Stirring the Cauldron

New Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice

New Wolf Moon

January moondark kitchen notes
from Jessica Prentice

The moon is new! We have just entered the lunar cycle known as the Wolf Moon in Old Farmer's Almanacs. Though we may want to be careful about flashing around our almanacs these days -- the FBI recently released a warning that carrying an almanac might indicate terrorist activities. Apparently, terrorists might be using almanacs to locate the tallest buildings in cities, although they do admit that people carrying or consulting almanacs might be innocently using them for recreational purposes. I'm assuming that reconnecting with the Earth and the Earth's cycles falls into the latter category, and I'm not expecting a raid anytime soon.

The Wolf Moon comes in the heart of winter, when wolves could be heard howling with hunger outside of villages and human settlements. "The wolf being at the door" is an old image of hunger. Wolves are also enduring images of wildness, both our own wild inner nature -- as in the werewolf that comes out on the full moon -- and the wilderness with all of its mystery and frightfulness. Perhaps because I grew up in a time without any widespread hunger or want, it is the second association that seems to resonate most strongly for me with wolves.

In Laura Ingalls Wilder's book By the Shores of Silver Lake, she describes seeing a wolf one moonlit night. She had convinced her parents to let her and her younger sister Carrie go and slide on the ice of frozen Silver Lake:

After that the girls race all the way home and arrive at their cabin in great fear. Once they have calmed down, their father pledges to hunt the wolf the next day. But Laura tells her father that she hopes he doesn't catch them. Even though she was frightened of the wolves, she was awed by their majesty, and feels that the fact that they didn't chase them should earn them some amnesty. The next day, Pa returns from his hunt and tells the family what happened:

Forgive my quoting the passage at length, but Ingalls Wilder is a beautiful writer, and the story weaves together both the feeling of the call of the wild within us, the exhilaration of feeling oneself to be part of the wide land (women who run with the wolves!) and also the way that we relate to the wilderness and its wild creatures. Pa goes hunting the wolves because it's what his duty to the safety of his family requires, but Laura hopes that the wolves will stay alive and free. When she understands how endangered they are, she is sorry. Ma is not -- thinking it only fitting that 'the brutes' should be eliminated from the countryside to make it safe for people.

As far as American history is concerned, Ma's perspective prevailed. I saw a documentary on wolves recently, and it showed sledfull after sledfull of heaped dead wolves -- footage taken at the height of the government-mandated extermination of wolves in the United States. The policy succeeded in wiping out nearly all of the wolves in the lower 48 states. In the late 1980's, there began to be a push to restore wolves to Yellowstone National Park, where wolves had once roamed but no longer did due to the elimination policy. There was a great deal of support for a plan to carefully reintroduce the species, but there was also opposition. Cattle and sheep ranchers with herds that grazed near the park were the most vocal opponents. The documentary showed them picketing with signs that sported slogans such as "Wolves are the Saddam Husseins of the Animal World!"

In the end, Laura's sentiments prevailed over her mother's when it came to Yellowstone Park. The plan for the reintroduction of wolves won the debate, and there are now almost 200 wild wolves thriving in the Park where once there were none. I consider it a victory for both our own inner wildness, for the preservation of wild ecosystems, and for the species that is the totem of the wild. I believe the potential costs to cattle or sheep herds are worth it in the end.

The story of the decimation of the wolves in the United States feels like a sadly familiar one. Species that were once numerous and thriving get wiped out during a very short period of human intervention. Of grizzly bears in California, Malcolm Margolin writes in his great book The Ohlone Way:

I can't help but feel like Laura and exclaim 'Oh, the poor bears!' Many of us alive today have heard, over and over again, of the countless examples of humanity's destruction of nature -- it is a sad refrain of our time. It is perhaps because of this that we find it shocking and a bit incomprehensible to witness, on such a large and dramatic scale, nature's destruction of humanity such as we did in the recent tsunami. It has been called the worst natural disaster of our time and there certainly seems little within living memory to compare it to. It is almost tempting to think of it as nature fighting back against humanity for a century of destruction. The old 'Man versus Nature' frame dies hard. I am reminded of the George Clooney character in the movie, The Perfect Storm, standing on the deck of the ship and screaming at the storm that is about to take his life: "Come and get me, you bitch!" or something like that. The notion of a war between man and nature is etched in the back of all of our minds.

