Constantly surprised here. So incredibly green. Photos of yesterday’s travels from Lalibela to Gondar, including common baboons.
agriculture
Soybeans
SOYBEAN CHECKOFF
If you grow soybeans, there is this program–not sure what else to call it–named the Soybean Checkoff. Basically, when you sell soybeans, you get docked a few cents per amount sold to advertise, etc. soybeans. I received my latest issue of the Lonestar Soybeans recently. For those of you reading from afar, Lonestar refers to Texas. It is the Lonestar state and our flag has one lone star on it. Back to soybeans. First, there is a report on soybean production issues. Research is to the point in terms of soybean physiology that they are about to zero in on optimal planting time, conditions, latitude, etc. Here in this part of Texas, generally no one grows soybeans. We grow irrigated corn and wheat, milo, sorghum, and crops that do not require as much water as soybeans.
EXPORTS AND ETHANOL
I grew up on a farm where we raised both soybeans and corn–I still do. We raised some wheat also; tried milo, but it was too wet in Missouri. Never thought a lot about where my soybeans went after I sold them so I learned something new today. Compared to all other crops, we export more soybeans than anything else–to the tune of 20 billion dollars a year. We also export a lot of wheat–about the same as soybeans, but soybeans trump wheat if you include soybean meal and oil. Meanwhile corn exports have dropped steadily since 2007 or so. Why? Ethanol.
GMO
This report does not tell the reader some other notable facts. While almost all corn grown commercially in the United States is GMO, such is not the case for soybeans. The big market for soybeans is Asia and at least China will pay more for non-GMO soybeans. 60 per cent of all soybean exports go to China. For those of you out there who are adamant about GMO, perhaps the solution is demand for non-GMO. Currently, the only way I know to get non-GMO corn is to find a company that sells heirloom seeds and plant and harvest the corn yourself or find a small farmer who does this.
Apocalyptic Planet-Part Seven: Species Vanish
We all know extinction occurs. Nearly everyone knows different species of dinosaurs at varied times roamed the earth for millennia. Bones of all sorts of animals and various hominids are dug up off and on. Scientists study them, determine their age, where and how they lived. Scientists and sometimes even average persons develop theories about why they went extinct. Regardless of which theory a person decides is accurate, these ancient extinctions generally took thousands of years. Recent extinctions are different, e.g. carrier pigeons. Millions existed a couple of hundreds of years ago; now they are gone. Why? Humans.
Various causes exist for the extinctions of ancient species. A major cause is the climate change caused my the changing tilt of the earth’s axis. These changes occur over thousands and thousands of years. What is different now? Let’s take corn. Native Americans cultivated rainbow colors of corn in small, frequently irrigated fields. Where is most corn grown now? Giant fields of GMO corn grow from horizon to horizon in the Midwest. And if Monsanto had its way, no other corn would continue to exist for long. Iowa is a good example. Wherever this corn is grown, native grasses and other native plants totally disappear, in part due to cultivation. A bigger issue is herbicides–to have clean fields, nothing and I mean nothing but corn must grow there. A farmer’s expertise as a farmer is measured my just how super clean his fields are. The only way to get these totally weedless fields is to use herbicides. Biodiversity is a key to environmental health. Little biodiversity exists in giant fields of crops like corn and soybeans. Fertilizers to obtain huge yields wash downstream and in the Midwest eventually end in the Gulf of Mexico and cause giant marine algae blooms which pulls oxygen from the water to create a dead zone where no marine animals or fish can live.
Perhaps readers have heard of the plight of monarch butterflies. Compared to just ten years ago, the population has dropped dramatically. What happened to them? Roundup. Over 100,000 tons of Roundup and other brands of glyphosate herbicides are annually applied to crops in the US. What do monarchs eat? Milkweed. Since 1999, 58 per cent of the milkweed has disappeared. Recently, monarchs experienced a 30 per cent reduction in their numbers in one year. Are we headed toward a mass extinction? Some scientists think so. These scientists are not talking about tigers, elephants, and rhinos being killed at an ever increasing rate for their body parts, but rather about the less noticeable extinctions of various plants and less obvious animals like frogs. And then there is the problem with bees. Bees are disappearing at an ever increasing rate due to not only diseases but due to herbicides and pesticides. Without bees to pollinate the giant fields of almonds and various fruits in California, for example, those foods won’t exist. See a previous post for more discussion on the importance of bees. So why care about frogs? Scientists consider frogs and amphibians in general an indicator of the health of an ecosystem. Certain more tropical species of frogs are especially subject to the effects of climate change and they are disappearing.
