The Mindful Carnivore (6 page)

Cabbage moth larvae, though, were camouflaged. Their pale green caterpillar bodies blended into broccoli stalks almost perfectly and, once they got munching, they decimated the plants in a hurry. Researching our options, we decided on Bt (
Bacillus thuringiensis
), a bacterium used by organic farmers to target specific pests. When cabbage moth larvae ingest it, they die. We bought a little and sprayed it on the broccoli.

Strict veganism prohibits eating honey, out of concern for bees. Beetle squishing and caterpillar poisoning were, I knew, beyond the pale. I was murdering insects.

More than a century ago, Howard Williams began his treatise on the history of vegetarianism by invoking the ancient Greek poet Hesiod, who valorized “the peaceful spirit of agriculture and mechanical industry” over “the spirit of war and fighting.” But how peaceful is our tilling of the earth?

I knew enough about industrial food production to realize that it wasn’t all endless acres of Edenic cultivation. Topsoil, for example, is being lost at an alarming rate. According to a 2006 study by Cornell University ecologist David Pimentel, erosion is stripping U.S. farmland of its dirt at ten times the rate of natural replenishment. And precious soil isn’t all that gets washed downstream. Fertilizers also end up in our rivers, harming fish and other aquatic life. In high enough concentrations, nutrient-rich fertilizer runoff can maintain a cycle of phytoplankton blooms, depleting oxygen levels so severely that virtually nothing else can survive. Where the Mississippi dumps into the Gulf of Mexico, the seasonal dead zone had already grown to the size of New Jersey—even before the
Deepwater Horizon
oil spill of 2010 devastated the region.

And then there are pesticides. The recovery of the peregrine falcon notwithstanding, in 2000 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that 672 million birds are “directly exposed to pesticides” on American farmland each year. Some 67 million die immediately. Millions more die slowly. In Central and South America, where unregulated and highly toxic chemicals are sprayed and where many migratory birds go during North American winters, mortality rates are dramatically worse. Throughout the Americas alone, creatures smaller and less noticeable than birds are presumably killed by the uncounted billions.

Whatever we do to the planet, of course, we do to ourselves. As the earth loses topsoil, we’re rapidly losing arable land. Wind-blown dust from eroding farmland pollutes the air we breathe and carries diseases like tuberculosis and anthrax. And it doesn’t take an advanced degree in toxicology to figure out that pesticides don’t do the human body any favors. Sixty-seven million birds make an awfully big pile of canaries in the proverbial coal mine.

Yet I knew, too, that agriculture didn’t have to be so brutal. Soil erosion could be prevented by planting cover crops, such as rye or wheat. There were alternatives to chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Whenever possible, Cath and I opted for organic foods, minimizing our diet’s chemical footprint. We ate close to home, buying food grown by small-scale, local farmers: no need to truck the produce cross-country, no gratuitous plastic packaging, and, thankfully, no massive combines mincing rabbits, rodents, birds, and birds’ nests as they worked the fields each season. (Studies suggest that grain harvesters wipe out between 50 and 75 percent of populations in a long list of field-dwelling species.) Though much of our food still came from afar—greens and fruit in winter, tofu and other products year-round—“local” and “organic” were my watchwords. They signified harmlessness, shoring up my decade-long vegan diet, reassuring me that agriculture was, at its roots, a gentle blessing on the land: a backyard vegetable patch stretching out into those amber waves of grain.

What got my attention was the deer. I was reading Richard Nelson’s
Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America
. Deer, I learned, eat just about everything farmers grow. They eat greens and pumpkins, corn and wheat, cranberries and carrots, avocadoes and wine grapes. They have a particular fondness for soybeans, used to make tofu, soy milk, and many other nonmeat, nondairy products sold in vegetarian-friendly stores around the country. They damage apple, plum, pear, cherry, and almond crops, often killing young trees. Individual farmers can sustain tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of crop damage in a year; in many states, total annual losses run into the tens of millions.

In states where agriculture is a major sector of the economy, wildlife agencies have to keep the whitetail population down to a reasonable level. Often, that means encouraging hunters to shoot a lot of deer during hunting seasons. It also often means issuing special permits to farmers, allowing them to kill deer in other seasons, day or night. And farmers do kill them. By the thousands.

