Chasing Nature, Chasing Hope
A Conversation with Bryan Pfeiffer: Naturalist, Writer, Photographer, and Boy Explorer
I’ve known Bryan Pfeiffer for at least 35 years, since his days as a reporter for the local paper in our mutual hometown of Montpelier, Vermont. He covered politics, the environment, and when he could, nature. One day in the 1980s he excitedly showed me a picture of a plant he’d found in a weed lot near my home, and he asked me what it was. “Teasel,” I told him. The next day his beautiful photo of what some might call a homely weed appeared on the front page of the paper with the caption “Teasel Time.” That was when I knew we’d be friends for life. Who else gets so excited about a weed, and who else can convince a newspaper editor to put a photo of that weed on the front page? Bryan Pfeiffer. These three-plus decades later, he continues to exult in the prosaic, finding beauty, joy, and meaning in the small things of nature.
Bryan is an influencer—his articles and essays have appeared in Orion, Aeon Magazine, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Audubon Magazine, Field & Stream, The Progressive, EatingWell, Northern Woodlands, and lots of other places. He co-authored Birdwatching in Vermont, a guide to finding and enjoying the state’s birds; co-hosted an award-winning radio program on birds; and wrote and hosted a public television special called Birding in Vermont. His blog, Chasing Nature, is well worth a look. I’ve been enjoying it since he launched it two years ago. Links to a few of its entries are scattered throughout this interview.
Bryan and I talked over coffee a few weeks ago. We had a rich and rambling conversation about the state of the world, the joy in nature, the art of writing, and his own longtime connection to the wilds of Monhegan Island.
(Our conversation was edited for clarity and brevity).
– Liz Thompson
Bryan Pfeiffer in his element. © Josh Lincoln
Liz Thompson (LT): I’d like to ask you about a number of things, including at least these three:
We are in the midst of a biodiversity crisis, and you bring to it an infectious fondness for nature and its resilience. Where does your love for nature come from?
You write about nature in such a compelling and engaging way. How do you see the impact of your writing? What is its role in making the world a better place?
You have a strong connection to Monhegan Island, which is featured in this issue. How did that connection arise, and where has it brought you? Can we start there?
Monhegan: A Paradise and a Place of Refuge
Bryan Pfeiffer (BP): Sure, let’s start there. But I’m curious: Why Monhegan?
LT: In our research for Wildlands of New England, we looked throughout the region for Wildlands: places that are permanently protected so that natural ecological processes will prevail in perpetuity. As David Foster describes it, the Wildlands of Monhegan were a surprise and a delight to discover.
BP: Monhegan is indeed a good crucible for the intersection of nature and the pressure of humanity. At its core, its interior, Monhegan has a lovely, mature red spruce community, with white spruce and patchy hardwoods here and there around the island. Monhegan’s rocky headlands are classic and dramatic. And then there’s the village, which is really a cultural melting pot of New England. So, overall, yeah, the island is a tiny, pristine place with lots of human history—and that’s a management challenge. And it’s among the reasons Monhegan has a gravitational pull on me.
Monhegan Lighthouse and Museum. © Bryan Pfeiffer
LT: So tell us—how did you become connected to Monhegan?
BP: My connection to the island, which began in the 1990s, has matured into a kind of personal relationship. I first visited Monhegan as a nature guide, bringing birders there for the autumn migration of songbirds. It’s a fallout spot, where birds pour from the sky.
Basically, in September and October, songbirds are migrating south at night in a broad front, heading south. The Maine coast runs east-west there. And these migrants, mostly young of the year, are on their first journey toward the tropics. No adults to lead the way. So they’re inexperienced. And if there’s fog or a strong north or northwest wind, the songbirds get blown out into the Gulf of Maine at night. Dawn comes, they look down, and they’re like, “holy shit!”
There’s no water landing for a songbird. Only death. So they head for Monhegan. To a birder there at dawn, it’s like confetti raining from the skies. Only it’s warblers! And they often fall out and make their way to the village, where they find food, including invasives, mostly fruits and insects. And that’s where we birders find them—in multitudes. Once they refuel and get reoriented, they launch again, mostly at night heading southwest to regain the mainland and then off and onward toward the tropics.
