words fail even upon
the death of Arthur Condie, RIP 2019
missing life over a scotch kilts and bagpipes just part of a show, he danced for eight decades-plus, lad who swam Odysseus’ sea, headwinds of Highland dew with mates on the peloton, rubbed hard living young the life of Scottish men dreaming of Route 66
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slipstream of life brings gravity to my own lift that man was like clan brother, there in Arizona family visits, always the character, song and dance a joke for every occasion
*-*
taught me life is hope full viewed with a big lens parlaying hope, pleasure he was a friend, two worlds apart, he and I yet weight of laughter holds me still
*-*
he is sound recalled
Tartan vest sometimes
always dapper Arthur
life cradled in stories
misadventures turned into refined
reminiscences, boyhood rites
Edinburgh, passage
over the pond into Canada
the world his oyster then
setting adventure in Detroit
Page, Arizona, his abalone
diving off California
*-*
stories are veins connective tissue to go forth muscle and mind memory worlds apart, his known with troubadour’s gusto ‘Art tells tall tale again’ pleasure for companies audiences, my own dispossession pressed into service precipice, near edge of his life
*-*
he’ll never know me the fast and furious departures from living depression, hard scrabble the flow of poetry, politics fits of criminality, beauty giver clan, brooding forceful, passionate
*-*
life can be humbling or an exit plan for pain or celebratory egos seem to pick like crabs, yet his came from the song the edge of Bobby Burns the antiquated, patina locked in magical time, he traveled with wife they seemed stitched together, long hauls several life makeovers his ending her breath seized her forever
*-*
he’s more than distant memory more than sum total of last years, oh the hard years before, when a child’s nothing more than foreshadowing death, life, processing who a man is outside the shell of civility, outside the pomp Art displayed, the truth of it he seemed alive and unreal at times, yet his survival holds like flashes of scenes inside this poet graying movie reels light shadow action
*-*
I never know which particle of life stays hardened like calcium how the brain is magical dark into light harsh into buoyancy or a relationship, man to boy then man to man old man to man here I sit, old man some say, six decades only, the light of recall is as bright as that teen or boy, Art juggling humor style, grace, aplomb insanity in a comic way
*-*
lessons can be retraced death like a huge wind whipping up sands waves crashing until a fog sets in one with oneself heavy air bringing forth almost hologram vision of the man alive he’s always young again penetrating my own aging his vitality, young with new stories the boy, me, learning tricks of memory
*-*
Scotland the Brave, maybe
this Arthur, though, deeply
felt even as vitality
scabs over into the last
breath of sagging man
he is what I hope all good
can be – a breath held
silent memory
opened palms
a jig or two
over brown ale
his reminiscing
defining me more
than a man I called
brother, uncle, friend
what a ‘character’ indeed.
Below a short piece I wrote for the Newport (OR) News Times. Sort of like shadow boxing, writing traditional news pieces to at least prop up some of the deep deep issues tied to broken Capitalism.
Note that capitalism as a system of broken dreams and powerful ecosystems destruction would never be allowed in the article as a sub-theme, let alone the reality of how broken capitalism is in its eviscerating of a small community like Newport (10,000) . Imagine, the pigs in politics, the war mongers, the Venezuela wannabe killers, all those elites running their mouths and groins in their spasms of narcissism.
Imagine how many communities in the USA are failing, near failing, about over because they failed years ago, because the billionaires and the war mongers and the Industrial Complex of felons — pharma, ed, legal, finance, IT, AI, insurance, banking, energy, chemicals, prisons, ag — is hell bent on abandoning any humanity in their insanity and their sick elitism and their bizarre anti-people and community logic to get more riches.
Thousands of dams are about the fail in the USA. Water systems shoot out lead and a thousand other chemicals that kill brains and DNA. Imagine the conservative society of civil engineers giving the USA a D- for infrastructure. Imagine the failing education system. Imagine the mass murdering media following all the dog-nose-in-rear-end stories.
This story, of course, is about $70 million a city is suppose to get for a failing duo of earthen dams. Newport is on the Cascadia Subduction Zone, where an earthquake will set off many other earthquakes and tsunamis.
The whole lovely Oregon Coastline will turn into a McCormac “The Road” dystopia.
The UN recently sounded the alarm that urgent action is needed if Arab states are to avoid a water emergency. Water scarcity and desertification are afflicting the Middle East and North Africa more than any other region on Earth, hence the need for countries there to improve water management. However, the per capita share of fresh water availability there is already just 10 percent of the global average, with agriculture consuming 85 percent of it.
Another recent study has linked shrinking Arctic sea ice to less rain in Central America, adding to the water woes in that region as well.
There you have it — the stupidity of this country flailing about the world with empire on steroids and smart phones for tweeting, and every community in the USA is facing sea ice inundation problems because those communities near the oceans have a heck of a lot of influence on the rest of the middle of America. Money money money — and the spigots go right to the pockets of the Fortune 1000 and the Aspen Institute fellows and the Davos crowd.
So, on a community level, Newport faces big issues because the dams will fail and the cascading disasters of no water for months will cause disease and depopulation.
The schizophrenia of the rich and deplorables backing trump or pelosi or biden or any of the two manure pile candidates make a grown despot weep, yet every community faces kissing bugs invading, housing crisis after rental crisis, wage theft, huge thefts of human futures. Billions of people’s futures and pasts stolen. So the rich and the sick people on FOX and CNN get off on the chaos they set forth.
From River to Tap:
Newport’s Water
System is an Engineering Miracle Delivering a Fragile, Vulnerable Resource to
us All
Newport’s state of the art water treatment plant along Big
Creek impressed the mayor and some of the councilmembers as we toured the
facility after a presentation on the very real future water crisis that could
befall not just Newport, but all the towns serviced by the water facility.
The message was clear from Newport’s Public Works Director: a
new dam has to be built for the public’s health, safety and economic welfare.
The public works director emphasized that 10,000 residents of Newport use
water, but also another 40,000 additional temporary residents also suck up the water
during tourist season. Add to that 50,000 number the huge seasonal water
demands of the fishing industry and year-round clean water needs of the Rogue
Nation brewery.
“In the event of an earthquake, the dams most likely could
fail,” Tim Gross said. “We are looking at two to six months after a major
Cascadia event (fault line earthquake) to rebuild a dam and replace the
infrastructure that supplies water.”
He likened a dam failure here to what happened after
Hurricane Katrina – people left the city, and millions upon millions of dollars
in GDP were lost. “If the dams fail, it would be hard for this community to
recover.”
There are projected population growths of 30 percent or more
for Newport by 2030, and a new brewery in the works, so in reality, water
demand will possibly double. Much of what Gross presented to the 20 or so
people attending April 29th’s Town Hall at the Water Plant was
pretty “technical” in a geo-engineering way, but the overarching message was
clear.
Each year delayed on construction adds a few million dollars
more added in inflationary costs. “I’ve been working on this for eight years,”
he said. “This is not a sprint, it’s a marathon.”
Councilmember David Allen emphasized that Senate Bill 894,
sponsored by Sen. Roblan and Rep. Gomberg, was just referred to the Ways and
Means Committee. It’s a $44 million general fund grant to be put forward for
this project.
The reality is four years of geotechnical work already invested
to study the two dams’ subsurface conditions point to the same thing – “the
soils under both dams fail in a 3.5 earthquake.” This is spongy soil holding
back millions of gallons of water; that
is, it’s “silty sand, clayey silt, and silty clay alluvium overlying Nye
Mudstone.”
The failure probability for these two dams giving out 60-feet
down and then causing overspills is high in a rather low intensity 3.5 (on the
Richter scale) quake.
We all know about the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and the
hundreds of faults that spiderweb throughout the coast, from sub-sea land
masses to the coastal and beyond terrestrial areas. Our communities have
various disaster preparedness plans tied to earthquakes and resulting tsunamis.
No amount of food and water will suffice, however, if the
toilets can’t be flushed and water won’t be piped into sinks for months on end.
It’s the resulting disasters that truly affect a community after the initial
impact of a natural calamity such as a quake and tsunami.
Ironically, Gross stated that a three-day study workshop in
October 2018 “was a career highlight for me . . . working with these people . .
. the smartest people I have ever met.”
The experts looked at studies, projections and cost estimates for a new
dam coming in at $70 million. For Gross (and others), there are basic questions
surrounding a $70 million project to build an RCC (roller compacted concrete)
dam between both the existing earth dams on Big Creek:
What will work?
How much will it cost to maintain?
Will it be resilient?
We’re talking about two earthen dams built in 1951 and 1955
and dozens of geophysical tests on site and in the laboratory, with some pretty
high-power members of the international community who study dams, seismic
events on infrastructure, and others who have dam remediation and building in
their portfolios.
Other options like rebuilding or rehabilitating the two dams
or constructing a desalinization plant or even building a new dam miles away at
Rocky Creek are off the table. The only thing really in play is Alternative
Six: No Action, which is still an option the City has to weigh against the
possible risk of losing the only drinking water source for Newport in case of a
seismic event.
Ironically, a new embankment dam (not a great choice) would
require 10,000 truck trips to bring in materials; 30,000 truck trips for a new
earthen dam, all of which would ruin a community the size of Newport. This RCC
dam proposal, however, requires less construction materials and would be
utilizing some old logging roads. The project is outlined in many phases, including
building a road around Big Creek, building a water pipeline to allow for water
to be continuously supplied to users during construction, then building the dam,
and doing stream restoration.
In the end, the plant manager, Steve Stewart, who has worked
for the Public Works Department 30 years, makes a plain selling point – “I love
my job because I like providing a clean product to the community. I drink it
out of the tap every day and am proud of what we do here.”
Gross emphasized that many Oregon communities are facing similar challenges with aging dams needing replacing. The biggest and least expensive push for Gross is getting the community behind conservation, and, more importantly, gaining an appreciation that water is always available and can’t be taken for granted. Newport is part of the Mid-Coast Water Planning Partnership which is a group of 70 entities and stakeholders representing diverse water interests in the region from Cascade Head to Cape Perpetua. The group’s goal is to not only understand water resources and create an integrated plan, but to carry forth on better water management in the region over the next 50 years.
*end of article*
Rachel Carson = SANITY!
So, yes, it’s milquetoast in some ways, the piece above, but how else can this stuff get through . . . and this is the reality of mainstream America and even small town news — never ever question the business community, the timber industry, the fish industry, even the oh-so-hip beer and ale community. You see, we have to work on bio-regionalism and stopping the unchecked growth in communities that can’t weather the current storm of neoliberalism and assault capitalism, let alone the future implosions of climate change and in our case, earthquakes!
Worse yet, though, and no matter how much George Monbiot or Dahr Jamail or Bill McKibbeon or any one that is part of the Extinction Rebellion or even ecosocialists like myself rail and rally, we have to realize it’s game over sometime in order to put some other things about humanity in some sort of “order.” Simple stuff, it would seem, in a world of Green New Deal, stopping more liquefied natural gas trains, pipelines, ports and ships crossing the seas to move that fossil fuel to the engines of consumption.
The reality is that every capitalistic and money-driven project from sea to shining sea that is in the words or is being expanded will continue to be, and no amount of paper mache dolls parading around DC or London will do anything to stop them.
Coos Bay, Oregon, once called Marsh Field, once a big timber shipping place (forget about the native Americans there for centuries) and now it is one of those sad coastal places that is about to give up fishing and tourism for the big Liquefied Natural Gas project, Jordan Cove LNG, which is emblematic of the broken systems of capitalism and the broken pipes of compliant democracy. Here:
Headline — “Coos Bay Braces for Jordan Cove Impacts.” Imagine that, we are still attempting to stop those mafia style energy companies with petitions and voter get out the rally cries; trying to get our own state to stop this project. But it’s all theater, and the provokers & purveyors of this sickness — multiple corporations, transnational banking, multi-nationals, etc. — don’t give a shit about the environmental and economic breakdown of all these ships criss-crossing. We are addicted to fossil fuel and oil, to the point, as a species, we will give up water and food — pink shrimp, Dungeness crab, halibut and salmon — for a turn at gathering more shekels:
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is expected to issue a final decision on the Jordan Cove LNG terminal and pipeline project early next year.
The Coos Bay Channel widening project is not as far along in the regulatory process. Earlier this month, the port hit the “90% design” milestone in completing their permit application. An Army Corps of Engineers spokesman said they don’t expect to have the Draft Environmental Impact Statement completed until March 2020.
Port CEO John Burns says the channel-widening project is the next big step for the port, which hopes to attract larger vessels and more shipping traffic overall.
“We look at the global Maritime Fleet, the size of ships. If we were going to be an international player we’ve got to be able to at least bring in ships of that size,” Burns said. “Otherwise, we will not be competitive with other ports on the West Coast.”
The project would significantly widen and deepen a little more than 8 miles of the Coos Bay shipping channel. Currently the channel is 350 feet wide and 37 feet deep. The new plan would widen the channel to 450 feet and 45 feet deep. The spoils would be dumped at a site offshore.
Regardless, the physical characteristics of Coos Bay would change significantly if the projects go through. The port’s proposed channel widening project would remove enough earth to fill a football field-sized skyscraper the height of Mount Bachelor. Add the fill Jordan Cove needs to remove for its project, and that shaft of earth rises higher than Mount Hood.
Federal environmental reports for Jordan Cove and a previous Coos Bay dredging project characterize the ecological, water quality and hydrologic impacts as temporary and within reasonable limits.
Thus, we are cooked, because we have trained PR spinners and bloodless engineers and financial creeps and legal felons coming from our elite schools and even mediocre schools to live in a world with no ethics other than getting the most out of earth as quickly as possible. They end up as government shills and they end up as these pigs running Jordan Cove.
Project after project like this is unfolding now and into the future. Not just by the USA, but in Russia and China and Europe and Canada and Australia and Japan. It’s no longer about retrenchment ans socialism in the ranks of the green washers, but more and more energy generated for more fabrication of a false humanity, for more pies in the sky — hell ships to Mars, the Moon, to asteroids, all sounds good . . . while a majority on earth can’t even collect clean water daily. Imagine that, we have allowed the schools, colleges, media, military, government, punishment sectors of our so-called advanced Western world, and those in the Far East, to sink ecosystems, which in turn, sinks communities Big Time.
Polluted minds with hubris dripping out of their veins and orifices is what the new normal is for so-called CEOs, public servants (disservants) and public “intellectuals” like Gates (sic).
Citizens against LNG or Jordan Cove is small in number because of the deplorable thinking processes people have garnered from deplorable media and deplorable parenting and deplorable jobs and deplorable politicians and deplorable Americanism — hence, there are a shit-load of deplorables out there ready to sacrifice food and water for a job! For oil in their veins!
You won’t see Naomi Klein or the stars of the New Green Deal tackle the very real battles going on now in community after community, which is how capitalism has always worked — divide and conquer, propaganda on steroids, military and police strong-arming, legal entrenchment, political pimping and prostituting: by the corporations, the polluters, the murderers.
More advanced schizophrenia displayed here — Democracy Now
On Wednesday, the House of Commons became the first parliament in the world to declare a climate emergency. This is Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn.
“We have no time to waste. We are living in a climate crisis that will spiral dangerously out of control unless we take rapid and dramatic action now. This is no longer about a distant future. We’re talking about nothing less than the irreversible destruction of the environment within our lifetimes of members of this house.”
It is highly significant, because it provides leverage for people like myself, for people like Extinction Rebellion, the youth climate strikers, to actually say, “Well, now you MPs, you members of Parliament, have declared a climate emergency; you have to act on it.” And, of course, it’s not clear that they’ve completely thought through the implications of this. I mean, on the same day, yesterday, that this climate emergency was declared, there was a legal ruling saying a third runway at Heathrow Airport can go ahead. Well, look, this is an emergency. And that means we need to start retiring fossil fuel-based infrastructure rather than building more of it.
The major banks, the oil companies, the politicians in the pockets of banks and oil companies, the military industrial-services-delivery-marketing complex, the Trumps and the Bidens, the entire mess that is American bullshit bifurcation of brain cells (I will fight for the good of my rich kids and family to be free of pollution, to be well cared for, well educated (sic), blessed (sic) with opportunities to make money and live in safe neighborhoods and see the world and dodge taxes . . . but the pain, suffering, slavery, pollution, despair, displacement, well, that’s all good for my corporation’s marks) will kill us all, the entire world: those tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of teeming shores, the homeless, tempest-tost.
The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
celebrating a life well connected through the process of death, mourning, memorializing
It was impressive, the number of people this 66 year old fellow touched: a father figure, a friend, a guide, a mentor, a guidepost, a brother, and a giver.
The service was held in Portland Sat. 4/27 and hundreds showed up at the Quaker church. I was asked to say some things about the man, my friend, and I had already written a poem of dedication to him, but I had to let a more simple-and-unfolding-of-our-collective-emotions sort of poem lead me.
I had just spent the night before in some forest land 10 miles north of White Salmon, WA, with Mt. Hood to the south and Mt. Adams to the west. I was there to thin out some trees so the health of the forest my sister and I had inherited from our old man more than 20 years ago would stay robust for another 20 years.
I spent time with Jim who lives in a house he and his wife built, and with his newly retired brother, JT, who has 20 acres with his big RV parked there and an outbuilding with electricity and a washer machine to make it feel more like home. JT is a bachelor who is still married to an estranged wife because of health insurance reasons and possibly social security concerns if he croaks. He has children and grandchildren, mostly living in Orlando, Florida.
JT was able to retire from Boeing/Seattle after 35 years working for that company. He told me he was in the military R & D department. JT’s liberal, and he spends time in the Hood River area because their 94-year-old mother was moved from Hawaii to a care facility in the town of Hood River. She’s going strong, and her life for a long time had been centered around living in Seattle.
