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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I met Finn Harries in Cedar Rapids at Al Gore’s 2014 Climate Reality Leadership Corps training. The diminutive Brit showed up only for the days Gore gave his Inconvenient Truth lecture. Harries and his twin brother Jack had millions of subscribers on their YouTube channel JacksGap. With a fame of his own, Finn Harries had specific intent in attending the Iowa training.
During the last ten years, the brothers developed a process to address the climate crisis. Finn is working on regenerative agriculture and Jack started Earthrise Studio. The transformation of their YouTube channel is ongoing at Earthrise Studio.
This channel is currently undergoing an exciting transformation. In 2011 we launched JacksGap, a creative storytelling project featuring short travel films by Jack and Finn Harries. Since then we’ve been on the most incredible journey covering stories all around the world and increasingly learning about the significant environmental issues we face. Today 10 years later we are re launching this channel as Earthrise, a digital media platform and creative studio dedicated to communicating the climate crisis. Earthrise tells stories for a new world. Radical stories of hope, of new possibility. Stories from the future that help us navigate the now. We’re so excited for this next chapter and hope you’ll join us!
Their channel has grown to 3.63 million subscribers.
On Tuesday, Jan. 16, I received this email with a link to their first video about fossil fuels. Please take 11 minutes to view it. It presents a different picture of the geopolitical impact of fossil fuels and leads into the same discussion about renewables.
A year ago, we set out on a journey to investigate the origins of the global energy crisis, an issue that took the world by storm and resulted in extortionate energy bills for people everywhere.
Fast forward to today, we’re so excited to share that the first episode of POWER has just gone live on our YouTube channel. But first, a quick recap on how we got here…
February: We decided to make a series about fossil fuels.
March: We went to our audience to crowdsource questions.
April: We began writing the series.
July: We kicked off production in our new filming studio.
December: We wrapped filming.
Yesterday: We held an in-person premiere for our community.
Today: We hit upload on Episode 1, and you can now stream it on our YouTube channel using the link below.
Dubai, UAE site of COP 28 – Photo by Aleksandar Pasaric on Pexels.com
I met with State Senator Joe Bolkcom before he retired to discuss ways to mitigate the effects of climate change. He told me something important as we finished our conversation. “Join a group and get active,” he said. What does that mean?
With a challenge so big it involves all of the populated regions of the globe, one person’s impact is not as useful as when we work with others to solve the climate crisis. As we face its challenges, it is important for our own sanity to feel like we contribute to solutions as individuals. Actions like reducing gasoline use, reducing natural gas use, reducing electricity use, eating less meat and dairy, and growing some of our own food are all important. These actions matter, yet what matters more is what we, as a society, do collectively. That was Bolkcom’s point.
On Dec. 13, 2023, delegates to the 28th Conference of the Parties (COP 28) agreed to transition away from fossil fuels. This despite heavy lobbying from delegates representing fossil fuel interests to do nothing.
Nearly 200 countries struck a breakthrough climate agreement Wednesday, calling for a transition away from fossil fuels in an unprecedented deal that targets the greatest contributors to the planet’s warming. The deal came swiftly — with no discussion or objection — in a packed room in Dubai following two weeks of negotiations and rising contention. It is the first time a global climate deal has specifically called to curb the use of fossil fuels.
Is the cup half full or half empty? Citizens engaged in solving the climate crisis should take the positive which this agreement represents even though it falls short of our aspirations.
When I activated an account on Threads, one of the first accounts I followed was climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe who is active on that platform. We had this exchange about COP 28, in which I quote-posted her report from COP 28:
As Hayhoe said in the talk referenced above (Here is a link), the challenge is to move from worried to activated. It is not only possible, it is imperative that advocates for solving the climate crisis do so.
Back to my question, is the cup half full or half empty when progress toward transitioning from fossil fuels saw such resistance at COP 28?
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said after COP 28 closed, “A small, self-interested minority of states cannot be allowed to block the progress necessary to put our entire planet on a path to climate safety.”
