Blind as a Bat

Book Review: Flying Blind: One Man's Adventures Battling Buckthorn, Making Peace with Authority, and Creating a Home for Endangered Bats by Don Mitchell

As human beings, we like to think that the course of our lives is linear, logical, and to a certain extent, predictable. In other words, we want desperately to believe that our lives make sense, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

I live in an area where there is a resident bat population. On summer nights, shortly after dusk, I have watched them darting across the night sky as they forage. Their apparently random movements are the antithesis of linear, logical, and predictable behavior. At least so it appears to our unperceptive human eyes.

Like the flight of a bat, Flying Blind dips and swerves, but not without purpose. Cutting down trees requires a chainsaw, the resulting piles of wood require an ATV to haul them out of the forest. These side trips are not extraneous; they are part of the process that is needed to get from point A to point B; "... bouncing from here to there, from one topic to the next without advance warning. Much of life is lived that way, looked at from a certain angle." The bat is not zig-zagging through the sky aimlessly - it is getting dinner. We're simply looking at the bat's behavior from the wrong angle.

Mitchell begins to see the trees within the forest, individuals that are both distinct and yet cogs in a larger system. The trees, the invasive weeds, and the bats themselves each have their own niche. As Mitchell becomes immersed in the interaction of these interdependent parts, he begins to wonder how he fits into the grand scheme; what is Don Mitchell's niche? "Maybe there was a light at the end of this tunnel; maybe my efforts would eventually help the bats." Life is NOT linear, logical, or predictable; our insistence that it is leaves us all flying blind.

Flying Blind is author Don Mitchell's journey to epiphany; a story that begins with him trying to find a way to reduce the property tax burden on his Vermont farm and ending with the realization of his own place in the world.

Nature as it Really Is

Book Review: Sightlines: A Conversation with the Natural World by Kathleen Jamie

"American conservation is ... still concerned for the most part with show pieces ...we have not yet learned to think in terms of small cogs and wheels." - Aldo Leopold

There is more to the natural world than picture-perfect scenic vistas, or majestic animals moving in choreographed precision. Not all wilderness is scenic, not all wildlife is majestic. The small cogs and wheels that keep the eco-system moving are often hard to see unless you know what you are looking for; and once you do, they are just as often not pretty to look at. Yet without them there would be no scenic vistas, or wild animals, or human beings to see and appreciate them.

In Sightlines, Kathleen Jamie shares with us both sides of the natural world, the beautiful and the not-so-pretty: "It's not all primroses and otters ... There are other species, not dolphins arching clear from the water, but the bacteria that can pull the rug from under us." At one moment we are watching killer whales swimming free, in another viewing thin sections of necrotic tissue. Is it so much of a jump to see these are but two sides of the same coin?

In her effort to make sense of what she sees and experiences, Jamie finds the same truth that Leopold found decades before: that the small cogs and wheels are every bit as important as any other part of the eco-system. A stagnant tidal backwater may not be as aesthetically pleasing as a soaring evergreen forest, but its function is every bit as important. The chain of life extends from predators to prey to scavengers; down to the bacteria that complete the process of decomposition each link depends on the others.

The sooner we see that they are all part and parcel of Nature "taking its course", the sooner we come to realize "... you just might be making the same journeys as these other creatures, all of us alive at the same time on the same planet."