The Lake Tahoe Basin is a living laboratory. In your next assignment you will be writing a short essay that explores the whole Lake Tahoe Basin as an ecosystem. Or you may choose some part or aspect of the ecosystem. The point will be to explore the connections between the kinds of visions of science, nature, history, and philosophy reflected in this week’s major reading: Daniel Botkin's Discordant Harmonies. Your posting here this week should be a first, rough draft exploration of your thoughts on the matter to get your ideas flowing and out for discussion, which will help you in your writing. It's fine if it's off-the-cuff and colloquial, but the more you can tie it to the ideas in Botkin, the better. On our first field trip to Lake Tahoe we heard echoes of some of the historical metaphors that Botkin analyzes: nature as divine order, Earth as a fellow creature, nature as the great machine, nature as the biosphere, nature as managed living resources, as well as the new metaphor that Botkin advocates, which I would characterize as nature as a dynamic cybernetic living system for which we can and must create computer models that will guide our engineering efforts on behalf of nature and ourselves.
Wow. That was a mouthful.
Your essay should tackle the resonance and staying power and use of these metaphors -- myths and meanings, if you will -- in the Lake Tahoe Basin today. You ought to also consider the ideas and possibilities and relationships that each of those metaphors open up for us, and what they close down. Every point-of-view opens up certain vistas and obscures others.
To do this you should use a few other sources in addition to Botkin: what you have heard on our field trips; what you have read or seen or heard in media coverage of science and the environment in the Lake Tahoe Basin (it might be worth doing some browsing in that realm if you haven't done a lot); the scientific papers I have posted on the course readings page of the course web site; and the package of scientific abstracts from last year's Tahoe Forum, which I am sending up to you via Donica. The site you choose -- the whole basin or some part of it, such as the forest, or Angora Ridge, or Tahoe Keys, for example -- can ground your essay.
A word about the scientific papers and abstracts. Don't get bogged down in them. You may "gut" them too. You should, however, pay particular attention to the two papers on water quality and clarity. Make sure you understand them or that you understand what it is that you don't understand about them so that you can ask questions. We will be meeting with some of those scientists. And they have told me there will be a quiz. I would like the quiz to be a two-way street.
So let's get started here. Tell us about the "discordant harmonies" of the visions of nature you have seen and heard echoing around the Lake Tahoe Basin. And which ones resonate most with you? And why?
5 comments:
It is late so I hope this makes sense.
The thing I find most fascinating about the ideas in Discordant Harmonies is the idea of nature as a machine. The view that nature can be “tinkered with and improved” (105) really relates to the Tahoe Keys for me. In our meeting with the TRPA, John Singlaub said building the keys was environmental disaster number one at Tahoe. When they filled in the marsh and straightened the river, humans destroyed the biggest filter the lake had. Water clarity has suffered since then.
This idea that we can fix what we break seems so arrogant to me. Why must we break things in the first place?? I guess in the 50’s when developers began to dredge and fill Pope marsh they didn’t fully understand the impact of their actions. It is a shame no one required an EIS in the 50’s.
The idea of nature as a biosphere is also an interesting one in relationship to the Tahoe Keys. The symbiotic bacteria in the moose help it survive. (135-136) The bacteria in turn get a place to live and thrive. You can look at the keys as the moose and the native minnow as the bacteria.
But human intervention has caused problems with the biosphere. The water in the Tahoe Keys is warmer than the rest of the lake and it has provided an excellent biosphere for an invasive weed called Eurasian watermilfoil. People dump their pet fish into the lake and have flourished.
These weeds and fish are throwing the delicate biosphere out of whack. The plants use all the oxygen in the water and threaten the existence of the minnow.
Event the Tahoe Keys home owner’s association seems at a loss on how to deal with the weeds, seeing it as a local problem and not as an indicator of the overall health of the lake.
This is from their frequently asked questions on the website:
Why can't the Association do a better job of controlling the water weeds?
The weeds grow at an excelerated [sic] rate during the summer months. They often grow back as fast as we are able to cut. It would be necessary to harvest in each Keys lagoon every day of the week to keep the growth down. In addition, we are hampered by the need to comply with State and Federal regulations and our own budget constraints.
Last week we examined politics in relationship to the lake. We might know what has to be done to fix the keys, we might know how to do it, but it seems likely that even if we could, like a machine bulldoze and “fix” the keys, politics and money would prevent it.
This is a response to Liz's post, my own post will be later.
With regard to the "arrogance" of human tinkering: I think you're right, it is to a certain extant arrogant for humans to think of ourselves as either "controllers" or "stewards" of the land. However, we cannot isolate ourselves from nature, and in many ways we do this automatically by defining nature as something that is somehow non-human. In truth, we cannot help but tinker with nature, because we are nature. We have a role in nature which we must choose to either have positive results, for both us and the environment, or destructive ones. In the course of human history so far we've been far more destructive to the environment than anything else. To me, the major reason for this is that, especially since the start of the Industrial Age, humanity has seen itself as somehow separate from nature.
In Discordant Harmonies, Botkin emphasizes our tendency to buy into old myths about nature -- even when science is indicating otherwise. Ya'll might recall when Rex Norman mentioned how slow the USFS was/is at implementing current (now decades old) ideas about the role of fire in forests. According to Botkin "The attempt to move away from the 'Bambi' and 'Smokey the Bear' image of forest fires to a perspective that fires are a natural and desirable part of the patterns found in most forests, shrublands and grasslands began, to the best of my knowledge, in earnest in the United States in the early 1940s." (155) Slow, huh?
Throughout Botkin's book, he tells stories about myth-based "scientific" decisions. His story about the Oaks in New Jersey reveals how forests, untouched by man, change. His point is to dispel the "nature as a machine" myth that has led environmental managers to seek a "steady state".
Botkin says that the mechanical and the "divine order" myths are similar (I agree and hope that we can discuss what seems to be nuanced differences). "Both lead to the idea of nature as constant unless unwisely disturbed, and as stable, capable of returning to its constant state if disturbed" (12) Obviously, the TRPA and the USFS have embraced these myths. The forest has had little intervention (divine). The ecosystem surrounding the Lake has had a lot (mechanical).
After reading some of the abstracts, particularly the ones related to the volcanic/earthquake-prone aspects of the region, it's seems entirely possible that the lake will experience far greater disruptions than nutrient runoff. (How come no one is talking about earthquakes?)
For Botkin, computer models provide variables that can help navigate environmental decisions. Based on the abstracts and the USFS's modeling, computers are playing an increasing role.
Botkin asks a lot of questions. One is: "What is the character of nature undisturbed by human beings?" (142) That's a question I keep struggling with. On the one hand, we keep hearing foresters say it's not "natural' to have so much underbrush. Then, we read about the Hutcheson Memorial Forest and learn that even "untouched" it grew to include significant underbrush that did not exist a century before. What's more, when foresters talk about "natural" conditions they admit that historically the bulk of fires were started by indigenous peoples rather than lightning.
Tell us about the "discordant harmonies" of the visions of nature you have seen and heard echoing around the Lake Tahoe Basin. And which ones resonate most with you? And why?
Before I respond to Jon’s question, I was struck by how Homer’s view of nature was absent from Botkin’s discussion. After all, Book X, lines 300 – 341 is the stretch of text in which the term physis first appears. Maybe I’m a wonk, but this wonk wants Botkin to start at the beginning.
From Wikipedia:
Physis (φύσις) is a Greek theological, philosophical, and scientific term usually translated into English as "nature". In the Odyssey, Homer uses the word once (its earliest known occurrence), referring to the intrinsic way of growth of a particular species of plant.[1] In other very early uses it had such a meaning: related to the natural growing of plants, animals, and other features of the world as they tend to develop without external influence.
Here two points may be of interest. First, physis carries with it connotations of permanence or a sense of a fixed endurance. This plant grows the same way, and possesses the same properties, no matter where it turns up. This order or pattern of growth belongs to the plant itself. The mental apprehension of this order is where the Western notion of “theory” originates. How might this move have led us to the idea that nature remains the same? Second, physis suggests how things behave “without external influence.” Note that the term does not specify the source of the external influence as either human or divine.
Botkin argues that both of these ancient and long-standing assumptions are false. Nature does not have a lasting, permanent order or structure that defines it. Nature evolves and changes. Moreover, nature is subject to external influences all the time—human or otherwise.
Much of the science at Tahoe aims at reversing the effects of human intervention in nature. For Botkin, Robert Coat’s 30-Year retrospective is guided by the uncritical acceptance of the “pre-scientific” beliefs of order in nature and the need to restore “balance in nature.” (33) As Coat puts it,
The historic and on-going research on the relationships between lake nutrient /sediment budgets and lake water quality will continue to play a crucial role in efforts to protect the lake’s water quality and clarity.
Coat’s scientific analysis also conceives of Lake Tahoe as an ecosystem; so “Scientists have sought to understand the linkages between the Lake ecosystem and the watersheds that drain to it.” As Botkin defines it, an ecosystem is “a set of interacting species and their local, nonbiological environment, functioning together to sustain life.” (234) As I read him, the main wrinkle Botkin wants to introduce into our ecological thinking is that the human creature is always a part of the ecosystem and a force of change within that system.
Life and the environment are one thing, not two, and people, as all life, are immersed in one system. When we influence nature, we influence ourselves; when we change nature, we change ourselves. (188)
For Tahoe, the heavy growth that caused the Angora fire resulted from yesterday’s logging practices and as well as conservation efforts to suppress forest fires. (We influence nature.) This results in a crowded, “unnatural” forest. We like the privacy this gives us. (We influence ourselves.) The TRPA’s environmental focus has been on the single issue of water clarity, and the means by which to achieve it (i.e., restrictions surrounding the removal of pine needles). But at the same time, this effort to maintain water clarity has helped to create a fire-prone forest in which the people of Tahoe live. (When we change nature, we change ourselves.)
I’m still trying to think of how this reciprocity between ourselves and the ecosystem result in a “discordant harmony.” I have a hunch that Jon’s new “mouthful” might help us to understand how we live in such a way with nature.
People’s actions affect nature. Most of the time, the effect of those disturbances is a significant change, to the extreme of losing balance in the ecosystem.
In analysis of relation human nature and understanding nature itself, Botkin sees a transformation –we progressed from seeing the Earth as an organic being, to looking at it in terms of a machine. To me, this is a fundamental statement of this book. We think we can simply fix what we ruined, like if the Earth operated like clockwork or an engine (Botkin, 12).
The Angora fire could initiate a really strong deliberation about this concept. Rex Norman and George Gruell spoke widely about mistakes that were made in forest management by both authorities and residents of Lake Tahoe. Now we are debating ways to fix the loss. OurTahoe.com, meetings, and public education seem to be some edifying tools to do it. The actual “physical fixing” will hopefully take place after the new Regional Plan is announced, and with undertakings of the Forest Services.
Another fascinating and very up to date aspect of this book would be the separation of the three areas of wilderness: no action wilderness, preaglicultural wilderness, and conservation area. Lake Tahoe falls into the third category. “Because we have so altered the landscape and have allowed inadvertently only small patches of former habitats to remain, most of these areas require active intervention on our part if they are to persist” (Botkin, 195). Tahoe has been affected by humans’ intervention a lot; therefore the unsettled ecosystem is falling apart.
Fire issues (Angora), pollution, water clarity issues (according to TRPA report today clarity is only on 70-feet level vs. 100+ in 1960s), and erosion, are disturbances to the ecosystem that we are responsible for in result of not following simple rules of nature. Even though Botkin contradicts the need of the divine order, where nature is perfectly balanced and harmonious (pg. 25, 75), by saying “The assumption and the conclusion that there is and must be a divine order in nature leave a major question unanswered: If there must be such an order, how do we explain its absence?” (Pg 84), he admits that lack of balance emerges not only from what we did, but also from what we haven’t done. Referring to Tahoe reality, we can relate this theory to the woodland overgrowth (we HAVEN’T thinned the trees) or lack of defensible space, or the pollution or water contamination (effect of careless actions we DID). Thus – we are constantly making up for past mistakes, and the effort we are challenged with today, would be obtaining information, knowledge, and necessary tools to manage nature wisely. (Botkin, 194).
Nature changes everyday, we all know the theory of evolution. Likewise Raup, Botkin is aware of the importance of conscious changes. He wrote: “Local changes are necessary for life for two reasons: the chemical clock sometimes runs down and chemicals become unavailable; and species evolve with change, and many are specifically adopted to it.” (Botkin, 66). “Discordant harmonies” seem to be a discourse about success and failure in people’s engagement into solving environmental problems, under the strong pressure of scientists, politicians and environmentalists, a battle that we have observed in Tahoe for many years now.
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