Tag: sustainability

Food Insecurity Looms Behind the Headlines

There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from a grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace. 

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, “The Good Oak”.

Food Security is threatened all across the Earth as climate change is ramping up in extreme heat, consequent drought, fires and flooding, and in rising costs to farmers. In some parts of the world, new crops may need to be considered. For decades now, groups across the world have been working to create new genetic seed varieties that can thrive under adverse conditions.

In the eastern United States, once the breadbasket of a new democracy, farmers are facing daily threats to crops. Changing seasonal patterns, drought, loss of pollinators and other synergistic insects; rising costs of diesel fuel and fertilizer, and saltwater inundation from sea level rise challenge crop production.

Out west in the breadbaskets of America where water is the limiting factor, a historic long-term drought has resulted in Federal oversight of the states sharing the Colorado River system to stem a catastrophe where 40 million people live in major cities of our nation: Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas.

This is an impending health crisis. Water is the limiting factor of human life. Water is first and a healthy, stable food supply is second. These major growing areas (the Imperial Valley in California, Arizona farms and orchards, and to some extent the northern Mexico food production supported by the Colorado River valley are all threatened by the drought on the once mighty Colorado River – caused by historic overuse of the river.

When the Colorado River Pact formed in 1922 among seven states (Upper Basin and Lower Basin states), the allocations were made using average annual flow data that was based on historic high volume. Later, after the Colorado River system was dammed and redirected to flow to agriculture and cities, scientists discovered that 100-year droughts were common in the geological record. In spite of John Wesley Powell’s historic expedition to the West and navigation of the wild Colorado River (paid for by Congress) to assess whether America’s western lands could be developed by harnessing the Colorado, he reported back to Congress that the lands were water restricted to 1-10” of rainfall per year. He cautioned Congress that big construction schemes should not be developed in deserts. Congress ignored his report. And here we are.

America’s Once Historic Breadbasket of the World is in Crisis

Let us be sober for once and look with a clear eye at our country’s situation. Farmers are sending signals that weather and climate are making it harder to bring their crops to harvest and economics are hindering it, too. Also, our long-held pride in small farmers at the center of production is giving away to corporate farms. Those small family farms that grace so much of the Southeast may soon be a relic of the past.

Our country is focused internationally, spending our wealth on unwarranted wars when we have a catastrophe brewing at home: loss of food security.

We see it now as millions of American families are priced out of the healthier foods due to rising costs caused by worldwide tariffs and consequent downstream price forcing. (I’ve watched the price of even the humble sweet potato rise from $0.69 to $1.29 per pound in just a year.)

Access to fertilizer and affordable diesel and climate impacts are chasing each other for front runner position with threats to water supply leading the race. Another runner nipping at their heels is saltwater inundation and drought-caused salination of soils from rapid evaporation. All these factors are combining to potentially reduce food security.

What do we mean by food security?

While there are a variety of ways to understand food security, it contains systems that intersect and combine to create access to a stable healthy food supply. American Agriculture and food industry have striven a century to create what we enjoy today.

  1. access to healthy food (affordability, quality and reasonable proximity);
  2. stable agricultural production season to season (predictable costs to farmers for production both nationally and internationally with oversight to assure farmers are supported in creating market demand for high quality food production);  
  3. predictable seasons and growth conditions);
  4. land use (should water-loving crops like cotton or corn for ethanol be grown or crops grown for meat production be carved back when water supply is limited?)
  5. land management for stable freshwater supply and healthy soil;
  6. scientific innovations for seed production, pest control, deep soil health;
  7. fair and stable markets and
  8. nonpolluting, affordable sources of power for food production/transportation..

For centuries, American farmers and international partners have created a robust and dependable food supply for the nation and many other countries around the world. For a century at least, the U.S.A. has supplied emergency food wherever famine develops.

Our national supermarkets are a wonder to international visitors. At least up to now. Dangers lurk that currently threaten our national and international food security.

Stay tuned for the next post on food production from our oceans, lakes and rivers. Please comment on this post so that we can all benefit from our collective wisdom on this critical matter.

