This is a collection of articles dealing with organic gardening, ecology, environmental restoration, news items of interest, travel and just about anything else I find of interest and willing to share with others around the globe. - ENJOY!
Another interesting New study which discovers how mushrooms can be as satiating as meat when protein levels are matched
nutritionalfacts.org
But which mushrooms ??? Wood ear, crimini, oyster, Italian brown, enoki, white button, stuffing, shiitake, chanterelle, and portobello mushrooms were compared to see which was best at inhibiting aromatase enzyme activity. You'll be surprised.
Another kool study on a natural food item which can aid in weight loss. Remember my last post on the weight loss benefits of Olive Oil. So many interesting articles on how Mushrooms can fuel batteries, inspire tiny homes, be grown in diapers and even create building "sausages," which just might help construct the homes of the future. But now we read that they can also help with weight loss. Paul Stamets even says they can save the universe. Well, maybe just the earth and reverse climate change. He gets overly excited about mushrooms. The Soil people say grassfed beef can reverse climate change. The reality is that to save the earth, all people in general all around the globe need to make numerous lifestyle changes and create different behavioral patterns, but how likely is that ? In this new study published by the Mushroom Council in Eurekalert, an organization that obviously has a vested interest in promoting the benefits of edible fungi – 32 women and men were split into two groups. One group ate 226 grams of sliced white button mushrooms (Agaricus bisporus) twice a day while the other consumed 28 grams of meat twice a day. Those amounts contained equal amounts of protein, which proved significant in the study, with results showing that the people who included the mushrooms in their diets reported feeling significantly fuller and less hungry than the meat eaters. They also tended to eat less calories during the day if they started with the mushrooms in their breakfasts.
"Previous studies on mushrooms suggest that they can be more satiating than meat, but this effect had not been studied with protein-matched amounts until now," said gut health and satiety researcher and study author Joanne Slavin, PhD, RD, professor at the University of Minnesota. "As with previous published research, this study indicates there may be both a nutritional and satiating benefit to either substituting mushrooms for meat in some meals or replacing some of the meat with mushrooms."
Without adding anything further, you can read the rest of the account in the link below:
Could Olive Oil be the key to weight loss? Scientists discover even the SMELL of it can make us feel full & not hungry
Courtesy of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Okay, I have no clue as to the power of merely smelling olive oil making you feel full and not hungry. But when my wife and I were on the Greek island of Zakynthos, we went with a bus tour up into the mountains and stopped at the village called Agios Leon. There was a little Olive oil pressing factory there called Olive Oil Press Margaris Lamprinos & Co. Before we stopped, our lady tour guide who was from Finland and had lived there in Zakynthos for over 20 years, told us the story of the Mediterranean diet which includes generous use of Olive Oil. She said the Greeks don't cook with it so much as they pour it over food after it's been prepared. She said it is why many there are not overweight. She said it does something to improve your metabolism and make you feel full and less hungry. Interesting note here on our tour guide lady. She was speaking Greek to the driver, but when spoke English, she sounded exactly like a friend of mine back in Anza. She even looked a bit like her. I actually thought so in the beginning of our trip, but didn't tell my wife until the lady revealed her country of origin. For those reading who know me up in Anza, I'm talking about Sirkka Rosada. How uncanny is that ? 😲 Whatever! 😎
Bus Tour to village of Agios Leon & Olive Press Co
The village where this olive oil press factory is location is mostly a mountainous terrain which offers excellent growing conditions for high quality olives and fine tasting olive oil. So we had the opportunity to tour the olive oil press company and get direct first hand look at the entire olive oil production process from the past to the present. We tasted their excellent virgin olive oil served with freshly baked homemade bread and local olives. And there were different flavours of olive oil. Some with a hint of garlic, orange or lemon. Others with different herbs. They offered two different types of whole olives and olive paste. Yesterday at 10:00 in the morning I ate some left over sweet potatoes, squash, onions and mushrooms with one hamburger patty my wife made the night before. But then I decided to pour some of the olive oil we bought over the reheated up food. But interestingly enough in the evening at about 6:00 in the evening, my wife wanted to know what I wanted for dinner and I said I really wasn't hungry and in fact I felt full. I had a small bowl of potato chips as a snack and and I didn't even like those. But then it hit me what I had done with the olive oil that morning, what it's effect was, what the tour guide said and what I found this morning in the Eureka Science Research Feed. There is a study by Virginia Tech researchers regarding the health benefits of olive oil. Two major things were found to improve. Diabetes and weight loss. The beauty of my own experience here is not that I read something first and decided to try it. But rather pouring the olive oil over food and not feeling hungry the rest of the day. Then remembering our road trip in Zakynthos and what was told to us, plus this article this morning. So here it is:
I decided to google some other info and there is a lot in studies and articles out there. The usual problem with Scientists is that they are generally by nature skeptical of natural methods of anything. If they can't synthesize and process something for corporate profit, then it must be no good. Anyway, here's another from Mail Online:
"Landslide on California highway part of $1 billion in damage"
This is Part II of my post about the Central California Coast Highway and natural mishaps that have befallen the Big Sur area with wildfire and flooding. Part I is below.
