Lake Dunes in the Desert

View across playa toward Dragoon Mountains from Hwy 186

Playa is Spanish for beach and also the term geologists use for dry lakes, such as the Willcox Playa, called Lake Cochise when referred to in its Pleistocene incarnation.  But the playa in Cochise County is not always dry. In fact, owing to a wet summer and fall, this past winter the so-called “dry lake” held more water than we ever saw in it before — bearing in mind, of course, that our personal memories here are only five years long. Right from the start, though, even bone dry, the playa exerted a fascination for us, as vast empty spaces tend to do. 

Our first year, on every trip to town, we would gaze out over that apparent void and speculate on its prehistory, straining our eyes to determine if we were seeing water or a mirage over on the far shore. The playa seemed so near and yet very far away -- and, always, utterly mysterious. 

Public access off Kansas Settlement Road

Now we learn that the section of the Sulphur Springs Valley in Cochise County (the northern end of the valley is in Graham County, its southern reaches in Mexico) has two drainage basins, Willcox in the north and Whitewater in the south, and that the heart of the Willcox drainage is the playa. Furthermore, the Willcox is a closed system, an endorheic basin, which means that water draining from the mountains down to the playa does not join ever-larger streams and rivers and make its way the ocean. Water may (and often does) evaporate or soak into the ground before ever reaching the playa, but it isn’t going anywhere else, and this kind of “unintegrated interior drainage” (Gilluly, Waters & Woodford, 1959) is typical of deserts.

View from 191 overpass, looking across corner of playa toward Willcox

Just as today’s Lake Michigan was once the much larger Lake Nipissing, what is now a playa was also once much more. An Arizona Heritage Waters website, hosted by Northern Arizona University, puts it like this: 

About 15,000 years ago in Willcox Playa, Lake Cochise reached a maximum depth of 46 feet and covered 140 square miles, maintained by the relatively cool, moist Pleistocene climate. Currently, with a mean annual rainfall of 18.5 inches per year and a mean annual temperature of 90℉, the modern playa can support only shallow, ephemeral ponds that form after heavy rains or snows. The most recent high lake level occurred about 9,000 years ago.

For more, see here. 

“It’s temporary!” Cher’s character screams at her father, when he objects that the “engagement” ring she shows him is a pinky ring. “Everything is temporary!” he memorably retorts. Ah, yes. Even mountains fail to pass the test of eternity. Ephemerality, as concept and reality, is an essential component of time, without which the world would be frozen and static.

We will not always be here. We are barely insects caught and stopped all too soon by the windshield of time, but my mantra is “We’re here now!” and so, while here, I am endlessly (note the contradiction) fascinated by what my Michigan eyes see as dunes on the Dos Cabezas Mountains side of Highway 186, miles from the extant playa in the opposite direction. 

This area reminds me of Lake Michigan sand dunes. Even the vegetation along the road looks somewhat similar — with alkalai sacaton here in place of Michigan’s marram grass — but mountainward, or “inland,” as I can’t help thinking of the land even farther from the playa, the look of the land and its vegetation is nothing like the Great Lakes region of the northern Midwest.

Farther inland and into what appear as dunes, mesquite dominates, as it does on the rangeland around Dos Cabezas. In both places occasional mesquite trees reach impressive size and stand out from their shrubbier fellows. The commonest cactus in Cochise County, cholla, is ubiquitous here, too, with foot-high cholla common and taller individuals commanding recognition. 

So it really has very little in common with the Great Lakes; however, these “duney bits,” as I can’t help calling them, continue to fascinate my mind, pulling me to them like some prehistoric, displaced mirage.

Sarah likes it, too. Of course, she likes to be wherever we are.

Donde la tierra es roja

Agriculture in Graham County, AZ

He looked out at the red earth stretching around them. It was hard to imagine, but millions of years ago this had been the bottom of a massive inland sea. Aquatic dinosaur bones had been dug up under this soil and there were still places in the desert where mounds of fossilized seashells baked under the sun. 

