Mother Nature don't do bailouts

(photo courtesy: http://creative-commons-photo.com/image/61-humpback-whale)

Thomas Friedman asks, in his Op-Ed in today’s New York Times, “What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall – when Mother Nature and the market both said: ‘No more.’”

For years, I’ve fed on writers who have shouted similar messages from their pulpits, smaller and less amplified than the New York Times usually but pulpits nonetheless. I have long been a convert to various strains of “Less can be More” credos of consumption, if at times admittedly lapsed in my dedication. Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry before him have long argued for a combination of personal and collective action to counteract prevailing destructive forces of contemporary capitalism; Gary Snyder and Annie Dillard are champions of the wild that is out there and in us; E.B. White examined work, craft, and community; Henry David Thoreau filled reams in an attempt to walk the walk he was talking.

Recently, I’ve sat down with more sobering fare: The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, I Am Legend starring Will Smith to name two. Both ask related questions: How might we push ourselves over the cliff edge? What will the ensuing post-apocalyptic world look like? A related, though ultimately more uplifting movie is the fantastic Whale Rider [If you haven’t yet, see it.]. A subplot that shook me was the story of whales. Whales elude conveyance – by saying that a house is large, blue, and south-facing, have I showed you what kind of home it is? Whales, like the dolphins in A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, may yet leave. I think I should resume a previous habit of answering, whenever asked, “What animal would you choose to be?,” – a whale.

While I can’t swim like whales, what lessons can I learn from them? Put another way, how can I better walk the walk of a concientious consumer/educator/friend/citizen? What can I do to help restore balance? What am I, what are we doing differently in 2009 that will help us climb up to greater stability, sustainability, and symbiosis? Symbiosis?

Yes -- "sym·bi·o·sis, noun 2. a cooperative, mutually beneficial relationship between two people or groups." To this definition I would add “or systems” – educational, health care, political, financial, energy, industrial, military, transportation, commercial... What systems will we create to ensure that Mother Nature and the market, our families and communities can look back and say, confidently and gracefully: “Never again.”

Birds, beauty, perambulations, and a bottom feeder

Walking the Florentine streets, we came across many things of interest. A few Irish pubs selling Kilkenny, a great Irish beer that is unfortunately not exported to the U.S. My mother’s new favorite digestif, limoncello – a sweet essence of summer lemon groves liqueur that may be the closest drink we have to Ray Bradbury’s dandelion wine. Christmas lights strung across the narrow streets, lighting the window shoppers, low-hanging constellations in blue and white. Taking the advice of my brother’s roommate, we took special care in crossing the streets – many Florentines zip through the city on scooters like rabbits late for very important dates – occhio!

In Piazzale Michelangelo, above the city and across the river, a green copper copy of the David stands above kitsch booths and buskers – we heard delicate classical guitar played by a focused youth with his back to the views. This piazza and the cemetery higher up on the hill are not to be missed.

From the banks and bridges of the river Arno, we caught frequent glimpses of the Duomo and the crenellated tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, admired skullers from the world-champion Florentine crew club and the reflection of Ponte Vecchio on the still waters of a cloudy day. My brother and I also saw some locals feeding imperial Roman quantities of bread to a flock of pigeons and a family of nutria – rats of the sky and rats of the water. Brilliant.


Perhaps the oddest aquatic sight was the giant catfish we saw pulled from the river by Hemingway’s Italian old man. I would not have thought such a beast possible in those waters. Leaving the fish up from the water’s edge, the fisherman waded back to shore through a whorl of gulls. He was loaded down with long rods, a cooler, a net large enough to seine for shrimp. He rode off on his bicycle and we did not stay to see whether or not he returned for his catch.

A rose by any other name

The magpie is back, outside my window, walking with exaggerated strides and short hops. From the spotty lawn, she pulls seeds? worms? Her black head and shoulders look like an executioner’s hood and the flash of blue on her wings is captivating.

Back home, I am so-so with flora and fauna identification, an area I would like to improve. I felt most knowledgeable in the montane zone of Colorado where I worked for a few seasons, though the relative symplicity of the ecosystem there made it easier to learn than the crowded temperate forests of southern New England.

Here in northern Italy, I’m most often unknowing when it comes to the natural world. I have plenty of opportunities to see plants and animals that invite investigation, especially on my runs out along the Via dei Mulini, about which I have written before. Long elegant herons are justifiably skittish and leave off whenever I approach within 100 meters. Nutria, large riparian rats, are hunted systematically by farmers during the fall, after the corn and hay have all been take in; an invasive species, they are unwelcome and left dead on the sides of the road. During this season, I have also seen the men wandering the fields, usually with baskets and dogs, searching for mushrooms.

