Behind the Headlines

Leaving here late Saturday night, I went to get in my car. Innocently, I unlocked the door and stepped forward to get in when I spotted it. I froze. I was hoping that they wouldn’t make it inland – that they would just float around happily mating over the water, spending their 24 hours of life out there in the world instead of clinging to the safety of a screen or the hood of my car. But there it was – the first fishfly of the season.

I stared at the little googlie-eyed thing before growling at it. It stared back, dumb, unshaken, impenetrable in its silence and will to live. I spotted another one on a rear window as I went to roll it down. The fishfly, apparently not wanting to give up its post, clung to the moving window until it wedged into the rubber edging. The window made a horrible squeaking noise as the bug met its demise.

I can sometimes be anxious and something I’ve learned to do when anxiety is setting in is imagine the worst possible situation. It sounds counter-intuitive, but when you peg what that is, it’s usually not as bad as it seemed when unnamed. I mention this because bugs make me anxious. The worst thing I could think of with fishflies was two-fold. One, trapped in the hair and flapping around near the ear (this drives me crazy about bugs) and two, stepping on a green slicker of the bugs, I slip and fall into a mass pile of them and end up surrounded. Yuck.

I understand how good they are for the environment and how harmless they actually are, but it doesn’t mean I have to like them.

For about a week now a wildfire has been raging in the wonderful Boundary Waters area of Minnesota up near the Ontario border.

Canoe liveries, cabins, campsites and forest areas have been scorched.

NASA’s satellite observatory has a Natural Hazards page that captures a bird’s eye view of such calamities on Earth.

Do aliens’ Earth probes record the same view?

The gas prices are predicted to rise higher than that little yodeling hiker person on the Price is Right game. Check out the SEMCOG calculator to see how much you spend on your commute monthly and yearly and see how much you could save if you were to pool with others.

Click here.

I know, I know. It’s not really kosher to promote your own blog site, but does it count if it’s written by somebody else? Ah, screw convention. Isn’t that what the wild web of the west is all about?
I strongly recommend you to visit the MEN Naturespeak blog. I find it to be utterly fantastic – if you like that sort of thing. Think Annie Dillard meets Rick Bass meets that scientific writer guy whose name I can never remember. It also smells faintly of Edward Abbey I should mention. Faintly. Since he’s one of my all time favorites, I don’t toss that around lightly.

In the words of Mr. Abbey: never apologize, never explain. So, just listen to what I say and go visit http://www.blogsmonroe.com/nature/ and love it.

Hey everyone, the trees in downtown are blooming. Downtown Monroe, Dundee and Luna Pier are the only locales I’ve been to in the past two days, so I’m not sure what else is happening around the county.

Does this mean the mayflies can’t be far behind?

Last year our fabulous designer and copy desk leader Stacy and I determined we wanted to make a movie starring mayflies. We wanted to call it Mayfly-a, like Mothra. Partial inspiration also came from Mansquito, the Sci-Fi channel original “horror” flick about a giant man-mosquito.

Then we realized that mayflies don’t even have mouths. Maybe this year a mutation is afoot…

I just came across Mark Morford’s rant on the individual’s place in preserving the world in the San Fran Gate. It kind of touches on how hip being green has become.

Read it here.

(Warning: The language may be objectionable to some.)

A story from businesswire.com, giving “all purpose” a new meaning:

MINNEAPOLIS–When Cookie severely fractured her leg, Mary Jane Martinez fashioned a cast from a Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day All-Purpose Cleaner bottle. Martinez, a happy farmer from the Missouri Ozarks, is hero of the mantra “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” Eight weeks after the break, the Mrs. Meyer’s cast came off to reveal a well-healed leg. Good thing, too, as Cookie’s kid is due in just a few weeks.

The real Mrs. Meyer, Thelma, is dedicated to creating earth-friendly and cruelty-free household cleaners containing plants found in her garden in Iowa. The company’s entire line of aromatherapeutic household cleansers is hard-working, yet gentle on the earth.

By the way, why is there snow in the Ozarks in this picture?

Kermit’s lament years ago was truer than he knew. It ain’t easy being green – sometimes. But, it’s getting easier.

It seems like green is the new black. As in, being “green”, as in being environmentally conscious is now the more fashionable thing to do.

In covering Earth Day stuff for a few years now, it feels like this year it’s really taking off. I don’t know that Al Gore can be credited for inventing environmental awareness – much like this ‘internet’ he speaks of – but I think the movie he put together may have something to do with it. Just general interest in the Global Warming debate, maybe, has sparked something.

Also, the trends in the American culture seem to recirculate every 30 years or so. With the war in Iraq drawing comparisons to Vietnam, it seems somewhat instinctual – and pardon the pun – natural that we would turn an eye more toward living organically and sustainably, a movement that really gained steam in the 70’s.

Like so many things borrowed from the past though, perhaps this is more than a trend, maybe it will become our way of life, rather than our fad diet. Hey bell bottoms and hip huggers infiltrated their way into everyday dress, were repurposed and renamed and have stuck. Who among us doesn’t have a pair of boot cut or flare leg pants?

“With concerns about the world getting warmer, the people thought they were just being rewarded – now we can swim any day in November…”
Ahh, global warming. It’s slightly difficult to blog about, because separate from the political firestorm, it’s snowing outside right now.

Sunday, I was asked this question: “Hey Steph, when you become a reporter do they make you take the oath or is it voluntary?”

My dad was doing the asking. When I inquired what oath that is, he retorted, “the one apparently all members of the media make to protect and serve the agenda of the liberals…” so on and so forth.

Yep. My dad is a conservative. He loves watching The Factor, but would never wear a fleece advertising that fact (you know who you are). Something else about my dad is that he’s fairly quiet and reserved, though cobra-like in debate, with pointed questions.

Sigh. Since it was Easter, since there was a room full of people and since I was hungry, I sarcastically conceded. Oh, yeah, they make us sign it and then we get sworn in. It’s like the Hippocratic oath Doctors take, but with a clear agenda and political bias. Then I asked him if global warming was still fake. This is a particular sticking point for my dad when it comes to liberals and doesn’t necessarily indicate my views on the subject. It was just a way of capturing one’s goat.

On Monday, I covered the green building and environmental town hall at the IHM, featuring Dingell. The talk inevitably turned to Al Gore and global warming. Representatives from LaRouche’s camp (Political Action Committee that states warming is a fraud) were there, asking long-winded questions about third-world economic genocides and those who stand to gain from such a hoax. They presented interesting views, some I had never heard before, eventually flat out asking Dingell how he could believe in global warming.

I’m able to keep an open mind, in fact, my livelihood depends on it, so when others were dismissing the LaRouche peoples’ questions, I tried to listen more. Instead of discounting them because it went against popular opinion in the room (and those nuns have some sway!) I wanted to make sure I was accurately hearing what they were talking about.

After the presentation, they asked me what I thought about global warming – where I stood on the issue. An impossible question! I told them I didn’t have enough information either way to make any decisions. I live in a natural state of skepticism. They seemed slightly taken aback when I told them they had some interesting ideas.

Why would this surprise them? They must have found out about the oath.

Sometimes I wish I could just sleep in, like the Postal Service song suggests, not having to hear the constant hum of these things, but then what fun would that be?

An article last week discussed the presence of VHS, or Viral Hemorrhagic Septicemia, in the Great Lakes. It’s a fish virus that’s spreading partly through minnows, and a lot of bait shop owners are upset that it could increase their costs or ruin their bait business by requiring them to import bait from distance areas instead of buying them from companies that harvest minnows and other bait from the Great Lakes.

A federal order banned the sale of Great Lakes bait without a veterinary certification that the bait wasn’t infected.

The threat to the bait shops is real (see www.savethebaitbusiness.com), but it’s also scary about what it might mean to Lake Erie’s larger fish industry.

“We’re considering all of Lake Erie a hot zone” for the disease, said Gary Towns, supervisor of the Lake Erie Management Unit for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

He said more restrictions will come down the pike about who can have fish, how they can be moved, and sold. “There’s going to be a lot of very sticky issues with this disease.

VHS took a toll on drum fish last year, and also caused a less severe die-off among perch and muskie.

“It almost operates under the ice,” Mr. Towns said. “It’s a cold-weather disease. Once the ice went out last year, we found fish that were decomposing already.”

By Dean Cousino, dean@monroenews.com

Friday was the last day for the three free countywide yard waste recycling stations to be open. They will be sorely missed until next April when they will reopen. The three sites in Ash, Bedford and Monroe Townships have served a vital role in providing a place for getting rid of grass clippings, leaves and tree limbs and keeping this debris from being dumped illegally out of our roadside ditches and other hidden areas. It is one of the most successful county programs initiated locally. I took about a dozen van loads with more than 50 barrels of stuff this fall to dump and found it so convenient than waiting for our weekly yard waste pickup in Frenchtown. The yard waste came from my home and two other yards in Erie and Temperance. While unloading, I ran into several people who mentioned how useful the recycling bins were. My only suggestion for next year is they might want to provide some staircase or platform for people like me who have to empty their barrels because we use them over and over again. In many cases, you can’t just walk into the bins, but have to throw your paper recycling bags over the side rails. That can be difficult for anyone who doesn’t have a pickup to stand on.

The county takes a lot of heat for programs that have floundered or failed, but this one has been valuable from its onset several years ago. Jamie Dean, the recycling coordinator, should be commended for arranging these bins with Homrich Inc. every spring and fall.