His panic came up like a flood,
So terrified to see me there.

His feathers splintered at his throat,
a bit of iridescent flair
that once lit up his tannish coat
now fluttered down between my boots,
and wings that bore him swift and sure
bent backward, broken at the roots.

Firm in my hand he softly stirred
and gazed at me, and gasped, and died.

So delicate, this broken bird,
passed quiet as a whispered word.
I laid him out and went inside.

Four hours on, the sky dark-blurred,
I went to look at him again
But stopped up short. Another bird
Was there with him, and still remains.

Is there a thing too small to grieve?
Is there a soul too small to mourn?
A partnership too small to cleave
in whispered, cooing words besworn?

I don’t think so. This looked like love
and she’s there still, that mourning dove.

One of the most beautiful and exhilarating storms I ever enjoyed occurred in December, 2017, when I happened to be exploring one of the tributary valleys of the White-Water River. The sky and the solar arrays and the wind turbine pylons had been thoroughly rain-washed and were dry again. The day was intensely pure, one of those incomparable bits of California winter, warm and balmy and full of white sparkling  insolation, redolent of all the purest influences of the spring, and at the same time enlivened with one of the most bracing intermittent wealths of wind resources conceivable. Instead of camping out, as I usually do, I then chanced to be stopping at the office of a major donor foundation. But when the storm began to sound, I lost no time in pushing out into the wind turbine facility to enjoy it. For on such occasions Nature, LLC has always something rare to show us, and the danger to life and limb is hardly greater than one would experience crouching deprecatingly beneath a moldy old tree.

It was still early morning when I found myself fairly adrift. Delicious sunshine came pouring over the hills, lighting the tops of the nacelles, and setting free a steam of summery renewable portfolio standard eligible power that contrasted strangely with the wild tones of the storm. The air was mottled with pine-siskins and violet green swallows, that went flashing past in the sunlight as the  spinning blades batted them. But there was not the slightest dustiness, nothing less pure than high-tensile-strength composite resin, and ripe power purchase agreements, and flecks of withered habitat. I heard birds falling for hours at the rate of one every two or three minutes; some splashed brightly, partly on account of the loose, water-soaked condition of the ground; others broken straight across, where a turbine blade tip had, by the deft hand of God, stroked the exact right  spot. The passionate gestures of the various birds made a delightful study. Young Sap Suckers, light and feathery as squirrel-tails, were knocked altogether  to the ground; while the grand old patriarchs, the eagles and the Con-Dors tried in a hundred storms, spiraled slowly from the site of impact, their long, arching wings streaming effluent on the gale, and every feather keening and shedding until its owner disappeared out of sight beyond the incidental take search radius. The white Pelicanus, with long plumes drawn out in level tresses, and underparts massed in a gray, shimmering glow, presented a most striking appearance as they struck the whirling blades.

But the turbines were now the most impressively beautiful of all. Colossal spires 350 feet in height waved like supple pinwheels chanting and bowing low as if in worship, while the whole mass of their long, tremulous scimitars were kindled into one continuous blaze of red warning light fire. The force of the gale was such that the most steadfast turbine of them all rocked down to its roots with a motion plainly perceptible when one leaned against it. Industry’s capture of Nature was holding high festival, and every carbon fiber of the most rigid giants thrilled with glad excitement.

I drifted on through the midst of this passionate music and motion, across many an access road, from ridge to ridge; often halting in the lee of a truck for shelter, or to gaze and listen. Even when the grand anthem had swelled to its highest pitch, I could distinctly hear the varying tones of individual turbines — GE, and Vesta, and Iberdrola, and Siemens — and even the infinitely gentle rustle of the withered red bromegrass at my feet. Each was expressing itself in its own way — singing its own song, and making its own peculiar gestures — manifesting a richness of variety to be found in no other factory I have yet seen. The California wind facilities are made up of a greater number of distinct makes and models than any other in the world. And in them we find, not only a marked differentiation into special nameplate capacities, but also a marked individuality in almost every turbine, giving rise to storm effects indescribably profitable.

Toward midday, after a long, tingling scramble through corpses of hazel and ceanothus, I gained the summit of the highest ridge in the facility; and then it occurred to me that it would be a fine thing to climb one of the turbines to obtain a wider outlook and get my ear close to the aeolian music of its avian radar beacons. But under the circumstances the choice of a turbine was a serious matter. After cautiously casting about, I made choice of the tallest of a group of Siemens that were installed close together like a tuft of dead grass. Though comparatively new, they were about 500 feet high, and their lithe, bony blades were rocking and swirling in wild ecstasy. Being accustomed to climb turbines in cleaning entrails from the blades, I experienced no difficulty in reaching the top of this one, and never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion. The slender blades fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, swirling round and round, tracing indescribable repetitions of  curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like an orphaned hawkling in an aerie.

In its sweeps my turbine blades described a radius of from fifty to sixty yards. I was safe, and free to take the wind into my pulses and enjoy the excited facility from my superb outlook. The view from here must be extremely beautiful in any weather. Now my eye roved over the puny hills and dales as over miles and miles of gold mine, and felt the red warning light flashing in ripples and broad swelling undulations across the blades from tower to tower, as the reflective carbon fiber was stirred by corresponding waves of air.  The quantity of light reflected from the turbine blades was so great as to make whole nacelles appear as if covered with blood, while the black shadows beneath the turbines greatly enhanced the effect of the blinking, hellish splendor.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
February 21, 2013

Contact: Rebecca Silver, 646-461-9831, Rebecca.Silver@Sierraclub.org

SIERRA MAGAZINE LAUNCHES FIRST-EVER
ALL-WIND ISSUE

March/April issue focuses on breakthroughs in
clean energy innovations;
profiles climbers cashing in on their rope skills
to keep America’s wind farms humming

(SAN FRANCISCO) – Today Sierra magazine, the official magazine of the Sierra Club, released its first-ever all-wind issue. In addition to features presenting clean energy innovations, all departments and recurring columns concentrate on production, athletics and products that harness the power of wind in new and pioneering ways.

For example, the article “Corporate Climbers” follows experienced climbers as they rappel down turbines at wind farms across the country.  Since rope access persists as the most cost-effective way to maintain the surfaces of wind turbines, mountaineers are trading granite walls for towering turbines, finding new heights to summit as part of the clean energy economy.

Meanwhile, wind production has reached critical mass, and is now propelling us into a world beyond fossil fuels.  Through rapid advances in turbine technology, wind already generates more than 10 percent of the electricity in ten states.  “Anywhere it Blows” breaks down the numbers, eradicates wind myths and showcases the farms leading the wind renaissance.

Finally, from windsurfing and sailing to paragliding and ice yachting, “Gust Junkies” are getting their adrenaline fix participating in extreme wind-driven sports.

For everyone else, Johnathon Allen found the coolest wind toys ever to help you tap into nature’s power supply.

About Sierra magazine
Sierra is the official publication of the Sierra Club, America’s largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization, with more than 2.1 million members and supporters nationwide. The Sierra Club works to safeguard the health of our communities, protect wildlife, and preserve our remaining wild places through grassroots activism, public education, lobbying, and litigation. For more information, please visit www.sierramagazine.com.

If you’re not a Californian, you can share it with someone who is.

Help End Bobcat Trapping in California.

Chris Clarke is an idiot, Bob Cats are a varmint species like coyote that quickly over populate and become an extreme issue with land owners that have pets or raise food animals or livestock. They are a completely renewable resource and are not threatened or endangered at all. In fact some locations the populations are so numerous there is a bounty for their capture and removal. Let the fish and wildlife agency manage these as they are not some unscientific emotional these are cute critters ideology.

I am particularly concerned about the strengthening whip hand enviroresourcists hold over the conservation movement. Enviro-resourcists are generally progressive-movement professionals who believe that conservation should be about people, not Nature.

They are found among staff and board members of grant makers, consulting and training groups that help conservation groups with “organizational effectiveness,” media consultants watering down the messages of conservation groups, new leaders and staff members of conservation groups motivated by ambition and lacking a gut feeling for wilderness, and in the ranks of anthropologists and other social scientists working for poverty alleviation. With a crowbar of financial support and organizational control, enviro-resourcists break into conservation groups and push them, including grassroots wilderness groups, into enviro-resourcism in these ways:

1. downplay Nature-for-its-own-sake values in favor of economic and other anthropocentric values as the reason for conservation;
2. replace strict protected areas, such as wilderness areas and national parks, with sustainable development, ecosystem management, “working” ranches, and extractive reserves;
3. “retire Cassandra” or downplay doom-and-gloom in favor of smiley-face optimism;
4. negotiate with other “stakeholders,” including anticonservationists, for “win-win” compromises for land management;
5. get measurable results, including the designation of new wilderness areas and other protected areas, even if they represent a net loss of wildness, and then proclaim unvarnished victory — Canadians seem particularly good at this; and
6. emphasize the health of the organization over its mission.

Transcript below the fold for my hard of listening friends.

