Friday, October 26, 2007

What are we giving Thanks for

Hello all!

Some givens about Thanksgiving are:
1. it is the number one travel holiday in the year,
2. it is centered around food,
3. it is a celebration of working together with people who may have very different ideas

First I'll address number three. I don't know if the story of thanksgiving they taught me in kindergarten is actually true, but it is a nice story. I'd like to give it a little context however. This information is coming from personal research that I did when I was studying for an ecology paper last year, and I won't be quoting directly, but the info is out there. Changes in the Land by William Cronon is one of my sources as well as multiple papers about settlement, and land use practices of settlers and natives on the East Coast. Also my brilliant professors, Clow and Moore.

When the white people came, they had a totally different world view from the natives. They differed especially on their views of ownership and property, in other words they had conflicting territorial customs. To the whites, the natives appeared to have no sense of ownership. They traveled great distances, moved their homes, and they were often absent from a plot of land that they considered to be theirs. You can understand how this observable behavior would appear to the whites as a lack of ownership, but in fact the natives had a very specific system of territoriality. It was more common for natives to percieve their ownership as a right to specific activities in specific areas, rather than complete dominion over specific areas. This meant that when a native sold hunting land in exchange for guns, maybe the deal was meant to be the sale of hunting rights on that area, and then the white guy cleared a field and built a house there. Not to say that's wrong, but the christian view of land ownership at the time and especially among settlers is that "thou hast no right to land lest it be duly improved by works of man." or however they said it. In other words it was the settler's duty to work hard, clear fields, build fences and raise cows. It was the honorable and christian thing to do.

This is because europeans seem to have a strange and relatively unique idea of a binary world. "It's mine completely or it's not at all". This is what gives western culture the idea of epics and tragedies because there is good versus evil, but in a native culture you see more trickster stories. Our tragedy as opposed to their comedy. The creator is the trickster is the fool is the bringer of fire is the animal is the spirit and so on. This worldview is more of a network than a binary. Perhaps the network is made of many binaries, but it is still very different. For the natives, the gift of food and the knowledge of how to grow it could have had a very different meaning than it did for the settlers who recieved it.

In the light of this interesting difference in worldview, it is possible that at that time, the natives were trying to figure out how these new bearded men and cloth covered women would fit into their network of spiritual and physical relationships, while the white people were trying to figure out how to defeat the savages. I like the idea of the first thanksgiving. Because that was before American civilization really screwed up.

It is highly possible that the white people could at that point have simply become another tribe in the network of American tribes. making treaties, owning land, fighting wars like all the rest. Instead we have conquered the continent and subjugated the people who owned it. I believe that it is pertinent to be thankful for the gift of survival in this new world. And it should certainly not be forgotten that this gift was in part given willingly by the natives and in part taken from them by force. I wonder if there was ever a wigwam on the spot where my house is now standing...

OK, now as for travel, I don't know what the grand solution to this is. Well, you'll probably save money if you ride the bus. I rode it from Vermont to Montana. 3920 miles all told and it was about 109 bucks. I packed my food in advance and only spent my first dollar on the road on day three when I wanted some nachos or something. But also I got to speak spanish on the bus and met great people, so consider it. It really wasn't that inconvenient either. You don't have to drive, its comfortable and that's all I have to say about that. Other than that the best alternative is staying home. Trains too, I guess. that sounds like fun.

Further more, when you eat on the road you often end up with no option but fast food that's unhealthy for you and the environment. Fast food is usually so cheap because it gets its ingredients from the lowest bidder and therefore lowest quality and farthest distances. Bringing your own food from home will be even cheaper and then you can choose what you really want, and that choice can include local food and low packaging and other good things like that.

This is amazing

http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071023/NEWS01/710230355

This is a link to an article about Will Forest and his Ebay stunt to show his dissapproval of the way The Yanks treated Joe Torre. I think its awesome. Will is my friend Spencer's Dad who lives in Montpelier where I grew up. I have always known him as a yankees fan and a great guy in general, he owned and operated a batting cage house in Vermont for a couple of years and we used to love going there and hitting balls and practicing pitching. Once my friend John threw a pitch that was so far off it went past all the idiot proof panelling around the pitching mound and punctured the insulation of the wall and got lodged inside the building! But Will's batting cage is only further proof of his devotion to baseball.

Well, Will decided to sell his loyalty to the team on Ebay and the winning bidder will choose his new favorite team. I love it. I like the way it demonstrates critical thinking rather than blind trust. He questions his favorite team just like its okay to question your government or your teachers, or your parents if they do things you don't agree with.

No New Coal

James Hansen is a scientist of great merit who has worked for NASA for a long time. He is considered the top climate change scientist in the country and he first started making waves about it in the early 80's when he testified before congress about the problem of anthropogenic climate change.

But on Monday night, he was clear that he wasn't speaking as a government employee, but as a private citizen.

New things you'll learn from him that were NOT in the Inconvenient Truth

Hansen said the beginning of our current glacial cycle was fifty million years ago when India collided with Asia, causing the formation of the Himalayas. As the weathering of this newly exposed and uplifted rock occured at an alarming (geologic scale) rate, it quickly drained CO2 from the atmosphere and put it into solid forms that were deposited in stream channels and in the ocean.
At right around the same time, the swiss Alps were forming. The added weight of these mountains on the tectonic plate reduced the rate of subduction of the oceanic plate under the continental one. Imagine trying to slide one piece of paper under the other. It's pretty easy, until you push down on the top sheet with your hand. This pressure was the equivalent of the mountains (that's my interpretation, don't take my word for it.)

Prior to these tectonic events the CO2 concentrations were so high that the well known Milankovich cycles could not sway the earth far enough to cool its surface to below freezing temperatures, even at the poles. Which means there was no ice.

Thanks to the Himalayas and the Alps, that blanket of CO2 was reduced and the Milankovich cycles reached a new center point that was much colder. This allowed the formation of ice caps, as well as the periodic glacial advance/retreat.

So ice ages have only been going on for fifty million years.

So that was the scientific side of the post which I find obligatory and awesome, but notice that I saved the best for last which is to say, the social and political aspect of Hansen's talk.

The Global Warming movement has now focused in on the reduction of COAL fired power plants. Preceding the lecture by Hansen, there was a rally outside called No New Coal which was organized by David Merrill and friends to bring awareness to possible coal developments in Montana and the states in general and why they are a TERRIBLE idea that don't benefit the country.

According to my Tree Bio teacher, who is also a climate scientist who has been devoted to disseminating information on climate change science for the last five years, When COAL is burned it is about 30% efficient, meaning we get about a third of the energy that is stored in the coal, it also emits tons more CO2 than burning liquid fuel which yields 90% of its energy storage.


Coal is really bad. I am relieved that now the global warming effort has achieved a focus. No coal. Coal sucks. Also, research has been done to show that those employed by nonsustainable energy industries can be rapidly retrained and offered jobs in sustainable energy. This is something that is instrumental to David Merrill's vision.

Merrill is a local Missoulian who has worked tirelessly on the issue of global warming and he suggests in his "Rosie Revisited" presentation that if America mobilizes to solve Global warming like we mobilized to fight WWII, then "we can do it!" In those days, kids were bringing bacon grease to school so the army could make bombs, farmers were growing hemp to make parachutes, and people were scrapping their bumpers to make guns and ammo and airplanes.

