“You have to know how to see what’s here.”
It’s not an exact quote, but when I was studying economics in the late 70s, a friend of mine in the program said something like this to me one day as we were driving I-95 between West Palm Beach and Boca Raton, and he began pointing things out—old neighborhoods, new developments, business districts, malls—and talking about economic geography, location theory, the study of how villages, towns, cities, and the economic activities that occur within them, come to be located where they are on a landscape.
In early 2008, I was asked to have the Zen Center of Los Angeles certified as a wildlife habitat, something that several of our members had done for their backyards. On the website of the National Wildlife Federation there is a questionnaire one can fill out indicating which features your place offers for the support of wildlife. The basic categories are food, water, shelter, and places to raise young, and within each of these the questionnaire lists the kinds of things a place might have that would provide these ecosystem services. If enough of them are present, NWF will add your place to their registry of wildlife habitats and send you a plaque.
This certification program serves to identify habitat and encourage its maintenance, wherever the necessary elements are found or can be created, whether it be a farm, a neighborhood park, a backyard, or an apartment balcony. Living in the midst of a vast city, with so much of our daily life devoted to interacting with each other and immersed in the myriad artifacts of our civilization, it becomes too easy a habit of mind to perceive only the human realm, and so difficult to recognize even a backyard for all that it actually is.
So I printed out the questionnaire and began to walk the grounds, noting as I went how this thing or that one fit into one or another of their categories. It was a wonderful experience. It allowed me to see my surroundings, things I passed by every day, in a new way.
As I filled out their form, checking off those items that apply to us, I suddenly realized that it wasn’t simply requesting information. Our plants provide food in the form of seeds, berries and fruit, nectar and pollen, leaves and sap. We have sources of water: the Sangha House fountain and the Buddha Hall’s small stone bird bath. The trees and stands of bamboo, areas of dense shrubbery, even the log pile in the Kanzeon garden and the rock pile in a corner of the resident’s parking lot, provided shelter for all kinds of creatures. Going down the list, looking for what matched, was shifting my awareness of what’s present here, allowing me to see it.
On Sunday June 22, 2008, ZCLA held a ceremony to bless our grounds as a wildlife habitat, in appreciation and support of their service in providing food, water, and shelter to local and migrating wildlife. Our newly recognized role as habitat was presented to the Sangha. Roshi Egyoku offered a blessing. Together we read a passage from Dogen Zenji’s “Mountains and Rivers Sutra,” and we walked in kinhin through the grounds, looking around, seeing, appreciating what’s here.
A couple of years ago, I began to notice how some of the items I had checked on that list had gone away. They were removed, for whatever reason, and I hadn’t seen them leaving. In some cases these were things not meant to last, like a huge pile of cut grass, partly covered with a tarp, that for some reason had sat behind the Pine House for weeks. In other cases, they were overgrown places that provided shelter to birds and insects, but they weren’t like that for that purpose, so they were later cut back or cleared out, made neat and uncluttered.
It’s not that we’re no longer a habitat—all the elements are still here, and some new things have been created, such as a wonderful butterfly garden—but having finally noticed, I found myself missing some of the old things, despite the fact that a habitat, even without our activity, is never a static place. It made me realize that my ability to see what’s here is something that fades unless I consciously cultivate and renew it.
Our plaque from NWF is located at the edge of the Jizo garden just west of the Zendo. It reads:
National Wildlife Federation
Certified Wildlife Habitat
This property provides the four basic
habitat elements needed for wildlife
to thrive: food, water, cover,
and places to raise young.
The National Wildlife Federation’s habitat certification program is found at www.nwf.org/CertifiedWildlifeHabitat.