Category Archives: Climate

On the Creation of an Urban Tree Canopy Management Plan for Redmond, Oregon

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Trees can be a defining element of a community as a ‘success’ story, a failure or somewhere in-between. A community’s trees are of it, not some separate amenity provided by the City. Ideally, just as the canopy is part of a community, its care should be a part of the shared responsibility of the community, with the City providing the services the community cannot, in addition to their role of coordinating the care so that the tree canopy can provide the highest level of service in addition to meeting aesthetic needs. The City is ideally situated to perform this role. Neither ‘group’, the community or the City can do this on their own. Training, education, outreach, project implementation (planting, tree care) are a joint responsibility. Leaving this as a City responsibility alone cannot result in the best product. Communication and partnerships should define the relationship and effort.

Picking numerical targets for increasing overall tree canopy misses the mark. We don’t need numbers, we need site and species appropriate trees in order to grow out a healthy urban canopy that is neither water intensive, given our climate and declining aquifer, nor one that increases overall wildfire risk. At the same time tree selections should be supportive of local wildlife and pollinators in addition to providing the environmental services associated with urban tree canopies. Planting the wrong trees to get initial numbers up, as some kind of marker of success, will be relatively short lived at best. Trees are a long term, living and growing investment that however you slice it, demand water in larger amounts as they grow over time. At issue is whether the normal growing conditions can adequately support the growth of chosen trees. When tree and climate are a mismatch the result is evidenced by the increasing numbers of shade trees around town where owners have turned off the water leading to stressed and dying trees. Success is absolutely dependent upon well chosen trees and the participation of an informed public. I have written of this problem elsewhere (forwarding some of it to Eocene’s Sarah Lilley). Continue reading →

Political Chaos, Wildfire and Drought: We have a choice, but not a lot of time

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I don’t usually repost what I’ve put on my FB page, but the world just keeps getting crazier politically, so much so that our new reality is being lost in the chaos. Now is not the time to give up. As bleak as things may seem to be becoming…it will be far worse if we don’t do what we can to implement a course correction.

If you want to keep your head in the sand, if you believe in the stagnant and bleak Trumpian promises of a return to a ‘golden’ past, if you truly believe that the MAGA movement contains all of the answers we require…don’t read any further. It will only upset you.

Picture from a Spokane, WA area newspaper of one devastated residential neighborhood.

As I write this the world is literally burning. Round it up and there are 2 million acres in Oregon alone either already burned or in the process of doing so this summer, with several months still to go in our ‘fire season’. There are multiple fires each over 100,000 acres. In Washington state Spokane continues to burn. In Bordeaux region of France hundreds of thousands of residents were evacuated while others were because of a fire threatening Madrid, Spain. Most of Europe is undergoing it’s fourth major heat wave with thousands having died as a result. As the drought in the American West and western Europe deepens the flow of rivers and the level of reservoirs across the Western US drop to or near record lows, all while demand for water keeps increasing. There is so much excessive heat and fire around the globe right now that it would overwhelm the news cycle to report it…so we only hear about those most local. Some are publicly claiming it to be a result of a singular ‘super-El Nino’, while most climatologists see this as the new normal, with much worse extremes to come, on an over heated planet.

Pundits dismiss and argue against climate change without evidence…just denials and random factoids. Western peoples tend to subscribe to the belief that because something hasn’t happened in their lifetime, it won’t or can’t. Such a belief actually insures that a WORSE outcome is likely as we do nothing to ameliorate it. That simply shows their ignorance of history, complex systems and ecology. They continue to deny the big picture and science, although as our new reality begins to dominate, more are becoming concerned, but few are acting. In some countries they HAVE been actively shifting away from their dependence on fossil fuels. Here, however, most of those efforts have been stymied or killed by the Trump misadministration, while programs to accelerate consumption have been increased masking it in claims of American energy/oil independence without even the suggestion of a backup plan as the limited resource is exhausted. We are thus ‘protected’ from even the possibility of climate change through shear will and belief….Good luck with that. This is a lot like waging war to gain the peace…we’ve seen repeatedly how that doesn’t work, but become ‘convinced’ time and again by those who profit from war, that it is a good and worthy cause.

