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I have a home near Lake Geneva, Wisconsin — surrounded by farm country — and traveling back and forth frequently to Chicago, I pass by many fields where scattered cattle contentedly graze. But more and more often I also pass the growing number of factory farms, where I see these long open-sided barns with the rear ends of hundreds of cattle, tails wagging in tiny pens under bright lights 24 hours a day.
I guess they are being fattened up for market. But I find the sight of these cattle, being treated as so much walking meat instead of proud animals enjoying some vestige of normal life, depressing and upsetting. Yes, I once worked for a prominent fast food company, and I know that burger places want to keep their prices low by buying less expensive meat. So do homemakers. But I’d willingly pay the extra few cents to know that cattle are treated humanely while they live.
When I was a boy, my father had an “ooo-ga” horn installed on his car, and when we went on country drives, he would pull up to a field fence and sound it, and cows and steers would sidle up to the fence and “moo” back. I guess those days are gone, but I still like to see cattle in the field, contentedly grazing with their young ones. That’s worth something to me.
Contact: Chuck Ebeling
262-581-6229 ceebeling@hotmail.com
Press Points – Saving Yerkes Observatory– May 2, 2018
- A new foundation, the Yerkes Future Foundation (YFF), today sent an “Expression of Interest” letter to David Chiaro, associate VP of the University of Chicago, indicating that concerned citizens of the Geneva Lake areas have come together as a cohesive organization with the desire to work with the university regarding the transfer of ownership of Yerkes Observatory, including its contents and associated land. The university had previously announced it plans to close Yerkes on Oct. 1, 2018 and is open to proposals regarding its future.
- The chair of YFF is Dianna Colman, a local Geneva Lake area resident, who heads a group of founding members.
- It was on this day 125 years ago that the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 opened, and one of the displays was the revolutionary new 40-inch telescope – then and now the world’s largest operating through-the-lens telescope – which would be installed at the new Yerkes Observatory near the shores of Geneva Lake, Wisconsin, in 1897.
- The goals of YFF are to preserve the historic features of both the observatory building and the site and at the same time make the facility open to the public, available for youth development and continuing education as a science center.
- A public meeting is planned by YFF to introduce and discuss its Expression of Interest, to be held Monday, May 14, at George Williams College of Aurora University, at Williams Bay, Wisconsin, at 7 pm in the Seabury Room in Beasley Campus Center.
- This proposal is being made by YFF “with a genuine concern for all aspects of the Yerkes entity but also with a deep respect for the Village of Williams Bay, its citizenry, the greater Geneva Lake community and the future, science, astronomy and architectural students who will benefit from the open and enhanced environment of Yerkes Observatory.”
- The YFF believes an endowment of at least 10 to 15 million dollars will be needed to preserve and operate the observatory, depending on deferred capital expenses necessary to have the building and grounds meet minimum standards.
- The YFF encourages the University of Chicago to give their proposal prompt and thoughtful consideration and looks forward to entering a dialog with the university leading to a good result.
The NBC news tonight reported that the population of giraffes has dropped by 40% in just 10 years, to about 80,000. When I took this photo of giraffes out on the great Masai Mara plain of Kenya about 10 years ago, and wrote about our safari it in an essay titled “The Masai Mara Hood Ornament,” I reported that wildlife in East Africa was then down about 60% since the 70s. Why? Climate change, human development, poaching, legal hunting. If the global human population had dropped as much over the past 10 years, we would have seen almost 3 billion people die. While the loss of so many of these magnificent animals is shocking in itself, perhaps their devastation makes them canaries in a coal mine:for mankind.
Everyone is taking about the new film, Intersteller, about a dying earth and the search for another planet for our species. A recent episode of The Newsroom dramatized the announcement, over a year ago, that carbon levels in the atmosphere and their consequences for mankind may be irreversible. And meanwhile we spend more and more on war and see renewal of primitive tribalism all around the globe, despite the internet and global communication.
I’d like to think there will still be giraffes, and people around to watch such wonderful animals, in the next century. What might we do to increase the probability of that?. .
Outside of Houston, a small town rallied to save a local 100-year-old historic oak tree, and mounted a creative campaign to raise $200,000 in funding, that involved 5 powerful CAT tractors working in Unison to move the living tree 1500 feet, out of the way of a new road. Why does it matter. When an entire community cares that much about saving a living symbol for the future, and mounts an effort as resourceful as that of moving the Endeavor Space Shuttle through the streets of LA, it deserves our notice, and respect.
See the “moving” video. http://youtu.be/BFTj0hM3DHM
A sprawling bur oak, lively as ever, dated to 1499, visited on Friday, in the High Wine Historic District on the bluff near Brad
ley University, in Peoria, Illinois. 
Last night governor Perry reiterated his belief that the “science is unsettled” on whether man’s carbon emissions is the primary cause of climate change, and whether we should change our economies on that basis. He raised the example of how Galileo was considered crazy in believing the world is round by the preponderance of scientists in his time.
In our time, today, the preponderance of science is on the side that mankind has accelerated potentially devastating climate change through our increase in modern carbon emissions related to burning fossil fuel. Yet there os also a historical perspective that suggests that monumental natural climate change has taken place several times before, but that the consequence to mankind is now greater because of the size and dispersal of our human population.
For example, after hurricane Katrina, some said that the answer was not to rebuild New Orleans in its aftermath, as has been done, but to rebuild a “new” New Orleans at another location that is not in the natural path of catastrophic storms.
I’d like to propose, not as a scientist, but from the perspective of a thinking person, that mankind should be taking a hedged approach to climate change: assume that to some extent that it is inevitable, but also assume that mankind should reduce carbon emissions that can only make climate change worse. For example, perhaps we should begin moving populations inland and to higher ground, at the same time we strive to reduce use of fossil fuels and develop alternative energy sources. Perhaps what we need to do is BOTH evolve our cultural footprint on this world and change our intensity of use and sources of natural energy.
Here’s a segment of my 2007 essay, “The Masai Mara Hood Ornament,” which can be found at http://www.chilit.org, that reports one scientist’s expert opinion on this issue:
“The guest speaker was Richard Leakey, the renowned paleoanthropoligist, former director of the National Museum of Kenya and of the Kenya Wildlife Service. Yes, he is the 64-year-old inheritor of the legacy of famed fossil hunters Louis and Mary Leakey. Richard has devoted his life, as did his parents, to helping conserve the habitats of wild species in Africa and elsewhere.
“He shared an increasingly familiar concern when he said, “I think the most threatening crisis facing us and our descendants is climate change. No single thing is going to do more damage or wreak more havoc than the climate change cycle we are now entering on.”
“He observed that many byproducts of human activities, such as carbon spewing into the atmosphere, have a negative impact. But he went on to share his view that the human race, our very species, might not be what and where we are today but for naturally caused climate change, in earlier prehistoric times.
“The first of such changes was 2.6 million years ago, when the response to fairly rapid desiccation or drought was the development of the earliest record of technology – the first time primates started to use sharp edges to access a meat diet.
The second sweep of climate change took place in Africa about 1.8 million years ago, when early humans first left Africa, and we began to find their fossils in parts of Europe and later in Asia.
“Some of you may have participated in the National Geographic Society’s Genographic Project, a landmark DNA study of the human journey out of Africa to populate the world. Vicki and I sent our DNA samples in, and found the portions of Africa from whence our earliest descendants moved on into Europe.
“The last major pre-historic climate change, and one that still affects us, occurred just 8 or 9 thousand years ago, when humans around the world underwent pressures from desiccation that led to the domestication of plants and animals.
Leakey concludes, “Had there not been such climate change in three separate episodes, we probably would not be where we are today, as a species.”
“The difference is that in previous times there were relatively few people to be effected by climate change, but today it can affect an enormous population – some 6 to 8 billion people across the continents. He believes that today there are far too many people on the planet to absorb such change, particularly if we go through a period of years when rainfall patterns change dramatically, mean temperatures rise, and most significantly, ocean levels also begin to rise.”
The carving is done, and our initials have been carved by Mike, and at the back of the tree, he added his signature as artist.
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