A Change in the Wind

Tips for Surviving Thanksgiving (aka "Compassion")

Last Thanksgiving, the NYTimes published an unusually good op-ed on an unusually fraught subject: how to survive Thanksgiving with difficult relatives. Written by Henry Alford, it began something like this:

Like you, I have often wondered, “How might a hostage negotiator help the average American family get through Thanksgiving?”

I’ve had this thought not because of my own brood — we Alfords are a wholly agreeable lot, whose emotional vicissitudes take the form of a lot of muffled, Protestant sobbing — but rather because so many reports I receive of others’ holiday gatherings sound like football scrimmages subtitled by David Mamet. Surely these are matters for professionals who’ve received months of intensive training in crisis intervention?

“Just shut up and listen,” said Frederick J. Lanceley, the F.B.I.’s former senior negotiator and former principal director of its negotiation course, when asked how to get two parties who are at odds with each other to cooperate at the holiday dinner table. “People want to be heard. They want the attention.”

Mr. Lanceley said that during his 26 years with the F.B.I., his active listening skills caused perpetrators in various cases to confess, to ask if they could write him from jail or to even offer him a job. Mr. Lanceley advocated the following course of action: “Repeating what the other person says, we call that paraphrasing. ‘So what you’re telling me is that the F.B.I. screwed you over by doing this and that,’ and then you repeat back to him what he said. Also, emotional labeling: ‘You sound like you were hurt by that.’ ‘You sound like it must have been really annoying.’ Little verbal encouragements: ‘Unh-huh,’ ‘Mm-hmm.’ A nod of the head to let them know you’re there.”

Great column, highly recommended (despite a dull title): Crisis Negotiators Give Thanksgiving Tips

I was so impressed I wrote in, mentioning a poem (and song) on my mind at the time, and to my startlement, the paper went on to publish the letter at the head of a column of responses.

Kit Stolz

Upper Ojai CA 23 November 2014

Fascinating -- some of the ideas (such as addressing first "presenting" and then "underlying" emotions) reminds me very much of a theory of communication to surmount conflicts known as "Non-Violent Communication." 

Also reminds me of a poem by Miller Williams, recently recast into song by his daughter Lucinda, which begins: "Have compassion for everyone you meet/even if they don't want it/what seems like conceit, bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign/no ears have heard, no eyes have seen..."

So, on this day of sharing, let me share my admiration for that great poem again.

 

Why I'm not writing much for newspapers these days

As the population in the US has more than doubled since l950, newspaper revenue has soared and crashed. Today a population of over 300 million is spending less on newspapers than it did back in l950.

No sign it's coming back, and web income -- the blue line -- isn't helping much. 

As a lover of the media, and someone who for some crazy reason likes reporting -- oy. 

[from Poynter]

Daniel Patrick Moynihan warns Nixon White House of Global Warming

From September 17, 1969, a thoughtful and still largely accurate assessment of climate change risk.

Words that stick in the memory: in a memo to John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon's henchman, who was later imprisoned for his part in Watergate, Moynihan wrote:

As with many of the most interesting environmental problems, we really don't have very satisfactory measurements of the carbon dioxide problem. On the other hand, this very clearly is a problem, and perhaps most particularly, is one that can seize the imagination of persons normally indifferent to apocalyptic change.

(Well -- not sure about that last bit.)

On the joys and wisdom of walking barefoot

Had the opportunity to visit with an Ojai artist/musician/wonder of nature named Dennis Shives, on the occasion of the publication of his new book, True Stories to be Read Aloud, and write about it.

The publication, the Ojai Quarterly, comes out as a pdf, which makes linking a little clunky, so let me just quote the opening. The story begins:  

Although he's just published a book, "True Stories to be Read Aloud," about his adventures, you can't walk a mile in Dennis Shives' shoes. 

Not because he's not willing to bring you along. He's happy to bring his readers along with him all over the West, from his home in Ojai, where he's lived most of his life, to Utah and the Southwest, where he's searched for dinosaur bones, to a home he built almost single-handedly for a client in Homer, Alaska. 

It's just that he usually shuns shoes, preferring the feel of bare feet on earth, especially on the trail. 

"When you go barefoot -- or when I go barefoot -- it makes me slow down,' he said, on a recent walk up Horn Canyon behind The Thacher School. "I notice more. You can't just fly up the trail. It becomes more contemplative. Most trails aren't very long, really. You get going and before you notice it, you're there."

