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Explore poems read by the two authors in conversation with each other, then follow your own fish to unlock your own creativity, and share it with us.
Hello, Deborah Backel Schmidt and me, Sue Boudreaux here, your Follow A Fish poetry conversations and inspiration podcast hosts. Friends and neighbors for ages are now enjoying the deep conversations of being poetry podcast pals. Every episode concludes with a prompt to inspire you to write and send something in. This Sunday, March 15, it's the second poetry open mic at the Good Table Gathering Space in El Sobrante. From that, we are going to be reading out and inviting local poet guests onto the show shortly.
Sue B:We also want to let you know that we are going to take a break after this first season of Follow A Fish poetry podcast until the April. We will be reflecting and perhaps tweaking our format and recording a backlog log of episodes on the just in case basis. Please let us know your ideas too. We love to hear from you at curiositycatpodcasts@gmail.com. Our theme this week is restoring nature, and oh, the spring here is just so gorgeous, like living in the green hills of paradise, nature restoring itself every year.
Sue B:And nature has such resilience even with the wounds that humans are inflicting. Not infinite, and disturbance does not mean nature will restore to what it was before, but, well, the meteorite 65,000,000 years ago and, well, here we are. The situation right now, the rate of climate change and the loss of species is serious, though, and we do not mean to diminish that. But inspiring people to actually act, that is the challenge of the conservation movement. It's each of us, our individual challenge.
Sue B:What is it that stops me from taking more action? How about you? Research suggests we consistently underestimate the impact of climate change on ourselves. And there's also research to suggest that doom and gloom is much less effective than realistic optimism of science based hope, as well as inspiration perhaps from poetry. Restoring nature even in small ways can help to restore ourselves in these tumultuous and frightening political times.
Sue B:Just being in nature, seeing the horses in the hills out of my window right now helps me to recenter. Doing something small for nature, especially with others, perhaps by picking up litter with the green team here in El Sobrante or weeding out invasives to help rewild a local creek. The spawners do that for the San Pablo Watershed, and it would be fun once I get over the I'm too busy and too tired loop in my head. I will do better and more. Maybe it's planting natives in my garden and watching bees and other pollinators come.
Sue B:All these things help restore nature and in doing so restore ourselves. I'll put a list of pro environmental things that can make a difference in the show notes. Think of it as a smorgasbord of choices. If this is something that speaks to you, if you are lit up by stories of surprising rewilding, of solutions that might save species, or damp climate change and make the world better, then you might like to join the Restoring Nature Restoring Ourselves monthly community forum at The Shed next door to The Good Table here in El Sobrante. The format will be round robin.
Sue B:Each participant gets to share solutions, inspiration, and the wonder of nature with time to discuss and chat. It's run by me with another longtime friend and neighbor, Wendy Warder. And who knows where that will go? It's up to us. Find the sign up details on our website curiositycats.com and at the shed El Sobrante.
Sue B:As usual, versions of our poems that we're reading today will be available linked in the show notes from our website curiositycatpodcasts.com. Today, I'm reading my poem Spring Break School. I'm alone on-site retrieving a forgotten item, fields still too wet to mow, a meadow in the making, gloriously green, a shag pile patchwork of grasses and clovers invading from hills where oaks and bays grow back, providing cover for deer who sometimes prance across the upper parking lot just under our notice, rewilding as beginning. Crows strut the sunlit breezeway down the center of the school. Well fed from dropped snacks, they heave up onto railings surveying the intrusion.
Sue B:A squirrel pauses in the distance, a little startled too, before rippling off its tail a liquid wave. The alarm switched off. It's just an interlude, all this urbanite. The stones we carve and raise, the land we drain and stabilize. Kids will return for a few seasons still, but nature, however altered, is waiting to emerge, edging in where it left off.
Sue B:A geologic moment since antelope hid in tall savannah grass, maybe even mammoths and saber toothed cats and awkward looking giant sloths. I'm imagining that when school gets back.
Deborah:I love the motion of his poem suit from the empty school with its overgrown grass to deer, crows, and the squirrel that signal the beginning of rewilding to your final image of antelope hiding, quote, in tall savannah grass, maybe even mammoths and saber toothed cats and awkward looking giant sloths. Here's one of your super intelligent crows again, surveying the intrusion, as you put it. And your description of the motion of a squirrel is just lovely, rippling off its tail a liquid wave. I feel that you and I have a deep kinship in the sense that both of us seem to be carrying always within us the vision of earth restored, reimagining every landscape we pass through as it might be with a light and loving human touch or no human touch at all. Here again too is the sensibility you have gleaned from geology of humans being just a blip in the long span of eons.
Deborah:And a note for our listeners, Sue had to educate me on the definition of the word urbanite, which just means reclaimed concrete used for landscaping. So, Sue, am I right that you often reimagine the landscapes you live in and pass through as restored? Yeah.
Sue B:I mean, I'm looking always for signs of nature coming back. So I love the spring because I constantly taking photographs of, like, emerging acid green leaves. Yeah. And I I sort of I guess I'm really drawn to that as the sign that's an annual thing of nature renewing itself. And the whole idea, the resilience of nature, its ability to renew itself is a source of allegory and hope for me.
Sue B:So do I imagine whole landscapes? I guess. But what I'm really doing is looking for and just that looking for and also the fact that I'm often taking photographs. The idea of taking photographs potentially for making paintings from them or using them as a a poem inspiration. Yeah.
Sue B:Those things right there help me to feel just a tiny bit better about the world. So it's the looking. I'm sure that most of our listeners do also use photography as a way to help themselves see good things happening.
Deborah:That's a lovely answer. And yes, and looking is so much at the heart of poetry. And so how was it that you came to do that to start to see nature restoring itself? I think the invention of digital cameras
Sue B:was really important for me. Because until then I'd occasionally taken photographs with film. But it was so expensive and so there was so much weight on each exposure. Yeah. But I just was like and then there would be this long wait until you got it developed.
Sue B:And so you know the idea of going back and looking at things. So the invention of us of cell phone cameras was was important to me and then I got myself a proper camera. And it's the looking that I think also helped to ground me more from which often poetry emerges.
Deborah:Yes.
Sue B:You know like there was a, just at the start of the pandemic I had a birthday party just before and somebody gave me a beautiful bunch of pink roses which I threw on the compost heap and it caught the light. And I've got this picture of the sort of gradual decay and destruction of these beautiful flowers on the compost heap. And you know those kinds of images are really important to me when I'm thinking about writing a
Deborah:poem. Absolutely, yes. Our listeners may not realize that you are currently pursuing an advanced degree in conservation science. So because of your training you may have some answers for these questions that I've had for a long time. Has anyone actually figured out what the ideal human population is in terms of sustainability or the ideal ratios of wild land, open space, sustainably cultivated land and urban space?
Deborah:In terms of the carrying capacity of the earth, I'm reading a book right now by Henry Gee called The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire, Why Our Species is on the Edge of extinction.
Sue B:Just in case you were feeling too cheerful. There you go. But it's actually less depressing than I had originally thought. I also read Jared Diamond's Collapse. So I'm kind of drawn to these dark titles and they do talk about things like, you know, the carrying capacity.
Sue B:And if we were all hunter gatherers, it would be about 10,000,000. Obviously, we're not. The agricultural revolution, first of all agriculture itself allowed far more people to exist on the earth and then the gradual breeding of domestication of both crops and animals greatly increased the number of people that could be fed and led to the rise of cities and crowding so But many events it also actually led to the crowding itself. When you put rats in a very crowded situation, their sperm count and their fertility drops. And it turns out that that's happening right now.
Sue B:Is that sperm count of men has dropped quite significantly in the last forty, fifty, sixty Which was a big surprise to me. The birth rates are now falling in many countries. And it's we're actually on the probably tipping over into reducing our population by just sheer total fertility rate. Now what the carrying capacity of the earth is depends very much on the standard of living that we either will accept. And if we were to do some things particularly impactful things in the Western world such as eating less beef is particularly heavy on the planet and takes an enormous amount of land to produce the same amount of calories that an equivalent, I don't know, you need know 10 times more land to produce the same amount of cow meat.
Sue B:And the same with dairy as well. It's very heavy on the planet. Pork, red meats in general. Lamb is particularly impactful. And air travel is also.
Sue B:And there's all kinds, you know, there's a load of information about which specific habits, how much carbon footprint they have. And that information is going to be included in our show notes.
Deborah:Right, yeah.
Sue B:And there are actions that you can take to reduce the impact we have on the climate. These are called pro environmental behaviors, PEBs. Mhmm. And I'll also provide a list of, you know, different things you could consider tweaking to make your personal footprint less and also the kinds of things that you might want to pressure local officials to do because even though our current administration has less than no interest in environmental stuff, The truth is that mayors and cities are particularly able to make significant changes. Yes.
Sue B:And they, of course, will listen to us more than the federal government.
Deborah:Mhmm.
Sue B:And, you know, a smaller electoral base means that each person has a bit more push.
Deborah:Yeah. There's still a lot of room for individual initiative too. Right. Company initiative. Right.
Deborah:Right.
Sue B:And so there's actually a lot of really good things happening at quite local levels. And by the way, some of these solutions around the world and here are things that we'd love to highlight in this new forum, Restoring Nature, Restoring Ourselves, will be held on the Monday, March 23.
Deborah:So ideal target human population for sustainable impact? I do not
Sue B:know what that would be. Just curious. Once we start to really exceed the Earth's carrying capacity where we're really at the brink of right now, there are so many systems which are already starting to fail, which have already tipped past. Then you're going to see scarcity. You're going to be seeing mass migration, which we currently have.
Sue B:And just on a side note, we were talking about this earlier that migration is something that can actually save The United States in particular because we have a drop, you know, our birth rate is declining which means that you're going to get a heavy population an inverted population pyramid with lots of older people. Right and nobody can take care of us. Yes! So we need immigrants not just for taking care of old people but for innovation vitality of society. And the first people to immigrate are going to be the people that have the most drive to make a better life.
Sue B:They're going to be really valuable to our society. Yeah. And I mean I just think it's so incredibly wrongheaded what we're doing right now. This kind of fear based protectionism.
Deborah:Exactly. It's so backward. But thank you. Great answers. Wow and the notes will help to amplify these answers too.
Deborah:Can you speak a bit about rewilding? Give us a brief definition and maybe a couple of successful examples. I know you gave one in the past as well.
Sue B:Yeah, yeah. So rewilding is not just letting nature take its course because it turns out to do that just to desert an area does not necessarily result in more biodiversity. There was recently an article about the effect of the black death on ecosystems in Europe. You know fields went fallow, a third of the population was killed by this epidemic. Something that might want make us want to pause about how we're currently managing vaccines and what have you.
Sue B:But in fact biodiversity did not particularly increase. So just leaving vacant lots to go back to the wild better than building something on it from a nature point of view. But there are ways that rewilding can be improved by well, Nepp in the South Of England is an estate which was a farm until I think 2001 and it just wasn't making any money. And so the owners Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree his wife decided they were going to do a rewilding experiment. And so they thought what would have been here in the Pleistocene?
Sue B:Oh wow. You know giant the aurochs which it's is the ox that's in cave paintings. Right. Which went extinct in Poland in like 1651 or something. They bought back some ancient cattle from Scotland because it turns out that the trampling is really important to micro habitats.
Sue B:And they bought back some wild boar because they're snuffling around and you know, disturbs the soil in ways, again, making tiny micro habitats. And, you know, they they looked at all of the different animals that would be likely to be present. They bought back some small wild horses as well. And they had to make adjustments because it turns out that too many pigs no. Bad thing.
Sue B:And and it's it's gorgeous. You could go on some safari there. And there's been some there's also, I think we mentioned last time, the rewilding of the Rhine River in in The Netherlands. Yeah. Which has resulted in a win win win situation and we talked about that in a prior episode.
Deborah:Yes.
Sue B:And so rewilding is something that needs to be carefully managed and not just from the nature point of view but also from public perception.
Deborah:Because
Sue B:there are booms and busts in population cycles and people do not want to see a bunch of deer starving to death.
Deborah:Mhmm.
Sue B:And yet, this is life is, to some extent, reddened tooth and claw. They do not like to see in the English countryside an area that used to be farmed going to scrub. This just the word scrub itself is a purgative term. Right. But it turns out that scrub is super important for baby rabbits.
Sue B:Think rare rabbit, right, being thrown into the briars. Because baby rabbits and baby birds need the scrub, the the thorns, to protect them from predators, you know, from hawks and what have you. Mhmm. And so they had a lot of pushback from their neighbors.
Deborah:I imagine.
Sue B:So, you know, your father would be ashamed of you to let your farm go like this.
Deborah:Yeah. Especially in England where there's such a high amount of cultivated land and pride in cultivated land. Exactly. And gardens.
Sue B:And so, you know, there there was a huge publicity thing that had to go along with it. They had to get grants. And and, you know, the whole thing is outlined in this book called Wilding, which is just a tremendous read. I would love to read that. Yeah.
Sue B:But I definitely recommend that. And then then in Holland, like I said before, there's there's some very exciting stuff going on in Europe. And also in The United States, there's, a wish to make a corridor from the Yukon all the way down for the migration of animals.
Deborah:Oh, fantastic.
Sue B:I mean, are enormous projects. Yeah. They're incredibly ambitious, but connecting wild lands is as important as rewilding a small piece of wild land.
Deborah:Yes. Like migration patterns.
Sue B:Right. Right. So in England, there's this thing where people build little hedgehog highways Uh-huh. Through their gardens.
Deborah:I love it.
Sue B:And so yeah. But I mean, that is the kind of the bigger picture. Like, there's a wildlife overpass being built in new in Los Angeles right now. Yeah. So these ideas light people up.
Sue B:I'm just I'm just feel lit up thinking about it. Uh-huh. And I really hope that, you know, other people consider rewilding their garden to some extent with native plants, Yes. For And maybe taking down fences between neighbors where possible and that kind of thing.
Deborah:Lovely. Well, I have the opportunity to reread your beautiful poem, Spring Break School. I'm alone on-site, retrieving a forgotten item, fields still too wet to mow, a meadow in the making, gloriously green, a shag pile patchwork of grasses and clovers invading from hills where oaks and bays grow back, providing cover for deer who sometimes prance across the upper parking lot. Just under our notice, rewilding is beginning. Crows strut the sunlit breezeway down the center of the school.
Deborah:Well fed from dropped snacks, they heave up onto railings, surveying the intrusion. A squirrel pauses in the distance, a little startled, too, before rippling off its tail a liquid wave. The alarm switched off. It's just an interlude, all this urbanite, the stones we carve and raise, the land we drain and stabilize. Kids will return for a few seasons still, but nature, however altered, is waiting to emerge, edging in where it left off.
Deborah:A geologic moment since antelope hid in tall savannah grass, maybe even mammoths and saber toothed cats and awkward looking giant sloths. I'm imagining that when school gets back.
Sue B:The prompt for today is restoring nature. Look for signs of hope and beauty in nature and perhaps take a photograph as well. Look in the news and see if there's a story that you think is particularly exciting and hopeful. And then start to write. Take a risk.
Sue B:Send what you wrote to us here at curiositycatpodcast@gmail.com. And unlike your grumpy uncle, we will read it and respond with specific positive comments and perhaps an inclusion on the show. Or you could bring it with you to tomorrow's open mic. Details in our show notes and at our website at curiositycatpodcasts.com. As with our podcast, the open mic is a friendly and encouraging place for creative people like you.
Deborah:We do encourage you to send us your poems. We're sure you probably have some hiding in a drawer that are dreaming a way of being heard. Besides print versions emailed to us at curiositycatpodcastgmail dot com, voice recordings as .wav files are also welcome. Or let us know if you'd like us to record your poem for you because we may choose a poem to read aloud on a future show. We will respond to all submissions whether or not we feature them here.
Deborah:Also at curiositycatpodcasts.com, you can read our show notes and see the poems in print with the artwork specially chosen for them. You can rate or review us via your podcast provider, and we'd be so grateful if you tell your friends about us. Our theme music is the Penelope Rag composed by John Partridge and played by John on piano and me on flute. Production and editing are done by Sue Boudreaux in El Sobrante, California.