Category: Conservation & Environment

Continuing with the Aldo Leopold conference, I was making notes on the speakers and thinking not only about what they were saying but also on some tangents. The main talks yesterday were about watersheds and how it makes more sense to avoid pollution upstream than to clean it up down. Of course we talked about fertilizers and herbicides washing into streams and ordinary sediment remains a big challenge.

We talk about externalities, i.e. results that one persons or organization imposes on others. Smoke from a factory is an externality. The owner keeps the profit partly at the expense of others (i.e. smoke), and we most often think of externalities as costs. But there are also external benefits. A forest owner, for example, creates positive externalities, like better quality water, air, wildlife habitat, that benefit the wider community at his expense. These benefits are rarely appreciated until they are threatened.

Economists dislike externalities because they are hard to measure and tend not to fit into models very well. In less dense systems we can often ignore them as factors. But they are coming more into focus as we live closer.

Consider a case study of smoke, not from factories but from prescribed burning. Prescribed burning creates many benefits for the wider community in that it protects resources, provides wildlife habitat and helps prevent wildfires. But the smoke and potential danger are what people see and feel more immediately. The benefits far outweigh the costs, but the benefits are slow acting and almost invisible, while the costs are in your face.

I am not generally in favor of the idea of quantifying ecological services very precisely, since that reduces nature to just another commodity, but we do need to think more about it in general. If we want to continue to enjoy the ecological services land provides, we do need to create decent incentives to keep them. Some people’s first response – and too often last – is to make laws and regulate. There is a place for this, but regulation tends to stop BOTH negative responses and positive ones. We need the stick, but also the carrot.
Farmers do not want to apply more fertilizer than they need, since it costs money and time, and no land owner wants erosion to wash his dirt down the river, but sometimes they do not know or cannot afford better methods. The carrot is education and cost shares. Just as we have right to complain about externalities that bother us – make polluters pay – we have a proactive duty to help facilitate and pay for those that benefit us.

My photos show the Aldo Leopold Center near Baraboo, a view from the cafeteria at UW Sauk County, where the conference was held (notice the green roof) and Devil’s Lake nearby. The last photo is left over from my Madison visit. It shows from nice old bur oaks. They need to burn under them, as I learned talking to folks at the Arboretum and they have plans to do it, but it is close to houses and the neighbors are unenthusiastic about the smoke. These are the externalities I am talking about. Everybody likes the natural beauty and they came for that, but the natural process needed to keep it is less pleasant.

Having fun with ecology. I was explaining the difference between aspens and birches. They really are not very similar except they both have whitish bark. The aspen bark does not peal; birch does. Birch are also much more often multiple stems. Aspen tend to go straight up. Aspen leafs shimmer in the wind; birch not so much.

You can see the difference in the pictures. Picture #1 shows both. The birch is the whiter one. Picture #2 is a typical birch and #3 typical aspens. The last pictures shows some aspens. They do not typically lay down like that, but you can get a good look at the usual shape.
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Went up to Mauthe Lake to get my fix of glacier landscape. Mauthe Lake is a gift of the glaciers. During the last ice age, which ended only 11,000 years ago, Wisconsin was covered by ice. Ice ages last a long time. The last ice age lasted 74,000 years, more or less. The time between ice ages is short, about 10,000 years. We are overdue for the start of a new ice age. We don’t think much about this in the age of global warming, but we should recall that we can influence but not control the really big swings.

When the last period of rapid global warming occurred, the ice rapidly retreated. Some big chunks of ice persisted, buried under the ground. When that ice melted, they became depressions called kettles and the bigger ones became lakes, like Mauthe Lake. You can see all the glacial forms in the Kettle Moraine State Forest, near Milwaukee.

The kettle is a depression often a little lake or a bog. I explained its origin above. A moraine is where the glacier stopped. They are like ripples. Hard to ride your bike up and down, as I can attest from my youthful experience. The glaciers advanced and retreated, so there are lots of ripples. The farthest advance is called a terminal moraine. Sea levels were much lower during the ice age. Long Island is mostly a terminal moraine, a big one. It was not an island during the ice age. There were rivers that ran across the tops of glaciers. Sediment accumulated in the bottoms and when the glaciers melted they dropped to ground level leaving serpentine hills. These are called eskers. Sediment also accumulated where there was a hole in the glacier or a little lake. When the glacier melted, this sediment dropped to ground forming teardrop shaped hills called drumlins. There are lots of drumlins in Jefferson and Dane Counties. Capitol Hill in Madison is a drumlin.

Part of Wisconsin was NOT covered by ice. This is the driftless areas around Lacrosse. Chrissy grew up in this region. Locally, they call the the “Coolie region,” A coolies is a long, narrow valley formed by glacial melt water. Grand Coolie in Washington State is an example of a very large coolie, formed when a giant ice dam collapsed releasing a torrent of water that scoured everything until it ran into the Pacific Ocean.

My pictures are from around Mauthe Lake. I walked around it. It was the kind of “solitude” I like. There were few people on the trail, but I could hear kids having fun in the lake in the distance. The second picture shows tamarack trees. Tamaracks are deciduous conifers. They are tolerant of bad and acidic soils, but very intolerant of shade, so they tend to grow on bad soils and in bogs where there is less competition. Picture #3 is scrub oaks. They are small, but old. Some of their size is probably due to genetics, but the soil is also little help. Picture #4 is the Milwaukee River. Mauthe Lake is not the source of the Milwaukee River, but it is close. The river runs through it. I first visited this in 1965, when I was ten years old. I was confused when I learned about the Milwaukee River. I recalled the polluted water in Milwaukee and worried that I was swimming in that. Of course, that was foolish. The water is clean up here.

Last picture shows a red pine plantation. It was planted in 1941 and has been thinned four times. I asked the ranger if they burned under the trees. No. I asked if they would be harvested. Yes but no clear cutting. So that means that the future will not include red pines on this acreage.
 

A lot of people fear GMOs. I do not, at least no more than I fear (respect) electricity, fire or power tools. As with every new development, we need to be circumspect. Transgenic plants and animals will not be a panacea but I see significant upsides. The modern varieties are not qualitative different from plants and animals developed with traditional breeding, however, more precise. If we breed a plant or animals for a particular characteristic, we really do not know what we are getting. Lots of other genes can/will come along that we do not know about.

A transgenic plant can have the precise single different factor, as in the case of transgenic American chestnut trees, which would be identical to other chestnut trees in every way except the one factor that makes them resistant to the chestnut blight that killed the billions of trees once a keystone species in North American forests.

I think about this a lot as I observe nature under stress. We live in an age of human-influenced nature. There is no escaping it. We no longer have the option of “letting nature decide” by itself. Invasive species already introduced HAVE changed the rules. Our choice is to allow the degradation to continue and worsen or take steps to improve and protect our biotic communities.

I am in Wisconsin, visiting places I knew well decades ago. I see many changes. Some are positive. Many are natural changes in forest composition. BUT there are some really bad ones wrought by invasive species.

In Stevens Point I revisited northern mixed forests I loved. I greatly appreciated the thick, dark hemlock trees. They filled a unique role, shading streams and forming the climate forest. They lived more than 400 years, or at least they could have done. They are all gone now, at least I did not see a one in the woods where they used to grow in great profusion, victims of the woolly adelgid from China. One of my favorite ecosystems is the oak savanna, locally called oak openings. Look at my picture below. They have to trench between them in an often vain attempt to ward off the wilt. Consider that trees often form root grafts and that those grafts are beneficial – usually. The BEST we can do is sever their ties. What about the ash trees? The emerald ash borer is relentlessly and energetically killing the ash. The trees can be treated with chemicals to ward off the invaders, but the treatment must be done every three or four years. Ash trees are among the most common trees in the Midwest. We really cannot afford to lose them, but we may.

What has this to do with transgenic plants? Plenty. Evolution is a slow process. We have introduced species at alarming rates and upset the process. It cannot work fast enough to cope. Plant breeding may work over time, but it may be that a plant species just does not have the capacity to breed a solution. Of course, we can, are and should use various management techniques, but they can be applied only in limited areas. We need a more sustainable solution.

Transgenic chestnuts currently exist that are almost completely immune to the blight. I read about ash trees that could be developed to deter or destroy the ash borer. This COULD happen through evolution, but how long?

So in many ways transgenic solutions work for those places NOT as generally impacted by humans. I do not worry as much about my loblolly pines. Plenty of scientists are working to protect them. It is like a disease that affects lots of people in rich countries. Lots of people are working on solutions. But what about those less economically significant but still important. That is where the transgenic varieties will be key.

Consider that you do NOT need to change all the trees. If there are sufficient numbers, there will be herd immunity. If ash borers bite into a sufficient number of protected trees, the bugs will starve or fail to reproduce. They are unlikely to be eradicated, but they can become an endemic but not fatal problem.

We need to act and be not afraid. We have many tools to fight invasive diseases and we need to be smart about which, when and how to use them. Transgenic plants and animals are among our sharpest and most precise tools.

My first picture shows the heroic efforts needed to stop wilt. Number 2 is the still living oak savanna. Number three shows ash recently emerald ash borer victims and picture number four shows how they should be, would normally be. The first two pictures are from Schmeeckle Reserve at UWSP. The last two are from Kettle Moraine Park, Northern Unit.