Thoreau's Legacy

by Richard Hayes

  Today I am studying the life of these ephemeral pockets of water so critical to the health of the midwestern ecosystem. Some 3 million prairie potholes, scraped out by the grinding retreat of the glaciers during the last ice age, dot the upper Midwest in the United States and parts of Canada. More than 90 percent of them dry out regularly, and many have been degraded, plowed, dredged, or filled. Some potholes are protected, including thousands in the federal Conservation Reserve Program, a project funded to encourage farmers to keep wetlands out of agricultural use.

  Today I am surveying the macroinvertebrates in a pothole on conservation land. As I sort my net samples, I know I will not find the unique fairy shrimp I would have seen a few weeks ago, because their short adult life span is over. I will, however, find dragonfly nymphs, small snails, and the tadpoles of various frogs, their development hurried in a race to leave before evaporating water strands them like raisins in a patch of baking mud.

  Potholes, lying across the landscape like droplets flung by a giant, form a network of habitats that wink in and out, full one year, low the next. They support a disproportionate number of plant and animal species relative to their area. For example, 50 percent of North American waterfowl breed, feed, and nest in these small wetlands.

  This habitat is vulnerable to climate change, which is likely to make this region drier, while economic pressure will cause some farmers to plow their drier seasonal wetlands. These twin pressures—increased use and decreased precipitation—are likely to further reduce these already limited wetlands.

  My love of this place, which drives my teaching, writing, and personal decisions, translates into a passion to protect all such places. It is not only the big picture, the loss of the great flocks that once covered the skies of our continent, that burdens me. I want to prevent the loss of this one small space, this chapel, miniature and yet inestimably vast. Doing so is a work of love.

  Dorothy Boorse is an associate professor of biology at Gordon College, a small Christian liberal arts college in Wenham, Massachusetts. Her research focuses on wetland ecology.

  One Acre at a Time

  Richard Baker

  LIVING IN IOWA, WHICH HAS THE MOST ALTERED landscape of any state, I appreciate Aldo Leopold’s statement about living in a world of wounds. All around us I see the effects of human use and neglect: endless monocultures of corn or soybeans, the loss of native plant communities to invasive species, intensive soil erosion and gullies, and stream pollution, which contributes to the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone. Global warming will only magnify these problems.

  Eight years ago I had the good fortune to move out into the country, to 125 acres of woods, overgrown savannas, ponds, and fields. It was then that I saw a chance to make a difference.

  Leopold said that the first step in intelligent tinkering is to find all the pieces. Historical records helped me determine what the vegetation and landscape were like prior to European settlement. Our area had been a mosaic of prairie on the uplands, forest along the Cedar River, and oak savanna in

  between, with a scattering of springs and wet places. This mix

  had formed a very stable landscape with little runoff and erosion. My wife, Deb, and I decided that our best legacy would be to return the land to this pattern, restoring where we could and starting from scratch where that was necessary. This strategy will produce stable plant communities and landscapes even in the face of global warming.

  In 2000 we planted a diverse mix of prairie species, such as compass plants and prairie blazingstar, on fourteen acres, the largest flat upland area on the property. In addition, we dammed the upper end of several steep valleys suffering from severe erosion. The dams allowed four small wetlands to form, which we planted with lovely local wetland plants, including wild iris, queen of the prairie, and arrowhead. Runoff and gully formation have virtually stopped, because the prairie sod retains so much moisture, and the wetlands act as holding ponds. Even the floods of 2008 had few adverse effects.

  Aerial photographs dating back to the 1940s and 1950s showed some beautiful oak savannas, but these areas, left unmanaged for sixty years, became overgrown with tall trees. Eight years ago I began burning the understory and also cut many of the fifty- to sixty-year-old trees, leaving the open-grown savanna oaks. Some savanna understory plants are returning, and visitors are charmed by the beauty of this restoration.

  It is a constant struggle to keep a handful of nonnative invasive species, like garlic mustard, autumn olive, and honeysuckle, from taking over the whole landscape. On the positive side, we are solving a number of problems, preserving our natural heritage, and preparing well for any future changes. The long walks I take every day convince me that I’m doing the right thing. Seeing the diversity and beauty of the prairies, savannas, and woodlands and of the birds, butterflies, dragonflies, frogs, and other wildlife gives us great joy. We have found most of the missing pieces of the mosaic, and paradise lost is becoming paradise regained.

  Richard Baker is a professor emeritus of geoscience at the University of Iowa. He and his wife, Deb, and two dogs live in the woods overlooking the Cedar River in eastern Iowa.

  Steel Creek

  Amanda Keen-Zebert

  I don’t know how big a difference we can make or how long it will take for the climate to respond to our changes in behavior. I do all the little things in the hope that decades from now I will be able to go to Steel Creek on a cold winter day, hear the elks’ hooves crunch in the snow, and delight in romantic dreams of wilderness and great-grandchildren.

  Amanda Keen-Zebert, a native of northwest Arkansas, holds a Ph.D. in environmental geography. She lives with her husband, Konah, a nature photographer, in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

  Steel Creek, Buffalo National River, Arkansas.

  Photo by Konah Zebert.

  The Lying Sky

  John Calderazzo

  THE SKY IS LYING TO ME AGAIN. I’M STANDING IN MY Colorado back yard, staring up at a dazzle of stars and imagining that the air I’m breathing stretches up and away from me for hundreds or even millions of miles, until the last lonely molecule of oxygen peters out in deep space.

  Of course, this isn’t true. I know that the atmosphere wraps our planet as thinly as a shell wraps an egg. But my eye is tricked by the transparency of air and the immensity of the universe, and my brain wants to follow. It’s reassuring to think that air goes on and on, just as it’s comforting to stand on a Pacific beach and assume that the crashing ocean is boundless, its amazing creatures numberless. Who wants to believe that the natural world can’t absorb, unchanged, everything we throw at it?

  But then I think about Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut who in 1961 became the first person to fly in space. As one story goes, Gagarin looked down shortly after liftoff, saw how thin the blue skin of the atmosphere really is, and became terrified. He had never before understood the limited and fragile nature of the only home we have.

  Since then writers like Rachel Carson have shown us how pulling on just one thread in the complicated fabric of biological life can yank so many others out of kilter. But it seems we need to be reminded endlessly. How else to explain the tepid attention our policymakers and citizens have, until recently, paid to climate change? Ever-mounting evidence shouts that this may be the biggest single issue facing the planet.

  So why haven’t we acted? Scientific illiteracy? The fact that “Grow back the glaciers!” doesn’t sound as sexy as “Save the whales!”? Eco-fatigue? Maybe the problem is that when I stare up at Orion or an afternoon thunderhead, I can’t actually see anything getting warmer.

  Or maybe our denial is born of an unfathomable clash of scales, as I’ve seen in people I’ve met over the years who live on the slopes of volcanoes. Refusing to leave even when the ground starts to rumble, they say, It hasn’t erupted in 1,200 years, so why should it start now? Well, because volcanoes grow and collapse to the planetary beat of Deep Time, which reaches far beyond human generations. Thus, while my rational mind has long acc
epted the proofs of global warming, a tiny part of me still doesn’t want to believe we puny humans are to blame.

  Which is why we sometimes need to distrust gut feelings and pay attention to the bigger picture of science.

  So here I am, standing in my back yard and watching an infinity of stars. And I’m thinking, The thin skin of our planet is not immune to us. The world is warming. We’ve caused it. And now, what are we going to do about it?

  John Calderazzo teaches creative writing at Colorado State University. With his wife, SueEllen Campbell, he founded and directs Changing Climates @ CSU, a lecture series in which professors talk about climate change from various academic perspectives.

  The Price of Detachment

  Tara Mitchell

  AS A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT, I WORK TO CREATE

  landscapes of beauty and utility, shaping the land to satisfy the human eye and human needs. Yet very often I find myself restoring degraded landscapes, battling invasive plants, and seeking to preserve even the smallest of habitats—sometimes a single tree, which in its lifetime will hold thousands of birds, in whose universe millions of insects will eat and be eaten, among whose roots billions more insects, fungi, and bacteria make their home.

  At a construction site, I see that the big oaks left unprotected near the work area are dead. Their naked limbs, like fingers, still reach toward the summer sun. The soil structure in the root zone has been crushed by trucks. People don’t understand that soil is a living material, but it is alive only as long as it has biological connections. Once compacted, it can no longer hold air and water or sustain microorganisms. Without access to these essential elements in the soil, a tree will die. When it dies, not only does the immediate habitat disappear, but a link in the larger habitat is broken. The invisible is altered as well as the visible: nitrogen cycles, carbon cycles, microclimates, evapotranspiration—chemical and physical changes in water, soil, and atmosphere that, taken together, make the earth more or less habitable.

  A few miles down the road, I pass a gap in the forest. Acres of soil lie bare. Bulldozers, backhoes, and excavators are eating away at the earth; a stream of trucks, like ants, cart soil away. It is like seeing flesh stripped, bone exposed. On the other side of the road, the landscape stretches low and flat, covered with stores, restaurants, and parking lots. Sparsely planted trees stir in the breeze above the hot concrete. Storm drains wait to pipe away rainwater. Very little is living here, yet we unquestioningly accept the replacing of forests with these lunar landscapes.

  When we can no longer read the land, we no longer see what is in front of our eyes. Despite access to ever more information, despite threats of global warming, toxic water, and eroding soils, we continue to close our senses to the land. Our iPods shut out the rustling of leaves, the quiet of snow falling. Fences, measured strips of asphalt, rectangles of lawn, reshape the native landscape. Our taste for fast food kills the forest. Like global warming, our detachment will feed upon itself: as the climate warms, we will increasingly withdraw behind air-conditioned walls.

  We have chosen not to live as an integrated part of the complex ecosystem upon which we depend, but to be separate, boxing ourselves off from cradle to grave. In so doing, we have lost the ability to sense both beauty and danger. We need to change, not for what we will lose in the future, but for what we miss in the moment. The landscape will always be here, whatever form it takes. Whether it is one we can live in may no longer be up to us.

  Tara Mitchell has been a landscape architect for the Massachusetts Highway Department for ten years. She lives in Medford, Massachusetts, and enjoys painting in watercolors, writing, and tending her orchids and bonsai.

  I Was Born on

  Shaky Ground

  Bronwyn Mitchell

  THE LAND THAT MAKES UP MOST OF LOUISIANA, AT

  least the southern part, consists of pieces of the Rocky Mountains, the Appalachians, and every place in between. Wind and water, snow and ice, work over time to break big rocks down into smaller and smaller rocks until the rock trades its former identity for that of soil. It can take five hundred years or more for an inch of topsoil to form.

  Perhaps the mountain longs to see the sea, to taste salt water, to play witness to schools of fish, because as rock becomes smaller, it becomes more mobile. Driven by gravity, water falling onto the earth picks up whatever it can and moves it. In tributary after tributary, three quarters of North America drains into the Mississippi River through southern Louisiana.

  When a river meets the sea, it slows down and spreads out into the traditional delta shape, which allows the sediment to fall out of suspension. In a geologic irony, the renegade sediment worn away from the mountains moves on to build up the land. This is southern Louisiana’s unique story: five deltas and borrowed land. Beginning at the continental shelf, pieces of thirty-one states unite in a series of layers. When the sediments breach the water’s surface, the coastal fringe is colonized by marsh grasses. The roots add structural stability, the live stems help capture additional sediment, and the decaying tissues continue the land-building process.

  Rivers are dynamic. Always seeking the shortest route to the sea, they continually change course. People, on the other hand, like things to stay pretty much the same, so they build levees to control seasonal floods, thereby halting the periodic sustaining deposition of new sediment. When the Mississippi River tried to change course to flow west into the Atchafalaya River, the people responded by building the Old River Control Structure. This giant wall regulates water flow, sending a constant 30 percent to the Atchafalaya and 70 percent to the mouth of the Mississippi.

  Louisiana is no longer growing. It is shrinking at a rate of one acre every fifteen minutes. Starved for sediment, the marsh is sinking into the sea. The rising sea level quickens the rate of sinking; even a few inches’ rise is significant for a land below sea level.

  Each summer, in a ritual as sacred as fireworks on the Fourth of July, my dad, along with all the other dads in the neighborhood, would order a load of soil. A big truck would dump what to a kid in New Orleans seemed like a mountain of dirt—five feet high—onto the front lawn. Armed with a wheelbarrow and shovel, we would use that mountain to fill in the areas around the house that had sunk over the previous year.

  Southern Louisiana is the nation’s canary in a coal mine. As Louisiana goes, so goes the country. Seventy-five percent of the nation’s population lives in coastal zones. The question is, do we have enough shovels?

  Bronwyn Mitchell is a New Orleans native now residing in Baltimore, Maryland. A onetime women’s professional football player, she is the executive director of the Maryland Association for Outdoor and Environmental Education.

  Racetrack Playa

  Mindy Kimball

  When we learned that nobody had actually seen the rocks in motion, I recalled a quote by Henry David Thoreau, who said, “The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.” I returned to Death Valley in 2007 to present a public lecture on global climate change. I volunteer with The Climate Project, speaking to the public about the impacts of and solutions to climate change.

  Mindy Kimball is a major in the army, currently serving in Iraq as a space operations officer. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy and California State University East Bay, she lives in Maryland with her husband and son.

  The “sliding rocks” of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley, California. Photo by Mindy Kimball.

  Windmills,

  Talking

  Jennifer Kepka

  GOING BACK TO SEE MY FAMILY LAST SUMMER, WE

  drove past fields of fresh-cut Kansas wheat but also past fields of towering windmills, windmills so large they felt cartoonish—science fiction come to life on the broad prairie. There are dozens of them now, and hundreds more are scheduled to join them. They cut a scattered line from the smooth concrete interstate out to the edge of Lake Wilson, waiting to
turn my state’s most abundant resource—wind—into energy.

  It’s strange to see windmills here, in a county where every driveway has a pickup truck, where tractors still belch diesel fumes into hazy skies all summer, where field burning isn’t up for debate, where recycling is the exception, not the rule. It’s strange, and yet it’s fitting, because it brings home the idea that global warming is really global, even for the places that aren’t seeing the ocean rise or the smog thicken. The windmills rise out of land that the farmers of my father’s youth didn’t worry about conserving, land that is now managed mostly by men and women with agriculture degrees, those Future Farmers of America who have studied the best ways to fight erosion, pests, diseases. Now the windmills spin on their grazing pastures, and I think the farmers must see—must begin to understand—how interconnected we all are in the world. I wonder if they see these windmills, as I sometimes do, when they flip a light switch at night. I wonder if they hear, in the steady hum and whoosh of a windmill at work, the sounds of our cities being powered, our air being relieved.

  My contributions to the fight against global warming are small. I reduce, I reuse, I recycle. But I also talk. Sitting in the cooling cab of one of those guzzling pickup trucks last summer, I found myself able, for the first time in my life, to connect with my farm-raised father on issues about the environment. We stopped in the shade of a grain elevator to marvel at the massive bulk of a load of windmill stalks sitting on a still train, and we talked honestly about the ways that energy use in our country has contributed to the carbon crisis. We talked about the need for these windmills, for more of these windmills, and he expressed real dismay that he wasn’t able to put any on his farm because of recently passed state legislation.