Baby Boomer Ranger

“Cindy Blogs the Sierra/Baby Boomer Ranger” made it – five years old and 100 posts, but I’m not sure if I’m much longer fit for the bloggersphere.

For Valentine’s Day, my husband and I watched Julie and Julia. We really enjoyed it, but being a blogger myself, I had something nagging me…my blog.

In Julie and Julia a writer turned public servant, decided to jumpstart her writing career by following Julia Child’s recipies and writing about it daily in her blog. Not to ruin the story, but she has problems, and meltdowns, and success. People discover her blog, she becomes famous, she gets speaking and book offers, her life changes and all is good in the world.

Real blogging is not like the movies. Life is not like the movies.

You may notice that I’m missing a few photos. My blog was vandalized and completely erased from top to bottom. What is now Baby Boomer Ranger was reconstructed from back-up but my format template was lost as well as many of my photos. In order to get it back the way it has been, it would take me hours of uploading, formatting and fixing. I don’t think Julia’s blog was wiped off the web.

I also get spam weekly, sometimes daily. No one seems to make comments unless they are selling low cost drugs or sending strange bad grammar messages that don’t make sense. No comments, no conversation, no challenging thought provoking witty comebacks. Just spam. Lots of spam.

I’m a little discouraged. Three months have sped by.

But…

Tomorrow is another day.

Caring for the Land and Serving Coffee – How obvious is that?

“Obviously the obvious isn’t obvious” is one of my favorite sayings because I am so frequently surprised by how many “obvious” things I miss and that is the case with my Earthwatch Expedition Fellowship.

Since I first heard of the Earthwatch opportunity, I wondered “now, why would someone donate money to the Forest Service to have four employees spend a day working on research projects in foreign countries?”

Did they think the Forest Service is too narrow minded and needs to get out and “see the world”?

The FS staff selected for the Earthwatch expedition were not upper management in the WO. We are all on the ground practitioners who are already getting to the field and digging the trenches. The three of us who went on the trip to Costa Rica already had international travel experience and were comfortable and excited about traveling to rural Central America.

Would you send a Baby Boomer Ranger to a foreign country?

Did the philanthropic donor think we were really going to learn practical research and field techniques?

The data we were collecting was really rather basic. The project was finding pre-selected transects, selecting representative individuals, measuring specific parameters in a consistent manner, recording the data for input into the database, and organizing the samples for transport and tracking. Basic field techniques that the FS uses for stream surveys, cultural resource surveys, biological surveys, timber inventory, and just about everyone in the Forest Service has either gathered or touched basic field data.

Maybe they expected the FS staff to contribute to the other participant’s understanding of environmental systems?

The project researchers Natalia and Sebastian had excellent command of the project parameters and were local. They had academic experience and personal experience with the coffee plantations, the community and the associated ecosystems. There was nothing we could really add or suggest to make things go better. The science, the field practices, and the logistics were flawless.

Sebastian (Center) measures coffee plantation organic matter with Earthwatch Expedition participants.

So, during our week of counting coffee berries and working our butts off, I asked my fellow Forest Service co-workers “Why do you think someone donated money for us to participate in an Earthwatch expedition?” Our philanthropic friend’s motive was not obvious, but we did learn a few things.

I learned that in any group, some people do a lot of work, and some people just show up for work. But despite various levels of effort, it is amazing how a group of complete strangers can come together, focus on a task and have a great time getting something done.

I miss hard fieldwork. Work where at the end of the day I stink, I’m filthy dirty and exhausted, but I know where I was, what I did, and why I did it.

But one of the more important items I learned comes connected to my forestry academics. I remember learning about the mass wasting landslides from washed-out timber clear-cuts, monoculture pine disasters and “scientific forestry.” As Foresters we were convinced that we knew how to grow a better tree. Forestry and agriculture now face the same land ethic issues, but I think that foresters were forced to learn their lessons starting about 50 to 100 years ago. Agriculture and consumers are just now facing the high cost of attempted eco-dominance.

What we learned in forestry is now being learned by farmers. It doesn’t pay to fight Mother Nature. Foresters and the Forest Service are learning how to work with the environment, not against the environment. A systems approach is needed and not everything can be cut, molded, planted and grown to perfection. Farmers will need to learn the same.

Organic and Fair Trade considerations are not sappy syrup soaked slogans served up to sell superficial shit at Starbucks. Best that I could tell, Starbucks is putting their money where the corporate mouth is: good farming and land stewardship; good relationships with the growing communities; and good products to the consumers. They decided there are valuable lessons to be learned from around the world. The support of the “Costa Rica Coffee from Community to Cup” expedition is their way of being connected to the environmental decisions each of us makes every day.

I am a true believer. “Caring for the Land and Serving People” is not my job. It is my calling. It is my place in the Universe. It is what I have been struggling with for the last 30 years and will likely carry it for the next thirty.

But, I have been focused on forests, the Forest Service, and the impacts to natural resources of our country’s wild spaces. I understand our Wilderness and wild land issues, but the issues are not just about our open spaces – parks, forests and public lands.

Butterfly on coffee plant.

The natural resource issues sparked by Ansel Adams, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Gifford Pinshot, and our mentors of the environmental movement are just are relevant as ever. But instead of open, wild and natural places, we need to be examining a regular, familiar, otherwise ordinary segment of our lives – being a consumer. Spending money is an environmental decision. Living in a community, any community is an environmental decision. Walking to the Starbucks with my husband, buying a cup of coffee, sitting and reading a newspaper and walking home is an environmental decision. It is a very hard, complex, and overwhelming decision and we are making it whether we like it or not. I am almost uncomfortable with how much our every action is tied to our planet’s resources. I buy a cup of coffee and my four bucks is directly connected to people across the world trying to feed their children.

Tarrazu Cooperative Coffee Farmer with Natalia, Earthwatch Researcher

What I have thought of as a career is no longer a decision made in the office Monday to Friday. It is a powerful decision made every minute of my life. A decision made every minute of every person living on this planet.

And I am reminded that “with great power comes great responsibility.”

It isn’t clear to me how I’m going to apply my Earthwatch experience to my Forest Service projects. But then again, some of the most obvious lessons aren’t always obvious.

I have more of my Earthwatch photographs posted on my photography website www.cynthiawhelan.com and choose the tab labeled “Tarrazu Textures.”

P.S. We drank the most amazing coffees. All were smooth, full of flavor and pure life !
If you want the best quality coffee, direct from the growers you must try Tarrazu Cooperative Coffee.

Yesterday and today were coffee intensive. In the plantation then off to the coffee shop.

Up early, get the gear and head for the coffee plantation. That’s me writing down our data while my coleagues count the number of nodes, the number of nodes with fruit and (of course) the number of coffee berries. Today we worked in six plots with counting berries on a total of ten plants per plot.

Luckily, it didn’t rain and it was warm, but not hot. Still, after a couple of hours of standing in the “shade” we were getting a bit thin and dopey. Lunch sure tasted great after a day of hard work. We were challenged by the conditions while counting coffee cherries, but whatever we faced is nothing compared to the conditions that the people who pick the beans endure. We were tired, but it could no where compare to people who need to pick beans to feed their families.

We also didn’t need to work after lunch, but rather went into town for a nice cup of coffee love. Awe, capichino.

We have had some great coffee. Acutally drinking coffee in a coffee shop, the way we do in the States, is a rather new experience for the Tico’s. I find it troubling to know that people are growing things that they don’t or can’t afford to enjoy.

I love the people in this group, but there seems to be a preponderance of fear for little crawley things. After dinner I killed some spiders so my roomate can sleep. Later tonight the guys came out to the common area to ask for help in removing a geko from their room. A Geko. I grabbed a glass to catch it, but they thought it was too small, so I got a bowl. It was a cute little guy and I was able to contain him and with the help of a pice of paper I carried it to a nice place in the garden. Hence, today I was a Bean Counter and I’m also Geko Wrangler Extradonaire.

Live from Costa Rica, It’s Baby Boomer Ranger.

My flight went well and I had a good evening in San Jose. We walked, quite by accident into the red zone, past the Burger King, Cornel Sanders and eventually into the Jazz Festival. I was friendly and got us into the last song of the festival and it was so great to see all the students playing with the guest artist. I bought his CD and had it autographed.

The next morning we got lost trying to find the butterfly museum. Luckily we found a friendly ex-pat at a high end hotel that sent us straight with a good map and directions. We found it. It was small, cute and if it hadn’t started to pour rain, I could have taken some awesome photos.

On our first day, we had a great hike in the rainforest. I could spend a whole day just looking at ferns, and one whole day looking a fungus and one whole day looking at trees. I could spend a lot of days just crawling in the duff looking for crawling things.

Cecilias Cabinas is too cute. Right out of the pages of Sunset Magazine. Tile floors, beautiful potted plants, flowers, green metal roofs and quaint wood beams. We finished early enough that I could take some photos around the cabins.

February and March really threw me for a loop. I’m not accustomed to taking back blogs or not blogging about a big project. But, I’m ready to blog for April before this month is gone too. Time flies while you’re having fun!

My big event this month was the annual gathering of the AMSETers. We met in the Land of the Megawatts aka. Santa Clarita, California.
(Check out those 500 kV towers! You can feel the megawatts.)

We had a very good attendance for a unit meeting. All but four permanent team members were present. AMSET added two new permanent memebers since the last team meeting, one of which is me, and our new to the team Wildlife Biologist detailer made the meeting as well. Although Jo Ann, our Enterprise Team Leader, did not attend because she is still on sabbatical, she did conference call in for a brief update on how she is doing.

“I love working with adults!” I said to myself more than once during our meeting.

We had an agenda and we moved through it like we wanted to get something done. Like grown-up adults.

All in only one day we discussed:
The roles of the team leader and team members,
The possiblity of changing our name to Adaptive Management Services, instead of AMSET,
Changing or improving the appearance of our logo,
Defining or re-defining our team mission,
Assessing and defining our workload (need more work or overtaxed already?)
Reviewing and changing our organization charts,
Reviewing the discussing how we could improve our marketing,
Discussing what will our future look like?

And we took a group photo. Say “Cheese” for the camera!

AMSET is really three self directed teams: the Science Section, the Business Section and I’m in the Planning Section.

The Science Section people all like to run out in front of fires, throw equipment into plots and watch the flames. Then after everything is all charred and ashy, they gather up their data and compare the predicted fire behavior to the actual. Real fire data.

The Business Section does a lot of stuff no one likes to do, and hopes to never have to do. I’m glad they’re around because they help all of us in the Forest Service get resource management work done. They have the guts to face things like purchasing, hiring, and dealing with the dreaded ASC (Albuquerque Service Center.)

The Planning Section was originally set up as “cash cows” for the Science Section. It seems that everyone hates doing NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) analysis and are willing to pay big bucks to get it done – by someone else! That’s us, the mercenary, work for pay: “Caring-for-the-Land-and-I’ll-Get-Your-Project-Done-for-a-Fee Planners.” The sick part is we really like our jobs. Well, maybe not exactly … at least I really like project planning.

The best part was meeting everyone on my Enterprise Team.

We didn’t sit and talk about when we would begin to talk about our organization. We didn’t study our workloads and pontificate on possible trends and analyze staffing alternatives until the cows came home. We didn’t decide to put off to tomorrow what we knew we wanted to do today. We didn’t whine about declining budgets and downsizing. We didn’t complain about when to turn in reports and targets. We didn’t dance around last year’s deficit and wring our hands over cries of cutting the budget.

We were honest and direct, and said what we wanted then moved on to the next item. The first ground rule up front was that no one was to have hurt feelings about what was said at the meeting.

Ah, how refreshing! Our organizational planning is done for now. I’m off to work my billable hours. There are projects to be planned!

Blog redacted upon request.

See me if you have any questions.
/Cindy

Thrashing through wall of brush and planted Ponderosa pine plantations, I found myself deep in a blast from the past. After twenty-five years, I returned to my former life as a Forest Service Timber Stand Improvement (TSI) Forester. My Forest Service past has caught up to my Forest Service present.

Early in my career on the Klamath National Forest, I would dawn my rubber rain pants in the drizzling rain and slip across logging slash attempting to count the trees per acre of fir and pine. I estimated the percent cover ceanthous and madrone, and guessed the extent of tan oak and poison oak. It was starting to come back to me… “Thin the conifers to 250 trees per acre; cut the brush,” and hope for the best.

