Tag: hats

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Climate Change IVLP

The day’s third meeting was lunch with Lunch with an IVLP in “Climate Change Adaptation & Infra Structure Planning,” in 2015)

It was a little poignant for me to hear the praise of the USA leadership in climate change and know that we have to a large extent abdicated that role. He said that he had thought about it during the IVLP visit. Lots of the climate change moves were made by presidential initiative. While he respected the speed that the decision could be taken, he wondered that if one president could do another could undo.

I repeated the mantra that I have repeated every year in my 31 years in the FS – “The American nation is greater than the American government and the American government is greater than the current occupant of the White House.” He understood this. One of the things he noticed and admired about the USA was that we were truly decentralized. States and localities took initiatives. Universities, firms, NGOs and even individuals acted as they felt necessary. Brazil is a federative republic in theory, but in fact there is much more centralization.

We talked about the difference between having one big plan and having lots of little ones, competing, combining and producing lots of options. We agreed the lots of options is usually more useful, since we live in an uncertain world. True diversity is a strength. We learn from failure, maybe more than success, and all success begins with (survivable) failure.

I asked if anything had impressed him about the program itself and he answered that it was the program itself. Even before he left Brazil, he was impressed with a country that would have a program like this, one designed to show various aspects of a pluralistic society.
The poignancy hit me again. Our open and pluralistic values are those of the America I love. Those are the values that should abide and I hope the current divisions are ephemeral.
Since he returned to Brazil only a few years ago, there was not a long term to assess, but even in the short term there are results. He is organizing programs with American NGOs and maintains a strong cooperation with many of those he met during the IVLP visit and his fellow Brazilian participants.

We had just come from our meeting with Harvard and mentioned that. Our contact thought that his organization, Fundação Getúlio Vargas, might be able to have meaningful cooperation with Harvard’s Brazil unit. They are, after all, literally just across the street from each other. You could throw a baseball from one and hit the other. I put our contacts in contact and I hope it is the start of a beautiful friendship.

My pictures are not closely related. I lost my hat and I needed a new one to keep the rain from pounding my bald head. The place selling hats had only Marvel Superheroes. I wanted Thor, but failing that, I got the Hulk. Next is the monorail, under construction. In the evening, I had dinner at KAA with my colleague Mark Pannell and one of our speaker participants. Nice place. Had a couple caipirinhas. They are better in Brazil. I think the limes are different here.

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Road Trip – Montana

Visited the Little Bighorn Battlefield. The geography has not changed much since we were last here, but the interpretation of history is different. It has come back to balance.

When I first heard about Custer, it was the “They Died with Their Boots On” story. Custer represented the light of civilization versus the darkness. The reaction to this dominated during the 1960s. Custer in this version was a cowardly, foolish clown, who deserved to die at the hands of noble savages. Now we can appreciate heroism and bravery on both sides.
After events pass from living memory, they become the common heritage of humanity. I thought of that when I saw the monument to the Sioux dead that sits maybe 100 yards from the place where Custer was killed. It is certainly appropriate. At the exhibit in the visitors’ center said that 42% of Custer’s troopers were foreign born. The Native American Crow and Arikara who rode with Custer were the hereditary enemies of the Sioux. My point is that there was great diversity on both sides and the sides were ephemeral.

All these diverse groups are part of the tapestry of America today. Consider that 40% of Americans today can trace an ancestor to Ellis Island, which opened for immigrants only in 1892 and we can see that it makes no sense to take sides on this historical event, but we can all learn from it and appreciate the participants. The events became our American history and the descendants of those who fought here are Americans, like those of us whose ancestors showed up after the battle.

My first picture is me in front of the memorial to the Sioux and Cheyenne who fought at Little Bighorn. Next is “Last Stand Hill.” They marker in the middle is where Custer fell. Next is a healthy stand of ponderosa pines in the Custer National Forests and last is a Sinclair Station. I like to buy gas there for the very irrational reason that there used to be a Sinclair station near my house in Milwaukee and I like the dinosaur.

Finished up the day in Billings, Montana. Not a big city, but it has a whole district of breweries and distilleries. My pictures are from the Billings Brewery District, except the last one. That one is from a rest stop on I-90. It is kind of clever to provide a fire hydrant for traveling dogs.

