It’s about dancing with systems

 One of the nice things about below average temperatures in June is that the bread baking season continues to warm the house and make it smell good. Come late July and August, the heat and humidity diminish the need for taking a chill off and offer a chance the baker may get even more light-headed than usual if he overdoes the amount of baking. Then again, June’s below average temperatures mean the furnace is off and it takes much longer for the dough to rise. During the actual heating season I use the upstairs bathroom, with the door closed, as a proofing room. That doesn’t work worth a damn when there’s no heat or the AC is on.

beardtongue (Penstemon grandiflorus)

Photo by J. Harrington

The beardtongue will be in bloom later today or tomorrow. Then we’ll be “in the pink.” [Couldn’t resist.] Using the dates on photos from other years, those blooms are just about on schedule. Climate scientists have alerted us to the likelihood of greater variability and intensity of storm events. I don’t recall seeing anything about greater variability in seasonal events due to climate weirding. I suspect I may have a better feel for that in a few weeks because I’m now in the midst of doing some stormwater research to see what, if anything, is projected as future “design storms.” In that process, I may well stumble into some descriptions of seasonal variability effects.

I’m not an engineer, but I’ve worked with several. As I understand it, the current “period of record” for stormwater management is 1971 - 2000 for most of Minnesota. I’ll look for updates because I believe that the variability of storms and precipitation patterns have increased over the past few decades. Is it possible to assess if the climate has become a nonlinear, complex, adaptive system displaying emergent properties? Has the climate always been such a system but in a more stable pattern? A University of California, Berkeley, seminar notes:

The environment is a classic complex system, composed of multiple interacting “agents,” or variables, that cause emergent behavior. Applying a complex-systems approach to environmental problems such as climate change, landscape evolution, or societal-ecological sustainability can yield valuable insight into risk, potential drivers of change, likely outcomes of perturbation, and whether it is even possible to forecast or manage the system.

I wish I’d had this kind of insight when I first began working on environmental planning and management. At least I think I do. At the moment I’m trying to sort out, to paraphrase an old saying, if we’re hunting gnats with an elephant gun, or elephants with a gnat gun. The whole question of restoration of an urban trout stream is looking more interesting by the week, day, hour. Stay tuned.

My Debt

Jane Hirshfield - 1953-

Like all
who believe in the senses,
I was an accountant,
copyist,
statistician.

Not registrar,
witness.

Permitted to touch
the leaf of a thistle,
the trembling
work of a spider.

To ponder the Hubble’s recordings.

It did not matter
if I believed in
the party of particle or of wave,
as I carried no weapon.

It did not matter if I believed.

I weighed ashes,
actions, 
cities that glittered like rubies,
on the scales I was given,
calibrated
in units of fear and amazement.

I wrote the word it, the word is.

I entered the debt that is owed to the real.

Forgive,
spine-covered leaf, soft-bodied spider,
octopus lifting
one curious tentacle back toward the hand of the diver
that in such black ink
I set down your flammable colors.

—2018

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