With nature as your home, it's hard to get sick.

I've seen a lot of the environment this week. My fave journalism professor, Bill Allen (of Costa Rica and California fame), let me hop in on a Field Reporting Institute trip to the Pioneer Forest, a cotton field and gin, and various facets and points of the Birds Point Levee issue. My temporary classmates created a lovely mosaic of impressions at their online blog, MUddy Boots News. It was really refreshing to be outside in new places, learning learning learning. My own recorded impressions will come later, someday, perhaps.

And then there's the passing of the environmentalist Wangari Maathai. Jared Cole composed a beautiful reflection on her. If you read nothing else today, read that. I was surprised to learn that Maathai influenced the operation of Sustain Mizzou, the nonprofit I led last year. I'd been living off of our mission statement addressing "the interconnection of human welfare and the environment," without ever having known the inspiration behind it. Anyway, what Jared wrote was really touching. Hard to shake off.

Nick sent me this New York Times article titled "A Well-Regulated Wilderness," about how government mediates even the gnarliest, most hands-off areas. Interesting to think about.

Today I watched this microdocumentary about my friend Julie's slacklining hobby. I've only done slacklining once, but it was a blast.

Slacklining from Ellen Thommesen on Vimeo.

Finally, in case you're interested, I went for a bike ride this afternoon in the Grindstone Nature Area in Columbia, Mo. This is my favorite place around town to see indigo buntings. They must have migrated away this time of year, but in the spring, they're all over. We saw several other birds, but it's hard to identify them when you're biking.

photo by Gary Irwin

The Beauty of Urban Forests

Over the past few days I have been conducting an urban forest inventory of a small town in Utah. I spent time in parks, cemeteries and in that awkward space between the road and the sidewalk. I took down information on big trees, small trees, healthy looking trees and trees that were not much more than bare sticks poking out of the ground. At last count, the inventory contained over one thousand trees. I promise you I have done more thinking about trees in the last eight days than most people do in a year.


The inventory provided a peek into not only the lives of the trees but also the people who live there. I have seen a family get a new puppy, watched as kids climbed the trees I was counting and held passionate
conversations with the citizens in the town about the past, present and future of their trees. “That tree was planted when I was just a boy,” a man said staring at a tree over thirty foot high. Another talked about the trees that used to be here. The memory of the trees remained alive in the man even as new trees had been planted to provide shade for some future generation. A crutch, and in another a paint roller, rested ten feet up a tree. The story of how they got there is one I will never know.

The trees I inventoried told stories simply by where they were located and the condition they were in when I added them to the list. A row of Norway Spruce with branches hanging like a well worn suit added to the somber nature of conducting a tree inventory in a cemetery. They spoke to the seriousness of the place. Planted not long after the settlement of the town, they showed the commitment of the town’s people to see the cemetery last well into the future.

Honeylocusts line the streets and make common appearances in the parks. I have always considered them to be a fun if somewhat bland tree. Their leaves are not quite serious about shade yet not as wispy as a willow. Cottonwoods, forever young, grow up fast, loud and full of life. The many fruit trees in the town teach to all who pay attention just which side gets the most sun. The town is also full of new trees still needing a stake to help them stand in the wind. Their future is unwritten and full of hope with just a handful of leaves.

I planned on writing this article about all the practical things that trees bring, how they can up property values, lower energy costs and improve water quality. But, I have to think that we get more than that out of urban trees. As I entered tree after tree day after day a certain beauty becomes clear in the data. Each dot on my map represented dozens of years of time, care and maintenance. The species chosen, the care given or withheld and the age distribution created a record of choices.

People plant trees in places they value. The elms and cottonwoods that are the shade trees of today were the seedlings of years past. That investment in the future continues with every tree planted and maintained. A city that manages their tree population is one that plans on sticking around awhile and maybe enjoying what experiences may come from having a tree or two.

"Encounters with the Archdruid"

I'm reading Encounters with the Archdruid: narratives about a conservationist and three of his natural enemies. Author John McPhee takes David Brower, former president of the Sierra Club, to meet a geologist, a developer and a commissioner of reclamation at sites threatened by the latter's idea of progress.

The third chapter is titled "A River," and Brower rafts down the Grand Canyon with Floyd Dominy, the man responsible for building dozens of dams. They hit Havasu Canyon.

"A bend to the right, a bend to the left, right, left — this stone labyrinth with a crystal stream in it was moment enough, no matter where it ended, but there lay beyond it a world that humbled the mind's eye."

