June Moon

It was all the more impressive because we had not expected it, and saw it all at once just as it was half-way up over the horizon. As you've heard me say, a far horizon is not one of our ameneties tucked down in the valley as we are.

We had been out for a rare night on the town and dropped by to visits friends for coffee. And from their place perched wonderfully on a hill with a commanding view during the day came their equally awesome night view.

I pulled out the camera. There was no time for the tripod. Have you ever watched the moon relative to the horizon or trees or buildings and seen how FAST it moves under magnification! So while this is the absolute best shot in the world, it serves as reminder of the moment, and I don't think it's terribly bad for a handheld shot (at 200mm with the repaired lens!)

But why did it seem so huge (not to mention ORANGE)? We're not sure. But NASA has some ideas. This info might come in handy when your children put you on the spot to explain why the moon is swollen.

Plastics Are Forever

One word: plastic.

Benjamin Braddock as The Graduate in the 1967 film may not have been at all interested in it.

Meanwhile, America has swooned to the seduction of plastic after finding a generation ago that "cheap oil" could be made into so many versatile, colorful and inexpensive tools, toys and trinkets.

Every year, about 300 billion pounds of plastic are produced around the world. And the best thing about plastic we discovered since the sixties is that it is practically indestructible.

And maybe the worst thing about plastic, Benjamin: it is practically indestructible.

Take plastic shopping bags, for instance. They are so prevalent across the landscape that I propose that they be named the new national flower. Lifted to bloom on tree limbs by the prevailing traffic-winds of speeding eighteen-wheelers, they are the most lofty blossom of humanity's love affair with plastic.

It's hard to believe it has only been some 25 years since we were first faced with that awful but lightly dismissed environmental conundrum: paper or plastic? And overwhelmingly in recent years, the answer has been-you guessed it-plastic. Fully 80 percent of shoppers choose it. I read recently that "somewhere between 500 billion and a trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year".

But wait. Let me set the record straight: that many bags are made and are utilized. But dear hearts, they are NOT consumed. They are NEVER really consumed. They are however, unfortunately, sometimes eaten-but more about that distinction in a minute.

So. Where do all those trillion plastic bags go when they disappear from our lives-the ones that don't end up in the high branches of roadside trees? First, we'll watch a bag settle into Goose Creek right out my window here, blown from the back of someone's passing truck.

From there, it will wash into the South Fork and on downstream, into the main flow of the Roanoke River. It may perhaps in high water become temporarily hung up in the branches of a piedmont streamside alder. But eventually, it will find its way to the ocean. And there it will not be alone.

Let's follow our wayward bag to its not-quite-final end (a Styrofoam coffee cup would follow the same route) all the way into one of six ocean "gyres"-great swirls of listless ocean sometimes called the "horse latitudes" where much of the world's floatable trash ends up in unimaginable abundance. The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre between Hawaii and California can swell at times to twice the size of Texas and has come, just within our lifetimes, to contain many times more plastic than that area of ocean contains in living matter (biomass.)

Bad enough that our trash plastic unaltered and whole can strangle an albatross or seal (six-pack holders are notorious for this kind of death) or choke a green sea turtle that fatally mistakes our ocean-drifting plastic bag for a tasty jelly fish.

But perhaps the most ominous thing about the durability of plastic is that it can, over long stretches of time, wear down by sheer mechanical action into smaller and smaller particles without reverting back to its constituent carbons and hydrogens.

Many millions of pounds of these tiny non-digestible particles are destined over decades, centuries perhaps, to float in the ocean currents. In time, tiny bite-sized bits of plastic will be munched but not digested by zooplankton, the bottom tier of the marine food chain. These tiny animals by countless metric tons will be eaten by bigger and bigger fish, on up the food chain and into the grocery stores. And the plastic-and its constituents (a rogue's gallery of dangerous additives) lives on, and on, and on.

Consider this: "Except for the small amount that's been incinerated-and it's a very small amount-every bit of plastic ever made still exists." Each of us tosses about 185 pounds of plastic per year. And you have to wonder: do we need filtered-water bottles that will last for 500 years?

Where does this leave you and me? Perhaps we are on the verge of a slow substitution of non-degradable with break-downable "plastic-like" shopping bags and six-pack holders and drink containers and Barbies and Kens that don't require fossil fuels. As nearby as Virginia Tech, new, less persistent polymers for this purpose are being created using chicken feathers!

So the next time the nice young man at Slaughters presents me with that impossible paper-or-plastic dilemma and I don't know how to answer, I'll be toting a canvas shopping bag (it's a start, and something we can do in the near term) and I'll smile as I imagine a green sea turtle off the coast of Myrtle Beach munching contentedly on a real, digestible, peanut-butter-and-jellyfish.

Recommended:
Polymers are Forever http://urltea.com/ji0
Plastic Ocean http://urltea.com/rcx
Plastic A'int my Bag http://urltea.com/ucj

Beauty, Truth. Truth, Beauty | Part Three

Closer. Closer. Closest.

Parts one, two and three bring us to the truth, you might say, of this vagabond beauty, wild Forget-Me-Not discovered along Nameless Creek this week.

And I will confess, until now I had missed the lesson, knowing only this plant family, with its uncoiling blossoms, pleased me. The AHA! comes from slowing down enough to see the pattern: the grand design in the apparent chaos of rampant growth. This plant displays the Golden Mean, Beauty manifesting Truth.

There is so much to say in this, more than I can find words for before first light on a busy day. But in the end, the lesson from this small flower and a thousand thousand other tiny teachers will be something like this: we need to move from anesthetic knowledge back toward aesthetic wisdom. Truth is more to be found in Beauty than in Efficiency, more needed to save our world than Power or the Knowledge of least things.

