Category: Conservation & Environment

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Brookings: Improving water infrastructure and promoting a more inclusive economy

Rode down to Brookings for a program on the water workforce, see below. Getting my bike fixed and some of the parts replaced saves at least ten minutes of ride-time, as the energy formerly turned into friction heat and sideways wobbling gets converted to forward motion. It took me a little less than an hour and ten minutes to get all the way from my house to Brookings.

Program was worth the trip and was especially appropriate given my recent visit to the Milwaukee sewage plant.

Key points are that the labor force in the water industry, including sewage, drinking water and related functions like plumbers, is relatively old, 50+% are eligible to retire and it is hard to replace them with suitable workers.

One problem is the general labor shortage. With unemployment so low, it is just hard to find people. Making it worse, the work is semi-skilled, so people cannot just do it right out of the box. There is also a security aspect. Water is a sensitive industry. Workers must pass drug tests and it is sometimes hard for ex-cons to get a clearance, more on that below. It is also getting hard just to find guys who will show up on time every day.

The water industry jobs pay above average wages. The woman at the Milwaukee sewage plant told me that starting wages are $30-35 an hour. However, they still have trouble getting qualified help. It is often a dirty job, sometimes out in the elements in stinky places, and many people prefer to work in comfortable offices and complain about their low pay.
We heard from Louisiana Congressman Garret Graves. He said that we spend way too much money reacting to disasters and way too little anticipating and mitigating them. Hurricane Katrina, for example, was largely a man-made disaster. Nature provided the wind and water, but Louisiana and New Orleans were not properly prepared and that made it a disaster.

He talked about the need to build infrastructure – human and physical, grey and green – but not just dump money in an inefficient system. In Louisiana, for example, they were able to get jobs done for half or a third of the supposed cost by making contracts more open and specifications better.

Some of the best infrastructure is green. Coastal forests and mangroves are some of the best defense against storms and they filter the water between events.
Next came a panel including Kishia Powell, Commissioner, Department of Watershed Management – City of Atlanta, GA, Andrew Kricun, Executive Director and Chief Engineer – Camden County Municipal Utilities Authority (NJ) & Katie Spiker, Senior Federal Policy Analyst – National Skills Coalition.

Andrew Kricun talked about the paradox that unemployment in Camden is more than 10%, but he cannot get enough people to do the jobs in his water facilities. They are addressing that by outreach and training. They understand that much of the training will not directly benefit the water works, since people will find jobs elsewhere, but he talked of the triple bottom line – economy, environment and social good.

Kisa Powell agreed and went on that in Atlanta they were trying to hold onto some of their older workers longer and going to non-traditional places to find new ones. For example, they have a program with the local prisons to train convicts while still in the joint for jobs they may take when they get out. This is another instance of a social benefit.Ex-cons can have trouble finding work and can too easily slip back into the ways that got them in jail in the first place. A steady and demanding job can help keep them on the straight and narrow.
They all emphasized that it is better to anticipate and avoid than to react to crisis. Emergency repairs can cost 3-5 times as much as fixing it in time.

They also touted the benefits of preparation and green infrastructure. Rain gardens, for example, can avoid overflows at the sewage plants. The water still finds its way back into the rivers, but slowly and usefully.

Everybody talked about the problem of just finding out what is going on. There are lots of good ideas, but they need more connectors. I have thought about this a lot myself. Connectors are very important, but they get no respect. Everybody thinks they are just talking to people and traveling and too many think that either communication happens by itself or that there can be some kind of centralized system that does it all.

Notes on earlier water program.

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Impermanence

I wish I did not go, but I am glad I went.  I took much less joy in my trip to Mauthe Lake because of all the dead ash trees all along the road on the way up and then all around the lake.  The emerald ash beetle and killed almost all of them.  I did not appreciate how many ash trees there were until I saw all the skeletons.

