The Mindful Carnivore (7 page)

Not all logging, of course, is created equal. Done mindfully—by conscientious loggers with the financial incentive to do it right—its ecological impacts can be minimized. Under Paul’s tutelage I learned that, with good planning, softer soils could be traversed when frozen solid and the land could be protected from erosion and rutted roads. With appropriate equipment, the soil compaction that harms tree roots could be greatly reduced. With appropriate techniques, the trees we left could remain free of bark damage, which invites disease. With a little thought for our fellow creatures, dead trees could be left standing, providing nesting cavities and sources of insect food for a multitude of wildlife species, including New England’s largest, loudest, and most striking woodpecker, the pileated.

Perhaps most importantly, working with Paul taught me to think in forest time. In the woods, signs of a past landscape were all around us: old stone walls, rusty barbed wire, the occasional stacked-fieldstone foundation marking an old cellar hole. Bit by bit, I began to grasp the meanings of things that I had seen long ago, but not understood.

As a boy, I had seen nineteenth-century photographs of Vermont, the hills bare and stark. The pictures looked nothing like the forested landscape I had grown up loving. In combination with other images I had seen—of New England log drives, the rivers packed with wood from shore to shore—they planted the seeds of my earliest, sinister perceptions of logging. The story seemed simple: The forest primeval had been pillaged by men with axes. Like most such stories, this one was mistaken, both in its simplicity and in its narrow assignment of blame.

When European colonists arrived in present-day New England, the land was already under active management, especially along the ocean and the major rivers. The coastal forest from the Saco River in Maine to the Hudson was, in the words of environmental historian William Cronon, “remarkably open, almost parklike at times.” In some places, there were no trees at all, for the native peoples of the region had pushed the forest back from the Atlantic, sometimes by miles. The site of present-day Boston, for instance, was treeless for thousands of acres and colonists had to harvest wood from nearby islands. The primary cause of this coastal deforestation? Agriculture. In these places, American Indians had established seasonal farming settlements, clearing fields and collecting vast quantities of firewood.

Parts of the inland forest had long been managed for food, too. Archaeological digs in western Massachusetts suggest that Indians were periodically burning the forest understory as much as five thousand years ago. This burning favored plants, like blueberries, that provided edible fruit, and fire-tolerant trees, like chestnut and oak, that provided edible nuts. As Cronon points out, burning also accelerated the recycling of forest nutrients back into the soil. This, along with the absence of brushy undergrowth and the increased light that reached the forest floor, boosted the growth of herbaceous plants, which, in turn, allowed deer, elk, and other animals to thrive. In his book
Reading the Forested Landscape
, ecologist Tom Wessels suggests that the fire-swept, grassy earth also made it possible for humans to stalk those animals quietly and take unobstructed shots with bow and arrow.

Farther north, in what is now Vermont, native peoples’ management of the landscape was concentrated along rivers, where they cleared fields. When colonists arrived here en masse in the late eighteenth century—after the 1760 British victory at Montreal ended the French and Indian War—it was in these riverside fields, and in old beaver meadows, that they built their first settlements. When those were used up, they carved homesteads, fields, and pastures out of the forest. Trees were felled and burned where they lay, the resulting ash used to make potash, in turn used for the production of fertilizer, soap, and gunpowder.

In the late 1700s, most Vermont farms were small, geared toward producing food for farm families. And commercial logging was concentrated in areas where large white pines, long valued as saw timber and as ship masts, could be easily transported by river. That pattern would soon change, however, and the intensity of the final assault on Vermont’s forests would have as much to do with the market for wool as with the market for wood.

In 1810 and 1811, taking advantage of the chaos surrounding Napoleon’s ongoing attempt to conquer the Iberian Peninsula, a merchant named William Jarvis, then U.S. consul to Portugal, exported several thousand of the region’s jealously guarded merino sheep, prized for their fine and bountiful fleece. He sold most of them, but reserved a few hundred for himself and brought them to a farm he had purchased in Weathersfield, Vermont, a small town in the Connecticut River valley some fifty miles north of the Massachusetts border.

With larger political and economic forces on their side—including the War of 1812 and related blockades, tariffs, and embargoes—merinos soon dominated the state. “A wool craze swept the region,” wrote historian David Ludlum, “a mania as powerful as any religious fanaticism.” By 1824, Vermont was home to almost half a million merinos; by 1840, 1.7 million, nearly six sheep for every person. Textile mills popped up everywhere. And Vermont’s remaining forests vanished in a single human generation. Few places were spared, as even steep hillsides went from woods to pasture. By 1840, three-quarters of the Green Mountain State was treeless, most of it grazed by sheep.

To keep their sheep contained, the settlers needed fences. With wood harder and harder to come by and the invention of barbed wire still decades off, they turned to the material at hand: stone. Between 1810 and 1840, the bare hillsides and valleys of New England sprouted thousands of miles of stone barriers. Tom Wessels suggests that these walls, constructed so swiftly and containing more stone mass than the Great Pyramids of Egypt, could be considered “the eighth wonder of the world.”

A wondrous feat they may have been, but within just a few years the animals they contained were already devastating the land. By the 1830s, erosion from overstocked hillside pastures was a serious problem. The pastures themselves became less productive and Vermont’s streams and rivers silted in, causing floods.

Watching their meager soil wash downstream, Vermont’s hill farmers looked west toward the deep, boulder-free earth of the Ohio River valley. The Erie Canal was open and the railroad was extending its reach. By the early 1860s, tens of thousands of Vermonters had departed and the state’s wool industry was in decline, crippled by its own brutal treatment of the land, by changing tariff laws and tumbling prices, and by fierce competition from states to the west, where production costs were far lower. Those who stayed in Vermont began turning from sheep to dairy cows, working the deeper soils of the river valleys.

Logging continued—for wood, for charcoal, and for potash—but by 1900 more than half of Vermont’s open land was already returning to forest. Soon the trend would be bolstered by the reduced need for hay as the automobile replaced the horse. Hay fields would lie fallow, waiting to be reclaimed by trees.

A century later, with Vermont three-quarters forested, Paul and I were working among the sheep farmers’ stone fences and cellar holes. It was dawning on me that although settlers’ axes had felled the trees that once stood here, it was farming, pasturing, and textiles that wrought the real havoc and kept these hillsides raw and bleeding. Freed from the yoke of agriculture and industry, the land had returned to aspen, pine, and maple. Today, with the great flocks of sheep gone, the forest thrived, even with loggers still working the hills.

After a day in the woods, a day of felling trees this way and that, leaving piles of hacked-off limbs everywhere I went, I would drive home past cornfields. I would return to the clearing where our house stands, to the placid scene of the flower and vegetable gardens Cath and I had built. And I would wonder: Is it neatness—the even regularity of raised beds and tilled rows, of summer corn and autumn stubble—that makes gardening and farming appear so much more benign than logging?

With a broader view of the landscape and our history here, I could look out across the Winooski and North Branch valleys and recognize the obvious. Every acre of agricultural land I had ever seen—every cow or sheep pasture, every wheat or soybean or vegetable field—was once forest, wetland, prairie: another kind of land. Regardless of whether the farming was done well or poorly, its initial establishment in all those places had required conquest, eviction of the creatures that lived there before, and conversion of the land to a new use. And maintaining it required constant defense against nature’s efforts at reclamation.

That helped me understand something else I had seen as a boy. In the Vermont Historical Society museum, near the capitol in downtown Montpelier, is a big glass case. In the case stands a mountain lion. It is said to be the last cougar—or catamount, as we call them here—killed in Vermont, shot near the town of Barnard on Thanksgiving Day, 1881. As a boy, looking up at the big cat, I had grasped the immediate cause of its death: the man in the photograph, Alexander Crowell, sharp nosed and bearded, dressed in dark suit and hat, firearm cradled in the crook of his arm. And I had taken catamount hunting to be what extirpated the species from the state.

In one sense, I had been right. Catamounts, like wolves, were indeed killed by men with guns, men who hated large predators for the danger they posed to livestock. Yet, despite the establishment of bounties in 1779 and the popularity of organized hunts, both species persisted in the state for decades.

What sounded the final death knell was loss of habitat. As expanses of forest were broken up, these predators’ hunting territories shrank. Simultaneously, their primary food source—the white-tailed deer—was being driven to the brink of extinction by the same factors: overhunting and habitat loss. It is no coincidence that Vermont’s remaining populations of wolves, catamounts, and deer all plunged precipitously in the first half of the nineteenth century when agricultural deforestation was at its peak. Only a few large predators survived the height of the merino’s reign. And even those few were eventually hunted down, mainly for preying on the state’s remaining sheep. There were, after all, virtually no deer left for wolf or catamount to eat. The “savage beast” shot by Crowell in 1881 had, according to a local newspaper report, “killed many sheep and lambs in different parts, and the people in this vicinity greatly rejoice at his death.”

No doubt predators feasted on plenty of individual sheep. But the merino population as a whole was instrumental in wiping wolf and catamount off the landscape entirely.

Hiking in the woods late one summer, I turned off a hillside logging road toward a break in an old stone wall. Almost to that breach of tumbled stones, I glanced up for some reason. Four eyes locked with mine. Fifteen feet off the ground, two house-cat-sized felines clung to the bark of a nearby maple, one on each side of the trunk: kittens, all fuzzy from ruffed necks to stub tails.

They were bobcats, the catamount’s much smaller cousin. They stared. I stared back. Though not rare in Vermont, bobcats are seldom seen in broad daylight, and such a close encounter with a pair of kittens was extraordinary. I gave myself an emphatic mental kick for not having a camera in my pocket.

When the spell broke, one kitten, then the other, leapt to the ground and vanished into cover. I caught a glimpse of one as it pranced from stone to stone along the top of the wall, then paused to look around, perhaps for its mother. She must have been close by.

Only later did I reflect on the spot. Though adaptable—and apparently tolerant of the occasional untidy passage of logging equipment through that timberland—bobcats prefer forest habitat. Neither they nor their main prey, snowshoe hares, thrive amidst intensive agriculture. The kittens would not have been there if that old stone fence still divided two pastures.

The mere fact of living, I had begun to realize, linked me to larger webs of life and death. Regardless of what I did, whether I liked it or not, I had an impact. No matter what I ate, habitat had already been sacrificed. No matter what I ate, animals would be killed.

Even while gardening within the confines of our deer- and woodchuck-proof fence, innocence was out of reach. The sandy soil, which I had ruthlessly stripped of grasses, wildflowers, and tree roots, needed all the organic matter it could get, so we imported compost by the truckload, compost made from the manure of chickens, horses, and cows. Now and then—shoveling the dark, rich stuff out of the back of my pickup—I would notice a knobby, light-colored chunk and pause to examine it. A fragment of bone. Perhaps the tip of a dairy cow’s tibia.

We weren’t eating animals, but our vegetables were.

4

An Animal Who Eats

Try to remember that we are going after food—that we are, in a way, exploring our place in the systems of life in the universe. I grant you that our place, when we think we’ve found it, isn’t always comfortable.

—John Hersey,
Blues

O
ur doctor, a soft-spoken Buddhist naturopath, was the last person you’d expect to say, “Go eat an animal.” And she didn’t. It was gentler than that. She simply reviewed an analysis of my blood chemistry and suggested I could use more protein.

She did not mean more tofu.

The suggestion was corroborated by Cath’s study of holistic health and nutrition. A few of her instructors—themselves former vegetarians—offered words of caution about long-term veganism. They had seen the effects repeatedly: people showing up in their offices after twenty years without any animal foods, bodies drained and depleted. They pointed out that certain kinds of protein, particular types of omega-3 fatty acids, and key nutrients such as vitamin B
₁₂
were difficult or impossible to get by eating unfortified plant foods.

Cath and I eased into it slowly. Local organic yogurt. Then eggs from cage-free hens. They tasted strange and rich. But I ate hungrily, and I started noticing changes. I had more energy, felt more alive. My allergic sensitivities to cats and dust mites diminished. Within a few months, wild-caught fish and locally raised chicken were also on the menu, their flavors and textures even more alien.