And they were damn proud of it! If we had a leader that could mobilize the people like that We'd be in real good shape. It is NOT TOO LATE to solve global warming.

But we only have about Ten Years. SO it's crucial to communicate to leaders and let them know you want strong global warming legislation now.

Monday, October 22, 2007

Figures

The U.S. government spent 50,000 dollars to invent a pen that could write in zero gravity.

The Russians used pencils.

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Check it out.

I'm down with this guys opinion. He challenges the whole notion of voting at the cash register. The theory there is that if enough people support sustainable products then industry will wise up and start producing sustainable products. Well, this is in fact a very indirect way to get your point accross to companies.

This guy suggests the following alternative:
Vote with your damn Vote!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/opinion/21friedman.html?ex=1350619200&en=bb2f71f77b00632f&ei=5090&partner=

Select leaders based on good environmental views. His point is good and its a good story about large scale changes occuring due to political will. That doesn't mean you should give up on those swirly light bulbs and all that good stuff. At least not in my opinion. REDUCE REUSE RECYCLE still applies, but electing leaders who aren't evil, blood-sucking, anti-earth, manipulative, lilly-livered, yellow-bellied, tie-your-damsel- to-the-train-tracks, kind of guys then we'll have a better chance of getting somewhere.

VOTE DEMOCRAT in '08!

Vote Democrat, act Progressive. That's my policy.

Friday, October 19, 2007

Missoula Climate Change talk

Well I wanted to spread the word in case anyone from Missoula reads this blog. There will be a talk by Jim Hansen on Monday night at 8:00pm in the UC ballroom.

He is the premiere climate change scientist for NASA. so it oughta be a good time.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Biodiversity and the Rare

Why are rare life forms important? Because they make up more of the biodiversity than common life forms. In fact most species are rare.

Shaking a tree in the amazon knocks hundreds of beetle species into a net. Some of them will be new, previously undiscovered species. Shake the next tree and you'll keep getting undiscovered species. There's more hidden in the next tree too.

Each beetle holds a secret and unique life cycle with subtle differences from the rest, perhaps one of them synthesizes a molecule that cures cancer. Or it could be interesting enough to inspire great art that addresses the human condition. Or it could be so shiny that they'll crush it to make lip gloss... but even if this beetle has no value to humans at all it still has a right to exist doesn't it?

Well let's think about human diversity. Humans don't have true races so I'm not talking about racial diversity. We also don't have very much genetic variation, so I'm not talking about a vast store of DNA that needs to be preserved. What we have is language and culture. But those can go extinct too.

Roughly 42% of people speak the top twelve major languages as their first language. This is equivalent to 42% of a lawn being covered in dandelions. According to Ethnologue there are 6,912 living languages in the world. Ethnologue is a christian linguistic organization that has the mission of providing bibles in the native tongue of indigenous people.

Even if each language was spoken equally by the remaining 58% of the population that means each one is spoken by just over 500 people. But the truth is that some are only spoken by one. Dead languages walking, just like dead species walking.

Like the unique beetle, each of these languages and cultures is a different way to see the world. Maybe a chance for Human culture to reinvent itself.

Biodiversity in our hands

I am not talking about the parasites that might be in our hands, cause that's wierd and gross.

No I'm talking about human influence on biodiversity. Notice I said influence NOT impact. Because saying that humans reduce biodiversity, human presence is bad for the environment, or the world would be better without humans are all TOTAL MYTHS!

Take Crete.
Indigenous people there practicing agrarian livelihoods like goat, chestnut, and olive production in complex systems that they have mastered over hundreds if not thousands of generations, actually increase the biodiversity of the areas where they practice (Sievert, 2006) Two contrasting examples from the traditional land use of Crete are a Cretian National Park, and industrial olive plantations in Crete.

The traditional ag. of Crete can be considered a specialized regime of disturbances of various types, intensities, periodicities and scales. There are many species in Crete that are adapted to this regime, and without it they are incapable of living in their usual way. The grazing of goats and the picking of fruits and planting and burning that the Cretians practice are in fact a sort of ecological garden that they can subsist on, using most of its parts in some way. The goats grazing has caused adaptations in plants to grow low, to be thorny, or poisonous. In the shade of the chestnut trees there grow the medicinal and food plants that the Cretians use. And birds inhabit and pollinate the trees as well. Its a complex heterogenous system. Heterogeneity being a key factor for biodiversity it isn't surprising that this system leads to high diversity.

If this regime of disturbances is removed we see immediate changes. The park was made. The people were kicked out. Part of Crete grew into a forest. The plants that were suppressed by goat grazing could now reach the canopy and this shade resulted in the doom of many plants used to the exposed sun of the island. In this scenario the seed sources were vastly changed as not oaks have a much greater ability to reproduce for example. Now the park is subject to forest fires and the Greeks need to send their park managers to America to learn how to fight fires because they were not a typical disturbance present on the island before.

The other example is industrial olive production. Again the traditional means of living were disrupted, and everything changed. Pesticides and herbicides caused there to be straight rows of trees with bare soil between them. birds steer clear, insects are less common. Forget about those cool medicinal plants. Biodiversity goes down.

I guess it isn't people that reduce biodiversity... Its stupid greedy people who insist on living outside their means.

There are other examples of this in Africa, with the Bushmen, (San? Xan?) the people of mozambique who live in an interesting place with unique conditions. These indigenous people only know how to live in this one area and no where else, and similarly there is no one else who knows how to live in this area. The women can find mud fish, hibernating under solid clay, just by walking on the clay! (Laurie Ashley, 2006) look into it. the facts are out there.

Indigenous people need to be left alone and allowed to practice their traditional ways. So Hydro Quebec can go to hell and so can Yellowstone National Park, Devil's Tower rec area, and the whole damn nation. Canada too! We're all invasive exotics in America! And our effect isn't caused by our species, but our imported culture.

Biodiversity in flux

OK so what makes for low biodiversity?

EXTINCTIONS

what causes extinctions?

in order
1. habitat destruction
2. habitat fragmentation
3. invasive exotic species
5. over exploitation

Look at extinction rates like a river. The river is fed primarily by ground water, and it generally has a certain stage that it doesn't fall below even if it hasn't rained in a long time. This is called baseflow. Paleo-ecologists have discovered that over the course of life on earth, there is a constant "baseflow" of extinctions. A steady rate that can be considered natural as the world changes. Now there are other events that cause the discharge of the river to increase such as a rainstorm or spring melting in our analogy that temporarily increase the flow, and give it all its variation. These events could be the ebb and flow in the extinction rate over time. But over life's history there have been five floods. in other words mass extinctions.

In nature, floods are inevitable. They are statistically destined to return to any given stream. Just as mass extinctions are destined to return at certain intervals to Earth. But the interesting thing is that after a mass extinction, biodiversity has the tendency to climb to a higher point than its pre-extinction peak.
(Again don't take my word for it, check out Wilson's Diversity of Life)

The most recent mass extinction was the end of the Dino-days caused by a massive collision with the earth's surface. Boy, they must have been surprised! Well, its always possible that another such event will occur and wipe out tons of species. And maybe we'll call that Big Mama of an asteroid Homo sapiens sapiens. If we're still around to call it anything!

In all seriousness we are in the sixth mass extinction. (David Quammen planet of weeds) weep about it if you want. Did you notice that those four things above all seem pretty human caused? Yep. Its our fault. We don't really know what this means for humanity yet, or for Earth. what have we ever realy known? But realistically life is still worth living, right?! Guys?

guys?

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Biodiversity Revisited

Now in that last post, there was a description of biodiversity, but so what? I recommend you read the comments to that one because they were really interesting. In fact the more comments you post the better. I find them fascinating.

What leads to high biodiversity? (courtesy of notes from a lecture by the brilliant Paul Alaback)
1. competition
2. resource availability
3. disturbance
4. time, history
5. equitability of climate
6. heterogeneity of habitats
7. population interactions.

How bout that another list of SEVEN items. Well, I talked about one of these things in my previous post: population interactions and how they can be threatened by development, i.e. bears that can't get past the highway. This concept specifically refers to members of different populations breeding together.

The other ones however I didn't really talk about, providing instead a rather static view of biodiversity, though I illustrated an idea about biodiversity helping Earth reinvent for the future, I will now discuss the way the past influences present biodiversity.

1. competition is the result of two species inhabiting the same niche in an ecosystem. This is not good for either species, so they become more specialized, one species keying into some habitat element that the other cannot, usually rather than changing its niche entirely, a species will become more common in what was once an extreme edge of its range.

2. resource availability, namely high resource availability causes high biodiversity. Jungle has more diversity than desert because there is more water for example.

3.Disturbances such as fire result in higher biodiversity over time because there are species dependant on disturbances that you will not see without disturbance. Disturbances increase nutrient availability in soil, and just give new life forms a chance to colonize an area that was previously too shady to inhabit for example. Disturbance changes the playing field so new organisms have a chance.

4.time, history. Evolution takes time. All other factors being equal, the longer there has been life somewhere the more diversity you can expect.

5. equitability of climate. Think North Pole versus Vermont. VT has way more diversity, because our land is hospitable to a wider range of species.

6. heterogeneity of habitats. Every species has its own niche that it lives in (very simplified) and the more variation in a site, the more niches there are. For example if there is a flat plain and a rolling rumbling, rocky plain, you'll see more diversity in the latter because of small microsites that occur. Differences in shade, effective precipitation (see Soils Lab is Fun! post), soil qualities, sun angle and so on.

7. population interactions. Interbreeding between distinct populations of organisms that creates a larger gene pool.

I think that if you took all these factors and somehow tried to mix them all together and find the perfect ecosystem for biodiversity, you'd describe a landscape with varied topography, long growing seasons, lots of water, lots of nutrients, large tracts of land where populations can interact without boundaries, and a place that has been inhabited by life for a very long time and is affected by various disturbances that keep refreshing the system.

Does it make sense that people are worried about saving the rainforest? The Amazon meets all these characteristics. The North pole does not.

Let's think about this critically though. Because the North pole doesn't have even a fraction of a percent of the diversity that the Amazon has does that mean it isn't valuable for Earth's diversity? NON, MES AMIS!

It is very important, if Biodiversity really is "the ability of the Earth to reinvent itself" then think of that storage of beneficial genes that are adapted to eternal ice age, dwelling at the Earth's top. If there is another ice age, it will not be the jungle butterflies that repopulate the earth, it will be the polar bears.

more on diversity to come, keep the comments rollin' in that's what the campground's for.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Visual concept of genetic diversity

Life has been given seven biological characteristics, lets see if I can remember them.

Growth.
response to stimuli.
reproduction.
metabolism.
organization. (being composed of one or more cells)
adaptation.
homeostasis. (internal changes maintain state in spite of external forces.)

These were taught to me in Biology class in high school by Mr. Tom Sabo. He was a great teacher with a sturdy mind and a great sense of humor, but not even he could truly define life. Sure an organism has all of these characteristics, but what is life itself?

In Neal Stephenson's book Cryptonomicon, he describes any life form as a "stupendous badass" descended from millions generations of stupendous badasses that went before. Stephenson is not a biologist, but he is right on the money. Life aint easy. It's full of struggle as we all know, and simply carrying viable DNA against all the odds is a tremendous honor and an incomprehensible privilege.

My ecology professor, Paul Alaback brought up the mind boggling topic of genetic ecology. From this discussion, I thought of the question.

"Can we think of the conservation of biodiversity to be the conservation of all the individual genetic combinations that occur?"

The answer without hesitation was yes. This is exactly how we can think about biodiversity.

Take away all the landforms and all the life forms in your favorite wild place, park, natural area, backyard, whatever. Replace the spatial dimensions with a three dimensional grid. Now in place of all the life, imagine the unique double helices present at every point on the grid. There will be trillions in the soil, billions floating in the air, one for each tree, rodent or bird. Each one is like a spiraling computer generated image that was designed in the late nineties to illustrate DNA to school kids, and they are all different colors. If you zoom in on one it will dissolve into GATC patterns linked together with supple ladder rungs. If you analyze this image you will come up with the figure: number of DNA combinations/unit volume. Or you could lay all the molecules end to end and simply calculate: length of DNA/unit volume.

Now we have a relatively static view that encompasses the three dimensions of space plus the quantity of DNA. What if we watch this figure for a longer time?

For one year. Even watching just one strand of DNA that exists in a flower at the edge of a stream. Most of the year it stays constant, contorting slightly under stress of mutation, perhaps only momentarily, but when it starts its cycle of reproduction in the spring, hundreds of new combinations of DNA appear near the plants top. They form delicately and abundantly, each pollen grain and ovum with half the DNA of the parent plant.

When these pollen grains combine with the ova of another flower, there is suddenly a new combination of genes with new properties and new adaptations. This offspring may grant the the chance to reinvent its species, perchance to carry it through the apocalypse.

A man who did extensive biodiversity studies in some tropical islands spoke at my school. If only I could remember his name. He said, "Biodiversity is the Earth's ability to reinvent itself."

How true it is, and the idea is completely dependent on this flow, and exchange, the process of combinations and recombinations, mistakes and opportunities. Imagine however that our reproducing flower is part of an isolated population of its species it is still trying as hard as it can to recombine its genes for its survival, but it is like trying to multiply without using the numbers 4,5, and 6, there are many fewer combinations and therefore less potential to overcome a change in its environment.

This is what happens when populations are cut off from each other. Highways that inhibit animal migration can cut a gene pool in half for example. Even mountains that rise up over time can separate populations and cause new species to develop on either side like immigrants to America forced into changing their names and identities.

Sunday, October 14, 2007

Soils lab is fun!

This is a picture I took of someone testing a soil sample with hydrochloric acid to see if there is a fizzing reaction. If there was we would note it as a presence of Calcium Carbonate (CaCO3).

CaCO3 is important in a soils profile. This compound's source of Calcium comes from the parent material of the soil, the bedrock so to speak. As it weathers as a result of chemical or physical processes, the calcium rock can be broken down into minerals or even elements. And Calcium is one of them.

The Carbonate in the compound comes from the respiration of plant roots, which are exhaling CO2 just like you and I. The carbonate mixes with the calcium to create CaCO3.