Make a point of finding one thing beautiful today.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." ~ John Keats

"Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect misshapes the beauteous forms of things: We murder to dissect." ~ William Wordsworth

"God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please, you can never have both." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Like a Weed: Forget-Me-Not Part Two

A closer look at our discovery (Part One) reveals the details of this sea of tiny blue flowers, details easily missed from a distance to those too busy for a bugs-eye view. It means getting down on your knees in the wet sand--a small price to pay for such a visual memory.

And among the details of form and color in this closer view of Myosotis scorpiodes is the inflorescence type. A flowering plant's "inflorescence" is the way it holds its flowers on the main and secondary stems. (Great page about flower types is at Wayne's World) This flower (and in fact the flower family to which it belongs) is characterized by this unusual type of flower growth form called a helicoid or scorpoid cyme. (More about that tomorrow in Part Three.) Getting an uncluttered shot to show this took some doing, so I'm especially pleased with this shot.

What I wasn't pleased to learn, however, is that this plant is considered an INVASIVE, primarily of wetlands. As a plant brought here (for aesthetic reasons, most likely) and escaped from cultivation, it spreads readily in places like our sandy creek. Ann spotted it yesterday downstream on her drive to town.

Next Thursday I'll be participating in (and photographing and writing about) a workday on the Blue Ridge Parkway to remove invasives from a parkway wetland area near the VA-NC line. More about that then, of course.

Beginning of the Beginning

We are poised in our time between humanity's proclivity for self-indulgence, arrogance and short-sighted self-destruction and a time of healing, cooperation and sustainable relationship with each other and the planet. Some of you understand. You feel revulsion and you feel the possibilities to do better--far better--for the sake of our children's children, and because it is the RIGHT thing. The problems are many. So too may be the solutions.

"But what can one person do?" we hear so often, perhaps from our own lips or unspoken thoughts.

While working in the garden yesterday, mending the fences from last year's deer damage, feeling more than a little discouraged about the state of the world, I listened to Paul Hawken describe our collective understanding about our place in the grand scheme of things, and encourage his listeners wisely in ways we CAN and ARE changing the way we do things to each other and the planet--perhaps, even in time to avoid paying the consequences of where our bigger-hammer approach to commerce and politics seems to be carrying us.

I encourage you to pull this thread. If you could use some encouragement, some hope, and a vision for a brighter future than the one we see at first glance in the media, take time to visit at least one of the links below.

Read the advance endorsements of Hawken's Book, Blessed Unrest by Jane Goodall, Barry Lopez, Bill McKibben, Terry Tempest Williams, David James Duncan, David Suzuki and others.

Watch the short video where Hawken speaks at the Bioneers conference describing this "movement without a name" that may already include more than a million like-minded organizations and 100 million people. If you think you're alone and powerless, watch.

Buy the book. Give to your children.

And finally, visit Natural Capital, and read about WISER, the World Index for Social and Environmental Responsibility. Let's find out where we fit best, each one of us. We all have strengths, skills, gifts, experience that can be used toward the healing of injury--environmental, political, and economic. Maybe it's NOT too late, after all. Perhaps we are at the beginning of the beginning, a time of blessed unrest--and not the beginning of the end.

Ant Ecology | Old Dog, New Tricks

I love that nature is an inexhaustible source of solace, beauty and education for me--and that it is so easy to approach in our chosen location and style of living here in Floyd County.

And I love the fact that I can still share my discoveries of aesthetic or natural history interest with "field trippers" from around the world who share the journey with me through the weblog.

I'd rather you have been there to see it, but next best thing, I can show and tell.

I remember being told in my Pteridology summer course at Mt. Lake Biological Station (back in the Pleistocene era) that Bracken Fern (pictured here) was perhaps the most world-wide of plants, found on every continent. So, it has been around for some while, and done quite well for itself. I wondered back then what made it so successful. Now, I have one clue towards an answer.

Every Braken fiddlehead in the sandy meadow along the Blue Ridge Parkway earlier this week had one or more Carpenter Ants stationed on its three-part unfurling frond. This certainly was more than a random search for food or mates, I figured, and when I got home, I looked it up.

Take a look at the right-hand image. See the wet black spot near the spot where the three prongs of the fern leaf come together? It looks rather like the eye of this otherworldly bird-like creature.

It is a NECTARY, not unlike what many flowers offer their insect visitors. Except, of course in this case, there are no flowers. The ant gets a sweet treat. It seems what the fern gets is protection from other predatory insects while it is in this tender, vulnerable stage.

In our meadow over where Nameless and Goose Creeks come together, there are NO ants on the mature fronds of Bracken Fern. By then, the plant is tough and able to take care of itself. Maybe this association accounts for some of the success of this worldwide fern.

So whaddaya know. The old biology watcher has learned something new about this amazing world--a living planet that has been equipped to take care of itself so very well in such interesting, cooperative ways.

Great To Be Alive!

This is what you'd think the birds were singing the other morning--so cheery and sweet, peppy and happy! But of course the males are really chirping "you want summa me?" and "so's ya muddah"--that sort of thing. "Step over that line. Dare ya!"

But it lifts my spirits, even when I'm objective and face facts as facts. We are blessed to have such a rich diversity of bird life yet, and should not take it for granted. It could well be that our children's children might only have the recordings if we don't do a better job of protecting our passerine (songbird) winter habitat in South and Central America from the logger's chainsaws (among other weak links in the chain of bird life.)

This home grown clip (link below) was taken hand held with my ever-present Olympus DS2 recorder. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) you can never get a clean recording of birdlife here on the creeks for the incessant babble of water over rocks. Can you hear it--Goose Creek in the distance, the brook by the house only 15 feet away as I stand on the back porch with the birds all around? Imagine you are out there with me, an audio field trip to Goose Creek.

http://64.106.159.99/sounds/morningbirds.mp3

Check out indentify.whatbird.com for great information and help identifying those unknown birds you spot or hear every day (don't you?). In my clip, prominent (though by no means exclusively) you'll hear Kentucky Warblers (ChippyChippyChippyChippy). And who is making the cheWit cheWit CHEWITT! (Listen and compare my Kentucky warbler and Hermit Thrush --tee oh lay! oh lay oh Teee!--to the website's recordings) And what other featured songsters do your perceptive ears hear?

