LAKE MACBRIDE— There are eleven more posting days in my work for Blog for Iowa, after which I’ll fade into the background from that very public blogging. I have been covering for a colleague who is taking a summer break and if the opportunity is around next summer, I might do it again.
After re-starting pauldeaton.com last March, I didn’t know where it would go. The 196 posts thus far have been focused on topics related to the blog’s title, “On Our Own: Sustainability in a Turbulent World:” Farming, gardening, cooking, eating, work life, home life, local event coverage and discussions of the two biggest threats humanity faces: climate change and nuclear proliferation. There is more to say on these topics.
Today, there are 281 followers of On Our Own, which is posted on my home page. Of those, WordPress is counting my 233 twitter followers who see a link to my articles after they post. I don’t see readers who find me through WordPress’s reader, except if they like my posts or begin to follow me. I appreciate every person who finds their way to pauldeaton.com.
After Labor Day, the posting is expected to settle in around homelife and worklife, which have been the most popular topics. I’ll revisit this year’s work on the CSA and in my garden, and who knows what else? Here’s hoping followers and readers stay tuned.
Four former administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency, William D. Ruckelshaus, from its founding in 1970 until 1973, and again from 1983 until 1985; Lee M. Thomas, from 1985 until 1989; William K. Reilly, from 1989 until 1993; and Christine Todd Whitman, from 2001 until 2003, have called for the United States to move now on substantive steps to curb climate change, at home and internationally. They are all Republicans.
They wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times, which can be read here. The crux of the letter pertinent to our series of posts on climate change is the following:
“There is no longer any credible scientific debate about the basic facts: our world continues to warm, with the last decade the hottest in modern records, and the deep ocean warming faster than the earth’s atmosphere. Sea level is rising. Arctic Sea ice is melting years faster than projected.
The costs of inaction are undeniable. The lines of scientific evidence grow only stronger and more numerous. And the window of time remaining to act is growing smaller: delay could mean that warming becomes ‘locked in.'”
On June 25, 2013, President Obama spoke about climate change at Georgetown University. He said, “as a President, as a father, and as an American, I’m here to say we need to act.” The president matched his words with a plan for climate action.
On Aug. 11, 2013, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wrote, “unfortunately, too many elected officials in Washington still talk about climate change as if it doesn’t exist. They falsely claim scientists are still debating whether carbon pollution is warming the planet. It’s time for us all— whether we’re leaders in Washington, members of the media, scientists, academics, environmentalists or utility industry executives— to stop acting like those who deny this crisis exists have a valid point of view. They don’t.”
People like Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma have begun to line up to fight against President Obama’s agenda on climate change, complaining that the president’s staff created a list of political talking points to support his plan. Lucky for us, Inhofe is using as his moral authority a survey of weathercasters. What do weathercasters, people who read weathercasts on the radio or television, know about the science of climate change? Inhofe obfuscated the difference between weathercasters in the survey and meteorologists, not to mention climate scientists, to make his point. This seems typical of climate change deniers.
From my experience of advocating for the New Start Treaty in the U.S. Senate during 2010, something is beginning to happen regarding climate action in Washington. Politicians, Republican and Democratic, don’t make statements like these unless there is.
While I was in Chicago on Aug. 1, the Climate Reality Project announced a partnership with Organizing for Action to support the president’s climate action plan. Inhofe was right about one thing, the forces for good are lining up to get something done about climate change.
“Something is happening but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?” Well maybe you should, as all the signs are present.
~ This is part of a series of summer posts on climate change written for Blog for Iowa.
Global warming is settled science, but one wouldn’t know if from conversations heard in Iowa. Blog for Iowa reported on Congressman Dave Loebsack, who wrote, “as Iowans, the threat of flooding never seems far away, and it’s only getting worse… flooding is costing taxpayers billions of dollars a year for preparation and recovery. The prediction and prevention tools from a National Flood Center would help prevent damage and allow our communities to better allocate resources such as sand bags, machinery, volunteers, and temporary flood walls. Every year flooding costs taxpayers, and the new technologies and methods already being put to use in Iowa could save our country untold millions.”
Loebsack was giving Iowans half a loaf. He did not mention the cause of the worsening weather events, saying Iowans should adapt to a climate that produces more frequent and stronger flooding, without mentioning the fact that mitigating the causes of global warming, which strengthens extreme weather events like Iowa’s recent flooding, is equally important.
