A SUNDAY FIRE, NEW ENGLAND ASTERS, AND A CRIME AGAINST AMERICA

THE FRUIT OF MY LABORS

NEW ENGLAND ASTER

Monday, the first full day of fall.  49 degrees F, wind SSE, light with moderate gusts.  The sky is clear except for haze on the eastern horizon.  The humidity is 87% and the barometer is rising, currently at 30.06".  It should be a nice day.
   Our tree board meets this morning, and we will take down and examine the two Emerald Ash Borer traps we placed in the spring.  One has been hung in a large white ash tree in the alleyway on Manypenny Ave. between 8th and 9th streets, the other in an ash tree in Dalrymple Park campground.

   Yesterday was purposely a quiet day of rest.   Except for church and Andy and Judy coming to dinner, Joan and I did nothing but read and relax.  There are few things more satisfying to me than the simple pleasure of watching a fire whose wood I have cut and split myself.  Wisconsin naturalist Aldo Leopold famously declared that he considered the opportunity to watch the fire in his fireplace to be far greater than the opportunity to watch television, and I agreed  with him wholeheartedly yesterday.

   Hints of fall are everwhere now, most apparant in lowland areas where the red maples are turning their brilliant hues, but for the most part the season's changes are still  too subtle for my camera  to  capture them.  Except for the last Aster to bloom, the New England Aster, Aster angliae-novae.  The one pictured is somewhat early, as it is at the back of our church where it gets plenty of warm west sun in the afternoon.  I had to cut back those in my own garden because they got entirely out of hand (they can easily grow to five or even six feet under the right conditions) and they won't bloom for a while.  The New England Aster is also called St. Michaelmas daisy, as it is commonly in bloom on that feast day, and so is often planted in traditional Episcopal church gardens.

   The plan now being unfolded by the Obama Administration and its Environmental Protection Agency will kill the coal industry at every turn; mining, transportation, electrical generation...it will kill almost a million jobs in our country and raise electricity rates dramatically, further impoverishing millions of Americans.  All this to reduce CO2 worldwide by an estimated .02%.  And, if it is shipped to China or India it will be burned in less efficient plants than even our oldest, and we will get not only CO2 but truly poisonous pollutants arriving on the west wind.
   Terrorism has been defined as the use of violent acts to frighten people as a way of trying to achieve a political goal. I think the new carbon dioxide emission regulations qualify as economic terrorism.  Too bloody a word? Then economic sabotage, or economic treason.  Take your pick, they all describe this crime against America equally we'll.