Summer Starting to End on the Farm

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It has been good spending time on the farm. I really had forgotten how quiet and dark it is here. It can actually be a bit unnerving. The leaf doodle bug was put to work in the forest. However, it looks like the car will be going back on the road. We can say it failed field trials,but that would only be partially true. The better utility value at this point is more suited to getting a teenager back and forth from high school. The mycological aspects of the farm did not disappoint. The pics of these shrooms are not photoshopped. The coal stove (very heavy) is loaded on the truck. It will be rebuilt in Georgia if I can save it. Coal stoves are increasingly out of production. When they are gone they are gone. The small wood stove is now in its place. The pic of the red sky in morning was indeed a warning of weather. We had strong storms and tornados in Upstate NY. Although I was travelling much that day in the area, I missed the worst of it.
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Environmentalism and Earth Day

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I remember the first "Earth Day" in 1970. I remember it well. I was in third-grade at Oakview Neighborhood School in West Irondequit, NY. We had energized school lessons regarding care for the environment and there was a common thread in our cultural changes that we all need to care more about nature and ourselves. There was almost no opposing dialog. We had seen large fish kills, weird colored skys, and bodies of water we wouldn't even think about swimning in, including Lake Ontario. This was almost 10 years before the awakening of "love canal" in nearby Nigagra Falls NY. Generally, in 1970 the dialog was about polution and what we can do to reduce polution. Polution consisted of many things, trash along the highways, untreated sewage and industrial dumping and runoffs. Don't forget about sound polution, also part of the polution spectrum. We were also significantly concerned about needlessly cutting of trees and wasting paper.

Since 1970 we have made great progress in reclaiming polluted waters and land. Better and more importantly, it is very difficult to get the water and lands poluted in the first place.

I find our attitudes very interesting in that a hundred years ago, before the first earth day we had a cultural thinking that we could not control mother nature. She was so big and grand that no matter what we did to her she would heal or somehow deal with whatever we threw her. Today as we pass more than 50 years of earth days we have an opposite view. Nowadays, we are culturally convinced that almost all of our actions impact mother nature. We were (a century ago) as a human race smaller than nature. Today we think we are much bigger than nature. This is a dangerous stance. We need to remember our failures of arrogance, unsinkable ships and the like.

Today, paper is "sustainable", enjoy.

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