Society
Sunday, May 13th, 2012: 2012 Trips, Mojave Desert, People, Regions, Road Trips.
This year’s desert powwow was enlivened by two totemic groups: the media-industry fathers and sons, and the field biologists.
The boys had the time of their lives climbing the boulder-strewn slopes near camp, and fathers and sons together had fun exploring the old mining ruins. Farther afield, the scientists roamed for miles over the surrounding ridges and canyons with their field glasses and GPS units.
My biologist friends are also expert gardeners and foragers, and we all enjoyed extravagant evening meals, featuring sazeracs and the legendary desert lobster.
The fathers had a chance to talk shop at midday under the shade canopy while their sons scrambled about outside, seemingly impervious to the sun’s rays. And around the late-night campfire, after the others retired to their tents, the scientists shared war stories of species and bureaucracies.
Sunday, May 13th, 2012: 2012 Trips, Indigenous Cultures, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips, Society.
Our land is in a mountain range that had special significance to the desert Indians, but it’s doubtful that our property saw much use by Native Americans. There are lots of mining ruins dating back to the 1870s, but whereas I’ve found prehistoric campsites, potsherds, and rock art elsewhere in the range, I have yet to run across artifacts in our canyon.
But my scientist friends hit the jackpot on this trip, finding a large agate scraper on the bajada, and a nice small arrowhead on the slopes.
The boys revisited an area up the canyon where the old miners disposed of their bottles and cans, and collected some nice pieces of purple and blue glass.
Monday, July 2nd, 2012: Odds & Ends, Society.
My weekend movie was the 2009 film Last Ride, in which Hugo Weaving plays an ex-con who makes his 10-year-old son an accomplice in an increasingly desperate flight from the law across the spectacular natural landscape of South Australia. The brutality of Weaving’s character finds one (of many) outlets at a remote water hole where he tries to teach the frightened boy to swim by throwing him in the water and holding him down: “C’mon you wuss!”
That scene instantly evoked a memory of my Grandpa Carmichael, my surrogate father, who told me he learned to swim because his father (great-grandfather Howard, who I also grew up with) threw him in the river and told him he had to sink or swim. Apparently, Grandpa had solved this childhood crisis on the spot via the sidestroke, which became his only swimming style.
By contrast, I had friendly one-on-one swimming lessons with the star of the high-school swim team, so until seeing the movie it hadn’t really occurred to me how terrifying that first experience could be. I tried to picture my great-grandfather – who was generally good with children – throwing my Grandpa in the river – a tree-shaded, muddy waterhole with low, muddy banks just like in the film – wondering what the father was feeling, what the son was feeling, how those feelings might be churning like the muddy water – or simply programmed by tradition. What sort of reconciliation would emerge later in safety, whether gratitude, respect, or lingering resentment.
People who haven’t experienced much cruelty may hold simplistic notions of what is cruel, and how “cruelty” functions in society and ecology. Richard Nelson, in his beautiful deer-hunting memoir The Island Within, reports watching a sea otter slowly devour a living salmon tail-first while the salmon watched itself being eaten. And most of us have seen TV clips of hyenas bringing down and feasting on a living wildebeest. How do humans benefit by condemning some behavior as “cruel,” and how much of this depends on the context?
The “cruelty of childhood” is an old cliche, and I certainly experienced childhood as the cruelest phase of life. I was one of the smallest boys in town and was bullied all the way up to my senior year of high school, first because I was small and later because I got good grades. The jocks and the tough boys were always verbally abusing me, threatening to beat me up, chasing me, punching and kicking when they could catch me. The neighborhood bully once found me out in the country in the woods by the riverside and shot me in the leg with his BB rifle. That’s when I found out I could run faster than other kids – I ran all the way home, leaving him in my dust.
My Dad tried to compensate for his absence by packing intense parenting into short visits. One of his favorite father-son activities was the old Scottish tradition of roughhousing, fighting for the sheer love of it, which in the old days often led to casual maiming and blinding. Dad was in his view trying to teach me to be a man, but he was huge and obese, so the contest was patently unfair and traumatic for me.
