Stardust and smoke

Note: This piece was written well over a year ago during historic wildfires. Before the almost historic floods of the following winter. For some reason I wrote the whole thing, about two very different kinds of trees to be found in my patch of central California. Trees that have their impacts on people all over the USA, even the world. So I decided to publish it this much later. … The Mariposa Grove was spared. Thousands of other Giant Sequoias perished in this and other wildfires along the Sierras during the past couple of fire seasons.

I also take note that science is always changing, that there are huge geologic patterns of heating and warming – and that what the human race does not yet know about our own planet surpasses what we do believe we know.

This is about two different kinds of trees that live within close proximity to one another. Both are both cherished and monetized by people. Both are in danger of disappearing from their long standing territories. [The Washburn Fire is now not likely to harm sequoias in the Mariposa Grove, and is being reduced bit by bit daily. So long on the wind stays low.]

I had to revisit the Apple Store down in Fresno, and I was barely on time for my moment at the Genius Bar as I had been gawking at numerous changes in the orchards as I drove. From my usual spot at the low table in back the merchandise, glittery with promise, demanded to be looked over.  “All stardust,” I thought, possibly jaded by what I’d just been noticing along the road.. Eventually I left with a replacement for an iPad Pro I got last Halloween, which had developed an intermittent shut down issue.  My third go-round about it with Apple, and a shyly friendly young tech with a brilliant rainbow watch band equipped me with a brand new refurb iPad Pro.  Stardust temporarily forming a useful thing for me.  I’m writing on it now. All the while part of my mind was up in the flaming forest in Yosemite, famous for its incredible granite bones as well as its lofty giant trees.

The tech and me are also stardust but no price tags..  However, being of the Earth and subject to immutable laws of nature — including the relatively new one that says we are mostly made of empty space, so billions of bits and bobs of stardust fly freely through our flesh as well as through the solid granite of Yosemite and the world’s tallest building, oceans and the shoes in your closet. They can do all fast yet no faster than light, apparently. At times I wonder how many other odd natural laws lie just beyond our present scientific understanding.

POSTER PLACE OF CLIMATE CHANGE, GATEWAY TO THE STARS

From the Apple store my old wheelchair van, serious gas guzzler that it is, rattled north up the busy 41, which goes between Fresno and Yosemite National Park.  It led to a convenient turnoff through the orchards, to a distant view of the Washburn wildfire then spreading like … wildfire … around Yosemite National Park’s world famous Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias.  The spot that long ago sprouted the first inkling of what is now the impressive US National Park system.  President Abraham Lincoln started that ball rolling. If I had to travel to replace my new iPad I was determined to check out this view of the current Sierra wildfire. From about 50 miles west.

The images force us to reconsider our senses of time and space. In this framing, the workings — or more accurately, the dysfunction — of our Senate do not mean anything. Our planet itself, in but one solar system of but one galaxy, is of no consequence except to those of us who call it home. The notion that, amid the universe’s vast expanse, we are the only planet of life also seems unlikely. 

This is from Dan Rather, contrasting a US Senator’s killing of US funding to fight worldwide impacts of climate change in contrast to the stunning first photos of deep, deep space which were just released, taken by the Webb Telescope.

“The ancient and magnificent trees and all the forest life that goes with them are also returning to stardust, that stuff of infinite potential…” I mused to myself rather fatalistically.  Some of the sequoias, along with the most ancient of trees, the Bristlecone Pines on the east slopes of the Sierras, were here when Christ was on Earth, when Egyptian pyramids were new..  Back at the start of Chinese dynasties.   Well before the first few Europeans in uncomfortable boats suffered their perilous way over the Atlantic to starve, die, but ultimately multiply, lurch rather cruelly along to take over from the indigenous natives by disease and by force. The Native peoples who knew how to keep the land healthy and had many practices for doing it that can be, that are to some inadequate extent, applied today.

The industrious class also put up tall buildings, churned out countless combustion engines for everyone, rockets, tiny phones with web browsers, and electric cars. Despite statements made early on in the development of the country, they did not follow the idea of “liberty and justice for all”. They tried to shoot all the buffalo so as the starve the few remaining Natives. They bought and sold enslaved human beings from far away and used them to grow the country’s famous cotton, among other things. By law they ostensibly freed these human beings as a result of the Civil War. They tore up what had been arguably the strongest “lungs of the planet” — the Great Plains — in favor of small farms and cattle. and went on to create… The very world capital of capitalism. All kinds of things to build great cities, farming to feed them, technical whizz bang to keep things moving. More guns than anyone. American genius, American leadership, American power abroad, fighting world wars and smaller ones such as Vietnam, overthrowing governments of a few other countries. Facing down earthquakes, wildfires, floods and tornados, helping people to get back on their feet. Environmental challenges before hardly anyone besides the displaced Native Americans foresaw where such problems would lead.

And these Giant Sequoias were standing there through this and so much of a more positive nature.

