We call the press approvingly, “the first Draft of History,” but it’s a pretty lousy Draft of History that has no historical perspective whatsoever.

We were struck by the beauty and balance of William Tweed's prose about his rail trip through the San Joaquin Valley. Tweed lives  in Three Rivers, gateway to Sequoia National Park. According to Amazon.com,

William Tweed, utilizing the knowledge and skills he developed during thirty years with the National Park Service where he worked as an interpretive writer, historian, and naturalist, specializes in writing that brings together the natural and human  worlds.

His major published works include: Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Parks: The Story Behind the Scenery (KC Publications, 1980);

Challenge of the Big Trees: A Resource History of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (Sequoia Naturalist History

 5-23-13

Dirty Water, Dirty Tricks

 The problem of groundwater depletion is obviously inseparable from the political/legal failure to solve it. In the San Joaquin Valley, one of the most severely over-drafted areas in the country, volunteer groups assembled to qualify for state-funded grants to "solve" groundwater problems, at least here in Merced, are being fed a local governance model from San Diego County, where groundwater depletion has barely gotten started. The mighty political instruments being brought to bear on our region, where land subsidence is an issue, are a greed for public grants vetted through a process involving a half-dozen nuances of consensus. 

It just doesn't make investment sense to pour money into alternative technologies when such a splendid speculative bubble is developing over the Monterey Shale Formation, promising to be the largest fracking bonanza of them all in the nation. So, the US hurtles onward to extract more petroleum to create more global warming while polluting more groundwater. Power without care is an abomination.

Badlands Journal editorial board

5-7-13

myFoxla.com

Encroaching sea already a threat in Caribbean

http://www.myfoxla.com/story/22184745/encroaching-sea-already-a-threat-in-caribbean

TELESCOPE, Grenada (AP) - The old coastal road in this fishing village at the eastern edge of Grenada sits under a couple of feet of murky saltwater, which regularly surges past a hastily-erected breakwater of truck tires and bundles of driftwood intended to hold back the Atlantic Ocean.

For Desmond Augustin and other fishermen living along the shorelines of the southern Caribbean island, there's nothing theoretical about the threat of rising sea levels.

"The sea will take this whole place down," Augustin said as he stood on the stump of one of the uprooted palm trees that line the shallows off his village of tin-roofed shacks built on stilts. "There's not a lot we can do about it except move higher up."

THE BADLANDS JOURNAL

EDITORIAL BOARD WISHES

WILLIE NELSON THE

HAPPIEST 80TH BIRTHDAY

EVER CELEBRATED!!

--BLJ

As this Water-War year shapes up, the lies, the slurs, the gaffes -- the "air game" as the politicos call it -- heats up with the temperature.

If only the desire of the agribusiness plutocracy that things remain the same -- i.e. get better and better for the richer and richer -- could be realized, somehow. Then we could all be happy farmworkers on the west side, enjoying the sun and dust-and-pesticide free fresh air. And for excellent wages, no doubt.

But, the facts are that things are getting worse and worse and the agribusiness utopia is a pile of artificially manufactured well known substances.

The agriculture they seek to increase is increasingly salting its own soil, returning the west side to a worse desert than it was before water was added and the ground was stirred by the largest tractors in the land. Species are going extinct at 100-1,000 times the pre-industrial rate; global climate change is already beyond the tipping point for ice melt/sea rise; and we are taking 121 million tons of nitrogen out of the atmosphere by the Haber-Bosch process "when the proposed boundary to avoid irreversible degradtion of the earth system in 35 million tons per year" (The Ecologial Rift, Foster et al, 2010, p.15).

That nitrogen extracted from the atmosphere not used for gunpowder is used for nitrogen fertilizers, like the 270 tons of ammonium nitrate that blew a 10-acre hole in the middle of West, Texas, removing the town's top employer and creating as yet unknown hazard to its drinking water supply.