Big Fracking Deal

Think of natural gas as the methadone of our fossil-fuel addiction. It’s cheaper than oil and therefore more addictive. It’s cleaner than coal so we can feel good about using it. And there is lots of it so we can take it until we drop dead. In Pennsylvania, dubbed the “Saudi Arabia of Natural Gas” because of its massive Marcellus shale deposits, 60,000 new wells are forecast by 2030. They will require clearing thousands of acres of woodlands, threaten the forest habitat of countless species, and have a multi-dimensional impact on fresh water: drilling a well requires hundreds of thousands of gallons; gas companies contend the chemicals they inject are a proprietary secret; and hundreds of wells will be drilled near the state’s cleanest streams. A chemical engineer friend told me that, while the technology exists or soon will for safe fracking, he doubts many oil and gas companies will use best practices. Meanwhile, stories of both human and environmental contamination pile up.

In the face of risks that are both huge and still largely unknown, the gas rush intensifies because the money is mind-boggling and the oil companies have enormous economic and political power. They spew the usual mantras: jobs, growth, dependence on foreign oil – although, as my son Jake pointed out, the U. S. is a net exporter of oil products.

As Bill McKibben wrote in a recent article that will wake you up, as long as the big energy companies control the public debate, little will change, and our addiction will end like all other addictions . . . badly.

Lights Out

Two days ago a massive blackout in northern India left 670 million people in the dark, in the heat and, in the case of 200 coal miners, in the ground. Now there is much head scratching over what caused this colossal electrical failure and endless finger pointing over who is to blame.

It seems pretty obvious to me.

Let’s begin with water. India’s monsoon rains are well below normal, which geometrically affects hydroelectric power because farmers are competing with energy producers for ever-scarcer supplies.

Then there are demographics. With half its population under 25 and two-thirds under 35, India is on its way to becoming the world’s most populous country, and its energy production lags well behind – in fact 300 million Indians have no power at all.

None of this has stopped the country’s monomaniacal pursuit of industrial growth that is based on a 19^th-century model of extractive development, including a heavy reliance on coal, and an obsession with economic growth at all costs.

And finally there is the equally old-fashioned corruption, with charges and counter-charges of diverting power to political cronies, demanding bribes for access and selling electricity at prices below production costs.

The conventional solution is to double down: produce more energy to grow faster to get richer to pull more people out of poverty and become a world power. Disregard the troublesome global climate hoax and blame low-level bureaucrats and the Indian culture of corruption.

This strikes me as a foolproof formula for ignoring the systemic causes of the problems, which are global, and reinforcing a positive feedback loop that will ensure they get worse.

Symbiosis

I took several garbage bags filled with a disconcerting number of beer cans and bottles to the recycling center yesterday afternoon. As I placed the aromatic contents in bins swarming with yellow jackets, an old man beside me filled the bed of his rickety red pick-up with unbroken bottles. In Maine, wine and liquor bottles bring 15 cents, all others a nickel – but many small towns don’t have redemption centers, and I realized that this man was taking out what I was putting in. He had spent all day weed eating up in the graveyard. “People appreciate it,” he said, “but when I get sweat in my ears, my hearing aids don’t work.” He had come here to make extra money.

“Last week,” he said, “I took $268 out of here in two days. . . .If we don’t take these, they just end up in the dump.” I redirected my treasure to the back of his truck.

Years ago in Ireland and later in Bhutan, two of the world’s most beautiful countries, I was appalled at the amount of trash by the roadsides and in the streams. Both countries were emerging from poverty into consumerism. The idea of excess was new, and they found themselves overwhelmed by throw-away goods.

“We had no concept of trash,” a Bhutanese official said. “What one person discarded, another had a use for.”

Maine’s 24-year-old bottle bill has reduced litter, promoted environmental awareness, and become a small source of revenue for the state’s increasing and invisible poor. It is also under attack from commercial interests and the governor.

Over the Hill

I’m a bleeder. Blood pours unbidden from old wounds as if I were some St. Gertrude for unbelievers. I attribute it to the 12 pills doctors make me take daily, one of which, I’m pretty sure, is to remember the other 11. So when we arose in the early rain near the top of Dix Mountain, it looked as if I had single-handedly fought off the bear. Worried about our water supply, we eschewed coffee and slogged uphill. We arrived at a face of rock, only 30 feet long, but very steep and shaped like an open book. We could not get up it with our packs on. The moment of truth had arrived. “Do we have rope?”

“Yes, I packed it.”

“Where is it?”

“It’s in here somewhere.”

“Go through your pack again.”

We sent Michael up with the rope, then hooked up the bags and followed ourselves. Soon we were at the top of Dix, where we took in the two-foot view of fog and rain. It would be “all downhill from here.”

When you reach a certain age, that phrase has a depressing ring to it – and it turns out to be true, of hiking as well as life, that coming down is harder than going up. It seemed an eternity before we arrived at a small lean-to on Slippery Brook, where we at last had our breakfast of coffee and sweet-and-sour chicken.

Like many Americans, I have come to expect my wild to be tame – trails marked, nature benign and pretty. And let’s be honest, pretty much it is. But that is because we have made it so. As Michael, Anne and I sipped our coffee, our bond strengthened, our souls revived, our fears behind us, we knew that this had not been just any walk in the woods.

Against All Odds

Jock Hooper was a fourth-generation member of one of the oddest clubs in North America: the Bohemian Club, a 140-year-old organization best known for its Bohemian Grove, a campground north of San Francisco, where many of the nation’s most powerful men gather for two weeks each summer to camp, perform skits and bond. The Grove is a place of remarkable beauty and tranquility, and Jock spent hours hiking its remote 2,700 acres, which hold some of the last stands of old-growth redwoods anywhere. One day he noticed that several of the finest redwoods were marked for cutting, and the more he walked the more appalled he became at what he saw.

Assuming there must be some mistake, he notified club officials, who patted him on his figurative head and told him to mind his own business. Angry, not cowed, Jock kept pushing. He wrote a letter to the members describing what he had witnessed. The president called that “unbohemian,” which is apparently about as low as you can go.

In truth, Jock had loved being a Bohemian. He is a performer who will burst into song with almost no provocation. But in the end, he loved the trees and his principles more. He resigned from the club to carry his fight, which became an 11-year odyssey, during which he was belittled, ridiculed, threatened and shunned. Old friends crossed the street to avoid him. Others wished him well in private but kept silent in public.

Against all odds, he prevailed.

One person can make a difference.

Maybe It’s Not the Economy

Much has been made – and rightly so – of the almost-40% drop in median family wealth in the United States in the last five years – from $126,400 to $77,300. The main reason was the collapse of the housing market. But the recession has taken its toll in other ways, particularly through high unemployment, much of it unrecorded but obvious to those who see growing numbers of homeless people begging on our city streets. The current election is being fought over two economic visions, as David Brooks described last Friday: the Democrats’ contention that the welfare state got hijacked by the ultra-rich and fairness needs to be reinstated vs. the Republicans’ argument that the welfare state is obsolete and needs to be replaced with something more dynamic that would create “an efficiency explosion.”

In 1972 some people from MIT published The Limits to Growth, which argued that spiraling economic and population growth would soon come up against the limits of a finite world. The thesis enjoyed a short day in the sun, not least because of the first great oil crisis that had people shooting each other waiting in lines at gas stations. Then oil prices dropped precipitously, and the world seemed limitless again.

But maybe the authors were right, and decades of relatively cheap oil obscured the enormous pressures we continue to put on our environment – creating feedback loops of resource extraction and population growth that we cannot sustain and cycles of hunger and poverty that we should not countenance.

Crude

In 1967, Texaco (now Chevron) discovered huge reserves of oil beneath the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador, a roadless place whose indigenous inhabitants had virtually no contact with the outside world. That swiftly changed, as Texaco and its partners built roads and even an airport into the jungle to extract billions of barrels worth trillions of dollars. They left behind 18 billion gallons of toxic sludge. Or so the lawsuit filed on behalf of the Amazonian people claims. That suit has been going on since 1993, and last year, in an unprecedented ruling, an Ecuadorian court ordered Chevron to pay $18 billion. It will be a long time – if ever – before the company hands over a dime. In fact, it responded by suing the plaintiffs’ American lawyer, Steven Donziger. But the real motivation is less to save the money (Chevron recorded a record profit of $26.9 billion in 2011) than to send a signal. As a company lobbyist said to Newsweek, “We can’t let little countries screw around with big companies like this.”

I teach a documentary about this case, “Crude, The Real Price of Oil,” whose maker told Mother Jones, “I hope that the film sends the message out that you should be very aware of where your products come from and how companies act in your name.”

I hope as well that it makes people look closer to home, where the forces behind gas “fracking” are making the same promises and behaving with the same arrogance as Chevron has in Ecuador.

American Dream

Harold Simmons leaves a bad taste in your mouth. One of America’s richest men, Simmons was born in poverty in rural Texas and has subsequently amassed billions through an arcane holding company that shields him from responsibility for the trail of toxic sites he has strewn across America. One of those sites is an abandoned NL Industries property on New Jersey’s Raritan River. Simmons bought the former National Lead in 1986, acquiring both the company’s assets and its considerable liabilities. It would appear that if you exploit the assets and stonewall the liabilities, you can make a lot of money out of toxic metals.

Last evening I gave a program in environmental justice for the New Jersey Council of the Humanities, which opened with the documentary, “Rescuing the River: The Raritan.” New Jersey is trying to clean up the Raritan, whose waters historically sustained some of the nation’s largest industries. Parts of the river now sustain nothing at all, primarily because of the toxic wastes those industries have left behind. It is a crime repeated along countless rivers across America. The Raritan’s biggest culprit is NL industries.

Perhaps coincidentally, Simmons is a huge philanthropist in Dallas and the largest individual contributor to SuperPACs in the country. As of March, he had give $18 million. Although Rick Perry was his first choice, he has subsequently contributed to every Republican candidate.

But there's hope: Simmons’ foundation, which is run by his daughters, supports immigration rights, campaign and prison reform, gun control and reproductive rights.

Is More Better?

After determining that China has been “dumping” its heavily subsidized solar panels on the U.S. market, the Commerce Department recently imposed duties of 31 percent on imported Chinese panels. This set off the predictable debate about free trade and protectionism, trade wars and global capitalism, the economics of alternative energy and Chinese currency manipulations.

It’s way too complicated for me, but a debate on NPR yesterday pitted US panel manufacturers against panel distributors and an environmentalist from the Rocky Mountain Institute. The manufacturers pushed for the tariff because of what they claim is China’s drive to create an international monopoly. By unfairly subsidizing its manufacturers, they argued, China has undermined the U.S. domestic industry – and ensured the transfer of thousands of jobs overseas.

The others raised concerns about the impact of substantially higher panel prices on the still-fledgling efforts to shift America from fossil fuels to alternative energy, and they forecast continue dependence on “foreign oil” and increased contributions to global warming.

Despite the variety of their views, they were united on the need to produce more of what all accepted as an unmitigated good: sustainable energy. In the last depression Americans were promised a chicken in every pot; in this one it is a solar panel on every roof.

But one reason we are in this mess is because of our insistence that more is better, that we can have our cake and eat it too. In a finite world, maybe we can’t – and maybe it’s time to talk, not just about alternative sources of energy, but about alternative ways to live.

Seekers

I spent the last few days at a remote ranch not far above California’s huge Central Valley, one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world. Being there made me think about people’s relationship to the land, a subject that was fed by weekend conversations with old friends and reading Wendell Berry’s Jefferson Lecture, “It All Turns on Affection,” and Isabel Wilkerson’s book, The Warmth of Other Suns. Berry is the poet of the simple rural life in which people are connected to the land. He is heir to both Jefferson and Thoreau, and the student of Wallace Stegner, who taught him that Americans can be divided into “boomers,” who “pillage and run,” and “stickers,” who have “such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.” Wilkerson traces the Great Migration of 1915-1970, when six million people left the Jim Crow South for the urban north – and in so doing, transformed both the landscape and the history of America.

Berry long ago came home to the Kentucky hills – where his family has farmed since before the Civil War – to live the values he espouses. It’s a story I want to embrace – but Wilkerson reminds me that this is the same rural South from which millions of Black sharecroppers fled an unimaginable system of oppression that bound them to the land.

