I talked about my flight over the farms with Brian in my last post. The aerial perspective was fun. I could see the interrelations of the wildlife plots for the first time. Below are some pictures with comments.
Above is a panorama of the feed plots and a picture of almost the whole CP farm (the wing covers only a small corner.) You can see how they are connected and how form openings in the woods. They are mostly covered in clover, which appears a lighter green this time of year. The picture below shows the sun reflecting off the streams. It has been a wet year, so they are wider than usual. I was a little surprised how much water is spread over the wetland area near the center of the photo. BTW, the gray trees are the broad-leaf forest, currently bare of leaves, around the streams and boundaries, so you can see things clearer this time of the year than when everything is green.
Below is the Freeman tract. You can see the boundaries with the deciduous bare branches. It is roughly rectangular. You can see the Vulcan quarry off to the NW. It is much closer to our property than I thought. You have to drive a long way around to get to the farm gate. As I wrote in yesterday’s post, that quarry may eventually become a deep lake, which would be a nice addition. The utility lines that run through the property were recently upgraded, and the dirt was a bit torn up by the machines. I have a total of eight acres under those lines, so it is not inconsequential. I would like to plant this over in warm season native grasses and encourage some quail habitat. The long narrow aspect provides a lot of edge environment.
The Freeman trees will be fourteen years old this year. It is an exceptionally good stand and I think they will be ready for thinning, maybe even this year. I have spent a lot less time on this tract. The CP farm was my first one, so I spent a lot of time there just getting to know forestry, it is also more interesting because it has a greater variety of environments, including the wetlands and hills. You cannot really tell from the pictures, but CP is a lot hillier than Freeman. But Freeman is more valuable for growing trees, acre for acre. Less interesting is often more valuable.
Above is a panorama showing the local lay of the land. My forest is only part of the bigger picture. The whole area looks like this. You can see how important forestry is to southern Virginia. Flying over made that clear. It is not just covered in forest, but also lots of clearly managed forests. BTW, the distortion you see in the picture is just the reflections from the window glass.
I was devastated when I first learned about original sin. No matter how good you are or what you do, you can’t overcome the sin carried by all humans. Fortunately, there is a way to redemption. Many in today’s world have rejected this religious concept and some have rejected religion altogether. At least they think so.
If you believe in nothing, you fall for anything
But humans are hardwired to believe in something beyond themselves. The non-religious or the un-religious often develop some very rigorous dogmas of their own. Sometimes they are deadly godless quasi-religions such as Nazism or communism. More often in our own times they are variations of difficult to define new age beliefs. Some people are attracted to these sorts of things because they can fill in whatever they want while still enjoying the safety net of spirituality.
Excessive purity is a perversion
IMO, one of the most pernicious perversions of religion was/is the type of exclusive, bigoted purity (BTW – I avoid using the term puritan because that implies a particular time, place and people.) that declares the very nature of humanity as evil and holds out almost no chance of redemption. We have had outbreaks of this throughout history and it is a deadly disease.
I always thought that if God was almighty he could take care of himself without the faithful on earth having to kill or torture people in his name and a just God surely doesn’t reward those that do. But many of the purists evidently have less confidence in the Almighty than I do and feel he needs their humble human violent interventions. Good people have to oppose this perversion of faith w/o necessarily attacking the God that these misguided people purport to represent.
There is no possibility of redemption in most secular variations of original sin
Unfortunately, secular quasi-religions can also be intolerant, deadly and human-hating and they can and do produce a secular version of original sin. In the Marxist version, your “sin” relates to the class and Marxist theology allowed whole classes of people to be consigned to Gulags, no matter their individual behaviors or attributes. The Nazis did this based on races, as they defined them.
Your carbon footprint = your sin?
The concept of original sin is becoming prevalent in some of the deeper green environmental circles and is manifest most clearly in the concept of the “carbon footprint.” The whole idea of global warming maps closely with original sin. According to the more extreme interpretations, all humans are guilty of greenhouse gas. In a modern version of the medieval mortification of the flesh, you can reduce your “sin” but there is nothing you can do to avoid it. The best thing you could have done for mother earth was never to have been born and some people have advocated holding you accountable for your own carbon footprint and those of your descendants. We could paraphrase Exodus 20:5 by saying that it visits the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and forth generations, but this modern religion goes on forever. And it is even expanding to include our pets. Yes, owning a big dog may be worse than driving an SUV. Ironically, I think the idea that the human species should voluntarily vacate the planet sits better with some people than the idea that they would have to get rid of their dogs or cats.
