2010 Extreme Weather

When I was a kid, it seemed to me that only old people talked about the weather; these exchanges  seemed too chatty, too giddy, something to do with a lifetime of too many cocktails I thought. I, on the other hand was grave, hypnotized by the nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over us, for which we practiced every week in school. The ever-present Apocalypse.
Now that I am approaching that age, I am finding a personal  irony in the way that Nature, with ever-greater frequency, seems to want to remind us that the apocalypse, if there is to be one,  may also come in the form of ... weather. Bad weather, and lots of it.
Consider 2010: already by Thanksgiving the year was headed for the record books for localized periods of extreme cold, extreme heat, extreme snow, and extreme downpours. Russia burned, and 30% of Pakistan was under water.
And just in December:
- Europe was stuck for weeks in travel chaos with heavy snows. Airports management under scrutiny by EU commission. Moscow airport management under scrutiny after an ice storm shut-down.
- US East coast from the Carolinas to Maine shut down on the day after Christmas  by a monster 'snowicane' (a dense blizzard with hurricane winds); 7,000 flights cancelled, and there too, airport and cities management criticized for the snow fail.
- SoCal/LA: worst flooding in decades, when several months' worth of rain fell in one storm.
- Southeast: multiple record cold temperatures in Florida. Southwest: unseasonably warm.
- India: record-breaking cold wave; Kashmir's  Lake Dal freezes over.
- Days of torrential rain in Queensland, Australia,  flooding over an area bigger than France and Germany combined, military called in.

Now, these are all weather events; to be sure. But since these are precisely the sort of weather events predicted to increase in frequency as the atmospheric quotient of CO2 continues to rise, I think we can in the very least have a strong suspicion that we are seeing the beginnings of predicted climate chaos due to the effects of anthropogenic CO2, which before the Industrial Revolution was at 260 ppm, and which  this year reached 390 ppm.

In the next years we can apparently expect to see such extreme weather events with greater frequency, here and there throughout the world. The near term toll will be an overall  fraying of infrastructure, a growing drain on national, local, and individual resources, a slow-down in public services and efficiencies. We can expect urgent discussions, as are going on in Europe now, about how to better prepare for these contingencies. But as long as  we continue boosting atmospheric CO2,  the extremes will continue to be further record-breakers, and we will always be behind the curve.

More on 2010 weather and climate chaos in Ecoversity.org's Case Focus.


December 2010 Blizzard Timelapse from Michael Black on Vimeo.

Postscript, Dec 31: "Tornadoes fueled by unusually warm weather pummeled the South and Midwest on Friday, killing at least six people and injuring dozens more across Arkansas, Missouri and Illinois. Forecasters said storms could hit along a stretch from near Chicago to New Orleans later in the evening as New Year's Eve celebrations begin.". One man who survived: "It sucked me out of my house and carried me across the road and dropped me," Chris Sisemore of Cincinnati told The Associated Press on Friday. "I was Superman for a while. ... You're just free-floating through the air. Trees are knocking you and smacking you down."
 And  a 100-Car Pileup In North Dakota... Happy New Year!

Live Webcast From Cancun

Watch live webcast of the Cancun Climate Conference:
cc210.mx
oneclimate.net

The Politics Heading into the Cancun Climate Summit

An in-depth report on the international politics of climate change in the lead-up to the Cancun Conference.

Cancun Climate Summit: Time for a New Geopolitical Architecture
26 November 2010, by: Nikolas Kozloff, truthout.org

"As we approach crucial climate change negotiations in Cancun, Mexico, the key question on many people's minds is this: what nation or nations will have the courage to stand up to the United States, which still represents the key obstacle to a binding agreement on global warming? If it looked unlikely that the U.S. would reduce carbon emissions before, the recent midterm elections have made such a possibility seem even more remote: many incoming Republican legislators simply deny that global warming exists.

"Without any targets set for emissions cuts in the U.S., it will be difficult for Washington to fulfill its obligations under the Copenhagen accord, an agreement which many feel is already hopelessly watered down. A US refusal to substantially decrease its emissions could in turn bode ill for future negotiations, since China will certainly claim that Washington is more historically responsible for global warming and is not doing its fair share to halt climate change.

"Developing nations need to get their act together and exercise more pressure on the U.S. In recent years, a leftist bloc of Latin American countries, chiefly Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador and Venezuela, have sought to challenge the U.S. when it comes to setting climate change policy. Ringleader Bolivia, which was particularly opposed to the Copenhagen deal, wants to limit any increase in world climate change to less than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).

"Yet, major emitters have failed to even meet Copenhagen's far less ambitious target of limiting the rate of increase to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). President Evo Morales, who some are pushing for the Nobel peace prize, recently organized a counter climate summit in Cochabamba. The Bolivian president declares that $300 billion a year is necessary to cope with global warming and is lobbying hard for the formation of an innovative international climate court.

Read the entire in-depth report on the situation leading up to Cancun here.

Nikolas Kozloff is the author of Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left  (Palgrave, 2008) and No Rain in the Amazon: How South America's Climate Change Affects the Entire Planet (Palgrave, 2010).  Visit his website, www.nikolaskozloff.com.


New York Times/Reuters pre-conference coverage:

Modest Climate Change Steps Are Goal of Meeting in Mexico 
"This year is likely to be recorded as one of the warmest since record keeping began in the 19th century. The United Nations panel of climate scientists says rising temperatures will mean more floods, droughts and sandstorms, as well as rising sea levels.
For Cancún participants, the major challenge is to end a deadlock on sharing the burden of emissions cuts between China and the United States. Their relationship already is strained over China’s trade surplus, North Korea and other issues.
The Cancún meeting also comes as the weak world economy, with euro zone bailouts of Greece and Ireland, has sapped attention from climate change..." (read full story at NYT)

Bolivia Report- Climate Debt

Avi Lewis travels to Bolivia to explore the country's climate crusade from the inside. An excellent reportage.

