It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine

The four horsemenTry matching the quote with who said it (answers at the bottom).

  1. Most convincing as evidence of populousness, we men have actually become a burden to the earth, the fruits of nature hardly suffice to sustain us, there is a general pressure of scarcity giving rise to complaints, since the earth can no longer support us. Need we be astonished that plague and famine, warfare and earthquake come to be regarded as remedies, serving, as it were to trim and prune the superfluity of population.
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  2. We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.
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  3. The battle to feed all humanity is over. In the [decade redacted] the world will undergo famines–hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.
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  4. The limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime in the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.
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  5. Our supplies of natural resources are not finite in any economic sense. Nor does past experience give reason to expect natural resources to become more scarce. Rather, if history is any guide, natural resources will progressively become less costly, hence less scarce, and will constitute a smaller proportion of our expenses in future years.
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  6. The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.
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  7. It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.
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  8. Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. The difficulty is the same one we have with compounding: possibilities do not merely add up; they multiply.

A. Paul Romer
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B.  Günter Grass
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C.  REM
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D.  Thomas Malthus
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E.  Tertullian, 200 CE
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F.  Paul R. Ehrlich, 1970
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G. Donella Meadows
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H.  Julian Simon

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1. E  2. B   3. F   4. G  5. F  6. D  7. C   8. A


Weekend Postcard from Mountain Home State Forest

I was the Assistant Forest Manager at Mountain Home State Forest in the early 1980’s.

Mountain Home Demonstration State Forest is a 4,800 acre tract of forest land in Tulare County managed by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The State Forest lies within the Tule River watershed some 22 air miles northeast of Porterville. Elevations range from 4,500 feet to 7,500 feet. Vegetation on the forest is dominated by a mixed-conifer forest with over 5,000 individual old-growth giant sequoia trees.

For more information on MHSF read Management of Giant Sequoia on Mountain Home Demonstration State Forest written by forest manager, David Dulitz.

Here’s a picture of a kid standing in one of the area’s so-called “Indian Bathtubs.”


For more on these rock basins read Rock Basins in Mt. Home State Forest and Immediate Vicinity.

iPhone app for wood

I own an iPhone that rarely has a signal in my area. Nevertheless, iPhones have some cool apps. For instance,  Double Dog Studios has an app called I.D. Wood. It’s available through the iTunes store and puts pictures  and information on more than 150 woods at your fingertips.

I.D. Wood allows a user to quickly browse by Wood Samples, Species Names or Other Names to aide [sic] in quick identification. Categories allow for quickly finding woods of a particular use, durability or sustainable status.

Africa, organic doesn’t work

Nearly one-third of the world’s hungry are in Africa and the Green Revolution has yet to reach the most of the African continent. They farm using organic methods.

[Many repeat] “the mantra that ‘sustainable food’ in the future must be organic, local, and slow. But guess what: Rural Africa already has such a system, and it doesn’t work…If we are going to get serious about solving global hunger, we need to de-romanticize our view of preindustrial food and farming.” – Robert Paarlberg

Read Robert Paarlberg’s full article here in Foreign Policy.




Weekend Postcard from the Napa Valley

I’ve shown you this picture before. It’s of a vineyard in the Napa Valley less than an hour from where I live. And, it’s an example of deforestation because deforestation is the conversion of the land’s use from growing trees to not growing trees.

Farther north and up State Route 29 is Robert Louis Stevenson State Park, which–from the road–consists of two wide spots for parking. The pictures were taken from RSL on the trail to Turtle Rock.

The silence of the limbs

My name is Norm, I love trees, and I’m a forester.

This is a picture of a stand on Mountain Home State Forest after it was logged

Foresters love all the types of forests that exist, young, old, and in between. Trees are awesome. We love all the stuff they provide, such as shade, habitat, cleaner air, clean water, and yes, wood.

