I target my writing here at the layperson, so it may or may not be obvious to my readers that lots of things are happening to the ocean as a result of anthropogenic climate change, from coral reefs dying to sea level rise to changes in our fisheries to a mysterious "Warm Blob" in the Pacific (an actualthing!). Today I thought I'd try to tackle one of the causes of a few of those changes, Ocean Acidification. Ocean Acidification is an important point to understand when we're talking about the scale and consequences of global warming, and I hope to impart a bit of perspective on the matter here, if I can.
There's a lot of chemistry I'm not really gonna go into, but a little of it you have to understand, at least conceptually. First, a quick lesson on pH. I know you've seen that letter combination before, be it on lotion or soap or what have you, maybe you remember playing with pH paper in high school, but the thing to know is that it is a scale of measurement. Simply, it measures how acidic or basic something is, and those are opposite descriptors for the chemistry of a fluid based on the activity of the hydrogen ions in it. The scale runs from 0 to 14, where 7 is neutral, the low half of the scale is acidic and the upper half is basic. Lemon juice, for example, contains 5% to 6% citric acid and has a pH of between 2 and 3 (high acidity). The ocean is at a pH of around 8 (a little basic).
The thing to understand about pH is that this is a logarithmic scale. Like the Richter Scale used for measuring earthquake intensity, it isn't linear. We're not counting things, we're measuring intensity, in a range that boggles the human brain. A difference of 1 does not reflect an extra orange in a sack of oranges. Each mark on the scale is the previous mark multiplied by a value, not added to by a value. On the Richter scale a difference of one represents about a thirtyfold difference in magnitude. With pH, as mentioned, we're talking about the chemistry of the relative abundance of hydrogen ions, charged atoms. It takes a lot of those to change the pH of a cup of liquid you can hold in your hand. The numbers involved are beyond the capacity of the human brain to comprehend without some sort of shorthand to abbreviate things. You probably know that multiplying something by 2 over and over again gets you to astronomically high numbers really fast. Imagine doing that with a multiplier of 10 and you begin to understand pH.
So we have solid data to show that the pH of the ocean used to be more like 8.2, around 300 years ago, and over the last 200 years or so (thanks, Industrial Revolution!) it has edged up toward 8.1, which National Geographic will also spare you the math on and just tell you is about a 25% increase in acidity. That's a whole damn lot, which, when you think about how very big the ocean is, should scare you a whole damn lot. Because part of the carbon cycle of this planet involves the ocean soaking up CO2 from the atmosphere, forming carbonic acid (H2CO3) when it hits the water (H2O). This effect of the oceans soaking up our excess atmospheric carbon has definitely helped us by slowing the accumulation of greenhouse gasses that heats things up enough to melt glaciers and tundras, but we've generated so much CO2, so fast (think geologic timescales, now), that we're literally changing the chemistry of our planet. And it'll get worse. By one estimate, "if we continue our current rate of carbon emissions, global oceans could
be 150 percent more acidic by the end of the century than they have
been for 20 million years."
Look, we're not concerned the ocean is gonna turn into lemon juice. But we're pumping enough carbon into the ocean, that the acification is keeping sea life from functioning properly. That's why coral reefs are bleaching worldwide, and why the industry that harvests and sells mussels in Oregon is suffering. The higher acidity inhibits shell growth in marine animals. They literally can't make the chemistry of their bodies in the water function well enough to produce the calcium carbonate that they need for their shells, exoskeletons and other structures. The whole food chain is affected by this, including our fisheries.
There is so much we don't know about the ocean! We find new and previously assumed-to-be-extinct species, and we have absolutely no idea what this is! We have no idea what caused the Bloop (OK, we have some solid evidence to imply it was iceberg related, but still). We're still in the "observation" stage of understanding what the heck is going on with the Blob, as it is way too early to say we understand the process of it's generation even a tenth as well as we get the El Nino formation or what they call the "Pacific Decadal Oscillation." Hell, we can only sorta say we understand THOSE. We've looked at MAYBE 5% of the ocean and its depths, and the budget for NOAA (the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration) is less than a quarter of that of NASA. We need more Boaty McBoatfaces. We need more research, not just of what climate change is doing but of what's been out there all this time (my own alma mater is amazing on this front, btw).
Don't get me wrong, I love NASA. I love the technological marvels they've brought us over the years, and the exploration of space, and I have no desire to see NASA's budget cut, but NOAA definitely needs more, because they work to understand our planet's life support system. If we screw that up, there's no fixing it. Sorry to end on such a downer note, but that's were the science brings us.
