Carnival of the Arid #5
Adobe Mesa at sunset, Richard Schwartz photo
[Edited post-publication to include a piece I’d misplaced.]
Howdy, and welcome to the belated fifth edition of Carnival of the Arid! It’s a shorter CotA this time around, and flanked (as has become traditional) by beautiful photos captured by Richard Schwartz.
The purpose of blog carnivals is to consolidate a bunch of posts on a particular topic, then amplify the traffic each post gets with a bunch of incoming links. So if you’re taking part in CotA — or if you just find it worthwhile — don’t forget to give us a little link love on your blog or community site or LiveJournal or what have you.
And please spread the word about CotA. Participation has fallen off just a bit — largely due to my own tardiness in putting the thing together this time, I fear — but there’s a lot of wonderful deserty blogging out there we could be including.
If we get a good showing next time around, we could consider rotating the hosting so as to maximize the audience for CotA over time. Let me know if you’d be interested in hosting an installment!
On to the posts! Though they’re fewer in number this time around, the overall wonderfulness of submissions hasn’t flagged. CotA stalwart Silver Fox, for instance, sends along a set of stunning photos of spring wildflowers in eastern Nevada’s Egan Range, taken May 29. The shot of the two-rut leading off into the distance actually hurts, it’s so gorgeous: made me feel the visceral lack of a working Jeep. Silver Fox offers a bit of more recent local photography as well in her post Hiking in the Rain.
Longtime Coyote Crossing habitué Cowtown Pattie submits a first entry to CotA with her post Bend Critters, a set of wonderful photos of Big Bend National Park on the US-Mexico border, which, in Pattie’s words,
is now part of one of the largest transboundary protected areas in North America. More than two million acres of Chihuahuan Desert resources, along with more than 200 miles of river, are now under the protection of the United States and Mexico.
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Another CotA first-timer, Elizabeth Enslin, sends a submission from eastern Oregon on the native bunchgrass bluebunch wheatgrass, which like most native bunchgrasses these days is on the decline in the wild. A pity, as the species’ importance to wildlife cannot be overstated. Elizabeth crossposted her piece over at the group environmental site The Clade, and you should crosspost stuff there too.
Yet another CotA first-timer, Ole Nielsen, reminds us that while deserts might be sublime playgrounds for those of us who have enough food and water, they pose special survival challenges for people who live in politically unstable places such as Somalia. If you’ve wondered whether there was a connection between aridity and Somali piracy, Ole spells it out for you:
So what can you do in Somalia for a living. Crops gone, livestock gone, fish gone, and no social security. One solution is taking aid helpers as hostages to get ransom money. There is however bigger money in piracy. And the pirates are local heroes. They are the revengers of those foreigners that destroyed the fishing industry and they provide money. Eyl (in Puntland, another more or less independent region, see map below) is the location of most of Somalia’s casualties from the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. It has about 3 million inhabitants and has become something like the capital of the Somalian pirates. As the so-called pirate capital it is where the high seas hijackers often steer their captured vessels. Special restaurants in the town cater for the captive crews. With their expensive tastes in fancy houses, cars and women, the pirates have brought boom times to the local economy.
At DesertBlog, which has recently undergone a change in staffing, Larry Hogue brings news of environmental groups preparing to sue the Fish and Wildlife Service for slashing critical habitat for the endangered peninsular bighorn sheep. I follow that with a note on the Interior Department’s rather duplicitous wholesale giveaway of public lands to Big “Green” Energy. That last was also crossposted at The Clade.
And though I’ve digressed into less-arid themes lately here at Coyote Crossing, I do have a couple droughty posts to include. I ruminate on a Mojave photo I took in the wake of a devastating wildfire in the Mojave National Preserve, and follow that up with At Home, a Joshua tree-related sonnet it only took me 12 years to write.
That’s it for CotA#5! Please spread the word, link us to hell and back, and don’t forget to send in your arid-land posts for CotA#6, deadline July 31. IF you missed submitting to this edition, feel free to offer a link in comments! Here’s Richard Schwartz, in lieu of Keyboard Cat, to play us off with a fantastic shot of a Southwestern icon:
Delicate Arch, Richard Schwartz photo
Comments
Thanks, Chris! This was fun. I got lots more photos ;-). Heck, you don’t have to be a professional to take great shots in the Big Bend. The natural beauty just turns any camera into magic.
Found your great blog through Cowtown Patti. Great stuff. I do a desert photoblog and a generally misc blog. We’re kindred spirits.
One of the new categories introduced at the Nature Blog Network last week was “Desert.” Last I checked, no one had reassigned their blog to that category yet…
There’s two of us there now!
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