Of course, “Raven's End” is a novel in which everything talks: The ravens, the wolves, the falcons, the trees. Even the wind can't shut up. Gadd, a naturalist and the author of a classic field guide to the Canadian Rockies, has written a kind of “Watership Down” for the Great White North, a story in which a young raven goes on a hero's journey in search of the meaning of life.

Our hero is Colin, a bright, impetuous raven who drops from the sky with no memory of his past. The Raven's End flock of Mount Yamnuska, east of Banff, adopts the orphan as one of its own. Colin's flockmates are a diverse lot. There's eager young Brendan, frail Sarah, wise old Greta, and dark and violent Dolus.

Colin spends his first year learning how to survive as a raven, which entails eating a lot of rotten meat and observing a strict social protocol. Mornings begin with “the Flap,” an all-flock huddle where the birds gossip about freshly killed elk and sheep. After a day of scavenging, the birds regroup for the Evening Flight, where the ravens gab about their adventures and perform an aerial ballet. It's a good life. Or, as Colin says, "By the Trees, it's great to be a raven!"

After apprenticing to wise Greta, who plays Yoda to Colin's Luke Skywalker, our hero leaves his adopted flock to seek his destiny. Like Skywalker, Colin is marked for greatness— which means the evil ravens must either turn him to the dark side, or kill him. I don't think I'm giving too much away by saying that, despite perilous challenges, our hero triumphs in the end.

Ben Gadd is a novelist with the heart of a naturalist, which means he spends too many pages explaining the ecosystem and too few revving the plot. I found myself charmed by “Raven's End,” though, despite its author's didactic tendencies. A raven's life, like a human's, can be cold, brutal, and short. But it also offers opportunities to dance in the wind and plunge a beak into a rotting carcass. When I wander through the mountains this summer, I'll have the pleasure of seeing the landscape with new eyes: Those of Ben Gadd, and a raven named Colin.

CURWOOD: Reviewer Bruce Barcott writes about the environment for Outside Magazine.

[MUSIC: Billy Bragg & Wilco "Birds & Ships Mermaid Avenue]

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Emerging Science Note/Moving by Moonlight

CURWOOD: Coming up: rethinking how to save nature. First, this note on emerging science from Cynthia Graber.

[MUSIC: SCIENCE NOTE THEME]

GRABER: It’s known that some animals use patterns of sunlight to find their way around. But scientists didn’t know of any animals that used the moonlight— a million times dimmer than the daytime sun. Apparently, though, it’s not too dim for one African dung beetle. Beginning at sunset, the beetle starts its search for fresh piles of dung. Once it finds some, it has to get the dung away quickly to prevent other dung beetles from snatching its food. Scurrying in a straight line provides the quickest path to a secure location. Beetles plot this straight line by using polarized sunlight. When light waves from the sun strike particles in the atmosphere, the waves polarize, or line up in straight lines. But dung beetles continue to forage after darkness falls. Scientists wondered— could the animals be using moonlight in the same way?

So researchers monitored the insects at night. They observed that when the moon lights the sky, the beetles rush straight away. Without the moon, the beetles weave a wavy path. But was it the moon itself, or the light emanating from it that was guiding them? So scientists used filters to change the direction of polarized moonlight. When the polarization changed, the beetles changed direction as well. Scientists now suspect many other animals may use polarized moonlight to guide them.

That’s this week’s note on emerging science – I’m Cynthia Graber.

CURWOOD: And you're listening to Living on Earth.

[MUSIC: Radiohead "Treefingers" Kid A]

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Rethinking Hotspots

CURWOOD: It’s Living on Earth. I’m Steve Curwood. In recent years, organizations trying to save biological diversity have focused on what they call “hotspots,” threatened areas that have the highest concentration of individual species. The thinking behind the hotspot approach can be summed up as saving the most species for the fewest dollars. But now two researchers writing in the American Scientist argue this may not be the best way to preserve nature. One of the authors is Peter Kareiva. He's a scientist at the Nature Conservancy and a professor at Santa Clara University and the University of California at Santa Barbara. Professor Kareiva says, though the hotspot approach sounds logical, it has fundamental flaws.