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Saguaro National Park near Tucson Arizona

Think of forests and most of the time the picture that comes to mind is shady galleries of spreading branches. But the sunny saguaro lands also are forests. One of the thickest of these is on the land of the Saguaro National Park near Tucson Arizona. There are miles of hiking trails, but we were not so rich either in ambition or time, so we took the eight-mile driving loop, stopping at the various places of interest and walking the short ecology trial. We had a nice convertible rental car, so we could enjoy the views from all angles even when moving.

When this park was established as a National Monument in 1931, the saguaro were thick and close together. That is what impressed the founders of the park, who thought that this place had been like that for centuries and should remain that way in perpetuity.

Unfortunately, there was a cold snap in 1937 and again in 1962 and the saguaro started to die off. Since the cactus did not die immediately, scientists did not immediately understand that saguaro will often die if temperatures drop below freezing for more than twenty hours and tried to figure out if some sort of unknown “cactus blight” was the cause. There were dire predictions that if current trends continued, the saguaro would be extirpated by 1990.
It was the cold and the thick cactus forest was the result of unusually warm weather in the late 1800s that had allowed greater survival. The more normal cold weather was just cutting them back. A more serious problem seemed to be recruitment of new saguaro. Scientists could find almost no young cactus among the old ones. So, even absent a “saguaro blight”, w/o new cactus the cactus forest had no future.

Saguaro have specific needs to get established. It has to be a relatively moist year and the little saguaro must be under a “nurse tree”, most often a palo verde, ironwood or mesquite tree, that protects them from drying out or from very hard rain. They also need not to be trampled. When cattle graze, they trample the young saguaro. When the authorities removed the cattle, and protected the nurse trees, the saguaro started to come back. There are now many little saguaros among the big old ones.

Saguaro grow only in the Sonoran Desert and only less than 4000 feet above sea level. They grow slowly and do not get their first “arm” until at least fifty years and maybe 100 when there is less rain. They may live to be around 200 years old. They are easily damaged and do not regenerate very easily. As the urban areas of Phoenix and Tucson expand, they are moving into saguaro country. Saguaro are icons of the old Southwest. Home owners love saguaro on their property. Let’s hope this love helps with protection.

So far, this is less a story of loss and more one of regeneration. Hope it continues.
My first picture shows some of the vistas, as does picture #4. Between is me in a “cowboy pose” and CJ in the rental car. Last picture is low density housing creeping into the saguaro. This is not all bad news. Park officials are working with home owners to maintain and enhance conditions for the survival of the saguaro ecology.

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Forest visit

Here is my daily beer drinking picture tree farming style. The hat is dopey looking, but the fringe keeps the bugs off. I brought down a bench where I can sit and have lunch, as you can see in the second photo. I have my usual Love’s picture. The price of driving has gone up. Penultimate photo, we got some rocks for the parts of the road that are persistently muddy. Hope it works. Last is one of the plots we will convert to pollinator habitat. It already has lots of what is needed.

I would like to say that I was having the beer after a morning of hard work, but I was doing mostly in anticipation of working.

I went down to the farms mostly to talk the the NRCS folks. They are giving me cost share to establish pollinator habitat and do some prescribed burning. I did do some of the usual vine cutting. The good things about that on a hot day is that you work mostly in the shade of the forests.

It was hot today, the hottest day so far in September. That is a bit ironic, given that it is almost officially fall.

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Dinosaurs

Alex and I visited Dinosaur National Monument, near Vernal, Utah. It is literally a dinosaur quarry.

What is now Utah was wet and tropical in the Jurassic Period, and a river ran through it. This river attracted dinosaurs and over the eons some of them died and fell in.The river washed their remains together, where they were covered by sediment and some of the bones turned to stone. There is a survivor bias among the bones. Small animal remains were just crushed, while the big ones persisted long enough to turn into fossils.

With changes in climate, the river ran dry and the former river bed was buried. But the earth never rests. As plates moved, the former river bed was tilted and thrust up to the surface.
The dinosaurs rested in the rock until 1909 when Earl Douglass of the Carnegie Museum went to Utah to search for dinosaur skeletons. This is where he found the mother lode.
The four corner area is the richest dinosaur region in the world. It is not so much that there were more dinosaurs living here, or that there are more preserved here, but the dry conditions and exposed rock makes them easy to find. It is also the case that there were/are more people looking for fossils in the U.S. than in most other places. It is likely that the local Native Americans occasionally stumbled on these fossils, and may have noticed them, but with no scientific or cultural infrastructure, they remained only curiosities, maybe not even that.

