Word: cotton
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When the elder Abel was growing up, he and his eight siblings picked cotton until the harvest ended each autumn. The elementary schools they went to were segregated. John David has always attended integrated schools and plays on integrated teams with blacks, Anglos and other Hispanics. "I have friends from different races -- blacks, whites, Mexicans," says John David...
...grandparents were poor and powerless, but they were rich in the hope that life in America would be better for their children. "My daddy believed in us helping in the cotton fields, but he didn't want us to be what he was," says the elder Abel. "He wanted something more for us." That wish came true. Abel and Mary Louise provide four sons with the comforts and opportunities of a middle-class upbringing. But they worry about the hurdles their third son must now clear, barriers that seem even higher than when Abel and Xavi were in school...
...best competitive spirit, shouts of "Look at mine! Look at mine!" brought high praise from parents. Exhausted with outdoor activities, they gathered in an auditorium to watch a skit titled Billy the Squid: a Calamari Western, produced by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Eager volunteers wearing minimal white cotton tentacle costumes were cast as a school of squid. The school's role was to appear to be a large underwater mass and thus discourage the bad-guy shark. This is apparently one of the squid's classic defensive tactics, as is shooting its ink to hide itself...
More good news: the opportunity for conservation is considerable, considering the scale of profligacy now encouraged in Western agriculture. Throughout the region, scarce but subsidized water is inefficiently flooded onto marginal soil to raise crops like cotton and rice that are already in surplus and must often be bought at a loss by the Federal Government. A recent study, commissioned by Democratic Congressman George Miller of California, showed that fully a third of the Government's $535 million annual spending on irrigation water flows to farmers who receive other agricultural subsidies. Miller has introduced legislation to halt this double dipping...
...Marc Reisner, author of Cadillac Desert, an incisive history of water development in the West, observes that subsidized water is "so cheap the farmers can't afford to conserve it." Ten miles west of Phoenix, for example, Mike Duncan, 38, would have to spend considerably more to irrigate his cotton if he were to use water-saving drip tubes. "If I farmed in the Coolidge area, where water is $80 an acre-foot," Duncan says, "I'd most seriously look at using drip irrigation." Instead, Duncan gets water at the federally subsidized rate of $9 an acre-foot. Better...