Category Archives: Arizona

Slow Food at the Handlebar Pub and Bar.

2018 Trip to Southwest USA, Arizona, Arizona Photos, Fat Opinions, Food

 

Ambience

Maybe the ambience is a little less than stellar, but the Handlebar Pub and Grille is still a great hamburger joint. Sometimes the music is excellent too.

 

We enjoyed a very convivial  dinner here with friends Don and Marlene Hoeppner. The restaurant is popular so we had to wait about half an hour to get inside. In the meantime we sampled their beer and enjoyed the sunset in the background. Remember I am an inspector of sunsets. The Handlebar is  our favorite restaurant in the Phoenix/Mesa area. My friend Dave Driedger says they make the best burgers in the world. No doubt that is an exaggeration, but I think they are pretty good. Interestingly, for a burger joint, the Handlebar does not offer fries Sometines the music is pretty good too. . Slowfood  with a convivial evening with friends makes for some very good times.

 

Life and Death on South Mountain

2018 Trip to Southwest USA, Arizona, Arizona Photos, Family, Fat Opinions, , ,

I went for a hike with my sister Barb and her husband Harv. It was wonderful. We all hike at sort of the same speed. Hiking in the mountains is one of the best things about the Sonoran Desert. Yet sometimes it makes you think. This was one of those days.

We drove up the South Mountain to get to the top of it. The valley looked magnificent. Except for one problem: It was not a minor problem. It was smog. We started with a couple of wonderful overlooks, but the sight of smog in Phoenix disturbed me. Of course this was not the first time I have seen it, but it sure is disturbing from on top of this mountain in the city. What are we doing to this  wonderful valley? When you think about it you realize it is disgusting.

Not a pretty picture

Some people seem reluctant to admit that there is smog in Arizona. To me it was obvious. Almost every time we drive from San Tan Valley to Mesa or Phoenix we can see haze in the distance. This is not fog. Phoenix does not often have fog. But it often has smog.

According to WebMD, “The greater Phoenix area  is the 5th worst for smog in the United States!

It is true that fewer people in the United States are breathing smoggy air, thanks to clean air laws. At least for now. No doubt Donald Trump will soon get around to dismantling these laws just as he has so many other regulations that he claims are bad for business. They are bad for bad business; they are not bad for good business.

Smog or ground-level ozone, still poses a health threat. About one-third of Americans live in areas with unhealthy air. Air pollution can make it hard to breathe and increases one’s chances of having lung cancer, asthma, heart attack, strokes, and other nasty diseases. Yet what is the American Congress doing about it? Here is what The Guardian said about it, 

More than half of the US population lives amid potentially dangerous air pollution, with national efforts to improve air quality at risk of being reversed, a new report has warned.

A total of 166 million Americans live in areas that have unhealthy levels of either ozone or particle pollution, according to the American Lung Association, raising their risk of lung cancer, asthma attacks, heart disease, reproductive problems and other ailments.

The association’s 17th annual “state of the air” report found that there has been a gradual improvement in air quality in recent years but warned progress has been too slow and could even be reversed by efforts in Congress to water down the Clean Air Act.[1]

 

I don’t know about you, but this does not sound very pleasant to me. I don’t want Donald Trump and his cronies to get rid of these “job-destroying regulations” as he keeps calling them. I think they are vital.

More recent studies do not paint a rosier picture either. As The Huffington Post reported recently,

Air pollution isn’t among the causes of death that medical examiners list on death certificates, but the health conditions linked to air pollution exposure, such as lung cancer and emphysema, are often fatal. Air pollution was responsible for 6.1 million deaths and accounted for nearly 12 percent of the global toll in 2016, the last year for which data was available, according the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.[2]

 

As Philip Landrigan of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai advised, “Air pollution is one of the great killers of our age.”[3]  Many have pointed out before me that the right to breathe is pretty darn fundamental. It is right up there with the right to clean water and fertile soil and bio-diverse ecosystems. We can’t live long without clean air. Yet we treat the world as a garbage dump.

