Yet Another Call to Action...

"For unnumbered centuries of human history the wilderness has given way. The priority of industry has become dogma. Are we as yet sufficiently enlightened to realize that we must now challenge that dogma, or do without our wilderness? Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?"  ~Aldo Leopold

I know that I have always been conscious of the quiet, but steady destruction of wild places that human consumption necessitates, somewhere in the back of my head there has always been an awareness that natural places that I have known and loved in my life will not always be there.  Its a reality I have been uncomfortable with for a long time, but one that I know I thought, and I think most people think, that they can do nothing about.  How does one person stop the inevitable grind of progress in defense of the wild places they have come to love?  This is an adversary against which the average person cannot possibly compete, right?  But in my more recent work I am beginning to discover the ways in which each of us, in our own way, can make a difference.  I am finding them, and I want to share them, because this is a fight that is truly worth fighting, not just for the environmentalists and the outdoors enthusiasts, but for everyone and let me tell you why.  

I recently listened to an episode of the podcast called "Too Much Information" with Benjamen Walker called "4 Big Ideas From Sept 17th, 2012" and I highly recommend it to everyone, and I mean everyone, not just environmentalists, even though I know that my audience of the 4 people who read this blog is heavily biased on the environmental side, please share this, because this matters.  It's about the book Small is Beautiful by the British economist and author E. F. Schumacher and it talks about economics of scale.  My favorite quote from the episode is by the author Andrew Sims, who says: 

"If a business goes bankrupt you can set up elsewhere, if the biosphere, if the ecosystems upon which we depend are bankrupted through over-exploitation, well, there might be no coming back from that."

I love it because I think it completely explains the sense of urgency I feel about protecting the planet that we depend on, not just because I am a nature-loving tree-hugger, but because I can see that in a very fundamental way this planet sustains us, and if we don't take care to preserve at least some of it, eventually we will bankrupt it.  Consider this statistic:  According to the Pew Environment Group 6000 acres of open land are lost each day...each day!  That is 2.19 million acres of land that are lost each year, every year or alternatively 250 acres per hour...until somebody says that's enough.  I'm saying that's enough now.  We cannot live as though our resources are infinite, we cannot assume that growth is always the answer.  Try to imagine a world with no open spaces, no wild lands, no wilderness.  It should be unimaginable, because it is illogical and unnatural, but I've met people who say they would prefer it.  I think this is a preference borne of a lack of understanding.  

So what can you do to help change this?  

Educate, teach your children about the environment and wildernesses that you love, your parents, your friends.  Talk about it, tell people why you care.  I can't help but be passionate about these things, and it just bubbles out of me all the time.  Ask any one of my friends, I am one of the most annoying hiking buddies ever, because I just spout information about ecosystems, air quality, endangered species, habitat loss, and anything else that pops into my head.  I can't help it, but I like to think that every once in a while I inspire someone else to care, and that is the best outcome that I can think of.  

Support, not everyone wants to do the kind of work that I do, and that is absolutely fine.  Not everyone has to, but if you support the efforts that people in my line of work are making, show it.  I know so many people who agree with what I do, and congratulate my efforts to protect these wild lands, but getting people to lift a pen and share these feelings with others is like pulling teeth!  Writing a letter to the editor, blog post, facebook post, or tweet about a local wilderness area that you love can be so inspiring to someone like me who spends their days making efforts that most people never even notice.  Like the Campaign for America's Wilderness on facebook, find the person closest to your area who is out there inventorying public lands to find eligible wilderness areas and shake their hand, write them a thank you letter, or donate to their organization.  Write to your congress person urging them to give lands near you wilderness protection.  These things can take 5 minutes, but if you don't show anyone that these issues matter to you, no one will ever do anything about it.  

Warning: Shameless plug of my own work to follow...

