Pointing the finger first at ourselves

We're living in a world that we've created and we have no one but ourselves to blame. Our politics, economy and environment are all suffering from a lack of collective goodwill. Committed to ourselves instead of others, we've become a mob. The planet's suffering grows increasingly urgent and obvious with every passing day.

We all want the freedom that comes from democracy but no one wants to do the work. Jefferson said eternal vigilance was the price of liberty.

Our nation has always heralded individual rights and we all firmly believe what is right, in our Bill of Rights. Today, those who claim to support the rule of law are referred to as Constitutionalists, who are relegated to representation not in either major party but the Tea Party.

The Establishment should heed the will of the populace, which increasingly goes ignored. I guess if we were a pure democracy, our nation's policies and actions of our government would reflect the popular will. In framing the Constitution, the Founders feared government run solely by popular opinion, as this could easily fall prey to hysteria and hatred.

There are a few persistent violations of our Constitutional rights looming today. Our privacy is routinely violated. Corporations rule. The legal premise that all men are created equal should mean something. Corporations can't be people. Only people can be people.

We're being challenged in a number of ways, with our individual rights and freedoms under attack. We were told in the beginning of the age of Terror that our way of life made us a target, and to this day we're instructed to give up freedoms for security.

A nation of laws abides by the law but recent examples have shown that those with the money make the rules, a belief held by Macchiavelli, a great mind who lived in an age of greed and deceit not too different from today's.

We can blame culture for much of our self-inflicted misery. In our society, the prevailing attitude puts "me" above "we. Cocooned in an tapestry rich with marketing messages, individualism has devolved into unrepentant hyper-consumption.

The Boomer generation's lifestyle obsesses over luxury, and shopping, which brings only transient happiness. Spending makes one feel good but a lack of savings mean few will be prepared for retirement. We all know how easy it is to defer tomorrow's problems until tomorrow. I worry sometimes that the generations that follow the Boomers--a group to which I belong--has been tainted by so much crass consumerism. These days, movements towards self-reliance and re-localization are resurgent though.

Hard economic limits have emerged out of unchecked consumption, when the crash of 2008-9 dried out access to credit. Maybe the change, shock therapy though it may be, isn't such a bad thing after all. Simple as it may sound, we need to not spend to spend.

Yet the financial pain will continue, particularly for the middle classes decimated by falling real estate values, outsourcing, and high unemployment. Dependent on consumption-oriented financing, our economy now flails, drained of its chief source of sustenance, more debt. Our spendthrift, high-borrowing ways are repeated by our government. Like a borrower, our government spends money we don't have.

The burden of repayment--plus interest--falls to future taxpayers. Also, our government's excessive borrowing has led investor funds away from other worthy investments. In economic terms, this is called crowding out, a process whereby investors avoid riskier forms of debt (corporate, municipal) and instead go into bonds issued by our government.

For our government and private individuals, overspending--and its twin, over-borrowing--have forged an unsustainable path. We know things will get worse but how much worse will things have to get before they change? Until we stop the misbehaviors that have led us into the predicament we all share, the problems will only worsen, though their impacts might be delayed.

Another trend we've seen is that of neglect. Too much in our nation has been deferred. We've neglected our responsibility to leave future Americans a country in as good a shape as the nation we inherited.

Any society or person who puts off what can be done in the present is prone to ignore the effects of its procrastination. In our always-on, 24/7/365 world we do have good reasons for neglecting the future in favor of the immediacy of the present. There's so much to do, so much we think we need but really only want.

Environmental health and economic growth

The environment has been neglected, and we've seen this in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as in the ravaged mountains of Appalachia which have succumbed to mountaintop removal. We've been told by our representatives that regulation is bad, even if the companies they really represent systematically plunder the earth and deplete resources at unsustainable rates.

For a long time, economic growth has been posed as an either/or to economic growth. Judging by the massive BP oil spill, most of the damage is economic in nature. The millions of people whose businesses have suffered are the victims, right alongside the Gulf region and its wildlife. So the price of environmental neglect and pollution is economic more than anything, which makes assumptions about economic growth vs. the environment obsolete.

To keep economic growth, a new paradigm is emerging: sustainable growth. The extractive industries like mining and drilling need to practice sustainability or be force to practice it. Otherwise companies like BP will take unacceptable risks and damage the rights of others to utilize the seas, which are a shared resource, not the exclusive property of any one corporation.

