The Flowers of August

It’s called “whiplash weather” and that is certainly what’s happened where I live. I just don’t know if I should be complaining or not.

That’s because of the wildflowers.

An exceptional run of dry weather from January through June was followed by record-breaking rains in July, creating ideal conditions for an explosion of vegetation across the land in August, including lots and lots of wildflowers. Normally, I don’t very excited about flowers but this cornucopia was so unusual and uplifting I had to get my camera out and take a picture or two. The psychology wasn’t very deep: I was damn grateful to see them. Things were so grim at the end of June that I felt certain that most of the plants near our home had died. How wrong I was! The desert greenbelt were we walk has exploded in purple, yellow, white, pink, and orange.

While the relief was palpable in the area – we barely dodged a serious bullet for the moment – I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the whiplash effect. Scientists say this is exactly what we should expect under climate change: weather see-saws of increasingly extreme proportions. Indeed, a couple of years ago violent thunderstorms over two successive days dropped so much rain on the greenbelt that three-foot headcuts (dry waterfalls) were created in sixty-year old ranch roads where none had existed before!

But if this is whiplash, no one’s running to the Emergency Room.

Partly, that’s because we’re accustomed to edgy, ever-shifting climatic conditions in northern New Mexico. Often called a “high, cold desert,” the region is vulnerable to drought, even at 7000 feet. Prehistorically, not many people lived here and for good reason – there isn’t much water. Bouts of drought pushed aboriginal populations around, evidenced by the sheer quantity of prehistoric ruins in the region. When droughts struck hard, as they often did, people packed up and moved, following the water. Everything depended on moisture – the crops of native corn, beans, and squash, as well as game, fish, timber, springs – and wildflowers. Alternating rounds of scarcity and abundance ruled the lives of prehistoric peoples, giving them whiplash of a slower and perhaps more painful sort.

Over the past century or so, however, we’ve managed to inoculate ourselves against these see-saws. We built reservoirs on the meager rivers to trap the water; we dug wells into the ground and attached electric pumps in order to draw out precious water from the deep; and lately, we’ve inserted long metal straws into the Rio Grande and have begun sucking on their ends like someone trying to siphon gasoline from a car’s tank with a plastic hose. It’s worked, at least temporarily. The upshot has been a lack of serious whiplash, though we’ve had to swerve sharply a few times to avoid a bad accident. We’ve become so accustomed to this state of affairs, in fact, that we believe a lack of neck pain is normal, even in a high, cold desert.

At the same time, pain or not, we still pray for rain. We know our reservoirs are still too low, our aquifers are still not producing like they once did, the Rio Grande is still anemic, and the monsoon rains – until this year – were still meager. We know we’re still in a drought. Instead of chile green and turquoise blue, the official colors of New Mexico have become the deep browns and vivid reds of weekly federal drought maps, colors which covered nearly all of the state in mid-June like spilled paint. Then the colors were diluted by the extraordinary rains of July. Now we’re awash in purple, yellow, white, pink, and orange.

All of this will cause many residents here to shrug their shoulders and say “Welcome to New Mexico” – and they would be right. Unfortunately, the rains have largely stopped. August has been dry – and the federal drought map for the region this week is covered in deep brown and red again. More whiplash, I fear.

So, should I cheer or jeer the wildflowers?

Cheer, of course. They’re just lovely. Here’s a photo of purple verbena:   

 Whiplash weather is hard on the carbon cycle as well.

It should not surprise anyone to learn that the flow of carbon from the atmosphere to the soil via green plants and back into the atmosphere again happens more slowly in arid environments than temperate ones, due to slower plant growth, and it should be even less surprising to learn that the cycle slows way down in a drought. If plants aren’t growing, they’re not cycling carbon very much – and if they’re dormant (or dead, god forbid), they’re not cycling it at all.

While this may be intuitive, there’s a major new scientific paper out in Nature that confirms it. Titled ‘Climate Extremes and the Carbon Cycle’ the authors of the study, according to a news release, “have discovered that terrestrial ecosystems absorb approximately 11 billion tons less carbon dioxide every year as the result of the extreme climate events than they could if the events did not occur. That is equivalent to approximately a third of global CO₂ emissions per year.”

