Pocket Gophers, Ice Patches, Pine Bark Beetles and Fire

Larry Todd

This session looked at archeology affected by environmental change - by pocket gophers in one, as ice patches melt in the other, and after forest fire in the third.  


It's after lunch and now there are three concurrent sessions.  I had to finish up the last post and then got into a talk with Peter on issues of communicating science to others.  I've gotten into the panel on archeological Perspectives on Environmental Adaptation. 

Larry Todd just gave a presentation on "The Past as a tool for Engaging the Future" discussing his work in Colorado and how the present affects when he's looking at the past.  Pocket gophers there live all year and bring soil up and change the landscape and if you don't know about the gophers, you don't understand the context of what you're looking at. 

Jeremy Karchut

Jeremy Karchut now.  Chugach National Forest. 

Climate Change, Melting Ice, and the Frontier of Alpine Archeology - human adaptations on mountain environments.  Ice patch archeology.  Human exploitation of caribou (reindeer). The largest animal in the north that people around the Arctic depend on.  Go to high elevations in the summer, congregating at patches of snow and ice.  Get away from heat, parasitic insects, and there's fresh water because of melting ice.  People have discovered that they are pretty easy to hunt there.  And so we are finding artifacts in the melting snow and ice.  Ice patches different from glaciers.  Noticing that a lot are starting to melt and disappear - even ones stable for thousands of years.  And artifacts, final remains, insects, bone, horn, insects, birds, preserve thousands of years.

Artifacts in Swizerland and Arctic from people going over mountain passes, not just hunting.  Patches accumulate, like soil, some spread uniformly, stable, preservative.  Otzi - the iceman, probably associated with an ice patch, not a glacier.  Also found clothing, quivers and other artifacts.  I was introduced by Dr. Craig Lee who was doing surveys in Yellowstone.  Showing me ice patches.  Black patches - animal dung - big horn sheet in this slide.  Surveyed around the ice patch and found a crooked stick - a dart (adaladal?). 

A lot of this study began in Norway.  Roman artifacts - even arrows with feathers, leather shoe.  Entirely new look of archeology.  Most just have stone artifacts, but ice preserves leather and other items. 

Ice tunnel into the ice patch in Norway, with reproductions frozen in ice.  An outdoor laboratory for various scientists to study this eco systems.  Klimapark.  Summer camps with students. 

Switzerland also has a similar place.  The site is melting.  Found leather pants, shoes, DNA shoes it came from a goat they didn't know existed there. 
Q:  Goat there or trade routes? 

Back to North America.  Yukon and Northwest territory.  Decade ago ice patch archeology started here in NA. 

Artifacts back to 8000 years old.  Lot of hunters lose shoes - another shoe. 

Alaska - work of Richard Vanderhook, started about seven years ago.  Amphitheater Mountains in Wrangell-St. Elias.  2003, this patch almost gone.  Ice in many places gone and artifacts not completely gone, but they'll deteriorate soon. 

Some thought patches only used by hunters, but also found animal snares (ground squirrel), baskets associated with berry picking.

2009 Pilot ice patch project in Denali National Park.  Where do you start in 6 million acre park?  In early 2009 4 year old, kid picked up artifact in Teklanika River - Caribou antler arrowpoint.  Mom called someone.  Since soil there isn't too preservative there, so we looked around - Google Earth, then fly over in plane, finally helicopter.   Big snow year in 2009 - a little too early in the season.  Hadn't melted back as much as we'd like.  There were doll sheep hanging out.  We didn't find any cultural artifacts, but established benchmark and recovered antlers. 

Been with Chugach National Forest for about a year and a half.  Ranger had already started planning.  Took Kenaitze youth with us in Kenai and went to ice patches along a ridge - where caribou had been seen.  But had been hunted to extinction and then reintroduced. 

On way down, caribou were coming back to the ice.  Not the Forest Service's priority, but have put it in to collaborate, especially with Kenaitze.

Climate change evidence clear.  Best if multidisciplinary.  Ice patch coming up with new information. 

Anthropocene Epoch - Age of Humans - "humans have altered the planet so extensively that a new geological time interval is being proposed."  Starting 8000 years ago. 

Daniel Eakin

Daniel Eakin, Office of the Wyoming State Archaeologist, "Shifting Landscapes in the GYE:  Potential Effects of Pine Bark Beetle on Native American Wooden Structures"


Catastrophic die-off of pines, spruce in West.  Archeological sites that burned and unburned areas.  Even though sites might change, but fire exposed archeological sites. 

GYE - in Yellowstone, Wind River area.  Yellowstone Park is doing well, the 1989 fire put them on an even keel.  White Park pines took it in the shorts.  Mountains near Laramie, where I live are bad, almost totally brown and other areas around there. 

Forest archaeology - generally can't see much.  But with pine bark beetles and fire, visibility is totally different.  All organic material gone from the ground surface.  The scale of the environmental change is massive.  Surface erosion, snow melt, sun light onto forest floor.  Need to consider soil if you want to call it that.  Where I'm from and northward into Canada, soils O Horizons over E.  Horizons?  I've learned that O Horizon - basically a horizon that can

[From Wikipedia

A soil horizon is a specific layer in the land area that is parallel to the soil surface and possesses physical characteristics which differ from the layers above and beneath. Horizon formation (horizonation) is a function of a range of geological, chemical, and biological processes and occurs over long time periods. Soils vary in the degree to which horizons are expressed. Relatively new deposits of soil parent material, such as alluvium, sand dunes, or volcanic ash, may have no horizon formation, or only the distinct layers of deposition. As age increases, horizons generally are more easily observed. The exception occurs in some older soils, with few horizons expressed in deeply weathered soils, such as the oxisols in tropical areas with high annual precipitation.
 

