I looked it up. Exurb: "A region generally semirural, beyond the suburbs of a city, inhabited largely by persons in the upper-income group." Webster's New Universal Dictionary.

In a field study in Sonoma county, California, orange-crowned warblers and Hutton's vireos occurred in higher frequency in relatively undisturbed areas than in urban and exurban places. That's to be expected. The surprise was that these two species were not only less numerous in suburban and exurban places, but their frequencies were practically identical in the two areas. In other words, more space between houses in exurbia does not necessarily exempt them from disruption of habitats that can, at least in some cases, equal the typical disruption created by ordinary suburban sprawl. This study is cited and illustrated in Corridor Ecology, a new book just out from Island Press and authored by J. Hilty, W.Lidicker Jr and Adena Merenlender. The book is a model of skillful explication of scientific findings that neither bogs us down in specialist language nor condescends by skirting complex issues of theory and practice. Unusual care is taken in definitions of terms, even everyday terms that we all think we know are given a fresh gloss to fit them into the particular purposes of the book. In the blurb on the back cover George Schaller says that it is "an essential resource for everyone concerned with landscape ecology." I have to add that landscape ecology has to be of concern to any and all of us who want to see some sanity restored to the way we treat the earth. That means you and me, right?

Ecologists warn that a few bird studies do not make for sweeping statements, and this is true, but there is more to the story. Exurbs, in addition to their intrinsic on-site characteristics -- high road density, drainage fields, water supply structures and so on -- are also one of the human- caused breakups of natural communities into smaller pieces, along with clearcuts, fire containment breaks and roads, oil and methane drilling, coal mines that remove mountain tops or chew up sage-grasslands, et cetera. The full array of consequences are not fully investigated; probably we will never have the entire picture, but some are well established, such as the disruption of habitats of far-ranging animals: bears, wolves, African and Asiatic lions, tigers, wolverines, mountain lions, elephants, jaguars et al.

Most species don't space themselves evenly across a landscape, they inhabit in a more fine-grained way, associating with plants, animals, soils, slope exposure and a host of other environmental variables to which they are adapted. Human intervention has drastically broken these arrangements. We face a worldwide situation now where restoration of animal and plant communities can no longer be confined to manipulation of public lands, nor are parks and wilderness set-asides adequate. The creation of landscape scale connectivities will be necessary, such as the Yellowstone to Yukon Ecosystem proposal. What this means is working out ways in which The Others can share private holdings. Even in the west where public lands and big parks, forests and wilderness areas seem to be in oversupply, they are not, if we are serious about conservation and restoration.

One fact about human history to keep in mind as a sort of vivid background for thinking about nature is that, unlike most organisms who are quite choosy about their own niches, we humans roam the entire planet insisting that we can live anywhere, even Antarctica. The downside is huge importations of materials from elsewhere to support our lives in places where as naked animals we would die. A colleague, Charlotte Meyer (emeritus, Edgewood College) has looked with care at Henry Thoreau's thoughts when he found himself beyond the reach of the last outposts of civilization, high on the rugged and rock-bound slopes of Mount Ktaadn. He seems to be saying that there are places on this earth where we do not belong. Charlotte writes, "On the barren mountaintop he feels fear not because nature is 'other', but because humankind like other animals has a natural habitat, and it is not the barren mountaintop." And as a sort of coda to that thought, she adds, "But he could never even have imagined the commodification of nature to come -- the rich matron on an Alaska cruise boarding a helicopter to land on a glacier to be helped onto a waiting dogsled for a 10-minute ride." (1)

I know some Zephyr readers have a different takes on humanity and the earth. There are those inclined to think that loss of species -- like, who cares about Orange Crowned Warblers? -- is not that big a deal. We can agree to disagree. Here's one of my disagreements: None of us knows for sure which loss of species will trigger bigger losses that will cascade and reach you and me and everybody else. Here's another: if you go out and get really acquainted with an Orange Crowned Warbler or, let's say, a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher, you might experience something new. I'm not saying that would happen, but it might. HENRY THOREAU, AGAIN

He spent a good part of his life writing and lecturing, trying to get people to take nature seriously. Now, about 150 years after his death, we can safely say that he is as relevant today as in his own time. Why? Because he was so continually conscious of his society, his fellow American empire builders, what they did, how they lived. I keep finding evidence that Henry had an unusual capacity to find new tangents in his thinking life. A full-of-odd-thoughts adventurer. Listen to him musing as he and his brother stand on a dam, knowing it blocks return of the shad to their spawning grounds. "I for one am with thee (the shad), and who knows what may avail a crow-bar against that Billerica dam?"

In Boothbay Harbor, Maine in mid June, a conference dedicated to discussion of Thoreau and Rachel Carson. I soaked up a good supply of thoughtful and provocative presentations that showed a deeper awareness than previous meetings of this sort, of the traumas we face in these times of ours, another reason why Henry Thoreau speaks so clearly to us today, his time on earth being the agony of tolerating slavery in the land of the free, and the complacency of citizens, and the approach of war. I had a chance to give a brief spiel on Henry, ending it with quotations from Wes Jackson, founder of The Land Institute and a fine writer about land and being on the land, and Rachel Carson, of Silent Spring fame.

Here's Wes: "So here we are at a rare place at a rare moment, embedded within ecosystems within the ecosphere, the only home we have known, and we're screwing it up. Why do we do it? Is it dumbness? Yes. Is it arrogance? Yes. Is it greed? Yes. It is all of the above and more if we could think of enough negative terms. Is it inevitable? Finally, a hopeful No! But a conceptual revolution is necessary, and this time a moral one, because it's perceived by us as necessary." (2)

And here's Rachel:

"We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork the road -- the one 'less traveled by' -- offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth." (3) ANTI WAR REPORT

Alison and I in the center of Malone, Franklin county seat, far north New York state on a Saturday noon. Her sign read NO MORE WAR. Its obverse read DIE FOR OIL? LET GEORGE DO IT. She got a bunch of honks and V signs with either side. Mine had EMPIRES ALWAYS DIE. STOP. BEFORE ITS TOO LATE.

A rainy day, but we had the signs protected. After a while here comes a military convoy, Three two-and-a half ton trucks and a command vehicle. I knew it was Tenth Mountain Infantry because they roam this north country frequently, based south of here near Watertown. My old outfit; I had to wave. So, sign in one hand, waving in the other and damned if the GIs in the cabs didn't wave back, some using both hands. The command car excepted, of course. None of those guys knew me; I was just an old crock holding an anti-empire sign. What the hell was going on? I don't know. I like to think they liked my sign.

Got in an argument recently with a friend, he a firm believer in what he called "a shift" in world affairs. We wouldn't live to see it, but it's predicted, it will come. I of the Thoreauvian persuasion that whatever the hidden powers decree for the future "we have a sort of living to get and must buffet it somewhat longer. There are various tough problems yet to solve, and we must make shift to live, betwixt spirit and matter, such a human life as we can." So I declared that I wasn't about to wait for "the shift," to solve things. It was up to us to get out of our dreamworld and start building democracy ... and so on and on, a real rant. Well, he comes back with a rant of his own, revealing an unshakable conviction that humans are stupid and bloodthirsty. Here again that damn Pogo thing, "the enemy is us." We have gone round and round on these matters over the years. Why do we stand there on a beautiful blue sky day growling at each other, each of us knowing the other's script by heart by now? The fine art of argument, we weren't practicing that at all. It was more like two stubborn mules braying. Oh well, just blowing off, shaking hands when we finally cooled down. But this time I got to thinking that "just blowing off" might be a Pogo trait that we don't really need. We could maybe cancel it without damaging our health. "Let it all hang out" was a sixties slogan. I doubted it then, I doubt it now, especially when I witness two males on opposing sides at a street demo, shouting at each other, poisoning the atmosphere, and to what purpose? Winning the argument? Come on! Real arguing is a mutual trading of views. You listen and you speak and you listen again. Well, that's the ideal anyway. Knocking the opponent down with high decibel blather is a totally different animal.

Thinking about all this, I remembered one of the times when I went into shouting mode and a woman said, "You're just as bad as he is," and that stopped me cold, because I'd gone off the rails before and knew I should have learned by now: demos, vigils, other modes of resistance are not arenas. Get that? Making them into arenas destroys the very purpose of the action. So, impulsively, I offered my right hand to the other guy. He responded with his, but no sooner had we clasped than he thought better of it and shoved me off the curb into the street. Now that is interesting. You see the conflict there? Two good old American habits fighting it out in that guy's body-mind. Mine too. I say we can win that internal conflict by knowing that the struggle is deadly serious, that the struggle is is for minds and hearts, that the struggle is, quoting Wes Jackson again, "perceived by us as necessary." Old dogs can learn new tricks. Even new dogs can do it; there's hope for them too. (1) Charlotte Meyer, "Ktaadn and the Term Wilderness", presented at 2005 conference of American Society for Literature and Environment, Eugene, Oregon. (2) Wes Jackson, "Conceptual Revolutions. Who Needs Them? Why? /The Land Report/, 83/2005. (3) Rachel Carson, /Silent Spring/, Riverside Press, 1962