We are not Romantics. We don’t confer pastoral scenery with transcendental qualities. Though we passionately love trees, we don’t wax poetic about them in the way Thoreau does. To you perhaps, we have an odd way to show our love for the forest: we cut trees down. That detail may remind you of Hannibal Lecter saying he likes people with “fava beans and a nice Chianti.”

A group of us non-Romantic types got together at the California Licensed Foresters Association (CLFA) convention, March 4-6 in Sacramento. The Arden Hilton’s parking lot held more pickup trucks than a Hollywood gala has Prius sedans.

It’s easy to spot the working forester’s pickup. And, don’t let the patina of dirt and mud-caked splashes around the wheel wells fool you, you’ll see that on the trucks of people who merely ‘play’ in the mud for fun. Foresters don’t play in the mud; they work in the mud during winter. And they work in ankle-deep dust in the summer. The giveaway to the pickup is found in the back. Along with bits of tree bark, leaves, and more dirt, you’re apt to see the tools of the trade: chainsaws, handsaws, double-bit axes, loppers, shovels, tow straps, plastic flagging, and some odd looking stuff with even odder names like hoedad, dibble, McLeod, and Pulaski.

Inside the Hilton, it was just as easy to recognize the foresters. We wouldn’t know couture from a coat rack and so we stand out like bib overalls at a black tie affair. Carhartt jeans and plaid-flannel shirts are common. We didn’t don our normal footwear, our caulked (pronounced “corked”) boots, which was fortunate for the floors since caulked boots have spiked soles. By the way, do you know how to recognize an extroverted forester? He (or she, yes, there are women in the woods) is the one looking at the other person’s boots.

We were at the Hilton to recognize our achievements, share knowledge, and celebrate surviving what had been the worst season in anyone’s memory. Foresters work in the only net carbon-positive industry. Yet, we’re in an industry struggling to stay alive. Due to lawsuits, additional fees, and regulations, the costs of producing a Timber Harvesting Plan have risen 1200 percent over the past 30 years. It’s a formula squeezing some of the greenest jobs out of the state.

Forestry’s survival has been through adaptation in the face of a public disinclined to what we do. We cut trees. Yet, we’re not your grandfather’s clearcutter. No more “Cut it flat, burn it black, plant it back,” said Jim Ostrowski. New awareness and new science leads to new goals and practices. Now, “We cut trees to grow trees,” says Steve Butler, a forester from Santa Cruz, “because what is left is the important part.” You cut bad trees, leave good trees.

Industrial forest management has changed with the times. Still, harvesting can look awful. Stumps, logging slash of bark and branches, and skidding trails can look like devastation. It takes time, training, and a willingness to learn. My training has ingrained in me the need to monitor progress and see what has and hasn’t worked. Not everyone sees harvesting as I do. Remember, trees are grown. And if it’s not grown, it’s mined.

Foresters use silvicultural treatments to maintain, protect, and manage biodiversity. Forests have evolved over millennia with fire, flood, insects, and wind. ‘Protecting’ forests from disturbances they count on for rejuvenation can be detrimental to their long-term health. Harvesting can mimic natural disturbance by creating openings for new plants and wildlife. So, if you look decades beyond the present, you’ll see a biologically healthy forest, teeming with life.

You may not like logging but I bet you love trees—and wood. Why, even people living in San Francisco have to admit that they use wood. You and I have tree-hugging in common. If you hug trees, perhaps it’s to tactilely become one with the tree and totally grok its nature. I hug trees to throw a D-tape around them to measure diameters for volume calculations. That’s my nature.

I love trees, sometimes with pine nuts and a nice Chianti, admit it, you do too.


Weekend Postcard from Yosemite-Atop Half Dome

Last weekend I posted a Postcard from Yosemite showing the cables that you use to get to the top of Half Dome. Lexi commented that the view might be rather terrifying. I suppose if one stands on the very edge it could be. The first time I went up I stood maybe 30 feet from the cliff’s edge and noticed a hand pop up over the side, then a foot, then a leg, and finally the climber who had just climbed the face of Half Dome.

I think this is looking north.