What Can You Depend Upon?



My digital indoor/outdoor thermometer says it is 41 F outside predawn. The low overnight was 36 F.  An old fashioned thermometer in the greenhouse says it is 33 F. It is June 9th.  It is very difficult to depend on the survival of my food source for the summer.  I began the challenge of gardening at 8250 feet altitude because I did not like iceberg lettuce and that was all the local store carried. I persist in gardening because of e coli and other persistent problems in food sources.

In the United States you could once count on safe food. I grew up certain about water sources and safe food. If you went to Mexico or Cozumel you should not drink the water but here regardless of where you were in the country you could drink the water. Then there is Flint, Michigan. And soon a lot of other places because Trump repealed the clean water act. And clean air.

In the mountain west we only had to worry about where the US stored its nuclear waste. Too much of it is in New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Utah and Nevada. And then suddenly it was the mines which were not cleaned up because the EPA was not enforcing that. Suddenly in the spring streams are acid orange or vivid yellow. But we had our mountain land and our wells and except for wild fires we felt safe from disasters.  And then they are fracking which ruins the aquifers here. And they never even question that said fracking would also upset the entombments of nuclear waste.

Then the GOP has decided to not fund firefighters trained specifically to battle increasingly hot and violent fires like those in California where they fear the next season will burn what was not burned the last time. We got rain and snow. But around us where such moisture was less things are burning.  Meanwhile on the coast the water is rising, the land sinking. And those with coastal land are looking to move. Some are already moving here to a land with delicate aquifer and ecology.

When no more land is for sale or livable will I have to fight people off with guns to save our ecology.




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