Well, probably. Sortakinda done. At 1:30 this afternoon, I made my final staggering plunge through the muck and mire to the finish line, having untangled various tangles and discovered yet more typos. I’d been up until 2:30 am Friday morning (NOT, mutter mutter, going out to photograph peak bluebonnets and plains nipple cactus, mutter mutter) and was back up before 8, unwillingly settling in to work again. Yesterday was gorgeous, clear and just cool enough. Today was mostly cloudy, so less temptation to go out, but a lot of stiffness and temptation to go back to bed. Which I did after coming to the end for the umpteenth time.<\/p>\n
For those who think they’d really like to see all the drafts, especially the stuff thrown out…no, you really wouldn’t. OK, some of you, the kind who would be glad to be handed the kitchen waste cans after dinner so you could decide if the chef cut off a millimeter too much or too little of the fat on the rack of lamb, and whether the nubs of the carrots looked fresh…you<\/em> might enjoy it. But most of us are far better off not knowing, so the story itself can come onstage, twirl about, do some high kicks and leaps, and disappear again without being encumbered by the “mistakes and accidents of surgery” (book type, at least.) (And yes, I have a real book titled Mistakes and Accidents of Surgery<\/em>, written by a surgeon for the education of medical students, so they can avoid being in the next edition.)<\/p>\n I’ve had a nap. I’m going to eat supper–leisurely. I am not staying up late to work on the book, which is what I’ve been doing night after night until after midnight. Tomorrow, if it’s not pouring rain, I’ll be out in the field with binoculars and camera. If it’s pouring rain, I’ll be knitting and cooking. And another nap will be taken.<\/p>\n So now, what bits of science-y stuff can I add to your end-of-week reading? Well, there’s the report in this week’s NATURE that Daylight Savings Time isn’t good for most people, that we are neurologically wired to _not_ adjust to the twice-yearly demands to change our circadian rhythms. I’ve been saying that for years. It gets harder every year to recover from the process. Someday when I’m old and crankier, I’m going to quit paying attention to it at all. (Who cares when an 80 year old gets up, eats breakfast, etc? As long as you stay out of a medical facility, which I have every intention of doing.<\/p>\n There’s a fairly stupid (my term) gleeful commentary by one Adam Briggs, who not only favors the “sugar tax” now being imposed in some countries, but thinks the next target should be red meat, because red meat has a big carbon footprint. As a grassland ecology citizen scientist doing prairie restoration, this is taking an H-bomb to a mosquito. There are people who tout a vegetarian, if not vegan, diet for all as being the solution to feeding a global population. Those people are not ecologists. In terms of red meat, those people are not grassland<\/em> ecologists.\u00a0\u00a0 (As it turns out the “cut” function doesn’t work as well in this theme as it did in my earlier themes, you’re stuck with the rest of the rant…but I will put in a visual barrier, though it’s not an actual cut: TO AVOID THE REST OF THE LONG BUT INFORMATIVE RANT, STOP READING HERE. )<\/p>\n Grassland is a valuable biome for many, many reasons: it’s sustainable with minimal fossil fuel use in management, it is excellent at erosion prevention and control, it transports rainwater into groundwater better than other soils, providing well-filtered springwater and thus cleaner streams, and it sustains its herbivores at levels that provide quality protein for human use. Converting natural grassland to cropping risks increasing soil erosion, nutrient dumping into water courses, removal of groundwater for irrigation, and desertification with encroachment of shrub species as a transition before full desertification. This happened in the United States, leading to the Dust Bowl. This has happened in Africa and Asia; the disappearance of the valuable mid-continental surface waters in Asia (Caspian and Aral seas) is due to the conversion of native grassland to agriculture using irrigation. Converting natural grassland to heavily populated cities, suburbs, industrial parks, etc. destroys all the ecosystem benefits that the natural grassland provides (lawn grass requires supplemental water and does not move rainwater into the groundwater.)<\/p>\n Natural grasslands–especially mid and short-grass–should be maintained for their many region-wide ecological services, and to do that…you need grazers. Grazers fertilize the grassland at a healthy level (low intensity, infrequent in a well-managed grassland.) Grassland needs to be grazed at a sustainable level to keep it grass land. You can attempt to mimic the effect with mowing, but mowing requires the use of fossil fuels, which contributes to global warming, and leaves more plant debris on the ground, rather than converted into fertilizer. Grazers need their population managed to prevent overgrazing (which is injurious)…which means either a size range of predators (some for the mice, some for the large herbivores) or human intervention. Hence: grass-fed grazers, which provide quality protein for humans as well as wolves, foxes, various wild cats. Whether wild or domestic, these animals can be managed for the health of the grassland ecosystem and their innate reproductive rate means that harvesting meat is both necessary and sustainable.<\/p>\n Taxing red meat to drive up the price will make it harder for low-income people to get the good complete protein they and their children need, while putting more pressure on owners of existing permanent pasture to convert them to cropland or sell to developers.<\/p>\n Yes, there’s a lot wrong with how meat is produced: cutting down rainforest is a bad idea. Feeding cattle corn and soybeans instead of grass is a bad idea, both ecologically and for the animals and those who eat them. Soybeans and corn both use more water than native grass (as well as needing the use of fossil fuels during their cultivation for livestock feed.) And eating grain and beans instead of grass and forbs mixed produces meat with a different protein\/fat composition, as well as non-natural gut flora that is more dangerous to humans. Cheap mass-produced meat from cattle fed unnatural feeds and crowded so they require antibiotics and hormones…a bad idea. But damning red meat because of how it’s currently produced is stupid, and risks losing more of the planet’s important grassland biome.<\/p>\n Instead, sustainable production on natural, existing grasslands should be promoted, from farmers in Cumbria and Wales in the UK feeding out lambs to ranchers in the US West selling beef direct off the prairie. \u00a0 Production close to consumption is a better goal–and will lessen the carbon footprint more– than eliminating an entire category of food (and its supporting ecosystem.)\u00a0\u00a0 Two principles top the list: water resource management as the foundation of maintaining a health grassland ecosystem, and ensuring adequate food for the lowest income citizens first<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, probably. Sortakinda done. At 1:30 this afternoon, I made my final staggering plunge through the muck and mire to the finish line, having untangled various tangles and discovered yet more typos. I’d been up until 2:30 am Friday morning (NOT, mutter mutter, going out to photograph peak bluebonnets and plains nipple cactus, mutter mutter) Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,22,10],"tags":[17,24,7],"class_list":["post-118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","category-science","category-the-writing-life","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-science","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":121,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions\/121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}