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The endurance of Leopold's essay is at least partly explained by its eloquence. Plainspoken but poetic, dense in the best of ways, it has a practical Midwestern beauty that serves it well. It is complex yet eminently quotable, even in 140-character chunks. But it's also more than 60 years old. Today, decades after it was written, the Western landscape faces forces almost too big to understand: urbanization, global energy demand, the compound effects of climate change on water and wildfire. Is Leopold's land ethic big enough to take them on?
"The Land Ethic" was the culmination of decades of thinking about conservation and, more broadly, about the relationship of people and nature. Leopold, a lifelong hunter and trained forester, recognized — and cherished — the practical benefits of nature. He accepted that people lived inside ecosystems, not apart from them. But he had also lived through the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, and seen the topsoil of southwestern Wisconsin, unmoored by drought and the profit motive, blow away and slip toward the sea. He understood, from bitter experience, how humans could fail nature. How, he wondered, could we do better by it?
"There must be some force behind conservation," Leopold mused in lecture notes from the 1940s. "More universal than profit, less awkward than government, less ephemeral than sport, something that reaches into all times and places. ... I can see only one such force: a respect for land as an organism; a voluntary decency in land-use exercised by every citizen and every land-owner out of a sense of love for and obligation to that great biota we call America."
Voluntary decency. That polite phrase doesn't appear in "The Land Ethic," but the essay is an argument for its necessity — and for its potential to power change at even the greatest scale. "A system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest is hopelessly lopsided," Leopold wrote. "It assumes, falsely, I think, that the economic parts of the biotic clock will function without the uneconomic parts. ... An ethical obligation on the part of the private owner is the only visible remedy for these situations."
Leopold thought that if Wisconsin farmers had a stronger sense of voluntary decency, they would have used the soil-conservation funds allocated by the state in the late 1930s for more than just immediately profitable measures. They would have improved their farming practices until their livelihoods, their neighbors' livelihoods, and the topsoil itself were protected for the long term. Many of us routinely accept such "obligations over and above self-interest" as members of the human community, Leopold observed. We fund schools not attended by our immediate family; we pay for roads not traveled. A land ethic, he argued, would simply extend that sense of obligation beyond people to the land itself — to what he called the entire "biotic community."
Leopold wrote most of "The Land Ethic" in a shored-up chicken coop on a desperately overworked piece of farmland on the Wisconsin River. The place he and his family called "the Shack" was, like "The Land Ethic" and many of his other writings, a product of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, the paramount ecological challenges of the day. After the Leopolds bought the land in 1935, they spent years struggling to revive it, planting hundreds of trees only to watch them be killed by drought. Eventually, they restored a patchwork of pines, hardwoods and prairie that survives today.
Leopold's response to the disasters of the 1930s was characteristic of his times. Char Miller, an environmental historian at California's Pomona College, points out that many of Leopold's contemporaries — composer Aaron Copland, filmmaker Pare Lorentz, anthropologist Margaret Mead — also sang the praises of simpler, close-to-the-ground living. But for Leopold, at least, going "back to the land" wasn't a retreat from the world's problems; it was an attempt to start solving them.
We, too, live in a time when ecological disaster seems very close and very real. It's tempting, perhaps even more now than then, to hide out in the metaphorical chicken coop. But Leopold's ethic is still working, covertly and overtly, against that urge. Leopold biographer Curt Meine, in the 2011 documentary Green Fire, finds the land ethic expressed in suburban prairie fragments, urban habitat-restoration projects, and similar efforts that aim to connect people with the nature of nearby places. Such connections, he says, foster the sort of voluntary decency Leopold described: a respect for nature, even in its most humble, altered and unlovely states, an awareness of one's place as a "plain member and citizen" of it, and a willingness to sacrifice time, money and effort on behalf of its lasting health.
Leopold knew that nature never had, and never would, exist in splendid isolation. While he spoke eloquently against a conservation strategy based on economic self-interest, he also distrusted purely preservationist arguments such as those advanced by Sierra Club founder John Muir. To Leopold, successful conservation required human connection to the land, and connection required use — respectful use, yes, and use for spiritual and aesthetic as well as economic benefits, but deliberate, active use. Even wilderness, he submitted, was a form of land use, perhaps the highest form of it. That seeming paradox is more relevant today than ever: We know, with greater and greater certainty, that it's impossible to put nature in quarantine — and equally impossible to survive without it.
"I think climate change, and the disruptions it's bringing to biological life, makes a preservationist impulse problematic," Miller says. "A conservation ethos that allows us to repair the dilemmas we've created is going to be much more useful in the coming century." Though that repair work requires us to muster yet more voluntary decency, it can create the connections that foster it, too.
When Leopold wrote "The Land Ethic," he was at the top of his field, revered for his pioneering work in forestry and wildlife science. He was also in poor health, suffering from a painful facial tic that resisted treatment. It's easy to see his most famous essay as the product of that confident mind and failing body: Despite Leopold's ambitious scope, he is careful to emphasize that his is far from the last word. "Nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written,' " he concludes. Ethics evolve "in the minds of a thinking community," he believed, and do so slowly, amid more immediate obligations. ("Breakfast comes before ethics," he once told his daughter, Nina.)
Our challenge, then, is to continue — or better, accelerate — the evolution of the land ethic and the ideas that underpin it. Three generations after Leopold, we're even more distracted than the people of his time, and our environmental problems are in many ways vastly more complicated and pressing. The biotic community is as interconnected as ever, though our influences upon it are greater now, and voluntary decency must stretch to serve species and places we don't know and never will. But we can still start in the same place Leopold did: in the chicken coop, and with the problems of the backyard biota.
Is Aldo's land ethic big enough for the modern West? No. But without its propelling force, nothing else will be, either.
Michelle Nijhuis is a longtime contributing editor at HCN. After 15 years off the electrical grid in Paonia, Colorado, she now lives and writes in White Salmon, Washington. michellenijhuis.com Follow @nijhuism
This story was originally titled "Where's Aldo?" in the print edition.
]]>But our neighbors' attachment to the forests is familiar. Whether surrounded by graceful aspen or scrubby juniper or majestic Douglas fir and western hemlocks, people care about trees in a way that goes beyond politics and logic. For most of us, forests are part of the personality of our places, and when they change, we change, too.
In recent years, Western forests have undergone profound changes. Deep drought in the Southwest, beetle attacks throughout the Rockies, and warming average temperatures worldwide have led to record-breaking forest die-offs. Many familiar species – lodgepole pine, whitebark pine, even the hardy juniper – are dying in huge numbers.
For most of us, the carnage is unsettling. For scientists, it's also a mystery worth solving.
Death is a complicated matter, and it turns out that tree death is no exception. As HCN assistant editor Cally Carswell writes in this issue's cover story, Western forest researchers are finding that what look like simple cases of beetle kill or drought-induced starvation are not really simple at all. Heat, changes in rainfall patterns, fire, insects and disease can all contribute to a single tree's demise, and the same factors can affect different species in different ways.
By understanding how trees die, scientists hope to improve the accuracy of our climate forecasts: If they can include forest decline – and its implications for the world's carbon budget – in computer simulations of future climate, they'll be better able to predict the speed and strength of climate change worldwide.
Scientists also hope their studies will benefit living forests, and those of us who live among them. Plants have a remarkable variety of strategies for dealing with stress, and as the climate changes, some strategies will be more successful than others. Knowing which species survive in which conditions will help managers decide if, how, and where to try to make forests more resilient.
These are grim questions, and they're yielding grim forecasts. But ecologist Craig Allen points out that the researchers' motivations are anything but. "What underlies this is the love of life," he says. "Trees are one of the most glorious expressions of that on this planet."
]]>"There's one," he said quietly. "And there's another one."
They were Western bumblebees, a native species. Bombus occidentalis was once among the most common bumblebees in the Western United States. In the late 1990s, its populations crashed, and the species all but disappeared from about a quarter of its historic range. Despite regular surveys of the Seattle area by researchers and volunteers, no sighting was confirmed for well over a decade. Then, in early July, Peterman confirmed a 2012 sighting in this neighborhood.
In early September, biologists from the University of Colorado at Boulder announced that Western bumblebees had also returned to Colorado's Front Range, with more than 20 individuals observed during surveys in 2012 and 2013.
Western bumblebees, which usually have a distinctive white patch on their tail ends -- hence their other common name, white-bottomed bees -- are key pollinators of cranberries, blueberries, cherries, greenhouse tomatoes and other species. Their recent reappearance in Washington and Colorado has surprised and delighted both amateur and professional entomologists, particularly because the species is among several North American bumblebees known to be shrinking in numbers and range. One of them, in fact, Bombus franklini, a related Oregon species known as Franklin's bumblebee, is feared extinct.
Like the better-publicized declines of European honeybees, which were introduced to the United States in the 17th century, researchers suspect that bumblebee declines are caused by a combination of factors, including disease and climate and habitat change. And each species decline may have its own story. The Western bumblebee crash in the 1990s is thought to have been caused by a fungus, Nosema bombi, which may have been introduced to the U.S. by commercially bred bumblebee queens from Europe. Another Nosema species, ceranae, has also been implicated in honeybee declines.
No one is certain why and how the Western bumblebee has reappeared, but it's possible that the species is now developing resistance to the Nosema fungus. "We may have hit the mutation jackpot," says Peterman.
Researchers from the University of Washington and the Xerces Society, an invertebrate conservation group based in Portland, Ore., are now looking for more Western bumblebee populations, and four additional sightings were confirmed in and around Seattle this summer. If the species does make a comeback, says the Xerces Society's Rich Hatfield, it will likely have room to re-establish: The society is working with farmers to plant pollinator-friendly flowers and shrubs in field margins and other fallow lands, an effort that's created about 100,000 acres of pollinator habitat nationwide. And some species of native bumblebees are still doing well along the West Coast, suggesting that at least some suitable Western bumblebee habitat persists.
Farmers value bumblebees because they use their tiny jaws to bite and shake each flower, a distinctive and efficient pollen-dislodging practice known as "buzz pollination." Humans can mimic buzz pollination with various gadgets, including electric toothbrushes, but the process is laborious and prohibitively expensive on a large scale. Private companies have been trying to breed Bombus occidentalis in captivity, says Jim Strange of Utah State University, but have struggled to protect bees from fungal infection. Since the Western bumblebee population crash, some farmers of bumblebee-reliant crops have resorted to honeybees, which can manage the job but aren't as effective, or have purchased bees from a related Eastern species, Bombus impatiens.
But many conservationists oppose the introduction of non-native bumblebees into the region, fearing the spread of new diseases. In 2010, the Xerces Society and other conservation groups petitioned the U.S. Department of Agriculture to create regulations preventing the movement of bumblebees outside their native ranges. While the federal government did not act on the petition, in 2012 the Oregon Department of Agriculture formalized a longstanding informal ban on the importation of exotic bumblebees into the state. California allows the use of non-native bumblebees in greenhouses, but not in open fields.
If the Western bumblebee is in fact developing Nosema resistance, the species may someday repopulate its former range -- and Western farmers may once again be able to purchase native bumblebees for their greenhouse tomatoes and blackberry fields. For now, though, bee enthusiasts like Will Peterman can only keep an eye on the hedges, looking for another white tail end.
]]>"It was the most surreal experience of my life," Rasmussen said afterwards. "And I'm talking about a life that's had more than its share of surreal experiences."
Stu for Silverton tells the story of Rasmussen, a Silverton native who, in his mid-40s, began to dress publicly as a woman. Rasmussen had always been deeply involved with his community, a former timber-mill town near the state capitol of Salem: He ran the local movie theatre, was active in local politics, and had a knack for fixing computers and cars. Though he'd long recognized his desire to dress as a woman, he kept it private, afraid of his hometown's reaction. Finally, with the fierce, steadfast support of Sage, he began his metamorphosis.
First, he simply manicured his nails. He followed with acrylic tips, then red acrylic tips, and then the occasional skirt and padded bra. In 2000, Rasmussen traveled to Portland for breast-implant surgery. (He remains biologically male.) Today, at age 64, he wears a cascade of bright red curls and favors miniskirts, three-inch heels and revealing necklines.
Most of his neighbors were shocked and scandalized, just as he had feared. But their initial consternation faded with time and familiarity, and in 2008, Rasmussen became the country's first openly transgender mayor. By that time, even his political opponents were more likely to complain about his cautious approach to community growth than his unusual silhouette. ("I'd basically blackmail-proofed myself," Rasmussen comments.) And when members of the Westboro Baptist Church came to town to protest Rasmussen's election, some 200 Silvertonians of all political convictions organized a noisy counter-demonstration. A dozen or so men attended in dresses. Rasmussen still chokes up when he talks about the show of support.
When Russell approached Rasmussen about creating a musical based on his life story, Rasmussen granted him full creative control, requesting only that Silverton and its citizens be portrayed positively. Russell agreed, and made good on his promise. While Rasmussen and Sage are clearly the play's heroes, one of the most poignant lines is spoken by Rasmussen's estranged best friend, a composite character who struggles with Rasmussen's transformation. "You see the rest of us making do with the cards we're dealt," he says angrily. "What makes you think you can go fishing for the cards you want?" Rasmussen's radical leap of faith created not only confusion and fear but also a kind of envy. With strong performances, catchy lyrics, and what The Seattle Times called "vivaciously clever" staging, Stu for Silverton is rich in emotional subtleties.
The play takes some liberties with the facts, rearranging timelines and simplifying events for dramatic effect, and is in some ways a fairytale of small-town generosity and acceptance. In reality, Rasmussen has his detractors like any other politician, and his wardrobe isn't always applauded: In 2009, for example, he was censured by his city council for wearing an especially short miniskirt to an elementary school function. But the essentials of the play are true. Mayor Stu, a model of fiscal if not sartorial restraint, remains personally and politically popular, and he was re-elected in 2010 and again in 2012.
In the theatre's courtyard after the opening performance, Russell raised a toast to Rasmussen, thanking him for his trust in the project. Rasmussen, who wore a black V-neck dress and black patent-leather heels, surveyed the cast, crew and audience -- which included about a dozen Silvertonians -- with a dazed expression. The crowd cheered wildly.
Since opening night, many more Silvertonians have made the trek to Seattle to see their mayor portrayed on stage, and both Rasmussen and Sage say the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. "No one in Silverton would be unhappy if I'd never come out as transgender," Rasmussen acknowledges. "But I'm happier now than I've ever been."
"Can I second that?" says Sage. "Because I see it, too. He is somewhat easier to live with."
Rasmussen laughs. "Somewhat. Only somewhat."
]]>Two weeks ago, for the first time in 15 years, I flushed the toilet inside my house.
This — and by "this" I mean the 15 years of non-flushing — was not quite as gross as it might sound. Until very recently, my family and I lived off the electrical grid in rural Colorado, in a straw-bale house with solar panels, minimal plumbing and a limited water supply. To conserve electricity, we had few appliances, and to save water we used a composting toilet (we had what is delicately called a honey bucket). It was fun and cheap and wonderful in unexpected ways — even the honey bucket had its charms — but over the past year it became clear that my family needed a less isolated place to call home.
Our off-the-grid life and our move is chronicled in this new piece from the public-radio show BURN, but to make a long story short, we rented out our straw-bale nest, bid tearful goodbyes to our neighbors, and moved to a still rural but larger town in the Pacific Northwest, close to both family and old friends. And then we promptly plugged back into the grid.
No matter my living situation, my carbon footprint is anything but petite. I travel frequently for work, and even at home, as HCN senior editor Jonathan Thompson recently pointed out, many of the things all of us use daily are manufactured with the help of dirty power. But in Colorado, the direct energy diet of my household was tiny, and it was strictly enforced: I couldn't have a toaster, or a waffle iron, or an external monitor for my laptop. We had a very small array of solar panels, and we just didn't have enough juice for those things. We lived comfortably but frugally, with hot showers and Netflix but no hair dryer or TV.
Now, I can have any and all of those things, as often as I like. And 10 years ago, even five years ago, I might have been quietly pleased to loosen my hairshirt. But two weeks in, I'm surprised to find that I'm just not tempted. The hairshirt, it turns out, has become damn comfortable. Why would we want a vacuum cleaner, anyway? Easier to just maintain our lowish standards of cleanliness. And a TV? Please. I look at a screen all day long. (The flush toilet in our new place, alas, is non-optional.)
The old adage that it takes only three weeks to form a habit is pretty much baseless, but actual research suggests that it takes between two and a half and 36 weeks for various daily-activity habits to take hold. After 15 years, I hope our household has formed something like a positive addiction to energy frugality, and can maintain its diet even in the face of a seemingly limitless supply. But just in case, I'm insuring my habit with the threat of public shame: If you ever find me sprawled in front of a brand-new large-screen TV, indulging in a late-night marathon of BBC dramas, remind me about this post.
Michelle Nijhuis is a High Country News contributing editor.
]]>We've got a lot of dead trees in the Rockies. More than usual. As the region has warmed, bark beetle populations have exploded, and they've been killing off massive swaths of pine and spruce. It's hard to miss the damage, and when British landscape artist Chris Drury visited the University of Wyoming campus in Laramie, he proposed to tell the forests' story in an outdoor sculpture.
"Carbon Sink: What Goes Around Comes Around" was installed on the UW campus in late 2011. Funded by an anonymous donor and by the state Cultural Trust Fund, it consisted of a 36-foot-wide circle of logs from beetle-killed trees, arranged in a whirlpool pattern around a pile of coal. Drury hoped the sculpture would be left in place until it disintegrated, and the campus art museum said there were "no plans to uninstall it." It was, Drury said, intended to inspire a conversation.
In May 2012, however, just after most students left campus, Carbon Sink quietly disappeared.
When University of Wyoming graduate Joe Riis inquired about the fate of Carbon Sink, a university vice-president told him that it had been removed due to water damage. But emails recently obtained by enterprising reporters at Wyoming Public Media tell a different story. When Carbon Sink was first installed, Marion Loomis, the president of the Wyoming Mining Association, wrote to a university official and asked: "What kind of crap is this?" Both industry representatives and state legislators weighed in on the sculpture, some threatening the university's funding in no uncertain terms.
In April, university president Tom Buchanan wrote to the director of the art museum: "Given the controversy that it has generated, it would be best for UW if the fire pit (I've forgotten the name of the work) could be considered part of the [removal of other campus artworks] during the summer of 2012." It was, and today, no trace of it remains.
Those involved have tried to walk back their statements, here and here. But since the installation of Carbon Sink, the Wyoming legislature has passed legislation requiring that art on parts of the university campus must be approved by the state governor and the UW School of Energy Resources governing board.
