Awesomely Creepy Trees: From Frightening Faces to Gnarled Branches

As an environmentalist, it may be a bit cliché (or just really obvious) that I like trees.  They’re just cool – how old they can live to be, how many different shapes and sizes they come in, and the way they can evoke so many different moods depending on their texture, leaves, the way their branches curve or how they’re lit at different times of the day.  I’m also a big fan of old school classic (I’m talking 1965 and earlier) horror movies, and the uniquely eccentric vision of Tim Burton, so naturally I love creepy trees.  There’s just something about them.  Here are some of the coolest creepy tree pictures you’ll ever see.

Check out the rest at Environmental Graffiti.

Link [Environmental Graffiti]

Rain-Swollen Lake Bursts Bank and Disappears

Nature doesn’t mess around. One look at this photo makes it clear how much power the forces of nature really hold, and how helpless we can be to their destruction. The photo shows two employees of Tommy Bartlett’s Water Show trying to clean debris and dead fish out of the empty bed of Lake Delton in Wisconsin, which was once a picturesque 267-acre vacation destination.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Weekend rains of biblical proportions dumped so much water into Lake Delton that it literally burst its banks.

Tens of thousands of gallons of lake water barreled through the woods, taking with it a roadway, several houses, boats, fish and lake bed. It emptied into the nearby Wisconsin River and was gone in hours.

On Tuesday morning, some 24 hours after the catastrophe, the massive lake is nearly drained. The lake is a muddy moonscape of cracked earth. Fish bake in the sun, flopping until their deaths. Mounds of dead fish are piled high. The shoreline is jagged and cracked. Boats hang in the air suspended by what is left of the docks. In parts, the little water that is left meanders like a silent brook. The roadway and earth that held the river back is now a grand canyon.

Lake Delton was formerly a lively scene of water skiing, fishing, and other recreation. State officials have vowed to refill the lake as soon as possible, but residents are afraid the lake will never be the same again. And it may not – the lake was artificially created by damming Dell Creek. Sounds like nature took things into its own hands and turned the man-made lake back into a creek, as it was originally.

Link [Chicago Tribune]
Photo credit: Chicago Tribune/ E. Jason Wambsgans

Trees Eating Bicycles, Cars & Benches

I’m about to sound like a real patchouli-scented Birkenstock-wearing treehugger, but here goes: trees are really pretty amazing, when you think about it. Some of them are astoundingly old. Without them, we simply couldn’t survive on this planet, yet we as a species have made life on Earth pretty difficult for them. That’s why I love to see things like this: trees taking back the world! Check out these photos of trees growing around objects that were left nearby for too long.

See the rest of the photos at The Contaminated.

Link [The Contaminated]

Man-Made Noise Interfering with the Earth’s Ecology

Shhh – do you hear that? It’s the sound of us effing up yet another part of ecology. Man made noise may actually be altering the sounds we should be hearing all day and night – those of nature. Field scientist Bernie Krause has been studying nature sounds for decades, and he’s noticed something disturbing: the natural sound of the world is vanishing.

Wired Magazine has it:

Krause has a word for the pristine acoustics of nature: biophony. It’s what the world sounds like in the absence of humans. But in 40 percent of the locations where Krause has recorded over the past 40 years, human-generated noise has infiltrated the wilderness. “It’s getting harder and harder to find places that aren’t contaminated,” he says.

This isn’t just a matter of aesthetics. The contamination of biophony may soon become a serious environmental issue — Krause says that man-made sounds are already wreaking havoc with animal communication. We worry about the carbon emissions from SUVs and airplanes; maybe we should be equally concerned about the racket they cause.

Krause’s argument is simple. In a biophony, animals divide up the acoustic spectrum so they don’t interfere with one another’s voices. He shows me a spectrogram of a wilderness recording, in which all the component noises are mapped according to pitch. It looks like the musical score for an orchestra, with each instrument in its place. No two species are using the same frequency. “That’s part of how they coexist so well,” Krause says. When they issue mating calls or all-important warning cries, they aren’t masked by the noises of other animals.

Nature has a way of delicately balancing every aspect of the world’s ecology, and as we humans have become more technologically advanced, we’ve fallen out of our natural place in the world and become tyrants, out of touch with our surroundings. Animals communicate with each other through sounds, and when our loud planes, construction noises and vehicles cover those sounds, an imbalance occurs. Suddenly an animal can’t make itself heard. While this might seem like a very small thing to some people, it can have huge effects on the ecosystem over time. It’s been suggested that we don’t just develop ‘green tech’, but ‘quiet tech’ as well. We certainly wouldn’t want to find out too late that yet another aspect of our dominion over the earth has created irreparable destruction.

Link [Wired Magazine]
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Nature Can Coooold Blooded: Frog Eating Spider Is Full of Badass

I feel bad for the frog, but…

Kick. Ass.

Via [Green Daily] via [videosift]

Billy Knows a Tree When He Googles One: The Soccer Mom Syndrome

The big ass Chevy Suburban that just cut you off is not dangerous because of the cell phone-jabbing, 5′2″ super housewife behind the wheel. The real danger lives behind those tinted rear windows, in the murky back seat region, where billions of microchips and processors compete for the attention of the one little whiny occupant who reigns supreme. Fumbling from Gameboy to iPod to DVD remote control, it’s a wonder little Billy even finds the time to allow a finger to break free and troll after those boogers that are just dying to get out. Our little friend has driven through the forest a billion times, but has yet to so much as touch a tree.

In his discussion at the Aspen Environment Forum, EO Wilson (Pellegrino Research Professor in Entomology at Harvard) blamed the group that he lovingly referred to as “soccer moms” for the declining interest in nature and the environment amongst children.

DiscoverMagazine.com reports:

Wilson filled more than an hour of questions and answers with witty remarks and barbs. And to be sure, his tone was playful. Yet, there was a seriousness behind his “soccer mom” remarks that struck a cord with many people in the audience: Have children been largely cut off from nature because of technology?

Many people agreed that they have, with video games, the Internet and structured play times replacing — as comedian George Carlin commented in a recent skit — sitting outside in a yard with a stick wondering how to entertain themselves.

If Wilson is right, little urban zombies like Billy will one day rule the world, able to leap tall logarithmic search engines in a single bound, but stupidly worthless when it comes to differentiating between an acorn and a pine cone. These are tomorrow’s Republican Senators and Governors.

Links [Discover Magazine] & [The Aspen Environment Forum]

Photo credit: Flickr user MonkeyLeo13

Peeing Outside is Good for Your Soul (and the Environment)

There’s nothing like a good pee outside. Green is Sexy so awesomely has it:

Not only is the fresh air liberating (even in sub-zero temperatures) it saves anywhere from 1.6 to 3.5 gallons per “episode,” depending on how chic and state-of-the-art your toilet is.

So true. Ladies can get the She Wee for easy outside standing bladder evacuation.

Link [Green is Sexy]

National Academy of Sciences: Digital Media is Turning Us Into Slugs

It’s official, the internet is turning us into a bunch of nature hating indoor slugs. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences just released a study suggesting that interest in outdoor activities is on on the decline world wide. The downturn coincides with the uptick in media consumption, mostly from the increased adoption of the internet.

This is bad news for the National Parks Service and could be bad for the environmental movement overall. If less of us are getting outside it means that less of us are likely to form a direct connection with the wilderness and hence will be less likely to place a high priority on preserving it.

So what’s the solution to our growing sloth? Well to start, you should stop reading this post. Go outside for an hour and smell the breeze. Walk around, feel the grass on your toes. Then come back and read eight more posts here.

Link [Ars Technica]