We had a little time last Summer so we thought we might head up to visit some family in Twin Falls. There are five sites in the area (City of Rocks National Reserve, Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument, Minidoka National Historic Site, Oregon National Historic Trail and Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve) and so we took a long weekend and wandered up for a few days.

On our way there we went through City of Rocks.  CoR is one of those paces that seem to just pod up out of nowhere.  The Geology is pretty cool and so is the botany of the area.  It must have been wonderful for those on their way to the West coast to pass through a place that had water, hunting and shelter.  Now it is a camping and climbing destination that offers a great deal to those that come.  Evidence of the early settler remain, there are names written in alcove in axle grease.  Funny how if we did that now it would be graffiti, but those are revered historical features.

We went and spent a little time at the Visitor Center in Hagerman, Idaho.  This is one of those places where they are doing an awful lot of good work with very little in the way of resources.  The VC is very small and does double duty.  Both the fossil beds and the Minidoka are housed here.  It is a lot to pack into the place but they do a good job.  They have a fossil dig inside and outside and a couple of really amazing fossils assembled inside.  Then in the back part of the VC is a tribute to the suffering of the Nikkei (people of Japanese descent) during the post-Pearl Harbor WW II era.  I knew the stories, well some of them, but I had no idea of the scale and depth of this tragedy.

I’ll get to it more in a minute but we went first to the Fossil beds.  We drove South West out of the town and along the Snake river.  The first overlook was a little bend in the river.  A lava flows had come down from the Craters of the Moon area ( we went there later.)  and pushed the river into a big bend that ate away a hillside and has now revealed a bunch of fossils.

The big deal about Hagerman is Equus Simplicidens.  It’s a one toed horse that grew up up about 10 million years after the Dinosaurs kicked it.  The one toe means that it is not the ancestor of any of the living horses today.  Even though our horse only has one toe.  Also they found two very large groups of fossils of these horses.  One of them seems to be a place were they dies consistently over time, perhaps a place that was very exposed to predators or a risky river crossing with an eddy below.  The other place seems that a lot of horses died there but it was not a consistent thing it was an event of some sort; a flood or a drought where they all gathered in one place but they were buried quickly.

Also while we were out here we looked at the Oregon Trail.  It passed through here and it’s tempting to think that you can still see traces of it.  I am not sure that we could but it’s fun to imagine the trains of wagons coming through there any way.

The next day we went to Jerome, Id.  This was the first Internment site we went to this year.  A year or two ago we had been in Pocatello for a benefit concert that our step-brother, Randall, was playing in for the local veterans.  I talked for a while to an American veteran who was of Japanese descent.  He was living just East of the Oregon/Idaho border and the rest of his family lived on the West side, in Oregon.  Following Pearl Harbor his entire family was rounded up and taken to an internment camp.  Shortly after that he was drafted into the Army and spent the next couple of years fight in Europe for the government that had just imprisoned his family.

The other exposure to this situation I had previously is a tiny spot in central Utah.  Topaz, Utah is one of the sites where we sent our friends that we had suddenly decided were enemies.  There are not many places more desolate than Topaz, Utah.  I can only imagine what it was like to come from the beautiful coasts and valleys of California and be tossed like a rabid dog into a cage in the desert.

I have a lot to say about this but I am going to put it into one of the other posts.  We visited three other internment site later in the year and I will put it all together in one post.

On our way back home we stopped at a hot springs that I had found.  We ate lunch there and I happily locked the keys in the car.  There is nothing for your morale like having to break into your own car.  In the end my daughter said a prayer, asking for divine intervention and less than two minutes later I was able to open the door.  It was funny because a car was passing when I did it and when you open the door from the inside that has been locked from the outside, the alarm goes off.  The reason why is obvious.  It is to alert everyone around that I had just broken into the car.  Everyone around had thought that the passing car was honking at me so there was a two stage round of excitement.  It was funny.

