DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

I confess: I flaked out. I voted electronically—and on a Diebold machine. I asked for a paper ballot, tentatively, “Can I still get a paper ballot?”, and they said they couldn’t give me one, and I decided not to make a fuss. I had just enough time to vote quickly before my dentist appointment if I didn’t make a fuss. I really wanted to get to my dentist appointment…..yeah, right! Well, I did…consider the alternative…ouch! Whoa, I’m digressing already….

I did ask if there was a paper trail, to which the election officials cheerfully replied, “no!” Well, this was not an election that anybody was likely to jack—the only close statewide race was the Republican Senate campaign, where two foaming-at-the mouth fascists, Bryant and Hilleary, were unable to stop the Lamar-Alexander-clone smoothtalking fascist, Bob Corker, from winning. It wasn’t even close, since the two foaming fascists were unable to curb their egos and figure out who should step aside to go one-on-one with Corker. Together they outpolled him by a slight margin. Maybe this is an opening to get Republicans to back instant runoff voting? Anyway, nobody was complaining about the validity of that election, and I’m sure they would have kvetched if they thought it would do them any good. I hear there was a local race out in East Tennessee where it appears that in some precincts every single voter turned out, and, guess what! most of them voted for the incumbent! With no paper trail to back the voting machine’s assertions, it is going to be difficult to figure that one out, although the 100% turnout in a local/primary election has been labelled “statistically unlikely.”

In one local state house race, longtime Tennessee House member Edith Taylor Langster was unseated by metro councilwoman Brenda Gilmore. That was in the district next door to mine, and the election was not even close, so it was probably honest, eh? Brenda campaigned on a platform of more economic development in her district, which makes me uneasy for the green spaces left in my quarter of Nashville.

The good news/bad news was that the “Memphis meltdown” didn’t occur; many anti-electronic voting machine campaigners were hoping that the twelve-page ballot would combine with Harold Ford’s popularity in Memphis to create long lines and lots of complaints, but no such luck.

The twelve page ballot was kind of a joke. There were very few choices to make, truth be told. Most races were uncontested, and many asked for a yes or no vote on appointing some guy I didn’t know anything about to a job whose description was unclear to me. I like to think I’m better informed than the average citizen, but nowhere in my normal perusal of the news had I encountered most of the names I was being asked to judge. I mean, I hadn’t even seen their campaign literature. Actually, I probably voted against my own best interests in many of those cases, because I voted to approve a whole flock of judges and I am reasonably certain that every one of those judges would not think twice about enforcing laws against victimless crimes that could in theory be applied against me. But, I digress. Again.

One of the Terrible Things About Russia that was drilled into my head as a child was that there, they had choiceless elections, because dissent was brutally suppressed. Wow—we’ve managed to do the same thing here just by creating widespread apathy—although police drug raids involving officers with concussion grenades, body armour, and automatic weapons might count in some quarters as brutal suppression of dissent—but not in any court in Tennessee, you can just about bet. And there I was, blithely voting for judges who would put me away and think “good riddance.” I embarrass myself at times.

Well, the cavalry is sounding their trumpets in the distance. What a racist metaphor! How ’bout, there’s help on the way? Paradise waits, yeah….

Bobby Kennedy, Jr. has filed the lawsuits he promised, but for legal reasons it’s all being kept very hush-hush, officially. Unofficially, Bradblog claims that Kennedy has filed fraud lawsuits against Diebold—not about the results of any election, nothing partisan, no, simply claiming that the machines did not perform as advertised. And what was it they did? Well, it seems you could program them so that when someone pushed a button that was supposed to vote the straight Democratic ticket, the machine would record a vote for every Democratic candidate but the President. You could also program them so that any vote for a third party presidential candidate would be recorded as a vote for Bush.

OK, you Democrats, you were right. A vote for Nader was a vote for Bush. At least on some voting machines. But on other machines—maybe some of the same ones–a vote for Gore or Kerry was a vote for Bush, too.

Bobby is reputed to have insiders at Diebold who are willing to testify on these issues, and I’m sure that’s some of why this case is so shrouded. I would be very, very nervous if I were one of those Diebold insiders. They could have Karen Silkwood-type accidents.

So, Bobby isn’t swinging for the fences, as I trumpeted last month—or rather, he doesn’t appear to be. It’s just a little ol’ bunt down the third base line….just pulling one string that’s going to start the whole fabric of the American political landscape unraveling.

Meanwhile, down in Mexico, with no electronic voting whatsoever, they’ve had a stolen election and millions of people are out in the streets—demonstrating peacefully, so far, thank goodness. Many American writers are praising the Mexicans’ spirit, saying things like, “not only are they showing us how to work, they’re showing us how to be concerned citizens of a democracy.” Everybody wonders why you can’t get a million and a half concerned Democrats converging on Washington.

I’ll tell you why—it’s because we Americans are too chained to our treadmills to peel off and put our asses on the line, and because the Mexicans are already out on the street anyway. Know what I mean?

Too many of us (and I mean us, me included) are too sucked into our paycheck-to-payment lives, running as hard as we can to stay in our middle-class place, to go sit down en masse in Washington and demand that those in charge quit padding their own nests and do something to pull the planet out of its nosedive. Let’s face it–we’re all afraid of the financial mess we’d come home to if we dropped what we are doing and embarked on an indefinite political demonstration, even if in some way we succeeded in our political goals.

Mexicans, especially Lopez Obrador’s supporters, have already lost that middle-class place, if they ever had it to begin with. NAFTA has destroyed the low end of the Mexican economy, leaving millions of people with a choice between street peddling, heading for el Norte, or raising hell. “When ya ain’t got nothin’, ya got nothin’ to lose,” if I may quote Bob Dylan, far from his original context. So—camp out in downtown Mexico City for a few weeks—or months? no problemo—might as well be homeless there as anywhere, eh?

So, maybe we’ve still got it too good to raise a fuss in this country….I do, anyway. Maybe some day, I—and we—will rise to the challenge.

(music: Robyn Hitchcock, “Filthy Bird”)

Comments

Every eight years, we are invited to vote Yes or No on appointed Supreme Court Justices and Appellate Court Judges. (Not sure what parts of those titles were unclear to you.) The reason you didn’t see any campaigning from them is that these positions do not campaign for office. The judicial retention system (called “The Tennessee System”) is not typical around the country. Most appointed judges never have to face voters in any way. Our high court judges have the chance of being voted out, though it has rarely happened.
Posted by Joe Lance on 08/14/2006 02:50:16 AM

thanks for the clarification–there were also a bunch of democratic party committee posts and things like that…how does one keep track of these judges? thanks again m
Posted by brothermartin on 08/15/2006 01:18:41 AM

A few weeks ago, Green Party gubernatorial candidate Howard Switzer got what at first seemed like a nice boost: Nashville Scene political columnist Dean Hinton invited him and a campaign-co-worker out for lunch and spent an hour and a half interviewing him, largely on Switzer’s views on healthcare, which is the main focus of his campaign, but also touching the strawbale homes which are his stock in trade as an architect, his years at the Farm community in Summertown, Tennessee, and his current back-to-the-land lifestyle near Linden, Tennessee.

Candidate Switzer left the lunch meeting relaxed, refreshed, and full of good food; he felt he had found a sympathetic ear in his conversation with Hinton, and expected to see an upbeat story about his efforts to reform the health care system spread across the pages of Nashville’s widely-read free weekly.

But that’s not what happened. Under the headline, “Politics in the Crapper,” Nashville’s so-called “alternative” newspaper spent a total of one hundred and thirty-six words dwelling on candidate Switzer’s use of a composting toilet, finishing the snippet with, “(Switzer) says Dems and Repubs often co-opt ideas from Greens after elections. Here’s guessing (his) bathroom routine won’t be one of them.”

I thought this was, shall we say, mean-spirited, and wrote the following letter to the Scene, which they had the grace to print, although Howard and others among my radical friends doubted that they would. Here’s what I said:
I am dismayed by your puerile fascination with gubernatorial candidate Howard Switzer’s composting practices (“Politics in the Crapper,” Off Limits, July 20). You completely ignored his basic campaign message: we can’t expect real health care reform from someone (Phil Bredesen) who has become a millionaire by profiting from the inequities in our so-called health care system. If we are going to provide health care for all, then we are going to have to change the system so that it exists to benefit all people, not just the corporate shareholders.

The Green Party advocates fundamental changes in the nature of our society at all levels, from health care to compost. Human and animal wastes are viewed in our current culture/economy as pollution—yucky waste products to be gotten rid of—when they should be seen as valuable resources for plant nutrition in a localized agricultural economy. Meanwhile, the highly processed fertilizers that our non-organic farmers depend on are skyrocketing in price due to their dependence on natural gas and other petro products, and the expense of transporting salad vegetables from California or beyond is ratcheting up too. Being too neurotic as a culture to get over our shit yucks may be one of the silly little details that doom us.

That was my letter.

