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“I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.”

            And so, in one brief sentence—and one long book—Charles Darwin changed our understanding of the world.  That long book was published on November 24, 1859.  Its proper title is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, a fittingly long title for a 502-page book The Origin of Species, as we shorten the title today, is undoubtedly the most important ecology book of all time and makes many lists of the most important books of all time, on any subject.

            Darwin took his sweet time getting his ideas into print.  He was born in 1802 (died 1882) to a cultured family, and  was educated as a Victorian gentleman, spending time studying at Edinburgh and Cambridge.  He drifted from subject to subject, but nature was clearly his core interest.  When he was 22, an opportunity came his way to act on that interest.  He was invited to join the voyage of the HMS Beagle as the gentleman companion of the caption, Robert Fitzroy.  The rest, as they say, is history.

            Darwin jumped at the chance.  He spent the next five years on geological and biological expeditions throughout South America.  As a gentleman passenger, he did as he liked, spending months at a time on land, exploring the continent (he only spent 18 months on board).. The observations he made and specimens he collected (770 pages of diary, 1750 pages of field notes, and 12 catalogues detailing 5,436 plants, animals, fossils and more) gave him a lifetime of material to consider.

            By the time he returned to England in 1836, Darwin was already a scientific celebrity.  He had dispatched many articles during the voyage, to be read at scientific meetings by his colleagues.  He continued to write and think, his understanding of nature diverging more every year from the universal religious thought of the Victorian age—that a divine hand had created all species just as they are today.  But Darwin knew that species changed over time and varied from one place to another—his observations of bird species on the Galapagos Islands and the fossils he collected were undeniable.

            Darwin might never have published On the Origin of Species if he hadn’t been pushed.  He was a cautious man who shrunk from argument and public debate, and his high status in society made him even more reluctant to risk his reputation by pushing unpopular ideas.  He had spent two decades refining his ideas, and he was in no hurry to publish them.  His plan was to produce a three-volume work that laid out all his ideas and evidence.  But Darwin learned that a colleague and fellow South American explorer, Alfred Russel Wallace, had come to similar conclusions as his own.  They published articles together in 1858 (and so are rightly considered the co-equal originators of the idea of natural selection), and then Darwin got down to work on a book that would beat Wallace to press.

            On the Origin of Species was published on November 24, 1859, in an edition of 1500.  The book sold out in one day.  An edition of 3000 was issued in early January, and it sold out immediately.  And, of course, the book has been in print continuously since then, selling countless millions and translated into many languages.  A 2017 poll found On the Origin of Species to be the single most important academic in history; it is, they wrote, “a book which has changed the way we think about everything.”  We are perhaps fortunate that Darwin didn’t have time to pen his planned three-volume work; as the famous botanist, Sir Joseph Hooker wrote to him, “…three volumes…would have choked any naturalist of the nineteenth century.”

            In environmental matters, Darwin’s work is the undeniable foundation work of ecological science.  The inter-relationships among organisms and their environments only matter if each can influence the other.  But let’s allow Darwin himself to tell the story, as he did in the closing pages of On the Origin of Species:

“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us … Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

References:

Darwin Online.  On the Origin of Species.  Available at:  http://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/Freeman_OntheOriginofSpecies.html.  Accessed November 18, 2019.

Desmond, Adrian J.  2019.  Charles Darwin, British Naturalist.  Encyclopedia Britannica.  Available at:  https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Darwin.  Accessed November 18, 2019.

Flood, Alison.  2015.  On the Origin of Species voted most influential academic book in history.  The Guardian, 10 Nov 2015.  Available at:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/10/on-the-origin-of-species-voted-most-influential-academic-book-charles-darwin.  Accessed November 18, 2019.

Well, it’s almost Thanksgiving, so why not a day about that most American of fruits,  the cranberry? According to all the nonsensical “national day” calendars on the Internet, November 23 is that day.  I can’t find anyone who claims to have started eat-a-cranberry day or any history about it, so let’s just give the day to cranberries without any official endorsement.

            And cranberries deserve a day.  The cranberry is one special little fruit, full of all the good things nutritionists tell us to seek in our food.  It is also all-American, endemic to the U.S.  According to the Cranberry Marketing Association, about 1100 family farms grow cranberries, with Wisconsin and Massachusetts in first and second place for most grown.  Cranberry farms go back generations, partially, I suppose, because the type of cultivation—old vines growing in reclaimed bogs and marshes—provides large barriers to entry into the business.

            And cranberries deserve a day around this time of year, because, as we all know, the special dinners in this season aren’t complete without cranberries.  Cranberry sauce, cranberry bread, cranberries in the salad, cranberry punch, cranberry-scented candles.

            What most don’t know, however, is that one of the first “recalls” of food for pesticide contamination involved cranberries–the “Great Cranberry Scare of 1959.”  A perfect cranberry storm left the nation with empty bowls where the cranberry sauce should have been.