Our last stop was Craters of the Moon.  What a place.  There was a sweet ranger program right when we got there, so we spent a little time learning about the basics of the area.  Then we wandered off and explored that place.  We went into a couple of caves and ate lunch.  The two caves we explored (Buffalo and Indian) were very different.  One was cramped and we ran out of room pretty quickly.  There were some places closed off so the bat mothers had a place to raise their young.

We found a sad and interesting scenario playing out in the caves we visited.  A fungal infection, known as White-nose Syndrome is killing bats.  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife service conducted research a few years ago that estimated the 5.7 million bats have died from this fungus.  It creates a white covering on the wings and around the mouths of the bats.

It is not completely clear how it kills that bats.  Some think that it wakes them from hibernation and interrupts their depressed metabolism causing them to starve to death.  some think that it suffocates them as they sleep.  It has spread very quickly across the U.S. and into Canada as well.  Nature doesn’t really respect our borders very well.

What we do know is that it is incredibly lethal.  Death rates in affected caves and mines are in the 90-100% range.  The Little Brown Bat is the most affected (you know the cute one), although 46 other species are getting hit as well.  It affects hibernating bats primarily.  A lot of different groups are reacting to this threat in different ways.  The Fish and Wildlife Dept is calling for a Moratorium on caving in certain areas to prevent human spread of the disease.  At the very least you should wear different clothes in each cave you enter.  It gets inconvenient, but so is dying.

The bats don’t really have much power to stop this.  We do though and herein lies one of my great hopes for mankind.  Never before has any species wielded such destruction on the planet.  There has never been a species like ours.  We could end nearly all life on the planet in moments if we lost control or our new president receives the wrong tweet.  At the same time I cannot find in the history of the world any other species that has worked so hard to prevent the destruction  of their surroundings.

We have worked unbelievably hard, poured billions of dollars and voluntarily stunted our progress in order to help the species around us to survive a little longer.  This is remarkable.  Leopold, one of the great conservationists of our time wrote in Thinking Like A Mountain, that if you removed all of the wolves, the deer would destroy the vegetation to the point that it will no longer sustain the deer.  Then they will die from starvation.  This rings eerily true in our own situation.  But there is a critical difference.  We are able to change paths.  We can recognize that our path leads to destruction and get on a different path.  I know that a) I have wandered far from the bat conversation and I will return to it.  And b) Global Warming is a contentious issue.

If you feel that the global warming crew are all doomsayers and that the world will end.  I understand.  I really do.  Because you are right.  They are doomsayers.  They are saying that we are doomed if we continue as we are.  This is a true statement.  Regardless of whether global warming is real they are right.  We are headed for trouble.  Anyone with their eyes open and not voluntarily blinded by capitalistic greed, simple ignorance or misled religious indignation can see this.

I will address all of these things in a bit.  But first I need to finish the world will end comment.  The world will not end.  Not in a real sense.  The world has been around for a long time and for most of that it has  been a barren rock.  Not a scrap of vegetation on the entire thing.  Even if we return the planet to that state, which at this point would be pretty hard, the world would be fine.  We would be hosed, along with most of what we share the planet with, but the planet itself will be fine.  George Carlin has said much the same thing, just a little more colorfully.

So now let’s talk about voluntary blindness.

The three causes I mentioned earlier came from greed, lack of education and a deep religious misunderstanding.  I like to think of myself as well-traveled and experienced.  I have met a lot of colorful people that have ideas that are drastically different than my own.  I am still surprised when I meet someone who wholeheartedly supports extraction and consumption of fossil fuels.

I understand the current need for them until we can replace them with something better.  Until then we should use them as sparingly as possible.  By the way, everything is a renewable fuel.  We will be fossil fuels eventually and all our carbon emissions will eventually make it back into the system as useful carbon, but that is neither here nor there because we will be long gone by then.

I have a hard time believing that people actually think that fossil fuels have no negative effect on the planet or the environment.  Anyone who says that their car emissions don’t effect the world should bottle it and then breath it for ten minutes.  If they are even alive after that, then we can talk about it not being damaging.  I think most of these people that support fossil fuels do so because they have been taught to believe that they are critical for our economy, quality of life and capitalistic system.

