On NOVA Tuesday night, I watching Dimming of the Sun, a program where James Hansen of NOAA appeared, talking about the effects of contrails from airplanes and particulates from other sources, like power plants and such.  On 9/11 and the three days where air traffic was suspended, a climatologist noticed that the surface temperature spiked 3 degrees.  He managed to view the complete data and put two and two together.  The contrails were dimming the sun, creating a global cooling effect.  So, it turns out that all of our oil worries are less than they should be, and not because of supply or price, but because of all the heat that's being generated by greenhouse gases, related to the burning of fossil fuels.

And I am further perplexed.  Should airplanes be belching out large clouds of silver iodide ?  Should I burn a lot more wood this winter in an attempt to help shield the sun ?  Should I be burning it in the summer too ?  Am I the only one that feels like the sun is burning a hole through my neck ?  And oh, is 108 degrees in middle Oregon normal for a summer hi temp ?

I wonder how many of us are are taking note of these scientists and looking for a solution... questioning the realities that are linked between big oil & coal, all the ads on the television for energy - from these same companies and lobbies, and the apparent greed that has consumed and is killing our country.  And we sit there and applaud in states like Ohio, because somebody stumps for President and complains because we don't want to open all our priceless shores to more drilling.  Didn't any of these people hear Congressman DeFazio yelling about all the leases they can't even use because of the backlog of equipment, labor and investment funds to create offshore drilling projects ???  Wake Up People, these are the haves - getting more !!!

I repeat this over and over again every time I sign a posting, wherever my thoughts are posited and because... bikes don't require oil wars... bikes don't need offshore drilling... bikes don't care what your political affiliation, race, color, creed or personal disposition is... bikes don't have a big carbon footprint... bikes don't make glaciers melt... bikes don't make people lethargic, ignorant or insensitive.  So, I repeat this over and over again so others will do the same, and here it is again... "As for me and mine, we'll see you out there, on our bikes of course"... JD Howell, Eugene, OR

I guess what we really need is for a bicycle manufacturer to set up production on the Crow reservation and get them all jobs, free bikes and an opportunity to be owners in the company - in exchange for not doing this crazy thing.  Anybody know a bicycle company owner willing to do this ? Come on Sinyard, Burke... hmmm, who else ???

JD & Kelley Howell of Eugene, OR. visit us: Cut20.blogspot.com

Wolverine is right, about how the US government "privileged" the Crow, at the expense of the Northern Cheyenne just to the east.  The Cheyenne and Lakota are traditional friends, but the Crow are their traditional enemies.  So in the 1860s and '70s, the US Army (Custer & co.) employed Crow scouts to help them locate the "hostiles."  (Presumably the guys who point out Kevin Costner's friends to the Cavalry, at the end of "Dances With Wolves," are supposed to be Crow.)  After the Cheyenne and Lakota "resistance" was finally crushed, the Crow were rewarded with a large reservation, including the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

It is not far from Billings, by Western standards.  But still it is a squalid place.  Barack Obama visited it before the Montana primary this Spring.

The impression that I have regarding inter-tribal relations nowadays is that the ancient hostilities have been for the most part put aside (Hopi vs. Navajo being one exception), and all sensible Native Americans realize they must stand together, in the courts of law and of public opinion, over against the Euro-American government.

To Howell:
Back in the early '90s, I visited friends from the Museum of the Rockies (from Bozeman, MT) at their important dinosaur excavation near Choteau, where they were preparing for their summer paleontology courses; I helped them unload and set up stuff, and spent the night in one of their teepees.  And in the course of this, I got to make the acquaintance of an intern, a college student at Montana State University (in Bozeman), who was Crow, and who had brought with him his mountain bike.  How he loved tearing through those badlands!  He let me have a spin, too.  He was a cute kid, full of vim and vigor, but otherwise quite a bore, telling me far more about bicycle maintenance than I ever wanted to know -- especially while I was trying to meditate on late Cretaceous ecology.

Anyway, I wonder what ever happened to the lad.  Apparently he did not return to the Crow reservation, and found a bicycle-manufacturing powerhouse.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

talking about the effects of contrails from airplanes and particulates from other sources, like power plants and such.  On 9/11 and the three days where air traffic was suspended, a climatologist noticed that the surface temperature spiked 3 degrees.

Wild.   I just had a similar experience while biking up Canyon Hill Drive on Kent East Hill (which I do most days in the summer).   On the lower part of the hill cars were at a standstill.   I assumed an accident or traffic light glitch.  I crawled up the hill in lowest gear (steep grade) smugly thumbing my nose at the motorists.

Then at the middle of the Hill I saw the reason...there had been a police chase ending up with some black and whites ramming the perp and gunning his SUV.   All four lanes of traffic were blocked off all the way up the hill (no cops were hurt).

The great thing was...I had a whole street entirely to myself.   And I could immediately smell the air!  Normally the trip leaves my lungs coated in soot because of the heavy traffic and probably because the grade makes a lot of the engines "lug" and pour out oil smoke.  But suddenly, on this drive which borders some preserved forest land, I could breathe.   And when I arrived at the top, I could swear that for an hour or two it smelled clean and pleasant.

I have been pushing for some "car free" time on this road, which I think at one point may have been more akin to a "parkway" for travel on  weekends but which since has been turned into a "Street Highway" for commuters to get to connecting exurbs and I think I'll ask again...
 

The current (1980s onward) Hopi-Dine "hostilities" have been manufactured by Peabody Coal and are largely nonexistent.  The real hostilities for the past few decades have been between traditionals and progressives, the latter meaning those who want to modernize, not the political meaning that we normally give that word.  I discussed this once in a previous post about the Pine Ridge area, and it's also true in the Big Mountain area of Arizona.  The traditional Hopi and Dine have been allied for decades.  You have to ignore the tribal councils, they don't represent the traditionals, only the sellouts.

Re poverty, yes the poverty on the Crow and Cheyenne reservations was heart rendering.  The worst I've seen was on an Apache reservation in southern Arizona.

Howell,

The manner in which people live in the area at issue here does not lend itself to bicycle use.  You either live traditionally with very seldom, if ever, auto use or you drive everywhere.  It's not an urban area as I assume you're imagining it to be.  The best way I can describe it is basically rural with villages.

My understanding is that not too long before the Spanish arrived in the Southwest, the Dine' (Athabascan-speaking Navajo and Apache) moved into the region and made life miserable for the various Pueblo Indians (stable, partly agricultural, architecture-building).  The fields and gardens of the Hopi were in the flat lands beneath First, Second and Third Mesas; so were their residences.  But they moved up ontop of those mesas after the Dine' arrived.

The Pueblo Indians were not push-overs, and the Navajo seem to recall some suffering at their hands, in reverse.  The art-historical/archeological term "Anasazi," nowadays out of favor, referring to the masonry-building civilization contemporary with the Romanesque and Early Gothic periods in Europe, is a Navajo word meaning either "people of the past who were our enemies," or "the ancestors of our enemies."  "Ancestral Puebloan" is the preferred term (unfortunately rather long and cumbersome).

Possibly the "misunderstanding" between the Hopi and the Navajo over the settlement and development of the part of Black Mesa that occupies the northwestern part of the Hopi reservation has something to do with whatever quarrel Peabody Coal instigated.  But Indians' memories are long.

Internal tribal disputes between "traditionals" and "progressives" are a fascinating subject.  I would love to know more about that.  It does not surprise me at all that "traditionals," despite their long memories, should recognize that the wise course now is to ally themselves with "ancient enemies."

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.