Milton Public Library

Saving Tarboo Creek, one family's quest to heal the land

eng

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non fiction

Saving Tarboo Creek

electronic resource

dictionaries

one family's quest to heal the land

"We all live in particular places and at particular times, but when we act with family and friends to preserve a local slice of nature, we are, together, saving the planet." -Natural History Magazine Can each of us, as stewards of our land, make an environmental difference that can be seen, felt, and measured? Scott Freeman emphatically says yes, and in Saving Tarboo Creek he explores how we can all do it by making small changes over time. Saving Tarboo Creek masterfully blends two stories of the Freeman family's effort to reclaim a small patch of the planet: one, a tale of the realities of rehabilitating a degraded fish run in what was once an old-growth watershed; the other, an account of human resource use over time and what that history means for the future. Based on the land ethics found in Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, Saving Tarboo Creek is both a timely tribute to our land and a bold challenge to protect it. Examine the most pressing environmental issues of our time through one family's detailed account of creek restoration. Equal parts heartfelt and enlightening, Saving Tarboo Creek explores how the Freeman family lived a more authentic, fulfilling, and natural life one sapling and one acre at a time. Scott Freeman teaches biology courses at the University of Washington, where he received a Distinguished Teaching Award. He worked in environmental education and international conservation before completing a PhD in evolutionary biology at the University of Washington and conducting post-doctoral work at Princeton University as Sloan Fellow. Susan Leopold Freeman grew up outside West Lafayette, Indiana, and attended DePauw University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received a BFA. In 2004, the Freemans bought 18 acres along Tarboo Creek, on Washington State's Olympic Peninsula, and began reforestation and salmon stream restoration work in conjunction with the Northwest Watershed Institute and Jefferson Land Trust. His family now owns and manages over 240 acres of forestland in Jefferson County, all protected by conservation easements held by Jefferson Land Trust. Introduction My uncle Carl Holtz farmed in southeast Wisconsin for forty years. But before he started farming, he went to the University of Wisconsin to row on the crew team. While he was a student there he took a course on wildlife biology-then called game management-from a professor named Aldo Leopold. During the semester, each student was required to have a brief one-on-one conversation about the course with Leopold in his office. More than twenty-five years later, my uncle told me about that meeting: "I sat there like the dumb jock I was back then, you know. Professor Leopold was asking me about this and that, and I had absolutely no idea what he was driving at. But then something caught his eye out the window, behind his desk. He looked at it for a moment, then turned to me and asked, 'Carl, what bird is that?'" "I had no clue, of course," he laughed. "But years later I realized it was a palm warbler, migrating through." My uncle was a big man, with hands the size of salad plates. He held them up. "Leopold knew I wasn't going to go on to graduate school or become a wildlife biologist. He just wanted me to look up and notice things." Uncle Carl put his hands down and nodded at me. "And so I have-ever since." Outside my window in Seattle right now, a flock of bushtits is feeding in the bare branches of a birch tree. Some are upside down; some are right-side up. They are flitting, fluttering, jumping. Then they disappear all at once-diving into the cover of a nearby Douglas-fir tree. Now they're back. A moment later, they're gone-until tomorrow. These birds are adults and juveniles. They are neighbors from the previous year and new immigrants to the neighborhood..

adult