Cell phones: The device I love to hate

I have hated cell phones since their inception. Maybe it is because I have always hated talking on the phone to almost anyone at anytime. I just don't like to talk that much, so the act of actually carrying around a device in your pocket where people can talk to you anytime is totally repulsive. Maybe it is because my family and I lived in Monteverde, Costa Rica in the mid-1980s, where we had no phone. Mail was delivered only once per week, and any mail from the states took about three weeks to arrive. And there was no internet there then. And we had no car. And life was pretty good there. So I know we can live happily without cell phones.

But there is more to it than that. It is the almost narcotic-like attachment that other people seem to have to their cell phones that repels, angers, and disgusts me. I used to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, so I know what that kind of addiction is. When you are a smoker, you can't wait to get out of a meeting or a class so you can go someplace to light up. For the past decade, when I saw students leave a classroom, the first thing they did was to retrieve their cell (remove the pack of cigs from their pocket), flip open the cover (flip up a cig from the pack), dial a number (light up), and begin to talk (take a drag). Of course, this sequence is then followed by a slight smile of pleasure as you hear the voice of the person you called (as the nicotine hits your lungs). This compulsion to use the phone as soon as it is socially acceptable to do so looks exactly like the cigarette smoking habit with which I was all too familiar.

If I see someone driving their car while talking on a cell phone, I literally want to ram their car with mine. They are putting other people's lives in danger so they can find out whether they were supposed to pick up Miracle Whip or real mayo at the grocery, or whether Emily or April is picking up the kids after soccer practice, or whether Harry should get black olives on the pizza he is about to pick up. I don't really know what those drivers are talking about, but I will bet my dog's first born that 99% of the time it is about nothing important. The cell phone is mostly for chit chat, gossip, and entertainment in a life that seems boring without constant digital stimulation.

So for many years, I resisted getting a cell. After all, if I ever wanted to make a call on the fly, everyone with me always had one. Cell owners are all too proud to offer up their phone for use, to show you all the neat things it can do and how kewl it looks. I parasitized this pride for a long time and, in the process, probably saved thousands of dollars in cell phones and cell plans.

However, last year my wife and I got our first cell. We actually have two landlines at home, but my wife’s work often has them both tied up for hours or days. Our children insisted that we get a cell so they can contact us during the day if necessary. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. But I am still basically clueless. I can dial and receive a call, but I don’t know how to text, to send a picture, to retrieve a message, or even to put it on vibrate. I really don’t care to know, because Management can do some of these things. It is a basic model that we got free with our plan, so it is not a “smart” phone. Therefore, I guess it must be a dumb phone.

My ignorance about cell phones can result in some interesting moments. A few months ago, my wife handed me the cell that she had just put on vibrate to put in my pocket in a restaurant in Albany, NY. A few minutes later, I felt a very strange sensation coming from my mid-section. I waited, it passed. A short while later, it happened again. I jumped out of my seat, wondering what was happening to my stomach. I was about to alert my wife to dial 911, because this is not normal. When you get to be my age, you wake up every day wondering if this is the day you get THE CALL. Turns out, I was getting A CALL, just not THE CALL, from the cell in my pants. I always thought that vibration machines were supposed to bring pleasure, not trepidation.

Then, last weekend, my daughter and her family decided to go to the local mall when visiting us. After she left, I realized I needed to call her about something REALLY IMPORTANT. I dialed her cell from my cell, because Management was using our landline. As soon as I dialed, another cell phone that was sitting on our kitchen counter began to ring. Not our phone; we only have one. I hung up, ran over to answer it, and no one was there. I redialed my daughter on my cell, and the same thing happened again. What an incredible coincidence that that cell rings at exactly the same time I am using mine. I hung up again, jumped across the kitchen to answer it quickly, but no one was there. I HATE PHONES! About an hour later, I realized I was calling my daughter’s cell from my cell in the same room. I guess if I had not hung up my cell, I could have had a pretty interesting conversation with myself.

It should be clear by now that I hate cell phones, and I suppose I always will. The myth we tell is that cell phones were developed to make our lives better, but they were actually developed so companies could make money selling them. But in addition to the irritations enumerated above, there is another. On nearly every hill of any size in America, there is a cell tower. Another bit of environmental degradation, another bit of visual pollution, another ugliness on the landscape. All this, so Harry can find out whether he should get olives on his pizza. Go progress!

My wife, the amenity thief

(Are these items found in a hotel in Hong Kong or in my bathroom in Danby, NY?  Answer: both.)

