Ray Wiggers' December 2005 Newsletter

Dear Friends,

As some of you have observed, correctly, it's been a while since I published the previous newsletter. For the past year, I've been doing my best to produce a new issue every two months -- a task that might not seem all that difficult, given my simple format and relatively short text. In fact, writing and producing this humble document takes many hours indeed. Happy hours, to be sure, but they've always had to be sandwiched in between many other commitments. Beginning this past summer, and continuing ever since, those claims on my time have multiplied. Given the nature of most of those claims, I'm not grousing. But finally I've accepted the inevitable and took a sort of half-year sabbatical from one of my favorite ways of communicating with you all.

In the long and eventful months since the last issue came out, the membership of the Natural History Exploration Guild has continued to grow, and, thanks to many of you, word about the Guild's mission and featured events spread farther afield. Notwithstanding that, my teaching responsibilities at Lake Forest College and the Chicago Architecture Foundation this fall precluded my running any weekend-long trips. That won't be a permanent omission.

PART I. NONLINEAR SOLILOQUIES & SERMONS

A. On the Strange Power of Lists

There is something in my mental makeup that makes me most likely to cook up new projects for myself exactly when I have the least time to devote to them. That baffling syndrome manifested itself again late last summer, when for no pressing reason I decided to start making inventories -- I call them accretionary lists -- of the plant, lichen, and nonlichenous fungi species I saw in more than a dozen parks and nature preserves in the four states that have frontage on Lake Michigan. Suddenly, it was something I just wanted to do.

Fortunately, hiking two or three miles a day in a natural setting has become a daily activity for me. Because my tours, lectures, and research trips take me fairly far afield, my hikes, and hence my list-making, takes place in over a dozen venues in four states. From the magisterial old-growth forest of Warren Woods in Michigan to the secluded, fern-dotted cliffs and wetland of Rocky Arbor State Park in Wisconsin, I've been scrutinizing leaves, flower heads, and mushrooms, and scribbling away in my field notebook, while other park visitors pass by and wonder what the devil I'm up to. I love it when they actually ask.

PART II. REVIEWS IN THE REALM OF NATURAL HISTORY

A. Books: Geology & Energy Policy

The nonfiction book market is now awash with titles that devote themselves to just one fundamental concept or substance. After reading a number of these and getting fairly weary of this trendy genre, I stumbled across Barbara Freese's Coal: A Human History, and I'm thankful that I did. In this slim volume Freese, formerly Minnesota's attorney general, displays her gifts as a first-rate science writer -- one who can tell a compelling story in beautiful prose while resisting the sort of sustained and egotistical self-reference so common in other, less competent but more aggressively marketed authors.

And Freese's subject -- the unusual but abundant black rock that is essentially sunlight processed and stored by ancient forests -- is a fascinating one to begin with. The effect this combustible part of the Earth's crust had in both fueling, shaping, and degrading civilization can scarcely be overestimated. Coal should be required reading for environmentalists -- who, truth be told, are often so obsessed with the potential dangers of high-profile nuclear power that they've let the greater culprit go largely unchallenged.

B. Books: Ecology in Science Fiction

If you find the current ecological woes of our own planet overwhelming, just wait a century. That's one of the more powerful implications contained in the Martian trilogy of acclaimed sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson. These three novels (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) are each written on a Tolystoian scale, and even if their literary quality doesn't exactly match that of the Russian master, they're well worth reading -- patiently and tenaciously -- nonetheless. Robinson envisages a day when colonists from Earth, in league with transnational corporations, turn the Red Planet into a much more habitable world. This process, which futurists and planetary-engineering advocates have dubbed terraforming, is opposed by a few souls who want to keep the ancient and harshly beautiful landscape of Mars intact.

Terraforming is nothing new, in fact. We human beings have been doing it on a truly grand scale for millennia -- consider the great landscape-altering fires of the plains and woodland Indians in North America, and the slash-and-burn practices of indigenous tropical cultures. And how can any person who has seen America's rural countryside more recently transformed into endless suburban clonescapes doubt that there is now some terraforming gene in Homo sapiens that is running amok?

What gives Robinson's novels their special relevance to students of natural history is that they expose this basic human urge to reinvent nature on a grander and more exotic stage. Whether this extraterrestrial version of the old conservation-vs.-economic expansion debate ever comes to pass, Robinson's trilogy makes us think more deeply about what we're doing in the here-and-now, and what it means to be members of the most invasive species the Blue Planet has ever produced.

The Not-So-Little Acorn with the Fringe on Top. It may lack the white oak's broad-based economic appeal and popularity with legislators who designate state trees, but the bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) should be the botanical symbol of the Upper Midwest. In its native savannas and prairie-fringe settings, this most cold-hardy member of its genus presents a rugged, spreading outline against the broad sky. And even its fruit is distinctive and eyecatching: the nut is almost completely surrounded by a flamboyantly fringed cup that, as I once wrote elsewhere, reminds one of a miniature fright wig.

Multum in Parvo. This summer, while researching a new course for the Chicago Architecture Foundation, I visited a number of Midwestern towns with banks designed by the great architect Louis Sullivan. Here, in Columbus, Wisconsin, is the facade of his final bank commission. And what a stylish riot of geology, botany and zoology one finds at the entranceway: heraldic lions, ascending leafy tendrils, and the bank's name on a slab of verde antique -- what geologists call serpentinite. This ocean-green metamorphic rock was once volcanic basalt on an ancient seafloor. Later, it was scraped up into a mountain chain by the forces of continental collision. That's a lot of natural history for a building that's smaller than some North Shore garages.

B. An Ode to Armored Mudballs

Early this fall it was my very great pleasure to lead a tour of the lower Illinois River valley for the board of directors of the Prairie State's chapter of The Nature Conservancy. The Illinois is a fascinating stream, not because it's particularly venerable as some rivers go, but because it and its surroundings are a treasurehouse of geological phenomena. South of Peoria, it proceeds majestically through a broad and sandy plain known as the Havana Lowland. This intriguing region was, for untold millions of years, the junction of an earlier version of the Mississippi and another great but now-vanished river, the Mahomet. The latter (which in Indiana and other more eastern states is known instead as the Teays) once wended its way through the Champaign-Urbana area. But a vast volume of sediments borne by Ice Age glaciers completely filled in its deep bedrock valley.

Those glaciers did more than hide all surface traces of the Mahomet. They also altered the course of the Mississippi itself. Originally, the Father of the Waters swung deep into the heart of Illinois, past what is now Peoria. And it wasn't until America's greatest waterway was diverted far westward to its current channel, that the Johnny-come-lately Illinois River appropriated its old, abandoned valley.

This dramatic story of migrating rivers was one of the main themes of the Nature Conservancy tour. But we also stopped to take a close took at two contrasting exposures along the Illinois bluffs. The first featured a Pennsylvanian-Period outcrop of sandstone where, some 290 million years before, a much earlier stream had flowed. The other revealed a high swath of glacial till deposited by two different icesheets; it was topped with a thick deposit of tan-colored loess, a windblown silt that had been blown to its high perch by cold winter winds in the waning days of the most recent glaciation. While those sites definitely held everyone's interest, the next stop, at a busy gravel pit south of Pekin, was the biggest hit of all.

Of the various shorter tours I did manage to run this fall, none was more enjoying or edifying than the canoe trip down the lower Fox River I led in October. This event, sponsored by the Oswegoland Park District, took more time-consuming (and money-consuming) preparation on my part than any other trip of comparable duration, but it was well worth it. Why? For one thing, it tremendous fun; for another, it demonstrated that my latest brainchild -- the idea to offer educational canoe trips as an alternative to the standard nature hike -- does in fact work. The great turnout and enthusiasm of the participants was most encouraging. My thanks go out to all who helped to make it a success. Now -- keep on the lookout for more canoe trips and related activities as my 2006 tours schedule develops. These events will be listed on my Tours Page as soon as the arrangements are worked out.

Impromptu trailside conversations are one payoff, certainly, but there's something even bigger involved here. Locales that seemed to have already yielded up all their secrets to me have been transformed from mere exercise-grounds into magic landscapes inhabited by a cast of characters three or four times as diverse as I originally suspected. What I first thought would be a rather dreary task of simpleminded record-keeping has become something akin to a game of three-dimensional chess, in which taxonomy -- the science and art of classifying things -- leads me into a larger matrix of soil, rock, water, and atmosphere. A simple grid of names and boxes on a sheet of paper becomes my guide to an extended meditation on evolution, ecology, and the deep interpenetrations of the world's living and nonliving constituents. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, yet I am. In gross defiance of the Law of Diminishing Returns, the world of nature offers dividends to the inquisitive that exceed all expectation.

It was there, amid a steady stream of dump trucks and clanking rock-crushers, that our host, foreman Steve Ziegele, showed us what elsewhere is a great geologic rarity -- clumps of mud, often nicely rounded, that were coated with pebbles of many different rock types -- including small chunks of coal. Geologists call such objects armored mudballs, and they're thought to form in only one way: when the rushing waters of a flood tear up pieces of the muddy river bottom and bounce them along in the surge. On their turbulent journey downstream, these chunks pick up other bits of stone until they are quite thoroughly coated with them.

The flood that created this abundant supply of armored mudballs was the Kankakee Torrent -- one of the Midwest's greatest examples of a large-scale natural catastrophe. The Torrent was unleashed some 15,500 years ago, when a massive moraine far upstream failed under the pressure of a vast meltwater lake. While elsewhere in this immense valley there are plenty of signs of more gradual geologic change -- the slow deposition of river sediments, the sculpting of sand dunes by the westerly winds -- these strange, elegantly adorned spheres of mud remind us, every bit as much as Hurricane Katrina has, that we live in a world that reserves the right to be violent. And almost unimaginably so.