The migrants’ story is unique; their message is  universal. As Berry writes, “land and people have suffered together, as invariably they must.” To me, those courageous enough to leave were neither boomers nor stickers. They were, like so many of us, seekers.

Strangers’ Gate, Children’s Glade

Strangers’ Gate, one of 20 named entrances into New York’s Central Park, stands near the park’s northwest corner under the shadow of the Great Hill. No one seems to know how the gate got its name, which is chiseled into the entry wall, so I like to think it is there to welcome strangers to this quiet oasis in the midst of a city that can wear you out. If you climb the 77 stone steps to the top of the Great Hill, you come at once on a small stone that marks the Peter Jay Sharp Children’s Glade. This is an urban playground unlike any I have ever seen. It has no swings or slides, no sandboxes or ball fields. It has only some large rocks set about an open lawn, trunk-sized logs on which to climb or sit (and one in which to hide), trees and flowers now coming into bloom, and paths that give the place a sense of unthreatening mystery and quiet adventure.

  Is a playground for the imagination, a place of quiet contemplation that beckons children with its simple beauty. It seems a novel concept in a world of computers, organized sports and flat-screened TVs. But it is what educators such as Richard Louv in Last Child in the Woods and David Orr in Earth in Mind have been trying to tell us we are losing as we become strangers to the world of nature from which we spring.

Earth Day

Yesterday was Earth Day, and the world hardly noticed. In these times when economics trumps the environment at every turn, we need not just to celebrate the earth but to rescue its future from those who seek only to exploit it.

Although Earth Day seemed to come out of nowhere 42 years ago, it was very much a part of the ferment of the 1960s – an era that shook American society to its roots – and its organizers drew on the non-violent tactics of other protest movements. Yet elected officials, who believed their role was to galvanize public opinion around critical issues, played a leading role from the outset. The most important of these was Senator Gaylord Nelson, Democrat of Wisconsin, who had the idea of a national day of environmental “teach-ins.” Convinced that it must be a bipartisan effort, Nelson asked Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey to be co-chair. (McCloskey was the kind of Republican who hardly exists any more. In fact, he became a Democrat in 2007.)

On the first Earth Day, 20 million people gathered at teach-ins and celebrations across the country. The combination of grass-roots demonstrations and bipartisan political leadership led almost immediately to real change: the Clean Air Act was significantly broadened in 1970; the Clean Water Act became law in 1972; and the Endangered Species Act was passed a year later.

Every one of those laws, enacted with broad bipartisan support, has made a real difference, and every one of them is under siege in the current Congress.

Easter Morning

Yesterday was as beautiful a day as I have ever seen. The sky was blue and cloudless, the grass a regenerative green. The morning sun warmed the earth, while a northwest breeze took the humidity from the air. I sat with a cup of coffee, trying to take it all in. I was by myself but not alone, for dozens of birds – robins and finches, redwing blackbirds and a northern cardinal, crows and blue jays – flew among the trees and sang from the branches to each other and to me. I felt completely at peace. Early spring. Easter morning. A season of rebirth. A day of resurrection. It might have been on a day like this that Francis of Assisi stopped in the Spoleto Valley to preach to the birds. It is a day that reminds me that religion is not just about transcending our mortality; it is about connecting to life. There is the one we now hear so much about – the one in which Jesus will return to judge us as saints or sinners for eternity. This is the Christianity that tells us the earth is ours to subdue, nature exists for us. This is the gospel of division, exploitation and fear.

I prefer another one – the one in which, as Lynn White wrote 45 years ago, “Francis tried to depose man from his monarchy over creation and set up a democracy of all God's creatures.” But, White continued, that heresy was quickly stamped out.

I wouldn’t bet the farm just yet. I’m pretty sure I experienced it yesterday morning.

Tell it to a Plant

The dangers of carbon dioxide? Tell that to a plant, how dangerous carbon dioxide is."

