In Honor of Easter....an Egg Suitcase

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The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains by Dan Flores. I disagree with the assertion that, just because aboriginal hunter-gatherer societies didn't practice (efficient) resource management or population control, aboriginal peoples share our modern day ecological failings. For, despite the causes of the Pleistocene extinctions, it does appear that Native Americans lived in North America for 12,000 years without bumping off many, or even any, of their animal neighbors (an achievement we moderns seem unlikely to match). Flores argues that the disparity in environmental damage between Moderns and aboriginals is merely one of degree, and that somehow this ecological disharmony is hardwired into the 'carnivorous, clan and kin-centered primate brain'. I would like to point out that all animals create or accumulate additional or enhanced habitat for their neighbors. Modern humans, not hunter-gatherers, are the only exception to this rule, with out urban deserts and suburban shopping centers. Aboriginal peoples, as long as they utilized local resources, invariably created more habitat and enhanced ecologies. Of course, the proof of this assertion is (hundreds of?) years of back-breaking ecological fieldwork measuring productivity and species richness.

The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples What's the difference between centripetal and centrifugal evolution? Despite needing better editing and a careful cross-checking of important numbers (pre-1492 population of the Americas anyone?), this is an inspiring book with lots of grist for the mental mill. In the interest of Big Ideas this book (written at Harvard don't you know) plays loose and easy with facts and rhetoric, often glossing important points and proclaiming rather than analyzing. But the Big Ideas are worth it! The parallel between the 300 year heyday and collapse of Clovis culture (11,000BC-12,700BC) and the 300-year opening of the American frontier (1580AD -1880 AD), the influence that growing weeds (succesional colonizers) as crops had on creating r-selected (weedy) society, the placing in context of our own extinction event with the last 100 million years of extinction and colonization events...the analysis and structure are a bit thin but the gist is pure gold...plus hearing an Aussie psychoanalyze America is priceless. I can't wait to read his parallel account of Australia's last 300 million years, "The Future Eaters." Flanery asks whether a "nation so conceived in liberty can long endure" and compares the mindset of "liberty" with that of a weed (which most of our crops are) that experiences "release" in a new environment before adaptation sets in. When will Americans adapt to America and become truly native? Maybe once we've all read this book... It is only at the end of the book that we discover how all this history answers Aldo Leopold's assertion that we must "know what the world was like" in order to save the environment. Flanery comes out strongly in favor of restoring parts of America to pre-Clovis (pre-human, approximately 13,000 years ago) conditions. By reintroducing extirpated animals as well as analogs or homologs of extinct animals, he hopes to restore America to "rival Africa" in terms of large mammal diversity, as well as creating balanced and sustainable ecosystems. Its amazing to think that where we live used to look like the Serengeti, or the Costa Rican rainforest. But, according to Flanery, we still have the choice to put things back how they were. Wolf reintroduction anyone?

Santa Fe: Land of the Prius and Suburu

How long after sunset does the Green Flash occur?

Have you seen the shimmering ghost clouds that effervesce in the black sky an hour or more after sunset?

Some say they are a hundred, a thousand miles up.

The sky definitely shades in every color of the rainbow, red sunsets fade to green and then to blue and black.

Stars cover more than their 180 degree share of the heavens.

The Jemez and the Ortiz and the Sandia and the Sangre de Cristo.

The mountains here create their own weather; each ranch has its own weather.

Quiet city of polite dogs and narrow walled streets; enclosed or exclosed? You can't tell if you're inside or outside the brown adobe walls.
The billboards all advertise watches and jewelry, while cows chew cholla for miles around.
In Santa Fe.

Wild Beings

The dogs catch a jackrabbit
that is slow and heavy with
dog-saliva now.

I leap across ground shouting
like a crazyman growl and
six dogs drop the blinking
grey fur. The rabbit stares
at me and I don't know if he
is flying back to that other
place where rabbits run like
air.

Sometimes it takes me awhile
to become one with the land.

* * *

Sometimes the sameness of my
days feels like the dry wind over
brittle rabbit-bush and stiff
cacti.
Again sun rises hot and high
hungry for moisture from my
open mouth. Dry wind sucks
my wet insides out like a
jackrabbit running to dust
over miles of creaking earth.

I make footprints blown back
into formless dust almost be-
fore I pass.
I walk towards horizon getting
no closer to how bones lying
white and silent sing with
wind. I see change in mountains
riverbeds arroyos see the
crumbling beauty of time-nibbled
bones and I pause and know
change is eternity.

For twenty-five years I walk
this same way one foot at a
time this sameness quenching
thirst like wind drying a wet
mouth. There is nothing but
this thin shell of land over
my heart a heart like a tired
jackrabbit changing to wind
over bone.

[adapted from _____________]
--------------------------

Gratitude to Wild Beings, our brothers and sisters, teaching secrets, freedoms, and ways; who share with us their milk; self-complete, brave, and aware.
in our minds so be it.

Gary Snyder Prayer for the Great Family

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Pygmy Owl

You know how strong
fate can be, but can you imagine
the sharp stab of the talons
to the back of your head?

The pygmy owl drops on a steep angle
a collision course with the ground
wings splayed
like an angel.

It falls with fervor
upon Mouse
one of the world's warm breathers
groceries in a grey sleeve of fur.

Did you not think
the same could happen to you?
And is it any different
than love?

The owl pulls hard
tearing at tissue and tendon
it waves the tiny carcass around
like a victory banner.

Charles Finn

Welcome to Rio Puerco

The Rio Puerco Preserve is located approximately 10 miles South of Cuba, NM. Marion Butte is visible in the background.

The river has deeply downcut because of erosion. There is not much rock in this valley alluvium and, with overgrazing, the plant life has not been able to hold together the soil. It is estimated that the Puerco is responsible for 50% of the silt flowing into the Rio Grande. Marion Butte in the background again.

In many places there is not enough vegetative seed source to provide ground cover.

Although there is some grass growing, and at least one large cottonwood remains.
So I decided to climb Marion butte for a better view. There was a storm brewing, however.
Under the dark clouds New Mexico's colors showed stronger.
There was something of a stairway leading up the Butte.
On top of the peak I found a thriving pack rat nest, layers of petrified wood, scarified pinyon, and an interesting insect living among the dry leaves of the mountain willow. Sunset looking west over Mesa Portales:
I walked back to camp under the gathering twilight, with one last look at Marion Butte, who watches with eternal vigilence over the Preserve.

Homage

If this sure animal approaching us
from a different direction had our kind
of consciousness, he’d drag us around
in his wake. But to the animal, his being
is infinite, incomprehensible, and blind
to his condition, pure, like his outward gaze.
And where we see the future, he sees
all, himself in all, and whole forever.

And yet the weight and care of one great sadness
lies on this warm and watching creature.
Because what often overwhelms us
Also clings to him — the memory
that what we so strive for now may have been
nearer, truer, and its attachment to us
infinitely tender, once. Here all is distance,
there it was breath. After that first home,
the second seems drafty and a hybrid.

excerpt from The Eighth Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke. Translation by ___________(?)

Foreshadowing the Puerco River

I feel like we're going off to war. Moving equipment, each day more preparation that builds on the gear and supplies and tools we've already shuffled and hauled and schlepped all over the landscape. Each step requires previous and prepares further. This is my third tour: a whole new river flowing through a new watershed held in the lap of new mountains, mesas, and wild country: big water, thickets, and quicksand. A vast brown landscape that requires new color words: burnt umber, ochre, chocolate, burgundy. New growth shows green around the edges.

To get to our encampment you take the exit for Placitas, but go west up the long slow slope of Rio Grande alluvium, while the hills of the Jemez slowly embrace you, and you wind between redrock mesas with deep canyons and cliffs. Onto the Rez, past White Mesa's warm pastels, past the arroyos full of cold salt, unnaturally blighted. Past Zia pueblo, past the dirt parking lot full of cars and people, lit by the neon LOVE RANCH sign, past San Ysidro. Into dark silence, past Cabezon Peak, solitary, unmistakable, dominating the first view (looking South) into the Puerco valley.

Puerco; an ugly name that changed the place to fit it. This used to be the "breadbasket of New Mexico", before the 1800's chewed it to dust, until it had nothing left to give, and it was abandoned... it had served as the hearth and heart of the Anasazi pueblo people, whose empire encompassed the thousand-roomed ruins at Chaco, still abandonded and brooding in a valley to the Northwest above the Puerco river.

You will find me standing there, breathing into the spaces, planting trees.

Insight of Landscape Architecture

To see placement, form, identity as intentional.

Give weight to each concrete arrangement of roots-on-rocks, moss&waterfall, blooming flowers and looming trees.

To swim in these origami arrangements of order without order: perfect, designed for some terrible purpose, full of trapdoors and hidden keys, rooms too big and too small and just right for humans.
To witness and accept and honor both what is done at the mercy of nature (man-made) and what is nature-made.

Jobsite: Las Huertas

Las Huertas drains the northwestern Sandia Mountains with what once was perennial flow. Today, the major environmental impacts are pollution from exurban septic tanks and ephemeralized flow diluted by diversion from over-allocated acequias (drainage ditches).
This project, located between Placitas and Tecolote, had already encompassed several years of trial and error hydrogeomorphology restoration and our replanting served to expedite revegetation and create a seed-source for further natural restoration.
Overview map showing streambed changes within the floodplane. Originally, the stream flowed along the blue meander, probably with smaller meanders superimposed on it, as determined by predicted measures of sinuosity. CF Rosgen Stream Classifications. Then, a hundred-year flood (caused by excessive volume and resulting in an overall increase in the average particle size), linearized (straightened meanders) Las Huertas into the newer, red channel. Purple denotes overlap of the old and new channels; note the small overlap and large differences, especially in total length.
Restoration work commenced several years ago when Bill Zeedyk and Steve Carson (Zeedyk Ecological Consulting LLC) diverted the stream from the red segments with large earthen dams (tan). They embellished the resulting channel (blue, again) with in-stream meanders and pools (brown structures).
To further stabilize the new channel and to speed up natural recolonization rates we planted approximately 300 trees on several banks over a 200 meter stretch of the river. This was a tight space to work in, and this map shows that by being dense and detailed. Please click the map for a larger view.
To add to our difficulties, the aforementioned cobble size made drilling difficult. I asked Peter about his secret for getting the auger through the cobbles, avoiding boulders and finding water. He clasped his hands in prayer and said “Good Earth, we're trying to do right by you, may we please put a cottonwood here?” He was the best among us this week, drilling more holes and lifting more rock, working harder than anybody, although he's lived beyond the half century mark when he never thought he'd make it out of his teens (or twenties). He and the rest of our gang – rock climbers and outward bound instructors – drive every day up and down the Rio Grande, the heart (carotid artery?) of New Mexico, a short stretch of the Camino Real whose terminus, Santa Fe, is also our own..

Las Huertas Jobsite Pages:

Before and After Photos
In-stream engineering
Landscape Architecture

Jobsite Las Huertas Before and After

These pairs of before-and-after photographs (respectively) are arranged from upstream to downstream.



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