| By

Off the keyboard of Palloy

Follow us on Twitter @doomstead666

Friend us on Facebook

Published on The Doomstead Diner on January 13, 2017

Discuss this article at the Doomsteading Table inside the Diner

When the Collapse starts, the best place to be is where the community is closely in touch with a sustainable lifestyle, otherwise known as the Third World. Here extended family ties are strong, most people eat from their own gardens and buy and sell at local markets. Also, if you worry about Global Warming, the best place to be is close to the equator, with volcanic soil, and with a maritime climate – where higher temperatures have the negative feedback effects of more clouds, more rain and cooler temperatures. That's why I live on an island in the South Pacific, in a modern house built in the tropical rainforest.

The summer wet season has just started, with more than 17 inches in 4 four days, which has its impacts. A quick tour – you did bring your water-proof boots, didn't you?

A big dead tree that overhangs my main walking track has been slowly leaning more, and eventually its half rotten base couldn't take the strain any more, and it fell into the adjacent canopy, making the track very unsafe now.

Moving on, this is a key spot, at the end of the ridge running down to the swamp, with a massive tree perched right on the tip. The swamp is on the fringe of a tidal estuary, so is sometimes filled with saltwater and sometimes with rainfall run-off. Here rainforest meets mangroves.

I'm told there used to be an old walking track around the swamp edge, before the bulldozer came and marked the property boundary. Behind me is the big tree, and just beyond that on higher ground is a special (sacred?) site, or a camp site for travelers. Quite a few rocks here, which must have been carried here. Lots of chips of splintered quartz, with razor sharp edges. What it really was, either everyone has forgotten, or they don't tell people like me. Note how the rainforest has recovered from the bulldozer here.

Off to the left is a shallow basin, filled with alluvial clay, and the water runs off towards the big tree. This is the area where I have been trying to help the forest to re-grow by cutting back the grass-sedge-fern thicket by hand, which stands up to six feet high, being careful not to harm any tree saplings.

Most grasses would wilt and die off after an inundation like this, but of course these grasses/sedges really love being underwater, (as do the paperbark trees), and are now preparing to go to flower. Before they flower they develop hairs on the stems that exude a kind of sugary slime. These quickly become teeming with bacteria, which give the dog sore eyes and ears, and infect any cuts or thorn jabs. Most plants here defend themselves with sharp edges (Sword Sedge) or thorns (Pandanus).

I might have to rethink this project somewhat, seeing it all laid out like this. All the tree seeds I have scattered here will have a really hard time to get going in the water-logged clay, and the grasses and sedges will be back in no time. We'll see.

Moving on, looping back along the edge of the basin, here is an old female Pandanus tree (multi-branched), all covered in moss and lichens, which tend to trap the spores of Basket Fern, which start living epiphytically on the trunk. The tree on the right is Melaleuca dealbata and the vine running up it is called Chain Fruit. This is on account of its seed pod is very constricted between each seed, so looks like a string of beads (My dog getting in on the action once again).

These catch tree debris and moisture for their survival, and also other fern spores like Elkhorn which also like the conditions. In the wet season Elkhorns produce these big flat outer leaves to protect their sodden spongy inner mass where the roots feed, and in the dry season they die back. Next wet season new leaves start to appear, and the longer fronds which will carry the next generation of spores.

Fern spores are clones of their parent, and blow away to become a microscopic sexual plant called a prothallus, that exchanges pollen (hopefully) with others through water and become fertilised (hopefully) to grow into the new fern plant. A prothallus doesn't have a flower, but does have an ovum where all the action takes place. It is a hopelessly random event, but the spores number in their billions.

Also moving in there are Pyrrosia Fern, with the big coarse leaves, and Vitella, the dainty little dangling ones. You can tell success at this struggle depends on getting sunlight, and managing to live on next to nothing from just falling debris – water not a problem.

On the way back to the house, another Pandanus tree, with moss, a new Elkhorn, an Eria orchid (I'm guessing), Vitella, and some Pyrosia round the back.



And finally an Elkhorn in all its glory.



With an environment like this, bursting with life, who would want to live anywhere else?

Ah, the rain has stopped, my satellite internet connection is back on, so after that brief respite, on with the doom.