Returning West as a young adult, two things blew me away: its screaming blue skies and the alkaline pungency of its landscape. My entire physical body recognized both as home; deserts and mountains were the playground of my earliest years. In the weeks before moving onto campus, I gathered armfuls of tall western sage, rabbitbrush and brome. I wove in asters and larkspur, blazing star and sunflowers. The hall outside my dorm room was so strong of scent, I was warned that “burning incense is against the rules.”
Every region on Earth has its own “incense,” the fragrance of its dominant flora, commingled. Many of these plants are keystone species, critical to sheltering, nurturing and feeding the majority of wildlife species, explains the National Wildlife Federation. “Without keystone plants in the landscape, butterflies, native bees and birds will not thrive; 96% of our terrestrial birds rely on insects supported by keystone plants.”
Like so many of us in the West, we live large and play hard, no bandwidth for the “little stuff”; turning our sights instead to the grandiose or epic. As recreators, we are public land users, conquering rivers and mountains, rock and ice, to engage our passions. (I am looking in a mirror as I write that.) So when I bring these ubiquitous species home, it’s an effort to capture every grand adventure, epiphany, achievement or ass-kicking the backcountry has given me.
A deeper lesson, indelibly marked by place, has risen for me: a commitment to honor these places…
…by staying out of them.
Headline after headline, study after study reports the ways that our playtime is pushing species to the brink — or outright extinction. I continue to look in that mirror and ask myself: Why disturb places so critical to others’ survival… when I don’t really have to?
From the most delicate larvae ensconced in subterranean mycorrhizae… to apex predators providing ecological services… to each everyday, ordinary species in between… I’ve had to ask myself: Am I more important than them?
It is not a loss to me. I’m discovering other wilds, places of obvious overlap between wild and developed. Feral places along roadways, edges of parking lots, abandoned places where nature is taking over again. In these borderlands, I can still get my dose of wild from the synanthropic species — the creatures that aren’t as bothered by us and, in fact, have found ways to leverage our resources and infrastructure to their own advantage. This still makes for an impressive immersion into the lives and antics of residential deer herds, hawks, eagles, ravens, magpies, migratory songbirds, wild turkeys, coyotes, foxes, raccoons, whistle pigs, skunks — even simple ol’ squirrels or gophers.
I’m Homo sapiens, sling shot in hand. So are you, I hope. Here we are, peering up at the goliath of climate change and mass extinction. What can a feeble primate such as you or I do in the face of all that?
We can introduce keystone species at home. We can jumpstart wildness in the space we rent or own or steward by planting all those common, ordinary “weeds” right up to our door. A triumph today can be making a difference. A score today can be the number of living things that show up for you. A rite of passage can be the first time you achieve a goal made for the planet instead of yourself. It feels pretty freaking awesome, to be honest.
When we plant a rabbitbrush or sage (just an example among many species to play with), we support an ecological web of life. So much bigger than you or me (how’s that for an epiphany or an epic?). Forty-four moths and butterflies use sage; 28, rabbitbrush. Beyond pollen or nectar, imagine how many moles, voles, rabbits, snakes, toads, etc. scurry from bush to bush for burrowing, cover or shade. Deer and elk eat either when there’s little else.
Less grandiose to some of us? Birds. Ducking under a sage last week, I looked up and discovered a nest, so delicate, so perfectly woven into its branches, yet invisible to any from the outside. That feathered brainiac built in the midst of a flying, crawling food buffet.
I grew up on Marty Stouffer’s Wild America, but this stuff, in real life? Is way cooler: moths getting it on, squirrels kickin’ ass at parkour, ravens duking it out with hawks… our fellow sentients, living out lives just as we are, replete with adventures, epiphanies, triumphs and downfalls.
Small, insignificant or common species are the key to life on this planet, and the key to saving it. Before we can save the rhino, orangutan or whale, we self-indulgent humans might look to save ourselves. But without saving these “plain old” species first, we cannot save the grand — or even ourselves.