Month: November 2015

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David and Gladys Wright house in Phoenix

Frank Lloyd Wright had lots of good ideas but most didn’t work well. The irony is that he claimed to want to build houses for the common man and used inexpensive materials to do so, but demanded everything be essentially custom made, thereby making it impossible for the common man to afford his houses.

We went to visit the David and Gladys Wright house in Phoenix. It is beautiful to look at, but uncomfortable to live in. Frank Lloyd Wright has a few trademarks, some he wanted; others just happened. Among the unintended bugs were roofs and windows that usually leaked. The unique materials and angles made that likely. You can see the leak damage in my third picture below. Notice also that none of the boards are the same size. Each had to be custom cut and fitted. Built in furniture and indirect lighting were features, not bugs. They made it hard to read or sit comfortably, as Wright did not want to allow furniture to be moved or lamps employed. You were supposed to live in the house the way Frank Lloyd Wright designed you to live in it.

Chrissy likes the look of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings and I do too. They are beautiful, like big works of art. But I think that a house should not be a work of art. It should be a home and be changeable depending on the needs of the current occupants, and it should be reasonably easy to maintain. I suppose you can apply the general axiom to FLW homes. They are nice places to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

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The Riparian Preserve in Gilbert, Arizona

The Riparian Preserve in Gilbert, Arizona was set up as a place to protect wildlife, but also – and maybe more importantly – to recharge local aquifers. Several shallow ponds are flooded to give treated wastewater and occasional runoff a chance to soak into the ground. Various ponds are occasionally drained and plowed so that the surfaces do not become too impervious to the water. It is a nice, green and peaceful area very popular with local residents as a place to walk and see animals.
 
 
 

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Casa Grande

Visited Casa Grande, the oldest national archeologically park in the U.S. The people her practiced irrigated agriculture, using water from the Gila River. It was evidently a fairly prosperous community, with a population perhaps as much as 20,000, but was not sustainable. The civilization crashed around 1450 and the people dispersed. Local oral tradition blames war. More modern interpretation indicates climate change as a factor. The explanations are not mutually exclusive.

The Spanish discovered the ruins in 1694 and called it Casa Grande, or big house. Archaeologists are still studying the ruins. Some they leave buried in anticipation of better techniques in future.

The structures are not very big by modern standards, but consider that the buildings and irrigation systems were constructed using stone tools and sticks and w/o even the use of draft animals.

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Ira Hayes

We went to the memorial in Sacaton, Arizona honoring Ira H. Hayes and Mathew B. Juan. Ira Hayes was one of the Marines who raised the flag on Iwo Jimi. Mathew Juan was the first Arizonian to be killed in World War I. They were both members of the Pima Tribe of Arizona.

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Way Down Upon the Swanee River

“Old Folks at Home” – Way Down Upon the Swanee River used to be the state song of Florida, but the Suwanee (the original spelling) actually starts in Georgia. Stephen Foster had never visited the river or knew anything about it. She just needed a name to go with his song.
 
We had lunch at the Suwanee visitor center. You can tell by the way the building is constructed that they get some flooding.
 
 

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Solar energy in North Carolina

Solar energy can be a really bad idea. I found this new solar installation along US 1. It is worse than a parking lot. I suppose the solar produces power, but it displaces forest. When you clear cut a pine forest, it is still a forest. It just is in a new stage. When you destroy all the soil and install solar, you are ruining the land for a long time. My bet is that this was built with government subsidy and it will not be economically sustainable after that money runs out. But it will be a sand desert for a century later. It is an abomination.

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Improving forest genetics

In my earlier post, I was talking about some of the things l learned about forestry genetics. There is a consortium dedicated to aggregating the information, linked below.
Each year, we plant 820 million loblolly pine in the South. When you add in other southern pine species such as longleaf, slash etc, we are planting more than 1.2 billion trees every year.

Ironically, we are planting fewer trees per acre because the trees are so much better. In the recent past, landowners might plant 700-1000 trees per acre. This was necessary because of the high mortality rate. Better trees & better silvaculture mean that we can now plant 400-500 and expect better results.

(I read about forestry in China, where they paid peasants to plant trees. They planted thousands of trees every year and every year they needed to plant them again because they died. It was just a business. Nobody cared if the trees were property suited to local conditions. The peasants got paid to plant, the officials filled the quotas, everyone seemed green and they could do it over and over again. Better to have incentives in the future, not the past.)

I signed the contract a few day ago to replant on the land we clear cut last June. We will plant 15 acres of longleaf, 30 acres of loblolly and an acre of cypress. We will have just over 400 per acre. We were going to space them 10×10, but I learned that it might be better to space 5×20. Same number of trees per acre, but it will be easier to take care of the trees, since equipment can pass easily. I hope that I can get some biosolids, for example.
http://treeimprovement.org

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Forestry business

The forestry business has changed remarkably in the last ten years. Gone are the vertically integrated paper and timber firms that once owned and managed vast tracts of land. They sold this off to private owners: organizations like TIMOs, which manage tracts of timberland the way REITs do in real estate, and individuals like me. This vastly decentralized the business creating challenges and opportunities. The challenge was that no longer did you have staffs of professionals managing all that timber. The opportunity was that thousands of little guys were given the chance to try new things, taking the risks and getting the rewards.

The big old companies did lots of research, but they mostly kept it to themselves. It was proprietary. The breakup of the big firms led to the creation of consulting firms and nurseries providing new and better trees. This time, fortuitously, also was a time of great progress in genetics. The loblolly pine is the most studied tree in the world. Its genome has been sequenced. And the trees today and qualitatively different from their wild ancestors. This is currently done the old fashioned way with selected breeding. GMOs still have not come to the piney woods. Controlled pollination produces great trees.

One of the collateral developments of having decisions in the hands of many individual landowners is that the scientists needed to develop a way to explain this us ordinary guys.
They rate trees on an easy to understand PRS scale- productivity, rust and straightness. P – is for productivity, how well it grows. R is for rust. Fustiform rust is a fungus disease that has long plagued loblolly pines. New varieties are almost immune. S is for straightness, form in general. New varieties are straighter with fewer branches. Unfortunately, you usually have to trade off some traits for others, so you are not looking for the “best” trees but for the ones most appropriate for your conditions. You try to get the highest PRS, but you are concerned with the components.

As I wrote, the loblolly is the world’s most studied tree in the world. It is also very mutable. In the rust studies, they found that heritability of the immunity is 95-98%. Of course, it is a never ending quest. The pathogens adapt as we do. But it looks like we can stay ahead.
My picture is from the patio of the conference center, the “Rainwater Center.” I thought it was a cool name, taken from nature, but it is actually named after a guy called Rainwater. It is hard to see in the photo, but it was raining hard with the sun shining. If you look closely, you can see the drops on the pond. A pretty sight.