O horizon
The "O" stands for organic. It is a surface layer, dominated by the presence of large amounts of organic material in varying stages of decomposition. The O horizon should be considered distinct from the layer of leaf litter covering many heavily vegetated areas, which contains no weathered mineral particles and is not part of the soil itself. O horizons may be divided into O1 and O2 categories, whereby O1 horizons contain decomposed matter whose origin can be spotted on sight (for instance, fragments of rotting leaves), and O2 horizons containing only well-decomposed organic matter, the origin or which is not readily visible.
 

E horizon
“E”, being short for eluviated, is most commonly used to label a horizon that has been significantly leached of its mineral and/or organic content, leaving a pale layer largely composed of silicates. These are present only in older, well-developed soils, and generally occur between the A and B horizons. In regions where this designation is not employed, leached layers are classified firstly as an A or B according to other characteristics, and then appended with the designation “e” (see the section below on horizon suffixes). In soils that contain gravels, due to animal bioturbation, a stonelayer commonly forms near or at the base of the E horizon.
The above layers may be referred to collectively as the "solum". The layers below have no collective name but are distinct in that they are noticeably less affected by surface soil-forming processes.]

vary from few centimeters to much more - undecomposed organics - pine needles, rotten branches, etc.  Key element is fire ecology.  O Horizon as old as forest it lies under. 

O Horizon containing archaeological artifacts. . .  More common in most fires, total incineration of O Horizon and any artifacts - settle down - and left with assembly of artifact lying atop of he soil.  Put clothesline so you can see it.  This would have been invisible without the fire.  A single sheep butchered in this area.  Assortment of both stone and trade bit material (post contact site).  Obsidian projectile points.  Machine screw, trade beads.  If you went to unburned forest to find this - good luck.  Would be under a foot of dust.
In burns, very dirty work.  REsponse time important.  Not only swat team - getting there before it washes away.  Be careful, right after fire hazardous - easy to get crushed by falling trees on windy days.  Particularly windy days 40 miles/hour - you hear trees cracking down after 20 years.  Smart thing to do is establish a safe zone in open meadow, and if wind comes up, retreat.  Put your tent there.

Getting there soon enough before hidden by reveg or washes away.  20˚ slope, storm would wash it away.  Recovered near 1000 artifacts, including trade beads 9 (four square feet.)  Little indication of disturbance.  It's amazing working in a burn after working where everything you dig out of the ground and all the work to document it and time.  But after fire, basic information is what you can get out of regular excavation - in burn, it's all laid out before you.

Another site in Yellowstone.  Only mechanism for burial here at higher elevation is soil creep, but over a long time, stuff doesn't move around a lot.  Unlike stream bed.  Vegetation here is pretty thick after 1988 fire.  Coming back on terraces.  In the trees some bare areas, had burned to EHorizon.  No sedimentation has occurred on this land.

Perishable structures - Wikiups, sheep traps - 19th century features preserved on the Wyoming landscape. 



All these sheep traps are now in areas where the trees are bark beetle killed.  Would burn in next fire. 

QPF -

[Warning:  I'm getting flaky here.  I just couldn't keep up, but you can get a sense of the talk.  People are leaving now for concurrent session.  I have to divide into three.]

Quantitative Precipitation Forecasting. The State Climatologist, Peter Olsson, is the lunch speaker.

1. Water Vapor
2. Cooling of the Atmosphere

Lifting agents - Large - warm front; Small - mountains

Small end of the scale

Cloud microphysics - cloud droplets to raindrops (2000 microns) - We don't really know what happens in the cloud. Can't do in a cloud chamber. Numerical models - scale from micron to thousands of kilometers.

Disclaimer #1: Gridded finite models and Spectral models
#2: differences between models used to be huge. Not so much any more.

Model Grids - [I'm not quite close enough to read the slides from my table near the electric outlet]

Global Climate models
Regional climate model
High resolution forecast model

Sorry, this is way over my head.

Now he's talking about Orographic Precipitation - Compared to Girdwood, we have a 5:1 difference. Which side of the mountain you're on.

From Wikipedia:

Orographic precipitation, also known as relief precipitation, is precipitation generated by a forced upward movement of air upon encountering a physiographic upland (see anabatic wind). This lifting can be caused by two mechanisms:

1. The upward deflection of large scale horizontal flow by the orography.

2. The anabatic or upward vertical propagation of moist air up an orographic slope caused by daytime heating of the mountain barrier surface.

He went through various technical problems in predicting. 

Mountains play significant role in precipitation and we have lots of mountains.  We tend to under predict in the winter and overpredict in summer.  QPF is not a cookbook for predictions near the mountains. 

How does this affect climate models?  A lot more guesswork going into what they have to do. 

I simply can't capture all he's saying.  You probably need to contact him if you want the details. 

Shad O'Neel, Can We Predict Global Sea Level Change?

Shad O'Neel, USGS Research Glaciologist.  [This guy gave a great talk.  I have more video I'll try to put more up later.  He really knows his stuff and is animated about it.  Well worth a look.  And if you are particularly interested in the relationship between glaciers and sea-level, definitely watch!]  [NOTE:  I'm putting this up quick - translation:  no editing until later maybe.]

 


Not all glaciers change because of climate change, but some based on geometry of the basin they live in.

Who cares?
Glaciers out of equilibrium, so we're in for a change whether we like it or not, and if climate continues to change, it will be greater. 
Large tourism base, visiting to see our glaciers.  Cruise ships, recreational, aviation to see glaciers.  So big that state parks have built visitor centers, but now they can't see the glaciers from them any more.

What may be more important is culture's ability to adapt to sea level rise.  If there is a 2 foot sea level rise in Florida, we're screwed.  But we can deal with it.  But what about the sea level islands in Asia - a lot more people?



Water from our glaciers.  Snow that lands on glaciers has different chemistry because not on dirt and when it goes into the water it's totally different from other water going into the sea.  So the eco systems near the glaciers are very different and changes the currents that go up to the Arctic - fisheries, flooding, coastal erosion, hydro electric.  Sea level rise.  Glacials modulate the sea level budget - if we want to understand sea level rise, we have to understand glaciers.

1-3% loss of total land loss by 2080.  $100 billion problem by 2080.  The longer we wait to deal with it, the bigger the problems.

Implications of sealevel rise.
1.  Adding or subtracting new water  -
2.  Steric

Chart of different contributions from small glaciers, ice sheets, terrestrial storage, and ???.

Bottom panel shows problem because we can't measure and compare perfectly with space born - capture the same trend, but not exactly the same.

What does global sea level rise mean?  How to measure it?  Each component tricky.  We're doing pretty good job.  Sea level budget.

Glaciare Surface Mass Balance - slide is showing time lapse of and Icelandic glacier changing from winter and summer - if it melts more than it snows it gets smaller.  This is what we thought was glacier health and what controlled sea level budget.  If positive it grows, negative should shrink, if 0 stays the same.
There's more than just snow and melt.  How do you measure?  Especially mountain glaciers.  Ice sheets easier.  Like a bucket of water.  But if I threw the water over the carpet - more like mountain glaciers.  Traditionally measured with poles - raid electric supply stores and they think we're crazy.  Bury pole in the winter.  Meters of snow every winter and meters of melt in the summer.
Now, we need to understand what these measures mean for glaciers as proxy of climate.  Two benchmark glaciers in Alaska.  Gulkana and Wolverine - small and simple.  Chosen because easy logistics.  Alaska glaciers go back to late 60s.  Do they mean anything.  Can we use them as proxy for regional and then global context?
Yeah, ok job, but asking those questions.
Record from the glaciers.
Washington state glacier has greatest loss.  But both continental has dwindling trend.  Coastal glacier - Wolverine - has been up and down.  More influenced by winter snow than summer climate.  No more recovery periods.
World Glacier Monitoring service tries to integrate global records.

Global record shows decreasing glaciers.  Old measures.  Now we have satellite pictures.  Long time series data is supercritical, but motivation has changed from 50's when no one was thinking of climate change and were just curious.

Do we have the right signal?  Whats the response time.  Changes that happened when?  Do the space measurements compare well with these traditional measurements?  Or is there a difference that warrants caution?  Can we model the measurement?

World Glacial Inventory
Looking at all the mountain glaciers 19 different regions.  Gray - complete inventories.  Clear, incomplete.  You're probably surprised we don't know how many glaciers there are.  In US, we're lacking behind China and Russia.  We don't know as much as we know.  Shocking to me that this is the state of the science now.

What about our measurement skills?  Getting better at measuring over broad spatial area.  Airplanes fly over glacier and measure surface and then return years later.  A lot more sophisticated the sticking poles in, but doesn't give us density.  Now laser from space.  Discovered there were lakes under Antarctica that rise and drain with lasers.

Mountain Glacier Changes
1950-2010
Alaska ones are long interval change.
1.  Not every region represented
2.  Alaska dominates - we have a lot of ice
3.  Similar shapes as Wolverine and Gulkana - decreasing curve
West Antarctica similar curve
East Antarctica actually gaining ice.

Only since space born measurements can we have confidence to say losing mass at increasing rates.

Graph - can't even see clear white bar for glaciers, but sea level % is huge.  Massive loss of glaciers compared to ice sheets.

Forecasting - what people want from glaciologists.  We have handle of measuring sea level change, but can't predict?  Just temperature?  Some regions changing temperature faster than others?  Some traction but not enough.  The gorilla in the corner is ice dynamics, well illustrated by Chugach.  Big bullesye over Columbia.  One part gaining another part losing.  Columbia accounts for have the mass loss in this mountain range.  Why is this so important and why we ignored it.  Scale of this is hundred meters tall, instantaneous transfer of mass from land ice to sea.  Not just stagnant disintegration of glaciers.  Like Manhattan going out into the ocean.  Imagine trying to study this.  Just can't.

All these couplings and feedbacks that are non-linear.  This process at Columbia is happening fast - ocean, atmosphere involved - we don't have a handle yet, so we can't predict sea-level rise.  Major speed up.

Why the uncertainty?  Ice dynamic thing.  Can't predict it.

Climate Change Solutions - Across Institutions, Cultures and Landscapes

[My notes here are on the fly. My intent is to give a sense of what is happening here today, but this is not any sort of official record. Contact individual speakers if you have specific questions. Consider this a starting point.]

(l-r)  Hartig, Balash, Holland-Bartels, Pendleton, Brown, Ulmer

This is the opening forum of the Classrooms for Climate Symposium at UAA.  I'm here because this is of interest and also I was asked to blog this.  So, my disclosure:  they've given me a media pass and I think that includes lunch and all sessions.  They've even linked here on their website  and also set out the conditions:

He is an independent blogger and opinions expressed by Steve are his own and do not reflect official positions of UAA or the U.S. Forest Service.

Margie Brown, CIRI

 I got here after the opening roundtable of youth participants and while the brand new Chancellor Tom Case introduced outgoing Chancellor and new Chair of the US Arctic Research Commission Fran Ulmer.  And she's introduced the panelists and now Margie Brown, President and CEO of Cook Inlet Regional Corporation is just finishing up.












Beth Pendleton, Regional Forester, US Forest Service, Alaska is now talking about USFS projects in Alaska around climate change - effects of fish and trees and people.

She mentioned research projects that will be presented here in the next few days and also about the student interns being used.  Climate change isn't the end of life, but it will challenge us with uncertainty and opportunities.

