Category Archives: Ecology

Climate Change and the Limits to Life: a couple reviews and examination

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Not to ‘rain on anyone’s parade’, but walking home last night at 10:30 from a neighbor’s, the air was still, it was 81F and 51% humidity…ugh. Normally, it cools off significantly here in the high desert once the sun goes down. This summer is different.
Today, August 2, we’re forecasted to break 100F again. That will be the 26th day over 90 this year, the ninth over 100F…with less than 1/4” of rain since June 1. I’ve mentioned before that our average high temp for July is 85F. We were at or below that only four days in July.
Our old normals no longer hold. They are shifting consistently higher from year to year. This is happening worldwide. Its effects are greater, and more devastating, at equatorial latitudes and polar.
It is estimated that at or above a wet bulb (W/B) temperature of 35C the human body cannot cool itself. We cool down by evaporating away sweat on our skin surface. W/B temps mimic this by placing a wet cloth sleeve around a thermometer bulb, the evaporation taking away heat in the same way. W/B temps are then cooler, ‘chilled’ by the water evaporating away, drawing heat away from the thermometer’s temperature sensitive bulb, than ‘dry bulb temps. When these rise higher than W/B 35C, our internal organs and systems begin to falter and will fail in relatively short order, depending on our state of health. Some of us will have greater tolerance than others, but all will die at these levels if they have no way to cool their core temperatures. Some argue that this begins happening below this. Many areas are already experiencing such ‘events’. Governments are still slow to act We continue to build out our cities in patterns that maximize energy use and consume resources and products from around the world which must be transported to us, removed from where they other wise occur. Profit driven businesses, still refuse to change their practices and goals, insisting that the market will solve this…the same market that has created the problem…and we ‘demand’ this, these patterns, goods and services, ever more ‘divorced’ from the places we actually live, the limits and constraints with which we’d otherwise have to live.

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On Healing: Life, Place and Relationship in Oregon’s Great Basin Country

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The massive fault block of Hart Mountain, Poker Jim Rim in the distance to the north. The gravel county road switchbacks up the more than 3,000′ beginning from the center in the distance here. From here this is how you get to Steens Mountain without doing miles of backtracking.

I woke up this morning to the sound of bird song…nothing else. There were Western Meadowlarks and a multitude of others, I’m sorry to say I don’t know, but beautiful and distinct. I was laying in bed, atop our truck, thinking about how rare an event this is for so many of us…not that the birds aren’t here greeting the morning every day, but that so many of us aren’t ‘available’ to hear them, sequestered away safely in our homes, otherwise occupied or, more commonly, the birds literally excluded from our urbanized and ‘modern’ places of residence, their own places developed/destroyed. Entire neighborhoods and cities excluding all but the most common songbirds and passerine species.  Little quarter is afforded most wildlife in modern development…and that upon which their lives depend.  Continue reading →

Weeds, Weeding and the Health of Our Public and Private Landscapes: an example from the ‘hood

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Every gardener is a weeder. Gardens are created landscapes, often expressions of the individual gardener or, lacking of intent and design sense, those of a chosen designer. We live in our landscapes as active, responsible, creators, participants and stewards. Gardeners are trying to create a particular look or to grow particular plants native to their area, or with ornamental value or food plants to feed themselves and their families. Some of us are simply pursuing what we understand to be a healthy relationship with one’s place, to undo the damage and allow a new healthy and vital landscape to grow. These are landscapes of our choice. Our intention and control results in various volunteers and weeds finding their own place and so follows the need for weeding. 

We watch carefully, monitor the impacts of our work, attempt to understand what result is moving us closer to our goal and which might be indicators of further loss. Landscapes and gardens are incredibly complex systems and anyone who claims to have all of the answers is fooling himself and you. Our landscapes are broken, by us and our predecessors. The Pandora’s Box of weeds and disruption was burst open long ago. The only way ahead is to find a new path.  Weeds are here filling the niches we have collectively made and maintain for them. The more one is surrounded by aggressive, well adapted weeds, the more time we must spend controlling them. While this can be significant, gardeners mostly take the work in stride, a necessity to reach our goal, a goal which may be the simple act itself, of working in concert with our place…open to its teachings. Gardening, is a way of life, a smaller scale version of farming and the management of large ‘natural areas’ with their attendant commitment, rhythms and demands. Continue reading →

Dry Canyon Proposal: the need for change in maintenance, use and planning

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[The following is a piece I wrote and sent to our local Parks staff, its advisory citizens committee, mayor and city manager…I got little back in response. I’ve developed a relationship with one of the city arborists and the park’s planner as well as have met several active neighbors interested in protecting Dry Canyon’s natural areas, several of whom have natural resources backgrounds with agencies. The City has no natural resource or botanical staff. There is no formalized friends group, nor is their an outreach and public education program that addresses these problems and the role of residents in their solution. Signage is minimal and inadequate. Their horticultural expertise would also seem quite limited. This is understandable as the City’s population has grown very rapidly in recent years. The need for such programs and an increase in expertise on staff will only increase as Redmond’s population continues to grow.]

