Unincorporated Kitsap County

"Your discussion of ecological assessment caught my interest, too. Environmental
historians--those practicing in history departments, not science
departments--often pay special attention to the language folks use to describe
nature: "enhanced" or "degraded" for whom? This impulse mostly derives from
historians' understanding of the entwined relationship of colonialism and
science, of which there is a large scholarship. As you might imagine, Native
people could lose out when colonial scientists helped categorize, map, and
explain landscapes in the American West for settlers. Terms like "healthy
landscape" meant healthy for settlers, not Natives. Historians always stress
the human dimension--otherwise we'd never get tenure!"

"But I do see that even twentieth-century language--"enhanced," "degraded"--is
falling by the wayside. What sort of language is cutting edge these days? Any
good references?"

Since restoration is often interdisciplinary, the language we use is sometimes more intuition than institution.

"We define river restoration as assisting the recovery of ecological integrity in a degraded watershed system by reestablishing hydrologic, geomorphic, and ecological processes, and replacing lost, damaged, or compromised biological elements."
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005/2005WR003985.shtml

What all of this is pointing at is a very intuitive concept: health. There are also various ways and tools for evaluating health. But the general concept of ecosystem health is not really in question any more than is health for the individual human. While there are different systems of medicine (Ayurvedic, Naturopathy, Homeopathy, Osteopathy) they all share core values. Healthy bodies, like healthy ecosystems, are easy to recognize, yet hard to define.

A general definition of health might be linked to integrity, or functionality, productivity (of green biomass, AKA carbon sequestration) or sustainability (of soil and water resources). For example, we look at how an ecosystem provides services: how it adds to life and measurable values that rely on life: water, air, recreation, hunting, resource-production.

The whole gamut of ecosystem services, from pollination to producing oxygen, clean water, and climate control. The recent efforts to attach price tags to these services has the important goal of revaluing natural systems in our capitalist economy. In the past the price of a tree was the sale of a tree, but now we can enumerate the costs in that transaction, the detriment to the salmon run, to clean air and erosion control, to endangered species and multiple-use, sustainability, functionality, productivity, sequestration, elasticity (ability to buffer e.g. climate change)

The notion of ecosystem health in the professional sphere is supported by factor analysis. Perhaps, as in other sciences like Quantum Mechanics, there are only equations: a relationship between numbers and variables. You could as well call the primary factor "oogly-boogly" as "impairment" or "health". But I don't think that is quite right, either. The math is logically constructed to conform to and confirm the consensus in the scientific and resource management community.


That consensus is one of the biggest untold intellectual ideas of the last hundred years: that ecosystems, like people, can be intrinsically healthy or unhealthy. The history of the American conservation movement, from the transcendentalists "preserving" sublime landscapes to environmentalists' campaigns to save the whale, eco 'hot spots' of "diversity" (watch out for that Chimera), and now landscape-level Resource Management, charts the emergence of a unified scientific consensus about what constitutes and is necessary for a healthy ecosystem. Thanks to Science, Technology, and Society scholars such as Kuhn, I needn't argue that we've progressed to a final understanding; there are certainly many technical difficulties in applied ecology/restoration, e.g. measuring "productivity". But I do want to argue that there is a progression; scientists understand ecosystem health in more and better ways than we used to, e.g. new wolf recovery plans take into account advances in theoretical genetics...

Unfortunately, public perception hasn't kept pace with the new consensus in Ecology and our society remains, arguably, the most ecologically illiterate ever. But this gap is understandable when you consider the leaps and bounds that ecology has made in the last 50 years. It is as if, up to about 50 years ago, we lacked the germ-theory of disease and today ecologists are embarked on projects that exceed, in scope and application, the Human Genome Project.

Unfortunately, public perception hasn't kept pace with the new consensus in Ecology and our society remains, arguably, the most ecologically illiterate ever. But this gap is understandable when you consider the leaps and bounds that ecology has made in the last 50 years. It is as if, up to about 50 years ago, we lacked the germ-theory of disease and today ecologists are embarked on projects that exceed, in scope and application, the Human Genome Project.