Plantation in the Westside Plantation Project, Shasta-Trinity National Forest

As the Timber Stand Improvement (TSI) Forester in the 1980’s, I oversaw all aspects of pre-commercial thinning, aerial application of herbicides, backpack application of herbicides, and the chainsaw release of planted plantations. After an area was logged and cleared and planted with baby trees, I was responsible for examining plantations for treatment needs, evaluating treatment effectiveness, writing prescriptions, coordinating Forest Service and public input, writing the vegetation management environmental assessment, preparing and writing contracts, setting treatment priorities, selecting projects, supervising workers, inspecting contracts, and recommending future targets and budget.

I was the Contracting Officers Representative (COR) for service contracts to get the work done, and I supervised inspectors, negotiated with contractors, and I directed work for two Forest Service brush disposal crews. Using my new fresh-out-of-college scientific forestry skills, I organized, supervised and completed the inventory of 2,500 acres of plantations and I updated prescriptions and scheduled inventories for over 1,500 acres of plantations. I was very proud of my work developing the district’s first plan to inventory all TSI units on a regular scheduled basis. I was growing the forest of the future.

Now, twenty -five year later, I was returning so some of the plantations that filled my early career. I wasn’t on the Klamath, but just up the Trinity River to the neighboring Shasta- Trinity National Forest. These babies were the same age as the little tikes I was stuffing in the ground – brown down and green up at the early years of my forestry career. The offspring have grown, and they were now tall and healthy and ready to burn to the ground if something isn’t done soon to help them weather the firestorms that burned through many of their neighbors earlier this year.

The summer of 2008 was not pretty for the Shasta-T. Fires tore through forest investments, and threatened local communities. Bit by bit, the forest was thinning its plantations, but they wanted to package up one big project so that they could get priority when funding was made available to do the needed silvicultural treatments.

In June 2008, I was contracted by the Shasta-Trinity National Forest to lead the interdisciplinary analysis of the Westside Plantation Project, a proposal designed to reduce fuels and improve forest health and resiliency on 33,000 acres of National Forest system land. The project proposes thinning and fuels reduction in plantations, or managed stands, within the Trinity River Basin. Specific vegetation treatments proposed include both hand and mechanical thinning, and the project will be completed over a ten year period. The goal is to reduce the risk of stand-replacing wildfire, provide for community protection, and promote the development of habitat for Threatened, Endangered, and Forest Service Sensitive species. Plantations proposed for treatment range in age from 21 to 55 years, most originated after harvesting and regeneration (planting) within the last 40 years. These plantations are currently over-dense (300-1500 or more trees per acre) and considered to be at risk to various forest pathogens and stand-replacing wildfire.

During my first five years of my forestry career, I took care of freshly planted trees, and now, I am developing plans to protect and enhance California’s future forests. My career has come full circle.

“Sid Vicious” ID Team Fuels Specialist with the Shasta-T’s
Silviculturist and the AMSET Wildlife Biologist in the background.

In October, from across the state, five interdisciplinary team members for this project gathered in beautiful Hayfork, California, to see that we had viewed in GIS layers and maps, and tables of the forest’s plantations. Passing the closed lumber mill, and empty business we piled into a monster of a green Forest Service six-pack truck, Under cloudy, drizzly skies we drove on the the logging roads of yore. We were on a mission to see the character and form of these young trees and look toward their future. Amid the brush and logging debris, the trees of my past were still growing and still needed help.

In addition to having TSI flashbacks, we found another relic of the northern California national forests – the abandoned pot plantation. There in a little depression next to a small meadow, surrounded by planted pines, were the remains of someone’s marijuana garden. Chicken wire hastily strapped to snow poles in a 20′x30′ rectangle in the middle of nearly no-where, someone had their pot plants watered and cultivated and harvested among the ponderosa pines of our future forests.

Bob Hawkins inspecting someone’s abandoned marijuana garden.

Things change, and they stay the same. It is a comfort and a disappointment. As my career moved along, and my life developed, so did the trees. They got bigger and denser and will continue to grow and mature long after my career with the Forest Service has finished. I would like to think that I have been a part of their development, yet, something tells me that all our scientific forestry doesn’t really mean much without the test of time. In forestry, and in life, hope and time are a big part of the Big Picture.