 

Redmond’s Dry Canyon looking south from the west rim on the Maple Street Bridge. The area in the immediate foreground burned this last summer.

A typical view at the base of a section of relatively unbroken rim on the east side.

The canyon floor is variable, but as this pic shows, a solid layer of hardened lava underlies what soil is here, either blown in or washed in, a limiting factor of what can grow here. Rabbitbrush is a common and ubiquitous native pioneer.

Match of the canyon floor is recovering from pasture use. These areas have relatively deep soils and are still transitioning with many weedy mustards, annual grasses like Cheat and planted grasses like Crested Wheat and Annual Barley. Native Bluebunch Wheat is scattered as are other natives. Gray Rabbitbrush, a native seral species has moved into much of it, but the weeds are dominant. Sagebrush and Bitterbrush are more at the edges and lower rim areas.

This section of bottomland, former pasture, probably burned not that long ago, has quite a colony of Rabbitbrush coming along, all it would appear of even age, suggesting a fire. Rabbitbrush are early colonizers and ‘prepare’ the way for natives to follow. This is just north of the Maple Bridge.

This area, maybe 5 acres, burned in July. It will be interesting to see what comes back and what the City may plant??? Fire kills Sagebrush and Juniper, while it seems to favor Cheatgrass. So far, April ’24, nothing has been replanted. The window for seeding is closed. Rabbitbrush can survive a burn. This site is unfenced, with very fragile soils and we’ve already observed new bike trails in it.

My wife and I are both recent returnees to Central Oregon having both grown up here. We are also frequent walkers in Dry Canyon, a place I spent many hours in playing and exploring as a kid in the 60’s. Redmond has changed a lot over the intervening years…change that continues apace as it grows. I’m not going to whine about the ‘good old days’ and things lost. Much of the change I welcome or at least accept (We did move back!), but population growth, in addition to bringing along economic vitality and stability, new and enriching opportunities and a more diverse community, increases the ‘pressures’ on the naturally limited assets that largely define the place and attract residents. I’m speaking here of the natural landscape, its features and the opportunities which it affords us for recreation and quiet enjoyment. Realtors were once fond of saying that no one is making new land, as a prompt for buying…it is a fixed and limited quantity. This limitation has profound implications for a growing population. We have far more people today ‘enjoying’ a limited, and increasingly over utilized landscape. Continue reading →

Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness and Being, Thoughts on the Book

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[My ‘reviews’ are not strictly book reviews. I’m not trying to distill the author’s ideas down into a simpler ‘bite-sized’ piece or discuss their ‘style’. These are my thoughts after having read these books. My attempts to make sense of them, usually after several rewrites, as I work to fit them into what I already ‘know’, an attempt to make the ideas presented in this book, consistent with those which I’ve read by other authors. They include ideas not covered by this author. Rarely, if ever, can you come to an understanding from a singular perspective. This is a link to an annotated bibliography on my Blog of several of the more significant books which have  influenced me on this topic,]

Complexity theory? Do we need a theory to determine what is complex? No, that’s not what this is about. Theise’s book does not layout a system for determining what should be considered complex/complicated or not. This is a book about systems and structures in nature and how they come about. He discusses how mainstream science has fallen short in explaining this and why, the author believes, without changes in approach, we will continue to fall short. He goes on to present an alternative, or, rather, a ‘sister’ approach which can provide a previously excluded way of ‘knowing’, and in so doing, can account for the ‘gaps’. The problems are not just that this is a difficult concept to understand, but that at the most basic, quantum, level, that at which nothing can be divided smaller, where all things ‘begin’, actions and processes do not follow human logic and contemporary expectation….

I remember reading the book “The Limits to Growth” in the early ’80’s, which introduced me to ‘systems theory’, an approach which required looking at all of the parts and actions within a system, consider their relationships and how they work together, in order to understand its ‘working’. A system could be ‘modeled’, mathematically and the long complex equations run on a computer. There were generally multiple possible models to run. This gave us a degree of ‘predictive’ power, but these would always be approximations, because no model could be perfect and every situation, every starting point, would result in a somewhat different ‘answer’.  I followed this with James Gleick’s book on Chaos Theory and its ‘ability’ to explain certain types of patterns, which appear spontaneously in nature, while introducing me to the idea and maths of ‘fractals’. There were multiple  books on ecology which necessarily take a wholistic approach. James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, published their book on Gaia Theory, a product of their collaboration which began in the 1970’s, a theory of the Earth itself functioning as a self-regulating system, as if it were a gigantic, single, organism of which we ourselves are a part. All of these were related, coming out over a short span of years. These were ‘new’ hypotheses and theories, never before seriously considered by science back then, but now being investigated, their validity, and the answers they suggest, impossible to ignore.