This isn’t just out in the agricultural breadbasket of the American Midwest. Nelson interviewed an organic farmer in northern California who grew specialty greens for upscale restaurants and grocery stores in San Francisco. A few times a year, the farmer had to shoot a deer. Because he didn’t like killing, sometimes he would cut the deer open and drag it around the perimeter of the field with a tractor, leaving plenty of blood to scare other deer away. Most years, he didn’t have to kill more than five. In Westchester County, just an hour north of Manhattan, another farmer gave Nelson a more startling figure: On his farm, they sometimes shoot ten in a single night. And still the crop damage continues. Nelson’s summary of the situation brought me up short:

Whenever any of us sit down for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or a snack, it’s likely that deer were killed to protect some of the food we eat and the beverages we drink … Everyone in modern North America who lives each day on agricultural foods belongs to an ecological network that necessarily involves deer hunting.

Deer are, he reports, “a fundamental part of our personal ecology. In this sense, the blood of deer runs through our veins as surely as we take bread and wine at our table.”

I tried to keep that knowledge at bay. I told myself that those were bigger farms, far away, and that we weren’t getting produce from those places. I was wrong.

In the end, I had to consider Joey, the kindly organic farmer whose veggies travel less than a mile to the produce display of the crunchy local food co-op—in whose fields Cath and I have often picked luscious strawberries. You’d be hard-pressed to find a gentler, more conscientious steward of the land. Ask him about deer, though, and he’ll tell you: “I’ve got a few guys on call. When there’s too much damage, they come and plug one and we share the venison.” Or ask about woodchucks: “I smoke-bomb their burrows constantly. Preemptively. A tunnel in a sandy bank right next to a kale field? Someone’s going to move into that!”

Damn
. I didn’t want Bambi and Chuckie getting plugged and bombed as part of my “personal ecology.”

Before long, though, I began to see that these deaths were among agriculture’s lesser impacts, constituting only a fraction of the story. All it took was a few years working as a logger: work that grounded me in the local landscape and opened my eyes to its history.

I have always cherished forests, for their beauty—the bright, pale green of the year’s first leaves, the majestic silhouette of big white pines against a summer sunset, the fire of autumn maples, the delicate bones of snow-laden twigs—and for their special places, like the spot in the oak woods near my father’s house where bedrock rose to the surface. Deep, feathery moss and low blueberries grew around the edges of the bare, weathered granite, tracing an outline suggestive of an eagle in flight.

Yet I have also depended on wood all my life. It framed the houses I grew up in, as it frames this one here on the little sandy plateau above the Winooski River. In most of those houses, the tree-ness of the structure was hidden, clothed outside with asphalt shingles or peeling paint, dressed up inside with plaster and wallpaper. In others—like the low, earth-bermed solar house my father built when I was ten—the nature of the material was more evident. The big exposed rafters for that house had been salvaged from a barn near Quincy, Massachusetts. Though they had been milled clean and square decades ago, thick, sticky sap still oozed from the wood in places, reminding me of its life in a forest somewhere, long before I was born.

Most of those houses were also heated with wood, usually delivered cut and split, dumped off the back of a truck in sixteen-inch lengths. And the umpteen thousand board feet I’d handled as a carpenter all came from the lumberyard—sawn, planed, and neatly sorted by length, with only knots or the occasional pitch pocket to make me think of a spruce, fir, or oak.

I had known all along, of course, that one came from the other, wood from trees. But I’d never had a hand in its metamorphosis.

So I apprenticed to a forester-logger and set off into the woods, intent on bridging the gap between my love of forests and the necessities of shelter and fuel. As with food, I wanted to cultivate a deeper understanding of what sustained me.

