holyoutlaw

That’s the title of a recent post by Richard Louv at Children & Nature Network. Since the subtitle includes “insert your city here” I thought I’d answer the five suggestions he proposes with what I know is happening around Seattle. I haven’t researched these, so this is just top-of-my-head thinking. I welcome any other recommendations. (The numbered list items below are direct quotes from the original blog post; the responses are my own.)

 
1. Incubate future entrepreneurs through the nurture of nature.

This suggestion is for improving nature programs in school. He particularly suggests “independent play,” which I agree with. Losing the ability to have free roaming time, or unscheduled, independent play, I think decreases the ability of children to think for themselves.

One important aspect of nature education (and independent play) is that it helps establish a home base for the child, from which they can then extend to see how their actions have remote effects. I think an effective nature education program would combine elements of independent play (perhaps an unescorted scavenger hunt for leaf-types through a park) and would use that immediate experience to connect children to the larger world.

 
2. Lead a campaign to reverse the pandemic of inactivity.

Well, I’ve spent all day at the computer, mostly on Facebook. Before the internet, it was books and magazines.

I think the “pandemic of inactivity” goes a little deeper than personal choice or laziness. Most of the infrastructure in our cities is designed around the car. Little or nothing is within walking distance, and even if it were, the roaming ranges of children has shrunk considerably in these more paranoid times. We can try campaigns like “sitting is the new smoking,” but until our cities are organized around bicycles, walking, and other forms of transportation than the car, we’ll be less active.

 
3. Become the first city to declare itself an engine of biodiversity.

This is the one that resonates with me, particularly the last sentence, used as a pull-quote in the original post:

In the future, our sense of personal and regional identity will depend as much on our bioregion’s natural history as on its human history.

I think this sentence exhibits part of the problem, by implying that human and natural history are separate things. It also I think eliminates the traditional ecological knowledge of Native Americans. In the Seattle area, there were people here shaping the land and working with its resources since glacier retreat. Pacific Northwest native peoples preserved habitat in the face of climate change (particularly the Garry Oak savannahs and other open plains), and worked with the resources at hand to support a growing population without running out of resources. Northwest Native culture was still growing when smallpox and Europeans arrived. It might have hit resource limits, such as what happened to the Cahokia mound builders on the Mississippi, or the limits that affected the meso-American cultures; we’ll never know.

Other than that, I do agree with the basic statement. We need to connect more closely with the nature immediately around us, however attenuated it may appear to be. And through that connection, reach back to people who knew better how to live with and manage the resources available to them.

But Seattle does connect well to its bioregion, we’re always bragging about closeness to the ocean, the mountains, the forests, etc. But this sometimes becomes just another path to consumption, with hiking poles and specialized clothing and expensive gear and then the big car to haul it in. Nature isn’t something we go visit; it intrudes on our every moment, awake and asleep; we owe the nature in our cities at least as much attention as the nature in our forests and meadows. That’s pretty much what Louv is saying here.

 
4. Be the leading pioneer city of nature-smart development and new agrarianism.

Don’t have as detailed an answer to this one. Seattle allows chickens, and there are lots of them around. People are finding out, however, the chickens stop laying after two years and still have several years left. The choice is either butcher them or keep them as expensive, not very cuddly pets.

But there are also lots of backyard farms and gardens. Ballard in particular has rain gardens, backyard habitats, pesticide-free yards, and more. In the rest of the city, there are community gardens (P-Patches), farmers markets every day of the week somewhere, and more. There’s even an urban food forest in the beginning stages, in Beacon Hill in Seattle.

Although the “locavore” movement is considered trendy and bourgeois, there are social justice aspects to farmers’ markets and p-patches as well. The best way we’ll survive some of the coming changes — the vanishing fresh water, the increasing temperature — is by decreasing the distance between the dirt and the consumer, and having as few intermediaries along the way as possible.

 
5. While government has a role to play, Houston could play a pivotal role in creating new, non-governmental ways of connecting people to nature.

