If we don’t plan now for the restoration of oak forests, our children and grandchildren will not have them. It takes 40-60 years to grow and oak tree and they are not regenerating fast enough.
It is easy to overlook this problem. Oaks are common trees. There are lots of oaks … now. But if you look under the big oak trees, you find very few little oak trees. Little oak trees don’t like to grow in the shade of big oak trees. That means that oaks need disturbance. Fire was much more common in oak forests in the past. We need it again.
I stopped off at Hoosier National Forests to talk to Travis Swaim, who is managing for oak regeneration. They recently burned 750 acres and I wanted to see what it looked like. I am doing oak regeneration on parts of my land, on a smaller scale of course.
Southern Indiana is an interesting ecology. It is hilly. Looks like western Virginia, not the Indiana we see in the flat north.
Travis talked about the differences on the Hoosier National Forest. They have relatively dry south facing slopes, where oaks can compete well and wetter northern slopes with deeper soils where the poplars and maples dominate. They also have karst landscapes, i.e. very permeable limestone soils.
These were and will be again hardwood forests. In fact, this is the heart of the hardwood. Settlers cleared these forests and much of what is the Hoosier National Forests was exhausted when the government acquired the land in the 1930s. CCC and others planted pine, longleaf and white pine. These are now mature and foresters want to transition back to hardwoods, including oak.
My pictures are from my walk in the woods to see the burn. They also thinned, leaving high quality oaks for regeneration. Travis says they may have to burn again, but maybe not. They will have to monitor and see how it goes. It is an art.
My pictures show the open oak forest. My second picture is rattlesnake master. I was glad to see this in the burned zone, since I extrapolate that my own rattlesnake master will survive the fires we plan to set in December. Last picture is deeper woods with beech trees. I was glad to see the beech survived. I like beech. These were near the road, where they first set the fire, so it was not that hot.
Went up to Aldo Leopold Center to talk to director Buddy Huffaker and Curt Meine, author of Aldo Leopold’s biography. I wanted to talk to them to get general insights about land ethics and Aldo Leopold.
I started Mr. Meine’s book a couple of years back and the upcoming visit gave me the incentive I needed to finish it. It was well worth it. I have been much influenced by Leopold’s “Sand County Almanac.” It was useful to read the biography and get more insight into the origins of his ideas. Much of Leopold’s life is braided with Wisconsin conservation. In that sense, we walked the same territory, literally.
We talked about many things, among them conservation. We agreed with the Leopold principle that you need to act within a land ethic, but then apply specific actions to specific goals. There is never an end to it; we are always learning, trying and adapting.
Mr. Huffaker shared some projects that Aldo Leopold Center was doing involving other landowners along the Wisconsin River to improve the larger ecosystem, something like the Landscape Management Plans being developed by Tree Farm.
Healing the Muir-Pinchot split We talked a little about the difference between conservation and preservation, the old Muir- Pinchot split. Meine thought that Aldo Leopold had done a good job of melding those two disparate thoughts and that there need be no conflict, at least on almost all conservation issues. Unfortunately, lots of people have not yet got that word. We need to be careful with our language, since the wrong word might set off the more enthusiastic proponents on either side.
New Portuguese translation A new Portuguese translation of “Sand County Almanac” just became available. Buddy Huffaker shared a copy with me, along with a new compilation of Aldo Leopold’s writing specifically on forestry.
I will incorporate these ideas and impressions into my thinking and my own land management. It is good to talk to people who know so much, that helps me know a little more.
My first picture shows the three of us outside the Aldo Leopold Center. Next is part of the center and last is a poster show about Aldo Leopold’s essay “Axe in Hand.” I am not sure if that was the essay the affected most my thinking, but it is the one I think of most often when I am out in my forest, thinking, doing, observing, reflecting and thinking again.
Not ready for college I was not ready to go to college when I went to college. My father was very supportive, but he had no experience with higher education. I didn’t have any close friends or older siblings who went to college. I was a stranger in a strange land with only a vague notion, not even a formed idea, about what I should do.
So I drank beer and “partied.” It is hard for me today to understand the young man I was. I had no real concept of my future, or even that there was a future that would include me. The odd thing is not that I felt like that, but that I don’t recall that it even bothered me. I guess I kind of lived in the present and had confidence that the future would sort itself.
