Category Archives: Sustainable Landscapes

Everything is Related, Of and Part of the Whole: Beyond Inheritance, Our Ever-Mutating Cells and a New Understanding of Health and the Economics of Life

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One of my most current reads and the book that prompted this posting.When Darwin wrote “Origin of the Species” in 1859, he clarified and developed ideas that had been kicking around by those studying natural history and the origin of life, even the possibility of it’s evolution. Lamarck, von Humboldt, Darwin’s own grandfather, Haeckel and others had been speculating, arguing about certain pathways to ‘now’, but without having done that much serious research into life’s intricate relationships. There’s were less bold challenges or conceived theories. Christian orthodoxy shaped the thinking of the time, and opposing it, well that wasn’t done. Creation was pronounced a one time event, that all life forms that existed, had from the beginning by the grace and workings of God. But Darwin, himself a devout Christian, and Alfred Russel Wallace, did do the research, did examine the relationships in depth, adding their insights, the idea of ‘natural selection’, a process that ‘sorts’ through the accumulations of adaptations across a community and populations, ‘selecting’ those that give them a competitive advantage. These, over time would produce progeny at higher rates and would come to dominate a population and species. Since then one question led to another, as is the way of science. Where do these adaptations, these mutations, come from? How frequent are they? Aren’t our chromosomes ‘protected’ from this random degradation and mutation? Are mutations truly random? What drives them? Evolution ‘shows’ that over Earth’s 4.5 billion years, life has evolved towards greater complexity, organisms innovating new structures, variations and with it an increase in the sheer bulk of life, as more species create and fill more niches. Life on life. This can’t then be an entirely random event. Wouldn’t a truly random process result in no net ‘gain’? Wouldn’t it be a 50:50 proposition? One step forward, one step back? What is going on in this mutating?

Roxanne Khamsi, in “Beyond Inheritance”, takes the reader on a guided tour of our rapidly evolving understanding of the mutation of our cells and what it means. Mutation is an essential fact of life, one central to natural selection and the ongoing health of every living individual, and, perhaps our demise. Mutation, however, is commonly understood to be a negative, a degradation of the ideal held in our chromosomes. What’s going on here? Is it necessary or is it bad?
Mutation, it turns out, is pervasive. Every species, every tissue every cell and cell type is subject to it. We’re not talking about what occurs in ‘germ cells’, our egg and sperm,  those all important passers on of our genetic code. There are 30-40 trillion cells, in a mature human body, depending on our size, colonized by a like number of bacterial cells. These cells too, as they are going through a continuous process of metabolizing, internal and external maintenance, repairing and replacing themselves, are much more prone to mutation in this endless process of living. Some human brain cells are thought to survive over the course of our entire lives, but all of the rest, are being replaced at widely varying rates. Those epithelial cells of our intestinal lining are replaced every 3-4 days; we replace around 170,000,000,000, 170 billion red blood cells in our bodies, EVERYDAY. Every single cell replaced in our body, requires that the cell replicate its DNA, the two sets of chromosomes each containing 3.1 billion base pairs, the rungs in the helically shaped ladder of DNA’s structure. 3.1 billion base pairs, each consisting of a specific four ‘letter’ group of Adenine (A), Thymine (T), Guanine (G), and Cytosine (C), a 4 digit quarternary code….Perfect replication of each cell, billions and trillions of times over our lives…‘mistakes’, mutations happen. Organisms, cells, are not machines. We have this idea that machines can perfectly produce products endlessly, but that is wrong. Our continuous ‘cloning’ of our cells is far more precise a process. As the bumper sticker once so popular used to say, Shit happens…and the numbers within a complex, multi-celled animal such as ourselves, are astronomical. Mutations happen. We get stressed, sick, exposed to toxic substances, free radicals, physical trauma, various types of radiation, we age, become sedentary, our systems slow, we slow…as the necessary processes of life go on, within bodies and cells. Most must replicate themselves perfectly over our lives. Nevertheless, given the numbers, mutations accumulate. Some of these enable our continued ‘good’ health, some are benign, while others become ‘negative’ change agents, altering the operation and conditions within us, in what can be very harmful ways. Continue reading →

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 →

On Wilding and the Return of Nature: Thoughts on an Idea

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Talk of environmental crises is everywhere, climate change, mass species extinctions, losses of critical habitat, the privatization of once public resources and landscapes (and their subsequent ‘pillaging’ by corporate entities), critically dropping aquifers, what a chaotic climate may mean for world agriculture and our food supply, a world beset by an increasing rate of diseases and diminishing efficacy of the tools we have to combat and treat them….it is daunting and depressing. At the same time, generally barely mentioned in mainstream media, are notices of studies and ideas of what we can do to not just lessen these problems, quite a few of which are being implemented, but to repair the organic and global systems, whose faltering is leading to these increasing problems and potential catastrophes. To make head way on these is going to require a much more concerted effort by most of us. What, many are asking, can we do to usher in a return to a healthier, better functioning, world…before any looming system ‘course corrections’ do the ‘work’ themselves, eliminating the human problem, that ’we’ have collectively become. 

