Tag: environment

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Environment Home Life Kitchen Garden

Gardening in End Times

Japanese Beetles Enjoying a Pear

I’ve been a gardener since we got married.

We planted a few tomatoes near the duplex we rented in Iowa City the spring after the wedding. As we lived our lives, raised our daughter, and sought economic stability, we either planted a garden or harvested what was there. When we owned a home, first in Merrillville, Indiana, and then in Big Grove, the garden got bigger and I became a better gardener. There is evidence in this year’s abundant harvest.

It didn’t come naturally even though gardening is elemental. The brief narrative of my gardener’s life.

As I step back from the working world to focus on home life what seems clear is society is moving at a startling pace toward disaster. Our industrial society consumes everything useful in nature, leaving us with foul air and water, depleted soil, polluted and acidified oceans devoid of marine life, and a warming world with all the consequences that yields. The earth will survive as it has. We people seem to be on the downside of our prominence. In multiple ways these are end times.

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek asserts there is a chance for a new beginning in the terminal crisis in which human society finds ourselves. His arguments are not convincing to us regular humans.

What do we do?

What we have done is argue about approaches. Should we have a carbon tax? Should we ban abortion? Should we ban plastic straws? Is wind, sun, nuclear or natural gas a better source of electricity? Should we cut taxes and reduce government’s role in our lives? Should we become socialists, or even worse, democratic socialists? Should we let go of Hillary’s emails? Should we all just try to get along? Approaches don’t work and we should let go of them all.

The better question to ask is what story do we want to tell? As others have said, notably author Joan Didion, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” What narrative will take us out of the current crisis?

For me it’s “I’m becoming a better gardener.”

Regardless of pending social collapse we must go on with our lives. Partly to keep our sanity, and partly — importantly — to take steps toward a more livable world. We will never go back to the Iowa of 1832 before the great division and clear cutting began. What we can do is plant the seeds of a better life where we live. Our forebears left us a disaster. What can we do about it? Make the best of it with forward-looking narratives for the next generations.

I get it that many people don’t have means to do more than survive. When I see the abundance of our garden it’s hard to believe people go without a meal. Yet they do, in large numbers. We can feed a couple of them, but is that enough? It’s something.

The essence of the narrative is the verb to become. “I seem to be a verb,” R. Buckminster Fuller wrote. I seem to be that verb. We are not predestined to anything except our human span of nine decades, and that only if we are lucky. We live in an imperfect society that beckons engagement. I’m not sure working toward perfection is as good as doing something positive is. Knowing what to do requires a better narrative. One that hasn’t been invented for the 21st Century and beyond.

I plan to work on a better narrative, although garden in end times doesn’t seem too bad.

Categories
Environment Living in Society

Reynolds Proclaims Weather Disaster – 11 Times

Front Moving In

Governor Kim Reynolds proclaimed counties in Iowa to be a disaster because of severe weather. It is time to act on climate.

Tornadoes tore through Marshalltown, Pella and Bondurant last Thursday as I got off work at the home, farm and auto supply store. It doesn’t appear anyone was seriously injured or died, although damage to the communities was substantial. Photos and video posted on social media depicted a horrible scene.

Are these storms due to climate change? We know Governor Kim Reynolds issued 11 disaster proclamations since June 11 for severe weather, heavy rains, storms, tornadoes and flooding. Something is different about our weather. Even a casual observer understands our climate changed and contributed to these extreme weather events.

Additionally, the seasons have been out of wack this year. A late spring, early high ambient temperatures, and more frequent storms make our weather exceedingly weird. Iowans have noticed and are talking about it. It’s not a random occurrence.

Ben Santer, an atmospheric scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, led a study of four decades of climate data that concluded human activity is disrupting our seasonal balance. That is, the seasons don’t proceed through time the way they did. Eric Roston at Bloomberg wrote a more accessible article about the study here.

“Poring over four decades of satellite data, climate scientists have concluded for the first time that humans are pushing seasonal temperatures out of balance — shifting what one researcher called the very ‘march of the seasons themselves,’” Roston wrote. “Ever-mindful of calculable uncertainty and climate deniers, the authors give ‘odds of roughly 5 in 1 million’ of these changes occurring naturally, without human influence.”

While an individual study is one thing, the science of climate change is clear. I wrote about it in 2014:

People seeking scientific proof of anthropogenic global climate change are barking up the wrong tree. The goal of science is not to prove, but to explain aspects of the natural world. Following is a brief explanation of climate change.

Around 1850, physicist John Tyndall discovered that carbon dioxide traps heat in our atmosphere, producing the greenhouse effect, which enables all of creation as we know it to live on Earth.