The study found that one particular type of extreme weather event is worse than the others: drought. It reduces the amount of carbon absorbed by forests, grasslands and agricultural land significantly. “We have found that it is not extremes of heat that cause the most problems for the carbon balance, but drought,” wrote Markus Reichstein, the lead author. “Drought can not only cause immediate damage to trees; it can also make them less resistant to pests and fire. It is also the case that a forest recovers much more slowly from fire or storm damage than other ecosystems do.”

Ditto for grasslands – which has important implications for carbon ranching. Not only does the carbon cycle work more slowly in a drought, if grass plants die then CO₂ in the soil will eventually reenter the atmosphere via microbe respiration and organic decomposition (albeit slowly in arid lands). This becomes a self-reinforcing loop: more climate change = more extreme weather = more droughts = reduced carbon cycling = more CO₂ being released = more climate change.

No one said this was going to be easy!

Reichstein went on to say that the ongoing drought in the Southwest could be particularly damaging to the United States’ overall efforts to mitigate climate change. In other words, if we’re banking on arid and semi-arid rangelands to soak up a lot of carbon dioxide in future decades, we’d better lower our expectations. Here’s how Reichstein put it: “I think counting on the biosphere’s ability to absorb carbon is a risky thing because you don’t know how long it will continue to take up carbon dioxide that we emit.”

While all of this seems rather self-evident, two thoughts come to mind. First, don’t forget the wildflowers. There’s been a decent amount of carbon cycling in the past month where I live, even in a drought. It is evidence of nature’s resilience. We can’t just throw in the towel. Nature bounces back, especially if managed properly. In fact, managing land for the other benefits of carbon sequestration, such as improved water cycling, should be the primary focus of our work. Mitigation of climate change is a co-benefit of our management, not vice versa.

Second, we must never take our eyes off the prize: reducing greenhouse gas emissions. I like what climatologist Michael Mann wrote in response to the Nature study – it’s “another sober reminder that uncertainties in the science of climate change are a reason for concern rather than complacency.”

So, take time to stop and smell the wildflowers, as I did this month, but don’t allow their pretty colors to instill a sense of complacency. Whiplash, after all, can cause a serious injury, even if it takes a while to become evident.

Here’s a photo of poor carbon cycling near where I live:

For more info on the study see: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v500/n7462/full/nature12350.html

More 2% Solutions

Here are two more 2% Solutions – short case studies of practices that soak up CO₂ in soils, reduce energy use, sustainably intensify food production and increase water quality. The collection is available at: http://www.awestthatworks.com

Rooftop Farming

I had never climbed three flights of stairs before to visit a farm.

That’s what I did after emerging from a subway station in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and walking along Eagle Street to a warehouse owned by a television company called Broadway Stages. On the roof I saw hundreds of vegetables set in neat rows of dark, rich soil. Walking to the edge, I saw the East River, and beyond it a sweeping view of mid-town Manhattan and the Empire State Building.

Wow.

I had come to Eagle Street Farm to see the nation’s first commercial rooftop farm in action and meet Annie Novak, the charismatic co-founder of Eagle Street – a Chicago girl who grew up reading Vogue magazine with dreams of “being fabulous” in New York City, who became a fabulous rooftop farmer.

The week after graduating college, Annie landed an internship that turned into a seasonal job at the New York Botanical Garden teaching children how to grow food. In the years that followed, she balanced her city job with farming upstate, starting a nonprofit organization, and dabbling in the restaurant business. Eagle Street happened when the owners of Broadway Stages decided to install a green roof. Originally, the plan had been to create an ornamental plant nursery, but Annie and co-founder Ben Flanner convinced the owners to give veggies a chance instead. They added compost to the soil mix, planted crops they knew were tolerant to heat and water stress, organized volunteers, studied weather forecasts, and crossed their fingers. It worked.

Today, the farm grows a wide range of crops, specializing in heat-loving and dry-tolerant chiles. The farm also keeps bees, rabbits, and hens. It sells its produce on-site and to local restaurants.

It hasn’t all been a bed of roses, however. Wind storms and unseasonable heat have bedeviled both the veggies and their handlers at times. Space is a limitation – she can’t expand the farm even though she would very much like to. Fertilizer was another challenge, since it needs to be hauled up the stairs every time it is needed. This challenged was solved when Annie introduced rabbits and chickens to the farm, which she calls “my little poop machines.”

Then there was the pollinator problem.