Which is why (and I can say this, because this is a personal blog, and I choose to say it because we're in an election year) I will never vote for anyone who denies global warming. And you shouldn't either. That eliminates about 95% of a particular political party, in case you were wondering. Bear that in mind this November.
The Dissemination of Useful Knowledge in the Struggle for Modern Life
According to the Canadian Museum of Nature, belugas (Dephinapterus leucas) and killer whales (Orcinus orca) may be considered toxic waste in some places when they die. I'm going to do my best in this post to explain how and why.
So there's this thing I'm gonna introduce as background, called an Ecological Pyramid. This is a simple graphic representation of biomass at multiple trophic levels. Trophic levels being, of course, position on the food chain, from plants to bacteria and little buggies that decompose dead plant matter, to the larger buggies that prey on those, to the grazers that eat the grass that grows in the decomposing material, to the megafauna predators that prey on the grazers. Biomass, being simply the sheer amount of matter that is living, for this purpose categorized by trophic level.
The idea in an Ecological Pyramid is that only about 10% of the energy in all the biomass of one
trophic level gets transferred/used to the next trophic level, so the apex predators need a ton of biomass and a large territory to support them. Now, this is simplified because it doesn't show food web interactions, so there are a number of reasons it doesn't work out for all situations, and there are a ton of exceptions and inconsistencies, but toss that aside a moment and imagine this:
So think about this as a way that nature might process some heinous contaminants. DDT, for example. Lead. PCBs. Mercury. Hydrocarbons from petroleum products or oil spills. This stuff gets picked up and processed a little bit at a time by the primary producers, bioaccumulated into that trophic level, but as a ton of primary producers get consumed by the next step up the pyramid, the contaminants don't dilute out. They aren't ever broken down because of how enduring they are, so they biomagnify. That means that a lot of contaminants sucked up out of the environment by the primary producers then end up in the bodies of each herbivore, because the structure of the food web and the biomass pyramid means a LOT of the primary producers are required to support herbivores. The concentration of the contaminant doesn't necessarily actually harm organisms at lower trophic levels, but because it gets more concentrated at each successive level, it can be really harmful to larger animals.
So if a chemical is mobile in the environment, long lived, and doesn't break down easily, if it is soluble in fats and/or can be considered "bio-available" for uptake by the primary producers, it can biomagnify. DDT was the beginning of our understanding of this phenomenon.
See, DDT is a nasty chemical, but the broader effects of it aren't immediately apparent. As far as we knew, it was just a really, really effective pesticide. It didn't just kill a few pests, though, it killed the broadest array of insects we'd ever seen. And like whaling or ocean dumping or logging or any number of other natural resource issues, we went overboard. Seriously, kids got hosed down with it in the streets, it was put on food crops everywhere, sprayed over whole forests and ornamental trees in residential neighborhood. We were spraying the stuff like it was going out of style.
“By their very nature chemical controls are self-defeating, for they
have been devised and applied without taking into account the complex
biological systems against which they have been blindly hurled” -- Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
The more pesticides got sprayed into our environment, the more made their way into the food web, the more it impacted species that had nothing to do with the intended use of the pesticides, particularly apex predators (which, as you know from previous posts, are vital to the health of an ecosystem). Bald eagles, for example, were impacted by DDT in such a way as to reduce the hardness of the shells of the eggs they laid, so they were severely impacted, and put on the endangered species list. They were only removed from the list in 2007 after enough time had passed without ongoing continued exposure so that their population could recover.
Hang in there, I'll get back to whale carcasses in a minute. See where this is going, though?
Anyway, part of the problem was that the people making decisions to spray were typically pest control officials, largely bureaucrats who found it a cheap way to get a ton of land cleared of pests in a hurry or agricultural producers advised by those bureaucrats on how to dramatically increase their yield in a single season, and not the underfunded wildlife biologists who were seeing the impacts on the rest of nature or the public health specialists who eventually started to see impacts on people. Even otherwise fully healthy people, years after use and exposure.
See, the problem with a lot of pesticides is that they are fat soluble. Which meant that not only do they get into mammary tissue and breastmilk and harm the most vulnerable of our population, they can accumulate and be stored in fat for years, seemingly harmlessly, until one day a person might lose weight due to illness or injury or even an attempt at improved exercise lifestyle and find their system suddenly overloaded with more pesticide than they could handle, suddenly released from those tissues as their fat cells got used for energy. People can drop like flies, kinda literally, years after any exposure to pesticides.
To top it off, for quite a while, it seemed like the only way we could find to deal with pests developing resistances to pesticides (a natural evolutionary consequence of pesticide application) was to spray at higher concentrations, and more frequently. This served the interests of the chemical manufacturers quite nicely, and they had armies of lobbyists pushing their product on Congress and on agencies like the USDA. They sold their products as "cheap and easy!" until it wasn't, and then it was just all we knew for a while.
However, there are alternatives out there. Selective application of pesticides rather than wholesale spraying at incautious concentrations as used to be common is one way. If you use just a little of just the right pesticide at just the right time in a particular pest's lifecycle, you can get away with applying a lot less pesticide, at way less cost, to much greater effect. We've also had great results by selectively importing predators and microbial enemies and other biological controls of pest species, after very careful testing in controlled lab and field tests to find what would work.
Collectively, these practices are called Integrated Pest Management, or IPM. My state, along many others including probably yours, has tons of information and resources on it available for the public (that's you!), for yardwork and gardening hobbyists, for agricultural producers, and for anyone who might be interested. I have vague memories of what my dad did to our yard and house to control an absurdly huge infestation of our dog's fleas when I was a kid, and I wonder what the concentration of those chemicals is in our own fat cells to this day as a result. It's a tough thing to think about, because nobody knew better. To this day, many people don't know better, and still over apply pesticides because they think simply that more is better and don't realize they can be causing problems that won't be seen for years, whether in the health of their family or in increased resistance by the pests to those chemicals.
Eventually, the voices of biologists like Rachel Carson started to get heard, even over the character assassination attempts of the well financed chemical industry and the politicians who served them. Rachel's 1962 book, Silent Spring, laid out all the evidence and made a convincing case for the application of alternatives and reduction of the use of pesticides. Her book, a labor of love she wrote while fighting cancer in the last days of her life, raised such a ruckus that DDT got banned, and the environment was raised for the first time to the status of a major political issue of interest to all of us. She basically started a major branch of the modern environmental movement singlehandedly.
I'd encourage you to read it, though I'd understand if you never picked it up, dear reader. I only got around to reading Silent Spring last year, in part just because I was embarrassed that I, an actual ecologist, had never read such an important work. Oh, don't get me wrong, I knew the information it held, and had taken classes that presented the same information with more recent updates to the science, but had never really fully appreciated the grace of Rachel's prose, or the effort she put into her work.
And that's why I (too rarely, I know) write about this stuff. Not because I consider myself a writer or scientist anywhere near Rachel Carson's eloquence or brilliance, but because so many people don't know this stuff, and sometimes someone might pick up a little knowledge from me. This is all just background information I'm fully aware of as a person with a career in natural resources, but many of my friends and family know almost nothing about it, and I feel like I have to honor the works of Rachel Carson and Bill Nye and Edward O. Wilson and Charles Darwin and Mary Roach and all the rest of the fascinating and entertaining science literature out there from ages past and present . . . by sharing it. We all benefit from this knowledge, because our neighbors overapplying pesticides in their yards, ignorant through no real fault of their own, affects us and the rest of the world we live in, too. Lots of issues are like that.
Maybe I'll get back into writing here more just by taking the time to read more, and sharing the experiences I get from my favorite new and classic science writing. Let me know if you like that idea, and encourage me once in a while, and you'll see more submissions from me, I promise. Gimme prompts! If there are questions about ecology or the broader sciences that you've wondered about, let me know. I'll be happy to share my knowledge, and go searching for it if I don't already have it.
Now: Confession time! I tricked you. Whale carcasses were really just a silly excuse to get me writing, and are hazardous not for the bioaccumulated environmental contaminants, but because Brobdingnagian sized rotting carcasses are a hazard to public health. Also, they have been known to explode without warning as gasses build up within them while they decompose from the inside out. But you learned some cool stuff, didn't you?
So without further ado, I'm really happy to have created an opportunity to share the following grossness. Enjoy. Oh, and, uh . . . viewer discretion is advised.
A few Rachel Carson quotes to leave you with:
“But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength
that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely
healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn
comes after night, and spring after winter.”
“The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is
wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these
qualities... If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not
because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write
truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.”
Every once in a while, I find something I need to share that I had no hand in creating (see the bottom of this post, for example). Well, I have another, and less to say to lead into it.
This one struck me for its poetry and advocacy, it's rhythm and it's hope. Enjoy.
