Chattermarks

By Daniel Matthews

Editor’s note: Renowned Northwest naturalist Daniel Mathews, author of Cascade-Olympic Natural History, recently released a new field guide with a twist — “Northwest Mountain Wildflowers” isn’t the trailside book you might expect, but an iPhone app. Interested in this new format for field guides, we asked him to share some information on what the app does, what his motivations were in creating an electronic guide and whether or not he thinks there are any drawbacks to this technology.

I have released a field guide for iPhone and iPod touch, called Northwest Mountain Wildflowers, based on my books Cascade-Olympic Natural History and Rocky Mountain Natural History. It covers 514 species, illustrated with more than 830 photos, and it weighs nothing, or at least adds nothing to the weight of your mobile device if you’re carrying one.

It does not require being online or on a cell network, as the content is contained in memory, and it works just the same on iPod touch as on iPhone. (When the user does happen to be connected, they can use direct links from species pages to the same species in EFlora BC and the Washington herbarium website.)

» Continue reading New NW wildflower field guide for iPhones

by Bill Dietrich

I’ve led a double life, writing about Nazis, pirates, and Napoleonic generals in my fiction but drawing on my newspaper experience to teach environmental journalism. I just ended a five-year stint of such teaching at Huxley College of the Environment at Western Washington University, and my swan song was completing work on the just-published: Green Fire: A History of Huxley College.

This was an in-house book, of course, aimed at alumni and students, but it also turned out to be an ambitious and complicated project that I hope will be of wider interest to those involved with environmental education. From start to finish took three years and involved at least 20 different contributors.

The 185-page book has my narrative history of one of the first (arguably, the first) dedicated environmental colleges in the United States, which was controversial when founded and has been pioneering and experimental ever since.

It also has profiles of 40 Huxley alumni that provide environmentalists with 40 wide-ranging examples of how to lead one’s life. The grads have ranged from organic farmers and a zen monk to high-powered attorneys and environmental activists. They are saving the tiger, climbing mountains, reforming high school education, running an airport, cleaning up toxics, coaching composting, rehabilitating salmon streams, mediating disputes, the examples go on and on. The book has about 170 illustrations, all on recycled paper, naturally.

It was very much a collaborative effort. Most of the profiles were done by a team of nine recently-graduated students who had been editors on the college’s undergraduate Planet magazine I advised, and it’s gratifying to make them published authors. Some of the photos came from students as well, and the book was given a lovely design by recent graduate Avela Grenier of Bozeman, MT. I’m always impressed what college-age students can do if given the opportunity.

Other parts include a brief biography of Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s Bulldog,” from which the college takes its name, and an environmental timeline of the last 40 years. As noted, Huxley’s history parallels modern environmental history: it was founded in 1970, the same year as the first Earth Day and the creation of basic U.S. environmental laws and agencies.

Since Huxley Development Director Manca Valum managed to raise the money necessary to produce the book, all proceeds from its sale will go directly to student programs, which is very gratifying. I also hope the book will increase Huxley’s own self-awareness (it is a modest place, to an extreme), interest future students and donors, and encourage a dialogue with other environmental colleges.

The book is $30. It’s available through Village Books in Bellingham, Washington and the bookstore at Western Washington University. If you know of folks interested in environmental teaching, give them a heads up: I think they’d find “Green Fire” provocative and intriguing.

By Kurt Repanshek, originally published in National Parks Traveler July 7, 2011.

For a quarter-century the North Cascades Institute has been working in partnership with the National Park Service to educate the public on the wonders of North Cascades National Park and its surrounding ecosystem. Those 25 years haven’t been overlooked by the Park Service, which recently honored the institute for its work.

Park Service Director Jon Jarvis and North Cascades Superintendent Chip Jenkins visited the North Cascades Institute in late June to present its leaders with a Certificate for Outstanding Partnership Achievement. The two presented the award to Saul Weisberg, the Institute’s executive director, at a special ceremony on June 22.

“North Cascades Institute and North Cascades National Park have worked together for the past 25 years to help people conserve and enjoy this special place,” said Superintendent Jenkins. “This partnership is critical to the long term well-being of the North Cascades and we look forward to it continuing to grow in the next 25 years.”

Mr. Weisberg founded North Cascades Institute in 1986, along with key park staff including Director Jarvis, who served as the park’s chief resource manager early in his career.

The Institute’s mission is to conserve and restore Northwest environments through education. It operates a number of award-winning education programs for people of all ages, including Mountain School, North Cascades Wild, Cascades Climate Challenge, and a graduate program in partnership with Western Washington University. In 2005 the institute opened its Environmental Learning Center located in the North Cascades National Park Complex.

“We are honored that this important work has been recognized by the National Park Service,” said Mr. Weisberg. “Creating the next generation of public lands stewards has never been more important.”

A group poem written by the 4th graders of Lummi Nation School, based on an Ute Prayer. The poem was drawn from inspiration during students’ time at Mountain School.

Earth Teach Me

Earth teach me love…as the two ducks swimming in the pond together.

Earth teach me to be happy…like the animals in nature are happy.

Earth teach me hope…as the eagle waiting for dinner.

Earth teach me to care…as the bear takes care of her babies.

Earth teach me courage…like the snake slithers through the forest.

Earth teach me freedom…while the eagle is soaring through the sky.

Earth teach me magic…like the jaguar in camouflage hiding in the tall grass.

Earth teach me how to be quiet…so the deer can come out of the bushes.

Earth teach me friendship…like the deer share the grass to the earth.

Earth teach me honesty…as a red tail hawk flying up in the air.

Earth teach me courage…as a salmon jumping up the river so he could get home.

Earth teach me learning…as the cougar which knows how to hunt to survive.

Please join North Cascades Institute and REI as we present Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods and co-founder of the Children & Nature Network, Thursday, May 12; 7 p.m. at Town Hall, Seattle and Friday, May 13; 7 p.m. at Sehome High School, Bellingham. Tickets available online or at the door; information at www.ncascades.org/events.

Co-sponsored by US Forest Service, Village Books, Sierra Club, ParentMap and the Bellingham Herald.

A Conversation with Richard Louv

Q: Why did you decide to follow up on the successful Last Child in the Woods?

A: Once in Seattle, while I was giving a talk, a woman said, “Listen to me, adults have nature-deficit disorder, too.” She was right. In Last Child in the Woods, I introduced that term, not as a medical diagnosis, but as a way to describe the growing gap between children and nature. By its broadest interpretation, nature-deficit disorder is an atrophied awareness, a diminished ability to find meaning in the life that surrounds us, whatever form it takes. This shrinkage of our lives has a direct impact on our physical, mental, and societal health.

Over the last few years, I’ve heard many adults speak with heartfelt emotion, even anger, not only about the deficit for children but about their own as well. The Nature Principle is not age-specific. It has a much broader scope and includes the latest research related to nature’s impact on human beings, as well as accounts of the personal discoveries of poets, artists, scientists and other thinkers.

What is the “Nature Principle?”

The Nature Principle holds that a reconnection to the natural world is fundamental to human health, well-being, spirit, and survival, and that the more high-tech our lives become, the more nature we need. This book suggests how we can apply the principle to where we live, work, learn, and play, and asks, What would our lives be like if our days and nights were as immersed in nature as they are today in technology? And how can each of us help create that life-enhancing world, not only in a hypothetical future but right now for our families and for ourselves?

So, we all need to move to the country?

No. The Nature Principle can be applied in our cities, suburbs, homes, and workplaces. In 2008, for the first time in human history, more than half the world’s population lives in cities and towns. What that means is that if human beings are going to have a meaningful relationship with the natural world, that relationship will likely take place in urban areas, but this will require new kinds of cities and towns. There’s a growing urgency.

Why the urgency?

» Continue reading Richard Louv & the Nature Principle

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Institute writing instructor Ana Maria Spagna’s new collection of essays Potluck: Community on the Edge of Wilderness. Join us at Mount Vernon’s Libation Station on May 6 for a free reading and author reception — more information on this and other readings in Seattle, Concrete, Darrington and elsewhere at www.ncascades.org.

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All summer the threat of a catastrophic wildfire had cast a pall over the valley. Ferns browned up and bowed over. Twigs snapped under Vibram soles, and we winced.  I’d spent so much dread on wildfires that I’d forgotten completely about floods. Besides, after that 100-year flood eight years back, didn’t we have a 92 year hiatus coming?

“Come on,” Laurie said.

She pointed to my boots strewn where I’d left them after my last day of trail work. I pulled them on, and we headed out. The extension cords in the yard were now completely submerged and barely visible. The earth had been too dry for too long, and now it would not accept water, but repelled it, dust-like, so that the whole forest floor was filling up like a series of plastic kiddy pools. Hydrophobic, people would say later: the soil had gone hydrophobic.

Laurie and I splashed on through. As we neared the river, the puddles began moving in rivulets that divided and spread like a crowd racing for their cars after a ball game. We stood on the bank with our camera and waved at neighbors and schoolkids standing on the opposite bank. Laurie jumped up and down and clapped as water sprayed over the top of a small log jam, like surf over tide pools. The kids mimicked her.

I stood still.

The air buzzed with excitement, but I resisted. Sure, as a seasonal laborer on backcountry trail crews, I’d been free to give in to it. We cheered when trail bridges washed out; if it meant more work for us, so be it. Nature wins! we’d say.  And we believed it. The river not only had more might than us, I figured back then, but more right, too. Once, when I worked in Canyonlands in Utah, a visitor had knocked at my door in the middle of the night to tell me about a rattlesnake she’d seen in the backcountry. Someone should do something about it, she said. The park belongs to the rattlesnakes, I said, and I shut the door. For many years I believed something similar about floods. The valley belongs to the river. The difference, of course, was that now that we’d settled down and bought land and built a home, we belonged to the valley too.

On our way back home, a familiar pickup slowed next to us.

“I think it’s gonna get wild,” the driver said.

» Continue reading Ana Maria Spagna’s “Spawning in the Mud”

By Dr. James M. Ford

Recently I attended the annual Skagit Land Trust fundraising auction where some 240 people gathered to raise more than $50,000 to help conserve land and critical habitat right here in Skagit County. Corporate sponsors from throughout the county and scores of volunteers stepped forward to lend a hand. The event served as a timely reminder that the health of our environment is equally as important as a sound economy. Clearly, people throughout our community are working together to promote the well-being of this special place.

Although Earth has suffered a great deal of damage due to human activities, there’s growing interest in a healthy and maintainable environment by a broad diversity of citizens who realize that a healthier natural environment can nurture a more sustainable business environment. Business and industry leaders have long recognized the importance of locating in communities that offer plenty of opportunities for health and outdoor recreation.

As a biologist, I remember well when we would question, what is more important, “nature” or “nurture?” We soon realized that humans need both the gift of genetics as well as a healthy environment in order to develop and flourish. Likewise, a successful and productive economy requires a clean and healthy environment.

My generation made plenty of mistakes because of what we didn’t know. We believed that technology and invention could solve everything. Now, we understand that’s only one part of the solution. Our planet has been damaged but, thanks to a new generation that understand and appreciates what needs to be done to sustain a healthy world, it may get the tender care it needs.

Locally, many nonprofits are working to improve our environment. I have been involved with three that are working cooperatively to inform and inspire our citizens, including young people, and bringing hope for a more vibrant and healthy Skagit environment. These deeply dedicated groups are Skagit Land Trust, North Cascades Institute, and Friends of the Anacortes Community Forest Lands. They are responsible, well-managed and particularly effective at accomplishing their goals. In doing so, they are meeting an essential need of our community: to conserve and restore Northwest environments, the world my grandchildren, and yours, will inherit. Using sound scientific principles, an inclusive and nonjudgmental approach and powerful experiences in the natural world, these groups are helping kids and their families see that if we want a healthy, beautiful place to live, work and learn, then we must make careful decisions.

It’s important work and these three organizations are doing it well. Although the need is urgent given the breathtaking rate at which the global population is growing, we still have time to make the critical changes we need to make in order to meet this challenge. With the leadership of these dedicated organizations and thousands of volunteers throughout our community, effective strategies can be developed for preserving our environment.

Who would have dreamed that a national forest, a housing non-profit and an environmental education organization would team up to provide Seattle-based Asian and Pacific Islanders with meaningful outdoor experiences? Starting in 2001, the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, the North Cascades Institute and the International District Housing Alliance began a partnership that has expanded over the years to include intergenerational learning for elders, stewardship projects for youth and paid internships for youth. The partnership sparks a better understanding of the connection between the forest and urban environment, and provides mentoring and leadership opportunities.

The United States Forest Service recently awarded these partners with the 2011 Urban Communities in Conservation Award. The conservation award is part of the Forest Service’s Wings Across the Americas program, which works to conserve birds, bats, butterflies and dragonflies.

Each of the three partners plays a distinct role in the program. The first partner, the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest in the Puget Sound Region of Washington State, is the largest urban forest in Region Six of the Forest Service. The staff works directly with the program’s youth to get hands on experience in a natural setting, often their first time outside the urban environment. The second partner, the North Cascades Institute, is a non-profit organization focusing on education. The International District Housing Alliance, the third partner, is a non-profit organization located in Seattle’s International District…that has successfully worked to improve the quality of life for Asian and Pacific Islanders by providing community building and housing related services to low-income individuals and families.

Youth and elders from Seattle’s International District learn about old growth forests and tree ecology from Rockport State Park staff

» Continue reading Institute Receives USFS Conservation Award

By Molly Hashimoto

Teaching landscape watercolor in summer and autumn at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center on Diablo Lake encompasses everything I love best: peaks, forests, water, wildlife and enthusiastic fellow artists. When I am at home in Seattle, I seek out the quieter parks nearby, especially Union Bay Natural Area, also known as the Montlake Fill, which seems to have a little of all those things I treasure in the North Cascades.

It is surprising that a place so rich with wildlife is less than a mile from the University Village shopping center, right off Sandpoint Way east of the University of Washington, and adjacent to its enormous parking lots. You can be entirely unaware of all that bustle, although in winter you can see the buildings to the north through a grove of leafless cottonwoods. The Natural Area is on land owned by the University of Washington.

In 1895, Lake Washington was lowered and the University was moved from downtown to its present site, which included the marshy land exposed by the lowering of the lake. At that time no one could think of a way to use this area, so in 1926, when the City of Seattle asked the University if they could pay to use it as a dump and a landfill, the university agreed. In 1971, the Fill finally closed. In 1977, the University’s regents approved a plan that would create an arboretum and keep a natural area for the study of horticulture, as well as a wild area.

Top: First Light, North Cascades, watercolor on paper. Above: Swans, Union Bay, woodblock print. One of the most beautiful sights I’ve seen at the Natural Area were the trumpeter swans in Yesler Cove in late winter of 2009. They are rare visitors, and that year they graced us with their presence for several days—seeing them inspired the design for this woodblock print.

» Continue reading Union Bay Wild: An Artist’s View

By Jack McLeod, guest blogger

I recently took the Spirit of Place writing workshop at the Learning Center with Nick O’Conell. Here’s my story from that workshop about a trip to Sahale Glacier. This is the third program I’ve participated in at the Institute and they’ve all been wonderful — so thank you!

My tent shook violently. Straining its granite-bound guy lines, I was afraid it would release and pirouette like a wayward balloon to the valley 3,000’ below. An arc of stones only partly protected me from the midnight river of air as the tempest commanded our miniature snowbound island.

We had hiked to the realm of skydivers and found our rocky outpost was directly in the channel of atmospheric winds traveling from one side of Washington to the other. I’d waited 6 months for this date, a dark moonless night in the mountains and perfect venue for the annual Perseid Meteor Shower. But atmospheric forces make the ultimate decision around here and they threatened to blow us off the mountain. In the spirit of a long-ago boss’s mantra “we don’t have problems, we have challenges”, the question became could we turn nature’s uncontrollable forces into our hoped-for glorious experience?

The three of us intended to camp just below flower-covered Cascade Pass, an easy four-mile hike. Bob had minor backpacking experience, Brandon had none so we chose that site for its beauty and easy access. The ranger made sure we had the required bear canister to protect our food – and us. “You don’t want anything smelling of food, including your skin, pack, tent or clothes.” Ah, we thought, just why we went camping in the woods – to have meticulous hygiene. She also told us the forested, creek-side camp we planned to stay at for two nights was full. But there were still sites available at Sahale Glacier. What’s a couple more miles and a couple more thousand feet of climbing with a full pack? And no trees or tumbling stream. Camped next to ice. In August. We had come to get away from it all so the ranger’s only campsite choice became a perverse type of trip insurance. Little did we know how this change in locale would change everything about our experience.

The hike to the pass was uneventful – no slabs of ice came crashing down from cliff-hanging glaciers 2,000 feet above on Mt. Johannesburg – all the guidebooks mention this as a possibility. The route to our newly designated camp led across Sahale Arm, high above an ancient trade route between western and eastern Washington and on this day deep in blue and white candles of lupine and bistort. Indigenous travelers and traders crossed this pass between the lush, green forests of the Skagit River valley and the dry plains of the Columbia Plateau. A nearby archaeological site was dated to 9,600 years ago. Stone tool fragments were found but no signs of plastic bear canisters or 4 ounce isobutane stoves.

» Continue reading Sahale Stars