STANISLAUS CONNECTIONS

Working For Peace, Justice, and A Sustainable Environment

October 2003

©Joe Medieros

Living Lightly

Water in a xeric land
By RICHARD ANDERSON

Modesto Area Partners in Science (MAPS) will present a free lecture as part of its series on Friday, October 17, from 7:30-8:30 p.m., in Forum 110, Modesto Junior College East Campus. Dr. Bob Metcalf will connect the use of solar cookers and clean water conservation in near-desert lands like Tanzania. (Xeric means "dry." It's the root of the new landscaping technique called xeriscaping.)

Visiting Tanzania in July, 2002 gave us Modestans a new perspective on "Water, Wealth, Contentment, Health." Our Tanzanian driver suddenly stopped the Land Rover. From over a half mile, a young Masai herder began running through the mid-day desert heat to beg water from us before we got the tire changed.

At the Ruaha River we saw the last fingers of free water disappearing into the sere sienna sands. In Tarangire we surprised an elephant in a dry wash kicking sand aside in search for water. In the rare riparian regions there is abundant water, but hippopotami and a zoo-full of other animals live in and defecate in it making potable water scarce.

Tanzania is among sub-Saharan countries targeted by Solar Cookers International to deploy solar cookers. These cookers cost only pennies for aluminum foil to cover a cardboard or wooden frame, yet they can pasteurize contaminated water or cook a family meal in only a few hours. Needing no wood fuel, cookers combat deforestation, relieve overworked women, and lower health problems coming from smoke inhalation; they also save scarce cash for city dwellers.

In "Cooking with the Sun Around the World," Bob Metcalf will present a richly illustrated account of the programs he has helped implement over the last 25 years in 18 developing countries including Tanzania. A microbiologist and professor of Biological Sciences at California State University Sacramento, he and some of his students have pioneered using solar cookers to pasteurize contaminated water.

Metcalf’s slide talk "will present the case for using the world's simplest solar cooker wherever the sun shines - from Modesto to Nyakach, Kenya."

ACTION: Contact Solar Cookers International; email: webmaster@solarcooking.org; photos at www.solarcooking.org/gallery-panel.htm

This column marks the first of a series devoted to Central Valley nature and culture. The author encourages exploration of the richly textured everyday landscapes surrounding us in Stanislaus and adjacent counties. The author, a regional poet, teaches English at Modesto Junior College.

Rivers of birds, forests of tules: Central Valley nature & culture in season
By LILLIAN VALLEE

1. A walk in the vanishing wonderland of oaks

A friend, Glen Schneider of Berkeley, has written an article in which he advocates a fresh look at California seasons: instead of the traditional four (spring, summer, autumn, winter), he writes, most of California has three—the rainy season (October through February), wildflower season (February through May), and the dry season (June through October, or the first rain). Here in the Central Valley these seasons may end a bit sooner and begin a bit later, but he is right to encourage us to think about California seasons outside of the four-season model. We would probably garden very differently if we thought about our summers as native plant winters, periods of dormancy and a time of quiet and rest. But now we are about to enter the rainy season. The cooling mornings and appearance of wispy cirrus, plump cumulus and the darker, rain bearing nimbostratus and cumulonimbus clouds (thunderheads) announce the season of dramatic Valley skies, often sun-pierced and transporting, the darlings of photographers.

This is also the time when many native plants are stirred to action by the moisture suddenly available to them: the engines of native bunchgrasses are revving up and the California fuchsias, champions of the dry, explode their firecracker reds in the garden. The riverine corridors along Dry Creek and the Tuolumne also show off their fruit: the glossy, red-orange hips of wild rose, frosty gray-blue elderberries, clusters of deep purple wild grapes, and the dull green balls of buckeye, reminiscent, as Glen has written, of a jester’s cap. Valley oaks, getting ready to shed their polite and tired leaves, show a bit of new green growth at the tips, to cheer us along. Valley Oak leaves are both efficient and polite because this species of oak is a light-loving tree, and its deeply lobed leaves allow it to absorb sunlight even while it sifts the light through the canopy so that none of the leaves beneath are completely without it.

