Ecosystem & Landscape

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to visit our country's first National Park, at a time when only 10% of their yearly visitors make the trip to Yellowstone.  Our adventure started on the west entrance of the park where we entered by snowcoach (a vehicle uniquely suited to driving on packed snow with tractor-like treads and skis serving as front tires).  The first thing to come into view was the beautiful Madison Valley with the Madison River on one side and great volcanic slopes on the other.  Before you see any of the wildlife along the river you notice that there ar

 On behalf of the Southern Sierra Partnership, I am delighted to post our recently completed Framework for Cooperative Conservation and Climate Adaptation for the Southern Sierra Nevada and Tehachapi Mountains and associated datasets.

A few months back I was invited to a policy and technology forum at Stanford University, whose goal was figuring out how to overcome constraints to ramping up solar energy production in California. The forum brought together scientists, engineers, policy makers, and leaders of the solar industry and conservation organization to develop a “blueprint… to meet the challenges presented by the implementation of large scale solar.”

From childhood, we can all remember special places that played an important part in our development. Growing up in the west, one significant place for me was the Columbia River George and High Desert Basin section bordering Oregon and Washington from Portland to the Tri-Cities. I was born in Baker City and spent many years traveling either by plane, train, bus or car up and down the Columbia. A week ago, on a road trip to Coeur d'Alene.

This week, I’ve been looking into the sustainability of bioenergy. The cover story on my CSA News (crop, soils and agronomy magazine) is called “Sustainable Bioenergy: Fueling Biomass Plants without Degrading the Land.” Can we do that? We’re having enough difficulties growing food without degrading the land. It would surprise me if we could produce energy from agriculture without further increasing soil degradation.

Last week a colleague from the lead Forestry school in France came to visit me in Olympia. Yves told me a story he read in the Smithsonian (2004) about forest decline following drought-years in Morocco, where Barbary macaques were found stripping the bark of Atlas cedars to eat the moist and nutritious tissues underneath. Authorities want to get rid of the monkeys but they are endangered.

As I was sitting in the office one fine June day in 2009 watching a severe weather cell steamroll its way through the Willamette Valley, I couldn’t help but marvel at its awesome, enveloping presence and destructive potential. My officemates and I were first alerted to its impending arrival by the rapid darkening of the skies to the East and South of us.

Dragon legends play a powerful role in mountain folklore. In European tales of yore, a dragon often dwells in a remote lair, which is nestled deep in a timbered and rugged landscape that towers high and secluded above town. However, when provoked, the dragon uses its power to fire scorch the lands below his domain, consuming everything that dare cross his path.

On Monday, the dragon that sleeps in the mountains above my town of Boulder, Colorado awoke with a vengeance. Most days, even most years, he sleeps peacefully and lets us live, play and love in the thickly wooded mountains that ground our place in space and time. However, officials confirmed this morning that he ravaged at least 95 structures, consumed more than 7,000 acres and is still uncontained.

I found that I was getting depressed every day when I took a piece of bread out of a bag to make French toast, open a pill container to take my allergy medicine, or peeled back the wrapper from a block of cheese to make an omelette, so I took a vow not to buy any new plastic for one week. Plastics aren't just in grocery bags, which I can avoid most of the time. They're in food wrappers, diapers, hair care, appliances, toys, computers, writing utensils, art supplies, pet supplies, eyeglasses, business envelopes, you name it.

In the entryway to the Conservation Biology Institute offices is a map we printed in 2004 of the Late Seral Forest of the Pacific Northwest, that was displayed in the American Museum of Natural History.