Environment
Historical category no longer used.
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It’s been a struggle to get a grip on the presidency of Donald Trump. There’s nothing he’s done to give us hope. Just give me a handle — anything to grasp onto as normal! Nothing. Like many who care about the environment, nuclear abolition, and the commons, there seems little hope of advancing a positive… Read more
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Rain began mid-morning and is expected to continue until sunset. Let it rain. It’s an opportunity to work on inside chores before spring planting. I’ll tackle a long-neglected inbox and use produce in the ice box and freezer to make soup. There’s plenty to do in the jumble the garage has become since winter —… Read more
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Pelicans left Lake Macbride this week. They were gone when I drove across Mehaffey Bridge Road on Monday. Have they depleted the fish stocks and gone to better hunting grounds? Did they detect something in nature that triggered migration? I don’t know, but hope they will return in the fall. Pollination of fruit trees appeared… Read more
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The first session of the 87th Iowa General Assembly adjourned sine die on Saturday morning after pulling an all-nighter to wait for Republican leadership. The decision was about improving Iowa water quality and reauthorizing use of medical marijuana. They did nothing positive on water quality and may as well have let the current medical marijuana… Read more
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Progressives, farmers and environmentalists heard there is movement in the Iowa legislature to fund water quality and ears perked up — a natural impulse to interpret new events as supporting something we already believe or are working on, also known as confirmation bias. 56 percent of Iowans support increasing the state sales tax three-eighths of a… Read more
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Yesterday I loaded pallets of fence posts, barbed wire and bottled water on a trailer pulled by two farmers in a pickup truck. They were bound for Kansas where wildfires fed by wind gusting at 70 m.p.h. burned 650,000 acres and killed thousands of cattle during calving season. Tens of thousands of miles of fence… Read more
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Snow fell in darkness leaving a thin blanket of white. The pin oak tree began shedding last year’s foliage indicating warm weather activated new leaf buds and pushed out the old. Seems weird to rake leaves in February. More to the point, it’s not normal. In a couple of hours I return for a fifth… Read more
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“Lordynges,” quod he, “in chirches whan I preche, I peyne me to han an hauteyn speche, And rynge it out as round as gooth a belle, For I kan al by rote that I telle. My theme is alwey oon, and evere was Radix malorum est Cupiditas. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer, The Pardoner’s Prologue Outrage at… Read more
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Rain is the best natural resource left in Iowa, helping us grow crops without irrigation because of its abundance. If other parts of North America can more deserving be called America’s breadbasket — Central Valley, Imperial Valley and Salinas Valley in California particularly — Iowa is due for resurgence because of abundant precipitation combined with… Read more
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Rain is the best natural resource left in Iowa, helping us grow crops without irrigation because of its abundance. Rain has been a blessing and is expected to be our future. Beginning in 1832, after the Black Hawk War, the landscape of Iowa was transformed from a natural place to a grid of farm fields,… Read more
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