Restoring the Americas

0: The Winding Path

Tells the story of my epic journey through North America. http://restoringtheamericas.blogspot.com/

1: Organización de Ejidos Productores Forestales de la Zona Maya s.c..

CONTACTO
Presidente: Carlos A. Torres Sabido
Director: Ing. Victoria Santos Jiménez
Direccion: Calle 66 #728
colonia centro c.p. 77200
Felipe Carrillo Puerto
Quintana Roo
Tels: 01 983 83 41329 y 01 983 83 41103
e-mail: oepfzonamaya@yahoo.com.mx
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Blog Post: The Arrival

I arrived at the Felipe Carrillo Puerto bus station today and promptly met John Curtis, who I made contact with through Curtis Buchanan, the windsor chair maker from Tennesee. John's been living in Carillo (the town goes by its middle name) for 6 years now, sharing his woodworking skills with the people of the surrounding ejidos. He introduced me to "la Ingeniera Victoria,"* Technical Director of the Organizacion de Ejidos Productores de la Zona Maya. It was barely a block away!

Other Blog Posts at OEPF Zona Maya:

2: Santa Maria Poniente, Quintana Roo, Mexico

Blog Post:Santa Maria Poniente

3: Chunhuhub, Quintana Roo, Mexico

Blog Post: Aserradero de Chunhuhub

On the way back from the woods tour in Santa Maria, we headed over to Chunhuhub to see where much of the wood from the ejidos ends up:

Afterwards, Alfredo asked me what I thought of the place, and I wasn't sure whether to talk about the brilliant eficiency of the place or the fact that this was a brilliantly eficient way to destroy forests. Turns out, he was thinking along equally negative lines:

"Yeah, its good that these people have work, but only one person is really winning here."

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http://restoringtheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/08/aserradero-de-chunhuhub.html *Note: Alfredo is the one in the blue shirt with the ghost hand.

4: La Laguna del Señor

Blog Post: La Laguna del Señor

Chalo and I went over to a beautiful lagoon in the ejido Señor today. The people of Señor started an ecotourism project where they cleaned up the lagoon, built trails, and erected an observation deck. They now charge 10 pesos per person to go to the lagoon, which is low enough that locals can afford it but still enough money to provide a steady revenue stream to the ejido.

-- *Image credits: Scince I forgot to bring my camera along for this trip, the beautiful pictures above were donated by Monica and Alfredo from OEPF.

5: Cozumel

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Blog Post: Paradise in Stasis

My friend in Cozumel is Andrea, who I know since about 1st grade when we went to Catholic School together in Huatabampo. She's studying ("supposedly" she jokes) tourism, specializing in food and drinks. Andrea meets me at the ferry port and we take a quick trip 'round the town. "Dando la vuelta," as its called, is really popular in small towns, and most of these have a specified route everyone takes. Cozumel's route, of course, takes you along the main boardwalk.

After "la vuelta," we headed to Andrea's aunt and uncle's house, where she's staying while she goes to school. Apparently, Andrea's aunt Lupita knows me since I was a baby, but I can't seem to draw up more than a vague recognition of her. Either way, she's a spunky, freespirited woman who refuses to get married out of principle, something I haven't seen in Mexico yet.

Andrea's uncle Julio runs a tour operation, catering, like most of the Island, primarily to people who get off the cruise ships. Also like most of the Island, his business is running dangerously slow.

You see, Cozumel is experiencing a tripple wammy of a blow to its tourist (pretty much its only) sector. First of all, Summer is generally the low season here, since most of Cozumel's buisness comes from Norther tourists escaping the winter, and of course "spring breakers" which is now officially a word in Spanish.

The second thing working against them is the global economic crisis, which isn't exactly encouraging people to go on cruise ships. And the third thing, of course, is the bird flu, swine flu, H1N1, Influenza, Influenza Humana, or whatever you want to call it this week.

Several countries have closed their border to Mexico, the US has issued a travel advisory, and the cruise ships have stopped coming. All this despite the fact that Quintana Roo has had only 3 cases of Bird Flu (less than Virginia!) or the fact that the Island of Cozumel has had none, and is unlikely to develop one since the only point of ingress or egress is a really expensive ferry.

Thats not to say I'm one of those conspiracy theorists who doesn't believe in the virus, or thinks the government released it, though I've met a lot of those people here. No, I think this whole thing has been a good example of what I call the Disaster Aversion Paradox: whenever you take extreme measures to avert a disaster and succeed, everyone thinks you cried wolf, calls you an alarmist, thinks you made it up, etc. Of course, if Mexico hadn't closed all the schools, temporarilly banned large public gatherings, and in the epicenter, closed restaurants, bars and night clubs, we might be in a different situation. The epidemic might well have spun out of control, and then we would all be wishing we had done more.

Of course, thats not the prevailing opinion here in Cozumel, where international panic over the swine flu has brought the Cruise Ship dependent economy to a screeeching halt.

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More Blog Posts from Cozumel:

6: Toluca Airport

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Blog Post: Eye of the Storm

I set off from Hermosillo to Cozumel today, with a lay over in Toluca, in the center of the country and the center of the flu epidemic. My aunts dropped me off at the airport in the morining, which was pretty normal except I had to fill out a questionaire listing the major symptoms of bird flu (we worried about bird flu for years, and when it finally did what we predicted it would do, spread to pigs and then to humans, we suddenly called it swine flu... I don't get it). I checked no for all the symptms, as would anyone who wants to get on a plane, regardless of whether they had them or not, making this a relatively useless gesture.

I got on the plane to find it was mostly empty, carrying about a third of its capacity. It was rather lonely, but I wasn't really feeling sociable with my mask on. It also had the immediate effect of giving me three seats to myself, so I stretched my legs and couldn't complain.

Right before we took off, the pilot and co-pilot came out and gave us a speech about the plane's filtration system. He said that the plane changes air with the outside 35 times per hour (or something) and that we woudn't be breathing the air of someone a few rows back or a few rows forward. This honestly did make me feel better, since I wasn't worried about the people leaving Hermosillo so much as the people coming from Toluca on the plane's arrival.

So I took my mask off, and promised myself I would put it back on when we got to Toluca.

The airline, Volaris, was the cheapest option, yet the plane was brand new, the service was great, and the head phones were free. The musical selection was young and hip, ranging from techno/electronic to a mix of Spanish and English rock. The plane ride felt like what air travel must have felt like in the 1970's, when it was tailored to a young, wealthy audience, and before it became the only viable form of Mass transportation in the US.

We arrived at Toluca's airport to find it just as lonely as the plane had been, though I kept my mask on just in case. When we took off again, a couple of masked health officials took my temperature with a really cool touchless infrared thermometer. Definitely a step up from the questionaire.

The plane ride was empty, uneventful, and masked. I arrived in Cancun, took my mask off, and hopped on the bus to Playa del Carmen. Along the way, I spoke to two European tourists who had arrived in Mexico City before the plague, only to find all the ruins suddenly closed one day. They hadn't been keeping up with the news, so they didn't find out about the flu until a journalist tried to interview them about it. Like me, they had flown to Cancun to escape the pannicked center of the country.

I arrived at Playa del Carmen, hopped on a rather expensive ($16 bucks!) ferry, filled out more questionaires, and finnally arrived at the Island of Cozumel.

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*Image Credit: I'm not sure if I can use this one, but it has a share link on the website so what the heck. It came from SDP noticias.

7: Huatabampito

Blog Posts: Semana Santa Sociodegradable Metal Mexican Metal Conversations with the Can Fairy

8: Obregon

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Blog Posts:

9: Biodiversidad y Desarrollo Armónico, A. C.

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Blog Post: Biodiversidad y Desarollo Armonico

I'm in Hermosillo, getting ready to switch from "visiting family" mode to "reforestation" mode and head south. I made my first visit today to the offices of a group that works on biodiversity issues, including restoration, throughout Sonora. Their name translates to "Harmony between Biodiversity and Development."

Hermosillo is the capital and the largest city in Sonora, so lots of state wide groups have offices here even though their projects are hours away. I've seen this pattern before, and I guess its something I'm going to have to get used to.

My cousin Millie came alolng to guide me through the bus system, and because she's a bit bored. Her university administration is on strike, which apparently is nothing new, since they do it every year.

We found the place and knocked on the unmarked door, to be greeted by the realization that I had forgotten everyone's name! I introduced us and awkardly asked for Eduardo (the director) by saying "E...e...e..." until the man at the front door finished the name for me. Fortunately, they were totally understanding and approachable, "totally normal" people as Millie commented later. Eduardo asked me to explain what I was doing (we had talked on the phone a couple of weeks prior). I told him I was traveling Mexico visiting restoration projects and the people involved in them.

We talked for about an hour, and he told me about their main restoration project in the border region of Sonora, which of course I cant see cuz its 8 hours away. Towards the end of the conversation, well after I had asked them if they could connect me to any other projects, Eduardo casually mentioned that his wife was director of the Alamos Reserve. My jaw dropped. What a connection! I'm planning on visiting that reserve, located arond a beutiful old Spanish mission town, and having someone's wife as a toplevel connection should be really helpful.

As we were heading out, the man who had greeted us dropped another one. He'd been sitting there quietly the whole time, and just now let us know that he was the director of restoration!

Millie and I left talking about how open and friendly they were, and it exciting that Millie seemed genuinely interested and engaged both during and after the meeting. Sometimes I forget how smart she is...

I love you Millie!

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10: Viveros de Produccion - Centro Ecologico y Conafor

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Blog Posts:

One of Us, One of Them, Part 1

Millie and I set off again today to visit a couple of tree nurseries. Both of these nurseries provide tree seedlings for "Reforestations" which in Mexico seems to mean any type of tree planting, including city parks!

The first nursery we visited was run by the Ecological and Sustainable Development Commission of the State of Sonora, and was designed to provide native plants like mesquite, palo fierro, and bugambilia (which apparently isnt native, but isn't invasive either since its sterile) to "urban reforestations" like parks, schools, even backyards. We spoke to "Ingeniero" Eulalio* as he showed us around and told us about all the advantages of native plants: less maintenence, less water use, more pride of place, more wildlife habitat. These were not news to me, but hearing them from a man that reminded me of my Abuelito (Grandfather**) was a new experience. Eulalio has the manner of a mexican farmer and the knowledge of an field ecologist. He's shy, calm, and casual, yet it seemed that he was almost holding back a huge resevouir of practical wisdom in his head.

As we sere talking, a man approached us to ask if he could take a palo fierro tree home. "Its not in season yet, sorry," replied Eulalio "come back in a couple of months." The man didn't like this, but Eulalio told him that if he were to plant the tree today, it would surely die because it was too small. Eventually Eulalio forwarded him to a commercial nursery, but what struck me was the lack of a profit motive in his manner.

"Oh, we can't sell trees," he explained, "no man, if we could sell trees, we'd be all over the place, selling trees to anyone without care about whether or not they make it. Thats whats been happening with some of these 'reforestations,' the government gives people money to plant trees, but they just stick them in the ground without watering them. Sometimes they don't even do that! They found a pile of tree seedlings one time that was supposed to be a reforestation."

