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Learning
from Mother Nature
Events
remind us again how powerful natural forces can
be. But can we avoid disasters of our own making?
East
coast, west coast – we’ve gotten some pretty
impressive reminders this year of how Mother
Nature remains perfectly capable of disaster and
disruption without undue regard for her subset
known as mankind. To the fires raging in
Southern California, for example, houses have been just a part of the
underbrush feeding the flames. The solar flares of
recent days could care less about the effect on
communications on a distant pebble of a planet.
SARS, blessed by mobile life forms to act as
incubators, is a virus determined to do its own thing. And Isabel spent over land the wind
and water energy she had packed together in her early
life over the
Atlantic Ocean, power lines or not, just as planned.
Any
experience with one of nature’s challenges or a
trip to the most natural spots of Virginia – and
in our case last week, of California –
reinforces one’s appreciation for both the power
and the fragility of nature and mankind’s often
subordinate role in the whole scheme. And the
scope of such natural challenges makes one think
we’d try harder to avoid as many disasters of
our own making as we could.
Virginians
certainly sympathize mightily with victims of the California
fires. But even as scientists can project that, in
the really long term, the sun will swell, boil off
earth’s oceans and leave the planet a cinder --
predictive science is such a comfort -- we also
can wonder why building homes directly up to and
into forests that turn into tinderboxes each and
every year is a good idea. We wonder why trimming
the trees we’ve planted under and around power
lines isn’t a priority. We wonder why we would
leave such a large portion of our population
without health insurance that boosts early
diagnosis and treatment of contagious diseases. We
wonder how much more water Palm Springs
is sucking out of its aquifer each year than
nature is putting back in.
We
know Mother Nature produces great and positive
things, including pure wonder. Canoeing a Virginia
river, experiencing them as highways as the first
European settlers did, or watching the
Pacific Ocean
crash timelessly upon huge rocks amid heavy fog
are special pleasures. The seafood bounty of the
Chesapeake Bay
or the water California
uses to turn its San Joaquin
Valley
into thousands of square miles of grapes, olive,
lemon, walnut, cherry, plum and avocado trees
certainly illustrate how mankind benefits from the
harnessing of nature’s power. The same winds that
fan the flames of those San Bernardino
fires also generate electricity as they spin
hundreds of wind turbines set like white pinwheels
in the hills east of Riverside
toward Palm Springs.
Impressive
as they are, however, the vast irrigation and
water schemes of Southern California, the groomed
vineyards of the Coastal Range, even William
Randolph Heart’s castle at San Simeon (now a
state monument), can’t hold a candle to the 75
Sierra Nevada groves of giant sequoia trees, the
oldest of which has been growing since B.C. Stand
at the base of that tree, think about what is
truly important and you'll realize that the tree could
care less about who sits as governor of California
this month, whether the GOP maintains control of
the Virginia General Assembly or what the latest
excuse in the Middle East might be for blowing up
people.
It’s
a bit of a surprise to learn from the National
Park Service that the most creative thing Congress
could do at the time it created the Sequoia
National Park
in 1890 was name two of the largest trees for
Union generals, Sherman and Grant. Perhaps there
was a need then to popularize in some dramatic
fashion for Easterners the idea that land and big
trees should be preserved for their scenic and
recreational value. But Sequoiadendron
giganteum fits a 275-foot tall tree that is
103 feet around at the base and has been growing
for 2,300 to 2,700 years better than any
person’s name and needs no further
embellishment.
Sequoias
grow naturally only on the west slope of California’s
Sierra Nevada
range at elevations between 5,000 and 7,000 feet.
In one of nature’s ironies, fire is the key to
seed dispersal and seedbed fertility. Fire dries
the tree’s cones, which then open and drop seed.
By burning away brush and branches, fire adds ash
as fertilizer to the soil and lets sunlight
encourage sequoia seedlings. The white fir, sugar
pine, yellow pine and incense cedar learned long
ago which tree is dominant.
Sequoias
are awesome. Listen to John Muir, father of the conservation
movement in the United States.
“When I entered this
sublime wilderness the day was nearly done,” he wrote of his reaction to encountering the
largest sequoias in what he named the Giant
Forest, “the trees with rosy, glowing
countenances seemed to be hushed and thoughtful,
as if waiting in conscious religious dependence on
the sun, and one naturally walked softly and
awestricken among them.”
Conveniently,
visitors can drive right into the middle of the Giant
Forest. Not by chance, perhaps, between Red’s Meadow
and Tully Hole along the John Muir Trail (which
runs about 200 miles from 14,494-foot Mt.
Whitney to the
Yosemite Valley
in the High Sierras) lies a Lake
Virginia.
Logging,
agriculture, urbanization, even fire suppression
efforts over almost four centuries since European
settlement have left Virginia, indeed, the Eastern
United States with a very finite set of old growth
forests. Nothing so big as sequoias are near, to
be sure, but these stands still inspire. The most
rugged areas of the George Washington
National Forest
give Virginians a starting point. The Great Smoky
Mountains National Park of North Carolina and Tennessee, the Joyce
Kilmer
National Forest
in North Carolina, even the Chapman
Forest
across the
Potomac
in Charles County, Maryland and Swallow
Falls
State Park
in
Garrett
County,
Western Maryland
are worthy destinations that are a lot closer than
California.
Legendary
forester and conservationist Gifford Pinchot
brought leading industrialists John Burroughs,
Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone and Thomas Edison to
camp at Swallow Falls
decades ago, the better to expand their support
for
America’s national forests and parks amid hemlock and
white pine that are hundreds of years old. As is
the case in contemplating sequoias firsthand, the
meaning of responsible leadership, conservation
and stewardship cannot help but become much
clearer in such circumstances. With California
preparing to swear in a new governor and
Virginians looking at November 4 elections for
everything from senator to delegate to supervisor
to sheriff to soil and water commissioner,
thoughts of really big, really old trees might
help consensus emerge in the budget battles ahead.
--
November
3, 2003
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