Shifting Baselines in the Outback

By: | February 6, 2018
Scotia preserve. Emma Marris

Daniel Pauley, a fisheries scientist, coined the term “shifting baselines” in 1995 to describe how depleted fish populations came to be considered “normal” by generations that had never experienced the teeming abundance their grandparents had known.

The concept is now a fundamental one in conservation. As ecosystems change and as human memory dims, former states are forgotten and newer, altered states come to be considered the baseline against which change should be measured and to which restoration should aim. This can mean that, for example, one generation insists that a park “should be” a dense forest because that is how it appeared in their youth—thanks to the fact that elephants had been driven locally extinct. (Elephants browse so ferociously and even knock over full-grown trees, keeping landscapes in savannah-mode.)

Now a new paper looks at shifting baselines in the Australian Outback, where ants have long thought to be the primary way seeds move around the landscape. Turns out that the role of small, adorable mammals in seed moving may have been overlooked because these creatures have been hit so hard by introduced predators, including cats and foxes.

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Fukushima’s legacy in the Arctic Ocean

By: | February 5, 2018

When the official photographer’s helicopter hovered above the Arctic Ocean for the bank note photo shoot, the Canadian Coast Guard ship Amundsen carried Jay Cullen’s oceanographic research equipment prominently on its deck. The icebreaker was to feature on the red Canadian fifty-dollar bill, and Cullen saw his chance at immortality. Unfortunately, when the mint released the note, the artist had airbrushed out Cullen’s crates like so much clutter.

Cullen has been going up to the Arctic for ten years now, taking measurements of chemical tracers in ocean waters to track the changes in currents. But over the last three years, Cullen’s techniques have been put to use for another task: tracking the radioactive material released by Fukushima.

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The Last Word

By: | February 3, 2018

January 29 – February 2, 2018

Craig begins the week:  he believes tarot cards? well, he believes chaos theory, he believes systems can organize themselves when smaller parts interact, he’s risking serious woo here, but sure, why not?

Rose’s dog is well-behaved, trustworthy, doesn’t even bark.  Rose’s dog was not always this way.  Once Rose’s dog was a puppy who drove her to the point of sitting on the kitchen floor and crying.

Jennifer has chronic pain and got herself off opoids, using an iffy plant/chemical/drug called Kratom.  She likes it, finds lots of arguments against it, and that would be ok, if they’d just do rigorous tests of the stuff.

Sadly, Ursula LeGuin has died.  Michelle remembers her voice and her connection with another great lady of the Pacific Northwest, Mount St. Helens.  LeGuin could see it out her kitchen window.

Craig ends the week too, this time out in the desert near an old uranium mine, picking up a little olivella shell, whose travels he traces back through the Southwest to its birthplace in the Sea of Cortez.

Ed. note:  Is spring ever going to come? No?

 

Shell Walkers

By: | February 2, 2018

I was snooping around an old uranium mill the other day in southern Utah, taking advantage of an unusually warm January day in the desert to explore washes, ridges, and places where I could hunt for artifacts. You’ll find here glass bottles, metal tags, and pieces of machinery. It was a field mill, looked like 1950s by the decay. No bigger than a one-bedroom house, it had been reduced to some crackled concrete walls and durable trash, glass, plastic, metal. Bolts, broken tea cups, bottle caps. It had been built near a steep gully above a dry wash, and its ruins were crumbling into sandy, ashen soil.

In this dark soil, instead of prospector artifacts, I began finding sherds of pre-Columbian pottery, some painted with lines of black paint on white clay. This was Pueblo ancestry, between 800 and 1,000 years ago, shattered pieces of jar necks and bowls from a cliff- and pithouse-dwelling people who still grow corn in the desert mesas and riversides of northern Arizona and northern New Mexico.

The mill had been built on a prehistoric kiln site, ground still discolored from the number of fires that happened here, ceramic pieces broken and left around as temper and trash. Sticking out of the soil near the base of a brushy sage was the end of a sea shell. I pulled from the ground the neat little capsule of an olivella shell. I hadn’t seen one of these in years. Last time I remember was a cave in southwest Arizona, a hundred miles from an ocean. These kinds of shells were transported across the Southwest, and went on to Texas and Oklahoma. They were moved by foot, carried in satchels, baskets, and woven cotton bags, some made on looms and given intricate colors and patterns.