- Jane Harper, The Lost Man 

Harper’s story takes place in the Australian outback, an environment even drier and more severe than Arizona. The red earth passages, though, set me to musing, first on similarities between Australia and Arizona, and then to other red earth parts of the world. Here in southeast Arizona, our pinkish-grey mountains can turn red at sunset, and there are places in Cochise and Graham County where the soil is red enough to remind me of Georgia clay. Here’s a passage from a children’s novel set in Georgia:

Then it began to rain. It rained and it rained and it rained. The yard ran in gullies, the lane was pink and slippery, and the road was deep in red mud. 

“I’m a-going to lose my mind,” Ma said, “if you all don’t stop a-tracking that old red clay into my house.” 

- Virginia H. Ormsby, Long Lonesome Train Whistle

That reminds me also (as my train of associations rolls along) that the first time I traveled in the American South, camping with my parents and sisters on our way to visit grandparents who had moved in retirement to the Gulf Coast of Florida, the red Georgia soil seemed bizarre and alien to my Midwestern eyes, whereas now, in more recent years, whether traveling through the South or spending time in Southwest, I have repeatedly been struck by the similarity of red earth in the southern U.S. to that where my “pen pal,” Kathy, lives in New South Wales, Australia, and — between here and there, if you take the Atlantic route — the red earth of South Africa, Botswana, and other countries in Africa, places I only know by reading about them. 

I asked Kathy (she’s the one who sent me the book quoted at the beginning of this post), for permission to use one of her photographs, and she not only said yes (thanks, Kathy Dowling!) but also sent another image, one I hadn’t seen before and had a little trouble deciphering at first. The first photo you won’t have a problem interpreting, but the second image below is a photograph taken during a dust storm that had engulfed my friends’ country home and B&B. This is not an altered image: the dust is this thick, bright red. Can you believe it?

Red earth around dam (pond) in New South Wales

Red dust storm, New South Wales

And now an old friend from my earliest Michigan life, married to a Brazilian, has sent me photos from their South American life — and there it is again: red earth. Jeanie Furlan writes, “The color of the earth is sandy red … in Pereira Barreto.…  Closer to São Paulo, the Ribeirão Preto earth is a deep, rusty red, and it is much more fertile.”  

Red earth in Brazil

Besides photos of the red earth, she sent an example of local architecture, saying, “This is the Aunt and Uncle’s house where I first visited in 1973  (outside Sales Oliveira). They use flooring that will match the earth and outside wall color is also the same as the earth.  It makes sense since people will track this color from boots and rain, dust and wind will blow this color around.”

Utilization of earth tones, Brazil

Of course, dwellers in the American Southwest have long used the colors of local earth in houses, walls, tiles, and decorative items. And here are a couple more red-earth images from here in Arizona, down near Pearce:

We know now that the continents of earth were not always configured as they are today, but I was in school too early to have been taught about plate tectonics, so lately I’ve been doing some catching up, marveling that the idea of continents moving at all is so recent in scientific history. In The Fossil Book: A Record of Prehistoric Life, by Carrol Lane Fenton & Mildred Adams Fenton, I turn (after lingering on the familiar Devonian examples) from compelling illustrations of fossils in rocks to passages of text that dwell on the movements of continents. There I learn that when Alfred Wegener and Alexander du Toit seriously proposed the idea in 1912, neither they nor anyone else could explain how the continents might have moved. The theory of seafloor spreading didn’t come along until H. H. Hess of Princeton put it together and published in 1962. So when I was in my high school freshman earth science class, plate tectonics theory was brand-new, a subject of scientific debate, and not the accepted working model and received knowledge it has since become. Pangea, Laurentia, Gondwana — prehistoric continents — an entirely different configuration of earth’s land and water. Fascinating!

I read novels set in other parts of the United States and the world, dwell on images sent by friends, recall soils in places I have visited, and I imagine (mind you, this is only my imagination at work!) all the red earth territories originally conjoined, and when I’m actually in red earth country, staring at the bright ground and rocks, I feel closer to other red earth parts of the world, as well as to characters in books who live in such places, as if we are still connected somehow by being on similar ground. Then I wonder this: around the world, how many different languages are spoken in red earth lands, and how many different words do human beings use to describe those places?

The “world” is at once so large and, as “earth,” a home small and contained and intimate. Or so it often seems to me.

It’s Even MORE Complicated AND Scarier Than You Thought

General Introduction:

It always surprises me when otherwise intelligent people undercut their own arguments by resorting to easy, sleazy informal fallacies, such as slapping a label on an opponent (e.g., liberal, conservative, libertarian) and thinking that constitutes an argument. Or outright name-calling (e.g., Luddite, elitist, extremist)– even worse.

An initial response of anger or disgust on hearing or reading something personally upsetting, I understand. I have those emotional responses, too. I feel I’ve been attacked – or, worse, ignored, unseen. But I’m not looking to get into a brawl with anyone. My hope is to present my own view so reasonably that my opposition will have no choice but to consider it.

I did not always hold the political views today. My positions on a few issues were different when I was younger. Not on everything but on some important matters, I have changed my mind over the years. People who disagree with me are not villains or morons. I do – I must – believe in reason, but I don’t believe in using reason as a bludgeon, its blows delivered with sarcasm and disdain.

Why I Bring It Up Again Today:

A recent article in an online magazine decried alarm from a segment of the public over genetically modified food products, suggesting (none too subtly) that genetic modification is too complicated for Americans not trained in science to begin to understand. So as not to seem completely patronizing or dismissive of concerns, however, the author went on to present cases where adoption of a GM alternative had (1) solved a problem posed by the previous unmodified version of the plant and (2) presented no health danger to the public.

If you’re like me, you don’t really want to wade into this issue. It’s too big, technical, and confusing. But come with me, just this once. I want to take you backstage, behind those blanket assurances about the safety of genetic engineering. I want to take you down into the details of four GMO fights, because that’s where you’ll find truth. You’ll come to the last curtain, the one that hides the reality of the anti-GMO movement. And you’ll see what’s behind it.

The reasonable-sounding, measured language above gives way later in the article, where the author calls opponents of genetic modification “Luddites,” “ quacks,” and “pseudo-environmentalists waging a leftist war on science.” It’s surprising that someone claiming the scientific high ground in defense of GMOs would stoop to name-calling, one of the most common uneducated informal fallacies. A strong argument need not insult opponents, and insulting anyone is the surest way to fail to persuade. Perhaps the writer hopes to intimidate and shame? Or simply raise cheers from those who already agree with him? Is his case weak, or simply his rhetoric? You can read and decide for yourself. He failed to persuade me.

Full disclosure: As will not surprise anyone who knows me, I am not a laboratory scientist. Not any kind of scientist at all. The last university math and science classes I had, very low-level, were as an undergraduate. My chief focus as an undergrad and nearly exclusive focus as a graduate student was in philosophy. If you never studied philosophy or only took one philosophy class, you may be tempted to joke about angels dancing on the head of a pin (how many can?) or trees falling in a forest when no one is there to hear them fall (is there a sound made?).

But the main business of philosophy, from cut-and-dried logic to way-out-there criticism is (a) to investigate the world and human thought and action, (b) to formulate arguments to make cases for stating claims about world and/or thought and/or actions and consequences, and (c) to analyze and critique claims and arguments made by others. This is not some idle, esoteric game. It is, in fact, a generalized, thought-experiment form of the scientific method itself.

Researchers in laboratories, medical researchers in the field, botanists, agronomists, farmers, courtroom lawyers, corporate attorneys, and men and women in every field of life, every day, are engaged in some version of this process. Differences in conclusions depend on starting points, knowledge, rigor of reasoning -- also, crucially, on background assumptions (almost always unstated and very often unrecognized); limits of the investigation; and wide implications attached to narrower legitimate conclusions.

