Rain

Yesterday it rained... and rained.  For the entire evening we netted 2.3" of precipitation, most of it during two large squalls.  Amazingly, the yard survived with little negative impact.  Stella was caught out in the storm, but we finally got her home.  No idea where Fluffy the feral cat goes in a storm like that, but she turned up dry and happy for breakfast this morning. 

Meanwhile, my conservation reading took a turn to Aldo Leopold.  This being the centennial of the Gila Wilderness, there are many pieces being written about him and his thoughts.  Here's part of the preface to the 1948 edition of The Sand County Almanac:   

Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the esthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture.

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten.

...

Such a view of land and people is, of course, subject to the blurs and distortions of personal experience and personal bias. But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. The whole world is so greedy for more bathtubs that it has lost the stability necessary to build them, or even to tum off the tap. Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.

Perhaps such a shift of values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free.