Public art is notoriously controversial. But controversy, in a way, is its very purpose. As Drury suggested, memorials and murals and outdoor sculptures — even, say, creepy 32-foot-high electric-blue horses — are meant to start conversations, even if the conversation is sometimes about how awful they are. A campus- or city-wide conversation without at least a little controversy is clearly leaving somebody out. In the case of Carbon Sink, the conversation barely got started — and almost everyone was left out.
Last week, The Casper Star-Tribune — Wyoming's statewide paper — opined that "The only way the University of Wyoming could have handled the removal of controversial public art piece 'Carbon Sink' any worse is if they would have used the coal and wood from the artwork as a pyre to roast the artist." (The coal, by the way, was burned for heat.)
Could it have been handled any better?
Consider the case of Thomas Hart Benton's Indiana murals, which have been displayed at Indiana University in Bloomington since 1940. The 22 panels tell the history of the state, from the Mound Builders to the early 1900s, and they include the bad and the good, for instance placing members of the Ku Klux Klan — who briefly dominated state politics in 1924 — in the same panel as a reporter and a printer from The Indianapolis Times, which broke the Klan's hold on the state (and won a Pulitzer Prize) through its dogged coverage of KKK corruption.
The Klan panel has long been controversial, discomfiting first white viewers and then, when it was displayed on the UI campus, drawing complaints from the Black Student Union. In 2002, the union asked that the panel be covered.
Public universities have restricted or removed art deemed obscene or offensive, and a string of legal cases have pondered the exact meaning of those adjectives. But both Carbon Sink and the Klan panel seem well clear of this territory, and while their stories are unpleasant and inconvenient, they're built with facts.
Still, the chancellor of Indiana University, Sharon Brehm, could have agreed to cover up the mural, or move it. Instead, in the spring of 2002, she gave a thoughtful, and quite moving speech on the issue. After acknowledging the history of racial violence in Indiana, ongoing racism in the state, and the lack of racial diversity on campus, she said:
What follows, then, is my own deeply felt position, respectfully developed after careful listening and much reflection.
I am convinced that moving or covering the mural would be morally wrong, because it would, in effect, do what Benton refused to do: that is, it would hide the shameful aspects of Indiana's past. I might note that trying to move the mural would probably damage it, perhaps destroy it, but the major issue here is a moral one, not one of cost or even of preservation.
I am also convinced that the major issue running throughout all of the discussions and conversations over these last several weeks is not, in fact, the Benton mural, but is instead the status of diversity on our campus. The real issue, the real test of character, for Indiana University Bloomington is the strength of its commitment to diversity.
The chancellor then proposed an education program around the murals that would provide historical context to all students encountering them. She also proposed several significant diversity initiatives, including a fundraising campaign for more multicultural art on campus: "Let's put IUB on the artistic map as a center for vigorous, exciting and (yes) controversial art by the multicultural artists of today," she said. Brehm resigned a few months later to take another position on campus, but multicultural programs have expanded and active and public examination of the Benton murals has continued.
These cases aren't identical, of course. An angry university funder is harder to defy than an angry student group, especially if the funder is the coal industry and the university is in Wyoming. But the University of Wyoming, like most public universities, has a mission statement that calls for academic freedom and free expression. University donors are supposed to further that mission, not try to restrict it, and university leaders are supposed to defend it.
What if President Buchanan had given a speech like Chancellor Brehm's? He could have acknowledged the reaction to Carbon Sink (taking care to first learn its name), and acknowledged the economic and social power of the coal industry in Wyoming. He could have acknowledged the science — some conducted at his own university — that demonstrates the connections between coal power and climate change, and climate change and forest decline. And he could have said that while coal is useful and important, it's equally important to not only acknowledge its costs, but also work to reduce them. He could have pointed to existing university programs aimed at doing just that, and called on the legislature to fund more.
It wouldn't have ended the controversy. But it might have opened the conversation.
Michelle Nijhuis is a contributing editor at High Country News
Carbon Sink photo by Chris Drury.
Benton mural photo from UI archives.
This story, I promise, will end with giant deep-sea tubeworms like the beauties above. Please bear with me while I get there via the Colorado River.
I'm one of the nearly 40 million people who depend on the Colorado for water, and for most of my adult life I've heard about (and reported on) the bureaucratic battles over the river's flow. Over the past century, the seven arid states that share the river — "share" being a generous term here — have tried to protect their portions with multiple lawsuits, clever insults, and, in one notorious case, the Arizona National Guard.
So when I recently moderated a panel at the Aspen Environment Forum about the future of the Colorado River, I expected to hear about more of the same. Surely, I thought, drought and population growth are only ratcheting up the drama.
Instead, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior David Hayes, ecologist Osvel Hinojosa Huerta of the Mexican conservation group Pronatura Noroeste and University of Arizona paleoclimatologist Jonathan Overpeck all described something that sounded suspiciously close to adult behavior. The outlook for climate and water supplies on the Colorado is grim and getting grimmer, they agreed, but the basin states have reached a few important cooperative agreements in recent years, and are even involved in promising discussions with Mexico about getting more water across the border and to the river's dried-out delta.
I was skeptical. (That's my job.) But Hayes, Hinojosa, and Overpeck each insisted, in public and in private, that the progress was real. Part of the reason, Hayes said, is that the veteran adversaries along the river have developed a grudging trust: "These people have worked together for so long," he said, laughing and shaking his head. "They know each others' tics, they know each others' food preferences. They're like a family."
A few days after the conference, my daughter and I got out of the summer heat and wildfire smoke and took a quick trip to the Colorado high country, where we visited with ecologist Rafe Sagarin at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. Rafe has notably eclectic interests, and he's always doing something worth knowing about; his two most recent books are Learning from the Octopus, about applying lessons from the natural world to national security strategies, and the just-released Observation and Ecology, about the importance of seemingly old-fashioned natural history to modern ecological insights.
I told Rafe about the conversation at the Aspen conference, and he nodded. "Symbiosis," he said. While resource scarcity is often assumed to lead inevitably to conflict (how many times have we heard about the coming water wars?) crisis can also have the opposite effect, and inspire cooperation even among hardened enemies. In Learning from the Octopus, Rafe writes about the ubiquity, diversity and productivity of symbiotic relationships in nature, and about their parallels in human society. Cooperative relationships, he says, are especially important in harsh conditions: Deep-sea tubeworms, for example, lack mouths and guts, so they depend on colonies of obligate symbiotic bacteria to fix hydrogen sulfide into food for them. (See? I promised tubeworms.) In the human world, decentralized partnerships among Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians and among the frenemy states along the Mekong River have successfully identified and contained disease outbreaks. Because of the Mekong partnership, public-health workers were allowed into highly restricted Myanmar just days after a devastating cyclone hit the country in 2008. (Rafe also reports that members of the Middle East consortium collaborated on one of the first scientific papers jointly authored by an Israeli and a Palestinian.) He adds:
The networks were not designed to tackle the much larger and complex issues of creating peace between their member states, though they very well may be an opening to future peace agreements. Symbioses in nature never solve all of an organism's security problems, but where new symbioses develop, they arise to solve the most immediate challenges. It may be that later, these relatively limited acts of symbiosis build into amazing outcomes that no one could have predicted.
I don't want to make too much of this. Not all crises lead to cooperation, and the ongoing Colorado water crisis won't be solved quickly or easily. But if water negotiators in the western United States can bring themselves to act like giant tubeworms — even a little bit — then there's hope for us all.
Michelle Nijhuis is a contributing editor at High Country News
Top photo courtesy of NOAA, from the "Tempus Fugit" vent field.
Colorado River Basin illustration courtesy of the Library of Congress.
]]>My rural western Colorado town of Paonia, population 1,500 on a good day, is in many ways a laboratory-scale model of the USA. We worship both community ties and unfettered independence from the federal government. We're gossipy and private, inclusive and provincial, divided by class and dogma even as we gather under our purple mountains majesty. Our community stew comes to a boil at Cherry Days, the annual Fourth of July celebration, and this year's version -- heated by wildfires and record summer temperatures -- was extra hot and spicy.
The Cherry Days parade was notable for its lead vehicle, a well-preserved Korean-War-era tank complete with a pair of anti-aircraft guns. Even more notable was the tank's owner: billionaire Bill Koch, brother to the liberal bêtes noires Charles and David Koch. Bill Koch, whose interests in sailing, fine wines and antiques are less political than his brothers' though probably just as expensive, is the founder and CEO of Oxbow Group, whose holdings include a local coal mine. Its affiliate Gunnison Energy Corp. is active in local natural-gas development.
In recent years, Bill Koch has also become a part-time neighbor, acquiring a couple of ranches in the mountains and a long list of Paonia-area properties. He's commissioned the construction of a private "Western town," furnished with his collection of frontier memorabilia. He's aroused local suspicion and resentment by pushing for Congressional approval of a public-private land swap that would benefit his ranch and close off access to 40 square miles of wilderness. And for the community activists fighting fast-moving natural-gas development, Bill Koch and Gunnison Energy have become symbols of unwelcome change.
So when Koch's collectible tank creaked down Grand Avenue last week, Sid Lewis — hairdresser, cycling enthusiast and former town councilman — stepped in front of it holding a handwritten cardboard sign about money and democracy and the corruption of the latter by the former. Lewis and his sign were soon escorted off the street, but the story of "Tiananmen Sid" quickly landed on Facebook. By Friday morning, news of the encounter was in The Denver Post, and that night the tale of the hairdresser versus the tank was told onThe Rachel Maddow Show. By the time you read this, local online arguments about the incident will probably have invoked the First Amendment at least 1,098 times (and, if Godwin's Law holds, mentioned Nazis at least once).