Jim says their mom gets riled up in the skilled nursing facility because she’s a social democrat and most the old timers living with her are conservative, and Trump backers. Jim says his mom can be pretty articulate but forceful talking about her spin on the world: she’s for regulating banks, she’s for a single payer health program, she’s for better PK12 education, she’s for making the rich pay their fair share of keeping safety nets for the working class, the working poor, the working homeless and the middle class. She believes the rich are only rich because the working class and other workers helped them get that way, so she is for higher taxes for the rich. These are not unAmerican ideas, nor are they off the charts liberal, but in today’s world, Ike Eisenhower would be a flaming liberal if he ran today as the Republican he was in the 1950s.
She’s 94, so that means she was born in 1925. Hmm, seems as if she should be at that table in Salem (or in Olympia) discussing the value of almost 100 years in this country paid to a society that helps, not hurts; a society that honors all people, not singles out the elite and the rich as the only ones worthy of attention and respect; a country that plans for seven generations out, not one that gouges previous generations’ ability to survive and bankrupts the current young generation and future ones.
Jim is not retired, technically, but he says he has a good life in the woods on 50 or more acres. He wanted to leave the city, Seattle, when he was 25, and now he’s 67 and still running a big CAT, bucking trees, cutting wood for income, and playing cards for income. He says it’s all a hobby, but in fact, his wife works as a personal care professional freelancing (many, many aging people who are still “aging in place” in this part of the Columbia Gorge) obviously to keep the bills paid and to add to the retirement fund.
The night before Jerry’s memorial, JT, Jim and I drank a bottle of vodka as gimlets, Jim’s specialty. We talked about the world, about my intersections with so much of the world as a writer, social worker, teacher, counselor and Marxist/ ecosocialist. Sometimes I function as the oddity or the intensely interesting guy, as Jim might call me.
Jim watches FOX News so he can see what the opposing side’s strategy is, according to what he says. He’s adept at navigating the Trump world since he plays cards at the Elks clubs in the area and does business with old timer loggers, millwrights, and blue collar types.
I think both JT and Jim got a kick out of me railing and listing off the systems of oppression breaking the country from the inside out. No matter how much NYT and CNN and NPR one consumes, these middling news agencies never ever get it right, or get to the bone, or get in the mix to see how precarious maybe more than half of the US population is in terms of economics. The fact that we are moving toward a world without ice puts 99 percent of us in some peril.
I find that Americans are good at laughing and joking, but in many ways do not have a great sense of humor. However, Jim and JT are good at story telling, good at laughing off their own foibles and aches and pains and do have a sense of humor, and a sense of irony.
I dig getting with people like JT and Jim to again let some of that America Once Might Have Been Good optimism flow over my tattered wings.
Bad knees from sports injuries, bad shoulders from repetitive work, and just bones wearing down are laments we talked about, but not very long and with no “woe is me” lines of discourse.
I bring this up since I was out from the Central Oregon Coast where I live to be a part of Jerry’s memorial in a church. I bring it up because while I am an angry man — sounding almost naively young — I can be very appreciative how the lives of others who have travailed various trail ways and narratives can be very compelling.
Here, a comment about one of my pieces just published here at DV:
Comment: Enjoyed (well maybe enjoyed isn’t the correct word) your Dissident Voice article on Earth Day. I have written for them, mostly when they first went online. So many of us have been fighting the good fight since Rachel Carson raised the flag, and yet nothing seems to change. I wrote this piece [“Fast Fashion”] about the impact of the fashion industry on the environment. It is even worse than I had imagined. I doubt that knowing these facts would make a dent in the buying practices of the elite progressives. Keep up the good work. I love reading pieces written in anger. Sheila
And, no, I did not have to rail against JT for being part of the problem — a worker bee for the vast military industrial complex that is Boeing. Sometimes just being in that moment of three guys, in our sixties (wow, that is a line for which have never written in my lifetime until NOW), talking, listening to owls, turkeys, and the wind whipping Douglas firs can be enough. Hood River has cloud server behemoths, and an international drone manufacturer, wind (sail) surfers, Full Sail/ Sessions brewery and even the famous Tofurky/vegan Field Roast manufacturer. It’s a “hip” town now, no longer the timber processing and exchange center it once was.
Jim likes being out in the woods, though where we have our property, others also like being on their 20 acres for maybe some of the same reasons, and for other reasons as well.
Ironically, I see Jim and JT as perfect candidates for adults in the classroom — mentors and living examples of Americans who with varying degrees of success came out the dark tunnel of capitalism with some safety nets. Both men could be integrated into any school system to teach youth about life, tenacity, perspectives and some hands-on stuff, too.
That’s one big fault of education — the pigs at the top, the administrators and politicians and such, have gutted the school systems’ ability to be transformative for young people. Instead, it’s dumb downed curriculum and teachers forced to not deviate from the various states’ application of NCLB — no child left behind (sic).
My various theses are not predicated on some Utopian ideal, some unrealistic vision of a world impossible to achieve. The problems we are facing in every arena — think of every department/sub department and specialized field of study at a decent state university and you can see everything, unfortunately, is about solutions, about dealing with problems that have been set forth through capitalism and a political/business world that is based on tolling and servicing the suffering and poor, one based on wars against people, including all the wars we have inside this society and those we export to other societies via armed wars, economic wars, environmental warring. The system is about creating poverty and precarity while creating a minority class of wealth accumulators.
Leaving the 20 acres we have, I saw a black bear scramble across the dirt road. I ended up heading west again to attend this funeral. Maybe I agreed to talk as a way of punctuating my belief that some people are so unusual in their compassion and ability to connect so many others to compassionate allies that I had to honor Jerry.
Cerebral Palsy, crutches, confined to a wheelchair, then one little thing and then big thing in less than 12 months, and he is gone. Sixty-six years later!
I went across the road where the Quaker church was receiving guests, to the private school, Reed College. I walked the grounds, watched a beaver muddle the water of a pond, and reflected on all the foliage bursting out from a fallow fall and winter.
Cliche, but life is around us, even among the dead and the dying. I knew at one point reflecting silently while walking on this toney small campus that it’s our call of duty to honor and celebrate the brave lives and the giving people in their midst and through their passing.
One remarkable aspect of this friend who died a hard death in the hospital was that he was a marker, that guidepost, not so much a guide. He allowed me to sound off, to emote, to dramatize my life in words, and he never judged but he was no pushover. He amazingly loved people the way I like people (not so gifted to love a lot of people but I do appreciate their struggle and their gifts to the world).
Jerry discovered his potency as a human who was straddled by CP rested on his ability to understand people way beyond any psychologist’s or minister’s understanding and shaping of humanity. Jerry was the guidepost from which I knew I could aspire to, but one I would never meet in the end because our physical beginnings and the amount of extra experiences with a healthy body that allowed me a lot of reckless travel and undertakings made us different since he had the body that limited that aspect of life but provided a deep well of knowledge and self-determination many of us “able bodied” souls can’t have, forget to have, or fail to nurture within ourselves.
Jim, JT, Jerry. I would have never thought a night in the woods could have gelled in me what I had to say at the funeral. I am glad to have been in his life since Jerry (like JT and Jim) allowed for a two-way transformation of self. You see, each time I engage, each time I intersect with people, each time even with Trumpies, I learn more about myself.
I learned at a young age not to take life for granted because of many reasons — from living in the Azores, in other countries like France, traveling throughout Europe in the 1960s and then later as an adult. Living and traveling and working in Mexico and Central America. Working with migrant farmers and then in prisons and then in low income communities as a teacher. Hell, when I was 19, my older sister by three years was splayed on the road in British Columbia when some guy fell asleep at the wheel and crossed into Roberta as she was driving her Harley down south to see us in Arizona.
Spreading her ashes in glacial fed waters near Hyder, Alaska, I gained much perspective for a person at a relatively young age. Earlier perspective I gained while I did community service working in a hospice at age 16 when the number of moving violations during my various motorcycling forays caught up with me and I opted to pay them off with community service. Reading Robert Frost and Shakespeare plays to one woman, Audrey, while she died a slow painful death with a forty-pound tumor wrapped around her kidneys and liver, I learned the value of a few more weeks on planet earth is not about the number of CC’s your motorcycle has or the number of watts in your stereo. She had been a high school English teacher for more than 38 years, and that’s what consoled her at the end as two liters of radioactive-looking brownish fluid come from her body each day. Drip drip drip under her hospital bed while her wild bunch long-haired volunteer 16-year-old read Othello.
Almost half a century later and here I am still trying to find guideposts, still looking to learn life, to do adulting the “right way, and learning to capture authentic life and living in a line, or two, or thousands of lines! Jerry too, like Jim and JT, would have been a valuable asset in the classroom — a vision of hope, guts, honor and ethical love for his fellow man/woman would have been worth a thousand other lesson plans the youth would have gotten!
Friend Who Forever Allowed Us In
for Jerry Pattee, on his passing
He Allowed the voice of impatience to settle
He allowed the disharmonious song to fall
He allowed Portland showers for a new dawn
He allowed old staggering men to lift words
He allowed new worlds to settle into his orbit
He allowed trauma and fear to sink into calm
He allowed sprigs and cuttings to be carried away
He allowed new friends to gather, old ones to root
He allowed indulgences of artists to be understood
He allowed space to enter slowly inside his realm
He allowed freedom to lift him from his physical inertia
He allowed family to be friends, friends as clan
He allowed shadows crisscrossing light to honor the gray
He allowed food to become spiritual
He allowed so many to call him brother, father, friend
He allowed us gathered here to sing his praises
Finally, I want to say that I never let my poetic words have the last line when thinking about the life of a person as uniquely broad and giving as Jerry. I’ve had a few times with William Stafford, the poet par excellence of America, and his son, Kim. Kim’s the poet laureate of Oregon, a job title that has two years of duties and ceremonial gravitas bundled up with it.
Ironically, Jerry had not been a nature-lover in the true sense of the terms, that is, not a backpacker, kayaker, camper, back-country explorer. He was, however, always talking about plants (he had tons in his house) and flowers (dahlias were one of his favorites). And he did live in a very rural part of the world, Payette, Idaho, early in his life.
He did understand how powerful the draw to land — mountains, rivers, forests, ocean — this place he ended up living in for most of his life has on new and old comers.
I think about all those people I have known and worked with that have had some physical or developmental challenge keeping them away from what I believe are powerful agents of harmony and perspective to any human — nature and wildlife.
Here, Kim’s poem, for Jerry:
Do You Need Anything from the Mountain?
By Kim Stafford
Could you bring me a smudge of camas blue, and the whisper whistle of that one pine at the edge of the meadow at dusk, when day
gives a lost, last breath? Bring me the road that becomes deep duff as it trails away into the forest, young firs ten feet tall
along the hump between the old ruts. Bring me a story you hear in dark silence after the last light, the gone that gathers dew
in the fingers not to hold, carry away, but only to feel. Bring me that skein of fire that hangs in intimate eternity, after
the dark but before the thunder, when the bounty of yearning in one cloud reaches toward another, in each being’s
endless, impossible desire to complete itself before falling away
Oregon State University’s Hatfield scientist who is an expert in stripping flesh and muscle into beautiful skeletons speaks to local group of whale naturalists
Note: A very short piece coming from me today? WTF?
Yah! I write about this fellow because he has been a part of curriculum development and delivering education — hands on — for many many years. We’re talking about 40 years, almost.
So, even four years back, Bill was working on jellyfish explosions in these parts — Central Oregon Coast. Explosions of jelly fish, hmm, not good:
Striking blue sea creatures, Velella velella, have washed up by the thousands on Oregon beaches including at Seaside, Manzanita, Astoria and Rockaway Beach in recent days, tourism officials report. The small jellyfish-like animals normally live out at sea, floating on its surface. But every spring, thousands get blown by strong westerly winds onto the sands of Oregon, California and Washington and die.
Unfortunately, the youngest person to listen to Bill Saturday (April 20) was 40, maybe? Most were past retirement, a few in their fifties, me, 62, but still working, teaching PK12. The rest way into their 60s and 70s. This fellow has enthusiasm that is catching and how dare we as a society that we have these silos, man, and we have no will to get intergenerations together.
Lurking in Yaquina Bay: Blue Whale Ready for Articulation
The quietude of the Central Oregon Coast – sans the
tourists/visitors – is an illusion when it comes to marine sciences and the
remarkable gravitas OSU Hatfield Marine Sciences Center and Oregon Coast
Aquarium have on researching the oceans and our discussions around the good,
bad and ugly tied to them.
It’s not difficult to get 26 cetacean (whales, dolphins) and
pinniped (seals, sea lions) adherents in a room at the Newport Library on a
Saturday morning (April 20) to listen to one of OSU’s best talk about marine
mammals and acoustic research, Dermestids
(or flesh-eating beetles) and the state of species in ever-changing
meteorological and ecological conditions tied to our oceans.
The Oregon chapter of the American Cetacean Society invited Dr.
Bill Hanshumaker to present his talk titled, “How do we know what we think we know
about marine mammals?” He brought skulls of whales, dolphins and sea
lions; vertebrae of a blue whale; baleen from whales and teeth from orca and
other toothed whales species; and decades of experience as a scientist.
The 67-year-old Hanshumaker is the CSI guy at the Hatfield;
he’s given more than 50 public presentations, some of which included “cool
stuff” like dissecting sharks at public gatherings and articulating skeletons
of huge – the largest species in the world – blue whales.
“Science is a dynamic process, not stagnant,” Bill Hanshumaker
said. “Most people look at science as a collection of facts or a belief system.
It’s much more than that.” Of course, coming up with a hypothesis – sometimes
referred to as WAG (wild-assed guess) – allows for testing it, looking for
patterns and demonstrating a willingness to change course.
Part of changing course, according to the scientist,
includes using new tools, or old ones, to go at a problem in a new way.
Observation of whales performing actions and reacting to their environment is
one good step toward making a WAG and then testing it. However, we need
multiple tools and systems to conduct good science.
Hanshumaker, who was with OMSI for 17 years, highlighted that he is responsible for all those “articulated” skeletons throughout the Portland museum. His current work is on the way out, as he retires i a few month, but he brought to us work by Bob Dziak whose research with hydrophones determines many aspects of whale behavior tied to their own acoustic calls and language.
Killer whales in particular vocalize more when hunting
salmon, tuna or sharks, because their prey aren’t hearing the sounds and the killer
whales are probably communicating signals for the pod members to act in concert
in getting at the food. When approaching marine mammals, stealth is more
important, so that ecotype of killer whale will not vocalize when on the hunt.
It’s the mother who teaches killer whale offspring to go for salmon or go for seals.
He’s looking at all the noise – called ambient and
background noise – in the ocean to determine what is natural and what can be
adaptable. Toothed whales like orca and sperm whales have high frequency calls,
whereas baleen whales like humpbacks and grays have lower pitched (frequency)
calls.
Calls from blue whales may signal mating language rituals;
however, the ship traffic in the oceans disturbs communication abilities, he
stated, which includes breeding habits. When September 11, 2001 occurred, all
ship traffic was halted, and previously placed hydrophones picked up more
communication calls from blue whales, leading to the hypothesis they were using
calls for mating.
The whale enthusiasts listened and watched the scientist
explain sound propagation, cavitation noise (propeller sounds), and which methods
of noise reduction will help whales and dolphins live in a less chaotic world
of hundreds of thousands of ships crisscrossing their habitats daily.
Interestingly, OSU got the job of designing three new
research vessels – with green technology incorporated, including noise
reduction propellers that are more fuel efficient, Hanshumaker stated. The
design also includes optimized hull form, waste heat recovery, LED lighting,
and variable speed power generation.
The National Science Foundation selected Oregon State largely
because of the university’s deep research history, active science programs and
leadership through the Hatfield Marine Sciences Center. The current research
vessel OSU uses, Oceanus, is almost
45 years old and has outlived its scientific capabilities.
Part of the research tied to acoustics is only possible
through fully funding marine sciences programs to include these research
vessels as floating laboratories and living classrooms. For instance, studying
acoustic recordings in the wild can tell scientists how different ecotypes of
one species have much different “dialects” versus other ecotypes. Humpback
whales, like other species, have different dialects so when groups congregate, differentiation
lowers chances of inbreeding: which is the bane of all species collapsing.
Our Central Oregon Coast is mostly visited upon (90 percent
of whales) by the iconic gray whale, which is a marine animal success story,
compared to the Atlantic coast where the grays were hunted to extinction. One reason
for Pacific grays’ success is that the Mexican government designated three
significant breading and calving bays along the Baja peninsula as protected
gray whale reserves.
One example (of many) illustrating “genetic bottlenecks” is
the elephant seal along the California coast. “In 1910 they thought it was
extinct, so a scientist shot what he thought were the last surviving eight,” Hanshumaker
said. The reality was there were still elephant seals living in secluded
habitats, but unfortunately, the diversity pool is now so limited that all
offspring are identical twins.
Interesting topics he brought up included stripping marine
mammal carcasses of muscle and meat, while still preserving connective tissue
and even the smallest bones with those beetles. Hanshumaker says anew, quicker
way has been developed: horse manure
compost pits are dug and the carcass covered so all bugs, bacteria and larvae
can work in concert to do the job beetles and fly maggots do.
For Hanshumaker – like most holistic-thinking scientists
I’ve interviewed over the course of almost four and a half decades – he posits all
things connect in nature. I use this John Muir quote to illustrate that for
students I teach:
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it
hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
When we see an otter around here, we have to be reminded
it’s a river otter, since marine otters no longer inhabit Washington and Oregon
waters. In fact, in the Aleutian Islands, sea otters were wiped out by a pod of
killer whales. No sea otter in a habitat means sea urchin populations explode.
Which in turn destroy bull kelp forests since urchins eat kelp and otters each
urchins. Those kelp habitats are like sea nurseries for hundreds of fish
species. Fewer places for juvenile fish to grow protected means less fish in
nets and on hooks.
