2009 Stream Team with Wild Earth Guardians

"Each spring WildEarth Guardians' members, supporters and volunteers become Stream Team Activists by gathering pledges and planting trees for each pledge. Our Stream Team planting days, held throughout New Mexico and Arizona, are a great way to get your hands dirty for the sake of the environment and re-connect to the wild rivers that sustain us all. Each event is a breathtaking display of what can happen when we come together to heal once-degraded waterways. At the beginning of the day, a somewhat barren landscapes lays before us. A few hours later in the afternoon, the area is a forest of newly-planted native trees..."

2009 Stream Team Planting Schedule:

La Jencia Restoration Day
Saturday, March 7, 10am-3pm
Near Socorro, NM

Rio Puerco Tree Planting Days
Friday and Saturday, March 27-28, 10am-3pm
Near Cuba, NM

San Marcos Tree Planting Day
Saturday, April 4, 10am-3pm
Near Santa Fe, NM

Santa Fe River Tree Planting Day
Saturday, April 18, 10am-3pm
in Santa Fe, NM

Bluewater Creek Tree Planting Days
Friday and Saturday, May 1-2, 10am-3pm
Near Grants, NM

Upper Rio Grande Headwaters: Blanca Wetlands

More photos.

Colorado Natural Heritage Program (CNHP)

"For in the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create but by what we refuse to destroy." Every state in the U.S. has a Natural Heritage Program (NHP) to comprehensively and systematically monitor biological diversity.
Colorado's NHP GIS computer models select points of special interest based on aerial and satellite imagery. We follow GPS maps to the sample point,
lay out plots to focus our attention at different scales from the microscopic to the landscape.,
collect plant specimens and soil samples as well as analyze ecosystem processes and integrity:
Long summer days in the field.

Jobsite Bluewater

Today is National Arbor Day on the Rio Puerco

If we are marked to die, we are enow
To do our country loss, and if to live,

The fewer men, the greater share of honor.
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is called National Arbor Day.
He that outlives this day and comes safe home
Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is named
And rouse him at the name of Arbor.

He that shall live this day and see old age
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors
And say, "Tomorrow is National Arbor."
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say "These wounds I had on Arbor Day."

Old men forget, yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names
Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered;
This story shall the good man teach his son.

And gentlemen in Graduate school now abed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That planted with us upon National Arbor Day.

What are we doing out here? II: Planting Natives.

The grocery store girls think its glamorous to plant trees and save the planet. But Why? How?

Poetic Interlude: Chainsaw Frenzy
--
yellin
yeah! alright! yeah!
carry the dead and dying
on our shoulders

rough, quick surgery
on our knees

load em quick onto the truck

--

During the winter, when the trees are hibernating, we cut branches and stems and soak the poles for two weeks to two months. We lop off most of the branches so the tree puts less energy into leafing out and more energy into its roots. Then we take them to a faraway river, a river where no trees grow. We build roads and drill holes and plant the poles and hope they grow into trees. The native plants grow and provide habitat for animals and other plants. They provide organic debris and obstructions that can secure banks while inducing meanders (through, e.g. beaver dams or natural log jams). Healthy natives outcompete invasive alien species.

So that's who we are: we plant trees. Silviculturalists. Farmers with an aesthetic flair. Landscape architects. (link) But why? Why toil in the mud and in the dust. In the middle of nowhere, gripping trees with white knuckles over swirling swift water and gasping quicksand. Why all the blood, sweat, and cussing?

One could enumerate the various rationales for tree planting and still end with the existential answer: that's just who we are. Basically, our specialty is planting native trees (like willow and cottonwood) along rivers where they used to grow, but were cut down and people let too many cows eat all the young ones so that it has come to the point where mother nature cannot regenerating autonomously (Ecosystem Collapse). Someone has to step in and plant the next generation...nature is broken and can't fix itself.

But we aren't restoring nature to full health. We're just planting trees, and its important to note that in a sense we are not restoring a functioning healthy ecosystem. Our restored ecosystem is NOT sustainable without humans, We're the immune cells of the ecosystem, dispatched to patch up the holes in the fabric of the circle of life. What holes? The absence of wolves, for one. We have to build tall fences, not just to keep out the nonnative cows from overgrazing and breaking our fledgling forest, but also to stop elk from practicing their mating performance on our tender cottonwood poles. Without wolves to scare elk, and without an entire forest of cottonwood to satiate them, even the native organisms in the ecosystem could have deleterious effects to our restoration effort.

This idea isn't without controversy. While some argue that the effect of large predators, the footprint on the ecosystem, is disproportionate to their number or size, others argue that the key problem in our ecosystem is lack of mycorrhizal fungi. The argument is essentially the same as the top-down vs bottom-up argument in neuroscience. Do charismatic megafauna have a top-down regulatory effect that controls a number of keystone processes or is it the primary productivity of the grasses, or even the health of the lichen, that is the determining factor? cite "Ecosystems Unraveling" William Stolzenburg in Conservation Magazine January-March 2008 (Vol. 9, No. 1)

But is it any coincidence that the charismatic megafaunal species we gravitate toward would hold the reins of power? What dark power the jaguar still holds over us, even snug in our surround-sound living rooms...as our eyes are drawn toward beauty, aren't they also to the power of the magestic eagle and the cunning coyote. In fact, across our America, aren't the mascots of every high school and college sports' team a large carnivore? (Would we think mammals cute if they behaved like insects, sucking blood and infesting our bodies and crops?)

Our work is ironic because we are doing work either wouldn't have to be done or that would be done for free, if we followed the ecological realities of the region and left the ecosystem alone to do its job. But in a situation where the best thing you can do is not touch something....humans have a hard time with that. And, because we're men and like to drive heavy machinery cross-country in a continuing ironic representation of our understanding of and unity with nature. We can help it heal a little faster, and possibly a lot faster. The logical endpoint of our desire would be to open a bottle and presto! instant forest.

The ecosystem has passed a threshold where it is no longer resilient to its original state. At best, you could argue that the grazed rangeland state is neutrally stable, that is, stable at the new point it finds itself at. But, judging from the unsustainable rate of erosion, this is unlikely. (cite Ecology text)
Dynamic equilibrium can mean the ecosystem is unbalanced and moves far from natural healthy processes..into a new steady state, or into a spiral of positive feedback? will a stream naturally correct its meander, or keep downcutting, the headcuts getting worse and worse....? To answer these question, due consideration of time scales are important. For our impatient human time scales, active restoration may be called for, even if the ecosystem is dynamically stable, but will take too long to return to equilibrium.Some argue that trees use water. For example, while the city of Las Vegas has plans to clear out all the tamarix upstream of its Colorado river water intake, they do not have plans to complete our second half of restoration, namely planting native trees. That would negate the entire single-minded purpose of the city of Las Vegas.

Some argue we are not actually increasing the total number of trees through all our hardwork cutting, transporting, and replanting them. We are not increasing the total number of trees, but, of course, as ecologists are fond of noting, plants and trees in particular are not singular but modular, so that one tree can grow, in the right conditions, into a much larger tree.

We expend a large amount of carbon in the form of nondomestic, unsustainable petroleum products. We consume and produce waste. We buy timber products that are cut from the national forests, and eat food that is produced on rangeland and farmland. We are part of the system, but we are also part of the solution, and we hope that our carbon negative contribution from the trees outweighs that bad karma/carbon positive contribution from our lifestyle. Of course, no one has done the math, nor do they want to. Guardians is not quite ready to take on that level of professional standards or adopt a lifestyle solution like battery, hydrogen, or biodiesel, (or Bedouin gypsies working out of their vans). There just isn't a good answer out there, but yeah, we're in the market. Sucks that the superheroes gotta pollute to get to the crime scene to save the planet...Everything that we consume, that cost (of providing ecosystem benefits when the ecosystem is broken), needs to be added to the value a healthy ecosystem produces.
And we have already determined that, since these type of restoration projects continue to call for both active management and passive vigilance (eternal vigilance, for that matter), they are not durable, but that does not mean that they are not sustainable. Can a human tradition work to create sustainability, or must we defer to nature, for wherever human ambition goes, human folly follows. Plus, if we argue that our conservation is dependent on humans, why not follow the argument of ranchers, who claim that cows are necessary for the health of an ecosystem that didn't formerly support large grazers. In fact, Dan Dagget's book Gardeners of Eden follows just such an argument, with numerous case example of denuded and degraded rangeland that has failed to respond (in our time scale) to human/cattle removal, but then remarkably improved with a certain magic mixture of the man and managed cows. Unfortunately, Dagget's anecdotal remarks, while providing ample argument that sometimes in some places the damage we can do to the land is not self-correcting, he fails to prove the positive point; that humans are necessary to the health of the land. Unfortunately, because in our tree planting, we are a necessary part of the plan, without which the first baby steps of tree propagation would be hopeless. That's job security in the restoration biz. Some humans try to patch things up but the rest keep right on injurin'.

We are just a demonstration project, and necessarily so. The actual weight of restoration work that critically needs attention is too vast to tackle without a small army -- something like the CCC over again. Right now our projects serve as lighthouses, markers of what could be, and experiments in determining how far and how much we've lost. We haven't gone to a place beyond the city lights and not turned on a light, but we have tried to grow a plant in the desert, and know of the value of sweat, blood, and alternately cursing and entreating the heavens.

