"Water will be the delivery mechanism of climate change in the West."
(From Kathy Jacobs, who once managed water for the Tucson area, and until now headed up the Arizona Water Institute, which unfortunately is going down to budget cuts. Its work was backed by the outgoing governor Janet Napolitano: When she left to become Secretary of Homeland Security, its funding was eliminated by the Legislature. Research into water issues by the researchers it funded will continue, but on an ad hoc basis, according to this story in the Arizona Daily Sun.)
At a recent panel about the woes of the press in an era of devastating change, the brilliant Tom Rosenstiel (the founder and director of the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism) related a parable he likes to tell about how to attract the public's attention.
He contrasted two characters: a young woman who had devoted her life to playing the violin, and a young woman eager for the public's attention. Challenged to prove themselves in the public square, each went down to the street to show off their talents. The violinist played, and struggled to attract a handful (much as Joshua Bell, one of the world's greatest violinists, struggled to attract listeners at a crowded Metro stop in D.C. last year, as shown in an award winning story by Gene Weingarten). The other young woman went down into the street and took her clothes off and attracted a huge crowd.
In a real-life 21st-century version of this story, a terrific free-lance writer named Nancy Rommelman, now located in Portland, has begun taking her clothes off for money…for a good cause (an Oregon food bank). I couldn't believe she was doing it at first, esp. since she's married and a mom, but check it out…her striptease is real, and she's cute.
But Rosenstiel's story doesn't end after the first day.
Imagine, he says, what would happen on the second day, and the third day, and so on. The violinist would continue to play, and continue to attract a small number of listeners…but over time, if she was good, her audience would grow. In contrast, the naked woman would still attract attention, but her act would grow increasingly stale with each passing day, pushing her towards more outrageous and humiliating stunts. This, argues Rosenstiel, is the fate of the sensationalist press. What works for a day, fades quickly; in contrast, what works over time, gains in stature.
But with Rommelman, one doesn't have to choose. She's very pretty, and very smart, and one can hardly argue with the cause (heck, even unemployed me donated). Give her a chance…
Earl Blumenthal, a Congressman from Oregon, writes a superb memo to the nation on the Huffington Post, about the GOP's all too successful attempt to strip funding for bicycle paths from the economic stimulus package. The whole post is worthy of your attention, but here's the gist:
Republicans have once again demonstrated how out of touch they
are with their pathologically short-sighted attacks on bicycles. To
their detriment, they are continuing their trend from last Congress of
using the most economical, energy-efficient, and healthy forms of
transportation as their whipping post. Investment in bike paths will
not only improve our economy, and take our country in the right
direction for the future; it is exactly the kind of investment the
American people want.
Moreover, bicycle and pedestrian paths are precisely the kind of
infrastructure projects our country needs. These projects tend to the
most "shovel-ready" and are more labor-intensive than other projects–
therefore putting more people to work per dollar spent.
We might have understood these attacks a decade ago, but today they
ignore the explosion of bicycling in this country in recent years that
has been nothing short of phenomenal. There are tens of millions of
American cyclists and even more who want their children to be able to
bike and walk to school safely and therefore support bicycle and
pedestrian infrastructure projects.
Blumenthal goes on to quantify what a difference just a tiny amount more bicycling could make:
Nationally, if we doubled the current 1% of all trips by bike to 2%, we
would collectively save more 693 million gallons of gasoline – that's
more than $5 billion dollars – each year. From 2007 – 2008, bicyclists
reduced the amount Americans drive by 100 million miles.
In Los Angeles, a project to create a bike path the length of the Los Angeles River is underway, backed by city and Federal funding, and it's shockingly nice…and could be spectacular. It's also the sort of shovel-ready project that supposedly the nation is looking for. Here's a pic from the local site:
At The Los Angeles Times, reporters specializing in science and the environment are becoming something of an endangered species. Before being purchased by real estate tycoon Sam Zell, the newspaper employed over a thousand editors and reporters; now it's about half that, according to the numbers meticulously compiled by the LA Observer.
But it's still the biggest newspaper on the West Coast, and still employs some of the best reporters in the business, including Kenneth Weiss, who co-wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning series on our trashed oceans. Other first-rate reporters focusing on the environment, whose efforts should not be overlooked include Bettina Boxall and Julie Cart, who first caught my eye with a piece she cowrote on Marlene Braun, a Bureau of Land Management employee who killed herself rather than consent to the ruination of California's priceless grasslands, the Carrizo Plain.
This past Sunday, Cart wrote a first-rate piece on how the Civilian Conservation Corps helped build the national park system we know and love, focusing on Yosemite.
The economy was a shambles. Millions of Americans were out of work. Saying something drastic needed to be done, the newly elected president announced a massive economic stimulus package aimed at repairing the nation's sagging infrastructure and putting people back to work.
The first "emergency agency" established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt was the Civilian Conservation Corps, which eventually put 3 million men to work in the national park system.
I talked with Scott Gediman, the National Park spokesperson for Yosemite, about the story. (Which he liked, by the way.) He said that although today's Congress does not want to create new programs, or revive the CCC, which was phased out after World War II, the idea of government investment in park infrastructure is widely popular on both sides of the aisle in Congress.
"We have hundreds of projects on the boards," he said. "The National Parks has a maintenance backlog of about $8 billion. In Yosemite, the Ahwahnee Hotel is overdue for a seismic retrofit. That's the kind of infrastructure project that requires a great deal of professional expertise, but we also have a lot of projects — like the Four Mile Trail from the valley to Glacier Point — that could benefit from CCC-type work. We have eight hundred miles of trail in Yosemite Park."
When asked to name names of prominent backers of government funding for infrastructure investment in the National Parks, Gediman surprised me by mentioning Mitch McConnell — the Senate Minority Leader who has been loudly protesting the size and scope of the President's stimulus package, complaining about $70 million for climate research, $20 million for fish barriers, and other environmental projects.
One question: Why is it wise to invest in national parks, but not in the health of our environment?
[A view of the valley from the Wawona Tunnel, constructed by the CCC, courtesy of Buck Forester's incredible photostream]
A section or two from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (aka Obama and the Democrats’ economic stimulus package, the Senate version):
16 NATURAL RESOURCES CONSERVATION SERVICE
17 WATERSHED AND FLOOD PREVENTION OPERATIONS
18 For an additional amount for ”Watershed and Flood
19 Prevention Operations”, $275,000,000, to remain avail-
able until September 30, 2010.
21 WATERSHED REHABILITATION PROGRAM
22 For an additional amount for the ”Watershed Reha23
bilitation Program”, $120,000,000, to remain available
24 until September 30, 2010.
To translate: more than twice as much money for flood prevention – which often means concrete channelizing – than for watershed management, which can meaner greener measures to recycle water with aquifer replenishment, tree planting, water treatment, and other greener measures.
And not nearly as much money as was spent on “clean water infrastructure” in California alone, according to the Center for American Progress’s report, which put that figure at $565 million.
But maybe I just need to read more into the bill, which is, after all, over 900 pages long.
Our own left-out-in-the-rain gauge shows about how much precipitation we've had over the last four days…it's been lovely, smells sweet and fresh…now we wait for the stream…
On the front page of The Los Angeles Times this morning is a sharp story on the the Federal Drug Administration, and its virtually non-existent oversight of a peanut processing plant in Georgia. Because the plant was "filthy" and because the government farmed out oversight to a state agency that looked the other way, hundreds of people around the country have gotten sick, and eight have died.
But for press hounds, the real news is the way the FDA admitted its culpability…in a tiny change in an online reporting document:
The FDA did not formally announce the new findings about the company's testing, but rather made small revisions Thursday to an online report about the investigation. Only when a Washington Post reporter discovered the changes did the news become more widely known.
If you follow the link to the "online report" (a pdf file) you'll see a form with all sorts of dreary details. This is half-admission, half-cover up. The agency was clearly hoping that reporters' eyes would glaze over and no one would notice their culpability. This would have worked, as it probably has worked in the past — without our knowledge — had not people around the country died from contaminated peanut products. This forced reporters to pay attention.
This new kind of quasi-lie lie seems to becoming increasingly common in D.C…for instance, the way NASA under the Bush administration casually changed the mission statement, dropping all references to "protecting the home planet."
Only James Hansen seemed to notice, and by then, it was too late.
Why did the FDA misinform this way, even after the demise of the Bush administration? Well, hard-bitten (and witty) Post reporter Dana Milbank, famed for his amusing Washington Sketch, offers a hint, in a freewheeling on-line chat with readers. A reader in Illinois remarks:
Evanston, Ill.: If you lose your job you could become a PR flack
for the government or corporate America. A cynic would say most
journalists already are. Not the Washington Sketch of course.
Tuesday Steven Chu, the newly-appointed Secretary of Energy, warned that if global warming is not slowed, California agriculture could be destroyed this century. He told the Los Angeles Times:
California's farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the
century, and its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not
act to slow the advance of global warming [he said]. Chu warned of water shortages plaguing the West and Upper Midwest and
particularly dire consequences for California, his home state, the
nation's leading agricultural producer.
In a worst case, Chu said, up to 90% of the Sierra snowpack could
disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital
to agriculture.
"I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what
could happen," he said. "We're looking at a scenario where there's no
more agriculture in California." And, he added, "I don't actually see
how they can keep their cities going" either.
Here's a link to a report (pdf) by Dan Cayans of Scripps (and many others, funded by the state's climate change center) on the implications of global warming this century for our state.
It's frightening, folks.
Here's a graph of estimated annual temps, according to various models and emission scenarios:
Maybe even more frightening is another study mentioned in Chu's interview, from Science, saying that heat could reduce crop yields by 20-40 percent by the end of the century, potentially lead to mass starvation. To put the heat numbers in context, Prof. Battisti of the University of Washington said that the infamous heat wave of 2003 in Europe, which killed as many as 52,000 people, would become normal summer weather. [One cautionary note: as climatologist Kelly Redmond has pointed out, extending climate model projections to a century's length is sure to amplify any error, however small.]
Our new Prez hasn't been talking about climate change as of late, trying to pass his much-needed economic stimulus package. Nonetheless the rhetoric he used yesterday to explain the risk of inaction on the economy applies equally well to the climate:
"A
failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe and guarantee a
longer recession."
Simply substitute "global devastation" for "a longer recession."
Al Filreis, the UPenn prof who knows as much about American poetry as nearly anyone alive (heck, he has roughly twelve freaking blogs on the subject) links to a big story in the inevitable New York Times about Bruce Springsteen, and endorses the idea that Springsteen is "The Rock Laureate."
Jon Pareles is a good writer and critic, but this story about "Mr. Springsteen" seems hopelessly stilted to me, and, as Al says, useful mostly for the quotes he finds. Yes, Springsteen may be as close to a national poet as we have today, but this clunky piece struggles to make the point.
Read it for its voices, not its conclusion.
The first comes from our new Prez, who said at a fund-raiser last fall featuring the Boss, in his inimitably direct way, “The reason I’m running for president is because I can’t be Bruce Springsteen.”
But if not as concise, perhaps more noteworthy is a quote from Springsteen himself:
A lot of the core of our songs is the American idea: What is it?
What does it mean? ‘Promised Land,’ ‘Badlands,’ I’ve seen people
singing those songs back to me all over the world. I’d seen that
country on a grass-roots level through the ’80s, since I was a
teenager. And I met people who were always working toward the country
being that kind of place. But on a national level it always seemed very
far away. And so on election night it showed its face, for
maybe, probably, one of the first times in my adult life. I
sat there on the couch, and my jaw dropped, and I went, ‘Oh my God, it
exists.’ Not just dreaming it. It exists, it’s there, and if this much
of it is there, the rest of it’s there. Let’s go get that. Let’s go get
it. Just that is enough to keep you going for the rest of your life.
All the songs you wrote are a little truer today than they were a month
or two ago.
It's heartening to me that Springsteen mentioned "Badlands," and, later in the piece, "Darkness on the Edge of Town," which although not as popular as some of his other records, made unmissable the edge that is part of his greatest songs. Even "Glory Days," even sung at the Super Bowl, isn't an ode to the wonderfulness of the high school athlete. In its frank, working-class way, it snaps back at the guy who can't get past the past, even as he (and the narrator) luxuriate in it. Al talks about this in his own way, stressing "the strong antipoetic (and thus very poetic) sense of the big it [American Idea]."
Maybe that sounds like a reach, but I think Al's on to something. With his relentless energy, his determination not to settle, his endless stories, Springsteen wants to be more than what a poet is allowed to be in this country. He won't stay in the literary district — or ghetto.
This is what he means when he sings in Jungleland:
And the poets down here don't write nothing at all They just stand back and let it all be
Springsteen couldn't do that; he's a poet, restless, uncontrollable, not a cliche.
Must say, though, his new record has yet to turn me on…and I'm puzzled by this poll from the New York Daily News, alleging that Springsteen dominated the Super Bowl perfs.
I thought it was Prince. Easily. [Though I can't convince you, because Prince's lawyers won't allow him on YouTube.]
Meanwhile Springsteen's best work recently was his cover of Dream, Baby, Dream, a song by Suicide, released last fall. And I still love his great old songs, such as this one, via Brian Beutler:
Kit Stolz 