I call it our agricultural enterprise.  I never want to retire, but I want to be working at something special from the time I leave officially paid work and when I take the road to glory.  That is why I am acquiring forest land.  Eventually, I would like to have an integrated enterprise including forestry, fish farming, hunting leases and maybe some limited livestock production.  I hope the kids will take an interest too.  This is a long way off and it is more of an aspiration than a plan, but we took another step today when we got another 115 acres of forest land.   Added to the 178 acres we already own, I figure we are around 1/3 to the goal.

The new property has 86 acres of loblolly pine planted in 1996.  It is excellent stand, only a little too thick, but I have not seen better at this age (except for a perfect stand of trees along HW 48 just south of US 1).  The owner who planted it was Union Camp.  During the 1990s, they had a lot of good foresters working for them who did an excellent site preparation and planting.   The trees you see in the picture (with the truck for comparison) are tall and healthy. This is an outstanding plantation of trees.   I thank the downturn in the property market and the low price of fiber for this land being available.   There is a minor risk from the southern pine beetle until first thinning, which I think we can do three years. a couple years ahead of average.  Then we will apply biosolids & do a prescribed burn.  I expect the second thinning chip & saw about seven years later. 

Running through the property are power lines.   This is a good thing.  It makes it less desirable for development and provides a long open area good for wildlife.  I can manage that space for herbaceous plants.  There just can be no trees.  Eight acres are taken up by this easement, which includes an access road.  The rest of the property is a seventy year old hardwood forest we leave alone to ensure water quality.   This property has no permanent streams, but the low lying areas feed springs and are watercourses in wet weather. 

We also inspected the precommercial thinning and wildlife plots on the first piece of land.  I am calling this property Chrissy's Pond.  I have not built the pond yet, but I have a couple of good places.  This place has two spring fed streams and big creek.  Below is one of the wildlife plots.  The clover and chickory are under those ragweeds.  It needs to be mowed.

This is more fun than being in Iraq.

Above is the thinned forest on the CP property.  The spacing will protect them from beetles and cause a growth spurt.  These pines were planted in 2003.   Before this treatment they were a bit too thick and there was significant competition.  I think they should be just a little bigger.  At some places on the property, they are.  The hardwood forest at the edge of the picture is beech-oak-tulip poplar.  That is my favorite part of the land.

Al Gore buys them; so does Madonna.  Green celebrities and politicians assuage their guilt with carbon credits.  It works a lot like selling indulgences for sin in the medieval church.  The jet-setting celeb can buy a carbon credit to make up for his/her sin - profligate use of energy - and still be a member in good standing of the church of the environment ... and not have to use less energy.  Ever wonder where those credits come from?  Some will come from me. 

Below - 2006

The guys who did my pre-commercial thinning have been working on this.   They say that I can sell the carbon my trees take out of the air on the Chicago Climate Exchange.  Young pine forests like mine take a lot of carbon out of the air and they figure that I can earn about $15/acre/year.   You have to enter into a 15 year contract to grow trees and not develop the place for fifteen years.   Since this fits with my plans anyway, it seems like a pretty sweet deal.  I even get a little more money for applying biosolids (which I already plan to do next year) since that makes the trees grow faster.  It is a win all around.  I get to grow my trees as I planned and get money.  People like Al Gore & Madonna get to feel virtuous and environmentally friendly when they buy the carbon sequestered by my loblolly pines.

There is an even more interesting permutation.    Scientists at Duke University have been studying loblolly pines in a higher CO2 environment as they expect with more greenhouse gases.  They grow significantly faster and stronger, so my trees are both removing excess CO2 and growing stronger while doing it.

I don’t feel too hypocritical.  I know.  It is a bit of a scam for fat-cat celebs, but it does some useful things.  It makes some eco-friendly activities more valuable.   In my particular case it will not change my behavior, but I can well imagine cases where a couple thousand dollars a year might help encourage someone to keep his land in trees and/or do better forestry.   The income from carbon credits will pay the property taxes, which are a burden on some of my neighbors.  Besides, we forest landowners have been giving the Al Gores of this world a free ride too long.  It is about time they pulled their own weight and we were appreciated.   The way I see it, we all like the green. 

Below 2006.  You can see the taller trees in the background in both pictures.  I have circled it here. I can no longer take a picture from this spot.  You cannot see the forest for the trees.

The minute the coins in the coffer ring, the soul out of green purgatory springs.  So when you see your favorite rock star, actor or celebrity, you can thank me for keeping them green (if not perfectly honest.)