I think today the school would have wanted to do some sort of intervention and sort me out. My 1.6 GPA would have been one indicator of trouble. But I am glad that I got to sort it out myself and with the help of friends. I don’t trust professionals on this sort of thing. I stopped off at Stevens Point today and walked around on the campus and in the woods. They have done a good job managing the woods and wildlife. The forests and fields north of campus are the laboratory for the students. There were bunches of kids looking for bugs. They were assigned to find and study the diversity.
Lizard mound and ancient Native Americans Some things we will never know in detail and maybe there is not all that much to know. We don’t know who build the lizard mounds. We can speculate about why, but we really don’t know. Some things are lost to history, or in this case prehistory.
Lizard Mound park doesn’t get many visitors, although it looks like they bring school groups here. There was one guy sitting at the picnic table. He was making art out of pieces of birch bark. Seemed a pleasant enough guy. He said that he had previously lived in his vehicle, but now had a place to live. He said that he works enough to make money when he needs money, but does not need to work that much. I asked him if he needed anything, but he said no. Maybe he is just content. He gave me a flower made of birch bark and I gave him one of my tree farm mugs. The park includes mounds shaped like animals. What significance these had we can never know.
Never know. That is an interesting concept. We like to think that in the fullness of time, with new technology etc, but absent the invention of a time machine, we will never know. And maybe it does not matter. It is nice to have a feeling of mystery.
We know that these mounds were built between AD 500 and 1000. No mounds were build here in the last 1000 years. What happened to the people is unknowable. Well, we might be able to speculate if we took DNA. I walked around the mounds. There are few markers. If you didn’t know they were mounds you would not think much about them. It was very quiet, however.
The birch bark guy told me that I was lucky to come this week, since until a couple weeks ago the black flies and mosquitoes made a comfortable walk impossible. My walk was pleasant. Pictures are from around the walk. I like the old fashioned pump. You don’t see them around very much anymore.
For your freedom and ours On the way into Stevens Point is a monument to Casimir Pulaski, hero of Poland and America. For those unfamiliar, Pulaski came to America to help us during the revolution and was killed by British grapeshot while rallying troops in Savannah. He volunteered to fight for America and died in our cause.
I stopped off for a closer look. It is mostly about Polish-Americans who found for Poland during WWI. About 300 from Northern Wisconsin and Michigan went to fight for the old country.
Point Special Beer
A visit to Stevens Point would not be complete w/o a visit to Point Brewery. I drank a lot of that beer when I was at UWSP. I did not much like it, but it was cheap and available. It is not great beer, but it is one of my traditions. I have some rituals.
They do make a decent IPA. I bought a twelve pack of Point Special (tradition) and a six pack of IPA (actually good).
Good fast food Speaking of actually good, I went to Rocky Roccoco and A&W. They share the same building, so I can have Rocky’s pizza and A&W Root beer. I like Rocky’s pizza a lot and I would go there even if it was not a tradition.
I am staying at Comfort Inn on County Trunk V near Baraboo. Tomorrow I will meet people at Aldo Leopold. The exit at County Trunk V has the Rocky’s, A&W and a Culver’s. A little bit of heaven.
My pictures show the Pulaski monument. Next is the Point Brewery and then Rocky’s and A&W. Last picture is a pine and a birch. This is relevant because Aldo Leopold’s essay “Axe in Hand” talks about birch and pine.
WPA builds parks Just a few more pictures.
I visited Iverson Park in Stevens Point. It was created during the 1930s and the structures were build by the WPA. Very attractive.
The first three pictures show Iverson Park. When I first went to UWSP, we had a party there and I swam in the Little Plover River. I was so surprised that you could swim in a river. At that time swimming in the Milwaukee rivers would have been unthinkable. Penultimate picture is the College of Natural Resources at UWSP. Last is a white ash tree beginning to turn. As I mentioned in previous posts re ash trees, the green ash and allied tend to turn brilliant gold. The white ash turns more purple.
From death comes new life. I know that is true and amply demonstrated on the ecology of the land, but I am still upset by the near total death of the ash trees (Fraxinus).
Ash trees The ash were among my favorite trees, with their glad grace, dark green leaves and fast growth. Ash quickly formed groves. They were among the first to leaf out in spring and in fall turned a beautiful golden, not yellow but really more golden color. Except the white ash. They could turn a beautiful maroon. Beyond those things, I liked ash because they seemed almost impervious to disease. You could plant ash, or more commonly just let ash plant themselves, with reasonable certainty that they would cover the area w/o problems. This last part proved not to be true.
