As The World Burns with Lee Van der Voo

Otters

A dear friend writes, from her generous summer home in Northern Michigan: 

Somehow we have OTTERS in Torch Lake this years! They swim by our deck twice a day. In my 60 years I have never seen or even heard of such a thing. Brings me such delight. (The brief video files are too big to send within the email so I'm including them as a google link)

It throws me back instantly to a day long ago. My job in my third year of Peace Corps Service in Central African Republic involved extensive walking in the forest with conservation guards (or rangers) and interpretive guides. Those forests are laced with clear running streams and rivers, and we'd have to walk right through them. That meant all day in wet feet but the joy was the river otters...so graceful and playful! If you planted your feet hip distance or more apart and stood quietly in the water they'd chase each other between your feet, looping back around and through with such grace and delight in their movement that it seemed a gift from the Gods. 

The utterly wonderful Elizabeth Garland (then on a Watson fellowship traveling the conservation world, and about whose current work you can read more on the Verite site) snapped this pic one day, just after we'd wasted time in this stream playing with otters. You can see Maoma, an Aka guide (that ethnonym is one used by forest foragers, often called "pygmies")  still grinning. Jean Fagounda on the other hand, an amazing architect and traditional builder whose very name means "forest tamer" in Sango and who comes from savannas further north, was more task oriented, and wanted us to keep moving and make camp before nightfall! 

Most of us wish we could do/have done more to enjoy and protect and respect the phenomenal gift of all the lives evolving together on this planet. These African forests are too often, today, being plowed under for palm oil plantations, timber concessions and mining (for, among other things, the rare earth minerals to make the kind of laptop on which i'm typing. Sigh). 

Maoma was such a generous teacher, contenting himself with too little in the way of "stuff" but sharing stores of knowledge of the intricate worlds around us. He saved my life more than once. The six years in my twenties I spent learning from and teaching people like Maoma, have shaped my interest in multimodal environmental education tools today. He and his community were representatives of entire nations of people across the Congo Basin without a permanent house, moving through the forest and building temporary shelters from year to year. Can you imagine, in the more and more volatile climate we are making? 

So let me channel that exquisite afternoon, and my friend's Michigan moment, and take a cue from these otters. The reprieve COVID has created, for otters and other life forms, must not be only temporary. It must become a beacon for us to make changes the world can feel, changes that help it heal.