Introducing a Sequence of Photographs: The Dunes of Starve Gut Bay: 6•2010...A Day in the Existence of a Dune Ecology Stretching Out from Treasure Beach's Fort Charles

They can be viewed by clicking on Photo Gallery Pictures, or through the LINK:

http://treasurebeach.net/guide/pg/gallery/main.cfm?d=779


"I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too clever for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We could stand a better chance for survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially."
--E.B. White


There are moments on our spinning globe which give us pause...considered by some as a kind of equipoise...a balance...a harmony of tunes played by the winds and the waves and the hissing sounds re-forming from hints of ageless processes.

You know, surely, if you hover over the cliff roads of Treasure Beach's Ft Charles that the sonics of winds whooshing through fronds & leaves will chorale with the swellings and recedes of the waves to in-still a rhythm of the forlorn power of a celestial breath.

Out at the DUNES, there, at Starve Gut Bay, on a lonesome beach that will take you all the way to Parottee and the Salt Pond, between sea and dune ridge, you sense a dance, where hoofs have sunk lightly in sand and little nibbles of dune-anchoring vines have barely been witnessed by the wind-swept trees.

Behind the dunes, away from the sea, into marshy bogs and idyllic pastures, runs a rough road for mining trucks and equipment...few, these days to contend with, but the residue of enormous tractor tires, by the side, is testament to the scouring of siliceous earth, that the machines that they have transported could engorge.

With flowering, crawling vines and sedums established here, freely, the tree line at the crest of the dunes, fallen trees, the sand dune shapes follow no property line, no sub-division, no private entrapment by engineered "works".
It obeys a dynamic harmonic of the the power, force (vio-lence) and repair in Nature.

Science laboratories are continuing to unveil some of the Splendor Mysteries in the Unities of Uni-Verse.

Travelers, who have ventured for centuries through the sand dunes of the world's deserts have told there stories of musical happenings blowing, drumming, oboe-ing, fiddling & ringing off these bronze stages.

Perhaps, there are quintets of Nature, which sound in our ears along with long-ago, work-song grunts of a line of fisher folks, pulling & anchoring seine nets that once yielded a catch which fed multitudes.

These Images of Dunes, without heavily engineered restraints, merely sieves of branches and decomposing detritus are praises to the lightly inhabited...bedazzling us with a mimicry of protection and restoration that eternally cycles.


Song of the sand dunes: Where science and art meet
(from Cosmos Magazine) by Isabel Parenthoen

A strange sound rises from the cinnamon-coloured sand: a deep, almost hypnotic rhythm.

It could almost be the chanting of Tibetan monks, a song beyond time, yet the setting is rigorous and clinical - the laboratory of French physicist Stephane Douady, where a robot arm is pushing small, precisely measured amounts of sand down a plexiglass ring.
Douady is a leading expert in a very narrow field. He is investigating one of the most romantic yet maddening phenomena in the natural world: the 'song of the dunes'.

Travellers in the desert have long known that shifting sand can make an eerie noise, ranging from a bass boom to a baritone bark and a soprano whistle.
Writings in the Middle East from more than 1,500 years ago discuss this spine-tingling effect, as did Chinese authors from 1,200 years ago.

The sounds are "the song of the sands, the song of sirens who lure travellers to a waterless doom, the tolling of underground bells in sand-engulfed monasteries," said British scientist Ralph Bagnold in a 1941 book.

In Douady's lab at the Paris-VII University, a few cubic centimetres of sand make a pleasant, low-frequency background noise. But in the real desert, the sound can reach 100 decibels, just 10 dB short of the pain threshold.
Marco Polo compared the sound to the ominous pounding of war drums.
"Only a few dozen dunes in the world can sing," says Douady. The most vocal are those in China and in North and South America.

The noise occurs when the ridge of a sand dune builds up and eventually topples. This shear effect causes a mini-avalanche of sand in which millions of grains rub against each other as they fall.
But different materials and different conditions make different songs, says Douady.

Lab experiments show that synchronicity plays a vital role. Put simply, enough grains have to be flowing at the same rate in order to create and amplify the oscillation.
In turn, the factors behind synchronicity are wind speed, humidity - most "singing dunes" are in warm, dry climates - the size of the sand grain and the smoothness of its coating, too: a varnish-like deposit of clay and calcite.

