TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Hernando Today

Not Even Fall Foliage Can Escape Government Waste

ADVERTISEMENT

By JOHN HERBERT, From Where I Sit

Hernando Today

Published: October 22, 2008

Every sliver of pork counts. Sen. John McCain can start his quest for frivolous federal spending in New England, which has just gone through one of the most vivid shows of autumn foliage colors in recent history.
That's not only my impression; it was shared by many of my 80 relatives assembled under a huge circus tent on a Vermont farm earlier this month.
Their verdict is not good enough for the feds, though. According to Vermont media reports, Washington has now awarded the University of Vermont $45,000 to study what effects global warming may have on the leafy rainbow of fall colors.
That $45,000 is only the tiny tip of a total of $18 billion in annual federal earmarks. And, $18 billion is just a fraction of the overall federal budget. Still, $45,000 is a small but typical example of the billions of dollars in wasteful government spending of taxpayers' hard-earned money.
Furthermore, this particular grant reflects a preconceived notion that global warming has an effect on autumn foliage. The feds, or maybe it's UVM's begging biologists, claim they want to know if an allegedly warming global climate could dampen or delay the annual fall spectacle.
Actually, if you target the first half of October for "leaf-peeping" on northern New England's back roads and mountain chains, you're going to be richly rewarded in any case — regardless of the previous summer's weather.
The recent Columbus Day weekend is a strong case in point. North-south interstate highways were clogged with sightseers, even though weekends are traditionally quiet on the roads. There were literally millions of cars crawling through New Hampshire's White Mountain and Vermont's Green Mountain chains.
To the joy of northern New England innkeepers, most of their hotels and motels were fully-booked with leaf-peepers. They always are, in early October, with group tours from as far away as Texas and California.
Unfortunately, the strain on hotel-bed availability is accentuated by mid-October's previously-scheduled parents' weekends and homecomings at area boarding schools.
Any way you point the finger, mid-October in northern New England is always critical for both big hotel chains and the small businesses that can clean out their antique shops or sell you a glass of freshly-pressed apple cider.
The conventional wisdom is that the blaze of fall leaf colors is best when dry summer days are followed up by dry and cool summer nights. That theory goes out the window when even a rocket scientist, or one of Gecko's ubiquitous cavemen for that matter, can recall that this past summer has seen almost daily record downpours.
Seems to me that the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the agency funding UVM's study of fall colors, would serve the taxpayers at least as well by spending just $20 on a copy of The Old Farmer's Almanac and a subscription to Yankee magazine.
All summer long, tree leaves maintain their rich green coloring via ample amounts of chlorophyll. Cool nights, which haven't changed for millions of years, strangle the leaves and cut off that supply of chlorophyll, setting off a marvelous array of red, yellow and orange colors before creating billions of tons of fallen dead leaves.
An over-simplified science lesson? Maybe. But it didn't cost more than a daily newspaper. That should be enough for soon-to-be penny-pinching feds.

A regular columnist for Hernando Today, John Herbert lives in Spring Hill.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT