Moon, rise!

Tomorrow night brings a full moon. Our Minnesota Weatherguide tells us that the Ojibwe call it the Great Spirits moon and the Lakota the "Hard Times" moon. Locally it will rise at 5:09 pm and set at 7:56 am. This year there will be only one full moon per month, every 29.5 days or so. No blue moons in 2021.

January: full moon

Photo by J. Harrington

It has been too long since we have been really aware of the moon's role in life. Back when we lived next to the ocean, we knew the moon phases because the moon strongly affects tidal rise and fall and, in those days, almost all of our fishing was for salt water species which were affected by tidal flows. Here in Minnesota, even Lake Superior is considered "non-tidal," and almost all of our fishing these days is done in rivers and streams.

The moon often is considered to play a major role in romance, and we're less than a month from Valentine's Day. That makes today a good day to dig out our copy of Ellen Moore Anderson's As Long as the Moon Shall Rise: Reflections on the Full Moon and start to reread it. It opens with the following, which seems all too fitting these days:

Let us know peace.

For as long as the moon shall rise,

For as long as the rivers shall flow,

For as long as the sun shall shine,

For as long as the grass shall grow,

Let us know peace. 

 - A Cheyenne Indian prayer for peace

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Don't forget to give a Christmas present to yourself

Thanks to the time of year and the weather patterns, I've begun rereading a couple of books of poetry that involve Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison. Kooser wrote Winter Morning Walks: one hundred postcards to Jim Harrison during the last years of the last millennium. Kooser and Harrison collaborated on Braided Creek, A Conversation in Poetry, during the early years of the current millennium. The poems in the latter aren't identified by poet. I have long admired and enjoyed the poems of each writer, and continue in my efforts to discover more details of the long-standing friendship between two poets who seem to me to be very different people, except they both love the Midwest and both are writers.

Next year I intend to once again risk paving part of a road to hell, with my good intentions to return to poetry writing. Kooser put his aside for several months after he'd been diagnosed with cancer, and then began sending postcards to Harrison. I hope to avoid anything as traumatic, but want to slow down and pay more attention to the details in my life, especially as the world around us gets more crazy, at least leading up to early November.

My suggestion: give yourself a Christmas present that lasts all year. Set aside time each and every day for meditation and meaningful reading. Try to stretch you attention span. I know I've shortened mine by spending too much time on the internets and social media. No matter how easy and addictive it may be, we don't have to do things that are unhealthy for our minds, bodies and emotions. In fact, it seems to me that learning to treat ourselves to health is part of the message of the birth and rebirth we celebrate at this time of year.

from “Braided Creek”

How one old tire leans up against
another, the breath gone out of both.

Old friend,
perhaps we work too hard
at being remembered.

Which way will the creek
run when time ends?
Don’t ask me until
this wine bottle is empty.

While my bowl is still half full,
you can eat out of it too,
and when it is empty,
just bury it out in the flowers.

All those years
I had in my pocket.
I spent them,
nickel-and-dime.

Each clock tick falls
like a raindrop,
right through the floor
as if it were nothing.

In the morning light,
the doorknob, cold with dew.

The Pilot razor-point pen is my
compass, watch, and soul chaser.
Thousands of miles of black squiggles.

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Getting the state squared away

As we've noted numerous times elsewhere on this blog, we were raised in New England, mostly in and around Boston, Massachusetts. Among the many things for which Boston is famous or infamous are the street layouts that wander like cow paths. Sections, section line roads and 36 mile square townships were not part of our New England heritage. Minnesota, on the other hand, was surveyed in accord with the Land Ordinance Act of 1785.

The Public Land Survey System is coordinate-based, with all distances and bearings made from north-south running meridians and east-west base lines. The largest subdivision of land is the Public Land Survey Township (as opposed to political township), and measures six miles square. Each township is comprised of 36 sections, and each section has an area of one square mile (640 acres).

Over the weekend, we started reading Creating Minnesota,  which we originally picked up a year or two ago in Ely at Piragis. The approach and writing are enjoyable, but we were somewhat taken aback when we read, in the first chapter,

The Land ordinance of 1785 established a system for surveying and dividing the United States into six-mile squares, counted westward from a point on the Ohio/Pennsylvania border. Subsequent land-law refinements divided those squares into thirty-six one-mile square sections, then each of those into four 640-acre quarter sections, ...

