free pass. I’m not sure about this. Nor am I sure how to word my definition to include violence against self, surely as invidious and terrible as violence against another. And of course violence is not restricted to the physical realm, nor is it directed only against humans. Our species’ casual, thoughtless violence against the natural world is relentless.

Unique to humans in this violent world, however, is the capacity to restrict the reach of our violence. Christians and Jews have been commanded to do so in no uncertain terms (as have the followers of virtually every faith tradition; it’s just that I’m most familiar with those two). Repeated several times in the Pentateuch is the phrase “an eye for an eye,” often misunderstood as an incitement to violent retribution. In fact, the point of the phrase was to minimize violence, not incite it; the loss of an eye could not be redeemed by murder. Leviticus 19:18 is even more to the point: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself....” Jesus thought this a good enough line to use in the Sermon on the Mount, and reinforced it by instructing his followers to rein in their violent tendencies even more tightly: “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew 5:39). Human violence against nature is less of an issue in the Bible, as the capacity to inflict permanent damage on our world wasn’t ours at that point. But scripture does specifically address the correct treatment of animals; they were considered part of the community and were to enjoy a Sabbath rest (Exodus 20:10).

Restricting the reach of violence requires recognizing its ubiquitous footprint. I see its size 7 1/2 tracks all around me: in my sarcasm, in my imperious demands that things be done my way, in my constant consideration of my own comfort, in my need to have reality ordered in a particular way. Having spent the last couple of weeks in my garden at home, I’ve become aware of the arbitrary nature of life and death: what have those cute little flowering clovers ever done to me that they should be so unceremoniously yanked up? And don’t get me started on pill bugs.

Gardens are great places for contemplating unsolvable mysteries. How else are you going to keep your mind occupied when pulling weeds? But I think there’s a deep and distinctive link between restricting our carbon footprints and our violence footprints. When we accept that our flourishing always comes at the expense of someone or something else’s flourishing, it’s hard not to be humbled. What better place than a beautiful, infuriating garden to watch such a serious drama play itself out?

—Heather

What we’re reading

Heather: Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy
Martin: Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science