Four Dublin Snaps - 23rd Feb 2013

Number of Species from Regularly Monitored Taxa in the Chicago Wilderness Region

Work in Progress - I will try to get this finalized in the coming days.... still waiting for feedback from several folks.... I should be able to break out the insects and add more arthropod groups.

	Total	Native	Non Native
Plants	2968	1829	1139
Mammals	50	47	3
Birds	423	_	_
Fishes	164	146	18
Reptiles and Amphibia	60	_	_
Insects	20000+	_	_
Molluscs	41	38	3
Earthworms	12	0	12

Notes:

Plants: Swink, F and Wilhelm, G (1994) Plants of the Chicago Region.  Indiana Academy of Science; personal communication G Wilhelm (Conservation Design Forum) (2013).  Mammals: Greenberg, J A (2002) Natural History of the Chicago Region and http://www.mammalsociety.org/mammals-illinois.  The three non-native mammals in the region are Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus), Black rat (Rattus rattus), and the house mouse (Mus musculus).  Birds: Personal correspondence: Judy Pollock (Audubon Chicago Region) Geoffrey A. Williamson, Doug Stotz (The Field Museum) and Sheryl DeVore (2013). Fishes:  Personal communication: Philip Willink (The Field Museum) (2013); Reptiles and Amphibia: Greenberg, J (2002) A Natural History of the Chicago Region.  Karen Glennemeier (Audubon Chicago Region) counts 12 species of frogs and toads in this number. Insects: The number of species here is an approximation made by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.  Since Chicago has a high concentration of natural area remnants relative the state of Illinois, there is a probability that it will have many of the states species.  However, the number is possibly a low approximation of that total species tally, as many of insect groups are poorly known. See: http://www.dnr.state.il.us/publications/pdf/00000679.pdf Molluscs:  Barghusen, L; Bland, J.; Klocek,R,(2010), A Field Guide to the Freshwater Mussels of the Chicago Wilderness, Field Museum of Natural History, http://fm2.fieldmuseum.org/plantguides/guide_pdfs/386.pdf.  Earthworms: Personal correspondence, Kristen Ross (University of Illinois, Chicago), Lauren Umek (Northwestern University), and Basil Iannone (University of Illinois, Chicago).  

*In many cases the data is for Chicago area is defined as the 22 counties that surround Chicago, including 11 in Illinois, 7 in Indiana, 3 in Wisconsin, 1 in Michigan.

Love in a Time of Objects - A Valentine's Day Poem

Love in a Time of Objects

For Vassia

T

here will be time enough on other days

For talk of Love, and Faith,

And the Gods

And of What Now Must We Do.

Today I remember

How one summer’s evening

On the dunes

The retiring sun lit up your face.

And how you turned from it,

Closed your eyes

And let it burnish you.

And how your feet made

A soft impress upon the wet sand,

And how the birds parted as you walked

And how they closed back in behind you.

And how clay yields to you

Seasons matter to you

Sunflowers nod at you

And you, in turn, turn to them.

Like flame takes to grass

Like wind tugs the leaves

Like grass calls to fire

Like leaves wait for the wind

Like the moon plucks upon the oceans.

Like oceans spread beneath the moon.

One night on a sidewalk in New York

You pulled me to you

And put your lips on my lips

So fiercely that it made me dizzy.

Is all this between objects

Love?  Let’s not talk about that today

Let everything that can, incline towards everything else.

14^th Feb 2013

Lincoln Park 9 Feb 2013 (Mainly trees)

Spring Reading List (Provisional)

Human Impacts

The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon, Updated Edition Susanna B. Hecht, Alexander Cockburn

Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England by William Cronon

African Silences by Peter Matthiessen

The State of Our Chicago Wilderness: A Report Card on the Health of the Region's Ecosystems by Chicago Wilderness

Ireland Study Abroad

Connemara: Listening to the Wind (Connemara Trilogy 1) Tim Robinson (you will be expected to read Vol II in Ireland, Vol III when we return).

Travels in Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara by J. M. Synge

The Way That I Went by Robert Lloyd Praeger

Complete Irish Wildlife (Collins Complete Photo Guides) Introd by Derek Mooney

Killarney National Park: A Place to Treasure by Bill Quirke

Urban Ecology

Urban Ecology: Patterns, Processes, and Applications by (Editor) Jari Niemela

Reading Pack

Ecology’s Image Problem

 “There are tories in science who regard imagination as a faculty to be avoided rather than employed. They observe its actions in weak vessels and are unduly impressed by its disasters” —John Tyndall, 1870

In his 1881 essay on Mental Imagery, Francis Galton noted that few Fellows of the Royal Society or members of the French Institute, when asked to do so, could imagine themselves sitting at the breakfast-table from which presumably they had only recently arisen. Members of the general public, women especially, fared much better, being able to conjure up vivid images of themselves enjoying their morning meal. From this Galton, an anthropologist, noted polymath, and eugenicist, concluded that learned men, bookish men, relying as they do on abstract thought, depend on mental images little, if at all.

In this rejection of the scientific role for the imagination Galton was in disagreement with Irish physicist John Tyndall who in a 1870 address to the British Association in Liverpool entitled The Scientific Use of the Imagination claimed that in explaining sensible phenomena, scientists habitually form mental images of that which is beyond the immediately sensible. "Newton’s passage from a falling apple to a falling moon”, Tyndall wrote, “was, at the outset, a leap of the prepared imagination.” The imagination, Tyndall claimed, is both the source of poetic genius and an instrument of discovery in science.

The role of the imagination is chemistry, is well enough known. In 1890 the German Chemical Society celebrated the discovery by Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz of the structure of benzene, a ring-shaped aromatic hydrocarbon. At this meeting Kekulé related that the structure of benzene came to him as a reverie of a snake seizing its own tail (the ancient symbol called the Ouroboros).

Read on here

Living Large: One Large Species Doing Many Dangerous Things

Collectively we are a stunningly large species. A way of illustrating the global nature of our species comes from calculations of our own ecological footprint; Invariably we exceed the amount of productive land available to us. For example, the population of the Chicago Metropolitan Statistical Area contains around 9 million people. The amount of land required to sustain each person (the physical footprint of our buildings, land for agricultural productivity and so forth) is about 20 acres. Collectively this is 180,000,000 acres (281,250 square miles). Illinois's land area is 55,593 square miles, making the ecological footprint of Chicagoans five times larger than the state of Illinois. In fact Chicagoans do not live in Illinois - they live wherever their environmental shadow is cast. In turn, the US population is larger than the country which contains us, and the global population footprint is now larger than the globe. We can overshoot on the global scale only by drawing down on global environmental capital. And the planet may prove to be a rather taciturn banker when accounts come due.

The resource gluttony that got us to this point has had extravagant consequences on a global scale: despoliation of the biosphere, vast eutrophication of the hydrosphere, depletion of soils, and atmospheric changes resulting in climate disruption.

We are in the seemingly paradoxical position of not knowing the number of species on Earth to the nearest order of magnitude (are there 5 or 50 million?) but knowing that we have accelerated species loss to rates comparable to that of a mass extinction event. That extinction is the fate of all species is beside the point, since ultimately the loss is measured in repercussions to us. Not the least part of this is the implication for our ethical self-conception. Is it good to be asteroid-like, comparable to the one that took out the dinosaurs?