- Now Online
2008
- 02/27/08 It amazes me that..........
- 02/23/08 Sense of place
- 02/02/08 Speaking of mice......
- 02/01/08 The next phase of my life
- 04/30/08 Earth Day 2008
- 04/27/08 How short it is
- 04/20/08 What’s a snake bite between friends?
- 04/16/08 DrTom retires from his day job—now what?
- 04/11/08 Eastern phoebes and our front porchlight
- 04/09/08 Rethinking your options in managing your private forest
- 04/07/08 Small distances, short times
Posts: 15
-
Fretting about my forest
08.May.08, 19:14 EDT
I am a purist when it comes to thinking about habitats for plants and animals. I want it to be the way it used to be. I wish I could go back and see North America 500 years ago. I wish I could live another 300 years to see what the forest around my house will become. But there are many factors that cause a natural habitat to deviate from what it could be, or to be different from what it once was. In most of the world, we cut down whatever was there originally and planted food crops, built houses, or just abandoned the land after we harvested the original inhabitants.
I guess we are pretty lucky in the northeastern U.S., from a naturalist’s perspective. After the massive clearing of those fantastic deciduous forests, humans attempted agriculture and most of it failed economically. That process has allowed that vast area to regrow itself over the past six or seven decades in a process known as secondary plant succession. For example, the hill on which I live was a cattle pasture until 1960, so I now own a forest that is about 48 years old. This old pasture is developing as a forest mostly on its own. The trees are getting bigger and older, they flower and produce seeds, new seedlings appear and grow, develop into saplings, and so on.
So why am I on edge all the time about the biological process I am witnessing every day around me? For starters, we have a major mammalian herbivore living here—white-tailed deer. Deer eat many of these tree species, as well as various non-woody plants, and deer, therefore, influence the species composition and relative abundance of tree species in the future forest. In my forest, they seem to prefer maple, oak, magnolia, and tuliptree, and avoid ash, cherry, aspen, juneberry, and hornbeam. Given that deer densities in this region may be about 10 times their original density, they can have a significant impact on what our future forests become. Realize that I love deer; after all, I conducted my Ph.D. dissertation on Columbian white-tailed deer in the Pacific Northwest. But they have become the bane of my existence as a conservation biologist in upstate New York.
Second, there seems to be a new tree disease in the region every time I ask an expert. Chestnut blight decimated American chestnuts decades ago, Dutch elm disease pummeled American elms, and beech bark disease infected American beech; more recently we have to worry about the woolly adelgid on hemlocks and the emerald ash borer in ash trees. All of these have the potential to significantly reduce populations of these tree species and every tree disease listed above has something else in common—none of them are native to North America. The pathogens all got to this country from Europe or Asia. Introduction of non-native or exotic organisms is a major problem for the conservation of biodiversity globally (one of the so-called “Four Horsemen of the Environmental Apocalypse”).
And finally, there is the “invasion” of non-native shrubs in the forests of the U.S. In my area, the offenders are usually Tartarian honeysuckle and multiflora rose. I have both of them in abundance in my woods, or at least I did until I declared war a few years ago. I have spent many hours walking and pulling, or walking and clipping, or even walking and spraying the tough ones with the herbicide “Roundup.” And with the elimination of every individual comes that feeling of satisfaction that I am putting the system on the right track. We may not know all the species that were in this habitat centuries ago, and we may not know the relative abundances of the various native species back then, but we know that Tartarian honeysuckle and multiflora rose were not part of it.
For what it is worth, I continue to patrol for deer with my Labrador retriever, pull up exotic shrubs, and monitor my trees for any mysterious death. I’d have to live until 2308 to see if I made any difference at all. And most of the time, I feel I am just spitting in the ocean, because the forces of degradation are enormous and the majority of the public will never know the difference. It sure is getting lonely out there.
DrTom -
Biodiversity Trade-offs
05.May.08, 10:37 EDT
Sometimes the decisions we have to make to conserve biodiversity are not pleasant. A news article came to my attention last week titled “Appeals court stays execution of sea lions: Killing was set to start Thursday to save salmon in Columbia River” (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24282734/from/ET/). The title pretty much sums up the dilemma. Salmon in the Pacific Northwest have been in trouble for years, due primarily to overharvesting by humans and the dams on rivers that “frustrate” their upstream migration to spawn. In the case at hand, it is the spring run of the Chinook salmon that is imperiled, which is made worse by hungry sea lions that are camped out at the base of the Bonneville Dam. (To see a photo of one of these magnificent fish, see Profile pic of member “AdrianSpidle”).
The necessity to control one species of native plant or animal to help out another is much less common than controlling a non-native species to benefit one that is indigenous. But there are other examples of this unpleasant trade-off when attempting to conserve native biodiversity. Predators are sometimes controlled in an area where biologists are attempting to reestablish a species that could be taken as prey by the predators. Snow geese are having a decimating effect through their grazing on areas of the Arctic tundra ecosystem and white-tailed deer suppress many species of woody and herbaceous plants in the eastern U.S. Although there are not control programs for these two species as far as I know, agencies rely on the public hunting season to reduce populations of these popular game species in the hopes that the legal “take” will alleviate the problem. Those harvests barely make a dent in the problem, however. So the damage continues, while the public is clueless and the ecologists lament.
Good people are usually trying to do the right thing, but it is often a lose-lose situation in the eyes of the public. “Don’t let the salmon run be extirpated, but don’t harm the sea lions.” The public often replies that wildlife managers should just move the offending or overabundant animals. Trapping and moving the sea lions, or any large mammal, is time-consuming, dangerous to the animal being trapped, and sometimes dangerous for the trapper. It is expensive and it seldom seems cost-effective to me, given that conservation dollars are always scarce. Money spent trapping and transferring animals that are neither rare nor threatened is money that could be spent to buy habitat or protection for a more needy species.
In the case at hand, the Humane Society brought the case to court, which just ruled that no sea lions can be killed now, but a few can be trapped and removed. Once again, the concern for some “individuals” by the Humane Society puts an entire “population” of another species at risk. Any real solution will have to wait until next year’s run, so Nero continues to fiddle.
DrTom -
Earth Day 2008
30.Apr.08, 08:52 EDT
The first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970. I was in the U.S. Army on that first Earth Day and, to be honest, I don’t remember a thing about that event. I’m not all that big on celebratory days anyway. But it is noteworthy that this event has been around for almost 40 years now, and it had a positive effect. Environmental legislation was passed, awareness was raised, and an annual remembrance was institutionalized. The following excerpt was copied from Wikipedia:
“Earth Day proved popular in the United States and around the world. The first Earth Day had participants and celebrants in two thousand colleges and universities, roughly ten thousand primary and secondary schools, and hundreds of communities across the United States. More importantly, it "brought 20 million Americans out into the spring sunshine for peaceful demonstrations in favor of environmental reform."
Senator Nelson stated that Earth Day "worked" because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. 20 million demonstrators and thousands of schools and local communities participated. He directly credited the first Earth Day with persuading U.S. politicians that environmental legislation had a substantial, lasting constituency. Many important laws were passed by the Congress in the wake of the 1970 Earth Day, including the Clean Air Act, laws to protect drinking water, wild lands and the ocean, and the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
Now observed in 175 countries, and coordinated by the nonprofit Earth Day Network, according to whom Earth Day is now "the largest secular holiday in the world, celebrated by more than a half billion people every year." Environmental groups have sought to make Earth Day into a day of action which changes human behavior and provokes policy changes.”
But I keep thinking about the resources needed to really clean up planet earth, to protect biodiversity, and to reduce the probable impacts of global climate change. We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on the Iraq war, and committed hundreds of thousands of people to that effort. The irony is that, in my opinion, we have done this primarily to try to protect the flow of inexpensive oil. If successful (jury is still out), we will use more oil because it is cheap, and contribute more to the primary global environmental disaster facing us today—climate change. So, in effect, we are spending tax dollars to destroy the planet faster. What is wrong with this picture?
As usual, humans are attempting to maximize short-term benefits at the expense of long-term costs, something I wrote about here a couple of weeks ago. We simply were not selected to worry about events that might occur years in the future. So on it goes. At least, Earth Day encourages humans to think about the future, if only for a few hours.
DrTom -
How short it is
27.Apr.08, 04:57 EDT
I tend to think of the year in bird seasons. April and May are the best months of the year for me because most of the species in this part of the world breed and nest during those months. June and July is fledgling time, when adults are busy feeding their still somewhat-dependent offspring, and the rest of the year is boring. It is just that by comparison, after May, it all goes downhill for me, and I begin looking forward to the following April. This is a terrible way to live, really.
As year-round residents, we have chickadees, nuthatches, cardinals, titmice, brown creepers, crows, blue jays, and woodpeckers, and some other species. Several of these are common at bird feeders stocked with sunflower seeds erected by homeowners. But now those species have become more conspicuous—they are singing and calling, prospecting for nest sites, and even building nests. The extremely high-pitched song of the brown creeper is common in my woods now. (This song is so high-pitched that some humans can not hear it). Chickadees are calling throughout the day, and I saw a pair checking out a small cavity in a dead red maple yesterday. Woodpeckers are tapping, barred owls are calling (although they do that all year), and crows certainly have an active nest by now.
