No Eden Without the Serpent

A Herpetologist's Blues and a Blueprint for Snake Conservation

- by Jonathan D. Wright-

"We won't be rescued by more research."

-David W. Orr, Editor of Conservation Biology

It's About the BIG Picture...

I once heard a wildlife biologist complain, "You know, I have a real problem with all these wildlife shows on T.V. There is often no larger context. They make the general public think that just beyond our city limits everything is still just fine in nature. They don't show you the critical situation that exists just beyond the dwindling boundaries of that little protected patch where the filming took place. Or if they do, they make people think that the answer is simply a bigger park."

She is right. In our portrayals of nature, popular and scientific, we consistently fail to provide a broader context. We consistently fall short of telling the full story. The reason for this is not because we lack awareness, but rather a complex political one involving the power structures of our society. If we are to conserve nature, however, we have to keep the larger context in mind. We need to get down to addressing root causes as to why things are not so great out there.

Henry David Thoreau said, "Hundreds are hacking at the branches for every one who is striking at the root." Right now, we are a society of branch-hackers. This must change if we are to have snakes for the future. Education is key, but it is only the first step. In our efforts to educate, we must be sure to open the larger dialogue of root causes. Then, most importantly, we must act. Awareness is not action, and is no substitute.

This essay offers a herpetologist's blueprint for snake conservation based on treating causes rather than symptoms. Treating symptoms, as we mostly do today, buys us a little more time. That is not unimportant. But only by treating root causes will we affect a lasting cure, an actual solution.

I have written this as an expert witness to the processes I describe herein. It is a simplistic portrayal in many ways as any attempt to boil complex issues down into a single essay is bound to be. I feel there is a compelling need to condense and clarify the process that has created the present reality into terms that can be easily and quickly grasped by average people like myself who differ from me only perhaps in that they did not have a front-row seat to these processes – including a career as a wildlife professional – as I have. I am hoping that through this essay, individuals may recognize some of the truths about the situation before us in a matter of minutes, not decades as it took me. And that they will then take action. We don't have the luxury of decades anymore.

As you delve well into this essay, it may seem to get off track, but don't be fooled – remember as you read that it is all about the conservation of snakes.

(And everything else.)

A Brief Personal History of Canadian Snakes...

Roger Payne, biologist and writer said:

"Any observant local knows more than any visiting scientist.

Always. No exceptions."

This is important for all of us to remember – we all can make significant contributions.

To begin this essay and place it in some context, here is a picture of Canadian snakes, centered in Ontario, that I have yet to see painted in detail in any book. It is based on the accounts I have collected from "observant locals" over the decades, as well as my own experiences. It paints in excerpts a small part of a picture I know then to be real, but it is our combined experiences that add true depth and continuity. The picture is tragic, for make no mistake about this while you are exploring "The Wilds of Pelee", for instance, rejoicing in the very last healthy dregs of diverse serpentine abundance eastern Canada has to offer - the story of Canadian snakes is indeed a profound tragedy. But this opening picture isn't just about Canadian snakes, and neither is this essay. Both are relevant to the entire natural history of our fabulous, shared Americas, and globally.

Is this to be all gloom and doom then, you ask? Gloom, yes, in part anyway – I am sorry, but that is the reality and if we are to brighten the picture – and brighten it we can - we must first be unrelenting in portraying things as they are. Doom? No. Not yet. Not if we start doing what is required of us today. There is hope, but that hope lies only in recognizing and embracing the grim realities of where we stand today!

This essay is unlike some others in that it provides us with answers as to what specifically is required of us. It doesn't just suggest, "Don't do that!" as many are already saying, it says, "Do this instead..."

History ...

When my Grandfather came from Lethbridge, Alberta to the University of Guelph and later to his new home at Vineland, Ontario to flee the Spanish Flu epidemic late in the second decade of the 1900's, there was no Queen Elizabeth Highway, no WWII, no widespread use of agricultural poisons, no out of control consumer culture yet. There were, not coincidentally, lots of snakes. He spent time in 1920's and 1930's in the Wainfleet Bog collecting peat (he was a horticulturist) and exploring the Niagara gorge and glen. His stories of these places were often snake stories. Rattlesnake stories. Not only stories of the little "swamp rattlers" that you could not enter the bog or adjacent meadows without coming across, but stories of the Big Timbers, all yellow and jet, basking on the flat-topped boulders of the gorge. Yes, they were there, and not very long ago. After all, I'm not very old yet (43), and I knew well a man who knew these creatures himself - first-hand - on Canadian soil. Think of that – I have looked into living eyes that beheld these snakes in Ontario.

Fast Forward...

It seems my parent's generation spent more time in the woods than those of today (as did mine, although the practice was already waning). How do I know this? I know this because virtually everyone from the environs of my home town my parents age or even a couple of decades younger – people who were "in their prime" in the 1950's and ‘60's – has stories about Black rat snakes. Not stories from Eastern Ontario or even Norfolk County. The Black rat snakes – those magnificent anthracine serpents of the shadows with their bold, chiseled lines and enormous reptilian charisma – were there, all over Niagara just a short time ago. They were there in the woods along the bluffs of the Jordan Harbor and around the trestle bridge and the old winery. They were there on the plateau of the escarpment at Cherry Avenue. They were there in the hollows just east of Vineland. They were at Grimsby and Cave Springs and Ball's Falls. They were at Wainfleet. They were absolutely abundant along stretches of the Welland Canal...

My friend Joe from Fort Erie is maybe a couple of decades older than me. It was no trick for him to find Massassaugas at Wainfleet into the ‘60's and into the ‘70's. In fact, according to a farmer I talked to down there in the ‘80's, they were "almost a nuisance" up into the 1970's. They were still relatively common there. As were the eastern hognose snakes of Point Abino and Crystal Beach...

The 20 Mile Creek of my youth in the late ‘70's and early ‘80's supported a thriving population of Northern water snakes, as did most of the drainages of the area – even the littler ones. They were there along the rocky banks basking in masses of communal coils in April and on the root masses of flood-water trees and they could be seen on any fishing trip patrolling the pools – big ones. And the benches higher above the creek were sure places to find numbers of "red king snakes" – the beautiful Eastern milks...

