Stories for a change

By J Mark Dangerfield

Ten unusual short stories from author Dr J. Mark Dangerfield that explain where we are in a world we have changed. These are compelling tales about the environment that will provoke, soothe and inspire. There is a story about a loaf of bread, one about the industry of ants and a tragedy for a farming family; plus seven more with awareness at their core. Short story aficionados will enjoy the breadth and environment people will find some resonance. It would be great if every undergraduate read them on their mobile device of choice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J Mark Dangerfield
• Release date: Feb 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465712394

J Mark Dangerfield

Dr J. Mark Dangerfield is an ecologist, environmental scientist, registered AFOLU expert and author. He specializes in the understanding of ecological, climate change adaptation, biodiversity and natural resource management issues. Mark has over 30 years experience in the measurement and evaluation of ecological processes, carbon dynamics and natural resource management in agricultural, rangeland and forest ecosystems in Europe, Africa and Australia gained through faculty positions at the University of Botswana, Macquarie University and as Director, Centre Expertise for Environment, University of Technology Sydney. In 1999 he received an outstanding teacher award from Macquarie University and has designed and delivered tertiary level courses in biodiversity, ecology (including ecosystem process and carbon budget analyses), biostatistics, soil biology and wildlife management. He was also co-founder and CEO of Biotrack Australia. He was a founding member of the NSW Natural Resources Advisory Council and serves on the Australian governments Domestic Offsets Integrity Committee. Since early 2008 he has worked as an environmental consultant in both private and public sector and is currently Principal at alloporus environmental. He writes to help create awareness of the environment.

Book preview

Stories for a change

J. Mark Dangerfield, PhD

Published by alloporus environmental at Smashwords

Copyright 2011-13 John Mark Dangerfield

All rights reserved.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

~~~

Table of Contents

Preface | Why write stories about the environment

Chapter 2 The last loaf of bread

Chapter 3 Eggs

Chapter 4 Ants

Chapter 5 Weeds

Chapter 6 Little creatures

Chapter 7 Johnno

Chapter 8 Corridors of power

Chapter 9 Science

Chapter 10 Grandfather

Chapter 11 Birth and death

~~~

Preface | Why write stories about the environment

My father was born in 1935. There was just a tick over 2 billion people alive at that time. Many still carried memories of the Great War two decades before that killed more than 8 million and a few were worried about the prospect of another, although none could have imagined the horrors of the Holocaust.

I came along in 1961. By then there were 3 billion people who had mostly forgotten about the world wars but were struggling with a fear of communism. There was fighting in Vietnam and the Berlin wall was standing firm.

My second son was born in 1994. There were 5.6 billion of us then. Conflicts were around, not least in Rwanda, but most of us paid little attention although many were happy when Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa.

In 2009 when my son turned 15 there were 6.7 billion of us. Israel was fighting again and everyone had been touched in some way by the fingers of terrorism. A global financial crisis gnawed at us through the media, and the planet was about to cook.

This is quite a sequence. My father, now well settled into his retirement, has seen a lot of history in his lifetime. A plethora of diverse events that have shocked alongside those that have brought joy, wonder and enlightenment. People have argued, fought, cried, laughed, loved and lived. And there have been more and more people around to do these things. These are the constants of the modern day.

In my lifetime there has been another constant. Not as overt or newsworthy as major historical events but a steady, ever-present concern. It is the notion that the environment is in trouble. The idea that there has been an impact of the ever-growing number of humans and their technology on the way the environment works that has given us loss of wilderness, extinction of species, unhealthy air and water, and even threatens the integrity of nature itself. It is a feeling that has grown into a worry for many and a crusade for some. Organizations big and small have sprung up to support the movement from the local ‘save our park’ to the global ever-presents such as WWF and Greenpeace. The effect of this organized concern has been significant. In many parts of the world environmental concerns now influence how we run our politics.

