I bought this book when it came out eleven years ago—I know that’s true, because my copy is a hardcover edition—but I haven’t read it until now, perhaps because I was afraid of what I’d learn. It’s an important book—I can see the way it is going to influence my current research—and it’s a good thing I finally put aside my fear and opened the book. It’s essential reading. All of us who make our homes on the prairies ought to read it.
Strangely, though, I already knew part of this book: the introduction is in the anthology I use to teach first-year English courses, and I’ve taught that essay, “A Way Home,” several times. It tells the story of how Herriot became interested in grassland birds, and what those birds mean to his conception of southern Saskatchewan. They are, he writes, “the presiding genius of the northern Great Plains . . . a presence that animates the grass and sky in the absence of the bison” (13). Bison, of course, are grassland obligates, like the songbirds, although their numbers today are a fraction of what they once were, after being nearly driven to extinction in the nineteenth century; we might have considered the bison the “presiding genius” of the grassland, except that bison now exist behind fences, on ranches and in parks and refuges. Herriot’s use of the word “genius” is slightly anachronistic; in this context, it means a guardian spirit associated with a place (O.E.D.).
If you hear a sense of the sacred in Herriot’s words, you would be absolutely correct. Grassland birds are “the embodiment of a spirit” one can feel “as an almost imperceptible tug” (13); there is something “good and holy in these birds,” which he hopes we will discover before it’s too late, before those birds (like so many other species) are extinct (3). “True grassland birds—species that cannot tolerate trees or cropland—bear witness to the world in their own particular way,” he writes. “It is a testimony as worthy as any other in Creation; not loud enough to attract busloads of tourists, perhaps, but all the more rewarding for the attention it cultivates in any who try.” (13). The word “Creation” is used repeatedly in Grass, Sky, Song; not in an orthodox Christian way, but rather as a way to imbue the world with a sense that it is sacred. He employs the word “mystery” for the same reasons, I think. Unlike most of us môniyâwak, Herriot has a sense of the land as sacred, and also unlike most Settlers, he has come into a relationship with it.
Those notions of sacredness and relationship are connected to belonging. Coming to know grassland birds is a way “to find out how we might belong to a place, to find a way home” (4)—to come into a relationship with the grassland. He advocates lying down on a patch of wild grass and looking up at the sky: “With grass blades waving overhead and the sky beyond, the human spirit has half a chance to come to its senses. If there are birds singing in the air, all the better. They will tell you where you are and, if you listen long enough, they may tell you who you are in the bargain” (4). Even though he was born in southern Saskatchewan, Herriot suggests that he did not truly know the place, or belong here, until he began to learn about the beings that live here—that can only live here: to know their names, not as a way to possess them, but rather as a way “to call things forth from generality into a particularity that allowed for admiration, familiarity, even wonder” (12). “The influence of beings as unprepossessing and elusive as grassland birds is something like gravity, a weak though persistent mystery that holds us in place,” he concludes. “The heart recognizes such a gentle force, knows that in simply becoming aware of its pull we take a small step toward belonging here ourselves” (13). My students are, I think, shocked to read those words; the idea that knowing something about a place, that apprehending something of its mystery, is a way to belong to it surprises them, because most of them know little about the creatures we share the prairie with, or that the prairie is more than a flat horizon, that it is a complex ecosystem that is in grave danger.
That grave danger resonates throughout Herriot’s book, and it is what makes Grass, Sky, Song such a difficult read. One of the things that is in danger is the prairie: that treeless landscape defined by grass. “I live in one of the only prairie cities built upon utterly treeless grassland,” he notes. “Most cities on the northern Great Plains were founded on large rivers, where ravines sheltered a few poplars and willows, but the stretch of Wascana Creek where Regina sprang up did not incise deeply enough into the tableland of its glacial lake bed to allow woody growth of any kind” (17-18). Every single tree in this city has been planted; Herriot describes the neighbourhood where he lives—not far from our house—as a place “where seventy-foot-high white spruce host red-breasted nuthatches and red crossbills year round. These birds think they are in a forest and they are right. To see the prairie and its birds I have to get out of town” (18). The “woody growth” that has encroached on the grassland here has led to many changes: the arrival of mountain bluebirds, for instance, is the result of the planting of trees (and fence posts) here, although most of us now accept that species as a prairie bird (18). Many common birds around this city are species that “live in tree and shrubland: house wrens, flickers, least flycatchers, orioles. These are all wonderful creatures worthy of anyone’s attention, but they are the common woodland species you can find almost anywhere in the populated regions of North America,” Herriot writes. “The birds that are distinctive in this part of the continent, having come to their place in the sun along with the buffalo and the grasshopper,” require grass, not trees (22).
But that grass is almost gone: a recent study suggests less than 14% of the original grassland of southern Saskatchewan remains (Sawatsky). Herriot describes “[t]he unparalleled destruction” that has come to the world of grassland birds since the arrival of Settlers in the 1880s:
When I am on a jet flying over the prairie, I search for fragments of grassland below and try to extrapolate them into the original horizon-to-horizon world of grass that once covered the plains. I wish away all the scars and uniformity of the drawn-and-quartered farm landscape and try to imagine flying north like a hawk in spring over the whole of the Great Plains in their pre-settlement splendour. High enough to view thousands of square miles at a glimpse, the journey begins above the Gulf Coast grasslands of Texas, then takes in the oak savannah of hill country north of San Antonio. Next comes the tallgrass of Oklahoma and Kansas, the bisected plateaus of Nebraska, the drier plains and badlands of the Dakotas, the vast wheat grass and June grass prairie drained by the Missouri, the Oldman, the Saskatchewan, and the Qu’Appelle Rivers, and finally the northern fescue prairie on the flanks of the Peace River Valley. The vista below unfurls in softly shaded wrinkles, folds, and dimples that shift without visible boundaries from one texture or colour to another in an impossibly complex and subtly brocaded fabric. But more than fabric, the earth shimmers and vibrates like something lit from the inside, as erotic and radiant as any living thing. (22-23)
That sea of grass now exists in fragments. The largest fragments are in the southwestern part of the province, “in big ranches, community pastures, and conservation land,” Herriot writes (23). The land where Herriot shares a country property with several other families, south of Indian Head, is on the borderland between two eco-regions—aspen parkland and moist mixed-grass prairie—“on the rim of the Great Plains,” and that is where he conducts much, but not all, of his birdwatching research (23). It is, he writes, “a good place to be: in the shifting, indeterminate territory that eases us out of the trees and into the dream of a grassland that is all but forgotten, and awaiting its chance to return” (24). The survival of grassland birds will depend on that dream becoming a reality—among other things.
