Advice to Environmental Policy Makers: Limit Further Damage
Descending the nearby mountain I had hiked last Sunday afternoon, I slipped a bit, and almost sprained my ankle. Though I quickly recovered my balance, the brief incident caused me to think about how clever nature is; in the case of such a trauma, my body would have instantly provided pain and swelling to the injured joint, limiting motion, thus minimizing further injury.
Of course, this is one of many self-limiting systems that helps regulate individual organisms, and society at large. We laugh about the annual Darwin Awards, posthumously bestowed on people who accidentally kill themselves in the process of attempting extraordinarily stupid things, thus unintentionally performing acts of kindness, removing bits of “stupid DNA” from the human gene pool.
Similarly, the natural environment contains numerous systems to counteract the damage that humankind is inflicting on it. As the late comedian and social critic George Carlin pointed out, “I love these people who talk about ‘saving the Earth.’ Don’t worry about the planet; the planet will be just fine. It’s people who are going away. The Earth is in the process of shaking us off like a bad case of fleas — like a landlord who evicts tenants who don’t pay their rent.”
Of course, he was exactly correct; that’s precisely what’s occurring. Those of us who can observe this, but who have, thus far, been ineffective in preventing the destruction, describe it as “watching a train wreck in slow motion.” The processes by which all this happens at the geologic scale are so slow that untold ruin is occurring while we’re gradually coming to understand the magnitude of the disaster we’re creating. Imagine how much damage an individual would sustain to his ankle, if, after a sprain, there were a week’s delay in the experience of the pain and swelling.
Because ecosystems on a planetary scale change so slowly, there is no real way to assess the harm we’re doing to the atmosphere and oceans on a day-to-day basis. As a result, it is possible that we’ll be bickering about which countries should cut greenhouse gas emissions until the damage is so great that it can no longer be corrected.
How many people will die in extreme weather events? Starved through desertification of our farmland? Displaced from their homelands by global climate change? There’s no way to know. But maybe we should consider wrapping our planetary ankle right now, limiting further injury.
There is an interesting DVD titled “Eating”–3rd edition which shows what is happening to the earth and what we might do to help ourselves and the planet at the same time. A copy donated to the library was refused. Wonder why?
If one accepts that the current mass of humanity exceeds the carrying capacity of the planet and that people are too self-centered to take personal responsibility to mitigate the harm, why do we worry about Gaia’s potential acts of self defense like desertification, plagues and other responses that will thin the herd and bring things back into balance? Given a choice, I’d prefer an exemption from the cull, but I know they won’t exist.
I can see you have you tongue firmly implanted in your cheek here, John. But don’t you see a lack of sustainability in our current appoach to energy, food, and water? And re: Gaia, please tell me what you think of this: http://2greenenergy.com/gaia-hypothesis/19325/. Thanks.
Check out the Gaia hypothesis http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Gaia_hypothesis
The earth is a restorative “organism”that can counter anything we throw at it. Humans might be a casualty of the restorative effects. Also consider the LeChatelier principle in chemistry that explains the statistical dynamics of restoration of a system that is stressed.
Because of the small scale of our human experiment on the skin of space ship earth, the effects and countereffects may be so masked by other natural stresses and strains that we may not see the net effect for a millenium or more. Then again, the “sky is falling” folks insist that everything is going to happen in their life time and probably by next week.
Larry Lemmert
retired chemistry and physics teacher
Neenah/Wautoma
WI
Please see: http://2greenenergy.com/gaia-hypothesis/19325/.
George Carlin is one of my favorites too. He said:
“When Thomas Edison worked late into the night on the electric light, he had to do it by gas lamp or candle. I’m sure it made the work seem that much more urgent.”
Maybe we should be fully aware that we have to use the last drops of oil to create the alternative energy solutions we need, before it’s too late.
Your analogy with our body mechanisms for warning-to-healing is not applicable to mankind as a whole. Those who really have the power to make or break this planet as a livable place live in a bubble of their own and never feel the pain. Mankind is a dysfunctional organism.
I recently showed a film called “Earth: The Operators Manual” produced by the National Science Foundation at our local college.
The audience sat in complete silence for a few moments afterward, trying to assimilate what they had just witnessed into their own prior view of the world.
We engaged in a very pro active discussion for about an hour afterwards and several people came up to me later and asked me if I would lend them the film so that they could show it at some of their organizations.
There is a growing realization that the political class in this country would like us to keep things just as they are and have been for the past 100 years. It’s cosey and cushey for them that way.
Therefore, the only other choices we have is to either go it alone, or find others of similar mind and begin to network togather. It is really up to each and everyone of us to set examples for others to follow. Become the change agent in your community.
Craig,
The saving of our world from politically active environmentalists eager to access grant funding for future research is counter productive. 80% of “Greenhouse Gas” (CO2) is produced by vegitation in the world’s oceans and of the other 20%; 19% is from trees and other plants, only One Percent is from human endeavor, so “What, me Worry?”
These percentages are as accurate as an entrepreneur’s profit predictions in a proforma business plan. Somebody just plucked them out of their head, but, much environmental data is created in just the same self-serving way by those desirous if making a “Splash” thats why we are told,”Believe none of what you read,(It was stated to sell newspapers) and half of what you see.” And to that I would add, “None of what a talk show host or guest says either!”
The other day I received a video showing a guy with a dump truck full of garbage baking up and dumping it into a river. He drives home and goes into the shower, as he showers, the same garbage he dumped into the river starts falling on him through the shower head. What a way to show us what happens with our junk and garbage.
Sounds clever. Please post a link if you can find one. Thanks.
I just had to mention a positive concept, forget the tar sands and oil shale and “Fracking” they are too expensive and un-necessary. Use Solar PV to generate electricity; Or use excess capacity from wind, hydro, or Geothermal to generate the electricity to “Disassociate water into Hydrogen and Oxygen, then pump the hydrogen into the natural gas pipelines as a fuel already being distributed and which it will mix readily as it is present in most natural gas already. Oxygen (for industrial purposes and medical use) is produced by cryogenic (Extreme cold)condensation of air and because nitrogen and oxygen condense at different temperatures they separate. Why not just use the oxygen from water after we remove the hydrogen; oxygen is often merely vented off into the atmosprere, bottle it and sell that too! At the prices they sell it for, to use industrially it would be profitable. Many areas in the south are desert or marsh/swamp and somewhat environmentally sensitive so put solar collectors on posts ten feet above and seperated to allow sunlight to reach the swamp or desert floor and the sun/shade ratio doesn’t disturb the environment. Swamps usually have many trees which can be trimed down to below the solar collectors. Alternatively put solar collectors under the high voltage distribution wires in the cleared right of ways already mowed or chemically denuded of all vegitation as most now are, produce extra power right in the distribution parhs already available and don’t eliminate good agricultural land we need for food production.
I have noticed in all the publicity pictures the large expanses of land with solar collectors sitting above it always is bare of any vegitation. Uaually it looks like a layer of gravel has been spread and I know the normal situation is to sprincle herbacide on the gravel to inhibit weed growth and minimise trimming of vegitation. Would it not be more environtamentally sound to prohibit such herbacide usage and lease out graizing for goats, sheep, or cattle on the land? All they need is a good fence and that is uasually present and a watering trough. Even wild donkeys from the BLM Mustang and burro program would eat all the weeds, and are not agressive toward any workers or the equipment. BLM prefers a shed for them to take shelter in but the burros would stand under a solar collector mounted seven feet high on the area somewhere. Only a couple of graizing animals per acre will keep the brush and weeds and grass down to less than six inches tall. I know, I raise burros to sell to sheep and goat herders to protect their flock from cyotees and wild dogs here in Florida.
As stated in prior comments, the earth will do just fine. It is also reasonably likely that humanity will do just fine. Hmmm? Well, it strikes me that it is a matter of definitions. Those who came before me and used firewood and had no antibiotics – from their perspective, they did just fine. So will our descendants, in the sense that its difficult, if not impossible, to have a perspective outside of one’s own context. An American in Newport Beach gets by, and so does an Indian in the ghettos of Mumbai – each from their own perspective.