Carbon dioxide increased as a percentage of our atmosphere since Tyndall’s time at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. As a result, Earth’s average temperature increased by 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit.

The disturbance of the global carbon cycle and related increase in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere is identifiably anthropogenic because of the isotope signature of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

We can also observe the effects of global warming in worldwide glacier retreat, declining Arctic ice sheets, sea level rise, warming oceans, ocean acidification, and increased intensity of weather events.

It is no wonder the vast majority of climate scientists and all of the national academies of science in the world agree climate change is real, it is happening now, it’s caused by humans, and is cause for immediate action before it is too late.

To learn more about what you can do to help solve the climate crisis, go to The Climate Reality Project.

~ First posted on Blog for Iowa

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Environment

Ed Fallon, Bold Iowa and the Dakota Access Pipeline

Ed Fallon in His Garden

Ed Fallon lives and works in Des Moines and has long been a friend of Blog for Iowa. Here’s an update on Ed’s current activities from an interview conducted last week via email.

We noticed you are affiliated with Bold Iowa. What is Bold Iowa and what attracted you to pitching your tent with them?

I continue to host the Fallon Forum and direct Bold Iowa. Bold Iowa grew out of the Bold Alliance, which was formed after the Keystone XL fight. Just a year after the alliance started, Jane Kleeb, founder of Bold Alliance, abandoned Alliance chapters in Iowa, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Virginia. We now operate as an independent organization.

What are you working on this summer and why?

We’re focused on supporting the landowners who have filed a lawsuit against the abuse of eminent domain to build the Dakota Access pipeline. Sierra Club is part of that suit. One of the ways we are supporting landowners is to raise awareness of the suit through The First Nation — Farmer Climate Unity March. We are also hosting a series of community forums, setting up editorial board meetings, sending out press releases, and encouraging people to write letters to the editor. If landowners and the Sierra Club prevail in the lawsuit, it could stop the oil from flowing through Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota and Illinois.

Climate change has been in Iowa news this year more than recently. Have you noticed? If you’ve noticed, to what do you attribute the increased mentions in social and conventional media?

I’ve noticed, although the uptick has been small. Mostly, it seems some editorial boards and a few reporters are beginning to understand that climate change is not just another issue, that it’s a crisis that demands immediate attention.

What would you like our readers to do to support your causes during the remainder of 2018?

March with us Sept 1 – 8 from Des Moines to Fort Dodge, following the pipeline route through Story, Boone and Webster Counties. Contact media about the importance of the lawsuit and the urgency of climate action. Most important, vote in November for candidates who take climate change seriously.

Listen to the Fallon Forum live Mondays, 11:00-12:00 noon CT on La Reina KDLF 96.5 FM and 1260 AM (central Iowa). Add your voice to the conversation by calling (515) 528-8122.

~ First posted on Blog for Iowa

Categories
Environment Living in Society

The Great American Give Away

Coyote Natural Bridge, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah. Photo Credit – Wikimedia Commons

The Trump administration is giving away access to our public lands for discovery and exploitation of minerals and fossil fuel reserves. Conservatives and mining interests are setting a place at the table to get their share.

“Trump signed a pair of proclamations late last year reducing the size of the 1.35-million-acre Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent and the 1.87-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by roughly 50 percent,” according to Huffington Post. “It was the largest reduction of national monuments in history, with more than 2 million acres losing protections. Prohibitions on new hard-rock mining claims in those now-unprotected areas were lifted in early February.”

The administration’s assault on national monuments is upsetting on a number of levels. It is the culmination of an effort by conservatives to divest government control over national parks and monuments, something most of us thought was long settled.

It’s not settled at all.

A Canadian mining firm, Glacier Lake Resources, Inc., has staked a claim on land that was, until recently, part of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah. The Vancouver-based company said in a press release it plans to mine copper, cobalt, zinc, and other minerals from the Colt Mesa deposit about 35 miles southeast of Boulder, Utah.

On Feb. 2, four members of the Lamoreaux family, which owns a small mineral company called Alpine Gems LLC, staked an 80-acre claim near Butler Valley, southeast of Cannonville. On May 9, Alpine Gems staked three 20-acre claims in that same area.

Last week, Utah Senator Mike Lee introduced the Protecting Utah’s Rural Economy Act in the Congress. He explained in an opinion piece he wrote for the Deseret News. Here are two excerpts that provide the gist of it:

The looming danger for Utah’s rural communities comes from the Antiquities Act of 1906, which was originally intended to protect objects of historic and cultural interest, such as artifacts and religious sites.

