An open letter to the NC Hunt & Fish forum

This is an open letter to the NC Hunt & Fish forum* which contains a thread on red wolves. For some time now, posters have quoted and excerpted materials from my book, The Secret World of Red Wolves, to uphold their perception that the red wolf reintroduction program in northeastern North Carolina ought to be shut down. This is a cynical political ploy, as the central thesis of the book is that red wolves are unique, are native to the Southeast, and are so rare in the wild that extreme measures are necessary to conserve them.

Speaking of rare, I’m preemptively turning off comments for this post — something I’ve never even thought about doing previously. The reason behind this decsion lies in the uncivil, and at times aggressive and bullying, tone which is often taken on this forum thread, and which is sure to spill over here. This letter is intended to communicate my thoughts on the misrepresentations of my work — and my character —  on the forum. I do not wish for this post to become a place where anti-red wolf and pro-red wolf supporters lob firebombs at each other, as has played out in other online spaces.

Libel on the NC Hunt & Fish forum?

It has been personally and professionally disconcerting to see my writing misconstrued, misrepresented and quoted out of context on this forum. But most galling, poster “BR549” recently insinuated that I was dismissed from the Red Wolf Coalition Board of Directors because the group was displeased with my book, which (supposedly) the Board has only just now come to realize supports the position of shutting down the Red Wolf Reintroduction Program. (Post #1574)

Both suppositions are flatly untrue.

This claim is false, uninformed, and in my opinion it is libelous. It defames my character by insinuating my professional writing and research were poor, and that I lost my position on the RWC Board due to their displeasure with the outcomes of my book. Neither accusation is true; both are groundless; and both are intended to harm and degrade me, and my work, personally.

Although I’ve let slide for months the sometimes atrocious misquotes and misinterpretations of my writing on this forum, I can not let slide misrepresentations of my character. The poster rather narcissistically claims that since they alone have “connected all the dots” of facts represented in the book, that somehow they have made the RWC Board see the light and understand that my book undermines the red wolf program and supports the anti-red wolf crusaders. This is absurd. What the Board sees is that someone is misconstruing my work to misappropriate it for their own uses. And while none of us can control that, we can call out the egregious personal accusations made by poster BR549.

This forum is publicly available. It is indexed by Google. It’s users ought to be made fully aware that what they post there is governed by laws covering libel.

For the poster in question to make the above assumptions based solely on the appearance and disappearance of my name from the RWC website reminds me of Plato’s allegory of the cave. It’s impossible to discern true knowledge when one only casts their gaze upon shadows of reality.

Grave Lessons: Efforts to understand human decomposition lead anthropologists to Western Carolina

 

Students at Western Carolina University excavate a mock grave containing a cow skull to learn the techniques of excavating clandestine human graves. (Photo by Ashley Evans, WCU)

This was my favorite article to report and write in the past two years. Seriously, it was that interesting. I first learned of the Forensic Osteological Research Station (FOReSt) at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee while reading Cat Warren’s amazing book, What the Dog Knows: The Science and Wonder of Working Dogs. Though it was only a small scene in which she and her cadaver-sniffing dog trained at the FOReSt site, I dog-eared the page and knew that I wanted to write a story about this amazing facility where the dead are studied as they decompose. Here’s the story, which first appeared Sept. 1 in The Observer (Charlotte)  with 650+ Facebook likes and counting! and the News & Observer (Raleigh):

When people die, Cheryl Johnston’s work begins. A forensic anthropologist at Western Carolina University, Johnston oversees one of our nation’s six human decomposition facilities. On a mountain slope near WCU’s main campus, recently deceased donors are respectfully, but intentionally, laid to rest on the sun-dappled forest floor. Over a year’s time, their bodies are exposed to light, rain, humidity, heat, cold, wind and wildlife. Beneath stands of mature tulip poplar, locust, oak and walnut trees they decompose until nothing remains but bone.