And it is the Valley Oak (Quercus lobata) which deserves a closer look this time of year. If you walk among the Valley and Interior Live oaks along Modesto’s Dry Creek in September or October, you will probably notice the busy (and noisy) acorn woodpeckers in their “drum major” costumes. Yet even they are upstaged by another phenomenon that makes the oaks hosts to the wildest tea party since Alice in Wonderland: galls!

Offspring of mysterious oak and cynipid wasp liaisons, galls come in various sizes and colors. The cycle begins with the female wasps who lay their eggs on the meristem (place where new oak cells form). This becomes the brood chamber. The larvae release chemicals from their saliva while they feed there and hormones in the saliva redirect plant growth. The oaks respond with a wild creativity matched only by the botanists who have named the galls: there are apple, potato or pear galls (first generation, all female wasps); chocolate chip or Hershey Kiss galls, wooly bear, yellow woolly, coral brain, urchin, turban, porcupine, hedgehog, gumnut, dunce cap, clasping twig and cupcake galls (these are tiny, many smaller than an infant’s fingernail, and are second generation, male and female wasps). Others have reported miniscule galls in the shape of bread loaves or mushrooms. Blue Oaks (Quercus douglasii) are reputed to have the most lavish diversity, but I counted eleven different galls on one Valley Oak in my Modesto backyard. Galls can be hot pink, yellow, orange, white, red, or salmon colored!

My favorites are jumping ball galls (home to Neuroterus saltitarious or the “vein-wing jumper”), often hardly bigger than poppy seeds and round with a dot in the center. No one notices them until they drop off the leaves and litter the trails, making them jiggle. The galls “jump” each time the larva moves inside, much like a Mexican jumping bean in which a caterpillar moves around in a spurge seed. In his book The Life of an Oak, Glenn Keator writes that the “erratic hopping movements may serve to bury the galls deep in the leaf litter, away from parasitic insects roaming the surface of the litter, on the lookout for these tempting morsels.”

“Little ones, big ones, hairy ones, pointy ones, bumpy ones, smooth ones, spotted ones…. Our trees are ill!” wrote Tonya Holmes, Modesto Junior College student and mother of Marcus, a budding entomologist and cecidologist (student of galls), who helped me cut a few galls open to examine the cynipid wasp brood chambers inside. Some of the chambers are false (empty) to protect the wasp babies from Acorn Woodpeckers and insects parasitizing the galls. Scientists are unsure what effect the production of galls has on the trees themselves; after all, it does take oak energy to produce them. I noticed this year that there are very few acorns on older Valley Oaks which have thousands of galls on them, but quite a few acorns on the Interior Live Oaks which have few galls. I like to think that the Valley Oaks are taking time out of acorn production for a lyrical sabbatical because the sizes and shapes of oak galls are nothing if not whimsical, playful, a child’s kitchen on a leaf. Most scientists believe the oaks are cynipid wasp protectors and benefactors because 82% of all cynipid wasp species use oaks for a home.

People have used galls, too: for tinder, ink, dye, and even to disinfect open wounds. Another Berkeley resident, Glen Olson, shows children how to carve apple and potato galls into faces or how to slice off a section and make a miniature mask. If you have time within the next few weeks, take a child for a gall walk and let the oaks be your gracious teachers.

Sources for this column: Glen Schneider, “The Seasons of California”; Glenn Keator, The Life of an Oak: An Intimate Portrait; and Elna Bakker, An Island Called California

Modestan visits the Amazon Rainforest
By LEE RYAN MILLER
Third in a series

January to May 2003 I lived on a ship that circumnavigated the globe teaching political science on Semester at Sea, a program run by the University of Pittsburgh. Some 650 students participated. We visited nine countries and ten ports.

In this series I present excerpts from my journal and commentary on the societies we visited. This installment takes us to the Amazon rainforest.

Many Brazilians resent what they see as the hypocrisy of people in rich countries like the United States who tell them not to develop the Amazon rainforest. They rightly point out that long ago we cut down most of our own forests, massacred our own indigenous peoples, and became rich by exploiting our own natural resources. Why, they ask, should they be forbidden from following the same path to prosperity?

Environmentalists from the U.S. and other rich countries reply that the Amazon rainforest is a vital resource for the whole world, not just Brazil. This vast region covering over a million square miles is the home of millions of plant, insect, and animal species, most of which have not yet been catalogued by scientists. Pharmaceutical companies believe these species represent a treasure-trove of chemicals that can be used to fight human diseases. As the forest is burned down, carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. At the current rate of destruction (an area the size of Kansas is destroyed each year), the entire Amazon rainforest will be gone within our lifetimes.

This, of course, is no answer to the Brazilians’ claim that we are hypocrites. Most Brazilians live in poverty (26.5% of the population, for example, subsist on less than $2 per day). For many, moving to the Amazon represents a chance to escape the poverty and violence of Brazilian cities.

In the 19th century, with help and encouragement from the U.S. government, millions of Americans moved to the frontier, carving new farms and towns out of the wilderness. Brazilian government officials and ordinary people think that we are selfish to deny them  the same opportunity in their country

Is it possible to raise the standard of living of ordinary Brazilians without destroying the Amazon rainforest? Given enough money, Brazil could develop in ways that are not so ecologically destructive. But this will require an enormous transfer of resources from rich countries to Brazil, something that the rich world has been unwilling to do.

I visited the Amazon during February 2003 and saw a wonderfully beautiful land teeming with fantastic plants and animals. I also visited Manaus, a thriving city in the middle of the rainforest that lacked the extreme poverty characteristic of other large Brazilian cities.

Journal entry, February 6, 2003

After flying from Salvador to Manaus, a city of 1.8 million people in the center of the Amazon rainforest, twenty-three students and I boarded a small, crowded riverboat.

We slept on hammocks on the upper deck, protected from rain and sun by a wooden roof and plastic tarps while the crew and our guides slept on the lower deck, which contained the kitchen and two bathrooms.

There was no privacy on the boat and the hammocks were closely spaced. The best way to get clean was to swim in the river or lather up in a strong rain shower. To change clothes, you wrapped a towel around your waist, dropped your pants, and then hoisted up the new ones underneath.

We sailed to the “meeting of the waters” –  the point where the Amazon and the Rio Negro converge. Both are wide rivers, but differ in character. The Amazon is brown with silt carried from its long eastward journey across the continent of South America. The Rio Negro it is slightly acidic, and the leaves that fall into it turn black as they decompose.

The “meeting of the waters” was quite beautiful as the waters swirled together, creating ever-changing patterns in black and brown. Freshwater dolphins –  some pink, some gray – swam nearby. We headed up the Rio Negro.

We stopped off at an isolated settlement populated by a single extended family who had no shoes, electricity, or running water. They lived off the land – fishing, growing some crops, and harvesting the bounty provided by the trees of the forest, such as mangoes, cocoa, coffee, gourds, and rubber. They ate or used most of what they grew or collected and sold the rest in Manaus. The tour company also paid them a small sum to maintain the dock and to allow tourists to visit. With their earnings they purchased items they could not make themselves, such as knives.

We also saw the giant water lilies indigenous to the Amazon, whose pads were often more than a foot in diameter. After dark, we divided up into two groups and set off in motorized canoes. Our canoe hugged the shore as our guide shined a flashlight into the bushes. Shortly, our guide spotted a pair of yellow eyes shining back at him, then he jumped out of the canoe and dove into the bushes. He returned holding a two-foot-long alligator.

He showed us many interesting features of the alligator and “hypnotized” the reptile still by laying it on its back and rubbing its belly gently. Alligators (and snakes) have lots of nerves in their bellies that enable them to feel the footsteps of approaching animals. Stroking their bellies stimulate these nerves and make reptiles go limp.

He showed us how to hold the alligator safely (one hand clamped firmly on the neck, the other at the base of the tail) and each of us took a turn. Then our guide climbed into the river and set the alligator free. We returned to the riverboat, found a sheltered cove and anchored for the night.

While my hammock was fairly comfortable, I did not sleep very much. The students talked late into the night. Later I was awakened by a chorus of hoots, whistles, and howls coming from the forest’s nocturnal creatures.

Next month: explore more of the Amazon rainforest, and observe life in the city of Manaus.

Read Last month's installment, Modestan observes poverty and inequality in Brazil
Learn about Semester at Sea by visiting www.semesteratsea.com
Read stories by Lee Ryan Miller at  www.LeeRyanMiller.com

Even the Queen of England has one of these
By TINA ARNOPOLE DRISKILL

What did Mahatma Gandhi have in common with the Queen of England, Tina Turner and the President of India? Each has employed personal Homeopathic physicians.

“You can be a skeptic, and it still works, but if you believe in it, results are miraculous,” affirms Dr. Rao Mudunuri who, with his wife, Dr. Vanaja Mudunuri, have opened The Clinic at 510 Scenic Drive in Modesto.

Homeopathy alone, which started in Germany in the mid-1700s, can involve thousands of possible remedies. A particular remedy is matched to an individuals particular symptoms. Although the remedies cannot be tested through modern science, the results are measurable.

Diseases are an imbalance in the vital force, either too much or too little vital force energy, explains Rao. These alternatives help to balance this energy.

Their clinic offers urgent and primary care, Scientific Acupuncture, classical homeopathy, Ayurveda (Indian herb medicine), mind-body medicine using biofeedback, nutrition and diet advice based upon Ayurvedic Three Dosha theory, massage by a registered nurse, Reiki with a Reiki Master, Reflexology, and individualized stress and relaxation therapies.

They also have scheduled (see below) free lectures covering options in conventional medicine, Acupuncture, Homeopathy, Herbal medicine, Ayurveda meditation and mind-body medicine in relation to the treatment of anxiety, depression, chronic pain, low back pain, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, fibromyalgia, and chronic fatigue syndrome.

The Drs. Mudunuri are experienced allopathic (conventional medicine) doctors from Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India, one of Modesto’s five sister cities. It was not the Sister City program, but Kaiser Permanente that brought the couple and their family to this area, when Vanaja, who served as the former Director of Urgent Care with Kaiser in Kansas City, was transferred to a Manteca clinic. She recently went into private practice with Rao after completing 13 years with Kaiser.

Both feel they can serve people’s health needs better in a private practice where they plan to see between 8 to 10 patients each per day instead of close to three times that in a large clinic. When you come [to The Clinic], you are like my family, says Rao. They believe everything affects health, and personal connection is a key treatment element, so they want to know all about each client and his or her family.

The couple met in medical school in India and graduated from Guntur Medical College in 1976, continuing to become family practice physicians with more than twenty years each in the field. Their families decided they would become doctors when they were still infants. Their first practice in Vijayawada was in a clinic, but they delight in telling people they did as many or more treatments in their home.

“If you came to our house at dinner time, you stayed for dinner,” says Vanaja, “while I might be administering an intravenous medication to your child in the living room.”

The couple immigrated to the United States to take advantage of modern medical technology unavailable to them in India. After learning about and using modern allopathic medical devices and treatments, both became aware that Homeopathy and other complementary medical alternatives sometimes worked as well or better with no side effects.

Both are US citizens, trained in Acupuncture in Hong Kong, Fellows of the American Academy of Family Physicians and members of the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin.

Rao is one of the only physicians in the United States trained in most complementary medical disciplines including the ancient Indian Ayurvedic medical system, hypnosis, and meditation and mind-body (bio-feedback) medicine. He has trained more than 100 MDs in India, is a Fellow and honorary consultant to the International Acupuncture Research Institute in Hong Kong, a former Director of the Indo-Chinese Acupuncture Association of India, a past Medical Director of Prompt Medical Care of Kansas City, the Director of Computers for Physicians, and has been an honorary guest lecturer to the University of Kansas for Complementary Medicine, and served as a research associate in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Kansas

Fluent in English, Telugu, and Hindhi, Rao is also a computer programmer and software developer.

ACTION: Free lectures at The Clinic, 520 Scenic Dr., Modesto: Wed., Oct. 1, Allergies. Thurs. Oct. 16, Anxiety. Thurs., Oct. 23, Fibromyalgia.