Nature Keeps Doing Its Thing Despite Human Beings

 Humans have changed the landscape of the earth ever since they settled down in one place and began cutting down trees.  With modern technology we've been changing the earth at a devastating pace.  But nature is resilient and ever evolving.  Even if we were to kill half the life in the oceans and destroy half the landscape, nature measures time in millions and billions of years.  It will endure.  And if we aren't totally crazy, life forms will survive.  I even wonder whether COVID isn't one of nature's adaptations to human life, a way of slowing us down to allow other life forms to escape our hunger to destroy.  

But there is still much of nature to still awe and amaze us.  The other night when the clouds had briefly left the Anchorage sky, I walked out onto the deck and tried to capture the beauty of the frosted trees in the backyard.  The image on my iPhone was pretty dim, but editing tools on my laptop enabled me to get it back to what it actually looked like, and even more dazzling than it really was.  

And Sunday we enjoyed one of my Anchorage winter highlights - the visit of the Bohemian Waxwings to harvest the berries on our Mountain Ash trees.  They come in swarms of 30-50 birds, swooping down and then abruptly taking flight and then returning.  

Shaggy Manes - Late September/Early October Gift From Nature

 On my bike ride Saturday, I noticed a patch of lawn where shaggy mane mushrooms had just pushed up out of the ground. 

Shaggy manes turn black when they're past their prime and become inky.  So I was concerned about all the black.  But it turned out to be dirt they'd pushed up as the erupted into the world from underground.  There were probably a couple of dozen in this area.  And it was public land so when I chose a few good ones, I wasn't poaching.  In the pictures above and below here, you can see why they are called shaggy.  

So I continued my bike ride and stopped back to get some mushrooms.  

Here they are, ready to be cleaned. 

Cut up.

And then cooking.  

With a little garlic and onion in butter (a rare treat in our house), they're delicious.  With the second batch I scrambled some eggs in with them.  

To me, these mushrooms are like a free gift from nature.  You just have to come across them at the right time, and they're yours to pick and enjoy.  

Mushrooms And The Buses - More Denali Pictures

 Here are some more pictures from Denali - the Alpine Trail and the Healy Overlook Trail.  

This was the Alpine trail.  Nature's a pretty good landscape artist.  

I'm not sure what these black mushrooms are, but they're pretty cool.  

I think these are puffballs.  

Ever since I read Richard Wright's  The Overstory, I realize that 'rotting' log just doesn't convey the process of giving back life that trees do after they die.  They're homes and food to untold species from small mammals, birds, and too many insects to even think about.  And then they give back all their nutrients and atoms for other trees and plants to use.  "Rot" has too negative an image.  And this is why we compost most of the food scraps from the kitchen.  Watching the compost heap full of scraps and leaves and other green plants slowly turn into rich compost - a factory of worms and all sorts of little critters - transforming the 'waste' into new plant food reminds me every year  that nature doesn't need humans to sustain the planet.  

Best as I can tell from my mushroom field guide is that these tan fungi poking up out of the ground like fingers are possibly strap coral mushrooms or pestle coral mushrooms.  

I just liked the look of this clump of tree trunks on the side of the trail.  

And when we got to a road we thought (correctly) was a shortcut to our car, we passed the bus lot.  It would appear that they are using a lot few buses this summer, even though they are only allowing half as many people on.  We had no interest at all on a bus ride with strangers for hours and hours.  But if this were my first and probably only trip ever to Denali National Park, I might have thought differently.  

There was another row of buses to the left and another to the right.  

More Denali Pictures and Thoughts

You can drive into the park 12 miles to Savage River.  From there on you need to take the bus or get a special permit to drive.  At Savage River there's a wonderful 2 mile loop trail which I've posted about in the past.  While people stopped in the parking lot, relatively few went on the trail.  And only we had masks ready to pull up if people were nearby.  The first view is from the bridge looking southeast.

There are lots of rocky outcroppings along the trail.  

And lots of lichens.  

The trail comes along Savage River on one side for a mile.  Then you cross a bridge and come back the other side.  You can see the sun on the water despite the mostly cloudy day.  

The Alpine Trail starts near the Savage River campground, and if you take the whole trail, gets you to the Savage River Trail parking lot where the pictures above are from.  We started on the Alpine Trail once and got a ways in, but turned back.  Then we went to where it ends and watched a mother bear and several cubs go up the trail we would have been arriving on had we continued the hike.  

The Alpine Trail is  lovely with totally different terrain and vegetation from the nearby Savage River trail.  Here's a tiny waterfall in the creek you go by.  