Was I throwing the word “doom” around a bit too freely? I wondered a bit, myself—I am prone to hyperbole, goodness knows. Jumping to conclusions is one of my favorite forms of mental exercise, but I soon came across two stories that showed me that I was far, far, more correct about this than I would like to be.

The stories came to me from the L.A. Times via Truthout. The first was titled Sentinels Under Attack, and it told a horrible story: a microorganism that has recently become widespread in the ocean off California secretes a neurotoxin that, when concentrated up the food chain in the bodies of large, carnivorous mammals and birds, causes brain damage that expresses itself as severe disorientation, stillbirths, seizures, hostility, and general failure to thrive. Wildlife veterinarians discovered that, while they could nurse affected animals back to physical health, there was no real brain recovery; once affected, animals lost their ability to navigate and would not care for their young, permanently. Another story told of researchers finding similar, though less drastic effects, in native people who eat a lot of shellfish, and even in children born to women who have eaten a lot of contaminated shellfish while pregnant.

This microorganism, Pseudo-nitzschia, has only become known as a problem in California in the last eight years, but once researchers started looking for it, they found it in the Louisana dead zone, where the Mississippi empties into the Gulf of Mexico. The water there is calmer than the Pacific off California, and layers of sediments can be read like tree rings. Evidence from those layers showed that Pseudo-nitzschia had only started proliferating in the late 1940’s. Its numbers rose when farmers in the Mississippi valley started making extensive use of commercial fertilizers—much of the nutrients in those fertilizers is leached out of the dirt where it is initially spread and carried downriver to the ocean. In California, researchers found that the most intense areas of nitzschia bloom occur around populated areas, where runoff from sewage systems, even when competently treated to eliminate bacteria, still flushes large amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and other plant nutrients into the ocean, sparking growth of the organism. Flush a toilet, kill a dolphin—or a sea lion, or a manatee, or a seal, or a seagull.

And that’s not the only toxic micro-organism that’s making a big comeback at the expense of us more complex critters. The second article introduced Lyngbya majuscula, known in Australia as “fireweed.” When conditions are right, it can spread across the bottom of a shallow lagoon at the rate of nearly an acre an hour. One researcher said, “It’s like ‘the blob’, but it’s real.”

We are talking about a life form here that is so simple, so basic, that it can apparently exist indefinitely in an ecosystem of which it is the only living member. It may have done that for a billion years or so in the far distant past, our far distant past. We evolved out of it or something like it. Phew. But we are not so simple and basic that we can be the only living creature in our ecosystem. We demand a highly complex web of life in order to survive. The oceans are now evolving backwards, into simplicity, and are big enough to drag the rest of the planet along with them. If things get too simple, we may discover that despite all our cleverness, we can no longer survive on this planet. These are the thoughts generated by the resurgence of Lyngbya majuscula. Fireweed, indeed. No more water, the fire next time….

So what does Lyngbya do? It’s poison ivy on steroids. Scientists have found a hundred different toxins in it. It sucks all the oxygen out of the water and kills fish. It kills fish directly. Touching it, even exposure to water that it’s growing in, causes a rash that makes your skin fall off. It gives off gasses that cause nausea and vomiting. It’s been around for three billion years. It’s been eclipsed until recently by higher life forms, but since we’ve destroyed 90% of the fish in the ocean we’ve cut out its competition, and flushing our fields and toilets has given it the food it needs to thrive.

Scientists predict that these and other microorganisms may soon turn our beaches and coastlines from tourist attractions into cesspools.

Nashville flushes its toilets into the Cumberland River. The Cumberland River flows, ultimately, into the Gulf of Mexico, where the oxygen and the fish have gone and slime prevails.

Maybe Phil Bredesen better adopt Howard Switzer’s bathroom routine, eh?

music: Leonard Cohen, “The Road to Hell”

I’ve been saying for quite some time that the United States has as much right to be in Iraq as the Nazis had to be in Poland. I’d like to take this opportunity to look through the lens of World War II and reframe more of the tragedy now unfolding in what was once the fertile crescent.

Israel’s destruction of Lebanon is a blitzkreig, a “lightning war,” waged against people who do not have the technology to deflect Israel’s strength. And Gaza is the moral equivalent of the Warsaw Ghetto. Our proxy state, Israel, has just as surely become the new Nazis as America has.

Think of it this way: “Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto captured two German soldiers and have held them hostage, demanding that all Jewish women and children held by the Germans be released. In response, the Germans have unleashed an aerial bombardment of the ghetto, leveling not only Jewish homes and businesses but those of non-Jewish Poles whom they suspect of sympathizing with the Jews.”