My woods mentor, Paul, wore the nearly constant hint of a smile under his short, graying mustache, as if he had just thought of something amusing. My first job with him was a salvage operation, removing trees that were already down, tipped over the previous September when Hurricane Floyd ripped its way up the coast. On the next job, though, and each one after that, virtually every tree I cut was alive. That took some getting used to. With Cath, I had cut Christmas trees for our living room, selecting ones that—crowded tight together or growing up under the power lines alongside our driveway—would have had to come out anyway. Taking down a mature tree was a different matter altogether. The first time I set my chain saw to the base of a fifty-foot pine, I paused. Though I knew why Paul had selected it to come out, knew that its removal would benefit the trees around it, knew that good use would be made of its wood, I couldn’t lightly kill this being. I said a silent prayer of thanks and apology. Then I unleashed the power of the saw, sending a rooster tail of chips through the air.

Over time, such fellings became habit. Regrettably, I didn’t have time for elaborate acknowledgment of each death. Why, I wondered, did this bother me? Why should dropping trees seem so different from beheading stalks of broccoli or uprooting the wild raspberries and milkweed that encroached on the garden? Did killing trees feel different merely because they were bigger? Was this why I swatted mosquitoes but live-trapped house mice, releasing them half a mile away? Or was that more a matter of loyalty to my phylum—to Chordata but not Arthropoda, to vertebrate but not insect? I had, at one time, been troubled even by slapping at the latter, but eventually decided I couldn’t worry about such deaths. If insects drew my blood, or threatened to, I killed them.

As I had hoped it would, logging grounded me in gritty transformation. Before long, I could glance at a tree and estimate how far it was to the first big crook, how many sixteen, fourteen, or twelve-foot sawlogs would come out of it, and roughly how many board feet that would add up to. Thinking that way, mentally converting a part of living nature to a volume of “natural resource,” made me uneasy at first. True, we weren’t using those calculations to make profit-minded decisions about which trees to cut. We were usually leaving the healthiest, straightest ones to grow. But, still, when I looked at a tree, I wanted to value it as a living entity, not as mere lumber. Eventually, I realized that my aim was to hold and see both: tree as magnificent being and tree as vital material.

Meeting even a tiny fraction of our physical needs directly from the forest gave me simple satisfaction. I enjoyed hauling home the coarse, raw treasure of firewood by the third of a cord in the back of my pickup and stacking it under cover, caching a small portion of the land’s summer warmth for the cold days and nights I knew would soon come.

Now and then, finer treasures could be gleaned. Once, as we split wood on that first salvage job, Paul paused to pick up two pieces of maple he had rent apart with his ax. The grain had a serpentine wave to it: the figuring that woodworkers call “curly” or “flame” maple. The next year, for my mother’s birthday and my grandmother’s, I carved two long-handled cooking spoons. Scraped, sanded, and oiled, the golden wood shimmered with iridescent stripes, like the wind riffles on water just before a storm blows in.

Logging also taught me a lesson in appearances. When we felled a tree, we would take what we could use for sawlogs, firewood, or pulp. That left limbs and tops, and the question of what to do with them. Leaving those downed treetops intact—their branches standing perhaps five, ten, fifteen feet in the air—would closely mimic what happened when a tree blew over in a storm. Wildlife like grouse and hare would find shelter there. But Paul and I tended to work on small woodlots, often near homes or recreation trails, and most landowners disliked the messiness of whole tops. They preferred to have them lopped down into lower, more compact piles. If Paul had offered treetop removal services, as some loggers do, I suspect that people would have taken him up on it, thankful to have everything chipped and shipped. Such removal, unfortunately, prevents that material from returning to the forest floor, where it would normally decompose, feeding the soil from which it grew.

I sympathized with the landowners’ preferences. Before I started logging, I bristled at the sight of brush cut and left strewn alongside hiking trails; it looked crude, careless. My image of a good-looking forest, responsibly logged, had been one of parklike tidiness. Seeing the remains of trees that had fallen of nature’s accord, thrown by wind or dead of disease or old age, hadn’t bothered me, but signs of human handiwork had. Though my ecological concerns had been sincere, my perceptions of logging had been underpinned by aesthetic discomforts, by an aversion to the evidence of arboreal carnage. Like the landowners I now worked for, I had preferred to stroll through woods that looked undisturbed. I had enjoyed the seductive illusion of having my firewood delivered, of selecting my building materials from orderly, clean stacks at the lumberyard, the messy work done far away. Out of sight, out of mind.