For those of you who don't recognize the homage, the phrase "Pale Blue Dot" is a nod to the late, great Carl Sagan, whose shoes the incredible Neil Degrasse Tyson may take his time wearing.
So I know I haven't posted in a while, but I got to journaling a bit in an effort to process a few things I'm going through, and this is what came out. I'm sharing it here because it started with a vaguely sciency bent even though it quickly got way off that track. Enjoy.
Our senses provide only an imperfect representation of the world around us. With our native ability, we can only perceive a sliver of the information that is truly out there to behold. Not only is the visible spectrum of light minuscule relative to range of frequencies at which photons bombard us, but we can only pick up changes in intensity when you actually slide up or down by something like an order of magnitude. We have to use logarithmic-scale sensitivity to interpret an infinite range of variability.
So how do we make sense of anything? Our brains try to fill in gaps. We take pieces of information and sew them together into a poorly sketched cartoon version of the reality around us. Our brains actually lie to us, telling us that there is sense to be made in the static, that there is a reliable signal when there isn't. We lay that cartoon over the world like a blanket, and sometimes we miss the pitfalls before us, or there's a mound under the blanket where we don't have a picture of anything. It's what makes illusion possible, what makes M.C. Escher paintings so disorienting; we forget, when we really fall into such traps, that the Escher is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional imagining, and our eyes lead us in uncomprehending circles.
When this happens, we have choices. First, we can ignore the discrepancy between reality and our cartoon-embroidered blanket. We can take no action and go on as we were, tripping or falling or stubbing our toes occasionally, and maybe it isn't a big deal because our blankets are comforting and it doesn't happen too often. Second, we can plant a flag to pin the blanket to the mound or draw a circle around the hole, label a thing with our best understanding of what's there, be eternally wary of that spot, perhaps even try to find similarities in setting and context to other spots like it. Maybe we'll even make up a story, draw constellations using stars further apart than they are from us and imagine a connection, or simply say the night's sky is a black sheet penetrated by pinholes that separates us from God's grace. But all that does is create another cartoon. These paths lead false assumptions to become rigid beliefs and can result in cognitive dissonance.
No, if we want to do the rewarding hard work, we can take the third option. Investigation, analysis, testing. We observe what we can and we circle around to look from other angles; we find things we cannot see using our hands, things we cannot hear using our eyes, and so on. Having such imperfect instruments as our senses, our brains require more to really have an understanding of things. We need use all the tools we have, and make more. We apply the microscope, the telescope, and we cut apart audio recordings. Not good enough! We direct electrons through a vacuum into copper in order to generate radiation, so that we can shine 1% of that light we cannot see through an object onto a backdrop and have a visual representation of variances in density within the thing . . . fractured bones, perhaps, or dental cavities. We need sonar, the oscilloscope, the mass spectrometer, the electron-microscope, magnetic resonance imaging, every tool we can dream up, each an achievement stunning in it's complexity, to help us more fully understand our place in things. But, even with these, our picture of reality is incomplete.
I use all of the above to explain my mindset in how I navigate relationships. It informs my personal philosophy on people. I never really feel like I've reached a conclusion in understanding someone because I understand that my picture of them is a caricature, or a sketch, or at best, a portrait capable of demonstrating how beauty is supported by imperfection. Whatever my picture, I know it lacks a certain depth, and is skewed by my own experiences in like situations and by where I was in my own journey when I painted it. I understand that there's a chance maybe that the proportions of the rough outlines I scribbled down early on, which set the tone for the rest of the piece, were skewed by a bad first impression or by something in me, or maybe a bad experience threw mud across the surface rendering it forever ugly to look upon. So I investigate, I analyze, I test.
When dealing with people, I work hard to assume no ill will unless it is openly stated, but I also must admit that I think most people are horrible, inconsiderate creatures, acting much of the time out of instinct or pride or fear; they are not malicious, but unaware of the harm they can do to others with a careless word or of how much their own selfishness may underlie their motives. But being short-sighted and lacking introspection does not make anyone worthy of unkindness. If you want to improve a rocky relationship, you give more than is fair. You build mutual trust by demonstrating trust. You build mutual respect by demonstrating respect. You do the hard work and you build better tools, learn better ways to communicate about yourself and about what you perceive, better ways to draw out clarity about others' intentions. It is hard work, no doubt, but it is rewarding.
