For a bright flash of light considering climate change- written on the Tejon Ranch, grass fed and all organic, continue below…

The Last Generation

Doug McDaniel’s boots rest together at the foot of a stump, his faded blue jeans and white striped shirt juxtaposed against the background of dense Ponderosa Pine corduroy. He kicks at a pinecone, a dark blue baseball cap restraining wisps of light gray hair. His kicking at the pinecone gains speed, angry bouts of energy sending needles and duff flying into the air. His face is hidden behind the baseball cap’s brim, but I can hear his voice cracking. He says that the forest service mismanages their land, forest fires get out of control, burning hundreds of thousands of acres, and bureaucracy runs rampant. He imagines a world in which public and private lands are managed responsibly, with regard for the land, not just for far-flung politics. Doug McDaniel has made the world ecologically healthier in his own way by changing management techniques on his land away from the commercial model in addition to a large river restoration project he has undertaken. In his lifetime the Wallowa River was straightened from a historically meandering channel, put in a trench, and diverted to irrigate cattle pasture; in the last 5 years he’s returned it to where it once was. The river now flows through a winding channel full of eddies, a river where Salmon can spawn. Doug has made a concrete difference through his actions, and will no doubt continue in his efforts, so does it really matter why he did it? Even if he only restored the river so he could go fishing in it like he did as a boy, I don’t really care; he made the world a better place.
The area where we sit is in the middle of a stand of third or fourth growth Ponderosa Pines, thin trunks bunched together, letting through only thin slices of the deep blue sky, splotched with late afternoon clouds tumbling over Eastern Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains. Sitting here, in a forest that was sculpted by humans, cut down by humans, protected by humans from the natural process, and now endangered by humans through climate change, I realize how much we have affected every last little detail of this landscape. Doug McDaniel, the retired logger who owns this land, isn’t the first person to feel strongly about how we should manage our forestlands, but he may be the first to have the luxury of managing the forests not for economic gain, but for his own personal values.
American forestry began well before Europeans even thought about sailing to the west in search of a new land. Native Americans managed forests for thousands of years by burning vast tracts to create grasslands and create particular ecological conditions. At the same time, Europeans were cutting through their forests as fast as possible, the wood going to urban centers for construction and heat.
The moment that Europeans landed on North America and began to settle, sustainable American forestry ended. Extraction techniques developed, accelerated, and forestry moved westward as trees in the east were harvested. As the Northeast was cut over, logging shot westward, razing the great lakes region to a stubble, moving on to the west coast, where the wood was thought to be unending. But even that prophesy fell through, and now we’ve moved on to new unexplored frontiers, British Columbia, New Zealand, Papau New Guinea, Guatemala. But at some point we reached the end of the road. The damage has been done, almost all of our virgin forest has been cut down, burned, built into homes, exported to places that cut their forests long ago, places that in theory learned their lesson before it was too late.
And that’s where Doug McDaniel comes in, his dark boot now kicked into a trough in the duff, needles stuck through the red and black laces, not matching. Doug McDaniel is part of the last generation that could ignore the long-term environmental effects of their actions, and he’s broken with that pattern. His life spent in the woods, first as a faller, then as a forester, and later as an owner, hasn’t gone to waste. He has created an intimacy with the landscape with strong opinions on what is healthy, what is bad, and what needs fixing.
Later in day, riding in the passenger seat of Doug’s white Chevy pickup truck, steel flatbed on the back, I learn a surprising fact: Doug and his wife don’t believe that humans have anything to do with climate change, in fact they’re not even completely convinced that climate change is happening at all. Doug is making changes to his land simply based on his personal observations of forest health; from years spent walking, driving, and riding through his property. No matter his reasoning, he is helping to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Instead of cutting down trees when they are 30 to 50 years old, Doug McDaniel tries to avoid cutting down a tree until stops growing, sometimes as old as a few hundred years. Doug does it because he likes older, bigger, trees; additionally this allows the tree to sequester more carbon per year as it grows proportionally larger in volume as it gets older. He would rather have a multi-aged diverse forest, than an even aged monoculture crop, so he avoids large clear cuts. The positive global effect is that deforestation from clear cutting releases an estimated 51.8 tons of carbon per acre, whereas healthy forests are able to sequester 41 tons per acre. Doug doesn’t like wildfires; he would rather cut out the younger trees and let them decompose on the ground than risk an out of control burn that could degrade soil health. Forest fires are additionally a cause of global warming that is said to produce as much greenhouse gas per acre burned as the exhaust from 48 cars for one year. Through his changes in forest management Doug has mitigated the effects of global climate change in ways that most of us can only dream of.
By the end of the day, rumbling down a rough dirt road, I am convinced that it doesn’t matter what Doug McDaniel believes at all. What is more important is way that he speaks with his actions. Doug McDaniel has actively worked to make the world a better place. And do I care if our generation recognizes it, or if we disagree and think that he could be doing something better, something different, do it all for different reasons? Not really. He’s doing something different from the tried and true commercial model, a norm that most of the world doesn’t even recognize, and I respect him for that. The reasoning behind why he does it doesn’t matter at all. The image of global climate change is too big and too abstract to effect change in the majority of our population. Simply caring for and knowing a place is all it takes to make a person change their actions for the better.

A brief update-

We spent the last few days with author Sharman Apt Russel at the Lichty Center near Cliff NM. The Lichty Center is part of the Nature Conservancy’s Gila River Farm, 160 acres of what was a farm and ranch, but is now primarily working towards habitat restoration and other conservation objectives. From the Lichty Center we drove about 4 hours to the El Coronado Ranch in Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern AZ. In the next 3 days at the Ranch we will be working on stream surveys, trying to evaluate rock gabian structures built to slow down flash flooding and increase sediment deposition.

For some writing (unattached to much of anything that we’re doing now)- continue reading below. Otherwise, look at pictures and enjoy!

Where Will Our Freshwater Go?

The orange blade of my paddle grates against cold grimy cement, scarred by years of use and abuse. A push, and leaning forward, my yellow pea-pod of a whitewater kayak gains momentum. Seconds of sliding, cold water rushing up my chest, cascades off of my chin, up my nose, dripping from underneath my helmet, down onto my temples, an early morning slap in the face.
Stillness smoothes my smarting face as my boats settles into the eddy. I take my hand off of the paddle and reach down into the crystal water, running along the rough yellow plastic, imagining my fingers able to reach down to the bottom. The bottom, 10 feet below, jagged blocks of cement contrasted through newly deposited silt, sands, pebbles. Pulverized only a month ago by big yellow machines, the work of diesel, heavy leather boots, air-conditioned truck cabs, union work.
I am paddling through history here, between the demolished walls of Marmot Dam, what was the only fish barrier on the Sandy River. I am running a section of the Sandy that has been underwater for triple my lifetime; the dam was built when my parents were children. The walls, crumbling into running water, stare down at me with fascination, what the hell is this kid in a plastic boat doing in my river, what on earth has happened here.
The road I put in from was the access road to the Marmot Dam, a diversion stricture that took water from the Sandy, through an enormous tube, to a reservoir. From the reservoir, a penstock, essentially a steeply sloping pipe, dropped the water down into the Bull Run Power Plant, and ancient cement structure, surrounded by an imposing cyclone fence, not a single window. The kind of place where you find condom wrappers in the parking lot, next to the white company pickup truck. The falling water spun blades in the turbines, making electricity for the cities of Gresham and Portland.
Pulling out of the eddy, following a friend, a lime green and red clad form, bundled in a drysuit against the spring chill, I wonder about the future of what I see here. In 50 years what will we do about electricity, dams, freshwater.
Only .3% of global freshwater is contained in streams, lakes, or rivers.* The rest is split between 68.9% in glaciers or permafrost, and 30.8% in groundwater. So in 50 years, as our climate and cultures change, where will our freshwater be, how will we use it, will we consider it with respect, or will we continue to take it for granted, build cities where there is no water, try to make the grass green without using spray-paint?
As the first wave of the rapid, created by the fallen dam, piles over my head, I take a strong stoke, lean forwards, and close my eyes. The stroke propels me through the frothing mass, and as if by magic, I surface upright on the downstream side. Downstream of where the dam used to be construction evidence scatters over the banks, greenery is a luxury not afforded by this conservation effort. Wet, humid, rainy fertility will take care of the rest, quickly cover the scars of our actions, of any place in the earth where human development is eaten by plants, the Pacific Northwest might rank at the top of that list.
Only shortly downstream the banks cover again with the usual thick vegetation, a dark green layer of ecological comfort. I almost expect salmon to leap with joy out of the now free water, bouncing with surprise into me, delightful smiles on their fishy faces. Their passage upstream is clear, they can swim all the way to Mount Hood.
As my imaginary salmon swims upstream, I continue downwards, but despite these uplifting surrounding, I still worry. Samplings show that 30,000 of Oregon’s 115,000 stream miles “fail to fully support aquatic life”*. In 50 years we are projected to have lost over ½ of the pacific northwest snow pack, salt water intrusion will destroy groundwater in fertile coastal areas, erratic weather patterns will increase already rampant erosion. Are things really getting better fast enough? Can we pull ourselves out of this dangerous dive? These questions run through my head as I navigate through a river restored by a mix of conservation activists, and the lack of economic motivation to re-license the dam site.
As I strap my kayak to the roof of my car at the takeout, I have no idea of what to do. Maybe I shouldn’t have driven today to paddle and photograph a newly free-flowing Sandy River, maybe I shouldn’t even have been born, judging from world population trends, I definitely should not have children, something that luckily isn’t really on my mind this drizzly spring day.
As I drive home my car rattles along the bank of the Columbia River, the gray sheen of windswept water stretching like a plate of steel the half mile to the far bank. Cars rush past me on the freeway, busily flying from one place to the next. Windshield wipers distractedly twitch back and forth and I can only hope that our caffeine accelerated culture notices what we’re doing to water, and what is going to happen to water, before its too late.

If you want another take, read on-

10.10.08
The man at the Bluff convenience store held the door for me. His black leather vest snug over a Harley-Davidson shirt, shimmering with recently dried sweat. His head was balding, with slight indents from sunglasses across his veiny temples. On his feet were big practical leather boots, boots that you wouldn’t want to be stepped on with. He gave me, an outsider, a wide berth entering the store, as if he didn’t want to risk touching me.
The inside of the Bluff convenience store was well lit, the cans and jars and bottles perfectly aligned on the shelves. The big man who held the door for me stopped at the checkout counter. He talked to the checker, a short young Indian woman- her name might have been Teresa. He greeted her as a friend, a warm “hi, how are the kids”. They appeared out of different worlds, the Harley man and the much younger Indian woman. As I perused the aisles in search ice-cream and snickers bars I heard them talking. Small town gossip about a guy named Dave, from Blanding, a neighboring rural town. It sounded like he had a run in with the law; I couldn’t hear what it was for.
As I searched through aisles, not finding normal snickers, only king size, eat me and you will have a heart attack, snickers, I wondered about this town. What brings the Harley man, why doesn’t the Indian woman up and leave for some more prosperous place? The aisles of Bluff’s convenience store blur with those of a familiar market it rural western Oregon. Thousands of miles, ecosystems, and mindsets apart, these two towns draw me, a sort of intrigue with the uninteresting. What is it about small, poor, rural towns that captivates me and pins down my curiosity, a stalemate at the end of a match?
Roaming the Bluff store I began to explore my absurd sense of attraction to something, somewhere, that most people would pass by on their way to somewhere else. The size, simplicity, and straightforwardness, that I began to find, presents a sense of place unparalleled in our transient and bustling culture; a sense of place in a bite size serving. A sense of place that I’m worried I might not find. I worry, childishly, about how I can care about the world if I don’t have some concrete version of it welded onto my brain. I need a microcosm for our bigger problems, a place that I can comprehend.
My attraction to small towns may be just the key that I’m searching for, A way to make it easier to love a place. I’d rather fall for a small main street, maybe just a gas station and post office, than tie myself to an alley in some bustling metropolis. Perhaps choosing this easier, more palatable route is cheating, but I’d rather succeed and stay than burn out and move on, have to find a new place, lose any faith I may have built.
When I checked out the man with the heavy boots had left, the Indian woman looked out the window, into the glaring southern Utah sun, maybe dreaming about somewhere else. I wondered if she liked living here, what her sense of this town tasted like, but didn’t have the courage to ask. Instead I gave her my 4 dollars and told her that I didn’t need a bag.
In the bluff store I found not only snickers bars and a tub of Ben and Jerry’s, but some borderline clue of why I like small towns. Right between the gas station and an abandoned church parking lot is where you’ll find me, searching for a bite size sense of place.

Again- click here for pictures.

For a brief piece of writing on public land use and ranching, continue below…

Imagine 10 years in the future, I’m at the grocery store. I walk down the aisle to the meat section, located at the back of the store. The clear glass displaying steaks, shrimp, salmon, chicken. One difference, the entire selection is smaller. I shop wisely, ask where the meat is from, how it was raised, the butcher at the counter answers all my questions. I select my meat, and am still the only one at the meat counter. I checkout and go home, cook dinner, eat, and go to bed.
10 years in the future times have changed, global food markets are failing, local markets thrive. The beef that I buy comes from a local farm; raised on a small scale, grass fed in an ecosystem that can support a cow an acre. Buying my beef, I know that it was raised in a sustainable manner; market pressures combined with democratic political process has defined the way we source our food.
Our current system of where and how we get our food is going to change. Ranching as we know it in the Western US, especially on public lands, is currently a borderline profitable occupation. The ranching culture however is a tough beast, and will not go down without a fight. As a result, pushing to simply obliterate livestock grazing on public lands is unrealistic in the short term. New avenues need to be made to increase the economic possibilities for ranchers according to future market demands.
The main forces that will create this change in where and how we get our food are increasing energy costs, a strong “green” movement spurred on by global climate change, and increased customer awareness associated with globalization. Fuel prices are rising dramatically and will continue to rise in the foreseeable future. This change impacts ranchers simply in operating costs, but also through the transport of their final product. A decreased beef production with a higher final cost will be part of the final product, as well as meat production on more fertile land that can support up to 3 cows per acre, instead of the current norm of up to 1 cow per 500 acres. Also, production of beef in the American west, a low population density area, doesn’t make sense when the markets are heavier on the coasts. A more efficient use of lands closer to population hubs would help to decrease transportation costs. Not only is land in coastal states much more fertile, but also has a much lower density of public land. In addition, importing cheap meat from South America will no longer be feasible.
The strong “green” movement resulting from global climate change is helping to increase customer awareness. In the next 5-10 years people will increasingly think about their impact on the environment. Raising cattle in our manner is not an environmentally friendly food source, and people are realizing the effects greenhouse gas emitted by cattle, the inefficiency of transporting foods, and the ecological impacts of grazing. In 2003 US slaughterhouses killed 10 billion animals, which factors out to 19,026 every minute for an entire year (HCN July-Aug. 2004 p.60). This is significantly more meat than any country needs to consume, a number that we could easily decrease with drastic environmental benefits.
I enjoy eating meat, a juicy steak, a blue cheese bacon burger, and sloppy Joes. I’m not going to give it up, but I am changing what and how much I eat. I try to eat local meat, I try to think about how it was raised, and no, I’m not perfect, every once in a while I slip and eat a generic burger from an undisclosed source. We don’t all need to become vegans or vegetarians, we just need to think, consider how our choices and our purchases effect the world, and vote both on the ballot and with our pocketbooks.
The decreased demand for beef combined with increased operational costs, will lead to a decrease in the demand for livestock grazing and ranching on western public lands. The culture of ranching is essential to how the West became what it is today, and is not going to simply disappear. The people of the United States are going to need to be the changing force behind the use of Western Lands, through the political process and by considering where what we eat comes from. Walking down the grocery store aisle, looking for steak, I think about what I am buying, how my purchase will affect the world that I live in. I hope that knowledge about what we are eating will spread, and through that we will change the way that Western Public lands are used.

And again, for photos just click here.

For photos click here- for epiphanizing- read below.

Seeing a Landscape Through Water
Reflections are scarce in the West, a dry and rugged sort of place, for one simple reason, they require water. A perfect looking glass for body and soul that lies pooled, easily disturbed by any motion, sending ripples out across its surface. Water flows, cascades, glides, and that entire time works as a mirror. It doesn’t need to be clean. In fact sometimes the most toxic pools of sludge in the middle of a cracked and sorrowful environment reveals more than a crystal clear brook flowing through an alpine meadow. Looking into a body of water I see a culmination of everything upstream, the counties, the towns, the people, and their children. I used to think that I was abnormal for seeing this way, looking at a glistening surface in a landscape where it is fluid gold, a simple resource, and trying to read it like a book, but then I started asking people about water, what stories it told, and began to realize that in a landscape as arid as this, every story is defined by water.
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A few months ago in Lone Pine California I walked into the town’s only hardware store to buy a notebook and a pocketknife. The one room store was cluttered; the walls thick with anything you would ever want to buy. From the ceiling hung a variety of ice-axes, hammers, toy sets, and icicle style Christmas lights. A stout balding man greeted me at the door, hearing aids straining the cartilage of his ears, a white t-shirt tucked into clean blue jeans; on his feet were black Velcro shoes. The wrinkles in his brown weathered face folded together like miniature canyons traversing his forehead. I asked him where to find the knives; quickly we picked out a small red Swiss-Army knife called “the packer” from a dusty and cracking display case.
At the checkout counter the man’s sausage sized fingers shook as he rang up my purchase. Looking at the man’s face I guessed that he had lived here for a while, if not for his entire life, and I began to wonder what stories he could tell. How did this local see the water? How did it create the person standing before me? So I asked him.
The man’s eyes lit up once he understood what I was asking. He began to tell me stories about the now dry lakebed and environmental disaster that festers a few minutes drive south of town. His cracked teeth smiled from between brown gums as he animatedly spilled out his life’s story to this stranger; his hands still now on the counter.
He came to Lone Pine from southern California when he was 19; he didn’t care to say where. He’s lived there every year since; he turns 81 in November. When he was 20 the Owens Lake was a different color, an earthy brown rimmed by layers of white, an enormous pot of dirt on the side of a small 2-lane highway. When he was 30 the river was dry, just a cracked white ribbon running through a similarly desolate landscape. He remembered floating in inner tubes down a cement ditch, he couldn’t remember where. In his 40s he worked at a car dealership. They had to wash the cars every other day to keep the dust off, a thick brown dust, heavy enough to scratch the paint. He told me about one time when he just tried wiping down a Buick with a rag and scratched the hood: it cost 30 dollars to fix. In his 60s he worked at a restaurant; the dust had become worse as more water was diverted to Los Angeles. Fine white silt would creep in under the door and blow in fantastical shapes over the linoleum floor tiles. It would settle in the bottom of coffee cups that were left upright on tables, it gave the air a slightly poisonous taste. He claims that sometimes he still coughs up the dust, that it is stuck in his lungs.
In his 70s there was less dust. He thought the entire lake had blown away, right down to rock, and I was in no position to correct him. He worked at the hardware store, selling everything from a garden sprinkler system to the impatient blonde in line behind me, to a blue and white striped engineer’s hat to the boy standing at the end of the counter. He likes working here, and thinks he will keep doing it, at least for a while.
I ask him what will happen to the lake in his 80s. He doesn’t know, only that it will go to LA. He wonders what all the trucks are doing out on the lake, about the big visitors center at the end of town, about the tourists roaring past on the highway on their way to somewhere else, he wishes they would slow down driving through town. He doesn’t seem interested in going out to see the lake, the environmental factor that has defined much of his life.  He would rather stay here and tend his shop, selling hammers to locals and sodas to the people who stop on their drive through.
He looked down at his hands, still steady on the counter, and I could see from the crow’s feet crinkling his cheeks that he is smiling. His gaze shifted again, and he looked me in the face. He asked me two questions. What the hell am I doing in Lone Pine, and what do I think is going to happen to the water in his 80s. I answered the first question quickly, explaining that I’m a college student- he called me a gypsy. The second question I let hang for a minute as he searched through the till for my change, 3$ and 50c.
I told him that I can only hope, I hope that there won’t be dust, that there will be water, the river will run again, that people will slow down when driving through town. In truth I told him that I didn’t know, I was just an outsider.
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Kneeling next to a pond left in the middle of the alkali flats of what was once Owens Lake, I glance out across the desolate plain. The pond encircles a sprinkler, installed to keep the dust down, as much an outsider in this alien landscape as I am. In the shallow pond of red-brown water, framed between the sprinkler and a rusting drainage pipe, rests a perfect reflection, the Inyo Mountains rising out of a sandy gray wasteland. As I kneel there, smelling the slightly sulfuric wind blowing out across the desert, I wish the old man from the hardware store was here, to look down and see the reflection of the mountains in what is left of his lake.
Once again- if you enjoyed the writing, you’ll probably like the pictures, so click here! 

Cheers,

-Ben

For more wet and wild images visit a full gallery from the east fork here.

For a full gallery of photos from this trip click here.