Why do we welcome some animals and plants into our lives, while we reject others? In this episode, we explore the boundaries of fear and belonging in relation to the other living creatures we share this planet with. Our guests are Wendy Bingham, a cattle rancher; Erica Berry, author of the book Wolfish; and Bobby Fossek, who works on ecosystem restoration, among many other things. This conversation was recorded in Pendleton, Oregon in May 2024.
Show Notes
About Our Guests
Bobby Fossek is a leader of Naknuwithlama Tíichamna (Caretakers of the Land) in Cove, Oregon. Caretakers of the Land aims to steward and strengthen the symbiotic life ways of the Columbia River Basin and the Blue Mountain bioregion through seasonal round immersion camps, cultural revitalization projects, ecosystem restoration, and regenerative life skills education.
Erica Berry is a writer from Portland. Her nonfiction debut, Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, was published in spring 2023 by Flatiron/Macmillan, and is a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and a semifinalist for the Pacific Northwest Book Award. Her essays, which are often about the intersection of emotion and the natural environment, appear in the New York Times, Orion, Outside Magazine, the Guardian, and the Atlantic, among other publications.
Wendy Bingham is a cattle rancher from North Powder, Oregon. She discovered her passion for horses and cattle as a child while helping out with her family’s herd. In 2002, Wendy and her husband, Jake, started Bingham Beef, a family owned and operated cattle ranch. Wendy believes that food is an important part of life and takes pleasure in providing beef that has been pasture raised with care.
Further Detours
- Read an excerpt from Erica Berry's book, Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear.
- Read about Bobby Fossek's ecosystem restoration work in Cove.
- Listen to our May 2022 episode "Democracy of Species" with Robin Wall Kimmerer and Emma Marris
- Join an online conversation with Emily Plec about our relationships with other animals on June 3, or invite Emily to lead a conversation in your community.
- Read more stories from Oregon Humanities about how humans relate to wolves, cougars, lions, beavers, otters, birds, sheep, apples, blackberries, the many creatures of the Columbia Plateau, and the whole of creation.
Transcript
Adam Davis: Hello and welcome to The Detour. I wonder wherever you may be, whether you have a dog or a cat. I wonder if your dog or cat lives in your home with you, maybe sleeps in your bed. I wonder if that dog or cat is in some undeniable way, part of your family, but I also wonder whether you have a wolf or for that matter, a cougar, and if so, whether that wolf or cougar is part of your family or belongs in your home or shares your bed.
This question of which animals we take to be part of our families and which animals we keep outside our doors is a question about belonging. It is also a question about fear, and it doesn't only apply to animals, it also applies to plants, some of which we cultivate and some of which we call weeds, or more strongly, invasive species.
And of course, terms like this, thinking like this, are sometimes applied to people too. It's through our senses of fear and belonging that we define the character and the limits of the communities we live in. This episode of The Detour explores that question with Wendy Bingham, who with her family runs a cattle ranch out of North Powder,
Bobby Fossek, who helps lead Caretakers of the Land in Cove, and Erika Berry, a Portland based writer whose book, Wolfish goes deep on fear of wolves and relationships we humans have with each other and other beings. We talked with Wendy, Bobby and Erica in May, 2024 at the Pendleton Center for the Arts as part of that year's Consider This series.
What do you get when a rancher, a writer, and a land steward walk into an art center in Eastern Oregon? The harmonious and thoughtful conversation that follows. Here's how it starts.
I want to start with a question about land. Is there something that you think about or even say when you're orienting yourself toward the land that you're on?
Bobby Fossek: I guess I usually start by saying thank you and showing my gratitude for, you know, the gift of life and being able to receive my life and the energy and the nourishment I need from the land.
And just look to it as my kin, as my relationship and continuing to always refine and work on that relationship.
Wendy Bingham: So I would say it's the land that is awe inspiring to me—of all that it does, like Bobby said, a sense of thank you. I really feel blessed to live where we do. And have that connection to the land of being able to just appreciate the beauty and all that it generates.
Erica Berry: Definitely echo you both and also. I was just at my grandpa's memorial and he was a biologist and I grew up with him in Montana walking around and he would ask me to identify the trees, you know, and I would never be able to at first. But it caught me to start thinking about the land as a place of stories.
Like I just learned that oak trees, the reason they grow back so fast is that they were—they came up when elephants were prehistoric, elephants were trampling them. And so they had to come back. So now when I see a little oak sapling, I'm thinking about elephants being there, which is to say awe–not just in what is there right now, but in thinking about the layers of history and story and science that are kind of behind that.
Adam Davis: If you think back a little bit to your childhood can you remember, was there an animal or a plant that you loved and why did you love it? Wendy, you're looking over here in a way that something popped up for you.
Wendy Bingham: I guess that would be easy for me just because we were around animals all the time. We lived on the river. I'm actually from Southern Idaho and I would have to say that a horse was my love. Their power and all that can entail in a horse, but they can be gentle, just a tremendous animal. That's amazing to me.
Erica Berry: I started thinking about the sort of Douglas fir trees with that really drippy green moss. I was recently having a piece fact checked. It was an east coast fact checker that couldn't understand what that green looked like. And I was saying, I sent photos, Google image search. It was like, I was like, it's extra-terrestrial. It's fluorescent. It looks like a candy that you shouldn't be able to eat. You know? And so those kinds of trees that were around where I grew up outside of Portland.
