I have been reading through a collection of Aldo Leopold’s classic nature writing, A Sand County Almanac as well as some essays from Round River. Leopold was a naturalist who appreciated the beings of the wilderness both as he relied on them for food and fuel, but also as autonomous animals, plants and places. One of the themes that has resonated strongly with me is that of poignant loss. Throughout his writings, he mourned the extinction of native species, whether from a particular habitat or in entirety. He wrote a remarkable eulogy on the extinction of the Passenger pigeon, and spoke the finals days of a solitary old grizzly bear that was the last of its kind on a mountain in Arizona. And, of course, there was his famous description of killing a wolf and her pup for no reason other than that they were wolves, and how deeply that affected him.

But none of these deaths and extinctions were taken in solitude. Each time Leopold provided a great deal of exposition illustrating just how intimately woven together were the single animal or species, and everything else in the ecosystem. Reading these leaves one with the distinct sense that we are only now realizing the extent to which extinction permanently affects a place, and that our new-found awareness is no consolation to the systems that have suffered such a devastating blow.

In one essay, Leopold speaks of particular animals holding the numenon of a place. The numenon, in this case, is the linchpin of a place’s identity–while the loss of any species changes a place, the numenon is one that especially carries the immeasurable, yet still perceptible, spirit of that place. In one case:

Everyone knows, for example, that the autumn landscape in the north woods [of Wisconsin] is the land, plus a red maple, plus a ruffed grouse. In terms of conventional physics, the grouse represents only a millionth of either the mass or the energy of an acre. Yet subtract the grouse and the whole thing is dead. An enormous amount of some motive power has been lost. (*p. 146)

And in the case of an individual animal, the grizzly bear nicknamed Bigfoot:

No one ever saw the old bear [on the mountain Escudilla], but in the muddy springs about the base of the cliffs you saw his incredible tracks. Seeing them made the most hard-bitten cowboys aware of bear. Wherever they rode they saw the mountain, and when they saw the mountain they thought of bear. Campfire conversation ran to beef, bailes, and bear. Bigfoot claimed for his own only a cow a year, and a few square miles of useless rocks, but his personality pervaded the country…[after his death] Escudilla still hangs on the horizon, but when you see it you no longer think of bear. It’s only a mountain now. (*p. 143-5)

Arguably the more charismatic animals, plants, and places are often seen as the most irreplaceable, when in fact all are important and often it’s the tiny ones on whose backs and stems the rest of the ecosystem rests. But if we look instead at the greater concept of the numenon as Leopold uses it, rather than just the individual species chosen for it, it’s a great deal like the Genius Loci, the spirit of a place. And all of the above are representatives of what gives a place its unique qualities, the je ne sais quoi, even if we can’t put a label to those qualities themselves. These are not quantifiable in the way that bird counts and the momentum of a waterfall are. They’re exceptionally subjective; it’s arguable that those of us who value a place for what it is create its spirit, while we cannot make a land developer or oil baron see beyond the cash value of the physical natural resources. It’s an aesthetic judgement, but no less crucial for that.

Hence, representatives. Or, perhaps, mascots if you will. They are as close as we may get to identifying the spirit of a place, and what we choose (consciously or not) to represent a place-spirit (literal or metaphorical) says a great deal about our relationship to that place. I find it unsurprising that the very first bioregional animal totem to contact me once I moved to Portland was Scrub Jay, as there were several of them living in the trees right outside my first apartment here. It’s not that there weren’t other animals, but the nocturnal raccoons, and the subterranean earthworms, just weren’t as noticeable. And over time, Scrub Jay’s boldness (and sometimes downright obnoxiousness) came to embody the things I love (and sometimes despise) about this city as I’ve gotten to know it better. In the same way, the more secluded but still charismatic Steller’s Jay was the perfect analogue out in the wilderness areas of the Columbia River Gorge. For me, Portland without scrub jays, and the western portion of the Gorge without Steller’s jays, would no longer be the places I have come to love, more than any other of the irreplaceable species here.

So here’s an exercise for you this weekend: think about, or even visit, one of your favorite places, wilderness or otherwise. Consider what the numenon, the place-spirit, the je ne sais quoi, of the place is for you personally, and what being(s) you would most sorely miss if they were gone from there forever. Whose absence would have the most impact? And why are these important to you? How does your connection to that being (or small handful of beings) affect your relationships with the rest of the system? Consider these, and move forward with them.

* Block quotes from A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation from Round River by Aldo Leopold, published 1986 by Ballantine Books, New York.

Back in March, I went to visit my parents in Missouri. While I was there, I was horrified to find that the first little patch of scrub woods that I considered “my territory”, as it were, had been completely bulldozed and turned into a pharmacy. There wasn’t a single bit left. What made it worse was that I had intended during this visit to pick up a few more physical traces of the place to go with the pine cone from there on my place altar, because I knew that at some point there’d be no more chances. I guess I was just a little too late.

At the time, I did some immediate processing to try to work through my shock and pain. I wanted to reach out and know that I wasn’t alone in that feeling of deep loss for this place. Since then, I’ve slowly and carefully been uncovering those feelings. I haven’t done a full funerary rite just yet, but the potential is growing.

I keep finding myself going back to my ecopsychology shelves for supporting material in this process. I feel like so much of neopaganism is about hearkening back to places across the ocean, or abstracting places and things into spirits and deities. While the totems and gods have places in my path, this raw, visceral pain calls for a more immediate, physical connection. That place that died is not the place of Artemis, or of totems, but of a child’s wonder at an emerging butterfly and pieces of sandstone that sheltered garter snakes, of poplar trees reaching past the power lines overhead.

So I find inspiration in things that have spirit, but are not necessarily dealing with literal spirits, like the Altars of Extinction project spearheaded by Mary Gomes, a well-known figure in the field of ecopsychology (but also published in Reclaiming Quarterly). In this ritual project it is species, not spirits, that are remembered and called upon. Altars are built to creatures driven to the edge and over, whom we will never see again on this earth because of our excesses. These are centers of grieving for these losses, for the physical animals and plants gone forever.

And I look to the writings of Joanna Macy, whose engagement with collective and personal grief began with protesting against nuclear facilities, but expanded into a greater understanding of how we as individuals and communities feel the loss of the world around us. While all of her writings that I’ve read have been inspirational, I continue to be awestruck by the Council of All Beings ritual that she co-wrote. Again, it is the physical beings that are mourned. And our feelings of being overwhelmed and powerless in the face of so many traumas on a global scale as well as personal are also approached with care and compassion.

I do not say this to speak as though compassion and grieving, and connection to physical beings, have never had a place in neopaganism. But it seems sometimes that many of us spend so much time with our heads focused on what’s going on in the spirit world, waiting for a sign or symbol from another plane, that we get a bit detached from this one. And in the same way, the dominant American culture, that informs so much of American neopaganism, does not offer a place to grieve for the loss of places, of species, of entire systems. I see a lot of “celebrate nature and its cycles” rituals, and I occasionally see places for pagan funerary rites and the like. And I know other individual pagans have suffered similar losses, from the overwhelming sympathy I received when I wrote about my own grief.

But there’s a decided gap in overarching American neopagan spirituality when it comes to grieving greater systems and patterns, and it parallels a similar gap in the dominant culture. We don’t talk about grieving for the environment, perhaps because we’re conditioned to approach the problems from an analytical, let’s-find-a-solution perspective. We’re expected to remain constructive about it all. We don’t have a setting where it’s okay to cry ourselves to pieces over the imminent extinction of many of the wold’s big cats–or some of the most vulnerable little plants. If we treat the loss of a place as being on par with the loss of a person, we’re often seen as having unusual priorities, or being “too sensitive”, or even not caring about people enough.

Perhaps I’m suffering from tunnel vision, though. Maybe I just haven’t been seeing the discussion and the practice of grieving for places and species and ecosystems in neopaganism the way I’ve seen it in ecopsych. Am I missing something? Do you, dear readers, have resources and angles I haven’t found? You gave me a pleasant surprise when so many of you resonated with my loss of my sacred childhood place–perhaps you’ll show me that there’s more going on in intesive grief-work in neopagan spirituality than I had thought.

In the meantime, I continue to meditate on my loss, and to contemplate how I want to move forward from it. There will be a place and a time set aside, when the right place and time come together.

Postscript: The photo below is of the creek near the place where I moved to next, across town. This place still exists, albeit in a much more heavily developed form than when I met it two decades ago. I have no pictures of the place I lost, and there are no photos that I know of that show it as I knew it, as by that point it was an isolated open lot next to a dilapidated apartment complex, and no one else seemed to particularly care about it. But I wanted to leave at least a little beauty at the end of this, as it was difficult to write.

In my years of practicing totemism, I’ve noticed that it is much easier for we human animals to connect to other animal beings. And we are especially biased toward those animals that more resemble us—mid-sized, erring on the side of larger, mammals, very often carnivores or omnivores. If we deviate much, it’s usually to birds, our living dinosaurs. Reptiles and amphibians are rarer, and if you want to get into the downright exotic work with a fish or an invertebrate. (Rather sad that the greater portion of animal life forms in the world can be boiled down to the one word “invertebrate” in this case.)

Still, we recognize in animals something of ourselves. I recently watched with great fascination a three-part series called Walking With Monsters. This featured the struggles of animal species prior to the dinosaurs, and focused especially on those animals that would eventually evolve into us. Even those species alive today who deviated far away from us early in the ancestral tree still share common ancestry, and we resonate with that.

But animals are not the only, or even the most numerous, living beings on the planet. Plants outnumber us, and represent an entirely different lineage (other than the very earliest sparks of life from whence we all came). The biology of a plant is very different from our own in every aspect, from how they gain nutrition to their manner of reproduction, and even the molecules they absorb from the air. Perhaps it is this seemingly alien nature that makes it harder for us to relate.

And perhaps it’s because we take them for granted, too, that fewer of us work with plants as totems, as opposed to a few dried herbs in a spell or magical pouch. Plants are all around us. We can see them, plant them, even destroy them with relative ease (kudzu not withstanding). But animals—those are more fleeting, especially those in the wild, and moreso those larger, shyer beings that can only be seen in their territory if we take ourselves far away from our own. Even professional nature documentaries are made of the tiny fraction of the camera crew’s entire time and film—most of it is waiting, and traveling, and too-brief glimpses.

So we focus on the lions in the savannah, and ignore the grasses and trees where they lie in wait for their prey. We hike in the forests in search of wild birds to photograph and count, but the canopies in which they sing and nest are often given little notice. And in the same way we overlook the totems of plant species while working with the animals. Who ever talks to the totemic White Sagebrush while smudging with the pungent dried leaves of one individual plant? And what of Douglas Fir, whose children line the Columbia River Gorge and further? And what of the totems of cooking herbs, and garden plants, all of which we rely on to live?

I admit I’m guilty of this, too. I’ve only more recently, since starting on a more formal shamanic path in the past few years, been looking less at animal totems as detached, floating spiritual beings to call into a ritual, and more as part of a vibrant spiritual community containing not only individual spirits, but archetypal totemic beings, of animals, plants, landforms, and more. I’ve written about my relationship with Fir, but because so many of my plant totems have been silent totems—perhaps more due to my doing than theirs—I haven’t had as much understanding of how I work with them.

But I am more and more an adherent of bioregional totemism, which takes totems in context, just as animals exist in an environment that is just as much alive as we are. And so while a lot of what work I have done with plant totems is still quiet and personal and not ready to share yet, I have been taking the time to extend my own awareness and cooperation beyond those of flesh, bone, eyes, and the intake of oxygen.