One of my ex-girlfriends grew up in a family where a lot of physical violence occurred and was mostly tolerated. They were all big, strong people with violent tempers. She told me of her younger brother throwing a cat off a bridge into a river, waiting for it to swim to shore and throwing it back in again, over and over. In some sectors of our society – sports and the military – bullying and brutality are considered essential to learning toughness and endurance. If you grow up isolated from cruelty, you may end up unprepared and powerless when you do meet it.
So where and when is it appropriate to learn about intimidation and physical force?
Or maybe the right question is how. In Last Ride, the father’s brutality really came out in how he treated his son – the same vicious way he treated the victims of his crimes. I don’t see my great-grandfather treating my Grandpa like that – I envision a firm but encouraging act. And in The Island Within, Nelson evokes the traditional hunter’s creed of respect for the prey – which raises the question of how and why we are different from the sea otter. I don’t buy the conventional answers to how humans are different from other animals; I’ve heard about the Asians who relish eating animals alive, and I can’t condemn them, not having the full picture.
After his first (failed) swimming lesson, the boy in the movie appears traumatized. And in the end, for other reasons, Last Ride won’t end up on my list of favorite films. But the glorious final scene shows how, in a cruel world, a hard lesson may be transformed into a moment of liberation.
Vision Quest 2016: Indian Wars
Wednesday, May 25th, 2016: 2016 Trips, Indigenous Cultures, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips, Society.
Long before I moved to New Mexico, during a period when my love affair with the desert was being tested, I was introduced to Dave, the archaeologist. He invited me along on a site survey, a search for sites or artifacts near a mountain spring in the Mojave National Preserve, we got to know each other a bit, and he gave me a copy of his master’s thesis. I told him about the Indian campsite I’d found in my mountains, and he said it was likely a girl’s puberty ritual site, a remote place that adolescent girls would visit with a female chaperone. The site included a flat-topped boulder with hand-carved hollows called “cupules”, in which the girls would mix paint for their faces, a part of the ritual.
In the years since, we’d fallen out of touch, but I knew he’d bought and moved into the former home of mutual friends, and I wanted to reconnect and get caught up on recent developments in desert archaeology.
Dave was on his way to a historic mining camp in the Preserve, where he was supervising restoration of cabins by volunteers. He invited me to join them, so I drove over in the morning to meet him at a crossroads, and followed him from there on a dirt road that climbed up into a steep area of granite peaks and slopes lush with perennial shrubs blooming red, yellow and blue, with cabins perched on ledges at different levels. It was an area I’d never visited, hidden from outside.
I’m not a fan of mining history or miner’s cabins, but I was quickly sucked into the volunteer spirit, and found myself brushing stain onto the frame of a cabin door while others bustled around me. Then Dave came up and suggested that I join him in a drive across the Preserve for some equipment. In his truck, we had our chance to talk.
My first question was a general one. Since first discovering traces of the Old Ones in this desert, 30 years ago, I’d developed a seemingly complete picture of its native inhabitants, the Chemehuevis, a branch of the Southern Paiute tribe that occupied southern Nevada and Utah. I knew archaeologists theorized that the Chemehuevi were recent migrants within the past 400 years, part of the so-called “Numic Expansion” from the northwest. But I took that theory with a grain of salt. I’d met Southern Paiutes who laughed at archaeologists and confidently asserted that their people had been here forever. I felt it was preposterous, and presumptuous, of Anglo scientists to rewrite the history of native people. Yet the other day, I’d seen a Park Service kiosk that claimed the Mojave Indians as prehistoric natives of the Preserve, omitting the Chemehuevis completely. I wanted to know which Indians I should talk to about the Native sites and artifacts I’d been finding, both here and in my mountains farther south.
Dave’s answer stirred up my settled local worldview. “Well, the Mojaves were here first. The Chemehuevi are newcomers to this desert. They came out of the north and kicked the Mojaves’ asses. You know about the Numic Expansion?”
“Yeah, I know about that theory. But the Southern Paiute had no history of a warrior culture. The Anglos just rolled over them with little resistance, everywhere they met. They avoided violence.”
“Well, that’s not completely true. They were guerrilla fighters. That’s how they beat the Mojave. The Mojave fought with clubs and tried to engage their enemy in hand-to-hand combat, while the Chemehuevis hid behind cover and shot them with arrows, from their powerful sinew-backed bows. They just kicked their asses, and the Mojaves gave up the desert and retreated to the River.”
“But how could the Paiutes have this overwhelmingly warlike, expansive culture of conquest for hundreds of years, then suddenly settle down and become peaceful once they’d migrated?”
“Well, they really didn’t. They fought back against the whites in the 19th century.”
“My impression was that they didn’t. Look at Carleton’s Campaign of terror, beheading them and mounting their heads on poles. We were the warlike ones, and we scared the shit out of the Chemehuevis.”
“Well, that’s true, but there are also accounts of Chemehuevis attacking whites. Dave Kessler, the rancher, was killed by Chemehuevis, along with a few other early settlers. And a war party of Chemehuevis trounced our military in a long, pitched battle at Zzyzx. You can read about that.”
“I will. I’ll read anything you can point me to. But I’m really having a hard time visualizing the Mojaves living out here. The Mojave are sedentary farmers. The Southern Paiutes are the ones who follow the old ways, nomadic hunter-gatherers perfectly adapted to the desert. How could some of the Mojaves live out here as nomadic hunter-gatherers, then just give it up and rejoin the main body of their tribe as settled farmers on the River?”
“That’s true. The Colorado River is the center of Mojave life and apparently always has been. But all the evidence shows this desert was dominated for millenia by what we call the Patayan culture, the ancient culture the Mojaves have inherited. I was on an excavation recently in the Woods Mountains, an amazing site with cultural materials in layers up to my neck, and it’s all Patayan, all Mojave.”
I felt like the rug had been pulled out from under my desert.
“The archaeologist David Earl has written about a big battle between the Chemehuevis and the Mojaves down in your mountains. The Chemehuevis just slaughtered them. They were not a peaceful people.”
It was a long drive across the Preserve to pick up the equipment at a historic ranch. On the way, we passed the stone cabin where my artist friend, Carl, had lived as a hermit for many years, perfecting his style of painting the desert. It was a high plateau lush with blooming shrubs in rainbow colors. The prehistoric cultures of the desert were Dave’s specialty – his passion – as an archaeologist. He was clearly sincere and conscientious. He gave me lots of references to papers and sources, and I needed to track them down and follow up. But I felt there were things in the prevailing view that didn’t make sense, that didn’t add up, and later, as I began to locate Dave’s references, I saw that the Numic Expansion remains controversial even among mainstream archaeologists. I kept seeing Calvin Meyers, the Paiute environmental activist, standing beside me on a desert mountainside, smiling out over the beautiful valley that our culture has since despoiled with a giant solar power plant. “We have our own stories. Why would someone else try to tell us where we come from?”
Dave mentioned rock art studies and theories alongside more conventional archaeology, which surprised me. In my experience, conventional archaeologists take a dim view of rock art studies, viewing them as pseudoscience, partly because rock art generally lacks a proven connection with dateable deposits and ethnographic accounts. But the desert is somewhat unique in that here, rock art is the most widespread, numerous, and visible artifact of prehistoric culture, so it can’t just be ignored. The last time I’d read about Mojave Desert rock art was when Whitley published his manifesto linking rock art with male shamans using psychedelics – I found that preposterous, citing all the petroglyph sites in exposed locations with clear functions of signage and wayfinding. Dave agreed that much of Whitley’s thesis had been rejected, but his identification of prehistoric motifs with “phosphenes”, the shapes we hallucinate or see under pressure to our eyeballs, is hard to dispute.
I asked him about treatment of the dead in prehistoric societies – did he think cremation or abandonment was more common, or were Native people just opportunistic and pragmatic? He felt treatment of the dead was a serious matter, following prescribed ritual. He mentioned cremation burials he’d found at Paiute Springs – rock cairns containing burnt bones and topped with upside-down metates, once again associated with Patayan or Mojave culture.
To me, the most important, most sacred, site in the desert is a cave that for me is associated with fertility and conception. It’s lined with colorful paintings with differing degrees of wear, suggesting that it was used and maintained for a long time, and I’d always assumed it was a Chemehuevi site. I thought I could remember young Chemehuevis visiting the site years ago, and it had later been purchased by members of the tribe and turned into a preserve.