Holland-Bartels

9:39am  Leslie Holland-Bartels US Geological Survey (USGS) - there was a relationship between the old agency Mineral Management Service.  .... Challenge of science is all the uncertainty of our research.  TV soundbites don't convey that.  Places on the landscape - we have species and many are migratory here in the north.  One story - gotwit, an Alaska shorebird in summer, then to New Zealand via China Yellow Sea.  Makes the 7000 mile trip to New Zealand non-stop.  The longest recorded.  How?  It gets onto the weather pattern to slingshot south.  How will climate change affect that.  Will the species adjust or stop migration.  Will it be able to find other places to feed?  How will it change the sites this bird visits?  Will it gain enough weight to make the flight?  How will the foodwebs in these 3 locations change?  It requires different thinking.  We need to think globally.  Growing up, we didn't have the tools of the perspective.  This is just one of thousands of species that call Alaska home.  We have to multiply this perspective by the thousands to understand our challenges.

Each of us from different agencies have different perspectives and how we look at this.  Some of us sit on the Climate Change Round Table where we can share.  New connections with UAA - physical and social sciences.

Joe Balash as deputy commissioner Alaska Department of Natural Resources.  [I think I need some staff.]  Climate change is affecting roads - ice roads to north aren't open long enough and we are looking at building year round roads.  Other challenges of climate change are coming from Congress - bills to limit CO2 emissions will affect us in many ways.  
Thinking through all the consequences that carbon limitations would have are things we have to think through as we develop our oil and gas.  Those consequences affect our revenue picture as a state.  It has the players in Juneau in special session right now arguing over a surplus.  In a decade we could be arguing over a decade.
The threat of carbon regulation is something we have to keep in mind, but there are other things being implemented today - endangered species act.  Through the actions of NGO's we are literally surrounded by endangered species.  Those additional requirements of critical habitats put more restrictions that impact our economy and people, and while not impossible to deal with, while not impossible, will seriously affect us.

Hartig and Balash

The long term projections on how our climate will change affects us in the short and long term.  That's the challenge we face and will continue to deal with.  Previous speakers also identified science as the key.  We try to make our decisions as often as possible on the best science.  We also rely on scientists.  Will continue to manage those resources with ever changing climate in mind.

Larry Hartig, Commissioner of Environmental Conservation.   We are a science and engineering based agency.  Most of our rules come from Federal laws implement through state agencies.  As climate change rules develop and change, we watch closely.  We will have to enforce them and we want them to make sense here.  We're different in many ways, and how climate change affects us.  I thought I would try to key on today:  Climate change impacts in Alaska.

Mitigation and Adaptation:  Mitigation is what is causing the change - like greenhouse gas emissions.  Adaptation is how do you prepare yourselves regardless of the causes.  I came here four years ago after private industry.  Then, everyone was thinking about mitigation, while adaptation is more important to Alaskans.

I remember a NYTimes interview on climate change in Alaska, and the longevity of carbon dioxide in atmosphere (140+years) and affect on the waters etc.  Given the concentrations in the models out there, we'll be dealing with this for 400 years.  NYTimes headline was, "Palin only concerned about adapation"  as though trying avoid mitigation.

That's changed quite a bit.  Now talking about adaptation.  Also, as people started talking about it.  Waxman-Marky bill, only focused on natural environment and not on human impacts or on infrastructure we depend on - water sources, highways, etc.  In Alaska, climate change here, not just temperature, but actually phase changes - ice changes to water, permafrost turns to mush, and wave surges that can hit our coasts.  Major changes.

Four years ago, state not looking at Climate change - Palin was first administration to look at climate change.  In spring 2007 thinking about this.  That fall, series of storms with fuel tanks full of fuel and no coastal ice and we could see the erosion and all the fuel headed for the water.  Fortunately, that fuel all got moved.  But it was desperate.

People themselves worried, one night decided to self-evacuate.  They are out in the middle of nowhere.  No roads.  Snow machines, Planes.  Elderly people.  State and federal government long ways off.  Governor formed climate change subcabinet that I chair - how to prepare for this.  Idea to bring key cabinet members dealing with this to be ready.  Also looking at 31 threatened communities.  Immediate Action Workgroup.  1.  Emergency preparedness  2.  Prevention    3.  Community planning.  Kivilina knew they needed to move, but didn't know how.  One place Corps of Engineers said no- that's permafrost and will melt.  So planning.  We aren't social engineers, telling people how to live their lives.  When we talk to them is provide viable options, but they have to make the decisions.  4.  Those that can't be re-placed.   Came up with plans, put training into place in most vulnerable communities.  Planning established a grant program with two types of grants - mini grants for assessment on community impacts and larger planning grant if you did have to move.  All that put into place in 1 or 2 years within start of Palin administration.  Workgroups from people all over the state.  Needed to build consensus.  Several reports on our climate change website.

Some of the regulations would affect heating oil in rural Alaska.  If they look at carbons emitted by turbines could cause serious problems.  A lot of agencies working on these issues, all science driven.  We should be able to get more of a consensus on the science and not argue over things we don't need to argue over.  It does seem more of a consensus is being built.  One is that adaptation needs to be addressed as well as mitigation.  And some of the dire predictions ???? [don't want to misquote him so I'll leave it vague]. 

I'm going to put this up now and add photos and videos later.

Q:  If consensus by scientists on climate change, but survey says 87% of Republicans don't believe climate change is real?
Ulmer:  90% of scientists believe in climate change.  Science literacy in US is abominable.  We rank in lower 10% on science literacy.  How will be able to compete?  President of Boeing yesterday said he feared future of US because we aren't taking science and development seriously enough and not seeing it as part of national security in addition to economy.  At all levels - including industry - no respect for science.  How has science been changed to something you can choose to believe or not.  Scientific literacy part of being a modern nation.  I would challenge each of us in each of our capacities, we have to think about this, work on it.  Other panelists?