The Farmer Cutting Hay for Winter Season

Additional Resources:

Small Planet Institute: Diet for a Small Planet

American Farmland Trust

How SNAP Fights Poverty:

Fire and Flood: Earth in Transition

“Any fool can destroy trees.” ~ John Muir, from “Save the Redwoods” essay in John Muir, Nature Writings, The Library of America, p. 830, 1997, N.Y., N.Y.

Study the maps from the Berkeley Climate Monthly Report (previous post on this blog). Study Europe, especially France and Spain. This heat pattern was long predicted by climate scientists yet with all we know, and without any hope of a global effort to reduce heat producing carbon emissions, it may yet all come true and then some.

Heating on land takes human lives, destroys forests whose carbon sequestration is fundamental to the gentle climate we have known for at least the last 10,000 years. We have depended on weather patterns known to us as seasons of the year. Farmers have known these patterns and have planned accordingly.

As agriculture varies over the centuries and location, humans have learned how to extract the most food out of a given piece of land. Extraction from tilling the land we have recently observed destroys the underlying networks of mycelia that are the conduits of water and minerals and the central hub of the lives of millions of microbes and invertebrates whose lives make our abundant foodshed possible.

We are entering a new era of life on Earth. Across the world people and organizations labor to restore ecosystems and to protect species. Notable too are the family by family efforts to plant natives to support insects and birds and other of our kin at risk from climate change, pesticides, and general disruption of their life cycles in their habitats.

In spite of these local or regional efforts, we have passed a point where Earth’s biological systems are irrevocably disrupted by climate forcing that has caused drought, floods, fire, mega-storms and now, these play back on each other for a forcing effect. The fires in the NE USA, Canada, and Europe are illustrative. The fires are so intense now that they are creating their own weather. When this happens, no human intervention can stop them. More people are displaced.

We have passed tipping points now. No going back. This could have been stopped or slowed down had we stuck together across political and social divides but we did not. We know Mother Earth’s creatures are malleable and ultimately able to adapt under favorable conditions. Its still possible that there are things we can do now but they are hard and will need big collaborations to achieve.

This fact has been hard for me personally to acknowledge. Generally, I am an optimist believing there is hope to make change happen soon enough. But those changes, at least in America, have been stymied and denigrated by leaders and some of the public alike. All that fossil fuel lobbying paid off? No one will be unscathed by the coming Earth changes. Nature will endure but in some form we cannot predict nor whether we’ll survive to be part of it. Nature is responsive and ultimately able to change under different conditions.

America embraces capitalism as its economic religion and oath. The vagaries of the system have boomeranged over the decades between the forces of greed and the forces of prudence and justice. In America the forces of avarice and greed are in the White House at present, half the Congress unwilling to stop it, and the other half powerless. Citizens and representatives still in touch with reality are forming coalitions and I feel a groundswell forming to stop them. But when? The world is burning around us. How much longer can rich and powerful people live in altered realities with all their power and wealth? Don’t hold your breath. Better to join with friends and people who DO possess reason and power through the Constitution.

I am not giving up nor are you. There is a growing coalescence among neighbors and communities across the U.S. We can do amazing things together; we can’t stop climate change but we can adapt to it using not only our wits, but also by cultivating a reverence for the Earth we forgot somewhere on the way to “get the gold”.

The reason our culture has not embraced an intelligent relationship with our planet is the way we consider humans separate from other species and the land and waters of Mother Earth. Yet nothing could be further from the truth no matter what some religions may teach. We are a biological species. Our contribution to the whole biota is that we are reasoning creatures and we have an opposable thumb and we make stuff. We could be very useful to Mother Earth by understanding how the natural world works and that we are one among millions of species. I am no fool that that change of worldview could happen in America soon enough, but a great deal of our people are coming to this understanding. So, a major action we can take is to be in a spiritual posture of humility and take actions to undo the conditions that are causing climate change.

We can’t stop it now, but we can mute the impacts and then learn what the new realities will mean for ALL life on Earth and adjust how we live. That is, we embrace and recall reverence for life which our species once embraced. We should turn to the original keepers of North America, the Tribal Nations across this land. We can learn from their understanding of our place in the great panoply of life on this land.

