The Omnivore's Delight

Omnivores, whether bears, ravens, dogs or humans, have a dilemma at this time of the year. We have such a glut of fresh food that we don’t quite know what to do with it all.

[Part of the great lettuce glut of 2012] 

We could simply wait: the glut will fade away as quickly as our Tasmanian daylight. While today we have 10 hours of daylight, by the winter solstice in a few weeks time, we will be down to 9 hours. And even then the sun, busy powering the plants of the northern hemisphere, will be giving our food plants scant attention.

Presented with a surplus of food, and a shortening of days, most omnivores have an irresistible urge to do something with their bounty. Some deal with the boom or bust situation by gorging themselves when food is plentiful, and going into torpor or hibernation when it’s scarce. It works well enough for Alaska’s brown bears. Along the Pacific coast of Alaska, the summer glut of salmon is hard to believe. Millions of large, plump salmonids swim into a finite number of streams to spawn. Bears – and humans – literally have to walk over fish to cross a creek or move along a shore.

[Expired Alaskan salmon: just a few of the millions]  

You might expect that bears would gobble down fish indiscriminately. In fact they become quite fussy. When we were in Sitka in south-east Alaska, we came across fish that had small holes in their heads and slits along their bellies, but were otherwise intact. The lumbering bears, perhaps 3 metres tall and with paws the size of dinner plates, had used their claws as delicately as scalpals to remove just the brains and roe, the parts with the highest fat content.

The same fussy eaters would then supplement their fish diet with other plant matter, especially berries. We did likewise when we discovered blueberries growing wild in Sitka’s wet forests. Oh to have that kind of scroggin in our bush!

After their extended feast, brown bears head to their dens for around six months. It’s generally called hibernation, although the bears don’t stay fully asleep. In many cases the females even give birth during the winter, not something any mammal would sleep through. Australia’s eastern pygmy possums, fattened on nectar and insects, favour torpor rather than hibernation, as described in this earlier post.

Another response to surplus is to put food aside in some form so it can be accessed and consumed during the lean times. Butcher birds, woodpeckers and squirrels are among those to “squirrel away” their food. Dogs bury bones as part of the same instinct.

Humans, with their mastery of fire, glass, metals and refrigeration, have a substantial advantage over most omnivores. We can, in truth, store summer in a jar. Or less romantically, in the fridge or freezer. In Alaska many of our friends smoke salmon to preserve it over the winter months. Cured, smoked and salted meats were staples for many centuries prior to refrigeration. They continue to be hugely popular.

[Summer in a jar: chutneys by Lynne]

Our own glut includes tomatoes, lettuce, basil, and parsley. And even though much of our fruit is finished, we’ve also been able to find a few late raspberries and apples. We have no shortage of recipes for tomatoes and apples, especially sauces and chutneys. A few hours work help us to store the ghost of summer in the pantry. While both basil and parsley can be dried for later use, we turn our excess, blended with oil, pine nuts and parmesan, into delightfully tangy pesto.

Lettuce is more problematic. Lettuce pesto doesn’t have a convincing ring to it. Neither will it freeze or dry. Despite our best eating efforts, much of last summer’s crop is either shooting or becoming rabbit food. One friend believes that’s all it’s good for, although I can’t agree with him on that. I will miss the wet crunchy freshness of homegrown lettuce over the next few months.

One bitter-sweet seasonal marker for us is the autumn colouring of Tasmania’s endemic fagus (Nothofagus gunnii). We make our annual pilgrimage to Mt Field’s Tarn Shelf to see its beautiful autumn display. Although the colouring and dropping of leaves tell us that colder, darker times are on their way, I never tire of seeing that flame lick across the high slopes. The colouring seems an act of both retreat and triumph.

[Fagus lights up the Tarn Shelf in Mt Field National Park] 

On our way home we happen across the last of the season’s fresh raspberries for sale in Westerway. At home a handful of late berries struggles to redden, but at the berry farm they have just enough to sell by the punnet. Back in our kitchen I combine fresh and frozen raspberries and sylvan berries, and cook up a large pan of hybrid red berry jam.

I know that in the depths of winter a spoonful of that jam will bring a summer smile to my soul. Although it’s highly doubtful I need delay sampling it until winter.

Life in the Fridge*

A harbor seal on ice, South Sawyer Glacier, Alaska  

They say firewood warms you three times: collecting it, splitting it and burning it. During the latest blast of wintery weather, while my thrice-warmed body relaxed by the fire, my curious mind was free to wander in comfort. It got to thinking about how other mammals deal with the cold.

A few years back we had the privilege of spending time in Alaska. Before you get mental images of snow and ice and polar bears, I should quickly add that we were there in summer, and in the relatively mild south-east. Except for the highest parts, the area is dominated by coniferous forest and intricate and rich waterways.