"What do you think the mortality is on a project like that without watering?" I asked with Millie's help.

"A hundred and ten percent," we laughed while my heart sank, "I don't think any of those trees are going to make it."

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*Note: in Spanish speaking countries, the idea of calling someone doctor as a title had been expanded to include everthing one can study. Eulalio is an environmental Ingeniero, or engineer.

** Another note: this blog is going to become increasingly bilingual. I'm fighting hard against the urge to switch to spanish completely, so if you don't want to learn the language of most of your hamisphere thats your problem.

11: Hermosillo

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Blog Post:

12: Huatabampito

Blog Posts: Semana Santa Sociodegradable Metal Mexican Metal Conversations with the Can Fairy

13: Tallgrass Prairie Preserve

Tallgrass Prairie Preserve!

Justin, John and I visited the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in northern Oklahoma today*. The preserve is the largest protected prairie remnant in the world. I assumed it was a national or at least a state park, but it turns out the whole thing is run by the Nature Conservancy! We met with Bob Hamilton (in between Justin and I in the picture below), basically the ecosystem manager of the preserve. He has been working with the preserve since before it started in 1989, so the Prairie is basically his baby.

As soon as we got in, we experience what happens when two incredibly talkative ecosystem managers (Bob and John) get together... just about 2 hours of introductory conversation! Fortunately it was actually quite interesting, with Bob describing to us the process of setting up and starting up the reserve and managing the huge Bison herd on the site. One of the main things that prairie ecosystems need in order to sustain themselves is disturbance, and Bob explained to us that in this area, disturbance has historically come from a combination of grazing animals like Bison and human induced fires. I was surprised to learn that he doesn't consider lightning to be a significant source of fire. Bob has surveyed the area after lightning storms, and found that what little fires they do start usually die out after burning a small circle around the strike site. If it wasn't for humans, Bob claims, the entire prairie would be a part of the eastern deciduous forest! Talk about slamming down the barrier between humans and "nature."

To replicate this disturbance pattern, Bob uses a combination of Bison and massive prescribed burns. He started with a small Bison herd of ~500 and used the existing fences that were there when the property was bought to slowly give the herd room to grow. Basically, whenever the herd gets too big for the enclosure its in, a fence is removed and the herd allowed to use the next enclosure. The herd now has free roaming rights around most of the preserve and numbers more than 2000 head of Bison. The most amazing part of that number is that every year, most of the herd is rounded up for monitoring, medical attention, and science! I say most of the herd because apparently there are some very stubborn old bulls that refuse to be rounded up. In the beginning, the preserve used four-wheelers and cowboys (real cowboys!) to round the shaggy beasts up, but now they make the bison come to them. They use "Bison Treats" and a siren to attract the native cattle to the trucks, and round them up from there.

The other disturbance method is prescribed burns, and the Tallgrass Prairie takes these to a new level. We heard Bob describe a 400 acre burn as "pretty small." With just a couple of water trucks and some torches, these guys burn about a third of the 39,000 acre preserve each year! What I found really interesting was the interaction between the fire and the Bison. Each year, the bison find the recently burned areas and prefer them as feeding areas. After an area hasn't been burned for about three years, the bison lose interest in it entirely. The burn patches are chosen with a random center, and then a reasonable seeming polygon is drawn around it. I didn't see a single square on the burn map!

The preserve places a high value on creating habitat diversity by varying the timing and size of burns, and it seems to be working. By not doing any one uniform thing to the landscape, they prevent the boring, agricultural look of other rangelands, which are usually burned all at once or even worse, herbicided all at once. In the surrounding cattle ranches, the management style is to knock out anything that isn't a grass, because "If it 'aint a grass, its a weed." On the way in, we saw crop dusting planes doing just that, spraying a broadleaf herbicide from the air. It reminded me of agent orange and the damage it has done to Vietnam and Colombia's forests.

The Nature Conservancy has been trying to change all this, and is doing some experiments on alternative methods such as patch burning rather than full burns and spot spraying rather than aerial spraying. Both of these have been found to greatly increase biodiversity while providing the same amount of weight gain for the cattle.

The Nature Conservancy, long criticized for their sole use of parks as a conservation method, seem to have finally gotten past their "park" mentality and are now thinking about the entire landscape as a unit of conservation. In Osage county, where the preserve is located, most of the land is held by a few large landowners, including the Nature Conservancy, the Mormon Church, and Ted Turner. As Bob said it, "You have to own at least 20,000 acres or more to wear the big hat around here." This means the preserve only has to talk a few people into changing their land use practices, but it also means that if they can't talk one person into it, they lose a significant portion of the landscape. So far, though, it seems that they are making quite a bit of headway, getting their neighbors engaged in conservation.

Anyway, enough science, its time for pictures!

*Note: I'm really behind on these posts, but I'm writing them as a diary anyway. Please ignore the dates on the Blog... :)

14: Nogales, Arizona / Nogales, Sonora

Crossing the Border

Amid alarming and exaggerated reports of a ¨Civil War¨ between the drug cartels and the Mexican government, I finally crossed the border today. After our trip to Biosphere 2, Levi dropped me off at a Mexican bus station in Tucson, and we joked that we were speaking the ¨last unaccented English¨ I would hear for a while.

I walked into the bus station, surprised people by speaking fluent Spanish, and felt like I was already home. It says a lot about the sorry state of mass transport in the US that the Mexican bus lines are now expanding northward, some reaching as far as Vegas or LA. Rather than driving everywhere (or flying) like we do in the US, in Mexico the normal way of traveling from one city to the next is by bus. This is mostly out of necessity of course, but the effect is that you can simply show up at the bus station whenever you please (within reason) and probably be on your way in less than an hour and at a decent price.