We are certainly attempting to understand the changes that occur when you have 500ppm CO2 and the methane hydrates are boiling out furiously, but it is unlikely we will in advance feel it at the visceral level, and that’s usually the only time we act.
The end of Doctor Strangelove comes to mind – moving into mine shafts. In this case, whatever we do for probably the next few million years or so. I’m sure the future of humanity will be considerably stranger than our fiction has yet described.
Injured ankle and Carlin examples are right on the button. The globe has already been there and wears its history where science can find it. What we are losing is a climate that has been very beneficial for our species. Our choice is to work for the climate we have known or allow the burning of fossil fuels replace this climate with a hotter one and all of those consequences. For example we know that this climate can feed us all but we have no such expectation of a climate that keeps getting measurably warmer every generation.
Planet Earth is feeling very uncomfortable. Like us when we feel uncomfortable, we move and adjust to find a more comfortable position. In early 2011, the New Zealand earthquake, the Japan earthquake and the earth quake in SW China all happened within 100 days. There were over 200 ‘ after shocks and tremors’ following the Japan and New Zealand quake.
We should all actively try to do something about climate change.
The reality of climate disruption is only one of a great many major reasons we need to get ourselves off of that grimy ancient sunlight we suck out from under the feet of foreign peoples and onto the modern stuff that streams cleanly and abundantly down upon us every day.
As a result of the success of ‘denier funding’ by slippery self-interests, and the knee-jerk ideological response of the lizard-brain, far too many have their heads firmly stuffed in the sand when it comes to seeing and admitting the reality of our collective disruption of our climate.
Rather than engage in the vain folly of screaming at a few buried heads, I will calmly address the rest of the body of humanity by taking a mildly circuitous tour of a few not distantly related factors at hand.
We in America enjoy our way of life and our liberties. That way of life and those liberties are – at the moment, and for the past few generations – dangerously dependent on a resource we no longer have in abundance… oil. Two thirds of the world’s oil is in the fractious and long manipulated Middle East where the people are awakening and demanding true representation that will prevent our continued domination of the region, except by prohibitively expensive and self-defeating force.
Additionally, as we engage in a senseless and futile struggle to win hearts and minds with violence, China has been quietly building its influence, using far more sociable and enduring methods, across numerous oil rich nations. The Chinese government has also shrewdly made itself the financier of our excessive greed – while that domestic greed has stubbornly engaged in a short-sighted spurning of the domestic investment in education, health and infrastructure that would undergird healthy profits into the future.
Having already helped fund our grinding misguided transformation from the greatest creditor nation to the nation deepest in total debt, Beijing has been working to ensure the satisfaction of the rapidly growing energy demands of the billion-plus Chinese population. They are not only pursuing this goal by increasing imports of that same foreign oil upon which we Americans still deeply depend (to use G.W. Bush’s well-acquainted word, “addicted”), but also by developing their already dominant manufacturing infrastructure to provide the world with yet another coveted product stream – the energy systems of the future, photovoltaic and concentrated solar, among others.
More rapidly than the billion-plus population of neighboring India, the Chinese have been transforming from a rural agrarian to an urban industrial society – just as we did here after our Civil War. The consumer economy that the Chinese have for decades so dominantly and skillfully supplied in the West is now growing in their homelands, and as a result their energy footprint is expanding rapidly. They can see, as we have not, that the planet’s fossil resources will not be sufficient to the task, and they’re preparing alternatives.
With about 6% of the world’s people and our wasteful economy, we use about 25% of the world’s oil, and yet our total domestic supply is, at most, less than 3% of the global total – this is why we have for decades imported a majority of the oil we use. The simple fact is that a time is fast approaching when fossil fuels cannot, even at maximum production, satisfy global demand, and we cannot hope to preserve our present position as the vastly overriding consumer of those resources in the face of other rising powers. Our national security and sovereignty are already vulnerable, and we are approaching a set of circumstances that make a net-less tightrope and a fifth of vodka seem like a safe combination.