This is, of course, absurd. We are part of nature, not separate from it, and it is simply common sense that our actions should affect the rest of nature, and that what happens in nature affects us in turn. We are absolutely, inextricably, linked. We are interconnected on every level of life and being despite any efforts we may make either to 'rise above' nature or to dominate it. Human survival always has been and always will be dependent upon nature.

Today's so-called culture wars have a tendency to distract us from this basic truth. Part of the political divisions in this country seem to involve a disagreement about what constitutes the greatest threat to our society. Some would say that ecological destruction, including a chemical-intensive agriculture and food system, constitutes the greatest threat. Others insist that ecological problems are greatly exaggerated, and that the real threat to our society comes from our enemies, those who deplore our culture and seek to destroy us. Many are unmoved by concerns about global warming, genetically modified organisms, and the over-extraction of natural resources, citing a lack of scientific proof that these things are real problems. They, in turn, try to convince the first group that it is the threat of terrorism that we should be most concerned about, but they too are unable to offer proof. Neither side has proof -- both sides have a certain ideological framework or belief system that they are operating from that overrides the need for proof.

The fact at the heart of the debate is that we are vulnerable, and we don't like feeling vulnerable. Human societies really do fail, once-great civilizations do collapse, populations die-out, and cultures become extinct as well as species. So what kills them? Is it destruction of natural resources or outside enemies? Or is it natural disasters that are beyond human influence, such as tsunamis, volcano eruptions, ice ages, or natural global warming?

Being a libra, I tend to shy away from either/or answers and be more of a both/and kind of person. It is perhaps for this reason that I have been so absorbed by the new book -- just released -- called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. It is written by Jared Diamond, who's last book, Guns, Germs, and Steel was a revelation to me and many others who read it. For those of us who can't stop contemplating questions such as "Where have we come from as human beings and where are we going?" Diamond's work is not to be missed. In Collapse, he has come up with a framework of five factors that impact why a given society might collapse or not, and then looks at historical and modern examples of societal collapse through the lens of those five questions. It is fascinating reading.

Unsurprisingly, included on his list of five factors are human environmental impacts as well as attacks from enemy societies. Also included on the list is climate change, but this refers more to natural climate change than to human-caused global warming. Another factor that Diamond considers is decreased support from friendly neighbors, especially trading partners that supply the society with crucial goods.

The final factor that Diamond considers is the social, political and cultural response to its problems, regardless of the cause. The question of whether to shoot the wolf or not, or when or how or why is impacted by one's belief system and understanding of the world.

The first major collapse Diamond investigates is that of the Easter Islanders, as well as the Polynesian islanders on Pitcairn and Henderson Islands. From there he moves on to the Anasazi, and then the Maya, the Vikings and the Norse who settled in Greenland. Moving on to modern societies, he looks at Rwanda, compares the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and then takes a look at modern China and Australia. At the end he draws lessons from the failures and success of the past. I haven't gotten there yet -- I'm still at the Maya -- but am convinced that the questions he is asking and the examples he is giving are crucial contributions to the conversation we need to have in this society about sustainability. And looking at the past is maybe the closest we can get to 'sound science' on these issues. We simply can't, in a laboratory, watch a society or the human race as a whole survive or self-destruct. We can only look to the past and see what we can glean from it in a spirit of open questioning rather than looking for proof of our own point of view. I think Diamond is doing just that.

It should come as no surprise that throughout his book, questions of food supply, diet, and agriculture are ever-present. How a society goes about feeding itself and whether or not it can do so adequately has everything to do with whether or not it is sustainable in the long term. Diamond's book provides a crucial background to those of us who wrestle every day with how to build a food system that can sustain us, day to day, year to year, decade to decade, century to century, and on and on. I highly recommend it.

May you feel the wildness within yourself and all around you on this Wolf Moon. May you feel that hope is not lost for the Earth and its creatures. May you be full of faith that humanity can choose to succeed and at the same time save the wolves, and the bears, and the whales. Life would not be the same without them.