Tag: cindy

Nature Profile: Women and the Woods

  • (L to R) Lorin Waxman, Cindy Waxman, Pamela Waxman, Bonnie Waxman, on their back deck. (Photo courtesy of Pamela Waxman)

Fairy tales and slasher films suggest that
the woods can be a scary place. It’s a place where
someone or some thing could hurt us. In our
occasional series about people’s connections to
the environment, Kyle Norris talks to one woman
who has every reason to fear the woods, but has
come to reject that notion:

Transcript

Fairy tales and slasher films suggest that
the woods can be a scary place. It’s a place where
someone or some thing could hurt us. In our
occasional series about people’s connections to
the environment, Kyle Norris talks to one woman
who has every reason to fear the woods, but has
come to reject that notion:


Pamela Waxman spends every minute of her free time hiking,
camping, and backpacking through the woods. And when she’s
in the woods she smiles a lot. And talks slower and a little
easier than when she’s in her day-to-day life. She likes
exploring nature with other people. But she also enjoys going out
by herself, and she does a lot. And that really stresses-out her
parents.


“They’re worried that something’s going to happen to me,
something bad. That either I will be attacked or that I’ll break a
leg or something and there won’t be someone else to help me or to go for
help. They don’t want to lose me and they don’t want me to
suffer.”


For some people, there’s a great fear involved when women go
into the woods. Especially when women go into the woods alone. For Pamela’s
family, this concern is based in reality.


“Well, my sister was murdered out in nature attending to
something she loved. She was alone in a wooded area and
somebody attacked and killed her. So it’s easy to see a parallel
with me going out in woods and being alone in a wooded area.”


Pamela’s older sister, Cindy, was sexually assaulted and killed
in the woods near her home. She had just turned eleven. Pamela
was eight. It makes sense that Pamela may not enjoy being out in the woods, but that’s not what happened. Instead of avoiding the
woods, she embraced the woods:


“I do turn to nature as a place to be and it’s definitely linked to
fact that Cindy was murdered in sort of a wooded area in the
suburbs but still. I reject that. I’m not going to live that way.
I’m not willing to stay indoors and not go out because
someone might murder me in the woods. I don’t think that’s
rational. I don’t want to and will not live that way and I don’t
want to set the example for other people to do that.


“Like the first thing my parents did, like really soon after my sister
was killed was send me away to camp. Which seems totally ridiculous now, but… backpacking which I don’t think I’d ever done, backpacking, rock
climbing and repelling. Under the supervision of basically
a bunch of teenagers, 19-year-olds. For a week, in the High Sierras. Sounds insane. Was totally great. I’m so grateful they sent me because it would have been so easy to clamp down.
And be like no you’re staying with us so we can watch you.
But they didn’t so that. They sent me out into the woods.”


(Norris:) “Did nature help you heal from her death?”


“Oh, I don’t know. Have I healed from her death? Not really…”


But she keeps going back to nature. Today Pamela works at a teen
center. And she recently took a group of teenage girls on a
week-long camping trip. She said the girls would say things like
“I’m afraid of the dark,” or “the woods are creepy”:


“There’s a lot of fear. I think it’s an internalized fear about
violence, rape. I never hear, then they feel it and repress it, but I
never hear boys and men say that they’re afraid to be out in
nature.”


So helping young women feel safer and more comfortable in
nature has become one of Pamela’s personal goals. Pamela says
that nature has taught her about survival. It’s taught her about being normal. And
being fine.


For the Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

Polars Bearing Weight of Global Warming

  • These polar bears lives at the Pittsburgh zoo where food is plentiful. In the wild, however, global warming might be making it harder for the bears to find food. (Photo by Reid Frazier)

If global warming is represented by one symbol, it
might be the polar bear. It’s an icon of the North
Polar region. Now, federal biologists have asked that
polar bears be listed as threatened under the Endangered
Species Act. They’re the first species to be considered
for protection because of global warming. Reid Frazier
reports that the polar bear might help connect the
abstract idea of global warming with the concrete
actions of people in their homes:

Transcript

If global warming is represented by one symbol, it
might be the polar bear. It’s an icon of the North
Polar region. Now, federal biologists have asked that
polar bears be listed as threatened under the Endangered
Species Act. They’re the first species to be considered
for protection because of global warming. Reid Frazier
reports that the polar bear might help connect the
abstract idea of global warming with the concrete
actions of people in their homes:


(Sound of kids talking to polar bears)


Parents and children gather around a large window to watch Nuka and
Koda frolick in the aqua water tank. The polar bears are having a
blast. They splash and dive, play with foam toys, and duck their heads
underwater to look around. The young brothers are only two-years-old
and already they weigh 600 pounds each. These bears, born and raised in
zoos, eat about 18 pounds of food a day. But, their cousins in the wild
are finding food much harder to come by these days.


Henry Kacprzyk is a curator at the Pittsburgh Zoo. He wants crowds to
know just how fragile the bears’ situation is. Walking along a
boardwalk near the exhibit, Kacprzyk points to a sign. It welcomes
visitors to “Piertown,” a replica village designed to resemble a
growing Alaska fishing town:


“The thing to note here is the human population has increased from 110
to 1,712, on the other side the bear population has declined, from 1,784
to 368, which, the message there is, as humans increase in population in some
of the bears’ habitat, the bears go down. It’s a sad but true fact.”


The situation for the world’s 25,000 polar bears is increasingly dire.
Besides people crowding them out, overfishing has depleted arctic
waters of fish for seals to eat, and seals are the bears’ main source
of food.


But here’s the biggest problem: the polar ice cap is melting. That’s
depriving the bears of a main hunting ground. The vast majority of
scientists attribute this to global warming. They say the warming is
caused by a buildup in the atmosphere of greenhouse gases from burning
fossil fuels.


Scott Schliebe is a biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service. His
team recommended polar bears be added to the protected list because
they’re losing their habitat. Schliebe says the bears need sea ice to
hunt seals. No sea ice means no food for the bears:


“They will wait at a breathing hole for a seal and wait until the seal comes up
and then catch the seal. They’re not effective at hunting seals in open
water, seals have the severe advantage of being able to outpace the polar bears in that environment.”


In areas with receding ice, polar bears are already hurting. Scientists
see the world’s polar bear population shrinking by a third in the next
50 years.


Back at the Pittsburgh zoo, the polar bears are a big hit with
visitors. They helped the zoo break an attendance record last year.
Curator Henry Kacprzyk hopes visitors tie their own behavior with the
plight of the arctic:


“It’s sometimes little things, as a general family, for instance, what you
can do is conservation of fuel and energy, keeping your lights off,
maybe living closer to work is a great idea. By choosing conservation
you can make a difference.”


The bears are popular with Cindy Jagielski, who’s visiting the zoo with
her small grandchild. Jagielski’s worried the bears will one day become
extinct but she admits she doesn’t know much about global warming:


“Maybe it’s just the Earth’s changing. I don’t know that industry has
anything to do with the melting of the ice there. Maybe it’s just a
natural occurrence.”


Despite some lingering doubts over what causes global warming,
polar bears are a popular cause. The Fish and Wildlife Service has
already received 40,000 emailed comments since it proposed protecting
the species. The Service will make its final decision on protecting
polar bears by next January.


For the Environment Report, this is Reid Frazier.

Related Links