This same concept comes up in Robert MacFarlane's astonishing account of journeys on foot throughout the British Isles, The Old Ways. In his graceful dancing way through our ancient language and across the ancient lands and sea of his home country, MacFarlane mentions his own barefoot adventures, but goes back to the record, and brings up what a scientist discovered when he went barefoot, pursuing a herd of deer across Scotland. 

Between 1934 and l936 the Scottish naturalist Frank Fraser Darling tracked a herd of several hundred red deer in wester Ross, north-west Scotland. The breakthrough in Darling's understanding of their behavior came when he decided to take his shoes off. "During the summer of l935," he wrote in A Herd of Red Deer (1937), "I went barefoot, and after a fortnight of discomfort I had my reward. The whole threshold of awareness was raised, I was never fatigued, and stalking became much easier." Darling's unconventional methods transformed modern ethology: instead of considering the deer as reflex creatures, displaying learnt but unversatile reactions to their environment, he proposed a dynamic model of the herd in which each deer's sensed experience of its landscape shiftingly informed their ways of living. Darling's contention, in short, was that deer 'were capable of insight,' and his insight into their insight emerged from his decision to go sympathetically barefoot. What Darling's work proved was that there are kinds of knowing that only feet can enable, as there are memories of a place that only feet can recall.

Shives, whom I've gotten to know a little bit as a result of writing about him, agrees. He told me:

It's true somethings only our feet understand.

Speaking of hooved creatures, I went to see Shives at a sand sculpture contest in Cayocos, CA., over the July 4th weekend. He and his assistant crafted a Pegasus out of nothing but sand and water, using a few hand-made tools. Here's Dennis, contemplating his creation.  

And here's a slightly better picture of his godly creature.

 

Billionaires demand change as inequality hits new high

It's crazy but it's true: Inequality has become so extreme that even billionaires have had enough of it.

From the opening of a column in the NYTimes this Sunday, a matter-of-fact intro to this nutty fact:

Earlier this month, when the billionaire merchandising mogul Johann Rupert gave a speech at The Financial Times’s “luxury summit” in Monaco, he sounded more like a Marxist theoretician than someone who made his fortune selling Cartier diamonds and Montblanc pens. Appearing before a crowd of executives from Fendi and Ferrari, Mr. Rupert argued that it wasn’t right — or even good business — for “the 0.1 percent of the 0.1 percent” to raid the world’s spoils. “It’s unfair and it is not sustainable,” he said.

The irony is a little heavy-handed, but that's fate for you: always has had had a sense of humor.

Emmanuel Saez, a leader in economic research and a co-author with Thomas Piketty of the unconquerable Capital in the 21st Century, points out in a new study that the top 1% did better than ever last year (although to be fair, he says, the bottom 90% also had an unusually good year).

In a just-released study based on last year's income tax returns:

Those at or near the top of the income ladder did substantially better in 2014. The share of income going to the top 10 percent of income earners—individuals making an average of $300,000 a year—increased to 49.9 percent in 2014 from 48.9 percent in 2013, the highest ever except for 2012. The share of income going to the top 1 percent of families—those earning on average about $1.3 million a year—increased to 21.2 percent in 2014 from 20.1 percent in 2013. Income inequality, then, remains extremely high, particularly at the very top of the income ladder. (See Figure 2.)

And Figure 2 is a doozy:

Meanwhile it's probably not a coincidence, suggests Hector Tobar of Los Angeles, that as prices soar and the super-rich prosper, we have homeless encampments by the freeways in Southern California.

The deepening gap between rich and poor is both a sociological fact and a state of mind. The cost of housing is up dramatically, and so is homelessness.

“If it feels like there are people living on the streets and under bridges everywhere you look, it’s because there are,” Bianca Barragan wrote for the website L.A. Curbed last month, after a survey by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority found an 85 percent increase in the number of people living in tents and cars over the past two years. In all, the census counted more than 25,000 homeless people in the city, up 12 percent over the same period.

And it's in the last two years that the economy has improved! Jeez.

"All men are created equal," but what about endangered species? [Blogging Pope Francis' Encyclical]

On this July 4th, commemorating our national independence, famously built on individual rights, I'm struck by a passage of Pope Francis's encyclical on the environment on endangered species:

33. It is not enough, however, to think of different species merely as potential “resources” to be exploited, while overlooking the fact that they have value in themselves. Each year sees the disappearance of thousands of plant and animal species which we will never know, which our children will never see, because they have been lost for ever. The great majority become extinct for reasons related to human activity. Because of us, thousands of species will no longer give glory to God by their very existence, nor convey their message to us. We have no such right.

