DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

Renowned biologist Edmund O. Wilson estimates that the “combined biomass” (that means weight of the human population of the earth) is one hundred times greater than that of any other large species that has ever lived on Earth, though it’s possible that we are outweighed by the dung beetles. But, I digress…In order to sustain ourselves, Wilson says, we are sucking up about 40% of the planet’s production of biomass, outcompeting other species to the extent that one fifth of all bird species, a third to two fifths of all mammals, fish, and amphibians, and fully HALF of all plant species are threatened with extinction—crowded out by US—human beings. I just read that a record one third of the planet’s land surface is now under cultivation of some kind. Where can the wild things go?

I hope I don’t have to tell you that this is not a healthy situation. Species are already disappearing at a rate at least a thousand times more frequent than what seems to be normal background extinction. We seem to be in the early-midstages of a mass extinction, the kind of event that has only occurred perhaps five other times in the entire 2.1 billion year history of life on the planet.

The last great extinction, in the late Cretaceous period, which cleared out the dinosaurs and made way for the likes of us, or at least our monkey-faced ancestors, took place 65 million years ago. eliminated 85% of all species on the planet, and was evidently caused by a relatively small asteroid–only about six miles across.. there are a lot of those still out there, folks. But, I digress…The Permian extinction, which eliminated 95% of all species on the planet (amazing luck for our ancestors to get through that!) about 250 million years ago, is linked with widespread vulcanism, and the previous three extinctions all seem connected with glaciation. But this current mass extinction is being propelled by humanity’s success in appropriating the world’s resources for our own use. This extinction is being created by an animal that think of itself as intelligent, compassionate, and possessed of free will. It’s enough to make you wonder.

The question that remains to be answered is, “are we fraying the web of life to such an extent that it will no longer support us? Will this mass extinction culminate in our extinction?”

For some of us, most notably those living in sub-Saharan Africa, the answer already appears to be “yes.” For those of us who live in the comfort of North America or Europe, we can at best say, “not so far.”

Think about it for a minute, though. Those who seem to be the most indifferent to this almost inconceivable crisis are the ones who don’t think twice about their Mexican lettuce, Argentine beef, Chinese clothing, Canadian building materials, Japanese cars, and Saudi Arabian energy sources. They seem to think that America’s overwhelming military and technological superiority will always be there to help them live in the style to which they have become accustomed. They have no problem with fighting a pre-emptive war for oil, because deep in their hearts they know that might makes right, and since they have the might, they must be right. In any case, they have the most to lose, so they are committed to winning at any cost. Why not pre-emptive strikes on China and India, to cut their population down so they won’t use so much of that oil we want so badly?

But nobody wins if the Natural World loses. The natural world is not just a passive repository of great scenery and resources for us to exploit. The natural world is what creates the air we breathe, the soil that feeds us, and the temperature conditions in which we can survive. The natural world purifies our wastes and provides the water we drink and use for agriculture. The natural world “just grows” the grasses and trees that provide fodder for our animals, food, fuel, lumber and paper for us, and –yes, I’m repeating myself–the air we breathe. Sure, we plant crops, but “we” don’t grow them—nature does. And we don’t know what threshold will have to be crossed before these basic natural systems will fail. We may not know until we’ve crossed them. And by then it may be too late.

This is why we, as Greens, are not exactly “leftwingers.” We are actually rock-ribbed conservatives. We would like to conserve water, soil, and air, conserve petroleum, because we recognize that the human race is currently using these things up faster—in the case of oil, far, far faster—than they can be replenished. Everybody acts like petroleum is as common and replenishable as water, but it’s not. For all practical purposes, there is only so much of it, and when it’s gone there won’t be any more, and the end of petroleum in our economy isn’t just about a looming scarcity of vehicle fuel and heating oil, it’s about all the millions of things we make out of plastic not being cheap any more, it’s about fertilizers and pesticides that mass agriculture depends on being prohibitively expensive, it really is about the end of the American lifestyle we have all come to be so dependent on—or is it addicted to?

