California coast range newts in amplexus. (Photo: http://dipperanch.blogspot.com)

Ambling along the oaky trails at Finley Wildlife Refuge last Saturday morning — one of the first days without rain in a long, long time — my two friends and I paused at the edge of a pond along Woodpecker Loop.  Just under the murky surface, several rough-skinned newts were swimming in slow motion, their bodies undulating in rhythm with the rippling of the water and the dappling of the sun.

“Hey, they have two tails!” Lorraine pointed out. We realized, all at once, that each newt was in fact two newts, one atop the other. These weren’t just newts lazing around in the sun. They were mating. When I got home, I Googled “newt mating.” The term “amplexus” is what biologists call this behavior, which involves a lot of chin rubbing and sometimes goes on for days before the male deposits his sperm to fertilize the female’s eggs. That cold Latin noun seemed like an impoverished descriptor for the dancelike fluidity of the newts’ courtship. And it offers a huge clue to why ordinary people often have a hard time relating to, or believing in, science. Tell someone you witnessed newts in “amplexus” and watch their eyes glaze over. But tell them you saw newts in “embrace” (the English translation of the Latin), and they’ll want to know more. The explanation for the behavior may be biologic. But the pathway to understanding is, for most of us, more poetic.

This, in a nutshell, is the challenge that Kathleen Dean Moore, an environmental philosopher of national reputation, has taken on at Oregon State University. Last night, Moore and her colleagues Allen Thompson (coeditor of Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change just released by MIT Press) and Carly Lettero of OSU’s Environmental Humanities Initiative, hosted more than 40 scientists, graduate students, science educators and science writers on campus for conversation and nascent collaboration. Co-sponsored by OSU’s Research Office, the gathering brought together researchers and scholars to talk creatively about the subject that unites their work: climate change. Scientists of oceans, rivers, forests, mountains, plants and wildlife met scholars of philosophy, history, communications, education and human health, briefly sharing their current research endeavors with one another. Then, over beer, wine and smoked salmon, they began to talk about new ways of thinking about and working on the looming crisis threatening our planet and our survival.

Joking that he was happy to see OSU’s “climate rogue’s gallery” assembled in one place, Rick Spinrad, vice president for research, kicked off the event by saying, “No single discipline can respond effectively alone.”

Moore, coeditor of Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, expanded on the urgency of talking and working across disciplines, the necessity of merging the empirical and the cultural in both conversation and action. Science is only half of the persuasion equation, she said. To get the average person to believe in climate change and, more importantly, to act on that belief, it’s not enough to pile more and more data onto their plates. Rather, the data (the way the world is) must be linked to values (what we ought to do). This “normative premise” derives from what we care about most deeply. For most of us, Moore said, it’s our children. This shared cherishing of children is the bridge, she said, that can carry us over the political chasm swallowing up so much of our national conversation these days.

“We need to create a global moral consensus that it’s wrong to wreck the world,” Moore told the group. “We have to tell the stories of climate change in ways that make people cry.”

Oceanographer Alan Mix added his voice: “Scientists are admitting that we’re never going to win the argument on a scientific basis — always thinking in terms of evidence, data points and squiggly lines on graphs.”

Moore summed up the event by encouraging “creative collaboration to amplify the social impacts” of scientific discovery. “It’s not enough to just do our own work,” she told the group. “We have to make sure our work is making a difference out in the world.”

What’s needed, she seems to be saying, is a sort of scholarly amplexus: an embrace of the sciences with the humanities toward renewal and restoration of life on Earth.

For more information, contact Carly Lettero, carly.lettero@oregonstate.edu, coordinator of the Environmental Humanities Initiative.

McKibben described the grassroots climate campaign 350.org, which he started in 2009 with seven students at Vermont’s Middlebury College, where he is a distinguished scholar. The campaign has coordinated more than 15,000 rallies in nearly 190 countries. He also told of circling the White House with thousands of fellow activists and spending three nights in a Washington, D.C., jail to protest the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

(Photo: Larry Pribyl)

Between this and other events on campus — including a workshop sponsored by OSU’s Spring Creek Project and a local-foods breakfast prepared by Gathering Together Farm — McKibben sat down with Terra magazine’s Nick Houtman and Lee Sherman to talk about the urgency of climate action worldwide. Below is an excerpt from that conversation.

TERRA: From your perspective, how does Occupy Wall Street intersect with climate-change action as a people’s movement pushing back against corporate interests?

McKibben: I went down to Occupy Wall Street very early and got to speak through the grand human microphone. And the thing I said was: “I’m very glad you’re here. Wall Street’s been occupying our atmosphere for the last 30 years. It’s about time we returned the favor.” You know, we can’t get anything done on climate change because enormous corporate power blocks action, time after time after time.

TERRA: Do you see a coalition forming between occupiers and environmental activists?

McKibben: You know, it’s like when we circled the White House to protest the Keystone pipeline a couple of weeks ago, and then Occupy Portland circled the federal building in Portland. It’s not like there’s some central Occupy headquarters that you call up and say, “What do we do next?” It’s an expression of a mood. And that mood is tired of being pushed around by major corporate power. It’s not working, and the climate is the perfect example of that. We’re literally entering into a time when the planet itself is not going to work for people anymore. It’s not even that we can’t break our addiction to fossil fuel, because as people, we’re capable of it. The problem is that fossil fuel companies can’t break their addiction to the quantities of money that fuel generates.

TERRA: What is the role of research universities in advancing the agenda for environmental clarity and stability?

(Photo: Larry Pribyl)

McKibben: It’s been really important that hard science has been applied to climate change in a huge, serious, sustained way. Probably more human intelligence has been directed at trying to understand this than just about any other scientific question. Thanks to research at universities above all, and for the work of federal government agencies like NASA, we’ve managed to understand this problem. In a short period of time it’s crunched difficult problems in atmospheric chemistry and physics. It’s given us a workable consensus on what’s going on. That’s an enormous triumph. The scientific method has worked remarkably well.

The part that hasn’t worked is the political method. Where we’ve failed as educators, as citizens, is in taking what we know and turning it into public policy. All the economists and policy people and everybody else have been saying the right thing to politicians, explaining the many ways that they could be working on this. It just hasn’t happened very much, especially at a federal level, because the power of the fossil fuel industry is so great.

So, that’s really our work — our responsibility as citizens — to take care of that. Outside of the classroom, we’ve got to build a movement big enough to make these guys do it. And that’s what we’re trying to do.

TERRA: Scientists often are hesitant to be advocates. They worry that they’ll lose their credibility as objective researchers if they advocate for a position. What do you think about that?

McKibben: I think that’s understandable. And I think it’s also a little too easy. I think it’s sometimes a cover for the fact that scientists, in personal terms, aren’t very comfortable engaging the world outside the lab. I completely understand it. I’m a writer by trade. My goal would be stay in my room and type; that’s how I like to engage the world. But there are situations desperate enough that one would change one’s M.O. a little bit. And I’m very glad to see more scientists stepping up and doing that.

If it wasn’t for the bravery of Jim Hanson at NASA — his willingness to state plainly what’s going on, to go to jail to back it up — I don’t know where we’d be. And I noticed when we were doing this mass civil disobedience in Washington, there were more scientists joining in, some of them untenured research scientists. That takes a lot of bravery.

But on the other hand, you know, if you’re spending half your life out in Greenland calculating how much ice is being lost, who better than you to have the credibility to stand up and say it? I mean, if you don’t say it, then what’s the point of doing the research in the first place?

(Photo: Larry Pribyl)

TERRA: OSU’s Spring Creek Project is dedicated to bringing scientists together with poets, writers and musicians to talk about issues like climate change across disciplines in order to reach different segments of the population. The idea is that not everyone responds to science.

McKibben: You know, 350.org is this huge campaign that takes its name from scientific data, so we’re not at all afraid of science. In general, I find no problem with people anywhere in the world understanding the basics of the science. I think we sometimes overstate how difficult or complex it is.

On the other hand, environmentalists have done much better appealing to the left side of the brain — the half that likes bar graphs and stuff — and not so well appealing to the side that deals well with art and music and things like that. That’s why we’ve made a big effort to incorporate tons of that stuff into 350.org. Much of our work is based around images — these beautiful images of thousands of rallies and demonstrations around the world. We did this giant art project last November with 20 pieces of art so big you have to look at them from satellites to really understand them. It involved thousands of people. Just yesterday we released a song in five or six African languages for this project called Radio Wave — bringing in one radio station at a time, north to south across Africa, to arrive in Durban, South Africa, right when the big UN Climate Conference is kicking off there.

TERRA: Here in Oregon people who are addressing environmental change in their communities tend to ask very practical questions — you know, sea level rise in a beachfront community that is causing waves to crash through their front windows. Most people don’t see climate change as the source, or global warming as the issue to address. They want to protect their property from erosion, period.

McKibben: Yeah, of course. It’s always easiest to think about things just locally, and that’s good. But what we’ve come to understand in recent years is the scale of change and the pace of change that we’re now kicking off. We’re not going to be able to adapt past a certain point. So people better start thinking further upstream and figuring out that we’ve got to stop putting carbon into the atmosphere. If we don’t, then we’re out of luck.

(Photo: Larry Pribyl)

TERRA: We’re closing in soon on 400 parts per million (CO2 in the atmosphere). So where do you find hope in thinking we could turn this around and even begin to move back toward 350?

McKibben: There are plenty of times when one doesn’t have an enormous amount of hope. But I am cognizant of the fact that there is a big and growing movement out there. We had a big win when we stopped this Keystone Pipeline. For one, the oil industry didn’t get its way. And second, the power of people willing to get arrested was sufficient to at least slow them down. Obviously, we can’t fight this fight little-Dutch-boy style, plugging one leak after another. But, we’re learning some lessons about how to build movements and how to take these guys on.

TERRA: How do you see China and India dealing with those issues?

McKibben: In China, the die is largely cast in certain ways. They’ve built an immense amount of coal-fired power plants. India is less so. They’re much further down the curve and there’s more chance for serious intervention. In both cases, we should be moving quickly to aid them with serious technological help to allow people, especially in India, to leapfrog past fossil fuel.

They’re also doing many things right — far righter than we are. I just did a big piece for National Geographic on China and energy. And, look, the Chinese have installed about 60 million of these solar thermal arrays for hot water. For a quarter of a billion Chinese, when they take a shower at night their hot water is coming off the roof. That’s about 25 percent of China. In the U.S., it’s less than 1 percent. The technology is simple. The payback is fast. You tell me why it’s not getting used.

TERRA: Do you see regional differences in perceptions of climate change? For instance, the Pacific Northwest has a pretty benign, temperate climate. We don’t have serious droughts or hurricanes. So the signs aren’t right in our face yet. It’s a problem because people don’t necessarily see it happening around them. But it can also be an opportunity because we have time to adapt if we get busy right now.

McKibben: Well, here’s the thing: There’s no place that’s going to do very well with this kind of change. I mean, we kind of thought we were sitting pretty in Vermont. It’s kind of benign and out of the way. But half the state damned near washed away from the hugest rainfall we’ve ever experienced, by far. It was just wracking — and expensive. So, it can happen here, too. There’ll always be places like Oregon that will temporarily benefit, like during this horrible drought in Russia. They had to stop all grain exports to the rest of the world, and the price of wheat goes through the roof. And, suddenly, if you’re a wheat farmer in Eastern Oregon, you’re sitting pretty for a while. But look at the computer models and you’ll realize you’re a coin flip away from that drought being right where you are.

TERRA: Here in the Northwest, there’s a lot of work going on with federal and state agencies. For our cover story, we’ll reflect on the application of the first Oregon Climate Assessment Report released about a year ago by our Oregon Climate Change Research Institute.

McKibben: The Northwest is really important for many ways. One, it’s ahead of much of the rest of the country in trying to do something about the environment. Two, this stretch of the Pacific is an important place to serve as a cork in the bottle to keep large amounts of energy from coming out of the middle of the continent and heading toward China. I was up in Washington State not long ago, where they’re trying to stop these proposed coal ports along the coast, which would take all the coal out of Wyoming and Montana and ship it to China. There may be a similar plan for Oregon at some point, too. And I was just up in Vancouver, B.C., where they’re trying to stop more of these pipelines out of the tar sands. You know, you guys are kind of the wall between a lot of bad, dirty energy and China. And so it’ll be an important place for people to be organizing hard.

TERRA: On the subject of population, how important is the correlation between population growth and carbon concentrations?

McKibben: At this point, it’s not the biggest driver of climate change. We’re going to see another 2 billion people in the next 50 years. It’s not going to be easy to deal with; the planet’s already strained at 7 billion. But in climate terms, most of the population increase will happen in places that are so poor, the incremental amount of energy they use is small. We forget how wide the gulf is. I mean, the average American uses more energy between the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve and dinner on January 2 than the average Tanzanian uses in the course of a year. So you can have a lot of Tanzanians before their energy consumption mounts up very much. One of the great tragedies of climate change is that it happens hardest in places that caused it the least.

So, yeah, population growth is important for many reasons, and climate change is one of them. But the biggest driver of climate change right now is places whose population is relatively stable but whose consumption is starting to rise toward the American level, China being the obvious example.

And it must be said that we’ve done a better job than people thought about dealing with population growth. You know, the average woman 30 years ago had six children. That number is 2.4 now and falling fast. And it’s because we figured out what to do — to educate women and to empower them. Fertility rates predictably go down dramatically. And, that’s what we’ve got to keep doing — make contraception available and accessible, and educate people enough that they have some control over their own destiny.

See a video of McKibben’s November 17, 2011, Discovery Lecture at Oregon State University.

Inspired by the university’s upcoming symposium, Song for the Blue Ocean: Science, Art and Ethics (February 18 – 19), “Literature of the Ocean” will “pursue the subject across time as well as through the three-dimensional space of the sea,” says English Assistant Professor Peter Betjemann. Literary readings focus on oceanic zones (littoral, neritic, oceanic) as well as levels within the water column (surface, photic, aphotic) and places where human communities meet the sea (wharves, docks, beaches). The course, ENG 499/582, is being taught winter term.

A joint colloquium in anthropology and zoology will explore the relative strengths, weaknesses and assumptions of the worldviews underlying traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and Western scientific knowledge (WSK). “Ocean Wisdom: Integrating Traditional and Western Ecological Knowledge of the Pacific,” will focus on the Pacific Ocean and its bordering lands. “Students will compare and contrast the different epistemologies on which TEK and WSK are based via case studies throughout the Pacific region,” says marine ecologist Mark Hixon, who will team teach the class with anthropologist Deanna Kingston. ANTH/Z 499H will be offered spring term.

“All my hurts
My garden spade can heal.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Musketaquid

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a cultivator and connoisseur of pears. His protégé Henry David Thoreau grew beans on the shores of Walden Pond. In the unfolding and fruition of plant life, these great 19th century Transcendentalists saw a metaphor for human life – and a glimpse of God. “Husbandry,” Thoreau wrote in 1846, “is universally a sacred art…”

So when David Robinson kneels, trowel in hand, to tend his hillside garden, the experience is not merely horticultural. It’s spiritual, too. And it links him to those eminent American philosophers and social reformers he has spent his career researching. “For me, as a gardener, one of the great moments in Walden is hearing Thoreau talk about protecting his beans from the woodchuck,” says Robinson, who holds the endowed Oregon Professor of English position at OSU.

His trenchant scholarship — which won him the prestigious Distinguished Achievement Award from the Emerson Society in 2005 — reveals not only the poetic and mystical sides of the Transcendentalists. In his most recent book, Natural Life: Thoreau’s Worldly Transcendentalism, Robinson makes clear their bent toward the scientific, as well — their meticulous observations of the physical world, their detailed recordings of nature’s processes. The place where the inner and the outer worlds unite, Emerson and Thoreau argued, is where the greatest truths exist.

“Both of them had a foot in each of these worlds,” Robinson says. “They were keen to show how that which science was discovering and proving confirmed that which they believed on philosophical grounds about ethical and spiritual questions.”

That unity of philosophy and science is what OSU’s Spring Creek project is all about, says Robinson, who directs the university’s Center for the Humanities. “Spring Creek is trying to reconnect people who are interested in the natural world and the environment — people who, because of the way modern life is structured, the way universities are compartmentalized, work inside their own disciplines,” Robinson says. “The project gets philosophers and biologists and poets and geologists talking together and finding common ground.” (See “20/20 Vision”.)

Finding Today

Steven Radosevich is a professor and graduate program coordinator in the Department of Forest Science at OSU. His research interests focus on plant ecology, sustainable forestry and agriculture, and the impacts and ethics of human land uses. He grew up on a farm in Tieton, Washington, in the upper Yakima Valley. Pruning an orchard, he writes, means making choices. “Good wood” refers to tree limbs laid on the ground, a result of choices that lead to a productive orchard.

Read more…

In 1987, Franz Dolp found what he was looking for: a place where nature beckoned, about 40 acres of cutover forestland in the Oregon Coast Range along a quick running tributary to the Marys River. He felt inspired by the remaining moss-covered forest and a spring that emerged high on a mountainside. After buying the land, he built a wood cabin with tall ceilings and expansive windows. He planted more than 10,000 cedar, hemlock and fir seedlings. He loved this place and wanted it to inspire others.

“Maybe I should have asked not how we can bring wildness into our lives, but how we can remember to notice the wildness in every sweating pore, every stewed carrot, every solid step; in the morning air noisy with rain; in the reeling stars.”

Kathleen Dean Moore

The Pine Island Paradox, 2004

“He said he was planting an old-growth forest,” says Kathleen Dean Moore, a friend and philosophy professor at Oregon State University. “He was investing in a future that he would never see, but he felt nourished by this land, and he felt a responsibility to nourish the trees. Every spring, he went out with a hoe to release the trees from the fallen leaves and encroaching brush.”

Dolp, an economist and poet, died in 2004. Before his death, he worked with Moore to create a program that carries out his vision for the cabin to serve as a retreat for writers and naturalists. Today, operating out of the Department of Philosophy under Moore’s direction, OSU’s Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word brings poets, writers and scientists together to explore our relationship with the natural world. The cabin on Shotpouch Creek hosts retreats, meetings and other Spring Creek events.

Moore and her colleagues have taken their mission well beyond these mountains. Financed by a private donor, they have held gatherings and academic conferences in Corvallis and a public presentation attended by more than 1,800 people in Portland. With the U.S. Forest Service, they sponsor an annual poet’s retreat at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest east of Eugene. Moore and Associate Director Charles Goodrich regularly lecture or give readings in the Northwest and throughout the country.

Their goal: philosophical clarity in our relationship to nature. “As a philosopher, I believe that ideas matter, that what people believe shapes the decisions they make,” says Moore. “The more cogent and clear-thinking their ideas, the wiser their decisions will be. On the other hand, confusion or disagreement about the fundamental ideas of a practice lead to incoherent policies or stalemate.

“For example, what is a forest? Is it a commodity like a seam of copper? Is it a cathedral, a sacred grove? Politicians and forest managers are accustomed to consulting scientists for information that will help them make good decisions. But they less often consult artists and humanists who can help them understand what forests mean in the human experience — important information for those who would design forest policies in a complex and changing social context.”

Mount St. Helens Foray

Few places provide as dramatic a focus for Spring Creek as Mount St. Helens. On a warm July evening in 2005, Moore, Goodrich and two-dozen poets, writers, scientists and artists circle around a campfire dug into loose pumice on a windswept ridge near the mountain. The deep carpet of popcorn-sized rock makes for uncertain footing. The mountain’s 1980 eruption had reshaped the landscape with no regard for trees, wildlife, people or even well-honed scientific theories.

One member of the group, author Ursula LeGuin, asks if we are in any danger. “Some shaking is possible, but no ballistics are expected in the next few days,” replies Lynn Burditt, U.S. Forest Service official. Fred Swanson, a Forest Service geologist and co-organizer of the event, notes that knowledge of the mountain’s underground environment is “crude.”

Research at the national monument has overturned theories of how nature responds to upheaval, and the Spring Creek group’s conversation often turns to scientific surprises. Ecologists describe biological diversity that blossomed unexpectedly after the eruption. They point to populations of western toads that are flourishing here while they are declining elsewhere. They tell of hot gases and rocks that turned Spirit Lake into a microbial stew resembling a pulp mill lagoon and how fish eventually returned. Geologists talk about the plumbing under the mountain and how often it has cracked and heaved in cycles of cataclysm.

In the face of such power, there is also poetry and song. Folksinger Libby Roderick sings “Thinking Like a Mountain” and “If the World Were My Lover.” Goodrich reads a Denise Levertov poem, “Open Secret,” evoking the power of mountains as metaphors for human aspiration. They watch the full moon rise and roll up a neighboring slope. As moonlight strikes the valley floor behind them, a chorus of coyotes yips and howls. Nighthawks dip and climb overhead.

Beautiful as the scene is, this is no sentimental journey. They are here to work. They trek through the “blast zone” where dark forests, once destroyed, have given way to a carnival of new life. They find pockets of sphagnum moss, Indian paintbrush and penstamen, some of the “biological legacies” that survived the blast, paving the way for diversity by seeding the new landscape. They visit forests that had been left standing after layers of volcanic ash had covered every leaf and branch.

They discuss the differences between human-caused and natural catastrophe — and the meaning of recovery. The point is to think hard and deep about nature’s resilience in the face of destruction and to reconsider the ideas that define the role of humans in these natural processes.

At the end of three days, they give a public presentation at the Windy Ridge Visitor’s Center. Mount St. Helens’ steaming crater, which geologists say could rebuild the collapsed mountain in as little as nine years, broods over the deliberations.

Left Brain, Right Brain

OSU biologist Mark Hixon has participated in several of Spring Creek’s gatherings. The project “offers a remarkable opportunity for environmental scientists to integrate their intellectual, left-brained worldview with the spiritual, right-brained perspective of environmental writers, poets, and artists,” he says. These exercises are “essential for successful conservation and sustainability efforts.”

Moore, Goodrich and their colleagues bring diverse academic and literary expertise to the task. Moore has a Ph.D. in the philosophy of law. She has written seven books, including three compilations of essays exploring the cultural values of wet, wild places. That has not always been her focus. Her first book, published in 1989, explores the moral justification for presidential pardons. Since then, she has won a Pacific Northwest Bookseller’s Award for Riverwalking (1995) and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award for Holdfast (1999). In 2005, she won the Oregon Book Award for The Pine Island Paradox.

In addition to several volumes of poetry, Goodrich has written a book of essays (The Practice of Home) and edited two anthologies of poems.

The Spring Creek Project has inspired students such as OSU marine biology graduate Roly Russell. “Places like Shotpouch are necessary,” says Russell, now a post-doctoral researcher at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. “The overwhelming ecological issues that face our society won’t be fixed by a better understanding of the underlying science alone. We need to have places that foster interactions and discussions between people who understand various facets of the issues involved.”

In 2004, Russell spent two days at the Shotpouch cabin with a small group of OSU students and faculty. Their topic: science and art as sources of knowledge and ways to communicate in a sustainable society. “This didn’t fall into the typical training of scientists like myself. Yet truly cross-disciplinary discussions about what leads people to care and pay attention to their environment are fundamental if we hope to move toward a more sustainable future,” he says.

Toward that end, Spring Creek fosters storytelling. Told through poetry, song or scientific report, stories evoke common human values that link people across barriers of culture, politics or religion, say Moore and Goodrich. “On a practical level, it is the most powerful way to bridge different viewpoints, to meet people face-to-face and hear their stories. You can’t abstract people into a single position,” says Goodrich. “Stories reveal the whole of a life.

“Some scientists are looking to people who specialize in storytelling. And many writers find the stories of science to be very compelling and add a precision that can be missing in lyrical and metaphorical language.”

In addition to eliciting stories, Spring Creek programs create an atmosphere that inspires listening, sharing and creative thinking, a kind of leadership training for Spring Creek’s mission to “re-imagine the place of humans in the natural world.”

“We’re just getting started,” says Moore. Future Spring Creek programs will focus on ideas related to land ownership, the commons and watershed health.

With the Forest Service, Spring Creek sponsors the Long-Term Ecological Reflections project at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest. The plan is to bring writers and poets to the forest annually for a week at a time for the next 200 years. The resulting record of creative responses to the forest will help us to understand what forests mean in the human experience.

“Imagine if we had started this project 200 years ago, with Lewis and Clark, what we would know about the changing human response to the land?” Moore says.

“The moss grows, the raven barks, the trees go to soil — first hemlocks, then firs, finally cedar. All the while the decomp team is there, watching how the cookies crumble. Maybe looking to the future is a way of hoping there will still be something to see when we get there. Maybe it’s the only way to make sure of it.”
Robert Michael Pyle
“The Long Haul,” Orion magazine, September/October 2004

200-Year Log Decomposition Study

Tree species lose mass (through density) at varying rates. Below are decomposition rates for Pacific silver fir (ABAM, Abies amabilis), Douglas fir (PSME, Pseudotsuga menziesii), western red cedar (THPL, Thuja plicata) and western hemlock (TSHE, Tsuga heterophylla). (unpublished data, Mark Harmon, the Richardson Chair in the Department of Forest Science)