Ash were very common in southeastern Wisconsin. That and their tendency to form groves of almost purely ash has made their rapid demise because of the emerald ash borer more painful. You can see the destruction easily just driving down the roads. That was exacerbated by another of the ash characteristics. They were a pioneer species, quickly filling in disturbed areas, like areas near roads.
Kettle Moraine again I drove up to Kettle Moraine State Forest (Northern Unit) along Highways 41 and 43 and the Götterdämmerung of the ash as particularly noticeable. By the time I arrived at Mauthe Lake I was in a profoundly sad mood and I was uncharacteristically pessimistic. The weather conspired in this. It was overcasts and gray. I thought for sure it would rain, but I needed to do my walk around the lake, as I have been doing for than fifty years.
Mauthe Lake is a gift of the glaciers. It is pretty, but not remarkable. The lake is much more prominent in my personal landscape of memory than on the ground. It was carved out during the most recent ice age and is the headwater of the Milwaukee River. The Milwaukee River does not start here, but flows through early on. Mauthe Lake is important to me because it was where I first learned about conservation, where I came to appreciate the Ice Age and where I saw how landforms interact with biotic communities. I took part in a nature camp there when I was in 5th Grade. It made a lasting impression. In HS, I rode to Mauthe Lake on my bike. In college, I hitchhiked down. I have driven up here dozens of times. The visits bring back memories and I can see the changes that have been taking place over the decades. I expected the dead ash. I had approached the visit with trepidation last year. They were mostly dead by then.
The old trail The walk around the lake is two miles. As usual, parts of the trail were flooded. This is not a problem. Once your feet get wet, they cannot get any wetter, so you just trudge on. You start off in a cedar swamp, with white cedar, tamarack and – until recently – lots of ash. It was on this leg that I felt the deepest discontent and rehearsed the narrative of loss. As I walked, however, I got more cheerful. Maybe it is the stages of grief. I was moving on to acceptance. More likely it was a prosaic combination of seeing more of nature and an improvement in the weather. The sun started to come out and that makes your disposition sunnier.
The turning point came as I crossed the Milwaukee River and started into the mixed and pine forest on the other side. There are a lot of big oak trees there, mostly bur oak. We had the big old oaks surrounded by lot of small and newly deceased ash trees. This reminded me of the impermanence of … it all. At some time in the not very distant past, this ground was probably sedge savanna, with a few big oak trees, some still extant. The oak savanna was almost certainly the result of fires set by Native Americans. I speculate that settlers grazed cattle there. After that, when the land because State Forest, the ash moved in. In other words, the ash were part of the cycle, not the beginning nor the end. This does not take the sting out of their loss, but it does put it into perspective.
You come into a red pine forest as you gain a few feet of elevation. These pines were planted in 1941 and thinned four times. This forest now looks a lot like an open southern pine forests, with a lot of sunlight hitting the ground allowing for diversity. My loblolly on Brodnax look very similar. The red pines are a little bigger than mine, but surprisingly not that much. The Wisconsin trees are nearly 80 years old; mine are just over 30. Trees grow faster in Virginia. Of course, all trees grow faster in their exuberant youth and then plateau. My loblolly will not end up bigger.
I remember the changes in this forest, as least I think I do. I remember my childhood hike in these woods and how I was impressed with hot deep and dark it was. The pine needles formed a thick carpet and there was not much growing under the trees. This was how they did forestry in those days. These days, they like to let in more light. It sacrifices some timber value, but creates a lot more wildlife habitat and species diversity.
What next? All of this made me ask the “what’s next?” questions. The ash trees are gone. We shall not soon see their like again. What is going to come up instead. Something will benefit from this. I observed tamarack, black willow, alder, maples, birch and – surprising to me on the damp land, bur oak. In some places the cattails had become more profuse. Maybe the treed swamp will in some places become a marsh or a sedge meadow. The trees suck up water. Absent the ash, maybe more water will stand.
I observed last time and still now that in some isolated places the ash were still standing and healthy. Sometimes dead ash were standing next to lives ones. What happened? I understand that ash trees in Asia resist the ash borers. Ash borers in Asia are endemic, but not as decisive. Some American ash likely also do not taste as good to the borers or maybe have some characteristic making the less attractive. In this maybe we have the seeds of recovery. I have a picture of the live ash near the dead one with the backdrop of a beautiful sedge meadow. The future?