Medical students routinely dissect cadavers to master human anatomy and develop skills to help the living. But people are less likely to know that forensic anthropology students, and professionals, need to study human decomposition processes to interpret and solve real-life scenarios involving recovery of human remains. From murders to mishaps, forensic anthropologists unravel how a person died and what happened to their remains after death.

NC’s Natural Treasures: 50 Years of Staying Wild

My husband and I, backpacking in the Birkhead Moutnains Wilderness (NC) in 2009.

My story on wilderness, below, ran in the Charlotte Observer last Monday. I wanted to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, which is upcoming on September 3, 2014 and I’m lucky enough that my editor indulged me.

Wilderness as a place is something that I’m both attracted to and intimidated by. The side of me which shuns living in a city and wishes I had a closer relationship with the natural world loves the idea of visiting wilderness. (And this from a gal who lives on several wooded acres — in the company of several black bears, coyotes, bats, flying squirrels, moths as big as my palm, and copperhead snakes —  and who can only see her closest neighbors when the leaves drop each winter.) But my attraction to actually visiting wilderness depends upon what kind of wilderness it is, and where it’s located.

The first time I stood on tundra in Denali, Alaska and watched as melting hail and sleet soaked through my cotton hiking pants, I knew I was in over my head. Never before had I stepped on ground that wasn’t solid… in Denali, each footfall sunk six inches or more, into a spongey mass of moss and freezing bog water. Sometimes, as in Denali, I’m admittedly intimidated by vast unknown landscapes devoid of marked trails, designated campgrounds, or treated drinking water. What if I get lost? What if I can’t find water? What if I encounter a rogue bear/hungry mountain lion/crazed wolverine? 

At the heart of these fears, some of which aren’t even rational, is my true fear: What if I can’t take care of myself in the woods? But this is also the same fear that attracts me to protected parks, forests, refuges and wilderness areas in the first place. To improve my skills, and to prove to myself that I can. It’s why I love going, and why I keep going returning. 

What do you enjoy about wildlerness as a place to visit, or as a construct of the mind? 

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America was forged by taming and civilizing a vast wilderness that stretched from sea to shinning sea. Yet in ecological terms, “taming” and “civilizing” involved widespread biological degradation, species extinction, habitat conversion, dammed rivers, logged forests, plowed-over prairies and the spread of nonnative or invasive organisms on a massive scale.

A growing concern that wild lands might disappear all together led to the birth of the National Wilderness Preservation System five decades ago this Sept. 3, with the passage of the federal Wilderness Act. The system began with a mere 9 million acres but has grown to 110 million acres. More acres are added every year.

These preserved lands exist in 758 different wilderness areas within 44 states. North Carolina is fortunate to have 12 different wilderness areas from the mountains to the coast. Two of this dozen were in the original batch of 54 wilderness areas created in 1964: Shining Rock and Linville Gorge wildernesses.

In lobbying for the creation of a wilderness system, famed American novelist and environmentalist Wallace Stegner wrote: “We need wilderness preserved … because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.”

Today, 4 of every 5 Americans live in cities or urbanized areas, but many still seek out wilderness to be alone in a natural landscape and taste that character-forming challenge.

Dogged Detection: How dogs help locate human remains

Author Cat Warren and Solo, photo courtesty of D.L. Anderson.

This is a Q&A with author Cat Warren that I wrote last month, it ran in the Charlotte Observer on April 20. (Shared with the News & Observer on the same day.) I’m reposting it on Wild Muse. Selfishly, I loved having the chance to interview Warren because I had recently read her book, What the Dog Knows: The Science and Wonder of Working Dogs (Simon and Schuster 2013) and could not put it down. I was enthralled to learn more about her work with dogs that detect human remains, and she didn’t disappoint!  – TDB

Cadaver dogs have been searching the recent mudslide in Oso, Wash., to recover victims’ remains. But how do dogs sniff out the perfume of death? N.C. State associate English professor Cat Warren authored “What the Dog Knows: The Science and Wonder of Working Dogs,” a 2013 book (Simon & Schuster; $26.99) about her experience working with a cadaver dog, law enforcement and forensics experts. (Questions and answers have been edited.)