Unfortunately, what was once a narrowly targeted tool for preventing looting on federal lands has become a weapon of faraway elites to use against hardworking rural Americans.

That is why I am introducing the Protect Utah’s Rural Economy, or PURE, Act. This bill would protect Utah from future abuses under the Antiquities Act by prohibiting the president from establishing or expanding a national monument in Utah unless the proposed monument has been authorized by an act of Congress and the state Legislature.

Rural Americans want what all Americans want: a dignified, decent-paying job, a family to love and support and a healthy community whose future is determined by local residents — not their self-styled betters thousands of miles away.

Lee’s argument is a genome away from political theorist and the seventh vice president of the United States John C. Calhoun’s arguments in support of slavery and state’s rights. Calhoun is remembered for defending slavery and for advancing the concept of minority rights in politics, which he did in the context of defending white Southern interests from perceived Northern threats, according to Wikipedia.

The Wilderness Society is challenging Trump’s proclamations in court and monitoring the progress of the companies seeking to extract minerals. It may not be enough.

Read more about The Wilderness Society’s efforts to protect our wild areas and fight back against the anti-conservationist movement at wilderness.org. If you are in a position to help financially, here is a link to donate to the Wilderness Society.

~ First posted on Blog for Iowa

Categories
Writing

New Potatoes and Cucumbers

Morning Harvest

The ambient outdoor temperature is 89 degrees and the heat index is 100. Another midday spent inside.

I feel caged.

Near sunup I harvested cucumbers and watered. I tasted a red tomato — they are not ready.

Won’t be long.

In the kitchen I emptied the crock of fermented dill pickles and started another batch. I washed and sorted cucumbers on the counter: first the dills, then sweet pickles, then some for eating, then a pile of too plump ones for juicing. There are so many cucumbers I could be selective. Soon I’ll run out of things to do with them… not yet.

I felt restless. I feel restless.

Cucumbers

I cleaned under the kitchen sink and returned the soaps, cleaning supplies and waste basket to their appointed places. I’m glad that work is done. I’ve been putting it off.

Using fruit thawed from the freezer, I made a smoothie for lunch with cow’s milk, kale, a banana and the fruit. It was satisfying…  and very blue.

There is only so much kitchen time a person can take before moving on.

Someone spotted water coming up through the ground near a main water line junction. I emailed our crew of well volunteers and we met near the leak. We saw water seeping up but couldn’t diagnose the problem. I told them I’d call our well service to come out and fix the leak. It was a productive exchange as I hadn’t seen some of them for a while. It was a chance to do something outside home. It will be an ongoing project for the weekend.

I came back. It got hot and here I am.

Our president had tea with Queen Elizabeth II today. I wonder if they had scones like she did with Ike. In Washington, D.C. Robert Mueller’s investigation produced 12 indictments of Russian intelligence officers who had been hacking U.S. computers in the run up to the 2016 general election. The hacking was with nefarious purpose and intent. The press event was at the same time the president was having tea. It will give him something to discuss with Vladimir Putin next week in Helsinki.

In the hottest part of the day I feel an urge to go somewhere else. I felt the same way when I lived near the main train station, the Hauptbahnhof, in Mainz, Germany, especially on weekends away from the kaserne. I would drive to the big box stores over in Wiesbaden… or maybe walk to the small grocery store down the hill and buy fresh fruit and a liter of Coca Cola. I had to time it right because they closed for a couple of hours in the early afternoon. About the same time it is now. I feel connected to those days 40 years ago.

I just got the call the well technician is on his way. Guess I can meet that urge… for now.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Kitchen Garden Day

d’Avignon Radishes

Plants and seeds are going into the ground — the main spring event in a kitchen garden.

Harvest is ramping up with d’Avignon radishes, spinach, cilantro and chives heading to the kitchen.

I planned cilantro for my gardener’s lunch, and the spinach has been cleaned — some frozen and some in a big, recycled plastic clam shell chilling in the ice box. Chives will be for dinner and the radishes for snacks and salads.

This is why we have a kitchen garden.

Yesterday I spent ten hours working in the garden. Big projects were making a space for zucchini and Marketmore cucumber seedlings, and mowing the lawn for the grass clipping mulch. I removed seedling rings from the kale, mulched garlic with a bale of wheat straw, and studied small sprouts to determine which were from planted seeds and which weeds. It’s not clear. Weeding and mulching are so commonplace it’s almost not worth recounting. It’s assumed.

Garlic Patch

Weather was perfect for being outdoors.

The harvest began before the garden is fully planted. Tomato and pepper seedlings mature in the greenhouse while celery plants are ready to go into the ground as soon as I can find time and a space. There are pickling cucumbers and green beans to go somewhere, winter squash to plant. The combination of planting, harvesting and cooking — kitchen gardening — will continue throughout the growing season.