The boundaries of grassland ecosystems are “particularly mobile,” growing and shrinking as woody species encroach on the grass, and as fire pushes them back. Herriot imagines an invisible weaver using “four primary tools” to make the grassland’s tapestry: “soil variability, climate, grazing, and fire” (25). Soil quality differs from place to place, “according to geological history, drainage, elevation, parent material, and so on, but it takes centuries to change significantly in any one location” (25). Climate—precipitation and temperature—moves within a certain range (25): until the onset of anthropogenic climate change, that is. Those factors are relatively stable. However, before Settlers arrived here, “the remaining two factors—grazing and fire—responded to opportunities presented by weather and soil in creating brief disturbances at random intervals. Fire and grazing events in turn fostered a complex mosaic of irregularly shaped patches of various grassland habitats” (25-26). Those various habitats became “ecological niches in large and small patches, determining which creatures would live where for this or that season” (26). “The spirit of the plains, its air of motion and freedom, has always depended upon this dance choreographed by the rhythms of earth, weather, fire, and buffalo,” he continues (26).
Those disturbances are necessary if grassland is to remain healthy. Herriot describes standing “next to a pile of lichen-covered boulders on a little knoll on the neighbour’s pasture south of our place” (35). Those boulders are the remnants of buffalo drive lanes, one of the ways that Indigenous people hunted bison (35). The land has never been ploughed, “but without the disturbance patterns that buffalo and fire provide, weeds and brushy vegetation have moved in and are taking over large patches” (35). That invasion makes this particular prairie remnant unsuitable for most species of grassland birds. Nevertheless, Herriot continues,
While it is sadly diminished and more difficult to see today without the roaming herds and wildfire, the life of grasslands from season to season and from macro-habitat to micro-habitat retains something of its original spirit, the old dance of grass and earth, vagrant and free as the clouds passing overhead. It moves through the air in the flight and song of the birds that still dwell within the graces of whatever comes on the wind. (36)
The language here is worth noting: Herriot’s use of words like “spirit” and “graces” is a sign of the way he understands the grasslands as a sacred space.
But even without grazing and fire, the grassland continues to provide habitat for its birds. Herriot describes reports he has received about the dickcissel, a grassland songbird that suddenly began to appear in Saskatchewan in greater numbers than before. “The miracle of the dickcissel is that it has adapted enough to survive the loss of the prairie it loved best and has figured out how to use other kinds of grass, native and introduced,” he writes (46). Because the dickcissel lacks any attachment to the places where it was bred, it “testifies to the liberty at the heart of grassland ecology” (46). “When. fire and bison were still choreographing the dance, dickcissels may have arrived here on the northern plains in years when drought, grazing, or fire in the core of their range south of the forty-ninth parallel forced them to wander in search of taller grass,” Herriot suggests (46). The appeared here during the droughts of the 1930s, for instance. But in 2006, after heavy spring rains produced “thigh-high alfalfa,” these birds were seen in greater numbers, particularly in southeastern Saskatchewan, than ever before. “What are these birds trying to tell us?” Herriot wonders. “With many species thinning out and disappearing from apparently suitable habitat across the northern plains, believing in the restorative powers of prairie requires a faith that is getting more difficult to make as the years go by. Then we get a summer of dickcissels, prairie evangelists canvassing for believers” (47). Those birds are doing their best “to show us that the dance is not over yet” (47).
Herriot cites the eco-philosopher David Abram’s book The Spell of the Sensuous to suggest that becoming aware of birds, “life that moves in the invisible realm of air,” might have been “the very exercise that led to human consciousness” (52). “Though it is articulated here in fresh prose, this kind of philosophy is what we expect from the Aboriginal peoples who came into their identity within the open, airy landscapes of the west,” he continues. “The surprise in Abram’s account comes when he goes on to demonstrate that deep in our own religious traditions there is a similar reverence for the air, though lately it has been reduced to the symbolic or merely metaphorical” (52). The sources of words like spirit, psyche, soul, anima, and atmosphere, Abrams argues, suggest that even for our civilization “the air, in breath and holy wind, has been the very medium of our interconnectedness and the source of our awareness” (52). “Is it possible that we first became aware of that communion”—that interconnectedness—“by seeing it manifest in the creatures that live in the air and give it a voice?” he asks (53). Birds, Herriot contends,
put flesh upon, incarnate the soul of the land they inhabit, bringing it to our senses in ways that mammals, insects, or reptiles cannot match. Remove the forest’s warblers, thrushes, and owls, and the truth of what a forest is, and the wisdom it offers is rendered insensible. In the presence of birds, something in Creation keeps us back from the brink, mindful of a spirit that is ascendant and yet available to our ears and eyes. What happens to a civilization that loses contact with birds? Will we forget what we ever meant by soul and mindfulness? (53)
He considers flight itself, but more importantly, flightsong—“the spiralling notes of a pipet three hundred feet into the sky, the rapid windchimes of longspurs fluttering above their brooding mates”—which, like all music, “bypasses our reasoned categories and comparisons and plays directly to the heart, where desire and imagination offer the deeper witness that makes us human” (54). Flightsong is also known as “skylarking,” and Herriot recalls his first experience standing in a pasture full of skylarking birds. Above the songs of the Baird’s sparrows and meadowlarks, “the swirling song of Sprague’s pipits fell to the earth in streams. I lay in the grass beneath a sky that was inhaling and exhaling song” (55). Herriot was “immersed in sound more than hearing it, powerless to name the truth it bore” (55). “Consider the birds of the air,” he writes:
They fly over the prairie, bearing messages to the Creator, and promises to all creatures below. Just now, their voices hand briefly on the wind, each song a passing testimony to the sacramental presence that rises and falls in every living thing. Should we ever set aside our sowing and reaping long enough to listen, might we remember that we too share in the spirit that animates all life? And, what is more, that we are bound by its daily promises? (56)
The spirituality here, the sense of the land as sacred, might have its roots in Christianity, but it seems (to me) broad enough to encompass other faiths, and, more importantly, to suggest that Herriot’s love of the land is perhaps close to that expressed by Indigenous peoples.
Herriot is not alone in his efforts to build relationships with birds. As the host of the local CBC Radio One show Birdline, he hears stories of people who love the birds that live beside them. One fellow tells Herriot that if the barn swallows who share his workshop disappeared, he would miss their friendship (66). But grassland birds have a harder time coexisting with humans. It would be easy to give up on those species, Herriot writes, to “write them off as the collateral damage of our civilization’s blitzkrieg advance” (68). But every spring, he is “amazed that the birds themselves have not given up. They come back, set up on a patch of grassland, sing, court, build nests, lay eggs—even if the grass is all wrong, the grasshoppers are scarce, and there isn’t the right kind of cover to protect nestlings from predators. They fail, re-nest, fail again, then leave for the winter” (68-69). For Herriot, the birds express the same thing farmers always say: “Next year, next year. There is always next year” (69). In this, he sees the power of writer Wallace Stegner’s adaptation of Jesus’s statement that if a sparrow falls to the ground, God knows and cares about it (69). “The power of Stegner’s adaptation is in the shift it makes from God to land,” Herriot writes. “Not only God, but the land itself keeps watch, keeps faith—for in prairie we sense an abiding awareness and attention that may be more obscure in other landscapes. God knows the sparrow. The land knows the sparrow. The trick of remaining here is to become a people who know the sparrow too, who will not give up on creatures who ask only for a place in the grass” (69).