Bobby Fossek: That's a hard one. The first one that comes to my mind though, which a lot of people don't really like this animal, is the magpie. I remember when I was a kid, I always loved watching the magpies and never understood why some people had such strong opinions about them, but I felt a sense of camaraderie watching these birds that just communicate, and adapt to living in the margins and picking through the crumbs of what's left.
Adam Davis: That's good. I mean, that's quite a range already to think about: magpie, horse, Doug fir. Can I ask the other side of it, and that is the threat inside. Do you remember as a kid being afraid of any particular animal or species? I'm going back to the kid stuff as a way of working back to what you're doing now, but starting with, as a kid, either a kind of animal, a kind of plant or a specific animal or plant that scared you a little bit. That felt like a threat when you were younger.
Erica Berry: I've got one super ready because I'm not a snake person, and today there was a guy who opened a package and there was a rattlesnake inside.
I don’t know if anyone saw this headline, but it really conjured my fear of snakes as a kid. Just never been into them.
Wendy Bingham: That was exactly what came to my mind was rattlesnakes, because we lived in the high desert and it was okay if it was a bull snake, but a rattlesnake was…that was a little scary. Something else. Yeah.
Bobby Fossek: The first thing that comes to my mind is probably cheatgrass and trying to run around, play along the river and having my socks just stuck full of cheatgrass and my legs all scratched up.
Adam Davis: I love the supportive sounds in response. So, what do you do about something like cheat grass or snakes to minimize the likelihood that it'll mess with you? And how do you feel about doing that?
Bobby Fossek: I think with all of these things, at this point in my life, I'm always just asking, what are you trying to tell me? You know, every plant that shows up is trying to tell me something about what's going on in the soil or what's the story of how it got here. All those kinds of things. I try to see what I can learn from this thing I don't understand, or I'm afraid of, or that bothers me.
Adam Davis: Can I just follow up and ask, is it only learning? Are there any plants that come across in a way where you hear something and you go, okay, I hear you, I'm learning about you, and I want less of you.
Bobby Fossek: Yeah. Cheatgrass. Still trying to figure that one out.
Adam Davis: Okay. Maybe we can keep staying with this question of I want less of as we keep going.
Wendy Bingham: Yeah, I would definitely say that trying to combat that and figure out how the snake is going to affect you when you're out on the land, you know?
Am I going to avoid that area or am I going to try to be proactive because I have to go there. Maybe you go when it's cooler because they're not going to be out. Or how do you adapt to what they are? Or ways to, I would say, exterminate them from an area that you have to be in. What do we do to make sure we're safe? I wouldn't want my kids to go get bit by a rattlesnake. That would be terrifying. Yeah.
Erica Berry: Bobby was just telling me you were teaching outdoor school and I was having a memory of doing that out in eastern Oregon as a kid, and I was really afraid of rattlesnakes when we were running around.
And then one day we saw a rattlesnake that had been smashed by a car and I can picture its body with the tail, the tire tracks, you know, over part of the snake. And I was standing over it and I felt such a strange mixture of things, which was not the relief that I think I thought I would feel because I'd been afraid of this creature.
And I was struck by the feeling like, I don't want this creature near me, but I also don't think it feels better to find it dead right here. And that experience, for me as a researcher, can I learn everything I can about snakes, and that's going to be me watching the screen with this over my eyes because I don't want to see any photos? I'm just going to research everything I can and ultimately get less fearful as I learn more about the reality of me stepping on a rattlesnake. Helps me get out there.
Adam Davis: And that reminds me of your book, Wolfish, which is about wolves and fear and all sorts of things.
Erica Berry: Not wolf fish, some people think it's about fish. Wolfish. It's not about fish.
Adam Davis: But at one point you, you quote this French tightrope walker who says if I remember right, “All fear. It's basically not enough knowledge.”
Erica Berry: Mm-hmm.
Adam Davis: That fear is ignorance.
Erica Berry: Fear is an absence of knowledge.
Adam Davis: Fear is an absence of knowledge and that felt like a high bar to me. Because it feels to me like there's some things we know about and we should fear maybe more.
And so, given what you just said…
Erica Berry: I mean, he's a tightrope walker. How many of us are going to be doing that?
Adam Davis: he's also French. So maybe he has a different orientation towards fear. You just said with research in particular, maybe it's easier to step back and think about knowing more, but what about with raising cattle, or what about with reintroducing native plants?
Are there things that you genuinely, the more you know, the more you fear. Are there species that you think we need to be careful of? And what is it that you're consulting when you determine that?
Wendy Bingham: In recent years we have run our cattle in the mountains and just over in the Wallowa Valley there's been a lot of wolf attacks and a lot of cattle that have been preyed on.
And so where we run our cattle, we have not had that. We feel like we've maybe had some harassment of the cattle, but we haven't had any actual predation that has happened. And so I would definitely say that is a fear and as I've learned more about that and just the different effects that it has on the herd, even with just the harassing itself.
Our dogs are normally with us. And after some of the cattle were in a certain area, they were very flighty towards the dogs, which wasn't usually the case. Their demeanor was a little different than what we were used to. And as we learned, you know, we've read several books about wolves and their behavior and, and just how they relate to cattle.
A lot of very interesting information in that way. But it does cause fear after learning so much about it and what others are experiencing in that way.