KAREIVA: It assumes two things. One, is it assumes that all that we care about are long lists of species, sort of like collectors collecting long lists of species. And that’s not all we care about in conservation. We care about working ecosystems, we care about erosion, we care about fisheries production. We care about a lot of nature services that aren’t captured just by listing species. The second thing is that, try to imagine that world, imagine a world where we have secured that small percentage of the land, but we haven’t paid adequate attention to that other 98 percent. That could be a world that would suffer huge climate change, because of degradation in the other environment. Even the protected two percent might be imperiled if people so abuse the environment in the rest of the world.

CURWOOD: You’ve got a concept in your paper where you talk about the importance of functioning ecosystems. Can you explain this to me?

KAREIVA: This is a concept that has really emerged in the last 10 to 15 years in the ecological sciences, not so much in conservation. And the notion is that ecosystems do things. They provide services. They recycle water. They purify water. They fix carbon. They mitigate the effects of erosion, or huge storms, or huge droughts. They provide fertile ground for migratory birds, or for fish and so forth. So they perform these functions, and those functions demand not just the list of species, but abundances of species and intact interactions, predator-prey interactions, wolves and elks. They demand that you have the right functioning species in the water and so forth. So it’s a notion that pays attention to processes.

CURWOOD: You also bring up an issue that has nothing to do directly with science, and that’s the stability of local governments. What does this have to do with how to direct conservation money?

KAREIVA: Conservation works in countries. And even though it’s a biological activity, it demands laws that are enforced, agreements that are held to. It demands enforcement of the borders of a national park. It demands enforcement of restrictions on land use, whether it’s logging or exploration for minerals. And so governance can totally inhibit effective conservation. If laws and signed agreements aren’t agreed upon, if there’s not enforcement of protected areas, all the money that you spend in a country may be for naught.

CURWOOD: Now, some critics would say that Colombia, places like it, have governance problems there—and of course it has a lot of hot spots—it would end up getting shortchanged. What’s your response?

KAREIVA: Well, that’s a good challenge, and I don’t think we should ever ignore those countries like Colombia or Indonesia. We would maintain a presence in those countries. But it’s a matter of the degree of investments. So when governance is poor— I would argue that in Colombia and Indonesia we should be paying attention to biological inventory, figuring out what are the species that are there and how we might work to improve them. Things that don’t cost too much money, and that don’t require government support. And then, if government improves, then we can invest heavily in establishing reserves and written agreements to protect species. So, we have a limited amount of money. And every year, you know, our goal has to be to make the greatest and best use of that money in promoting conservation around the world.

CURWOOD: Now based on what you’ve researched and what you’ve explained here, you would say—and correct me if I’m wrong here—that programs should take into account not only species diversity, but unique ecosystems and ecosystem services to humans, and political stability of host countries. Taking this as a framework, what countries do you see that aren’t getting their share of conservation attention today?

KAREIVA: Well, some of the countries that turned up in our analysis—and in no way is our analysis complete yet, we’re still working to improve it—but countries like Mozambique, Bangladesh, and Argentina are countries that don’t really come out on hotspot lists, but it looks like they would be good returns on investment.

CURWOOD: Peter, it seems to me that on a number of levels here, you’re challenging the conventional conservation wisdom, or dogma here, depending on one’s perspective. What do you hear in response to your papers from other conservation scientists?

KAREIVA: A lot of people—I think it resonates. One of the reasons we wrote the paper, it really resonates with ideas I’ve heard from conservationists in the field. Imagine a world where we focus too much on hotspots. Somebody living in Montana, somebody living in Alaska, somebody living in Mongolia—it’s hard to connect them with nature if there’s so much press, and so much attention to these tropical rainforests. So it resonates with a lot of scientists because it admits the value of their local work, and local work is very important. On the other hand, there is some worry, because it makes it look like conservationists haven’t figured it all out yet, that we’re not all on the same page and that we don’t all agree. And to be frank, some people are worried about that. They worry that, geez, if it looks like the conservation NGOs don’t all agrees, and they don’t have their act together, then why should we be giving them money? So they’re concerned about that. And I think that misses the point. We do all agree on the problem, we all agree that biodiversity and our ecosystems are at risk and we have to protect them. We don’t necessarily agree on how we should set priorities, but as organizations committed to biodiversity, we should also be committed to diversity of solutions, diversity of strategies, and diversity of ways of thinking about priorities.

CURWOOD: Peter Kareiva is a lead scientist at the Nature Conservancy, and a professor at Santa Clara University, and the University of California Santa Barbara. Thank you so much for taking this time with me today.

KAREIVA: Thank you.

[MUSIC: The Notwist "Pilot" Neon Golden]

Related link:
Biodiversity Hotspots

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Wilderness Squatters

CURWOOD: There are people who've identified their own wilderness hotspots. You might catch a glimpse of them in wild places across the country, people living illegally in shacks or shelters among the trees. You might describe these forest dwellers as homeless. But that's not how some of them see it. They call themselves wilderness squatters— people living outdoors entirely by choice. Reporter Robin White went in search of some of these people in Northern California.

[HIKING SOUNDS]

SERDAHELY: See here, this is isless cherry that a fox has pooped here.

SCHOOLY: Yeah, right.

WHITE: Besh Serdahely and his city friend David Schooly are showing me a steep trail up San Bruno Mountain just south of San Francisco.

SERDAHELY: That’s a cherry. That’s got a coating on there as sweet as can be.

SCHOOLY: Islay is the Indian name–

SERDAHELY: Meaning delicious cherry.

SCHOOLY: Right, uh huh, exactly.

[LAUGHTER, TEASING ARGUMENT]

WHITE: The men argue about who’s going to lead the way. Both of them are excited to show off the mountain and the place where Besh slept in a tree house for 12 years.

[HIKING SOUNDS]

SERDAHELY: I just loved the dappling leaves and the - this glorious - just to look - just to open your eyes here.

WHITE: A thousand feet up San Bruno Mountain the air is pretty good and the view of the San Francisco Bay lifts your spirits. The 3,600-acre mountain is an island of wildness. Until recently Besh Serdahely lived here with his wife Thelma. But then San Mateo County found them and knocked down the hand-built tree house which had been on the mountain for 20 years. Deputy county manager Mary McMillan says the county was concerned for the couple’s welfare.

MCMILLAN: Health and safety – fire - those were the biggest concerns. There’s no running water. There’s no sewage. There are no facilities for that couple. So you really cannot reside in a park in that situation.

WHITE: Well there is a pit toilet. Besh’s friend David Schooly believes that San Mateo County just didn’t have the imagination to let the couple live here. Schooly runs San Bruno Mountain Watch, an organization of volunteers that care for the mountain. He leads hikes with hundreds of schoolchildren. On every nature walk he’d bring them to visit Besh and Thelma’s treehouse.

SCHOOLY: The kids are just drawn in immediately. It’s the dream of their childhood. It’s the right way. It’s a connection that we lose from living in the cities and the TVs and the freeways and cars.

WHITE: Schooly says before Besh lived outdoors he tended to drink and his wife Thelma had mental health problems. But Schooly taught them how to identify non-native species and for years, they spent their time weeding the canyons and making them better habitats for the mountain’s endangered butterflies.

SCHOOLY: They’ve done more work than the county or the state or anybody.

WHITE: When the County began pressuring the couple to leave, Besh started drinking again and Thelma got scared. In the end she was seduced away by social workers and that made it easier to get Besh out. But he’s not planning to move inside anytime soon.

[SOUND OF CROWS]

WHITE: There may be several hundred wilderness squatters living in California’s Bay Area. There are also reports of communities in the Sierra Nevada, in Portland, British Columbia and in Utah. Some keep themselves secret for fear of eviction– which makes it hard for a reporter to find them to tell their story. One day I went looking for a community I’d heard about in the redwoods at the edge of a Bay Area city.

[SOUND OF HIKING THROUGH BRUSH, CROWS]

WHITE: So I found an abandoned hut here— has a couple of chairs and there’s a storage bin covered in water. I wonder what’s inside.

[WATER SOUNDS]

WHITE: Well it is somebody’s stuff— there’s a notebook there with some pens and a message. “Hi – Whose is this beauty?” it says. But even after a couple of hours I still couldn’t find people. I found out later that I had been only about a hundred yards from two inhabited huts. It took weeks of unreturned phone calls and letters to mailboxes before I finally met a man named Woodrat who would take me to his place.

[SOUND OF WALKING THROUGH WOODS]

WHITE: He was dressed head to toe in warm woolen clothing. And he kind of walked sideways. I can almost see you walking a certain way here

WOODRAT: I kind of don’t have the sense of it any more It’s so long that I’ve been doing it.

WHITE: You’re kind of stepping and stepping…

WOODRAT: I try to step in the same place most of the time

[WALKING SOUNDS]

WHITE: That way he doesn’t pound the ground into a trail - which is partly why it was so hard to find the dwellings. There are five people living in this secret community. They try not to draw attention from the corporation which owns the land they live on. Woodrat’s hut is draped in military camouflage and hidden in tall manzanita bushes with dark red trunks.

[DOOR OPENING]

WHITE: Can you tell me about your set-up here? It looks like you have a Coleman stove.

WOODRAT: Yeah just the camp stove and a little propane heater. A pretty well stocked kitchen with lots of maple syrup.

[LAUGHTER]

WHITE: Woodrat does go into town sometimes where he works for free on an anarchist magazine. His lifestyle doesn’t require a lot of cash. His name he takes from an animal which was nesting outside an earlier cabin.

WOODRAT: The wood rat was constantly building this pile of sticks in front of my door and every morning I would get up and brush it away so that I could get out the door. And one day it just built the sticks in just the right way so that I couldn’t get out.

WHITE: The animal’s daily rebuilding was a metaphor for Woodrat’s underdog life. Eventually he himself had to rebuild his cabin when he was found out.

[BIRD SOUND]

WHITE: The people in this community say the hide and seek game they play with security guards is more than made up for by waking up in the woods each morning and feeling themselves to be directly a part of nature. The urge for wildness is a deeply rooted part of the American soul. Henry David Thoreau sought refuge in a hut at Walden Pond for much the same reasons as today’s tree dwellers. But Thoreau wasn’t squatting and these people are. They have a more overt agenda.

[RAIN SOUNDS]

WHITE; On another visit, it’s a rainy day and Woodrat’s neighbor, Lenny, is busy sweeping his hut.

[SOUND OF SWEEPING]

LENNY: Cleanliness is next to godliness. Or, as I like to say, cleanliness is godliness.

WHITE: Lenny’s been squatting in the woods for 17 years. He’s in his fifties and he identifies himself as Jewish. He dresses in black and sports a pointed hat and stainless steel hose clamps as a form of jewelry. He flouts the law– he’s a hobo and he has a pirate radio show. He’s a dumpster diver and built his hut with scavenged materials.

LENNY: How is that scavenging possible? Well we live in a very wasteful society is probably the main reason

WHITE: Lenny’s hut is shaped like a dented oval to accommodate the trees that grow around it.

LENNY: Compare that to a two or three thousand square foot home where they bulldoze a meadow or cut down a bunch of trees, and the lawns, and the driveway, and the road leading to it, and the telephone poles…

WHITE: Lenny likens the forest squatters to latter-day Robin Hoods.

LENNY: Robin Hood and his merry gang lived in the forest and the bad guy in that story is the sheriff, right, and the king. You’re not supposed to live on the king’s land and the sheriff is the guy who comes round and tries to kick you off, right?

WHITE: But for the people who have to play the Sherriff of Nottingham the problems caused by the squatters contradict the utopian values they claim to uphold. Maggie Fusari is the Natural Resource Manager for the University of California at Santa Cruz which owns 3,000 acres of parkland. She estimates perhaps a hundred people live there in the University’s forests in tree houses, huts and tents. Some of them are students saving money and using the bathrooms at the school gym to shower off. But some are non-students choosing to live out for political reasons.

FUSARI: It’s people who don’t like living in the built world and who feel that their way of living lighter on the land is justified because they don’t make as much of a mess of the land as those of us who live in the city. And there’s definitely a righteousness element to their positions, because I know, I’ve talked to them and I know that— but it’s not negligible.

WHITE: Fusari says she’s worried the squatters will bring their own version of sprawl.

FUSARI: Even in the backcountry if one person is living there, then there’s another, then there’s another, and it grows by accretion to the point where it really is going to have an impact.

WHITE: Fusari says she’s sympathetic with the urge to live outdoors. But she says with the world population threatening to overwhelm nature, people have to accept that living in towns is the best way to preserve the open spaces.

[FOREST SOUNDS]

WHITE: For their part the forest squatters say their lifestyle is unconventional enough that they’re not expecting hordes of people to be joining them anytime soon. For Living on Earth, I’m Robin White.

[MUSIC: Purple Ivy Shadows "Ladderback" Field:Guide]

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CURWOOD: And for this week - that's Living on Earth. Next week— It's been nearly two years since fire swept through Glacier National Park in Montana, burning more than 27,000 acres of forest. But the fire has lead to an unexpected boom in the population of one park resident.

MALE: I was grading the road through the inside from Logging to Dutch Creek, and as I proceeded through this area I noticed the ground started to move and jump and hop and so I thought, “Oh, I'm hallucinating!”

CURWOOD: The resurrection of the boreal toad, next time on Living on Earth. And remember that between now and then you can hear us anytime and get the stories behind the news by going to livingonearth.org. That’s livingonearth.org.

[EarthEar: David Dunn "Mora, New Mexico: Underwater Pond Insects" Why do Whales and Children Sing?: A Guide to Listening in Nature]

CURWOOD: Recording artist David Dunn didn't expect much when he first plunged his hydrophone into a small New Mexican pond. But he found that underwater insects make an astonishing array of sounds.

[GURGLING, CLICKING UNDERWATER NOISES]

CURWOOD: Living on Earth is produced by the World Media Foundation in cooperation with Harvard University. You can find us at livingonearth.org. Our staff includes: Jennifer Chu, Andy Farnsworth, Elizabeth Kline, Tom Simon, Susan Shepherd, Carly Ferguson, Nathan Marcy and Liz Lempert. Special thanks to Ernie Silver.

Our interns are Carolyn Johnson, Julia Keller, Taylor Ferguson and Mary Beth Conway. Alison Dean composed our themes. Environmental sound art courtesy of EarthEar. Our Technical Director is Al Avery. Ingrid Lobet heads our western bureau, Eileen Bolinsky is our senior editor, and Chris Ballman is the senior producer. This week’s program was produced by Diane Toomey. I’m Steve Curwood, executive producer of Living on Earth. Thanks for listening.

FEMALE ANNOUNCER: Funding for Living on Earth comes from the National Science Foundation, supporting coverage of emerging science, and Stoneyfield Farm—organic yogurt, cultured soy, and smoothies. Ten percent of their profits are donated to support environmental causes and family farms. Learn more at stoneyfield.com. Support also comes from NPR member stations and the Annenberg Foundation.

MALE ANNOUNCER: This is NPR, National Public Radio.

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