Blog 09

This past week we had The Nature Conservancy come in and give a presentation on their land acquisition and preservation organization. They have obtained many areas of land in the Keweenaw region to preserve from development. While I agree, a lot of the presentation was loaded down with the financial aspects of their struggles, I don't think that it was out of place. It's important to consider that many of their successes and struggles have been financially related as they try to pay and for these parcels of land. These financial successes have been a large part of their work, so it is very important to them. Personally I would have liked to have heard more about some of the actual areas of land that they had. She went into some brief descriptions, but I would have enjoyed hearing more about what specific things/trails there are at each park.

There was also a lot of discussion this past week on logging, logging methods, and new/old growth forest. A close family friend of ours works as a forest manager for Nicolet National Forest in northern Wisconsin. This Saturday I called him with a few questions regarding some of these issues and ideas surrounding foresting techniques. I summarized the information he gave me:

Forest management isn't operated in the same way that is it was in the earlier logging days. It was partially that people didn't know how the forests responded to large scale clearing, but also clear cuts were done out of convenience often. Many logging companies were removing all trees, so everyone else felt the need to do the same thing to keep up and profitable. From a conservation standpoint, clear cuts are rarely done now in many of our areas. Because of clear cuts, the composition and make-up of many of our forest has changed, a lot of the topsoil is often lost, leaving a dryer clay soil. So select cuts are often performed to help give sunlight to undergrowth (young trees) so that they have more of a chance in the different soil.

I found this interesting how previous clear cuts have caused some forest to almost require maintenance select cuts for regrowth. He mentioned how they do not select cut in older forests that are already sustainable. He also mentioned that some foresting is also done to stop the spreading of diseases such as oak wilt.

Blog 08

Before spring break, Chad Norman came in and talked with us about his experiences of living in India in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains. In this resourcefully rich region, water is such an important ingredient in its ecological life. There were many stories about unfair ways people were abusing the environment and indigenous cultures in those areas, but there was one part that I found particularly interesting. When trees were logged off the foothills of the mountains, rainfall could easily wash the dirt and ground away with no roots to hold the soil in place. This causes all of the nutrients to wash away from an area, become more dry as rain just washes over the dense earth and rock. When this happens, it makes it extremely difficult ans sometimes impossible for an ecosystem to return to its original state, and this presents many problems for an environment whose resources are becoming fewer and farther between.

The next two days of class were spent watching a movie regarding water wars that are shaping our environment, foreign and domestic. While many of the points brought up were alarming and very interesting, there were many aspects of how they went about their arguments that I disliked and found to be unprofessional. When depicting courtroom trials between the individuals and the companies, they made their own "courtroom artist" representations of the people and had all of the company's people look big, mean, and scary. That's a cute little tactic but it just looks unprofessional. Also, when the guy went to Nestle's seminar about some of their water projects and expected an answer right away about the letter he received  how would those individuals talking about the projects have any idea about that situation? It makes sense to try to talk about that at the end of the presentation when they can find out more about the situation, as the suggested. I'm not saying that Nestle as a company wasn't doing anything wrong, there is just no way to expect those presenters who were likely engineers and other technical employees to have any idea about that situation immediately. And the crowd didn't sound outraged as they suggested. 

I understand with a film like this where you have strong feelings about something, some points or arguments may be a little biased, and sometimes this is necessary to get across a point. But using unprofessional tactics and typical "political moves" leads me to disregard their arguments and thoughts.

Blog 07

Water was a common theme this week in the classes and presentations. With a growing global population and a shifts in the balance of water extraction, water is becoming the new oil. That is, clean fresh water safe enough for drinking and other uses. Many indigenous societies seem to be losing their water supply as others who have to means to extract the water are doing so. But it doesn't even seem like advanced societies have a sustainable water supply. Many of the largest U.S. cities are struggling to maintain levels in their aquifers and water sources.

Even more scary, some water sources could be gone in a second. For example, Los Angeles and its entire metro area population of almost 17 million people receive a lot of their water from Owen Valley, an aquifer north of Los Angeles. This underground lake lies directly over a fault line, and if a large enough earthquake were to occur, millions of tons of magma would mix with the lake water, rendering this entire water source useless. Los Angeles currently does not have another large scale alternative for their water sources.



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