“Fishermen do not want sea otters returned because they see
them as competitors, eating fish. Kelp beds will help increase the numbers of
fish,” Hanshumaker stated, Science and data and field evidence are not enough
to stop “fishermen believing what they want to believe.”
The irony is kelp needs rocky areas to anchor and root into.
Trying to reintroduce kelp and marine otters would be fruitless since those
rocky bottom “holds” are now covered up with sand years after the kelp forests’
disappearance.
Back to the whale lurking in a net in Yaquina Bay: It was struck
by a ship, it’s 80 feet long, and it’s been at the bottom of the bay with a net
around it going on three years. Hanshumaker says there is still flesh on the
carcass. Plans for this scientist to get the bones stripped of all flesh and
then articulated as one skeleton are on hold because the marine sciences
classroom that is being built at Hatfield has new architectural plans that will
not accommodate the blue whale to hang anywhere.
The Siletz casino in Lincoln City doesn’t want the skeleton,
he stated. The scientist thinks the Lincoln County fairgrounds building will be
the skeleton’s final resting place.
Who knows where this CSI scientist will end up since he is
retiring from OSU this year. There’s no doubt about it though, Bill will be
right there if another big animal washes ashore. The amount of institutional
(science) memory he will take with him is a whole other article about where the
sciences are heading as Baby Boomers retire.
another earth day yet no rolling strikes, no massive shut downs, just speakers and cheese and crackers, man
To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There’s no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter that these people’s dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I — or does anyone else — have to destroy them.
At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?”
― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization
I never thought I would get so viccseral watching a nature show on TV. I’ve been around a lot of bad hombres tied to nature and animals — shark finning off Costa Rica, sea turtle butchering on St. Johns, cock fighting in Guatemala, dog fighting in Juarez, and a whole lot of on the scene newspaper report stuff — accident scenes, suicide scenes, murder scenes, and some bad stuff in Guatemala and Salvador in the 1980s.
But something about this scene I watched on my can in my little abode on the Oregon Coast, where of course I see birds strangulating on fishing line, whales once in a while washed up dying of starvation, and, well, before my veganism, I was tutored in the skills of bow hunting and gun shooting for animals.
I feel bad about killing a deer and a bear, a long time ago. Not my thing, and not tied to blood sport. However, I’ve been in huge confined animal feeding operations (before we were considered terrorists for taking notes and filming) and have been with two rabbis while they cut the throats of cows in their bizarre kosher ritual. I euthanized my own dogs when it was time for them to say sayonara.
A lot more in my meager 62 years, from Vietnamese butchering dogs to Arabs in Saudi Arabia garroting goats.
But just yesterday, watching passively (well, I was writing a poem, too, while on my keister) watching a nature show.
Words and images to define a moment during an animal show on the corrupt Netflix: Pathetic. Emotionally upsetting. Par for the course of human centrism. Sad. Bloody traumatizing. Sick. Insane. Inhumane. Bizarre.
Here, approaching Earth Day 2019, all I can say that this one animal’s fate now is rapidly approaching death by climate change, because of man’s/woman’s fossil fuel consumption and the impending sea ice melt: illustrative of all sorts of collapsing ecosystems, and collapsing mental states that will unfold rapidly as more species starve to death, disappear, suffer more and more inbreeding.
In the scheme of things, yeah, one animal species, quasi iconic in a humorous and comic way, no big deal dying off, compared to us, the big boys/girls on the block: chimpanzees with nuclear weapons. Yes, 11 million human infants dying worldwide each year from preventable and treatable gut issues, like diarrhea — because the rich and those “that have” get access to relatively clean potable water, while billions have to scoop up protozoa-laden water from ditches and fouled waterways. How much are those idiots raising for Notre Dame Cathedral? Billions for a symbol of rape, murder, theft, destruction? It’s a tourist spot, not some tangible place of intellectual or spiritual recompense. You think those billionaires and famous celebrities and the Holy See have the bucks to help put in clean water systems to stop 11 million babies dying yearly from preventable diseases? No way, Victor Hugo! It’s about the gargoyles, man. Billions for a fire-scarred church, while the US raped Iraq of antiquities, big time!
Are my readers already saying, “Dude, are you daft? Those people — churches, synagogues, billionaires, celebrities — don’t pay for helping black and brown people live, nor do they care their progeny bite the durs? The sooner their kids die, the better off for humanity and us, the elite, those elites are saying in their hearts of hearts, brother Paul.”
I’ll introduce what it is that’s getting me pissed off/down in the dumps and repeating in my mind, over and over, “I told you so this would be happening 50 years ago.”
First, though, an aside: What the precipitating factor today is to determine a person’s worth . . . what I have always said . . . should be the precipitants of our ire when considering the true colors of people – in most cases, how we should judge the so called elites/leaders/people with billions/militarists.
A singular action is enough to paint an entire person’s career and his or her value to the world, or lack of value. We know Obama did terrible harm to the world, but killing an American citizen and then his son in his Tough Guy Killer Drone Tuesdays says it all. Ike Eisenhower has all sorts of bad about him, but refusing to take Mami Till’s letter and failure to acknowledge the true civil rights platform of her son Emmett’s murder by redneck racists (and the entire system), well, that’s it for that Five Star dude in my book. Clinton and Goredismantling our righteous and necessary social safety nets in their big Welfare Reform package, adding cops cops cops to the menu, well, that says it all for them, baby. Hillary believing and saying there are black children who are monsters, “super predators” as her white racist female self proclaimed, need we say more?
Then there are genocidal/ war criminal lovelies like Henry Kissinger and his Vietnam program. Need we say more about him other than he is a sub-human who should not be advising and helping make more killer policy and garnering millions in speaking and book fees? Colin Powell and his yellow cake lies, or his work in Vietnam trying to discredit the heroes who exposed the Mai Lai Massacre? What redeems these killers? Did they spend time in solitary decades, and receive rehabilitation in our rotten penal system? Which leaders like Churchill are there in history who have had laurels and money and position, status and power thrown at them for following these credos? A good Jap is a Dead Jap. A good Indian is a Dead Indian? Bomb them back to the stone age. Dead civilians or members of a wedding party are collateral damage. Bug splat. Worthy of not double-tapping but triple-tapping?
Judge, jury, and executioners all.
You get the picture. George Junior Bush helping the chemical industry save money (make profits) by not pushing specific markers in chemical poisons so ER doctors and first responders might have antidotes ready in case of a child or adult poisoning? Come on, folks, you let that go, and support anything by this Mengeles?
Goes to the issue of perversions like Trump and Epstein, kidnapping or drugging teens for sex slaves. Hmm, give that boy, Trump, a pass on that? Even his Access Hollywood tapes, that’s just fine he can grab you mother’s, aunt’s, niece’s, sister’s, daughter’s, wife’s vaginas, gets away with it, and then that qualifies him to be prez – albeit boot licking president? You even consider voting for that perversion, well, what’s that say about YOU? Deplorables? Yes, yes!
They voted for Hillary and they voted for Trump. Deplorables all and one. Forty-two percent of USA eligible voters did not cast a ballot in 2016 for either perversion, and they/we are accused of putting Trump in POTUS office; accused of being the reason this country is so screwed up, failing, a pathetic excuse for a superpower?
I disqualify any human perversion, especially those with power, money, bombs and inside leverage (as in political/bureaucratic/corporate), for any job involving public service or interacting with us, the citizens. For instance, Trump continued to call the Central Park Five guilty when they were found illegally, unethically and perversely prosecuted guilty for the rape of a jogger they had nothing to do with! Not a disqualifying response during the lead up of several presidential campaigns for a casino criminal, Trump the Prequel?
What disqualifies people or nations to be considered worthy of our compassion, understanding, respect or backing? We ever fix that Japanese internment problem here in USA or Canada? Hell, so-tragically-hip Spain can’t even acknowledge the rape, murder, torture of millions of people and the theft of heritage, culture, resources as a consequence of invading Mexico more than half a millennia ago?
“There were massacres and oppression,” AMLO says in the video. “The so-called conquest was fought with the sword and the cross. They built their churches on top of the temples.” He then called on Spain to apologize for its role in the conquest, and to ask for forgiveness from Mexico’s indigenous peoples.
And what does pathetic ex-Empire Spain say in response? This country that for whatever sustainability they may have in the crumbling EU collective shows its colors. I wonder how many Iberians reject the Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s with his wife to Centla—the Maya city whose ruins they stood among—commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the battle the Chontal Maya fought against the forces of Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés.
I was in many of those cities many times, including San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. The town was named after Bartolomé de las Casas, a Domincan friar, who wrote to the king and queen back then, about what he saw traveling through Spain’s colonies in Latin America and the Caribbean: from 1517 in 1540 in his book, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. The friar detailed the systematic torture, rape, and mutilation the Spaniards exacted on indigenous people in every colony de las Casas visited.
Their reason for killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches, Las Casas wrote.
— Bartolomé de las Casas
I won’t get in details how the Spanish government felt impugned by AMLO’s letter being published, and the letter AMLO got published in Spanish newspapers was directed to not just the Spanish government and people, but to the more perverse examples of humanity, the King and Royal Family.
So, I am going tangential again, but alas, here is what the leading edge of the points I am going to make about “you can judge a book by its cover, or people by their early deeds, beliefs, actions.” Or, some event or cataclysm in nature which I am about to explain is emblematic and illustrative of larger issues that are not always apparent in the Western mind, or our collective way of thinking.
I have been accused of more than just “exotic” thinking, or more so, surreal, stream of conscious, disconnected, disharmonious, almost fugue. Let me try here, below. First the quotes:
“This is the sad reality of climate change,” Sophie Lanfear, who led a documentary crew that recorded the behavior for Our Planet—Netflix’s big-budget answer to Planet Earth, told me. “They’d be on the ice if they could.”
“It’s the worst thing I’ve ever filmed,” says Jamie McPherson, a cameraman, on a behind-the-scenes video.
Once at the top, they rested for a few days, and walked off only after the beaches below had emptied. Indeed, as the narration suggests, the sounds of their departing comrades may have lured the cliff-top [ones] off the edge. “They seemed to all want to return to the sea to feed as a group,” Lanfear says.
“It is not a normal event,” says Lanfear. “It’s such a tangible, obvious thing to show people. It’s clear as day.”
When these animals encounter hard surfaces, they rise up to meet them, hauling their two-ton bulks onto floating pieces of ice. When they fall, they flop off those low platforms into the accommodating water. So you might imagine that an [animal], peering off a tall cliff, doesn’t really understand what will happen to it when it steps off. It doesn’t expect to plummet for 260 feet, cartwheel through the air, bounce off the rocks, and crash abruptly.
Climb, plummet, cartwheel, bounce: These are not [these animals’] associated verbs.
Yes, so walruses amass in their haul outs to rest, but the ice is gone — no, this is not some bullshit Sean Hannity FOX thing make believe thing. The ice, my friends, is the big story of the century, of the millennia, yet, we have the new green deal for capitalists — wow, bullet trains, AOC announces. That’s as big of a scam as anything. We have collapsing ecosystems, entire meteorological systems, changing, the water cycle, clouds, and more and we will have Starbucks, Patagonia Clothing and Gear and Broadway and Bodegas.
Conversion to an ecologically sustainable and just economy cannot happen under the capitalist system. Capitalism’s competitive structure drives blind, relentless growth that is consuming and destroying the biosphere. Its competitive international structure breeds wars for resources, markets, cheap labor, and geopolitical military advantages. With the nuclear weapons of the nuclear powers on hair-trigger alert and a new nuclear arms race now underway, the capitalist system will annihilate us if we don’t replace it with an ecosocialist system first.
Sometime in the near future it is highly probable that the Arctic will no longer have sea ice, meaning zero ice for the first time in eons, aka: the Blue Ocean Event.
Surely, the world is not prepared for the consequences of such a historic event, which likely turns the world topsy-turvy, negatively impacting agriculture with gonzo weather patterns, thus forcing people to either starve or fight. But, the problem may be even bigger than shortages of food, as shall be discussed.
Watch the episode of the Attenborough show with hundreds of walruses falling to their deaths:
“It was like 100,000 Chewbaccas outside,” says Lanfear. “We could hear tusks scraping along the side of the walls. We could hear walruses snoring. We opened the door, and it was a wall of blubber.” The walruses gather “out of desperation, not out of choice,” David Attenborough says over the resulting footage. “A stampede can occur out of nowhere. Under these conditions, walruses are a danger to themselves.” And so they climb “to find space away from the crowds.”
Now, I caught an article in the Atlantic, that bad magazine of neoliberalism and false balance/false equivalency. This pathetic writer, this so pathetic writer, Ed Yong is also so flippant — “Climb, plummet, cartwheel, bounce: These are not walrus associated verbs.” What kind of shit is that?
In his piece, he gets some paid-off, middling person to say that the walruses climbing cliffs up to 260 feet high is not a result of climate disruption/chaos. First, reality in his piece:
But in recent years, Arctic sea ice has been thinner and sparser. The 2017–18 season marked a record low. As these icy platforms have retreated, walruses have increasingly been forced to haul out onto solid land—in the thousands.
These haul-outs aren’t new events, but they were once rarer, smaller, and less dangerous, according to Anatoly Kochnev, a Russian naturalist who has studied walruses for 36 years. When he started, only males gathered on these sites; now females and calves do too, and many are trampled in the scrum. When he started, haul-outs were rare in the northerly Chukchi Sea; now many sites there regularly heave with walruses.
It doesn’t matter how many naysayers old Yong can find to present a false equivalency in his piece. This is standard operating procedure for flaked out editors making a cool million a year or more on the East Coast working for these middling magazine. But Yong finds one. Here, again, university-preened, blatant Little Eichmanns, fit for Exxon public information officer fidelity:
But a few walrus scientists who saw the clip have questioned parts of this narrative—including the claim that walruses are climbing “to find space away from the crowds.” “Walruses thrive on crowds and haul out in tight groups, even when space is available,” says Lori Quakenbush from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Also, in the sequence, it looks as if the beach beneath the teetering walruses is relatively empty. What crowds are they escaping from?
This confusion arises from the ways in which documentaries elide space and time. Lanfear clarifies that the sequence includes footage from two separate beaches—one with the 100,000-strong congregation and one with the falls. At the latter, walruses started climbing only once the area beneath the cliffs had completely filled up; gregarious or not, they had no room. Once at the top, they rested for a few days, and walked off only after the beaches below had emptied. Indeed, as the narration suggests, the sounds of their departing comrades may have lured the cliff-top walruses off the edge. “They seemed to all want to return to the sea to feed as a group,” Lanfear says.
Oh, those “few walrus” scientists in their classrooms and labs. What the hell does that mean? And, what is a scientist tied to some university — that is now corporate funded to keep real science kettled and controlled — got to say anyway?
This is the tragedy of Earth Day 2019 — 49 years in the running. We have a society of incrementalists, those who have no idea how quickly the quickening will be, or already is. It’s both comical and suicidal. Baby steps for infantiles.
Earth Day, yeah. I just went to a cool talk in Newport given by an Oregon State University fellow who talked to our Oregon-based American Cetacean Society group. Dr. Bill Hanshumaker presented, “How do we know what we think we know about marine mammals?”
ID: Dr. William Hanshumaker, Fisheries and Wildlife Senior Instructor at Oregon State University and Oregon Sea Grant’s Chief Scientist
“Top Ten Organisms Coast Watchers Find on the Beach”
Beach visitors frequently call the Hatfield Marine Science Center or drop by with unknown artifacts with the need to have them identified. Bill Hanshumaker has been documenting this data for over 23 years. During his presentation Dr. Hanshumaker will share some of the most common and unusual findings. Bill has nearly 40 years of experience in Free-Choice Learning, working first at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry before joining OSU at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in 1993. He designs and evaluates educational programs for delivery through a variety of vehicles to a broad range of audiences. This includes developing exhibits and curriculum that meets state education standards. Since 2003, Bill has organized more than 50 special events or workshops that have reached over 25,000 individuals. His public necropsies of marine mammals, large fish, sea turtles or cephalopods are extremely popular.
Cool guy but he’s retiring at age 67. Next year. I am writing a piece about his talk to the ACS people, and, well, I try to insert a bit of a more radical narrative and line of questioning in the mix wherever I go. Way too many lock step older people not questioning war, capitalism or looking at the big picture. Like me, he was inspired and pushed to get into marine sciences while watching Jacques Cousteau’s Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau on ABC when he was a kid. I went into journalism, and blew that idea off getting a doctorate in marine biology. Some days, I think I fucked that opportunity to be a poor struggling artist! Ha.
What’s this fellow’s salary compared to the rot gut people at the university — coaches? Shit, so little compared to coaches — millions. This coach ranks 63 at Oregon State in the Pac-12, Jonathan Smith, $1,900,008, $1,275,000 — $3,075,060 , $4,037,517 — base pay and assistant pay, and buyout if they are fired!
These fellows are right-wing, hyper Christian, and, not educators. Coaches are pimps. On the other hand, scientists like Hanshumaker have done some amazing research, traveled to work on looking at whale and other marine mammal life, and teaches students and the public. He is worth a hell of a lot more than some football coach herding youth to get brain injuries!
But earth day, really with this climate change scenario after scenario bypassing the brains of CEOs and politicians, it is no easy thing to kumbaya together and pretend there is light at the end of the Capitalist Tunnel.
That spring, tens of thousands of walruses appeared at Point Lay, Alaska. Such haul-outs were once rare; now they’re an annual fixture, which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says is “most likely” connected to global warming. Walruses, it seems, can no more resist the changing of the world than they can defy gravity.
Most likely, the operative words of careerists, little Eichmanns, people who are not movers or shakers and certainly are gutless. “Most likely,” the operative words of the 2020’s?