This is not surprising for a politician. Inculcated in our culture is the erroneous idea that global warming is a liberal hoax, and to get elected in Iowa’s second congressional district, the liberal moniker is more liability than asset. Global warming is not a hoax. The idea that it is has been the direct result of a conscious effort on the part of American businesses with an interest in perpetuating our carbon culture for short term profits.
Noam Chomsky, linguist and political critic, said, “the chamber of commerce… the American Petroleum industry and other business lobbies have publicly proclaimed, in fact with enthusiasm, that they are carrying out a campaign to try to convince the population that global warming is a liberal hoax… and it’s succeeded unfortunately. The latest polls I have seen show that maybe a third of the population believes in anthropogenic global warming.”
It is easy to say Iowa should do something to reduce the cost of increasing and more devastating floods in the state and a National Flood Center, as Loebsack proposes, may help. What would help more is doing something about the causes of these floods, and that falls to what is a politically unmentionable, reducing CO2 emissions drastically and immediately through the assignment of a price on carbon.
Below is a link to the Noam Chomsky YouTube video where he discusses global warming. The part from the beginning up to the 5:43 mark is most relevant.
~ This is part of a series of summer posts on climate change written for Blog for Iowa.
Conservatives met in Ames this weekend at the Family Leader Summit 2013, making the case for detractors of Iowa’s first in the nation caucuses with their extreme views and media circus.
While views expressed at the event are in the minority among Iowans, who gave Barack Obama their seven electoral votes in 2012, Iowa conservatives garner broad bandwidth in the news media. President Obama and the congress are on vacation, so it was a slow news day.
Family Leader spokesperson Bob Vander Plaats indicated a number of news media outlets were credentialed. Iowa City’s Adam B. Sullivan posted, C-SPAN has partial coverage archived, including speeches by Rick Santorum and Donald Trump, the latter appearing to be the media darling of the event.
…although some disagreed, With his usual style, Trump named the impossible dream for Republicans,
The event hit some of the current conservative memes, including the tug of war over who is the most conservative freak to occupy airspace about the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, Speakers touched on immigration, … abortion, … abolishing the IRS, … a call to break the law, … and more votes to repeal Obamacare, There were also bits of advice rendered, …and, There was analysis, … and,
Seems like a bunch of crazy talk to me, but what would a progressive blogger know? Oh, that’s right, I’ve read Sun Tzu, “pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance.” There’s more on twitter at the hashtag #FLS2013 if readers can stomach it.
Trish Nelson has been enjoying her break from Blog for Iowa and reported that in addition to following coverage of the Kent Sorenson – Michelle Bachmann – Ron Paul affair, she has been checking out the technology of Iowa,
Iowa Leading Edge Technology
looking for and finding Elvis,
Elvis Sighting
and watching sunsets.
Thornberry Park
We miss Trish, and hope she enjoys some rest during her break from Blog for Iowa. Expect to see her back on Sept. 2
That leaves me with sixteen posting days to fulfill my commitment to post about the challenges of temporary workers in Iowa; implications of immigration reform; Iowa’s role in mitigating and adapting to climate change; and occasional posts on energy policy, local food, and peace and justice activities in the state. I have already touched each of those points and want to focus more on the climate crisis.
Since I began posting on July 15, I have written and posted here about climate change exactly five times. Check them out here, here, here,here, and here.
I affiliate with the Climate Reality Project, and our team put together a starting point for the conversation I hope to have about the science of climate change before I fade into the background again on Sept. 1. To understand that climate change is real, and caused by us, it is important to understand the science. This four minute, 34 second video with Bill Nye the Science Guy helps set a scientific framework for the discussion. More follows, but that will be another post.
LAKE MACBRIDE— Sunday was cooking day after finishing my work at the newspaper and the farm: the beginning of a long season of using and preserving the summer bounty. It began with figuring out what was in the refrigerator.
Three heads of cabbage are holding up reasonably well, but there is leftover coleslaw from last week. The idea is to make sauerkraut, feeling bullish on fermentation after the success of my pickle experiment. For now, I peeled the old skin from the outer layer and neatly arranged them on a shelf.
I boiled potatoes to use in breakfasts and a potato salad. The potato salad included potatoes (skins on), two hard cooked eggs, diced dill pickles, diced red onion, and a dressing made from salad dressing, yolks of the cooked eggs, yellow mustard and salt. It will keep for a few days if it is not eaten first.