Surely we all know by now what needs to be done to prevent the coming crash—or at least mollify its impact. There are things we can do personally: We in the developed world need to back off the path of conspicuous consumption, eat food that is in season and grown close to home, learn to share with each other and appreciate each other’s company and talents. There are things we need to do institutionally: find ways to transfer appropriate technology and wealth to those who are severely impoverished, so that they can enjoy a graceful and sustainable standard of living. A little electricity, pure water, and access to health care and family planning would go a long way to ease the lives of billions. There are things we need to do politically: end the paradigm that favors the continued accumulation of wealth by the already wealthy and that favors violence as a solution to disputes. Suppose we said that corporations should no longer have standing as persons, that nobody needs to earn more than, say, a hundred thousand dollars a year, and that the best way to get rid of the threat of weapons of mass destruction would be for America and China—followed by the rest of the world’s governments– to quit manufacturing them and decomission their armed forces?

If we can just take a few steps towards sanity, the rewards will be great enough to keep our feet on that path. One step at a time…..

Here’s a story, verbatim, from New Scientist magazine:
Climate Warning as Siberia Melts
By Fred Pearce
Thursday 11 August 2005
The world’s largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of western Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground melts, according to Russian researchers just back from the region.
The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.
The news of the dramatic transformation of one of the world’s least visited landscapes comes from Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist at Tomsk State University, Russia, and Judith Marquand at the University of Oxford.
Kirpotin describes an “ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming”. He says that the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to melt, and this “has all happened in the last three or four years”.
What was until recently a featureless expanse of frozen peat is turning into a watery landscape of lakes, some more than a kilometre across. Kirpotin suspects that some unknown critical threshold has been crossed, triggering the melting.
Western Siberia has warmed faster than almost anywhere else on the planet, with an increase in average temperatures of some 3 °C in the last 40 years. The warming is believed to be a combination of man-made climate change, a cyclical change in atmospheric circulation known as the Arctic oscillation, plus feedbacks caused by melting ice, which exposes bare ground and ocean. These absorb more solar heat than white ice and snow.
Similar warming has also been taking place in Alaska: earlier this summer Jon Pelletier of the University of Arizona in Tucson reported a major expansion of lakes on the North Slope fringing the Arctic Ocean.
The findings from western Siberia follow a report two months ago that thousands of lakes in eastern Siberia have disappeared in the last 30 years, also because of climate change (New Scientist, 11 June, p 16). This apparent contradiction arises because the two events represent opposite ends of the same process, known as thermokarsk.
In this process, rising air temperatures first create “frost-heaves”, which turn the flat permafrost into a series of hollows and hummocks known as salsas. Then as the permafrost begins to melt, water collects on the surface, forming ponds that are prevented from draining away by the frozen bog beneath. The ponds coalesce into ever larger lakes until, finally, the last permafrost melts and the lakes drain away underground.
Siberia’s peat bogs formed around 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. Since then they have been generating methane, most of which has been trapped within the permafrost, and sometimes deeper in ice-like structures known as clathrates. Larry Smith of the University of California, Los Angeles, estimates that the west Siberian bog alone contains some 70 billion tonnes of methane, a quarter of all the methane stored on the land surface worldwide.
His colleague Karen Frey says if the bogs dry out as they warm, the methane will oxidise and escape into the air as carbon dioxide. But if the bogs remain wet, as is the case in western Siberia today, then the methane will be released straight into the atmosphere. Methane is 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.
In May this year, Katey Walter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks told a meeting in Washington of the Arctic Research Consortium of the US that she had found methane hotspots in eastern Siberia, where the gas was bubbling from thawing permafrost so fast it was preventing the surface from freezing, even in the midst of winter.
An international research partnership known as the Global Carbon Project earlier this year identified melting permafrost as a major source of feedbacks that could accelerate climate change by releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. “Several hundred billion tonnes of carbon could be released,” said the project’s chief scientist, Pep Canadell of the CSIRO Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research in Canberra, Australia.

That’s the article. As I researched this topic, I found that methane hotspots similar to the ones mentioned here have been observed in the Arctic Ocean by satellites. This is very bad news, people, because while we could control our own carbon emissions if we had the political will to do so (and by the way, the amount of carbon our civilization is putting into the atmosphere is the equivalent of 17,000 good-sized volcanoes erupting continuously), methane releases are not something we can readily stop. They have a momentum of their own—even if we miraculously quit ALL fossil fuel use NOW, they will go on releasing greenhouse gasses, warming the planet, setting the stage for more methane releases and more warming.
And what happens when massive amounts of methane get released into the atmosphere? Let’s look at the record—and not just the fossil record, although that is where a lot of the evidence lies.
For starters, we can look at Lake Nyos in Cameroun, which emitted a cloud of methane and carbon dioxide in 1996 and killed 1800 people who lived along its shore.
Looking further back in history, many researchers believe the Permian extinction, 250 million years ago, in which 95% of all life on the planet was killed, involved a massive release of methane at the end of a glacial era. After that, life barely had a foothold on this planet for the next five hundred thousand years; it took twenty to thirty million years for coral reefs and forests to recover; and it was nearly a hundred million years until some parts of the planetary ecosystem regained their former diversity.
More recently, there was apparently a big burp (to be polite) of methane about fifty-five million years ago, which caused the climate to warm up by about ten degrees for nearly a hundred thousand years. It apparently took about a thousand years to warm up that time, but there is no telling whether that will be the case this time or not. We have entered unknown territory. During that warming period, much sea life died off due to deoxygenation of the water, and many large land animals died off—possibly because they couldn’t adapt to the heat. This is the time period during which redwood trees were growing in northern Greenland.
But the Bush junta doesn’t want to deal with global warming. They’re say that it will put a crimp in the economy, aka their ability to get richer and maintain control. I got news, George. The planet is hemmoraging methane, and it’s going to blow your money economy away. All your petty little political concerns—and mine–control of the oil fields and the courts and the press and the stock market, all our little piles of toys are about to be declared meaningless. I guess we’d better enjoy them while they last, George. The final bell has begun to toll.

Last week marked the sixtieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which to me are the two most horrible acts of terrorism ever committed. Our government promotes fear of non-Governmental terrorism, but if you look at the historical record, state terrorism has it all over the amateur variety. Dresden, Dachau, the slaughter of the Indonesian Communists and the reformers in Guatemala, Chile and Iran, the Chineses invasion and continuing occupation of Tibet, Stalin’s administration of Russia, the list goes on and on. And of course there is the United States’ treatment of North America’s original inhabitants. From the first years at Massachusetts Bay Colony to Wounded Knee, it was women and children first—as in, shoot the women and children first.

The mistreatment continues, albeit usually on a subtler level. A current example is the “Indian Trust Reform Act” that John McCain has been trying to pass for years. It never quite gets anywhere, but it attempts to address the fact that the government has, since the very beginning, both intentionally and negligently mismanaged a trust fund that is supposed to benefit the Native People.

In the mid-nineties, following the actual passage of one attempt at reforming the “Indian Trusts,” the government hired—of all people—Arthur Andersen to reconcile the accounts. The firm worked at it for over a year before reporting that the accounts were so severely mismanaged that they could probably not be reconciled, at least not for a price the government was willing to pay. This leads to questions of whether the firm’s subsequent troubles have been a form of shooting the messenger, but I’m not going there today.

This trust fund collects, or is supposed to collect, money from ranchers, oil and mineral extraction companies, and other for-profit businesses that use native peoples’ land to make their profits. What Arthur Anderson uncovered was that in many cases these monies have never been collected, and that much of the money that was collected did not actually get back to the native people it was supposed to benefit.

Senator McCain’s bill is based in a compassionate desire to get some money to the native peoples who were robbed, first of the land that was their birthright, and now of income they deserve from what we left for them. McCain’s bill, as I see it, has two drawbacks: the first is that the Native people are owed billions and billions of dollars (depending on how you figure interest and penalties) and McCain’s bill offers only pennies on the dollar. The second is that McCain’s bill expects the federal government to supply the missing funds—and the only money the federal government has is the taxes it collects from you and me and a few corporations that don’t quite have their accounting down. Why should we pay for the BIA’s malfeasance? It seems to me that the best way to collect these stolen and uncollected funds would be to get them from the businesses that failed to pay them in the first place or from the managers who pocketed the money on its way past—well, okay, some of those people are long in their graves and their ancestors are no more responsible for the current mess than you or I. Maybe we should give the native peoples the billions we owe them in the form of land—like, most of the upper midwest. Hey, they did a better job managing it than we have.

There’s a buzz going about Iran. They’re close to having nuclear weapons. They’re a long way from having nuclear weapons. The people are restive under the restrictive rule of the mullahs. It’s a nation of religious fanatics. President Bush says we have no plans to invade Iran. We all know how much that means. Pat Buchanan says we do have plans to invade Iran. We don’t know how much THAT means.

Here’s what I think: the fact is that Iran sits on a big chunk of the world’s oil and a bigger chunk of its natural gas. The junta that is running America seems intent on seizing control of as much of the oil supply as they possibly can, and doesn’t seem fazed by the mess they have made in Iraq. In fact, I think it suits their purposes— I think the Bush junta wanted to create a tar baby that would suck up the energy and economy of the U.S. so that even if they screwed up so badly that they got voted out of power in spite of cheating on the elections, the hands of the new president would be tied.

I think they are planning to invade Iran—to manufacture a provocation one way or another, and at least use air strikes, if not ground forces, to take out major components of Iran’s nuclear power program and military establishment.

I think this will stir up a hornet’s nest that will make the current struggle in Iraq look like peace. Unlike Iraq, the Iranian government does have the support of a majority of its people, and there will be no lack of will to retaliate against the U.S. for whatever we do to them. The U.S. military has made plans for dealing with multiple terrorist strikes inside the U.S., and I think that is connected with their long-term, secret planning on Iran.

I think that the Cheney-Rove-Bush junta will create or allow terrorist strikes in the U.S. in order to create an excuse to declare martial law, or something like it, in the U.S. They have had enough of freedom of expression and of the press, thank you. Freedom to make money takes precedence for them, and for the rest of us it will have to do. When that happens, all of us who talk like I am talking or listen to those who say what I have to say will be traitors or enemy combatants or whatever the buzzword of the moment is, and we will be shut down, shut up, locked up, shot up, whatever it takes to stop that awful buzzing of conscience in the ears of the powerful.

Meanwhile, Iran is not so isolated as Iraq was before we picked it off. Russia has always supported Iranian independence from Western hegemony, and is not likely to sit by idly if the U.S. opens hostilities. India is collaborating with Iran on an oil pipeline, and the Chinese are one of Iran’s best customers. They will not be happy about U.S. designs on Iran, either—and don’t forget we owe the Chinese lots and lots and lots of money. They are essentially bankrolling our current adventure in Iraq. They might not be such enthusiastic financiers if Uncle Sam wants to take out one of their major oil suppliers.

The situation is rich with irony. The U.S. spent years backing Sadam Hussein as a counterweight to the Shi’ite theocracy in Iran, and now that we have occupied Iraq, it looks like the only government that could effectively replace us there is—a Shi’ite theocracy. More ironic still—until the US invasion of Iraq, a sizeable majority of Iranians were favorably disposed towards the US. Since the invasion, a candidate who wanted more accommodation with this country has lost a relatively free and fair election, and a candidate who favors a hard line towards the US and about Islamic law has been swept into power by a strong majority.

So, while the junta may view jumping off on Iran as a way to shut down domestic opposition while insuring a continuing lock on the world oil supply, they will almost certainly end up even further over their heads than they are already. Meanwhile, the environmental clock keeps ticking….

post script: and the environmental alarm went off: “KATRINA! RITA! KATRINA! RITA!” and maybe, just maybe, diverted the Bush junta from diving into this nightmare….

Jim Cooper is Nashville’s congressman. Jim Cooper, as many of you are aware, helped put CAFTA over the top. Jim Cooper also voted for the Bush junta’s tort reform bill, which made it more difficult for individuals to call corporations to account for malfeasance, and for Bush’s bankruptcy reform bill, which made it much more difficult for people in debt to get out from under crushing debt loads—typically, it seems, hospital bills or credit card tabs that were pushed over the line due to unexpected hospital bills. This makes it hard to tell Jim from a Republican, which is especially galling when you consider that Nashville is far and away the most liberal/Democratic city in Tennessee. Him? Us? It doesn’t add up, except in the light of the fact that the tremendously energetic wave of anti-war sentiment in the Democratic party in 2004 resulted in the nomination of John Kerry, a pro-war candidate—and that Howard Dean, who was in the vanguard of the anti-war movement, has said since becoming chairman of the Democratic Party that he wishes Mr. Bush success in his policies in Iraq. That kind of bait-and-switch jazz is why I’m a Green, not a Democrat.

So, yes we are looking for a Green Party candidate to challenge Mr. Cooper, because I think the people of Nashville deserve better than him, and I’m not holding my breath waiting for a righteous Democrat. What are they going to do, clone Dennis Kucinich?

What CAFTA does, is expand NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which involved the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, to the countries of Central America. NAFTA had a tremendous negative effect on the U.S. economy, resulting in the loss of about three quarters of a million jobs to Mexico, but only for a few years—because Mexico is now losing many of those jobs to China. Oops. NAFTA also opened up the Mexican grain market to U.S. imports, driving down the price of grain in Mexico and further destabilizing that country’s agricultural system, making it harder for small farmers in Mexico to support themselves—in a country where subsistence agriculture, also known as growing most of what you eat yourself, is a way of life for millions.

Many people predict that CAFTA will have a minimal impact here in the U.S., because the combined economies of all the Central American countries put together don’t amount to a hill of beans compared to the U.S. economy, and besides all the jobs that could leave the U.S. have left already. Burger King and Walmart can’t outsource their sales forces, but you know they would if they could.

Sometimes I have kind of perverse thoughts about those lost jobs. I heard a story the other day about a couple that used to work in a clothing factory in North Carolina, about how happy they had been to be making $40,000 a year with both of them working after twenty years with the company—and I did the math—twenty thou a year is about four hundred a week, that’s ten bucks an hour after twenty years. Here in Nashville, the living wage level is calculated to be about eleven dollars an hour. Wow! It’s a tribute to human adaptability that these folks could feel happy about making dreck wages doing an incredibly boring job for all those years, exploited by their bosses who then just threw them away when they found some people in Mexico—and then China—who were even more exploitable.

To be even more perverse—I think that in some ways America is better off without a class of factory wage slaves—just as Mexico and China would be—the big thing is to help people find some more fulfilling way to spend their time. I have worked in factories. Have you? It’s an incredibly degrading way to waste your life. The cameraderie of factory workers is like the cameraderie of prisoners. The switch from home workshops to factory work in the early 19th century helped create the alienated culture that we all suffer from these days—not that pre-industrial Europe was a paradise by any measure, but if you want to create real “family values” the first thing you have to do is make it so mom and dad don’t go away every day and leave the care of their offspring to underpaid strangers. Of course you also have to back up at least one step and make sure mom and dad are sane enough to raise sane children.

Here’s what I think we need to do: we need to put a 100% tax on all personal income and corporate profits of over $100,000 a year, and use the redistributive power of the federal government to give every adult $20,000 a year in guaranteed income, no matter what—you can stay in bed all year and still collect it, or you can go out and work and make more money if you want to. This will eliminate the need for most petty crime, as well as the number of stupid, low-paying jobs that people only take because they have to. As for hauling the garbage, well, we can make it pay pretty well. We need farmers and trash haulers a lot more than we need stockbrokers and corporate lawyers.

What this will do is give people the leisure to discover what they really want to do. We need to couple it with a national wellness and health care program that will teach or encourage people to live healthily and take care of them if they do fall ill. And with the environment in the mess it’s in, a lot of people are going to have health problems in spite of their best efforts.

You may be wondering if there is the kind of money around that could guarantee everybody twenty grand a year—i just did the math, and the gross domestic product of the U.S. is over 11 trillion dollars a year, which yes, is plenty enough to give every individual from Paris Hilton to the nameless homeless guy their twenty grand. I think that democratizing our national income would result in much more intelligent decisions being made with the money than now happen, since what happens now is a few people have way more money than they know what to do with, and it’s making them crazy. The compassionate thing to do is confiscate their excess wealth so all those poor, overstuffed Republicans can regain their sanity.

So this is a long way from Jim Cooper betraying the working class by voting for CAFTA. I’m sure it’s not what was on his mind when he voted against it. I called and asked his office why he voted for CAFTA, but they have not returned my call. Maybe Bush threatened his family. I don’t know. Until we get a Green government and a guaranteed income, we need to enable people to earn a decent living, and in any case we need to be the ones who make what we use, rather than hauling clothing and other household goods halfway around the world so a few people can make a lot of money. Sorry, Jim Cooper—you screwed the pooch one time too many with this one.