Not again ... Oh Las Vegas (10/2/2017)

Well, it happened again.  Another mass shooting.  What the fuck!
It is a horrible thing that happened, a thing that should never have happened.  I am absolutely devastated.

At least the gunman was not Muslim, nor some other minority; it seems to be a lone wolf.  Maybe an angry white guy (64 year old), who knows?  Not that this make it any better, nor that this is a thing to celebrate.  Actually, for me being a white guy of 64, it makes me feel horrible.  I know I am writing this way too early to come to real conclusions but I need to get this off my mind.

While I am glued to the TV trying to find out more about the crap that went on in Las Vegas, these two guys have not worry in the world.  They were fed and walked.  Daddy is home with a migraine and the news does not help.

It is amazing to watch TV and watch what went on and how everyone analyze it.  I just hear the automatic gun fire and wonder how people get these guns.  Honestly, you do not need them to hunt but you can use it to mow down people like I mow my lawn, but then he did it from a high-rise motel room.  

Readers of my blogs know that while I am not a hunter, I am pro hunting.  I am a naturalist/ecologist who believes like my hero Aldo Leopold that because of the extirpation of the natural predators we need to hunt deer, but we do not need automatic rifles to hunt for deer.  We use those to kill people as we saw last night!

Education is for weaklings, really? (9/26/2017)

As I have written about before, I spend a lot of time in cars while traveling throughout the state.  I have started to listen to podcasts in order to avoid having to be totally disgusted or angry by the time I get out of the car.  There are so many holes where there is no reasonable radio to keep me awake during my drives and I am forced to listen to extreme right-wing radio or even some religious stations.  I have written about this before (see my post <here>) and those podcasts are a great antidote for that.  I did not go in too much detail when I wrote my post on March 3, 2015, but here it is one and a half year later and I think things have gotten worse rather than better.  There are a lot of triumphant right-wingers now that try to whip up there base even more.  No wonder what is happening in our country lately.  

You may counter that this photograph has little to do with this blog post, but it was taken on my most recent trips to give two stormwater workshops out in the western part of Virginia.  I always take time out to take a walk or a bike ride on one of the rail to trail parks.  It is a great way to de-stress, relax, and blow off steam after the ridiculous statements on right-wing radio.  This one was on the New River Trail.

I am not really talking about what I encountered in the western part of Virginia.  Absolutely not!  I am really thinking about life in the U.S. in general.  Since March 2015 we have gone through an election.  Little did we know where that would lead us.  I reported about one of those incidents when I wrote about my visit to Charlottesville after the riots, something I could not have predicted back then.  In addition, we have had a travel ban that is being renewed, a war on poor people, on healthcare, on the uninsured, on the elderly, on Muslims, on blacks, on transgender people, on marriage equality, on education, on the environment, on the climate, I can go on!  

On my way back home the other day, my podcast ended and I did not want to stop to look up a new one.  I was between good radio stations so I got to a local “Family Radio Station”.  Family stands euphemistically for religious and ultra-right wing.   At the top of the hour a pastor came on to talk about Paul’s visit to Athens.  He described how Athens was the center of education, architecture, wisdom and philosophy, but how horrible it was because there was a temple on every corner that was dedicated to a different god or deity.  It was a city full of educated scum.  He went on telling the audience that it was just like here where the educated people, and in particular those from Harvard and Stanford, are the scum of the earth and cannot be trusted because they are godless heathens (he mentioned those two institutions by name).  A (university) education is the root to all evil.  Here I am driving thinking “and my daughter goes to Harvard Divinity School studying religion, and I have a Ph.D. and am an educator?” 

There seems to be such a fight or push against intellectuals, against education, for the common lowest denominator.  I think that is what Twitter has started and is so successful.  You really cannot have an intelligent discussion on Twitter, with 140 (or so) characters, which just fits fine with some well-known individuals; we can come out with statements like “fake news”, “poor rating” and that’s it. 

Another rails to trail visit, this photograph was taken during my walk on the Virginia Creeper Trail in Abingdon, VA.

Discussing this in church this weekend my friends and I wished we could tell this pastor that next time he is sick not to consult an educated person (doctor) to get better.  Maybe he should just have a snake bite him in the hope to get cured.  When he wants to cross a river with his car he should not to use a bridge that is built by an educated engineer, but build one himself with a few boards and rocks.

In the Swahili language of East Africa, they have a word called Mzee.   The literal translation is “respected old person”, or “title of respect to anyone older than oneself.”  When I worked there, I learned Mzee was also used to show respect for wise (educated) people.  I was called Mzee when I worked in East Africa.  I was 25 years old and the people that called me Mzee were double my age.  It showed their respect for me and for the education I had; and yes I called them Mzee as well.  Education was treasured in those countries; children would walk hours to go to school.  The story goes, that’s why they are so good at running marathons.

Folks, whatever your believe is: conservative or liberal, religious or atheist, show some tolerance for your fellow human being, be they from a different ethnic background, education, religion or sexuality!  Secondly, I have lived in countries where people have died to get educated.  It is a great privilege.  Education brought our society where we are right now, it allowed us to question things, out culture and our standard of living.  The day we start crucifying our educated people like we did in the middle ages will be the day that we will loose our civilization and our status in the world. 

This week I am giving lectures in Virginia Beach while hurricane Maria is skirting by.  It is nice and windy, and having a walrus mustache, it is definitively a bad (hair) mustache day.  It is the 3rd category 4 or higher storm in the Atlantic in one year.  Now who said there is no such thing as climate change?  Damn those educated people.

Nature Deficit Disorder IV (8/31/2017)

The (Unitarian) Universalist Minister Max Kapp (1904-1979) wrote the following poem that was made into a hymn:

I brought my spirit to the sea;
I stood upon the shore.
I gazed upon infinity,
I heard the waters roar.
And then there came a sense of peace,
Some whisper calmed my soul.
Some ancient ministry of stars
had made my spirit whole. 

I brought my spirit to the trees
That loomed against the sky.
I touched each wand’ring careless breeze
To know if God was nigh.
And then I felt an inner flame
That fiercely burned my tears.
Upright, I rose from bended knee
To meet the asking years.

It struck very deep inside me when we sang this one in church the other day.  Regular readers know I write a lot about Nature Deficit Disorder and about how being on or near the water is my way of meditating, my way to zone out.  Well, here I discovered that there is actually a hymn in our church that addresses this phenomenon. 

On my way to my teaching gig tis week I spent some time at the Virginia State Arboretum.  I walked around the native prairie, or meadow, or wetland.  The sunflowers were blooming.  In the wetter areas there were cardinal flowers and all kind of others.

Wow, to think I gave a talk on it (see my post here) and did not know about this hymn!  It would have been the most perfect way to start my talk.  I started with a piece from "Moby Dick", which is good too, but kind of depressing.  About blowing one's brain out if you stay away from the sea too long.  Oh well, this poem/hymn is much more positive, meditative and healing, the thing that nature is and should be.  And boy do we need it!

This past week we learned that nature has it all.  She presented her ferocious side, as in Hurricane Harvey.  Some questions are now being asked if it was extra bad because we have been screwing around with the climate.  Who knows and who cares?  I think we should just be at awe of nature's inner beauty, its power, its order, how it encompasses us and how we are part of it.  On my walks through nature I am constantly struck by the little things, the small details, it seems that natures never overlooks anything.  Growing bonsai, I love examining the branch structure and surface roots of trees.  In my classes, I tell folks that if you want to learn economics to just look at nature.  There is no waste in nature, eventually nature strives to be a perfect balance of supply and demand; and it does it as efficiently as possible.  Remember, it is survival of the fittest and if you waste anything you are toast.  

At the arboretum, lichens are slowly taking over the bench.  I kind of felt like an intruder sitting on the bench.  It was theirs!

Even some of the blooming grasses can be very beautiful.  This grass had bright yellow pollen sacks which really stood out in the late afternoon sunlight.  Ahchoo!

Definitively cardinal flower and I think it is boneset in the background.  Boneset was named because of it's healing properties when people broke their bones.  It was added to the bandages; it was said to speed up the healing process.  

Those are some of the things I meditate on when walking through nature, through the woods, when I am on the water, or even walk downtown Richmond and look at the old oaks along the streets or walk along the James river.  I let it wash over me, try to block extraneous thoughts out of my mind and just experience what I see.  Yes, I take my camera (or cellphone) with me at times, to take photographs; however, even that connects me with nature and experiencing it.  I tend to take photographs of those experiences.

Not sure what flower this is but I love the color combination the green, the purplish-blue and the red (of the cardinal flower).

Charlottesville (8/21/2017)

I am Charlottesville!  I visited Charlottesville last week on my way to one of my teaching gigs, upstate.  It was only two or three miles out of the way, so I felt like I could do it.  Leaving town, the car I got was tuned to an AM station that played the rightwing character known as Rush Limbaugh.  His discussion was upsetting calling the people that want the removal of the confederate status worse than ISIS who are destroying the museums in Syria and Iraq.  It was nauseating!  No mention of course that a lot of these statues were put up in the Jim Crow era, as a direct result of the voting rights act and the end of school segregation in the 1960s.  They were a kind of “in your face” statement to the black community at the time.  Here in Virginia, black kids have to go to General Lee Middle School every day; if that is not in your face!

Driving down Monument Avenue in Richmond for the first few times I was in awe, the statues are beautiful and I did not really look at what they depicted or stood for.  It helped that I am a foreigner and was not really educated about the U.S. Civil War that much.  For us Europeans it was more about the War of Independence, and living in Yorktown that is just amplified.

But I have become much more sensitive to the racial relationships.  I often jokingly call myself the token or sometimes the only "real" African American.  I was born in Africa and I am a U.S. citizen.  But I am as white as any other full blooded Caucasian. 

So why did I go to Charlottesville?  I went for three reasons:

1. To pay my respect to Heather Heyer and the spot where she was killed.
2. To pay my respect to the town I like a lot, Charlottesville is a great, liberal town.
3. For myself and to symbolically poke those KKK-ers, Neo-Nazis and Alt-Right criminals in the eyes and metaphorically kick them in the testicles.

This last point was particularly important to me after listening to the radio and after a weekend of hearing Trump saying that both sides were at fault and that what he called the alt-left were violent as well.  There might have been a few, but the counter protesters were resisting fascism, racism, anti-Semitism, and discrimination against women. 

HBO was showing that the right wing groups were marching and chanting the following three slogans:

1. Jews will not replace us
2. You will not replace us
3. Blood and soil

The first and the third are direct quotes of slogans that were chanted in the 1930s under the fascist Nazi regime of Hitler (anyone want to buy my tiki-torches?  I am not sure if I can ever light them again without having to vomit).  The result was the gas chambers.  I had an uncle who died in a Nazi concentration camp and a father who spent time in one.  That is why I stand with the people resisting the rightwing wingnuts.  We need to squash them and that is why I dare to say that until Trump changes his tune, as a son of a father who spend time in a concentration camp and a nephew of an uncle who died in one, he is not my president.

It's a matter of perception and reaction (8/8/2017)

I was watching Morning Joe the other day when Tom Brokaw mentioned how he had been working on a documentary in Wyoming on the Japanese internment during World War II.  It was in this small town, I don’t remember the name, but that does not matter.  He mentioned that during the past elections 70% of the town voted for Trump and now, a half year in, he walked around town interviewing and talking to people, his estimate is that 69% of the inhabitants are still pro-Trump.  When asked why this was, he said that the local people in this town felt that no one in Washington really looked like them, acted like them, spoke like them, or represented them, especially not the Washington elite, but that Trump came the closest.

