chicago and the white pines

"Toward the end of his life, Isaac Stephenson, one of the most successful of the Marinette-Menominee lumbermen, would write in his autobiography,

The habitual weakness of the American people is to assume that they have made themselves great, whereas their greatness has been in large measure thrust upon them by a bountiful providence which has given them forests, mines, fertile soil, and a variety of climate to enable them to sustain themselves in plenty...

From the wealth of nature, Americans had wrung a human plenty, and from that plenty they hadbuilt the city of Chicago. Chicago's relationship to the white pines had been exceedingly intricate, emerging from ecological and economic forces that for a brief time had come together into a single market, a single geography.The tensions in that market and that geography finally destroyed the distant ecosystem which had helped create them - but by then it no longer mattered. Perhaps the greatest irony was that by surviving the forests that had nurtured it growth, Chicago could all too easily come to seem a wholly human creation."

-William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis

Cyrille Weiner - ‘La Fabrique du pré’

Feral landscapes on the periphery, Paris, France.

[Urbanautica]

deer composting

I was looking through the New York State Department of Transportation's environmental design guidelines when I came across the Hudson Valley region's special pilot guidelines on deer composting. With a growing deer population and increasing congestion, disposal of roadkill has become a pressing logistical problem (local rendering plants are apparently also shutting down). The solution is to simply dump the deer carcasses into a compost bin and use the compost a few months later on DOT right of ways. It's a fascinating document, and I'm now keyed in to a growing national trend. 

mummichogs

Currently reading environmental impact statement documents for the Oak Point Link, and mummichogs repeatedly came up. One of the hardiest fish species in the northeastern United States, mummichogs may be the only fish species present in heavily polluted waters. 

The reports I'm reading hold out little hope for the Harlem River (it's amazing how much differently we perceive our urban waterways today) and point to the abundance of mummichog in its waters as a symptom of its highly degraded nature.