Step into any hotel room with my wife and you will immediately notice that there is no soap, no shampoo, no body lotion, and no bath cap in the bathroom.  Nada, zilch, zero.  Because you only just checked into the room, there is no way that you already took a shower, forgot that you did so, and used up all those products.  No, the answer to the disappearing amenities in the room is that they are already in my wife's bag.  I admit, somewhat sheepishly, that my wife is an amenity slut. 

As I flip through my bathroom at home, I see shampoos from Sheraton and Radisson hotels, body lotion from the Hilton Garden Inn, and sundry products from hotels or pensions in France and Costa Rica that we visited years ago.  We almost never have to buy shampoo for our home.  In fact, my wife could open a small boutique with nice smelling lotions from around the country and the world.  Bed, Bath and Beyond watch out!  There is a major competitor coming to a town near you and her name is Robin.  Mind you, my wife is not a true thief.  She does not steal towels, or bath robes, or pillows, or the tv remote from hotel rooms.  She takes only those items that they place there for your use; it is just that in her case, she "uses" them all within minutes of hitting the room.  Nothing illegal or immoral about this, but it is damn irritating to her roomie----me.

How am I supposed to take a shower or dabble moisturizing lotions over my dried up skin if she has them stowed away?  I have learned that on the second day of our stay, I watch for the housekeeping lady.  I slip out of the room, and I tell her I will gladly carry the amenities into our bathroom to save her the trip.  But I surreptitiously slide a shampoo or two into my pant's pockets for later use.  Later in the day, I have to calm my wife when she begins complaining about housekeeping and how they skimp on bringing ample amenities to the room.  When she is about to call the front desk, I quickly draw her attention to the mattress on which we just slept: "I feel a bit itchy this morning honey.  I'm going to check the underside of this mattress for bed bugs", I say, acting as uncomfortable as I can.  I took entomology in college, so she trusts my observational skills when it comes to insects.  I spend a good 6-8 minutes examining the surface and finally conclude there is nothing there.  "I must just have dry skin", which is true for sure since I HAVEN'T SEEN BODY LOTION SINCE 1976.  My ruse works.  By the time I finish looking for the fictitious bed bugs, she has forgotten there was no daily replenishment of her sought-after booty, and we move on to the lobby to look for free newspapers or magazines.

I like traveling with my wife most of the time.  And she is generous to a fault.  We have friends who run a lodge in the Adirondacks in New York.  When they visited us last time, my wife gave them a supply of loot from her hotel visits that they will use to furnish the bathrooms in six cabins.  Not sure what those guests will think when they read "Holiday Inn" on the soap in their room.  But if cleanliness is next to godliness, does it matter from whence the cleanser came?

The dispersal of human offspring

(Human offspring disperse for the same reasons as these dandelion seeds, but the effects of dispersal are quite different.)

It is normal in birds and mammals for young to disperse from their birth area.  There are a variety of biological explanations as to why this is adaptive.  A common reason given is that dispersal reduces the chances of offspring mating with their parents (or competing with them for resources like food), which would result in a higher degree of inbreeding and a higher probability of recessive, deleterious genes manifesting themselves in the offspring of such a mating between close relatives.  In birds, females tend to disperse farther than males from their natal area, and in mammals, males tend to disperse farther than females.  Again, if male and female siblings disperse different distances from where they were born, they are less likely to encounter each other when they reach reproductive age and, therefore, siblings are less likely to mate with each other.  So, while birds and mammals have different sex-specific dispersal patterns, the effect is the same.

We are all familiar with the bad jokes told about human inbreeding (=incest) in communities where everyone stays near home, and there is little movement of new humans into this isolated community.  This is probably an extreme case for humans.  I have to figure that for most of human history (3-4 million years), young males probably dispersed to nearby villages, probably no more than miles or tens of miles away.  After all, they had to walk.  Once they got there and were accepted, they found young females to mate, settled down in their new digs, and had babies.  Young female humans probably stayed near home more often, although the details of all this varied with cultures around the world.  In some cultures, females are simply kidnapped from nearby villages and brought to the male's home.  Important as well is that in this ancestral system everyone knew everyone else within the home community, and they probably knew almost everyone in all the neighboring communities. 

But in recent times, meaning decades or a few centuries, this pattern of relatively short dispersal distance and everyone knowing everyone else changed dramatically.  Many young people still remain in close proximity to their parents and to where they were born; they retain close friendships with many of their peers from high school.  But many others disperse hundreds or thousands of miles from their family, their birthplace, their homeland.  This can be a somewhat painful experience for those of us who enjoy being with our adult children on a regular basis.

This diaspora-like phenomenon has consequences for society as well, I believe.  Human behavior seems to be influenced and tempered mostly by peer pressure.  We tend to be on our best behavior when we are being watched by people who know us and who know our family.  Our family, in turn, puts pressure on us to behave in a socially-acceptable manner.  When humans move to a community where literally no one knows them, human behavior has a tendency to change.  I am not familiar with studies that document this, but I am betting they exist.  In other words, when you are not directly accountable to a social system in which your status is known and familiar to others, I predict that, on average, humans will be somewhat more likely to engage in immoral or illegal behavior.  For this pattern to emerge in the data, we would need to examine a sample of thousands of individuals who dispersed and compare their behavior to thousands of similar individuals who did not disperse.  If entire extended families dispersed together, I think my prediction would be weaker.

Thus, there are good biological reasons why human offspring might disperse from their natal area, but this dispersal may also have effects, or unintended consequences, in societies where it is common.  I love playing these mind games with myself to see where it leads me.  Having just helped one of my sons disperse even further away from home than he already was has caused me to focus on this topic again.  (In the case of my son's recent move, I am more concerned about what his new community will do to him than what he will do to it.  This must be a common parental reaction.)  I was always fascinated with dispersal in the mammals and birds I studied, but there is nothing quite like thinking about human behavior to get the juices flowing.  Of course, human dispersal is another one of those book-length issues, but maybe this little essay will start you thinking about the movement of people in a new and creative way.

"Don't date a stripper from Vegas!"

(Punk's Place in Candor, NY will not have the same appeal after my son works in this Las Vegas nightclub.)

"Don't carry your wallet in your back pocket", is a useful piece of advice when walking around the streets of Las Vegas.  I have known that one for a long time, although I am a bit black and blue having my wallet bouncing around in my underwear.  Besides, I went to use the bathroom in the Venetian casino last night and the darn thing flipped into the urinal.  Thank goodness I wasn't at a Sahara urinal.  There must be a better place to store my money and credit cards.

My son and I have been in Vegas for five days and we have been given tons of advice on how to gamble here, where to find an apartment, what parts of the city not to live in, where to eat, and which shows to see.  It seems that everyone is an expert and we are novices here, so we are all ears.  Yesterday, a real estate broker told my son that whatever you do, don't date a Vegas stripper.  This advice was amended last night when a friend of my son's added cocktail waitress to the forbidden list.  (I actually dated a majorette from the marching band back in the day, but that is just between us.) The fact that we even have to have this conversation will put my wife on edge as we observe our "baby" sidle into Vegas life.  I guess that is why she sent me to help with this transition and she stayed at home.  So, I interviewed six strippers and three cocktail waitresses last night and I agreed with his real estate broker that Ryan should not date women who work in those categories.  I want to be thorough.

On the other hand, there may be some hidden (I use this term very loosely) advantages to taking up with women of this sort.  I would guess that they are somewhat used to being chilly, given their normal working attire.  Therefore, you could probably turn down the heat in the winter and save on the fuel bill.  I doubt they are ever pick-pocketed on the street, cause they have so many interesting places to hide paper money.  No thief would ever think to look there.  Financially speaking, it might not be so bad.  A good stripper or cocktail waitress at one of the high-end places in Vegas makes more money per year than a university professor.  Maybe my son wouldn't have to work at all. 

Thinking creatively, maybe I should stay out here and become a male stripper so I could return home with some loot.  Is there a market for a 63-year old, white-haired male stripper wearing only binoculars?  There are certainly plenty of elderly women wearing blue jogging suits who might want a break from those slot machines of an evening.  I'll check the classifieds today. 

P.S.  Don't worry Robin.  Either I will be home soon, broke as usual, or I will arrive home a few weeks late, with money hiding in places where thieves never go.

In Denver, and I’m homesick

(I'm confused.  I flew to Vegas, but I might be in Paris.)

For the past week, I have been in Denver, Colorado visiting our sons. Denver is large and growing rapidly, as is the entire Front Range of Colorado from north to south. Driving on the highways is reminiscent of driving in southern California. The area is full of young people who immigrated here from Ohio, Illinois, New York, and other places where life has ceased to be exciting enough. They come here for skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking, hiking, and camping in the Rocky Mountains nearby, and when in Denver there is plenty to do. The city boasts professional teams in baseball, basketball, football, and ice hockey, plenty of parks, bike and jogging paths, restaurants and bars of every stripe, interesting museums of art and history, and a good zoo. But I’m bored stiff. What the heck is my problem?