Maybe a better investigation of these concepts than I can provide would do something to alleviate the profound misunderstandings perpetrated and perpetuated by human ignorance on the Earth. It is as if basic laws of physics, such as gravity, were widely unknown and people routinely attempt to violate them. I say attempt, because, when people "cheat" nature, they always end up loosing. (e.g. : tamarix removal without native replanting fails, plowing windbreaks and conservation reserve grasslands creates dustbowl conditions, fire severity increases even as we spend more and more to control it, etc)
As someone astutely pointed out, sustainability isn't just a value, its a law of of physics (conservation of energy). It seems to be a law of healthy ecosystems, too. I'll let you know more as I figure it out. That factor analysis is especially vexing. I can't tell what their null hypothesis was...this discussion pokes at the undefined underbelly of restoration, which is in its infancy as a professional field. Perhaps that wild west character is why I'm attracted to it. I can work with restoration professionals in the field who are every bit as scientific as scientists in the University's' laboratories, without all the latter's emphasis on paradigm jargon and professional status. I'm sorry I can't think of any sources that focus on defining the concept superstructure of health in ecology and restoration.

Trusted Conservtion Organizations

NRDC
EarthJustice
Community Watershed Alliance
Sagebrush Sea Campaign
National Public Lands Grazing Campaign
Nature Conservancy
Wildlands CPR


Local Southwest:
New Mexico Wilderness Alliance
Quivira Coalition
Arizona Conservation Science (Nature Conservancy)
Sonoran Institute
Sky Islands Alliance
Arizona Wilderness Coalition

Limestone Canyon Volunteering with NMWA

"I'm looking forward to the Service Project in Limestone Canyon over the May 16, 17, 18 weekend. This is our second project to this area. We liked it so much last year that I asked the Forest Service for a repeat. It is about 2.5 hours from ABQ to the campsite. Gene Tatum, President of the ABQ Wildlife Federation, Michael Scialdone, 'Scial' of NMWA ,and Dave Heft, FS Biologist, will lay out the project. For Saturday, we will build structures to aid in the restoration of the streambed." "









Why Volunteer?
To those who don't know the joy of volunteer work, who only work for the almighty dollar and take wages as the official readout of society's values and adopt said values wholeheartedly, it can be difficult to explain. But to those who know it, the reasons are manifold. To share a cause with others who are equally free and yet driven, the camaraderie. The freedom of choosing something to care about. And yes, the relief from the obnoxious obsession of needing to accomplish something, that ingrained appreciation for hard work that, whether it be rational, is part of our psychological makeup, entrained, and undeniable. And the payment received for volunteer work is often quite beyond the ability of ordinary remuneration. Access to a 10,000 acre ranch for a couple weeks work. Friends. A sense of ownership of an entire landscape, and an understanding of a way of life and the people who live it. A home.

Old House, New House

OLD





NEW

Backpacking on Mount Ellinor

(Quotes from Jesse Wolf Hardin, Gila, NM)

Even now, enshrouded in a crust of asphalt and concrete, the Earth is wild, willed, directed and empowered by its own inner nature rather than some conglomeration of outward ideas. Gaia is faithful to its natural processes .. those rhythmic patterns of impermanence and change, mounting waves of their own fertile heat, then birth and death of Gaia's varied parts, the flex and pause of Earth's heart muscle pumping new life through arteries in time.

And as integral extensions of Gaia, we too are originally wild: deeply willed, and willful. For safety, certainty n d comfort we may try to deny our wildness, sacrificing our will as we seek shelter in the certain and the tame. Yet in spite of all the artifice and constraint of our times we remain instinctual, visionary beings. We are mirror made of dancing flesh, interterrestrial sensors, activated nerve endings extending from the gaian ganglion into the evershifting universe.

The human spirit dies when it is tamed, and the human species cannot long survive the deliberate unraveling of contextual Nature. Rational mind, government and science cannot alone cure the environmental crisis, which is first and foremost a crisis of value and character. By recognizing perception as the instrumental element in our kind's estrangement and resulting destruction behavior, we have the option of participating in the inevitable cure. The return to balance spoken of by most "primitive" cultures requires a deliberate shifting of the total weight of human perception in the direction of relationship, wildness, and love.

