In the Owls' Lee

According to today's Washington Post, Owlsley (I cannot help pronouncing it that way) just died. He was the guy who manufactured vast quantities of acid, kick-starting whatever it was that roiled up in late-1960s America. Although this was not one of their featured stories (in fact, I could not find it on the home page), it was among the Top 5 Most Popular stories. Nearly 50 years later, the psychedaelic flashtershocks can crest where you least expect them.

I was not part of that. LSD is too powerful for mind like mine. But for Owsley fans few photos of Mount Baker from the southwest tip of the peninsula that is the northwest tip of the Lower 48. You can rest assured that within the frame of each shot, there are hundreds of owls and probably quite a few Lees.

Or, how about realizing that as you gaze at the mountain, this is right behind you?

Pristine?

Oak savannah, pasturized.

Sometimes, my work brings me together with folks trying to do something called "restoration," by which they mean bringing the local ecology back to it's allegedly natural state, returning the pristine conditions pre-dating human intervention. Like the romantic ideal of Noble Savages, the concept of a totally natural, pre-human landscape is a concoction of minds less sophisticated than they conceive themselves to be.

Fortunately, the effects of Homo sapiens are clear enough in the NW environment that most ecologists recognize it, even if they are not quite ready to let modern humans interlope in preserves. Glaciers covered most of Washington until humans traipsed there, or pulled their umiaks ashore. As the ice retreated, human influence advanced across the land and sea, changing them. Many of you may have read that the Clovis people swarmed over the continent, killing and eating Pleistocene megafauna, perhaps extincting those camels, mammoths, and their ilk in the process. 

But meat ain't sustenance enough. There are vitamins and minerals, trace substances that don't show up in flesh, and people have always recognized that, or we would not be here now. So people pick shoots and dig roots. They gather weeds and harvest seeds to suit dietary needs. In a land where people showed up in glacial aftermath, it defies plausibility to believe that historic plant communities (and the animals that fed upon these) are the result of some pristine proces unsullied by the human touch. The touch that grabbed food and spread seed.

In the maritime Northwest, and in swaths of the interior, meadows and prairies have existed for thousands of years because humans spread fire to keep forests at bay. Savannahs had roots and oaks because people liked to eat carbs and acorns, because people had a hankering for the flesh of small and large four-leggeds with similar appetites.

So it strikes me as odd when "restoration" projects are based on the concept that the human influence should be eliminated. Often as not, the prescription is based on a floral community known from the late historic period or from a testbook, rather than the plants that actually occured on a particular piece of land. In the charcoal of an ancient campfire and in the pollen that fell between plank houses, the material remains of the actual environment is there to be seen, but I'm not sure if this record has ever been consulted.  

To admit that a landscape is not pristine is not to say that the place is defiled, just like not all people who've lost their virginity are craven whores. People in many places, the Northwest among them, learned how to nudge the ecology of a place toward a stasis in which large primates could eat well and the water, fungi, plants, two-leggeds  and four-leggeds could all get along. Sure, some natural successions were cut short, some species prospered at the cost of others, but this no less true in places where humans don't tread. The fact that archaeologists have found camas ovens buried thousands of years before foreigners strode in and found flourishing camas prairies suggests that a balance was achieved. 

Why then would newcomers presume to march in and insist on a "natural" landscape that locks out humans?