Sky Island Alliance

"To my mind these live oak-dotted hills fat with side oats grama, these pine-clad mesas spangled with flowers, these lazy trout streams burbling along under great sycamores and cottonwoods, come near to being the cream of creation." Aldo Leopold (1937)


"This landscape that so enthralled Leopold was where the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Madre kiss, where the plants and animals of the Neotropics mingle with those of the Nearctic, where jaguar and grizzly hunted the same ridges, where elk and javelina browsed and rooted cheek to jowl, where northern goshawks took thick-billed parrots on the wing. Arizona, New Mexico, Chihuahua, and Sonora are landscapes of wonder, beauty, and wildness--and of mind-boggling biological diversity. Aldo Leopold saw this landscape as a single ecological region, as do we today. Sky Island Alliance (SIA) hopes to protect it and restore it to ecological health."
[paraphrased, Wild Earth Journal, 2000: The Wildlands Project.]

Sky Island Photos


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Earth Verse

Wide enough to keep you looking
Open enough to keep you moving
Dry enough to keep you honest
Prickly enough to make you tough
Green enough to go on living
Old enough to give you dreams
Gary Snyder

Tea-Time on the Mountain-Top

You are CORDIALLY INVITED to a TEA PARTY on the SUMMIT of Mt. Wrightson, (Santa Rita Mountains, Sky Islands) this SATURDAY and SUNDAY from noon till 4 in OBSERVANCE of the planet MERCURY's greatest visibility on the 29th. Refreshments will be served. Dress will be smart-casual and please be on time. An after-party camp will observe Mercury's peregrinations.
Cheers,
CONOR

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Postscript:
The glare up here is Tremendous, serving tea and talking about imaginary things. I can see smoky haze rolling off the open pit mines. Mines and telescopes, the only things visible of the earth from up here by moonlight. The crickets lie still on the asphalt as autumn starts. I am fatterning up for the Winter;mosquitoes cannot bite me and river rocks are Shiatsu on my back. I'm spending the weekends tracking Jaguars (either melanous or spotted) in the Borderlands. This is where Coronado sought the seven cities of gold. There is only one place in the world with more mammal diversity: the Costa Rican rainforest.

Ranch Life

We keep a loaded rifle at all times. Always know where the animals are. Always know where the nearest exit gate is. Bison are a herd animal, and when they stampede, as is their wont, they are almost impossible to stop; it is a classic example of a self-perpetuating system. The ones in the middle have to keep running to keep ahead of the ones behind, so even though they can't see what's in front of them they'll keep pushing the ones in front, through anything: fences, streams, people. They'll trample the individual who stops to smell the flowers.

The tractor blows smokes rings into the whimsically blue sky, while 50 miles away, across the valley, thunderstorms perch like gargoyles on the mountains. But the only thunder comes from the lumbering bison as they re-enact the stampedes of their racial memory. When the daughter of the rancher talks about how "they mainly wander around in the north slope, but once one starts heading down this way they'll all follow..." I think she is talking about clouds before I realize she is talking about buffalo.

--

Crouched in the tall grass, sweating, I remember where I came from. The cavernous darkness of the barn, a shaft of sunlight from the open door, sparks flying from my slowly sharpened weapon. The sweat takes me back to Tucson, a place far away but with similar summer weather (monsoonal) and similar annual rainfall (about 10 inches). But here, on the West Slope of the Colorado Rockies, the streams gorged with snowmelt and mountain rain are only 13 miles away, not 1300, and their misty breath, siphoned through itenerant sprinklers, grows grass up to my chest. There are a hundred species in this artifical meadow (many grasses and forbs:great burdock, knapweed, red and white clover, alfalfa (purple, blue, and light blue), mullein, morning glory, milkweed, gumweed, western dock, chicory...) but one does not belong. Suddenly I lunge and my shovel strikes the root of the musk thistle. I move on while it lies there dying. I wander long and aimless...

