Prairie Restoration Area at Lake Macbride State Park
Each time I walk on the state park trail there are different wildflowers in bloom. Today’s offering was some of my favorites.
After returning from the day’s exercise, I mowed the front yard and couldn’t make out the line where the back yard started. Grass apparently wasn’t tall or thick enough to need cutting so I stopped and put the mower away until there would be enough to use as mulch.
I raked what few grass clippings there were for the garden, checked the moisture in the last few seedlings, and went inside to spend the rest of the day as temperatures climbed toward 90 degrees. We’re to have several days like this without rain.
We enjoy sunny days while we can. The restored prairie shows its pleasure in them with wildflowers in bloom.
On a fine summer day conditions were perfect to harvest hay and garlic.
My CSA friends recruited volunteers to bring in the garlic and across the county farmers were baling hay in large round and small rectangular bales.
On Independence Day farmers came to town to buy cultivators, salt blocks, pumps, feed, big pedestal fans, bedding (for horses), air compressor parts, nuts and bolts, and other stuff of life. At the home, farm and auto supply store we also sold a lot of propane, grills and kayaks, but that was not to farmers, as a farmer plans his/her kayaking and grilling ahead of time.
The rain has been good enough my garden doesn’t need much watering. Predatory insects are noticeably in abeyance, I suspect because of the polar vortex and extremely cold temperatures last winter. Tomatoes look as good as they have in years. It is already hard to use all the cucumbers. There will be green beans, okra, hot peppers, eggplant, squash, kale, carrots and more by the time August is finished.
We love summer.
Actually, we love life even in the extreme weather brought on by our own assault on nature. That we have perfect conditions for haying and garlic harvesting may well be an anomaly going forward. It was enjoyable this year and will be for however long it lasts.
I viewed the president’s speech on the environment on YouTube. It was not about climate change, human-made or other. In fact, the speeches by the president and about half a dozen others were devoid of any mention of the science of climate change, or solutions to solve the climate crisis.
I feel certain the bait shop owner from Florida has seen improvement in his local environment by the administration’s work on red algae. His speech was unprepared and somewhat random, but a slice of Americana available for public consumption and that, maybe, was the point. There was praise for the president from his staff, including the despised Andrew Wheeler, current head of the Environmental Protection Agency. If one adds up everything in the 56 -minute event, if we didn’t know the science of climate change, it would be believable. The climate crisis was absent from the environment Trump depicted and that is the problem with the Trump administration.
What bothered me the most, as it does any time I listen to the president, it’s the assertion that covers up a lie. Wheeler was bragging on how many super fund sites have been deleted from the list. Were they actually cleaned up or just declared clean and deleted?
I agree with Al Gore’s analysis:
Sometimes it’s hard to tell the origin of hot weather. Is it coming from Anthropogenic climate change, or from politicians in Washington, D.C.? Maybe a little of both.
Blaming the woes of society on our K-12 education system is a habit I need to break.
In the post below the target was a failure to teach children about their responsibilities when signing student loan papers. A high school graduate is an adult at age 18 in our culture, so when taking on debt that has the potential to cripple them for decades, they should be equipped to know what they are doing.
Parents also play a key role in educating youth, however my grievance with the way the Iowa legislature funds public schools is they are not spending enough money where it is most needed, and the results show in the form of an ill-educated electorate that makes what I believe are bad decisions.
It is unfair for me to pin this on public schools as State Senator Claire Celsi immediately pointed out:
In the July issue of The Atlantic, author Nick Hanauer addresses the tendency to blame public schools in an article titled, “Better Public Schools Won’t Fix America:”
Long ago, I was captivated by a seductively intuitive idea, one many of my wealthy friends still subscribe to: that both poverty and rising inequality are largely consequences of America’s failing education system. Fix that, I believed, and we could cure much of what ails America.
This belief system, which I have come to think of as “educationism,” is grounded in a familiar story about cause and effect: Once upon a time, America created a public-education system that was the envy of the modern world. No nation produced more or better-educated high-school and college graduates, and thus the great American middle class was built. But then, sometime around the 1970s, America lost its way. We allowed our schools to crumble, and our test scores and graduation rates to fall. School systems that once churned out well-paid factory workers failed to keep pace with the rising educational demands of the new knowledge economy. As America’s public-school systems foundered, so did the earning power of the American middle class. And as inequality increased, so did political polarization, cynicism, and anger, threatening to undermine American democracy itself.
Hanauer assigns blame to our economic system: income inequality and the fact workers are underpaid.
“Allow economic inequality to grow, and educational inequality will inevitably grow with it,” he wrote. “By distracting us from these truths, educationism is part of the problem.”
While sad that my participation on Twitter is sometimes a distraction, eventually I can get around to a more reasonable position thanks to the commentariat. One commentator accused me of adopting the policies of U.S. Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst. That’s not the case, but at least we didn’t have to invoke Godwin’s Law to resolve the issue. Despite any issues with an ill-educated electorate, hope for a better world remains.
I’ve not been a fan of the Independence Day holiday since military service. It’s not that I paid much attention to it previously. As a military officer I had time to reflect on the meaning of independence while stationed far from home among strangers.
People celebrate the Declaration of Independence and its grievances against the King of England. I don’t mind. While I’m as glad as anyone Elizabeth is not our queen, and Prince Charles will never be our king, Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas was an affront to human society. 284 years later the damage had been done and the founders were formalizing a relationship with the King as the hegemony of natives had been diminished by disease and warfare.
Few things point out the advancement of pre-Columbian society, and what was lost, as much as the recent book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann.
The premise of Mann’s book is there were societies in the Americas that were as sophisticated as any on the globe. They endured for multiple millennia, coming and going over time before Columbus arrived, cultures unknown to Europeans. The Declaration of Independence was an insider deal among participants who had no standing to occupy and exploit the Americas. Yet they did.
It was not unusual for Americans to side with natives at the time of independence, especially when compared to living under English rule. I side with Frederick Douglass who said,
Your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
If I celebrate anything this day it is the renewed opportunity to get along with neighbors and friends, something I believe is critical to healing our broken Democracy. While we may not agree about the meaning of Independence Day, it is better to find common ground every way we can. We’ll need that in the Anthropocene Age.
The combination of advancing age and a world heated by human-made global warming has me looking for ways to cope.
When temperatures are forecast above 90 degrees Fahrenheit with high humidity I get my outside work done early then head into the house. I keep the thermostat at 83 degrees so as not to use too much electricity, but to take the edge off the hot, humid days. I manage to sustain my sanity.
I used to work outside in blistering weather until beginning to black out. It is a concession to age that I refrain from scheduling work to spite such conditions. Mother Nature always wins.
If the political failure to address global warming takes us all out, I can live with that. The extinction of humans would be fair if everyone goes together. Such fatalism serves no useful purpose if there is still a chance to slow greenhouse gas emissions and eliminate the use of fossil fuels that power our economy. What choice do we really have but to go on living? Part of that has to be political advocacy.
If we are individuals in the Anthropocene, we are doomed already. One has to wonder what Ayn Rand would have to say about the prospect of an end to humanity. One supposes as long as government doesn’t tax individuals and corporations she’d be okay with it. Although, she too signed up for Medicare and Social Security.
2019 has been a time of personal rebuilding. I made it across a career finish line and it took time for life to settle. I signed up for Medicare, then Social Security, and have begun to take better care of myself and effect repairs around the house. I spend a significant amount of time at home where reading, writing, gardening, yard work and cooking take a majority of my time. Something will be next.
I know what part of it is. The 2020 general election looms large in our efforts to engage the government in addressing the climate crisis. How to impact the election is complicated. In part I plan to band together with like-minded citizens and work for candidates, Democratic candidates for the most part. Everything from president down to township trustee requires positive change. There is more than politics.
It starts with taking care of ourselves but cannot end with the individual. That’s the outlook that brought us to today. What we know is government’s reduction of taxes and deregulation of business have played out in front of us. They fail to address the core issue: our survival in a turbulent world. What seems important is answering the question what role should government play in our lives? Finding a new answer is essential while living in the Anthropocene.
Wednesday I worked outside for five hours at the home, farm and auto supply store.
