Three springs ago I visited the Leopold Memorial Reserve—the depleted Wisconsin sand county farm Aldo Leopold bought in 1930 known as the “shack.” In the 1940s he recorded in his field notes that without large predators such as wolves to regulate their numbers, deer were eating aspens and other trees and shrubs to death. I wanted to see whether this was still so.

The Wisconsin River where it flows near the shack, at flood stage. Photo by Cristina Eisenberg.

The 1900 acre Reserve lies along the Wisconsin River, half in floodplain and marsh, the rest in upland oak-hickory-pine forest and old farmland. Deer densities range from 5-11 per square mile, 150 to 300 percent above management goals. Predators include coyotes, with occasional cougars and black bears. Several wolves have been sighted in recent years, dispersers from northern Wisconsin. These wolves sometimes turn up as roadkill or shot by farmers and hunters. When one was shot near the Reserve a few years ago, the Leopold family mourned its death. Although no established wolf population exists here, more wolves are coming from the north.

The terrible condition of the aspens at the Shack. Photo by Cristina Eisenberg.

I surveyed the Reserve’s aspen stands and found many being eaten heavily by deer. Prescribed fire had stimulated vigorous aspen growth; however, this had only intensified browsing, leaving stands in worse condition than if they hadn’t burned.

One day Aldo Leopold’s daughter Nina joined me in the field. Her chocolate Labrador retriever Maggie ran glad circles around us as we examined the aspens around the shack. As we looked we became aware of missing age classes and ghosts of trees likely long lost to herbivory. “Look,” I said, gesturing toward the aspens, “Lots of old aspens. Lots of young aspens. No middle-aged aspens.”

Next we examined the aspens below the height deer can eat (about six feet). Almost all had sharp, chisel-shaped ends where the deer had bitten off the dominant growth bud. I examined an aspen less than three feet tall and counted its wounds—eight in all. Aspens can sustain moderate browsing, but these Bonsai trees would eventually die.

We looked hard, but couldn’t find stands near the shack with aspens growing above browse height. Across from the shack in Crane Marsh, aspens grew above browse height. But this area contained rough terrain impassable to humans and difficult for even deer to navigate.

When I finished all my fieldwork, I sat on a mossy bench overlooking the Wisconsin River floodplain. It was Earth Day. The sun slanted low across the water and illuminated the white pines planted by the Leopold family. Now grown tall and stately, their boughs swayed gently in the wind. The weather forecast promised snow the next day. I sensed the earth burgeoning with life on that warm afternoon between storms, everything green and growing. Now and then I spotted the bright feathers of returning warblers, flying low between the oaks, exhausted from migration.

Perhaps Aldo Leopold had sat where I sat, hearing cranesong from the marsh, a light wind playing through the previous year’s dried grasses, leaf buds beginning to open after a long, hard winter. Perhaps he had sat here and thought about his struggles as a game commissioner grappling with too many deer in Wisconsin, or about how to sharpen his writing skills to communicate more effectively about conservation. Perhaps he had found hope that his words would open hearts and minds, that his restoration efforts might bear fruit, and that his children would carry on his efforts. And so they have, and the wolves are returning.

There is a great clarity of light here.

For over 30 years, I’ve worked in rainforest ecosystems. My senses are finely tuned to the sweet smell of cedar and pine, sap runs through my veins, and I have learned how to read the forest like the pages of a good mystery novel. But each year, I do an annual trek to the desert where rainforests give way to spiny, prickly things with names like pincushion and rainbow cactus, prickly pear cactus, and ocotillo. This year, I arrived in the Sonoran desert just outside Phoenix, Arizona during an early spring bloom where I was greeted by a kaleidoscope of colors and unfamiliar scents. But what do such extreme environments have to teach a rainforest guy?

To even the most causal observer, deserts and rainforests are polar opposites. While rainforests bath in moisture, deserts must cope without a drop. In rainforests, it’s easy to go vertical as trees are layered from the ground up. In deserts, vertical is replaced by a hodgepodge of irregularly spaced shrubs, small trees, low-growing cactuses, and the desert equivalent of old growth – long-lived saguaros with “arms” that point every which way. Snags, downed logs, and pileated woodpecker hollows are replaced by the occasional dead saguaro hollowed out by desert-dwelling Gila woodpeckers, nature’s version of “drill baby drill.” Instead of humus-rich rainforest soils, crypto-biotic crusts are populated by an unseen world of microbes and algae.

Just a few nights in the desert can convince even the staunchest rainforest advocate that something is special here too. Contrary to popular belief, arid landscapes are far from a wasteland. The desert is a rich, interconnected ecosystem that has etched out an existence in some of the harshest environments on the planet. Javelinas, bobcats, poisonous snakes, scorpions, tarantula hawk wasps, Gila monsters, and Harris hawks are but a few of the life forms in the extremes.

And while the absence of clearcuts offers a temporary respite for a rainforest ecologist like me, the desert is not without its own scars. Cow-bombed landscapes replace native plants with cheatgrass, crush crypto-biotics, and pollute streams with cow excrement. Cavernous pits are dug out of the earth, as minors search for gold, silver, uranium, and copper, leaving mounds of toxic tailings behind. A relentless caravan of off-highway vehicles discombobulates the homes of desert sidewinders and tortoises.

On the one hand, nature’s disturbances, known as “pulse” disturbances since they occur more or less in regular cycles with predictable outcomes, have sculptured both desert and rainforest environments for millennia. Humanity’s disturbances, on the other hand, are chronic, occurring at much greater intensities, frequencies, and over larger expanses that exceed nature’s rejuvenating powers. Clearly, humans have become the planet’s bigfoot in terms of our ecological footprint. As such, both rainforest and desert environments share a common fate. Their survival depends on stepped-up stewardship, conservation, and human restraint. There is still time to live sustainably even at these opposite extremes. We can best do this by operating within the means of what both ecosystems can provide without forgoing opportunities for future generations.

As I observed a passing bobcat, I pondered whether it sensed that I was a stranger to this extreme land. And I wondered whether there really is any respite for an ecologist who cares about the beauty and pain of both places.

While in Caravelas I met people whose lives are intertwined with mangroves. They live amongst them, make their livelihood from them and revere them. Here is what I wrote after meeting some of the fishers of Caravelas. . . Read more»

The results of last month’s annual Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge Bird Survey indicate that birds may colonize reforested areas much faster than experts had predicted. This year’s surveyors spotted all five of the common native forest birds and four endangered forest birds within sections of the refuge that two short decades ago had been treeless areas dominated by non-native plants and animals. “I never thought I’d live to see this,” said Jack Jeffrey, who coordinated this bird survey and was the refuge biologist from 1990-2008.

Hawaii’s Hakalau (Hawaiian for “place of many perches”) Forest Refuge was explicitly created in 1985 to preserve native forest birds and their habitat. Today the Hakalau NWR comprises almost 33,000 acres between 2,500 and 6,600 feet. By the time the refuge was established, however, more than 200 years’ worth of damage from cattle, feral pigs, logging, fires, and noxious weeds had converted much of what had been a magnificent high elevation native rain forest into a vast ecological wasteland.

Read the rest of Robert J. Cabin’s post at Huffington Post Green.

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Robert J. Cabin is an associate professor of ecology and environmental science at Brevard College. Before returning to academia, he worked as a restoration ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service and the National Tropical Botanical Garden. His new book Intelligent Tinkering: Bridging the Gap between Science and Practice will be published in August 2011 by Island Press.

In my travels through the mangroves of the Americas I was keen to learn how mangroves had influenced or been incorporated into local cultures. In Caravelas, in the Brazilian state of Bahia, I met three remarkable brothers who promote the indigenous culture of Bahia—a culture that is infused with images and myths relating to mangroves. Here is a blog post I wrote from Caravelas … Read more »

Teaching Afro-Indigenous culture to the children of Caravelas. Photo by Kennedy Warne.

Opposition to shrimp aquaculture in Ecuador has been growing as coastal mangrove dwellers find their voice and harden their resolve to fight for the preservation of the forests that sustain them. Some of the more outspoken opponents of shrimp farming have had their lives threatened. I met one such champion of the mangroves, who had been in hiding with his family for a month. Here is the blog post I wrote after talking to him. . . Read more »

Peter Segura—a marked man. Photo by Kennedy Warne.

In the Esmeraldas region of northern Ecuador a large mangrove reserve has been created, within which several villages have custodianship of the forests. Here traditional ways of mangrove-dependent fishing continue, including picking cockles from the mud around the mangrove roots. Cockle collection is predominantly women’s work, and in the village of Tambillo I joined a group of these concheras as they set out for the mangrove collecting grounds. Here is the blog post I wrote about that experience . . . Read more »

Concheras at the cockle beds, about to climb the mangrove scaffold. Photo by Kennedy Warne.

No, it’s not in Brazil or Borneo. It’s actually in the good old USA, literally and figuratively clinging to a steep slope in a drainage called Mahanaloa Gulch on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai. We need to stop twiddling our thumbs and SAVE THIS FOREST NOW.

I first visited this mystical forest shortly after I began a postdoctoral fellowship in restoration ecology at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in 1996. To my novice eyes, this gulch contained a beautiful but bewildering quilt of plants. Even more bewildering was the fact that several species I had recently seen elsewhere in the archipelago looked so different (what had been, say, a small shrub on another island had magically transformed into a vinelike tree here) that I never would have recognized them without my colleagues’ help.

What also struck me about this remnant forest was that every other plant seemed to be another federally endangered species found only on Kauai. We later realized that since 1) Hawaii has the world’s most unique and endangerment flora, 2) Kauai has the most unique and endangered flora of all the Hawaiian Islands, and 3) Mahanaloa Gulch has the most unique and endangered flora on Kauai, to the best of our knowledge, that particular forest contained the most unique and endangered flora on the planet!

New post from Robert Cabin, author of the forthcoming book Intelligent Tinkering writing on Huffington Post Green. Read the rest of his post here

In March I participated in a University of Nebraska literary retreat at the Platte River Whooping Crane Maintenance Trust. It was the climax of spring migration on the river, where sandhill cranes pause to feed during their 5,000 mile journey from Mexico to as far as Siberia. I spent my time there ensconced in a primitive blind with several eminent poets, bearing witness to the cranes’ sempiternal return. Fossil evidence suggests that cranes have been stopping at this place on their journey north for the past 10 million years.

Rough windows cut into the blind overlooked the river and vouchsafed us a view of the cranes as they came down to roost on the silvery Platte at dusk and left to forage at dawn. If we spoke at all, we did so in whispers and gestures, overcome by this primal spectacle, this coming together of legions of cranes into a great council of beings.

Cranes need grasslands, wetlands, and open space. They prefer shallow, broad water for roosting; the Platte River, an inch deep and a mile wide, offers ideal habitat. Accordingly, each spring hundreds of thousands of sandhill cranes and a handful of whooping cranes, spend three weeks in a sixty-mile reach of the Platte. Their annual return is one of the most heartening conservation stories.

While I was in Nebraska winter broke, with crusty snow carried downstream by the river and cranes on the wing filling the air with their clarion calls in the gloaming. I watched bright runes of cranes parachute in against the strong prairie wind after a day spent foraging in nearby farm fields. With sun-gilded breasts, cupped wings, humped backs, and dangling legs they streamed earthward to join their roosting comrades. Their bodies darkened the sky as far as I could see as they streamed in endlessly.

In the 1920s, Aldo Leopold found only five breeding pairs of sandhill cranes and five whooping cranes remaining. This inspired him to write “Marshland Elegy,” in A Sand County Almanac at a time when there was little hope for their survival.

Cranes declined due to over-hunting and habitat loss. Today more than 700,000 sandhill and 280 whooping cranes exist. Legislation (the 1900 Lacey and 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Acts) helped enable their recovery. In the 1920s, the National Refuge System began to conserve migration and nesting habitat. But it would take decades of wetland restoration and outreach to bring cranes back.

Smudgy contours of landforms lay soft against glowing skies as the light gently faded at dusk. Cottonwoods and river and cranes ribboned horizontally. This landscape and these cranes had shaped each other over eons. My senses filled with the sounds of cranes calling, purring, growling, their songs at once strident and gentle. I sat yearning to understand this vast hegira-the same way that humans over the ages must have sat here witnessing the lessons and truths this great migration holds. This time in this place was about trust: that the future will be better than the near past; that we will reweave the web of life by bringing back species from the brink of extinction.

As dawn broke the next day we discerned among the 100,000 dun sandhill bodies pressed together on the riverbank a blaze of white-a lone whooping crane. Head and shoulders above the others, this great white hope of a bird moved regally amid all the flapping, clamoring sandhills. As it fed it periodically flared its enormous black-tipped wings, and gave loud whooping calls that stood out above the sandhill clamor. Long after all the sandhill legions had spiraled skyward, the whooping crane remained.

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Cristina Eisenberg is a conservation biologist at Oregon State University, College of Forestry, and Boone and Crockett Fellow who studies how wolves affect forest ecosystems throughout the West.

The wildfire created by the recent eruption of the Kilauea volcano on the Island of Hawaii has already burned some 2,000 acres in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, home to 23 species of endangered plants and 6 endangered birds. Because this fire now threatens a relatively pristine native rain forest that is home to Hawaii’s famous happyface spiders and honeycreeper songbirds, Park officials are quite rightly doing everything they can to stop it. As a whole, Hawaii is a globally important paradise that is dying on our watch. Three quarters of all the bird and plant extinctions in the US have occurred within these islands, and one third of America’s threatened and endangered birds and plants now reside within this state.

Read more of this post at on Huffington Post in their Green section.