Black-and-white warbler. © Bryan Pfeiffer
So I first experienced Monhegan as a birdwatcher and a guide, which means I didn’t know the island. I didn’t know its people. I didn’t know its culture. I knew its birds. I knew a bit about its ecology. We saw minke whales and ocean sunfish and harbor porpoises—but I’m not that skilled in marine biology; so that would be it. We went mostly for birds.
But over the years I got to know Monhegan. I got to know it as a culture of artists, second-home owners, lobster fishers, misfits, outlaws—basically this wonderful, beautiful mix of natural resources and the human experiment. As a result, I began to spend less time looking at birds on Monhegan and more time seeing the island for its culture and its nature.
Monarchs on Monhegan Island. © Bryan Pfeiffer, montage created in PhotoShop from multiple images
I’m no longer guiding. So I now visit Monhegan to see birds, butterflies, and dragonflies, to botanize, to watch the ocean, but also to see friends. Mostly I go to sit and meditate on the waves, sense the curvature of the earth at the horizon—and to think and write. In that sense, Monhegan has been kind of fertile turf for who I’ve become over the past quarter century or so. It tracks my growth as a writer and someone trying, like the rest of us, to figure out where he might best fit in the world.
That’s what Monhegan has done for me. Of course, it’s one of the most beautiful places on the planet. And it’s familiar to me now. I know most every step of it because it’s so small. Even so, those of us who don’t live there tend to conjure up our own version of what Monhegan is about—and we’re usually all wrong. So I suspect I know the Wildlands better than I know the wild people.
Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui) on New York Aster, Monhegan. © Bryan Pfeiffer
LT: Does the protection of the island make a difference in your experience?
BP: Absolutely. Even without the protection, Monhegan would still be a fallout place for birds, but so much would be missing: the wild forest, the remote feel of the headlands. It wouldn’t be the same place.
“Monhegan is indeed a good crucible for the intersection of nature and the pressure of humanity”
Even so, having said all that, and recognizing the immeasurable value of conservation there, I think we can find that same kind of refuge almost anywhere—near our homes, city parks, the cracks in the sidewalk. And that guides a lot of my writing now. I think I first experienced the sublime in the presence of giant sequoias a half century ago. But I now like to think that I can find it anywhere, including among the prosaic. I think all of us can.
An ocean-going dragonfly called wandering glider (Pantala flavescens) off the north end of Monhegan Island. © Bryan Pfeiffer
The Biodiversity Crisis: Hope in a Chaotic World
LT: Let’s go back to my first question: We’re in a biodiversity crisis. Can you describe that? I’ve heard you say you want to save the world! What’s wrong with the world?
BP: That’s a big question, Liz! I do want to save the world—I won’t, of course. But I think what’s wrong with the world is that we’re losing our connection to what’s real. To my mind, the real things in the world are love, art, literature, community, nature. The rest is mostly artifice. I want to celebrate what’s real. And that’s probably why I write.
But to answer your question, I’ll confess: I’m not optimistic about our ability to remedy or ease the biodiversity crisis. And I define it as a crisis of extinction, abundance, and experience.
We know the causes. Climate gets a lot of attention. And although we generalize at our peril, an overheated planet is of course driving declines in biological diversity. But the more proximate cause is habitat destruction owing to human population growth and its demands for food, especially meat and seafood; for mined minerals; and for commodities like sugar, coffee, and cotton. We know this. Forests and native grasslands are far more diverse than cotton fields and rangeland; tropical lowlands are more diverse than coffee and pineapple plantations. Heck, a brush-hogged field is more diverse than even your most responsible, small, organic, groovy, grass-fed dairy or beef operation. Even if all these aren’t causing extinction, they’re causing a decline in biological abundance. Insects are perhaps the best example.
So, changing the way humans eat and buy stuff is a monumental task, probably tougher than solving the climate crisis (although I recognize they go together). And when it comes to biodiversity, I think we’re up against not just human nature, need, and behavior. It’s bigger than that. To my mind, beyond population growth, our greatest obstacle is the incredible ascendancy of capitalism. We ignore it at our peril. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a reluctant capitalist. This isn’t reflexive capitalism-bashing. It’s actually astonishment at capitalism’s versatility at exploitation of people, land, and other natural resources.
“To my mind, the real things in the world are love, art, literature, community, nature. The rest is mostly artifice. I want to celebrate what’s real. And that’s probably why I write.”