I hopped on the bus and headed South. Almost immediately, I struck up a conversation (in Spanish) with the girl in front of me, who I quickly discovered spoke perfect, unaccented English. So much for that!

We crossed the border and cheered when the random search button said we could go through with no hassle. Within a few hours I was in Hermosillo, where I went kindergarten, greeting my cousin Milly and her family. I was home.

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15: Desert Botanical Gardens

CouchSurfing in the Desert

After a weeklong pit stop with family and friends in Williamsburg, I flew into Phoenix and discovered an amazing new resource: Couch Surfing. The concept of couch surfing is not new to me, since I've been doing it for years as many of my friends may already know. What is new, however, is the website, CouchSurfing.com, where people post available couches and invite strangers to crash at their pads. After browsing the Phoenix Couchsurfing pages, and there were many, I came upon Annie, who not only looked friendly and nice but offered to pick me up at the airport!

She did just that, and I ended up spending two nights with her, her roommates, and her adorable and crazy little dog. While everyone was at work during the day, I headed over to the Desert Botanical Garden, about 20 minutes from the house on foot. The Gardens were extremely busy because there was an exhibit of blown glass sculptures by Dale Chihuly. The eye-patch wearing artist creates works that look like alien plants and are often integrated into the landscape. They've been touring botanical gardens across the US for a while now, but I never thought I'd get to see them in person.

I spent the day between sheer wonderment at the artwork and ingdignation because it was preventing me from seeing the plants (I'm not sure for how long this link will work, but see here for a gallery of glass at the garden). I did, however, learn a few cacti and other desert plants, among them the cholla, the organ pipe cactus, the senissa or old man cactus, palo verde and palo blanco. I learned about some of the native people of the sonoran desert, and noticed over and over again that their traditional dewllings offered little if any rain protection, which I guess makes sense if it hardly ever rains. Overall, I felt at home in the landscape and even more excited about crossing the border. -- *Image credits: first two images are from Annie's couchsurfing profile and used with her permission. The last image is by Bernard Gagnon and comes directly from this page on the wikimedia commons.

16: Biosphere 2

Biosphere 2! A bit of background

Before I get into Levi and I's trip to Biosphere 2, lets go over a bit of background, from a 10 year old's perspective. As a child growing up in the 1990's, I kept hearing about this magical place called Biosphere 2, where a team of scientists and at least one very rich person had built a complex ecosystem that was closed to the outside world and sent a few people to live there for two years.

Facsinated by this idea, I tried to build my own closed systems, usually without much success, although I once got a small plant and some ants to live together for almost a week. Usually, my attempts at building closed systems consisted of an insect, a plant or a few plants, and one of those little clear balls with toys in them (minus the toy), sealed with a bit of chewing gum. They tended to die in the space of a few hours, but as I got better at picking species, adding the right amount of water, pulling plants by the root, etc, I got these little systems to survive longer and longer. Needless to say, these were never really closed systems, but I learned a lot of early lessons in ecology by playing with them.

Later, when I told people about Biosphere 2, I realized that the public largely thought of it as a failed project. Not only that, but the project had become a sort of flagship for closed systems, on earth but more importantly in space. When the project "failed," it took with it the reputation of and funding for the whole field, setting this incredibly important area of study back about 20 years. This is especially unfortunate because the failure was really more one of public relations than of science. Biosphere 2 set records for the longest running closed system, and taught us valuable scientific lessons about running a closed system, lessons which might have been more disasterous had they been learnt on, say, the moon. Now that people think "failed" when you say Biosphere 2, any other project like it can be dismissed with a snooty, "oh, we tried that already and it didn't work." Imagine if we had given up after the first crashed airplane prototype, or the first dead computer bank, or even the first exploded space shuttle!

Right about here is where my ideas diverge from traditional environmentalism. In the long term, and I mean the extreme long term, it is very important that we bring the life that has evolved here on Earth to other planets, just in case something happens to ours. Biosphere 2 was an important step in that direction, an attempt to create a really big bottle, seal some plants and animals (including people) in it, and see how long we can get them to last, with the express purpose of learning lessons for future space colonies. Other projects like it need to be funded, and some are progressing, but the field as a whole still suffers from a public that thinks the grand project is either unimportant or imposible.

Like most grand projects related to space, creating a closed ecological system that can support humans will (and has) taught us lessons that we can apply here at home. Just like the first space age brought us tang, dry freezing, and communications sattelites, Biosphere 2 and other projects can teach us us important lessons about the carbon cycle, about sustainable intensive agriculture, and about recreating and managing ecosystems. Restoration ecology has a lot to gain in this endeavor, and a lot to teach as well. I see the two fields as sisters, essentially the same project with slightly different goals. One field tries to re-assemble functioning ecosystems in places where they've been obliterated, the other tries to assemble functioning ecosystems in closed jars that can be transported into space. Both are in the business of assembling functioning ecosystems, and both benefit when one succeeds. My only hope is that both carry out their missions as far and as fast as possible, because if one of them fails, we're all dead.

Here's to the year 5000!

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*Image credits: Toy capsule image was taken by Charles Nguyen and found on the wikimedia page http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gachapon.jpg

Other Posts from Biosphere 2:

17: Annie!

18: Flint Gap Strip Mine Restoration Project

19: Big Stone Gap

FarmLIFE

Well I got a videocamera for Christmas, so I'm going to be doing a bit of what the kids call Video Blogging, or "Vlogging." Its way easier and better than writing all of this down! I don't really like spending a lot of time editing either, so I'm going to upload the videos individually.

