▶ This is National Dirty Fingernail Week. Wear them proudly, and give up the notion that you’ll remember or be able to wear gloves transplanting small sets or pulling tiny weeds. Black is beautiful.  

▶ The pasture grass is perfect for a brisk day like yesterday, blowing silver in the wind as cloud shadows race along behind. It needs cutting very soon, or it will lodge over with the next heavy rain. I have someone who promised to cut it, so better while it is standing. Hurry.  

▶ I was going to exchange a mess of nettles from our forest edges and stream for some asparagus, but the Asparagus Man was out of town the week we wanted to make the swap. But of course, we have our own asparagus patch. It has yielded so far this summer–let me count them–exactly one spear. We’ll wait for year three and maybe get THREE! 

▶ We (or should I say more correctly) She has three chickenoid things over in the pen. They should be giving us eggs just before they stop laying for winter. We will measure the value of those precious eggs in total miles between house and coup divided by the total number of eggs. Precious, I say.  

▶ I think I’m right that I have NEVER had a fire in the wood stove before on May 25. It feels pretty darned good. Low last night was 36 here, I think the tomatoes and peppers are intact–at least from the threat of frost.  

▶ I planted 12 bell peppers because Herself likes to chop them in with tomatoes and onions in August to make quarts of soup stock for winter. I went to inspect the 4 inch peppers the day after planting, and found three showing only a bunch of leaves above ground, as if the plants had been sucked into the earth. The leaves were unattached to a stem. Voles. It’s going to be a long summer.  

▶ I guess I have become a closet archivist. There are at least a dozen potentially substantial topics in my binder that I would have, at one point, been working on for a newspaper column or a blog post. Sometimes, the one took priority, other times, the other one did. Now, neither so much. What am I going to do with a flotsam of resources about Monsanto, disappearing amphibians, biomimicry, the biology of aging, the origins of genius and the burden of a bad name? I’ll dust them off, maybe, from time to time, then they go back in the drawer. I’m just a hoarder who has far too much accumulated trivia to tell at a dinner party.

Our dogs, like us, enjoy the coming of spring, marked by the arrival of the swallowtails. Gandy thinks the first part of the butterfly name implies an imperative verb. Tsuga believed them to have magical properties.  

Tsuga–who would have celebrated his 10th birthday in about a month–was not interested at all in the Tiger Swallowtails on a cloudy day. One could fly just in front of his face, and he yawned. But on a sunny day, the chase was on. Except it was not the butterfly but its shadow he followed. And where he lost the trail, he dug, just knowing that the shadow had burrowed underground. Our lawn was channeled this time of year with dug-out butterfly bunkers. 

Gandy, as I said, thinks swallow means grab a mouthful of them. And with the puddling behavior that aggregates a dozen or more butterflies at a single seemingly-unremarkable spot on the driveway or road bed, coming away with a mouthful is not that hard for her. (Still, I have to think she is disappointed that they don’t taste like their namesake.)

And so she’d leapt at a gaggle of swallowtails heading away from us, and then proceeded down into the creek bed. As she started up the other side, she lifted her head, and opened her mouth. And one at a time, yellow swallowed-tails fluttered to freedom in a celebratory fashion, the dog oblivious. All in a country dog’s late spring day’s work.

Start your Saturday in Floyd with buckwheat pancakes, homemade music, and conversation (guaranteed fresh, not from concentrate, locally grown)–not to mention Red Rooster Coffee.

If you’ve not been to a “market breakfast” organized (as much as possible) and offered by SustainFloyd, you’re in for a treat.

While you’re there, consider becoming a member of SustainFloyd and join us in imagining the future of food, energy, conservation and natural resources for the next generation.

Serving Suggestion: splurge and get the locally-grown pork sausage. See you there!

I’ll be meeting today with a group of retired folks, Methodists mostly, who will attend a retreat at Camp Altamons, a mere stone’s throw from home. My part is to share ways I’ve come to consider that we, and maybe especially those longest among us with the most experience and wisdom–might reconcile broken relationships. 

Here is the 300 word summary:

I learned in the summer of 1970, as a new zoology grad student, that many of the planet’s species and habitats–in fact, entire classes of animals and whole biomes–were under threat from our growing numbers and resource demands now referred to as our ecological footprint. 

More than that, I became aware of an alarming indifference to nature’s grave condition, beyond the youth and some older academics of that day. It was as if the planet’s matter and energy were believed to be inexhaustible and her working systems too big to fail. I saw this as the most epic of conflicts in which I was a character, a story that would shape the state of the world that my unborn children would inherit. 

Now four decades of biology-watching later, limits and ecological boundaries continue to be ignored–often in the name of profit and power. I have come to believe that reconciling essential and broken relationships–to nature, to place and within our human and non-human communities–must be the chief focus of our energies if we are to leave a legacy of hope and healing for those who come after us. 

But there is hope. Our nature apathy and ignorance can be reversed by renaturing our selves and our children, defeating “nature deficit” and its physical and spiritual consequences. Placelessness may be reversed by a renewed discovery of “sense of place.” In so doing, as Eudora Welty said, “one place understood helps us know all places better.” Out of these therapeutic responses may finally evolve eco-empathy–a personal, ecological, stewardship ethic. With that understanding, we might then come to use our technologies and guide our economic engines with a seven-generation view of their consequences. If we are successful, mankind may yet foster resilience and balance on a planet whose health our well-being will continue to depend.

For a change of pace I’m fleshing out this post via Postach.io–a beta blogging platform that works off of Evernote.

Since Evernote is where I create and curate my blog posts and related links (as many others do as well), makes sense that this might someday become a fleshed-out blogging medium.

So here’s a little snippet of trivia, if you’re so inclined, for a drizzly Sunday:

Sweetlips don’t take no crap from the likes of Jim Reeves (1960 country hit) and she did NOT after all, tell the man there with her he’d have to go.

Jeanne Black sings “He’ll Have to Stay” after Jim Reeves sings the contrary point of view.

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What? Maybe four times of carrying credit cards in our adult lives we’ve missed a payment because I thought she and she thought I had paid it; or it got sorted by mistake into the wrong pile. Four times in decades of full-amount on-time payments to Bank of America or its predecessors.

So I admit I’m naive about how these missed-due-date things work. I slipped up this week and paid a $300 BOA bill due on the 14th on the 14th. So it would be late. Dang, I hate it when that happens once every couple of years.

And this morning, first Amazon, then Netflix tell me there are problems and I need to bill to another card.

Wait a minute. Surely not. That would an idiotic good-customer-alienating policy to inactivate the card for what turns out to be a $15 penalty for a cardholder who carries no outstanding balance beyond this one check that should arrive at BOA today or tomorrow.

But yes, that is the policy at Bank of America. Check’s late, you’re frozen. No skin off their beaks.

Yes, after holding for Eternal Muzac and talking to someone “higher up” about my displeasure, things were made right and the fee was waved, and all is rosy, they tell me.

But I want to know: is this day-late DOA standard policy for all credit card issuers? This has rubbed my fur the wrong way, and if other cards offer more rational and measured grace periods to good customers, I may want to be one of theirs, and t’ell wit Bank of AmeriKa.

Meanwhile, I’m setting up autodraft for this card from our bank. But for the longer haul, I’m shopping around for alternatives and open to any ideas.

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We’re talking well-aged water: like for a billion years or more: found trapped in ancient bedrock north of Lake Superior. And that ancient water may contain living organisms that came along long before multicellular life on the surface. Or so they speculate.

So I’m looking at the map in the NPR piece–the age of bedrock coded in colors. Hmmm. I’d sort of like to know what the colors mean in terms of age.

So I find the USGS National Geologic Map Database and I’m in map-geek heaven. Except that nowhere on the elaborate customizable maps do I find a legend that gives me any information about what the map shows. Maybe the colors are something a geologist just knows. But for us armchair explorers, I need more information, please.

Then again, it looks like this overall map database is a long way from being standardized for anything (note the four maps that converge in the center of this screen shot), and the ages of the individual quadrangle maps are probably, well,  all over the map yet.

So. Another science fiction storyline bubbles up in my mind, as if I ever wrote fiction: ancient trapped water is discovered, and…it contains lifeforms that are not carbon based and considered to be extraterrestrial. Or once released to the oxidizing atmosphere, the lifeforms proliferate, spread rapidly and threaten the worlds fresh water; or….

If they do find organisms, chances are they will be not too distant from the geothermal chemosynthetic autotrophs found at the boiling vents deep in the oceans. Still, that would be cool to discover that at about the same time as we resurrect extinct species like the Wooly Mammoth by currently available genetic engineering. (The jury is still out on whether that is such a great idea. DeExtinction is a whole nuther topic. See this National Geographic coverage on DeExtinction if you are interested.)

Strange world we live in. And it ain’t over. Yet.

