The real ghosts of Pennsylvania

Halloween (or All Hallows’ Eve) has become a largely secular holiday, known mostly now for an excess of candy, costumes, and scary movies. In Christian liturgical traditions, though, it precedes the Feast of All Saints, a time to remember those who have died but live on in memory.

Imagine if we remembered the spirits of the animals, plants, birds, and insects we have eradicated with the same fondness and intensity.

“Even recent memory can be ghostly,” said Lisa Williams, the wildlife biologist who is chief of wildlife diversity for the Pennsylvania Natural Heritage Program.

If I am fortunate enough to be walking there at the right time, I can sometimes see an eagle soaring across the water of Marsh Creek Lake in Chester County. Back in 1983, when the Pennsylvania Game Commission had to import eaglets from Saskatchewan, Canada, in its attempt to restore the population, Williams reminds me, there were only three nesting pairs in the whole state. There are now more than 300 nests across the state.

It is easy, comforting, and perhaps natural to focus on the beauty and mystery of what we see around us. But just because we see a migratory bird now doesn’t mean it will be here in 50 years — or even 10, as I discovered in a World Wildlife Fund analysis, which indicates that global wildlife populations fell a shocking 73% between 1970 and 2020.

Habitat loss, degradation, and overharvesting due to our interconnected food system are the primary threats to global wildlife populations, according to the WWF.

Williams is currently working on restoring the Allegheny woodrat, a creature that lives nowhere else on Earth except in the Appalachian Mountains, she said. The loss of woodrat habitat can be traced, in part, to the decline of the American chestnut tree in the early 20th century.

“Perhaps more than any other species, this tree helped people survive and settle on the land,” Williams told me. “Data shows that each generation sees what’s around them as normal and has little awareness of the losses and gains — and how those changes felt to our forebearers,” she added. “The memory of the wild lands and wildlife that our grandparents saw as kids has ghosted away from us.”

The list of what we are no longer seeing in Southeastern Pennsylvania is sobering, a reminder that humans continue to shape the natural environment, sometimes at the cost of the creatures who share our world.

Bounties for killing the eastern wolf started in the late 17th century and persisted until the animal disappeared, sometime in the late 19th century. Eastern mountain lion carcasses also reaped rewards. The last fisher was killed (as a chicken thief) just north of Bird-in-Hand, Lancaster County, according to Williams, and the beaver was gone by the early 1900s (though the Pennsylvania legislature quickly passed a law to protect them).

“The memory of the wild lands and wildlife that our grandparents saw as kids has ghosted away from us.”

Consider the Carolina parakeet. Native to Southeastern Pennsylvania, it was extinct by the 1930s, the last known individuals (Lady Jane and her mate, Incas) dying in a zoo in 1918. They were targeted by hunters, their habitats devastated by deforestation, said Williams, as was the heath hen, which went extinct when Booming Ben, the last male, died around 1932.

The lost species that moves Williams almost to tears is the passenger pigeon. Like chestnut trees, wiped out throughout their range by the 1950s, people thought passenger pigeons would be around forever until they weren’t.

There is a staggering amount of work still to be done — and the odds of saving most global species seem debatable at best. Within decades (in geological time, less than the blink of an eye), around one million species are at risk of extinction.

At the same time, a lively local conservation movement, birthed in large part by hunters and anglers, now under state supervision, has been instrumental in sparking the recovery of species on the brink.

That includes beavers (reintroduced to Pennsylvania in 1917), white-tailed deer (brought in from seven different states starting in 1917), elk, wild turkeys, osprey, peregrine falcons, otters, and fishers, Williams said.

Older generations looking at the biodiversity crisis, coupled and entwined with the staggering impacts of climate change, know these challenges can’t be complacently left to future generations to solve. Still, they can take inspiration from the ways in which many colleges and universities are meeting increased demand for courses and degrees focused on sustainability and the environmental sciences.

The popularity of a cross-divisional minor in sustainability studies at Villanova University is growing rapidly, said Francis A. Galgano, the geography professor who directs the program. He noted that his department, which also has a geography and environmental science major, has a total of almost 200 student majors.

For Villanova’s chief sustainability officer, Augustinian priest John Abubakar, faith adds another dimension to the science. “The intellect has to be there, but also the heart has to be converted.”

Abubakar, who hails from Nigeria, said that many non-Christian, less individualistic cultures have a strong sense of connection with the natural world. “We don’t have an American, or a Nigerian, or a Mexican sky,” he said. “We have one in common. It shows how interdependent we are.”

The big picture can look bleak at times, but there are many ways in which individuals can have a positive impact, Williams said. Avoid rodenticides, which can travel up the food chain, poisoning the animals who eat them. Keep bird-killing cats indoors (which is safer for the cat, as well). Retrofit your windows with bird-resistant glass. Participate in the Lights Out program, designed to save migrating birds.

In this time of spirits and saints, Williams has a plea for all of us: “Look around you. What might be ghosting away from us now? What opportunities are there to restore species we’ve lost to time?”

Open your eyes, and see what can still be seen.

As fall shades toward winter, it is the season in which we mark not only the uncanny specters that haunt our dreams but the lives of the saints who have gone on before us. If nothing else, our increased awareness of how much human beings depend on a complex web of life on this planet might humble us into recognizing that not all saints walk on two legs.

Elizabeth Eisenstadt Evans is a freelance journalist in Chester County. Her writing has appeared in Religion News Service, the National Catholic Reporter, Sojourners, Christian Century, the Washington Post, and The Inquirer.