Dragonfly Migration

It wasn’t so long ago that I didn’t know that dragonflies migrated.  I’ve never seen them gather in swarms to migrate, but now I know it happens.  Some dragonflies migrate.  In Ohio, they head south to the southern United States.  Those that return to Ohio have never been here before.  They were born down south and then make their way north.

Of the species of which I am aware that migrate, the Common Green Darner (Anax junius) is probably my favorite.  Common Green Darners migrate on average 550 mi., with a maximum distance of 1850 mi.  They may be common, as in there are a lot of them, but their colors are anything but common.  They start out as nymphs, living underwater.  The nymphs are ferocious predators, known to be predators on tadpoles, larval salamanders and small crayfish.  I’ve seen one take on a small fish–albeit a very small fish.  The adults are predators as well, eating on a variety of insects.

The males rarely stop flying, constantly patrolling their territories.  I’ve had to resort to trying to photograph them on the wing (see below).  I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that was not flying, except when linked to a female laying eggs.

The fall migration of dragonflies takes place between late July and mid-October, with a peak in September (http://www.migratorydragonflypartnership.org/uploads/_ROOT/File/Migration%20Review%20JICO%202012.pdf).  Often migrating dragonflies swarm and form groups that can number in the millions. Some birds, American kestrels for one, have been observed following the dragonfly migrations, using the insects as a source of food.

For some nice videos of dragonflies, check  out: . http://www.migratorydragonflypartnership.org/index/behavioralResources.  If you would like to participate in monitoring dragonflies, the Migratory Dragonfly Partnership provides an opportunity (see: http://www.migratorydragonflypartnership.org/index/documentation).

 

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

I started trying to read this book tonight.  I didn’t get through the introduction.  The book is not hard to read.  I don’t disagree with or dislike the author.  It just is hard to read the truth of what has happened in the political world over the last 30 years, especially during the past eight years.

“The Koch’s failed at the ballot box in 1980, but instead of accepting America’s verdict, they set out to impose their minority views on the majority by other means.  In the years since they were trounced at the polls, they poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a stealthy effort to move their political views from the fringe to the center of American political life.” (p. 3)

“The Kochs were unusually single-minded, but they were not alone.  They were among a small, rarefied group of hugely wealthy, archconservative families that for decades poured money, often with little public disclosure, into influencing how Americans thought and voted.” (p. 4)

“When these donors began their quest to remake America along the lines of their beliefs, their ideas were, if anything, considered marginal.  They challenged the widely accepted post-World War II consensus that an activist government was a force for public good.  Instead, they argued for ‘limited government,’ drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services on the needy, and much less oversight of industry, particularly in the environmental arena.  They said that they were driven by principle, but their positions dovetailed seamlessly with their personal financial interests.” (p. 4)

Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group: “[The Kochs] have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation.  I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it.” (p. 5)

“…for the 2016 election, the political war chest accumulated by the Kochs and their small circle of friends was projected to be $889 million….  As one Republican campaign consultant who worked for the Kochs in the past said of the family’s political activities, ‘To call them under the radar is an understatement.  They are underground!'” (p.8)

In 2009, the Kochs held a summit of their rich friends and invited two senators to make the case as to what the group ought to do in the wake of Obama’s win.  The voice that carried the day was the voice of Jim DeMint.  “Rather than compromising their principles and working with the new administration, DeMint argued, Republicans needed to take a firm stand against Obama, waging a campaign of massive resistance and obstruction, regardless of the 2008 election outcome.”  (p. 20)

For eight years we have watched the Republicans play the latest line of the Kochs’ tune, opposing anything and everything the Democrats and President Obama have proposed, including his moderate nominee for a position on the Supreme Court.  A group of the richest of the rich have made the Republican Party what it is today, so that they can become richer and have the control they believe that they ought to have over our country.  Hopefully, Americans will wise up.  The Kochs and those wealthiest Americans who are a part of their group have nothing but their own interests at heart and care about no one but themselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flipping our Ideas on Their Head

In my work, I often hear people talking about balancing the need for economic development with environmental concerns.  In my experience, that means that the environment will lose.  We start with the need for economic development and then squeeze in a little bit of environmental protection.  Unfortunately, the environmental protection we squeeze in is generally not sufficient to really protect the environment.  I suggest that we need to turn this thinking on its head.