None of these are completely true.  Our economy has shifted hundreds of times and will shift many more times in the future if we are intelligent.  The alternative is stagnation.  If we allow ourselves to switch to a less consumptive style of life, where we use less (which is the first step in the recycle triangle by the way.  It goes reduce, re-use and then after you have done the first two as well as you can then you recycle what is left) and we use it better, then we will naturally have a better quality of life.  I will go into this more on a later blog.  I am already way to far off my topic.  It is partially true that our current capitalistic system is based largely on fossil fuels but to think we can’t switch or that to switching would cause a complete collapse is silly.  Despite what our fear says, we have not sunk so far into hyper-specialization that our skills are not transferable.  We can learn how to manage different systems.  We do it all the time.  Again the alternative is stagnation.

Ignorance is the simplest to combat but often the most difficult.  This is because a person who is ignorant on a subject is usually unaware that they are ignorant about the subject.  If they know that they are uneducated about the subject and have never had the opportunity to increase their knowledge about it then they should be given whatever support they need to change their situation.  If on the other hand they know they are un-educated and they refuse to improve their situation then this is another problem altogether.  We call this stupidity.  By the way here is another blog post for the future.  The cure for these problems is the same.  It is not legislation it is education.  Not just any education, experiential education.  This is, in fact the only thing that has any chance of changing behavior.  But as I said we will have to wait for another time to finish that diatribe.

The final cause of voluntary blindness, religious indignation, is the worst of all because there is no excuse.  I have heard people say that we don’t need to worry about taking care of the planet because God will never allow any serious damage to happen.  This is about the silliest pile of tripe I have ever heard.  If we think for just a minute about the times in the past when God has acted to halt the path of a people, it never ended very well for the people.  Noah’s flood, Sodom and Gomorrah come to mind.

No, even if he would act to stop is in this path, which I doubt, we don’t want him to.  But more than this we shouldn’t even be think along these lines.  When God gave us this planet as our place to live he told us to subdue it and have dominion over it.  I think it’s safe to say that we have more than subdued it.  We have subdued this planet and the species on it in the same way a vicious and drunken father subdues a terrified and disobedient child.  As far as dominion goes, the word is used 74 times in the Old Testament.  It is clear that there is righteous and unrighteous dominion.  Both of these have consequences, as do all actions.  Good for good and bad … you get the idea.

I feel deeply that Our Celestial Father would have us act in dominion over his works in the same way that he has acted over us.  That is with compassion and understanding.  Any other way will displease him and bring negative consequences, not necessarily from him but from the planet itself.  All the universe obeys laws.  We cannot break them, we can only break ourselves on them.  If we treat the planet with disregard, it will not flourish and be able to support us the way it could.

He gave us a huge responsibility when he told us to take care of the planet and I think he is going to be very angry when, at the end, we have only a smoking, gutted and worthless shell to hand back to him.

That’s not how I want to approach this situation.  So please, let us kindly pull our heads out of the sand and make some decisions that at first might be a little uncomfortable but in the end we will feel the rightness of them and that will be reward enough.  And at that great and final day, we will be able to say that we did our best.  That we took care of His planet as close to the way he would have done if he had been here himself.  Anything else is a terrible idea.

Some of the people on the planet are already doing this.  Those people, for example, who are trying to save bats.  White nose syndrome is likely not our fault.  Nor is all of the spread of it.  But we are in a position where we can see clearly enough that there is a problem and a potential imbalance.  Less bats means more bugs, especially mosquitoes, and another pollination aid lost, just to be clear.  We see it and we know that we are in a position to help.  So not only are we trying to keep our hands, and more importantly our boots in this case, clean, we are trying to solve problems that we did not even create.

Sadly, the people that I find that give the greatest resistance to this type of approach and philosophy are those that are religious and in many other ways deeply spiritual.  They of all people ought to feel compassion and care for the part’s of the world that cannot deal with threats themselves.  Our savior did exactly that.  He cared for those who had no way of caring for themselves, and no one cared for them.

Please join me in caring for the world in a better way.

 

https://www.whitenosesyndrome.org/