A Change in the Wind

The fall of a mighty oak: The Guardian notices

Nothing against new style longform journalism, but let's give credit where credit is due to a tradional but awesome story from The Guardian on the greatest tree in Wales, and how it fell (but could possibly have been saved).

No one knew quite how old it was because it had lost its heartwood, but Michael Lear, a tree expert with the National Trust, visited Pontfadog in 1996 and wrote to Josie Williams: "Using Forestry Commission techniques, the youngest it can be is 1,181 years, the oldest 1,628 years. "I cannot find a record of an oak tree of any of the 500 species internationally which has a greater girth anywhere in the world."

Yet, for all its local renown, the Pontfadog oak was barely known outside the small Ceiriog valley and the community of ancient tree experts. It was mentioned by George Borrow on his journey across Wales in 1862 but, like most other ancient trees in Britain, it was never fenced off or protected, and no one was ever asked to pay to see it – although Huw Williams's grandmother used to put out a collection box for the local Cheshire home, sometimes raising £5 a year. "It was just our tree, part of the landscape. We were very proud of it," said one woman from the valley the next day. Last week, some of Britain's specialists on ancient trees gathered at Pontfadog for a post mortem.

"It was the national tree of Wales and one of the oldest oaks in Europe. I'm desperately trying to find people who can help in propagating from the tree by either grafting or micro-propagation in order to maintain its genotype. Kew Gardens have said they are interested," said Simpson.

In fact, the tree could have been saved for many more years. Last year a group from the Ancient Tree Forum visited Pontfadog and, seeing it was vulnerable to a big wind, put together a list of actions costing £5,700 that they thought might have protected it. Despite a petition of 6,000 signatures to the Welsh assembly, no money could be found.

Wonder if tree lovers in this country could call on a group such as the Ancient Tree Forum to save a great old tree, if they feared one was in trouble somewhere in this land.  

The Driven American: Unable to wander freely

From Edmund White's gloriously thoughtful The Flâneur::

The flâneur [city walker/wanderer] is by definition endowed with enormous leisure, someone who can take off a morning or afternoon for undirected ambling, since a specific goal or a close rationing of tme is antithetical to the true spirit of the flâneur. An excess of the work ethic (or a driving desire to see everything and meet everyone of recognized value) inhibits the browsing, cruising ambition to "wed the crowd." 

Americans are particularly ill-suited to be flâneurs. They're good at following books outlining tours of Montparnasse or at visiting scenic spots outside Paris...but they're always driven by the urge towards self-improvement.

A couple of assumptions are embedded in this concept: that the wandering should take place in the city (as described in Walter Benjamin's epochal Arcades project) and that the drifter, if you will, shall be alone. But is either necessarily the case? Perhaps for Benjamin, an urban philosopher.

It's interesting to posit the counter-example of Jack Kerouac, who certainly made a life and great work out of his wandering, but does have that "driven" aspect that White describes, and even made a bit of sport of his inability to wander idly in his great and underappreciated Dharma Bums. 

A pic of Kerouac typing from the Orange County Regional History Center.

He wrote in that book:

“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.” 

Brower: Wilderness a place to rescue yourself

"For [David] Brower [who led the Sierra Club] wilderness was the place "where man could be alone, where you could rescue your self from what Ortega calls the other -- all the extraneities that pile on you too deep." 

From Nature's Altars, p216

This is my way of saying I'm going to hit the Pacific Crest Trail, for just a few days, just enough to get my feet dusty.

Have left a few posts for your entertainment...after all, here in SoCal, there are some unique aspects to the PCT. Here's a sign near Campo, where the trail starts, not far from the border. 

Actually good to see some signs of caring. What for some of us is a chance to question our reality -- because quest is after all at the heart of question -- is for others a chance at a new life. 

I can't help but sympathize with those will to roll those dice. 

