Reflections on Water - Chapter 5, Reflections on Mud Dialog

Chris Nicodemus & Katrina Meserve

1. How is mud important for wildlife?  

Mud is critical for wildlife because mud is one of the ways that our landscape banks water and makes it available to sustain new life. Water is a principal currency for life in our biosphere. In northern temperate zones water that falls over the winter is captured as ice and saturates the soils. With the spring melt, runoff fills streams, carries runoff sediments over riverbanks into riparian forests and agricultural lands. As mud slowly dries out of the warming soils allow for plant and animal life to re-emerge, plants to re-establish and fauna to flourish. Mud serves as the ready reserve of water to prime the spring grow and allow the landscape to prepare for the drier times of summer ahead.   Eliminating mud by filling wetlands and containing riverbanks with hardened shores prevents this natural cycle of life from occur and drastically reduces the volume and variety of wildlife, both flora and fauna that the landscape can support. Mud is essentially nature’s neighborhood cash machine or debit card. Landowners should take care not to eliminate all their mud. 

2. Can you elaborate on the “tension” you alluded to between Civil Engineering, Public Health standards and Mud?

Having grown up in a rural community that was transformed by an expanding urban footprint and the progress that strict standards of civil engineering imposed on community growth, I have borne witness to the tension and the collateral damage that strict adherence to well-intentioned standards can sometimes cause. 

Public Health rules intended to reduce the spread of disease often focus on sanitation and elimination of vectors of disease, while civil engineering seeks to establish standards in design and construction to assure the safety of the public, integrity of our structures, and protection from natural hazards. Swamps, wetlands, and mud have long been a target of regulations originally intended to facilitate the draining of swamps to allow for a healthy, wholesome and clean landscape and more recently as the biological value of mud has become more generally appreciated, regulations intended to protect wetlands and biodiversity have been overlain on top of the civil engineering and public health rules that preceded them. Individuals and communities are also the stewards of their landscape. Sometimes the very rules intended to protect and improve society can stand in the way of innovation and progress. Rules to control and eliminate mud can have adverse consequences that likely may not have been foreseen. A part of the public process should periodically question the consequences of existing standards, and a successful society will seek to cut red tape but also prevent injury to our natural environment and our population through innovation and continuous refinement of the rules we impose on ourselves in the name of these goods. 

3. Would you comment on the northern forest, and mud?  

Is Pondicherry northern Forest? Mud season is a feature of north temperate zones that have winters cold enough to freeze soil deeply. North temperate forests extending from New England across the mid-atlantic and into the mid-west have mud seasons, but the term Northern Forest or Boreal Forest refers the forests that extend to the coldest northern reaches bordering the tundra. Such northern forests create a large biosphere that extends southward from the arctic around the northern hemisphere. Northern New England includes characteristic spruce -fir northern forest but not as a continuous forest. As one approaches timberline in the higher peaks of New York and New England spruce-fir forests predominate. Some lower altitude locations such as Pondicherry in Jefferson as well as stretches of the forest in northern Coos are also characteristic boreal forests. Although there is little to no permafrost in New England, these boreal forests have prolonged snow covers, long mud seasons and persistent wetlands. In Pondicherry bog lands serve as a reservoir water basin that does not drain via the nearby river valleys to the sea. The wetland serves as a major stopping point as well as habitat for migratory birds and supports plant and animal species otherwise not seen south of central Quebec. It is notable that with climate change, the planet’s boreal forests are shrinking and if summer heat leads to sufficient drying these scruffy landscapes can be prone to devastating wildfires not seen in cooler damper times. The impact on the planets eco-systems will be devastating if too much boreal forest is lost. 

4. Any thoughts about Glaciers and Mud? 

While northern reaches of the boreal forest have permafrost that is boggy and muddy in summertime, the ground below a glacier is insulated from the extreme atmospheric cold of winter by the ice itself. The natural heat of the earth always limits the depth of frost in the ground, but under a glacier the ground can remain unfrozen, and it is the mud and water below the ice that lubricates the slow glacial motion of the ice. As mentioned in our earlier chapter on glaciation, this observation was made only recently by scientists in Greenland taking deep ice samples from the Greenland Ice sheet(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorthe_Dahl-Jensen). They were uncertain what they would find at the bottom of a mile long drill shaft deep in moving ice and were concerned about shear forces that would destroy their drill, but at the limit they reached a layer of mud and water. Whether this is universally true of continental glaciers is uncertain and perhaps Antarctic glaciers will prove different. The cycle of glaciation and shifting ecosystems and the migrating locations of continents is a constant on planet earth, but the changes occur slowly on a geologic time scale. Biosystems will respond to rapid change as well and some life forms will survive, but civilization must be sensitive to unintended consequence as a standard of behavior that should not be dependent only on existing laws to protect our natural environment from devastation caused by humanity on our watch. 

Banner photo and photos 1 and 3 by: EP Chow

Photos 2 and 4 by: Chris Nicodemus