Chattermarks

By Debra Daniels-Zeller, author of Northwest Vegetarian Cookbook — Join us for a special vegetarian harvest celebration at the Learning Center when Debra is the guest presenter for our September 24-25 Sourdough Speaker Series event!

Fall, apples and pears naturally flow together. Summer harvest is over and rainy winter days loom on the horizon. This time of year, baking with autumn fruit refreshes my seasonal passion. The fragrance of baking apples mingling with cinnamon brings back memories of my grandmother’s delectable homemade apple pie. Locally grown apples were always the essential ingredient.

Today, Washington provides an abundant selection of crisp apples and juicy pears. But the tree fruit industry also is vital to the state’s bottom line, reminding us of why it’s important to buy local.

The State Horticultural Society reports that Washington tree fruit is first in the state for overall economic value. More than 142,000 jobs are generated, from field work to advertising and sales. The total cumulative value is greater than that from Microsoft and Boeing combined. It’s also greater than the value of the biotechnology industry, which reportedly employs 19,300 statewide and generates only $1.8 billion in revenue.

The economic value of Washington tree fruit is more than $2 billion a year from the Yakima Valley alone. Half the apples grown in the United States and approximately 64 percent of our nation’s pear supply comes from Washington.

» Continue reading Why local matters, Washington apples and pears

We are pleased to offer a special limited-edition poster commemorating North Cascades Institute’s 25th anniversary. This high-quality poster features a new painting by watercolor artist Molly Hashimoto, who also is the featured artist on our catalog this year and is teaching two workshops at the Learning Center. Her piece depicts an iconic view from the Learning Center of Pyramid Peak, Diablo Lake and a detail of Diablo Dam.

We’re selling these posters for $10 in all five of our bookstores, including the Learning Center, Stehekin, Newhalem and Marblemount. We’re also making them available to purchase by phone or email for $15 includes tax and shipping/handling).

To purchase one of these keepsake posters from afar, please email nci@ncascades.org or call (360) 854-2599. All of the proceeds from the sale of these posters will help us to fund outdoor education opportunities for local youth!

Here’s Molly sharing some thoughts on her painting and this particular view:

» Continue reading 25th Anniversary posters for sale

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.

As much as we love North Cascadian landscapes, we here at the Institute are still called to visit and experience other amazing places on our planet. We publish accounts of the places Institute staff and graduate students visit in our Road Trip series.

About this time last year, summer solstice, with its long days filled with light and birdsong, I left Bellingham and headed out on a pilgrimage to Yellowstone and Grand Tetons national parks. It is a tradition of mine to spend some portion of my summer out there in the glory of western Wyoming. Having lived for a few years as a snowboard bum/river rat in Jackson Hole in the late 1990s, I have tasted the ineffable sweetness of summertime in the Tetons and the surrounding Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Once you sip that nectar, it is impossible not to go back for more whenever possible.

This particular road trip with two good friends, one from Portland, another from San Francisco, started with a visit to Yellowstone’s northeastern Lamar Valley, an area of the park renowned for wildlife viewing opportunities and a more remote feeling than other popular attractions like Old Faithful or the springs at Mammoth. We spent two nights at the lovely Lamar Field Station in the heart of the valley, a rustic outpost that is operated by the Yellowstone Association as accommodations for many of their field excursions.

Approaching the Yellowstone Association’s Lamar Field Station

Out the front door of our cabin was a view across the verdant valley in fresh flush, studded with silhouettes of hundreds of bison grazing with their young. Out the back door, a trail followed a creek back to Druid Peak, the famed mountain where Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt let loose Canadian wolves in 1995 to reintroduce this vital carnivore to the ecosystem. It felt like a holy place, this ground where our culture made an attempt to right a wrong from the past, where the food chain thrives in all of its perfect, intact elegance.

» Continue reading Road Trip: Yellowstone

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.

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.

Note: Kathleen Dean Moore will present her new book Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril at Village Books in Bellingham on Wed, February 9, at 7 pm; free!

Because of humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels, we are warming our earth beneath a cloak of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.

Here in Washington State, rising temperatures and a warmer climate are causing our glaciers to melt faster than they can replenish themselves. This is leading us towards a future with less fresh water for agriculture and drinking and less resources for inexpensive hydroelectric generation. Over 40 of our coastal communities are threatened by rising sea levels. Sagebrush-steppe and alpine ecosystems may disappear as the tree line shifts, and growing seasons will change in unpredictable ways. The loss of several amphibian species, alterations in bird and butterfly migratory patterns and invasions of unchecked, voracious insect infestations are already underway. Ocean acidification is choking the abundant life in Puget Sound and bays of the outer coast. Eastside forests are drying up and wildland fires will become more prevalent. We humans will face a deadly spike in infectious, respiratory and heat-related illnesses as the natural world around us smolders.

Heard this laundry list of doom before? Most likely you have, and it’s because scientists have done an impressive job of both studying the phenomenon of global climate change and communicating the causes and effects to the public. The effort has be so heroic that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

While the data, interpretations and subsequent warnings from the scientific community are essential pieces of this puzzle, Kathleen Dean Moore, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State University, recognized that something was missing. Moore, the author of personal essay/nature writing books like Riverwalking, Holdfast and Wild Comfort, teaches environmental ethics and moral reasoning to students and she soon realized that the scientists’ arguments, no matter how comprehensive, were not going to inspire us to act to save our world.

“Clearly, information is not enough,” she writes. “A piece is largely missing from the public discourse about climate change: namely an affirmation of our moral responsibilities in the world that the scientists describe. No amount of factual information will tell us what we ought to do. For that, we need moral convictions… Facts and moral convictions together can help us understand what we ought to do – something neither can do alone.”

In the new volume Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, co-edited by Michael P. Nelson for Trinity University Press, Moore assembles eighty of the world’s leading visionaries, leaders and writers to create a compelling call to action to confront the challenges of climate change based on moral and ethical grounds. Moore and Nelson have orchestrated a chorus featuring the sterling voices of the Dalai Lama, Barack Obama, Desmond Tutu, John Paul II, Barbara Kingsolver, Paul Hawken, Thich Naht Hanh, E.O. Wilson, Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, Terry Tempest Williams, Gary Snyder, bell hooks and many, many others from cultures and countries around the planet.

“Do we have a moral oblication to take action to protect the future of a planet in peril?” the editors asked of their contributors, “and if so, why?”

The answers – inspiring, creative, sobering and grounded in reason – are presented in thematic clusters, including “Yes, for the survival of humankind,” “Yes, to honor our duties of gratitude and reciprocity, “Yes, for the stewardship of God’s creation, “Yes, because justice demands it,” “Yes, because the world is beautiful.”

Moral Ground strives to start the conversation about “who we are when we are at out best, what we must do to be worthy of our gifts” and how we might live on Earth “respectfully, responsibly and joyously.” These are essential questions to ponder here at the most crucial turning point our planet has ever faced.

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

Last week, North Cascades Institute was the beneficiary of a major piece of artwork from Qwest Communications, thanks in large part to its creator, Northwest sculptor Tony Angell. “Ascending Eagles” is cast bronze, approximately 12 feet tall (including its granite base, part of the composition) and was commissioned by Qwest. It stood in front of Qwest headquarters in downtown Seattle until a few years ago.

Lofty and inspiring, “Ascending Eagles” interprets the role of the bald eagle in the natural and cultural history of the Pacific Northwest. It will be a great addition to the Institute’s educational and interpretive programs. Tony Angell is a friend of the Institute, former director of environmental education for Washington’s Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction and a leader in the conservation of Northwest environments. He is a highly regarded Northwest artist and his most recent books include “Puget Sound Through an Artist’s Eye” and “In the Company of Crows and Ravens” (co-written with John Martzluff). Tony is thrilled his work will be part of North Cascades Institute, recently writing “Tears came to my eyes seeing these old friends come back to life in the most perfect place.  I couldn’t be happier.”