Hartig:  Not just climate change, many arenas.  At meeting in SF for Permanent Fund and economist talked to me, saying, if you look at all things people struggle with, the hardest to grasp is climate change.  Complicated, you can't see, won't impact most people any time soon, or broad impact not obvious, people see they have less complicated options - buy new vehicle or like the old one.  People don't get the science.  Have to look at behavioral factors and how people make decisions.

Regional EPA director.  Back in Nixon generation there was a big fight over leaded gas.  Most people kept buying leaded because it was a few cents cheaper.  Until they took away the option, people would use it despite the science.  Right now it's too complicated.

Jeff:  Disconnect - while there were tornadoes destroying part of the country, Congress was cutting climate monitoring money from NOAA's budget and thinking how brilliant they were on cutting the budget.

Majora Carter: Discovering the Bronx River

Marjora Carter opened the University of Alaska Anchorage and Chugach National Forest's Classrooms for Climate Symposium Wednesday night.

She told how her family moved north to the South Bronx in the 1940s and she grew up in a neighborhood that was always characterized as blighted and which became the trash dump of New York City.




It was only when she was forced by finances to move back home while in grad school that she began to see her neighborhood differently.  While walking her dog one night, they wandered into an illegal dump site and just beyond the site she saw the Bronx River for the first time.

Today that dump site is a beautiful park because of Carter's ability to get grants and coalesce the neighborhood.  In her talk, she brought together a variety of issues - how the waste in the neighborhood caused health problems - including affecting kids' learning abilities.  How the neighborhood and its people were essentially abandoned and it was known as a dangerous neighborhood of crime and drugs, and as a convenient place for the rest of the city to dump its trash.

But starting with park and then going on to green roofs, Carter worked on programs that created hope for the hopeless through training programs and jobs on turning the neighborhood green.  Ex-cons in one of the programs - BEST - went from being what she called 'the most expensive citizens' to productive citizens.  They got off government programs and became tax payers.  The green roofs lowered temperatures in the summer, caught rain water (reducing the runoff that would normally need to be treated by the city water systems, and added greenery to the concrete environment.  She cited studies that showed all sorts of improvements from higher grades to lower teen pregnancy rates for people who had greenery in their environments.

Majora and Judy Bonds

And then she went on to talk about others doing related projects around the country.  Andy Lipkis of TreePeople getting the school district to change their billion dollar school refurbishment program from adding asphalt to making more green areas.  Brenda Palms Barber who in Chicago used beehives to start a skin product business with ex-cons.  Recidivism for her workforce went from 65% to 4%.  Judy Bonds who's green work in coal country started the fight against mountaintop removal mining.  And Winona La Duke. 

I'm reminded that the world's narrative has changed greatly in the last 30 years.  People understand that the environment is important and lots of people are quietly doing many important projects, generally below the radar.  But the work is being done.

Here's a bit of video of Majora Carter's talk at UAA:

The symposium has three days of serious research panels in a program that is aimed at involving UAA students. 

Oh, btw, today Carter has her own for profit consulting firm teaching businesses and communities how to go green.  Green, she said last night, stands for money as well as a clean environment.



Afterward a group from Transition Town Anchorage were discussion the talk and implications for Anchorage.

"this is not civilization"

That's the title of a novel by Robert Rosenberg that was a University of Alaska Anchorage and Alaska Pacific University Book of the Year for this past year.  And probably what tonight's UAA Classrooms for Climate conference meeting speaker Majora Carter was thinking when she decided to clean up her South Bronx neighborhood.

The UAA/APU Books of the Year program is a powerful partnership between University of Alaska Anchorage and Alaska Pacific University that brings faculty, staff, and community members together to understand common themes. The books serve as the catalyst for discussions of larger issues of local and international significance.

[This] program started in 2006 as part of a Ford Foundation Difficult Dialogues initiative--one of only 26 in the country--to provide a safe environment on campuses for discussions of challenging topics. UAA and APU are now national leaders in this area. 

For me the title was intriguing, plus, it was about a Peace Corps experience.  Every PC experience is different, yet there are common themes - feeling totally lost as you enter a foreign world and language while people have unrealistic expectations of you and want to use you for their own purposes which you don't understand, making great friends, and always wondering whether you are doing more harm than good.  Here's Rosenberg's hero as he arrives in his town in Kyrgyzstan.

In Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka Jeff received what felt like a hero's welcome.  Over his first few days his neighbors on Karl Marx Street introduced themselves in a continuous wave.  Expectations were high;  they seemed to believe he could change their lives.  The attention was jarring. . . the villagers offered gifts of warm bread, eggplant and cabbage from their family plots, strawberry and cherry compote, boiled mutton, and plastic bags filled with cold triangles of fried dough.  They explained just to what length Anarbek [his host] had gone to refurbish the old brick townhouse.  The previous year the occupants had repatriated to southern Russia.   The house had served a six-person family for three decades, so the village deemed it large enough for one American.  Anarbek had arranged for its purchase with the village akim.  For an entire month he had shown up each day with his wife and two daughters to renovate the home and bring it up to Peace Corps standards.  He had installed a Western toilet (the bathroom did not have running water;  Anarbek would work on that, they said) and a series of electric radiators (the street's electricity seemed sporadic;  he would work on that).  His daughters had hung printed curtains made from bedroom sheets, pounded out the carpets, and scrubbed the several years' accumulation of Central Asian dust off the floors.  Anarbek requisitioned a heavy steel gate for the front door, a strict requirement stipulated by the Peace Corps, but in the neighbors' opinion an unnecessary precaution.  For the previous quarter of a century, Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka had known no crime.

You can learn more about the Book of the Year program and the two new books for next year

Part 2:  

Wednesday, May 4th 

Wendy Williamson Auditorium. 

 7pm - FREE (free parking too)

Majora Carter presents -

Hometown Security: Climate Adaptation, Social Innovation and Local Solutions

The theme for the two books this year was service.  That theme and the title "this is not civilization" seem a good segue into another UAA activity - Classrooms for Climate.