Rick Santorum, Biloxi, Mississippi, March 13, 2012

Of all the tripe to which we have been subjected in the never-ending Republican primary, this is the most ignorant. Partly because it was uttered with such willful hubris – and pride, if I remember my confirmation classes, is not just one of the seven deadly sins, it is the first of them. Moreover, the statement makes no sense, and it wouldn’t even if Santorum actually talks to plants. Plants, of course, depend on carbon dioxide, and we humans increasingly depend on plants to remove the escalating levels of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

For contrary to the pontifications of Santorum, Rush Limbaugh, et. al., the question of global climate change – and the role of humans in accelerating it – are no longer matters of serious scientific debate. I am not a scientist, but I have spent a lot of time with them, and I recently talked to one who studies carbon movement and climate change. Not only is the evidence “irrefutable,” he said, but as researchers refine the models, the message gets more dire. The good news, however, is that, if we get serious about addressing the issue, we can prevent the worst excesses of global warming.

If Santorum is going to dismiss something this important as “a hoax,” he should at least tell us why “liberal America” is perpetrating it – something more informative than “in Washington, blocking the American dream has become political sport.”

I hate to sound like a curmudgeon on such a beautiful day, so I am heading outside to enjoy the weather.

Growth?

Third in a (sort of) series     In a world in which one in seven people is undernourished, it seems unconscionable to talk about policies that slow economic growth. In a world in which we use the equivalent of 1.5 planets to provide our resources and absorb our waste, it seems unconscionable not to.

This, I think, is the great – and often unspoken – divide in progressive politics today. The United States has long equated the nation’s well-being with its median standard of living, and we use economic growth to measure human progress. For the last 70 or 80 years, the Gross Domestic Product has been the measuring stick of America’s prosperity . . . and even of its people’s personal happiness.

That whole notion is under attack – from Joseph Stiglitz’s Mismeasuring Our Lives to Woody Tasch’s Slow Money to Bill McKibben’s Eaarth. And yet, when a hard choice must be made, we continue to treat environmental issues as a luxury to be addressed after we have solved the more immediate economic problems.

Everyone’s mantra in this election is “jobs.” And while Republicans attack environmentalists as job killers, Democrats bring them to the table to discuss “green jobs” and to figure out how to build future growth on alternative energy and better management of ecosystem services.

That’s all fine. But the deeper question is whether the model of economic growth, in whatever form, is viable any more. That question – as we are already beginning to see in issues such as the Keystone pipeline and “fracking” – threatens to divide the current Democratic coalition.

Tea Party

• Last week, at a program I moderated on environmental justice, I had my first direct encounter with a follower of the Tea Party movement. While it’s unfair to generalize from a sample of one, this guy lived up to the stereotype – intransigent, belligerent, misinformed (no, Henry Waxman is not a senator from Wisconsin), and completely uninterested in dialogue. He was also oddly likable.

• I also read an article about Tea Party activists showing up at local planning meetings across the country to protest environmental – and even cost-saving – proposals, ranging from bike lanes to high-speed rail lines, from smart meters on home appliances to smart growth to limit sprawl. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/us/activists-fight-green-projects-seeing-un-plot.html?scp=1&sq=Activists%20Fight%20Green%20Projects,%20Seeing%20U.N.%20Plot&st=cse

• On Saturday a note from an old friend raised concerns about a movement that seemed increasingly able to impose its views on local governments. “I think this is as battle worth fighting,” he wrote, and suggested a counter-offensive as a focus of this blog.

The public object of the protesters’ anger is something called Agenda 21, a non-binding resolution from the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio that called on all nations to practice sustainable development and conserve natural resources. The apparently Orwellian name, the UN imprimatur and the link to the “global warming hoax” have made Agenda 21 a bull’s eye for Tea Partiers and talk show hosts. The Republican National Committee recently condemned its “destructive and insidious nature”– although it didn’t explain how it had overlooked this “dangerous” threat for 20 years.

The dangerous threat is from zealots seeking to impose their know-nothing views on the country – and working harder than the rest of us to do so. This is a battle worth fighting.

Walking

I am an inveterate walker. When I am in the country I walk nowhere in particular – like Henry Thoreau, who wrote of “sauntering,” a word derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre – to the holy land.” The land I walk across is holy to me, but it is also mostly private property. No one has yet thrown me off, however, so I walk where I please. I tread carefully, mindful of others’ privacy and of the fact that I am a visitor in every sense of the word. I walk in the clouds, lost in my surroundings and in my own head. In the city, where I walk more often now, it is different. The streets are alive with people and filled at all hours with sounds. The tabloids scream out their headlines (“Dumped” “Thighs the Limit! “Tom Talks Trash”). Here I don’t saunter; I am going somewhere. I am seeking vitality not serenity. “The United States was born in the country and has moved to the city,” Richard Hofstadter wrote, and our cities have always seemed the foster children of America’s landscape, places for those who don’t really belong.

But as someone who just walks around, I believe that America needs both the energy of the city and the reflective peace of the wild.

State of the Union

As an army veteran (European front), I get nervous when someone uses the military as the beacon for us to follow. So when the president said last night that “this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected around the world,” I thought, he needs to get out more. Leading off his speech with military and foreign affairs, however, was a brilliant tactical maneuver, for it caught the “it’s-the-economy-stupid” people by off guard and went virtually unnoticed by the pundits. And it allowed Obama to frame the state of the union around his most spectacular moment – the killing of Bin Laden – and to play to the country’s infatuation with the military. Other institutions have let us down, he said, let’s follow the military’s example. Not, I hope, of paying $640 for a toilet seat or urinating on dead Afghans. With his paean to the Hoover Dam, praise of fracking, and insistence that “we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy,” Obama stepped firmly into the past at a time when we desperately need a new vision of environmental justice. And his efforts for social justice brought tepid applause for tax fairness and none for a millionaire’s tax.

Then came Mitch Daniels. Aside from making Bobby Jindal’s 2011 performance look animated, his pedestrian rebuttal contained startling Republican praise for “these proud programs” of social security and Medicare, the usual Europe bashing, and such soaring rhetoric as: “the problems are simply mathematical, and the answers purely practical.”

Good enough for William Kristol, who is leading the “Draft Daniels” movement with an enthusiasm he hasn’t shown since the invasion of Iraq.

2020

Notwithstanding the fact that he was only the second-best looking Mormon in the race and was trailing even Stephen Colbert in the South Carolina polls, Jon Huntsman’s decision to drop out of the Republican primary is largely due to the reaction to his August tweet: "I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy." The second sentence makes clear that he knew what was coming, and that perhaps it was crazy to go public with such bizarre beliefs. But do we really want a president who does not believe in evolution and maintains that global warming is a hoax? So, what does the probable candidate say on the matter? Virtually nothing. Only three issues appear on Mitt Romney’s website: Jobs, Healthcare and Foreign Policy. But scroll down under Jobs, and you come to this: “Amend Clean Air Act to exclude carbon dioxide from its purview.” Short-term economic growth once again trumps long-term environmental health.

An old friend of mine, a businessman who has been deeply involved in the issue, told me recently that the scientific consensus is zeroing in on 2020 as the critical year in global climate efforts. “After 2020,” he said, “it’s game over.”

In 2020 my granddaughter, Calliope, will be 10 years old.

"Bipolar America"

That was the collective title of two reviews of three books in yesterday’s New York Times. All deal with the rightward shift of the Republican party and the destruction of its moderate wing. Michael Kinsley’s review of Thomas Frank’s Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right asks: what causes so many working-class people to vote against their own interests? The same thing that always has, I thought: big money and the race card. But Timothy Noah’s review of Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson’s The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, rattled my self-satisfied mind. Tea Partiers, it seems, want to do away with all entitlements . . . except their own. The reflexively oppose all new taxes . . . except those levied on other people. How unconscionably selfish, I thought, until I realized they weren’t so different from me. I know we need entitlement reform . . . but Medicare is the best health insurance policy I have ever had (of course, I’ve never been in Congress), and social security is a safety net. We need reform . . . but this was a promise. These are not isolated thoughts. As a committed environmentalist, I have reduced my footprint . . . but not quite to the point of inconvenience. I abhor what is happening in our inner cities . . . but I lock my car doors when I drive through them. I am not as self-sufficient as I think I am. I need more inconvenience . . . and to unlock the doors.