What Do Cedar Rapids and Sichuan Have in Common?...

[J A Ginsburg]

(see more photos and video of floods in China)

The view outside my morning coffee window is gorgeous. The last of the storms for a while blew out of the Chicago area yesterday morning (...at 60+ mph, leaving a thousand uprooted trees and a smattering of squished cars and smashed roofs in its wake about 20 miles south of where I am). If it's hard for me to reconcile what I know is happening with what I can see, I am sure it is an abstraction from where you all are scattered about the globe.

But the ramifications are global. It is stunning to see how many "grain bowls" around the world have been shredded this year. While the waters may be receding in the corn and soy fields of the Midwest, those few half-drowned plants that survived have roots to shallow to make it through the dry hot months of July and August, and it's too late to replant. In Asia, earthquakes, a cyclone. and now flooding have done a number on rice.

Right now in the U.S., the focus in on the Mississippi and its tributaries as the storm waters rush downstream, breaking records and lives as they go. A popular resort lake in Wisconsin burst its mad-made banks last week, draining within hours into the Wisconsin river, taking entire homes along for the ride:



Of Cranes, Seeds, Circuses & Books...
This near a town called Baraboo, one of my favorite places. Not only is it fun to say, it's home to the Aldo Leopold Foundation ("Sand County Almanac" & "The Land Ethic"), the the International Crane Foundation (the only place in the world where you can find all 15 species of crane - they're the ones who led some Whoopers by untralite down to Florida to start a new migrating flock a few years ago). and Circus World Museum. Baraboo used to be the Barnum & Bailey Circus folk and menagerie spent their winters. I've actually canoed past on the Baraboo River (renting and seen an elephant (the elephants bathe in the river).

Another threatened treasure is the Seed Savers farm in Decorah, Iowa. This is an extremely cool and feisty organization whose mission is to save heirloom plant species, mostly fruits and vegetables, but flowers, too, from extinction. They are the David to Archer-Daniel-Midland and Dow's Goliath, promoting natural genetic diversity over patented GMO seeds designed for commodity monoculture planting. It is in large part due to their network of gardeners, keeping these seed lineages going, that heirloom tomatoes have become such a huge hit among consumers in the last few years. Recently, they sent shipment of 485 varieties of vegetable seeds to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway for safety duplication. Good thing....

At the University of Iowa in Iowa City, it's full out academic triage. Volunteers by the dozens formed lines on the stairwells of the main library to save books -- many irreplaceable -- stored in a basement.

Meanwhile, in southern Indiana, some friends of mine who are fortunate enough to live on 40 acres of high ground, were told by the local Red Cross that volunteers were needed at the Humane Society to pet and comfort abandoned pets and farm animals.

After the Waters Recede: Clean Up & Public Health
The staggering crop loss / soaring food prices part of the story is beginning to move from headline to dreary deal-with-it reality.... (try to ignore the annoying ad at the beginning of the videos...)

...the media are moving on to the next disaster: mold-wrecked homes and businesses and public health threats. The waters are contaminated with all kinds of chemicals and sewage. A great hunk of the middle of the country is now basically a superfund site and the microbes are having a party.

Tara Smith, an epidemiologist at the University of Iowa, who writes an excellent blog called Aetiology, has a post on how pandemic preparedness is paying off in the crisis. Still, luck seems to play an uncomfortably big role (see comment by Dean Morrison about flooding in the U.K. last year.)

Stay tuned....