Showing posts with label climate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label climate. Show all posts

Friday, February 17, 2023

Liquid Winters and Time-Bending Blooms

Long time local botanist Betty Horn sent me an email some days back--February 10, to be exact--reporting that she had just found a hepatica blooming in Herrontown Woods. Hepaticas in early February? This was news. 

Without asking, I knew nearly exactly where she had found it. If you're a field botanist, you maintain a mental map of where you've found certain special plants growing, and in Princeton, my mental map has exactly one location for hepaticas, along the ridge in Herrontown Woods. Sure enough, she had found it there, given a head start by the warmth of a nearby boulder and the snowless winter. 

Hearing the news, another botanist friend, Fairfax Hutter, checked out some hepaticas she knows of in Hopewell. No flowers, nor any buds, she reported. Betty looked back at her records and told me that "the usual time for hepaticas to bloom is early to mid March, and sometimes as late as the first week in April." 

Another early flower is snowdrops--a nonnative spring bulb that decorates the grounds around Veblen House. The first bloom I noticed this year, for the record, was on Feb. 6.

Before moving to Princeton in 2003, I lived in Durham, NC for 8 years. Winters there were much like the one we've had here in New Jersey this year. The default was no snow, and if a snowstorm did come, it became a spontaneous holiday, with schools shut down for several days. It could be said that New Jersey is the new North Carolina, with Georgia in hot pursuit, so to speak. 


The shift towards a liquid winter has made for dramatic changes in our "fillable-spillable" minipond in the backyard. It's a 35 gallon tub that captures runoff from the roof, originally conceived as a pond that could be easily emptied when our pet ducks had made it muddy. 

Like an artist who has lost inspiration, it hasn't produced very interesting ice patterns the past few winters, nothing like that stretch from 2018-19, when intermittent freezes and thaws caused it to behave like a canvas for the profound artistry of nature. Each freeze would bring new and endlessly varied patterns in the ice. 

Wednesday, September 08, 2021

Hurricane Damages DR Canal Towpath--Again

Driving into Princeton the morning after Hurricane Ida swept through, my first thought was to check Princeton High School. Had the school flooded yet again, ruining the performing arts stage for a third time? Fortunately not, judging from appearances as I peered in the windows. 

My next thought was the towpath along the DR Canal. Ten years ago, almost to the day, Hurricane Irene rendered the popular towpath almost unusable for walking, jogging, and biking, eroding it in places, coating its cinder surface with mud in others. Full repair, probably with FEMA money, was not completed until 2019--eight years later.

This is what I found after Hurricane Ida. A combination of fallen trees and thick mud have rendered sections of the towpath impassible, only two years after it was resurfaced.






Here's a closeup of the flood's deposits of silt that walkers and bikers encountered.
While some areas were covered in mud, others were scoured, stripped of the cinder surface that made for a comfortable walk.

At Rogers Refuge, the hidden floodplain preserve upstream of Carnegie Lake, a plaque marking the high water mark ten years ago was exceeded by an inch by Hurricane Ida. 

Elsewhere in Princeton, Mountain Lakes reportedly sustained damage to its bridges. In Herrontown Woods, the trails remained in good condition, but the power of the rain and runoff was evident in the widespread scouring of ground and the flattened vegetation. 

As our machines pour more CO2 into the air, the warmed atmosphere can hold more water, leading to rains that are extraordinary in their density and weight. The raising of CO2 levels by 50% represents a militarization of the atmosphere, where clouds can now carry tremendously heavy payloads of water. 

The need to build and maintain more and better waterbars to divert runoff from trails--a local form of "climate resilience"--is only adding to the workload faced by the largely volunteer organizations that care for Princeton's open space. More than a decade ago, working on habitat restoration at Mountain Lakes, I began thinking of climate change as a dark cloud on the horizon threatening to cast a shadow over our work in local preserves. The incredibly heavy rains are one example of how what once was foreboding has become a reality. 

Of course, one reason so little is being done about climate change is that the episodes of extreme weather quickly pass, segueing often into pleasant weather. Hurricane Ida seemed to sweep away the hot, humid summer, leaving in its wake refreshingly cool air. 

This hurricane's most lasting legacy may be a change in our relationship to water, perhaps the beginning of a retreat from the shorelines we so dearly love. The plight and uncertain future of the towpath--that wonderful waterfront trail--is only the most dramatic example of how a climate of our own collective making is beginning to threaten that which we hold dear. 

Saturday, April 24, 2021

My Writing in the NY Times on Earthday

My writing was included in an opinion piece in the NY Times on Earthday, entitled "When Climate Breakdown Hits Home: Readers share how environmental issues are changing their lives."

The term the editors used in the title, "climate breakdown," is a useful variation on climate change and climate crisis, given the damage extreme weather is doing to the systems that sustain our lifestyles. Here's my contribution to the piece:

For years, people in my community have ignored education campaigns and scolding letters to the editor and continued putting plastic bags in their curbside recyclables. Only when crews stopped taking recyclables contaminated with plastic bags did people stop. It took about a month to change everyone’s behavior.

Then Covid hit and people were forced again to change their ways, this time on a much larger scale. We proved ourselves adaptable, resourceful and even capable of finding silver linings, one of which was rediscovery of the great outdoors.


Local environmentalists still cling to the notion that education will cause people to change their ways voluntarily. Necessity in the form of policy change is the only form of education most people learn from, but we’ve been taught to resent those who dare impose necessity upon us. It’s sad that such an adaptable species is saving all of its adaptability for the endgame. — Steve HiltnerPrinceton, N.J.