Below - most of S. Virginia is pine covered.   This is I85.  It is like that for many miles.  Lots of carbon credits available.  Of course, older forests do not take as much carbon out of the air and an old growth forest is pretty much carbon neutral.

I love my trees and am proud of their growth.  If you look at the sets of pictures in the text, you can see how well they are doing.  The pictures with the smaller trees were taken in 2006.  Only two years later it looks a lot more like a new forest.   I also bought another forests today.   I will write more in the next posts.  I have always loved trees.  Thanks to energy guzzling celebrities, it pays better.

I am back in the U.S. on my last R&R.   I can easily see that my country that is prosperous, peaceful, clean and full of opportunity – and very green in Virginia.   Yet all I hear on the news is how tough everything is.   Maybe all those whiners should check out some other places. You really have to wonder about the points of reference.

My point of reference is the 1970s, when I started to pay attention to things like jobs, the economy and the environment.   Then like now, I was very concerned about the environment; it was a lot worse back then.  Lest we forget, Lake Eire was declared dead and you couldn’t safely breathe the air in major cities.   Many people seem unaware of the improvements and perhaps most think the opposite, but the environment is indeed better.  So is the economy.  In my economic courses back in college, I learned that unemployment of around 5% was “full employment” and almost impossible to sustain.   I remember the stagflations and unemployment rates of 10%+.  Of course, when I was apt to whine, my father would point to his youth during the 1930s.  Now I hear that unemployment of around 5% compared to the Great Depression and economic growth of only 1% is called a recession.  What great times we live in when such trouble we have is cause for gnashing of teeth.  

It doesn’t get very much better than this in terms of opportunity, despite what politicians are promising.   Maybe that is precisely the problem - it doesn't get much better.  Let me give a individual analogy. Alex has been working out for a year so that he can now toss around hundreds of pounds w/o much effort.  He is worried re “plateauing”.   It is a little sad to reach a goal, but at some point you are about as good as you can get.  Society is not the same as an individual person.  Experienced people understand that general conditions do improve – over time – and it is indeed possible for them to improve their own circumstances with hard work, patience and a little luck.  But some aggregate measures will never get much better.  It is not possible for unemployment to drop much below 5%.  Some “problems” are merely tautologies.  Half of all Americans will always earn less than the median wage, for example.  And the weather is always bad someplace.  If you look for reasons to be depressed you can find - or make - them, but why would you do that?

What I take a bit personally is the rotten information being generally believed about Iraq.   I could sum it up like this, “Let’s call our victory a defeat because it was harder than we thought.”  There are movies and TV programs about Iraq, none of them show our troops in a good light.   An episode of ER was on my flight’s entertainment center.  It featured a crazy, drug addicted and mistreated vet.  It turned out that he had gone nuts because he had seen so many Iraqis abused.  What kind of crap is that?   I saw a variation of that on “Law & Order” a couple of months ago.  We have to call attention to this.  Some people in the media seem to be working up the same type of slander they pulled on the Vietnam vets, only this time they pretend to care about them as victims. 

The true story of our success in Iraq would be more interesting.  We have heroes.  It is not even very hard to find them if you try. 

Our troops are not victims and they certainly are not perpetrators.  They are doing their duty in a difficult environment and doing it well.  For most, their time in Iraq gives them valuable insights and makes them better citizens.   It is a hard thing to do. Doing the hard things reveals character.

I blame the politically correct culture for these problems.   We essentially have to downgrade heroism and bravery so that we don't imply those not exhibiting these traits are not as good. We let people revel in victimhood.  In fact, it is legally enforceable.   Somebody claims victim status and it becomes legally hazardous to give him/her a hard time – even when they have it coming. Who knows how the lawsuit will go with a credible (if deceptive) victim?  It certainly is considered bad manners to tell the truth and it is politically dicey.

When Phil Graham made his whiner comments, the whiners came out in force and whined that they were being called whiners.   Of course, politicians distanced themselves from this and listed the many reasons why whining was appropriate.   

Is this the way it is going to be?  I don’t think so.  Most of the Americans I meet are still self reliant.   Most of us still take care of ourselves; we pay our mortgages on time; 95% of our workers have jobs and they dutifully go to them.  We grumble about how things are (grumbling is not the same as whining), but we understand that OUR efforts will improve our situations.  But many of us have the impression that we are part of a small and dwindling minority that practices these virtues.  We do indeed look like a nation of whiners, not because most Americans are whining, but because the whiners dominate the debate and everybody is afraid to say anything, sort of like the bystanders in the "Emperor's New Clothes" story.

