Category Archives: Growth

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 while 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 just 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; one that helps us, a portion of the more powerful human residents, bridge the gap between the contrived landscape in which we spend most of our lives, and the wild, evolving landscape outside our communities, that operates in ways that balance all the competing and supportive needs, of all of the species that comprise it. Our ‘developed’ communities, heavily prioritize a narrow fraction of the lives within them.

Tree selections should be supportive of local wildlife and pollinators in addition to providing the environmental services associated with urban tree canopies…not just those of the decision makers within the human community. 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 shape the future. However we slice it, they will demand water in larger amounts as they grow over time. So our choices should be thoughtful and considered. At issue is whether the normal growing conditions can adequately support the growth of chosen trees. We know that almost any other tree, beyond our Western Juniper, will require supplemental water. How much though we need to weigh. When tree and climate are a mismatch the result is evidenced locally 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, their ongoing care and the participation of an informed public.

 

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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. Continue reading →

Tree Planting Problems at Dry Canyon Village

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The reversion on this competing leader threatens to dominate the canopy if not removed. The planting appears good, straight trunk, well staked. It is always what is below ground, that is not readilly visible, that’s critical.

When I was still working for the city of Portland Parks, one of my jobs, for a number of years, was to do design reviews and construction inspection on big capital Parks projects being built from scratch downtown including South Waterfront, Caruthers, Jamison Square, Director’s Square,Tanner Springs and The Fields. I’d attend meetings with our project managers and the landscape architects, charged with assessing the appropriateness of their plant choices given their requirements, the site conditions, our capacity to provide the necessary maintenance over time, whether their combination presented conflicts, without commenting on the aesthetic of their designs, which was considered outside my expertise. Sometimes I was asked to do the same for projects in other areas. I’d visit the project sites regularly to observe prep work, planting and follow-up care, suggesting changes to the contractor and writing up my report. The architects generally approved, or rejected, the plant stock coming into a job, accepting or rejecting substitutions. It was my job to make sure that plants were properly cared for on site before planting, the prep appropriate, that they were planted properly and cared for over the first year of establishment. 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 →

The Emperor of all Maladies: Mukherjee’s look into Our Relationship with Cancer

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Siddartha Mukherjee’s first book, “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer”, is the third of his I’ve read. My interest earlier, and still, remains in understanding the biology of the organism, so I read his books on genetics and the cell first, trying to improve my understanding of the complex actions and structures of life before attempting to understand a disease that ravages and destroys so many lives. His effort to write this book led to Mukherjee receiving the Pulitzer Prize. It is a gargantuan endeavor, artfully constructed. It contains several stories in an overlapping, although, natural style beginning with man’s earliest recorded conception of the disease(s). It becomes clearer and clearer as you read through it that cancer is more a ‘family’ of diseases, linked by their pattens and effects as they progress within the cell and from there, into the collective structures of our body, than it is a singular disease. But that gets way ahead.

Cancer is not a ‘new’. The ancient Greeks wrote of it and there are scattered records of it much earlier from other civilizations. Galen, wrote of it almost 2,000 years ago, attributing it to an imbalance in ‘black bile’, one of the four humors, which when out of balance, he claimed, lead to various diseases (This was the justification for the practice of ‘bleeding’ a patient that continued on into 18th and early 19th centuries, not that long ago). Such ‘humors’ were thought for centuries to be at the root of many diseases and infections across Europe until scientists, through the use of microscopes, began to understand that the cell was the basic building block of all life, and that there was a microbial world beneath and within the world readily observable to us. Galen’s views continued to hold sway until anatomists, through their careful dissections, realized that ‘black bile’ was a fabrication, an attempted explanation for something unseen at work within the body. Cancer then, along with our understanding of the body and disease, began its slow, lurching, advancement through the practice of science. What actually is cancer? Continue reading →

On Rediscovering the World We’ve Been Ignoring: An Introduction to the Life Sciences and Our Need For It

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Science is the study of life and the world around us, an exploration of the reality of the universe conducted from different ‘directions’ with the intent of understanding its endless aspects. Today, however, science in seeking to ‘peel back its layers, in attempting to clarify our place in it and improve the conditions within which we live along with our relationship with it, and each other, many have dismissed the effort and our effort to continue ‘doing’ science has become contentious. Knowing and its pursuit, has become a kind of ‘blasphemy’. Science has become politicized along with so much else. Many completely dismiss it as a wasteful effort, an attempt by elites to purposely complicate our lives with distractive and destructive nonsense, the value of expertise dismissed. For them life seems simple and obvious. Science, many claim, is an effort by ‘elites’ to obfuscate and to remove decision making ever further from the ‘people’…in doing this we are replacing curiosity and understanding with a willful ignorance, generalized fear and a ‘trust’ in those who simply, and loudly, claim to hold the answers, who demean all others and promise to return us to some ‘golden age’ fantasy of the past. They ‘reduce’ language, surrender clarity, replacing it with volume and repetition, shrink both what is acceptable for discussion and the lexicon with which we do so, rendering communications more open to confusion and misinterpretation, to manipulation. Language and speech, limited, regulated. Science can’t afford this. (Nor can any vital society.) Doubt and insecurity will overwhelm us, until we reclaim our right to knowledge. Reason, science and critical thinking, offer us a way out, a way to reclaim our agency, without destroying the world. Continue reading →

“Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death”, a Review and Thoughts on this Life

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I begin this post in my usual way of attempting to incorporate the science presented in Lane’s book into my own understanding of life. That’s what I do through the first portions of this piece. Then I stray….discussing how I understand the process of homeostasis and what I see as the extension of this, relationship as integral to complexity itself, developing from necessary sensitivity, the ‘awareness’, necessary for internal communication,  signaling, responsiveness and, ultimately, the coordination of internal functioning and cognition, sentience and ,ultimately, intelligence. It is a process of accretion, with increasing complexity. The links between related ‘things’ are then not just physical, they are energetically connected. I’ll leave this now for later.