This reminded me of an article that I wrote in 1994, entitled: Viewpoint: Perception of the Western Rangelands by the Media, Environmentalists, and the Public.  It was published in Rangelands.  It’s not the most scholarly article ever written, and not my best writing (my English was still fairly new), but I meant well.  I was a student of the naturalist literature, in addition to just having finished my Ph.D.  I had read a lot.  Muir, Leopold, and Ehrlich were some of my favorite writers about the western culture; McPhee, Hubbel, and Hoagland touched on it somewhat, Hubbel on living in rural Missouri and McPhee and Hoagland was just a traveler and all out great writer.  I was in love with Powell’s account of his trip down the Colorado River.  

We lived in Gallup, New Mexico at the time where I helped with the management of a public radio station.  We just had the outbreak of the hantavirus and the CDC was all over the place and so were reporters.  Our little volunteer run radio station was hosting reporters from NPR.  In addition, as a family, we also had connections back on the east coast and could live in both worlds and read east coast naturalists (McPhee and Hoagland) who visited the west with their personal biases as well.  So, in 1993 I was invited to give a talk on this intersection of natural resources, literature, and the " East Coast" attitude towards the western culture at a conference in Colorado Springs and this resulted in my article.

In my article I described how I saw that there was this divide between the ranching community and the people on the east coast; and recommended the we tried to bridge that gap.  We could do that be reacting rapidly to any negative information.  Being in radio and in teaching, I suggested that the reaction should be positive and educational.  But then I got job offer in the mid-west and we moved to the east in 1994.

Now twenty-three years later, after moving to the east coast, I am amazed that nothing seems to have changed, or maybe the differences have become even larger.  The ranching side seemed to have dug in even more and it still is "us against them."  I honestly did not think this would ever stay this way.  In the time of the internet and free information flow you would think we would open our mind and gotten closer, but it seems that the divides have deepened (politically, socially, and economically).

I am not a good enough philosopher or political scientist to be able to tell you why that is.  All I know is that when we dig in and close ourselves off, we can just blame them.  Keeping a dialogue going and educating our fellow human beings would be so much better but would take so much effort, and you can get disappointed.  The only thing I hoped was that dialogue and education could prevent it at least for the ranching community.  But, it seems to be a lot like in real life (here I am assuming that that town that Brokaw visited depends for a large part on ranching).  

But it is not unique to the ranching community, or the west.  There are times when I briefly talk about evolution or about climate change in my classes and there are always one or two persons who accuse me of spouting my "liberal bias."  I have learned to get a thick skin and to go on.  As I mentioned before, hopefully it will rub off on one or two in every class I teach.

I agree this picture does not represent the western U.S., so why do I show it here?
Well, this past weekend the family and I did some exploring along the eastern shore of the Northern Neck, the northern peninsula in Virginia.  I took this picture in the Hughlett Point Natural Area Preserve.  My daughter wanted to know what these grasses were doing out there in the water.  Teaching moment: A nice time to talk about sea-level rise; how the peat that is visible between the shore where we are standing and the grass once was also covered with the smooth cord grass, but the sea-level rise killed (drowned) the grass and the exposed peat is now eroding away and eventually so is the shoreline.  It is so important to be educated and to disseminate that information and to teach and educate.That is how we change the world.    

This is the philosophy we all need to have.  Keep that dialogue going, be tolerant of the other side and don't close yourself off and hope your attitude will rub off.  Terms "fake news" shut all chances for a dialogue, all the sudden we don't listen anymore and the divide opens wider.  Let's not be like that frog in that pot with water that is slowly being brought to a boil.  It will notice until it is too late.  We need to try to educate each other even when and if you get push back or accused of things you really not intent to do.  Hopefully something will stick and the opposite sides will come together if only a few inches,