A special electron microscope has shown that the musical dunes are composed of grains of sand more highly polished than similar, non-musical dunes. (Big Site Amazing Facts)

The frequency range is remarkably high, from as low as 64 Hertz to as high as 2,500 Hz.
Research into dunes also has practical outlets. Douady's lab also replicates the desert on a 1/1,000 scale, creating dunes made from tiny ceramic balls and using water instead of wind, to see how the sand advances.

"In a day, you get an idea of how dunes can move over years, centuries even," says Douady.
Douady, whose research appears in a forthcoming issue of the journal Physical Review Letters, is passionate about the desert, about poetry (the opening page of his website has a quote from the English romantic poet William Wordsworth) and is exploring ways in which the "song of the dunes" could be incorporated in art and music.

To most people it is just sand, and to many other scientists, it is just silica. For Douardy, it is a substance that is fluid, capable of order and disorder at the same time, and becoming more complex as the aeons pass.

"We are trying to understand chaos, and we are finding systems which gain in complexity with the passage of time."


Diana McCaulay (JET) on Shifting Sands of Time & Coastal Matters
I would like to say something about Coastal Ecosystems.

A good definition of a beach is "sand in motion."

Beaches generally wax and wane in response to bad weather, time of the year, tides and so on. Over time, though, beaches are often stable because they are protected by coral reefs, mangroves, seagrasses, beach vegetation, and the natural configuration of the land. Chances are, if you have a beach, conditions are favourable for beach development.

What developers tend to do is disrupt that stability. They don't want to live with the times when the beach is small, and they build much too close to the sea. So they then have to build coastal structures to protect their beach from its natural waxing and waning, and this almost inevitably has implications for other parts of the beach. As one part builds up, another part declines. This can be seen in many places in the north coast, but a really good example is to be found in Negril. Now, many resort owners are facing catastrophic beach erosion and have to put in expensive coastal works to protect their properties.

A big sand dune with mature vegetation is generally an indication of a stable coast. Vegetation does not have time to grow if the dune is only a year or two old. Perhaps someone from Treasure Beach could say how long the dune at Old Wharf had been there. It is my belief that leaving the dune intact would not only have provided important habitat for turtles and other organisms, but would have been good coastal protection for the owners.

The practice of building on stilts well set back from the sea is what NEPA should insist on in a place like Treasure Beach - well, possibly everywhere on the coast. Beach vegetation should never be touched - it is hard to establish, hard and often slow to grow. What typically happens is the hardy beach vegetation which is stabilizing the beach is taken out, and then exotic plants are put in which struggle and often fail.

But for me, these difficult issues come down to a simple issue: R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
Do people respect and revere the natural resources that have attracted them to an area in the first place, or do they simply see them as backdrop for their houses or hotels?
For me, I find beauty and mystery in nature and I regard all its manifestations with awe and the utmost respect.

For me, turtles in farms will never approach the value of a healthy coastline, with the miracle of a turtle returning to the beach where they were born, some 30 or so years later, digging a deep hole for eggs, and then the further miracle of the hatchlings race to the sea.

Treasure Beach still has gorgeous natural features.

I hope they will be respected and protected. I hope they will never be traded or sold for short term gains, like the making permanent a canal that should never have been constructed in such a way and was built illegally.

Intact natural features will keep people coming to Treasure Beach long after they have stopped coming to those parts of Jamaica which have been ruined by short sightedness and greed and poor governance.
(from TB.Net:20•1•2010)


Diana McCaulay on The Sense of Wonder
(from the Blog SnailWriter 17•6•2010)

I have seen marine turtles in the sea and on land – and I have felt wonder at their facility in the water, the slow sweep of their flippers taking them on journeys of 1,000 kilometres or more, and I have wanted to give the females a helping hand as they struggle through sand to lay their eggs.

Come, Mama, let me carry you.
Of course, I did no such thing, just sat, hidden, and watched the titanic struggle to send forth genes into the next generation. I have seen sandy turtle hatchlings emerge to begin their stumbling race for life over countless hurdles, until they make it into the breaking waves and I can see their tiny heads held up to breathe, and then disappearing into the sea, where they take their chances, face their long survival odds.
And I have seen crocodiles lying like rolling logs in the water, and basking on banks in the sun at the side of cold, green rivers, the reeds pulled in the direction of the sea.

