Growing rampant

 

Growing rampant on some of the Virginia saltmarsh mallows, Kosteletzkya pentacarpos or virginica, which you saw in the last post on the gulf side of Galveston Island State Park on September 19th, were a bunch of hairypod cowpea vines, Vigna luteola, as shown above. Next, have a look at one of the cowpea flowers from down low, where I’m wont to go:

  

And here’s one in isolation that’s even more sculptural:

 

  

 

§

§       §       §

§

 

On the theme of “Do as I say, not as I do,” the other day I happened across an article by Emily Smith from November 1, 2021, that began like this:

There is outrage after Jeff Bezos’ $65 million Gulf Stream jet led a 400-strong stream of private planes into Scottish environmental summit COP26.

World leaders and dignitaries from all over the globe, including Prince Albert of Monaco and a host of “green” CEOs landed in Glasgow and Edinburgh over the weekend, creating what one Scottish news outlet described as “an extraordinary traffic jam [which] forced empty planes to fly 30 miles to find space to park.” 

The article went on to quote Matt Finch, of the UK’s Transport and Environment campaign group:

The average private jet… emits two tons of CO2 for every hour in flight. It can’t be stressed enough how bad private jets are for the environment, it is the worst way to travel by miles. Our research has found that most journeys could easily be completed on scheduled flights.

Private jets are very prestigious but it is difficult to avoid the hypocrisy of using one while claiming to be fighting climate change…. To put it in context, the total carbon footprint of an ordinary citizen — including everywhere they travel and everything they consume — is around eight tons a year. So an executive or politician taking one long-haul private flight will burn more CO2 than several normal people do in a year [italics added].

Of course those 400 private jets converged at a “climate summit” for the sake of “saving the planet,” so it must have been okay.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Virginia saltmarsh mallows

 

On the gulf side of Galveston Island State Park on September 19th I sat near the base of some cattails and wildflowers and took a bunch of pictures. At one point a passerby asked me what I was photographing. It seemed pretty obvious to me but I said “wildflowers.” A few minutes later a couple asked me the same question, and I answered the same way. The woman in the couple said she thought what I was photographing looked weedy. There’s no accounting for tastes, is there? The most prominent of the wildflowers I took pictures of there was Virginia saltmarsh mallow, Kosteletzkya pentacarpos or virginica, whose genus name I always have to double-check the spelling of. Below is an artsy portrait showing one of the opening flowers. That it’s reminiscent of a conch befits the oceanside location, don’t you think?

 

  

 

§

§        §        §

§

  

Much of what we hear about race is superficial. In contrast, consider the thoughtful, nuanced, and sometimes iconoclastic discussion that Kmele Foster, Glenn Loury, and John McWhorter held in July of 2022. You’re welcome to listen to that 53-minute trialogue, “From Racial Reckoning to Race Abolition.”

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

More from the beach

On September 19th we spent hours on Galveston Island. One of the plants that drew my attention formed distinctive mounds wider than they are high. I recognized it as a species of Croton; it turned out to be Croton punctatus, appropriately called gulf croton and beach tea. One website says that “it forms compact, seemingly manicured mounds in dunes that are accumulating sand and tends to disappear from eroding landscapes.” In the top picture, the grass behind the croton is sea oats, Uniola paniculata, which you last saw here from the Florida panhandle in 2019. In the second picture, the wildflowers behind the even broader mound of gulf croton are beach sunflowers, Helianthus debilis, which the post two days ago showed you a big colony of.

 

§

 

Alan Dershowitz’s new book, The Price of Principle: Why Integrity Is Worth the Consequences, praises American philosopher John Rawls.

He contemplated a nether world in which none of us knows whether we will be rich or poor, male or female, Black or white, Republican or Democrat, healthy or sick, intelligent or average, young or old. Blinded by this “veil of ignorance” we must articulate principles that would be maximally fair to all of us without any of us knowing into which categories we would fit in the real world. So even if one wanted to act out of self or group interest, he could not, because he would not know what he would be or what group he would belong to when the time came to apply the principles.

The laudable moral stance of treating everyone fairly, in the same way, is quickly falling out of fashion among a segment of our population. That unfortunately increasing faction insists on favoring people in certain groups and disfavoring—discriminating against—people in certain other groups, even though that discrimination violates the “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment as well as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and all U.S. state constitutions.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

A willet won’t will its way into your will, will it?

 

On September 19th we spent time at Galveston Island State Park, where we saw—how could we not?—several kinds of shore birds. I figured the one above in the surf on the gulf side of the park is a kind of sandpiper, and Shannon Westveer confirmed that it’s a willet, Catoptrophorus semipalmatus. The dictionary says the common name mimics the willet’s cry. An hour later—to within 15 seconds—on the bay side of the state park I photographed three roseate spoonbills, Platalea ajaja, doing their bill-in-the-water thing sifting for food: 

 

 

 

 

§

§        §        §

§

 

 

I’ve long known that calumny and lies in politics go back centuries, in fact probably as long as politics has existed. The introduction to Alan Dershowitz’s new book, The Price of Principle: Why Integrity Is Worth the Consequences, provides a quotation in which Alexander Hamilton called out the practice in 1797:

A principal engine, by which this spirit endeavours to accomplish its purposes is that of calumny. It is essential to its success that the influence of men of upright principles, disposed and able to resist its enterprises, shall be at all events destroyed. Not content with traducing their best efforts for the public good, with misrepresenting their purest motives, with inferring criminality from actions innocent or laudable, the most direct fals[e]hoods are invented and propagated, with undaunted effrontery and unrelenting perseverance. Lies often detected and refuted are still revived and repeated, in the hope that the refutation may have been forgotten or that the frequency and boldness of accusation may supply the place of truth and proof. The most profligate men are encouraged, probably bribed, certainly with patronage if not with money, to become informers and accusers. And when tales, which their characters alone ought to discredit, are refuted by evidence and facts which oblige the patrons of them to abandon their support, they still continue in corroding whispers to wear away the reputations which they could not directly subvert….