We think the environment we first saw is THE proper environment, that the forests and fields of our youth was the way it was supposed to be. Nature, in fact, is dynamic and impermanent. Our nature was just one short and changing scene in the endless drama. As I described with the big oaks, it was not what had been or what had to be.
Along the trail, I passed some kids with their parents and a group of what looked like high school kids. They were looking at each other, the boys paying attention to the girls and the reverse. They were not paying particular attention to the forests around them, but they were drinking it in unawares. This is their baseline. Maybe the next generation will think that the cattail marsh next to the river is the way it is “supposed to be.” If sometime the ash recover and recolonize the fenland, these old people of the future will decry that mess and invasion, the trees sucking up water and shading out the cattails.
I know I should more joyfully embrace impermance. I know that intellectually. I know that future generations will not feel that way and maybe even I will not long into the future. From death comes new life. The environment endures and adapts. But I still miss my ash trees.
Bryce Canyon is very nice, but more a theme park than a wild place. Alex and I went down into the canyon for a short hike. It was pretty easy until the last part.
It reminded me of some kind of science fiction movie, with people trudging up to some high goal. You can see this on the first picture. Next shows some big trees in the narrows. You wonder how they got their starts, but they are impressive. Next two are Alex and me. Last is Alex with some big old ponderosa pines.
Wandered Chicago a little and met Michael W. Fox for a few beers and pizza.
We passed the statue of a giant Boomer, so Mariza can see in the first picture.
Christine Johnson will be pleased to know that we went to the original Pizza Uno, as you can see in the second picture.
Picture #3 shows the Trump building. He insists on putting his name on the side. Bad form. I took the Metro into town from my hotel near O’Hare. I like to take the train better than driving. Driving in the cities makes me nervous. Last picture is from the Metro window.
Stopped off in Chicago to have a couple beers with my old Iraq colleague Michael W. Fox. Actually, he had wine.
Like many big cities, maybe more than many, Chicago has undergone a renaissance, becoming more pleasant and more diverse.
Michael is very proud of his home city and showed me lots of the architecture. Not sure what the typical Chicago food would be, but ribs would be on the short list, so we went to a ribs place.
Mass timber and McDonald’s The architecture I was most interested in seeing was not the most magnificent. I wanted to see the new McDonald’s finished last year using mass timber, cross laminated timber (CLT) and gluelam. I don’t love the ultra modern outside look, but I love the material. Wood is good.
Greater use of mass timber to renew and rebuild our cities is an ecological imperative. Using concrete and steel too much will be more than our environment can bear. CLT can do the job. Wood is the most benign building material and we can grow it regeneratively. I am sure my friend Susan Jones is familiar with this building, but let me provide a few more pictures and the personal experience.
It is great that McDonald’s is building with CLT. They have the market power and the ubiquity to make a difference. Michael and I enjoyed some McDonald’s food. You can park for free for 30 minutes, enough to eat the fast food. If you stay longer it costs you $12 an hour.
I am on a kind of conservation pilgrimage up to Wisconsin, where I will meet people at Aldo Leopold Foundation, hike around the kettle moraines, where I first came to appreciate conservation. On the way there, I have stopped in Chicago to see the new CLT McDonald’s and on the way back I will be stopping off at Hoosier National Forest to talk to people doing prescribed burns for oak regeneration.
And I have been studying on the subject. I am finishing a biography of Aldo Leopold and will meet the author in Baraboo. I recently read a joint biography of Gifford Pinchot and John Muir. And just today I finished the audio biography of George Grinnell. I had not heard of him, but he personally knew Muir, Leopold, Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt, Fredrick Law Olmsted, Stephen Mather and John Wesley Powell. Grinnell was a true connector, if less famous than those he connected. Among his achievements was the creation of Glacier National Park. A glacier, a mountain and a lake there are named for him. He was both an active explorer and an intellectual. He wrote many articles about nature as well as a series of boys’ adventure books.
Grinnell was also a sort of anthopologist, writing about the Blackfeet, the Cheyenne and others. He was with Custer on the exploration of the Black Hills and was almost with him at Little Bighorn.
The man was active.
I have been thinking a lot about conservation and preservation. Grinnell was a hunter and believed in the need to hunt, but he leaned toward preservation, more like Muir than Pinchot. But I think the whole preservation-conservation division has been overtaken by events. I will write more about that when I get back from the pilgrimage.
Ash tree Armageddon.
I drove through Indiana and Ohio today and I had a lump in my throat the whole way that gave me a little sore throat and stress. The cause was all those dead ash trees. Ash were especially common in those states and especially along roads. The emerald ash borer killed almost all of them. It made me profoundly sad to see all that. I take some solace in that some ash are resistant and maybe biotech can help, but I will not see the restoration in my lifetime.
Ash are beautiful trees. I loved to see them in early fall. Their leaves turned golden earlier than many other species and now so many are lost. When I go up to kettle moraines, I will check the ash there and see what is coming up under them.
What I liked most about my work in the Foreign Service were the opportunities to for interaction with other systems and cultures. I used historical-anthropological method and came up with lots of insights beyond the simple joy of doing the work, but I always kept in mind the limits of my understanding. I was always an outsider and should never let myself believe otherwise. We cannot be objective And my interpretations were very much colored by my own perspective. Even if I was somehow able to recall and report what people told me w/o any of my own interpretations (not possible, BTW), the questions I asked would shape the narrative. I noticed that my “memorandums of conversation” had lots of commonalities no matter the variety of people I met. There is no way around this. We cannot be objective. The best we can do is to broaden our outlooks. Despite the limitations, the insights are sometimes useful for others and almost always enlightening for the one making the observations. It is way to personal growth. Life and times of Franz Boas “Gods of the Upper Air” spoke to these concerns. The book is essentially a life and intellectual times of anthropologist Franz Boas and his students. It made me wonder about my own methods. I studied anthropology in college. I remembered reading Franz Boas, but remembered nothing specific besides the name. Nevertheless, it is likely that I internalized some of his ideas and methods, his emphasis on boots-on-the-ground observation and the need to look at cultures on their own terms w/o too many generalizations. When Boas was asked to generalize, the generalized only that people cannot use what they do not have. Cultural relativism The Boas groups believed in cultural relativism. I don’t buy the whole relativist idea. Rather, I think of culture in an ecological paradigm. Everything depends on the factors of the environment. Some cultures are better adapted to the current situation. They all have equal “value”, but they are not all equally valuable. But I cannot blame Boas. There has been a lot of advance in biological sciences as well as just experience since his time. Marget Mead Boas’ most famous accolade was Margret Mead. She was maybe one of our most influential anthropologists. She was mostly wrong about details. As the book outlines, she found what she was looking for rather than what was when doing her work in Samoa. She fell victim to the biases I described up top. The additional problem is the people you meet. The people outsiders are likely to meet are probably not the people who really know best. … and Frasier Crane Think of an anthropologist trying to understand the USA by hanging around in a bar and talking to the people there. The image that came into my mind was that old comedy series “Cheers,” the place where “everybody knows your name.” I think of the sophisticated and erudite Frasier Crane observing the natives. He might produce a better narrative, but it would be his narrative and maybe useful but not the truth. The book is more joint biographies than anthropology. The members of the Boas circle were all weird. They were misfits in their own societies, which is maybe why they looked for meaning in others. Now I don’t know how much of this is the product of the narrative of the book and how much is how it was. Taking it personally The great thing about this book for me was the thoughts it provoked. I know this is very personal. I thought back to my education in history and the importance of evidence and narrative. I learned to “do” history in the tradition of Leopold von Ranke, with emphasis on primary sources and evidence and lack of confidence in unifying theories of history. Yes, I know it is old fashioned, but I still am a true believer in that method, adding to that the boots-on-the-ground imperative. Where I part company, however, is with the idea that we can find the truth, as Ranke said history as it really was. But while we cannot find the truth in an absolute sense, we should continue to search for it, so that we can reject things that clearly are not true and so that we can come closer to at least a useful truth. I am drifting from the book, but maybe that is the sign of a good book. I recommend it for those who studied anthropology and maybe even more those who did not. Lots of our routine ideas are influenced by these guys, whether we know it or not. I wonder if my friend and colleague Rick Roberts knows this book.
Went to Gordon Biersch for a party featuring Chesapeake Porter, beer made according to an old recipe.
We got a short lecture about lagers and ales. Lagers are made a lower temperatures and have a crisper flavor.
In the old days, beer was generally dark. A big reason was that technologies were not well developed and the darker beers were easier to make. They also hit impurities better. As tech improved, it because easier to make lighter beers. As clear glass cups came to replace mugs or steins, people could see their beer and liked it clearer.