We're in complete agreement down to that last phrase. A one mile square section is 640 acres. We're not sure whether the concept got lost in editing or the arithmetic wasn't crossed checked by a copy-editor at the Minnesota Historical Society Press, the publisher, but we hope, and expect, to find no more such anomalies in the book. How this one slipped through is beyond us, or maybe the description and arithmetic are fine and we need a remedial reading course? In any case, we're looking forward to learning more about the history of our adopted state and region of the country.

With no segue whatsoever, we'll note that this morning's cool pre-sunrise temperature was very much to our liking, much more so than the flocks of mosquitos that descended on us as, later, we did some maintenance on our utility trailer at mid-day. We had, incorrectly and foolhardily, anticipated that today's breeze would protect us. We subsequently discovered that one of our mosquito-repellant shirts needs a repellant refresh since the mosquitos seem to lick the material before trying to puncture it and me to get their drop of blood. Winter and road repair; polar vortex and legions of bugs. Our Minnesota really needs more than two seasons.

THE SURVEYOR

"Remove not the ancient landmark which thy fathers have set." 
---Proverbs 22:28

He thrives on patterns,
    his marks and monuments
    transform a wilderness
    and by his carefully tagged
    and numbered squares,
    neat roads, correction lines
    and small cadastral lots
    he clothes in certainty,
    in geometrical designs,
    man's ancient rights.

He scans the skies,
    reading some far-off star
    by which he plots
    meridians and makes his maps,
    stitching a new-found world
    into a patchwork quilt,
    a net of metes and bounds,
    so lands may know their own
    and live in peace.

                                        -- DON W. THOMSON

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#WorldOceansDay in the North Country

If you're from the MidWest or the North Country, you may well ask "what's World Oceans Day got to do with us?" The answer is at least three fold:

1. This year the focus is on preventing plastic pollution. Do you use plastic? Probably so.


2. There's a 97% or so consensus among scientists that humans are responsible for global warming that's negatively affecting the oceans and our weather/water cycle. What's your carbon footprint?


3. What do you know about the hydrologic cycle? The rain and snow that falls on us largely originates with evaporation from the oceans. Streamflow down the Mississippi River transports sediment and farm fertilizers to the Gulf of Mexico, helping to create a dead zone off shore from New Orleans.

Are you getting a clearer picture of what John Muir meant when he wrote "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." (- My First Summer in the Sierra , 1911, page 110.) or was that already obvious to you?

Minnesota's Inland Ocean

Photo by J. Harrington

We grew up next to the Atlantic Ocean. We swam in it, boated on it, fished in it and watched the tides rise and fall. In fact, one of the most significant (to us) observations about Lake Superior is that it doesn't smell right. For those of us who've spent much of our lives near an ocean, that much water is supposed to have a "salt smell" that's missing from Superior and the other Great Lakes, although, as "inland oceans" they have lots of appeal. For confirmation, take a look at Lorine Niedecker's Lake Superior after you've read:

"Out of the rolling ocean the crowd"

By Walt Whitman

Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me, 

Whispering, I love you, before long I die,

I have travell’d a long way merely to look on you to touch you,

For I could not die till I once look’d on you,

For I fear’d I might afterward lose you. 

Now we have met, we have look’d, we are safe, 

Return in peace to the ocean my love, 

I too am part of that ocean, my love, we are not so much separated, 

Behold the great rondure, the cohesion of all, how perfect! 

But as for me, for you, the irresistible sea is to separate us, 

As for an hour carrying us diverse, yet cannot carry us diverse forever; 

Be not impatient – a little space – know you I salute the air, the ocean and the land, 

Every day at sundown for your dear sake, my love. 

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On Veteran's Day

I'm remembering my father, who served in the Air Force in both WWII and the Korean "Police Action." Also thinking of my uncle who served in the Army in WWII and used to play taps on his bugle at military commemorations, and of other friends and relatives and all those who have served in the military to protect the rest of us.

Minnesota blizzard

Photo by J. Harrington

Other November 11 events of note:

• Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in 1821


• Armistice signed: "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" of 1918


• Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born in 1922


• U. S. numbered highway system was established in 1926


• Forty-nine people died in the Armistice Day Blizzard of 1940

Facing It

Yusef Komunyakaa, 1947

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn’t,
dammit: No tears. 
I’m stone. I’m flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I’m inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s 
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet’s image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I’m a window.
He’s lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.

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How to save America(n poetry)

This is day three of National Poetry Month. The third of thirty things we can do to celebrate is "Sign up for Teach This Poem, a weekly series for teachers." If you believe that the best way to learn something is to teach it, signing up for "Teach This Poem" might well be worthwhile even for nonteachers. Or, you could look into starting your own poetry course through a local arts organization or "adult" education program.

You were young once, don't let them tame you

Photo by J. Harrington

Tony Hoagland, in Twenty Poems That Could Save America, writes:

Nonetheless, it is common knowledge: real live American poetry is absent from our public schools. The teaching of poetry languishes, and that region of youthful neurological terrain capable of being ignited and aria'd only by poetry is largely dark, unpopulated and silent, like a classroom whose door is unopened, whose shades are drawn."

I was raised at a time, in a place, that preached and practiced making sacrifices to improve life for the next generation. The American Dream I grew up with was that the kids would have a better life than the older generation. I don't see much evidence of that kind of thinking these days, do you? Do you have a clue where it went? When it disappeared?

I'm again reminded of one of my all time favorite quotations, from one of the few politicians I've admired. Robert F. (Bobby) Kennedy, in remarks at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968, noted:

... But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all.  Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.  Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.  It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them.  It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.  It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities.  It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.  Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play.  It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.  It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.  And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.  [emphasis added]

unused skills deteriorate

Photo by J. Harrington

I believe that we as a nation, as a people, will not, can not, confront our poverty of satisfaction without poetry playing a much larger role in our national life. One of our country's greatest contemporary artists, from Hibbing and Duluth Minnesota, has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition". If a reformed folkie, rock and roller winning the Nobel Prize does not bring poetry into mainstream America, I have real concerns about whether we can be saved, or should. Hoagland tells us that "the list of poems taught in our schools must be updated." He's correct, and Dylan's lyrics are, in my opinion, a better place to start than anything else available.

The Times They Are A-Changin’

Written by: Bob Dylan 

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’ 

Copyright

© 1963, 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1992 by Special Rider Music

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Congratulations! #BobDylan and Minnesota's North Country

For the past several years, I've been struggling with the question(s) of form(s) in poetry and genre in literature. I've been doing this while those that create poetry and literature have been busy transcending boundaries of form(s) and genre(s). That was made clear this morning when the 2016 Nobel prize for literature was awarded to northern Minnesota's own Robert Allen Zimmerman, known to the rest of the world as Bob Dylan. That makes Mr. Dylan the second Minnesotan to be honored as a Nobel literature laureate, Sinclair Lewis being the first.  Minnesota, Sauk Center and Hibbing should start promoting whatever it is in our air, or water, or both, that contributes to such creativity. There's something happening here and you don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones. ("Ballad of a Thin Man" lyrics).

Bob Dylan Way, Duluth

Photo by J. Harrington

Actually, another Minnesotan, this one an immigrant from New York, has spent years studying, teaching and writing about what it is that's happening here, when it comes to Bob Dylan and other Midwestern writers. David Pichaske has written Song of the North Country: A Midwest Framework to the Songs of Bob Dylan and Rooted: Seven Midwest Writers of Place. Unfortunately, the latter does not include Mr. Lewis, focusing on Bill Holm as the Minnesota representative. Pichaske's two books, plus some of his other works, seem to offer helpful insights into the role place, particularly Midwestern rural place, can play in the creative development of writers.

Iron Range mining tailings

Photo by J. Harrington

Dylan is Dylan. As the Nobel committee noted the award was bestowed for "having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition." Dylan has been a large part of the soundtrack of my life for more than two generations. I caused a minor stir in a Loft poetry class some years back when I asserted that, as far as I was concerned, Dylan was as much a poet as a singer-songwriter. As rural Minnesota looks to create a sustainable life and economy for the twenty-first and subsequent centuries, it might be helpful to spend more time thinking about what we've done successfully to create more Nobel laureates in literature, and what seems like a disproportionate number of creative, talented writers and visual artists. Creativity isn't an extractive or polluting industry. Two of Dylan's songs provide a helpful contrast, I believe. One is the North Country Blues, the other, Girl from the North Country.

North Country Blues

Bob Dylan

Come gather 'round friends and I'll tell you a tale
Of when the red iron pits ran a-plenty
But the cardboard-filled windows and old men on the benches
Tell you now that the whole town is empty

In the north end of town my own children are grown
But I was raised on the other
In the wee hours of youth my mother took sick
And I was brought up by my brother

The iron ore poured as the years passed the door
The drag lines an' the shovels they was a-humming
'Till one day my brother failed to come home
The same as my father before him

Well, a long winter's wait from the window I watched
My friends they couldn't have been kinder
And my schooling was cut as I quit in the spring
To marry John Thomas, a miner

Oh, the years passed again, and the giving was good
With the lunch bucket filled every season
What with three babies born, the work was cut down
To a half a day's shift with no reason

Then the shaft was soon shut, and more work was cut
And the fire in the air, it felt frozen
'Till a man come to speak, and he said in one week
That number eleven was closing

They complained in the East, they are paying too high
They say that your ore ain't worth digging
That it's much cheaper down in the South American towns
Where the miners work almost for nothing

So the mining gates locked, and the red iron rotted
And the room smelled heavy from drinking
Where the sad, silent song made the hour twice as long
As I waited for the sun to go sinking

I lived by the window as he talked to himself
This silence of tongues it was building
'Till one morning's wake, the bed it was bare
And I was left alone with three children

The summer is gone, the ground's turning cold
The stores one by one they're all folding
My children will go as soon as they grow
Well, there ain't nothing here now to hold them

Songwriters: Bob Dylan

North Country Blues lyrics © Bob Dylan Music Co.

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A house divided against itself ...

Very early this morning I walked my dog through fog and temperatures reminiscent of this time of year on the southern Massachusetts coast, between Green Harbor and Duxbury Bay, just north of Plymouth. Back East the weather we're having in Minnesota this week is just seasonable along the coast. Here it's above average, although last year at this time was very much like now. The photo shows a wetland along the northern edge of William O'Brien state park in December 2014. No aroma of the salt marsh, but otherwise a reasonable facsimile of my "home" territory in Massachusetts. The weather and the Star Tribune's series have added to my interest in the similarities and differences between the Minnesota of my arrival and today's Minnesota. Those, and things like it, continue to fire my desire to understand My Minnesota in the New England terms I still find most native.

wetland near William O'Brien state park, December 2014

Photo by J. Harrington

If you believe in coincidences, you might believe that the concurrent publication of the Star Tribune's three-part series on Minnesota’s Growing Divide: Urban and rural areas are splitting apart... with Politico's publication on the nation's political geography is a coincidence. It may be, but I've grown very skeptical of coincidence. What's fascinating is that Politico is asserting that "our most abiding fissures are not urban versus rural, “North” against “South” or the coasts against the interior. Rather, they are between nearly a dozen dominant regional cultures..." at the same time the Star Tribune series finds a "functional alliance between city and country folk is at the core of Minnesota’s success story."

Politico includes Minnesota and New England in what they refer to as "Yankeedom." Having lived for extended periods in both New England and Minnesota, i've found the culture in each place to be more dissimilar than similar. As a budding bioregionalist, I'm looking forward to seeing what, if anything, the Star Tribune has to say about Minnesota's "common goals" and what else Minnesotans have in common. It was almost two years ago, in February 2014, that My Minnesota raised the question of whether Minnesota has a cultural identity. I'm delighted to see others are finding value in both the question and potential answers. At a local, bioregional, state and multi-state scale, we as a people need to place more emphasis on what we have in common than on what we may disagree. We must get better at putting planet before profits and people before politics. New England seems to have found ways to do that. They're smaller, geographically, less unified politically, have about three times the population and, on a per capita basis, are a little more economically successful than Minnesota. What bearing does that information have on Minnesota's common goals? Do you remember the essay fundamentals of "compare and contrast?"

basic source: Wikipedia

An Identity Crisis

By Garry Gottfriedson 

I certainly know who I am . . .

I can get away with being politically incorrect.

I am the ambassador to First Nations’ poetic expressions

& as Kinsella pompously put it straight

“I have the license to do so.”

what a magical way to escape tyranny!

just like Trudeau & Chrétien hiding beneath cowboy hats

nevertheless & back to the point,

call me cowboy

call me First Nations

call me aboriginal

call me native

call me chug

call me skin

if you must,

but never call me Indian.

