Spring greetings to you from a rapidly greening Great Basin. The flowers have crisped up and blown away in the low Mojave desert, but there’s still some blooms to be found at elevation. But what I’m really excited about now is the Great Basin kicking into high gear. There’s a band from Reno to Lone Pine and extending west along Highways 6 & 50 to the Utah border that all got 200%+ of normal precipitation. For much of that area, it’s the wettest winter on record. The flowers this summer will be remarkable. I drove Highway 6 the other day, and found extensive fields of scale bud (Anisocoma acaulis) growing in one of the lower elevation valleys. Lots of germination near Lunar Crater. Prepare yourselves, give it a month, and the Great Basin is going to explode in flowers. You read it here first.
Back in the late '80s and 90s when I used to watch CSPAN, Dale Bumpers (D-AR) tirelessly advocated for mining reform, only to be defeated by a coalition of Republican and Democratic western senators. The more things change, I guess. I fear the mining rush is going to turn large swathes of land across the planet into gigantic piles of toxic slag heaps.
Back in the late '80s and 90s when I used to watch CSPAN, Dale Bumpers (D-AR) tirelessly advocated for mining reform, only to be defeated by a coalition of Republican and Democratic western senators. The more things change, I guess. I fear the mining rush is going to turn large swathes of land across the planet into gigantic piles of toxic slag heaps.
https://earthworks.org/blog/remembering_senator_dale_bumpers/