Category Archives: environment

A final anniversary note

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—-unless another final note occurs to us.

—-about the half century since men first walked on the moon. The five or six percent of you who supposedly still think it was a Hollywood-generated hoax can leave the room now. Or maybe not.

Only twelve men in the entire history of mankind, however far back you consider that history to go, have seen our earth in its entirety with their own eyes.   Only twelve. And, assuming you are not among those who think Hollywood had computer generated special effects far advanced from what they were showing the rest of the world, or whether you think these twelve were looking at a ball or a pancake, what the twelve unanimously agree they saw affected most of them for the rest of their lives.

The first three to see the full earth were not those on Apollo 11 but those who had flown around the moon the previous December, the crew of Apollo 8.

The poet Archibald MacLeish wrote in the New York Times on Christmas day, 1968 about what that view could mean to those of us too small for Borman, Lovell, and Anders to see from their great distance.

Men’s conception of themselves and of each other has always depended on their notion of the earth. When the earth was the World — all the world there was — and the stars were lights in Dante’s heaven, and the ground beneath men’s feet roofed Hell, they saw themselves as creatures at the center of the universe, the sole, particular concern of God — and from that high place they ruled and killed and conquered as they pleased.

And when, centuries later, the earth was no longer the World but a small, wet spinning planet in the solar system of a minor star off at the edge of an inconsiderable galaxy in the immeasurable distances of space — when Dante’s heaven had disappeared and there was no Hell (at least no Hell beneath the feet) — men began to see themselves not as God-directed actors at the center of a noble drama, but as helpless victims of a senseless farce where all the rest were helpless victims also and millions could be killed in world-wide wars or in blasted cities or in concentration camps without a thought or reason but the reason — if we call it one — of force.

Now, in the last few hours, the notion may have changed again. For the first time in all of time men have seen it not as continents or oceans from the little distance of a hundred miles or two or three, but seen it from the depth of space; seen it whole and round and beautiful and small as even Dante — that “first imagination of Christendom” — had never dreamed of seeing it; as the Twentieth Century philosophers of absurdity and despair were incapable of guessing that it might be seen. And seeing it so, one question came to the minds of those who looked at it. “Is it inhabited?” they said to each other and laughed — and then they did not laugh. What came to their minds a hundred thousand miles and more into space — “half way to the moon” they put it — what came to their minds was the life on that little, lonely, floating planet; that tiny raft in the enormous, empty night. “Is it inhabited?”

The medieval notion of the earth put man at the center of everything. The nuclear notion of the earth put him nowhere — beyond the range of reason even — lost in absurdity and war. This latest notion may have other consequences. Formed as it was in the minds of heroic voyagers who were also men, it may remake our image of mankind. No longer that preposterous figure at the center, no longer that degraded and degrading victim off at the margins of reality and blind with blood, man may at last become himself.

To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold — brothers who know now they are truly brothers. 

There was that hope in those often ugly days of ’68.   And now, fifty-one years later—–?

Notes from a quiet (and perhaps flooded) street

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Might one offer an observation about the extensive coverage of rainfall by the television weatherfolk?    They do an excellent job when weather is awful except for one thing.

What does it mean when they say the Missouri River is expected to crest at—for example—32.3 feet at Jefferson City?   Will there be 32 feet of water over the Jefferson City Airport?  Or in the River Bottom area west of the Capitol?  Will the community garden in what once was Cedar City (and the nearby Highway 63) have 32 feet of water over it?

Uh, no.

When we did flood stories at the Missourinet, we never used numbers like that.  Here’s why.

Flood stage at Jefferson City is 23 feet.   That means that a Corps of Engineers river gauge is someplace that measures the bank of the Missouri River at 723 feet above sea level.  The altitude changes as the river flows east or downhill. (Bank full at Washington is only 720 feet, or “20 feet” as is commonly said.)  Any water higher than that means the river is out of its banks.

So, 32 feet means the river is nine feet above bank full at Jefferson City.  It always seemed to us to be more meaningful to report the river was expected to crest nine feet over flood stage.  And a flood stage at 30.2 feet at Washington means the river will be about ten feet above bank full there.  Nine feet and ten feet are more meaningful to people who are five-feet-ten inches tall than thirty-two feet.

The record flood crest at Jefferson City in 1993, by the way was 38.65 feet, or as we reported it, 15.65 feet over flood stage.   There’s a graphic example of the accuracy of reporting flooding using the 15.65 feet standard we used.  Go to the restaurant at the airport and look at the markings on the door which record the levels of various floods.  The mark for the 1993 flood is almost at the ceiling level of the restaurant, about sixteen feet up, not thirty-two.

Having gotten that out of my craw—-

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A few days before the end of the legislative session, your observer watched some of the debate in the House about whether undocumented immigrants living in Missouri should be denied in-state tuition and financial aid when attending our state colleges and universities.

Among those banned from paying in-state tuition and financial assistance using tax dollars were the DACA people, children brought here at a young age by their undocumented parents.  The legislation says the state universities can use their own resources to provide that assistance or to make up the difference between in-state tuition and international student tuition.

The Columbia Daily Tribune had a story about then noting there were 6,000 people in Missouri approved for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or eligible for it.

 

A thought occurred during the discussion: Why couldn’t our universities, state or private, offer a course for those students that would lead to American citizenship, online for adults and especially for DACA high school students and current college students?  Might solve a few problems.

Might not be a bad idea to have a lot of our non-DACA students enroll, too.

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Come to think of it:  The capitol is awash in third-graders each spring, students who are taking their courses in Missouri government.   They sit in the visitors’ galleries for a few minutes and are introduced by their legislator and given a round of applause and then go downstairs to look at the old stage coach and the mammoth tooth.

It will be nine years before they graduate, months ahead of casting their first vote.  That’s a long time to remember what they saw and learned as third-graders.

I THINK I can remember the name of my teacher and the building I attended in third grade.  But that didn’t make me qualified to cast a learned vote the first time I had the chance to do so.

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I was driven out of retirement this year to lobby for the steamboat museum bill in the legislature.  The opportunity to help do something great for my town and my state forced me back into coat and tie more times in the last four months than I have worn them in the last four years. I found that I was regularly turning the wrong way to get to a meeting with a legislator in the most efficient way.  I had forgotten my way around the Capitol.

I confess there are some things I liked about being a lobbyist and being back in the capitol while the legal sausage was being made.  In all of my years as a reporter, my contacts with legislators were arms-length business arrangements.  As a lobbyist I got to spend a half-hour or more—sometimes less—in the office talking to lawmakers. And I met some REALLY interesting people, particularly the members of this year’s freshman class.

But, boy, did I miss my guilt-free naps. (A few times I hid behind a column in a side gallery of the House and snatched a doze—but those instances sometimes ran afoul of a school group that came in to see five minutes of debate that I’m sure didn’t teach them a darned thing about their government in action.  Or inaction.) And living by my own clock.  And going around in tennis shoes all day.  And going to the Y three days a week for the fellowship there that replaced the relationships I had while I was working.

But the chambers are dark and cool now.  And my naps have returned.  Until January when we take a stronger, better organized run at building a National Steamboat Museum in Jefferson City.  You’re welcome to join the effort.

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It was interesting to know that some things haven’t changed at all.  About three weeks before the end of the session, the place starts to get kind of squirrelly.  That’s about when the House gets all huffy because the Senate hasn’t turned fully to debating House-passed bills. And the Senate gets in a snit because the House hasn’t switched to Senate-passed bills.  And the budget isn’t done with the deadline looming.

 

In the second week, a purported compromise budget comes out and the chambers start and stop on no particular schedule depending on who’s filibustering what bill or which chamber thinks its conferees didn’t stand up for their chamber’s priorities, and whether to stop the entire process to have more conferences on a small part of a multi-billion dollar budget, and the Senate decides a “day” can actually last until sunrise the next morning or longer.

And the last week when legislators are like desert-crossing cattle who catch a whiff of water in the distance and scramble to get a bill dead a month ago resurrected and added to something moderately akin to the topic, thereby adding to the legend that “nothing is dead in the Senate until the gavel falls at 6 p.m. on the last Friday.”   And, oh, what a blessing that falling gavel is.

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The end of a session today is nothing compared to the days when the odd-year sessions ended at MIDNIGHT on June 15, usually with a “midnight special” appropriations bill just before adjournment that created funding for new programs approved during the session. The only people who knew what was in it likely were the people who hay-baled it together in the closing hours. Pandemonium hardly describes those nights when everybody was beyond exhaustion and more than a few were seriously—shall we say “impaired?”—because of social visits to numerous offices which were well-equipped with adult liquids.

 

And at midnight, many lawmakers went out to the Ramada Inn to celebrate surviving another session.  The Capitol press corps would start writing stories about the session, a process that was not nearly as much fun as falling in the swimming pool at the Ramada. Both groups would pack it in about sunrise—except for those of us who had newscasts all day Saturday.

One of the best things the legislature ever did was change the adjournment time to 6 p.m. on a Friday night.

Now—-

If we could only get rid of term limits now—–

 

A t-shirt story

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I have a t-shirt that says “Missouri. It’s not all that bad.”

Some folks laugh at it.  Others just shake their heads.

A new survey indicates why those opposite reactions are both accurate.  A new survey says we’re keeping our money (“because the people know better how to spend their money than government does,” as the legislative cliché goes).  But what’s it costing us?

A personal finance company in Washington, D.C. peppers our mailbox regularly with surveys on local and state issues. One of the most recent looks at where Missourians rank when it comes to return on investment of their tax dollars.

Wallet Hub says Missouri is the sixth-lowest in total taxes per capita (meaning the population 18 and older).

But we don’t rank as highly in some key things the company also measured.

Our economy isn’t bad—19th, rated on the median household income, annual job-growth rate, the share of people living below poverty line, economic mobility, unemployment and underemployment rates.

