20 to 7-year storms (7/30/2021)

There was a report in one of the professional publications that I read that predicts that what we call in our profession 20-year storms are shifting and becoming 7-year storms. Now that is an interesting concept that I teach in my classes on stormwater, in particular in the class entitled “Where the Water Goes.” The class has a subtitle Hydrology for ESC and SW Inspectors. ESC stands for Erosion and Sediment Control and SW for Stormwater.

So, what does a x-year (24-hour) storm means and what do these values mean? I tell my students that those famous 100-year storms do not occur only once every 100 year. I remember well that in 2003 we had two 100-year storms in one week, followed the next week by hurricane Isabel, which dumped another 100-year storm in our area. As you can imagine that September the ephemeral ponds behind our home were full to the brim, a thing that usually only occurs in February. They are usually dry in the month of September. Those two 100-year storms in a row actually created a major issue during Isabel; the soil was saturated, and the trees were extremely unstable because of this. Trees were falling all over the place during the hurricane. I lost 13 trees in my back yard that day.

In a simple explanation, I tell my students that the concept of so many year storms is based on statistics. For example, a 100-year storm tells us that the storm has a likelihood of 1% (or 100%/100) of occurring any day of the year. A 20-year storm has a chance of occurring 5% (100%/20) any day of the year, and so on. Somehow, NOAA or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, could not find a better name for this phenomenon than calling it a so-many-year storm. In particular, since if it occurred today, it has the same probability of occurring again tomorrow. So, although rare what happened in 2003 having three 100 year storms in two weeks, it was statistically explainable.

So, I looked at the data for my home. A 20-year 24-hour storm at my home dumps around 6.5 inches of rain or 165 mm in those 24 hours, according to NOAA. In the good old days, a 7-year storm drops 5 inches or 127 mm in the same 24 hours. In other words, as a result of climate change the 7-year storm at my home would increase 1.5 inches or almost 40 mm of rain. Surprise, this is something we are all experiencing, thunderstorms are increasingly getting stronger and more severe.

I realize this is only an example for one place, but in the past weeks we have seen similar examples in Germany, Belgium, Arizona, and China just to name a few where we are seeing that storms are getting increasingly severe and dumping more water. Naturally this is not helped by all the development around us and the imperviousness that we are creating in our watersheds. It all means more runoff and flooding. The problem on top of this is the imperviousness that we appear to have created and are increasingly creating in neighborhoods of disadvantaged racial minority groups.

Some of these things going on with our climate and our earth are most likely very difficult to reverse. We will have to learn to live with them and adapt to them. That is part of the job I do professionally. I am part of a group that teaches stormwater management. We teach designers, developers, and regulators that it is best to try to infiltrate all that stormwater, by minimizing the impervious areas such as parking lots and roads. We also tell them that they need to preserve the soil, not compact it, so that water can infiltrate. Plant trees and shrubs, minimize lawns. Trees and shrubs intercept rain in their canopies and often only 40% of the rain makes it down to the ground. Are my students listening? Some, few are. But we keep working on them. But we don’t get discouraged, it is the right thing to do.

This is a picture I took a few years ago of a rain garden/bioretention area in Charlottesville, Virginia.  We teach students that the placement of ponds like these help with the infiltration and cleanup of stormwater and hopefully reduce the flooding danger.

Bugs (7/24/2021)

I currently have Japanese beetles in my bonsai, white fly, wooly aphids, and potato leaf hoppers, just to name a few. Pesticides that wipe out all of them will also kill the beneficial ones like spiders, so I rather patiently pick them off then get out the killer chemicals. Actually, I can shake off the Japanese beetles, relocate the caterpillars, and often use a strong spray of water on the other bugs. I seldomly use soapy water and on a rare occasion some neem oil. I’m sorry if I sound like a broken record, but I am somewhat obsessed about the idea living with as few pesticides around the house as possible since we have bees in the back yard.  In addition, learning about environmental estrogens and alike has gotten me even more against the use of chemicals. Watching people fighting bugs all around us, sometimes with little success, I am afraid that it will wipe out the useful ones such as the honeybees and other important pollinators.

Parts of one of my Siberian elm have been completely denuded by caterpillars.  These elms seem to be favored by leaf eating bugs. 