In an ironic twist, I've had this post in draft form since December 15th 2016, yet I've spent so much time pondering how to find a way to conclude it and then suddenly this catastrophic event above took place in the very area I wanted to highlight an an example of infrastructure rethinking. This section of Pacific Coast Highway is notorious for is instability. There's really no bedrock, the soil is made up of loose soil and fractured rock on an extremely steep mountain slope. In so many ways the unstable geology here is reminsicent of the broken fractured geology of the Carrizo Gorge area of eastern San Diego County where a series of 17+ tunnels have always been in danger of total collapse as this tunnel #16 above right which was recently seen collapsed this yearas seen in a January 31, 2017 YouTube video, weeds and large boulders obstruct the track. The American way of road building in the early days had many twists and turns. The roads didn't offend the landscape, but rather flowed along with it. In later years roads were straightened to increase speed and ease travel and this often meant blasting their way through mountains and other obstacles. Unfortunately many places are unstable and have a long history of bandaid fixes and patches, only to fall down again during the next storm or earthquake event. It was back in December 2016 that I saw what could be the answer to the bad stretch of roadway from the way sensitive care was taken by this article below.
"Scientists hope a new approach to planning road infrastructure will increase crop yield in the Greater Mekong region while limiting environmental destruction, and open dialogues between developers and the conservation community"
A new highway snakes through the mountains of the upper Mekong in the picture above & right which was needed to improve transportation infrastructure which would benefit the economy. But rather than tackling the steep unstable slopes along those hills and creating an ecological nightmare, they opted for something that would be intitially more expensive to build, but in the long run safer and easier to maintain while providing a better conservation purpose at less cost over time. The very first images that popped into my head when I read this study were the many dangerous landslide points along California's beautiful Pacific Coast Hwy 1. Had such dangerous locations been bypassed with more superior engineering at original construction, the loss of life, property and permanent damage to the environment would never have played out the way it has over the past several decades. Of course way back when it was first built, they most likely had very little money aside from technology. This mostly was a tourist scenic route as opposed to major economic transportation corridor which is east of here with Hwy 101. Not only would being a scenic route want to avoid tunnels, the geology would make it almost impossible just like San Diego's impossible railroad to Imperial Valley. Clearly there are many places along the coast highway where steep slopes should be abandoned and ocean infrastructure considered. And there is usually no consensus on how or if this should be done. Here are some of the ideological roadblock hatreds from two opposing sides as the article pointed out:
"Conservationists can to appear to oppose nearly all new infrastructure, while developers and their financial backers are often fairly mute on the environmental impact of their proposals. This can lead to a breakdown in communication." (University of Cambridge)
Maybe both environmentalists and developers should learn how to use the data to avoid building those so-called highways to hell. But I wouldn't bet on it. As it stands now, even some of the fix-it patches they have already done will always be subject to removal by Nature in one fell swoop no matter how sophisticated and technologically advanced they believe their skills are.
Devil''s Slide area on Hwy 1 south of San Francisco in rock fractured by faults in San Andreas zone.
image - California Department of Transportation
This construction zone at right is Pitkins Curve on State Highway 1, the California Department of Transportation is completing a bridge that juts out from the side of the cliffs, leaving the old highway to capture falling rocks which I believe is finished now. My wife and I passed through here heading south on Cabrillo Hwy 1 towards San Luis Obispo, California. Some would argue that it would ruin the scenery by putting part of the highway viaduct bridge off the shoreline into the water, but can we really say that these massive scars since the original construction are more scenic ? Below here is the finished product we drove through on our way south.
I love this combination of half tunnel half bridge landslide shelter which respects that the area is slide prone and impossible to tame. This type of design allows for periodic sliding which is common feature of this geography. But it also hopefully allows no danger to befall automobile travelers along Hwy 1. This type of structure is uncommon to most of Southern California, but well known and very common in many of the northern parts of the world.
British Columbia's Hwy 1 Lanark Snow Shed is 316m long
Image - TranBC Canada
Above and Below are beautiful examples of what are termed either Snow Sheds or Avalanche Sheds.
Below is British Columbia's Great Bear Snow Shed on the Coquihalla Highway and it's interior drive
Image - CWMM Consulting Engineers Ltd
Ultimately these types of partial tunnel shelter designs on mountain sides allow natural slides to occur rather than preventing them is what that Pitkins Curve Bridge is all about. Unfortunately such construction is rare in Southern California where weather and climate have traditionally been pleasant most of the time and allowed the State to save money by taking a shortcut approach which has allowed development to increase at a faster pace and that's ashame for both Humans and Nature.
Image - LE CHIC EN ROSE - Model Railway
I know, it's a model train, but scenes like this are common everywhere in the real world of Switzerland. The Swiss cannot afford to ruin and destroy or make mistakes on landscapes they do not have. One stupid engineering blunder could ruin a steep mountain valley and almost render it unusable forever by bringing an entire unstable mountainside down into a valley.
Image - Northwest Air News
Above here is the Golden Pass Scenic Train near Zwissimen station Switzerland. I remember traveling through many tunnels and avalanche shelters on the train back in 1976 when I first visited Europe. This photo above reminds me of that movie scene from the 1965 WWII flick, "Von Ryan's Express," where Frank Sinatra single handedly holds off all those German soldiers in that Alps avalanche tunnel while his fellow prison camp escapee comrades make it over the border from Italy into Switzerland. All through the Alps these incredible infrastructures were everywhere and many of them seemed to have been built a century ago. Even the numerous public walkways or pathways and trails are all lined with stone along terraced hillsides to prevent erosion and degredation which were meant to last for centuries. Much of this careful done by hand has lots of natural character while providing a more maintenance free infrastructure system. Nothings perfect, but this kind of thinking is as close as you get. It's a work of Art.
image - jw.org
Public Pathways in Switzerland's Lavaux Wine Region
What about Tunnels and Wildlife Corridors ??? Maybe Nature's trying to tell mankind something !!!
Tragic Landslide event in 2010 on a Motorway in Taiwan
Image of Dipslope Failure - Reuters
A catastrophic slope failure incident took place at 14:33 on April 25, 2010, at the Da-Pu section of National Freeway No. 3 in northern Taiwan. It resulted in a nearly 200,000 m3 debris mass on the freeway and caused five deaths.
Early traditional road building like that of the iconic American highway Route 66 often flowed with the landscape's natural geography. It rarely offended the land by blasting through formidable mountain barriers for a more straighter convenient tourist travel. The early roads hugged river canyons, had many "S" curves, some like this one on the right called 'Deadmans Curve' which is old Hwy 99 through California's Grapevine Canyon which was eventually replaced & road straightened when Interstate 5 was constructed. I can understand thier reasoning, but why not make a short tunnel through that low hillside which would allow deer, mountain lion and other large animals easy access to the riparian canyon corridor below without danger of crossing the freeway ? Large cuts in roadways are also constantly subject to slides in California either by heavy rain storms or earthquakes.
Postcard image - socalregion.com
Above is an old postcard photo of an early Hwy 99 switchback roadway up the canyon. I get the reasoning for straightening out a endlessly twisting roadway infrastructure for convenience and safety. But long term maintenance and forethought should also have been considered and incorporated into many design plans for Interstate 5 and they weren't.
Image - Matt Beckstead 2011
This photo above is a wildlife ecoduct on the highway from Calgary, Alberta to Invermere, British Columbia. Over here in Sweden, while I'm not exactly keen on many things about living here, I do respect and applaud their numerous attempts at tunnels and wildlife overpasses like these two examples above and below. When we travel to Oslo Norway or Stockholm Sweden, these infrastructures are all along the route. They allow Moose and large Elk to travel from one side of the motorway to the other. It prevents automobile collisions with these large animals which also saves human life. Are they really all that complicated to design and build ? I come from Southern California which in the decades since WW II has had excessively almost unrestricted growth and doing things cheaply has been their road most taken. However in the long run many areas are ongoing maintenance nightmares.
Main Reasons for Highway Wildlife Over & Under Passes
Image - Inside Philanthropy
Google Earth
In Southern California there has been a movement to build more and more of these wildlife overpasses to prevent the larger animals from becoming roadkill. Yes we see roadkilled squirrels & rabbits all the time, but it's the larger animals like Deer, Bears, Cougars, Wolves and Coyotes which are not nearly as abundant as the smaller animals. Plus there is the human life safety factor. Hitting a large animal on a highway (usually at late night) is a dangerous experience. One area of controversy for roadkill is the passes between the Santa Monica Mountains, especially where Cougars of Mountains Lions attempt to traverse such passes to get from one part of their traditional territoral range to another. For me coming from San Diego County, I never understood why a tunnel was never proposed and implemented when the newer Mission Gorge Road bypass was built back in the 1960s for a wildlife gap connection between Cowles Mountain's Pyles Peak and Kwaay Paay Peak next to the San Diego River's Mission Gorge within the Mission Trails Regional Park.
Image from Trail to Peak's website
If you look towards the left hand side of the photograph above, you can see where Mission Gorge Road leaves west Santee headed towards San Diego's Mission Valley. It pushes upwards from Santee through the gap between Pyles Peak and Kwaay Paay Peak. This would be the ideal location for building a tunnel to allow a wildlife corridor above and allowing a major connection between both sections of Mission Trails. The other major spot which would have provided good beneficial wildlife corridor would have been a short tunnel through the gap between North Fortuna Mountain and Miramar Military Reservation along Freeway 52 which is on the right hand side of the photo above.
From Trails to Peak's website
Again here is the entire map of Mission Trails Regional Park and you can easily see both Pyles Peak and Kwaay Paay Peak with Mission Gorge road running through the center of both. Perfect spot for wildlife corridor.
Photo credit: Dr. Yun Wang
I kid you not, if Southern California had the mega-fauna (Asian Elephant) problems common to the Simao-Xiao Mengyang expressway in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan Province, China, heads would roll if something sensable wasn't done immediately. So getting back to our California Route 1 Cabrillo Highway along the central coast, I really think that building a viaduct type of bridge over water construction would be the way to go and still be beautful and scenic. Allowing those unstable steep slopes to settle and heal with native vegetation would be much more eye pleasing than allowing the area to continue to degrade because of a belief that Nature has to be tamed and conformed or bent to our will. Somewhere Jennifer Doudna just fell off a chair. Below is another example of successful over water viaduct down in Australia.
Photo: david_wimble via Instagram
Sea Cliff Bridge in Australia
Seriously folks, picture California's Central Coast where most of the major catastrophic landslides have historically taken place and imagine a picturesque viaduct bridge like the one above to bypass the danger and allowing the land to heal with it's native coastal sage scrub.