Fracking in Upper Ojai: the latest

Fracking -- which as you all no doubt know is the injection of water and chemicals below ground at pressure, to break up rock formations and release natural gas and/or oil -- has come to rural Upper Ojai and Ventura County.

In truth, fracking turns out to have been going on in this area for a long time -- decades. How long in this neighborhood is a little unclear. I have been told by neighbors that "all the wells in Upper Ojai" have been fracked. I also have been told that oil companies have applied to drill hundreds of new wells in Ventura County and the backcountry. I have heard that fracking is not a danger to our water supply because the oil wells being fracked are so far below the surface they can't possible contaminate surface waters. I am skeptical, after reading the latest on fracking from ProPublica. 

At the same time, I am aware that oil production is what first brought white people like me to this area, beginning in 1867, so perhaps I am complicit, in a sense, and should be a little more open-minded. 

The irony is that there is so little regulation on fracking in California that oil companies wishing to frack have to jump through more hoops to drill in the National Forest backcountry, where no one lives, and on which wells have stood for decades, than in neighborhoods such as ours. 

Here are some links to the latest: 

Chevron offers public tours of fracking site: Ventura County Star. 

“The most dangerous thing you will do today is climb in and out of the vans, so please watch your step,” said Leslie Klinchuch, Chevron’s project manager for what’s officially known as the Pacific Coast Pipeline Superfund site.

The point was that the site, despite being contaminated with a known cancer-causing substance and other pollutants, is safe to visit. It’s also safe to live near, according to decades of testing by Chevron and the EPA. Hundreds of Fillmore residents do live nearby, separated from the refinery site by the Pole Creek concrete drainage channel, and a few of them were on Tuesday’s tour to see the property for themselves.

Fracking has been going on in the nearby National Forest for decades, and four wells were fracked int he last couple of years. An investigatory report: 

The ForestWatch investigation revealed that at least four wells were fracked in the Sespe Oil Field in 2011, and at least three additional wells were fracked in 2012. The fracking occurred on private land owned by Seneca Resources Corporation, a Texas-based oil company that operates the vast majority of wells in the Sespe Oil Field. The company relies on slant drilling to reach oil deposits on federal leases beneath the Los Padres National Forest. The chemicals, supplies and equipment were provided by Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oil field service companies with revenues of $24.8 billion in 2011 and also headquartered in Texas.

The recent fracking operations were approved without any public notice or environmental review. This is because fracking is unregulated in the State of California, and is typically rubber-stamped by the California Department of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources (“DOGGR”), the agency charged with regulating oil and gas extraction throughout the state. In one of the recent Los Padres fracking operations, DOGGR officials received a Notice of Intention to Rework Well 48-33 on the White Star lease on June 22, 2012, and three days later issued a one-page Permit to Conduct Well Operations authorizing the fracking. According to records submitted by Seneca Resources Corporation, the fracking operation was completed a few days later on July 5, 2012.

Fracking consumes millions of gallons of water a year in Ventura County (Ojai Valley News)

According to the voluntary reporting site www.fracfocus.org, 13 wells have been fracked in Ventura County since January 2011. Based on the water volume listed for those wells, 3,679,879 gallons of water were used during the franking process. According to the site, that total could include fresh water, produced water and/or recycled water.

Produced water comes up during drilling and has to be separated from the oil or gas. Fracfocus reports that 99.2 percent of the mixture injected underground during fracking is water; the remaining .79 percent is chemicals. That means 29,071 gallons of chemicals, gellants and other components were used in the 13 wells that were voluntarily reported.

Aera Energy — the largest oil producer in Ventura County, according to its website — did not respond by press-time to requests for information about its water sourcing and the quantity of fresh water it has used in drilling operations.

James Hines of the Sierra Club of Ventura County claims industry sources have disclosed that “60 wells have been fracked in Ventura County alone, along the Ventura River and Rincon. Those areas drain to the ocean. And along Sespe Creek,” said Hines. “With the new permits in Upper Ojai and old wells which can be re-drilled, there is nothing to stop them from fracking (in the valley),” he said. “There are plugged and covered wells in the Casitas watershed area.”