I stopped around noon and made lunch — fresh cilantro tacos.

Fresh Cilantro Tacos

Using pantry ingredients — storage onions, garlic, recipe crumbles, salt and home blended seasonings — I made a filling. I cooked tortillas in a large frying pan, and finely cut cilantro stems and ribboned the leaves. I topped the filling with halved grape tomatoes from California and fresh cilantro, which made the dish.

I bartered for a spring share at the farm so there are bags of greens in the ice box. We had a tub of firm tofu, so I decided on stir fry for dinner. Making stir fry is a way to use up vegetables.

I started two cups of raw brown rice in a quart of home made vegetable broth. I fried the tofu in olive oil, cut in half-inch by one and a half inch square slabs, then set them aside.

Included in the stir fry were baby kale (stems and leaves), carrots, onion, celery, garlic, pine nuts, halved grape tomatoes, red cabbage, a teaspoon of lemon juice and salt. Once the vegetables were soft, I spooned the mixture over a bed of rice and topped with spring onions and chives. It made four servings.

I texted Carmen to get the work forecast at the farm on Sunday. A light load of seedling trays is planned. After farm work, it’s back to the kitchen garden.

Categories
Kitchen Garden Living in Society

Farmers Talk Land Use

Ready to Exit Stage Left if Proceedings get Dull

The room was packed for the Johnson County Board of Supervisors public hearing on the County’s comprehensive plan. Current and would-be farmers were present and spoke about their profession. The hearing took two and a half hours.

Supervisors have been working on the plan for two years and would like to finish it and move on to what matters more, the Unified Development Ordinance, which codifies how the plan will be implemented. Last night’s public hearing brought the county closer to closure, even if the subject of land use will continue to be debated well beyond my years of walking the earth.

The main points were the 40-acre rule for definition of a farm is an obstacle to beginning farmers, and there is a wide difference of opinion regarding the role of animal feeding operations in producing the beef, pork and chicken non-vegetarians love to eat.

The Frequently Asked Questions page of the plan website addressed the first issue, “Will the new Comprehensive plan change the 40-acre rule?” Short answer is no. While officials expressed a desire to accommodate smaller farms during the process of developing the comprehensive plan, one expects the 40-acre rule to remain intact. A farmer can make a living on less than ten acres, especially if they can benefit from the State Code’s agricultural exemption from county zoning regulations. The path is unclear to enable farmers to acquire smaller parcels that would be zoned as ag exempt. There may not be a path, except by supervisors establishing special criteria and deciding each parcel individually on its merits. That’s no way to go. Not only is it labor intensive the politics of the board can and will change over time. People have spoken on the issue. Now it’s time to see what supervisors do.

If people want meat and meat products, livestock will be raised to meet demand. The words “concentrated animal feeding operation” have become a lightening rod of tumult about livestock production. Many do eat meat and few non-farmers want to live next to a livestock production facility. In any case, the State of Iowa maintains preemption over concentrated animal feeding operations. Under Republican control of government, preemption is here to stay. I doubt that would change under Democratic governance. People like their pulled pork, fried chicken, hamburgers and steaks, and it has to come from somewhere. Environmentally it would be better for humans to source protein from plants. If you believe they will over the near term, stand on your head.

The highlight of the hearing was a grader and son of a farmer who read an essay titled, My Barn. “I see my cows Jake and Nick coming up to me because they’re excited for me to rub their noses,” he said. “They feel as soft as a teddy bear.” The hearing engaged several livestock farmers. The ones who raised cattle and hogs took issue with persecution of their trade and the appellation “CAFO.” They said treatment of animals was humane on their farms.

There was insider baseball about the new map to accompany the comprehensive plan. My view is “whatever.” Let the supervisors decide based on best practices. There’s no going back to the way the land was before it was settled. It’s already been ruined by development and that happened in the 19th Century. The North Corridor Development Area has been designated as a buildable area in the plan in order to preserve county farmland. When one flies over it, it’s clear it has been settled from the outskirts of Iowa City and Coralville all the way to the county line. Everyone who has a strong opinion on the NCDA has an ox being gored. Speaker and naturalist Connie Mutel made the best case about how the new map was developed using “best practices.” Managing development in the county is like carrying water in a half empty leaking bucket.

Despite the serious nature of the presentations last night was fun. I got a chance to see friends and acquaintances in the context of working together to resolve issues of beginning farmers. That counts for something and in these turbulent times where would we be without that?

Categories
Environment Kitchen Garden

Bringing Food Home

Farmers Market Food

A relationship with food in American society is complicated.

Some don’t have enough. Others are awash in calories. We each have a human need for nourishment and the ways we go about meeting it are as different as the families which engendered us.

A favorite childhood memory is when Mother went to work in the school cafeteria after the Catholic Church built a new grade school near our home. With other women like her, she took a list of ingredients based partly on government programs (including lots of cheese) and partly on a limited budget, and made meals that included such dishes as porcupine meatballs (hamburger and rice) and grilled cheese sandwiches with tomato soup. Father worked at the meat packing plant which had an employee butcher shop where he could buy beef, pork and meat products at a discount, and did. The idea of stretching hamburger by mixing it with cooked rice was a novelty in our household and eventually we implored Mother to make porcupine meatballs for us at home, just like the ones at school. She did.

This story of external culinary practices coming into our home is essential to understanding the rise of a diverse diet in American society. We see things out there, they look good, and we want them. Most people, including low-wage workers, have or find the means to get them.

Many books, careers and lives have been based on food in society. We are an individualized rather than generalized culture with regard to food acquisition, preparation and consumption. To a large extent, the rise of the modern mega grocery store has shaped our eating habits in ways no one would have expected. Much ink has been spilled about that and I’m less interested in regurgitating my slice of it.

What I do know is local food farmers work hard for the sparse income they garner. All farmers do. The local food movement of which they are a part is based on the hope more people will bring locally produced, raw ingredients produced in a sustainable manner into their kitchens, ice boxes and pantries. Enough people do for a small group of farmers to make a living.

In many ways the increased interest in local food is the same type of behavior that took place in our home in the 1960s. We experience surprise when our CSA share includes Broccoli Raab, Koji or Bok Choy. We learn how to eat and cook them and want more. It’s not that our home nourishment plan is boring. We want and enjoy the experience of creation as it relates to cooking and eating. We want that experience to be personal and shared with family. That is very American.

I concede promotion of local food is a form of consumerism no different from a tomato catsup purveyor who spends dollars on an advertising campaign to enhance sales. The same behavioral forces are at work. I’m okay with that.

Just so you know, I’m not bewitched by the allure of eating a kale salad, at least not yet. Suffice it to say the diversity and behavior regarding food in our household with its kitchen garden, farm sourcing and grocery shopping has some unique qualities that may not be of interest to the authors of the Michelin Guide, but make our lives a little better. That too is very American. That’s part of who I am, who we Americans all are.

Categories
Environment Writing

Earth Day Weekend 2018

Earthrise Dec. 24, 1968

Earth Day is and will always be about this photo taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts on the first manned mission to the moon.

“The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth,” command module pilot Jim Lovell said from lunar orbit.

With a perspective six inches from our noses, we often forget who we are and how we fit into the vast reaches of the universe. We are a speck in a place larger than we can imagine.

When I participated in the first Earth Day as a senior in high school, the idea we should work together for peace, reduce pollution, and care for the environment seemed obvious. Even much reviled President Richard Nixon got it — society had to do something to address clean air, clean water and endangered species.

Earth Day is a chance to revisit this iconic photograph. When we consider a broader perspective, as the photograph encourages us to do, little has changed on Earth since it was taken. Our troubles seem petty compared to the overriding fact Earth is our only home. We are all in this together.

As much as societies seek to delineate metes and bounds, there are no borders on the globe. There is only one society of which we are all a part.

This Earth Day I’ll be working at home in my garden. A late spring created pent up demand for outdoors work. For the last four weeks, one excuse after another delayed needed work, yet now I’m ready to release the floodgates.

Not before I consider this photo one more time.

Categories
Environment Living in Society

Letter to the Johnson County Board of Supervisors

Woman Writing Letter

Dear Lisa, Mike, Kurt, Janelle and Rod,

It’s funny how when one gets all the information the picture looks different.

Since I complained about the purchase of Dick Schwab and Katherine Burford’s property using conservation bond money after partial information was leaked via our local newspaper, I wanted to get back to you now that the purchase has been made public.

The fact Burford/Schwab donated the developed portion of the property mitigates my concern about how bond money is being used. In fact, because of that, the plan, as explained in the Press Citizen, complies with what I said in my March 7 email. “I hope and expect you to vote no on the acquisition of this property using conservation bond money.” My concerns are rendered moot because of the donation.

On reflection, this decision was a good one for which the board should be commended. It is also consistent with conversations I have had with Schwab about how he planned to dispose of his property.

While I continue to be dissatisfied by the partial leakage of information, I have no beef with you.

Thanks for your service on the board of supervisors.

Regards, Paul