What Me Worry?

Despite recent headlines of deadly flooding from San Antonio to Chicago, much of the mid- and southwest continues to face a second year of searing drought. This year’s most drought-stricken region sits on top of the Ogallala aquifer, the 174,000-square-mile well that has been geology’s gift to the nation’s breadbasket. It holds a seemingly inexhaustible supply of fresh water, some of which has been underground for six million years. Unfortunately, it is not inexhaustible, and what has taken nature 6,000 millennia to do, humans can undo in decades. And we have begun: the Ogallala’s water is already leaving at a faster rate than it is being replenished. This is not a new story. We have done it with oil, with topsoil, with the codfish. And yet here we are, 7 billion of us, living longer, growing bigger, getting richer (at least in the aggregate). The enviro-radical Cassandras keep prophesying doom, but the human race keeps trucking forward. We discover new oil, apply more fertilizer, farm fish, desalinate the oceans. We have faith that our next technological fix will come before the last one expires – such as Monsanto’s imminent launching of a genetically modified drought-resistant corn – and the plan to run the Keystone pipeline, which will carry the world’s dirtiest oil, over the Ogallala aquifer, which holds the earth’s cleanest water, is no cause for concern.

So why are we uneasy? Is it because we know we can’t go on like this forever and worry that the price of progress is our great-grandchildren?

Theorem of Toxic Attraction

I'd like to introduce my Theorem of Toxic Attraction (ToTA), which states that toxic people, toxic activities and toxic places have an elective affinity that intensifies the damage they do. It’s not my entire theory for the existence of evil in the world, but it’s a start. Take, for example, the recent New York Times story headlined “A Black Mound of Canadian Oil Waste is Rising Over Detroit”, which describes a three-story pile of petroleum coke covering an entire city block along the Detroit River. When people talk about dirty tar sands oil, they mean petroleum coke, a waste byproduct the EPA no longer permits to be burned in the United States. Who owns the growing toxic black pile along the Detroit River? Koch Carbon, a company controlled by Charles and David Koch.

Cigarettes have been dubbed the perfect product: they cost a penny to make, they sell for a dollar, and they’re addictive. They also cause cancer. Think of this pile of cheap toxic waste as a cigarette millions will soon have to smoke. “It is,” said an expert, “the dirtiest residue from the dirtiest oil on earth.”

So you have the Koch brothers pushing for the Keystone XL pipeline so that more cheap waste can be produced to sell at a huge profit to China and Mexico to burn as cheap fuel. And you have 501(c)(4) non-profits spending hundreds of millions of dollars given by anonymous donors to buy politicians who will get the government regulators off their backs.

Something stinks.

The Global Frontier

Years ago I drove my son Daniel to play ice hockey in Toms River, New Jersey. It was there I first encountered the famous “hockey parent” – grown-ups clanging cowbells and unleashing barrages of epithets at the other team. By the second period both sets of parents were howling insults across the rink. Daniel was eleven. Dan Fagin presents the town in a different light. Toms River, A Story of Science and Salvation is a parable of big industry running roughshod over a small American community. In 1949 Ciba, the giant Swiss chemical company, bought 1350 acres of forest and farmland in Toms River and built a dye manufacturing plant. “Dye manufacture had always been a waste-intensive business,” writes Fagin, noting that “the dye would leave Toms River, but the waste would stay.” At first Ciba buried its waste on the property, which became an early Superfund site. Later the company dumped directly into the river, and when that was thoroughly polluted, Ciba built a pipeline from the plant straight to the ocean. When parents raised alarms about a childhood cancer cluster, the company strong-armed local officials, threatened to relocate its jobs, claimed its chemicals were trade secrets, and emitted black smoke only at night.

Eventually, the company left New Jersey for the lower wages and more relaxed regulations in the South, and ultimately for Asia, where China “is now the largest producer and consumer of the world’s most heavily used toxic chemicals.” The dye, the jobs, the pollution had left, but the waste stayed in Toms River.