But when I asked Dave for contrasting examples of Mojave and Chemehuevi rock art, what he showed me associated the oldest, most prevalent, and most coherent art – all the art I was used to, including the fertility paintings – with the Mojaves, the sedentary floodplain farmers, rather than the nomadic hunter-gatherers who were perfectly adapted to the desert. Apparently the association had been made by rock art specialists on the basis of comparision with patterns on Patayan pottery. Dave repeated his assertion that the campsite I’d found was a girl’s puberty site, and that based on my description of potsherds found there, it had to be a Mojave site, more than 400 years old. Anything old and lasting in the desert was from the Mojaves, not the Chemehuevis.
It was tough news for me to chew on, especially as I recalled the oral culture of the Chemehuevis, recorded by ethnographers, which included myths and legends describing the creation of this desert landscape. How could newcomers enter and conquer a strange land and then establish detailed and elaborate songlines – all-night song cycles including a place-based mythology – within a few generations, a process that the Aborigines of Australia had 45,000 years to develop? Is it likely that the Chemehuevis would have borrowed these songs and stories from the Mojaves, the people they conquered? That certainly isn’t what we Anglo-Europeans did when we conquered and imposed Christianity on the natives of North and South America.
Later, back at one of the miner’s cabins which had been “stabilized” with a new roof, windows and a furnished kitchen, Dave finished working on a contract for his latest project, a study of black homesteaders in the Mojave. Whereas the local historian, Dennis Casebier, had labored for decades to record and publish the stories of white homesteaders in the Lanfair Valley, nobody, including me, had heard the story of Lanfair’s counterpart, the adjoining black community of Dunbar. Dave had stumbled upon it accidentally, won a sizable grant for research, and was really excited to see it unfold.
The restoration group gathered around us that night: the serious “cabin brotherhood” from suburban California, the female nonprofit staff from Santa Fe, and their young Navajo carpenters from Gallup. The Santa Fe staff complained about “anti-cabin” forces in the Park Service, while the brotherhood spoke of their admiration for the old prospector who’d built this place, and their intimate relationship with his descendants. They’d set up a shrine of sorts to him and his family, along one side of the kitchen. So many obscure hobbies and subcultures in our huge, affluent society, consuming resources from all over the world!
Dave entertained us with the story of a Park Service ranger who, unwilling to appear ignorant, lectured European tourists on how the local name “Ivanpah” came from an early Russian prospector – whereas it’s actually derived from the Paiute term for “clear water”. One of the cabin brothers described a group of visiting Russians he’d encountered on a previous trip, high up on the rocky ridge above the cabins. They were all burly guys with long black beards, and they claimed to have walked almost 40 miles without food or water, but they refused any help or supplies, and they wouldn’t say where they were going.
The cabin brothers had unrolled their bedrolls in the back room, and most of the rest of us had set up camp outside, spread out across the upper slopes. But the young women from Santa Fe had pitched their tent inside a side room of the already weatherproof cabin, as if they weren’t sure whether they wanted to be indoors or out. They’d found a cell signal and sat inside the tent, inside the cabin, texting or Instagramming, to the amusement of the rest of us.
I laid out my bedroll in the duff under a juniper and wrapped the tarp around the sleeping bag for extra insulation. The temperature dropped into the 30s overnight, but I was snug as a bug in a rug.
A week later, I returned to my mountains for the last time before heading home to New Mexico. On one of the first hikes of this trip, looking down from the edge of the plateau, I’d noticed the house-sized rock outcrops standing out on the bajada, and I remembered that my friends had talked about hanging out there once, around the time they’d found artifacts in the area. Some old hippies I’d met camping in the gulch also mentioned finding artifacts around one of these rock piles, so it suddenly hit me that there were probably prehistoric sites nearby that I’d been walking past and missing for years. It occurred to me that this might be an outlier of the girl’s puberty site above on the plateau, a staging area where the girls might camp out after their long walk from home, before making the strenuous climb to the plateau. I couldn’t go home without taking a closer look.
Vision Quest 2016: Challenging the Patriarchy
Friday, May 27th, 2016: 2016 Trips, Mojave Desert, Nature, Problems & Solutions, Regions, Road Trips, Science, Society.
The Chicken and the Egg
Driving the highway east across the desert in late afternoon, I looked south across the basin, watching the old cinder cones far in the distance. When I had a view between them into the Pass, I pulled over to try the field glasses. Sure enough, I saw a glint of sunlight on glass and chrome, ten miles away, at the campsite behind one of the low hills. I hadn’t been able to reach John after getting his email a couple of weeks ago, so I’d been taking a risk that their plans might’ve changed and I’d be spending the night alone, after shopping and driving hours to make this rendezvous.