Similar to what I wrote about religion a few paragraphs above, good people have to oppose this perversion of environmentalism w/o rejecting the concept that these misguided miscreants purport to represent.
Humans are part of nature and what we do becomes part of nature
Human beings are not some kind of blight on nature that should be extirpated. Humans are an integral part of nature as it exists today. As part of nature, we have the responsibility to use wisely the intelligence given us by nature and natures God. This also means using wisely those natural resources available on this earth. We must firmly and forcefully reject the idea that humans should deny their own right to continued existence on the earth, understanding that having humans on earth means that the earth will be altered by us. This is what every plant and animal does.
I always admit that I don’t have any original ideas and I don’t have any new ideas. I found something I wrote six years ago while sitting in forest shelter to avoid the rain. It has the advantage of being more spontaneous and I really cannot improve on it so I copied it below with a few minor edits.
I have been wandering forests for my entire adult life, most of my adolescence and some of my childhood. I have learned to identify the trees, soil types, & topography. I love forests, but my thinking about them has changed. I used to like to wander lonely as a cloud. I didn’t want to see the signs of human kind in my forests. Maybe that was because there was little chance I would get my wish.
Nature without people is just plain lonely
I have changed my mind. I don’t really like wilderness in the sense of land without man. There was plenty of that in the countless eons before man and there will be plenty more after we are gone. Will “time” stop with nobody left to count the minutes, hours, days and years? It might sound arrogant to say that man is the measure of nature, but it is even more arrogant and downright ignorant for any human to say that he can understand nature in any other way. Raw nature is nasty, cold and incompressible. No human can respect nature in its natural state and it really doesn’t matter if we do. There is nothing the human race can do to add or detract from nature. If we managed what we arrogantly fear (but couldn’t really do) – if we destroyed the entire surface of the Earth, would that make any difference to a nature that encompasses an endless universe of worlds without end with billions of years at its disposal? Is there anything any of us could do that will make a difference a billion years hence?
What can we do to harm nature? In the long run – nothing
It would make a difference to humans in the here and now. We can only add or detract from the human interpretation of nature. Now I am happy to see signs of “good” human intervention and sometimes even the results of a bad intervention healed. More than a century ago, a great man-made catastrophe transformed Northern Wisconsin. The great Peshtigo fire burned everything from the middle of the state to Lake Michigan. You can still see the signs in the type of vegetation and soils. We now call it old growth, but it results directly from inadvertent “bad” human intervention. The people living now benefit from this horrible tragedy of which most of them are unaware. Sitting in alone in a forest shelter in a downpour puts things in perspective.
The Obama Administration is exceeding our expectations at Copenhagen. Todd Stern, our chief negotiator has adroitly thrown cold water on developing county blackmail while our delegation makes the joyous noise with environmentalist. It has been an excellent balance of realism and hype that might actually lead to a workable agreement instead of the usual crap that comes out of these big convocations. So far, so good, let’s keep it up.
Calling their bluffs
Stern has called the climate community’s bluff, as we hoped he would. No more can plaintive voiced people get away with just saying how bad we are, how terrible things might get and – with a tears in their eyes – say that it would all be just great if only the U.S. would do the right thing. Stern pointed out that 97% of the new emissions will come from developing nations. Unless they step up, nothing will work. A little tough love was what they needed and what they are getting. One of our most potent tools is the resort to higher authority. This is something you learn in negotiations 101, but most people hate to use it. It does our egos a lot of good if we can say that we are the final decision makers, but it is a very bad negotiating position. It allows you to get rolled and/or carried away by the tide of events. This is what evidently happened at Kyoto. Otherwise it is hard to explain how our negotiators agreed to such a monumentally stupid agreement.
The negotiator proposes; the Senate disposes
How does the resort to higher authority work in this case? Our negotiators know and they have let other know that no matter what kind of agreement they reach at international venues, the U.S. Senate will have something to say about it when all the dealing is done. If the agreement is too absurd, the Senate will reject it, as the unanimous Senate did with Kyoto. This is a powerful incentive for everyone to be reasonable and not allow the exhilaration of the moment overpower the longer term realities.
Good guys and bad guys
There is another negotiation tactic that it seems that the Obama administration is using. That is the one we all recognize from watching cop shows – good guy/bad guy or good cop/bad cop. It is closely related to the higher authority gambit in that President Obama gets to be the good guy while the vaguely identified opposition plays the villain role. The incentive is to give something to the good guy so as to avoid rewarding or even having to deal with the bad guy. George Bush could never have pulled this off. He would have been undercut by the U.S. environmental community and, anyway, he didn’t have the persona to pull it off. Obama can. We all hope that he can swoop in at the end and scoop up some of the marbles that we otherwise would have lost.
America holds a strong hand this time
Addressing climate change is a big job and it will cost trillions of dollars. We agree on the goal, but there are ways to do it that are more and less effective; more or less costly and more or less costly particularly to the U.S. That is what these negotiations are about. And this is something that those most loudly braying about the need to “save the planet” are often trying to obscure.U.S. CO2 emissions relative to the rest of the world have been dropping for a long time. The blame America idea is just a non-starter. America is a big part of any solution, but if others, especially developing countries, don’t step up the problem cannot be solved.
Beyond that, everybody knows that the U.S. can more easily adapt to climate change than many others. Another bluff that many developing countries are running goes something like “give us money or we will drown ourselves.” That is another bluff we can call. America has more advantages this time than ever before. We should be fair but also tough. We cannot afford free riders. As we wrote elsewhere, the U.S. is now in a better position in relation to many others. We can plausibly promise real reduction in CO2 emissions, but it is very important how we sell reductions. You don’t give things away in negotiations because you get no credit in the international community if you just do the right thing w/o making a big deal about it. Multilateral negotiations are a kind of kabuki play. You have to scream and grimace at the proper times or else nobody pays attention. You have to call attention and claim credit for good things that just happen. You know that you will be blamed for the bad things.
Climate change talks should be about … climate change
We have to insist that the climate change programs remain about climate change. They cannot be sidetracked into a general push for development aid or some kinds of transfer payments from the rich countries to the poor ones. Many national leaders and NGOs come to climate change talks with the hope of hijacking them precisely in this direction. The threat of climate change has given them a potent weapon, which they are not eager to relinquish. That is why they often reject sensible solutions such as nuclear power or want to concentrate all their efforts on the developed world industries.
Physics doesn’t distinguish among emissions
So let’s keep on task. The job is to mitigate climate change and adapt to what we cannot mitigate. This is a practical problem involving lots of physics and physical infrastructure. The Chinese Ambassador disingenuously called for soul searching when talking about climate. If he can find a place to sequester carbon there, let him search his own soul. Otherwise the world’s biggest emitter of CO2 might just want to do something practical.
You have to be willing to walk away
Finally, the most powerful tool of negotiators is the ability to walk away from a bad deal. Developed countries like the U.S. accounted for most of the historical emissions, but they emit less than half of the GHG today and this percentage will drop now and forever. If current trends continue, China alone will emit more CO2 in the next thirty years than the U.S. did since 1776. China’s emissions alone more than swamps any “historical damage” done by us.
Nevertheless, many big and future developing polluters have a big incentive to play the victims. We already hear the silly rhetoric and attempts to guilt us into doing something stupid. (The Sudanese, you recall the guys who brought us the genocide in Darfur, had the guts to ask us to remember the children. Well, we do.) We should not let the idea that we MUST make a deal stand in the way of making a good deal. If many in the developing world have their way, we will send a lot of money with few or no strings attached to countries that historically have not managed their finances well. They will talk a lot about reducing CO2, but not do very much about it. In fact, the big buck infusion will enable them to pollute even more. This deal is worse than no deal and everybody has to understand that we will walk away than accept it. Climate change is an urgent problem and we need to find solutions. But rushing to do the WRONG thing will just make the whole thing worse. It is like the dishonest salesman who wants you to sign w/o reading the agreement. He tells you that if you don’t act right now, it will be too late. The deal will disappear. It is usually better to let a deal like that disappear. But the funny thing about negations is that if they know you are willing to walk away, the other side usually gets a lot more reasonable. The ABILITY to walk away usually means you don’t have to. The world will get a more effective climate deal if the U.S. is tough and realistic. Let’s not let another Kyoto mess things up for another decade. Below are some sources you might want to consult on the climate debate.
This is Virginia. We usually don’t get snow this early in the year, but this has been a cool and wet year and maybe winter will come early. The pictures are taken from our back and front doors. The snow is falling on some trees that still have not finished shedding their leaves.