The European magpie I knew by name. It was not the bird baked into a pie, though that “Sing a Song of Sixpence” nursery rhyme, like many others, has an interesting back story – this one with pirates! Arrrr! The magpie, as I found in my research, is common throughout European folklore and is often associated with unhappiness and trouble. Occhio!

The list of plants and animals to look into grows. I will never be the Thoreau, Abbey, or Muir of Codogno, but perhaps I can take part in the ancient practice of naming the world around us.

A poem on names and the light inside the named.

34. ‘As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme’
by Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: 5
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces; 10
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Fields and mountains

I walked out into the fields at dark the other night. Partly I was curious to see what the path I run almost every day was like after sundown, and partly I wanted to face, even in passing, some of those fears of darkness that seem ingrained in us. The town’s development ends at a rounded curve where the path begins – or ends, depending which way you’re going. The path is mostly paved but not lit. At a turn, I veered off the pavement. I watched my step through cornstalk stubble, the field having recently been shaved. I heard a splash in the fieldedge irrigation ditch; I suspect it was a nutria spooked by my arrival. [Nutria are rodents the size of small beavers that live in waterways, marshes, bayous, swamps, and the like.]

The path is technically a road, connecting our town with an outlying village, the frazione of Mulazzana, and so is used by cars, mopeds, tractors, threshers, trucks, bicycles, tillers, walkers, runners, and other sundry motorized farm equipment. And nutria, though they usually cross it transversely from one ditch to another. That night, a few cars passed, sweeping the fields with their headlights, traveling in a little globe of light visible from quite a distance across the flat landscape.

I saw stars, though not as many as I had hoped. The glow of Codogno behind me and the streetlights along the autostrada cast an often-overlooked pollution into the sky. The cloud ribbons above looked almost like dull versions of the Northern Lights, and I thought of a friend in Alaska who is probably a loosescrew bodhisattva. I thought also of a mountain ridgeline east of Seattle in the North Cascades.

Gazing up at a starry sky reminds me of Frost again and another thing I feel to be true: we need wilderness. In his famous letter in defense of wilderness, Wallace Stegner quoted the writer Sherwood Anderson, “I can remember old fellows in my home town speaking feelingly of an evening spent on the big empty plains. It had taken the shrillness out of them. They had learned the trick of quiet...." The rectilinear farms around Codogno do not have much directly in common with big empty plains or the great tracts of wilderness in the west of the United States. This part of Lombardy feels much more like Kansas than Vermont or Oregon, but, as for Stegner, the idea that wild areas exist is some consolation to me.

People have been living in the area around Codogno for over 2500 years, but the fields at night feel at least one step closer to wild than my balcony above the street. These fields, as well as the bici vecchia culture, have lessons on the trick of quiet. Hope you’re finding some in your nape of the way as well.

Chitty? Is that you?

La vita continues to take interesting turns.

Italian TV is interesting for more reasons than I can possibly enumerate let alone count in one post. We can look at commercials, per esempio. One of my favorites is a series featuring three men stranded on a desert island, doing deserted-on-a-desert-island-type things like making phones out of tin cans and string. I'm a sucker for tin can phones. Many Italian commercials make me go hmmm. For example, Vera, a company owned by Nestle, advertises their bottled water using a song made famous by Dick Van Dyke...

Today I was thrown a curveball when I found out that I had been signed up for a softball tournament. Does this kind of thing happen to anyone else? My team is the Bad News Bears mashed with Cocoon. In Italian, of course. A few of the players used to play for the baseball team here, but that was in the era of the phonograph. We even have the Babe Ruth of Codogno baseball, il bambino himself: Bob. Yes, Bob. I watched the first few innings from the bench, then I got the call up. "You've pitched before?" asked our make-shift coach, perhaps thinking that all Americans are born with a glove on their non-throwing hands and spikes on their feet. "Uh. Sure. Years ago," I answered. Maybe in middle school gym class? "Great. Start warming up. You're going in next inning."

Heavy metal poured from the sound system; beads of cold sweat trickled down our opponents' necks; time froze as I strode to the mound. I unleashed a barrage of fireballs and mowed down the batters like so many dandelions, fluttering in the breeze... Not exactly, but it was fun to hear the crowd of 17 cheering my name, to see little kids posting the score on the manual scoreboard perched above center field, to cheer incoherently with the chain-smoking grandmother sitting next to me on the bench. No one asked for my autograph and the kids posted way too many donuts for our side, but la nonna played center for a few innings and I went home laughing. Game #2 is next Sunday. I'll be working on my slurve all week.

Oh, and I was almost eaten alive by a dog the size and color of a polar bear.