Tag: environment

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Living in Society

April Showers

Volunteer cilantro from the garden.

April is ending with rain showers. As hot as the atmosphere and ocean have been, I expect an abundance of rain in 2024. Our local newspaper wrote there will be “bouts of record-challenging high temperatures throughout the nation and the possibility of the hottest summer ever observed.” Call it the climate crisis, call it a lot of rain, call it whatever you will yet these are crazy times and the weather became crazy along with it.

A friend and I organized a political meet and greet at the public library so voters could meet candidates before the June 4 primary election. As mentioned yesterday, the primary election may as well be the November general election for county supervisors: The county electorate is liberal compared to many Iowa counties and Republicans on the November ballot don’t stand a chance.

It is no surprise there is discontent among the electorate. That is the county Democratic resting happy face. Two new candidates challenged three incumbents for county supervisor. I spent time at our event with each of the five, including the ones I am just getting to know. They are all good people with a set of manners one expects from a candidate for public office. Incumbency is difficult to overcome unless someone did something terribly wrong. There is no evidence of that among these incumbents.

The state house races are just beginning and neither the state senate nor representative candidate was ready with campaign literature or yard signs. April politics is a parade gathering in a field waiting for the grand marshal’s signal to start. There is a lot of milling about. All eight candidates at the event, including the county sheriff, are solid.

Inside the front entrance to the library is a stone wall with the chiseled names of original donors who built it. Our public library used to be under the bandstand in a city park, then moved to the former fire station. Both spaces were incredibly small for a library in a city and surrounding community of more than 10,000 people. Many take for granted having a well-built library with a robust staff. Not every small community can afford it. The original community donations, in money and sweat equity, set the path for a great local resource we use for our political meetings and many other things.

Morning sunlight is drying the driveway as I type these words. No rain is forecast so it should be a decent day of outdoors work. Soon it will be time to get cabbages in the ground.

Categories
Environment

Nuclear Power Isn’t It

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Pexels.com

Little has changed to make nuclear power a safe and affordable option to produce electricity. That didn’t stop Iowa Republican members of congress, all four of them, from voting for H.R. 6544, the Atomic Advancement Act of 2023. They were not alone, the bill passed on Feb. 29, 2024 (365-36-1). It awaits action in the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. What were they thinking? They were thinking they would take care of big business first.

In a sneaky, self-serving way, the bill revised the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s mission statement to emphasize the “public benefits” of nuclear energy instead of protecting human life and health through regulation. In other words, it promotes more nuclear power over safety.

Using questionable wisdom, the U.S. House of Representatives pushed more of the cost of recovery from a nuclear disaster upon tax payers. The bill calls for renewal of the Price-Anderson Act, a 1957 law which caps the industry’s liability for nuclear disasters at only $13 billion. H.R. 6544 extends it for 40 more years. The Price-Anderson Act makes US taxpayers liable for the full costs of nuclear disasters – which could run into the hundreds of billions of dollars – and exempts the insurance industry from covering homeowners and businesses for damages from those disasters. We regular folks never have it that good from our government.

Construction costs for new nuclear power are more than ten times those of comparable solar capacity. There are similar cost issues around fuel sourcing, waste disposal, safe operations, and escape of radioactive pollution from a power plant, none of which have been resolved. There can be agreement we’d like to use a method of electricity generation that minimizes pollution. Nuclear power isn’t it.

Entrepreneur Bill Gates is working to make nuclear power more cost effective and safe. When he decided to make nuclear power generation one of the projects in his post-Microsoft life, he said he wanted to solve its problems so it could replace more polluting methods. Gates believes nuclear power is an important part of solving the climate crisis. That may be, yet not until we solve the problems of cost and safety. Read about his effort in Kemmerer, Wyoming here.

The U.S. Congress is getting ahead of itself in advancing this bill. My House Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks was out with a statement shortly after voting for it, “The Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy held a hearing to discuss nuclear energy expansion. I believe nuclear energy plays a key role in the future of American energy and am proud to support it.” I have been writing about the representative’s affection for nuclear power since this post on Dec. 11, 2010. I wrote, “As a proponent of nuclear power to control toxic emissions from coal fired power plants and concentrated animal feeding operations in the state, she is expected to kick the ball down the road for the decades it would take to bring adequate megawatts of nuclear energy on line.” One decade down, how many to go?

