God & homo sapiens

This is an edited version of a story by Cornelia Dean that appeared in The New York Times on Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Roving Defender of Evolution, and of Room for God

University of California Irvine professor, Francisco J. Ayala, a former Dominican priest, tells his audiences not just that evolution is a well-corroborated scientific theory, but also that belief in evolution does not rule out belief in God. In fact, he said, evolution “is more consistent with belief in a personal god than intelligent design. If God has designed organisms, he has a lot to account for.”

Consider, he said, that at least 20 percent of pregnancies are known to end in spontaneous abortion. If that results from divinely inspired anatomy, Dr. Ayala said, “God is the greatest abortionist of them all. If God or some other intelligent agent made things this way on purpose, he said, “then he is a sadist, he certainly does odd things and he is a lousy engineer.”

That is the message of his latest book, “Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion” (Joseph Henry Press, 2007). In it, he writes that as a theology student in Spain he had been taught that evolution “provided the ‘missing link’ in the explanation of evil in the world” — a defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence, despite the existence of evil.

“As floods and drought were a necessary consequence of the fabric of the physical world, predators and parasites, dysfunctions and diseases were a consequence of the evolution of life,” he writes. “They were not a result of a deficient or malevolent design.”

He said he was saddened when he saw the embrace of evolution identified with, as he put it, “explicit atheism,” as in the books of the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins or other writers on science and faith. Neither the existence nor nonexistence of God is susceptible to scientific proof, Dr. Ayala said, and equating science with the abandonment of religion “fits the prejudices” of advocates of intelligent design and other creationist ideas.“Science and religion concern nonoverlapping realms of knowledge,” he writes in the new book. “It is only when assertions are made beyond their legitimate boundaries that evolutionary theory and religious belief appear to be antithetical.”

Read the unedited version at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/29/science/29prof.html?_r=1&ref=science

And here is an intelligent review of the book that appears on Amazon.com
REVIEW

James F. MCGRATH - See all my reviews
[reproduced from my blog, EXPLORING OUR MATRIX, at the author's request]

I've been reading several books on evolution, intelligent design, and related subjects, as I seek to decide on representative readings to assign for my religion and science course this Fall. It seems to me that the differences between many viewpoints centers around the question of what God does.

Naturalistic explanations of various things in the world around us have always challenged religious beliefs. The monotheistic God of the Abrahamic traditions continues to have adherents precisely because of the flexibility and all-encompassing character of this concept of God. While Zeus' thunderbolts are now the domain of meteorology rather than metaphysics, the God who is responsible for everything does not disappear so easily. Yet the question must be asked by any religious believer: if you believe in God, what do you envisage God doing, and how?

Francis Ayala's book Darwin's Gift: To Science and Religion, is appreciative of arguments such as those of Paley, even when disagreeing with his conclusions. Paley, after all, was working with the best scientific knowledge available in his time. Paley was also an opponent of slavery, which Ayala helpfully notes - it is easy to regard those whose views we disagree with as foolish, particularly authors in the past, and so it is helpful to be reminded of other aspects of their life and work, to remind us to be appreciative of their place in our intellectual history, as well as of the fact that no one alive today will not seem as off target as Paley to some future author writing with the benefit of centuries of hindsight.

Ayala takes completely seriously the evidence for evolution, and the fact that, now that we have DNA evidence, there really is no more doubt about common ancestry and evolution than about the criminals we put away on the basis of the same sorts of forensic evidence. Even Behe acknowledges as much.

What is the fundamental difference between the various approaches to theology and to the intersection of religion and science today? The question of what (if anything) God does, and by what means. Answers to such questions will by definition involve metaphor - the challenge is to find metaphors that do justice to our deepest religious experiences and insights in a way that also does justice to not just the present state of our scientific knowledge, but the fact that science's track record suggests that natural explanations of things currently unexplained will one day be forthcoming.

See all the Amazon.com reviews here: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Gift-Religion-Francisco-Ayala/dp/0309102316//www.msn.com/defaulto.aspx

The New York Times covers the end of The Capital Times

Here is how The New York Times covered the end of The Capital Times:

Reluctantly, a Daily Stops Its Presses, Living Online
By NOAM COHEN
April 28, 2008 With print revenue down and online revenue growing, newspaper executives are anticipating the day when big city dailies and national papers will abandon their print versions. That day has arrived in Madison, Wis. On Saturday, The Capital Times, the city’s fabled 90-year-old daily newspaper founded in response to the jingoist fervor of World War I, stopped printing to devote itself to publishing its daily report on the Web.

An avowedly progressive paper that carried the banner of its founder, William T. Evjue, The Capital Times is wrapped up with the history of two larger-than-life Wisconsin senators, the elder Robert La Follette (whom it favored) and Joseph R. McCarthy (whom it opposed). But in recent years, the paper’s circulation dropped to about 18,000 from a high in the 1960s of more than 40,000.

“We felt our audience was shrinking so that we were not relevant,” Clayton Frink, the publisher of The Capital Times, said in an interview two days before the final daily press run. “We are going a little farther, a little faster, but the general trend is happening everywhere.”

The Web strategy, while seen as a long-term solution, is still a work in progress, Mr. Fanlund says. It revolves around a portal, Madison.com, which is owned under the same joint arrangement mandating that both Madison papers share revenues, though they are editorially independent.

“If there is a window of opportunity for newspapers on the Web, it is locally,” said James L. Baughman, director of the University of Wisconsin journalism school in Madison. “The reason the online version of the Cap Times may have life is that opportunity. ”Once upon a time, the afternoon newspaper was the Internet of its day, Mr. Baughman said, giving afternoon baseball scores and stock market reports in a quick turnaround. It was the more lucrative slot as a result.

It doesn't give you a lot of confidence that anyone knows what's coming next, does it? You can read the entire story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/business/media/28link.html?_r=1&sq=the%20capital%20times&st=cse&oref=slogin&scp=1&pagewanted=print

The African part of Nicholas Wade's story

Our April selection, Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade, was concerned solely with the small group of people who crossed the Red Sea from Africa and populated the rest of the world. At our last meeting, some of us wondered what was going on with the ones who stayed behind in Africa. Their story is suggested in the current (April 24) issue of The Economist:

A study carried out under the auspices of the Genographic Project used the mitochondrial DNA of more than 600 living Africans to show how genetic diversity has developed in Africa. The team paid particular attention to samples taken from the Khoi and San people of southern Africa. Comparing Khoi and San DNA with that of other Africans shows that the first big split in Homo sapiens happened shortly after the species emerged, 200,000 years ago. Most people now alive are on one side of that split. Most Khoi and San are on the other. The consortium's analysis of which DNA “matrilines” are found where suggests that for much of its history the species was divided into two isolated populations, one in eastern Africa and one in the south of the continent, that were defined by this split. However, few other matrilineal splits from the first 100,000 years of the species's history have survived to the present day.

This suggests the early human population was tiny. Homo sapiens may have come close to extinction. Indeed, there may, at one point, have been as few as 2,000 people left to carry humanity forward.

This shrinkage coincides with a period of prolonged drought in eastern Africa, and was probably caused by it. The end of the drought, however, was followed by the appearance of many new matrilines that survive to the present day. The researchers estimate that by 60,000-70,000 years ago, the period when the exodus that populated the rest of the world happened, as many as 40 such groups were flourishing in Africa—though that migration involved only two of these groups.

The African matrilines, however, seem to have remained isolated from each other for tens of millennia after the exodus. It was not until 40,000 years ago that they began to re-establish conjugal relations, possibly as a result of the technological revolution of the Late Stone Age, which yielded new and more finely crafted tools. Only the bushmen seem to have missed out on this panmictic party. They were left alone until a few hundred years ago, when their homelands were invaded from the north by other Africans and from the south by Europeans. Panmixis thus came full circle. And that particular party was certainly not a happy one.

The Capital Times rides into the sunset

Today The Capital Times rolled off the presses for the last time.