Now this compound is in fact produced close to the surface of the soil, where the roots are right? But it doesn't always stay at the surface. The compound can be carried down through the soil profile by water in a process called illuviation. This simply means the CaCO3 is getting carried in the water, by force of gravity, lower into the soil.

You test for presence of CaCO3 at different depths in the soil (using the acid test). The closer to the surface the CaCO3 is found, the less effective precipitation the soil experiences. I've seen soil with no CaCO3 in it and I've seen soil where the CaCO3 is at the very surface. Can you guess what the different soils were like?

The first one was a grassland soil with sparse, small vegetation on a south facing slope in Montana. It gets 11-13 inches of precip. per year, but since it is angled, the water runs off before it soaks into the soil, furthermore south facing slopes get more solar radiation than other aspects due to our northern latitude so the water not only runs off, but also evaporates before going into the soil.

The second soil without CaCO3 was in fact less than 100 feet from the very dry soil. It has the same amount of annual precipitation, but it is low in a gully where water collects and where it is shaded. The dominant vegetation here was snowberry, a shrub, rather than the drought tolerant species of the south facing slope. This change in topography resulted in leaching the Calcium Carbonate not only to lower depths in the soil, but lower down the slope, and eventually perhaps into a stream or groundwater system. All things are connected: topography, solar radiation, water, plant life.

Lightning rods

The point of the story is this. Plants never give up. If a tree is girdled it will die because the cambium, (tissue below the bark that conducts sugar down from the leaves) is made discontinuous so that the roots can't get any of the food that the leaves make. The leaves may be able to live for a season because they'll get water from the roots through the sapwood.

But what if a tree was, as Miracle Max might say, "only mostly girdled?" It doesn't give up, it continues to grow however it can. Laura and I used a ponderosa pine that had been struck by lightning as a marvelous landmark. We could tell it was lightning because of the spiral pattern of the exposed and damaged wood. Lightning struck timber poses a hearty challenge to any carpenter who wants to use it! They'd tie themselves in knots just trying remember, "sand with the grain. sand with the grain."
It looks just like the grain is spiraling, but I believe it has to do with the heat of the lightning bursting the water in the tree's wood. Now, you may be surprised by this, but Lightning has a tendency to kill the tree it strikes. But not this one.

Allow me to build the picture of this tree for you piece by piece.

step 1) Imagine a dead log standing. The entire trunk of the tree is bare wood, where the bark has been stripped off by the lightning, the subsequent fire, the wind or the animals and beetles that took advantage of it afterward.

step 2) Except there is a boa constrictor of flaky, red bark that coiled halfway up the tree. The snake's tail is forked and pierces the soil, its mouth devours a single fat branch 20 feet off the ground and 15 feet below the pointy gray top of dry wood.

step 3) This branch that marks the highest point of the living bark-snake, is in fact, the beefy arm of your testosterone laden lacrosse coach waiting by the sidelines to give you a high five. The branch is short, strong, and extremely thick, perhaps two feet in diameter. It juts from the bole of the tree at a ninety degree angle and then abruptly turns upward at a ninety degree angle. From this branch is the epicenter of a vegetative explosion. Branches grow in all directions from all parts of this sole, central branch.

step 4) Now imagine your coach isn't slapping you five at all, he's got his arm in a puppet of himself, but since it is his hand and not his head that is the top of the figure, it is significantly lower. This tree held up a puppet of its former, (pre-lightning) self. The canopy looked just like the canopy of any ponderosa pine, but instead of being centered on the tree, it was lower, and to the side, held up by this ridiculous branch.

Have you ever seen a tree wound that's healed over? Exposed wood can't grow anymore, can't create new bark, only the cambium can do that, so instead of creating a new layer of skin like a person does, the tree swells its bark on either side of the wound until the bulging woody membrane is pushing against itself to create a seal.

This tree was making a valiant effort to perform this feat of controlled growth, but being more wounded than not, the result was this appearance of a round woody snake climbing around the tree.

What about the branches? Can the branches live if the cambium underneath them is dead? No they can't, they have been disconnected from the roots. But on this old tree there was one branch left. And HOOOOO BOY was it ever making a go of it!

I wish I could say as much for myself. We have a lot to learn from trees like that, who like war vets bear the wounds of society. The pain and the suffering and the conflict that stem from our daily lives are not enough to harm us much, not us civilians. But when there is a war, these maladies of our culture are concentrated through the funnel of our misrepresentative government. Each little bit of hate, of waste, of ignorance gets thrown into the funnel. And the pissing end of it is centered on our troops and on the countries they occupy like the crosshairs of a speeding stealth bomber.

And sometimes its the same for our trees. Lightning strikes the tallest object, and that means the most dominant tree. This tree must have once been truly grand, towering over the rest on that South facing slope in West Montana. It got plenty of sun, outcompeted the other trees who couldn't handle as much drought, and it probably made hundreds of thousands of seeds. Maybe some of those seeds will grow to be as dominant as their mother once was, but maybe thats a curse, like being an outstanding young man in highschool who is virtually forced to go to Norwich or West-point, or some other institution of the noble, bloodthirsty, professions.

These are the young men I've known who have joined the service. Gavin Wageman, Jake Fangman, John Cody. May you all bend down during thunder storms.

Adventure!

What you are seeing here is an extreme close up of tree bark, the kind a Ponderosa Pine grows. If you stick your nose into one of these deep ol' cracks in the bark, you can smell something sweet. The whole debate right now is whether it smells like butterscotch or vanilla. I'd tell you my opinion, but I don't think it would be good for my popularity on the blogs if I chose sides!

Anyway if you can see the real dark color on the outer edges of the picture, you can? Oh good. Well, thats because the bark has been harmed by a fire. Though the tree lives on. Ponderosa's are generally quite fire resistant once they are mature.

My roommate Laura and I went bushwhacking yesterday. It sure was fun and challenging. We parked the car on a paved road in the Garnet Mountains and set out, moving as close to south as we could at eleven in the am. We had no map, compass, flashlight, knife, clock, or matches and we just went by sense of direction courtesy of the bright sun in the blue sky. But as our shiny friend moved it got a little bit tricky sometimes! There are other clues that help you determine the cardinal directions, such as species composition on slopes of different aspects. And careful mental record keeping as you march, always having a little compass arrow in your brain that points to the car.

As we went south, we crossed trails, but rarely followed them. We used X's made of sticks to show where we crossed a trail so that on the way back north we could go up and down a trail we crossed and find an X and then keep going as close to due north from that as we could. We
got utterly turned around once or twice and I was amazed at how my mind was unaccustomed to this kind of navigation. It took a lot of concentration to remember where we had been, think of what landmarks would look like from the other side, and to figure out what order things had happened in. For instance I thought we went under the fence and then watched the leaves fall off of alders in a gully, but Laura thought it was the other way around.

Another time, we hiked along some impressive cliffs, and I was certain that the hill we were going to across the river was in fact the hill we were coming from. Laura had to convince me. I don't know how my mind got totally turned around like that. It's like there was something flipped in my memory, I remembered turning right where she remembered going left. I conceded to her because judging by the sun, I was clearly wrong. Scary to think about what would have happened if I had been alone!