Without a doubt, we ignore the attentions of the animal world at our own peril. One by one the shrinking ponds cease to ring out with the glad croaking songs of frogs. One by one they are hushed by the weight of our presence and by what we, as lovers of this Earth have yet failed to do. The moonless nights may soon be as still as stone. In the face of such a final silence, we should be "all ears": attentive, concerned, and vigorously responsive.

When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego
and when we escape like rats
turning in the cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don't know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in
and passion will make our bodies
taut with power
we shall tamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will
curl up like burnt paper
D.H. Lawrence

The domesticated animals, like the wild, are a set of messages. Living in a world which, at the level of the senses, is heavily man modified, congested, and polluted, the spavined horse, land scalping goat, and pea brained sheep are important signals. The pathos of the over fat pig, white rat stripped of nuance, and dog breeds with their congenital debilitation signals to us an aspect of the human condition.
Paul Shepard

Ten Years' Restoration on the Paradise in Moscow, Idaho

http://www.landandwater.com/features/vol47no2/vol47no2_1.php

Fire Ecology

Review of The WildFire Reader: A Century of Failed Forest Policy. Edited by George Wuerthner.

"...for the latter half of the twentieth century, every decade has been followed by a decade of increased expenditures on fire suppression activities, yet each decade has also been followed by one of increased losses in property and lives." Like the militarized "war on drugs", the equally militarized "war on fire" is doomed to failure, as pointless as shooting into a mirror. And how much more metaphorical can you get: that we are fighting the raging, fiery passion of irrational nature? The more we push, the more nature pushes back. Every "victory" in our mismanaged and ill conceived war on wildfire insures that the next fire will be even bigger and burn even hotter.

But the losses are not only in property and human lives, but in natural environments and diversity. Many authors wax lyrical about the ecosystems that existed before our warping of their fire ecology. Here is an example from my native Southwest:

"In prehistoric times, the Southwest's valleys were filled with perennial grasslands, blending to sparse stands of desert scrub (e.g. pinyon and juniper) in the higher valleys and deciduous desert scrub (e.g. catclaw acacia) in the more southern valleys. Pinyon and juniper woodlands merged to ponderosa pine forest at middle elevations (7,000 to 9,000 feet) and thence into mixed conifer highlands, depending on the latitude of the mountains. Ponderosa pine forest were open parklands of mostly older (100 to 600 year old) trees, with thick grama and bunch grasses at their bases. Those grasses prohibited most pine seeds from taking root, and they carried frequent, widespread low intensity fires that would kill most of the rest of the seedlings. Streams flowed from mountains in relative abundance to the valleys below to join larger rivers like the Gila, Rio Puerco, Rio Grande, Pecos, San Pedro, and San Juan. Those streams and rivers were sheltered by willow and cottonwood riparian forests, where beaver created wetlands critical to subsurface hydrology, and wolves and grizzly bears lurked among the flood nurtured trees.

Today, the Southwest is a land of relatively barren, deeply eroded valleys and overly thick uplands forests. The wold and grizzly bear are gone, the beaver is all but gone, exotic vegetation competes with native vegetation in key environments, and fire has a radically different place in the landscape. Deep human misperceptions about nature have forced dramatic change on the regional ecology."

from Fire in the Southwest: A Historical Context by Tom Ribe in The WildFire Reader: A Century of Failed Forest Policy.

Tom Ribe's description highlights not only how much we have lost biologically from the natural fire adapted ecosystems, but how much we have lost aesthetically. The former forests were beautiful, accurately described as "parklands", while the current forests are referred to as "doghair" thickets. Not exactly inviting. This is a great opportunity for strategic conservation: when natural state and fire safe are also most pleasing to the eye, we have the opportunity to synchronize values among otherwise ideologically disparate voters. For example, the Nature Conservancy's firesafing through thinning for fuelwood program in NE Arizona could and should be rapidly expanded to "treat" most of the critical forest lands in America, perhaps thirty of a hundred million acres. Of course, grazing needs to be reformed as well, and if it could be tied into this matrix of [to usurp the Administration's maligning of the phrase] "healthy forest initiatives".

My only concern about thinning in the Southwest, is that I believe the ecosystems here are often carbon limited, especially in the topsoil, but also in terms of total biomass. There just isn't enough structural diversity to go around. I.e. there is not enough ground cover; downed trees to provide habitat, erosion control, and nutrient sink/sources. This, along with the vastly increased erosion of destabilized soils, is the reason "salvage logging" is one of the worst ideas. If the forest has already burned it should be left to recover, and the regrowth can be thinned at an appropriate time. Ideally, I believe thinning should leave biomass in the ecosystem.

For Gary Snyder's contribution to the volume, see http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma6/smokey.html

Rio Puerco: the Poster Child of Eroded Watersheds

[NOTICE - This Road Not Maintained by New Mexico State Highway Department]

* Frederick Jacson Turner, father of modern American history, wrote persuasively that the frontier (where less than 3 people lived per square mile) defined American life, but that it closed in the 1890's as the country filled up with emigrants and settlers. But the land is emptying out again, as chronicled in Richard Manning's Grassland. The old world ecology and thinking brought by the Anglo settlers is failing in the drylands of the American West and the people are leaving, the roads abandoned. Despite massive government subsidies, the remaining ranchers and farmers have less and less to stand on every year. Populations in most rural counties peaked in the early 1900's and have declined ever since. The exodus that started with the dust bowl has continued unabated, as has the soil erosion and ecological damage.
[Could this be restored to its original ecology of cottonwood/willow bosque and gallery forest?]

Now, The Good News: "This is a search for the unknown...Now the sun is here, and he simply watches the land year by year to see what happens, waiting for the next clues as to what the nature of this place might be...It's like a ratchet in that we take the first turn, then back off and let nature take a turn, as we listen and watch as closely as possible, knowing that we are not so much rebuilding nature in these places as nature is rebuilding us. With each turn of this ratchet, nature reveals a bit more of itself to our science."
[SUN]

"In some real ways, the effort to re-find the landscape, which is the same as the effort to re-attach our lives to the land, is a religious quest, and it makes sense to consider it that way.

[Erosion (so bad it took 2 photos to fit): The bridge on the left used to span the river chanel. This is why the road is closed. Nature fights back. ]

"...it is difficult to imagine what we have learned. Annual topsoil loss to erosion here in some years totals one hundred tons per acre, or an inch of topsoil removed every 1.6 years...the topsoil the grass had built was thought to be so deep as to be inexhaustible..." p.165 from Grassland, Richard Manning.
[Dead willow, killed incidentally with herbicide "friendly fire"]

Mutilated and mutated willows, the taste of heavy metals on the tongue: this place has been sprayed. "Many in federal agencies ignore the connection between livestock grazing and weed invasions. Since they deny the role of livestock grazing, they seldom reduce the number of livestock allowed to graze public lands, even in areas where weeds are a major problem. Agency personnel prefer using herbicides and biocontrol agents to eradicate the weeds rather than trying to prevent the invasion of weeds in the first place." From "Comrades in Harm: Livestock and Exotic Weeds in the Intermountain West", Joy Belsky and Jonathan L Gelbard. in Welfare Ranching, Earth Island Press
[Rio Puerco Watershed: this area could be a State]
John Wesley Powell recommended that states and counties' boundaries in the American West be demarcated based on watersheds, since water is the natural form that power takes on the land...today, as witnesses of the modern West's "Water Wars" can attest, more and more political boundaries are being created or determined by water rights.

The Rio Puerco is oft mentioned as an example par excelance of some of the worst erosion in the United States. Once the "Breadbasket of New Mexico", the Rio Puerco watershed is now given as a common example of the degradation that can befall such formerly productive areas through mismanagement and ecological ignorance. Enhanced rates of erosion on the "dirty river" are the cause and effect of downcutting in the soft alluvium that formerly supported such bountiful harvests. Unstoppable headcuts and devegetated banks, combined with a climate shift that creates more "flashy" events (which, of course, are also caused by devegated uplands that lack competence and capacity to absorb rainfall, leading to sheetflow and immediate runoff that feed back to cause even more erosion...
[Landslide]
The Rio Puerco Management Committee lists several causes of erosion, such as (over) grazing and the placement of the new highway. As you can see from this photo essay, the war between the road and the river is not over yet. However, much of the battle has already been lost, and the country abandoned without roads. The downstream is reachable only by unimproved dirt roads and crosses some of the remotest parts of the state.
[Fenceline showing effects of grazing, on the right, where thickets of sagebrush dominate]

