Trauma Specialist Offers Ospreys As ‘Gateway Drug’ to Nature

 

BookShelf: Trauma Specialist Offers Ospreys As ‘Gateway Drug’ to Nature

“My Summer With Ospreys: A Therapist’s Journey Toward Hope, Community, and Healing Our Planet”
By Pamela Lowell
Stillwater River Publications, $35.00

Reviewed by Tom Henry

Here’s one of the big-picture lessons to be learned from Pamela Lowell’s “My Summer With Ospreys: A Therapist’s Journey Toward Hope, Community, and Healing Our Planet”: A lot of people can show their passion for the environment without sticking their noses to the grindstone and digging up statistics or culling through heavy databases.

In fact, I don’t recall many statistics or much top-heavy science in Lowell’s book at all. If you want reams of data, look elsewhere.

What Lowell has written is a breezy, loose narrative based around several months of weekly monitoring of ospreys and eventually banding them with the Massachusetts Audubon Society along the Westport River.

Instead of trying to write in the voice of a hardcore wildlife biologist, which she’s not, Lowell does some journaling and presents readers with an easygoing book that reads much more like a memoir than groundbreaking news about ospreys.

Her thoughts meander to and from the osprey nests to include a lot of insight about her life, much of it in a lighthearted tone that can be distracting at times yet a good read for the layman.

Ospreys are the focus, though not often enough. At times, they seem more like a backdrop. But, as an avid birder, she uses them to help explain other environmental issues, such as climate change and the growing, ubiquitous dangers of plastic pollution.

 

An artistic dimension, and a therapeutic one too

Lowell’s book — her fourth — is noteworthy, too, in terms of perspective.

She is both a watercolor artist and a trauma specialist, the latter for nearly four decades in private practice. She also has served as a consultant and clinical director providing training and supervision for a minority-operated, not-for-profit residential treatment program in Providence, R.I.

 

As a mental health counselor,

she applies her perspective to

what she has encountered

with the environment.

 

As an artist, she adds a new dimension in this book— and a different form of communication — sharing watercolors she has painted of ospreys and other scenes. And as a mental health counselor, she applies her perspective to what she has encountered with the environment, including an upbeat prescription for collectively trying to get people to make more progress on climate change.

“I guess we don’t know, any of us, what will eventually happen with the fate of our planet, either. That’s the scary part,” she writes near the end of her book, referring to the planet as Mother Earth. “We don’t actually know how it will end, but we do know that the earth and all its creatures are suffering now from a trauma of our own human making. I think it’s up to us, all of us, to help treat her.”

 

Ospreys a portal to less understood nature

Lowell offers a lot of insight and empathy for other animals. But as for ospreys, she almost seems to have a personal connection to some of them.

Midway through her book, she writes about how ospreys tend to be social birds. “Fledgling, adolescent Ospreys, when first learning to fly, often visit other nests in a colony, sometimes many times a day, before returning home, kind of like teenagers hanging out with their friends,” Lowell notes.

She also explains that a researcher she admires has given her a “writer’s pass” after warning of the dangers of anthropomorphizing wild animals too much.

 

Ospreys ‘can serve as a

gateway animal to caring about

wildlife and the environment.’

                       — Pamela Lowell

 

“We don’t need more Osprey researchers,” Lowell recalls being told during one conversation. “Ospreys are among the most researched birds in the world. But if Ospreys can be a portal for everyday people to be interested and concerned about less understood parts of nature and habitats, well then, the imperiled Saltmarsh Sparrow, the Least Tern, and the Willet, all vulnerable to sea level changes, might benefit.”

And that, in the big picture, is one of the lessons of this book, how ospreys, as Lowell writes, “can serve as a gateway animal to caring about wildlife and the environment.”

In that sentence, Lowell has captured the unique perspective she brings as a watercolor artist and trauma therapist to the nonexpert who has an appetite for environmental knowledge, waiting to be whetted.

In other words, meet people where they are. Fundamentally, that is why journalists try their best to decipher dense scientific gobbledygook for the layman, anyway.

Tom Henry is SEJournal’s BookShelf editor and a former board member for the Society of Environmental Journalists who created The (Toledo) Blade’s environment beat in 1993. His last review was of “My Life With Sea Turtles: A Marine Biologist’s Quest To Protect One of the Most Ancient Animals on Earth.”

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 10, No. 1. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.