I’ve just received a press release from the National Parks Conservation Association, of which I am a member, informing us that 9 of the 12 members of the National Park System Advisory Board have just resigned in frustration. Despite repeated requests to meet with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, the NPSAB has not had the opportunity to advise the secretary through all of 2017.

Founded in 1935, the NPSAB is entirely non-partisan. One of its major concerns, the past few years, is that our national parks currently have an $11 billion maintenance backlog.

Members of the NPSAB serve without compensation. Like me, they’re park service volunteers. Most of them, like me, are entitled to an NPS Volunteer Pass, given annually to NPS volunteers who have logged more than 200 hours the previous year in service. Year after year, around 250,000 citizens, 40% of whom are seniors, donate more than 6 million hours of service to the system.​

And now we’ve lost nine of our most expert volunteers.

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist”

                                    Hannah Arendt,  The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

I write this morning from within my apartment in Santa Clara, where the windows are closed and the air conditioning is on despite cool temperatures outside. Although we are 94 miles south of Sonoma, the air quality index here is 154, which is considered “unhealthy.”  All outdoor athletics have been suspended by the university, including team sports, club sports and intramurals.

We didn’t go up to our sailboat this weekend because it should be even more smoky up there. The air quality index in Sausalito right now is 161, which I’m assuming is even more unhealthy. Sailing regattas have been cancelled on the bay, and the National Park Service has closed down Golden Gate Raptor Observatory’s hawk watch because they are unwilling to risk the health of official NPS volunteers such as myself.

What bothers me about this is how routine it’s getting to be smokebound. In July, up in our cabin in the San Juan Islands, we inhaled the smoke from a forest fire in British Columbia for more than a week. Then, in August, we lived for another week in the smoke of forest fires in Idaho and Montana.  Those fires were 400 miles away! Neighbors who have lived on the island for decades assured us that it’s never been this bad in the past.

I realize that I’ve got relatively little to whine about. My sister, who works for the Sonoma Land Trust, has evacuated to Sacramento and doesn’t even know whether her home is still standing. She reports that visibility was no more than thirty feet when they left their house.

This morning I can make out the hazy outline of mountains out my window. It’s the first time I’ve been able to see them this week. We were breathing in their smoke in September of 2016, and the glow of their flames lit up our bedroom one night.

I’m no climatologist, but I am a nemophilist, which the ancient, 2,000-page dictionary in my office defines as “one who loves the woods.” And the woods are telling me about profound changes that are going on in terms of climate. For thousands of years the forests of this planet have controlled the climate, keeping just the right amount of carbon sequestered, emitting just the right amount of oxygen.  But now the climate is controlling the forests, and much of the carbon sequestered there is literally going up in smoke.

The forests need our help, and they need it now. A good place to start is to resist EPA administrator Pruitt’s recent proposal to unravel this country’s Clean Power Plan. A good way to join that resistance can be found in the Environmental Defense Fund’s blog here: https://www.edf.org/blog/2017/10/09/trumps-epa-making-reckless-and-damaging-decision-heres-what-you-need-know?utm_source=google&utm_campaign=ggad_clean-power-plan_pd_dmt&utm_medium=cpc&utm_id=1507655789&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIwIqAl8Pw1gIVD5BpCh1-OwRXEAAYAiAAEgKdofD_BwE.​

Let’s all campaign for the trees.

Q:  What do you get when you buck up a Douglas-fir into 5" rounds?
A:  A cordwood writer's shack!  (Some assembly required.)

Today is my final full day as a Whiteley Scholar, and I was able to complete my manuscript for the new book, BEYOND SOLITUDE, this morning, a few hours ahead of schedule.  

Many thanks to the staff of the Whiteley Center at Friday Harbor Laboratories of the University of Washington for allowing me to take advantage of their wonderful facility. Here is a shot of the study I was assigned. What you can't see is the fireplace behind me as I took this shot. Nor can you see the fireplace in my cottage, a two-minute walk from the study. The cottage is actually closer to the water than the study, and there was a bald eagle in the tree above my back deck when I went home for lunch today.

Let's hope the inspiration was sufficient! 

I went out for a walk this afternoon to clear my head after a day of revision and editing. I hadn't journeyed further than our front path, however, when I discovered something truly macabre.  There, lying in the sawdust where I've been bucking up a tree we felled last week, was a raven's bill. The lower mandable was located about a meter west of the upper, and there was nothing else of the carcass to be found. Not a single feather!

How does one explain that?  The only mammals we've seen on the property so far are squirrels and deer, and I understand that the largest mammalian preditors we've got here are raccoons. We've seen birds of prey, but most of them are bald eagles and osprey, which tend to be piscivores.  (Yes, I realize that bald eagles are opportunistic feeders and will sometimes scavenge.) Otherwise, I've seen Coopers Hawks, Northern Goshawks and a Great Horned Owl here on the island.

​Any theories?