Yet another wildflower cemetery

  

On May 5th I drove along TX 71 in Bastrop County and stopped several times after spotting great displays of mixed roadside wildflowers, as the two middle pictures in yesterday’s post showed. One place where I pulled over turned out to be right outside the Alum Creek Cemetery, which I then saw was home to quite a few lazy daisies (Aphanostephus skirrhobasis). Also present were smaller amounts of phlox and black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia hirta).

 

  

Now I’m wondering if central Texas has more wildflower-strewn cemeteries per capita than other places. 

Are there any cemeteries like these in your area?

 

 

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Humans being what we are, and the journalistic profession not being what it ought to be, the threats of resource scarcity and overpopulation remain widely believed. We have evolved to be zero-sum thinkers, for in the days of yore, if one member of the band ate more of a slaughtered antelope that really did mean less meat for everyone else. Today, we still think that the more people we have on the planet, the less meat, grain, or fuel there will be to go around. Our stone-age thinking remains oblivious to the advances in trade and technology that allow us to produce more stuff and exchange our surpluses across vast distances. In the meantime, the media, which is more interested in apocalyptic clickbaiting than in reporting on the real state of the world, exaggerates the possibilities of catastrophic future scenarios. If it bleeds, it leads.

 

That’s from Marian L. Tupy’s excellent April 22nd article “More People, More Prosperity: The Simon Abundance Index,” with subtitle “The Simon Abundance Index 2024 finds Earth’s resources 509% more plentiful than in 1980.” The article includes graphs and facts to make its points. (That last sentence may sound banal, but plenty of people make plenty of claims without providing evidence for them.)

 

© 2024 Steven Schwartzman