A Change in the Wind

Bak Sun

As Winnie the Pooh (or was it Piglet?) used to say: "Bak Sun"

Back on Tuesday; probably post again on Wednesday. We're off to celebrate a friend's 50th birthday in spring in Ventura County's back country. Believe it or not, sometimes it looks like this:

"My Life is My Message"

Went to Santa Barbara last night to hear Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, speak. She is the first environmentalist given the award, and said more than once that she believed she was given the award because the prize committee wanted to awake people to the connection between peace and sustainability.

Maathai, a sturdy woman with an beaming, unlined faced, spoke simply but powerfully about the importance of "embracing our problems."

She focused on how we must help people look at issues directly, and returned again and again to a favorite phrase: "The bottom is heavy." She helped launch the Green Belt movement that has planted thirty million trees in Kenya and other nations in Africa, but insists that her greatest achievement is not planting the trees, but making sure they survive, and for that, she says, we need to provide motivation, understanding, and incentives to local people, most of whom are poor and uneducated.

When the movement first began, they would go into a community and organize three-day seminars. On the first day they would ask people: "What are the problems in your community?"

And people would list problems.

On the second day, they would ask people: "Where do these problems come from?"

And the people would say: "It is the government." But the Green Belt people would continue to ask questions, such as, why is the water dirty? Because it rains very hard. Yes, but it always rains very hard; why is it the river dirty now? Because people live too close to the river. Why do people live too close to the river? Because they need the water. They cannot cultivate further away from the river, because the soil has washed away? Why has the soil washed away? Because the trees are not there to protect it. Why aren't the trees there to protect it? Because they have been cut down. Why have they been cut down? And so on...until the solution became plain: They must plant trees.

The seminars were an exercise in "breaking the inertia" and motivating people to plant trees, and grow crops using furrows and terraces, Maathai said. When it came time to plant trees, she succeeded in motivating women (but not men, who refused to work on this new project). She went to train them with Kenyan foresters, but discovered something:

"A lot of professional people can be very complicated."

So she found ways to teach women how to plant trees without using technical terms and jargon. "And what do you know, when the trees grow up? They look just like the other trees!"

Unfortunately, I don't have time to fully report on the speech, but here are some other wonderful quotes from Maathai, whose appearance was well-attended...even Oprah Winfrey was in the crowd!

"You know, when people are really rich, you sometimes don't know what to tell them."

(As my wife Val pointed out, a notable hush fell over the Santa Barbara crowd at that moment.)

She talked about visiting Japan, and helping the Environmental Minister there rediscover an ancient Japanese concept--Mot Tai Nai--which is roughly comparable, she says, to the American concept of Reuse, Reduce, Recycle.

She mentioned a discussion about the Kyoto Protocols while in Japan, and said that "millions of Americans are living by the spirit of the Kyoto Protocols, so never mind what is happening in Washington, D.C."

My personal favorite? She talked about the dangers of consumerism, which she pithily pointed out can result in making purchases and coming home and discovering that: "You have not what you really need, but what you want."

Below the fold is a version of the speech she gave after winning the Nobel Prize (just one of her many, many honors).

I asked her if she thinks there's a connection between our fast-paced Western style of life and the difficulty we have living in harmony with our planet, and our home. She wasn't sure about that, but pointed out that in the Book of Genesis, God spends six days making our home, and all the other animals, and making sure their lives are good. Only then, at the last minute--"almost as an afterthought"--does he create Man. She added that the plants and the animals could survive very well without us, but we could not survive without them. Good point, Wangari!

Cheap Shots and Harsh Realities

A week ago, in a column in the LATimes, a careless young faux-conservative named Jonah Goldberg mocked the idea that we need to fear climate change. Here was one of his big "gotchas":

For example, Gore blames the disappearing snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro on global warming, but a 2003 study in Nature identified the clear-cutting of surrounding moisture-rich forests as the culprit.

Ah, well, thank God for that!

But, of course, it's not that simple. I almost wish it was.

Here's the full story on Kilimanjaro; its vanishing glaciers, its diminishing forests, the drought, and its vanishing rains, via Salon and a journalism program at the University of California at Berkeley. It's written by Kate Cheney Davidson. It's also available as a radio program at Living on Earth.

Personally, I prefer the secure retrieval and searchability of text, and will take the liberty of posting the story below the fold.

You'll note nowhere in the story anyone sneeing at what is happening today on the mountain, unlike distant, oblivious, know-it-all Goldberg.

Forget the Middle East...

Had the interesting experience last week of being interviewed by a good journalist (and friend) named Nomi Morris, formerly a bureau chief in Jerusalem for Knight-Ridder, and in Berlin for Time. Somehow she was able to get accurate and telling quotes out of me with just a few scrawls on a notebook. I'm envious, Nomi!

She writes a column for the Santa-Barbara News-Press. I'd link to it, but they've put up a firewall for all but subscribers, so it wouldn't do you much good. It's posted below the fold: Please read!

Here's a taste:

A new survey in the National Journal showed that only 23 percent of Republicans in Congress believe humans are causing global warming. But Time's poll found that 85 percent of Americans believe the mainstream science and want controls enacted. This means that by 2008, whether a Democrat or Republican is in the White House, environmental policy will change. 

That's in part a reference to this study, brought up by Roger Pielke, Jr at Prometheus.

Also in the piece is a glancing reference to an important story in The Washington Monthly called "The  Emerging Environmental Majority." The piece says that the reason a bill designed to sell off public lands brought forward in the present-giving season last year by Richard Pombo and his slimy cohorts failed was that duck hunters and other "hook and bullet" users of the wilderness no longer disliked environmentalists as much as they feared far-right anti-environmental zealots. True, I think, and I hope Christina Larson is right when she argues that global warming will provide a new working consensus for the movement...although to write a brief history of the environmental movement and not mention John Muir and his inspiring presence? Mystifying.

Hinted at but not discussed in Nomi's piece is the aspect of climate change that is most alarming and least understood: The possibility of big climactic swings. Here's a good discussion from earlier this month in Scientific American. As the piece mentions at one point, "a conservative interpretation of the data [from the Cretaceous period] is worrisome enough," and adds:

In short, CO2 seems to pack a bigger punch than expected, perhaps because the warming becomes self-reinforcing.

Consensus Builds on Global Warming

The journey of a thousand miles...begins with a single consensus.

Remarkably, despite the opposition of the White House, a consensus on the need to reduce the rising levels of CO2 emissions right here in the U.S. appears to be forming.

Here's a news story from Bloomberg, quoting numerous Republicans, including moderates (Christine Todd Whitman, former chief of the EPA in Bush's first term), conservatives (such as Lindsay Graham from South Carolina), and likely presidential candidates, such as John McCain, on the need for legislation now.

The change is palpable in the Senate. Graham, who has said in the past that he was ``on the fence'' about climate-change legislation, became a stronger advocate for taking action after a trip to Alaska in August with McCain and Senators Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, a New York Democrat. They heard from Native Alaskans who are experiencing melting permafrost, coastal erosion and other effects of climate change.

"Seeing is believing,'' says Graham spokesman Kevin Bishop. Bishop says Graham believes global warming is a problem that must be addressed, while declining to say if Graham would support specific legislation such as the McCain-Lieberman measure.

"When you have the overwhelming evidence from eminent scientists on one side, and a few skeptics on the other, we are guided by the thoughts of the overwhelming, not the few,'' says Representative Sherwood Boehlert of New York, who heads the House Science Committee.

Below the fold I'm posting a much deeper story by Amanda Griscom Little, on the particulars of the bills coming up for action. A vigorous debate among enviros has broken out about the bills being brought forward, by the likes of Dianne Feinstein, Jeff Bingaman, and John McCain and Joe Lieberman, among others. For those who think the movement isn't going far enough, here's a thought from the story:

"Even if climate advocates defy the odds and manage to break through the congressional impasse, it's all but inevitable that Bush is going to veto whatever they manage to push through," says Sierra Club analyst Brendal Bell.

[Little adds]:

If that's the case, why not push the debate in a greener direction and try to build support for the kind of legislation that could make a difference?

Happy Birthday, John!

Dear John:

Happy birthday!

I'll never meet you,  but I feel I know you pretty well. I've followed you in your books up some of your trails. I've gone out of the city and up into the mountains and I've seen some of what you found up there.

Today especially I won't forget you. Sometimes you said you felt closer to absent friends when away even than when in your company, and sometimes I feel closer to you perhaps than I should.

I'm not alone, of course. Activists, botanists, conservationists, the makers of the national parks, nature lovers and poets and writers from around the world--everyone who knows the Sierras knows you, and many of them know the mountains because of you.

Even as a write, two more of your admirers are following your first great California walk, from San Francisco to the Sierras, the lucky bums.

I shall be quietly content for now to be what another of your admirers, Waldo Emerson, called "an unknown friend." 

You always had a way of asking questions, John. Even before we had the words to describe some of your ideas, you asked us: why not?

"The hall and the theater and the church have been invented, and compulsory education. Why not compulsory recreation?" you wondered, back at the dawning of the age of the outdoor recreation industry. This concept has been translated, dully, into what American schoolkids call "p.e." but some traces of your insistence on beauty and health still remain, in our hikes and parks and wilderness parks. "How hard to pull or shake people out of town!" you reminded us, again and again, in a thousand ways. "Earthquakes cannot do it," nor even plagues."

It's no better now, John, I write this in a virtual reality almost complete devoid of matter, and yet it pulls us all out of the natural, indoors, away from what you loved most.

Most of all this past month, after reading a book by a mountain scientist, "The Weather Makers," I've been thinking about a question you asked about the moutanins that often has been raised by others again, from Michael Cohen in "The Pathless Way," to Frederick Turner in "Rediscovering America." First published in l938, in a notebook you wrote sixty years earlier, you asked:

"I often wonder what man will do with the mountains--that is, with their utilizable, destructible garments. Will he cut down all the trees to make ships and houses? If so, what will be the final and far upshot? Will human destructions like those of Nature--fire and flood and avalanche--work out a higher good, a finer beauty?"

You distinguish between the earth--the rocks--and the life upon the rocks (what scientists call the biosphere). Even at our worst, you remind us, we're not likely to greatly imperil the earth itself.

Touchingly, with an idealist's openness to fate, you assume that if we destroy a tree, we will get some use out of it.

John, I must tell you the truth. I believe you would want it. You always wanted to see everything possible to see; storms, the tops of mountains, trees waving wildly in the wind, oceans, bears, dead and alive--nothing terrestrial was ever foreign to you. You first great find was a rare lily in a Canadian swamp far far beyond the reach of the maps of the time. You would want to know.

"The final and far upshot" of the fate of the mountains at the moment is not good.

Somehow, I suspect this won't surprise you.

"That anyone would try to destroy such a place seems incredible," you wrote of the Hetch-Hetchy Valley, before San Francisco and the Congress drowned it under a reservoir. "but sad experience shows that there are people good enough and bad enough for anything."

Of mountains around the world today, Australian scientist Tim Flannery writes in The Weather Makers:

"Nothing in predictive climate science is more certain than the extinction of many of the world's mountain-dwelling species. We can even foretell which will be the first to go. This high degree of scientific certainty comes from three factors. First, the effect of rising temperatures on mountain habitats is easily calculated, and past adjustments in response to warming are well documented. Second, the conditions that many mountain-dwelling species can tolerate are known. And finally, as the climate warms, mountains species have nowhere to go but up, and the height of mountain peaks worldwide has been precisely ascertained. Given the rate of warming, we can calculate the time to extinction of most mountain-dwelling species." (Chapter 18)

Not only will we destroy the mortal "garments" of the mountains, John, but not for any reason, but out of sheer carelessness.

For example, the Canadian Forest Service reports that "the largest insect epidemic ever to infect North America" is devastating British Columbia and is expected to spread east and possibly south.

The Washington Post reports that lumber mills are running "flat-out" right now but as soon as the "beetlewood" runs out, the mills are expected to close, and the small towns around them degrade. The epidemic is firmly linked to what we call global warming.

We've put ourselves in the soup, John, and turned up the heat. The glaciers you found in California and Alaska; well, we've burned through a half-billion years of summers heating our houses and driving our smoky cars and trucks and busses and boats and planes. They're shrinking from our touch. We've changed the look of the earth, the magnitude of our forests, strewn lines of clouds in the sky and pollutants in the seas, and now, inevitably, we've changed our atmosphere too.

But as I say, perhaps you wouldn't be too surprised. Once, as a young man, your father had you chip a well through stone eighty feet down, only to have you hit a pocket of "choke-damp."

We call it carbon dioxide. It nearly killed you.

It's not doing us much good, even at a mere 380 parts per million, though I guess the plants like it.

But you always were one to look for practical solutions--even invented a bed that would put a late sleeper on his feet in the morning. We're inventing anew, as well, perhaps we'll be able to work it out. And certainly some people find ways to live in harmony with this earth for some of their lives.

But this much I know: As soon as you came out of that poisoned well, as soon as you got back on your feet, you set out walking and you didn't come back.

You wanted to see all you could see of this "grand show" of ours, and by God you did.

In your honor, I'm taking the dogs and anyone else around here who chooses to go, and I'm going out for a sunset walk, to see again the vast sweetness of this world.

"I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in."

Happy 168th, John. I'll see you in the light between the mountains and the stars.

The Big Burp

The day after winning the Pulitzer Prize, Nicholas Kristof of the NYTimes (sorry, it's behind a firewall) resorts to horror movie scenarios to awaken law-makers to the risks of climate change.

It's a dark and stormy night, and deep within the ocean the muddy bottom begins to stir.

Giant squids flee in horror as reservoirs of methane frozen at the bottom of the ocean begin to thaw, releasing bubbles that rise to the surface. Soon the ocean surface is churning and burping gas like a billion overfed infants, transforming the composition of our atmosphere. That's a scene from a new horror movie I'm envisioning, called "Killer Ocean."

I'm hoping it might play in the White House and Congress, because it depicts one of the more bizarre and frightening ways in which global warming could devastate our planet — what scientists have dubbed the "methane burp."

Since President Bush is complacent about conventional risks from climate change, such as the prospect that those of us in Manhattan will end up knee-deep in the Atlantic, let's try fear-mongering. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. And thousands of gigatons of methane, equivalent to the total amount of coal in the world, lie deep within the oceans in the form of ice-like solids called methane hydrates.

The big question is whether global warming — temperatures have risen about one degree Fahrenheit over the last 30 years — will thaw some of these methane hydrates. If so, the methane might be released as a gargantuan oceanic burp. Once in the atmosphere, that methane would accelerate the greenhouse effect and warm the earth and raise sea levels even more.

"The juiciest disaster-movie scenario would be a release of enough methane to significantly change the atmospheric concentration," suggests the excellent discussion of methane hydrates by scholars at www.realclimate.org.

One reason for concern about a methane hydrate apocalypse is that something like it may have happened several times in the past. For example, 251 million years ago, there was a catastrophe known as the Permian extinction that came close to wiping out life on earth. Nobody is sure what caused the Permian extinction, but one theory is that it was methane burps.

And as long as I'm fear-mongering, there was also a better understood warming 55 million years ago, known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM. That was a period when temperatures shot up by 10 degrees Fahrenheit in the tropics and by about 15 degrees in polar areas, and many scientists think it was caused by the melting of methane hydrates.

"The PETM event 55 million years ago is probably the most likely example of their impact, though there are smaller events dotted through the record," says Gavin Schmidt, a NASA expert on climate change. He emphasizes the uncertainties, but adds that since we are likely to enter a climate that hasn't been seen for a few million years, it's reasonable to worry about methane hydrates.

Hey, reason-based calls for action haven't had much effect, even though (according to this poll from ABC/TV, Stanford University, and Time, fully 85% of the US population thinks that global warming is happening). Horror movie scenarios are worth a try.

Remember Ketchup the Vegetable?

Back in the l980's, the Reagan administration famously categorized ketchup as a vegetable, to meet minimum nutrition requirements for school lunches.

Now the second Bush administration has continued this glorious tradition of Republican prevarication, this time in regard to wetlands.

Check out "Field & Stream" conservation director Bob Marshall's biting column on the topic. This is how it begins:

The Bush Administration announced last week that the nation is no longer losing wetlands--as long as you consider golf course water hazards to be wetlands.

Really.

(HT: Huffington Post)

 

Advertising Sustainability

A great image from Australia, the clear winner (according to the quite wonderful Oikos environmental economics blog) in an advertising competition sponsored by the Australian Conservation Foundation.

David Jeffrey sensibly asks:

Why are you interested in environmental issues? Because you’re passionate about nature? Because you’ve visited places that are beautiful and think we can make our backyard a little more beautiful too? Because you can envisage a world that’s healthier and fairer and feel good about trying to give the world a little bump in that direction? Or because you want to ease some of your guilt about existing and eating and breathing and buying nice clothes? I don’t know anyone who does it for the last reason.

Have you ever seen an ad for Diet Coke that says "Stop eating sugar you big fat slob"?. Hardly. They show slim active people having fun and imply that’s what we’ll be like if we drink Diet Coke. Manipulative? Maybe. Effective? Certainly.

(Now let's see if Typepad can keep this image up...)

Sing It! "Impeach the President"

According to polls, as Rosa Brooks writes in a column in the LATimes, the people have at last woken up to the lies of the current administration, even if they're too apathetic to do anything about it.

What would happen if mainstream Americans [demonstrated their opposition]? If the 33% of Americans who think Bush should be impeached took to the streets to peaceably express their views, that would be almost 100 million marchers — enough to wake up even the most somnolent of politicians. If the 47% of Americans who think U.S. troops should leave Iraq ASAP actually marched on Washington, our troops would already be on their way home. If the 60% of Americans who disapprove of Bush's job performance decided to stage a peaceful sit-in outside the White House, they'd spill over into a dozen neighboring states, and the American political machine would grind to a screeching halt.

Now, Neil Young has taken action, recording a song called, yes, "Impeach the President." It should be out in about two months, with, according to Editors & Publishers, a 100-voice choir.