Lenora Curtin Wetlands in Winter

On the Importance of Meandering

Streams love to meander for reasons that are simple to understand yet profound to ponder. When a stream meanders around a bend the outside water must travel faster than the water on the inside of the curve. This increased speed leads to increased erosion and the bend becomes wider. As the bends become wider the overall length of the stream increases. Also, because the stream is eroding the landform more evenly, the overall grade is reduced and the water slows down. This decreased speed combined with increased length vastly alters the hydrological characteristics of the watershed, contributing to aquifer replenishment and filtering.

Changes in the Mississippi river's meanders:Meanders are a good thing that happen naturally. Sometime humans want to help the process along, especially for streams that have downcut and linearized (straightened). Water has momentum and will bounce off an oblique line of in-stream rocks, known as a vane, toward the opposite bank, starting an oscillation that can become a full-fledged meander.
Vane closeup showing rocks, stabalizing posts, and planted willow:
Several parallel vanes create an induced meander:
The banks that form behind vanes are first accretions of large boulders, then smaller rocks, and then small particles, all stacked somewhat like oranges at the supermarket. Because of the gradient of particle dimension, these banks act to soak up moisture from the stream through capillary action and are therefore great places to plant trees.
The old channel can still be seen seeping out from under the bank on the right while the new induced meander flows around to the left.:
Another view of the old channel seep (now on the left) and the new channel (on the right) flowing into a pond:
A dam can create ponding, which also slows water. The ratio of riffles to still water is an important measure of hydrological health, and for streams of this size and location the ratio should be close to 1:1. Even large rivers should often have this ratio; for example, the Columbia river, before it was artificially dammed and its watershed logged, held vast log jams stretching from bank to bank creating huge lakes. The easiest and most natural way to create ponding is with beavers, a keystone species that create habitat for hundreds of other species.

Unfortunately, there is not enough vegetation to support a beaver colony on Las Huertas. Creating an artificial pond with a wicker weir backed by an infill dam is a good short-term solution.
Eventually the dam will fill in with sediment, raising the stream bed and creating good streamside habitat. At present the pond helps raise the water table as well as store surface and subsurface water. The weight of the water in the pond pushes water further into the alluvium around the dam, supporting our revegetation project. Eventually there will be enough trees to support beavers and a self-sustaining ecological-hydrological system.

Another way to create ponding (and slow water) is a Zuni Bowl, an in-stream depression lined with rocks. It is named in honor of the Pueblo Indians in the Southwest who invented many of these water-control structures hundreds of years ago.
Slowing water is one way of slowing erosion. Another is stabilizing slopes.

The slope pictured below is divided into two regimes. The lower pitch is an equilibrium arrangements of small particles. This slope is also known as the angle-of-repose. The upper pitch is a nearly vertical cliff where disturbances can cause catestrophic failures.
The slope pictured below is composed of alternating regimes of angle-of-repose and cliffs. The slope erodes from the bottom and then unstable slopes just above that collapse, and so on. The progression of erosion from bottom to top is an example of effects moving "upstream": erosion at the mouth of the river affect the headwaters even though water only flows downstream. Even though stones can only roll downhill, their downhill absence propagates uphill to affect the perch of still-higher stones. Thus , what happens in a valley can determine the shape and slope of the mountains around it. By slowing erosion here we determine the shape of mountains.

A plant's roots can often form a barrier to the progression of erosion by holding together soil in a steeper slope. However, unless the root causes of erosion are addressed (e.g. with vanes) eventually soil will be washed away from the roots and/or the entire plant will be undercut.
A combination of engineered solutions and revegetation can work together synergistically to slow erosion. Indeed, since water velocity is determined by slope, decreased erosion is itself responsible for slowing water and hence slowing further erosion. The key to influencing such feedback systems is knowing where to interfere. Often restorationists find themselves faced with the bemusing problem of wanting to work simultaneously both downstream and upstream of the target stretch, asking themselves the question, "does the water above push the water below or does the water below pull the water above"?

Financial Revolution

Revolution?
Pull with every ounce and fiber --total war-- if monkey wrenches or bazookas worked, we'd have them...the criterion for our Revolution is Sustainability. All extractive industries, premised as they are on destruction, are dead ends. Limitless growth within limited resources is illogical and unsustainable.

“Two paths lie before us. One leads to death, the other to life. If we choose the first path… we in effect become allies of death, and in everything we do our attachment to life will weaken; our vision, blinded to the abyss that has opened at our feet, will dim and grow confused; our will discouraged by the thought of trying to build on such a precarious foundation anything that is meant to last, will slacken; and we will sink into stupefication, as though we were gradually weaning ourselves from life in preparation for the end.

"On the other hand, if we reject our doom, and bend our efforts toward survival...then the anesthetic fog will lift;our vision, no longer straining not to see the obvious, will sharpen; our will, finding secure ground to build on,will be restored; and we will take full and clear possession of life again. One day- and it is hard to believe that it will not be soon- we will make our choice.”
Jonathan Schell - The Fate of the Earth

Post-Industrial
Their economic arguments are no longer valid. "Those who make it an us-against-them problem insure that it is an insolvable problem." But, since they are invested in self-perpetuating self-interest, they will fight against us, the people. So we will fight back. But ours is NOT a negative vision: we are working toward a post-industrial world where sustainable industries can grow to replace the pirate corporations.

Citizens have a responsibility to steer capital to create wealth sustainably. Part of this is understanding the nature of wealth; wealth differently defined from the outdated GDP measures of the economists. It is not money. It is not more asthma, cancer, and high blood pressure. It is understanding; understanding that wilderness has more value than consumption, that local organic food is net-cheaper than processed...We are motivated by this vision that is more than logic. It is passion that keeps us awake at night.

Post-Capitalist?
Investing in mutual funds and stocks of large corporations is not Honorable or Responsible. Handing over your accumulated money, which is time and power, to the corporations so that they can spend it for you -- doesn't it smack of feudalism?? Venture capital is usually OK, because it is usually administered personally. Also, VC investment returns are based on actual dividends (i.e. profits) as opposed to stocks, which are only really a glorified casino whose expected payouts are a shell game of speculation not directly tied to any real dividend. Real Estate is also a good investment, for the same reasons of promoting, rather than abnegating, personal responsibility.

I'm not arguing for a return to the gold standard, or trying to repeal the law of comparative advantage, but do understand what is real and what isn't. Hold onto tangibles, especially property...or better yet, don't make any money to begin with. "All money, in whatever form, should be put into land conservation." To really invest in the future, invest in preservation of our vital natural heritage that provides the fresh air we breath and the clean water we drink. The ultimate revolution is understanding what is important.

We Are What We Eat

Quality of Light

There is something about the quality of light in New Mexico, its extraordinary luminosity. Its easy to see what the artists see: quotidian light that washes away the mundane, hundred-mile color that you can feel in the pit of your stomach.

Long Walk Home. Ed Sandoval. Oil. From Southwest Art magazine.


Long Walk Home. Conor Flynn. Photograph.

Santa Fe River Mesa Overlook Petroglyphs

In a recent trip to the Santa Fe River jobsite I was lucky enough to take a side-trip through the horizontal snow up onto the low mesa overlooking La Cienega and Arroyo Calabasas. There, in the fragrant pollinating juniper there are hundreds of classic Pueblo petroglyphs. Petroglyphs are distinguished from pictographs because they are pecked into the desert varnish of large granite boulders to reveal the lighter rock underneath. Their age can sometimes be determined by the extinct of varnish re-growth. These petroglyphs are at least serveral hundred years old. Furthermore, the amount of work required to hammer away detailed images is unlikely to be tolerated by modern day copycats.


Shaman/Huntress Female (note characteristic vagina)

Kokopelli (with prominent archaic jackrabbit ear and separate flute/penis)


Lizard (probably not a turtle due to lack of stereotypical shell markings)


I did not find any kachinas (faces). Here is a comparison of common Kachina elements from Puerco Ruin (Petrified Forest National Park) and vicinity. a-c Antelope or deer kachinas; d-e solstice kachines; f-h, k-u unknown types; i-j Mudheads; v-x possible kachines; y-ii ogre kachinas.

Accommodating the Heart of the Land

Heart of the Land (1994, Vintage Books) collects 30 essays by some of the greatest living writers. The essays document their responses as they travel to The Nature Conservancy's "Last Great Places" in the U.S. and Mexico. This essay documents my response.

Barry Lopez foreshadows many of the 30 answers as he attempts to understand the question:

"We are in a time of wakefulness about our relations with the land, reacting to an inattentive and sometimes abusive human past; each one of us, awakening, understands this shift of consciousness and the dilemmas it presents somewhat differently. And, whatever our efforts, they are all shot through...with enduring paradox and moral complexity....

"...if we are incapable of addressing these conundrums, which call on the courage inherent in abiding love, and upon social justice, then land conservation in our era will prove to have been only a fashion...

"...if our endeavor--the protection of natures other than our own--is to succeed, it will require more than mind and hand can bear....It will require that we reimagine our lives."
Terry Tempest Williams probes Lopez's "courage in acknowledging imperialized landscapes of the past for the battered remnants they are" by examining the psychological rift that opens in ourselves when we acknowledge the one we have created in Nature; "we are a tribe of fractured individuals who can now only celebrate remnants of wilderness". She argues that we must heal our souls in order to heal nature, but she quotes D.H. Lawrence to argue that, ironically, we must first embrace nature in order to heal our souls.

"What a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the magical connection of the solstice and equinox...We are bleeding at the roots"

From Moab Utah, on Winter solstice Williams is transported by the Nature Conservancy's preserve toward a new era of warmth and light. However,in contraposition, many of the authors reach back to their childhood traditions in mourning for what has already been lost. Rick Bass eulogizes the Texas hill country he knew as a youth and the holism of wilderness there that even, especially, children understood. He asks, "Must we break everything that is special to us, or sacred--unknown, and holy...What happens to us when all the sacred, all the whole is gone..." and wonders whether the only real, lasting ownership is through love: "it was ours because we loved it." Carl Hiaasen ponders why we still love degraded landscapes, or, love them even more; "why, after all, does one sit with a dying relative?"
Many of these writers find strength and courage in the slivers of preserved land, almost as if the Nature Conservancy had miraculously managed to save slivers of their own childhood memories. Others ponder the cause of the commonplace destruction of nature outside of select wilderness preserves. Joel Achenback asks whether our relation to land is really as stewards (as we tend to believe), or "perhaps the ultimate problem with the steward or farmer paradigms is that they imply that humans are apart from nature, superior to it, above it....Maybe that's why I sort of like the cancer model--because it is internal, part of the host. Because it destroys in a way that seems so senseless."
James Welch criticizes the attitude of farmers who still "feel it is their God-given right to dominate their particular landscapes." Thomas McGuane quotes Mike Lawson, fly-shop operator and outfitter at Last Chance on the Henry's Fork, ID, "If [the ranchers] don't learn to negotiate and compromise they're going to lose it all." William Kittredge, a former rancher himself, advises, "the people in my old homeland...[need to] work out some accommodation..." Teresa Jordan quotes Harvey Payne, the Nature Conservancy director of Tallgrass Prarie Preserve, OK, "On this preserve" he says with sadness rather than hubris "we play God." Jordan concludes that we believed "that the earth should bend to our will. Science made us arrogant; now, as we begin to understand the ways in which we have damaged the systems that sustain us, it is making us humble."
Gary Paul Nabhan points out that it is precisely the unpredictability and hence unmanageability of wilderness that marks it as wilderness. It can never be controlled; instead, it is the history of raw force, defiant of our will, that teaches us. But, for practical reasons, (if for no other reason) many farmers and ranchers will never come around to this conception of our place in the land. Indeed, as Payne admits, management, whether for cows, corn, or wildlife, forces us to attempt control.Philip Caputo also sees pedagogy in wilderness, but he suggests we look at microcosms such as Martha's Vineyard for proof if "we and our works can reach an accommodation with those of God." That accommodation, he finds, embodies basic contradictions within ourselves both as "romantics awed and enchanted" and "conquerors roused to possess and exploit". On Martha's Vineyard he finds wilderness, but "it is a tight little place on a tight little island" with, ironically, little room for either exploitation or enchantment. Bill McKibben celebrates the fractured landscape and the accommodation of people in the Adirondacks wilderness in upstate New York, "a wilderness with room for people." He thinks we should look to the Adirondacks as an experiment in managing sustainability. McKibben says of the Adirondacks wilderness, "this is what the world used to look like", but Caputo fears that all wilderness will someday tend toward "a tight little place" like Martha's Vineyard.
Heart of the Land is by far the best travel writing I've read and adds at least 30 places to my ever-growing list of places to visit. To paraphrase Barry Lopez, "the mere existence of such [places]...pulls us beyond ourselves."

This essay practically wrote itself thanks to Barry Lopez's ingenious ordering of the authors by common musings. I knew this was one of the 'Last Great Books' when I saw the list of writers, which includes many not mentioned above, such as Barbara Kingsolver, Peter Matthiessen, and Paul Theroux. But it is much bigger even than its pieces. It is a whole landscape, to quote Wallace Stegner from the frontispiece, a "geography of hope" .

Save Wolves from Federal Incompetence

Letter to the Editor:

The recent admission by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that only 29 gray wolves survive in Arizona (plus 23 in New Mexico) comes at the end of a multi-million dollar 10-year recovery effort. As a highly endangered species, our wolves, like all threatened animals in this great country, were afforded protection under the Endangered Species Act. But, instead of protecting the wolves as is their mandate, Fish and Wildlife continues to trap and kill the last remaining wolves in the Southwest.

Rather than listing the wolf population as endangered, Fish and Wildlife has, through a bureaucratic loophole, listed our wolves as an "experimental population" in the wild. This wordplay allows the government to exterminate wolves that venture outside of arbitrary wilderness release areas, as long as "backup" wolves are bred in captivity. Instead of letting mother nature restore the wolf for free, we pay millions of dollars to breed, release, and then kill wolves in an absurd parody of nature.

A more cynical citizen might presume political malfeasance in creating a "recovery plan" that was designed to fail. But I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt to our hardworking elected officials and presume that this situation is simply the result of one hand not knowing what the other is doing. The sheer incompetence, not to mention futile waste of taxpayer dollars, of this "experiment" is outrageous...with such low population levels the Southwest's gray wolf is poised to slip through a bureaucratic loophole into oblivion. If we wish to allow the wolf to survive we cannot allow the continued incompetence of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Dead Flowers and the Giant Juicer

As someone who's known the value of compost, I can appreciate the value of detritus in nature, especially in the desert where organic carbon is often the limiting factor in vegetative growth.
Are plants worth more dead or alive? Where does all the detritus go? Why do some ecosystems produce more dead standing matter than others? What does this say about ecosystem health or productivity? To answer these and many other fascinating ecological conundrums, ecologists would like to measure and compare the efficiency of different systems. Efficiency is conceived as the ratio of production (new tissue) to biomass (existing tissue). But,

"...there is another way of looking at the figures of productivity in relation to biomass. This is to say that biomass as we define it is a quite unrealistic way of measuring the standing crop of a community. For example, is it justifiable to treat the dead wood and bark of a tree as if they were in any direct way causally determining the rate at which that tree makes new dry matter (or fixes energy?) Nearly all the differences in community productivity that we see between community types arise because we choose to define biomass in this way. It might be much more sensible to define biomass in terms of weight of living tissue (if we could find a way to measure it)." p.720 Ecology. Begon, Harper, and Townsend.


