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!
Interesting set of articles recently from the Los Angeles Times on various schemes for fixing the problems of the Salton Sea
Animated Gif - Los Angeles Times
(Gary Coronado /Los Angeles Times)
The issue with the eventual fate of the Salton Sea is at a critical point now. It actually always has been critical, but clearly the present set of negative ecological circumstances surrounding the sea encompass so many other health and ecological issues as never before. There have been many proposed solutions over the years, but nothing has ever really gotten done. After the initial Colorado river bank breach was corrected back in 1907, the sea level has been maintained by the irrigation runoff from farms in the Coachella and Imperial Valleys and two rivers (horribly polluted) coming out of Mexico, the Alamo River and the New River. The danger became even more elevated when the impending legislation to transfer some of the local farmers’ share of Colorado River water to San Diego County. Even then the studies showed that this disastrous decision would make the shoreline recede by more than a mile. And this is where the concentrated salinity and toxic pollution increases causing massive fish kills and bird dieoffs. Another side effect which damages human health are all the toxic dust storms from the dry fine silty lake bed where the sea has receded.
Animated Map - Los Angeles Times
(Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
Dead trees, debris and dead fish dotted the shoreline of the Salton Sea in 2015. This is now a common site everywhere along the Salton Sea's shores and beaches. For folks who are old enough to remember what the Sea once looked like, it's an incredible sadness to know how so much life has been destroyed. I'm fascinated with the Sea's historical creation back in 1905 with the irrigation canal construction blunder over in the Mexico area south of Yuma and some of the incredible wildlife changes which facilitated miles of shoreline ecosystem freshwater (at worst brackish) habitat. I'm even more fascinated with the sea's ancient freshwater Lake Cahuilla creation 1000s of years ago. I imagine the area was incredibly rich in all manner of wildlife, including the Sonoran beaver which would have existed in Southern California. The non-profit organization "Martinez Beaver" has a wonderful reprinted document from the state of California Fish and Game entitled, The Status of Beavers in California. Scroll down to page #23. This was an amazing piece in that it reveals the development of beaver activity in fresh water all the way to the Salton Sea via Alamo & New Rivers, which originate from the south at Mexican border. It documents a trek once taken down the Alamo River in April of 1940, by Robert Hart, from the California Division of Fish and Game, who examined this river by boat along its entire course in California from Mexico to the Salton Sea. He found evidence of Beaver activity from the Mexican border, through Holtville, through Brawley, through Calipatria and all the way into the Imperial Game Refuge near the Salton Sea past Calipatria and west of the town of Niland.
In one description there is mention of Beaver in and around several lakes on either side of the Alamo River next a Finney Gun Club. The map on the right shows the location of this hunting club being near Hwy 111 south of Calipatria where the highway crosses over this game refuge. Looking on Google Earth you can see the interesting pattern of these lakes (Finney, Ramer & Wiest lakes) along the Alamo River and also numerous smaller Ox-Bow Lakes which were created decades ago prior to the build up of towns and farmland creation when the Alamo was allowed to meander back and forth which is the nature of most rivers on floodplains. Now the river is pretty much maintained and kept channelized so as to not disturb the existing bordering farm fields which has tightened the river channel. But it was this region that had the heaviest concentration of beaver which would have all thrived in the rich abundant native riparian vegetation of a wide meandering floodplain, plus the same meander created countless ox-bow ponds everywhere which still exist in places. Keep in mind that prior to 1934, the Tamarisk and Arundo cane had not yet taken over and destroyed the native riparian ecosystem as it has done today. There were later drought years from 1931 and especially 1934 which brought serious water shortages to Imperial Valley. The regulation of the river by Lake Mead didn't begin until 1935 and eventually freed the Imperial Valley from the periodic water shortages and inferior water quality which usually resulted from droughts in earlier years. This same year, 1934, started the dramatic drop in beavers populations in this region and over in the New River which had a huge population they completely disappeared. Less water into the valley meant complete shut off which dried many places up to mere saline seeps. The new All American Canal started construction in 1934 so that irrigation water delivery would never again be dependent on coming up through Mexico. Still, Salton Sea has so much potential as a wildlife draw, but not under the present system of maintenance. Something radically has to change and it's starts with completely stopping the toxic pollution on both sides of the border. Fat chance that ever happening! 😒
Image - Google Earth
The image above is from Google Earth on the Hwy 111 bridge in Imperial Valley just south of the town of Calipatira, California. The view is looking south at the Alamo River which comes out of Mexico. Often at this point in the Alamo you can even see those giant foamy suds floating downstream towards it's goal north to the Salton Sea. As you can see the vegtation here is predominantly non-native Tamarisks and Arundo cane. Neither of these plants are favoured by beaver as compared to the willows, Ash and cottonwoods which dominated in the early descriptions of accounts of beaver in Imperial Valley. Although Beaver have been found to chew on Tamarisk in the Colorado River where no other palatable plants exist. If you venture over to Google Earth to this exact location and turn completely around viewing the Alamo River looking north, you will see some natives like California Fan Palms (Washingtonia filifera) which in my almost 40+ years of experience viewing this region are in fact on the increase as a result of birds. Grackles most likely.
The original Breach in Irrigation Canal Construction which gave us the Salton Sea
Back in the 1950s the Salton Sea was once known as the “California Riviera” which gave life to real estate schemes of a Las Vegas by the Sea known as Salton City. Now it's one of the United States of America’s worst ecological disasters. Nothing more than a fetid, stagnant, salty lake, coughing up millions of dead fish and birds. It's been estimated that around 100 million fish thrive in the Salton Sea, but problems such as algal blooms caused by excess pollution (Miracle-Gro for Algae) in the water from Imperial & Coachella Valley agriculture and the raw filth coming from Mexico via the New & Alaamo Rivers which flow straight out of the city of Mexicali have led to these massive die-offs such as this one (above) affecting gulf croakers. I remember back in 1996, the news reports of thousands of white and brown pelicans in the Salton Sea were being killed off by this avian botulism, marking the first time that fish-eating birds succumbed to the disease. The potential for wildlife of all sorts was huge at the very begining of the Sea's modern re-creation at the hands of an irrigation canal contruction blunder at the Colorado River in 1905.
US Fish ans Wildlife Service
Flocks of snow geese (above) rest on an upland habitat adjacent to the Salton Sea that is part of the Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge. This scene flashes me back to a time when Spanish Explorer, Juan Bautista de Anza, came through Imperial Valley, there was no mention of the great Sea's existence in 1774-1776 in his journal when they camped at San Sebastian Marsh where San Felipe Creek enters into the Salton Sink. Oddly enough at the time, the climate was far different. Both Fray Pedro Font and Anza made reference on the second journey the following year of a fierce snow blizzard they encountered at San Sebastian Marsh (about the area of Hwy 85 Border Patrol Checkpoint), where conditions were so miserable that they lost several livestock and horses which they brought with them on the expedition. Hard to believe such a weather event like this happened if you've ever passed through here and seen the area's lunarscape appearance. But interestingly, when they did leave Anza Valley in the San Jacinto Mountain range and looked down into the Hemet-San Jacinto Valley from the higher elevations coming down through present day, Bautista Canyon, he did comment on what had the appearance of a massive snowy landscape in the valleys below. In reality once the Spanish expedition arrived on the Hemet-San Jacinto Valley floor, they found a massive riparian habitat where millions upon millions of aquatic birds like snow geese, maybe even white pelicans, egrets, etc covered the landscape. Ancient Lake Cahuilla (Salton Sea) must have at one time (before Anza) looked like that scene when the Colorado followed the same ancient pathway where the canal construction breach took place at the Colorado River in 1905.
At the start of the 1950s, the sea was viewed as having so much potential as a tourist Mecca. Indeed as the post card above promises, this was a resort of Las Vegas caliber and so close to L.A. and San Diego in the west and Phoenix to the east. But that was then. Modern Science in the 1950s brought mankind the not soGreen Revolution, where those miracle chemicals Allied & Axis Power Chemical Companies (DuPont, Monsanto, Dow, BASF, Bayer, Etc) used for bomb making during World War II, could now suddenly be used to make deserts artificially green. Either way those chemicals destroy things. But this was the beginning of the end for the Salton Sea with this scientific miracle, sorry I meant debacle. Unfortunately, looking at the Salton Sea today and the surrounding post apocalyptic appearance it has along all it's beaches & shoreline, one could almost agree with the online gamer description of it as nothing more than "a putrid, salt-rich lake whose waters are unlikely to be home to anything you’d want to go fishing for." The Salton Sea is clearly a toxic mess, in which the same online gamer again described as being able to "burn through a man's lower intestine in seconds" if you were to ingest any of it's foul liquid. Yuck, but that's the feeling you get anyway.
So are there any real viable Soultions ???
SDSU Center for Inland Waters
Comments from readers in the original article in Yahoo News
"Dig a tunnel to San Diego and fill it up."
This comment above had the right idea, but the logistics were a way off their target. Something closer to home - Mexico!
"The best thing for the Salton sea is to let it return to it's natural state as a dry lake bed."
Okay now this was a totally out of touch. True, the modern day Salton Sea was a dry lakebed prior to the construction accident in 1905, but allowing it to go back to a dry lakebed is not the answer and creates massive amounts of health issues. Both for human as well as wildlife. There was once a water pipeline plan dismissed years ago which may not have been an attractive option to save the beleaguered Salton Sea way back when, but now it may be the only best way to buy the region more time. Below here are three links to info on the scheme of building a sea level canal from Sea of Cortez to Salton Sea. This really is the only viable option, but as usual it's only a mere fix-it-pill approach which is generally the way humans ever accomplish anything. While this proposal in interesting, there should also be a side by side second canal or pipeline which should act as a release valve back to Sea of Cortez in case of another Hurricane Kathleen in 1976 and Doreen the following year 1977 flooded which made the Salton Sea level rise significantly enough to flood several coastal towns like Bombay Beach. But here are the links to canal info.
“Bureaucracy, made up entirely of petty minds, stands as an obstacle to the prosperity of the nation; delays for seven years, by its machinery, the project of a canal which would have stimulated the production of a province.”
Honoré de Balzac - French Novelist & Playwright
Helping clean up the Salton Sea must also include helping Mexico clean up it's Troubled Waters
Animated Map Sources: Tim Krantz, professor of environmental studies, Salton Sea Database program director, University of Redlands; Lisa Benvenuti, GIS analyst, University of Redlands; California State Parks.
References about Salton Sea It's Creation, it's historical Drawdowns and eventual Death
I'm reserving this spot for a furture post which deals with why the ancient Lake Cahuilla disappeared in the first place. The post is almost completed and I'll place it here, as well as the Networkedblogs Facebook page.
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:
