Environmentalism and the American Way
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A very interesting read by Janet Smith, found in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, highlights common attitudes on environmentalism among the U.S. ‘Far Right.’ The piece is probably well worth your time, but here are some highlights:
“Environment is not about saving nature,” the founder of Freedom Advocates, Michael Shaw, sternly warned an audience of antigovernment “Patriots” and far-right conspiracy theorists during a mid-July conference. “It’s about a revolutionary coup in America. [Environmentalism] is to establish global governance and abandon the principles of Natural Law.” Sustainable development policies, Shaw argued, will require “a police state” and ultimately “turn America into a globally governed homeland where humans are treated as biological resources.” . . .
. . .
This year’s conference linked up several of the far right’s bogeymen into one giant whopper of a conspiracy about sustainable development policies that attempt to protect the earth for future generations. The basic thesis pushed at Freedom 21 was that the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), a trade agreement between Canada, Mexico and the U.S. that includes some environmental requirements, is part of a nefarious and secret plan to merge the U.S, Canada and Mexico into something called the “North American Union” (NAU) — an entity which does not, in fact, exist, and has never been planned, despite the hysterical warnings of conspiracy theorists like Corsi.
The NAU, these theorists insist, will bring with it global government, and, most horrible of all, sustainable development policies. Sustainable development is the real evil lurking in the shadows of global government, according to the conference’s organizers; a wolf in sheep’s clothing, environmental policies really exist to destroy Americans’ freedoms and system of government.
“Freedom cannot be sustained in the presence of ‘sustainable development.’ The two concepts are mutually exclusive,” Freedom 21 materials insist. “Sustainable development can exist only when people are controlled by government.” . . .
My penchant for dark humor compels me to ask these people in exactly what ways they feel they are not currently being “controlled” by one of the most bellicose, plutocratic, anti-democratic governments in the world.
Among other charges leveled at environmental activists—even at mere oxygen-breathing enthusiasts, one almost feels—was that of ‘pantheism,’ and thereby the severing of humankind from God’s word. Sheesh.
Yet, underneath the cacophonous hysteria, it bears mentioning that the ‘patriots’ at Freedom 21 are actually hinting at a fairly salient fundamental point about the human living condition, one which their obstinacy unfortunately obscures.
Perhaps the most important lesson that environmentalism teaches us—a lesson well-known (and sometimes learned the hard way) among primitive peoples for countless ages—is that ‘freedom’ is a relative concept. We should strive to be as free as possible in the most meaningful imaginable sense, but with the knowledge that we cannot be absolutely free to do as we wish if we are to leave future generations an Earth which is worth inhabiting. If that is ‘Earth worship,’ please count me in among the heathen pagans who are, out of the very sort of patriotism we are accused of sorely lacking, ready and willing to admit that the so-called ‘American Way’ has, in more ways than one, frequently proved far from the best way in dealing with matters interior and exterior.
Dualism and Monism (mostly Monism)
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I’ve revamped this essay, and I apologize for any inconvenience to those of you who’ve come by in the interim hoping to check it out. Please trust me that the original product . . . lacked panache. The discussion was framed in too-ambiguous terms, and was, in places, enthusiastically circular. To be searingly self-critical, reading that essay was rather like listening to a career sot casually babble himself to sleep.
And, while the perfectionist in me doesn’t like being pinned down to the finished product at any point ever, no way, no how, uh-uh, I feel that this new version is much more representative of my thought and substantially more deserving of your attention. So I’ll leave it, but with the contingency that I may make modifications to correct clumsiness as I spot it or as it is pointed out to me.
ONTOLOGY WE DEFINE as the study of existence, the examination of our conceptions of what constitutes reality. To define reality, we will use any of various terms: the world, the Universe, etc. I want to consider two ways of looking at ontology and at the issues of ontological dualism and monism:
- Metaphysical – In this sense, we attempt to consider the nature of reality as a thing unto itself—that is, as something independent of our perception and cognition.
- Epistemological – From this posture, we explore reality in the context of our own knowledge of it, and as inseparable from our experience.
It’s appropriate to engage in a preliminary explication of what is meant by dualism and monism. These terms can be employed in any number of ways, so it is impossible for our discussion to have any meaning unless we are explicit about what these terms mean for our purposes:
- Dualism – By far the most prevalent ontology in contemporary thought, dualism (which, it is to be noted, is really just the simplest form of a more general ontology we might call pluralism) is the position that there is more than one kind of existence or existential substance. Dualism is most frequently entangled with conceptions of mind, i.e. mind-matter or mind-body dualism. To the dualist, mind is not the same thing as matter and cannot be reduced to matter. Cartesian dualism goes so far as to say that the ‘mental’ is a different type of substance than the ‘physical,’ but that both types of substance are more or less equally real (ontologically valid). Dualism is a necessary prerequisite to most conceptions of spirituality (spirit-material dualism). That is, for one to say that one believes in spirit, one must establish that spirit is real in the same or a similar sense that the material world is real. For this reason, one can see that dualism is extremely pervasive in human thought. Consider the concept of the supernatural, for instance. This is an embodiment of dualism in that it supposes there is an existence outside of the space and the rules of natural existence. Dualism, then, is really a given for those who espouse the necessity of an Aquinian “first cause.” Here we do not consider the dualism of opposites (good/evil, light/dark) because it seems so patently obvious that it is a cognitive construct of comparison that can say nothing about the nature of existence.
Monism – Monism is the opposite view, the assertion that, by its very nature, the substance of existence is singular in quality. From this, any number of premises of varying extremity can be seen to follow—weak monism we might define as a sort of naturalism, the view that everything is a part of nature and that nothing is outside of it, while strong monism would hold that “all is one” and that there really are no fundamental material divisions, that the whole of the Universe is the only really existent, ontologically valid thing. It is this “strong monism” which I will propound and defend—the view that the Universe is really just one concrete object of tremendous, perhaps recursive complexity but with no genuine, extricable parts. To the logicians among us, that’s: ∃x(Cx & ∀y(Cy → y=x)), where C denotes the property of being an object, a concrete thing[1]. Anaximander (likely the figure pictured here in Raphael’s School of Athens), a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher and the teacher of Pythagoras, among others, is widely viewed as the father of monism in the Western tradition. Since virtually the whole of Western philosophical literature is in some measure descended from Aristotle’s later attempts at systematic categorization (his “causes,” etc.), one quickly finds that monism is not at all a popular view among “educated” or “traditional” philosophers. The literature is liberally sprinkled with references to monism as “indefensible garbage” or “summarily nonsensical.” And that ticks me off.