We’re 25th in education, a measurement of the quality of our public university system. The company ranked 500 of the 951 public and private universities in another survey.  Truman State was the highest ranking public university in Missouri and it ranked 107th among the private and public schools. Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla was 140. UMKC was 200th, the University of Missouri (apparently Columbia) was 223.  Schools were measured on Student selectivity, cost and financing, faculty resources, campus safety, campus experience, educational outcomes, and career outcomes.

We were 29th in public schools rankings.  Among categories in that ranking were the number of blue ribbon schools per capita, high school graduation rate among low-income students, projected high school graduation rate increase between 2017-18 and 2031-32 school years, dropout rate, math test scores, reading test scores, median SAT and ACT scores, and pupil-teacher ratios.

Missouri ranked 35th in health, measured in terms of hospital beds per 1,000 people, the quality of public hospitals—using data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, average life expectancy at birth, births, infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births, average health insurance premium, and the quality of health care.

The numbers for safety are worse. We’re 42nd in safety. The ranking is based on our per-capita violent crime and property crime rates and vehicle fatalities per 100-million miles traveled.

In infrastructure and pollution quality—only seven states are worse. The poor quality of our roads and bridges is well-known.  But other factors enter in: average commute time, parks and recreation expenditures, highway spending per driver, air pollution, and water quality and the share of the population that receives fluoridated water through public water supplies.

Not sure what we should expect as the sixth lowest in total taxes per capita.  Probably not surprising that we’re only average at best in some categories and among the worst in others.

But everybody has to be someplace.  And Missourians seem to be happy to be in the lower third of state in some important areas.

King Canute, Charles Wilson, and the dangers of rejecting change

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We have a lot of misquotes that we like to quote to prove our points in arguments and discussions.

One arose when Charles E. Wilson was appointed by President Eisenhower as Secretary of Defense. Wilson was the President of General Motors and his position triggered intense questioning during his confirmation hearing.  When he was asked if he could, as Secretary of Defense, make a decision that would be bad for GM, he said he could although he could not think of such a situation happening because “for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa.”

Through the years his statement has been turned into the rather arrogant and erroneous quote that “What’s good for General Motors is good for the U.S.” It came to mind recently when GM announced layoffs and plant closures affecting thousands of workers in the United States and Canada.

The President has threatened GM with various penalties if it doesn’t reverse course and keep running factories and keep employing people making vehicles that consumers aren’t buying in enough quantity to justify their continued production.

It’s the equivalent of President Woodrow Wilson in 1915 ordering the thirteen-thousand manufacturers of wagons and buggies and their supporting industries (horseshoes, harnesses, buggy whips) to maintain production while people drove by their factories in Model T’s.

Paul Turner has recalled in his Adaptive Insights Blog that there were 4,600 carriage manufacturers in 1914, the year after Henry Ford fired up his first production line.  About a decade later there were only 150 of those companies and just 88 in 1929.  “Companies that tried to hang on to the past, or simply apply old world skills and technology to the new world simply failed to exist,” he wrote. One company that recognized the future and embraced the idea that it was not in the business of making wagons and buggies, but was in the transportation business was Studebaker. But changing economics, market demands, and public taste eventually drove Studebaker out of business, along with its late partner, Packard.

Think of the badges that have disappeared in recent years—Plymouth, Oldsmobile, Saturn, Mercury.  We let them slip away with some minor mourning, not paying as much attention as we might have to what their disappearance meant.  But now Ford has announced it’s getting out of the passenger car business because of changing public demand. And General Motors has ignited public awareness dramatically with its announcement that the products it makes, while good products, are not what the public wants in enough numbers to justify continued production and before GM becomes another Studebaker-Packard, it has to reprogram itself for what tomorrow’s consumer wants.  And tomorrow’s consumer appears to be leaning more toward being a rider than a driver and increasingly turning attention to electricity rather than gasoline.

We have lived through numerous non-weather climate changes and that is happening with the auto industry—worldwide—might just be the most eye-catching example.  The sprouting of big windmills and wind farms is an unmistakable indication that the way we get our energy in ten years will be much different from the way we get it today.  A former Sierra Club CEO, Carl Pope is quoted by Theenergymix.com saying “Real markets are poised to savagely strand assets, upset expectations, overturn long-established livelihoods, and leave a trail of wreckage behind them.”

Some will see the words “Sierra Club” and immediately dismiss Pope’s observations as drivel. But remember how quickly the wagon makers and their extensive support industries that employed thousands of people disappeared.  Pope wrote in 2015, just three years ago of, “fossil fuels, with coal companies declaring bankruptcy at the rate of one per month, stock exchanges delisting their stocks, and oil and gas beginning to lose market value.”

Woodrow Wilson probably could have gotten a lot of votes in some places if he promised to revitalize the horse-drawn wagon industry. But by then, Lydston Hornsted had driven his 200 hp Benz faster than 124 mph, pretty well proving one horsepower was not the future of transportation.

Change is not coming in transportation and energy alone, it is here and it is gaining momentum.

Paul Turner set forth three lessons from the transition to the car:

  1. “Only those who embrace creative destruction will make the shift…The carriage makers that didn’t invest in retooling their production failed. Most were too busy protecting their existing, dying, revenue streams. The same holds true today….”
  2. “The transition is much faster than anyone expects.” He cites the death of the wagon industry 1914-1929 and remarks, “That’s akin to a staple of the year 2000 sliding into the dust today—or perhaps today’s cars essentially being replaced by self-driving cars by the mid-2020’s. The pace of change can be disconcerting. Those that have spent their entire careers in a single industry invariably underestimate the breadth, depth, and speed of change. The speed of disruption and the unwillingness to put aside antiquated technology is a potent combination capable of bringing organizations to their knees much faster than thought possible. Innovators like Google with a self-driving vehicle, and Tesla Motors with an electric vehicle designed from the ground up understand this, while the old automakers do not.”
  3. “New innovators emerge out of nowhere, faster than the old world leaders expect.” Forty-six hundred carriage makers were in business in 1914. A dozen years later there were 3.7-million cars and trucks on the roads, some of them driving past a lot of shuttered carriage factories.

He concludes, “Holding on to the past is more risky than embracing the future.”

The Twelfth Century English Historian Henry of Huntingdon told of King Canute setting his throne by the seashore and commanding the tide to stop before it wet his chair and his robes.  Moments later the wet king rose and turned to his followers and told them, “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.”

The tide is here and it is going to keep coming and General Motors is the latest “king” to realize sitting still is to become submerged by the future.  There is pain in change but history tells us that ignoring change or ordering us to ignore that change is asking for a mouth of salt water at best, drowning at worst.

What would you save?

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We caught some video a few weeks ago of North Carolinians who had fled their homes and who had taken refuge at the Charlotte Motor Speedway, which was providing parking space for trailers and RVs, camping facilities, and food service to hurricane refugees.  Some of the folks were interviewed about what they had brought with them.

One woman’s pickup truck contained a small chest freezer with all of her home’s frozen food, ready for hookup to an electrical supply.  She also brought along a generator.  A family of seven brought five dogs.  One family brought some children’s drawings and a blanket with family handprints on it. Another family brought things it would use while away from home; the father had stayed at the house in a rural area to prevent looting.

Watching news coverage of various and recent natural disasters such as forest fires and hurricanes and floods, we started thinking about a group consensus exercise we have done from time to time.

If you had a few minutes or a few hours, to flee from your endangered home, what would you take?   We are assuming your first priority is yourself and any other family members.  But after that?  Here’s a list of possibilities.  Feel free to add others in the comment section below.

Computers

Wallet

Passport

Pets

Cell phone

Coin collection

Television(s)

Clothes

Children’s (Grandchildren’s ) Refrigerator drawings

Family archives

Financial records

Video games

Family heirlooms

Jewelry

Medicines or medical supplies

Wedding dress and/or album

Art collection (prints, posters, originals, etc.)

Favorite furniture

Mom’s recipes

Cameras

An additional vehicle or vehicles

Antiques

Baseball card collection

Food

Guns

Family Bible

Insurance policies

Sleeping bags

Tools

I’ve run consensus exercises with groups using a similar list.  Admittedly the exercise assumes there is at least SOME time to grab things although many disasters such as house fires in the middle of the night require instant escape in whatever sleeping attire is being worn—or whatever clothing can be grabbed on the way out.

The answers show generational differences.  Younger people are more likely to take the material things—the television set, the pets, the tools, the jewelry.  Older folks are likely to make memories the priority—pictures, recordings, some family heirlooms.  Younger folks grab things they can replace. Older folks grab things that cannot be replaced.

When I was a high school freshman, I dashed out the front door of my house one morning to get on the school bus.  Six hours later a man met me in the principal’s office to tell me that my parents were okay but all we had left were the clothes we were wearing, the family car, and whatever was in my gym locker.  A person never forgets what was lost in a disaster. A small nugget of fear deep inside never goes away.  And sometimes people spend the rest of their lives trying to recover what was lost (which is why I have a complete set of Fran Striker’s Lone Ranger novels on the bookshelf five feet from where I am sitting).

Many people have their family photographs, documents, and all kinds of other things stored in the cloud, which might alter the disaster-grab priorities.  But a lot of us haven’t gone there yet.

There are three places in our home where we keep family archives, one of them a basement cabinet filled with thousands and thousands of slides.  I’ve made up my mind that if I had the time, those would be the first things to go in the minivan—after the second row seats had been removed, if possible—then the computer. What would you save, beyond yourself, if you had the time to save something?   It’s worth thinking about.

Because we never know.

 

Notes from a quiet street—October, 2018

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Get your speculation machines turned on.   Someone asked the other day, “If Josh Hawley is elected to the U. S. Senate in November, who do you think Governor Parson will appoint to finish Hawley’s term?”

Well…..?

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In a long life, a person is likely to make some interesting friends.  Well, all friends are interesting or they wouldn’t be friends, would they?  And if you’re lucky, you get to go to interesting places that broaden your perspective on the world and your place in it.  Some who read these entries might be scornful of those, such as your correspondent, who can see beyond the concrete, steel, and glass of the big cities and can cherish the big and the small worlds that surround us.

A friend in Indianapolis is the Executive Director of the Indianapolis Prize, the world’s leading prize for animal conservation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UARcO8jTVk0

This year’s prize went to Dr. Russell Mittemeier.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=207&v=OqeoeDg-CTo

Harrison Ford flew to Indianapolis to attend the awards dinner.  Nice guy, said those who met him.   Why are we surprised to learn that big-time people we admire from afar are nice?

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In my news director days I sometimes reminded myself and my reporters that it was not always necessary to do a story about an event if nothing was done or said worth reporting.  If a committee or a commission or a council met for three hours but did nothing newsworthy, there was no reason for any of us to waste our listeners’ time by saying a meeting was held and then trying to find something in our notes or on our recorders to write or let people hear that had no purpose other than to justify our presence at the meeting.  “It’s just three hours of your life that you’ll never get back,” I sometimes counseled the news staff.  “Don’t spend any more time trying to find something not worth the time to put on the air.”

Somebody else had the same philosophy a long time ago. From the Jefferson City Daily Capital News of May 10, 1945:

Gov. Phil M. Donnelly yesterday held his first press conference in four days but it was unproductive of printing news.

We were told by a reporter who covered him that Donnelly used to hold two news conferences a day. One in the morning was for reporters from afternoon newspapers.  The one in the afternoon was for reporters from morning papers. He had more news conferences in a month than some governors have in a year.  Or two.

We also had a lot more reporters covering the capitol.

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Some of the saddest places are baseball diamonds in city parks and baseball parks in the big cities when there’s no more baseball to be played. Especially by January. With a little snow. Even hope has left.

But we’ll find it in Arizona and Florida in February.

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A restaurant sign seen from across the room recently:

It raises a question.  Does the sign mean the place isn’t all that dangerous?  Or does it mean that people who eat there live longer?

I rolled the dice.  I had a big breakfast.  So far, so good.

The last eden

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There were three zebras munching on the grass outside our patio on the edge of the Ngorongoro Crater on our last morning in Tanzania.  Monkeys frolicked on the sidewalk as we walked to the lodge for breakfast.  And we realized after two weeks of civilized travel in dangerous places what an amazing adventure we had had.  And it is likely we would never return. But we took a lot of pictures that we will look at time and again because—–

Well, because we were someplace magic, I guess.  That might be the closest we can come to describing being in another world, one that wasn’t a human world.

Imagine being in a place so sublime that you can sit on your patio after dinner and watch what we were able to watch.

It doesn’t take long to realize why Serengeti National Park in Tanzania is called “The Last Eden.”  But dangers lurk in these places.  Not long after we got home, we saw a news article that a tourist at a park where we watched zebras and gazelles graze was killed by a hippo.  We were told that the hippos came around our sleeping places in that park late at night to graze.  They are very territorial and surprisingly quick.  We were in a boat on a Kenyan lake one day and we made sure we kept our distance.

So did the hippo.

Visit all the zoos that you want to visit, but until you have seen the broken line of hundreds of families of approaching elephants stretching to the horizon on your left to a similar line headed to the horizon on your right, these elephants crossing the road twenty yards in front of you, you have not seen elephants.

Until you see a black line in the distance and realize it is thousands of migrating Wildebeests, you cannot imagine the Great Plains in our country as our ancestors in covered wagons saw buffalo.  Nor can you imagine the grasses of that era until you have gazed at the grass of the Serengeti that extends as far as you can see.

 

See the giraffe in a zoo and you have not seen a giraffe until you see a half-dozen of them gliding in their awkward dignity across an open area, nor can you appreciate the magnificence of these creatures until you walk past one of them munching on the leaves of the tree over your head as you head to your room from the dining hall.

And seeing a lion in its zoo “habitat” is not really seeing a lion.  Peering into the tall, tan, grass trying to differentiate between what is grass and what is fur, listening to it eat and then watching something  of powerful grace emerge and walk away, perhaps with a dismissive glance toward you, that is seeing a lion. But it’s often hard to see them, and that’s the way they like it.

For most of us, zoos are where we can appreciate these animals. In some cases, zoos are places where these animals have their greatest hopes of survival as species and we should appreciate the people who want to make sure we see something more than skeletons of extinct animals in our natural history museums.

But friends, if you ever have the opportunity to see them where they really live, save your money for however long it takes to afford the trip, and take it. We signed up for a Central Bank Classic Club tour, knowing we would spend hours in an aluminum tube high in the air, sometimes so crowded we couldn’t stretch out our legs all the way, hoping our tray tables didn’t cut us in half because a dolt in front insisted on lowering his (or her) seat back all the way.  We knew we might get little sleep, would eat microwaved food (which isn’t all that bad) and snacks and might get to watch a movie to help pass the time. More than seventeen hours on three flights each way, and vehicle travel for two weeks that often made us dearly appreciate seat belts might be discouraging to some.  But every inconvenience was worth every penny—and then some.