A reckoning might not be that far off. Global warming could shorten vastly the time between what we do to the Earth and the consequences. With the combustion engine spewing out so much CO2, it's only a matter of time before the impact of too much CO2--heating--is felt in the environment.

Another one goes in the Gulf

Recent events are an indication that more environmental destruction is on the way. I just saw today that another well had blown up in the Gulf of Mexico. Reports are sketchy at the present, but I believe we'll see a pattern of regulatory violations--coupled with inadequate enforcement by Fedgov--that preceded that event.

We've all heard that Gulf oil drilling goes deeper and deeper, and all the risks associated with that, but the Norwegians don't seem to lose their deep water wells like we do, at a rate of 2/year or more.

How much of the ecological damage could have been prevented by adequate enforcement? I'm not going to guess. I will tell you that I don't dwell on "could" scenarios. It's pointless speculation. I'd rather dwell in certainties and try to limit timeframes. It is certain global warming is occurring. We see the effects what I call Global Climate Radicalization frequently.

We can hardly decide on what to call it--it being this odd potpourri of droughts, floods, storms, and forest fires. The "climate change" label is more accurate than calling it "warming" as we can anticipate heat but not the effects of heat. You just get a sense that something bad is out there. {For readers of my review of the movie The Road, we get a sense of some troubles out the window, where The Man (played by Mortensen) is illuminated by fires burning outside and shuts the window.

To give a good example, the link between mismanagement of forests and flooding is strongly established. Cut down the trees upstream and, surprise, you get more flooding downstream. Until a big rain comes--an event more likely with climate change--people can ignore the loss of vegetation. It's only when flooding worsens to apocalyptic levels that people can guess the a major compounding contributor: deforestation.

Apparently the horrible situation in Pakistan was made possible not by too much rain (as likely as that is in the New Normal) but by clandestine cutting of forests. If the environmental axiom that fewer tree=more flooding holds, then the failure to protect Pakistan's forests is a big deal. Now, and only now, with so many homeless, can the people and government address the need to protect their forests. This new direction will clearly face reactionary forces which exploit the corruptibility of officials in the Third World.

How soon before they forget? Or, to be blunt, how bad does it have to get before people start taking environmental protection seriously? Well, if the politicians aren't accountable, they might choose to ignore illegal deforestation, which makes future flooding not only worse but entirely preventable.

Another area where decay is evident is our infrastructure. I've seen no mention of bridge repair despite the horrific collapse of a major bridge in Minneapolis three years ago. The problem might not be that things are going wrong, but rather no one seems to be taking responsibility with preventing tragedies. All our politicians want to pose as if they're helping once the disaster strikes, but where is the leadership (and media spotlight) when it comes to the little but vital improvements that need to be continually made?

Our image-conscious politicians don't see much gain in infrastructure. The American people seem unwilling to make repair of our nation's crumbling infrastructure a top priority. Yes, you could blame people in "high places" for not "being the ones who start...to mold a new reality...closer to the heart," to borrow the song by Rush. But ultimately we must take individual responsibility regardless of what we've become as a people. Failing to maintain an infrastructure is a collective failure but it's people, not their leaders, who will bear the consequences.

We all know it's true: pollute one area too much and the land show it, toxins kill off crops, the vitality of the land diminishes and remediation becomes necessary, like all those SuperFund sites littering the U.S.. The timeframe between cause and effect appears to be shortening, courtesy of climate change. Years of pollution and inadequate management of resources makes the time of reckoning that much sooner. It's like the Lakota Sioux medicine man, Floyds Looks For Buffalo, who speak of a revenge by Mother Nature who's been so abused by man (Part 4 on youtube here.)

Like Floyd, I believe I have a responsibility to tell people of a coming event. I guess you could call it the medicine man in me. I think many people like me have been labelled tree-huggers, or conspiracy theorists, in an effort to diminish not our credibility but the validity of the truths we present. It's simply easier for a society that wants convenience to ignore the inconvenient, to marginalize those who would dare tell it it's wrong, or facing doom.

I can tell you for sure that we're facing economic consequences for over-consumption, this is true. I can also tell you that things will get worse, far worse, if we don't change. I guess the effectiveness of my message depends on how badly as a people want to hear what it is I'm saying.