You might think you understand someone's actions or their perspective, but I guarantee the information you have is incomplete, and somewhere or other you are filling the gaps with cartoons that approximate your understanding. Maybe a friend was close to you for a time and the relationship soured in some way. Maybe you saw what looked like solid evidence that you had been betrayed. But how do you know betrayal was the intent? We tell ourselves stories about people, about what they think of us, about what they thought their actions would mean to us, and how we approach (or avoid) that person forever thereafter is influenced by the stories we tell ourselves. Your assumptions, your false picture, can lead you in circles. For families, this can lead to a devastatingly difficult to buck trend that can last decades.
Be careful in your stories. Be careful in your assumptions. Accept that you are imperfect, that you act sometimes out of instinct or pride or fear more than rationality or altruism, and that words you may not remember saying can leave lasting damage. People mistreat each other enough without our adding to their emotional injuries, so I'd rather we broke the pattern than reinforce it. Be kind to the people around you, and when someone hurts you, take whatever space you need but continue to be kind while you address it, especially if the person is important to you or to others you care about. Understand that some portion of their true story is hidden from your eyes, that their story of you may be a fairground caricature, and do your best to show them their error with gentleness and patience.
The hard work is worth it, I promise you, and the world will be an unquestionably better place for it.
Senator Wyden has released a new plan for management of Oregon & California Railroad trust lands, a plan that I think is intended to replace, update, or supersede the Northwest Forest Plan that Bill Clinton signed into law in 1994 for O&C lands. I'm glad new science is being brought to bear on an old problem, but I think the approach is wrong. I disagree with it's broader objectives, and thus with some of the specific things it tries to do.
Wyden's plan relies on the recent work of two well-regarded scientists, Norm Johnson and Jerry Franklin, men who helped craft the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan in the first place. The broad objective is to create a plan whereby these lands can be sustainably logged forever without dramatically sacrificing ecological protections. This is not an unworthy goal. I think we should approach all our resources this way, starting with the question "if we have to use this, how do we make sure we're not using it faster than it replenishes on its own?" But a consistent problem with that idea is that people with a profit-driven interest take an optimistic view of what's sustainable. Fisheries get overharvested because a certain fishery will have a few good years because of factors nobody has any control over, so everyone upwardly revises their idea of what's sustainable, and then our ability to monitor the decline in population lags a few years, so the population crashes in response to the increased harvest and it takes many, many years to recover. The same can happen with forests if managers assume that what's sustainable now will continue to be so five years down the line.
Clear-Cut near the source of the Lewis & Clark River
I'll freely admit, I'm not sure there's anything to doubt in the science of sustainable forestry they're relying on for this plan. The plan has the support of the Pacific Rivers Council and the Wild Salmon Center, solid natural resources protection groups, and it relies on good science, with adaptive management and rigorous scientific review built in. Johnson and Franklin are likely smarter than me, and are certainly more experienced ecologists than myself, and I've only had the opportunity to read a couple of Johnson's academic papers, which I admired for their well-balanced emphasis on both the social and environmental issues raised by forest management, and none of Franklin's. But I think the focus of Wyden's approach to the social matters is misplaced.
I'm always leery of any reduction in natural resource protections. The Sierra Club, Environment Oregon, and Oregon Wild (which I must disclose I have the pleasure of volunteering for) all disagree with the O&C plan. Narrowing the stream buffers that protect the riparian habitats salmon and so many other species depend on, even if only in specially designated areas, is a worrisome idea. Limiting the ability of activist groups to file lawsuits against logging actions is even more worrisome. Allowing clear-cuts, even in selective "variable retention harvesting" patches intended to mimic the natural variability of a fire-prone habitat mosaic, is not necessarily a great idea when global climate change has thrown natural variability out the window.
Fires get BIG!
Wildfires now regularly reach intensities never seen before. As annual snow pack decreases due to changes in global climate, there's less spring melt to feed streams and wet forests, so forests that haven't been logged in some time get more dry and more prone to fire. That's basic fact right now, and I could do a whole blog post just about that. But selective thinning for fuel load reduction is different than trying to create a perpetual, sustainable harvest regime based on what we know of past conditions, in an era when past conditions don't mean anything. We don't know what the wildfire regime is going to look like in five years, we don't know just how habitats and species will change and migrate over the next decade independent of all our best efforts to manage and control. There's an argument to be made that we should use logging to try to artificially force forests to match past natural conditions, but the system is not stable, so stable harvest is not really going to be possible. Fires have been getting bigger and more out of control every year, and we need to protect what we've got, not continue to harvest based on what the fire regime was like in the past.