Anyway, I'm spending a week farm-sitting for my friend Kirsty at her farm in Big Stone Gap, VA. FarmLIFE is a strangely capitalized animal farm with chickens, sheep, cows, and a very naughty llama!

But why am I writing this? I'll let the videos speak for themselves.

I've had better luck with these sheep:

Anyway, we'll see how this whole video blogging thing goes. Bear with me while I figure it out!

--- http://restoringtheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/01/farmlife.html

Other Posts from Big Stone Gap:

• Terrible Nature Videos: Part 1
• Terrible Nature Videos: Part 2
• Shitake Mushrooms at FarmLIFE
• Leaving FarmLIFE
• Shiitake Mushroom Logging

20: Banner Boundary

Blog Post: Horse Logging! A country drive

Driving away from Abingdon, VA on Alt. 58, the first thing you lose is your sense of distance. Even though I've driven this route at least ten times, I can never keep track of where that next landmark, that next turn, is supposed to be. And so I flip through through the radio, find a wonderful folk and bluegrass station, and try to convince myself that I haven't passed it yet, that I haven't been going the wrong way for the last twenty minutes. As soon as I've all but given up hope, the turn comes, and I continue on my way to the boundary (a forestry term for the place you are logging) in Castlewood.

As usual, my country directions include a stoplight without a street name, so I'm left wondering if this really is the correct stoplight. Oh well, I think, its only five miles to the next turn, and if I don't find it, I'll try the next stoplight.

As it turns out, it was only three miles to the next turn, causing me to see it only as I passed by, and then turn around awkwardly in someone's circular driveway, apologizing to them mentally the whole time.

But I make the turn and easily find the next one, though this last road immediately turns into a driveway-esque gravel path. As I head up the mountain, I come across a young man walking without a dog. He waves at me and I think, maybe he's one of Chad's loggers trying to flag me down. I stop and say hi, he says hi back, and we just sit there until I ask "Were you trying to flag me down?"

"No, just wavin'," is his reply.

"Oh ok," I respond, and drive off feeling more like an outsider than usual. I arrive at the end of the road, wondering if this is the place, and hop the gate. At this point, I'm either early or tresspassing. I breathe a sigh of relief when I find Chad's truck at the end of the dirt drive.

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Other Blog Posts at the Banner Boundary:

• Horse Logging! Stories and video
• A little more horse logging before I go

21: Curtis Buchanan

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Blog Post:

Curtis Buchanan: Chairmaker

Sustainable forestry doesn't have to be all about high tech science, carbon credits or certified forests. Sometimes, all it takes to use a forest sustainably is the ability to make a really awesome, valuable product out of a small amount of wood. Today, I visited a man who knows how to get the most value out of the little material he uses. His name is Curtis Buchanan, and in an unassuming, quiet little workshop behind his house he makes Windsor chairs.

When he's not making chairs, Curtis also happens to run the first certified organic Christmas tree farm in the US, Glen Ayre Tree Farm (here's another article with a picture).

He also happens to be one of the founding members of Greenwood. Started by a group of artisan woodworkers from the US, Greenwood helps people use their forests sustainably by teaching them the skills they need to turn wood into furniture, guitar necks, and other high value products. Sounds right up my alley, right? That's why Curtis gave me info for two of the other founding members, ans why I'm going to try really hard to see parts of their operation.

So why does Curtis do all of this? Lets ask him:

Baller.

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http://restoringtheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/02/curtis-buchanan-chairmaker.html

22: Clinch Mountain Preserve

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Blog Post: A late night

After leaving Kirsty's farm, I headed out on the main road towards the home of Steve and Maxine, long time activists and stewards of a 500-year-forest. Turns out I went the wrong way.

About an hour or so later, during which I tortured myself wondering if I was going the right way and thinking that I probably was, then doubting myself again, I finally decided to ask for directions. When I told the attendant, an incredibly sweet girl with a red buzzcut and a butch country look, where I was going, a woman on her way out remarked "Boye, you are a long way off!" Unfazed, the attendant described the steps to get where I was going ("No, I don't know the street names, but its real simple"), saw my worried look, and decided to write the directions down.

go 2 second Red light turn right, about 25-30 min come 2 red light and take another right you should Be in duffield drive Bouth 25-30 more min when you see a wendy's you R in GAte CitY

Adorable, right? I thought so too, but I was still nervous about whether I could follow them reliably. Fortunately, they were absolutely perfect directions, despite the lack of punctuation. They put me back on track, and I continued onward, passing an increasingly themed array of private drive street signs: Winter Wonderland, Snowflake, Arctic; Revolver, Rifle, Shotgun. When I finally got to my turn the road almost immediately turned to gravel/dirt. It also got narrower and narrower as it twisted its way up the mountain.

My directions said to go to the end of this road, but at times it got so narrow I kept thinking "surely I'm in someone's driveway now." Then another three houses would pop up and I would keep driving. I finally arrived at about 9 PM, two hours late, and although I didn't get to see the property, I did have a long and interesting conversation covering topics as diverse as activism since the 60's, travelers that have come through and stayed at the house, and "Possibly Possums" an idea for a Possum-themed gift shop. Steve was one of the founders of Virginia Forest Watch, an organization that literally watches forests, keeping an eye out for illegal or inappropriate logging in our public lands and educating private landowners about how to manage their resources sustainably. He first arrived in the area as a "Vista," a government program set up to fight poverty that in the sixties became a breeding ground for countercultural ideas.