The only reason for having a 96-gallon recycling cart is to hold all those boxes and containers that consumable products come in. If mountains of unusable refuse are the necessary price of economic growth, we need to rethink the whole economy, starting with home economics. Reduce mail orders. Buy locally made products from local retailers and pay them with cash or checks. (They’ll thank you.) Choose and demand low-tech packaging, preferably plant-based, that can be recycled, downcycled, or composted. Bone up on which plastics can harm your health. Reuse empty containers that are hard to recycle to the extent it’s safe to do so. Walk, cycle, or take transit to the store and of course, don’t forget your shopping bags.
Walruses may not be as fast or agile as their seal cousins, but apparently they can dive deeper than most. Even though diving prowess is high among “pinnipeds,” the family of semiaquatic mammals to which they belong, walruses were long thought to be one of the few members of this family incapable of diving deeper than 100 meters. But a new study provides evidence that they can, in fact, dive deeper than most seals and sea lions.
In 2010, scientists from the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources traveled to the Arctic Circle to study the diving behavior of a group of Atlantic walruses living in the high Arctic. With the help of some local Inuit hunters, the researchers located 21 walruses and used harpoons to embed small satellite transmitters into their blubbery hides, which allowed them to monitor the movements of the walruses.
They spent the next three years monitoring the movements and foraging habits of these walruses, and according to their findings, which were published in February in the journal Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, they discovered that the walruses sometimes dove as deep as 500 meters. Of the 33 living species of pinnipeds, only 10 are known to dive deeper.
I’m thinking about Rex Tillerson and all the CEOs and advanced marketers and Little Eichmanns who have made money off of lying about global warming and fossil fuels. What a dream — having the top 50 richest men and women frog marched off those cliffs those walruses are falling from, largely because their eyesight is horrible out of water and they are hearing below walruses entering the water.
What a great big magical dream — all those militarists, kings and queens, politicians, presidents, old and new, dictators, the entire cadre of Mad Men and Mad Women whose jobs ares to not tell the truth, to obfuscate the truth, to bend it, to unlearn it — you know, the industry of agnotology. All of them pushed off those cliffs in Russia where these scenes of slipping death are harrowing for even an old dude like me.
What don’t we know, and why don’t we know it? What keeps ignorance alive, or allows it to be used as a political instrument? Agnotology—the study of ignorance—provides a new theoretical perspective to broaden traditional questions about “how we know” to ask: Why don’t we know what we don’t know? The essays assembled in Agnotology show that ignorance is often more than just an absence of knowledge; it can also be the outcome of cultural and political struggles. Ignorance has a history and a political geography, but there are also things people don’t want you to know (“Doubt is our product” is the tobacco industry slogan). Individual chapters treat examples from the realms of global climate change, military secrecy, female orgasm, environmental denialism, Native American paleontology, theoretical archaeology, racial ignorance, and more. The goal of this volume is to better understand how and why various forms of knowing do not come to be, or have disappeared, or have become invisible.
Denialism, the new normal for capitalists, even those in the 80 percent, who are being abused and denigrated and economically/intellectually/ spiritually/ culturally/artistically/environmentally neutered by the elite!
For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.
— The Culture of Make Believe, Derrick Jensen
Part One — I am scrambling to get this first part of the Earth Day two-part article series up and running while I work hard Friday night to write the second, more sobering part of what Earth Day 2019 is and, unfortunately, what it is not.
I like going local by looking at global issues. I will talk about the reality of recycling products as a big scam. I will write about all this chatter from millionaires like Naomi Klein and now the leadership of the so-called alternative web journalist sight, The Intercept. I watched the interview and the live-illustration by Molly Crabtree, “We Can Be Whatever We Have the Courage to See,” which, according to Klein’s millionaire husband, Avi Lewis, has had 4 million hits already as of April 18, 2019.
Hits on the internet, and this Lewis fellow declares this as a huge win for Mother Earth, for “the movement, and, surely, a grand win for the New Green Deal. This can be so dishearenting to hear the idiocy around these moments and digital expressions. Earth systems are in total collapse, and it’s more than some Canadian writer’s world view or the Holly-wood-ization of the world seen through the looking glass of the two dirtiest countries’ liberal spokespeople: Canada and USA.
Daily, it becomes more and more delusional on all aisles of the political manure pile, but also on all fronts of mainstream media and fake alternative media. The Press is out to lunch, man, big time. Having Today’s (4/18)Democracy Now:
“We can be whatever we have the courage to see.” That’s the message of a stunning new video released by The Intercept, Naomi Klein and award-winning artist Molly Crabapple Wednesday that imagines a future shaped by the Green New Deal. It’s called “A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.” The film was co-written by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez herself, along with Avi Lewis, the co-founder of The Leap. We speak with Avi Lewis and award-winning artist Molly Crabapple about the power of art to create social change.
Crabtree’s new thing is as follows: “As an award-winning animator, she has pioneered a new genre of live-illustrated explainer journalism, collaborating with Jay Z, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The ACLU and The Equal Justice Initiative to tell stories about America’s prison system and history of institutional racism.”
“Live-illustrated explainer journalism”! Wow. Tha’s a whole other book to write about, what this all means to humanity’s greater and greater loosening of its grip on sanity. In any case, the part two of my Earth Day hit will look at this new-fangled mixed up and same old Capitalism loving soft shoe bull crap lying about what has to be done to mitigate a world without ice. Because that’s the fact, Jack, so bullet trains and cool ass urban jobs and folks like Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis, a Canadian self-proclaimed Jewish couple with Jewish children, well, they are living the good millionaires’ liberal lifestyles, and, the revolution and the rebellion will not live in the belly of the controlled opposition which they are very centered inside
Interesting the power centers in Canada vis-a-vis the family lines of both Klein and Lewis, from Wikipedia, really are at the top of the top of elites. I bring this up to point out that the narrative around climate change and the New Green Deal and poverty and envirogees and starvation and physically harming toxins in this Mad Mad Mad World of Consumerism CANNOT be shunted into elitist and vain-glory liberal and pro-Capitalist politics or centers of non-profit gobbledygook:
Avi Lewis is the great grandson of Moshe Losz (Lewis), an outspoken member of the Jewish Bund who left Svislach, Poland (today Belarus), after being interrogated by the Russians and threatened with death or the Gulag for his political activity. He left for Montreal in 1921, with his wife Rose (née Lazarovitch) and three children. Avi Lewis is the grandson of former federal NDP leader David Lewis and the son of former Ontario NDP leader and diplomat Stephen Lewis and journalist Michele Landsberg. Avi Lewis is married to journalist and author Naomi Klein; his sister Ilana Landsberg-Lewis is the executive director of the Stephen Lewis Foundation.
Naomi Klein was born in Montreal, Quebec, and brought up in a Jewish family with a history of peace activism. Her parents were self-described “hippies” who moved to Montreal from the U.S. in 1967 as war resisters to the Vietnam War. Her mother, documentary film-maker Bonnie Sherr Klein, is best known for her anti-pornography film Not a Love Story. Her father, Michael Klein, is a physician and a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Her brother, Seth Klein, is director of the British Columbian office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Before World War II, her paternal grandparents were communists, but they began to turn against the Soviet Union after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. In 1942, her grandfather, an animator at Disney, was fired after the 1941 strike,[15] and had to switch to working in a shipyard instead. By 1956 they had abandoned communism. Klein’s father grew up surrounded by ideas of social justice and racial equality, but found it “difficult and frightening to be the child of Communists”, a so-called red diaper baby.
Klein’s husband, Avi Lewis, was born into a well-connected political and journalistic family; he works as a TV journalist and documentary filmmaker. The couple’s only child, son Toma, was born on June 13, 2012. (Wikipedia)
I continue to question the elite’s role in furthering the decline of people and third world societies, and those playing around with apocalypse (art, education, performing, documentaries, non-profit complex) and those seeing green as the new non-profit profit industry, or green washing or green pornography thing, or green whacking or green is the new black towering inferno of lies, as in profits for all and great new renewable energy jobs and business pretty much as usual thinking.
You see, I just taught at a Toledo, Oregon, school, actually both HS and elementary schools. I will write about that, too. Youth that are really bad, according to one teacher (math) who hails from New Jersey but went to school in Massachusetts, taught there, Vermont, Eugene, OR, Bullhead City, AZ, and now Toledo. She told me that hands down this high school was the worst place she ever taught at.
She’s got 14 or more years under her belt as a traveling teacher, and now she lives in Newport with her highly-paid (compared to Toledo or Newport wages) husband who works for Oregon State University (average undergraduate/grad tuition — for a state school in a dumpy town, Corvallis, is: $11,166 for Oregon residents and $30,141 for out of State students and the 2019 graduate school tuition & fees are $14,061 for State residents and $24,483 for others). Interesting, this 50 year old-ish teacher with a middle class wage and state retirement portfolio, and a second wage earner in the mix, and they are white, so there is probably inherited well in the mix, telling me, a part-timer, 62, precarious worker (a substitute teacher, come on!), that in her limited scope, Toledo, Oregon (not Ohio) has the worse students in both Junior/Senior High School in her realm of teaching.
This town is Koch Brothers-polluted with a paper-mill run by Georgia Pacific which is owned by the billionaire Koch brothers who despise poor people, hence the dirty water, the dirty air, the dangerous jobs and the low pay for parents and those future workers barely getting through high school (many want to quit and go to Jobs Corps or get their GED’s while pumping gas).
What makes these students “the most destructive to school property and the most disruptive and disrespectful,” according to the East Coast teacher, we’ll talk about that too, soon, in a future article. Or what makes a teacher declare that in the public school realm, that too will be addressed.
You know, all that paper the Klein-Lewis family uses for their copy and books, manuscript and TV scripts, etc., hmm, where does that shit come from? What are the consequences of all that paper use/misuse? All that virginpaper used in Congress, in political halls of injustice, and yes colleges and PK12? Really, come on — these children are coughing up a storm from the pulp mill pollution. These youth I talked with several times are broken and need alternatives to classrooms with broken lights, peeling paint, and rows of desks — they are so down on themselves, so not confident they will go anywhere in life, so traumatized and broken, so chronically seized with negativity and put-downs and self-loathing . . . or self-delusional.
I guarantee, Earth Day to them is a day off, since it falls on the bizarre holiday of Easter Sunday/take off/Monday!
Back to Part One —
Local Environmentalists Meet Inside for some Presentations — A Far-Cry from the Earth Days I Organized in Spokane!
celebration in Newport is April 22, at the public Library
The first “earth” day started really with nuts and bolts issues focusing on stopping air and water pollution, using a more sexy crisis as a platform for marching: awareness around the annual increasing depletion of whale populations worldwide. That was in 1970, and the iconic blue and humpback whales were plastered all over posters and some were paper mâché giant icons that led the marchers on a pathway of civic engagement and political action tied to the planet’s degraded ecosystems, including those in cities.
On April 22, 1970, millions of people took to the streets to bring voice to the planet and hold corporations responsible in large part for the negative impacts of 150 years of industrial development.
In the U.S. and around the world, smog alerts were common, turning deadly. This fortified leading scientists and health experts to connect growing air, water, food and soil pollution to developmental delays in children, respiratory ailments and cancers in both young and old.
Almost 50 years ago — biologists supported by universities that were not so beholden to corporate influence and censorship — proved global biodiversity was in decline as a result of the heavy use of pesticides and other pollutants. We were just beginning as citizens to see how timber cutting and plowing over the rain-forests of the world for animal feed crops – to just name a few heavy-handed human scale degradations – could exponentially expand creating a much different – and lesser — world.
Those big events across the globe, especially the first earth day in Washington DC, pushed politicians, media and the average citizen to become aware of ecological challenges. The US Congress and President Nixon responded to the pressure, and in July of the same year, they created the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as significant environmental laws such as the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, among many.
For Lincoln County – with three branch campuses of Oregon Coast Community College, and with the OSU Hatfield Center and a plethora of environmental and conservation groups, 2019 Earth Day is more like a whimper than a roar . . . a pebble splashing in the big blue Pacific Ocean.
It’s a huge body of water now hobbled with acidification fueled by the world’s oceans absorbing 93 percent of all carbon dioxide expelled through fossil fuel burning and forest burning.
Hypoxia, or dead zones, buffet the oceans around here, and from time to time, these oxygen-squeezed sections have huge marine species die-off’s. Sometimes fish like halibut just flee the waters nowhere to be found.
Towns like Newport, Lincoln City, Depoe Bay, Waldport and Yachats depend on whale watching, beach tourism, sport fishing and, of course, commercial fishing, yet we have significant issues tied to clear-cutting forests up to the ocean (or Highway 101); solid waste (bio-waste) dispersal on land and into watersheds; and significant fracturing of natural ecosystems through construction, road building and dike deployment to “hold back” natural sea and freshwater flooding. Our estuaries were once amazing natural systems of biological and hydrologic ebb and flow.
Interestingly, the Earth Day theme for the big groups organizing it last year was “End Plastic Pollution.” Many organizations – thousands – were working on ending single-use plastics and promoting alternatives to fossil fuel-based materials, as well as pushing for 100 percent recycling of plastics, corporate and government accountability, and changing human behavior concerning plastics.
That has become the strategy of non-profits and grassroots groups – educating citizens so they can become active players in demanding governments and corporations control and clean-up plastic pollution.
Most environmental issues, whether it’s stopping the slaughter of whales or curbing pesticide use, go to the core of the topic at hand by looking for frameworks from which to regulate. Part of the Earth Day celebrations I have been involved in as a coordinator in Spokane, Auburn and El Paso included passionate and knowledge voices who have lead movements, written books, directed documentaries and risked their lives to stop wanton destruction of, say, the Amazonian rain-forest.
Yes, getting entire groups of people and communities (including the colleges I taught at and for which I acted as sustainability coordinator) to take personal responsibility for whichever consumptive practice is producing more and more negative environmental effects, such as plastics, involves educating them on how to live a life of reducing, refusing, reusing, recycling and removing.
In one more year, 2020, the 50th anniversary of earth day arrives, but this year’s theme is Protect our Species. That includes the threatened and endangered species that are both rare, like the white rhino, snow leopard or the killer whale pod living in the Puget Sound, and once ubiquitous like butterflies, turtles, lizards, what have you.
However, there are more threads to the environmental quilt that are not just frayed, but outright missing in huge patches.
We are losing many insect species, and birds around the world are becoming fewer in terms of sheer numbers and diversity. Writer and researcher Elizabeth Kolbert made popular the science community’s assessment that we are in the Sixth Mass Extinction.
Regarding the Anthropocene, on some level that’s neither here nor there. You could say that a meteor strike is natural in the sense that it’s part of the cosmos or whatever. But a meteor strike is unusual, and its effect is an unusual and devastating one for many other species. So I don’t think whether we are “natural” or not is the issue. Obviously, we’re having a very dramatic impact on the planet and on other species. And if you want to say that’s natural, fine. And if you want to say it’s unnatural, fine. We need to decide whether we like the impact we’re having, not whether we’re natural or not.
I am pretty new to the Central Oregon Coast—as in four months. Part of my journey into communities is I get to know the people, the systems within community structures – especially services tied to youth, aging, poverty and social justice – and the built and ecological environments.
I’m teaching PK12 in the schools. I just became a member of both Surfrider and the American Cetacean Society. I also am closely tied to Oregon’s writing communities, and my hope is to get more involved in the ones out here on the coast.
I’ve met some dedicated people on microplastic beach clean-ups and the big SOLVE beach clean-up. I’ve made an effort to listen to subject matter experts in order to glean from them knowledge I need to move forward as writer and activist.
I posed four fundamental questions to many environmental and conservation-minded people, tied to the value, meaning and effectiveness of Earth Day awareness and celebration campaigns —
Students ask, “What’s one thing I can do for the environment?” Give us your best answer here.
Earth Day is going on 50 years in 2020. What is one big issue — and why — you are concerned about that needs addressing not only in the USA/Lincoln County but globally?
What is one big change you have seen to your community you’ve been in the past few years tied to the environment?
Tell us your favorite or most memorable time in “wilderness” or “nature.”
For Charlie Plybon, Oregon Policy Manager of Surfrider Foundation, his eye is on individual habits and consumption choices: “Consider the source and eventual fate of your purchases and consumption habits – think about that before you buy it. From foods to plastics, we need to understand the full impacts of what we purchase and consume. Buy local, reduce consumption or avoid “single-use”, compost, grow food and plant trees.”
It makes sense to look at the area’s youth as future leaders in the movement to stop the pollution and mitigate the effects of global warming. Martin Desmond, 67, is a volunteer for Citizens Climate Lobby and has been in Newport for six years. He states: “The most effective action that students can take is to become involved with getting carbon reduction legislation passed at the local, state, and federal levels.”
For someone who has been here on the coast for 46 years, Scott Rosin, 70, has a simple answer for students to abide by: “Be aware of your effect on the environment every waking minute and act accordingly in a positive manner. If you can transcend to effective action instead of bogus rationalizations or despair, do so.”
While Earth Day can be a day of celebration and self-congratulatory homilies, I know false hope, greenwashing (using environmental and ecological language to make money and still not stop pollution and degradations), and all those adults in the room telling youth and activists to “just take baby steps” will not turn the tide, so to speak, on the great melting of polar and glacial ice. We are talking about scientists who are independently looking at a world without ice in the coming hundred to three hundred years.
For 42-year-old Plybon, with 19 years as a resident of South Beach, he is concerned about several big issues the country and Lincoln County have to face. Again, this earth day story is not for the faint of heart: “Climate change and water,” Plybon stated. “The inhabitability of our earth will be the challenge of the next generations – that’s not an environmental issue, that’s an everybody issue. Today’s kids are asking what next, will we have a place to live?”
