10/26/11 MORE NUANCES, AND WHERE IS THE "HERE"?

MAPLE, SPRUCUE AND TAMARACK

RED OAK WITH YELLOW LEAVES

RED OAK WITH RED LEAVES

Wednesday, 8:30 AM. 42 degrees,  wind N, light.  The sky is partly overcast, and the barometer predicts rain.
    Monday’s Tree Board meeting was well attended by Board Members, who listened attentively and asked numerous questions of Kelli Tuttle, of Bluestem Forestry, who presented a new and updated Tree Inventory and Management Plan for the City of Bayfield, and an ancillary study, a City of Bayfield Forest Area Assessment.  There is not room in this blog or even several blogs to go into detail, but the upshot is that we are doing a pretty  good job of keeping our urban forest healthy and renewed, at least with the resources at our disposal, and some good news is that we have relatively few ash trees within the city, either on public or private land, so if and when the Emerald Ash Borer arrives here, the city itself will not be greatly impacted.
    Continuing on with fall color nuances, the combination of maple, spruce and tamarack in our front yard is really  rather spectacular.
    The two red oaks pictured each have very different leaf colorations, one yellow and one red, this in spite of the fact that they are probably the offspring of the same tree in the woods; genetic diversity is everywhere, often unexpected, in nature.
    Political commentary: I have not heard the old adage “the buck stops here” in a long time. I have pondered the apparent demise of the phrase, and have come to the conclusion that, at least in the higher reaches of government, there is no longer a “here” for it to stop at.  Take President Obama, for instance.  By all accounts he spends little or no time in the Oval Office, the hallowed place which has always been the “here.” He is constantly jetting somewhere, making endless speeches, campaigning, to say nothing of the the golf course and the basketball court.
    I have vivid memories of old newsreels of Roosevelt, Truman (who I think coined the phrase “the buck stops here”), Johnson and Reagan, sitting behind the big desk, radiating power and dignity and purpose, and examining all the many “bucks” that were passed up to the “here.”  They read copiously, they listened intently in the quiet of their inner sanctum, they telephoned and “jawboned’ as Johnson put it.  Air Force One is not the Oval Office, and a Blackberry is not its big desk.  No one, no matter how intelligent, can grasp complex issues without quiet, diligent study.  No one, no matter how decisive, can make good decisions based on summary readings of some else's analysis. The attitude that one is so damned smart that one does not have to spend time and effort at understanding things (that used to be called “working”) is mimicked by everyone beneath the office, and we end up being governed by the attitude that “It's not my fault, I never saw it, nobody ever told me, I had nothing to do with it.” When the weasel occpies the hen house, us chickens don’t have a chance.
     I am obviously no fan of President Obama and his Administration, but he might get an occasional nod of approval even from myself if he would sit at the big desk in the Oval Office, go to work, and stop a few bucks from whistling by.