Where I live big bluestem, blue grama, buffalo grass, and other native species grew from horizon to horizon. This is the high plains. Root systems of some plants grow twelve feet deep. It has not rained in over a month. Where the native grass once grew, crops are now grown. This time of year finds open fields. Without rain, with the recent endless high winds, dust fills the sky. To safely return home from town Sunday, I had to turn on the car lights to see. The dryness fuels wildfires. Earlier this week, over one hundred homes burned down in a wildfire north of Amarillo. Drought.
Many human inventions are wonderful and make many lives better, but for some of them, I cannot help but wonder at what cost.
Random Thoughts at the End of a Rather Long Day
When I realized the time and know 5:30 tomorrow morning will come sooner than I may prefer, I decided I had to write something here to fulfill my commitment to write daily for at least one month–three weeks down and one to go. Will I continue? Don’t know yet. Pluses: I have gained quite a few new followers, at least ten, maybe more–have not taken an exact count; it proves that if you stick to something, there are pay offs; and it forces me to think about some things I’ve read or experienced in a way that I might not if I were not going to blog about it.
What are some of those things I am thinking about? First, the weather. We desperately need rain and this statement comes from someone not all that fond of rain. I like the green results but do not like to be out in the rain normally. It is a wonder I love Costa Rica because it rains almost daily at least it did when I was there two summers ago. Fire warnings are even currently posted on overhead flashing signs on the interstates–not daily, but every time the wind rises which here is almost daily. Second, when I think about the destruction of volcanoes–from reading another chapter in Apocalyptic Planet last night, I keep wondering what would happen today if another explosion like Krakatoa in the 1800s occurred. Mass famine I imagine and a bunch of certain types of religious people claiming the end of the world. Third, after spending two boring mornings giving STAAR tests–the state standardized tests in Texas, and another morning left to go, wondering exactly why I still think standardized tests are good. Fourth, wondering how to turn this blog into a sort of website where people who want a signed copy of my new book, On the Rim of Wonder, can order it directly from me on this blog/website (I have had requests already which is, of course, a wonderful thing since book marketing is not all that easy). Fifth, well this will have to wait until another day when my mind is really sharp and we can have a discussion about the effects of poverty and why it is so difficult to escape.
In the meantime, while I was out watering around my house–to keep my xeroscape garden alive (even drought resistant flowers need some) and to, I hope, make my house safer in case of a wildfire, I thought about all the lovely flowers blooming in spite of the dry weather. Here they are in all their enduring beauty.
Volunteering at Palo Duro Canyon
In front of the Visitor’s Center with Eduardo and Gaston, exchange students who lived with me several years ago.
Occasionally, I volunteer in the gift shop at Palo Duro Canyon, the second largest canyon in the United States. If individuals drove through Amarillo on I-40 through the endless flat prairie land and never ventured far, they would not even be able to dream up this canyon only twenty miles away. To get there, you have to drive through more flat land, covered in wheat pasture, corn, milo, and the few remaining pastures of native grass. You can see for miles; you can even see the taller buildings in Amarillo which are not all that tall. Then, unexpectedly the land opens up, cliffs appear. The first time you see it, you feel astonishment. Nothing you see on the way there prepares you. Years ago Battelle Memorial Institute sent me on a business trip to Amarillo. People told me I should go see the big canyon. I laughed to myself, thinking they must be just talking about a large arroyo. When I finally did drive down, my mouth gaped in shock. How could this be?
Palo Duro Canyon is still being created by water erosion. The Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River (no I did not make this name up) runs through it. Barely a running stream now with the drought, when a big summer thunderstorm blasts it fury, this river can rise ten feet almost immediately. When it does this, campers remain stranded inside the park until the river calms down because to get into the park, depending how far in you go, you have to literally cross the river repeatedly. Because of this, they have decided to build bridges across the five water crossings. Some of us who love driving through the water find this innovation unacceptable.
Today, I volunteered from 1-5. People came in from Indiana, Minnesota, Ecuador, south Florida–on a trip to Californian and back, Ohio, Germany–a young woman working as a nanny here. Usually, I meet even more people from other countries, especially European countries. When I ask the Germans in particular how they know about this place, they tell me Palo Duro Canyon and its history is featured on the Internet there. Here come all these people from far away and I have students who live a mere 25 miles away and have never seen it. The family from Indiana came because their daughter wants to attend West Texas A & M University in Canyon, Texas–named after the canyon of course. She told me she wants to bring her horse and WT is one of the few universities in the country where you can major in agriculture and participate in an extensive horse program. She exuded excitement and enthusiasm.
In the midst of chatting with all these visitors, I noticed the unusual behavior of one woman in particular. She had medium grey hair pulled back in a ponytail with hair a lighter shade of grey framing her face. All her clothes were dark grey. She walked to the book area–we sell a lot of books, and started flipping slowly through several of them. She picked them up as if they were delicate flowers or fragile glass. She held them as if she thought they might break if she held them tight. When she put one up to look at another, it appeared as if she barely touched them. She never smiled, just looked and looked and looked. She did not buy a book.
Water, Water, Where?
Today, I drove about fifty miles to watch a play especially produced by my friend, King Hill, for the Gem Theatre in Claude. I almost did not go because of high winds and blowing dust. Between 8 and 10 this morning visibility was so low it was impossible to see the horizon. High wind and blowing dust warnings started yesterday. Now, as I write this, these warnings have continued for more than 24 hours. Red flag warnings flash across the TV screen. Thankfully, not quite the dust bowl extremes, not yet anyway.
Originally, a green sea of grass covered all the land where I live in the Panhandle of Texas, the Llano Estacado. Immense herds of buffalo roamed free. This prairie grass protected the land from erosion. Rivers and an occasional canyon interrupted this endless sea, including the Canadian River, Palo Duro Canyon and the network of canyons running into it. Once the Spanish brought horses, Kiowa and Comanche ruled this sea for more than a hundred years. Under a full moon, the Comanche reigned by night raids from Nebraska to Mexico.
What happened? Plows brought by people from the East dug up the grass. These people planted the crops they knew, wheat, corn. They settled in towns and homesteaded the country. They brought cattle and in some areas developed gigantic ranches. Hunters killed all the buffalo except a few the famous rancher Charlie Goodnight and his wife managed to save. Remnants of this southern herd now live at Caprock Canyons State Park near the tiny town of Quitaque, Texas. Those who farmed dry land farmed. In a normal year crops grew, the people prospered. In dry years dust blew because there was no grass to hold the dirt.
Today, giant pumps pull water from the aquifers, the Ogallala, the Santa Rosa. My well is 400 feet deep, some are nearly 900. More and more people move here from other parts of the United States. They want lawns like the ones they had where it rains forty inches a year. It does not rain much here, twenty in a good year, ten in a bad year. These aquifers lose much more water to irrigation in a year than are replenished by rain. Farmers grow corn,wheat, cotton, and milo, all irrigated. In some places where the water became to saline for crops, the pumps sit abandoned.
Today, I drove by miles and miles of dry, thirsty grass, perfect fuel for the wind driven wildfires which sometimes start this time of year. In other places irrigation pivots rained water on immense emerald fields of wheat. I could not help but wonder how much of this water evaporated in the sixty mile an hour wind. As I finish writing this with the TV on weather watching, I see Fire Weather Watch, High Wind Warning, Red Flag Warning flash across the screen. I hear the wind roar and heavy outdoor furniture slide across the patio. I’ve seen wildfires, had a half mile of cedar post fence burned down. All it takes is a tiny piece of cigarette thrown from a truck or car, a flash of dry lightning. They predict three more days of this.
I love the space, the vermillion sunsets, the intense blue of the sky. I watch my neighbors water, water, water their new houses in the country. I think about those pivots irrigating in the wind, and I wonder what will happen when all the water’s gone.
Intelligent Beings
Tonight the program Nature on PBS asked questions about animal intelligence as compared to humans. This list portrays some of the things I learned, some new, some I remembered from past readings or other Nature programs:
-A few other animals besides humans recognize themselves in a mirror. This list includes elephants, dolphins, and chimps. Actually, humans do not demonstrate this ability until they are about 18 months old.
-Only a few species studied demonstrate a sense of social justice. If they think they are being treated unfairly, they get mad and sometimes have a little fit. This includes monkeys and dogs.
-Only one species studied demonstrated overt altruistic behavior and a sense of social justice toward others, the bonobo. Of course, others may but have not been studied yet. Notably this is the same species that resolves social tension and conflict with sex rather than fighting.
-Humans grieve. Many other mammals grieve immediately after the deaf of a loved one, e.g. their own young offspring, but few recognize the bones of long deceased members of their species. The exception is elephants. Elephants not only recognize the bones of other elephants, they frequently nuzzle them with their trunks and stay with them a while.
-Dolphins may seek out help when they need help. The program showed a diver who was not looking for dolphins at all. A dolphin who had a fish line and hook stuck in his side approached the diver and managed to stay very still while the diver removed the hook. This took nearly ten minutes. Of course, no one knows whether the dolphin was actually seeking help or simply stayed still when help was available.
-Chimps possess another behavior similar to humans, the ability to purposefully deceive. A less dominant chimp was shown where a banana was hidden from a window outside an enclosure. She and a more dominant female chimp were released into the enclosure at the same time. The first chimp did not rush to the food. Oh,no. She waited and watched, played it cool, and when the other chimp wandered off to the other side, ran and ate the banana.
It is difficult to get inside of the mind of other animals. Anyone who has pets thinks they are smart or at least dogs and cats seem to demonstrate considerable intelligence. Horses do as well. And yes, I have seen horses grieve. When one of my horses died in a terrible and rather bizarre accident a few years ago, the other horses stood for hours in the place where the deceased horse had died. They did not even leave to eat their alfalfa, a food they loved and always ran to.
I even think animals, in particular mammals, know when they are headed to slaughter. I think those who kill them know this but to admit it would be too painful. They certainly know the smell of blood. It incites terror. Certainly animals can suffer at the hands of cruel humans. Do animals besides us deliberately hurt others for the sheer, sick pleasure of it? If there is a study regarding this topic, I have yet to see it. I wonder.
Sacred Corn
In the summer on hot, humid nights, you can hear the corn grow. My great grandfather, my grandfather, and my father grew corn. I grow corn in that same rich loess soil of Northwestern Missouri. Soil laid down by Ice Age glaciers thousands of year ago. Only on a few hill tops, here and there, will you find non glacial soil. Repeatedly, daily, I walk by the sacred corn plant of life painted on my hall corner. This sacred corn corner houses three corn maiden kachinas and a drum decorated with corn maidens. I give thanks to corn for my house and the life I lead.
Corn Song
I sing the song of ancients:
pueblo peoples,
Anazazi, Hopi, Zuni.
I sing the song of an America long gone.
Maya, Aztec, Tolmec.
I sing the song of life: colors of the rainbow
golden, red, white, blue.
I sing the song of now: thick, endless
identical rows.
Pioneer, Monsanto,
anhydrous ammonia,
atrazine.
I sing the song of hope and joy:
an ancient reclaiming,
a klaidescope of colors,
butterflies and fireflies.
I sing the eternal human song.
This is a Navaho kachina. Kachina are actually Hopi, but Navaho artists now make kachinas as well. The first corn maiden kachina I bought.
Spotted corn kachinas, on the left, are unusual. It took me years to find one. The kachina on the right was created by R Pino, who is both Hopi and Navaho.
Every year Pendleton runs an art contest among Native American students. The winner’s art work is transformed into saddle blankets. This design, created by Mary Beth Jiron, is the latest in this Student Series. There are three corn maidens on each side of the blanket, representing the different varieties of corn grown by native peoples, yellow, red, blue, white, black, and spotted.
Apocalyptic Planet-Part Two: Hadley Cells, Weather and Drought
Hadley cells, the wind systems in each hemisphere , form patterns of atmospheric circulation in which warm air rises near the equator, cools as it travels poleward at high altitudes, sinks as cold air, and then warms as it travels back to the equator. They are named after George Hadley, an English scientific writer. Tropical regions receive more heat from solar radiation than they radiate back to space and such areas have constant temperatures. More simply, warm air rises (heat rises) and then flows poleward at high altitudes, cools, drops, and flows back toward the equator at lower altitudes. Then the process repeats itself. When the air rises and leaves these tropical areas, it loses moisture as it heads to subtropical areas. The majority of the worlds large deserts lay in these subtropical areas.
Hadley cells are expanding. Precipitation has declined in tropical areas since 1970. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, Southern Asia, the Sahel, Southern Africa, the Mediterranean, and the US Southwest are getting drier and drier. Even wetter areas now experience long dry spells between extreme events of rain and snow. Examples in the US include the cold and snowfalls in the Midwest and Eastern Seaboard this past winter. Texas and New Mexico continue to experience a prolonged drought. In the next thirty years scientists predict a 30 per cent decline in water resources.
In some places both governments and individuals create innovative and sometimes simple measures to counteract desertification. In India near the Thar Desert, the government mandated the dispersal of grass seed to hold the ground. Studies indicate that the grass seed grew better when planted by hand than when dispersed from airplanes. Also in India orans, small sacred groves, have helped preserve shrubs and grasses and even trees, a genetic bank that would otherwise have been lost. Childs describes how his friends who live on the outskirts of Tuscon have coaxed their water table fifteen feet higher, using ordinary shovels and hard work. They built contour traps and “massaged” the ground. Hardly worth noticing except when it rained, the rain sank into underground catches. Their properties now look like small areas of refuge in the vast desert. In some areas of the Sahel people have been able to plant and nurture trees in such a way that areas of green exist where they had disappeared.
Archeologists and geologists know that periods of drought occurred repeatedly for millions of years. For humans and the animals we know, drought has never been easy. Large areas of civilization cannot exist without water. We can affect our future in positive ways and prepare ourselves if we choose.
Apocalyptic Planet–Part One
Usually I read only one book at a time. Lately, I am reading several, one of which is Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Future of the Earth by Craig Childs. Childs is a sort of combined explorer/adventurer/scientist. He goes to places few go to see what occurs there, the wind, the flora and fauna, the weather, the climate. The next couple of days I intend to share some of his most pithy observations and ruminations. We will start with the desert. He and a friend literally wandered around the most arid and hostile portion of the Sonoran Desert in northwestern Mexico. This desert has enlarged and become more arid due to an extended drought.
Deserts come and go. If you live in a lovely lush green landscape, wait long enough and it, too, may become a desert. Six thousand years ago lakes, marshes, and grassland lay where the Sahara is today. A slight orbital change in earth’s relation to the sun caused nearby oceans to heat up, changing atmospheric conditions. Humans living there had no choice but to move. Forty per cent of the earth’s population lives in semiarid regions. Even a small drought changes survival chances for the people who live there. The Sahara, the Gobi, and the Taklimakan are growing, arable farmland decreasing. Vulnerable areas include southern Spain, Greece, Bolivia, Australia, central Asia, and our own West. The entire American High Plains (I live in the southern part) sits on top a giant desert. Without pivot irrigation, only grass grows here. In the last decade many irrigation wells have dried up or gone too saline. The giant bulges you see in places like the sand hills of Nebraska are really a sand dune sea covered with grass. Take away a little rain and here comes the desert.
Childs and his friend carried water with them and buried them with markers in the sand so they could find them later. As the desert grows in parts of India, women carry water farther and farther, an average of six miles a day, four gallons at a time. In the Sahel just south of the Sahara a difference in rainfall of just an inch or two can mean the difference between survival and starvation. Without water, there is no civilization.
What causes these changes? Human behavior and the increase in greenhouse gases are part of the reason. Humans are creating enough changes that we are moving toward more deserts, not fewer. One climate expert, Jonathan Overpeck, thinks we are seriously underestimating the severity of drought we will face in the not so distant future. Forget five and seven year droughts and think fifty years. Hadley cells also affect climate change. Tomorrow I will explain Hadley cells and how they affect our weather.
Northern Arizona
Eastern New Mexico
Texas Panhandle
writingontherim 