We endured the worst roads we’ve ever traveled to get to some of the most magnificent areas we have ever seen. (Come along with us for several minutes on a stretch of road that led to one of our lodges. Understand that our guide, James, did an excellent job making our ride as smooth as possible by swerving all over the road to minimize the beating we were taking).  It is worth noting that the tires on our vehicles were TWELVE-ply radials.  The tires you and I drive on our tame Missouri roads are four-ply. Some of our party who wore the wrist-bands that measure how many steps are taken in a day (10,000 is considered healthy) were seeing numbers beyond twenty and thirty-thousand. One even got a reading of 42,000—because of the daily bouncing, twisting, turning and grabbing the OS handle in our Land Cruisers.  At the end of the day we could understand how tennis shoes feel after they’ve been through the clothes dryer. We were surprised when we got home to see that we had each lost about five pounds although we had eaten well.

But, oh, my goodness.  The things we saw—some of them things that are disappearing in the wild.

The rhinoceros is under dire threat from poachers who are killing them for their horns that are ground into a powder and sold for high prices in some countries because of the belief the powder cures cancer or hangovers or improves virility or produces a cocaine-like high.   This is the only time we saw rhinos and these were white rhinos.  We saw no black rhinos because they are considered critically endangered and only about 5,500 are known in all of Africa.

Marvel at the trees, the Acacias with their leaves that seem to grow as clouds over the top branches, but also with thorns similar to the thorns on our locust trees—a reminder that in the wild, beauty and danger often are the same.   And sometimes it’s not the thorns that are the most dangerous things in those trees.

No, we did not get out of our Range Rover to go stand under the tree to take this picture.  On trips such as these, we worship the telephoto lens and the high-megapixel camera.  In fact, we worshipped them more than 3,500 times, probably and we worshipped the big memory card when we got home.

But the eaters and the eaten are facing uncertainty.  The National Geographic we bought at Downtown Book and Toy after our trip had an article about Kenyan farmers who were crowding the habitat of the magnificent creatures we saw poisoning the animals who were there in the first place to protect their crops and livestock.

Did you know that you can tell if an elephant is right-handed or left-handed?  Yep.  And that leads us to the difference between the elephants we saw in Africa compared to those we would see if we ever go to India.  African elephants such as this fellow (and we were a safe distance from him, too), both male and female, have tusks. Asian elephants don’t all have tusks. Those that do are males.  About half of the Asian lady elephants have tusks but they don’t have any pulp in them and they’re called tushes, a word that has a different meaning in our country.  something else.

Yes, the tusks are weapons against predators. But they’re mostly used for foraging, or digging, or stripping bark off trees or just moving things out of the way. And you can tell if an elephant is right-or-left handed (tusked?) by checking which tusk is shorter.

We saw the “Big Five,” the animals the big game hunters most covet—Lion, Cape Buffalo, Rhinoceros, elephant, leopard—throughout our safaris although we saw the rhinos only that one day and leopards were elusive. We didn’t start seeing them until our last couple of days.  We saw them from a safe distance, too, and we wouldn’t have seen them at all if our guides and their trained eyes didn’t spot them for us.

Leopards like to take their food up a tree to eat it.  Otherwise a lion will take it away from them, we were told.  We knew we were in leopard territory when our guide pointed out the horns of a former gazelle dangling from a tree branch.

And if we needed any reminders that the furry friends at home are related to these beautiful, lethal, creatures, this one reminded us that a cat like this, awakened from a nap and ready for action, acts just like our lap-warmer at home.

Okay, that’s enough for this edition of the summer vacation slide show.

Find a way to do what we did.  Find a way to explore cultures and economies and habitats far different from ours and witness some animals who dismiss you as long as you are in your vehicle but who will gladly and quickly kill you if you step outside.

You won’t find anybody named “Puff” out there.

 

 

See it before it’s too late

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Sunrise.  Masai Mara National Reserve, Kenya. 6:55 a.m. July 23, 2018. It is a winter day in Kenya, according to the animals who float above the animals below.

There is no time in nature; there is only light and darkness.  There are no calendars, no seasons in nature; there is only instinctive behavior driven by heat and cold, dry and wet. There is no war in nature; there is only those who eat and those who are eaten—and all ultimately fall into the latter category.

But it is not the lion or the leopard, the angry elephant or hippo or rhino that is the most dangerous animal in those places. Only the most intelligent of nature’s creations—and therefore the most dangerous of nature’s creations—divide the world into measurable segments called time.  Only the most intelligent—and most dangerous of nature’s creations—apply names to places, to the cycles of heat and cold, dry and wet, define the world around them in terms of beauty, and declare war on each other and sometimes on nature itself.

There are a few places in the world that prompt such reflections by the most intelligent and dangerous species. And those places are endangered by these most intelligent creatures who long ago abandoned an understanding that nature is a place for living and have accepted the idea that it is, instead, a place for having.

We have returned from places to which our fellow species have bestowed names: Aberdares, Naivasha, Nakuru, Masai Mara, Amboseli, Tarangire, Ngorongora, and Serengeti and in this and succeeding and perhaps irregular entries we propose to tell you about them.

But being part of the most intelligent and most dangerous species imposes a challenge because these places must be absorbed as much as seen. In the end, we suppose, there is a desperate hope that our species will—before it is too late—understand that we need places where there is no time, no seasons, no names.

There were times when we realized we were seeing some things reminiscent of what the a-westering pioneers in our own country might have witnessed when crossing the Great Plains and its high, tan, grass more than 150 years ago.  The wildebeest migration was under way, their numbers blackening the horizon as the American Bison must have blackened our horizon then.

In our recent travels, we have gone from cities so crowded, so deadlocked by social and economic structures, so stifling of life itself, places with no horizons, to places where the heart may expand in a seemingly limitless world.  Our species needs places where we are not forced to live inwardly but where we are free to fill national lungs (a phrase that originated with former Missouri Senator George Graham Vest when he defended Yellowstone from a plan by the federal government to let private commercial interests develop the area).

One of our group asked one of our guides in Tanzania if the country had natural resources it could exploit to build its economy.  “We have oil,” said the guide. “But we prefer to leave it underground where it belongs because refining oil causes wars.”  Tanzania uses hydropower, which supplies a lot, but not enough, of its electrical needs. It is extensively exploring development of biomass, particularly in agricultural areas, and it is aggressively moving toward the use of solar power, not surprising in a country with 2,800 to 3,500 hours of sunshine every year. 

We stayed in lodges with limited hours of electric lights and limited hours of hot water because generators are used; no power lines are constructed across these lands. But these lodges had seemingly unlimited numbers of employees who walked with us between the main building and our rooms to keep us from crossing the paths of the animals who freely roamed the area: the giraffe along the walkway, the zebras and the antelope and the monkeys that roamed freely in our presence.  And especially the hippos that came out of the water late at night to graze near our rooms.

In Tanzania and in Kenya, at least, there are some who realize some places are more important to the national character and to the future well-being of all species than what is beneath the soil.  All of us need to see these places. And if our arrogant intelligence will let us learn from these places, perhaps we will learn there is an innate value to us in them that once lost can never be regained.

We are the smartest and therefore the most dangerous of all animals because we can think in abstract terms.  Instead of communicating to others of our species, as the wild creatures we saw communicate to their own species, “Lion, run!” we are able to think, “Lion. What a great trophy,” or “Rhino. Horn.  Better Sex.”  Or “Land. Resources beneath it. Lions and rhinos and giraffes and wildebeest are dispensable. There is money here.”

The ancient scriptures tell us that God gave man dominion over the earth and all of the creatures created earlier. And they tell us that man and woman lived in harmony with those creatures—until they ate from the tree of knowledge and in doing so destroyed Eden.  But they became the smartest animals.

There are too many who do not understand there is a difference between “dominion” and “domination.”

Domination is an excuse.  Dominion is an obligation.  Domination is a rationale for selfish and uncaring consumption. Dominion is a responsibility to save, to preserve, to create that which is lasting and which touches the spirit. Domination is short-sighted.  Dominion is a long-term understanding that we, the smartest animals, cannot survive in ignorance of and disrespect for the land that give us life.

Domination is a destructive narrowness of immediate gratification. Dominion is an understanding that there are, as Aldo Leopold wrote, “things in this world more important than dollar signs and ciphers.”

If you trust your fellow intelligent species to accept Leopold’s words, you have no worries.  Otherwise, do what we have done.   See it before it is too late.

The emerging crisis

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Analysis of any number of mass events in human history will turn up any number of causes but beneath the surface motivations, the root cause is often—in one way or another—resources.

Exploration is often motivated by a search for resources: silk, gold, oil, slaves.  Wars often are the result of a search for resources or access to them.  Religious activity is often motivated by resources or the lack of them.

Our social and archaeological visits to the Southwest that have generated those evaluations and have exposed us to a coming crisis is shaping up there today—and there are signs that the crisis is not in that part of the country alone.  There are worries in Missouri already.

Our work in finding and recording ancient pueblo societies in the Four Corners area has involved an exploration of their movements and the reasons for their movements as well as the apparent reasons for some of their behaviors.

The ancient pueblo people who created the cliff dwellings and their fates appear less mysterious than popular culture portrays when the archaeological evidence is examined.  Your correspondent has no scholarly credentials to offer to this discussion, but we have listened to and read numbers discussions by scholars.  (Kind of like, “I’m not an archaeologist but I stayed at a hotel full of them once” type of thing.)

One line of thought is that those people a thousand years ago left the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings area and the great cities such as Chaco Canyon’s communities because they used up the resources.  A combination of increased population produced by improved diets and a 45-year drought forced people to abandon their river-valley dwellings and move to alcoves in cliffs that were more secure in increasingly troubled times and offered better protection for the food supplies they harvested in the valley and on the cliff tops.  As things became more desperate there seemed to have been a rise in religious activity, some of it sacrificial, in an effort to please the gods that had withdrawn the means of survival for some reason.   At the same time, the various competing societies became more militant and combative in their quest for the limited resources available.

It’s a human story repeated many times throughout the world.  The availability of resources motivates us as a species, often in ways that overcome reason and humanity.