It's the wrong kind of sustainability for our present situation. Right now, given climate change, I think conservation is a higher priority than smarter resource extraction for (mostly) private profit. Adaptive management of lands conserved for their own sake is the way to go, and harvest should be allowed to happen as part of that management, not as the main goal of that management. We have to consider whether our public natural resources should even be allowed to be extracted for private profit. Apparently the answer everyone comes to these days is yes, but should it be?
The lean towards increased logging comes from the idea that logging creates jobs, but that idea is outdated and no longer accurate. In Lincoln County, timber harvest more than doubled from 2009 to 2012, but employment went down. In Lane County, there was a 75% increase in harvest over the same period, but a 14% decrease in wood products manufacturing jobs. Why the disconnect? Because logging in Oregon is a truly extractive industry, and fully a third of the trees harvested from our forests get exported as logs or as chips for use elsewhere. The logs get extracted from our public lands and shipped to Asian markets, the processing and manufacturing jobs get extracted by increased mechanization and shipping of raw materials overseas to support manufacturing jobs in places where labor is cheaper and tax breaks are higher, and the profits get extracted by owners. Logging just doesn't create jobs like it used to, doesn't benefit Oregon's economy like it used to, and we waste obscene amounts of money subsidizing the practice.
In fact, there's reason to believe the reduction in forest harvesting was not such a bad thing. Want to know what happened from 1988 to 1996, when harvests in the Pacific Northwest fell most precipitously? ECONorthwest reported, in a document titled "The Sky Did NOT Fall: The Pacific Northwest's Response to Logging Reductions," that while harvests fell 86% on federal lands and 47% overall in that time, yes, jobs in the lumber-and-wood-products industry fell 22%. But total employment, reflecting a much larger population than just the lumber-and-wood-products subset, increased 27%.
ECONorthwest proposed two main causes for this, with many contributing factors. Cause one: Logging's importance to the economy had already diminished by a good deal. This is because of the timber industry cutting jobs and wages in union-busting tactics in the 1980's, before the Northwest Forest Plan was even in place. By 1990, the timber industry was only 3.1% of the jobs in the region, and decades of overharvesting had the resulted in predictions that there would be a crash in timber production in the 1990's anyway. It wasn't all about the spotted owl, people.
Cause two: Un-logged forests became more important to the economy, and this here's the not-so-obvious part. Do you really think Intel or Nike would want to be in Oregon if their headquarters were surrounded by clearcut wastelands and brown rivers that couldn't support any form of recreation, much less salmon? If their employees didn't want to be here, they wouldn't be here. Logging is a messy business that leaves a lot of cleanup and restoration work for others to take care of, it damages the land and the water and the species that rely on a healthy wild ecology, and the fact is, people want to live near beautiful forests. Other jobs came and more than replaced those lost.
I get that rural counties used to relying on the tax income from the logging industry, and, later, on compensatory payments from the federal government to offset the economic damage of forced reductions in logging, are hurting. Services are being cut, county governments are unable to govern, and people in the government are losing their jobs. Law enforcement has been devastated by the lack of funds, and people are suffering. But another point to note in all this is that many of these counties have dramatically lower property taxes than the rest of the state, rates they were able to maintain because they got funds through logging, and the populations of these counties keep voting against raising the property tax. As one article notes:
Voters in Lane and other timber-dependent counties have been resistant to raising property taxes in part because they're accustomed to the feds picking up most of the cost of county services and giving them low tax rates. Josephine County residents pay 58 cents per $1,000 of assessed value for county operations, the lowest rate in the state. Curry County follows just behind at 60 cents and Lane County's rate is $1.28, the seventh lowest. In comparison, Multnomah County's rate is $4.34.
There are better ways to stimulate local economies than logging, even if that's been their traditional driver. A recent study found that National Wildlife Refuges are economic engines all their own, and pumped $2.4 billion into the economy, supported more than 35,000 jobs and produced $792.7 million in job income for the people who engage in, facilitate, and manufacture products that allow outdoor recreational activities. For every $1 appropriated to the refuge system in Fiscal Year 2011, the refuges contributed $4.87 in total economic output. Not too shabby an investment.
I'm not suggesting that converting all these lands to wildlife refuges would solve all the county problems, but I am suggesting that it's time to stop blaming the owl, the murrelet, and the salmon. It's time to stop pointing the finger at laws designed to benefit us all, which protect the natural resources that make our state a beautiful place full of wonders that people travel from around the world to see. If this is about jobs, put up a jobs bill. If this is about county funding, find another way: create incentives for companies to move there, earmark a few federal projects to take place in those counties and stimulate things that way, maybe even make the landowners of those counties pay more in taxes for the services they need.