2023 was a disastrous year for our climate. We experienced the hottest year on record and the extended Iowa drought impacted corn and soybean yields. Rivers and lakes began to dry up. What gets overlooked is that just as the climate crisis seems to get worse, actions to tackle the problem are ramping up. There were environmental wins out of COP 28:
The cost of solar power has fallen by around 90% and wind by 70% in the past decade.
The majority of new energy capacity being added in the U.S. and globally is solar, wind, and battery storage; these renewables already account for nearly 14% of the U.S. energy production and 12% worldwide.
Electric vehicles are becoming cheaper and more attractive. For the first time, more than one million EVs have been sold in the United States in a calendar year.
At COP28, delegates took a historic step in establishing a loss and damage fund, the latest development in a three-decades-long fight to have wealthy, high-emitting countries compensate vulnerable, developing ones for the harms of climate change.
For more positive news, read Katarina Zimmer’s complete article on Atmos.
Despite its shortcomings, COP 28 marked a major step forward for the environmental movement. For the first time ever, a COP agreement explicitly acknowledges the main culprit responsible for the climate crisis is fossil fuels. While the agreement falls short of what many of us wanted, it still reflects progress in a decades long struggle to address the climate crisis. We should keep on the sunny side and build on this progress by finding other, like-minded people and getting active.
Black-eyed peas, rice, and cornbread for first meal of 2024.
An uncomfortable truth about environmentalism — that no one wants to discuss, especially in Iowa — is the amount of land used to feed and husband animals. To say it another way, the best thing we could do to mitigate the effects of ongoing climate disruption is to drastically reduce the amount of animal products consumed by humans. Not by a little, but by a lot… and immediately.
In his recent book, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, author Jonathan Safran Foer wrote about this. In the appendix he discusses how he came to the environmental impact animal husbandry makes. It ranges from 14.5 and 51 percent among different experts. How does one even begin to address this? Here in Iowa, someone who suggests humans stop eating animals and their dairy products wouldn’t get one minute of attention. They would be run out of the state.
The State of Iowa developed into an agricultural state and with reason. The prairie that existed after the 1832 Black Hawk War is almost gone. In its place is a grid of once fertile fields and crop land to take advantage of our temperate climate, rich soil, and adequate rainfall. It seems quite organized in 2024. It is. It is organized to extract as many crops from this ground as it can, growing corn and beans fence row to fence row. If the nutritional content of the soil isn’t what it used to be, there are fertilizers to help. While not all of the corn and soybeans is fed to animals, the contribution Iowa-style farming makes to environmental degradation is astounding.
Safran Foer would have the population take collective action to reduce or eliminate consumption of animal products. As the title of his book suggests, he asks us as to eat no animal products before the evening meal. The problem, he points out, is that people will convert to a “plant-based diet” or “go vegan” in order to check a box, assuage guilt, and feel hope, rather than taking more substantial, collective action to mitigate the causes of climate disruption related to agriculture. This is a problem wanting a solution. Because it is controversial, few appear to be working on it.
As we face the climate crisis, it is important for our own sanity to feel like we contribute to solutions as individuals. Actions like reducing gasoline use, reducing natural gas use, reducing electricity use, eating less meat and dairy, and growing some of our own food are all important. These actions matter, yet what matters more is what we, as a society, do collectively.
While I type this post people are working to expand U.S. export of liquefied natural gas. Government support for this is among the crazy things the Trump and Biden administrations have in common. The level of methane pollution of this export operation is mind-boggling and Biden could do something about it. It is just one example of how collective advocacy could make a difference in reducing methane pollution. Few people even realize what is going on and that’s a problem.
The meal shown in the photograph above has no animal products in it. It was satisfying from the standpoint of living a New Year’s Day tradition, and from a save the planet perspective. I checked off the box and feel good. However, there is much more to do to organize our neighbors and encourage our government to take more affirmative climate action. That is just as important as what we eat.
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