Octopus Dreams

On the mind of an octopus, from Orion:

Here is someone who, even if she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long, could still squeeze her boneless body through an opening the size of an orange; an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink. But most intriguing of all, recent research indicates that octopuses are remarkably intelligent.

My whale biologist mother began her research career with octopus behavior, so this especially caught my eye.  There’s a lot, lot, lot more to learn about this world.  And I like this article because it isn’t just about “research” as constructed by Western science – it’s also about interaction and connection.

Norman Myers, Conservation Elder

The Field Naturalist Program got to spend an hour yesterday morning with Norman Myers, a legendary elder in the conservation world.  Some nuggets from our conversation:

–Biodiversity extinction is an “irreversible” environmental problem.  You can pull greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, you can remove and sequester heavy metals from the soil and water, you can break down hydrocarbon pollutants, you can reforest deserts and restore rivers and wetlands, but you can’t bring back extinct species.  Scary!  (And to add to that, the potential runaway feedback loops from climate change, like release of tundra methane or ocean plankton dieoff, are probably irreversible in a practical sense as well, at least within a human lifetime.)

–Norman spoke about the “biodiversity hotspots” concept that he introduced decades ago.  I was impressed by the realism of its triage approach, understanding that some landscapes are higher-leverage than others in terms of biodiversity conservation.  He said that this concept and all the work associated with it have raised and moved over $1 billion for conservation in his lifetime.

–He posed a hypothetical: if Obama asked the conservationists for their well-developed blueprint for ending the mass extinction crisis, and they reached into the bottom drawer to take out the blueprint they’d been preparing and saving for that moment, “I suspect the bottom drawer would be empty”.  He said that very few conservationists have been thinking in the specific (and in my mind, largely social/cultural/political) terms that are necessary to change the way that the earth’s resources are being used.  I have more thoughts on this, incidentally - I think there’s an “epistemic closure” situation to some degree in the traditional conservation world that sees only “preservation” and “stopping bad things from happening” as the solutions.  But those solutions so often lack a specific path forward that address’s people real economic needs.

–”We are so fortunate to be alive at this time, when there’s a huge cataclysm taking place and a huge opportunity to do something that no human generation has done before.” – i.e., to save species from extinction by the thousands or even millions.

–Norman was 5 years old in England when WWII broke out, and he described how in the early years of the war it seemed to many people as though Nazi Germany was certainly going to win, and that England would be invaded and occupied.  He said that Winston Churchill got on the broadcast radio over and over again insisting that it wasn’t too late, that if they could hold out long enough the Allies would prevail – even though Churchill may well have believed that there was little actual hope for that outcome.  But his saying that effectively and clearly helped people hold out long enough for the tide to turn and for the Allies to win.  This is an intense (if simplified) leadership story, and it points to some subtle realities about what motivates people.  It’s not always incongruous with “reality” to tell a one-sided story that gives people hope.  It’s not always about “facts” and data, but also about speaking to peoples’ hearts.

–Hope vs. fear as motivators – they’re different and both powerful.  Fear is sometimes the more powerful one though!  The hopeful visions conservationists offer often aren’t all that meaningful to most people.  (How about regenerating the planet and rebuilding viable local economies?  That gets me a lot more excited than “preservation”.)

–In 1989, VERY few people thought the USSR was about to fall apart or South African apartheid was about to end.  No one thought that a majority of US smokers would quit during the 1990′s.  Big-scale change is possible under the right conditions and with the right leadership and movement-building.   He mentioned great leaders like Wangaari Maathi and Nelson Mandela who’ve built and led whole social movements that have changed the planet for the better on a huge scale.

Cool stuff.  Lots more to chew on around it all.  But it was a great hour with Dr. Myers.

The Tipping Point Nears: Regenerative Agriculture in Mainstream Media

New flash: in the last 24 hours I’ve seen no less than three articles in major mainstream media outlets related to regenerative agriculture and land use.

I think what this means for the movement of the culture is that the local food/sustainable ag story-meme is reaching some sort of critical mass.  None of these three topics are at all well-known outside of the permaculture/sustainable ag/land use planning worlds.  And here they are, being reported on in NPR, the New York Times, and the Atlantic!

Something’s shifting in the media conversation around farms, food, and land.  And in the “newness” of it, it’s important to remember when reading “discovery” media pieces like these that people have been using these techniques on the ground for decades.  Furthermore, they’re in many cases based on native land use practices that stretch back many thousands of years, and on ecological patterns and processes that go back millions.  They’re ancient patterns being put to use to solve modern problems and meet modern eco-social needs.

An increase in public attention might not mean much, in immediate day-to-day terms, for established practitioners and teachers of regenerative agriculture and land use.  But zoom out a bit, and I think the marginal position we’ve been in is beginning to change significantly.  Which is very, very exciting!  And I also think it’s going to create a need for us to become even more clear, professional, and effective in our work and communication.

The three pieces below.

1. A local food-focused piece from the NPR blog on pawpaws:

We took the Billy Goat Trail on the Maryland side of the Potomac River. “Wow,” was the first word out of my mouth when I tasted one we found on our hike. It’s sort of mango-meets-the-banana … with a little hint of melon. [...]

Lewis and Clark wrote in their journals that they were quite fond of the pawpaw. At one point during their expedition in 1806, they relied on pawpaws when other provisions ran low. And from Michigan to West Virginia, people have even named towns and lakes after the pawpaw.

But the pawpaw has only recently been commercialized.

2. A New York Times piece on “working landscapes” (i.e., integration of forestry/ag with wildlife habitat and ecosystem services):

The San Francisco-based nonprofit [Pacific Forest Trust] is rewriting the rules of forest economics by proving that stands like this can remain ecologically valuable while also generating significant income for their owners — goals that have pitted logging communities against environmentalists in the Pacific Northwest for decades.

“The old paradigm was you couldn’t get here without being a goody two-shoes and sacrificing all things,” said Wayburn, whose group has been promoting incentive-based strategies to conserve private forests since 1993. “The new paradigm is you can.”

Instead of clear-cutting 20-acre forest tracts at a time, foresters here selectively remove trees in a process called “uneven-age management.” The harvesting approach encourages more rapid restoration of redwood-dominated stands and old-growth forest structure by consolidating growth into fewer, larger trees.

3. Perhaps most astonishingly, an almost-longform piece in The Atlantic on holistic management (intensive rotational grazing to regenerate pastures and grasslands):

In arid environments, plant matter doesn’t degrade easily on its own — it needs these large animals to break it down in their rumens and stamp it into the ground and generally work the land. This was accomplished naturally: As the herbivores traveled in large herds for safety against their predators, they would cause a great disturbance to the land; then, for their own sake, they would leave and not return until the plants had had enough rest to regenerate.

Now take away the Great Plains’ bison, or the equivalent animals elsewhere, and replace them with cattle, property lines, and fences. The equation still includes large, grazing herbivores, but because they are relatively stationary within the landscape, the symbiosis is lost. Certain areas are overused, and elsewhere plants simply oxidize and die off from under-use; microorganisms decline, water cycles fall apart, and the land gradually collapses.

The basic premise of holistic management is to use livestock like wild animals. But whereas bison on the Great Plains moved through the landscape by instinct, now ranchers must supply that direction. Rather than simply turning cattle into a pasture, these ranchers conduct them like a herd, concentrating bodies to graze one area hard, then leaving it until the plants have regenerated. The effect can be tremendous, with benefits including increased organic matter in the soil, rejuvenation of microorganisms, and restoration of water cycles.

Things are moving fast, folks.  We ready?

Forest Garden Root Gallery

I held a forest garden party this past weekend, with ten super helpful attendees.  We planted out an edible/medicinal understory in two different patches (one sunny and one mostly shaded), and took a closer look at the below-ground parts of some of these beautiful plants.

Any guesses on their identity?

  

  

  

A lot of the above segmented rhizomes are easily propagated by breaking into sections.  This is the best time of year to do it, as the plants are already going dormant or fully dormant, storing their energy for the long, cold wait for spring.  Break larger rhizomes into two or three segments each, and plant them out separately to grow your garden stock more quickly.

These next two, a tuber and a very stolon-like rhizome, look a little different but are still propagable by segment:

  

Post your guesses!  I’ll post a follow-up with their identities in a few days.

Koppen Climate Classification

I’m back from the TEK conference and it was amazing.  Still gathering my thoughts and processing everything I experienced.  Will post some key reflections and take-aways soon!

In the meantime, because I am a sucker for big-picture geographic classifications, I just saw this really cool simple climatic classification system from Koppen, a Russian-German climatologist and botanist.  (This is from Gordon et al.’s Stream Hydrology: An Introduction for Ecologists.)

The first letter is a broad, general category:

• A – tropical rainy climate, no month’s average temperature cooler than 18 C (64 F).
• C – humid warm climate, average temperature of the coldest month between 18 C and -3 C (64 F and 26 F)
• D – humid cool climate, average temp of the coldest month below -3 C (26 F) and average temp of the warmest month above 10 C (50 F)
• E – polar/alpine climate, average temp of warmest month below 10 C (50 F)
• B – arid climate, evaporation exceeds rainfall.

The second letter classifies seasonal rainfall:

• s – dry summer.
• w – dry winter.
• f – year-round rain.
• m – monsoon-type rains.

The third letter “fine-tunes” the summer temperatures – a is warmest, b is middle, c is coolest – within the range of climates that have the first two classifications.

