Earth Needs Mothering: Dead Trees and Dry Rivers...

Caring about what sort of world is left for our progeny, and the changes we can see happening...

The state tree of New Mexico, the pinon, is under siege  -- whole areas are full of dead trees -- with the worst devastation around Santa Fe.  According to a 7/31 front-page article in the Wall Street Journal by Jim Carlton, the U.S. Forest Service estimates that as many as 80 million pinon trees have died in Arizona and New Mexico between 2001 and 2005 during one of the worst droughts in decades.  In many places more than 90% of the pinon trees have died and you can see this -- swaths of brown dot the hillsides.

Spring now comes earlier in the Rocky Mountains... The Earthwatch Institute, in studying climate change, has an article about the difference in global warming in high altitudes and how it is potentially disrupting the timing of pollination.

Could the pollinators, shifting to different altitudes with the climate change, leave the pine beetles (ravaging the pinons) without predators? I wonder. 

The droughts and warm weather have weakened the trees, making them more vulnerable to the pine beetles.  Springs have dried up and fires have swept through huge tracts of land in the southern Rockies.

Mother Earth seems pretty fragile and in need of serious attention and nurturing... 

(If you just want to be entertained, go no further!  Just go see Stephen Colbert's spoof of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth which he calls "The Convienentest Truth" on YouTube.)

In the article on climate changes, Dr. David Inouye, director of University of Maryland's graduate program in Sustainable Development and Conservation Biology, presented more than three decades of data on pollination ecology in the Rocky Mountains. High altitudes are one of the habitats where it seems that climate change is having dramatic effects and the "synchrony of plants and pollinators may be changing."

Pinon ips, a bark beetle, is responsible for the pine tree devastation.  The tree, pinon edulus, produces pine nuts which are very flavorful. 

It is hard to imagine what the landscape will look like in the next few years.  For now, in many areas, the landscape looks more dead than alive. There is a huge difference just from last year to this year in the amount of dead trees one sees on the hills.  It looks like tinder box that could be devastating if fires were to break out.  Thinning the trees and removing the dead ones should be done in the winter to prevent the spread of the beetle, officials say.  It seems as though the beetles have won, though, just by visual inspection, especially around Santa Fe.  Patches of brown, similar to those seen in Santa Fe, can now be seen on the west side of the Sandia Mountain in Albuquerque.

Earthwatch, a 35 year-old global volunteer organization, sponsors scientific research financially and through volunteer labor.  The article on the high altitude changes, published on YubaNet, included information from Inouye's report regarding plants in the Colorado Rocky Mountains and I found this information very intruiging: 

The flowering time for plants is determined by "when the snow melts, which is likely to change in response to regional and global climate change. There is some evidence that plants and pollinators are responding differently to climate change, potentially resulting in reduced reproductive success for both groups and possible extinction. ...Earthwatch volunteers in the Rocky Mountains helped Inouye document that global warming affects lower altitudes differently than higher ones. As a result, animals exposed to earlier warm weather may exit hibernation earlier and birds responding to earlier spring weather in their wintering grounds may flock north while there are several feet of snow on the ground, risking starvation."

The smell of pinon wood burning in fireplaces in New Mexico is distinctively pleasing.  A coffee company,  New Mexico Pinon coffee, produces wonderful, award-winning coffee using the pinon nuts.  I love to use pinon nuts in salads and crushed pinon nuts are delicious as coatings for fish (yummy on salmon).

My children are the fourth generation (or fifth/sixth, depending on which side of the family you base it on) to enjoy time in the southern Rocky Mountains.  The frequency of fires which started several years ago, were unprecented in our collective memories.

The fires in the Sangre de Cristo mountains several years ago left stands of Aspen trees looking like mountain meadows of toothpicks.  New aspen trees are growing at their bases and fields of wildflowers and native grasses have begun the replenishment process. It still looks like a moonscape on many mountainsides.

However, with all of the dead wood and weak trees due to the drought years, the mountains seem like tinderboxes and threat of fires remains. Big trees with shallow roots tip over with a nudging from storms and this is in areas that were not hit by fires.  Dead trees block hiking/horse trails.

In some areas the streams barely run and springs that once were dependable stops on long wilderness treks in the Pecos Wilderness can no longer be counted on to produce the water they used to provide, according to outfits that take regularly take hikers/horseback riders deep into the national forest areas.  Rafting on the Rio Grande south of Taos was unusually dangerous last year due to the high levels of water due to the 04-05 winter record snowfall which seemed like an abberation from the dryness. The 6/20 issue of The New Mexican reported that "17 locations in New Mexico had endured the driest November-through-May period (05-06) on the books and that Santa Fe had just 1.2 inches of rain in that period, breaking the 1903-04 record.

