Ruston - Dickman Mill Wetland

Part sandy beach, part saltwater wetlands, and part industrial remnant. Dickman Mill extends some nine acres along Ruston Way in Tacoma. The City purchased the 3.5 acre wetland site in the early '90s for over $1 million. The graffitied concrete and pilings that remain are the remaining vestige of Old Town's lumbering past. The park is small, but allows a nice sidetrack away from at-times, busy Ruston Way. The wetland is small as well, but illustrative of the extensive wetlands that were converted to port facilities and other industry over the last few hundred years.

Paul's Peak Trail

In November, access to the Carbon River entrance to Mt. Rainier gets slim. The river washed out Fairfax Rd. during the second week in November due to the evermore common combo of snow>warm weather>rain>flooding. This makes the hike to Ipsut Campground several miles longer than it already is from prior road damage, which stops car traffic at the Carbon Ranger Station. Supposedly, access to the vehicle bridge across the Carbon is cut off. We have not yet made it to the suspension bridge this year. With this luck, we are devising a plan to mountain bike to the campground and hike the shorter 3.6 miles to the suspension bridge to avoid some 10 miles (roundtrip) of relatively boring gravel road between the ranger station and Ipsut Campground. We will leave it for another day....

The road to Mowich Lake is closed as well. NPS closes this road at the first snow, or early November - whichever comes first. So, we drove 11 miles (past the Road Closed 11 Miles sign) from the Fairfax junction to the yellow gate to see what trails we could find.

At 11 miles, we find a parking lot with a handful of cars on a Sunday afternoon. Paul's Peak Trail starts there, hooking up with the Wonderland Trail. The path heads steeply downhill through some moist coniferous forest, across the creek and around the southern ridge. It was a warm day, and as we turned a corner, the South-facing slope was receiving some good sun for mid-November. We passed, interestingly, several couples with very young babies on the day. The trail is short, and drops several thousand feet down to meet the Wonderland Trail and further to hit the Mowich River. We witnessed some ginormous douglas firs as well as some lush western hemlock coming up under the canopy.

Too, sporadically, we would come upon different mushroom and saprophytes popping out of the duff or downed trees. They are not parasites, who take their noursihment from another living thing. These plants, like the tall pinedrop we saw, are some of the coolest plants in Cascadia - they connect with their host underground, have little or no cholorophyll, living on dead and decaying vegetation. The pindedrop was brown, going to seed, and lost its red and green coloration. Easily passed up as a dead stick, fascinating to plant geeks.

As the switchbacks start, we were able to see some of the best views of the mountain and Mowich glacier I have ever seen thanks to some massive blowdown. Arriving mid-day, we made it to the Wonderland intersection and continued on to the river to eat lunch. The semi-formal log crossing had blown out, so we stopped there and made our way back up the hill. About four hours later, and 40 switchbacks later we found ourselves winding back towards the car as the sun was going down. On the road out we could see the Olympic Mountains clearly to the West, emerging out of the fog that was rolling into the valleys below.

Green Stimulus, More Than Climate and Energy

Does green job creation have to be science fiction or market driven? Clinton and Bush regimes focused some energy on renewables research and development. While corn, clean "brown" coal, and hydrogen research will most likely run on, the new Obama administration looks to investing in infrastructure and jobs. We are picking winners in a way. Ones we want. Public transit initiatives kicked perverse highway subsidies around last week all over the country. It helps folks get around in an econonomic manner appropriate to fighting climate change.

Now, what is left in the 5 million job proposal for environmental initiatives that complement this charge? Green Jobs Corps and like initiatives already exist. Pump them up!

It is not a new topic. Who has Obama's ear? While some progressive think tanks put the emphasis on "retrofitting buildings to improve energy efficiency, expanding mass transit and freight rail, constructing “smart” electrical grid transmission systems, wind power, solar power, and next-generation biofuels," Patrick Heffernan (in 1976), Alan Durning (in 1999), Van Jones and Thomas Friedman (2000s) introduced the (often, more holistic) term to congress and the American public. The Sightline Institute in Seattle calls green jobs "the green wave that will lift all boats." It should be part of the Obama transition, if we are to see one during the next presidency. Renewing our perception of work with nature is, as Alan Durning writes, "leading this change-by planning community forestry, fostering value-added manufacturing, retraining workers for ecosystem restoration, tapping the conservation market, and tethering money at home. None of these approaches is sufficient in itself, but they underline an all-important lesson: people make the economy, and people can change it."

Whoever is running the show, please keep the architects, planners, conservation biologist, geogologists, ecologists, and tree huggers in mind. While climate and energy are near term and long term challenges, protection and restoration of biodiversity in our ecosystems is threatened everyday. Most of the jobs above are relatively low-paying, led by non-profit groups, strung along by grants and local fundraising. Projects completed on a shoestring budget are often too numerous to count or go unaccounted for because they are not expressed in the market. The pairing of labor and the environment for climate justice, real restoration and community defense is extraordinary. January 20th cannot come soon enough, because we are living with the legacy of poor stewardship everyday.

Superman!?

Barack Obama has an obvious mandate and hopefully his friends in Congress will back him up. No one has mentioned how ecstatic we will be when the Bush Department chiefs get replaced with real wildlife, energy and agriculture professionals, not corporate figureheads. On a personal note, when people talk about green jobs and use the word restoring the environment, most of the talk is centered on green collar technology jobs - energy jobs. So, in essence, we are still left to pull ourselves up with our bootstraps when the Barack Administration takes office. Perhaps, as always, scratching funds together to restore our own rivers, wetlands and forests while state money goes towards "typical" urban issues - mostly converting "sustainable" energy sources that still helps to feed our need for growth, in a "green" way.

Yo Heart El Duwamish

The Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition sponsored an afternoon tour of the navigable river on Saturday afternoon. Besides reviewing and viewing some of the meanest environmental contamination in the state of Washington, the groups was able to view bald eagles and great blue herons in addition to hearing about the awesome community building efforts around the cleanup.

Superfund since '01, EPA and Ecology are moving through the process of assessing the sources and extent of contamination (Phase I) in and around the river. The EPA representative on the tour mentioned the footprint of the contamination could be anywhere from the ridge of West Seattle all the way across the valley to Beacon Hill. Right now the worse contaminants to be controlled and removed are PCBs, heavy metals and the crap from combined sewer overflows. Importantly, DRCC's coordinator, noted the presence of pthalates (used in PVC plastics) in the river as well, which are hard to track and are not on the priority list of chemicals to control. The chemical is in medical devices to toys to cars to homes - it is the stuff in your Nalgene bottle.

The cultural and natural history of the river is fascinating. We have to look forward to the opening of the Duwamish Tribe's Longhouse Project sometime in the near future.