I am trying to let my crape myrtle trees grow to thicken up the trunk.  But this year the Japanese beetles had a different idea.  I need to go out every morning and shake the bushes.

It is interesting trying to compare the human species to bugs roaming the earth. You have good ones, and you have detrimental ones. Pesticides are somewhat like the natural disasters that might could wipe out humans indiscriminately whether these humans are good the earth or bad. This begs the question, does nature really care we are here? In other words, do we humans really matter? Interesting question, isn’t it? Are we just one of the many bugs on the face of this earth that are annoying her? So, is she sending hurricanes, floods, wildfires, earthquakes, you name it in an effort to exterminate this terrible bug that annoys her? Are they natures soapy water or fly swatter?

It has been quite a week, hasn’t it? Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands flooded. Oregon, California and parts of western Canada are burning. Moreover, they are suffering in sweltering heat. We on the East Coast are breathing in the polluted air from the wildfires. Japan, where the Olympic games have started has a heatwave, and we are predicted to have another one here in the U.S.A. next week. Covid-19 is still difficult to get under control, although this is probably mostly caused by human stubbornness, plain stupidity of some of the bugs (I mean humans), and misinformation. But as I mentioned before, the earth, nature, is angry.

I intent this to be a short post, most of you know where I am coming from. I do not want to bore you. However, I do think it is important to register the flooding in Europe and the wildfires in the west in this post. Yes, it is in the news, but experiencing the smoke here in the east and feeling it in our breathing is really amazing. It is a great example of how interconnected this world is and it shows that what we do here might affect someone else in another place. Something intelligent bugs like bees and ants that live in large colonies have figured out a long time ago.

Our beloved earth (7/16/2021)

In a recent post I asked the question if the earth loved us. This was not an original question, but something that was asked in a book I am reading. Now, I read multiple books at the same time, and in my last post I mentioned reading about the need for humans on this earth. In the same book, Wendell Berry introduced the term beloved country when he writes about taking care of the earth and the environment, so maybe I need to start calling it beloved earth, although I am probably not as spiritual as Mr. Berry.

I realize when I would be doing that, I would not very original; however, my heart is in the right place and I am giving credit where it is due. In an other quote by Mr. Berry he writes:

The standard – the physical, intellectual, political, ecological, economic, and spiritual health of this country – cannot be too high; it will be as high, simply, as we have the love, the vision, and the courage to make it.

I honestly think we can and should substitute the word earth for the word country and the sentence would and should read exactly the same. We should expect the highest physical, intellectual, ecological, environmental, economic, and spiritual ethics from every person on this earth if want to save some semblance of what we have right now for future generations. Surprise, surprise, we can only do this by truly loving this earth, our or your beloved earth.

You can just imagine how disturbed I was when I saw on a church billboard in a county just north of us a notice that read something like (I am paraphrasing here): “Join in us to prepare for what is to come next, since life here on earth is so horrible.” In other words, life sucks here on earth, join our church to get ready for heaven. Those folks do not get it; they only have one life! Let’s make heaven here on earth.

Mr. Berry argues in his book about the need to more tightly integrate the sciences and the humanities in order to achieve this. I hope that many of you have noticed by now, that I am a huge proponent of that. I do not want to call myself a philosopher scientist/naturalist, but I have argued for a long time that biologist or ecologists would make great economist and the other way around (maybe). I am a strong believer in the parsimony of nature and now of the mutuality and maybe even empathy, all things being studied by certain branches of the humanities. But I digress. I want to make this a short post, since I wanted to get this of my chest that I love the earth and I still hope she loves me.

Earlier this summer, when the temperatures were still cool in the morning, I loved to go on extended hikes in the national park near my home and explore the sites.  Sites that not many people get to see; off the beaten path.  It is nice to be out on solitude and meditate out there, away from the crowds.  

(a quick post script:

1. While writing this, the door bell rang, and a young, well dressed gentleman was at the door trying to sell pesticide treatments for my yard to me.  Poor guy, I lost it!  Another person who has no regard for mother earth, he probably goes to church and complains how bad it is here on earth and how he looks forward to going to heaven.
2. I purposely did not write about the current disaster in Europe, including my home country of the Netherlands.  Is this think mother earth is getting angry and the love hate relationship is really showing lately, but I write that in the blog post I reference above.)

Do we need humans? (7/12/2021)

Why do we need ticks in this world, or mosquitos? Those have been questions asked of me at times. Why do we need these vermin in our lives? They are all parts of the web of life, that is usually my answer. They serve as food for some other creature; the have a place. But then what are people for? This is a question asked in an old book by Wendell Berry that I am currently reading.

My argument has always been that the world will keep rotating on its axis around the sun, whether there are humans on it or not. Cockroaches will probably still be there whether people are there or not. I agree, some folks have created beautiful art: Bach, Rembrandt, Vermeer, van Gogh, Picasso, Saint Saens, Mahler, just to name a few, and we would not have that or miss it.  If humans disappear from one moment to another, some animals and plants will suffer. Cows that have been bread to get milked twice a day will most likely die from mastitis; house plants will not get watered; neither will my bonsai. Our household pets and some other domesticated animals may survive, who knows. I always argued (not in my blog) that the earth might actually be better off without humans or when they vanished. I would expect that the world would eventually heal itself. I think this is partially visible in the Chernobyl area that was abandoned after the nuclear disaster. But do we as the highest animal in the food chain serve as food for some other creature?

On the other hand, Mr. Berry argues in his book that humans (or people) are needed for work (read the economy) and to protect the environment. This is a very idealistic view of humanity; still I walk through the neighborhood with my wife and watch her picking up discarded cigarette butts, plastic bottle and other trash from the street while I pick up the dog poop. To think we live in a middleclass neighborhood with well-educated folks who should know better. Daily, you can watch folks throw stuff out of their car windows, or things blowing out of their truck bed. In my estimation, maybe 15% of Mr. Berry’s folks are actively working on protecting the environment, another 15% are status quo, and the rest don’t give a damn. I hope I am wrong in this estimate.

I realize that I am very pessimistic; however, if we want to improve my glum view of society and follow Mr. Berry’s ideals of working on the environment, we need to work on people first. How would we do that apart from working on ourselves?

First, I think we need to step away from the words global and world. We need to start using the word earth! In my opinion earth would engender a closer connection with the self; global and world does not affect us directly.  As I argued before we need to find or develop a more accessible environmental language.

Secondly, the conservative movements have been very successful in pushing an economic agenda and telling us that deficit spending means that we are putting future generations at risk. Actually, nothing is riskier to future generations than environmental annihilation. This will happen with global warming (or should we call it the irreversible warming of the earth?). In a previous post <click here> I wrote about an argument about the cyclical nature of our climate that some will throw at me.

Thirdly, I am a lover of trees. Honestly, I think they are the best way to lock up atmospheric carbon, modify are local climate (both micro and macro climate), stabilize the soil, and provide essential habitat for a great many critters (a.k.a. diversity). Nothing gets me angrier than folks in my neighborhood needlessly cutting trees. I just finished Suzanne Simard’s book “Finding the Mother Tree.” It is an amazing read, something I always expected to find; however, she has articulated it very well.

Who would ever miss these tinny guys?  When walking in the woods this past weekend (after the area was drenched by the rains from tropical storm Elsa) I saw these small mushrooms less than 1 inch or 2 cm sitting under this root.  On a Virginia Mushroom group on Facebook someone identified these as being in the chanterelle group of mushrooms.  Chanterelles are mycorrhizae, and that is what Suzanne Simard's book is all about: the interconnected web underground that connects the trees with each other and the mutual support they give each other by way of this web.  In other words even this small insignificant mushroom which is the fruiting body of the mycorrhizae is sorely needed for the whole of the ecosystem to function correctly. 

Lastly, but probably most importantly, we need to lead by example. We need to do what is right, what is right for the environment, for future generations! This is what I have been trying to do with my teaching and my blog. I just wish that I could reach more folks with my activities. But I am not sure on how to turn it in to a vlog or a video blog or a podcast for right now. For one, from my end there is a lack of resources and a place to post all this, but also a way to get an audience. Right now, I have at somewhere around 150 to 300 readers (hits) per month even though I only have been publishing three lousy article per month lately. Again, if any of you readers have an ideas or suggestion, I am all ears. Furthermore, I am more than willing to write a guest column appear on your podcast or vlog. Finally, if any of you would like to publish one of your thoughts on my blog, I am open to considering that as well. But for sure let’s keep working on educating the masses.