Oh, they will say it's not really gone, that the voice of The Capital Times will still be heard. But it will be a ghost of itself, living on in name, but no longer master of anyone's destiny, least of all its own. Henceforth, it will be an arm of the Capital Newspapers media conglomerate and the money that formerly went for newsprint and salaries of news-gatherers will be available for an endless series of redesigned web sites, each trying to fill some niche that some 56 year old publisher believes will surely appeal to 26 year old consumers. But the truth is it has been heard less and less anyway. Once it thundered and Washington heard the echo. Lately it's hardly heard beyond East Washington Avenue.

When I joined The Capital Times in 1971, circulation stood at about 40,000. No one knew it, of course, but the paper was at an apogee; there was nowhere to go but down. Evjue had just died in June. Miles McMillan had moved into the publisher's office, Elliott Maraniss became Executive Editor, Dave Zweifel was named City Editor and I got Dave's old desk behind the post, in front of Whitney Gould and next to Jeff Smoller. I think it may have been Aldric Ravell's old desk too, though he was gone by then. The glorious Watergate years followed, but so did the newspaper strike in 1977. If nothing else, the strike revealed that Madison was nowhere near as liberal as it was reputed to be and nowhere near as liberal as The Capital Times needed it to be. Few cancelled their subscriptions. Professors sent their students to apply for jobs as scabs. It was a cold winter.

So there's an element of inevitability in this last edition.

The Times it is a'changin'. I'm just sad to see it go.

The rediscovery of Wendell Berry

Like the rest of the environmental world, The Drinking & Reading Society is finally catching up with Wendell Berry, although some of us have read a lot of his stuff and some have read none. Blame it on the slow food movement and the new concern about what we’re eating. Our book for May is his collection of essays What Are People For? In these selections, I think you can see why he has angered just about every segment of the population – right, left and apolitical:

The supermarkets are crammed with food and the productivity of American agriculture is, at present, enormous. But this is a productivity based on the ruin both of the producers and the source of production. What Are People For? (1985)

I am making a plea for diversity not only because diversity exists and is pleasant, but also because it is necessary and we need more of it. We need a greater variety of species of plants and animals, of human skills and methods, so that the use may be fitted ever more sensitively and elegantly to the place. Our places, in short, are asking us questions, some of them urgent questions, and we do not have the answers. An Argument for Diversity (1988)

The mess that surrounds us must be understood not just as a problem in itself, but also as a symptom of a greater and graver problem: the centralization of our economy, the gathering of the productive property and power into fewer and fewer hands, and the consequent destruction everywhere of the local economies of household, neighborhood and community. Waste (1989)

The industrial eater is one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical – in short, a victim. The Pleasures of Eating (1989)

The newfound popularity of Berry’s essays is an example of the principle that while science and technology may change our lives, the arts and humanities change our values. In company with Alice Waters, Michael Pollan and others, the rehabilitation of Wendell Berry is a harbinger of social change on the march. Come Senators, Congressmen, please heed the call.

Here's the best part

Gospel of evolution

I am sure it's very comforting to explain evolution as a clever act of God, but there is also great value in being able to hold two apparently contradictory notions (God+evolution) in your head at the same time because it acknowledges the obvious fact that we don't know everything there is to know about God, evolution or anything else. But in any case, here's the information about this guy.

NEWS RELEASE
Evolutionary Evangelist coming to Madison

Madison, WI - Rev. Michael Dowd, author of the bold new book “Thank God for Evolution!”, is bringing his cosmic gospel to Madison in May.

Rev. Dowd, an ordained Christian minister and former Baptist and United Church of Christ pastor, and his wife Connie Barlow, an acclaimed science writer and author of "Evolution Extended" (MIT Press) and “The Ghosts of Evolution” (Basic Books), are packing pews and leaving audiences across America awestruck with their programs that present evolution as theology, not theory.

Dowd's breakthrough book, "Thank God for Evolution!" and the couple's mobile ministry propose a marriage of science and religion that is being embraced by those on both sides of the debate over the origins of the Universe and evolution of life on Earth, including five Nobel Prize-winning scientists and a long list of religious leaders.