As a boy I was more interested in soccer and cricket than the grass that I would run over to chase the ball. We lived in the outer suburbs of London where the environment was buildings, roads and pavements and the occasional park was the only concession to nature. But somewhere I became interested. It might have been the enthusiasm of my geography teacher or the fact that he gave me good grades. Maybe it was because my biology teacher was cute. Whatever happened I ended up liking the environment and especially finding out about it. I squeezed into University to study environmental science, a subject that I found by luck and turned out to be the ultimate modern merger of old school biology and geography, and then managed to hang around long enough to complete a PhD in ecology. Sport was still good but now I had the tools to learn about how the environment worked.

After my studies I took a job at the University of Zimbabwe and started a career as an academic that has included four Universities on three continents. Now I could not escape the environment, it was my job. I taught courses on Ecology, Wildlife Management, Biodiversity and researched the way organisms influence nature as well as each other, and found new ways to measure the performance of the environment.

In spite of this over immersion I did not consider myself to be a conservationist. No membership or affiliation to the green groups seemed right for me. Something about what was being said and claimed did not fit. It was obvious that a planet with 6 (and now 7) billion people hungry for food, shelter and comfort was a concern and later, as I became more involved with the management of natural resources, these challenges seemed to be ever more acute. We are using natural resources more and more rapidly, changing the face of the planet as we go and we have not yet figured out how to be sustainable. Surely an environmental scientist who knows these things should be a rabid conservationist. Every day he sees the consequences in the data he collects. But I am not. Although at times such an admission makes me feel very guilty.

So if an ecologist is not a conservationist, why not? At first I had no idea because even as my own trappings of rampant capitalism began to accumulate I felt guilty about that too. Talk about a rock and a hard place. Not a conservationist, but not a capitalist either.

Confused thoughts followed me around for a decade until one evening in 2005 I had some time to kill and found myself at the computer writing a story. Why I did not know. There was no blinding flash or surge of inspiration, just a calm certainty. By midnight there was a story about Joe and his loaf of bread on the screen.

Over the next years there were more stories that arrived apparently at random. At first I thought they were unrelated but I soon realized that there was a strong thread running through them. What they all had in common was something to do with conservation and my feelings about it.

Meantime I had left academia, first for business, and then to work as an environmental consultant, and I witnessed another historic event. Not one that historians will be able to pin down precisely, but no less historic for that. The piece of history is that the environment had become mainstream.

Perhaps galvanized by the issue of global warming, a topic that generates more than 2 million individual requests per month to the internet search engines, for a moment at least everyone wants to know about the world we live in. At worst this is a handy blip in the importance of things outside our egotistic selves; at best it is the start of awareness, an arising of some truths that we can all grasp. And, somehow seeing this increased awareness made my stories clearer. I now knew what they were about. I also knew that it was time to share them.

This book is a collection of conservation stories that I hope will be entertaining. They are a work of fiction and although some might bear a close resemblance to real persons or events this is the nature of storytelling, and not any intent my part. At the end is my more factual take on what the stories mean for a future where upwards of 9 billion people will share this world with, the gods and chance willing, my sons.

I also hope that reading them will help you understand what the environment means to you, and all of us.