Rosin, on the other hand, goes right back to the plastics on the beaches and in the oceans, which now account for millions of marine birds perishing as well as turtles, seals and sea lions, whales and dolphins choking or starving to death. Every apex predatory in the ocean – those that we end up eating – has microplastics in their blood and flesh.
“Plastic pollution in the environment and particularly the ocean is a death sentence for most animals larger than mice, as surely as the Yucatan Meteor was sixty-six million years ago. The difference is that event and outcome (to channel T. S. Eliot) was practically instantaneous (a bang,) whereas what we face will take years (a whimper.)”
Celebrating wilderness is probably the best bet for any Earth Day participant. Get out in the woods, on the mountaintops, in the rivers and ocean. Remember those powerful spiritual moments in nature and then fight for those same memories for future generations to experience.
For Plybon, making large connections to one species has been amazing. “Fishing in Alaska with my dad — behind the big sockeye run — for trout, everything makes sense. My family and existence, the idea of ‘salmon nation,’ the connections of the forest and wildlife to a single species’ migration and reproduction make this world feel fragile and inexplicably connected.”
Desmond too has family memories about deep connections to nature: “We took our grandkids to Yellowstone several years ago when Lillian was four years old and Evan was one and a half years old. While Yellowstone is known for its unique geothermal features and large numbers of bison, elk, grizzly bears, and wolves, our Evan got the most pleasure out of watching ground squirrels crawl up to his shoes while we were illegally feeding them. For Lillian, she remembers swimming near Mammoth where a hot spring pours into Gardiner River. Our granddaughter Lillian has now collected 12 junior ranger badges from national and state parks.”
Finally, anyone working hard on conservation and fighting to restore and preserve the environment can get philosophical, as Rosin did when I asked him about his most memorable time in wilderness: “The illusion of the ‘natural’ life I believed I was once living has evaporated to the point I that I can no longer mentally conjure it. Once, respite only required paddling beyond the breakers and keeping my back to the shore. Now I know what floats around me.”
Here, for a list of Monday’s Newport speakers:
Citizens’ Climate Lobby – Newport Group and 350 Oregon Central Coast will be sponsoring an Earth Day celebration from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm, Monday, April 22nd at the Newport Public Library.
Mark Saelens, District Manager for the Solid Waste District of Lincoln County, will speak about the county’s recycling and sustainability efforts. Saelens is a former Newport City Councilor.
Martin Desmond, volunteer for Citizens’ Climate Lobby – Newport group, will give an update of HB 2020, the carbon reduction bill that is moving through the Oregon State Legislature. The Joint Committee on Carbon Reduction is expected to pass out the bill on Earth Day. Desmond will briefly speak about the development of climate action plans for Lincoln County.
Rio Davidson, owner of Cascade Coast Solar, will discuss the potential of solar energy installation in commercial and residential homes in Lincoln County. Cascade’s solar systems typically pay for themselves and start saving money on energy bill in seven years to ten years.
Jason Gonzales, the Forest and Watershed Campaign Organizer of Oregon Wild, will speak about impacts to forests in the Oregon Coast Range. Gonzales grew up near Sierra Nevada mountains, exploring the granite domes, freezing rivers, and giant pines on public lands around Yosemite National Park.
Aimee Thompson of Thompson’s Sanitary Services will discuss current recycling and disposal procedures. Thompson’s is offering free compost, Saturday April 20 near its main office, 7450 NE Avery Street, Newport, in celebration of Earth Day while supplies last, limited to one pick-up load per person.
Organizations that will have informational tables include Oregon Wild, Cascade Coast Solar, Thompson’s Sanitary Services, Lincoln County Community Rights, Friends of Yaquina Lighthouse, Oceana Natural Foods Co-Op, Citizens Climate Lobby – Newport group and 350 Oregon Central Coast. Light refreshments will be served.
We will also be serving light refreshments. Thanks for your interest.
***
Note: I attempted to get a more “diverse” set of responses from a more diverse set of interviewees — youth, teachers, poor people, tribes people. I wrote the above article for the local Newport Times News, for Friday’s edition (not sure it will make it in). I have to say the new normal is outright fear of answering questions posed to people by writer/journalists — as in fear of reprisals (not sure which ones), fear of being in print media, and many more issues, including not having approval of the various employers to speak as a teacher or tribal member on some environmental board.
I got one woman’s take, late, after my deadline for the local Wed & Friday newspaper; I will include her responses here, since I think they are important. Joy also is the Oregon Chapter leader for the American Cetacean Society, for which I just finished a naturalist certification course under her auspices.
1. Every year the most common question I get from students and people I talk with about deep ecology and ecosocialism is,
“What’s one thing I can do for the environment?” Give us your best answer here.
JP: “Everyone can do the 4 R’s: Reduce, Reuse/Repurpose, Recycle, and Rot (compost). Start with number one Reduce. Buy less by buying only what you really need and will use. Choose durable items that will last. Buy gently used, shop at garage sales and thrift stores.”
2. Earth Day is going on 50 years in 2020. What is one big issue — and why — are you concerned about that needs addressing not only in the USA/Lincoln County but globally?
JP: “Our oceans! Over 2/3 of the earth is ocean. The ocean is critically linked to our survival on earth and is under attack in multitudes of ways. Pollution of all types, chemical, industrial, plastic, and coastal development are destroying habitat. Ocean acidification is a huge problem. It negatively impacts the food web as well as fisheries. The world needs to focus on ocean health.”
3. What is one big change you have seen to your community you’ve been in the past 10 years (or more if it’s the same community) tied to the environment?
JP: “I grew up in the Midwest in an area and time where the environment was only looked at as a resource to be used for farming. My children however, grew up in a time and place where they learned to recycle, to compost and garden, and to take walks to pick up garbage while in elementary school. They and their generation learned a better way to take care of the environment. We still have a long way to go but society can make positive change.”
4. Tell us your favorite or most memorable time in “wilderness” or “nature.” A couple of sentences.
JP: “I have so many it is hard to choose just one. I’ve been fortunate to spend time in many environments from deserts to forests to the ocean. I recall hiking along the Umpqua River outside of Roseburg. I was by myself, it was so quiet and peaceful, just the sounds of nature and deer for company. Of course, being surrounded by blue whales is an incredible experience!”
5. Name, age, organization/affiliation, is this your home (where) and for how long? Joy Primrose, 53, Oregon since 1992 — ACS Oregon Chapter President
are we fighting against the plastic that ends up in landfills and in oceans, or the total energy used (global warming gasses expelled) to create the mult-iuse bags?
We’re probably not the first time there’s been a civilization in the universe,” states Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester and the author of Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth.
The idea that we’re destroying the planet gives us way too much credit. Certainly, we’re pushing the earth into a new era. If we look at the history of the biosphere, the history of life on earth, in the long run, the earth is just going to pick that up and do what is interesting for it. It will run new evolutionary experiments. We, on the other hand, may not be a part of that experiment. Source.
Damn, and I was just going to rattle on about why I am not making it to the Newport City Council meeting in an hour (6 pm, 4/15/2019) to see if the wise mayor and council vote for a single-use plastic bag ban. I have rallied around the ban for many more reasons than the negative effects of this throwaway bag on marine life, fish, reefs and the aesthetic value of not having a bag for groceries wafting high in the Sitka spruces around here.
I’m thinking a puny single-use plastic bag ban is the inch-worm step toward having a shitload of real conversations, action plans and paradigm shifts in how communities will attempt to weather the impending huge negative effects of climate change, food shortages, high cost of energy, pollution, lack of housing (affordable) and the lack of worthy employment, education, retirement, palliative care, and rehab.
If we can’t restrict one plastic item in the scheme of all the junk thrown at us by corporations and their chemical purveyors, then how are we going to have conversations about forcing all corporations to stop mindless over-production of junk and put an end to their Capitalism on Steroids of planned material-product obsolescence so they can continue to sell-sell-sell? How are we going to stop capitalism in its tracks, which is the ONLY solution to climate change, predatory wealth, and the resulting externalities of more and more pollution, toxins, wars, and death? That’s the only way to battle against what we have now, in 2019 as 410 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere continues to increase, ocean acidification continues to rise, and hypoxia and mindless-endless wars continue to spread; wars and war making/prepping/staging sucking an amazing 52 cents of each tax dollar thrown at war material/war profiteers/war enablers/ war side businesses?
Broken schools systems, broken lives, and broken spirits, in a country that calls itself Christian and then supports the most irreligious, blasphemous devil-loving man/woman/LBGTQ-hating, racist and sexist and imbalanced human shadow called Trump. All of those seven deadly sins he has dripping from his Big Mac lubricated jowl.
The reality is there is no simple approach to anything these days — to even getting to first base in regard to community participatory thinking in order to make way at rolling up our sleeves to begin to solve problem after problem created by that perverted business principle (sic) that any of the Fortune 1000 and all the sycophants embrace (all solvable). And the unintended and intended consequences of our individual, family, group and national/global decisions need to be weighed ahead of the game. The tipping points, the feedback loops, and lag time and tragedy of the commons and the overshoot of everything capitalism does for profit with no regard to humankind, wildlife, air, water, food, soil, aesthetics and so on, this is what we need to be working on, not all the flippant shit we express in our collective capitalist angst and superficial consumerism.
I am also colliding with some heady stuff, tied to the Great Filter, while teaching some dirt-poor children in this rural county and working on imbecilic plastic bag bans (when we should be banning all plastics and go back to a world where we do things in bulk — think reusable containers, streamlining packaging and working with the finite planet. These juxtapositions are the thing of my morning first cup of coffee:
Humanity seems to have a bright future, i.e., a non-trivial chance of expanding to fill the universe with lasting life. But the fact that space near us seems dead now tells us that any given piece of dead matter faces an astronomically low chance of begating such a future. There thus exists a great filter between death and expanding lasting life, and humanity faces the ominous question: how far along this filter are we?
Combining standard stories of biologists, astronomers, physicists, and social scientists would lead us to expect a much smaller filter than we observe. Thus one of these stories must be wrong. To find out who is wrong, and to inform our choices, we should study and reconsider all these areas. For example, we should seek evidence of extraterrestrials, such as via signals, fossils, or astronomy. But contrary to common expectations, evidence of extraterrestrials is likely bad (though valuable) news. The easier it was for life to evolve to our stage, the bleaker our future chances probably are.
[…]
Finally, we would do well to keep a in mind a few unusual aspects of this Great Filter puzzle. First, let us keep in mind the interdisciplinary nature of the this puzzle. While it may comforting for each discipline to claim that the Filter must surely lie in some other discipline of (in their eyes) lessor repute, such claims should surely be backed up by detailed analysis using our best understanding of that discipline. It will no more do for astronomers to simply claim, without further supporting analysis, that people will lose their tendency to colonize, than it would do for biologists to simply declare that astronomers could not possibly know that the universe is as big as they claim.
Second, we must be wary of the “God of the Gaps” phenomena, where miracles are attributed to whatever we don’t understand. Contrary to the famous drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost, here we are tempted to conclude that the keys must lie in whatever dark corners we have not searched, rather than face the unpleasant conclusion that the keys may be forever lost.
Finally, we should remember that the Great Filter is so very large that it is not enough to just find some improbable steps; they must be improbable enough. Even if life only evolves once per galaxy, that still leaves the problem of explaining the rest of the filter: why we haven’t seen an explosion arriving here from any other galaxies in our past universe? And if we can’t find the Great Filter in our past, we’ll have to fear it in our future. — Robin Hanson
How can we not question the scheme of things, big and small and unknown . . . and the observable now and the predictable future in our collective predictive consciousnesses? Really, though, the crux of this blog is about how quickly words become, now, in 2019, the tools of incarceration and damnation by the powers. Words that repeat themselves and end up on the precipice of propaganda time, with realities only set for the marketers, billionaires and political class. Just look now at Julian Assange. We are all Julian Assange! That is, those of us who write, we all are Assange. Those of us who publish. And who report!
The big question today and from hereon is: How might I end up erased or un-personed, because I espouse anti-Imperialism and anti-Americanism and anti-Capitalism ideals, or posit a much more aggressive revolutionary zealotry or even ask for people to face fascism with chaos/disruption/ physical force against the powers that be. Rejecting to jobs, rejecting payments, fines, levies, fees, prosecutions, mortgages, indoctrination, taxes, mandates, tolls; or invalidating popular propaganda and its evil twin, marketing, well, that in itself is violence against the state, the corporation, the old-new global or community or group order.
The shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “sow the seeds of discontent [without which] there would be no advance towards civilization”. The warning is explicit towards journalists. What happened to the founder and editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a newspaper, you in a TV studio, you on radio, you running a podcast. — John Pilger
Now, this mental state I am shaking out of is tied to the big picture/small picture thing, and while the plastic bag ban I have written about here recently in the past, and those few little bits that have been published in the local newspaper, well well, life does go on in terms of the big big scale!
This is how democracy doesn’t work — going to a small town city council, rural county locale, trying to wade through the ineptitude of our representative government. Many in the city councils around the country get paid squat. Many are using it — political service/disservice — to make connections, both business and political, which is the same Hydra in fact. Much on that later, too! Many small town council members are attempting to do some good for the community, don’t get me wrong. But the solutions are still mired in the fantasies of economic growth unchecked, a green light to the business community, and a belief that everyone in the USA can pull himself or herself up by the bootstraps and find his or her 40 acres and a mule — or in modern parlance, his or her own 2500 square foot rancher on 1.5 acres with 2.3 children and 2.7 vehicles in the 3 car garage while managing a string of drive-through coffee stands! Or variations on that theme!
Environmental concerns are just postcard thinking by the masses, that majority of people who have not yet suffered the fenceline communities’ environmental (pollution) racism.
Q. What are some people that inspire you?
A. The work of W E B Dubois has inspired me a lot. He was not only a famous sociologist but also someone who could be called a ‘change agent’. He was not only a good social theorist but also very interested in the application of his work. I saw his work to be directly relevant to influencing the life of ordinary people. His work made me believe that research, policy, and practice must go hand-in-hand.
Q. How is climate change a social and environmental justice issue?
A. Climate change is the number one problem of the 21st century. We sometimes forget that climate change is much more than simply parts per million (of greenhouse gas emissions). It is an equity issue. It effects some people directly. The most peculiar aspect of climate change is that the populations that contribute least to the problem of climate change are most likely to feel its impacts. Such disproportionality makes it a serious social justice issue.
Climate change is also a very complex issue to solve. It is a global issue, a national issue, and a local issue—all at the same time. At the local level, the population at the front line of the impacts of climate change are also at risk to other things. For example, usually the most susceptible to climate change-related impacts are those with greater food and water insecurity.
Hence, climate change intersects with vulnerable populations not only after a disaster but also before a disaster. Because of the complexity and uniqueness of the climate change crisis, we cannot continue to plan (climate mitigation and adaptation) for it using the tools of the past. I think that from a planning perspective, we cannot assume that a uniform plan can work for all in terms of ensuring social justice. Planning has to be sensitive to the fact that communities and nations have different levels of wealth, health, and education. The goal for planning should be to build community resilience and provide an opportunity for people to bounce back both before and after a catastrophic event. — Robert D. Bullard, the Dean of the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas. He is often described as the father of environmental justice.
Look, I cut my teeth on environmentalism, and yes, we have disaster after disaster happening to ecosystems — wild, as in marine, and with homo sapiens, as in the average Joe and Jane, Lupe and Lorenzo! I put the human element in with the wild element, and, yes, there are huge issues tied to capitalism, population at 7.5 billion, corporate complicity (and its driving of other sell-outs and Faustian Bargain adherents) in driving the ecological crisis. There is no argument from me to say that the 2,700 billionaires (and their families) and the 36,000,000 millionaires (and their families) do not deserve the power they have buggered the world with, nor how the majority of their loot has been gotten at the expense of families, men and women and children, and entire communities, entire regions, entire countries, entire species. If I say lock them up, then, well, what a better solution that is, than what the 36,002,700 super rich and their thugs and sycophants and Little Big Eichmann’s have had in store for us, the 80 percent, and the ecosystems destroyed by each and every cargo ship unleashed to the world.
But, we also are a rapacious species, self-deluded into thinking we are above the rest of the animal kingdom, and that it’s winner takes all. That attitude is not the attitude of the majority of peoples. Yet, those people, those civil societies, those battlers for agriculture and water rights — to hold their land as bio-intensive and organic components of the ecosystems around them — they are battling overlords and societies that depend on perpetual growth: perpetual growth in profits, in interest rates, in population rates and replacement rates for each passing generation.
The unborn and the old and the ones who want to stay poor but completely able and subsistence centered on their own land can’t even get past the evil of the corporation and the government unregulators working with the thugs. Death in he womb:
Glyphosate is the base chemical component for some 750 different brands of pesticides worldwide, in addition to Monsanto-Bayer’s Roundup. Glyphosate residues have been found in tap water, orange juice, children’s urine, breast milk, chips, snacks, beer, wine, cereals, eggs, oatmeal, wheat products, and most conventional foods tested. It’s everywhere, in brief.
In a long-term animal study by French scientists under Gilles Eric Seralini, Michael Antoniou and associates, it was demonstrated that even ultra-low levels of glyphosate herbicides cause non-alcoholic liver disease. The levels the rats were exposed to, per kg of body weight, were far lower than what is allowed in our food supply. According to the Mayo Clinic, today, after four decades or more pervasive use of glyphosate pesticides, 100 million, or 1 out of 3 Americans now have liver disease. These diagnoses are in some as young as 8 years old. (read old interview of great scientist exposing GMOs and Monsanto, who is now deceased, conducted by yours truly here!)
I always feel as if a little bit of hope can creep up on me and assist me in my own sanity in the insanity that is now. Sure, everything that changes stays the same. Maybe, but much on that later. The fact this glyphosate story is just one of millions demonstrating there is no great filter running this society, though many believe we as a species will eventually get to speeds approaching FTL — faster than light — to help us explore, move away, become celestial pilgrims again and again!