I think George Monbiot puts his finger on the problem–Our lives of endless consumption. As he said, “Our consumption is trashing a natural world infinitely more fascinating and intricate than the stuff we produce.”[4]

         Monbiot also asked a very pertinent question:

This is a moment at which anyone with the capacity for reflection should stop and wonder what we are doing. If the news that in the past 40 years the world has lost over 50% of its vertebrate wildlife (mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish) fails to tell us that there is something wrong with the way we live, it’s hard to imagine what could. Who believes that a social and economic system which has this effect is a healthy one? Who, contemplating this loss, could call it progress? [5]

This is my opinion:  Our modern industrial system (capitalism and its imitators) has clearly demonstrated that it is anti-life. It has been great at producing stuff, but this stuff is killing life on the planet. When will it be our turn to be killed? Who is next?

I do not for one minute deny that each of us is responsible. We have to learn to curtail our consumption. We must do better. We cannot continue to facilitate the destruction of life on the planet?

Yet at the same time, we must remember that corporate capitalists are good–very good–at manufacturing desires in us. They spend a lot of money buying advertising, spin, and propaganda to convince us that we need their products. And by and large that money is well spent. It works.

Standing on South Mountain I thought about these things. I didn’t do anything about them, but I did think about them. Is that enough?

[1] Oliver Millman, The Guardian, April 20, 2016

[2] Erin Schummaker, ‘Air Pollution is Killing Millions Around the globe each year,” The Huffington Post, January 23, 2018

[3] Erin Schummaker, ‘Air Pollution is Killing Millions Around the globe each year,” The Huffington Post, January 23, 2018

[4] George Monbiot, “Its time to shout stop on this war on the living world,” The Guardian, (October 1, 2014)

[5] George Monbiot, “Its time to shout stop on this war on the living world,” The Guardian, (October 1, 2014)

Blue Desert Skies

Arizona, Arizona Photos, Nature

 

As a wanna be photographer I love blue skies. A few happy little white clouds add a lot, but I love the deep cobalt blue.

 

 

First it is true the skies in the desert are blue–really blue. Not puny blue like back home. This is real blue.

There is a reason that the skies are so blue in the desert. In all skies the sky appears to be blue. It is not really blue. The sky appears to be blue because of the way that sunlight interacts with air. Most ordinary visible light passes through the atmosphere with relatively little disturbance. However once in a while, a tiny particle of light–a photon— collides with an air molecule and bounces off it. This process is called scattering. The light we see in the sky is sunlight that has been scattered off air molecules. Yet the question remains why is blue instead of white?

Since the time of Isaac Newton that great British scientist, we have realized that ordinary white light is a mixture of all of the colours of the rainbow from red all the way through violet. Two other scientists Tyndall and Rayleigh showed that how strongly light is scattered by air molecules depends on the wavelength of the light. Light from the blue/violet end of the spectrum is much more likely to bounce off the air molecules than is light from the red/orange end of the spectrum. As a result of that most reddish light travels through the atmosphere more or less unimpeded by air molecules. However, enough of the light from the blue/violet end of the spectrum is scattered into our eyes to make the sky appear blue to us. So the sky appears to be blue, because we see more of that light than from the other end of the spectrum.

Of course ultra violet light, which is even farther beyond the blue/violet end of the spectrum, is scattered even more than the blue or violet light but that light is invisible to us. Some animals like hummingbirds and bees can see it but we can’t.

 

As David Wentworth Lazaroff said,

Sonoran Desert skies are such a deep blue (to human eyes) because desert air is unusually pure, that is, compared to the air above many other places on the planet; its relatively free of the tiny floating particles and droplets called aerosols. Aerosols come in a wide range of sizes, and the larger ones reduce the blueness of he sky. Unlike air molecules, they scatter light of all colors about equally. As a result, they seem to fill the sky with white light, diluting the blue.

Desert air has so few of these large aerosols partly because it’s so dry. In more humid climates water vapor condenses on microscopic airborne particles, forming tiny droplets that we see as hazes and fogs. This is especially true in coastal areas, where tiny salt crystals from evaporating ocean spray are especially good at capturing water vapor and creating water droplets. In fact morning fog is a routine occurrence in parts of the Sonoran Desert along the western coast of Baja, California. [1]

[1] David Wentworth Lazaroff, “Desert Air and Light,” in A Natural History of the Sonoran Desert, edited by Steven J. Phillips & Patricia Wentworth Comus (2000) p.55-56