The stardust, of course, is omnipresent, waiting to recycle newly liberated atomic bits.

I do not mean to indict any particular group of people here. Right about now seems a good point in history to reevaluate the application of the USA’s founding principles with an eye towards justice for everyone, all races, religions, genders. In the interest of full disclosure here, my ancestors were those Pilgrims who had such a difficult time of it back around Plymouth, Massachusetts before their numbers swelled. As far as DNA can show I am 100% white and 99% of British/Irish ancestry, with a pinch of Italian. I dearly love my country and I dearly welcome its darkening skin tones. I don’t believe in ancestor worship or following tradition for no reason other than my fathers and mothers did, and I am well aware that white people are not any smarter than anybody else..I like to look forward to the future. I find it an unpleasant shock to discover that there is no visible diversity in my genetic makeup. I do, however, consider myself to be a citizen of the Earth.

I hope this is not offensive to anyone.

THE CHALLENGE

Many have long been saddened over these vast forest blazes, the toll on the relatively few sequoias that grow nowhere else on earth. Twenty percent of them have died by fire in the past few years by one estimate. There is widespread awareness that in this period of many countries not doing nearly enough to counter global warming that there will be many more wildfires, droughts, floods and so on.  It is so very hard to go up and spend time amongst the giants, come back and see news of their kind horribly devoured by flames they never were prepared for in spite of millennia of developing defenses against low to mid intensity natural forest fires.  It is spirit crushing to be a human recognizing that my species is what is causing huge changes in the world’s flora, fauna and mankind’s own relationship to it all.  Those sequoias need the smaller, natural wildfires of millennia past in order for their seed to grow.  Today’s monster fires take cones, seeds and chances of future giant trees with them.

Sequoias, along with lots of other natural creations, need climate champions desperately right now.

Sequoias are my emblem of global warming, but there are so many others.  Such as the drowning islands and the need for their civilizations to locate someplace else or/and  perish, colossal melting ice sheets north and south, starving polar bears, orcas and penguins, floods and wildfires around the earth, crop failures, starvation, billions of birds gone from North America over just thirty years, on and on.

We ourselves are now the frogs in a pot of cool water, newly placed over flames.

SHOW A LITTLE ENERGY

There’s no doubt whatever that we can tackle climate change, covid, and economic distress because they are all related. Above all war, a subcategory of imbalance. Humans are born to be creative. We know how to plan and retool and implement impossibly complex projects.  Look at the Webb telescope and its astounding photographs of the universe.  We can summon will enough to focus down on our social capital to create such possibilities as carbon capture, alternative energy, ways of storing and delivering new energy, to refit or tear down whopping great structures to fit the new systems. 

Look how long large oil companies and combustion engines have been at work…. Just a fraction of a fraction of the time it took for the Grizzly Giant, now in harm’s way from the Yosemite blaze, to reach its impressive 200 foot height and immense girth.  Two to three thousand years.  And now through over-capitalistic focus on the actual importance of their product — which is also stardust — the fossil fuel industry renders great harm to Grizzly and so many other living things.  Including ourselves.  Fortunes are made and lost.  Fate is so fickle that way.

Whose turn is it to launch the next big thing? For sure it’s somebody out there right now.  The planet has messages it sends along periodically, flaunting its power over all things human.  Look at the way it’s flinging challenges like wildfires, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, diseases, floods and tornadoes at an accelerated intensity and rate.. Sure, these have all been hard on humans forever, but they are growing more intense, more frequent, geographically closer together, like wildfires and floods close by.  So far we have come back after mega events such as the great Galveston hurricane of 1900.. There are natural disasters we may not even know about yet waiting for just the right overbalance of Earth’s natural systems in order to shake us up big time.

MESSAGES FROM THE PLANET

There are other potential perils, potential messages from the planet to be aware of, at least two of them in North America. Sequoia and bristlecone ancestors were already ancient the last time tectonic plates just off the northwestern coast of the USA and Canada shifted and sent tsunamis miles inland, crushing human settlements right along with most living things in its path That last earthquake and its tsunami were in January 1700. The super volcano at Yellowstone blew out sufficient ash to darken Earth skies for enough years to kill a lot of living things, mostly through starvation, around the planet. That was about 70,000 years ago. Both of those grand natural disasters had repeated themselves periodically over the ages, and now are said by scientists to be longish-ly overdue to recur.  They have historic geological patterns.

All stardust, the insentient chameleon shaking and shivering all matter into more stardust, massively altering the systems of Earth..  Cosmic stew.

As I passed Sierra Nevadas they appeared cloaked in haze, which is common, but the color appeared pure white, not so common.  At one point in my early journalistic career I learned a little about fires.  White smoke tends to signify dry fuel.  And this region is tinder dry from the deepest drought in some 1200 years.  The forest … Dear Lord, it is toast. If not in this Yosemite blaze, which is being treated as a full suppression event, in another. Wildfires have been coming bigger, faster, closer together, starting earlier and ending later in the year that previously. Policy normally is for fire fighters to defend essential structures and let the flames take out the over accumulation of duff, dead trees, fallen branches, low shrubby stuff. in the case of Yosemite and its Mariposa Grove, the trees are treated as essential. More water and flame retardant drops from aircraft, more bulldozer and hand lines.

The Mariposa Grove, barring a sudden strong wind event, will probably survive the Washburn Fire. It has been kept relatively cleared of ground litter, deadfall and so on, and thus the flames around have not succeeded in penetrating the grove at a height great enough to destroy the foliage of the giants. But there will be more wildfires this year, and for many years to come.

The thin line of firefighters working hard towards saving giant trees, in this rare total suppression event in wild land firefighting, gets paid, individually, something like $15 per hour.  Who would do that life threatening, health risking job for that?  Heroes, that’s who!  D—-n straight wild land firefighters must have a raise.

OTHER TREES AND THEIR PLACE

I had driven through the same orchards along Avenue 12 a week earlier, and often in the previous several months.  Each time I observed that there were dead spaces where a few orchards had been.  But the iPad trip was a bit more graphic as not only were a couple of vast tracts now either barren or filled with dead trees, all toppled rhythmically, geometrically by bulldozer, but more orchards are now filled with dying trees, as their water supply is no longer.  The ‘dozers will come for them when the roots have dried.

These trees, of which there are thousands in my area, measure their lives in decades rather than centuries like many other trees, or millennia like sequoias and bristlecones. They are sprouted, grown, watered, pruned and harvested entirely for the benefit of humans. Alas, they are subject to the whims of nature and right now the region’s worst drought in 1200 years is wreaking havoc on all agriculture in California’s Central Valley.

Statistics from 2017 show the largest percentage of farms in this area – 29% – to be between ten and forty-nine acres.  So when orchards or vineyards lie down like this the site goes on a long way. Those trees don’t live long at all compared to Giant Sequoias and their sea coastal relatives, the Redwoods.  They work hard for farmers, then are turned into something else, be it mulch or, illegally by cheaply, smoke.  I guess when you are a seed you don’t get to choose which type of tree you get to be.  

I guess a lot of the tidily bulldozed dead trees were almonds. Those do take more water than some other types of nut trees. like pistachios. Some farmers have been replanting with pistachios but there are so many economic considerations involved.

This same scene of orchard and vineyard destruction is being re-enacted in many places around here.  The state greatly reduced water deliveries to farmers in the central region some months back causing, among other efforts at shoring up agriculture, numerous farmers to pay tens, hundreds of thousands on deeper wells.  Possibly they are sinking their funds in a deep well, indeed.   As aquifers disappear they turn the orchards atop them dead shades of brown and grey. I find it awful to look at.

All this heavy agricultural pumping takes a terrible toll on residential pumps in the area. Lots of homeowners in small, scattered communities are finding nothing coming out of their faucets, having to decide if it’s going to be better for them financially to pay thousands for a deeper well, or leave the area. Another major source of California water, the Colorado River, mainly delivers further south in the state, but if current trends continue that, too, will end in the months ahead. The plight of the Colorado River, Lake Mead and Lake Powell are well covered in the press, online and in print.

Some Native people say it is nature’s payback for the destruction of one of the most beautiful and sacred spots in their world when Lake Mead was filled to make a dam. Countless small caves containing cave paintings and other relics of ancient tribes were drowned.

It’s all very sad, a heaviness to live with. Yet some. wise ones have observed that the Earth never belongs to anyone, the grandest palace will succumb and turn into dust eventually, continents will drift, currents shift until Earth’s surface is completely remade.. CivilIzations rise and fall and right now is a good time to think long and hard about what we might be doing to put off the expiration date on our own civilization.

People all over the country will eventually feel the lessening of fruit, nuts and other produce.  They won’t miss it as much as some farmers will be missing the livelihood that had been passed down through generations. Now it is all rolled up into shades of tan dust, the families must relocate elsewhere, may end up out of anything to do with farming. 

As stardust gains particles, people scattered widely on the planet, some long from being born yet, will miss the Giant Sequoias, the memory of them will grow weaker, as all of our stardust is gradually recycled into something else. … A law of thermodynamics:  energy is neither created nor destroyed. To me that suggests that everything is in flux forever, and there we are. Funny how the human race has gone on surviving as well as it has for several million years.

This all can make a person quite sad – and baffled  I am relatively new to the area and I come from distant places in the USA.  I landed here with a skepticism about the role of big agriculture in disturbing the earth, killing good soil with chemicals, creating great hostilities over water, and so on.  I still don’t know farmers well.  I do have dear friends in the agricultural business. I see their livelihoods on plain view any time I want to got outside my few small city blocks.  And the changes in it over the past four years are very distressing, as the realization of human costs joins that of environmental issues.