State park trail entry point.

Journey Home

Tales from the pilgrimage.

environment

  • Earth Day 2016

    My participation in the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970 evolved in a convergence of social vectors. Among them was this Apollo 8 photograph of Earth above a lunar landscape by astronaut William Anders. After viewing the photograph I felt conflicts and maladies in society were insignificant compared with what we have in common… Read more

  • Palm Oil is Bad for Iowa

    On Friday, Feb. 5, the benchmark crude palm-oil future contract traded on the Bursa Malaysia Derivatives exchange reached its highest level since May 2014, according to NASDAQ. Traders were feeling bullish as warm, dry weather caused by El Niño in the region receded from the prime palm plantations in Sumatra, Borneo and other parts of… Read more

  • Post Paris

    Yesterday the 21st Conference of the Parties, including 195 nations, adopted an agreement to curtail greenhouse gas emissions. A few people I know attended, but mostly the names and faces of the negotiators and players were reduced to certain heads of state and prominent activists. Short version: now that the agreement is made, governments must… Read more

  • It is the Season

    The deer population is abundant because of a lack of predators, including the mostly male deer hunters currently in the field. People freak at the idea of wolves or large cats being near, so culling the herds has become a human activity. There is little danger of taking too many. Almost three months into the… Read more

  • Eve of Paris 2015

    President Obama is scheduled to depart Washington for Paris later today to attend the 21st Convention of the Parties (COP21 or Paris 2015). Paris 2015 offers our best hope to curb greenhouse gas emissions through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. As of yesterday 150 heads of state had accepted the invitation to… Read more

  • Reading Naomi Klein

    Unlike the climate crisis story spoon fed to us in decreasing numbers of corporate media stories, in social media memes, and in fleeting conversations at community gatherings, in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate, author Naomi Klein said there is a nascent, global movement preparing to take climate action. “The climate movement has yet… Read more

  • The Senator and the Sierra Club

    The exchange between U.S. Senator Ted Cruz and Sierra Club president Aaron Mair during an Oct. 6 Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing was a brief flash in the news cycle. Was it also a debate about climate change? The subject was to have been the impact of federal regulations on minority communities. The junior senator from… Read more

  • Electricity and Our Future

    It would be great to just plug into a socket, use electricity and be done with it. There’s more to it than that. We take lighting after sundown for granted, as we do preserving food in the ice box and proper functioning of the myriad of appliances in a modern home. Since before the Christian… Read more

  • Denial and Denali

    Environmentalists are having trouble wrapping their head around a president who visited Alaska above the Arctic Circle on Wednesday to speak on the need to mitigate the causes of climate change, while at the same time on Aug. 17 approved Royal Dutch Shell’s exploration and development of oil there. It’s not that hard because the… Read more

  • Taking Local Out Of Local Food

    Ingredients for this kale salad were grown within 100 feet of our kitchen. It is as local as food gets. We enjoy garden produce in high summer — when nature’s bounty yields so much food we either preserve or give it away. Any more our household gives away more than it preserves because the pantry… Read more