All posts by Jessica McDonald

Geology

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In mid-August, Becca and I dropped our kayaks into the Willamette River just north of Corvallis for an afternoon paddle to Albany.  The river was filled with canoeist, kayaks, rafts, and inner tubes of various makes, colors and conditions. The river was lazy and slow and our kayaks occasionally scrapped river bottom gravels because of the low flows.  I remember on February 8th, 1996 when the waterfront of Corvallis was a sea of umbrellas as citizens excitedly watched the river spill over its banks and flood the eastside.  Greater Willamette River floods in 1964 and 1943 discharged far more water.  A massive flood in 1861, during Corvallis’s early history, covered over 320,000 acres and washed away many emerging communities.  The dams that block the McKenzie, Middle Fork of the Willamette and Santiam Rivers have done the work intended by the army engineers who constructed them so we will not likely experience a flood like 1861. However, I cannot but think the river a few tricks up its sleeve and may again surprise us with its power.

The Pleistocene floods that ravaged the Pacific Northwest were likely some of the most dramatic hydrologic events in earth’s history.  Huge glaciers blocked canyons of the Clark Fork River in Idaho and created an enormous 3000 sq mile lake referred to as Lake Missoula.  As the glaciers periodically receded the giant lake emptied in massive floods that inundated vast stretches of the Pacific Northwest.  The waters surged through the Columbia Gorge transforming the landscape and depositing gravel and giant Pleistocene granite boulders from Montana and Idaho on the low hills and valley floors in the Willamette Basin.  The Willamette Valley became a lake, 100 miles long, 60 miles wide and hundreds of feet deep.  Geologists suspect that the floods occurred dozens of times over a period of 6,000 years during the Pleistocene with the last event perhaps 13,000 years ago.  Another lake, Lake Bonneville, in the present day site of the Great Salt Lake, may have created another massive flood 14,000 years ago that ripped through Hells Canyon and into the Columbia Gorge.  The Bonneville and Missoula floods left massive deposits of sediment on the valley floors of the Willamette Basin.  There is evidence that humans resided in the Pacific Northwest during the latter periods of the giant floods and perhaps fished and encamped along the lake shores formed by the flood waters.

Bob Duncan, a geologist and geophysicist from Oregon State University, led a tour of Bald Hill Farm this July.  Bob grasps the nature of events that span millions of years including the evolution of ocean basins, and the formation of ocean crusts and coastal mountain ranges.  While most of us focus our imaginations on our next meals or weekend hikes, Bob’s imagination must roam across geologic epochs.  The descriptions of his research and publications includes many wonderful words that I love to say such as “petrogensis” (dealing with the origins of rock particularly igneous rocks), “ophiolite” (serpentine, pillow lava, and chert rock typical of the upper mantel of the earth’s oceanic crust), “mafic” (rock that is rich in magnesium and iron), and “celadonites” (another rock type in the mica group that forms massive prismatic crystallites or clay aggregates),  but had to look up to gain some basic understanding of their meanings.  The tour provided a brief glimpse of the underlayments of the land that we walk on and, for the most part, take for granted.

The geomorphology of the Willamette Basin and our community  shaped the natural history of the ecoregion and is deeply intertwined with eruptions of huge shield volcanos in the Cascades between 17 and 6 million years ago that flooded the valley with basalt, and the ice sheets that covered  and etched the valley floor and hillsides for thousands of years.   Bob also mentioned that until fairly recently many geologists assumed that the Pacific Northwest was reasonably secure from massive earthquakes similar to the latest one in Japan, but now the data clearly suggests that Washington and Oregon will likely experience a massive 9.0 or greater earthquake perhaps within the next 50 years.  This super quake may last for up to 4 minutes and create tsunamis that inundate our coastal communities.

We take for granted that our grand structures such as dams and skyscrapers are incomparable monuments, but compared with the landforms shaped by lava flows,  historic floods, and ice sheets, they are inconsequential.

