Charlie LeDuff Canoes the Rouge River

This video is a terrific little piece of local reportage and public history. Charlie LeDuff is a legend in Detroit, where he is known for such reporting as Waiting for the Detroit Police and Meals on Wheels, Charlie LeDuff Eats Cat Food. In this video he explores Detroit's urban Rouge River, supposedly the most polluted in the country. It is a trip through history, as well as sewage.

The Rouge River may be the worst-polluted urban river in the U.S., but it is by no means the only one, and I think this exploration could be replicated in many American cities. In Hartford, two explorers have documented the underground Park River (video here) for example. And here is a little news video about kayaking the LA River (and getting arrested for the effort).

What lost or neglected streams and rivers would you like to explore (or have someone else explore!) in your community? What historical stories would it tell?

Lantern Slide Shows of Washington State: 1910-1939

Here is a fun image collection from the Washington State Digital Archive: Lantern Slide Shows from the Washington Department of Conservation from between 1910 and 1939. [Unfortunately I cannot link directly to the images--you will need to go to the DA site, then Keyword Search => choose "Photographs" from the drop-down menus => then under "Record Series" select "Show All Records."] These arresting images show Washington State at a pivotal time in the decades just before the Great Depression. We see modern scenes of battleships in Seattle Harbor, images of farming, and early highways along with beautiful scenes of nature across the state. (To the left we see Monroe Street Bridge in Spokane.)

These slides were made for use with an early version of the modern slide projector, the "magic lantern." The picture of the magic lantern to the right is from this page at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, which provides this helpful description of the devices:

Magic lanterns are an early equivalent of today's slide projectors, with a few important differences. First, magic lanterns used fire instead of electric bulbs to illuminate the slides. A second difference was the shape of the slides. Today's slides are often made of lightweight, thin plastic or glass, and come in single frames. Magic lantern slides came in strips of large, bulky pieces of glass held together with metal or wood. They often contained mechanical features that allowed limited movement of one or more slides within the projector, a feature no longer found on modern slide projectors. Lastly, many magic lanterns could display images of greater complexity than today's slide projectors.

The slides in the Digital Archive Collection feature many interesting and historically important scenes from early 20th century Washington. And many are by Asahel Curtis. Asahel was the brother of infamous photographer Edward Curtis and an important figure in his own right--but that is a subject for another post. Here are a few of my favorites of these slides:


Cattle herd at Grand Coulee:

This image has a wonderful 19th-century feel to it and is a reminder that mush of Washington State was still very rural and undeveloped in the early 20th century.


Alhambra Cabins, Soap Lake:

I love this picture of early automobile tourism!



In the loggers wake, clear cut debris:

There are a whole series of these illustrating environmental degradation, which is quite surprising for a set of slides produced by the state government.


Speed Boat Racing, Lake Chelan

The boat in the center has an almost 3D effect.

H.C. Bohlke with poultry at Grandview

Finally, a boy and his chicken:


There are over 250 of these wonderful images at the Washington State Digital Archives, so come pay us a visit!

Henry David Thoreau, Climatologist

A fasinating article from the New York Times about a group of researchers using Thoreau's journals to map climate change:

"On average, common species are flowering seven days earlier than they did in Thoreau’s day, Richard B. Primack, a conservation biologist at Boston University, and Abraham J. Miller-Rushing, then his graduate student, reported this year in the journal Ecology . . . 27 percent of the species documented by Thoreau have vanished from Concord and 36 percent are present in such small numbers that they probably will not survive for long. Those findings appear in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“It’s targeting certain branches in the tree of life,” Dr. Davis said. “They happen to be our most charismatic species — orchids, mints, gentians, lilies, iris.”

Of the 21 species of orchids Thoreau observed in Concord, “we could only find 7,” Dr. Primack said."

(Photograph of Walden Pond from the Walden Woods Project website.)

NPR: Eroded Oregon Coast Yields Once-Sunken Surprises

NPR: Eroded Oregon Coast Yields Once-Sunken Surprises: "Shipwrecks, ghost forests of tree stumps thousands of years old and brilliant red formations have all been uncovered this winter along the Oregon coast after severe storms led to massive erosion."

It seems as if this winter's storms have severely eroded sections of the Oregon Coast, revealing not only ancient stumps but shipwrecks and even some Civil War-era cannons:

Visualizing Man's Impact on the Oceans

A Global Map of Human Impacts to Marine Ecosystems: "The goal of the research presented here is to estimate and visualize, for the first time, the global impact humans are having on the ocean's ecosystems. Our analysis, published in Science, February 15, 2008, shows that over 40% of the world's oceans are heavily affected by human activities and few if any areas remain untouched."

This report is from the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), which "supports cross-disciplinary research that uses existing data to address major fundamental issues in ecology and allied fields, and their application to management and policy." What makes me post it here is the innovative way the NCEAS presents its data as a Google Earth layer. Here is the KML file: Marine Impacts KML.

(via MetaFilter)

A Mining Town With a Bleak Past Starts to Blossom - New York Times

A neat NY Times article about the revival of Kellogg Idaho where buyers of second homes are injecting new life into a depressed former mining community: "Night-life decisions in Kellogg are basic and limited. If you smoke, grab a drink at Dirty Ernie’s. If you don’t, try the Jackass Saloon, where city council campaigns can start over frosty mugs of microbrews. Most of Uptown Kellogg has yet to recover from the economic shock of the 1980s and 1990s, with several storefronts and historic buildings still boarded up. Then there are the poisonous metals . . . " (The picture on the left is of the smelter at the Bunker Hill Mine.)

The whole Silver Valley is a fascinating study in mining, the environment, and modern redevelopment in the west. The valley boasts the Cataldo Mission, the oldest building in Idaho, and was part of the route for the Mullan Road, an important early transportation route. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the boom and eventually bust of a series of deep silver mines in the valley, which left behind one of the larger Superfund sites in the nation. Yet, despite the widespread lead contamination, the area is also one of the most beautiful in the Pacific Northwest, and has fantastic recreational opportunities. One of the neatest examples of this redevelopment is the Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes bicycle path project (photo on right) which encased 72 miles of lead contaminated railway line in an impervious clay cap and put a stunning bicycle path on top of it.

Here also is an NPR story about the revival of the Silver Valley, and a an article from Boise State University, "Kellogg Redefined: A Mining Town Reinvents Itself."

Penalty for logging 700 year old cedars less than 10 years

A sad story from the Seattle PI: Penalty for logging 700 year old cedars less than 10 years: "The crime seems so audacious: chopping down 27 old growth cedars on public land. The trees measured up to five feet in diameter. They were between 400-700 years old." The trees in question were an isolated stand in eastern Washington along Lake Wentachee.

Isolated now--the first white settlers to the Northwest found infinite forests of such behemoths, and bigger. I am reminded of a delightful passage in Alexander Ross' Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon Or Columbia River: "There is an art in felling a tree as well as in planting one but unfortunately none of us had learned that art and hours together would be spent in conjectures and discussions one calling out that it would fall here another there in short there were as many opinions as there were individuals about it and at last when all hands were assembled to witness the fall how often were we disappointed the tree would still stand erect bidding defiance to our efforts while every now and then some of the most impatient or fool hardy would venture to jump on the scaffold and give a blow or two more Much time was often spent in this desultory manner before the mighty tree gave way but it seldom came to the ground."

Like so much else in the west it the arrival of the railroad that turned the trees from nuisance into resource. The groves of giant cedar became shingles. I am sitting beneath some of those shingles right now, nailed to the roof of my Missouri house a hundred years ago. The cedar shingles have been covered with multiple layers of asphalt, but whenever I climb into the attic on a hot day I can still smell the ghosts of ancient trees long since gone.

(I need to make a post on logging in the northwest! The photograph of western red cedars on this page is one of the breath taking images at Leland Howard Fine Art Nature Images.)

NY Times: The Future is Drying Up

Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country’s fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more modest worry.

This fascinating and chilling article from the New York Times Sunday magazine surveys the effects that a warming climate is already having on the American West. Among the worrisome observations and predictions:

• 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear
• a "catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River" has already caused the level of Lake Mead to drop by 100 feet and threatens the 30 million people who depend on Colorado River water
• groundwater tables are dropping all over the west and those around Denver will be exhausted by 2050
• dendrochronology suggests that western drought cycles often last 60 years
• virtually all climate models show the west getting drier over the next century

The article focused on the Colorado basin, but this Seattle Times piece suggests similar issues in the Columbia River basin of the Pacific Northwest. On the other hand the snow pack in the northwern Rockies was 25% over normal this year.