But most of us don’t know about those creatures, let alone care about them, and their numbers are plummeting. Herriot thinks about William Spreadborough, a naturalist who travelled with naturalist-explorer John Macoun’s 1880 expedition across the northern plains. Spreadborough and Macoun kept notes about the vegetation and birds they saw. Their assignment, Herriot notes, “was to determine once and for all whether the grasslands between the forty-ninth parallel and what was then known as ‘the fertile belt’ (a band running south of the forest roughly from the North Saskatchewan River in Alberta to what is today southwestern Manitoba) were suitable for farming and settlement” (79). With his birding mentors, Stuart and Mary Houston, Herriot travelled the route Macoun and Spreadborough took through Saskatchewan. But even before they departed, a comparison of the range of species Spreadborough recorded, and the ones Herriot could see on the pastures where he goes to see and hear birds, was sobering:
I was sure that a patch that size would still be holding onto a relatively healthy bird community. After three mornings of good weather for birdsong, though, I had to face the truth: the pastures had a few Baird’s, savannah, and grasshopper sparrows, two or three pair of upland sandpipers, some meadowlarks and horned larks, and a handful of Sprague’s pipits. Not a single longspur, no burrowing owls, long-billed curlews, or shrikes. Once again, the birds that I depended on for a sense of home were losing their grip on the land. (80)
Following Macoun’s trail, which ran further south, closer to the birds’ breeding ranges, could take him “to grasslands where there were better numbers,” but he wanted to know why the birds closer to home were suffering (80). “On the trail of Macoun there would be the past, with its abundance and the irrevocable decision to hand the prairie over to ploughmen,” he writes. “But there would also be the present: human and ecological communities damaged by our engagement with the land, and farmers and biologists trying to make sense of it all. Looming over every fragment of wild grass, there would be a future no one talks about, a prairie where no birds sing” (80). Much of the second part of Grass, Sky, Song follows Herriot and the Houstons on their journey.
Herriot has a sense of the miraculousness of these birds. Sprague’s pipits, for instance, make a sound that resembles what we might imagine a UFO would make as it flies—or, rather, plummets: “A male pipit comes to earth in a reckless freefall, an all-out wings-folded dive that must be seen to be believed” (86). The bird will fall hundreds of feet through the air, “plummeting toward the land in utter surrender to gravity,” and then, “at the last second, the pipit suddenly opens its wings, braking on the air and arcing gracefully to disappear into a tussock of spear grass” (86). “From bird to stone to bird again in a long line with a J-hook at the bottom, the pipit in this way stitches heaven and earth,” Herriot writes, “marking ever so lightly its small claim upon sky and grass” (86). Naturalists like Macoun and Spreadborough tended to miss these birds, though, because they are difficult to see (89-90). It wasn’t until a later expedition, in 1894, that they finally identified the bird making the strange noise they had been hearing (90). “All things considered, Macoun’s inability to see or hear the pipit is more symbolic than anything else,” Herriot writes. “He was, quite literally, the last naturalist to see the northern prairie as an uninterrupted sea of grass. Upon his return east, his recommendations sealed its fate, bringing the railway to the south and with it the ploughmen who began tearing at the ancient sod” (90).
Settlement had a dramatic and immediate effect on grassland birds. A.C. Bent, a field naturalist who travelled through southwestern Saskatchewan in 1905 and 1906 to study the area’s birds, noted that even during the two years of his study “‘the change was so striking as to indicate the passing away within the near future of nearly all the great breeding resorts of this interesting region’” (qtd. 88-89). The reason was cultivation—the ploughing under of the grassland by Settlers, and the conversion of that grassland to cereal agriculture—which was destroying the birds’ breeding grounds (89). Herriot imagines what might have been if Macoun had, “by some miracle seen the intrinsic value of vast stretches of natural grassland, had he even recommended it be used only as cattle pasture,” but he knows that “sooner or later the pressure to grow grain on every arable piece of land would have had its way” (90-91). Macoun, he continues, “was merely the instrument of a particular moment in history ordained by choices our civilization made long ago in taking up the plough” (91).
Herriot notes that he is not alone in his apprehension of the grassland as a place of sacred mystery. Ornithologist Stephen Davis, for instance, who works at the bird sanctuary at the northern end of Last Mountain Lake, reminds Herriot of grasshopper biologist Stephen Lockwood, who “talks about the need for reverence in his field research, and says that the prairie brings him to a kind of prayerfulness, in which he is forever petitioning for a question worthy of his life’s work” (92). I was moved by Herriot’s description of Lockwood’s essay, and I ordered it through interlibrary loan. It begins with a surprising statement: “I converse with grasshoppers” (Lockwood 14). Using recordings of grasshoppers, he would listen for their response “to decades of our blanketing the grasslands with broad-spectrum insecticides” (Lockwood 14). In doing so, Lockwood is developing a relationship of respect with these insects, typically reviled by farmers. “For an ecologist to relate to a prairie as a living being worthy of deep respect is to push the limits of modern science,” Lockwood admits. “I surely risk my professional credibility when I claim that I hear the creatures of the grasslands. Their speaking is neither literal nor metaphorical, but it is true in a way that transcends mere sensation and abstraction, reaching through and beyond the objective facts of ecology” (14). Moreover, Lockwood claims that he converses not only with grasshoppers but also with “the soil, grasses, and birds. I speak to the prairie and God answers. Well, sort of” (14). “The notion of transcendent ecology implies a complex relationship with the divine that can be troubling for both conventional science and theology,” Lockwood admits (14). He cites William James’s notion of divinity “as that which is enveloping and real, to which the individual responds solemnly and tenderly” (15). There’s another book I’m going to have to read, I think.
Lockwood suggests that “the hazards of excluding the divine from the scientific method are grave indeed,” and that by not “infusing scientific inquiry with meaning, we risk continued moral failure” (15). “For science to become a moral enterprise, it must subordinate itself to concerns that are larger than its own, concerns that cannot be heard without extending beyond its own limits of rationalism,” Lockwood continues. “If I can truly perceive biotic communities (including farms) as enveloping and real, if I can respond to ecosystems (including cities) with solemnity and tenderness, then my science is infused with the divine” (15). Practicing ecology might be a way of discovering “a gateway to the divine,” in which the ecologist “is guided—whether knowingly or unconsciously—into a dissolution of the self, of permanence, of separateness from the world” (16-17). “Ecological love is as much an act of humility as affection,” according to Lockwood:
The ecologist becomes mindfully connected to powers that shall never be comprehended or controlled. Like the mind of a lover, a grassland is complex beyond our capacity to imagine, let alone understand. Lovers and lands are forever mysterious, but they can be engaged and explored, touched and tended. We can enter into dialogue, find the right questions to ask, and thereby come to know more of both them and ourselves. (17)
But the love Lockwood feels is perhaps more than the analogy of a physical lover reveals, although he admits to having a passion for grasshoppers (19). “Upon returning to the grasslands after a winter of windchill and whiteness, I find myself engaged in a prayer of adoration,” he writes. “Walking through the brief blush of green in late May, searching fervently for early hatching of grasshoppers in order to delineate our field sites, it feels good to stop and be still. There is a rightness in lapsing into moments of hushed reverence, becoming keenly aware of the Place” (17). He experiences both ecstasy and objectivity in his work, and argues that “good science and deep prayer become a matter of seeing the essence of the world” (17). Lockwood describes himself as “a seminarian of the grasslands” (19).
For Herriot, scientists like Davis and Lockwood are like “the mendicants of old”: “their abbey is in the open air,” and they “beg questions not food, arming themselves to tend the mysteries of soil and leaf, grasshopper and bird” (92). Each question, he continues, “if it is worthy, is like a prayer, a respectful inquiry into a unity that will never yield enough answers to be completely possessed in the mind” (92). Of course, as a natural historian and avocational ornithologist, Herriot is one of those mendicants, I think; Grass, Sky, Song is the result of that kind of “respectful inquiry.” But along with that respect comes complicity, “for the millions of birds we sacrifice every year in the New World”:
in the south, where the coffee and banana plantations destroy millions of acres of rainforest, where slash-and-burn agriculture in the Amazon basin trades in the world’s richest avifauna for a few years of cheap beef, where the pampas of Patagonia are ploughed under and poisoned with pesticides long banned in northern nations; and here in Canada and the United States, where we do nothing to halt the commerce that drives destruction in the south, and where we continue to extract energy and resources, build our cities, and grow our food in ways that destroy marshes, grasslands, meadows, and forests. (96)
That destruction can be seen in the differences between the numbers of birds Spreadborough recorded and those Herriot sees. For instance, Spreadborough suggested that the chestnut-collared longspur was one of the most common birds around Indian Head, where Herriot’s country property is located; there are none living there today. The same is true of McCown’s longspurs, ferruginous hawks (now a threatened species in Canada), long-billed curlews, loggerhead shrikes, and burrowing owls (an endangered species) (101). “Other more resilient grassland species hang on for the time being,” he writes: Baird’s sparrows, grasshopper sparrows, Sprague’s pipits, Swainson’s hawks, bobolinks, short-eared owls, sharp-tailed grouse, horned larks, western meadowlarks, and upland sandpipers can still be found on the pastures south of Indian Head, “but roughly half of the grassland species that were common here in Spreadborough’s time have been extirpated from the area” (101-02). “We may find it hard to imagine the abundance of bird life that greeted prairie naturalists like Spreadborough—the fullness of song reigning over long miles of grass—but we are heading for a day when it will be hard for anyone to imagine that prairie skies were ever anything but silent,” he writes (102).
That vision of the future leads to the question of whether there is any hope. “By ‘hope’ most seem to mean the calculated odds of a particular strategy of program succeeding, as though we need to know whether our efforts will be rewarded before we commit ourselves to anything,” Herriot suggests. “This is a tawdry kind of hope masking a wider despair that keeps us mired in the status quo, averting our eyes form the carnage all around, shrugging off responsibility with a sighing, ‘Well, what can you do?’” (102). However, another kind of hope exists, “one that sees things as they are”:
It bears witness to the complicity encompassing not only the way we feed and house our families, how we travel and make a living, but the whole history of our civilization’s engagement with the landscape—sees all of it and then, without knowing outcomes, gets down to the good work of setting things back to right.
In the community of bird conservationists you will sometimes meet people who live out this hope, enacting an altogether unjustifiable faith by lending their labour to study and advocacy that come with no guarantee of success. Over the years of work they become creatures as rare and astonishing as the ones they serve. (102)
For Herriot, his friends Stuart and Mary Houston are examples of such people. Would that there more more like them; would that the rest of us could overcome the despair that books like this one tend to engender, despite Herriot’s emphasis on hope, on the argument that the future he imagines has not yet arrived.
Macoun’s journey across the prairie took place 60 years after naturalist John Richardson’s similar trek. “In that interval the great bison multitudes had been reduced to a few scattered herds, which were to disappear entirely by 1890,” he writes. “[T]he loss of the prairie’s largest animal, still fresh in Macoun’s time, was written in every landscape” he and the Houstons passed through in 2005 (109). Herriot notes that Macoun’s journey took place in unusually wet years, while Captain John Palliser’s 1857 expedition took place during a dry decade and led him to the conclusion that the land was unfarmable (109). Macoun was determined to prove Palliser wrong, and he “maintained that the precipitation was adequate and the soil fertile” (109-10). The result was the destruction—or perhaps near destruction—of the grassland ecosystem. As a result, populations of grassland birds have been in decline for more than 50 years, since the first Breeding Bird Survey took place in 1966 (116-17). Herriot describes the graphs published on the BBS website, each one showing a line sloping downwards from left to right. “In the simplifying logic of a graph, any downward slope points towards a future zero, but with certain species that future appears to be shockingly imminent,” he writes (117). “For a naturalist faced with the diminishing beauty of a beloved world, the job of seeing does not end with counting one bird instead of twenty,” he argues. “Seeing means opening your eyes to witness the mechanism behind the horror; lifting the veil of our myths—from blaming to denial to despair—long enough to glimpse the disfigurement and decay for what it is” (119).
What is causing populations of grassland birds to fall so dramatically? Biologists don’t know. It can’t be habitat loss, because a lot of grassland was destroyed before the BBS counts began. “We continued to have some land conversion [ploughing native grassland] in the seventies and eighties, but not enough to account for the changes in bird population we’re seeing,” Davis told Herriot. “Like anything else in ecology, it’s probably a number of interrelated factors contributing to the decline” (125). Other bird researchers told Herriot the same thing:
bird decline is accelerating even though habitat loss has slowed down. No single factor is responsible. It’s a combination of the original habitat loss, abetted by improper grazing and management, including fire suppression, which brings on invasive plant species and shrubby growth. Then you can throw into the mix a few other factors: toxins in the environment, West Nile virus, urban sprawl, damage caused by energy-extraction industries, and the compounding effect of drought brought on by global climate change. Most if not all of these destructive forces are also present where grassland birds winter in the southern states, Mexico, and the South American grasslands. (125-26)
I was surprised by Herriot’s inclusion of West Nile virus in this list, but it may be an important factor in the decline of sage grouse populations (206).