"Life goes on though, and fires are not unnatural"
Margarethe Brummermann
Image - CNN
Annimated Graph - USA Today
The quote at the top of the post is from Margarethe Brummermann, Biologist from Dortmund Germany who resides in the Tucson area. She had written a post about Mount Lemmon which towers above Tucson to the north. I made a comment on her page about how my wife and I had driven up to Mount Lemmon last year May 2016 and how sad we were to see so much of the forest destroyed by wildfires. I made mentioned how I had first visited Mount Lemmon back in the late 1970s and there was hardly ever a scene where wildfire had damage anything. There was always the occasional snag here and there, but forests and even the high desert scrub were always able to recovery properly. That has all changed now. But her reply to me was simply, "Life goes on though, and fires are not unnatural."Her viewpoint is reflective of most all fire ecologists who champion fire as natural, yet often times have a hard time differentiating between human (especially if Native American) and lightning caused fires. Earlier this year, Fire Ecologist, Jennifer Balch, and other researchers revealed that 84% of all wildfires are human caused. Oh, but it get's even worse. They found that the actual figure for California, Oregon, Washington and on up to British Columbia in Canada is actually a figure at 90% human caused. So it question begs, is that something we should consider natural or unnatural ??? I only ask because humans today are considered unexceptional and nothing more than animals if you read the latest scientific literature on the subject. Don't get me wrong here, I don't believe anything as asinine as that. But it does reveal how an ideologically driven worldview can infect and distort the practice of Science and create ignorance as opposed to understanding. Historically, the majority of wildfires on Mount Lemmon have had a human cause. This has also exacerbated theproblem of human introduced non-native, Buffel Grass, to invade clear up through the Saguaro Forests into the mid-elevation ranges of the Mount Lemmon. Here is that interesting finding regarding the human 90% origined cause of most wildfires at present.
Last year when we traveled up the Mount Lemmon highway, we were greeted all along the way by an overwhelming sea of Buffelgrass which blanketed all areas of the Santa Catalina Mountains near Tucson. Researchers say warming temperatures and fewer winter freezes are helping the invasive plant spread, posing a threat to saguaro cactuses and other native plants. The Tucson Sentinel even had an article with a chilling title, "Arizona without Saguaros? As climate warms, desert's future uncertain." The Saguaros are such an iconic symbol of Arizona and the Sonoran Desert. But they cannot take wildfire. They have no protection against it. I can't hardly imagine them being eliminated permanently.
Grant Martin/Cronkite News Service
Bromus tectorum, an invasive species commonly called “cheatgrass,” grows in an area of the Coconino National Forest burned in a 1996 wildfire. I strongly dislike Cheatgrass. This is the invasive noxious weed whose stickers you have to pull out of your socks every so often down the trail when you go on a hike.
Grant Martin/Cronkite News Service
Researchers say this area of the Coconino National Forest, which burned in 1996, is decades away from returning to its native state, if it ever does. They say rising temperatures have weakened trees, raising the potential for devastating wildfires that will open the door to invasive species. Don't expect recovery anytime soon.
Image - Getty Images
I remember reading the fire ecology literature some time back in 2006. There was an account written by Arizona Historian Marshall Trimball of the old west in New Mexico, when a Cavalry Officer was complaining to his superiors about his men smoking cigarettes and dropping them along the trail as they all rode horseback. The problem was they were starting grass fires from their careless bad habit. Of course this was in the 1800s, when Indians still existed and practiced their ecological conservation with fire. Yet hsitorical writings from the 1800s relay that they used fires to war against their enemies. Not exactly eco-friendly. I know, it destroys the narrative. This 1800s is the time period for celebration for most fire ecologists who champion how natural the forested ecosystems all were back then because of Indians. But as I've questioned this before, if fire ecologists were looking at the world back then and telling us how natural wildfire played in ecology of all plant community systems, how did they reconcile white European Soldiers starting fires with their cigarette butts ? Was that a good thing for Nature ? How did this factor into their research of what was good for the plant community environment ? Native Americans generally get a free pass on why they started fires and they really shouldn't. See the post, Dances With Myths. But now what about the white man back then ? Today there is a movement to down grade human beings as not being so exceptional. Mankind is now being considered nothing more than animals equal to everything else. Does this now mean that the research on wildfire causes being 84% human fault provide us a new designation of the term, "Natural" ??? 😲 Would it mean that humans carelessly throwing down a cigarette butt today should now be considered perfectly normal behaviour ??? 😟 We seem to be living in a time period of redefining everything from it's historical normalcy.
But what about all those heavy Rains🚿 ??? Didn't things get better ??? 🌳
Image - Pismo Hotels
This year's rainy season of 2017, California experienced one of those unprecedented rainy seasons, after four years of serious intense drought. But everyone cheered Hooray 🙌 and celebrated with waving pom poms that all was well again in California again. The drought was now over, or was it. Indeed, heavy rains came, even to the point of major flooding events up and down the state. While there were some very clear catastrophic negatives, one of the great joys of all that rain brought out a spectacular display of wildflower blooms. Starting in early March, flowers popped up all across Southern and Central California and produced some seriously spectacular scenery. The photo opportunity didn't go unnoticed nor wasted by many of the non-profit eco-activist groups hoping to cash in on a fund raising opportunity by posting pics on their website's & Social Network pages indicating that Nature seemed to have rebounded from the jaws of death. Or you know, that old Jurassic Park Cliche (a phrase or opinion that is overused and betrays a lack of original thought) "Life found a way." Except that things really were'nt all that rosey as they advertised. First, some of the people were a little too anxious about getting out there first with they cameras. Then it appears that much of the water came in so fat and furiously, that most of it raced back to the Pacific Ocean like a bullet train. Some water did fill up many of the State's reservoirs, but the surrounding landscape didn't have great percolation into the hills and mountains.
