Leaves changing and falling from the trees is really what defines fall and signals the coming of winter.  (Is it leaves or leafs?)  But, I have a pet peeve about fall and leaves.

When I was a kid, our whole neighborhood would pretty much get together and rake our yards on the same weekend.  We had huge leaf piles that we’d all jump in. Then we’d burn the leaves in the street gutter and it would be super smokey.  Kind of weird now, but that was the way it was back then.

People used to take care of the gutters in front of their houses.  Not anymore.  At least in Topeka.  I live in a pretty good neighborhood in Topeka and most of the street gutters and nearly all the sewer grates are clogged with leaves.

But when many people rake their leaves, most put them into plastic trash bags and have the trashmen pick them up.  That is wrong is more than one way.

First of all, I read something about leaves in a dump and it is a high percentage, something like 16% of all volume.  I think it said that 125 million tons of leaves are put into landfills in the US.  We’re putting stuff into a landfill that would decompose on its own.  What is up with that?

We have a couple compost places in our backyard.  I can add as many leaves as I want and they are mostly gone by the next spring.  It makes super garden additive.  If you don’t want to rake the leaves and put them in a compost bin, then just mow them and let them help your yard.  Or rake  them and put them around your bushes.

Up in Mount Prospect, a Chicago suburb, where Trudi grew up, all you have to do is rake  your leaves to the curb and every Monday they come by with a special vacuum truck and the suck them up, shred them and then they take them to the vegetation dump.  Every city should do this.  Clogging up our storm sewers with leaves is just dumb.

Anyway other than bagging them up and giving the trash guys more work is okay.  We have enough problems in our society than filling our trash dumps with vegetation.   Someone, maybe our city officials, need to educate us all about what is the right thing to do with leaves.  We’re doing it all wrong now.

One of my neighbors driveway.

Another. This is nearly weekly all fall.

Nothing like the storm sewers being clogged. If you have a storm sewer in front of your house you need to keep it clear.

This guy has been coming nightly to the compost pile. I guess he likes the fruit peels or something.  I’ve been teaching Tucker to not bark in the yard, but he can’t help himself with an opossum.

I woke up early this morning and was listening to the BBC.  They had a pretty good segment on airplane flights and greenhouse gases.  Man, there is a lot of information to digest on this subject.

They said something like there are 100,000 flights per day currently.  And that 3.5 billion passengers per year currently fly.  That number is nearly 1/2 the population of the planet now.

Obviously jet planes use fuel, which causes warming.  The fuel a flight uses, per person, is quite a bit more than an automobile, considering how much distance a flight covers.

Burning the fuel also cause clouds.  They are addressing that there are so many flights and the flights obviously make contrails, which affects the greenhouse gas problem.  The contrails create clouds and these clouds are high clouds that are complicated.

The high clouds contain warmth for the planet, that has a next warming effect. But these clouds also reflect the sunlight, which has a net cooling effect on the planet.  So the problem is to figure out which is stronger.

They tried to compare the amount of sun reflected from volcanoes, even 9/11, which grounded nearly all aircraft for 72 hours.  There was a study during 9/11, when the flights were grounded, that showed that with no planes in the sky, the nights were cooler and the days were warmer. This gap was over 1 degree, which seems extreme for only 3 days of no airplane flights.

Anyway, it is complicated and, I’m sure, won’t really be addressed until it is too late to correct. I’m pretty sure that the US is going to be contributing way more to the heating of our planet the next four years.  At least if the president elect keeps his campaign promises.   Funny that the rest of the world is intent on addressing this and, currently, we’re dragging our feet.  Go figure.

Contrails are pretty, but maybe not so good for the planet.

On a happier note, a hunter’s trail camera filmed a mountain lion in Shawnee County, where I live. This is the first photoed mountain lion near Topeka. They are very stealthy and shy.