Grounded in mainstream science and preached with pentecostal fervor, the former anti-evolution fundamentalist turned evolutionary evangelist shares a “God’s eye view” of everything from microbiology to supernovas in provocative program that is inspiring evolutionary epiphanies among believers and non-believers alike and liberating religious literalists left, right and center.

Wednesday, May 7, 2008 7:00 PM - Free Workshop Covenant Presbyterian Church 326 South Segoe Road
Thursday, May 8, 2008 7:00 PM - Free Workshop Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative 426 West Gilman Street

Wendell Berry hasn’t changed.

No doubt you read Michael Pollan’s paean to the garden in the Sunday NY Times Magazine. If not, you can find it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/magazine/20wwln-lede-t.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin. He concludes:

The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

A passionate and even inspiring piece, but I have to say I don’t see a whole lot of difference between Al Gore’s “change a light bulb” message and Pollan’s “plant a garden.” Neither called for the one thing that will make a difference, a dedicated national leadership that focuses all our energies and resources on solving the (singular) environmental problem.

But that’s not what I want to write about. I want to write about Wendell Berry. Pollan praises him. It seems everyone is praising him after 30 years of ignoring him and calling him irrelevant or a Luddite or worse. He is still a curmudgeon. His criticism still goes to the heart of the American way of life. He has the temerity to ask, “What’s the point?” His message hasn’t changed. Does that mean we are now ready to listen? And what are the implications of that? Not familiar with Berry? This appeared in the January issue of Gourmet, of all places, written by John T. Edge:

... Berry has argued tirelessly for independent communities, small family farms, and local foods. His outlook marries agrarian and environmental ideologies, but he doesn't settle for either. A traditional agrarian values small farms and argues that they are essential to the political and social well being of the nation; Berry claims they are key to our ecological health. Environmentalists often concern themselves with the against-all-odds protection of wilderness; Berry believes land was meant to be worked by man.

While I'm sure that's not all he believes about land, it's an important point, and what Berry means by it is that land was meant to be worked by man and not by machines, namely huge grain combines. Small is beautiful. I have a notebook in which I used to jot down quotations from things I was reading. Here are a few from Berry:

Good cooking must be said to begin with good farming.

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

You really cannot specialize the work of conservation. You cannot save the land apart from the people or the people apart from the land. To save either, you must save both.

Same point was made by Paul Hawken in Blessed Unrest. See my Jan. 13, 2008, post: An impossible vision? Anyway, how will you observe Earth Day?

The mean gene

One of Nicholas Wade's premises in Before the Dawn, or perhaps a premise of one of his main sources, is that a “peaceful gene” or combination thereof, somehow arose about 15,000 years ago and made it possible for humans to stop killing their neighbors and get along. Civilization is the result.

(Susan believes that the event was no accident of random drift or mutation. It must have been precipitated by women who were sick of all the pointless killing and conspired to either kill or castrate all the warlike men and then proceeded to mate only with the peaceful men, thus ensuring the spread of the peaceful gene.)

However, Jared Diamond’s story in the current, New Yorker (April 21, 2008, p. 74) entitled "Vengeance Is Ours," calls into question whether the mean gene ever did get replaced or whether Wade’s premise lays too much on a genetic explanation. Here’s the précis:

In 1992, Daniel Wemp‘s paternal uncle Soll was killed in a battle against the neighboring Ombal clan. In the New Guinea Highlands, where Daniel and his Handa clan live, the responsibility for arranging revenge for Soll’s killing fell to Daniel. It took three years, twenty-nine more killings, and the sacrifice of three hundred pigs before he succeeded. Soll was killed in a “public fight”—one fought in the open between large groups of warriors separated by a considerable distance. It’s often impossible to tell who’s responsible for a kill. For that reason, the target of Daniel’s revenge was not Soll’s killer but another Ombal man, Henep Isum, who’d organized the fight. Handas are taught from early childhood to hate their enemies and to prepare themselves for a life of fighting. His first attempt at revenge was a failure, so he hired over two hundred men from other villages as allies for his next attempt. Mentions intermarriage between enemy clans. Since Isum was Daniel’s relative by marriage, Daniel was not permitted to kill him, but he could hire men to kill him. In the three years following Soll’s death, there were six battles. In the sixth battle, the Handas sent out several groups of stealth killers, one of whom shot Isum with an arrow, which cut his spinal cord and permanently paralyzed him. Daniel was unapologetic and enthusiastic about Isum’s punishment, although Daniel himself was now, of course, a target for Ombal revenge. Daniel said, “I admit that the New Guinea Highland way to solve the problem posed by a killing isn’t good…we are always in effect living on the battlefield.”