As temperatures reached toward 85 degrees, a colleague and I consolidated the remaining plants and supplies and opened up traffic flow where the garden center had been. I used a lift truck although there was plenty of physical labor. Our permit with the city expires soon and it’s time to make the parking lot a parking lot again.
Lifting numerous bags of mulch, soil and garden products took a toll. I was tired when I clocked out at 4:30 p.m.
Stopping to pick up provisions at the warehouse club, the trip home took an hour and 40 minutes. I followed a large sprayer from North Liberty to Solon and it drove really slowly. There was no way I could make the trip to the county seat for a meeting where a group is coordinating a presidential candidate debate on our issues: nuclear abolition and climate change.
Aware of the televised and webcast first presidential candidate debate, I skipped it for complicated reasons, but mostly because I couldn’t stay awake until it ended at 10 p.m. With a large glass of milk and an appetizer plate for dinner, I retired early and slept through the night.
I woke around 2:45 a.m. and picked up my mobile device without turning on the lights. A friend from one of the farms where I work participated in a CNN discussion panel after the debate and sent me video. She represented our community well in the brief amount of air time.
My main conventional news sources, Associated Press and the Washington Post each had their spin about what was most significant. AP framed health care and immigration as the top issues debated. The Washington Post headlined economic policy, although they presented multiple articles on several topics.
My social media scroll showed partisans supporting their candidate and little else new. What stood out was broad support for Elizabeth Warren’s performance and a breakout for Julián Castro. In the honorable mention category, de Blasio was not as bad as expected and U.S. Senators Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar came across as knowledgeable and presidential. Of the ten in the first debate, it is time for Bill de Blasio, Tim Ryan, Beto O’Rourke, Tulsi Gabbard, Jay Inslee and John Delaney to make their way to the exits and find other Democratic work needing to be done. If we have too many presidential candidates, there is no shortage of work to regain a Democratic majority in the legislature.
No regrets about missing the debate as I feel rested and ready to start another day. When you get to be a certain age, physical limits are familiar. One hopes to keep our powder dry and live to fight when it really matters. I can’t honestly say sifting through dozens of announced presidential candidates matters that much.
Editor’s Note about June 27 debate: Survivors of the second debate, according to accounts I read similar to those mentioned, and not from watching the debates, are Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders (only for their high ranking in the polls), Kamala Harris (for her discussion of the importance of race relations in 2019), and Pete Buttigieg for his millennial status and as a reminder of the promise of youth. As U.S. Senators Michael Bennet and Kirsten Gillibrand get honorable mention, they should make their exits from the presidential race to work on electing additional Democratic U.S. Senators to secure a majority. Eric Swalwell, Marianne Williamson, Andrew Yang and John Hickenlooper should recognize the exit music and gracefully seek other important work in the Democratic Party to improve our chances of securing majorities in both federal legislative chambers.
Based on this analysis, there are few choices for me: We need to turn the page on Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders even though their current standing in polls is evidence many like them both. That leaves Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Julián Castro. I’d like to hear more from each of these candidates in the next debate. The field needs to reduce by half again after that process is completed. Of everyone that is running, on June 28 I’m more likely to support Elizabeth Warren than I was. My willingness to listen will decrease as summer continues. Making a decision of who to support should be doable by Labor Day.
The garden was muddy making it difficult to plant… so I waited.
For exercise I took a walk on the state park trail, 20 minutes out and 20 minutes back… with stops for photos.
Wildflower
Although the pace was slow, I could feel the benefit of the walk. It energized me to install the deer fence around the tomatoes and perform a few garden chores before an afternoon thunder storm.
I picked turnips and sugar snap peas from the garden. The first Japanese beetles have arrived. The six-foot stakes worked well to protect the tomato plot from deer who eat the top shoots if they can get to them. It makes a significant difference in yield. Almost everything looks good.
With season’s end of soil blocking tomorrow comes blank space to fill… or not. I’ll do something but let go of filling every moment with intentional action a while back.
One of the most profound things I studied in art history was horror vacui, or fear of the empty. We looked at photos of Greek vases where every space of the surface had images on it. The human tendency is to fill everything the way a person gets a tattoo or two and ends up with a full sleeve. Fear of the empty. It is more creative and more difficult to leave spaces blank. Letting go the obsession to engage every chance to express ourselves frees us to produce better work.
A gardener gets time to think about things like this… and watch the arrival of Japanese beetles, and vegetables planted with one’s own hands grow in sunlight, and devise unique solutions like my deer fence.
Some days we have to stand back and look at what we’ve built:
I ran into a couple of neighbors at the well house while receiving a shipment of chlorine for our water treatment plant. They were checking to see if the dehumidifiers had dried out the well pit after the rain. They had.
We got to talking about the wet spring, polar vortex and the weather generally and predicted we’ll be going into drought next. None of us were kidding.
Other than that I spent the day in our yard and garden. I finished planting the fourth of seven plots and have about a third of number five in. As long as the weather holds I’ll keep after it. The soil is a combo of dry and muddy which is the best we can do this spring.
It’s been five days since I left the property with my car. Spiders made a web in the wheel well.
I planted these seeds in the fourth plot on June 3:
I’ve never grown okra before, so fingers crossed. For the plant to be productive, once it starts fruiting, pods are to be picked once they are three inches long. Gotta get from seed to plant before I worry too much about that. The two rows of beans are a lot. The main purpose is to increase soil nitrogen for next year… and of course we’ll eat or preserve them. It’s the first time planting red beans for drying and storage. I have seedlings of cilantro and parsley, so this patch is for later on, assuming they germinate. There are never enough carrots.
Monday breakfast of scrambled eggs and sauteed bok choy with spring garlic, topped with green onions (scallions).
I picked the first green onions and used them for breakfast. There is a lot going on outside.
I left some of the volunteer garlic in the ground so we can get scapes. If my garlic stock from last year lasts, I’ll plant them as seed later in the summer to supplement the volunteers.
I inspected the apple trees and they fruited nicely. Apples form clusters of five blossoms which get pollinated if we’re lucky. When the fruit forms and starts tipping up, and the calyx closes, you know there will be a fruit. When we get to this point it is the time to cull the extra or non-productive fruits so the ones left will get decently sized. Because this pollination persisted for so long, I believe nature took care of the culling for me and rejected later pollination because the fruits are nicely spaced on the lower branches. That would be your folk-apple theory.
I’ll have to check in with the chief apple officer at the orchard when I next see him. I hope that’s soon.
The myth of relaxing on a towel at a beach, sunglasses and sunscreen on, reading a book may not exist for most of us in Iowa. The beach nearest us has been closed in recent seasons because of the risk of exposure to microcystin and E. coli bacteria, both harmful to human health.
Nevertheless, reading is an important part of summer activities, and essential for people engaged in society. Our home owners association has a monthly meeting at the public library where staff politely boots us out in June and July because it falls on the same night as the summer reading program. Summer reading is one of the most important programs at a public library.
When I write “reading,” I mean books. A lot of our time is spent reading news articles which, while important, does not involve the kind of commitment as reading a book cover-to-cover. I started the Goodreads Reading Challenge last year and it helped me stay focused on reading. I’ve read 16 books this year and you can see which ones on my Reading List page.
Here, in no particular order, is a list of ten books on my bedside table for reading this summer:
Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself by Jill Biden.
The Tallgrass Prairie: An Introduction by Cindy Crosby.
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore.
The Overstory by Richard Powers.
Pacific by Simon Winchester.
Milkman by Anna Burns.
The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World by Charles C. Mann.
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming by David Wallace-Wells.
Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein.
Energy: A Human Story by Richard Rhodes.
While beaches may be closed due to environmental pollution, I plan to find a shady spot on our property or a comfortable chair inside to crack open a book from time to time this summer. Please do leave a comment with what you are reading this summer below.
Spanish Moss on a Tree in Thomasville, Georgia Photo Credit – Wikimedia Commons
My memory of South Georgia is specific. I don’t know if it’s real.
