Blackcap Blog

Published at 17:35 on 18 January 2012

The forecasters really couldn’t make up their minds on this one. First it was supposed to be the storm that ends this current cold spell by dragging the normal mild marine air back. Then, it was supposed to start as snow but turn to mild rain and end the cold spell anyhow. Then the amount of initial snow went up to amounts that would create a slushy mess when the rain came. Then it was supposed to be all snow, huge amounts of it.

Those huge amounts of snow went south (Chehalis, a lowland town that gets no more snow on average than Seattle does, got a whopping 17 inches). We ended up with a little over 4 inches here in West Seattle, still a very significant accumulation for the lowlands.

It all wound up as forecast around 2PM. Or so I thought. I woke from the nap I took after my walk in the woods, and looked out at a puzzling sight: tiny little drops on the outside of the window, a haze in in the distance as if it was still snowing, but no flakes falling and no evidence of the least bit of melting.

I went outside and the mystery was solved: the leaves on the laurel bush out front were becoming glazed with ice. Freezing drizzle. It’s sundown and there’s now a distinct crust on the snow, and the tree branches are making that creaking sound in the wind that they do when encrusted.

Up until this week, I had been worried that this was going to be a dud of a La Niña winter. No longer.

Published at 19:40 on 15 January 2012

Was planning to go to the foothills for a hike in the snow, but minutes after I left it started really dumping (after half-heartedly snowing off and on all morning and not amounting to much), so I quickly changed plans and took a walk in Schmitz Park instead.

Up until today, it’s been a real dud of a winter for those of us who like interesting weather, which has been something of a surprise, given that La Niña years tend to have below-average temperatures and above-average precipitation. Maybe that pattern is about to change.

Published at 20:03 on 9 January 2012

At the headwaters of Longfellow Creek in West Seattle is what used to be an extensive peat bog. It was then partially mined for peat, filled, and turned into a park. Except that much of the park never was very successful, because it was still in a low area and its lawns tended to be mushy and squishy. Worse, there was still peat under all that fill, meaning the land had a tendency to subside.

So about 10 years ago, it was decided to try and bring the bog back, at least in the lower part of the park. Except that it’s no longer a coniferous forest in the surrounding area; it’s mostly lawns. Lawns that get a fair amount of lime and fertilizer dumped on them in order to keep them healthy.

Alas, what keeps a lawn healthy is the same thing that kills a bog. Bog plants can cope with extreme acidity and low nutrient levels just fine. What they cannot generally cope with is non-bog plants, because the latter grow faster and out-compete bog plants in non-bog environments.

And so it is that, ten years on, the “bog” is not really bog at all; it’s an open, marshy wetland in the process of evolving into a forested, swampy one.

Wetland (as opposed to bog-specific) plants were in general doing just fine. Swamp roses were growing in great profusion, and black cottonwoods and willows were volunteering everywhere. The Sitka spruces which had been planted generally looked very healthy.

However, most of the specific bog species plantings I found were sickly and barely surviving. There were a fair number of stunted bog laurel bushes, and an even smaller number of very sickly-looking Labrador tea shrubs. Hardly any of the bog sedges remained; invasive grasses had pretty much universally displaced them. Sweet gale was an exception to this rule; I saw a number of vigorously-growing, very healthy specimens, which had obviously spread significantly to form large clumps since they were planted.

It was, in total, less of a complete weed patch than I had expected. Perhaps there’s enough remaining bog acidity in the soil there to keep a damper on the worst of the weed overgrowth.

Sorry, but I don’t have any photos to accompany this article. I did have a camera with me, but I spaced and forgot to use it.

Published at 09:44 on 6 October 2011

One thing my recent trip to New Mexico allowed me to appreciate anew is how the air is scented with the fragrance of conifers in the Pacific Northwest. Some, like the western red cedar, are fragrant enough and distinctive enough that they can be olfactorily appreciated from several hundred feet downwind.

It’s one thing I enjoyed when first moving to this ecoregion from a desert climate. Like most such phenomena, one fairly quickly loses the ability to perceive it if one continuously lives amongst the sensation. Spending a week in a dry, dusty place was enough to “reset” my nose so that I can perceive it anew, at least for a brief time.

Even when it rains in the desert, much of the odor I can perceive in the moist air is one of wet dust. Even amongst the delightful fragrance of sage, it is there, reminding me that this respite from the dryness and dustiness is but a brief departure from the normal scheme of things. It is an underlying veiled threat that removes much of the pleasure I would otherwise receive from such weather.

There is no such threat in the moist air of the beginning rainy season here. The pervading fragrance, even in many quite urban areas, is the woodsy and coniferous one of a lush land that nourishes my senses instead of assaulting them.

It’s good to be home.

Published at 09:30 on 6 October 2011

Not always. If they see something they believe suspicious while zapping you with X-rays, the TSA will grope you anyhow. It happened to my sister a few days ago.

I opted for the groping on my recent trip, because I don’t believe them when they say the waves emitted from the machines are harmless. Powerful organizations like governments and corporations have persistently claimed such about various kinds of radiation, only to be definitively proven wrong later.

It happened to those downwind of the Nevada Test Site, and it’s starting to happen with cell phones.

Published at 11:29 on 27 September 2011

Basically, unlike in Venezuela, the revolution in Bolivia is a bottom-up affair, backed by a diversity of groups, as opposed to being something orchestrated from above by a single charismatic figure. That becomes clear when you read stories like this one about a highway project being opposed by the indigenous people whose land it would compromise.

Of course Morales has become a new oppressor. How could he not, given the nature of the job he sought? By becoming the chief executive of a hierarchical system of authority, he chose to participate in a rotten system.

That’s not to say its a useless achievement and that Morales administration is no better than those it replaced, only that it’s a very limited achievement. Past administrations would not have stepped back, embarrassed, and called a moratorium. However, unless the pressure from below continues and intensifies, the outcome will be the typical “compromise” of industrial civilization: less wild nature and more development.

True change must always come from below.

Published at 13:07 on 24 September 2011

One of the books I read while traveling on my recent trip south was Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot. It sort of happened by chance: I was browsing the shelves at Left Bank Books, looking for a couple of good, inexpensive used books to read on my upcoming trip, and a copy of that title which satisfied those criteria caught my mind. Having never read it, and it being something of a highly-regarded science fiction classic, I naturally purchased it.

What makes it not merely futurist but a completely unrealistic fairy tale is the plot element of the robots being manufactured by an ethical corporation that insists all its products obey the Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. It is of course highly unlikely that any capitalist corporation would so voluntarily adhere to such a set of safeguards, particularly any corporation that made robots for the military. (And remember, the military has been the funding vehicle behind much of the research into high technology.)

Moreover, even in Asimov’s story, things eventually take sinister turns, as the main manufacturer of robots eventually does bow to pressure to weaken the laws of robotics which some of its models are programmed to obey. Eventually, things reach the point of the robots deciding to manipulate and rule humanity because they believe it is for our own good for them to do so.

So far from being an endorsement of futurism, I, Robot looks to me to be a vindication of my basically Luddite views of advanced technology.

Published at 15:32 on 21 September 2011

When I said the Fukushima disaster was another Chernobyl.

It’s been rated by none other than the Japanese government itself at the same level of severity as Chernobyl; Fukushima and Chernobyl stand by themselves as the only INES Level 7 incidents in history. Fukushima has a 20 km permanent evacuation zone around it (and Japan has been roundly criticized for not making that larger). Chernobyl has a 30 km zone around it.

By all measures, the two are indeed comparable in severity, even though the types of reactors involved and the specifics of the two catastrophes are very different.

And it’s not over yet. The situation is still far from resolved, and there’s a typhoon headed straight for the damaged reactors.

Published at 10:09 on 15 September 2011

First, it bears pointing out that illegal immigration only became a big issue when Dubya’s popularity started flagging, as a result of the Iraq War going badly and the economy slipping into a slump, and that the professed concern about it was whipped up by the same crowd that advocated Dubya’s policies.

Second, it bears pointing out that about 90% of the rhetoric is about the illegal immigrants themselves (who have been rebranded simply “illegals;” presumably the extra word “immigrants” had too much danger of humanizing those the Right was trying to demonize). Only a tiny fraction is about the illegal employers who give them work, despite it being every bit as illegal to employ an illegal immigrant as it is to become one. (Why aren’t those employers being called “illegals,” too?) Remember that the next time one of the anti-immigrant crowd tries to claim they principally care about playing by the rules and obeying the law.

Finally, as Derrick Jensen has pointed out, this whole obsession with tightly regulating the human crossing of borders while ignoring all the harm from inanimate objects (i.e. finished goods, raw materials, and wastes) crossing borders shows just what a bunch of xenophobic hypocrites those who rant about “illegals” typically are. This is particularly the case when they add ecological pretenses to their ranting. Unless, that is, for some reason you find it reasonable to believe that it is mere coincidence that they only raise concerns that are inconvenient to those with the least power and privilege in society.