It is obvious the nuclear industry has made little progress toward improving safety in operations and affordability as measured in unit cost of electricity produced. They hang their hat on the likes of Bill Gates, instead, and pray he solves the problems. I didn’t know those folks spent that much time in church.

Categories
Environment

How Are Things Going Before Earth Day?

Image of Earth 7-6-15 from DSCOVR (Deep Space Climate Observatory)

Earth Day is Monday, so how are we doing? Is the news media helping us create a better environment?

Bill McKibben follows issues centered around the climate crisis better than almost anyone. Here’s the stark truth from his substack, The Crucial Years:

At the most fundamental level, new figures last week showed that atmospheric levels of the three main greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—reached new all-time highs last year. Here’s how the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported the figures:

While the rise in the three heat-trapping gases recorded in the air samples collected by NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory (GML) in 2023 was not quite as high as the record jumps observed in recent years, they were in line with the steep increases observed during the past decade. 

The global surface concentration of CO2, averaged across all 12 months of 2023, was 419.3 parts per million (ppm), an increase of 2.8 ppm during the year. This was the 12th consecutive year CO2 increased by more than 2 ppm, extending the highest sustained rate of CO2 increases during the 65-year monitoring record. Three consecutive years of CO2  growth of 2 ppm or more had not been seen in NOAA’s monitoring records prior to 2014. Atmospheric CO2 is now more than 50% higher than pre-industrial levels.

Entirely unsurprisingly, the planet’s temperature has also continued to rise.

The Crucial Years, a substack by Bill McKibben, April 10, 2024.

Not long ago, McKibben headed an organization called 350.org, which advocated keeping average surface concentration of CO2 below 350 ppm. At 419.3 ppm, and increasing about 2 ppm per year, we are going the wrong direction.

How do news audiences perceive the climate crisis? A recent study explored this question. Why is it important? How we perceive and receive news about the climate crisis determines, in large part, whether and how we address it.

Around Earth Day, we expect to see more news stories about the climate crisis. Folks at Reuters Institute studied news use and attitudes about climate change, using data from Brazil, France, Germany, India, Japan, Pakistan, the UK, and the USA. The issues are similar to what we see in response to media on any topic: Should we trust scientists? What is misinformation and what isn’t? What news sources are trustworthy? Are direct action protests covered fairly by media? They found a lot:

  • In most of the eight countries there has been a slight increase in climate change news use, with just over half (55%) on average using climate change news in the previous week.
  • Climate news avoidance and trust in climate information from the news media have remained roughly stable, but avoidance has decreased slightly in the UK, USA, and Pakistan, as well as trust in the UK and Germany.
  • Scientists remain the most trusted sources of news and information about climate change, trusted by 73% on average, and respondents more often see them used as sources in the news media than any other source of information.
  • Over three quarters (80%) of survey respondents say they are concerned about climate change misinformation, consistent with data from 2022.
  • Once again, respondents think television and online (including social media and messaging apps) are where they see most climate-related misinformation. Politicians, political parties, and governments are frequently mentioned as sources of false and misleading information.
  • Nearly two thirds of respondents believe that news media play a significant role in influencing climate change decisions, actions by large businesses, government policies, and public attitudes, with particularly strong beliefs in Brazil, India, and Pakistan.
  • There is large variation in how soon respondents think people in their country will face the serious effects of climate change, with significant proportions in every country thinking the consequences are decades away at least. However, people who use climate change news on a weekly basis are considerably more likely to think that people are being affected by climate change now.
  • Significant disparities exist in perceptions of the impact of climate change on public health specifically, with those in Global South countries (Brazil, India, Pakistan) generally perceiving larger effects (50% or more) than those in the Global North (UK, USA, France, Germany, Japan).
  • Just over half of respondents think that climate change has a larger effect on poorer people (53%) and poorer countries (52%), but there is a considerable partisan disagreement on this in France, the UK, and the USA, with those leaning politically right less likely to agree.
  • People are more likely to think that richer countries and more polluting countries should take greater responsibility for reducing climate change, and weekly climate change news users are more likely to hold this view.
  • In the UK, USA, Germany and France opinion is roughly evenly split on whether direct action climate protests (e.g. blocking roads, disrupting sporting events) are covered fairly by the news media. But in Germany, the UK, and the USA opinion varies depending on whether people support or oppose the protests.
  • People in our survey expressed a high level of interest in various types of climate coverage, including news that discusses latest developments, positive news, and coverage presenting solutions. People did not express a clear preference for the type of solutions journalism they are most interested in.