A Collection of Fractal Flythroughs
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I love me some recursion, folks. Hopefully you’ll enjoy these fractal animations I’ve gleaned and compiled from YouTube. The music is, in my humble opinion, much more forgettable than the video in some instances—but your ears are not mine, so perhaps you’ll hear something I don’t. As for the graphics, though: get out your Mandelbrot Brand spectacles. Enjoy the turbulence while it lasts.
Far more than mere shimmering pretties, fractals are geometric patterns which have fine structure at arbitrarily small scales such that the structure is at least approximately recursive to the shape of the whole. Some examples of naturally occurring fractals include snowflakes, lightning bolts, tree branches, fern leaves [ed. okay, fern fronds]—in fact, fractals seem to be integral to the geometric expression of natural forms in any direction you happen to be looking (the link is to the Wikipedia article with excellent illustrations and explanations). The principle of recursion is fundamental to number theory and has been gaining the attention of mathematicians and cosmologists at least since the days of Leibniz, and increasingly so since the exploits of Benoit Mandelbrot and in this age of all things electro-graphical.
By the Light of the Bloody Moon
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Check out Aussie photographer Steve Selbst’s incomparable capture of the moon during last month’s total eclipse (pic links to artist’s page on Flickr).
The eclipse of August 28, 2007 was especially noteworthy because of its unusual length, clocking in at over an hour and a half in the depths of the shadow. It was not visible throughout Europe, Africa, and western Asia; in the Americas we caught it just as the moon was setting and the sun was coming up in the morning, while east Asia and Australia had been treated earlier, at moonrise. No one really got to see this eclipse in full glory, but it was very interesting in its orientation near the horizon, nonetheless.
The next total eclipse of the moon will occur on February 21, 2008. Its totality will last only about 51 minutes, but it will be at least mostly visible to the entirety of the world except east Asia and Australia.
If you caught wind of those ridiculous emails claiming that, on August 27, the planet Mars was going to be so close to Earth as to appear “about the same size as the moon,” et cetera, ad nauseum, take heart—snopes.com has a thorough exposé on the subject. Mars did come unusually close to Earth in August of 2003, but even at such a unique perigee, the red planet still appeared as little more than an auspiciously bright point in the heavens. If you ever do happen to catch a moon-sized Mars in the sky, well . . . it’s probably fair warning to have that last beer for old times’ sake.
Keepin’ it in the Family
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Biologists from Canada’s McMaster University have published a study which shows that at least some plants, though they of course lack cognitive abilities, are nonetheless capable of exhibiting what humans might interpret as social behaviors. The subjects of the study showed a strong preference towards being planted with sibling specimens; the scientists say they did not get along so well with ‘strangers.’
From Press Esc:
Plants are able to recognise their siblings, according to a study appearing today in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.
Researchers at McMaster University have found that plants get fiercely competitive when forced to share their pot with strangers of the same species, but they’re accommodating when potted with their siblings. . .
Plight of the Honeybee
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About a week ago I spent a warm afternoon at a creek in Bankhead National Forest. I’d sat for some time gazing at the surface of the water and listening to the hawks, and was just about to stand up so as to answer the call of nature, if you will, when a large bee buzzed in from out of nowhere. It hovered inquisitively a few inches from my nose. Hanging between fascination with the moment and my hopes to avoid a sting on the face, I motionlessly marveled at the intricacy of the bee’s anatomy—the delicate yellow banding, creepy-cool eyes, and bee fuzz. Did you know bees are fuzzy? I didn’t. I might have learned more; but the queen must have been calling, for my little interrogator soon darted away as unexpectedly as it had arrived. I wondered what it had been doing so far away from any other bees.
Half of the known bee population of the United States has disappeared over the course of the last thirty-five years. There are numerous documented and suspected causes for this decline, to include parasitic infestation, pesticide use, and habitat destruction. But, as Reclaiming Space wrote earlier this month, the past several years (and, most particularly, the past year) have seen declines unprecedented in size and scope. It appears that the rapid and unexplained disappearance of whole populations of bees—known currently as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) and previously as Fall Dwindle Disease—is also being documented throughout much of Europe. The threats to human agriculture are significant, with some US states reporting 2006 population declines as high as 75%. While grain staples are normally pollinated by wind, over 80 cultivated fruit, nut, and vegetable crops rely on feral or commercially farmed bees for pollination. The long-running decline has been a factor in the persistent elevation of some food prices throughout the US and other parts of the world, an impact which is certain to increase in magnitude as more colonies are found “dead-out.” Dr. Diane Cox-Foster of Pennsylvania State University, a member of the CCD Working Group investigating the phenomenon, has said that the consequences of continued decline could spell devastation for a number of food crops.
Colony Collapse Disorder is a process through which a previously healthy colony can die out over a period of time as little as three weeks. In colonies that are found to be in the process of collapse, the workforce is inadequate in size and seems to be made up almost entirely of young bees. The bees are reluctant to consume provided feed, which is unusual. After collapse, there are very few to no adult bees remaining in the colony. The brood remains unhatched, and there are food stores present. Curiously, though, invasive species which would be expected to relish just such a find are not observed to rob the dead colony of its riches, or do so only hesitantly; this suggests to researchers that the colony has been rendered toxic in some way. It’s an apiary Jamestown over and over again. The lights are on, but no one is home.
All indications are that the CCD epidemic is likely the result of a number of causes. Because the recent declines have been so severe, they have garnered a greater than usual measure of attention from academia and the media. Some researchers have suggested that power lines and cell phone signals may be to blame, as studies have shown that the proximity of either to a hive can affect <badpun>beehavior</badpun>. However, the vast majority of dead colonies studied have exhibited signs of multiple diseases, which would suggest that deficient immune response is likely a factor, and no links between the potentially detrimental effects of electromagnetic radiation and such immune weakness has been conclusively established. Furthermore, because less severe but certainly significant and persistent declines have been observed over the past several decades—and some say as far back as 1896—it is not likely that an explanation concerning technology that is unique to the past decade or two is adequate.