To better compare measures of productivity the authors want to separate structural and detritus from actual living tissue. I suggest using a Giant Juicer (GJ) to strain out all the structural fibers...of course, their proposal begs the question of what it means to be "living" versus nonliving, because to measure dry weight they would evaporate the juice, leaving, at the bare minimum, most of the intracellular structural components. Are proteins alive? Maybe they should just measure the weight of DNA and RNA?


Measuring an accurate ratio of production to biomass (P:B) is useful for figuring out all kinds of stuff, e.g. how ecological succession affects productivity and whether natives or invasives sequester more carbon (i.e. are more productive). NB: since cropland productivity has been measured at utilizing nearly 10% of the available solar flux it is certain that native flora are usually suboptimal. (Limiting nutrients are the cause of suboptimal production.) But that judgement of "suboptimal" might only point to a flaw in our measurements: perhaps a long-term measure of the sustainable productivity would yield different results (organic farming?)...or perhaps this simply reiterates the hope of the Panglossian Paradigm in ecology, that natural systems are somehow "better" than man-made systems. Indeed, this does appear to be part of the assumptions of Permaculture (taking natural ecosystems as the model for our own human habitats).

It does seem that most living organisms in natural ecosystems create more habitat for other organisms simply as a side-effect of building their own tissues (parasites, detrivores) and homes (e.g. burrows, beaver dams). Humans appear to be the glaring exception to this logic, in that we more frequently destroy habitat (antibiotics, monocultures, cities) than create it.


But all these speculations must remain entirely philosophical and equivocal until my Giant Juicer can provide quantitative certainty...

La Jencia Documentation

[Overview map of La Jencia jobsite. The flow is from bottom (South) to top (North).]

Although La Jencia watershed is subject to ephemeral flooding events, the creek itself is perennial from springs ~100m upstream of our jobsite to its confluence with the Rio Salado. There is ample evidence that this system has downcut substantially in recent years. In fact, current GoogleEarth satellite photos record a markedly different channel from the current one. The older channel was probably active within the last two years.
[Blue marks the channel recorded from GoogleEarth; Red marks the approximate course of the new channel. Note the linearization of the former meanders. #7 denotes the position of the next photo.]

On the ground it is obvious that this new channel is 3-5 feet lower than the previous channel/floodplain.
[Blue denotes approximate position of former channel; Red denotes current channel. The wetlands/spring in the bottom of the photo confirms continued subsurface flow along the old meanders. The bank with machinery on it is several feet above the new bankfull channel.]

Due to the lack of on-site building materials and other reasons, our project does not directly address the channelization and downcutting but instead attempts an oblique approach to these hydrogeomorphic issues; by suppling more vegetation to slow and absorb large flow events we can limit further erosion as well as build up biomaterial that could someday provide substrate to dam, sediment, and eventually reconnect La Jencia with its floodplain.
[Upper La Jencia 2008 Jobsite.]
[Lower La Jencia 2008 Jobsite.]

We planted ~700 cottonwood and a few thousand willow poles along both sides of the channel for approximately 1/2 kilometer above the road crossing. Light green along stream banks is willow, dark green denotes cottonwoods. This is a crude approximation to give some idea of the size and location of treated areas.
[Overview map with Key to documentary photographs. ]

Click on the photo above to enlarge it enough to see numbers marking the location and direction of each of the post-planting photographs] that follow:
[photo #0]
[photo #1]
[#2]
[#3]
[#4][photo #5]
[#6]
[#7]
Farewell, La Jencia.