Without the Roar

Wow, I've never had a tweet go viral before.

This photo I tweeted got over 18,000 views, hundreds of likes,
and over a hundred retweets. In two days!

I'm not sure what to say... except thank you. And follow me live next weekend on Twitter as I climb Mt. Shasta--just kidding. My favorite comment: "this looks like my lawn during baseball season."

Carrizo Plain Photos

Soda Lake, April 14, 2017

Looking southeast toward snowcapped Mt. Pinos
from Soda Lake Overlook, April 14, 2017

Meadowlark, Goldfields, and Tidy Tips, March 30, 2006.

California Poppies, March 31, 2006

March 31, 2006

Long-billed Curlews, March 31, 2006

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Central Valley Grassland and the Carrizo Plain

In April 2017 we were on our way to Carrizo Plain National Monument, and we stayed a night in Taft at a relatively new Best Western with toilets that were too full and lights that were excessively bright. Views of the starry sky would have to wait for a camping trip at another time. The view of Buena Vista Lake full of water was very gratifying, however.

It is so nice to see terminal lakes filling up. Our watersheds are so heavily developed that the only water that makes it past our dams usually is that which is required by law. But in a year like 2017 there is too much to take, and terminal lakes on both sides of the Sierra start filling up: the Walker River flows to Walker Lake, the Owens River flows to Owens Lake, the Kern River flows to Buena Vista Lake, the Kings River flows to Tulare Lake. Just to name a few. What was once typical is now extraordinary.

I first saw the Carrizo Plain in March 1993 from the top of Caliente Ridge. A dayhike from Cuyama Valley to the highest mountain in San Luis Obispo County was exhausting (30 miles) but revealing--I looked down to the north on a valley filled with colors. Vast blooms of yellow, orange, and purple flowers filled the San Andreas Rift Zone in that wet year following record drought.

I wrote the following essay and published it on my former Website between 2001 and 2005. I reprint it here in my "Best of" category.

There's something about a grassland. The sound of the wind in the grass, the wide open horizons, the spring wildflowers, and one of the most beautiful songs in the world: Western Meadowlarks. The Carrizo Plain is my other favorite place in the world, for these reasons primarily. It sits in a high valley between the Temblor Range and where the Transverse Ranges transition to the Coast Ranges, out of the way of modern "progress," more accurately modern destruction (although it used to have more farms, since abandoned). Since it hasn't been destroyed, but most of the Great Central Valley has, it is the best example of what the Central Valley uplands probably used to be like. Also, not a coincidence, it harbors one of the greatest concentrations of endangered species in California. I think I saw a California Condor there once, and I definitely saw San Joaquin Kit Foxes.

Daily animation of wet year March-April Eastern Sierra snowpack at 6800'

The animated gif below was a series of mostly daily photos taken February 28 through May 5, 2005. It is a view of the snowpack changes in front of and on the hill behind the Lee Vining Elementary School. It is about 25 MB, so if it loads slowly the first time you can watch it faster when it repeats.

Reservoirs

When thinking about where rain goes in a watershed, it helps to think of a watershed as a series of reservoirs. In my last blog post, I mentioned this concept--anywhere water fills up and spills can be considered a reservoir. A bucket in your backyard, a rain barrel, and a swale would be obvious ones. Less obvious would be the soil profile itself, and the surfaces of leaves on plants and trees--it takes a certain amount of rain to get these surfaces wet before they start dripping--over an entire watershed, that adds up to a lot of water. Especially a watershed with giant redwoods.

December 15th 2016 San Geronimo Creek Flood

12:30 pm 650 cfs

2:20 pm 1,250 cfs

4:23 pm: almost peak flow (the 3,000 cfs peak flow at the downstream gage was at 5pm)

Next day at 100 cfs: note high water marks on the fence

On December 15th, 2016, San Geronimo Creek flooded basements in San Geronimo and cars and houses in Forest Knolls. It was the largest flood since 2006.

Pushing the envelope

A primer for the incoming Trump Administration: How to extract the most natural resources possible, at a sustained yield, over the long term

Dear Mr. Trump,

You are into long term gains, right? Passing wealth onto your children? Leaving a legacy? Alright, let’s do this with America’s natural resources! Make America’s ecosystems and ecosystem-based economies great again!

Here’s how.

Don’t you hate stop-and-go traffic on the freeway? Don’t you wish it would be smoother, so it didn’t have to come to a complete stop?

Pushing the envelope to extract as many resources as possible as quickly as possible is like that. The closer to nature’s limits that you get is when you start building a bubble (that will burst at some point). If you speed up suddenly, you will have to slow down suddenly. Because nature is variable. But people want reliability. Businesses need predictability. So don’t tie your extractive economy to a variable indicator, or else you are going to have booms and busts.

How do you insulate extractive industries from natural variability? You back off. Don’t push the envelope. Set limits well below nature’s.

In Natural Resources Management 101 you learn that in order to maintain a sustained yield of natural resources, you only harvest the interest, and you leave the principal untouched. If you start tapping the principal, you start losing yield (and revenue). So don’t do that.

On private lands, this is called good stewardship. On public lands, or with public resources (like water and the oceans and the air) it requires laws and regulations (in addition to good stewardship and a conservation ethic). These laws and regulations are good for business because they bring stability and reliability and predictability. A free-for-all benefits no one.

Because so much of America’s economy is tourism, or nature-based (think hunting, fishing, birdwatching, river rafting, etc.), anything you leave on the table benefits the ecosystem and those industries. So by backing off and not pushing the envelope, you aren’t losing anything. And you are gaining reliability.

One example is in California’s Bay-Delta. Wet years leave more water on the table than we can extract, and as a result we now rely on those wet years to refresh the Bay-Delta and boost fish populations. If we were able to capture that water, as new dam proponents propose we do, we’d be killing off the only thing that is keeping our fisheries going. So we don’t want to build new dams—it isn’t good for the ecosystem or the economy (by the way, the dams are super expensive and usually funded with tax dollars, and managed by powerful bureaucracies that expand government forever—as a Republican you should be opposed to any new dams, which were a favorite socialist program of the New Deal). Unfortunately, bad hombres and nasty women keep proposing new dams, and suckering America’s politicians into buying them. These are huge liabilities. Huge.

The obvious question is: well, how do we know how far to back off? We can’t extract everything, and we can’t extract nothing. Where is the line we shouldn’t cross?

Well, luckily, there are many laws and regulations, based on scientific research, that give us a great starting point. Let’s use those whenever we can to maintain stability in our extractive economy. Unfortunately—especially in relation to private lands—often we don’t have strong laws to guide us. You mostly don’t need to worry about that at the federal level, unless you want to throw some incentives at scientific research, management experiments, and support state-level efforts to limit development. Because it is additional development that creates that bubble I was talking about.

The Great Recession was started by the housing bubble—inadequate regulations allowed investors to push the envelope too far. The collapse of the timber and fishing industries is no different.

People hovering around you like vultures will be telling you to remove as many restrictions on extractive industries as possible. These individuals trying to make a quick buck off of America are blind to long term gains. Don’t listen to them. Those establishment politicians got us into this mess, and now we have to make America great again. Let the professional land managers and scientists guide natural resources policy, and guide us to healthy ecosystems, a resilient economy, and prosperity. You’ve got professionals—use them! And trust them—especially when it comes to climate policy.

Don’t be afraid to buck the party line and think for yourself on this one.