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The Products of a New Environment

Are you certain that you’ll reap what you’ve sown?

For the moment, I seek to address those in the southwestern portion of the United States of America & ask those reading from elsewhere to keep an open mind & an open eye. We’re just about halfway into our summer season but we’re nowhere near close to beginning the actual battles that’ll come in respect to water rights & land rights for those in the southwest & eventually the entire nation.

As most are aware, more than a few bodies of water & rivers they connect to are depleting at exigent rates like Lake Powell, Lake Mead & the Colorado River Basin. To note, the “U.S. Bureau of Reclamation officials gave all seven states until August 15 to create a plan to save between 2 million and 4 million acre-feet of water. If they fail, the federal government will take control and impose its own cuts as water use exceeds supply and an ongoing megadrought continues to sap water from the Colorado River.” To clarify, the seven states in question are Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah & Wyoming – by August 15th, nearly 40 million people will be subject to regulations & contractual agreements they’ll probably be hearing about for the first time.

Though one could dive deeper into the legal acumen involving water use, I will not be doing that here. I am admittedly more concerned with the present nature of genetic ownership in regards to gardening & farming – I find the issue to be a bit more murky than Leak Mead is at the moment & I believe predetermined agreements between corporations & legislative bodies will exacerbate any water issue regardless of civilian conservation efforts going forward.

Are you certain the things you’ve grown are things you own?

To illustrate the point of a future scuffle regarding “right to grow”, one must only look to existing laws that provide precedent for such an incident.

In a Nature Biotechnology paper from 2015, four authors found that,

“Nonetheless, with the data that can readily be gleaned publicly, our analysis of mapped and referenced patent sequences across the three crop genomes revealed DuPont and its affiliates as the holder of the largest collection of gene patents. It holds more gene patents than Monsanto or the rest of the US industry—including small and medium biotech companies and governmental research institutes and universities—put together (Fig. 1).
Uniquely in the United States, plants and their products can be protected by patents and by other IP mechanisms at the same time. Plant varieties can be protected by a specific plant patent under the Plant Patent Act of 1930 for asexually reproducible plants; by a plant variety protection (PVP) certificate under the Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970 for sexually reproducible plants or tuber-propagated plant varieties; or, since 1985, by utility patents.
Because several types of protection can be granted at the same time—for example, either a plant patent or a PVP certificate with a utility patent—and exclusive rights extend for 20 years, any IP right holder on any of the crops can in principle benefit not only by enforcing their IP rights but also by holding off competition in the market and potentially delaying innovation on certain technologies, especially when the granted rights are under utility patents. Utility patents have a broader scope, including protection on the plant itself, its diverse uses, its progenies and the method used to produce it, and they have an impact on follow-on innovations.”

In summation, bioengineered materials are property, in some way, of corporations that produced them. This fact itself is what lies at the core of most debates around commercial agriculture practices & genetically modified organism (GMOs) as “the biotech industry argues that genetic engineering can be used to create “nature-identical,” non-GMO products. This false claim supports the development of new GMOs in the food supply while side-stepping the current definition of bioengineering and avoiding BE disclosure. Without transparent and reliable GMO labeling, Americans are kept in the dark about what goes into their food” & who really owns it.

The Invasion of the Garden Snatchers

The commercial aspect of gardening, rife with rebranding & business-to-business marketing schemes like any other discernible industry has notably unique moments wherein legislation concerning biological conservation can be tweaked or outright ignored.

While most Californians by now are aware of the issue of the moderately invasive nature of the Eucalyptus globulus (Tasmanian Blue Gum) & the impact it has on soil erosion & fueling fires, certain corporations that operate in the southwest are tactically circumnavigating subnational & national legislation meant to curb the sale of invasive species & they’re becoming increasingly bold in their endeavors.

In all honesty, I work for a large nursery that supplies plants to a number of states & I thoroughly enjoy my job so I won’t be disclosing business practices I can directly speak to that correlate here. Sorry Too Short, this is the one time I don’t want to blow the whistle. That said, I will do my best to display the matter as a basic schematic so as to allow application to any business that potentially falls under the model to be properly scrutinized in a like manner.

Linked here are the 6 agencies overseeing the invasive species list; if you live in California, look at one of the lists the next time you go shopping at a store that has a garden center. For the past year & change that I’ve worked in the industry, a number of the listed plants have been available for purchase & the number of invasive species being sold on the market is growing.

Through genetically manipulating invasive species, commercial growers are able to market the plants as “new varieties” or “regional friendly” – no determinations, to my knowledge, are required by legislation to assess the nature of hybridized or genetically modified plant varieties in regards to local impact on the environments where these lab-produced plants are introduced & established. As the Non-GMO group put it in their blog post, “nothing in nature exists in a vacuum, and it is unnatural to assume that it would.” So it could be said that these lab-produced edible & non-edible plants on the market are potentially as detrimental as the organisms they are based on, unfortunately only time & focused attention will tell.

At the present time, companies like SDG&E are facilitating programs wherein “qualifying SDG&E customers can receive a $35 rebate for planting or potting a 1- or 5-gallon tree/plant species.”

Specifically, under the “native trees” category, the Black Willow is native to the East Coast of the US, not the Southwest; furthermore, the other two Willow species listed are more commonly found in wetlands as their root systems take so much water that is advised not to plant them near septic tanks or drainage fields. Intriguing choices to say the absolute least, though when you look to the “regionally-friendly” trees & see the number of invasive species, it doesn’t seem to matter much anymore. Either SDG&E is misinformed or they’re willing to let the public stay misinformed about the future cost of those $35 since it’s all for “local biodiversity, improving air quality, and sequestering carbon.”

That “sequestering carbon” bit is how a lot of these GMO trees are being pushed on the market & into the ground lately & why the Lorax is one of my favorite films of all time.

Artificial Trees & Grasslands Please

Mass sapling-planting campaigns are nothing new; most of anyone who could read this is probably aware of at least 1-3 moments wherein a company or country just threw a bunch of saplings in the ground. My mothers homeland just went crazy with the idea last year & planted 350 million of them.

Without a doubt, the only certainty at all, is that the most interesting & equally terrifying campaigns are the ones that involve the interplay between genetically modified trees & the cap-and-trade carbon-credit scheme.

MasterCard, a proponent of the cap-and-trade scheme, has a credit card called Aspiration: Zero Carbon Footprint where they “plant a tree every time you make a purchase—and let you round up to plant one too. Using this card just once a day can plant enough trees that, once grown, will counteract your daily negative carbon footprint (unless you’re a real gas-guzzler). Spend daily with Zero to neutralize your footprint and earn up to 1% cash back. Use your rewards to plant more trees or receive a statement credit.”

Call me crazy whatever way suits you, merely afford me a bit more of your time if you’ve yet to read Part 3 of “The Volumes on Vitality” specifically the section on utility tokens.

The “statement credit” Zero Card is vaguely proposing in lieu of planting more trees is rather reminiscent of the utility token FreeWater quickly mentioned on their own site & digital advertisements, along with carbon credits as a whole. Aspirations’ “join us in our mission to plant 125 Million trees by 2030” remark on their website, coupled with the self-implementation of a carbon-credit schematic makes it clear they are probably aware of one of the contracts I mentioned in the blog post that precedes this one. Good old “market forces”!

Another company, Living Carbon, genetically modifies trees in a way that causes “modified poplar trees [to] store up to 53% more carbon than control trees.” In the interview for the article, the CEO Maddie Hall said, “if we were to double the acreage that we have today up until 2030, we would be able to actually plant enough trees to remove 1.66% of global emissions in 2021.” I can’t wait to see how many companies try to buy these GMO trees, then reason to the government & relevant regulating bodies that the trees in question warrant greater carbon capture credit values than purchases of regular trees.

It’s odd though – there is a respectable amount of science regarding carbon capture practices that point out that grass is more of a reliable carbon sink than trees for two reasons: grass grows faster & grass stores the carbon in the soil unlike trees that store carbon in their wood above soil. The carbon above the soil line is pure fuel in the event of a forest fire & hardly the safer choice considering a sizable portion of the US is in a drought & is expected to remain so for the foreseeable future. All this considered, we have a stark prevalence of tree planting campaigns across the globe & across the market & water restrictions across the Southwest that directly impact civilian grass lawn upkeep. It seems as though not all things are considered equally, I should say.

Due in large part to the unequal use of water from the Colorado River Basin, one can see exactly what it looks like when water is continuously taken from one environment & used/left in another. The canopy alongside the canal that exists now is a testament to what Lake Mead will look like (check out 12:16-17:08) in due time, should the water levels continue to recede at the rate they have as shown in the beginning of the video.

But as a whole, what will our collective future be like in regards to water rights & land rights? I often wonder, did the people who wrote the film adaptation of the Lorax just get oddly lucky in retrospect or were they prematurely portraying a theoretical situation where GMO trees modified to capture increased levels of carbon replace natural trees in a system where carbon credits & debits become commonplace across the globe?

Will we prevail through this unifying struggle or will we communally fail, leaving behind only remnants of our attempts to simply survive, much like the Hohokam people who long ago built the canals that the city of Phoenix, Arizona finds inspiration from today?

I don’t imagine these compounding issues can be swept under the rug – we’re talking about the earth itself, where can we sweep it? There needs to be better application of the best practices available to every region afflicted with constrained access to the basics of life, greater attention paid to the outcome of our efforts & actual transparency between civilian, regulator & market. The cool thing is, the civilian is the foundation of the coupled latter & Dr. Seuss said it well enough, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

This is not to say we all need to memorize the list of invasive species & self-impose restrictions; on the contrary, in a world where the morality of consumption is debated & designed by market forces & legislation that can oftentimes be overreaching (hello & goodbye 18th amendment) we, the consumer, must become pickier & demand more of the persons seeking to make off with our hard earned money. We must work to see our own requirements met, soon, before there comes a time, for some maybe August 15th, when the only requirements met are those set outside of our control.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. look at Point 5 of the Summary of the Energy Security and Climate Change Investments in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022:

SDG&E is salivating I bet

And when you find another 20 minutes of your time affordable to this post, watch this video on the pipeline being built for carbon capture:

https://www.iceagefarmer.com/2021/11/09/farmers-land-confiscated-for-carbon-pipeline-through-corn-belt/

And to cap it all off, a nice photo I snapped of a moth on my balcony enjoying the pollen of a buddleja davidii.

Works Cited:

Swanson, Conrad. “As Critical Deadline Nears, Only Half of a Plan to Save Colorado River Water Has Been Proposed.” The Denver Post, The Denver Post, 22 July 2022, https://www.denverpost.com/2022/07/22/colorado-river-drought-plan-water-arizona-california/.

Jefferson, O., Köllhofer, D., Ehrich, T. et al. The ownership question of plant gene and genome intellectual properties. Nat Biotechnol 33, 1138–1143 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3393

Non-Gmo Project. “What Is Bioengineered Food? .” The Non-GMO Project – Everyone Deserves an Informed Choice, 8 Sept. 2021, https://www.nongmoproject.org/blog/what-is-bioengineered-food/.

“National Invasive Species Resource Center.” Resource Search | National Invasive Species Information Center, https://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/resources/search?f%5B0%5D=location%3A90&f%5B1%5D=subject%3A268.

“Community Tree Rebate Program – SDGE.” SDG&E Community Tree Rebate Program for Residential Customers, SDG&E, https://www.sdge.com/sites/default/files/15897_sdge_treerebate_fs.04.pdf.

“Ethiopia Plants More than 350 Million Trees in 12 Hours.” AFR100, https://afr100.org/content/ethiopia-plants-more-350-million-trees-12-hours.

“Green Credit Card: Carbon-Neutral & Eco-Friendly.” Aspiration, Aspiration Partners, Inc., https://www.aspiration.com/credit.

Kerlin, Katherine E. “Grasslands More Reliable Carbon Sink than Trees.” UC Davis, 25 Oct. 2021, https://climatechange.ucdavis.edu/climate/news/grasslands-more-reliable-carbon-sink-than-trees.

Millison, Andrew. “The Canal That Accidentally Grew a Forest in the Arizona Desert.” Andrew Millison, YouTube, 29 Nov. 2021, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jf8usAesJvo.

“Lake Mead Drought Update!!! Lowest It’s Ever Been!!!” SinCity Outdoors, YouTube, 20 July 2022, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3Azy88IiVqU.

© 2022 Zakariyas James. First shared here at theruminationcompilation.wordpress.com.

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Environments & Requirements

So, the Supreme Court of the United States of America attempted to backhand the Environmental Protection Agency.

But did it actually do anything?

In an another example of the Supreme Court redefining & restricting regulatory rights of an agency we see that these Justices, for some time now, have been potentially pondering some sort of idea that the federal government has done enough or what it can. Odd to say, considering this is an extremely active time for the Court as they’ve made a total of 7 decisions since June 23rd of this year; some would say that’s more than enough & some of what’s been done is more than unnecessary.

Solely focusing on the EPA matter though, considering what this decision may mean for our collective future, I wonder if we may witness the beginning of a reinvigorated battle between state economies & the likelihood of various sustainability development goals set by the UN being met by the United States of America by 2030.

Although this recent Court decision emphasizes the States’ right to discern appropriate levels of emission reduction over periods of time, external forces besides the federal government are pushing to incentivize States to move away from coal as much as possible, as soon as possible.

Summarily, the Supreme Court denied the EPA, emboldened by the Clean Power Plan introduced by the Obama Administration in August of 2015, the regulatory power to implement a cap-and-trade economy centered around carbon credits & compliance costs through the form of increased energy prices that would begin this year. The goal of the Clean Power Plan was to reduce carbon emissions by 32% by 2030, a legislative example of a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDCs) spoken of in the Paris Agreement that was adopted in December of 2015.

Every five years, nations that are party to this agreement submit NDCs that detail how their governments will steer their respective nations towards achieving various sustainability development goals set by the UN & its various subgroups like the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) & IMO (International Maritime Organization).

Provided here are the two NDCs the USA has submitted since the inception of the Paris Climate Agreement:

1. Submitted on 03/19/2016

2. Submitted on 04/22/2021

In a portion of the dissenting opinion provided by Justice Kagan, supported by Justices Breyer & Sotomayor, it is said “the effect of the Court’s order, followed by the Trump administration’s repeal of the rule, was that the Clean Power Plan never went into effect. The ensuing years, though, proved the Plan’s moderation. Market forces alone caused the power industry to meet the Plan’s nationwide emissions target-through exactly the kinds of generation shifting the Plan contemplated.”

The “market forces” vaguely presented as proof of some inevitable generation shift are more aptly described in full as the corporate compliance with a global cap-and-trade carbon credit system established by non-government organizations & various conglomerates in the banking & energy industries.

Earlier this year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres spoke at a Powering Past Coal Summit, urging members to reduce coal use in electricity generation “by 80% below 2010 levels by 2030” by “cancel[ling] all global coal projects in the pipeline and end[ing] the deadly addiction to coal, end[ing] the international financing of coal plants and shift investment to renewable energy projects & jump-start[ing] a global effort to finally organize a just transition, going coal plant by coal plant if necessary.”

While the United States federal government itself is not a member of the Powering Past Coal Alliance (a coalition of governments, businesses and organizations) representatives of California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania & Washington state all attend the Summits & act as intermediaries, to a degree, that facilitate the economic & legislative maneuvers these international agreements seek to enact.

Cognizant of these extrajudicial environments that enumerate new requirements implemented through “market forces” just about every year, five years at the minimum accounting for NDCs, I have to wonder, what exactly did the Supreme Court do?

What do you think?

Thanks for reading.

Links to ponder in this frame of light:

https://www.financialexpress.com/economy/time-has-come-to-tweak-the-world-order-established-after-world-war-ii-union-minister-hardeep-singh-puri-at-express-adda/2580688/

For decades, these UN sub-groups have been affecting governments on the micro & macro level; here’s a San Carlos, CA city council meeting from 2009 that showcases the process by which they circumnavigate democracy through “rapport building”:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Su7i4cH7eYo

Saudi water deal threatening water supply in Phoenix
Story from June 23 of this year.

© 2022 Zakariyas James. First shared here at theruminationcompilation.wordpress.com.

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The Volumes on Vitality: Part Three

Platforms of Mobility

Even the Rain

Growing up, I’d heard that someday there would be water wars. Conflicts centered around physical domination of a resource that is already depleting or diminishing in value/utility. I’d heard this from immediate family members, those I’d randomly encounter over the course of a day & the a few forms of content available on the web like this NPR piece from a while back that’s always stuck in my mind.

Though I accept this unfortunate possibility of nations warring over waterways & dams, I often wonder to myself, “what’ll lead up to that? What will the economics of water look like over the course of my lifetime & further on?”

Along the way, going through life with these random thoughts, I’ve come across tidbits of innovation & determinations that I believe paint an abstract picture of what the economics of & around water could look like.

At the moment, the CME Group, the largest financial derivatives exchange in the world, has been offering futures contracts where the underlying asset is water since December of 2020 when California’s entire water market was valued at $1.1 billion. The speculated water spans “across the five largest and most actively traded regions in California. Water entitlement transactions from the surface water market and four adjudicated groundwater basins-the Central Basin, the Chino Basin, the Main San Gabriel Basin, and the Mojave Basin Alto Subarea are included in the index.”

As far as California goes, around 65%, give or take seasonal changes, of the surface water available is in Northern California, hence the mentioning of the basins in the NQH20 index. Most of that water is pumped from the north to south or transported by other means; the rest of the water needed in the south is pumped from groundwater basins regulated by the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014 & other legislative actions.

To do a bit more in depth research & also try my hand at trading the NQH20 contracts, I contacted the CME Group & one of their registered brokers to open an account but was told I do not possess the capital required to participate in the market. I guess I should cry a river & then trade futures on that supply of water.

In all seriousness, not just because my humor lacks refinement by any standard of the word, I bring this up to echo the sentiment Pedro Arrojo Agudo made when he said, “water is increasingly being treated as a mere commodity and even as a financial asset, undermining the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation and the sustainability of the environment.” at the UN General Assembly on October 20th, 2021. If I myself, a “middle-class” citizen, can’t access the potential profits from a water market, what sort of hope or outlook should I hold for my future financial status & the mobility of my money? Will it stretch worse in a world where water prices are speculated on by those who won’t even drink that exact water? Or will those gains “trickle down” too & it’ll all be okay?

About a week ago or so, my fiancé brought to my attention a startup company called FreeWater based in Austin, Texas that markets aluminum bottles & paper-based cartons of “free” water “paid for by ads that are printed directly onto eco-friendly cans and cartons. Ten cents per beverage is donated to charity.”

The 10¢ per beverage is donated to WellAware a non-profit based out of Austin, Texas as well that “fund[s] and implement[s] lasting clean water systems to drive development and empower communities in East Africa.” After a bout of equal parts boredom & being nosey, I perused their IRS audits from 2017 & 2020 & noticed the non-profit WellAware, pays a for-profit company called WellBeyond, which is owned by the same individual, also based in Austin, for “project consulting and execution services for the Organization’s program services in Kenya” to the tune of “$237,460 in paid expenditures and $124,823 of in-kind contributions and expenses,” in 2020.

Through pessimistic lenses critical of foreign conglomerates granted unilateral rights of a resource or location, I look at this “free water” scenario as a possible foundational step towards a future where the 1999-2000 water wars of Cochabamba, Bolivia are replayed with new characters. The protests over the wells & water costs inspired a film called (in English) “Even the Rain” that I saw some years ago now; as summer is upon & droughts continue, various scenes from the film cross my mind as of late, especially so when I think of the creeping normalization of water as a commodity.

FreeWater, in their FAQ section, says they’ll be launching “a new type of utility tokens called the FreeWater token.” Ignoring the application of a currency not scrutinized by external securities aspect (hello crypto), I’ve sat wondering how many energy resources will someday have respective “utility tokens” created by large conglomerates; I eventually wonder, will there be tokens or other company-based credit systems for electricity too? Mastercard already has a card in Sweden with a company based there that “not only helps users track and measure CO2 emissions associated with their purchases, but also puts a limit to the climate impact of their spending with a carbon footprint limit.”

Hear me out, I’m not saying blockchain currencies won’t be a part of the future with my jab earlier towards cryptocurrencies in a general way. Earlier this week, Shell Corp., American Express Global Business Travel & Accenture announced a joint partnership to create a company called Avelia Solutions, that facilitates a “blockchain powered book-and-claim solution that provides you with fully traceable environmental attributes of SAF (sustainable aviation fuel) to help decarbonise your air travel.” I see these continued applications of blockchain pay systems & corporate tokens to be indicative of the fact that they’ll be the norm at some point.

As far as innovation besides blockchain tokens & the like goes, technology related to water & other liquids necessitates further discussion on the levels of access & uses of water.

Over the last decade & change, the desalination industry has made improvements in technology & production costs to combat the decreasing level of access of freshwater, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have developed a method using microbes to clean both organic contaminants and salts from hydraulic fracturing wastewater, while producing renewable energy & countless other examples can be given but my favorite comes from even further back in time: MagnetoHydrodynamics (MHD).

Popularized by a few Tom Clancy books, MHD systems can be found discussed & funded at length by parties like the US Dep of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, NASA & the HIT-SI lab, part of the William E. Boeing Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics at the University of Washington.

I’d wager, if this technology that utilizes water as a fuel component becomes widespread with multiple applications (as far vehicles go) water will become even more scarce but truly live up to its designation of “platform of mobility”. In a way, it’s like we might go from ancient, disconnected seafaring peoples that eventually learned flight to evolving into spacefaring peoples that will use water as much as our ancestors did before us, maybe even more.

In my mind there’s a war between all these thoughts; possibility versus possibility, only settled by time passed. Hopefully, we enter a future ultimately lacking in strife that is abundant with the needed resources for us all to equally enjoy the gift of life. I hope we all someday look at a glass completely full, instead of bicker about the determined or perceived volume.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. leave a comment! Tell me of your goals, expectations, concerns for 2022; I hope to create an area where it can all be hashed out.

P.P.S. are there water restrictions where you live too?

Links to ponder:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-southwest/the-water-wars-come-to-the-suburbs

Added on 8/16/22:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/16/colorado-river-bureau-of-reclamation/

© 2022 Zakariyas James. First shared here at theruminationcompilation.wordpress.com.

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The Volumes on Vitality: Part Two

Water Music

The next post is rather long & bleak, so here’s a pleasant break before really delving into the deep end. Here’s to a relaxing weekend; next post is on Monday!

“Shenandoah” arr. by unknown

Fairly certain this arrangement is a stylistic melding of two different arrangements for SATB (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) versions repurposed for this men’s group called Chanticleer.

The song first appeared in writing as “Shenadore” in The New Dominion Monthly in April, 1876. The author, Captain Robert Chamblet Adams, indicated that he had first heard the song around 1850.  W.B. Whall reprinted it in his 1910 book Ships, Sea Songs and Shanties Collected by W.B. Whall, Master Mariner. The lyrics tell the story of a canoeing voyageur, or fur trader, who was in love with the daughter of a Native American chief.

This earliest known version of the song likely originated with French Canadian voyageurs who traded with Native Americans around the Great Lakes starting in the 16th century. The voyageurs gave weapons, tools, and money in exchange for animal furs, especially beaver pelts. They often sang while they paddled their canoes along the Mississippi River and its tributaries, including the Missouri, in the quest for furs.

“The Blue Danube Waltz” arr. by Johann Strauss II

I remember first hearing this one in 2001: A Space Odyssey; still one of my favorites of all time. I think Kubrick purposefully picked this song as the Sea of Tranquility is where the obelisk is found for the first time by spacefaring humans. In the next post, at the end, I’ll lightly touch on water as a fuel source; I like to imagine Kubrick was aware of this technology & wanted to symbolically portray it both musically & geographically, as far as the moon goes, which is also symbolically synonymous with the seas & the tides.

Written to celebrate the River Danube that flows through Vienna, it was premiered as a choral piece on February 13, 1867 at a concert of the Vienna Men’s Choral Association. Its initial performance only got a lukewarm response and Strauss is reputed to have said “The devil take the waltz, my only regret is for the coda – I wish that had been a success!” Strauss adapted it into a purely orchestral version for the World’s Fair in Paris that same year, and it this form that it is best known today.

“Boat on Tai Lake” arr. by Dr. Reed Criddle

I honestly have had the hardest time finding historical notes about this piece; I’ve tried for about 5 years now since first hearing this song with no luck whatsoever.

Tai Lake is a lake in the Yangtze Delta and one of the largest freshwater lakes in China. The lake lies in Jiangsu province and significant part of its southern shore forms its border with Zhejiang.

“Across the Western Ocean” arr. by Celius Dougherty

I only know this song because I was a choir nerd as a kid (can you tell yet?) & sang this piece as a solo. I think the lyrics are depressingly beautiful, the opening line is timeless: “oh the times are hard & the wages low,” how much more needs to be said?

Penniless in the wake of a potato famine in their homeland, one and a half million Irish people immigrated to the United States between 1846 and 1850. Their passages were frequently paid by relatives who had already settled in America. Crossing the Atlantic by packet ship was inexpensive, especially for those who traveled from English ports, due to trade competition between America and Britain. The journey took at least six weeks on the overcrowded vessels. Famine, disease, and shipwreck caused an estimated one of every five immigrants to die at sea.

Thanks for reading & hopefully listening to these awesome pieces of music!

P.S. leave a comment! Tell me of your goals, expectations, concerns for 2022; I hope to create an area where it can all be hashed out.

P.P.S. are there water restrictions where you live too?

© 2022 Zakariyas James. First shared here at theruminationcompilation.wordpress.com.

Posted on by The Rumination Compilation · 3 Comments

The Volumes on Vitality: Part One

The Summer Solstice

For the next few posts, I’ll be devoting time to discussing water in a multi-part series we’ll call “The Volumes on Vitality”.

In the Northern Hemisphere, where I’m writing this from, the first day of summer starts tomorrow!

When I was really young, my mother made a point to use my summer breaks from school in hotter-than-hell Arizona to take trips to Ethiopia as that’s where she’s originally from; she would always say it’s a trip to see extended family & to see how the rest of the world lives with my own eyes.

Even though it lies north of the equator, due to large mountain ranges & high elevation most of Ethiopia is subject to two rainy seasons: a short one that lasts from February to April, and a longer one that lasts from mid-June to mid-September. I essentially skipped the summer season over five times just by traveling to a place where the four season schematic is not descriptive of the climate-I jokingly call this a life hack from time to time.

On the other hand, my father’s side of the family is from a tiny town called Wardell, Missouri of about 390 people per the last U.S. census where “natural gas [came]…in 1966 or 1967 and a sewage system was installed in 1976. Although public water had been available since 1962, each individual had to install his own cesspool or septic tank,” as Eva Welch wrote in “History of Wardell”. (The Mr. & Mrs. W.O. James mentioned at the end of paragraph 6 are my great grandparents.)

When I review my ancestral roots, I always marvel at the similarities my two families displayed in regards to their experiences with water even though they were genuinely worlds apart, 7,858 miles to be exact.

On one side, I see Amharas walking with jugs of water on their backs for miles & on the other, I see Americans doing the same thing; the only real difference is the timeframe in which these events took place.

Large bodies of water are prevalent aspects of both parties & their stories of success, failure & demise. Wardell itself lies about 10-14 miles from the Mississippi River & Ethiopia itself is home to the Nile River; both are foundational in the formation of various cultures to date like the people of Egypt & the people of the Sioux nation in America & both have storied histories of both floods & droughts.

This summer, besides moving from one state to another with my fiancé & two cats, I plan on being a bit more aware of water & the things water accompany. This blog aside, I’ve been finding myself in a recurring position where I utilize water & begin thinking about these molecules strung together perfectly that create this world we inhabit, in all its variety. A repetitive motion of, “water my plant, think about water, realize I have other plants to water, repeat process” that admittedly hasn’t done much other than help me recall memories where I’m at a body of water with family & friends or I think about humanity in general.

I encourage whoever is reading, the next time you use water, think about the water for a bit. “Where has it been?” “Where will it go?” The next time you take a sip, think to yourself, “what else did it give further life to, before me?”

Thanks for reading.

P.S. leave a comment! Tell me of your goals, expectations, concerns for 2022; I hope to create an area where it can all be hashed out.

P.P.S. are there water restrictions where you live too?

Links to review: https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/san-diego-county-water-authority-proposes-5-2-increase-citing-inflation-and-energy-costs/2957211/

© 2022 Zakariyas James. First shared here at theruminationcompilation.wordpress.com.