A Northwoods Almanac for 7/23 – 8/5/21 by John Bates
State Natural Areas 70th Anniversary
The State Natural Areas (SNA) Program celebrates 70 years of existence this year, making it the nation’s oldest statewide system of natural areas. In 1951, the Wisconsin legislature established the State Board for the Preservation of Scientific Areas (later renamed Natural Areas Preservation Council) with duties found in State Statutes Chapter 15.347(4) and Chapter 23.26. Wisconsin has not only the oldest but the largest natural areas program in the country with 687 sites encompassing 406,000 acres across Wisconsin. These sites represent the last remaining vestiges of Wisconsin's native landscape, and are a living record of natural communities valued for their research and educational use, and the preservation of genetic and biological diversity. SNAs provide benchmarks for determining the impact of use on managed lands and also provide some of the last refuges for rare plants and animals.
Wisconsin’s leadership nationally in establishing state natural areas has made the state a model for other states. Go to https://dnr.wi.gov/topic/Lands/naturalareas/index.asp for a full description of every Wisconsin SNA along with property maps and directions.
Van Vliet Hemlocks SNA
Last Monday, I led a small private group of folks into the Van Vliet hemlocks SNA near Presque Isle, a 432-acresite which harbors one of the largest old-growth hemlock-hardwood forests left in this region. The old-growth is dominated by eastern hemlocks, sugar maples, and yellow birches, but very few white pines remain, likely because they were high-graded out during one of the several light selective cuts done over the last 50 years.
The last advance of glacial ice stopped here 12,000 years ago, where it deposited the loamy sands of the Winegar Moraine. At around 1,700 feet, this moraine marks a sub-continental divide where all waters north of here flow into Lake Superior, and all waters south of here flow into the Mississippi River.
Located in Section 16, this land that is now an SNA was set aside upon the creation of Wisconsin’s Common School Fund. As new states were coming into the Union, citizens sent petitions to Congress asking for help to establish public schools. In 1825, Congress passed a law that gave each new state the sixteenth section of every township for the purpose of establishing public schools. The site of today’s Van Vliet Hemlocks was included in this Act of Congress because it’s located in the sixteenth section of Presque Isle Township.
To manage these lands and the proceeds from their sale, the Wisconsin Constitution of 1848 created a school trust (now known as the Common School Fund) to be managed by the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands (BCPL). Nearly 1.5 million acres of land was eventually set aside for the support of public schools.
In the years since 1848, BCPL sold over 99% of these lands to create the principal of the Common School Fund, but Van Vliet Hemlocks escaped the sale block and remained a part of the last 5,500 acres of the Common School lands. The good folks at BCPL recognized that it was a rare remnant of old-growth forest and needed to be protected. So, in 2011, the BCPL approved the sale of the Van Vliet Hemlocks to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources in order for the land to be designated as a State Natural Area and to receive permanent protection.
The proceeds of this sale was used by BCPL to acquire better timberlands, and thus income-producing lands, that can be managed sustainably.
What happened to the money BCPL received from the state? As directed by Article X, Section 2 of the State Constitution, earnings from the Common School Fund are used exclusively for the support and maintenance of common schools (now known as K-12 public schools) and “the purchase of suitable libraries and apparatus therefor.” Public schools today use these funds to purchase library books, newspapers and periodicals, audiovisual materials, and computer equipment and software.
The principal of the Common School Fund is used differently, however. It's invested in loans to school districts and municipalities for public purpose projects through the BCPL State Trust Fund Loan Program, helping communities in every corner of the state.
The Intersection of Spirit and Nature
The folks who hired me to walk with them into the Van Vliet property heard the above story of how the site was saved, but asked that I focus my interpretation on a talk I’ve given called “The Spirit of Place.” Because of their age and size, old-growth forests often are catalysts for feelings of awe and reverence, which in turn lead to a sense of being in a “sacred” place.
Of course, not everyone feels that way, but many people do, and so we concentrated some of our discussion on what it means when we say a place feels “holy,” or when someone experiences a “spiritual” connection to a place.
This is a very personal, very individual connection. In so many ways it depends on how your “inner landscape” experiences the outer landscape. What is in one’s head and heart when one enters a forest?
A “sacred place” is found both in the physical nature of the location and the mentality that perceives it as sacred. We all carry a suitcase of past experiences and beliefs with us wherever we go which filter our present experiences. Often, the first filter I hear from folks on a forest hike is their fear – am I safe here? What about bears and wolves and ticks and snakes and getting lost and . . . ? Peter Steinhart wrote about this dichotomy in relation to our perception of a lake, “What we see in lakes depends much on what we bring to the shore – King Arthur's sword or the Loch Ness monster.” The same holds true for a forest.
So, what happens when we enter a forest? Our sense of a place occurs initially through a series of perceptions.
- Our brain immediately maps the place.
- We pull out historical/cognitive information about the place – do we know the name of this tree? this wildflower? the function of the place?
- We pull out personal memories – this is the place I met my spouse; this is the last place I saw Mom; this is where I first went hiking with my grandmother and picked blueberries.
- We catalog sensory information – the sounds, smells, light.
- We intuit emotional information – does the place frighten us, depress us, inspire us, repel us, draw us in.
- We then begin interacting with the place, building an experiential relationship with it that is based on our self-interests. A birder hears bird songs, a deer hunter looks for rubs or scrapes, a wildflower enthusiast sees flowers, a bug-hater sees only mosquitoes, a woodworker sees tree species and the form they can take in his/her workshop.
- We proceed then to comprehend our interactions through a host of perceptual filters – our cultural and personal beliefs, our background knowledge, our momentary state of mind. Sometimes we’re so preoccupied with something that happened or what we have to do when we get home that we’re lost in our head and not present in the forest. Sometimes we see the forest through an economic filter – cut this tree down and we could make some money! Sometimes we know we’re in a beautiful place, but it’s a sensory blur. We lack any understanding of what the species are, what bird just sang, what that smell is.
- And finally, we leave, and what do we then remember about a place? And why?
Since a place is different for each observer according to their perceptions and experiences, all places are thus inside our heads (and hearts). There is no such thing as an objectively described place.
Ancient peoples often had stories associated with just about every hill, spring, rock outcrop, river bend, lake, and unusual tree in their country. Their memories were actually stored in the landscape. Ancients experienced the land at slow walking speed, every day, every minute. Walking was a form of “topographical language”.
Some cultures were animistic. They believed that all animate and inanimate objects were suffused with spiritual qualities – they were ensouled – and they populated their world with spiritual presences.
Most Western American moderns no longer see places filled with spirits or ancestors. We see materialistically, not spiritually – it’s hallucinating, we think, if we see otherwise.
So, our group talked about what today can make a place feel animated, feel ensouled. Of course, there was no answer, but there was rich discussion, thoughtful, heartfelt considerations. We asked the impossible questions, like what has a soul and what doesn’t. Are the spirits of those that passed here still somehow on the land, a part of the place?
And we talked about the need to know a place ecologically, to give things the dignity of their names and to try to understand their stories, all the while knowing there’s far too much to ever know.
So, we ended up talking about the importance of humility, of wonder, of appreciation for all that is, for not judging a species as useful or not based on our human use of it, for accepting death in a forest as a necessary ecological process that gives life to other species, perhaps even more in death than during its life.
Through it all we marveled at the beauty, the quiet, the history embedded in the place, the life histories of so many species all living together in a community of life. And I think we walked away with no “answers” but enriched and enlivened, I think happier, and perhaps having experienced a bit of the soul of the place.
Celestial Events
The “Half Way Through the Summer Moon” (in Ojibwe – aabita-niibino-giizis) full moon occurs tonight, 7/23. And tomorrow night, 7/24, it will still be 99.5% illuminated, so be sure to take a walk in the warmth and brilliant light of a summer full moon.
On 7/24, Saturn will be 4° north of the moon, and the next night, 7/25, Jupiter will trade positions with Saturn and hang 4° north of the moon.
The peak Delta Aquarid meteor shower takes place in the predawn of 7/28, but the shower usually offers a decent number of meteors for several days before and after the peak. Look for 15 to 20 per hour, though the bright waning moon will wash out a good portion of them. Look for the radiant point in the southern sky after midnight. The Deltas overlap with the more famous Perseid meteor shower, which peaks this year on the mornings of August 11, 12, and 13.
By August 2, our days are growing shorter by three minutes per day.
For planet viewing in August, look after dusk for Venus very low in the west; for Jupiter low in the south-southeast; and for Saturn, also low in the south-southeast. Mars is not observable this month.
As for national temperatures, the average June temperature across the contiguous U.S. was 72.6 degrees F (4.2 degrees above average), making it the hottest June in 127 years of record keeping and surpassing the record set in June 2016 by 0.9 of a degree.
Thought for the Week
“One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike. We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.” – Albert Einstein
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