Meanwhile politicians, especially here in America, continue to waffle, beholden to the billionaires, the petrochemical corporations and all of the infinite growth advocates across the economy, an economy that recognizes no limits, who only value MORE. We keep increasing extraction and consumption of resources, no matter what damage it imposes on the environment and landscape. We deny that it matters while the landscape and conditions deteriorate. The economic priority is still singularly focused on increasing demand and production, limitless growth of manufacturing capacity, increasing sales and extracting more profit. It isn’t so much that business is ‘king’ its simply about extracting profit. Where will it end?

The Trump misadministration, by chicanery and blatant disregard for law, continues defunding and dismantling virtually every program that attempts to address energy consumption, or supports alternative energy and technologies, celebrating our use of carbon fuels, alone…while much of the rest of the world is waking up to the crisis that is becoming not only impossible to ignore, but is worsening at a rate independent of what we do. More and more natural systems are beginning to crash and the predicted catastrophes many climatologists have predicted, are manifesting, earlier and quicker than anyone anticipated. Thresholds have been crossed. Cascades have begun, largely beyond human control…yet we continue to do nothing or worse. People, lulled into complacency or hopelessness, simply pray for rescue, while continuing their past habits, in denial of their agency…their responsibility. No one wants to talk about it. This isn’t just a regular head in the sand moment, this is a crashing of natural systems that have worked for millions of years to maintain stable living conditions, planet wide, crisis. This is biology demanding its due.

When James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis put forward their Gaia hypothesis in the early 1970s, the power brokers, economists and many of their fellow scientists, attacked and ridiculed them. The Earth alive? Preposterous! But that isn’t what they were really saying. The Earth with its impossibly complex diversity of life, is a system of interwoven local ‘communities’. Of resource and energy cycles that feed back continuously shaping and effecting the entirety. Each is related to the other in a way that supports the whole. Were competition, aggression, limitless consumption what drove the dynamism of life, what ecologists generally term the process of ‘natural selection’…there wouldn’t be anything left. Relationship, cooperation, communication, resilience, responsiveness are essential at every level.

The Earth, with all of its life, is an interlocking system. Extremes, of whatever kind, aren’t just unsustainable, they are anomalous, momentary outliers, short lived and cyclic. Today’s extremes, even our slavishly followed economic system, had its benefits, but that time passed, as everything else became subservient to it, but today, in our world of over 8 billion people our a global economy still only recognizes growth as the ultimate value, pushing the Earth system dangerously out of balance….Extremes have always cycled, rising and later disappearing in concert with every other individual, community, species and the non-living systems on the planet, including the oceans and the atmosphere. They are all of one piece.

Hoover Dam Lake Mead water level comparison 1983, 2003, 2026

Life, biologists and ecologists are saying, more and more, is an ‘emergent’ property. It arises out of complexity and wholeness. It is a product of that complexity. There is no ‘recipe’ one can follow in one’s lab, no pantry of organic chemicals, no matter how complete, that can be concocted in a lab, that can bring about life. It can only be modified…messed with, cajoled so far, before collapse. Life is a process at every scale and our own arbitrary delineations of it into independent individuals can never capture, completely, what it is. Nor can an individual survive for long absent other supportive life. It’s not possible. We kid ourselves with fantasies about going to Mars, terraforming it and creating a living planet of our own. Hell we can’t even keep this one alive!

Our own individual bodies work to maintain dynamic balance, homeostasis, the ‘forces’ and processes that maintain any organism in a state of health. They are complex and emergent. It cannot be ‘built’ piecemeal’. It arises out of a complex process, out of particular relationships. Relationships linked to all of those that preceded it, from the simplest forms to today’s.

Emergence is unpredictable, a product of the joining of the individual with! It allows for the novel, the previously unimaginable. It makes this life possible. Worked in reverse, when intact biological systems, whether those of an individual, a local community or the planet as a whole, are degraded, reduced, simplified, they begin to lose that quality of emergence as well as their resilience, their capacity to buffer themselves against a changing world. What was once sustaining, succumbs to collapse and this can occur in the form of catastrophic cascades that will continue to the point where a new ‘balance’, a new network of relationships begins to work in harmony, until life resonates with that around it. These aren’t things within our control. We are ‘of’ this world and cannot exist without or outside of it. Astronauts must bring everything with them to sustain life and return to Earth. The possibility of life on Mars, as portrayed in the film, ‘The Martian’ is simple fantasy. Divers can remain underwater only so long before suffering damage.

Respect, between the parts, is a given in healthy living systems, without that…well, that’s our problem. We don’t truly respect life. We use it. We value ourselves over all others. We have removed ourselves from the systems that sustain life. We take and we use. It is what our politics and economy are based on. We have failed to see this because first, we aren’t looking, we haven’t recognized the need to, and second, because there is a resilience in functioning natural systems built into them over Earth’s several billion years, we refuse to see it coming. We live under the lie that what we do doesn’t matter. The Earth has always been here for us and so it must and always will be. Life supports that which sustains it, until it can’t. We are in the process of learning this…I hope, and it is going to cost us dearly.

This misadministration would rather spend endless billions of dollars, killing people and destroying irreplaceable infrastructure, in a fruitless war, and in a terror campaign against its own people and citizens, then it would towards positive projects that would address the several existential crises that we face as a country and as a world. There won’t be much of a world left if we can’t out maneuver, the ship of fools and SOB’s currently in the White House or feeding off the spoils it tosses their way.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/25/world/europe/wildfires-france-spain-bordeaux-madrid.html

The Nutrient Cycling Role of Fire in Central Oregon’s Arid Landscapes

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A Juniper like this one, growing out on BLM land around Cline Buttes, attains this squat and sturdy stature only after hundreds of years. Growing as they do on shallow, raised rocky areas, not only do they grow slowly, but there tendency is to caliper up. In irrigated pastures, these grow overly fast, spindly and upright. Look at that taper!

Ecologists will regularly claim that fire plays an essential role in the life and dynamics of the Juniper woodland, our sagebrush steppe and the grasslands of our arid and semi-arid plant communities, that without it, the landscape will deteriorate. Okay, but what does that mean? How can fire actually lead to a landscape’s improved vitality and diversity? What does fire actually do and what happens when it is eliminated? The short answer is that fire, in burning the collected fuels on the ground, breaks them down and returns them in nutrient form to the soil and the cycle of life. It provides the space necessary for a healthy and diverse landscape. To get there requires more thinking.

First some essential definitions and clarifications are needed: what are these ‘types’ of landscapes that together can be found in the arid reaches of Central Oregon; all landscapes are dynamic, evolving, changing over time according to the forces in effect on them, they are not static or fixed; what is meant by arid and semi-arid; fire, what is it, what is actually occurring when something ‘burns’; what is going on at a molecular level when an arid landscape burns; if this is so necessary, what fulfills this role in wetter landscapes; what’s the relationship between fire, rot and digestion; how, and does it, serve the nutrient availability and the necessities of organic growth. In understanding these basic parts we can better understand the self-renewing CYCLE of life as an ongoing process and how disruptions to it negatively influence its capacity to continue. Continue reading →

Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, My Thoughts on Goldfarb’s Book

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Had I not read Ben Goldfarb’s 2018 book, “Eager”, I probably wouldn’t have picked this one up. Why would I want to read an entire book on ‘roadkill’? But I trusted him. And so I read it. 

I found his writing here crisp and engaging, like his other work, but I was still hesitant and did my reading in fits and starts. I’ve read several books lately about impending environmental crises and I didn’t really have the energy to do another, but I did finish it and found it a worthwhile and satisfying experience. Amongst these earlier books was Slaght’s, “Tiger’s Between Empires” which returned repeatedly to the problem of how devastating even the relatively little travelled roads of Russia’s remote Primorye Province are for its endangered population of Amur Tigers. In the world of ecology, roads routinely bring death to the wildlife they literally impact, as well as because of the discontinuities they create in the landscape, physical and chemical changes they visit upon the animal’s environment and the surrounding biotic communities. This is about the wholesale implementation of a technology ‘alien’ to the animal world, that purports to meet the ‘needs’ of humans while making little allowance for the uncounted species that reside alongside them. Continue reading →

Nature’s Ghosts, Sophie Yeo’s Look into Ecology, the Loss of Species and Habitat, in a World that is more than mud, leaves and atoms.

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An ecological study tends to start with a particular species, a place or biotic community and then goes on to define it in terms of its relationships with its various members and the place itself, with its physical conditions. Sophie Yeo, the author of, “Nature’s Ghosts: the world we lost and how to bring it back”, does that, but where most of the books I’ve read take a narrower view and focus on a particular species or place, Yeo takes a both ‘local’ and a more global view as well as one that goes back deeply in time. Hers is not a book limited strictly to ecology as we generally understand it, because she is interested in it as a tool, a tool for reclaiming what has been lost, the ‘Ghosts’ of her title.

As a horticulturist, who took care of landscapes, this book has strong appeal, because not only does it look at life and all of its integral relationships, she includes us, the humans, who so often set ourselves separate in the rarified and an exceptional world of our own making. This is also a critique of this decision in which she writes to show us where and how we belong in this world, how we once were very much a part, how we behaved as a ‘keystone’ species, actors in a landscape, shapers, ‘creators’, and how now, as consumers/destroyers, because of our self ascribed position as superior beings, we became removed and exceptional, a threat to the our other community members, as we changed the world into one that allowed them less and less space. It’s a tall order, what she sets out to do here, but I think she largely succeeds and she does so in a way, with language that is almost lyrical, beautiful at times, and like a ‘bad’ scientist, introduces herself into her story, along with the emotion and clarity that being a new mother can give one’s self.  Continue reading →

On Our Western Juniper Survey in Redmond’s Dry Canyon

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This is an explanation of the importance of the survey work being done by the Friends of North Dry Canyon Natural Area, FNDCNA, and it’s role in the creation of a broader management plan, and a fire management plan, that addresses both community safety needs, as well as those of the Western Juniper and Sagebrush steppe plant communities in Dry Canyon. This is a 160 acre portion of the Canyon Park that stretches 3.7 miles, north to south, through the City, a remnant of one of the canyons formed by one of the previous courses of the paleo-Deschutes River, (There were at least two, one some distance east of Redmond’s location, joining with the Crooked River at present day Smith Rock State Park. The current Deschutes River flows 4 miles to the west of this location through a canyon carved in its earlier stages by Tumalo Creek.) Continue reading →

The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue, a Review

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Global climate change, in our current political climate, has been relegated to a secondary status. There is so much ‘shit’ hitting the fan right now that it gets largely lost in mainstream media coverage. The science that supports it, continues, although at a slower rate. Our transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy has slowed along with the republican denials, their actions to ‘deBidenize’ America, cutting funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act, ‘seed’ monies to fund needed infrastructure investment, along with their cuts to the funding of research into the supporting science and technologies. The topic has been rendered into one of ‘belief’ as if its consequences will have no real world effects, a simple argument of the uninformed, like ‘Ford beats Chevy’, pointless and personal. Author Mike Tidwell, an obvious long time ‘believer’ and lobbyist, has worked over the last 30 years to move the political dial toward climate action, amongst his neighbors, his home state of Maryland and Congress. Here, in his recent book, “The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue”, he tells his and his neighbor’s story, in his DC area neighborhood, of the real world impacts they’ve observed and are attempting to combat. Amongst his neighbors are  Congressman Jamie Raskin, his friend, Ning, a college prof who has been working tirelessly on getting a novel carbon sequestration program up and running, a local state legislator who has been working to get massive scale wind generators built off shore and others working in smaller ways, dealing with the fall out of a climate already changing around them which, among other things, is causing crazy weather perturbations, changes in rainfall and temperature swings that are leading to things like a large increase in Lyme disease, because the milder winters are killing fewer of the disease carrying ticks, while also leading to the massive die off of mature trees across their neighborhood. Continue reading →

The Cut Leaf Thelypody in Dry Canyon

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[Plants of the Dry Canyon Natural Area – This will be the start of a new series focused on the plants of Redmond’s Dry Canyon. I’m creating them to be posted for ‘local’ consumption on the Friends of North Dry Canyon Natural Area. It’s a City Park including about 166 acres at the north end of Dry Canyon Park which the City has identified as a Natural Preserve. The group works as an advocate with the City, on public education and helping with on the ground work projects. I’ll identify each such post here.]

As you walk the trails below the canyon rims you will be seeing these growing scattered and in bunches. This is the Cut Leaf Thelypody, Thelypodium lacinatum. These are common where ever there’s a bit of soil between the rocks on the slopes below the rims growing amongst the tumble of massive basalt. I’ve seen these elsewhere growing in other eastside Oregon canyons with similar conditions.
These are members of the Mustard family, prolific seed producers and quite competitive. Another plant that, at least so far, doesn’t venture out into the canyon’s bottomland.
Elegant when it first starts flowering, like so many native annuals and perennials, these start declining while they proceed through their flowering season detracting from their appearance. What do I mean…each spent flower, begins to form its narrow, linear, Mustard seed capsule, quickly maturing its tiny seed and then drying, twisting and browning, while the inflorescence continues to bloom out towards its terminal end. A little messy, yes, but characteristic of these plants. We humans are relatively intolerant of such decline in our garden plants and so generally refuse them admission. Under the local wild conditions, as dry as they are, species tend to either be early flowering, when soil moisture is still most available or those like this that begin to decline before the show is over. Summer drought is a ‘cruel’ taskmaster. There are exceptions to this rule but….

https://oregonflora.org/taxa/index.php?taxon=8778

The Seat of Awareness: On Plants and What We can Learn from Them

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“From the viewpoint of the evolutionary biologist it is reasonable to assume that the sensitive, embodied actions of plants and bacteria are part of the same continuum of perception and action that culminates in our most revered mental attributes. “Mind” may be the result of interacting cells. Mind and body, perceiving and living, are equally self-referring, self-reflexive processes already present in the earliest bacteria.”
—Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, “What is Life?”, 1995

From what do sentience, awareness, consciousness and intelligence come from? Are these capacities a product of an organism’s complexity? At what point does it first appear? is it a property inherent to even the simplest organic chemicals? of peptide chains and amino acids, of atoms themselves?What of the organizing principle that seems to guide embryogenesis, the growth and form of every living individual of every species? Is it in action in the most ‘simple’ interactions between organic chemicals and the energy flowing through them, that favors one form over another and animates those same forms once they meet some critical minimal level of complexity?  Is this evolution towards complexity and ‘awareness’ an inevitability? A product of its component parts and the energies within it? [This is an idea that is separate from the notion of an inevitable ‘progress’ of life, always moving ‘forward’. Progress is a human notion, an assessment and a valuation of the change around us, not a ‘goal’ of natural selection and the animating ‘flux’ of energies within the universe.] Rudimentary awareness must exists at some necessary and basic level in the simplest single celled organisms…even in plants.

I look to that which is shared between all organisms and question the idea of the animal brain, and its neural system, as the basis for these things and its purported absence in plants, fungi, bacteria, viruses and archaea, as lacking in them. The brain itself and associated nervous system is a unique and complex structure present only in ‘higher’ animals. This bias in favor of the brain and neural systems, especially that of the human brain, as the seat of awareness and consciousness, ignores the requirements of any organism. We are biased in our insistence that these capacities must be located in a singular physical organ and no other. A singular occurrence in the universe. A huge conceit on our part, that this capacity exists in us alone, in and organ and tissues we could could physically evaluate, one which we ‘carry’ internally within us as we move freely about. The body, any body, is a vessel which contains life and is shaped by it. Life is both of the body and transcendent, existing beyond it. Life exists within the continuously unfolding moment. Life is not a ‘thing’ so one can hardly expect awareness, consciousness and intelligence to fit neatly into a limited organ, however we define it. The roots of this reach back into the study of evolution, ecology, cell biology, neurobiology, the metabolism and thermodynamics of life and the expanding field of quantum biology.

This latest thought piece has been inspired by three recent books I’ve read, Ed Yong’s, “An Immense World”, Paco Calvo’s, “Planta Sapiens” and Zoe Schlanger’s, “The Light Eaters”. I am not a scientist. I’m a student driven to make sense of this world. The connections and conclusions I make here are mine, although they may be suggested by the writings of others. Continue reading →

On Ornamental Trees and the Remaking/Unmaking of Place: Revising the City of Redmond’s Tree List, part 2

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How Much to Water?

Recommending trees from climates with significantly wetter growing seasons needs to stop if we are to continue growing our population. Landscapes as designed, and managed, are the single largest user of residential water. Recommending trees which ignore this problem is irresponsible. Lower water use residential landscapes are possible. Local codes and recommendations must, however, reflect this priority.

Additionally, how much to water is a bit of a mystery to all of us and especially so to non-gardeners. How much? How often? Our watering practices should be determined by the local precipitation and the tree’s needs. What is commonly done, however, is that we water for our lawns and that largely determines what our trees receive, unless we have separate drip systems. A tree’s root system doesn’t stay neatly between the lines. They quickly extend out well beyond the span of the tree’s leafy canopy. In many cases even 2-3 times as far, taking up water and nutrients. A roots of a tree, planted in a small bed, adjacent to an irrigated lawn area, will move out into the lawn. A tree isolated in a xeric bed with only a few drip emitters, will quickly demand more than such a meager system affords it and such a tree, if it requires summer moisture, will struggle while competing with its nearby  ground level growing neighbors. Again ‘neighbors’ should share compatible requirements so all can thrive on the same ‘diet’ and moisture regime. Continue reading →