That oil supply is already beginning to dwindle, new discoveries already fail to satisfy the growing demand, fossil energy sources are more and more remote and expensive to extract and transport, and their extraction is more damaging to the vitality of the rest of our natural resources – mountaintops, rivers, oceans – and the necessary web of life they support, and of which we are part…
As merely one vitally important facet of our way of life, our fossil-energy-intensive food production methods are increasingly at risk, as our new techniques sap and sterilize the soil and make us more and more reliant on inferior chemical substitutes in a strategy that quite obviously cannot be sustained over the long term. We are already seeing mass die-offs of bellwether species like bees, frogs and birds, and we’re observing with alarm the formation and expansion of vast dead zones across our oceans and coral reefs. We can no longer eat seafood safely because of the mercury content we’ve poured through our power plants into our atmosphere and down into the seas.
The value of the natural world that ultimately supports us, and with which we must always be inextricably linked, is little accounted in our measurement of progress. An economist not long ago asserted that even the worst collapse of the natural world would have only a negligible fiscal effect because it agriculture amounts to only 3% of the economy as a whole. The fact neglected there in that calculus is that’s the 3% we eat.
Our dominant measure of economic advancement is the GDP, but it’s a useless number. It’s merely a blind lump sum of all the transactions that occur in our economy. The cost of increased security measures against crime and private prison expansion and treatment of rising cancer rates all show up as positives under this measure.
Healthcare is a great example of how this measure fails. Costs have risen over 70% since 2000, leaving US businesses at a crippling global disadvantage. American auto companies pay more for medical coverage than for steel. US citizens pay far more per capita for medical coverage than any other nation, and yet the WHO ranks our availability of care 37th in the world. We pay more than 16% of our GDP for medical insurance and over 37 million of us have no coverage at all. While “health insurance” firms typically show 17% to 28% overhead (executive pay, advertising, lobbying, etc.), national health systems show just 3% to 8% overhead and cover entire populations.
Even the conglomerated news media (as restricted as it is by editors’ and boards’ fears of offending major advertising clients) is not barren of accounts of callously cruel and even illegal decisions to drop a patient’s coverage or limit care or benefits for the sake of greater profit. Yet, as a recent example of highly skewed news coverage, Investor’s Business Daily suggested people like the palsy-stricken physics genius Stephen Hawking would never survive under Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) – but, in fact, Hawking was born in Britain and has lived there all his life, and he states that without the NHS he wouldn’t be alive today.
We see a lethally skewed government as healthcare “reform” committee chairman Max Baucus refused to allow anyone representing a national single-payer health system to testify, or even to discuss that long-proven solution. Why? Look at his campaign contributors. His very biggest donors include “health insurance” firms.
This sort of phenomena leads many to distrust and discount government as a beneficial and guiding force in our society, and yet those whom we consider most honorable and trustworthy among us – firefighters, soldiers, policemen, teachers, and park rangers – are all occupying positions we have properly learned to include in government, for the greater good of society.
Compare the honor we ascribe to these professions with the well-earned reputation of corporate lobbyists and the board members of our largest corporations, ExxonMobil and Wal-Mart.
Some would put their trust in the wealthy to rule. After all, this thinking goes, haven’t they demonstrated – through their success – their superiority and their fitness for leadership? Not satisfactorily considered in that thinking is the corporate world’s very long and very woeful track record in terms of ethics and corruption whenever there’s cash to be made or saved. In the corporate ‘mind’ everything is justified for profit’s sake.
