I got into Susanville, California to start my internship with the Bureau of Land Management just about three weeks ago after driving north through the Mojave desert and northern Sierra Nevadas. As an east coaster, my tour through the west has been an eye opening experience. Over the past month, I’ve seen Joshua trees, many many dusty towns miles from nowhere, and more sagebrush than I can shake a hand lens at. Since starting my drive out west, I have been feeling pretty out of my element. I have spent a lot of time thinking back to the lush moistness of New England’s Appalachians where I grew up. The dryness and vastness of the west are pretty new to me.
Still, I can already feel the sagebrush steppe – where I have been working – growing on me. I am pretty sure that the best place to make a new ecosystem feel like home is to be thrown out there for six to eight hours a day intensely studying plants. We have been out in the field for most of our days so far. One of my favorite days so far has been exploring the Pine Dunes north of our office near the small town of Ravendale (population 20).The Pine Dunes are a unique ecosystem with about 40-50 Ponderosa pines growing in the middle of the inhospitable sandy desert. No one really knows why there are Ponderosa pines in the middle of the desert, but our mentor hypothesizes that there was a short period when the desert flooded, simultaneously exposing long-buried pine cones and providing them with the moisture to germinate and establish. While we were out there, we also found an odd-ball stand of willow shrubs perched atop a dune. I wonder if these too established themselves during a single wet season.
The beautiful Pine Dunes north of our field office
Our mentor used the term dynamic to describe these kinds of ecosystems. Ecosystems are constantly changing and working in restoration ecology, we need to remember this. This invites us to think about what we are restoring when we go to rehabilitate an ecosystem. Do we restore it to how it was 10 years ago? 50 years? 100 years? 1,000 years? Some might say that we should try to return landscapes to how they were before human contact. But I think that is problematic because there were people living on this continent for millennia before the arrival of Europeans and with the genocide of native Americans, so too went a wealth of knowledge about the continent’s ecosystems. So, we really don’t know what this continent looked like before human contact. Does it matter? Should we be striving to minimize any human contact on the land? Or should we be trying to figure out a way to make contact with the land without destroying it?
-Susanville Bureau of Land Management
Oh and did I mention that we went to the Redwoods over 4th of July weekend?