Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Who will stop the flood?

Missouri has tornadoes, which are conjured and over within half an hour. They also don't usually put 7 million people out of power. So hurricanes are cinematic, for better or worse, and I've been glued to the New York Times throughout this storm.


This op-ed on oysters and bank stabilization was a surprising nugget among the crisis coverage.
Just as corals protect tropical islands, these oyster beds created undulation and contour on the harbor bottom that broke up wave action before it could pound the shore with its full force. Beds closer to shore clarified the water through their assiduous filtration (a single oyster can filter as much as 50 gallons of water a day); this allowed marsh grasses to grow, which in turn held the shores together with their extensive root structure.
See also: this prescient, month-old article on New York City's "resilience strategy" for storm flooding.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Edward Abbey

I have no clue how I missed this speech by Edward Abbey. For anyone who has visited the Southwest or read one of Abbey's books this is a must listen. He strikes me in the video more like Hunter S. Thompson than I had ever realized before now, great Americans the both of them. Here Abbey talks about one of the subjects he cared most about, life before the Glenn Canyon Dam. The speech is in three parts.


Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Hills of My Home

I grew up listening to folk and singer-songwriter legends like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Harry Chapin. There is a certain limitation that comes with music made by one or two people and a guitar. I have always had the feeling that it makes the music a bit more genuine. It either works or it doesn't. When The Honey Dewdrops plays, it works. The band released their third album titled Silver Lining earlier this year. A highlight of the album was Hills of My Home. I have heard the band perform this song in concert and am happy to see it make its way to this album.The song takes on the topic of mountaintop removal mining in a way that makes it both personal and potent without being overbearingly political.


 

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Lessons from West Texas

Jackrabbits being all spindly at the National Ranching Heritage Center.
 While in Lubbock for the Society of Environmental Journalists conference, I was delighted to see new wildlife and landscapes, namely:
  1. Grackles are sassier in Texas.
  2. Jackrabbits look like deer with long ears.
  3. Palo Duro Canyon is especially impressive after driving two hours across flat, flat, flat brown plains.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

The Rewilding Debate: Debating the Extinct to Death

Image created by Sergiodlarosa

Since 2005, due in no small part to a commentary article published in Nature, Pleistocene rewilding has been a source of friction in conservation biology. Pleistocene rewilding generally differs from traditional conservation biology in its support for introducing extinct megafauna or a proxy species to positively impact ecosystems at the landscape scale.

In an edge.org discussion, Ryan Phelan attempts to justify rewilding because extinction primarily is caused by man.  She frames the issue as such:
"One of the fundamental questions here is, is extinction a good thing? Is it "nature's way"? And if it's nature's way, who in the world says anyone should go about changing nature's way? If something was meant to go extinct, then who are we to screw around with it and bring it back? I don't think it's really nature's way. I think that the extinction that we've seen since man is 99.9 percent caused by man."
Phelan’s questions seem to accuse Pleistocene rewilding opponents as being not only the cause of anthropogenic eradication of species but also apathetic to the possibility of reversing that same eradication. There are several underlying assumptions in her questions worth questioning.
  1. When does one start the clock on which extinctions should be considered “caused by man”?
  2. Does the fact that man caused an extinction necessitate the reintroduction of the extinct species? 
  3. Even if we conclude that man has a duty to reintroduce all animals since the Pleistocene, how would one go about it?

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Landscape Nostalgia, or, How My Brain Replicates Pulaski County Topography


Certain landscapes will never leave my memory: clouds hustling over the continental divide at Monteverde, cow-spotted pastures in purple-and-gold winter, and the welcoming bluffs on Stadium Boulevard. None, however, are so ingrained or so pure than my childhood world in Dixon, Missouri. Rivers and cliffs direct the curving roads. Foliage looks lusher, the fields more trim than any of their counterparts in my second home of Lebanon. There's the oak-walled house my great-great grandfather built and that little house on the hill where a nice farmboy once lived. There's the east edge of our field where the deer always appeared on misty mornings. The fallen log between two trunks that my cousins and I used as teeter-totter. The country was my playground.

I've returned lately with friends. Even places I had never seen, such as the view from above Riddle Bridge or panoramas across Maries County, strike familiar chords.

Nostalgia comes with some caveats. The drives remain beautiful, but the gas tab hurts (those rivers and bluffs keep good roads away; it would take hefty blasting jobs to change it, and frankly, the government doesn't have that kind of money for backwoods folks). Recently at a Dixon festival, I couldn't help but desire better food, different music and more culture. People gawked at my dreadlocked, colorfully dressed friends. Memories, meet Reality. Suddenly moving to industrial Lebanon when I was 10 years old seemed like a good move for the sake of culture. Thanks, grandparents.

But the landscape abides.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

A View Through The Lens of DTC Photography

I recently had the chance to interview the head of DTC Photography, David Crabtree. After years of admiring his work it was great to get a peak into what drives his photography and the thoughts that go into each captured moment.

NM:It seems that a lot of your photography captures the areas between the built and the natural landscapes, are these areas you seek out?
DC:Built and natural landscapes have sort of become my comfort zone shots. I seem to do a better job with these scenes and so I am often drawn to them. I also see the comfort zone as challenge in which I must break out of that zone and try new things that I am unfamiliar with. Lately I have been experimenting with HDR photography and also some photos with more live and movement in them. As an amateur photographer, this can be a real challenge sometimes but hopefully the saying is true: "Practice makes perfect".