With all the rain damage to the roads, it was an hour later when I pulled into camp behind the volcanic hill above the Pass. The first people I met were hunters who’d volunteered to help find and count bighorn sheep with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, or “Fish & Game”. I drove further into the clearing at the center of the circle of pickup trucks, and asked who was in charge. An attractive young woman approached, saying “You must be John’s friend! He hasn’t showed up yet, but we’re expecting him any minute now.”
I parked my truck in an open spot across the circle, got out and took a look around camp. At first, all I could see was attractive young women with long, tanned legs, wearing skin-tight short shorts that looked like underwear. I’d attended many other sheep surveys with Fish & Game, and they’d all involved a bunch of rugged outdoorsmen overdressed in khaki, so this was quite a surprise. John later explained that the girls were biologists working with Fish & Game under a program he’d set up, and that they’d been doing all his sheep work for a while. Paige, the one I’d met at first, was the leader of this trip. The few women I’d met before in this role had been stereotypically plain. Later on my trip, another male scientist would complain that attractive young women are getting all the good jobs in biology now.
I laid out my tarp and unrolled my pad and bedroll. John drove up shortly and parked in the remaining spot next to me. The sun was setting, and Paige called everyone together to plan the next day’s work. As we stood in a circle, about a dozen of us, she passed out photocopied maps with the planned routes into the northernmost canyon system of the range. I could see immediately that they were beyond what I would be able to do, at least at the speed I expected John, and these younger people, to maintain. I didn’t want to slow them down, and I didn’t want to push myself trying to keep up, and end up straining the muscles and joints I’d spent months trying to rebuild since surgery. I said that, and Paige quickly grabbed my map back and handed it to someone else.
As I expected, John spoke up first, choosing the most difficult route for himself.
After the planning session, the group broke up. No hanging out around a campfire or lantern, getting to know each other, as we’d done on past Fish & Game outings. John returned to his truck and laid out his own bedroll, then brought a folding chair over to sit with me. I asked him if he’d memorized his route. He laughed. “I helped plan those routes! I’ll go wherever I damn well please!”
I questioned him about the respiratory epidemic, and how it might be spread. One topic of current research is the movement of sheep between ranges, and that led us into a discussion of climate. John scoffed at concerns over human-caused climate change. “There’s no question that humans are causing climate change in the near term, but my perspective, studying sheep populations, is much longer! In my perspective, global warming is just a blip. We’re still in an interglacial – in a few thousand years, this desert will be forested again. Where will the sheep go then?”
John took this as an opportunity to emphasize the primacy of evolution as the explanatory theory of life in the universe, reiterating the population biologist’s dominant view that genes are at the root of everything, determining everything important. So I had to point out that genes and evolution only apply to the individual organism, and no organism can live in a vacuum, without the context and interactions of its ecosystem, so ecology is really the foundation science. “No, no!” John protested, but I forged ahead. “Evolution is just popular in our technology-crazed society because it’s reductive and instrumental – we can easily crunch genetic data and manipulate the genome – whereas ecosystems are far too complex and chaotic for us. Ecosystems are the context for evolution, not vice versa, but they resist our understanding and hence our exploitation, so we say that evolution is more important than ecology!”
“So it’s a chicken and egg problem, which came first?” said John, starting to get my point. “I still say you can’t have an ecosystem without organisms, and you can’t have organisms without evolution.”
“It makes sense that genes are fundamental to you, as a population biologist,” I said. “But what biology traditionally sidesteps is the importance of non-living things in the ecosystem. Non-living things like rocks and clouds – geologists speak of the living rock – can be said to evolve, but not by means of DNA and genes.”
“Well, it’s not completely true that biology ignores the abiotic – climate and substrate are figured into ecological cycles…”
Fear of the Noble Savage
Night had fallen, the air was cooling, and the mass of the old cinder cone loomed beside us. The stars were out over camp, but we could still see the trucks and the silhouettes of people moving about, and hear the occasional rustle of pots, pans and other domestic affairs.
Thinking back to climate change, I wanted to restore humans to the ecological picture, as participants rather than detached, godlike manipulators. John’s interests are eclectic like mine, and it had been a long time since we’d had a good talk. I wanted to share some of my recent findings with him. I suggested that we Westerners needed more holistic paradigms, and that we might have lessons to learn from other, more traditional societies.