Borrowing from Our Children’s Treasure

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”   ~ Aldo Leopold

We see this phenomenon in the seven states who have been drawing down the Colorado River Basin water resources to the point of an emergency, and now in the proliferation of data centers in support of AI. In both cases large scale industrial projects drive decisions rather than prudent decision making with a land ethic (meaning the best decision making by a thinking community).

Citizens are finding themselves in a water crisis across seven states who utilize Colorado River Water, or in the fact that citizens in U.S. states are in a quandary as data center developers pressure them to either sell their homes or face the whine, pollution, grid and water overuse of mega data centers built in their backyards.

These kinds of abuses and overuses of the planet’s generosity occur without an ethic that all agree upon. Aldo Leopold made the greatest contribution to this discussion in his landmark essay, The Land Ethic. Leopold considered a land ethic as a dynamic outcome of a thinking community working together for the best outcomes for both the biotic health of the land and for people. The quote above sums up the concept.

When the Colorado River Compact, which includes seven states that utilize its waters, discussed how they could work together to share this great river’s resources, they did so in spite of a basic fact: the river experiences periodic one-hundred year droughts as shown in fossil records and tree rings.

Americans living in these states have witnessed a long-term drought that has all but emptied the two giant reservoirs, Lake Mead (lower basin states) and Lake Powell (upper basin states).

Desert states like Arizona and California, have sucked the regions dry to support enormous growth in cities and agriculture. Before building the Hoover Dam to create Lake Mead, Congressmen in 1878 sent John Wesley Powell to assess the southwest region for its potential for development of the western states. He returned after 18 months to deliver a sobering conclusion: the arid region is unsuitable for large scale development based on available water supply and geological aspects of the west. Read a summary of his report here.

Today, nearly a century later, mega-wealthy oligarchs who developed artificial intelligence (AI) want to build huge (thousands of acres) data centers to power AI. The horses are ahead of the cart again as the public isn’t sure they want AI to be developed without careful discussion and oversight. Virginia, a drought-stressed state, has hundreds of data centers clustered in the northern part of the state and are salivating for land in rural area. They bully landowners, promise huge tax income while drawing large amounts of fresh water from aquifers. The trend is to push out home owners, farmers, and even small townships, by offering as much as $12M an acre. Some owners are pressured when neighbors sell and leave other land owners whose homes, farms and enterprises are their treasures. Emissions from gas-powered turbines, noise pollution, and hidden impacts such as the water required to produce the power to run the data center are unsustainable and undemocratic. Read this recent executive summary of data centers pros and cons from CERES, a nonprofit that supports sustainable business solutions.

Ceres Report Drained by DataDownload

What is missing is the values-discussion that Aldo Leopold described that is a dynamic process within a thinking community. It is an ongoing discussion that considers the health of the land when making decisions that could decrease its well-functioning. Read The Land Ethic Below. **This is one of the most downloaded files on my blog. People from all over the world read it. My own view is that no one from the scientific community has analyzed “how to live on a piece of land without ruining it” better than Aldo Leopold. See the Aldo Leopold Foundation located in Baraboo, Wisconsin for more about his legacy.

The Land Ethic_A Sand County AlmanacDownload

Do we have a right to a stable climate?

Today on the Sam Matey-Coste Substack account – The Weekly Anthropocene – news and a record of how countries voted to uphold the right of people across the world to a stable environment is presented. The vote responded to a ruling by the International Court of Justice. Note below, the U.S. now joins Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, Liberia, and others, to deny that right.

A U.S.A. nonprofit supporting youth is working in state and federal courts toward a declaration of the rights of children and youth to a healthy, sustainable climate. Our Children’s Trust is a nonprofit worth following.

Listening to youth speak to their futures requires all of us to understand our inaction acts to decrease their life’s potential. No one would deny that to children, right? The children and youth are given top notch legal education and representation at no cost. Explore the website by state to learn where youth are applying pressure to achieve a sustainable environment for their generation.

I highly recommend the book, The Ecology of Childhood, How Our Changing World Threatens Children published in 2020. Barbara Bennett Woodhouse devoted her law career to the rights of children. (See Google Scholar for her published works.) Bennett demonstrates how the U.S. ranks low compared to other developed nations in the social safety net provided for our children. We talk a good game about how we love our children in the U.S. but, when studied, that proves to be false. Now, we deny them a stable climate as well?

Readers, it is my firm belief that Americans are misrepresented by the current administration which denies climate change and has turned our country back to increasing fossil fuel production and use. The momentum toward clean energy that just got started in the Biden administration has slowed as a result.

In Sam Matey-Coste’s Substack account you can learn about advancement in clean energy and environmental victories in countries around the world. I highly recommend him to all of you who need a daily dose of climate hope.

In the U.S. there is progress in clean energy development such as in Texas and California, but it is much slower than it could be – especially in the automobile industry where sales of electric cars have plummeted. And now that Trump has illustrated how vulnerable the fossil fuel industry can be, the U.S. is losing out and our children’s futures are even more imperiled as the Earth warms. Emissions from fossil fuels are the primary driver of climate anomalies and storms like we’ve recently experienced — fires like we’ve never seen, droughts across whole regions of the continent.

But, it is not just our children whom we imperil. We imperil the world’s children. Emissions do not stay in place but circulate around the globe. We are all responsible and must get back to representatives in government who are responsible, serious adults. The window of opportunity for Americans to gain access to free or cheap clean energy is attenuating.

How can this be true? We have historically been a nation of innovators. But here, oligarchs in tech have taken away our agency and made us prisoners of their outsized influence over our politics and thus our government. Data centers to support AI development are being shoved down communities throats. Who profits? Oligarchs.

Step Up!

Step into this path we are on to take back our country and get back on a path to innovation, clean cheap energy for All, and working alongside our allies across the world to obtain for youth and coming generations a safe, stable environment, a world of innovators and well cared for people. War is obsolete, and our people must have a say through our representatives as to whether we go on defense of liberty. DEFENSE. The Speaker of the House refused to bring a vote to the floor of the House of Representatives to end the Iran War.

This administration must be held accountable. We must stand for truth and for our children’s future.

This time in U.S. history will either be recorded as our undoing and defeat, or our finest hour. Which will history record?

Update: A Related Post – New Book for Hotter Times

Food Security

… every day, 2,000 acres of farmland are lost to non-agricultural uses, many farms continue to lose topsoil at alarming rates; and one-third of America’s farmland may change hands in the next 15 years as aging landowners sell their properties. These trends jeopardize the future of agriculture and our environment. Farmland is essential for food production—the demand for which is expected to increase by 60% by 2050. But farmland is also essential for a wide array of ecosystem services on which our future depends.~ American Farmland Trust

The American Farmland Trust is where I first learned about the importance of land trusts as a means of conserving land for farming, forestry, and soil improvement. I was living in Bowling Green, Kentucky when I was learning about the organization and its goals. This was during the Pandemic years from 2019 – 2022. I was an avid supporter of Community Supported Farmers (CSF).

Land Trusts Help Young Farmers

My farm family was a young couple with a growing family. They supplied me and their subscribers with a beautiful box of fresh farm produce with occasional surprises like local jam or sauces. And during the Pandemic, this enterprising family delivered the produce to our door.

A land trust conserves farmland and leases it to farmers in long-term leases as long as they fulfill the terms of the lease. Some leases can be as long as 99 years and inheritable. With some, farmers can gain equity for buildings and equipment they invested in farming the land leased. This can be passed on to relatives. Land trust have formed to specifically address inequities such as farmable land being bought by industrial farming operations that drive up the cost of land. Young farmers wanting to do the right thing by the soil, water, and air often cannot find land they can afford to buy. A lease with a Land Trust makes it possible. Black Soil KY is an innovative agribusiness model.

No-Till Growers: the Innovators

Young farmers and entrepreneurs put together podcasts about regenerative, no-till farming. I helped them with a start up grant from the government to provide educational videos for farmers to learn the art and practice of regenerating their farmland or market gardens. Today, this is a nationally recognized nonprofit business: No-Till Growers.

The Farmer

During these heavy, Pandemic years, I found hope in Kentucky farmers, especially the young farmers. Most could not afford to buy land and thus joining a Land Trust allowed them to lease land long term and even gain equity on it should they wish to pass it on to relatives.

My mind was on fire with stories I could write about a quiet revolution happening on farms with dreamers regenerating the soil. The outcome? A novel! The Last Farm on Lovers Lane is complete and I am now looking for a publisher. Below is an excerpt, protected by copyright law. Read it here.

