Boreal B[l]og

It’s our third night out on Lake Insula, 40 miles from civilization, completely quiet, the weather mild for late September.  The barometer is falling and I notice a slight south wind, so change is coming, but for now, we savor Indian summer in Minnesota.  We camped on a point with views on three sides and up into Museum Bay, haven’t seen another soul for two days and won’t for three more.  On the north shore, a half mile away, is a fine beach that few ever see.  We walked it yesterday.  After dinner, I head out to ledge rock 20 feet above the water and start scanning with binoculars.  I do that when I’m in the woods.  I usually see conifers and rocks, but sometimes I strike gold. 

This was one of those nights.  Within 15 seconds, my hands stop.  I see a large bull moose – his antlers catch the last bit of light – in water by the beach, and as I watch, he starts walking the shoreline toward us with alternating clops and splashes.  I’ve seen more than sixty moose in the wild, been within 12 feet of several, far too close.  One even followed me.  But to see one sauntering through the water, unaware of our presence, was one of my more memorable sightings.  We watched him 15 minutes in the growing dusk before he disappeared into the woods with the crashing of branches only a moose can produce. 

Curiosity is one of the greatest gifts I’ve been given.  A while back, I worked with a church group removing buffelgrass in Oro Valley.  I’m not willing to cede our part of the Sonoran Desert to an invader.  Nor is “Dave,” who manipulates his wheelchair into deep sand of washes to bag it.  He is amazing. 

Usually, I listen to music or podcasts while hacking, but this group was friendly, not trying to convert me and were living their faith, good stewards of a portion of the Earth.  That impressed me.  When we finished, a boy started asking questions about invasive species — why it was a problem, how it got there and burned so hot.  That impressed me, too.  I answered the first two questions, couldn’t answer the third, telling his mother that her son asked great questions.  She said he attended a science charter school.  Science and religion need not be mutually exclusive, but the anti-science drift and rise of American fundamentalism is disturbing.  Fortunately, I’m probably not going to be around when the bill comes due.  Perhaps this boy will help keep America competitive in science. 

Later, his brother asked why clouds were white and how they formed.  They were also great questions, along with why the sky is blue and sunsets red or yellow.  More than half of Americans don’t know the astronomical definition of a year.  Bet these boys did. 

I wish I had told the mother how good she was not quieting her boys.  Too many adults think it impolite for children to ask searching questions and drum curiosity out of children.  That’s wrong.  Perhaps it is a misguided sense of politeness.  Or perhaps the adult is embarrassed they don’t know the answer.  We need better questions asked, and we need more “I don’t knows.”  Maybe then we would be smarter.  I have a few questions:

• When you awaken at night, why aren’t you fully dark adapted, but within a minute are?
• What causes us to have annoying, persistent songs in our head?
• What is the neuroscience behind dreaming?
• Why do people with right hemispheric infarcts keep their eyes closed during the acute phase?
• What causes shadow bands just prior to a total solar eclipse? 

Instead, we are fed a fare of stupid tweets and non-balloon boys.  Another question:  What is happening to Tucson’s climate?  Colton hunts and sees first hand the desert’s dying.  He knows it is changing.  The Sonoran desert suffers from 26 consecutive years with above normal temperatures (and “normal” has been raised twice in the interval), 14 of the last 16 years with below normal rainfall, 2 ½ years’ deficit in the last 10; 7 of the 10 warmest years this decade and 1 in 5 days “unseasonable,” more than 10 degrees above normal.  Except 20% is no longer unseasonable.  It occurs two-thirds as frequently as below normal temperatures. 

A snowfall in Baghdad is anecdotal.  Tucson’s changes are over decades and worsening.  For 20 years I’ve called it climate change, to be more precise, for world-wide rainfall patterns are changing, too.  This year, Tucson will be a “minor” 3 degrees above normal.  “Minor” is 7 of the first 11 months in the top 10 for warmest, even during the strongest solar minimum in a century, which ought to enhance cooling. 

Half the bird species in the annual Christmas bird count have significantly moved north.  They don’t think climate change is a hoax.  Kutek Lake in Gates of the Arctic NP is disappearing as the permafrost melts.  My wife and I will eventually follow the birds, for we see the meteorological and political climate in Arizona both worsening.  I still have not heard a counterargument containing a margin of error, no pejorative attacks and no charged language.  We may be in an Anasazi drought.  I never dreamed I would become a climate refugee.

We can still deal with buffelgrass.  Go to www.buffelgrass.org and help out.

I visited two elementary schools in the Sunnyside District to speak to the nurses about obtaining obesity data on their children.  Sunnyside is the only district in Arizona to mandate a nurse in every school.  Because of the nurses, fewer children are sent home with medical problems, and the nurses are able to immunize some of the children who haven’t completed their immunizations.  I know these days many Americans on both sides of the political spectrum think vaccines are dangerous; the diseases they prevent, like rabies, are still out there in the wild just waiting for us to let our guard down.  I find myself wishing they would get a case of measles.  Not complicated measles, which is not rare.  Just measles.  Maybe that would change their perspective. 

All districts must check hearing in the 6^th grade.  But Sunnyside additionally weighs, measures and checks vision of their students pre-K, 2^nd, 6^th and 9^th grade.  Nobody else in the Tucson valley is doing this.  They don’t have extra money; they just decided it was important. 

Because of their work, we have the first step to obtaining obesity data on middle school kids in Tucson.  From there, we hope to get the other districts involved and have county-wide data on public school 6^th graders, which likely would be some of the best data in the state, if not nationally.  I’m pretty excited about the prospect. 

It was eye-opening to watch the kids leaving the school going home.  There weren’t a line of large SUVs and vans picking the kids up.  Many actually walked home.  Imagine that.  The houses down there aren’t six to seven figure ones up in the Foothills.  Their parents aren’t movers and shakers.  They can’t home school their kids.  They are too busy trying to scrape by.  If they don’t have public education, how will these kids get educated?  Or is it just too bad and they should just stay in entry level jobs and be house or yard cleaners because they can’t do anything else? 

America has given three things to the world — liberty, the national park system, and public education to support a vibrant middle class.  None of these has occurred as quickly or as effectively anywhere else.  In 1966, I learned what LIONS Club stands for “Liberty, Intelligence.  Our Nation’s Safety.”  Exactly how are we going to educate millions of children without public education?  Who is going to pay for it?  Or will volunteers step forward?  Why not have volunteers step forward to save public education?

Will this be an America where people don’t vaccinate, and visitors will need vaccinations the way I needed a yellow fever shot to go to Africa?  Already, immunocompromised children can’t go to day care centers, because there are too many unvaccinated children.  Will this be an America where we end public education, because it is a government program, and all government programs (except defense, of course) are bad?  Should people should be free to do whatever they want, including logging the rest of the redwoods and old growth forest, mining the national parks, taking oil out of ANWR, because somebody rich has bought the land and can do whatever they want?  Is this why I, among only 7% of Americans, served America in uniform? 

If we end education, health care, food stamps, social security and Medicare, we will have people on the streets the way we have stray animals, lots of people, because the fundamentalists would have banned birth control, too.  We’d have people dying horrible deaths from treatable conditions, the way stray animals do.  Isn’t that a death panel?  And I don’t consider a stray animal an “only,” having taken in many.  Indeed, I rank companion animals above the Norquists and the Newts of the world.  Reread that. 

Those who espouse smaller government have not been in these schools, learned nothing from Katrina and have not been down to the county public health department. 

I don’t know how big our government should be.  But I do know that leaving people unregulated is akin to a fraternity house on a Sunday morning, the economy a year ago, the 60 to 37,000% fold difference in frequency of medical procedures depending upon where you live and worse driving than we already see.  How much do we regulate?  As much as we need without doing too much.  And what would that be?  I don’t know, but we better start figuring it out as a country and soon.

In these pages, I have stated that I am not religious.  But I think we have a duty as human beings to help make our society better.  Sometimes by saying no, we make things better and by saying yes, we make them worse.  Sometimes we should leave people alone; other times, we should step in.  Those who argue solely from one side are as wrong as they are loud and nasty, and I have never heard an ideologue naturally laugh, not once, nor make fun of themselves, which healthy people do. 

Those who read my columns are in general well off in life, probably wealthy.  One of my mottos is “Those to whom much is given, much is expected.”  Give of your time, your knowledge and your resources to make this country better.