J Mark Dangerfield

February 2012

~~~

Chapter 2 | The last loaf of bread

If I may, I’d like to tell you a story about Joe, a forthright and well-meaning man who was sound of heart and mind; only Joe had a problem. The problem was that Joe desperately wanted to conserve a loaf of bread.

It is hard to understand why he wanted this, but he did. He wanted to save a loaf with a desire that made his stomach ache. Now we are talking really preserve, keep, protect, look after, and perhaps even hug this everyday product.

Clearly bread is for eating not preserving but Joe just couldn’t help it. Something deep inside told him he had to preserve a loaf of bread.

It began suddenly one fine spring morning. Having bought a delicious fresh loaf of bread from a fine baker on the village high street, Joe had this feeling that this might just be his last loaf. It was quite a surprise but it gripped him like an attack of cramp. Maybe, just maybe, this loaf was the last of its kind.

Joe was overcome with a profound sense of duty to protect this oblong cob, this last loaf. Like some great turning of the tide it was inevitable. He had to do it. And yet there was a quandary. The desire to protect was powerful, dutiful; noble even, and yet hunger was still the reason he bought the loaf. Part of Joe still wanted to eat a slice or two with peanut butter and jam. This was, after all, a very fine loaf; a loaf designed to be eaten with peanut butter. And here it was, in his hand, at it’s very best. Goodness soft enough to squeeze between the fingers and yet with firmness that only the crispest of crusts could support. It even had the warm smell that first danced across his nostrils when he entered the bakery and was about to infuse his clothes and the deepest recesses of his Nissan pulsar.

Perhaps if I was frugal, Joe thought, I could eat just one slice a day and the loaf would last a couple of weeks. This seemed to Joe like a reasonable plan. It would work fine for Monday and Tuesday, a bit hard on Wednesday, probably pretty stale by Thursday and altogether too risky to his health by next week. No problem. What, after all, were freezers made for? A freezer was the perfect repository to preserve a loaf of bread. So, our man, being smart, decided that he could pre-slice his loaf and put it into his freezer so that his tactic of frugality could be implemented without risk to his digestive system. Sure enough, the loaf would last for a couple of weeks.

Defrosting a pre-sliced frozen loaf is not quite the same as cutting a doorstop fresh from the cob. You miss the pleasure of rasping the blade across a crisp crust that still holds with affection the amazing soft centre, all set off with an aroma that just makes the mouth water and the lips say more please. To pre-slice and freeze was a compromise, yet this loss of quality was acceptable to Joe. For all he had to do was retrieve a slice from the freezer, thaw for a few minutes at room temperature, apply the spreads, and eat.

This was it, a logical solution. Yet it left Joe with a feeling that maybe this was not satisfactory. After a week or so the loaf is finished. No more loaf. If this really was the last loaf ever, then surely there was something better he could do than to eat it. There should be some record of it as the last ever. Something to remember it by, a gravestone perhaps, or something subtler rather like the depressions in the cushion of grandmas favorite armchair. Perhaps the paper bag wrapper that the kept the loaf clean in transit and moist for its natural life could be framed and hung in a local museum.

Joe fumbled for options. Then in a surprising moment of clarity, it came to him. What if, he imagined, I preserved the loaf indefinitely? A big grin lit up his face. What an idea. I am a walking genius! he said to nobody within earshot.

The frozen option would do pretty well so long as the freezer worked and the power stayed on the loaf would indeed keep indefinitely. Sure, another food source would have to be found, and luckily there were some handy rice crackers in the cupboard. You know, the ones that line the calorie counting shelves of the supermarket and taste like cardboard. But this was a small price to pay for preservation permanence.

Joe made a decision. He must get serious about this cryogenic method and if he did, if he took a few precautions, he could indeed keep his loaf for what he thought would be forever.

So he bought a second freezer as backup in case the first one broke down and installed an alarm system to tell him if this happened. At the hardware store he bought an uninterrupted power supply system and, in case the power went off, the most expensive portable generator they had. Two Terry cans of petrol for the generator were stored safely in his garage. He toyed for days with the idea of buying a gas freezer just in case. In the end he just had to get one to stop the worry.

Fearful of risk from natural disaster, he moved his new preservation setup into a shed that he had built in his yard. Made out of brick and clad with the latest fire retardant, it was a very solid structure that included the latest in surveillance cameras, a digital alarm, an anti-tamper system and all the power backups for the electronics. Standing at the top of his yard, staring with admiration at his museum, Joe figured he had the bases covered.

A mate of his who was a risk assessor for an insurance company agreed. So barring acts of god or terrorism, his loaf was secure. Joe had made it safe and our man was pleased with his work. He could not, of course, eat the loaf, having gone to so much trouble to keep it, but