Wood Lit - Autumn 2005
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Confluence: A River, The Environment, Politics & The Fate of All Humanity
This is a powerful book. It is relatively short as well, and if you are lucky enough to be able to read it over the space of a few days, it will work on your psyche the way a really good poem works.
It will haunt, evoke, remind, return. Images will float to the surface and get tangled up with your daily life; you will find yourself thinking about sediment as you set the table, the changing lives of the Cree as you drive to work. It is concentrated like a poem, too, and gains momentum as it goes, the way water moves downhill.
Mainly what will stick with you when you are finished, though, is the author’s powerful, articulate voice, at times kind and humorous, at times outraged. Having lived on a farm in the Connecticut Valley since 1973, having served as chairman of the river’s bi-state Joint Commissions, negotiated with power companies over the river’s use, and turned to it as a source of healing after his return from Vietnam, Tripp knows the Connecticut River well. He is advocate and admirer, educator and fighter, friend.
In Confluence: A River, The Environment, Politics & The Fate of All Humanity, Nathaniel Tripp takes an unflinching look at the politics that have shaped the Connecticut River, undermined its banks, changed the course of its 410-mile run to the sea into a series of lakes, devastated local economies (at times by drowning them) and divided neighbors’ common interests. He covers the politics of the Atlantic salmon (and a genetically modified alternative, the Frankenfish), the physics of flow, the beauty of meandering (to which he relates the Coriolis effect of the earth’s spin), a river’s surprising hunger for sediment, water-powered mills, and the ecological consequence of the river’s hydroelectric dams.
Tripp, whose memoir, Father Soldier Son, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, is a wonderful writer. His prose is both down to earth and eloquent, the very best of combinations. Here he describes the headwaters of the Connecticut on the Canadian border on a day in early spring:
Here, just above the forty-fifth parallel, halfway between the Tropic of Cancer and the Arctic Circle, the time of snowmelt is thrilling, immobilizing, often cataclysmic. Water gathers in every hillside cleft and starts to wear its way down, an annual passion play reenacting the withdrawal of the glacier ten millennia ago. Frozen waterfalls of ice – turned blue or green or rust red from mineral springs – begin to weep from rock faces, and the frozen earth turns to soup, closing the back roads and skid trails. The water swirls under ice, rises more and sculpts fantastic shapes.
It is typical of the author that in this elegant passage about the mysteries of spring, he includes a reference to skid trails. Throughout, he makes plain that real environmentalism is inclusive: “It includes the human, the social, and the economic environment. It does not see humankind as a separate entity, apart from the rules of nature. It recognizes the oneness of our own circulatory system with that of the river. It places consideration before exploitation.”
One of the challenges of living in our society, at least for anyone paying the least bit of attention, is how to live with all the bad news about the environment without succumbing to cynicism or despair. Confluence will help you keep your eyes open and take heart.
Mary Hays
© 2005 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author's consent.
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Vernal Pools: Natural History and Conservation
In the past decade or so, vernal pools have received a fair amount of attention from people other than naturalists, ecologists, conservationists, and natural resource professionals. An increasing awareness about these small, isolated pools has been fostered among the general public, thanks in part to the work of a variety of conservation agencies and organizations that have developed curricula on vernal pool ecology and published guides to help landowners recognize, manage, and conserve these often-overlooked wetland systems. Among the people who have led this charge, both as a scientist and an educator, is Elizabeth Colburn, author of Vernal Pools: Natural History and Conservation.
Like Charles Johnson’s Bogs of the Northeast, this book brings together a wide variety of information about a particular natural community – from hydrology to landscape ecology, microscopic organisms to mollusks, arthropods to amphibians – and presents it in a comprehensive, yet accessible, format.
The book’s 14 chapters are loosely arranged in five major sections, beginning with a broad overview of vernal pool ecology that is both authoritative and a pleasure to read. It moves on to describe the physical characteristics of vernal pools, including a wonderful chapter on hydrology and another describing the various landscape features that contribute to the diversity of plant and animal communities that different pools may support. About half of the 426-page book is devoted to a comprehensive summary of the biology and ecology of vernal pool wildlife and plants. Divided into nine chapters, this section covers everything from microscopic organisms (bacteria, protists, algae, and fungi) to vegetation, crustaceans, insects, amphibians, other vertebrates, and more. For each taxonomic group, it contains up-to-date information about life history, habitat, eggs, larvae, and distribution. The final two sections of the book cover vernal pools as ecosystems and examine issues surrounding vernal pool conservation. There is also a glossary, an extensive bibliography, and an appendix consisting of an annotated list of vernal pool fauna.
The book has numerous tables, line drawings, and photos throughout, as well as 16 pages of color plates, which complement the text. As a biologist, I found the list of suggestions for future research needs at the end of each chapter to be my favorite feature of the book. These include thoughts on technical scientific studies, as well as natural history observations that could be made by amateur naturalists or school groups.
The book is not without its flaws, however. I found the method of citing published materials to be quite cumbersome. Within each chapter, the book uses sequentially numbered superscripts to identify scientific papers. Author and date of each citation are then listed at the end of each chapter, and the full citation is listed in the bibliography. This results in a long list of citations for each chapter, many of which may be listed numerous times. For example, the chapter on amphibians ends with 3 pages of citations, and one randomly selected reference was cited at least 23 times!
Despite this shortcoming, the book provides a wealth of information wrapped up in a comprehensive, inch-thick text. This valuable reference should appeal to a variety of people: students and teachers, conservation commission members, town planners, foresters, biologists, and armchair naturalists alike.
Steve Faccio
© 2005 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author's consent.
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Landowner’s Guide to Wildlife Habitat: Forest Management for the New England Region
This is not the book for you if you want the standard wildlife habitat fare: what kind of viburnum to plant at the edge of your yard, how to make a brush pile for chipmunks and sparrows, or how to set up the hose to drip into a basin that birds will use for bathing.
Though the cover has photos of a lovely, inviting road disappearing into ferny woods, a flying squirrel on a big, old tree, and a handsome deer peeking out through snowy branches, this book is not about prettiness. It is a serious book, and it is about making major changes to the forest overstory in the service of increasing diversity of wildlife habitat.
The primary focus is on creating early successional habitat, a forest type that the authors believe is seriously underrepresented in the New England landscape. They consider the loss of this kind of habitat to be “the most pressing wildlife concern in New England.” The whippoorwill, yellow-bellied cuckoo, chestnut-sided warbler, indigo bunting, towhee, and field sparrow are just a few of the shrubland birds whose populations are decreasing throughout much of the Northeast because the forest is maturing. Sawtimber-sized forests are so widespread that species requiring summer fruits such as strawberries and soft mast from pin cherry, blackberries, and raspberries are having a hard time getting by.
The authors use computer-generated images of what the landscape will look like under different management strategies 10, 20, and 100 years after cutting to demonstrate that even-aged management, with partial or complete overstory removal on 20 percent of the land every 20 years, will produce the most diverse forest, with trees in all age classes. These landscape images are created using real tree data and topographic information, together with computer models of tree growth and programs that produce photo-like images of a dynamic landscape. You can see a clearcut area filling in at years 10 and 20, only to be cut again at age 100.
Though their preferred options for southern New England differ from those for the northern part, periodic clearcutting in hardwoods and shelterwood harvests in softwoods are shown to support the largest number of wildlife species.
At the outset, the authors state that the aim of the book is to put forest management options in the context of “natural forest disturbances that have historically created an array of wildlife habitat conditions in New England.” Opinions vary greatly on how much land was open or young forest in the pre-European era, and there is plenty of disagreement as to whether this percentage – whatever it is – is something that we should work towards recreating.
In this book, “letting nature take its course” is explicitly rejected as a way to benefit wildlife. Except at high elevations or in unusual circumstances, stands left unmanaged in perpetuity are not going to be necessary for animals either: “In New England, no species need stands older than the silvicultural rotation age.” Instead, it’s the many species that rely on early successional habitat that are in danger of being lost. In order to keep these habitats on the landscape, they write, “we need to intentionally and continuously create them.”
This book constitutes a big and bold salvo in the already contentious battles over the value of extensive uncut forests and the ecological effects of significant clearcuts. It is written by highly respected experts, and the goals of the book and of the forest management they advocate are clear – that more wildlife species are better.
Their prescription for increased use of clearcuts, however, is bound to be unappealing to many landowners. Even those who wish to manage their land for wildlife are likely to find the prospect of sizeable clearcuts more than a little daunting.
Virginia Barlow
© 2005 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author's consent.
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