Even Merced hydrologist, Roger C. Bales, who advocated & pushed for increased logging in the Sierra Nevadas which he claimed would stop water hog trees from gulping down precious water which would have otherwise ended up in streams and rivers causing reservoirs to fill for his agricultural buddies to use downstream (See the Modesto Bee article: Overgrown Sierra forests gulping water that could flow to Valley ), jumped up and down when the rains came. Why ??? Because now his story has changed. He now claims to have been proven right because the 130+ million dead trees caused by the out of control bark beetle outbreak didn't have a chance to suck all that water which ended up in the streams and rivers and filled all the reservoirs. This is a farce folks. The great lack of water over the past five years had zero to do with there being too many trees sucking & gulping all the water down and had everything to do with the State's worst mega-drought in years. It hadn't rained in those five years (or extremely little rain coupled with high Temps) and with or without trees water eventually won't run in creeks, streams and rivers to fill reservoirs. Even a child gets that. I knew this from viewing early on all the photographs of dried dead invasive weeds and not all that long after the flowers died that the drought was not over. Now look where they are over there with heat waves and no more rain. Plus as indicated at the top of this post, lookie where we are now with the 2017 Wildfire season stats. So have things really changed for the better ? Nope, same old same old. 😏
Look, I refuse to celebrate and worship fire as some kind of animist Creator the way most fire ecologists worship it. Yes fire has always existed and is a reality in the natural world and can be used as an excellent tool for correcting problems along with other management tool like thinning forests in any ecosystem if done properly. And I've actually done that. But mostly humans have misused and abused fire, even the so-called experts. Prior to 2006 I never read much of anything about the science discipline of fire ecology, although I worked with people in the US Forest Service back in the 1980s who did prescribed burns. But I've also fought them tooth and nail against many of their ideas which are complete failures when it comes to reforestation techniques. Take the Fire Ecologist insistence that fire is needed for the wild seed germination. For example, Tecate Cypress is one of those trees in which Fire Ecologist have insisted for decades needs fire in order to propagate itself. Prior to reading their literature, in all my 30+ years of outdoors exploration experience and seed collecting, I never found this to be true of Tecate Cypress. There are numerous circumstances under which the seed is dispursed or spread and germinates fine without the need of fire within old growth chaparral which hasn't burned in a couple of hundred years. Same with Arizona Cypress. Fire is not always necessary, but you cannot tell them this. Science is not supposed to be about working in a Lab and venturing outdoors once in a while on a couple token field trips to make the research look legit. You have to live outdoors with nature. Look, I am not credentialed. I have no alphabet soup initials behind my name, nor some fancy coveted title before my name. Thank God. That allows me the freedom of not being shackled to a dogma and infected by the worldview biases and flawed presuppositions common to the Scientific Orthodoxy's industrial business model. I'm just one of 6+ billion people on Earth subjected to the negative consequences of inept decision making from a world leadership which has been weighed in the scales and found deficient. But it's allowed me to view things from a periferal viewpoint as opposed to tunnel-vission.
Image from H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock
BTW, here is an example of Prairie Fire and a Steam Locomotive, 1872, whose smoke stacks belched cinders (pre-spark aresters) and started numerous prairie and forest fires in the days of the old west. Wonder if that was ever factored into the fire ecologist fire is a creator research ??? This video below from China's still operational locomotives servicing coal mines just question begs, "Do fire ecologists who insist that fire is a natural necessary healthy component of plant ecosystems ever factor in human stupidity as part of that natural component mechanism ???" I know I know, because the Indians did it! 😕
Fire sparks of Steam in Sandaoling Coal Mine Railway China
References I've written for seed germination, not entertainment, just practical real world application and fun:
Meandering Floodplains provide Real World Biomimetic Blueprints for Infrastructure Designs vrs Engineering Inspireded by Ambitious Human Business Venture Schemes
Image - ourwellnessway.com
The iconic classic movie, Chinatown, makes it abundantly clear that humans have always disrespected designs found in Nature, especially when their wouldview (based on blind faith) believes that such designs are an impedement to their economic business successes. This is certainly true with the history of Los Angeles where business development and growth hinged on aquisition of water, both it's abundance and controling it. LA’s legendary water superintendent William Mulholland was driven towards channeling this water from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles. But stealing water from far away north wasn't enough. Vast floodplains in Southern California had potential economic value for both agriculture and the creation of an industrial infrastructure. So the natural meandering physics of flowing water on floodplains had to be tamed and harnessed. Take for example this photograph above with the meandering switchback pattern of the river. From a politics and businessman perspective, this impedes quick transportation of both people or goods. Logically (from a flawed human perspective) a straight channel direct line would seem to be the obvious choice. Same logic for getting rid of stormwater quickly from cities to prevent flooding, straight channeling seems the better choice. This is evident by all the straight floodcontrol channel infrastructure you can find throughout all of Southern California like the Los Angeles River below. Unfortunately, the path of least resistance hasn't always been the safest or most efficient route for moving human economic goals forward.
Photographed by Lane Barden
Industrial corridor of the Los Angeles River at the Seventh Street bridge in downtown Los Angeles, California
Image - Nature Conservancy - Stream Restoration
In my other post on Beavers and slow water movement, I had a cartoon at the top of the post of a beaver/builder constructung his dam. Other Beavers in the cartoon were on the river bank looking like eco-activists with protest signs demanding to have the dam torn down so that ALL of the river water could be used to irrigate the Pacific Ocean. But that really is no joke, because that is exactly how southern California has mandated it's floodcontrol infrastructure be designed for quick water movement supposedly to prevent flooding and endangering human beings and their businesses. But how well has that really been working for us ??? Often times channeled rivers, especially those in agricultural valleys channeled by earthen levees have been breached on many sides during high flood waters due to exceptional rainfall years. Like the photo here on the right where human modifications to the landscape strongly influences triggers to instability, accelerating the erosion potential and altering sediment transport and flow regimes of channels. Pay close attention to this picture of the Walla Walla River back in December of 1964 which defied human attempts at channelization and re-created it's former meanders, point bars, pools, and riffles. Can you click on the image and count how many right and left breaces there are ? That's just the nature of water and physical natural laws. By their very nature many people not only resent laws by humans, but also disrespect natural laws. These disastrous events are not so much the fault of nature as they are exposure of inept decision making by the elites among humans who believe they are above fault. After all, most of the scientific orthodoxy believes nature is flawed, imperfect and badly designed. (Okay, I won't go there, but you know it's true) In their worldview's paradigm the floodwaters should be managed as a waste product as something that should be gotten out of the system as quickly as possible. And so all floodcontrol infrastructure is really being considered as a greywater infrastructure with it's system of concrete pipes, culverts, channels, etc to facilitate water out of the urban environment as fast as possible to it's final destiny, the oceans. In reality, this is simply gross scientific ignorance where researchers have bought into their flawed worldview. Here's one man who battled the prevailing scientific orthodoxy in Germany & Austria while championing natural designs based on Nature most all of his life.
Institute of ecological Technology
In the early 1920s, Austrian Forester, Viktor Schauberger, also a self taught physicist and river engineer, was given the task of helping an Austrian Prince who became broke after World War I to improve his economy by finding a way to bring valuable virgin Timber down from remote mountain properties he owned which had no easy access. Timber in those days would had to have been hauled out with mule teams on less than ideal narrow roads through rugged country. Viktor Schauberger had a nature based scheme for building a unique log flume for transport which was very unconventional for the times. As with anything, logging flume design then consisted of straight walls and flat bottoms or at best flat bottoms with 'V' shaped design for the sides. But the flow dynamics were horrible. Schauberger's design was to be biomimic designs he had observed in Nature. He went with a half egg shaped design in which the flume would twist here and there like a snake in biomimicry of the meandering habit of a large river on a massive floodplain.
Very crudely designed log flume Quebec, Canada
As the story was been told, Viktor Schauberger acquired the contract for building the flume caught the attention of the Estate Administrators and the Institute of Hydraulics at the University of Vienna. He was considered an anti-science Luddite by the science orthodoxy of his day. They hated the man. The day before it was due to be commissioned, Viktor decided to make a preliminary test of the flume's performance. An average-sized green beech log was ushered into the mouth of the flume and to his horror it stranded on the bottom after a few metres and would not budge. This wasn't supposed to happen according to he Natural designed flume calculations. Important dignataries, including his mocking critics were all going to be there at the grand celebration. After his workers were sent away to give himself some space to think, Viktor sat on a rock to ponder the situation. As he sat down he felt something scrabbling underneath his leather trousers and sprang up to his feet to find a snake. Grabbing it quickly, he flung it into the log holding basin, which supplied the flume with water and where the logs were to be assembled before being guided into the flume. As he watched it swim to the other side, he wondered how it was able to swim so fast.
Illustration - giewasser.ch
Then he suddenly became aware of its peculiar serpentine 'S' shaped movement. It appeared like Nature had again came to his aid again. Calling his workers back, he ordered the holding basin to be drained and the log jammed up withing the flume removed. He then gave them instructions on how to attach thin wooden slats to the curved sides of the flume walls, which would act like the rifling in gun-barrels and cause the water to rotate anti-clockwise at left hand bends and clockwise at right hand bends. You can see the illustration blueprints here on the left. Working all through the night with the promise of double wages, the work was finished by early next morning ready for commissioning at the Grand Opening. The pond holding basin for the logs was refilled the next day in preparation for releasing the first logs. His critics were said to be dumbfounded by his unconventional flume design. Eventually the time came for the flume sluice-gates to be opened and the logs guided into the mouth of this half-egg-shaped channel. One particularly large beech log (which they did not want to test) managed to get itself included with the first few logs and, half way into the flume it suddenly jammed and the water began to back up behind it. While everyone there watched with anticipation, all at once with a loud gurgling sound it was sucked forwards and departed round the first bend. The other logs followed, passing easily down the flume, being kept away from the sides at the bends by those longitudinal vortices induced by the rifling slats which they installed the night before. Needless to say, it was a success, but maybe too much of a success. The Prince and his Princess got greedy and clear cut almost all the forest to increase their fortunes. Funny, nothing's changed one iota since the 1920s. Well, that's not true, it's actually worse.
Image - LifinLapland.com - Nellim Log Flume
While the early history of true biomimetics regarding hydrology is interesting, how does any of this benefit the average person today, especially in view of the further degradation of our planet's natural world that has been accelerated through the misuse and abuse of science ??? While there are some who truly believe in biomimicry of Nature, they are still greatly outnumbered by those who would trash Nature through the worldview argument of Nature being badly designed and only intelligent free-thinking humans can fix those flaws through scientific shortcuts. Okay, so change of pace here. There is an organization whose mission is to revitalize the contrete channelized L.A. River bed. who are known as the "Friends of the L.A. River". That's a tough assignment they've given themselves. Even during the lightest rainstorms, the greater L.A. infrastructure is human designed & engineered to rapidly facilitate storm water off the streets, parking areas, rooftops etc and efficiently send it rapidly on it's way down to the Pacific Ocean. This is an incredible waste of valuable freshwater resources. But believe it or not there are viable real world natural solutions to reduce runoff and redirect water into public and private landscapes and possibly percolate much of in into the subsoil layers of the ancient floodplains to be used later as well water. How much depends really on people being interested in change for the better. Below I'll provide a gallery of photos demonstrating how street rainwater harvesting techniques through biomimetics can change the present Hydraulic infrastructure and save disappearing fresh water resources from the outside of the region. Take a look, much of where this is already practiced is from areas with higher rainfall averages than Southern California like up north and back east.
Large City Street Landscaped Medians
Image - svrdesign.com
This is the central California city of Paso Robles, who are successfully positioning themselves at the leading edge of this municipal rainwater harvesting technology which biomimic's nature by the use of "baffles" which creates a switch back motion replicating the meandering pattern in the design & using periodic low dams called weirs (replicates beaver dams on small scale) which deliberately slows & backs up water raising the water level behind the weir in the planting bed that allows a good percentage of water to percolate deeper into deeper subsoil layers. Top photo illustrate what happens during storms and lower photo reveals an attractive look when dry. Utilizing native plants and having knowledge of how to encourage one gallon containerized seedlings to develop deeper root systems would truly help such plants make it without any further water assistence the rest of the year. There could be a minimal irrigation infrastructure of deep irrigation designs, which would be utilized only in emergency summer situations to supplement and apply water three or four foot below the soil surface where most healthy California native plants want and prefer it.
Image - svrdesign.com
Here in this picture above you can see the baffles which look to be recycled small guage railway track with a center concrete guide on top of a bed of cobblestones which allows the waters to slow down and remain clean prior to easing into the actual planting beds. Further cobblestones downstream are both functional for keeping soil intact, allowing further percolation and have a decorative purpose that biomimics a dry streambed which are common in California.
Image - hawkinspartners.com
Curb and Gutter Rainwater Harvesting for Landscapes in Business Areas and Residential Main Streets
Image - State Collage Pensylvania
Curb cut-out inlet to rain garden on west side of Allen Street near Pennsylvania State College. Just like a forest with meandering water courses and beaver dams, the goal here would not be to prevent water from reaching the oceans, but slow it way way down and make it work for the benefit of all sorts life along the way down.
Image - State Collage Pennsylvania
This rain garden is demonstrating weir flow during rain event. For those who may not understand what the word "weir" means. The term "weir" is a Dam-like barrier across the horizontal width of a landscape bed that alters the flow characteristics of the water and usually results in a change in the vertical height of the water level. There are many designs of weir, but commonly water flows freely over the top of the weir crest before cascading down to a lower level section of the landscape bed. Again, the purpose here is not to prevent water movement down stream, but rather to slow water movement down and percolation with drainage at the end for major storm runoff.
Image - State Collage Pennsylvania
Now here is the full entire length-wise view of rain garden on west side of this Allen Street. Everything here is functional and decorative all at the same time. The concrete weirs again back the water up in a small pond behind the artificially replicated beaver dam. With a series of weirs, this would also prevent erosion of planting bed materials just the way a series of beavers dams would accomplish on a real life floodplain in the wild.
Residential Neighbourhoods and other low Traffic Side Streets
Image - progress-project.eu
Image - greywateraction.org
Sidewalk bioswale treats street runoff in Portland, Oregon
In cities like San Francisco California and Portland Oregon, their storm drains are connected to their sewer treatment plants, and the potential for hazard for such infrastructure design is that heavy rains cause the sewer plant to overflow with raw and partially treated sewer water into the bay or river. Other cities connect their storm drains to underground creeks, and the polluted oily water runs straight into the bay or nearby river. By cutting curbs and digging sunken basins into the “right-of way” or “parking strip” area of the sidewalk, you can turn street rainwater from a problem into an actual resource. Diverted rainwaer that falls on streets can nourish plants, protect creeks, and contribute to cleaner cities as a result of the planter bed's healthy microbial community taking care of the pollutants & turning them into safer elements.
Image - svrdesign.com
Preventing and reducing water pollution can be as simple as building a rain harvesting curb cut for the garden. Once again, this runoff water from streets can come in contact with various substances to pollute it like chemicals from fertilizer, oil from cars and garbage, etc. Before this polluted water makes its way into storm drains and our riparian ecosystems, we would filter it through a natural rain collecting garden with a strong healthy microbial soil community to digest & process it. Rain gardens can also add to a home’s curb appeal and allow runoff water to filter naturally and deeply down through your yard’s soil. Keep in mind also that many of these structure as also designed with outlets and/or drains into runoff water pipes to allow for those extreme weather downpour events.
Commercial Parking Lot Medians and Dividers
Image - landskapsarkitektur.no
What amazes me with many of the beautifully designed landscape medians in many places like these parking lots is the fact that they exist in mainly higher rainfall areas like the northern & eastern parts of the USA, Canada and Europe, like this example above in Norway. What about Southern California where it is even more needed because they lack water ? Free water that is otherwise facilitated rapidly down the drain so that they basically are forcing themselves to use public utility provided clean drinking water to irrigate their commercial and home landscapes.
Bioswale parking lot created by Lynn Capouya Landscape Architecture
This is the kind of thing that really makes sense. Love the plant selection for the area and keep in mind that mulch is an important part of this bioretention system to really work effectively. Rocks and other smaller cobblestones are perfect for the slowing down of water movement and work perfectly as a mulch to keep the ground cool and retain moisture levels in soils. This is extremely important in parking lots where they create a massive heat islands.
Image - grownative.org
These Natives plants within the planter accompanied by a species abundant microbial community within the soil system are able to filter the runoff and protect streams. They can recycle the pollutants & turn them into nutrients that the plants can use. No stream or river pollution to kill aquatic critters in the water environment. Also runoff volume is greatly reduced (not stopped) which prevents the violent scouring of the natural local creek or riverbeds which allows the system to be stable, much like it was prior to human pavement. I would love to do something like this picture (minus the parking lot) for my mother's property with street curb back in El Cajon California. Unfortunately I'd have to be living back there permanently to maintain it. However having said that, look below at this Walmart parking lot in Santee California.
Image - Google Earth
Walmart parking lot in Santee California
Last year in May/June 2016, my wife and I went back to my home town area of San Diego California and visited my mother who lives in the El Cajon/Santee area. Ignore the 2017 dates on the Google Earth picture, I just posted this to illustrate how illustrative it is of ir's improper design when they took this parking lot photograph. When we visited this exact parking lot (May 2016), it was 100+ F (40+ C) and I waited in the car while mum and wife went shopping. Half of those trees, irrigated by inefficient bubblers in a tiny planter median were dead or dying because they stopped watering them. Why did they cut back the water ? Because prices out there are outrageous, even when people have cut way back on watering like they were asked to in order to help buffer the shortages create by drought, the Water agency went and raised the water rates big time. Hence, the management decided the landscape was not worth the effort and expense. so the parking is nothing more than functional in purpose. Too bad and every customer who visits fights for that small shady spot for their car because of the effect of direct sun in 100+ degrees pushes inside temps 160+ degrees.
The Landscape median mechanism designs for Successful Water Harvesting
Image - Empowerhouse
These are just some simplified animated illustrations to help provide an easy way to comprehend the design of the soil system withing the planter. Water enters into the cells through curb cuts and flows to an area planted with native plants (preferably native to the region that are attractive and ornamental looking) & a microbial community system that are known to remediate heavy metals and toxins that vehicles usually leach on to the street, not to mention the totally unnecessary Agro-Chemical products used by commercial & home owner landscapers. The water is filtered through the topsoil where most of the roots are and then into a type of mixed gravel bed which will hold and store the bulk of the floodwater only then to seep slowly back into the subsoil layers and possibly as far as the moist ground water supply which helps to alleviate runoff to local waterways. Usually this rain water runoff would enter directly into the storm system, where it could lead to an increase in combined Sewer Overflows that contribute significantly to the pollution in our rivers and streams.
(Image courtesy of GeoSyntec Consultants)
Stormwater runoff flows into this type of bioretention area like the other one above, percolates through the soil (which acts as that bio- filter) and eventually drains into the groundwater; some of the water is also absorbed by the plants. Bioretention areas are usually designed to allow ponded water and with an overflow outlet to prevent flooding during larger storm events which are becoming more common. Where soils have low permeability or where faster drainage is desired, designers may incorporate a perforated underdrain that routes to a storm drain system. If you have a soil profile like my mother's place which is built on top of an ancient alluvial floodplain, then such drains may not be necessary. But if you have a clay or adobe type soil profile, then I'd recommend the drainage.
Nice Video Resources
This video surprisingly comes from the State of California. I say it's a surprise because you cannot see very much in the way of people practicing this water harvesting technique out there, with the exception of the Palm Springs & Coachella Valley areas.
This video below is excellent as it provides a how to for boring a hole through the curb and sidewalk to allow a inlet for stormwater to enter into the landscape strip.
This final link comes from Arizona. Actually it is a separate post I created because Arizona is much further along on this biomimicry and their climate almost mandates such a practice be done over there. And besides I thought it would have cluttered this post up with more info than it already has. 😏