I’m bored because my primary activity in life, aside from blogging and trading stocks, is learning about, and living in, the woodland around my house. In short, I miss my forest in upstate New York and the “backyard ecology” that I practice there. Normally, an ecologist loves to travel to new places, because there are new habitats to explore, new birds to observe, new trees to appreciate. But in the city of Denver, that is not very satisfying. Oh, there are trees everywhere, but almost none of them should be here. Denver was built on the short-grass prairie of central Colorado—the native vegetation was only a few inches tall. Trees would have been limited to the banks of streams and rivers, and they would be cottonwoods and willows. The trees in the city now are mostly native to some other region of the U.S. or to another country: ash, Russian olive, Chinese elm, and Tree of Heaven, that native of China that I absolutely detest outside of its homeland. An irony is that we drove around a neighborhood yesterday with street names like Ash, Birch, and Cherry. Rub it in my face!

My issue here is that there is vegetation everywhere, but it does not constitute a “habitat”. Most homes have attractive green lawns, scattered trees planted in the yard and along the sides of the house, and a variety of flowering plants in gardens. All of this takes nearly daily watering, of course. But that is another complaint I have, for another blog. Nothing I criticize about Denver is any different than what I would say about almost any city in the world. We reconstruct a poor facsimile of the natural world that we took away when we built the city in the first place. For most, this is apparently just fine. In my case, I can’t wait until I go to the airport. But first, I have to spend time in Las Vegas, the Mecca of Facsimiles---Vegas even has the Eiffel Tower, which I always thought was in Paris.

The 60s, and other memories of the way it used to be

(They were radicals, but they were correct.)

Another year, another birthday.  What the heck?  I'm now 63 years old, but I don't feel a day over 62 1/2.  I attribute this amazing youthfulness to eating properly and exercise.  And, of course, a scotch and a cigar a day probably contribute as well.  I will go so far as to say that if you smoked one cigar a day and drank one scotch per day, you would also not feel a day over 62 1/2, even if you are 30 years old.  That combination of alcohol and nicotine has amazing restorative properties, and I am living proof of that.

Having lived this long, I have witnessed some interesting changes in practices and attitudes in many aspects of American life.  For example, I started school at age 5 in the first grade.  We lived in a somewhat rural area about a mile from the school.  To get to school, we walked.  But to do so, we walked along a country road, crossed a busy highway, and a set of railroad tracks.  Years later, the fathers of two of my friends were killed driving across those same tracks, so it was no joke.  After a couple of weeks of my mother walking with me, I was free to make the walk alone both to and from school.  There were some other kids making the same walk, but can you imagine parents letting any kid even twice that age do this today? 

I loved baseball when I was 9-12 years old, so I wanted to play on the local Little League team.  I tried out for 3 years and was cut from the team each year.  It was done like this.  The day finally came to announce who made the team.  The coach read the list and those of us who did not make the team, turned our backs and walked home while the coach started passing out the team shirts and caps to those who made it.  I distinctly remember the cheers of joy from those guys who had made the team, as they tried on their new gear.  I was devastated each time.  Our parents were not there.  We always faced these events on our own.  However, after the third turn down, one man started an additional team with those of us who did not make the Apaches team.  Our Sioux team then actually beat the Apaches during the regular season, which was one of the sweetest days of my life.  In those days, we always knew that success was not guaranteed, and that you had to prepare extremely well in a competitive world.

When I was in junior high school, I got paddled by the teacher in front of the class at least once each year for some infraction of some rule.  Usually this involved talking in class when we were not supposed to be doing that.  I was not alone.  Today, that kind of corporal punishment would be definite grounds for a law suit.

Then, there was the decade of the 60s, which was amazing in so many ways.  When we were first married, my wife worked full-time as a nurse and I was a student.  She could not get a credit card issued in her name in those days; it had to be issued in the husband's name.  Crazy, since she was making the money and I wasn't. Of course, now, we don't open the mailbox without there being an offer for her to accept a new card.