Juicing half a bushel of apples made a sweet, but almost clear liquid. I need to add juice to the mother of vinegar in the pantry, but decided to wait until an amber colored juice came from the apples in my back yard. I bottled half a gallon of apple juice for breakfast and casual drinking, then drank some.
While gardening, I found a stray turnip and harvested it for the greens. I made soup stock with turnip greens, carrot, celery, onion and bay leaf. I used some of the stock to make rice, some to make onion soup and the rest waits in the refrigerator for the next project.
Onion soup is a mystery solved. I piled vast quantities of sliced onions in the Dutch oven with a layer of olive oil on the bottom. A sprinkling of salt and then a low and slow cooking until they began to turn brown. Just covering them with the turnip soup stock, I simmered until done. Soup was served with grated Parmesan cheese. The soup was as good as any French onion soup to be had at a restaurant. So sweet and flavorful with the simplest of ingredients.
The tomatoes are starting to pile up, there are potatoes aplenty, apples and sweet corn is due any week from the CSA. This year, I’m ready for all of it.
LAKE MACBRIDE— In a quest to use the bountiful zucchini, I found a juice recipe. Zucchini juice? Before you click on the next page in your reader, hear me out. The apple harvest is beginning to come in, and they are also basic part of juicing recipes. Organic carrots were on sale at the mega market, as they often are, and they are another essential part of juicing. Put the three together, run them through a juicer, and the result is a sweet juice that immediately creates a boost of energy. The zucchini flavor is masked by the sweetness of the carrots and apples. Mmmmm.
I know what some readers are going to say, that vegetables should be eaten in the form nature presents them, and not highly processed. They have a point. The rationale is that if the zucchini and carrot are fed through the juicer first, the fiber can be used as a cooking ingredient, especially in soup. Too, there is an abundance of apples and zucchini, and a glass of juice in the morning gets the digestive tract moving, if you know what I mean.
Undecided whether this is the next new thing, or a pit of hopeless and despairing zucchini abundance, all there is to do is recommend readers try it and decide for yourselves. I’ll be having a few more glasses before the season is over.
RURAL CEDAR TOWNSHIP— The onion harvest is in at the CSA, and more than two tons of white, red and yellow onions have been arranged in the germination house and barn to dry. Today begins the third day of trimming the excess leaves and arrange them for further drying. A few more four hour shifts and the project will be complete. Onions are one of the most popular vegetables, so the shareholders at the CSA will enjoy continuing to receive this bounty in their shares.
Trimming Onions
I filled the blank spaces in my garden’s cucumber row yesterday afternoon and gave the new patch a good watering. The zucchini are about done, the vines withering and yellowed. Same with yellow squash. There are butternut squash seedlings to plant, although I’m not certain they will make the 90-100 day window needed to mature— another experiment. Next weekend I begin paying work at a local orchard, helping with the weekend surge of city dwellers who come out for family entertainment and apples. That means this weekend will become a working time in the yard and garden, getting caught up on weeding, grass mowing, tree trimming, and preparing garden plots for the next iteration of planting.
White Onions
Fall crops will include turnips for the greens, radishes, lettuce and spinach for sure, adding to the most prolific of gardening years here in Big Grove. (Note to self: prepare more trays for germinating seeds).
My first crop of apples is getting close to ripe (there will be two harvests this year, plus pears), which means the CSA operator and I have to stay in touch with the work for tomatoes project so everything can get processed as it comes in at the same time. In my garden, the large tomatoes are beginning to ripen. We’ve been eating fresh tomatoes for about three weeks.
In the kitchen the storage space is filling up with onions, potatoes and apples, and the soup stock is getting used, making room for the approaching tomato harvest in a week or so. There is a lot to do before Labor Day.
SOLON— While stopping in town to pick up a gallon of milk, I spotted something in the door of the restaurant previously known as Reggie’s Weenies. Salt Fork Kitchen, hoping to be open Sept. 1.
I checked with the Secretary of State, and Eric Menzel of Sutliff Road near here registered Salt Fork Kitchen, LLC. on July 8. It’s hard to read the sign, but it looks like they intend to compete in the breakfast business, cater and make other food related offerings.
A quick Internet search revealed the following by Pascale Brevet in The Atlantic:
I met Eric Menzel, a doctor of anthropology in his thirties who turned to farming because he couldn’t find the high quality of food he was looking for. Eric helps Bill (Ellison) on the farm and gets to use part of Lois’s (Pavelka) historic farmland in exchange. He organically raises chickens for eggs and meat, and in season he cultivates a vegetable garden. He sells at the nearby farmers’ markets and supplies restaurants. Eric worked as a chef for many years to help pay for his studies. He loves food and experiments with Bill and Lois’s cows’ milk. I tried one of his fresh cheeses. Similar to a ricotta, it had a slight tanginess nicely offsetting the richness of whole milk. The creamy yet pungent Camembert-like cheese I tried on my second visit was delicious too, and it made me nostalgic for France.
Whether the town of Solon, population 2,037, can support three new restaurants is an open question. The Dock recently took over existing space in a strip mall on Windflower Lane and turned it into a white tablecloth place with resident mixologist, Mick Malloy. The Dock is open now. Big Grove Brewery started brewing their first beer this week and brought executive chef, Ben Smart from The Herbfarm outside of Seattle, Wash. The Herbfarm was one of the first restaurants in America to focus on regional foods from local sources, and is widely considered one of the top 50 restaurants in the U.S. They also brought Doug Goettsch from the Culinary Institute of America in Napa Valley, Calif. With all of this talent, the food in town is expected to be good.
Here’s to the prospect of excellent dining during the coming months. I hope they aren’t relying on our family’s once per month eating out habits to survive.
It must get a Republican’s hackles up when a Democrat talks about the founding fathers. After all, it was Republican Warren G. Harding who coined the term, first using it in his keynote address at the 1916 Republican National Convention. The term is less than one hundred years old, much younger that our family roots in Virginia where ancestors named their male children after well known revolutionaries from the state. Leave it to a Republican to omit women as founders, but women’s suffrage and the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution wouldn’t come until four years later. Harding, while elected as president in a landslide in 1920, was never a visionary, unable to see the scandals in his own administration.
What we know about the founders was they were part of a natural aristocracy, or gentry, as Stow Persons described it in his book “The Decline of American Gentility,” based more on talent and taste than birth or financial status. 13 were merchants, seven were major land speculators, 11 were large scale securities speculators, 14 owned or managed plantations or large farms operated by slaves, eight received a substantial percentage of their income from holding public office and the rest were occupied as small farmers, scientists, physicians, retirees and other occupations. There is no evidence my forbears were included in this group, although they were in Virginia by 1680.
I never thought much about the founders while growing up, focusing on those revolutionary figures who were from Virginia, where my father’s family settled: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and James Madison. I also liked Thomas Paine, who while not a Virginian, wrote the practical sounding and popular pamphlet “Common Sense.” He also wrote “The Age of Reason,” his book that advocates deism, promotes reason and freethinking, and argues against institutionalized religion in general and Christian doctrine in particular. We’re getting to the point of this post.
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen and George Washington were deists, or influenced by them. Deists insisted that religious truth should be subject to the authority of human reason rather than divine revelation. Consequently, they denied that the Bible was the revealed word of God and rejected scripture as a source of religious doctrine.
They were also products of the Age or Enlightenment which was a cultural movement intending “to reform society using reason, challenge ideas grounded in tradition and faith, and advance knowledge through the scientific method.” These views proved to be unpopular, and emblematic of this was the fact that only six people attended Thomas Paine’s funeral as he had been ostracized for his ridicule of Christianity.
Anyone who knows this history must see the irony of modern day citizens who constantly refer to the founders, yet eschew the scientific method, especially as it pertains to climate change. We know why that is.
In mass society, media plays an important role in educating the public, just as Paine’s “Common Sense” informed the American Revolution. The public’s attention has been bought and sold by the hydrocarbon industry through prolific and continuous advertising. The executives of the oil, coal and gas industry must know the science of climate change, and that they are mortgaging their children’s future to make a buck near term. Yet they continue their work as slaves in the fields of corporatism.
There was an age of enlightenment, but its promotion of scientific inquiry has today been replaced by something else. A combination of misinformation, partisan politics and fundamentalist faith. Arguments about the science of climate change fall on many deaf ears, and opposing voices create a voluminous din that echoes in valleys carved over millennia that predate Europeans on this soil.
As I write this post, I am reminded of William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
My response is simple, climate change is real, it’s caused by us, the effects on humans are getting worse, and we can do something about it without changing our way of life or hurting our economy. We should do something about it before it’s too late. The founders resolved the issue of their time, now is the time for us to return the favor by solving the climate crisis.
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