No, this will not be another bit about the joys of garden anointments from full bladders. This particular P also does not grow on a vine in said garden. This one is, however, the reason why we will have a garden at all. Or health or life at all, for that matter. This P is phosphorus and its chemical cousin, phosphate.

Phosphorus is a limiting factor, a finite and vanishing earth-mineral resource that is built into the design of living things. It is in our bones and teeth, in every cell membrane of every cell of every living membraned thing (as part of the “phospho-lipid bilayer” you might have learned about in biology class if you weren’t texting your girlfriend.)

And we whiz away P with our pee–so much so that it precipitates out into the lining of the pipes at sewage treatment plants. And what passes on finds its way–together with the readily-leached agriculturally-applied rock phosphate as well as nitrogen–into the oceans, where, it over-fertilizes the plankton and creates the famous Red Tides and ever-popular Dead Zones.

The rate of phosphate use far exceeds the rate of phosphate recovery. We are flushing away some of the best hope of feeding the future. But it is not too late to change to become self-sufficient at least with regard to this strategic resource before we go to war with China or Morocco–the only other exporters of the stuff.

You’ll find many ideas for not treating our soil like dirt and other means of “upcycling” in the excerpt in Scientific American from the new book Upcycle, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart (Cradle to Cradle.)

One subject I learned about here was the “harvesting” of struvite–basically kidney stones–from the clogged pipes of sewage treatment plants. These pellets contain just the right mix of phosphorus compounds from flushed and otherwise-wasted human urine to provide slow feeding of field crops. This is not yet a common industrial recovery practice, but should become so right away.

Like the honeybee and the bats, we desperately need to shift our attention to those tiny cogs in the great machinery of our fragile civilization. Once they become extinct or flushed into the ocean, our Humpty-Dumpty world won’t be able to fix itself.

Can Soil Replace Oil as a Source of Energy? [Excerpt]: Scientific American

The Story of Phosphorus: 8 reasons why we need to rethink the management of phosphorus resources in the global food system

Peak Phosphorus: the sequel to Peak Oil 

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Why it was that, the week before, when somebody passed to Ann the children’s sermon resource book, that made her immediately see that as MY obligation, I can’t say. It HAS happened before.

I do know that I totally forgot about it, what with all the packing and then the two days at the Naturalist Rally Friday and Saturday.

So I used what I had at hand (or better, under feet) to cobble a short message for Sunday morning. It did not have anything to do with mothers, really, though they could have been the recipients of the props: earthworms.

So rather that hitting the delete button on the outline for that 3 minute homily, I posted it here on CheckThis. Worth every penny ya paid for it.

The white-nosed bats and the honey bees.

That both these earth-economy essential creatures should be threatened in a serious way should be improbable details you’d come across only in dystopian fiction.

The storyline of such a novel is predicated on the large consequences that derive from the disappearances (only a highly creative imagination could come up with a plausible cause) of the smallest and most peripheral of creatures. It would be a morality tale of arrogant, world-ravaging civilizations being brought to their knees by what would turn out to be their weakest, and in the end, most essential links.

But I digress. I only wanted to give a few details from the 39th Annual Mt Rogers Naturalist Rally Friday evening program by Dr. Karen Frankl, who is a bat biologist from Radford U.

There are some 1000 bat species world-wide. Of those, 17 are found in Virginia, 14 are resident species here. Of those about half are cave and half are tree species. It is the cave species that suffer from White Nose Syndrome.

WNS first came to the headlines in 2006. I think I just saw it was now confirmed in 22 states and spreading. It probably originated in Europe, where cave bat populations are much less dense than in American caves–this possibly indicating that these are resistant survivors of a WNS epidemic there some centuries or longer ago.

Geomyces destructans is the pathological agent afflicting cave dwelling bats. It causes the bats to use up more of their fat stores during hibernation, and to venture out during winter. Both these facts may stem from the irritation the organism causes. It itches–not to mention it causes the wing membrane to lose elasticity and develop actual holes.

Bats are impacted by large-turbine windmills. But surprisingly they are not killed by direct trauma but by barotrauma. They basically “explode” due to pressure changes caused when the blades create a low pressure suction on the bats especially fragile lungs.

So, while honeybees continue to be decimated by Colony Collapse Disorder (hit harder this year than ever in many places), up to half of all North American bats could be wiped out by WNS.

And the so-what? Read Blood and Spore: How a Bat-Killing Fungus Is Threatening U.S. Agriculture (The Atlantic)

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