There's a lot to like in Wyden's bill (summarized here). It takes a reasonable approach that balances a perceived human socioeconomic need with environmental protections. If there was enough data to support the idea that increasing timber harvests would solve the problem, I'd be all for it. But there isn't, and I didn't see anything in my reading on the matter to suggest anyone was seriously proposing we keep some proportion of the logs in Oregon until they're processed into finished products or anything that would really create jobs. What we need right now is more conservation, and logging-industry lobbyists shouldn't be able to convince anyone that the problem will be solved if only a few profiteers at the top can get a compromise on natural resources protections and use low-wage jobs to ship raw materials overseas and then sell a finished product back to the Americans they just deprived of real employment opportunities. That tactic is a different kind of short-sighted, however many times the word "sustainable"appears in the plan.
Early this year, an old D&D buddy of mine (Yes, D&D. Shut up.) contacted me about hiking Mt. Whitney, and asked if I'd like to join. I was excited, and immediately told him yes. Afterward, it dawned on me that it might be a kind of big undertaking, and I realized I was going to have to do a lot of training, ideally with my friend Benji, who agreed to be my buddy-system pairing for the Mt. Whitney hike. This blog post is just gonna be a little about one of those hikes we did as training, with some photos, and a little bit of additional information thrown in for good measure as we go along.
Our first hike was up Larch Mountain. For those of you who don't know, Larch Mountain is just a little ways east of Portland, and the summit can be reached from a trail that starts at beautiful Multnomah Falls, which really is a tourist destination all its own. It's one of the many waterfalls that cascades down the cliffs of the Columbia Gorge in this region, and is worth visiting in every season. Even if you're not up for the hike up the mountain, even if you're not up for the hike just to see the top of the falls, if you're ever gonna visit Portland, you should go see Multnomah Falls, check out the interpretive center and learn a little about the history of the region, have some ice cream and coffee, maybe even enjoy the restaurant. In any case, the hike up the mountain begins with a hike up those cliffs.
At the top you can see a great view of quite a few peaks in the region (Rainier, Adams, St Helens, Hood and Jefferson). Interestingly, there are no larch trees on Larch Mountain. It just got that name because the old-time loggers who were the first Europeans to climb it confused the noble-fir for larch, which only grows east of the Cascades. There's still a lot of beautiful old-growth forest up there, which is surprising for a place so close to Portland and its logging history. Larch Mountain also adjoins the Bull Run watershed, which supplies Portland's drinking water, and after years of fighting, Oregon Wild and other groups managed in 2009 to achieve protections for the Larch Mountain area as part of the Lewis and Clark Mount Hood Wilderness. A lovely set of maps of that achievement can be viewed here.
We did it as an out-and-back trip, though there are options for loops
that aren't much longer, and if you just want to see the view from the
top, you can simply drive to the upper trailhead, just a short walk from
the summit. A couple experienced hikers shouldn't have too much a problem with this hike . . . but we were not experienced hikers. First of all, we were woefully underprovisioned. We went up a mountain with full bellies, tons of water, and a couple oranges. Sweet jeebus, we were loopy on the way down. Our blood sugar was demolished. There are a couple spots where you have to cross picturesque streams using even more picturesque log-bridges with a handrail on only one side, and on the trip down the mountain we were starting to get dizzy, so those bridges were mighty menacing. Second, we probably shouldn't have tried to do this monster hike as our first trip out. It's about 14 miles on your feet, and takes most of a day to complete. Our joints were really achy the next day.
However, we DID get some beautiful pictures.
One of those many, picturesque streams we crossed.
Western Columbine (Aquilegia formosa)
VICTORY! (View from the summit, Mt. Hood in the background)
I love anime. I really enjoy my Trigun, my Bebop, and my Ranma, and I rewatch them from time to time. One of the better movies to come out in a long time was Spirited Away, by the ever talented Studio Ghibli. This is a fan-art image of one of the main characters, Haku the (SPOILER!) river spirit. I've heard that some people have no idea why they chose a dragon to represent the spirit of a river. Why not a fish? Why not a bull/man creature like Achelous of ancient Greek legend? Is it arbitrary enough that it could as easily have been a unicorn or a griffin, or any creature off this list?
How is a river like a dragon? Well, that's a complicated question. I know you come here for ecology reading, and I normally prefer to focus my academic reading in that direction, too, but the confluence (Hah!) of several things has resulted in me writing this piece about rivers and their morphology, and really, geological processes are a major part of how ecology functions, so here goes.
Lets talk about erosion for a minute first. Streams and creeks in high mountains often flow directly over bedrock, but as you move down toward the bottom of a watershed, you come across boulders, then cobbles, then smaller cobbles, gravel, then sand and silt. This happens as the the exposed rock of mountains get drenched in rainwater or snow, which later freezes and expands, enlarging cracks. Boulders crack off the side of a cliff face like a calving glacier, and water flows around them. Those boulders, too, crack and shatter, and over time the whole process turns mountains, the jagged, jutting bones of the earth, into rolling hills. Next time you're in an airplane, look out the window at the landscape and think about how the contours of every mound in the earth are shaped by epochs of wear and slumping caused by water. Our world is older than we can wrap our little heads around.
A river, in its natural state, jumps and writhes; it whips back and forth like an angry snake. This image is a drawing of the Mississippi River over geologic time. It changes like that both by its natural flow wearing new bends in its own bed, and also by the effects of periodic flooding and deposition of sediments, which can cause it to jump its own normal banks to a whole new part of the floodplain. How does that work?
When floods happen, a river swells to exceed its ordinary channel boundaries. It spills over into the floodplain and deposits silt everywhere. Rushing waters knock things around quite a bit, and sometimes an area that was a highly sinuous, meandering reach with slow flow might see a series of avulsions where those meanders get cut off, curves get abandoned, and the channel becomes a straighter, faster flowing reach along a steeper gradient. Imagine rolling a ball straight straight down a steep hill instead of carrying it down a trail with a ton of switchbacks. Rivers do that, and when they do, you get these abandoned channels in the floodplain, you get oxbow lakes, you get geological traces of the monstrosity of the river. Traces that can be mapped.
Now check out this sexy beast:
To the right, there, that's a segment of the Willamette River, baby sister to the Columbia, yet still the 13th largest river in the US, a more modern, computerized mapping project showing similar change to the image above of the Mississippi. In ancient times, glacial floods from the Columbia, which carved the great Columbia Gorge out of the continent and pushed enough sediment around to create rows of hills across Washington that look like the teensy rows of sandmounds left by retreating waves at the beach, deposited as much as 5 meters of sediment in the southern Willamette Valley, more than halfway across the state from where the Willamette River meets the Columbia. In the northern Willamette Valley, at a lower elevation, closer to where they meet, the sediment deposition was as much as 35 meters deep.
But even in more recent history, the beast has still been deadly. Few early European settlers in the 1850s tried to claim land anywhere near the river, preferring to settle on the upper margins of the densely forested floodplain where they still had access to all that lumber, but some measure of safety from floods. After several decades of almost continuous work by the Army Corps of Engineers and local interests to improve the channel and control flooding, the upper Willamette especially was still prone to frequent channel change. It took until the 1930's for things to stabilize enough that even 50% of the Willamette could be bordered by agriculture. If you've read my blog before, you may have come across the post in which I talk about how water flows through the riverbed as much as over it, if not as quickly. One of the results of this is that an awful lot of gravel and sand gets moved around. As long as the river flows, more sand will always be brought down from up high. Fortunes have been made just mining the gravel and sand from rivers. But this also means that rivers require a certain amount of . . . maintenance . . . in order to be reliably usable for commerce.
When the Columbia River was first being used to access the continent, none of this work had been done. The mouth of the Columbia was very wide, and very shallow, and the navigation channel was different every year; sometimes there were four channels a ship could use, sometimes one. It's hard to overstate the danger this posed to early European explorers trying to get through. However well a river pilot thought he knew an area, the channel he'd used last time might not be there anymore, and the ship could run aground without any warning. A typical shipwreck in the 1850s could cost 40 human lives and a whole shipload of cargo, which represented the livelihoods of many tradesmen and businesspeople waiting at the port. It was 1879 before the US Army Corps of Engineers tried to narrow the
mouth of the channel in an attempt to make the flow deeper.
Is it any wonder the spirit of a river can be represented as a dragon? Over the course of eons, the slender claws raked the landscape, gouging ice into the greatest of mountains to wear them down to hillocks, the body writhed across the floodplains and for centuries destroyed all we could hope to build, and the mouth could swallow entire ships whole.
Nowadays, we keep our dragons rather tightly chained, muzzled. We dredge and we build levees and seawalls to lock them down into beds we like for them. We chain their power with dams that suck the energy out of them, turning what was once a powerful flow into more a series of lakes. But, I suppose . . . that's a post for another day.