Back by popular demand: the post-apocalypse

Looking at the movies I reviewed last month, it doesn't really matter whether people were warned of a coming apocalypse. No mention is made in the movies Book of Eli and The Road of what caused things to go bad. Once the bombs fall and food runs out, I guess who or what started it really doesn't matter much.

The popularity of movies in this genre today suggests people intuitively assume we're due to receive some really nasty rebuke from God. People may just assume this. Heck, it's nothing new, people have been drawn to tales of earthly destruction since the first storyteller spoke in front of the fire, telling tales of unimaginable horror and mayhem, capturing spellbound his audience and cementing the place of the apocalyptic story in human history forever.

If it's true that we are all linked to one another, it would therefore hold that we share our misery and our pleasure. As much as we'd like to build castles for ourselves, man is a social animal. We really can't excel without other people, and as big of a pain as others may often be, I guess we all need to get along. Mother Nature plays a vital role in linking us not only to each other but to the space we all share. In limiting us to one physical place, we are forced to examine the metaphysical and spiritual dimensions of our existence.

No such evaluation of where we stand as a society can ignore the importance of preserving our common humanity. I guess these apocalyptic movies serve an important purpose to transcend whatever horrors we face, and show how we can emerge from the apocalypse changed but perhaps wiser for it.

In The Book of Eli, they destroy the Bible, blaming it as a source of problems. I don't know if this act of destruction creates a new order, although the villain thinks rediscovering the Bible will. And Eli eventually reaches a place where a restoration of pre-apocalyptic technology and civilization appear inevitable.

In The Road, a new life awaits at the end of the road. We can see what's happened to the earth, cannibalism, etc., and it may frighten us but simultaneously the idea of a new start gives us hope. And hope is the light that can steer us out of the darkness. Unfortunately mankind just seems destined to screw things up, causing the apocalypse. We seem almost destined to self-destruct. But slowly, these stories tell us, we can laugh again, and live once more in a world that gives us a second chance despite our failings.

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Hyper-capitalism pushes Earth to edge

[Editors note: I'm going to post this article over at my enviro-blog, which I'm only now introducing here for the first time. My original intent was to separate the political from the environment, but there's simply too much common ground between the subjects, as I hope this article demonstrates.]

What kind of world are we going to leave our children? Even if you think no global warming is happening--a state of denial that must be progressively harder to live with--you can't deny something is afoot. And it's not just heating--it's cooling, flooding, raining, hailing, blowing...one extreme to another.

Rising levels of carbon monoxide, alongside methane escaping from arctic areas, has led to weather intensification. Under the new global warming paradigm, rather than hotter temperatures what we have is increased storm speed, longer and worse droughts, and extensive flash flooding caused by more rain coming down faster or harder.

Our oceans are in big trouble. Mercury levels are rising in fish, a top source of food. As more sulfur oxide enters the ocean from coal-fired emissions, the level of acidity has risen and is actually imperiling phytoplankton, the source of sustenance for krill and other tiny creatures that form the bottom of the food chain in the oceans.

The biggest problem is that we don't know what the future has in store for us. Like some horror film, we might know that something bad will soon happen but somehow can't seem to communicate that to the poor unsuspecting sap playing the role of victim.

We will need to feed more than 8 billion people here on Earth. The challenges associated with achieving that goal grow more dire and urgent with time. Already disruptions in monsoon and tropical airflows have become more pronounced, with dire consequences for those dependent on local agricultural production.

Often, it's the best of intentions that cause unforeseen consequences. In trying to save ourselves, we might end up doing as much harm as good.Recently, in a government-mandated move away from transfats, much tropical forest has been lost to palm oil plantations. Tropical forests compromise only 2% of the earth's surface area but convert more carbon monoxide to oxygen than any other terrain, the source of 50% of the world's natural reduction rising CO2.

As we get more efficient at extracting resources, species risk becoming extinct, like of overfished stocks of tuna. The stress upon nature will at some point be relieved, but with so many people's looking to an American-style hyper-capitalism as the model, we can only imagine the environmental destruction brought about by relentless consumption will continue. Must we wait 'til there's a Walmart on every block before we realize we stand to kill off the environment with our lifestyle?

It's not enough that we let our man-made machines continue to belch their Mordor-like stream of emissions into the atmosphere, gradually poisoning us and our children. And it's not that we haven't improved. But we're simply NOT DOING ENOUGH, FAST ENOUGH.

To make matters worst, our companies practice ruthless exploitation of the world's remaining natural resources. With the favoritism only money can buy, these entities ravage Mother Nature--they have no souls neither any ability to imagine or dream of a future where children run under skies free of chem-trails and mercury from coal-fired coal plants.

Big Agribusinesses, frequently using Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), have contaminated the food chain. Monsanto forces impoverished farmers in places like India to sign seed-buying contracts. Rare indigenous varieties of corn in Mexico have been undercut by global conglomerates as Mexican agricultural workers displaced by free but hardly fair, post-NAFTA prices go north to work in Tyson and Smithfield's sweat shops.

A Smithfield facility near Veracruz is suspected as the source of the so-called swine flu. Apparently flies bit a boy who lived near a huge pool of pig waste, made possible by Mexico's lax and bribe-ridden enforcement of environmental standards.

It should come as no surprise Smithfield was good friends with the Bush administration, and received preferential treatment when ICE raided their facility in North Carolina, removing suspected union organizers alongside other undocumented workers, then separating them from children waiting for them to get back from work. Instead they were incarcerated in preparation for deportation.

There's a large degree of social injustice in the way many multinational conglomerates operate. It's as if the operations, particularly in the Third World, are designed to dehumanize the people, and devastate indigenous peoples, who rely on the natural balance to sustain their traditional lifestyles.

Aquifers are systematically being privatized. As a result public access to drinkable water is being limited.

Water could be the next oil. Corporations could seek to cause any amount of environmental damage in the name of securing it, especially as supplies start to dwindle. We are seeing what could be the start of multiple resource wars.

A Russian campaign in Georgia could launched at any moment; through Georgia goes a strategic pipeline from the Caspian Sea (the unofficial holy grail of Central Asian oil.)

The US vies for strategic influence and power in Central Asia in what is called the Great Game. Russia would like to see the Georgian pipeline interrupted, as it is currently the only nation between the oil reserves and Western Europe. The Georgian pipeline would provide an alternate route.

We may be entering a sort of Last Stampede for the world's last, dwindling resources fought between giant corporate entities and the armed forces that represent them.

Resource wars are a popular theme at sites like Alex Jones' prisonplanet. The phrase "resource wars" has a corporate connotation to it. The strategy is corporatism, the modern equivalent of mercantilism as seen during Colonial times. Resource acquisition becomes the primary motivator for foreign policy. Projecting force must be bent around the goal of the investing class and corporations, between whom the ties are strong.

Rather than have government control our policies, corporate needs dictate where we must go to compete strategically with rivals like Russia and especially China. I've heard it said that Iraq may have been as much a war to keep out the Chinese, or the French for that matter.

Can we trust the government to protect us from swine flu? Millions of doses of vaccine have been made without a thorough screening of their potential side effects; if administered in large vials, these doses may contain Thimersol or ethylmercury as a preservative. are thought to contain Squalene--a chemical soup thought to have been responsible for permanent disability granted by the Department of Veteran's Affairs to over half of the veterans from that War.

We know that the last major vaccination program for Swine Flu in 1976--the government is careful to tell us this one is H1N1, so it's different--caused major health problems like Guillain-Barre's syndrome for a substantial number of vaccine recipients. See this article on that fiasco.

The US government can't be expected to know what will happen, but preparations should have been made. We've become a country of whiners who want their lifestyles granted to them in perpetuity, without having to worry about things like bird flu.

It's a political climate that relies on fear. Except it isn't fear about what will happen 10, 20 or 50 years down the line. All this hysteria is borne on the fixation that we, here and now, will not get that to which we are entitled. Deep down inside, most of us look only to our own needs and wants, and look at the environment as a never-ending source of bounty, no matter what we might collectively do to it. The leap in shared human consciousness to a level where we can simply coexist is simply too great a step from the fear-riddled existence we live.

I guess life presents too many challenges for all but a few to see the need to change before it is too late. Then of course resource acquisition becomes an end to itself, assuring ongoing environmental devastation as the have's take from Nature and the have-nots, who are too politically emaciated to protect themselves from the resource exploiters and escape permanent poverty.