Hope is like knowing sugar is bad-bad-bad for you, for the entire human physiology, the entire system of the homo sapiens regulating immune system, creating inflammation, gut issues, brain “fog,” and more. Not glucose for the body as the body breaks down veggie and fruit fructose to feed the brain.
Yet, we go out and eat a Reese’s peanut butter cup or down a soda or shot of whiskey. It’s all bad-bad-bad, but we have hope that just one scoop of Ben and Jerry’s or one margarita or that Lucky Charms binge is just a passing phase.
Wrong! Addiction and feedback loops and hungry insulin rushing through the body tricking it to want to eat more and more. And, alas, comes the single-use plastic bag ban. We want those reusable ones, those cotton ones, and, well, the bag ban — single use ones, that is (actually the single use wimpy bags are used as garbage liners and poop scoop receptacles, so they are actually disposable bags with a second use-reuse-repurpose tag) — seems like a win-win.
But, there are life cycle assessments, and the jury is pretty much in, out there — you have to look at the consequences of one action creating another action or one product taken out of the consumer stream but replaced by other products.
Life cycle assessments and embedded energy . . . and that fact that when you chew that mango on the Oregon Coast, consider how many miles it traveled from where it came; how many machines sowed it and harvested it; how many pesticides and inputs “protected” it and grew it; how much oil was used to build the transportation system that moved it and all the equipment to grow and harvest it; and how many more miles were expended to take it from point a to point b, and then to points c and d, as well as how much packaging after processing was used to bring that mango to you at the local 7-11 as dried sulfur-gassed chews ready to be trucked to the vendor selling them at the beach kiosk?
Life cycle analysis. Maybe we need to do the same life cycle (destroying) analysis of products. Or the life cycle enslavement cycle of freaky thinkers like Mister 9-9-6 man or Elon Musk!
One of China’s richest men has been criticized for endorsing the controversial culture of 12-hour workdays in the country’s red-hot tech industry, saying employees who worked longer hours will get the “rewards of hard work.”
Jack Ma, founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba (BABA), has spoken out on social media in recent days in support of the Chinese work practice known as “996.” The number refers to working from 9 am to 9 pm six days a week and is said to be common among the country’s big technology companies and start-ups.
“If we find things we like, 996 is not a problem,” Ma said in a blog post Sunday on Chinese social media site Weibo. “If you don’t like [your work], every minute is torture,” he added.
Ma’s comments prompted criticism from Chinese social media users.
“Did you ever think about the elderly at home who need care, (or) the children who need company?” wrote a Weibo user with the online moniker stupidcan123, in response to Ma’s post. “If all enterprises enforce a 996 schedule, no one will have children” because of a lack of time, they added.
“It has become harder and harder to raise money recently,” Zhao said in his brightly decorated office located in a fancy Beijing office building. “I’m under a lot of pressure. Sometimes I’m awake from around 2 am to dawn and can’t stop thinking about my company’s future.”
Eric Tao, founder and chief executive of Beijing-based random video chat company Holla, feels the same pain as Musk and Zhao. “As CEO of the company, I can’t underperform this week and make it up by outperforming next week. It doesn’t work that way,” he said, adding that he works about 12 hours a day, so not as many as Elon Musk.
In the scheme of things, 996 or 797 — 7 am to 9 pm 7 days a week — is what will (is) burning up the planet. Busy bees, these slave masters are. What are their billions made doing for society.
I know I know — a plastic bag ban is a drop in the proverbial pond.
I sent this email below to the mayor and council to circumvent going to a meeting an hour away (one-way) from where I live. Also, to circumvent the hard stares directed at me, as I am the only one who doesn’t stand for the pledge of allegiance and I am one of the few who doesn’t take off my hat for councils and judges, inside or outside. I am not afraid to visibly emote or enunciate my concerns when I hear something said. You know, I also do not like the constraints of gaveling fools looking down on us and three-minute time limits for public comments per citizen.
I also do not see the plastic bag ban as a win-win, since we have allowed the plastics and toxics and oil industries and other industries to dictate what we do, think, believe, purchase and invest in . . . with the dirty bidding of the elected officials behold to them.
Date: Monday, April 15, 2019 – 6:00 PM TO: Council Chambers, Newport City Hall, 169 SW Coast Highway
Dear Council –
First, I have to say our form of shallow participatory democracy is not working when we have to spend so much time on a simple single-use plastic bag ban.
This may be an elected form of representational democracy, but the reality is you all do not have the collective IQ to drill down on much. We the people, for the people, by the people actually should be working daily and at night to determine how communities thrive, or survive or mitigate what many scientists and journalists like myself call the privatization of the external negative costs to the community, including air, water, soil, ecosystems, human and non-human health.
Corporations reap the profits but we the taxpayer and the tens of thousands of human communities and the ecological ones to boot pay for the clean-up and negative outcomes of rapacious capitalism.
Our collective IQ exponentially outshines those collectively of all the CEOs of those companies like Exxon or Georgia Pacific or Weyerhaeuser or Raytheon or Google or Wells Fargo, et al. The problem is in places like Newport, where livable jobs are scarce for the average person working in service jobs and warehouse and blue collar employment, families sometimes have to have five jobs between both parents to make ends meet.
Coming to City Hall for a Council meeting is both difficult and disconnected to their lives.
So, back to not just a low hanging fruit, one that is right there between your feet:
The average bag you pick up at the grocery store, or carry your takeout in, has a lifespan of about 12 minutes.
When discarded, they clog sewage and storm drains, entangle and kill an estimated 100,000 marine mammals every year, and degenerate into toxic microplastics that fester in our oceans and landfills for up to 1,000 years.
Despite this, shoppers collectively use around 1 trillion billion single-use plastic bags every year. That’s 300 bags per person, per year, for every single person on Earth — or enough to circle the globe 8,600 times.
One trillion plastic bags – single use – are used, equating to 2 million per minute.
Now how is the average child from a family of parents barely getting to each new paycheck before an eviction or foreclosure notice going to wrap their heads around JUST single-use plastic bag consumption?
How will we have conversations about the incredible and perverse ways corporations have fed them and their parents on habitual overuse of plastics in everything?
A bag ban is a micro-start to the bigger conversations around ocean acidification (CO2 release from fossil fuels – plastics are fossil fuels – cement factories, cutting down and burning forests) and fisheries depletion and microplastics inside their own children’s gut, blood and feces.
We are the throwaway society we all embrace and decry because corporations profit from that lack of durability.
The ban is just a small start to the conversation which we need to start attacking the external pain and pollution and quickening of global warming we have to have now. Do we change our habits significantly when we have almost no choice in the matter since corporations control legislatures, federal agencies, local communities’ will and will power and narratives?
No, we have to demand a new system of production, resource exploitation, and citizen consumption.
Good luck tonight. LCA’s are deeper ways to look at all our consumption habits and the goods and services we demand as a very consumerist-centered society. That’s life-cycle assessments!
This is no small matter. You all are lowly representatives of the small city of Newport who will have to deal with these facts when looking at other plastics and other products used in the city. Life-cycle assessments and embedded energy and the amount of calories of energy (fossil fuel burning) to get food from farm to plate are big issues you might not think affect city council business but they will!
Vote for the plastic bag ban, but then be ready for bigger fish to fry, to use a pun that is probably not so funny these days.
I teach youth here in the Lincoln County school district. I write social-cultural-environmental-economic-media justice issues.
I continue to study (and was a leader in) true sustainability discourse, planning and education.
While I support the plastic bag ban, I am smart enough to look at the leakage of bans toward other uses of plastic to make up the bin and garbage can liner issue — yes, more plastic bags of heavier gauge will be purchased to offset that 12-minute single use bag.
Ponder how complicated the world is now that we have given the rights to clear-cut forests, dump toxins in river systems, emit pollutants in small and large communities’ air systems, and limit affordable housing to the purveyors of profit without social-environmental-cultural-racial considerations.
Even knowing all of the so-called ins and outs and positives and negatives tied to a city-wide ban on single use plastic bags, we have to show some mettle and begin to start the larger conversations on how what we get from corporations actually determines our futures and the futures of more than just seven generations out – about 140 years into the future!
P.S. — I am committed to not adding to the road congestion and air pollution of my round-trip to Newport even in my 46 mpg 20 year old car by staying put this evening! (ahh, even knowing the energy footprint of typing on a computer and using an email system is significant unto itself!)
Here’s the leakage:
This means that 28.5 percent of the plastic reduction from Disposable Consumer Bags (DCB) policies is lost due to consumption shifting towards unregulated trash bags. The results also provide a lower bound for the reuse of plastic carryout bags, with 12–22% of plastic carryout bags reused as trash bags pre-regulation. In other words, a substantial proportion of carryout bags were already reused in a way that avoided the manufacture and purchase of another plastic bag.
If carbon footprint was the only metric of environmental success, the results in this paper suggest DCB policies are having an adverse effect, especially if we consider the effect on paper carryout bag use. However, if the unmeasured benefits with respect to marine debris, toxicity, and wildlife are great enough, they could outweigh the greenhouse gas costs.
LCAs of plastic, paper, and reusable carryout bags have been shown to be sensitive to assumptions made about the weight and number of trash bags displaced by the secondary use of plastic carryout bag, with the reuse of plastic carryout bags as bin liners substantially improving their environmental performance (Mattila et al., 2011). According to a UK Environmental Agency (2011) study, a shopper needs to reuse a cotton carryout bag 131 times to have the same global warming potential (measured in kilograms of CO2 equivalent) as plastic carryout bags with zero reuse, while that same cotton bag needs to be reused 327 times if all plastic carryout bags are reused as bin liners.
And, of course, plastic bags are a major threat:
The United Nations Environmental Programme (2014) estimates the environmental damage to marine ecosystems of plastic litter is $13 billion per year. This estimate includes financial losses incurred by fisheries and tourism as well as time spent cleaning up beaches. While plastic bags and films represent only 2.2% of the total waste stream (CA Senate Rules Committee, 2014), plastic carryout bags and other plastic bags are the eighth and sixth most common item found in coastal cleanups. Once in waterways, plastic bags do not biodegrade, but instead break into smaller pieces, which can be consumed by fish, turtles, and whales that mistake them for food. A survey of experts, representing 19 fields of study, rank plastic bags and plastic utensils as the fourth severest threat to sea turtles, birds, and marine animals in terms of entanglement, ingestions, and contamination (Wilcox et al., 2016).
I’ll be posting an earth day, Earth Day, article soon, since that’s occurring on 4/22/2019. All the intricacies of just how screwed the planet it and how screwed 80 percent of us are in the immediate future. Screwed if we continue business as usual and coming up with the same asinine solutions to solve bigger and more complex problems —
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.
So minor good news is that Newport, on a vote of 5 to 2, passed the plastic bag ban!
NEWPORT — The City of Newport became the eighth city in Oregon Monday night to pass a plastic bag ban ordinance, outlawing single-use plastic bags often used at grocery stores and community events to carry out purchases. The council vote was 5-2 in favor.
It follows that the institution of a leisure class acts to make the lower classes conservative by withdrawing from them as much as it may of the means of sustenance and so reducing their consumption, and consequently their available energy, to such a point as to make them incapable of the effort required for the learning and adoption of new habits of thought. The accumulation of wealth at the upper end of the pecuniary scale implies privation at the lower end of the scale.”
Remember this ratio — 567 to one . . . 567 to one. We’ll get to that in a minute.
Also think about how many sycophants and bootlickers are mired in the mess that is the MM or MMM or MMMM: Mass Media, the Massively Mauling Media, or the Masterful Meaningless Media, or, well — Masochistic Mentally Minor Media/ Marauding Mentally Minor Media.
IT is incessant, the number and breadth of the stories that are meaningless or drawn from the blood and soul of us, the 80 percent. In no way shape or form does the Mass Media care about the realities of us flagging, flailing, failing, floundering foot soldiers for Capitalism.
The real crimes occur daily — incessantly and recklessly but with the madness in the method and the method being the madness of the One Percent and their prostitutes. This isn’t outrage? We take this over and over, until this entire society — 280 million of us out of the 344 million Americans — is spiritually pummeled and colonized with fear and Stockholm Syndrome: relating to the masters of the madness that keeps the worker down like a dog in the gutter.
Another set of numbers: 8 million, $35,308, $1.2 billion.
Eight million. That’s how many U.S. middle-class workers will be left without strong overtime pay protections under the Trump administration’s weak overtime rule proposed on March 22. In human terms, that means 8 million working people across the 50 states can be made to work up to 50, 60 or even 70 hours a week, missing time with their families, without receiving any extra pay, even if they make as little as $35,000 a year.
The problem is the salary threshold below which workers are guaranteed time-and-a-half overtime pay when they work more than 40 hours in a week has been frozen for decades, with no adjustment for the rising cost of living. As a result, the share of salaried workers guaranteed overtime pay has plummeted from six in 10 in 1975 to less than one in 10 today.
Trump overtime regulation replaces a 2016 Obama-era Labor Department rule that would have restored overtime protections for more than 12 million salaried workers earning up to $55,055 by 2023. The Trump rule slashes that salary level to $35,308 — and treats workers earning more than that as if they were highly paid executive who don’t need overtime pay. All told, Trump’s decision to slash the salary threshold means workers will miss out on $1.2 billion in wages each yearthey would have received under the 2016 rule.
This all goes back to the flagging American, parents and aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, foster parents, grandparents. Work these children’s parents to death.Steal wages. Underpay. Expose kids’ parents to toxic work environments, air, water, chemicals, products. Force these children’s charges to vomit up fear, anxieties, paranoia, chronic pain, chronic disease, self-imploding thinking, and the lies of Capitalism.
Stealing wages, man, and these deplorables — and they are in many regards — people who defend a pedophile, a serial stalker, a felon, a mafia thug, a child incarceration zealot, thief, abuser, idiot, narcissist, S/M freak, a traitor, an anti-worker/anti-family billionaire — cannot get a pass, man.
The leisure class is so sheltered from inevitable changes going on in the rest of society that it will adapt its views, if at all, “tardily.” Comfortably clueless (or calculating), the wealthy leisure class drags its heels (or digs them in) to retard economic and social forces that make for change. Hence the name “conservatives.” That (re)tardiness — that time lag imposed by conservative complacency — stalls and stifles the lives of everyone else and the timely economic development of the nation. (Think of our neglected infrastructure, education, housing, health care, public transport — you know the lengthening list today.)
Accepting and adjusting to social or economic change, unfortunately, requires prolonged “mental effort,” from which the leisured conservative mind quite automatically recoils. But so, too, Veblen said, do the minds of the “abjectly poor, and all those persons whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance.” The lower classes were — and this seems a familiar reality in the age of Trump — as conservative as the upper class simply because the poor “cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow,” while “the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands.” It was, of course, a situation from which they, unlike the poor, made a bundle in an age (both Veblen’s and ours) in which money flows only uphill to the 1%.
Veblen gave this analytic screw one more turn. Called a “savage” economist, in his meticulous and deceptively neutral prose, he described in the passage that follows a truly savage and deliberate process:
It follows that the institution of a leisure class acts to make the lower classes conservative by withdrawing from them as much as it may of the means of sustenance and so reducing their consumption, and consequently their available energy, to such a point as to make them incapable of the effort required for the learning and adoption of new habits of thought. The accumulation of wealth at the upper end of the pecuniary scale implies privation at the lower end of the scale.
Thorstein Veblen, the greatest American thinker you probably never heard of (or forgot). His working life — from 1890 to 1923 — coincided with America’s first Gilded Age, so named by Mark Twain, whose novel of that title lampooned the greedy corruption of the country’s most illustrious gentlemen.
I can wack the average deplorable over the head with fact, with history, with illustration, with point after point, evidence after evidence to prove to him or her that Trump is a wimp, that he is a cheat, that he hates the common man, that he wants people in the 80 percent as the manure for his fields of dreams and buckets of gold. I can show people that Trump is afraid of combat and guns and soldiers and enemies (perceived) but he is so happy to send the boys and girls — those parents’ offspring — to countries where the ultimate product is pure hatred, and it’s deserved, of America, red-white-blue.
I can go out in a field and shot up tin cans, get on my big motorcycle and cruise down the coast, get out on the water and suit up and scuba dive for shark and octopus shots (photos). I can try and get them to hitch-hike in Mexico, hang out in Vietnam, live in Guatemala.
Unfortunately, the average deplorable is a paper tiger, or so broken from racism and white supremacy that they are shells of homo sapiens. White poor people with overweight kids and children on the spectrum and rotting teeth and rotting roof tiles; grandparents stuffed away in old trailers; beer cans and old sofas for landscaping; Jesus Duck Dynasty photos, rusting motorcycle frames, taped up window frames, piled up old 5 gallon buckets that once held Lucky Charms and Blue Bunny ice cream.
These deplorables think Trump cares about, knows, defends them because as we see above, it’s the reality that people’s jobs depend on them intentionally not knowing, or jobs that keep them from knowing, or jobs that they have to confuse others about truth, or those who depend on a job to never want to know the truth.
When the truth hits them smack in the face, daily, with perversions of Trump vis-a-vis his Tweets or his People’s Slime or the Media Midgets, they are like dinosaurs looking at the meteorite flashing through the sky and hitting off the Yucatan. Dinosaurs caught in the meteorite’s tail.
This economist, Veblen, saw the coming of the Trumps, the Kardashians, the Holly-Dirt and Betsy DeVos, the Sheldons and Soroses, the Gates and Bezoses, the entire rotten Elan Musk smell of rotten thinking and rotten being. Fascism of the market, fascism of externalities those parents and those children pay for.
