President’s Column
Boy, Beetle, or Elder?
In his welcoming speech and songs opening of the 2004 Aleutian Goose Festival, Tolowa elder and preserver of the Tolowa language Loren Brommelyn told a Tolowa story of a boy who tried to kill a beetle on a freshly swept trail by stepping on it. He was stopped from doing so by an elder who explained that the boy had no right to kill the beetle unless there was a need to do so. The beetle could be another beetle’s mother or father, dinner for a bird or useful in some way that we do not understand.
As I listened, I became aware of the same process occurring on a different scale today. The Western Snowy Plover first came to mind. For years we have used our beaches for many things; some have abused the beaches without caring, others have used them carefully and with respect. As we learned more, we found that even some of the most careful beach users were unknowingly making it difficult for the Snowy Plover to breed. Like the child about to squash the beetle, society needs to stop and listen to those who try to stop the inadvertent destruction of a seemingly insignificant form of life. As Audubon members, it is our duty to inform society that to dismiss a little shorebird as insignificant, or that its population on a beach where its ancestors have bred for thousands of years is not important, is arrogance born of ignorance. As we continue to learn more about our ecosystem, it is humbling to learn how much we don’t know. We now know a lot about the biological details of the snowy plover, but we don’t know very much about the chain of events that might occur because of local extinction. Let’s listen to everyone on this issue, including those whose important activities might be affected. We could just as well be that beetle as the boy’s foot.
Another example is that the Siskiyou National Forest (SNF) wants to salvage log the Biscuit fire area in southwestern Oregon and Northwestern California. “Salvage” logging is proposed in areas where few marketable trees were burned and the fire mostly stayed low and cleared out the undergrowth. I saw second-year growth from brush, and a profusion of early blooming wildflowers found no where else on earth in the “severely burned” area. Like stepping on a beetle, one SNF proposal would create a damaging permanent fireline to protect the burned low fire danger California portion from the adjacent mismanaged private timberlands that are the true fire threat. We need to remember that our relationship to our government is as a parent (elder) to a child. We also must remember that we are all the beetle, the boy, and the elder depending on the situation. Let’s strive to be the elder most of the time.
Thank you Loren for your inspiration.