I call myself that!

& if you feel guilty when I say so,

this is not about postcolonial rhetoric

it is about an identity crisis

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Our Rural / Urban culturesheds

As much as I enjoyed the Rural Arts and Culture Summit, it was nice to get home yesterday, to be greeted by the woodcock which seems to have decided to stick around, because s/he was in the driveway puddle again as I pulled into the yard.

the new neighbor, a woodcock

Photo by J. Harrington

Although each of the sessions I attended at the Summit was really good, there are a few high points that I want to share. First, I got to meet Jay Salinas, a founder of the Wormfarm Institute in Wisconsin. Way back in the last millennium, in 1998, he coined the term:

cultureshed (kul’cher-shed) n. 1. A geographic region irrigated by streams of local talent and fed by deep pools of human and natural history. 2. An area nourished by what is cultivated locally. 3. The efforts of writers, performers, artists, scholars, farmers and chefs who contribute to a vital and diverse local culture.

That definition provides wonderful overlap with the concept of bioregion. It could well be the Heartland’s term for what the west coast has termed a bioregion. It leaves out specific reference to hunter-gatherer-foragers, but then I don’t recall having yet seen any of those terms in the bioregional writings I’ve encountered. (I'm particularly interested in heightening awareness of indigenous and native contributions to the conversation on bioregions.)

From the Ground Up Summit

Photo by J. Harrington

Second, my apartment roommate, James Godsil, has been doing some very interesting and creative work in regenerative development and urban agriculture -- hydroponics in Milwaukee. It turns out that he and I had more in common and more shared interests than I had any reason to hope for in roommate assignments. Much of what he’s done can be found on the website of a nonprofit organization where he serves as president, the Sweetwater Foundation.

Third, Dana Johnson, an award-winning producer at the Appleton, MN Public Television Station, made a comment during a Thursday morning panel to the effect that some of her friends from the Los Angeles area ask when she’s coming back. (She went to college there.) She said that she can accomplish more and have a feeling of greater impact right where she is. She said, as far as she’s concerned, big cities don’t always lead to a better life. Her observation was reinforced later that day when I heard Joe Dowling’s (Artistic Director of the Guthrie Theater for the past 20 years) observation on Minnesota Public Radio that some of the best theater he’s seen during the past two decades has been produced by “regional” theatres and that regional no longer can be assumed to be amateurish or second rate. The same is true for rural arts and culture, as the Summit clearly documented. I may be a recovering planner, but I'm an unreconstructed regionalist whose heart belongs to the city and the country. It's wonderful to encounter others with similar perspectives and a love for intrinsically sustainable values based on quality more than quantity. Bigger is bigger, not necessarily better.

Eagle Affirmation

By John Kinsella 

You’ve got to understand that sighting the pair

of eagles over the block, right over our house,

not more than twenty feet above the roof,

so massive their wings pull at the corrugated

tin sheeting even with gentlest tilt, counteracts

bitterness against all the damage I see and hear

around me on an exclusively crisp blue morning,

when clarity is pain and even one small missing

wattle tree, entirely vanquished since I was last here

at home—I still find this hard to say—is agony;

a region is not a pinpoint and a different compass

works in my head, having magnetics for all

directions and all pointing to one spot

I know and observe as closely as possible;

and even one small vanished or vanquished

wattle tree is agony close to death for me,

where I find it hard to breathe to feed myself

to get past the loss; but the pair of eagles

still appearing and keeping their sharp

and scrupulous eyes honed, overrides

this ordeal, though I wish their victims

life too and their damage is traumatic

as anything else; that’s as much sense

or nonsense as I can make in such blue light.

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Just chillin', or somethin'

Back when I was eleven or twelve years old, a noteworthy hurricane hit Massachusetts where I then lived. I'm sure the effects of hurricanes, though infrequent, were a source of worry and inconvenience for my parents. I also remember, vaguely, that flooded roads and flooding streams and downed trees and ..., offered a great opportunity for adventure to a preteen male interested in nature and the outdoors. Memories of those days have been triggered while reading a book I recently bought on sale at my "local" book store in Cambridge. Diane Ackerman's The Human Age has been on my "think about reading" list for some time (see "on sale"). In the first few chapters, she mentions, et al., Katrina, Sandy, Tohoku and other weather disasters the world has suffered during the past few years. As of today, we know California's drought is affecting crops and idling workers. Last year we, and much of the rest of North America, froze our *#%$s off with the Polar Vortex. Starting tomorrow we're about to experience a micro vortex? And in the face of all of this, this past November as a nation we're about put a climate denier extraordinaire in charge of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. What the hell is the matter with us? Have we no sense whatsoever?

chickadee puffed up against Winter's cold

Photo by J. Harrington

If I lived on either coast, I'd probably be trying to form the liberal equivalent of the tea party in hopes of keeping my home from being washed out to sea. (I come from where they really know how to do that kind of stuff.) It's too late for many of those in New York and New Jersey already flooded by Sandy. A similar, but worse, fate is befalling the Yup'ik Eskimos in the village of Newtok. It makes me realize that facing a week's worth of subzero temperatures is a relatively mild problem by comparison. (pun intended) All in all, Minnesota is in a proportionately safe location when considering the effects of Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (aka climate change or global warming). Plus, look at all the jobs and taxes we'll be able to benefit from if the Sandpiper or other oil pipelines are allowed to proceed. What could possibly go wrong? Right? Right?

Much Madness is divinest Sense - (620)

By Emily Dickinson 

Much Madness is divinest Sense -

To a discerning Eye -

Much Sense - the starkest Madness -

’Tis the Majority

In this, as all, prevail -

Assent - and you are sane -

Demur - you’re straightway dangerous -

And handled with a Chain -

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Rebranding Minnesota?

Have you seen the coverage of the "rebranding of Minnesota?" There's this blog posting and a Star Tribune article, each of which was triggered by this event at the Walker Museum. I would respectfully suggest that the question of Minnesota's identity is not one that can be readily answered by any brand. Minnesota is large (84,397 square miles), the 12th largest state in area. By comparison, all six New England states total 66,507 square miles and half of that is in Maine.

Minnesota brand?

Photo by J. Harrington

Minnesota is home to four different biomes and, as of 2000, about 71% of its population was urban. We have Lake Superior, the North Woods, mining and agriculture and forestry and the Boundary Waters Wilderness Canoe Area and Fortune 500 company headquarters and lord knows how many professional sports teams and venues and ...  So, although I wasn't able to attend the Walker's event, I am curious about what it is folks think we should be branding and to whom? Personally, I though we were on the right track when Time magazine branded us as the state that works and home to the good life. I suppose, now that we're in the twenty-first century, that might not be considered good enough, or is it that we fear we can no long deliver on either promise? If we're just looking for an update, we could try "the sustainable state," conveying the idea we intend to be here for a long, long time and support balanced economy, equity and ecology. You know, an aspirational brand. Or, if we really want a tag line, how about "Minnesota, where you can have it all?"

Minnesota brand?

Photo by J. Harrington

Chanson Philosophique

By Timothy Steele 

The nominalist in me invents

A life devoid of precedents.

The realist takes a different view:

He claims that all I feel and do

Billions of others felt and did

In history’s Pre-me period.

Arguing thus, both voices speak

A partial truth. I am unique,

Yet the unceasing self-distress

Of desire buffets me no less

Than it has other sons of man

Who’ve come and gone since time began.

The meaning, then, of this dispute?

My life’s a nominal/real pursuit,

Which leaves identity clear and blurred,

In which what happens has occurred

Often and never—which is to say,

Never to me, or quite this way.

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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.

Getting hot about global warming

I love the look of old barns like the one in the top photo. I also know that, if neglected long enough, a barn will collapse and end up like the one in the bottom photo.

scenic old barn             © harrington

collapsed old barn         © harrington

I think we've been neglecting the reality of global warming and its effects on Minnesota for long enough. Here's why:

According to Paul Douglas, we've just gone through "The wettest June since 1874..." Today's Star Tribune reports that "Waterlogged fields wash out Minnesota corn, soybean crops" leaving farmers with few options. Connect those dots with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency's (MPCA) 2013 report to the legislature that noted:

A significant reduction in GHG emissions is seen in 2009. The financial crisis led to a contraction of economic production, which had the effect of reducing energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. With economic recovery, emissions rose in 2010.

I hope we're not stuck with a strategy of repeated recessions (economic washouts) as our primary response to greenhouse gas reductions. Unfortunately, the Star Tribune recently touted that "Minnesota leads in reducing emissions" in reference to the Obama Administration's efforts to reduce greenhouse gases from burning coal. The editorial went on to congratulate Minnesota on how well we are going to respond to a 2025 goal. 

I can only assume that the Star Tribune didn't feel a need to fact check for an opinion piece. My interpretation of the graph below (from the 2013 report) leads me to believe we're in the proverbial "world of hurt" when it comes to meeting our own 2015 (next year-15%) and 2025 (30%) GHG reduction goals from the 2005 base. The line from the Smokey and the Bandit theme comes to mind. Something about "a long ways to go and a short time to get there."

As long as I'm raising concerns and being snarky about how seriously Minnesota appears to be responding to the challenge of reporting on and adapting to global warming's effects, I might as well highlight that the same MPCA report that contained the above graph, also contained a statement that

"In the past, this report included both a greenhouse gas emissions reduction progress report per subdivision 3 and a discussion of legislative proposals to achieve greenhouse gas emission reductions per subdivision 4. Minnesota Statute §216H.07 subdivision 4 was repealed in 2012."

Now the report doesn't say, and I don't know, why the subdivision requiring MPCA to report on a discussion of legislative proposals to achieve greenhouse gas emission reductions was repealed, but, at face value, it seems about as foresighted as North Carolina's legislative prohibition on considering sea level rises associated with climate change. 

If the Star Tribune Editorial Board wants to engage in simple boosterism, and Minnesota's legislature wants to be peered with North Carolina's, that's up to them. I happen to believe we deserve better and so do our children and grandchildren. I don't believe global warming is something we can let future generations solve while we concentrate on this quarter's profits and getting reelected. It's here, it's now and it's going to take a lot of hard work to adapt. Some of that work is already being done and is reported on here. It would, it seems to me, behoove us to pay more attention to what remains to be done, instead of spending much time on our laurels congratulating ourselves on our leadership and what we've already done. We don't need to get a prize for rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic faster than anyone else. (I probably should have read Jane Kenyon's poem before I wrote today's posting, but I've had enough water for now.)

Portrait of a Figure near Water

By Jane Kenyon 

Rebuked, she turned and ran

uphill to the barn. Anger, the inner   

arsonist, held a match to her brain.   

She observed her life: against her will   

it survived the unwavering flame.

The barn was empty of animals.   

Only a swallow tilted

near the beams, and bats

hung from the rafters

the roof sagged between.

Her breath became steady

where, years past, the farmer cooled   

the big tin amphoræ of milk.

The stone trough was still

filled with water: she watched it   

and received its calm.

So it is when we retreat in anger:   

we think we burn alone

and there is no balm.

Then water enters, though it makes   

no sound. 

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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.

Ground cover

© harrington

Hi! Thanks for slushing by. What do you think the world is coming to? Terrorist bombings in Boston; explosions in Texas; and Mother Nature acting like a terrorist in My Minnesota. Bostonians shut in per police order; we were shut in by heavy, wet snow; and folks in West, Texas were apparently lucky to have an "in" left in which to be shut. During the storm last night, I tried waving a white flag of surrender. Apparently Mother N. couldn't see it through the snow. Do you think we need an international agreement to change the color of truce and surrender from white to florescent orange or lime green so it could be used in Winter or "Spring?" Could we get both houses of congress to approve it, or would the fact that it needs to be international mean that some members would raise the flag of socialist, UN conspiracy? Do you recognize the bipolar, manic symptoms of SAD and cabin fever combined? Shall we move on to today's poetry? Yes, let's. We can return to Where One Voice Ends... and read Angela Shannon's 

Carrying Home

I am carrying home in my breast pocket:
land where I learned to crawl,
dust that held my footprints,
long fields I trod through.

Home, where Mother baked bread,
where Papa spoke with skies,
where family voices gathered.
In my palm, this heap of earth
I have hauled over hills and valleys.

Releasing dirt between my fingers,
I ask the prairies to sustain me.
May my soil and this soil nurture each other,
may seeds root and develop beyond measure,
may the heartland and I blossom.

Nature literacy? Yes. Grounded in place? Yes. Coyote and Bear totems? I think so, but not in an obvious way. Look at "spoke with skies" and "nurture each other." Further totems: soil as totem. Science and further science: person and place co-evolving and blossoming together. Language, craft, getting the work done? I say absolutely. "Planting" a new "home" for your "transplanted" life works for me. Thanks for listening. Come again when you can. Rants, raves and reflections served here daily.

Neap tide

Welcome. Come in. Where I am at the moment, it's neither snowing nor sleeting nor freezing nor raining nor some combination of those, the way it was when I drove to work this morning. We'll see what the rest of the day brings. This being Spring in Minnesota, there's lots of options for Mother Nature to choose from and she does. I grew up near the ocean in a location where the average rise and fall of the tide was about 12 feet. Whether the tide was rising or falling, the waves were always incoming. They'd run up the strand and then withdraw but each time either closer to or further from high tide markings. You're probably wondering what that has to do with a state that's in the middle of the country and about equidistant by more than a thousand miles from any sign of a tide. Think about our Spring. One day it's warm and sunny. Next day it rains. The day after it snows. Then the sun comes back, but this time it's even warmer than it was the last time we saw it. That weather waves pattern continues until there's no more snow on the ground or falling and we start to enjoy warm weather (and mosquitoes). You're probably fed up with this kind of equanimity and just want it to be warm and sunny, here. It will be. Soon.  In the interim, here's the next (third) segment of Prairie Grasses Suite.

WIND

Have you heard it

Whistle through seedheads
Implode among grass stems
Never stay in one place
Dance across distances limited only by the
prairie

HORIZON

Thanks for listening. Come again. Rants, raves and reflections served daily.

Flooded with ideas

© harrington

Yesterday I skimmed through an interesting post in Planetizen that led me to the full Scientific American post on geodesign (not geoengineering). If, in Minnesota, we're going to try to minimize  problems that arise from spring flooding in the Mississippi and Minnesota basins, or to help Duluth be successful at replacing their washed out infrastructure, I thought maybe we should learn more about better ways to respond to our tendency "in recent years to overdevelop land at the expense of natural habitats, as well as population growth and climate change, which have left communities increasingly vulnerable to natural disasters..." I was heartened to see that Tom Fisher, Dean of the College of Design at the U played a prominent role in a recent conference on geodesign, not in Minnesota but in California. Then I noticed that My Minnesota was not mentioned among the places actually applying geodesign. I was dismayed. But then I remembered that here in Minnesota, we decided several years ago that having a state planning agency was an unnecessary expense. Since our economy is recovering faster than those of our neighboring midwestern states, that must have been one of the reasons. In Latin that approach is called "post hoc, ergo propter hoc." You run into a lot of that kind of reasoning in political circles, especially those that deny climate change is either occurring, or largely attributable to human activities, or both, as in "So if climate change isn't occurring than it can't be responsible for the increasing frequency and intensity of storms that have been occurring recently and we don't have to do anything about it because the insurance companies (profit making job creating private sector) will pay off claims so folks can rebuild right where they were and we can all go merrily on our way and geodesign is totally unnecessary and will no doubt lead to more job killing regulation." I'm glad we settled that. Let's see how much deeper into the sand we can push our heads, or maybe we should ask Dean Fisher to share with us his insights on how geodesign might benefit Minnesota. I'd go to a local conference like that, even if it didn't fill the River Center. How about you?

Half a chance

© harrington

I'm reading one of my Christmas presents, For the Health of the Land, some of Aldo Leopold's previously unpublished essays and other writings. Scott Russell Sanders wrote the foreword, in which he says "... the Midwest is plain and straightforward, yet shadowed with mystery; open and welcoming, yet reserved; full of promise and hope, yet acquainted with grief. The Midwest is a fertile, well-watered landscape, long inhabited, much abused and much adored, deeply scarred but also quick to heal if given half a chance." I had the pleasure of meeting (in person) and spending some time with Scott last autumn at the Loft's writer's workshop at the Audubon Center of the North Woods. Modest as he is, he never mentioned that he had written the foreward. Although I'm a native New Englander, I've lived in the Midwest long enough to recognize the truth in Scott's description. On this last day of 2012, please join me in looking forward to a 2013 in which we all agree to give the Midwest, and the rest of the world, half a chance to heal.

Happy New Year!