As a child, our family drove from Iowa to visit Tallahassee, Florida, the place Father lived after re-uniting with his father after Grandfather’s release from prison. For the record, Grandfather’s conviction for draft evasion was a misunderstanding. He hadn’t meant to be a draft dodger during World War II, according to his late, youngest son Eugene. Dad graduated from Leon High School, then enlisted with his brother Don in the U.S. Army.
That trip was to visit relatives in Wise County, Virginia, according to a recent conversation with Mother. The Tallahassee stop was a side trip. I don’t recall whether the memory occurred southbound or northbound, maybe both.
The memory is of riding in the back seat of the family automobile as Father drove on two-lane Highway 319 where Spanish Moss hung from oak trees with branches extending over the road. Mother was in the passenger seat, I was in back with my brother and sister. Except for Dad, we had never seen Spanish moss before. We did not have that in Iowa. We visited the plantation where Father stayed, Leon High School, and maybe stayed over in a motel, I can’t remember. These events and the long trip at slow speed through the Spanish moss-hung oak trees rolled into one over time, It was almost 60 years ago.
In 1997 I had a three-month work assignment near Ochlocknee, Georgia. My project was located at the largest employer in the county, which was and is involved in mining and processing minerals for a variety of consumer applications. No local ever complained to me about the mines. The rest of the economy was agricultural: peanuts, cotton and pecans.
Because Tallahassee was the closest airport, I flew home from there every other week, driving the same road I had as a child, replete with oak trees hung with Spanish moss. I lived there long enough to recognize other flora and fauna. In particular, pine forests and pecan plantations. The road seemed the same as my childhood memory. I made this regular trip between Ochlocknee and Tallahassee for most of my stay.
The memory sparked an interest in Janisse Ray’s memoir, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. I wrote the following brief review in the Spring edition of the Prairie Progressive:
Other than authors of country music, few write about the pine forests of South Georgia. Janisse Ray’s memoir, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, is important for the sense of place it creates. She grew up in a junkyard with ever-present extreme poverty, mental illness, and fundamentalist Christianity. Her story is one of growing self-awareness and hope in a land where both were in short supply.
While Ray is ten years younger, we share cultural references. Perhaps the most significant is the sense of loss she describes for Long Leaf Pine forests and their ecology. I feel much the same living in a state where what was here — tallgrass prairie — has been replaced by fenced parcels where farmers grow crops and raise livestock. Her experience in Georgia informs my life in Big Grove.
Ray mentions Thomasville, Georgia a couple of times in the book. I stayed in Thomasville while working at the mine. There was little daylight between work and rest so my life then was very specific.
The biggest excitement during my stay was when an inspector found a boll weevil in a trap during the season. Boll weevil traps were part of an early warning system to prevent damage to the important cotton crop. One of the plant workers at the mine had a government contract to inspect boll weevil traps. When he found one it made news all round the county.
The first boll weevil appeared in Thomasville in 1915. The insect did its part to bring down the antebellum economy where cotton was a global mainstay. Boll weevils had supposedly been eradicated by chemicals by 1990, but weren’t.
Ochlocknee, Georgia was a poor place where cattle casually roamed Main Street and a Model T Ford sat up on blocks in someone’s yard. I went to the auction house one night, but had no way to transport anything home. I listened to the bidding and tried to keep my hands down. Lunch at the Depot Restaurant was a meat and two sides with iced tea. A diner could pay extra and get a third side. The restaurant has since closed. When I encountered locals outside the job site, the conversation was a mix of complaining, gossiping and harshness. The place and its people defined hard-scrabble.
I had few friends in south Georgia. After working a 13-hour day at the plant, I made dinner at a hotel and watched cable television including a fledgling channel called Food TV. The name later changed to Food Network. I attribute my interest in food and cooking to those nights alone in Thomasville. My involvement in the local food movement has its origins in the contrast between that uninviting place in South Georgia and my nightly food escape. We didn’t have Food TV in Iowa at the time. Like Spanish moss, it seemed exotic.
The main memory, of driving through Spanish moss hanging from branches over the highway, is essential. It is an unchanging remembrance of something seen as a child in a way that shaped me. It has no time or place and some days I don’t know if it’s real. It is the human condition to believe it is real, and eternal. So I do.
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