Our trail was a straight line, the northern point was our car, the southern point was a clear cut ridge several miles away. We couldn't see either point from the other. And only decided to try for the ridge after we had already bushwhacked quite a ways. The ridge always seemed so close. It took much longer to get there than we thought and every time we thought about turning around we looked up the slope and decided to push on, because it looked like it was going to be just a short walk. Well that slope kept on climbing and she and I were both taking clothes off and sweating and we didn't talk much because all I wanted to say was "I hate climbing mountains." and I didn't think it would be a positive thing to bring up at the time considering we were climbing a mountain. We were tired and hungry and worried about daylight when we were on the final climb.
"Should we turn around?" Laura asked.
"But we're so close. I bet there's a palace made of golden trees on the other side!" I replied.

and we kept going. Finally we lumbered up onto the top of the ridge. It was bisected by a barbed wire fence that we helped each other through and it was clearcut. There were noxious weeds all over the place. Then trying to be optimistic I said, "Hey, there's the golden palace!"

Indeed there was a cluster of golden larches brilliantly standing among the green of doug fir on the opposite slope to the south. But I was interrupted in my sentence by the loud distant mooing of a cow, among whose shit we were standing. We laughed at ourselves for assuming we'd find something great on that ridge. Laura thought it was a Buddhist story. The journey is the reward after all.

Its true so far it had been pretty rewarding, but what about the return journey. Every step we had taken farther from the car was one more step to get back, and another chance to get lost.

At one point when we were resting on the disappointing ridgetop which was our final destination, Laura asked me what time I thought we'd get back. I said 6:03 she said 7:00. We had no clock with us. Then we started back and struggled through the mental challenges of picking a course and being tired and foodless in an area where neither one of us had been before.

Well we never found out who was right about which came first, the fence or the alders because we accidentally went the wrong way on our return journey! We didn't go over the fence or through the alders at all and we got pretty confused about that, but we just kept going north trusting the sun. Our X's helped immensely and we found them one by one with some effort and searching. The whole time we kept comparing notes, talking about where we thought we were and where we thought each option would take us. Whenever we disagreed, we stopped and conferred and figured it out.

We were right every time, and though we went at least three miles away from the car with no trail, map, or compass, and with a return route that was somewhat different than the way we set out, we made it back exactly to the car. All we had to do was cross the street and hop in.

I opened her cell phone to check the time. It was 6:23 pm. Almost exactly between our two estimates. We're good.

Though to be honest we both talked it over and agreed that we wouldn't have been able to do it alone. We also agreed that we wouldn't have gone as many miles or had as much fun if we were alone! What a great day!

Friday, October 12, 2007

Hope and Hopelessness

Yesterday I took care of kids at an elementary school in Missoula. Kids today aren't all Christopher Robin and Huck Finn you know. Neither was I. They riddle their playground with imaginary bullets, they maim their friends with imaginary stop signs, they fight with their siblings over pointless disputes, they grab you and pull you and have no concept of respect. They tell you about who they killed in a video game, and they cheat against each other in imaginary games. I was killed with grenades, shot with lazers and machine guns, I was thrown out of a "house" a kid made because he didn't like me. But that's just the boys. Girls aren't angels, but at least they don't drink blood with their fruit roll up at snack time.

How can I have any hope when these kids are the building blocks for the future? The school is in the middle of the valley. I pointed to the mountain with an M on it that is visible from everywhere in Missoula and asked them if they knew what it was called. Not one of them could answer me. What are they learning in school if not how to play and live and participate in their environment in a powerful and meaningful way?

I couldn't have named any landforms when I was their age, but now that I'm older, being able to do so is one of my chief joys and it's essential for my concept of life.

I watched a kneeling kid get interrogated for information. When he gave the info, he was shot with a shotgun, the imaginary barrel pointing downward from the standing kids shoulder and aimed right in the kneeling kids face. It looked exactly like the front page of a Newspaper covering a barbaric foreign war.

Does this behavior belie great creativity in the kids? I believe not. Imagination, yes, but creativity is something that requires more than turning the playground into an arena where they are all simulating a video game. Do game developers realize that kids so young are being influenced by their work? These boys idolize strength, invulnerability, deadliness, violence. Where are the tricksters? Where are the stories of adventure and risk? Where are the children? They don't realize what they do, that when you kill someone, they don't stand up again in fifteen seconds.

There were two native boys. They were brothers. I wanted so badly for them to demonstrate what the white kids failed to. At first I was discouraged that they turned sticks into lasers and grenades like the rest, but there was also an element of reluctance in the way they fought. These boys were defending their base, choosing leaders for missions, and throwing bombs away from themselves rather than towards others. They included me, unlike the other kids, and wanted me to be armed so i could defend myself. I could tell from the way they talked that they didn't have the same concept of what bombs and lazers were for that the other kids had.
"That's a big bomb, it can shoot a lot of people."
"No the lazer sounds like, zhooozhoozhooo, and when you shoot someone with it, you both dissappear and then you can fight eachother."

They created spaceships out of leggos and gave me one. It had a chainsaw launching gun that could cut through anything, "Even metal." Though it wasn't a weapon exactly, though they said it could go through another ship, they never said it would hurt anyone.

Then when we played basketball, a younger boy who had bad manners was trying to steal the ball and get attention. The native boy let him play, even handed him the ball after a missed shot and encouraging him to keep trying even though it meant giving up his turn for a while. This native boy also had a football. It was taken away by a bully and then the bully punted it and it wasn't a very good kick. The native boy said, "Oops, nice try. At least it went really far."

I remember being a kid and my friends would want to play violent games where we'd have all sorts of powers and guns and technology and dinosaur pets and everything. I always disliked it. I developed a sense of nostalgia at a very young age. And i wanted out games to have some literary merit, some challenge. I thought it made more sense if my friend and i had different powers, and had to help each other. I don't know. i don't remember it that well, just images and feelings. But they all came rushing back on the playground. Feelings of regret, of just wanting to be left alone, of not belonging with other kids and feeling guilty about playing along with their games.

ZERO WASTE

It was started in the 1970's by Paul Palmer. His original company was focused on reusing industrial waste from the production of computers. They were centered in California, but had a large influence in a pretty big area. Zero Waste is now a philosophy where the outputs from every system become the inputs for a different system. As Tom Stoppard would say, "Every exit is an entrance somewhere else."

It is a "theory of universal reuse of all goods." The vision is to turn our linear stream of

production-
consumption-
waste,

into a circle. Huh, kinda sounds like the way nature does it... Waste is not a given! "Waste is a result of bad design." Eric Lambardi, executive director of Eco-Cycle

I find this very exciting (being something of a solid waste nerd) and there have been lots of successes in this regard, the Xerox company reuses 95% of the materials from its old machines, the Toyota company doesn't send ANYTHING to the landfill, the 2012 Olympics in London will have recycling information and tips at every sporting venue! It's out there and in a lot of ways its working.

It's not all doom and gloom on the environmental front! Part of the difference between recycling and zero waste is that recycling is completely oriented toward consumer responsibility, whereas in zero waste systems that function correctly, producers are responsible for designing goods to be reused. "If your product can't be composted, recycled, or reused, you shouldn't be making it!" Professor Paul Connet, SLU.