The New Mexico ski season was the worst in years. An article by Kiera Hay on 6/10 in the Albuquerque Journal reported that skiier visits were the lowest since at least 1999/2000. The annual precipitation in the state, she wrote, was 46% of normal through April and in '04/'05 it was 181% of normal.   In an area economically dependent on tourism, the weather dramatically impacts revenues.

Then the summer monsoon season started and some areas, such as Santa Fe, have already received huge amounts of precipitation as compared to other years.  The extremes in rain/snowfall and drought continue to set records. (8/16 update: The rains, beginning in July and continuing through August, will probably make this one of the wettest summers in Santa Fe, a state meteorologist says.)

A cousin in Texas tells us that many of the lakes have levels 20' below normal.  Fred Pierce, in his book When the Rivers Run Dry: Water - the Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century, published this year, presents the issues we'll be facing regarding diminished supplies of water. Dams, the 20th century modern marvels, (but now seen as environmental disasters), have wreaked havoc.  Pierce writes that in the second half of the 20th century, the World Bank spent an estimated $75 billion on building large dams in 92 countries. Man-made efforts to control rivers?  How does this make sense when we read of all the devasting floods?

Depleting underwater acquifers, such as the Ogallala which underlies the Great Plains region --New Mexico, Texas, Colorado and other areas, is not going to solve problems, according to Pierce. Water extraction is exceeding the rates of repletion. The world's wild rivers are becoming extinct and 200 of the largest 300 river systems have dams. The Rio Grande River is now just a little trickle.  In some areas illegal immigrants just walk across the river barrier.

Harvesting rain is perhaps an idea that can be used.  New houses in Bermuda are required by law to collect rainwater from the roofs (photo at left is an example of the roof design).  Xeriscaping is a smart way to landscape in terms of the natural environment and is increasingly being applied in the western states; water for landscaping is the largest part of the per-person water consumption. People living in El Dorado near Santa Fe for example, are recycling rainwater from roofs, using the collected water for landscaping needs and to wash cars.   Don't you remember the sing-song chant from childhood, "....slide down my rainbarrell, climb up the cellar door..."  - we have forgotten the frugal and conservative ways of our ancestors with modern ways to use (up) our resources.

Applying money and brains to find solutions: An 8/14 article in Business Week, Wall Street's New Love Affair, writes that "you know the cultural movement is real when the money men get on board... sinking billions of dollars into producers of ethanol, fuel cell superbatteries, microscopic bugs that turn glucose into plastic, environmentally friendly pesticides, anything that might tap into the green craze. Saving the planet, protecting America, doing God's work, cynically exploiting a feel-good trend -- call it what you will. Wall Street sees money to be made."  MIT is pursuing energy alternatives, as reported by  Wired this week,  so maybe solutions will be coming sooner rather than later.

Caring about an out-of-balance environment: I wrote about solar energy in the 70s on newspaper assignments.  I guess I've not ever lost interest in how we can better harness energy and manage our environment in a responsible way.  Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, should be mandatory viewing. imo.  I really can't comment on things I've not studied or observed first hand, like the dead zones shocking scientists off the coast of Oregon or the recurring dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. I'm not an expert on this issue, just interested and very concerned.  The lastest news includes gators coming further up into Georgia.  The impact of  invasive plant and animal species (feral hogs, kudzu, saltcedars, hydrilla, fire ants and nutria, for example) on the environment is an entirely different subject but it also has to do with our off-balance global environment. 

MotherPie... caring about mothering our earth so it is a good and healthy place for the children, grandchildren and thier progeny.

Comments

[Laundry Woman]

One of the little things I do is recycle my egg shells and coffee grounds. I have a little flower bed and I turn them in there. I also chop up veggie leftovers and put them in there. My current desire? A big box of juicy worms to let loose in my little compost/miniature orange tree flower bed. I have been passionate about composting for years. Off and on I had to desert the project due to pests and drought. Yet this little hobby brings me such joy and satisfaction.
What does it have to do with water? Well, we run water when we run our disposals. If we can dispose of food waste in other ways, we can save water.

BTW- The bark beetle is one reason why controlled burning is practiced. We lose quite a few trees through controlled burns that get out of hand. If they would let the loggers log those trees, it would help contain the problem. I haven't had much time to pursue the details, but controlled harvesting rather than an attempt to save all trees is a more balanced and feasible approach.