There are those who question the personal narrative and motivation to undertake this kind of work. Chauvinistic masochism, etc. And, indeed, there is much soul-searching and many want to quit. "Drawing upon the Buddhist tradition is the work of Joanna Macy. Macy, working as an anti-nuclear activist in USA, found that one of the major impediments confronting the activists' cause was the presence of unresolved emotions of despair, grief, sorrow, anger and rage. The denial of these emotions led to apathy and disempowerment." But, for whatever reason, we were born for this work and this drama. If you see something that needs to be done for good, you just do it, and write essays about it afterwards.
So we go in with the big yellow machines. It could be argued that these industrial behemoths also, in passing, fill some of the ecological niches left vacant and provide some of the ecological services that remain inoperative since the Pleistocene megafauna's disappearance. CF: Laurel's Wild Ride Bringing Back the Pleistocene

Anyone who's ever floundered through thickets can attest to the valuable velocity of a pithy path in the heart of such havoc. The need for giant mechanical elephants to tear through the underbrush is appreciated most by those hardy souls who dare flounder through the thickets of sagebrush, impenetrable by even elk and cows... Do the elk feel the loss of their larger herbivore cousins in the foreboding overgrown places of today's altered landscapes?

Finally, on the last day of the planting season, a volunteer asked me what my role was. Poet, witness, scientists, journalist, storyteller, property manager, mascot...at a loss for words I could only say that "I plant trees". And the simple fact was enough of a reason. I think people understand that.

Colorado Natural Heritage Program

The Colorado Natural Heritage Project (CNHP) is the Human Genome Project (HGP) of Colorado's environment -- nobody's really cataloged all the different ecosystems - how they are composed and comprised, what separates (gradations or demarcations), how each responds to the "disturbing presence" of humans. Plus, it will help us save at least a little bit of every habitat and hence, hopefully, at least some of every species.

Of course, we already know what we'll find -- that there's not enough of the environment left to save all the species. We've already destroyed too much of some kinds of deserts and wetlands...its as if scientists, setting out on the HGP discovered that we'd already erased large parts of our own DNA. These environments are just as essential: we are a combination of nature and nurture, genes and environments. When we loose an entire class of environment, we loose that potential self expression as surely as if we lost a segment of our DNA.

Also, GIS mapping speaks to a larger audience, including management professionals. To quote Van Wagtendonk, Fire Ecology of the Sierra Nevada in The Wild Fire Reader (Wuerthner, ed) 2006

"The...[GIS] analysis was used extensively in the development of Yosemite National Park's current fire management program. Although the nature and extent of the ... [problem] ... had long been recognized, the maps depicting the results of the analysis reinforced this recognition and communicated the extent and severity of the problem."

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.

Endangered: Pima Pineapple Cactus

This expedition, led by Patrick Dockens of EcoPlan Associates, traveled beyond the mine tailings of Green Valley and skirted the variegated edge of the beautiful Sonoran Desert to map the homeland of the rare & Endangered Pima Pineapple Cactus (PPAC). The PPAC is named for its shape, not its taste, and is primarily threatened by the voracious appetite of development & accompanying habitat destruction.

This quite large mother is shown carrying a single "pup" (at bottom of photo), a vegetatively propagating bud. The really cool thing about these surveys is that they provide an excuse to thrash around in the prickly heart of the Sonoran desert. Unless science mandates straight-line transects for statistical rigor, few would dare to brave the physical rigors of the desert for days and weeks on end. This labor bore the fruit of knowledge: we located several isolated populations of the Pineapple, and since we had also observed many places without populations of the cactus we began to form an idea of the microclimate and plant associations that the Pima Pineapple Cactus favors. Although it is only a hunch or an intuition, I believe that the members of this field crew are probably now better able to find this cactus than are any other people on Earth.

I wonder if this intuition could be quantified....here is an effort to use non-hypothesis-based factor analysis to do just that in the Colorado Rockies.

Breath. Deep. Ecology.

The lights of Tucson turn black sky blue on the horizon,

obliterating the stars there and I think of the numberless salmon who, in their ardor, turned the waters pink,

so thick you could walk across, from bank to bank, on their backs (source: probably apocryphal story believed by Lewis and Clark).

But we embraced progress and prosperity
and built the dams that killed the illimitable salmon,
numberless as the stars.

In my career I see reflected
this history of society embracing technology,
perhaps to prove to ourselves that we can.
I've done genetic engineering and brain surgery,
great endeavors that now seem hollow.

In their stead, I would
Embrace the wild uncertainty of nature....

Opportunities

www.caretaker.org
www.coolworks.com
www.housesitter.com
www.organicvolunteers.com

scientist ivory tower gods mortal authority

(The SCIENTIST is working late into the night, locked safe in his IVORY TOWER, but the GODS are angry with the puny MORTAL for challenging their AUTHORITY. )