A Look Back

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Since its founding in 1989, Greenbelt Land Trust has celebrated many conservation accomplishments, developed relationships with friends of open spaces, expanded our horizons to include four Counties throughout the mid-Valley, and emerged as a leader among Oregon conservation. We often look back at the people who founded this organization, inspired by their grassroots ambitions and perseverance. In the early days, two of our founders, Charles and Elsie Ross, developed their personal Vision Statement for GLT. This Vision Statement has stood the test of time, and continues to inspire all of us all.

Our Vision Statement

We support the greenbelt concept because it provides a happier way to live in cities large or small. Corvallis and Philomath are blessed with a most interesting and varied physical setting. Every dictate of reason and desire tells us to retain some of the green fields and wooded hills where we can see them daily and reach them easily. Walking the footpaths and wooded trails of the greenbelt would become our most popular recreation, and a passionate pursuit for many. The healing hand of Nature would lift the spirits of those burdened by the loneliness and disappointments of life. Everyone would enjoy a greenbelt, and none more than our myriad successors destined to trod its trails far into the future.

Elsie and I believe that Nature is the greatest comfort of life. Friends and books are priceless comforts, too, but friends are not always at hand, and much reading may become tiresome. Nature is never tiresome, and is always at hand. The landscape is the living image of Nature.

Therefore, Elsie and I wish for Corvallis and Philomath an ample, permanent greenbelt that grows as population grows, a greenbelt that does more than assure ‘livability’, but makes life here exciting and its future optimistic; a greenbelt that injects vibrancy into city life, provides stability for investments and immunizes against downtown decay. Success hinges on the actions of this generation. The time is now for townspeople to accord the greenbelt purpose a special place in their charitable giving. Our family and others have been doing this for 10 years and longer.

We need to remind ourselves that “In the beauty of the land lies the dream of the future.” We are challenges to keep that dream alive, and it may be Now or Never.

– Charles and Elsie Ross, 1999

Bugs of Summer

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Ah, summer. Long days, cools nights, delightful picnics, and bugs. The world’s most annoying creatures. They’re not even cute. And for a number of reasons, bugs are weird. That may be their only redeeming feature. Ask any kid, or sci-fi aficionado, or horror-movie producer, bugs are scary- strange—too many eyes, too many legs, sometimes furry, sometimes sleek and enameled (sometimes both, in different places), flying, leaping, trundling, always chewing or chirping or buzzing. Many don’t even retain anywhere near the same shape throughout their lives (where is their concept of self if you start out without legs, say, or wings, then suddenly sprout these things as if it were the easiest thing in the world? Do they remember the flying phase but not the squirming one? Or, retaining both, are they necessarily schizophrenic?  Most start benign and morph into nightmares. I mean, mosquitoes are perfectly fine in their aquatic phase: natural fish food. But once they get their wings, they cross the line into total nuisance. And with bugs in general (and mosquitoes in particular) there is never just one of them at a time; unlike the stately elk on a ridgeline and the osprey on a branch who have the supreme good sense to pose, solitary and distant, for all to see, bugs come in thousands or tens of thousands or more (one termite colony in Louisiana housed an estimated 60 million termites—which is a good reason to carefully consider any move to that state) and shamefully congregate where you don’t see them or don’t want to see them.

Happily for those of us in temperate climes, bugs don’t like winter. In fact, most perish in even fairly mild cold. There are spectacular exceptions– the alpine weta (imagine a large flightless grasshopper) in New Zealand, for example. Normally it creeps about foraging and no one pays any attention to it until winter when everyone starts noticing— this weta freezes solid, hunkered down in the Rock and Pillar Range of the South Island. Scientists build little fences around their habitats so cross-country skiers won’t disturb the various studies going on.

Yet some of the problems bugs pose are interesting;  should we eat them as opposed to simply using them as bait for things we like to eat better, like trout? (yes, especially since many of them would gladly eat us)  Could we have apples or delicata squash or cotton socks without them? (no, nor a great many other things we cherish, ungratefully)  are they very very old?  (of course)  will they survive without us? (most will).  But we don’t always think about them with such detachment, let alone appreciation. I know people (e.g. me) who will delicately avoid stepping on a wildflower but unleash a can of industrial strength insecticide on a wasp nest without batting an eye. There’s something. . . if not exactly icky, at least alien about bugs that disarms our solidarity as living species.  Here’s W. H. Auden in his “The Aliens” (written for his god-son who was, presumably, just as interested in bugs as any boy): after pointing out that we revere plants (which seem so diligent and hardworking) and feel such kinship with animals that “in our folk-tales,/ toads and squirrels can talk, in our epics the great be compared to lions or foxes or eagles. //  But  between us and the Insects,/ namely nine-tenths of the living, there grins a prohibitive fracture/ empathy cannot transgress. (What Saint made a friend of a roach or/preached to an ant-hill?)”

His explanation is that the insects were caught up in an earlier Fall after a crab-like Adam (“who’d just wriggled out of a steamy ocean where he had failed to make a living”) ceded control of his ganglia to seducing Archon in return for what passes as immortality-by-numbers. The general drift is that because we cannot imagine bugs to experience empathy (especially since they look vaguely mechanical AND have irregular breeding habits, to say the least), they forfeit claims to our sympathy. You’ll never hear anyone say “Don’t kill those cockroaches under the sink! They look so cute!” Even the daily trials of Gregor Samsa, Kafka’s man-into insect elicit greater disgust than sympathy.

Species-profiling has a long and storied past, but none better to illustrate our seeming innate human distaste for bugs than Darwin. Darwin saw in a particular  (and particularly nasty) species of wasp a profound moral conundrum. This wasp deposits its eggs beside a certain caterpillar it has just stung and stunned so that the growing larvae can slowly consume their host bit by bit, keeping it alive precisely long enough for them to mature. In a letter to Asa Gray in 1860, Darwin expressed his doubts in Providential Design based on the habits of this wasp: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars…”   This was, for him, the smoking gun of non-Intelligent design. I think it tells us more about Darwin himself than he intended to that he uses this example to question the existence of Providence.  Even had he known about Black Holes and their extraordinary, pitiless violence, my guess is that Darwin would have pinned his case on a insect.   Nasty ol’ bugs give us a glimpse of the amoral universe— probably because we already think them entirely capable of the most heartless evils.

But Darwin’s well-known quip about Providence and the Ichneumon wasp itself underwent a curious evolution. He first met and meditated on this icon of cruelty in Brazil aboard the Beagle around 1832, and became familiar with its peculiar method of providing for its young—and reasoned that because the adult wasp simply deposits the stunned prey in the same hole as it lays its eggs, whatever information is transmitted in this process cannot be called intentional: parent does not know it is providing food, nor do the larvae know there was any benevolent parent on whom it should model itself.  This blind (and incidentally predatory) behavior, repeated over and over through the generations, perfectly describes the mechanical process of natural selection.  The wasp example came up again in 1859 as merely an example of ‘mindless’ nature.  There was no specific mention of the moral qualities of this method of providing for one’s offspring (after all, it seems pretty well suited if you’re a wasp. . . not so much if you’re a caterpillar. . . who’s to judge?)  Most commentators connect Darwin’s loss of faith not to the Ichneumon who takes the rap but to the death of Darwin’s young daughter Annie in 1841—which, incidentally, provides a far less quaint bit of evidence than a hungry larva for the question of God’s oversight.

Happily, it seems that by the late 1870s Darwin patched up his feud with bugs— or with worms, at least, for whom he formed a curious affection strong enough that he gave over his living room and study to glass vessels filled with triturating worms. For years he observed their reactions to light (no deterrent to their sex instinct), odor (they prefer raw carrot over tobacco), and piano concertos (no preferred composer). Where would we be without worms, who actually seem to ‘enjoy’ (Darwin’s phrase) eating? With a degree of precision we mortals cannot but admire, he calculated there were 53,767 worms per acre on his farm, each busily contributing to the fecundity of the soil for our benefit. And while remaining fiercely agnostic despite the charm of worms and the natural beauty of his country estate at Downe, he took pains to point out that for the rest of us, belief in evolution was not irreconcilable with faith in God.

Bombus

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Spring and early summer days are filled with wildflowers and insects.  While resting along a pathway at Bald Hill Farm last weekend, I watched numerous bumble bees (Bombus spp.) alight on the petals of a nearby wild rose bush and extract pollen from the stamens. Their hind leg hairs (corbicular fringe) were ablaze with yellow grains of pollen.

Bumble bees range mostly in northern temperate ecosystems in part because they have learned to use solar radiation, shivering and other internal mechanism to raise their body temperature and function in colder weather.  A hardy bumble bee (Bombus polaris) forages through the wind-swept arctic tundras of Ellesmere Island with musk ox, arctic foxes and wolves.  Other Bombus species roam the high mountain meadows of the Sierras and Cascades.  Bumble bees are social insects, form colonies, and nest generally on or in the ground with a queen and workers.  About 50 species of bumble bees are native to North America including the parasitic cuckoo bumble bee which are somewhat indolent and don’t collect pollen.  They invade nests of other bumble bees, kill the queen and use the resident worker bees to raise their young.

The Xerces Society states that 70 percent of the world’s flowering plants, including most of the world’s food crops, need pollinators such as bumble bees to complete their reproductive cycles.  Bumble bees are less important than honey bees for commercial pollination, but they are generalists that select from a wide range of plants across many diverse habitats. They pollinate many berry crops and are the primary pollinators for greenhouse peppers, eggplants and tomatoes. In early spring bumble bees pollinate the fields where I pick blueberries in late summer. They are profoundly important pollinators of native flowers in many natural ecosystems distributed across their range.

Many bee populations including bumble bees are declining.  The Xerces Society listed five species, western, rusty patched, yellowbanded and American bumble bees, as potentially declining in abundance and distribution.  Franklin’s bumble bee, once found in southwest Oregon and northwest California, was last observed in 2006 and with great sadness may be extirpated.  Scientist and artists in Great Britain have created an opera “Silence of the Bees: A Science Opera” dedicated to raising the awareness of the dramatic loss of bumble bees including the near extirpation of the great yellow bumblebee that once roamed the valleys and hills of Great Britain. There are likely many causes for the declines of bumble bees including habitat fragmentation and degradation, pesticide use, pathogens and competition with introduced bees.

A little over fifty years ago, a book was published with the opening line “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.”  A few paragraphs later the author wrote- “Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community.” It sounds like an extract from J.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” but in fact was the beginning of a chronicle called the “Silent Spring” that described the poorly regulated use of chemicals and the impacts these chemicals may have on wildlife and people.  There a many arguments on both sides of the aisle when discussing the costs and benefits of agricultural chemicals and regulations to minimize the impacts of these substances have come a long way since Rachel Carson wrote the opening line of Silent Spring. However, the importance of Rachel Louise Carson’s account in “Silent Spring” was the recognition that humans have a responsibility to try to fix what they break. The Oregon Department of Agriculture recently attributed the deaths of tens of thousands of bumble bees in a shopping center near Wilsonville to the application of a pesticide used to control aphids on some trees. Sometimes it takes dramatic and tragic events for us to fully understand how to walk more softly across the land.  Xerces published a wonderful guide to conserving bumble bees entitled “Conserving Bumble Bees. Guidelines for Creating and Managing Habitat for America’s Declining Pollinators.”  It is available for free on their website (www.xerces.org).

Beer and Porches

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Summer nears. I can barely remember May—some heat, some rain. And suddenly we’re in to June; “Spring is gone and summer cannot last”: it won’t be long—alas—before we yearn for the rains of October, then May again. There was a time when seasons stretched beyond the horizon—their cities and peoples distant, vast, and beyond. Those horizons have shortened— now I see exactly what summer holds and only hope I have time enough for half of it: finish bucking and splitting the felled oak, re-gravel the courtyard, build a new back step. . . read. . . . and soon the vine-maples go scarlet and the gathering geese let us know it’s time to put away the shorts, mulch the garden because winter’s on its way. Already? Even the normally sunny Horace caught this sense of acceleration in a melancholy ode (IV,vii)

Cold softens in breezes, spring fades into summer’s heat
no sooner felt than doomed
when autumn pours out its harvest fruits, and soon
ice-cold winter steps back.

This would indeed be sad—beyond sad– were it not for porches, Oregon’s impeccable July complexion, and the fact that here in the Willamette Valley we have what must be the epicenter of microbrewing. Local wheat, local rye, and local hops, great water, perfect summer weather– after stacking firewood, picking strawberries, or cycling down Bellfountain, this is the world’s best place to sit on a porch and indulge in a bit of bottled wizardry that has been our near constant companion ever since we (as a species, I mean) stopped roaming, build houses with porches and settled down around fifteen thousand years ago. Beer and Oregon are an uncanny match—proof, as Benjamin Franklin is rumored to have said, that God wants us to be happy. And Franklin never made it to the Willamette Valley.

As with all true friendships, humans and beer go way back. Beer accompanied (some might say precipitated) the greatest change in human patterns we’ve experienced so far—at least before the texting age. After several million years of chasing and fossicking for food, we decided to settle down and raise it. Very bright idea. At the same time, beer (and presumably porches) appeared, as if by magic. High in Vitamin B, rich in protein from yeast, far safer than much water, beer emerged as a result of—or maybe the reason for– agriculture. Beer and bread doubled as wages at least until mechanized tools were invented in the 19th century. Inflation proof, at pretty much the same rate over the centuries—the original living wage.  And when writing came about several thousand years after we settled down and could store records of what goods we were also storing, one of the oldest texts introduces us to Ninkasi, the goddess of brewing. Other texts (around 3400 BCE) mention beer by a cuneiform depiction of a jar as its symbol. At the same time, Enki, the Sumerian deity of water and agriculture, is said to have brewed beer for his father Enlil, leader of the entire clan of gods. In retrospect, this may not have been a good idea—Enlil was, by most accounts, responsible for the Great Flood, but so far no one has blamed that on beer. And when Enkidu, Gilgamesh’s wild friend –whose “shaggy hair no one cuts/ He was born in the wilderness and no one raised him” –is civilized, one of the traits that signal this particular rite of passage is knowing how to drink beer—there is no beer outside civilization. He also learned how to wash himself.  (It’s sobering to see how so little has changed in these thousands of years.) By the time of the construction of the Great Pyramids of Egypt, workers—state employees, not slaves—were routinely paid in beer, and apothecaries used beer to dissolve various compounds for remedies to treat those same workers.

We can all indulge in a little homo sapiens sapiens nostalgia by calling to mind that after a hot afternoon’s toiling (even if you’re not building enormous geometric monuments),  simply by sitting on your porch having a beer (perhaps reading a little Gilgamesh) you are celebrating the not-so-long descent from our Neolithic predecessors, through the cradle of civilization (and its signal beverage, beer). We have not come so far that our origins have vanished from sight, despite the proliferation of devices  and achievements (drones, iPads) we often see as evidence of the insurmountable distance we as a tribe have come from those halcyon days.

Of course, the Romans preferred wine, probably because it was stronger and kept better. Or maybe because, German barbarians drank beer, and they gave the Romans only trouble. But that is a story for harvest-time.