THREE NATURAL HISTORY BLOGS

The original idea of the “weblog” (which became “blog”) was to provide a log of websites visited so as to remember before “bookmarks” or links were devised. That was before the design of web templates was made automatic enough for we non-programmers to just call up a provider and fill in the spaces. I think I was born to blog. I resist progress in terms of adding bells and whistles all the time, but as a method of “publishing” a 1,000 word essay every day, it is a boon and a miracle. I became used to writing columns long ago and then newsletters plus, of course, preaching every Sunday, and then in seminary mailing out a one-page essay about what was happening. Very helpful since I had a struggle at age forty, learning to think in that linear deductive way, history-based, biblio-justified.

But as a reader, I dearly and in particular love the blogs that include photos taken by the blogger. (There are not many who post videos except for Barrus and the boys.) I cherish Stephen Bodio's Querencia (http:stephenbodio.blogspot.com ) esp. since Cat Urbigkit has come aboard. The Bodios are farther south in the Southwest, but Cat is ranching in Wyoming, a closer ecology, and she has a clear-eyed camera besides all those beguiling dogs. The Bodio dogs are like racehorses, but the Urbigkit dogs are guard dogs, almost bears, with cuddly cubbie little babies. Then there are startlers like the small herd of cranberry red sheep, dyed to be marker sheep in the way that black sheep used to be. If a marker sheep is missing, there are probably other sheep missing. I don’t know why a sheep should look so natural when it’s cranberry red -- maybe because I think of woolly Hudson’s Bay blankets.

http://prairieice.blogspot.com/ is John Carlson, a photographer who works both Antarctica and the North American prairie. His recent photos of bison in a blizzard are among the most mystical portraits of the animals that I’ve seen. When you look at John, you’ll see that he’s a hearty fellow capable of going out in such weather. Now that so many “ecology” and “environmental” writers are preoccupied with laws and regulations, numerical counts and so on, natural science seems to have migrated to photographs. I can’t say that I object.

I do appreciate http://trevorherriot.blogspot.com/ who says “I am a prairie naturalist who writes books, essays, and radio documentaries about the intersection of culture and nature on the northern Great Plains.” Trevor is a bit north of me in Regina, Saskatchewan. I’ve preached there several times but didn’t meet Trevor, who would have been a kid then anyway. He talks about “citizen science” which crosses politics with biology/ecology and he’s a great networker. Since he ignores national boundaries and so do I (even though I can’t even cross into Canada until I scrounge up $100 for a passport), he’s valuable in helping to break down the glass wall between the two sides.

In fact, it was Trevor’s link that took me to http://nativeshores.blogspot.com/ which is the blog of a man with so many eerie coincidences with my own life that I shiver while I read. We’ve made contact (which is the great thing about bloggers, who are neither dead nor so sequestered that they don’t answer mail) and he’s impressed by the coincidences as well. He’s living in Swan River, which is where my father’s family homesteaded a potato farm in the Twenties. He raises llamas, which my “sister-out-law” raises. He took classes from Jim Gustafson and Langdon Gilkey at the U of Chicago, two of my landmark professors who had the same effect on me. He went through a period of reading the object relations psychologists. (Winnicott, Kohut, and Klein -- what I call “the teddy bear books” since they key off the idea that little kids when separating from their mothers use a teddy bear as a transitional object for reassurance). But alongside this high intellectual stuff and serving a Lutheran congregation (which makes him liturgical, which I am also, though I’m not Christian), he is an organic farmer with a special interest in a little blue berry.

Not Saskatoon/sarvisberries but “haskap” which is a Japanese word because the berry is circumpolar and sounds like a very intense version of huckleberries/blueberries/saskatoons, though he says haskaps belong to the honeysuckle family. Are these other berries also honeysuckle family? Swan River is way the heck up there. But, oddly, sometimes weather farther north is better than here. Soil characteristics and geology count for a lot. I haven’t been up there since our family went back to visit in the Fifties.

We both spent time in Saskatoon, but I didn’t know that in Toronto they call it “the Harlem of the north.” It’s a tough town. Sharon Butala has moved to Calgary. Which is tough in a different way. More cowboy.

Right now the “Native Shores” blog is following out a line of thought about violence: what is it, where does it come from, what are the characteristics and so on. Daily anecdotes. I think about that a lot myself, but he is a boomer and marked by the Vietnam War. This is sort of where I part ways with boomers, because in the Sixties I was adult and in Browning on the Blackfeet Rez, more impressed with the interpersonal violence there, which continues. My sense of massacres is more historical.

The great power of blogs -- far more than Facebook, I think -- is to establish relationships in a network of affinities that go far deeper then Democrat/Republican, even deeper than Canada/US. The affinities among those who deal with animals, who grow things, who walk the prairies and tundra or even the snow crust of polar regions, are deep and strong. Unlike political parties, their byproducts are both beautiful and useful.

An early post on “Native Shores” is about meeting three wolves -- he says “timbre wolves” in one of those wonderful typos (think of howling) -- who have just made a kill. In fact, the deer is still alive when the writer happens onto the scene. The photo of the dying deer -- the wolves faded away for the moment -- is not pretty but it is real. Is it violent? Is the deer violated? The way we so often violate land? Ponder, ponder, ponder.