The top 1% of American income-producers now constitute almost half of the total income in the US. Social mobility has become completely stagnant. Of course there's a link between the rising disparity of incomes to the congealing of political power in the hands of fewer people. The rich and the corporations they own dictate environmental policy. Meanwhile the ranks of the poor swell, forced to contend with whatever scraps fall from the master's table.


Unrepentant, mankind isn't only changing his ways, he's accelerating the pace of destruction. Probably the worst example is how petroleum producers are bulldozing huge tracts of Alberta to provide dirty oil on a massive tar sands project. The monetary costs of devastation aren't being borne by the destroyers, but rather to everyone who becomes dependent on cheap gas.

The more efficient oil producers are at getting, refining, and producing their product, the less incentive there is for consumers to change. We've become hooked as a drug addict would. If the oil "dealer" were to give us our product too expensively, we might look elsewhere, but as long as it comes plentiful and cheap, we ignore our constant use.

Oil use hasn't been increasing in the US. The recession might not go on forever though. And when the economy does climb out of its doldrums, it might do so too fast, like a scuba diver surfacing too quickly. This overheating could see the economy transition from recession to inflation in just a few months.

The whole boom and bust economic cycle seems to be at the heart of our problem. If cheap, oil and alternative energy development just isn't as high a priority for government. (Obama did manage to fund a major investment in alternative energy research, though.)

We may still be overly sensitive to short-term prices, as the $147 oil peak showed us a few years ago. Just a few miles from me in the Midwest a full-fledged ethanol plants rose up, then closed a short time later as oil prices collapsed.

Do we want a energy policy going from one extreme to another? I thought the whole purpose of government was to help secure the energy future of its citizens. Judging from the aftereffects of a run on natural gas development, where Exxon Mobil was hit with a massive fine for poisoning people with natural gas exploration and drilling chemicals. [I've followed environmental issues in the West on my enviro-blog, following the risks of uranium mine tailings in the Colorado river basin in my article "Nuclear Power Unsafe in Any Dose" and the downside of natural gas exploration, which took off late in the Bush Presidency.]

We--meaning not only the US, but the world--need to move down a path that's unsustainable. That's what sustainability is all about--not destroying the source of our sustenance. Rather than think like animals--individual, greedy, and aware of the group only as a secondary contraction, we must think and move as a group.

We're not there yet. The gap between theory and reality is still too large. Too many people are unaware how the collective sum of our actions is directly affects them. And too little accountability is being foisted on the major sources of pollution, who tend more often than not to be large corporations involved in resource exploitation or energy production.

Our enforcement of environmental laws is too ineffective to keep polluters from polluting. Government can hardly lead if it can't back up what it's saying with action. Yes, support for research into alternative sources of energy can move us in a positive direction. But no, we also need a coherent plan to getting us off the oil and CO2 emissions associated with fossil fuels.

The lack of a coherent conservation strategy also reveals how vested interests shape our government's energy policy. It's like the unsuccessful Drug War: we can't stop the importation if we don't tackle demand. Demand is the source of supply.

In the energy field, no conservation says that more is better, that demand reduction isn't a priority at all, and that we can simply produce more, which seems to be the rote response for every consumer demand since the dawn of the Industrial Age.

On top of the emissions created by combustion, we use huge quantities of energy to extract fossil fuels means the more energy produced, the more carbon dioxide. And even ethanol made from corn requires lots of fossil fuels, a good proportion imported petroleum, as well as natural gas-based fertilizers and fuel for running tractors, etc.

The combustion engine is taking humankind down a path towards its own destruction or to be more accurate, the emissions from oil-burning combustion engines are taking us to envrio-hell.

The gas byproducts don't need to contain as much CO2 as they do. We can simply use fuels that don't contain produce CO2 when they combust. Burning algae and bio-fuels may be the way to go.

Here the environment dictates that we do it right. We can't replace petroleum with cleaner-burning fuels--at some point we will need to eliminate fuels that cause any negative environmental consequences.

Once we've reduced mankind's carbon footprint, we can focus on to the next problem: how to move away from the combustion engine, to newer, lower-emitting, more efficient sources of power. Some might like nuclear, but it's extraction, and waste disposal costs are simply too big as I've explained in the past.

Why not shoot higher--towards something safer, with zero or virtually zero waste? Might not be technologically up to the task...yet. But if we can anticipate something, it is this: if we do nothing, our children will face a nightmarish world very much of our making.