There are those who think a crisis that could produce conflicts at various levels is shaping up with water. We already are seeing skirmishes.  You might have noticed some already.  Some old-timers will recall the upheaval that was caused by a proposed South Dakota plan to pump water from the Missouri River to Wyoming’s coal-producing areas where it would be mixed with coal to produce a slurry that would flow in another pipeline to powerplants in the southeast.

The issue is growing serious in the Southwest again.

The newspaper in Casa Grande, Arizona that we read a few days ago carried an Associated Press story that the flow of the Colorado River, “the most important waterway in the American Southwest,” is almost twenty percent less than it was before a drought now in its eighteenth year.

Researchers Brad Udall and Jonathan Overpeck, in The Journal of Water Resources, note seven states and part of Mexico are served by the Colorado’s 246,000 mile basin.  The area includes forty million people and 6,300 acres of farmland.  But the two great impoundments from which water is drawn by various communities and other entities are stressed.  They find water storage levels at Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam, and at Lake Powell, behind the Glen Canyon Dam is  forty-two and forty-six percent.  There are fears that Lake Mead could drop so far that cuts will soon have to be made in water deliveries to Arizona and Nevada, the first states to feel the shortage under multistate water use agreements.

(How far has the water level in Lake Mead dropped?  Consider the town of St. Thomas, Nevada.  It was flooded in 1938 by water backing up behind Hoover Dam.  At one time, water about sixty feet deep covered the tallest remaining structures on the site.  Today, you can walk the streets of St. Thomas, Nevada again.  It’s on National Park Service Land.)

What’s causing this?  Udall and Overpeck say precipitation was 4.6 percent below historic averages in the fifteen years through 2014.  The temperatures during that period were 1.6 degrees above historic averages.  That, they calculate, amounts to about two-thirds of the decline.  They think most of the rest is the result of a warming atmosphere that causes more evaporation from the snowbanks, plants, and soil.

The long-term outlook:  Rain and snowfall will have to increase by FOURTEEN PERCENT FOR THE REST OF THE 21st century to offset the effect of anticipated rising temperatures.

Arizona is considering what to do.  Reporters Ethan Millman and Morgan Wheeler of the Casa Grande Dispatch wrote in the same issue that Arizona leaders have started a push to abolish a 2001 prohibition against letting some people drink recycled wastewater by the end of the year.  A state regulatory council has to approve the plan to turn toilet, shower, and other treated water used for drinking. Officials know a substantial change of public perception will be needed and the recycling is more likely to be used in smaller towns rather than the major cities of Tucson and Phoenix.

Reclaimed water already is vital to a major part of Arizona’s popularity.  They write that eighty million gallons of reclaimed water is used on the golf courses of just one county, Maricopa, home of Phoenix, EVERY DAY.  A ski area near Flagstaff makes snow out of it.  One vineyard uses it to irrigate the grape plants that ultimately produce wine.

Not a worry in Missouri?  Oh, but it is.

And if it were not for federal laws four or more decades ago there would be major, major problems.  The Clean Water Act forced cities to stop dumping sewage directly into our rivers and their tributaries.  So, in truth, Missourians already are drinking former sewage that was processed before it went into the rivers and is processed when it is drawn out of them.  We who live along the river cannot collect enough rain water nor drill enough deep water wells to sustain our homes, our businesses, and our health without those processes.  Or our golf courses.

The Corps of Engineers worries about the inflow of water from the Missouri River upstream mountain-snowmelt and precipitation—but those areas also are dealing with long-term drought.  The impoundments on the Missouri not only provide commercial value in the Dakotas and Montana, they also provide the water needed to maintain navigation on the Missouri and, ultimately, on the Mississippi Rivers that is vital to a major segment of our economy.

Then there is this:

We started seeing news reports in August 2009 that the Ozark Aquifer is drying up. A United States Geological Survey report that month that a four-year study at Missouri Southern State University indicated the aquifer could go dry in places “if demand increases by as little as one percent annually over the next 50 years” and that it could be emptied near some cities.  Among the first to feel the shortage: Carthage and Noel, towns with industries that use a lot of water.  Joplin and Miami Oklahoma would be next, then Pittsburg, Kansas.

The study covered 7,340 square miles in Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, and Oklahoma. As of 2006, eight-seven percent of the water drawn from the aquifer was used in Missouri—

8,531,520 cubic feet per day. There are about 7.5 gallons in each cubic foot of water.

A year later, John Goldsmith at Emporia State University reported groundwater in the

region’s aquifers was being polluted by coal beds in the Tri-State area and other factors. But industry and state government actions were slowing the contamination.  Remediation and cleanup, he said, is expensive and difficult.

John Thomas, who bills himself on his website as “The Mad Hedge Fund Trader,” wrote in 2010, “If you think that the upcoming energy shortage is going to be bad, it will pale in comparison to the next water crisis.”

We spend a lot of time discussing this or that crisis here or in another nations. But we have one developing right under our feet.  And unlike those ancient people of the Colorado plateau, we can’t just walk away to another place.

(photo credit: raisethestakes.com)