This column was published January 25, 2025 in the Manhattan Mercury.
Nature takes its course in Kansas. Winter snow provides needed moisture for a dormant wheat crop. In the summer, the wind blows hot and dry out of the south, the combines roar to life and we swell with pride, deep in the heart of the Breadbasket of the World, carbs and gluten be damned.
We tamed the wild prairie, our forebears busted the sod and our middle-of-the-country work ethic, independent-minded, do the right thing, neighbor-helping-neighbor agrarian culture was immortalized.
Along the way, we came to appreciate and respect the occasional extreme blizzard or ice storm. They only occurred once every generation. After all, it’s good for the crops and a healthy agricultural economy anchored stability and predictability.
As goes the farmer, so goes the county seat.
Somewhere along the four-lane freeway with wide shoulders made possible by a healthy ag sector, the winter blizzards and ice storms came deeper and more often. The spring and summer storms morphed from an occasional outlier from sunshine and good weather, to the norm. High over Kansas, warm air rose and collided with cold air aloft. More often.
We were not alone. The average temperature on the planet rose. The depth of our caring enough about it to warrant action ebbed and flowed, depending on political consensus (or lack thereof), awareness and motivation.
We moved to the top of a Flint Hill this summer. The winds blow hard up here. Santa Ana-esque. My wife recently Googled ‘Heaviest deck furniture known to man.’ We’re surrounded by cedar trees, basically gasoline-infused firecrackers with roots. I look at the Pacific Palisades and want to organize a chain saw party. Tomorrow.
My sense is this subject is culturally generational. I recycle and turn off the tap when I brush my teeth, but the chances of me trading in the Ford Bronco for a Prius are slim and none, and Slim just left town, bound for the sunny Gulf Coast, only to encounter another blizzard. Truth be told, I covet a Cadillac Escalade. Yeah, I said it. Solving this problem may get easier after we selfish trailing-end Boomers finally ease on down the road.
If climate change means more damage caused by more fire, snow, ice, thunderstorms, and tornadoes, we will need more financial and human resources. Full-time, year-round pothole patrol. When does the increased allocation for climate change-related remediation become commonplace, like public safety and fire prevention?
Less ozone, more outlay.
Probably about the time we started busting sod, we mere mortals bought into this notion that we can tame nature. A few generations later, in 1951, downtown Manhattan was inundated by a flood and our answer was to build Tuttle Creek dam. Nature will take a man-made course.
I wonder if future historians, a few generations into the My God This Planet is Hot Epoch, will look back, scratch their heads and contemplate why we didn’t do more. They may question why, collectively, we bounced around so much.
We’re caught, one-off the continuum, seemingly without clarity or direction. Why was one of the most environmentally aware presidents in my lifetime succeeded by the least? Toyota will sell more Priuses to drivers motivated to make a difference. I’ll still covet the Escalade. General Motors would not continue to crank them out if they didn’t have a pretty good sense the trailing-end Boomers were still a viable market.
Maybe those future historians will determine that as people moved around, as the number of farmers dwindled and farms got larger, our work ethic-do the right thing agrarian culture evolved over the generations from reality, to a feel-good, backward-looking narrative, and finally, to a fading, distant memory.
And that while living in the midst of the change and witnessing the evolution all around us, we struggled.
Mike Matson’s column appears every other weekend in The Mercury, and he hosts ‘Within Reason,’ weekdays at 9 a.m. on NewsRadio KMAN. Follow his writings at mikematson.com
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