I mostly remember worrying about the military draft during the 60s.  It was all any male thought about.  Would I be called?  Could I escape it somehow?  If we stayed in university, we were safe until we graduated.  Maybe the Vietnam War would be over by then.  I remember a couple of guys when I was attending Ohio State whose grade point average (gpa) was right on the cusp of flunking out of school.  (In those days, universities actually flunked students out and they went home.  Seems much less common today.)  I distinctly remember these particular guys taking an exam in a course we had together.  If they got a D on the exam, their gpa would dip below the minimum needed and they would flunk out.  In the mid to late 1960s, that would almost certainly mean you would be drafted into the army within months, probably sent to Vietnam, and possibly killed or injured.  Talk about pressure when taking a math or biology final exam.

I was lucky.  I graduated Ohio State, got drafted, and ended up in Korea.  All in all, that was a valuable and interesting experience, and not dangerous.  In Korea, I was in military intelligence and lived undercover as a civilian, but I mostly spent my time playing ping pong, bridge, and third base on the softball team.  I had been sent to language school for a solid year before deploying to Korea, so I was nearly fluent in the language at that time.  My wife and young daughter joined me there, we lived with a Korean family in the village, and we learned a lot.  The army did not want my wife to come, but there was no law against a U.S. citizen going to Korea, and my wife would not take "no" for an answer.  This was pretty much SOP for my wife during our military years.

So times have changed for the better in some ways, and probably not for the better in other ways.  I often wonder, and even predict, if the last half of the 20th century may have been as good as it ever was in human history and perhaps as good as it will ever be, all things considered.  In time, I will build this argument and present it for your critical analysis.  But several centuries will have to pass before this idea can be tested fully, so you will have to let me know how it comes out.  Just send me a text message.

Cats: our feline friends, or are they?

(Cat eating a bird it has just killed.)

About a decade ago I had a student in my Conservation Biology class named Scott Boomer. We were discussing the problem of non-native organisms that week, and Scott told me he had kept some interesting records on the behavior of three cats that he and his wife had at that time. The cats (one male, two females, and all neutered) had access to food and water in Scott’s apartment around the clock. The three natural predators had the habit of capturing prey outside and bringing it back to Scott, often dropping it at his feet or putting it in their bathtub. Scott is a biologist and he was able to identify all the prey items returned to his apartment over a 2-year period.

The list included:

Mammals: 5 deer mice, 2 woodland jumping mice, 5 Eastern chipmunks, 4 meadow voles, 1 gray squirrel, 6 star-nosed moles, 4 short-tailed shrews, 1 cinereus shrew, 2 little brown bats, 1 Eastern cottontail

Amphibians: 2 green frogs

Reptiles: 1 Eastern painted turtle, 3 Eastern garter snakes

Birds: 3 common yellowthroats, 2 black-capped chickadees, 1 house wren

Total: 43 animals

Now, there are about 90 million cats in the U.S., according to the 2005-2006 National Pet Owners Survey. A certain percentage of those cats never go outside. But anyway you run the numbers, the collective mortality on native wildlife by U.S. cats must total millions of individuals of dozens of species. In some places in the world, feral cats, those that have gone completely wild, are responsible for the demise of rare species of birds. The Stephens Island wren (a flightless species) in New Zealand went extinct in the late 1800’s due to the island’s cats, or so that story goes. The wedge-tailed shearwater in Hawaii is also impacted by cats. Conservation biologists actively control cats (as well as non-native rats, mongoose, etc.) in such places today, especially on oceanic islands.

We hear a lot these days about our “ecological footprint”, or the impact that a human has on the earth’s natural resources and ecosystems. I doubt that our pet ownership is included in these calculations. Remember that I tend to think in terms of quantity and quality of habitat for biodiversity. I usually think of our “habitat footprint” as defined by the boundaries of our house and the lawn surrounding it. But the effect of that living space penetrates further depending on the chemicals we use on the property, how far away we or our children trounce on the environment, and the influence of our pets, of which cats are probably the worst offenders. There are zones of concentric circles beginning with the epicenter of the house itself, which include areas of decreasing influence on the fauna and flora that is there now, as one moves respectively outward. Cats probably have an effect in each of those zones, but they may represent the only threat in the outermost circle, which is perhaps several hundred meters from the edge of the house.

In fact, last year someone built a new house about 100 meters from the edge of my woodlot. For the past few months, I have had two cats roaming my property that I am sure live at that house. I have not had cats on my property in 20 years. And so it goes. We increase our collective ecological footprint, we chip away at the quantity and quality of wildlife habitat and, in my opinion, the quality of life is diminished just a little bit more---again.

In these few paragraphs I wanted to increase your awareness of an idea that perhaps you have not thought much about--- how that lovable pet cat of yours is possibly reducing the biological diversity in your neighborhood. I do not intend to explore a detailed solution to this problem, although attaching a simple bell to your outdoor cat would probably reduce its kill rate. You might be thinking that cats kill organisms that people do not like very much anyway, so what the heck. But I can assure you that every one of those species killed by Scott’s cats represents a unique and interesting biological story. Remember that not so long ago, nearly everyone thought it was fine to shoot, trap, or poison wolves, mountain lions, and eagles.

Senecence sucks: The sleep clinic (part 5)

(This woman in the Sleep Clinic is sleeping like a baby---a robot baby.)

Last week I had a sleepover at the hospital.  My wife made me report to my family doc at my annual physical that I suffered from sleep apnea, where you stop breathing for periods of time and then gasp for air.  Snoring is usually associated with this.  Apnea is, of course, disruptive to your normal sleep and can affect the body's ability to restore and repair itself.  I think my wife has the same affliction, so I sent an anonymous message to her family doc yesterday.  I squealed like a stuffed pig.

I packed my pajamas, a pillow, some reading material (see below), and a toothbrush and headed off in the direction of all those scrub gowns and the Sleep Clinic at 8:30pm.  All I knew was that I had to sleep there all night.  I didn't prepare anything.  After all, I have been sleeping my entire life.  How difficult could this be?  Just to make sure I could sleep, I went into my den and pulled Prosser's Comparative Animal Physiology off the shelf, a textbook I used 30 years ago.  A few minutes of reading about osmotic balance in the Chondrichthyes should do it.  If not, maybe there is a baseball game on tv.  Ten minutes max.  I'll be out.

But when Mike the technician appeared in my room, I realized there was a bit more to all of this than just a leisurely snooze.  He explained that he would be monitoring me during the night from his observation room, but that first he had to "wire me up".  He proceeded to clean up spot after spot on my body with alcohol, then smeared a glue-like gel in all those places, and then attached an electrical lead to each of those areas.  This is way more than I do each night at home before going to bed, and my wife used to be an ER nurse.  Maybe I kiss her good night, but nothing electrical.  When he finished, I had 24 leads attached to my head and a couple on my chest and lower legs, with all wires leading to a box on my night stand. Mike also attached devices in front of my nose and mouth to monitor my oxygen level and respiration.  Judas Priest!  I'm ready to begin filming Frankenstein now.  Sweet dreams.

But seriously, after I was wired, I was fearful about turning on the tv.  What if Mike wired me incorrectly and when I turned on the television I saw Desperate Housewives inside my head, for the rest of my life?  Was he an electrical engineer at Cornell?  He didn't look like one, and I've seen plenty.  The wires are supposed to transmit electrical signals from MY brain to HIS instruments in the observation room.  But what if the polarity got reversed and HIS machines sent impulses to MY brain?  I'm never going to get to sleep now, and I read all there is to know about osmotic balance in fish.

Fortunately, there was a baseball game on the tube.  By the third pitch, I was sending data to Mike's machines.  I slept more or less normally, for me. Tough to move or turn on your side when there is a half mile of wires running from your body. I would not do this during the summer when thunder storms are common. If lightning hit the hospital, I would probably look like Wiley Coyote after his own dynamite blew him up. (Which reminds me, how can a mammal not outsmart a bird? A coyote's brain is the size of an apple; a roadrunner's brain must be no larger than a few apple seeds. Come on Wiley. This is embarrassing.) 

When Mike greeted me in the morning, he was all too cheerful.  He removed the wires and other monitors, and gleefully reported that he got about 1,000 pages of data that now needed interpretation.  Amazing, in 30 years of doing scientific research, I never generated that much data.  How could I possibly accomplish all that in one night while asleep?  What a fool I have been all these years, staying awake, and working like a dog to gather a little data, sometimes only a datum.  Maybe our university students have had it right all this time.  Many of them must have generated copious amounts of data right in front of my eyes while I lectured.  I left the Sleep Clinic hurriedly, and bought the first legal stimulant I could find.

What in the world is Danby?

(Make sure you come with a full gas tank.  We have no gas station.)

The late Carl Sagan, who was a professor at Cornell, once said that Danby, NY was nothing but an IGA store along the side of a highway.  Well, those were the good ole days.  That store closed a couple of years ago, and our only gas station burned down about the same time.  The elementary school closed in 1980, the year we moved here, so our children had to be bussed into Ithaca.  Closing the only school in a small town causes the place to lose spirit and a bit of its identity. Sad, really. Danby does have a small town hall and a nice looking church.  Danby's most famous resident was Martin Luther Smith, who graduated from West Point in 1842, and served as a general in the Confederate army.  Geography was not his strong suit.

But it is not that bad, if you don't like crowds.  I always said I would not live in a city if it was so busy it needed a traffic report on tv.  And the best town of all is one where the elevation is greater than the population; Danby almost meets this criterion.  We have a populaton of 3,000 and Danby is at an elevation of about 1,500 feet.  (By the way, I just tried to get this information off the Danby town web server, but I repeatedly got a Fail to Connect message, so I had to go to Wikipedia.  Maybe we lost our server also.).

The residents in Danby mostly work in Ithaca, a 20-minute drive away.  It is rural, with some dairy farms, hayfields, and forests, including some state land called Danby State Forest.  We boast Jennings Pond, where you can fish for bass or swim, after the community cleans up the beach in the spring.  We have a volunteer fire department to keep us safe.  Lots of volunteering around here, and I am not very good at that.  Many people heat their homes with wood and there is some logging of large trees to help pay the taxes.  We are located in the southern part of Tompkins County, where the soil is not as good as the northern half, but it is hillier and there is more forest.  The farms are smaller and not as productive as those to the north. Within a mile of my home, there is a small and tired cemetery with dates from the 1800s.  Danby is my kind of place.

Whenever a new house is built in the U.S., I detest it, as the human footprint grows larger on the land. I long for the day when the only new house built is constructed on the foundation of an old one that had to be taken down. If a new house is built within a mile of my home, I am depressed for a month.  At present, I have another three weeks to be depressed. Residents of Danby are economically stressed generally, and so everyone does what they have to do to make it in the short term, but who speaks for the landscape and for the long term?

In the evening I sometimes sit outside around a bonfire in my woods and listen to the Barred Owls calling and the coyotes whooping it up a short distance away.  One of my favorite scenes is when I walk away from the fire in the dark and look back at the light and embers shooting up into the forest canopy.  I imagine that it might have looked just like that in this very place 300 years ago when Cayuga Indians gathered around the heat to keep warm.  I can spend all day in my woods doing chores, but it really doesn't seem like work at all, although I would have complained bitterly about it as a young boy.  What changed?

I live at the top of one of the hills in Danby. If I urinate in the drainage ditch alongside my driveway, those molecules flow into a stream down the road, then into the Susquehanna River, and eventually empties into Chesapeake Bay near Baltimore. If I walk 100 yards up and over the ridge and then urinate, it flows through small creeks and streams into the southern end of Cayuga Lake and out the north end, then through a couple of rivers to be dumped into Lake Ontario. That great lake empties to the east into the St. Lawrence River, which flows another 750 miles to the northeast into the largest estuary in the world and the north Atlantic. I used to recite this story to my students when they visited my property, but they never seemed as enthused in hearing it as I was in telling it. So depending on whether I want to send a little "message" to Maryland or to Quebec, I urinate outdoors either on this side of the hill or on the other side. This morning I am in the mood to say "bonjour" to our friends to the north, although it will probably take a month for the message to arrive.  Entertainment comes cheap on this hill.  But Danby is a place where one still has the luxury of sending a liquid message.

Of invasive plants and Big Macs

(A McDonalds in Cairo.  Your order please.  Hamburger or hummus?)

One of the first-hand observations I have made over the past few years is the tendency to homogenize the world’s biota, especially plants. Jacaranda trees native to Brazil are common as ornamentals in Nairobi, Norway maples native to Europe are common on the streets of eastern U.S. cities, and the bird of paradise flower native to South Africa is found in nearly every city in the tropics worldwide. The botanical situation reminds me of the proliferation of franchised fast food restaurants, where you can now find Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets in Cairo and Kampala as easily as in Louisville. The homogenization of biota and the homogenization of cultures disturb me.

I tend to bond with habitats like most people bond with their friends or their pets. I also bond with humans and dogs, so I am not totally weird. But I have a close affinity to every place where I have spent considerable time: the meadows of upstate New York, the riparian habitat along the San Pedro River in Arizona, the sagebrush community in Idaho, the rain forests of Costa Rica, and, of course, the forest around my home in Ithaca. When a real estate agent is asked to name the three most important aspects of a home’s value, they usually say “location, location, location.” Similarly, we biologists often say when asked to name the three most important elements in conservation, “habitat, habitat, habitat.”

Very simply, habitat is where an organism lives. It is comprised of the plants, animals, and microorganisms in a particular location. The species composition of a habitat is determined by many factors, but it includes the climate, the historical path leading to species’ colonization or evolution in that location, the interaction of species over time, geology, soils, and more. Each habitat on earth is absolutely unique—they each have their own physical appearance, their distinctive sounds of birds, frogs, and insects, and their complex blend of odors. I am convinced that if I were blindfolded and dropped into any habitat where I have ever spent any amount of time that I could identify where I was by simply smelling the air. The ponderosa pine forest of the Kaibab Plateau and the cloud forest of Costa Rica come to mind. The sounds would make it even easier—vermilion flycatchers along the San Pedro River, bellbirds and black-faced solitaires in Monteverde, cicadas (different species) in Ohio or Las Cruces.

Now, before my ecology friends jump all over me, I realize fully that habitats are not static. Habitats change over time. The habitats I love will not be the same a century from now. During that amount of time, some ecologists would say that the habitat has changed or matured; some would say that it has become a different habitat altogether. I am not interested in that debate. I just do not want readers to think that I think these entities are unchanging. I have watched the woodland around my house change dramatically in 30 years. Therefore, I am not arguing that we do whatever we can to prevent habitats from changing. That would be folly, and would be an unwise strategy biologically.

But I am arguing that we do what we can to allow habitats to develop along a more or less “normal” path. We can also argue for a week about what is meant by “normal” or “natural.” I am bored with that argument. Simply put, there are certain events or conditions that I define as “unacceptable”, and which I think are an impediment to following a normal path to change.

One of the unacceptables is the human-assisted invasion of a habitat by plants or animals that are native to some other part of the world. That is a no-brainer for me, and a reason I spend many hours per month eliminating Tartarian honeysuckle, multiflora rose, autumn olive, and common buckthorn from my woodland, four species indigenous to Eurasia. I know they were not here a century or so ago, so when I see them it offends my sensibilities. From a conservation perspective, I am not even sure there is a practical reason to eliminate them. Certainly, if they became superabundant, they would exclude native plants from growing there, with the result that some ecological interactions between those native plants and other organisms would be disrupted or extinguished. But when they are in limited abundance, their greatest danger may be that they will not remain at such low densities. I eliminate these plants because I can; the large Lumbricus earthworms that are so common in my part of the world are not native here either, but there is little I can do to diminish their numbers.

To me, there is a certain parallelism between what I observe in our native habitats and what I observe in cities around the world. When I am in a foreign country, the last place I want to eat a meal is in a Pizza Hut or a McDonalds (in fact, I guess they even kind of offend me here). And when I am in a forest near Ithaca, NY, the last plant I want to see growing there is a European or Asian species. In both cases, something is being lost and, although I can not put to words exactly what that loss is, I believe it is important.  But it goes something like this for me: The invasion of our landscapes with non-native plants is like a technician at the Louvre deciding to "touch up" the Mona Lisa with watercolors.  The average person would not even see the difference, but the art expert probably would.  The act of changing the Mona Lisa, the most famous painting in the world, would transform this important and beautiful object from what it was to a different piece of art.

On the other hand, are Costa Ricans or Egyptians offended when they see an American franchise restaurant in their cities?  Possibly not.  They might even think it is chic that they have this international influence.  I don't get offended to see a Chinese restaurant in Ithaca, but seeing a Pizza Hut in Alexandria bothered me a great deal.  Maybe I am uncomfortable because I fear that these restaurants, and these invasive plants, will not simply be an addition to what was already there, but that they will come to replace the original.  This creeping sameness makes the world less diverse and less interesting, but does that bother anyone else?
 
So I pull and cut and sometimes spray and my students think I’m that crazy ex-prof who would rather declare war on invasive plants than talk on a cell phone.  How weird.  And I eat rice and beans in Costa Rica instead of Big Macs, and I eat hummus in Egypt instead of pizza.  Is this what happens to us as we age?  We rebel at "progress"?  We cuss at the automobile for replacing the horse, or lament that email caused the extinction of the hand-written letter.  Or that friends were replaced with acquaintances. Or that family time was replaced with sitcoms.  I wonder, maybe I just have too much time on my hands.