100 Photos About Turning 50

I’m turning 50 years old on October 1, 2008, and well, I’m not taking it well.

Since I’ve had a change in photo opportunities, since I’ve had a change in jobs, I need to be more creative in my photographic project development. So, I’ve decided to do a photography project in response to my becoming an artifact (a historic artifact, like described in the National Historic Preservation Act.)
I’ve looked on the web at photo-a-day projects, and many are not very satisfying (read: boring.) So, the big challenge is to make it interesting, different, personal, and something that makes sense. But since I often I find it hard to remember what I did just yesterday or even last night, let alone around one of my birthdays, it at least should be a nice remembrance; to have a collection of 50 photographs of my life before turning 50, and 50 photographs of my life after turning 50. I will start on Tuesday, August 12, 2008 and end on Wednesday, November 19, 2008.

You can read more on my Photography webpage and see my daily photo on my Photographer’s Blog.
Link Below.

wwww.cynthiawhelan.com

Tomorrow is my Going Away Party.
My party for leaving the Sierra National Forest.
And I am sad.

I keep thinking about divorce. I am very fortunate to not know first hand about divorce, and I hope that this is a close as I will ever get.
It is a friendly divorce, but papers are now final.

I also keep thinking about a bad joke. You know it, it goes like this:
A man goes to his doctor “Doctor, Doctor, it hurts when I hit my head against the wall!”
The Doctor tells the man, “then stop it…”
There comes a time to listen to one’s doctor.

And

“GOD, grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
and the Wisdom to know the difference.”

Several of my friends should be very sick of hearing me say “I need to move on.”
I do, and I am.

“Is this what you want?” I was asked.
DAMN Right it is!

I ready to get back to managing the National Forests of this country.
I want to start a project and finish a project, and really know it starts and when it is done.
I want to make agreements, keep agreements and be held accountable for my agreements.
I will know what I am going to work on for that day, week, and month.
I am going to be on time and prepared.
I will be technically challenged to apply what I know and learn what I don’t know.
And if someone else doesn’t want to keep up their part of the agreement, I know my choices.
Stop, or move on. That is all there is.

My first week is developing contracts and arranging work as a Natural Resource Planner. I have a large, forest-wide plantation thinning/fuels reduction project on the Shasta-Trinity Forest. I will be working on a gas pipeline that goes across three National Forests in Southern Oregon, and I will be picking up a City of Los Angeles transmission line project across the Angeles National Forest. It feels great to do what I was trained in doing – planning large-scale, multi-forest, multi-agency, resource management projects! Caring for the Land and Serving People, that’s what I’m talking about.

What will become of “Cindy Blogs the Sierra?”
I have a plan.
After all, “I blog for good, not evil!”
There will be more to come.

I am writing this on my last Cindy Blogs the Sierra day. My last day as an employee of the Sierra National Forest.
Starting on Monday, June 23, 2008, I will be a Forest Service employee working virtually for an Enterprise Team. I am going to be a “Forestry Ranger” without a Forest. I will be part of AMSET; Adaptive Management Services Enterprise Team.

I now work for a new Forest Service, a Forest Service without trees.
I can’t just jump into a green rig and drive out to the field to “check-it-out.”
I won’t see my supervisor on my first day of work.

I won’t be ushered around to see the location of the mailroom, the restroom, the snack area or the back door.
I will be entirely responsible my own work space and find my own supplies and materials, my own files and my own time schedule.
I will not walk around the office and meet my fellow team members, because they don’t work here.
I am unfunded.
I do not supervise anyone, and
I start off with no projects, no management areas, no administrative responsibilities, no program oversight, no Program Work Plans and no targets.
I have no authority.

Here I am signing my last Cost Recovery Agreement as a Cost Reviewer for the Sierra National Forest.
And all those Special Use Permits… they will be dumped on some other GS-9.

Who would have imagined a Journey Level GS-12 460 Forester with the US Forest Service without a District, without a Forest or a Region?

But… this is a very, very good thing for me to do.

to be continued…. because now I need to get to work… Resource Management Work…