Q. What compounds are cadaver dogs sniffing out?

A. There are any number of volatile compounds that make up human remains. You want a dog who is trained to recognize a whole range of scents related to death, whether it’s coming from dried bones or the recently dead. Dogs exposed to this range in training have no trouble. The dog is trained to trek back and forth until it picks up the edge of a scent, then it tries to get to the spot where that scent is most concentrated. The dog’s body language changes, and the dog’s handler knows when the dog is “in scent”; they see the dog slow down, concentrate, and work its nose really hard. But the dog should also have a trained final indication, an alert. For both my dogs, Solo and Coda, they lie down.

Q. How do the dogs filter out carcasses of wild animals at a search site?

On being a Good Reader

Can you read and ride a bike?

In March I began reviewing nonfiction science and nature books here on Wild Muse. There were a couple of reasons this came about. First, after experimenting with blogging for several years, I’d grown a little bored with the model of writing a post about a published science paper. Second, my life shifted in ways that precluded being able to do even that when, within the span of a few months, I finished my first book and became a new mother. Suddenly, my time was too limited and too fractured to write regularly in a meaningful way. It was not just my blog suffering from neglect, it was my professional writing too.

Slowly I learned to be okay with the fact that I’m a Writer who is not currently writing. At first, it felt like my identity had been stripped away. If I wasn’t writing, then who was I? What was I doing with my time? Could I still say I was a writer? In addition to being a full-time mom to a rambunctious toddler, I continued to help my husband get his business off the ground; I found new depths of meaning in each of these roles. But a part of me still groped blindly in the dark for something to hold onto from my writerly life: I keened for time and mental space to write again and was repeatedly frustrated when this absurd venture turned into something akin to Waiting for Godot. I’ve been a cyclist for long enough to know I was simply spinning my wheels, doing nought but going through the motions. And so I settled down, and I listened to the Reader Yin of my Writer Yang, the part of me who yearned to be a Reader again. I became comfortable with putting my writing away for the time being; I imagine this scene as a wild bird released from a rattan cage that I watch as it careens out of my window . . . and I must trust it will come home to roost again. Someday. I then learned to curl up with a book whenever the opportunity arose. 

(Review) Love, Life, and Elephants: An African Love Story, by Dame Daphne Sheldrick

Love, Life and Elephants: An African Love Story

There aren’t many autobiographies which hold the power to lock horns with my attention and hold it captive for days on end until the last page is turned. But this one did. Perhaps this is because I tend to be more interested in reading about wildlife and nature than people, and perhaps this is because Love, Life and Elephants contains a series of deeply gripping emotional tales of the personal lives of rescued and orphaned wild animals in Kenya’s famous Tsavo-East National Park.

Sheldrick is best known for her work caring for orphaned elephants. She helped pioneer husbandry methods to nurse motherless milk-dependent elephant calves to survival. Prior to her work these newly born mammals faced a near certain death once their mothers were lost. But Sheldrick’s memoir is about much more than this singular achievement. It’s a history of her British family homesteading in Kenya at a point in time when the Crown was encouraging colonization there; and their subsequent feeling of abandonment and cultural isolation when the British government ultimately pulled out of Kenya.

Her family felt torn between two countries: culturally they were English, but they had poured years of time and energy into carving productive farms and ranchland from the Kenyan soil. Sheldrick wrote: “Labelled the White Tribe of Africa, we were rapidly losing our stake in the country we viewed as home and could never be truly British again, due to long isolation in Africa. Nor could we be truly African either, because of our colour and culture.” Though Sheldrick viewed herself as an Englishwoman living in Kenya, she knew she could never return to Great Britain; and in this way she felt keenly the isolation and abandonment that her many wild orphans experienced, the singular sense of being on your own. Maybe it was this shared sentiment that led her to become a deeply nurturing and loving surrogate mother to so many motherless wild animals.