There are many NGOs working to improve Seattle — it’s parks its waterways, its neighborhoods, and more. Seattle is one of the hotbeds of neighborhood activism, and has been for decades. The ones I work with most closely include Green Seattle Partnership, Groundswell NW, Seattle Parks Foundation, and EarthCorps. They all help with different aspects of restoration for North Beach Park.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

The Looming Collapse of Agriculture on the Great Plains

This article looks at some of the changes happening in the Great Plains, particularly over and around the Oglalla aquifer. Capital wants to turn the land into wind farms, so that’s what will happen. I think wind farms aren’t as scalable as once thought; a big enough concentration will slow down the wind.

Another possibility talked about in this article is rotational paddocking; moving herds of cows from paddock to paddock, making sure it’s grazed clean, and then allowing it time to regenerate. Helping this is allowing the prairie ecology to return, notably prairie dogs and their predators.

Organic farming is given a very brief over view in the beginning. More time is spend on perennial farming, adapting crop plants to prairie conditions by making them perennial (deeper roots, much less damage to the soil). But perennial crops is a good way to go, and returning the land back to a buffalo commons is good as well. To that end, the Nature Conservancy and other groups are buying large tracts of land, and restoring them to buffalo prairie.

It perplexes me that these farmers can see what’s happened to their land with decades of capital taking it over, and yet they resist government management. Soon enough, the agribusiness monoculture factory farms will be abandoned by capital, and then it will be the government’s business to restore land that is in worse shape than ever.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

Remember a couple weeks ago when nearly everybody on Facebook was using the red equals sign to endorse marriage equality? Here is an article posted to Scientific American blogs looking at that from the angle of prescriptive and descriptive norms.

A prescriptive norm tells you what you should or should not do. Don’t drink and drive. Don’t litter. Pay your taxes. Go to church on Sunday. Don’t steal pebbles from the Petrified National Forest.

A descriptive norm tells you what other people are already doing. That’s when you notice none of your friends smoke tobacco any more (or maybe few ever did). Or the sign, instead of saying “don’t steal pebbles” says “most people leave the pebbles to preserve the natural integrity of the forest.”

This isn’t a joke; in fact, it’s a “classic study” that showed how using descriptive norms has a stronger influence on behavior than prescriptive norms. When the signs said “Don’t steal the pebbles,” thievery increased. When the signs said “Most people leave the pebbles,” thievery plummeted. The blog post lists several other ways that descriptive norms have a greater effect on behavior than prescriptive norms.

But what I want to think about here is the use of prescriptive norms to attempt to influence positive environmental behavior. I think there is entirely too much of it.

The crisis mentality of most environmental exhortations I think actually alienates us from the possibility of anything we do having a positive effect. Sure we can drive less, but when the bus you’re on goes slower than all the single-occupancy cars, the next day you’re in a car. On the other hand, we recycle more because we know our neighbors are. And we know our neighbors are recycling more because we see their bins on the street on pick up day.

This is another way in which I think that the tangibility and immediacy of urban restoration comes into play. When we see people working in the park, we see the effects of their actions; when we join them, we see the effects of ours. And from that action we can make the connection to the rest of the world. Working on a small park will have little or no effect on the world, but it will have an effect on the people who see the work, who participate in it, who share the benefits.

Environmentalism is hampered by its heavy reliance on prescriptive norms. The doom’n'gloom drives people away. This is why I almost never post a link to more bad news here. It’s not that I’m Pollyanna/head in the sand. It’s because I want people to know what other people are doing. And as we see more of what other people are doing, we see more of what we can do.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

Rambunctious Garden by Emma Marris, 2012

This book looks at the historical antecedents of the idea of wilderness, and how that has affected conservation today.

There really is nowhere in the world that is “pristine” wilderness, because global warming has reached into every corner. But even before the effects of global warming were known, the idea of pristine wilderness frequently eliminated the Native Americans who had lived their before — as the Miwok Indians were evicted from Yellowstone when it was made a national park.

Some groups, like the Washington Native Plant Society among many others, set a baseline of European colonization, picking different years for different parts of the continent — 1850 for Washington. But the idea of a baseline is itself based on an old, outdated concept on the processes of ecology; that is, that an ecological zone proceeded along a steady path to a climax state, as in the old idea of climax forest. That’s been pretty thoroughly disproven, but a lot of practices started when that idea held sway are still being carried out. For instance, the idea of an 1850 baseline ignores the fur trappers, who were decades earlier, and who wiped out the beaver, which drastically affected the waterways of the region. Not to mention smallpox, which arrived even earlier.