30 by 30 is a fine idea. We’ve got a little more than five years to get there. But we’re up against something bigger than the power of the state and its good ideas: 600 years of capitalism. For six centuries the arc of history has bent toward exploitation and depletion. These are the deep roots of our biodiversity crisis. I’ve written about this, using sugar as an example and relying on the work of a group of scholars collaborating as the Commodity Frontiers Initiative.
But now capitalism is coming for our minds—the next big frontier. Capitalism has exploited human labor and it’s exploited the Earth. Its latest frontier—reaching us through glowing screens—is our brains, our attention. And that’s breaking humanity’s intrinsic bond with nature.
Long before the internet began to addle our brains for distraction, the lepidopterist and author Robert Michael Pyle began to get at this disconnect in an essay called “The Extinction of Experience,” in his 1993 book The Thunder Tree. It’s about a growing estrangement from even the familiar in nature. If we do not know what lives next to us, we won’t even notice when it’s gone.
“Capitalism has exploited human labor and it’s exploited the Earth. Its latest frontier—reaching us through glowing screens—is our brains, our attention.”
Making The World a Better Place: Writing as an Act of Love
LT: And is that why you write?
BP: Yeah. First and foremost, I’m the guy out there with binoculars, an insect net, a camera, a notebook and a pencil for drafting essays. I don’t think it’s any more complex than that. And, I’m often writing among the prosaic at our feet. I write about what I see in remote bogs and in ordinary backyards. So beyond my field work, mostly among butterflies now; my seat on the Vermont Endangered Species Committee; and my lecturing in UVM’s Field Naturalist Program; writing is my role to play in easing the biodiversity crisis.
Bryan’s Personal Philosophy
LT: How do you summarize your personal take on life?
BP: My overriding philosophy is this: Love yourself, love the world, and try to make it a better place. The bullet points beneath it are that we’re all trying to do the best we can with the skills and passions we have. Mine is field work and writing. It’s finding joy in learning new things or learning more about things I thought I knew.
Here’s a really great example. I’ve always enjoyed looking at Parnassia glauca (fen grass-of-Parnassus). How could you not love this plant? I’ve admired its flower for 30 years. And then, only recently, I learned about its bee—that there’s an exceedingly rare solitary bee obligate on this flower. So I found the bee, photographed it, wrote about it. And soon after that, while searching for the bee a couple years ago, I noticed something unusual about the antics of the Parnassia glauca’s stamens, how they seem to cycle through maturation one stamen per day. And I thought, I’ve got to figure this out! So now, every fall I go and I look at what these flowers are doing with their stamens and their bee, and I’ve written about that.
And you know, that’s really all I need—that kind of stuff.
Fen grass-of-Parnassus (Parnassia glauca) with its bee, the Parnassia miner (Andrena parnassiae). © Bryan Pfeiffer
“My overriding philosophy is this: Love yourself, love the world, and try to make it a better place.”
LT: And you look, and you pay attention, and you’re an amazing photographer, so I want to ask you about that. Is photography part of your practice of being with the world, or is it just a tool?
BP: It’s definitely a tool—I want to show people these things. But there is a mind-body nexus with photography that I don’t quite get. I often ask myself: Why do I want this photo? For me it’s mostly about butterfly and botany photography now, about capturing beautiful images and sharing them with readers.
As for the Parnassia, I want people to see these flowers really well, and without a photo, they may not—they might walk right by them without noticing the beauty.
Fen grass-of-Parnassus (Parnassia glauca). © Bryan Pfeiffer
I write, and I photograph, so that people see the beauty. That’s my little contribution to making the world a better place.
LT: It’s a huge contribution, Bryan, and I so appreciate you and the time you’ve taken to talk with us. I’ll keep following your blog and getting out in nature to take joy in the small things. Thank you!
Liz Thompson is an ecologist, botanist, conservation scientist, and Managing Editor of From the Ground Up.
When not outside or writing, Bryan Pfeiffer has been—or still is—a bread baker; a pot washer; an air-pollution chemist; a firefighter; a mercenary writer; a print journalist; a professional photographer; and a consulting field biologist for governments, nonprofits, and private landowners. He is adjunct faculty in natural resources at the University of Vermont, serves on the Vermont Endangered Species Committee, and traces his eco-roots in part to hard-core birdwatching and guiding (although he’s since recovered from that affliction). Bryan is also owned by an English shepherd named Odin. Learn more about Bryan →