Book Reflection- Canaries of the Rim

Canaries on the Rim-living downwind in the west by Chip Ward

                This book is from the perspective of Mr. Ward and his personal battle with protecting the environment. He moves out west living in Utah and Nevada and while there is faced with many interesting environmental problems like a magnesium refinery with chlorine gas emissions through the roof, warhead missiles scattered among the desert,  and a former  nuclear test site just to name a few. He truly tried to act whenever he felt there was an environmental injustice forming commissions, signing petitions and doing his own scientific studies. It makes me feel that I too have the power to act when I feel the government or state or anyone isn’t treating the environment justly.

                The Cow got stuck in the Chimney:

                Cows poop in everyone’s drinking water and this is awful because cow poop has a protozoan, giardea, which causes dysentery. Cows are a “square peg in a desert’s round hole.” They “kick up dust, compact soils, breakdown surfaces that fix nitrogen into the soil, erode hill sides, and chew out stressed plants down to the nubs.” After gold rush, there was a cow rush out West. In 1863 there were 97,000 cows grazing parched Santa Barbara County in California.

In this chapter of Ward’s book he is obviously talking about the negative effects cows have had on the environment. While out west, we saw first a dairy farm and learned that cows eat about 100 pounds of food each day and drink up to 1-2 tubs of water per day; cows add a huge strain onto the environment. If we ate less meat, produced less cows, and used the farmland that would have fed a cow to feed people we could end hunger in the United States.

We out west also visited methane digester which is a type of energy system where you capture the methane released from cow poop and use the methane to generate electricity. If nothing else cows in Southern California can be looked at as an energy source.

Landing on the Rim of the Great Basin:

                The Great Basin is considered a “wasteland”- a redundant landscape of mostly dry desert and small mountain ranges-it was looked upon as an obstacle to westward expansion.

I can see why people say the Great Basin located in Nevada as a wasteland. It is a huge hot, dry piece of land. While in Las Vegas, I was on top of the Stratosphere looking over the city. You could see the lights of the city expand below you and then abruptly stop in the distance. Was there an ocean out there in the distance, why did the lights of the city just suddenly stop? Well, it is because Las Vegas is built in a desert, which is no ocean, its desert. Also when we were in Reno, Nevada I could not get over how windy it was. It is so windy because again a big city in a desert just in northern not southern Nevada. There are no obstacles to block the wind just open land so therefore Reno is very windy.

Cowboys in Gas Masks:

There are 1,140 of those are uranium mines in Utah according to the book. We were graced with visiting one uranium mine while we were outside Moab, Utah. The mine we visited thankfully was being cleaned up by the Department of Energy but it still was right on the edge of the Colorado River so who knows if any of the radioactive material touched the water supply.