There are so many ways to make a difference, and personally I'm probably making such things into my life's work, but as for the rest of you there is something you can do in the spirit of Zero Waste. First of all, you should all be composting. You don't need a fancy bin, or a garden, or anything, just a pile will do. Do some research and get it going because food DOES NOT break down and return to the nutrient cycle, when it is land filled.

Well, composting is the biggest one right now because its easy and it reduces land filling by a real drastic amount. Just think about recycling as well for now, metal, plastic, paper, Those are the things that should really be recycled without fail. Anyway I really wanted to tell you all about the evils of Junk Mail. But as levar Burton from Reading Rainbow would say, "you don't have to take my word for it!" Check out these websites PLEASE! You can severely reduce your Junk mail (paper mail) today if you want. https://www.dmaconsumers.org/cgi/offmailing.I also suggest you check out www.ecocycle.org to see the environmental reasons for stopping junk mail.

Thanks,
ad-man

Thursday, October 11, 2007

From him, to me

adam,

a chord was struck in the heart of the world and the harmonies which sprang from that divine chamber radiated invisibly out into the aether.
suddenly there were birds.
suddenly there were conflicts.
suddenly there were colors.
suddenly there was.

yet there had always been and it is this supernatural irony which finds no tangible expression, no outlet save for the soul of life.
it`s in the flapping of a bird`s wings.
it`s in the duality of an argument .
it`s in the multitude of the wavelengths.
it`s in the.

in the infinite variety of ways there are many methods to harmonizing life and death and all their permutations.
it takes the form of a bird`s flight path.
it takes the form of a violent stalemate.
it takes the form of solar wind.
it takes the form.

imagine the form of soil trodden by eight hooves and two horses bearing an elf and a wizard, together, back into the heart of the world.
together they see birds jumping bisecting the air about them.
together they see disputes between travelers turn bloody.
together they see every texture and hue that ever graced their brains.
together they see.


evan

My busywork assignment for Tree Biology

The maple tree reproduces sexually. Using flowers that bloom before the leaves even emerge, probably to key into a source of pollinators at that time. The pollinated flowers grow into winged seeds that can be carried impressive distances by the wind which allows for gene flow over a larger area than for example, the heavy seeded oak. I think one of the key reasons these winged seeds work is because they sprout very readily. In missoula, a related species the norway maple sprouts in the shade of hedges, from between cracks in the pavement, and anywhere else you can imagine. In Vermont however they are not quite as prolific on diverse sites, but rather keying into an understory where it is surrounded by other maples. Maple trees affect the soil that they grow in, like many climax species of hardwoods, to be favorable to their own kind and disfavorable to others.

I would expect that at my site, Hubbard Park, the maples have quite a bit of genetic diversity. this is because in the middle of the state there is plenty of sexual recombination to be had with no barriers between maples, so much so that I might refer to the maples of the entire state as but one population, though there are places where they don't grow, the distances between two maple flowers is never too great a journey for a springtime bee.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Courage

Stop kidding yourselves! All of you are delusional. You think that because you walk and think that you are more advanced than all other life. Be humbled ye scampering cowards. Behold Kingdom Plantae.

The Moss:
I AM BORN OF WATER.
Your life began inside of your mother, sheltered, in folds of heavy flesh, but like a bird from a high nest I was cast into the torrent, when solitary, minuscule, alone with my senseless brothers and sisters the water crashed down on my mother's bowed head and wrested me from home. Infinitely vulnerable, infinitely inert, I was tumbled through Earth's water, perhaps to be deposited on some hospitable shore, perhaps to be extinguished, metabolized by fierce life.
I DESTROY STONE.
Without true roots that my tall brother's boast, I absorb solid stone and abundant cold water, incorporating elements of the dead world into my living soul.
I HOLD MY CHILDREN.

The Tree:

You who run away from cold. You who build. You who consume flesh. Behold Kingdom Plantae. Strength is not what you can kill, lift or climb. Strength is what you can endure. I freeze, I boil, I consume your very breath as you speak. I turn the world into power. Worship me and fear my leaving.

The Ferns:

Hishawww, I breathe the low air. I drink the low sun, and I kiss the high dirt. Farewell ye brazen woody trees. Farewell ye lofty shrubs that peddle your berries and brandish your thorns. I'll keep the paths hidden. I'll grow fast and cover the turf. I'll tell secrets the dragon's know, I'm as old. I'm as dirt-drunk, I'm as wise.

The flower:

You fall in love. You offer my death. May you perish while my kind thrives. May you fall into our midst and your delicious meat dissolve into our wide open roots. My life is shorter and slower than your oafish, flailing flicker. May your skull hold soil where flowers will grow in ways you never did.


BEHOLD!
The kingdom of plants developed AFTER the kingdom of animals.

BEHOLD!
The kingdom demands homage. Give your compost to the plants of Earth!

BEHOLD!
Without language plants speak,inspiring poets to weep, artists to crumble, science to baffle.

BEHOLD!
Forego your movement and survive! Plants dare you!

BEHOLD!
Generations of our kind will occupy your body when you have gone. May the roots churn you and may Earth FORGET YOU!

The Wonders of Nature

The Living Stump

Boy, I'd jump if I saw a living stump! Imagine a stump whose sawn top is completely covered in bark. You can't count its growth rings because it's healed the wound that killed it with growing bark. It looks like a macabre stone or gnarled old tooth, with roots anchoring it against the force of the wind it once felt, but now without branches or leaves to catch the wind, the roots are superfluous...

or are they completely necessary? This organism can only live because before it was cut down, its roots grafted with the roots of another tree. Now, the photosynthate (sugar or food produced by photosynthesis) that is made by the symbiote passes through the roots to the stump, thus giving it enough life to function. The roots of the stump can also provide water and nutrients to the symbiote. WEIRD HUH!

Root grafting happens all the time, though living stumps are quite rare. Check it out at
www.pfranc.com/projects/LSD

to my distant friend

Evan.

In the lord of the rings, one of Gandalf's stately associates is named Radagast the Brown. He only appears in the book for a moment, but you learn that one of his uncanny skills is to speak in the language of birds. He wears an Auburn cloak as his name entails, and he is wrapped in mystery, though from Gandalf's description he is clearly an amazingly genuine and sweet man. He was one of my favorite characters in the books.

You, sir, are Radagast. A wizard from a different time with abilities that separate you from the rest. You are the last pillar in this mortal world of your old order who yet remains honorable and wise, using magic and mystery only for the betterment of the world and never for epic or suspicious ends. Would that I were an elf, who alongside thy cloak-hem trots, to guard thee and keep thee safe from dangers and free from all mortal woes, that I might glean from your mutterings the answers to some of the world's questions. Or at least that I may learn better questions to ask.

My name would be Ruheron Lornythien and I would lightly tread beside you and be your eyes, your ears, your arm, and your friend. Perhaps one evening at the end of a day's travel, in an alehouse we'd take our repose. The stories of the bards and the drama and the fights would seem to us so precious and temporary, us being endless, them being a flicker of the candle light. And we'd sit in our pipe-smoke slowly thinking to ourselves, when suddenly thine eyes would mine meet, and that, my friend, would be the most glorious joke of all.

If only to us. Ha ha ha! Our laughter would bubble out of strong hearts.
If only to us.

