The New Yorker: A Day in the Life of a Tree

Reporting this story involved obtaining my first research permit, which allowed me to install a fascinating instrument to the truck of a gigantic London plane tree in Prospect park called a dendrometer. It allowed me to see, minute to minute, the changes in the tree’s growth over the course of a day, week and month over the spring and try to understand the environmental factors that influenced it. I chose one day in particular to write about, which just so happened to coincide with a stunning thunderstorm in the evening.

One morning earlier this summer, the sun rose over Brooklyn’s Prospect Park Lake. It was 5:28 a.m., and a black-crowned night heron hunched into its pale-gray wings. Three minutes later, the trunk of a nearby London plane tree expanded, growing in circumference by five-eighths of a millimetre. Not long afterward, a fish splashed in the lake, and the tree shrunk by a quarter of a millimetre. Two bullfrogs erupted in baritone harmony; the tree expanded. The Earth turned imperceptibly, the sky took on a violet hue, and a soft rain fell. Then the rain stopped, and the sun emerged to touch the uppermost canopy of the tree. Its trunk contracted by a millimetre. Then it rested, neither expanding or contracting, content, it seemed, to be an amphitheatre for the birds. Read the rest here

VICE: The world’s favorite disaster story: One of the most repeated facts about Haiti is a lie

When the geologist Peter Wampler first went to Haiti, in 2007, he didn’t expect to see many trees. He had heard that the country had as little as 2 percent tree cover, a problem that exacerbated drought, flooding and erosion. As a specialist in groundwater issues, Wampler knew that deforestation also contributed to poor water quality; trees help to lock in rich topsoil and act as a purifying filter, especially important in a country where about half of rural people do not have access to clean drinking water.

Haiti is frequently cited by the media, foreign governments and NGOs as one of the worst cases of deforestation in the world. Journalists describe the Caribbean nation’s landscape as “a moonscape,” “ravaged,” “naked,” “stripped” and “a man-made ecological disaster.” Deforestation has been relentlessly linked to Haiti’s entrenched poverty and political instability. David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, once cited Haiti’s lack of trees as proof of a “complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences.” More recently, a Weather Channel meteorologist reporting on the advance of Hurricane Matthew made the absurd claim that Haiti’s deforestation was partly due to children eating the trees.

Few places in the world have as dismal a reputation. And as the recent destruction wrought by Hurricane Matthew shows, Haiti is tragically vulnerable to natural disasters. But as Wampler would discover, Haiti’s reputation as a deforested wasteland is based on myth more than fact — an example of how conservation and environmental agendas, often assumed to be rooted in science, can become entangled with narratives about race and culture that the powerful tell about the third world.

Read the rest at Vice

The New Yorker: Finding the Way Back

A new piece at NewYorker.com about the stars, GPS, and a physicist: "As a species, humans lack many of the biological gifts that allow other animals to get around. A loggerhead turtle, for example, begins to take its bearings within a couple of hours of hatching, using magnetite crystals in its brain to sense Earth’s magnetic field. (Spiny lobsters, monarch butterflies, and termites have similar compasses.) Honeybees get from nectar to hive and back in part by judging the position of the sun, which they can sense, even on a cloudy day, from patterns in polarized light. Where biology has failed humans, we have substituted culture. Throughout our evolutionary history, we have created ad-hoc systems of knowledge that organize environmental information and make it transmissible to the next generation. Often, difficult and monotonous landscapes—desert, sea, ice—resulted in more intricate systems. Several thousand years before the magnetic compass was invented, Pacific Islanders had worked out how to navigate by star compasses and read ocean swells for information about nearby land." Read the rest... 

How Fast Can Evolution Go?

I recently returned from a reporting trip to the banks of this tiny creek on a U.S. Air Force base in White Sands, New Mexico. Called the Lost River and at times no more than a foot wide, the slow-moving water creeps for about a mile until it disappears into the gypsum dunes of the White Sands National Monument. I went to see Cyprinodon tularosa, a desert fish that has survived in the Tularosa basin since the Pleistocene era, when the basin floor was covered by a body of salt water called Lake Otero. As the climate warmed, the lake dried up and the pupfish were isolated to a handful of remaining springs and drainages. In modern times, these habitats shrank to just two: Malpais Spring and Salt Creek, and the fish were listed as threatened by the state of New Mexico. The geologist C.L. Herrick, who went to New Mexico in 1898 to try and cure his tuberculosis, was the first person to take note of the silver fish, no more than two inches long, flitting in the waters of Malpais Spring. A few years later, another geologists noted the same fish in Salt Creek. Later genetic testing shoed that a volcanic lava flow separated these two populations from each other at least 5,000 years ago. 

In 1859, Charles Darwin wrote that "We see nothing in these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages." 150 years later, Darwin's belief that natural selection and evolution are slow processes that take place over eons, has been upturned by the White Sands pupfish. Biologists now believe that the fish have one of the fastest rates of evolution for a known vertebrate. This phenomenon, called “rapid” or “contemporary” evolution, has significant implications for how we think about and mitigate extinction crises. Anthropogenic disruptions like climate change don’t just reduce biodiversity and abundance, they alter the evolution of organisms and can do so over mere decades. This also means that conservation efforts themselves—moving populations of animals, captive breeding, and assisted reproduction—is not really preserving animals at all. It’s actually setting them on new evolutionary trajectories that are not “wild” in the way we typically understand that word to mean free of human interference. This is evolution directed by us.   

Biologists might never have discovered this remarkable trait of the obscure pupfish if not for a retired engineer by the name of Ralph Charles. 40 years ago, Charles' fascination with pupfish led him to do something bizarre: he stole 30 of them from Salt Creek and brought them to Lost River, where he released them into the tail end of the creek as it meets the white gypsum sand dunes. Charles was a former employee of the Bureau of Reclamation, a water management agency under the U.S. Department of Interior. For years he had requested to visit the native populations of pupfish at Salt Creek and Malpais Spring. Unfortunately for him, the fish had been under the protection of the U.S. Department of Defense since around 1945. That was when the military created a missile range and weapons testing ground on 3,200 square miles in the Tularosa Basin (still operative today) that enveloped both native pupfish habitats. Charles finally appealed to a U.S. Senator, who granted him a one day security clearance to get onto the missile range. In the late 1990s, when ecologist John Pittenger was trying to understand how exactly pupfish got to Lost River, he came across the papers of William Jacob Koster, one of the first ichthyologists to focus on New Mexico’s fish, at the Museum of Southwestern Biology in Albuquerque. Among the papers was a letter from Charles inquiring as to how the pupfish he had brought from Salt Creek to Lost River were faring. Until Pittenger found this note, no one knew whether the Lost River population had always been there or was introduced. 

Charles' motives for taking the fish have been lost to time, but translocating fish around the springs and drainages of southern New Mexico was not necessarily unheard of. An anonymous rancher had done the same thing in the 1960s, bringing pupfish from Salt Creek TK to a freshwater environment called Mound Spring further north in the basin, probably as a form of mosquito control. Both of these translocated fish survived. Pupfish, in fact, appear to be an extraordinarily adaptive species, capable of reproducing in waters that range from brackish to highly saline. At Lost River, for instance, the water can vary from 25 to 80 percent salt concentration. At the high end of this spectrum, the salt content of Lost River is double that of the Dead Sea.  “I like to say they are evolutionarily labile,” said Michael Collyer. “They are capable of evolving in multiple directions. They can be saline fish, freshwater fish. These changes would normally cause extinctions in most fishes but they tend to persevere.” Fresh and salt water, however, have different densities that result in different kinds of fish. Saline habitats produce fish with more slender bodies and hence less drag, whereas freshwater fish have a deep-bodied shape.

By the time Collyer, a graduate student at the North Dakota State University began studying the species in the late 1990s, he began to notice something strange about the two introduced populations of fish at Lost River and Mound Spring. "You spend enough time looking at the fish and start thinking, you know, they look different to me," he told me. "It's a lot like parents of twins, they see differences in their kids other people can't see." This single observation became the main thrust of Collyer's research. He developed a methodology for establishing morphological differences between the populations and what he found was that the Mound Spring population had evolved a deep body shape since their relocation, while the Lost River population maintained their streamlined morphology. This was not just the result of what biologists call phenotypic plasticity, the ability of an organism to change its appearance and physiology in response to changes in the environment. The differences in the Mound Spring population were genetically based. "This was contemporary evolution," said Collyer. "This population of fish was now different from its source. That was fascinating. We're talking about a couple of decades, when we're used to to seeing changes over thousands of generations." 

Sounds of 'alalā

The story of the extinction of crows indigenous to the Hawai'ian forests is not well-known outside of the islands. I came upon it through writing about The Frozen Ark in San Diego, where some tissues from Corvus hawaiiensis are preserved in liquid nitrogen. In 2002, the last two ‘alalā, as they are called in Hawai'i, disappeared from the wild and there are around 110 individuals in captivity today.  Hawai'ian crows, like other corvid species, are extraordinarily intelligent and emotional; they have been observed using twigs as tools to get food and are monogamous, and forming lasting bonds. Bird couples usually build nests together in early spring and raising a brood of one or two chicks each year. Because the crows' vocalizations are so distinctive--ranging from howling to growling to muttering, I was eager to hear what they sounded like and found this gem, a recording of some of the last ‘alalā living in the wild, taken on McCandless Ranch, a privately-owned tract of land in the Kona District of Hawai’i island. Early hunters disliked the crows because the curious birds would follow them through the woods, and their squawks alerted other animals to their presence. But it was easy enough to imitate the birds’ own calls to draw them close enough to shoot them. In the late 1800s, the archeologists Henry W. Henshaw wrote that, “It would be difficult to imagine a bird differing more in disposition from the common American crow than the Hawaiian ‘alalā. The bird, instead of being wary and shy, seems to have not the slightest fear of man, and when it espies an intruder in the woods is more likely than not to fly to meet him and greet his presence with a few loud caws. He will even follow the stranger’s steps through the woods, taking short flights from tree to tree, the better to observe him and gain an idea of his character and purpose.” 

The word "‘alalā" has a multitude of meanings and connotations within Hawaiian culture, where the bird has a potent spiritual and symbolic place. Some say the word comes from from ala (to rise up) and lā (the sun), a reference to the garullus bird’s habit of filling the forest with its voice in the morning, while others say the word refers to the sound a child makes. During the court of Kamehameha in the 18th century, the ‘alalā were a group of gifted orators used by the king to deliver news in poetic form or songs, or during wartime communicate commands to warriors. 

The question of whether ‘alalās have maintained the behaviors of forest-dwelling birds is central to the effort to conserve them. Unlike some bird species, ‘alalās are not hardwired from birth for particular behaviors. Instead, they learn how to be a crow, so to speak, from their parents in the year after hatching and when the juvenile birds join the larger flock, which can contain multiple generations of the young bird’s family. For over two decades, the eggs of captive ‘alalās have been pulled from the parent’ nest and hatched in incubators to insure their survival. Until 2014, when a few birds were allowed to hatch their own eggs, all ‘alalās in existence have been raised by humans rather than other birds. There is evidence that the birds’ culture has already changed in substantial ways as a result, as behaviors particular to the ‘alalā, once passed from generation to generation, have disappeared. The birds’ repertoire of vocalizations has diminished. When an release of captive bred ‘alalā was attempted in the 1990s, the crows appeared to no longer know how to avoid the ‘io, the Hawaiian hawks they once banded together against. The crows are habituated to humans and no longer forage for food for daily survival; all  behaviors that might be important for their ability to survive back in the wild one day. In his book Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction, anthropologist and philosopher Thom van Dooren spoke with local Hawaiians about the ‘alalā, including Cynnie Salley, who fought so bitterly to keep the last wild ‘alalā on her land. Salley told Dooren she believes the captive breeding program has changed the crows profoundly, so much so that they represent a different species. 

"They were kind of like the kings and queens of the forest. They chased the hawks and the hawks had a healthy respect for them. As a matter of fact, it took four or five years of releasing young birds before the hawks realized that these were different than the ones that used to chase them around and that they had fair game… All of those birds that were originally wild are now gone. All of the birds there [at KBCC] have been raised by puppets. So I truly feel that whatever happens in the forest now with these birds, it’s a different species…. Whatever they release now is really starting at evolutionary ground zero. They’re going to have to relearn everything—including calls… So, from their language on up they’re going to have a huge learning curve. So it’s going to be a different bird."