We all have to make choices and we never can get everything we want.  This is probably a good thing, but no matter whether we like it or not, it is just how things are.  It is nobody’s fault.   I understand that I run the risk of becoming a curmudgeon, but I just don’t see the crisis the media tells me about.    We face challenges – as always - which we will overcome and meanwhile life is not bad.  It is just not perfect.   If you find yourself is a perfect world, check your pulse.

Who of us would want to live permanently in a different time or a different place?  We live in a great country and it is a great time in history to be here.   To pretend otherwise is dishonest and to believe otherwise is silly.

Above are Mariza & Chrissy at Mariza's new place in Baltimore.

Below is a "gas station" in Hadithah.  Not much to look at, but there was no fuel to buy not long ago.

It is easy to get discouraged around here if we look at the things that are still lacking.  But when I think about how much has been accomplished, the mood changes.  Places like Hadithah, which were wastelands of rubble less than a year ago, are now enjoying growing prosperity and stability, with full markets and lots of economic activity.  Our "good news story" is part of that, but only ONE part.   The Anbari people are resourceful and resilient.  They are going to make it and we can take great satisfaction that we helped.

We are beginning to notice the effects of more Iraqi government money funding projects in the cities of Western Al Anbar.  Projects are being built without our involvement.  For example, the Al Faraby Primary School in Hadithah was an ITAO project. When USACE went to do site planning they found a GOI project already in full swing.  Similarly I recently visited a youth Center in Rutbah.  CA was planning to renovate it and the ePRT was supplying some soccer field improvements.  I recently learned that our help was no longer needed as GOI was going to fund and work the project with a big budget. 

Below is Hit near the City Hall

The effects are still uneven but unmistakable and they are bringing a subtle change in attitude.  Local leaders are coming to understand that their own government, not coalition forces, is where they should look for resources.  Effecting this change in attitude has been one of our key goals, but I am not sure how much credit we can take for it happening, sort of like the rooster taking credit for the sunrise.  Certainly equally important are the fantastic oil revenues that the Iraqi government is earning as well as the perception among observant people that the U.S. Congress and the American people are less enthusiastic about continuing to push American money into a country that can well afford its own development.

Below is irrigation system near Rawah

I was a little concerned to hear that the elections may be postponed.  We hear from contacts that the people of Western Al Anbar are anxious to have their voices heard.  They learned their lesson from the foolishness of their earlier election boycott and now want more representative politicians in power throughout the area.  I am afraid that frustration will build as elections are delayed and people suspect that incumbent politicians are abetting in the delay to protect their own careers and prolong their tenure in their jobs.

 All tolled, I find many more reasons for hope than for despair.  Iraq still has a very long and steep road to travel, but it is increasingly prepared to make the journey successfully.

Above is a Marine playing golf during free time.  You take what you can.

At least that is how it used to be when Matthew Arnold wrote those words more than a century ago.  I am speaking only of my own observation but I have noticed a change in society.  I can recall when people doing bad things pretended to be good because they were rightfully ashamed of their bad behavior.  Today many celebrities and athletes revel in their horrible behavior with apparent impunity.   Being bad is now cool.  It is something akin to the radical chic.  Good people feel a little shy of admitting that they are not bad and cool.  It is strange.  We have in many ways reversed the earlier formulation.

When I talk to my colleagues in Iraq, both civilians and military, it is clear to me that most people are here for good reasons.  They came to do their duty, to serve their country and to try to make the world a better place.  Of course there are also other reasons, but duty is the dominant, the predominant, motivation.  It is the sine qua non of why we are here.  My new team members feel a little reticent about admitting that.  I did too.  Why? 

The Marines really believe all that stuff they say about patriotism, duty & commitment and being around them has been both refreshing and liberating.   I think we underplay the call to duty in our lives.  Most people are looking for meaning.  True happiness comes from doing what you should do.  It need not be heroic or dangerous and it will be different for every person, but doing what YOU think you should do is what makes you happy.  That means happiness cannot be found, bought or given; it has to be earned - too bad for rich heiresses and morality-challenged sports & movie stars.  

I am going to change my introductory talk to new team members to emphasize this a little more and give them more opportunity to feel good about what they are doing.  Maybe I can use some variation of that speech John F. Kennedy gave re going to the moon, we do these things "not only because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win…"

Or is that just too un-cool for today's ears? 

I stay out of specific politics on this blog, but now that both candidates have come down to nuanced but similar policies of staying in Iraq as long (or as short) as the need exists, I feel a little freer to ask what the hell is wrong with the American media?

During the bad days in Iraq, not long ago, they were writing the American obituary.  They had no trouble finding and quoting experts telling why we couldn't win in this sort of environment.   Now they cannot seem even to notice success.  Isn't that an extraordinary story?  In the heart of the Middle East, on a battlefield chosen by Al Qaeda as their key front for their war against civilization, in a place where they proclaimed the beginning of their new caliphate we have driven them to virtual extinction.   As they cower in their spider holes, fearing the arrival of our Marines or our Iraqi allies, their frustration is palpable.  This was supposed to be their victory, not ours.   They thought they had the weight of events on their side; they were mistaken.   Why is this not story worthy of investigation and exposition by our esteemed journalists? 

My experience with journalists informs me that many, perhaps most, work from their existing models and do not actively seek out information that disconfirms them.  They have a narrative that is generally accepted by other people in the media and that tends to constrain their perceptions.   This is not something limited to journalists, but they are particularly susceptible precisely because they think they are not.  

The narrative that their conventional wisdom accepted was that Iraq was mostly lost and that we were in a holding pattern heading for a long term failure and withdrawal. They fixed the various data points around their narrative and the stories more or less made sense back in 2006.  This narrative is now unraveling but the MSM has yet to figure out a new one to replace it.   It is not a conspiracy, but it is a syndrome, a kind of a group-think.   It will take a lot of changed facts and a couple of courageous leading journalists to break out.  We have the changed facts on the ground; what we need now is the courage.  

BTW - I was reading one couragous journalist today.   People who have been here recently know a lot more.  Stay away from those pundits and bloggers who have been to Iraq years ago ... or never. 

I spend some considerable time complaining about the weather here in Iraq and who can blame me if you look at the pictures of the nearly opaque red air?  But Al Asad has pleasant weather much of the year.  November is very nice around here.  Winters are a bit chilly, but never cold and usually clear.   It is churlish to complain all the time.

You just have to adapt.  For example, in the summer it is much too hot for any strenuous activity during the middle of the day.   The local Iraqis are active early in the morning and in the evening.  They hunker down in the shade in the middle of the day.  This bimodal activity optimal is probably the origin of the siesta.  If you follow a similar pattern, (IF you can) you too are okay. 

I have been getting my running in before 0700.  This time of the year, it gets light around 0430 and it is very nice at 0600.   I get up in the morning and look out the door. If I can see a reasonable distance (i.e. dust is not so bad) I go out and run.   There is an interesting aspect of the dust that I only figured out (maybe) recently.   On some days the dust is not so bad at 0600, but it gets thick and unpleasant by around 0700.   Some of this has to do with the nature of wind.  The wind tends to pick up around dawn.   I suppose it is because the earth heats differentially as the sunlight hits.  The wind picks up dust and a short time later it is a mess.  

But not all the dust is natural.  Much is kicked up by our own activities.  Around 0600 the trucks & heavy vehicles start to roll in earnest; each creates a tail of dust and cumulatively there is a lot of dust.  All this dust has to go someplace and it doesn't settle very fast.   Most of the roads are paved with white gravel and I am pretty sure our activities are the source of much of the whitish "moon dust."  The red dust comes from farther away.   Our weather maps show massive clouds, sometimes covering almost all of Iraq.  The most recent attack of the red dust originated in the western deserts of Iraq and in Syria.  This kind of weather pattern is usually associated with a northeastern wind.  

Our local activities can create local unpleasantness, but the real dust storms are those caused by Mother Nature.  Of course it is not all Mother Nature either.  People have abused this land for >4000 years.   Much of this dirt would have been held down by the roots of plants had humans and goats not uprooted them.  I blame Dennis, our AG Advisor, for the current problem.   He has been here nine months and still not managed to cover the hills with grass and reverse the mistakes of the last four millennia.

BUT today is nice.   The air is clear and the morning was cool and pleasant.  We are supposed to have at least three days of this before the next clouds of dust obscure the horizon.   I have to get my running in while the running is good.

I made the three and a half minute trek to the highest mountain in Al Asad, an elevation of at least 30 feet,  and took the pictures.  This is as good as it gets around here. 

The Regional Engineer of Rutbah is a modern man with little patience for religious extremists or excessive tribalism.   He hates what Saddam Hussein did to his country.  He told me that in some towns essentially no new schools were built between the end of the 1970s and the liberation, despite big population growth.  As an engineer, he decries the general lack of maintenance.  Instead of building infrastructure, Saddam bought expensive weapons systems from the Soviets, French & Chinese (the U.S. supplied only 0.47% of Saddam's stuff). The fruits of big buying spree litter the deserts around here, MiGs that never fired a shot in anger, tanks that never went anywhere.  They decided it was better to abandon them than to fight a real enemy.

It was worst during the sanctions.  When Saddam had less money, he spent what he had on palaces, but enough of the past.

Rutbah's future depends on water.  As I mentioned earlier, water is in short supply in the region.  There have been some grandiose plans occasionally touted to pipe water over the desert from the Euphrates.   It is a long way to pump water and it is all up hill.  Beyond that, the Euphrates has been running lower because of dams in Syria and Turkey.   In The long pipeline solution is proposed by people who do not understand geography, hydrology, gravity or politics.   Besides those things, it is okay.

Below - They have more success with sunflowers than I did.

Fortunately, according to the engineer, the solution to Rutbah's water woes lies only eighteen kilometers away in Al Dhabaa wadi.  He says that twelve wells already exist and that hydrologists have mapped out the groundwater.  There is more than enough for a city twice the size of Rutbah.  Eighteen kilometers is only around 11 miles.  Why, I asked, were people complaining about water when water was so easy to get?

Some of it goes back again to the lost decades of the Saddam tyranny.  There are no reliable pipes to bring from the wells across those eighteen kilometers to thirsty Rutbah and much of Rutbah just doesn't have access to water pipes period.   They were never built.  Our friends says that Rutbah had good zoning laws, but they were enforced sporadically so that there are some pretty big buildings sitting on some pretty dry land.  Well, it is not completely dry.  There are no sewage lines either, but what is soaking into the ground is not something anybody wants to drink.  Retrofitting whole neighborhoods is extremely costly and time consuming.   It may be years and it may be forever before these things are done.  Given the ramshackle quality of these buildings, it is probably a better idea to start again from the ground up, but people already occupying these places are less enthusiastic about this sort of solution. 

The other reason for the water shortage involved the great bane of Western Iraq - fuel.  In this, perhaps the world's greatest repository of liquid hydrocarbons, fuel for pumps and/or electricity to run them is inconsistent.   When the pump goes on and off, it begins to lose siphoning pressure.  After a while it is sucking up air or mud.  Steady and predicable is what is needed.   I don't know that much about pumps.  It doesn't seem to me that should be such a problem, but the engineer tells me that indeed it is and he seems to know about these things.

In any case, on the one hand, Rutbah's water problem is solvable and solvable soon in the general case of water for the city.  On the other hand, it may be solvable never in the specific situation of some construction that went on w/o the benefit of zoning.   Life is tough all over, tougher for some.  It is mostly a matter of organization and choices.  Most of the choices are simple; some are not easy.  

Above is our ride home.  Ospreys are good for longer trips. It is still a thrill to ride, but the joy wears off when you hit some turbulence, which always seems to happen on the way to and from Rutbah.

The soccer field is in back of the kids.  In Iraq, you don’t even get to watch the grass grow on the soccer fields.  All they do is smooth out that dirt and put in a kind of a sub base.  We are going to fix this soccer field up.  The local kids are excited about it.  When we got out of our cars, they all came running over.

The kids in Rutbah are a little less spoiled than some others.   They were friendly w/o expecting too much candy.  It is funny because kids are similar all over the place.  We asked them if they got to use the field very often.  They said it depended on whether bigger kids came along to run them off.  I remember exactly the same experience.  We used to play football in Humboldt Park.  We got to use the flat, good places to play until some bigger kids came and ran us off.  On the other hand, we would run off any groups who were smaller than ours.

Now that I think about it, the big kids never actually had to run us off and we never actually had to run off any littler kids.  You would see the group coming and make a general estimate of their total mass.   If their total mass was greater than ours, we would pick up our ball and run away.   Kind of an interesting system.  Prepares you well for adult life.

In any case, we have done soccer fields before and will do this one in Rutbah.  I told my guys that I want to see it done before I leave and that I want a few drought tolerant trees nearby, so that people can sit in the shade and not only have to watch soccer.  The kids will  be happy.