"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts." - Rachel Carson
A few pictures from recent adventures in the White Mountains. Specifically, two hikes:
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| South view from Middle Carter |
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| Mt. Washington and the Presidentials from North Carter |
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| South view from Mt. Whiteface |
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| The Bowl Natural Research Area from Rollins Trail |
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| Wonalancet Ridge from the Walden Trail |
- Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life, How fungi make our worlds, change our minds & shape our futures
Sheldrake shares some absolutely fascinating details about fungi - not just mushrooms (which are the fungi's fruit) but also their mycorrhizal networks - in this amazing book. Take two details: The details what (little) we know about how fungi facilitate communication and information sharing between trees (the infamous "wood wide web") or how the symbiotic properties of lichens leads to a breakdown of component parts: "The biological identity of most organisms can't be pried apart from the life of their microbial symbionts." (p 91) I knew mushrooms were having a moment, but learning just how strange their behaviors are, and how little we actually know about how they function, it's hard not to dream about the amazing capabilities this new knowledge unlocks. Highly recommend!
A wonderful little book filled with close observations about the trees all around us. Trees turn out to be so much more complex than we usually think, and Wohlleben paints an alluring picture of their life at a MUCH slower pace than we are used to perceiving. I found this book insightful and enabled me to see new aspects about the trees around me - for example, the splits in the bark of young trees that are growing too fast because they were planted away from the forest. Good stuff.
Some interesting things I've read:
Related:
We’ve killed roughly half of the world’s non-human vertebrate animal population since 1970. … The declines are almost exclusively caused by humans’ ever-increasing footprint on planet earth. “Humanity currently needs the regenerative capacity of 1.5 Earths to provide the ecological goods and services we use each year,” according to the report. The only reason we’re able to run above max capacity – for now – is that we’re stripping away resources faster than we can replenish them.To choose just one example, it's why you're seeing entire populations of walruses stuffed together onto rocks - because there's no more ice!
The natural world can only persist now as a deliberate act of human will. That will require firm human purpose as a gesture of humility, yes, but also a form of self-protection. “This is not really an ‘environmental problem.’ It’s a human problem,” writes environmental historian Roderick Frazier Nash of the University of California, Santa Barbara. “What needs to be conquered now is not the wilderness, but ourselves.”This all reminds me of a Radiolab podcast about the Galapagos. One of the interviewees, in a conversation about the insane lengths that the country made to save a species of tortoise, observes that we've changed our world so dramatically that the only way forward is to accept that Nature will never be how it was. As they pithily stated it: if we're going to play God, we should at least commit to doing it right. In other words, that means making careful and deliberate decisions about what species or environments we want to save given our limited resources - and which we should let go.
Invertebrate numbers–not species, but total numbers–have fallen 45% in the last 35 years.Combine that with news like this and it's enough to drive you to drink (not that I need a reason):
A new study just published shows that—using more accurate measurements than ever before—Greenland and Antarctica are together losing ice at incredible rates: Together, over 500 (±107) cubic kilometers of ice are melting from them every year.It's hard to not let facts like this demoralize and overwhelm you, especially when confronted with the willful ignorance of some that it's even existing and the utter lack of ability to change things by most of us. The effects of all of my recycling and composting is put into harsh relief every time I travel to a state where recycling isn't mandatory, or even a conference where everyone tosses their plastic bottles and plates into the garbage.
That means 450 billion tons of ice are lost every year, melted away into the oceans.
Scientists studying huge glaciers in Antarctica have found that they are already in the early stages of a huge retreat, and—although the entire event may take more than 200 years—this melting may also be unstoppable. By the time this plays out, it could cause a sea level rise of more than a meter, which would be very bad indeed.For us Americans, one meter is ~3.3 feet, a big problem considering how much of humanity is crammed into our coastlines. (The CPO sez that "More than 8 million people live in areas at risk of coastal flooding. ") One can see why KSR it as a tipping point. Scary stuff. Read Bad Astronomy's excellent synopsis for more information, including a slick video explaining what's going on.
It's hard to get your head round this. The crop which causes most floods and does most damage to soils is the only one which is completely unregulated.The Guardian keeps the optimism flowing with an interview with the prescient James Lovelock who predicts that climate change has already reached the tipping point:
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So why did government policy change? I've tried asking the environment department: they're as much use as a paper sandbag. But I've found a clue. The farm regulation task force demanded a specific change: all soil protection rules attached to farm subsidies should become voluntary. They should be downgraded from a legal condition to an "advisory feature". Even if farmers do nothing to protect their soil, they should still be eligible for public money.
You might have entertained the naive belief that in handing out billions to wealthy landowners we would get something in return. Something other than endless whining from the National Farmers' Union. But so successfully has policy been captured in this country that Defra – which used to stand for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – now means Doing Everything Farmers' Representatives Ask. We pay £3.6bn a year for the privilege of having our wildlife exterminated, our hills grazed bare, our rivers polluted and our sitting rooms flooded.
It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do." ...Weird magna short horror stories! Just some creepy stuff. I can testify to how powerfully macabre Junji Ito's Uzumaki is. Shudder.
What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."
Solitude, I think, heightens artistic receptivity in a way that can be challenging and painful. When you sit there, alone and working, you get thrown back on yourself. Your life and your emotions, what you think and what you feel, are constantly being thrown back on you. And then the “too much humanity” feeling is even stronger: you can't run away from yourself. You can't run away from your emotions and your memory and the material you're working on. Artistic solitude is a decision to turn and face these feelings, to sit with them for long periods of time.
It takes the courage to be there. You run into your own pettiness. Your own cowardice. You run into all kinds of ugly sides of yourself. But the things that you've experienced in your life become the writing that you do. And there's no easy way to get to it, if you want to write literary fiction.
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| Trail Entrance |
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| Path down to the Beach |
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| One of many Stone Walls |
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| The Trail past Dodge Cemetery |
...elephants, the only other known creatures that — whatever it may mean to them — purposely commemorate their dead, in a way [Coming of Age with Elephants author] Joyce Poole calls “eerie and deeply moving”: “It is their silence that is most unsettling. The only sound is the slow blowing of air out of their trunks as they investigate their dead companion. It’s as if even the birds have stopped singing.” Using their trunks and sensitive hind feet, the ones they use for waking up their babies, “they touch the body ever so gently, circling, hovering above, touching again, as if by doing so they are obtaining information that we, with our more limited senses, can never understand. Their movements are in slow motion, and then, in silence, they may cover the dead with leaves and branches.”
After burying the body in brush and dirt, family members may stay silently with it for over a day; or if a body is found unattended by elephants not related to it, they may pause and stand by for some time. They do this with any dead elephant, recently deceased or long departed with only the skeleton remaining. “It is probably the single strangest thing about them,” [Elephant Memories author] Cynthia Moss writes.
So there is a lot going on in the arms, but the connections between arms and brain are apparently restricted to a narrow channel. ...Which explains the absolutely eerie way in which they move combined with the intelligence in their eyes. Well, that and the lack of bones.
If you were an octopus, distinctions [in moving your limbs] would be blurred. Your arms would move in a way that is a mix of the centrally and peripherally controlled. To some extent you would guide them, and to some extent you would just watch them go.
Almost a third of managed U.S. honey bees died last winter, according to a new survey of commercial and home beekeepers. That’s more than triple the losses of 5 to 10 percent that used to be normal for beekeepers before 2005 — and double the 15 percent that beekeepers say is acceptable for their businesses to continue unharmed. The finding marks a disturbing trend among honey bees: each winter since 2006, the Bee Informed Partnership has documented losses of 21.9 to 36 percent of U.S. hives. …The most likely culprit of this Colony Collapse Disorder is a pesticide class called a "neonicotinoid". My understanding is that while Europe has started controlling these substances, the U.S. has been moving much slower.