Red maple and aspen are flowering now, but none of the trees have any leaves yet. This will change rapidly over the next couple of weeks. And, of course, this is the season for daffodils, tulips, and forsythia to bloom. Juneberry, dogwood, and lilac will follow shortly.
So the locals have come alive, but we now have new members in the community, who left us last fall to go to warmer, more productive climes. For the most part, the birds that have now returned by mid-April are the so-called “short-distance migrants” that wintered in southern U.S. Song sparrows, American robins, brown-headed cowbirds, dark-eyed juncos, and accipiter hawks, are back and acting sexy. Eastern phoebes and broad-winged hawks, who have returned, came from a bit further. Phoebes can winter as far south as Mexico and broad-winged hawks can winter even further away. From the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website: “A recent study attached satellite transmitters to the backs of four Broad-winged Hawks and followed them as they migrated south in the fall. The hawks migrated an average of 7,000 km (4,350 mi) to northern South America, and traveled an average of 111 km (69 mi) each day. Once at the wintering grounds, the hawks did not move around much, staying on average within 2.6 square km (1 square mi).” And there are ruby-crowned kinglets, which just arrived at my place, but they are passing through to breed in coniferous forests farther to the north.
April is the beginning of the bird year for me. Everyone is now vocalizing, looking for their 2008 mates, and locating nest sites. May will be even better, when the long-distance migrants return. The action is picking up, but I want every day to slow down. Based on my bird-oriented annual calendar, “winter” is only three months away.
DrTom -
What’s a snake bite between friends?
20.Apr.08, 08:50 EDT
When you do field work in places where there are venomous snakes, you think about it. Because you see these snakes only rarely, you become somewhat habituated to the fact that they exist in your location, but it is always in the back of your mind. You think about where you put your hands and feet, where you sit down to have your lunch, where you go to the bathroom, and how you pick up a backpack that has been on the ground for several hours. But we know that humans actually do get bitten by poisonous snakes. I have had two colleagues receive serious bites from snakes, and it is not pleasant. You spend days or weeks in the hospital receiving doses of anti-venom and other drugs, battle pain and nausea, and often undergo reconstructive surgery to repair the muscles that experienced necrosis and atrophy near the site of the wound.
It was a tense moment when one of my graduate students appeared unexpectedly at the door of our little house in southern Costa Rica one evening and announced to me: “Tom, I think I’ve been bitten by a snake.” I was studying birds, so my schedule was that of an ornithologist. I got up at 4:30am, went to the field at 5, came home about noon, and went to bed at 9pm. The grad student, who is the focus of this story, was studying frogs and lizards. He went to the field about 2pm, but never returned home before midnight. We rarely saw each other until the weekend when we took some time off. But on this day, I heard his car pull up to the house in the dark about my bedtime, saw him trudge past the window in his yellow rain gear, and watched him make his startling appearance at the back door. He was slightly hunched over, his face was pale, and he stared me straight in the face as I digested the words “…….bitten by a snake.”
He explained that he and his assistants were sampling lizards after dark in a pasture next to the forest. This technique involves crouching low to the ground and, using a flashlight, searching every square meter of your assigned area, capturing all lizards you see by hand. The individuals were then taken to a processing “station”, where they were weighed, measured, and marked, before being returning to the area where they were captured. At one point, the student felt a sharp “prick” on his buttocks and at that very moment a small snake crawled between his legs. The temporal proximity of the prick and the presence of the snake led him to conclude that the snake had caused the prick. Not an unreasonable conclusion, in my opinion. The snake was definitely NOT a fer-de-lance, which we feared the most. But there are many other venomous snakes in Costa Rica. He waited a few minutes, felt nothing, and assumed that either the snake was not venomous, or it had not really bitten him, or, or, or. But the student was about an hour from any medical help, so his Costa Rican assistants demnded that he return home, just in case he needed to go to the hospital in town. He would be that much closer.
So the student returned to our house and appeared at the door as described. The next question out of his mouth was almost more shocking than the statement that he might have been bitten. “Tom, would you check my buttocks?” I explained that this might be going further than the faculty-student contract, that this was not in my job description, that I needed to go to bed to get my sleep, but, geesh, this had to be done. He dropped his trou and I put on my examination face as if I had done this a hundred times before, and not at all sure what I would find. I looked it over, carefully, but I could see absolutely nothing—no wound, no mark, no swelling, no redness. I pronounced that he would probably live, although the scientist in me was quick to point out that I had no baseline data with which to compare. I could only assume that what I was seeing was a normal-looking Swiss butt (the student was, in fact, from Switzerland). We both laughed and the incident ended.
I got a lot of mileage out of this anecdote. I repeated the story when I introduced this student to an audience before he gave a presentation on his research. I emailed everyone I knew and told the story. My son replied to the email with a sobering thought: “Dad, it is a good thing he had not been bitten. You would have had to suck out the venom.” What could have been a really serious event turned out to be nothing but fodder for an amusing anecdote. But our fascination with snakes continues, and we think about them, and we watch for them, and the stories about them are remembered for a long, long time.
DrTom -
DrTom retires from his day job—now what?
16.Apr.08, 04:59 EDT
Earlier this week I officially announced my retirement from Cornell University after 28 years of teaching and research, to be effective November 1, 2008. On the home page of this site, I allude to this transition in “What this portal is about?”, so the careful reader will not be too surprised at this decision.
Without a doubt, I will miss my relationship with students more than any other aspect of my academic career. Many of those young people have become life-long friends, and now they are not so young themselves anymore. Because of the nature of the courses I taught, I got to know most of them pretty well, and at one time I knew all of their names. There have even been a couple of marriages between students who met in my course. I actually thought the day might come when a child of one of my former students would appear at Cornell to take the same course their parent had taken from me, but this never happened.
So now what? For starters, my moonlighting job (this website) becomes my new day job. Hopefully, I will have more time to watch birds, look at ants under a scope, learn how to identify ferns, thin my woodlot, and plant new gardens. All of those activities, and many more, can provide material for this blog and for the forums here. My wife and I want to travel more. I want to be better about cleaning the house. I need to build a bunch of bookcases to house my library that is now in my university office, which I will soon lose. (At a university, space is more valuable than faculty). I intend to have more bonfires in my woodlot with the white pine I cut there as fuel, and to have friends over to enjoy that more often, to sip scotch, to smoke a cigar, to watch the flames ascend to the forest canopy in the dark.
But there is a great deal to do, and I want to be involved. These are exciting times. The world might be going to “hell in a handbasket”, but I intend to fight it every inch of the way. People generally seem to be getting the message that the collective environmental weight of 6.3 billion people is enormous, and they want to help plan a way out of this morass. There are new ways of living, new technologies that might help, new leadership of major developed countries, new ways of thinking by us all, and new attitudes by multi-national corporations. What is exciting about it all, is that none of it would occur unless individuals had spoken up, acted out, demanded healthier and safer products, and became more aware. It is my sincere belief that sites like this one can contribute to that awareness by mobilizing that small army of thoughtful environmentalists (many of whom are former students) to share their ideas, regardless of how “experimental” they might be.
DrTom (wwww.drtom.tv) -
Eastern phoebes and our front porchlight
11.Apr.08, 19:42 EDT
Each year in early April, Eastern Phoebes (Sayornis phoebe) return to my property from having spent the winter as far south as Mexico. Today, they returned. I can always tell because the male sings incessantly when he returns, and his favorite song perch seems to be at the corner of our house next to our bedroom. The singing starts just before it is light, so spring phoebes and DrTom are on the same schedule, fortunately. I love early morning.
Bird migration has always fascinated me. I have been more interested in why birds migrate, then in how they do it. The answers to the how question are truly astounding, and there are many good summaries of this. (Of course, much of the early pioneering work on this topic was done at Cornell University by Bill Keeton, who used homing pigeons as his model. And the Germans Kramer, Sauer, and Wiltschko). Depending on the species, they might use visual landmarks like rivers during the day, or they use the sun’s location, or they navigate at night by orienting to the stars, or they use the earth’s magnetic field. (Bobolinks (Dolichonyx oryzivorus), for example, contain small deposits of an iron compound called magnetite in their skulls. This is presumably used to detect the weak forces of the earth’s magnetic field to help them migrate between North and South America).
Eric Bollinger and I published a number of papers in the 1980s on Bobolinks and the behavior known as breeding site fidelity, or breeding site faithfulness. This is the tendency of individuals to return to the exact location where they bred the year before. It turns out that this is a common phenomenon in migratory songbirds: adults often return to the exact location where they bred the year before, but their babies rarely return to the place where they were born. In Bobolinks and most songbirds where this has been studied, adults tend to return to the site where they bred the year before if they were successful in producing babies at that location. If the nestlings had been eaten by a snake or a skunk, for example, or the nest was destroyed by farming equipment, then those adults tend not to return to the same location the following year. It appears there is a simple Darwinian algorithm operating in those pea-sized brains: if I was successful in producing offspring, return; if I was unsuccessful, do not return.
So, every year since 1980 we have had a pair of Eastern Phoebes near our home. But the observation is more remarkable than that. Phoebes originally nested on ledges beneath an overhang, probably rocky cliffs. Houses, however, are a great substitute, because of the overhanging eaves and the existence of some kind of platform beneath that overhead protection—like a window ledge. At our home, phoebes almost always use the light fixture next to the front door. This is convenient for me, because every morning during the breeding season, I step outside, reach my hand up and into the nest, count the number of eggs or nestlings by feel, and then resume drinking my coffee. Although I have never formally studied phoebes, this would make for pretty easy field work. The bottom line is that nearly every year, the nest over our light fixture successfully fledges 4-5 young.
Now, I have never banded the phoebes at my house, and this is unfortunate. I am missing a lot of the biological story, because I do not know if these are the same individuals that return to my property each year. But for 28 years, phoebes have nested on this light fixture and yet these birds probably live only a few years—they can not be the same individuals during all of that time. This means that new birds sometimes settle near my house, start looking for a suitable nest site, see the light fixture under that overhang, and a “CFL light bulb” goes off in their little head. (Research has proven that light bulbs in bird heads are fluorescent and not incandescent). Each succeeding generation of phoebes spots that nest location and simply can not resist it, in spite of the fact that every time we enter or leave the front door, the attending adult is flushed off the nest.
As you can see, my original interest in site fidelity has blended with a fascination for this incredible innate focus by the bird on a suitable resource, in this case a nest site. I am sure that exactly the same consistency and skill go into locating and capturing food—phoebes mainly eat flying insects like moths. Many thousands of years of natural selection have honed these abilities into a razor-sharp performance, which ensures their survival and successful reproduction. For me, spring has not really started until I hear that simple, yet distinctive song of the phoebe. My coffee is ready, so all I need now is this year’s nest.
DrTom (www.drtom.tv)
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Eastern_Phoebe_dtl.html -
Rethinking your options in managing your private forest
09.Apr.08, 19:46 EDT
A few weeks ago I volunteered to meet a state forester and 8-10 local residents at my woodlot to discuss the options for managing private forests for fun and profit. Today we had that meeting. The weather was a bit cold and rainy, and the soil was soft and soggy, but we trekked along for about three hours and discussed what individuals can do if they are fortunate enough to own or manage their own forests. There are tens of thousands of private landowners in the northeastern U.S. who own forestland, and many of them want to know what they can do to improve the stand for future timber production, to increase biodiversity, to make a few bucks selling the timber, or just to create a more aesthetically pleasing landscape.
Most “foreigners” to the Northeast, and that includes Americans who live in the Midwest or the West of the U.S., are surprised to learn that the Northeast is now mostly forest. That’s right! The area of the U.S. that includes New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia is mostly forested once again after having been almost completed denuded of trees a century or more ago. (Just a 30-minute drive north or west from New York City, you find yourself in relatively old forest, with a tall closed canopy). For example, New York State was classified as about 20% forest in a 1920 survey; today it is about 66% forest. Of course, 400 years ago, it was about 99% forest. The explanation is quite simple. Land was originally cleared for agriculture, most of the land in the Northeast is lousy farmland, farms went under economically early in the 20th century, and the forests grew back on abandoned farmland. I am probably living in one of the few areas of the world where forest acreage is on the increase. We hear so much about tropical deforestation that we forget that land use patterns are different in other parts of the world.
So now, the forests in the Northeast are 50-80 years old, with a high diversity of tree species that may be 20-25 meters tall. Many of these species (sugar maple, red oak, black cherry) are highly desirable for furniture, flooring, or other household uses, have now reached a merchantable size, and are owned by rural residents who often need a few thousand dollars to pay real estate taxes, send their kid to college, or buy single-malt scotch. If you contact your state forester, and every state has one assigned to your geographic area, he or she will come to your property armed with good information to help you decide what to do, depending on YOUR goals for your woodland.It is perfectly fine to do absolutely nothing. Just let nature take its course. They are born, they live, and they die. And as a conservation biologist, I am strongly supportive of anyone who adopts this management approach. I happen to heat my home with firewood, so I thin my 50-year old forest, leaving good specimens of a variety of species to enjoy the additional sunlight for more rapid growth. Some of my trees are now large enough that I have them rough-cut into lumber for future building projects. (I will discuss this more in future posts). But the old-time foresters, who have mostly retired from state and federal agencies, were all about timber, timber, and only timber. Their recommendations were easy to define: remove all species of trees of low economic value, remove all specimens that are rotten, stunted, or crooked, and harvest the biggest and best for commercial sale. Of course, these “poor” specimens are home to woodpeckers, nuthatches, wood-boring insects, lichens, and dozens of other species that comprise our forests’ biodiversity.
Management of all natural resources has undergone an evolution, maybe even a revolution during the past few decades. The young forester who led us through the forest today is an example of that new generation. This is encouraging to a student of the natural world. The earth’s biota is under tremendous pressure by people everywhere, but our collective improvement in the “wisdom” behind her management is a reason for optimism.
DrTom (www.drtom.tv) -
Small distances, short times
07.Apr.08, 16:33 EDT
Last week at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association in San Diego, CA, University of Missouri professor David Konisky reported on the results of his survey of 1,000 adults regarding their environmental concerns. “The survey’s core result is that people care about their communities and express the desire to see government action taken toward local and national issues,” said David Konisky, a policy research scholar with the Institute of Public Policy. “People are hesitant to support efforts concerning global issues even though they believe that environmental quality is poorer at the global level than at the local and national level. This is surprising given the media attention that global warming has recently received and reflects the division of opinion about the severity of climate change.” More on the survey can be found at http://truman.missouri.edu/ipp/. <b>
In other words, people are more concerned about what happens in their own backyard than they care about the global environment. “Americans are clearly most concerned about pollution issues that might affect their personal health, or the health of their families,” Konisky said. Global warming ranked 8th among the environmental concerns reported by the respondents.<b>
Is this really an unexpected result? On the surface, it seems surprising that given all the media attention to the problem of global climate change (e.g., rising ocean levels, melting glaciers, demise of polar bears and penguins, mass extinctions, shifts in agriculture, etc.) that it would not rank as the number one concern among a sample of Americans. But thinking like a Darwinian for a moment, something I try to do a lot, the results could be viewed exactly as expected.<b>
Throughout the Pleistocene epoch, which lasted from about 1.8 million years BP until about 11,000 years BP, humans lived in relatively small nomadic groups, or clans, of related individuals. They probably did not live much past the age of 40 and they probably did not travel long distances. The landscape must have been a dangerous place, so I have to presume that individuals went only as far as they needed to obtain the requisites of life: food, water, animal skins for clothing, wood for a fire. Occasionally there would be a dispersal event to colonize new territory, but the world you knew was only as large as the area you walked during your relatively short life. What another hominid clan did three valleys away had absolutely no effect on your life whatsoever, and it seems likely that humans living 100 miles apart never even knew of each other’s existence. What I have briefly described here is what evolutionary psychologists call the “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” or EEA. That is, conditions of life during the Pleistocene were such that humans were selected to be adapted to that environment, where life was short and known distances and effects were spatially small. <b>
But times have changed. Now, the lifestyle of Americans, or Europeans, or Chinese threatens the well-being of a Bangladeshi living on the coast through the effects of global warming and rising ocean levels. The demand for furniture in Japan made of tropical woods can eliminate the habitat and homeland for native wildlife and humans living in parts of Indonesia. Radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine resulted in resettlement of more than 300,000 people locally, but the fallout was detected in North America. And on, and on, and on. <b>
Somehow we have to rise above our evolved concerns focused on immediate issues of time and space, but I still do not know exactly how to bring that about. We are all at least aware of how local actions can have global effects, and that is a start. And many of us pay lip service to our responsibility to future generations. But it seems to me that overcoming the small distance, short time dilemma is critical to solving 21st century environmental problems. The evolutionary problem is simply this: what is best for us and our family right here and right now may be harmful to others further away and not yet born. This dilemma manifests itself over and over again. Recognizing it is a first step to overcoming it. <b>
DrTom -
The value of wood
21.Mar.08, 09:52 EDT
The striking thing about visiting an arid part of the globe is the lack of trees and the struggle of those people to find wood for cooking or heating. I have observed this first-hand in the Dominican Republic, Madagascar, and East Africa. Those of us who live in locations where there are abundant forests are incredibly fortunate, even though we seldom rely on wood for household uses. (My wife and I actually heat our home with wood, so I appreciate the value of this resource. However, if I don’t gather enough wood for the winter, we have the luxury of turning on the electric heat).
The problem is really a “mass balance” problem. Wood is produced (i.e., trees grow) at a rate dependent on the species of tree, and the temperature and moisture of its environment. Opposing that growth rate is the rate at which wood is collected and used. The rate at which wood is used is greater than the rate at which new wood can grow in many places, especially in arid lands with a dense human population. Hardly a branch hits the ground that is not picked up by women who endure this arduous task. Benet women in eastern Uganda spend up to 10 hours per day, three days per week, gathering wood. That amounts to a full-time job, which is in addition to all the other tasks these women need to accomplish during the week. Can you just picture the soccer moms of the U.S. spending time in this manner? (Actually, the Benet left some mature trees, almost all Prunus africanus, from the original forest when they cleared the land for agriculture. Prunus africanus, the African plum tree, has been used for thousands of years to cure various ailments, including prostate cancer).
Gathering wood in some places is downright dangerous. One Benet elder told us that he lost two wives during his youth while they were gathering wood for the home—one was killed by a neighboring tribe when she wandered into their territory. And, of course, there are large mammals and the scorching sun that can do harm as well.
So the answer is simple, but execution is nearly impossible. Grow more trees. But when Joe plants trees for the future, Sam cuts them down to use this year. In fact, Joe knows this will happen, so he doesn’t even bother to plant the trees in the first place. Or, no one can really afford the space for trees that will take years to grow large enough to use, given that trees shade areas that are needed to grow food for tomorrow. You can see a version of “tragedy of the commons” at work here. And so, the women continue to walk 30 hours per week to gather wood from some communal area miles away from home.There are some successful attempts to turn this pitiful situation around. My colleague, Louise Buck, started a tree-planting program in Kenya about 20 years ago. The successful project was called the Agroforestry Extension Project (AEP), which mobilized women's groups and their members to develop small-scale nursery enterprises to propagate native and naturalized trees and to plant and to sell them. Over 1 million trees/year were planted in and around farms in western Kenya for over a decade, and the tradition continues. My friend, David Kuria, has mobilized a small cadre of volunteers (KENVO) near Mt. Kenya who maintains nurseries for native species of trees, and then plants them in concentric zones around a nearby national park. The idea is that those trees can be used eventually by local people, thereby reducing pressure on forests in the national park. At present, women can collect dead wood in the park after being issued a wood-collecting permit. Even this tree planting at the perimeter of the park, however, will not help women who live miles from this reforestation zone.
But the fact is that it is possible to produce wood where there was little before. It takes agreement within the local community that growing trees in a communal woodland is a worthwhile goal, some protection of young trees until they reach harvestable size, and a little money. The Benet women were waiting on a small grant ($100) to buy the seedlings to begin planting when my ecoagriculture group visited them, an about equal to what I spend on scotch in a given month. A little money can do a lot, if you can get it to the women. Women are the movers and shakers in most of these cultures. Women see the value of the plan immediately, and they are willing to do the work if given the resources to succeed.
One of the advantages of traveling around the world is the appreciation you gain for commodities we Americans take for granted. After living in Costa Rica, for example, I never looked at a cup of coffee or a banana in the same way again, because I learned how much sweat-equity was used to produce those items. Similarly, I have always loved the trees in my forest and the firewood they produce to heat my home, but after some time in East Africa, my respect for that resource ratcheted up another notch. People only need a little help from the outside, and they can nurture a culture of trees that can provide an essential resource for their livelihood, reduce carbon dioxide, and contribute to conservation of biodiversity. It might just be that what is good for some locally is good for all globally.
DrTom -
It amazes me that..........
27.Feb.08, 14:39 EST
pundits on television keep asking why the price of oil is going up. Most estimates indicate we have already used up 50% of all the oil that was ever on earth, and we are now working on the remaining 50%. There are 6.4 billion people on earth, and we are adding an additional 80 million per year. The two most populous nations, India and China, have a rapidly growing middle class who want to own cars and drive. The whole world wants to consume like Americans, if they can. I never even took an economics course in college, but the supply/demand curve here is a no-brainer. I predict that in my lifetime (and I'm 61), I will see the day when we remember how cheap oil was in the good ole days at $100 a barrel.
-
Sense of place
23.Feb.08, 18:29 EST
I love my property. I mean, I really, really, love it. It is not that it is a particularly beautiful place, because it is not---typical 50-year old second-growth forest in upstate New York. My maple, ash, and aspen woodland is certainly not as dramatic as the Sonoran Desert in March, or as majestic as the Grand Canyon, or as awe-inspiring as the savannas of western Kenya. I have been to many truly wonderful places during the past few years, but after I am there for only a few days, wherever it is, I long for my 12 acres near Ithaca.
Where does that longing come from? I am not absolutely sure, but that feeling contains emotional, psychological, and biological elements. After all, I have lived on this land for 28 years now, and it holds many memories for me. My children grew up here. I can look at the yard in front of the house to this day and remember playing catch with my son there 20 years ago. I can still see in my mind the other accoutrements of my children’s activities: the old tree fort, the skateboard ramps, the rabbit hutches. I can hear their youthful voices. I can smile at the memory of all those undergraduates who I duped into moving my firewood from one place to another over the years. I remember my mother emerging ghostlike from a dense fog as she returned from escorting our kids to the bus stop down our long driveway, during one of her visits. So the place holds memories of events, and objects, and people who are now gone. Imagine how strong this suite of emotions must be for people who still give birth to their babies and who still bury their loved ones on their land. I assume the concept of “sacred land” must originate from this.
But the longing for my land consists of more than old memories. There is a relevant vitality about it as well, which renews me every single day. I have an evening ritual (at least during good weather), which I have described many times. With a glass of single-malt scotch and a good cigar in one hand, and a folding chair in the other, I go to some predetermined spot in my woods to sit for an hour or so. Well, I don’t just sit there—I use the scotch and cigar for their intended purposes. But mostly I watch and listen to what is going on around me and conclude that it doesn’t get any better than this.
May and June are my favorite months, because the forest is alive, especially with singing, territorial songbirds. The migrants have returned from Central or <place st="on">South America</place>. The resident species are rejuvenated with new hormone levels that make them interesting again. The vireos, tanagers, warblers, and chickadees are mine; they are not legally mine, but in every other sense of the word they belong to me and to my land. They live here, build nests here, raise their babies here, and eat insects or fruits that grow here. I love this place so much that I have all but vowed not to do any traveling during that time of year so as not to miss a single day. My wife understands this about me, and she indulges me this evening ritual, even though she has much she wants to share from the day’s activities.
I have learned much about myself and about the human connection to the land from my time on this hill. I have learned that the most enjoyable moments I spend all year is when I am sitting amongst those organisms near my home. Once you have the land, those moments are absolutely free. It costs you nothing, and it can be more fulfilling than anything I can think of to do in town.
I have learned that it is not the same for me to sit in a publicly-owned forest, even though it may be more beautiful to the unbiased eye—it is not mine. That sense of pride I have when sitting in my forest is not there. I am not allowed to cut trees for firewood, to manipulate the habitat to encourage the residence of certain species of vertebrates, or to build a bonfire for social gatherings on the public’s land. I am strictly a visitor and, as valuable as that experience is to most, it is not enough for me.
And most of all, I have learned how powerful the connection of humans to their land can be. By extrapolation, I can only capture a hint of the powerful emotions of all those peoples across the globe who are in conflict over “their” land, who are moved around by distant governments, by neighboring enemies, by degraded resources, by market forces, or by global climate change. Most of the time my professional and personal goal is stated as “conserving the earth’s biodiversity”. But in a very real way, my goal in conservation is to allow the unadulterated sense of place to flourish in a manner consistent with the antiquity of human cultures and races, and with all other species.
-
Speaking of mice......
02.Feb.08, 07:07 EST
We have always captured lots of deer mice in our kitchen under the sink in a metal, box-like live trap that I use. I would capture the little critter, throw it out the back door, and reset the trap. The next day there would invariably be another occupant in the box. One day my young son suggested we mark the mouse before tossing it outside, so we placed a spot of blue paint on the tip of its tail. The next day when I checked the trap under the sink, it contained a mouse, you guessed it, with a blue tail. From then on, I took the mouse a couple of miles down the road before releasing it on my way to work.
This species actually makes a pretty good pet. Very cute and very docile. But mouse droppings in the kitchen are not acceptable. Plus, this species is implicated in carrying the dreaded Hanta virus. -
The next phase of my life
01.Feb.08, 06:16 EST
Most of my adult life has been spent studying birds and mammals in the field, or teaching in the classroom. I have studied white-tailed deer along the Columbia River, bobolinks in New York meadows, ground squirrels in Idaho sagebrush, wildlife in Arizona, and birds in tropical forests in Costa Rica. You do the research, then publish the papers in scientific journals, and maybe 6 people read them. I have loved all of that, but now I want to turn my attention to trying to make more of a difference in the real world, as opposed to the "ivory tower". The internet is a fantastic medium to attempt to interact with many more people than the number who can fit into a classroom.
-
What's your pleasure?
30.Jan.08, 11:14 EST
I'm up for discussing anything about nature or the environment. I'm a little burned out at the moment talking about global warming, so let's begin on a lighter note. I would love to hear some observations about some interesting plant or animal near where you live. I live in upstate New York, so as Chris Mathews always says, "Tell me something I don't know".
WELCOME TO MOLI ® - Control Your Privacy™
© 2008 MOLI, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. MOLI ®, COVIBE TECH™, MOLI KIDS™ AND MONEY AND LIVING™ ARE TRADEMARKS OF MAINSTREAM HOLDINGS, INC.
TERTIARY PRODUCTIONS ® IS A TRADEMARK OF TERTIARY PRODUCTIONS, LLC.