And while you're in an audio state of mind, visit the freesounds project to which I will probably upload my bird clips when I've accumulated a few more.

Forests: Our Last, Best Hope Up in Smoke

When I end up with 80% of an online article highlighted in Diigo, that tells me this is something I think is significant and worth passing along, even when I feel generally like the proverbial tree falling in the forest. So let me start with this quote toward the end of this piece called Deforestation: The Hidden Cause of Global Warming from the Independent/UK.

"In a world where we are witnessing a mounting clash between food security, energy security and environmental security - while there's money to be made from food and energy and no income to be derived from the standing forest, it's obvious that the forest will take the hit."

What's the so-what? Only this:

The accelerating destruction of the rainforests that form a precious cooling band around the Earth's equator, is now being recognised as one of the main causes of climate change. Carbon emissions from deforestation far outstrip damage caused by planes and automobiles and factories.

How much CO2 are held by forest that is likely to be burned in the coming four years? Oh, not so much:

Most people think of forests only in terms of the CO2 they absorb. The rainforests of the Amazon, the Congo basin and Indonesia are thought of as the lungs of the planet. But the destruction of those forests will in the next four years alone, in the words of Sir Nicholas Stern, pump more CO2 into the atmosphere than every flight in the history of aviation to at least 2025.

But hey: there are no multinational corporations made fat by NOT "harvesting" this "crop." I mean, they're only trees. They just sit there and take up space where we could put a shopping mall; or make a pasture to raise cheap beef for Triple Patty Cheeze Croissants.

I think, dear folks, we are doomed. If we can't simply passively accept the benefits of something as elemental as the environmental services of a self-sustaining scrubber for the environment we have in what forests we have left.

A couple of you out there, please take a look at this.

Bee Mystery More Serious by the Flower

This mystery continues, and chances are, even if we discover the cause, it will be years before things get back to a healthy normal.

"Honeybees don't just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have. Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.

In fact, about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Even cattle, which feed on alfalfa, depend on bees. So if the collapse worsens, we could end up being "stuck with grains and water," said Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for USDA's bee and pollination program.

"This is the biggest general threat to our food supply," Hackett said." Yahoo News

Want to keep up to date on this topic from a reliable source? Check out the Mid-Atlantic Apiculture site's coverage of Colony Collapse Disorder.

Windmills No Threat to Cats

One of the objections often stated for windmills in the increasingly strident debates that stand to do nothing by grow in coming years is that the long swirling blades of mountaintop windmills spell massive death to birds.

Turns out, we'd be better off to control our burgeoning feral domestic cat population than to avoid a potential source of energy in our rather bleak future as easy oil goes the way of the dodo bird (an extinct species that succumbed to predation in part by cats imported to the Mascarene Islands where they once lived). Here are some interesting figures that come from a recent study of wildlife impact of mountaintop wind generators: link

A long-awaited federal report on the environmental impact of wind power suggests birds have far more to fear from high buildings, power lines and cats than they do from the swirling blades of wind generators at Altamont Pass and elsewhere.

But North America's bats might have plenty more to worry about, according to a report released Thursday by the National Academy of Sciences.

The report said bats might be at considerable risk in the southwestern United States and elsewhere, where reliance on wind power has been growing. The wind-power turbines generate sounds and, possibly, electromagnetic fields that lure the acoustically sensitive creatures into the spinning blades, scientists suggested.

In the United States in 2003, wind generators accounted for only three-thousandths of 1 percent of bird killings -- no more than 37,000 birds. That same year, possibly as many as a billion birds died in collisions with buildings, and electrical power lines may have accounted for more than a billion more deaths, the report said. And domestic cats were responsible for the demise of an estimated hundreds of millions of songbirds and other species every year.

In the eastern United States, up to 41 bats are killed annually for every megawatt of wind energy generated along forested ridge tops, the report said.

One of the more interesting and potentially palatable sources of wind energy would come from interstates, inherently already aethetic sacrifice areas. Have you ever stood on the side of the interstate with a crippled car and practically been blown off your feet by a passing 18-wheeler?

At Engadget you can see pictures of two prototypes of hiway wind-to-current sources: one overhead, the other in the median barrier panel. Makes sense to me. So instead of NIMBY, how 'bout YPOOI...Yes, Please On Our Interstates.

King Coal's New Clothes

This persistent unheeded issue from the "national sacrifice areas" of central Appalachia is finally rising up into the radar outside the hills and valleys that have born the brunt of exploitation, and previously-powerless mountain people are gaining a voice. Where we get our coal and what it is doing to our nation is not a trivial problem to be swept under the rug, though for too many years, it has been. Consider:

"One million metric tons of explosives are used each year in Central Appalachia --by the coal industry-- to blow up the mountains for coal extraction. This equals the explosive force of 58 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs."

But the end is not in sight--only the long hard fight ahead.

In the coming days, the rest of the 20-member coalfield delegation --composed of incredible leaders from all over Central Appalachian -- will ascend upon Manhattan for the United Nation Commission on Sustainable Development meetings on sustainable energy. The delegates believe extraction is not being discussed as part of national or global energy strategies, and are worried that so called "clean coal" will increase mountaintop removal coal extraction –-devastating their lives and homes. link from itsgettinghotinhere.org

Do you believe in "clean coal"? Or the Tooth Fairy?

"We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone's arguing over where they're going to sit." ~ David Suzuki

Eco-ethical Decisions | Species Extinction or Oil?

When I first read about this, it struck me as a kind of extortion:

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa and his government say that if the international community can compensate the country with half of the forecasted lost revenues, Ecuador will leave the oil in Yasuni National Park undisturbed to protect the park's biodiversity and indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation.

Here's what's at risk:

Yasuni National Park protects one of the most biologically rich regions in the world, including a large stretch of the world's most diverse tree community and the highest known insect diversity in the world. It is one of the most diverse places in the world for birds and amphibians.

And here's the conundrum:

Ecuador is very poor. Its international debt is staggering. It's chief asset is in the timber and oil of its Amazonian rain forest. Selling those finite resources would be to give away its basis for survival, and it at least acknowledges that this would be to despoil a global treasure of species and habitat diversity. The choice to NOT develop also has the benefit of avoiding the CO2 that would come from development AND maintain the carbon sink of hundreds of square miles of intact vegetation.

Now: how much is it worth to the commons of the planet to pay Ecuador to not develop Yasuni? How is that decision made across cultures and world political divides, and who will pay and how might that be prorated for each contributor? Can we expect energy-hungry nations (very like our own) to volunteer to pay higher oil and gas prices so that unseen indigenous people and rare salamanders can continue to survive?

This kind of tough world-community, for-the-long-haul decision about sustainability, diversity and planetary health is likely to become increasingly common in coming years. I'd like to think our species will have the foresight and resolve to do the right thing, spending proactively to purchase toward the future. This would be a whole new way of thinking. And in this case, a cheap purchase. Look at what one year of the war in Iraq costs!

Where are the Dead Bees?

This was one of the more puzzling aspects to me in the recent reports of massive and sudden bee die-off: Hives weren't cluttered about with hundreds or thousands of dead bee bodies. The bees simply went missing from the abandoned hives--left, and never returned. Read on...

" It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail.

They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.

The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives."

This last part--avoidance of the abandoned hive--doesn't jibe with the cell-phone radiation theory. My guess is that there are probably several factors at work to cause this colony collapse. Other sources say bees in the hive are infected with almost every known bee virus and fungus, indicating a massive failure of their normal immune functions.

And as some have mentioned and I have discussed here last summer, "the" honeybee is not native. Were it not for the money made from honey, it isn't likely its numbers and our agricultural dependence on this species would have grown as it has. But now, in all probability, native bees are being impacted by the same stressors as honeybees, whatever those may be, so falling back on that source of pollination may not solve the CCD problem any time soon.

For want of a nail...

Earth Day 2007: How Many More?

The first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, marked for me the dawn of environmental consciousness, and I was so hopeful.

In southern Alabama, the channelization of streams by the Army Corps of Engineers and clear-cutting of southern forests by the mammoth forest products companies were the issues at the top of the local environmental agenda of the day. As a young zoology grad student, the issues seemed large but surmountable in the spring of 1970. Fixing them would just take time.

Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin was the founder of Earth Day. It took him almost a decade to find a way to lift the declining state of the planet's health into the political radar; most of his political colleagues would have none of it. But in the late sixties, the youth of those times took up the banner, because they came to see their futures as much impacted by the environmental fate of the Earth as by the political fate of Southeast Asia.

Only a few years had passed since Rachel Carson first sounded the alarm that yes, we could foul our own nest, and had already done so. Our air and water were making us sick, as well as bringing about the decline of many of the animal species with which we share the planet. That the products of man's industry and commerce had accumulated to such a degree as to alter the balance of nature was a new and startling alarm, but not so many were listening back then.

Flash forward: Earth Day, April 22, 2007.

I won't bother giving you the numbers that measure thirty seven years of world-wide population growth; energy and resource use per capita; the number of extinct species and disappearing habitats; and the rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases and elevated air and sea temperatures.

Suffice it to say that the planet-wide problems we face today fall far higher on the scale of urgency than anything looming just ahead of us on that first Earth Day less than forty years ago. The specter of a rapidly warming planet overshadows every lesser concern we might have. And some still aren't listening.

Working to protect particular species and habitats or air and water quality in our cities becomes moot-like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The ship must stay afloat. This Earth Day, we acknowledge that it can sink. And we don't have so much time.

I'll be bold and assume that thirty seven years of planet-watching earns me one stand in the bully pulpit. From this one citizen's perspective, four things must happen. Making the rubber meet the road is quite another matter, and these are complex issues we must be talking about in Floyd's meeting places, churches, and organizations.

1. We must take individual responsibility for being carefully conscious of our family and community "environmental footprint" and reduce it. This will require over the coming decades that we restructure our households, municipalities and economies of goods and services on a more local and self-sufficient scale. Floyd can be exemplary in this transition, and many are already moving in this direction. Have you visited the Sustainable Living Education Center at the Jacksonville Center lately?

2. We must insist that efficiency and conservation by industry and commerce play a much stronger role than they have thus far in CO2 abatement. Energy produced by 600 new coal-burning plants already planned for could be saved (and that much CO2 avoided) by changes in air-conditioning and improved building insulation efficiency alone. What are we waiting for?

3. We must not become complacent by thinking that our individual conservation or lifestyle changes alone will fully solve the larger problem. Let's insist that international governments-especially including our own and starting now-shift away from carbon-based industry, commerce and transportation. Simply using less of the same toxin will still, over time, poison the planet-and this, particularly as China and India grow to match the US as per capita energy consumers.

4. We must find a just way to prevent those who produce the least greenhouse gases from suffering the most. And governments would do well to be proactive-in places like Bangladesh, for instance-to reduce the unprecedented refugee crisis likely when tens of millions lack water once provided by Himalayan glaciers. We must channel our national budgets towards a new kind of defense that includes mitigation of climate change impact here and abroad, even while we drastically reduce production of greenhouse gases.

No matter what we do in the short run, climate change impacts on humanity are likely to be large in the coming century, even here in remote Floyd County. Coping with this unprecedented degree of change will require a whole new way of thinking about our relationship with the planet and each other. Let's renew our commitment to these goals this Earth Day, and move quickly toward an Earth Decade.

And while I'm hoping, perhaps we could come to see THIS ISSUE as the common enemy, not other nations with whom we share this shrinking planet. We're all of us on the very same boat. © Fred First / April 2007

Earth Trends: Appalachian Recovery?

This is good news indeed, even if an act of closing the hen house door after the hungry weasel has been and gone.

HARRISBURG/April 12 – Pennsylvania Governor Edward G. Rendell, Virginia Governor Timothy M. Kaine, West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin III and Maryland Governor Martin J. O’Malley today announced the signing of the Highlands Action Program charter, a regional partnership that seeks to preserve the ecological and cultural resources of the Mid-Atlantic Appalachian Highlands. link

The mid-Atlantic region offers an array of recreational opportunities and thousands of acres of public lands that draw visitors from throughout the world, yet also supports robust timber, agriculture and mining industries that have been the mainstay of our economy since colonial times,” Governor Rendell said. Our challenge is to seek common ground and develop policies that will manage the many demands on this land while preserving the natural beauty and heritage of the Appalachian Mountains. Read More at Nameless Creek

More Than Scenery: Viewshed Protection

That we are deeply affected at a gut level by what we take in through our eyes is a given. A picture of an abused animal makes you want to cry, while another image of an injured soldier can make you sick at your stomach.

That we respond viscerally to the view before our eyes is certain. And so there are places we chose to go where what we will see can calm our souls in a world that in too many instances is a "bad scene".

The Blue Ridge Parkway is one such place, and millions of visitors make this aesthetic choice each year. And more and more, when they drive through the Roanoke section of the Parkway, they see that green corridor encroached by man-made structures built to the very edge of the thin boundary of pasture or woods that separates these two worlds.

And they may feel a sinking feeling deep in the pit of their stomachs. A favorite place, once set apart for a different kind of view of the world, is beginning to look like every other common road.

To many, it is appalling that such visual intrusion was not prevented before it ever happened. But there it is: a row of two story homes along a half mile stretch at Milepost 125.5 west of Roanoke. There is talk of a Wal-Mart being built adjacent to the Parkway near Roanoke--unless enough voices are heard to protest it.

Yesterday, the Friends of the Blue Ridge Parkway sponsored a viewshed tree planting to grow a new forest boundary along this short stretch of roadway, and even under the threat of rain on a chilly April day, dozens turned out to help, including these 25 students from nearby Roanoke College.

If you care about what you see along the Parkway, now is the time to make a difference.

Honeybee AIDS?

The following excerpts are from Der Spiegel, reposted to Truthout/Environment March 22, 2007.

Since last November, the US has seen a decline in bee populations so dramatic that it eclipses all previous incidences of mass mortality. Beekeepers on the east coast of the United States complain that they have lost more than 70 percent of their stock since late last year, while the west coast has seen a decline of up to 60 percent.

Scientists call the mysterious phenomenon "Colony Collapse Disorder" (CCD), and it is fast turning into a national catastrophe of sorts. A number of universities and government agencies have formed a "CCD Working Group" to search for the causes of the calamity, but have so far come up empty-handed. But, like Dennis vanEngelsdorp, an apiarist with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, they are already referring to the problem as a potential "AIDS for the bee industry."

It is particularly worrisome, she said, that the bees' death is accompanied by a set of symptoms "which does not seem to match anything in the literature."

In many cases, scientists have found evidence of almost all known bee viruses in the few surviving bees found in the hives after most have disappeared. Some had five or six infections at the same time and were infested with fungi--a sign, experts say, that the insects' immune system may have collapsed.

...bees and other insects usually leave the abandoned hives untouched. Nearby bee populations or parasites would normally raid the honey and pollen stores of colonies that have died for other reasons, such as excessive winter cold. "This suggests that there is something toxic in the colony itself which is repelling them," says Cox-Foster.

There is evidence that points to agents in genetically-modified corn as a possible cause. Funding to study this has not been forthcoming from the agribusiness industry. Meanwhile, see if you can find a honeybee to show your children. Hurry.

"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man." Albert Einstein

In Search of Wildness

Emily Dickinson was right to see that a prairie consists of only one flower and a bee. When my world was small, a quarter acre vacant wooded lot was enough to make a wilderness.

I grew up in the limits of a sprawling Alabama city, but I was happiest when I imagined I was surrounded by 'wilderness'. In the leafy chaos of empty lots and wooded neighborhood margins I was a pioneer. Playing cowboys and Indians in a tiny fraction of an acre of woods, I could imagine that I was in undisturbed 'native land', and belonged there as a native myself.

As I grew older, I needed more of the nutrient of wildness than my little neighborhood woods could give. I went to summer camp and my backyard forest was magnified a thousand fold. Living at camp for a week, smelling of creek water and pine straw with a hundred other free-ranging feral children,I felt more connected to the larger life of the world than I would have after an entire summer of immersion in chlorine-smelling swimming pools or organized, sanitized sports.

I fished to find wilderness. Fishing possessed its own sense of isolation and otherness and was its own alien country fit for a young explorer. Mostly I fished alone walking the shoreline; more often than not, I'd find myself distracted by a little side creek or a rock bluff along the lake and I would forget fishing entirely. It was not the fish I was after, after all.

Like many of my friends, I followed my father onto the golf courses that spread into the countryside ahead of the expanding city. Our dads went there looking for something--to find tranquility and be near the land perhaps by chasing behind a little white ball. I'd wander off the manicured fairways into the rough turning logs for salamanders. And I decided that for me, just being out there was the point.

It is not easy these days for city children to know the joys of secret woods. Most of the tiny wilderness sanctuaries of my childhood are paved over now. Locked behind guardhouses of gated communities, they’ve become uninviting and forbidden domesticated places. Even the margins and edges from youth were not far enough away to provide reliable wildness. Maybe knowing this has made me long for remoter places when looking for our true home, a place for roots in our later years.

Now, far beyond the edges of a town so small that there are no spreading suburbs, we have found those roots. A vast forest surrounds me, and creeks flow full of bright fish and sunlight. I have tranquility by the sky-full here, and few neighbors to disturb in my rambling walks.

This little valley may be the place I knew I would belong to long ago in that half-acre woods. And I have to wonder if I did not start moving to Floyd County while picking berries with small hands-- beyond my suburban yard in a secret patch of woods where natives lived.

This is a repost from Fragments (or elsewhere) from years ago. It just seemed fitting, what with all the reading and thinking lately about childrens' exposure (or lack thereof) to the natural world.

Creature Feature

So we've now had two full nights without a nibble. No creature was stirring, not even a mouse. What a profound relief to be free (for now) of things that go bump in the night. The scratching was so loud at times it even upset the dog, who would come stand in the dark at my side of the bed for reassurance.

But yesterday, we were all well rested. The dog was up to his usual antics for this time of year, what with the butterfly shadows zigging and zagging around the yard on a sunny afternoon.

But when I called him to come in, he balked. He'd come just so close to the house, then acted as if he was guarding something in the grass. And as I stepped closer to see, he picked up his kill du jour: a rather large, long-tailed mouse (species unk).

Odd, I thought. He catches lots of moles, and the cat (rest her soul) used to catch the much quicker and more nocturnal and secretive mice. But I don't think I've seen the dog catch a mouse before. It must have been sick. Uh-oh.

Do you suppose this was one or our poisoned evictees?

I lassoed the dog and drug him inside, and came back and bagged up the potentially warfarin-laden mouse carcass and put it out of harm's way. And we will have to be vigilant over the next few days for a repeat of this scary consequence of our purging the dancing mice from over our not-quite-sleeping heads.

And while in the dog-zone, we discovered last week that the dog had tape worms. And looking back, I have to wonder if this helps explain Tsuga's bizarre eating disorder that had him eating (and puking) walnut shells. Maybe this was just the wisdom of the species (along with eating grass) as a way to either 1) make himself throw up, or 2) cut/shred some tapes in the intestines from sharp edges of the odd stuff he'd eaten.

Pollen-Nation Biology

A pollen count of 120 is considered EXTREMELY HIGH in the southeast.image link

We spoke to several relatives from the Deep South last week when the pollen count in Atlanta reached 5500 particles. And small wonder that we could barely understand their scratchy voices: allergies and throat irritations are at almost record levels.

And all that yellow stuff that coats their cars and makes that yukky scummy froth on every garden pond and lake is finding its way deep into their lungs. Thank goodness for MUCOCILIARY CLEARANCE! Right?

This is one of the healthy body's unappreciated "miracles" that keeps our lungs from becoming the waste heaps they would quickly become if all the soot, fungal spores, bacteria, dust, rug and clothing fibers AND POLLEN that we breathe in every day stayed deep inside our lungs air exchange surfaces.

Two things happen: the GOBLET CELLS that are richly scattered in this epithelium or lining tissue secrete a sticky glue--MUCUS--that traps the particles.

The CILIA are living whips--cellular organelles that are constantly in motion. And this motion is not random but coordinated--even within entire fields of such cells--so that there is a POWER STROKE and a RECOVERY STROKE. The power stroke, of course, is in the direction of UP and OUT. The cilia (as you can see in these movies) push particles toward the throat where we reflexively swallow, sending those umpteen thousand pollen grains to the hydrochloric acid in our stomachs instead of ending up in our lungs. UNLESS...

Unless you kill the cilia. If you want to do that, light a cylinder of plant material with a match. Put it to your lips and inhale. Cilia in this environment beat weakly, then stop entirely. And where does all that mucus-plus-pollen end up? You guessed it. It slides so deeply in the lungs that it can't be coughed up--no matter how violently you try. Make a wonderful medium for bacteria. Can you say PNEUMONIA?

(Parents, this little biology lesson with movies makes a good visual motivator to the would-be smokers in your family.)

The Great Warming

What does it take to get the attention of our young people, the generation that will be most impacted by the coming changes of such great magnitude?

Certainly it must reach them through the buzz, use the internet and other current technologies well, and be timely. The Great Warming seems to have covered those bases, even if the home page is so full of great information as to be overwhelming. And what a great graphic, don't you think?

So let me narrow it down for you, for starters: Check out the Discussion Guide on Global Warming: Changing CO2urse. (Not a typo, but it takes a minute.)

Sponsored by the Northwest Earth Institute, seven study guides are offered, including

• Voluntary Simplicity
  
• Choices for Sustainable Living
  
• Exploring Deep Ecology
  
• Discovering a Sense of Place
  
• Globalization and Its Critics
  
• Healthy Children-Healthy Planet
  
• Global Warming: Changing Co2urse
  

As you might imagine, the module on Discovering a Sense of Place caught my attention. I have seen this bonding between people and place crucial in my own story to gain a perspective not possible as a migrant homeowner. Even one's sense of patriotism--honoring the father-land, literally--must begin in the countryside before it can fully extend to love of country.

Also, a reminder that Step It Up 2007 (Bill McKibben's "distributed revolution") is April 14. Read more about it in Business Week.

Clean Coal: Count the Costs

" More than 470 mountains have been destroyed by mountaintop removal coal mining. Watch this video about mountaintop removal, including excerpts from the documentary Kilowatt Ours, featuring Woody Harrelson and a soundtrack featuring an original recording of "Blowin' in the Wind," sung by Willie Nelson. (08:23)"

PLEASE do more than watch the video when you visit the link. Keep clicking on the page. Get an education. Then educate somebody else. Maybe even a politician.

You might also keep in mind this quote from a few days ago: "the Bush administration released a new energy plan in April 2001 that called for construction of 1,300 new power plants by 2020." And understand that "clean coal" mined just as you see here will power those plants. Unless WE SPEAK OUT for our mountains, streams, freedoms and rights.

Leaving the Best: Sustainable Forestry

I'm sorry not to have been able to write at greater length about Jason Rutledge and Healing Harvest Forestry Foundation. A few more images of his demonstration last Saturday in nearby Copper Hill can be found here.

Suffice it to say, Jason is an early ambassador and elder statesman of forestry stewardship. He and his son, Jagger (who you can see in the gallery image cutting up the tulip poplar he just dropped) are engaged in a work of love (the profit is small and hard to come by, especially in a day of declining timber values.) And both are as articulate about their purpose, methods and goals as you'd ever expect to find coming from a suit and tie, much less from the garb of a woodsman in the backwaters of Virginia forests.

What Healing Harvest sees perhaps most clearly is there is more to the forest than the trees. In the end, it is the "environmental services" of the forest--its carbon sequestration, cooling effect, energy conversion and especially water resource impact--that makes our woods so valuable to us. To US, not just the small landowner who thinks in terms of his acres during his day.

But then, Jason can also convince you that it makes sense now and in pennies to consider leaving your woods better and better with each sucessive, selective, low-impact, worst-first cutting.

In this demonstration, Jagger Rutledge used a "Swede cut" to drop a tulip poplar 31" across at breast height. (The area it grew in is destined to become a pond). He estimated the tree was about 80 years old. The 8-foot section that was cut from the trunk of the tree weighed approximately 2200 pounds. And the Rutledges' team of Suffolks moved it away as if it were made of balsam wood, leaving no dozed road, no collateral tree damage--just a scuff in the leaf litter in the process.

Waste Not, Want Not

Inefficiency: energy converted uselessly to heat of friction and incompletely burned energy residues: air and water pollutants.

The answer: Efficiency boosts--a much better solution to having more energy and less waste (including famously: greenhouse gases). Here's a snippet from a piece by Lester Brown on Huffingtonpost.com

" One crucial area of focus, a step we can take essentially immediately, is raising energy efficiency--especially in the United States.

When the Bush administration released a new energy plan in April 2001 that called for construction of 1,300 new power plants by 2020, Bill Prindle of the Washington-based Alliance to Save Energy responded by pointing out how the country could eliminate the need for those plants and save money in the process. He ticked off several steps that would reduce the demand for electricity:

* Improving efficiency standards for household appliances would eliminate the need for 127 power plants;

* More stringent residential air conditioner efficiency standards would eliminate 43 power plants;

* Raising commercial air conditioner standards would eliminate the need for 50 plants;

* Using tax credits and energy codes to improve the efficiency of new buildings would save another 170 plants;

* Similar steps to raise the energy efficiency of existing buildings would save 210 plants.

These five measures from the longer list suggested by Prindle would not only eliminate the need for 600 power plants, they would also save money. Although these calculations were made in 2001, they are still valid simply because there has been so little progress in raising U.S. energy efficiency since then."

Fred sez: When the time comes, I'll vote against the BIGGER HAMMER approach. Sometimes LESS is MORE.

On Losing Our Rootedness in the Soil

"Most people of my grandparents’ generation had an intuitive sense of agricultural basics: when various fruits and vegetables come into season, which ones keep through the winter, how to preserve the others. On what day autumn’s frost will likely fall on their county, and when to expect the last one in spring. Which crops can be planted before the last frost, and which must wait. What animals and vegetables thrive in one’s immediate region and how to live well on those, with little else thrown into the mix beyond a bag of flour, a pinch of salt, and a handful of coffee. Few people of my generation, and approximately none of our children, could answer any of those questions, let alone all of them. This knowledge has largely vanished from our culture."

by Barbara Kingsolver | Orion Magazine March-April 2007

Why Has it Taken SO LONG?

...and so many miles of streams gone--entire watersheds? I look at Goose Creek and Nameless, and try to imagine how I would have felt had these irresponsible "laws" allowed them to become lost to "overburden" and acid mine waste.
Press release 3/23/07 from EarthJustice

"Today, we applaud the ruling in federal court stating that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers violated the law by issuing mountaintop removal mining permits that allowed vital headwater streams to be permanently buried.

"The federal government has been illegally issuing such permits. Doing so has led to widespread and irreversible devastation to the streams, mountains and lands across Appalachia. The judge

The Corp's witnesses...conceded that the Corps does not know of any successful stream creation projects in the Appalachian region

has made it clear that the Corps must now comply with the Clean Water Act and stop issuing illegal permits.

"This decision does give the Corps another chance to try and show that they can issue permits for valley fills in streams without violating the law. But the evidence to date shows that the Corps has no scientific basis--no real evidence of any kind--upon which it bases its decisions to permit this permanent destruction to streams and headwaters. They have shown no evidence to support their claims that this destruction can simply be 'fixed' through mitigation. In fact, as the court opinion correctly notes: "The Corp's witnesses...conceded that the Corps does not know of any successful stream creation projects in the Appalachian region."

"Mountaintop removal mining valley fills cannot comply with the Clean Water Act without strict environmental limits. We hope the Corps recognizes this fact and realizes that approving illegal mountaintop removal mining permits does nothing to protect the environment, violates the law and is destroying the lives and culture of the people of West Virginia and the region."

Healing Harvest: Demonstration March 24

Join Jason Rutledge, the Healing Harvest Forest Foundation, and Virginia Forest Watch for a demonstration of what it means to be a Biological Woodsman serving the forested community of Copper Hill. Meet at the Apple Ridge Farm on Pine Forest Road in Copper Hill at 1:00 pm on March 24 to carpool to the demonstration. For more information telephone 929-4222.

I'm going (read more about it). So is my camera. See you there. Jason is a Floyd County low-impact horse-logger. And while you're thinking sustainable forestry, take a look at this!

Our second media production is now available!

This is a professionally edited one-hour film made at Biological Woodsmen's Week entitled: Community-Based Restorative Forestry, HHFF Style. It features a collection of national, regional and local media, plus homemade video never before seen by the public, including footage of working in the woods, and the panel discussion held at the Airlie Center in Warrenton, Virginia.

The panelists are Troy Firth, Gary Anderson, Wendell Berry and Jason Rutledge.

Floyd County: On or Off the Beaten Path?

This is a comment to yesterday's post, Floyd Among the Giants. This seemed a discussion worthy of more.

This is a real conundrum. Of course we want to live in a place that is a nice, comfortable and attractive, and off the beaten path. We want the town and county to survive, even prosper, but it's chief "product" perhaps is the lifestyle and setting that will be destroyed if enjoyed by too many living too close--or too many at once on a weekend or special event.

That rural places are being discovered is a certainty. That they are increasingly popular as home-building destinations is also certain if you look at what is happening to land prices in places where previously there was a "vacuum" of population.

Perhaps the best we can do for in Floyd County in this netherworld between bucolic isolation and popular exploitation is to 1) decide what's precious about the place, pace and pleasures we enjoy and 2) prepare to protect them by zoning, by conservation easement, by purchase by entities whose goal is preservation and not mere profit. We can exert our influence on our supervisors to listen to more than the cha-ching of the treasury at the prospect of dollars--regardless of impact on the "commons" of the county.

We MUST put values on our sense of place and common "ownership" of Floyd County that aren't measured exclusively in revenue. And yet, money talks. Farming is no longer a livelihood. Farmers own the land and can't pay taxes. And there go open spaces, watersheds, viewsheds, and fertile agricultural soils.

This problem is not going unnoticed, but I haven't heard a great, unified solution to it. And Floyd is a divided community--about fifty percent would welcome commercial development of any kind if it meant greater convenience and more jobs, even minimum wage.

I do know that, since new residents ARE going to move here, I'd rather have people move here that KNOW what life is like in the winter during ice storms; what it is like when you want Chinese takeout or to see a movie; what it is like living an hour's round trip from the nearest gallon of milk or expecting any of the other missing "necessities" of life in the towns from which they might hope to move. Most who would expect these things here are so NOT ready for Floyd.

While some bloggers actively promote development of the county and region, most I know are FAR more concerned with keeping the rate of growth very slow and in maintaining the kind of change compatible with the qualities that brought them here in the first place. Many who have moved here have already left and gone back to less isolated places, as I heard today at lunch in town.

Floyd is far from perfect. And I can't think of any of its problems that will be solved by a massive influx of retirement relocation all at once, or by importing the city amenities--Starbucks, W-mart, and convenience-at-hand--that might come with in-migrants if they don't plan to come to be adopted by the land and lifestyle rather than to remake it to suit their habits and preferences.

This is a matter actively discussed and of great concern: how to love Floyd County, hope for a prosperous future, have affordable land and jobs for the next generation, and not overwhelm the roads, the economy, the rural feel, and the quiet landscapes in the process.

Step It Up!

Speaking to a Dartmouth audience about changing global warming's impact by modified lifestyles and economies, Bill McKibben was accused of "preaching to the choir". How will converting the converts do any good, asked one person in the audience.

"Only if the choir sings five times louder is there any chance we'll get federal legislation to help stop global warming", McKibben said. "It's important now to get everyone in the choir to sing at the top of their lungs."

His timing may be right: Congress is considering more than a dozen global warming bills, Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" just won an Oscar, two global oil companies are investing in wind energy, and several corporations are backing legislation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

A youthful-looking 46, McKibben was among the first to sound the alarm about global warming in 1989 with "The End of Nature." But after that book and nine others, he no longer seems content with just issuing warnings. He wants to lead people into action."

Step It Up happens in your area on Earth Day, April 14. Be there. (Click JOIN AN ACTION at top of stepitup web page to find an event near you.)

And I'm buying DEEP, McKibben's book (which he recommends you buy LOCALLY), published just this month. Here's an excerpt from the author's webpage that talks about the book:

"The time has come to move beyond "growth" as the paramount economic ideal and begin pursuing prosperity in a more local direction, with cities, suburbs, and regions producing more of their own food, generating more of their own energy, and even creating more of their own culture and entertainment."

Wedge and Tong: Cutting Trees, Saving the Forest

I appreciated the space in the Sunday Roanoke Times devoted to the Rutledge's Healing Harvest Forest Foundation's horse-logging practice.

Healing Harvest is based in the Floyd County community of Copper Hill. The nonprofit was established in 1999 to support sustainable forestry and animal-powered logging. They advocate a "worst-first," single-selection cutting program. That means choosing to cut individual trees, taking weak, diseased and unwanted trees first and leaving healthy trees to continue to grow.

"What's important is what's left," Jason Rutledge said.

Cutting the weakest and least desirable trees opens up the forest for other growth, he said. Not only trees, but also mushrooms and ginseng -- which Healing Harvest will help landowners cultivate -- can thrive in a healthy forest.

"You can't have them without the forest," Jason Rutledge said. "You can't grow them in a clear cut."

Watch Jason's team of Suffolk draft horses, Wedge and Tong, do their work in a short video at the Roanoke Times link above.

Read more about Healing Harvest in Floyd County, Virginia.

No Child: Your Thoughts

For those of you who responded to the Leave No Child Inside link last week, please take note: You can share a comment to the piece on the Orion site. The comments already posted are worth reading, i