Classrooms for Climate is organized by the Chugach National Forest and UAA in partnership with the Alaska Coastal Rainforest Center, Alaska Geographic, and the Northern Forum. Alaska is ground zero for climate change, and the Chugach and neighboring landscapes, with world famous glaciers and watersheds, are an extended classroom for researchers, educators, and students around the world seeking to understand the potential physical, biological, cultural and socio-economic impacts. Each of the participating institutions recognizes its own unique role as a “classroom” for understanding and responding to climate change. All are committed to working across geographic and institutional boundaries to build knowledge and craft sustainable and effective solutions. This symposium is a first step in bringing together partners in inquiry, education, and management from across Southcentral, Alaska and beyond.

The partnership between the university and the Forestry Service picks up on the theme of service.  And tonight's speaker at Wendy Williamson Auditorium,  McArthur Award winner Majora Carter,  probably thought that life in the Bronx was less than civilization and decided to do something about it. 

Majora Carter simultaneously addresses public health, poverty alleviation, and climate change adaptation as one of the nation’s pioneers in successful urban green-collar job training and placement systems. She founded Sustainable South Bronx in 2001 (with the help of a small Forest Service grant) to achieve environmental equality through economically sustainable projects informed by community needs. By 2003, she coined the term: "Green The Ghetto" as she pioneered one of the nation's first urban green-collar job training & placement systems. Her organization spearheaded new policies and legislation that fueled demand for those jobs, improved the lives of all New Yorkers, and has served as a model for the nation.

There's a lot more about her (and links to even more) at the UAA website.  From all I've heard about this woman, the free talk tonight at Wendy Williamson is another one of those incredible Anchorage opportunities to meet a world class thinker and doer.  It would be nice to think that our mayor and assembly members might show up to learn about how to integrate economics and environment and humanity.

America's Wealth of Fact-Free Political Opinion

It appears that many politicians and commentators - particularly those on the right, though some on the left as well - have adopted a fact-free rhetoric to support their positions.  Apparently, if fat-free is good for your physical health, fact-free is good for your mental health.  Or at least the political health of fact-free proponents.

Actually, while fact-free opinions are problematic, the real issue here is made-up facts that have no basis in reality but sound good and support one's argument.  To be clear, I'm using 'facts' as statements which can (to a certain extent) be proven true or false.  So you can have false facts, and that's really my concern.  Maybe I should have said Truth-Free, but it's not nearly as alliterative.  But at least I'm disclosing my own slight-of-word here. 

Let's look at an example.  Dave Cuddy's Compass Piece in the Anchorage Daily News Monday offers a number of glaring examples.

1.  He starts by saying:

OK, so our nation is now in bankruptcy.

Is the US 'in bankruptcy'?  Not even close.  Investopedia defines bankruptcy this way:

A legal proceeding involving a person or business that is unable to repay outstanding debts. The bankruptcy process begins with a petition filed by the debtor (most common) or on behalf of creditors (less common). All of the debtor's assets are measured and evaluated, whereupon the assets are used to repay a portion of outstanding debt. Upon the successful completion of bankruptcy proceedings, the debtor is relieved of the debt obligations incurred prior to filing for bankruptcy.

The US has not filed for bankruptcy.  Why not?  Because our assets far exceed our debits.

According to Wikipedia 

As of March 25, 2011, the Total Public Debt Outstanding of the United States of America was $14.26 trillion

Rutledgecapital says the US total assets come to about $200 trillion.  Mybudget360 estimates that US household net value in the US in 2009 was $70 trillion alone.  This later figure doesn't count any of the assets of the US government, whether we're talking about land, buildings, machinery, art and historical artifacts and monuments, and on and on. How much do you think Yosemite is worth or the Everglades?  You get the idea. 

So, we have the assets to pay our debts with plenty left over.   

The US is NOT in bankruptcy. Rather, we're like some rich guy who has the means, but just doesn't want to pay his bills. Yes, we should be careful with the spending, but I believe the right's 'starve the beast'  strategy of continually reducing taxes, so there will be a 'crisis' requiring us to cut government, is now being played out.  



2.   Some of this is so fuzzy that it defies proving true or false.  But let's try another.

Obamacare is a consequence of importing the poorest and neediest of legal and illegal immigrants, and of bankrupting our entitlement programs.

Nothing about the flaws of capitalism that lead insurance companies to cut off those with pre-existing conditions or to lobby Congress to prevent government health systems from bargaining for lower drug prices? 

It's the fault of immigrants.  Where are the facts?  If we look at Medicare we find that the population is 78% white - probably not a lot of  immigrants, legal or illegal.  Hispanic is only 8%. 

United States	Percent	0% - 100%
White	78%
Black	10%
Hispanic	8%
Other	4%

OK, maybe he wasn't talking about Medicare. But even Medicaid is only about 1/4 Hispanic.

United States	Percent	0% - 100%
White	43%
Black	21%
Hispanic	28%
Other	8%

We all know [sarcasm alert] that poverty among Blacks and Hispanics has nothing to do with past or continuing discrimination and everything to do with their just being inferior and lazy. That's why they're getting medicaid. 

What about Social Security?  It appears that ethnicity data for social security is unreliable and not readily available.  But I suspect there aren't too many illegal aliens and I'm still not sure what Cuddy's problem with legal aliens is.  Since Cuddy is making the claim, it should be up to him to prove it, not me.


What about Veterans benefits?  It doesn't look like Hispanics (US born, legal or illegal aliens) are causing the problem.

How exactly are legal and illegal aliens causing the problem?  It's my understanding of immigration law that the 'neediest' don't have much chance to get to the US as legal alien.  We like people with money and education. Those poor that do get in, make up a tiny percent of legal immigrants. 

And if Cuddy has a problem with legal aliens, how many generations make you ok? And if we're calculating the cost of legal immigrants to the US, how about calculating the benefits?  How do we factor, for instance, the financial benefit to the US of people like Google co-founder Sergy Brin? 

3.  How about this one?  

Higher taxes are a consequence of crazy overspending. Stimulus spending is a consequence of government interfering in the housing industry -- pushing for too liberal lending to put people who couldn't really afford housing into houses, artificially stimulating the economy ... and resulting in a housing bubble that now threatens our economy (coupled with the structural deficit).

What higher taxes is Cuddy talking about?  From USA Today May 2010:

Amid complaints about high taxes and calls for a smaller government, Americans paid their lowest level of taxes last year since Harry Truman's presidency, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data found.

Some conservative political movements such as the "Tea Party" have criticized federal spending as being out of control. While spending is up, taxes have fallen to exceptionally low levels.

Federal, state and local income taxes consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports. That rate is far below the historic average of 12% for the last half-century. The overall tax burden hit bottom in December at 8.8.% of income before rising slightly in the first three months of 2010.

Here's a chart of tax rates  which shows that in the 1950's the top marginal tax rate was around 91% for income over $400,000.  Why is millionaire Cuddy complaining about high taxes?  His income bracket hasn't had it so good since the 1920's with just a couple of years of exceptions.

And why is he blaming government?  I'm sure he knows that Clinton handed GW Bush a debt free country in 2000 and it's the GW Bush pro-capitalism years that pushed us into the financial crisis we face today.   I know that Republicans don't think it's fair to mention the Bush legacy, after all he only had eight years to run up the national debt, while Obama has had two years and three plus months now to fix it.

I won't even get into the idea that the housing crisis was caused by liberalizing lending policies.  Credit default swaps played no role? Here's a Pulitzer Prize winning analysis that refutes Cuddy's opinion on this.  Judge for yourself, but don't simply accept it because Cuddy said it.

4.   One more, I don't have all night to check Cuddy's facts for him.  I'm just trying to make the point he's loose with his facts. 

Half of American voters now pay no federal income tax, and so, have no motivation to keep spending and taxing down.

First, the statistic is 47% of Americans, not of voters. I'm not sure if anyone has figured out what percent of voters don't pay federal taxes.   Most of us know that lobbyists have a much greater influence on taxes and spending than do voters - especially voters with low enough income to not pay taxes. Except, of course, the General Electrics, but then they don't vote - they have to pay for legislators. 

To Cuddy's credit, he mentions federal income taxes, which many commenters have not.  Of the 47%, many pay a variety of other taxes.  Those with lower incomes pay much higher percent of tax in payroll and other taxes than the wealthy. 

TheAtlanticWire deconstructs the 47% pay no taxes 'fact' that comes from a Tax Policy study last year.  The piece quotes a NY Times article on why the wealthy pay more taxes:

There is no question that the wealthy pay a higher overall tax rate than any other group. That is an American tradition. But there is also no question that their tax rates have fallen more than any other group’s over the last three decades. The only reason they are paying more taxes than in the past is that their pretax incomes have risen so rapidly — which hardly seems a great rationale for a further tax cut.

 And it quotes another Atlantic writer to point out that the increase in people not paying federal income taxes has Republican fingerprints. 

The Atlantic's Derek Thompson argues the 47 percent statistic is "a monster that Republicans have helped to create." Looking at the Earned Income Tax Credit--which pushes many Americans' federal income tax burden to zero--Thompson explains: "The EITC is a Republican creation. It was enacted in 1975 under President Ford (a Republican), and expanded numerous times over the last 35 years by Republicans."

 One wonders why Cuddy first complains that tax rates are so high (when as shown above they aren't)  and then complains they are too low.  But he doesn't call for raising taxes, rather he calls only for cutting spending. 


It's funny though.  I agree that there are a lot of Americans who feel entitled to a good life without paying for it.  But I think a lot of that comes from the impact of capitalism. 

All those advertisements tempting people with a cornucopia of products and services.  And all those credit card offers filling our mailboxes telling us to spend, spend, spend.  And making bankers, like Cuddy, wealthy on people's growing debt through usurious interest rates.

And let's remember that a huge percent of the entitlements - like health care - goes to those capitalist companies Cuddy thinks will save us, such as drug companies, medical equipment manufacturers, and hospitals.  In most cases, the consumer never even sees the money.  And defense spending goes to a myriad of contractors who supply everything from food, communication, transportation, weapons, vehicles and planes, and on and on. 


So beware of the truth-starved opinion pieces.   Even the ones you agree with!

What Bush Couldn't Do in Seven Years, Obama Does in Two - Bin Laden Reported Dead

Just got back from a bike ride and was about to delete my ThaiVisa news feed when I saw the words:

U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to announce on late Sunday evening that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has been killed in Pakistan, nearly 10 years after the devastating attacks of September 11.

The White House confirmed that Obama would hold an unprecedented late-night news conference, but gave no details. All the major news networks in the United States cited sources saying that Bin Laden had been killed.

According to Fox News, Osama bin Laden was killed over a week ago by a U.S. missile in Pakistan. CBS News, NBC News and CNN also said that Bin Laden's body is in possession of the United States.

The cynic in me is wondering how the right, particularly the crazy right, are going to deal with this.  Let's see.  GW made it his mission to find and kill Bin Laden.  The BBC quoted Bush on Dec. 14, 2001:

"We're going to get [Bin Laden] Dead or alive, it doesn't matter to me." 12/14/2001 [32]

But by the time he left office seven years later, he Bin Laden neither captured nor dead.

The Kenyan, Muslim, socialist president (as some on the right like to characterize Barrack Obama) managed to do the deed in a little over two years. 

Nixon's attorney general used to say, "Watch what we do, not what we say."  Good advice then and now.  Bush said.  Obama did.

Clearly this is a huge symbolic event, and symbolism is everything.  But how much actual physical threat was Bin Laden these days?  I don't know.  And how will the symbolism play in the Muslim world?  We'll see.

At least former President GW Bush handled it well:

This momentous achievement marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001.

Clutter Wars - More Locks and Surprise Hoya Flowers

In March I posted a picture of two Master locks I'd found uncluttering.  I'd always been frustrated with locks with lost combinations.  But this time I googled a way to get the combinations from Google.  (Luni left a comment on that post with links to websites that showed how to crack the locks, but I couldn't make it work.)

As uncluttering continued, more locks showed up until I had six, the most you could get combinations for with one request. 

Not sure what I need six locks for, but I've sent in for the combinations.







And today I discovered how cluttered (or maybe just busy) when I found that our hosta [for some reason it came to me later this is a hoya, not a hosta] plant is now blooming.  How did it get this far along without me even noticing buds?   Well, this is positive neglect. 

Maybe  I've concentrated  too much on the philodendron jungle that's been in there.  This floor pot had vines growing up the wall and then dangling down.  I figured I could clear the floor space for better things by repotting.  So here I've pulled all the vines down and started untangling them and cutting them for repotting. 







I'm not sure I made a wise move, we'll see in a few weeks I guess.  I thought I could cut them at the joints and put them in new soil, build a shelf that got them well off the ground.  The shelf worked, but they are struggling to gain traction. (I found the white pot cleaning out the backyard greenhouse!)

The ones on top are still green after a couple of weeks, but limp.  But nothing as bad as the yellow, curly leaves dangling down on the left. 

We'll see.   I did leave a few in the old pot in case these don't make it.  And we gained a lot of room on the floor. 

We've got visitors headed this way in June so I have motivation to step up the clutter war.  Unlike Afghanistan, this is a war I know, with determination, I can win.  (Well, it never ends, but I can get to a point where it's controllable.)

Bridgman/Packer - The Matrix of Dance

[8pm Discovery Theater tonight (Saturday) tickets here or at the box office.]

Last night we saw Bridgman/Packer perform in Anchorage.  We'd seen Under the Skin - their first piece Friday - here three years ago.  But I'd forgotten details.  It was just as amazing as it was the first time as the dancers perform against an audio/video backdrop that blurs the line between live and recorded, real and unreal, and does other tricks on your expectations of dance, art, and even gravity.  This is the Matrix of dance.

Packer, Bridgman, and videographer Bobrow after Friday performance

The second piece, co-commissioned by Anchorage's Out North Theater moves into yet another dimension.  [Look, I feel an obligation to write about this, but I also realize that what they do is so radically different, that there is nothing I can say that can capture it adequately.  Not just different, but amazing and spectacular].  In Under the Skin, there is a lot of video through which the live dancers dance, starting with the opening scene of letters zipping up.  But then previously shot images of the performers dance with the live performers on stage.  And then one more layer gets added - live video of the current performance is layered on top of it all until the audience is wondering which are the real dancers and which are the images.  Though this time around, the projected images were not as saturated as I remember last time, and so the live Bridgman and Packer did stand out from their paler video images.

Here's some video of Art Bridgman working with the lighting crew Wednesday evening for the Friday performance.  Myrna Packer was stretching on stage at the beginning.




But all the technology would just be a gimmick that was neat the first time, but flat once you've seen it, if the ideas behind the choreography and the quality of the dancing weren't first rate.  The precision necessary for them to be at exactly the right spot so that you can see the front of their live body superimposed with the back of the projected image of their back is incredible.

And perhaps I'm biased because the theme that jumps out at me is the theme of this blog - how do you know what you know?  What is real?  What is imagined?  How do the real world and the non-real world interact to lead us to think we know reality and truth?

The second piece - Double Expose - pushes to a whole new level.  A lot of the background images are very real street scenes and architectural settings through which Bridgman and Packer roam as six different characters - prerecorded, live, and as projections of their live performance.

What does it mean when you see the live Art Bridgman on stage dancing against a black background to the side of the stage while the projected image of him dancing is put in context in the video landscape center stage?  He's live on stage, but your eye is drawn to the image which is part of the scenery and where he interacts with a prerecorded, a live, and a live recorded Packer.  Or a prerecorded Bridgman.  What is more real?  What has more meaning?  The live man abstractly dancing against the black backdrop?  Or the image of that man interacting with other images?  And where should I look?  I'm paying money to see a live performance, so why is my eye pulled from the live performer to her image? At one point the lights are behind the performers and their shadow giants are also dancing on the walls of the theater in the audience. 

What does this say about how the human brain constructs its version of reality? 

At one point, their very realistic backgrounds change into fantastically playful fabric patterns, which come to life. [UPDATE 5/1/11: These were done by artist/animator Karen Aqua, who I was told is ill and hasn't seen the performance.  Send her good vibes.]  The colors and images were a total change from the noir feel of most of the realistic backgrounds.  The animation added yet another dimension to the juxtaposition of reality and image of reality.  Why are the filmed street scenes more 'real' than the animated tiger walking in the background?  After all, the filmed street scenes and arches and tunnels are no less humanly created artifacts than are the animated images.

The live performers dancing on the sides of the stage while their images were stage center in the scene interacting with the images of other characters also reminded me of puppeteers being the live animators of their on stage puppets.

I also pondered about how Bridgman/Packer  (I feel that now and then it should be Packer/Bridgman) play with so many different media, yet their performance, ultimately has to be seen live.

As you can see, they've invaded my brain and are rearranging the furniture.  We're going back tonight and will sit in a different location to see how that changes all this.

So, yes.  While there was a nice sized (and incredibly appreciative) audience last night, you can go to the Discovery Theater and get tickets for tonight's performance.  As good as these performers are, they are off the radar.  And when Bridgman/Packer is finally a 'household name' it will be much harder to get to see them.