If Ever There Was An Enduring Symbol: Hope and the Yarnell 19 Hot Shots

I can feel your blank stare.. how, oh how, can you get hope from this, the deeply saddening deaths of these 19 swaggering young USFS Hot Shots who died in this wind shift near Yarnell AZ... where are you going to go with this Grumpy? Will it be right on any level?
I can't guarantee it will be right.. nothing about this is right...I was a few hundred miles away when it happened, also sweltering in similar heat, and I resent the crap out of any good coming from bad, but in some funny way, that's what this blog is about, so follow if you will, on a trip that might seem a bit Machiavellian, a bit opportunistic, but if you were these 20 guys, the 19 departed and the one spotter who survived, I think you would be looking for any opportunity possible to make a difference to keep this from happening again, or becoming commonplace..

The Great Mississippi River Greenway & Wildlife Corridor

I might be coining a term here: The Great Mississippi River Greenway and Wildlife Corridor

Click for Background Music

There are municipal greenways on the Mississippi, research shows a few, around St. Louis, Minneapolis, and even Memphis, good natured nature projects by civic groups and governments that try to make the riverfront a common area for recreation, tourism, and nature,
http://www.planningdesignstudio.com/portfolio/greenways-trails/mississippi-river-greenway
http://www.stltoday.com/lifestyles/health-med-fit/fitness/trail-of-the-week-new-segment-of-mississippi-river-greenway/article_1c402714-4d12-5709-8b3e-c334621133c7.html
and there is even a National Trail of sorts:
http://www.mississippirivertrail.org/map.html

but its a driving route that links all the good spots.
I am unable to find any evidence that anyone has thought of the whole river, 'The Land Between the Levies', as what it has very well become, which is a sort of massive greenway and wildlife and nature corridor through the heart of the United States, accidental at that.

The Return of the Elk to the East: Kentucky Most Prominently, But Now Little Pockets Everywhere

go to minute 2:45 if you want to get to the point...
I'm not usually an emotional guy, but somehow those 45 or so seconds of footage bring me close to tears. This entry might be the one that most affects me on a personal level, since it affects so fundamentally and dramatically a place I love so much and know so well, the Eastern United States, and the Appalachian Mountains.
When I saw the above video,while learning about a release of Elk in Missouri that were brought from this wildly successful Kentucky herd, first released in 1997, I felt like I was learning about a long lost uncle as an adult, as if something that had been missing from me, and from how I understood my world on some emotional level, was being returned, even though I had never known it was gone.
Not to play into the myth of a pristine pre-Colombian world, but I for years was left non-plussed by the legions of white tailed deer that populated my world, by the eastward moving Coyotes that were the only predators left, as they invaded previously unknown territories for them to pick off the edges of the weird kind of predator-less garden patch that was the East.
I grew up suspecting but never knowing that that Eastern ecosystem had indeed been a wilder and much more complex one, and watching this video, after an accidental run in with an article about the Missouri effort, was big for me.

The Dark Sky Movement: Not all Polution is Matter, but it Still Matters!

http://earthscience.files.wordpress.com/2006/12/worldlightmap.jpg
In college I was once in a desert field ecology class (distribution requirements.. it was not my major.. now I kind of wish it was), and I found myself bumping through Tuscon with a van full of stinky but amiable Co-Ed's late one night. Somehow it left an impression on me that Tuscon felt surprisingly small for the population I knew it to have, kind of, well, natural... and I remember someone mentioning or knowing there were some observatories up on Kit Carson Mountain, so I gazed up and had a look as we drove by on what must have been good ol' I-10. I never knew much about astronomy, but my dad had been in the Navy, and knew how to navigate by the stars, had even studied it in college. He used to occasionally teach me a constellation or two. Given this small family preoccupation, I liked to pick out little details like knowing the observatory was there, and file them away.
Fast forward a few years, and I am a Municipal official of sorts (everyone makes mistakes in life!), and something crosses my desk about a new type of Light Fixture that the state government wants me to set up a demonstration project for. I have to find a place to put something like 7 so called "Full Cut Off Lighting Fixtures". There was so much jargon in government that my brain took it in stride (it's a street lamp!), since I was learning about everything from the constitutional law to street plows. I read the description that the state legislature had passed,  something kind of exotic and progressive called Dark Sky Legislation, to mitigate a so called Light Pollution Phenomenon ("What won't they think of up in the capitol! Good for them, my brothers in utopic striving!" I thought to myself, in all earnestness.), and I think my brain was about to move on to other business as I moved further down the description, when I found the allegation that flooding street lamps have not only social consequences, but health consequences as well, and that people sleeping in rooms with too much light from street lamps can suffer from hormonal imbalances, mental health issues, and even circadian rhythms and menstrual cycle disturbances, and that it can be a contributing cause or the cause of their cancers and other infirmities directly or indirectly. Realizing that I work in politics, it might make sense that I fixed on one important thing: this might be something else to blame my girlfriend's moodiness on when I am in the doghouse again.. hot dog!

Hope is in the Air: What Makes The Boeing Dreamliner Such a Big Step for the Environment

Check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pw4OE7gM2M
The plane you see taking off is made with Carbon Fiber, from a kit based on the design of the Piper Cub, the famous bush plane, and perhaps smallest of what would be considered a traditional airplane. They usually weigh about 900 pounds. This one weights 300 less because of the difference in weight between carbon fiber and steel or aluminum. The plane landing likely is Carbon Fiber too. A friend of mine once took third place in this competition landing in about 130 feet with a plane, a Maule, that was handicapped for being slightly larger, but I can tell you that people were shocked when this thing took off in 17 feet in 2007, since even a normal cub souped up like a top fuel racer would still need 50 feet to take off.. not 17. In fact, the voice you hear muttering "Wow.. nice landing.. nice..." at the end is likely a buddy of mine, which I put together a few years ago. He was pretty astounded by what he saw there in 2007, as was the whole Alaska flying community. This carbon fiber thing was something big.
http://www.cubcrafters.com/carboncubex
Fast forward 6 years to 2013, and it's been a tough few months for a low Carbon future in Aviation, specifically, for the Boeing Dreamliner, the biggest innovation in Commercial Aviation since the Concord, the airliner equivalent of that Cub, and the most fuel efficient Commercial Aircraft ever produced, 20% more efficient than any current competitors.

The Restoration of the Mesopotamian Marshes: Twice the size of the Everglades, but being in Iraq makes it..umm.. complicated..

Here's something I never expected to see coming out of Iraq. It looks more like Moab, it just seems too normal, the anal tepid CNN anchor and all:
http://cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/international/2013/04/03/inside-middle-east-iraq-babylon-e.cnn.html

I am better aware than most that the US went to War with Iraq the second time under some pretty attenuated public reasoning.. trust me... I might have heard some of the guys who trumped the whole thing up, in person and privately, in a different phase of my life, scheming about it, but that aside, and with all due respect to Sean Penn, Saddam was a pretty bad dude, and no friend to the environment...
We sometimes make a very Muslim mistake when we get frustrated with a political situation in our country, and we declare the enemy of our enemy to be our friend... and almost no one likes War, and well, if you are going to win a war, you need to so called 'Win the Peace', but no such luck in this case... However, Rummy, W and the boys, they did know a bit more than the average Tom, Dick, and Mustafah about Iraq, and even as they sharpened their knives and pens to `help Iraq rebuild it´s oil and national infrastructure', in that order, they were aware of one or two little things that they didn´t necessarily think would sell as well as the 'Goebbels perfect' WMD fiasco. You see, in addition to Saddam´s mal-treatment of the Kurds, with Chemical Weapons at times, and the Shiites, and the Iranians.. and, well, the Kuwaitis...and any Environmentalist who remembers the burning wells after the Mother of All Battles, which burned 1.5 billion barrels, perhaps only 17 days use at current rates for the world, but straight into the atmosphere which caused perhaps a sharper than usual high in the saw tooth patterns of world atmospheric Carbon charts, should be as pissed as I was.. (that was pure Saddam), he had also destroyed one of the world's distinct Ecosystems, the Mesopotamian Marshes.

The Mouse that's Roaring Less and Less: Nicaragua Works for a Green Grid

This will seem funny for me to write about a country that as of now gets more than half of it's energy from from Fossil Fuels ( CIA World Factbook Nicaragua Energy ).. but wait a second.. or a few years, and Iceland and New Zealand might have something to worry about.
I refer to the latter two because they are examples of countries that have put a concerted effort into having Carbon Free National Electrical Grids. From what I know, Iceland, with it's famous Geothermal Plants creating about a quarter of it's grid energy, and a good deal more of it's bragging rights, not to mention one of the world's coolest spas in The Blue Lagoon, the rest coming from hydroelectric dams. As far as I can tell, Iceland is alone in this distinction.

A Percolating Renassaince for The LA River

I don't want to ruin the movie magic.. I don't want to impose fact where fantasy should reign supreme, shatter the illusions that drive the American Fantasy Machine, but have you ever wondered what the heck this was?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b08DChU5qsg
or hows'about this Greese reprise from the cult classic Repo Man:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fN2AXsF-kwc
Oh wait, we got one more! God I miss the 70's.. how's this for a svelt action hero:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF-dgroq4TI
Go Cannon!
That was so random that it looks like the last time I played bumper cars at Lake Quassapaug as a kid...
So kidding aside, it's the LA River, and what makes the LA River so vital in it's current form is that, well, it's kind of a natural disaster, and it has grit, and well, grit can be in short supply in Sunny La La land, but fantasy there is a business (and tongue in cheek, I will say fantasy is a business even more so up in the San Fernando Valley where the river originates, but I will leave that joke up to the adults to figure out!). So when you are too cheap to film on location like The French Connection, why not run people through the world's biggest drainage ditch to supply a little cement bottled desperation to spice up the visual, even though Paris Hilton is tweezing her dog's eyebrows a few blocks west.. it's what's called character in the land of Sun and Fun.
But I bet a few of you didn't even ever figure that was a river, ever.. a few of you figured it was just some massive public works thing in the Home from Nowhere landscape of the American industrial nightmare, and I wouldn't blame you, but a river it is.. and it used to, and upper parts of it still do, look like this:
LA River Kayakers
http://activerain.com/blogsview/3380586/kayak-down-the-los-angeles-river-
Does this photo seem like they have no association with the videos above?