What to do about it?  Last time I was here, I wrote about possible solutions using GMOs. Maybe we could develop ash trees naturally resistant.  But maybe it is just the impermanent.  I also wrote about the vastness of geological time last time I was here.  The ice day did not end very long ago in the great scheme of things.  The ash forests are recent.  This kind of geography would be dominated by tupelo and bald cypress if they were farther south.  Global warming has made most concepts of “native” almost meaningless. Maybe it is time for tupelos and bald cypress in anticipation of the “new” climate.  I don’t know about tupelos, but I know that bald cypress can survive and thrive in Wisconsin, although they are not native to the state.  They tend not to reproduce is the cooler climate, but if the climate becomes less cold, maybe that will change.

I like the woods and fields familiar from my youth. Mauthe Lake was where I learned to love nature.  We were in a day camp up there when I was in 5th grade. We took the path around the lake that I walked today.  It is only a couple of miles, but for us kids it was a true adventure.  I don’t remember details, but I the feeling abides.  I don’t want change, but change is what we are getting, so we can adapt and make things better or let them get worse.

First picture show a ghost forest of the ash. Next is a recently cut stump. I counted 98 rings. Since I probably missed a few, I figure the tree was more than 100 years old. Not all the ash are dead. You see a healthy one in picture #3. Don’ know why that one did not die. It might be useful to find out and maybe help spread. Picture #4 shows some tamaracks, eponymous of the trail. Tamaracks are very shade intolerant. They tend to grow in place where others do not thrive, places like bogs. Last shows the beech on Mauthe Lake. Glad to see people enjoying being outside.
Facebook reports re Mauthe

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Forest Visit June 2018

Went down to the farms to look at the thinning and burning.  Besides just being in my forests and checking on those things, my goal was to try to get rid of some of the ailanthus.  It is an endless struggle. I wish that other – useful – trees were so resilient.  I have trouble telling ailanthus from sumac at a distance and sometimes even close.  I don’t doubt that I have been knocking off sumac too.  Sumac, I like so I am not happy about that.  Sumac does well with fire, at least that is what I observed.  I see a lot of it sprouting from the roots after the burns.

I still worry that the Brodnax fire was a bit too hot.  The heat plumes scorched the needles. Some of the local guys who know fire told me that scorch does not kill southern pine, and that they would come back.  I looked carefully today (see picture).  Most of the trees have some green again.  They will probably make it. Still, I think in future I will want only dormant season burns, and certainly not after they have candled.  The anxiety is too much.  You can see the picture of what the trees on the other side of the fire line looks like.  The fire top killed the hardwoods.  On this land, we are doing patch burns, one-third each year, so we will go after the far section next year and the adjacent one year after that.  That will give us a chance to see the variation and maybe start over again.

Longleaf are doing well on the Freeman place. I went after a few ailanthus among them and knocked out some sweet gum and yellow poplar for good measure.  None of them were big problems.  I think the fire does a good job on them.  Still not sure if we will burn this next year.  I keep going back and forth about it.  Not even sure if I will burn the thinned acreage. The cutter, Kirk McAden, did a really good job and made easy to use fire lanes.  We are going to plant a couple thousand longleaf before Christmas this year.  We have around five acres of that we clear cut. The trees were twenty-two years old and the tract had not been thinned. I feared that if we thinned they would be too likely to be damaged by ice or wind storms.  They had been growing so tight that they did not develop strong enough roots or branches.

I am going to replant myself and get he kids to help.  That may be a good reason to burn, to clear up some of the crap so that they will have an easier time.  Next year (2019), we will plant a lot more into the openings (we created ¼ acre openings on every acre, i.e. 80 acres x ¼ acre or 20 acres total.   Along with some trees under to loblolly, that will be around 10,000 trees.  I think I will need to hire a crew to do that.  It is a bit too much for the kids and me.

Loblolly are just easier to grow than longleaf.  I was looking at the Brodnax place where we planted about 30 acres of loblolly and a little more than 15 of longleaf in 2016. The loblolly now come up to my waist and they are competing well with the vegetation, see the picture below. The longleaf are still in the grass stage and I am not sure the ones in the vegetation are even alive.  We burned last year. This top killed the hardwood brush by the other vegetation came up like mad.  You really don’t need to plant loblolly at all.  They come up whether you want them or not. There are probably twice as many loblolly now growing than we planted.  In theory, the planted ones are better genetically and will grow faster.  We will see in a couple years if the rows are much better than the random.  I bet that there are more natural regenerated loblolly on the longleaf plots than there are longleaf.
Anyway, thinking about how the forests are growing is a great joy.  I have an idea of what I want and I guess about how it will play out, but it is always a surprise.

Picture up top shows the loblolly among the ground cover on Brodnax.  The first one below is the longleaf on Brodnax. You can see the difference Bu.t they CAN grow similarly.  The next picture shows a longleaf and a loblolly on Freeman.  Both were planted in 2012 and they are just about the same size. Below that are pictures of the un-burned and the burned one next to it.

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Sand County Almanac

Spent my morning rereading and thinking about parts of “A Sand County Almanac”. I read “Axe in Hand” and the “Land Ethic.” That book had a great influence on me. I realize it when I reread the passages and find so many of “my” ideas. Way back in 1972, my biology teacher, Mr. Hosler, assigned us to read it. Since I was a poor student, I probably only skimmed it enough to pass the test, but it sunk in roots nevertheless. Maybe that is because I was living in Wisconsin and studied forestry at University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, which is itself a sand county. I have visited Aldo Leopold’s sand county shack a couple times and enjoyed the white pines he planted, the ones he mentions in “Axe in Hand.” “A Sand County Almanac” was published in 1949, a couple years after Leopold’s death. He died of a heart attack while fighting a fire on his neighbors land, but his insights and advice are still valuable to us today. One thing that I noticed reading time was the ethic of valuing the non-economic communities on the land.

We spend a lot of time trying to explain to people why it pays to conserve nature. We talk about the value of “ecological services” and that value is immense, yet undervalued. However, things have value in themselves. The beech forests on my land are valuable to me for their beauty, even if they have little economic value. But even that does not go far enough. They have value in themselves beyond their economic value, their ecological service value and even their value that I appreciate as beauty. They are part of the world, as we are.

As Leopold writes in “Axe in Hand” – “Whoever owns land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine function of creating and destroying plants.” We need to take that very seriously and think of yesterday, today and tomorrow when contemplating the land and what to do on it.

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I Speak for the Trees

A really great article. It is a little long, but well worth reading.

I remember those protestors in the picture. I thought it appropriate that one of them was dress like a cartoon character in a children’s story, since it reflected the level of their understanding.

Sorry to be snarky (actually not), but these guys are pernicious, not cute. I stipulate that they are sincere, but they do not understand forestry and make appeals to fear and emotion. “I speak for the trees” – what a load of crap. People like me spend years listening (figuratively of course) to the trees and the forest and they certainly would not want this guy as a spokesman.

treesource.org   Analysis: In zeal to restrict logging, advocacy groups exploit dubious research – treesource

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Looking for a Land Ethic on Virginia Tree Farms

The American Tree Farm System (ATFS) assessed our Virginia program this year. I got to go along with the assessor. We visited a random sample of twenty-one tree farms all around the Commonwealth, covering 1,195 miles. It was fun and enlightening to see so much of Virginia and meet such great people.

What does it mean to be a tree farmer and a conservationist? I have studied this and have been repeatedly drawn to the ideas of Aldo Leopold on a land ethic. I expect you all can read his work. One thing that really stuck with me was when Leopold wrote, “nothing so important as an ethic is ever ‘written.’” It evolves through interactions with the land. It is written on our hearts and manifest on the land we love. From this I took my instruction. I looked and listened for a land ethic when visiting Virginia tree farms and talking to tree farmers.

I found approaches as diverse as our tree farmers and our Virginia environment, evolving and adapting, changing details and tactics with the times, but always with the core of protecting water and soil, enhancing and improving the health of the biotic communities, while producing wood and forest products for the market. We own lots of things in our lives, but we form special bonds with land; it is our connection to the earth, our promise for the future and joy for today. There is no surprise that people have deep feelings for land that has been inherited their families for generations, but it is astonishing how fast the same connections develop with newly adopted land.

A competent tree farmer makes a reasonably profit. Profit is the price of sustainability in the human world, but profit is nobody’s primary motive

Our tree farms are interwoven in human and the natural environments. Both are complex, and their interactions add another layer of complexity. This makes it more challenging and very much more interesting to be a tree farmer. A competent tree farmer makes a reasonably profit. Profit is the price of sustainability in the human world, but profit is nobody’s primary motive. I met tree farmers who owned the land to improve wildlife habitat and others who wanted it as a home. Some revered family traditions on the land going back centuries; others were new owners. All follow a holistic approach, with active and adaptive management. Diverse goals are not as much prioritized as melded. There is no clear answer to the question, “What is your top priority?” without the context of “In relation to what?” The whole is more than the sum of the parts.

We seek not to mimic nature or “preserve” it motionless but understand and use nature’s principles – energetically and regeneratively

With the caveat that I am summing up in writing what we said cannot adequately be written, tree farmers share a land ethic that knows that trees are more than wood and forests are more than trees. Our stewardship recognizes the past and anticipates the future with adaptive plans and iterative decision making. We seek not to mimic nature or “preserve” it motionless but understand and use nature’s principles – energetically and regeneratively. Forests forever. We respect the biotic and human communities that influence and depend on our land. We are conservationists, caring for the health of our land and its biotic communities while celebrating human use of our land’s resources. We grow trees in sustainable forests for sustainable uses. The wood buildings where we live remain part of our forest’s lifecycle; the clean water we drink is a forest product. All are threads in the big tapestry, so intertwined that they cannot be separated.


A Sand County Almanac
Notes on Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic

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Freeman Thinning 80 Acres

I dislike how it looks right after a harvest and I should probably avoid it for a little while, but I must look. I know this is a necessary step and it will be better soon. On the plus side, I think it is looking like the widely spaced ponderosa pine I like so much in the west and I know it will be great wildlife habitat in as little as weeks. I want it to have an herbaceous, grassy ground cover like is developing under the longleaf shown in picture.

In the next couple weeks my friend Scott Powell will plant pollinator habitat on loading decks. For the record, this is the list of the types of plants in “pollinator habitat” plantings in Virginia, in case somebody else wants to plant such things – Little bluestem, splitbeard bluestem, purple top (NC or VA ecotype), bearded beggartick, lanceleaf corepsisis, Indian blanket, partridge pea, evening primrose, black eyed Susan, narrow sunflower, purple coneflower & eastern showy aster. The seeds will spread into the woods.

To remind about the overall plan – We thinned 80 acres of 22-year-old loblolly pine to 50 basal area. We also made clearings of around a quarter acre in each acre, i.e. twenty of them. We will plant longleaf into these clearings. They will grow into what foresters who work on longleaf call “domes” because the trees in the middle grow faster than those near the edges, where they get less sun.
Reference on ecological forestry

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Tribal Forestry – Flathead Reservation

Back in the 1930s and 1940s, professional and expert opinion was firmly against any fire in the forest. The only ones who still burned the woods were Southerners and Native Americans. Both groups were ridiculed for their outdated habits. The authorities mounted an advertising campaign against them. “Scholarly” articles were written attacking Southern bad habits and authorities unleashed PR campaigns against burning. They called burning by Native Americans Paiute forestry. Fortunately, neither group stopped burning and gradually ecologists came to a better understanding of fire in the forest.

The experts were not entirely wrong. If your only goal is to produce as much wood as possible in the short term, you should exclude fire. But trees are more than wood and forests are more than trees. A holistic approach is better.

We cannot always justify this with bottom line thinking, but it fits better into the “triple bottom line,” the sweet spot at the intersection of something being good ecologically, economically and culturally.

This triple bottom line – holistic – thinking was much in evidence when we visited the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation. They want to make their timber lands profitable, but they also have other priorities. I very much agreed with their philosophy. It is like what I want on my own land.

My first picture shows a fire managed ponderosa pine forests. It is open and park-like, since the fire cleans out the brush. Ponderosa pine forests used to burn every 3-15 years. The little fires make the forest healthy and can prevent big fires. Notice how high the branches are. The fire does not get into the crowns of the trees. Next shows the tribal forestry folks explaining their methods. After that is a field of camas. The roots are edible and were a culturally valuable food for the Native people. W/o burning, the camas had just about disappeared. Next two are just some more beautiful pictures.

Tribal foresters explained that fire had been a tool their ancestors used for generations. At the end of the season, they set the woods on fire. The fires burned until put out by the snows. When the people came back next spring, the land was again rich with new growth. This virtuous cycle was stopped when fire was excluded. It is coming back now, but restoration takes time. Fortunately, forestry folks understand the need for patience.

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Heading Home from Missoula

Heading back east. The fire conference in Missoula was fun. I got some new insights and lots of things to think about.

Conditions in Virginia are way different from those in the West. Lots of the things that work in our SE ecosystems would be a bad idea out here and the reverse is also true. You really cannot make a policy that works for the whole country.

Today’s talks were useful for me, since they talked about the SE a little more. I was afraid, however, when the first speaker talked about tree mortality and said that trees that were scorched 90% would probably die. We just did a burn that scorched ten acres of loblolly. I was relieved when the next speaker pointed out that, indeed, in the West this was true, but in the SE scorch does not usually kill pines.

We talked about the different fire regimes. I think I added a little to the discussions talking about how spacing affects the heat plumes. I have seen this from experience. The research did not account for changes in convention related to spacing (a tighter canopy hold the heat) and said she would think about it as a factor in her research going forward. The other comment I made was that I thought that backing fires destroy duff, while head fires often scorch. Some of the research conflated the duff destruction with scorch. The two are often inverse. Backing fires look more benign, but they fry the roots. Anyway, it was fun today. It was good to mix the research with the field observation.

A guy from Georgia gave a talk about growing season burns versus dormant season. His research indicates no difference in hardwood suppression, especially dealing with sweet gum. This goes against some of our traditional wisdom, but it is a good thing, if true. It is safer to burn in winter. I got the guy’s information and will follow this.

My pictures show the usual beer drinking. Since it is my birthday, we went to a place called “Jake’s”. My relatives know, but my friends may not, that was my nickname when I was a kid. The next picture is a gas station in big sky country. Finally is a photo from one of the morning lectures, showing convention and its effects on trees, in theory.

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Fire as Complex Adaptive System

I have studied systems theory and complexity since the 1990s. I did not expect to find those things so prominent in a seminar on wildfire but I should have. Very few things we “manage” are as complex as wildfire. A lot of it depends on weather conditions, which are themselves notoriously difficult to predict in detail. Fuels are unknowable in detail. Behaviors of smoke are known in theory, but not in practice. Layer onto all of this the social dimensions. Complex.

Mark Finney, the day’s keynote speaker, talked about the need for models to simplify reality, but the models do not equal experience. He contended that techniques have run ahead of science. Burn bosses have learned from trial and experience in ways that are not codified.

Fire science divided into two divergent streams. One stream is structural fires. This is a true science in that it takes place in human made structures and there can be standardization. You can do actual experiments that can be replicated concerning materials and conditions. Engineers can build whole structures just to burn them down and then specify what works in building codes. Wildfires do not offer this. Conditions are always dynamic.

This does not mean that we cannot learn from wildfires and develop better strategies. Mr. Finney said that we need to continue to work to improve. We can get better, even if we cannot get perfect.