Yikes! My thought is to try and learn how to identify a fracked well by sight, for my own knowledge, and potentially to get neighbors involved. But is that even possible? 

Here comes the drought: Climate Prediction Center

From the forecast from NWS's Climate Prediction Center: 

Drought is forecast to persist for much of the West and expand across northern California and southern Oregon.

Just doesn't look good...at all. 

Sigh. I miss water in our creek. 

When the L.A. River (and Sisar Creek) ran wild

This month in this part of Southern California, we've had a lowly 36% of average rainfall (although precipitation in this region of the world is so variable that "average" is more of a mathematical construct than a reality to be relied on). Still, we've had about five inches of rain, roughly half of what it takes to get our local stream running. So it makes me wistful to come across this story in Los Angeles Magazine blog CityDig, about the Los Angeles River, which once upon a time really was a river...believe it or not. 

From historian Nathan Masters: 

"Imagine the Los Angeles River before its metamorphosis into a concrete flood control channel, and Mark Twain’s quip about falling into a California river and coming out “all dusty” might come to mind. But the historical record, including photos like the one above, paints a much different picture.

Before human civilization transformed it, the L.A. River flowed in some places through grassy oak woodland. In others it coursed through a dense forest of willows, cottonwoods, and sycamores. Steelhead trout swam through its currents, antelope and deer paused at its banks to drink, and grizzly bears ambled into its waters for food.

After a winter storm, the tame stream became a whitecapped fury. In the parched summer months, the river plunged below the surface where it encountered the porous soil of the Los Angeles Basin. But at the Glendale Narrows, shallow bedrock forced the stream aboveground, guaranteeing a year-round flow. In other places, where the parking lots of Beverly Hills, Compton, and Hollywood bake in the sun today, groundwater hydrology conspired with seasonal flooding to create a vast system of marshes, ponds, and other wetlands teeming with plant and animal life.

For centuries, the Los Angeles River also sustained human life in the area. As Blake Gumprecht explains in his masterful history, The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth, Gabrieleño (Tongva) Indians collected tule from its banks to thatch their huts, and later the Spanish agricultural village of Los Angeles built a system of ditches (zanjas) to irrigate its fields.

In the photo above, circa 1900, the man in the bowler cap works a sluice gate for the city’s Canal and Reservoir system. One of many systems that diverted water from the river for industrial, agricultural, and household uses, the one pictured here took water from a point north of Griffith Park, through the hills of the present-day Silver Lake district, and into a reservoir that eventually became—in shrunken form—Echo Park Lake."

Downtown Los Angeles is located where it is because that's where the river ran, just as in our neck of the woods in Upper Ojai, the Chumash had a trading post on a local stream. When the waters ran wild...

Nathan Masters of the USC Libraries blogs here on behalf of L.A. as Subject, an association of more than 230 libraries, cultural institutions, official archives, and private collectors hosted by the USC Libraries and dedicated to preserving and telling the sometimes-hidden histories of Los Angeles.

The Sierra Club High Trips and why women liked them

In the High Trips, for about thirty years at the start of the 20th century, the Sierra Club as a mountaineering club peaked, surely. On those brilliantly organized journeys, as many as 200 people at time went into the High Sierras, having committed to a walk of a minimum of two hundred miles, over several weeks of hiking. Though the club's founder John Muir was too old and too busy battling the Hetch-Hetch Dam to go, he greatly encouraged these trips, and they were led by the likes of Norman Clyde and David Brower, with great campfire talks and performances as well as great mountains. 

This was a highly evolved society, divided (roughly) into "mountaineers." of the likes of Muir and Brower and Clyde, and "meadoweers" who didn't care for the heights. (Likely I would have been one of the latter number, had I been so fortunate to have been present on the trip.) 

When I talked to Brower on this and other topics, a few years ago, he bemoaned the fact that the National Park Service will no longer approve long trips for Sierra Club backpacking groups. The limit (in the Sierra, at least) today is about eight days.

In his gentle but insistent way, Brower argued that the transformative power of the wilderness is lost if it is restricted to a handful of days. 

True, and perhaps the time has come to remember those extraordinary trips, before everyone alive who remembers them has passed away...for one, the camp photographers included Cedric Wright and Ansel Adams! Here's my fav pic from their 1929 efforts, by Wright, showing a High Trips expedition summiting at Mount Resplendent:

[Sorry about the angle: comes directly from the hand set Bulletin (pdf).]

These High Trips were for the elite of the Sierra Club, and set out to attract intrepid women, and succeeded (although the trips were predominantly male, the women who did go were as adventurous as any man).  

In her gender study of women in the wilderness, "Nature's Altars," Susan Schrepfer finds some interesting examples of women who were drawn to the wilderness because it gave both them and their mates a chance to shed their gender roles. That was part of the idea of the High Trips, that women weren't the domestic slaves. Wasn't easy on these trips, but after a day of mountaineering, a woman didn't have to do the dishes too. 

The club secretary, William Colby, made this clear in a letter to applicants to the High Trips: 

The irksome duties of cooking, dishwashing, and provisioning will be turned over entirely to a commissary department. All transportation of outfits, etc., will be attended to by a committee, such relieving the party of all drudgery and leaving their time entirely free for the enjoyment of scenery and mountain life. The trip will be particularly attractive for women, and every effort made to secure comfort usually lacking in excursions to the high mountains.

Isn't that a dream? "To relieve the party of all drudgery."

Only in California...

A pilgrimage to the snow on the mountain: 2013

Every year for the past fifteen or so I've walked up our local mountains, called Topa Topa, during the snows. This year, as you can see, we've had only dustings...

...but still, I was not alone. Saw nearly two dozen fellow travelers, from age one or so to seventy, in all shapes and sizes, with dogs and alone, in large groups, or alone, outfitted immaculately, or in sneakers and t-shirts. Most heading up to the ridge, at about 5000 feet, where the snow lay a little more thickly.

A sort of pilgamage to winter. Sensed a little excitement around the rarity of the snow this year, now that it did come, at least a little.  How reassuring to see the patches of white, feel that cold wind blow. 

Was a lovely day, sunny but cool, with lots of smiles. Some kid on the trail called me "sir" and actually appeared to mean it. Holy cow. 

Fracking: Pro, Con and (possible) Compromise for CA

The Wall Street Journal is excited about the possibilities of fracking for California:

California has Saudi Arabia-scale oil resources, notably in its largely untapped Monterey shale field, which stretches northeast for more than 200 miles from Bakersfield in central California. New technologies, especially smart, horizontal drilling and hydrofracturing, aka "fracking," make that oil accessible, and cleanly. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that the Monterey shale field alone holds 15.4 billion barrels of oil, rivaling America's total conventional reserves.

California collects about $15 billion in tax revenues for every billion barrels of state oil production, according to research conducted last year by the University of Wyoming's Timothy Considine and Edward Manderson. If that is accurate, then simply by opening up Monterey oil development—no incentives, grants or state funds required—tax receipts could total $250 billion over the coming two decades. Economists Robert Hahn and Peter Passell, at the American Enterprise and Milken Institutes respectively, point to another $30 billion to $80 billion in broad economic and social benefits that ripple through an economy for every billion barrels of oil production.

This might sound like over-the-top boosterism, but yes, the US Energy Information Administration has confirmed the vast reserves in the Monterey Shale formation, estimated to be 3/5ths the size of Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, which was for decades this nation's biggest producing oil field. 

But as so often has proved to be the case with the oil industry, the price of the potential economic good news will be paid by the environment. Or so the EPA warns. In a recent report on emissions from industrial sources, the agency revealed that the second biggest producer of greenhouse gas (equivalent) emissions is the oil and gas industry. (This I learned from Breanna Norton, of Food and Water Watch.) 

Which is true, but when I went to the EPA, I learned it's not the whole story. Here's a bar graph from the EPA, that shows how big power plants dominate emissions. Power plant emissions add up to nearly 60% of the total, about 10x as much as the total emissions from oil and natural gas extraction. [2,221 million tons of CO2 equivalent emissions for power plants, vs. 225 million for oil and natural gas extraction]

Hence the importance of cleaning up power plants, which is what the newly appointed head of the EPA, Gina McCarthy, is (from all accounts) set to do. If the EPA can reduce power plant emissions by ten percent, that savings could offset the existing contribution of refineries, for example.  

But meanwhile, in the words of Center for Effective Government (formerly OMB Watch) fracking continues to dominate exploration, and change the industry, for better or worse.

While the oil and natural gas sector includes a wide range of exploration and production activities, fracking has become the primary method companies use to extract natural gas. Traditional drilling for oil and gas has declined as reservoirs of easy-to-access oil and gas have been depleted. The top oil and natural gas sources also indicate the large contribution fracking activities are making to the industry sector’s greenhouse gas emissions. The data was not collected on individual wells but instead aggregated emissions from large production areas or basins. The highest emissions came from New Mexico’s San Juan Basin and Texas’ Permian Basin, where advances in horizontal drilling and fracking have led to a boom in shale gas and shale oil production. Emissions from onshore production (which includes fracking) were primarily methane. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 21 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

In recent years, scientists and environmentalists have emphasized the polluting nature of fracking, despite the repeated claims by industry about "clean natural gas." A Cornell University study showed that fracking produces more greenhouse gas emissions over time than traditional methods of oil drilling or coal mining, due to hauling in large quantities of water by truck and the methane released from fracking wells. Since the EPA greenhouse gas data does not include emissions from transportation, the total amount of emissions contributed by the oil and gas sector is likely underreported. Greenhouse gas emissions are not the only concern involved in fracking; the drilling method has been linked to a growing number of cases of water and land contamination.

It's not just about the climate, in other words, which explains why Food and Water Watch is tracking fracking. But the invaluable Timm Herdt of the Ventura County Star, who has been reporting for the paper from Sacramento for decades, reveals in an op-ed the inside story: 

Environmentalists advocating strict regulation of fracking cited a Monterey Shale oil-drilling boom as a certain prospect, while oil industry representatives downplayed the speculation, noting that results from test wells so far have not been promising.

The oil reserves may exist, they said, but they may not be recoverable, at least not with current technology.

Both sides had self-interested reasons for taking those views.

Environmental advocates are alarmed that fracking has been taking place for so long in California without being subjected to any regulations beyond those that apply to all drilling operations. The Department of Conservation is just now circulating a “discussion draft” of fracking rules it may put in place, rules that environmentalists have criticized as too lenient.

The industry, which notes there has not been one reported instance of environmental damage caused by fracking in California, seems resigned that an age of regulation has arrived, but wants standards that are not overly intrusive or expensive with which to comply.

In other words, Herdt hints, a compromise could be in the offing for the state. 

There may yet be some way, however, to differentiate between requirements that will be placed on traditional operations at conventional California oil wells, which tap into underground reservoirs beneath a layer of impermeable cap rock, and regulations targeted at emerging oil development that will use different technologies in areas with different geologic features.

One such differentiation being discussed behind the scenes by some in Sacramento is a variation on an old and controversial idea — the establishment of an oil severance tax, but one that would apply only to new wells.

An oil severance tax, in California, such as is paid by oil companies in radical leftist states such as Alaska, Texas, and Louisiana? That would at least repay the state, if not the state's environment?

As the irresistible Wallace Shawn said in The Princess Bride: Inconceivable! 

Little on the dry side in California?

NOAA says it's not likely to change: