From PostSecret a three or four months or so ago:
Water use actually has fallen over 10% this summer in SoCal.
How it feels when the bird goes splat
A couple of years ago I wrote a story about birds and windows, and learned that millions upon millions of birds die every year after hitting windows. Kevin Prufer noticed, as only a poet can:
Something hit the office window hard
so now there's a smear
that won't be washed away
until it rains.
Red and vaguely
heart shaped, it appears
to hover over
the city like someone's idea
of love..
Far below
the morning grows moneyed and quiet,
the last of us
having emerged from our tunnels
and ridden
the long elevators up our buildings'
throats. Even the birds
are at peace on our distant
trees and power lines.
When the keyboards' noise
resumes, I play through
the scene again—
the silent towers,
a crack against the bright glass,
and a burst of black
feathers.
The Southern Review
Summer 2014
Note: I'm out on section e of the Pacific Crest Trail: back in a week or so. Thanks for listening.
Ojai Chatauqua on fracking: know your CA geology
Part of what the Ojai Chautauqua tries to do every couple of months is bring out information regarding complex topics, which is what I tried to do in part as a moderator this past Sunday for a panel on fracking.
What did we learn? Well, here's one item, from Kimberly Rivers story in the Ojai Valley News this yesterday.
In contrast to Anne Kallas' story in the Ventura County Star, mentioned last time, this time Rivers doesn't find a consensus in the panel around a need for transparency.
She focuses more on the geology, and on the increased volume of wastewater.
A couple of excerpts. One, we get a close-up look at the geology from a UCSB geophysicist named Craig Nicholson, who was the first guy I wanted on the panel, a real honest-to-God scientist:
Nicholson pointed out that because of California's many faults, the rocks are already fractured quite a bit — actually reducing the need to use processes like fracking, which break the rock to get the oil out.
"Because of the natural fractures that already occur in California, fracking has never been a major component of producing oil and gas in California," Nicholson said.
[Nicholson said] fracking has increased in the last ten to fifteen years.
"California geology is way more complicated than other parts of the country where fracking is used. California always has more problems."
[I'm standing: Craig is seated four chairs away from me, second to the far left]
Ojai fracking panel agrees: more transparency please!
Over the last four or so months I put together a panel on fracking for the Ojai Chautauqua, a centrist group that holds public forums/discussions on controversial issues at the Ojai Valley Inn. (Think I'm beginning to learn how to do it: This is the third such panel I put together this year, and the second I moderated.)
What happened? General agreement among panelists: more transparency please.
One of the panelists, a former petroleum engineer named Don Clarke, who has been touring the country for the Obama administration and the National Academy of Sciences on the subject of induced seismicity and fracking/injection wells, introduced a concept he picked up in Canada — the Social License to Operate. Meaning that oil companies need the consent of the governed, essentially, and if the process is convoluted or mysterious and the findings alarming, then the license may not be granted. (It's more specific than that: check out the link — but the point is a local permit is not enough.)
Here's the story from the Ventura County Star. Funny to me the way I am quoted, but not inaccurate, I must admit.
[OJAI, Calif. – The word fracking has become a red flag for people concerned about one of the practices of oil-well stimulation, according to Kit Stolz, moderator for the Ojai Chautauqua: The Future of Fracking.
“How do we deal with such a complicated issue?” Stolz asked a panel of five speakers with various ties to the oil industry on Sunday at the Ojai Valley Inn and Spa.
The panelists agreed on the need for greater openness on the part of oil companies about the process of extracting oil from the ground.
“There is a deep mistrust of oil companies. If (fracking) is safe, then let’s find out more about it. What chemicals are they using? By building transparency we hope to lower the temperature,” said Henry Stern, a legislative aide to state Sen. Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills. Pavley sponsored the highly criticized Senate Bill 4, which Stern helped write.
Senate Bill 4, in part, calls for extensive scientific analysis of fracking by the California Department of Natural Resources. The bill requires greater oversight of various oil extraction practices, as well as more regulation of wells, including permitting and providing information about the chemicals used, source of water used and plans for disposal of that water.
Panelist Craig Nicholson, a geophysicist from UC Santa Barbara, noted that while there has been a correlation between fracking and an increase in earthquakes in Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Midwestern oil fields, the opposite is true in California.
Showing a chart that detailed the earthquake rates compared with fracking wells in Kern County, the only California county where hydraulic water injection — or fracking — is widely used, Nicholson said there has actually been a drop in seismic activity.
Don Clarke, a petroleum geologist, said fracking essentially involves using liquid with various chemicals that is injected underground to fracture rock and release the oil. Other oil extraction methods include injecting hydrochloric acid down wells to dissolve rock.
Brian Segee, an attorney with the Environmental Defense Center in Ventura, contended that there is little oversight of old wells in Ventura County, many of which have permits that go back decades.
Stern pointed out that SB 4 calls for all wells that are fracking to get a permit, even those older wells. “If you’re fracking an old well, you need a permit,” he said.
Stolz, a freelance writer for The Star, said one of the biggest arguments for fracking and increased oil drilling is job creation. He pointed to a University of Southern California study that says using hydraulic fracturing to access oil in the Monterey Formation shale deposit would yield 15 billion barrels of oil and create 500,000 new jobs.
Dave Quast, California director of Energy In Depth, an advocacy group of independent oil producers, said those are “very optimistic” numbers. He added that most oil companies agree that greater openness about their practices will go a long way toward appeasing public unease.
Tom Krause, of the Ojai Chautauqua, ended the session by thanking the 150 or so people who gathered to pose questions or listen.
“This is a community-based project about how people can get together for civic discourse,” said Krause, who said the fracking panel is the third event sponsored by the group.
He concluded by asking people to send in nominations for other topics. For information about the Ojai Chautauqua, call 231-5974 or go online to http://www.ojaichautauqua.org.]
There is a fairly substantial uptick in local production in Ventura County since 2007, from about 7.2 million barrels a year, to about 8.9 million barrels. But it's impossible to know how much, if any, of that uptick can be attributed to fracking — or at least none of the panelists could answer that question.
Have compassion for everyone you meet: Williams’s
On an election night sure to plunge us into yet more political discord and disputation, tonight might be a good night to mention the record of the year, sez here, Lucinda Williams' Where the Spirit Meets the Bone.
The record begins with Williams' musical version of a poem by a man who happens to be her father, the simply great Miller Williams, here in its entirety:
Simple, no? Actually, no, not really — but still, when Lucinda sings it, in her cracked voice in its warped frame, the seemingly simple poem deepens, broadens, stands repetition, becomes a song.
Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don't want it — a reporter's creed. I hope.
“The creative adult is the child who survived”: Banksy
Is this true? Or is there something to be said for the creativity of adults?
Langer at Harvard might agree about the importance of the youthful mindset, if this fascinating and brilliant study of adults sent back in time is any guide.
Anterra suspected of dumping hazardous waste in Ventura County
As I mentioned in a post in early September, Anterra, a small company with two offices in the Ventura County, was raided back on September 8th by District Attorney Christopher Harman, for a suspected criminal violation of law.
I talked to the District Attorney in a story published in the Santa Barbara Independent, but he refused to tell me what the violation was about.
Meanwhile Brian Baca, who oversees enforcement of industry for Planning in Ventura County, told me with complete conviction that they had no contact with the district attorney and no idea what his investigation was about.
Which only added to the mystery. Here's the lede from my story:
Last week, the Ventura County District Attorney sent police squads to seize records from two sites run by Anterra Energy Services, which operates the only commercial injection wells in Ventura County legally allowed to dispose of fluids generated by oil production. Senior Deputy DA Christopher Harman said the company is the target of a criminal investigation but would not discuss the reason why. “I can confirm the search warrant,” he said. “I can’t comment on what the investigation is about.”
You can hear my puzzlement.
Well, today in Superior Court, the concern of the investigators was revealed: hazardous waste. Here's a portion of the search warrant in the court records, via the Ventura County Star.
According to this warrant, the district attorney Harman "intends to show that a felony has been committed or that a particular person has committed a felony."
What is the nature of such a suspected crime? Well, it's still not stated explicitly, but according to the warrant released by the court action pursued by Anterra, the district attorney wants to see documents relating to hazardous wastes:
Etc. So it's reasonable to assume that the county believes Anterra illegally disposed of hazardous wastes. Might this be related to the uptick in drilling and production in recent years, the so-called "oil boom?"
That would fit with the county's separate pursuit of Anterra for violating its permit by disposing of too much waste in its Class II injection well in Oxnard.
This may or may not be related to fracking — and it may or may not matter.
Oilco’s spend $9 million to defeat county anti-fracking efforts in CA
According to this excellent story from Reporting on Health fellow Leilani Clark, oil companies such as Aera, Chevron, and Exxon-Mobil have donated more than $1.7 million to efforts to defeat Proposition J in San Benito county, which would ban fracking.
Ever heard of San Benito? True confession: I hadn't. Despite spending most of my life in California.
San Benito, located perhaps fifty miles south of San Jose, turns out to be tiny. Less than 60k humans, and a lot of cows. An experienced activist with Food and Water Watch told me the county has about 24k voters. Some of those voters are ranchers, and some of them don't like the idea of fracking.
Every morning, just after breakfast, Joe Morris heads out to check the water for his herd of 130 pasture-raised cattle. This year, thanks to California’s extreme drought, the creeks on his property have run dry.
“A herd of cattle without water is not a pretty sight,” says Morris, a rancher who has practiced holistic management of the water and soil on his family’s San Juan Bautista ranch since 1991.
Morris Grassfed Beef is part of a large network of organic ranches, farms, and vineyards in San Benito County, a rural enclave just south of the San Francisco Bay Area, where farming is a way of life. Earthbound Farms, the largest industrial grower of organic produce in the U.S. is located here, along with dozens of smaller operations that produce much of the local meat, vegetables, and fruit relied upon by chefs and restaurants in nearby urban areas. All these farms rely on water, but the drought isn’t their only concern. Farmers and ranchers like Morris also worry that the area’s precious water might go toward hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” in the county.
As one of two counties with fracking bans on the local ballot this November, San Benito County has also become the site of a heated political battle between oil companies and anti-fracking ranchers, farmers, and residents. A similar fight is going down in Santa Barbara County, where oil companies have funneled $7.6 million into a campaign against Measure P, a citizen’s ballot initiative that would ban future high-intensity petroleum operations on unincorporated county land.
California's a big place, but wow that's a lot of money to spend in two counties. If you're not an oil company, I guess. Chevron, for instance, made close to $5 billion in the second quarter.
Here's a pic from the Morris Ranch in San Benito county.
New climate rhetoric: “the least worst of all possible worlds”
What makes a t-shirt about the grim future cool?
An even-greater-than usual recent episode of Radiolab focused on this question. It found a route into the question through a bizarre fact: an ultra-obscure philosophical book from Zero Press called In the Dust of this Planet has overnight (well, this past year) become a fashion/cultural icon of pessimism.
Or, just a cool t-shirt.
But the coolness can't be denied, because the reference has the legs. Not just the model's, but the central idea of the book — from young philosopher Eugene Thacker — turns out to have been central to the (really) cool mini-series True Detective of this past year.
Example? Look at the scene in which the lead anti-hero Rusty Cohle discusses the flatness of our existence versus the perspective of our lives seen from the fourth dimension — with a graphic visual demonstration to boot.
Some observers trace this to Nietzsche's idea of the horror of the eternal return. Which is interesting, but even more interesting is the idea from the broadcoast –the idea of the horror of philosophy.
Thacker talks about how (as I understand it) horror movies with a supernatural element dramatize what cannot be known by philosophy or logic. The monsters that spring from the darkness in our imagination: — that's the true horror. Our inability to see past our limits. This is where Radiolab shines, and I encourage you to give it a listen.
