Allowance

In the aftermath of the Independence Day flooding in south-central Texas, I encountered a question online that I wasn't expecting, although perhaps I should have, given its age and ubiquity: "Why would God allow this to happen?" It was asked in the context of Camp Mystic, the Christian summer camp for girls, but could just as easily apply to the whole event.

I suppose that people will trot out the usual answers, such as the sinfulness of mankind and the need to have bad things happen in order to appreciate the good, but a different answer (or perhaps retort) occurred to me while considering the question: "What part of 'Flash Flood Alley' is difficult to understand?"

And I realized that some variation on this is likely a good response to the question in a lot of instances. A lot of places that are some combination of desirable, useful and/or inexpensive have some hazard associated with them. I mean, were it not for the fact that I live in an area cluttered with trees and other obstructions, I'd have line-of-sight to an active volcano, one that's considered one of the world's most dangerous. Were it to erupt, things in this area would go downhill in a remarkable hurry. And "What part of 'active volcano' is difficult to understand?" would be a very valid question.

While in a sense, the question "Why would God allow this to happen?" is about the seeming inactivity of the Abrahamic god in the face of tragedy (I wonder of Hinduism or Shinto ask a version of the question.), it strikes me that it's also about the idea that humans, especially worshipers, are important enough that the laws of nature (and/or human behavior) should be altered in their favor, regardless of any other considerations, including intentional or inadvertent risk-taking. The Guadalupe River watershed isn't consistently dangerous, otherwise no-one would live there (I would think, anyway), but like any number of other places (say Tornado Alley), it's not  "safe" in the sense that one can be reasonably assured that Mother Nature won't come knocking in a blind rage. And, to some degree or another, therefore, living in these places comes with the assumption of a certain amount of risk. And, comparatively rarely, that risk goes south in a big way, at least for some segment of the population. And sometimes with human help; our built environment, especially here in the United States, can be just as much a hazard as whatever natural process is in play when a disaster occurs.

There are good reasons to live and/or work in places where it's not clear that the Earth really wants anyone to be. But it's worthwhile to understand when that's what's happening. Because the reasons for not putting the resources into being well-adapted to the specific locale are often less good. Remember that I included "inexpensive" as a potential characteristic of hazardous locations. And asking why people don't look after their own well-being is likely a more fruitful line of inquiry than wondering why the Universe doesn't structure things so they don't have to.

Chillin'

There are, to be sure, places where you might expect this sort of thing to happen in the Winter. Texas, however, is not one of those places. The ice was mainly a problem as I understand it, because of the trees that it brought down. Locals told me that the streets were, for the most part, okay, with the exception of bridges (which don't have the Earth to insulate them from below).

Since the hotel I was staying at was only a couple of blocks away from the office and there were no old, large trees in the area, the ice was a rather fascinating inconvenience, rather than an active hazard.
 

Birding

These guys came to hang out with me during lunch yesterday.

It was interesting to watch them. Both had clearly come to understand that humans eating outside carried the potential for easy calories... but only to the first bird that could claim them. The seagull had started out standing on the rocks, until growing discouraged and flying up to the nearby rooftop. But when the crow decided that it would take up that perch, the seagull rushed back, and took up the spot at the end of the row of tables. And their they stayed, for about ten minutes, watching me eat, and ready to pounce should I drop something or walk away from my meal for a moment.

Typically, I don't mind feeding the birds; but since I was at work, no morsels were forthcoming for these two. I'm well aware that birds that come to see humans as direct sources of food can become pests, and seagulls have been known to swoop in on people carrying food in an attempt to startle them into dropping some. So they went hungry, at least for the time being.

Once I was done eating, A walked a short way from the table, and then turned back to watch what would happen next. The seagull, complaining loudly, flew back to the rooftop to scan for any other meals that it might be able to secure (likely any crabs foolish enough to allow themselves to be seen on the nearby beach). The crow, on the other hand, flapped over to the spot I'd just vacated, and absolutely scoured it for any hint of leftovers. I was impressed by how thorough its search was.

I suspect I'll see more of these two throughout the summer, as they keep a lookout during lunchtimes for any abandoned people food. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that they'll see more of me... I've heard that crows, at least, can recognized individual people.

