Another reason not to reduce agriculture in Minto Brown Island Park

There's no reason that agriculture and enjoyment of the park should be viewed as conflicting. Image by Mr.Thomas via Flickr

Nick Kristof, a native Oregonian, has an outstanding column today about "nature deficit disorder" -- the increasing tyranny of electronic doodads that dominate kids' lives and the paucity of contact with the natural world.

How to Lick a Slug

While backpacking here with my 11-year-old daughter, I kept thinking of something tragic: so few kids these days know what happens when you lick a big yellow banana slug.

My daughter and I were recuperating in a (banana slug-infested) wilderness from a surfeit of civilization. On our second day on the Pacific Crest Trail, we were exhausted after nearly 20 miles of hiking, our feet ached, and ravenous mosquitoes were persecuting us. Dusk was falling, but no formal campsite was within miles.

So we set out a groundsheet and our sleeping bags on the soft grass of a ridge, so that the winds would blow the mosquitoes away. Our dog looked aghast (“Ugh, where’s my bed?!”), but sulkily curled up beside us. As far as we could tell, there was no other hiker within a half-day’s journey in any direction.

We debated whether to put up our light tarp to protect us from rain. “No need,” I advised my daughter patronizingly. “There’s zero chance it’ll rain. And it’ll be more fun to be able to look up at shooting stars.”

It was, until we awoke at 4 a.m. to a freezing drizzle.

The rain not only punctured the doctrine of Paternal Infallibility but also offered one of nature’s dazzlingly important lessons in perspective, reminding us that we’re just tenants — and ones without much sway.

Such time in the wilderness is part of our family’s summer ritual, a time to hit the “reset” switch and escape deadlines and BlackBerrys. We spend the time fretting instead about blisters, river crossings and rain, and the experiences offer us lessons on inner peace and life’s meaning — cheap and effective therapy, without the couch.

All this comes to mind because for most of us in the industrialized world, nature is a rarer and rarer part of our lives. Children for 1,000 generations grew up exploring fields, itching with poison oak and discovering the hard way what a wasp nest looks like. That’s no longer true.

Paul, a fourth grader in San Diego, put it this way: “I like to play indoors better, ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.” Paul was quoted in a thoughtful book by Richard Louv, “Last Child in the Woods,” that argued that baby boomers “may constitute the last generation of Americans to share an intimate, familial attachment to the land and water.”

Only 2 percent of American households now live on farms, compared with 40 percent in 1900. Suburban childhood that once meant catching snakes in fields now means sanitized video play dates scheduled a week in advance. One study of three generations of 9-year-olds found that by 1990 the radius from the house in which they were allowed to roam freely was only one-ninth as great as it had been in 1970.

A British study found that children could more easily identify Japanese cartoon characters like Pikachu, Metapod and Wigglytuff than they could native animals and plants, like otter, oak and beetle.

Mr. Louv calls this “nature deficit disorder,” and he links it to increases in depression, obesity and attention deficit disorder. I don’t know about all that, although his book does cite a study indicating that watching fish lowers blood pressure significantly. (That’s how to cut health costs: hand out goldfish instead of heart medicine!)

One problem may be that the American environmental movement has focused so much on preserving nature that it has neglected to do enough to preserve a constituency for nature. It’s important not only to save forests, but also to promote camping, hiking, bouldering and white-water rafting so that people care about saving those forests.

One sign of trouble: the number of visits to America’s national parks has been slipping for more than a decade. Likewise, Europe and Canada have both done an excellent job of building networks of long-distance hiking trails, while the U.S. has trouble maintaining the trails it has.

One of our family’s annual backpacks is the 40-mile Timberline Trail circuit around Mount Hood, crossing snowfields and dazzling alpine fields of flowers. In years when we’re particularly addled, we hike it as many as three times. But a washout almost three years ago left part of this gorgeous trail — completed in the 1930s — officially closed, and unofficially rather difficult to get by. Here’s a spectacular trail that was built in the last depression, and we can’t even sustain it.

So let’s protect nature, yes, but let’s also maintain trails, restore the Forest Service and support programs that get young people rained on in the woods. Let’s acknowledge that getting kids awed by nature is as important as getting them reading.