Later in life, Veblen, the evolutionary who believed that no one could foresee the future, nonetheless felt sure that the American capitalist system, as it was, could not last. He thought it would eventually fall apart. He went on teaching at Stanford, the University of Missouri, and then the New School for Social Research, and writing a raft of brilliant articles and eight more books. Among them, The Vested Interestsand the Common Man (1920)may be the best summation of his once astonishing and now essential views. He died at the age of 72 in August 1929. Two months later, the financial scaffolding collapsed and the whole predatory system came crashing down.
To the end, Veblen had hoped that one day the Predators would be driven from the marketplace and the workers would find their way to socialism. Yet a century ago, it seemed to him more likely that the Predators and Saboteurs, collaborating as they did even then with politicians and government lackeys, would increasingly amass more profits, more power, more adulation from the men of the working class, until one day, when those very plutocrats actually captured the government and owned the state, a Gilded Business Man would arise to become a kind of primitive Warlord and Dictator. He would then preside over a new and more powerful regime and the triumph in America of a system we would eventually recognize and call by its modern name: fascism.
Back to the number I started with — 576 to one. i got that Friday on one of my gigs substituting, this time for a PE instructor, in Lincoln City. I met the counselor in the gym, and we talked. He had gigged in Korea as a college teacher, and he had done other stuff, but came back to USA and got his counselor credentials.
We were managing students, elementary aged, in the indoor recess since this place rains all the time.. I also had PE classes to sub. In the end, the broken system I work in and write about and then also ground truth around with people like Wayne produce some strong reactions to the leisure class and the punishment class and the policing of everything in America, from womb to tomb or cradle to grave (and beyond and pre-birth as well).
Wayne is the only counselor in the school with more or less 576 students. That’s it, really, game over. Students coming from broken, breaking, chaotic homes; three job parents; homelessness, or near homelessness; victims of or observers of rape and assault; already held down at birth with various chronic illnesses. These children are in schools with 30 kids to the classroom, with bullies and highly sexualized fellow students. These kids are forced to eat shitty curriculum and standardized testing. Bad food, bad images, bad media, bad opportunities, no public spaces, no enlightenment, no mentors really.
Five hundred and seventy-six students with varying levels of trauma, PTSD, epigentics and physical challenges, and self image issues, and self-loathing, and fears, anxieties, problems, dysfunctions directly from caregivers and families and the family lines.
That in itself — 576 to 1 — says more than any white paper on the failure of education, on why charter schools are bad, why we need a new curriculum, and why the family is dead, authority and god need to come back to the classroom, and how spoiling the child is all about sparing the rod.
Do my readers get it yet? Five Hundred and seventy six students and they have one counselor to talk to, to help them, to hash out issues, to help diagnose, to help get the students help.
America, and capitalism, and the perversions of the Trump Class, well, when do we put the rapists and murderers into the prisons and having them face death row as they have put 576 students in harm’s way?
I had a short confab yesterday with four elementary teachers
after doing my substituting for a 6th grade class whose teacher – 21
years at the same school – had to deal with her father who was placed in a
memory care facility 60 miles away more than 10 years ago.
That in itself is one entire tome’s worth of discussion, how
the elite and both money-drenched parties and their governors and round-table “movers
and shakers” and the entire death machine that is Capitalism have put middle class
people like a public school teacher behind the eight ball to figure out how to
take care of a father with dementia.
That teacher – who has won awards for her science teaching,
her classroom dynamics, and was gracious when handing off her class to me – is,
believe it or not, in a much better position in her precarity and the entire
false for-profit rigged system that is extracting money-money-money for a case
of dementia that will/does hit people in this country every second.
What do small communities like Lincoln City or Newport,
populations of 11,000 more or less, do when the old start or not-so-old begin
to have infirmities that demand 12-hour care, or 24-hour care? Many people
living in these cities are working in service jobs, serving meals to tourists,
or packing crab and fish at the fish plant, or are in some of the county
government jobs, and a few working for the hospitals, and schools.
This is the story that never makes the bubble butt and
bubble head national news feeds, because, it isn’t what these millionaires want
to juggle with, because, Americans, the top 20 percent (economically) – and “top”
doesn’t apply to these 20 percenters’ intelligence, ethical standards,
humanity, caring, humility, fairness – want the perversion of the cult of
celebrity, cult of crime reporting, cult of money-money money.
We are up a shit creek without a paddle in every form
possible as a community of group of communities. The endless traffic down 101
increases as more and more homes and apartments are taken out of the rental/housing
markets, and put into the hands of these rental home criminal enterprise
organizations. Rentals for a weekend at the beach.
Endless streams of tourists looking for crab cakes, some
pipeline on the Pacific for a backdrop of drinking booze, gorging on food and then
yammer on and on how backward and bumpkin we living in these communities are?
The reader can research how broken this country’s people
are: more than 150 million citizens have a chronic illness/multiple chronic
illnesses; the suicide rate in the USA is sky high; more and more people have dissociative
disease; more children are chronically distracted, anxiety-heavy, physically
deteriorated; more and more families will have one, two or more people in their
circle that will need lifetime medical, mental, occupational, psychological
assistance.
The chickens have come back to roost, but let’s be clear
readers – blame the One Percent, the Prostitutes in Politics, the CEOs like the
Boeing murderer who should be in shackles now, instead of making off with his
$23 million a year theft while he bullshits his way in Seattle.
This teacher, 21 years in the profession, has seen many
changes herself. She was not complaining, and I was probing. Children in her
class – more and more each year – have specialized education plans, IEPs, for
various issues tied to learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, behavioral
issues, and even physical ailments. Many are having big issues of standing
still, and learning. Many are so tied to the junk of consumer culture, the
celebrity junk, the superficial junk, the digital dungeons out there, just more
and more kids more and more focused on themselves – the me-myself-and-I angst
that America manufactures every single minute in this Propaganda Madness.
I did the class, probed the youth about their projects –
genius projects that include a 3 to 5 minute presentation on topics of their
interest, their passions. At a time when the genius should be flourishing at
age 12, these children for the most part are flagging, because even the
stalwarts, they are being dragged down by the commonest denominators of
superficial childlike Pavlovian reactions to life itself. These kids have no
form to show gumption and to carry on with their un-bloomed genius because public
spaces are almost degraded totally, and parents are working for the mills and
paper product and timber processors and have been themselves degraded into work
mules and consumer cows.
Parents who hand off kids to the schools, but have no
interest in or abilities to assist the learning and critical exploration
processes these little geniuses in the making need.
I talked with a 60-ish teacher, who came to the profession
doing many things before getting credentials in 2011. She posits that all the behavioral
issues she has seen spiking are attributed to the fact that children have no
negative consequences for bad behavior. That the society in general has allowed
that permissiveness, but also parents specifically. She sees the lack of
respect to teachers as incredible, and she seems flummoxed by that fact.
A teacher in her late thirties posited that it’s the epigenetics
of past trauma in the parents’ and grandparents’ and family circles’ that have
added to the DNA changes in offspring. She mentioned the total war this country
has been in since 1940s, and we talked about the war-like conditions at home
and in the communities that children pick up in the womb with mother’s cortisol
flooding them as fetuses and the same cortisol inside their tiny tot’s lives
once out into gravity and absorbing the constant fear, anger, anxiety, chaos, discord,
fracturing and yelling and possibly physical punishment in their lives as
parents and fractured caretakers themselves are broken by the One Percent’s
plan to gouge every last glimmer of hope from people that this democracy is,
for, and because of THE People, and that systems will be there for them if they
work hard.
No health care system for all, so instead, parents are
paying exorbitant amounts for rents, for food, for the daily fees, tolls,
fines, levies, add-ons, triple-taxations just to live in a community. Parents
that are confused in this Psychological Torture that is
Consumer-Predatory-Parasitic-Casino Capitalism.
The other teachers also see the disruptive children in a
classroom – sometimes up to 8 or 10 out of 29 in the class – as not being
properly worked with and educated, but also the others in the classroom who
have to survive the barrage of those behaviors, outbursts, confusions, and
special treatment for more and more children.
As I have written about many times, we need to dig up the
parking lots, open up the classrooms, build learning garden-crafts-solar panel
centers on the schools’ roofs. We need parents there for parents day every
week. We need muralists, children out of the four rooms and a plethora of desks
teaching environment. Gardens in the school playground, total Marshall Plan for
pk12 youth so we, the aging farts, have safety nets.
Bring in people daily from the community, and get youth to
do service learning in the community.
Talking circles, a la Native American tradition, salmon
smoking sheds, pottery classes, writing and music learning yurts, and more, more,
more.
Dostoevsky said that one can more or less learn about a
society’s humanity or lack thereof, or in fact a nation’s ethos and goodness or
badness based on how the prisoners in jails and prisons are treated. USA gets
an F-minus there. Add to the same formula – How well are children and youth
treated and taught in the schools with the zip codes that reflect the lower and
middle economic zones, the sacrifice zones, the fence line communities.
We know Trump is perverse beyond all perversions. A bully
with no biceps and a belly and zero cardio. He wimped out of military service because
he was afraid and rich. This man should be shackled and put in the docks and studied
until he flitters away. But so should all the Empire’s Hussies, the presidents
since Washington, onward. So should all the politicians whose pockets are lines
with CEO graft money, and that’s a good 90 percent of those slugs.
To have these conversations is enlightening, and as I have
had many in Guatemala or in Juarez or Belize or Vietnam, wherever, it is
amazing to see glimmers of hope from people who are beaten down so much by the powerful,
the elites and their Little Eichmann’s.
That’s not all I have, seeing people rise, even in the most
degrading situations. In the most dangerous situations. I have my own exit
plan, and I know we need less pacificism, less cordiality, less respect for
more people in our communities. I can’t say all the things that would work to
bring this system down because then I would be completely blackballed from the
Jail Keep’s game.
This blog today, a bit of a left field fly-ball, considering how messed up the world it, just looking at middle of the road but considered so radical Democracy Now’s headlines today:
British Police Arrest WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange
Sudan: Military Overthrows Pres. al-Bashir After Months of Protests
Dems Demand Evidence After AG Barr Tells Senators FBI Spied on Trump Campaign
ICE Acting Dir. Leaves Post in Ongoing Purge of Immigration Officials
Politico: Trump Considering Ex-Head of Hate Group for DHS Role
Dems Introduce Bill to Reverse Trump’s Muslim & Anti-Refugee Bans
Israel: Netanyahu Declares Victory as Gov’t Moves Further to Right
India: Elections Kick Off as Hindu Nationalist PM Modi Seeks 2nd Term
EU Leaders Extend Brexit Deadline to Oct. 31
Louisiana: Suspect Arrested over Fires at 3 Black Churches
House Dems Pass Net Neutrality Bill, But Senate Fate Remains Bleak
Bernie Sanders Unveils Revamped Medicare for All
Israel: Netanyahu on Track for 5th Term in Office
DHS “Purge” Continues with Deputy Sec. Claire Grady
Reports: WH Wants to Put Border Agents in Charge of Asylum Interviews
AG Barr to Congress: No Plans to Release Unredacted Mueller Report
Mnuchin Says Treasury Consulted with WH on Trump Tax Returns
Bipartisan Tax Bill Would Make Free IRS E-Filing System Illegal
Airbnb Reverses Ban on Listings for Illegal Israeli Settlements
Tomorrow? Variations on a theme. More on prison industrial
complex. More on the weather eating at the world. More on climate science. More
on the stupidity of Wester Culture and Celebrity Politics. More on the white
supremacists in the Oval Office, in the military, in the boardrooms, in the
governor’s mansions, in the police-INS-BP-CIA-FBI-NSA mafia.
Sure, I can riff with those, and, well, poetry, since it is national
poetry month, or climate change and the environment, since it’s Earth Day coming
up. Yeah, I met with Governor Inslee while working for SEIU 925 in Seattle, and
now he is being interviewed on all the billionaire networks by bubble butts and
bubble brains as he has thrown his aspirant’s towel in the bowels of
presidential politics.
Nice guy, former teacher, Seattle-guy, not a wall-flower,
family guy, white, intelligent, a fighter of sorts, but still, DNCC all the
way. He is the guy adding to the fodder in the Democratic race to go up against
the Zionist-Jewish Enterprise, which is now the Stephen Miller show that Trump’s
in law Kushner recruited years ago. How to go up against these Jewish guys like
Elliot Abrams, and then these Christian Guys like Pence and Tribe?
In the end, though, life is about parents and loved ones
getting care for Alzheimer’s and dementia, and about youth and babies being
born already hobbled with any number of chronic illnesses and learning and
intellectual disabilities. It’s about Baby Boomers aging out, and about Millennials
Stuck in Perpetual Chaos.
It’s about our crab and salmon and rockfish “industries”
dying off, about acidification of the oceans, about the rising theft in rental
property agreement, the rising price of gasoline, because summer is coming up
(arbitrary), and the rising tides and lowering public health.
I wonder about these fellows and females running for office.
I really know that they for the most part are egotistical, megalomaniacal, and
narcissistic. Maybe not Jay Inslee, but what chance does he have when he allows
the handcuffs and ankle monitor of the Democratic Party guide his ethos and philosophy?
It is really about the youth, the chronically ill, the prisons, the schools, the rents, the public spaces, the holding the masters of corporate greed and corruption responsible for this society’s diseased soul.
Finally, without identifying the school I subbed at, the air, man, the air. Pulp mill stink. Poor community up in the mountains, and the children, adults, old and frail, that’s their reward for being born on the wrong side of the money. While the smell of burning sulfur is everywhere in America’s boardrooms, in the Senate, in the Congress, in the Supreme Court and other courts, I recall the smell in Powell River, BC, Canada, where my mom grew up and where her lungs were singed by the air coming from what was once (then, 1930s) the largest pulp mill in the world.
I subbed, smelled that hellish odor, and as a poet and environmentalist, my mind went back to all those years hearing and seeing my mother spit up sputum and eventually get hooked up to O2 tanks while she lived to the unusual age of 78 with both lower parts of her lung (lobes) cut out at age 21 as another sadistic western medicine “solution” to her lung issues.
Nighttime and the sulphur still lifts above while children are sleeping
Children and learning and air pollution! How’s that working out for intellectual and learning disabilities?
The main components of pulp mill related pollution are chlorine and chlorine based materials, sulfur, hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide. Chlorine and compounds of chlorine are used in the bleaching of wood pulp, especially chemical pulps produced by the kraft process or sulfite process. Plants using elemental chlorine produced significant quantities of dioxins that are persistent organic pollutants that are one of the most toxic human-released pollutants.
The used process water from a pulp mill contains a lot of organic material such as lignin and other organic material from the trees, including chlorinated organic material. The presence of these organic substances results in high biological oxygen demand (BOD) and dissolved organic carbon (DOC).
Sulfur-based compounds are used in kraft process as well as sulfite process for making wood pulp. The release of sulfur dioxide is of particular concern because it is water soluble and is a major cause of acid rain.
Air emissions of hydrogen sulfide, methyl mercaptan, dimethyl sulfide, dimethyl disulfide, and other volatile sulfur compounds are the cause of the odor characteristic of pulp mills utilizing the kraft process. Other chemicals that are released into the air and water from most paper mills include carbon monoxide, ammonia, nitrogen oxide, mercury, nitrates, methanol, benzene, volatile organic compounds and chloroform.
Nitrogen dioxide(NO) sulfur dioxide (SO) and carbon dioxide (CO) are emitted during paper manufacturing. All of them cause acid rain and CO is a major greenhouse gas that causes climate change. These toxic gases contribute to air pollution.
Mill Letting Loose on Students, Families, Everyone
how can poets fly outside the frame that holds humanity in the ecological balance of Taker Society**
I think poetry, if it’s going to be really engaging and engaged, has to be able to come at the issues of our lives from all kinds of angles and all kinds of ways: loudly and quietly, angrily and soothingly, with comedy and with dead seriousness. […] Our lives are worth every risk, every manner of approach. — Tim Seibles
The question always comes up: Does poetry matter? Better yet, does art matter? This in a time of cult of celebrity, cult of nothingness, the cult of instant fame and repetitive prequels and sequels.
Even though everything is new under the sun in the 21st century, the way this country – Western Civilization, that is – rolls, more and more so-called artists, and that includes poets, are the dust bunny kings and queens. We aren’t taking chances – the big chances we have to take to stave off predatory, parasitic capitalism.
So, true art counts. If you can’t figure out what true art is and have employ have some arbiter of style and humanities to do the interpreting and defining for you, then you are lost in la-la land.
These are, of course, cynical questions, possibly steeped in a Western mindset where business as usual is all tied to the economics of relationships, and that includes the co-option of everything in American society wrapped around the barbed wire gulag that is Capitalism. No matter how frail the artistic expression is, or nuanced or nascent, the cynic would ask, “Does poetry in a time of our doomsday clock one minute to midnight and with 410 ppm Co2 in the atmosphere, in addition to the reality we are surviving, barely, under the strafing toxic clouds of the of one warped super power advancing in every aspect of humanity’s lives, including art, for total control of every blink, click of the mouse, lifted hand in artistic disbelief or fealty, count, matter, mean anything?”
Knitting my brow, I’m wondering whether we have a word Problem— numerical, mathematical, logical, or political Problem?
Scratching my head, searching for its formula I found: Money Talks to our representatives Year-round and Votes boots, batons, fists, tasers, Glocks, and cuffs cutting off circulation— 24/7— 365…
Yet, I’m tutored, 3 minutes 2/4 Dance is our 1 chance to Advance…?
We are what we read, what we watch, what we think, what we discuss, what we believe, what we profess, what we say, and, then, what we buy, consumer, eat, build, destroy, create, throwaway, what we buy, sell, purchase, steal, take, give away, and what we drink – the Kool-Aid of Empire or the elixir of rebellion and revolution.
