I've been back from our study area in Michigan's Upper Peninsula for over a week so it's about time I posted something about what we were doing up there.
One of the main issues we will study with our integrated ecological-economic landscape model is the impact of whitetail deer (Odocoileus virginianus) herbivory on tree regeneration following cutting. Last November we spent a week planting 2 year-old seedlings in Northern Hardwood forest gaps created by selective timber harvest (like the one in the photo below).
Our plan was to return this spring to examine the impacts of deer browse on these seedlings. In particular, we wanted to examine how herbivory varies across space due to changes in deer population densities (in turn driven by factors such as snow depth).
To this end we selected almost 40 forest sites that would hopefully capture some spatial variation in snowfall and that had recently been selectively harvested. At each site we selected 10 gaps produced by timber harvest in which to plant our seedlings.
In each gap we planted six trees of each of three species: White Spruce (Picea glauca), White Pine (Pinus strobus) and Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis). We chose these coniferous species as these are examples of the mesic confer species the Michigan DNR are trying to restore across our study area, and because we expected a range of herbivory across these species.
At each site we would also undertake deer pellet counts in the spring to estimate the number of deer in the vicinity of the site during the winter (during which time the browse we were measuring would have occurred).
On returning to the study sites a couple of weeks ago we set about looking for the trees we had planted to measure herbivory and count deer pellets. In some cases, finding the trees we planted was easier said than done. We tried to get our field crews to plant the trees in straight lines with equal spacing between each tree. In general, this was done well but on occasion the line could only be described as crooked at best. Micro-topography, fallen tree trunks and limbs, and slash from previous cutting all contributed to hamper the planned planting system. However, we did pretty well and found well over 90% of the trees.
We haven't begun analyzing our data as yet, but some anecdotal observations stand out. First, the deer preferentially browsed Hemlock over the other species, often removing virtually all non-woody biomass as shown by the 'before and after' examples below (NB - these photographs are not of the same tree and this is not a true before/after comparison).
In some cases, the deer not only removed all non-woody biomass but also pulled the tree out of the ground (as shown below).
In contrast, White Pine was browsed to a much lesser extent and White Spruce was virtually untouched (as shown below).
Having a species that was unaffected by deer (i.e. spruce) often made our job of finding the other trees much easier. Finding heavily browsed Hemlock that no longer had any green vegetation was often tricky against a background of forest floor litter.
The next step now is to start looking at this variation in browse through a more quantitative lens. Then we can start examining how browse and deer densities vary across space and how these variables are related to one another and other factors (such as snow depth and distance to conifer stands).
All-in-all the two weeks of work went pretty well. There were some issues with water-logged roads (due to snow melt) meaning we couldn't get to one or two of the sites we planted at, but generally the weather was pretty good (it only rained heavily one day). I'll write more once we have done more analysis and stop here with a shot I took at sunrise as I left for home.
Last week I took a brief snowboarding trip to Utah. After two days on the fantastic Snowbird slopes we explored the area around Salt Lake City a little. One place we visited was Garr Ranch on Antelope Island, home of the oldest Anglo house still on its original foundation in Utah. Perched in the middle of the Great Salt Lake, it was quite a windswept location and impressive that it's also the longest Anglo inhabited site in the state. A couple of photos from the trip now on the photos page.
A few pictures from our trip to the UP study area this past week.
The fall was almost over. We were out on a recce to find sites for an experiment we're setting up over the next couple of weeks to examine the impact of deer browse on seedlings of various conifer species.
We want to locate our seedling planting on both state and commercial lands - cutting had recently finished at this commercial site.
We also visited a deer exclosure set up to examine tree regeneration in the absence of deer browse (similar in many ways to our experiment). It's not the best picture, but the effects of 12 years of protection can be seen - very little regeneration on the left of the fence but evidence of green juveniles on the right. These effects haven't been quantified at this site but by sight alone there's clearly difference outside s inside the exclosure.
Finally, not all the leaves had fallen. We were a couple of weeks late for the real colours, but some remained down on the Lake Michigan coastline.
For now here is a grossly unfair, and probably invalid, comparison (but this is how it felt just looking whilst stood there). On one side of Detroit River is its namesake, Detroit, Michigan (top). On the other side lies Windsor, Ontario (bottom).
"I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye."F. Scott Fitzgerald
I, on the other hand, liked it immediately. Like London, it just has that energy that gets mind and body moving. I arrived the day after the tornado and the transport network was just getting back to normal. There were still a few problems though...
So, my highlights: Top of the Rock (the usual tourist thing of going to the top of something tall and checking the view - above); the UN HQ (below); Brooklyn Bridge (another US bridge about to collapse by the look of things); generally just hangin' out with old friends enjoying the atmosphere with a few beers (Brooklyn Lager was pretty good); and learning to play wiffle ball in the street at 3am (not the easiest whilst half cut...) All good!
One evening whilst sitting on a deck overlooking a tranquil lake in the wilds of the UP's northern hardwood forests, I began reading William Cronon's contributions to the volume he edited himself; Uncommon Ground. The book has been around for a decade and more but it is only recently that I came across a copy in a secondhand book store. It seems apt that I considered what it had to say about the 'social construction' of nature in a setting of the type that has long intrigued me. Maybe the view of a landscape which confronted me is another of the reasons I am doing what I am right now. I have had pictures of these large wilderness landscapes on the walls of my mind, and elsewhere, for a while.
Cronon examines "the trouble with wilderness" with reference to the Edenic ideal that underlay it from the beginning. Wordsworth and Thoreau were in bewildered or lost awe of the sublime landscapes they travelled, but by the time John Muir came to the Sierra Nevada the landscape was an ecstasy. Whilst Adam and Eve may have been driven from the garden out into the wilderness, the myth was now 'the mountain as cathedral' and sacred wilderness was a place to worship God's natural world. Furthermore, as the American frontier diminished with time and technology,
"wilderness came to embody the national frontier myth, standing for the wild freedom of America's past and and seeming to represent a highly attractive natural alternative to the ugly artificiality of modern civilization. ... Ever since the nineteenth century, celebrating wilderness has been an activity mainly for well-to-do city folks. Country people generally know far too much about working the land to regard unworked land as their ideal." (p.78)
Cronon suggests that there is a paradox at the heart of the Wilderness ideal, this conception that true nature must also be wild and that humans must set aside areas of the world for it to remain pristine. As Cronon puts it, this paradox is that "The place where we are is the place where nature is not". Taking this logic to its extreme results in the need for humans to kill themselves in order to preserve the natural world;
"The absurdity of this proposition flows from the underlying dualism it expresses. ... The tautology gives us no way out: if wild nature is the only thing worth saving, and if our mere presence destroys it, then the sole solution to our own unnaturalness, the only way to protect sacred wilderness from profane humanity, would seem to be suicide. It is not a proposition that seems likely to produce very positive or practical results." (p.83)
I'll say. But Cronon is not saying that protected wilderness areas are themselves undesirable things, of course not. His point is about the idea of Wilderness. As a response he suggests that rather than thinking of nature as 'out there', we need to learn how to bring the wonder we feel when in the wilderness closer to home. We need to abandon the idea of the tree in the garden as artificial and the tree in the wilderness as natural. If we see both trees as natural, as wild, then we will be able to see nature and wildness everywhere; in the fields of the countryside, between the cracks in the city pavement, and even in our own cells.
"If wildness can stop being (just) out there and start being (also) in here, if it can start being as humane as it is natural, then perhaps we can get on with the unending task of struggling to live rightly in the world - not just in the garden, not just in the wilderness, but in the home that encompasses both" (p.90)
Sitting on that deck looking out over the lake it was clear that landscapes such as the one I was in aren't the idealised, pristine, wilderness that they may be portrayed as in books, photographs and travel brochures. Just as in studying its nature I have come to understand a little better the uncertainties of the scientific method that is supposed to bring facts and truth, so I think have come to better understand the place of human needs within these 'wild' landscapes. As naive as it is to think that science might offer the absolute truth (it can't, but it is still the best game in town to understand the world around us), thinking humans are inseparable from nature seems equally foolish.
In the introduction to a book on natural resource economics (which has mysteriously vanished from my bookshelf), an author describes a similar situation. As a young man he wanted to study the environment in order that he might save it from destructive hands of humans. But in time he came to realise this was unrealistic and that better would be to study the means by which humans use the 'natural world' to harvest and produce the resources we need to live. Economics is concerned with the means by which we allocate, and create value from, resources. Just as it is important to understand how 'nature' works, it is also important to understand how a world in which humans are a natural component works, and how it can continue to function indefinitely.
Landscape Ecology and Ecological Economics have grown out of this understanding. Whilst theories and models about the natural world independent of humans remain necessary, increasingly important are theories and models that consider the interaction between the social, economic and biophysical components of the natural world. These tools might help us get on with the task of living sustainably in the place which humans should naturally call home.
Some of the State natural resource manager I met with spoke about the 'Maple-ization' of the forests in the western UP - whilst a native of these forests, the economic value of Maple wood is leading to the removal of other Northern Hardwood species and an (over) dominance of Maple.
The Mackinac Bridge, linking the Upper and Lower peninsulas of Michigan, celebrates its 50th birthday this year. Currently the third-longest Suspension Bridge in the world (at 1.7 miles of suspended roadway) it was originally dubbed the 'Bridge to Nowhere'. Now however, it provides a vital (though recently decreasing) influx of tourist dollars to the UP. Whilst impressive, IMHO the Mackinac Bridge doesn't have a patch on the Bristolian's beloved Clifton Suspension Bridge.
Many of those tourists crossing the Mackinac Bridge head to Tahquamenon Falls. The second largest waterfalls east of the Mississippi (after Niagra), at peak flow more than 50,000 gallons of water per second flow over the edge.
Checkout the location of these pics, and others I took on my trip, at the photos page.
Let's go Lansing Lugnuts that is. Last night I went to my first Minor League Baseball game. I've been to a couple of Major League games before, but on a nice summers' evening it was about time to find out more about what goes on in the lower echelons of the game that has always intrigued me. When I was about 8 my uncle brought me back a Red Socks baseball and pennant from a business trip. Maybe that got it started. One of my favourite writers Stephen Jay Gould was a huge baseball fan and used the apparent extinction of the .400 batting average as an adroit metaphor in one of his books to discount the idea of evolutionary progress with humans at the pinnacle in. And of course there are the parallels with cricket.
The lower levels of professional sport rarely get heard above the din and clamour for the biggest and best teams. The FA Premiership is now the richest football league in the world and followed avidly by many fans around the world. Its transition from a league with a reputation of violence and hooliganism to one of the most marketable sporting brands in the world has come via a change in attitude and facilities. I have a vivid memory from one of my first trips to a Bristol City game in the late 1980's (again, I must have been about 8 - I hasten to add City are not, unfortunately, in the Premiership). I needed to use a bathroom so Dad took me to the 'Gents' where I was confronted simply by a 10 foot wall painted black with a gutter of urine running along the bottom. The smell was 'colourful' as was the language around me. It was intense to say the least. How this experience has effected me later personal development I can only guess - Mum certainly didn't approve of me going along. But the violent and abusive behaviour that once embodied watching the game is no longer tolerated and the terraces have been replaced by more manageable and comfortable rows of covered seating (and more hygienic toilets).
Apparently a similar change has occurred in the minor leagues of baseball. In the game programme was a piece about the rise in popularity of Minor League games. Season attendances in every season since 2000 have been placed in the top 10 since the leagues began and in 2006 the current record was set at 41.7 million fans. That's more than the NBA, and more than the NFL and NHL combined, each year. Fifth Third Field in Dayton Ohio has sold out every game since it opened in 2000. But the continuing growth has come since the 1990's and a similar attitude toward the game as has changed football in the UK. And the programme article described a lady faced by a similar toilet experience as my childhood one - it's certainly not like that now. The emphasis has shifted toward entertainment and whilst the minor league game hasn't changed, the crowds have. In family-friendly America this means kids. And lots of 'em.
So whilst the high pitched screaming wasn't so good for my ears, the $9 seat in the third row along the first base line was good for my wallet and got me close to those 90 mph pitches. I have got to say though, even with my uneducated eye, the quality of play wasn't quite up there with, say, the SF Giants. The Lugnuts gave up 4 runs in the first inning and it wasn't looking good. But then South Bend gave up 5 in the second and from there on we cruised to victory (8-5). Highlights from 'the game' for me included a Lugnuts batter snapping his bat over his knee (golfer style) after he struck out with the bases loaded, and the genius sack race 'run' by some 'hefty' women from the crowd between 8th and 9th innings. I was less impressed that they wouldn't refill my plastic beer glass when buying a second and that I HAD to have a new one. Grrr...
Regardless of the quality of play it was a good night. And seemingly the growth of Minor League Baseball is good for the cities in which the teams are located. Oldsmobile Park is leading the much needed regeneration of the waterfront area of downtown Lansing. After the game, the fireworks reflected in the windows of the old Ottawa Power Station (above) that has lain empty for over a decade. Regeneration is needed in Michigan of all places in the States, where the decline of the American auto industry has hit hard. With manufacturing in sharp decline the state and the city need to turn to alternative industries for income and regeneration. The dollars spent in the stadium are now helping to boost the local economy, and give this part of town something to build around for the future. So, let's go nuts!
Erin (AKA travelorphan) has been offline for a while, but on her return from the field she's made several posts to her blog detailing some of her recent work and the events in Sri Lanka.
Two of my best friends are currently travelling across Eurasia. To document their trip they've set up a cool little travelblog complete with comic strip ('Hel on Earth - episode two out now!), movies (check the Black Panther in Belgrade), music, pics, food reviews and treasure maps!
Now that I'm into my second week at MSU, things have calmed down a little. I've ploughed through most of the necessary admin, met many of the people I'll be working with here at CSIS and throughout MSU (although being summer campus is quiet right now - the undergrads are gone and the postgrads are away on their fieldwork), and finally got my apartment into a liveable state. The next few weeks will no doubt be spent really getting my head around what we're aiming to achieve with this integrated ecological-economic modelling project. For example, during the next month or two I'll take a trip up to our study area to get a feel for the landscape, see the experimental plots that have been put in place previously, and gain a better understanding regarding the subsequent effects of timber harvesting. Also I plan on meeting and interviewing several key management stakeholders from organisations such as Michigan's Department of Natural Resources and The Nature Conservancy to get their perspective on the landscape and what they might gain from our work. I've also been examining some of the tools that we hope to utilise and build upon, such as the USFS' Forest Vegetation Simulator.
So whilst I get my head around exactly what this new project is all about, I'll continue to blog about some of the work coming out of my Phd thesis. I've been threatening to do this for a while, and now I really mean it. Specifically, I'll walk through the later stages of my thesis where I explored the potential of more reflexive forms of model validation - seeing the modelling process as an end in itself, a learning process, rather than a means to an end (i.e. the model) which is then used to 'predict' the future. I'll discuss the philosophy underlying this perspective before re-examining my efforts to engage the model I produced with local stakeholders after the model had been 'completed' with their minimal input.
And of course, I'll throw in the odd comment to let you know how things are going here in this new world I've recently landed in. Like my trip to the grey and windswept Lake Michigan at the weekend - I'm going to have to look into this kite-surfing stuff...
Before my impending departure to the States I've been out and about visiting a few places that I won't see for a while. This week, I took my Grandmother back to the town where she grew up on the English south coast - Lyme Regis in Dorset. I'd never been and she hadn't been back for a while so it was a trip down both new and old memory lanes.
And what steep lanes. Apparently they used drag cargo up Cobb Road from ships docked in 'the Cobb'. They realised it was a bit much like hard work up these steepled slopes and stopped a fair while ago. But there were other war-time stories about the inclines; run-away trucks with failed breaks, careening down narrow lanes toward the sea-front, their landings cushioned not by a sandy beach but by the solid walls of the old coal merchants (it seems it's still happening these days too). Line upon line of American soldiers snaking up and down Broad Street outside the old Regent Cinema (then The New Thing In town). Apparently it remains quintessentially British today - tea and biscuits from a china cups and saucers before taking your seats (aside the fact it shows the latest Hollywood block-busters of course).
The vertiginous topography has not only caused rapid runaway of trucks, but also the rapid (and creeping) runaway of the soil. Efforts to manage and reduce land slippage are being undertaken in parallel with a £17 million coastal defence and harbour improvement scheme. Whilst understanding that it is necessary if they want to save their sea-front industry (which has changed from sea-trading and fishing to sea-swimming and tourism), locals aren't happy about the large new shingle banks that provide the needed protection. Sand has accumulated in the harbour over recent years and has now been joined by a nice sandy beach imported from France.
Alongside visiting the sea-side we had tea and cake at some old friend's house - all in all a good day stocking up on memories of the British coastal landscape before I jet off across the pond.
OK, so I'm back from gallivanting and just beginning to get my brain back up to speed to after some well-needed mental free-wheeling. Well, actually, maybe free-wheeling isn't the best phrase - rather, I needed to get my head out of my thesis and back into the real world.
And what better place to escape from the ivory tower than to Rajasthan, northern India, former jewel in the crown. Here, my theoretical assumptions were confronted and summarily dismissed by the harsh practical realities of people struggling to survive amongst a billion countrymen all sharing a common, upwardly mobile, dream. Western rationalism met Eastern mysticism. Swirling scarlet saris, spiced sauces, sweet (and sour) smells sharply contrasted pale personal computing, drab digital logic and the dreary desk-bound slog of 'writing-up'. Confronting a hoard of fare-seeking rickshaw drivers is quite a different problem to attempting to find a single bug amongst several hundred lines of code (though a similar level of patience is useful). Needless to say this diligent young PhD scholar took a few days to get up to speed...
However, once the common ground had been found ("My name? James... Yes, that's right like James Bond...", "I'm from England... Yes, that's right we beat those Canadians in the cricket last week...") everything went swimmingly. Upon meeting some young street cricketers in Jaisalmer during the second week it was beginning to feel much more like home. The game was just like I remember my summertime street-cricket - same rules ("6 and out"), same characters (tempestuous batsmen, earnest bowlers and lackadaisical fielders) - just a little hotter and dustier than the suburbs of Bristol.
Our 'safari' into the Desert National Park aboard chapatti eating camels was an opportunity to get away from the mayhem - a silent night's sleep under the stars was welcome. But even in this more remote and inhospitable environment the population size and pressure continues to grow. The government has improved water supplies recently but even now there seems to be pressure on the limited resources.
Further south, the lake-side towns of Udaipur and Dungapur were much more relaxed than the manic Jaipur and Jodhpur. Here we had time to swim, and I to find out just how unforgivingly hard marble can be when when one lands on it back first. The grand finale of our tour was the majestic and ethereal Taj Mahal. It diffuses light like a cloud. And, I am adamant, it looks bigger the further you are away from it. Then it was back to Delhi for fond farewells and enlightening twilight conversations on the nature of being, reincarnation, Karma, Reike... Thanks to all the guys for their hospitality and the fun in Delhi.
I decided not to take my camera with me - I wanted to free myself of as much technical paraphernalia as possible. So all the pics here are thanks to Erin - permalinks to the others she's posted are listed below. Now, back to some work and preparations for my viva and impending departure for CSIS at MSU.
A missed bus gives me a couple of minutes to get online to point you in the direction of Erin's blog (http://travelorphan.blogspot.com) for some pictures of our Rajasthani gallivating (i.e. the pictures posted on March 29 2007 - permanent URLs to follow in a later post).
Briefly: Busy Delhi (no belly yet), Gangaur festival in Jaipur, lakeside downtime in Pushkar, Fort and pool in Jodhpur, street-cricket in Jaisalmer, camelback desert safari near Khuri, and now on to Udaipur, Bundi, Agra and Delhi (via this unintended stop-over in Jodhpur). More soon...
I saw this YouTube video containing an excerpt from Carl Sagan's writings over on Perceiving Wholes recently. It's a little cheesy, but it contains a strong and important message - that we humans are our own custodians on this planet. Whilst the way Sagan goes about making this point is understandable from is background as an astronomer and astrobiologist and the context of the image he discusses, I think there's a more salient way to think about our position within the universe.
Sagan talks about out insignificance [text of video here], about the miniscule size of this plant and our short time upon it. I think that misses the pale blue point. More importantly, we need to recognise that this world is finite. In both size and resources. Just as Silent Spring kick-started the environmental movement, another image taken from space a decade later and almost two before Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, 'The Blue Marble' highlighted that the blue planet in our solar system is not the infinite horizon it may seem from the surface.
Sagan is probably right, we are alone for now in this part of the universe to solve our own problems. But we can't prove that (which is quite a cool thought eh?). What we do know for sure, by looking at images from space for example, is that this planet is finite and that many of the resources we require to survive here are not infinite but are most definitely exhaustable.
Sometimes, as an individual sat atop a mountain ridge surrounded by miles of forest it may feel as though we are so small that we would have an insignificant effect upon the landscape. But we are now over six and a half billion individuals and that is no small number. Upon the Geologic scale and relative to the size and age of the known universe our number and time here may well be insignificant. Upon the scale of our finite pale blue dot however, the global population is now of such a size that in all likelihood our actions are having a significant effect on our capacity to survive.
Just as we might remember our insignificance in the Grand Scheme of Things, we might also remember our significance in the smaller scheme of things too.
Addendum 31st Jan 2007: An editorial in this week's Nature takes a similar view with regards looking at Earth from space (rather than turning our attention to the moon).
I went to Georg Gerster's exhibition 'Past from Above' at the British Museum over the weekend. As the title might suggest the exhibition is a collection of photographs of archaeological and historical landmarks shot from the air. Gerster suggests
"Height provides an overview. And an overview facilitates insight, while insight generates consideration."
Some of the photos don't really fit this perspective however, shot with such a zoom that an overview isn't actually provided. For example the shot of the Minaret of the Great Mosque at Samarra, Iraq (see it here). What's the scale of this building? What's the context? This shot is from above but it doesn't provide an overview. I get the feeling some the shots like this might have provided more insight if they'd been taken from a location on the ground.
However, this aside there are some images that really show off the context of the archaeological sites well. Whether it be the grand locations of derelict temples or the juxtaposition of sweeping, fluid sand dunes encroaching upon and over the geometric remains of a dead city. These are the shots that do provide some insight into what the past might have been like, how the landscape may have been different from today, and how it is still changing now.
Obviously some of these images are very reminiscent of Yann Arthus Bertrand and his "Earth from Above" project, and browsing Gerster's website I think I actually prefer some of his shots of contemporary landscape patterns - both those imposed by humans and those of a more natural origin.
Overall, the exhibition was an interesting way to spend 45 minutes on a Sunday afternoon - but some of the shots didn't quite fit the ethos of the exhibition.
By the morning of the second, the sky was as blue as could be out across the Firth of Fourth and our hangovers had just about receeded (though maybe not quite enough for a run on the beach...)
The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain? Not when I'm there it doesn't, then it follows me about. In this case all the way up to Santa Maria de la Alameda in the Sierra de Guadarrama.
Quite a gloomy picture. We were up there interviewing the president of a local cattle farming organisation for some work related to my PhD. Earlier in the week we had been talking about bullfighting, and Raul had pointed out the large stones found in each corner of town squares, one on either side of the road, with large holes cut through them. The purpose of these holes is to hold wooden poles across the road, closing the square for the corrida de toros. As we waited for el presidente to arrive we sheltered from the rain in the porch of the ayuntamiento. Looking at the bullring's cornerstones and the balconies that would allow spectators to overlook the confrontation, the town square reminded me of a story retold in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. On that occasion it wasn't a bullfight, it was a civil war a massacre.
Hemingway's leading characters display stoic bravery becoming, in Lawrence Broer's view, "manifestations of the Spanish matador";
The bull was on him as he jumped back and as he tripped on a cushion he felt the horn go into him, into his side. He grabbed the horn with his two hands and rode backward, holding tight onto the place. The bull tossed him and he was clear. He lay still. It was all right. The bull was gone.
He got up coughing and feeling broken and gone. The dirty bastards!
"Give me the sword", he shouted. "Give me the stuff."
Fuentes came up with the muleta and the sword.
Hernandez put his arm around him.
"Go on to the infirmary, man", he said. "Don't be a damn fool."
"Get away from me", Manuel said. "Get to hell away from me."
He twisted free. Hernandez shrugged his shoulders. Manuel ran toward the bull.
There was the bull standing, heavy, firmly planted.
All right, you bastard! Manuel drew his sword out of the muleta, sighted with the same movement, and flung himself onto the bull. He felt the sword go in all the way. Right up to the guard. Four fingers and his thumb into the bull. The blood was hot on his knuckles, and he was on top of the bull.
The bull lurched with him as he lay on, and seemed to sink; then he was standing clear. He looked at the bull going down slowly over on his side, then suddenly four feet in the air.
Then he gestured at the crowd, his hand warm from the bull blood.
[from Ernest Hemingway, The Undefeated]
Down on the plains of Madrid below Santa Maria, the rain has stopped and the attitude seems more 'spirited optimism' than 'stoic bravery'. The Spanish economy is booming, with GDP steadily rising year on year.
The environs of Madrid feel positive, the attitude is 'go-ahead'. Cranes are everywhere, more than in London probably. Apartments being thrown up rapidly. New roads and motorways being constructed apace. It's been like that the last few years I've been visiting.
Further out, within range of the commuters (going into Madrid) and the day-trippers (coming out), economic change is modifying the landscape. The agricultural sector is in decline and as the younger generation seeks out employment in manufacturing, construction and service sectors. Talking to people in my study area it seems such employment is desired as it brings more stable working hours, more benefits, greater leisure time and a more 'modern' lifestyle. The environmental consequences of these shifts are still playing themselves out however. For example, such a lifestyle is likely to require more water, a precious resource in the Mediterranean. Environmentalists still campaign against large dam projects and the environmental impacts of tourism along the Costa del Sol and the Balearic Isles