“There you go, romanticizing the noble savage again,” John cut in.
My biologist friends really don’t like to hear anything positive said about traditional or indigenous cultures. At the first hint, they tend to cut me off before I can explain, reacting to a stereotype in their own minds instead of what I’m trying to say, and accusing me of the romantic fallacy of the “noble savage”, a cliche of European literature and philosophy during the 17th-19th centuries.
Recent archaeological studies in widely separated parts of the world have shown that many prehistoric societies were like us, engineering their habitats for their own benefit and causing significant damage to local ecosystems. Reading these reports in the popular literature, scientists who don’t study other cultures conflate all traditional societies with the destructive ones, painting everything they don’t know with same broad brush. Worst of all, biologists blame ancestral Native Americans for “overkill” leading to the Quaternary Extinction Event in North American, a mass die-off of megafauna, even though this hypothesis is disputed by specialists who study it. Finally, coming from academia, they’re predisposed to dismiss traditional people as backward, ignorant, and superstitious.
My heroes in biology have been independent thinkers like Lyn Margulis and Gary Paul Nabhan, but my friends tend to work at the grass-roots level without power or influence, laboring away at their super-specialized studies and taking the dominant paradigms of their fields for granted because they’re not in a position to challenge them. They’re often frustrated in their careers, defensive in the face of anti-science political conservatives and religious fundamentalists, and helpless to stop the destruction of natural habitats & species that they see firsthand in their work.
But unlike my other biologist friends, John has worked with archaeologists and knows something of the history & philosophy of science.
“Our cultural bias leads us to focus on large-scale, technologically advanced societies of the past who were more like us,” I pointed out. “These were the aggressive societies that rolled over their weaker neighbors, like us against Native Americans. And societies that dominated people also tended to try to dominate nature.
“Jared Diamond popularized this idea that only the winners are relevant, that cultures who were conquered are failures that we can dismiss. After all, history is written by the winners.
“But let’s look at this rationally. Even the U.S., the most powerful country on earth, could be wiped out by an asteroid. Might doesn’t make right, and weakness and defeat don’t prove inferiority. In the 1950s, a multidisciplinary group of scientists spent 18 months on a remote atoll in the Pacific, studying every aspect of the terrestrial and marine ecosystems, and using native people as their assistants. And the leaders of the expedition came to admire the native culture so much that they would’ve given up their careers and stayed for the rest of their lives if they hadn’t had families back home.
“These peaceful people had achieved a stable equilibrium in their very limited habitat, cultivating food plants in patches of wetland without trying to engineer or manage the entire atoll, and harvesting seasonal resources from the ocean, sustainably. And they managed to keep their population from growing beyond its capacity.
“They’re part of a larger anthropological project by the University of Alabama called Peaceful Societies, and pacifism is roughly correlated with sustainable ecological practices. By focusing on the dominant winners and ignoring the submissive minorities, we may be missing some valuable lessons.”
John and I went on to have a long, productive, wide-ranging talk, our first in many years, until he realized he still needed a shower and good night’s sleep before the early morning start.
I, on the other hand, lay awake all night, watching the moon trail away over my shoulder to its own bed, watching the constellations rolling after, and the Milky Way rising in the final hours of darkness. My mind wasn’t racing, I wasn’t worried about anything. I just watched, resting my eyes occasionally, never falling asleep until dawn, when our camp came alive again, and I crawled out of bed, exhausted, to start the first day of the survey.
Challenging the Patriarchy
I always look forward to meeting grad students doing field studies at the desert ecological preserve, in hopes of learning about their work and deepening my understanding of the desert. This time, hauling my gear into the residence hall that I helped build 25 years ago, I met Ally and Haneen, beautiful young PhD candidates working together on a study of ecological facilitation in the understory of the creosote bush.
Traditionally patriarchal like all science, biology is undergoing a demographic revolution as female recruits increase. And at a much slower rate, the male-biased dogma of biology are being challenged as women gradually replace influential male peer reviewers.
The aggressive, coercive, domineering nature of Anglo-European society ensured that male biologists would see competition and negative interactions, rather than cooperation and positive interactions, at the foundation of both evolution and ecology, but female biologists are beginning to restore balance and a more accurate view of nature.
