Good morning, CALS colleagues,
I hope this finds you well.
Next week will be Fourth of July, and we’ll not have a Monday newsletter. I can tell from the rate of email this past week, and expecting the same for this week and next, that lots of you are on vacation or deeply engaged in your summer work - both are great.
Each year at this time, I think of many things about the Fourth of July holiday - from parades and history to vacations and more. But I also think about the two summers while working on my master’s research in far northern Maine. There, at that time, I was completely engaged in fighting mosquitoes and black flies in the black spruce forests around Square Lake, while studying the economically important spruce budworm. At that latitude, the insect is inconveniently at critical life stages for study this time of year, so no Independence Day vacation for me those years!
This time of year in Iowa, we can enjoy the blooming of roadside orange daylilies that help light up our ditches and gardens. Enjoy them! (Even though they are an invasive plant that crowds out native vegetation.)
And, on a very much more somber note, I was recently in a park in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and saw the monument below – as a reminder of why what we do is so important.
Thanks for all you do, enjoy the summer, and be careful out there. My best - Dan
Scenes from CALS
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, there is the Irish Famine Monument (by Maurice Harron, 1997) that calls us to action, as we do in CALS, but sadly there is so much work yet to do. "The scale of the current global hunger and malnutrition crisis is enormous. WFP estimates – from 79 of the countries where it works (and where data is available) – that more than 345 million people face high levels of food insecurity in 2023. That is more than double the number in 2020," according to the World Food Programme website. Learn more about the Irish potato famine.
