At the recent Festival of Books in Los Angeles, the world-class essayist Rebecca Solnit, chairing a panel on sustainable living, mused out loud on "the organic movement," and had a Great Thought. She said:
The organic movement has created a picture of a black or white world: You eat it [something organic] and you see Buddha; or you might as well be eating Agent Orange. Everything is either enlightening or toxic.
At Whole Foods, I can almost hear what they're thinking: Yeah, and so? That's our business model!
The decision we as a species face on climate is so overwhelming it's understandable that we cannot seem to open our eyes to it. But for the same overwhelming reasons, we must.
Here's a quote that might help us see. The late Israeli reporter and writer Amos Elon warned his people in l967 that they would regret their unthinking decision to occupy Palestine, no matter how good it felt in the moment. In a superb recounting by Marlene Nadle (in the Los Angeles Times op-ed section for 6/7/09, in a piece called "Amos Elon and the Death of Hope") Nadle quotes Elon as saying:
HELL IS THE TRUTH UNDERSTOOD TOO LATE
Let me put it in context (because the Los Angeles Timessearch function is hopelessly unable to find this first-rate piece, no matter how many clues you give it, I'm sorry to say). Nadle wrote:
Elon had been one of the few at time [in l967] to write that the occupation would be a disaster. That night in New York, explaining to his countrymen, he said that the emotions of religious nationalism blinded them and caused them to miscalculate, and them assume the Palestinians weren't a military threat and wouldn't be in the future. "Hell is the truth understood too late," Elon concluded, surveying the burning landscape of suicide bombers and vengeful tanks.
Need I explain the relevance of this quote to climate preservation? I expect not…here's Elon:
Don't often get to announce that a newspaper story I wrote for the Ventura County Star made the front page of the Sunday edition. Pretty thrilling for a late-blooming ink-stained wretch. Here's the lede:
Ojai activists are hoping to launch a new form of local money as soon as this year, but no one knows yet what the currency will look like.
Nor have they agreed on what it will be called, its denomination, whether it will be printed on paper or be a plastic debit card or work off an Internet site.
“We have an amazing range of perspectives on what kind of complementary currency would work best, but we all have exactly the same goal,” said Dave Farber, an activist, philanthropist and founding member of the Ojai Economy Group, which has about a dozen members and has been meeting since March. “The goal is not to replace the existing economy but to add a new form of exchange to help develop the community.”
As the story mentions, on the East Coast a complementary currency called BerkShares is well-established in the Berkshires. This currency was founded by a society inspired by the great 20-century economist E.F. Schumacher, who argued with good evidence that local commerce can protect an area from international downturns. The Berkshares group actually prints their own, compete with pictures of local heroes.
Here's a pic of the currency — you'll notice that Herman Melville is worth twenty bucks. Not bad for a writer type!
Activist #1: Hey girls, want to save the world together? Girl #1: Ummmm… Activist #2: Do you like our planet? Girl #2: Eh, I've been to better. Thanks, but no thanks.
In the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society last September, scientists William Connolley and Thomas Peterson and journalist/equaintance John Fleck routed a favorite line of climate change deniers, to wit:
An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science
community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an
observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate
scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of
the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even
then dominated scientists' thinking as being one of the most important
forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales.
But not only were scientists concerned about global warming in the l970's, they were talking about in the l950's. Physicist Spencer Weart lays this out in his History of Global Warming (available on-line).
In the 1930s, people realized that the United States and North Atlantic
region had warmed significantly during the previous half-century. Scientists
supposed this was just a phase of some mild natural cycle, with unknown
causes. Only one lone voice, the amateur G.S. Callendar, insisted that
greenhouse warming was on the way. Whatever the cause of warming, everyone
thought that if it happened to continue for the next few centuries, so
much the better.
In the 1950s, Callendar's claims provoked a few scientists to look into
the question with improved techniques and calculations. What made that
possible was a sharp increase of government funding, especially from military
agencies with Cold War concerns about the weather and the seas. The new
studies showed that, contrary to earlier crude estimates, carbon dioxide
could indeed build up in the atmosphere and should bring warming. Painstaking
measurements drove home the point in 1961 by showing that the level of
the gas was in fact rising, year by year.
Hollywood got involved. A Bell Labs short for television, circa 1958, directed by no less than Frank Capra, of "It's a Wonderful Life" fame, featuring Frank C. Baxter, aka "Dr. Research," laid out the essential facts of global warming quite succinctly. Six billion tons of CO2 added to the atmosphere a year, a change in atmospheric chemistry, a few degrees of temperature rise, ice sheets begin to melt.
Sound familiar?
Remarkable how much we knew, and how little we cared…
Who would've thunk it? From a clever Los Angeles Timesfood piece, with a great pic and quote:
First the quote, from raw food advocate/punk rocker Amanda Brown:
People don't realize that just as there are all these professional people going to train at Le Cordon Bleu,
there is a whole generation of chefs who are punks, and they're
partying and they're hedonists and they're into food and sucking the
nectar out of life.
(For the forgetful, here's the original quote from chapter two of Walden, paragraph #16).
And here's a pic from the chefs' Crops and Rawbers site. Now, have you ever seen a pair of sexier cooks?
Apparently. It's just one of four environmental disasters seen in Chile in recent months:
Over the course of approximately three months, thousands of [rare Andean flamingos] abandoned their nests on a salt lake in the Atacama Desert in the far
north of Chile. Their eggs failed to hatch, and all 2,000 chicks died
in their shells.
Of the six species of flamingo in the world, the Andean is the
rarest. There are just 40,000 of them, and about half live in Chile,
where they nest on the barren salt flats of the Atacama Desert. They
share this harsh desert habitat with Chile's big copper mining
companies. Some ecologists say the mining is destroying the area's
fragile ecosystem and threatening its wildlife.
But another, perhaps more likely, explanation for the death of the
chicks is that this was a hot, dry summer in the southern hemisphere,
even by the standards of the Atacama. That caused the lakes to shrink
and become more saline than usual. Eduardo Rodriguez, the regional head
of the government's environmental protection agency CONAF, says the
high temperatures might have killed the micro-algae on which the
flamingos feed, forcing the birds to abandon their eggs and migrate in
search of food.
The Atacama's hotter summer is seen by some as a symptom of global
warming, which may force the flamingos to flee to higher, cooler and
damper nesting grounds. That theory was supported by an unprecedented
discovery in the northern Chilean Andes this summer — a flamingo nest
at more than 4,000 meters above
sea level. Usually the birds nest at around 2,000 meters and seldom
settle in the very high mountains. "This is the first time we've seen
anything like that," says Rodriguez, who fears this could be the start
of a pattern in which flamingos try to adjust to unfamiliar nesting
grounds, with all the risks that entails. "In the next 10 years, we
were hoping for the birth of around 20,000 chicks to replenish the
population," he says. "But if the breeding season is a failure again
next year and if we don't have chicks in the third, fourth or fifth
years, then I think we'll have to sound the alarm bells."
"Sound the alarm bells?" And then what? (Sorry.)
From Nicky Iew, here's a picture of a flock of the Andean Flamingos, taken in Uyuni, Bolivia.
A stupendous climate change report, complete with extensive interactive graphics on emissions, now can be found on the European Environment Agency site.
Part of the story is about how climate change is making life drier and more difficult in Southern Europe. Story includes a great graph on "water stress" in a country, called the Water Exploitation Index.
Already southern Europe is drier and hotter than in the past, and many nations — including Cyprus, Spain, and Turkey — are struggling with drought and water stress.
Sounds callous to say so, but for Americans, checking to see a graph on how water-stressed a nation is before your next vacation to Europe might not be a bad idea…below is the comparison of current consumption against available long-term renewable water capacity.
Anything over 20% is considered stressed. [As to why the designers of this index couldn't choose the easily understood word "use" instead of "abstraction" — well, you'll have to ask them.]
Next question: How does California and the Southwest compare?
I'm not a big fan of talks on the Internet, but I have to admit, I liked this one from Mythbusters, whatever that is…by Adam Savage, a delightful art director, on how much he learned from his colossal failures.
No transcript, unfortunately, but he concludes with a lovely line, in which he talks about kids and how they will push up against rules and boundaries, like a blindfolded person in a room, looking for the walls — "trying to figure out the shape of the world."
[Talk is about thirty-five minutes long; didn't hear Q & A…h/p: Metafilter]
Kit Stolz 