A generation ago, Lyn Margulis overcame male resistance to gain wide acceptance of symbiosis – interspecies cooperation – in evolutionary theory. More recently, some biologists have turned their attention to “facilitation” – cooperation and positive interactions in ecology. The distinction between positive and negative, competition and cooperation, is another historical artifact of Anglo-European tradition; the reality is clearly a continuum or spectrum of behavior and interactions that can go in or out of balance around a state of dynamic equilibrium.
The women and I got to know each other over a period of days in the common room of the preserve facility. Ally, from Toronto, was blonde and wholesome-looking; Haneen was raven-haired, tanned, more reserved and enigmatic. We were joined from time to time by Fred, an older botanist and plant illustrator, and Tasha and the kids, who had adopted the “girls” as big sisters. In contrast to my older scientist friends, Ally and Haneen were at the beginning of their careers, receiving a lot of support and encouragement from the establishment, excited about their future rather than discouraged by the setbacks that plague us all as we age and see more of life.
I talked about desert places and phenomena they hadn’t encountered yet. Haneen was interested in my music, and Ally pointed me to some background reading on facilitation. Her current work focused on the use of the creosote understory by other plants and by pollinators. Facilitation spans an infinite variety of natural phenomena that we really only need common sense to observe, from spatial structure (one species creating a nursery, home or workspace for other species) to community diversity (structuring interspecies interactions), from protection from stress and predation, to seed transport by birds and rodents. A male Anglo-European eye is likely to see selfishness behind it all, but that’s only one perspective, a form of anthropomorphism.
Hidden Underfoot
I arrived in the desert the day after heavy rain, and hiked up to the seep on our land, where I began to notice something I’d been only marginally aware of in the past. Here, the gravel slopes were laced with outcrops of white, sometimes translucent metamorphic rock, and my eyes were drawn to vivid black clumps of “stuff” that was neither plant, nor rock, nor soil, knobby mats swelling around cracks in the bright rock, as well as in patches in the pale gravel. I guessed that it must be biological soil crust, a community of lichens, bacteria and other tiny organisms that work together to build these structures on the interface between the living and the nonliving. Why hadn’t I noticed and studied these before, in the 35 years I’d walked among them? Probably it was the rain, the water they’d absorbed that made them more prominent, and their contrast against the bright substrate here.
I’d first encountered soil crusts, or cryptobiotic soil, 25 years ago during my Paiute skills course. The instructors had started by briefing and warning us about the extremely delicate crusts in the powder sand of the Colorado Plateau, an important part of the ecosystem which is instantly crushed when walked on and takes centuries to regenerate. I always work hard to avoid trampling these when I go back there, but I’d totally ignored their counterparts in the Mojave.
Now I was smitten. I got down on my knees and examined our local crusts. Unlike the Colorado Plateau crusts, which form a distinctive, modular architectural pattern, our Mojave crusts are free-form. They may swell around cracks in the rock like a spreading amoeba, or appear as small bumps across the bajada. My favorites are the scalloped rings.
Close up, their structures reveal a chaotic pattern of irregularly-shaped, variously sized knobs separated by gaps. The crusts in the white rock appeared black at first glance, but those out on the bajada showed more of a dark rust color. Whereas the Colorado Plateau crusts are delicate, these feel tough, like old leather.
Humble soil crusts were mostly ignored throughout the male-dominated history of biology and ecology. Macho male biologists tend to focus on charismatic megafauna. But crusts are finally getting more attention, which I suspect is a result of more women in the field. Per usual, there’s controversy over whether crusts are primarily competitors or facilitators in the ecosystem. A botanist friend told me that they’re essential for regeneration of shrubs, which may be set back by centuries when crusts are trampled or burned by wildfire. I remembered this the following week, when I hiked into a remote, heavily grazed valley where invasive bromus had replaced native grasses, encouraging a wildfire which had stripped the center of the valley of its shrub cover and significantly reduced its capacity to capture water in vegetation. I followed the tracks of the cattle and eventually saw them in the distance, half-wild, running away from me up a steep hill.
At the ecological preserve, I asked Tasha and she referred me to a female crust specialist, from whom I hope to learn a lot more about these fascinating communities of organisms working together at the foundation of life on earth.
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