But it can still get cold, and the incredibly diverse wildlife of both sea and land has had to adapt to that. We were fortunate enough to see some of the amazing variety of mammals that live in and around Alaska’s Inside Passage.

Largest of all were the whales, mainly humpback, but also grays. The area is a hot-spot for humpbacks, providing both large amounts of food (krill) and vast sheltered waterways. Their protection against the cold water is two-pronged: fuel and insulation. Digesting food gives the body energy, and thus warmth. But the right kind and quantity of food also builds up a fatty layer (blubber) just beneath the skin. It can be up to 15cm thick, and keeps the whale’s body warm even in freezing cold water.

A mother humpback whale and calf in the Inside Passage, Alaska 

Steller sea lions and harbor seals use a similar tactic, building up layers of blubber that can account for up to 30% of their weight during winter. Both have extremely fat-rich milk, enabling their pups to quickly put on weight, including the all-important insulating layer of blubber. Although both of these pinnipeds have some hair, the hair has absolutely no insulating value.

Steller sea lions hauled out on a rock in Sitka Sound, Alaska 

That contrasts starkly with the defence against cold used by sea otters. We came across a raft of these charming aquatic mammals in Sitka Sound. They were swimming and resting in the kelp-covered shallows, occasionally surfacing with shell-fish, which they ate using their tummies as a table. We approached slowly, engine off, so as not to scare the skittish mammals. They’ve been hunted close to extinction, so their wariness is justified.

Sea otters dining in the shallows, Sitka Sound, Alaska 

Apart from fuelling themselves via a rich shell-fish diet, sea otters have the densest fur of any mammal. Hair density can reach an amazing 165,000 hairs per square cm, equating to hundreds of millions of hair fibres per otter. Only God is supposed to know how many hairs humans have on their head (see Luke 12:7), but scientists estimate a mere 150 000 in total. And that's if we've kept them all! 

Only one other mammal comes close to this hirsute sea otter, and that’s Australia’s unique monotreme, the platypus. Body fat becomes far less important to these creatures, as their dense fur traps air and excludes water, both of which keep the body warmer. 

On land we came across a mammal which uses yet another tactic to cope with life in the fridge. Bears, both Alaskan brown (or grizzly), and the black variety, live in south-east Alaska. We got uncomfortably close to the obligatory three bears, although in our case it was a momma bear and two baby bears (papa bear, thankfully, didn't show). Although the state of their fur and the amount of fat they carry are still important, bears also beat off the cold by hibernating through the winter months.

Interestingly, Australia's other monotreme, the echidna, also hibernates. In fact echidnas lower their temperature far further, and hibernate more deeply, than do bears.

Meanwhile there's snow on Kunanyi/Mt Wellington, and I’m carefully considering my cold-beating options. I'm not keen to add blubber, and my hair density only looks like heading south. While hibernation also has its attractions, I think I’ll settle for food (in moderation) and fire to protect me from the cold. That and the feathers that fill my doona and down jacket. I bless the geese that kindly loaned me those!


* When Alaska was purchased from the Russians in 1867 for $7.2million (about 2c an acre), it was derided by the press and many politicians as a waste of money for a useless “ice-box”.

Small Wonder

[lichen and leaf mold, Pandani Grove walk, near Lake Dobson, Tasmania]

 

My senior high biology teacher, Mr Harnack, was fond of asking questions. Nothing unusual about that, I suppose, except that it was always the same question. And he would ask it every single lesson: What is life?

I’m sure he thought he was being deep, dramatic, and more than a little cosmic. To our shame, my classmates and I focussed less on the depth of his question than on his nerdish mode of delivery and his American drawl (“Boyzz – Whaart izz larrff?”)

Spending time among lichens in recent days brought Mr Harnack’s question to mind. It’s not that I doubt lichens are a lifeform. They are actually one of the more complex and interesting forms of life on earth: a symbiosis between two other living forms, algae and fungi.

Because the algal part of the partnership processes light via photosynthesis, lichens have some plant-like characteristics. However unlike plants, if they experience extended periods of heat, drought or cold, they can go into a suspended state – known as cryptobiosis – until conditions improve. They may appear dead, hanging as crisp and lifeless as dead leaves, when they are actually full of life. Hence my asking the Harnack question.

Cryptobiosis enables them to grow in locations impossible for most plants, including bare rock, sterile soil or sand, and human-made structures like walls, roofs and tomb-stones. And they can grow on other plants, even in the darkest depths of a rainforest.