Guest Post: Meera Lee Sethi, author of Mountainfit

Meera Lee Sethi. Birding in Sweden.

Dear Reader: Prepare for a literary treat. Today I am excited to bring to you a guest post by one of my favorite science and nature writers, Meera Lee Sethi. Sethi self-published a book last year called Mountainfit, which I reviewed here, about time she spent birding in Sweden. And yet, it was about so much more. And this is the main thing I love about Sethi’s work, an essay on any certain topic illuminates not only it but layers of many other things. 

Since publishing Mountainfit, Sethi’s work has turned heads, including a few at CCLaP Publshing which picked it up and is now publishing and distributing hard cover versions. Meera also blogs at the Coyot.es network, where you can find her words at Dispersal Range. This post is the first of her blog book tour, so you’ll be able to find more of her beautiful writing elsewhere over the following days and weeks.  And now, here’s Meera Lee Sethi, with a glimpse of some thoughts from Sweden. – TDB

Sphagna

It was like the surface of the moon, people say, meaning strange. Meaning wild. I didn’t think about it much before that summer—so much of my life spent walking on concrete, on asphalt, on soil made smooth by human hands—but the surface of the earth can be all those things, too. The planet has many different skins. In a small zip-lock bag inside an envelope inside a box, I keep a little piece of one of them.

There are well over 130 species of Sphagnum known to science. About three dozen of those are found in Sweden alone, a country whose surface area is about one quarter peat bog. In the wetland tundra surrounding the observatory where I began writing Mountainfit I might, for example, have been tramping over the tightly clustered branches and tiny toothed leaves of Sphagnum fuscum, or balticum, or magellanicum.

It is this last I have with me, a keepsake mailed to me by a sweet friend months after I left. Its yellow fascicles and tiny, deep pink leaves are dry and disarticulated now, but once they were part of a vast, interconnected mantle. 

(Review) How Animals Grieve, by Barbara J. King

Have you ever witnessed a pet or captive animal grieve? How did you know what it was feeling?

In order to feel grief, one must also feel love. Most likely, you just read that sentence and thought it so uncontroversial as to be absurd. But now imagine that the “one” under discussion is a… goat? How about a chicken, or a cat? Now, what do you think about that statement?

In her book, How Animals Grieve, anthropologist and author Barbara J. King explores a multitude of anecdotes about animals that appear, to human eyes, to experience what we know as grief. Cats who keen for recently deceased siblings. Goats who search frantically for missing goat-friends. Horses who encircle the exact patch of land where their herd mate was buried in a pasture. An emotionally insecure elephant who leaves her beloved security object, a tire, on the body of her beloved dog companion. These intriguing stories, and many more, form the core of King’s exploration of how individual animals grieve over lost relatives and companions.

It’s deeply telling that King, who is a practicing anthropologist at the College of William and Mary, titled her book How Animals Grieve (emphasis mine), rather than asking: Do Animals Grieve? From the beginning, it’s clear she believes some animals experience grief, in ways that are different from how we understand grief to be, though still recognizably within the realm of sadness, depression, and a deep awareness of the loss of something or someone near and dear.

Scientists typically caution against interpreting animal behaviors within the suite of our human behaviors and emotions. Anthropomorphism, as it’s called, is viewed as a big no-no. Biologists and experimental animal behaviorists tend to view anthropomorphism as folksy, unprofessional  and even flat-out wrong. But recently, a case is being made that the scientific community has gone too far in disallowing themselves to interpret animal emotions in relation to our own. (After all, if you go back far enough, we evolved from a common animal ancestor.) King writes, “The skpetics have a point: rather than accept uncritically the existence of animal grief, or animal love, or any other complex emotion in non-human animals, we should first weigh other, simpler explanations.” This is exactly what King does throughout the book as she recounts anecdotes of how surviving animals behaved after losing a sibling or close companion;

(Review) Big, Wild, and Connected, Part 1: From the Florida Peninsula to the Coastal Plain, by John Davis

What does the East look like to a dispersing panther? What obstacles might they face?