Diamond makes the tale personal by relating the experience of his late father-in-law, Jozef Nabel, who passed up the opportunity for vengeance and lived to regret it bitterly. Jozef was a Polish Jew who was captured by the Soviets in 1939 and sent to a Siberian camp before becoming an officer in a Polish division of the Red Army. In the summer of 1945, he led an armed platoon to Klaj, Poland, to discover what had happened to his mother, his sister, and his niece. There he learned that an armed gang had shot them, but when he was face-to-face with the man who led the gang, he hesitated to shoot. Instead, he delivered him to the police, who investigated the crime and then, after about a year, released the murderer. Until his death, Jozef remained tormented by regret at his failure to take vengeance.

Maybe this will placate some of Diamond's political foes. (See the Jan. 1, 2008 post The politics of science.) In this case, Wade is the one arguing that there is such a thing as human nature and Diamond seems to argue that it's the system.

So much evolution, so little time

The Society’s April book is Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade, the NYT science writer. He gives a précis of what science – especially genetics – has learned in the last ten years about recent human evolution. He quotes extensively from Charles Darwin at the top of each chapter, but I have to say that in a way, the story Wade tells makes me sympathize with the creationists. It is a hard story to get your head around.

He tells a riveting tale: that the human family as we know it is only 50,000 years old. That about that time, a group 1/5th the size of my graduating class at West High School ‘65 - maybe 150 people - from the ancestral population in NW Africa crossed the Red Sea and – to make a long story short – populated the world. (Presumably, their cousins who stayed behind populated Africa.) There were older hominids around like Neanderthal and H. erectus, but Wade avers they lacked that special something, maybe language, to make them fully human. Humans may have looked modern for 100,000 years or more, but the new population was “behaviorally modern,” which is to say they lived like modern hunter-gatherer societies.

We are used to thinking of evolution in millions of years. The time of the glaciers is recent history, at least in geologic time. But Wade postulates that human intelligence, language, pacific behavior, races and many other sine qua nons of humanity evolved quickly, and in some cases, multiple times in the space of only a few hundred generations. In his words:

Human behavior, whether in the search for reproductive advantage or the defense of territory, shows a clear continuity with that of apes. But it also developed its own characteristic pattern with two pivotal steps: the emergence of long-lasting bonds between men and women some 1.7 million years ago, and at 50,000 years ago, the evolution of language. Language opened the door to a new level of social interaction. Early human groups developed the institutions that shape even the largest and most sophisticated of today’s urban societies. These included organized warfare; reciprocity and altruism; exchange and trade; and religion. All were present in embryo form in the hunter-gatherer societies of the upper Paleolithic. But it required another development, a diminution of human aggression and probably the evolution of new cognitive faculties, for the first settlements to emerge, beginning 15,000 years ago, and it was in the context of settled societies that warfare, trade and religion attained new degrees of complexity and refinement.

The relentless search for new solutions produced not one, but a whole clutch of hominid species. At least three: the Neanderthals, Homo erectus, and Homo floresiensis, (all descended from the earlier lines of humanity) survived until modern humans made their exit from Africa. Had these archaic people endured till the present day, our own species would surly seem less special, being evidently just one of many ways in which evolution could spin variations out of the basic ape lineage.

The evidence now accumulating from the genome establishes that human evolution has continued throughout the last 50,000 years. The recent past, especially since the first settlements 15,000 years ago, is a time when human society has undergone extraordinary developments in complexity, creating many new environments and evolutionary pressures. Hitherto it has been assumed that the human genome was fixed and could not respond to those pressures. It now appears the opposite is the case.