That’s where I most recently encountered them, luscious and luminescent on the trunks of rainforest trees. But I’ve also seen the more demure forms that blotch granite boulders or daub dark dolerite. And the Harnack question comes to mind wherever I observe this intimacy between lichen and its substrate. The growth habits of lichen seem to blur the distinction between the living and the dead. Where, for instance, does the rock or dead bark end and the lichen begin? Does the fungal part of the organism reach deep into the rock as fungi will in soil. And can the substrate really be excluded from the symbiosis if the lichen “protects” the rock or bark?

[lichen on granite, Maria Island National Park, Tasmania]

 

I observed its role in bridging the living and the dead when visiting some Alaskan glaciers a few years ago. There lichen plays the part of John the Baptist, preparing the way for the lifeforms that will come after it. As glaciers retreat – and they have long been seen to do so in Alaska – bare rock sees the light of day for the first time in millennia. Lichen colonises the fresh faces, slowly doing its rock-breaking, soil-producing work. The soil then enables other pioneering species, plants like willow, fireweed and alder, to gain a foothold. In Alaska it takes 70 to 80 years from glacial retreat to full-blown coniferous forest. That’s a startlingly short time in earth history, and a testament to the influence of the easily overlooked wonder that is lichen.

Dragons in Paradise: Part 1

[A stuffed Alaskan Brown Bear in the Juneau Museum. In the rest of the USA they're known as Grizzly Bears. You'd be grizzly too if you'd been stuffed!]

[I'm amazed and intrigued by our perceptions of things that bite, sting and sometimes devour ...]

Every Garden of Eden has its serpent, every paradise its dragons. So there will always be hazards in the wild. Few walkers on their home patch give these more than a respectful thought or two. They’re like the local road rules: you’re so accustomed to following them you do it almost automatically. In contrast the first time I drove in North America, there was nothing automatic about driving on the right side of the road.

So too when I first walk in a new area, I tend to pay the unfamiliar hazards a lot more heed. If you wanted to be heavily analytical about it, or if OH&S training was deeply ingrained, you could create a score-card of such hazards for your walking destinations, and assiduously eschew all hazards. In practice such an approach is a little more anal than most of us tend to be. Rather we listen to locals – sometimes filtering their words for blarney – and/or we read the guidebooks. We then take appropriate precautions.

But common sense doesn’t always prevail. I’ve found a certain tabloid-fuelled fear, especially among Europeans, of all biting and stinging things in Australia. Sometimes this fearfulness can not only rob you of enjoyment, it can even backfire. One poor German we heard about in New Zealand had avoided walking in Australia for fear of poisonous spiders (something I’ve never encountered while walking). He chose to tramp in New Zealand, because it had no snakes and few spiders. But on his first day in Fiordland he was besieged by sandflies. The bites, many on his face, became infected and he ended up almost incapacitated.

Of course even the most rigorous hazard chart will never tell the full story. As much as I like to think of Tasmania as a “green and pleasant land”, there are times when I’ve paused to wonder why the scrub has to be quite so spiteful. One Easter we came off the Traveller Range near Lake St Clair by means of a traditional off-track “scrub bash”. The term is the same in New Zealand, even if, in my opinion, the scrub is marginally less fearsome. In Alaska, where the bush has the added seasonal bonus of bearing deliciously edible fruit, they call it bushwhacking. Despite its apparent meaning, the phrase actually means getting from point A to point B without a track, and hopefully with the least possible damage from or to the vegetation.

As we dropped from the Travellers through thick scrub, the theory was that descending would be so much easier than ascending, whatever amount of knee wobbling it may induce. But knees proved to be the least of our worries. At regular intervals our progress was blocked by cutting grass (Gahnia grandis) ready to slice our grasping hands if we sought to use it to slow our inelegant stumbling. As we spiralled off that hazard we plummeted into a wall of scoparia. This stuff alone is enough to keep me from wearing shorts in the Tasmanian bush. That it bears flowers of great beauty and with an edible nectar every summer is, at the time, small compensation for the shredded skin and clothes that a serious exposure to its teak-tough, razor-sharp foliage produces. Add encounters with hakea (needle bush), banksia, and bauera and the theme of tough inflexibility is seared into your brain.

Yet as you level out this resistance army gives way to a smiling guard of honour, as a beautifully benign myrtle beech forest welcomes you back to the Overland Track near the so-called Bowling Green. It was probably named for its lawn-like appearance, at least from afar. It’s kept that way by a combination of browsing wombats and waterlogging.

… While the natural instinct might be to do a St George, most of these dragons actually have a rightful and useful place in the ecology of the areas we choose to visit. Rather than slaying them willy-nilly, we can learn to live with dragons, and can even develop a grudging admiration for their biting, stinging or blood-sucking genius. Failing that we can at least adapt our walking styles to their presence.

Walking with an awareness of “dragons” doesn’t always have to be as extreme as when we hiked in bear country in Alaska. There we took some early advice to wear bear bells on the trail. We felt more than slightly crazy wearing these “jingle bells” and clapping and singing to forewarn bears that we were around. But given that we did see our statutory 3 bears (a mother and her two cubs) we felt justified in our lunacy.

