The eternal cosmic clock, rewound by the choreographed dance of celestial bodies, precisely marks the rebirth of light and the start of winter.
The runway for January’s landing is lit nine days before, during the winter solstice. The lights grow brighter as the spinning earth tilts in relation to the sun. This delicate earthly pirouette is anything but a solo performance. Only in a state of cosmic equilibrium, held firmly in place by gravity, can the possibility of life occur.
The relative stability of atmosphere and repetitious seasonal changes found on earth, provide the predictability and time, life requires to evolve and adapt.
While the January first rewind is a human convenience, all life forms, humans included, have evolved to key in on the periodicity of increasing and decreasing day length. Light, along with atmosphere, temperature, and gravity dictate the detailed specifications that must be met to exist. Life on the other hand, has no bargaining power and must somehow develop a form that embraces all the requirements set forth by the cosmic design as found on earth.
Successful adaptation is critically dependent on the stability of environmental conditions. Life forms whose ability to adapt, lags behind the speed of change, simply go away. The constant effort to achieve existence, results in an almost infinite variety of life, whether it be a blade of grass or an elephant. Each develops unique mechanisms to deal with seasonal changes in atmosphere and light. New life forms are constantly being discovered while other life forms go extinct.
I find it amazing our existence depends on heavenly bodies, light years away, hurtling through space in well-choreographed orbits controlled by gravity. Even more amazing is how oblivious humanity is to its existential condition, hanging only by an invisible thread. Though cosmic events are out of our control, its link to our existence sparks imagination and wonder. The curiosity that arises when we look toward the heavens has a gravity of its own which draws us in to seek deeper knowledge. Imagination and creativity are set afire when faced with a gap in information. We are compelled to temporarily bridge the unknown with subjective theory, a vestige of our innate survival skills.
As humans we are surrounded by natural wonders whose intended or unintended purpose is to fire our imagination and fuel our creativity to enhance our survival. In that way nature is teaching us how to fish as well as providing our daily bread.
Wise words spoke of rendering to Caesar and following that advice we celebrate January first as a nod to society. Let us also be inspired by the brightness of January traced back to the winter solstice and that moment of perfect equilibrium between light and darkness. A celebration of the moment life began to stir on a planet spinning in the blackness of an infinite universe bounded only by our imagination.
Author Joe Mish has been running wild in New Jersey since childhood when he found ways to escape his mother’s watchful eyes. He continues to trek the swamps, rivers and thickets seeking to share, with the residents and visitors, all of the state’s natural beauty hidden within full view. To read more of his writing and view more of his gorgeous photographs visit Winter Bear Rising, his wordpress blog. Joe’s series “Nature on the Raritan, Hidden in Plain View” runs monthly as part of the LRWP “Voices of the Watershed” series. Writing and photos used with permission from the author. Contact jjmish57@msn.com. See more articles and photos at winterbearrising.wordpress.com.
HUGE THANKS to the 60+ intrepid souls who joined the Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership and Central Jersey Stream Team out on the Green Brook floodplain for our last clean-up of the year. It was a cold, windy, rainy, mucky start to the day – really only the cold abated by the time we wrapped up.
With appreciation to Green Brook Township, Green Brook Regional Centre, GreenBrook Lions, Sewa Central Jersey, Mr. Kevin Ellis’ Middle School Science class, our Hackensack Riverkeeper friends and all the wonderful volunteers for giving of their time to clean up our watershed!
A crazy amount of trash was collected including a mini fridge, large screen TV, a big inflatable banana and so much more. See below for a few photos from the day. See you in 2021!!
LRWP board member Anton Getz and CJST board member Jens Riedel spot an inflatable banana on the Green Brook
Green Brook Middle School science teacher Kevin Ellis and his students
Central Jersey Sewa volunteer fill dozens of bags with plastic bottles
Dams are devastating to our stream systems and watersheds. They fragment our riverine habitat with cascading impacts including reservoir sedimentation, channel degradation, water quality effects, and blockage of fish migrations. Socioeconomic and cultural effects include loss of homes and livelihood, compromised access for recreation, concentration of heavy metals in the food chain, hydraulic undertows and drowning risks, and the potential for dam failure.
Dam removal takes a big picture view of River restoration, advancing an approach that prioritizes restoring the rivers’ ability to create, retain, manage, and reconnect watershed habitats, rather than man made attempts to direct flow or artificially create habitats.
It would be hard to find anyone who has advanced a clearer vision for a restored Raritan and improved watershed habitat connectivity than hydrogeologist John W. Jengo, PG, LRSP. John, a licensed Professional Geologist in several Northeastern and Southeastern states and a Licensed Site Remediation Professional in New Jersey, works as a Principal Hydrogeologist in an environmental consulting firm in southeastern Pennsylvania.
Over the last 30 years John has drawn on degrees in geology from Rutgers University (1980) and the University of Delaware (1982) to conduct the characterization and remediation of large, complex contaminated industrial sites throughout New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. He played a key role in Natural Resource Damage (NRD) assessments that led to groundbreaking legal settlements to remove numerous low head dams on the Raritan and Millstone Rivers to restore historically significant migratory fish spawning runs. As technical project manager, he planned, permitted, and successfully managed the removal of the Calco Dam, the Robert Street Dam, and the Nevius Street Dam between 2008-2013, and the removal of the Weston Mill Dam on the Millstone River in 2017, along with leading the archaeological investigation of the former Weston Mill in the Borough of Manville and Franklin Township.
The Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership thanks John for developing a blog series that provides a history of five of the dams in the Raritan Basin, the problems they have caused, and the process of their removal. In this series of posts about the Calco, Nevius, Robert Street, Headgates and Westons Mill dams, John highlights his big picture view of restoration: reconnecting the Raritan River habitat.
Click on the links below to read John’s story of dams and dam removal on the Raritan Basin.
