Dear Fieldstone Friends,

This is my first post on Field Notes, and it's a joy to be here. As Andy mentioned in last week's post, he and I, together with our exceptional team, have been deeply immersed in getting the first 7 newly-designed apps of the Fieldstone Earth series ready for launch, which happened, auspiciously, on Earth Day a couple of weeks ago. (Learn more here.) It has been an exciting process. With this milestone achieved, and many more to come in the months ahead, it's given me the opportunity to reflect.

About 2 years ago Andy asked me to consider taking the helm of our small-but-mighty publishing company. Though I come from a literary family, this is my first foray into the other side of the industry, and I have embraced the challenge. I do so, informed by both my background in corporate finance and a lifetime dedication to the protection of the Earth and her species, as expressed through my artistic life as a classical singer and founder of the One Earth. One Voice. campaign, a global movement in over 75 countries to raise environmental awareness through community singing.

I have long believed that any hope for the future of our planet rests on our shared commitment to raising up what I call the "voice of the Earth," particularly through the arts and human creativity as catalysts for united, galvanized action. Having spent years doing so through human voices, I have dedicated this new chapter of my life to raising the voices of the other magnificent species with whom we share this elegant and fragile blue-green orb. It is my hope that by doing so, we inspire future generations to its care. I can think of no more important work, or legacy, especially at this tenuous time in human history.

At Fieldstone, we believe that nature herself is the ultimate, highest "art" which we humans have striven to emulate since the beginning of time. It is this spirit which infuses every aspect of our work, including the redesign of our apps (and soon to come, our books). By streamlining and "quieting" the palette and interface of our digital platform, we have brought nature to center stage, allowing you to experience the full and rich beauty of each subject within a neutral, simple, and intuitive presentation, designed to inform and inspire.

Next on the horizon is the release of the first of our Fieldstone Home series: apps and books dedicated to living well and in harmony with nature. Our first app on gardening, Herbs, will be released next month. You'll be the first to know.

I can't tell you how grateful I am for the remarkably talented and dedicated team working with us to bring this work to life. In the weeks ahead, you will be hearing from them as well. Their voices are as much a part of the Fieldstone story as ours, and they have much wisdom and insight to share with you.

Thank you for being a part of the Fieldstone family and our unfolding story. Stay in touch, and may we work together - one act, one decision, one download at a time - to make Earth Day every day.

Yours from the field -
and for the Earth,
Shyla

​
Shyla Stewart is President & CEO of Fieldstone Publishing. She is also an internationally-acclaimed classical singer and founder of the One Earth. One Voice. campaign, a global movement in over 75 countries raising environmental awareness through the power of song.

Here in Vermont, when we think about significant rain events, Hurricane Irene comes to mind. Compared to Houston’s Harvey, Irene’s statistics are modest. Only about 11 inches of rain in a day or so. But here the water is concentrated in the streams between the ancient hills and mountains. That’s where the roads were built and most of the towns and villages were established. So water velocity becomes impressive and a lot of earth is moved down stream. If we had the kind of rain Houston is having,  with the exception of those of us who live on hills, Vermont would have to start from scratch.

On average Houston and Vermont get about the same amount of rain a year, 45 to 47 inches. But when the water hits the ground in Houston, it behaves differently.  There are no rocky streams or deep valleys for the water to follow. In Harris County, where Houston has been built, the land is flat. Houston’s 667 square miles were originally swampland laced with bayous. Houston now has 22 square miles of water and 86 of parks. The rest is paved roads (including 739.3 miles of freeways and expressways in the metropolitan area on which 71.7% of its residents drive to work alone in their cars), parking lots and air-conditioned buildings, laced with bayous and man-made water courses.  So there is no easy way for the water to get out.

In 2001 parts of Houston received up to 40 inches of rain, causing what was then the worst flooding ever known in that city. In August 2005 2.5 million people, the largest evacuation in U.S. history, left Houston in anticipation of Hurricane Rita, though little damage occurred.  Reports are that parts of Houston will receive a total of up to 50 Harvey inches. Perhaps because of the embarrassingly unnecessary evacuation in 2005, there was no mass evacuation this time.

