Me and My Planet

It was the morning of my tenth birthday. My dad and I had tickets to see the Phillies host the Astros at Connie Mack Stadium. But outside it was pouring, a typical late August thunderstorm in south-central Pennsylvania. I’d been waiting for this game all summer and it was hard to hold back my disappointment. Being the soft hearted and generous soul he was, my father agreed to make the three-hour roundtrip to Philadelphia regardless of the storm.

We arrived at the ancient ballpark in time for the first pitch, the sun now blasting through the clouds. Except for a few thousand other hard core fans, we had the stadium to ourselves. Connie Mack was originally known as Shibe Park and opened in 1909 as the home of the Philadelphia Athletics. It had a nostalgic vibe with wooden seats and bleachers and ornamental wrought iron posts, the kind of place that came of age when Rogers Hornsby and Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb were stars. Connie Mack Stadium reached its glory (and highest single day turnout) when Jackie Robinson made his debut in a double header between the Phillies and the Brooklyn Dodgers on May 11, 1947.

The Phillies won that rainy August Sunday and I can say with over 50 years of experience that being a Phillies fan is like having malaria. It stays in your blood for life and at some point every summer you get sick.

Playing baseball was a big part of my identity growing up. Despite severe hay fever I loved the baseball season. Waiting for the pre-season to begin, the chance to play two games a week, the uniform, the crack of wooden and aluminum bats, the snack shop with snow cones and bubble gum and extra treats when we won. I even loved baseball as a catcher wearing all that extra gear in 98 degree weather with 100 percent humidity. To feed my passion I invented my own fantasy league long before anything like that ever existed, using a baseball card game and dice and meticulous score keeping.

The fields were in an industrial area of town. The grass was mowed regularly and the foul lines and batter’s box laid down with fresh lime before every game. There were dugouts made of cinder blocks and painted plywood advertisements on the outfield fences and an electronic scoreboard and an announcer. It was all serious business, which didn’t thrill my dad. He thought we kids should just be thrown in a pit with balls, bats and gloves and encouraged to make up our own rules. Sometimes my grandparents would come to watch. My Dad’s dad, Howard, had white hair and a white goatee and the kids would say, “Hey look, Colonel Sanders is here!” That was my grandpa.

For many years I was a very good player for my age and I think that had to do with my eyesight. When I was ten I hit a double off of Bob Fox who was two years older than me and really intimidating. I ripped a fastball off one of the wooden advertising plaques in center field. I must have been gloating because the next time I came up Bob Fox drilled me in the ribs, which left a bruise for about a week. Still, that double was worth it and foreshadowed the hitter I would become.

I remained an All Star for a number of years. My eyesight changed drastically between my twelfth and thirteenth years. I’ve worn prescription glasses ever since. That made catching harder and curtailed my peripheral vision.

The summer after eighth grade my parents agreed to send me to Mickey Owens Baseball Camp in Miller, Missouri. This was a huge deal. It meant flying on my own to St. Louis and venturing out in the world for the first time away from my family. I met kids from all over the country, including Carl from San Diego who had also just completed eighth grade. He had blond hair and talked like a surfer and his favorite expression was “Alrighty then!” Carl regaled me with stories about nickel bags of marijuana and one of his friends who had gotten his girlfriend pregnant in junior high school. That was a real eye opener. They grew up much faster on the West Coast.

The counselors were athletes who were trying to become pros. They timed our speed between home plate and first base with a stop watch. We had sessions on hitting, fielding, pitching and catching, the ins and outs of sliding. It was all baseball all the time. We played three games per day until the oppressive midwestern sun went down. I was still catching and wearing all that gear but I would soon transition to the outfield. I think it was around this time I began to realize that I might not have what it takes to be a professional baseball player. For a very select few baseball is a field of dreams. For others it’s where childhood dreams die.

I had promised my dad I would try out for the high school football team in return for sponsoring the trip to Missouri. I did try out but got injured very quickly. It wasn’t easy to start football in high school without having played formally at a younger age. I played baseball until my junior year. When I didn’t cut my hair high enough above my collar, I was cut from the team by coach Bushy. He was determined to weed out the Freaks from the Jocks. Somewhere along the line I had lost my competitive drive. Almost immediately I started playing guitar and studying ceramics and experimenting with drugs and alcohol and living closer to the life my San Diego friend Carl had described years earlier in the cabin at baseball camp.

To this day I spend way too much time following the malaria stricken Phillies. For many people it’s way too slow and much more of a game than a sport. I marvel at its innate brilliance, the hundred-mile per hour fastballs, the probability (and improbability) of a catcher throwing out someone trying to steal second base, the home runs and sacrifices and double plays, and just how hard it is to close out a game with a small lead. The one thing I can’t understand is the spitting. Why do they have to spit so much?

I’m offended when I hear someone say that so and so “sucks” when talking about a professional ball player. It’s so difficult to play baseball at the highest level, even though some days watching the pros feels like you’re at a Little League game. To be in that rarified company of people who make their living at a kid’s game is such an extraordinary accomplishment.

I am thinking in particular about a current Phillies player named Mark Appel. He was a high school star from California who went to Stanford and was selected number 1 in the Major League Draft by the Houston Astros. Then he went through a decade of setbacks — mental anxieties, injuries and illnesses. For years he carried the burden of being “the biggest Number 1 draft bust in the history of baseball.” He even stepped away from the game for a time.

Finally, this season, at the age of 30, Mark Appel walked onto the field at Citizen’s Bank in a Phillies uniform. It brought him to tears. In a recent article in the New York Times, after finally achieving his dream of playing on a major league field, Appel said:

“I came into this year knowing each day might be my last. Genuinely I was at a point where I was still trying to figure out what my role was — reliever, starter — do I still have it in me to put up good numbers, things like that. So if each day was going to be my last, I’m going to enjoy it. And I really enjoyed tonight.”*

These are words spoken from the deep well of the human spirit, which, more often than you may realize, finds its way onto a baseball field.

Now if we could only move beyond the spitting.

* “If Each Day Was Going to be My Last, I’m Going to Enjoy It,” New York Times, Victor Mather, June 30, 2022.

Photo: York Dispatch, Summer 1971, (middle row, second from left).

©2022, Dan Imhoff. All rights reserved.

A number of years ago I found myself in northern Argentina being chased through a grassland by a giant anteater. It was a large mammal with a tapered snout and nails on its front paws like curly fries. In Spanish he’s known as oso hormiguero gigante.  He (I believe it was a male) had been radio-collared and reintroduced in an area of wetlands called the Esteros of Iberrá in the province of Corrientes.

My guide was a veterinarian from Europe working with Tompkins Conservation, now known as Rewilding Argentina. She carried a hand-held tracking device that looked like a small satellite dish. What the oso hormiguero really wanted was one of the milkshakes the recovery team had been occasionally feeding him since his release to the wild. This afternoon we didn’t have one. Hence our dash through the overhead reeds once we’d spotted him from a safe distance. This was a surprisingly agile animal who really wanted his milkshake. My heart was literally beating out of my chest with both fear and excitement.

If you’ve ever seen ant hills in northern Argentina you can understand why someone might want to reintroduce a giant anteater. The ant colonies are unlike any I have ever seen. They move in caravans carrying blades of grass and other materials three times their body length, basically carving inch-wide super highways out of the grasslands. Their ant hills are equivalent to skyscrapers, maybe bigger than ours on a relative scale, about chest high to a human and made of red clay that bakes like adobe. You need a tractor to knock them down and they can cover acres of land. Giant anteaters have thin straw-like tongues and eat ants and termites. They are also endemic to this grassland habitat.

Rewilding is a concept that has been around for many decades. The team at Rewilding Argentina refers to this work as restoring a landscape to “Full Nature.” They are master puzzle solvers who study how ecosystems have been torn apart and then find ways to restore habitats and species and communities to some semblance of natural balance. This idea is gaining interest all over the world. Integral to these efforts are species reintroduction projects on every continent: tigers in India, lynx in Spain, wild horses and donkeys (Kulan) in the Ukraine, wolves in North America, beavers in England, jaguars in Argentina, various marsupials in Australia, large animals in southern Africa. This is an extremely abbreviated list.