How much and what kind of development do we really need as a society?  The development “needs” that are balanced are typically not societal but individual.  Individual land owners have an investment in a particular property, and they want to make a profit on that property.  They did not want that property to be protected from development prior to their purchasing it and especially do not want that property to be protected from development after they have purchased it.  If the property is protected after they have purchased, they will commonly call that protection a “taking.”  They argue that the government has taken value from their property, in effect taking money from them.

What is often missed in these discussions is that these developers may well be taking money from the rest of us.  Sometimes these developments are placed in areas where they both harm the environment, are threatened by it and place other properties at risk.  Developments built too close to creeks fall into this category.

Creeks need room to stay healthy.  Building too close to them harms the creeks, but it also places the development itself at risk.  Too often, developments placed close to creeks wind up being threatened themselves by the creeks adjacent to them.  By this point, the developers are normally long gone, and the residents of the development and/or the general public wind up paying to protect the development.  The developer ultimately may take money from future residents–more than the purchase or rental price paid–and sometimes even from the general public.

Such developments also typically cause increased creek flows downstream, causing erosion that can threaten other properties and public infrastructure.  The developer has again taken value from others, cost others money.  The difficulty is that it is pretty much impossible to demonstrate that a given development caused damage in a particular location downstream.  It is not possible to hold the developer accountable.

What is the solution?  One possibility is to recognizing that creeks, streams and rivers are infrastructure.
We are very careful about protecting the infrastructure that we create such as roads and pipelines.  What if we were to treat our waterways in the same way?  What if we recognized that they are indeed part of our infrastructure?

While our creeks, streams and rivers perform many other important functions, the one that it most apparent to people is that they conduct water off of our land.  There is no way around it.  We need waterways to move rain runoff and groundwater that comes to the surface off of our land.  These channels have and will continue to form no matter what.

One of the challenging features of the waterways is that they are not static.  Unlike the infrastructure that we build, they move.  Unless we respect that, we will impinge on this natural, infrastructure and this natural infrastructure will place the infrastructure that we have built at risk.  Nature will always win.

It costs us money to put in place structures to contain our waterways, often a great deal of money.  These structures need to be maintained, or they will eventually fail.  The force of the water is relentless, and it is a waste of money and energy to try to work against it rather than work with it.  We need to place the needs of nature first, recognize the forces of nature and fit our development around these things, not the other way around.

There are other dimensions to this issue, but they will have to wait for a future post.  That’s all for now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Candidate the Republican Party Created

I really hate politics but can’t stop thinking about the election process… and writing about it.  I find it so ironic that the leadership of the Republican Party is tripping over themselves trying to figure out how to stop Donald Trump.  From my point of view, Trump is the candidate the Republicans created.

I’ve been hearing from the Republicans for years that government is bad.  Donald Trump is the perfect candidate.  He hasn’t ever been a part of the government.

They’ve been talking about how great wealthy people are and that we need to help them keep their wealth.  The rich are successful.  They are job creators.  If we take care of them, everything will come up roses for the rest of us.  Who better to serve as president than a rich person?   Donald Trump has been one of the most visible rich people in our country for years.

Greed is good.  Republicans don’t like to say it out loud, but I think the message leaks out anyway.  The Donald epitomizes greed.  He declares that he was greedy for himself.  Now he is going to be greedy for America.  For Trump, greed is indeed good, very good!

Over the past seven years, the Republican Party has embodied a total lack of respect for our president.  Among other things, Republicans have derided him for treating other countries with respect.  As best I can tell, the only person Donald Trump respects is himself.  His lack of respect for his fellow candidates is palpable, and he has made his attitude towards other countries entirely clear.  He’s going to sic the nastiest SOBs he knows on them.

The Republican Party has been playing the fear card for any number of years now.  Lately, we have been told to fear Muslims and Mexicans.  Wow, is Trump going to take care of that fear!  He’s going to build a wall to keep the Mexicans out, and he’ll stop the Muslims from coming in, too.

What’s the problem with Donald Trump?  He seems to me to be the perfect Republican candidate, and lots of Republicans seem to think so, too.  Why is the Republican leadership so unhappy?  Is it embarrassing to hear the Republican message stated so baldly, without having it dressed up and prettified?  Many Republicans seem to like the fact that Donald Trump doesn’t sugar coat the message.  Because he hasn’t been in government, Trump has never voted on anything.  He doesn’t have any track record.  Does that make them nervous?  I suspect that they’re mainly worried that he might not be electable.  Whatever their problem is, they only have themselves to blame.  They’ve been playing the Donald’s song for quite a while now.

 

 

 

The devil, and all his works, and all his ways.

I have often thought about what it means nowadays when people affirm that they renounce the devil, and all his works, and all his ways—at least those were the words we used when I was growing up as a part of the Lutheran baptismal rite. For most of my adult life, the words were, “Do you renounce the forces of evil, the devil, and all his empty promises?” The newest Lutheran hymnal reads, “Do you renounce the devil and all the forces that defy God?”

If you were to be asked this question in one its several forms, what would you say? If you were once asked this question, what did you say? I would guess that you would and/or did say, “Yes.” What did you think when you said it? I could imagine many people thinking, “Sure, why not? Who wouldn’t renounce those things?” How often do you think people are conscious of actually doing something or not doing something because they remounce/renounced “the devil and all the forces that defy God?” If you haven’t been aware of having done that, here’s an opportunity… at least from my point of view.

Around 2,200 years ago there was a king by the name of Antiochus IV Epiphanes. He had two favorite things: Greek culture and himself, not necessarily in that order. The word, epiphany, is generally used to refer an appearance of God. I would guess that Antiochus didn’t have low self-esteem given that he chose to give himself to add Epiphanes (epiphany) to his name.

As ruler over the territory that included Jerusalem, Antiochus did whatever he could to advance Greek culture—and religion. He went so far as to put an altar to Zeus in the Jewish Temple, thereby desecrating the Temple. One account indicates that he went further and forced Jews to sacrifice pigs on their own altar. Did he actually do that, or was it just a story told to emphasize what a vile king he was? Placing an altar to Zeus in the the Temple was an abomination. It would have been truly heinous to force Jews to sacrifice a pig, an unclean animal according to their religious teachings, on their own altar. Sacrificed pigs or no sacrificed pigs, Antiochus IV Epiphanes was a vile king who was despised the Jewish people.

Approximately 200 years after Antiochus, there was a new ruler over Jerusalem, Pontius Pilate. I don’t know what he thought of himself. The fact that he tried to bring symbols of Roman power/culture into Jerusalem and robbed the Temple treasury to pay for an aqeduct did not endear him to the Jews. The Samaritans in particular were not big fans of his, since he slaughtered a number of them on Mt Gerazim. I suspect that the Galileans weren’t fond of him either, especially the family and friends of those whom he killed, apparently while making sacrifices at the Temple. He seems to have tried to keep the peace through killing and intimidation. It didn’t work particularly well for him. The Samaritans complained to Rome, and Pilate was forced to return to Rome and account for his actions.

Fast forward another 40 to 50 years, and the Romans have surrounded Jerusalem. They were trying to intimidate the Jewish people and bring an end to the seige by crucifying any rebel they captured. Josephus wrote that they crucified so many people that they were running out of wood to make crosses. 1800-1900 years later, African-Americans, whose ancestors had been enslaved in this country, were being terrorized by costumed, masked, hateful white people who murdered people of color and burned crosses to try to intimidate them and keep them under control.

Emperors, kings, tyrants, and haters throughout the ages have used terror and intimidation to try to maintain their power over people. Periodically they have used religious beliefs to torment people as well. Sometimes it evidently works. Other times, it backfires. In any case, it is always horrific.

Within the last two weeks, a story that evidently has no basis in fact was told by one of our candidates for president. According to the story, an American general, General Pershing, was facing the task of trying to control Muslims in the Phillipines. In order to do so, he rounded up fifty Muslims. Fifty bullets were dipped in pig’s blood. Forty-nine of the Muslims were shot and killed with the bullets dipped in blood. The fiftieth was sent back to his people to tell them what happened. According to the story, General Pershing didn’t have any more problems with the Muslims after this event.

This story was not told as an horrific story. It was told as an example of an approach to dealing with Muslims that we might want to consider now. Its telling hardly created a ripple.  Do you renounce the devil and all the forces that defy God?  Denounce the telling of this story and all that it represents!!!