Tacked to my office wall is a color-coded map, “World Biogeographical Provinces,” which describes the distributions of plant and animal communities. Unlike conventional maps with their rigid political boundaries, lines that demarcate biological provinces are mutable and fluid, often with wide transition zones that shift and shimmy with the vagaries of climatic and geologic forces.
Grasslands, for instance, Province 18, is a bright yellow swath that runs north from the Gulf Coast of Texas into south-central Canada, roughly dividing North America, which is called the “nearctic realm” by biogeographers. During wet years, deciduous trees invade the prairie along its eastern border. During dry years, the process reverses. Sometimes a fire nudges a transition zone, driving back the advanced guard of the deciduous woods and spreading the desert eastward.
We live at the northeast corner of Province 5, the eastern deciduous forest, shown on the map as a pale-green, fist-shaped region crowned by the steel-blue of the Canadian taiga, and set upon the deep green of the Austroriparian, the humid, alligator-lowlands of the Southeast, Province 6. Except for the Hudson and the Mohawk Rivers, which appear on the map as unlabeled wavy lines, and Lake Champlain, there are no discernible features in the northeast corner of Province 5. The Connecticut and Merrimack remain nameless and invisible on this map at global scale.
Although the nuances of my home ground—the lush wetlands with its noisy, voice-carrying bitterns and the trembling gray-green of hillsides full of young big-toothed aspen leaves—are all subsumed on the map into pale-green uniformity, when I look at the map of “World Biogeographical Provinces” I see a world order that embodies biologic rhythms. This reminds me of my reliance on products that are produced outside of Province 5 and, in some cases, outside of the nearctic realm, in regions to which I have little or no visceral connection. I eat oranges grown in Province 6, wheat from Province 18, raisins from Province 7, and smoked salmon from Province 1.
I know neither the conditions of soil in south Florida nor the population dynamics of Pacific salmon, yet my appetite extends to the far reaches of the globe. I am, according to Raymond Dasmann (author more than 30 years ago of Biological Conservation, still in print), a typical “biosphere” person: a stockholder in the grand scheme of global economy and technology, loosed from the constraints of my biogeographical province. Earth would be much healthier, wrote Dasmann, if there were more “ecosystem” people who “lived within one ecosystem or, at most, a few closely related ecosystems, and depended entirely on the continued functioning of those ecosystems for their survival.”
Traditionally, ecosystem people have established intimate, complex relationships between their culture and nature which assure that an individual’s economic interests need not jeopardize the health of the surrounding environment. Ecosystem people worship the Earth as the basis of life. For thousands of years, the Western Abenaki have lived in Ndakia, in the northeast corner of Province 5. They once danced for moose and sturgeon, and mirrored the earth’s cycles and patterns with their myths and ceremonies, researches, and contemplations. They were our regional ecosystem people.
But not all animals stay in one ecosystem, and it isn’t necessarily travel that does harm. Take the red knot, for example, a bird that travels the whole earth. Synchronized with global changes in light and temperature, these plump, red-breasted sandpipers nest upon the crown of the globe from Greenland to Scandinavia. Knots migrate down every coastline of the world to winter from Tierra del Fuego to New Zealand. Some populations complete round trips that approach 20,000 miles. In early May, precisely when horseshoe crabs spawn, hundreds of thousands of knots arrive at Delaware Bay. For four weeks, they feed on crab eggs until, sated, the red knots conclude their flight to the high Arctic. Can I know the world like a red knot and remain finely attuned to more than one biogeographic province?
My goal is to set deeper roots in the valley of Gillette Swamp, my own home ground, to become more reliant on resources and products of my home region while pruning some of my biosphere connections. And when I do travel, to settle and step with the lightness of a red knot.