Confirmation Bias?
Forbes Magazine has a good article about forestry as an investment called Buying Woodlands for Fun and Profit. I cannot believe how lucky I was to get into forestry and I keep on getting confirmation of that. I admit that I went into it backwards. I have always loved trees and wanted to have something to do with forestry. Since we are not rich enough to own such a thing as a luxury, I had to figure out a way to make it an investment, and I think I succeeded.
I sometimes worry that I am victim of confirmation bias, i.e. I notice the information that confirms what I already believe and just overlook or ignore contrary arguments. I suppose the downsides are the large initial investments & long term commitment. It also helps to know something about trees. I got good deals on both my forest parcels. It is not only luck. I looked at dozens of properties and I could envision what the land would look like in a few years. This is now the fifth year we have owned the first piece of land. It is developing about as I anticipated, only a little better.
Everybody has to save for retirement, especially these days. Forestry is a good option.
Given the ways the deficit is shooting faster than it has since World War II, I don’t think anybody can count on Social Security and other investments will be devalued by the inflation that will have to come in the wake of our enormous spending binge, not to mention paying for health care and the raids on the trust funds. Forestry is a tangible asset. It will rise with inflation. But it is much more than an ordinary investment.
It is just a joy to walk across MY land and I believe that I am doing something that has lasting value. I just don’t get that same feeling from mutual funds in an IRA.
The joy of forest ownership
Owning a forest has changed my thinking on forestry and changed my life. I understand a lot more about the moral imperative to make forestry work. It is much more work and better for the world to grow and sustainably harvest trees than it is to set up a “sanctuary” or “preserve.” I feel a little like I am swimming against the tide of environmental perceptions. And when I think back to how I used to think, I understand the misconception. I just have to make it my business to explain how it really is.
Read the article if you are interested in forestry or owning a forest. If not, you probably have not gotten this far down the post anyway. It is not something everybody wants or can do, but it is easier than most people think. You just have to really want to do it. It requires a commitment and you have to recognize the terms. You won’t get your money back quickly and your fortunes are controlled by the rhythms of nature. You have to think of it as a long-term retirement asset, not a quick turnaround investment. It literally grows slowly over time. But it is a great thing if you can wait for it.
I understand that the chances are small that I will live long enough to make the final harvest, but that is okay. We all plant trees for the next generation as the last generation did for us. Life is one long chain letter.
I got an interesting comment on a post I wrote a year ago. Goes to show how things live on once posted to the Internet. The commenter said that I was delusional, full of myself and a con artist. I admit that I was a little taken aback. I can understand the delusional and full or myself accusations, but con artist just doesn’t make any sense. The guy didn’t like what I wrote about nature and how I mange my forest lands. You can read the original post at this link and his comment at the bottom of this post. I admit that I chose a provocative title and I guess it provoked … eventually. I invited this guy to write 500 words rebutting me and I promised to post it. I doubt anything will come of it.
People sometimes send comments directly to me, which I don’t publish. I publish almost anything else anybody sends in, but I don’t get too many complaints or comments in general.
My Audience & Editorial Policy
The “delusional” comment made me think about my “editorial policy”. I don’t really have one. I write the blog mostly for my friends and relatives. I know I have acquired some “online” friends and I am grateful for their continued support. The statistics tell me that we get around 600 visitors on a good day, but most are just from search engines hitting on some of the pictures. I figure only that only a couple of dozen people regularly read what I write. During my time in Iraq I know that some families of the PRT & USMC colleagues read the blog for general information about the situation their loved ones faced in Anbar. I am glad that I could provide that service. I suppose most of them have wandered off now that I am out of Iraq. Given the personalized, idiosyncratic nature of my interests and all things considered, I don’t have a “general” audience.
But let’s get to the question of editorial policy. There is a valid question about how comprehensive, balanced or fair any writer should be. Some people worry about this, but it is not something I struggle with. I am honest and try to be as accurate as I can. But I feel absolutely no obligation to be fair, balanced or comprehensive. Mine is only a miniscule contribution to a very large whole, one piece of a very large puzzle. Presumably those looking for a variety of views will gather mine along with a lot of others and make up their own minds.
I think that is a good policy for a blogger who writes for nothing and doesn’t promote his blog.