Who would have expected such powerful, direct, almost personal writing about little-known plants and animals from a man at the head of an institution overseeing billions of people? 

Brings to mind Gary Snyder's great pledge of allegiance For All, which concludes:

I pledge allegiance

I pledge allegiance to the soil
of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all.

"big droughts end in big floods": NOAA expert

From NOAA scientist Jake Crouch in his "reflections on a really big drought" today in climate.gov:

The Southern Plains drought lasted more than four years before coming to an end very quickly in the spring of 2015. There is an old adage that big droughts end in big floods, and that was the case in Oklahoma and Texas, when a slow-moving climate disaster was washed away by a fast-moving catastrophe.

Here's a NOAA chart showing the Southern Plains Drought as of 2011:

Scary to contemplate a flood as extreme as our drought today.

Further reminds of what oceanographer and forecaster Bill Patzert has been known to say, which is that El Niños come in all shapes and sizes -- small, medium, and Godzilla.

Blogging the Pope's "Praise Be": on Nature as a book

In Chapter 12 of Pope Francis' encyclical, "Praise Be," in our language, just before he launches into an appeal to all people to come together to save the world, the pontiff brings up the idea of nature as a book.

He writes (in a passage that is, may I say, too rich to be truncated):

12. What is more, Saint Francis, faithful to Scripture, invites us to see nature as a magnificent book in which God speaks to us and grants us a glimpse of his infinite beauty and goodness. “Through the greatness and the beauty of creatures one comes to know by analogy their maker” (Wis 13:5); indeed, “his eternal power and divinity have been made known through his works since the creation of the world” (Rom 1:20). For this reason, Francis asked that part of the friary garden always be left untouched, so that wild flowers and herbs could grow there, and those who saw them could raise their minds to God, the Creator of such beauty.[21] Rather than a problem to be solved, the world is a joyful mystery to be contemplated with gladness and praise.

The metaphor of nature as a volume of writings has been with us long before the paperback -- since the Greeks. The Book of Nature, the idea was called, and (as usual) Aristotle has a lot to do with whipping it into a shape we can recognize. The metaphor/idea was inculcated in many of the Christian faith growing up over the centuries. To give an example John Muir grew up with the concept and in his youth likened Nature to a book, with Scripture to be revealed. He talked of glaciers writing their stories on the walls of Yosemite.

But as Muir grew older, and as he grew as a writer, he moved away from that metaphor. (As discussed in Frederick Turner's biography "Rediscovering America.") Nature was too fluid, too alive, to be likened to dead things, even if they were words on paper.

The pontiff doesn't directly confront this weakness in the thinking, but he has an answer for it. Because Saint Francis so loved wild things, and connected wild things with God, he reserved a part of the friary garden for that divine purpose. So the Pope sanctifies wilderness.

Here's Albrecht Durer's simply unbelievable watercolor of much the same idea, called, in our language "Great Piece of Turf." It's said to be painting's discovery of ecology:

 

Jefferson and the problem of inequality in a democracy

\Earlier this month, the Ojai Chautauqua held a panel discussion on income inequality, with a brilliant and politically diverse group of panelists, phenomenally well-moderated by Dan Schnur of USC. I'll put in a link, but may I say (even as someone associated with the "Ojai Chat") that it really went well, and honestly may be worth your time to watch, if you worry about the imbalance of power between the rich and the not-so-rich in this country.

Speaking of American government, we often hear Thomas Jefferson mentioned as someone who believed in small government, who advocated for the bucolic country life, and worried about tyranny of government. Well, Nelson Lichtenstein, of UC Santa Barbara, had a fresh take on that question (that deserves to be searchable here on the interwebs).

According to Lichtenstein, a MacArthur Foundation scholar, the problem of inequality in a democracy was something that Thomas Jefferson thought about a lot. Lichtenstein taught at the University of Virginia, he said, so he had first hand exposure to Jefferson's thought. Here's what Lichtenstein said:

"What Jefferson was worried about in the late 18th century was the problem of democracy. How do you have democracy in a world of inequality? What do you do when you have a society of people who own lots of land, and Jefferson happened to be one of them, and other people are either enslaved, or are working for someone, or are women, who are disenfranchised?

 

So what Jefferson said was that the problem is that those people who do not have an independent income, who didn’t own their own land, if they voted, if they had a voice, it would be inherently corrupt, because they were dependent on those with power and money and land. So his solution, Jefferson’s solution, was let’s have a world of independent farmers. Let’s not have big cities. And those people who aren’t independent farmers, i.e., slaves, or women, or even landless people, they shouldn’t vote, because they’ll be corrupt.

 

Now, in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt, when gave his acceptance speech on being renominated, he had a solution to that question. What he said was, what are doing with the New Deal? We are ending a new form of tyranny. Jefferson and the founders ended a political tyranny, when they threw out  King George. We are ending an economic tyranny. We have a new class of economic royalists, he said, and he used that phrase to evoke King George, and he said what we have to do is democratize the society.

 

How do we do that? We create institutions that can counter the power and land and money, and can give the powerless a voice, as in trade unions, as well as the power of the government to regulate, with the SEC. To tame, to regulate, to control this new form of economic tyranny.

 

The solution, to fulfill Jefferson’s ideal, is not to go back and only give the vote to those people who have an independent income, but to do something else, which is to give everyone a sense of independence. Let me give you an example of this right here on the South Coast.

We did a survey in Santa Barbara two months ago. We asked lots of questions, and among those questions we asked, of people earning low wages, was the question: Can you take time off if you get sick? Some companies make provision for sick leave, and others don’t. A huge proportion of those people we asked said, no, I’m not taking time off if I get sick, because I don’t have enough money and I need to work, or because I’m afraid I’ll be fired or penalized if I take time off. So what they represented when they said that was what Jefferson was afraid of, which was the fear and dependence of people without their own voice, or without institutions that could defend them. What these [low wage] people need is not an inspector in every workplace, but institutions [such as trade unions] that will defend people without a voice, to give them the equivalent of a farm, the equivalent of independence."

Jefferson as a defender of the independence of the working poor! That's original -- and hearteningly American.

Can Las Vegas grow without limits in a drought?

Abraham Lustgarten, a top-notch reporter for the public interest site Pro Publica, a couple of years ago wrote the toughest story on fracking ever, in my limited experience.

Here's the money quote from that piece from 2012:

...in interviews, several key experts acknowledged that the idea that injection [of oilfield wastes in underground wells] is safe rests on science that has not kept pace with reality, and on oversight that doesn't always work.

"In 10 to 100 years we are going to find out that most of our groundwater is polluted," said Mario Salazar, an engineer who worked for 25 years as a technical expert with the EPA's underground injection program in Washington. "A lot of people are going to get sick, and a lot of people may die."

Lustgarten's story won a number of awards, and was nominated for the biggest award in environmental reporting. Now he's shifted his focus to water in the West, and this week published by far the most critical story I've seen on Las Vegas water chief Pat Mulroy.

Mulroy is a legend among water experts, and much admired for her ability to talk tough and get results, be it "wet water" for Las Vegas, or conservation from that city. But Lusgarten is not impressed. He takes her on for never once daring to challenge Las Vegas' central creed: development.

...an examination of Mulroy’s reign shows that, despite her conservation bona fides, she always had one paramount mission: to find more water for Las Vegas and use it to help the city keep expanding.

Mulroy wheeled and dealed, filing for rights to aquifers in northern Nevada for Las Vegas, and getting California to use less water while her city took more. She helped shape legislation that, over her time at the Water Authority, allowed Las Vegas’ metropolitan footprint to more than double. She supported building expensive mechanisms with which to extract more water for the city’s exploding needs – two tunnels out of Lake Mead and a proposed pipeline carrying groundwater from farms in the east of the state. Not once in her tenure did the Authority or the Las Vegas Valley Water District she ran beneath it reject a development proposal based on its use of water. The valley’s total withdrawals from the Colorado River jumped by more than 60 percent on her watch.

Yet even last summer — staring at the effects of growth and drought on the reservoir, where once-drowned islands were visible for the first time in as much as 75 years — Mulroy apologized for none of it. She bridled at the idea that Las Vegas or other desert cities had reached the outer edge of what their environments could support.

“That’s the silliest thing I have ever heard,” she said, her voice rising in anger. “I’ve had it right up to here with all this ‘Stop your growth.’”

It's a great story, and raises the question: How many California communities have dared to limit their growth, based on their water supply? Any?

Can't really accuse "the Water Witch" of short-sightedness and hypocrisy, of course, if she is only doing what every other thirsty community in the West is doing as well.

An example? How about growth in Phoenix, from l960 (in brown) to today (in orange). 

From an interesting and interactive set of graphics that goes with the Killing the Colorado series.

Visiting Larry McMurtry at Booked Up

A few years ago, back in the days when the LATimes had a stand-alone Sunday magazine, Scott Kraft wrote a tremendous story about visiting Larry McMurtry, the writer, author of "The Last Picture Show," "Lonesome Dove," and "Terms of Endearment," among many other great stories, at his bookstore in tiny Archer City Texas. It's called The Loner.

A couple of noteworthy lines:

McMurtry lives in a majestic three-story home a few doors down from the single-story house where he grew up and not far from the high school where he graduated in 1954 among a senior class of 19. He moved back to Archer City, population 1,848, just five years ago.

He keeps mostly to himself, and locals know better than to try to engage him in chitchat. "He's a very conservative-type feller," says Max Wood, the town's 68-year-old mayor. Wood has known McMurtry since high school but doesn't consider himself a close friend. "Larry was always the type of person who was more of a loner."

Here's a picture of McMurtry, from a photo posted in one of his bookstores in Booked Up:

Well, to put it simply, to learn that one of this nation's greatest writers has a bookstore -- a monster bookstore -- in a famous (from "The Last Picture Show") little town in Texas, and what's more hangs out at his store, and can be talked to -- well, I had to visit. So yesterday, after attending a reporting workshop that gave me the chance to visit Dallas, two hours away, I did.

More below...

Blogging the Pope's Encyclical: Praise Be

Where do we start with a document as vast and thought-through as Pope Francis' "Praise Be?"

With listening, I think.

Try this, from the Vatican's translation into English, section 11:

If we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs. By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously. The poverty and austerity of Saint Francis were no mere veneer of asceticism, but something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality into an object simply to be used and controlled.

Offers an excuse to republish yet another awe-worthy shot from the US Dept of the Interior's Twitter feed...the Great Smoky Mountains, which, yes, are not "an object to be used and controlled."

The climate "pause" that didn't refresh: Tom Toles

This month has seen a number of studies showing that the much-discussed "hiatus" or "pause" in global warming reported by the IPCC two years ago was a misreading of the data.

In the words of Nature:

“The bottom line is that the IPCC reported that the rate of warming was less in the last 15 years than it was in the previous 30–60 years,” says Tom Karl, the study's lead author and the director of the National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina. “That is no longer valid according to our data.”

The analysis follows a raft of papers that seek to explain why global temperatures seemed to level off around the turn of the millennium. NOAA's updated temperature record still shows cooler observed conditions than those projected by most climate models for the same period. But Karl says that the warming trend is clear up to the end of 2014. That holds true even if researchers choose 1998, which saw extreme heat associated with an El Niño weather pattern in the tropical Pacific Ocean, as the starting point for such an analysis.

In other words, even if you cherry-pick the data, you still can't find the "pause." But Tom Toles can!

Tom Toles publishes more editorial cartoons on climate than anyone else and it's not close. 

Global warming gas tax fails to outrage Californians

Don't tell anyone, but the California plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is working. So writes business columnist Michael Hiltzik in today's LATimes. He begins by quoting the leading state official on the subject of air pollution.

"We think we do have a good story to tell," says Mary D. Nichols, chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board.

The program's quarterly auctions of emissions allowances have gone on largely without a hitch. The program has fit in, as was expected, with other emissions reduction programs implemented under AB 32, the state's landmark greenhouse gas legislation, including mandates for renewable fuels sources for electrical utilities and emissions standards for new cars and trucks.

It has done so without a measurable drag on economic growth. The program generated $969 million in revenue for the state through the end of 2014, and is expected to generate $2 billion a year or more in the future. The money must be spent on efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

Hiltzik also points out that before passage of Fran Pavley's AB 32, fossil fuel interests predicted gas price rises of 16 to 76 cents a gallon. An anti-tax campaign attempted to stir outrage about the program, making no apparent impression.

One positive aspect of the state's lengthening experience is that it has "drained away some of the fear-mongering" about cap-and-trade, says Severin Borenstein, an energy expert at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

Only a column could a newspaper editor get away with a headline like this:

Emissions cap-and-trade program is working well in California