Mites such as verroa have proven to be the bee’s most prolific nemeses since such things began to be studied, and international commerce has spread a number of such species beyond the zones to which they are endemic. Likewise, parasitic microorganisms are transferred globally in the same way, into bee populations that are not immune to them.
The chemical treatment of genetically modified and non-GM seeds with insecticides (such as imidacloprid) is also being investigated as a potential cause, since the pollen produced by treated plants has been found in many cases to contain traces of such chemicals. While ongoing, this research has been less than promising; most of the pertinent studies of affected colonies in the United States and in Germany, for instance, have involved specimens from areas where GM crops are not generally present. While it is believed that certain chemicals used in or resulting from the processing of these seeds are potentially detrimental to insect health, the phenomenology of CCD cannot be easily reconciled to just such a cause, at least not based on the research that has been done to date.
Some researchers have speculated that new and previously undocumented parasites or diseases could be major culprits. Nosema apis (pictured) is a well-known protozoan that can infect the digestive tracts of bees. In 2006 US researchers discovered nosema ceranae, a new species which has been found in many, but not all, CCD-afflicted colonies. They say that adult desertion of the colony is a characteristic of severe ceranae infection, which is consistent with observation.
I must preface this by intimating that I am not an entomologist. That being duly noted, my own secondary research indicates that neither cell-phone signals nor GM seeds, the most politically charged environmental hazards yet considered as explanations for CCD, is very likely to blame, at least not significantly or exclusively, for this fierce and deep decline in the populations of American and European bees. That does not mean we’ve no room for improvement, not in the least. Human commerce provides free global transport for certain bee parasites, and, based on all observations and analyses to date, it is in this respect that our own lifestyles can most soundly be inferred to be contributory to the decline in question. Some of us are a little loose with the herbicides and pesticides from time to time—our dandelionless lawns stand as testament. Additionally, bee breeding practices in the US are such that only a few hundred breeder queens are used to produce the millions of hive queens commercially available to farmers in search of pollinators, and this could result in genetic “bottlenecking,” which would be expected to have generally detrimental effects upon the immune capacities of bee populations. It is extremely interesting that the imported “Africanized” bees now common to the US southwest do not appear to be nearly so susceptible to CCD as are endemic species—thusfar I haven’t seen any original field research on the possibility that these bees may carry a pathogen to which native bees are not immune. Invasions by imported fire ants are thought to have been responsible for the decimation of ground-nesting bees throughout much of the southern US in recent years.
In short, the plight of the honeybee is an issue to be taken seriously. The complexity of the problem demands research, particularly to the end of remedies. Scientists need to understand what is causing CCD in order to develop strategies with which to cope, but such research should not be used for the purposes of scapegoating, at least not until the picture is much clearer. The long-term effects of pollinator shortage could be potentially severe, even catastrophic in a worst-case scenario, as Einstein famously noted. For now, the consumer can expect, at the very least, continued rises in the prices of affected crops.
Links:
NPR – Bee Decline Threatens Farm Economy (Oct 2006)
University of Florida – CCD in Honeybees
Wikipedia – Colony Collapse Disorder
Earth Day 2007
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Sunday, April 22 is Earth Day.
A quick glance across the EarthDay.net website reveals Earth Day-related events unfolding throughout all inhabited continents, in such disparate locales as Phoenix, Lithuania, Calgary, São Paulo, and Djakarta among many others.
It’s a good opportunity to be involved in the discussion of the impact of humanity on itself and on the rest of the biosphere, a good day to assess choices and to make plans. Happily, I’ll be spending this Earth Day without a gas-powered vehicle (if only ’cause it’s in the shop. Cynical me. Hell, maybe she’ll stay in the hospital for a few weeks…that could only be good news for my atrophied leg muscles, anyway.)
I tend to agree with Bill Maher on this one…shouldn’t every day be Earth Day?
Global Warming for the Skeptical, or the Merely Inquisitive
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Last month the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (that’s an international group of peer-reviewed scientists—not cabinet ministers, congressmen, or oil lobbyists, n.b.) released the summary of its fourth assessment report on the topic of global climate change. The analysis is both quantitative and qualitative, discussing how much is changing, what is changing, and why it is changing.
The latest report takes advantage of both more precise physical observations and data collection as well as a better understanding of the data provided by computer models. It is the most sophisticated and circumspect collection of analyses and projections available to humanity.
You can view the summary here (PDF). Below I’ve extracted some of the information that I found most interesting and revelatory.
What does all of this data mean? I’m not in a position to pontificate, although I have wildly gesticulated in the past.
I will merely say that it seems to me that common sense dictates:
- Global warming is a matter which is of concern to our generation not only because of the immediate manifestations of its effects—which are felt most harshly in the less-developed world, not in air-conditioned suburbia—but because of future manifestations. This is because the industrial activity of today generates the climatic fallout of tomorrow. It is precisely because of this slow-motion reaction that the danger is so easy to ignore. In this respect, response to global warming can be viewed as an extremely important test of the ability of humanity to organize and act on behalf of future generations. This is a skill which is altogether foreign to the capitalist/imperialist ideal, and a skill which has never before been of such urgent importance to the well-being of life on Earth.
- It is important for citizens to petition their governments to act decisively in enforcing regulations on industries which contribute to global warming and pollution. Will these regulations restrict economic activity in certain sectors? Will jobs be lost? Absolutely. Is that too high a price to pay for the continuation of an environment which is conducive to complex life? Hardly. We are faced with a situation in which we must bear unpleasant responsibility for a cultural dysfunction for which we are not personally responsible in the generative sense. It’s strange that this sort of altruism is the basis for much proud flag-waving and militarism when it is perverted to the uses of nationalist profiteering pursuits such as warfare, wherein it is lauded as “proud sacrifice” or something similar, and yet is viewed by many as hardly worthwhile when it needs to be applied to the future health of the entire planet.
