Thoreau's Legacy by Richard Hayes Read Free Book Online Page A

the dry, hot summers were 10 to 15 degrees warmer than I had ever known them to be. Water sources for plants and animals were drying up. Trees were dying and beavers were moving out of the canyon, but logging continued, just as it had since the days of the pioneers. I didn’t see how this forest could sustain itself under the drought conditions and continuous logging.
    The severity of the situation manifested itself on June 3, 1998, when a microburst hit the area where the Engelmann spruce stood. Within a few minutes this tree and others, totaling 2 million board feet of lumber, had been felled. In the years since then, the climate of that area has remained much hotter and dryer than it was before the 1980s, and logging is still going on. The old-growth pine forest is giving way to the younger quaking aspens that took root where the pines used to be. How much more will the makeup of this canyon change as logging (which contributes to global warming) and the drought continue? The canyon my daughter knows is very different from the canyon I knew at her age. What will it be like when her children are growing up? I can only pray that nature will find a way to sustain itself in this beautiful place.

    Helen Whitaker was born and raised in Salt Lake City. She now lives in rural Lehi, Utah, and works as a paralegal.

Prairie Pothole Wonder
    Dorothy Boorse
    ON A BRIGHT JUNE DAY I STAND AMID THE SHARP
edges of the rice cutgrass, looking over a prairie pothole wetland. Circles of sedge, cattails, smartweed, and water plantain rim a puddle of muddy water. Green hues wash over me. I breathe the air, hear the call of the red-winged blackbird and the faint popping sounds of trapped air bubbles escaping from mud in the heat. Insects buzz, a goldfinch flicks by. A trickle of sweat on my temple evaporates in the breeze. The beauty of this day and this place stops me in my tracks. It is a holy moment, a moment of prayer. Nothing is more glorious than this wetland, this summer day, the joy of being allowed to do this research project for my Ph.D. I am transfixed.
    Today I am studying the life of these ephemeral pockets of water so critical to the health of the midwestern ecosystem. Some 3 million prairie potholes, scraped out by the grinding retreat of the glaciers during the last ice age, dot the upper Midwest in the United States and parts of Canada. More than 90 percent of them dry out regularly, and many have been degraded, plowed, dredged, or filled. Some potholes are protected, including thousands in the federal Conservation Reserve Program, a project funded to encourage farmers to keep wetlands out of agricultural use.
    Today I am surveying the macroinvertebrates in a pothole on conservation land. As I sort my net samples, I know I will not find the unique fairy shrimp I would have seen a few weeks ago, because their short adult life span is over. I will, however, find dragonfly nymphs, small snails, and the tadpoles of various frogs, their development hurried in a race to leave before evaporating water strands them like raisins in a patch of baking mud.
    Potholes, lying across the landscape like droplets flung by a giant, form a network of habitats that wink in and out, full one year, low the next. They support a disproportionate number of plant and animal species relative to their area. For example, 50 percent of North American waterfowl breed, feed, and nest in these small wetlands.
    This habitat is vulnerable to climate change, which is likely to make this region drier, while economic pressure will cause some farmers to plow their drier seasonal wetlands. These twin pressures—increased use and decreased precipitation—are likely to further reduce these already limited wetlands.
    My love of this place, which drives my teaching, writing, and personal decisions, translates into a passion to protect all such places. It is not only the big picture, the loss of the great flocks that once covered the skies of our continent, that burdens