The secret to living longer, or at least thinking you are

(Times flies when you are having fun, but it is no fun trying to watch it fly.)

This month is a particularly weird month for DrTom.  (Sometimes I refer to myself in the third person.  After all, some of the greatest writers of the English language have used this technique.  It hints that the anecdote you are about to read will be a bit deep, even sinister.  Or, that I have bipolar disorder.  You be the judge.)  September has always heralded the beginning of the year for me.  January is not the first of the year, September is.  I am sure I feel this way because I commence the school year with this month, as many of you do also.  Even the Day Planners I buy begin with the month of September, not January.  January is one of those months that is just buried in the middle of the year, part way between the Xmas and the Easter holiday vacations.  For the past 56 years, September has meant the beginning of classes, either as a student or as a teacher, except for a couple of years in the army and a couple of sabbatic leaves from the university.  But September 2009 is the first September where none of that is true.

I'm not doing any of the activities that I normally do at this time of year and I am finding that I, well, I absolutely love it.  It is weird that I am not stocking up on pencils or notebooks or yellow sticky pads.  It is weird that I am not arranging field trips for my class, or writing a syllabus, or ordering books for courses I teach.  It is weird that I am not giving lectures, or making up exams, or trying to act all wise and intelligent.  It is weird that I am not trying to memorize the names of several dozen students.  This is probably a good thing, because I forgot the name of my dog yesterday, although I remembered that it rhymed with "goose".   This lack of doing "useful work" does make me feel guilty, like I am a lazy bum, or playing hooky, or just goofing off with no serious purpose in life.  What would my hard-working father say if he could witness this?  It has felt like one long episode of Ferris Bueller's Day Off .  Is it ok to feel this good and to have this much fun?

But there is a downside to having all this free time and doing exactly what I want to do every day, and enjoying every moment of it.  The time is going by too quickly.  Summer zipped by, autumn has begun, and every month seems to go faster and faster.  If someone is watching the atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado, I am convinced it has sped up over the past few months.  Please fix that thing.  Slow it down.  Even stop it.  I have more free time than I have ever had in my life, but I am getting farther behind on everything I want to do.  I didn't even have time to smoke a cigar yesterday.

They say that time flies when you are having fun.  Is that the phenomenon I am experiencing?  When I was teaching, September seemed to take forever to end, with all the planning, and worry, and attention to details required to present courses that students would find interesting and useful.  I liked that work, but it wasn't exactly what I would call fun.  So the time went slower then.  My old friend Paul Ehrlich was once quoted as saying in an interview for Playboy magazine, "Move to New Zealand.  You won't live longer, but it will surely seem like you do".  So that is one way to get through, I suppose.  Live a life that is a bit tedious, uncomfortable, or boring to give yourself the illusion that you are living a long life.  Is that the answer?  Long and boring, or shorter and fun.  Geez, what a dilemma.

Maybe the solution is for DrTom to do something one day a week that he absolutely hates.  That might slow down the clock just a bit and allow him to really appreciate the days when he is not doing that hated thing.  Every Wednesday morning, I could dust the shelves in my den.  I would remove each book and journal one by one, dust the shelf with Pledge, and return each item exactly where it had been, alphabetically by author.  I could follow this chore by raking the gravel in the driveway to make it smooth.  Then, I could watch several hours of reality tv about people I don't know who are trying to lose weight, build a house, or get a mate.  Yowsa!  That is a good formula for living to be 120, or at least feeling like you did.  But maybe you have a better approach to maximizing enjoyment while minimizing the quick passage of time.  Let me know; we could make a fortune.  If people are willing to pay $8 for a product that claims to reduce belly fat, they will certainly pay big bucks for a formula that makes you feel like you are living longer and enjoying life more.

But I think I have constructed a phrase that captures how I want to proceed: "Live long and prosper."  Isn't that great?  Very clever of me.  You just watch.  Some television series will pick that up and use it, and I won't get a lick of credit.

Should I get off my high horse?

(DrTom sometimes has trouble getting off his high horse.)

Yesterday's post was a serious one, and dealt with the plight of eastern deciduous forests.  On rare occasions, I can not help but pontificate on some environmental issue that bothers me.  But when I do that, my wife goes berserk: "don't write that kind of post for your blog, get off your high horse, quit being a professor, and just be funny".  Well, I am trying to make the transition from an environmental educator to a Dave Barry-like humorist, but I feel I need to offer some meaty ideas or perspectives along the way.  This is a real challenge. 

My recent students know that I think the global environment is "going to hell in a handbasket", to use my favorite expression.  Furthermore, I don't think there is a thing we CAN do to change the outcome.  More precisely, I don't think there is a thing we WILL do to change the outcome.  So why talk about it if it is a foregone conclusion?  Answer: because there is a slim chance that I am wrong about this.  I sincerely hope that this generation, with their passion and commitment, can turn it all around.  In the meantime, we will return to our regularly scheduled program.

Fretting about our forests

(Check out Great Smoky Mountains National Park to find some old-growth forest.)

I am a purist when it comes to thinking about habitats for plants and animals. I want it to be the way it used to be. I wish I could go back and see North America 500 years ago. I wish I could live another 300 years to see what the forest around my house will become. But there are many factors that cause a natural habitat to deviate from what it could be, or to be different from what it once was. In most of the world, we cut down whatever was there originally and planted food crops, built houses, or just abandoned the land after we harvested the original inhabitants.

I guess we are pretty lucky in the northeastern U.S., from a naturalist’s perspective. After the massive clearing of those fantastic deciduous forests, humans attempted agriculture and most of it failed economically. That process has allowed that vast area to regrow itself over the past six or seven decades in a process known as secondary plant succession. For example, the hill on which I live was a cattle pasture until 1960, so I now own a forest that is about 50 years old. This old pasture is developing as a forest mostly on its own. The trees are getting bigger and older, they flower and produce seeds, new seedlings appear and grow, develop into saplings, and so on.

So why am I on edge all the time about the biological process I am witnessing every day around me? For starters, we have a major mammalian herbivore living here—white-tailed deer. Deer eat many of these tree species, as well as various non-woody plants, and deer, therefore, influence the species composition and relative abundance of tree species in the future forest. In my forest, they seem to prefer maple, oak, magnolia, and tuliptree, and avoid ash, cherry, aspen, juneberry, and hornbeam. Given that deer densities in this region may be about 10 times their original density, they can have a significant impact on what our future forests become. Realize that I love deer; after all, I conducted my Ph.D. dissertation on Columbian white-tailed deer in the Pacific Northwest. But they have become the bane of my existence as a conservation biologist in upstate New York.



Second, there seems to be a new tree disease in the region every time I ask an expert. Chestnut blight decimated American chestnuts decades ago, Dutch elm disease pummeled American elms, and beech bark disease infected American beech; more recently we have to worry about the woolly adelgid on hemlocks and the emerald ash borer in ash trees. All of these have the potential to significantly reduce populations of these tree species and every tree disease listed above has something else in common—none of them are native to North America. The pathogens all got to this country from Europe or Asia. Introduction of non-native or exotic organisms is a major problem for the conservation of biodiversity globally (one of the so-called “Four Horsemen of the Environmental Apocalypse”).

And finally, there is the “invasion” of non-native shrubs in the forests of the U.S. In my area, the offenders are usually Tartarian honeysuckle and multiflora rose. I have both of them in abundance in my woods, or at least I did until I declared war a few years ago. I have spent many hours walking and pulling, or walking and clipping, or even walking and spraying the tough ones with the herbicide “Roundup.” And with the elimination of every individual comes that feeling of satisfaction that I am putting the system on the right track. We may not know all the species that were in this habitat centuries ago, and we may not know the relative abundances of the various native species back then, but we know that Tartarian honeysuckle and multiflora rose were not part of it.

Now that I am retired, I continue to patrol for deer with my Labrador retriever, pull up exotic shrubs, and monitor my trees for any mysterious death. I’d have to live until 2309 to see if I made any difference at all. And most of the time, I feel I am just spitting in the ocean, because the forces of degradation are enormous and the majority of the public will never know the difference. It sure is getting lonely out there.

The time we save: Charcoal vs. gas for BBQs

(The way some people used to bbq, back in the day.)

I have always loved to grill food outside on our deck in the evening.  It is an age-old ritual that must go back to the time when humans first learned to build a fire several hundred millenia ago.  This discovery allowed early humans to cook meat, which would have made it more tender and safe from dangerous bacteria.  But we humans don't think much about that when we decide to light the grill and flop on a raw slab of beef, sliced zucchini, Vidalia onion, or a Portobello mushroom.  Most Americans want to flip a switch, light the gas, get the food on the grill, and be eating 5-10 minutes later.  I find this appalling, even disgusting.

Preparing a meal should be about as enjoyable as eating it, in my opinion.  After all, the enjoyment that comes with eating must be at least 50% due to the anticipation of the experience anyway.  So what is the rush?  Slow down and savor the anticipation.  For this reason, and I suppose because I reject the never-ending status race that comes with buying bigger and more expensive propane grills, I prefer to use charcoal.  It is a simple system and it is inexpensive.  For about $100, I buy a Weber charcoal grill that lasts me 10-15 years; the new gas grills can cost $5,000 or more.  When my grill finally rusts out, I buy another one.  Also, I am convinced the food tastes better when cooked with charcoal compared to gas.  But most importantly, it takes time for the charcoal to get to the correct level of burn before you cook any food with it--about 45 minutes.  It is during that time that I sip my wine, sit on the deck, talk to Management about my working conditions, and prepare the rest of the meal.  Using charcoal forces you to slow down and smell the roses along the way.

But what if I could see my neighbor's grill from my deck, and they could see my puny charcoal grill?  Maybe peer pressure would urge me to buy that Lynx 42 Inch Propane Gas Grill On Cart With 1 ProSear Burner And Rotisserie L42PSFR-1-LP for $7,168.  Maybe I would be intimidated by that professional apron he is wearing, obviously embroidered by his wife for him on Father's Day. Maybe I would go out and find a steak that is 3 inches thick, a whole inch thicker than his.  Maybe I would buy a fancy Belgian beer instead of drinking a Bud Light like him.  Maybe my wife will just go ahead and put on a tinier bikini than his wife is wearing now.  But I don't have to worry about any of that, because I can't see him.  Thank goodness for maple trees, and the charcoal that could be produced from them.

I suppose the debate about using charcoal vs. gas for barbequeing will continue until we have a new breakthrough.  When nuclear BBQs are commonplace, someone will write a post similar to this one comparing propane to plutonium for grilling food.  The plutonium grilling will only take 3.4 seconds, and the exposure to radiation will be minimal, about like getting a half dozen dental x-rays.  Certainly that would be worth the time you would save preparing dinner.  The time saved could then be used to check our smart phones for text messages from people we contact regularly but never talk to in person.  We could watch more television sitcoms about families that sit around the kitchen table and joke with one another.  Or, we could read more articles in Popular Mechanics magazine about how much more time we will be able to save in the future with labor-saving devices around the house.  It is as though we think we can put all that time we saved in a hermetically-sealed container, and then let it out to use it later, when it is more convenient.  Oh, how I wish.