E, What's Up Doc?

This is from the NewScientist.com news service 15 April 2008.  Click the link and listen. I think it's conclusive. UPers are the direct descendants of Neanderthals.

Neanderthals speak out after 30,000 years Talk about a long silence – no one has heard their voices for 30,000 years. Now the long-extinct Neanderthals are speaking up – or at least a computer synthesiser is doing so on their behalf. Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton has used new reconstructions of Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate the voice. By modelling the sounds the Neanderthal pipes would have made, McCarthy's team engineered the sound of a Neanderthal saying "E". He plans to eventually simulate an entire Neanderthal sentence. Listen to McCarthy's simulation of a Neanderthal voice

Avian ethnic cleansing takes a blue life

Tonight after our prairie walk we checked on our most advanced bluebird nest and had a sad discovery. The male was dead at the foot of the pole with the eggs scattered and broken around him. No, it wasn't a cat or even a snake. It was bird on bird violence. Ethnic cleansing in the avian world. He was pecked to death on the head and neck. Not a bite eaten. Nor any of the eggs eaten. Just destroyed and thrown out of the nest. 

There's green grass in our pasture and the horses are mighty pleased. But the prairie is dry and brown both on the hillsides and on the blufftops. If you were a horse or a bison back in the prairie days you wouldn't be here now. You'd be down in southern Illinois munching on the first shoots of prairie grass that won't appear around here until June or July. You can say what you want about prairie grass holding more nutrients over the winter or surviving the drought. Undoubtedly true. But if you're a horse or a cow and you live inside a fence and don't migrate, you will get very lean and hungry waiting for the bluestem to become green. We love prairie and we love horses and we don't mind living with some contradictions in our lives. The problem always comes from people who have to have things all one way or the other, whether that means religion or economy or politics. Contradictions might make you think you're going crazy, but too much uniformity and consistently is crazy.

The retreat of the Wisconsin glacier

Today the last snowdrift has finally disappeared from the tree line of our neighboring field.  Probably the result of yesterday's steady, cold rain, some of which is standing in our basement now. Puts me in mind of the argument between Louis Agassiz and the biblicists about whether erratic boulders were left by glaciers or Noah's flood.  It's all water. E. C. Pielou tells us that glaciers are the result of cold summers, not snowy winters. That's a good thing; I was getting worried. Of course, now they're predicting snow for tonight so we can never be sure.

Burning the prairie 3

The thing about a blog is you write something and then afterward you think about what you wrote in a different way.  Yesterday I wrote about burning prairies in the snow or cold.  Why would anyone do that?  They weren't good burns - patchy and slow burning.  And today I realized they weren't my burns. They were burns where I was helping someone else who had to burn, even if the conditions were awful.  Why? Because they had signed up for a government program and taken the money for seeding or clearing brush and now these back country Drs. Faustus had to pay the devil his due, or at least the appearance of his due, by burning when the agency said they must.  I've never done that.  I have burned when I wanted to or not. But I haven't taken the money.  So I've never had help in seeding or clearing and maybe I haven't gotten as much done as I might have otherwise.  Maybe there's prairie or savannah that I could have cleared and saved if I'd been willing to sign the paper. But that didn't seem like the prairie spirit to me, or maybe I'm just too much of a natural rebel to do it like someone else told me.

But I also realize that the prairie isn't really mine to save or lose.  Walking in the dry, brown bluestem and gramma tonight and looking at the relentless assault of the honeysuckle and cherry, I realized that I'm part of a holding pattern, or maybe even just a pause in a long, slow retreat.  The next person, if there is a next person, may take up where I've left off and the prairie will be the better for it.  But if not, then at least I have had the pleasure of saving what I could in a way that I have enjoyed.

A prairie like life is a process, not a goal to be reached. There is no end state.

Burning the prairie 2

Sunday was windy again, but the weather report predicted rain in the afternoon, so we thought we might extend our burn to a strip along the north edge of the pasture where the little bluestem is still hanging on and a few nice burr oaks are starting. Bruce would rather burn than eat so that was also a factor.

When we started walking back to where we had left the truck, it was apparent right away that something was amiss. There was equipment scattered about where we hadn't left it and it soon became apparent that Maya, Susan's 2-year-old quarter horse had been at work. Maya wishes she had thumbs, and there's no telling what she might accomplish if she did, but uses her mouth and hooves to great advantage anyway. Plus she's more curious than any cat. She had to check out the burn equipment. One of the water jugs had been taken out of the truck bed and stomped. The drinking water bottles had all been chewed. Fortunately, the packs, drip torch and fuel cans were only tipped over, not destroyed.

We didn't miss the shovel at the time. Susan found it later near the horses' run-in shed about 200 yards from the truck. Maya must have picked it out of the truck bed and carried it all the way to her shed. Who knows what she might have done with it. Maybe dug a tunnel.

Fortunately she was so fascinated by the fire that she didn't miss the shovel. I thought horses were supposed to be afraid of fire, but we had a hard time keeping Maya off the fire line. She wanted to stand six feet away and sniff it. We were concerned that she and Odetta might get themselves inside the fire line and get trapped, but found that a quick squirt from the water pack was enough to keep them away.

Anyway, the weather report was wrong; there was no rain until night, but we quit burning anyway because we didn't have a large enough crew to safely burn in the woods. Maybe next year.

Burning the prairie

Saturday was an almost perfect day to burn a prairie if you didn't mind that the wind was 15-20, Ordinarily we would have scrubbed the burn in that wind, but the humidity was rather high and we waited until late in the day when the humidity would be rising, and we hoped the wind might drop. Plus the burn we had in mind was well contained - the steep, south-facing hillside on the north side of our pasture.

This prairie is virginal, but not pure, so to speak. It's a much-degraded community of four or five grasses - little bluestem, big bluestem, side oats gramma, indian grass and a couple of smaller varieties, plus a very limited number of forbs. It's too steep and rocky to pasture, so I can only think it has just been neglect that has reduced it to such a paltry number of species, interspersed with the usual invaders - prickly ash, Japanese honeysuckle, black cherry, red cedar and some escaped pasture grasses.

Almost perfect until we loaded the truck with all the burn equipage and tried to drive out to the burn site. I should have known when I skidded through the first gate with mud flying that this was a bad idea; by the time we approached the second gate, the truck was axle deep and going nowhere. We had moved about 25 yards. I wasn't looking forward to humping the water packs and 40 gallons of extra water all the way to the other side of the pasture, so I got the little tractor out and tried to pull the truck out. Nothing. 8 wheels spinning. Finally I went around and pulled from the front. Somehow it started moving and with Bruce spitting mud 20 feet high from all four wheels, we skidded the truck through the mud and into the waterlogged pasture. If his friends at the Sierra Club could see him now! Good thing I had just washed the truck.

That's what we should expect I suppose when we still have glaciers six inches deep along the north-facing hillsides slowly releasing their gallons of meltwater into the low part of the pasture. It's 600 feel of squish. I've burned prairie when it has been below freezing (Don't do it; the water freezes in your nozzles) and in a snowstorm, but never with snowbanks still on the ground. But this was the year of 102 inches of snow, so of course it wasn't gone by April.

Once we made it to the site the burn went off without a hitch, even burning through the woods where we cleared two years ago in hopes of coaxing the savannah back into bloom. That's the same area where the fire got into a hollow oak about three or four years ago and Dan and I had to cut it down while burning embers rained down on us from above. Now it's pretty clear of those dangers. So far it's blooming in prickly ash and black cherry, but they're both pretty vulnerable to fire, so maybe this will help. Last year we couldn't burn - a big disappointment - because the weather was always too wet or too windy. This year we lucked out.

In any case, there's nothing like the smell of a prairie fire to make you thrill to the elemental joy of the primordial land. This land has been on fire for thousands of years since the big glaciers left and Saturday we once again reenacted a spiritual rite that's older than any religion.

If you're wondering, we just left the truck in the pasture. That's a story for the next post - the fire horse.