Tag: greatest hits

Posted on

Planting longleaf on the precise, exact edge of the natural range

The natural range for the longleaf pine starts in Texas and Florida and goes to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, but it ends in the north and west in Brunswick County, Virginia. I have been studying the map and it looks like the natural range of longleaf ends precisely in the middle of my property in Freeman, where we planted longleaf pine.

Therefore, I believe, or at least will assert, that my land forms the northwest terminus of the natural longleaf range. Next time I go to the farm, I will paint a bright line to mark the border. Perhaps it will become a minor tourist attraction, one of those things worth seeing but not going to see.

Posted on

Aldo Leopold Foundation

I attended a program at the Aldo Leopold Foundation in Baraboo. We discussed conservation and how to communicate it with a more general public. The sessions are based on Leopold’s thinking and also his methods. He believed in learning actively. Observe – participate – reflect – observe … repeat.

 I like it. It fits in well with my mindful boots-on-the-ground philosophy. You have to go to the places, experience them. You gain knowledge through practical experience, and it is always contingent on what happened before. That is why you need to absorb the context. However, while experience is mandatory, learning is optional, which is where the reflection and thinking comes in.

Anyway, the picture is our group photo. It was taken just before our work pulling invasive plants out of the prairie to get some of that hands-on experience. That is why some of us have gloves. Right after we finished the field work, we discussed Leopold’s essay “Axe in Hand” where he talks about making choices in conservation and understanding how we are affecting the land. The work helped with understanding and internalizing the essay.

I am in Baraboo at a two-day seminar at the Aldo Leopold Foundation. Leopold is the founder of an important stream of conservation, although I am not sure he would have taken credit for it.

Leopold’s “land ethic” is both simple and profound. We all live in the natural world and should be mindful of the choices we are making, both actions and inaction. Things we do that tend to improve the biotic communities on the land are good and those that harm them are bad.

The profound and ostensibly paradoxical part is that Leopold wrote that you cannot write a land ethic in a book. A land ethic has to be written on the land. You leave your signature on the land you manage and you learn from the land you are walking on. You learn from being involved. It is a melding of thinking and doing.

Observe – participate – reflect – observe … It is circular and endless, but even when I write it in this order it is misleading, since they overlap and merge in the practice.

The other point that Leopold made about the land ethic applies to most sorts of practical philosophy. It is dynamic. The process is constant; the conclusions are mutable depending on the interactions and the circumstances. I am thinking about this and I don’t suppose I can explain it in writing. But I think I understand some of it from my interaction with environments all over and from working on my own land.

I have owned my forest land for more than ten years now. I have seen many changes on the land and changes in how I view land, my own and others. I appreciate Leopold’s thinking on this more than I did, more than a could have, before I had the responsibility on my own property.

Anyway, Leopold summed up ethics by explaining that acting ethically meant that you did the right thing even when nobody is looking, even when doing the wrong thing is perfectly legal and maybe acceptable to others. Of course, he did not originate this thought, and never claimed it was original. But it is good to recall and reiterate.

My first two pictures are the Leopold Foundation buildings. Much of the wood is from trees Leopold planted. The buildings are designed to use lots of natural light and take advantage of the site for climate control. The third picture is a sedge meadow in Stevens Point. This is a wetland dominated by grass and forbs, generally w/o trees. Standing water is present only episodically, but the soils are generally saturated.

Save
Save

Posted on

Lefsa

Chrissy got some lefsa through the mail. I have not had that for a long time. For those unfamiliar with the food, it is kind of a tortilla made of potatoes, but it is softer and more absorbent. You can use it most place where you might use bread or rolls. Eat it with butter or use it as a wrap for sausages or cheese.

Posted on

Congaree National Park

Went to Congaree National Park in South Carolina. I wanted to see the world’s biggest loblolly pine and I did. The park was established in order to protect un-logged old growth timber. It is a wet land. The trees grow big because the fertile soil and frequent inundation from the Congaree River, which carries water and silt.

The big pine was hard to see, since I could not linger. Even in on this cool day, there were clouds of mosquitoes When I stopped more than a few seconds, they swarmed. I had to breathe through clenched teeth so as not to breathe them in.

My picture shows the big tree. I tried to get a picture of myself with it, for comparison, but I am not good at selfies. Loblolly live around 250 years, max. You can see that they then blow down or the tops come off.

Posted on

Better decisions through randomness

I was asked to be on a committee to figure out who got into a prestigious university program. They told me that they had many times more QUALIFIED applicants than slots. I asked about the meaning of qualified; they said it meant that students could do the work and have a good chance success. So I suggested rock-paper-scissors or some sort of random number generator. Since they were all qualified, we were assured a good class. They could publish the odds ahead of time and make it fair and clear.

The committee was unimpressed. As happens in these things, they didn’t kick me off; they just never invited me back. But I was right. My offense was not being wrong, it was threatening the phony-baloney jobs of admissions committees. I am convinced you would get a BETTER class if you introduced randomness, since it would eliminate bias.  Dice have no prejudice and no memory. Have a threshold requirement to assure quality, but then take advantage of the beauty & simplicity of random chance.

Such a system also has the advantage of broadening the base of possible classes and it implicitly recognizes that current “experts” do not have the necessary knowledge to micro-manage future needs.

Beyond that, we should let no kids into college when they are 18. Let all who are interested go to open enrollment community colleges. They will then have time to work out what they want, what they are good at doing and where they want to be.  Some who were uninterested in college might find a passion there. Other who were pushed into academics may find more joy in other lines of work. Better all around.

I have thought about this before and wrote about it here. 

The reason I was thinking about this, BTW, was a new book about not fearing to fail, linked here. 

Posted on

Another tequila sunrise

The last time I drank tequila was on January 4, 1974. I worked at Medusa Cement Company over Christmas break that year.  It was tough work.  I did the night shift, midnight to noon, unloading hopper cars full of cement.  It was cold.  I remember being out there looking at the Allen-Bradley clock and temperature.  I can still picture it today, the clock at one in the morning and the temperature -5 or less.  We would run out to the hopper cars and set up the shakers and then run back in to our shacks with heaters. The heaters ran on propane and were shaped like torpedoes.  They produced lots of heat along with of noxious fumes and the occasional belch of flame.  My partner LC Duckworth (he evidently had no first name, just initials) actually set his pants on fire when he fell asleep in front of the heater.  No real harm was done.  It was only on the bottom and the coveralls were fire resistant. He woke up a little startled.  I ran in and I helped put him out.  

I made the big bucks that year; at least it was big bucks to me at that time.  The twelve hour shifts meant four hours a day of time and a half overtime, but it interfered with my social life, which consisted mostly of boozing with my friends.  My nights were always cut short, as I had to be to work at midnight.  In that time and place, they didn’t really mind if showed up a little tipsy.   In the land of soaks, the semi-sober man is king.  I have a theory about how this affected all of U.S. society, which I include below. But I still felt oppressed and longed for the end of my working term so that I could go back to my dissolute ways.  

I finished my working week and my working term on Friday and set up a party at my house, in the basement.  With some of the big bucks I made, I bought all sorts of booze. I used to walk back from work and buy a couple of bottles at Bay View Liquor on my way home, so I had the feeling that I was building up to this for a long time.  I invited all my friends and acquaintances. My plan was to give away free booze.  I would stay perfectly sober and talk to my old HS friends. That was the plan. The flaw in my bold plan was that everybody else was drinking.   It is not much fun to talk to drunks when you are not among them. So I set about to catch up. 

I had a long way to go and wanted to get there quick as I could. There was a bottle of tequila that had remained untouched.  I started to drink that, one shot at a time, but persistently and with vigor. I am not really sure if I finished the bottle, but I knocked down a lot of it. The last thing I recall from that night was noticing that it seemed like I was looking through a broken mirror and the world was spinning. The last person I remember seeing was a girl I knew from HS called Janie Peterson.  There was a two or three of these Peterson sisters.  They all looked alike and they all were blond and pretty. I didn’t impress her. Actually, I am not entirely sure she was there. Lots of things I remember from that time may not have happened and many things that happened I forgot.

The next morning I woke up with no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt. As an experienced boozer, I thought that I would take care of it in the usual way. My method was to run. It moved the blood around and provoked a horrendous headache. After about a mile you would usually throw up, but then you felt okay. I still recall with some fondness walking back in the sublimely icy air (it was winter a lot in Wisconsin) feeling restored. Not this time. 

This time I could not even get out of bed.  When I stood up, the world would spin and I fell back.  I was really thirsty, but just about as fast as I could drink water, I would throw it back up.  I spent the whole day trying to get up, drinking some water, throwing it up, sleeping a little and then starting it all over. Sometime around evening, I could move again. I was extraordinarily hungry.  There was not much around the house and in those days we didn’t have that many restaurant choices.  I walked down Kinnickinnic Av and ended up in “the Ritz.”  It was not a great place, but it was open. Hunger is the best cook and I recall with joy the greasy hamburger and fries.

This experience did not entice me to swear off booze or even swear off tequila, but I found that the smell of tequila and even the thought of tequila brought back vivid and unpleasant memories.  I didn’t drink a drop of tequila for the next nearly forty years, no Margaritas, no tequila sunrises, no tequila with salt or lemon, nothing.

I told this story to Espen, who told me that I should give tequila another chance on the fortieth anniversary of the great unpleasantness. I didn’t quite wait for forty years, jumping the gun by a couple weeks.  I tried tequila again.  It was surprisingly hard to drink a shot. It was like jumping into a pool of cold water, ready – go…go.  Are you going or not?  But I did it. It didn’t taste that bad, but neither was it good. It was a long run for a short slide, something maybe worth doing but not worth thinking about doing for four decades.  I will never become a fan of tequila, but I suppose I should be grateful to the cactus whiskey for crystallizing a memory. 

Re my theory of boozing and work.  I was a member of the Longshoremen’s Union Local 815 back in the early 1970s.  We were in that union because we were near the river and some of our cement came in boats.  Most of my brothers worked on the Milwaukee docks and most were hard workers. Many were also boozers, but it didn’t matter.  You could come to work a little tipsy and some of the jobs didn’t require that you work every day.  You could show up and work hard for a few days and then take off. The hard manual work could be done by people recovering from a bender.  I observed that guys sweating out a drunk are often very hard workers.   Besides,  there were “opportunities” to find things that “fell off the back” of trucks.  This world was destroyed in the 1970s when containerized cargo came in.  They needed fewer men to work on the docks and those men could no longer be boozers.  They had to run big machines and come in every day. IMO, some of the homeless problem can be blamed on these developments. There was a general disappearance of short-term, itinerant jobs.   Some guys can work hard, they just cannot work consistently. They had a place before; they do no longer.  I am not saying this was a great world.  It was not.  But it did have an easier time for some marginal people.

Posted on

A language is just a dialect with an army and a navy

Language difference is the obvious but vaguely surprising thing I noticed in Columbia. Portuguese to Spanish is a one-way street.  Portuguese speakers can understand most Spanish, but Spanish speakers do not understand much spoken Portuguese.  My Brazilian colleagues told me about this and I found it was true in Bogotá. People spoke to me in a language I more or less understood, but my responses were met with puzzlement. Portuguese, especially the Brazilian variety, uses vowels in a more exuberant way. 

The boundaries of language are interesting.  Some dialects should qualify as languages and some languages are really just dialects. There is an old saying that a language is just a dialect that has an army and a navy.   When I spoke Norwegian, I found I could also understand Swedish w/o too much difficulty. Written Danish is almost identical to written Norwegian, but the spoken language is different.   

Of course, some things called dialects probably should have their own language.  I read that Chinese “dialects” are mutually unintelligible.  Like Danish and Norwegian, the written languages are the same or similar, but the spoken languages are not.  I have had some problems with English.  There were people I could not understand when travelling in the UK.

My first language shock came when I was nineteen.  I hitchhiked from Wisconsin to South Alabama.  It was a dumb idea.  I was not prepared and I had only about $15.  I was trying to go to Florida, but I didn’t have a map or much of a plan.  I ended up on State Highway 10 and got a ride from a guy in a truck.  I understood nothing the man said.  He didn’t take me very far and when I got off a farmer was standing near the road.  He started to talk to me (People of rural Alabama very friendly).  He had one of those Civil War accents, but I understood him well.  He was a little put off when I told him that I was glad I understood.  He laughed when I explained that I had understood nothing from the man who had just dropped me off.  “Oh, that’s old Butch.  He’s the town drunk.   Ain’t nobody understands old Butch.”

Accents and languages can be fun.  I am not very good at accents, but I did find an interesting performance by a woman who does 21 accents in a few minutes.  She is at this link.

Posted on

Lost, found & maybe lost again

Things should be lost and only sometimes found.  We try too hard to preserve things for a posterity that should be left alone to discover for themselves what we knew, what we were and what they have become.  It is sad when something of old beauty disappears and tragic when hard-won lessons are lost, but it might be sadder and more tragic still if they persist and crowd new beauty and lessons to be learned by another age.  

We have a passion to preserve, or at least try to.  We embrace change in theory but in practice try to hold onto everything, memorialize each moment.  But things pass and when they are gone they cannot be persevered, perhaps only fossilized, a lifeless impression reminiscent of the vital living thing, but w/o any of its essence. The essence of vital life is change and the fossil preserved cannot do that.  

Sometimes just let go, let that moment pass into obscurity, with maybe some lingering meaning to be discovered by an explorer or an antiquarian of a future generation, when it will be rediscovered and misinterpreted to fit their needs.  

Things preserved are things dead.  The world should belong to the living. My historian’s heart loves the past and knows that we can learn from the experience of others.   Our ancestors left us a wonderful legacy and I count as MY ancestor every human who came before me whose legacy I touch: good, bad and indifferent. Events change but human nature abides.   But with all due respect to what went before, the future is what matters. Knowing what came before should enable us, not hold us down. They are our ancestors but we have no responsibility for what they did. 

I often feel most awe in lonely places. I recall coming on a big pile of rocks while hiking in Norway.  It turns out that it was a Neolithic monument.  Thousands of years ago, the local hunters and farmer just piled rocks.  There was a marker, which is how I knew what it was, but it didn’t really have a good explanation. Maybe it was just that somebody started to do it and other just did it too.  The tradition perhaps persists along hiking trails, where you find piles of rocks that people create as a type of fetish.

When I come on a sign of some great past event, I feel pensive but also connected. I feel connected, however fleetingly, to humans who like me strives, achieved, failed and overcame.  I know that all I do will soon be like all they did.  I take a moment to respect them and also myself.  I try to take a lesson and then I move on.  

Posted on

Coca-Cola is good for you

Parts of grievance industry are in full assault against Coca-Cola et al.  It is true that Coke can make you fatter. But there is the easy and obvious solution – Diet Coke.  I have been drinking around two liters of Coke every day since I was about seven years old. That makes it a whole half century and roughly 36,000 liters of Coke.  Around ten years ago, my advancing age overtook my quick metabolism. To cut calories I switched to Diet Coke, then Coke Zero. Problem solved.

I am in my eleventh year of Coke Zero, which means more or less 8000 liters. When I was in the Iraqi desert, I drank little water and mostly Coke. It hydrates well and it is a myth that it doesn’t refresh or that it is unhealthy. The only harm it seems to cause is that I have to pay for it, whereas water would be mostly free, although not always.   

If we believe that people are getting fat because of soft drinks sweetened with sugar or corn syrup, we should just get them to switch to calorie free soft drinks. It is hard to break a habit but much easier to substitute one. I didn’t have to give up Coke; I just changed the existing habit.

Drinking mass quantities of Coke has been useful. I don’t get dehydrated. In fact, I credit Coca-Cola with much of my management success. In the classic business book “In Search of Excellence” the authors advocated “management by walking around”. They said that leaders had to get out of their offices and talk to people in the organization. I agree. Drinking lots of Coke reminds me to get off my ass, since I have to go to the bathroom a lot I walk around.

Back when I was in college I had a couple of housemates who were vegetarians. Not only that, they were hostile to the “big food industry” and the reserved a special animus for Coca-Cola, which they identified as a type of devil’s brew. They had several annoying habits. Among them was making mooing sounds when someone ate a hamburger and constantly telling me that Coca-Cola was going to poison me. Since I was in robust health and neither they nor any of their hippie friends (we still had hippies back then) were up to ordinary physical standards, I discounted their advice. When they told me that Coke would kill me, I would ask them when.   

I have come to the conclusion that not only is Coke not bad for you, it has positive health benefits. As I mentioned above, you are always hydrated. I run, ride my bike and lift weights and never have to make a special hydration effort. Beyond that, the mild caffeine dose helps keep you alert all day and more energetic, so you get more exercise, so it is better than plain water.

So let’s praise Coca-Cola, at least in the calorie free forms, and encourage its use.

Posted on

Four days and three nights of the ungulate

It seemed like a good idea at the time. I could get a sheep to eat the grass. I would save time and money on gardening. It would be ecologically sound, as the animal consumes no fossil fuels and fertilizes its own pastures. Beyond that, sheep are picturesque. I thought it would be a biological version of one of those robotic vacuum cleaners that drives around on the floor, turning round when it bumps into something, but generally working automatically. The trouble is that I didn’t know much about sheep.

I thought they were like big dogs that ate grass, i.e. I thought they would be like a pet and behave like a dog. They don’t. Dogs do dumb things, but compared to sheep they are Einsteins. Sheep, I learned to my sorrow, really are just as incredibly stupid as you have heard. The only thing my sheep did, besides eat and shit (see below) was look in the window and baa. They are a lot louder than you suppose. My sheep generally slept when it got dark, but it did not sleep the whole night, occasionally waking up to remind everyone that it was still out there. It kind of warms up, sometime with a low ummm, which sometimes crescendos to a very loud ummmBAA-AAA. I am not sure why it did that. I think it may have seen its own reflection and thought was another sheep.

But that was not the big problem. I could get used to that; maybe even appreciate the bucolic beauty of it all. On the plus side, it did eat grass, and seemed to like the taller grass better, so it was trimming exactly as I had hoped it would. The other end of the process was not so agreeable.

I was prepared for the fertilizer aspect of the sheep. In fact, I considered that a net benefit, as it would make my plants grow better. I have no problem with manure and happily use biosolids on the tree farms. But I assumed that the fertilizer would be mostly deposited on the grass, where it would do some good. No. My sheep evidently walks around on and eats the grass, but holds most of the shit for when it is standing around on the veranda under the roof. Worse, it seems to want to shit as close as possible to the house and most prefers to go right near the doors or windows. And it shits a lot. I soon found my pre-work period would be devoted to shoveling and washing down the patio; I got a similar task when I got back from work. Despite my shoveling and hosing, it was really starting to stink.

I was going to give the sheep a little more time, but the odor was starting to get pretty strong. I planned to be away for a week and a half. The guy who sold me the sheep told me that it would be okay. Independence was a big advantage of sheep. I travel a lot. If the sheep has shelter from the rain, it can be left along. It just stays out and eats grass. I had to make sure it had water, but probably not even that, since the rainy season grass was very wet. The guy told me that it would get enough water from the moist grass it ate. So, I COULD have left it alone, but I figured that if I left it for a week and half, the shit would be knee high when I got back and the smell would knock the proverbial buzzard off the proverbial shit wagon. My plane was leaving that night. I depend on sweet serendipity and a solution presented itself.

The cleaning woman comes by every two weeks and Wednesday was her day. When she showed up around 7:15, she was surprised to see a sheep in the front yard, but not much bothered. Her rural childhood included lots of sheep & goats. She knew what I was just discovering and seemed to find my dilemma very amusing. Courtesy and the fact that I pay her kept her from laughing out loud, but I am sure my story will engender mirth back in the village. It will also provide a sheep. I asked her if she wanted the sheep; she had some relatives with a pickup truck & when I got home after work, my problem was gone, almost. I am not sure where it went, but I don’t really care. I like to think that my erstwhile lawn mowing manure machine is off romping with others of its kind, stinking up somebody else’s yard for an indefinite period, maybe gracing somebody’s table for a somewhat shorter time. No matter. It seemed lonely by itself. After all, sheep are naturally gregarious. The essence of the animal will persist for a while around my house. But I cleaned off the patio and I expect that the strong rains we get around here will do the rest.

My advice, which I allow applies to few people but that I will give nevertheless, is to avoid buying sheep unless you have a way to keep them far from the house. They stink on ice even just standing around and they seem to enjoy crapping where they sleep, not like a dog. If you must get sheep, you probably want a border collie to “herd” them. Just get the collie. Border collies are the smartest of the dogs, they may at least seem to be happy to see you when you come home and don’t crap all over the place.