The Snoozefest Biome & Ecology
Saturday, July 2nd, 2022 10:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudioI decided a good way to fight the boredom of July would be with audio books.
I've had an Amazon Prime account for ages, so I'd racked up 12 credits on Audible. One credit is good for one audio book. so... hey! Twelve free books!
I looked for books about crickets specifically, and there were none, so I did the next best thing and bought four books (for starters) about insects. And I've finished the first one already... All Creatures Small and Great: How Insects Make the World by Dr. George McGavin.
This isn't really a book review, but I'd forgotten what it's like whenever you read a book by a biologist, or see a nature documentary... where, no matter how fascinating it is... 75% of the message is about how badly we are fucking up the planet... which we are!
It's not just climate change, which would be bad enough, but apart from all the CO2 emissions heating up the atmosphere, which is driving climate change... we're also killing biodiversity with... farming and suburban sprawl really.
Farming isn't just responsible for the destruction of habitats (rainforest, anyone?) all over the globe, but it's responsible for herbicides & pesticides getting everywhere. Suburban sprawl is basically just farming, but for grass lawns.
Biologists have no choice but to bring this up, because we're currently causing a mass extinction event around the planet, from insects on up to primates. And that's their business. It's 75% of the message, because it's 75% of what's happening in the field.
I'm not in a position to save the planet... being a nobody with no money and no platform... but this book did get me thinking about the biome in the place where I live, and from where I record.
------------{=0=}------------
Although Aurora Illinois is sometimes referred to as a suburb of Chicago, it is it's own city. Specifically it's a river city, and one of a string that straddle the Fox River, which comes down from Wisconsin, and empties into the Illinois River... all of which were founded through the 1800s.
Aurora, itself was founded in 1834, around a grain mill on the Fox, and the city spread out from there, to both the east and west sides of the river.
The neighborhood in which I live had been part of a farm, until about 1865, at which point it was sold to the city, and reformatted to be residential lots... or in other words... the monoculture of corn (or whatever crop Mr. Gifford grew) was replaced with some forgotten species of grass.
Being two to three miles from the river... in the days before automobiles, when everybody walked everywhere, this neighbornood was outside the circle where all the wealthy people were building their mansions, and so was only slowly populated by the working class, over thirty years.
In other words, most of the lots remained vacant for decades, with houses popping up here and there at random.
So, because it was no longer used for farming, and nobody was out there aggressively trying to maintain the grass on the vacant lots... nature had time to come and reclaim the area. Plants, trees, insects, birds, and mammals, came in quickly, and established a new biome.
It wasn't the old biome, from before the white farmers came... because it was now a mix of both wild and feral plants & animals, some native, and some from other countries... but it was a legitimately balanced biome with a lot of biodiversity.
We're talking; 50 different species of ground cover, coexisting with 50 different species of grass, and dandelions, and clover, and wild flowers, and feral garden flowers & vegetables, with 50 different species of trees... allowed to grow to enormous heights and establish vast root systems... supporting innumerable species of insects, birds, and mammals.
And because it's always been a working class neighborhood, nobody's ever had the money to try and upset any of that very much. Certainly nobody's ever scraped their lot clean and replanted some monoculture of grass to scrupulously maintain from that day forward.
And, nobody's ever needed an ounce of fertilizer around here, because everything around here grows out of control... partly because of the regional climate, but also for local reasons I'll get to below.
At any rate, all anybody around here does is mow... which only helps to scatter seeds around... or mulch the dead leaves... which only helps to fertilize the soil.
Cutting down a big tree is prohibitively expensive, so nobody ever does it unless one is really on it's last legs.
Now, people do use herbicides and pesticides I'm sure (I wrote a whole entry about how I went to war with the overgrown yard using Tordon in 2021, which was an anomaly) for some persistent weeds, or, unfortunately, wasp nests and bee hives... but, I would argue, not nearly to the extent that such measures are taken in actual suburbs.
------------{=0=}------------
What do I mean by, "actual suburbs?"
I'm talking about white-flight subdivisions of pre-fabricated houses, strictly zoned for residential use only, with their SUV driving residents shopping only at mega-marts and strip-malls, in asphalt deserts, far outside the reaches of the filthy inner cities.
Places far from ubran centers, which were farmland yesterday, and aggressively formatted with monocultural grass... where every single new sapling has to be approved by a homeowners association (HOA) and lawns must be meticulously maintained under penalty of stiff fines and ostracization!
