Lingua Botanica the National Newsletter for FS Botanists & Plant Ecologists
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Lingua Botanica The National Newsletter for FS Botanists & Plant Ecologists This is the last edition of Lingua Botanica in its current form. Your botany program newsletter is going on hiatus for a short period of time, but it will be back soon. It has been a labor of love for the last five years. Lingua Botanica has never tried to be a mouth-piece for happenings in the Forest Service. Instead, I have tried to make it a means by which readers can become better botanists through exposure to the breadth of our discipline (the art as well as the science). In particular, I’ve used this particular space in each issue of LB to cheer for each and every one of you and the work that you do. Sometimes that encouragement has been fairly whimsical, at other times my tone has drifted more toward the belligerent, but in every instance I’ve tried to share my sense of wonder and joy in the natural world – no hocus pocus magic crystal bologna please. I can only assume, based on the email I get from LB readers, that many of you share my sense of awe when I look at and try to understand the living world. That bit of tedious history aside, I am grateful to have one last opportunity to say my piece, and here it is. Once a botanist, always a botanist. And because you are botanists to the bone (heartwood?) it’s important that you each take an active role in reforming the current state of plant conservation in America (heavy on disembodied fact and manipulative fallacy; embarrassingly weak on substantive meaning). The current problem is not with a particular Federal agency, and neither is it wholly the result of the current cultural war against the environment. Most of the largest and most influential environmental groups in the U.S. are pursuing a cynical agenda of confrontation that serves to trivialize and marginalize conservation action (especially for native plants). The persistence of the American flora is our hands alone until we build a righteous and powerful constituency for botany and plant conservation. It’s a quest of epic and heroic proportion – not merely for the physical comfort of future generations of humanity, but because it is our species’ purpose to understand and marvel at the infinite variety of life that is the manifestation of the basic principles that govern our universe. the editor. In this Issue Vol. 5, Issue 4 2004 Winter Botany is Hot Hot Hot Linkiana.................................................................................................................................................................. 2 Wallace Stegner’s Wilderness Letter ................................................................................................................ 3 Restoring Sweetgrass in South Carolina ............................................................................................................... 7 At Home with Barbara Ertter................................................................................................................................. 8 Fire Reveals Rare Flowers................................................................................................................................... 11 Moss Hunters Roll Away Nature’s Carpet.......................................................................................................... 12 More Cycad Thefts............................................................................................................................................... 15 Orchid Thief Pays Small Fine.............................................................................................................................. 16 Climate Change and Arctic/Alpine Plants .......................................................................................................... 16 America’s National Tree...................................................................................................................................... 17 Black & Decker Sponsors National Gardening Month ...................................................................................... 18 Mutant Poppies..................................................................................................................................................... 19 Continuing Education News ................................................................................................................................ 19 Federal Botany Jobs............................................................................................................................................. 21 Banner Plant: Phoradendron leucarpum......................................................................................................... 24 After-Image: NRIS TES Plants Workstation................................................................................................. 25 1 Linkiana The Celtic Origins of Mistletoe: http://www.tartans.com/articles/mistletoe.html State of Denial: Change your life – read this! http://www.sacbee.com/static/live/news/projects/denial/ Report on Intelligent Consumption: After State of Denial, go here http://www.wisconsinacademy.org/programs/icp/index.html Deadwood: It’s not just for the Washington Office… http://www.panda.org/downloads/forests/deadwoodwithnotes.pdf Epiphytic Macrolichens of Arizona: Download the keys in any of several versions. http://ces.asu.edu/ASULichens/plb400/laboratory/keys/az_macrolichen_key.html Remote Sensing of Rare Plants: Fun for techno-bots. This web page may be restricted to people with access to the FS network. If you can’t access it, drop me a note and I’ll email the .pdf directly to you. http://fsweb.rsac.fs.fed.us/documents/4007-RPT1.pdf Society for Economic Botany: Where you can read Plants and People. http://www.econbot.org/home.html Botany for Kids: Helpful resources for your next Celebrating Wildflowers event. http://www.nbii.gov/disciplines/botany/science.html Titan Herbarium Sheets: How to smash an Amorphophallus http://persoon.si.edu/Amorphophallus/ Partnership Resources: Some helpful information over here… http://www.partnershipresourcecenter.org/ National Register of Big Trees: Handy for pub bets… http://www.americanforests.org/resources/bigtrees/ Ecology Data for Download: Some exciting NatureServe data products here. http://www.natureserve.org/getData/ecologyData.jsp Private Forests: Resources for private landowners, from TNC. http://privateforest.org/ Ignobel Prizes for 2004: Advances (?) in weird science, from Harvard University http://www.improb.com/ig/ig-top.html 2 Wallace Stegner’s Wilderness Letter Los Altos, Calif. December 3, 1960 David E. Pesonen Wildland Research Center Agricultural Experiment Station 243 Mulford Hall University of California Berkeley 4, Calif. Dear Mr. Pesonen: I believe that you are working on the wilderness portion of the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission's report. If I may, I should like to urge some arguments for wilderness preservation that involve recreation, as it is ordinarily conceived, hardly at all. Hunting, fishing, hiking, mountain-climbing, camping, photography, and the enjoyment of natural scenery will all, surely, figure in your report. So will the wilderness as a genetic reserve, a scientific yardstick by which we may measure the world in its natural balance against the world in its man-made imbalance. What I want to speak for is not so much the wilderness uses, valuable as those are, but the wilderness idea, which is a resource in itself. Being an intangible and spiritual resource, it will seem mystical to the practical minded--but then anything that cannot be moved by a bulldozer is likely to seem mystical to them. I want to speak for the wilderness idea as something that has helped form our character and that has certainly shaped our history as a people. It has no more to do with recreation than churches have to do with recreation, or than the strenuousness and optimism and expansiveness of what the historians call the "American Dream" have to do with recreation. Nevertheless, since it is only in this recreation survey that the values of wilderness are being compiled, I hope you will permit me to insert this idea between the leaves, as it were, of the recreation report. Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment. We need wilderness preserved--as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds--because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in 3 ten years