George’s slightly off-center view of the world
Places I remember
It’s the air we breathe… inside our homes!
Since passage of the Clean Air Act in 1963 and creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, emissions of carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and other harmful gases have fallen by half; particulate matter by eighty percent. An official “very unhealthy” warning for outside air is no longer common. That’s great, except, on average, we spend ninety percent of our time indoors.
Continue reading “Another Thing To Worry About”Maybe a plastic-debris raft the size of Texas — actually two Texases — floating around the ocean amuses you; then you’ll get a real chuckle from the latest evidence of micro plastics being found everywhere! Everywhere includes both outside and inside our bodies.
As we know from television, movies and other media, the westward expansion to our manifest destiny was the work of white men of European stock. The women were there for, well… you know what went on upstairs at Miss Kitty’s Long Branch Saloon.
But in the Old West a person could get away from life’s previous entanglements, get a fresh start or simply lose oneself.
Continue reading “Where Men Were Men and…”“We know the losses of bats in the West will be less conspicuous than in the Northeast, where thousands of dead bats are spilling out of cold, dark caves and across the countryside.”
Bees seem to get all the good publicity. In the past few decades, we’ve gone from fear of marauding hordes of killer bees to concern about the decreasing populations of the cute and fuzzy pollinators. But what about bats? These nocturnal creatures, who like to spend their days hanging upside down in dark caves, are creepy and scary. (Except, of course, a certain crime-fighting comic superhero.)
Bats have a good side, though. In their nighttime wanderings, they feast on mosquitos, including mosquitos carrying West Nile virus. They consume pests and insects to the benefit of cotton and corn crops. Recent studies estimate bats provide pest-control worth nearly $4 billion in the U.S. More importantly — to some — they pollinate the agave plant, the ingredient necessary for tequila. They do the same for Arizona’s official state cactus, the saguaro. In Austin Texas, they entertain locals and tourists with their evening emergence from under the Congress Street bridge. They provide similar entertainment in other cities.
Bats’ ravenous appetite for bugs, encourages many homeowners to make their properties attractive roosting places for bats. And there is no documented proof that a bat caught in your hair has dire, even fatal, consequences.
But now bats are threatened by the spread of white-nose fungus.
Continue reading “The Bats and the Bees”The acidic cormorant poop threatens to mess up a $75 million paint job that drivers across Washington and Oregon are paying for through gas taxes.
For salmon, if it’s not one thing it’s another.
In the Klamath River Basin straddling the Oregon-California border, salmon compete with onion, potato and wheat farmers for the ever-scarcer water. Dams on the river have also contributed to the decrease in the salmon population. Further north, sea lions from California(!) travel all the way up to the Columbia River to feast on the salmon returning to their spawning grounds. That’s if a few years earlier they escaped predation by cormorants as they made their way from the river to the salt water of the Pacific.
(Fun Fact: The name “cormorant” is a contraction of the Latin words corvus and marinus which taken together mean “sea raven.”)
Continue reading “It’s Not Easy Being Salmon”