"To us!" You'd exclaim and I'd raise raise my cup slightly.
"Are you posing a toast, wizard?"
"Aye." you'd chuckle. "I'm that."
"To us, then," and we'd be gone by morning, the rain never wetting our tunics for it's learned to give us passage. We have many miles ahead, though all must change around our stepping feet as though we walk through time itself. Tree roots rapidly churn and rake the soil as slowly we walk, marveling more and more as we are swallowed in the beauty of the dynamic world.

love,
adam

Monday, October 8, 2007

Local Food Local Dispute



My da sent me a link to an article from my hometown newspaper The Times Argus. You can read the article here.
http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007710080343
In Montpelier there is a company called Vermont Compost Co. that composts manure and the food residuals from downtown businesses to produce 1500 dozen eggs a year. The business is run by Karl Hammer, and he employs ten people (who are all characters from the stories I've heard.) People complained about Hammer's operation even making legal inquiries to state officials. My initial reaction was that the complaints may be worthwhile and its a good idea to keep Hammer in check so he'll do as good a job as possible to be a good neighbor, but that his services are way too valuable to Montpelier for these people to lay any complaining rights to it.

There are some legitimate complaints and arguments against them and I'm not saying I know the right answers, but there is one comment in the article I'd like to address.

"Blow lives downstream from Hammer's site, and is one of the neighbors who brought his concerns to state officials.

Blow describes the brook as "a nice, clear mountain stream that is no longer a nice, clear mountain stream."

"That gentleman is allowed to put and store a pile of compost right on the brook," he said. "Every time it rains that compost is leeching into the stream. It is impossible for it not to."

"I don't care if he is a farmer. The things he is doing he can't do," Blow said. "To pollute the stream is against the law."" (Times Argus)

I am just so biased towards agriculture and composting that I find these complaints lacking in consideration for the service that Hammer is doing for the city. Also, I'm not exactly sure that I know which stream the guy was talking about, but it's total propaganda to call it "A clear mountain stream that isn't a clear mountain stream anymore." If I am thinking of the right stream, the one that runs along main street, then eventually down into Sabin's pasture, that part of the stream is a ditch that was engineered when they built the road, complete with oil dripping into it, salt from the plows, cigarette butts and everything else you can expect for a stream next to a road.

I don't want to sound transcendental about it, but there needs to be some realism here and someone who doesn't know the area will read the article and get the image of Hammer dumping toxic waste in an alpine stream that's fed by glaciers.

I think that the dangers of the runoff coming from a compost place (compostery?) are nutrient deposits. I would estimate a very low risk of heavy metal and other pollutants, but the main things are going to be Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potassium. These can be a problem in high concentrations, resulting in an excess of nutrients for algae to subsist on which causes harmful algal blooms, such as at the outlet of the Mississippi River into the Gulf. These nutrient overloads can upset ecosystems, but until there is evidence of something like this actually going wrong, I'd rather not have it in the newspaper.

Also no one drinks water from that stream, it just drains into the Winooski which runs along highway 2 thus subjecting the water to all the same impacts of any road: yearly construction pollutants, bank stability loss, weed invasion, litter, and so on and around. The Winooski goes to lake Champlain after pushing its way through a few hydro electric dams which further affect the stream with heat pollution.

Hey, I like the winooski as much as the next guy, but a bit of nutrient pollution from a well meaning composter might be the least of its problems. Especially since the landfill where the compost would have been dumped is in the same watershed as Hammer's Compostery and rain has a tendency to percolate through landfills and make a sort of Trash Tea. Also if the manure he uses was left at the farms where he collects it from, it would be leaching a lot more of these nutrients into the water at those locations than it does at Hammer's site.

That's my two cents. More on Montpelier's waste stream later.

Thursday, October 4, 2007

If you're not learning, you're not paying attention.



I have to admit I haven't been a very good student in French lately. I have just been so darn interested in learning about nature and exploring nature that I haven't had attention for much else. I don't intend to drop French, though, so instead of giving up I took matters into my own hands and found a way to make myself interested.

I picked up a French-English dictionary and looked up words about nature that I wanted to know so perhaps I could start to say things in French that I would want to say in English; maybe so I could start to see nature in a new way. I thought a new language could be the key to a different nature, a new world so to speak with different history and unique undertones.

I brought my dictionary and my text book up on a mountain that is right next to my house. I brought along my trusty plant guide and hiked up and out of the city onto the steep, dry grassland slope of Mount Jumbo. Without stopping I took straight for a less traveled path that traversed into wilder and wilder land.

At first the brown path was well defined and easy going. It went straight accross the range land of the mountainside without going up or down the slope much. The soil was rocky and hard, and there were mounds of rich brown dirt all over the place next to the trail, and some of the mounds even spilled onto the trail. Can you guess what could have made the mounds? Badgers. Lots of Badgers. Taxidea taxus.

In a year's time, the pesky Badgers'll thrash up roughly 3% of the ground in the rangelands. They dig to make their homes which probably made some of the mounds, but most of their hunting is done by digging as well. It's how they catch little critters like rodents and bugs. What does this mean? It means that after a certain amount of time, every square inch of the rangeland in North America will be dug up by Badgers. Truth be told we're not talking about thousands of years here. 50? 100? Hoo boy that's some pretty serious activity. The profile of the grassland soil will be churned and blended by the activity of these large weasels. The organic-matter-rich A horizon will be brought down and mingle with the C and B horizons, water will flow through the open tunnels of the Badgers and this access to water will affect the rates of weathering of the parent materials under the soil. The bedrock will dissolve, break up, fall apart, and the Badgers will laugh.

So as I was in the badger fields, I spied some skat on the ground. I spent a very long time examining the various piles of skat and determined it belonged to coyotes. So much can be learned from skat! It's usually just as exciting to find it as it is to see the actual animal that left it there. In the feces there was hair and claws (mole remains? Small weasel?) there were also berry pits and twigs from the choke cherry plant. Coyotes are predators, but they tend to be fairly omnivorous.

To my right the hard grassy slope extended up hundreds of feet at an angle steeper than 100% and to my left the slope was equivalent, but it shallowed into a valley, I could have rolled a rock down to my street from there. The sounds of traffic were still loud, but as the defining edges of the path became less and less discrete, it was clear that the hillslope still had wild elements. Soon I was on grass, and only the hint of a trail, maintained more by hooves and paws than sneakers. The skat seemed fresher and fresher as I went toward the steeply slanted horizon. The yellow line of the grassy slope in front of me was almost vertical. Beside it was the blue gray sky, behind it was the entire world about to open up to me like looking around the door frame into a crowded party.

There was one piece of skat that didn't look like the rest. I believe this was badger skat. It was much blacker which indicates a diet that's high in meat, and it had a greasy sort of coating which is characteristic of the weasel family. There were also seed heads of spotted knapweed plants which would suggest that it was going HERBIVORE. What? Badger don't eat seeds! But wait! Inside the seedhead of the knapweed, there dwells a small grub from the gall fly, which is high in protein and fat! Furthermore, the knapweed seed heads grow less than 12 inches from the ground, so even a fatty badger could grab them, as opposed to the choke cherries which grow too high for badgers, but not Coyotes.