- Even more important is individual responsibility and accountability in developing sustainable lifestyles. Clearly the automobile-driven lifestyle is a primary culprit in hydrocarbon emissions, so the elimination of unnecessary fuel consumption and participation in biopowered transportation and public transit are helpful. Likewise, opting for low-energy devices in the home and the pursuit of local, unprocessed foodstuffs and other goods are positive contributions that the average person can make. Furthermore, raising the issue as widely and as intelligently as possible is one of the most productive enterprises in which one can engage. Don’t look to the government for solutions. Create your own, and be proud of them. Make some noise; then the government will react and take credit for the initiative.
Let’s have a look at some of this data.
The most reliable data on atmospheric conditions before the period when such data began to be measured in real time comes from Antarctic ice cores. Just as geologists can tell much about conditions on Earth in a given geologic period by examining the differences in strata of rock, climatologists can also discern, with a surprisingly high degree of precision, the climate conditions from a given period by examining strata of unexposed ice which are known to have been deposited at a given rate. Through this type of analysis, climatologists have been able to reconstruct temperature and atmospheric composition data for the past several hundreds of thousands of years.
The graph below is a composite of changes in atmospheric greenhouse gas levels as recorded in the ice cores over the past ten thousand years, and as recorded by active human measurement of atmospheric levels over the past several years. The red lines show the contemporary data collected from real time atmospheric sampling; the other colors represent various interpretations of the ice core data and so naturally extend back much further in time. Note that, while the ice core-derived values from the different studies vary slightly, they coincide with one another remarkably as to the general trend of increase. Pictured are carbon dioxide levels (parts per million) and methane and nitrous oxide levels (parts per billion):
Since the graphs cover a large expanse of time, the last several centuries of activity are presented in exploded views. You can see that carbon dioxide levels, for instance, have risen from roughly 300 to about 375 parts per million in the last century, compared to a net increase of about thirty parts per million over the previous ten thousand years.
The following graph shows changes in average temperature, sea level, and snow cover in the northern hemisphere from various periods ending in 2000. The changes are relative to averages from the period of 1961-1990.
The solid black lines represent decadal averages of values; the circles indicate plotted annual values and the blue shaded regions represent reasonable uncertainty resulting from these discrepancies. This data was obtained entirely from real time human measurement.
Next, a depiction of changes in regional average temperature changes from 1900 to 2000 is presented. The black lines represent decadal averages of actual observations of temperatures. Here is the important twist: the pink shaded areas represent ranges of values derived from computer models which included anthropogenic forcing of climate shift (models which accounted for industrial activity.) The blue shaded areas represent ranges of values derived from computer models which did not include human industrial activity. You can see that, particularly from about 1950 forward, the actual observations follow models which included human industrial activity much more closely than those which did not. This means that, according to an array of a total of 33 simulations, it is virtually certain that the rises in temperature experienced throughout the past half-century to century are explicitly associated with human industrial activity. Put another way, absent of human emissions of greenhouse gases, we could expect to have seen temperature changes within the blue shaded areas. Unfortunately this has not been the case, as the trajectories of the black lines clearly denote.
Now, let’s talk about the future. This last graph represents a variety of predictions of changes in surface temperature from the present up through the year 2100, based on computer simulations of several different scenarios, each scenario reflecting a different projection of rates of increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases based on projections of increasing economic/industrial activity, population increases, and other variables. The orange line represents values from an experiment at which greenhouse gas concentrations were frozen at the levels observed in the year 2000.
Please review the assessment report summary (link at top) for a description of each of these projected scenarios (page 18/18). Based on these values, it is reasonable to project an increase in average global surface temperature of 4-6º C by the year 2200 or of 6-8º C by the year 2300 if human emissions are not drastically and permanently reduced in the immediate future. Such temperature increases and the associated climatic changes, if not prevented, will very likely result in massive depopulation and extinction of thousands of species of plant and animal life. This prediction is based on climate change alone, without consideration of environmental compositional degradation (pollution, urban sprawl) associated with human industrial activities and population increase.
Here are some various observations/predictions based on the IPCC’s fourth assessment:
- Eleven of the past twelve years (1995 – 2006) rank among the twelve warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature (since 1850.) … Urban heat island effects are real but local, and have a negligible influence (less than 0.006º C per decade) on these values.
- The average atmospheric water vapour content has increased since at least the 1980s over land and ocean as well as in the upper troposhere. The increase is broadly consistent with the extra water vapour that warmer air can hold.
- Observations since 1961 show that the average temperature of the global ocean has increased to depths of at least 3000 m and that the ocean has been absorbing more than 80% of the heat added to the climate system. Such warming causes seawater to expand, contributing to sea level rise.
- Average Arctic temperatures increased at almost twice the global average rate in the past 100 years.
- It is virtually certain that the 21st Century will be marked by warmer and fewer cold days and nights over most land areas.
- It is virtually certain that the 21st Century will be marked by warmer and more frequent hot days and nights over most land areas.
- It is very likely that the 21st Century will be marked by an increasing frequency in heat waves over most land areas.
- It is very likely that the 21st Century will be marked by an increasing frequency in heavy precipitation events over most land areas [such as the extreme snow accumulations experienced in the eastern U.S. this winter -ed].
- It is likely that in the 21st Century the geographical areas affected by drought will increase in size.
- It is likely that in the 21st Century there will be an increase in intense tropical cyclone activity.
- It is likely that in the 21st Century there will be an increased incidence of extreme high sea levels, excluding those which can be accounted for by tsunamis.
- Average northern hemisphere temperatures during the second half of the 20th Century were very likely higher than during any other 50-year period in the last 500 years and very likely the highest in at least the past 1300 years.
- It is likely that increases in greenhouse gas concentrations alone would have caused more warming than observed because volcanic and anthropogenic aerosols have offset some warming that would otherwise have taken place.
- The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that the global climate change of the past fifty years can be explained without external forcing and very likely that it is not due to known natural causes alone.
- Warming tends to reduce land and ocean uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide, increasing the fraction of anthropogenic emissions that remains in the atmosphere.
- Increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations leads to increasing acidification of the oceans.
- Snow cover is projected to contract.
- Sea ice is projected to shrink in both the Arctic and Antarctic under all SRES scenarios. In some projections, Arctic late-summer sea ice disappears almost entirely by the latter part of the 21st Century.
