So Florida has been in this long drought. Not Murray-Darling Basin dry, but unenforced rationing of lawn watering dry. Since the 13th, however, we’ve gotten 5.86″ of rain at the airport. The average for all of May is 2.74″. It’s brought out the frogs and the rain lilies and what grass there is in the lawn is growing like mad.

This nifty drought map notes that in the last week we’ve gone from 57% of Florida being in Severe or Extreme drought down to 31.5%. Tampa Bay is now colored yellow for Abnormally Dry (least serious category). It would be nicer if the downpour was spread out more of course.

With the rain often comes lightning. Wunderground’s animated radar has become my favorite website, watching for when we may need to unplug the computers in case of power surges.

These clouds are from the 16th.

The lightning here reminds me of Kilauea: a force of nature that you must adjust your life for. The consequences of trivializing either can be immediate and severe. I’d like to think that such reminders of our fragility would lead to a general respect for the balance of all the rest of the system. But reading the reality of the changing winds is as difficult for recording industry heads as it is for workers of the land.

From the Murray-Darling Basin article:

What Jones [a fisherman] finds, as he travels around the basin to argue that water must be allocated for his Coorong [national park and lagoon ecosystem] and his lakes, is a sentiment that the whole water crisis is the environmentalists’ fault anyway. The greenies are derided for their shrill sanctimony. Farmers express indignation that any of their precious “working river” is lost to the sea. They tell Jones that it makes more sense to divert the Murray all the way inland, officially consigning the river to eternal servitude as an irrigation channel, while fishermen buck up and learn to live off the sea. In cotton-growing areas wholly dependent on irrigation, Jones says, “I’m lucky to get out with my life.”

And from another National Geographic article about the Tongass National Forest in Alaska:

a former logger and millwright, Bob Widmyer… said, “They decided they had to save all the trees and shut down the mill, and everybody here and in Ketchikan started to starve.” The Widmyers ended up at a culinary arts school in Arizona. They were back in Alaska now, and he operated a commercial fishing boat. “I’m kinda bitter,” he told me. “This is a damn rain forest. It was put here to log.”

Some blamed environmental activists and the Timber Reform Act for throwing people out of work, but others argued that the mill closures had more to do with a sharp recession in Japan, a slumping world market for pulp, and Alaska’s disadvantage in competing against countries with faster growing trees and less expensive pulp production methods. Ketchikan’s mill was also facing serious air- and water-pollution fines.

I get that each one of these farmers and loggers are being faced with the loss of their investments and livelihoods, and that in both of these examples, the government was formerly encouraging the consumption of the very natural resources that are now being withheld. These groups have an interest in the present moment to continue to reap the land as they’ve built a history of doing, but their stubborn disregard for their own future viability as well as other people’s, let alone the health of parts of ecosystems that aren’t obviously involved with someone’s occupation, is stunning. The rain forest wasn’t put here for you to log any more than it was put here to protect the salmon spawning beds, and attempting to grow rice in a desert, though possible, for a while, was never a good idea.