Morning
Dunelight
Oregon coast by spring dunelight, a study in contrasts
Turtles not Nurdles
The future is not in plastics.
These are Nurdles, the plastic pellets that are used to make all plastic products. 
They are small and light and often escape the captivity of shipping containers and factory waste streams. They turn up in the most remarkable places, like the Oregon beach in the photo above where I collected this vial.
After Nurdles are extruded into their final form, they go off to live in the world. When their useful life as some product or another is over, they are discarded and become a different part of the waste stream. The plastic breaks down into smaller pieces but, being a petroleum derivative, never biodegrades. Rather, it becomes micro-plastic, and it is becoming a common beach phenomenon. The Nurdle vial in my hand in the photo to the right is the same vial among the micro-plastic below. Kneeling in the sand, I collected this vial-full in ten minutes without moving from this spot.
Ten ten-minute surveys on eight Oregon beaches
Find out more about Nurdles and the Nurdle Patrol here.
Desert morning
The rebranding of Nature
Ecosystem Services
In my most cynical moments, I see a brightly lit, well-appointed marketing office with sleek, well-dressed communications people sitting in comfortable chairs pitching a new ad campaign to a group of equally scruffy biologists in Carharrts and flannel. “We’ll call it, ‘Ecosystem Services, making nature more useful again.’ It’s a new way of thinking about the natural world.”
A buzz phrase coined in the early Oughts, “Ecosystem Services,” identifies human benefits of the natural world and values them as we would price engineering projects. Really, they are not valuable unto themselves, but they offer us a range of goods and services that make them worth keeping. Our natural world has come to a marketing campaign to encourage people to believe that wild spaces are valuable. What of their inherent right to exist undisturbed?
“We have turned all animals and elements of the natural world into objects. We manipulate them to serve the complicated ends of our destiny.” Barry Lopez
Do you agree and sympathize with the abuser or reach the breaking point and snap? It happens both ways, doesn’t it? Where is the Earth on this spectrum? “Our Earth,” I almost said. Is it our Earth? Or are we its people? I think the latter. Yet, we enslaved it, and torment and abuse it. Is it ready to throw us back into the dust and goo from which we slunk? Who would blame it? Those who plundered its depths, mined its oceans, and leveled its mountains? Everything we take turns to waste and ash and anthropomorphic layers of plastic. When future archeologists uncover this epoch, will they wonder that we destroyed ourselves in the mindless, relentless pursuit of personal wealth? Will they see that we drowned in our own waste and called it Climate Change?
“But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.” Rachel Carson
Desert forest
Logging trucks roar past my house from the early, dark hours of the morning until, this time of year, long after sunset. We call them “logging trucks,” but they no longer transport logs. They carry toothpicks. The forests cut today are row crops. There is no time for them to become forests; timber companies would have us believe that there is no money in sustainable forestry. Yet, there are no longer jobs or community support in commercial cutting either. A single harvester and a handful of truck drivers can clear and move a cutting unit in no time. Mills are mostly automated, and much of what comes off the land is sent abroad to be returned as cheap products; the profit mostly goes to investment firms. Clearcuts are sprayed to kill all competing vegetation before the next crop is planted, despite evidence that trees grow better with various plant compatriots and mature trees nearby, regardless of aerial herbicide applications sometimes drifting (or sprayed) onto private lands and chemical runoff in the once-teeming salmon rivers and residents’ drinking water.
“Sadly, it’s much easier to create a desert than a forest.” – James Lovelock
The UN has declared the years 2021–2030 as the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. The common goal is not just to stop environmental degradation worldwide but to reverse it. I laud the initiative and the intent, but I question the feasibility. We spent centuries creating this mire. In a generation with eight billion inhabitants on the planet, we will need to put forth our most valiant efforts to dig out of the muck. For those without food or clean water, a safe place to rest, without educational opportunity, or sustaining income, will these people have the capacity to create more than a day’s worth of survival? Do those with enough have the will to bring the others along, support and encourage their well-being, and the habitats we all depend upon? Can we judge those pursuing deforestation in an attempt to survive when we skin our landscape in economic pursuit? We cannot cast stones.
“Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Rennaissance painting to cook a meal.” E.O. Wilson
Perhaps a new quote for the marketers and the decade on Ecosystem Restoration could be, “Ask not what your ecosystems can do for you – ask what you can do for ecosystems.”
Winter Solstice
12 21 2020 @ 0202 PST
My calendar says the winter solstice occurs on 12 21 2020 at 0202 PST. Three palindromes must be auspicious. The light returns and another trip around the sun begins. May 2021 be everything that 2020 was not—joyful, expansive, and healthy.
Given the rampant lockdowns and shelter in place orders this year, the annual photo round-up is not as adventurous as other years. Still, I hope there is something here that will resonate.
2020, over and out.
Among giants
Life upon life
Deep in the forest, amid the rain and fog, where the trees grow to be giants, live the rulers of the world.
Defying gravity
The rain seems to have settled in and the days are a series of water, flowing, falling, ebbing. Six-hour windows of tide in, tide out, water falling from the sky, flowing downriver to the sea, and upriver on the incoming flood tide. The geese and ducks floating by in the rain-soaked air seem to say, “WTF? Are we swimming or flying?”
I will try flying. This year is about defying gravity. Are you ready?
p.s., Thank you for the most generous birthday president.
Drain the swamp
Indulge me for a minute.
When Europeans invaded North America, it held an estimated 220 million acres of wetlands. In the intervening years, approximately half of that was lost to development, “reclamation,” dredging, poor land-use practices, and, more recently, drought and climate change.
Wetlands are one of the most ecologically productive habitat types on Earth, providing a multitude of benefits to humans, including economic boons like billions of dollars in flood damage prevention and a place for the vast majority of commercial and recreational fish to spend some of their life (multi-billion dollar industries), not to mention millions of waterfowl and shorebirds. Five percent of the lower 48 states’ land area is swampland, and more than a third of all threatened and endangered species live only in swamps. Wetlands also filter and store water (a finite resource) and store one to three times more carbon per acre than forest or prairies – a significant fact given the current climate and its crisis.
This is a minuscule fraction of wetlands’ value, but it is enough to create the question, “What makes sense about draining the swamp?” Only foolish, short-sighted people would suggest such a thing.
What we need is a flyswatter.
Eliminating parasites (think mosquitoes draining lifeblood and introducing malaria) that inhabit the swamp would solve the problem.
And that is what voting is all about—one swat per person.
Full disclosure, I could not vote in the 2016 election because I moved and changed my address after the registration deadline (unknowingly, or I would have waited, but really, who could imagine the outcome?). So, this year, I encourage all those who did not, could not, or would not vote in the last presidential election to get out and swat some parasites. They suck.
p.s., November 3rd is not only election day; it is also my Birthday! Yay! I want a new president, please. And, thank you.
p.p.s., yes, I already voted.
Shooting from the deck
The world continues in its surreal swirl of politics and protests, viruses, and fires.
The view from the deck holds sway; the fog, elk hunters, and fishers captivate me.
