What I am...
Eating
Burritos, mostly. See this recent post with my recipe.
Pulled Jackfruit BBQ
Watching
Schitt’s Creek. Seasons 1-5 on Netflix. Final 6th Season is now playing on PopTV
Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist. On NBC/Hulu. Needed a show to watch during lunch and was just gonna watch the pilot but I stuck with it and ended up really liking it. (April 10 update: am currently obsessed with show & w/Skylar Astin)
Anything with Phoebe Waller-Bridge. I watched Fleabag (on Amazon Prime) while in NYC in January and rewatched Season 2 several times (I can do a pretty good Hot Priest impression of the line “are you a nostalgic person?”). I stumbled upon another of her creations Crashing (on Netflix) and have watched that short 6 episode season at least 4x.
Listening To
mostly podcasts, like, Pod Save America & Pod Save the World —>how I usually consume news, with a progressive POV. ..Pro tip I got from a friend: listen to podcasts at 1 & 1/2 speed. ..I can’t listen at normal speed anymore. It saves time and I can listen to more.
As for music, lately I’ve only been listening while running & when I’m not listening to PSA. I listen to my Marathon playlist full of upbeat songs ranging from “Killing In the Name” by Rage Against the Machine to “Turn Down for What” by DJ Snake & Lil John to “Send Me on My Way” by Rusted Root, just to name a few. I just did a 30-Day Song Challenge post you can find here.
& just cause I like a good recommendation here are the other podcasts I listen to when I have the time, like a long road trip.
Pod Save the People
-Backpacker Radio presented by TheTrek (thru-hiker talk by folks I write for)
-She Explores
-Women on the Road
-Dead Pilots Society (I recommend this a lot to aspiring TV writers.)
-Teaching Hard History: American Slavery
photo source: sticher.com
Reading
Cadillac Desert, which I wanted to read before going out West to hike the Arizona Trail to familiarize myself better with the West’s water crisis. I learned a lot while living in Flagstaff during grad school, like about the Central Arizona Project where it diverts water from the CO river 333 miles and pumps the water up 1,249ft (powered by the largest coal power plant in the West, Navajo Generating Station, which closed Nov 2019) to Phoenix and Tucson. I was also a graduate advisor for the Action Group for Water Advocacy there on campus so I became more intimate with the issues facing the Flagstaff community.
But I didn’t end up going to AZ cause -pandemic- and I’m struggling to get through the dense 500+ page book. Makes me feel like I’m in grad school again. It’s infuriating to read how man has drastically altered this country’s waterways by way of dams and aqueducts in order to irrigate desert lands where the crops are subsidized (& water to pay off the billions (from taxpayers) it took to create the dams/reservoirs/aqueducts), to power populous cities in deserts, and supply millions of people with water so they can fill their pools, visit water parks, and golf at courses all in the DESERT. It makes my blood boil. … And I’m wanting to be done with it so I can read On Fire: A Burning Case for The Green New Deal by Naomi Klein, which I recently got for free through my fave free bookswap- paperbackswap.com. I read Klein’s Shock Doctrine for a class in grad school, attended a talk when she came to NAU, read her article, "Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not, "Human Nature" for The Intercept, and watch her interviews on Democracy Now- she’s one of my fave writer/activists. [May add-on: I finished Klein’s book and wrote a response you can find here]
I’ve got more of my current readings on a separate page found here.
April Update Rant: Still reading Cadillac Desert. Still raging over the ridiculousness of it all. Let me give you another example. The projects that the government/Bureau of Reclamation/Army Corps of Engineers want to build even when they were in bad places. They built the Teton Dam anyway without checking fissures on the right side of the dam where the abutment was, and previously ignoring some geologists saying that the rock in that area would cause problems. Then the next Spring when they received high snow melt the dam started to leak and ended up failing which ended up flooding/destroying several towns down river, killing people, and causing millions in damages. They were lucky the dam didn’t go in the middle of the night cause that would have killed thousands. Another example, The plains have been pumping millions of acre-feet of water from the aquifer in an unsustainable way so they started looking at water projects diverting water from the MS River after New Orleans through swamps and marshland, siphoned under rivers and creeks a thousand miles to Texas, all uphill. The amount of energy it would take made them want to build twelve nuclear power plants, which cost billions of dollars. Then they tried to figure how much the water would cost the irrigation farmers and how much they would be willing to pay, which then the taxpayers would pay the rest as subsidies. People would be paying to give farmer’s water after those farmers depleted the aquifer by irrigating crops that shouldn’t even exist there. And if that’s not ridiculous enough, then you’ve got powerful politicians, business leaders, media by way of newspapers (owned by who again? those rich business leaders) supporting the project. Whereby the media would then publish support and skew the facts to confuse communities. It’s all so very disgusting and such a good example of the length those in power will go to make some money. The length man will go to control and change the environment. So farmers who grow crops in places where they shouldn’t. So people can inhabit places that are inhospitable and unsustainable. It’s called nonrenewable resources for a reason. Once they pump all the water out of the aquifers they will only replenish at a fraction from rainfall. These are aquifers that were filled by runoff from ICE AGES. People are so shortsighted. Sure, with growing populations they need water, and sure we need to grow food. But if we all took intentional actions to reduce our use of water (by not having pools, water parks, golf courses, washing our cars, taking 30 minute showers in the desert), ate food that doesn’t take lots of water to grow (or only grow those crops in areas that can support it. 50,000lbs of water is used to raise 1lb of cow in deserts. The global average is 1,799 gallons of water per 1lb.) grow our own food, etc. It just seems like such common sense to me. We cannot continue at this pace. We cannot continue down this path of unlimited growth in a world with limited resources. It all reminds me of what has been going on and is still going on with coal mining. It’s being phased out, but folks want to save the industry to keep folks employed. It’s the same with the farmers; people are going to such lengths to save the farmers when in both cases they need to move into a transition. I don’t want people to suffer, but I also don’t see the point in robbing one thing for a temporary fix. The coal workers can transition into renewable energy/solar workers. And farmers must transition. Yes, it’s hard to flip a whole industry, but there is no way around this. It will happen. It’s just either taking control now or waiting for such calamitous times which then will be harder and more expensive to shift. Ie. Teton Dam. ..This book really makes me question a desire to live in the West. Why would I want to purposefully move to a place to add to the problem. It’s these questions that more people need to ask themselves. And another reason why I think we’re in the mess that we’re in. People are so self-centered and only concerned about getting as much as they can whether it be money, land, possessions, etc. This unlimited reaching is unsustainable. Every action needs to be questioned. This shift in daily behavior is the only way we can move toward a balance with our surroundings. ..End of Rant. And as I responded to my mother recently when she said, “you can get off your soapbox now”, I said “there is no on, off. I live on this soapbox.” <—describes me to a T
..A few days later…with a loud exasperating exhale I close the book after reading till the end. And I have a little more to say about what I learned. Just to give a little perspective when I talk about how ridiculous I think the Bureau/Corps/Gov was to build so many dams-there are 84,000 dams in this country. I also wanted to add because in the last paragraph I mentioned that if people tried to conserve water more or didn’t live in deserts that would help, but really it’s not even people in cities who are using all that water. At least 80% of the water these dams etc are going to is for agriculture. Crops and water that are then subsidized because the water costs too much and there is an excess of crops. Or that irrigating has caused salt runoff to increase which eventually kills the land. That dams will eventually cause reservoirs to silt up and then what? We spend billions to excavate, or to make the dams higher, or what? Lastly I would like to acknowledge that this book was originally published in ‘86 and revised in ‘93. That’s over 30 years so I would definitely be interested to learn about the changes that have taken place since the book came out, specifically regarding if any new dams have been built out West, what they are doing about providing more water to an increase in population, have they been taking down dams, etc.
“The irrigation farmers not only had come to expect heavily subsidized water as a kind of right, allowing them to pretend that the region’s preeminent natural fact-a drastic scarcity of that substance-was an illusion. They now believed that if it turned out they couldn’t afford the water, the Bureau (which is to say, the nation’s taxpayers) would practically give it away. These farmers were about the most conservative faction in what may be the most politically conservative of all the fifty states. They regularly sent to Congress politicians eager to demolish the social edifice built by the New Deal - to abolish welfare, school lunch programs, aid to the handicapped, funding for the arts, even to sell off some of the national parks and public lands. But their constituents had become the ultimate example of what they decried, so coddled by the government that they lived in the cocoonlike world of a child. They remained oblivious to what their CAP water would cost them but were certain it would be offered to them at a price they could afford. The farmers had become the very embodiment of the costly, irrational welfare state they loathed-and they had absolutely no idea.”
“When thousand of farmers on millions of irrigated acres can no longer afford to pump vanishing water, the dilemma they face will be universal: how to survive on a finite amount of acreage that has suddenly become one-fifth to one-eighth as productive as it was. The answer is foreordained: they cannot. ”
“The overdraft of groundwater on the high plains is the greatest in the nation, in the world, in all of human history.”
“You might import a lot more meat and dairy products from states where they are raised on rain, rather than dream of importing those states’ rain.”
“The Bureau of Reclamation set out to help the small farmers of the West but ended up making a lot of rich farmers even wealthier at the small farmers’ expense. Through water development, the federal government set out to rescue farmers from natural hardships—droughts and floods—but created a new kind of hardship in the form of a chronic, seemingly permanent condition of agricultural glut. We set out to tame the rivers and ended up killing them. We set out to make the future of the American West secure; what we really did was make ourselves rich and our descendants insecure. Few of them are apt to regret that we built Hoover Dam; on balance, however, they may find themselves wishing that we had left things pretty much as they were. ”
May Add-on: I remembered that I wrote this spoken word piece about water for a grad class and later performed it at an event in town. Enjoy. It was the first and only time I have performed a spoken word piece.