Isabella Tree’s, “Wilding: the Return of Nature to a British Farm”, which prompted this post, supports an approach in which mankind takes on a more responsive and respectful, while simultaneously, a less active role, in the management of the landscape. A ‘less active role’ because what she’s describing requires that we step back, relinquish some control, and allow the powers of nature to heal itself, stepping in where, when and how we must when those ‘forces’, diminished to the point where they are ineffectual, need the support…but no more. She calls for us to trust that our own evolved status is a product of the natural world, a potent nature with the inherent capacities and tendencies, to create, balance and heal, in like proportion to what it ‘takes’ and consumes; that we reclaim our ‘membership’, our historical relationship with this place and all of the life with which we share it. We are active agents of change and must, to the same extent, do the necessary work to heal those wounds, we’ve inflicted upon it through our economic demands and  industrial power. Her story here is one of a shared fate and a faith in life, which is illustrated time and again as she and her husband, Charlie Burrell, work to understand the land and life they are beginning to re-envision, more as curious students than confident ‘experts’. The process quickly becomes one of open discovery as they attempt to understand the health of the place they previously managed as a farm, with the economic expectations of a modern world that has itself become disengaged from life, seeing it narrowly in economic terms that had long ago been separated from ecological reality, limits. and the richness of a place. 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 →

The Eager Beaver: Sociology, Ecology and the Role of Relationship in Life and Community

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Ben Goldfarb’s, “Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why they Matter”, is an excellent model for other authors who write on ecology for the interested lay public. It is also an excellent entry for the novice into the world and thinking of ecology. As in any other ecological examination of a species, Goldfarb tells us about the roles and relationships the beaver has in their particular landscapes, how they fit in. In doing this he tells its history, that is, its historical role in the lives of us humans, and we in its, alongside those it shares intimately with the other species of its biotic community. It is a book very much about this important animal’s relationships, and, by extension those of our own and every other species on the planet. The beaver’s, or as the author also refers to them, the Castorid story, (the latinized name of our North American species is Castor canadensis, its old world counterpart, the other species, Castor fiber) is closely linked to our own. We, as the ‘dominant’ player in our landscape, have overlooked the beaver’s pivotal role in the world of water including the rivers, streams, ditches, ponds and seeps that ‘water’ the desert. Beavers were essential in the historical landscape and now, in their absence, our landscapes are often very much diminished. Wildlife, and even farmers and ranchers, who have often vilified them, are slowly beginning to understand the benefits their presence can provide, benefits that far out weigh any negative impacts they bring with them. People are, however, stubborn with long and selective memories. It is not easy for anyone to let their misconceptions go and accept what you have always rejected as patently false. 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 →

Holodiscus microphyllus, Rock Spiarea in Dry Canyon

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Another less common slope dweller is Holodiscus microphyllus, or Bush Ocean Spray, a deceiving name, or Rock Spiarea, which is also somewhat confusing. Confusing because Spiarea is the genus name for an entirely different genera of shrubs. So I call it simply Holodiscus. ( Botanical names can be confounding to the uninitiated. I’m not a big user of mnemonics, but I still remember first learning this plant’s close relative, Holodiscus bicolor, and the phrase immediately came to mind, ‘Holy Discus, Batman!” I know, silly, but I doubt I will ever forget that plant.)

This typically occurs on the eastern flank of the Cascades and in the mountains of SE Oregon. The common name, ‘rock’, suggests its preferred sites. I’ve not seen one in Dry Canyon bottomland. It seems most common below the east rim north of the Maple Bridge. 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 →

On Ornamental Trees and the Remaking/Unmaking of Place: Revising the City of Redmond’s Tree List, Part 1

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Perhaps an odd tree to start this with, Juniperus scopulorum ‘Woodward’, is not a ‘shade tree’. It is not deciduous. It is a narrow, fastigiate form of Rocky Mtn. Juniper that, growing to a height of 20′ with a 2′-3′ spread can serve as a formal accent in colder climates like ours, a ‘replacement’ for the more tender Italian Cyperss, and it can do quite well here with very little supplemental water.

Trees, specifically ornamental shade trees, have become an expected and desired part of our urban lives, at least util their leaves fall and await our cleanup. Many associate long tree lined streets and avenues with urban living. Broad Maples. Lofty Elms. Plane Trees and, in tighter spaces, perhaps Cherrys, Crabapples and flowering Plums. Urban trees provide several notable ‘environmental services’ increasing our comfort level with their cooling shade, their capacity to remove pollutants from the air, cover and nesting places for birds, food sources for the insects which the birds rely on and the sequestration of carbon. Trees are generally viewed as a public good, necessary even for our lives. We can get quite emotional about them. So it seems a bit ‘wrong’ to suggest that this ‘ideal’ may not always be ‘best’ or even desirable.

Broadleaved deciduous shade trees are ‘naturally’ members of mesic, temperate to cold-temperate regions of the world. That is where they evolved and where when we plant them out, where they do best. When we begin planting them outside of their historic natural ranges, especially when we ignore the conditions, the disparities and the extremes between their natural ranges and those where we choose to plant them, then we can have some serious problems. The trees may struggle along, or if we remain committed to making up for our local area’s lacking, usually in the form of supplying more water, they can do reasonably well. But this suggests possible real problems as one moves further away from the conditions of a tree’s natural limits and increase the numbers planted out. Where is this water coming from and what are the impacts of removing this water from its normal and healthy cycling of which it is a part? What will be going without? And, is that cost worth the losses it creates? Our selection and planting decisions depend on how we value that which is lost! In short, the typical deciduous shade tree of our imaginings do not belong here in a desert. Continue reading →