But the invalidity of the idea of a baseline or of pristine wilderness does not mean we should pave over everything. Rather, it gives us the freedom to bring nature closer to us, to see that the separation of nature and the built environment is itself a false distinction, and one we should get rid of as soon as possible. This is the same point that Lyanda Lynn Haupt makes in Crow Planet: nature is everywhere, and the sooner we realize that, the sooner we can change our lifestyles and habits and awareness.

As I type this, I’m less than halfway through the book, so there is probably a lot more to learn about. But I was thinking that “Rambunctious Garden” is complementary to “Crow Planet” and that the former is likely to be as influential on my work as the latter. That may be overburdening Rambunctious Garden with false expectations, but I hope not.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

“Log” is what my wife and I call the above ivy root (it’s a Ren & Stimpy reference). This is what those little sprigs of ivy turn into when they’re allowed to spend years attached to a tree. Log is about four feet long.

Log gets two reactions from people: aghast horror from people who have never seen an ivy root before, and “meh, I’ve seen worse” from people who have.

Anyway, this is what we’re working to remove from our parks.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

The forest is a place of many cycles. Some are much less than a year, such as the annual cycle of plants like Pacific Waterleaf (which grows in late February, and starts dying back in late July). A Western redcedar can be alive for more than a millennium, and spend just as much time as a nurse log before it returns to soil. An alder tree can spend 80 years on a stream bank and fall in a matter of seconds.

The short term scale for forest stewardship is on the order of 50 years. That’s how you should try to visualize the forest as you’re working in it now. This is longer than any plan I’ve made for my own life, and I think it’s longer than any plans people generally make.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

Ivy is an introduced ornamental that has escaped the garden and is taking over the parks. Birds love its fruit, which leads to a seed rain falling down on us all.

Ivy can grow in very low light conditions (someone told me 1% sunlight) so you can’t shade it out. It happily chugs along until it encounters an obstruction, and then grows up the obstruction. Ivy can create monocultures that provide little or no food and habitat only for rats.

When the ivy encounters a tree, it will climb eagerly toward the sunlight. Ivy doesn’t kill trees outright, but the massive roots can weigh down a tree. If the ivy reaches the crown of the tree, it gets enough sunlight to flower and fruit, providing food for birds and a vigorous seed source. The ivy will keep growing , reaching out its thickening stems further and further. Soon enough, the ivy acts as a massive sail on the tree, and pulls the tree over long before it would naturally die.

One of ivy’s great competitive features is that it can easily reroot — if ivy is pinned down by a fallen tree, everywhere the ivy touches the ground underneath the tree roots, forming a massive network. Ivy can form a thick carpet. Its shallow, easily broken roots easily resprout when it’s pulled.

Here is a picture from Green Seattle Partnership illustrating the problem:

An example of an ivy monoculture, from http://greenseattle.org/

Here is a chart showing what can happen if GSP and other organizations and volunteers weren’t working to remove ivy and other invasives:

What will happen if Seattle forests and parks do not have ivy removed.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

There’s practically a sub-sub genre of books about children not getting enough time in the woods or nature. Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, and The Geography of Childhood come to mind immediately, although I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more.

The Geography of Childhood is the one I’ve read. At first, I had a resistance to it, as it extolled the wonders of a childhood spent in the desert, poking under every rock and looking at every cactus blossom. My childhood was spent in Chicago, and my roaming involved taking the el downtown. But the common thread between these two experiences is the unsupervised free roaming. That’s what kids today lack, whether it’s in nature or not.

The importance of free roaming is not just that it helps shape the brain for independent experience and analysis, but that it establishes a home range, a place for children to experience as their own.

I think more important than whether this roaming have an approved percentage of “natural” is that it be close to home. If you bundle the kids into the car and take them to the mountains, you’re just reinforcing the idea that nature is there and good, the urban/suburban life is here and bad.

With this home range established, they can more easily connect their actions to their immediate surroundings. And from this home range, they can extend their actions, and the effects of those actions, to the larger world.

In the specific case of North Beach Park, cleaning the park will help clean the water running through it, which will lead to an incrementally cleaner Puget Sound. From that connection, they can make larger connections.

Without this connection, however, ecological education is a bombardment of futility. Being presented with doom’n'gloom scenarios involving remote (to us) parts of the world doesn’t help build a sense that we can do something.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

“Developing community” is one of those things you hear as a benefit of volunteering. And it’s been my experience that bringing people with a mutual interest together can lead to community and friendships that reach beyond the original interest (in my experience, this has been most true in sf fandom, but I’ve seen many other examples of it).

But there are many instances of restoration work going beyond just the people of mutual interest and bringing together people that were previously antagonistic. For instance, the Yainix Ranch on the Klamath River brought together ranchers and Native Americans, groups that had previously been in conflict over restoration efforts. Elan Shapiro, in his contribution to Ecopsychology, talks about the Mattole River project, which brought together shareholder groups with widely varying agendas. I think this is an important aspect of restoration work.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

On the morning of Tuesday, August 7, forest stewards and others who have benefited from Green Seattle Partnership testified to the Seattle City Council “Libraries, Utilities, and Center” committee, which is Jean Godden (chair), Richard Conlin (vice chair), and Sally Bagshaw. The speakers included me, as representative of North Beach Park; Mary deJong and some girls from Refugee Women’s Alliance, as representatives of Cheasty Greenspace; and two men who gave more technical presentations before and after us. There was also someone who spoke against the rate increase. I think he made a good point about the rapid increase in drainage fees. However, that could be addressed by the city including some mitigation for rainwater retention — lowering rates for people with cisterns or rain gardens, not just giving rebates for the installation. After that last public speaker, we left.

The public comment section is the first part of this embedded video.

The first GSP speaker starts at 3:20, and I start about 5:30. The other GSP speakers are worth watching as well, and the man opposed to the rate increase.

I think it went pretty well, and hope that the rates are used to fund GSP. Don’t think that’s easy for me to say, being a renter. It’s very likely that cost would be passed on to me by the landlord (which is only fair). Also, there is not a square inch of permeable surface on the lot my apartment building is on.

And now, here is the complete statement I’d planned on reading.

Good morning, council members. My name is Luke McGuff, and I live at 59th St. and 20th Ave. NW, in Ballard. Thank you for the opportunity to talk about my volunteer work at North Beach Park.

North Beach Park is a 10 acre ravine located at 90th St. NW and NW 24th Ave. Like urban ravines everywhere, it was used as a dump – we’ve found tires, shopping carts, water heaters, oil tanks, even the front end of a car.

But it also provides a beautiful urban oasis. Just a couple dozen yards down the main trail, the city noises fade away and you’re surrounded by bird song and the sound of a babbling stream.

Because it is such an oasis, the neighbors, from Olympic Manor, North Beach, Crown Hill, and other nearby areas, really love it. So when restoration work started in 2011, there was instantly an outpouring of support.

Personally, one of the great things that has happened is that working on the park has given my life a little more focus than it had before. Many of the working relationships have grown into friendships, through the community-building experience of shared work.

Another great memory is when an 8th grade group from a U District Alternative School came to the park last January. They had a great time, and got more trash out of the park than any other group before or since.

The support of Green Seattle Partnership has been invaluable, and I wonder how long term forest stewards were able to work without this support. Tool delivery and pick up, trash removal – sometimes hundreds of pounds at a time – training, promotion, and just the feeling, overall, that someone had my back. GSP has also been a great information resource, on best practices for invasive removal, planting techniques, native plants.

GSP training has helped me see that North Beach Park is far from an ivy or blackberry monoculture, that it has many plants that are rare or even nearly extirpated in Seattle. It’s also helped me see that this work has begun just in time – the existing alder and big leaf maple are near the end of their life spans, and it’s critical we get conifers in and the laurel, holly, and other weed trees out.

Water enters North Beach Park through a number of broad horizontal seeps. During and after rain storms, there are two locations where street run off enters the park. As we restore the health of the park, this water will be filtered, slowed down, cooled, and enter Puget Sound cleaner than it would have without our efforts.

North Beach Park is across the street from an elementary school. I have a great interest in getting the school kids into the park. There is graffiti on the trees and evidence of adolescent partying. If we get the grade school kids into the park, they’ll grow into teenagers who have a better sense of the treasure this is. Also, when we begin working on trails, the park can provide a safe route to school – currently, kids who live on the west side of the park have to walk blocks out of their way or get driven.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.