Glomalin and Conservation in Humboldt County The 1996 discovery of the soil glue glomalin is changing our understanding of the impact of elevated carbon dioxide, while giving important clues to forest health, watersheds, revegetation, wildfire and carbon sequestration. Here I share what I have found so others may read and draw their own conclusions, and relate it to my own experience, Humboldt County issues and stories from the news.

Friday, February 24, 2006

190. Water 

The Supreme Court has taken up a challenge to the Clean Water Act of 1972 brought by Michigan developers who say the law overextends its authority, and denying them the rights to develop in areas designated wetlands. Justices to Study Scope of '72 Clean Water Act
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-na-scotus21feb21,1,3144888.story?coll=la-news-environment
In an article written by their staff writer David G. Savage on February 21 the LA Times illustrates developers and industry’s continued attempts to roll back progressive legislation for protecting the environment. The cases involve filling in wetlands for development, and the key to these arguments is the extent of navigable rivers and who has authority in those areas far from rivers big enough for boats. No where in the article is any of the fill considered non=point pollution, the heart of TMDL (total maximum daily load) regulations. As we have seen over and over, it is not what happens on a nice day that matters, it is what happens in large weather events. We can be sure large events will move fill out of wetland areas and into streams as that is the nature of sediment transport. We also know wetlands are wetlands because flow in the area exists as surface water, which will probably be converted into runoff through land management and roofing and paving. This is why we support the concept of builders taking care of runoff from heavy events in the planning. Storm water systems just deliver contaminated runoff into naturally healthy environments. Sand vaults and percolation zones should be part of altered drainages.
Now it is a known fact that every inch of land is in one watershed or another and we must sacrifice some natural environment for development. That doesn’t mean every situation should be a challenge to or from developers. It also means developers are learning to live within the rules as laid down. Rules prevent us from damaging our ecosystem and impinging on our neighbors. If developers could cause no net harm they may find less opposition.
These arte closely watched cases due to the arrival of new Supreme Court Justices Roberts and Alito and is their first environmental test. One week in and already they have abortion and development cases that will probably be an indication of what is to come. We don’t expect rollbacks of state rules under this lawsuit but we can be sure challenges will continue.

Long time onsite retention champion Jim Marple has kindly posted a list of references for Best Management Practices for collecting and storing rainfall on the Waterforum Newsgroup, run by Rockware, a storm water management company and publisher also of Erosion Control magazine. He has argued our water systems are hugely inefficient and that we have created a huge bureaucracy and infrastructure to do something that should be far less capital intensive and only benefits operators and beneficiaries while putting simple solutions far out of reach. He has taken lots of flak over the years and tirelessly crusades against complicated solutions to a simple problem- how do we manage precipitation?
To complete our examination of this issue this week we look at CO2 Science magazine’s article on Soil Moisture (Climate Model Inadequacies (Soil Moisture) – Summary) http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/subject/m/summaries/inadeqsoil.jsp . After several years of writing them we couldn’t be more disappointed, not in the study but much more in the Editors Summary, since they are critiquing soil moisture experiments and no one even mentions glomalin. The article is riddled with unknowns that make the authors appear not to have read glomalin articles listed on their own site. Attributing an increase in available water to stomata closures from increasing CO2 would seem less important of an issue than how much volume of moist soil is available to for the dry season. The research done appears to be legacy thinking in an area where new ideas are as abundant as fungi in the forest, and the clear picture provided is still out of focus without bringing all possible light to bear. This is where HSU needs to start, not in identifying species or getting snapshot counts or single reading glomalin studies. We need long-term experiments that can handle many species to get an idea of soil conditioning by living systems and their waste products.
In the same they recover a bit issue River Runoff: The Effect of Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment (http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V9/N8/EDIT.jsp and illustrate why there should be more fresh water available but again miss the long term picture of the vegetation conditioning the soil to absorb water. River flows are meaningless without historic land use (glomalin destruction) patterns and the duration and cover species on site (glomalin deposition). These forces are constantly at odds in today’s world yet they are responsible for all connected water issues.
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