Restoration workshop on the San Francisco River, NM

"Join SIA, NMWA and UGWA along the beautiful San Francisco River just downstream from Reserve, NM where we will be doing restoration in support of UGWA's work on the Gila watershed. Come lend a hand to a very successful US Fish and Wildlife 'Partners for Wildlife' project that began in 1994 and has been going strong since. This is a unique opportunity to see what a southwest desert river is supposed to look like!"
On the weekend of May 2 the "Tres Alianzas" (Sky Island Alliance - SIA, New Mexico Wilderness Alliance - NMWA, Upper Gila Watershed Association - UGWA) convened on the Rio San Francisco in Catron County, New Mexico, to discuss and implement permaculture restoration projects. Break-out sessions included Road Improvement, Induced Meandering, Acequias and Terracing, Firesafing, Forensic Ecology, and Philosophy of Human/Nature Interactions.

The San Francisco flows through the hill country of west-central New Mexico. All along the Mogollon Rim, where the Blue, Pueblo, Gila and San Francisco cut deep canyons amid vast grassy meadows, juniper, oak, and pinon grade to parks of stately ponderosa, pillars of the revolving cosmos.

# In this case, an oak (Quercus spp), alligator juniper and pinon pine (Pinus edulus) compete under changing conditions - locked in a slow dance - what we see here is a single frame of a vast motion picture of ecological succession. Can we, from this single frame, determine the past and the trajectory of future succession?
It seems the juniper, because of grazing and, somewhat consequently, lack of natural fire, grew up under and around the old oak. But now, just at the height of its glory, a usurper, the pinon, has broken through the juniper to overreach the triumvirate.
How can we influence this succession to firesafe a Southwest woodland. Clearing brush to rush succession -- but what to cut? SW forests are actually carbon-limited: e.g. not enough ground cover, downed trees provide habitat, erosion control, and direct nutrient infusion. It is foolish to try to "speed" succession by salvage logging, when that dead and downed timber is exactly what the forest needs to recover.

# In this case a packrat midden is also aiding succession, but not in the direction we would like: a thicket of woody perennials and wildflowers has grown up. Packrats, beavers, ants, and humans: Gardeners. A life of wandering and dispersing seed (wildcrafting).

All species are gardeners in that they tend to produce better habitat for other species; some produce better habitat for themselves, e.g. "keystone" predators and builders. Some degrade habitat for themselves and others, e.g. parasites. Humans are sometimes selfish enough to create habitat only for themselves, at the expense of others. So: are we also a weed, doomed to succession by other, more mature, species? Agents of disturbance. CF: People move like predators. Science News. Davide Castelvecchi. March 22, 2008; Vol. 173, No.12, p.190.

#In this case, a natural log jam has noticeably raised the floodplain of this small ephemeral creek, a tributary of the Pueblo River. Similar structures can also be built to slow erosion and create ephemeral pools and irrigate fields. These beneficial effects are lost to watersheds that experience "salvage logging".

# In this case second growth overshadows the downed logs of old growth, although there remain a few old growth juniper and oak.
The fallen timber all has rootballs, and Craig suggested we are looking at the aftermath of an old (50+ years ago) stand-replacement wildfire. Type change: the dominant pinon and juniper used to be understory to ponderosa. Without the ponderosa a new, drier ecotype predominates.

But even if we do know what it used to look like, that doesn't mean we know how to get back to that state. Restoration is historical, while replacement, a more neutral term, simply denotes a succession from one ecotype to another. State transition models (STMs) (cite article in Quivira) can be developed to implement flow-chart style managed succession, but such model are often idiosyncratic (to variables e.g. aspect, slope, microclimate in general) and unavailable to the particular ecosystem of interest.

These notes end with more questions than answers, more reflection than action. Out of all the things we can do to help nature heal, which is the longest lever? We have only a limited amount of muscle and money to bring to the task. And nature will heal by itself. But between the extremes of doing nothing and doing everything lies efficiency, a laser drawing out the path of life. I think now, for me, is a time of reflection. Walking with tools in the hand yet not using them. Such constant motion there now must need be a time of stillness.