The olivella in my hand was a type that would come from either southern California or high in the crotch of the Sea of Cortez between Baja and mainland Mexico. Continue reading →

Redux: The Lady and Le Guin

By: | February 1, 2018

I’ve been thinking a lot about Ursula Le Guin since her death on January 22. Here in the Pacific Northwest, she was not only a beloved author but a beloved public figure, active in the Portland community until the very end of her long life. I’ll miss hearing her voice, and I’ll miss her sharp wisdom about worlds real and imagined. Here’s a post I wrote in the summer of 2015 about Le Guin’s history with another great woman of the Northwest—Mount St. Helens.

Late last month, I got to camp with a group of ecologists at the base of Mt. St. Helens, in southwestern Washington state. Some of the scientists had been studying the mountain since shortly after it erupted on May 18, 1980, and they were full of stories about the changes they’d seen over the past thirty-five years. They told me that someone else had been watching the mountain just as long as they had, and that she still watched it every morning. Her name was Ursula Le Guin.

Ursula Le Guin? I said. The Ursula Le Guin?

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Let’s Be Reasonable About Kratom

By: | January 31, 2018

I used to take opioids for pain. Every day. Numerous times a day. I didn’t abuse the drugs; I was prescribed them for legitimate reasons and I used them as directed.

Still, a human body becomes reliant on narcotic drugs like this, and over time it takes more for the same effects. It’s simple physiology. The same pills that can help a person manage pain can also ruin or even end that life.

Meanwhile, the process of getting a prescription for opioids is stressful and sometimes embarrassing: For years I had to pee in a cup regularly so the pain clinic could make sure I was taking, rather than selling, my pills. It was also expensive. Not only did I have to have an office visit at the clinic every two months, complete with co-pay, but one of the meds, before I fulfilled my insurance deductible, cost me $400 a month.

I got tired of the circus and the expense and decided to stop taking the damn things, and so I reduced my intake a little each week. My body fought back and my pain grew worse than I remembered it being before the drugs. I got down to half of my daily dose, but I struggled to go lower. I wasn’t sure I could do it. Plus, I was hurting.

Things have changed drastically since then. Now, I take a half or a single pain pill maybe twice a week—and only when truly needed. It took me about 10 days to get to (basically) zero, something that drug addicts and their doctors and families can’t imagine is possible. I used a completely natural substance, a ground up plant, to get through the withdrawal, and it worked amazingly well. I still take it each day because it eases pain and anxiety, both of which have plagued me for years. Continue reading →

Redux: I Got the Post Puppy Blues

By: | January 30, 2018
My majestic animal

When I first published this post, we had just brought home our adopted pupper Moro. Now, we’ve had her for over two years, and when people come over they compliment how well trained she is. (Sometimes people think she’s a service dog, because we make her carry our groceries in a little backpack, because we are lazy and it tires her out.)  It’s taken many, many hours of training and help from experts to get to this point, but Moro never barks and can run around off leash without a problem now. No more puppy blues for me! But if you got a Christmas puppy, and you’re now realizing oh my god you have a puppy what the hell are you supposed to do with it, this post is for you.

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Anybody who knows me at all, in any context, probably knows that I adopted a dog two weeks ago. It’s all I talk about all the time. Sources know that she might try to get in my lap during an interview. Friends know that they’re invited over any time to see her and teach her how to play nice. My family knows because I already brag about how much better behaved she is than their dogs.

What they probably don’t know is that for a few days in a row last week I came home from running errands and sat on my floor and cried. Continue reading →

Go ahead, call me a quack

By: | January 29, 2018

I have a friend who is a magician. He performs the occasional stage show with card tricks and coins hidden behind the ear. His work is sleight of hand, a flash of movement deceiving the eye. He’d say it’s science. You experiment and find what actually works.

My friend, Angus Stocking, is also a tarot reader with his own small business for clients who have questions about love, money, and other volatile, mysterious indulgences. For him, reading people’s cards is different from stage magic. In one he wows the audience with gentlemanly distraction, and in the other, he believes he is accessing an invisible realm of order and prediction where each card holds symbolic information relevant to the viewer’s life.

Besides reading cards, Angus might have you reach into a bag to dig out a rune stone marked with one of 25 symbols, or colored marbles for the I Ching, a Chinese divination technique dating back 3,000 years.

“Sometimes you need the extra umph of a miracle to listen to what is being said,” Angus tells me.

Angus has a scientific mind. He’s a land surveyor by trade and makes the bulk of his living writing papers for the infrastructure industry, studying and writing about materials and engineering techniques for bridges, manhole covers, sewer drains, and skyscrapers around the world. He reads fortunes on the side.

Does he honestly think it’s real?

“I regularly experience synchronicities or intuitive predictions at a rate that argues against simple chance,” Angus says. “It becomes fatuous to insist there is not a spiritual component.” Continue reading →