These are the places where they're using all the pesticides & herbicides, as a matter of course, to combat biodiversity itself. Plants, insects, and mammals alike, are all closely monitored as threats.
These are the people to whom the exterminators ask, "Is your lawn infested with crickets?"
------------{=0=}------------
I'm not saying Aurora is without ecological sin, or immune from the ravages of mass extinction and climate change.
But as human habitations go, in the 21st century... it's not doing bad!
Between 1996 and 1999, I lived in Leland Tower, an old 20-story building smack in the middle of town, on Stolp Island, right in the middle of the Fox River. For a while I lived on the 7th floor, looking over the west side... and then I lived on the 17th floor looking over the east side. And I always had the stairwell windows looking north, from all floors.
What I saw, from that vantage, was a forest.
Didn't matter what direction you looked. In the near foreground, yes, there were the buildings and bridges of downtown. But beyond that, and as far as the eye could see... it was nothing but tree canopy.
No houses. No streets. Just endless bundles of leaves, and cones of pine needles.
And thirty years later, it's the same. Some trees have been cut down in their old age. But others have grown to take their place. There is no pressure to get rid of them.
And wherever you have a dense population of old, huge trees... you have everything else.
------------{=0=}------------
The dense root systems of, "mother trees," as they're called, create vast networks of fungal, bacterial, and insect life that keep the soil fertile, while their trunks and branches provide habitats for innumerable different species, as well as food... and those canopies create their own weather conditions as well.
It could indeed be that the Percy Jones' Hole effect, I described in an earlier entry, is due to the fact that the forest of Aurora is a protuberance on the western edge of the metro.
Storm systems come from the west, moving eastward... over mostly open land the whole way, through Nebraska & Iowa... with Aurora being the first big forest they encounter. And we have corridors of open land around us to the north and south.
So, rather than a magnetic anomaly, or an urban heat island... it could simply be the atmospheric bubble created by the dense concentration of neighborhood trees, in a western peninsula of the greater Chicago metro, that's got open land north and south of it.
I guess I'll have to spend more Audible credits on forestry books, but my understanding is that they do create their own local temperature & humidity bubbles... and who knows, maybe there's even a net electrical charge to that bubble?
Whatever the case, the forest that is Aurora Illinois is also home to a ton of wildlife, with the back yards of every block constituting huge green spaces.
The combined back yards of my block alone... all joining back to back, with the houses all off on the edges of the streets, is a good eight acres. The neighborhoods at large are vastly more, on either side of the river.
It's mostly side streets, quiet after dark, and the back yard fences present no obstacle to wildlife, which can easily get under, over, or around them.
In addition to the animals you'd expect... squirrels, rabbits, oppossums, raccoons, skunks, and groundhogs... I've seen deer walking through the neigbhorhood. It's rare, but it happens.
I've seen and heard owls on the block, and hawks hovering overhead.
And you know about, Zorro, the neighborhood fox!
Butterflies, moths, beetles and bumble bees, blue jays, cardinals, robins and sparrows... they're all here... minding their business and mostly ignoring us. We're just monkeys in boxes who sometimes run lawn mowers, but mostly just move around in cars to god knows where. They don't care.
------------{=0=}------------
It may not have the species diversity of a truly wild forest, but semi-urban Aurora isn't doing bad... and it is a kind of accidental nature preserve... created by historical and economic forces.
Once upon a time it was a forest. Then it was cleared for farming. Then industry set up shop on the river and a lot of the farmland was relcaimed for residential use.
But it took decades for that residential land to be populated, allowing a forest biome to get reestablished. But socio-economic forces have pushed out everybody who didn't like living in an antiquated semi-urban forest, and kept in, only the people who don't give a shit... or can't afford to fuck with it much.
And history has grandfathered-in, this type of place... with shady streets and random houses of all shapes and sizes on block-sized islands of greenspace, with mismatched chainlink and wood fencing... and now we protect it.
It's a little too pretty to redevelop... but a little too run down to try and gentrify.
It's an accidental preserve.
A little oasis, with it's own biome and it's own weather bubble... sitting on a minor river, in a little sweet spot between endless farmland to the left, and a big lake metro to the right... and I hope to God it stays that way.
But that's not up to me.
I can only do my best with the little plot I own, and make my recordings of whatever species they are, of crickets and other bugs that call my yard home.
°¦}
https://soundcloud.com/snoozefestaudio
I've had an Amazon Prime account for ages, so I'd racked up 12 credits on Audible. One credit is good for one audio book. so... hey! Twelve free books!
I looked for books about crickets specifically, and there were none, so I did the next best thing and bought four books (for starters) about insects. And I've finished the first one already... All Creatures Small and Great: How Insects Make the World by Dr. George McGavin.
This isn't really a book review, but I'd forgotten what it's like whenever you read a book by a biologist, or see a nature documentary... where, no matter how fascinating it is... 75% of the message is about how badly we are fucking up the planet... which we are!
It's not just climate change, which would be bad enough, but apart from all the CO2 emissions heating up the atmosphere, which is driving climate change... we're also killing biodiversity with... farming and suburban sprawl really.
Farming isn't just responsible for the destruction of habitats (rainforest, anyone?) all over the globe, but it's responsible for herbicides & pesticides getting everywhere. Suburban sprawl is basically just farming, but for grass lawns.
Biologists have no choice but to bring this up, because we're currently causing a mass extinction event around the planet, from insects on up to primates. And that's their business. It's 75% of the message, because it's 75% of what's happening in the field.
I'm not in a position to save the planet... being a nobody with no money and no platform... but this book did get me thinking about the biome in the place where I live, and from where I record.
Although Aurora Illinois is sometimes referred to as a suburb of Chicago, it is it's own city. Specifically it's a river city, and one of a string that straddle the Fox River, which comes down from Wisconsin, and empties into the Illinois River... all of which were founded through the 1800s.
Aurora, itself was founded in 1834, around a grain mill on the Fox, and the city spread out from there, to both the east and west sides of the river.
The neighborhood in which I live had been part of a farm, until about 1865, at which point it was sold to the city, and reformatted to be residential lots... or in other words... the monoculture of corn (or whatever crop Mr. Gifford grew) was replaced with some forgotten species of grass.
Being two to three miles from the river... in the days before automobiles, when everybody walked everywhere, this neighbornood was outside the circle where all the wealthy people were building their mansions, and so was only slowly populated by the working class, over thirty years.
In other words, most of the lots remained vacant for decades, with houses popping up here and there at random.
So, because it was no longer used for farming, and nobody was out there aggressively trying to maintain the grass on the vacant lots... nature had time to come and reclaim the area. Plants, trees, insects, birds, and mammals, came in quickly, and established a new biome.
It wasn't the old biome, from before the white farmers came... because it was now a mix of both wild and feral plants & animals, some native, and some from other countries... but it was a legitimately balanced biome with a lot of biodiversity.
We're talking; 50 different species of ground cover, coexisting with 50 different species of grass, and dandelions, and clover, and wild flowers, and feral garden flowers & vegetables, with 50 different species of trees... allowed to grow to enormous heights and establish vast root systems... supporting innumerable species of insects, birds, and mammals.
And because it's always been a working class neighborhood, nobody's ever had the money to try and upset any of that very much. Certainly nobody's ever scraped their lot clean and replanted some monoculture of grass to scrupulously maintain from that day forward.
And, nobody's ever needed an ounce of fertilizer around here, because everything around here grows out of control... partly because of the regional climate, but also for local reasons I'll get to below.
At any rate, all anybody around here does is mow... which only helps to scatter seeds around... or mulch the dead leaves... which only helps to fertilize the soil.
Cutting down a big tree is prohibitively expensive, so nobody ever does it unless one is really on it's last legs.
Now, people do use herbicides and pesticides I'm sure (I wrote a whole entry about how I went to war with the overgrown yard using Tordon in 2021, which was an anomaly) for some persistent weeds, or, unfortunately, wasp nests and bee hives... but, I would argue, not nearly to the extent that such measures are taken in actual suburbs.
What do I mean by, "actual suburbs?"
I'm talking about white-flight subdivisions of pre-fabricated houses, strictly zoned for residential use only, with their SUV driving residents shopping only at mega-marts and strip-malls, in asphalt deserts, far outside the reaches of the filthy inner cities.
Places far from ubran centers, which were farmland yesterday, and aggressively formatted with monocultural grass... where every single new sapling has to be approved by a homeowners association (HOA) and lawns must be meticulously maintained under penalty of stiff fines and ostracization!