- Climate carbon cycle coupling is expected to add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as the climate system warms, but the magnitude of this feedback is uncertain … Based on current understanding of climate carbon cycle feedback, model studies suggest that to stabilize at 450 ppm CO2, could require cumulative emissions over the 21st Century to be reduced from an average of approximately 670 GtC to approximately 490 GtC.
- Contraction of the Greenland Ice Sheet is projected to continue to contribute to sea level rise after 2100.
- Both past and future anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions will continue to contribute to warming and sea level rise for more than a millennium, due to the timescale required for removal of this gas from the atmosphere.
The Working Group of the IPCC which prepared this report is composed of more than fifty independent authors. [correction—in addition to the authors referenced on the summary frontispiece, the working group contains hundreds of additional researchers and representatives of industry and government bodies.]
After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say
“I want to see the manager.”
– William S. Burroughs
When the well’s dry, we know the worth of water.
– Benjamin Franklin
Peter Norvig’s Experiment on the Climate Change Consensus
Global Warming Facts: Top 50 Things to Do to Stop Global Warming
Union of Concerned Scientists – ExxonMobil’s Disinformation Campaign on Global Warming Science
Sierra Club of Canada – 10 Popular Myths About Global Warming
UNEP – World Environment Day 2007
The Ecologist Online – How Mankind Is Sleepwalking to the End of the Earth
An Inconvenient Truth – climatecrisis.org
The Guardian – Arctic Ocean May Lose All Its Ice by 2040, Disrupting Global Weather
The Boston Review – Phaeton’s Reins – The human hand in climate change
BBC: The Stern Review at a Glance
Environmental Defense – Shifting Gears: Cars and Global Warming
Center for Biological Diversity – Bush Administration Issues Polar Bear Gag Order
EcoBridge – Causes of Global Warming
TheRealNews.com – Interview with David Suzuki
Foreign Policy in Focus – Going Green
Wired News – New Carbon Dioxide Tracking Developed
Wikipedia – Martin Durkin (producer, The Great Global Warming Swindle)
Greenpeace – The Energy Revolution
Yahoo! News – Canadian Activist Given Hearing on Global Warming/Human Rights
Bill McKibben – The Gospel vs. Global Warming
Carbon Footprint – Calculate Your Carbon Footprint
Project Earth – Tour the Wounded Earth
UN: Deforestation Out of Control
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The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has released a report indicating that improvements in forestation stability and recovery among developed nations are being negated by “out of control” slash-and-burn agriculture in less-developed countries, primarily in Africa, the Caribbean, and Central and South America.
Forests in the developing world still suffer from widespread deforestation primarily caused by unregulated slash and burn farming practices and uncontrolled forest fires.
“Deforestation continues at an unacceptable rate,” said Wulf Killmann, a forestry expert at the FAO who helped compile the report, adding that the world currently loses approximately 32 million acres of forest cover a year.
Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean are currently the regions with the highest losses.
Africa, which accounts for about 16 per cent of the world’s forests, lost more than 9 per cent of its trees between 1990 and 2005, the FAO said. In Latin America and the Caribbean, home to nearly half of the world’s forests, 0.5 per cent of the forests were lost every year between 2000 and 2005 – up from an annual net rate of 0.46 per cent in the 1990s.
Of particular concern is the future of the Amazon rain forest of Brazil. The Amazon has been shrinking for quite some time, but Brazil’s aggressive ethanol production may claim the rain forest at an increasing rate, particularly if Brazil becomes a major supplier to hungry economies like that of the United States. President Bush recently met with Brazilian President da Silva to discuss ethanol policy. While hefty U.S. tariffs currently make the import of Brazilian ‘clean’ fuel unfeasible—the U.S. favors its own corn-based ethanol, which requires large amounts of fossil fuels during its production process, over Brazil’s much neater cane-based product—a shift in this policy could spell doom for huge tracts of Amazonia and the many thousands of species that call it home.
Deforestation negatively impacts the biosphere as a whole because forests are key in regulating atmospheric CO2 and in producing fresh oxygen. Furthermore, the burning of forests releases huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
It seems clear that the primary solution is not alternative energy. It’s less energy.
On Addiction to Energy
Even if nonpolluting power were feasible and abundant, the use of energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically harmless but psychically enslaving. A community can choose between Methadone and “cold turkey” — between maintaining its addiction to alien energy and kicking it in painful cramps — but no society can have a population that is hooked on progressively larger numbers of energy slaves and whose members are also autonomously active…
Liberation which comes cheap to the poor will cost the rich dear, but they will pay its price once the accelleration of their traffic systems grinds traffic to a halt. A concrete analysis of traffic betrays the truth underlying the energy crisis: the impact of industrially packaged quanta of energy on the social environment tends to be degrading, exhausting, and enslaving, and these effects come into play even before those which threaten the pollution of the physical environment and the extinction of the race. The crucial point at which these effects can be reversed is not, however, a matter of deduction, but of decision.
–Ivan Illich
Energy and Equity, 1973-1974
Return the books to me!!
The forest is a college,
and each tree a university.
All knowledge resides within me.
-COIL
“Queens of the Circulating Library,” 2000
The title of this website is meant to imply the unfolding of an holistic learning process. Holism, from the Greek όλος (holos, “whole”), is essentially the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts—that a system can be only poorly understood merely as Element A, Element B, and Element C without accounting for the unique properties of the interactions between each and all elements. Think of a family: there could be a mother, a father, and children, but to name the members of the family and their genders and ages is hardly a description of the family. It is a directory listing, an itemization of trees and not a portrait of the forest. If the family is plagued with problems, we will not arrive at an understanding of the trouble and certainly can never come up with prospective solutions simply by rattling off rows of data. The concept seems simple, intuitive. Yet I am continually surprised each and every day in my own life and in observations of the world around me how this idea eludes our grasp in large ways and at crucial times. Leaning to respect details with an eye on the big picture is a lifelong learning process. It is why I am here, and I hope it is at least a part of why you are reading.
Isaac Asimov, asked for his advice to young writers, once said something like this: “If you want to become a better writer, you must write less and read more.” In his trade memoir On Writing, blockbuster novelist Stephen King said much the same thing. I could confidently offer similar counsel to developing musicians: play less, listen more. As a writer—well, so far, the writer—at this site, I have situated myself before the keyboard numerous times, convinced that my day would be scratched off as worthless if I did not produce a post before getting up out of this chair. The results are telling, and I hope you won’t click on them. :-) Write less, read more. Rinse. Repeat.