“Because there aren’t a lot of green spaces in the city,” she said, “we don’t get a lot of pollinators and that’s a bigger issue than most people think.” They resolved to start growing their own bees, but quickly learned that Mayor Giuliani had made bee-keeping illegal (putting them in the same category as poisonous snakes). Eventually, new regulations were passed allowing apiaries, but then a cold winter killed all of Eagle Street’s bees.

The economics of rooftop farming are a challenge as well. The for-profit farm relies on value-added products like its hot sauce (called Awesome Sauce) to raise the $1.50-$3 per square foot value needed to farm unprocessed crops. At 6,000 square feet with no room to grow, farming at that scale makes just enough income to support a few part-timers, management included.

Given the farm’s small size, the most frequent question Annie gets is ‘can New York City feed itself?’ Her response is unexpected: ‘does New York want to?’ She thinks not. “The quality of our air and water is protected by upstate organic growers,” she said. It’s important to her that farmers, and the watershed in which they work, be supported by New York City residents.

Eagle Street has inspired others to give rooftop farming a try.

In 2010, a group of young farmers formed a for-profit organization called the Brooklyn Grange and opened what has become the world’s largest rooftop farm, totaling 2.5 acres (108,000 square feet). They grow more than 40,000 lbs of organic produce a year. Their goal is to create a fiscally sustainable model for urban agriculture while producing healthy food from what they call the “unused spaces of New York City.”

The work of Brooklyn Grange has quickly expanded to include: (1) egg-laying hens; (2) a commercial apiary and bee-breeding program (for city hardiness); (3) a farm training program for dozens of interns; (4) hosting thousands of New York City youth for tours and workshops; (5) launching the New York City Honey Festival in 2011; and (6) providing a unique setting for corporate retreats, dinner parties, and weddings.

And tackle environmental challenges peculiar to metropolitan areas. With a grant from New York’s Green Infrastructure Stormwater Management Initiative, Brooklyn Grange sited its second farm on the 65,000 square foot roof of a building in the historic Brooklyn Navy Yard, which allows them to manage over one million gallons of stormwater a year.

There’s another environmental benefit: the 2.5 acres of soil under management of the Grange are soaking up atmospheric CO₂. It isn’t much, but it’s a start – which raises a question: how many rooftop farms could New York City accommodate?

In 2013, rooftop farming spread to Boston with the launch of Higher Ground Farm occupying 40,000 square feet on top of the Boston Design Center, becoming the world’s second-largest rooftop operation. The brainchild of two young farmers, the mission of Higher Ground is similar to what Annie Novak and the folks at Brooklyn Grange pioneered: (1) make a dent in the urban heat island effect with a green roof; (2) help with stormwater management (3) reduce carbon in the air and improve air quality; (4) increase access to fresh, healthy food; (5) provide habitat for biodiversity and habitat; and (5) provide educational opportunities as well as many other community co-benefits.

“When I’m on a rooftop all I’m doing is listening to the sound inside a tiny seashell and trying to hear a larger ocean,” Annie said. “If you live in a city, take advantage of it. Soak up the street smarts and the rush of city living that also embraces outdoors and fresh tomatoes. You have to grow a small plot with a big picture in mind.”

Here’s a view of Eagle Street Rooftop Farm:

A Carbon Sweet Spot

For a minute, I thought I had stepped into that scene from Lawrence of Arabia where T.E. Lawrence, approaching the Suez Canal, sees a ship sailing across the sand. I had parked on a levee at the north end of Twitchell Island, in the middle of the great Sacramento-San Joaquin river Delta, east of San Francisco. In front of me was prime farmland and just beyond a slight rise in the distance I saw a big cargo tanker plowing its way slowly across a field – plowing the middle of the San Joaquin River, of course.

I didn’t drive to Twitchell Island to see farmland, however. I wanted to see a carbon sweet spot in action. Sweet spots are where big things happen in small places for a minimum amount of effort. On Twitchell, a whole suite of big things had happened on just fourteen acres in only a few years with very little cost.

The Delta was once a vast freshwater marsh thick with tule reeds, cattails, and abundant wildlife. At least six thousand years old, the marsh caught sediment that washed down annually from the Sierra Nevadas, building up soil that eventually extended sixty feet deep in places. When the delta began to be settled in the 1860s, following California’s famous Gold Rush, farmers couldn’t believe their luck. Since the soil had been often submerged – a consequence of flat terrain, frequent flooding, and tidal action – it had essentially become peat, rich in carbon and other organic minerals. Crops grew vigorously in the rich soil. Soon, a new gold rush was on – to claim land in the Delta, drain it, and grow row crops by the bushel-load.