“The steep declines we see now may be ripples echoing from that primary catastrophe”—the destruction of most of the grassland when Settlers arrived (127). The result is a “barely functioning environment that has become unnaturally vulnerable to local and short-term weather events: a late-spring snowstorm, drought, flood” (127). Fragmented habitats have powerful effects on birds (127-29). Grassland birds “need enough habitat to maintain a neighbourhood and, what’s more, they need enough neighbours to provide a functioning community in which pair formation and mate choice can foster a healthy, stable population” (130). A fragmented habitat, in which pieces of remaining grassland have a “high ratio of edge to interior,” will give an advantage to predators, “but when a community of longspurs has dwindled down to a lone male singing out to the sky, predation, food supply, disease, climate, and all the other limiting factors that play into population dynamics of grassland birds do not tell the whole story,” Herriot writes. “The very suddenness of the collapse may simply be a matter of females giving up on the pasture and moving out to a place with a larger population of males to choose from” (130). As that happens, population declines will accelerate (130). “That may sound bleak,” Herriot admits, “but discovering the reason why birds disappear from seemingly suitable habitat is a vital step toward knowing which fragments are the most important to conserve, as well as what must be done to restore, expand, and maintain the right mix of habitat within and between fragments so that a diversity of bird communities will be able to thrive” (130).
Recent innovations in farming which “depend on heavy herbicide use and larger machinery,” are making the situation worse (135). “These new weed control and seeding techniques, which now dominate conventional agriculture on the prairie, are having an indirect but very real effect upon a guild of grassland birds that until recently were thriving on and around cultivated farmland,” Herriot writes (135). Those species, more adaptive than others “and therefore able to subsist in the weedy margins of cropland,” include some waterfowl and raptors, and songbirds like the barn swallow, horned lark, savannah sparrow, western meadowlark, and bobolink; populations of all of these species have been in precipitous decline since 1980 (135-36). Stuart Houston told Herriot that the changes in farming he has seen during his long life—“the shift from human-scaled farming to industrialized agribusiness, with the labour of people and animals supplanted entirely by petrochemical-intensive machinery, fertilizer, and insect and weed control”—are “driving farmland birds from the prairie” (136). Road allowances—those sixty-six-foot-wide strips of land where roads would go if they were ever constructed—used to be left to grass, and meadowlarks and other species would be left with places to feed and nest as a result. “But now, with the cost-price squeeze farmers are under, they need to maximize and seed every inch of land so even the road allowances are under crop,” Houston stated. “And where there are roads on an allowance, the crop goes right to the edge of the road” (136). Practices like zero-tillage, which rely on herbicides and applications of artificial sources of nitrogen such as anhydrous ammonia, allow farmers to improve the fertility and productivity of their land “without having to rest it as summerfallow or keep animals for manure” (137). But the specialized equipment needed for zero-tillage means farmers have to crop several sections of land. The expenses involved—new machinery, fuel and chemicals, and land—“force more farmers out of business every year and drive those who remain on the land to increase the scale and ‘efficiency’ of their operations” (139). “These pressures lead to further changes in farming methods that, taken together with continuous cropping, are creating a landscape that is becoming hostile to any life form that does not contribute directly to the bottom line,” Herriot notes (139).
“Meanwhile, a lot of bird habitat on the edges of fields, aspen bluffs, sloughs, and rocky hilltops is being ploughed under in the efficiency compromise that happens when you have to manoeuvre large equipment around obstacles,” he continues. “Conservationists shake their heads when they see a farmer bulldozing bush, filling a slough, or levelling a grassy ridge, but the economics of large-scale grain farming have turned any natural land in the path of machinery into a drain on cash” (140). Together, all of these practices are “a net loss for wildlife despite the benefits they may bring in soil and water retention and in providing nesting cover for a few ducks,” and “these new agricultural practices are eliminating some of the last vestiges of habitat within and around cropland” (141). In addition, nobody really knows what the effects of herbicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers might be on the soil—on “the small living things it contains, the microbes that everything else depends on”—or “the insects and other creatures the next level up” (141). Glyphosate herbicides in particular have toxic effects on soil microbiology (141-42). “It may be decades before we know what glyphosate and other chemicals are doing to the overall health of the prairie, but I know what I have seen as the land around Regina has been given over to zero-till practices,” Herriot writes. “Yes, it is ‘merely anecdotal,’ but where I once saw meadowlarks and vesper sparrows on the edges of every field and McCown’s longspurs and horned larks singing above black summerfallow, the land today is alarmingly empty and silent” (142).
All of this constitutes what an ornithologist working for the provincial government once described to Herriot as “‘a pathology in the landscape’” (142):
Not naming or even describing that pathology in any way keeps the peace in a place where agriculture provides the founding myth of our very entitlement to the land. That foundation spans the moral divide between what farmers want to do (grow food and make a living) and how they do it (with industrial technologies, methods, and marketing systems), convincing them that they have a responsibility to “feed the world,” that the land is properly to be used as its owner sees fit, and that nature is an obstacle, or at best a fringe benefit of farm life. (142-43)
“Hidden by that founding myth, a malignancy threatens the very wholeness and health of the prairie,” Herriot continues. “Its causes are multiple and masked by a complex interplay that compounds their effect. No one can say conclusively how it operates, and the most insidious factor in the pathology is also the most difficult to bring into the light of day” (143).
The word “malignancy” is deliberate, because the next chapter discusses Herriot’s wife Karen’s experience with breast cancer, an illness she shared with many farm women. The farmers in the hospital waiting room talked about the insecticides they were using to kill pests in their fields; the women were wondering about the effects of all of those chemicals. “I felt like I was watching a badly written docudrama on pesticides and cancer,” Herriot recalls. “There were the two sides in front of me: the men who believe the chemicals are harmless and the women who are not so sure. I decided I was not so sure, either” (152).
The freefall in the populations of grassland birds, Herriot continues, began after 1987. The 1980s were a bad time for farming on the prairie, a time of low prices and drought. In 1985, plagues of grasshoppers devastated grain crops. The response: spraying pesticides. “It was 1987 before I heard anyone suggest that burrowing owls and perhaps other birds were being hurt by grasshopper sprays that were popular at the time,” he remembers. “Burrowing owls, like sage grouse and loggerhead shrikes, eat larger grasshoppers and, in particular, feed their young a lot of grasshoppers” (155). The pesticides that farmers used in their war against the grasshoppers, Herriot suggests, were part of a war on “nature itself” (155). Provincial governments provided rebates to help farmers poison grasshoppers. In Saskatchewan, the provincial minister of agriculture assured his citizens that almost every inch of public land would be sprayed with grasshopper poison, including highways, ditches, railway rights-of-way, road allowances, and provincially operated community pastures (156). Farmers sprayed places that had nothing to do with crop production, such as pastures, on the grounds that they were breeding grounds for grasshoppers (156).
“As I read through the history of the grasshopper outbreak and the accounts of pastures being sprayed—some entirely, others only at the margins—I thought about the pipits, sparrows, longspurs, owls, and shrikes using that land and feeding tainted grasshoppers to their nestlings,” Herriot writes (157). One of the most popular grasshopper poisons was carbofuran, a powerful neurotoxin (157). “A quarter teaspoon of the liquid form is enough to kill a human being,” he notes; “a single grain of the granular form will kill a songbird” (157). The granules of carbofuran are the same size as the grit birds swallow to help with their digestion (157). A document prepared for Agriculture Canada reported that a single cornfield in Utah was treated with carbofuran; researchers found 479 dead horned larks in those 160 acres, and “[t]he median number of granules in the birds’ gizzards was two” (158). That field, Herriot notes, was just one “out of the millions of acres of canola on the northern Great Plains treated with carbofuran to protect against flea beetles—in addition to the millions of acres treated to kill grasshoppers” (158). “When Canada’s Pesticide Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) finally got around to searching for carcasses on sample fields and extrapolating the results, the estimated annual kill of songbirds on prairie farms was staggering,” he continues—as many as one million birds every year (158). Meanwhile the liquid form of carbofuran “was killing birds and reducing nest success throughout the region” (158).
Granular carbofuran was finally phased out in the 1990s, and the liquid form was banned for some but not all applications (159). Supplies remain on farmers’ shelves, though, in case the grasshoppers return—not surprisingly, “there has not been a major outbreak since the 1980s” (159). “Meanwhile, other highly toxic insecticides remain on the market, registered by the very American and Canadian agencies that originally approved carbofuran despite the manufacturer’s own supervised field trials in which at least forty-five species of birds died,” Herriot writes (159). One chemical, terbufos, is half as lethal as carbofuran, which means that only half of birds die after ingesting a single grain of that poison (159). “Eating two grains of terbufos evens the score, yet until 2004 it remained a registered pesticide legal for use on canola where migrating flocks of longspurs, horned larks, and sparrows congregate to feed in spring,” he points out (159). In addition, “songbirds often eat the small canola seed itself, which, until recently, was treated with another powerful chemical, lindane,” an “older, very persistent toxin that has made its way around the globe by travelling in the atmosphere. It can now be found in water in the remotest regions of the Arctic. It occurs in everything form polar bear fat to human breast milk, and has been linked to breast cancer” (159-60). Lindane was deregistered in Canada as a treatment for canola seed in 2001, but the manufacturer, Crompton Corporation, appealed (160). Herriot notes that it took almost 20 years to get carbofuran partially deregistered, partly because the PMRA and other agencies exist to assist the processes of conventional agriculture—but they aren’t alone in their responsibility: “For every scientist who says he is just doing his research, there are hundreds of farmers who will say they are just growing food, and millions of consumers who will say they are just buying and eating it” (161). “I thought again about the risk-benefit trade-off that secures our modern comforts, the gamble we forget but which comes to mind whenever someone is diagnosed with cancer,” Herriot continues. “I began to feel for the first time that the gamble is not mine to make or unmake on my own. In effect, government agencies are quietly rolling the dice on my behalf, justifying the risk of cancer and the killing of birds and other creatures to ensure that high-yield agriculture continues on its inexorable path” (161).
That form of agriculture exists to make sure that food prices are low: “This is the moral compromise that since World War II has kept us going to the supermarket and the restaurant instead of to the garden or the cold room. If it has brought us any security, it is the dubious sense of ease that goes with having been liberated from our responsibility for the quality of our engagement with the earth” (162). Herriot notes that one document he discovered calculated crop losses and additional costs to farmers of $17 million per year if farmers were prevented from using carbofuran (163). Not surprisingly, the millions of birds killed by the pesticide were not assigned a dollar value (163); they were mere externalities, as I learned in my first-year economics course. “I felt as if I had been fogged by an elaborate smokescreen of reasonability that showed costs and benefits being carefully balanced, but obscured the cold truth no one wants to face,” Herriot writes: “specifically, that human beings receive the benefits by enjoying relatively cheap food grown by a few farmers who do the dirty work on our behalf, while the real costs are borne entirely by the wild creatures we keep out of sight and out of mind” (163). He admits that he is one of those consumers who depends “on industrialized systems to grow, process, package, and deliver much of my food, taking advantage of the big machine that keeps agricultural decision making in the boardrooms and laboratories of people who can legitimately claim to be serving the public interest by ensuring food systems security” (164). However, he continues, “[b]eyond the smokescreen of pesticide review, we all have to answer for the agriculture that is destroying the grasslands of this continent and contaminating our food” (164). Without that kind of agriculture, more of us “would have to be willing to leave the city to grow food” (165).
The near extinction of burrowing owls is one of the legacies of the use of carbofuran. “Before the crash in the 1990s, the level plains south of Moose Jaw and southwest of Regina still had good numbers of burrowing owls in colonies ranging from two to twenty-five pairs each,” he recalls (165). Then they disappeared. During his 2005 trip with the Houstons, Herriot learned that much of the land where the burrowing owls had nested had been cultivated and planted to crops. Despite programs intended to facilitate their return, they appeared to be gone for good. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a book about the effects on birds of one particular pesticide, DDT, was published in 1962, the year before I was born. We seem to have taken the wrong lesson from that book: not that pesticides are destructive and kill forms of life other than those they are aimed at, but that DDT itself was the problem. Indeed, DDT was a problem, but so are carbofuran, lindane, and the rest of the horrors Herriot describes in Grass, Sky, Song.
One retired geologist who has been surveying birds on a BBS route told Herriot that the disappearance of grassland birds might just be part of the planet’s sixth extinction. “Geologists take the long view,” he told Herriot. “The earth has had big extinctions before. This could be another one. No one knows for sure” (171). “I had been hoping for a more encouraging response, but I appreciated his candour,” Herriot writes. “At least he is out there looking and listening. There are naturalists on the prairie who would rather avoid the unpleasantness of grassland bird decline altogether. After a few depressing outings at increasingly silent pastures, birdwatchers just stop going. There is more to see in the city with its artificial woodlands and wetlands” (171).
Herriot talked to an entomologist, Dan Johnson, who is the Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Grassland Ecosystems at the University of Lethbridge. He pointed out that there are many species of grasshoppers, many of which don’t affect crops, and noted that he was trying to educate farmers to distinguish between destructive and benign grasshoppers (172). After a career at Agriculture Canada, Johnson felt freer in a university setting, but it was difficult to get funding for his research: “Agribusiness is not interested in studying the effects of farming on grassland ecologies, and Agriculture Canada is reluctant to sponsor any program not endorsed by the industry” (173). Johnson told Herriot, however, that he has been able to study the way pesticides affect “non-target species,” such as grassland birds (174). “This got my attention,” Herriot writes, “along with some research he has been doing on the ‘sublethal’ and indirect effects of pesticides”:
For many years I have been hearing from the anti-pesticide lobby that one of the great shortcomings of the PMRA and its American counterpart in the Environmental Protection Agency is that when they study the risks of a pesticide, they restrict themselves entirely to direct and lethal effects. If sixty-three sage grouse die in a small Idaho alfalfa field sprayed with dimethoate, as they did in 1986, the kill gets duly noted. Meanwhile, several hundred more sage grouse and other animals in the area may fail to breed successfully; their young may die at unusually high rates before fledging; both young and adults may become more vulnerable to predators for a period; they may experience a serious disruption in their endocrine and immune systems; and all of these effects may be compounded by the chemical’s conjunction with other toxins in the environment. Some or all of this may happen, but no one notices. Long-term population decay caused by pesticides is never even considered by the approving agencies, let alone studied. (174-75)
“There are reasons for this omission,” Herriot continues:
Sublethal effects and population decline from pesticide use are notoriously difficult to prove, especially with modern chemicals that break down faster than first-generation organophosphates such as DDT and dieldrin. Dan told me that a bird can die of poisoning but show no trace of the chemical that killed it, unless the carcass is found quickly. Even so, the dose required to kill is many times greater for the modern, fast-degrading poisons used today. (175)
And yet, it seems fair to assume that the chemicals currently on the market “have some serious sublethal effects on birds who eat contaminated insects or who are sprayed directly”:
Summer is short and the life of a prairie bird is unforgiving. One or two days of impairment—the typical dizziness, nausea, blurred vision, and shaking caused by these pesticides—might be enough to give a predator the upper hand or to chill neglected nestlings in cool or wet weather. (175)
In addition, we have no idea what long-term exposure to these chemicals will do to a bird’s endocrine function or immunology (175). We don’t know what such exposures do to humans, let alone other creatures:
No one is studying what happens to the health and reproductivity of birds after officially approved farm chemicals go through their bodies, which are already carrying a load of the same cocktail of DDT, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), lindane, benzene, and other persistent wonders of modern chemistry known to be causing tumours int he one species with access to cancer treatment facilities. (176)
Then there are the indirect effects of herbicides and pesticides, Herriot continues: “Eliminating the insects and weeds that birds use as food and habitat is the most obvious direct effect, but what are farm chemicals doing at the foundation of prairie life, where soil microbes create mysterious webs of interrelationship with invertebrate and plant communities that we cannot begin to comprehend?” (176).
If we are going “to choose technologies worthy of our goal of feeding ourselves without passing on undue costs to grassland communities,” we need to consider these sublethal and indirect effects (176). However, the results of the research have been inconclusive, partly because “there are limits to what science can say conclusively about cause and effect within chaotic systems” (176). “Science is good at proposing reductive, linear, cause-and-effect scenarios and at making predictions that can be tested under laboratory conditions,” Herriot writes. “Yet most scientists know that at some level this is all a charade. The actual, multi-dimensional mystery in which birds live, rear their young, and die is nothing like a laboratory, and the very act of eliminating factors guessed to be extraneous to the question at hand renders the results suspect” (176-77). Unlike a laboratory, “[e]cosystems are borderless, chaotic, and ultimately unfathomable” (177). “Do I want to rely entirely on technology for my wisdom, my judgment, my understanding of what it means to be alive?” Herriot asks. “Should I expect science on its own to regulate the relationships I believe to be holy—between the individual and the community, between the body and the earth, between creatures and the rest of Creation?” (178).
“Science provides some of the testimony, gathering the evidence of bird decline and examining the mechanisms of decay and dysfunction in a species’ population,” Herriot writes,
but if we choose a comfortable blindness over moral courage, the data, no matter how impressive, cannot make us see. Beneath the aspirations of biology, of all science, there is the power of a deeper way of knowing, a knowledge that has intuitive and moral dimensions too important to abandon merely because science is unable to provide incontrovertible evidence. Each of us knows that it is not good to kill creatures wantonly. Each of us knows that it is not good to pour poison on the land that feeds us. Any child can tell you these truths. (181).
“We have made this land and ourselves unhealthy, justifying immoral means—pesticides and other abuses of the earth—by pointing to the ends: high-yield agriculture, low-cost food, and the economic growth these offer,” he continues. “Questions worth the intelligence and time of our biologists and ecologists would fall out of the larger moral questions we have been avoiding as we push the prairie towards its own lethal-dose rating. How do we live within the limits of the prairie? What can we do to restore our health and the health of the land that welcomed our ancestors?” (181).
Herriot is not interested in assigning blame, however. After the Macoun trip, he recalls, “I had lost the knack for blaming the ‘agri-industrial complex’ and the comfort that comes with being able to point at something specific and say, ‘This is what is destroying the land’” (212-13). Instead of such misplaced certainty, he continues, “was the sad confusion of history, imperfectly recollected and interpreted, the inadequacy of science, and a hunger for ways of knowing that we are worthy of this land” (213). He recalls a visit to an abandoned homestead, where he thought about what drove those Settlers from the land, and the failure of the myths of settlement that have shaped the Settler imaginary (214). “Seven thousand years of living with the grassland and its creatures has been sacrificed to make way for a civilization that skins the earth alive,” he laments. “Like most people, I can only take small draughts of my anterior responsibility for that founding sacrifice, my ancestral connection to it, and my continuing benefit from it” (214-15). “In the end, the trail of our exploring and colonizing testifies that everything in nature that suffers from human agency is a victim of our desire to accuse the other and deflect blame from ourselves,” he continues (217). We blame nature, we blame the land, we blame each other—everything except ourselves: “The sooner we admit that we have all been living off the avails of the original violence done to these plains, the sooner we might begin to accept that we have to learn new ways of drawing life from a land where grass likes to grow” (217). I think that’s true, but that phrasing downplays the fact that part of that “original violence” was the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, who by and large have not profited from the destruction of the grassland, by Settlers, the way that Settlers have done. I know that Herriot is aware of this fact, and I’m not criticizing his desire to move from accusation to community, but I wonder how difficult that kind of move would prove to be. Indeed, as I read this book, I wondered why Indigenous peoples don’t express a more certain hatred for Settlers—not only for what we have done to them (residential schools, deliberate starvation, the Pass System, incarceration, the apprehension of children) as for what we have done to the land that sustained them for so many thousands of years.
