Yorktown ((9/27/2015)

The concept of global warming has been in the news the past week.  It started with the Papal visit to the east coast and when I posted a few pictures of the yacht club on my Facebook account, one of the first questions from one of my friends on the west coast was: "Global warming? "  At the same time a very conservative Facebook acquaintance posted something about the Pope being the Antichrist because of his opinion on the environment, evolution and homosexuality.  Boy it sure has been an amazing couple of days.  It is nothing I am going to solve in this blog, but it is also not something I wish to ignore.

Arriving at the yacht club around high tide Sunday morning it was evident that there was a coastal flooding issue. 

The water had retreated a little, but not enough for me to get on the finger pier and on the boat.

Blame a high pressure system over Maine and a coastal low off North Carolina, and there we had a stiff (20 to 30 mile per hour) easterly wind for the past couple of days.  Wind like that will pile the water up into the Chesapeake Bay.  With high tide it will push it in and even with low tide it will really not let the water out.  (This is a great website that shows you a comparison between the expected astronomic tide and the observed tide in the Chesapeake Bay, I assume there are other websites that do this for other places as well).  Thus with each successive tide water gets higher and higher.  Resulting in coastal flooding.  Yes, sea level rise increases the effect and we all know what causes sea level rise.  Or do we really?

High tide in the York River on Saturday

While you can't see it on this picture, the tide was still rushing in under the Coleman bridge at Yorktown.

We here on the east coast in particular in the Chesapeake Bay area are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to sea level rise, at least I am told.  We live in a subsidence area.  During the last ice age, our area was pushed up.  We were not covered by ice, but the oceans had retreated.  This made the land lighter, and with the ice pushing on the land further to the north, our land was pushed up.  Our countryside is currently sinking, making any sea level rise more pronounced.  On top of that we were pushed up by a meteor impact that fell in the lower part of the Bay and we live on the rim of the crater.  This rim is sinking as well.  Finally, out in the ocean, the Gulf Stream makes a bend towards Europe right near us, and that bend will push water our way as well.  So this is why they predict a larger sea level rise in our area while elsewhere on the east coast it likely to be less.

Seaside goldenrod swaying in the 20+ mph breeze at the beach

On trainers and teaching, Part V on new courses and old experiences (9/15/2015)

These past two months I have been working on the development of two new courses that I am supposed to be rolling out this fall.  They are both on subjects that I am very familiar with,  so it should be a breeze,  shouldn't it?  Well, not so fast.  I think familiarity makes it often more difficult to explain a subject to a novice in such a way not to blow him or her out of the water.  Making things understandable and a learning experience without being condescending or dumbing it down too much as in being offensive is a challenge.  Up to now I have been relatively successful with it, but I don't want to fail now.

The courses I am working on is a course on wetlands and a course on soils.  Both are geared towards practitioners in erosion and sediment control and stormwater management.  These are people who need to know the basics but definitively do not need to become experts.  In a way they need to be able to interpret reports that they get to review or understand that they need a report when they did not get one.  Having worked intensively as a wetland scientist since 1994 and been involved in soils all the way back since the early 1970s, it is fun developing classes that interesting and applicable.  Thanks goodness, I have a friend, a fellow teacher and a soil scientist (all wrapped up in one person) who is partnering me on the soils class.  David will also be helping me teach it; we make a great team when we are on the road.

For my wetland course I am teaching my students how to recognize a wetland in the field.  So I went out back, behind my home to take pictures, braving ticks, mosquitoes and chiggers.  These trees show clear signs of flooding.  So nice to be out in the field tromping in the woods.  These trees show clear signs of seasonal flooding, the dark wood is how far up (3-4 ft.) the water gets in the winter.

In my class design and delivery I rely on my life experience, dating all the way back to my college years in the mid 1970s.  Yes, I have that advantage, I have all this experience.  However, I feel that in the past six years I have somewhat stagnated in my professional field.  I can't believe that I've been away from field work and into the class room (and class design room) for that long, having to rely on my past experience and on stories that I now hear from colleagues.

This realization that I have such a multifarious experience came rushing back to me these past few weeks or so since I received a surprise email from an old high school friend of mine who lives in a foreign country.  It was fun to hear from her, and in writing back made me relive a lot of my life back then, but also between the time that we parted our ways and now.  I wrote her a very brief email where I described what happened to my wife and I during the passed 38 years and our world travels.  Just thinking about that email makes my head spin, which is why we typically don't mention it to people, because when we do, we mostly get blank stares.  But yes, I (we, my wife and I) need to write (a book?) about our experiences in particular about the time we lived in Uganda in the late 1970s under Idi Amin.

Idi Amin

But come to think of it, all these 38 years worth of experiences are what I bring to class development and teaching, and I hope many teachers do the same.  When I teach, I tend to tell stories, anecdotes, and give examples of what I have seen (no I don't teach about Idi).  It is relatively easy, having worked for almost 40 years.  However, I sparingly use my international experience in my classes.  When I teach the stormwater classes I will mention my experience in Nepal where deforestation resulted in the disappearance of streams, of firewood and fodder for livestock, or worst, landslides.  I sometimes see students look at each other and smile (kind of in disbelieve that I also worked in that field) when I start a story with: "When I worked in the mining industry in New Mexico ..."  But I really did work in the mining industry.  I hope that these stories makes the classroom experience more fun for my students, and of course more interesting and a better learning experience.    For myself, I do think it is so invaluable to be able to bring real life work experience with me in the class room and I even  gladly borrow examples from other people's experience to illustrate points (I will give credit and will not claim them as my own).