The first picture is Alex in front of the dinosaur quarry wall, now enclosed and protected. Next is Alex in front of the model stegosaurus. It was nice to see his enthusiasm, only a little more concealed than when he first came here when he was only four years old. The third picture are model dinosaurs. Notice the model ranger to give perspective. Penultimate is the lonely and winding road. There is an amazing amount of space out here. Many stretches were you get no bars on your mobile phone. Last is a grouse wing collection spot. It is not mere morbid collecting. Researchers use the wings to study bird numbers and migration patterns.

I thought maybe I would post the beer picture first this time rather than last of the day. This one was taken at the Vernal Brewery. Alex said that I merely have the same photo each time, so I changed it up by putting on my hat.

Vernal Brewery has a nice outdoor seating area and it is conveniently located across the street from the dinosaur museum. Alex and I went to the museum and then just walked over.

I have been enjoying my time with Alex and I am happy to think that he is enjoying his time with me. One of his friends was supposed to go along but dropped out because he could not get off from work. I feel bad for Alex, but it worked out better for me. My role on the trip would have been much more passive. I think it likely that I would avoided some of the more strenuous hikes, like the one to Angel’s Landing.

This is the second time Alex and I have been to the dinosaur places in Vernal. He does not remember well the first time in 1992, when the whole family drove from Spokane, Washington to Washington, DC between our assignments in Norway & Poland. FSOs get “home leave” to be reacquainted with our country. On our home leaves, we crossed the country going east from San Francisco to by train, from Seattle, Spokane & Phoenix by car. Now I have to do it on my own, but I still want to do it.

As I sat in the Vernal Brewery across from my adult son thinking of the boy so excited by the same dinosaurs that I could still see across the street, I felt acutely the passage of time. Looking down at my aging hand, I doubted I would ever pass this way again. This might be the last big hiking trip with Alex and we will certainly never again do a family cross country trip. Driving with three kids asking when we were going to get there was not fun at the time, but it is remembered better than it was lived.

My first picture is my beer photo with the permutation of a hat. Next is Vernal Brewery. When you look at the building, one thought should enter your mind – it could have been built faster and better in the same form using cross laminated timber. That is what popped into my head.

Number three the the traditional duel between triceratops and tyrannosaurus. It was standard fare for the dino myths of my childhood. Scientists now believe that such things never happened, that tyrannosaurus was colorfully feathered and that they didn’t walk around in that clumsy clipped kangaroo fashion. But besides that, it is accurate and it was the best science at the time. Next is a full skeleton of a long necked dinosaur. Finally is something called a “mochops”. I never heard of it before, but I appreciated the quizzical look on its face. I noticed that several of the animals depicted have looks like that. I think that is more the result of the artist than the science. Maybe he used his dog as a template.

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Travels in Colorado & days of fire past

Day’s end
My end of day post with my daily beer. This one was at Golden Block Brewery and Restaurant in Silverton, Colorado.
Chrissy pointed out that my beer pictures imply that I am a boozer. I do tend to drink beer almost every day, but I do not drink all day. I usually have no more than a couple beers, often have only one, and some sad days none at all. I like the “beer experience,” but I do not habitually pound down very many.

Fires of the past
I have been observing the ghosts of forest fires past during my trip. I mentioned the fire that destroyed the piñon pine-juniper ecosystem at Mesa Verde. I will put the link to that one in the comments section. It did not recover even after almost fifteen years.
Today I saw the effects of an even older fire. The Lime Creek fire destroyed 25,000 acres of spruce-fir forest way back in 1879. It has not recovered even now.
This is very different from the fire regimes in Virginia and the Southeast, where the forests begin to recover the next growing season and where many forests are actually fire dependent. I visited the site of the Peshtigo Fire that in 1871 was the largest fire in American history. Those forests have grew back through natural regeneration.

Location and the precise ecology is very important.
Look at the pictures and notice that the trees are in rows. People started to plant trees back in 1911 and the process is still continuing. I didn’t climb up to look, but it looks like there has been little natural regeneration in places not planted. Again, this is so different from what I observe in the rainier pine forests in the south and the lake states.


Quick moves among ecosystems

A remarkable thing about the west is how fast you can move among vastly different ecosystems. Yesterday, we were in the high desert. We went to the piñon pine-juniper ecology by midday and ended the day among the ponderosa montane forests. Today, we moved through the ponderosa and into the spruce-fir ecology, where these pictures are taken.

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Ancestral Pueblo & fire on Mesa Verde

Mesa Verde
We went up from Chaco Canyon to Mesa Verde, the other big Anasazi place. This one was also abandoned around 1300. Scholars speculate about the reasons. Maybe it is simple as the lifestyle was just not sustainable.

We listened to an audio book called “Cities of the Ancient World” on the way to and from the Mesa Verde. Most of the great cities and cultures of the world have declined or disappeared. Our experience in the last couple of centuries is not the common one. We have experienced more or less steady growth. But even we have ghost towns, places abandoned when the resource played out or just when people found better opportunities.

Alex made a couple of good speculations. Maybe simple prosaic causes pushed them people out. This settlement was on the edge of a trading community. Maybe when centers farther south declined, this one did too. It is like the contagion of the economic decline of 2008. Or maybe they just used up the resource. The forests above Mesa Verde were destroyed by fire in 2003. They still have not recovered. A fire or a drought would starve the people of Mesa Verde. Theirs was always a precarious existence. It would not take much to tip them off.

Fire on Mesa Verde

Fires stopped us from visiting Mesa Verde when we drove through here back in 2003. Turns out that this was a serious fire, part of a series of fires that burned 24,000 acres in Mesa Verde in 2002-3. This land was covered with old growth juniper and piñon pine forests. These are slow growing trees that never get very tall. It is not a fire adapted forest. A big fire can kill it. A big fire did kill it – all of it.

As many reading this know, I am an advocate of using fire in forestry. I have used fire on my own land with excellent results. It is a wonderful but fierce tool and fire is not appropriate in all conditions. I walked through some of the burned over acres today. After around fifteen years, the land still has not recovered. It is so different from what I know in Virginia. There is no evidence of natural regeneration, even near places where the forest is intact and presumably living trees would have provided seeds.

What to do? If you believe in “natural” you do nothing and let nature decide. This is not good. Nature doesn’t do any thinking. Random events can create widely divergent outcomes. A confluence of good conditions might restore the forest, while bad luck will leave it in the poor state it is today. And bad luck is much more likely.

Piñon, for example, don’t produce germinating seeds until they are 75 years old. And when they do produce, they only produce viable seeds only every seven to eight years. If they hit a drought during that time, nothing grows.

Right now, the ground is covered with invasive cheat grass and in lots of places with nothing at all. It seems that there is kind of an ecological Nash equilibrium. This calls for human intervention to move it off this self-sustaining bad outcome.

There would be a question of resources, but it would be useful to replant pines and junipers. Once established, they would be sustainable, at least until the next big fire.
There really is no natural choice. There are many options, some better than others. There has been no human-free environment in North America for at least 12,000 years. The fires that destroyed the piñon -juniper forest was human-made. At least part of it was caused by the Ips beetle killing piñon pines. The beetle probably hitchhiked in on a car or truck. The cheat grass is an invasive brought in by humans. Humans started some of the fires. Given all these human choices that created this outcome, it is silly – it is pernicious – to think that there is a natural choice. There are, however, sustainable choices that can be had with a targeted human intervention.

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Wisconsin Nature

Old growth forest in Milwaukee

Cudahy nature center is actually in Oak Creek, just off College Avenue. I started coming here sometime in the early 1970s, before it was a nature center and before Milwaukee County owned it. I used to read books about ecology and natural succession and then come to place like this and try to see how it worked. This is very much my “home woods.”
The preserve is about 42 acres of maple-basswood forest (farther east it would be joined by beech, but there are no natural occurring beech trees in Milwaukee County outside the immediate reach of Lake Michigan fog) that managed to avoid being cut. I doubt it is “virgin” forest, as some say, but it sure is old growth.

An obvious sign of old growth are big trees, but there is more. If the stand is really old growth, i.e. has been there for more than a generation or two, you will find unevenly aged trees and a variety of species.

If you look closely, you can see how the forest composition has been changing. There are some very old oak trees. They are probably at least 200 years old. Some look like they grew in a more open setting, since they had lower branches, but most are very tall before they branch, indicating that they grew with lots of other trees.

The oaks, however, are not the future. Oaks are disturbance dependent, since they need a fair amount of sun. Their offspring will not grow in the shade of the parents and here you have sugar maples and basswood that replace them.

You can see that in my first photo. I saw the trunk and the bark and though “oak” but then looked up and saw maples leaves. I was confused for a second and then looked farther up and saw oak leaves. If I could jump 100 feet into the air, I would see an oak poking out above a sea of maples. The next photo shows some very big basswood trees. They are part of what we used to call the climate community. Basswood and maples will dominate this site until disturbed, since their seedlings can thrive in the shade. The third photo is one of the old oaks that I bet grew up in a much less dense forest, maybe a field. Last is me by the sign for the nature preserve.


Kettle Moraines
Continuing some observations from yesterday’s wet walk around Mauthe Lake. One thing I like about the walk is the constancy of the biotic communities around the lake; another is the constant change. It seems like a contradiction that both can be true at the same time, but that is how natural systems work.

One change I do not like is the death of the ash trees. I noted last time that the ash were still alive. Invasive emerald ash borers evidently arrived in sufficient numbers to change that. I wonder how the damp, but not wet, land near the lake will change.The ash grew well in this environment and changed it by their growing, pulling up water and transpiring it. Will the damp-land become wetland now that they are not doing that? Will the damp forest become more marsh-like. Or will some other sort of trees take up the slack from that niche? There may adapt some natural control. Emerald ash borers eat only ash. They have now eaten themselves out of a home, although I am sure there are residual populations lurking around. Maybe local birds and frogs will learn to like the taste of ash borers and they will be transformed from an existential threat to a mere local menace, maybe just a nuisance, or maybe human effort can extirpate them. Hope.

Mauthe Lake represents the headwaters of the Milwaukee River. The official source is nearby Long Lake, but it flows through Mauthe. The river was high, as you can see from my photos.

My first picture shows a nice stand of white pine along the path. They are probably (only a guess, I was unable to confirm & if anyone knows better let me know too) seventy years old, planted by CCC. Next is the Milwaukee River leaving Mauthe Lake, followed by a photo of is coming in. The “river” after that is not a river at all. the left branch is the hiking trail and the right one is a bike trail. The water was shallow and warm. Last is the ghost forest of ash trees.

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Key West

A few photos from around Key West. We have Chrissy and me eating breakfast and then Key Lime pie, separate places. Last is me at the very end of US. 1.
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Nature Conservancy in Florida

The best thing about the Nature Conservancy is the way they bring ostensibly competing interests together in pursuit of common aspirations. What is now the Disney Wilderness Preserve near Orlando was a cattle ranch slated to be developed into another subdivision. Today it is an essential part of the Everglades ecosystem with 3,500 acres of restored wetlands that act as nature’s “sponges” in the landscape capturing rain, filtering out nutrients and replenishing our ground water. All this based on the cooperation of NGOs, private firms, individuals working in voluntary association and government. This means that TNC preserves are usually managed better than public parks, are more better integrated to greater ecosystems than most private lands, provide ecological services to human communities and provide individuals with places of peace and renewal.

You can visit this and most other TNC properties. We did this today. I was interested in seeing how the longleaf restoration was coming. It is good. You see on my photos that the understory is largely saw palmetto. This is something we will not get in Virginia longleaf forests.

I have supported TNC for thirty years. It is the only charity that I have never failed to remember. If you study the details of conservation in the last sixty years, you cannot help but be impressed by the consistent role TNC has played. It has not been through overt political action or even through the wonderful work they did buying and protecting land, but rather through the development of theory and theory in practice of conservation. For example, TNC was literally the keeper of the flame, keeping alive and viable principles AND practices of prescribed burning when “only you can prevent forest fires” was the official mantra and the generally respected consensus.

My photos are from the preserve. Notice the pine and palmetto, as well as the evidence of frequent fire that keeps this fire dependent ecosystem in balance. What looks like dead trees in the background are bald cypress, that lose their needles in winter, hence the name bald.

I also note that while my photos show the trees I love, the sky is a big player in the pictures. In that, it reminds me of Brasilia.