            The first part of the perfect storm came in the mid-1950s, when cranberry growers began to use a new chemical, aminotriazole, to control weeds in their cranberry bogs.  FDA approval of the herbicide required that it be applied only after the fall cranberry harvest so that none of the chemical, a known carcinogen, would contaminate the berries themselves.  Part two was a change to federal food-safety legislation in 1958 (the Delaney Clause) that prohibited sale of foods containing cancer-causing substances (there were only a few known at the time).  Part three was a series of tests of that showed aminotriazole contamination in some lots of cranberries from Washington and Oregon, in November.  Secretary of the (then) Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Arthur Fleming, felt he had no choice but to warn the public not to eat cranberries.

            The storm grew to hurricane proportions just before Thanksgiving.  Sales of fresh cranberries dropped 63% from the previous year.  Sales of canned cranberries dropped 79%.  Almost half of people interviewed said they would never eat cranberries again.  The $50-million cranberry industry, which had been anticipating a great year after a bumper crop, went into a tailspin, losing most of their revenue for 1959.  Arthur Fleming was persona-non-cranberry across the country.  In Modesto, California, Miss Cranberry burned Fleming in effigy!  Mamie Eisenhower struck cranberries from the White House thanksgiving menu—as did most other Americans (on the campaign trail, however, presidential candidate Richard Nixon ate several helps of contaminated cranberries to prove, well, something).

            Many believe that the government went overboard that fateful Thanksgiving.  Quickly after the uproar, large batches of cranberries that had tested clean were released, a $10 million fund was created to compensate cranberry farmers, and the food-safety regulations began an evolution towards more sophisticated nuance. 

            But the cranberry was out of the bog, so to speak.  Since then, governments around the world have become more conscientious about food safety, with recalls of contaminated foods an almost weekly occurrence  And whether we consider that a good thing, protecting our health, or a bad thing, creating health scares over nothing, we owe it all to the humble fruit that graces our dinner tables beginning every November and disappearing again in January—the cranberry!

References:

Cranberry Marketing Association.  About US Cranberries.  Available at:  https://www.uscranberries.com/.  Accessed November 17, 2019.

O’Donnell, Edward T.  The Great Cranberry Scare of 1959.  InThePastLane, November 21, 2012.  Available at:  http://inthepastlane.com/the-great-cranberry-scare-of-1959/.  Accessed November 17, 2019.

Tortorello, Michael.  2015.  The Great Cranberry Scare of 1959.  The New Yorker, November 24, 2015.  Available at:  https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-great-cranberry-scare.  Accessed November 17, 2019.

Pundits often say that the truly American contributions to literature, philosophy, and the arts all stem from the American landscape.  As Woody Guthrie wrote and sang, “…From the redwood forest to the gulf stream waters…,” this land was made for stirring the imagination and creativity of America’s artists and writers.  A prime example of that combination of art and landscape is the Grand Canyon Suite, which premiered on November 22, 1931.

            The composer of Grand Canyon Suite is Ferde Grofe, who lived from 1892 to 1972.  Born to a musical family, he grew up playing almost any musical instrument, most notably viola and piano, in local jazz clubs, bars and, sometimes, brothels.  As his reputation grew, Grofe graduated to positions in touring bands and orchestras and began composing his own songs and longer works.  In 1923, he was hired as a pianist and arranger for the Paul Whiteman Band, one of the nation’s leading jazz ensembles.  In 1924, George Gershwin sent a piano score to Whiteman.  Whiteman liked it, but asked Grofe to arrange it for full orchestra.  When the composition premiered in 1924, it made history—Rhapsody in Blue became an instant hit, both as popular and classical music.  And it made the careers of all three men. Whiteman became known as the “king of jazz,” and Grofe as jazz’s “prime minister.”

            Several years before then, however, Grofe experienced a sight that propelled his career even further.  In 1916, he went camping at the Grand Canyon.  When the sun rose, he was hooked: 

“I first saw the dawn because we got there the night before and camped. I was spellbound in the silence, you know, because as it got lighter and brighter then you could hear the birds chirping and nature coming to life. All of a sudden, bingo! There it was, the sun. I couldn’t hardly describe it in words because words would be inadequate.”

He determined then to write about his feelings, but composing the suite had to wait in line behind other obligations.  Undeterred, he wrote that “It became an obsession.  The richness of the land and the rugged optimism of its people had fired my imagination.  I was determined to put it all to music some day.”  He eventually finished the suite, and it premiered at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago.  “Five Pictures of the Grand Canyon,” as it was titled then, became an instant classic.

            The most well-known of the suite’s five parts is “On the Trail,” that depicts a cowboy riding his mule down the canyon, a ride that many Americans have taken.  The orchestra simulates the braying of the animals and the unsteady clip-clop of their hooves (using, in true Monty Python fashion, coconut shells to replicate hoof-beats).  The suite’s other parts are much more natural, depicting sunrise, sunset, the Painted Desert and a cloudburst. 