These are the places where they're using all the pesticides & herbicides, as a matter of course, to combat biodiversity itself. Plants, insects, and mammals alike, are all closely monitored as threats.
These are the people to whom the exterminators ask, "Is your lawn infested with crickets?"
I'm not saying Aurora is without ecological sin, or immune from the ravages of mass extinction and climate change.
But as human habitations go, in the 21st century... it's not doing bad!
Between 1996 and 1999, I lived in Leland Tower, an old 20-story building smack in the middle of town, on Stolp Island, right in the middle of the Fox River. For a while I lived on the 7th floor, looking over the west side... and then I lived on the 17th floor looking over the east side. And I always had the stairwell windows looking north, from all floors.
What I saw, from that vantage, was a forest.
Didn't matter what direction you looked. In the near foreground, yes, there were the buildings and bridges of downtown. But beyond that, and as far as the eye could see... it was nothing but tree canopy.
No houses. No streets. Just endless bundles of leaves, and cones of pine needles.
And thirty years later, it's the same. Some trees have been cut down in their old age. But others have grown to take their place. There is no pressure to get rid of them.
And wherever you have a dense population of old, huge trees... you have everything else.
The dense root systems of, "mother trees," as they're called, create vast networks of fungal, bacterial, and insect life that keep the soil fertile, while their trunks and branches provide habitats for innumerable different species, as well as food... and those canopies create their own weather conditions as well.
It could indeed be that the Percy Jones' Hole effect, I described in an earlier entry, is due to the fact that the forest of Aurora is a protuberance on the western edge of the metro.
Storm systems come from the west, moving eastward... over mostly open land the whole way, through Nebraska & Iowa... with Aurora being the first big forest they encounter. And we have corridors of open land around us to the north and south.
So, rather than a magnetic anomaly, or an urban heat island... it could simply be the atmospheric bubble created by the dense concentration of neighborhood trees, in a western peninsula of the greater Chicago metro, that's got open land north and south of it.
I guess I'll have to spend more Audible credits on forestry books, but my understanding is that they do create their own local temperature & humidity bubbles... and who knows, maybe there's even a net electrical charge to that bubble?
Whatever the case, the forest that is Aurora Illinois is also home to a ton of wildlife, with the back yards of every block constituting huge green spaces.
The combined back yards of my block alone... all joining back to back, with the houses all off on the edges of the streets, is a good eight acres. The neighborhoods at large are vastly more, on either side of the river.
It's mostly side streets, quiet after dark, and the back yard fences present no obstacle to wildlife, which can easily get under, over, or around them.
In addition to the animals you'd expect... squirrels, rabbits, oppossums, raccoons, skunks, and groundhogs... I've seen deer walking through the neigbhorhood. It's rare, but it happens.
I've seen and heard owls on the block, and hawks hovering overhead.
And you know about, Zorro, the neighborhood fox!
Butterflies, moths, beetles and bumble bees, blue jays, cardinals, robins and sparrows... they're all here... minding their business and mostly ignoring us. We're just monkeys in boxes who sometimes run lawn mowers, but mostly just move around in cars to god knows where. They don't care.
It may not have the species diversity of a truly wild forest, but semi-urban Aurora isn't doing bad... and it is a kind of accidental nature preserve... created by historical and economic forces.
Once upon a time it was a forest. Then it was cleared for farming. Then industry set up shop on the river and a lot of the farmland was relcaimed for residential use.
But it took decades for that residential land to be populated, allowing a forest biome to get reestablished. But socio-economic forces have pushed out everybody who didn't like living in an antiquated semi-urban forest, and kept in, only the people who don't give a shit... or can't afford to fuck with it much.
And history has grandfathered-in, this type of place... with shady streets and random houses of all shapes and sizes on block-sized islands of greenspace, with mismatched chainlink and wood fencing... and now we protect it.
It's a little too pretty to redevelop... but a little too run down to try and gentrify.
It's an accidental preserve.
A little oasis, with it's own biome and it's own weather bubble... sitting on a minor river, in a little sweet spot between endless farmland to the left, and a big lake metro to the right... and I hope to God it stays that way.
But that's not up to me.
I can only do my best with the little plot I own, and make my recordings of whatever species they are, of crickets and other bugs that call my yard home.
°¦}