Afterwards some more savvy locals told us that bears refer to the bells as dinner bells. They then shared lots of not-very comforting bear mauling stories. They topped it off with the standard bear bell joke, which goes. Q: How do you know when a bear has eaten a tourist? A: From the bells in their droppings. When we went bushwhacking with locals on Baranof Island, and they saw our bells, they quietly offered us cans of pepper spray instead. They prefer to carry it as a last ditch weapon against an attacking bear. Some dragons have to be taken pretty seriously, especially 3 metre tall carnivorous ones.

Witnessing A Coup

[Written during a visit to Alaska in 2005]

Many of Tasmania’s most vivid landscapes have been bequeathed us by ice. Yet even a deep and prolonged association with both the fact and the landscapes only partially readied me for the drama of seeing a working glacier. The U-shaped valleys of Tasmania’s Lake Judd have a clean elegance, while the steep sides of Lake St Clair wear a forest-fringed softness. Even the vertiginous cirque walls of Lake Huntly and the sharp aretes of Cradle Mountain have a finished look, as though the ice has stepped back to admire its work. All of Tasmania’s glacial landscapes seem to mix even their most abrupt shapes with a sense of mellowed age, a vintaged wine whose astringent elements have been tempered through time in oak or bottle.

While flying over the altogether younger ice-fields and glaciers of Baranof Island in south-east Alaska, there was still a white-wedding aura about the uncomplicated virgin white of the stunning scene. Snow white purity dominated, with the somewhat dowdier peaks and lakes merely making up the wedding party. Given this gentle introduction – and my own Tasmanian conditioning – I was ill-prepared for the shot-gun wedding that is the South Sawyer Glacier. One of Southeast Alaska’s many sea-level or tidewater glaciers, South Sawyer extends more than 30km to the sea from the 2,500 metre mountains and ice fields of Canada and the Tracy Arm – Fords Terror Wilderness. The glacier guards the landward end of the vast Tracy Arm fiord, once a glacial valley itself.

The day of our visit is a rare and gloriously blue-skied Alaskan day. But it is the blue of the glacier that initially steals the scene. This is no blushing white glacier, nor even a pale, powder blue one. John Muir truly called it a “quick and living blue”. South Sawyer presents a huge rough-cut maw to us across the terminus of Tracy Arm, grinning with deep cobalt ice-teeth. If at first all seems silent, we soon discover otherwise, for this is no stately and static set-piece. Both teeth and ‘food’ are in motion the whole time we are there. Crashes and clashes of rock, ice and water are seen and heard all around. Meltwater shifts great quantities of rock and silt from the steeply enclosing walls and from beneath the glacier, pouring them into the water in torrents or loosening them for gravity to take its turn. Boulders tumble with loud, echoing thuds. Yet to the eye – fooled by the clear air and lack of vegetation for scale – the boulders look like mere clods of earth, fraying into fragments as they fall. With slow, chaotic regularity bergs of varying size slice off the glacier’s face, again seeming mere slivers until the sound reaches us with a thunderous roar. To call these juddering collapses ‘calving’ – a term that for me has gentle bucolic associations – seems to down play the rugged reality of a birth under the pressure of both gravity and the bullish weight of ice pushing from behind. Or is my perspective overly urban and masculine? Perhaps giving birth – even bovine birthing – really is as noisy, dramatic and messy as this.



As we watch and listen, some of last week’s bergs squeeze quietly past us. It is like rubbing shoulders with the ancients. Each luminous blue beast may be literally prehistoric, made up of compressed snow that fell many hundreds of years ago, and has moved from mountaintop to sea at as little as 20 metres a year. We had passed their brethren on the way here, all blue and bobbing in the sun, but growing imperceptibly smaller as they made their relatively hasty way to the sea and oblivion.

In fact glaciers are no drop-in-the-ocean. They hold over 2% of earth’s total water, oceans included. And around 75% of the planet’s fresh water is held in glaciers. Were all of these beasts to become extinct, sea level rise would be catastrophic. Each ancient berg also carries small loads of silt and dust, some stolen from surrounding rock, some sprinkled on them from the heights, some added by short-lived streams that flow onto the glaciers in summer. All will be added to some far future sedimentary formation, when even the unthinkable depths of Tracy Arm will be forgotten, and a new landscape will joust with ice, rain, heat, fracture or whatever else is thrown at it.

But the present action isn’t only mineral. Animal and vegetable stake a claim here too. On the congested ice dump beneath the glacier’s snout hundreds of harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) dot the ice. With the temporarily solid ice preventing orcas from attacking, the seals loll insouciantly in the sunshine. It must feel quite the opposite of skating on thin ice – at least until hunger forces their next fishing trip.

From the surrounding slopes alder, hemlock and spruce watch and wait as the glacier retreats. In a mere dozen years it has retired hundreds of metres. Eventually, even in this dramatically steep terrain, there will be land ready for colonising. Others may be the first, but the conifers will surely follow. At the Mendenhall Glacier on the outskirts of Juneau, the glacier’s retreat has been systematically observed for well over a century. The Visitor Centre, high above Lake Mendenhall and several hundred metres from today’s glacier, was built where the glacier had been active as recently as 1935. Where once ice went unchallenged, there is now established coniferous forest. An ordered and predictable succession of growth has been noted, with lichen doing its rock-breaking, soil-producing work first. This is followed by pioneer species such as willow, fireweed and alder. Finally within 70-80 years the conifers start to predominate.

A day in the company of glaciers has me comparing history with geology. We may read blithely of a coup that replaced King A or President B, with years of peace (or otherwise) following. So too we may study geology and read mechanically of the epic landscape-altering work of glaciers. But seeing the violence and mayhem of a glacier up close seems to me like witnessing a coup. History judges a coup by its outcome. So too will geomorphology judge a glacier by its resulting landforms. But what a privilege, albeit a dangerous one, to be there for at least a small episode of this earth coup, and to see first-hand the processes that once shaped so much of my island home, Tasmania.

A Hymn to Tasmania

[A Welcome Speech to the Interpretation Australia Association (IAA) National Conference in Strahan, Tasmania by Peter Grant, October 3, 2005]

What is this place, this island you have come to that we call Tasmania? In a sense there are as many Tasmanias as there are people who experience it. So I would like to simply share something quite personal of what Tasmania means to me. I call it “A Hymn to Tasmania”, adding a warning footnote that not all hymns are “happy clappy”. Many of the best have a dark or sombre note through which hope and victory must struggle to shine.


Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is universally regarded as a magnificent work of art. In addition to the beauty of the subject, there is something about the enigmatic smile that has sparked both admiration and speculation for as long as it has existed. Likewise there is a certain magnificence to Tasmania. Here is an island – an archipelago of islands as our late Premier Jim Bacon liked to say – that is admired across the Strait by the majority of Australians, and loved by the increasing numbers who come to it from further afield.

Here you will find a beguiling mixture of utter wildness and amiable approachability. As American writer and photographer Arthur Rosenfeld put it “nowhere have I seen such breathtaking contrasts arise so naturally from the dialogue between mountain and forest, clarity and cloud, sun and moon. A person can disappear in beauty like this."

But once you have penetrated the beauty of this island you will find, as with the Mona Lisa, that there is also an enigma. Instead of a smile however, it is an enigmatic frown. On this heart-shaped island, there is a feeling that the heart has been hurt if not broken at times. What is the source of this frown; this veiled heart-ache? For me it derives from a sense that something tragic, something sad, flawed or failed has happened here. A skein of melancholy seems woven into the warp and weft of this beautiful place.

And our history bears this out, starting with the Aboriginal tragedy that unfolded here following European invasion. It is difficult to see how we can use any other word than invasion. Surely “discovery” is just plain wrong, and “settlement” euphemistic at best. Even before 1803 there were skirmishes between the Palawa, the original Tasmanians, and the Europeans – as there were also friendly exchanges. But once the English decided to come, their gaze having turned here following their capture of French information on the island, there was little that could stop them. Aboriginal resistance was blunted by both guns and germs. The Palawa, so long isolated from a host of germs, quickly succumbed to European-borne diseases. It was a victory of sorts merely to survive under such circumstances, but Tasmania’s Aboriginal people have survived … and we will hear more of that story later.

Not only were the English determined to injure, infect or ignore the island’s long-established inhabitants, they also worked to supplant them with convicts. This cargo of human misery was to be transplanted out of the old country – out of sight and mind – to the “end of the world”. A place where nature herself was to be one of the keenest gaolers. Thus were culture and nature dubious allies in old Van Diemen’s Land.

And then there is our more modern history, in which the worst excesses of Van Diemen’s Land were to be expunged through hard labour. But this time the work was not so much for the overseers as for ourselves. We would delve, cut, sow and pluck a new state into being, even changing our name to Tasmania as though to distance ourselves from “the hated stain” of our convict past.

So how have we fared on this rebound from the past? Let me employ an extended analogy. The ancient Hebrew prophet Hosea was given one of the most bizarre jobs in the bible. He was instructed by God to marry a prostitute named Gomer. This was so that he could experience, and then communicate to his peers, what it was like for the Lord to have his “wife” – the people of Israel – constantly unfaithful to him through worshipping false gods.

As I look at modern Tasmania, I sometimes feel a little like Hosea. I love this place, yet Tasmania, like Gomer, seems always ready to run off after false gods. In the post war years this included the idea that we could become a manufacturing centre – “The Ruhr Valley of the South” was the rhetoric of the time – if only we could produce enough cheap power to attract heavy industry. The loss of the irreplaceable Lake Pedder was one result of this short-skirts-and-gaudy-make-up approach. And currently it seems that we are selling off our forests for a cheap drink and a bit of slap-and-tickle, while only the Madam makes any money.

I have recently returned from Alaska, a place with many resonances for a Tasmanian. Alaska is seen – indeed their vehicle number plates proclaim it – as “the last frontier”. (We are “Your Natural State”.) When Alaska was purchased from the Russians in 1867 for $7.2million (about 2c an acre), it was derided by the press and many politicians as a waste of money for a useless “ice-box”. (While no-one had to buy Tasmania, I’m sure some of you consider us to be Australia’s bar-fridge in terms of climate! And doubtless Cascade & Boags would be happy to fill that role for you!)

Despite its inglorious beginning, one of Alaska’s biggest roles today is as a reminder of what the lower 48 used to be and used to have. In Alaska you will find vast forests, huge wildernesses of ice-fields and glaciers, wildlife in unbelievable abundance. Tasmania plays a similar role for Australia, albeit on a smaller scale, especially in terms of intact wild ecosystems. Chief Geographer Henry Gannett, writing of Alaska in the late 1800s, stated that its grandeur, “is more valuable than the gold or the fish or the timber, for it will never be exhausted.“ This quote, more than a century old, sets out some of the alternatives both Alaskans and Tasmanians still face today.

And in neither place is it always a straightforward choice. In Alaska the tourists that come to see the grandeur, especially those in cruise ships, can overwhelm the local populace and the unique local culture. Juneau, the state’s capital, is dominated as much by its plethora of souvenir and merchandise shops as it is by its stunning mountainous surroundings. The locals know that you only have to go 100 metres up any hill – and there are plenty of those – and you will shake off the exercise-shy tourists. Either that or wait for winter! In Sitka, where I spent most of the last month, the best coffee shop in town, a wonderful Bohemian hang-out, is hidden away at the back of a bookshop, and thus protected from the majority of the “boat people”.

Bulk tourism of this kind seems to be a very mixed blessing. Which is where Tourism Tasmania’s “Experience Strategy” seems to me to show the way. Here it is recognised that you will only add value to tourism, and win the word-of-mouth game, if you offer an authentic experience. Can you truly experience Alaska by spending several days in a cruise ship, stopping en-masse in ports that sell food and merchandise that comes from the cruise companies, and is usually made elsewhere? And if you seldom meet a local and go no further afield than the shops, how “Alaskan” is the experience? You could see the same scenery, and more wildlife, by staying at home and watching the Discovery Channel. You would also avoid sea sickness.

Tourism Tasmania, to its credit, has recognised that tourists increasingly demand an authentic experience. Moreover they have seen that the key to providing such experiences in Tasmania is interpretation. And so a circle starts to form, cycling through experience, stories and meaning to authenticity … with interpreters central to the whole process. However it will not remain authentic if we Tasmanians “whitewash our tombs”; if we try to gloss over the tragedies of our past or the inconsistencies of our present.

American novelist David Guterson (“Snow Falling on Cedars”), who himself lives on an island, observed that:

Islands fill mainlanders with an unabashed yearning for a life simpler than the one they endure, a pared-down life in which all that is elemental - sea, wind, sun, love, the last light of day, the sand beneath fingernails - is brought to the fore-front of existence.

In Tasmania we can choose to pander to that illusion. We can try to convey that here you will find only blessed and happy people; the cleanest and greenest of economies; food and wine fit for gods; and bounteous wild and untouched wilderness, all in perfect balance. Or we can tell the truth: that the human drama, with all its pathos, comedy, tragedy, farce and struggle, is played out here in the nature culture of Tasmania, just as it is everywhere.

And yet … it seems to me that there are lessons that can be learned from observing Australia’s island state closely. Our conference theme is Nature Culture: Interpreting the Divide. Here in Tasmania if we have witnessed, and continue to witness, some of the dreadful results of the perceived divide between the two, there are also positives that have been gained. I have spoken of tragedies in relation to our Aboriginal, convict and resource extraction histories. But each of these also shows us a hopeful side. Despite everything, our Aboriginal people have survived. And their culture and presence is burgeoning, as you will witness when you hear Jim Everett or walk the Henty Dunes. Likewise our convict past, as Richard Davey so eloquently reminds us, managed to produce some unexpected – and at the time unwanted – positives in terms of resistance, ingenuity and the triumph of the human spirit. And our natural resources have not been, and will not be, completely pillaged. Here in Strahan you are on the edge of 1.38 million hectares of World Heritage Area – saved and so-proclaimed through the action of individuals who loved this wild home, and told their rulers so.