If you’d like to see more of Tony’s work, visit www.fosterwhite.com/dynamic/artist.asp?ArtistID=58

A second set of work included in this gift depicts river otters.

Watching these magnificent animals in the changing light, glistening in the rain, and catching people’s eyes as they round a corner of a trail, is magical.

The move and installation was conducted by Artech of Seattle, our region’s leading art handling service. Qwest is donating the cost of art handling and installation. This is a terrific show of support from Qwest and Tony for the work the Institute does and we hope that everyone will enjoy this addition to our campus. We’ll have a proper celebration this coming spring. Until then, say hello in eaglesquack or otterspeak next time you’re at the Learning Center.

What: A free Electronic Field Trip to North Cascades National Park to explore climate change and its effects on people and ecosystems

Who: Students 4th through 8th grade

When: October 13, 2010, 7:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. PDT

How: Register for free at http://www.northcascadeseft.com

North Cascades Institute, North Cascades National Park and the National Park Foundation invite schools across the country to take a free Electronic Field Trip (EFT) to North Cascades National Park on October 13, 2010. The EFT will be hosted by popular television personality and passionate conservationist Jeff Corwin. Classes can watch the broadcast as it is streamed over the internet or broadcast on participating public television stations and internal school satellite networks. Lesson plans for teachers and web-based games for students are available now at http://www.northcascadeseft.com.

The Electronic Field Trip, “Climate Challenge: North Cascades National Park,” will include two live, hour-long broadcasts (7:00 a.m. PDT and 10:00 p.m. PDT) from North Cascades National Park featuring park rangers, scientists, kids and spectacular scenery. The free program is designed for 4th through 8th grade students and it will be the first in a series of investigative EFTs to explore the impact climate change is having on our national parks and encourage students to become leaders in addressing climate change. Students will have the opportunity to call in and have their questions answered during the broadcast.

“National parks are fun places, and they make great classrooms,” said Chip Jenkins, North Cascades National Park Superintendent. “You can learn about the foundations of democracy at Independence National Historical Park, about the struggle to preserve the nation at Gettysburg National Military Park, about geological forces that shape the earth at Grand Canyon National Park, and you can learn about the effect of climate change on people and ecosystems through this Electronic Field Trip to North Cascades National Park.”

Teachers and students are encouraged to visit http://www.northcascadeseft.com now to access lesson plans and web-based games to get a jump start on their interactive adventure to North Cascades National Park.

According to a recent study released by the Environmental Protection Agency that followed trends relative to sea level rise along U.S. Coasts between 1958 and 2008, climate change is expected to affect virtually every sector of society, including water resources, energy use, food production, commerce and recreation. Using North Cascades National Park as a backdrop, this Electronic Field Trip will educate tomorrow’s leaders about the effects of climate change and explore with them ways climate change can be addressed. Home to 9,000 foot tall mountains and over one-third of the remaining glaciers in the lower 48 United States, North Cascades National Park is an excellent location to explore the effects of climate change. Its northerly location and high altitude terrain make prime territory to teach about some of the earliest tangible impacts of climate change evidenced in glacier melt and species distribution.

Jeff Corwin is an Emmy award winning producer and host of numerous Animal Planet and Discovery Network television series. Presently, he serves as a correspondent for science and the environment for NBC. His most recent project, 100 Heartbeats, is a multimedia endeavor highlighting the planet’s most endangered species along with the heroes of conservation trying to save them. Beyond television, Jeff is the author of more than 10 natural history and conservation books.

Web Resources:

North Cascades National Park Glacier Monitoring Program

Do Your Part! For Climate Friendly Parks

North Cascades Institute’s Cascades Climate Challenge Program