Battle Royal

Kings Midas and Canute are alive and living in the Hamptons. Midas, as you may remember from your studies of ancient Greece, was offered one wish as a result of an act of kindness, and he asked that whatever he touched be turned to gold. His wish was granted (an outcome which current Greek politicians are desperately trying to replicate), and he went merrily around his palace showing off. . . until he tried to kiss his daughter. Canute, who ruled Denmark, Norway and England a millennium ago, sought to teach his fawning courtiers about the limits of human power by ordering his throne brought to the beach, where he commanded the waves to stop. They didn’t.

Canute offered his lesson on the beach of Southampton in Hampshire, England. It is a lesson lost on the modern plutocrats of Southampton, Long Island. A recent article in The New York Times tells the stories of billionaires building huge fortifications to protect their beachfront mansions from the next Hurricane Sandy. It is a modern fable of hubris, as hedge fund managers seek to impose their wills on nature with little understanding about how nature operates and less regard for the impact of their actions on others. The erosion of the public beaches being caused by the heroic battles to save their vacation homes is just collateral damage. Their insistence on the primacy of their private property rights over those of the public square is yet one more example of the tragedy of the commons.

Spring

Yesterday wasn’t technically the first day of spring, but it felt like it. As I set off for my weekend battle with the vines that are strangling trees along a small stream, the sky was clear and light blue, the sun warm, and a northwest breeze kept the humidity in check. Absorbed in my work, my arms bleeding from the thorns of the multiflora rose, I suddenly heard the stream beside me. It has been there all along, of course, but I hadn’t been paying much attention. Now, as the water moved through a shallow riffle, I became so struck by the sounds it made that I sat down and listened, watching it flow over glistening stones. I’m not much of a naturalist, but what little I know I have learned from unexpected moments such as these, when the sounds and colors of the natural world gently push themselves into my consciousness. I worry that we are increasingly moving our efforts to understand this world indoors, particularly for children. For reasons that range from the price of insurance to focusing on test scores, schools don’t send their students much into nature anymore, and we have replaced real experiences with computer models and simulations. There are people sounding the alarm on this, particularly David Orr and Richard Louv, whose book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, tells a story in its title. We can learn a lot from our computers, but we can’t learn to love an abstraction. And if we don’t love the natural world, we won’t take care of it.

The Iron Lady and the Teflon Cowboy

"What we are now doing to the world, by degrading the land surfaces, by polluting the waters and by adding greenhouse gases to the air at an unprecedented rate – all this is new in the experience of the earth. It is mankind and his activities that are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways" (Margaret Thatcher, Nov. 8, 1989). There was much to dislike about Margaret Thatcher, but she was no Ronald Reagan, the national leader with whom she will be eternally coupled. She was one of the first major politicians to grasp the damage that humans were doing to he earth; he assured us that “trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.” Nor did Thatcher’s England bear much resemblance to Reagan’s America. While both countries suffered from the global economic affliction dubbed “stagflation,” Britain, in the 1980s, had become a sluggish place whose sclerotic labor movement and clubby conservatives both seemed to be forever looking backward.

The short-term benefits of liberalizing the economy were clear and necessary, but the long-term price of a philosophy that ignored the poor and blamed the victim, that undermined both the safety net and the social contract, has proved as divisive in England as it has in America. In the wake of Thatcher and Reagan, we have become heedless societies, increasingly unconcerned about creating an inclusive community.

And climate change? Thatcher recanted in 2003. An Oxford-trained chemist, she did not dispute the science. She was upset the issue had become a rallying point for liberals.

April Digression

“We do not inherit the world from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children,” David Brower famously said. Or did he? I googled. Some attribute the quote to Moses Henry Cass, an Australian Minister for the Environment; others to Helen Caldicott, the anti-nuclear advocate. Chief Seattle, as always, has strong support. Brower was delighted to get credit for something he didn’t remember saying: “I searched my unorganized files to find out when I could have said those words. I stumbled upon the answer in the pages of an interview that had taken place in a North Carolina bar so noisy, I could only marvel that I was heard at all. Possibly, I didn’t remember saying it because by then they had me on my third martini.”

