No news is good news

Matthew Kaiser reports (in the most recent Friends newsletter) on Resource Manager Dave Lawlor’s July survey of the waters of Dogue Creek, which drains Huntley Meadows Park. Fortunately, no snakehead (Channa sp.) fish were detected, and even more positively, samplers found ten Largemouth Bass. It is believed that the presence of the bass will put pressure on snakeheads that would otherwise move upstream in the Creek. Other species counted in the survey (alas, no scientific names in the report):

  • Yellow Bullhead
  • American Eel
  • White Sucker
  • Satinfin Shiner
  • Creek Chubsucker
  • Tessellated Darter
  • Lamprey
  • Green Sunfish
  • Pumpkinseed
  • Bluegill
  • Creek Chub
  • Eastern Mudminnow

I find it unpleasant to find myself reporting observations of Lamprey as a good thing. Lampreys are the one taxon of the animal kingdom that I could do without, if it’s all the same to you: they’re nasty things.

West decoded: 3

Or not, as the case may be. The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West’s maggotty mash note to California, has several instances of slang that may be obscure, undocumented, or simply his own coinages. I got nowhere with the following:

He sat near Harry’s bed and listened to his stories by the hour. Forty years in vaudeville and burlesque had provided him with an infinite number of them. As he put it, his life had consisted of a lightning series of “nip-ups,” “high-gruesomes,” “flying-W’s” and “hundred-and-eights” done to escape a barrage of “exploding stoves.” An “exploding stove” was any catastrophe, natural or human, from a flood in Medicine Hat, Wyoming, to an angry policeman in Moose Factory, Ontario. (ch. 6)

How is it that Medicine Hat was transported from Alberta to the Equality State? I wonder whether hundred-and-eight is a misprint for hundred-and-eighty—unlikely, since it would be plural in this context.

Most of the online hits that this next one turns up want to sell me an Acura.

Faye was coming back. Homer saw that Tod was going to speak to her about Earle and the Mexican and signaled desperately for him not to do it. She, however, caught him at it and was curious.

“What have you guys been chinning about?”

“You, darling,” Tod said. “Homer has a t.l. for you.” (ch. 20)

This last one has such a rhythm that I have to believe West made it up.

… all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence. A super “Dr. Know-All Pierce-All” had made the necessary promise and they were marching behind his banner in a great united front of screwballs and screwboxes to purify the land. No longer bored, they sang and danced joyously in the red light of the flames (ch. 27)

Spark decoded

Spang on page 2 of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a topical reference, never directly referred to again in the course of the short novel, but one definitely laden with foreshadowing. The work was published in 1961, but its events begin in 1930.

At that time they had been immediately recognizable as Miss Brodie’s pupils, being vastly informed on a lot of subjects irrelevant to the authorised curriculum, as the headmistress said, and useless to the school as a school. These girls were discovered to have heard of the Buchmanites and Mussolini, the Italian Renaissance painters, the advantages to the skin of cleansing cream and witch-hazel over honest soap and water, and the word “menarche”; the interior decoration of the London house of the author of Winnie the Pooh had been described to them, as had the love lives of Charlotte Brontë and of Miss Brodie herself.

In the interwar period, the evangelist Frank N. D. Buchman formulated an approach to shared spiritual experience that became known as the Oxford Group. Even digging shallowly in the online record, it’s clear to me that Buchman’s methods attracted controversy. A snippy notice from an 1928 number of Time calls the Group a “curious collegiate cult” apparently obsessed with sex. Later in the 1930s, with war drums rumbling, Buchman and his followers organized under the banner of Moral Re-Armament (MRA). Buchman was active in Nazi Germany, ultimately denounced by the ruling party; Communists likewise attacked him. His work is also credited as one of the roots of the Alcoholics Anonymous movement.

The fierce urgency of now

Martin Luther King. Jr., addresses the crowd from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, 28 August 1963:

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

Poetic license

In the first chapter of the The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender, a quite fine novel, this passage stopped me:

My father usually agreed with [my mother’s] requests, because stamped in his two-footed stance and jaw was the word Provider, and he loved her the way a bird-watcher’s heart leaps when he hears the call of the roseate spoonbill, a fluffy pink wader, calling its lilting coo-coo from the mangroves. Check, says the bird-watcher. Sure, said my father, tapping a handful of mail against her back. (p. 5)

Now Ajaia ajaja is indeed a spectacular bird to see, and she’s got the habitat right, but waders as a rule don’t have much of a voice. But (thought I), since I hadn’t heard the birds I saw in Florida some years ago, maybe the spoonbill does have a pleasant coo. Not so, says Roger Peterson (eastern North America field guide, 5/e): “VOICE: About nesting colony, a low grunting croak.” David Sibley adds, “Also a fairly rapid, dry, rasping, rrek-ek-ek-ek-ek-ek, much lower, faster than ibises.” The one available audio sample from the Macaulay Library confirms.

I ♥ NPR

i ♥ nprThe city has been repaving the curb cuts in my part of downtown. One or more street artists have capitalized on the opportunity to embellish the freshly-trowelled concrete, and many of their efforts are darn clever. In the case of the present example, found just down the block from 635 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., its epigraphy is a little crude, but its sentiments are apposite and appreciated.

Swaps

Richard A. Fuller et al. make a provocative proposal in a recent latter to Nature. Working with a data set of the protected areas of Australia, the authors make a quantitative assessment of each preserve’s contribution to conserving vegetation types in the country. They then divide that contribution by the cost of continuing to protect the land (its estimated market value plus management costs), thereby deriving a benefit-cost ratio for each property. Fuller and his team find that about 1% of Australia’s protected areas are not pulling their weight in terms of conserving diversity, and propose that selling these lands (the local term of art is “degazettement”) and using the funds to acquire alternative lands leads to an overall increase in protection with no net impact on public spending.

There are certainly points to argue with in this work. The authors use conservation of vegetation types as their benefit measure, adjusted for the amount of each type found in the protected area and the percentage of each type remaining countrywide since the arrival of Europeans in the mid-eighteenth century. Another measure might yield different results. There are some benefits to protection—a visually attractive viewshed, for instance—that don’t appear to fit into this analysis. Along the same lines of thought, the importance of keystone or indicator species is discounted. If old-growth temperate rain forest is preserved specifically to protect Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis), there may be knock-on effects. Also, the work assumes that protection can be acquired at market rates, either through outright land purchase or through conservation easements.

Nevertheless, I think it’s a good step toward quantifying the tradeoffs that are an inevitable part of conservation. It’s also worth noting that nearly all the benefit gains are achieved by degazetting the “dogs,” the bottom 1%. Beyond that, the bang (as measured by number of vegetation types protected) doesn’t increase.

Meanwhile, the U.S. federal government is under pressure from the State of Wyoming over two parcels of state-owned land adjacent to Grand Teton National Park, as Bob Beck reports. The high-value properties are held by the state in order to produce revenue, but the lands are yielding little, due to federal restrictions on their use. Wyoming is looking to exchange the land for other lots that can be developed, say for coal mining.

Flaubertian

The artifice lies in the selection of detail. In life, we can swivel our heads and eyes, but in fact we are like helpless cameras. We have a wide lens, and must take in whatever comes before us. Our memory selects for us, but not much like the way literary narrative selects. Our memories are aesthetically untalented.

—James Wood, How Fiction Works, §39

The Mountain State, not the Extraction State

A case where a wind farm appears to be the less damaging alternative: Tom Zeller, Jr. reports on efforts to forestall mountaintop removal mining at Coal River Mountain in Raleigh County. W. Va.

The idea for a wind project first surfaced in 2006, after David Orr, a professor of environmental studies at Oberlin College in Ohio, approached researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, part of the Department of Energy, about its analysis of wind potential around the country.

“We were supporting lots of groups trying to stop mountaintop removal and to do remediation at former sites,” Professor Orr says. “But we realized that, while that’s fine, it’s hard to get something done if you’re always just against something. So we began looking for alternatives to mountaintop mining.”