Essentially Thacker takes Nietzsche's idea as a jumping off point:
Nietzsche suggests that the thought of the end of all thought is really the pinnacle of humanism, in which even the possibility of human extinction is recuperated by the heroic capacity of human beings to think it, to comprehend it, maybe even to accept it. Thus the speculative opportunity of extinction becomes, ironically, a form of therapy. this is what we see happen in culture today, where speculation about extinction is rampant, from pop science to books about "the world without us" or science documentaries on "life after people." Even the discourse around climate change and sustainability plays into this. It's been interesting to see it shift in subtle ways. At one point not so long ago, the rhetroic was about changing our habits so as to change the planet – little changes resulting in big changes. Now it seems that it's too late. We've pretty much fucked things up, and watched ourselves do it. So the rhetoric has changed from “saving the planet” (a ridiculous and naive proposition—that the planet needs to be saved by us is the height of human presumptuousness), and more towards a new rhetoric of minimizing the negative effects, doing the least amount of damage, living in the “least worst” of all possible worlds. A strange, compromised pessimism.
Radiolab actually discusses this idea of Thacker's. Plus, why this image of Jaz-Z is cool:
But although in one respect Thacker is right — the planet will continue with or without us — in another he's completely wrong. When people talk about "saving the earth" they mean saving us, our civilization, our culture. Not just the rocks. We are the people called earth, as Neil Young put it in a recent song.
“I got trapped on a path”: Charles Bowden
About ten years ago I wrote an essay, perhaps my best to date, about John Muir, that was published in the spectacular nature magazine Wild Earth. (Which sadly no longer publishes, nor can it be found on-line.) I found myself in good company, with the likes of E.O. Wilson, but the best piece in the magazine that month was written by a fellow I had never heard of named Charles Bowden. The piece was called "Snaketime," about how he was befriended (sort of) by a rattlesnake who liked to hang out on his porch.
Here's an excerpt:
For the snake a few things are obvious: I am large, and this is certain because of my footfall. She can hear the footfall of a mouse. I am rich in odor. She can pick up the faintest scents, identify them, and follow a single strand as clearly as if it were signage on an interstate highway system…And I am irrelevant unless I get too close. She will ignore me if I stay six feet away. She will ignore me if I become motionless for 180 seconds.
If I violate the rules of her culture, she will work through a sequence of four tactics. First, she will pretend to be invisible and hope I do not see her. If that fails, she will try to flee. If that fails, she will rattle in hope of frightening me away. And finally, if I am completely ignorant of simple courtesy and get within a foot or so of her, she will attack me…
She herself is cultured. In her lifetime, she will attack maybe twenty or thirty or forty times. She will never attack any member of her own species. She will never be cruel. She is incapable of evil.
Bowden became a magic name for me, as he turns out to have been for many other Western writer and editor types. The last issue of High Country News had a wonderful profile of the man, fortuitously written by Scott Carrier before Bowden died recently (in his sleep). It's not fully available on-line, understandably, as High Country News needs subscribers, but here's an excerpt:
Bowden knows why I've come. This morning, before I arrived, in order to prove he's been working, he emailed a new book to an editor in New York. It's called Rhapsody and he says it's a love story about wild places…I ask him if it's true he has been hiding out.
"I just got tired of talking to stupid people on the phone," he said. "I wanted to strip everything down and start over."
He knows I understand the feeling and lets it sit for a moment with the crickets.
"I got trapped on a path," he says.
Bats are dive-bombing bugs above our heads.
"I wanted to write about nature, about animals, what it's like to be an animal, but I went into murder reporting and now I'm recovering."
I can't see him but I know he's lying on his back with his hadn on a cup of red wine, looking at the stars.
"Everything you see out there is constantly re-inventing itself," he says. "We call it evolution. It's all one big yes."
The crickets agree.
"I want to write something that matters. In order to do it you have to get rid of yourself. The lion on the hunt ceases to be the lion and becomes the deer."
I know what he's saying, but I'm wondering how to describe it the folks back at headquarters.
"In the end all writing is about adding to life, not diminishing it. that's what life is all about. there isn't a plant out here that' snot trying to take all that chlorophyll and light and trying to add to life. The book I sent today I did 15 drafts, or I stopped counting at 15. I don't know if it's any good. I just know it about killed me and it's the best I can do."
Thank you Chuck Bowden. Look forward to reading your Rhapsody.
Kit Stolz 