Are there examples? Here are just a few among many, from news stories that largely escaped mainstream attention in recent decades:
• Ocean-Spray was reportedly caught “cross-hauling” (using trucking contractors who were known to be filling up trailer containers with highly toxic chemicals and hauling them in one direction, and then filling the very same containers with juice ingredients to haul in the other direction – with merely a quick soap-and-warm-water rinse in between loads)…
• A whistleblower revealed that Beechnut was selling colored sugar-water labeled as apple juice for our infant children…
• A coal-mining firm in Tennessee had apparently figured it was cheaper to pay the EPA fines than to properly contain its vast pool of accumulated toxic sludge – the predictable impact was hideously disastrous…
• Evidence reveals our importers show little concern about the lead in the Chinese toys that they sell to our children…
• Texaco chose to use antiquated and lethally polluting processes and practices within the headlands of the globe’s largest river, thereby decimating wide swaths of virgin wilderness and poisoning thousands of local people – and then, just like Union Carbide in Bhopal, and so many other similarly guilty firms, it simply sold its local assets and walked away…
• Those fanatically publicized but mythical Obama “death-panels” have instead long existed in head offices of medical insurance firms – in the ghastly and ethereal shape of care denial strategies and coverage cancellation practices…
Note that not a single one of these organizations has ever had its charter revoked for its callous and willful assaults upon innocent life. Yet now our nation’s highest court has decided to allow the filthy, grasping and rending claws of soulless and unreal creatures like these to simply buy our democratic republic out of hand, and out from under our feet.
In our path toward a sane and survivable future, one of the principal obstacles is the deepening wholesale purchase of our leadership and our legislative processes, and the increasingly centralized control of our media – our information resources – by moneyed interests, personified in the corporate charter.
Despite their merchant roots and their overwhelming favor of white male landowners, our founders wisely sought to nurture and preserve our free press and prevent the seizure of our government by a wealthy few, and they put quite stringent limits on the power of corporations, particularly in the political sphere. We’d since made respectable progress in the realms of civil rights and social responsibility, and investments in education and infrastructure that led to collective prosperity. However, the condition that those fathers of our country long feared has nevertheless come to pass – our government no longer exists as an arm of the whole people, but instead is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of an opulent few.
From horserace “news” coverage of dumbed-down campaigns to those fork-tongued promises and ‘issue ads’ that mock public service, avarice continues to accomplish its pervasive evils. In every facet of human endeavor, including the vital conversion of our energy to sustainable and healthy sources, the removal and prevention of bribery and the free circulation of knowledge are of primary importance. Wealth, and not wisdom, greed, and not greatness, wins and will keep winning the day. We now genuinely reside under the best hypocrisy that this money can buy… and as long as We the People allow cash to reign as king over our government, our beloved America will only get worse.
We the People have endured too much to be silent, sacrificed too long to be still, and suffered far too much of this opulent corruption at the expense of our prosperity, our jobs, our homes, our health – our lives. When will we summon the courage and the righteous indignation and the outrage to get up out of our chairs and say… forcefully, decisively, and continuously…?
“WE’RE MAD AS HELL, AND WE’RE NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!!!”
Craig,
Some things in the comments make a lot of sense; others not so much. Man’s actions or lack of do have an effect on this planet but folks forget that this is a dynamic planet is constantly undergoing change – with or with out mans intervention. We can’t “make” it remain as it is; that’s a pipe dream. The thing we can do will help offset our mistakes but so many of those mistakes are not well known and they will have a shorter more dramatic affect than others such as the U.S.’s current use of systemics (such as the coating on corn seed) this is killing the honey bees and if one considers that 80% of what we eat needs bees for pollination the results will be felt sooner that say “green house gas effects”. In other words we might starve ourselves to death before the polar bears die off. Our own EPA allows the fox to guard the hen house in spite of the European states outlawing the use of these compounds. The point is we need to take care of those little things that we create that will directly affect us and work on the larger picture as we advance. The climate is going to change no matter what we do but we shouldn’t choke ourselves with pollution in the mean time. We all have to do our part and it is much easier with the current electronic media at our finger tips. Spread the word as it becomes available, get some fresh minds in leadership positions and make sure they’re knowledgeable on the issues; don’t let up but don’t makeup stories either be truthful it goes further and is more convincing than say Al Gore’s approach. Nobody wants to buy from a salesman who uses scare tactics.