Month: August 2024

A Month at the Brandt Hermitage

/ Jason M. Brown / Leave a comment

I had never been alone in the Brandt hermitage before. I first visited Fr. Charles in 2017, when I was completing my PhD on monastic sense of place at the University of British Columbia. We sat on his back porch and talked about Thomas Berry, the state of environmental activism and climate change. And at the end of July, four years after Charles death, I was sitting alone on that same back porch listening to the Oyster River hush toward the sea.

Fr. Charles’ successor at the hermitage, was a contemplative nurtured by the Benedictine tradition and the spirituality of the Desert Mothers and Fathers (She has asked to keep her name private). However, she has recently moved to Nanaimo, to start the next chapter in her life journey. For the month of August, I took up temporary residence at the hermitage to work on getting the house ready for the Hermitage Society’s contemplative in residency program. We invite people of all backgrounds to experience the benefits of silence, solitude and immersion in the natural world while living in this historic and prayer-infused space.

Contemplative Ecology can be defined in many ways. We call Fr. Charles a contemplative ecologist because he brought his vocations of priest, hermit, bookbinder and land-keeper together into a single life well lived. A monk once told me that a hermit (a monk who lives mostly in solitude) is not someone who is running away from the world but running toward God. In my time here I can affirm that silence and stillness are compost for feeding the gardens of healing, growth and spiritual connection.

I have started and ended each day with silent meditation. In the mornings, after my meditation, I would make coffee and watch the day unfold before I buckled down to the day’s tasks of writing, my duties for the university, and coordinating the many repairs and upgrades to the hermitage that inevitably come with an aging building.

So, to be honest, I was not alone the whole time free of work. We have a very talented craftsperson who has taken on the hermitage as a personal project (we pay her of course) and members of the board stop by to help with the work. On my walks in the forest, I often meet people from the neighborhood and their dogs. I have met many slugs and birds, but no bears or cougars.

There is only a narrow driveway on which to walk on the property, as most of the property is on a steep bluff facing the Oyster River. But even on this small trail I never feel bored. My favorite thing about walking in the forest is how the light changes. In the morning the sunlight slants in from the east and by afternoon these slender sheets of light have shifted to the west. Each moment is its own eternity and when I am really paying attention, each footstep like a pilgrimage.

Sometimes late at night, when the weather was clear, I would wake up and stumble out to the deck to crane my neck at the night sky. I was lucky enough to catch some of the Perseid meteor shower and an early morning Mars/Jupiter conjunction. Cassiopia was my most constant constellation in the east, with trees obscuring most of the southern sky. Above me and to the west I could just make out through the trees, Vega and Arcturus, two of the brightest stars in the night sky. Being able to see the dark sky with her bejewelled cloak of stars felt very sacred to me. It both makes me feel very small and insignificant in size, and preciously and uniquely valued by this warm greenhouse world that spins so precariously on the vast oceans of the cosmos.

On Tuesdays I ride my bike to volunteer with the Oyster River Salmon Enhancement Society at Bear Creek Nature Park, which is only a few kilometres west of the hermitage on the Oyster River. The organization was founded in the late 1980s, and Fr. Charles was a part of it from the beginning. There is a picture of Fr. Charles in the small cabin that serves as a meeting area for board members and volunteers and his name is on a small plaque on a memorial bench near the river. Mostly what we do is maintain predator exclusion fences, feed fish, and brush algae off the river water intake screens. On my first day, I walked the meandering trails of the hatchery with a retired commercial fisherman and pruned shrubs and cleared debris.

As I was leaving the hatchery I saw hundreds of pink salmon who were beginning to venture into the Oyster River from the ocean as they prepare to spawn. Their sleek bodies syncopating through swirls and eddies delighted me. So, I decided that I would go fishing. Fr. Charles was a long-time fly fisherman, and many of the volunteers had met Fr. Charles. One old timer had tied flies for him. Later in life, Fr. Charles admitted that he really went fishing to feel more a part of the river, and that it seemed rather cruel to hook a fish and let it go. But I didn’t want to let one go. I wanted to eat one.

So, I found a fly-fishing guide in Campbell River and early in the morning we put on waders, and I soon felt the power of the river rushing past me. We spent time on the banks casting into deep pools for clouds of pink salmon who weren’t biting. We rafted down the river in his small boat and by the end of the day found ourselves at the kissing mouths of the Campbell River and the Salish Sea. I had hooked several pinks and a cutthroat trout with a small blue nymph, but none of them had wanted to go home with me.

Feeling bad, the guide invited me to come back to his house the next day, which is right on the south bank of the Campbell River, to see if I might catch one to keep. I returned the next morning and after a few fumbles and false starts, I felt that familiar tug on the line. She gave chase but after only a minute I could feel the line soften and I reeled her toward shore. I netted her and put her in a cooler filled with water, not sure if I could bring myself to end her life. I didn’t want to use a rock, that seemed barbaric, so I used a slender fishing knife and soon her water breathing gills fell still in the rose-clouding water.

As I cleaned the fish, I was amazed by the dense clusters of orange eggs marbled through the innards. I brought the fish to friends, and they mercifully taught me how to prepare and cook the fish on a cedar plank. We ate the smoky fillets with relish and cooked the roe in butter. I also made a stock out of the bones. I really wanted to use as much of the fish as I could to honor its life and to recognize that all life depends on death to continue. This cycle is embedded in ecosystems and the spiritual ecology of what Christians call the Paschal Mystery: Life, Death, Resurrection. Eating that fish was, in the language of the catholic tradition, eucharistic and sacramental because it pointed to the divine mystery that is shot through our days and meals and bodies and prayers.

I am grateful for my time at the Brandt Hermitage, and I am very hopeful to return for additional time there. But I am also excited to welcome in a single file community of folks from many faiths and paths and parts of the world to experience the power of silence and solitude. If you or someone you know might be interested in becoming a contemplative in residence, please have a look at our call for residents or send me an email with any questions at jason.minton.brown@gmail.com.

A Blessing for Living in a Chaotic Climate

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In Laura Schmidt, Aimee Lewis Reau and Chelsie Rivera’s book How to Live in a Chaotic Climate. There are ten steps to work through climate anxiety, grief and connect with meaningful purpose and action. I used this book as the textbook for a seminar on ecological grief and radical hope in the Spring term of 2024. The steps are:

  1. Accept the Severity of the Predicament
  2. Be with Uncertainty
  3. Honor My Mortality and the Mortality of All
  4. Do Inner Work
  5. Develop Awareness of Biases and Perception
  6. Practice Gratitude, Seek Beauty, and Create Connections
  7. Take Breaks and Rest
  8. Grieve the Harm I Have Caused
  9. Show Up
  10. Reinvest in Meaningful Efforts

The book is a wonderful framework for working with difficult feelings. And the course went well. At the end of the course as I thought about how I would rap it up, the Irish spiritual teacher John O’Donohue came to mind. John loved to write blessings, which in a word are not overtly religious though they often are. They come from the Latin Bene, to will the good for someone. We need more blessings in our lives. What a powerful way to express our goodwill for family, friends and loved ones. So here are ten Blessings related to the ten steps of the book:

  1. May your acceptance of the severity of the predicament deepen your care for the preciousness of life.
  2. May your encounter with uncertainty solidify your certainty that life is worth fighting for.
  3. When you honor your mortality, remember the softness of it too.
  4. When you do inner work, remember that it is not just work, but exploration.
  5. As you compost the messiness of biases, prejudices and perceptions may it also germinate seeds of self-compassion.
  6. May you be grateful for something every hour, seek beauty every day, and create connections that last a lifetime.
  7. May your radicalization include taking breaks and deep rest.
  8. When you grieve the harm you have caused, let that grief point you toward that which is still resisting destruction by the dominant system.
  9. When you show up, show up with everything you’ve got: love, fear, excitement, despair, joy, anger, optimism, rage, and active hope.
  10. And, lastly, whenever you harvest a bounty of blessings from your life, reinvest it into meaningful efforts so that at the end of your life you can say that you fought hard for all we can save.

Hope is an Heirloom

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Hope can have different meanings. One sense of the word is when it is used as a wish: I hope there will be seats at the movie. I hope there is asparagus at the grocery store. This kind of hope can be rooted in expectations that defy reality, or long for our expectations to be true. We hope that the climate crisis isn’t happening, that it isn’t too bad. But hope as written about by many authors these days is radical, active, and critical. It is a living thing that we nourish with our action.

I’d like to add to this biodiversity. For me, hope is a bone deep faith in the goodness of things; in the beauty of the world, and the worthiness of being alive in troubled times.
If we think about it, we are the embodiments of thousands of hopes gone by.
Hope is inherited from our ancestors and borrowed from future generations.
Hope is an intergenerational heirloom. It does not depend on a feeling. It depends on a keeping. Hope is a seed to be saved and planted when the time is right and harvested when the time is right and saved all over again.
What is something you are too scared to hope for because it seems impossible?

Ten Principles for Ecological Action

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I used this list in my last module when teaching Environmental Ethics between 2018-2022. They are not doctrines but principles that I think are worth thinking about in relation to environmental action.

