Climate Wars

An unpublished article for the OVYM Quaker Quill, 

The other day an item on the radio caught my attention. Russia had laid claim to a great deal of the sea floor in the Artic to establish their right to the oil and gas reserves that lie there. This reminded me of other items. Some time before there was an interview on the radio with some pundit with what seemed to be reasonable credentials. It was his calculation that there was neither the resolve nor the time to deal with global warming. His advice was to enjoy it while we could. And more recently, a news items about how the Russians had opened a way for a tanker along their Artic coast and that this had been possible because of reduced ice on the Artic Ocean and then another on how with rising ocean levels, the earth might be able to support only about one billion people when ocean levels fully rose, one sixth the current earth’s population, all of this with the expectation that oceans may rise fully within one or two hundred years.

I can not speak to the correctness of any of these propositions or the meaning of any of these observations taken singly. They do not seem to be hysterical or poorly reasoned although the only things seen with certainty are in the past. The singular sign of the odd, lunatic doomsayer with the sandwich board and standing on the street corner or even the lone voice in the wilderness is past. This is no longer the few but the many taken in the aggregate. We ignore what can be seen at humanities peril.

The article here in the Quill, ‘Thinking Green - Quaker Earth Care at Bloomington Friends Meeting’, may have stirred my memory of these. This and a search for an additional item to round out this edition of the Quill lead me to the following article from FCNL (edited to include the url).
                                                                                                DC QQ

New Bill to Help Prevent Climate Wars -Take Action!

On July 20 Representative Pete Stark (CA) introduced H.R. 5783, the Investing in Our Future Act. The bill would place a levy of 0.005% on currency transactions and invest the revenue in programs to help countries adapt to the negative impacts of global warming, improve health systems in impoverished countries, and support childcare programs in the United States.

The bill would tax all transactions starting at $10,000, meaning the levy would not impact small-scale traders and investors or travelers. The financial sector collects huge profits from global currency speculation which can destabilize economies, and a tax might have the added benefit of reigning in this destabilizing practice. You can read Representative Stark’s op-ed on the bill at http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-a-budget/109869-currency-tax-a-way-to-invest-in-our-future-rep-stark.

As FCNL’s policy brief Global Warming Heats Up Global Conflict   notes, the developing world will be hit hardest by the effects of global warming, including desertification, extreme weather events, an increase in the incidence of infectious disease, rising sea levels, and changes in weather patterns and fresh water distribution. These impacts are “likely to exacerbate societal or cross-border tensions and, in some cases, lead to violent conflict, threatening international and U.S. security.”

This sentiment is echoed by many in the U.S. government, including in the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review released by the Department of Defense which states that “assessments conducted by the intelligence community indicate that climate change could have significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to poverty, environmental degradation and the further weakening of fragile governments” and therefore that “climate change… may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict”.

One of the least costly and most effective steps that the U.S. government can take to help prevent an increase in violent conflict spurred by climate change is to invest in global adaptation funding for at-risk countries. Adaptation programs help countries that are experiencing or will experience major negative shocks from climate change to manage the impacts and adapt in positive ways, reducing potential instability and violence. Please write to your representative today and ask her or him to cosponsor H.R. 5783, the Investing in Our Future Act.

blue suit brown shoes

In the Urgent Search of a No Growth Economy

In the Urgent Search of a No Growth Economy
We are quickly coming to the limits of an habitable world on this planet Earth. It is hubris of the worst kind to believe that economies can grow without end. The limits of human culture are quickly coming, not necessarily in my lifetime or of the lifetime of any living human but in the imaginable future of a few generations, straining our ability to respond to the inertia of the arc of our future.
Even that slight remoteness gives us confidence that ‘it’s not my problem’. It was easy to believe in the limitlessness of the physical world, Earth, when the edge of that world was known only by the endurance of humanity to travel and return. Maps of the known had fuzzy edges with territory to be discovered that lay beyond and beyond the celestial dome was where God lived. Now we have images of a remarkably small rocky planet with a veneer of gas and water covering its surface against the vast black vacuum.
Great societies have grown and declined. It seems that this character of human communities is fundamental. That is not the fear. This is the charter of human culture and the result of living in a world and on a planet that changes. Some times the declines of societies are due in part to the exhaustions of the local environments as well as the cyclic nature of societies. They could move on to the next place. This time human culture, the world of human activity, has filled the planets environment to capacity. We must learn to live within an absolute physical limit of the planet to support us.
By the estimates of some, the habits of those of us who live in these United States can not be extended to the whole of humanity on the limited resources of this planet. For us in the ‘first world’ the task of sustaining human culture will require giving up the affluence in the way we have become accustom and redefining ‘quality of life’ in a way that can be supported by and for all of humanity. Peace and social justice issues will seem as a quaint aside when the world is quarrelling over food and water in a global ecosystem that is contracting. We must find new ways of living that satisfies our individual and collective egos that do not require economies and populations to grow without end and that regards the global environment as destructible.

White

Living at the confluence of the flows of stuff, I have wondered what it would be like living in house that looks like a house that on occasion I have seen in architectural magazines: a stark white room with a single white sofa, one floor lamp in chrome and glass on a wood floor with an entire wall of glass revealing a wooded expanse beyond.

Is this the acme of the monastic, contemplative life: no television, no books, no dog, not even a place to put a drink except on the floor? Why not strip the room of every thing but white? How would that be different? Is this a prison or a statement of consummate self completeness? I wonder if the person who would live there would have a dingy, dark place in the middle of some urban blight where they live the rest of their life? What is the threshold between too little and too much? I have on occasion commented that my ideal living situation would be a small house and a big out building, but that is my life. I have a friend who is an academic and I do not even know if he owns a hammer or screwdriver and could easily get along without a garage. He lives in a medium small house in a well kept urban neighborhood in a medium sized town in the Midwest. He has an office and I suppose he keeps the clutter there. I will have to invite myself in some time.

Some years ago I was aware of the nomads of Africa who own no more than they could carry themselves. Is owning stuff the acme to be pursued or the chaos before life changes? Most of us become accustomed, habituated to our circumstances, sentimentally attached to our previous lives. Is it possible to live in a white room on a white sofa next to chrome and glass floor lamp on a wood floor looking out (or not) of a glass wall? I have this sudden vision of scores of people in this room dressed well, eating well, earnestly engaged in intense but casual intercourse.

It occurs to me as I look up at all of the books around, some of which are used and some of which despite their lack of use I can not or do not shed, most of which seem at least interesting, below the row dvds, left to right are Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Complete Tales of Edgar Alan Poe, Thesaurus, Spanish Dictionary, Codes and Ciphers, DVD & Video Guide 2005, Guide Book of United States Coins, an MRS propane camping stove, The Twelve Terrors of Christmas, Field Guide Matchbox, Familiar Birds of North America, Field Guide to American Wildlife, Game Animals, Ground Cover, trees (yes a book), a bottle of baby aspirin, A Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs, Rocks and Minerals, Rocks and Minerals (same name, different book), Seashells, Seashells of North America, American Clocks, and Watch & Clock Repair. I had a friend years ago whose parents’ house I would visit occasionally: well kept, pleasant, and comfortable. There was not a book to be seen. I went for years before I realized this, but only in retrospect did it seem odd.

And now?

Virtues

The Virtues of Digging a Post Hole by Hand

The virtues of digging a post hole by hand on a hot summer’s afternoon are at least to be enumerated. I counted my pulse. I have done to little excise recently. It was 117. I was keeping up with the water and the breaks. It was hot. The heat index was over 100 and the actual temperature was ninety two. My goal is one post hole a day, maybe two if I start early, along with other things. On a cooler day I would have done four. It is no mean post hole. While no utility pole, (I wonder how the first telegraph pole holes were dug? I remember Mom watching road work being done from the front window of my Grandmother’s house, the road grader was striping away pavement so that the road could be resurfaced, she commented that the road grader replaced many men with picks and shovels, and mules and wagons to do the same work.) it was a six by six requiring a larger hole than a single bite of my extra sturdy Sears and Roebuck post hole digger and the hole needed to be dug four foot deep. I have an auger that can be tractor mounted but no tractor presently that will carry it. That tractor needs a new clutch but time, money, and interest keep me from it.
We are going willy nilly to the edge of the planets ability to support us with but only a hopeful gesture from us that somehow all will work out. Daily I see ads for new ways to use energy, seemly endless ways to replace good excise, to advertise our wealth with the well trimmed lawns - Frederick Law Olmsted set the standard for lawns and with growing wealth of the nation came the lavish spending of the planets health on green lawns, battery power everything – an electric motor can be eighty percent efficient, so if a drill is plugged in with a cord, twenty percent of that electrical energy is lost, (better yet a muscle powered drill - I do not own one), a battery is about eighty percent efficient and if a battery is put between the drill and the outlet about thirty six percent of the energy is lost plus now there is the environmental load of the battery manufacture and disposal, and the power of personal transportation - when good public transportation might reduce the carbon load on the atmosphere and by some estimates it is already to late, no possible course of action can stop global warming to the point that oceans will not rise and inundate coasts and islands. We are ready to throw the planet away to own gadgets that take away our mental and physical exercise. I saw a shower gadget on one of those house programs that remembers the temperature of the water and which of eight shower heads to turn on for each of several persons – just twiddle the knobs please.
These posts are corner posts for a ten acre field. This will be a high fence to keep the deer out, six foot. This field will be the beginning of the shade tree nursery and needs extra protection from the deer. We rarely see the dear but the evidence is plentiful. I am well past the time I had expected to start the nursery, years. It will become my retirement plan. The first three feet of soil is hard, partly it is well drained and dry, partly it is well compacted silty loam. I dig through the first foot of soil and fill the hole with water and take my first break. When I return, most of the water has soaked in. The digging is difficult but not as difficult. The next foot of soil is out and I refill the hole with water, break time. The third foot of soil yields more easily and the forth foot of soil is easily dug being mostly sand. I set the post and tamp the soil taking care to make the post plumb.
Tomorrow will be hotter and I have other things to do, so the second post and maybe the third will wait for the next day or the day after.

The Virtues of Digging a Post Hole by Hand

The virtues of digging a post hole by hand on a hot summer’s afternoon are at least to be enumerated.
It is virtuous to think of the future
as if it will be,
to plan the spot
were the first piece of sod will be taken out,
to cut back the brush,
to move the soil,
to know what lies under foot.
It is virtuous to know what energy it takes,
to have it flow through flesh that I know,
to feel the sting of the sweat in my eyes
and its salt in my mouth,
to be thirsty and tired,
and to drink water and sit where it is cool.
It is virtuous to feel the soil yield with difficulty,
then with greater ease as the dry loam turns to sand.
It is virtuous to pile soil
so that it can be used again.
It is virtuous to fetch the post
that was laid away so long ago for this purpose,
to feel the certain thud as it finds the bottom of the hole.

The post should stand plumb and at the corner, then the soil replaced in metered portions and tamped so that the post may resist its load.

A Training Fire

A Training Fire

I arrived well after the volunteer fire department had gotten there. I had a skills evaluation earlier that morning for a course I was taking, otherwise I would have been there earlier. They had been lighting fires and putting them out and relighting them again and again. They had a group of cadets that needed some practice with a real fire and a house owner that needed a house demolished.

They were packing up gear and trucks when I arrived. It was a niece day for a fire. I had not packed my camera when I had left home, having not thought about the training fire, as I had focused on my test anxiety. I took it all in and said hi all the way around and went the six miles home to get some lunch and my camera.

When I got back most of the breather gear had been packed in the pickup truck and the last of the cadets were finishing there training. The fire would start in earnest soon. Folks had gathered on the lawn: friends and family of the cadets, the regular volunteers, the local Red Cross Chapter, neighbors, and official and unofficial photographers. There would be a group photo in front of a fully engulfed house later.

The fellow with the hose was teasing the cadets with a shower?

The house had been stripped of its shingles to avoid burning them but this had left the house so wet from several days of rain that the house had been hard to light. The fire started slowly and was lit several times before the whole house began to burn. It would not burn fully until later, much later. As a whole, the mood was festive lacking the urgency of an unplanned fire.

When I left, the fire department had left a crew and truck behind to watch the fire. Some of the neighbors still sat out on lawn chairs to watch the remainder of the fire.