Herriot believes that if we step away from blaming each other, we might discover “a humble re-entry into community and creation. There is a healing, gathering force in grassland, and in all natural landscapes, that can bring us together into a circle of shared responsibility for one another and for the health of other beings” (218). The land doesn’t require our management—in fact, it resists our attempts to manage it—but it asks “that we receive and honour it as an invitation to set aside our orientation toward death so that we might open ourselves to participate in the livelihood of this place. Were we ever to undergo such a transformation, imagine what might be achieve in us, breathed into us, quickened and declared in the life we draw from prairie” (218-19).
The last section of the book sets out to provide readers with some sense of hope that all is not lost. “I want to believe that if enough people are moved by the faithfulness of grassland birds, by the way they continue to follow the promptings in their blood to make more of ourselves, we might find ways to lay out a proper reception for them, to spread a banquet of grassland as near as possible to the original bounty prepared by the traditional masters: buffalo, fire, soil, and weather,” he writes. “It would begin with protecting all the different kinds of native grassland we have, restoring them to health, and then making room for a lot more grass, the closer to native the better” (229). Note the conditional phrasing of this desire; I could be wrong, but I sense a struggle between hope and despair in this part of the book. Herriot does point to efforts to protect and restore grassland: the Old Man on His Back Plateau in southwestern Saskatchewan (229), Grasslands National Park (230), the scientists working towards these goals (230-31), the Northern Mixed Grass Transboundary Conservation Initiative (231), the popularity of bison as food (232), the possibility that consumers might purchase grass-fed beef as a way of protecting grassland bird habitat (232). The growing importance of Indigenous people is another sign of hope, particularly if they are able “to bring something of the ethics, grounded wisdom, and reverence of their traditions into modern economics and agriculture,” which would “help us all to discern what kind of prairie we want to leave our children and grandchildren” (237). Some farmers in areas with lighter soils, he continues, are seeding cropland back to native grass, although rising grain prices would put a stop to that movement (and probably have) (238-39). Herriot acknowledges that there are considerable obstacles facing these possibilities, but suggests that “[t]he two sides, of opportunities on the one side and obstacles on the other, hang in a rough and uneasy balance that may shift in the coming years” (241).
One initiative he praises is the Longspur Prairie Bison and Beef cooperative, a group “made up of private landowners, consumers, livestock producers,” and the Carry-the-Kettle Nakoda First Nation, which is restoring grassland, in part through the efforts of people who join the coop and exchange labour for meat (251-53). The cooperative’s work gives Herriot hope. “To live in honest hope is to live well in your own body, in your family, in your community, and in the land that feeds you,” he writes. “It begins in sensuous contact with the world as you find it—whole and broken, familiar and strange, resilient and imperilled. From there, hope feeds advocacy, the passionate defence of the life beloved, and that experience inevitably leads to an encounter with the forces, inside others and yourself, that threaten to bring you crashing back to earth” (253-54). Hope can survive that fall “by joining itself to a wider forgiveness and becoming something more grounded,” he continues (254). “If I eat and take for the earth in ways that keep faith with it, I replenish myself and the earth in the same movement,” he concludes. “The truth of this harmony eludes us most days but lives within every small gesture of forbearance, generosity, and care, from the decision to eat healthy and local food to the farmer who sets aside his pesticides for the last time” (254). We need to become more like our prairie surroundings: “Listen. The grass accuses no one, the sky bears no grudge, and the song—forsaken, repudiated, still waiting to be received—is a timeless benediction welcoming us into a freedom, a community, and a landscape that may yet bring us home” (255).
I want to believe in the hope with which Herriot ends his book, although at the same time I find myself overwhelmed by the story he tells about carbofuran and other poisons and their effects, and I am prone, for good reasons and bad, to see darkness and futility where others see light and possibility. So I turn to a book I read, or at least started to read, a year ago, Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. “It’s important to say what hope is not,” Solnit writes: “it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction” (xiii). Instead, she says, “[t]he hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It’s also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings” (xiii-xiv). “Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act,” she contends. “When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists” (xiv).
Hope, Solnit continues, is “the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone” (xiv). She quotes the theologian Walter Brueggeman: “Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair” (qtd. xix). “It’s an extraordinary statement, one that reminds us that though hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past,” she states (xix). We can tell a story about incessant defeat and loss, or one about a golden age now lost, “or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story, one that has room for the best and worst, for atrocities and liberations, for grief and jubilation. A memory commensurate to the complexity fo the past and the whole cast of participants, a memory that includes our power, produces that forward-directed energy called hope” (xix). Amnesia, on the other hand, forgets the progress that has been made, the changes that have taken place (xix). “One of the essential aspects of depression is the sense that you will always be mired in this misery, that nothing can or will change,” she suggests. “There’s a public equivalent to private depression, a sense that the nation or the society rather than the individual is stuck. Things don’t always change for the better, but they change, and we can play a role in that change if we act. Which is where hope comes in , and memory, the collective memory we call history” (xix).
Perhaps I need to reread Solnit’s book, and to take the hope Herriot searches for in the last section of Grass, Sky, Song seriously. It’s hard to imagine, say, conventional agriculture moving away from its reliance on poison. But anything can happen. Two weeks ago, I would have said that it was impossible to imagine, for instance, the NFL saying that was wrong for it to refuse to allow players like Colin Kaepernick to protest, too, and that’s happened (“Colin Kaepernick”). Solnit’s point seems to be that the future is unwritten, and that hope is an acceptance of the possibilities that idea implies. I need to hold onto that, especially when I look at the destructions wrought by Settlers on this place and its inhabitants.
Works Cited
“Colin Kaepernick: How the NFL Made Its U-Turn.” BBC Sport, 6 June 2020. https://www.bbc.com/sport/american-football/52948942.
Herriot, Trevor. Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril and the World of Grassland Birds, HarperCollins, 2009.
Lockwood, Jeffrey. “Prayerful Science.” Earthlight: Journal for Ecological and Spiritual Living, no. 52, 2005, 14-19.
Sawatsky, Katy Doke. “The State of Native Prairie in Saskatchewan,” PrairieCommons.ca, 1 October 2018. http://www.prairiecommons.ca/?page_id=300.
Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, 3rd edition, Haymarket, 2016.