RIP Peter Matthiessen, 1927-2014

"The finality of extinction is awesome, and not unrelated to the finality of eternity. Man, striving to imagine what might lie beyond the long light years of stars, beyond the universe, beyond the void, feels lost in space; confronted with the death of species, enacted on earth so many times before he came, and certain to continue when his own breed is gone, he is forced to face another void, and feels alone in time. Species appear and, left behind by a changing earth, they disappear forever, and there is a certain solace in the inexorable." –Wildlife in America, 1959

Birds of a Feather

Hummingbirds, owls and finches are some of the 130,000 bird specimens preserved at University of Washington's Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. The 125-year-old museum continues to preserve whole specimens but it increasingly focuses on its Genetic Resources Collection, one of the largest in the country. Today the museum maintains tissue samples from some 50,000 birds that are cryogenically frozen and kept in deep freezers. I've been visiting, reading and researching "frozen zoo" initiatives around the world and one of the best perspectives I've found on them comes from the anthropologist Tracey Heatherington. Here's an quick excerpt from her essay, "From Ecocide to Genocide: Can Technoscience Save the Wild?"

"Mundane monitoring of population health and protection of habitats is necessarily the mainstay of wildlife management for most biodiversity conservation programs. Yet the moral terrain of extinction is tremendously evocative for the genetic imagination, defining the frontiers of capital investment in both technoscience and biodiversity."

Death and The Red Horse

 Back in Albuquerque, I finally found a 1st edition of a book I've been searching for the last year, River of Traps by writer William deBuys and photographer Alex Harris. When it came out in 1990, the book  was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize but both author and photographer weren't very well-known. deBuys had written one other New Mexico-centric book, Enchantment and Exploitation, and Harris had just founded the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University after years of photographing native Alaskans and living in New Mexico. Today, deBuys has published widely on the topic of desertification and conservation and Harris' work is in collections like MOMA and the Getty.

River of Traps has become something of a quiet cult classic (it was reissued in 2008) because it is so unusual: loosely-connected observations about a New Mexico farmer, Jacobo Romero, who was a neighbor to deBuys and and Harris on their own farm in northern New Mexico, accompanied by black and white photographs. Much of the book follows Romero through his fields and village as he cryptically explains the complexities of irrigation or fence-making. He didn't necessarily have revolutionary ideas or major accomplishments to his name. He wasn't even well-known during his lifetime beyond his small village. It's just that over time, he has become a representation of a way of life and a kind of deeply-indigenous knowledge--the product of generations of stewardship of  the land--that has become so rare it is nearly extinct, even in New Mexico. His significance has become clearer and more urgent over the years. . 

I think some of the best passages from River of Traps are descriptions of Romero's brutally pragmatic relationship to death, an attitude born of survival and utilitarianism, even when it was the passing of a horse that had carried and toiled for him for over 30 years only to die in a fairly tragic fashion during a flood.  

"Alex never photographed the red horse, and the red horse never had a name. Like much else in the history of small places, the horse epitomized something basic about the land that nourished it. It was an embodiment, literally, of the valley's grass and water, and a relic of its weather. LIving, it had been a definition of local horsiness, ridden by an old man and plodding as slowly as the change of seasons down the dusty village road. The red horse passed its years, stalwart and unique, then dropped from sight, and eventually will drop from memory too, as slowly, without it, the place changes... The virtue of namelessness was that it made the unforgettable easier to avoid. Jacobo never mentioned the red horse. Nor did anyone. As the dead had no name, no one spoke of the dead, and its presence could not intrude, unwanted in conversation. Memories were locked away. Jacbobo's sense of loss--and everyone's--became as personal as fingerprints."  

One more on the subject of death: 

"In the mountains the touch of death was never far away. An animal died or was killed somewhere in the valley nearly every day. You shot the cow, or in the old-fashioned way, clubbed it with an ax or a maul, you did it with dispatch. But never with grace. No cow or hog ever fell in the right position, and the aftermath of its death, the turning and bleeding and lugging around, was invariably messy and difficult. Killing a sheep was different. A sheep does not struggle or even protest its own death and accordingly does not merit a bullet. YOu straddle its back, grasp it by the lower jaw, pull back the head and slice the throat deeply with a knife, cutting to the spine if you can to be sure of severing the arteries. A chicken's death, meanwhile, was scarcely noticed; you simply swung it round by the head, casually, like a toy."