Well, I wasn't too much more than half a mile from my house. That's pretty close for coyotes, though I have never seen one except in Yellowstone. The Coyotes there had so much character and freedom and aloofness. They didn't mind running right by us Vermont boys as we made flapjacks while sitting on the bumper of the minivan. They loped quickly by us, first one, then another and they swung their low heads from side to side with their tongues out and ears up to survey the land.

Okay, anyway, I studied French under a Douglas fir. I learned so much! I practiced prepositions. L'arbre petit est derriere de l'arbre grand. Le ciel et au-dessus de moi, mais la terre est au-dessous de moi. I said, 'the little tree is behind the big tree' which made much more sense to me than the vocab from my textbook. I thought about how it must be to see a winged creature moving through the air and think oiseau rather than bird. Or nuage, rather than cloud. I didn't really get into the mindset of French, but I thought it was a good mental exercise. I had to learn the words about nature in order to connect the interest in French to my interest in the land.

Les feuilles d'automne
sont loin de moi.
Je recherche mon foyer
qui est derrière de moi.
Je réfléchis mon fleuve
qui est au-dessous de la terre.
Il va comme l'oiseau
entre les montagnes
et la côte.
Je regarde les nuages

Je regarde l'horizon.

I studied for over an hour on a little grassy bench on the slope and looked out over the city of Missoula wishing it would dissappear.

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Kane revisited


I spent some time with the wolf today. Kane seemed to be in the same sort of melancholy mood as me so I lounged with him on a bed for a while. His mind is too sharp to be wasted on domesticity. His body is too big and ungainly to inhabit human walls. His fur is too beautiful to be seen as a nuisance when he sheds. Outside it would blow away. Outside he could hunt and use his mind and senses. Outside he could flow through the forest and choose his own path rather than following the cramped hallways of the built world.


But instead he waits and waits for his owner to come home and stares into my eyes. He is only marginally interested in me, I'm more like a buddy to commiserate with than a true friend to him, but for now he considers me with calmness that implies deep understanding. The luster of his eyes reminds me of my grandmother. She would look at me and tell a story, with all the expression in the world in her voice and hands, but then after she was done laughing about it she would become so calm for a moment and look out the window at the birds. With her profiled like that I could see the white sides of her eyes, the red veins, and the yellow from cigarette tar or age creeping up her stained fingers.


I could still see the brown of her iris as well, and the combination of all those colors, dull, glazed colors, regarding nature out the window while she sat there with me was so memorable. To sit with someone much younger and relate to him on his level must be difficult, perhaps in order to continue she needed to stop, inhale smoke and let the imprinted images of her many years looking out that window compare with what was out there now. To look away from this vibrant youth, so demanding of attention, into something else; the past or another world perhaps. That was the way Kane looked away from me.


I am older than Kane in years, but he inherited many years from his parents. He inherited wisdom and sadness and stories of genocide so I will never question if it is he or I that is older. Nor which one of us is closer to our deaths. There are gray hairs on his chin and he moves slowly. He nuzzled his head into my belly and it was almost the size of my torso. It was humbling to know that I was so close to an animal's mouth that could crush my muscles and bones until I could no longer flee and then roll me over and eat me alive like an elk-but that's something a wolf will do with a pack and Kane has none.


His ears pricked up all of a sudden and his eyes left mine to disappear again into another world. When the noise of traffic outside lulled I could hear what had gotten his attention. A dog howling in the neighborhood across the street. Like my grandma, Kane retired from me for a moment, perhaps intensely remembering or trying to forget. Either way he was entranced and though I petted him I got no response from the focused wolf. Then the washing machine upstairs turned on and drowned out any sound coming from outside. First Kane's ears collapsed then his head fell down onto my leg with a loud sigh.


What is my role in all this? How have I affected wolves in the world? How will I affect them in the future? I can only hope that Kane and his kin will always thrive. 10,000 generations from now, maybe wolves in Montana will howl about Kane. How he was taken away. How he was heard from the city down below, hollaring about a blue eyed boy that sang too much and took up too much space on his bed.

Monday, October 1, 2007

Lichens revisited




Man this is my second day in a row doing strenuous exercise while collecting lichen samples. Boy did I get some good ones! I hiked up Mount Sentinel this morning in the rain. It took a lot longer than I thought it would, but when I got to the top I saw the next peak over called University. I decided to take the trail that goes down along the saddle between the two peaks and climb the other mountain while I was at it. It was on this saddle ridge area where I found the new lichens.

The area was burned not too long ago, with lots of larch regeneration and some ponderosa and doug fir as well. I thought it was interesting to see willow up there because it is normally associated with riparian areas right next to streams, where the relatively frequent flooding provides it a new bed of sediment to grow on. It is good at colonizing these freshly disturbed river soils, but not a great competitor otherwise so it sticks to asexual production, spreading with rhizomes. It makes sense that it would be able to germinate in a burned area because the post fire situation could be somewhat similar to a flood, but where did the seed source come from way up on that ridge? I guess wind can do amazing things.

Anyway the lichens sure were interesting and they even help to tell a little bit of a story. Cladonia cariosa is a species of lichen that is one of the first to show up on the soil after a disturbance. I didn't see it in great numbers, but then again the disturbance was some 10 or fifteen years ago so the species would probably decline as the shade of the kinnikinnik came in. Also Cladonia chlorophaea which is a more common species. Not really good at telling a story because its sort of like finding deer tracks in a forest, it doesn't tell you too much about the forest because deer are everywhere. If you find fisher tracks its a better indicator.

i also found Xanthaparmelia coloradoensis what a cool looking organism. It has parts that look like gray bowls full of black chocolate and grayish leaves that curl up like kale. Also not a great indicator species. But farther north its possible that it could be used to determine an area that doesn't have prolonged snow cover.

Further down the slope I found two more lichens. These were on the North slope of Sentinel where there is much more moisture and it shows in all the plants. There was moss on either side of the trail and just a much denser vegetation cover. On this steep slope I saw freckle pelt Peltigera aphthosa, a large green leaf lichen with black warts on it. The underside is lighter, whitish even, and it feels like the flesh of a mushroom. A very similar lichen grew alongside it, but rather than a bright green color, it was in fact brown. The underside white, but this time not only did it feel like the underside of a mushroom, but looked like it too. They looked like gills under there! I think its another peltigera species, but I can't identify it for sure with the book I've got. So thats pretty exciting stuff!

G.W short for Global Warming

Recently Bush had some kind of a summit about climate change and he admitted it was a problem. Unfortunately he decided not to do anything about it. http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h8-HfqSh4OKG8FX97YeBFtGPSFhQD8RUIDC00

you can check that baby out right there.

You see the problem is that EVERY time you hear about the environmental movement, it all comes to the little people making different decisions. We are the ones who have to recycle. We are the ones who are urged to spend money on the environmental choices and We are the ones who are responsible for it if it doesn't happen. Well I don't agree with that one bit. I do a lot to make sure my decisions are green, but that doesn't stop the products I'm not buying from being produced!

I wish they would just make laws about this stuff. I'm sick of the incentives and tax breaks and other measly things like that to urge going green because they don't seem to work. I toured the water treatment plant of Missoula last year and the man giving the tour who was extremely knowledgeable said that the increased standards of water efficiency in household appliances caused the water usage of the city to remain the same even as the population boomed.

They didn't send a memo saying, "could you please use less water?" They made a law and raised the standards and it worked.