And this is from the road driving back to Riley Creek Campground.  This is an example of why you may easily miss the wildlife around you.  There is a herd of caribou in this picture.  No, don't even try.  I could barely spot them in the original higher resolution version of this picture and I knew where to look.  We found them the most common way to see wildlife - see other people looking through binoculars out into the distance.  It took a while with my binoculars until I saw them.  They were the only large animals we saw.  And a ground squirrel and a bunch of tree squirrels.  There was also a golden eagle flying around at this spot.  

Despite the forecast of rain, we had a rainless Wednesday and the sun was making its location known through the clouds enough that we could see our shadows most of the time.  It was a fine day and the campfire at the end led to a delicious meal.  

I look at this picture and it's hard to believe we've had this van since 1998.  It replaced the one we'd originally bought in 1971 after we got married and honeymooned on a road trip from LA to the Great Slave Lake in the Canadian New Territories.  Followed by a summer trip to Mexico, British Honduras, and Guatemala the next summer.  Then we had kids  and didn't take a long trip until we drove up to Alaska.  I remember when we finally sold the first one after 24 years (and my mechanic telling me the holes in the floor couldn't really be repaired), that my son told me that he and his sister got worried.  After all, we'd had the car longer than we'd had them and they were concerned we might get rid of them next.  We finally got new sleeping bags last year, but we still have some stools and a hatchet that were in the original van.  (As I write that I realize they're in the picture.)

And I'd also like to compliment the folks who designed the Riley Creek campgrounds.  The spots of the cars and tents had absolutely no mud even though it had rained a lot before we got there.  And you're a very good COVID distance from the other sites.  Though you have to go into the Mercantile (a small grocery there) to claim your reserved campsite.  But the visitor center is closed.  There are two masked rangers behind plexiglas barriers giving information to tourists, many of whom were not wearing masks.  This was really the most contact with others since early March and only our second outing.  And we only did this to let the carpet guy install our carpet that came last fall, but they held up installing until the kitchen floor was put in.  But the bamboo flooring didn't come til really late.  It got in, but there wasn't time to put in the carpet.  So our life has been on hold to a certain extent since last fall when we started putting as much stuff as we could downstairs so we could clear the upstairs.  Then the virus hit and I didn't want anyone spending a couple of days in the house.  

But we've had time to learn more about how the virus spreads and other friends have had workers in to do things with no bad consequences.  So we decided on the Denali trip to be out of the house while the carpet went in.  But the carpet installer had a longer estimate for the work than the salesman.  So only the living room and the hall were done, not the upstairs bedrooms.  But I'm delighted that this got us up to Denali.  And the carpet looks great and we're going to be very careful about what comes back upstairs and what gets given away or tossed.  

Carting Off McCandless' Bus Reflects Alaska's Cultural Bias

The State of Alaska removed the bus where Chris McCandless died and that has become a mecca for those who connected with Chris through the book and movie Into The Wild.  A number of his fans hiked cross country to reach the bus, braving river crossings that can at times be treacherous.  The basic reason given for removing the bus was to save lives and reduce rescue costs.

Note: COVID tab above for daily updates on state case counts

I've thought about it.  Getting rid of the McCandless bus is a form of cultural discrimination.  The justification is to protect people from danger and death and to reduce rescue costs.

But aside from cruise ships, Alaska tourism is all about attracting people to adventures in the wilderness - camping, kayaking, hunting. (And even cruise passengers die in flight seeing and other adventures sold on board.)

The epitome is climbing Denali.  We love the idea of people overcoming obstacles to reach the peak of North America's highest mountain, even though people die every year trying and we spend tens of thousands of dollars or more in rescue efforts.  It's just that McCandless wasn't the rugged adventurer type that Alaskans idealize and his followers are seen as sentimental and emotional about the wrong things.  (After all climbing Denali is also an emotion driven pursuit.)

And probably most important, no one was making lots of money off the Bus pilgrims, like they do from hunters, fishers, mountain climbers, and other adventure travelers.  No one set up a McCandless Bus guiding expedition.  If they had, the bus would still be there.

From the Anchorage Daily News:

"The removal of the bus comes in response to the public safety hazards caused by its presence and location, Department of Natural Resources spokesman Dan Saddler said.
Between 2009 and 2017, there were 15 bus-related search and rescue operations by the state, according to the natural resources department.
Saddler said he hoped its removal would 'reduce injuries, search and rescues, loss and even death that have occurred in connection with this bus.'”

But really, people die all the time in Alaska following their dreams.

And we're told we have twice the accidental death rate of the US as a whole.  Here are some stats on unintentional deaths.

The National Park Service allows people to climb Denali every year (though COVID spared the mountain this year from all the garbage and waste climbers leave) despite deaths and many rescues.

The National Park Service has a series of reports on Denali from 1979 to 1989.  Here are some excerpts from the 1989 report.  Each paragraph is a separate incident.

On 2/16/89 a very experienced four person Japanese team flew into the SE Fork of the Kahiltna Glacier to attempt a winter ascent of the West Buttress. The leader, Noboru Yamada, was on a quest to become the first person to climb to the summit of the highest mountain on each of the seven continents in the winter. Teruo Saegusa, Kozo Komatsu and Shunzo Sato were the other team members. Sato became ill early in the climb and returned to base camp to wait for the others. The remaining three reached the 17,200' high camp on 2/20... the same day a team of Austrians returned to high camp from a successful summit bid. On 2/21, neither team could move because of severe weather. On 2/22 there was a short break in the weather and the Austrians began their descent. The Japanese team was still in their camp. They were not seen alive or heard from again. Weather soon deteriorated and an extremely severe wind storm enveloped the upper mountain. Wind speeds were estimated to be 200 mph and continued through 2/26. Winds then decreased somewhat to 60-90 mph through 3/9. On 3/10, search flights located what appeared to be three bodies below Denali Pass. Search efforts were terminated on 3/11. It is believed that the climbers tried for the summit during a brief lull in the severe wind storm and were caught near Denali Pass as the winds again increased. The bodies were recovered later in March by a 17 person team of Japanese climbers who came to Alaska for that purpose. The three men died from hypothermia. 

. . .He placed an anchor, climbed about 40' above it, then encountered an ice window. He grabbed under the window then leaned out for a better look at his options. Suddenly the entire formation upon which he was climbing collapsed. Sweeney, and the 15'-wide, 35'- high and 6'-thick ice formation fell down the couloir. His anchor held, but his hip was fractured in the resulting 100' fall and avalanche. The events of the next seven days are too involved to detail here (CIR #890016) but proved to be a test of endurance and of their will to survive. During this time, either one or both of the men were hit by eight different avalanches. Weather deteriorated and prevented all access to the mountains by rescue teams. The two men were eventually rescued by a military helicopter on 4/26.

Early the next day, a National Park Service Mountaineering Ranger camped at the 14,200' basin on the West Buttress, noticed what appeared to be bodies at the base of the Orient Express, a couloir which cuts across the upper West Rib. The rescue team discovered all three of the Brits died in a fall. It appeared the men were probably descending the West Rib, roped together, in extremely poor weather, when one of them slipped and pulled the others down the couloir.

 One especially violent gust tore one of the tents, with three occupants, from its anchors. The tent and occupants began a tumbling fall toward the Peter's Glacier. One occupant, John Richards, the assistant guide, was ejected early in the fall and came to rest 300' below the ridge campsite. The other two occupants, Jim Johnson and Howard Tuthill, fell 1,000' and came to rest on a small ledge dressed only in polypro underwear. All equipment and clothing were lost in the fall. The assistant guide was able to ascend to the camp and alert others of the accident. The chief guide, Dave Stahaeli, was able to descend and provide some survival equipment to Johnson and Tuthill. Others on the mountain, including the Denali Medical Project personnel and private mountaineers, organized a difficult and dangerous rescue effort, eventually stabilizing the two men who were flown off the mountain the following day via helicopter. Johnson suffered a compression fracture of a lumbar vertebrae and Tuthill frostbit his fingers. Both men were saved by the rescue efforts.

High Altitude Pulmonary Edema, ground evacuation:
A Genet Expedition trip led by Dave Stahaeli reached the 17,200' high camp on 6/21/89. There they waited three days for weather to improve. One of the clients, John Michel, had been feeling poorly earlier in the trip. At high camp, he lacked energy and spent most of the three days sleeping. It was decided he would not attempt the summit. On 6/24 all expedition members left for the summit except for Michel who remained in camp. No other parties were at high camp. Late that afternoon, another Genet team arrived at high camp and discovered Michel to be suffering from HAPE. They evacuated him to the 14,200' camp where Michel received treatment and recovered. There were other incidents of altitude illness and frostbite this season. Most of these were treated at the Denali Medical Project camp at the 14,200' basin on the West Buttress.

Surely rescuing people at Denali elevations and weather extremes is more costly and dangerous than where the McCandless bus was.

While Denali climbs involve complex preparations, lots of money, and registration, the cost of rescues is not covered by the person rescued.

Here's from a US Senate Report on Denali rescues:

At 20,320 feet, Mt. McKinley is the highest mountain in
North America. In 1998, 1,166 climbers from 38 countries
attempted to climb the mountain, an increase of 250 percent
since 1978. Largely because of bad weather, only 36 percent of
all climbers successfully reached the summit in 1998, down from
a historical average of about 50 percent.
    The 1998 climbing season was typical in that it involved
climbing deaths and several life-saving rescue missions. The
policy of the National Park Service is to ``make reasonable
efforts to search for lost persons and to rescue sick, injured
or stranded persons.''
    As a general rule, the National Park Service does not
recover search and rescue costs. When individual search and
rescue incidents cost more than $500, they are paid from a
central account

The [now canceled] 2020 climbing season has this information about fees for permits to climb Denali:

Q: Do I have to pay anything at the time of registration?
A: Yes, climbers are required to pay the full permit fee when they submit the registration form. The cost of a mountaineering permit for the 2020 season (October 1, 2019 through September 30, 2020) is $375 US currency. Climbers who are 24 years old or younger at the time their expedition begins are eligible for a $275 youth fee. Note that each year the mountaineering special use fee is subject to increase based on Consumer Price Index changes.
It is also important to be aware that when you arrive to check in for your climb, a park entrance fee of $15 per person will be due. Interagency passes are accepted in lieu of the entrance fee. Passes must be presented at the time of check in along with identification. 

Cultural bias comes in many different colors.  Methinks the dreamy, listless image of McCandless and his fans clashes with the rugged, macho adventurer image Alaska likes to promote.  And that's why the bus was removed.  After all, adventure and risk is part of the Last Frontier image.

Rethinking People's Relationship With Nature When COVID Is Over

[I thought I posted this last week.  Whoops.  This is a good one.]

This has gotten too long for one post.  So here are the basic interconnected themes I'm trying illustrate.  Trees role on earth, humans' relationship to nature, science and capitalism's roles in all this, and COVID-19.

Overview

1. The natural world's value has not been understood in by human beings.  We see nature as
1. something we can use (food, energy, tools, etc.)
2. something in the way (trees to be cleared for land we can use)
3. something dangerous to be eliminated or tamed (wild animals, hostile weather, volcanoes, diseases)
2. As science has advanced we've used it to exploit nature for our own benefit with little or no understanding of
1. the ways nature - plants, rivers, oceans, and all the animals - live in a balance that filters the air and purifies the water and feeds nutrients to the soil
2. or how our exploitation of nature - destroying forests and the species in them, fishing to depletion the species in the oceans - disrupts the infrastructure that keeps the earth a  hospitable place for humans to live
3. the evolution, with science's help, of humans' separation from nature, moving from living as part of nature to humans seeing themselves as the conquerors of nature and losing their intimate understanding of the natural world around them, 
4. how capitalism has used science to accelerate humans' ability to destroy the living natural world either directly (destroying forests for wood or land) or indirectly (destroying wildlife by destroying their habitat and by changing the natural cycles such as climate) and the thus destroying the conditions that make living on earth comfortable for humans
3. The laws of nature keep working whether we pay attention to them or not.  So, when we destroy the world's forests and burn fossil fuels without thought, then we set into action natural changes in the temperature on earth and the weather patterns that threaten the survival of many life forms on earth.  And that our destroying of forests with diverse life forms means that there's more interaction with wild animals and the viruses that live in them.  

All this together suggests that COVID-19 is a natural outcome of our lack of understanding and lack of attention.  While I don't think there's intent on the part of nature, when one species gets wildly out of balance, forces eventually get unleashed to bring things back into balance.  We know that prey and predators have cycles that keep both populations from getting to numerous or too scarce.  As humans 'overgraze' their habitat, there are consequences.  It appears that this virus will only make a tiny dent in the human population on earth.  But it has also slowed, however temporarily, our destruction of the earth.  

The Overstory

This first post will focus on the natural world and our relation to it.  (Points 1 and 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3, and 3 in the overview.) The post was inspired by my reading of The Overstory by Richard Powers.  And as I read the book, lots of other articles caught my attention that reinforced the story he was telling.  

When people ask me why I live in Alaska, my feeble attempts to talk about living very close to relatively unspoiled natural settings are inadequate.  The way my body relaxes and comes to life in the forests is hard to explain.  How the dead trees covered in lichens and mosses and fungus, and teaming with life stir my mind and spirit just doesn't seem compelling as I try to describe this to people in Los Angeles, who know that they couldn't survive where the temperatures rests below 40˚F more often than not.     

In the The Overstory, Richard Powers makes my awe of nature much more understandable.  I got to rub elbows with characters far more immersed in the power of nature - particularly trees - than I am.  I felt I was with others who could get obsessed with the fecundity of the forest.  

So let's start with The Overstory.

I'll let CG Fewston get to the guts of the book, which he does well in a blog post:

"Ultimately, The Overstory is a love-letter to trees. The reader can feel the love and admiration the author has for trees and all things related to flora. There’s no question that humanity—at this time more than ever—needs a book that pays homage trees, to the planet, to Nature, to the environment, to the living-green things that produce oxygen and help in many uncountable ways to keep humanity alive. The Overstory is without question worthy of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. . .

"Richard Powers throws a spotlight onto the importance of trees and how their survival is tied to the survival of the whole human race. He brings Nature humming to the page, and the words leave a haunting effect over the reader as they learn of this sad planetary struggle.

"The villain of this story is the entire human race. Trees, far older and wiser than humans, are the heroes. Readers cheer for these green, silent heroes and cry when a single mammoth tree is cut from the heavens and comes crashing down. Richard Powers turns the tables on humanity, making them appear an ugly race of animals who lack an intelligent connection to their surroundings.

"Humans are the idiots. Humans are the fleeting species. Trees are the genius. Trees are the lasting species.

"There is a deeper message humanity needs to learn when it comes to trees. In The Overstory the trees are the patient teachers who instruct by being. If humanity could only learn to listen more closely to the planet and the environment, to Anima Mundi, we might see a better way forward than our current path of destruction, desolation and unsustainability."  (emphasis added)

Now let me offer some quotes from The Overstory.  I'll try to minimize the context so this doesn't get too long.  And this is a novel filled with interesting people doing interesting things.  But here I'm focusing more on the trees.

"The biochemical behavior of individual trees may make sense only when we see them as members of a community."  (p. 126)

"You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor .  A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways.  But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes. . ." (p. 152)

"Clicks and chatter disturb the cathedral hush.  The air is so twilight-green she feels like she's underwater.  It rains particles - spore clouds, broken webs and mammal dander, skeletonize mites, bits of insect grass and bird feather . . . Everything climbed over everything else, fighting for scraps of light.  If she holds still too long, vines will overrun her.  She walks in silence, crunching ten thousand invertebrates with every step, watching for tracks in a place where at least one of the native languages uses the same world for footprint and  understanding." (p. 154)

"The older man is on the ground, on his side, popping tiny creatures into specimen bottles.
"Ambrosia beetles?"  The two heads turn toward her, startled.  Dead logs:  the topic was

Dead trees near Portage Glacier

her passion once, and she forgets herself.  "When I was a student, my teacher told us that fallen trunks were nothing but obstacles and fire hazards."
The man on the ground looks up at her.  "Mine said the same thing."
"'Clear them off to improve forest health.'" . . .
"'Lay down the law and get the stagnant place producing again!'"
All three of them chuckle.  But the chuckle is like pressing on a wound.  Improves forest health.  As if forests were waiting all these four hundred million years for us newcomers to come and cure them.  Science in the service of willful blindness:  How could so many smart people have missed the obvious?  A person has only to look, to see that dead logs are far more alive than living ones.  But the senses never have much chance, against the power of doctrine." (pp. 158-159)  (emphasis added)

"All winter she has struggled to describe the joy of her life's work and the discoveries that have solidified in a few short years:  how trees talk to one another, over the air and underground.  How they care and feed each other, orchestrating shared behaviors through the networked soil.  How they build immune systems as wide as a forest.  She spends a chapter detailing how a dead log gives life to countless other species.  Remove the snag and kill the woodpecker who keeps in check the weevils that would kill the other trees.  She describes the drupes and racemes, panicles and involucres that a person could walk past for a lifetime and never notice.  She tells how the woody-coned alders harvest gold.  How an inch-high pecan might have six feet of root.  How the inner bark of birches can feed the starving.  How one hop hornbeam catkin holds several million grains of pollen.  How indigenous fishermen used crushed walnut leaves to stun and catch fish.  How willows clean soils of dioxins, PCBs, and heavy metals."  (pp 217-218)

The following takes place on a 7X9 foot platform in a giant redwood, twenty stories above the ground.  Maidenhair and Watchman have been living there for nearly a year to keep loggers from

Me, long ago, at the base of a giant sequoia

cutting it down.

"The subjects sit on the platform, gazing at the questionnaire and the pencils Adam gives them.  Their hands are stained brown and green, with crusts of duff under their nails.  They smell ripe and musty as redwood.  The examiner has gotten himself above them in the lookout hammock, which won't stop rocking.  He studies their faces for the strains of paranoid salvationism he has seen in so many of the activists he has already interviewed.  The man - capacious yet fatalistic.  The woman - self-possessed in a way that no one getting hammered as badly has a right to be.
Maidenhair asks, "This is for your doctoral research?"
"It is."
"What's your hypothesis?"
Adam has been interviewing for so long the word sounds alien.  "Any thing I say might affect your answers."
"You have a theory about people who . . .?"
"No. No theories yet.  I'm just gathering data."
Watchman laughs, a brittle monosyllable.  "That's not how it works, is it?"
"How what works?"
"The scientific method.  You can't gather data without a guiding theory."
"As I told you.  I'm studying the personality profiles of environmental activists."
"Pathological conviction?"  Watchman asks.
"Not at all.  I just  . . . I want to learn something about people who . . .  people who believe that . . ."
"That plants are persons, too?"
Adam laughs and wishes he hadn't.  It's the altitude.  "Yes."
"You're hoping that by adding up all these scores and doing some kind of regression analysis ---"
The woman fingers her partner's ankle.  He hushes at once in a way that answers one of the two questions Adam wants to sneak into his questionnaire.  The other question is how they shit in front of each other, seventy yards in the air.
Maidenhair's smile makes Adam feel fraudulent.  She's years younger than he is, but decades more certain.  "You're studying what makes some people take the living world seriously when the only real thing for everyone else is other people.  You should be studying everyone who things that only people matter."
Watchman laughs, "Talk about pathological."
For an instant, above them, the sun pauses.  Then it starts its slow drop westward, back into the waiting ocean.  Noon light washes the landscape in gilt and watercolor.  California, American Eden.  These last pocket relics of Jurassic forest, a world like nothing else on Earth.  Maidenhair flips through the booklet of questions, though Adam has asked her not to look ahead.  She shakes her head at some naïveté on page three.  "None of this is going to tell you anything important.  If you want to know us, we should just talk."
"Well."  The hammock is making Adam seasick.  He can't look anywhere but at the forty-nine-square-foot country below him.  "The problem is ---"
"He needs data.  Simple quantities."  Watchman waves southwest, the saw-whine song of progress.  "Complete this analogy:  questionnaires are to complex personalities as skyline yarders are to . . ." (pp 318-320)

The subjects continue to question the researcher.

"Do you believe human beings are using resources faster than the world can replace them?"
The question seems so far beyond calculation it's meaningless.  Then some small jam in him dislodges, and it's like an unblinding.  "Yes."
"Thank you!"  She's pleased with her overgrown pupil.  He grins back.  .  .
"It's so simple,"  she says.  "So obvious.  Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse.  But people don't see it.  So the authority of people is bankrupt." Maidenhair fixes him with a look between interest and pity.  Adam just wants the cradle to stop rocking.  "Is the house on fire?"
A shrug.  A sideways pull of the lips.  "Yes."
"And you want to observe the handful of people who're screaming, Put it out, when everyone else is happy watching things burn." (p. 321)

"You can watch the hour hand, Mimi finds, hold your eyes on it all around the circle of the clock, and never once see it move." (p. 375)

"No one sees trees.  We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade.  We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage.  Obstacles blocking the word or wrecking the ski slope.  Dark, threatening places must be cleared.  We see branches about to crush our roof.  We see a cash crop.  But trees -- trees are invisible."  (p. 423)

"Trees know when we're close by.  The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we're near . . ." (p. 424)

"'If we could see green, we'd see a thing that keeps getting more interesting the closer we get.  If we could see what green was doing, we'd never be lonely or bored.  If we could understand green, we'd learn how to grow all the food we need in layers three deep, on a third of the ground we need right now, with plants that protected one another from pests and stress.   If we knew what green wanted, we wouldn't have to choose between the Earth's interests and ours.  They'd be the same!'" (p. 454)

All that above is about or from the book The Overstory.  There may be skeptics who think I should offer the counterarguments to Richard Powers.  My response to such a request is this:  99.9% of what we have learned at home, in school, in houses of worship, at work, on television and in movies, and in various other media assume the counterarguments.  You're all well immersed in those concepts.  So much so that many of you don't even realize there could be any other way of thinking.  So there's really no need for me to present that way of thinking.

As I read the book and thought about this post I kept coming across things that reinforce Wright's notions.  So here are a few.

From an interview in The Sun Magazine  Two Ways Of Knowing: Robin Wall Kimmerer On Scientific And Native American Views Of The Natural World.  (If it's not clear, Kimmerer is Native American.)

"From as far back as I can remember, I had this notion of plants as companions and teachers, neighbors and friends. Then, when I went to college, a shift occurred for me. As an aspiring botany major, I was pressured to adopt the scientific worldview; to conceive of these living beings as mere objects; to ask not, “Who are you?” but, “How does it work?” This was a real challenge for me. But I was madly in love with plants, so I worked hard to accommodate myself to this new approach.
Later in my career, after I’d gotten my PhD and started teaching, I was invited to sit among indigenous knowledge holders who understood plants as beings with their own songs and sensibilities. In their presence, and in the presence of the plants themselves, I woke from the sleep I’d fallen into. I was reminded of what I’d always known in my core: that my primary relationship with plants was one of apprenticeship. I’m learning from plants, as opposed to only learning about them."

An LA Times Op Ed

"Pathogens have leaped from animals to humans for eons, but the pace of this spillover has increased rapidly over the last century. As 7.8 billion people on this planet radically alter ecosystems and raise, capture and trade animals at an unprecedented scale, “the road from animal microbe to human pathogen” has turned into a “highway,” as the journalist Sonia Shah has written.
The growing body of scientific research is clear: Diseases like COVID-19 are an expected consequence of how we’re choosing to treat animals and their habitats."

But the wildlife trade is just the tip of the iceberg. Humans have altered three-quarters of terrestrial environments and two-thirds of marine environments. Our ecological domination, aside from risking mass extinctions, makes humans more vulnerable to disease. . . .
The human health effects of deforestation are even more devastating in global disease “hotspots,” which are tropical areas with high wildlife biodiversity. When these forests are felled — be it in the Amazon, East Africa, Thailand, or Indonesia — the mosquitos that transmit malaria become more abundant and infect people at higher rates.
And then we have the bio-catastrophes that are modern factory farms. We pack most of the world’s livestock animals, for all or part of their lives, into crammed living conditions that are hotbeds for viral and bacterial pathogens, and then we lace their feed with the world’s most medically important antibiotics, creating perfect conditions for antibiotic-resistant pathogens to develop. The public pays the price in the form of drug-resistant UTI and MRSA infections, feces in the air and water, and increased risk of deadly viral epidemics like the 2009 H1N1 outbreak that sickened an estimated 59 million people. . .
To prevent future outbreaks like COVID-19 or worse, we have to treat planetary, animal and human health as inseparable. This will require radical changes to business as usual. To date, we’ve operated under the fallacies that medicine and ecology can be understood independently and that the conditions that impact the animal kingdom are separate from those that impact humans.

From  Arundhati Roy in The Financial Times

But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.
The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war. They don’t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally. But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.  Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. 
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. (emphasis added)

From The Guardian:

"Scientists have shown to be true what JRR Tolkien only imagined in the Lord of the Rings: giant, slow-reproducing trees play an outsized role in the growth and health of old forests.
In the 1930s, the writer gave his towering trees the name Ents. Today, a paper in the journal Science says these “long-lived pioneers” contribute more than previously believed to carbon sequestration and biomass increase.
The authors said their study highlights the importance of forest protection and biodiversity as a strategy to ease global heating. They say it should also encourage global climate modellers to shift away from representing all the trees in a forest as essentially the same." 

From the LA Times after a couple of weeks of the closure of Yosemite National Park the bears have quadrupled in Yosemite Valley with the absence of people.

And all the other forms of wildlife there are taking back their land.   

And from the EPA - a look at Los Angeles air quality 

The arrow points to March 2020 when people went into isolation.  It's the greenest (best air quality) period in 25 years.  

I'm going to trust the reader to put together the points in the overview, the quotes about and from The Overstory, and the quotes and images from other sources at the end.  The points on science and capitalism probably need more spelling out.  If I get that done, I'll put a link here to that future post.

"Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats "

Iguazú, Argentina 2019

The Sun Magazine* has a section called The Dog Eared Page, where the publish works that have been from the January 2020 issue, is about hummingbirds and hearts.
published before.  This one,

"A hummingbird’s heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird’s heart is the size of a pencil eraser. . .
"To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles — anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature. It’s expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old."

Then he makes a stark contrast.

"The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon."

Most of us know so little about the natural world, a world we have tried to set ourselves apart from.  But, we too, are in the continuum from hummingbird to blue whale.  Our hearts are also four chambered.  Some specialists know a lot about hummingbirds or about blue whales.  But as profession of science has required more and more specialization, many scientists know a lot about a very small portion of the universe.  Knowing nature holistically is not the specialty of science, yet it's what we need, so that we understand how our actions affect everything else.  How extracting oil affects the air, the earth, the water, and all the living things near and far.  How it affects human health, wealth, values, morality.

Juneau,  Alaska 2008

*The Sun Magazine is a wonderful magazine with interviews, poetry, short stories, readers' stories based on a set theme, and other insightful writing.  It's also ad free.  You can see an article or two online without a subscription, but you can see all the titles over the years.  

Thoughts On Pebble Mine After 6 Classes

I've been to six of the planned eight OLÉ classes on Pebble Mine. Here's my sense of this mega project to extract copper, gold, molybdenum, and other metals in a remote area adjacent to the world's largest salmon fishery.


1.  Obsession:   Anyone who wants to undertake a project of this scope in the United States has to be an obsessive gambler. The amount of time and effort it takes to get all the permits, to get to the site, to put in infrastructure, to put in all the safety procedures, to woo the local communities, and to so raw mining and then to clean up everything is enormous.   I suspect that for some people this is a challenge, like climbing the peaks of the world's highest mountains.  I imagine for all who undertake such projects, the promise of great riches is a key factor.  And apparently, getting a project along a certain part of the way, means the project can then be sold to someone else.  And I'm not exactly sure who's money is at risk and what sort of tax benefits some may get out of losses in a project like this.
For example here are some of the Pebble Mine presentation slides that show a sense of the enormous scope of the project without getting into minutiae:

They have to process such enormous amounts of ore because the amount of valuable minerals is a tiny fraction.

This is just the site for the current 20 year planned mine.  There's a much richer ore deposit to the east of this, but it's buried under bedrock and harder to get at.  No one seems to believe that this project is going to end after 20 years.  That's just the point where they will begin this process over again to then go after the rest of the ore.

2. Complexity.  There is no one person who has the knowledge and experience to be able to assimilate all the data in order to make a yes or no decision on a project like this.  There's way too much technical data from too many different areas.  We've been told about tests of chemical reactions, groundwater studies, surface water studies, acidity, toxicity, bulk tailings and pyritic tailings,  porphyry intrusions, how copper affects salmon's ability to smell, the many federal and state regulations, and  growing demand for copper in green economy,

Here's an overview of the Baseline Study - an attempt to document the existing conditions.  Who is really going to read 30,000 pages?

3.  Many Decisions.   There isn't just one decision.  There are many permits and approvals to get - some of which can stop the project.

On the left are the US Army Corps of Engineers authorities.  On the right are other federal laws. (clicking on any of the images will enlarge and focus them)

And there are approvals and permits needed from Alaska.

And here are all the groups involved in the Army Corps of Engineers Environmental Impact.

Although we got charts showing the decision making process, no one ever said who exactly makes the final decision.  Is it just one person?  Or several people?  We still have two more sessions so I can ask next week.  (I'll miss the last session, unfortunately.)

4. Risk.   In fact, this is NOT a technical decision. Ultimately it's a decision about risk.  How much risk is there and is that risk worth the possible consequences?  It's about the level of comfort with risk the decision maker has.  There isn't just one risk, but many.  At the extreme is the potentially catastrophic consequence of destroying the salmon in Bristol Bay.  McNeil River bears are also nearby.  Then there are the possibilities of lesser impacts on the salmon and other parts of the environment around the mine site.  On the other side are the benefits, which the Pebble folks identified as employment for local people and the importance of copper in the new green environment.  And, of course, the hundreds of millions of potential profit.

Here are some slides from the presentation of Bristol Bay Native Corporation which opposes the mine:

And this slide from the Pebble Mine folks:

5.  Ultimately It's A Values Based Decision.  Aside from the decision maker(s) comfort with and exposure to risk in this situation, this all boils down to two opposing world views:

1. The United States is based on individual freedom and capitalism which allow, even encourage, individuals and corporations to go out and exploit the world's God given natural resources to become rich and make the general economy better
2. Human beings are part of nature, not APART from nature.  Humans have been exploiting the planet and now it has reached the point that human caused climate change will make life and survival for humans and most other species of life much harder.

6.  The Decision.   The decision on Pebble will probably be determined not so much by all the technical details that are being presented, but by where on the spectrum between World Views #1 and #2  the decision maker(s) sit.


7.  Money.  As I review all this, I realize that one important aspect* of the Pebble Mine project has not been discussed in the class - how the project is being financed.  I made the assumption in #1 above that this was a gamble.  But bits of conversation after class with presenters makes me question that.  At one point I made a comment about Northern Dynasty (the company that has been at the lead in this project) and someone said, they won't be the ones who actually carry all this out.  They will be sold out.  So I have questions about how a deal like this is put together.    Who actually has money at risk?  Who is investing in this?  What are their motives?  How much of the expenses of doing all the preparation costs are only paper losses?

These all boil down to who is actually risking how much money and what do they stand to gain?  To what extent do tax payers end up underwriting this because of tax deductions for business expenses or tax offsets for losses?

*Of course there are other important aspects that haven't been discussed that I haven't yet thought of, I'm sure.

Pushing Around Leaves

The cottonwood trees in the back have been acting as personal trainers, giving me a certain number of new leaves each day to sweep up off the deck.  I think they used up their supply finally.

In front the mountain ash leaves have been dancing with the wind into different patterns on the driveway.

Looks a little like a map.

They tend to crowd together against steps and in corners.

And this October has allowed me time to procrastinate gathering up enough leaves to cover the various flower beds.  Yesterday was a record 54˚F in Anchorage, today was balmy again.  The low temperatures have been regularly higher than the normal lows.  You could say, well, it's just a blip, except we've had the 'warmest month ever' regularly this year.  

Cottonwood leaves covering the back yard.  I just need to rake up enough to get the flower beds covered.  There are some decaying amur maple leaves in the mix too.  

 And here's a small bed that I just used mountain ash leaves to mulch.

It's so wondrous that the trees give us this free mulch to protect the wintering plants from the cold and then this all goes into the compost heap where it becomes compost to fertilize everything next year.  

After all, that's what happens in untended forests every year.  Somehow they manage to maintain exquisite gardens without humans to take care of them.