An argument is presented to persuade. There is nothing “scientific” about falling down in awe of an argument presented in the majestic robes of “science,” and there is nothing rational about being persuaded without examining an argument.

Good science has no need to hide behind a curtain.

The author says the issue of genetic modification is “big, technical and confusing.” Unfortunately, despite promising to shed light, he cherry-picks facts and oversimplifies the issues. The truth is much, much more complicated than he would have us believe -- not because of shadowy conspiracies of science-phobic Luddites the author imagines "behind" opposition to GMOs but because of the limitations of scientific research and the holistic nature of both agriculture and health.

A farmer friend who is always open to new organic methods -- both because reducing chemical inputs means more money in his pocket if an organic experiment is successful (i.e., produces a crop as good or better than would conventional methods) and because he takes seriously his role as steward of the land, and he cares about growing nutritious, good-tasting, safe food in a sustainable manner – is often frustrated by his inability to control experiments and quantify results. Scientists commonly study plants grown in greenhouses, in sterilized “soil,” under controlled conditions. Or animals raised in laboratories and fed measured amounts of food and drugs that has been subjected to careful chemical analysis.

That isn’t farming.

Weather affects crops. Variations in soil play a role. What has grown or been raised on the land in previous years? What about the health of pollinators in the vicinity? And that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the complex, interconnected, very real physical world of nature and what we do with it and to it.

The online author writes that GMO opponents do not worry about toxic chemicals used to grow food, that they should worry about poisons instead of GMOs. Where did he get such an idea? Who are these people who worry about one and not the other?

Clearly, the writer wants to frame a debate in which one must choose either genetically modified crops or heavy doses of agricultural chemicals., but this is an egregious false dilemma. (Note: another fallacy in reasoning.) Roundup-ready seeds genetically modified to be immune to herbicides have triggered speeded-up evolution of weeds, necessitating increased applications of chemicals to the fields, so it is not a case of choosing either genetic modification or chemicals: if you choose the GM seeds, you have also chosen the chemicals, in ever-increasing doses. Roundup has been used for forty years, he reminds us. Not, I would point out, at levels of application we are seeing today. A short history of weed control, including Roundup and its consequences, can be found here. The increase in tons applied over the last decade is astronomical.

Only in recent years has the place of mycorrhizal fungi in the production of humus even begun to get scientific attention. Australian soil ecologist Dr. Christine Jones, in an interview in the March 2015 issue of AcresUSA, discusses the carbon cycle and the nitrogen cycle as these are played out in the soil, the breaking-down process in compost, the building-up in formation of humus. Soil testing, long the gold standard to determine soil health, Jones says,

will only tell you what is available to plants by passive uptake. The other 97 percent of minerals – made available by microbes – will not show up on a standard test.

The kicker is that if the necessary microbes are present, minerals and trace elements not even present in fertilizers will be available to crops, but cultivation and chemical fertilizers and pesticides destroy the mycorrhizal networks. With graduate degrees (albeit in philosophy) from the University of Illinois, I was happy to see Jones referencing that university’s Morrow Plots, “the oldest continuously cropped experimental fields in the United States.” Beginning in 1955, U of I scientists began applying nitrogen and testing the soil:

They discovered that the fields that had received the highest applications of nitrogen fertilizer had ended up with less soil carbon – and ironically less nitrogen – than the other fields.

Hardly the result a fertilizer producer would be anxious to publicize. Then comes increasing soil compaction, loss of water-holding capability, more demand for irrigation, and increased soil erosion....

Also, nutrients present in food are not automatically available to those consuming it, either. Certain chemicals added to crops can bond two minerals together and make them inaccessible to the end consumer’s internal system.

Looking at rats in a laboratory eating two different diets for four weeks, all other things being equal, is such a distortion of the world in which plants and human and nonhuman animals live that it tells nothing about our ability to grow food and feed ourselves and remain healthy in the future. It’s complicated because it’s all connected – agriculture and food and health, chemicals in soil and in food, soil management and soil loss, microbes, pollinators, erosion, water supply -- and more. Initial increases in yields from GM crops looked good; over the longer term, the increases were lost. Now more herbicides are needed to control weeds, as GM seeds, lacking natural resilience, need chemical support. The chemical glysophate, Roundup’s main ingredient, is estrogen-sensitive, an endocrine disrupter, crosses the placental barrier, disrupts the gut microbiome, and causes necrosis in cells, among other things [Interview with André Leu in AcresUSA, , October 2014]. Sound safe to you?

And arguing against agricultural chemicals is not changing the subject from GMOs, as long as the latter are dependent, over the long term and increasingly, on the former.

It baffles me that otherwise intelligent people can be so lost in admiration for what they see as “science” that they label skeptics “unscientific,” “Luddites,” quacks,” “pseudo-environmentalists waging a leftist war on science,” etc.

Skepticism is scientific. Caution is scientific. Continued investigation before making illegitimately broad claims is scientific.

When the GMO issue comes up on Facebook, as it does repeatedly, I issue an open invitation to anyone in the area, either as a resident or a visitor, to drop by my bookstore and take the opportunity to read back issues of AcresUSA. In-depth interviews with scientists in the field, with organic practitioners of many years, with government and former government ag workers, etc. are eye-opening. And yet, so far, despite repeated invitations, the only person, ever, to take up my offer -- and he’s not even on Facebook -- has been my farmer friend. He is my age, no spring chicken, but he has an open mind. He follows up avenues of information. He continually questions – and he questions himself, too. He has what I call a truly scientific mind.

And he’s out on the front lines, too. In the field. Practicing rather than preaching. He doesn’t have time for blather.

The truth is that a massive experiment is already underway in our world, and every living thing, animal and plant, is a guinea pig in that experiment, and by the time the results are in, it will be too late to put the toothpaste back in the tube. As usual, to make use of another figure of speech all too often appropriate, we human beings, with our scientific hubris, are overdriving our headlights.

What do you expect from science? Its practitioners, as in any other field of human endeavor, are human beings, with agendas, biases, and blind spots. Scientific? How do you define it? 

---

I'll apologize for this post in that it is not a polished essay. It's summer, and between home and bookstore, mowing grass and selling books, making and cleaning up after meals and setting up and promoting author events, I am not at leisure during waking hours and have put this together in pieces, at odd moments. If I could write and edit myself and rewrite in my sleep, it be better, but it is what it is.

Earth Surfaces

Snow frozen rock-hard at sunrise

These early April mornings the topmost layer of snow (still ankle-deep or more in many places) is frozen to a hard crust. It’s hard enough to walk on, easily, with only the occasional surprising plunge of foot and leg precipitating a stumble or fall. During the day, sun and warmth do their work; like a retreating glacier, the snowpack gradually gives ground; and by early evening another six feet of last year’s sorry-looking vegetation has been exposed to view. Where snow still lies deep, it has the consistency of a slushie and begs to be kicked.

Standing water still freezing overnight, too

The basic soil type on my home ground is clay. With all the snow melting right now, water stands in temporary pools and lakes in field and orchard, and a miniature river, ephemeral, runs across my meadow. Runoff water is hurrying north to the little no-name creek that will carry it the last stretch west to Lake Michigan, while on the north side of the creek, water rushes south, tumbling down the soggy clay bank. All creeks are running high this spring, and there is still a lot of snow and ice left to melt, besides the usual April rainstorms.

Another thing I think about this time of year is “miniature geography,” as I called it in the past, although I’m now seeing it as miniature, speeded-up, fast-disappearing geology, as well. That second phrase hasn’t quite the same ring, but here are a couple of illustrations of what I'm talking about:

This snowbank built up over months by snowfall and road plow exhibits layering that reminds me of Upper Peninsula sandstone deposits, the banding in the stone along Lake Superior making apparent a laying down of sediment that occurred over vast periods of time. As warm weather and sunshine do their work of revealing the snow layers, they also, along with wind and rain, erode the bank. Sandstone erodes much more slowly, but wind and water are at work there, too.. Over on Karen Casebeer’s blog, you can see ferocious uplift and grinding of ice on Lake Michigan—again, similar to what happened with the earth’s crust long ago. Modern episodes like that, with earth rather than ice, we term disasters. Demonstrations in geology, just outside your door!

In my garden, rhubarb began to poke through a couple of days ago, as did daffodils under the silver maple tree. Soil is much on my mind in the spring.

It must be thirty years, maybe forty, since I first read Plowman’s Folly, by Edward H. Faulkner, a book that had such a profound effect on novelist Louis Bromfield that it changed the course of his life. Like Immanuel Kant when he read David Hume’s A Treatise on Human Nature and “awakened from his dogmatic slumbers,” Bromfield reading Faulkner experienced the epiphany of his lifetime and was inspired to return from France to his native Ohio, where, with royalties from his fiction sales, he bought up “wornout” farmland (Malabar Farm, now a state park) and return it to productivity. The methods Bromfield practiced on his land were called then the “New Agriculture.” “No crime is involved in plagiarizing nature’s ways,” wrote Faulkner in his little book, published in 1943 and destined to become a small classic in its field. In fact, he argued, nature’s ways are what farmers should have been following all along.

[I'm letting the foregoing stand as I wrote it, although I mistrusted my memory, and with good reason, as it turns out. Malabar Farm was already in operation when Faulkner's book came out. There was, however, a connection, as you can read here, and Bromfield did think highly of Faulkner's recommendations and practices.]

The importance of organic matter in holding soil moisture and preventing erosion has become well known in the decades that have passed since Faulkner’s book was first published, but I’m finding plenty of new food for thought in his argument, nonetheless. Take the matter of soil compaction. Faulkner’s objection to the moldboard plow is not, as one might assume or I might have misremembered, that it compacts the soil but that, in turning over the soil, it deposits organic surface matter below the surface. Organic matter at that level, he says, will pull moisture down and away from crop roots, while the smooth, bare soil surface the plow leaves, however beautifully friable it appears, will shed moisture, leaving crops thirsty and setting up conditions for erosion.

Is anyone still with me? Did you think soil compaction was a bad thing? Is Faulkner is saying it’s a good thing? Not compaction, but compression:

Compression was the principle upon which the marker worked. [This was a roller he invented for marking rows and spacing to tell him where to put his vegetable transplants.] Where the idea originated, I do not know. Perhaps it was the result of an illustration we used to see in one of our soil texts. The illustration was intended to show the student how a well prepared seedbed should look. The light color of the surface soil indicated that this loose, “well prepared” surface soil had been dried out by wind and sunshine—as is always true—even though the area presented was supposedly ideal for seed growth. Included in the picture was a heel print. The moist condition of this compressed spot, darker in color, proved that capillary water climbed the vertical column of soil immediately under it. The comparatively dry condition of the rest of the soil showed that, in the loose soil, the capillary connection with the deep underground water supply had been broken. Thirty years ago, the picture meant nothing more than a clean-cut photo of an exceptionally well prepared soil in good tilth (according to established standards). Fitted into the new scheme of soil management, it becomes a significant guide to better methods of planting seeds and transplanting plants. [The italics are my added emphasis.]

If there is even one person who reads this far and is fascinated by the claim that compressed soil is better for plants than loose, friable soil, I will be satisfied. If two people are fascinated, I’ll be downright thrilled!

Because, think about it—does anyone want to go to the trouble of double-digging if the practice is deleterious rather than beneficial? We’ve been told that soil has to be loose, has to be aerated, and here’s Faulkner saying, Hey! Nature doesn’t do it that way! Do not disturb! Or, at least, disturb the soil as little as possible, and after you’ve disturbed it, try to restore it, as much as possible, to its undisturbed state.

I’m thinking Aristotle here and the Golden Mean. Soil too loose to hold moisture can’t be good, but neither can soil compacted into rock. “Builder’s clay” is what Faulkner had to begin with in the yard of one new family house, and that took a long siege of amendments, physical and organic. Too compressed or not compressed enough are bad. What we want is the “just right” middle position. Yes, Goldilocks comes to mind, too.

Not all cultivation is plowing, and here’s a site that will help make various tillage distinctions clear for the uninitiated (nonfarmer).

The question of tillage and cultivation has not yet been settled, even among organic farmers, partly because no-till practices often involve heavy use of chemical herbicides. An article published not long ago in AcresUSA (November 2013, Vol. 43, no. 11), which is a factor in unwanted soil compaction.

Many farmers bought into no-till methods as a way to “save money.” What the abandonment of tillage saves in the beginning, though, can be offset by declining fertility. Long-term use of no-till methods, especially when heavy machinery wheels are used at planting and harvest times, can lead to a state of brick-like compaction. It is unlike anything anything in nature, except perhaps as a result of certain catastrophes such as meteorite strikes [emphasis added]. 

 Salts, whether naturally present in the soil or added as part of the fertilizer regime, provide an active bonding agent to stick the soil together. This, you see, is the age-old formula for making mortar. – Jeffery Goss, “Tillage Under Attack?”

Faulkner, it should be noted, was not an advocate of herbicides and even thought fertilizer unnecessary, if proper tillage and planting practices were followed. He did admit, however, that his own “research” was not controlled enough to deserve the name and that long-term studies needed to be done. Here’s a 2014 site I found with a lot of recent research on the subject. Time for me to stop blogging now and go read the studies....

But first a couple of reminders --

Reminder: A book that makes clear the relationship of soil health to every human being's health, Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us About Health and Healing, by Daphne Miller, M.D., is still being featured at Dog Ears Books.

Reminder: Poets Night Out in Traverse City is Sunday, April 27. And this is National Poetry Month, so I'll be getting to poetry with my next blog post.

Forest, Farm and Wildlife, From the Perspective of 100 Years Ago (More or Less)

The forest is as beautiful as it is useful. The old fairy tales which spoke of it as a terrible place are wrong. No one can really know the forest without feeling the gentle influence of one of the kindliest and strongest parts of nature. From every point of view it is one of the most helpful friends of man. Perhaps no other natural agent has done so much for the human race and has been so recklessly used and so little understood.

- A Primer of Forestry, Part I—The Forest, by Gifford Pinchot (1900)

The grasses are of great importance in our agriculture.... A feature of the grasses which makes them valuable pasture plants is the location of the growing point of the leaf. This is near the base, so that the tip may be grazed or clipped off several times and the leaf still continue to grow. The forage grasses add variety to the rotation, supplying crops which may be used as meadows or pastures, or short-season crops such as millet, which may be used to occupy the land when an earlier-planted crop fails. The perennial varieties add a mass of vegetable matter to the soil. They thus improve its physical condition and their decay increases the yield of annual crops which follow. They also form a cover which prevents the loss of fertility by washing and other means of erosion.

- Field Crops (revised), by A. D. Wilson & C. W. Warburton (1912, 1918, 1923)

I have twenty-seven guns—and I have used them all. I stand condemned as having done more than my share toward extermination. But that does not lessen the fact that I have learned, and in learning I have come to believe that if boys and girls and men and women could be brought into the homes and lives of wild birds and animals as their homes are made and their lives are lived we would all understand at last that wherever a heart beats it is very much like our own in the final analysis of things.

- James Oliver Curwood, in his preface to Baree, Son of Kazan (orig. pub.1917)