On any given day between the onset of spring and full summer in the mid 1980's I could be almost assured of finding a half-dozen or so gorgeous Eastern fox snakes in a few hours searching of locations in Norfolk county. These were areas on the mainland, not down on protected Long Point itself. Some of the snakes were nearly six feet long, massive, almost unbelievable! The fox snakes were there sunning on old woodpiles at the edges of the meadows as the mornings grew warm, their copper-heads glinting in the sun, and they were there in numbers...

I could go on. I have many more such stories. Sounds pretty incredible, eh? It was. I myself enjoyed some pretty fantastic "herping" in Ontario (we called it "snake hunting" then), but it was almost the last "big hurrah", and already much diminished at that. Even by my time, I was seeking out the healthier remnants, and much of what should have been my birthright – and yours - had already been destroyed. How about today? After all, none of these stories are ancient, not even my Grandfather's. Those snakes were there through many generations of our civilization already when he came along. Thousands of people had all their lives known them by my Grandfather's day. The Black rat snakes at Jordan Harbor were there when my ancestors were born, and they were still there when they died. So how about we go looking today in the places I described? Okay. It's always nice to get out and walk in nature. Maybe we can use our imaginations and conjure up a scaly ghost or two even, in all those places that still look so likely. But we won't find anything.

Those places are barren now.

Nothing Left of the Garden of Eden But Pickles...

The last Ontario timber rattlesnake is in a pickle jar at the Royal Ontario Museum. In the 1980's there were a few ancient black ratsnakes left at isolated points on the Welland Canal, and perhaps at Grimsby and Port Colborne, but even then your chances of finding one were down to almost nil. But there are some from these places in pickle jars. They are gone from the bluffs and the forests of Niagara. They have one small stronghold left in Ontario, in the east, and they are in serious decline there. Your chances of finding a big one, pretty good in my younger days are slim now, and getting slimmer unless you get well away from the roads. I wish I'd made a pickle or two of the biggest ones I'd found dead-on-roads. Or maybe I don't. Pickles are a poor substitute for the real thing, waiting in the garden.

How many Massassaugas can be found in the Wainfleet Bog today? There have been concerted searches. Mostly they come up empty handed in a place where a short time ago these snakes could hardly be avoided. There are a few puny watersnakes left in the 20 Mile Creek where once metre long-plus bruisers were common. There are mostly no milksnakes to be found in twos and threes and fours under old roofing tin along the trails of my young adulthood – or as singles for that matter. Try finding them – you'll see. I could take you to my secret sites – the spots are still there, the habitat has not outwardly changed, but the milk snakes are virtually gone. The days of mainland Long Point being a sure thing for fox snakes ended before the 1980's were up. Sure, they're still there. As a remnant of what they were a scarce blink of the eye ago. Many trips will turn up none. We turned away one year, and when we turned back a year or two later... where were they?

In my Grandfather's days in Ontario, it seems the serpentine ecosystems were still largely intact. In my parent's days, you could walk a ways to find abundant snakes of the larger types, but you'd never see another Timber on Canadian soil. In my younger days, you had to drive, but not too far – there were still a number of strongholds in the south where you could bask yourself in the feelings of well-being that truly abundant, healthy nature gives...

Today, there is one place left in southern Ontario that is "a sure thing" for snakes. One tiny place of an entire southern stretch of a very big province where the reptilian guild is still a little more than just an echo of what it was. One place where you can fully expect to see a metre-and-a-half of serpent on a given outing. Pelee Island. And Pelee Island was one of the absolute "snakiest" places on the entire continent at one time, according to the accounts of early naturalists...

"There are several islands near he west end of the lake [Erie] that are so infested with rattlesnakes that it is very dangerous to land on them. It is impossible that any place can produce a greater number of all kinds of these reptiles than this does... J. Carver, 1778."

How much longer does what's left of the natural abundance Pelee have? Pelee, last home of the Canadian blue racer, the Lake Erie watersnake and our last great eastern stronghold where you are virtually guaranteed to find numbers of rare snakes, has nonetheless already lost five original species. And developers and businessmen stoned on "growth" have their eyes on the place as I write this.

Are you experiencing a profound sense of loss yet? Well, you've got company - I have lived with it most of my life. This is indeed an immense tragedy. The worst thing about it is this: it never had to happen. Regardless of what you've been told about the nature of ‘progress', about "that's the way it is folks," please remember this – it never had to happen. And it doesn't have to keep happening, either. We had a choice then and we have one now. We always have. And knowing this is the first step in knowing that we can stop the process by which this tragedy came about. Not only can we stop this process, we must. Because, tragic as the story of Canadian snakes is, it is still only a footnote in much larger story. It is a symptom of an illness, not all illness itself. The illness is our own. I don't mean some "Royal ‘our'" by this. I mean mine. It is my illness, it is all of ours, and I'm going to do my best to do something about it.

In order to do something about this, I - we - have to understand exactly what the process is and what brought it about. We must consider the root, and then we must dig it up and do away with it and start afresh. No more branch-hacking. No more treading water, no more wasting time. There is none left to be wasted. We must get to the root – and it is in each of us - and then we can understand what is required.

Onward!

The Root Causes

The root cause of the plight of snakes has not occurred because we have failed to do enough research or failed to develop an appreciation for these life-forms or failed to maintain enough habitat or failed to educate honestly and deeply enough, although certainly the last two conditions are true. The root cause of the plight of snakes is that we live in a system where over time it is a given that conservation will fail. For conservation to succeed – and I mean succeed for the generations as it should have done and should be doing - not just win a few skirmishes while losing the war as we have been doing for decades now – it has to have a context in which that success is possible. This context does not exist today. So far, most of what we have left today is still here only by default. Not because we are winning this battle, but because there are yet some things, like the blue racer on Pelee Island - for which the clock is still in the process of winding down. Yes, there are some cases where this is due to the skirmishes we've won – the whooping crane, the bison, the American alligator – but overall, our efforts are failing and are bound to keep on failing until we come to realization that our current system is not just unconducive to conservation, it is anti-conservation to its core. Anti-life.

Conservation and our current way are in fact contradictions. We are consumers, not conservationists. This basic fact, this fundamental situation, is why we cannot conserve. Conservation occurs under this regime only as long as it's not too inconvenient, and then it doesn't. Clearly, this needs to change. Consumption as a way of life is suicide. As a Calgary lawyer once said to me at an environmental hearing in that city:

"You can't suck and blow at the same time."

Consumer Culture is Created - Not Born...

How did this system happen? Is it inevitable? Is it "just the way things are" or is it the result of our concerted creation? I used to believe it was inevitable. I used to believe it was human nature to just want more and more and more and more of all the things and do-hickees and gadgets and bigger and bigger everything that the market has to offer. That to seek these things ad infinitum was our basic nature. I now know this to be untrue, and knowing this gives me hope. It is no more in our nature than it is in the nature of dogs to be vicious or in horses to walk onto your farm and hook themselves up to a plow. More stuff is not really what human beings fundamentally want. We feel we need these things not because we were born needing them (although it may feel like it, this many generations in), but rather because we have been relentlessly and consciously and ruthlessly manipulated by the existing power structures and those seeking power for decades now to believe this. Like workhorses and vicious dogs, we have been trained. Don't think so? Read on...

The Art and Science of Growing Greed...

"If people today understood the money system, there would be

a revolution tomorrow."

-Henry Ford

Picture yourself as a petri-dish of faceless, vaguely animate slime. That'll give you a pretty accurate picture of how many of the power-elites of today (Big Business, Big Government) view you and me. But don't think for one minute that just because we are dumb goo in their eyes that that makes us unimportant to them. The fact is, we are vital to them. We are possible without them, but they are not possible without us. For it is in us, in our little innocent dish, that they plant the seeds of their most important crop: want. To many, we are quite literally like the stuff in a petri-dish - nothing more than a medium for growth.

Want hasn't been an easy crop for them to grow in us in our young democracies – those of the Americas - as want far beyond the basic needs is not really the nature of healthy humanity. We were a reluctant soil that had to be enhanced with heavy doses of artificial fertilizers. That moderation and conservation are our natures is elemental: it's the only way we will survive into the ages. At the core of every healthy life form lies the basic knowledge of what is good for their survival over the generations. We act naturally in accordance to this fundamental knowledge. For this to change, we must be coerced or we must be "reprogrammed" or both.

In the systems of our ancestors, those seeking unnatural levels of power used to just take what they wanted from us through violence. Depending on who you are, that's mostly illegal for now, at least in a literal sense. But it is important to recognize that the power elites of today are composed of people who are basically junkies - that is their personality profile - and as junkies they are driven to get what they want (power via money) at any cost. To do this in our democracies they had to be cunning, as our democracies were set up as classless systems with safeguards against gross civil imbalances. And so those deviants among us with the desire for great power over others pondered and studied the situation day and night. And then they planted the seeds that eventually were successful in turning all of us into traffickers and fellow junkies ourselves. To their credit, they have done this masterfully and completely.

The cost to us all has been immense. Snakes are part of that cost.

We're All Junkies Now - A Brief Glimpse at Our Reprogramming...

The following is a brief glimpse of how we were reprogrammed to become ourselves deviants from healthy normality. Most of the examples here are from the States – ground zero not just for the modern conservation movement, but for consumerism as well, and offering the most scholarly historic record of both processes. Besides, none of this is about artificial boundaries or political orientation anyway. It is about life.

In the 1880's, William Morris – poet, artist and essayist argued publicly from England against the industrial model of excess that,

"Free men must live simple lives and have simple pleasures," with a decent, wealthy life requiring "a healthy body, an active mind, occupation fit for a healthy body and active mind, and a beautiful world to live in."

You can bet his world would have been one good for all of nature, for birds and people and snakes. His views were trumpeted by many during heated social debates during these days when industrialism/consumerism was starting to heat up. But these were not the men holding the purse strings, nor driven to hold them.

The view that actually prevailed, thanks to those increasingly in power (and enabled in part by our own escalating democratic apathy) can best be summed up by Harvard economist Thomas Nixon Carver who believed that the most important thing to plant in our petri-dishes was not spirituality and an appreciation for simplicity and beauty, but rather "the desire for goods." He argued against a shorter working week, for instance, as we might then be encouraged to spend our time in appreciation of wholesome things ...

"...in the cultivation of arts and the graces of life; in visiting museums, libraries and art galleries, or hikes, games and inexpensive amusements... [this] would decrease the desire for material goods. If it should result in more gardening... making or repairing furniture... and other useful avocations it would cut down on the demand for products..."

He understood that it would be bad for consumerism to create the kind of society that would be good for nature, for forests and farmland and snakes because such a society would revert to its natural state and be less needy, spend less money on non-essentials and then how would he and his cronies at supply headquarters ensure their "fix"? How would they become rich off of us? This mindset is what defeated, for example, movements that would have given us shorter workweeks and more time to live. Instead, we were given just enough time to spend our money.

Even this monstrous perversion of natural right wasn't enough to hook us, however. We were still more inclined, left to our druthers, to gravitate in our purposefully diminished private hours towards the more simple, wholesome pleasures that William Morris advocated and Nixon Carver frowned upon. It wasn't enough to get us to spend beyond our needs – we needed to be persuaded to spend on an escalating scale. GROWTH was, and is, the mantra. Endless growth. So in order to keep us spending, modern advertising was invented, aided enormously by the advent of T.V. and the planned obsolescence of products. The GNP soared. So did our population. Nature reeled.

Pierre Martineau, marketing director for the Chicago Tribune had already wrapped up the prevailing wisdom of today by 1957...

"Advertising's most important function is to integrate the individual into our high-speed consumption economy. [The consumer] buys everything, based on wants which are created by advertising to a large degree. Our standard of living is the highest in the world because our wants are the highest... the well-being of our entire system depends on how much motivation is supplied the consumer to make him continue wanting."

That this mindset is more alive and better-understood than ever in our present era can be illustrated no more powerfully than by George W. Bush's urgent message to America in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, basically:

"Do not panic. Do your patriotic duty and go shopping."

Clearly, not enough of us had taken to heart the message of Bobby Kennedy back in 1968 during his Presidential campaign ...

"We will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods... The gross national product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior."

He was killed before the election. But not before he had delivered the Bottom Line. Substitute "snakes" for "redwoods", and perhaps you can now see why our present model of society and the preservation of healthy nature are at fundamental odds. Let's stress his message again, as here is the root cause we must address in order to save our snakes...

"The gross national product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior."

... and, ultimately, everything else. Because we now know that the GNP is destroying more than redwoods and the forests of the Cariboo-Chilcotin and Lake Superior and snakes and cod and salmon and farming and time for our families and peaceful enjoyment of leisure and our food quality and our bodies and our mental health and our atmosphere. The GNP is destroying our climate.

Consumerism is killing the planet. Consuming it – of course.

That's the root, that's the Bottom Line. Why should anyone be surprised about this? That's what it does, after-all. And if it is conducted on an escalating scale as our current system demands, in a finite space no less, the only thing it can lead to is eventual collapse. And somewhere farther down this line, whether next week or ten years from now or a generation from now, that means not only snakes, but us. Unless we find a solution.

We've created a huge problem by listening to the wrong people for a very long time now. What to do, then, to save the snakes?

Creating Options...

Right now our options not to feed into consumer culture are limited. Right now, if we are to make a living, there are few options but to continue feeding this beast, because it is now virtually all there is. Virtually, but not entirely. We are all therefore part of the problem right now, me as well as you, but the flip side of the coin is that we are therefore all an immediate part of the solution, too. Recognizing this double-edged truth gives us power. The important thing to see today is that there are indeed some options we can choose, and by exercising them right now, we will create more options for tomorrow. Powerful ones. Recognizing ways in which we can opt out of the existing economy as much as possible right now is the first step towards the lasting conservation of snakes. We must in the process create an alternative economy, a new sustainable model. An economy whose "entire well being" does not rely on us always wanting more consumer goods, does not hinge on ceaseless Growth. And while we're making choices that will work towards creating these models, we have to do our best to limit our support of the present one wherever possible. The journey has already begun, all over the globe.

One of the best ways of looking at the phase we're in now is one of "robbing from the status quo to give to an alternative future." Only we're not literally stealing, of course, we're earning our legitimate pay. But where we're automatically expected to feed what's left back into the existing structure, we can instead break this cycle. Sure, we may have to cater to the beast right now to make our living. But we don't have to feed it our disposable income. We can put that into helping create options.

We can break the cycle.

You could call this prescription "the antidote". It's the opposite of what we've been doing for decades: impoverishing our future to glut ourselves on the "right now". Only the right now, as we've seen, isn't looking so great these days. The need for an antidote is becoming harder and harder for even the most oblivious to ignore.

Here's an example of the quest for an antidote in action. A fellow I know well has, for the past decade made a handsome living (by his standards) as an environmental consultant to the oil industry as a typical branch-hacker. The expected thing for him to do with his excess affluence would have been to "Maximize Growth" by investing in a bigger house in a trendy part of Calgary and in RRSP's and Mutual Funds and other "blind investments" and perhaps in Exxon or EnCana stocks, (although a chunk of his blind money would have gone to them already, rest assured). But it's one thing to live an hypocrisy because you have little or no other option, and quite another to choose to. He did this instead: he bought a modest home in a small town in the Badlands of Alberta to live in (in great comfort, he would add) for less money than most people pay for a car, close to the snakes of course, so he could literally walk to great herping, as he is an avid herper. He bought a highly fuel-efficient vehicle. He put most of his money into an alternative venture he and his partner are starting up that he believes is a part of the solution and a breaking of the cycle – natural mixed farming using organic principles and aimed at supplying what is right now a niche market, but a fast growing one. Striking at the root. He has severed yet another link to the status quo by purchasing not tractors, but workhorses which he has learned to train and use himself. No hydrocarbons there! He assures me that while he has had plenty of interesting jobs, this one eclipses them all. This is just one example of how one might "rob from now to benefit tomorrow". The money for these things must come from somewhere. Where it goes is the most important part, and that is up to you. To quote David Suzuki:

"We don't know what details of a truly sustainable future are going

to be like, but we need options, we need people experimenting

in all kinds of ways..."

Expectations...

Our expectations must change. Leaders like the current Premier of Alberta, Ed Stelmach for instance, who convey to the public the idea that we can live sustainably at the same time as maintaining our current standard of living are either in gross misunderstanding of what's happening on this planet, of how things work at a fundamental level to sustain us, or they are lying to us on purpose in order to perpetuate their own power and that of the elite supporting them. (Stelmach's plan is to lower Alberta's climate warming gases by a paltry 14 per cent by... 2050!) We have seen what our current standard of living is contingent upon and we know the cost. We have a choice to make, then: our current standard of living, or a future.

But this isn't so dire as it sounds. Remember that when people of Stelmach's ilk speak of maintaining our "comfort" – something all of us justifiably desire – they are not actually speaking of "comfort" they are speaking of "extreme luxury". We can live very admirably in comfort in a sustainable world; in fact, on the most important levels we will be more comfortable. We will be simply trading one extreme luxury for things which now seem like luxuries but which are really our birthright. Which for instance, would make you feel more comfortable: knowing that there is a Hummer in the driveway of your monstrously wasteful 4,000 square foot home (to which you may be a wage-slave), or knowing that there will be fresh water for our needs in a decade? Do you feel more comfortable having the luxury of a walk down a hall of Persian rugs over what has become the luxury of a walk in pristine nature for your children? Do you feel more comfortable making a six-figure-plus oil-economy income over living free from the threat of terrorism, war?

When people speak of "comfort", examine what it is they're really saying. Are they simply manipulating your thoughts surrounding a basic human need to try to scare you into subservience to the status quo on which they've grown obscene?

The Folly of Parks... or... You Can't Save a Hen in a Weasel Cage

Society is an ecosystem. When it is functioning healthily, it is a mosaic of farms, interwoven with natural areas (woodlots, meadows, prairies, streams and ponds), modest town centers at regular intervals, a few larger centers (cities) here and there, and wilderness areas on the periphery of all this. All these elements must be present in a healthy ratio and must work together in interdependent concert to sustain the health of the society. Most of the people live in the country. The towns are historically within reasonable reach, and provide for most if not all of the needs of their citizens as well as the outlying farms: employment, services, a marketplace for farm produce, stores for the staples and necessities, basic schooling. The cities are in some ways simply towns offering a higher complexity and range of choices of the same resources, but they also provide some of what modest towns cannot: universities, museums, factories, publishing houses, art galleries, centres of parliament; a greater diversity of culture to create, perpetuate and remind us of our rich context. The wilderness functions as a reservoir of biodiversity, a purifier for the planet's air and water, as a place of spiritual renewal, and as a warehouse of materials for the use of society.

A sustainable society might choose to have parks, but they wouldn't be a necessity. The reason we need parks today, why we cry out for "more protected habitat" is because we're getting desperate – we have no sustainable model and everything is being consumed. In fact, according to historians, Teddy Roosevelt, 32^nd president of the United States and considered by many the "father" of the parks system...

"...was one of the foremost proponents for a simpler life...[and] was quite candid in saying that for all his support of American capitalism, he feared that if allowed to develop unleashed it would eventually create a corrupt civilization."

He created parks because he foresaw that there would otherwise be nothing left one day under the prevailing system. There is great folly, however, in believing we can maintain areas that are entirely off limits to most forms of human use in order that we can completely and utterly exploit the rest. The system is bound to fail.

In a consumer society, it is only a matter of time before we must go after those assets we seek that lie inside parks and other protected areas. Once we have consumed the resources outside the parks, and having developed no viable alternatives in the meantime to a system that requires ever more to function at all, we will have absolutely no choice but to go after what's inside the parks.

When George W. Bush tells us it is in the best interests of Americans to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge he is correct. When EnCana corporation tells us it is in the best interests of Canadians to be allowed to drill 1,200 new gas-wells in the supposedly protected Suffield National Wildlife Area of Alberta, they are right. Under our current system. We have voted for this. Every day we vote for this. We have voted for this through our consumption and our investments – with our wallets and our habits – for ever more gas and ever more oil, we say in no uncertain terms "this is what we want!" And yet we expect these areas to be left alone?

Well, you can't suck and blow at the same time.

Simone de Beauvoir, French existentialist philosopher summed up our conundrum as would-be conservationists within our current context very well with this statement:

"To protest in the name of morality against ‘excesses' or ‘abuses'

is an error which hints at active complicity. There are no ‘abuses' or ‘excesses' here, simply an all-pervasive system."

So let's make sure we are voting for the right things with our wallets, through our consumption and our spending and our habits – for a new system in which we can honestly say that going after our last natural assets is not in our best interests. For a system where our last natural assets need never fear ultimate consumption, because through wise use and moderation there will be no such thing as "last".

The Role of Technology

One of the things that disturbs me today is the message, growing in popularity, that if we only channel our energies and finances into alternative technologies, we can then solve our human-created climate change problems (remembering that climate change is symbolic of the even larger root problems we are discussing here, of which it is but another symptom) and live sustainably in pretty much the same fashion as we live today. Sounds pretty good. The problem is, it has already been proven to be false hope.

The Club of Rome is an independent group that "brings together scientists, economists, businessmen, international high civil servants, heads of state and former heads of state from all five continents who are convinced that the future of humankind is not determined once and for all and that each human being can contribute to the improvement of our societies." They have been spearheading sophisticated, comprehensive and exhaustive research on global problems and since the 1970's have been warning of the limits to economic and population growth. In the early 1990's, they showed us definitively that we were by that point already consuming significantly beyond the earth's capacity to continue to sustain us much into the future.

They warned against viewing technology as the solution to our root problems. Their studies showed that while we may indeed be capable of coming up with technologies to solve our issues, we have waited too long. Our issues have exploded exponentially, each issue then creating more branch issues, while our technologies designed to cope with them are progressing on a more linear scale. In fact, many of them are still experimental. In other words, the snowball is rolling downhill bigger and faster all the time and not only can't we keep up with it, many of us are still just putting on our boots!

The Club of Rome has determined scientifically what many of us have known all along. That the only solution to sustainability and therefore a future is to put limits on both our economic and population growth, and that in fact at our present moment, we are far enough over our limits that a reduction of both is in order. The solution then to our root problems here is not technology, but rather a return to modesty and simplicity of living. Technology will certainly help us achieve this solution in comfort. Implementing technology while adhering otherwise to the status quo, however, is no solution.

Abandoning the Ethos of Unlimited Growth – Redefining "Progress"

We need to re-program ourselves so that when we hear some politician or businessman enthusiastically talking "Growth", we don't just hear alarm bells, we hear air-raid sirens! We need, as a society, to do to Growth as an ethos what we have successfully done to cigarette smoking as a habit. We need to make the idea of continued Growth as socially repugnant as smoking in the waiting room of a cancer-ward. Because it is.

Let's while we're at it sever in our thinking our cherished tie between the terms "progress" and "Growth". I think it is clear at this point that while it is natural and desirable for things to grow to a healthy degree, we have long ago vastly exceeded the point of healthy growth in our traditional economic sectors. The analogy has been drawn many times, but we might as well draw it again here, as none is more apt: the only significant thing in nature for which unlimited growth is the norm is... cancer.

Clearly, "growth" of the status quo today can hardly be defined as "progress". What is "progress" today, then? How should we redefine it? Perhaps we could redefine progress today as such –

"Progress is to be defined today as "growth" only in the following terms: where it concerns an ethos and incumbent technologies that lead to reduction, modesty and simplicity, that is - sustainability."

