climatology

Weekend Trip to Northern Baja

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This past weekend I headed to Mexicali in Northern Baja to visit the town of San Felipe and see a new development about an hour south of there. San Felipe is a small fishing town of approximately 20,000 people where there are no fast food restaurants and no Starbucks. Excellent restaurants and good coffee can be found but not at the places mentioned above. They do not exist there. The town of San Felipe has a long boardwalk right along the Sea of Cortez with restaurants across the street. This past weekend they were holding a ceviche contest and fiesta on a cross street. This is shrimp season and the city is known for its shrimp. Unlike the Pacific side of Baja, there is no large commercial fishing allowed in this part of the Sea of Cortez because it contains many endangered fish and the place where whales come to mate. Locals can fish and you see smaller fishing and shrimp boats in the sea. Not only is the Sea of Cortez protected but so are the plants and animals in the desert. Certain plants, like ironwood trees, are ancient and rare. If you want to build a road, it has to be around them. Many other species are also protected.

Unlike the Pacific side of Baja, the water in San Felipe is safe to drink from the tap. It comes from an aquifer up in the mountains to the west.

We spent most of Sunday at the new green development (it is totally off grid) called Rancho Costa Verde. Solar is used for power and each house has a large underground water tank where water comes from an aquifer up in the mountains. This is a newer development so although many of the lots are already sold, except for beachfront, many houses are just now under construction.

This is a very modern beachfront property with marble floors and a glass wall facing the Sea of Cortez.

This photo is of the clubhouse and looking the opposite direction toward the mountains. Here I am standing on the roof of the house in the previous photo.

Here I am in front of the pool in front of the clubhouse facing the Sea of Cortez. The house in the first picture is on the left in the distance.

This is desert land where even though it can get hot in summer, the sea breeze keeps it relatively cool.

The plant on the right is ocotillo which is protected. If you are building a house and it is in the way, you have to move it elsewhere. You cannot just get rid of it.

Monday was a big adventure trying to cross the border. We arrived in Mexicali only to discover no busses could cross the border there so we had to take the highway to Tijuana and cross there. To do this you must cross a mountain pass. What a feat of engineering building this road must have been. It is quite incredible and as you climb higher and higher the views go on forever into the far distance. The following are photos I took from the bus window as we drove higher and higher.

These mountains are made of rocks of all sizes that are just stacked on top of each other. Here only these small blue-green plants seem to thrive.

In this photo you can see the highway where we had just traversed.

Here you can see how at this height the mountains are nothing but stacked rocks of all sizes.

After the summit as we went down toward the town of Tecate, it started to rain and it rained most of the way to Tijuana. The Pacific side of this part of Baja gets rain and it was lush green this time of year while the Sea of Cortex side is desert.

I do not recommend crossing at Tijuana in a large bus. Even though we had sent all our passport information in advance, they made the bus sit there for nearly an hour and wait. Meanwhile those on foot and in cars were just zooming along at a rather rapid pace. Then we had to get out of the bus with all our luggage and everything and wait more. I crossed the border (not in a bus) last April and it did not take long at all. I have heard that Tijuana is the busiest port of entry from one country to another in the world but have not verified that. It certainly was busy yesterday.

Book Seven for 2024: “After Eden, A Short History of the World”, John Charles Chasteen

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Want to learn a lot in less than 400 pages? Read this book. Published this year, it is the most recent book by a prominent Latin American scholar and historian. After humans learned agriculture and built cities, most of the population of the world became increasingly patriarchal and warlike. The divide between rich and poor increased. Egalitarian foragers and wandering hunters existed only in more remote areas. A few still exist in those remote and less modern corners of the world, often places where few others want to even go. This quote says a lot about the current state of affairs:

“Our civilization has thousands of years practice making war. We have almost NO practice making global peace, but without it we are doomed. Today’s pervasive nationalism and rearmament is unlikely to help us make global peace.”

And a page later:

“Only a true unanimous global effort has any chance to preserve our common home.”

He notes that saving Earth will take huge social transformations, including curbing the excessive consumer capitalism that currently pervades plus overcoming a world wide history where half of humanity mistreated the other half, a practice that still continues.

One Book A Week-28: “The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane”, Lisa See

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My view of this book remains somewhat mixed. I know it was a best seller, but some parts of the storyline seem extremely contrived rags to riches stories without evidence to back them up. Nevertheless, it is a powerful novel about the ritualistic Akha tribal people of the southern Chinese region of Yunnan who were viewed as backward and remained mostly unknown until their superior Pu’er tea was discovered. Additionally, the novel explores Chinese adoptions, issues Chinese children experience when adopted by white people, and how so-called primitive practices, e.g. killing twins and banishing their parents, can change over time even in remote areas.

I prefer to read books that provide me the opportunity to learn something new. This book definitely provided that. Before reading this novel, I knew nothing about the Akha people, even though I have visited tribal areas not too distant, nothing about Pu’er tea or tea processing and how tea can be as valuable a commodity as gold. Pu’er tea is different from other teas because of the types of trees from which it is harvested and its unique fermentation process which makes it a probiotic.

One Book a Week-26: “Holding Fire: A Reckoning With The American West”, Bryce Andrews

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If you LOVE the West, but sometimes struggle with its violent history, this is the memoir for you. Here is a quote from page 178: “I’m embarrassed at how long it has taken me to notice that a rancher’s view of the natural world is blindered in comparison to the hunter’s perspective; that driving livestock from one field to another is nothing like stalking free-ranging herds; that finding, gathering, and preparing a hundred different wild plants bears no resemblance to growing alfalfa or oats…”

Andrews also discusses the difference between sustainability and reciprocity. Before reading the book, I had never thought about this. He notes that sustainability is taking without damaging. Reciprocity entails giving back, e.g. nature, asking, “What can I give back? What can I do to take care of this place that feeds and shelters me?” This is quite different from “How much can I sustainably take?”

Andrews grew up in the West. However, after cowboying on several ranches in Montana, hunting annually, and later inheriting his grandfather’s Smith and Wesson revolver, he begins to question the gun violence and destructiveness of Western culture. This book details his journey. He continues to live on a farm in the Montana mountains, slowly transforming the land to make it profitable but also a place for nature, for wildlife to prosper.

National Poetry Month: 1: The Kingdom of Trees

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An essence within the heart of trees

allows them to communicate

with other trees to

-aid each other when disturbed

-send secret signals, warnings to other trees

-express pain, sympathy.

The kingdom of trees now cries

worldwide in pain,

watching each other’s murders.

land laid naked, nature destroyed.

Note: I wrote this poem last year. It is published in the anthology, “Writing Through The Apocalypse, Pandemic Poetry and Prose”,

Editor: Marcia Meier

One Book a Week-4: FINDING THE MOTHER TREE: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

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When it first came out in 2018, I read The Overstory by Richard Powell. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard appears to contain the endless years of detailed research and life story behind one of the characters in Powell’s novel. In fact, in her Acknowledgements, Simard thanks Powell for helping to make her life’s research more accessible to the general populace.

Simard’s book is part memoir, part detailed scientific explanations of her research and how a forest works and lives, and part how difficult it is to be taken seriously in the science world if you are female and your research contradicts the norm. She grew up in Canada. Her family made a living cutting down trees. Her family and life was and is intricately interwoven with nature. Even as a child, she was obsessed with tree roots, crawled around on the forest floor to see what lived there. A specific fascination was all the types and colors of fungi that grew just under the surface. Why were they there? What purpose did they serve? Later this became her life’s work, leading her to discover how trees of varying species use these fungi to communicate with and nurture each other. Of special significance are the “mother trees”, older, larger trees who provide nurturance to all the younger trees around them, recognize their kin, favoring them as they nurture all the other trees as well.

Traditionally, loggers and timber companies clear cut, then replanted with seedlings of all the same species of evergreen. It took Simard decades of research to convince them that it was not only the poorest way to grow new trees but also the least economical. For decades they saw her as some nutty woman, laughed at her research, laughed at her, even using epithets to her face. Ultimately, however, her work led to changes in how forestry is practiced.

This book relates her long struggle to save the forests. For those who are science minded, the final pages of the book contain 32 pages of Critical Sources. If you are interest in learning more about “mother trees”, go to http://mothertreeproject.org. It defines the term “mother tree” and explains how trees communicate. It also contains videos.

An Afternoon at the Cheech–1

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Some of you may remember the comedy duo Cheech and Chong way back in the day. Cheech has spent his life collecting Chicano and Chicana art. This year he gave a lot of his art collection to open a new museum in Riverside, California. Earlier this week my grandson, his girlfriend and I went to visit the museum. Photos and videos are allowed without flash. The following is the first set of photos I took. Please note that you need to see this art for yourself. Photos do not do it justice. Much of it is multidimensional and looks very different depending on where the viewer stands.

This is what you see when you enter the door; it is two stories high and multidimensional. Look how different the next photo of it looks from this one.

Walk farther to the side and it looks totally different again.

This speaks for itself. Right now where I live the air is clean enough that unless it is foggy, I can see all the way to downtown LA 30 plus miles away.

All the art at this museum has a message; much of it illustrates the ills of society.

The influence of indigenous art, e.g. Aztec, Mayan, can be seem in much of the art and the statements the art makes.

The woman above and the woman below hang next to each other.

Is Your Toilet Paper Killing the Planet?

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Much of the toilet paper used in the US comes from the boreal forest in Canada. It is the tree to toilet pipeline as one environmental organization calls it. The Canadian boreal forest is home to many indigenous people as well as numerous wildlife species. Additionally, it is the world’s most carbon-dense forest. Below are some photos from the Internet.

Major companies clear-cut a million acres of this forest yearly for disposable paper products, much of it toilet paper. The leading culprits include such brands as Angel Soft, Cottonelle, and Charmin. Some brands are better choices if you care about our planet. Below is a chart provided by the NRDC to help you choose your toilet paper wisely and contribute to saving the planet.

Five Days: Tornadoes, Dust, Wind, 76, Blizzard

/ Juliana Lightle / 2 Comments

Hunkered down with two pillows–“Safe Place”??

Check TV to track tornadoes

It quits

Try to read, can’t

TV returns, tells me maybe safe

Tornados went east a few miles

Next day tan fog–dust

Wind, can’t stand up

Then spring, 76 degrees, birds sing,

sit on patio, sip tea.

Next morning, blizzard, wind roars,

no electricity, white out,

read by flashlight.

Electricity returns.

Thankful!

Winter Wonderland

/ Juliana Lightle / 2 Comments

It has not reached a temperature above freezing for six days. One night it broke the low recored set in 1895. It dropped to minus 11. The old recored was minus 6. While a lot of the rest of Texas had no power, where I lived had only rotating short blackouts occasionally. At my house, there has been no outage. Not only has it been cold but also snowing. The last two says shout out winter beauty. The first few photos I took yesterday. Then it snowed another 3-4 inches and I took more photos this morning.

I took the above photo early this morning. The following photo was also taken this morning.