Fast-forward to today, and the Delta is in big trouble. Innumerable ditches and levees have broken up the marsh into 57 separate islands, 98% of which are now below sea level. Pumps work continuously to keep the roots of the crops dry enough to grow and be harvested. Salt intrusion from the Bay is creeping inland, threatening not only the crops but the drinking water supply for two-thirds of all Californians and much of its agriculture. Not many people know that central California is a vast plumbing project, cris-crossed by a complex network of canals, ditches, and pumping stations. And most of the water in this plumbing system originates in the southern part of the Delta.

However, the islands are sinking, sea level is rising, and the 1100 miles of levees that protect it all are feeling the stress, literally. It’s called ‘subsidence’ and it places tremendous hydrostatic pressure on the levees, requiring constant maintenance – and creating perpetual anxiety. What if the levees were breached by a massive flood? What if salt water poured through, ruining crops and drinking supplies?

In an attempt to alleviate these worries, a group of scientists with the U.S. Geological Service in 1997 came up with a novel idea: employ nature, not technology, to reverse the subsidence. Here was their bright idea: when the early farmers drained the Delta they exposed the peat soil to the atmosphere, causing the organic material – previously under water – to oxidize rapidly. The carbon in the soil literally blew away, causing the land to compact and subside over time. That’s how the islands ended up below sea level – as much as 25 feet in some places! The scientists wondered if this process could be reversed? In other words, could the land be built back up if the marsh ecology, including periodic flooding, could be resurrected?

To find out, they implemented an experiment on two 7-acre, side-by-side plots of farmland adjacent to a ditch that bisected Twitchell Island. They flooded the western plot to a depth of 25cm, and the eastern plot to 55cm. Tules were planted in a small portion of both plots. By the end of the first growing season, cattails had colonized both plots (the seeds arriving on the wind), which provided a screen for other plants, including duckweed and mosquito fern. Then things really took off. After just a few short years, and annual managed flooding, the western plot had developed a dense canopy of marsh plants, as did the eastern plot, though it maintained some open water.

Then they took measurements of the soil and were amazed to discover that after seven years the soil in both plots had risen 10 inches – the result of 15 tons of plant material growing and dying per acre per year. This answered their question: subsidence could be reversed by returning natural marsh processes to the land.

But the good news was just beginning. The researchers next tested the amount of CO₂ that had been sequestered in this new soil as a result of their experiment. They suspected that 10 inches of dense, carbon-rich peat soil likely soaked up a lot of atmospheric CO₂ – and they were right. In fact, as much as 25 metric tons per acre per year were sequestered in the study plots, according to their analysis. In comparison, a typical passenger vehicle emits 5 metric tons of CO₂ per year. The fourteen acres in the study plots sequestered the equivalent emissions of 70 passenger vehicles per year! And that doesn’t even count the CO₂ emissions eliminated by not farming the land. And that doesn’t count all the other ecosystem services generated by a functioning marsh, including water purification and wildlife habitat.

The researchers called what they did a “carbon-capture farm” and hoped that the project would demonstrate that it is highly feasible to use managed wetlands to sequester carbon and reduce subsidence simultaneously. The key word is managed, which raises another whole set of questions, especially about working at scale.

Although the specifics of this project are likely limited to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, it is nonetheless a very good example of a sweet spot. On just fourteen acres, the project demonstrated how to (1) reverse subsidence; (2) reduce the risk of levee failure; (3) sequester a lot of carbon; and (4) provide wildlife habitat, especially for birds on the Pacific flyway.

Sweet spots are important literally and figuratively for what they can do for the land, and for what they can teach us. They’re not a mirage, like a ship in a field. They’re all around us, if we know where to look.

Here’s a graphic of C banking courtesy of the Bay Area News Group:

The Rains of July

Last week I relearned an important lesson: life is a force to be reckoned with.