If you are in Wyoming, have traveled to Wyoming, or want to travel to Wyoming, consider doing me the favor of writing something about your appreciation of the lands that I have inventoried.  If you hunt in Wyoming, consider voicing how crucial winter ranges for big game need better protections so that there will continue to be healthy populations of game for sport hunting.  If you appreciate desert landscapes, consider writing to the to a local paper and expressing how important it is that we realize deserts are not simply wasted space, sitting on top of possible energy reserves, but are instead valuable habitats and ecosystems.  If you like backpacking and back country camping, write to your favorite magazine or publication urging readers to recognize that many of the areas they enjoy are not yet protected, and could in fact be developed at any time.  

Do something!  Do anything.  Express what you care about in your state and why to anyone that you can, because tomorrow's 6000 acres could be the forests and fields of your childhood, and if you stay quiet today you'll forever regret it when that fateful tomorrow comes.  

"The most striking thing about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little. Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one's ordinary powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed."  -E. F. Schumacher

Japanese Knotweed Pie!

On Saturday morning I attended an invasive weed talk about the unfortunate prevalence of the non-native invasive plant variety known as Japanese Knotweed.  I learned a few important things, first that this stuff is really nasty and tough to get rid of, seriously seriously persistent (complete removal can take up to and often more than 5 years of concentrated efforts) and second, that it is edible, has a flavor comparable to rhubarb, and makes a mean piece of pie.  So naturally I had two immediate reactions: First, I should sign up for a site to try to do my part, and get rid of some of this stuff.  And then second, and perhaps more obvious, I should make a pie.

So today, first I walked the site that I "adopted" and learned that this time, I might have bitten off a bit more than I can chew.  This stuff is everywhere man, well maybe not everywhere, but where it is, there is a lot of it, and it's well established.  I walked the rail trail in Johnson today, from Parker and Stearn's just to the ball park, and in that short strip I found 4 large and established patches of Knotweed.  After that I checked down the bank at the back of the ball field, where the bank slopes down to the Lamoille River, and there I found a Knotweed forest the stretched almost the entire length of the park.  I don't have ARCGIS but I ripped off a little scrap of satellite photo from google maps (so thank you google, and please don't sue me!) and made myself a map of my little infestation, to help me keep track of what needs to be done (and maybe to recruit some volunteers...anyone wanna help?) so here's my map, complete with photo points, because I'm a dork, and I love this kind of thing and I haven't had the fortune of using this side of my brain in a long time!

(Click to enlarge)

Photo point 1: Patch of dried up stalks of last years knotweed (and plenty of hard to see new babies) on the rail trail facing Railroad Street and Parker and Stearn's

Photo point 2: Another patch on the side of the rail trail overlooking the park

Photo point 3: Patch of knotweed on the side of the rail trail abutting a private property.

Photo point 4: Patch covering both sides of the rail trail at the entrance to the park

And this ones not on the map, but its the patch from the last photo continuing along the drainage ditch on the other side of the road.

And finally, photo point 5: The bottom of the bank.

So there's that whole depressing story, hopefully I can do my part to cut these guys down to size.  Now on to more positive topics: Pie!  After my reconnaissance mission, I collected a few of these frightening looking stalks to bring home and clean and make a pie!  I used this fabulous recipe from Yankee magazine, which I of course edited slightly because I can't leave anything alone.  I used about 2 cups of peeled, chopped, knotweed, 2 to 2.5 cups of sliced strawberries, and one peeled, cored, and chopped pink lady apple (because it added extra volume, cut down on the strawberry costs, and allowed me to cut out a bit of the sugar) and here is a collection of photos of the resulting pie:

 

  Yummm!

And the hardest part of making this whole pie: not throwing the scraps in the compost (remember, these little buggers are invasive, and they'll invade your compost heap too!)  The pie was delicious, not as tart as rhubarb, a not unpleasing texture (I was concerned because the uncooked knotweed had it's "slimy" moments).  All in all I'd say it was a success!  

For more information about the problems associated with invasive weeds and best management practices for their removal, check out the Nature Conservancy's information page for Knotweed or their section on all of the Invasive Plants in Vermont.  And finally, a more comprehensive pdf of all of the different invasive plant species in Vermont is available here for free download.

Dancing, Greening, and Baking on Mother's Day Weekend

This was a big weekend for me for many reasons.  It's Mother's Day and I'm a pretty big fan of my mom, so thats always a big deal, but it was also Vermont Green Up Day on Saturday and the JSC Dance Show on Friday.  This means that Friday I attended a dance show with some friends and then went out dancing to various live shows around town after (a band called "The Thang"  embarrassed me into holding still at the Hub so I headed out to Moog's in Mo'ville to watch Chad Hollister play solo-definitely worth the trip-where I danced my butt off).  Then on Saturday I spent my morning picking up garbage along the Rail Trail where I walk my dogs, scaling a steep hillside up towards the road to pick up old skoal cans, McDonald's wrappers, and to try to steer clear of at least this years bags of deer guts (at which I was mostly successful).  Saturday night I first made a triple layer chocolate cheesecake/mousse dessert for both my friend Holly and my mom for mother's day and then in the later hours I made spaghetti dinner and garlic bread for dinner followed my preparing my mom's mother day breakfast after she went to bed.  This consisted of maple walnut cinnamon buns from a recipe I found in a magazine and adapted to my needs.  Then on Sunday I finished up the cinnamon buns and sliced up some fresh fruit for a surprise breakfast for my mom that was ready just as she came downstairs in the morning.  The bun recipe was from a magazine but I'll post the cheesecake concoction recipe below, but first: Pictures.

Sunrise outside my window, I love the silhouettes of trees in the foreground

Instead of pictures of garbage from Green Up Day, you get pictures of things that are already green, because they're really what it's all for anyway....

I am in love with baby leaves.

Sunshine on new leaves...nothings better

Fiddleheads!

Baby fern

Morning Dew

Mother's day Breakfast!

Cheesecake concoction: I made this cheesecake, then covered it with ganache and topped it with this chocolate mousse...wasn't crazy about the cheesecake recipe but all in all I think it turned out alright. 

Then I made chocolate chip peanut butter cookies.  What a weekend!  Goodnight all! 

Crazy week(end)!

I just might have missed a few days in the daily photo thing recently, but its so hard to tell because I have just been so busy that all my days are running together!  This week I started my macroinvertebrate monitoring (only the thing I have been planning for since I moved up to Tahoe in May) and we are working SO much faster than I had planned, getting 8 entire 250 meter reaches done in 3 days (not to mention closing up day three early to go pull invasive weeds in the Upper Truckee Marsh to support another AmeriCorps volunteer in his event)!  Sounds impressive right?  Well it kind of is, but it also involved 2 twelve hour days and one 11 hour day, but thats okay.  That was Monday through Wednesday, and then on Thursday our AmeriCorps training starting with trail building on the Tahoe Rim Trail which involved an early morning and some hard work (fortunately I was able to leave early for that work picnic I made the pie for and the pie was a pretty big hit!)  Then we headed off to the beach to meet up with the rest of our AmeriCorps group to have some dinner.

That brings us to Friday, a full day of training on like after AmeriCorps (job hunting, resume building, interviewing, etc).  The most important lesson I took away from that was to keep in touch with everyone you meet ever because you never know who might prove to be a great contact later on (plus you know, having friends is pretty cool...).  That was a rewarding but very long day that ended with a reception for the Sierra Nevada Alliance Conference attendees and AmeriCorps volunteers which was very cool.  I met and spoke to a science teacher who is also a GLOBE trainer and was utterly fascinated by his stories!  It brought back wonderful memories of some of my science teachers that really inspired me back in the day (shout out to Mr. Grotto and Mr. Mitchell!)

Anyway that was yesterday and that brings us to today, when all of us AmeriCorps folks got to be conference attendees for the day which was a very cool experience!  I learned a lot, met some VERY interesting and amazing people, and learned that my Mom isn't the only one who reads this blog!  (which gave me all sorts of guilt about having not updated for a few days...) I handed out all sorts of business cards that I knew I had printed for a reason, and felt very inspired at the end of the day, after hearing about all the wonderful things all these organizations are doing!  The conference officially ended for me at 4:30 pm and now I'm home, and it really feels like weekend, which I needed after this week because its back to monitoring on Monday and while it is amazing and fun work (can't complain about playing in rivers all day), it is thoroughly exhausting and we are getting reports that it will be cold enough to snow here tonight as low as 7000 feet (that is unconfirmed rumors of course, my favorite information source!) and that could make Monday extra frigid!

Anyway today I have taken several photos to make up for my few days of silence, and I figured it has been a long time since I gave my Mom a garden update so here are my little kiddos:

Basil Flowers

Yellow Tomato Babies, even though I bring him in out of the cold every night he's still having a very hard time figuring out how to redden up his tomaters!

My Snap Dragons, now so tall that they are bent over and flowering upside down!

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watercolors

A friend and fellow SNAP volunteer recently asked me would I be interested in possibly doing some watercolor illustrations for some interpretive signage their organization is creating.  They want 10 in total, of invasive and native species of the foothills where the signs will be placed.  They want some samples of my work so that they can decide if they like it enough to put it on their signs and so I decided to try to practice with a few of the species this weekend to see if I think I can really handle it.  Well I can certainly draw/paint what they are looking for, but I'm not all that impressed with my final products.  I made these in only a few hours, so if I put a great deal more time into it maybe I could, but I'm not sure I have that kinda time right now.  Anyway, these are what I created, the first is English Ivy (Hedera helix) and the second is Himalayan Blackberry (Rubus armeniacus), both of which are invasive to those parts.  I'm not overly impressed with my blackberry painting skills, but I guess i can do leaves okay...

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botany!

Today I helped my coworker finish up some vegetation monitoring and learned some more plants.  I'm making myself a sheet with common names, descriptions, Latin names, and photos of all the plants that I have been IDing, here are a few of the new ones from todays plots:

Common Horsetail

Mule's Ear

Brewers Daisy (Surrounded by Green Stipule Lupine) 

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TOMATOES!

After months of nurturing and loving and watering my little tomato babies....finally i have some little green tomato babies!  Annnnddd here they are!

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Project Tour

Today at work I spent the latter part of the day on a project tour, looking at upcoming and completed project sites.  This picture is a successful restoration project; the creek you can see had been diverted when a sewer line was installed in the meadow.  The water pooled around the manholes and created such a draw that it dried out the whole meadow.  This channel was completely constructed and has raised ground water levels and restored the meadow to its original moisture content and therefore vegetation, habitat, and hydrology.  Very cool!

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annnnd more veg monitoring..

Another day at work....today I spent all day here:

completing our final veg transect (and therefore all of our spring veg monitoring for the year!) at one of the CTC projects.  HURRAY!  I will not miss veg monitoring, it involves lots of activities that really hurt your back, like sitting on the ground and cutting and sorting every scrap of plant life in a 2 by 2 foot plot.  This one below took me 2 hours

:

So yeah, pretty psyched to be done!

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long day

i'm too tired to even try to post anything better than this crappy black and white is snapped outside of the Tahoe Environmental Research Center today while I was waiting for someone to let me into the lab to pick up my veg samples.  here it is...

now its time to sleeeeeep.

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my garden!

its been a while since i gave you an update on my little plant babies!  so heres my photo of the day, a happy little pansy:

And here is a photo of all of them:

i now have enough lettuce to make the worlds tiniest salad!

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vegetation monitoring

Okay, veg monitoring is not my favorite activity (when I learned how it was just Lauren and I one by one cutting all the plants out of a 2 square foot frame on the ground and sorting them by type, sunburning my knees and making my back ache; we finished our first (very diverse) plot in just under 3 hours and we knew we had 7 more to go) but today I found that it can be a lot better when there are 5 people all cutting in that same square.  We set an all time record, finished a (not so diverse) plot in just about 10 minutes.  We finished all three of the plots we were supposed to get done today with time to spare, and we only have 9 left to go!  

I'm talking, of course, about my project that I am leading with participants from the Tahoe-Baikal Institute's Summer Environmental Education Program.  This afternoon we spent a half day doing our vegetation monitoring out in the meadow, they will finish up tomorrow and on Wednesday morning while I am away at a training and then I'll be back on Thursday to begin mapping remnant stream channels in the meadow with GPS.  We work on this project for a week and a half, spend 2 days creating and practicing a presentation (I'll be the advisor, not a presenter) and then my group will present their findings on the state of the meadow vegetation with relation to groundwater levels and their recommendations as to which historic channel would be most beneficial for use in a possible future restoration project.   

This is one of the participants, from Mongolia.  She is holding a Stadia Rod for scale, to show the height of vegetation.  I chose this one as my photo of the day for today because I just love the clouds.  

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And Happy Mauritaniversary to all the RIM Pirates who set out with me on that fateful day to begin a 2 year journey that lasted only 14 months.  Heres a throwback photo for nostalgia:

Me and my We.  

Funny how sometimes it feels like living in a different culture in a far away place speaking a different language felt more comfortable than trying to understand the complexities of my own.  

i'm baaaack!

I know that it has been simply AGES since I updated this thing, and seriously, apologies all around!  I have been working roughly 50 million hours a week and for my first month and a half here I had no internet at home.  I do now though, and as promised, I will continue my challenge!  it may be a little tough to get back in the swing of things but i'll do my best not to let you down again!  First things first, here is some of what you missed:

Early morning fog at our spring training down in Coloma, CA.  All of the pictures of flowers below are ones that I took at our campsite during our week of training:

Sunrise on our second or third to last day in Coloma.

The weekend after spending an 80 degree week in sunny Coloma, we were back in South Lake where we got snowed on some more.  On the way back from a trip down to Carson City, NV to do some shopping   I grabbed this shot of snow clouds over Lake Tahoe from highway 50.  

 I spent the snowy Friday before memorial day painting at Fredericks Cabin on fallen leaf lake.  I couldn't resist snapping a shot of a rather white Mount Tallac sticking its head up into the clouds.

A short hike up to a sweet waterfall and my favorite picture of the day is this little guy, who must have had good luck begging from tourists before since he was not afraid to show off his round little belly to us.  No, i did not feed him, in case you're curious.

The sunset at Fred's after our memorial day BBQ...still quite a bit of snow out there...

Nevada Beach in Stateline, NV.  No place like Tahoe to lay in 80 degree sunshine and stare at snow covered mountains!

This is how I get to work in the morning, or at least its how I had to go when high spring flows flooded the bike trail I usually use.  This is probably one of my favorite commutes ever.

Amazing waders for amazing ladies...somedays i quite enjoy this job.

Upper Truckee Marsh...just another day at work...

Last weekend I got to hang with TBI and go with them on their small plane trip around Tahoe.  I rode shot-gun in a 4 person plane and snapped a few shots of the mountains and Emerald Bay while I was up there.  

This one is the Tahoe Keys, the most unnatural creation I have ever laid eyes one.  Its a neighborhood in which every house has their own boat slip.  Interesting, but unfortunately not great for the environment.  

And finally this one, the beautiful Bear River at my friend Lucy's house, where we camped last night and swam this morning, so yes, as this photo was taken today, it can be considered my first "photo of the day" since I quit sooo soooo long ago.  that means its time for one of these:

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wow...its been so long since i've done that!  how very exciting!  Thats all i've got in me for now, I really should have been in bed HOURS ago.  I have a very very busy week ahead of me, but i'll do my best to keep on top of my photos!