| Boundary
Waters |
Lee
Frelich |
|
Sep
18, 2005 19:26 PDT |
ENTS:
This evening I returned to Minneapolis after attending the
Wilderness
Society Governing Board meeting as a guest in the Boundary
Waters, near Ely
MN. My presentation to the Governing Board on the difficulties
of forest
restoration when on a continuous trajectory of change caused by
global
warming, introduced diseases and pests, earthworms, and high
deer
populations was well received.
Jerry Franklin, the originator of the 'new forestry' concept,
Associate
Chief of the Forest Service Sally Collins and I spent three
hours in a very
small forest service beaver float plane, and flew over most of
the
1,000,000 acre Boundary Waters Wilderness (and couldn't stand to
even think
about food for three hours after landing). We examined several
large
prescribed burns, and the vast panorama of the wilderness with
1100 lakes,
and thousands of miles of interconnected wetlands, all marked by
strands of
black ash, which have turned yellow and stand out against the
conifers. The
landscape has exceptional spatial variation, unlike anything in
the east,
south or Pacific Northwest. Jerry Franklin was amazed at how the
colors
and texture change from one acre to the next, with alternating
stands of
jack pine, white pine, red pine, black spruce, white cedar,
white spruce,
tamarack, black ash, quaking aspen, bigtooth aspen, paper birch,
and red
maple, all of which come in different textures depending on soil
type and
stand age. What a complex tapestry. If the forests of the west
are
analogous to a modern minimalist carpet, then this forest looks
like an
oriental carpet.
After the Wilderness Society meeting, I attended the Friends of
the
Boundary Waters board of directors meeting, where we decided to
come up
with a vision for what we think these forest should look like 30
years from
now. It is part of the large movement among environmental
organizations to
be offensive, and be in favor of something, rather the always
being against
everything, which has clearly failed and led to the so-called
'death of
environmentalism'. We had dinner at a friends cabin right next
to Sigurd
Olson's Listening Point.
On the way home, I drove Lake County highway 1--the most
beautiful forest
drive in the U.S., a winding road through 75 miles of remote
lands along
the edge of the wilderness, with extraordinarily weather beaten
300 year
old sentinel white and red pines projecting above dark
lichen-draped boreal
forest with moss-covered forest floors. When I reached the edge
of the
boreal forest, there was a bright splash of color in the
northern fringes
of the sugar maple forest, which were just past the peak of fall
color,
with the leaves falling rapidly. If you haven't driven this road
to Ely,
MN, you should soon. In a few years they are planning to
straighten it so
that one can get to Ely 10 minutes faster.
In doing so, it is almost certain that they will wreck its
character.
Lee |
|