In our world today there are grave injustices singing out in every province. We are told that “life is not fair,” which is a truth, but a truth with an implicitly demoralizing assumption built in: that there’s nothing we can say or do about it. Some go so far as to say that this is somehow the divine will, that we should “participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world” in this sense. I am no stranger to existential unease, but I profoundly disagree with the idea that this notion is for it the panacea. There are fights that we might judge to be worth our whiles, and others that we deem to be less so. There are twenty-four hours within each revolution of the Earth, and only so much that we can accomplish within them. The holistic thinker, then, rather than considering Injustices A, B, and C as unrelated circumstances, will from his easy chair permit himself the luxury of exploring the relationships between them if he wishes to discover an undercurrent, a common thread. In a Universe which from all appearances works to evolve holistically, there will always be unifying themes.
The more I read about political turmoil, abuses of human rights, and ecological disaster, the more I come to believe that the iniquities of life in the contemporary world are driven by a personal and economic addiction to energy in increasing quantity and at decreasing cost. The writings of the Croatian priest, philosopher, and scientist Ivan Illich (pictured) have recently been instrumental in confirming what I had suspected. His Energy and Equity, a brief but rich essay, in my opinion deserves a reading by every literate person and a hearing by every illiterate person on Earth.
At the risk of oversimplification, Illich’s basic premise is this: that a society which maintains its lifestyle and culture without a ceiling of energy consumption is a society which is inherently exclusive to personal equity and thus to the achievement of its potential for social progress. That is, an “energy crisis” is not best understood as a lack of available energy so much as a need for reduced consumption. When the cupboards are getting bare, we do not need to go to the market so much as we need to eat less.
Liberals and conservatives alike, and especially many capitalist libertarians, tend to shriek in alarm at such a suggestion. “How could you dare to limit our freedoms in this way?” An extremely intelligent and valued friend of mine, on hearing my argument for this ideal of frugality, insisted that I could not possibly have meant what I was saying. “You must want something out of it,” he told me. “That’s the reason that treehuggers never accomplish anything. The establishment can smell your hypocrisy. They can shoot you down because of your own false altruism.” This person is a friend, and he meant to challenge me, and he certainly did. He clearly pointed out the ineffectiveness of any doctrine built upon “Do as I say and not as I do.” It is a formidable discrepancy, and I will return to it in my conclusion.
Capitalist moguls and economic planners would have you believe that markets will always grow, that economies should and must always grow. This is because the more an economic system expands, the wealthier those at its reins become. But the expansion of an economy requires ever-increasing amounts of energy for its fuel, about half of which is used for transport and the other half of which is converted into goods. Illich writes:
The advocates of an energy crisis believe in and continue to propagate a peculiar vision of man. According to this notion, man is born into perpetual dependence on slaves which he must painfully learn to master. If he does not employ prisoners, then he needs machines to do most of his work. According to this doctrine, the well-being of a society can be measured by the number of years its members have gone to school and by the number of energy slaves they have thereby learned to command. This belief is common to the conflicting economic ideologies now in vogue. It is threatened by the obvious inequity, harriedness, and impotence that appear everywhere once the voracious hordes of energy slaves outnumber people by a certain proportion. The energy crisis focuses concern on the scarcity of fodder for these slaves. I prefer to ask whether free men need them…
…While people have begun to accept ecological limits on maximum per capita energy use as a condition for physical survival, they do not yet think about the use of minimum feasible power as the foundation of any of various social orders that would be both modern and desirable. Yet only a ceiling on energy use can lead to social relations that are characterized by high levels of equity. The one option that is at present neglected is the only choice within the reach of all nations. It is also the only strategy by which a political process can be used to set limits on the power of even the most motorized bureaucrat. Participatory democracy postulates low-energy technology. Only participatory democracy creates the conditions for rational technology.
What is generally overlooked is that equity and energy can grow concurrently only to a point. Below a threshold of per capita wattage, motors improve the conditions for social progress. Above this threshold, energy grows at the expense of equity. Further energy affluence then means decreased distribution of control over that energy.
My interpretation of this passage is as follows: if one truly believes that the ideals of social progress are constituted by the gradual emergence of a uniform standard of living accessible to all nations and to all peoples, then one must recognize that, because energy and resources are both available only at a fiscal cost, the increased availability of energy will never amount to an equalizing force and in fact will tend to oppress and divide society as it grows. Also, because energy and resources are also both available only at a real cost to the environment in which we and millions of other species of life live, the increased availability of energy will tend, as it grows, to degrade the ecology on which life depends for survival.
The common wisdom is that a near-infinite source of “clean” energy would be cheap enough for all to afford and would not adversely affect the ecology of Earth beyond acceptable standards, standards which should be stringently cautious indeed if we as a society are thinking beyond our own generation. But there are a number of problems with this wisdom, which turns out to be in my view not so wise at all.
One problem is the idea that more energy means cheaper energy: for, in a market economy, we know above all else that increased demand means the need for increased supply, but also that increased supply tends to engender increased demand. When supply outstrips demand, demand is created by marketers. When we have more, we want more. In the world of traffic and urban planning, this quandary manifests itself as Braess’ Paradox: adding extra capacity to a network in which moving entities selfishly choose their own routes does not guarantee increased performance and efficiency. Adding lanes to a traffic corridor will tend eventually to increase congestion. The experience of brilliant but ultimately failed cultures throughout history, from Sumer to the Maya, I think, bears out that more is not better and certainly is not necessarily cheaper.
Another quandary with the pursuit of clean energy to the end of increasing its quantity and availability is ecological rather than economic in nature. Clean energy derived from botanical sources reduces the availability of resources for human nutrition—the explosive population growth which characterized both early civilization and the 20th Century, pace Dr. Atkins, has only been possible because of grain crops. We can get a great deal of clean energy from plants, but not nearly enough to provide for the continual economic expansion lusted after in Wall Street and indeed in our own modern homes. Also there has been much fanfare about the possibility of obtaining energy from solar radiation. But the devices which accomplish this are high-technology products requiring an abundance of refined minerals such as silicon and cadmium. The Earth and probably all of the near asteroids simply do not possess enough of these minerals to guarantee the continuous expansion of energy availability very far at all into the future. We and our planet could potentially subsist on a diet of solar and botanical energy; we could not perpetually expand on such an intake.
Let us return to the idea of equity and social progress. Historically, wars between tribes and nations have been fought for a spectrum of reasons, but centered on the need for economic expansion and greater resources. Social revolutions, on the other hand, have been driven primarily by the growth of awareness of perceived “natural rights” of human beings and by unrest derived from social and economic inequalities perceived as unjust. Both are bloody affairs generally entailing poverty, misery, and loss of life. If by “social progress” we mean the elimination of these ills, then we mean the cultivation of a society in which there is no need, or as near no need as is practiceable, for either of them.
If we wish to bring an end to institutionalized warfare, we must cast away such foolish delusions as that we conduct them in the service of “liberty” or “democracy” or “righteousness.” Wars are conducted for the purposes of capital gain; nothing else can realistically justify the capital expenditures required by them, and certainly nothing at all can justify the human expense of war—a belief to the contrary is, in my view, quite antisocial and psychopathic. It happens to be the view of a number of Western leaders, a view which remains largely unquestioned and even reinforced by a despicably subservient and purposefully myopic journalistic media.
And if there is to be no need for bloody uprisings within a society, we must recognize that, just as the capital gains sought by corporations and nations have led to warfare in the modern era, so the unrestricted propensity for personal financial gain among élite classes has been primarily responsible for the outcry and the violence among the less privileged. For both of these unfortunate “realities” of civilized life, then, we can see that greed, the desire for “more,” is ultimately responsible.
There are those, the chief Enlightenment thinkers among them, who would argue that violence and social inequality are somehow products of human nature. I have written before and will gladly reiterate that when one purports to be able to conclusively define any aspect of human nature, one is bluffing if not outright lying. Like any other organisms, and arguably much more so, humans are highly dynamic creatures and it becomes ever more apparent that many of the negative aspects of our being that we write off as human nature are, in reality, learned behaviors which we are not sufficiently resolved to unlearn. Usually this is because we feel that we have somehow earned our rights to do as we please, consequences be damned. The appeal to the constraints of human nature is a merely a quite unsophisticated protest against personal accountability and responsibility in the face of changing circumstances for which we as a species are often responsible. It takes other unsavory forms, encroaching on otherwise pure conceptions of natural rights and the values of heritage and tradition. All are to be severely distrusted. 
For example, one cannot overestimate the impact of the automobile on modern conceptions of our rights (and responsibilities) as human beings. The best literature I have ever read on the subject is CARToons, a slender but powerful art/essay book by the American cartoonist Andy Singer and expatriate writer Randy Ghent which was forwarded to me by Reclaiming Space. It is published by the Czech-based organization CarBusters. Through facts and figures, smart and scathing illustrations, and well-thought prose, CARToons amply illustrates that our love affair with the automobile comes at a cost we cannot afford to sustain.
Although I (happily) spent the past several years as a pedestrian and mass transiteer, I now rely on an automobile to get myself to and from school and around town in general because it was necessary for me to relocate temporarily to an area in which motorized transportation is the only feasible solution for getting around. My one consolation is that it is not a new automobile. Reading the pages of Singer’s book, I can somewhat sympathize with the neoliberal/faux-conservative ethic of “me and mine;” the book feels very much like an attack on my way of life, which is what it is and what it should be. It forces me to consider the merits versus the consequences of a car-driven lifestyle, and compels me to look beyond my own relatively insignificant existence for answers to pressing questions.
I feel, and you may conceivably feel as well, that it is my “right” to drive an automobile and thus to consume fuel. But even the Alabama Driver’s Manual states in plain language that “Driving an automobile is not a right—it is a privilege.” I only conceive of driving as an inalienable right at the moment in which someone suggests that it is destructive and irresponsible behavior. Driving an automobile and consuming the energy resources required in so doing are in fact privileges of wealth, and privileges of wealth are not exacted from a vacuum. They come at very real costs which I am not required to pay, and at others for which I am personally responsible. In an age in which the United States alone fuels and operates about 200 million automobiles, in which a bite of food on average must travel about 1,400 miles from its point of origin to the table, and in which virtually every aspect of urban planning and land development policy is dictated by the needs of the automobile driver, it is certainly far from unreasonable to inquire about the costs associated with the privilege of motorized transportation. They are, in a word, insane.
I am not speaking merely of fiscal or even environmental costs, although both of those categories present challenges and reinforce social iniquity to an alarming extent. Returning to Illich’s treatise:
More energy fed into the transportation system means that more people move faster over a greater range in the course of every day. Everybody’s daily radius expands at the expense of being able to drop in on an acquaintance or walk through the park on the way to work. Extremes of privilege are created at the cost of universal enslavement. An elite packs unlimited distance into a lifetime of pampered travel, while the majority spend a bigger slice of their existence on unwanted trips. The few mount their magic carpets to travel between distant points that their ephemeral presence renders both scarce and seductive, while the many are compelled to trip farther and faster and to spend more time preparing for and recovering from their trips.
In the United States, four-fifths of all man-hours on the road are those of commuters and shoppers who hardly ever get into a plane, while four-fifths of the mileage flown to conventions and resorts is covered year after year by the same 1.5 per cent of the population, usually those who are either well-to-do or professionally trained to do good. The speedier the vehicle, the larger the subsidy it gets from regressive taxation. Barely 0.2 per cent of the entire United States population can engage in self-chosen air travel more than once a year, and few other countries can support a jet set which is that large.
The captive tripper and the reckless traveler become equally dependent on transport. Neither can do without it. Occasional spurts to Acapulco or to a party congress dupe the ordinary passenger into believing that he has made it into the shrunk world of the powerfully rushed. The occasional chance to spend a few hours strapped into a high-powered seat makes him an accomplice in the distortion of human space, and prompts him to consent to the design of his country’s geography around vehicles rather than around people. Man has evolved physically and culturally together with his cosmic niche. What for animals is their environment he has learned to make into his home. His self-consciousness requires as its complement a life-space and a life-time integrated by the pace at which he moves. If that relationship is determined by the velocity of vehicles rather than by the movement of people, man the architect is reduced to the status of a mere commuter.
