Growing Wild

Work in progress: Not Dead Yet

water-mixable oils on canvas

Should be able to finish this one with a couple more passes; just need to clean up the bottom half a little.

So, "everyone" pictures western Washington as naturally being covered in evergreen forests made up primarily of Douglas Firs. (If they know what a Douglas fir is) They think everything over here was just old growth evergreens. Therefore, many, many people's first thought when getting into ecological restoration is "Plant more trees!!!" And they go out and they get a bunch of Douglas firs and they plant them. Because they're cheap, they're native, and they grow well.

(Do you know what our most common tree is? Do you know what tree has actually expanded it's range since colonialization? Do you know what tree pops up everywhere? Do you know what tree will just show up on it's own and is doing JUST FINE and DOESN'T NEED ANY HELP????? And has actually caused a decrease in biodiversity as it takes over and crowds out other species????)

America's picture of ecological wellness, at least when it comes to Washington state, is a thick, vibrant evergreen forest full of Douglas firs.

But! That's actually not the only ecosystem that was here before colonialization, and before the diseases that Europeans brought over killed a huge percent of the native human population. A huge swath of what people now call the I-5 corridor was prairie and oak savanna! We only have 3% of the historical extent of the oak savanna!

That means there's less of it left than of the old growth!

But the thing is that those prairies and oak savanna had been actively maintained by native peoples (and these ecosystems have greater biodiversity than the Douglas fir forests!!!) Until! The U.S. government banned intentional fire and actively suppressed naturally occurring fires! Which turned out to be A BAD IDEA.

And the thing is, oaks support so many MORE species of insects and birds than Douglas firs, it's incredible. Oaks are a keystone species, and so many of the species that are struggling in this state are struggling in part because the DOUGLAS FIRS INVADED THE PRAIRIES AND OAK SAVANNAS and turned them into closed canopy evergreen forests with fewer species and less food for people and other animals.

Because the thing is that the oaks and the camas and the lomatiums and a bunch of other extremely cool plants that are super important to native bees, native butterflies, native birds, and native peoples, are adapted to fire.

Douglas firs (and scotch broom and Himalayan blackberry and a bunch of other invasive species that really want to take over the prairies) are not. So for many hundreds and thousands of years- since the last ICE AGE!- native peoples in this area have been intentionally maintaining open prairies and oak savannas by using fire to keep the Douglas firs from taking over and turning everything into a Douglas fir dominated closed canopy forest.

But when the people here were hit first by European diseases and then the U.S. banned intentional fires, Douglas firs started moving in from the surrounding forests. Their seeds are everywhere. They are pioneer species. They're widely adapted. They're fast growing. They transform every ecosystem into one ecosystem that they dominate. They're planted by the million each year! Because they're a great timber tree! But they're also literally everywhere else!

We have so many! SO many Douglas firs! More than any other tree species!

So tell me why people go out and plant EVEN MORE! Instead of, I don't know, something that actually supports way more species and is a much rarer tree and part of an ecosystem that has almost been wiped out, like, say, the Garry Oak?

But the other plants and the animals that depend on them need space to grow, too.

My sycamore tree began life in the gravel at the edge of a parking lot. If trees can feel pain, that is a painful, unlucky death. I carefully dug it up and put it in a pot I made out of a disposable cup.

Hello small one. This world may be cruel, but I will not be.

I decided to take care of it, not expecting it to survive, and when my sycamore tree unfurled one tiny leaf and then another, it chiseled a tiny foothold in my terrified brain, the kind of brain that doesn't remember a world before the atomic bomb and before 9/11.

I googled the lifespans of trees. My neurons had to stretch and expand to accommodate what I learned: My sycamore tree may live five hundred years. It's hard to think something so big. In twenty years, my baby sycamore tree will be three stories tall, and the home of many creatures. In five years, my sycamore tree will be taller than I am. In one year, it will be summer.

There's this concept called sense of foreshortened future where people who have lived through trauma can't conceptualize a future for themselves because deep down they don't expect to survive, When I look forward, all I see is fire and death, melting ice and burning sky. We were raised Evangelical. All we see is Judgment Day, except there is no heaven.

But now there is a tiny gap in the wall, a crack in the door of my cell

and on the other side, I see a tree

There is, in the future, a great old sycamore tree, full of clean winds and the stir of a thousand wings. A hundred years from now. Fifty years from now. There will be forests in that world. There will be a world.

It takes courage, but we have to imagine it.

Most tree species can live in excess of three or four hundred years. I think I'm learning something. I think there are ancient voices saying hello small one, touch the dirt and the leaves, for now you are part of something that cannot die

in 2030 I will be thirty years old and the world will not have ended and there will still be hummingbirds, and we will have photos of the stars more beautiful than we can now imagine.

I planted an Eastern Redcedar; they may live nine hundred years. There will be nine hundred years. The people in that time will remember us. Maybe we will meet the aliens (hi aliens!).

I will blow out the candles on many birthday cakes in a world where there are wolves in dark forests far from home. I am learning to imagine the future. I learned recently that elk were reintroduced to the Appalachian Mountains after over a hundred years of extirpation, and that they are expanding their range.

That tiny crack I can see through now opens a tiny bit more:

Maybe elk will pass through my hometown, maybe there will be a forest where the pasture is on the high hill that I can see from my home

say it, say it, say it: ten years, thirty years, a hundred years from now

I'm obsessed with gardening systems that utilize rainwater without the use of barrels or cisterns. My ultimate fav is using bioswales to catch and filter stormwater on the street.

Fun addition: Dams that utilize trees to catch dirt/ stop erosion, and prevent disaster that can come from broken dams.

SUSTAINABLE URBAN DRAINAGE! SUDS!

We need more of them, in the right places!

Also, using these to reduce stormwater loads in storm events, particularly in places with combined stormwater and sewage systems, could/would be helpful at reducing river discharges of raw sewage. (If climate change is factored in at system level cos more rain in less time needs to be accouted for at rhe large scale designs...)

While four leatherback sea turtle nests might not sound like a lot, it's the same number in a single year as were found in total during the ten year span between 2015-2025. The Cape Hatteras National Seashore is also on the north edge of the species' range, so leatherback sea turtle nests are already not very common in the area.

This will be a somewhat brief introductory post to flat reed basket weaving, these two patterns are provided. Below are SOME websites you can buy supplies at:

Basketweaving.com

Peerlessratten.com

Thecountryseat.com

Explore these websites, as you learn basket weaving there's different materials you can learn to use and replace others and these websites will often provide the tools you will need too. You can use dyes or stain for flat reed, I have more experience with dyeing which basically involves boiling the color and then dunking the reeds in it.

Flat reed is literally that, flat reeds. Many flat reeds used are commercial but some traditional ones will be made of splints from trees such as Ash or White Oak. They are soaked in water and then shaped and woven into the craft desired.

Source

These patterns will tell you how you will need to cut your reeds. You will need a water source, preferably a tub of some kind, an awl, measuring tool, and a flat workspace.

Tips:

Do not let your flat reeds stay wet for too long! Let it dry in an open air space when you are not working on it or when it is complete, FLAT REED CAN MOLD.

If you soak flat reed for too long it can become mushy and unusable, at the very least if you soak it for extended periods be careful with how you bend it.

Flat reed tends to (not always) have a 'rough' and 'smooth' side, you want the rough side to be on the inside of your basket.

If you're a flat reed has started to split trim it as close to the split as you can as quickly as you can or it spreads.

Starting is the most difficult part and no basket will look like the end result in the beginning. Getting overwhelmed is normal, come back to it, these are not projects you do in one sitting.

It's a program that would probably need to be organized as a group to help disabled people because of the prep involved, but Matthew 25: Ministries does take clean, label- and residue-free pill bottles to reuse by mail. It could be a decent "let's all go to someone's place or a third space that has hot running water pill bottles to soak and then scrub off/wipe while having a (masked?) socializing session and meal afterwards" monthly or quarterly event to catch up with people and process bottles for mailing without having to take it all on alone. It would also cut down on shipping costs and materials if you send one shipment, reuse a box or bag (taping up a paper bag from a grocery store is a good medium-sized option), and use something like Pirate Ship to find the cheapest postage.

Some city recycling programs do take empty pill bottles specifically, but many don't because they're #5 plastic, and are small enough to fall through sorting machines. A city nearby (sadly not where I live) does specifically say that they take them in the recycling bins on their "Accepted for Recycling" webpage; I just had to go through some webpage trees and then open up some drop-down menus to find it.

The "upcycling" solutions don't really work long-term when you have such a buildup of pill bottles that you're never going to use the dozens or hundreds that you accumulate in a year, but it's possible that local creative reuse stores might take the bottles (clean, no identifying information/residue/etc., brings us back to the "having to clean them party"), but personally I'd see if you can find sewers or knitters who need places to store pins, small thread scraps or notions, stitch markers, etc., and need small containers, or specifically upcycling artists in your area who do higher volume material reclamation.

Pictured: Luis Cassiano is the founder of Teto Verde Favela, a nonprofit that teaches favela residents in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, how to build their own green roofs as a way to beat the heat. He's photographed at his house, which has a green roof.

Article

"Cassiano is the founder of Teto Verde Favela, a nonprofit that teaches favela residents how to build their own green roofs as a way to beat the heat without overloading electrical grids or spending money on fans and air conditioners. He came across the concept over a decade ago while researching how to make his own home bearable during a particularly scorching summer in Rio.

A method that's been around for thousands of years and that was perfected in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, green roofs weren't uncommon in more affluent neighborhoods when Cassiano first heard about them. But in Rio's more than 1,000 low-income favelas, their high cost and heavy weight meant they weren't even considered a possibility.

That is, until Cassiano decided to team up with a civil engineer who was looking at green roofs as part of his doctoral thesis to figure out a way to make them both safe and affordable for favela residents. Over the next 10 years, his nonprofit was born and green roofs started popping up around the Parque Arará community, on everything from homes and day care centers, to bus stops and food trucks.

When Gomes da Silva heard the story of Teto Verde Favela, he decided then and there that he wanted his home to be the group's next project, not just to cool his own home, but to spread the word to his neighbors about how green roofs could benefit their community and others like it.

Pictured: Jessica Tapre repairs a green roof in a bus stop in Benfica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Relief for a heat island

Like many low-income urban communities, Parque Arará is considered a heat island, an area without greenery that is more likely to suffer from extreme heat. A 2015 study from the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro showed a 36-degree difference in land surface temperatures between the city's warmest neighborhoods and nearby vegetated areas. It also found that land surface temperatures in Rio's heat islands had increased by 3 degrees over the previous decade.

That kind of extreme heat can weigh heavily on human health, causing increased rates of dehydration and heat stroke; exacerbating chronic health conditions, like respiratory disorders; impacting brain function; and, ultimately, leading to death.

But with green roofs, less heat is absorbed than with other low-cost roofing materials common in favelas, such as asbestos tiles and corrugated steel sheets, which conduct extreme heat. The sustainable infrastructure also allows for evapotranspiration, a process in which plant roots absorb water and release it as vapor through their leaves, cooling the air in a similar way as sweating does for humans.

The plant-covered roofs can also dampen noise pollution, improve building energy efficiency, prevent flooding by reducing storm water runoff and ease anxiety.

"Just being able to see the greenery is good for mental health," says Marcelo Kozmhinsky, an agronomic engineer in Recife who specializes in sustainable landscaping. "Green roofs have so many positive effects on overall well-being and can be built to so many different specifications. There really are endless possibilities.""

Pictured: Summer heat has been known to melt water tanks during the summer in Rio, which runs from December to March. Pictured is the water tank at Luis Cassiano's house. He covered the tank with bidim, a lightweight material conducive for plantings that will keep things cool.

A lightweight solution

But the several layers required for traditional green roofs — each with its own purpose, like insulation or drainage — can make them quite heavy.

For favelas like Parque Arará, that can be a problem.

"When the elite build, they plan," says Cassiano. "They already consider putting green roofs on new buildings, and old buildings are built to code. But not in the favela. Everything here is low-cost and goes up any way it can."

Without the oversight of engineers or architects, and made with everything from wood scraps and daub, to bricks and cinder blocks, construction in favelas can't necessarily bear the weight of all the layers of a conventional green roof.

That's where the bidim comes in. Lightweight and conducive to plant growth — the roofs are hydroponic, so no soil is needed — it was the perfect material to make green roofs possible in Parque Arará. (Cassiano reiterates that safety comes first with any green roof he helps build. An engineer or architect is always consulted before Teto Verde Favela starts a project.)

And it was cheap. Because of the bidim and the vinyl sheets used as waterproof screening (as opposed to the traditional asphalt blanket), Cassiano's green roofs cost just 5 Brazilian reais, or $1, per square foot. A conventional green roof can cost as much as 53 Brazilian reais, or $11, for the same amount of space.

"It's about making something that has such important health and social benefits possible for everyone," says Ananda Stroke, an environmental engineering student at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro who volunteers with Teto Verde Favela. "Everyone deserves to have access to green roofs, especially people who live in heat islands. They're the ones who need them the most." ...

It hasn't been long since Cassiano and the volunteers helped put the green roof on his house, but he can already feel the difference. It's similar, says Gomes da Silva, to the green roof-covered moto-taxi stand where he sometimes waits for a ride.

"It used to be unbearable when it was really hot out," he says. "But now it's cool enough that I can relax. Now I can breathe again."