As you experience the extraordinary places around Strahan, and around the rest of Tasmania, try to resist the notion that this is a place untouched by what happens where you live. And above all reject the notion that you are an alien here. As Gary Snyder has pointed out, nature is not a place to visit, it is home1. Welcome home.



1. The Practice of the Wild, p 7

Why I’m a Christian and a Conservationist

[sermon preached by Peter Grant at Margate Christian Church, Margate, Tasmania. August 26th, 2007]



I want to make this a personal meditation rather than a sermon. I want it to be theological in the sense that the thoughts behind are reflective of the bible, and of my long grappling with how to think about God and the world. But it will not be systematic and nor will it be linear or logical. After many years of trying, I have discovered that my brain, and those of many I know, don’t always work that way. Instead I see things episodically; I flit like a bird from thought to thought; I am gripped by the drama of a story or situation; I grab what is relevant and then move on.

I want to paint a series of scenes, and then ask you to respond to them is some way: some via interaction with others, some via personal reflection.

Scene 1: Birds at my window

A male superb blue wren – that is actually its proper common name, and an uncommonly felicitous one – lands on the oak tree next to where I am writing. As usual I have music accompanying my work: a Scottish band playing a complex Balkan dance tune, as it happens. Seemingly in time with the music one, two, three, four female wrens arrive in sequence. The five wrens then flit from branch to branch in an impossibly complex dance – their form of the dance of love – and it looks to be perfectly in time with my music. I smile at this wonderful display, which lasts perhaps 90 seconds, before they fly out of sight to continue their dance elsewhere. They leave me with a feeling that mixes joy and grace. Call it coincidence, but I am grateful to both God and the wrens for this moment of wonder.
Question: Turn and share with someone near you an example of when you have been grasped by something in the natural world that has made you feel grateful or joy-filled.

Scene 2: Some Scripture

"God saw all that he had made, and it was very good" – Genesis 1:31

"The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it." – Psalm 24:1

"Everything under heaven belongs to me" – Job 41:11

"My rainbow in the clouds … will be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth." – Genesis 9:13

"But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds of the air, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish of the sea inform you." – Job 12:7-8

"Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father." – Matthew 10:29

Question: What do you take from these verses? Are there other verses that you would use to reflect on how Christians might view the environment?

Scene 3: The Bishop and It

A learned and respected bishop is speaking at a conference. He is just getting into his much-anticipated, deeply theological talk when a baby begins crying. Several times he pauses, hoping perhaps for the child to be removed. Each time the bishop continues, so does the crying. Eventually unable to go on, the obviously exasperated bishop stops and says" "Either it goes or I go!"

Question: What, if anything, offends you about the bishop’s words and actions?

Scene 4: Object or Subject: Desire or Love?

Martin Buber’s "I-Thou". Buber was an Austrian Jewish philosopher and theologian. He spoke about "I-Thou" as distinct from "I-It" as a way of relating to the world. He saw creation as holding ways into relationship with the ultimate "Thou", God. This distinction has been taken up by some environmental thinkers as a means of preventing us from seeing the world and objects as only there for our benefit. Even a tree, Buber argued, could be treated (mystically) as a "Thou" rather than an "It".

Zygmunt Bauman, a contemporary sociologist, has described contemporary life as "liquid modernity" (a metaphor for the never-static, always adapting nature of today’s living). It is based on the idea that our lives are fuelled by a problematic consumption.
This consumptive attitude goes beyond the obvious "consumer products" version. We also consume experiences, hobbies, even relationships. This consumption is not based on need, or even on want, but on desire. He illustrates the way in which it isn't the goods of consumption that drive us to consume; it is the experience of desiring them. Desire has an almost spiritual force – "desire desires desire".

He continues: "We shop for … the resources for doing faster the things that are to be done and for things to do in order to fill the time thus vacated; for the most mouth-watering foods and the most effective diet to dispose of the consequences of eating them; for the most powerful hi-fi amplifiers and the most effective headache pills. There is no end to this shopping list."

Apart from the obvious pollution and waste that results from this, there is another relevance to the environment. In discussing relationships, Bauman helpfully differentiates love from desire. The latter "is an impulse to strip alterity of its otherness; thereby, to disempower. . . . Love is, on the other hand, the wish to care, and to preserve the object of the care. A centrifugal impulse, unlike centripetal desire." Apart from many other applications, this applies to our attitude to the environment also. If ever the creation needed people to love it, now is the time.
Question: [individually] When you think about a specific aspect of creation, be it a bird, a tree, a mountain or a moth, what kinds of attitudes or feelings are generated within you?

