This will be a short post because I am exhausted.

Early this morning I left La Quinta Inn for Abbeville. The hour an a half drive brought me to work by 7:30am where I met many of my fellow workers and my supervisors. After getting set up I began what turned out to be a day long orientation in the field meeting a number of the farmers here and seeing the destruction wrought my Hurricane Rita on their homes and fields. I observed that the marsh environment here has been extensively modified by intense human activity. The most common land use appears to be growing rice/crawfish (each grown seasonally in the same field in rotation). I was pleased to see so many species of birds wading in these crawfish ponds. The rice/crawfish crop is threatened by saltwater intrusion deposited by the hurricane’s storm surge (the largest ever seen in cajun memory here), the lack of enough rain this winter to flush the saltwater from their pond’s many irrigation canals, the accumulated and sometimes dangerously explosive debris in their fields such as propane tanks tht make machanical harvesting difficult. Sugarcane takes three growing seasons to mature and the saltwater intrusion killed off all the sugarcane growing. Cattle and aligators are also raised here.
That’s all for now since I should be asleep already.

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

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“First Day” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.