I live for the woods

Bush alder and pentaphylooides floribunda graced the south bank, while grasses and sedges and --what's that? a decaying old mushroom --with a fringed ring -- psychedellic! Definately a Psilocybe. I took a deep whiff and the on-beyond-earthy smell, as usual, constricted my bowels and while my heart raced to keep up. I gasped and staggered back, but soon I overcame these time-tested instincts and so, with a cry of "no time, no time!" plunge-stepped off into the wilderness.

My explorations take me gradually upstream. It seemed as if the days were flowing by, and I spent whole lifetimes at each bend in the babbling brook. Do not the fish also cause erosion? The elk with their thrashing?

In a clearing where the buck elk stood
squared their hips and bellowed their mating cry
thrashed their still-tender antlers against the sticky-hard
and brittle-soft
bark and branches of the aspen,
Quaking.


On this mountain I am climbing to meet you. I stop under a Ponderosa while the rain passes, and eat of the clear pine sap, and browse oregon grapes packed thick about, gently brushing my ankles, and dream:

It is not possible to tread on the Magic Island, the plants grow so thick. Instead one must swing from limb to limb! Or from stalk to stalk. Let nature show herself as she will. Often a juicy stalk of food will appear in the morning. Trash is simply dropped, whereupon is promptly vanishes into the udnergrowth (Sometimes you can smell where a lot of people or animals have recently been). But to what purpose the song of the birds? The angry chatter of a chipmunk? The ecology of sound? A mossy world where nothing has any weight. The long rise and slow intermittant relapse. The sound of bubbles popping underwater. Quicksand in the river deltas; even the larger boulders rock gently as if they were floating. A caterpillar living on a bed of moss.

I speak for the woods
I live in the woods
I speak in the woods
I live for the woods

Lime Night Life Light

Ah, back to the hammock

cold paws, correct breathing

shoulders relaxed
writing in bed, flowers
scattered around
my dark shape
amid
innumerable dark shapes
under an empty sky
full of fluttering
moths
whose white noise fills up the valley
called to my reading
my lime night life light
a babbling brook of half-heard ideas
while
I roam, hourless,
over the mornings and afternoons
of possible lives not lived
and possible patterns
of impossible sciences

South Park, Colorado

Its best to be protected the first day out in the wilderness. Racing clouds and sun meant sunglasses useless. Plunging through underbrush - stop at the edge of a copse of woods. So unfortunately that meant boots. There was evidence of Plenty - the squirrels had more pine cones than they knew what to do with; many lay unchewed in the relative clearing under the canopy of Engelmann spruce boughs.
The edge of the woods, where the aspen grow shorter, scarred by the testosterone-fuled frenzy of male Elk. There were battles here, symbolic and real; the snorting cry of chivalry and desire. Scattered bones stand silent testament to those too old to be fleet of foot.

Steep Gulch outside Leadville, CO

I started down from Hope Mountain in a light rain -- so light I could still look about normally. The Gentians were closed against the storm, though. The face of a deer caught the corner of my eye, and the recognition became an involuntary turn of the head, in time to see her do the same.

Down, down through the mats and then thickets and then forests of Engelmann spruce, as if dull silver-evergreen tips remember dry copper-containing ore. Where the spruce grow tall they let the mat juniper have the understory. And now mats of strawberries...I noticed a tiny wild strawberry sitting on the lip of the mountain squirrel's burrow; ripening in the sun or dropped from his paws when my oversize shadow darkened his door? Without hesitation I picked it up and ate it in two heavenly bites. No regret.

Two butterflies were fluttering over and on one another, surely engendering piles of caterpillars in the underbrush.

Contingency and Control in the Laboratory

The Comparative Psychology of Learning: the Selective Association Principle and Some Problems with "General" Laws of Learning. Bolles (ed) 1973.

"A rat on a treadmill learns i f it runs when it hears a beep it can avoid an electric shock. The rat can also learn to turn to avoid a shock. But rats cannot learn to rear up on their hind legs to avoid being shocked. The rat's brain cannot learn to avoid danger using a naturally exploratory behavior."