There will be a better day, and we have that thumb and toe hold inside, as poets – and as artists; which in the end we call to them as our guides and our echoes, and the reflectors of universal humanity and chroniclers of struggle and celebration of glory in a human culture, in the individual. This planetary and spiritual life can sometimes be best reflected in and by and for “the poet.” Whether we see art as a song of the self, the poetry of creation and creativity, for those who create, show, and then sometimes lucky enough to live off of the stuff they create, somehow we/they have to have a more revered place in societies, and revered spaces for all humanity to partake in the action of being in-with-for-outside-inside the artist’s mind and heart, belly and soul.
But it’s poetry, no less, and we have this April as NPM, national poetry month. It’s not all razzle-dazzle in small communities where I live and work in – Oregon’s Central Coast, Lincoln City, Newport, Toledo, Siletz. Because in reality, a certain cultural critical mass has to cluster around so many elements to the humanities and arts as worthy of a cross-sectional interest in a community for those of us to put weight on the more lofty things like the arts, and in this case, the written and spoken word, poetry. Small towns or less populated communities and regions just don’t have the density of people who are willing to sacrifice a lot to try and be expressive artist. Poets are like monks, Tibetan monks, in a small place like where I currently live.
If you haven’t met a poet, then the unusualness of it might intimidate.
However, there is some poetry going on here, and some of it is celebrated, in very small and rare moments. Read the piece I wrote on Kim Stafford, Oregon’s poet laureate here. He came to town and had a standing room only venue at the local public library! Here, Flotsam Central Oregon. Then my poem about interacting with Kim Stafford: Somewhere in a Writer’s Workshop He Learns the Lines from “Oregon Trail”.
Think about how difficult it is to get the attention of small-town America when so many colluding forces of economic pain and retrenchment of services and erosion in the public good/health/welfare/safety nets that really hit these 10,000 and 15,000 population communities that are tied to mostly servicing tourists and with timber and fish.
Then, when and where and how can we get overworked teachers and over-stimulated movers and shakers of a community to concentrate just a bit on the vitality of poets in their communities to exhibit that wonderful “business” of translating sight, sound, touch, taste and perception, philosophy, universality, psychology, intellect, joy, struggle, pain and transcendence?
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility — William Wordsworth
A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great — Randall Jarrell
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. — Percy Bysshe Shelley
Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people. — Adrian Mitchell
Well, write poetry, for God’s sake, it’s the only thing that matters. — ee cummings
Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. — Carl Sandburg
I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet. — Bob Dylan
Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. — Dylan Thomas
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering. — Robert Frost
The poet is the priest of the invisible. — Wallace Stevens
Poetry is, at bottom, a criticism of life. — Matthew Arnold
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. — Emily Dickinson
There you have it, “as if the top of my head were taken off,” that is poetry. What more of a graphic image do we need to follow the crumbs there? Poetry — That process allows humanity to share the act of being, because without words, there are no ideas, nothing, really, to bring forth the passing of knowledge. Naming of plants, planets, porpoises, peoples, it all involves the art form of discovery and teaching. What better way than to draw people to it with a poem.
That brain surgery Emily Dickinson alludes to is the value of poetry, everyday – it comes to people in unexpected ways, a dance, inside, especially for those who never thought the poet would emanate from the soul of a biker or street walker or drug user or incarcerated man or high-falluten debutante.
All sorts of ways to study and express poetry, categorizing, throwing movements into timeframes, geographical locations, cultural, ethnic, racial, national, self-identity framing modalities. Think of a poetic movement or some other poetry foundation, and then there you go. In today’s parlance, should stave off the madness. Below are a few poems, challenging, possibly tied to what this essay is attempting to get at — is there a form for ecological thinking, deep ecology, psychology of Sixth Mass Extinction, a sociological consideration tied to an earth/Earth without ice?
Form as in poetry!?
Ecopoetics
Similar to ethnopoetics in its emphasis on drawing connections between human activity—specifically the making of poems—and the environment that produces it, ecopoetics rose out of the late 20th-century awareness of ecology and concerns over environmental disaster. A multidisciplinary approach that includes thinking and writing on poetics, science, and theory as well as emphasizing innovative approaches common to conceptual poetry, ecopoetics is not quite nature poetry. The influential journal Ecopoetics, edited by Jonathan Skinner, publishes writing that explores “creative-critical edges between making and writing” and features poets such as Jack Collom, Juliana Spahr, and Forrest Gander.
This is not enough, though, now is it?
What short stories and poems will arise from the intersections of heart, mind, soul, belly and the cascading realities of a world on the skids?
To that point, thousands of miles from Siberia, Vladimir Romanovsky, a permafrost expert at the University of Alaska/Fairbanks found freeze-ups of permafrost shifting from mid-January to as late as March, happening since 2014.
Additionally, from National Geographic: “It’s worrisome,’ says Sue Natali, a permafrost expert, also with Woods Hole, who saw an active layer not re-freeze recently during a research trip to Alaska’s Yukon region. ‘When we see things happening that haven’t happened in the lifetime of the scientists studying them, that should be a concern.”
The stakes in the Arctic are high. It’s common knowledge that if permafrost layers are consistently exposed to thawing, consequences can be hard, fast and not pleasant. Counter intuitively, once it’s unfrozen, permafrost can potentially release GHG year-round, not only in summertime. And, that’s a huge problem without a solution, unless well-beforehand Homo sapiens halt GHG emissions. No chance.
Dangerous territory, looking at climate, earth, raging tipping points, put into the prism of poetry. Many many Americans coming out of MFA schools, well, this is verboten, pushing themes or social conscious issues as the germination of poetry.
Some Effects of Global Warming in Lackawanna County
By Jay Parini
The maples sweat now, out of season. Buds pop eyes in wintry bushes as the birds arrive, not having checked the calendars or clocks. They scramble in the frost for seeds, while underground a sobbing starts in roots and tubers. Ice cracks easily along the bank. It slides in gullies where a bear, still groggy, steps through coiled wire of the weeds. Kids in T-shirts run to school, unaware that summer is a long way off. Their teachers flirt with off-the-wall assignments, drum their fingers on the sweaty desktops. As for me, my heart leaps high— a deer escaping from the crosshairs, skipping over barely frozen water as the surface bends and splinters underfoot.
I can hear those MFA’s now — “Oh god, not more of this tripe. Poetry is about me, us, me myself and I, about angst and living hard, about my bi-polar disorder, about me in the system, me in the matrix, about me and my feelings and how I see the world.”
I have had argument after argument about the valueness of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a program that was borne of Cold War logic and the greatness of America (sic, sic). Interestingly, the Workshop’s second director, Paul Engle, embodied everything the 1950s conservative mind embodied. Read this piece on the MFA program here, How Iowa Flattened Literature. With CIA help, writers were enlisted to battle both Communism and eggheaded abstraction. The damage to writing lingers.
To have read enough to feel the oceanic movement of events and ideas in history; to have experienced enough to escape the confines of a personal provincialism; to have distanced yourself enough from your hang-ups and pettiness to create words reflecting the emotional complexity of minds beyond your own; to have worked with language long enough to be able to wield it beautifully; and to have genius enough to find dramatic situations that embody all that you have lived and read, is rare. It’s not something that every student of creative writing—in the hundreds of programs up and running these days—is going to pull off. Maybe one person a decade will pull it off. Maybe one person every half century will really pull it off.
Of course, we live in an age that cringes at words like “greatness”—and also at the notion that we’re not all great. But ages that didn’t cringe at greatness produced great writing without creative-writing programs. And people who attend creative-writing programs for the most part wish to write great things. It’s sick to ask them to aspire but not to aspire too much. An air of self-doubt permeates the discipline, showing up again and again as the question, “Can writing be taught?”
Faced with this question, teachers of creative writing might consider adopting (as a few, of course, already do) a defiant rather than resigned attitude, doing more than supervising the building of the bases of pyramids. They might try to get beyond the senses. Texts worth reading—worth reading now, and worth reading 200 years from now—coordinate the personal with the national or international; they embed the instant in the instant’s full context and long history. It’s what the Odyssey does and what Middlemarch does and what Invisible Man does and what Jonathan Franzen’s and Marilynne Robinson’s recent novels try to do. But to write like this, you’re going to have to spend some time thinking. — Eric Bennett
That’s a whole other story, MFA programs and the flattening of literature, fiction, and, alas, the same holds true of poetry. Maybe not, though, since how do poets learn to channel their voice and to develop writerly ways? Maybe in groups, sure, workshops in some senior center, right, but why not schools, i.e. community colleges and universities? I’ve taught a few writing classes in colleges, and outside colleges. Poetry is a tough one to get young and old to wrap their brains around, but, alas, poetry is where the immediate song of the person gets to lift off like a kite on a good windy beach day!
Poetry and the environment?
What does Jean-Paul Satre say about African poets? Black Orpheus:
When you removed the gag that was keeping these black mouths shut, what were you hoping for? That they would sing your praises? Did you think that when they raised themselves up again, you would read adoration in the eyes of these heads that our fathers had forced to bend down to the very ground? Here are black men standing, looking at us, and I hope that you–like me–will feel the shock of being seen. For three thousand years, the white man has enjoyed the privilege of seeing without being seen; he was only a look –the light from his eyes drew each thing out of the shadow of its birth; the whiteness of his skin was another look, condensed light. The white man –white because he was man, white like daylight, white like truth, white like virtue –lighted up the creation like a torch and unveiled the secret white essence of beings. Today, these black men are looking at us, and our gaze comes back to our own eyes; in their turn, black torches light up the world and our white heads are no more than Chinese lanterns swinging in the wind. A black poet –unconcerned with us–whispers to the woman he loves:
Naked woman, black woman Dressed in your color which is life .. . Naked woman, dark woman, Firm fleshed ripe fruit, somber ecstasies of black wine.
and our whiteness seems to us to be a strange livid varnish that keeps our skin from breathing –white tights, worn out at the elbows and knees, under which we would find real human flesh the color of black wine if we could remove them. We think we are essential to the world — suns of its harvests, moons of its tides; we are no more than its fauna, beasts. Not even beasts:
These gentlemen from the city These proper gentlemen Who no longer know how to dance in the evening by moonlight Who no longer know how to walk on the flesh of their feet Who no longer know how to tell tales by the fireside . . .
Formerly Europeans with divine right, we were already feeling our dignity beginning to crumble under American or Soviet looks; Europe was already no more than a geographical accident, the peninsula that Asia shoves into the Atlantic. We were hoping at least to find a bit of our greatness reflected in the domesticated eyes of the Africans. But there are no more domesticated eyes: there are wild and free looks that judge our world.
Maybe poetry needs some of that crumbling under the look of a new Anthropocene world!
There is Kickstarter, and an Earth Day 2019 goal of a book of poems that looks at climate, ecology, us inside the environment, Gaia.
Elizabeth J. Coleman’s new anthology, Here: Poems for the Planet, published by Copper Canyon Press and live on Kickstarter now, is a collection of poems from over 125 authors — Pulitzer Prize winners, Poet Laureates, activists, emerging writers, and youth poets as young as six — that confront climate change. It has “an arc that bends towards hope,” says Copper Canyon editor Elaina Ellis, who worked on the book with Coleman.
“Poetry is moving and touching in a way that dry facts are not,” Coleman says. “You can reach people’s hearts. If you tell someone about the hell we’re heading towards, people just despair. They become indifferent. It’s too big. It seems very different when you talk about ‘the polar bear drifting out of history on a wedge of melting ice,’” as a poem by Paul Guest puts it.
Here is the long list of poets and translations of poems (125) in this collection.
A unique way to create activism at the end of the collection:
The Union of Concerned Scientists created a Guide to Activism just for this project, to follow the poetry in Here: Poems for the Planet. After the poems have helped you feel what’s at stake, the guide will help you take action toward a better future.
The guide walks through best practices for anyone who wishes to:
Contact your Representatives and others holding governmental power
Put pressure on corporations to commit to green practices
Communicate with media about environmental issues and actions
Connect with others in the community who are working for environmental justice, against climate change, or on an issue you’re passionate about
By mobilizing scientists and combining their voices with those of advocates, educators, business people, and other concerned citizens, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has amassed an impressive history of accomplishments. UCS scientists and engineers develop and implement innovative, practical solutions to some of our planet’s most pressing problems—from combating global warming and developing sustainable ways to feed, power, and transport ourselves, to fighting misinformation, advancing racial equity, and reducing the threat of nuclear war.
The editor of Here: Poems for the Planet has chosen to donate all royalties from the book (including those copies reserved through this Kickstarter campaign) to UCS.
Here you go, Earth Day coming up, and National Poetry Month in a time of despise, syphilitic tweets, uncompromising crass commercialization of humanity. A few picks, hodgepodge style.
Remember
Joy Harjo
Remember the sky that you were born under, know each of the star’s stories. Remember the moon, know who she is. Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the strongest point of time. Remember sundown and the giving away to night. Remember your birth, how your mother struggled to give you form and breath. You are evidence of her life, and her mother’s, and hers. Remember your father. He is your life, also. Remember the earth whose skin you are: red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth brown earth, we are earth. Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems. Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the origin of this universe. Remember you are all people and all people are you. Remember you are this universe and this universe is you. Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you. Remember language comes from this. Remember the dance language is, that life is. Remember.
Once the World Was Perfect
By Joy Harjo
Once the world was perfect, and we were happy in that world. Then we took it for granted. Discontent began a small rumble in the earthly mind. Then Doubt pushed through with its spiked head. And once Doubt ruptured the web, All manner of demon thoughts Jumped through— We destroyed the world we had been given For inspiration, for life— Each stone of jealousy, each stone Of fear, greed, envy, and hatred, put out the light. No one was without a stone in his or her hand. There we were, Right back where we had started. We were bumping into each other In the dark. And now we had no place to live, since we didn’t know How to live with each other. Then one of the stumbling ones took pity on another And shared a blanket. A spark of kindness made a light. The light made an opening in the darkness. Everyone worked together to make a ladder. A Wind Clan person climbed out first into the next world, And then the other clans, the children of those clans, their children, And their children, all the way through time— To now, into this morning light to you.
Nolan,
By Ed Roberson
The apparition of these faces in the crowd…) riding the bullet train the view passes by so fast it is either a blur they say
or —like night lightning strobes the raindrops to a stop in midair
in that soundless moment— maybe from the train you can glimpse waiting there
one of those famous petals stopped still in midair holding its wave to you in place. write us
and tell us if this is so.
Storm Fear
By Robert Frost
When the wind works against us in the dark, And pelts the snow The lower chamber window on the east, And whispers with a sort of stifled bark, The beast, ‘Come out! Come out!’— It costs no inward struggle not to go, Ah, no! I count our strength, Two and a child, Those of us not asleep subdued to mark How the cold creeps as the fire dies at length,— How drifts are piled, Dooryard and road ungraded, Till even the comforting barn grows far away And my heart owns a doubt Whether ‘tis in us to arise with day And save ourselves unaided.
Song of Myself, 22
By Walt Whitman
You sea! I resign myself to you also—I guess what you mean, I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers, I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me, We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land, Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse, Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.
Sea of stretch’d ground-swells, Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths, Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell’d yet always-ready graves, Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea, I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.
Partaker of influx and efflux I, extoller of hate and conciliation, Extoller of armies and those that sleep in each others’ arms.
I am he attesting sympathy, (Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that supports them?)
I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.
What blurt is this about virtue and about vice? Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent, My gait is no fault-finder’s or rejecter’s gait, I moisten the roots of all that has grown.
Did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy? Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work’d over and rectified?
I find one side a balance and the antipodal side a balance, Soft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine, Thoughts and deeds of the present our rouse and early start.
This minute that comes to me over the past decillions, There is no better than it and now.
What behaved well in the past or behaves well to-day is not such a wonder, The wonder is always and always how there can be a mean man or an infidel.
**
Early in the book, Ishmael (Daniel Quinn, 1992) a man, the narrator, answers a newspaper ad that says:
“TEACHER seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.”
The narrator meets the teacher — Ishmael, a thousand-pound gorilla who communicates telepathically. Using the Socratic method, Ishmael implores the narrator to think for himself on “how things came to be this way” and to come to the understanding that our culture has been enacting a story from the book of Genesis: that Man is here to conquer the earth.
Ishmael separates humans into two groups — “Leavers” and “Takers.” “Leavers” formed cultures that thrived for thousands of years before the agricultural revolution — hunters and gatherers, herders, indigenous societies. Those cultures lived lightly and took only what they needed. “Takers” are us — the people who killed or annexed those cultures and continue to do so; logging and farming in the Amazon threatens some of the last uncontacted tribes on Earth.
“Mother Culture teaches you that this is as it should be,” Ishmael tells the narrator. “Except for a few thousand savages scattered here and there, all the peoples of the earth are now enacting this story. This is the story man was born to enact [according to the mythology], and to depart from it is to resign from the human race itself. … There’s no way out of it except through death.”
Unlike “Leaver” societies, which sustained themselves and the natural world for thousands of years, our “Taker” society will run out of things to kill and will die. Quinn likens the agricultural revolution to humans’ first attempts at flight. Those attempts failed because we tried to mimic a bird. Only when we discovered the law of aerodynamics did we learn to fly.
Through “Ishmael,” Quinn argues that no law or theory underpins “Taker” culture — and that’s why it has been in free fall since its adoption.
Quinn emphasizes that the natural world, which includes “Leaver” cultures, sustains itself through what he calls the law of limited competition. Under this peace-keeping law, he says, you may not hunt down competitors or deny them food or access to it. You also may not commit genocide against your competition.
“And only once in all the history of this planet has any species tried to live in defiance of this law — and it wasn’t an entire species, it was only one people, those I’ve named the Takers,” Ishmael tells the narrator. “Ten thousand years ago, this one people said, ‘No more. Man was not meant to be bound by this law,’ and they began to live in a way that flouts the law at every point.” Source: Pete Reinwald
Paul Haeder, Author 