Rain

Yesterday it rained... and rained.  For the entire evening we netted 2.3" of precipitation, most of it during two large squalls.  Amazingly, the yard survived with little negative impact.  Stella was caught out in the storm, but we finally got her home.  No idea where Fluffy the feral cat goes in a storm like that, but she turned up dry and happy for breakfast this morning. 

Meanwhile, my conservation reading took a turn to Aldo Leopold.  This being the centennial of the Gila Wilderness, there are many pieces being written about him and his thoughts.  Here's part of the preface to the 1948 edition of The Sand County Almanac:   

Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the esthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture.

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten.

...

Such a view of land and people is, of course, subject to the blurs and distortions of personal experience and personal bias. But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. The whole world is so greedy for more bathtubs that it has lost the stability necessary to build them, or even to tum off the tap. Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.

Perhaps such a shift of values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free.

Extinction

The Arnold Arboretum e-mailed out this link -- https://arboretum.harvard.edu/stories/collections-extinction-abundance/ -- and that has got me thinking about endangered species, conservation, and all that.  In turn an old college friend sent me two interesting articles that discussed global issues, biodiversity, resilience, and sustainability.  That led to this reply to him:  

The planetary commons article was a good read and it meshed well with my current reading, https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/articles/10.3389/fsci.2024.1349350/full. Another illustration of the difference between a global commons and a planetary commons turned up recently in https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/food-environment/2024/the-impact-of-the-us-mexico-border-wall-on-biodiversity, where the disruption by The Former Guy's border wall is apparent at the local and regional level, including human social. 

 

NM has a state-level effort for protecting rare plants and they link to a UNM website, https://nhnm.unm.edu/botany/nm_rare_plant_conservation_strategy, with its map of conservation targets.  By the way, that map pretty much shows you where to go for interesting outdoor hikes. 

 

Meanwhile, the border wall seems to have stopped everything but human beings--https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/food-environment/2024/the-impact-of-the-us-mexico-border-wall-on-biodiversity.  

Just for fun, here's a photo of Black-eyed Susans at Bike-in-Coffee taken during yesterday's ride.  We peddled from the Nature Center down and back, using unpaved paths as much as possible.   

Courtesy of Loreena McKennitt

A poem by Rudolf Steiner:

The Bell

To wonder at beauty

Stand guard over truth

Look up to the noble

Resolve on the good

This leadeth us truly

To purpose in living

To right in our doing

To peace in our thinking

And teaches us trust

In the workings of God

In all that there is

In the widths of the world

In the depth of the soul 

As read at https://loreenamckennitt.com/reading/.

If a tree falls in the forest...

... and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Last week we lost a grand old cottonwood in the Botanic Garden.  It was a victim of a day of strong, gusty winds the weekend before.

It fell across the west loop of the trail in the Cottonwood Gallery.  It nearly crushed the four-wing saltbush that our Nature's Notebook group monitors.  

You can barely see the saltbush under the fallen canopy.

My friend Kent brought this link to my attention, an article in The Guardian by Tad DeLay.  The Guardian does a passing fair job of staying on top of climate change issues. 

 

Of course, if denialism isn't enough to make you slit your wrists, McGoey's favorite, Vaclav Smil and his doomsday writing will push you over the edge.  Pablo recommends wearing leather wrist protectors when you read things like https://e360.yale.edu/features/beyond-magical-thinking-time-to-get-real-about-climate-change.  The idea is that by the time you can unbuckle the wrist protectors, the suicidal urge will have passed.  (Let me know how that works out for you.) 

 

Something similar is happening in politics.  Many Democratic stalwarts (Caro among them) are just burned out, having dealt for so long with the MAGA party in general and The Former Guy in particular.  Doing everything we can to make sure TFG and his ilk aren't elected is critically important.  Voting is not denialism, although it would be by DeLay's definition.

 

Meanwhile, it's true that there is no individual action that can make a difference when it comes to global warming, taking individual steps do have an effect, even if not separately measurable.  And I don't call those steps "denial."  Virtue signalling can inspire others to make small lifestyle changes and they are cummulative.  My docent work at the BG lets me personally interact with and educate large numbers (well, about 600 per year) of visitors each year.  The Garden also has me plugged in to the conservation work at the BioPark, which in turn has me involved with State of NM endangered species activities.  Spurred on by Nirankar and Ty, Caro and I are diminishing our meat consumption and trying to stick to sustainable foods.  I am reminded of the parable about the hummingbird and the forest fire.

 

Capitalism is not as hopeless a case as DeLay would have you believe.  One of the biggest drivers will be the insurance industry.  Coastal flooding (I'm looking at you, Texas) intense hurricanes (hello, Louisiana), derechos, tornados, wildfires (Ruidoso this week), and all the rest will eventually make obtaining insurance prohibitively expensive or unavailable for risky rebuilds after disasters.  Hurricane and flood insurance in Florida is fast approaching that point.  When FEMA can't keep up, Congress will be forced to take action (hard to believe). 

 

Thanks for listening to my TED talk.  

The type specimen illustration of Stegnosperma for the photo tax.

Trees of the Field

Isaiah 55:12

“For you shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. 

It looks like phenologists are finally making headway on some vexing questions... https://www.quantamagazine.org/across-a-continent-trees-sync-their-fruiting-to-the-sun-20240618/.  Yet how European beech trees do it is still a mystery.  

We have a few birches in the Botanic Garden, but I don't know of any beeches, genus Fagus.  There is an American beech, Fagus grandifolia, native to our continent, but I don't know of any in our collection.    

Best I've got for a photo this evening is this one of a grand old cottonwood.

Los Poblanos

Los Poblanos Farm up the road a mile or two offered a talk and tour of their gardens hosted by fellow Nature's Notebooker, Judith Phillips.  Caro and I had a lovely time, learned a lot, and even got a few sprinkles of rain.  

I'm reminded that water is life and that millennia of human history lies beneath our every step in New Mexico.  And before that, millions of years of geology and evolution.  
 

Afterwards we had a drink and a nosh at the Campo Bar.  Met a fellow from Sandia who is in Janine's department.  Small world. 

The Swallowtail

After a long spring bereft of butterflies, yesterday our fennel was visited by a gravid black swallowtail.  As you can see in the video, she spent time laying more than a few eggs.  

Within a week, we'll have wee little caterpillars going about their caterpillar business.  

This is our sacrificial fennel, which the caterpillars are welcome to munch right to the ground.  Every year it rebounds with a second flush of growth (and sometimes a second crop of butterflies).  

I'll continue to buy fennel for dinner at the Co-op and leave our garden fennel to the butterflies.