CHAPTER 1

Belle Patterson

I parked the truck in the shade of a sprawling sugar maple. The redolence of warm soil and spice of wild grasses filled the cab as I rolled down the window. On this day I would continue an experiment on a worn out field on my grandfather’s property. Two centuries of extractive farming had depleted our farmland of its natural soil diversity. Teaming up with my friend Janelle, we were conducting a 2-year capstone project to restore the soil.

Stowing the instruments of my trade in a tool belt – spade, sample bags, soil test kit, thermometer, syringe, and Draeger tube – I headed for the field with anticipation. Kneeling in the spongy soil near the first metal cylinder, I inserted a needle into the aperture on the lid to draw a sample of air and pump it into a Draeger tube to measure the gas concentrations, recording them in a field notebook. Knowing the relative amounts of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and oxygen, we could determine the health of the soil’s ecosystem. Next, I drove my spade into the dark loam for a sample. An earthworm oozed out.

“There you are earth-queen,” I whispered to the soil denizen. A drop of my sweat splashed onto its glistening skin causing the worm to contract and plunge out of sight. Small insects worried their bodies through the soil while a sow bug rumbled along my glove like an invertebrate Humvee. Under a hand lens, springtails were busy at life and ants went about their well-ordered societies. The soil community was reawakening.

Hours passed happily as I continued this process at each of the cylinders placed at intervals across the field. A flock of sparrows in the old maple chattered amicably. Engrossed in the process, I jumped when my flip phone vibrated in my pocket. It was Pops.

Out of the Ashes, into the Sun

Beginning about the middle of 2023, we entered the really steep part of this growth curve that could redefine our future, crossing another invisible line, this one marking the installation of a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels on this planet everyday. ~ Bill McKibben, Here Comes the Sun; Introduction, p. 3.

I want to help promote Bill’s book which was just released, written in 2024 with updated figures about the world’s and the U.S.’s transition to solar and wind power.

UPDATE: 8.28.25

But first, I want to share that Bill expertly and with flare and humor, traces humankind’s history of burning things for power and light. Scanning over our journey as a species, we can see how all that came before from burning wood, coal, oil and gas will be surpassed at warp speed as cheap, clean energy replaces those sources. Solar and wind energy are AVAILABLE TO ANYONE which will not only revolutionize how we live but will shift power because, as Bill points out, solar energy is diffuse – available for anyone anywhere on Earth.

Where people who were once able to hoard and control the availability of energy, that will no longer be true. People everywhere will be freed to experience a healthier and more robust life.

Are we in time to stem the worst of a heating Earth and oceans? Bill brings readers up to date on climate science and clean industry, soberly laying out what we have to do and by when to stop additional heating. The race is on but the current U.S. leadership has declared climate change a hoax. That decision is the real hoax – one that imperials Americans and the world.

The book is full of hope and good sense and a realistic estimation of where we are and what we must do over the next 4 and a half years (by 2030) and 24 years (by 2050). Most of the solar industry development is in China but in spite of all the obstacles in America’s way, its happening here as well.

We are going to buy the cheapest energy, the cheapest cars and transportation, and everyone will have access equally. That is a Revolution in America and across the planet.

VOLTS INTERVIEW WITH BILL MCKIBBEN AND JAMIE HENN

SUN DAY, SEPTEMBER 21, THIRD ACT AND PARTNERS

Here Comes the Sun by Bill McKibben

Where Climate and Politics Meet

 If the last year has been about a phase change in our planet’s climate, the next year has to be about a phase change in our planet’s politics. ~ Bill McKibben on Substack, August 22, 2023

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are the only candidates who are engaged at the national and state levels to manage climate adaptation and the clean energy transition – both of which lead to reduction of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide that are drivers of heating the atmosphere and thus the oceans.

Joe Biden and his Cabinet of experts formulated the Inflation Reduction Act, a historic commitment to funding business, communities and families to make the transition to a clean energy economy. This is an historic achievement.

Oceans have been a sink for heat in the atmosphere throughout the Earth’s history. The ice sheets at the polar caps also reflect incoming sunlight, another of Earth’s modifying functions. Both of these processes have managed to keep the Earth’s temperature at a temperature that supports life. It had been so for 4.3 million years. Humans have long benefitted from the planet’s incredible renewing forces that have made life so abundant and predictable.

Then came the industrial age and with it the burning of fossil fuels. Hundreds of years of wanton deforestation has also removed another natural carbon dioxide “sink” that once kept the Earth cool. The Earth’s temperature has been rising since the industrialization of farming and later industries that burn coal, gas, and other fuels put too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

We have been made aware of this for a century. (Actually, Alexander Humbolt, in the 1799, warned people that the Earth was heating up from human induced causes.) But, I’ve learned something about humans. We are short term thinkers on the whole. When it shows up at our door, we might act but that is not even a guarantee. The problem with that kind of thinking is that once the heat is in the oceans and the atmosphere, it stays there for centuries.

I watch as so much of our heartland is being destroyed by floods and fires, and hurricanes with massive flooding events. Iconic cities and natural areas are disappearing before our eyes. And with them, our livlihoods and lives.

With the other party denying climate change, heads in the sand, while extolling how brilliant they are, please vote for the team already leading on climate mitigation and solutions for our children and all the children to come.

For two centuries the USA has been the biggest emitter and so we have contributed most to the warming of the atmosphere and oceans. Cry babies, some who hold Congressional offices, cry out that China is the biggest emitter today, ignoring our much longer contributions. We have to become adults!

Its about our generation standing up for future generations. Our Children’s Trust recently put it very succintly.

Vote for Harris and Walz as if your life depends on it, because it does.

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.

Wendell Berry

Photo by Susan Feathers. Pensacola Beach on Santa Rosa Island, Florida

Places –

Sonoran Desert

Phoenix, Low Desert – 1999

At midnight the heat radiates from the cement driveway under my feet. I stand in the white moonlight gazing up at twinkling stars. The dark outline of tall trees and roof tops form a stage-drop where city glow breaks the blackness of night.

This is my summer ritual: star-gazing in my pajamas. I wake out of some consciousness that tells my snoozing brain I can open the doors and go out to a cool 90 degrees. I lay in a chaise lounge in the middle of the driveway under a sparkling dome of heaven. The air is gentle, warm, caressing. Like other desert creatures, I have become nocturnal. The moon is my muse.

It’s summertime in Phoenix, Arizona. Temperatures soar over 110 ̊. After June, the buildings and streets absorb the day’s solar energy and then slowly release it through the night. Even though the sun goes down, the built environment radiates like an oven.  The hum of air conditioners is a constant auditory feature of modern desert life.

In the old parts of town residents open aqueducts in their yards. Encircled by an earthen berm, the lawns hold the precious ground water releasing it slowly to soak deeply into the sandy soil and keep their urban lawns green. In the 1900’s people moved to the desert for its dry climate and to escape allergy-causing vegetation. However, the mulberry and olive trees they imported with them resulted in Phoenix becoming the asthma capital of the west by 2000. The average low temperature has increased by 10 ̊ in just 40 years—the result of miles and miles of asphalt and concrete which act like a heat sponge.

Native trees have been reduced by introduction of non-natives (exotics) like the Tamarisk tree in areas where the water table once ran close to the ground. For thousands of years these habitats supported the greatest species diversity in the state.  Beavers and otters abound in rivers and streams, and fauna like deer and Coati mundi inhabited native forests. Memories of Arizona’s extensive green belts have faded with each new generation. Who will remember what has been lost?

Gazing at the twinkling night sky above me, I imagine the ancient Hohokam people—who laid down the original grid of canals still in use today— how they, too, must have lain outside in the cool of moonlight thousands of years before me. Did they work and cavort at night like the desert’s creatures, and sleep in the cool of their adobe huts, or under a shady ramada of reeds, during the blistering heat of daytime? What happened to their great city and 200,000 inhabitants? Why did they leave this valley and its two rivers, the Salt and the Gila, leaving only their canals behind?  Am I part of a Great Reenactment?

I watch the dark outline of a big, brown bat drinking nectar from a tall saguaro’s bloom in my neighbor’s yard. Afar I hear coyotes yipping from a hilltop in a suburban sea. In the wee hours of the warm, dry night, I drift into a deep sleep under a canopy of stars.