I thought of the quote when I was walking recently through East Marlborough Township’s wastewater-treatment field. It’s a beautiful spot, marred only by the hundreds of spigots that periodically spray the people’s private waters onto their common ground. Some criticize the field’s current use, but to me it seems preferable to another suburban subdivision – and far better than the old practice of sending sewage into the stream. Not long ago, a scientist told me that every municipality that releases its “clean” wastewater into a stream should have to put its drinking-water intake pipe just downstream from its wastewater discharge pipe. I don’t own this field, but I consider the hours of peace it has given me an inheritance, and I hope future generations will see its beauty, and not think of it only as the place the community deposits its wastes.

John Wesley Powell

Sixty years ago Wallace Stegner published Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. It’s a wonderful book about an extraordinary man, a one-armed Civil War veteran who became the first to navigate the Grand Canyon by boat, a journey so terrifying that three of his small crew took off at Separation Canyon, climbed the Colorado’s steep walls and were never seen again. Powell went on to a long career as an explorer and government agent. He was a staunch critic of the national obsession to overdevelop the west, arguing that its water resources couldn’t sustain the massive agriculture he foresaw. He pushed the novel idea of creating political boundaries based on natural watersheds. Stegner reprinted a rainfall map that shows why: east of the 100^th meridian the country has plenty of rain; west to the Rockies it is mostly desert. But governments and homesteaders ignored Powell’s warnings. Embracing the widely held and thoroughly debunked theory that “rain follows the plow,” they made the Great Plains bloom –nowhere more so than Nebraska, which became one of America’s most productive agricultural states. What it lacked in rainfall, it made up by finding itself atop the huge Ogallala aquifer and its seemingly endless water.

But Powell’s vision of a west of small farms, animal grazing and land protection has proved prescient. According to a recent study, Nebraska has become the driest state in America, all of it in the grip of severe drought, which caused last year’s wheat production to decline by 18%.

That Rain is Gone

We called Erbold “our Mongolian,” not in a patronizing way, but because we had never met anyone quite like him or from so exotic a place when he came to spend a year with us and our youngest son, Daniel. Assured that he spoke English, we quickly realized that a smiling “yes” really meant “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But he was gritty and determined. We bought him the first ice skates he had ever seen, and after the last game of the JV’s season, he raced home to announce he had scored a hat trick. He came to us through Clyde Goulden, a scientist married to Erbold’s aunt, who spent half his year studying Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest freshwater lake, and the other half in his office at the Academy of Natural Sciences. Erbold’s favorite stories were about summers spent with his grandfather, a nomadic herder on the Mongolian steppes. He loved that life and was devastated when his grandfather died.

Yesterday NPR reported that Clyde Goulden has received Mongolia’s highest award, the Order of the Polar Star, for his work on climate change. He and his wife, Tuya, traveled the country, where the 4-degree temperature rise since the 1950s is four times the global average. They interviewed Mongolia's herders, who told them “everything is changing” – particularly the rains, which have shifted from long-lasting silky rains to short, inundating showers.

Mongolians have many words for rain, Tuya told NPR, but the words for good rain are disappearing. “That rain is gone,” she said.

Food for Thought

“I am having a hard time eating quinoa,” my daughter emailed me yesterday, “now that I have read that article saying it is ruining Bolivia.” For those unfamiliar with current dietary rages, quinoa is one of the three major food groups (along with Greek yoghurt and kale) for today’s upscale eaters. It first achieved prominence when NASA scientists determined it was the perfect food to serve astronauts in space. Since then it has come far from its Andean roots, where for centuries it was the staple of mountain peasants.

Now, unfortunately, the peasants can’t afford it. But the quintupling of quinoa prices has been a great boon for farmers and exporters, and it has had a significant impact on the local economies where it is grown. Naturally, farmers are planting more of it and there are signs of an emerging export-driven monoculture. Meanwhile, poor people are turning to white bread and noodles, which are cheaper and, it is said, taste better. Malnutrition rates are on the rise.

Sound familiar? The mandated use of ethanol was meant to break our dependence on foreign oil, produce cleaner gasoline and revive American agriculture, all by planting corn? One side effect was an estimated $6.5-billion spike in world food prices. Then there was the Soviet Union’s forced production of cotton (or “white gold”) for export, which poisoned the fish in the Aral Sea and reduced it to 10% of its original size. And, of course, McDonald’s, whose practices have changed agriculture everywhere and created the modern enigma of malnourished obesity.

Apocalyptic Heat

There’s no future in predicting the end of the world because only two things can happen, and both are bad: either the world will end, in which case nobody will care about your prediction, or it won’t, in which case you will become a joke. The world’s latest “drop dead” date, if you will excuse the expression, is one week from today, when the Mayan calendar either does or does not forecast the Apocalypse. I’m not predicting, but (full disclosure) I haven’t done my Christmas shopping.

According to a new poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, only 2% of Americans believe the Mayan story, which isn’t surprising since the Mayans couldn’t even predict their own demise. But a much larger number believe the end of the world is approaching, although they diverge sharply on the reasons for, the meaning of, and the correctives to such an event.

The evidence is in the weather, which most Americans now believe has grown more extreme of late. Specifically, 75% believe that the globe is warming – although a majority of the Republican Party faithful nevertheless continue to insist that “global warming” is a hoax.

Here’s where things get dicey. If you believe, as most Americans do, that “God is in control of everything that happens in the world,” you are likely to also be among those who believe that the Biblical “end times” are near. If you’re ready, this is very good news.

On the other hand, if our role is to ensure the future wellbeing of the earth, this is not the time to sit back and enjoy the Rapture.

Birth and Carbon

Last week the Pew Research Center announced that in 2011 the U.S. witnessed its lowest birth rate in history. The greatest decline was among immigrants, particularly Mexican women, which undercuts the image of hordes of Hispanics slipping across the border to have American babies. The news unsettled pro-growth conservatives, represented by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who equated America’s future as a great power with the continuation of “our demographic dynamism.” This is an idea whose time has gone. In the 19^th century American newspapers, in small towns and big cities, constantly beat the drum for population growth as a sign of greatness. Numbers mattered, not quality of life.

With 7 billion people on Earth, it’s time for a new model, particularly in light of a second report last week that record global carbon emissions have rendered current planetary warming targets already obsolete.

Douthat attributed lower birth rates to “a decadence . . . that privileges the present over the future [and] embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.”

This is supercilious tripe. Historically women had more children because mortality rates were high, child labor was a critical economic asset, birth control was ineffective, and women had less control of their own lives.

The current trend toward smaller families is because young people want to provide their children a better life, are fearful of the world they will enter, and worry about the fate of the earth.

This is not selfish. It’s responsible.

A Skunk at the Oil Party

Gone are the days when we asked of the Arab world, “How did our oil get under your sand?” Now we are relentless in our quest for energy independence, and recent forecasts indicate that we will achieve it within a few years. Who knew that, while the presidential candidates bashed each other over who would develop fossil fuels faster, we were already exporting more oil products than we imported? We are expected to overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil producer in five years, and Russia as the top gas producer by 2015. Only China produces more coal than we do. A future of no more gas lines, no more US warships escorting Mideast tankers, no more energy blackmail has been America’s dream since the 1970s. We now really can turn our backs on the world. All of which puts Barack Obama in something of a bind.

The forecasts assume development of the natural gas locked in our shale deposits, increased oil drilling and, of course, coal. In other words, we must tear up our ground, drill in our water and remove the tops of our mountains to replace Middle Eastern oil.

Both parties made economic growth the mantra of their campaigns, and Obama will be expected to deliver – to consumers, to labor, to business. The costs of doing so went unmentioned during the campaign. No talk of climate change, of carbon emissions, of pollution.

But the long-term trends of such dependence are clear and serious. Environmentalists voted for the president in huge numbers, and he owes us a serious discussion about alternatives to conventional growth.

King Coal

Both sides in the election campaign made impossible promises about economic growth based on unconscionable pledges to develop energy sources: drill, baby, drill; go nuclear; frac that shale; build that pipeline and, above all, remove those mountaintops and strip that coal. At least the president consistently included alternative energy sources in the mix, for which the Republicans consistently ridiculed him. Amid all the talk of moving forward, we got paeans to coal, the engine of the 19^th century. In the midst of one of history’s most destructive storms, we heard nothing about global warming. We must change the conversation about growth and energy, and only the Democrats seem willing to do it. And no matter how shrill our environmentalist warnings, they will not reach the hearts of those struggling just to get by.

So instead of going after the bad guys in the GOP who won’t listen, why not begin with the Democratic senators from coal states? There are a lot of them, and they tend as a group to be more “moderate” than their caucus. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania is pro-life; West Virginia’s Joe Mancin refused to attend his party’s convention; Jon Tester just scraped through a close election in Montana. And Jay Rockefeller need not rely on coal companies for money. While their constituents depend on coal jobs, they are also the front-line victims of the environmental contamination that accompanies production. And they are increasingly organizing on behalf of their families’ health and quality of life.

Their leaders need to get ahead of them on this issue. In 2012, the only Cole that should be King is Nat.

Armageddon (the Movie)

One of my daughter, Gayley’s, and my favorite movies is “Armageddon,” a B-grade thriller that is exciting, funny, romantic and completely trite. Its plot centers on the desperate efforts to save the world from a huge asteroid heading right for us. Pieces have already bombarded New York, and other bits will wipe out Paris and Shanghai. NASA decides that the only hope is to detonate a nuclear weapon deep in the asteroid, and the only folks who can get up there and bury the bomb are a bunch of tough, freehearted oil drillers led by Bruce Willis. After a series of zany episodes and dramatic mishaps, the team manages to get the bomb in place, only to learn that someone must stay behind to detonate it manually. Ben Affleck draws the short straw, but Willis tricks him into leaving so he can go home and marry Liv Tyler, Willis’ beautiful daughter.

The unfortunate message from the film is that it takes the combined efforts of a nuclear bomb and the world’s best deep-sea oil-drilling team to save the earth.

I thought of “Armageddon” as I followed Sandy’s path along the eastern seaboard – about how this storm seemed to thumb her nose at our efforts to dominate nature, and about how two of the biggest threats to our own annihilation are nuclear proliferation and our frantic search for fossil fuels . . . and that exactly 50 years ago in Silent Spring, as a historian recently wrote, Rachel Carson warned “that efforts to control nature threatened man’s survival.”

Oh, Canada

So far, no pundit has commented on a simple word change uttered more than once on Tuesday evening by Mitt Romney, who talked not about “American” energy independence, but about “North American” energy independence. This was no meaningless slip of the tongue. North America includes Canada and Mexico, and if I were Canada, I’d sit up and pay attention. Canada has the second highest proven oil reserves in the world. It is the world’s third-largest producer of natural gas and second-largest wheat exporter. It has large coal resources and is known as “the Saudi Arabia of fresh water.” Its tar sands, which Romney wants to connect forthwith to the Keystone pipeline, produce some of the world’s dirtiest fossil fuels. Canada has, in short, just about everything we need in terms of natural resources, and Mexico has long been a source of cheap labor . . . including in the Romneys' front yard.

I am not suggesting that Romney plans to invade Canada, as he will clearly have his hands full with Iran and China. But the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which Romney supports, suggests the possibility that a signatory nation cannot restrict the extraction and exploitation of its natural resources of natural resources. This has become a huge issue with regard to water, as Canadian and U.S. political and corporate interests have developed wild schemes to divert Canada’s water flow from Hudson Bay to the Mississippi River.

Like junkies everywhere, we need a better way to address our addiction than getting our hands on more dirty needles.

The Third Rail

I was driving home last night after leading a program on environmental justice in Camden, New Jersey. The program’s heart is a film, Poet of Poverty, which portrays the 40-year crusade of Father Michael Doyle to bring dignity and a better life to the people of the nation’s poorest and most violent city. In a tour of his neighborhood, Father Doyle points to the regional sewage treatment plant, trash-to-steam garbage furnace, state prison, and huge mountains of scrap metal awaiting shipment to China. We are, he says, the recipients of all the waste and junk our throwaway society doesn’t want anymore. Sometimes I think patriotism means, “I love my lifestyle, not I love my country and my fellow man.” On the radio I listened to President Obama and Mitt Romney spar over energy policy, and I was stunned by their almost-schoolyard efforts to tout their devotion to extraction.

“I love oil more than you do.”

“I love oil, gas AND coal.”

“Do not.”

Do, too.”

At least, at the end of his litany of federal lands drilled, coal mines opened and natural gas produced, Obama did stress the importance of alternative energy sources. Whereas Romney talked giddily about how he would drill every inch of Alaska, line our coastlines with oil rigs, frack for gas, strip for coal . . . and build that toxic pipeline down from Canada.

The environment has become the “third rail” of this campaign. Touch it and you’re dead. Of course, if we don’t address it someday soon, we’ll all be dead.

Oil, Food and Water

This is a rainfall map of the United States taken from Wallace Stegner’s fascinating book, Beyond the 100^th Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West.

In one way, neither the map nor the story of the West have changed much in the 20 years since the book was published or the 150 years since the story unfolded: the defining difference between the country’s two halves remains water. But that water has become much scarcer, and the pressures on its use and its allocation among users have increased dramatically.

For the first time in history, my son Jake wrote me recently, electricity produced from natural gas exceeds energy produced from coal. To many, that is a good thing because gas burns “cleaner” than coal, and America has a lot of it. But also for the first time in history, we use more water to produce energy than we do to produce food – and nowhere is that change more critical than in the arid west, where we grow most of our food and produce most of our energy.

Hydraulic fracturing uses enormous quantities of water, particularly in the drilling stages, and scientists have raised significant concerns about the chemical contamination of the groundwater from “fracking.” Now, with a searing drought throughout the west, the oil companies are willing to bid a thousand times what farmers can pay for water.

“The West’s cardinal law,” wrote Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert, is “that water flows toward power and money.”

A Food Community

I think of Michelle Obama as the First Lady of Nutrition, the most environmentally aware person to yet occupy the White House. In March 2009 she planted an organic vegetable garden on the White House lawn to give her family homegrown food, to provide at least a topic of discussion at state dinners, and to create a place where children and teachers could learn about healthy food.

And they need to learn. It seems incongruous that the richest country suffers from such poor nutrition: most American children eat far fewer fruits, vegetables and whole grains than they need, and far more salt. They drink more soda than milk. More than a third of Americans – and half of all African-Americans – are obese. They are overweight and underfed – a combination that seems unfathomable to those of us who equate skeletal images with starvation. But it is real.

Michelle’s efforts brought a blistering response from the food lobby. Organic gardens were elitist, while corporate agriculture could feed the world. The lobby poured millions into fighting taxes on sugary sodas and persuading Congress to declare pizza a vegetable . . . just like catsup.

Nutritional issues are most severe in our inner cities, where the absence of decent markets makes the residents captive to both high prices and unhealthy food. One response is the emergence of community gardens on vacant urban lots. Detroit has over 1500 such gardens. They are small, often isolated. But what a difference they could make if they joined together to grow – and to demand – healthy food for the city's poor.

The Jordan

I was in a seething black rage the other day, and so I went down to the water. Jordan Stream runs clear and cold much of the year. Its waters descend from the mountains of Mount Desert Island and gather in Jordan Pond before continuing to the ocean. They run through a woods of mostly conifer, poplar and birch, where the only sound, apart from an occasional birdcall, is the rippling of the stream as it meanders over red, brown and deep gray granite stones. If this won’t calm the mind, nothing will.

Streams and rivers do a lot for us. They provide water and food. They irrigate our farmlands and replenish their soil. They transport both goods and people. Harnessing their power was the first step in the Industrial Revolution and the modern world as we know it. But we need to stop thinking of streams simply as public utilities that provide essential goods for human consumption.

They are places of great beauty and spiritual rebirth. None more so than the Jordan River – the real place where Jesus was baptized and the mythical destination that slaves sang of crossing to freedom, one way or another.

Today, the Jordan River is the source of fierce contention in the Middle East, where it is listed as one of the world's 100 most endangered ecological sites – another reminder that a stream is an ecosystem that supports the entire web of life, and a refuge from the world and, sometimes, from my own rage.