For those interested in statistics about rain on Houston:  Large raindrops are roughly 5 mm (a little less than ¼ inch) in diameter.  They can get as large as 9 mm, but above 5 mm they tend to break up into smaller drops due to air resistance.  The larger they are, the faster they fall. The terminal velocity of a large raindrop is about 9 meters per second (30 ft./second – 20 miles per hour.) Based on estimates of an average of 30 inches of rain falling on Houston over the period of Harvey’s visit there I have worked it out that approximately 1,982,190,000,000,000 (nearly 2 quadrillion) large raindrops will have fallen on Houston’s 667 square miles.  This amounts to 3,473,000,000 gallons or 14.5 million tons of water.

As to the effect of climate change, increased temperatures result in increased evaporation and therefore more rain.  Of course the effects vary. Most of the increase is between 30 and 50 degrees north latitude. (Houston is nearly at the 30 degree line.) Higher temperatures in dry areas simply make them dryer.  In the United States annual precipitation has increased by about 6% since 1900. In the American south the increase has been 11%. Heavy downpours have increased overall, with parts of Texas experiencing an increase of 700% compared to the decade of the 1950s.

A few years ago Fieldstone Publishing created The National Audubon Society Field Guide to Weather. There are now more than 500,000 copies in print. That doesn’t make me an expert, but it gives Fieldstone a foothold in this increasingly wet subject. (You can purchase a copy here.)

We at Fieldstone Publishing extend our thoughts and support to the people and communities of coastal Texas and Louisiana at this time of unprecedented crisis.

Yours From The Field,
Andy

The hills and forests of Vermont hide thousands of forgotten apple orchards and countless wild apple trees spawned from saplings planted in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Sheep and dairy farmers created a long-term resource that could with a little attention be transformed into a fine drink to stimulate the spirit and bring a bit of frolic to the long winters ahead. 

This is a particularly good year for wildflowers and fruit.  The open grassy spaces are, in August, dense with wildflowers that come to take advantage of the few years before the neglected fields return to forest -- goldenrod, milkweed, Queen Anne’s lace, wild aster, dogbane, thistles, burdock. Around the edges of these open spaces, the forest is on its way to retake our old orchard. Wild cherries, maples, poplars, and wild apples (most of which have bitter or no taste) have joined the aged and weary apples planted a century or more ago.

My task is to return all this to the elegance of a well-tended garden of Cortland and Macintosh. The first step is to wrestle the brush hog onto the three-point hitch at the back of my John Deere.  It is a 15 minute two-man job that I accomplished by myself in a little over two hours. I then climbed atop the machine and strapped myself in. (The orchard is steep in places, and I imagine myself pinned beneath the tractor if I neglect the harness from which, if I miscalculate John Deere’s center of gravity, I will find myself hanging between the roll bar and the rest of the machine.)

The key to mastering and rebuilding the orchard, as often occurs to me as I beat up and down the orchard hills and into the brush above the whirling blades of the brush hog, is steel, which of course, is mostly iron. Without iron there would be no blades, no tractor, not even an axes with which to confront nature’s intention to return the orchard permanently to forest.  By a stroke of cosmic good fortune, iron is created as the last stage of fusion in high mass stars, and is released into space, and ultimately some of it into rocky planets like ours, by explosions known as supernovas. I am therefore grateful to the accidents of natural law that combine to help me with our orchard.

Yours From The Field,
​Andy

My first introduction to the marvels of a solar eclipse was when I was a kid, in 1950, with the release of a remake of the movie version of “King Solomon’s Mines,” about the search for an explorer who was lost in darkest Africa while seeking the fabled gold (in the book, diamond) mines of King Solomon. The story was based on a novel by H. Rider Haggard and had previously been depicted in a 1937 film staring Cedrick Harwicke and Paul Robeson. In the 1950 full color version, our hero, Stewart Granger, has been persuaded by Deboarah Kerr, to risk his life in search of her not particularly well-liked husband.  Granger and Kerr fall in love, fight wild animals and cannibals, and restore a king to his throne. In the process, Granger, who has been captured by angry tribesmen, and is well informed about matters astronomical, claims to have been sent from the stars and predicts an eclipse soon to occur if they don’t release him. As all hell is about to break loose, the eclipse occurs, and everything ends well for the hero. (In the novel it is a lunar eclipse, but I have a clear memory of a technicolored solar eclipse.)

The Chinese were able to predict solar eclipses as early as 2500 BC. Two Chinese astronomers were executed for failing to predict a solar eclipse, thereby endangering the health and success of the Emperor. (Indeed, solar eclipses can apparently be dangerous to kings, as one occurred immediately prior to the death of King Henry I.) The Babylonians were able to predict eclipses by the 14th century BC. Perhaps this helped Babylon to carry on until its passing as world power about 70 years after the destruction of the city of Jerusalem and the Babylonian abduction of the Jewish leaders in the year 587.

On the other hand, a solar eclipse may be a message of calm. Not only did it calm Hollywood’s African natives, but Herodotus reports that in the year 585 BDC, armies of the Lydians and the Medes, then at war with one another, were so frightened by the midday darkening of the sun that they immediately made peace.

A little more than 1,000 years later, in the year 632, a solar eclipse marked the death of the Prophet Mohammed’s son Ibrahim. You can draw your own conclusions about the significance of that event. I note only that if Ibrahim has not died, the Sunnis and the Shiites would have nothing to quarrel about, and the Iranians and the Saudis would be friends.

On average it takes 375 years for a total solar eclipse to happen again at the same location. There will not be another one to touch the territory of the United States until April 2024. So let’s make the most of the one we have next week and see if anything unusual happens at the White House.

Yours From The Field,
​Andy

I am fascinated by the fact that an extended series of extremely unlikely conditions allowed life as we know it to exist on earth.  For starters, each of the known four forces at work in the universe --  gravity, the electromagnetic force (e.g. light, etc.), and the less familiar but essential weak and strong forces determining the behavior of subatomic particles -– have to be what pretty much exactly they are. If any of them were significantly different, there would be no stars, planets, air, water, trees, Broadway musicals, or essentially anything we might enjoy.

Leaping ahead, there are other improbable but essential accidents.  For example, the  earth was born without a moon, but one came along only a few tens of millions of years after the earth was formed. At that time there were many more planetary objects in the solar system and many collisions. One important collision kicked a piece of earth off into nearby space sending plenty of stuff into orbit around the earth, finally coalescing into the moon.

The moon is spiraling away from earth at the rate of 1.5 inches a year. Calculating backwards, which I have just done, it appears that three billion years ago, when life first came about on earth, the moon, receding at its current pace, was roughly 75,000 miles closer than it now is – 165,000 miles rather than the present average distance of 239,000 miles, and it would have been spinning around, appearing larger by half and played hell with the tides. (The moon’s orbit is eliptical and its distance from the earth varies by up to 25,000 miles.)

Fortunately, during our time here the moon is perfectly placed to preserve our existence by stabilizing the earth, giving us predictable seasons and the right tides for the success of life. By remarkable coincidence it is also the right size and distance away to block all but the outer edge of the sun when seen from the narrow path of a total eclipse, allowing us to learn much about the universe that we would otherwise not know.  Think how little we would know if the sky were perpetually cloudy.

Yours From The Field,
​Andy

Anticipating the solar eclipse on August 21, let’s consider the sun.

The sun is of moderate age, 4.6 billion years – coalescing as a star from dust and gas when the universe was about 2/3rds of its present age. It was originally far larger than it now is, but the inward gravitational pull of the dust and gas squeezed together to the point that the sun’s interior is 8 times the density of gold. It cooks along at an interior temperature of roughly 28,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and a pressure of 250 billion times earth’s atmospheric pressure, just right for nuclear fusion. 

It is expected that for the next 5 billion years the sun will continue to generate energy by converting four protons (hydrogen nuclei) into a single helium nucleus, which, being slightly lighter than the four protons, releases the small difference as energy. That energy release is equivalent every second to the energy of 100 billion one-megaton nuclear bombs.  After that we can expect things to change. In the end the sun will turn into a red giant, and we had better have someplace else to go, because it will grow so large that it will consume the inner planets, probably including the earth. But it may warm the moons of Jupiter quite nicely, giving us another opportunity to do things right.  

For now the sun is about right for life here in Vermont. If you want to see it disappear for about 3 minutes this month, consider traveling to Salem, Oregon, where at 10:20 AM PDT it will start its overland course from NW to SE, reaching the Atlantic just north of  Charleston in South Carolina at 2:48 PM EDT. 

Yours From The Field,
​Andy

I interrupt my observations on the coming eclipse to comment on the vultures Shyla and I watched this weekend circling the eastern shore of Lake Champlain. I took the above photos of Turkey Vultures on Sunday at Basin Harbor, and Black Vultures on a trip to the Everglades three years ago. Vermont seems to be somewhat of an extension of the Turkey Vulture’s usual range, while Black Vultures rarely fly north of New Jersey.

Vultures are, of course, homely creatures to look at, and would not be pleasant to hold, if given the opportunity. They rarely speak, but when they do it is to utter hisses and groans. I have not smelled them and would not want to. In short, there is nothing to recommend them except the important work they do in cleaning up deceased creatures. It is for this reason many indigenous cultures acknowledge them as gatekeepers between the worlds - bridges between the living and the dead. I regret to report that they also do a bit of harm, occasionally harassing with culinary intent young mammals and baby birds.

They glided effortlessly on the breezes that prevailed throughout Sunday and were entirely absent on the rainy and breezeless Monday, when they were likely waiting out the day in caves, under rocky ledges, and in hollow logs.

Yours From The Field,
Andy

Anticipating a major celestial event a little more than a month from now, I think it might be helpful to consider over the next weeks some facts about the three participants:  Sun, Moon, and Earth.  Let’s start with the Moon, excluding facts you probably already know:

• The moon takes its name from the Anglo-Saxon word moneth, also, of course, referring to the 28 day period between successive new moons. In fact, the time between two new moons varies somewhat because the location of the new moon with respect to the earth and the sun changes as the earth moves around the sun.  The position of the moon is also slightly affected by gravitational influences from other planets (and like everthing else, by everything else in the universe).
• There are about 12.5 new moons a year, but only 12 months, and as a result the moon’s time table does not match the sun’s. This, and the time variantions between new moons were excruciating problems for early astonomers who sought to show that the universe is entirely earth centered and orderly.
• The diameter of the moon is about 25% of the diameter of the earth, but its mass is only a little more than one percent of the earth’s.
• From earth we can see only 59% of the surface of the moon, as the moon rotates on its axis in the same amount of time it takes to circle the earth, but with a little wobble thrown in.
• Total lunar eclipses (when the earth casts a shadow on the moon) are visible anywhere on the earth where it is night at the time of the eclipse. Including partial eclipses, eclipses of the moon can last several hours. Lunar eclipses are far more frequent than total solar eclipses (when the moon gets between the earth and the sun) which are visible much less frequently, only in narrow bands on the earth’s surface, and then only briefly. 

More next time. 

Yours from the field,
Andy

I consider myself a lover of plants, including vines.  Think of wisteria, grapes, red runner beans, and peas. But I strongly object to several vines that seem to be asserting dominion in a number of environments I have visited in recent months. Here are some terrifying examples:

Japanese Knotweed:  I see this everywhere in Vermont, some as close as ¼ mile from our farm.  This weed should be careful about treading any closer as I will battle it until one of us can fight no longer. Knotweed is listed by the World Conservation Union as one of the world’s worst invasive species. It was first brought to London’s Kew Gardens in 1850.  Now in England and Australia it is illegal to have this species anywhere on your property.  In the United States our reverence for property rights probably makes such a prohibition unconstitutional, still I would liked to propose like legislation to the Vermont Senate.

In Georgia and South Carolina I was alarmed to see that Kudzu is suffocating the earth and everything that grows in it. It will even eat a house if not fought off. It was introduced to North America in 1876 at a Philadelphia exhibition and helped to spread by farmers who used it to control soil erosion. It is also edible, but I have yet to find it in the Stop & Shop. 

The Oriental bittersweet vine can, in limited sizes, be decorative. A few delicate feet of vine with red berries will make a lovely wreath. The problem is that these vines have no sense of proper proportions. They grow up to 40 feet long and 4 inches in diameter and strangle any tree they take a fancy to.

Finally, I come to my personal enemy, Poison Ivy. This member of the pistachio and cashew family can be quite lovely to look at.  (See photos.)  But any intimacy with it will reveal its true soul. It is an enemy of mankind. During a recent trip Shyla and I took to Martha’s Vineyard, we found that where there were not lawns, plowed or grazed fields, or deep woods, there was a jungle of vines, including vast reaches of bittersweet, thorny blackberry, grape, and poison ivy in wild embrace and impenetrable to any human not astride a bulldozer. Goats are happy to eat poison ivy, and it doesn’t bother their stomachs. They don’t eat the roots, so the plants keep coming back until you have enough goats that the plant can no longer produce a leaf. Martha’s Vineyard is a beautiful place, and would be so much more accommodating with the introduction of ten thousand goats.

Yours From The Field,
​Andy