What do these findings mean? Assessing news in media has become a critical skill in 2024. It is important to align our lives with accurate information about the climate crisis. Rich McKibben is a good source of information. So are Katharine Hayhoe and Al Gore. Knowing the truth about the climate crisis will make us better advocates. It will set us free to create a better world for our progeny.

On Earth Day 2024, we are a distance from achieving our goals. Things are not going as well as we need and it is complicated by reliance on media fraught with misinformation. We can do better.

~ The author helped organize the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970 in his home town. He served as chair of the county board of health, and has been advocating and writing on environmental issues all along his journey. He joined Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project in 2013.

Categories
Living in Society

After the Storm

Green up in the state park, April 16, 2024.

During the first two minutes I had my Merlin bird identification software listening, it found: White-breasted Nuthatch, Northern Cardinal, American Robin, House Finch, House Sparrow, Red-winged Blackbird, Blue Jay, Chipping Sparrow, and Canada Goose. The usual suspects were awake and came out to greet me a few days after the storm.

The storm gathered all the ash tree seed pods from the roof and collected them in the gutter downspout. That caused rainwater to overflow into the window well, and then leak into the house. It was a mess to clean up. There was no real damage, although the gutter design needs a remake to position the downspout elsewhere. Adding that to the long to-do list. It will go high on the list.

Clean up after the flooding will take some effort. Luckily we have the needed tools: buckets, rags, wet/dry vacuum, mops and brooms. Now to get those cleaned up, dried and put away.

Despite recent rainfall, and refilling of the lake, the newspaper reported this morning we continue to be in drought conditions in Big Grove Township. It continues to be too cold to plant much in the garden, with last frost as much as a month away. However, it is time to shift gears to doing more garden prep beginning now.

Where to start? Probably at pushing the post button and getting on with it. Make it a great day readers!

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Early Spring Chills

Black bean and kale taco filling.

With ambient temperatures in the twenties and thirties it has been a chilly early spring, of a kind that has me lingering indoors to find things to do. It is what it is. I hope to plant potatoes on Friday, yet if it’s too cold, I will delay. In the life cycle of Midwestern gardening, the growing season is extended by a warming climate and a few days doesn’t matter that much.

I plant potatoes in containers so the soil is less accessible to rodents. I move them each year, using the soil dug to bury them plus some soil mix and compost all blended with a cup or so of fertilizer in each tub. So far no critters dug their way into the tubs to eat the tubers.

A company in Monticello sells composted chicken manure, which is used by a lot of organic growers. I need to get over there and buy this year’s supply which is 150 pounds. There will likely be the annual discussion of which sales person gets credit for my sale. A few years ago we established that mine is a “house account” which means no sales person gets credit as I just walk into the office to buy it. Since beginning to use fertilizer, garden yields have improved.

Based on last year’s experience, I delayed planting peppers last weekend. Timing of seeding to planting time is more important for peppers and tomatoes. Any more, I don’t see an advantage of germinating early. I am cutting back on peppers and tomatoes this year with fewer varieties. For peppers to be successful in this climate, I need to install drip irrigation. I have been unwilling to do so, and there is an abundance of peppers when they come in around the county. I do plan to plant the varieties that grow well with my sparing watering.

I inspected the garlic and it is looking quite good. Taking time to loosen the straw mulch compacted over winter facilitated growth. It looks to be another great harvest.

When the weather finally breaks, there will be a lot of outdoors work to do. I am ready for it, even if there is plenty of indoors work to keep me busy.

Categories
Environment

Drought Continues

All of the foreground should be covered in water. Photo by the author on March 18, 2024.

A few snowflakes fell on my forehead while rolling the recycling cart to the road. The forecast did not indicate much snow, yet we’ll take any we can get.

Yesterday we went to the new Department of Transportation facility across the lakes for an appointment to renew my spouse’s driver’s license. We took a thick envelope of documents to meet the new Real ID requirements. We were able to get what we needed beforehand and a new driver’s license was efficiently issued. Appointments like this can consume a whole morning in the life of a septuagenarian.

While there, we stopped at the wholesale club to get two cases of organic soy milk from the least expensive place in the county to do so. The trip was uneventful and met our needs.

It was a punk afternoon after that: too chilly to spend much time outdoors and too sunny to stay indoors. We ate late lunches after which I retired to my writing table to work on weekend posts. Our child was streaming, so that was on in the background.

I was feeling a headache so decided not to attend the political event near the county seat. One of the county supervisors was having a kickoff event. In our active local politics, there is always another event.

A note about fasting labs had me skip dinner so I wouldn’t forget. It was another day in a time of appointments, shopping, and living in the ongoing drought.

Categories
Environment

Naming Things

On the state park trail on March 18, 2024.

Naming things found in nature reflects an urge to own, control, or possess them. I have no interest in that. I seek to be outdoors and observe everything natural with all my senses. I don’t object to knowing the formal taxonomic classification of a plant, insect, animal or other living thing. With increased experience in nature, some knowledge of genus and species comes naturally. For example, when I see a Blue Jay, I know the name. What I don’t want is worry about naming everything in my environment.

I began using the Merlin Bird App last week to interpret which songbirds are nearby. Identifying bird sounds is a subset of ornithology. On Tuesday, the American Robin, Northern Cardinal, and American Crow showed up on a windy morning. The app helps me understand nature. While I’m working outdoors all kinds of sounds become a background noise for my activity: birds, vehicle traffic, weather, local human and animal activity, and more. I want to recognize when something different stands out from the background. What new bird might I see? What new world will be unveiled?

As a gardener, I care a lot about insect and plant life. Which insects are beneficial, which are predators in this specific vegetable garden? Which plants are weeds? Which are edible or poisonous? I’ve been gardening since 1983, and am getting better at identification each year. I see behavior of white butterflies that lay eggs on my cruciferous vegetable leaves yet have no idea what they are called. I’m not that interested in learning the name, just in identifying their behavior as a pest.

When I move indoors, my view toward naming is not much different.

I’ve been writing about my early life before the seventh grade. I’m lucky I didn’t obsess over the naming of things. My classroom focus was on the mysticism of the Catholic Church and stories told by my teachers and classmates. Charlotte’s Web in fourth grade was pivotal. I sang, learned to play music, and played games with classmates in the playground. We knew the game was called “Four Square” yet what mattered was getting a chance to play after waiting patiently for our turn in queue near the court painted on the asphalt. These activities didn’t require a name.

When I go to the pantry, I sometimes can’t recall what things are. I know we have almond and barley flour, yet to identify them takes tasting a pinch. Some in the household says I should label things. Maybe, yet I resist. I don’t know if my reasons are good, but I don’t want to be limited by the confines of having to know things by name. In the kitchen, imagination and improvisation are the key dynamics, even when it comes to the “science” of baking. Not once have I mistaken salt for sugar.

What is the story of nature? It is more complex than I can understand. I’d call mine a Cartesian outlook and that means I live in my senses most of the time. What may be “out there” beyond senses, we have no way of knowing. We are taught nature is out there. Equally so, there is no way to own, control, or possess things we sense with any permanence. Living this way is a matter of faith, not requiring any naming. We are better off by not naming things we experience.

As long as I’m getting along in society, I’m not going to spend undue amounts of time with this. I’ll be the better for that.

Categories
Environment

Into Spring

Lake Macbride on March 12, 2024.

In one minute, my newly downloaded app, Merlin from Cornell University, identified the sounds of four birds: American Robin, Blue Jay, American Crow and Northern Cardinal. They are common birds in Big Grove Township yet the app is training me in how to listen for and identify bird life with which I’ve lived since we moved here. I stood on the front steps and turned it on. Briefly, it is fun.

Judging from my email traffic, yesterday was busy. I published the letter to the editor I wrote yesterday, worked on my class reunion, planned for the county convention, cleaned, and cooked. I made chili and cornbread for dinner.

My chili recipe is toned down for milder palates. Six ingredients: a diced large onion, three 15-ounce cans of organic kidney beans, three pints of tomato sauce (home canned or store bought), chili powder, cumin, and a bag of Morningstar Farm Recipe Crumbles. I usually make vegan cornbread to go with it. It isn’t like the cornbread Mother used to make but it is uniquely ours and tasty.

Overall it was a punk day, with a walk on the state park trail being the only outdoors activity. When I moved the mulch over the garlic earlier in the week, there was still frost on the ground underneath. We had a couple of days in a row where temperatures got up to 70 degrees. A few more and I will be able to dig in the garden.

We got much-needed rain this morning. Hope to get outdoors in between showers. Lots to do this cloudy day before we get into Spring.

Categories
Sustainability

Why Eat Less Meat?

Grass Fed Dairy Cattle

We, as a society, should be eating less meat. Why? Producing meat is an inefficient way to make food. Much of our agricultural production goes to animal feed where most calories are wasted because animals have lives to live. For example, for every 100 calories a cow eats, it produces three calories in meat. It’s not much better for sheep, dairy, pigs and chickens. Not only is meat-production inefficient, it requires a lot of land: half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture. Three quarters of that is used for livestock. (In Iowa, half the corn crop is used to manufacture ethanol). Add it all together — greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water consumption, and air and water pollution — and there is a strong case for meeting human nutritional needs other than from livestock.

R. Buckminster Fuller was the first person I read who said there is enough food produced in the world to feed everyone comfortably. He canceled the notion there wasn’t enough. What nature couldn’t provide, science would, he said, in the form of improved fertilizers, plant genetics, better land use, and distribution and packaging. Where we are each day is a beginning point for the rest of our lives. Each generation develops new insights into what makes our world work and how to improve it, including food production and distribution. Humanity is fraught with potential to feed ourselves.

“Man is a complex of patterns, or processes,” Fuller wrote in I Seem To Be A Verb. “We speak of our circulatory system, our respiratory system, our digestive system, and so it goes. Man is not weight. He isn’t the vegetables he eats, for example, because he’ll eat seven tons of vegetables in his life. He is the result of his own pattern integrity.” Understanding our “pattern integrity” and how it relates to the physical world is a key challenge of agriculture. It is also a source of planetary degradation because of how we pursue agriculture, especially through livestock culture.

Hannah Ritchie points out in her book, Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable World, “Our battle with agriculture has been centered around one thing: having enough nutrients in the soil at the right time.” During the early 20th Century, German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch developed what is called the Haber-Bosch process which converts nitrogen and hydrogen into ammonia which can be used as fertilizer. The advances in plant genetics developed by Norman Borlaug are well known. Between Haber, Bosch and Borlaug, they created the Green Revolution which enhanced food production three-fold from historical levels. This is the kind of science to which Fuller referred.

Changing how we live regarding agriculture is about more than personal choices. I have no regrets choosing a mostly ovo-lacto vegetarian diet beginning in the 1980s. In the early period, there was no strict line between meat culture and vegetarianism. I did not eat meat at home, and when I was out, especially with business clients or close family, I sometimes did. It was a non-issue. I guess you would call 1980s me a casual vegetarian.

As I age, I have less interest in eating meat: partly because it is expensive to buy, and mostly because it has no viable role in the cuisine I developed in our kitchen-garden. The issue with personal choices is they are not scalable to a level where it would make make a significant change in land-use policy. It would take a lot of people leveraging the power of the pocketbook to turn things around regarding consumption of meat and associated environmental degradation.

When addressing global environmental problems we can lose hope because of their scale. By identifying a big part of the problem has been livestock and meat production, we have something tangible to grasp, something within our control. By reducing consumption of meat we contribute to a solution to our environmental crisis. There is something good in that.

Categories
Kitchen Garden Living in Society

Exiting the Deep Freeze

Tools to make the first tray of garden seedlings. Kale went in on Feb. 3.

I’ve been chatting it up with some neighbors on social media. There was consensus we hunkered down inside our homes for most of January because of snow and freezing ambient temperatures. There is hope for a break in winter and we’d just as soon move into spring. Personal productivity lags in winter. It’s time to step up the pace.

The idea of a “week” still resonates. Monday means start of the week, Friday is for closing down activities, Saturday is to perform a number of small household tasks, plus help our child with their small business. Sunday remains a day of rest, sort of. It’s not the same as when I worked full time. Then I knew that Friday usually meant casual clothes, voluntary trips to the office, and time to pursue my writing and family life.

I walked about the garden. The green I saw from the kitchen was collards that had been eaten more than I could tell from a distance. I had no interest in picking through the leaves, especially with a freezer full already available. I suppose the cruciferous vegetable-eating insects that survive the cold don’t have a lot to choose from in winter.

On Saturday I planted the first seeds for the garden and put the tray on a heating pad under a grow lamp. They are mostly last year’s seeds and that should not be a problem for kale. Kale is one of the vegetables I have mastered growing. It was something to see the tools lined up and ready to start. I worked with the garage door open for the fresh air and because we seem to be exiting the Iowa deep freeze.

Kale seeds planted Feb. 3, 2024.