Returning to New Mexico from a nearly two-week canoeing adventure in northern Minnesota with my son and his Boy Scout Troop, I couldn’t believe what I saw: the color green – everywhere! It had rained so much during July that the land around Santa Fe had exploded in green. A lot of it is annual weeds, including an amazing amount of purslane, but a lot of it is perennial grass too. This was amazing news for two reasons. First, New Mexico is an arid place and we don’t normally get a lot of “green-up” during the summer, but the amount of vegetation that greeted me last week was as much as I’ve seen in twenty-one years of living here. 

Second, six weeks ago I thought all our grass was dead.

It had been a bad year for moisture. According to NOAA, the region was deep in the grip of an “exceptional” drought that began in 2012. Other agencies said the prospects for summer monsoon rains were bleak. I believed them all – that’s because the land surrounding our house certainly looked like it was suffering. Very few weeds had come up, the grass plants showed no sign of life and winds kicked up a fine dust from the trails near where we live – something I had not seen before. The color green was conspicuously missing and I began to fret that we’d never see it again given the dire warnings about hotter and drier conditions prevailing in the Southwest due to climate change. I wondered: was this the beginning of the end?

Then it began to rain. And rain. And rain.

The monsoons arrived in force at the end of June and it rained nearly every evening in July, it seemed. By the end of the month, according to weather data, the amount of rain that had fallen was double the average for July. In the mountains above Santa Fe, the amount was seven times as much. And many of the storms were monsters, causing bad floods as a result. On July 27^th, for example, the entire town of Corrales, located near Albuquerque, was flooded by a massive storm. The flooding was so intense and so widespread across the state, in fact, that Governor Susanna Martinez issued an executive order on July 31^st making emergency funding available for flood assistance. Talk about climate whiplash!

And it’s still raining.

Looking at the land, the contrast with mid-June is stark. I couldn’t believe my eyes as I flew into the Albuquerque airport – there was a carpet of green across the land as far as I could see. Just a few weeks earlier I had been lamenting to family and friends about the Dust Bowl-like conditions in the area. On a drive to Cochiti Lake, south of Santa Fe, to train for our canoeing odyssey, I had to avert my eyes. Hammered by overgrazing and drought, the land looked dead. It was depressing and my son did his best to cheer me up. Today, the same stretch of land is covered with green fuzz – the color of life.

What does this all mean and what does it tell us about the future?

First, it’s a testament to the resiliency of nature, grass especially, and the power of life. This is important because when we discuss the future, especially under climate change, we tend to overlook nature’s intrinsic and powerful capability to ‘bounce back.’ That’s what I was doing until the rains came. I assumed the grass was dead, just as I had assumed that the drought was here to stay. Predictions of a permanent Dust Bowl for the region, frequently cited in the media, looked to be true – and early! I had already started the grieving process.

Then it rained. And green returned, reminding me that life will do its best to find a way. Nature is stronger and more resilient than we think, which is good news. This is not to say that there won’t be changes or that thresholds and tipping points won’t be breached in the long run under a changing climate – they will, most likely. It just means nature is tougher than we give it credit. Let’s not despair so quickly, in other words. Where there is green, there is hope.

Second, we need to be careful about our messaging. Although the rains made a dent in the drought, we’re still a long way from “normal” amounts of precipitation for the year. To the public, however, it certainly looks like the drought is over. But what about all those gloomy predictions of a hotter and drier future? In June, they looked to be accurate (as letters-to-the-editor to our local paper pointed out); but by August, not so much. Unfortunately, this adds to the confusion that much of the public feels about climate change – what they hear and what they see sometimes don’t mesh, and when they don’t doubt is sowed.

It’s a tricky situation. Heavy rains and flooding can be a sign of a changing climate – though both conditions can be considered ‘normal’ in northern New Mexico – but they also make the land turn green. One is bad, the other good – all from the same source. We have to be careful about crying wolf as a consequence. While it’s necessary to raise alarms in order to get people’s attention, but it also sets up the crier to look like a fool. I’m certain many residents here are looking at their windows right now and thinking “If this is climate change, bring it on!”

So, it’s complicated. That doesn’t help much. It doesn’t motivate people to action, but it’s the reality of the situation. Life is a force. Nature heals as it destroys, which means it will continue to defy our need to pigeonhole it, control it, or grieve for it. We’ll just have to deal with it – and figure out a way to explain it to the public.

In the meantime, I’m going to outside and enjoy the sudden burst of colorful wildflowers among the grasses and weeds taking place – at least until I start sneezing from all the pollen!

A New Mexico thunderstorm: