Fen study continues in prospect basin
World fen expert and study lead, Dr. David Cooper from Colorado State University, talks about San Miguel County's longitudinal fen study while standing in Prospect Basin's Buckbean Fen last Saturday.
FEN TOUR ... Wonderful to see the Prospect Fen Study continuing thanks to Dr. David Cooper and the Telluride Institute (TI), 
in collaboration with Colorado State University (CSU), Patagonia Inc., the Telluride Ski Area, the Town of Mountain Village and Sheep Mountain Alliance ... Some 20 folks did a TI walkabout while listening to Dr. Cooper, Dr. John Hribljan from the University of Nebraska Omaha, his graduate student Kate Miller, and Peruvian researcher Eduardo Oyague Passuni working on his doctorate from CSU ... They did a presentation at the Wilkinson Public Library terrace on Friday, Aug. 11th, reviewing the on-going work on fen hydrologic processes in Prospect Basin in order to better understand the importance of winter snowpack and monsoon rains on fen water tables. The team also presented on fen carbon dynamics that illustrate the excellent current conditions of the fen complex’s peat accumulation processes ... They elaborated even more on the fen tour, as Miller's work will likely enable the team to measure the carbon sequestration happening in the Prospect Basin fens as well as identifying the small modifications that can make the difference between a net accumulation or a net release of carbon from the sites. That, in turn, has large ramifications for how we value fens as repositories for carbon sequestering and their ultimate importance as we walk down this rocky road of Climate Change. The library presentation should be available to see soon.
Photo above of Eduardo Oyague Passuni explaining figures from his research on his computer to tour participants.
Fen butterfly on Queen's Crown (Rhodiola rhodanthus). According to Dr. Cooper, the insect-fen plant associations have not been studied in the Prospect Basin Fens -- a future project for some enterprising entomologist.
Buckbean Fen (Photo courtesy of the Telluride Institute)
PANDORA'S AMPHORA ... I've been writing a column in Telluride newspapers for 40+ years (until let go by the recent out-of-the-area owners of the advertising-cash cow monopoly-publication that currently passes for a community newspaper) ... Itki* began as Pandora's Box, speaking to the historic town of Pandora wiped out by an avalanche that was located at the head of Telluride's box canyon near the millsite. Pandora's Box was an arts column when I was first appointed as director of the Telluride Council for the Arts & Humanities in 1981 ... Then, when I took over as editor of the old Telluride Times, itki* became an op-ed column that ran in the Telluride Mountain Journal, the San Miguel Journal and the Telluride Watch (while Pandora's Box had a second run in the Daily Planet). I also had a long-running column Looking South from Lone Cone in Cortez's Four Corners Free Press , as well as various short-lived columns in other regional publications (like my early historical column Mining the Gold in Telluride, Remembering Aztlán for the Montrose-based Whole Life Network, and The Slope for the Colorado Poets Center's Colorado Poet)... The Pandora's Box myth was Greek poet Hesiod's patriarchal reinterpretation of the ancient fertility goddess Pandora (παν δορα = all gifts). He suggested that a woman opened a container "left in the care of her husband" releasing all manner of emotional and physical curses, including death, on humankind. Only itki* wasn't a "box" but a "πιθος" -- originally a large clay jar containing a human body for burying and eventually used for storage of wine, oil, grain and other provisions. "Pithos" got mistranslated into "box" in English. And, because of the rhyme, I'm going to change pithos to amphora, which is also a large Greek clay vase used for the transport of wine, oil and grains, particularly by ship, where they have been found in many Mediterranean shipwrecks. Since I was first baptized at St. Paul of the Shipwreck in San Francisco, the correspondences were intriguing ... This will be an occasional column appearing here on by blogspot using my favorite San Francisco columnist Herb Caen's three-dot journalism style.
ANDREW SCHELLING ... Got to hear Naropa scholar and Colorado poet Andrew Schelling of Boulder read poems of his own and translations from the Sanskrit at Lithic Books in Fruita. A brilliant researcher and teacher, Andrew has a raft of important books that he has authored. Check his bio and bibliography HERE ... I got an autographed copy of his new book of poems, The Facts at Dog Tank Springs (Dos Madres, Ohio, 2020) -- from a site he loves to visit on Cedar Mesa. Itki's* in memory of Dale Pendell, a Northern California poet, psychonaut and editor who published the influential Sixties/Seventies mag Kyoi/Kuksu, Among Pendell's many books are his three pharmacopeia volumes about sacred plants -- a hugely influential series for those of us interested in entheogens ... Like Pendell, Schelling is a very important figure in the ethnolinguistic movement in American poetics.
An excerpt from 'Third Party Mountain Dog":
Not hunter-gatherer
but scavenge-monger
constructivists...
O ancient western lineage
your red pot designs...
out at the edge of Chaco
bent juniper baked clay
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*itki
“Ki” is a grammatical neologism Indigenous science writer Robin Wall Kimmerer advocates for using in place of “it”, “its”, “it’s” or “itself” to help correct English’s objectification of phenomena. The neologist term is harvested from the last syllable of a longer word in Potawatomi for an “earth being.”
As a pre-school teacher I learned that we humans learn best by going through the known to the unknown. Instead of substituting “ki” for “it”, I’ve chosen to add the Indigenous neologism to our neutral English pronoun as a suffix, changing the way we speak of things in English from inanimate to animate. Indeed, that syllable, “ki”, is a Potawatomi suffix meaning “from the living earth.” Thus, itki means that even gender-neutral objects are in some way alive.
Fascinating
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