Interview: Ingrid Betancourt

BigThink asks Ingrid Bettancourt what her experience as a captive of the FARC for 6 1/2 years in the Columbian jungle taught her about human psychology...



Ingrid Betancourt is a French-Colombian politician and anti-corruption activist. In February 2002 Betancourt was kidnapped by the guerrilla organization "Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia" (FARC) while she was campaigning for the presidential elections. She was finally rescued by Colombian security forces six and a half years later.

Pierre Rabhi: To grow one's own garden is today a political act

Pierre Rabhi, farmer, writer and thinker of French-Algerian origin, is one of the pioneers of organic agriculture and the inventor of the concept "oasis everywhere." He urges a form of society more respectful of people and the earth and supports the development of agricultural practices accessible to all, particularly the poorest, while preserving the heritage which nourishes us. Since 1981, he has been spreading his know-how in the arid countries of Africa, as well as France and Europe, seeking to restore their own food to the people. He is now recognized as an  international expert for food safety and participated in drafting the UN Convention for the fight against desertification. He is the founder of the "Mouvement pour la Terre et l'Humanisme" (Colibri), and the author of numerous books including "Earth Song, from the Sahara to the Cevennes", and "Consciousness and Environment: Seeds of the Possible" (co-authored with Nicolas Hulot).
Here is a brief article he posted to his blog recently on the importance of localized food production:

To grow one's own garden is today a political act

It's no surprise that there is a growing chasm between ordinary citizens  and those meant to represent them. Who still feels he or she can participate in choices which concern their future? Yes, our leaders came to office through the vote, but too many of their decisions do not correspond to what they were elected to do. Their function seems limited to piloting  the meandering daily flow of the status quo, which opens no perspectives for the future. Worse, it obliterates them, by assuring the continuation of a model of unlimited growth, a model which everyone understands to be incompatible with the truth of our finite resources.

In spite of our incredible technology, we have created the worst performing society of human history, the most wasteful in terms of energy, in social terms the most destructive, and the least resilient ever, depending entirely as it does on a combustible fossil resource which is running out. And we persevere: that which we call "politics' looks more like a therapeutic assault on a moribund economic system. While mistrust  toward politics is spreading, precariousness and malaise are also increasing. We blame by turn bad management by the state or the abuses of industry, but few call into question the foundational principle of our society: this mercantile logic, which confiscates from humanity that which Nature has given us: life, water, the soil, the seeds… Extending this logic, one can imagine a global cartel possessing the planet and making all of us renters upon it.

To reinvent politics we must protect our sources of life from this mercantile logic which  destroys ecosystems and  impoverishes entire populations- even in countries rich in natural resources. Ecology must be  more than a band-aid on the wounds of the environment. It must lead us to rethink our industry, our medicine, our education, our food. It invites to walk away from the organized pillage and restore the economy to it's most noble function, that is to see to it that basic needs in goods and services are available to the greatest number of people. Our consumer choices are political acts. Everything we can do to become autonomous, that is to satisfy our needs without passing through the corporate machine, is a political act. Even our own country, a 'developed' country, can no  longer assure it's own food supply. We have killed our soils with pesticides, our waters are polluted, our bees disappearing, and GMOs are a despicable sham. And when the petroleum runs out, we are assured of famine.

This is why it is so vital to support local farming and  to create networks of CSA farms- (Community Supported Agriculture).

 To grow one's own garden is today a political act.

- Pierre Rabhi July 8, 2010
- translation: S. Miller
   Orginal post

Colibri: Mouvement pour la Terre et l'Humanisme
Colibri Video Presentation (fr.)
Association pour le Maintien d'un Agricuture Paysanne
USA: Community Supported Agriculture

Pogo - Gardyn- Live From the Guggenheim

John Robbins: "The New Good Life - Living Better Than Ever In an Age of Less"

Excerpts from an interview with John Robbins, scion of the Baskin-Robbins family, about his new book, at OpEdNews:

"I believe there is a hidden blessing in the economic crisis, in the necessary return to reality from a make- waste society. Many of us know, at some level, that we have become caught up in something deeply out of balance, that we are going way too fast, that we are speeding past too many of the things and moments that could really matter. Many of us sense that life is too precious and too precarious to live the way we are living...

"I knew how high ice cream is in saturated fat and sugar, and I was coming to see the link with heart disease… It was disturbing to consider that people might suffer more heart attacks as a result of the company's meteoric growth.

"In 1967, my uncle Burt Baskin, my father's partner in the company, died of a heart attack. A big man, he was only fifty-four years old. I was overwhelmed with grief for the loss of my beloved uncle and increasingly troubled by the existential dilemma I was facing.
I asked my father if he thought there might be any connection between the amount of ice cream my uncle ate and his fatal heart attack. "Absolutely not," he snapped. "His ticker just got tired and stopped working."

"It was not hard to understand why my father wouldn't want to consider that there might be a connection. By that time he had manufactured and sold more ice cream than any other human being who had ever lived on this planet. He didn't want to think that ice cream harmed anyone, much less that it had anything to do with the death of his beloved brother-in-law and business partner. But I could not keep from wondering.

"My dad had groomed me since my earliest childhood to one day succeed him at Baskin-Robbins. The company was expanding rapidly, with annual sales in the billions of dollars. But despite the considerable lure of great wealth, I felt called to a different way of life, one whose purpose wasn't focused on making the most money but on making the biggest difference. Every new generation has an instinct to step out on its own, but what was stirred in me felt somehow much deeper than a stereotypical father-son generational split.

"As a teenager, I had read the writings of Henry David Thoreau, who challenged the relentless pursuit of money and social status. "I love to see anything," he wrote, "that implies a simpler mode of life and a greater nearness to the earth." Seeing people too often make themselves what he called "slaves to the acquisition of money and things," he suggested that "a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can do without."

"Thoreau's books inspired me to think about topics that were never discussed in the household in which I grew up--issues such as the importance of contact with the natural world, self- reliance, personal conscience, and social responsibility. Meanwhile, I was living in a home with an ice cream cone-shaped swimming pool and a soda fountain that offered guests all thirty- one flavors. My father was proud of his Rolls-Royce and the many expensive classic cars he collected. His yacht was named The 32nd Flavor.

"If money was all that was needed to make a person happy, I would have been jubilant. But I wasn't, and my distress kept growing stronger. I had the distinct impression that even though humanity now had the potential to live upon this earth with more ease and comfort than had ever been possible in human history, we were collectively moving farther and farther away from that possibility.

"I thought that Gandhi was right when he said that there is enough for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed, and so it pained me to see how often money was becoming the goal of our lives, rather than a tool in service to our ultimate goals...

"One of the reasons I wrote "The New Good Life" is to provide people with simple, easy and inexpensive suggestions on how to raise their quality of life while lowering their cost of living, and at the same time lowering their ecological footprint. The book is filled with hundreds of ideas, many of them counter-intuitive.

"Learning to live with respect for ourselves, respect for others, and respect for the whole earth community is no easy task in a culture that has become as out of balance as ours has. We have literally become out of phase with the deepest needs we have as people and as citizens of our dear planet earth..."

read the complete interview at OpEdNews

Billionaire Koch Brothers Financing Climate Confusion: Vertically Integrated Strategies vs. Scientific Concensus

(This is an excerpt from an article in the current New Yorker Magazine. The full article, entitled "Covert Operations- The Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging War on Obama" can be seen online here)

"Charles Koch seems to have approached both business and politics with the deliberation of an engineer. "To bring about social change," he told Doherty, requires "a strategy" that is "vertically and horizontally integrated," spanning "from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action." The project, he admitted, was extremely ambitious. "We have a radical philosophy," he said.

"In 1977, the Kochs provided the funds to launch the nation’s first libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute. According to the Center for Public Integrity, between 1986 and 1993 the Koch family gave eleven million dollars to the institute. Today, Cato has more than a hundred full-time employees, and its experts and policy papers are widely quoted and respected by the mainstream media. It describes itself as nonpartisan, and its scholars have at times been critical of both parties. But it has consistently pushed for corporate tax cuts, reductions in social services, and laissez-faire environmental policies.

"When President Obama, in a 2008 speech, described the science on global warming as "beyond dispute," the Cato Institute took out a full-page ad in the Times to contradict him. Cato’s resident scholars have relentlessly criticized political attempts to stop global warming as expensive, ineffective, and unnecessary. Ed Crane, the Cato Institute’s founder and president, told me that "global-warming theories give the government more control of the economy."

"Cato scholars have been particularly energetic in promoting the Climategate scandal. Last year, private e-mails of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia, in England, were mysteriously leaked, and their exchanges appeared to suggest a willingness to falsify data in order to buttress the idea that global warming is real. In the two weeks after the e-mails went public, one Cato scholar gave more than twenty media interviews trumpeting the alleged scandal. But five independent inquiries have since exonerated the researchers, and nothing was found in their e-mails or data to discredit the scientific consensus on global warming.

"Nevertheless, the controversy succeeded in spreading skepticism about climate change. Even though the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently issued a report concluding that the evidence for global warming is unequivocal, more Americans are convinced than at any time since 1997 that scientists have exaggerated the seriousness of global warming. The Kochs promote this statistic on their company’s Web site but do not mention the role that their funding has played in fostering such doubt.

"In a 2002 memo, the Republican political consultant Frank Luntz wrote that so long as "voters believe there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community" the status quo would prevail. The key for opponents of environmental reform, he said, was to question the science- a public-relations strategy that the tobacco industry used effectively for years to forestall regulation. The Kochs have funded many sources of environmental skepticism, such as the Heritage Foundation, which has argued that "scientific facts gathered in the past 10 years do not support the notion of catastrophic human-made warming." The brothers have given money to more obscure groups, too, such as the Independent Women’s Forum, which opposes the presentation of global warming as a scientific fact in American public schools. Until 2008, the group was run by Nancy Pfotenhauer, a former lobbyist for Koch Industries. Mary Beth Jarvis, a vice-president of a Koch subsidiary, is on the group’s board.

"Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, is the co-author of "Merchants of Doubt," a new book that chronicles various attempts by American industry to manipulate public opinion on science. She noted that the Kochs, as the heads of "a company with refineries and pipelines," have "a lot at stake." She added, "If the answer is to phase out fossil fuels, a different group of people are going to be making money, so we shouldn’t be surprised that they’re fighting tooth and nail."

"David Koch told New York that he was unconvinced that global warming has been caused by human activity. Even if it has been, he said, the heating of the planet will be beneficial, resulting in longer growing seasons in the Northern Hemisphere. "The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because far greater land area will be available to produce food," he said.

Read the full article at NewYorker.com

Anak Agung Gede Agung: "Calamity" of Overdevelopment in Bali

Striking glimpses of the effects of rapid, often unregulated over-development in Asia occasionally show up in our news streams in the States, like China's recent 100 km-long traffic jams, lasting, in some cases, weeks.
But what is happening to the tiny "paradise island" of Bali is particularly poignant and distressing, a focused   microcosm in which these forces are overwhelming a tiny island's ancient and venerable culture. Tourism is still increasing, now with many from China (PRC). Lately we've heard of a rabies epidemic (93 people dead, 110,000 dogs killed), a dengue fever epidemic (2771 cases in the first three months of 2010), deadly gangsterism,  and murders of tourists by migrant laborers. But these are only the most dramatic symptoms, below which lie a raft of problems brought about by the exploitation of Bali's people and culture for industrial-scale tourism, in the process creating a wild west of unregulated speculative development.

Here is Anak Agung Gede Agung, a member of the Gianyar royal family, former Indonesian Minister of Societal Affairs, a graduate of Harvard and Leiden University in Holland and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, writing for the Jakarta Post Sept 6:
Bali last year had 5.75 million foreign and domestic tourists, which is almost twice the island's population of 3.9 million (the ideal population based on the environmental support capacity is 1.5 million).


"All of Bali's 48 beaches have undergone acute erosion, so much so that its coastline has lost 181.7 kilometers of land this last decade, which amounts to 41.5 percent of the island's total shoreline. In one year alone, in 2008, the satellite data showed that Bali lost 88.6 kilometers of its beaches, caused mainly by massive disregard of zoning and coastline laws.


"This last decade, the average temperature in Bali rose from 28 to 30 degrees Celsius to 33. This is caused mostly by an increase in population density.


"The number of hotel rooms, excluding those in the fast mushrooming villa complexes, has shot up to 78,000 while the optimum number is 22,000, as indicated by the survey commissioned by the government.


"A hotel room consumes on average 300 liters of water per day. With 78,000 rooms, this amounts to at least 23,400,000 liters of precious water used daily by the tourist industry.


"The result is a massive shortage of water in various parts of Bali and acute seepage of seawater penetrating inland, with sea levels rising by 50 centimeters in most coastal areas in Bali.


"Massive illegal logging is occurring in the forests of West Bali, endangering the island's few national parks. Since 1983, Bali has lost 25,000 hectares of its forest, indicating a drastic reduction of one fifth of its forest reserves within a 20-year period.


"Around-the-clock traffic jams are now an everyday phenomena in most parts of Bali, especially throughout the regencies of Badung, Gianyar, Tabanan, Buleleng and the major highway around the whole of the island.


"Bali has lost on average 1,500 hectares of lush agricultural land per year to the tourist industry over the past 30 years. Considering Bali's small land mass, this is an enormous alienation shift.


"In its place comes a hotel, mall or restaurant that every day exudes an alien way of life, fast replacing the indigenous culture.


"While the biodiversity erosions are caused by an overuse of natural resources due to an influx of tourists and changes in lifestyle are severe enough, the cultural erosion caused by the land alienation are more critical as they lead to the rapid extinction of the Balinese custom, tradition and identity.


"Why has such a calamity befallen Bali? The answer lies in the government, both at the central and provincial levels, together with the tourist industry's over-focus on Bali . . ."

 -Anak Agung Gede Agung   

Labor Day message from Robert F. Kennedy

Bobby Kennedy said this in a speech on Labor Day 42 years ago:

"Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product ... if we should judge America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

"Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America, except why we are proud that we are Americans."

(thanks to Alan Grayson for forwarding this excerpt)
(Listen to the original audio of this segment)

Fire Tornadoes

Bill McKibben wrote in "Eaarth": "We imagine we still live back on that old planet, that the disturbances we see around us are the old random and freakish kind. But they're not. It's a different place. A different planet."
In the last week we've seen two filmed occurrences  of "rare" fire tornadoes... one in Brazil, one in Hawaii,  both  tropical locations.
Brazil-



In Hawaii:

Undersea Oil Plume Vanished?

The New York Times headlined the story on August 24th:
Undersea Oil Plume Vanishes in Gulf, Degraded by Previously Unknown Bug
Sounds like  unexpected and welcome good news. A hitherto unknown microbe has eaten up the undersea oil plume in the gulf, and not significantly degraded the oxygen content of the water in the process. A good luck double-header! The Times goes into great detail in the story, but one detail it left out was reported in the AP coverage, to wit: "The research was supported by an existing grant with the Energy Biosciences Institute, a partnership led by the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois that is funded by a $500 million, 10-year grant from BP..."
So caveat emptor, and hold the champagne.

Democracy Now did a piece on the current status of the Gulf oil spill coverup on August 23rd.
And Dahr Jamail has been doing some excellent reporting from the Gulf.

Making Rounds With Oscar

In February of this year, David Dosa published a full account of his experience with Oscar the Cat in the nursing home where he lived. Oscar has now accompanied 50 patients to the other side; twice the total at the time Dr Dosa first wrote of this extraordinary animal in a 2007 article in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Here is an excerpt from that article:

A Day in the Life of Oscar the Cat
David M. Dosa, M.D., M.P.H.
N Engl J Med 2007; 357:328-329July 26, 2007
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp078108

Oscar the Cat awakens from his nap, opening a single eye to survey his kingdom. From atop the desk in the doctor's charting area, the cat peers down the two wings of the nursing home's advanced dementia unit. All quiet on the western and eastern fronts. Slowly, he rises and extravagantly stretches his 2-year-old frame, first backward and then forward. He sits up and considers his next move.
In the distance, a resident approaches. It is Mrs. P., who has been living on the dementia unit's third floor for 3 years now. She has long forgotten her family, even though they visit her almost daily. Moderately disheveled after eating her lunch, half of which she now wears on her shirt, Mrs. P. is taking one of her many aimless strolls to nowhere. She glides toward Oscar, pushing her walker and muttering to herself with complete disregard for her surroundings. Perturbed, Oscar watches her carefully and, as she walks by, lets out a gentle hiss, a rattlesnake-like warning that says "leave me alone." She passes him without a glance and continues down the hallway. Oscar is relieved. It is not yet Mrs. P.'s time, and he wants nothing to do with her.
Oscar jumps down off the desk, relieved to be once more alone and in control of his domain. He takes a few moments to drink from his water bowl and grab a quick bite. Satisfied, he enjoys another stretch and sets out on his rounds. Oscar decides to head down the west wing first, along the way sidestepping Mr. S., who is slumped over on a couch in the hallway. With lips slightly pursed, he snores peacefully- perhaps blissfully unaware of where he is now living. Oscar continues down the hallway until he reaches its end and Room 310. The door is closed, so Oscar sits and waits. He has important business here.

Twenty-five minutes later, the door finally opens, and out walks a nurse's aide carrying dirty linens. "Hello, Oscar," she says. "Are you going inside?" Oscar lets her pass, then makes his way into the room, where there are two people. Lying in a corner bed and facing the wall, Mrs. T. is asleep in a fetal position. Her body is thin and wasted from the breast cancer that has been eating away at her organs. She is mildly jaundiced and has not spoken in several days. Sitting next to her is her daughter, who glances up from her novel to warmly greet the visitor. "Hello, Oscar. How are you today?"
Oscar takes no notice of the woman and leaps up onto the bed. He surveys Mrs. T. She is clearly in the terminal phase of illness, and her breathing is labored. Oscar's examination is interrupted by a nurse, who walks in to ask the daughter whether Mrs. T. is uncomfortable and needs more morphine. The daughter shakes her head, and the nurse retreats. Oscar returns to his work. He sniffs the air, gives Mrs. T. one final look, then jumps off the bed and quickly leaves the room. Not today.

Making his way back up the hallway, Oscar arrives at Room 313. The door is open, and he proceeds inside. Mrs. K. is resting peacefully in her bed, her breathing steady but shallow. She is surrounded by photographs of her grandchildren and one from her wedding day. Despite these keepsakes, she is alone. Oscar jumps onto her bed and again sniffs the air. He pauses to consider the situation, and then turns around twice before curling up beside Mrs. K.
One hour passes. Oscar waits. A nurse walks into the room to check on her patient. She pauses to note Oscar's presence. Concerned, she hurriedly leaves the room and returns to her desk. She grabs Mrs. K.'s chart off the medical-records rack and begins to make phone calls.
Within a half hour the family starts to arrive. Chairs are brought into the room, where the relatives begin their vigil. The priest is called to deliver last rites. And still, Oscar has not budged, instead purring and gently nuzzling Mrs. K. A young grandson asks his mother, "What is the cat doing here?" The mother, fighting back tears, tells him, "He is here to help Grandma get to heaven." Thirty minutes later, Mrs. K. takes her last earthly breath. With this, Oscar sits up, looks around, then departs the room so quietly that the grieving family barely notices.

from: A Day in the Life of Oscar the Cat
David M. Dosa, M.D., M.P.H.
N Engl J Med 2007; 357:328-329July 26, 2007
 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp078108

Some excerpts from the online chat with Chris Hedges 7/21/10

Peter from Ontario:
"Hi Chris, thanks for your inspiration. Could you outline concretely how we might go about turning things around?"

Chris Hedges:
"We have to stop believing that we can effect change through established political or social organizations or electoral politics, and I think that still remains a huge hurdle for us people who in the end, through accommodation of fear and very clever advertising, are herded like sheep into a dysfunctional system, which is how so many people who should have known better voted for Obama. The environmental crisis that we're about to face will be even more catastrophic than the economic one, and we have to, on a personal level, reconsider how we relate to the society at large and to the ecosystem. We have both personal and social decisions to make. At this point most people are not willing to make those choices or take those steps."

Reader question from Terry:
"If you could put a single book on the topic of global warming (or ecology in general) into the hands of everyone on the planet with the knowledge that everyone would read it cover to cover, what title would you pick?"

Chris Hedges:
"Either any of the books by Lovelock or the new book by Clive Hamilton 'Requiem for a Species'."

Comment From Jason:
"I listened to your chat with Derrick Jensen and I guess my question is the question he asked, what do we do, the average person that is? Join Greenpeace, run for political office, start a farm in the country and live completely off the grid, hide in the woods and weather the storm? I feel like nothing anybody says or does, no form of action, can stop the machine we call civilization from destroying humanity and world along with it."

Chris Hedges:
"Well the coup d'etat is over, and they won. We lost. And now we have to learn to cope with it. It is very clear that the engines of corporatism and globalization are going to kill the ecosystem, no matter how many dead zones are created in the Gulf of Mexico or protests organized. We are going to have to make some very serious decisions about acts that dispute a system that in theological terms is a system of death and exploitation. And yet even then, it's probably too late. If you read closely the science on global warming-  even if we stop emissions, global warming will accelerate because of what has already been emitted. I think we have to begin to prepare for collapse and if you want to survive, that's going to mean access to a local food source.
"So, in the end I'm with Camus, I don't think we're going to fool ourselves into thinking we can make a change. It's all hijacked, the political system, financial system. . . hijacked military complex, it's hijacked, even all of our social and educational systems. I've taught at places like Princeton and they all function like corporations. We've allowed these corporations to snuff out all voices of sanity and decency. . .  and  we listen to this garbage and  we watch it. And I include Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow-  as bad as the right wing, they are all playing the same wing, nobody is addressing the institutional methods that are strangling us. I don't care if its from the left or right, it all acts as diversion to keep us in a state of self delusion."

Comment From Alias:
"What does the fact that Bolivian peasants were able to roll-back the government's plan to privatize the water supply while we here can only sit back and ask people like yourself and Chomsky 'What can I do?' say about us?"

Chris Hedges:
"Well as a culture, we've been rendered captive to electronic hallucinations that have dis-empowered us. One of the most pernicious elements of the electronic age is that it destroys the cohesion of real communities. People retreat into virtual communities, you can walk down the street where I live in Princeton at night and see that sort of glow of monitors that keep people inside their homes. . .  and in a future civilization people will be living in cells called hives that essentially sever them from their neighbors."

Question from Richard Nixon:
"Chris in your recent article you wrote 'Why continue to obey the laws and dictates of our executioners?'  Can you expand on this a little. I took this as laws made need to be broken to get decent climate change reform."

Chris Hedges:
"Well it's very clear that the people who control the power systems have no interest in power change reforms because it would mean their extinction. So those of us who care about effecting change have to find mechanisms outside of the political structure, which Henry Thoreau wrote about in Civil Disobedience where he analyzed an individual's relation to the state and the moral questions of whether human beings should obey laws when they are immoral- or, in this case, self destructive. And I think that the questions that Thoreau asks are ones that we have to ask and I think we have to follow in Thoreau's footsteps where he writes about what he calls the machine. Thoreau writes about how many people around him are opposed to slavery and the war, but rather than expressing their opinions they sit around and do nothing about it. He said they hesitate, regret, sometimes petition, but nothing that actually has an effect."

Comment From Peter from Ontario:
"I'm a bit cynical about the idea of uprooting the powerful institutions that have created this mess. I realize this is throwing you a softball, but don't you think anyone that tries to rebel will be squashed like a bug? I mean, I look around at my family and neighbors, and see people that have been indoctrinated by the same message, 'focus on yourself right now and don't worry about anything that will happen later on'. Whenever I share your column with family and friends, they always give the same response - quit trying to wreck the good times for the rest of us and get a real job."

Chris Hedges:
"Well America has produced a country of people who've never had to grow up. They live in this illusion that reality is not an impediment to what they desire . . .  they can have everything they want, they just have to dig deep within themselves,  grasp that they are truly exceptional or believe that Jesus that can produce miracles. Its a form of magical thinking that is fed to us from the media to the corporations, from Oprah to Hollywood to Corporatism to the Christian right, and it has created a society where we are captivated by illusion, an illusion about who we are and where we're going and that's a very common characteristic among dying civilizations that lack the emotional fortitude to grasp that their world is are crumbling around them, so they retreat into the magical. If you read Cicero, Joseph Roth,  or Freud, they saw very clearly, both the disintegration and the capacity of people around them to accept it. The danger is when you remain in a state of illusion, you essentially perpetuate an infantilism that leaves you unprepared- physiologically, intellectually and emotionally- for collapse, and when collapse comes, you react like children, you search for a savior, a demagogue, someone who promises vengeance, moral renewal and fantastic visions of a new glory.
"Its an old old story and we are not immune to the cycles of human history. The Greeks did not believe in a linear time, they believed that societies had a period of growth, maturation and decay and I think the Greeks are right. So when your family doesn't want to hear, they are retreating into the far more comforting arena of illusions that are provided for them by corporate entities that seek to keep us ignorant and dis-empowered and stop us from fighting back.
"And will they crush us like bugs? Probably. but that doesn't mean we shouldn't resist. Resistance is a moral imperative. The problem with the left is that it was seduced by the practical and that is what killed it as a moral force. We have a commitment to non-historical values, justice, liberty, protection of life, love, which are of course deemed by the world to be impractical; but which keep alive that possibility of another way of being and another form of community. At this point I think we have to look at the middle ages and the monastic communities that kept alive learning, humanities, and life in a time of darkness so that these great contributions of human history are not lost. And that becomes a battle worth fighting because as we enter an age of barbarism, the snuffing out of these great forces of humanism will be tragic for the human race.  I think we have to focus much of our energy on trying to protect these non-historical forces, these commitments to [moral] values, and that's going to entail rebellion and perhaps even great personal risk. But I think it is worth doing, not because we can create a structure that can disarm corporatism, but because we can at least protect those virtues that permit people to live in ways that they are not slaves."

 From the online chat with Chris Hedges  July 21, 2010 hosted at TruthDig.com

Here is a July 12  audio discussion at TruthDig with Chris Hedges and Derrick Jensen, on what can be done about this situation:

Chris Hedges: Calling All Future-Eaters

excerpts from Hedges' "Calling All Future-Eaters" published July 19 at TruthDig:
". . . now we sit passive and dumb as corporations and the leaders of industrialized nations ensure that climate change will accelerate to levels that could mean the extinction of our species. Homo sapiens, as the biologist Tim Flannery points out, are the "future-eaters."
. . .
"In the past when civilizations went belly up through greed, mismanagement and the exhaustion of natural resources, human beings migrated somewhere else to pillage anew. But this time the game is over. There is nowhere else to go. The industrialized nations spent the last century seizing half the planet and dominating most of the other half. We giddily exhausted our natural capital, especially fossil fuel, to engage in an orgy of consumption and waste that poisoned the Earth and attacked the ecosystem on which human life depends. It was quite a party if you were a member of the industrialized elite. But it was pretty stupid.
. . .
"Collapse this time around will be global. We will disintegrate together. And there is no way out. The 10,000-year experiment of settled life is about to come to a crashing halt. And humankind, which thought it was given dominion over the Earth and all living things, will be taught a painful lesson in the necessity of balance, restraint and humility.
. . .
"We view ourselves as rational creatures. But is it rational to wait like sheep in a pen as oil and natural gas companies, coal companies, chemical industries, plastics manufacturers, the automotive industry, arms manufacturers and the leaders of the industrial world, as they did in Copenhagen, take us to mass extinction? It is too late to prevent profound climate change. But why add fuel to the fire? Why allow our ruling elite, driven by the lust for profits, to accelerate the death spiral? Why continue to obey the laws and dictates of our executioners?
. . .
"The news is grim. The accelerating disintegration of Arctic Sea ice means that summer ice will probably disappear within the next decade. The open water will absorb more solar radiation, significantly increasing the rate of global warming. The Siberian permafrost will disappear, sending up plumes of methane gas from underground. The Greenland ice sheet and the Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers will melt. Jay Zwally, a NASA climate scientist, declared in December 2007: "The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming. Now, as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines."
. . .
"We face a terrible political truth. Those who hold power will not act with the urgency required to protect human life and the ecosystem. Decisions about the fate of the planet and human civilization are in the hands of moral and intellectual trolls such as BP’s Tony Hayward. These political and corporate masters are driven by a craven desire to accumulate wealth at the expense of human life.
. . .
"The leaders of these corporations now determine our fate. They are not endowed with human decency or compassion. Yet their lobbyists make the laws. Their public relations firms craft the propaganda and trivia pumped out through systems of mass communication. Their money determines elections. Their greed turns workers into global serfs and our planet into a wasteland.
. . .
"As climate change advances, we will face a choice between obeying the rules put in place by corporations or rebellion. Those who work human beings to death in overcrowded factories in China and turn the Gulf of Mexico into a dead zone are the enemy. They serve systems of death. They cannot be reformed or trusted.
The climate crisis is a political crisis. We will either defy the corporate elite, which will mean civil disobedience, a rejection of traditional politics for a new radicalism and the systematic breaking of laws, or see ourselves consumed. Time is not on our side. The longer we wait, the more assured our destruction becomes. The future, if we remain passive, will be wrested from us by events. Our moral obligation is not to structures of power, but life."
-Chris Hedges, excerpted from "Calling All Future-Eaters", published at TruthDig.

Join an online Q&A with Chris Hedges about this column Wednesday July 21 at 12 noon MST.

Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times for 15 years, and has worked for the Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. The Los Angeles Press Club honored Hedges’ original columns in Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year in 2009, and granted him the Best Online Column award in 2010 for his Truthdig essay "One Day We’ll All Be Terrorists."
He has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey. He has written nine books, including "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle" (2009), "I Don’t Believe in Atheists" (2008) and the best-selling "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" (2008). His book "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
Hedges holds a B.A. in English literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, Calif. Hedges speaks Arabic, French and Spanish and knows ancient Greek and Latin. In addition to writing a weekly original column for Truthdig, he has also written for Harper’s Magazine, The New Statesman, The New York Review of Books, Adbusters, Granta and Foreign Affairs.

Interview With Poet Jorie Graham

(excerpt)
Graham: Sometimes I feel I am living an extended farewell, where my eventual disappearance, my mortal nature, normally a deep human concern, has been washed away by my fear for the deeper mortality- the extinction- of other species, and of the natural world itself. I cannot look at the world hard enough. My love for it has never been so directed. I can take nothing for granted. Creation astonishes me where it used to just delight me. 
In many ways this book is an attempt to describe to a future people what is was like to have water, to have seasons, to know what blossoming was and a daybreak where one did not fear the sun, or a heavy wind where one did not fear its' going too far, beyond normal. What is normal, I have kept wondering. Where is the tipping point? Where does the positive feedback loop set in? Where is the point of no return? How are we going to be as people then? What is an ethical compass for when scarcity sets in? How does one retain one's humanity under those circumstances or does one become inevitably barbaric in the defense of one's tribe? Where does one draw the line- what is a line under those circumstances- and which side of the line will one be on?
And what is art for then? What is dreaming for? What is the imagination supposed to do with its capacity to imagine the end? Is the imagination of the unimaginable possible, and, perhaps, as I have come to believe, might it be one of the most central roles the human gift of imagination is being called upon to enact? Perhaps if we use it to summon the imagination of where we are headed- what that will feel like- what it will feel like to look back at this juncture- maybe we will wake up in time? I have written it in order to make myself not only understand-we all seem to understand- but to actually feel (and thus physically believe) what we have and what we are losing- and furthermore what devastatingly much more of creation we are going to be losing.
. . .
Wengen: This collection feels as if it ties the connection between the past and the unknown future into a state of teetering present- yet you weave hope throughout. Would you consider yourself a hopeful person? Do you have faith in the future?


Graham: In the short run I cannot but hope, I wouldn't have written this if I were hopeless. I think artists have a large responsibility at present- that of awakening the imagination of a deep future. If humans have to be asked to make sacrifices for people they do not even know will be alive- sacrifices the results of which will not be evident, if at all, except four or five generations hence, then we are going to have to help awaken an imagination of that deep future, in order that people feel connected to it in their willingness to act. After all people are going to be asked to radically alter their lives- for their whole lives- in order that their kind and their world might remain. I happen to feel one can reawaken that sensation of an unimaginably far off horizon. We are so collapsed-down now into a buzzing noisy here-and-now, an era of instant gratification, decimated attention-span, that it is going to take some work to help people see in their mind's eye that far off horizon many generations beyond their own time, a time towards which they are going to have to try to take a leap of faith- and a leap which involves deep sacrifice at that. But I wouldn't be making the effort to answer you in this way, at length, or to write such a book, if I did not believe we still had that chance. A real chance. And that art could be in service of that goal.
_______
read the full interview at Poets.org
_______
Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa.
Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently Sea Change (Ecco, 2008), Never (2002), Swarm (2000), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
About her work, James Longenbach wrote in the New York Times: "For 30 years Jorie Graham has engaged the whole human contraption- intellectual, global, domestic, apocalyptic- rather than the narrow emotional slice of it most often reserved for poems. She thinks of the poet not as a recorder but as a constructor of experience. Like Rilke or Yeats, she imagines the hermetic poet as a public figure, someone who addresses the most urgent philosophical and political issues of the time simply by writing poems."

July 13 Update: Oil Disaster in the Gulf

An informative update on the Gulf disaster from McClatchy Bureau's Mark Seibel. A 'dramatic moment' is in progress. The previous cap, which collected 20-30% of the oil and gas flow, will be removed, allowing 100% flow until a new cap is put in place in several days which can capture potentially all of the oil flow. The risk here is that the pressure building inside the capped well may cause eruptions through the bore walls into the intermediate sub-surface strata- which may later destabilize, allowing potentially widespread and uncontrollable further leakage.

The State of the World

Maude Barlow, head of The Council of Canadians, founder of the Blue Planet Project, gives an assessment of the true state of the world at Massey Hall in Toronto, during the G20 confab.

Joy Harjo - Reality Show

Here is a meditation on the place of art, poetry, and song in our lives by Joy Harjo; I wonder, is someone singing of the oil spill in the Gulf in this way yet?

Energy Independence- A Presidential Tradition

Java Mud Volcano: A Premonition of the Gulf Disaster

Oil spill: A 'Cri de Coeur' in Congress

Dennis Kucinich, from the heart, on the floor of the Congress:

Giant Plumes of Oil Found Forming Under Gulf

An alarming report from The New York Times, May 16:

"Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.
"There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water," said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. "There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column."
The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes. . . 

"Scientists studying video of the gushing oil well have tentatively calculated that it could be flowing at a rate of 25,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day. The latter figure would be 3.4 million gallons a day. But the government, working from satellite images of the ocean surface, has calculated a flow rate of only 5,000 barrels a day. . . The undersea plumes may go a long way toward explaining the discrepancy between the flow estimates, suggesting that much of the oil emerging from the well could be lingering far below the sea surface.
BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.
"The answer is no to that," a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. "We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort."

(see full article NYTimes 5/16)

Obama 'Fuming' at Big Oil's "Cozy Relationship"

"President Barack Obama on Friday angrily decried the "ridiculous spectacle" of oil industry officials pointing fingers of blame for the catastrophic spill in the Gulf of Mexico and pledged to end a "cozy relationship" between the oil industry and federal regulators that he said had extended into his own administration..." (HuffPo 5/14)


Watch the video:

Video of Main 'Leak' Released

BP had refused to release this footage of the largest of the leaks, but had to give in under pressure. Here it is (the white is natural gas, the black is oil):

NPR has reported that the flow of oil is estimated at  ten times greater than the Coast Guard's 'guesstimate' of 5,000 barrels a day. (report)  -  (NPR audio)

Video Showing Undersea Oil Spew in the Gulf

In this excerpt of a video released yesterday by the UAC Joint Information Center ("DeepWater Horizon Response ROV May 6 2010") one can see parts of the oil spew happening at 5000 feet below the surface in the Gulf, and the awkward efforts of the remote-controlled robotic vehicles to deal with the crisis.

Oil Spill Disaster Keeps Growing

Yikes! Now it's a estimated at  million gallons a day, with no end in sight, and it could get worse: there is a reservoir of "tens of millions" of barrels according to a company insider (that's tens of millions of barrels, not gallons; 42 gallons per).
This might just kill the Gulf before it's over, turn the whole thing into a dead zone.
And it will likely flow into the Gulf Stream, proceed down along Florida's west coast, through the keys, then up to Miami and on up the Atlantic coast to the Jersey Shore and Long Island and beyond, to Europe. And it will keep flowing, until someone figures out a way to stop it.
Tell me again, how this is less expensive than going with renewable energies?

A Story for Earth Day

Miss Capucine's version of Winnie the Pooh... see more of Capucine at her Vimeo channel.

This will be the 40th Earth Day since the first in 1970. While a lot has been accomplished since then, it is  clear  we are  not doing anywhere near enough. For just one example:  in 1970 the U.S. produced nine million tons of hazardous waste. 40 years later, the U.S. produces over 500 million tons of hazardous waste per year. Are we just going to keep going like this until the planet is ruined for us? Let's think of the children, at least.

Obama and Offshore Drilling

Perhaps Obama calculated that he could get the carbon trading and caps legislation through if he threw the oil and gas interests a bone. In other words, a strategic political calculation. Apart from the damage to the environment and endangered habitats, there is a raw scientific calculation which we ignore at our peril-

James Hansen has said "I've come to conclude that if we burn all reserves of oil, gas and coal, there is a substantial chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty." (ref: ecoversity.org)

So every time we find yet more fossil fuel sources to burn, we are only rushing faster to that runaway greenhouse in our future. Nothing to celebrate, to the contrary.

Here is a KSFR Santa Fe interview with New Mexico's Senator Jeff Bingaman on the subject of the offshore drilling plan.

Update April 30:
Seems the furies have rushed to greet the administration's plan to give coal a pass and boost offshore drilling. Following the coal mine disaster in West Virginia, now an enormous oil rig has blown up in the Gulf, and an undersea geyser of oil is pumping at 5000 barrels a day from the ocean floor, a mile deep, too deep for human divers, and it could take 90 days to stop the hemorrhaging.
Reality check.