Category Archives: environment

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)