Restoring Bison, Restoring Creation

During the settlement of the West, bison were nearly wiped off the face of the earth. This event was and remains a shameful chapter in the American story, haunting us to this day. Yet, happily, these massive, shaggy ungulates have evaded their near extinction and are now coming upon better times, as they surge in renewed numbers across the Montana landscape. While some are thriving in herds that are being given relative freedom to roam, think of Yellowstone Park or the American Prairie Reserve, the majority find themselves being managed as commercial livestock on smaller, enclosed parcels of grazing land. On June 26th, I hitched a ride with Roland Kroos, along with members of the Creation Care Team of Bozeman’s Hope Lutheran Church, to visit an example of the latter.

Skoglund and Kroos

The North Bridger Bison Ranch, owned and managed by Matt and Sara Skoglund, runs 150 head of bison on 1200 acres of land, roughly two square miles. With the help of Kroos’s expertise, the Skoglunds have not only been successful in making a go of it financially but, in doing so and with the help of the bison themselves, are restoring biodiversity and fertility to their land. Grazing animals, Kroos reminds us, whether they be bison or cattle, co-evolved with grasslands. But there is an art to keeping grazing animals in tune with their preferred landscape, something Kroos knows a lot about.

In his former life, Matt was an environmental lawyer who grew up in the big city - Chicago - far from the sagebrush and mountains of the Shield Valley. Listening to Matt speak of his relationship with the bison and the life they have made possible for him and his family, it’s hard not to think of this ranch as the outcome of the Skoglund’s own personal leap of faith, faith in the bison, faith in the land, and faith in how humans might better comport themselves in making a go of it in creation.

Needless to say, bison, even as they are making a comeback, instigate controversy. When asked about how the landholders surrounding the Skoglund homestead view living in proximity to a herd of bison, Matt responds: “At the end of the day, we all share a love for this land, and my neighbors have witnessed how hard we are working.” This is good news, given the sometimes negative reactions to the re-introduction of bison that has been experienced across the state in recent times.

For me, one of the highlights of the trip occurs when Matt takes us to an area where the remains of field slaughtered bison, after their meat has been delivered to the processor, are left to find their way, with a rich store of nutrients, back into the land. “We recycle the bison back into the soil,” he explains. He points out a circle of earthy smelling, green duff about an inch thick and five feet in diameter, where the innards of the most recent kill has been deposited. In less than a week the crows and other scavengers have made off with all but the grassy stomach contents and a few scattered bones. When I observe that the area, across which over the years the remains of dozens of animals have been set out after their deaths, seems holy, Matt agrees. “The holiness of the gut pile,” he observes.

This strange, unexpected holiness is no small thing. If the biblical injunction for we humans runs “from ashes to ashes, and dust to dust,” the Skoglunds remind us that for bison we would do well to add, “and from grass to grass.” As Aldo Leopold observed now nearly a century ago, the very survival of the prairie depends on our remaining true to its eco-dynamic processes. In doing so, we are implored to think of the various animals and plants with whom we share the land as “fellow biotic citizens,” as each living kind contributes to the health and thriving of the living world in a manner that it is impossible to replicate through human actions alone. We are all in this together. And this still includes, thankfully, the bison!

There is so much more to report about the Skogland’s amazing project, including how meat can be purchased for those interested in buying at least a quarter of an animal. The reader is directed to the North Bridger Bison Ranch website for further information, including an informative blog and the chance to subscribe to the ranch’s newsletter: https://www.northbridgerbison.com/

Green Thoughts, Green Shade

So often we talk of bringing things to light, as if light itself were the highest good, as if illumination were the very soul of our being ensouled.  We seek the light, whether it's at the end of a tunnel,  clarity in an idea, or just pointing out the path to a glass of water, late at night in the kitchen.  In a more philosophical mood we entertain how existence itself is like the flashing out of a light that in turn offers us companionship among all that becomes visible through it.  Light, in this sense, is what makes us real, or, at the very least, lets us assume we are so for the time being.

So why dawdle in the shade?  

We are strange creatures.  For the fact of our existence is not in the first instance obvious to us, even if retrospectively the affirmation of it seems fairly incontrovertible.  In the beginning, then, we are not so much in the light as in the shade, although, ironically, without any sense of its being shade.  

Engaging in the chemical magic of photosynthesis, a plant drinks in a broad swath of the spectrum of visible light and leaves us to witness the leavings of that light, which is to say its greenness.  Paradoxically, green light is not invited into the plant's living tissues, but instead is reflected outward into the surrounding world.   We understand the plant to be green, the plant understands itself to be all but that.  When a plant is feeling generous, or in need of a visit from another living kind, other colors projected outward can be involved.  But they are divvied up into bits and drabs, even if these are often intense and so compellingly attractive to one living thing or another upon which the plant depends for various ecological services.  But the green remains in the main, because green light is unneeded for the maintenance of a plant's life.

Still, in a certain frame of mind, in a certain moment of poetic reverie, the greenness of plants is all.  Such a moment meets the reader of Andrew Marvell's "The Garden."  A phrase from that poem has always stuck in my mind, namely, "green thoughts in a green shade."  Whatever Marvell might have meant by those words, they have become for me a mantra, a guiding sentiment for delight in the world entered into, when one is immersed in the company of plants.  People speak of "forest bathing, and certainly part of the power of that practice has to do with drinking in through one's eyes, the greenness of phytological beings fully alive.

But what after all did Marvell mean by this particular set of words, reverberating down the centuries, often loosened from the context in which they were first brought to light?  This question recently brought me back to Marvell's poem, to renew my acquaintance with the circumstances in which his artfully coined phrase emerges.

What I found was a bit surprising.  Green thoughts in a green shade were ghostly ones for Marvell, but in an odd way.  These ghosts, it turns out, involved the imagination's play with the sensations of living things as they made their way into the mind to be cultivated there in another sort of garden altogether than that located in the world outside. In the outer world, after feasting on melons and ripe apples, nectarines and the "curious peach," not to mention a good measure of fermented grapes, the poet collapses in pleasure to the ground, "ensnared" as he puts it, in the grass.

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, 

Withdraws into its happiness; 

The mind, that ocean where each kind 

Does straight its own resemblance find, 

Yet it creates, transcending these, 

Far other worlds, and other seas; 

Annihilating all that’s made 

To a green thought in a green shade. 

This turn inward reminds me of Augustine, of how the creatures in Book 10 of his Confessions speak to him but, in doing so, implore him to search out the depths of his own soul so that he might inquire into their, as well as his own, Creator.  The creatures are curiously dependent upon human reflection to make sense of their reality.  But with Marvel this turn inward is not so much about a search for the Most High, as it is a confrontation with the powers of the human mind to rework the real of the ordinary world into  more intense, more compelling realities, ones that ironically "annihilate all that's made to a green thought in a green shade."

Marvel's words leave me with this discomforting metaphysical question: Is anything real at all?  To be human, let alone to be a human poet is not a simple thing, surely.  But for Marvel the drama is compounded by how the mind is not a still pond into which the world is confidently reflected, but a storm-ridden ocean, from whose depths new worlds, or at least new versions of the shared and common world, precipitously arise.  Where even to look for the reality of an earthly thing within that tempest-tossed realm that is one's own soul?  Likely Marvell goes too far in claiming for humans the capacity of a god to pull out from the hat of nothingness, rabbit after rabbit and world after world.  Still, we humans seek the company of green shades on a regular basis, and we do so to loosen our ties to a more ordinary, a more mundane world.  What comes of that, who is to say?  At the very least, another poem.  Or in my case, another image of the greenness of green things encountered along the paths I have been recently walking, camera in hand.