Since then, Steve and Maxine have been vocal advocates for peace and environmental stewardship in the region, building quite a reputation for stirring things up (or annoying officials, as Maxine called it). Maxine told me it was a sign of the times, though, that they had recently become involved in the Democratic Party.

The couple take in travelers from time to time, and have thus developed a network of contacts who they can (and do) visit abroad. One such person was Martin Vosseler, who has been walking across the US to promote solar energy after having sailed across the Atlantic in a Solar-Powered catamaran.

As the conversation went on, it got later and later and Steve started to fade out. I wanted to let him sleep, but kept getting hooked back into the conversation by the sheer interestingness of these people. Eventually I left, but I hope I can go back during the daytime sometime to see their beautiful forest.

--

http://restoringtheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/02/late-night.html

23: Holston Lake

The Dry Lake

I went on a little photo assignment today, with the goal of capturing the beauty of our most plentiful wood, poplar, in a recently installed ceiling. It was a little awkward showing up at a stranger's house to photograph their ceiling, but the Sharon and Powell were great sports and even posed for me and rearranged furniture. Here's some of the pictures from the trip:

Powell is quite a nature aficionado, and showed me the trail system he built behind his house in a steeply sloping wooded area. The whole understory was covered in rhododendrons (laurel) and was quite beautiful. As we were walking around, we got to talking about the elephant in the forest.

At the bottom of the hill we were on was a little kayak dock, and the neighbors had a large dock with boats somewhere between skips and yachts. The water, however, was nowhere to be found. In fact, the South Holston Reservoir was been almost twenty feet lower than normal, leaving the inlet that Powell and his neighbors shared high and dry. Powell and Sharon told me that the Southeastern Drought was to blame. In the past few years, the South has been experiencing a massive drought, straining the water supplies of many southern cities. Seeing the dry lake bed made me feel like I was watching a glacier melt or New Orleans drown, not thinking about or imagining what the future effect of climate change might be, but seeing it, here and now, with my own eyes.

As I headed home, feeling the disjointment of driving through the mountains while listening to an electronic radio station, I snapped a few pictures of the dryness of the lake.

This is the first weird thing I saw as I was driving to Powell and Sharon's house. Its a huge, two level dock in the middle of what looks like a normal field, with no sign of the lake anywhere in the landscape (I'm not hiding it with camera angles). In this dramatic shot, the normal level of the lake is the top of the denuded slopes, where the silhouette of the land is straight, rather than tree covered.

http://restoringtheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/01/dry-lake.html

24: Appalachian Sustainable Development Office

Really cool organization, with Sustainable Forestry, Organic Farming, and distribution systems for both. Contact: Anthony Flaccavento

120 Acres?!?!?

I spent much of Today at the Appalachian Sustainable Development office in downtown Abingdon. I was researching carbon markets and sustainable forestry certifications. This is the main research component of my internship, with the ultimate goal of getting the forestry operations certified so we can get carbon credits for them.

There are two main certification systems that allow a firm to claim that their wood is "sustainable." The Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) was designed by the wood and paper products industry, is the most popular system in the U.S. and seems to be only marginally better than nothing. For example, there's this little quote:

"Average size of clearcut harvest areas does not exceed 120 acres, except when necessary to respond to forest health emergencies or other natural catastrophes."

I took a few minutes to compose myself after reading this amazing example of greenwashing, and then took heart that although SFI is the most popular standard in the US, it is not generally accepted as "green" by anyone reputable. From "LEED," the green building standard that stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, to environmental groups like the National Wildlife Federation, most legitimate environmental organizations do not consider SFI to be a true standard for sustainability.

Instead, these organizations and many others use the Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC, standard. FSC was designed by environmental organizations and is generally considered to be the greener of the two standards. However, not everyone agrees with FSC. When I mentioned to Chad the Horse Logger the other day that part of my internship was to get FSC certification, for Sustainable Woods, he told me that he didn't think it went far enough because it allowed for some clearcutting.

I've just started my research, so I don't know the extent to which FSC allows for clearcutting. I only hope its less than 120 acres...

-Peace and Plants

Andon

Sources: Sustainable Forestry Initiative: www.sfiprogram.org/ SFI vs FSC (pdf): www.yale.edu/forestcertification/pdfs/auditprograms.pdf

More Posts from Appalachian Sustainable Development Office:

25: Appalachian Sustainable Development Packing House

My life begins

I felt like my life finally got started today. I was at a farmer's meeting for ASD, and I pitched the idea of a couple of workshops on forest grown crops. I expected almost no interest, but was pleasantly surprised when several of the farmers got really quite excited. I think phrasing is incredibly important in this sort of thing. If I had said something to the effect of "How many of you are interested in Non-Timber Forest products?" probably like one hand would have gone up, if that.

Rather than use that totally valid and scientifically accurate term, I chose to pose the question practically: "How many of you have a little woodlot that you would like to grow something in?" Seven or eight hands went up at this point, out of something like 15 households represented. I had mentioned Shiitake Mushrooms, which can be grown in logs under natural shade. It almost seemed like I had struck a dormant nerve, because everyone seemed to have heard of growing mushrooms but no one had talked about it. People began asking me questions as if I knew anything substantial about it (I don't) and I could see the hunger for this sort of information in everyone's eyes. It felt like I was standing on the edge of a tipping point, like all the ingredients to the reaction were sitting there waiting for a catalyst to kick it into high gear (wow three metaphors!). These people had experience growing things, interest in trying new things, and forest land to grow them on. All they need is practical information, maybe a few seeds, and BAM! we're growing things in the forest instead of cutting it down.

