“Yellowstone DNA: A Tale Of Wolves, Wildlife, And Humans”

What does it mean to say an ecosystem is balanced—and what happens when it’s not? There are scholarly answers to those questions, of course, but former Chico City Council member Scott Huber uses his latest novel to draw readers into a heartbreaking generations-long story of “Yellowstone DNA: A Tale Of Wolves, Wildlife, And Humans” ($14.99 in paperback from Long Creek Dutch Publishing).

The novel focuses on elk, wolves, and humans, which, Huber writes in the preface, “until the coming of white Europeans … existed in a state of equilibrium—two predators who hunted in small packs or clans and a prey animal that existed in numerous herds of dozens and hundreds. The predators killed only enough to sustain their small populations. The prey’s numbers were kept in balance by their pursuers.”

Based on two years of research and observation, Huber’s story mixes fictional characters with historical events. It culminates in the great debate “pitting ranchers and hunters against wildlife watchers and eco-tourists” over the question of reintroducing gray wolves into the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. (Speculative chapters at the end take readers to 2031 and beyond to show how anti-wolf government policies might be changed.)

Huber, a hunter himself, brings nuance to the novel’s debate about restoring the ecosystem. But the wolf must be part of that balance. “In Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley,” an author’s note says, “Scott was privileged to experience close encounters with wolves and their pups … enchanted by the beautiful songs of gray wolves near Wyoming’s Sunlight Basin.”

Chapters take readers into the minds of the humans and the other animals, using indigenous names throughout. From the nineteenth century through our own time, here are the tales of Chili the elk, Nuni and Omah the wolves, Pohogwe (Po) the Shoshoni (Tukudika) archeologist, and many more.

Without wolves, the burgeoning elk population devours aspens the beavers need, ruining their habitat; then the beavers are taken by coyotes and killed by cars when they try to make for better waterways.

But this is a novel of possibility; the gray wolves, “the Isa, creator gods of Shoshoni mythology, began singing their approval.” Huber invites readers to join in.

"In Search Of The Canary Tree: The Story Of A Scientist, A Cypress, And A Changing World"

"Some people call it the Alaska cedar," writes Lauren E. Oakes, who teaches Earth System Science at Stanford. "Others call it the yellow cypress. ... Alaskans use the name yellow-cedar." In remote parts of Alaska groves of yellow-cedar are on the decline. Just what is going on had not been documented until Oakes, in 2010, began a years-long research project for her doctorate. 

The book that emerged is a nuanced and poignant exploration of the impact of the dying trees. "What I didn't know then," she writes, "was that these dead trees would eventually ... give me a sense of conviction about our ability to cope with climate change. They'd motivate me to do my part. They'd move me from pessimism about the outlook of our world to optimism about all we still can do."

"In Search Of The Canary Tree: The Story Of A Scientist, A Cypress, And A Changing World" ($27 in hardcover from Basic Books; also for Amazon Kindle) has been chosen as the 2019-2020 "Book In Common" for Chico State University (csuchico.edu/bic), Butte College (butte.edu/bic), and the larger community. (Oakes is scheduled to speak at Chico State in April.)

In addition to teaching, Oakes works for the Wildlife Conservation Society. Her book presents the scientific questions she set out to answer in Alaska, such as how to distinguish the normal growth and decay cycles of a healthy forest from the threat to the yellow-cedar species itself. 

On some Alaskan archipelagos there is significant yellow-cedar dieback, but that has made room for spruce to flourish. There is grief at the loss, especially among the native Tlingit community, but that leads to questions of how the relationship with the forests will change. 

Oakes comes to realize, through dozens of interviews, that the many perspectives she finds (economic, ecological, spiritual) present a complex pattern of how those affected face the loss.

The yellow-cedar is the canary, the early warning that profound change is upon us. The species teaches "that there's simply no imaginable tomorrow ... that could ever possibly nullify the need for unwavering care and thoughtful action today."

For the sake of the wolves

The indefatigable Dick Cory, former science and math teacher, Nebraska native, and passionate Chicoan, has created a love story for a wolf. This is wolf OR-7, so named by Oregon Fish and Wildlife biologists who used a GPS collar to track the animal over his 3000-mile trek from Oregon to California and back again. Given the name “Journey” in a contest, the wolf attracted worldwide attention, especially when it strayed into our neck of the woods.

Cory imagines diary entries made by the gray wolf in a whimsical book for kids of all ages, complete with colorful maps and wolf images. The book is called “Journey The Lonely Wolf: The Travels Of OR-7” ($15 in paperback, self-published; available at Made in Chico or from the author at ubangarang@yahoo.com, with a donation made to Teichert Ponds Foundation for each book sold).

“Finding food is not my problem,” Journey writes. “Finding a she wolf mate is. I have heard that I’m the first wolf to be seen in California in one hundred years. Still I have hopes.” The entries end in 2014, three years after Journey started his travels, with his mate Wanderlust raising three pups. All is well, at least for now.

Sentiment is never far from Cory’s pen. A second recently published book, “Days Of Love Songs And Roses” ($30 in paperback), pairs lyrics to some of Cory’s favorite romantic songs with pictures of colorful roses, courtesy of the Butte Rose Society. “You Are My Sunshine” (1933) features the dark orange rose, symbolic of enthusiasm and desire. The Beatles even get in, with “And I Love Her” (1964), paired with the red rose of love.

In a third book, “Dust!” ($20 in paperback), Cory assembles seventy-three short reflections on just about everything, from the Teichert Pond Project to puppy love, from manners and dress codes to “lessons I remember.” Writing on this side of 80 years, Cory notes that dust has always been with him, from cement dust when he worked concrete, to chalk dust when, as a teacher, he went for the abstract.

And found his voice.

The human side of the Sacramento River

Retired Butte College photography instructor Geoff Fricker has teamed with writer Rebecca Lawton for a mesmerizing exploration of the human side of the Sacramento River. Fricker’s work is housed in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Crocker Art Museum, and other repositories; Lawton, and essayist and novelist, was one of the first female river guides through the Grand Canyon.

The book is called “Sacrament: Homage To A River” ($45 in hardcover from Heyday), containing striking full-page black and white photographs and powerful text detailing the changes that have come to the “Sac” and its tributaries. It is, says Fricker in the Preface, “a contemplation of water and our often contradictory connection with it. … I am inspired by the slow but certain path of the river—which meanders in spite of all our attempts to control it.”

Though several images focus on the “natural” world—from water flowing over fossilized ammonite in Chico Creek, to Jed’s point, “where Jedediah Smith first sighted the Sacramento River”—most show the intertwining of that world with the human. There’s a 1997 image of collapsed Butte County Bridge #17 in Centerville; 132-year-old brackets “used to harness a wooden flume on the basaltic cliffs of Table Mountain”; and Labor Day tubing on the Sac in 1999.

For Lawton, this is a cautionary tale. “There is no going back to life on an untamed floodplain where conjoined freshwater marshes teemed with wildlife, human diversity, and aquatic life in unimaginable numbers.” But there may be a way forward in what she calls “cooperative restoration,” which includes “conserving and recycling water” and “reestablishing ecosystem health.”

The reader is confronted afresh with the often heavy human hand on the swirling waters of the Sacramento; the tone is something like hopeful sadness. “If there is a river whose potential for biological richness and natural wealth can lead us to wholeness, it is the Sac. El Rio del Sacramento. River of redemption. Miraculous river.”

The Sacramento River, in all its glory

"My love of rivers is deep and enduring," writes Bob Madgic. "What inspired me to move from the San Francisco Bay Area to Shasta county after a career in public education was the Sacramento River. My wife, Diane, and I live in a home overlooking this magnificent waterway. The river's daily gifts are immeasurable. Constant yet ever-changing motion, myriad birds, stunning sunsets that tint the water red, and full moons that coat the surface silver are joined by a continual symphony of river sounds. I can walk to the water any time and possibly hook a spirited rainbow trout. We are truly blessed."

Madgic, aided by project contributor Walt Simmons, has created a printed homage to this great waterway. "The Sacramento: A Transcendent River" ($24.95 in paperback from River Bend Books, 6412 Clear View Drive, Anderson, CA 96007) is a beautifully designed book, replete with color photos, some taken by Madgic, that captures "the power and beauty of the natural Sacramento River, including the flora and fauna that co-exist with it."

Madgic will be signing copies of his book and presenting a multi-media presentation this Thursday, March 28, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the meeting of the Sacramento River Preservation Trust, 631 Flume St. in Chico. Books will be available for purchase; the signing is free and open to the public.

The story of the Sacramento River is told in eleven chapters, from the history of the native peoples to the development of Shasta Dam, the "decline of the Delta," the diminishing of the winter-run salmon, and, more recently, new hope for conservation. Ironically, the "age of abundance" created by new technologies also caused industrial pollution and "widespread destruction of natural habitat." But then came new conservation organizations, like the Sacramento River Preservation Trust. Co-founded in Chico in the 1980s by John Merz, it fought a proposal to, in Merz' words, "rip rap every bend between Red Bluff and Colusa," thus turning the Sacramento into a glorified canal.

But even more central to Madgic's story is the encounter with the river itself and how a "natural" river, to the extent that that is possible, offers abundant gifts. The river is a classroom, and the lesson is clear: that "a healthy human race calls for thriving river ecosystems."

"California's last glaciers"

Tim Palmer, who recently appeared at Lyon Books in Chico for a signing and slide show, knows the mountains of California. Author and master photographer, Palmer has traversed them "by foot and on skis, by canoe and whitewater raft, and in his well-equipped van." "In the spring of 2010," he writes, "I set out for the glaciers of California. I wanted to see them before they were gone."

Hear the sadness: "I wanted to climb on the glaciers' steep slopes, to feel the crunch of their snow underfoot, to drink from crystalline streams cutting their icy surfaces, to sleep at their rocky windswept edges, and to photograph their evanescent beauty so others might also know what was there. It proved to be one of the most remarkable summers of my life."

His report, filled with stunning color photographs, is simply called "California Glaciers" ($29.95 in hardcover from Sierra College Press, published by Heyday Books). It's a personal account, capturing the sense of what it is like to walk atop a glacier, coming to terms with a "glacial truth that required me to stretch my concept of what is real, or likely, or possible: a solid substance that flows. I imagined the creeping ice as if it were extremely dense clay, ever so slowly yielding, bending, and moving to the molding pressure of my hands. Gravity had exerted that kind of force on the ice non-stop for ages, and so the ice bent and slid downhill. By setting foot on the glacier, I had figuratively--and quite imaginably--reentered the ice ages of the past."

Near the center of the book is a glacier portfolio, pages of blues, whites, browns, and reds, from Thompson Peak in the Trinity Alps to Hotlum Glacier on Mount Shasta's east side. A chapter is devoted to Shasta. Listen: "On the towering stratovolcano of the north, California's largest surviving glaciers still move, rupture, creak, crack, groan, push rock, and swallow the unwary."

But these glaciers are fast disappearing. "Throughout the Sierra," Palmer writes, "glaciers are about half as large in area as they were a hundred years ago. ... From a purely nature-focused view, the changes written in the glaciers are tragic and, I might add, heartbreaking."

Here, then, is an elegy to the California glacier.

Solution to our garbage problem? It's in the bag

Edward Humes is a California-based, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has turned his attention to the stuff we throw away. "Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash" ($27 in hardcover from Avery/Penguin; e-book versions for the Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook) is a fascinating and surprisingly upbeat look at how we got here, where trash goes when it's tossed, and how ordinary mortals can make a difference.

Where's "here"? Humes sums it up: "Americans make more trash than anyone else on the planet,throwing away about 7.1 pounds per person per day, 365 days a year. Across a lifetime that rate means, on average, we are each on track to generate 102 tons of trash."

What's more, "American's two highest volume exports to China were paper waste and scrap metal, a little more than $8 billion worth of bundled old newspapers, crushed cardboard, rusty steel and mashed beverage cans sold at rock-bottom prices. ... America, a country that once built things for the rest of the world, has transformed itself into China's trash compactor."

Humes is scheduled to be interviewed by Nancy Wiegman on Nancy's Bookshelf this Friday morning at 10:00 a.m. on KCHO (Northstate Public Radio, 91.7 FM).

Humes' research is driven by a key question: "How is it possible for people to create so much waste without intending to do so, or even realizing they are doing it?" He spends time at Southern California's Puente Hills landfill (the "largest active municipal dump in the country"), charts the history of Waste Management, Inc., and details the work of trash-trackers (who attach electronic beacons to thrown-out sneakers and plastic containers). "Managing waste" makes it seem to disappear. But it's still there, such as in the zillions of plastic nodules mixed into our beaches and populating the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch."

Humes devotes a chapter to Andy Keller, the head of ChicoBag, and Keller's legal fight with "Big Plastic." Plastic grocery bags "are mostly not recycled despite decades of efforts. ... Their environmental footprint and cost are greater than the simple expedient of a reusable bag. They are, as Andy Keller is quick to point out, a product with a useful life measured in hours and a waste life measured in centuries."

Now we know.

Urban homesteader to speak in Chico

"Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living" ($16.95 in paperback from Skyhorse Publishing; digital editions for Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble Nook, and from Google ebookstore) is a spirited manifesto by Rachel Kaplan with K. Ruby Blume. In 2008 Blume founded the Institute for Urban Homesteading in Oakland; Kaplan "works as a somatic psychotherapist and teaches homesteading skills."

Together, they write, "our work reflects a commitment toward a regenerative, living culture, rather than the consumptive consumerism our country has refined to a sick art. We opt out by digging in."

Kaplan will be speaking at Lyon Books in Chico this Thursday, Oct. 13 at 7:00 p.m.

Chapters in the profusely-illustrated book cover such practical matters as creating community gardens, making cheese, butchering chickens, using a composting toilet, growing herbal medicines and building structures with cob ("just soil dug from the backyard and mixed with water, sand, clay and straw"). This is radical stuff: "The front lawn must go the way of the dodo. No longer will we spend our time in submission to the manicured lawn, wasting water and energy. Our rallying cry is: Turn Your Lawn into Your Lunch! Sheet mulching reclaims the lawn with an organic 'lasagna' of cardboard, compost, and mulch."

The goal is "permaculture," not a back-to-the-land movement or a self-sufficiency movement. It's about permanent culture, which means creating community sufficiency and resilience through collaboration." It involves neighborhoods, not just households.

This is not a call to sacrifice. "We love our lives as homesteaders," the authors write. "Don't confuse this lifestyle with a fear-driven mentality of scarcity and lack. This kind of living is about the richness of the present moment and the joy in living a simpler, uncluttered life."

"And so we find ourselves in our backyards fighting gophers, pulling carrots, harvesting rabbits and eggs, tending bees, and gathering raspberries, grapes, broccoli, and kale. We save our seeds. We pee in a bucket and dump it on the compost bin. We harvest our rainwater and drain our bathtubs into the garden. On hot summer afternoons you'll find us preserving jars of peaches, plums, and nectarines that have fallen from the trees. We bring people together to learn how to can, make yogurt, hold a meeting, or turn a lawn into a garden."

Chico couple's cross-country journey mixes social activism and vegetable oil

In July 2007 Chris Nelson and her spouse Michael Pike celebrated retirement from nursing careers by setting off on a nine-month journey. Their transportation of choice: "An '87 Ford F-250 four-wheel drive 3/4-ton pickup with a 8' cab-over camper," a "multi-fuel vehicle able to run on diesel fuel, bio-diesel, or straight vegetable oil." They called it the Veggie Voyager.

Nelson kept a blog along the way (http://veggievoyagers.blogspot.com) and now its content, including some stunning landscape photographs, has been published as "The Veggie Voyagers: An Eco-Friendly, Low Budget Loop Of North America's Wild Places Powered By Used Cooking Oil" ($26 in paperback from Are-We-There-Yet Press) by Chris Nelson with Michael Pike.

The couple will be sharing their "adventures in mobile homelessness" tonight at 7:00 p.m. at Lyon Books in Chico.

"This is a book about retiring on $40 a day," Nelson writes. "It's a book about loss of habitat and environmental threats. Most of all, it's a book about the beauty of the natural world." The couple sometimes bought vegetable oil from Costco, but often along the way obtained the used variety from fast-food chains. Any water had to be removed from the oil. The filtration process involved a modified juicer and a contraption that looked more like a still or meth lab. It took hours, and more than once local law enforcement asked them to move along.

Nelson and Pike (along with Sasha, the dog, who learned repeated lessons about porcupines) traversed some twenty states and three Canadian provinces. "I figured out we'd stayed 16 times at Walmarts and 67 days with friends, family or under the wing of New Orleans folks. We've stayed at gravel pits, casinos, . . . hot springs, dumps, roadside turnouts, BLM land, campgrounds and four motels."