What does the American East look like to a panther that seeks to paw its way from southern Florida up into Canada? How do wide-ranging quadrupeds like black bears find safe crossings where interstates and highways lace their habitat? What does the southeastern U.S. look like to a red wolf wishing to reclaim its former haunts?

In Big, Wild, and Connected adventurer and author John Davis sets out to answer these questions, and to see if there is still a chance to create a continuous wildlife corridor spanning the North American East. This e-book, a part of of the Island Press e-essentials series, transports readers along a human-powered 7,500 mile journey over ten months in 2011 of hiking, cycling and paddling from the southernmost tip of Florida to Gaspe Peninsula, Quebec in maritime Canada. Called TrekEast, Davis and his partner organization, The Wildlands Network, did a fabulous job promoting the adventure with social media; and you can still visit this online map to explore Davis’s journey and click on starred “trail stories” which link to blog posts that (as the name suggests) record anecdotes along the route.

Davis, a former board member of The Wildlands Network, wanted to draw awareness to the need for an Eastern Wildway — an eastern parallel to the more widely known Western Wildway, which seeks to connect a corridor for wildlife from Mexico to Canada along the spine of the Rockies. An eastern continent-scaled wildlife corridor was first proposed by Dave Foreman in Rewilding North America (2004), and Davis wanted to find out if Foreman’s vision for such an ambitious wildway was still feasible — or if it was too late. Big, Wild and Connected is the three-part story of Davis’s awareness-raising campaign for this unrealized corridor vision. (Each of the  three parts is sold as a separate e-book.)

(Review) Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, by Emma Marris

What makes something “natural”?

Grist.com wrote that Rambunctious Garden is “Potentially the most optimistic and controversial work about the future of nature to appear in years.” I don’t know about the optimistic part—pages of the book left me feeling utterly deflated, but I whole-heartedly agree with the controversial part. Reading Rambunctious Garden is akin to embarking on an intellectual and philosophical rumination over what comprises the concepts of nature, wilderness, and conservation. The ground Emma Marris covers, figuratively, is a fertile landscape fraught with high-stakes debates about how to preserve, conserve, and manage our natural world.

Marris is a talented and gifted writer. She seamlessly links one idea to the next with grace and skill. She presents issues and then pokes around  each one to expose all sides. The book is thoroughly researched and wonderfully organized as it leads the reader through increasingly complicated conservation conundrums and scenarios. Every single chapter challenged my thinking about how we classify and define what is natural, what’s worth saving, why, and how to got about it. However, I must admit, I began reading with the expectation of spending some time communing with, well, nature. But this book dwells less on experiential factors and more on the meta: it dives deeply into the thinking and philosophical frameworks that undergird the conservation of nature today.

Marris first asks the reader to redefine nature and our ideas about pristine places—an exercise that I found valuable. I live on the eastern outskirts of Asheville, where it’s a relatively short hike from manicured neighborhood lawns to wooded trails leading up to the Blue Ridge Parkway and into the Pisgah National Forest and Black Mountains (which contains the highest point in the East). Black bears and coyotes are just as apt to turn up in my backyard as are groundhogs, red-tailed hawks, morning doves, and starlings. In my eyes, the land here is not so much bifurcated into “developed” and “wild” as it is on a continuum from “disturbed” to “less disturbed.” But why do I think of it this way? Likely, because I implicitly have an expectation that even the conserved land surrounding my valley was disturbed by pioneers when the East was first settled by Europeans and their descendants several centuries ago—and that it’s never been quite the same since.