  1. No single narrative or movement will save us; but we must each find a deep sense of meaning and purpose in this world and act from there.
  2. There is no time for despair, but there is plenty of room for it.
  3. Supremacy is not the same as primacy. We are not separate from the earth, but we do have unique capabilities and responsibilities to the rest of our earth community.
  4. There will always be markets in society; but we should avoid ending up with a market-society. 
  5. Technology is not the enemy nor ours savior, therefore it must be expressed and harnessed by an ever ethically vigilant people.
  6. In light of new ideas and propositions, we should embody the Precautionary Principle without being reactionary.    
  7. Wonder is a virtue that we should cultivate, just as dogmatism is a vice that we should avoid.
  8. Everything we do matters. But nothing we do matters a great deal more than what others propose we do.
  9. We need all hands on deck: Top down and bottom up; deontology and utility; religion and science; politics and personalism; technology and simplicity.
  10. The dragon of capitalism is at fault for the global ecological crisis; but we will have a better chance of making change if we can tame the dragon, rather than try to kill it (for now).

A Hopeful Eulogy for the Northern Spotted Owl

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Is it time grieve the imminent extinction of the Northern Spotted Owl?

NOTE: While writing a draft of this essay, the following New York Time op-ed was published! This one written by philosophers in Oregon. I support their skepticism but do doubt some of their empirical claims. Here I add my own philosophical and spiritual questions to the conversation.

In my environmental ethics and humanities classes, we cover many different subjects from pollution to consumerism to climate change. One of the most important topics in the age of extinction is the question of value. At what scale are we willing to invest intrinsic worth? (value that is inherent, and not oriented toward some greater purpose). The individual organism? The species? The ecosystem? The biosphere? Clearly a holistic ethic considers the relationships between these interacting agents and contexts, but in some case studies we must decide what is more valuable in the long run, and what criteria to use to assess this value judgement and the decisions and consequences that flow from it.

For example, the emerging strategy of conservation organizations in the Pacific Northwest of the US and southwestern Canada to cull Barred Owls (Strix varia) on an ongoing and apparently indefinite basis so that the Northern Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) might not go extinct is a case where the existence value of the subspecies Northern Spotted Owl has been valued above the suffering and death of thousands of individual Barred Owls. This is a heart-rending decision for many conservationists I am sure, and I sympathise with the intent, and for me it illustrates the strangeness of one thread of contemporary nativist ecological dogma.

Northern Spotted Owls are a subspecies Strix occidentalis which has two other subspecies: California and Mexican. The ecological importance of these owls is not as a keystone species, but more as one indicator among many of ecosystem health. The idea is that when Northern Spotted Owls are healthy, so are a range of other old growth forest inhabitants such as marbled murrelet, salamanders, flying squirrels and species of forest voles and mice.

Surprisingly, the Northern Spotted Owl is not listed as endangered in the United States but as threatened. There are an estimated 3,000-5,000 individuals left in the US. In British Columbia, the owl has been put on the red list, which is the most endangered category of risk before extirpation. Historically, there were likely no more than 1,000 Northern Spotted Owls in BC, which touches the northern extent of their range. In 2022, it was reported that there was literally only one wild born Northern Spotted Owl left in BC. Since then the Province has been goaded to initiate a recovery plan mostly through a captive breeding program.[1] The Canadian Spotted Owl Recovery Team has also been monitoring populations of both species in some 300,000 hectares of protected area, some of which is located in deferred old growth logging concessions, for recovery of wild breeding pairs. They have also attempted to relocate Barred Owls when they are encountered near known Spotted Owl nests.

Some conservationists have devoted their whole careers to saving this beautiful being. And during the 1990s, the Northern Spotted Owl became a flash point for public conflicts related to old growth conservation. The Jobs vs. Owls debate was framed narrowly as a culture war between hard working loggers, truckers and millworkers and the environmental movement.

Billions of dollars were spent, and thousands of jobs were lost when the Northwest Forest Plan, presided over by President Clinton, was implemented in 1994. The plan is currently being updated by federal officials under President Biden. The Plan spanned some 17 federal forests and protected over tenmillion acres across a landscape that spans some twenty-five million acres. In recent years, British Columbia has gearing up for a major paradigm shift in old growth phased forest conservation which has resulted in the protection and deferral of some 6.4 million acres.

Despite these gradual changes, many in the conservation movement are feeling like with the Barred Owl in play, it is critical to save the Spotted Owl by any means necessary. Anything less would mean the whole enterprise was a failure. In a Guardian piece from 2023, Susan Jane Brown (no relation), a lawyer for the Western Environmental Law Center said, “I think the spotted owl is going to go extinct in my lifetime. For someone who has spent their entire career trying to conserve the species, that’s a failure.”[2] She sees the extinction of the owl as a failure of the movement, despite the major wins in terms of acreage protected.

This line of thinking has led to the justification for plans to cull the Barred Owl as a regrettable but necessary solution. Journalist Jim Robbins recently explored the US’s strategy to cull Barred Owls amid news that the US Federal Government is renewing funding for Barred Owl killings throughout California, Oregon and Washington States. The plan will kill 15,000 owls per year starting in 2024, including any hybrid “Sparred” owls they find. Previous pilot projects as early as 2010 in the region have already killed thousands of Barred Owls, and test plots show that where Barred Owls are killed, Spotted Owl populations can stabilize and may recover.

This species-centric view understands habitat as the backdrop for the main event: Species. So, to succeed, you must ensure that the species sticks around as it has been taxonomized and understood in its historical ecology. We are acting out an analogy of preserving a painting and a museum. A historic baseline determines which species belong and which do not.

As far as we know, Barred Owls have the longest history in eastern North America. Our best guess is that they were able to slowly migrate west through the suburbs and urban forests of the Midwest. They did this on their own, without any direct assistance from humans, except that we like trees and plant them wherever we go. The owl didn’t arrive in the Pacific Northwest until the 1970s, right when the Spotted Owl was in steep decline due to the voracious rate of old growth logging in the region.

Geneticists have identified two clades within the Barred Owl species that run latitudinally (north to south) and correspond to pre-Pleistocene refugia populations. The current distribution is longitudinally broader, and not predictive of this ice age bottle neck. Claims in the NYT Op-Ed that the Barred Owl has been in the Pacific West for longer than the conventional story seems to be picking up on this major taxonomic fork, but there doesn’t seem to be evidence that the Owl was in the Pacific West before the 20th century.[3]

The trouble with their arrival, is that because the Barred Owl is more versatile than the Spotted Owl in both preferred habitats, hunting and prey, they have adapted well to the urban wildland interface habitat that humans have co-created. They also appear to be outcompeting Spotted Owls in old growth phase forests, sometimes preying on them, but also sometimes mating with them. In addition to major declines in preferred habitat, the Spotted Owl has had to deal with a new competitor.

I feel that the decision to cull Barred Owls is not made lightly or with malice by federal agencies and that conservationists feel that by killing one owl they are saving two. But I have also observed a kind of crusader’s enthusiasm among some ecologists against any species they deem to be out of place, exotic, or part of an invasive scenario.[4] A student related to me that one of her biology professors once gloated about drowning grey squirrels which many conservationists have labeled as an invasive species, which implies a duty to eradicate them for the good of the whole, a troubling ethos that I need not elaborate on.

Animal rights and welfare organizations have voiced opposition to the killing of Barred Owls because their approach to intrinsic value is focused on the level of the sentient organism. The species Barred Owl cannot suffer, only individual owls can suffer. Therefore, intentionally kill thousands of owls a year is a breach of an ethic that believes that regardless of how the owls arrived, they deserve to be treated with dignity and have a right not to be subjected to undue suffering.

This ethical objection has led to an approach to the control of aggressive species called compassionate conservation which seeks to save species without causing the undue suffering of non-native species who are only doing what organisms do. From rats and mice to cats and goats, compassionate conservation believes that ends and means matter, and saving a species should not unfold in the wake of mass shooting, painful time delayed poisoning or limb breaking traps. In the case of Spotted Owls, the relocation of Barred Owls from Spotted Owl nesting zones, as has been tested in British Columbia, would be the preferred option rather than culling. There are other options if we want to both reduce suffering and give Spotted Owls a chance as recovery.[5] Emma Marris’s book Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World (2021) is an excellent exploration of the nuances and limitations of these approaches.

I have never seen a Spotted Owl in the wild, but I have seen dozens of Barred Owls. And they are a magical site to see. Their existence is just as worthy and beautiful as the Spotted Owl, even if their prowess is displacing their spotty cousins. So, what I want to say is that I don’t like the idea of Spotted Owls going extinct; and I feel visceral horror at the plan to slaughter Barred Owls. I think we should do what we can to save the Spotted Owl but not at the cost of thousands of dead Barred Owls.

I also find it interesting that one of the definitions of species is the ability to interbreed. More than 10 per cent of birds can mate across species, but still, I find it a fascinating twist in this story. One interesting fact is that the genetics of Sparred Owls often come from female Barred Owls and male Spotted Owls.[6] Typical Owl courtship involves calling and offerings of food by the male and then mutual preening within pairs. It appears that female Barred Owls, the more aggressive species, are accepting courtship displays from male Spotted Owls. This might sound silly, but are these owls trying to adapt to local conditions? Is this integration rather than colonization? If that were the case, wouldn’t we expect to see the most dominant and aggressive Barred Owl males occasionally mating with female Spotted Owls? Again, I might be stretching my social science of owls here, but it strikes me as interesting. More specifically, what it makes me think is that evolutionary ecology has surprised us before. And evolution is always a dance between confluence and conflict, and we need to think harder about how to relate to these intermingling choreographies.

From my perspective, it seems that continuing to protect and steward resilient ecosystems is the best use of our time and resources. Ensuring that there are large swaths of old growth phase forest for Spotted Owls considers both the intrinsic value of this majestic bird and its relationship to its wider ecology.

It also seems to me that the current conservation paradigm’s approach suffers from a primal denial: the denial of death. The anthropologist Ernst Becker argued that the belief in immortality in the world’s cultures has its roots in this primordial human consciousness of our own deaths and our anxiety about its implications.

Becker argues that our species’ immortality stories and heroes’ journeys are ways of projecting ourselves onto the stars and into the future so that something of ourselves might live forever. Human consciousness longs for stability and eternity. And our era of human rights has affirmed this infinite and intrinsic worth. No human being needs to justify its existence. Our inherent dignity comes from who we are, not what we do.

Recognizing the intrinsic value of a species, was a powerful step beyond an imagined human supremacy and into a more ecologically oriented ethic. A species has a right to exist not because it provides us with some service, but because it is a unique and precious incarnation of the unfolding wonder of evolution and plays an important role in evolving ecosystems. 

But it feels like draconian culls are the result of a denial of the reality of ecological death. When a loved one dies, we must grieve their death. When a species goes extinct, we must accept that it is gone. Spotted Owl extinction would be an irreplaceable loss from an ecology that has resisted much of the onslaught of European colonial expansion and ecocide.

Yet, the Spotted Owl is dying, and that death is an inevitable part of life. To seek to restore ecosystems, to fund captive breeding programs, to relocate Barred Owls from known Spotted Owl nesting sites are heroic efforts to preserve the Spotted Owl’s fingerprint in the sacred body of our ecologies.

But by attempting to do this by slaughtering thousands of Barred Owls is to somehow cross a moral threshold. It is to believe that immortality for the species is the only outcome we will accept, rather than preparing to grieve the loss of a species even as we are working within our value system to protect it. And then, if we fail, feeling the full weight of that failure and continuing to work to protect the ecological conditions under which new species, including hybrid Sparred Owls will emerge. To insist on preserving the Spotted Owl as we imagine it to have been, and to do so at the cost of the suffering of thousands of Barred Owls feels like losing faith in the creative and generative potential of evolution and ecology.

I sympathize with compassionate conservation on this issue, not because I think we can prevent all suffering in the natural world, or because I do not consider species or ecosystems as possessing intrinsic value. I object to culls and sympathize with more compassionate measures in this case because not only do the means and ends align, but because I recognize that even where ecosystems have been protected, captive breeding programs have been funded, relocation efforts have been tried, and Barred Owls continue to spread, what is truly needed is grief not guns.

[1] https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/environment/plants-animals-ecosystems/species-ecosystems-at-risk/implementation/conservation-projects-partnerships/northern-spotted-owl

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/26/northern-spotted-owl-canada-british-columbia-ghosts-aoe

[3] Barrowclough, George F., Jeff G. Groth, Karan J. Odom, and Jonas E. Lai. “Phylogeography of the barred owl (Strix varia): species limits, multiple refugia, and range expansion.” The Auk 128, no. 4 (2011): 696-706.

[4] I do not call any species ‘Invasive’. Invasion is never a direct trait of a species, invasion scenarios always play out as an interplay of aggressive species, exacerbated by human-caused disturbances, and are dependent on the novel ecological conditions and the lack of potential predators in early phases of range expansion.

[5] I am not speaking here to other examples of culling on small islands where rats, cats or goats have decimated populations of ground nesting birds. These present a range of other questions, and I have sympathy for those working on these projects which are crucial for saving some island bound species from extinction.

[6] Haig, Susan M., Thomas D. Mullins, Eric D. Forsman, Pepper W. Trail, and L. I. V. Wennerberg. “Genetic identification of spotted owls, barred owls, and their hybrids: legal implications of hybrid identity.” Conservation Biology 18, no. 5 (2004): 1347-1357. https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2004.00206.x