I believe in pluralism. We need to have a lot of ideas put forward and tested against each other. Our goals should NOT be to achieve consensus or hold each other accountable, beyond the basic imperatives to be honest, remain reasonable and stay reasonably civil. We should also not try to clip our ideas to fit the sensibilities of others. That is the good thing about pluralism. You don’t have to be inclusive. Those who are offended can go someplace else where they feel appreciated, not merely tolerated. That is all I can offer.
Do Not Block the Way to Inquiry
We need to express our idea AND be willing to accept criticism. Everybody is entitled to his/her opinion but nobody is bound to respect them. Too much respect won’t help us find useful truth. Conflicts, corrections, experimentation and restatements are how we come closer to truth. We never get to possess THE truth, BTW, but we will get closer to useful knowledge. (THE truth has no meaning outside religion.) Building knowledge is an iterative process. We try something, learn something, adjust and try again. This goes for individuals, organizations and societies. “Do not block the way to inquiry,” is what the philosopher Charles Saunders Pierce said and he was right.
NB: This is the comment and response copy/pasted from the old blog.
You are delusional. You write as though you are the final authority of all conservation methods, and i quote: “REMEMBER” (as though you are teaching me something from a vast storehouse of knowledge you lord over all other humans)… “Remember, if you want to preserve special places…” you have to chop down others. You’re nothing more than a con artist who has convinced himself you have the perfect key to the very history of natural conservation. You’re completely FULL of bologna, and full of youself to boot. Your best footprint would be perhaps to never have been born. Maybe then your land would not be mangled by the likes of you, but simply owned by someone who appreciates nature. So, YOU REMEMBER THIS: Nature will always trump the stupidity of humans, especially man; who believes he has an answer for everything.
When you have a field, and you allow all the natural elements to contribute in their inevitable way to this field. It then has limitless possibilities. When you decide you know infinitely better than the original design, you simply limit all possibilities, in lieu of what YOU think is best.
This does not make you a great handler of conservation, this just proves that humankind is barely evolved enough to live here, especially those who are so SURE they know best, such as yourself.
Posted by: Robert | November 28, 2009 12:28 AM
Robert
Don’t worry. Not many people read this blog. I write based on my opinions and observations and the only people who read it are those who want to.
I don’t advertise or promote my blog and do not set it up as anything except what it is – my opinions and observations.
If you want to write and send me something around 500 words telling my audience how stupid you think I am, I will post it.
Posted by: John Matel | November 28, 2009 09:14 AM
“When you have a field, and you allow all the natural elements to contribute in their inevitable way to this field.”
It will soon stop being a field and become a patch of secondary growth woodland, and eventually mature forest. This is great for squirrels, but it doesn’t put food on the table.
I went down to the farm to check for flood damage. The farm got more than five inches of rain in a couple days, which is about double the usual monthly average for November. Larry Walker told me that the road flooded and the Meherrin River was seven feet above flood stage.
The water was lower by the time I got there, although the creeks are clearly higher than usual. The forest near the river was still flooded but this is not uncommon even in more “normal” wet weather. There was no serious damage, however. It doesn’t hurt the trees if the water doesn’t stand too long and the sediment deposits are good soil builders. That is why forestry is so good for watershed protection. Judging from the sediment deposits, the water spread at least 100 yards from Genito Creek and up the road. My guess is that it must have been at least eight feet higher than usual. I have never seen it do that.
It was lucky that I went down. I got a last look at the fall colors (see above) & I fixed my bald cypress. The flooding had undercut it. I am very fond of that tree and it is the only one I have on the farm. I built up the base with rocks and put in some dirt. That should hold it. Maybe it will be better rooted by the next time we get such a big flood.
I also had the chance to meet with Larry Walker’s boss to talk about thinning schedules. He is going to take a look at the Freeman place to see if it makes sense to thin the 86 acres of 1996 pine this year. It is an exceptionally good stand of trees. I think that early thinning might be a good idea, even if the pulp prices are low. Some of the inside trees are already dying back. You have to balance the benefits with the risks. Ice storms become a danger the years after thinning, but that will be a problem no matter when you do it.
Above & below is the CP forest from 623 today and three years ago. The trees did well this year. Notice the cedar tree more or less in the middle. It stands out in the field in the top picture, You have to look hard in the bottom one, as the pines are now almost as big or bigger. In fact, you can hardly see the pines at all in the top picture. Of course, seasons are different.
They have been planting trees at the University of Arizona for a long time, so it is not only a pleasant place but also a place where you can see a great variety of plants from around the world. The climate in Tucson is almost tropical, but the soils and moisture levels are very different, so it makes for some interesting combinations.
I came here to talk to some University of Arizona professors at the agriculture and soils department. They were courteous and hospitable. I can always find good people willing to tell me about the place they live and what they do and I enjoy getting the local angle wherever I go. Their ideas are reflected in the post on Mt Lemon. They told me about the environment there and suggested that I make the trip up the hill, so I thank them for that piece of local intelligence too.
My hosts were proud of their town and happy to live in Tucson. It is not hard to see why. Tucson has a lot to like. But the recent rapid growth has presented challenges to the local ecosystems. The extension services at the University of Arizona and the county extension are actively involved in their communities, helping local authorities, landowners and developers do the right thing to maintain a sustainable environment.
As with all cities in arid environments, water is a problem. Tucson depended on ground water and is one of the largest cities in the world to do that. The ground water renews itself (it is not like the Ogallala aquifer) but not at the rates now required. They now have a water plan that uses a water allotment from the Colorado River. Importing water creates its own challenges.
Minerals and salts can poison soils. This is what happened in large parts of Mesopotamia and it is an ancient lesson that we have to be careful when irrigating dry fields. The water itself brings with it minerals and salts and water sitting on irrigated fields can bring salts and minerals to the surface. In either case or in combination, the result is the same. The general idea is that you need enough fresh water dilution to wash out the salts and minerals. Rainwater is pure except for the small amount it might pick up from things like dust or smoke, but once on the ground it begins to pick up minerals and salts. When water evaporates, it leaves the minerals and salts it brought along. Most arid irrigated regions have a positive salt balance, i.e. more come in than goes out. Over time this buildup is a problem.
There is a lot you can do to conserve water, but conservation is not w/o its own problems. There really is no such thing as a decision w/o some negative consequences. All life involves trade-offs. Conservation means you use less, but using less concentrates the minerals and salts in smaller volumes of water, which may be worse for the soils. That is one reason there is a limit to the amount of gray water (semi-treated) that you can apply to irrigation. The water is reused and recycled … and the salts and minerals are concentrated. If you live in a place where it rains a lot, you don’t think about these problems very much, but you have to if you live in a arid place like Arizona, with rapidly expanding populations.
On the plus side, the growth of urban populations might REDUCE water demand. That is because no matter how much water an urban population reasonably uses, it is often less than irrigated agriculture had used with the methods employed in the past. Ranchers can convert their irrigated agriculture to dry land production and sell the water saved to the growing urban regions. Production declines, but it might be more profitable. Municipalities also buy up land, along with the water rights. This has the double benefit of providing water and open lands for parks and nature reserves.
We learn from experience how to maintain a sustainable environment. As I often say, yesterday’s solutions are today’s problems, but that does not mean we made stupid mistakes in those solutions of the past. As conditions change, often BECAUSE of our solutions, our responses must also change. That simple knowledge should make us less critical of the “mistakes” of our ancestors and less arrogant in our out decision. There is no end to this game, just one move after another. The good player just get to keep playing. Some people think this is depressing (These are often the same ones who were upset when they discovered the principle of entropy.) I find this exhilarating. It is almost the very definition of being alive.
Tucson is a pleasant place and a lot of people want to live here. With good management and some foresight, they can accommodate more while keeping it a place people want to come.
I know it is ecology101, but I had never actually done the road trip version of driving from the Sonora desert biome into the alpine/Canadian biome in around an hour. To get the same sorts of changes you see as you climb Mt Lemon from the roughly 2500 ft near Tucson to around 9000 ft at the peak, you would have to drive from southern Arizona up to just south of Hudson Bay.
You start in the scrub and cactus forest on the lower slopes. Next is semi-arid grassland. Soon you get into junipers, some cottonwoods and oak woodland, followed by montane ponderosa pine and then the spruce of the boreal forests. The biomes mix and match in ways they would not if spread over a larger area, as subtle changes in elevation and topography create micro-climates.
It was more than twenty degrees cooler on the top than on the bottom the day I went up.
They call these “sky islands” because boreal and montane forests are islands of this sort of vegetation in a sea of desert. As with all islands, the environments on them are fragile because of its isolation. If species are eliminated from a relatively small area, there may be no nearby seed stocks to bring them back. These communities have been in place since then end of the last ice age, when the cool weather systems were present all around. We can think of the deserts like rising water as the earth warmed 10,000 year ago.
It is important to manage these islands carefully, but sometimes good management seems counter intuitive. It seems to make sense to protect the ecosystems from destructive forces such as fire, but years of fire protection have endangered them. Fire is a natural part of the ecology. When it is artificially excluded by human efforts, the ecological communities change and large amounts of fuel are left standing in the forests or lying on the ground. Instead of being a useful and healthy clearing process, fires under the man-made conditions become major disasters.
When people see these fires they often demand even greater “protection” making things worse and worse. Above you can see the results of a fire made too big by years of fire suppression. If we continue to “protect” this land from regular fires, the forest will grow back – again too thickly – until the next big fire. Below is one of the reasons we exclude and fight fires. The new cabins are named “Adam,” “Hoss” & “Little Joe” after the characters on Bonanza. Hoss is the biggest.
Fire is a natural and necessary part of a healthy ecological process. If we exclude fire, we change the environment in undesirable ways and make it less robust. Smokey the Bear should probably be put on pension or at least modify his pitch. He has done too good a job. Smokey is cute, but when he hired on we didn’t understand as much about the environment.
I went up to Mt Lemon yesterday and have some pictures, but I cannot currently post them since I am lacking a connection. But I have a picture and some general thoughts from the day before.
Above is another view from Carl and Elise’s yard, this time during the daylight. It is amazingly green, although you see that the ground itself is bare. There were all sorts of birds flying around. Especially common were desert quail. They walk around most of the time and only fly when flushed out. Their calls were very nice to hear.
I was comparing this desert land to Iraq. I think the land in Iraq is just misused for millennia. The challenge of the desert is that it is unforgiving. You can get away with a lot more in a wetter place, where grass and trees will quickly grow back after a disturbance. In the desert your mistakes are written on the land for many years or centuries. I bet that much of Iraq could be as rich in natural diversity as Arizona, but there are too many goats and the country has been too abused for many centuries. Plants in the desert grow slowly and they depend on the other plants in the natural community. The brush you cut down or let your goats eat might have taken decades to get that big. And once taken out, it is hard for it to come back.
The picture above is me talking with some Iraqis who want to restore their land. I think it can be done and so do they. We are standing in the middle of one of their projects. It is a good start. It just takes work and long-term – multi-generational commitment.
We have learned many good lessons in land management. If we just follow our own best management practices and strive to continue to learn, we won’t suffer the fate of the ancient lands of the Middle East. And maybe if we all learn the right lessons, we can help them return to a better place. That is a truly worthy enterprise.
Montgomery is on a flat site so it spreads out easily. The central part of the city is very quiet. It is easy to drive and find your way around the grid pattern streets, and there is ample parking all around. The country’s first electrical trolley line was set up here in 1886. That started spreading out the city’s population. There are no natural barriers, so since it was easy just to move a little farther out and since the city’s population is only 200,000 (a little less than Arlington) the whole place has more the density of a suburb than a city. Above is the state capitol.
Below is the Confederate White House, where Jeff Davis lived. Montgomery was the first Confederate capital. The woman running the reception desk was originally from Czechoslovakia. Her parents fled Sudetenland when Hitler took over, only to be subsumed when he took over the rest of the country after the Munich sell-out. After WWII, her family wisely got out when the communists took over. Although she came to the U.S. when she was only eleven, she still had a trace of a Czech accent, overlaid with the Alabama drawl.
I was a couple hours early for my appointment at the Alabama Forestry Association, so I got a chance to walk around the Capitol area. The buildings are classical revival built with white marble from Alabama or the neighboring states. Below is the Alabama Archives building. There is a museum inside. Notice the classical style with the white marble again.
The city has clearly gentrified. Near the river are a lot of old warehouses and railroad buildings, now converted to loft apartments and nice restaurants. I didn’t take pictures of them, but below is the Dexter Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King served as pastor 1954-1960. It was from here that he organized the Montgomery bus boycott.
At the Alabama Forestry Association, I met Rick Oates. Forestry is an important industry in Alabama. Although the state tree is the longleaf pine, loblolly is a lot more common. Mr. Oates said that woody biomass looks like it will take off and some of the pulp firms are worried about it. I wish. The price of pulp is so low now. It would take a big change in biomass to bring it back up. You can find out more about Alabama forests at this link.
Above is a memorial to police officers at the Alabama Capitol. Below is a traditional Alabama cabin.