I kind of miss being out there in the field and making new experiences.  I am starting to notice that I am getting rusty.  Thanks goodness I still learn and gain other experiences and expertise by fixing my sail boat, sailing and traveling through Virginia; I will never stop learning.  Hopefully I can apply my boat stories to my teaching one of these days.  If you are a teacher I hope you too reach in that big bag of experience you are carrying on your back.

On a work trek with my wife (and one of our two dogs) in the mountains of Nepal in 1982 or 83.  I sometimes had to walk 7 days for a an one hour meeting and walk back seven days.  Thanks goodness it was through the project area and I always had my eyes and ears open to do project (extension) type work and talk natural resources conservation.  This is probably close to the hill (looking at it) that dammed the Kali Gandaki valley by a landslide after this year's earthquake. 

Reflection (9/4/2015)

Amazing, this blog was started as a photo blog.  I posted a nice picture from my sailboat on June 25, 2013, with just an amazingly simple one sentence statement, that had less depth than something a 6^th grader would write.  I used to be an avid photographer and this was my way of trying to get back to my hobby.  Moreover, since I would be traveling to a different part of the state of Virginia to teach every week, I felt it was a great opportunity to share some pictures of the often beautiful sights or at least my views of the State.  Finally, it also was a way for me to let off some steam.  That day was the first day of a forced move where I and my program moved from one State agency to another State agency and that caused a lot of anxiety to the group of people who were forced to move to the other agency.  We did not feel welcome at all, there were definitive signs that we were not, and we did not know what would happen.  Comparing notes among colleagues now, the anxiety has gone away and we feel accepted and fine where we are.  Now just a raise and everything will be fine!

From left to right these are the three locations I have successively worked at in Richmond over the past six years (left DCR, DEQ to the right and what I would call the half way house in the middle) .  I have not been job (employer) hopping, just forced building hopping and agency shifting.

In fact, I really did started this blog for me.  I announced my blog to no one; not even my family.  I did not want my ego or anything else to get in the way of expressing myself and doing what I did.  I had no ambition with this blog.  Little did I know this darn blog would grow up to be like this.  When I post this entry, it will be my 254^th.

Looking back through some of the posts I put up, there definitively is a trend.  I have become more verbose; I have become bolder; more outspoken; become a bit more of the teacher that I am in real life; maybe too self-indulgent; and taking myself a bit too serious?  Yes, I have always tried to include an outside link or two (too much Wikipedia maybe) since I do not want to claim to be a “know it all”, but as I mentioned in this blog post, there is a lot of stuff stored in that big head of mine.

Did I mention my big head?  This picture was taken last year during a nature walk in the Roanoke area last fall (2014) after a fun day of lecturing in a nature retreat.

So why write about this now?  There is no anniversary of this blog or of the move to DEQ.  Well, this past Thursday morning I read an article in the newspaper about a Dutchman with the name Jaap Haartsen.  Mr. Haartsen is the inventor of the Bluetooth.  He invented it while working for Ericsson in Sweden.  It seems that he only works (worked) 40 hours per week, turns his phone off at 6 pm and does not check emails in the evenings and on weekends.  Moreover he goes hiking on weekends.  It claims that his way of recharging and reconnecting with real life is what he needs to be inventive and creative.  This is very different from what we see here in the U.S.  When I came in the office this morning, the first thing my supervisor said was "have a productive day" (and he says that almost every day), that is what our U.S. culture seems to be increasingly based on, productivity, not creativity.  It would be so much nicer if he would wish me "a creative day", because that is what course design should be, especially when your do it from scratch.  I think Google is still doing it right, giving people an hour or so do do something different, but the Amazons and other groups, it seems like they are just emphasizing putting in hours and mouse clicks.

So the story about Jaap Haartsen made me think about this YouTube clip that I saw recently on Nature RX; it is a spoof on the need to reconnect with nature,  I have written a lot about it in my blogs and borrowed the phrase "nature deficit disorder."  Looking at the labels, I have used the term in at least 20 blogs of the 253 that I have written up to now.  I used Nature 79 times as a label on posts.  I do think it is so darn important to reconnect with nature, with ocean, with water, you name it; just the natural world.  I find it disarming, calming.  As the naturalist John Burroughs wrote:

"I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order"

No, I will not invent the next Bluetooth, but it brings down the blood pressure; it is where I formulate a lot of my ideas for my classes, my blog and just life.

We went for a sundown/moon rise kayak trip last Saturday which culminated with a picnic dinner on a narrow sandy peninsula in the bay.  It was very private and the views were spectacular.  This is what I call taking care of your "Nature Deficit Disorder", while even getting some exercise.