In the same vein, you also can't train animals to get a reward by moving away from a stimulus that predicts reward. Pavlovian conditioning trumps Skinnerian. (personal communication, Dr. Insel) Accepting the full import of this work entails abandoning general intelligence. Without general learning, we can question the adaptability of man to the modern social-technological milieu. It appears we can learn some things, but for others we will continue to make the same mistake over and over again.

...which reminds me of my current philosophy of science, expressed by E.O Wilson:

"Nature first, then theory. Or, better, Nature and theory closely intertwined while you throw all your intellectual capital at the subject. Love the organisms for themselves first, then strain for general explanations, and, with good fortune, discoveries will follow. If they don't the love and pleasure will have been enough."

The idiosyncrasies of evolutionary contingency make controlled experiments difficult to interpret, in the sense that it may be hard to extrapolate "logically" from one model (animal) or trait to another system. The general laws we attempt to find by working in simplified laboratory settings may not even exist, but if we don't "love the organism for itself" we may never know it. This is part of the reason I'm leaving laboratory science. Under this interpretation, contrary to current fashion (and dogma), the profligate wonders of Natural History become the supreme biological science.

Zeitgeist: nobody believes this story

w90a8TYT8)(*#)%(its like somekind of voodoo science fiction

horror story - Weird Circumstances and Religious Visions

too...evolving...raw,fresh,feral, the long drawn out death of

a mountain lion, the dry hills, Backbone of a continent,

pinyon, piece-meal, shattered. Here, too, squat in stone

towers (albeit 1000 A.D.), blasted sinfilled cities, share in

the earthern pizza oven with all the rainbows of biodynamic

generalities. DOING GOOD WORK< SURROUNDED BY DUST up to our

eyebrows, machettes and slingshot, spear, and motorcycle;

running on high-octane raw milk and butter, bjorkian

wonderlusting up the Backbone through the second Eden of

permaculture Santa Fe, Taos, Durango, Montrose, Hotchkiss skip

and jump to Rocky Mountain Nat'l Park.

in the bathrooms the scientists all clasp their hands before

the mirror
in prayer that the autofaucets will turn on
in the cubicicle the woman next to me is selling her

breastmilk
a machine is suckling now

so i quit the frankenstein
Department of Defense
and return to the land:
I'm sleeping in a hammock
the earth owns
a small strawbale casita, in the big pantano cuerca, canelo,

rillito

watermelon pineapple & soy sauce
Hawaiin-brought macadamia nuts
heavy odor of centronella
i kneel and pass fingers through dirt
fingers through dirt
everything made of dirt
made of dirt
I pass fingers through the world

to worship technology but still doubt
understand the mistake in what's
given

i eat these cumquat preserves w/
(local) (raw) honey and butter
i combat global warming
i grow fat while it grows thin

fuck man its total war
HELICOPTERS everywhere, every 5 minutes
La Frontera, The Border
they're strafing villages 100 kilometers from here

awww man we're totally fucked
its so hot here you want to fuck yourself
the 9-to-5ers must be unhappy everywhere
none of them ever stops trying
finding work - playing hot potato

I'm playing bongos on the street
I've cured global warming
the green spreads out from my
huts and tents
the whirlwind
a moon-burn
making good choices
and opening lucky meetings

Breath. Deep. Ecology.

The lights of Tucson turn black sky blue on the horizon,

obliterating the stars there and I think of the numberless salmon who, in their ardor, turned the waters pink,

so thick you could walk across, from bank to bank, on their backs (source: probably apocryphal story believed by Lewis and Clark).

But we embraced progress and prosperity
and built the dams that killed the illimitable salmon,
numberless as the stars.

In my career I see reflected
this history of society embracing technology,
perhaps to prove to ourselves that we can.
I've done genetic engineering and brain surgery,
great endeavors that now seem hollow.

In their stead, I would
Embrace the wild uncertainty of nature....