To some in town, it turns out, Bill Koch is the benevolent rich guy who buys the groceries, and Sid Lewis is the outsider poking his disrespectful outsider-y nose into a pretty good deal. To others, Koch is the dastardly outsider trying to buy the town and invaluable public land for cheap, and Sid represents the community standing heroically against him. These stories, with different characters in the lead roles and varying degrees of truth, have been told and retold here for generations. Neither is likely to change anyone's mind.
But I was happy that Tiananmen Sid shook up the town's 66th annual Cherry Days celebration, and not only because I happen to prefer beauticians to billionaires. Sid Lewis made the parade a more accurate reflection of my small complicated town and big complicated nation. Most of us, after all, are in a testy, confrontational mood these days.
I was even happier, though, when the parade continued its march, unrolling its humble column of Constitutionalists and conservationists, Republicans and Democrats, Shriners and dancing librarians, organic farmers and volunteer ambulance drivers and the Class of 1982. They straggled slowly along the long, crowded route in pickups and flatbeds and sometimes under their own steam, waving and grinning, separate but more or less on the same path. That's the part of the procession where most of us live our daily lives. When we're lucky, its story is the truest one of all.
Watch a video of Sid Lewis's protest.
Michelle Nijhuis is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). She is a contributing editor of the magazine and lives in Paonia, Colorado.
]]>Over the past few years, though, this prejudice of mine has collided not only with the hectic schedule of new parenthood, but also with -- can we put this delicately, please? -- the arrival of the time of life when one's waistline no longer requests, but demands a workout. And I'm too vain to buy new jeans.
So late last year, during an especially long, dark December night, I ordered a rowing machine -- the kind with a flywheel, a bicycle chain and a sliding seat. This wasn't entirely an impulse purchase: In high school, I had a brief stint as a coxswain on the crew team, and I have fond memories of misty early-morning outings on the Hudson River -- and even of the dreaded rowing-machine workouts, which I found somehow rhythmic and soothing. A rowing machine, I reasoned, would let me exercise at home near my daughter -- and it would at least imitate a real-world activity. So what if it came with a computer screen, and looked a lot like an extremely large gerbil wheel?
"Mama, where you going to row?" asked my 3-year-old, eyeing the big cardboard box in the living room.
I sighed. Exactly the problem, I thought. I'd capitulated to pointless exercise.
My daughter brightened. "You should row to Yap!"
Yap, as you may or may not know, is an island in the Western Pacific, and one of the states of Micronesia. It is my household's conceptual equivalent of Timbuktu -- an impossibly faraway, mysterious place. According to Google Earth, it is 6,992 air miles away from my front door. The water route, I thought, would be ... well, I didn't even want to think about it.
I laughed. "That's a pretty long row."
My daughter looked unimpressed.
"How about we start by rowing to the coffee shop?"
The coffee shop is 1.5 miles away. My daughter, still foggy on matters of scale, quickly agreed. (Also, the coffee shop has bagels. The availability of bagels on Yap is as yet undetermined.)
After a single 5,000-meter workout, we'd gone to the coffee shop and back. "Did you like the bagels?"
"Yeah. Now Yap."
I sighed. Six thousand nine hundred miles is ... about 11 million meters. Eleven million meters is about 2,200 average workouts. My daughter would be finishing elementary school before we spotted land. But wasn't this what I'd wanted in the first place? To use exercise to get somewhere?
"OK," I said. "But it's going to take a while."
To date, I've rowed about 300,000 meters, close to 200 miles. I figure we've rowed down the North Fork River and into the Gunnison. We've gotten through the first serious rapids of the Colorado River, and crossed the border into Utah. We've camped on the beach, and told stories in our tent. Soon, we'll get in a special yellow airplane and fly around Glen Canyon Dam, then Hoover Dam and the rest, our boat strapped securely to the fuselage. In a few months, we'll hit the Colorado Delta, where we'll portage across the mudflats and into the Gulf of California. We'll round the tip of Baja and head out to the open ocean, where, if we're lucky, we'll see gray whales and cookie-cutter sharks. My daughter hopes to see some dolphins, and maybe even a stray penguin. We need to remember to bring lunch, and cookies, and juice.
And so I row on. Behind my left shoulder, framed by a bedroom window, the view of the mountains stays the same. But the imaginary horizon is infinite.
]]>I grew up in the Hudson Valley of New York State, and went to college in western Oregon — both beautiful places, beloved by many. But I never knew what it was to love a place until I spent a college summer in southern Utah, where I worked as a field tech on a wildlife research project. The red rocks, the blue sky, the dry, quiet air, the weather building on the horizon — why had no one told me this place existed? I was a goner.
Tyra Olstad, a Ph.D. student in geography at Kansas State University, has spent the last few years trying to explain people like me — or, rather, trying to explain the far-from-universal appeal of big, wide landscapes like deserts and prairies. Like me, Olstad grew up in New York State and spent a season working in the Southwest — in her case, for the National Park Service in the Painted Desert of Arizona. "I just absolutely fell in love with the space," she says. "But I also realized that a lot of people didn't like it — they felt uncomfortable in it, or they thought something needed to be done with it to make it more productive."
In her research, presented at the Association of American Geographers' meeting this week, she's found that many before her have struggled with the elusive attraction of open landscapes. Psychologists have concluded that most people feel alienated by pictures of broad plains, perhaps feeling an ancient need for shelter and protection. Landscape managers have lamented the difficulty of measuring emptiness, of comparing absence with the un-ignorable presence of waterfalls and forests and mountains. Even conservationists speak of "scenically challenged" places — places that might be rich in diversity, but whose flat, open countenance doesn't translate into calendar photos. But certain people get these places, and they range from environmentalists to ranchers to roughnecks on Red Desert drill rigs: rich or poor, old or young, natives or imports, they just love being out there.
Which is part of the problem, Olstad says. Understanding these landscapes means understanding what it's like to be out there watching the clouds, seeing the light change, or just getting close to the ground to watch a spider spin a web, and marveling at the contrasts in scale. Static photographs and facts can't contain these experiences. During her research, Olstad has found that stories in any form — series of images, anecdotes, anything with an axis of time — are the best way to share the lure of open space. "Almost every time I tell someone I love prairies, and why I love them, they perk up and we have a conversation," she says.
For Olstad, the exposure of the desert and the prairie inspires not fear, but excitement and aliveness. For me, the Big Empty is somehow both humbling and comforting, a reminder of the tininess and temporariness of my own problems. Whatever your reasons for loving or hating these flyover landscapes, though, Olstad has some advice. "Sometimes I see people with cameras and I think, 'Stop!Stop trying to take a picture of it!"" she says. "I want to say, 'Just stand there. Stand there and let it amaze you.'"
Image courtesy Flickr user Mark Montgomery
Michelle Nijhuis is a contributing editor at High Country News.
]]>Updated 2-21-2012 to correct image of chipmunk.
Several years ago, on a soggy but majestic mountain afternoon, I hiked into the Yosemite backcountry to meet UC-Berkeley mammalogist Jim Patton. Patton and his colleagues at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology were retracing the steps of renowned naturalist Joseph Grinnell, who surveyed California's wildlife early in the last century — and obsessively documented his work in voluminous, barely legible field journals. (Fellow archive nerds, see some wonderful examples here.)
But that's not the end of Grinnell's legacy.
Delving into the deep Museum of Vertebrate Zoology archives, the Berkeley team sampled skin from the actual alpine chipmunks Grinnell trapped in Yosemite nearly a century ago, had the samples analyzed at a lab specializing in ancient DNA, then compared the results with a similar genetic analysis of the park's current alpine chipmunks (While Grinnell and other naturalists of his time didn't hesitate to kill critters in the name of science, today's researchers are more restrained: The modern samples came from probably unpleasant but non-lethal chipmunk ear punches.) In a study published yesterday in Nature Climate Change, Emily Rubidge and her co-authors report a decline in overall genetic diversity within Yosemite's shrinking population of alpine chipmunks, as compared with another Yosemite chipmunk species that has stayed put since Grinnell's time. The analyses also suggest that as the alpine chipmunks' range retracts uphill, their once-free-flowing population is becoming isolated into small subpopulations.
For animals whose habitat is soured by climate change, there are two options. Well, three. They can move to a more tolerable climate. They can adapt — genetically or behaviorally — to the new conditions. Or they can go extinct. For species like the pika and the alpine chipmunk, which already live on islands of habitat above treeline, the first option is literally a dead-end strategy. Can they take the second, and evolve their way out of a bad situation?
I recently edited a fascinating High Country News story by my friend Hillary Rosner, which describes how the rate of coat-color change in snowshoe hares may be responding to changing snowfall levels. Luckily for the hares — and for the Canada lynx that dine on them — snowshoe hares are still plentiful and diverse, making small, relatively fast evolutionary adjustments more likely. For species like the alpine chipmunk, survival means not only outrunning the heat in the short term, but also slipping through a narrowing genetic bottleneck.
Some species will survive the squeeze; some won't. But what's certain is that Yosemite, down to its smallest mammals, is no longer the place Joseph Grinnell once knew so well.
Yosemite chipmunk photo courtesy Risa Sargent
Joseph Grinnell photo courtesy of the UC-Berkeley MVZ.
Michelle Nijhuis is a contributing editor at High Country News.
]]>The evidence has sparked a lively and emotional debate among conservation scientists. When threatened species can't relocate to more hospitable habitats, should we move them ourselves? The idea, known as "assisted colonization" or "assisted migration," is controversial for a lot of reasons, but a growing number of researchers see it as a necessary conservation strategy for at least some species.
As part of "Hot Times," our continuing series on climate change and the West, Hillary Rosner examines other strategies available to Western wildlife -- and to conservationists. Some species may be able to adapt to their changing habitats, either by simply tolerating new conditions or by evolving quickly enough to survive them. "Evolution is not just about one species ever-so-slowly transforming into another," Rosner writes. "It's also about much smaller, much faster changes that can determine whether a species will endure or perish as its world shifts."
Late last year, Rosner accompanied Montana biologist Scott Mills and his students into the Seeley-Swan Valley, where Mills studies seasonal coat color changes in snowshoe hares. For hares, coat color is a matter of survival: Brown hares on snowy ground and white hares on brown ground are both easy pickings for predators. In recent years, hunters and other observers have reported increasing numbers of hares out of sync with the season. But by tracking a group of Seeley-Swan hares throughout the year, Mills is finding that individual animals may be able to adjust the rate of their coat change to match variations in snowfall -- literally outfitting themselves for survival in a changing world.
For the hares, it's hopeful news. For us, it raises some new -- and sticky -- questions. If evolution can occur rapidly enough to protect some species from climate change, do conservationists have a responsibility to practice so-called "evolutionary rescue"? That is, should they encourage the reproduction of especially adaptable individual animals, or introduce resilient subspecies into new habitats? There are countless questions, both scientific and ethical, and no clear answers.
It's easy, and tempting, to say that humans have meddled enough, and that natural systems should simply be left alone to adapt as well as they can. But our power over the West's climate and habitat, for both good and ill, is outsized and growing. We can pursue answers to the many questions raised by climate change, and do our best to direct our influence intelligently. But stepping back is not an option.
]]>Animal migration happens all around us, but we rarely glimpse more than a snapshot of the journey. We might know, vaguely, where the animals are going, or perhaps where they came from, but we almost never travel with them. In 2008, when the U.S. Forest Service established the first -- and so far only -- national migration corridor, protecting part of a 120-mile-long migration route for pronghorn in Wyoming, most of us saw the dramatic journey as simply a long line on a map, a constellation of data points collected from satellite collars. Even today, only the very lucky or very persistent get more than a glimpse of these pronghorn during their extraordinary seasonal struggle through the mountains.
For four seasons, freelance writer and former HCN editorial fellow Emilene Ostlind tried to see this pronghorn migration -- really see it --- firsthand. She followed the path of the Teton herd in western Wyoming, searching for them in the Gros Ventre Mountains and at creek crossings accessible only by foot. She got lost in drainages, battled through thick brush, and post-holed her way through deep snow. Over many miles, she slowly learned the landscape, much the way the pronghorn fawns do as they follow their mothers along the migration route. Ostlind learned a lot about pronghorn endurance and gained a new understanding of the importance of migration to the species' survival. And she saw ... well, I'll let her tell you what she saw. Photographer Joe Riis, who worked and hiked with Ostlind during her research, used camera traps to produce the stunning images that accompany her story.
Also in this issue, freelance writer Mary Ellen Hannibal looks at the complex science and policy of wildlife corridors, and wonders why the Path of the Pronghorn remains our only nationally recognized and protected migration corridor. Finally, HCN Assistant Editor Cally Carswell reports on the role of private-land conservation in the protection of pronghorn and other wildlife migration corridors, and on some ongoing efforts to preserve connectivity across privately owned landscapes.
Migration, our writers agree, is still in many ways a mystery. But the closer we look, the more amazing the view.
]]>In the rural Rocky Mountains where I live, we disagree about a lot of things -- politics, religion, water, Tim Tebow -- but we all agree on aspen. We love them, especially when they turn blaze-yellow in the fall, and we'd like them to stick around. So in 2004, when aspen throughout the Rockies started dying wholesale, the public reaction was fierce. What the heck was happening to our trees?
So Bill Anderegg, a doctoral student at Stanford and a native of southwestern Colorado, performed an autopsy on aspen. Anderegg and his colleagues assumed, from previous studies of pinyon pines, that aspen killed by SAD essentially starved to death. When stressed by drought, the thinking went, the trees closed the pores on their leaves to keep water from escaping, interrupting photosynthesis and, over time, running down their carbohydrate supply. But in a paper published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Anderegg and his colleagues report that the aspen are dying not of hunger, but of thirst.
When the researchers studied dying aspen in the field in Colorado, and induced drought stress in both potted aspen and full-grown trees, they found that the aspen hung on to plenty of carbohydrates. The problem was that the water-delivery systems in the trees' roots and branches were blocked with air bubbles, like straws trying to pull water from too-shallow pools. (This condition is called cavitation, and researchers who have held sensitive microphones up to drought-stressed trees -- don't ask me why -- have recorded the pinging sound of air bubbles shooting into the water-carrying xylem tubes.) When trees lose 50 percent of their water-delivery capacity, they start to drop their leaves, no matter the season; the dying aspen in the study had lost 70 to 80 percent. And the more root blockage, the researchers found, the more root death. Aspen are a clonal species, and without healthy roots, they're slow to resprout and recover.
Like most of the casualties of climate change, the aspen are dying of multiple causes. Thirst weakens the trees, but as Forest Service entomologist Jim Worrall points out, insects and fungal infections play a big part too, often finishing the job. Some of these afflictions appear to be climate-change opportunists, encouraged by hot, dry conditions, vulnerable trees, or both: The aspen bark beetle, for instance, was unfamiliar to most entomologists before biologists studying SAD started finding them in almost every diseased stand.
The results of the aspen autopsy will help scientists model the response of forests to future climate change, predicting how forest types will shift, shrink, expand or simply blink out. Meanwhile, we in the Rockies still have our signature tree. But the view is bittersweet.
Michelle Nijhuis is a contributing editor at High Country News.
Image courtesy Stephanie Paige Ogburn
]]>When I'm thrashing through the brambles of a first draft, no story in sight, I have one reliable lifeline. WWJMD? What would John McPhee do to get himself out of this #%&! mess?This, after all, is the guy who found fascinating stories in Alaskan placer mining. And the geology of Wyoming, Nevada, and California. And even Switzerland! Some of his writing is now two generations old, and not, shall we say, of smartphone-friendly lengths. But his work holds up. He knows what readers don't know they want to know, and he knows how to tell them about it. Those gifts don't expire.
There are a lot of answers to WWJMD, and a lot of places to find them. You can read his books and pore over The New Yorker archives. You can get hold of the charming and instructive Paris Review interview by his former Princeton student, MacArthur-award-winning journalist Peter Hessler. Or, best of all, you can hear from the man himself.
McPhee appeared at the University of Colorado-Boulder in late October as a guest of the Center of the American West. He read from a forthcoming New Yorker piece (just out today) about the composition of some of the profiles he's written for the magazine. He then spoke with Western historian Patty Limerick, and took questions from the audience. At 80, he still talks much like he writes — in full, well-tuned paragraphs. Our friends at The Open Notebook posted a complete transcript for you, but here are a few highlights.
On specializing vs. generalizing:
It didn't occur to me when I started writing for The New Yorker that it wasn't just a good idea to write about this that and the other thing. But I did run into some umbrage from other writers and stuff like that along the way. Not badly, though. [Then-editor William] Shawn said one time, though, "You know, there are some problems in managing you," because of the variety of themes.
On the importance of structure:
I had a teacher in Princeton High School, Mrs. McKee, who had us write three pieces of writing a week. She had us get up and read them to the other kids, who would wad up paper and throw it at us when we were doing our reading.
We had a lot of fun in that class. We could write anything, fiction, non-fiction, poetry. Whatever it was, the structure had to be defended. You had to turn in, with each piece, a structural presentation, an outline, or a doodle of some sort that showed that you were thinking about the anatomy of the piece when you were writing it. And so, every single Princeton kid that I've ever taught has turned in every piece with a structural outline. But I picked that up in 10th grade, or 9th grade. She was a very influential teacher.
On organization:
Audience question: I was told at one point that you would put the whole book on a series of 3-by-5 cards and organize it that way. Is that accurate, and if so do you still do that?
Yes. It's the whole book in the sense that I've reduced the notes to little things like airport codes. It means something to me and they relate to components of the story. On the 3-by-5 card there's nothing more than one word, or half a word, but I know what it relates to. It relates to a whole body of stuff. Then I move the cards around to see where I'm going to find a good structure, a legitimate structure.
On getting good quote:
I'm just listening. Tons of stuff streams by, and I'm obviously not using 100 percent of it, but I do use a tape recorder if I have to. I never try to remember later what they said. There have been writers writing non-fiction who claim that they went home at night and wrote it down. I don't do that. I scribble constantly. If I'm climbing up the North Cascades, I have a notebook in my hand, trying to keep my balance, and I'm scribbling, scribbling, because I much prefer to scribble in the notebooks than to transcribe endless tape.
But if you have 15 Appalachian geologists of the first rank standing around some outcrop, arguing about exotic terrains in Vermont, the language is unbelievable. I take out a tape recorder and put it on the outcrop. And then I go through the whole process with the thing with the foot treadle and all that to type up the taped stuff. But my first go is a notebook.
On the pleasure of research, and the pain of writing:
There's a big difference between riding a coal train through Kansas and Nebraska and trying to write. Writing is a suspension of life. I believe that so-called writer's block is something that any writer is going to experience every day, but in a minor way. You break through some kind of membrane, and then you go into another world. Time really goes fast in there, but it is hard as can be to get there, and it frightens me. It frightens Joan Didion. She talks about the "low dread" she feels looking across the room at the door of her study. When she's sitting somewhere, not writing, and she looks and sees that door, she experiences the low dread. Oh boy, do I know what that means. Getting past it is just a daily thing. It's not there when you're riding around in a train, but it sure is when you're trying to write about riding around in a train.
Michelle Nijhuis is a contributing editor at High Country News.

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Academic programs
Please review this section to learn more about the variety of academic programs offered by the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. On the individual program pages, you can find much more detailed information about the programs, degree requirements, and research.
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Hi! I'm just starting out with an organic vegetable/fruit container garden and am terrified I'm going to do something wrong and ruin it all. :/ I wish I had someone here to walk me through, step by step, but I'm hoping I can at least get some advice as I go along. :)
I have been consulting "Bountiful Container" and "Grow Great Grub" as my primary resources. I've also consulted with a couple of folks at a local organic gardening center. I confess to being rather overwhelmed with the amount of new information, to the point that it has, at times, been difficult to process it and make sense of any of it. I'm trying to take baby steps and learn things as needed, but I know if I go too fast I'll end up frazzled. So, here's where I'm at: I purchased organic starts from Sarah's Starts in Oregon, which were trucked in and arrived last Tuesday. I got:
I have planted thusly:
Everything is planted in an organic 50/50 mix I bought at the organic garden store. The guy i spoke to when I bought it indicated I wouldn't need to add compost or anything as it was already included (and I did see that on the ingredients). I watered the soil as I filled the containers and then watered the plants thoroughly after planting. I poured a dilution of liquid fish around all of the plants the day they were planted. Other than that (most of which only happened yesterday!), I've just been trying to keep them watered. It's basically summer here, already, though actually a bit mild for us. Temps have been in the lower 80s during the afternoon, sometimes a little muggy and sometimes (today) quite dry and pleasant. I did also buy liquid seaweed as I've heard it's good for pretty much everything, but I haven't used it. (I bought one spray bottle, which wouldn't spray, so I just used it for diluting the fish and poured from there to the base of the plants.) I am not sure how I'm going to work the cucumbers and, particularly, the watermelons. I knew it was risky getting watermelon, but I'd *LOVE* to have them work - even if we only get one fruit! I ended up putting the healthiest looking of the starts all in the same pot because I had no other place, and the cucumbers, being half dead, weren't going to fill it up. I'm not sure if we should plan to let the watermelon run down and along the ground, or if we should try to trellis it and keep things up. I have been planning to trellis the cucumber and have a smaller trellis purchased for it. These are just flat, more decorative, trellises I purchased at Lowes. They did seem sturdier than the tomato cages, though they don't have the benefit of the conical shape. So, I would love any help evaluating what I've done so far and what else I need to do. I know gardening takes time and work, but I just want to make sure I give it the best I can and, hopefully, get to enjoy some of the fruits of the labor! Thanks!
Follow-Up Postings:
- Posted by ronalawn82 z9FL (firstname.lastname@example.com) on Sat, Apr 16, 11 at 7:11
I wish that I could say something specific about containers; but in general, the important thing is that the little plants should not dry out. This can easily happen if the container is watered by moisture from below (by capillary action) or "wicked" (past participle of "wick") up (by wicks!) to the root zone of the transplants. If this happens, top-water the container (gently!) until the self watering containers start to function. The water melon vine should do just fine if you let it run along the ground. I once planted some seeds in a crate (of well composted soil) and set it in the top of a large heap of stones. In time the whole heap was covered by the vine(s) and melons. Many were mystified as to how a pile of stones could produce so many water melons! |
- Posted by OrganicTexasMama none (My Page) on Mon, Apr 18, 11 at 1:32
Thank you, ronalawn. These are not self-watering containers, so I've been out watering on a daily basis. But, I also don't want to over-water and rot out the roots. Eek! I'm hoping that daily watering will work as they settle into their new homes. It just seems like what they need (though one - either stalvia or coral nymph - seems not to like as much water?). I suppose we need to pick a good spot for the watermelon that we can let get overrun with vines! I am seeing some new leaves on a couple of the watermelon and cucumber plants, so I'm hopeful they'll survive. It looks like I've got strawberries developing already, which is quite exciting! I thought birds were getting to them, as the petals were in the pot rather than on the flower. But, it looks like that's normal course for them. Whew! Now I just have to worry about birds stealing my berries. :) Thanks! |
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Originally published Thursday, October 10, 2013 at 3:05 PM
'Ghost Team One': Parody scares up a few laughs
A movie review of "Ghost Team One," a lowbrow, micro-budget comedy for the drunken frat-boy crowd that sends up such "point-of-view" horror flicks as "Paranormal Activity."
Special to The Seattle Times
Movie Review
'Ghost Team One,' with Carlos Santos, J.R. Villarreal, Tony Cavalero, Fernanda Romero. Directed by Ben Peyser and Scott Rutherford, from a screenplay by Andrew Knauer, Arthur Pielli, Peyser and Rutherford. 82 minutes. Rated R for strong sexual content, brief graphic nudity, pervasive language, some drug use and violence. Pacific Place.
"Ghost Team One" operates on the level of a juvenile prank, but this lowbrow, micro-budget comedy earns a few laughs as it sends up such "point-of-view" horror flicks as "The Blair Witch Project" and "Paranormal Activity."
The movie's characters and target audience are essentially the same: hard-partying teens and college kids with raging hormones and questionable potential. Add beer, and "Ghost Team One" is destined to be a streaming-video hit with truant frat boys everywhere.
After hiring a videographer to capture alleged paranormal activity with a helmet-mounted camera, self-proclaimed "Ghost Team One" housemates Sergio (Carlos Santos) and Brad (J.R. Villarreal) throw a raucous party while their class-clown housemate Chuck (Tony Cavalero) struggles to maintain his hard-earned sobriety.
When sloppy-drunk Brad swears he saw a ghost, sexy partygoer and wannabe ghostbuster Fernanda (Fernanda Romero) sticks around to summon the ghost of Lady Azalea, a Japanese prostitute who committed double-homicide in the house decades earlier. They get a big surprise when the kimono-wearing spirit possesses Chuck's body and starts wreaking bloody havoc.
If it were scarier, "Ghost Team One" might have been an energizing blend of comedy and adrenaline. If it were funnier, it might have matched the guilty pleasure of the "Harold & Kumar" comedies. Instead, this 82-minute tribute to immaturity takes a full, patience-testing hour to bring on the comedic mayhem. That's when Cavalero (a lead member of the acclaimed comedy troupe The Groundlings) delivers a wacked-out performance that suggests he could've been a great replacement for Bill Hader on "Saturday Night Live."
Nobody else matches Cavalero's manic energy, and "Ghost Team One" suffers from a dreary, meandering lack of structure. To be fair, that may be intentional: As it stumbles around like a loud, obnoxious freshman, "Ghost Team One" has the dubious honor of being better than the "Hangover" sequels.


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Getting 'downstream' treatment dollars diverted 'upstream'
Last week the advocacy group Disability Rights Washington filed a class-action civil rights lawsuit against Washington State on behalf of children and youth suffering from mental illness. The complaint cites the state's failure to provide home- and community-based services that would effectively address these children's health needs.
Susan Kas, staff attorney for Disability Rights Washington, said in a telephone interview that the intent of the lawsuit is not to recover financial damages but to change the way mentally ill youngsters in the public health system are served, by bringing Washington into compliance with federal law. "In return for billions of dollars in federal money, the state agrees to provide certain services," Kas told me. But according to the lawsuit, the state Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) spends federal money on practices deemed ineffectual by the Department's own studies since at least 2002.
Children in the public system who are diagnosed with serious mental illnesses are too often taken from their homes and placed in residential facilities. "Instead of creating more trauma for kids and spending money on institutional care that's the most expensive kind of care but not nearly as good" as home- and community-based, family-centered care, Kas said, "the state should let children remain with their families" wherever possible and organize services around them. "The fiscal policy behind the federal funding is that if you treat kids correctly when they're young, you can prevent their conditions from becoming chronic or severe. It's a financial investment in the future of these children, that in the long run actually saves public money," she said.
Dr. Eric Trupin, Director of the UW Psychiatry Department's Division of Public Behavioral Health and Justice Policy, which oversees the Evidence Based Practice Institute, provided some clinical perspective on improving the treatment of childhood mental illness. "We know so much more about effective mental health interventions with children and families than we did 20 years ago," he told me. "It's a shame we're so slow to implement what we now know: that psychosocial interventions which include intensive skills-based work with families lead to better outcomes than earlier approaches ever did."
Such interventions are also cheaper, when considered from a long-term perspective. "If you can teach a family how to reduce a child's symptom or how to help a child manage his or her behavior, it's incredibly cost-effective, Trupin said. "The challenge is convincing policymakers to shift the balance to effective practices rather than continuing to fund the current practice of institutionalizing kids, where the outcomes are so much poorer."
To its credit, the Washington Legislature has taken significant steps during the past decade to improve care for children with mental illnesses. In 2000 it established Family Integrated Transitions, a UW pilot program that builds in-home collaborations with families to help juvenile offenders return to their communities with less conflict and recidivism. Further, Trupin told me that two years ago the Legislature provided funding for the Evidence Based Practice Institute at the UW, which he co-directs. "The state has aggressively supported expanding the use of evidence-based treatment" in the public mental health system for children, he said. But true reform "depends on keeping kids out of foster care and institutions" except where absolutely necessary for the safety of the child or other people.
So more steps need to be taken. Eleanor Owen, founder and interim executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Greater Seattle, as well as a co-founder of the parent NAMI and of NAMI Washington, agrees with the purpose of the lawsuit. "We've created a system of mental health care that benefits, instead of kids and families, vested interest groups far from where the challenges originate," she told me. "Although families can often identify problems their kids are having, we don't put effort or money into early intervention. We don't provide needed care upstream; we build everything downstream."
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Posted Tue, Dec 1, 10:51 a.m.
Your teaching shows. By focusing on the people who don't make it in the system, we can learn a great deal about all of us. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we taught everyone using evidence based intervention instead of the group instruction that generates much of the drop outs.
Posted Tue, Dec 1, 12:12 p.m.
It's a shame that it takes a lawsuit to make the government take action to do what is best for children & families. The more pro-active we can be, the fewer crises we will face down the road (at a much higher price). If all we do is put kids in facilities than we must be ready to keep them in facilities as adults...instead if we help the families to keep their children in the community, the kids and families learn the skills to stay in the community!
Posted Thu, Dec 3, 7:02 p.m.
Sad that it takes law suits to get us to do what we know is best -- in mental health, in education, in children's health care generally. Despite what we say oh-so-sentimentally, we are a society indifferent to children, except perhaps our own.
Posted Fri, Dec 4, 3:22 p.m.
How dare you take the Washington State children's services to task? The next thing you'll do is to raise hell about the way the Irish Catholic Church treats orphans. What are you, some kind of socialist?
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Only the strong of body & mind survive the 'pipeline,' the world's toughest school...
Jason Cunningham's body begged for air. Submerged 9 feet under, the airman's lungs prickled and burned, feeling as if they'd burst like a pair of overinflated truck tires. By reflex, his nervous system declared a state of emergency - DEFCON 1. Every instinct urged him to burst to the surface and suck in cool, fresh air.
But he ignored the red alert blaring in his brain and stayed below for several minutes. Soon the throbbing in his chest ceased, his peripheral vision collapsed and the world around him faded to black.
Cunningham lost consciousness and sank to the bottom of the pool.
Immediately, a group of rugged men wearing black neoprene suits and scuba gear hauled him out of the pool and revived him. One of the men, who hovered over him, asked, "You OK? You OK? Did you meet the wizard?"
At the time, still reeling from the fog of delirium, Cunningham could only manage a gurgled "Huh?" but later recounted his near-death experience.
"Once you pass out the first time, you get used to it," said the 24-year-old from Camarillo, Calif. "It's like - it hurts, it hurts, and boom, you're asleep. Then you wake up, some-body's slapping your face, and you've got this oxygen mask covering your mouth. It's really not that bad, no big deal."
Excuse me - No big deal? For most people, drowning ranks pretty high in the "big deal" department, right up there with electrocution, decapitation and being buried alive. But Cunningham isn't what you'd call most people. He's going through the toughest school on the planet in hopes of becoming an Air Force pararescueman, also commonly called a "PJ," which comes from the old symbol on aircrew orders for parachutist.
And a PJ is far from being your average Joe Six-pack. Like the Navy's SEALs, the Marine's Force Recon and the Army's Green Berets, Air Force pararescuemen stake claim to being the best of the best in the military. They're a crack fighting force - lean, lethal and lightning quick. Calling them "elite" may sound like a cliche, yet there's no other word for it. While SEALs and Green Berets teem in the thousands, the Air Force treasures the mere 300 active-duty pararescuemen they have primed and ready for action.
Cunningham, a former Navy petty officer, even considered a hitch with the SEALs, going so far as passing the grueling frogman fitness test, but had a change of heart after his tryout.
"I didn't want to kill people. I want to save them," said Cunningham, now an airman first class.
Unlike other special operators, who search and destroy, PJs "search and save." Think of them as SEALs with stethoscopes. They're extreme emergency medical technicians, a kind of cross between Schweitzer and Schwarzenegger. In a pinch, a PJ is a pilot's best friend, and the bad guy's worst enemy, just as accurate with a 9mm pistol as he is with a syringe. One minute, you might find these Rambos of resuscitation subduing an enemy patrol and the next, jump-starting a heart with a pair of defibrillator paddles.
Most of these ninja paramedics belong to combat search and rescue teams, where they're charged with locating downed aircrews behind enemy lines, patching them up and spiriting them away to safety. If given a choice, PJs prefer avoiding confrontation. It's too messy.
"We're not about death and destruction, and blowing stuff up. We want to get in and get out... no fuss, no muss," said Master Sgt. Craig Guthridge, a veteran PJ and director of operations for the Pararescue School at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M. "But we're not going to raise the white flag the first time the enemy says 'boo!' either. We're just as skilled in taking lives as we are at saving them. And sometimes you have to do bad stuff to get the good guy out."
Sink or Swim Gaining admittance into this exclusive fraternity (law excludes women from volunteering) demands that pararescue candidates endure a two-year long initiation ritual called the "pipeline" - a gauntlet of coursework and instruction taught at military bases scattered across the country. It's a killer curriculum; about 90 percent of the applicants wash out. And most don't even make it past the entrance exam - a physical fitness test that'd have your average jock doubled over wheezing.
Pararescuemen shatter the stereotype popular among other services that airmen are cream puffs living a pampered existence and whose idea of roughing it is sharing a room at the Hotel Intercontinental.
"I love to see the Army guys gain an appreciation of the Air Force. Most of them think we're a bunch of wussies, that is, until we pass them in the pool," said Master Sgt. Steve Sanko, a pararescue instructor at the Army's combat divers school in Key West, Fla.
Well, not all think that way. One Army Special Forces sergeant major, who asked not to be identified, said, "PJs are the best trained special ops forces in the Defense Department - bar none - but you'll never hear me admit that in public."
The philosophy behind the rigorous regimen boils down to this - the more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat. And by the time a PJ pledge finishes plodding through the pipeline, he's sweated an ocean. In the process, he's become an expert marksman, accomplished parachutist, mountain climber, scuba diver and a certified emergency medical technician.
While riding the pipeline, he's learned to whoosh down a 30-foot fast rope from a hovering helicopter. He's scaled sheer rock faces and traversed craggy cliffs at elevations that'd give a mountain goat a nosebleed. He's parachuted on moonless nights into choppy seas while lugging on his back an 80-pound rucksack containing a portable operating room. And he's braved a witches' brew of climates and conditions, surviving in the wild on his wits and own devices.
"Although you can never really simulate combat, the pipeline is very adept at preparing you for the real deal. All the training they throw at you, all the 'PT,' the stress, both physical and mental, everything you go through is as close as it gets," said Staff Sgt. Jeremy Hardy, a PJ, who dodged flak and missiles last year during a rescue mission in Bosnia.
Gut Check Pushing the envelope of human endurance emerges as a central theme in pararescue training. At every stage of the pipeline, your body and mind get taxed to its breaking point - to the very brink of total collapse - and you must find somewhere deep within yourself the grit to forge ahead, even when every sinew screams "uncle."
And nothing tests a man's mettle more than the first hurdle in the pipeline - the 10-week Pararescue/Combat Control Indoctrination Course at Lackland AFB, Texas. Indoc reveals early on who'll throw in the towel when faced with adversity. But better to find out now that a man's fainthearted before he's squirming at the end of a hoist while bullets whistle past.
"We want to break the students down, crack them open, and peek inside them to see what they're made of," said Sanko, the scuba instructor. "We want to find out how they'll react after missing 24 hours of sleep, when they're totally spent, sore and hungry, when they're humping that rucksack up the side of the mountain in the cold and rain. We want to find out if they're quitters. Without drive and determination, you'll fail the mission. If you fail in the pool, no problem, we'll drag you out and send you home. But fail on a mission and you come home in a body bag. Maybe your whole team comes home in body bags."
Master Sgt. Tim Wilkinson, a PJ who's landed in more hotspots than a Tom Clancy character, said, "Indoc is a gut check. We want to know if you're the type of person who'll stick it out when the chips are down."
Indeed, the course makes workouts at boot camp look like a sixth-grade phys ed class. The pain commences at 4:30 a.m. and doesn't end until well after sunset. Students double-time through a daily routine of circuit training on weight machines, swimming, running, and huffing and puffing through 50-odd combinations of calisthenics with names like cherry pickers, steam engines and mountain climbers. By the time they reach the end of the second month, trainees must crank out - in perfect form, mind you - 70 push-ups, 75 sit-ups, 13 pull-ups, 14 chin-ups and 85 flutter kicks, each within two minutes and with little rest in between. They must also run six miles within 45 minutes, swim 50 meters underwater on a single breath, and swim 4,000 meters on the surface under 80 minutes.
For an extra sock in the solar plexus, the schoolhouse staff convenes frequent "smoke sessions," which are punishing marathon workouts that make recruits "feel the burn." Also, committing the most miniscule infraction merits your entire flight "getting dropped" for a set of 50 remedial push-ups plus extra reps dedicated to every instructor in the area and another for the pararescue corps. It's not unusual for the group to pound out 800 or a thousand push-ups in a day. The administration calls it "teambuilding," and if they think a class isn't functioning as a single, motivated unit, they heap on another incentive to bond - lugging around a 450-pound piece of iron railroad track called the "rail" between classrooms and sites.
"When I arrived at indoc, I thought I was in shape but found out within the first five minutes I wasn't in 'PJ' shape," said Airman 1st Class Adrian Durham, a 22-year-old former lifeguard from Hartford, Conn., now in the pipeline. "To keep myself going during the smoke sessions, I told myself the pain's got to end sometime. Then at some point, your muscles become so numb you just stop caring."
All these drills, however, serve only to warm up recruits for the persecution in the pool. Officials have dubbed the pool sessions "water confidence training," which is like calling a beating with a baseball bat "hickory familiarization." The water weeds out more candidates than any other activity. There's something about inhaling a lung-full of pool water that saps a man's resolve, prodding him to question his commitment.
Between indoc and combat divers school in Key West, students spend more time performing in the pool than Shamu, but without the pleasure of drenching onlookers. Instead, the waterlogged warriors slosh around wearing 16-pound weight belts; tread water; tie knots at the bottom of the pool; and swim and bob with bound feet and hands during an exercise called drownproofing. For many, buddy breathing makes or breaks them. The drill pairs two students, who must share a snorkel for several minutes while instructors splash, harass and dunk them. Surface more than once to gasp for breath and you fail.
"To an outsider, the training may look abusive or like hazing," Sanko said. "But if you panic on a real dive and shoot to the surface, you may explode a lung or get the 'bends.' The ocean is very unforgiving, and at least here, we give you two chances."
Men of Steel For those steely and stout enough to survive the first few weeks of indoc, Motivation Week looms. It's a feared and fabled rite of passage, the Air Force's version of SEAL Hell Week. During this ultimate test, black-shirted instructors prowl the ranks, dispensing less mercy than the Terminator doing a drive-by, spraying students with icy jets of water from a garden hose and barking orders at the airmen, who all seemed to be named "you." "Get off that wall, you!" "Hey, you! Keep those legs straight!" "You want to quit, you? Then quit!"
Regardless of the circumstances, students answer every question with the same response - "Hoo-yah!" which is a catch-all phrase meaning everything from "yes" and "no" to "You talking to me?' and "Please, make the pain stop!"
Said Cunningham: "Motivation week is downright evil. It's ugly... chaotic. It's nonstop training, constant screaming, smoke sessions one after the other, and only a couple hours of sleep a night. When you finally get a chance to put your head on a pillow at night, you're out in seconds.
"Thinking of my family motivated me to suck it up and press on. I have a wife, a daughter and another on the way who've sacrificed a lot for me to be here," the airman said. "They're counting on me, and I'm going to earn it for them. Plus, I've had my butt kicked too many times to give up. Anybody who has ever quit regretted it the next day. I don't want to be that guy."
According to instructors, it's impossible to predict, at first glance, who'll stay the course and graduate. Naturally, you'd expect those muscle-bound troglodytes, who dwell in the free weight rooms of gyms, to have a good shot at making the grade, but that's not usually the case. Because of low body fat, these hulks usually sink faster than a snitch in a cement overcoat.
"It doesn't make a difference if you're an NCAA swimmer or some big, buff stud. You've got to have smarts and a heart - the total package," Sanko said. "Usually, it's the mean little dog who makes it through."
Wilkinson agrees that success is often a matter of mind over muscle. "Pararescue is a thinking man's game. You can't be 'strong like bull, smart like tractor,'" he said.
Nobody back home in Hartford ever pictured Durham as a camouflaged commando. Friends and family thought of him as a bookworm, even nicknaming him the "absent-minded professor," because he preferred academics to athletics. They figured him for a librarian, schoolteacher or accountant.
"I fooled them," Durham said. "I hate sitting down at a desk so when I saw the pararescue brochure at the recruiter's office, I said this is the ticket. I can be a high-speed operator - skydiving, scuba diving, rock climbing, ice climbing - all the things I could never do before because I couldn't afford them. And now they'll pay me for it."
Although PJs receive extra pay for their special duties, none concede they're in it for the money. Most admit they're adrenaline junkies, 'jonesing' for challenges, adventures and the "rush" that a 9-to-5 grind couldn't offer. Others cite compassion for their fellow man, patriotism, and the pararescue corps' esteemed and legendary heritage for volunteering.
Of the 21 Air Force Crosses given to enlisted men for extraordinary heroism, 11 were awarded to para-rescuemen. During the Korean War, PJs plucked pilots out of the frigid Sea of Japan; extricated aircrews from the jungles of Vietnam; rescued Rangers during a bloody firefight on the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia; and saved the skin of several airmen during the most recent conflict in Kosovo. Furthermore, PJs pitched in during the SS Mayaguez rescue mission off Cambodia's coast in 1975, raided the North Vietnamese Song Tay prison camp in 1970, helped evacuate Saigon, recovered astronauts on Gemini and Apollo missions, and continue to provide support for NASA shuttle launches and landings.
Today's generation of pararescuemen share much with their PJ patriarchs. They both possess a tight-jawed tenacity, a stubborn will to never surrender, and a competitive spirit that'd turn a game of solitaire violent.
Look! Up in the Sky! You see the same fire burning brightly in the eyes of the new breed of PJs like Staff Sgt. Doug Isaacks. The 25-year-old native of Anaheim, Calif., just wrapped up his two-year trial through the pipeline last September. When he initially applied for retraining into the pararescue field while a cop at Dyess Air Force Base, Texas, more than a few of his contemporaries at the security forces squadron scoffed at him, telling him he'd most certainly fail and betting he'd be back patrolling the perimeter within weeks.
"All I heard were the statistics, the high washout rates, like only one in a hundred makes it. Nobody gave me much of chance," said Isaacks, who looks as strong as a Clydesdale. "But I did it, and it's one of the greatest moments of my life. It feels great to be part of something special - a brotherhood. It's also changed me as a person, boosting my self-esteem and my confidence. I know now that I'll never quit no matter what."
Last September, Isaacks left for his first pararescue assignment at a special tactics unit at Hurlburt Field, Fla., but a pressing matter delayed him. He first had to drop by Dyess so he could strut through his old squadron sporting his new maroon beret. It's not that he wants to rub it in that everybody underestimated him, but he told you so.
And who's going to argue with a PJ?


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Tonight's contest was of course a continuation of Wednesday night's clash, which was called off after 35 minutes due to the failure of one of the floodlights. Swallows thus took a 2-0 lead into the game, with the match continuing in the 35th minute.
Their goals on Wednesday night had come from Siyabonga Nomvete, who had cut in from the left and fired a sizzling effort across the body of Brian Baloyi in the ninth minute, and Vincent Kobola, who had struck with a thunderous 30-yard drive to double the advantage after 35 minutes.
Prior to, and between both goals, it had, however, been Sundowns who enjoyed the better of the play, creating several chances on goal, but having not been able to beat Greg Etafia in goal for Swallows.
Back to tonight's game then, which in effect saw Sundowns outscoring Swallows by three goals to one.
Both sides had half chances in the opening passage of play, before Downs struck in the 43rd minute to get the goal they so badly needed; Mathew Pattison's free-kick was floated in from the right and deceived Etafia.
When the teams retuned for the second half, it was the Brazilians who remained on top, with chances coming in from Papi Zothwane, whose 47th-minute effort went just wide, and a 57th-minute shot from Elias Pelembe, which forced Etafia to get down quickly to cover his near post.
And in the 67th minute the pressure paid off as Zothwane bundled the ball home to level matters after another blunder from Etafia following a Pattison free-kick.
But the lead was only to last for two minutes as Nomvete snuck into the box to head in Lefa Tsutsulupa's free-kick.
Goal chances were seemingly being created at will and Sundowns could well have netted in the 74th minute, but Surprise Moriri shot straight at Etafia from close range.
But Sundowns kept on coming at their opponents and in the 76th minute it was 3-3 as Swallows again failed to deal with Pattison's ball into the box, enabling Moriri to net from close range.
There were anxious moments in the Swallows box as the pressure continued to mount from the team in yellow, who were inches away from making it 4-3 when Felix Katongo's header smashed into the cross-bar and back into play.
Zothwane then missed a great chance in injury time when he ballooned the ball over from 10-yards out.


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This is my first tab ive ever done,but ive been playing for quite a while now. Choices is a good song to play and it's fairly straight foward. He uses power chords throughout the entire song. For the first verse he just picks F#,when it gets into the bridge and the chorus he starts struming, just listen to the song and you'll pick it up. (1st Verse) F# lay me down to rest awhile F# i'm feeling cold, cold to the bones F# lay me down so i can fly,fly,fly F# dragon fly buzzing by F# these flowers and this sunshine F# warming me up to the bones F# lifting me up so i can fly (Bridge) F# she say's there's nothing to be said C# nothing to be gained Eb C# B B all you have is time C# walking down this line Eb C# B all twisted from presertives of life B but you have what you have C# what you have is for you Eb C# B and for the future of your child B look there's a full moon C# and i'm looking at you (chorus) F# C# Eb choices you've been warm B and you've been cold X3 (verse 2) F# C# Eb and i'm not scared no,no B F# C# we'll maybe just a little scared to die C# Eb B scared to die And thats pretty much it! Enjoy!!! Comments
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