After a day's adjustment, and heaping doses of hot caffeinated beverages, I'm adjusting to being back in the office after a week away. While Monday was dominated by an email tsunami and preparing for Monday's board meeting, I got a chance to get out Tuesday and take a look at some problems at Brooklake.
First, off someone has cut down a Sitka spruce within the stream and wetland buffer at Brooklake. I'll be trying to find out who did what, but in the meantime, this really - to use the technical term - sucks. Adele Freeland counted the rings and estimated it to be about 160 years old. The tree was favored roosting habitat for eagles, hawks and the great blue herons that fish at Brooklake.
I doubt that the tree was logged legally. As you can see, the hillside (also part of the stream and wetland buffers) was seriously degraded as well. While the buffer can be replanted and "restored" within a reasonable time frame of a few years, the tree cannot be replaced within our lifetime. That's over 160 years of growth and biological development that is gone. If I went out there and replanted a Sitka spruce seedling, perhaps my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren would see it attain 160 years of age. That tree was so old that it began life before my two main family lines (the McCarrolls and Ryans) arrived in America.
On a positive note, a section of tree stump is in the stream and looks like great large woody debris. Also, the top of the tree was felled into the lake and is providing great habitat for little fishies (several were jumping when I was there).
What drew me out to Brooklake originally, were reports from Hillary that persons unknown have been engaging in habitat destruction on our restoration site. Indeed, someone has been "pruning" our restoration site, attacking that invasive scourge, Himalayan blackberry, but also doing terrific damage to the hard wood species we have planted over the years.
Who would do this? Some well-meaning, but misguided vigilante steward who can't tell the difference between a blackberry cane and a Nootka rose? We're trying to find out, obviously, before more trees and shrubs are massacred.
Restoration is such an unpredictable business!
The LA Times reports that warming-induced sea level rise is already starting to affect low-lying coastal nations.
Sea level rise is probably one of the first things people think of when it comes to imagining the effects of global warming. It's easy to imagine and create computer graphics illustrating the problem. An effect of global warming that is not so easy to capture by imagination or computer graphics, is the spread of diseases expected to occur in a warmer world. This Seattle Times reports on this issue here.
"Incremental temperature changes have begun to redraw the distribution of bacteria, insects and plants, exposing new populations to diseases that they have never seen before.
A report from the World Health Organization estimated that in 2000 about 154,000 deaths around the world could be attributed to disease outbreaks and other conditions sparked by climate change."
Most of what I know about medicine comes from watching House and St. Elsewhere on TV, but I do know this, warmer temperatures, in general, favor the spread of many, many pathogens. In the Northern Hemisphere we've become accustomed to having to deal with a fairly minor and predictable set of pathogens, at least compared to the warmer Southern Hemisphere. The bad news on health and global warming, is that looks like its going to change, for the worse.
And finally, Gov. Christine Gregoire gets Washington in the global warming game.