After the meeting, I talked to several of the farmers individually, and found out that some of them already had ideas about where and how they would go about growing things in their woods. One couple told me of their plans to purchase a Shiitake Mushroom kit, another guy thought Goldenseal (a medicinal herb) would grow well on his land. I even got to talking about what to do with Sustainable Woods' scrap wood. This is another problem entirely, but one that I've been thinking about since I saw the piles of woodwaste, more than we could ever burn in our kilns, at the Castlewood sawmill. His idea was to create vegetable boxes and wine racks, which would be labor intensive, but I asked him if he would make a prototype that we could show around.

Needless to say I am really excited about all of this, since its exactly the type of thing I need to learn about if The Plan is ever going to work. I wonder if this is how it feels to be "born again?"

Born all right the first time,

--

http://restoringtheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-life-begins.html

26: Sustainable Woods Processing Center

Sustainable Woods

On the first day of my internship in Southwest Virginia, I went over to the wood processing center for Sustainable Woods. Part of Appalachian Sustainable Development, the wood processing center focuses on making and marketing flooring from sustainably harvested logs. They help landowners apply a forest management plan to their land and take far less wood than a traditional logging operation. They even use methods like horse logging, the practice of pulling logs out of the woods using horses. This reduces soil compaction and other disturbances compared to using heavy equipment. Sustainable Woods is my main interest in ASD and the focus of my internship.

It was a wet, cold, miserable day and yet I still learned a ton! For starters, running a "Sustainable" wood processing plant is a lot like running a regular processing plant. It takes saw operators, laborers and managers, all of whom can still wear camouflage and continue to be "joe six pack" while contributing to the efforts of an environmental non-profit.

In a way, ASD defeats the stereotype of environmentalists as "hippies" or "outsiders" by creating local sustainable jobs. For example, Chad is a horse logger on a contract with ASD. His accent is more Southern than Appalachian, his demeanor friendly and intelligent. Because the big loader wasn't working, Tim (a hardworking laborer with a sometimes incomprehensible accent) had to unload a truckload of huge logs with a tiny forklift. Since this took a while, Chad and I got to talkin'.

I wrongly assumed that sustainable logging was more of a side job for Chad, so I asked him how often he logged. "Every day," he responded, "we log full time." Chad has a distaste for environmental activists who "do nothing but talk." He considers himself an "active-ist," someone who's out there "doing the work, practicing good forestry" rather than just talking about it. When I told him that part of my internship was seeking Forest Stewardship Council certification for the forests he logs, he revealed that he doesn't think FSC goes far enough. "These people allow for clearcuttin'," he told me.

Chad doesn't like it when people talk about horse logging in terms of going back to an older way of logging. He considers horse logging to be very modern, and explained to me that the horse breeds have gotten bigger and the tools more efficient since the old days. Chad represents what ASD is all about-changing the system from within rather than from without. When someone like Chad talks to his friends and neighbors about sustainability, they listen in a way that they would never listen to a liberal college boy like me.

---- More dispatches from the hills soon, so stay tuned!

--

More Posts from the Sustainale Woods Processing Center:

• Quality Control

27: Tinker Air Force Base

First Three Days

I finally got to posting again after three amazing days at Tinker. I've been touring the base with John and Justin (the other SCA intern), checking out all the projects that the Integrated Environmental Team has going. Most everyone's civilian, and I haven't really interacted with too many Air Force people yet. The environmental team on this base is really impressive. You've got a guy for fisheries, two for wildlife management (mostly taking care of pest species), a GIS expert, a PhD student with three field techs studying Texas Horned Lizards, and John, who oversees the projects and is really into native plantings and restoration. That's just one office, but it covers most of the people involved.

The base has an Urban Greenway, which is a series of natural areas connected by trails. The goal is to have all the reserves connected by native plant species, including prairie, forest, and wetland areas. John's really focused on habitat variability, which is great because a lot of native plantings end up being monocultures. On the first day I got in and met John and Justin at the airport, after which we toured some of the base. On the second day we toured some more and checked out the native tree farm. The farm has sets of two rows of trees planted together and sharing an irrigation line. The trees are staggered, planted in big holes with a rootbag to keep it all together. The rootbag works better than a pot because they keep the roots from wrapping around in the pot.

The other intern, Justin, has an incredible amount of practical knowledge, especially when it comes to game-type wildlife. He's a Bio Major form Michigan and he's memorizing plant names way faster than me (story of my life!). He eventually wants to apply what he's learning here to land that he wants to buy in Michigan. Justin hates snakes, and he saw his first 4-foot wild black ratsnake snake today. He was peein' in the woods and almost peed on it!

We also had a fun experience in the office with another black ratsnake. The Texas Horned Lizard people usually keep the little "Varmints" (as John calls them) in burlap bags. So when I saw a bag that looked really full, I naturally assumed that it was a bag full of Lizards. Ray, the fisheries guy and practical joker, assured me that it was ok for them to all be together in the bag like that. Then he told me to open it, and when I did, I jumped back because it was another black ratsnake! Anyway I got to eat, but I'll catch up with day three soon!

http://restoringtheamericas.blogspot.com/2008/05/first-three-days.html

--

More posts about Tinker Air Force Base:

• Third Day
• Blowin grass onto other grass
• Seeding!
• Why Burning Rocks
• Texas Horned Lizard ROUND UP!!
• The Restorationist
• Catch'n Up
• Invasion of the Trees!
• Trackin Storms, Deer and Planes
• I caught a snake!
• Bulldoze it!
• Tracking Lizards!
• Later That Night...
• Flight
• An environmentalist's dream, an airstrip's nightma...
• Spaddadock Pond I: Design
• Spaddadock Pond II: Planting
• Leaving Oklahoma

28: On the plane to Oklahoma

Plane Ride

I'm on the plane to Oklahoma, and I'm looking down on our country and noticing all kinds of cool spatial patterns. I'm pretty sure you can actually see the effects of our wetland and stream protection policies from the air. In the Midwest, these have resulted in everything but a small buffer around the streams to be used for farmland or urban/suburban use. The buffer seems to be always uniform. It usually looks like the federal 100 ft buffer, but once in a while its uniformly bigger. I wonder if that's the result of better local protection laws, or just less usable land or wetlands that were not drained prior to the day we got smart and stopped draining wetlands.

