Let’s Go Drown Ourselves

All DC-area residents should be issued canoes at puberty. Great, full-body aerobic exercise and serious doses of adrenaline! Learning to handle a canoe in turbulent water so that it goes where you point it, upstream or down, is gratifying like nobody’s business. And you can do it in some of the world’s best year-round whitewater (where the U.S. Olympic team practices), without going beyond the Beltway. How excellent is that?

Or, like me most of the time, you can paddle around lazily in the backwaters of the Potomac’s many islands, sneaking up on herons and ospreys and basking turtles, then stop on a nice island with your cooler for a civilized lunch and a smoke.

You make your choice. Canoes give access to thousands of miles of streams large and small, and to the marshes and beaches. And you can take your friends and/or family along, and a cooler.

Mine is 16 feet of red ABS plastic, a nice, versatile canoe for the rocky whitewater streams of the Potomac and Shenandoah basins. I bought it used 10 years ago, for a few hundred dollars. It was pristine them, but I’ve abused it quite a bit, so the bottom is worn about halfway through, and the white ash rails have been replaced. (More about that later.) One drawback is the deluxe wooden rails and cane seats, which are not that practical if you leave it outside in winter they way we do. Every spring I need to spend an hour sanding the rails and painting on linseed oil cut with turpentine, to avoid splinters and rot. I’d go with plastic rails next time.

And this in a river that in my youth—the1960s—was a stinking, putrid thing, lined with health notices warning against contact with the water. Georgetown's ancient sewers -some were hollow logs -poured 15 to 25 million gallons of raw sewage into the river every day. More than 100 towns and villages, upstream and down, followed suit. The Army Corps of Engineers' solution, appropriate enough, was to flush the river periodically, like a big toilet. A $500-million system of reservoirs, with a 120-foot dam at River Bend, above Great Falls, would do the trick, they said. The project would have turned a beautiful island-studded stretch of river (today nearly continuous parkland on the Virginia and Maryland sides) into a 36-mile-long lake, edged by smelly mudflats in the dry season.

The project—proposed each year from 1946 to the early 1960s—never got built, thanks to big-shot conservationists like Stewart Udall and William O. Douglas. But the river continued dying. Not until the mid-1970s—after the federal Water Quality Act had paid for sewage treatment improvements on every stream in the watershed--did fecal coliform bacteria in the river fall to levels less than scary. And only in the 1980s did aquatic weeds and fish populations begin to return to reasonable health. It was the 1990s before I was willing to swim in it.

The most pleasant stretch of rapids in the DC area is the Virginia Canal/Seneca Rapids section, about 5 miles upstream from Potomac, Maryland. Park in a gravel lot at Violette’s Lock on the C&O Canal. The ruins of an old rubble dam—part of George Washington’s disastrous investment, the Potowmack Canal—stretch straight across the river at this point. upstream—to your right— is an area of impounded water luxuriant with underwater grasses, home to lots of bass and catfish, and the occasional whining jet-ski. Downstream, for nearly a mile, the surface is broken by thousands of rocks of all descriptions and sizes, splashing over rapids, as the river makes a big left-hand bend around Blockhouse Point.

If you paddle across the river (a few hundred yards), you can enter the ruins of the canal itself. A vigorous flow carries you downstream through a curving entry channel, shaded by huge sycamores and swamp maples, and into an aquatic paradise of intricate braided channels, jungle-choked islands, and a century or two of fallen trees. There’s about a mile of this stuff, including some little islands with semi-permanent summer camps, with tents, coolers, fisherman, and smoldering campfires.

Mr. Washington was many things, but a wise investor he was not. His Potowmack Canal—visible here and in the amazing ruins on the Virginia side of Great Falls National Park—was completed in 1802 (three years after his death), with goal of reaching the growing markets of the Ohio Valley. It was a great engineering achievement but had huge costs and nearly zero revenues; it operated at a huge loss until 1828. The federal government stepped in to charter a new and better canal on the Maryland side, with both private and federal investments. On the same day (July 4), work began on America's first railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio (B & O). Railroads would prove the superior technology. The canal struggled with never made it past Cumberland. The railroad was a very sad development for canal investors, but for us in DC it was a great gift, because the canal and towpath are priceless.

The B&O railroad bought up the canal’s debt and in 1938 sold the entire thing to the U.S. government for $2 million.) .I guess we would all agree it was a good investment

Cure plant blindness!

Marty Smith, our new next door neighbor, identifies himself proudly as a "developer." He is therefore a predator, and not a fun neighbor (not that there is anything wrong with a predator.... But Ann and I came close to being prey .

After buying the neighbor's tiny decrepit bungalow at the peak of the market for $535,000, Marty spent nearly two years waiting for his moment. He got all his neighbors to sign letters saying that he might be injuring some of our trees, but would take every precaution.

During this period he began to nag us. He started by objecting to our compost bin. During the two years between groundbreaking and moving in with his family he kibitzed constantly, critiquing our landscape design and our lifestyles.


"You have too much old junk," he announced, indicating our old Volvo and our piles of bricks and concrete rubble for terracing our steep lot, Here in Arlington, which prides itself on recycling everything (including building materials) and composting and talks about it's AIRE something about reducing emissions) us it's and probably us. His crews took care that we didn't recycle any building material. (I had visions of turning a long tubular fence rail into a fountain.


He announced that he had spotted "a big rat." out in the alleyway of our property! He probably realized that he and his crew was the one that disturbed the ecosystem by driving those rats out of their homes and driving out predators like foxes and owls.

I caught them removing our wire galvanized wire fence and moving our county issued compost bin, which he found smelly and unsightly. He called my visiting Sister in law's attention to it, and she came running to suggest that civilized people don't do that. She is not a sturdy soul, but believes we should live in "harmony." She lives in a developing country.

In the two years we have known him, Ann and I have never had a real conversation with him. We go, "Hi Marty, how are you?" and he responds "hi" and then ducks his head into the nearest doorway.


He spends pretty much all of his time there, working.


He began by bulldozing the little house that had been there for a hundred years or so, along with all the outbuildings. Then he deleted EVERY piece of plant matter, including grass, many trees and mature shrubs and other items, leveled the lot with a laser, removed an old fence post that had marked the alley forever.


During July, our friend Mike sent an email with this subject line:

Prevent Plant Blindness -- a new syndrome discovered

Plant Blindness
American Institute of Biological Education Eye on Education

William Allen

Plants fuel life on Earth by tapping the sun's energy. But if plants are the main mediators between the physical and biological worlds, why do most people tend to appreciate animals so much more than plants?

That question is at the center of a new campaign whose rallying cry is "Prevent Plant Blindness." The aim of the campaign is to liberate students from the many traps that lead to a lack of appreciation for and understanding of plants, say its leaders, botanist-educators James Wandersee of Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge, and Elizabeth Schussler of the Ruth Patrick Science Education Center, in Aiken, South Carolina. Wandersee runs LSU's 15° Laboratory (www. 15degreelab.com), which takes its name from the observation that people prefer to view objects that are between 0 and 15 degrees below eye level.Surely as hunter-gatherers we evolved responses to food plants as well as animals!

To read the whole thing go to ....
http://www.aibs.org/eye-on-education/eye_on_education_2003_10.html

Some say Disney and PETA have inculcated us with images of animals that are more interesting than plants. Surely we are also hardwired by evolution, through our history of hunter-gathering, to recognize plants too.

Various members of the Garden Club weighed in on this note, Kathy Jentz, editor and publisher of Washington Gardener magazine, summed it up:

Based on 1998 research, it is not new, but maybe a name change: 'green blindness' was a previous moniker and I see it daily in the different ways lawmakers treat animals vs plant issues (ie deer vs our forests).

Here is what I wrote on my blog in 2007:

>>At one of today's APGA conference talks there was a brief mention of Plant Blindness, which I'd heard tale of before and wish they'd go into more deeply. What is it? The affliction of many in the general public that makes them see right past anything green. Like many diseases, it is genetic. Hard-wired into us humans. We see color. We see movement. We filter out the background (i.e. plants). Just a matter of survival you know.

What I found really interesting this time was the speaker talked briefly about a real cultural bias against flora over fauna. That animal life is given far more weight than plant life. We are animal so of course that is how we view it and our innate prejudice is formed. That made me sit up and my ears prick forward. I had been feeling this undercurrent for years, but never heard it expressed so well. When I talk to naturalists and environmentalists, there is most definitely an animals-first, built-in institutional morality that I find slightly repugnant and off-putting. Hey, I love animals too - some of my best friends are of the mammal persuasion! But are we really honoring Mother Earth when we outright give preference to one category over the other? I think I may need to start a PETA equivalent for our green friends!<<

Sincerely,
Kathy Jentz
Editor/Publisher
Washington Gardener Magazine
826 Philadelphia Ave.
Silver Spring MD 20910
301-588-6894
http://www.washingtongardener.com/
http://washingtongardener.blogspot.com/

_

How could guys with PHdS BE SO DUMB?

Or to the shockingly careless propaganda of the senior climate scientists themselves in the Proceedings of the NAS and associated emails.


http://www.slate.com/id/2248236/pagenum/all/#p2

Cutting US energy use

''After all the attention the BP spill is getting (the inescapable video image of the broken wellhead spurting oil), its interruption hasn't yet brought Congress to face the real problem of climate change: reducing the amount of energy we use.

It's not about demonizing our suppliers, with vaguely racist caricatures of Muammar Achmadinajad, as mailings from Operation Free (of the Truman National Security Project of some congressional democrats), and wildly overstating the costs of importing oil ["a billion dollars a day"].

http://www.trumanproject.org/files/papers/Oil_Addiction_-_Fueling_Our_Enemies_FINAL.pdf


Or the quick fix promised by hedge fund manager T. Boone Pickens and his "Picken s Plan."
It's an extremely sketchy combination of wind power and supposedly large new sources of natural gas, "induced" by fracturing the shale in which it's found through a scary injection of fluid. The scheme would also entail converting all of our 8 million tractor trailers to run on natural gas (which has a substantially lower energy content than gasoline or diesel, and presents new explosion hazards), to the tune of several hundred dollars per vehicle.

http://www.pickensplan.com/


His fellow billionaire Ted Turner signed on as a "supporter."

http://www.pickensplan.com/news/tag/supporters/

Nor will the so-called "clean energy climate bill," passed by the House and being considered by the Senate:
http://af.reuters.com/article/metalsNews/idAFN1523837220100715 .

It takes increasing the price of oil so consumers use less.




Duncan Brown - 4501 16th Street N - 703-243-1219

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