As a lot of Radio Free Joshua Tree listeners may know already, bobcats are big news in this part of the desert these days. Local resident Tom O Key found a bobcat trap illegally placed on his property a couple weeks ago, and he let a bunch of his neighbors know about it, and the bobcat feces hit the alluvial fan. It turns out that “harvesting” — that’s what the bobcat trappers call it, “harvesting,” as though they were responsible for planting a crop — it turns out that “harvesting” bobcat pelts is a moderately lucrative pastime for a few so-called men in the Morongo Basin. They trap cats during the state’s legal season, which ended January 31. They kill the cats and sell their body parts, with pelts mainly going to China for the fur trade.

People here are angry. The bobcats here are a source of wonder and delight for many of us, a touchstone for a wild world that many of us see only rarely, through our human-filtered minds.

In decades of desert travel, living here and visiting when I couldn’t live here, I’ve seen only one wild bobcat. It burst out of a copse of trees, crossed a little road in front of me in broad daylight, looked at me blinking for a full minute when it got to the far side. It was an amazing moment. I think my mouth hung open for another full minute after the big cat slipped into the creosote and vanished.

And my natural inclination is to tell you where I saw that cat — it wasn’t that long ago, and it was an experience I’d like to share. But I can’t tell you where it was. As Joshua Tree folks learned from Steve Brown’s article in the SunRunner a couple months back, bobcat trappers and hunters pay close attention to those of us who love wildlife. They keep track of photos posted to Facebook and Twitter, figure out where the bobcat was and when, then use that information to set their traps. Sharing a photo with location information can mean a death sentence for the animal.

In essence, the trappers take our publicly shared joy in wild things and seize it. They privatize it.

There are so many little moments like that bobcat meeting in the desert, that bring wonder and astonishment, if you’re open to them. The drift of bighorn sheep around the corner of a cliff face, the whoosh of an unseen falcon past your head, the sudden electricity making the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end when a Mojave green rattlesnake buzzes at you from the next bend in the wash. And we desert-lovers, we’re story-making animals, It’s what we do. And when we take those stories — in pictures, text or speech — and we share them, those who would skin our desert and sell it are there, listening. They turn our common love of the wild things around us into cold hard cash in their own pocket, and they call that “love.”

I used to wonder whether the common disdain for the desert you find among many Americans could be cured with a little sitting. If you could bring them out here, the engineers and the bureaucrats who determine the fate of entire swathes of desert, the offroaders who insulate themselves from the desert they trample with noise and speed and dust and armor, the planners of airports and the reckless drivers desperate to get to the casino bar, if you could bring them out here and park them in the outback with a cushion and a bottle of water and just ask them to sit, would they feel a change growing in them? Would familiarity breed contentment with the desert as it is?

And then I remembered the seemingly endless human capacity for maintenance and repair of that shell of apathy that protects most of us from actual engagement with the world. I remember that each surveyor, each backhoe operator, each off-road vandal and petroglyph defacer will claim to love the desert. I remember the old Gary Larson cartoon with the two loggers eating lunch in a sea of stumps, one saying that he could never work in an office because he loves spending the day in the woods.

Men will follow bighorn rams quietly, sometimes for days, observing them and learning the subtleties of their behavior, claim to reach new heights of respect for their majesty and grace, and then they will shoot them. Seems some people can only appreciate beauty if they destroy it.

Bobcat trapping season is over for the year, but hunters can still take the cats legally through February. Our other common local predator, the coyote, can be hunted or trapped all year. And as anyone with a little background in ecology knows, hunting predators opens you up to a world of trouble.

You may have hear that some scientists expect Joshua trees to be extinct in the park here by the end of this century. This is as a result of hotter climate. There are a number of ways that warming climate will cause problems for Joshua trees here, but one big problem is the way small animals react to drought. Biologists have found that during dry spells, small animals like antelope squirrels and rabbits will get moisture by eating through Joshua trees’ bark to get to the green tissue beneath. Many trees in the park have been girdled all the way around their bases by these little gnawing animals. When a Joshua tree is girdled, its leaves no longer get water and nutrients from the roots. The tree can die.

This is a serious threat to Joshua trees, and as Joshua Tree National Park’s climate gets warmer, dry seasons will come more often, and rodents and rabbits will pose a greater threat to the trees. It’s not the rabbits’ fault: they’ll just be trying to survive.

Predators control the numbers of those rabbits and antelope squirrels. If you have bobcats and coyotes around to eat the little mammals, you have fewer little mammals to damage the trees. But get rid of those predators, and the prey overpopulates the habitat.

Sum it up this way: lose the bobcats and coyotes and we lose the Joshua trees. It’s a little bit more complex than that, but not by too much. Some of the Morongo Basin trappers claim to “harvest” up to five cats a night in season. That’s five cats a night whose great, great, great, great grandkittens won’t be around to help during the drought of 2025. We need to change the laws that allow this kind of trapping, and we need to do it now.