Examples of progress that we can enact at a personal level can be found in the "Options I can Choose..." sections of this essay.

Canada is a Small Country with a Huge Cold Storage

One of the reasons Canada is in a crisis situation with her snakes (and also, significantly, her farmland) is because she is a relatively small, overpopulated country. No, this isn't a misprint. Let's say it again, because it's something we need to recognize: Canada is a small, overpopulated country – with a huge cold storage facility out back.

This is not what I was taught growing up in southern Ontario. I was taught that it was our American neighbor that had issues with being overrun by humanity. I'd then consider the sprawl around me and how the woods were being cut and how everything was being paved over and think, "my God, if the States are worse than this it must be a wasteland!" It didn't figure to me. It wasn't until I first began enjoying the eastern States that I realized Canadians were being misled about their country. New York, one of the four most populous states in the Union, looked like a sylvan paradise compared to much of southern Ontario. In fact, you don't have to go to New York to see this – you can see this from a satellite photograph. The devastation of southern Ontario is visible from space.

Canada may have a vast landmass, but the reality is that most of Canada is considered uninhabitable by 75% of her citizens. In fact, in Ontario, where most of Canada lives, 90% of the people live on the southernmost 15% of the land base. This 15% (where most all the snakes live as well), in my estimation and as Hemingway would have put it in terms of being "good country" in which to exist, is pretty much "finished." So to take our total landmass and divide it by the number of people here gives us a worse than meaningless statistic, it gives us a dangerous one. It is the impetus nonetheless behind the erroneous boosterism we still engage in: "Canada is under- populated!" "Canada Needs More People!" "Canada has so much room for Growth!" Not unless you want to live in a root cellar, it doesn't. Or, conversely in a concrete jungle with no farmland or natural areas left to sustain you. Or you're a mainstream politician looking for a broader tax-base. From the standpoint of sustainability, this mindset is suicidal.

The truth is, if we had less people here, we could live much better. I guess this applies to the entire planet.

I have no idea what to do about this problem on a global scale. I do know that there is not enough dialogue on this subject. And in this country at least, most of what dialogue there is, is fallacy.

Options I Can Choose Today for the Snakes

Engage in My Civic Duty

This means becoming politically, socially and environmentally engaged. Our forefathers understood that in a democracy, this is Job # 1. The alternative is to lose more than our snakes; it is to lose our freedom on many other significant levels. Because we haven't had direct experience with totalitarian systems as many of our forefathers did, we've forgotten what history has proven: that democracy is not the normal state of society – tyranny is. Democracy demands our involvement if it is to survive. As was explained to me in my ignorance, my role in life looks like this:

A) I am a Citizen of a Democracy first, accountable to my fellow citizens and fellow creatures, my family, and the values important to our mutual well-being (a healthy planet being top of this list);

B) I am whatever I decide my profession/specialty/job may be, second.

The order of these things is very important. "B" indeed comes second – it must not be allowed to trump "A". I have learned that most of us never understood this, or have forgotten it, or have simply found it inconvenient. For instance, I was at a talk by a research biologist on the conservation of declining grizzly bears in Alberta. I asked a question about the potential wisdom of putting a moratorium on the hunt of these animals. The biologist literally threw up his hands and exclaimed indignantly to the room, "I'm a Scientist! I do my best not to address such political questions!" This man clearly misunderstood his role in this democracy. He mistakenly believed that his specialty should justifiably trump his civic duty. As a result, he was not only a coward; he was – as one Calgary politician explained upon hearing the story – "in default as a citizen." He certainly wasn't doing his bears any favors where they needed him most.

If you love snakes and the healthy nature they stand for, it means engaging in some activities to stand up for them. Vote for those who would change the system. Vote, period. Write letters. Don't ever think, "What can one person do?" What one person can do besides vote is to motivate others through letters and articles and presentations and discussions on the street and so become two people and then ten people and then a hundred. Maybe a hundred thousand! This has worked for common people throughout history, myself being one of them. In fact, I have sacrificed jobs effectively campaigning for the good of snakes, in order not to allow the requirements of my specialty over-ride my obligations as a citizen. Not only do I consider such sacrifice my civic duty at times, it has served to assist me on my journey towards "right livelihood". My life has never been better! This is not meant as a boast. I am just saying that if a hairy little asthmatic son of an Englishman like me can do this, then so can anyone.

We are in charge here!

Be Very Careful How I Invest My Money

This one is all about making sure you are not feeding your profits back to the beast that is killing the snakes (and by now you realize that "snakes" are a symbol for all life). It's about investing in sustainable options. Know where your investment money is going – try not to invest a single penny blindly. Don't wittingly or not use your money to benefit the companies that are killing the things you most value. If you are involved in a group investment plan through your profession, find out where your retirement money is coming from. If you don't like what you see, protest now! Motivate your co-workers to protest, too. Don't let your right hand kill the things you hold dear in your left.

Get off the Grid

Explore, invest in and implement alternative energy sources (solar panels, passive solar heat, wind power, rocket mass heaters etc.) to heat and power your home.

Blow up the TV

It's a waste of life. Get rid of the thing and you won't be nearly so susceptible to consumerism, and you'll have a lot more time – and energy - to engage life where you're needed. I've been without T.V. for 23 years. I have no idea where people find time for it. Nor why they'd want to. You won't either when you give it up.

Slow Down

The average vehicle's fuel efficiency plummets at about 100 kph (60 mph). In Germany, they are actually considering enforcing speed limits on the autobahn for the first time for this reason. Besides, the signs here say maximum 100 kph, not minimum. Never noticed that, huh?

Get a More Fuel Efficient Vehicle

This one's obvious. The fact that Hummers and Escalades aren't illegal is a stupefying indication of how out-of-sync we are with our predicament. If you don't need it, don't drive it. Ride a bike where you can!

Car-pool, Take the Train, Take the Bus...

Mass transit is a smart option.

Join a CSA

The world needs more farmers doing things right. To do things right will take more farmers yet, as it's impossible to farm most big acreages in a sustainable fashion. It is estimated that if all the world's farmers farmed like we do right now in North America, we would run out of oil in about 14 years. It's pretty standard for an Alberta farm, for instance, to burn about $50,000 in diesel fuel a year at 2007 prices.

CSA stands for "Community Supported Agriculture". A CSA is a small farm where a variety of crops are grown using sustainable, organic methods. The produce is provided locally to customers who buy memberships or "shares" at the beginning of the season. The farmer gets operating money up front and you get good, old-fashioned produce that isn't full of poisons and bereft of food value and hasn't burned 1,500 kilometres worth of fuel getting to you. But you get much more than that. You get a share in a sustainable future where all the countryside being used is being done so in a responsible way that is great for people, for wildlife and for the planet. You are voting with your wallet for snakes.

Putting money into a CSA is an investment in the antidote.

Talk About the Big Picture

Share your stories and spread your message. Make sure the people around you understand the difference between hacking at branches (buying a little more time) and striking at the root (creating lasting solutions). Remind others of their civic duty to nature in this democracy.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Yes, the three-"R's" and other immediate household measures are important. On their own, they aren't nearly enough, but they are nonetheless part of the picture.

Don't be a Bigot

We all think we know what it is to be a Bigot and we all think we aren't one, right? Well, let me ask you this: have you ever used the terms "Redneck"; "Hick"; "Simple Farmer"; "Hippie"; "Hillbilly"; etc? This is the language of discrimination. The reason it is mentioned here is because the widespread use of these terms and the mindset they engender has been bad for snake conservation. How so? These terms have gone a long way towards portraying the types of people who opt to live skillfully in rural areas as backward, unmotivated, unsophisticated, ignorant, undesirable – you name it. They are terms that have gone far to implant in us the idea that a life spent in a rural setting is demeaning, pointless to society, wasted even. They cast a negative light on the rural life and the self-sufficiency we need to see a large-scale return to.

These words are an impediment to sustainability. Don't use them.

Don't Handle Those Herps

Pelee Island seems to be getting quite popular with herpers. I think this is mostly fantastic! But one can easily see how this small island, much of which is not even good habitat, could become an example of a place where a life form was "loved-to-death". Remember that your presence is a certain stress to snakes. The more you are present, the more stressful you become (although I imagine a certain level of habituation occurs, too). Snakes are one of the few forms of wildlife that can be enjoyable (and possible) to actually pick up and hold in the hand. That's pretty hard with warblers. (Or bears). Do them a favor and don't pick them up, then. Not in busy places like Pelee, anyway. Get a "long-lens" on your camera and photograph them in-situ. Watch them, don't molest them. If you're the hands-on type (as I am!), handle captive-bred snakes at home.

Support Vital Research

Vital research in the case of snakes means doing the things we must with a given species to learn the basic biology of its life: is it found here, what does it need in terms of range, habitat, etc. for maintaining its population? This information can then be hopefully used to help buy the snake a little more time on this planet, which is about all we can hope to do in a lot of cases until we manage the changeover to a sustainable culture. In a sustainable culture, wildlife research would be much like parks – we might choose to do it, but it wouldn't be necessary in most cases to ensure the survival of species. I am nonetheless very grateful for the fascinating information research yields, even when not directly applicable to conservation.

This isn't really about the big-picture, but it's one that people expect to see. You may be told by some researcher that the best way to help snakes is to support their project. In reality, helping their project may or may not be a way to help snakes - it may only be a way to help the researcher. Even if the given project is a way to help snakes, perhaps a good one, it is still important to remember that it isn't the best way. Snake research is still branch-hacking. It can be very important branch-hacking, as it may lead to knowledge that could spell the difference between having some snakes still around or not to repopulate when we've finally solved the root problems.

Ask some questions, do some digging of your own – has this been done before somewhere else applicable? Not all wildlife research is vital, and some of it should probably cease, at least until better times prevail and we can afford such luxuries. Nor does research automatically lead to conservation. In fact, it automatically doesn't without political involvement somewhere. Snake research, needed or not, is usually stressful on snakes to some degree.

Snake researchers – wildlife researchers of all kinds – could be doing a lot more to spread the idea of root causes, and I wish they would. Encourage them to do this where you can.

Options I Can Work Towards for the Snakes

Travel Less

This is about, among many other things, voting with the wallet. You can't travel the globe on trans-continental airplanes on a yearly basis or drive all over North America regularly and claim in total honesty you are doing what you can to fight global warming or the development of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or to conserve snakes. What you're really doing is casting your vote for more of the status quo. We have a sense of entitlement today to extreme levels of mobility, but until and unless we develop alternatives to fossil fuels, our mobility is something we are going to have to learn to limit. In fact, travel could be said to be another of our drugs, an expensive and in the current model unsustainable escape from day-to-day consciousness. Best solution? Make the move to somewhere you really love being and develop a deep and intimate relationship with "your own territory" as people in the past did. Develop a lifestyle there that you don't feel the need to escape from.

It's almost a dead art.

Ditch the McMansion

As Time Magazine pointed out, "Oversize houses aren't just architecturally offensive," a "green" large house still uses more energy than an inefficient small house, as well as requiring more building materials. More trees, more hydrocarbons burned to cut and transport the wood, etc. etc....

Grow Your Own Food

An alternative, or an adjunct to joining a CSA. It doesn't get more local than this!

Move to the Country

All these recommendations are part of a whole, but these last four really go together. This one also ties directly into the idea of traveling less. Your dream may be to live in a high-rise, but I doubt it.

Upwards of 87% of Albertans for example are nonetheless urbanites today. I find this statistic terrifying. Our ecosystem is way out of balance. Worse, we will not conserve what we don't love. We can't love that with which we are not intimate. We need more people in the country and we need more children raised in nature. A few classroom field trips and then back to the city is not enough to raise the kind of future generation we need.

Not to mention the fact that a move away from the urban-centers is one of the best things you can do, according to the experts (including some urban economists) if you are concerned about buffering yourself from the unraveling of the social fabric that is occurring today, including the threat of terrorism - itself a by-product of an unsustainable system.

Become Self-Sufficient

Wendell Berry, professor, author, poet, farmer and philosopher pointed out that where we used to be a country of landowners, we are now a country of employees. This is not good for a lot of the reasons we've already touched on, but another reason is that it is a very bad thing for democracy. You can't be self-sufficient, for instance, without land. And without self-sufficiency, we are more prone to being slaves to the power elites and feeling less comfortable about exercising our democratic rights. I don't think it is a coincidence that as the proportion of urbanites has gone up and up, the quality of our democracies in the Americas has gone down.

Becoming as self-sufficient as possible is the ultimate key to opting out of the status quo of today. The more self-sufficient you become, the less dependent you are on products that "feed the beast" and kill nature, in fact, the less a part you need to play in the money economy, period. This gives you a buffer against economic uncertainty. This is not only personally liberating, it is about the best insurance you can have in today's uncertain times.

Become an Organic Farmer

We've already mentioned the need for more farmers and an alternative agriculture. How about doing something really radical then, and becoming one? A fundamental reason that most of us are urbanites now is the industrialization of farms, the costs of which have made sustainable, small family farming virtually impossible. Healthy farming – a way of life that has sustained us for many, many centuries - began to die the moment farmers embraced the industrial model, a movement that really took off after World War II.

Modern farming has killed a helluva lot of snakes, as many or more perhaps than roads. Entire populations. In one Texas study where two near identical adjacent valleys were examined, one with heavy inputs of agricultural chemicals and one without, the one with lacked egg-laying species. I suspect this is where our once healthy populations of Niagara milksnakes went (along with some of my old neighbors who died young of some highly virulent cancers).

Becoming an Organic Farmer (certified or not), then, is about as big a direct step as you can right now take to save snakes!

Join An Ecovillage

An Ecovillage is a "planned community". It's like a big CSA farm with a bunch of farmers all living on it. A group of like-minded people get together and draft a vision statement, which can be likened to their Constitution, buy some land together and develop their own more-or-less self sufficient community on it according to sustainable principles and goals. It's like a vote of non-confidence in mainstream society, and an alternative to it. The burdens of land-acquisition, farming, building, choosing alternatives and developing more and etc. can all be shared. There are more and more of these springing up. Some successful ones have been around since the 60's.

Recognize Our Population Crisis

We've already touched on this one, too. There are too many of us. Let's talk about this together in the hopes of one day somehow arriving at ethical solutions. Persistent dialogue on the subject is the first step towards solving this monumental problem. We must keep the fact of our overpopulation in the forefront of our consciousness and not be afraid to discuss it.

A positive solution may already be upon us. There are those who tell us that our present birthrate is going to lead inevitably to depopulation. If this is indeed the case, then our next problem is going to be to make sure we are not mislead by those with an agenda other than the sustainability of our culture into believing this is a bad thing. Fundamentally, it would be a fantastic thing! Yes, short-term problems will arise to be dealt with - how a minority of young people will take care of an aging majority being perhaps the biggest one. Again, we must avoid at all costs being duped into misinterpreting such short-term problems as ‘proof' that a return to population growth and an adherence to our consumer model is therefore the answer, as there will inevitably be those who propose this, and they may well be the ones in control of the loudest media.

Other issues like a diminished workforce and a reduced tax-base are problems primarily from within the current consumer standpoint – if by the time the purported depopulation occurs we have already abandoned the Growth model for one of Sustainability under our new definition of Progress, these issues may not constitute a problem at all.

In Summary

It's been a long journey getting here, for me certainly, if not for you in taking the time to consider all of this. It's taken me all my life so far to get to this point.

Some of the places where I could go out as a boy and literally fill a sack almost full of snakes in a few hours (not a great thing to do, but think of what just being able to do this meant! I did return them...) are literally under concrete now. Some of the creeks I used to haunt have disappeared completely – they run through underground conduits. Even more ominous are those places that still look pristine but in which the snakes and many other things have died off, victims of a systemic toxicity.

I live now in Alberta, a relatively short distance away from sites where I regularly find snakes as big as my wrist and in the neighborhood of two metres long. A significant part of the rush of coming upon such magnificent reptiles in nature is the feeling that all is still well in a few out-of-the-way places. Snakes don't reach those sizes where things are not well for them. Instead they get smaller and smaller as though they are not just dying out as a population, but actually shrinking as individuals into oblivion! That's not to say all is well here. The oil and gas industry as aided and abetted by myself is responsible for introducing relentless armies of vehicle traffic swarming daily over remote places that would otherwise see only a pickup truck or two every once in awhile. This industrial traffic has slaughtered many thousands of snakes on roads, snakes that would otherwise have lived. And in my area, the push is to bring to the Badlands more Tourism, the very industry of extreme mobility and escalated burning of hydrocarbons. They have been successful in this goal, and in the matter of the past few years - sure enough - the big snakes have disappeared from some of my treasured sites. The ones still there are "getting smaller"... the ominous first step towards oblivion. Here we go again.

Where are the children of today going to go to catch snakes and frogs? What of those places that still look great, the places where the black ratsnakes used to prowl, the places that tempt the children out only to find there's now nothing left?

Less and less children go into nature at all. This is a huge problem. Perhaps an even bigger problem is that the ones that do aren't being rewarded by the kinds of experiences we were rewarded with because those experiences are no longer possible in many places accessible to a child. What happens to a child who is persuaded to go out into nature but sees nothing time and again? Do they come back thinking, what's the point? Think of their eroded life-experience. I think of my eroded experience, and mine was likely much better than theirs will be.

All I can say is to reiterate: this didn't have to happen. It didn't have to happen, and it doesn't have to continue and it mustn't be allowed to. If we think saving snakes is just about snakes, we haven't got a prayer of saving them.

But now we know better. We, as a culture, are waking up to the larger facts of what's required of us. We know better in many, many ways. We can change the story. We did an experiment, we created a mess, and now we can fix it.

Who's in charge here, after-all?!

My Eden includes the Serpent.