This last past seems the most squirrely to me – I would need to see a map to really understand what “a” “b” and “c” meant within a given climate type.  But the first two are really easy to assess.  Here in northern Vermont, we have a humid cool climate with year-round rainfall, so that’s “Df” (and probably Dfb given that Df would extend significantly north and south from here).  Coastal California would be “Bs.” (There’s an alternative classification for B climates that uses different letters to describe arid/semi-arid, but I’m using the standard one because I don’t think the alternative describes mediterranean climates very well.  I would probably modify the the system for my own purposes, as many other people have done, if I were to use it more extensively.)

The really interesting thing here, of course, would be to create some taxonomy for agriculture and built-environment design directions for each climate type, a la Bill Mollison’s Designer’s Manual.  Another “think-and-do tank” project waiting for someone to grab it!

Grokking Northern Vermont

I spent a good part of today visiting three great permaculture-oriented nurseries in the Lamoille River Valley in northern Vermont – Zack Woods Herb Farm, Perennial Pleasures, and Elmore Roots.  It was a gorgeous, clear, warm early fall day, and the drive gave me time to observe and understand more about the landscapes of northern Vermont.

Some unfocused observations and themes:

–The river valleys of northern Vermont are very “settled” with agriculture and small towns.  This is in stark contrast to central and northern New Hampshire, which has plenty of small towns but little agriculture.  Geology is one reason for this – the more erosive limestone-based rocks of the Green Mountains have allowed more and wider river valleys to form, and the large post-glacial lakes that occurred here dropped tons of nutrient-rich sediment from those erosive rocks into those valleys.  So the state is crisscrossed with rich agricultural soils in these little river valleys cutting between mountain ranges.  New Hampshire, on the other hand, is mostly a big chunk of less-erosive granite other than in the Connecticut and Merrimack river valleys and along the narrow seacoast in the southeast.  So New Hampshire’s post-colonization economy has always been more extractive – mining, logging, factories, etc. – while Vermont’s has been more agricultural.  By the way, this also gave me a good sense for why re-establishing large predators in Vermont would be a challenge.  The Greens aren’t as unbroken as they can seem on maps – each of the individual ranges is like an “island” surrounded by this working-landscape mosaic of farmland and towns.

–The Lamoille River Valley is a happenin’ place for the new polylocalized agricultural economy!  Within 20 miles of each other along VT-15 are turnoffs for Prospect Rock Permaculture (my friend Keith Morris’s teaching and floodplain reforestation site), all three nurseries I mentioned above, High Mowing Seeds, multiple CSA farms, and the town of Hardwick, the famous “Town That Food Saved.”  I’ve heard the same is true of the Mad River Valley south of Montpelier (home of Yestermorrow Design/Build School and numerous other cool eco-social businesses) but I haven’t been there yet.

–The parallel north-south running ranges of the Green Mountains exert a big influence on travel and access between places.  After all, the roads over the mountains are dirt, 25 miles an hour, and/or closed or requiring off-road vehicles for parts of the year.  At one point I was only 35 miles due east of Burlington as the crow flies.  But two different ranges of the Greens were between me and home.  The only way to get back in a sane amount of time was to go south to the Winooski River Valley or north to the Lamoille, and then west on the highways that run through those valleys, both 60+ mile trips in all.  Again, this is in contrast to New Hampshire whose mountains are scatter-dot monadnocks until you get up into the higher Whites.

–The Northeast Kingdom really is its own eco-socio-geographic region.  As soon as I crossed into Caledonia County the forest type started to change, with much more spruce-fir present and much less hemlock and white pine.  The working-landscape settlement pattern described above continued, but was more spread-out and dispersed.  Geologically the Northeast Kingdom is essentially part of the White Mountains (the Connecticut River actually flowed to the west of the Kingdom in the distant past) so it has scattered-granite-dome topography and a more New Hampshire-like feel in general.  And it’s also the coldest part of the state (zone 3 until recent decades), the farthest from any urban centers, and the least densely populated by people.  A very unique, beautiful, and remote-feeling place.

–I really, really like having heritage plants to grow and propagate.  Two of the friends I picked up today below.  See if you can identify them!

  

International Permaculture and New England Traditional Knowledge

As of last night, the 10th International Permaculture Convergence is underway in Amman, Jordan.  The whole event is being live-streamed here, and if you’re on Twitter you should follow @ethanappleseed for ongoing reporting and updates.  An amazing lineup of speakers from around the world – well worth checking out.

More locally, next weekend (Fri-Sat the 23-24) is the 2nd annual Native People of New England conference at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.  The theme this year is “Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Past, Present, Future,” and it’s a collaboration between UNH’s anthropology department and the Native American regional organization Gedakina.  I’ll be going and posting about the event here on the blog.  The conference is free with no pre-registration – come if you’re in the area and curious!