Water main break leaves 37 MA communities without drinkable water

A friend from Springfield called me a few minutes ago to ask if I'd heard anything about a need to boil our water in Springfield because of something that had happened to the Quabbin Reservoir.  I told her I'd check around and it didn't take long to locate the news at Boston.com: a major break in a pipe carrying water from the Quabbin and the Wachusetts Reservoirs  to Metropolitan Boston has ruptured, dumping an astounding 8 million gallons of water an hour into the Charles River. The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority is turning to its emergency back-up reserves from the Chestnut Hill and Spot Pond Reservoirs and the Sudbury Aqueduct.

Life would be nothing without ironies, yes?  On Thursday, Concord, Massachusetts became the first city in the country to ban all sales of bottled water.  Concord  is not among one of the 37 communities who now needs to boil its water, or I imagine there would be plenty of "I told you so's" going on in the town right now.

My older daughter is moving today from her apartment in Salem to an apartment in Arlington, which is under the Boil Water order, and I gave her a call.  I can just imagine she and her friends, having just now finished moving furniture, going to the kitchen sink in the new place and getting a nice cold drink from the tap.

I've been waiting to calm down, if that ever happens,  before blogging about what is now being described as a "river of oil" rushing from the ocean floor in the Gulf of Mexico.  What ought to be clear, though is that we are using 19th and 20th century infrastructures to deal with 21st century life on earth,  and dangerous 21st century technologies to solve energy problems that demand a cutting edge vision.  When will we shift our priorities?

Photo of Quabbin Reservoir from thelehegarets' photostream at Flickr,

Is this how you want our state forests to look?

Photo by Christ Matera, Mass Forest Watch.  More on his site.

New England's (possibly) oldest elm soon to be no more

This morning's Boston Globe tells the story of Herbie, an approximately 235 year old tree in Yarmouth, Maine, which is finally succumbing to Dutch elm disease and will be removed by the town on January 18.  The tree has had the disease for more than 50 years, but careful tending by volunteer tree warden Frank Wright, now 101 years old himself, added another six decades to the tree's life.  Now the tree's time as a tree is ending.  Read more.

The same edition of the Globe has an opinion piece about the  Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation's promotion of clear-cutting in our state's forests.  I've learned a lot about clear-cutting recently, but until reading this article, I hadn't also heard that Massachusetts lost its "green certification" from the Forest Stewardship Council.  Hundreds of acres of forest have been clear-cut around the Quabbin Reservoir, which supplies Boston's water but is located here in Western Massachusetts.

Do we have to anthropomorphize trees to save them?   I don't recall ever having named a tree but I certainly have had close relationships with a number of memorable trees throughout my life.   I didn't learn to truly love them as a species until I lived in Maine and began to understand their importance.  But loving a single tree is not a bad place to start.

A hundred years ago, even in a city like Springfield, children could name their favorite climbing tree, and knew where to find apples and chestnuts.  The modest mulberry tree still thrives, but do Springfield children even know their berries can be eaten?

Photo from McPhloyd's photostream at Flickr.