You Gonna Eat That?

Hopefully, opening the photograph at full size will make some of the bit players easier to see.

Normally, I shrink pictures down prior to posting them, just so they don't require as much storage space or bandwidth. But in this case, I made an exception. A little above and to the right of the Bald Eagle in the picture is one of the local troublemakers, a Stellar's Jay. A jay that is clearly plotting some mischief. I suspect that it wanted a bite of whatever it was that the eagle had taken up into the tree to eat. Nearly hidden in the foliage to the right of the Jay is one of the several crows that were also likely looking to score some calories that someone else had done the work for. But none of them, in the end, had the nerve to take on the eagle, which was able to eat in peace, presuming that birds are self-conscious when being closely watched.

Unfortunately, even with a good-quality compact camera, nature photography is difficult. The small sensor and narrow aperture at the end of the zoom range mean that even in broad daylight, the camera isn't really capable of getting the level of light it needs for a sharp, crisp picture. And with cellular photography having gutted the compact camera market, better offerings are unlikely to come along. Still, as the saying goes, the best camera is the one you have with you, so one makes do as one must.

An Object At Rest...

...Gives one more time to take the photograph. I took this a number of years ago, and I'm impressed with how sharply it came out, considering I was using a pretty large telephoto lens from not all that far away. Bright sunlight will do that for you, I guess.

Au Naturel

The weather was nice yesterday, so I went out for a walk in the "woods." It's really just a reasonably large park, but the place was large enough, and the foliage dense enough, that you could spend a good deal of time in places that seemed reasonably natural. Or would have, were it not for the broad, groomed trails and the fact that every tree that fell in proximity to one of the trails had been chainsawed into small sections.

But, for all of the artificial naturalism, it was a nice break from the reminders of what we fondly term the rat race. Even if it was someone else's rat race.

Camo

A bird, sitting on a fencepost. I don't know what kind of bird it is, or whether it's resident or migratory. It was close enough to photograph and it stood still for a bit, so I snapped a picture. I thought about cropping in on it, but the busy background makes the bird seem more camouflaged, which they never really seem to strike me as when I see them. Maybe I'm just better about picking out bits of bird-shaped brown out of all of the other brown than the bird's natural predators are, or maybe it's not really optimized for close-range viewing. But I do notice that the bird seems a bit out of focus, even though the fencepost and foliage seem sharp enough. Maybe that's part of the effect. Or maybe I need more practice.

Sunbathing

There's a pretty good-sized colony of cormorants that hangs out at the northern end of Lake Washington. And one can generally find a number of them on the old pier pilings of a long-removed dock. I always wondered about this behavior, and then I learned that unlike most waterfowl, cormorants don't have waterproof feathers, so they have to dry off  now and again.
 

Plum Blossoms

So the 2020 Primary election is officially tomorrow, which mainly means just that it's the start of vote counting, since it's a vote-by-mail election, and I wouldn't be surprised if most people who plant to vote have already mailed or dropped off their ballots.

And while the panic buying has calmed down, the local area is still freaking out about COVID-19.

But I'm burning out, so it's flower photo time.

Brown-eyed Bird

I find crows to be strangely photogenic birds. Perhaps because, while they are skittish around people, they will stand still long enough for a close-up.

You Comin'?

I take a fair number of pictures over the course of a year, and normally, I would pick out a number of them and place them into an album. But Blogger removed its album functionality and Google + has shut down, and so I don't have the venues that I used to use to display pictures. But still, I went through many of last year's photos, and decided that I liked this one, so here it is.

Another Autumn

The start of a clear, cool morning in Autumn. Autumn in the Puget Sound area is strange. Many of the trees are from elsewhere, it seems, and so respond to differnt signals for them to turn and lose their leaves. So some trees are bare, while others are bright with colors and yet others are still green. And, then, of course, there are the evergreens, which are indifferent to the turning of the seasons.

'Sup?

A North American River Otter, wondering what the thing I'm pointing at it is.

Overdrawn

While they aren't exactly similar, an analogy can be made between climate concerns and finance. One can think of the greenhouse gasses that are being released into the atmosphere as a sort of "climate debt" that, at some point, is going to need to be paid off. And if that debt is not properly managed, it's possible to imagine a "climate default," a scenario in which the changes to the climate create enough upheaval that it's no longer possible to continue to borrow against the climate.

And I do think that it's possible to make the case that currently, world economic activity borrows against the climate, mainly because of scale. For a certain population size, all manner of wasteful, polluting practices are sustainable, because the local environment replenishes itself faster than it can be used up. One could conceptualize this as being similar to the tax revenue of a nation-state, where that revenue is consistently greater than expenditures. While the level of services it supports may be extravagant, it can go on forever. But as population rises relative to tax receipts, it comes to pass that to maintain that level of services requires more money than current income, and the state resorts to borrowing to make up the shortfall. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with borrowing. But if one is borrowing to fund consumption, there may eventually be a problem, as that consumption usually doesn't create the extra resources required to service the debt incurred.

And so to return to our climate analogy, a case can be made that the current world economy is consuming, rather than investing, the resources borrowed from the biosphere, and so the duration over which this can be sustained is finite. And at the end of that duration, as with a point at which a nation my no longer borrow, things are going to have to change.

I make this analogy because it occurred to me that many climate activists have set their sights on Congressional action as a means of heading off the metaphorical "climate default." But the United States Congress is a body that doesn't seem to understand that "kick the can down the road" isn't a viable solution to dealing with the currently mounting fiscal debt that the nation is incurring. So why expect that they'd treat "climate debt" any differently?

After all, the same set of incentives are in place. Just as with fiscal expenditures, climate expenditures have constituencies that rely on them, and therefore lobby for them to be maintained. And as a general rule, "fiscal restraint" isn't put forward as: "I'm willing to forgo this, that or the other in order to lessen the need to borrow." It's more commonly phrased as: "Those people over there should have this, that or the other benefit removed in order to reserve capacity for me." The climate discussion often isn't any different.

Whether it's simply doing without what is otherwise perceived as a necessary good or service, or making expensive (and perhaps risky) investments where the payoff is far in the future, the current set of incentives is not conducive to either fiscal or climate management. And that likely needs to change before policy will.

End Of Summer

And then, the rains came...

Look Both Ways

You can never be too careful when crossing the street.

Keeping Watch

For such large birds, Great Blue Herons can be somewhat difficult to find around here, to the point that it's easy to forget that the Puget Sound region is part of their year round range. But this particular bird had located a nice vantage point for itself, which, in turn, gave me a nice shot at it. The bird seems small in photograph, and so I considered cropping it down to make it seem larger, but I kind of like how unobtrusive the bird comes across as being at this angle.

The Great Monster

One of the central conceits of H. P. Lovecraft's Mythos corpus is that there are these ancient and very powerful beings that exist out in the universe. They aren't hostile to humanity, they're just indifferent. But their power makes that indifference into a mortal threat.

While coming up to the door of my apartment a few days ago, I met a spider. As happens from time to time, he'd spun his web across the gap between the wall of the building and this post that runs between the balcony and the roof. Right in a space that I have to pass through in order to get to my door. So I come home, and find myself face to face with an arachnid, who that morning had likely marveled at its good fortune in finding such prime and unoccupied real estate.

Needless to say, that turned out to be a colossal error in judgment; and the end of one web, since I had no intention of winding up with it all over my face, hair and shirt.

And in that moment, I kind of understood how Mr. Lovecraft intended Cthulhu and company to interact with humanity. I had nothing against the spider. It simply had the misfortune to build a web in a spot that I needed to pass through. I wouldn't be surprised if it never even saw me clearly. From its point of view, there may have been somewhat of a strange, localized darkening of the sky, and then catastrophe struck. (The spider did survive. But if one can be traumatized, there's a spider therapist about to make a killing.)

I'd once read an interesting story about ants managing to communicate with humans and being able to ask favors; and how horribly wrong that could go. And that's a pretty good analog for how cultists might find their interactions with the Elder Gods. But the interaction with the spider speaks to what life in that world can suddenly be like for the rest of the inhabitants. The ones for whom life is normal until they find themselves face to face with a force so much greater than themselves that they can't even perceive it properly, that destroys their works and maybe even lives out of sheer indifference to their fates.

Peek-a-Boo

All In A Row