Kit Stolz

Climate change in Canada: the funny version

Here's an editorial cartoon about global warming, from a young artist…

…who notes that countless species are migrating northward to survive.

But Stephanie McMillan is right on another count, too: Climate change is coming to Canada, and could cost as much as $5 billion a year by 2020, and 20-42 billion by 2050, according to a panel of experts.

For the "Paying the Price" report from the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy, go here. The experts suggest it might actually save money to take action now. As reported by the Sustainable Business newsletter, the "report recommends:

increasing forest fire prevention, controlling pests, and planting climate-resilient tree species
preventing new construction in flood prone areas
installing pollution control technologies to limit ozone formation.

It also recommends that Canada sign onto a global treaty that commits the country to systematically lower carbon emissions."

Outrageous!

Bert Collins: I paint every day

Had the pleasure this weekend of interviewing one of my favorite artists, Bert Collins, and writing about her for the Star. Here's my lead (or "lede," to use the newspaper spelling):

Admirers of pastel artist Alberta "Bert" Collins began lining up outside her Ojai studio at 5:30 on Saturday morning, eager to buy one of the 20 or so landscapes she had on sale for the Ojai Studio Artists tour, knowing that they would be walking out with a bargain.

Collins, who has been painting and teaching art to students, mostly adults, in Ojai since l976, charges less for her elegant pastels than many of her former students charge for their work. Her prices begin at about $200, even though her art is widely admired, collected, and can be found in museums.

When asked why she sets her price so low, she responded with her usual blunt wit.

"Why not?" she said. "I do five shows a year, and I paint every day, so if I didn't sell out, I'd have a stack of paintings to deal with!"

Not likely, but nonetheless here's the artist, in Juan Carlo's appreciative framing:

And here's an example of her irresistible work. This is what a stream around here looks like, as often as not, complete with hills and clouds…

Texas drought: “Years before the cows come home”

Today reporter Molly Hennessy-Fiske took a potentially mundane story about how the drought in Texas is changing the traditional cattle business and wrote her way on to the front page of the Sunday Los Angeles Times with her boldness:

The cowboys rose well before dawn, stars still high in the West Texas sky. They strapped on spurs and leather chaps and climbed into their saddles for one last roundup.

They didn't have to do much to rustle the cattle from the dusty flats about 220 miles west of Dallas. Hundreds of hungry black Angus and Herefords, tired of foraging for scarce, drought-dry grass, came running — drawn by the hope of feed.

But it's not just color. She also slips in some climate science:

Texas has suffered more than $5.2 billion in agricultural losses this year from the dry spell, including in the cattle industry. No relief is in sight and the state climatologist says this could be the start of a 10-year drought, part of changing weather patterns worldwide.

Want a little more? Here's the Texas state climatologist's thoughtful discussion of the three suspects in the most recent Texas drought: the Pacific Decadal Oscilation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, and "the long-term oceanic warming trend." It's very complicated, but John Neilsen-Gammon concludes:

At this point, all I can say is that we're in a period of frequent Texas drought until further notice. This period, with both the Pacific and the Atlantic working against us, might be over in a year or two, or it might last another fifteen or twenty years. it seems likely to last another decade.

Texas cattle producers can't wait. They're leasing pastureland in Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and Montana, and shipping their cattle out of state.

Or, as Hennessy-Fiske puts it, with a touch of wit:

Many [cattle-managers]say they plan to return at least some cows once Texas greens, but admit it could be years before the cows come home.

Kudos to the reporter, I say. Good job.

What we have over-run and on which we rely

Here's a lovely profile of a poet new to me, Kim Stafford, from High Country News' Uncommon Westerners features series.

The writer finds Stafford in a coffee shop in Portland. Nearby, writes Tara Rae Miner, is "a strip of untamed land, bounded by busy roads in a dense, urban landscape. It is not a park, simply a tract of woods that developers missed."

Stafford muses:

"a place like this is an island that's never been conquered, a metaphor for that wild part of the mind." That wildness, according to Stafford, is manifest in horsetail pushing up through a crack in the sidewalk and cottonwood seedlings growing in an abandoned storefront. Such things, he writes, "remind us of what we have over-run, but on which, in the end, we rely."

Horsetail pushing up through a crack in the sidewalk — a picture of life itself.

Brad Pitt to win Best Actor

Reviewing Moneyball for The New Yorker, David Denby declares that Brad Pitt should win Best Actor — for The Tree of Life. He's right about that, and he describes Pitt's performance well:

…in Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life,” in which he plays a father who takes out his disappointments on his sons, his anger is self-wounding and tragic. It’s a performance that deserves an Academy Award.

But really it's an oblique nod to a more likely reality: Pitt will win an Oscar this year, but for the bigger picture, Moneyball, which gives him the star treatment, but doesn't challenge the audience.

Over at the fascinating Grantland site, Mark Harris runs the numbers, so to speak, and disagrees:

Aside from all the bad metrics, Oscar voters may simply feel no particular need to nominate an actor as successful as Brad Pitt for playing a character who looks like Brad Pitt and sounds like Brad Pitt. It may be unfair that they prefer to reward the new, the old, the unfamiliar, or the ostentatiously transformative over the swing, confidence, and ease of a star in his prime, but it’s been that way since the era of Cary Grant — who, incidentally, ended his 35-year career in Hollywood with the exact number of nominations Pitt has now: Two.

Yeah, but back in Cary Grant's day, we had lots of movie stars. Now we're down to a bare few.

The cast of Oceans Eleven, pretty much.

Whales, algae cross melting Arctic for first time in eons

First this year, in June, came the algae:

A single-celled alga that went extinct in the North Atlantic Ocean about 800,000 years ago has returned after drifting from the Pacific through the Arctic thanks to melting polar ice. And while its appearance marks the first trans-Arctic migration in modern times, scientists say it signals something potentially bigger.

"It is an indicator of rapid change and what might come if the Arctic continues to melt," said Chris Reid, a professor of oceanography at the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science in the United Kingdom.

Now researchers have tracked a pair of bowhead whales crossing the Arctic:

For the first time, scientists have documented bowhead whales traveling from opposite sides of the Canadian High Arctic and mingling in the Northwest Passage, a usually ice-clogged route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans….

The rapid loss of Arctic sea ice in recent years — earlier this month ice reached record lows and has declined dramatically since continuous measurements began in 1979 — has probably made this intermingling easier, the researchers write in a study published online in the journal Biology Letters on Sept 1.

"Given recent rates of sea ice loss, climate change may eliminate geographical divisions between stocks of bowhead whales and open new areas that have not been inhabited by bowhead whales for millennia," they write.

800,000 years. Millennia. Think of that. This is a new world we're entering — rapidly.

[pic of bowhead whales from NOAA]

A Wilco riff that just won’t quit — for good reason

Wilco's new album, The Whole Love, concludes with a song unlike any I've ever heard from a Jeff Tweedy band. It's twelve minutes long, but not for the sake of a guitar freak-out (Poor Places). Nor does it want to pound home a point, or feeling (Misunderstood).

A critic from Aquarium Drunkard describes it eloquently:

The Whole Love closes with “One Sunday Morning (Song For Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend),” a twelve-minute narrative based around a simple acoustic guitar figure that slowly unfolds to reveal gentle vibes and light percussion. If “Like A Rolling Stone” was Dylan’s noisy kiss-off to the folk music scene and -tradition that raised him, “One Sunday Morning” is Tweedy’s inversed equivalent—the song revolves around a son’s recollection of the falling-out between he and his father. But where Dylan is cocksure, towering on warbling keys and a swagger of harmonica, Tweedy sings nearly under his breath; that repetitive guitar run and the rattling percussion are the closest thing to filigree the song allows for. “Something sad keeps moving / So I wandered around,” Tweedy sings shortly after the father’s death. “I fell in love with the burden / Holding me down.” The death of the father, the rejection of all he stood for, and the crackle in Tweedy’s voice—all are devastating. “What I learned without knowing / How much more I owe than I can give,” he sings as the song exhales. It’s a song of remorse, of a very deep love whose full expression comes in its final few minutes, the music continuing well after Tweedy has said his final word.

All true, but you won't hear the lyrics the first few times around — the music is too sweet.The lyrics ache, but the music soothes. This is Tweedy exploring out loud the pain he cannot forget. Greatness.

12 One Sunday Morning (Song For Jane Smiley's Boyfriend) 1

Birds, otters and whales: a week in the SoCal Bight

Had a busy week last week covering the ocean (by chance) for the Ventura County Star, I'm happy to say.

On otters: fishermen not happy with prospect of being regulated by endangered species laws.

On whales: CA air regulations may have saved whales from collisions with ships, but that could end.

On birds: On the Channel Islands, the National Park Service is restoring a wetland.

Pic of island scrub jay by the talented, hard-working Juan Carlo.

Stephen Colbert knows America on global warming

"Speaking of not knowing what to do — global warming!"

Yours truly is not a big fan of the modern-day kings of irony, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but this segment on global warming, despite the slightly confusing opening, is hilarious…and, actually, quite insightful about the American public's reaction to the threat of global warming. As Colbert said:

"In the face of all the mounting evidence of climate change, America has stood with one voice and boldly proclaimed, "Eh."

The Colbert Report

Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Global Warming

www.colbertnation.com

http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:397948

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

Video Archive

"One day our environment will get bad enough that we'll want to act on it — maybe on the day that Florida sinks under water!"

Wangari Maathai, rest in peace

The great tree-planter and feminist, Wangari Maathai, Nobel Prize winner, died yesterday.

We were fortunate enough to see her speak a few years ago, and I was frankly awed by her ability to find simple, enduring truths in complicated, desperate situations.

Even today, speaking about the unhappiness of development in Kenya, her words resonate with me:

"Now the forests have come down, the land has been turned to commercial farming, the tea plantations keep everyone poor, and the economic system does not allow people to appreciate the beauty of where they live."

In these United States we need not fear tea farming, can still see forests, if we choose, and haven't seen our lives ruined by commercial farming. Yet so many of us — myself included, at times — have become wage slaves, gripped by fear, unable to see the beauty of this world all around us.

Thank you for insisting on the goodness and power and beauty of trees, Ms. Maathai.