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There is hope: Dinosaurs on the river

One of the reasons I object so strenuously to the fake climate alarmism nonsense is that it not only takes away attention and energy from real, measurable environmental problems, it also is so transparently fake and ridiculous that more and more Americans are beginning to doubt the entire environmental quality cause with which “climate change” is unjustifiably included.

When the public is lied to for five decades, told that the climate sky is falling, and that we have only five more years until… pick your fake end-of-times flooding, crop failure, too hot, too cold, end of oil, end of natural gas etc… and those predictions do not play out, then that public becomes weary and suspicious about everything the climate alarmists say, including the very real problems like loss of farmland, forest fragmentation, invasive bugs and plants, loss of wildlife habitat, loss of wild places. And that is bad, because Americans do need to maintain environmental quality, and improve it where needed. If we lose public support for true environmental problems that have real world solutions, then we will truly and needlessly suffer in the end.

Aside from being wrong about literally everything they claim and then demand, one of the other problems with climate alarmists is that they assume and promote a view of nature as steady state. That is, Nature never changes, it is always a Garden of Eden, except for human intervention. And when humans make mistakes or act greedily, climate alarmists say massive government intervention is needed, to the point where Western Civilization must be turned on its head, democracy must be canceled (for our own good, of course), and government bureaucrats must be in charge of every choice and decision we now make (we can’t be trusted to make “the right” choice). This is yet more nonsense, for the simple reason that Nature heals itself naturally.

How else does Nature recover from natural catastrophes like explosive and polluting volcanoes, floods, huge fires, meteor strikes, tornados etc? Well, Nature abhors a vacuum, and where a gap exists in Nature, some animal and some plant will adapt to exploit it and make room to live and grow in it. Even if the prior plant or animal can no longer live there.

In 2006 something very bad and mysterious was suddenly happening to the Susquehanna River. A hard-fighting smallmouth bass fishery so good (100-200 fish per day per fisherman) that fishermen came from all around the world to fish (and spend the night and spend their money locally) from Sunbury down to the Conowingo Dam in Maryland, was suddenly gone. Vanished. And gone along with the vanished smallmouth bass were the big predacious muskellunge, brown trout from the feeder stream mouths, largemouth bass, fallfish, sunfish, redeye, and shad.

Within just a few years a highly tangible and visible environmental catastrophe had revealed itself as a long stretch of the Susquehanna River literally went belly up and died. Native aquatic insects, the backbone of all life in the water there, disappeared. Up until 2005, you could stand on a late summer afternoon in Harrisburg along the Front Street Greenbelt walk and watch as the entire river surface practically boiled with dimples from rising fish eating hatching mayflies, caddis flies, and stone flies. In 2006 that whole activity ceased. Literally everything in the river died, and it still has not come back.

Long story short, what caused the demise of the Susquehanna River was a perfect storm of every bad thing that could happen to any waterway anywhere. If it could go wrong for the Susquehanna, it did go wrong in just a few short years, and the sum total was a total unmitigated shock and detonation of the waterway.

Several years of drought and unusually warm summers led to unusually low water flows, which left fish exposed and with no where to hide from predators. The over-heated water then developed algae blooms that robbed the water of its oxygen, suffocating fish and prey crustaceans like crayfish. When large summer thunderstorms happened, they overwhelmed and drowned the many community sewage treatment plants along the river, resulting in “Combined Sewage Overflows” up and down the river. These huge torrents of raw, untreated, undecomposed human filth blasted into the low, warm river water. There was no dilution of the mess, because the river was too low and too slow. One can only imagine that the conditions then were ripe for that human excrement to sit in still waters and become a feast for bacteria, which attacked the few surviving fish and left them with open wound lesions. Then viruses appeared, apparently rejoicing in the poor conditions, further attacking the remaining fish. Finally, when Pennsylvania’s shale gas boom started in 2006, there were some documented and suspected incidents of “midnight dumping”, where large tanker trucks filled with well brine or frack water were illegally unloaded into waterways that, of course, went into the Susquehanna River.

With the demise of the river’s fish, native grasses and watercress, the birds that migrated to, lived on, and migrated down the river, had nothing to eat. They also disappeared. Hundreds of egrets and herons, and huge rafts of ducks and geese used to grace the shores and skies above the river around Harrisburg on any given summer or Fall day. Not any more.

In 2005 one of America’s largest Great Egret rookeries flourished on the islands in the Harrisburg Archipelago across from Harrisburg City. My fishing buddy Ed Weintraub and I used to wade half a mile out to fish among the archipelago’s islands, and marvel at the hundreds of these gigantic pterodactyl-looking birds and their enormous nests. The place sounded like what a Jurassic jungle must have been like, with loud screams, cries, grunts, groans, and other weird sounds from the huge birds and their babies assembled in that relatively small place.  All the boulders jutting out of the river were coated in bright white bird dookie, as were the trees. The entire place stank to high heaven of rotting fish. It was a natural marvel of human-Mother Nature coexistence that reflected the incredible environmental diversity and health of the waterway, despite it being surrounded by huge train yards and human communities. This all was also eventually lost to whatever was ailing the river.

In 2011, while kayaking and wading the unnaturally smelly river in Harrisburg, I contracted MRSA in a tiny scratch on my leg, and then spent four days on a drip IV in a hospital, successfully avoiding the loss of my leg. The river was deader than a doornail and I almost joined it.

Last week two of us took a nice long canoe trip down river, my first in years, to see how the river has changed. We see a few bass fishermen now, local catfish guides brag about sixty-pounders, and walleye boats are out every day. Something in the river must be improved. It seems to be healing, but it is nowhere near where it was twenty years ago. I know that the West Branch of the Susquehanna is greatly improved from twenty years ago, when acid mine drainage turned its waters an unnatural turquoise blue. Now those old mines are washed out by the subterranean springs that first unleashed the mines’ acid, and the cold water is now clean and actually improving the West Branch.

Large bass and catfish -a more rugged critter filling the void left by the formerly numerous smallmouth bass- scurried out of our shadow, and as we approached the Harrisburg Archipelago, we began to see Great Egrets wading around the upstream islands. Lots of them. A juvenile bald eagle patrolled above. We paddled around and through the Archipelago and were surrounded by cormorants (a federally protected pest), mallards, wood ducks, turtles, a snake, and lots of nesting Great Egrets.

The dinosaurs were back on the islands and so were my hopes for a comeback by the river. No metaphysical cataclysmic environmental or political catastrophes were required for Mother Nature to bounce back. She always does, and she always will, despite what the Al Gore type fakirs predict.

The Rockville Bridge is the longest stone arch bridge still in use in the world. I think it is longer than the Glenfinnan Viaduct in Fort William, Scotland, which I have ridden over in a train. The Susquehanna River is slowly recovering from the many things that ailed her, and is now a delight to experience.

 

It’s that time of year again

Plenty of things have gone to hell in a hand basket over the course of the last four or five decades, and I would only be living up my highest and bestest reputation as a grouchy curmudgeon if I ticked them all off here as a laundry list of petty grievances. But other writers and commenters have already done all that, much better than I can, so I am going to mention just one frustration. And it must be credited to that mild mannered conservationist Aldo Leopold, who first put his finger on this, on the very beginning of what ails us Americans today.

If I read one more time the overused phrase “In a Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold writes…” I am going to scream. You are there and I am here on the other side of the screen, and we cannot actually hear one another, so it will sound like a silent scream, but rest assured, it drives me nuts and right now I am doing my best silent scream imitation about this. Sure, it is a testament to how inspiring Leopold was and still is that so (so) many people begin all kinds of talks and writings and poems with this opener, citing some comment or observation Leopold made back in the crusty 1940s Dark Ages that yet, surprisingly, has so much application and salience today, eighty years later. But it is so very much overused to the point where it is almost maudlin to hear it used yet one more time.

And then, when I think of those intervening eighty years, well, they have been both a blessing and a curse, haven’t they, and so I find myself in that recognizably similar frame of mind…

So what the hell.

In Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, he talks about cutting down a large oak tree with a crosscut saw, and how much history is gliding by as the saw blade traverses across the tree stem. For every few growth rings that are sawn, Leopold lists various wars and human milestones, scientific achievements as well as natural science moments, as the blade cuts deeper. Just that description alone is a pretty cool writing achievement by Leopold. It is a symbol and image that so many people have trouble forgetting.

But then at the end of the essay, just when the reader thinks “Yeah, I suppose cutting fire wood is more symbolic and meaningful than I thought it was, guess there’s a lotta history in those old oaks at Grandpa’s farm,” Leopold suddenly gets to the whole raison d’être of his history lesson (and I am closely paraphrasing here):

I knew Americans were eventually doomed to cultural rot and failure when we discovered that heat came from a small switch on the wall, and not from cutting our own firewood every year.”

Here in the middle of his gentle outdoor lullaby, Leopold lamented the ease of life that had arrived with then-modern conveniences and services. He saw them as a two-edged sword, cutting both ways, for and against, because working hard for something, especially for your own ambient heat in the dead of winter, is an important lesson about how all humans are in truth part of the natural cycles around us all the time. Participating in these cycles humbles us, brings us into the actual healthy swing of things around us, helps integrate us with the earth’s natural vibe, tune, and wavelength, each of which we ride every moment of every day, even if we are unaware of it. And thus, it helps us thereby appreciate the natural world that sustains us every day. Even if we are unaware of it.

Leopold was advocating for Americans living newly cushy lives devoid of physical challenges to get the hell off their asses and live in the real world, to take responsibility for their own needs and not outsource everything (like the Romans did at their end). Cut their own firewood, grow a garden, shoot a grouse for dinner or a catch a fish for lunch. The ability to be self-reliant is not only an American trait from our frontier days, it is innately tied to all successful human cultures at all times.

Mind if we switch here to someone on the other side of the spectrum from our mild naturalist and wildlife biologist Aldo Leopold, who nonetheless expresses much the same sentiment?

I hate luxury. I exercise moderation…it will be easy to forget your vision and purpose once you have fine clothes, fast horses, and beautiful women. [All of which will result in] you being no better than a slave, and you will surely lose everything.” — Genghis Khan (brutal conqueror of the entire known world in his time).

As that completely successful “mad butcher” said it, luxuries make humans soft and weak. Hard work makes us strong and successful. If there is a hallmark of modern America, it is that we are awash in luxuries and conveniences, to the point where the younger generations have no idea how we arrived here at this point, how much sacrifice was required to give them these fancy phones and coffees. Our younger people think that luxuries and easy comforts just fall like manna from Heaven.

So, to be the truest, best American you can be, why not cut some firewood?

Here in central Pennsylvania it is that time of year again, the time of year where if you have not yet stacked the last of your firewood in the woodshed, you damned well better get on with it. Ain’t no time to lose. Any week now Mother Nature can show up with a big old cold surprise, a major dose of early Winter, knock out the electricity to your town, and leave you at the mercy of serious cold temperatures. It’ll be nice if we have all of October to enjoy mild Fall weather, with no need to light the wood stove, but you never know what the future brings. Better to be prepared, right?

Funny how something so insignificant as cutting one’s own firewood can be synonymous with an entire culture’s success or failure.

Wildlife biologist Aldo Leopold smoked tobacco, owned guns, ate what he hunted, planted a garden every year, and cut his own firewood. If you have not read A Sand County Almanac, then get it, because a world of special delight awaits you there, and it will change your life.

This season’s supply of split firewood stashed in the old woodshed, which is due to be replaced in 2020