Oh, and the slug? Time was, most kids knew that if you licked the underside of a banana slug, your tongue went numb. Better that than have them numb their senses staying cooped up inside.

Well, if we're worried about nature deficit, doesn't it make sense to reduce the agricultural acreage and increase the "restored" naturescape in the park? No, for a number of reasons.

First, agriculture is natural. Agriculture is how humanity earns its living, just like herons fish and eat frogs and slugs eat plants. For all intents and purposes, every calorie we eat derives from farming, directly (plant foods) or indirectly (animals nourished on crops). When you reduce this basic and essential human activity in the park, you reduce the park to a monoculture just like the suburban sprawl that surrounds this gem. People whose conception of nature means "no agriculture" have an impoverished view of nature and man's place in it -- they see man as outside of nature, able to observe it at a distance, rather than a being whose every molecule is part of the web of life, whose every sip of water has been shared by innumerable other creatures. Children (and adults) LOVE to watch agriculture when it is done at a human scale, as it is in Minto Brown Island Park -- and it can be even more so if we preserve the right to use that land for farming (the way the farmers who deeded the land to the City thought it would be preserved).

Second, most of the park already is "natural" in the sense of being undeveloped (no structures or permanent habitations). Of the 900 acres in the park, the 200 acres proposed to be locked away forever include some of the highest, driest ground in the park, two small parcels on either side of a legacy cherry grove -- a place where chemical sprays were never used and, therefore, a place easily converted to organic production. Oddly, the most regularly flooded ag land in the park is not amongst the acres proposed for this "conservation."

Third, the idea that simply "restoring" acreage to plantings similar to those found in undisturbed parcels is inviting is wrong. The most inviting and appealing acreage in the park ARE the agricultural lands and the boundaries surrounding them. In nature, boundaries (ocean/land, forest/field, prairie/lake, reef/sea, etc.) are the most interesting and biologically richest places of all. Replant the 200 acres into black cottonwoods and you will soon have a place that few children will go to, even if their parents let them.

The Minto Brown Island Park Master Plan calls for agriculture to be continued -- not reduced, and for conversion to organic agriculture. We have a unique opportunity to increase the natural diversity in our park in a way that puts humans into the natural world, rather than defining nature as a place where humans are excluded or limited to defined paths. If we want to have "naturally literate" future generations, we need to have places where they can see humans being part of nature, rather than just observing it through a windshield or on park display signs.

UPDATE: August Salem Monthly has a small story on this.

Says a thousand thousands of words

Minto Survey

Image by voodooangel via Flickr

A friend writes:

As some of you know, I've been following the proposed use of federal economic stimulus money to create a conservation easement in Salem's Minto Brown Park [which will forever bar any kind of agriculture from 200 acres of the park, most of which are currently being cultivated]. On August 10, the City Council will decide whether or not to accept the Feds' offer. It's hard to know how people would react to the changes the easement would create in the park.

So here's an unofficial, 4-question survey being conducted by a Salem resident to assess people's feelings about the proposed changes.

No Ikea in Salem, but great stuff anyway

The IkeaHacker website is full of creative ways to use bits and pieces of stuff from Ikea -- including this elegant design for a quick and easy coldframe, a Salem essential for stretching the fall harvest (sometimes through the winter entirely) and for getting an early start on spring and summer delights.

Not a local business though -- so just make a list of ideas and then remember to stop at Ikea when some you're up there near the Portland airport for some other reason.

New brewpub in NE Salem??

Hops -- the source of the phrase "hopped up?" Image by joelplutchak via Flickr

The nice folks who run the Willamette Noodle Company (whose veggie mac and cheese is to die or even murder for) have put a cryptic hint in their newsletter that suggests that we may have even more to love about Salem soon --- a new brewpub would be my guess (since grapes grow in Colombia too):

Boy you are all a curious bunch! Yes, something new is still "Brewing" for our little Broadway location... and the hints will start soon as to what's coming! Awww... what the heck - I'll give you one now. If I was a betting woman I would pick something that is brewed with something grown in Oregon as opposed to, say, Columbia [sic]. :) Happy guessing!

Sincerely,
Janet & Robert
Willamette Noodle Company

Be afraid. Be very afraid: The tundra is outgassing CO2/methane

Turns out, a witty license plate for a gasoline powered car isn't enough. We needed to act before nature's balance tipped. We didn't. Image by 37 °C via Flickr

Sub-Arctic timebomb: warming speeds CO2 release from soil

PARIS (AFP) – Climate change is speeding up the release of carbon dioxide from frigid peatlands in the sub-Arctic, fuelling a vicious circle of global warming, according to a study to be published Thursday.

An increase of just 1.0 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) over current average temperatures would more than double the CO2 escaping from the peatlands.

Northern peatlands contain one-third of the planet's soil-bound organic carbon, the equivalent of half of all the CO2 in the atmosphere.

Peat is an accumulation of partially decayed vegetation found in wetlands or peatlands, which cover between two and three percent of the global land mass. While present in all climate zones, the vast majority of peatlands are found in sub-Arctic regions.

A team of European researchers led by Ellen Dorrepaal of the University of Amsterdam artificially warmed natural peatlands in Abisko, in northern Sweden, by 1.0 C over a period of eight years.

The experimental plots exhaled and extra 60 percent of CO2 in Spring and 52 percent in Summer over the entire period, reported the study, published in the British journal Nature.

"Climate warming therefore accelerates respiration of the extensive, subsurface carbon reservoir in peatlands to a much larger extent than previously thought," the authors conclude.

The findings highlight the extreme sensitivity of northern peatland carbon reservoirs to climate change, and the danger of a self-reinforcing "positive feedback" in which the CO2 released adds to global warming.

And unlike the boreal forests in Canada, Russia and Northern Europe, very little of the extra carbon was absorbed by additional vegetation spurred by the warmer temperatures.

The researchers warn that annual surplus CO2 released by peatlands with a 1.0 C increase -- between 38 and 100 million tonnes -- could cancel out the European Union objective of slashing greenhouse gas emissions by 92 million tonnes per year.

In another study released last month, the Global Carbon Project based in Australia found that the amount of carbon stored in the Arctic and boreal regions of the world is some 1.5 trillion tonnes, more than double previous estimates.

This is it, folks -- the moment when the long, long, ricketyricketycreak ascent up one side of the roller coaster just eases and you stand poised--just for a moment--and see that first tremendous drop ahead of you and you realize that there's no getting off the ride now.

We've pumped enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to destabilize the climate to the point where now, we don't have to do anything at all --- we're just along for the ride, and it doesn't stop until a new equilibrium is reached, probably in a much, much hotter and less benign climate.

Congratulations to all the climate change deniers, you succeeded in your mission of preventing any meaningful action until it was too late.

Same here: ODOT's edifice complex threatens to bankrupt us -- and for what?

Homely but serviceable, and more than adequate for the traffic we are likely to see. Image via Wikipedia

There was an excellent analysis of the flaws in the Columbia River "Megabridge" proposal in the Oregonian the other day. So much of it applies directly to the "Salem River Crossing" third bridge boondoggle -- only a difference of degree ($600+ million is the pre-overrun figure down here, rather than $4.2 billion up there). But even if you think $0.6 billion looks small compared to $4.2B, when you compare the size of the Salem area vs. Portland/Vancouver and the number of trips anticipated, our boondoggle seems to be even more of a boondoggle than their record-setting boondoggle. Some key points:

We're all smarting from the economic recession that's hurt our incomes and job prospects, from the decline in housing values that's dented our wealth, and the collapse in financial markets that's dealt a big setback to our retirement plans. We're smarting, but, we tell ourselves, we're smarter, too.

We've learned key lessons. We won't be fooled by the Bernie Madoffs, or by claims that house prices can only go up, or that some form of complex mortgage-backed security can eliminate financial risk, or that stated-income "liar loans" were ever a good idea. At a high price, we've bought ourselves some very valuable lessons.

Next time, we tell ourselves, we'll be smarter. We'll ask the hard questions -- before we sign on the dotted line. We won't be conned by overly optimistic estimates or take some self-interested experts' assurances at face value.

But are we really smarter? . . . [L]ike frenzied homebuyers a few years back, many bridge advocates seem chiefly concerned with superficial questions, such as whether the bridge will be pretty. Before we sign on the dotted line, we ought to be asking the kind of questions that will keep us from repeating the worst mistakes of those caught up in the housing bubble.

First and foremost, who will pay for this bridge? Project proponents have vaguely promised that funding will come from a mix of federal and state sources, but there is little indication of any of this will materialize. . . .

In the height of the housing boom, lots of buyers rationalized mortgages they couldn't afford for houses bigger than they needed based on the belief that housing prices could only go up.

Highway advocates have a similar delusion -- that traffic levels can only increase. But that's not true. Driving has been going down in Portland, a trend that started even before the run-up in gas prices and the recession. Traffic counts have been going down on the Interstate bridges for the past three years. And according to Inrix, the nation's leading providing of real-time traffic information, afternoon peak-hour congestion on I-5 northbound has declined more than 10 percent in the past year. If traffic levels flat-line, or grow much more slowly than in the past -- as now seems certain to be the case, thanks to higher gas prices -- we simply don't need 12 lanes of capacity, plus light rail.

Projections of continually increasing traffic are not simply a justification for a bigger bridge, they are essential to paying for it. Because any new bridge will require tolls, the amount of toll revenue hinges directly on the number of people who cross the bridge. If fewer people use the bridge than predicted, then the bridge will need a bailout.

Not only are toll revenue forecasts notoriously over-optimistic -- like rating agency estimates of likely default rates on subprime loans--but across the country, toll revenues are declining in the face of the recession and changing driving habits. . . .

If we've learned any hard lessons from the past year about borrowing money, now is the time to put that learning to work. We need to demand a financial plan for the CRC that spells out who pays, and how much. We need independent accurate estimates -- based on a world of $3 or $4 per gallon gas, global warming, and declining vehicle travel --and of how much traffic will use the bridge, especially with a toll . . . .

And we should really ask whether, if we really have $4 billion to spend on the region's transportation infrastructure, we ought to spend so much of it in one place, to facilitate more peak-hour commuting and suburban sprawl. . . .

The work of the project's consultants is too reminiscent of the glossy real estate brochure providing only the most cursory examination of these risks, making implausibly optimistic assumptions, and doing nothing to quantify the consequences of error. The region's elected officials and citizens should insist on real due diligence on these risks -- preferably from parties completely independent of the project -- before mortgaging our region's future for a bridge we don't need and can't afford.

One of the key issues is highlighted above: the circular nature of the traffic projections. The planners presume that we're going to keep on driving more and more every year, in more and more cars, despite the fact that vehicle-miles-traveled has been falling for the past few years. Even more important, the state has made a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% in just 40 years -- that means that not only can vehicle emissions not increase, they must keep declining from here on out. That means that the existing bridges are more than adequate into the future.

Moreover, the restored Union Street RR bridge has been prepared for emergency vehicles, so even if something happens to block one of the bridges (Center St or Marion St), police, fire, and ambulances can all use the Union Street bridge. That eliminates the claim that we have to build a new bridge in case someone stops traffic for a few hours by threatening to jump off one of the bridges.

There is no problem with any bridge capacity that reversing the share of single-occupant vehicles and carpool vehicles in the commuting profile won't cure, for about a savings of $599 million.

In case you didn't grow up growing food

Except for the part about the plant being happy and the gardener looking competent, this is totally us. Image via Wikipedia

At LOVESalem HQ, we're barely even novice gardeners.

In fact, we're still at that embarrassing stage where it seems like our most common activity could be described as laying down the experiences for what we hope will become funny gardening stories about our early years.

We hope that, years from now, when our vegetables are lush and our fruit trees overwhelm us with their fecundity, we'll be telling those stories.

We found a cool cheat sheet though, one that should help bring those halcyon years about sooner: What to plant when, month by month, by region. All praise to Mother Earth News for this great service.

For instance, from there, you can go here, to a link to a great table showing, for virtually every place in Oregon, the dates for the 10%, 50%, and 90% chance of frosty, freezing, and hard frost weather (frosty = 36F; freezing = 32F, and hard frost = 28F) and the number of frost-free days per year and total number of days below the three threshold temperatures (again, all given in terms of 10, 50, and 90% probabilities). An invaluable chart to helping answer the question about "What should I be planting now?"

UPDATE: Rather than getting rid of farmland in the city, Salem should be following Milwaukee's lead.

Another incident shows why we need cop-cam

Police all over the world are videotaping citizens. We should approve 100% - and require that police be equipped with audio/video devices in all their interactions with non-police. Image via Wikipedia

Another case where the presence of audio/video makes the difference.

Update: From Washington, DC, supposedly the heart of American democracy, the place where the principle that government derives its just powers from the people -- another clear example of why police should be fitted with cop cams that record their interactions with civilians:

JUDGE LAMBASTS DC POLICE OVER 2002 ANTI-GLOBALIZATION PROTEST

DC Examiner - A federal judge has called for an investigation into the D.C. police department after officials there destroyed key evidence related to a controversial mass arrest of anti-globalization protesters in 2002.

Judge Emmet G. Sullivan said he wanted to get to the bottom of the disappearance of police records of the orders and movements of police officers in a massive crackdown of protesters rallying against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Hundreds of innocent bystanders in Pershing Park were swept up by the police dragnet. Some 400 people have filed a class-action civil rights lawsuit. Police Chief Cathy Lanier, then a deputy, ordered those arrested to be "hog tied" -- bound hand to foot.

In federal court Wednesday, Sullivan ordered D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles to file an affidavit on the disappearance of the records within the next two weeks. He also suggested that he might appoint an independent investigator to look into the matter.

"When, if ever, can anyone trust their government?" Sullivan asked.

Plaintiffs' lawyer Mara Verheyden-Hilliard said the District has shown "reckless disregard" for legal ethics.

"This case has now developed from a case solely about a massive constitutional rights violation to being about a massive cover-up," she said.

Nickles denied there was anything untoward in the destruction of the evidence and blamed the D.C. Council for not funding a better document-management system.

Police union Chairman Kris Baumann, who has often litigated against the department, said the incident wasn't isolated.

"The destruction of e-mails, the destruction of documents -- anything to cover up government misconduct is the norm," Baumann said.

Washington Post - Some evidence, including a key report and portions of radio transmissions, has vanished. In recent days, the D.C. government has also turned over thousands of pages of records and videotapes to protesters' lawyers, some of which should have been produced years ago.

Sullivan ordered D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles to submit a sworn declaration detailing his office's shoddy work and the steps he was taking to fix the problems.

Sullivan said he would impose "severe" monetary sanctions on the D.C. government and urged Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) to "settle this case soon."

"This kind of conduct is not acceptable," Sullivan said, calling the actions of D.C. government lawyers "abysmal" and urging the D.C. Council to investigate the attorney general's office.

After the judge's harangue, the District's attorney, Thomas Koger, had tears in his eyes. He declined to comment.

Sullivan's criticism came during a hearing in two lawsuits that accuse D.C. police of violating the rights of demonstrators and bystanders when officers arrested 386 people in Pershing Park without a warning on Sept. 27, 2002. Former D.C. police chief Charles H. Ramsey eventually issued a public apology for the arrests. Protesting at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the demonstrators were charged with parading without a permit.

Jonathan Turley, an attorney for the protesters, called for an independent investigation of the attorney general's office. Another lawyer for the protesters, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, said she had never seen such "a breathtaking destruction of evidence before."

Dangerous curves

In August 2003, we were living in the Midwest, and we sweltered through a terrible heatwave -- which led to the most recent great blackout in the US, which sent us back to pre-electric days.

This made me even more attuned to the stress that climate change is placing on our electrical grid (a failure of which was the proximate cause of that blackout, the real cause of which is our blockheaded habit of thinking that we don't have to live within any natural limits and that we can use as much energy as we want to bail us out of our poor decisions, such as to build millions of houses and commercial office buildings so that they must draw immense amounts of energy at all times).

So I've been following this curve quite closely this week.