The Problem with Paradise

The Eagles' song "The Last Resort" begins with these lines:

She came from Providence 

The one in Rhode Island

Where the old world shadows hang heavy in the air.

She packed her hopes and dreams like a refugee

Just as her father came across the sea.

It's a song about emigration, about westward movement, the colonization (and destruction) of the continent.  With each westward move, to the farthest coast and then to the islands beyond, the colonists believe they've found Paradise, the ultimate place of rest and beauty.

But there's a problem: no sooner do they arrive than they begin to turn Paradise into a wasteland.

I was thinking about this song when I watched After Earth, the Will and Jaden Smith vehicle.  Not a bad film, as summer sci-fi fare goes; if you want a full review, check out my other blog, YA Guy.

But what got me thinking about the Eagles song as I watched this film was the theme of emigration and colonization, in this case emigration away from earth and colonization of distant planets.

In After Earth, humans have destroyed our home planet's environment, and so they leave, seeking a new, more hospitable planet.  It's a theme we've seen in a number of recent fantasy/sci-fi films: Avatar, Wall-E, Battle for Terra.  I wrote about those films here.

And what I wrote is that I find such films disturbing, because--for all their ostensible environmental awareness--they suggest that even if we trash this planet, there'll always be another planet waiting for us.

Some people actually believe this.  Should earth become uninhabitable, they say, we'll simply pull up roots and terraform the moon or Mars.  That such a feat is far beyond our current technologies isn't the main problem with such thinking.

The main problem is that, unless we can overcome such thinking, no matter where we go we'll start doing the same thing all over again.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with Paradise: we don't really want to live in it.  We want to devour it and move on.

The Eagles song ends:

And you can see them there on Sunday morning

Stand up and sing about what it's like up there

They call it Paradise

I don't know why

You call someplace Paradise

Kiss it goodbye.

What's going to save us, if anything is, is not another place "after Earth."  There is no such place, or if there is, it won't be safe from us for long.

Paradise can't save us until we decide there's something worth saving.

35,000.org

As you know if you're following my Twitter feed @JoshuaDBellin (and if you're not, why the heck aren't you?), I was in DC yesterday for 350.org's ClimateForward Rally.  The stated purpose of the rally was to convince President Obama to put the kibosh on the Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline, or at least the part of it that's planned to pass through U.S. territory (which, as I understand it, would put the kibosh on the whole deal).  The broader purpose of the rally was to draw together the disparate elements of the climate change movement--people fighting fracking, mountaintop coal removal, the petroleum lobby, and a host of other issues--and thus to forge a single, coherent force capable of halting the juggernaut that is our nation's and our world's fossil-fuel addiction.

Whether the rally achieved either purpose is anyone's guess.  President Obama didn't make an appearance (he was reportedly golfing with Tiger Woods), and whether he'll show the political strength and foresightedness to live up to his recent rhetoric on climate change remains to be seen.  (The fact that he held that rhetoric in abeyance during the election season, bringing it out only when victory was assured, suggests that he knows how unpopular it remains among a sizable portion of his constituents.)  Van Jones, one of the day's speakers, opined that no matter what else the president does during the next four years, all his achievements will come to naught if he fails to act decisively on the world's climate.  I'm inclined to agree, but I'm not sure the president will.

Regarding the climate movement writ large, 350.org creator Bill McKibben announced at the rally that February 17, 2013 was the day the movement finally came together and found its voice.  That may be.  By some estimates, there were as many as 50,000 people marching, chanting, dancing in the streets, and sign-holding (my favorite banner read "We Must Rise Faster Than the Seas"), though 35,000 is probably closer to the actual mark.  That's a lot of people, and we sure did look united.  On the bus ride home, though, I eavesdropped on a rather contentious debate about the merits of solar versus nuclear--a very old debate, and one that's likely to get us nowhere.  I've been in this fight for over a decade now, and every time there's a big rally, someone says our time has finally come--yet obviously, measured in terms of tangible changes in policy or popular conviction, it hasn't.  To expect 35,000 people--or 35 million, which is what the movement will need if it really wants to attract attention--to stand united on any issue seems like a lot to ask.

Still, for the moment, the day belongs to us.

Toxic Tommy

Of all the crazy things, I've been asked to create an anti-fracking coloring book to parody, lampoon, and otherwise undermine the pro-fracking coloring book recently released by a natural gas company. The title character's name, Toxic Tommy, is not of my design, but the character and his shenanigans are. I offer the first page of the coloring book here; I hope the whole thing will be out soon.

How did a self-respecting English professor like me end up doodling sinister cartoon dinosaurs?

Weird World

The world of environmentalism is a weird one, full of surprises, unexpected juxtapositions and reversals, random facts and realizations. Here are three recent examples:

1. I was driving home a few days ago in blinding rain when it occurred to me that what I was seeing (or, actually, not seeing) was the climate I'm going to be living with for the rest of my life. We all know how rainy it's been in the northeast and the south, how strange the weather patterns have been; we remark about it all the time. But it doesn't strike most of us that the reason the weather's so weird is that the climate has changed; we keep waiting for global warming to happen, not realizing it already has. Weather is the veil of climate: it hides the bigger picture we can't see. But at the same time, weather is the sign of climate: it reveals what we can't see. If the weather is weird--and it is--a weird climate lies just behind.

