Should I have done as well

[M Kfivethousand]

“Snowpack was the year’s water reserve. In some recent years, however, the snowpack’s been half of normal. Precipitation that used to fall as snow now falls as rain that runs off so rapidly that even the state’s extensive dams and reservoirs cannot hold it all for later use. * * * Ed Burg, a somewhat shy, bearded biologist employed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is a big-picture guy fascinated by how landscape and lifescape fit together; how ice, water, rock, sediment, vegetation, and animals weave their tapestry, do their dance. We’re in a roadside meadow dotted with trees, like a pretty Alaska postcard. When Burg drilled here, he found twenty feet of sphagnum peat, representing about fifteen thousand years of accumulation under very wet conditions. He didn’t find any wood in those cores; trees did not grow here. When he cored growing trees, he found that the median age of the spruce in these meadows is about thirty years. The birches are just ten to fifteen years old. His main point is that the trees and shrubs are not only young; they’re new. Until recently, all the emerald glades in view were wetlands. All these meadows, in other words[…]” Excerpt From The View from Lazy Point Carl Safina