Constantly surprised here. So incredibly green. Photos of yesterday’s travels from Lalibela to Gondar, including common baboons.
farming
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.
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.
Earth Day
Sometimes when you love nature, the environment, wildlife, wild places, it is easy to become extremely discouraged. News about the dramatic increase in poaching in Africa condoned by some governments there does little to help. Data illustrating how the United States is a hub for wildlife trafficking, the push to kill wolves, big oil’s persistence to explore and open fields in the Arctic and other more delicate environments, water waste, climate change denial, a seemingly endless lists of negatives, can make one think about giving up. The Colorado River is under siege. The drought ridden Southwest of which I am a part has too many people fighting over too little water. The EPA just approved a new pesticide known to kill bees which are already disappearing, posing a huge threat to our food supply (see a previous blog highlighting how our food supply depends on these same rapidly disappearing bees). Another mountain top removal coal mine is being proposed in Kentucky and it is next to a school. The US Army Corps of Engineers issued the permit. I could probably spend this entire evening adding to this list of negatives. I could give up, but I never do. I keep looking for positives and for changes created by people who care.
In honor and praise for those who care and for the positives occurring, I am creating another list:
-Ralph Maughan, an Idaho native, continues to work on the saving the pristine wilderness of the River of No Return Country. He wants to save wolves in a state where politicians have proposed a law to kill 60 per cent of the state’s wolves. The Idaho Department of Fish and Game plans to professionally exterminate them so there will be more elk for hunters. No, I did not make this up. Maughan says, “the wilderness is supposed to be a place where large carnivores, like wolves, grizzly bears, and mountain lions can exist as they did before humans arrived.” Now the agency wants to come into a proclaimed wilderness to suit their own purposes. This fight continues.
-In Hawaii many housetops and businesses now glitter with solar panels. Isaac Moriwake’s consumer advocacy efforts support consumers who want to generate their own electricity through clean energy. Solar panels totally cover the roof of the new parking garage at the Kapl’olani Medical Center in Oahu. Hawaii has been able to create a clean energy framework with considerable solar success in spite of traditional utilities’ efforts against it.
-In more remote places like Nepal the WWF helped locals replace wood burning stoves with biogas burners so they would not have to cut down their forests for fuel.
-As Myanmar develops economically and joins the international stage, huge areas of prime forests and native animals are at risk. Conservationists work with the new government to create national parks and other areas to preserve Myanmar’s rich biodiversity and to listen to local wishes as to how to preserve their valuable natural heritage.
If I wanted to stay up half the night, obviously I could add more and more to each list. And it is easy to wonder just what can one person do. For starters, use less water, get rid of all the junk mail that arrives–a later post will describe methods to do this–so it will not add to the landfill and the demise of trees, do not buy furniture made from slow growing tropical wood, adjust your thermostat to warmer in summer and cooler in winter, carry your own bags so you won’t have to use the plastic ones at the store, become politically vocal about conservation. If you wonder is all this effort worth it, take a walk in the woods, along a beach, through the jungle, on a desert path; fill yourself with wonder.
Trivia
This marks week one of my commitment to write for at least twenty minutes every day. A good way to “force” myself to do this is to blog daily. In this past week I have heard from new people and received more comments than usual. I had something already written out and then decided against posting it. Because I am at least one hour behind on what I planned to do when I arrived home from work, this blog may be a bunch of trivia, depending on what you consider trivia.
I had not planned on cleaning my barn in preparation for fifty 100 pound bales of hay, but when they told me they would deliver Wednesday instead of Friday, it changed this evening’s plans dramatically. I had to move the remaining hay from last November’s delivery to a different spot because I do not want “old” and “new” hay mixed. 100 pound bales do not weigh all that much less than I do so moving them is not all that easy. Once moved, I sweep the loose hay up, lay down pallets, and sweep up everything. I do not like hay to lay directly on the cement floor of the barn. All that took over an hour. Then it dawned on me that I should probably eat something. Time mandated simplicity so I made a salad. Suddenly it reminded me of salads Gaston used to make. Gaston lived with me for six months–a handsome exchange student from Argentina, who rode horses, played the piano while I cooked dinner, and then when I gave the word, made beautiful salads, kaleidoscopes of color, orange, red, green, yellow, purple. Tonight, in a rush, I finally managed to make a salad as beautiful as Gaston’s. In addition to his other assets, Gaston’s name is a song for the ears and the heart: Gaston Luis Zulaica del Sueldo. I love his name so much that it is the title of one of the poems in my new book of poetry, “On the Rim of Wonder”. His counselor at school here loved it so much that she insisted on practicing it over and over and over to get it right when she announced it at graduation.
Salad eaten, once this post is complete, I must finish the baby blanket I promised today to deliver tomorrow. More than eight years ago, I taught freshmen English. One of my students, who has since gone to college, graduated, and now works for the school district where I work will soon be a father. His wife, through her work as a neonatal ICU nurse, became a good friend of my daughter’s. Their baby is due in a week or so. I am running out of time. I MUST finish this tonight. Since I have to get up at 5:30 to get to work on time–I work 25 miles from where I live–it would seem that since it is now 7:49, I had better quit writing this and get to work. Tomorrow I promise more exciting material.
Apocalyptic Planet-Part Five: Civilizations Fall
Whether it is my innate ambition, something my parents instilled in me, or something else unknown, I try to learn something new every day. Craig Childs starts this chapter of his book by talking about a Phoenix landmark. Back when I travelled to Phoenix regularly, I knew this place as Squaw Peak. Now its name Is Piestewa Peak. The name change is probably a good thing. I never knew before reading this how dreadfully pejorative the word squaw is. Basically, it means Indian bitch as well as other things related to the privates of women. All languages seem to possess an accumulation of dreadful words geared to putting women down one way or another. Slang words for the private parts of a man rarely mean anything pejorative, at least not that I know of. The new name, a Hopi name, a blessing word, is a word that calls water to this place. Not a bad idea in Phoenix or most of the Southwest for that matter.
The name Phoenix fits. Underneath modern day Phoenix, an ancient city lays buried, a quite sophisticated city with ball courts, temples, irrigation canals. This city existed at least a thousand years ago. Its inhabitants grew corn, cotton, beans, and agave. Farmers, hunters, carvers, all sorts of artisans and merchants apparently lived there. Now they are called Hohokam taken from an O’odham word meaning “ancestors”, the “ones who have gone”. We find forgotten cities all over the world, Palmyra, Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat. What causes these sophisticated civilizations to fall? If you read a bit, look further, you find common themes: environmental decay, resource depletion, conflict, disease, social problems. Angkor Wat fell because it could not maintain its complex irrigation network. Ur in Iraq fell because a drought caused its port to dry up. Usually, the demise of particular civilizations occur over time, e.g.Rome.
Childs notes that human patterns often follow animal patterns, or at least mammalian patterns. For example, when over population occurs, behavior changes. Parental care and cooperation become replaced with aggression, violence, competition for resources, dominant behaviors. These types of behaviors are particularly detrimental to females and the young without whom the society (or animal population) cannot replace itself. Generally, in animal populations, when this occurs, reproduction slows for several generations and the imbalance corrects itself. For humans, it is not so simple. Hohokam bones indicate mass starvation and malnutrition. Other civilizations, e.g. the Anasazi, seem to have disappeared without a trace.
Today, most of the world’s largest cities have immense infrastructures that keep them going, miles of underground sewage tunnels, water mains, etc. Here in the US in our oldest cities, much of what we take for granted is very old and deteriorating. New York City and Chicago have water main systems that some experts claim are near collapse or at the very best badly in need of repair. Doubtless such conditions exist in old cities throughout the world, most of which are much older and larger than the majority of cities in the US. Yet, they continue to prosper. Have we passed a point when civilization cannot fall?
Childs completes this discussion by describing his visit with his wife to Guatemala. They visited all the best known Mayan sites, visited with natives. His wife managed to get invited to a Mayan fire ceremony, a renewal ceremony. History books tell us the Mayan civilization is dead, ended. But it is not. The Mayan culture still exists. At least six million still live in the Central America. What would have happened to Mayan cities if the Europeans had not brought epidemic diseases and better fire power? We will never know, of course, but no matter how many civilizations rise and fall, change continues and humans continue to inhabit the earth.
The new question is this: can this planet we live on sustain the ever increasing numbers of humans who inhabit it??
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
