Ecological time seems to move at different paces depending on where you are, the climate, and the responses of flora and fauna to environmental change. Having worked across the Northeast, Southeast, and the Bay Area, I have learned to notice and accommodate these different paces. September in the East Bay, at least to me, feels like a slow, dragging trudge. The heat from the summer continues while all of us, human and vegetable alike, wait patiently for the winter rains to return the hills to greenery. In contrast, September in New Jersey (my home state and where I am coincidentally writing this article from) is a time of quickening. The summer seems to slip through our fingers, and despite the humid warmth, the evening breeze smells of January snowfall. Foliage begins to turn red –the first signs of the death which winter brings.
Land stewards tend to be deeply aware of ecological time (also referred to as phenology). Our lives and day-to-day tasks are beholden to it. We feel it somatically, as our bodies make sense of seasonal changes. We get to participate in the rhythm of the landscape, the rhythm of the trees. Anyone who works across both coasts will be brought into awareness of both time frames, and while I would bristle at the term “bi-coastal,” I admit that both rhythms live in me like two syncopated heartbeats.
No organisms better represent this syncopation than those within the Aesculus genus, commonly known as buckeyes. In the hottest, most inhospitable months of the year, California buckeyes drop their leaves in order to conserve water. This shut down can be thought of as sleep, or resting in wait for more abundant conditions. The yellow buckeye, from the humid riverside bottomlands of the East Coast, lives a mirrored existence to the California buckeye. To prevent cellular rupture due to freezing, the yellow buckeye goes to sleep in the fall, as signaled by autumn colors and leaf drop. The same process, expressed in different ways and at different times. The same can be said of most phenological processes from east to west coast.
As restoration practitioners, we must learn to surf on these waves of moisture and heat, harnessing them to facilitate the healing of damaged landscapes. The waves have gotten rocky indeed, with climate change advancing all over the planet in different ways. How we respond now will determine our future ecologies from coast to coast.