Science often advances this way. Seemingly radical ideas, rejected by the majority of the mainstream…until resistance worn down, their validity demonstrated through thoughtfully conducted and reviewed experimentation, the scientific community then coming around to more broadly adopt them and reshape science and our understanding. (Some argue that this ‘process’ requires some number of the old guard to literally die, younger minds being more free to consider the new.)  Margulis and Lovelock’s ideas were just too far out there for most at the time. For many, such thinking then belonged to the realm of metaphysics, or fanciful science fiction, frivolous exercises in thought and belief. Exploring these ideas, testing their validity, only became possible with the computational capacity of ever more powerful computers and an openness to branches of thought once rejected by science. ‘Game Theory’ and cybernetics played a role in all of this as well. Complexity Theory has far more capacity to explain how matter and functional systems emerge, or manifest, than mainstream science could historically. Nature, through the conditions and forces in play at any given moment, ‘drive’ the universe toward order along with the ‘creation’ of complex structures and functions, at the cost of energy spent, ‘held’ in the new structures and dissipated away as lost heat. All of countless processes linked to one another through a myriad of relationships and the feedback loops which comprise them. The universe continues to evolve, and as it does, it continuously spins off everything in it, from sub-atomic particles to human beings over time, a process which it itself is directly influenced by its evolving ‘self’.

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Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds, a Valueable Entry into Understanding This World

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Otherlands by Thomas Halliday | Penguin Random House AudioI mostly read non-fiction, books on history, the ‘natural sciences’, about life. I get my fiction in the form of television and movies, graphic novels and no, there is a lot more out there other than the limited, repetitive genre of super-heroes from the DC and Marvel universes. I’m drawn to the speculative stories, alternative tellings of this world, of life lessons, attempts to reimagine the past, or invent possible futures, stories that question what we are generally taught in this life. But really, I’m a science guy, reading those authors who draw from the leading edge of science, and the scientists themselves, who are skilled enough communicators, not something that necessarily is companion to those ‘doing’ science, those who can clearly discuss what they’ve learned and present reviews of entire fields of study, which strive to show the reader how our understanding of the world is changed.  Continue reading →

Knapweeds in Redmond’s Dry Canyon and the Pursuit of a Healthy Landscape

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Redmond’s Dry Canyon looking south from the west rim on the Maple Street Bridge. The area in the immediate foreground burned this last summer.

If you garden, or maintain a landscape, you come to understand that not all weeds are the same. Each will have its own ‘strengths’, or perhaps you might call it ‘virulence’. Any particular weed, just like any other plant, will respond ‘positively’ to supportive growing conditions, conditions which often closely align with those which exist in its place of origin. Plant explorers and nursery growers are always looking for ‘new’ plants for landscape use. in a way, they have to walk a fine line. They must find plants, that with reasonable effort on the part of the gardener, can thrive across a range of conditions, unless they are looking for specialty plants, for narrow, niche, markets. The introduction of new plants must be somewhat measured, our enthusiasm tempered, because plants which are too adaptable, too vigorous, may possess the ability to escape our cultured gardens and find a place in the surrounding, uncultivated, landscape.

For Central Oregon, when we look beyond our regional natives, we must keep this in mind. Exotics from similar growing and climatic regions around the world offer both promise and threat. We want our plants to be successful, but not too. Sometimes through the process of trade, the movement of livestock and agricultural products, particularly aggressive species hitch a ride. A few weed seeds can be easy to miss. If they are aggressive enough and go unnoticed, a distinct possibility, it is likely that they wont be detected until a sizable local population asserts itself…and if no one is watching, that can be a fateful error. One group of plants, with many wonderful possibilities, also include species which can be exceedingly problematic here in Central Oregon, these are from regions sometimes referred to as Steppe. Continue reading →

On Weeds, Disruption and the Breaking of Native Plant Communities: Toward a More Informed Working Definition of Weeds

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The bottom land in Redmond’s Dry Canyon was used for decades as low quality pasture, the native community pretty much obliterated. Those areas with surface rock are more likely to retain more of the original plant community, although Cheatgrass has invaded much of those areas as well. The is looking southerly over one of the larger ‘pasture’ areas near the disc golf course. There is very little Cheatgrass through this section south of West Rim Park. It includes a few native seral species which typically occupy disturbed sites as a site transitions, including Gray Rabbitbrush you see here. Found in this area too is Secale cereale, Annual Rye, a non-native, which appears to have been planted along more formal paths to limit Cheatgrass spread(?).  Junipers are moving in. Sagebrush hasn’t yet.