I’ve just finished reading evolutionary biochemist, Nick Lane’s latest book, “Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death”.  It is not light reading. There are diagrams of chemical reactions, often with descriptions that urge the reader to not get overly hung up on them, the terms and steps. They are not simple processes. One transformation following another, necessarily, in precise order, until removed for other processes, other needs, the remainder augmented by what is required to continue on. Uninterrupted. Billions of times per second. He writes about the quantum hopping occurring in reactions instantaneously. Shared electrons. The flow of protons in the continuous ‘flux’ of life. The processes changing ‘directions’, spinning off secondary products, closing and reopening paths as the cell and organism works to maintain homeostasis, interpreting the seeming chaos of activity into the sustenance of life. It is a ‘story’ of constant metabolic change, patterned and ‘free’, the work of homeostasis that takes place within every organism. There is a lot here I write of not in the book, but which I’ve picked up in my other reading. And, again, I’ll remind you that as an intuiter, I combine ideas, works from disparate sciences and follow my own paths. This is another part of my journey to understanding this world.

His other books have been more accessible, for this reader anyway, but to move ahead in one’s understanding of life’s complexity, one has to have an understanding of the concepts and big ideas involved. Life isn’t magic. Its study can be simultaneously intimidating and fascinating as well as a wondrous process when look closely. I’ll be rereading this one to pick up more bits later. Continue reading →

On Biology, Ecology, Evolution: Health as a Product of an Engaged Life Aided by Science

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Biology, the ‘life sciences’, botany, evolution, cell biology, ecology, health and disease, plant communities, our relationship as humans with each other, geology and the life around us, are all topics that interest me. My most recent reading choices have focused on embryology and an organism’s capacity to maintain homeostasis, what is meant by ‘health’. Earlier I focused on the big question of ‘What is life?’ I’m an integrator, an intuitor, an assembler of conceptual puzzles. For me understanding is the goal and that usually involves understanding the ‘pieces’ of the puzzle and fitting them together into coherent wholes. That’s what I do when I select books and read. While my fiction choices are relatively wide and varied, when it comes to this question, I am far more focused, purposeful. I am not overly concerned with being correct in terms of conventional thought or even regarding that which is accepted as being scientifically correct. I’m looking for what makes ‘sense’. I ‘test’ what I read.

Science is conservative and rightly so. It works to define a foundation from which we may build on. Many, if not all scientific advances, came at the expense and pain of researchers who reach beyond the established to address the problems that accepted theory has revealed as the process advances. Egos and careers can get crushed. Arguably, every significant advance in science began as a controversial idea. Over time, with repeated experimentation, advances in technologies that enable scientists to address questions not previously possible, new insights and ways to ask the ‘question’, the new gains support, or alternatively, is revealed to be ‘wrong’. In this process other questions arise, that move us toward a more complete ‘truth’, a truth that enlightening and revealing, can never be the ultimate answer. What preceded it was not necessarily ‘wrong’, but more likely incomplete, unable to fully explain the world as our understanding of it itself changes. Science becomes a process of understanding at an ever finer scale. What once served, still does, but in a coarser grained way. Occasionally, it demands a radical rethink of our basic understanding of reality. Continue reading →

The Good Virus, A Review and Thoughts About the Necessity of an Informed Public

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Every book tells a story, even the driest academic tome…or rather, utilizes the form of a story. Humans communicate through story. It’s how we give some communicable ‘form’ to our thoughts which we can share. Without it everything is disconnected reportage of facts, personal impressions, emotions. Raw data. Zeros and ones. incomprehensible. To communicate through story requires that we share enough elements of the story, its language, form and ideas, with our ‘listener’, that they can understand what we are saying/writing. If it is too alien, communication does not happen. The listener/reader, hears the words, but the meaning eludes them. Meaning and experience are not shared. Without these, connection, communication, fails. The more esoteric the topic, the more important it is that both ‘parties’ share a common language, that  each is ‘educated’ to some degree, about the world the other is attempting to communicate. As science and technology become ever more specialized and schools and social institutions become more isolated from their larger communities, communication fails more often than not. Especially when the ‘other’ is viewed in a negative light, as untrustworthy. Communication then requires a leap of faith, because as our understanding of the world becomes deeper and more complex, we cannot all become expert in all things. There is just too much to learn. This is when effort, trust and faith, become essential. We must share a commonality, a trust in the other. As shared knowledge, and ‘ways of knowing’ decline, assumptions then dominate. Intentions then become suspect and the very possibility of community and communication evaporate. What we ‘see’, is what ‘we’ see, not what someone else does. Whether or not that is shared is the crux of the communication problem.  Continue reading →

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 →