The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their society’s time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.
The figures are dated and would need revision to be exactly applicable to the 21st Century. But Illich here is outlining his conception of automobile drivers—and, more broadly, the consumers of automobile transported goods—as “energy slaves,” a caricature that is quite apt. What so many proud key jinglers, myself included, have defended as an inalienable right can be more accurately understood as an enforced mode of existence, as bondage to a gluttonous and wrecklessly voracious economy. We are energy addicts. Our addiction requires ever more resources, resources which are not native to our milieu and which must, at some point, begin to be acquired through intimidation and coercion. We are now long past that point, and virtually every instance of turmoil, of perpetual famine, and of intercultural conflagration in our time can be traced back to it. Every crank of the engine, every morsel of processed food or transcontinental produce, then, is in fact a tiny act of oppression and hostility, a mild but sonorous endorsement of social inequality and starry-eyed war for profit. What is clearly the result of conditioning is misconstrued as ubiquitous necessity. The truth is painful.
There are a number of imperfect but progressive solutions.
The development of public transit is one of the most promising prospects. An automobile lane on an expressway, according to Robert Caro, can carry at maximum about 1,500 cars per hour across the same distance that a single track of light rail could carry at least 40,000 persons. The figures of the energy efficiency of one mode versus the other must be staggering in their starkness. Yet, because of the power of the automotive industry lobby and the oil industry lobby—which together represent the lion’s share of corporate revenues in the US and the developed world—the development of public transit systems is seen as subsidy, while the construction of imposing, divisive, and environmentally destructive highways is viewed as sound investment. Unfortunately, not all of us live in areas in which public transit is available or in which transportation by our own biopower is practiceable. But, acting together, groups of citizens can exert a great deal of pressure on local government to invest in more efficient transportation.
Eating locally or even self-produced foods and abstaining from the unnecessary purchase and consumption of mass-produced goods is another solution. The satisfaction derived from regional self-sufficiency is palpable, and the challenge therein presented to an energy-hungry economy can be real and effective. If everyone conserves a little, then we all conserve a very great deal indeed. In an age of interconnectedness and unbridled personal communication across even the largest distances, organization cannot be very much of a problem.
For those who categorically must engage in automobile travel, which realistically is probably relatively few of us, pooling of resources and car sharing are attractive and responsible options. In Europe and East Asia these practices have long been the norm, not born so much out of social responsibility as of economic necessity.
If one perceives such measures as contrary to one’s natural rights, the diagnosis is a simple lack of realization of the costs which the exercise of such “rights” exact upon others. Such misconceptions are widespread and are in fact propagated by the corporatocratic and technocratic establishments which govern economic policy in the modern world. It is indeed a conspiracy theory—a conspiracy to make as much money as possible and to externalize as many costs as possible for as long as possible. To accomplish this, slavery to oppressive and inequitable economic policy has been disguised as inalienable liberty. Said General Motors’ William Mitchell in 1965: “The motorcar must be exciting and create a desire and not become mere transportation, or we will have just a utility, and people will spend their money on other things.”
When someone guarantees you liberty in exchange for cash, when a salesman guarantees that a new food processor or a shiny automobile will increase your happiness, you had better ask serious questions (of yourself, not of the salesman.) A fool and his money are soon parted.
In the end, this issue is about much more than a critique of the automobile; motorized transportation is simply the largest and most threatening manifestation of the sickness of a society addicted to energy.
An addict to hard drugs characteristically refuses to admit that the addiction is problematic, and therein lies the largest obstacle to overcoming the addiction. An addict to energy likewise refuses to acknowledge the unfairness of the conception of his addiction as a natural right, which is likewise the biggest fence between himself and a better world. Commenting on a recent article about the effects of human industrial activity on the ecology of Earth, one BBC reader wrote: “Who’s going to tell a billion people they can’t drive cars or own a home?” Society will not quit its energy habit cold turkey; inevitably Illich’s route of “fits and starts” will have to suffice. Getting reliably from point A to point B and enjoying a comfortable lifestyle are not occluded by the option of a low-energy existence. This is the greatest, most deceptive, and most powerful myth in service of the power brokers and money changers. It is a lie, the irony of which is too great to consider without some measure of anguished laughter.
The idea is that, at the popular level, a shift in ideological focus is necessary. Conceptions of human rights, of human nature, and of social progress must be adaptable. The unchanging word is a lie, at best a lullaby. No rights are inalienable unless they apply equally to every individual on Earth—that comes on the authority not so much of Locke or Montesquieu as Jesus Christ. Furthermore, it is common sense. There is not, nor will there ever be, enough energy to continuously elevate the living standard (if that is what one chooses to think is happening) of every person on Earth; therefore, quite simply, unbridled consumption is not an inalienable right. It is likely that a culture built upon the fable of infinite resources will destroy itself from the inside out before it destroys its environment, and both of these dread endeavors are already well on their ways to becoming reality.
My friend’s challenge that my desire for a society built upon a minimum feasible rate of energy consumption is somehow self-serving is not unfounded. Such a charge is not ammunition for capitalist moguls so much as it is a source of purpose for their opponents—the deciding factor lies in one’s attitude. The cynic can turn the entire world against himself if he so chooses, and his neighbors are none the wiser. We would be well-served in mental and physical health by a lifestyle which required more of us and less of others and of the Earth, by a lifestyle rooted in the fact that we can never have it all, so we must be happy with what we have. In the Earth of bygone eras, such conceptions were branded ludicrous by the wealthy even as they remained self-evident reality for the poor. Not much has changed in that dynamic. Always there was more territory to explore, more people to enslave, more energy to guzzle, more soldiers to die. But in the age of modern understanding of our limitations—which is, by anyone’s account, a critical first step in defining one’s sense of self—we are now in a position to do away with mesmerizing tales of divine blessing of our follies, of riches beyond compare which are ours for the taking. The toxicity of such ideas begins to overwhelm us. What have we learned? What will we pass on? Will it be an organically vibrant forest, or a confused battery of trees in decay?
can't see the forest 
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