It is commonly said that a weed is a plant out of place…and of course ‘we’ are the one’s who decide this. Some will try to argue that there are no weeds, that all plants belong and if we only left weeds alone landscapes would reach a balance on their own. If one’s time frame is long enough this may be the case, though this will take considerably longer than one of our lifetimes, and then there is our inability to actually leave landscapes on their own, or to at least consciously moderate our disturbance of them. Weeds are plants. They are not a separate classification of plants. They are plants removed from their places of origin and released into another where they have competitive advantages. Most people still simply tend to refer to plants they don’t like or want as weeds. These positions are at odds with one another. This leads to confusion and a lack of clarity, undermining any urgency to take action.

Weeds have become ‘personal’, their status a matter of ‘opinion’….A weed is a weed only if “I” agree that it is, or perhaps some ‘expert’, such as when agricultural scientist identify them as an economic threat to farms and label them as ‘noxious’. Without agreement and urgency there is a tendency to do nothing about them. Plants in general are attributed little intrinsic value. For many people they are just there. Native plants we vaguely understand as belonging to a place, but most people would be hard pressed to identify and name many at all. Quite different species are often lumped together, their relationships unnoticed. Natives are reduced to being ‘background’, their status reduced to decoration, attractive or not, a ‘space’ filler, perhaps a hinderance to what we would chose to do with a place. Continue reading →

Spruce Park, Redmond’s Newest Park and Our Neighbor: a horticultural critique

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Redmond’s Spruce Park looking NNE from the SW corner toward Gray Butte and Smith Rock in the background. The border beds which follow much of the loop path are ‘native’ plantings according to the conceptual plan. It is common to claim that most of the plants are natives in designed natural areas, but native is not synonymous with ‘natural’. Although natives are used here concessions have been made including such plants as Echinacea purpurea ‘Pow Wow Wildberry’ and Rudbeckia ‘Goldsturm’. In a strict sense Ponderosa Pine aren’t native to this immediate locale either, they require more precipitation than we normally get and the Autumn Blaze Maples are a hybrid of two northeastern North American species.

A landscape, in nature, is a whole, functioning system, capable of perpetuating itself, through out the seasons and years, relying entirely on its own conditions and the cycling of energy and resources occurring on and within it. This is also the definition of a modern sustainable landscape. Ideally they require no inputs or energies supplied from offsite aside from the sun, precipitation and the normal cycling onsite of nutrients and water. A human made, contrived landscape, as all of those built by us today are, may be ‘judged’ by how well they function on ‘their own’, by how well they fit this ideal. Labor and outside inputs necessary to maintain a landscape are then indicators of how out of balance, how far from ‘ideal’ nature and genuine sustainability, a landscape is. A contrived landscape, which ignores the relationships integral to a healthy landscape community ‘demands’ more and more maintenance and support. Given its design and use, a landscape which ignores its site and relationship requirements will deteriorate from the intended design, losing to death component plants while gaining, increasingly, more unwanted available weed species. Design, conditions and use are essential to determine, in this sense, what a ‘good’ landscape is. Continue reading →

The Owls of the Eastern Ice:A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl, Jonathan Slaght, a review

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Slaght holding one of the Blakiston's Fish Owls they captured and released.This is a story about the effort to understand and protect Blakiston’s Fish Owl, the largest owl in the world and its endangered population living in the Russian territory of Primorye Krai which lies along the Sea of Japan, north of the Russian port city of Vladivostok. It is a remote, sparsely settled and wild place, isolated from the rest of the world, and Russia as well, at a latitude close to our own, stretching 559 miles, between 42º and 48º north latitude. The author, Jonathan Slaght, a PhD candidate at the time, spent years in Primorye first in the Peace Corps and later working on a variety of wildlife projects before he took on the owls, a several years long study he undertook in association with the University of Minnesota, teaming up with Russian experts, and a loose international group of others doing research on other species resident there, like the Amur Tiger. His crew of Russian field workers, most of them hunters, skilled sportsmen, skilled as well in traveling through the wild landscape and survival there, were invested in the work they were doing. These people become his friends over the several years, despite or maybe because of their quirks, while both assisting and ‘training’ him as they do their primarily winter field work, under very harsh and often dangerous conditions, gathering data in the long months he spent back in the US. Along the way he lays out the work he must do to create an effective conservation plan, the goal of which was to secure the owl’s future, an owl about which relatively little was known. Continue reading →