By Ella Johnson
SAU Theological Perspective
(Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in an essay series on migration offered by the St. Ambrose University Theology Department in Davenport.)
Last fall I spoke as part of a panel discussing the life and writings of Aldo Leopold. Most famous for having written “Sand County Almanac” (1949), Leopold was an Iowa native, from Burlington. He finished his remarkable career as a professor of ecology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His is the first ever attempt (in English) to develop an environmental ethical formula. All of this is important, but this is a story I heard from co-panelist, Dr. John Pauli, professor of Forest & Wildlife Ecology at UW-Madison. It’s about porcupines.
More specifically, it’s about solving the mystery of the disappearing porcupines. Well, on the surface, there is no mystery. They are being hunted to extinction by “fishers” (weasel family). But this answer is unsatisfactory. Since both species are native, their populations should be maintaining a certain dynamic equilibrium.
Pauli says that the key to the problem is the snowshoe hare, or rather their absence, as they are nearly extinct in the southern half of Wisconsin. So, why is that happening? The answer is in the hare’s heretofore clever adaptive ability to shift from white fur in winter to brown in the summer, thus keeping them camouflaged year ‘round from its main predator, yep, the fisher.
But, climate change means that Wisconsin’s snows come later, leave sooner, and are less prevalent all ‘round. The hare’s adaptation is mal-fitted in this new disorder. They stand out in their white fir amidst the browns of a winter without snow. Predation increased from about 5% of the population to 45%. So, they migrated north, following the retreating snowy winters.
Porcupines, now absent competition for winter forage, and enjoying the more mild winters, exploded in population…for a time. That is, the time it took the fisher to shift its hunting strategies from the rare fat hare to prolific prickly porcupine. Now porcupine are following the hare. No doubt the fisher will follow.
To say species are migrating is like saying that 20,000 years ago the glaciers “retreated.” They’ve not moved north; they melted away from the south. Individual snowshoe hares, then porcupines, and predictably, fishers, don’t pack up and move. They die off locally while the populations on the northern fringe of the habitat thrive and spread. This phenomenon is occurring even among tree species (yellow birch, northern white cedar, sugar maple, etc). The point is that nature isn’t concerned about individuals, but species (and, honestly, not even those: natural extinction is a thing). In a slightly less Darwinian sense, we too conceive of ourselves in the collective. To say, for example, that “we Irish migrated here after the Great Potato Famine of 1845-52” doesn’t mean that anyone living in 2026 made that trek. This way of thinking is VERY Biblical: the phrase “עם ישראל חי” means “The People of Israel Live” (II Sam 7:24, Jer 31:36, Is 45:17). There is no “I” in “people.” Similarly, Catholic identity is not exactly mine. I am claiming to be part of a historical community. That’s why we call martyrs and saints our “brothers and sisters in Christ.”
Returning to the tale of the snowshoe, porcupine, and fisher, the ecological message is that “everything is connected to everything” or, as the Lakota speak about the other species of their lands, “Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ” (all my relatives). Observing these species reacting to the ecological crises of this anthropocine age, Pauli puts it more bluntly: “lose one, lose ‘em all.” And, of course, that includes us.
(Ella Johnson is an associate professor of theology and associate dean at St. Ambrose University in Davenport.)