Check it out on the map or on the pictures:

Another pattern I'm noticing is that once in a while, especially while flying to my stopover in Ohio, I'll see a square patch of what looks like forest surrounded by agricultural fields. I have to wonder if those are old field re-grown forests, tree farms, or patches that have lain unfarmed for a long time.

I still have no idea what's waiting for me when this plane touches down. Will I learn all sorts of cool and useful stuff about forest management and ecology? Will I end up just doing a lot of unrelated stuff? Will I ever be able to explain what I did to my friends beyond a vague "Natural resource management on an Air Force base."? Well, the compy's runnin' out of power, so until next time, thanks for readin'.

http://restoringtheamericas.blogspot.com/2008/05/im-on-plane-to-oklahoma-and-im-looking.html

29: Home Base

Blog Post: 

The Beggining

Hello, and welcome to my new blog about ecological restoration in North, Central and South America. Starting in May and going on for at least a year after that, I will be traveling down through the Americas, stopping for a week to a couple of months at a time to volunteer on permaculture farms, sustainably managed forests, and restoration projects along the way. I will record my experiences on this blog, on videos, and perhaps in a book at the end of the journey in hopes that they can be useful to others who are interested in ecological restoration. I hope you will join me in my travels, and perhaps even provide a stop along the way.

http://restoringtheamericas.blogspot.com/2007/11/beggining.html

30: William and Mary

Oklahoma?

I just found out what my first stop will be. I'm going to Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City. Me and another Student Conservation Association intern will be working on the urban greenway, weeding out invasives, tagging trees, restoring native prairie and woodland habitats. There's also a native tree nursery which provides street and greenway trees. The expenses are paid so thats exciting, however I likely won't be making much money. Thats to be expected with any environmental work, though. It should be interesting to do restoration work in an urban setting, although from the aerial photos it looks pretty developed. It should also be interesting to work as a civilian on an air force base, especially if I end up living on base.

http://restoringtheamericas.blogspot.com/2008/03/oklahoma.html

31: El Continente

32: Chetumal

33: Zoh Laguna

34: Ejido Veinte de Noviembre

From the Blog: http://restoringtheamericas.blogspot.com/2010/02/condor-watch.html

Condor Watch

Mauro and I headed out to the field today, driving past an epic ridgeline before arriving at out little basecamp. We spent the next 2 hours (or was it three?) tying tons of tiny little nooses to the net that formed the trap. Which was fine at first but got worse and worse as the heat rose. The idea is that the King Vultures will walk around on the net when they go for the bait and get their feet stuck in the nooses. Once we were done, we set the bait, a pile of cow guts that had been cooking in the sun. Then the waiting got started. While we waited, we (quietly) headed over to the King Vulture Rookery, where Mauro counted about 15 birds and collected feathers (from the ground) while I tried my hand at using binoculars as a zoom lens. After about half an hour and upteen tries, I finally got a decent shot. I woke up out of my photography trance and joined Mauro by the stream. Watching him work, I realized field biology is often very much like a World of Warcraft quest:

"Follow the trail south to the river where the King Vultures sleep. Collect as many of their feathers as you can (drop rate - 15%) and bring them back that we may learn about their kind." EXP 5000 (low level).

We checked the trap on the way back, and ate lunch on a table mauro made while he was bored on another outing. There's a lot of waiting in this job. But that's alright, because the waiting takes place in a beautiful forest, and gives you time to do things like go down to the river and bathe. Mauro told me the bridge over the stream I bathed in used to connect Veinte de Noviembre (the ejido we're working in, named after the date of the Mexican Revolution of 1910) to a neighboring ejido. The other community had started stealing timber out of Veinte's land so in response Veinte cut them off by blowing the bridge. Nowadays, it is only passable on foot or on a bike, and makes a great place to sit and enjoy a cool breeze. We didn't catch anything, no surprise since Mauro has yet to catch one of these creatures, even though he's been at it for months! But it was a beautiful day nonetheless. On the way back, Mauro and I started talking about how unfortunate the King Vulture's name is. Think about the words 'Condor' and 'Vulture' for a second.* If you're like me, 'Condor' brings up images of a majestic bird soaring off of a cliff, of Californian and Andean efforts to bring a natural wonder back from the brink of extinction. 'Vulture,' on the other hand, brings up images of a roadkill and garbage eating scavenger that circles overhead as you die of thirst in the desert. The difference is pure perception, but hey, so is the stock market. Since the "King Vulture" is a sister species to the California Condor and a distant cousin to the Common Vulture, why not call it a condor? I had been thinking of "Mexican Condor" as a better name, but Mauro suggested something better - the Mayan Condor. Let the name switching battle begin! -- * We had this conversation in Spanish, but the words 'Condor' and 'Zopilote' have similar connotations to their counterparts in English. ** Some more pictures that didn't make it into the text:

Another binocular-zoomed shot of the Mayan Condor.

The bridge no longer supports cars or trucks, but that's the idea.

The creek where I took a bath. 

Sometimes this place looks just like Virginia in the Spring.

Other Blog Posts from Ejido Veinte de Noviembre: