Posts Tagged ‘forestry’
“Every act of energy conservation… is more than just common sense: I tell you it is an act of patriotism”*…
But how do we best honor that admonition? The estimable Saul Griffith has observed “We need a proportional quantitative understanding of energy use, for everyone.” Now, Hannah Ritchie (Deputy Editor of Our World in Data and Senior Researcher in the Programme for Global Development at the University of Oxford) rides to the rescue with an elegant tool that compares and quantifies (in both watt-hours and usage cost, in both the U.S, and the U.K.) the energy consumption of different products and activities.
Try it: “Does that use a lot of energy?” from @hannahritchie.bsky.social. Background in her newsletter.
* Jimmy Carter
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As we watch our wattage, we might send wild birthday greetings to Bernard Frank; he was born on this date in 1902. A conservationist, forester, and wilderness activist, he had a long, engaged career in conservation concerns, especially in the D.C. area, where he was a leader in organizing the Rock Creek Watershed Association which worked to restore and preserve the area around Rock Creek in Washington, D.C., and Maryland and in the effort that lead to the creation of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park. He was honored for his work in this region with the naming of Lake Bernard Frank in Derwood, Maryland. But Frank is probably best remembered as one of the eight founding members of The Wilderness Society.
“One feels the need to bow to unquestioned sovereigns”*…
Confronting ancient redwoods can be a transformative experience, helping us appreciate both our place in a larger scheme and the transitory nature of our lives.
The earliest redwoods showed up on Earth shortly after the dinosaurs – before flowers, birds, spiders… and, of course, humans. Redwoods have been around for about 240 million years, and in California for at least 20 million years, compared to about 200,000 years for “modern” humans. – source
But redwoods also play a key role in our ecosystem…
The coast redwood and giant sequoia forests are home to the tallest and largest trees on the planet. They represent the original face of nature, embodying a beauty millions of years in the making. These forests store more carbon from the atmosphere than any other forest ecosystem, and they support communities of life found nowhere else on Earth.
The redwood forests are the greatest forests on Earth.
But the redwood parks and private lands we have protected over the last century still need help. The primeval forests today resemble islands of disconnected old-growth stands — pinched at the edges by clear-cuts, development and agriculture. They depend on streams choked by sediment, and they are cared for by parks organizations that are under-funded and under-resourced… – source
* John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America
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As we prioritize preservation, we might spare a thought for Charlemagne; he died on this date in 814. A ruler who united the majority of western and central Europe (first as King of the Franks, then also King of the Lombards, finally adding Emperor of the Romans), he was the first recognized emperor to rule from western Europe since the fall of the Western Roman Empire three centuries earlier; the expanded Frankish state that he founded is called the Carolingian Empire, the predecessor to the Holy Roman Empire.
Committed to educational reform and extension, he began (in 789) the establishment of schools teaching the elements of mathematics, grammar, music, and ecclesiastic subjects; every monastery and abbey in his realm was expected to have a school for the education of the boys of the surrounding villages. The tradition of learning he initiated helped fuel the expansion of medieval scholarship in the 12th-century Renaissance.
Charlemagne is considered the father of modern Europe, the first of the Holy Roman Emperors, and thus the forerunner of the Holy Roman Empire. At the same time, in accepting Pope Leo’s investiture, he set up ages of conflict: Charlemagne’s coronation as Emperor, though intended to represent the continuation of the unbroken line of Emperors from Augustus, had the effect of creating up two separate (and often opposing) Empires– the Roman and the Byzantine– with two separate claims to imperial authority. It led to war in 802, and for centuries to come, the Emperors of both West and East would make competing claims of sovereignty over the whole.
We might note that as Charlemagne’s life unfolded, the oldest (officially-recognized) living Redwood was already 400 years old (though some foresters believe some coast redwoods may be as much as 1,000-1,500 years older).
“Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read.”*…
From the annals of advertising…
Planted in 1938, the Studebaker sign in Bendix Woods was once recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest living advertisement. In its prime, it contained 8,000 red and white pine trees. After 75 years with no maintenance, it has thinned out to just 2,000 but is still visible from the air.
Back in 1926, the Studebaker Corporation built what it claimed to be the first closed testing facility for an American car company. The automobile manufacturer, founded in 1852, spent more than one million dollars on the test facility, which included a three-mile circuit with a variety of special test sections including hill climbs, skid pads, snaking curves, and bumpy roads.
Naturally, if you’re going to spend a million dollars on a test circuit, you might as well invest a little more on a giant living sign made out of pine trees that’s only visible from the air, so that’s what Studebaker did…
Initially, the letters were nicely ordered, well defined and maybe even a little skinny. They were easy to read from the air, which is exactly what Studebaker intended. The sign was a salute to the growing aviation industry and a handy publicity stunt that could be seen by overflying aircraft passengers.
Over the years, of course, the pine trees grew and so did the letters. Studebaker, on the other hand, started to wither away. After years of financial problems, the company closed its last remaining production facility in 1966. Studebaker sold the land on which the trees stood to the Bendix Corporation, which donated some of the property for the creation of a county park (hence its current name: Bendix Woods County Park)…
Despite the demise of its namesake company, the Studebaker sign remained. In 1985, it was included in the National Register of Historic Places. Two years later, it first appeared in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s “largest living advertisement sign” (a record that no longer seems to exist)…
One of the world’s largest living advertisements is made out of pine trees: the “Studebaker Tree Sign,” from @atlasobscura.
* Advertising pioneer Leo Burnett
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As we think big, we might recall that today is a momentous one in the histories of two other monumental messages:
On this date in 1631 Mumtaz Mahal, the beloved wife of the fifth Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan, died. He spent the next 17 years building her mausoleum, the Taj Mahal.
And on this date in 1885 the Statue of Liberty— a message of affection and respect from the people of France– arrived in New York Harbor.
“Investment in infrastructure is a long term requirement for growth and a long term factor that will make growth sustainable”*…
So it’s a problem that infrastructure here in the U.S. is so very expensive. Why is that?
As Congress argues over the size of the infrastructure bill and how to pay for it, very little attention is being devoted to one of the most perplexing problems: Why does it cost so much more to build transportation networks in the US than in the rest of the world? In an interview in early June, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg acknowledged the problem, but he offered no solutions except the need to study it further.
Biden’s original infrastructure proposal included $621 billion for roads, rail, and bridges. His plan is billed not only as an infrastructure plan but one that would help respond to the climate crisis. A big part of that is making it easier for more Americans to travel by mass transit. The Biden plan noted that “America lags its peers — including Canada, the U.K., and Australia — in the on-time and on-budget delivery of infrastructure,” but that understates the problem.
Not only are these projects inordinately expensive, states and localities are not even attempting to build particularly ambitious projects. The US is the sixth-most expensive country in the world to build rapid-rail transit infrastructure like the New York City Subway, the Washington Metro, or the Chicago “L.” And that’s with the nation often avoiding tunneling projects, which are often the most complicated and expensive parts of any new metro line. According to the Transit Costs Project, the five countries with higher costs than the US “are building projects that are more than 80 percent tunneled … [whereas in the US] only 37 percent of the total track length is tunneled.”
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America’s infrastructure cost problem isn’t just confined to transit, it’s also the country’s highways. Research by New York Federal Reserve Bank and Brown University researchers reveals that the cost to construct a “lane mile of interstate increased five-fold” between 1990 and 2008. New construction — widening and building interchanges and building new sections of road altogether — is where the bulk of the problem lies, says one of the researchers, economist Matthew Turner. (The cost of “heavy maintenance” like resurfacing increased as well, but Turner said that’s due almost entirely to the rise in the price of certain paving materials.)
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According to a report by the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, the nation’s transit spending “fell by $9.9 billion in inflation-adjusted terms” over the last 10 years. In comparison with similar countries, America spends a relatively small amount of its GDP (1.5 percent) on public infrastructure, while the UK spends 2 percent, France 2.4 percent, and Australia 3.5 percent.
The problem is fundamentally that the US is getting very little for what it builds…
Infrastructure: “Why does it cost so much to build things in America?”- this is why the U.S. can’t have nice things. From @JerusalemDemsas in @voxdotcom. Eminently worth reading in full.
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As we lay the foundation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1886– the anniversary of the date in 1864 the Abraham Lincoln set aside Yosemite Valley as a preserve— that Congress recognized and established by law (24 Stat. L.103), the Division of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture. Created in 1881 by fiat of the then-Commissioner of Agriculture, it’s initial remit was to assess the quality and conditions of forests in the United States. In 1891, its mandate was expanded to include authorization to withdraw land from the public domain as “forest reserves,” to be managed by the Department of the Interior– the precursor to America’s National Forest and National Park program.
“Everything has a time of being – a birth, a life span, and a death”*…
In 2014, the United States ranked 41st in the world in life expectancy, with an average American expected to live to age 78. But, like most averages, that doesn’t paint the whole picture. Life expectancy is more like Norway’s in some parts of the country and more like Kazakhstan’s in others.
That’s why it’s more useful to look at it county by county…
An interactive map that allows one to do exactly that: “How life expectancy in U.S. counties compares to other countries.”
*Dixie Lee Ray
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As we take our vitamins, we might send carefully-conserved birthday greetings to Gifford Pinchot; he was born on this date in 1865. An American forester, he became the first chief of the Forest Service in 1905. By 1910, with President Theodore Roosevelt’s backing, he built 60 forest reserves covering 56 million acres into 150 national forests covering 172 million acres. Roosevelt’s successor, President Taft– no environmentalist– fired Pinchot. Still Pinchot’s efforts earned him the honorific, “the father of conservation.”
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