            As a boy, I lay on the living-room floor between the two swing-out speakers of my parents’ console stereo, immersed by the sounds of a day at the Grand Canyon (which I wouldn’t see for another 30 years).  I strained to detect the first notes of “Sunrise,” as the music picked up as the sun burst over the horizon.  I rocked with the rhythm of the mule walking “On the Trail.”  I thrilled as “Cloudburst” boomed into my ears from the facing speakers. 

            Grofe composed, arranged and performed many other orchestral works based on the American landscape.  These include Mississippi Suite, Hudson River Suite, Niagara Suite, and A Day at the Farm.  All reflect what he first saw in the Grand Canyon as “an infectious passion for the beauty of the untouched American West.  It’s become an international postcard.”

            And whether that postcard depicts the west or east, Grofe’s music welcomes us all to find the same beauty and inspiration in what is truly unique about America—a landscape filled with marvelous places, some spectacularly beautiful and others less so but still able to stir the imagination.  And so many, like the Grand Canyon, are preserved for all time through what has been rightly called America’s greatest idea—our national parks(learn more about the National Parks here).

References:

Guion, David.  2017.  Grand Canyon Suite, by Ferde Grofe.  Musicology for Everyone, May 29, 2017.  Available at:  https://music.allpurposeguru.com/2017/05/grand-canyon-suite-ferde-grofe/.  Accessed November 15, 2019.

Schiavone, Theresa.  2000.  ‘Grand Canyon Suite’.  NPR Music, October 29, 2000.  Available at:   https://www.npr.org/2000/10/29/1113160/grand-canyon-suite.  Accessed November 15, 2019.

Songwriters Hall of Fame.  Ferde Grofe.  Available at:   https://www.songhall.org/profile/Ferde_Grofe.  Accessed November 15, 2019.

President Calvin Coolidge was known as a man of few words (his nickname was Silent Cal), and he characteristically used few words to proclaim a new national monument on November 21, 1925.  The lands, he said, “contain objects of such historic and scientific interest as to justify their reservation and protection….”  And so, Lava Beds National Monument was born.

            Lava Beds is located in far northern California, just below the border with Oregon.  The park covers more than 46,000 acres, and over 60% of the area is now preserved as wilderness (designated in 1972).  Lava Beds is adjacent to other federally protected lands and water, including Modoc National Forest and the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge.      

            Lava Beds is a geological marvel, the landscape shaped by a history of volcanic lava flows that repeatedly covered the area in the past.  As the flowing lava cooled, it formed a dozen or so long, undulating lava tubes, subterranean channels left empty as the cooling lava shrunk or drained away.  Over time, the roofs over many of those tubes collapsed, breaking the tunnels into “caves” that lay just below the surface and have open access from the top.  Lava Beds National Monument contains about 500 lava caves, more than any other place in the United States.

            The lava caves create a formidable landscape.  The surface is fractured with caves and fissures that make traveling around the area difficult and dangerous.  Bats like it, however, as the variety of caves in size and extent provide a variety of niches for different species.  Fifteen bat species inhabit the monument.  The most common is Townsend’s big-eared bat, but the most exotic is the Brazilian long-tailed bat, a migrant that travels thousands of miles between its summer and winter homes.  Bird life is also abundant and diverse because Lava Beds sits at the intersection of several different habitat types.

            Native Americans lived in the area for thousands of years, making Lava Beds one of the longest continually occupied homelands in North America.  Ancestors of today’s Modoc people left an astounding display of rock art, both petroglyphs (carvings into the rock) and pictographs (paintings on the rocks).  More than 5,000 individual rock pictures occur, many at the entrances to lava caves.  The artifacts date back more than 6,000 years.

            Lava Beds was also the site of one of the most brutal battles between native peoples and the United States during 1872-1873.  The Modoc War, as the confrontations are now called, occurred because the US government forced Modoc people out of their traditional homelands in the Lava Bed area, moving them to the nearby Klamath reservation.  When Modoc families continued to return to their homes in defiance of the government, the US Cavalry finally resorted to violence to enforce their orders.  The resulting series of battles left many Native Americans and US soldiers dead or wounded.  The landscape prolonged the warfare, providing ample routes and locations for Modoc warriors to use to escape or ambush soldiers.  Eventually, all Modoc people were relocated to a reservation in Oklahoma.

            Despite its location and interesting cultural, geological and biological resources, Lava Beds is not heavily visited.  During 2018, about 128,000 people enjoyed the park, a number that hasn’t changed much in this century. 

References:

National Park Service.  A Brief History of the Modoc War, Lava Beds National Monument.  Available at:  https://www.nps.gov/labe/planyourvisit/upload/MODOC%20WAR.pdf.  Accessed November 14, 2019.

OhRanger.com.  Lava Beds National Monument, History.  Available at:  http://www.ohranger.com/lava-beds/history.  Accessed November 14, 2019.

US Geological Survey.  Lava tubes at Lava Beds National Monument.  Available at:  https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/medicine-lake/lava-tubes-lava-beds-national-monument.  Accessed November 14, 2019.