Adam Davis: Thanks, and maybe we can keep thinking about both the learning and the responses with different species, as well as wolves, as we go. But Bobby, what are you thinking?
Bobby Fossek: Yeah, I definitely– as I continue engaging and learning with the plant communities at times I do fear for how are we going to deal with some of these “ invasive species.” Some of them harbor diseases that they spread to native plants and non-native plants alike. And some change the behavior of fire.
Some, you know, just completely change the way the ecosystem flows and works. And then so many of the solutions that are being enacted, you know, chemical or mechanical removal, things of that nature have their own consequences and cause their own further disturbance and create conditions for sometimes even nastier kinds of plants to move in, I guess.
See even these words– I'm afraid, and then I'm also just like embracing what is, and just trying to learn more and see what can be done and how to encourage things to, you know, be in balance. And what is balance? What does that look like?
Adam Davis: So, and you said at the beginning of that comment, ‘Quote unquote invasive species.’ So I just want to keep that out. But Erica, you were going to….
Erica Berry: Yeah, I mean, I guess I was just thinking about what fear means in this case too, and the idea that so much of the fear that I've lived with–because I've lived a pretty fortunate privileged life—is, is anticipatory.
It's a story I'm telling myself about the future that hasn't happened yet, and I forget who said this recently, but it was the idea that both faith and anxiety are stories we tell about things that are not right in front of us and that are in the future. Fear. So I guess I just think about when I feel afraid, I'm thinking about what is the likelihood that this thing is going to happen and if it's a decent likelihood, like I'm pretty afraid of how rising temperatures are going to make summers where I grew up look really different.
But what do I do with that fear then? Like I think so much of— this came when I was thinking about fear in wolves as actual— like what does an obscured wolf look like? I'm often thinking about other creatures being afraid of wolves. But you know, wolves are born afraid. And as a biologist was telling me, if a wolf hears something in a tree when they're young, they're going to go investigate it because they're afraid.
That cracks something open to me where it's like, sometimes the fear isn't the shutting of doing research or inquiry. It's actually like an invitation. Like, I'm worried about this thing. I'm going to go check it out. And so for me, when I'm afraid about something, I'm thinking like, how can I go towards that a little bit?
And how can that help me feel?
Adam Davis: When I'm afraid of something, how can I go towards it?
Erica Berry: I know it's, it's amazing. I'm still alive. It's not my full, I'm really like a risk averse person. But I do on Google look into it.
Adam Davis: Wendy, how does thinking about a ranch, cattle, and also on that ranch you're raising kids.
[laughter]: Hmm.
Adam Davis: So there's a lot to care about and be concerned about. How does it land with you to hear, go towards the thing that you start to fear?
Wendy Bingham: So I would say with raising kids, we've really tried to instill confidence in our kids.
So we don't try to do things for them. Give them a task and let them think for themselves. And sometimes it might be lots of phone calls or lots of. But mom, this, but what about this? But we've really tried to help them be self-sufficient and to think for themselves and not just, not to be acted upon, but actually to, to take action, but be prepared in different situations.
So. When I don't hear back from any of my family, my husband, anybody, and they've been up on the mountain for hours and now it's dark and I'm worried because they won't answer any calls. I always hope that we've prepared them for what they may face because there's bears, there's cougars, there's wolves, there's all the different, there's all kinds of scenarios.
It's not minimized at all. But I think being proactive, teaching them how to deal in those situations of what would you do and discussing them beforehand.
Adam Davis: Can I go back? It's funny because like we talked about before, I also have two teenage kids and I think fear and letting go and preparing are like the big challenge.
But I want to go to something that's either simpler or more complicated, which is cattle probably not going to prepare them in the same way to deal with tough situations. How do you try to control, if that's the right word, the dangers that are going to come into the life of the cattle you're raising?
Wendy Bingham: That's not completely simple at all, but I mean, obviously there's being able to have enough feed, knowing where they're at, trying to make sure like the mothers and the calves are, are paired up well so that the mother and baby are together before we actually leave them to continue grazing.
So that'd be a way that we prepare them without just. Good luck. Instinctively cattle, when there's a predator, the mothers will actually circle and face out to help protect their young, and so they're really blessed with a lot of just internal things that they automatically have to protect as well.
Adam Davis: Yeah, it's that image of the mothers circling and facing out–that is a powerful image. I wonder about the changes any of us either make to the environment or hope to make to the environment to decrease the likelihood that those situations will arise. And Bobby, maybe this goes back to your quotes around invasive species. Do you feel like you're trying to change the environment in ways that control the environment or the opposite or somewhere in between as you're thinking about what you want to have flourished there?
Bobby Fossek: That's not a simple question to answer. I'm weary of ideology, you know, and I, I'm more falling back on pure relationship. And so it's ongoing and it's what is this trying to tell me about the land, you know, because one approach is, ‘I've read that this is bad and I don't really understand it, so I'm going to eradicate it by any means necessary.’
And that often has its own consequences. Or if I would've taken the time to build relationship with it, I might've learned that it's trying to tell me, ‘Hey, the soil is depleted,’ or, ‘Hey, the soil is contaminated with heavy metals,’ or ‘it's too compact, and if you just let me help while you encourage the return of the native plant community.’
I might be of service, you know, and not necessarily your enemy. Because with most of these quote unquote invasives, they're filling a vacuum post settler, colonial, industrialized disturbance. I. And post-removal of the native plant community and the manipulation of the ecological function. So working with succession to try to bring back balance is more my approach.
Relationship building and working with that natural flow, engaging in the natural flow rather than really deciding what I'm for or against or what fight I'm going to pick today, you know, and how I'm going to battle it.
Erica Berry: I was just going to say that, it's just reminding me of a great book by Jessica Hernandez, who's an indigenous scientist who talks about the role of descendants of settlers, which I guess I am.
And parts of me are, she's like, you know, invasive species that were introduced by settlers. And are your plants kin? And how can we think? Or how can I, you know, as a white person out here, think about invasive plants as relatives actually, and what duty do I have to think about them in relationships. This was just a different way of thinking about invasive plants that I hadn't thought of.
It's a great book called Fresh Banana Leaves.
Adam Davis: So it's interesting thinking in these last couple comments, especially being in relationship and kin. And then Bobby, at the end of your comment, you talked about sort of not wanting to kind of get ready to fight, but it feels like that's… I want to push on that a little bit, maybe for all three of you, because it feels like the underlying picture then is one of harmony that if we find our place right on the earth, it won't be a fight.
It'll be something calmer, something gentler. And I just want to ask about that because it seems to me, one could make the argument that it is a fight. And that we're only able to say that because things have shifted a little bit. So I put that starkly to try to be provocative. To what extent, and maybe is it okay? Wendy, can I start with you, because it feels like you're responsible for many large, complicated animals.
To what extent does it feel like a harmonious endeavor, and to what extent does it feel like there's competition and fight here that I need to be aware of while engaging in this work?
Wendy Bingham: I think that when you think of plants and animals and the soil like that is, that's the root of everyone's existence. Like we have to have those things. And so I feel like it is a fight because there's more people, there's less land to be able to produce food for people, that is a challenge and a fight as more and more land gets taken up. There's more people, there's more food that needs to be produced, but yet there's less land.
So I would definitely say that sometimes it feels like a challenge. A lot of political things that are placed upon us are regulatory things that we have to do. It's just harder and harder all the time to be able to do that. But why do we do it? Because we want people to exist, like we love people.
And so being able to provide something that helps a protein, that helps everyone be able to be healthier, stronger, that speaks to me. And being able to do it currently like. A lot of land that can't be used for homes or housing because it's in the mountains, it's remote. That grass can't be used in other ways.
But that's a powerful thing for an animal to be able to turn that into a protein to help people in their lives.
Bobby Fossek: So yeah, I think in terms of, you know specifically plant species and plant communities and restoring them and it's all so tied together. It was like Wendy said, we can't live without clean soil and clean air and clean water.
And those are the foundational things. And that there's a lot of people and a lot of mouths to feed, but that this land and this water and the way it all interacts together is an intelligence, and it's, I guess you could say, a technology, a natural technology, and it naturally produces abundance.
Through over-exploitation and commercialization, continued objectification and commodification of every living thing on the planet is part of why it's hard to feed all these billions of people, even though there's food sitting in dumpsters as we speak, that is inaccessible to people.
And so there is, you know, trying to live in that harmony, but there's a lot of things threatening harmony. It does sometimes feel like there's a fight. And then in the world we live in, there's so much divide and it seems like things are almost engineered to divide us and keep us not seeking tangible solutions, but just continuing to perpetuate division and point at what's going wrong and all that when right in front of us and around us.
Usually the solution is just sitting there, you know, and we're just looking past it.
Erica Berry: I'm thinking about the novelist Jess Rowe, who has a quote in his book, White Flights, where he says, I think America's possibly catastrophic failure is our failure to imagine what it would look like to live together or something to get along.
I forget how he puts it, but I think about that not only between people but between the different inter species connections. And that idea of imagination, he's basically like, we need to have more imagination when we think about this. And I think about, you know, I got my start as a writer at the campus newspaper where, what were the stories we were most telling? It was when things weren't getting along, right? And there are also the stories in my DNA about conflicts. They're juicier stories, they're stories about the natural world that I grew up hearing in this sort of western canon of what does it mean to interact with plants and animals?
It's to be in conflict with them. Those are older narratives that many of us are sort of reapproaching. So I wonder if this idea that we're coming at it with a language of kin or harmony is like in resistance to this larger inheritance of conflict.
Wendy Bingham: And I would say like trials, that's what makes us better and stronger like that.
If everything was just easy and never hard, we wouldn't ever grow and learn something more. It's kind of like you're talking about fear and going to it, like embracing those challenges of, okay, how are we going to work through this because there is a future beyond now, so we have to figure out a way to work through those trials.
Adam Davis: Yeah. I'm thinking about a couple things. I'm thinking about the moment in Wolfish, when, is it Blair and maybe Susan, his wife?...Blair is sort of overwrought. Will you tell this story because it seems to be about the question of whether certain species suffering at the expense of others is inevitable.
Erica Berry: Yeah. So they were two livestock producers I spent some time with in Northern California. Some of his neighbors there had cattle that were dead and they were not burying the bones which he knew was likely to draw wolves. And so Blair was out there and he was digging holes and burying his neighbor's cattle.
And he said he was doing it because he not only knew that if the wolves came, the wolves were going to die and cattle were going to die. It was going to be bad for everything. And his wife sort of told me he cares too much. Like as a rancher, that's what you do. Your job is caring and your job, you care so much that it gets you up.
She was like, he's over here with the neighbors. He's working so hard at 5:00 AM burying their cattle. Like, why is he doing this? And it's because he has so much care. And that idea that he was in a way caring for the wolves too. And he sort of saw that even though it was this whole loop of just how do we keep these worlds separate?
I have to do what I can to keep these worlds separate. And caring was that feeling, not fear.
Adam Davis: You're listening to The Detour with Erica Berry, Wendy Bingham, and Bobby Fossek.
Can I just say care is, it feels to me like actually central to what all three of you are doing and care shows up prominently. For example, on Bingham Beef's website, when you describe what you're doing and how you're doing it, and caretakers of the land, so we've been talking about fear and a little bit about belonging, but like, how does care for, let's say, putting healthy and abundant food on the table, take fear into account.
Wendy Bingham: So. The better you care for the animals, the healthier they are. That's bottom line. We're around our cattle a lot, so they're pretty calm and feeling comfortable and that helps them to be calm. It helps us to be calm. I'm sure all of you have heard crazy stories about, you know, all the bad words and all that stuff that fly when you're working cattle, but that's something we've really tried not to be a part of. Sometimes it's just my husband and I and we can do that pretty calm, just even the two of us because the cattle are used to us being calm around them and noticing there's just little things, you know, maybe a droopy ear on a calf. And so we're going to check and see what's wrong, what's going on.
But I feel like the more you care for them the better they obviously do and we're able to provide a better product by caring.
Adam Davis: Yeah. And maybe we can stick with care some. Bobby, can I go your way?
Bobby Fossek: Care, you know, goes hand in hand with just reciprocating and in order to have a relationship, you have to have reciprocity, which isn't always easy.
You know, as a descendant of the Columbia River Basin, it's repeated over and over and over through our lives how it is we even came to be able to live here and to be able to have life and to be able to create societies and nations that have existed here for thousands and thousands of years.
And it's a lot to take in. Thousands and thousands of years of societal existence, deep-rooted existence in harmony with the relation with the land, understanding that all of these foods, all of these plants and animals in what we call now native plant communities and habitats, and ecosystems were all already here. They showed us how to live here and they have taken care of us since the beginning of time.
And have promised to take care of us since the beginning of time, and all they can ever do is keep that promise. And our only job is to only take what we need and always take care of that, which takes care of us. And so that brings up a lot of fear and sometimes I feel discouraged because, you know, there's so many people on the planet and everything's so geared towards this fallacy that we're separate from the earth and that we somehow have dominion over it and somehow it's here to be bent towards our will and, and you know, for a time you can bend the water and the earth towards your will, but the water is the law and the land is the law, and anyone that works with it. Realizes that pretty fast. because it I mean, water has the power to carve rock, to carve canyons and move mountains.
So the fear that is associated with that care is that everything that I seem to care the most about so many people in the world just seem hell bent on destroying it. And that's hard. Yeah,
Erica Berry: I mean, it just makes me think about for us to care deeply, sometimes we have to worry about the thing.
And I'm thinking about my mom saying this to me as a teenager. When I said, why are you worried about me? She said, because I care. You're not home by curfew. It's because I care. And I worry. And those are the same things. And like worrying about the land. I have some friends that are really not worried about plants and animals and land, and I think you don't care if you're not looking.
And I mean that's an oversimplification, but there's a way that being [fearful] ... again, what is the utility of fear? It can make us care more.
Adam Davis: It's interesting that you were talking about what your mom said. I was also thinking as we started talking about care, I was thinking that's probably the place where I express care most directly is in parenting and probably where I felt it most directly was being parented.
But it's hard to separate care from control.
Bobby Fossek: Yeah. You know, I always think about all these life forms were already here for a long time before we ever got here. And so I looked at them as my elders and my teachers. And when you have teachers like the salmon, who no matter what, keep their promise, no matter what, they always swim back up the river no matter what.
They always try to make it back up the river and they lay their eggs and then ‘til they're dying, ‘til their last breath, they defend those eggs and then they let go, you know? And every day I think about that. When I'm feeling like, what the heck am I doing? Why am I doing anything that I'm doing?
You know, it's you plant the seed, you lay the egg and you let go. Yeah.
Wendy Bingham: I would say with care and control and raising kids I had some experience that way. Very much. You can't control every action they're going to do when they're not home or whatever, but you can care enough to teach them the right things or help provide them the things they need so they can still have the opportunity to choose.
And I think that's the same with plants and animals. You can plant a seed, but if you don't plant it in the right soil, it's not going to grow. But if you provide it with the right things and it has the opportunity then I think that's partially having some control, but also allowing for growth on their own.
Erica Berry: Yeah. I guess the only thing I'd add is I'm thinking about the limits of there are no limits to how much we can care, but there are so many limits to our control and anyone working in the natural world or with. Creatures in the natural world, you confront that. And maybe kids are creatures in the natural world too.
They are, right? You confront the limits of control,
Adam Davis: But confronting the limits of control feels different from, for example, saying, I'm not going to try to control it at all. And it feels to me like that could be one response to go, if what we do is not good for this world. The best thing I can do is not try to control it, which feels different from trying to control it in ways that work well with it.
So in a way, I'm asking a question about where we fit. Like how is our gift a form of control rather than say a form of walking away?
Wendy Bingham: Well, I think that we all have different talents within ourselves and we recognize different things. As you can see, just even with this panel, we all have different perspectives.
We all have different talents, different eyes for different things, and so I think that we all have God-given gifts within us to do good. Not everybody can be an expert in every field. That's just not humanly possible.
Erica Berry: I guess I'm just thinking about how I'm aware constantly of the limits of writing a story, which is, I'm a kind of one trick pony.
I don't have many talents. I'm like, I write, you know, I wish I could do more useful things many days, but I think I'm writing, trying to change some perspective or open some minds. And even when I feel like that's actually a futile thing, I'm still going to try to do that. And this goes back to like the question of faith.
And like, I want to live in a world where I can believe that we can try to make it better. I will not, I don't want to wake up in a world where I don't think that we can all try to better it, even if on some rational level, I think I'm going to write an essay of 1000 words and what is it going to do for the world, you know? And yet to believe in art and we're in this beautiful art space is to believe in the potential. You have to believe in the potential.
Adam Davis: And can I just note that you said one trick pony. Which felt like the ideal, like in a way that's the question–that a one trick pony is a horse that we have somehow by intervening in the life of that species…
Erica Berry: Yeah. So true.
Adam Davis: have altered the being such that it becomes shorthand for an incomplete being.
Erica Berry: Yeah.
Adam Davis: Because of our being in its life.
Bobby Fossek: So true. Yeah. I just think the same, you know, kind of similar that just like the salmon was put here for a reason. You know, just like the roots and the berries all serve their purpose.
They all do what they do and most of them are, they serve many purposes, you know, many plants. They not only can feed humans, they can feed wildlife. They can. Feed pollinators. They can filter water. Some of them can transmute radiation and pretty intense toxicity. I think all humans are put here for a reason.
I can't help but believe that we're all put here for a reason and that the more we develop our relationship with reality and with the land we live on and with ourselves internally, the more we are shown and guided into our strengths and into our gifts, and then the more we exercise those gifts, the more we give to that whole, because we're all part of one big organism.
You know, we're all part of this one living organism, planet Earth. So the more we just step into those strengths and gifts and stay close to that relationship, you know, I feel like the less turmoil we face on an individual basis, the less we need, the more whole we feel, and then the more we are just like that plant or that animal [which] serves in that ecosystem, that community, we serve our community better.
Adam Davis: To go back a little bit to wolves, which we were talking about earlier, and I want to go back there in part because this program really arose out of an inquiry that Erica, you and a guy named Joe Whittle, who some of you know, raised the question about wolves in a possible program and the care with which we had to approach a conversation about wolves, especially in eastern Oregon, ‘wolf’ the word. To go back to the divides we were talking about before, ‘wolf’ has come to stand for everything but a wolf. In some ways it stands for so much. And even when we went into our call where we talked to each other for 15 minutes, I felt like we had to move carefully through the first few minutes of that call.
And then it felt like, okay, we're human beings talking to each other. But I'm bringing wolves up again to ask about that, to ask about your feeling about the kind of magnitude and the power that the word ‘wolf’ seems to have now.
Wendy Bingham: Well automatically, when you say power and wolf, it automatically raises feelings of fear, obviously, towards cattle.
But the wolf's jaws are so powerful and they will grab a hold of the neck primarily on the cattle, especially calves, and just that impact can kill the calves. And when they've done that, they'll open them up and be able to see the bruising that goes in that. And so I guess when I hear power and wolf. Yeah. They're very powerful animals. They're majestic like they are made amazingly powerful.
Bobby Fossek: Yeah. I can't help when I hear the word wolf, you know? I know myself and many others from this area. We have a lot of people in our family lines that carry names such as “Charging Wolf,” you know, “Wolf Necklace,” you know, lots of people that embody that power and a way of life that is power from the land and from the water.
Pure power from the mountains and so powerful that it was made illegal and eradicated. You know? So that's kind of where my mind starts to go with that word, ‘wolf.’ And then I think about, you know, I live right now, I'm, I've grown up between here and the Grand Ronde Valley. I just always say I'm from the Blue Mountains and I've heard stories of, you know, not even that many years ago.
A lot of people's attitude, and some of them still have that attitude, but just don't say it out loud as much, their grandfathers and great-grandfathers worked so diligently to get rid of wolves and native people and native ways of life, and to erase native plant communities to put that power out so that people could be more submissive towards a different way of life that is about removing ourselves from that relationship.
And, justifying again, the objectification and commodification of relatives and then the engagement with those relatives into a massive global economy that is really exploitative and it's kind of like, it feels like to me like a bully. They feel powerful for a moment, but it's fleeting.
And so they always need more, they always need to try to overpower more. And some people think about that kind of energy when they think about wolves, because yeah, they're apex predators, you know, and we're predators, we're pretty predatory too as humans. And we kind of do a lot of these things to the earth and to the living systems of the earth.
And just like the wolf leaves the bruises on the neck of the calf, we've left bruises and blights all over the planet. So, yeah, when I think of the words, ‘wolf’ and ‘power.’ I think about just the overwhelming power of the natural world and the wolf being kind of an extension of that spirit and a really unique aspect of that spirit that demands all of us to live in respect and in presence and observation. You know, so much of the world is set up so that we don't have to be observant. We don't have to pay attention. And things like wolves and grizzly bears, oh, they'll make you pay attention. They'll make you be respectful. You know, they'll make you walk with care and think about what you're going to do next.
And I don't think that's necessarily a terrible thing to have, to be deliberate in your actions.
Erica Berry: Thinking about that idea of watching and observing and thinking about nature documentaries and how documentaries tend to really show the predator-prey fight, right? They show these moments of capture, of pounce, and we see the power, but we don't see how the large percentage of fights that are not successful.
And I'm thinking about a story that I heard from a biologist who is now working with the USDA to help funnel funds toward producers and help get support, but he'd been studying wolves in Wyoming. And basically there was this big wolf that he was studying and it had a collar on. So he's going to get some mortality signal from the collar, big male.
And he goes out into the snow and tracks it and it's dead in the middle of the snow. And there's a circle of blood around this wolf. And he's kind of got his detective hat on trying to figure out what has killed the biggest wolf in the pack. And there's two holes in the center of the wolf. And he pieces together that a big Elk had got the wolf, spun it around and tossed it.
And what he said to me was, we underestimate the prey. We've gotta give it a lot more credit. And I guess I just think about that also with power. Not to say that wolves, I mean, when I've been around them and hearing their teeth crash through bone, it's really different than a dog. You know?
It's just, it's a different thing. And yet there are all these times where wolves are predated. Just the other day a mountain lion in Colorado killed a wolf. So I'm just thinking about those two sides. The predator–prey binary that I inherited is so often more complicated, true for humans and animals.
Adam Davis: So as we go to questions, you just remarked on the different sound between a wolf's jaw and a dog’s and actually, the wolf-dog spectrum or difference is what? For the last 20 minutes I can't get it out of my head because I feel like it actually holds so much about the belonging question in it.
The dogs we welcome into our homes. And sometimes into our beds. And wolves, we don't to understate it. And thinking about what we're after and what we feel like we belong with or belongs with us and what we feel like we need some distance from. As we go to questions, can you join me in saying a big thank you for what feels to me like a really harmonious conversation with very different perspectives and backgrounds, and I just want to say a big thank you right now.
Our first audience question has to do with division. What lessons can we learn from our plant and animal teachers about how to break down silos between humans?
Bobby Fossek: You know, the more I study and learn about plant communities and ecosystems and how things that seemingly are so differential, you know, a pine tree can never be a willow tree, you know cottonwood can never be a, a biscuit root, but that they're all functioning together.
They're just all in this flow together. And it just always encourages me to understand that even though, you know, we all are in our own meat suit, you know that same life is breathing through all of us. And you know, as we exhale, the tree inhales and as the tree exhales, we inhale and all the unseen things going on in the soil, you know, and in the air and that ties it all together somehow, even though it all seems so different that there's a lot of honor in the differences. Beause those differences and those strengths are all important and they're all needed to make the picture complete.
Wendy Bingham: I was just going to say about plants and animals in the land, like if we overuse the grass in an area, it's not going to come back as well.
And so finding that balance of how you help each other get to the right point. If you don't ever graze the grass, then it isn't as productive either. And so finding where those two come in. Alignment is a very finite thing and, and takes a lot of practice. And I think that's part of recognizing how you can work together with the animals and the land, but also people and knowing that it's never going to be exactly the same.
Erica Berry: I love this question. It makes me think about sort of the fallacy of individuals. Like we're not individuals. We are this larger body of things. And I, you know, recently read that 97 percent of breast milk has microplastic in it. So like the outside world is in here and we're out there. And I was also clearly just doing a lot of reading these days about whale fall.
Whales are eating all this stuff in our oceans and then when they die, their whale fall goes down and it gets eaten by shrimp, and then we eat the shrimp. And the author was making the point like, the whale isn't us and we are in the whale. And that is inside you right now. And I guess when I think about these boundaries and silos, I just sort of get on a larger scale.
Like yeah, you know, we are these, the teeming macro bacteria and just general, what it means to be human right now is not to be a meat sack. Was that your word that I'm now stealing? Yeah, we're like a meat sack, but we're a very porous one and there's something useful. That is the grossest possible sentence I've ever said.
Adam Davis: We're just a bunch of, oh my God, like a bunch of laughing porous meat sacks in the room together. It's great. Who knew we were going to end up there? No, thank you.
Erica Berry: Thank you.
Adam Davis: Thank you for getting us there with that question. Next we have a question about goats. How do you feel about local government using goats to clear tall grasses and weeds right near town?
Bobby Fossek: Well, that's a, that's a good question. Especially, you know, in relativity, I think it really ties together the plant part of this talk. And then the human part too, and the fear and belonging part where there's so many symptoms in our world that are, that have a deep root and we get so caught up in looking at the symptoms and they invoke fear in people and it's hard to figure out how to get to the root sometimes.
And so. And I could be completely wrong, but my feelings about the goats on the river is that a lot of it is that fear of homeless people. A lot of it is to keep the cover reduced so that there's not as many places for homeless people to congregate, which is an interesting land management strategy.
Which I get it. You know, like, yeah, we don't want people doing heroin and fentanyl and starting fires down on the river, and we want to make sure that we don't, you know, have so much vegetation that we burn the town down if there's a fire down there. But the level at which they graze, like you said, the things that are left, they hydrate, you know, and they eat what they really like.
Which a lot of that is the native willows and alders and cottonwoods. What they leave is the black locust and the thistles and things that are more invasive and don't really have that natural predator. And so those are starting to become more prolific along the river. I was just walking it the other day and noticing some of that and noticing some good effects of where, some places where they graze it, opened it up and now there's native celery coming up.
And so it's not just black and white even with that topic right there, but, that, you know, some of the root of the decision-making being, you know, preventing places for people to camp essentially, and, you know, fear of people and fear of fire– fear-based decision-making based off lack of understanding and real surface level.
So much of the world is just so surface level and just working at the symptoms and it's like pulling weeds. You know, I'm sure everyone, has anyone pulled weeds here? Yes. If you just pick the top off, it just comes back four or five times as thick, you know? And so we're just plucking at the tops, you know?
We're not really getting to the root of it with a lot of these decisions.
Adam Davis: At what point does an invasive species become native?
Erica Berry: I started thinking about the reverse of that. When does a native species become seen as invasive? There was a situation with that in Japan with wolves. People live beside wolves. You have rice farmers where the wolves are the ones that are scaring away the deer from eating the rice. You introduce cattle farming in the middle of the twentieth century. Suddenly the wolves are the problem. And they, that cattle farming was brought over by a Ohio rancher who introduced Strychnine, that poison. And suddenly wolves, which had been sacred to some of the people in Japan and sort of thanked, became a problem.
Wendy Bingham: I think it's all our perspective really. I mean. Who gets to decide that? Some people might think this is what we need here, this is it. We've done this for hundreds of years. This is native. Maybe it was brought over, you know, but it's all perspective.
Bobby Fossek: Yeah. It's hard for me to say when a—and I always say, quote-unquote—invasive species becomes a native.
But I more wonder like when does it get brought into balance by creating culture from the presence of the non-native species? So as I travel the land and the waters of the Columbia River Basin and I see things that are non-native invasive plants, one of the reasons why they're, to me, they're invasive is because they're not being used.
And I feel like if it was acceptable for there to be human beings inhabiting a niche in the ecosystem by becoming the natural predator of these plants and utilizing them to make beautiful things and to eat beautiful, healthy foods. Because a lot of 'em are medicine and materials and food that have just lost their value in our perspective, or we shifted where this is no longer valuable. You know, just like with a lot of things, you know, we, one day horses are valuable. The next day they're dog food because we got cars, you know. And our lives relied on them at one point. And so it's like, when do we allow for there to be a culture birthed from the reality of what is, you know, I'm kind of an idealist, but I envision bands of people out there that are of all backgrounds and races and religions and, and they're, you know, clearing blackberries and stripping them and making baskets out of them. I've seen it done. You know, it's beautiful. And almost anything that's considered invasive can be used for something. And if it was managed by that, you know, management through mastication, I once heard, I think that would maybe start to shift a lot of things, but that's a huge cultural shift.
But it's kind of what I'm aiming towards, you know? So, good question.
Adam Davis: Can you share a specific example of a time when plants, animals, or the land communicated to you?
Wendy Bingham: Just a couple weeks ago, we had a young cow, it was her first calf. And what we like to do is we put a halter on them and then we actually lay them down.
Like it would be a natural position for birthing. So they actually need to lay down on their left side, and then they're at a better angle to be able to have their calf. And so you would think naturally this cow is just going to like, be so upset with us or whatever, but it was like she needed the help.
And so we were able to– she laid down quite easily. And then my husband was able just, you didn't have to put any contraptions much on her just to help get the calf out, and she immediately stood up, turned around, and was taking care of her baby. And she wasn't just so fearful of us. And so I love that connection we have at times with the animals.
And not that every time they're just like, yeah, help me out. I'm not saying that at all, but those are, they make you feel so good to be able to help. I guess
Bobby Fossek: The first one that comes to my mind is there's a lot of our foods– all of the foods of this land, you know, have been interacted with by people for thousands upon thousands of years, once again.
And so many of them rely on being dug in order to proliferate or become dense or to really thrive, they need to be disturbed intentionally. There's one specific place where I was digging this certain kind of root, that when you dig the root all around the root is little baby roots stuck to it, and those roots can't grow until their mother is dug out of the ground and they are removed from their mother, and that mother is taken for food by a human or a bear. And so. I was digging this kind of root one year and I had been digging a bunch of them and then sprinkling those little babies where my digging stick had left a line of aerated soil.
I sprinkled them back in and patted them in nice and gentle and then I didn't go to that spot again for three years or so. And when I went back to that spot, you could see all those lines of roots growing everywhere. And it was just like so simple. But just so profound and beautiful to see that relationship where I didn't have to, you know, do anything crazy.
I just had to take what I needed and not take any more than that, and to do it with intention and to do it very deliberately. And in that action was left more abundance than there was before. And that just sticks with me all the time.
Adam Davis: Bobby Fossek is a leader of Caretakers of the Land in Cove, Oregon. Erica Berry is a Portland based writer, and Wendy Bingham is a cattle rancher in North Powder. You can find links to our guests' work in our show notes@oregonhumanities.org. The Detour is produced by Want to McClain, Ben Waterhouse. Karina Briski and Alexandra Silvester are assistant producers.
This is Adam Davis. See you next time.