2. I recently learned of a company, Terracycle, that will turn those pesky juice pouches into kid-friendly products (pencil cases, etc.). If you sign up online, your school gets a few pennies per pouch donated. On the face of it, this sounds like a good thing. But then you have to ask yourself: why are juice pouches manufactured in such a way that they're not recyclable by usual means? And is not the promise to recycle the things into yet another consumer product a way of convincing people to buy non-recyclable items, guilt-free? My advice to anyone who worries about juice pouches being thrown into landfills: don't buy the damn things in the first place.

3. A few weeks ago, I attended an event concerning the Marcellus Shale. One of the speakers delivered a passionate address against drilling; she waxed eloquent about the "poisons we're pumping into our chilren's bodies," and she presented herself as a staunch foe of corporate greed, indifference, and propaganda. After the event, I went to congratulate her on her speech. I found her outside, smoking a cigarette.

The Puppet Master

This whole business with the "independent" drilling inspectors has gotten me so worked up . . . I couldn't resist.

Wake Up and Smell the Poison

This morning, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that inspectors policing the drilling operations in the Marcellus Shale will no longer be able to do anything--issue permits, enforce regulations, cite violations--without approval of top Department of Environment officials. According to DEP spokespeople, this will bring "consistency" to the regulatory process. Yet oddly enough, such consistency is being sought only in regard to the Marcellus Shale; the same policy does not apply to any of the other regulatory protocols the DEP oversees.

Come on, people! This is a shameless ploy to strip independent inspectors of their power to regulate the shale drilling, and to place all decisions in the hands of political appointees whose jobs are dependent on an administration utterly sympathetic to the drilling industry. It's one step short of having the drillers issue their own permits and cite their own violations. My guess is, they wouldn't find themselves having committed any.

Tom Corbett's office denies having had anything to do with the policy change. And if you believe that one....

When are ordinary Pennyslvanians going to wake up and smell the poison?

The Evil That Men Do

The murder of a teenage girl in my hometown has set me on a course of rather gloomy reflections. The person accused of the crime, a teenage boy, is alleged to have convinced her to play hooky from school, then, at her home, perhaps while attempting to rape her, he is accused of shooting her in the chin, a wound that would not in itself have been fatal. He is then, however, alleged to have covered her with a blanket, which he proceeded to set on fire, whether to cover the crime or merely for the thrill of seeing another living creature burn I don't know. She died of smoke inhalation. While she died, the boy is alleged to have looted her house, taking (among other things) that other favorite of a species bent on rapine and destruction: a video game.

Reading between the lines, my wife, a mental health professional, speculates that this girl, who was described as "simple" and "trusting" and who could neither read nor write, was mentally retarded.

So there you have it: a boy who snuffs out the life of a profoundly innocent creature merely because, I suppose, it fulfilled some need of his own. And in that respect, he's pretty much like the rest of us.

Assuming he doesn't get the death penalty--and though he's being tried as an adult, I hope he doesn't, because what's the point of adding more death to the original death?--he'll spend sixty or so years in prison. There, he'll perhaps learn to feel bad about what he's done. But what can he ever feel, what can he ever do, to justify, atone, or compensate for this act?

Nothing.

Which brings me to the human species of which he is, sadly, all too representative. We've caused untold chaos on this planet, much of it directed against ourselves, much of it directed against other species and the planet itself. What have we ever done, what can we ever do, to justify, atone, or compensate for our acts?

Nothing.

Those seeking to find extrinsic value in human life--that is, value that goes beyond our value to ourselves--can point at a number of accomplishments as evidence that, despite all the bad we've caused, we're still capable of producing good. But I'm not buying any of it.

Art and music? Sure, they're nice to look at and listen to, but all they do in the end is fulfill our own needs. They have no extrinsic value whatsoever.

Technology? Most of it has been bent toward the destruction of human and non-human life and the gutting of the planet. Some of the rest has been dedicated to making us feel good about how smart we are: landing on the moon, for example. And the rest has either helped prolong or enrich human life or attempted to fix some of the planetary messes we ourselves have caused. So again, none of it has value beyond what it produces for us or, in the latter case, what it would not have needed to produce had we never come along in the first place.

Human rights? Well, if there hadn't been human wrongs, there'd have been no need to develop human rights. All the human rights movements throughout history have done little more than move us marginally closer to respecting each other in ways that the simplest caterpillar instinctively respects its fellow caterpillars. And even if we go all the way--that is, even if we arrive at a point where all human life is treated with dignity and care--we'll have done no more than fulfill another intrinsic need, a need to value ourselves.

