Whenever
I walk along Sherbrooke Street past the McGill University campus I cannot help
but regret that Joe Fafard’s wonderful larger-than-life sculpture of a wolf is
no longer there. It was one of several
sculptures that McGill University hosted as part of Montreal city’s 375th
anniversary --- was that already two summers ago? --- and I became so
accustomed to its presence, looking out for it every day as I passed by, that I
began to think of it as our defender, on which not only the university, but
also all of us passing humans, depended for our safety.
That may sound a bit far-fetched, but
if you think of the wolf as symbolic of the other creatures with which we share
this earth, it is an idea that makes perfect sense.
It is estimated there are 50,000
wolves in Canada, the highest number of any country in the world. But before the
arrival of Europeans, of course, there were infinitely more.
Our forebears regarded them as pests,
and got rid of them. Even when we established our first National Park in 1885,
we cleared the area of predators, and from 1920 until wiser heads prevailed
around 1970, wolves bit the dust with dramatic, deleterious results to our entire
ecosystem.
In 1995 the United States National
Parks service decided to re-establish the wolf in Yellowstone National Park ---
if my memory serves me, some wolves were brought in from
Canada for the purpose --- and what they have found is that the presence of
wolves “continues to
astonish biologists with a ripple of direct and indirect consequences throughout
the ecosystem.” For example, when they were re-introduced there was only one
beaver colony in the park; today there are nine, and results in improving the
ecosystem in other ways have been equally dramatic.
How this worked is described by wildlife
biologist Douglas Smith on the Yellowstone web site: when the wolves were
killed off in the 1930s, their absence made life easier for the elk, even
though elks were still preyed upon by bears, cougars and coyotes. Subsequently
the elk population, under less pressure, did not move around as much as before
during the winters, but because they were relatively more stable, they browsed more heavily on young willow,
aspen and cottonwood plants. This made life tougher for the beaver that need
aspen to survive the winter. With the return of the wolves, elk are more
constantly on the move, not browsing those plants so voraciously, thus allowing
willow stands to recover from the intense browsing, which allows the beaver to
rediscover an abundant food source that hadn't been there earlier.
It wasn’t until I was in my mid-forties that I paid any attention to the
workings of Nature, to its central importance for every living thing, and to
the dangers inherent for us all in the modifications we so carelessly make of
the natural system. I did not know it at the time, but New Zealand had been
brought to the edge of complete ruination of its landscape by the careless
introduction of imported animal species without any predators, a state from
which it was rescued only by the devoted activism of an English expatriate professor
before World War II. The particular agent of destruction was the rabbit, and as
a result of the professor’s intervention, the entire country was divided into
Rabbit Boards, each one surrounded by a fence, within which their hired
rabbiters were active trying to wipe out the miscreants. (As a cub reporter I
remember covering meetings of the local Rabbit Board). It never worked until myxomatosis was
introduced decades later, from Australia.
Only when I sat in the court case in 1972 by
which the Grand Council of the Cree attempted to challenge the Quebec Government’s
attempt to build a huge hydro-electric generating project in their traditional
hunting grounds, was I wakened to the beauty of the natural processes by which
the Earth is kept ticking over so that it may be used as habitation by us, and
all other living creatures.
The Indians of Quebec had been trying to
negotiate some kind of land deal with the Quebec government for some years, a
process that was given urgency by this new challenge to the indigenous people
living in northern Quebec. They had
found that the government refused to
take seriously any evidence they
presented about the environmental effects of physical changes to the landscape,
so, confronted with the need for emergency action, they decided to send a group
of friendly scientists north to cobble together some authentic sounding
language that would support their case.
I had made a film as part of the process, although
I had concentrated on how the indigenous people in the region viewed the
forthcoming invasion of their lands. But when they did finally get into court,
I was staggered by some of the interactions in nature described by these scientists,
along with the indigenous experts, who, in what might have seemed odd to the
uninformed members of the general public, often did not know a word of English or
French but yet had astonishing expertise in questions pertaining to landscape,
changes in normal processses, animals and their behaviour, and so on.
I described some of these effects in five
pages of a 342-page book, called Strangers
Devour the Land, that I wrote about
the indigenous response to this challenge,,
published by Knopf in New York, Macmillan in Canada, and various other
publishers in the United .States in succeeding decades.
“The system has no real beginning since it
never ceases to change, with life being created and destroyed during every
minute of every day,” I wrote. “But the climactic event of the year in these
northern climates is the immense spring flood that occurs when the warming sun rises
higher into the sky, and begins in May and June to melt the vast blanket of
snow that covers the entire country. The first function of these waters is to
flush out the ice from the river. The ice has already begun to break during the
winter as the river level has dropped, creating a sub-ice space that has been
an essential value for many species of little animals during the winter.”
Next, the river waters flush the ice loose
from the shore, breaks it into small pieces and carries it into the sea. The rushing water has great power and energy,
so it scours out deposits that already exist along the river, drops the silt in
different places and carries much of it out to sea, where it warms the sea, and
by being deposited on top of the sea ice cuts down the reflexivity of the ice, thereby
enabling it to absorb more radiation and melt more quickly.
This water is a kinetic energy source that
brings to the surface from deeper ocean levels essential fertilizer salts --- phosphates, nitrates and
silicates --- that feed the cells in ocean plants that feed animal plankton, which
themselves are crustacea or shrimp-like creatures that form the basic food for
many larger forms of fish life.
I go on for several thousand words with this
kind of information, writing with the enthusiasm of a new convert. What I was
explaining was also a new concept to me, namely, that every inch of every ecosystem is already at its maximum
carrying capacity of animals, fish, birds (or ultimately, people), ranging from
the tiniest little scurrying creatures like bats, insects, flies, up to muskrats, mink, weasels, and so on, and so up
to the gigantic lumbering bears, elk, moose and so on.
I thought
this new discovery of mine was a mind-blowing concept, because what it means is
that all the well-meant actions of men in transferring animal populations from
one ecosystem to another are ultimately destined to fail. Their failure could
be hidden from human participants --- and that is another mind-blowing concept,
shared with me in interviews by Cree subsistence hunters, that humans are
participants in nature on the same level as other forms of life.
One impact
of all this was to make me understand that, encouraged by our arrogant
religious doctrines, human beings, with homo sapiens at the centre of
everything, have always operated from a
mistakenly perilous attitude of superiority over every other form of life.
Well, so be it…. The evidence is accumulating
rapidly in our own day --- as from the recent scientific warning that we have
twelve years to abate global warming, or suffer the drastic consequences; or
the concomitant revelation that one million species are in line for
extermination if we don’t change our ways soon; these examples providing
evidence that we need a total re-think of our system of living, to bring it
into conformity with the inexorable process of nature that life is constantly
being created, destroyed and reborn so as to continue the cycle indefinitely.
This brings me back to Joe Fafard’s wonderful
wolf, standing there, I remember, through the succeeding year of its being set
up, half covered with snow through the winter, immovable and strong, watching
over us all. One of nature’s real beauties, the wolf, described on the website
of the National Wolfwatcher Coalition, as “a highly social and playful species,” that live in small, tightly
organized family groups called packs, made up of four to eleven members who
form extended families.
“Each pack is dominated by an alpha male and an alpha female who
are the only mating pair in the group. The alpha female dens up to deliver and
raise the pups. There are usually four or five pups per litter born in late
April or early May. The rest of the pack helps to feed and care for the pups.”
An admirable species, marred only by the fact that it is feared
and detested by many human beings, who have, over the decades, poisoned it,
hunted it down, and tried to exterminate it. Maybe we are slowly learning the
need to co-exist with it, as we must do with all other species. Let’s hope so.
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