"The walls widened first into a cascaded gorge and then flared out to become the ovate sides of a deep valley, into which the stream rose in tiers of pools and waterfalls.  Some of the falls were only two feet high, others four feet, six feet."

"There were hundreds of them."

 "The pools were as much as fifteen feet deep, and the water in them was white where it plunged and foamed, then blue in a wide circle around the plunge point, and pale green in the outer peripheries. Mile after mile, the pools and waterfalls continued. The high walls of the valley were bright red."

"This was Havasu Canyon, the immemorial home of the Havasupai, whose tribal name means 'the people of the blue-green waters.'"

"Dominy was waiting below. 'It's fabulous,' he said. 'I know every river canyon in the country, and this is the prettiest in the West.'"

This is what Encounters does: paint stunning scenes and juxtapose them with men supposedly who rather profit from a place than admire it. McPhee, however, gives these characters humanity and nuance. They know these lands better than Brower; they just don't think we can afford to preserve every inch of it.

At first, I disliked this book and then realized I actually disliked Brower, or at least the way he was characterized in the first part. He's consistently shown up on nature, knowledge and hiking by a geologist who wants to put a copper mine in the Cascade Mountains. In dialogue, the mining expert says something reasonable and Bower pipes up with something cliche like "population is pollution spelled inside out."

Later Brower mellowed out, and I found peace. It's a good story. There's definitely some stilted dialogue and an anemic amount of scenes and plots, but that's an issue with the concept. In just three parts, McPhee effectively shined light on the preservation -> conservation -> development gradient and challenged conceptions about each one.

So if that sounds like your kind of paperback, check out Encounters of the Archdruid by John McPhee, lent out at fine libraries nationwide. Maybe even bookstores! Definitely Amazon.

The Wild Bluffs

I pulled a twig from my hair, clinging with the other hand to a small branch. A blue jay’s jeer pierced through my heavy breathing, but I saw no sign of the bird or my friend below. If a rock tumbled, I could go with it — 60 feet down to a scoured-out creek bed.

The scoured-out creek bed. Photo by Miranda Metheny.

It was August 27, 2001, and in the first weekend of our senior year in college, I traveled to Three Creeks Conservation Area with my friend Miranda. She hadn’t been in Missouri for twelve months, and I hadn’t been in woods since the start of the summer heat wave; after reading The Wild Trees about the redwood canopies, I was craving a climb.

We skipped Rock Bridge State Park; it’s too mediated, too mapped. In the Columbia, Mo., microcosm, if Rock Bridge is Muir Woods, then Three Creeks is at least like Humboldt Redwoods State Park. There’s a little more left to discover. Some know this area for its “swimming hole” in Bonne Femme Creek that’s easy to find from a parking lot. Fewer know about Turkey Creek’s holes, cliff swallows and dripping moss. Even fewer have seen the dove habitat’s purple-blue shade on a full moon or smelled the musky green-gold grass as they broke a path through it. Like the canopy explorers, though, I don’t share these places with just anyone.

The land is by no means untouched. “Through the years, the timber was grazed and logged and occasional fires swept through the area,” the Missouri Department of Conservation website reads. “Because of these practices, the land has suffered...“ The geology, however, endures.

I have never done any truly dangerous climbs, and these rises are often biologically bland. But I think I understand in some small way what Steve Sillett felt when he looks up at a redwood. I feel the bluff tops beckon. Carved by many millennia of water and wind, bluffs hold geologic history I barely understand. They’re nearly vertical, and yet saplings and animals brave enough to defy gravity keep living on them.

When a human defies gravity, “brave” morphs to “reckless.” I was free climbing. My flat-soled Converse shoes began slipping in the soil and I stretched to the nearest root. It slipped too. Nothing felt stable. Loose rocks all around, and nothing else in reach. I was relying on one foothold at the base of a bush with my body pressed against the steep ground. Scrambling ensued, and a minute later I made it.

“Miranda,” I shouted. “I found another trail.”

“Are you staying up there?” she answered. Her voice could barely climb the bluff.

“I can come down, but it won’t be graceful.”

“I’ll come up. Give me a minute.”

As I waited for her ascent, I thought about how Steve Sillett didn’t curse in the canopy. After scrambling around the Ozarks for years, the reservation seems clear. A certain respect is reserved for nature when it forces us into tough places.

- I wrote this as an assignment for Bill Allen's "Readings in Science Journalism: Four Great Books on the Environment" class. The prompt was to "write a personal narrative about your own encounters with the natural world, reflecting on all the encounters described in The Wild Trees by Richard Preston." It was a good exercise, restricted to 500 words. I'm happy to share it with you now.