Scene 5: Lessons from Alaska

Loving your own place means that you take real notice of it; you know what fits where; you know what is happening from season to season; you chuckle – and possibly grumble - at its little peculiarities. But you love it! You rejoice in what it gives to you and yours. And because your covenant is mutual, you also give back to the place. You become its advocate and its defender from outside threat.

One person who personifies this for me is an ecotourism operator named Davy Lubin. I met Davy in Sitka, Alaska while he was showing a small group of mostly elderly cruise-ship tourists the wildlife of Sitka Sound in the state’s south-east. At one point, after Davy had cut his boat’s engine to wait for whales, he began explaining his love for this beautifully wild part of Alaska – the Tongass National Forest, the largest national forest in the whole of the USA. Oblivious to the borderline bilious boat movements, Davy praised the vision of President Theodore Roosevelt, who had reserved the area in 1907. He then talked of his own utter dependence on the area’s natural systems. Simply but profoundly he talked us through the local food chain. To say it starts and ends with Pacific Salmon is an over-simplification, but not a gross one. The salmon come in from the Pacific Ocean every spring in unimaginable numbers to spawn in coastal streams. From northern California to high-latitude Alaska they are caught while still at sea, directly providing the likes of Davy and his family with food. The salmon also feed countless bears, orcas, sea lions, otters and birds, helping them to put on fat that will see them through the harsh winter. The fish also indirectly feed and fertilise every square inch of this place, Baranof Island, as they do thousands of similar places. Salmon DNA has been found in the pine needles of conifers high on the island’s highest mountains, percolating into the tree’s juices through bear and bird droppings deposited there.

As well as supporting the vast and rich coniferous rainforests, and the array of creatures in them – including deer that provide Davy’s family with venison – the salmon-enriched nutrients eventually flow back to sea as a powerful brew. That in turn provides food for aquatic life from protozoa and krill all the way up to the humpback and grey whales that frequent the area in large numbers. And that is yet another meal-ticket for Davy Lubin and thousands of other Alaskans who rely on tourism for a living. So much rides on the salmon’s back – and there’s plenty enough for everyone, at least for now.

While I was in Sitka it was salmon spawning season. Every estuary and stream writhed with striving salmon. For weeks they kept pouring up the rivers and creeks. There are so many salmon in this annual run that the brown bears become very choosy about what they eat. With surprisingly delicate claw movements they will slit open salmon to remove and eat such delicacies as the roe or the brain. They then discard the rest of the fish, which will join all the others that expire shortly after spawning. The streams and eventually the very air become choked with death. On one approach to Sitka township, near Indian River, the stench of dead salmon fills the air. Even driving by with air conditioning it’s impossible to avoid the stench. But it is possible to think of it positively. We once lived near a piggery, and the farmer would smile at those who commented on the smell. "The smell of money" he would say with a wry smile. In a rather less crass way the locals of coastal Alaska know that the stench of dead salmon is the smell of a healthy ecosystem as well as the smell of money. For them ecology and economy aren’t separate. Back in Australia I’ve come to love the smell of mangroves; the reek of rotting kelp; the vapours rising off wetlands. They too are the smell of a rich and healthy environment.
It was not always so in Sitka, which once had a pulp mill. Despite all the usual promises about zero emissions, stringent controls and state-of-the-art technology, the mill ended up spewing effluent and smoke into this indescribably beautiful environment. The company paid the resulting fines as a kind of licence-to-pollute fee. The mill created employment, of course, but at what cost? The town became deeply divided between pro- and anti-mill factions; families and neighbourhoods were divided; and sensitive wildlife such as seals and sea-otters voted with their flippers, and stayed away from the area. And that’s to say nothing of the forests that were turned to pulp, and the soil that was washed into the sea. In 1993 the mill closed, and when I visited in 2005 most of the rancour was long gone, and both the wildlife and the economy were doing well. At the peak of logging, about 4,000 people worked for the timber companies. Now more than 5,000 work in tourism-related fields.

At Davy’s beautiful hand-built waterside home, made from local Sitka spruce and hemlock, logged and milled by Davy and friends, we talk further about the difference between conservation and preservation. Davy is firmly of the former persuasion. He unashamedly uses some of the natural resources of the area to feed and shelter his family. But being a lover of the place, and a powerful advocate for its natural systems, he is not going to lightly allow the area to be exploited or degraded again, as it once was by the pulp mill.

I left wondering whether it need be all that different for any of us in our own local regions. Perhaps access to a wonderful natural environment is more powerfully concentrated in places like Alaska and Tasmania. But couldn’t it be similar everywhere? One of the necessities, wherever we choose to call our home place, is that we cultivate a contemptless familiarity with whichever natural processes are going on around us. If we have to pay something, the least we can do is pay attention.