Bayesian Statistics

A recent post by Scientific American writer and blogger John Hogan got me thinking about Bayesian statistics again.

My favorite explanation of Bayesian statistics was by Nate Silver in The Signal and The Noise.  The basic approach involves incorporating prior estimates of probability into new measures of probability.  The opposing approach, which does not rely on prior knowledge, is termed "Frequentist" statistics and is exemplified Fisher's standard test used with p=0.05 (which implies that a given result would occur "by chance" only 5 in every 100 such tests).

Hogan uses the standard example of cancer tests to illustrate the importance and power of Bayesian thinking, but an astute commenter points out that the real power of Bayesian thinking comes when used in a process that tests, updates probabilities, and tests again, so that each test incorporates the learning from previous tests.

Silver offered a similar example in his book, but a review in the New Yorker points out that Silver got it wrong.   In Silver's case, he applies Bayesian statistics to the probability that global warming is occuring.  But the prior probability is estimated, and Bayesian approaches only improve on standard statistics when prior probabilities are well known.  So while Silver does present a rational means of updating beliefs, since the original belief is not based on statistical data, the resulting analysis cannot be called statistically valid.

Both the New Yorker review and Hogan's thoughts highlight the inherent power of confirmation bias to trump any statistical test, even Bayesian tests.

How To Find The Truth (on the Internet)

I recently read about two different meta-review techniques: the Total Evidence Approach and the Quality Analysis Method, and that got me thinking about information processing and knowledge creation in our information-saturation internet-era.  How do we find the truth on the internet?

"In the total evidence approach (Kluge 2004; Sherman et al. 2008) all information is considered and data are not weighed by quality of evidence. Although the total evidence approach is subject to the biases and errors of individual studies, we deemed it preferable to the alternative “quality analysis” method (Sherman et al. 2008) in part because of the difficulty of objectively evaluating the relative validity and quality of the widely heterogeneous data sets that we reviewed."  Source.

I think we can all agree that a total evidence approach isn't going to work very well on the internet: there is simply way to much junk to try to average out truth from the hubbub.  But how to engage a quality analysis?  Michelle Nijhuis describes an iterative process of fact-checking in journalism, wherein she continually seeks out new sources to comment on and counterbalance other sources, until ideally, after an infinite(!) number of steps, truth is reached asymptotically.  But she admits this approach is time-intensive and unwieldy.  Furthermore, this approach can lead to the problem of "false objectivity":  journalists actively obscure truth when they try to objectively treat controversial issues by giving crackpots equal weight with experts and scientists. 

Instead,  I use a balance of evidence approach to truth-finding in science debates: I read widely and then select trustworthy sources.  If a person or organization publishes unsupported or erroneous information, I tend not to give them a second chance.  Also, sources that don't include open debates are outed as substandard information sources and discarded from the analysis.  A process of winnowing results, and after several months (years) of research, only the best sources are left standing.

Typically, the best sources are: experts who publish in-depth analyses of primary sources (e.g. journal articles).  They are open to quality comments from a range of voices, and their work is therefore continually self-correcting. 

Interestingly, I often prefer blogs over than traditional journals in my research.  Bloggers can attain higher standards of truth than the peer-review system.  Journals are slow to correct mistakes and often don't include enough discussion to reveal divergent viewpoints.  

A Disturbing History of Nutrition Science

What is the biggest mistake scientists have ever made?  Nina Teicholz's The Big Fat Surprise, a wonderful history of the awful state of nutrition science, suggests that science's worst mistake may well be the idea that saturated fat is unhealthy.  She makes a convincing case that nutritional guidelines over the last half century, by focusing on fats rather than sugars, have resulted in the premature deaths of millions of Americans and others around the world.

Even more interesting than turning conventional wisdom on its head, this book is an eye-opening journey into how an entire field of science can be hijacked by special interests and strong personalities. Moreover, this book holds important lessons about how the process of science is still susceptible to the same biases and group-think as the rest of society.

Nina Teicholz sums up the story of how nutrition science went wrong:

"Well-intentioned experts, hastening to address growing epidemics of chronic disease, simply overinterpreted the data. Scientists hypothesized that dietary fat was to blame...  This hypothesis became accepted as truth before it was properly tested.  Public health bureaucracies adopted and enshrined this unproven dogma.  The hypothesis became immortalized in the mammoth institutions of public health.  And the normally self-corrected mechanism of science, which involves constantly challenging one's own beliefs, was disabled.  While good science should be ruled by skepticism and self-doubt, the field of nutrition has instead been shaped by passions verging on zealotry. ...Once ideas about fat and cholesterol became adopted by official institutions, even prominent experts in the field found it nearly impossible to challenge them."  

"What I found, incredibly, was not only that it was a mistake to restrict fat but also that our fear of the saturated fats...has never been based in solid science.  A bias against these foods developed early on and became entrenched, but the evidence mustered in its support never amounted to a convincing case and has since crumbled away."

Let the sorry story of nutrition science be a lesson for the scientists and promoters of scientists in other fields.  We like to think that science is independently and objectively building a tower of knowledge for the ages, one rock at a time, but the reality is that our science is a product of our society, our beliefs, our biases, and our assumptions.

Paleo Diet Reading List

Reading about human origins can be fascinating, and informative.  It has been said that nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution, and the same could be applied to diet. I originally wanted to understand the physiological biochemistry of digestion, but several textbooks later I had lots of facts but very little understanding.  While strolling at the zoo, I realized I needed textbooks that described the differences between animal digestion -- a comparative physiology textbook, perhaps.  But again, after reading all of the most popular titles, I had only scattered facts and no theory of the differences between human and animal digestion, or even between carnivore, omnivore, and vegetarian modes of sustenance.

Luckily, two Harvard professors have written books on human evolution with particular emphasis on how dietary changes made us human.  In the process, they provide the best, although somewhat contradictory, source of information on comparative dietary physiology.  Daniel Lieberman's The Story of the Human Body (2013) is a more traditional telling of human evolution, but it is written in an attempt to answer the question of how our paleo bodies have adapted (or not) to modern lifestyles.  Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (2009), is an extended argument concerning the importance of cooking to human evolution, but he does deal extensively with the comparative behavior and anatomy of humans, proto-humans, chimps, and other primates.  Only at the end of his book does he tackle the problem of modern dietary choices for humans, and then only as a parting shot.  John Hawkes, at the University of Wisconsin, is often mentioned as an authority on human evolution, and I would include his Great Courses lecture (2011) in this triumvirate of human evolutionary tales.

The above works often reference modern accounts of extant hunter-gatherer tribes to understand what life might have been like during the Paleolithic era.  The most notable of these books are Lee's account of the !Kung San, and I would also suggest Weston A. Price's classic Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diet and their Effects.  A modern synthesis and review of the same subject matter can be found in Lindeberg (2009).

It is interesting to compare the literature on human evolution with the diet book literature making use of ideas in human evolution.  The originator of the "Paleo Diet", Loren Cordain has several books specifying his interpretation of the evidence.  While his 2002 book specifies a diet that seems more restrictive than what I've read in Lieberman and Wrangham, I haven't had a chance to read his 2012 book yet.

1. Lieberman D. The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group; 2013.
2. Wrangham R. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Profile Books; 2009.
3. Price W. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects (Hardback). Benediction Classics; 2010.
4. Lindeberg S. Food and Western Disease: Health and Nutrition from an Evolutionary Perspective. Wiley; 2009.
5. Lee RB. The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge University Press; 1979.
6. Cordain L, Friel J. The Paleo Diet for Athletes: The Ancient Nutritional Formula for Peak Athletic Performance. Rodale; 2012.
7. Cordain L. The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat. J. Wiley; 2002.

Excess or Insufficient Micronutrients?

Some authors have argued that excess micronutrients, specifically zinc, iron, and copper are a cause of a number of diseases, from atherosclerosis to Alzheimer's. (1) But other writers argue that most Americans are micro nutrient-deficient (very few Americans are macronutrient deficient!). (2)

Micronutrients are critical for human health, but many have relatively narrow ranges associated with optimal health.  Assuming that U.S. dietary guidelines are valid (debatable, but a good starting point), how many people really are receiving inadequate or overabundant micronutrients?

I searched journal articles featuring contemporary data from the U.S. NHANES which surveys a representative sample of the U.S. population.  

Large portions of the population had total usual intakes (food and supplement use) below the estimated average requirement for vitamins A (35%), C (31%), D (74%), and E (67%) as well as calcium (39%) and magnesium (46%). Only 0%, 8%, and 33% of the population had total usual intakes of potassium, choline, and vitamin K above the adequate intake when food and multivitamin use was considered. The percentage of the population with total intakes greater than the tolerable upper intake level (UL) was very low for all nutrients; excess intakes of zinc were the highest (3.5%) across the population of all of the nutrients assessed in NHANES.(3)

Population-based studies indicate that vegetarians have lower mean intakes of vitamin B-12 and zinc and higher intakes of fiber, magnesium, and vitamins A, C, and E than do nonvegetarians. Usual intake data suggest a similar prevalence of inadequacy between vegetarians and nonvegetarians for magnesium and vitamins A, C, and E, with both groups at high risk of inadequate intakes of these nutrients. These same data report that vegetarians have a higher prevalence of inadequacy for iron, vitamin B-12, protein, and zinc than do nonvegetarians. Vegetarians should optimize intakes of vitamin B-12, zinc, and protein; and both vegetarians and nonvegetarians need to increase intakes of calcium, magnesium, fiber, and vitamins A, C, and E. (4)

But these studies only analyze reported food intake, which is notoriously unreliable, even, possibly, in NHANES. Interestingly, NHANES also does actual blood tests, and the results from that research found very few physiologyical (as opposed to dietary) deficiencies.  CDC's National Report on Nutritional Indicators (2012, valid for the period 2003-2006,  only found deficiencies in B6 (11%), Iron (women: 10%), Vitamin D (8%), Vitamin C (6%).   This same report indicates that folate supplementation is responsible for lowering deficiency to less than 1% of the U.S. population.  They also note that many women have iodine levels "bordering on insufficiency".  They did not note any micronutrient excesses. (5)

Sources:

(1) Power Foods for the Brain.  Barnard, Neil.  2013

(2) see, for example, http://chriskresser.com/are-supplements-really-necessary and http://chriskresser.com/why-you-should-think-twice-about-vegetarian-and-vegan-diets

(3) J Am Coll Nutr. 2014;33(2):94-102. doi: 10.1080/07315724.2013.846806.

Multivitamin/mineral supplement contribution to micronutrient intakes in the United States, 2007-2010.

Wallace TC1, McBurney M, Fulgoni VL 3rd. (Affiliation: Council for Responsible Nutrition)

(4) Am J Clin Nutr. 2014 May 28;100(Supplement 1):365S-368S.

Nutritional adequacy of plant-based diets for weight management: observations from the NHANES.

Farmer B.PlantWise Nutrition Consulting LLC

(5) Second National Report on Biochemical Indicators of DIet and Nutrition in the U.S. Population. 2012

Farewell to a good pair of Army Boots

Fresh out of the box, I took my Magnum Boots Desert Spider 8.1 HPi "Moon Boots" for a test in my backwoods.  I walked on rain-slick logs over the creek and ran up and down thick pine duff hills.  They were a good pair of boots with some pretty serious flaws, but also lots of good design ideas.  And they actually fit my feet, which is the most important thing a pair of boots can do.  That's the reason I wore them for two full field seasons even after the "rope gripping" tore out after the first couple months.

Tear on cheaply-stiched "rope gripping" patch tore out after the first couple of months.  Also note the Aqua-sealed drain holes on the fore foot, definitely the worst place to put holes in a boot!

They never did break in, though -- up to the day I finally trashed them they still felt stiff where the material has to flex around the ankles.  And the "drain holes"  were a big mistake: they let every puddle, no matter how small, splash in, plus all the dust and dirt on the trail.  I eventually plugged them with Aquaseal. 

Boot linings are usually the first to tear out, and these boots were no exception. 

Synthetic boots are on par or better than leather boots now, and the weight and cost savings of foregoing Vibram rubber is a fair tradeoff.  I just bought another pair of synthetic boots but decided to go with Irish Setter hunting boots.  The fit isn't as good for my toes, but they are lighter and seem to be of higher quality construction.  Time will tell.  

Note wear on the non-vibram soles.

(Note: my Desert Spider boots were size 9 wide)

Salvage Logging is Not Supported by Published Research

I completed a literature review on the effects of salvage logging (SL). I read all of the major papers, including the two extant literature reviews, the old Forest Service-funded one by McIver and Starr, and the newer one by conservation ecologists Lindemeyer and Noss. The conclusions are consistent: in general, SL increases fire risk, increases erosion, reduces wildlife habitat, and impairs natural recovery. SL has the potential to be much more detrimental than traditional (green) logging (Lindenmeyer and Noss 2006).

This Ponderosa Pine forest burned in a the Las Conchas fire, a stand-replacing crown fire in the summer of 2011.  Two years later, grasses and flowers had recolonized the area.  Cover values were greater than in nearby unburned forests;  forests can recover naturally from even very severe fires.  

 *Increased fire risk:  salvage logging provides the kind of fuels necessary to introduce ground fires into the canopy (Donato 2005). SL increases fuel loads for 20 years compared to controls (McIver and Ottmar 2007).

These burned trees will gradually decay and fall to the forest floor.  Some burned trees may take as much as 50 years to fall, providing valuable wildlife habitat all the while (Lindenmeyer 1997). If they were logged, most of the limbs and crowns would be left as "slash" that, if re-burned, would yield extremely high flame lengths and soil temperatures.

*Increased erosion: salvage logging has the potential to exacerbate erosional problems typically observed in burned watersheds (McIver and Starr 2000).

Natural post-fire erosion can deplete soil, further impairing vegetative recovery.  Human disturbance can compact soils and channelize flow paths, thereby exacerbating natural erosion.  

 *Reduced wildlife habitat:  Most wildlife species rely on dead trees in one way or another.  Of the 102 terrestrial vertebrate species in Washington State, over half (56) require dead tree boles (snags) to nest or den (Hutto 2006). Across the West, 150 species of vertebrates rely on dead trees for nesting or denning (Rose et al 2001).

Less than three months post-fire, bark beetles in the Jemez Mountains, NM were so active they created large piles of sawdust.  Needless to say, woodpeckers were extremely active in this area.

 *Impaired natural vegetation recovery: SL results in increased mortality of pine seedlings (Castro et al 2011).

A pine seedling emerges from the burned forest floor one year after a fire (with a little natural fertilizer thrown in to help).  This seedling would likely be crushed (and the elk dispersed) by salvage logging, necessitating an expensive tree-planting operation to compensate for destroyed natural recruitment and depleted natural fertilizers.

Yes, forest fires are a major natural disturbance to forest ecosystems.  But despite all the talk of unnatural "megafires", even the largest and hottest fires leave some legacy of the previous forest (e.g. burned trees). Logging is also a major disturbance to natural forest ecosystems, a disturbance that burned forests are less resilient to.  Multiple disturbances have cumulative effects on ecosystems, so compounding the damage to a burned forest by removing the remaining trees is much more damaging than logging without fire.

Going forward, there needs to be broader recognition of the ability of ecosystems to recover from natural disturbances and the essential role of biological legacies (in this case, dead burned trees) in the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem processes (Lindenmeyer, Burton, and Franklin, 2008).  Those burned trees are hard at work shepherding the forest back to life, not wasted timber that must be "salvaged".

Medical Decision-Making

When a doctor diagnoses a patient, who makes the decision about treatment? Perhaps the patient defers to the knowledge and authority of the doctor: "you're the doctor, you decide." Although the structure of power dynamics between the doctor and patient can bias decision-making, the final decision usually comes down to money, which is decided by the insurance company. So how does a large insurance company decide what procedure to pay for?

Others have pointed out that this is a system of misaligned incentives can lead to situations where, for example, insurance companies would be much more worried about over-prescribing rather than under-prescribing treatment. So how do insurance companies do this in practice? By conducting a scientific review of all published literature on a given treatment, and then evaluating it. For example, Aetna's Clinical Policy Bulletins lay down the law of what is, and isn't accepted medical diagnosis and treatment.

"Two views of our planet's future"

ILLUSTRATIONS BY MAXWELL HOLYOKE-HIRSCH
Nature article by Dr. David Orr, (Oberlin College) in this April 28 2010 review of books written by Stewart Brand and Bill McKibben. Each book advocates societal responses to anthropogenic climate change, with Stewart Brand advocating technological solutions and Bill McKibben advocating local interventions. Dr. Orr has also written his own book on solutions, entitled Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse.

The article is well written and the even the comments section contains interesting citations by volunteers.

2008 Autumn in Review

When the snow came to the high country of Colorado, in September, I left on a series of explorations. I had traveled to CO to understand more about the ecology of small rivers and streams in the Southwest that I had been trying to restore with Wild Earth Guardians. After learning the ecological integrity assessments practised by the Colorado Natural Heritage Program, I knew I needed more time to wander, and think. I found lots of the former and not enough of the latter. I visited a couple dozen riparian areas in New Mexico and Arizona, some were revisited restoration sites, others were new sites. Figure a couple days hiking around each place, and that about explains the last months. I attended talks on the history of vegetation change in the SW, and even gave a talk on the subject at a symposium put on by the Arizona State Museum.

I was traveling pretty much constantly, camping in my van wherever I found myself at the end of the day. Autumn in AZ is beautiful...fall colors and balmy temperatures mix to make a lot of lucid dreaming... and finding an awesome girl to travel with helped sweeten the deal. I think the highlight of the last few months was backpacking for a week in Aravaipa Canyon, a slot canyon that straddles the Sonoran desert / Pinon Juniper ecosystems, and I'm hoping the GIS I did there will materialize into a job next fall. After that Alexandra and I retired to the beach in Mexico for the month of December.

Still trying to get paid to do what I love, and living on a shoestring in my obedient old van with an obstinate laptop while I appreciate what a vow of poverty means.

Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics and Promise of the American Prairie

Grassland is definitely not the work of a doting professor, but the keen wit of a hard-hitting journalist, which Richard Manning is. Reading Manning can still be difficult, though. Not because he writes poorly - the euphony is verse poetry at times. And not because he writes badly - the precision and economy of prose is exemplary. But because he is so smart it hurts, and so honest you want to crawl under a blanket and hide.
They say we should love that which is better than us, for we tend to become what we love, and by that logic I would want to edit this unwieldy tome. Grasslands feels as if it were written in pieces, which perhaps such a vast and encompassing interest as an entire biome must be. There is literally the feeling of your mind being tugged in many different directions;"broadening". Yet the entire work is cohesive, inevitable; massive yet solid. You feel it in your forehead. He wants to download everything, and it is delightful and excruciating to wonder at which droplets out of the entire firehose of creation, heaven and hell and the human psyche, he lets fall to the page, perfect and complete and confusing.
The work is relatively short - if he had taken more liberty with tangents, as Barry Lopez in Arctic Dreams, the read could easily have topped 1000 pages. This is, afterall, the story of an entire ecotype, 1/6 of the world. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass falls easily within its radius, but so too does history and interview, travelogue and diary, speculative science and definitive natural history.
When I saw Richard Manning speak last summer I listened breathless as his shaking rustled the crumpled notes he'd scribbled "some contrairian thoughts on". His son had just left to a second tour in Iraq, and I wish him all of the best in his travels, and the forests around his home were all on fire, and I wish these natural places the undisturbed recovery that only nature, in her wisdom, can provide. That was Manning's point then -- that perhaps we shouldn't believe in the perfectability of humans anymore, of the good inherent in our work. Perhaps our every action is a mistake, and the idea of a sustainable agriculture, and hence civilization, is an illusion.
Such are the troubling thoughts Manning, and I, end with.

Displaying 2 of 2 reviews

The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains by Dan Flores. I disagree with the assertion that, just because aboriginal hunter-gatherer societies didn't practice (efficient) resource management or population control, aboriginal peoples share our modern day ecological failings. For, despite the causes of the Pleistocene extinctions, it does appear that Native Americans lived in North America for 12,000 years without bumping off many, or even any, of their animal neighbors (an achievement we moderns seem unlikely to match). Flores argues that the disparity in environmental damage between Moderns and aboriginals is merely one of degree, and that somehow this ecological disharmony is hardwired into the 'carnivorous, clan and kin-centered primate brain'. I would like to point out that all animals create or accumulate additional or enhanced habitat for their neighbors. Modern humans, not hunter-gatherers, are the only exception to this rule, with out urban deserts and suburban shopping centers. Aboriginal peoples, as long as they utilized local resources, invariably created more habitat and enhanced ecologies. Of course, the proof of this assertion is (hundreds of?) years of back-breaking ecological fieldwork measuring productivity and species richness.

The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples What's the difference between centripetal and centrifugal evolution? Despite needing better editing and a careful cross-checking of important numbers (pre-1492 population of the Americas anyone?), this is an inspiring book with lots of grist for the mental mill. In the interest of Big Ideas this book (written at Harvard don't you know) plays loose and easy with facts and rhetoric, often glossing important points and proclaiming rather than analyzing. But the Big Ideas are worth it! The parallel between the 300 year heyday and collapse of Clovis culture (11,000BC-12,700BC) and the 300-year opening of the American frontier (1580AD -1880 AD), the influence that growing weeds (succesional colonizers) as crops had on creating r-selected (weedy) society, the placing in context of our own extinction event with the last 100 million years of extinction and colonization events...the analysis and structure are a bit thin but the gist is pure gold...plus hearing an Aussie psychoanalyze America is priceless. I can't wait to read his parallel account of Australia's last 300 million years, "The Future Eaters." Flanery asks whether a "nation so conceived in liberty can long endure" and compares the mindset of "liberty" with that of a weed (which most of our crops are) that experiences "release" in a new environment before adaptation sets in. When will Americans adapt to America and become truly native? Maybe once we've all read this book... It is only at the end of the book that we discover how all this history answers Aldo Leopold's assertion that we must "know what the world was like" in order to save the environment. Flanery comes out strongly in favor of restoring parts of America to pre-Clovis (pre-human, approximately 13,000 years ago) conditions. By reintroducing extirpated animals as well as analogs or homologs of extinct animals, he hopes to restore America to "rival Africa" in terms of large mammal diversity, as well as creating balanced and sustainable ecosystems. Its amazing to think that where we live used to look like the Serengeti, or the Costa Rican rainforest. But, according to Flanery, we still have the choice to put things back how they were. Wolf reintroduction anyone?

Accommodating the Heart of the Land

Heart of the Land (1994, Vintage Books) collects 30 essays by some of the greatest living writers. The essays document their responses as they travel to The Nature Conservancy's "Last Great Places" in the U.S. and Mexico. This essay documents my response.

Barry Lopez foreshadows many of the 30 answers as he attempts to understand the question:

"We are in a time of wakefulness about our relations with the land, reacting to an inattentive and sometimes abusive human past; each one of us, awakening, understands this shift of consciousness and the dilemmas it presents somewhat differently. And, whatever our efforts, they are all shot through...with enduring paradox and moral complexity....

"...if we are incapable of addressing these conundrums, which call on the courage inherent in abiding love, and upon social justice, then land conservation in our era will prove to have been only a fashion...

"...if our endeavor--the protection of natures other than our own--is to succeed, it will require more than mind and hand can bear....It will require that we reimagine our lives."
Terry Tempest Williams probes Lopez's "courage in acknowledging imperialized landscapes of the past for the battered remnants they are" by examining the psychological rift that opens in ourselves when we acknowledge the one we have created in Nature; "we are a tribe of fractured individuals who can now only celebrate remnants of wilderness". She argues that we must heal our souls in order to heal nature, but she quotes D.H. Lawrence to argue that, ironically, we must first embrace nature in order to heal our souls.

"What a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the magical connection of the solstice and equinox...We are bleeding at the roots"

From Moab Utah, on Winter solstice Williams is transported by the Nature Conservancy's preserve toward a new era of warmth and light. However,in contraposition, many of the authors reach back to their childhood traditions in mourning for what has already been lost. Rick Bass eulogizes the Texas hill country he knew as a youth and the holism of wilderness there that even, especially, children understood. He asks, "Must we break everything that is special to us, or sacred--unknown, and holy...What happens to us when all the sacred, all the whole is gone..." and wonders whether the only real, lasting ownership is through love: "it was ours because we loved it." Carl Hiaasen ponders why we still love degraded landscapes, or, love them even more; "why, after all, does one sit with a dying relative?"
Many of these writers find strength and courage in the slivers of preserved land, almost as if the Nature Conservancy had miraculously managed to save slivers of their own childhood memories. Others ponder the cause of the commonplace destruction of nature outside of select wilderness preserves. Joel Achenback asks whether our relation to land is really as stewards (as we tend to believe), or "perhaps the ultimate problem with the steward or farmer paradigms is that they imply that humans are apart from nature, superior to it, above it....Maybe that's why I sort of like the cancer model--because it is internal, part of the host. Because it destroys in a way that seems so senseless."
James Welch criticizes the attitude of farmers who still "feel it is their God-given right to dominate their particular landscapes." Thomas McGuane quotes Mike Lawson, fly-shop operator and outfitter at Last Chance on the Henry's Fork, ID, "If [the ranchers] don't learn to negotiate and compromise they're going to lose it all." William Kittredge, a former rancher himself, advises, "the people in my old homeland...[need to] work out some accommodation..." Teresa Jordan quotes Harvey Payne, the Nature Conservancy director of Tallgrass Prarie Preserve, OK, "On this preserve" he says with sadness rather than hubris "we play God." Jordan concludes that we believed "that the earth should bend to our will. Science made us arrogant; now, as we begin to understand the ways in which we have damaged the systems that sustain us, it is making us humble."
Gary Paul Nabhan points out that it is precisely the unpredictability and hence unmanageability of wilderness that marks it as wilderness. It can never be controlled; instead, it is the history of raw force, defiant of our will, that teaches us. But, for practical reasons, (if for no other reason) many farmers and ranchers will never come around to this conception of our place in the land. Indeed, as Payne admits, management, whether for cows, corn, or wildlife, forces us to attempt control.Philip Caputo also sees pedagogy in wilderness, but he suggests we look at microcosms such as Martha's Vineyard for proof if "we and our works can reach an accommodation with those of God." That accommodation, he finds, embodies basic contradictions within ourselves both as "romantics awed and enchanted" and "conquerors roused to possess and exploit". On Martha's Vineyard he finds wilderness, but "it is a tight little place on a tight little island" with, ironically, little room for either exploitation or enchantment. Bill McKibben celebrates the fractured landscape and the accommodation of people in the Adirondacks wilderness in upstate New York, "a wilderness with room for people." He thinks we should look to the Adirondacks as an experiment in managing sustainability. McKibben says of the Adirondacks wilderness, "this is what the world used to look like", but Caputo fears that all wilderness will someday tend toward "a tight little place" like Martha's Vineyard.
Heart of the Land is by far the best travel writing I've read and adds at least 30 places to my ever-growing list of places to visit. To paraphrase Barry Lopez, "the mere existence of such [places]...pulls us beyond ourselves."

This essay practically wrote itself thanks to Barry Lopez's ingenious ordering of the authors by common musings. I knew this was one of the 'Last Great Books' when I saw the list of writers, which includes many not mentioned above, such as Barbara Kingsolver, Peter Matthiessen, and Paul Theroux. But it is much bigger even than its pieces. It is a whole landscape, to quote Wallace Stegner from the frontispiece, a "geography of hope" .

Hiking Barefoot?

"The Barefoot Hiker" A Book About Bare Feet
by Richard Frazine, BD [Bachelor of Divinity?]
1993, Ten-Speed Press, ISBN: 0-89815-525-8
Read the book. Join the club.

This is an excellent and well-written book full of irreverent spunk and practical advice for hikers who habitually go barefoot. It is also an interesting addition to my "What would caveman do" bookshelf (see: Anopsology and my analysis). But, this book is written by Easterners, and I must humbly take exception to the application of their advice to the west, particularly Tucson.

The authors would sore regret hazarding a single barefoot footfall, let alone an entire cavalcade of such vulnerable events, in the Sonoran Desert, a Desert incomparably well-equipped to puncture the inflated expectations of innocent trespassers. The rapacious wit and perspicacious criticism embodied in the hard reality of the Sonoran desert would soon render the author's philosophy moot as he became a human dumpling skewered on the spines of cholla, saguaro, fish hook, and porcupine cactus, not to mention the infinitely small, sharp, and numerous "glochids" of the prickly pear.

The idea that humans are fit to live in the environment uncouth and unshod is an admirable one, an idea dating back perhaps to Genesis and the Garden of Eden. But the beauty of wilderness, especially Sonoran desert wilderness, bursts such hubristic bubbles and skewers such dainty pedagogy. Aristotle's peripatetic circumlocutions aside, this shit is sharp. To take humble pride in the profligate-armed Saguaro, to know that we are outmatched and vulnerable at his side, is to know the true reality of wilderness: not unadorned freedom to trample as we wish, but careful respect for all creatures great and sharp, and a willingness to adapt our footprint to the landscape we inhabit.