Lego Mindstorms Nxt Alpha Rex

14. Banana Boat and Hawaiian waves in the boreal forest


The summer is the ideal season for whitewater canoe, renewed pleasure and yet always reinvented the liking of climatic and water levels.

I bought specially for the whitewater, canoe, used short and crisp, familiarly known as Banana Boat, a sort of tribute to double its sleek and interplanetary hit Harry Belafonte, immortalized by Tim Burton BeattleJuice.

drought of June was an opportunity to try the rafting section of the Mistassibi a series of V-MIR and to decommission all because of low water- with evocative names of Black Mass, cemetery or Hawaii. The river flow was then decreased to half its usual level, so that the large waves that ordinarily meet for sure the boats were becoming more common.

Closer to home, on the Mistassini is a team of kayakers professionals who met to make rush fall on the eleventh. This passage, then deemed impassable, was taken, apparently without difficulty, by specialists from the far from everywhere.

Then the rain came, finally, the magnifying Ousiemisca, and I found my favorite sections, Rapid greenhouses, toads fall to the ICON of the largest rapids. Lowering the threshold IV was the occasion of great satisfaction and a few bumps.

is sometimes thought, wrongly, that rapid descents are made by great kids wanting to scare these passages and collect as many titles as successful. They forget that we are not talking about lowering barrel, but the canoe.

We do not conquer a fast, it is not a stretch. The water level is variable and while some may get faster still in the same way, others need to be watched before each descent. Humility is still required.

What matters in a canoe is to understand the forces at work in the water body to anticipate the movements of the hull and control his house, otherwise we may soon turn around. The force is less in the biceps of the paddler in the water movements. If small RI and RII forgive many, RIII and RIV, usually much less.

In other words, the canoe is to sports whitewater what Aiki-Do is the martial arts, a technique that makes the violence of the outside elements, the strength of the fighter. And the battle is not played against the River, but against our fears of terrestrial mammals and bipedal, always looking for a hard surface where cling.

stability on the water, is to look at the heart of the wave scrolls. Everything here is as fluid and intangible pleasures, thrills eco-compatible without motor sport where only the sound of water hitting a rock just cover the cackling of tourniquets and other diving ducks.

Doujin Pokémon Ash Misty

13. The spirit of trees

I drink my coffee and look outside.
I watch and hear the leaves of aspen in the wind. I know right from wrong at the beginning of July, to recognize the forest outside my house. Spruce and pine were eaten by deciduous vegetation: mountain maple, elder, birch, alder, viburnum and as a young larch copper tint my fall garden.

A whole teeming, Baroque, leaves, thorns and twigs, shapeless mass for the neophyte, assembly rigorous naturalist. Because plant in chaos, there is a rule on the order of short seasons and light penetration under the canopy. This

Aldo Leopold, that I quote often called the biotic community: each species which adapts to the presence of the other.

These communities are polyspecific and also transcend the boundaries of the reign. To understand how they fit, look how assemble the mineral, vegetable and animal, including humans, in a given place. Because if the forest is a lot for the wolf, the wolf is a lot for the forest, the saying goes, it limits the number of grazing mammals.

The role of humans in these biotic communuautés is essential, because its potential to cause harm is matched only by its power to protect. It is the creature of the eighth day, one who has self-assigned role to extend the unfinished work of God, for better or for worse. I note with amusement

Christian vocation that has implications pagan. The work of foresters, as well as that of climate, insects, or topography, gives a spirit trees.

(photo, Morvan, F)

In Europe, especially, the human hand has transformed the forests and shaped the tree. It must be said that glaciations have deprived the old continent the majority of endemic species, offering a whole continent the opportunity to reinvent themselves.

On these lands, the action of the forest was, in turn, benefit and excessive, and the result is there, a variety of forest which is more robust than anywhere else in the forest. More importantly, the farm is absolutely necessary in places, otherwise he would finish these forests that we think is straight out of a fairy tale ": dark Black Forest in Germany, twisted trunks of groves furetées Morvan , clear forests of larch in the Italian Alps, etc..



(left, Col. Cherry, Mercantour, F, pictured right, Oparara Basin NZ)

In the new worlds, unfortunately, the action of the Western man was too fast and too sharp, and the magic has given way to a teratology.

The contrast struck me in all its violence in New Zealand, the islands where no less than thirty per cent of native vegetation has been retained but now cotoie scopes Douglas planted there to meet the needs of a predatory economy.

(Photo, near Picton, NZ)

Elsewhere in Indonesia, for example, the vast rainforest comes to agro-industries interested in growing oil palm, even if it means depriving oran-utan habitat.

In Quebec, we did a lot for the preservation of the timber resource. Here, we have always lived in the great boreal forest, and we know that the future will come along. So we protect the resource, with varying degrees of success.

Yet, even where it succeeds best, as on the territory of model forest Saguenay - Lac St-Jean, there is something that runs out, something that will disappear if we do not take custody.

This forest, southern part of Nistassinan is full of ghosts. The stealthy shadows of former portageurs Ilnuat. Runners of the woods. Missionary explorers on their way to James Bay. Foresters and loggers to Ouasiemisca.

presences we talking trees and whose habitat is threatened. Because this forest is replanted to maintain the resource is not like that before.

I have great difficulty with these cultivated forests, which we sometimes meet at the end of a fir-white birch or spruce-moss, I see the rotten fruit of a mind human too often sacrifices the natural beauty on the altar of progress and chaos is a field plant straight black spruce plantations.

These trees are soulless, all identical, their fathers' fathers, skinny trunks, waiting for the gale or saw them put down. These forests we talk about money and big business, but it's not a hurry that passes through them to find moss and spruce-fir forests, natural extravaganzas whose wealth is her inexhaustible.