We recently spent two days in an auditorium listening to speakers at the First Global Meeting of Translocation Practitioners in Valencia, Spain. The conference was organized by Ignacio Jimenez, who has worked for decades to save endangered animals and spearheaded the giant anteater (and other species) reintroductions for Rewilding Argentina. It took place in the Oceanogràfic, an aquarium complex that is part of the Ciudad de las Artes y Ciencias in the city’s old river bed. The backdrop of the stage was the glass wall of an aquarium. Speakers from around the world recounted their tales of relocating wild animals to protected landscapes. Behind the speakers was an ever evolving scene of swimming and twirling and gliding fish and sharks. 

Their stories were the stories of the heroic struggle to reverse the extinction crisis. We heard in great detail about their trials and tribulations, successes and failures. All kinds of factors can derail reintroduction efforts: diseases that affect prey and move up the food chain; hostile communities who poison or hunt wolves and tigers; years of successful gains wiped out by drought; the hybridization of wild animals with other species (red wolves mating with coyotes, for example); bureaucratic road blocks.

One of the presenter’s slides was deeply alarming. At the dawn of the human era, 99 percent of the weight of the Earth’s vertebrates and landmass consisted of and supported what we today call wildlife. Out of the wild came domestication. Most of the species that didn’t suit human needs for food, fiber, traction, companionship, indulgences or our sense of security were exterminated or driven to increasingly remote places. Today livestock account for two-thirds of the Earth’s vertebrates and landmass and humans about one-third. Wildlife are down to 1 percent.

The speakers highlighted many lessons learned about Rewilding over the last four decades:

• much of the work is political rather than biological in nature;
• stories matter more than data;
• people are threatened by the concept of rewilding — especially of large carnivores;
• talking about community- and nature-based economies is far more relatable than “rewilding”;
• there is a bias that farming, ranching, forestry or development are economically superior to land conservation;
• biologists are becoming more flexible (and less purist) about the introduction of species from other regions, countries and even continents;
• zoos may become important sources of species genetics through captive breeding programs;
• the true measure of success for a rewilding effort is the ability to translocate “surplus” populations to other areas;
• you can never be too complacent, challenges are always right around the corner.

It’s difficult to hear that restoring the beauty of the natural world is not a compelling enough reason for communities and governments to get behind rewilding efforts. Yet this is what we heard over and over for two days. Local communities must become partners in these projects and they must see that the economic benefits will outweigh the risks.

The good news is that Rewilding is extremely effective at job creation. Meanwhile, agricultural areas around the world are being dewatered, depopulated, poisoned and are dependent upon billions of dollars of government support. Many conservationists have learned that, in addition to identifying and preparing animals for relocation, their main challenge is political. Communities need to understand the natural legacies they have lost. New businesses can be incentivized. And politicians sometimes must be allowed to take the credit once all the work is done. 

While Argentina is a relative newcomer to the rewilding movement, South Africa has been at it for decades. Wildlife protection has been monetized on a variety of levels. They have developed an infrastructure of helicopters and other equipment to transport elephants, rhinos, cheetahs, and other very large animals across countries and continents. Conservation organizations and government agencies have invested considerable resources in defending themselves and wildlife against well-armed and sophisticated poaching operations. Most of the conference presenters acknowledged the enormous contributions of the South African conservationists. 

There is a sane vision for the future: nature-based economies centered around resilient rural communities, eco tourism and creating the most biodiverse landscapes we can imagine.

Say whatever needs to be said to rewild hearts and minds. Release whatever you can. Save whatever you can. Don’t hesitate. And offer a prayer for the conservation translocation practitioners. Their work is beyond inspiring.

Photo: Oso hormiguero gigante (notice its tongue!), Jackie Russell, DVM

©2022, Dan Imhoff. All Rights Reserved.