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Back to the Gulf

 

The first time we made it back to the Gulf of Mexico since the pandemic was at the beginning of June, when we spent a few days in Corpus Christi and Port Aransas. The second time was on September 19th, when we drove-and-stopped our way southwest from downtown Galveston to the far end of the island. The next bunch of posts will document that day in nature.

While Corpus Christi had offered up plenty of purple beach morning glory flowers, Ipomoea pes-caprae, the plants in Galveston put on a greater show of spreading their runners across the beach sand, as you see above. Another great spread that we saw in many places was sunflowers, which formed good-sized colonies right on the beach and in “vacant” lots in town. Local informant Linda suggests we saw beach sunflowers, Helianthus debilis. Look how dense they were:

 

 

⇟

⇟               ⇟

⇟

 

 

On Wednesday Florida suffered devastating damage from Hurricane Ian. It took only two days for our vice president to racialize the suffering by announcing that the federal government would prioritize aid to hurricane victims based on their race:

It is our lowest income communities and our communities of color that are most impacted by these extreme conditions and impacted by issues that are not of their own making. And so we have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity, understanding that we fight for equality, but we also need to fight for equity, understanding not everyone starts out at the same place, and if we want people to be in an equal place sometimes we have to take into account those disparities and do that work.

For the uninitiated, let me explain that “communities of color” is a euphemism for “everybody except white people.” “Equity” is code for “discrimination according to race, sex, or other personal attributes.” The word sounds like “equality” but means the opposite. “Do the work” is racialist jargon that means confessing that white people are the “root cause” of the country’s troubles and therefore it’s okay to discriminate against them. If that sounds blunt, it’s because race essentialism is blunt.

It’s also illegal: prioritizing aid to hurricane victims based on their race would violate the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and many other laws. If the government follows through and starts to distribute aid based on race, courts will strike that down as illegal, just as they struck down racially based programs the current administration tried to put into effect during the pandemic. No matter how many times citizens and the courts tell government officials they can’t discriminate based on race, they keep trying to do it. That’s not only illegal, it’s immoral.

You’re welcome to read more about this in a September 30th Washington Examiner story by Maria Leaf.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

 

Pelicans

Most of the birds that followed the Galveston-Bolivar ferry on October 7th were either gulls—two of which you saw a few posts back—or brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis), which you’re seeing now.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

On the ferry

“We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.”

So begins Edna St. Millay’s 18-line poem “Recuerdo” (Spanish for “I remember” or “Remembrance”). While we could have gone back and forth as often as we wanted on the free car ferry between Galveston and Port Bolivar*, on October 7th we went only one-way, northbound from Galveston. And we weren’t tired, because it was morning, not night; tiredness would come later, after we’d driven four-and-a-half hours back to Austin.

I hadn’t taken this ferry in decades, yet I had a distinct recuerdo of the way birds follow the boat, and now I aimed to follow the birds and see if I could get any decent pictures of them. My technique was to pan with a telephoto lens at a high shutter speed to track an individual bird as it wheeled by, trying to keep it in focus and also completely inside the frame. Sometimes I failed on one count, sometimes on the other. And occasionally I succeeded, as you see in these two photographs of gulls.

* The Spanish surname is Bolívar, with the middle syllable stressed: bo-LEE-var. The Texas place name, however, has come to be pronounced in a way that rhymes with Oliver.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

Artist Boat Coastal Heritage Preserve

On October 6, after time at the Kelly Hamby Nature Trail, we went over to the Artist Boat Coastal Heritage Preserve. Linda had told us to expect to see Solidago odora, called fragrant goldenrod, sweet goldenrod, and anise-scented goldenrod. My nose and brain detected a vinegary scent.

Close to the goldenrod was some croton, Croton sp.

On one of the croton leaves a tiny fly caught my attention. UPDATE: the good folks at bugguide.net have placed the fly in the genus Condylostylus, adding that it may be a female Condylostylus mundus.

Another find was some flowers of Vigna luteola, known as hairypod cowpea, wild cowpea, and yellow vigna.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

A cemetery that welcomes wildflowers

On May 23rd Eve and I were in Dickinson, Texas, to attend the wedding of a former student of mine. The reception was held about 30 miles away in the Hotel Galvez that evening, and as we drove down Broadway in Galveston on our way there, we passed the Old City Cemetery, which to our delighted amazement was covered with wildflowers. Short on light and time (and long on prohibitive clothing), I conceived a plan to return the following day to take pictures, but it rained on and off the next morning back on the mainland where we were staying and things weren’t looking good. At noon we had lunch with Linda of shoreacres, whom we were meeting for the first time (long overdue). When we’d finished our meal, the weather, though still heavily overcast, looked like it might be okay, so the three of us drove to Galveston and spent the better part of an hour exploring the wildflower-bedecked cemetery.

You’re looking at a part of it here. Most of the flower heads are a species of Coreopsis, but the ones with prominent red in the center are Gaillardia pulchella, known as firewheels or Indian blankets. Why can’t all cemeteries look this colorful?

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman