Also sprach Zarathustra - Montana

In my mind - not all that long ago - the Dakota's were at the top of the Earth. Maybe I was just cartographically challenged, but it wasn't until I made a work trip to the Agriculture Canada research station at Beaverlodge in northern Alberta's Peace River region and looked at an airline route map after flying from Salt Lake City to Calgary to Edmonton to Grand Prairie and then realized that my "Top of the World" was actually half way to the Gulf of Mexico from there.

Jump forward to a year-and-half ago when I was visiting a research group in Sidney, Montana and saw some of the upper reaches of the Missouri River and the surrounding farmland that was once long grass prairie where ancient Pleistocene megafauna such as giraffe and horse, as well as giant short-faced bear and mammoth once roamed, and Bison bison and some brown bear then and now still do - the places where Native peoples, Lewis and Clark, fur traders, Cavalry soldiers, drovers, and Teddy Roosevelt came and went. The only images that still exist other than the land itself, are paintings like this one that hang in the the MonDak Heritage Center and Art Gallery - showing the landscape near the confluence where the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers meet, and where the buffalo once roamed and wolves watched (1).

Long-gone are the endless seas of mixed grasses with rhyming names:

Pseudoroegneria spicata
Festuca idahoensis
Bouteloua gracilis
and Hesperostipa comata

Bromus marginatus
Bouteloua curtipendula
Nassella viridula
and Elymus lanceolatus

and the grasses whose names rhyme less - though no less poetic - and which are also now only island patches surrounded by an ocean landscape of farmland:

Poa ampla and P. secunda
Achnatherum hymenoides
and Andropogon gerardii

Schizachyrium scoparium
Panicum virgatum
and Pascopyrum smithii

Replaced now by coal mines with piles of spent shale and farms with waving sheaths of wheat - and new pioneers with dreams of Camelina fields. Yellow-flowered oil seed crops growing above oil wells - a short step from being changed through chemical engineering into JP-5 or JP-8 jet fuel or F-76 marine diesel, fueling newer kinds of prairie schooners that sail the seas of air overhead or the waters of the bounding main below - a promise of a renewable future for these lonely prairies - a new kind of home on the range, up in the big sky as well as down in the dark brown earth of this high plains place.
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Home on the Range, Anonymous

There's a land in the West where nature is blessed
With a beauty so vast and austere,
And though you have flown off to cities unknown,
Your memories bring you back here.

Home, home on the range
Where the deer and the antelope play.
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day.

Where the air is so pure, the zephyrs so free,
The breezes so balmy and light,
That I would not exchange my home on the range
For all of the cities so bright.

How often at night when the heavens are bright
By the rivers were sweet grasses grew
Where the bison was found on the great hunting ground
And fed all the nations of Sioux.

The canyons and buttes like old twisted roots
And the sandstone of ancient stream beds
In the sunset they rise to dazzle our eyes
With their lavenders, yellows, and reds.

Oh, give me a land where the bright diamond sand
Flows leisurely down to the stream;
Where the graceful white swan goes gliding along
Like a maid in a heavenly dream.

When it comes my time to leave this world behind
And fly off to regions unknown
Please lay my remains on the great plains,
Out in my sweet prairie home.

Home, home on the plains
Here in the grass we will lie
When our day's work is done by he light of the sun
As it sets in the blue prairie sky.
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Navy Launches Green Hornet
By Greg Grant Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 3:26 pm
DoD Buzz - Online Defense and Acquisition Journal

The Navy intends to deploy an energy efficient “Great Green Fleet” carrier strike group consisting of ships powered either by nuclear energy or biofuels with an attached air wing of fighter jets fueled entirely by biofuels. The “green” strike group was part of an ambitious energy efficient agenda that will include a radical restructuring of the way the Navy and Marine Corps awards industry contracts, laid out today by Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, at the Naval Energy Forum in McLean, Va (2).

The Navy conducted the initial tests yesterday of a biofuel powered engine for a new F/​A-​​18 “Green Hornet,” Mabus said. He vowed the new plane would fly within three years. Hybrid electric power systems using biofuels will power the sensors, weapons and other electronic systems onboard the green strike group’s surface combatants. The strike group will demonstrate local operations by 2012 and will be fully operational by 2016.

Mabus said the Navy and Marine Corps intend to reshape their approach to awarding shipbuilding and weapons contracts to favor companies that provide the most energy efficient products. From now on, he said, lifetime energy consumption costs and the “fully burdened cost of fueling and powering” all ships, planes, weapons and buildings will be a “mandatory evaluation factor” used in awarding contracts.

“We’re going to hold industry contractually accountable for meeting energy targets and system efficiency requirements,” Mabus said. “We’ll also use the overall energy efficiency and the energy footprint of a competing company as an additional factor in acquisition decisions.” All new surface combatants will be built from the ground up with energy efficient systems installed, he said.

The Navy also plans to convert its fleet of 50,000 commercial vehicles at its many bases to electric and hybrid power by 2015. By 2020, half of all the service’s shore-​​based installation energy use will be powered by alternative fuels as well as solar, wind and geothermal sources. While readily acknowledging that biofuel prices are high, Mabus said prices will go down as biofuel production increases and that the military’s shift to greater biofuel use will incentivize more biofuel production.

Improvements to the traditionally fueled F/​A-​​18 engines will increase the fuel efficiency of each aircraft by three percent, Mabus said. Those improvements will not only allow the planes to fly further on the same tank of fuel but could potentially save 127,000 barrels of fuel per plane per year.

While Mabus said the Navy and Marine Corps have an obligation to do something today to reduce their impact on the environment, the Navy is particularly mindful of rising fuel costs as oil prices climb above $70 a barrel. To fill the 450,000 gallon fuel tank on the Navy’s DDG-​​51 destroyer today costs $643,000, said RADM Phillip Cullom, who heads the service’s Task Force Energy. That’s an improvement over last summer’s $1.8 million cost to fill the destroyer’s tanks when oil prices soared above $100 per barrel.

Additional fleet-​​wide energy saving initiatives include tests of a new anti-​​fouling coating to be applied to ship’s hulls and the installation of stern flaps on amphibious ships intended to increase fuel efficiency, Mabus said.
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(1) The MonDak is that area shared by Montana and North Dakota at the top of the center of the United States. There is a ghost town named Mondak in Roosevelt County that flourished about 1903-1919. More details are found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondak,_Montana#cite_note-0

(2) This official Navy photograph is remarkable in that the joint naval exercise shown is of two Japanese ships in procession with U.S. ships. This 60 years after the memorial plaque to the USS California shown in the preceding blog entry (Birds of Ford Island - Pearl Harbor).