All of us are pulled to the sea.

So what do I tell the worried hoteliers and the defensive sea wall owners?

Keep to your own habitat, perhaps, stay out of ponds and riverbanks and wetlands and the edge of beaches.

Let the crocodiles move along their age-old migration paths, leave the sand dune and the vegetation for the turtles.

And keep your sense of wonder, hold fast and hard to it...


Architect: Sim Van Der Ryn: Design for Life
"...The key strategy in the ecologic design of buildings is to consider the building as an analogue of a Natural System.
Ecologists study such systems by tracing all the energy and material input and output flows through the organism or system...its metabolism. Thinking of a human-designed system as analogous to a natural system is a radical new idea. It is critical in a world where our decisions about the form and shape, or morphology, of human-designed objects and systems have profound consequences for the living systems in which they are embedded.

Design that learns from nature's examples is design that provides hope for the future and satisfaction in the present.

Nature is unfolding wholeness.

Nature lives by creating generative living structures that emerge and change through progressive transformations...They are never fixed...To transform design from mechanical processes and products require a profound shift in how we understand design, nature, and ourselves.

Why has it taken so long for designers to discover the obvious and find ways to apply nature's lessons in design?

The dualism that arose out of the early age of science and industrialism replaced the beauty and function of organic nature as the fountain of design inspiration with that of the machine--the tamer and dominator of "untidy" nature.
The Modernist Movement in architecture heralded the rise of inexpensive mass technology as an equalizer and liberator of social and economic inequity.
Modernism equated the clean, unadorned box and the strait undecorated line with beauty and order.
The reaction to these movements was Romanticism, which viewed nature as a Victorian-era virgin to be protected from defilement--again, a dualistic view that set nature apart and at at the same time viewed as passive rather than dynamic.

The overreaching principle of Sustainability is that of Linked Diversity.
Within Natural Systems, it is the evolved diversity of species & niches that works to maintain stability in face of big changes.
What nature does to combat instability in a particular environment is evolve an integrated or linked diversity in which many species at all scales are connected through flows and cycles.
Virtually everything we perceive as fixed is actually in a state of flow & change.
Everything is engaged in an intricate dance that we can't see because the elements of the dance are either too large or too small, and the music being danced is either too fast or too slow for us to take notice.
Nature's design is adaptive design.
Looking from the perspective of a very long time scale, design for adaptation equals evolution; at a short time scale, adaptation is ad hoc innovation & change.
Ecologic Design takes into account a wide time scale of adaptive strategies and scenarios integrating Place, People & Pulse.

• The Naturalist: E.O. Wilson's Concept of the BIOPHILIAL:
...Another aspect of integral built form is that its physical character & form are biophilial..."the inately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms. Innate means hereditary and hence part of human nature."
Our Sense of Beauty is hard-wired into us through our million years of living in nature. In the Integral Epoch, we will again recognize that the source for all beauty is the Natural World.
(from Sym Van Der Vin's Design for Life)

•Magnus Larsson:Turning Dunes Into Architecture

www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/magnus_larsson_turning_dunes_into_architecture.html

• Rachel Armstrong: Architecture That Repairs Itself???

www.ted.com/talks/rachel_armstrong_architecture_that_repairs_itself.html

• Manual for Sand Dune Management in the Wider Caribbean
www.cep.unep.org/issues/sanddunes.PDF

SPECIAL NOTE: Photos of the "porous","helping-hand", scaled-down Sand Fences, gentling the dunes into wind-wave form, as vegetation establishes itself

• Membership to the Jamaica Environmental Trust (JET):
jamentrust@cwjamaica.com

Awesome, one day we will all realize just how important it is to coexist with our planet our only home (FOR NOW) and not destroy it day after day. Humans are a speck in something far greater and more powerful. Everything is connected to everything. TED TALKS is one of my favorite site along with Treehugger, Ecogeek, Digg, Green Planet and a whole lot more, so much info and absolutely cool what we humans can do even though every pro has its con (just the way it is). We can do this (CHANGE). A lot of Dune sites in Southern Ontario is protected but still doesn't stop trash an people and their pets from trampling upon them, hard to hear the music of the dunes here. Thanks Zed very informative.