Today is a day for botanists.  Two famous plant guys were born on November 20.  Augusto Weberbauer, born in 1871, was a German botanist who studied the flora of Peru, publishing the first comprehensive catalogue of Peruvian plants.  Twenty years Weberbauer’s senior,  John Merle Coulter was born on November 20, 1851 (died 1928), and became one of the world’s foremost botanists.

            Coulter was actually born in China, where his missionary parents were living.  When only two years old, his father died, and so his mother returned to her childhood home of Portage, Indiana, on the shore of Lake Michigan just east of Gary.  There Coulter and his brother (who also became a famous botanist), took to the outdoors, studying the fields and woods of the sand-dune ecosystems of the vicinity.

            Interested in all fields of natural history, Coulter decided to study geology at Hanover College in the opposite corner of Indiana, on the Ohio River.  Life changed for him when his former professor (students, listen up—find an interesting professor and volunteer in her lab) invited him to join a group that was going to explore the west.  That group was the now-famous Hayden Expedition, sent west to study the Yellowstone region in 1871; their report told of the “fantastic” ecosystem there and led to the formation of the world’s first national park a year later (learn more about Yellowstone here).

            Although he was a geological assistant on the expedition, Coulter became mesmerized by the western flora, so different from that of the Midwest.  Hayden discovered his talent and interest—while others spent their evenings playing cards, Coulter worked on his plant collections—and named him the expedition’s official botanist.  He co-authored the monograph, Synopsis of the Flora of Colorado, in 1874.

            Coulter never looked back, taking up botany as his profession.  He completed advanced degrees at Hanover College and took a faculty position there as both a Latin teacher and natural history professor.  In 1875, he founded a journal, the Botanical Bulletin, and edited it for fifty years.  The journal has been in active publication since Coulter started it, now called the International Journal of Plant Sciences and among the top botanical journals in the world.  As Coulter wrote in 1916, “In 1875, …an insignificant-looking botanical journal began to appear each month….This journal is distinctly a Hossier by birth, but its influence has reached wherever the science of botany is cultivated.”

            In a similar journey as his journal, Coulter became one of the world’s leading botanists.  He published at a breath-taking pace, producing botanical works about Indiana, the Rockies, Texas and other locales, and becoming the global expert on the carrot family (the Umbelliferae), naming dozens of species (he wrote to Asa Gray, “…for a year now I have been eating, drinking and sleeping Umbelliferae”).  He took over the editing of Asa Gray’s famous Manual of Botany, producing the sixth edition.

            When the famous fisheries scientist, David Starr Jordan, left the presidency of Indiana University (to become president of Stanford), Coulter was named to take Jordan’s place.  After just two years, he became president of Lake Forest College in Illinois, presumably a better fit with his strong Presbyterian faith.  He then went to the University of Chicago, where he headed the botany department and remained for most of the rest of his career, producing a string of students who became leaders of the next generation of botanical ecologists.  Coulter’s personal collection of about 44,000 botanical specimens now resides at the Field Museum in Chicago.  His final years were spent at Harvard, where he helped found the now-famous Boyce Thompson Institute, devoted to botanical research in support of agriculture and environmental sustainability.

            A most fitting tribute to this pioneering botanist is the John Merle Coulter Nature Preserve in his home town of Portage, Indiana.  The 92-acre preserve incorporates a variety of ecosystems,  including black oak savannas, prairies, sedge meadows and intertidal sand dunes.  The site was mined in the 1930s for sand—and in a happy outcome, the disturbance created niche habitats for rare native plants.  The preserve boasts more than 400 plant species, 19 of which are on the Indiana protected list.  The preserve abuts the western portion of Indiana Dunes National Park, the nation’s newest national park, created on February 15, 2019.  

References: 

Coulter, John Merle.  1916.  A Century of Botany in Indiana.  Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Sciences, 26:236-260.  Available at: https://books.google.com/books?id=86ohAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA48&lpg=PA48&dq=john+coulter+on+indian+dunes&source=bl&ots=qN9Yarc6ef&sig=ACfU3U1nteDpXnFd4nwIaGpxy04PpJRr_g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj81Nflwt3lAhXxmq0KHRQyCbcQ6AEwAHoECA0QAQ#v=onepage&q=john%20coulter%20on%20indian%20dunes&f=false.  Accessed November 9, 2019.

Heiser, Charles B. Jr.  1985.  John Merle Coulter, Botanist.  Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Sciences, 95:367-370.  Available at:  http://journals.iupui.edu/index.php/ias/article/view/7520/7537.  Accessed November 9, 2019.

Shirley Heinze Land Trust.  John Merle Coulter Nature Preserve.  Available at:  http://www.heinzetrust.org/john-merle-coulter.html.  Accessed November 79, 2019.

When we see the acronym “WTO,” we typically think World Trade Organization.  But there is another WTO, one that is much more important and fundamental—the World Toilet Organization.  It was founded on November 19, 2001.  And, therefore, the United Nations has designated November 19 each year as World Toilet Day.

            You can make all the jokes you wish—is this the world’s number two problem?—but sanitation is a major issue around the world.  According to the United Nations, 4.2 billion people live without “safely managed sanitation,” which means toilet facilities that effectively collect, treat and dispose of human wastes, and do it so people are safe and dignified.  Nearly 700 million people have no sanitation facilities at all, so they defecate on the ground—not sanitary, not safe, not dignified.

            And not healthy.  Inadequate toilets and related sanitation facilities (like someplace to wash your hands after defecating) cause 432,000 deaths each year because of diarrhea and parasitic infections.  About 1000 children under 5 die from these causes every day.  These issues cause lots of related problems, especially for women and girls—absence from school, violence in unsafe locations, loss of productivity.  Turns out that investing $1 in better sanitation realizes more than $4 in increased productivity.

            Just before the turn of the last century, a successful businessman from Singapore gave up his career and took up the cause of improving sanitation.  Jack Sim is now known universally as Mr. Toilet.  Starting in his homeland and spreading globally, he and his organization, the WTO, have advocated for better sanitation to whomever would listen.  He started the idea of World Toilet Day in 2001, when he founded WTO, and the United Nations endorsed it as an official day in 2013. 

            It hasn’t been easy to get the world’s attention.  Sim says, “It’s called a brown issue because it’s brown in color. Funders [and] donors love “green” issues and “blue” issues — water, forest, animals, then children, women, climate change. These are beautiful pictures you can show, but toilets, sanitation, shit, sewage treatment is really uncomfortable.”  So, he uses humor to get the idea across, often dressing as the poop emoji or snapping toilet selfies in unlikely places and poses.  “We have to compete with Kim Kardashian and football.  When you’re at the bottom of the pile, humor helps a lot.”

            But progress is being made.  When the UN established its new Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, an entire goal (goal 6) was devoted to ensuring the “availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.”  Their most recent report states that from 28% of the world’s population having safely managed sanitation services in 2000, the percentage rose to 45% in 2017.  But the effort must be increased substantially to meet the 2030 goal of good sanitation for all.  Much of the problem is centered in India, where half the population still lacks sanitary facilities, and in Africa.

            When you see a toilet that is “out of order,” it irritates you, right?  Imagine if it were that way every day of your life.  So, appreciate what you have and join in this year’s theme for World Toilet Day—“Leave no one behind!”

References:

Global Citizen.  How ‘Mr. Toilet’ is Using Humor to Talk About Better Sanitation.  Available at:  https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/mr-toilet-jack-sim-interview/.  Accessed November 6, 2019.

United Nations.  Sustainable Development Goal 6.  Available at:  https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg6.  Accessed November 6, 2019.

United Nations.  World Toilet Day, November 19.  Available at:  https://www.un.org/en/events/toiletday/index.shtml.  Accessed November 6, 2019.

World Toilet Organization.  What’s UN World Toilet Day?  Available at:  http://worldtoilet.org/#.  Accessed November 6, 2019.

It was the perfect place to build a dam.  The Italian Alps had formed a deep, steep-sided valley that could provide the site for a tall, narrow dam capable of providing enormous amounts of hydro-electricity.  So, the Italians built it—the Vajont Dam, highest arched dam in the world at the time.  The tragic flaw would not surface until later.

            The Vajont Valley is in northeastern Italy, about 60 miles north of Venice.  Mount Toc, a 4,800-foot peak, forms the southern boundary of the valley, dominating the landscape.  The dam is 860 feet tall, a thin arched structure, much like Hoover Dam in shape. The dam went up between 1957 and 1960, when the gates were closed and the reservoir behind the dam began filling. 

            That’s when the trouble began.  As the dam filled, the slope of Mount Toc began to slide downhill.  Engineers had expected some movement, knowing that landslides were common in the Alps and that the side of Mount Toc might be somewhat unstable.  Their strategy was to fill the lake slowly, alternately raising and lowering the water level, creating small controlled land movements that would eventually stop.  The strategy worked for a time, as engineers monitored the “creep” of the mountain and made changes in water level to slow it down if the movement was too fast. 

            A little problem occurred in November, 1960, when 700,000 cubic meters of the mountain slid into the reservoir—in ten minutes.  The dam held and the lake absorbed the landslide without incident.  The large rock-pile in the middle of the reservoir was a cause for concern, however, because engineers worried that a bigger landslide might block water from reaching the dam and so stop the ability of the dam to generate electricity.  In response, they designed and built a tunnel between the upper part of the reservoir and the dam, so that a potential blockage could be by-passed.

            Then came the big problem.  The summer and fall of 1963 were wet, the unusually high rainfall raising the lake’s water level higher and faster than desired.  As the lake behind the dam reached a depth of about 800 feet, Mount Toc started slipping more.  Some observers got nervous, but the general feeling was that the mountain would hold.  Then, at 11:39 PM on October 9, the entire side of Mount Toc fell into the reservoir.  An area 1.5 miles by 1 mile containing about 250 million cubic meters of rock (400 times bigger than the earlier landslide) fell into the reservoir in 45 seconds.  The landslide completely filled the valley, to a height well above the top of the dam.

            The water in the reservoir had to go somewhere.  An 850-foot tall wall of water pushed up the opposite side of the valley from the landslide, destroying one small town on the hill.  Another wall of water was pushed upstream, flooding several more villages.  The landslide pushed all the water between the slide and the dam into a huge wave that towered 700 feet above the dam.  It fell on five downstream towns, the weight of the water destroying everything in its path.  A flood wave traveled downstream, still more than 200 feet high when it hit the mouth of the Vajont River one mile below the dam.  In all, 2059 people are known to have died, crushed by the falling water or drowned in the accompanying floods.   In one downstream village, 94% of the residents died.

            The geology of the region was much more complex than thought when the dam was designed and built.  Rather than solid rock, the slope of Mount Toc was relatively unstable, composed of rubble ancient landslides.  Underlying the rubble was a thin layer of clay that acted as a gigantic slip-n-slide for the mountain.  High rains and the rising water in the reservoir helped to waterlog the clay layer, which eventually gave way all at once.  And, as you might expect, post-mortems revealed that the early tests of the geology were too few, insufficiently detailed and their cautions largely ignored.

            Dams are the largest and most intrusive human-made structures on the planet.  They provide enormous benefits—water for direct human use and irrigation, renewable electricity, efficient transportation, flood protection—but they are also dangerous.  As an old adage states that in time the river washes away the dam.  And, indeed, most dam tragedies are caused by the washing-away of the dam as water goes over the top of the dam and erodes it from downstream.

            But not in this case.  In a tribute to Italian engineering, the dam withstood the disaster on October 9, with only slight damage to the top of the structure.  The dam still stands, and it still generates electricity—water in the reservoir upstream of the landslide is routed through the by-pass tunnel, which also wasn’t damaged, to the turbines located in the dam.

References:

Bressean, David.  2017.  Expecting A Disaster:  The 1963 Landslide of the Vajont Dam.  Forbes, Oct 9, 2017.  Available at:  https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2017/10/09/expecting-a-disaster-the-1963-landslide-of-the-vajont-dam/#2d53844011f8.  Accessed October 1, 2019.

Mauney, Lee.  Case Study:  Vajont Dam (Italy, 1963).  Association of State Dam Safety Officials.  Available at:  https://damfailures.org/case-study/vajont-dam-italy-1963/.  Accessed October 1, 2019

Petley, Dave.  2008.  The Vaiont (Vajont) landslide of 1963.  American Geophysical Union, AGU100, 11 December 2008.  Available at:  https://blogs.agu.org/landslideblog/2008/12/11/the-vaiont-vajont-landslide-of-1963/.  Accessed October 1, 2019.

This date in 1974 represents the creation of a new category of U.S. National Park Service units—the “national preserve.”  Two national preserves were created on this date—the Big Cypress in southern Florida and the Big Thicket in southeastern Texas.

            National preserves are much like national parks—they must be functioning ecosystems that contain outstanding natural, scenic and recreational values.  While virtually no extractive activities can occur in national parks (you can’t take home a leaf or souvenir rock from a national park), some utilization of natural resources is allowed in national preserves, as long as that use doesn’t impact the fundamental values of the preserves.  Which activities are allowed is specific to each preserve, but typically allow hunting, fishing and trapping and oil, gas and mineral extraction.

            The U.S. has 19 named national preserves to date.  Ten of the preserves are in Alaska, created to ensure protection of Alaska’s wild lands while also allowing subsistence use and mineral extraction by Native Alaskans and other residents.  Most of the others are also in the western U.S.  The National Park Service also lists two national “reserves,” which are essentially the same as national preserves but whose management may be delegated to the states in which they occur (specifically Idaho and Washington). 

            Big Cypress National Preserve is the twin region to Everglades National Park.  It covers about 730,000 acres (a bit larger than Rhode Island) just north of the Everglades and serves as an essential watershed feeding freshwater into the park and adjacent estuaries.  The impetus for national preserves came from the perceived need to protect Big Cypress from further development (it was the proposed site for a major airport development in the 1960s), but also continue the historical uses of the landscape—for recreation, oil and gas extraction, Native American uses and other private landownership.  Consequently, the new category of “national preserves” was created to accomplish both goals.

            Big Cypress is fundamentally a huge freshwater wetland that includes significant habitats of hardwood hammocks, pine savannahs, prairies, cypress swamps and tidal estuaries.  The preserve hosts a wide variety of rare and endangered species, including 9 federally and 151 state protected species.  The state list includes 120 plants, an indication of the exceptional diversity of the area.  The park is home to the Florida panther, a critically endangered species.  Nearly 800,000 visitors enjoyed the park in 2018, but in some recent years visitation topped one million.

            Big Thicket National Preserve covers about 113,000 acres in southeastern Texas.  The area is considered of great ecological importance as the convergence of a variety of ecosystems—swamps, deciduous forests, prairies, pine savannas and dry sandhills.  The resulting biodiversity is said to be the highest in the world outside the tropics. Because of these extraordinary properties, the United Nations designated Big Thicket as a Biosphere Reserve in 1981 and the American Bird Conservancy designed the preserve as a “globally important bird area” in 2001.  The Big Thicket is home to several federal and many state threatened and endangered species, including the Red-cockaded Woodpecker, Texas trailing phlox and Louisiana black bear.  About 200,000 visitors enjoy the preserve annually.

            The kinds of areas protected by the National Park Service vary widely, from small historical sites to sprawling western landscapes.  While most of these areas are dedicated to preservation (that is, only non-consumptive uses), the national preserves are examples of sustainable use.  And, as such, they illustrate “conservation” in the truest sense—using resources today in ways that don’t destroy their ability to continue providing benefits in the future.

References:

National Park Service.  Big Cypress National Preserve.  Available at:  https://www.nps.gov/bicy/index.htm.  Accessed September 30, 2019.

National Park Service.  Big Thicket National Preserve.  Available at:  https://www.nps.gov/bith/index.htm.  Accessed September 30, 2019.

Imagine a combination of John Muir and Mark Twain, one an astute observer of nature and the other a journalist of his worldwide travels.  Both were enormously popular during their lives—and both are still popular today.  Now, imagine them as a British woman doing the same things at about the same time—and you have Isabella Bird.

            Isabella Bird was born in Yorkshire, England on October 15, 1831 (died 1904).  The daughter of a clergyman and his wife, Bird was a proper young English woman in all ways.  She was a sickly child and young adult, however, plagued especially by back troubles.  Doctors recommended that she travel for her health, so her father gave her 100 English pounds and told her to go wherever she wished.

            And did she ever go!  For the rest of her life, she traveled and traveled and traveled.  It is said that when she died, her bags were packed for her next planned expedition.  Unlike other well-bred Europeans of the time, however, she set her course for the wilderness, wherever she could find it.  Her first trip was to the western United States, where she began writing the compelling natural history that made her famous:

“This is no region for tourists and women, only for a few elk and bear hunters at times, and its unprofaned freshness gives me new life. I cannot by any words give you an idea of scenery so different from any that you or I have ever seen. This is an upland valley of grass and flowers, of glades and sloping lawns, and cherry-fringed beds of dry streams, and clumps of pines artistically placed, and mountain sides densely pine-clad, the pines breaking into fringes as they come down upon the ‘park,’ and the mountains breaking into pinnacles of bold grey rock as they pierce the blue of the sky.”

She traveled around the world, making many trips to the U.S. and Canada, but also trips to Australia (it was hot, she said, and full of flies and drunk men), New Zealand, the Middle East, China, Japan, and Korea.  But it was a seven-month stop-over in Hawaii, on her way home from Australia in 1873, that changed her life.  She loved Hawaii because “there are none of the social constraints of colonial rule or Victorian moral correctness.”  She also loved the coral reefs, volcanic landscapes and tropical forests.  She became an excellent horsewoman, learning to ride astride her horse, a position that solved her chronic back problems. She wrote intimate and informal letters home to her sister, Henrietta, and later published them as a book.  The book was an instant best-seller, earning her fame and financial independence.

            After her Hawaiian visit, she landed in California and headed east on horseback (by herself) into the Rocky Mountains.  She settled for a time in Estes Park, Colorado, entranced by the scenery and the wildlife.  She teamed up with a local cowboy and outlaw known as “Mountain Jim” (she described him as “a man any woman would fall in love with but who no sane woman would every marry”).  Together they climbed Longs Peak, an extraordinarily difficult ascent, just a few years after the first recorded climbs.  She was, as one biographer wrote, a true “outdoor bad ass.”

            Her second book, published in 1879, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, was also a best-seller.  Her descriptions of the Estes Park region appealed to the educated men and women of the Eastern U.S. and Europe, eager for tales of wilderness and adventure.  She wrote, “I have found a dream of beauty at which one might look all one’s life and sigh.”  She was the female counterpart to John Muir, writing much as he did and about similar places.  The National Park Service suggests that Bird should be called the “Mother of Rocky Mountain National Park” for bringing the area, and its need for protection, to the loving attention of the American public. Just like John Muir, she enthralled readers with the majesty of these places and the need for their conservation:

“Grandeur and sublimity, not softness, are the features of Estes Park.  The glades which begin so softly are soon lost in the dark primaeval forests, with their peaks of rosy granite and their stretches of granite blocks piled and poised by nature in some mood of fury.”

References:

Encyclopedia.com.  Isabella Lucy (Bird) Bishop. Available at:  https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/british-and-irish-history-biographies/isabella-lucy-bird-bishop.  Accessed September 27, 2019.

Heaver, Stuart.  2015.  Isabella Bird, Victorian pioneer who changed West’s view of China.  South China Morning Post, 8 Aug 2015.  Available at:  https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1846990/isabella-bird-victorian-pioneer-who-changed-wests-view-china.  Accessed Septpember 27, 2019.

National Park Service.  Isabella Bird’s 1873 Vist to Rocky Mountain National Park.  Available at:  https://www.nps.gov/romo/isabella_bird_visit.htm.  Accessed September 27, 2019.

Ross, Tracy.  2019.  Seven reasons Isabella Bird should be your new role model.  Visit Estes Park, Jan 04, 2019.  Available at:  https://www.visitestespark.com/blog/post/seven-reasons-isabella-bird-should-be-your-new-role-model/.  Accessed September 27, 2019.

No, it isn’t an official day, endorsed by the United Nations or the U.S. Congress or even Charlie the Tuna.  The origins are as murky as a cloud of octopus ink.  According to one site, it began in 2007, but no one has claimed responsibility.  And it is on October 8 because, well, because the “oct”-opus has 8 legs.

            So, eight cheers for the octopus, a not so humble denizen of the world’s marine shorelines.  Octopuses (and yes, it is octopuses, not octopi, because the word’s origin is Greek) are pretty remarkable creatures.  They have eight suction-cup covered arms, each of which is largely independent of the rest of the creature.  Each arm is packed with neurons that give an octopus extraordinary senses of touch and smell.  So, an octopus can be catching prey with one arm while battling off predators with another.  Octopuses are also intelligent—as intelligent as a domestic cat, I’ve read—able to use tools, map out their habitats, and change colors to match the background.  They have three hearts which transport blue blood (incorporating copper, not iron, into the blood molecules) around their body.  The body itself is worn like a hat, on top of the head, and the head attaches directly to the arms.  Octopuses are soft bodied (except for a hard biting beak), able to wiggle through small spaces and transform their shapes to look bigger and more ferocious or smaller and inconspicuous.  Some species are small and inconspicuous—a few inches across—while the Pacific octopus can weigh more than 100 pounds and reach 30 feet from one arm tip to another.

            They are also remarkable diverse and resilient.  Fossil specimens date back about 300 million years, predating dinosaurs and vastly outlasting them.  They come in 289 species, distributed in all the oceans and seas of the world.  We have no idea how many exist, because they are solitary, territorial and cryptic—counting them is pretty much out of the question.  They have short life spans of just a few years and produce hundreds of thousands of young each year.  Consequently, population sizes can fluctuate wildly from year to year.

            All in all, it seems octopuses are thriving just as well now as 300 million years ago.  Only one species found in New Zealand is endangered; the other 288 are of “least concern” or unknown status.  Commercial fisheries are thriving, although worldwide catches vary a lot annually.  Catches peaked in the 1960s, at about 100,000 tons per year (that’s a lot of calamari!); current catches are around 30,000 tons.  A recent article suggested that octopuses will probably keep on doing well, replacing the ecological niche that overfished marine species had occupied.  They can also respond quickly to favorable environmental conditions, as occur during El Nino years.

            Lest you feel that the octopus is getting undue attention with its own day, never fear.  Cephalopods get most of a week for celebration.  October 9 is Nautilus Night, and the 10^th is Squid/Cuttlefish Day (what do you call an affectionate octopus?  A cuddle fish).  October 11^th is devoted to the kraken, a mythological giant sea monster that was modeled after the giant squid.  Krakens were believed to be the size of small islands, able to envelop and sink large sailing ships. 

            Octopuses of different species are hard to separate, looking more or less alike.  Yes, they are pretty much i-tenticle!

References:

Arkhipkin, Alexander.  2016.  Here’s Why Octopus and Squid Populations Are Booming.  The New Republic, May 25, 2016.  Available at:  https://newrepublic.com/article/133734/heres-octopus-squid-populations-booming.  Accessed August 27, 2019.

Bradford, Alina.  2017.  Octopus Facts.  Silversea, June 8, 2017.  Available at:  https://www.livescience.com/55478-octopus-facts.html.  Accessed August 27, 2019.

Courage, Katherine Harmon.  2013.  Happy International Octopus Day!  Scientific American, October 8, 2013.  Available at:  https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/octopus-chronicles/happy-international-octopus-day/.  Accessed August 27, 2019.

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.  Species Fact Sheets—Octopus vulgaris.  Available at:  http://www.fao.org/fishery/species/3571/en.  Accessed Augusst 27, 2019.

The Museum of Unnatural Mystery.  The Kraken.  Available at:  http://www.unmuseum.org/mob/kraken.htm.  Accessed August 27, 2019.

The National Wildlife Federation.  Octopuses.  Available at:  https://www.nwf.org/Educational-Resources/Wildlife-Guide/Invertebrates/Octopuses.  Accessed August 27, 2019.