The human species, in short, is exactly like every other species in this fundamental respect: we seek to fulfill our needs and preserve our lives. There are only two differences between us and everything else. On the one hand, we've needlessly deprived trillions of other organisms--human and non-human--of the same desires; and, on the other, we appear to be the only species capable of recognizing, conceptualizing, and articulating these desires. In consequence, we seem to think that fulfilling them is inherently more significant than the fulfillment of those desires in and by other species.

We even have recourse to God to provide extrinsic justification of our biological needs. All I can say to that argument is, if it's true that the most depraved, destructive species the planet has ever known is God's personal favorite, then God has some serious issues.

Maybe we make the argument for God because otherwise, we couldn't live with ourselves.

In the end, these reflections are not despairing (much less suicidal). I want to live just like everyone else. I enjoy life. I enjoy music, art, certain forms of technology, Nature, my family, my writing, and lots of other things besides. I've done some good to other human beings and non-human beings in my life (and also some bad). I just don't think the things I've done justify my existence.

That teenage girl wanted to live, too. Maybe that's all she wanted. And no matter what the person who did this to her may do in the future, the one thing he most assuredly cannot do is give that back to her.

It Bears Repeating

Much as I hate to repeat myself, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to, shall we say, augment my post of a couple weeks ago concerning our "smarter" planet. Once again, the impetus for this post was a commercial, which might seem a bit trivial; but then, what are commercials if not barometers of cultural desire? Commercials show us what we want, or at least what we think we want, and the fact that so many of them show us thinking we want technological solutions to planetary problems suggests something significant about where we are today.

Enough preamble. The commercial of which I speak was, I think, for GE, and its slogan, after showing lots of people (doctors, salespeople, nuclear plant workers) dancing in some ungodly, earth-spanning conga line, was this: "Technology that makes the world work." My response was: here we go again.

Let's look at this in two possible ways. By "makes the world work," the commercial might be suggesting that technology gives people jobs. (That's the standard corporate and government line, even when they're pushing supposedly "green" technologies: they'll put people to work.) But "makes the world work" could also mean "makes the world function." That is, in the absence of technology, the world would break down, fall to pieces, and ultimately, I guess, cease to exist.

Both of these suggestions are nonsensical. Yes, in a technological society, technology does provide for employment--but it also provides for unemployment. Just ask anyone who's lost a job to a machine whether technology "made them work." My grocery store has trimmed the number of cashiers drastically by installing automated scanners; every time I try to reach someone on the telephone to complain about the breakdown of some piece of technology I purchased, I have to punch fifty-seven keys into the automated system then wait an hour to talk to the one living human being still employed by the company. Unemployment in the U.S. still stands at a whopping 10% (and remember, that figure doesn't include those no longer looking for work, those who are underemployed, or those who are employed in below-subsistence-level occupations). And the U.S. is a lot better off than much of the rest of the world. So much for technology as a panacea for joblessness.

Technology, it would be fairer to say, makes the work that is necessary to sustain itself. In its absence, the work taken up by technology would be taken up elsewhere.

But even more nonsensical is the suggestion that technology makes the world function. The world was functioning just fine before we came along, thank you. Rather, once again, it's a purely circular process: technology creates the conditions under which further technology can be called into action. So technology pollutes rivers and cleans them, sickens people and heals them, trashes the planet and tries to patch it up. If you can name one technology that has solved a problem technology created, I will grant that I'm being hyperbolic. But you can't. You can only name cases (such as the case of CFCs and ozone) in which the removal of an existing technology was necessary to begin to resolve the problem it had introduced.

I am not, in the end, a technophobe, a Luddite, a primitivist. Technologies have achieved some very nice things (such as enabling me to disseminate these words). But let's not kid ourselves about their capacities. Let's not forget that every time I fire up the blog, I expend energy (most of it produced by coal) that dirties the planet and sickens its inhabitants. Nor let us forget that when you read these computer-mediated words, you distance yourself, if only ever so slightly, from primary contact with the physical world.

If we must have technology, then so be it. But let's be prepared to deal with the consequences, and not imagine we can so transform the world through technology that it will, at long last, work.

A Smarter Planet

A few weeks ago, an IBM-designed computer program, Watson, defeated several human contestants on Jeopardy. This was hailed by many as a triumph. In its commercials, IBM featured the program's chief engineer, pronouncing the company's new mantra: "Let's build a smarter planet."

I've been mulling over why this disturbs me so much. For what it's worth, here's what I've come up with.

Humans, being human, have tended to measure intelligence in absolute terms, with ourselves as the sole and final standard. Thus anything that possesses an intelligence functionally akin to ours--say, chimpanzees and dolphins--is "smart," while the farther you get from that standard--from birds to lizards to jellyfish--the farther you get from intelligence. God, being the smartest of all, is simply an uber-human, with an extension of our own capabilities: he knows everything, sees far into the future, etc. Being smart, according to this way of thinking, is an abstraction; it has nothing to do with the organism that houses it, much less with the conditions and contexts within which that organism exists. You're either smart like us, or you're dumb.

But this is, in my view, a radically reductive--and dangerous--understanding of intelligence. Intelligence, as I'll define it, has little to do with human-ness. Rather, it has to do with adaptation.

Birds and reptiles, for example, aren't particularly "smart" by human standards; in fact, we tend to think of their brains as the most "primitive" aspect of our own. Partly, that's an evolutionary description, but it's also an evaluation: the least evolved part of the brain, the part that has the earliest evolutionary emergence, is also the least "smart." (Hence the expression "bird-brain.") And indeed, were you to place a bird or reptile in a situation requiring human intelligence, they'd fail miserably. Put them in front of a closed door, for example, and (even were they possessed of opposable thumbs) the most they'd do is stare listlessly at it.

But the evolutionary progenitors of birds and reptiles, we are told, were very "smart." Dinosaurs ruled the earth for millions of years, and in modern theorizing and modern storytelling such as Jurassic Park, their intelligence compares favorably with our own. Put a Velociraptor in front of a closed door, and it figures out how to use its claws and snout to open it.

My guess, however, is that if you actually put a Velociraptor in front of a closed door, it would have no more idea what to do with it than a modern-day parakeet. That's because, having spent millions of years adapting to a particular environment, a doorless environment, its intelligence would not extend to an environment to which it was not adapted. Over time, given the opportunity, this misfit might eventually figure out what to do with doors. But initially, a creature "smart" enough to survive infinitely longer than we've managed to thus far would appear quite "dumb" when thrown into a world some other creature's intelligence had built.

The same applies for birds and reptiles. They're not particularly smart by our standards, but they are supremely well adapted to their environments. In the absence of major disruption, in the absence of the equivalent of our poor Velociraptor being thrown into an alien world, they thrive without much "smarts" that we would recognize. But as soon as the environments in which their intelligences evolved are disrupted--mostly by humans--they die in droves. Just like their "smart" dinosaur forebears, who died without a wimper when the climate changed and the meteor struck, modern-day organisms are only as "smart" as the environments to which they are adapted allow them to be.

We humans tend to forget this. We believe we're so smart we can adapt to anything--even the drastically new environments we've created for ourselves. If our smarts get us into a jam, if they produce environmental disasters we weren't godlike enough to predict, no problem--we'll just build an even smarter planet that addresses these issues.

It should be evident by now that it doesn't work this way. In fact, it works exactly in the reverse. The more we engineer our planet in an effort to address the perceived and actual shortcomings we've either abided or produced, the farther we drive our world from the intelligence that was adapted to it. The "smarter" we make our planet, the less readily our own smarts can deal with the results.

We don't need a smarter planet. We need a planet to which we're adapted, a planet on which our bodies and brains can survive: a planet in which the global climate remains within the range we evolved to tolerate, a planet in which we don't dredge up radioactive waste every time we force fracking fluid into the shale, a planet in which mercury and other toxins don't concentrate in the fatty tissues of fetuses, a planet in which the other species with which we co-evolved and co-adapted aren't driven to mass extinction by our activities. A "dumber" planet, perhaps--a planet with fewer Watsons and Ipods--but a planet that can sustain the creatures whose intelligence it shaped for these millions of years.

We've already built a smarter planet--a planet smarter than us, in fact. And it turns out that was pretty dumb.

What Would Aldo Do?

Last summer, I participated in a month-long institute funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities on conservationist Aldo Leopold. Leopold's not as well known as other environmentalist icons such as Thoreau and Rachel Carson, but arguably he's more important than either in developing a philosophical underpinning to the modern environmental movement. If he were around today, I think he'd have a thing or two to say.

In his essay "The Land Ethic," published in his book A Sand County Almanac (1949) the year after his untimely death, Leopold wrote:

"The 'key-log which must be moved to release the evolutionary process for an ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

Now, as I hasten to point out to students when we read Leopold, a land-ethic does not erase human claims or automatically subordinate them to the claims of non-human members of the biotic community; it does not mean that we should ignore the legitimate economic needs of human beings. Having lived through the Great Depression, Leopold knew better than to argue that human beings didn't need jobs, natural resources, and land on which to enjoy both. But having lived through the Great Depression, he also saw how reckless land-use had contributed to the breakdown of the human economy (think soil erosion and Dust Bowl), while as an ecologist, he saw how the same tendency to ignore all but short-term economic considerations had devastated the "economy" of Nature (think depleted wolf populations, deer overpopulation, downed forests, polluted waterways, and all the rest of it). He saw, in other words, that a reasonable accommodation had to be struck between human economic activity and the larger needs of the biotic community, including the needs of its human members.

Judged by that standard, the Marcellus Shale craze fails utterly. The integrity, stability, and beauty of the land are being ignored altogether in the rush to produce the profits and fossil fuels that drive the human economy; from what I've read, not a single thought is being given by industry or government to the ethical issues involved. Whether considered in solely human terms--as a grotesque infringement on human rights--or in ecological terms--as an equally brutal assault on the land and its non-human inhabitants--the Marcellus boom tragically illustrates how far we as a society are from the ideal Leopold articulated more than sixty years ago.

We need to organize, agitate, legislate, and do everything possible to combat this great wrong. But we need Leopold's voice as well to remind us that it is wrong, and that only we can set it right.

Afterthoughts on the People's Summit

Great as the People's Summit was, there were a couple things that troubled me while I was there, and I feel as if it might be important to the movement to note my misgivings.

1. The East-West divide. Numerous westerners, folks from Texas and Wyoming who have been living with the effects of the fossil fuel industry (and fracking in particular) for years, professed themselves thankful that this issue has finally hit the east. They weren't wishing their ill luck on us--they were just pointing out that until fracking became a reality for us, we easterners were all too happy to consume the natural gas produced in their states. Like the fossil fuel industry itself, in other words, we were willing to externalize the costs of fracking, to palm them off on someone else. As a homeowner whose water and air are heated by natural gas, I hope I'll never make that mistake again. But I fear that, in many cases, an issue needs to affect one personally before one wakes up to its dangers, or even its existence.
2. The black-white divide. Though there were numerous representatives of tribal peoples at the summit, there was no one I would have identified as African-American. (This is not to say, of course, that visual identification is foolproof.) One of the oldest splits in the environmental movement, one dating back to its origins in the nineteenth century, is the predominance of (relatively affluent) whites and their tendency to ignore the issues of most importance to (relatively poor) non-whites. Given the anti-fracking movement's emphasis on environmental justice--on securing clean air and water, meaningful work, and civil liberties for all people--I hope the movement will be responsive and receptive to the needs of people of color. But given who is most directly affected by fracking at present--rural and suburban people, large landowners, etc.--I fear the movement may take a while before it begins to recognize the concerns and claims of urban, lower-class, and minority peoples.

If this movement is to succeed, it can't be exclusive or exclusionary. Here's hoping the next People's Summit works to address the issues that divide us.

The People's Summit, Day Two

The People's Summit ended today with another excellent round of presenters and a slew of frightening, but galvanizing, facts. Mayor Calvin Tillman of DISH, Texas (featured in Josh Fox's film Gasland) spoke, introducing us to a new nonprofit he's created to help low-income families and communities get their air and water tested. The lunchtime keynote speaker, EPA whistleblower Wes Wilson (also of Gasland fame), fired the crowd up with his homey aphorisms and grassroots passion. (His best line was a Winston Churchill quote: "You can always count on the American people to do the right thing--after they've exhausted all the other options.") And at the conference's close, Fox himself Skyped in from Australia, where he's doing location shooting for a Gasland sequel. I missed a morning session on new online tools to help people in the anti-fracking fight track the industry and connect with each other, but overall, I feel as if I'm bursting with new information and energy.

For me, the most enlightening presentation was given by Bob Howarth, a professor at Cornell who challenges the industry's claims that natural gas is cleaner than coal and oil. In particular, he demonstrated that when you take into account routine leaks of methane from the pipelines and storage tanks, as well as the carbon-intensive activities necessary to transport the fracking water and refine the gas, natural gas ends up being a greater contributor to global warming than either coal or oil. As a longtime follower and advocate of the fight against global warming, this was important news for me to hear--and it suggests that the two movements need to start communicating to a far greater extent than they've done thus far. The only sour note to all this was the speaker who followed Howarth, a former industry vice president now working for the UN who addressed a roomful of activists as if we were kindergartners while he explained to us why gas is much better for the planet than coal and oil. He even had the gall to ask Howarth--a Cornell professor, mind you--if his research had been peer-reviewed! If nothing else, his presence reminded us of what we're fighting against, and of the depths to which they'll sink to try to invalidate our movement.

I returned home to a nice surprise: an email from a fellow blogger, John, who'd noticed my blog and featured it in his own. For those who are following this issue, John's blog is essential reading, focused as it is specifically on fracking. You should definitely check it out!

The fight continues. And thanks to the summit, I think it's safe to say the movement is stronger, more unified, and more prepared to take on the challenge than ever before.

The People's Summit

Today, I attended the first half of the EarthWorks National People's Oil and Gas Summit, held in Pittsburgh (whose City Council, earlier this week, unanimously passed an ordinance banning gas drilling within the city limits). Attendees came from as far as Wyoming and New Brunswick to discuss hydrofracturing ("fracking") in the various shale formations that underlie the North American continent; some of those who spoke are featured in Josh Fox's film Gasland (which, we learned today, has been short-listed for an Academy Award nomination). One of those speakers, Wyoming rancher John Fenton, summed up the attitude of those assembled when he said: "Drilling might be the industry's pot of gold, but to me it's a pot of poison." Stories were rife of people sickened and forced from their homes (or unable to sell them), of communities divided and disenfranchised, of itinerant workers bringing crime and drugs to town, of callous industries threatening and equally callous governments ignoring the communities they claim to serve. One speaker discussed how the profits from drilling are privatized while the costs (economic, environmental, and social) are "externalized" and foisted on the public; another described industry-funded studies based on flawed data, outmoded models, and insupportable comparisons; yet another documented the links between fracking chemicals (those we know of; many remain shrouded in secrecy) and health risks ranging from neurological impairments to cancers. A number of shocking facts emerged, including the following:

• In two communities in Wyoming and Texas where fracking is taking place, between 70 and 80% of residents are experiencing respiratory problems.
• While drilling is often touted as a job-maker for local communities, fully 70% of the industry's workers in Pennsylvania come from out of state.
• The natural gas methane--which is not only deadly to humans but a potent greenhouse gas--has been recorded at asphyxiation levels in some homes near fracking sites.
• High rates of sexual predation--including predation on children--are reported among fracking workers.
• Though Pennsylvania's State Senate insists that a severance tax will drive industry away, Wyoming, with the highest taxes among western states, also has the highest energy production in the U.S. (indeed, it ranks close to the top compared to other energy-producing nations).

On the positive side, some legal battles have been won against the drilling companies, ordinances such as Pittsburgh's are being contemplated by other municipalities, and as evidenced by today's summit, the movement against fracking is growing larger every day.

The chief message I took from today's meeting was the need to learn as much as possible about this issue, and to act on that knowledge in every way imaginable.

I'll be going back tomorrow to continue that process.

Baboons and Monkeys

As a lover of all non-human primates (gorillas especially), I'm never pleased to see them used colloquially to stand for human misbehavior or stupidity--as in "stop monkeying around," or, "you've got the table manners of a chimpanzee," or "you big dumb ape!" It seems to me bad enough that we've managed to drive the majority of our closest genetic cousins to the brink of extinction without suggesting that they, who never did anything nearly as bad to us, must somehow be held responsible for our sins.

But I've been reading a lot of Thoreau and Emerson lately (all in the context of a class I'm teaching), and I have to admit, both of them get a lot of mileage out of simian analogies. Here's Thoreau, in Walden (1854):

Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain.

And here's Emerson, in his 1851 address on the Fugitive Slave Law:

I thought it was this fair mystery, whose foundations are hidden in eternity, that made the basis of human society, and of law; and that to pretend any thing else, as, that the acquisition of property was the end of living, was to confound all distinctions, to make the world a greasy hotel, and, instead of noble motives and inspirations, and a heaven of companions and angels around and before us, to leave us in a grimacing menagerie of monkeys and idiots.

I resort to sentiments such as these when I hear people blather on about extending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, and leasing national parks to oil companies, and drilling in the Marcellus Shale, and building more strip malls, and leaving uninsured children to the mercy of the streets, and dropping more bombs on Afghanistan, and buying more handheld technogadgets, and refusing to tax carbon because China refuses to do it, and lifting regulations on Wall Street, and buying bottled water, and polluting the water that's left, and lots of other things besides. I find comfort in the thought that some people, past and present, knew the true purpose of life, and refused to allow anyone to tell them otherwise.

And I find even greater comfort in the thought that baboons and monkeys have known this all along, and never needed to be convinced.

Or Well

Pennsylvania voters, God love ‘em, have just elected (by a sizable margin) a Republican governor and (in a squeaker) a Republican senator who share, among other loony opinions, the belief that taxes are evil and should not be imposed under any circumstances. Seems like folks in the Keystone State were sick an’ tired of them damn tax-and-spend liberals in Warshington and Harrisburg with their bailouts, stimyoolous plans, and what-not draggin’ our country and our economy down.

Never mind that without the bailouts of the automobile, banking, and lending industries, millions of jobs (not only in those industries but in all sectors affected by them) would have been lost. Never mind that without the stimulus, we’d be in a full-blown depression comparable to the Great one. Never mind that the deficit under Obama is actually lower than it was after eight years of Bushonomics.

Never mind any of that. The citizens hath spoken, and their word is law.

Now, from an environmental perspective, the most depressing part of this whole business is the governor-elect’s vow to resist imposing a severance tax on the gas companies that have descended on my state like a swarm of locusts. Every other state in the union that allows deep-well drilling (the “fracking” process you’ve heard me talk about before) makes the drillers pay such a tax, which the states use to support various programs including, most importantly, environmental clean-up from the drilling. Pennsylvania’s State House, controlled by Democrats, passed a severance tax last year, but its State Senate, controlled by Republicans, can’t seem to move this legislation out of committee. With the new governor at the helm, all hope for a severance tax is lost: even if, by some miracle, the Senate could be convinced to pass this legislation, the governor would surely veto it.

Those opposed to the severance tax say it will scare away the gas companies. If this were true, I’d say that's the best reason of all that we should impose a severance tax. But it’s not true: the gas companies will come wherever the gas is, and the gas is in Pennsylvania. They’ll pay the tax if that’s what it takes to mine our state’s natural resources, just as they pay it in every other gas-rich state across the land.

As you know, I'd prefer a permanent moratorium on gas drilling. That would be the ideal. But in the absence of that unlikely outcome, a severance tax is a minimal palliative against the environmental devastation drilling causes, as well as a minimal mechanism to level the playing field for alternative energy development. It’s a recognition that when drillers drill on public lands--as they’ve already begun to do in Pennsylvania’s state forests--they owe the people who own the lands, namely the citizens of the state of Pennsylvania, something in return. It’s a tax, sure, but it’s a tax that returns money to the citizens, not one that takes money away from them.

But in the Orwellian logic of our newly anointed governor and senator, any tax is a bad tax. The only exception they’ll make, the only tax they’re all too willing to impose, is the exorbitant tax on the health, the environment, and the communities of the very people who put them in office.

Frick, Frack

In the city of Frick, the people are taking a stand against Frack.

Today I attended a rally in downtown Pittsburgh to protest industry plans to drill tens of thousands of natural gas wells (through a process known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”) into the Marcellus Shale formation that lies beneath our fields, forests, and cities. A broad coalition of environmental and citizens’ groups has formed to push for a state moratorium on drilling until further research into its environmental impacts has been conducted, to call on lawmakers to impose a severance tax on the drilling companies to help mitigate environmental impacts, and--most radically--to declare the city of Pittsburgh off-limits to drillers, permanently. The latter ordinance is working its way through Pittsburgh City Council. If passed, it would be the first such ordinance nationwide.

The rally was attended by none other than Josh Fox, rogue visionary behind the film Gasland. Fox whipped the crowd into a frenzy by citing the copious evidence (all of it denied by industry) of negative environmental and health consequences of drilling. He also showed his characteristic flair for the theatrical, calling up the Republican governor-elect of Pennsylvania on his cell phone and, while the crowd hooted approval, leaving a message with the man’s secretary. But the grandstanding had a serious purpose: as Fox represented it, the fight against fracking is the environmental battle of the day. Win this one, he told us, and we secure a greener, brighter future. Lose it, and we concede a future of runaway environmental and human degradation.

Now, all environmentalist prophets say these sorts of things. For Aldo Leopold, the issue was land. For Rachel Carson, it was pesticides. For Al Gore, it was global warming. Environmentalism thrives on these sorts of dire prognostications of utter collapse if that one issue, whatever it may be, is not addressed.

But this time around, I tend to agree with Fox. The natural gas industry stands in the way of healthy environments and communities not only in Pennsylvania, but nationwide (if not worldwide). This latest boondoggle by the fossil fuel industry represents an effort to keep our future locked into the same sorry path we’ve been walking since the time of the industrial revolution, a deal with the devil where we forfeit environmental and communal wellbeing for the luxury lifestyle offered by rapacious robber barons. The rush to drill is based on two deeply flawed propositions that, if exposed and rejected, may well set us on the road to recovery as a people and as a world:

1. Natural gas is a clean energy source. This is, quite simply, bullshit. While natural gas is marginally cleaner-burning than coal or oil, the process by which it’s extracted is brimming with environmental hazards: contaminated water, damaged soil, toxic air. Of the three, the threat to water is perhaps the most ominous: the amount of water required to drill one well is astronomical, and there’s precious little regulation concerning where that water comes from and where it goes after it’s been drenched in hazardous chemicals. As several speakers at today’s rally pointed out, if drilling is as safe as the industry claims, then why did they enlist Dick Cheney and his cronies in Congress to ensure that legislation would be passed exempting the fracking process from key provisions of the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Superfund law? To tout natural gas as a “clean” alternative to oil is akin to praising crack as a safer-burning form of cocaine.

2. Natural gas represents a “transition fuel” to a clean energy economy. Again, total bullshit. If you look at the history of the fossil fuel industry, you’ll find plenty of transitions--but only from one fossil fuel to a yet more cheap, abundant, energy-intensive, and environmentally destructive fossil fuel. From charcoal to coal to petroleum, the industry has tried them all, and they’re seeking newer and unhealthier sources of energy (tar sands and the like) even as we speak. There’s simply no incentive for the industry to do anything else, and anyone who thinks it will diversify out of the goodness of its heart or concern for its customers has been drinking its toxic Kool-Aid for way too long. (We all saw how well BP fulfilled its vow to move “beyond petroleum,” right?) Unless the rest of us make it inconvenient, unprofitable, and in fact illegal for these vampires to conduct their filthy business, the industry will continue to suck fossil fuels from the planet until it’s literally sucked dry. If we are to embrace a clean energy future, it has to start now, with heavy investment in renewables and disincentives for business as usual. This will hurt in the short term, but it will not hurt nearly as much in the long term as a continued dependence on fossil fuels.

So if you’re following this issue, keep your eyes on Pittsburgh. If my hometown can secure victory in this battle--if we can claim our land, our communities, and our health as inalienable rights no one can steal--then the collapse of the fossil fuel industry is within grasp, and a sustainable world within reach.

Drill in Pittsburgh? As they chanted at today's rally: "No fracking way!"

Well, Well, Well....

And here's a shock: it now appears that Halliburton, the company that brought us the Iraq War as well as the gutting of environmental regulations to promote the Marcellus Shale feeding frenzy, knew weeks beforehand that the cement mixture it planned to use to seal the bottom of the Deepwater Horizon well was unstable. Halliburton has steadfastly denied that it did anything wrong or that it had any prior knowledge of faulty methods or materials.

Halliburton lied.

And when Halliburton lied, 11 human workers--and countless non-human workers--died.

If the Iraq War is any indication, Halliburton's punishment for its criminal malfeasance and suppression of the truth will be . . . well, nothing.

When you go to the polls tomorrow, all fed up with the damn Democrats and itching to make a change, to get the country back on track, to axe Obamacare, to do away with the new regulations on Wall Street, to lock in tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent of Americans, or whatever the hell else you plan to vote for, remember this: a vote for the Republicans is a vote for Halliburton, a vote for everything Halliburton stands for: rampant corporate greed and disregard for human (and non-human) life. It's not about limiting government, cutting taxes, restoring individual liberties, or any of that tea-party crap; it's about limiting government, cutting taxes, and restoring individual liberties for the people and corporations who are ruining this country and this world.

But hey, if you can live with that, vote for Halliburton. Maybe they'll be so thankful they'll clean up their act.

Trash Stinks

While I'm on the subject of commercials, how about this one for unrivaled stupidity:

A husband and wife are sitting on their couch at home. Their noses wrinkle. Seems like something stinks. Next thing you know, the camera zooms back to reveal that they're sitting in the middle of a landfill. Apparently, this is meant to represent the fact that their house is malodorous.

So what do they do? Buy a Glade air freshener, of course! Couple sits back down on couch, camera zooms back once more, and presto! they're now sitting in the midst of a forest glen. The miracle of modern air freshening technology has converted a dump to a national park.

Now, of course, once the air freshener runs out--which it will in a month or two--where's it going to go? Into a landfill, naturally (where, I can assure you, it will no longer smell quite so wholesome and piney). But that's okay--the couple can always buy another, and another, and another, and keep on disposing of them in their friendly (someone else's) neighborhood landfill. Their house need never stink again! So what if some other guy's house--or the entire planet--stinks to high heaven? So what if, sooner or later, there will no longer be a forest glen with which to compare the smell of their home?

No one expects commercials to have a social conscience. Or a brain. It would be nice if the people watching them did, though.

Oil's Well That Ends Well

Reports are that as of Sunday, the relief well that BP dug to intersect with the blown-out Deepwater Horizon well has served its purpose: the flow of oil into the Gulf has stopped.

This is, of course, good news. The bad news is that, in the meantime, untold millions of gallons have gushed into the Gulf. The biota, non-human and human, in the affected area will never be the same.

The well blew on April 20. It's now September 22. That's five mighty momentous months.

If this incident has taught us any lesson, it's that some things are far easier to start than to stop. Wars. Wildfires. Love affairs.

And, gee, wells.

Will the closing of the BP well mark a moment of rebirth, or simply a pause in the ruinous train of consequences that brought us to this point? When we look back at this event twenty years from now, will we see this day as a boost for clean energy, or a reprieve for its dirty predecessor?

It's impossible to say. On the one hand, even as I write, new wells--oil and natural gas--are being dug, around the world as well as in my own backyard. On the other, a growing coalition of activists, scientists, and politicians is moving, however haltingly, in the direction of a new energy future.

We commemorate September 11 as the day our nation was confronted with, and triumphed over, a great evil. Let's hope that, years from now, we remember its double--September 22--in somewhat the same way, as a triumph over our own worst instincts and as a birthday for the good.

Talk to the Hand

My latest crusade is to get my students to stop talking to their hands.

And staring at them. And caressing them. And waving their other hand over them.

So far, I've had exactly zero success.

If you don't know what I mean, just take a look around you. There are an awful lot of people talking to their hands. On the streets, in cars, at work, in restaurants, at ball games, at playgrounds, just about everywhere you go, there they are: people talking to their hands.

Apparently, there's something more fascinating about their own hands than the people, places, and things around them. Apparently, their hands contain mystical portals to an alternative realm of experience vastly more captivating and worthwhile than the realm you and I call reality.

In college, most students have the good graces, and the good sense, not to talk to their hands during class. (Some, however, can't resist, and I've had to humiliate them publicly as a result.) But the moment they walk out the classroom door, no matter what we were talking about inside--Descartes or Art Deco, World War II or Timbuktu, Thoreau or Theroux--and no matter what's going on in the wider world around them--a riot, an exhibit, a flower unfolding its petals--they're right back to talking to their hands.

It puzzles me. Never having had (or desired to have) anything in my hand worth talking to, I just can't imagine what they find so intoxicating there.

But I guess there must be something. My students, much less the whole world, certainly couldn't be wrong and I alone be right.

Still, I wonder. If we are to become a society of hand-talkers, what will become of other parts of our bodies (including our brains)? What will become of those places our bodies have traditionally found it convenient to inhabit (such as the planet earth)? What will become of friendship, love, compassion, conviction, intellectual stimulation, art, music, laughter, and poetry if all we want to do is talk to our hands?

Unless, of course, our hands start talking back. Now that would be nirvana.