During their trip they participated in a rally in New Orleans on behalf of public housing, made tense with abundant police presence. In Utah they visited the town of Monticello where the "uranium and vanadium processing plant" "had created a legacy of cancers." They walked among the Bristlecone Pines on the Eastern Sierra and took a "walking meditation. The trees had one voice. It was a low, slow, deep, muted sap hum."

And they showered every four days, needed or not.

Chico becomes a coastal town in new eco-novel

Dale Pendell is not only a contributor to the Huffington Post; he also achieved cult popularity with the Pharmako trilogy ("an encyclopedic study of the history and uses of psychoactive plants and related synthetics"). A proponent of what his website (dalependell.com) calls "wild mind," he has been deeply influenced by "poet Gary Snyder, Zen teacher Robert Aitken, and philosopher Norman O. Brown."

Now the Sierra foothills resident traces the ecological history of California for the next ten thousand years in a new science-fiction novel, "The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse" ($21.95 in hardcover from North Atlantic Books; $9.99 in Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble NOOK e-books). In 2021 a pandemic destroys most of the world's population, brought on, it's said, by weaponized bugs from the Americans and the Chinese.

"By 2031, ten years after the Collapse, the population of the United States had stabilized at four million." Carbon dioxide emissions from now-defunct factories had triggered a vast chain reaction. Global warming, and the rising oceans, would change the face of the world.

Pendell is scheduled to be in Chico tonight at 7:00 p.m. for a book signing and discussion at the 1078 Gallery, 820 Broadway. The free event is sponsored by Chico's Lyon Books.

The novel uses maps, travel journals, poetry, interviews, and news accounts to flesh out the human response over the course of millennia. Each chapter begins with a "panoptic," an overview focusing on the social and climate changes reshaping California.

As declarative sentences multiply, it's evident that the remaining humans are somehow surviving in small, do-it-yourself communities. In an address in 2171 to the Berkeley Scholar's Guild on "Pre-Col Society" one historian notes: "It was called democracy but it wasn't at all what we mean by that; it was really an oligarchy. Representatives weren't even required to do what the people wanted them to do."

In the years 2121-2220, "twenty feet of water lay over Sacramento. . . . The Sacramento Valley had become a great bay, already stretching 125 miles from the Sutter Buttes to Modesto. . . . A tallow industry developed at Chico, producing candles. Tanbark and hides were floated to Santa Cruz, where locals operated a tannery."

People followed Earth's rhythms, not the other way around.

Lin Jensen: Deep ecology through Buddhist eyes

Author Lin Jensen, the founding teacher of the Chico Zen Sangha, and now teacher emeritus there, writes that "as both a Buddhist and a student of deep ecology, I'm struck by how much the two have in common, each exacting of the follower a genuine paradigm shift in perception. For the Buddhist the shift is an awakening to earth as an extension of one's own body wherein the dichotomy of self and other dissolves. For the deep ecologist the shift is a similar awakening wherein earth is realized as one indivisible body comprised of all beings of any sort."

Deep ecology is more than the study of ecosystems. "It's a perception that recognizes the right of all beings to exist simply because they do. Nothing is left out, nothing excluded." Jensen draws on the work of Arne Naess, the founder of deep ecology, and others, in showing the deep ecological concerns of Buddhism, even from ancient days. "Deep Down Things: The Earth In Celebration and Dismay" ($15.95 in paperback from Wisdom Publications) takes its title from words of the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who observed that, in the midst of industrialized blight, "nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things. . . ."

Jensen is scheduled to be interviewed on Nancy's Bookshelf tomorrow morning at 10:00 a.m. on KCHO (Northstate Public Radio, 91.7 FM). He will be speaking on Tuesday, October 5 at 7:30 p.m. at the 1078 Gallery, 820 Broadway in Chico. Hosted by Lyon Books of Chico, where "Deep Down Things" is available locally, the event is free and open to the public.

Jensen writes of places where the earth lives, and places where it can hardly breathe. "On the east side of town prime orchard land lies buried under Chico's South Mall, but on the west side of town the fields of a young and thriving organic cooperative are green with new life." Jensen's Buddhism is local and practical; "the proper scale for human endeavor," he writes, "is that of the household." Finally, "my prayer is that to the very last of this planet's brief tenure in the vast cycle of the universe someone will remain to say 'earth' and to say it from the heart's core."