Of course, the Israelis have learned a few lessons from their Nazi tormentors, most importantly—no concentration camps. No point giving bleeding heart types anything to concentrate on, eh? Just keep the ragheads where they are and build walls around them, destroy their communities, homes, gardens, farms, schools, hospitals, water sources, communications routes. Make sure there’s plenty of lebensraum for God’s chosen people—us Jews. It’s not a policy that will ever win Israel any Muslim hearts and minds. They must know this. If they’re obviously not committed to reconciliation, what is the long-term goal of Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians? What is Israel’s “final solution to the Palestinian question?”

The conflict is not new, nor is it simple. The Old Testament is, among other things, a record of struggles over the narrow band of wet, fertile ground between the Mediterranean sea and the Arabian desert. The Palestinian people have been protesting for over a hundred years, often violently, against the influx of European Jews into their fragile ecology. In many ways, the story of Israel is the same story of Europeans vs. native people that has been played out all over the globe. I got a lot of insight into this by reading Starhawk’s dispatches from Palestine. I strongly suggest you look them up at her website, www.starhawk.org, for an eye-opening, positive picture of the Palestinian people, written by a Jew–like me.

So, when George Bush fires off lines about “fighting Islamic Fascism,” he is, as usual, about 180 degrees from the truth. Fascism is, in the words of fascist founding father Benito Mussolini, the marriage of corporate and state interests for their mutual benefit. Mussolini said that a synonym for “fascism” could be “corporatism.”

Hmm. That makes George Bush the fascist, not Hezbollah. The new order in the Middle East that Bush and his junta envision is a Middle East dominated not just by Shell, Mobil, and Halliburton, but by Coca-Cola, Col. Sanders, Walmart, and their ilk. The Muslim people of the Middle East are fighting to stay free of fascism, not to establish it. They may be fanatical, authoritarian, repressed, violent misogynists, but they are very strongly committed to their native cultures, and opposed to the corporatist/fascist business state model Mr. Bush and his cronies would like to impose on them. No, no, no, Hezbollah and friends are not fascists. It is you, Mr. Bush, who is the fascist. Your words and actions have demonstrated that over and over again.

You wish to fight terrorism, Mr. Bush? What you call terrorism is warfare fought by those who are too poor to afford armies. The way to stop terrorism is to stop the kind of military and cultural arrogance that leaves people feeling that they have no other option than a violent attack on their oppressors, and then reroute the resources that have been used to enforce oppression into improving the lot of the oppressed.

From Palestine up through Lebanon and Syria, then down the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, stretches the cradle of our civilization, an area still occasionally referred to as “The Fertile Crescent,” though it is hardly that any more. Its hills have been denuded by the demands of goatherds and wood-cutters; its fields and pastures have blown away in the wind or been saturated with salt from too much irrigation and not enough rainfall; its rivers are running dry, squeezed between emptying aquifers and burgeoning populations, choked with sewage and agricultural runoff. All of it has been trampled by too many marching armies. This once-fertile crescent, between the deserts of Arabia and the steep, rocky mountains of the Caucasus, does not need more wars, more bombs, more destruction. The Israeli campaign against Lebanon, like the American campaign in Iraq, is breaking something it cannot fix. A complete change of direction is needed to bring peace to the Middle East.

I can call it a Green proposal, but it comes from the Old Testament, that testament of sorrows, from the Prophet Micah, who suggested that if everyone could sit beneath their own vine and fig tree, there would be peace and happiness. The Old Testament also famously references the cedars of Lebanon, but there are hardly any of them left. Evidence from such primeval sources as The Epic of Gilgamesh suggests that, when civilization first arose, there was extensive forest cover (and its corollaries, regular rainfall and year-round streams) throughout the area we now think of as borderline desert. Is it possible to reclaim this devastated land? Such a massive bioremediation project would employ thousands, possibly millions of people, in a project that would demonstrate fairly immediate benefits to them. It would include ecological education as well as hands-on projects, and would be structured to give local people control over projects in their vicinity. That is the way to create a democratic Middle East—not by holding staged elections for a powerless government, but by giving people control over their lives.

But—but—you ask—what about this terrible plot that was just uncovered—they were going to blow up a bunch of airplanes full of tourists!?

Here’s what I think about the latest so-called “terrorist threat”: a great many of the so-called “terrorist threats” that have been revealed have turned out to be more hot air than substance; the timing of such announcements, I believe, usually has more to do with political calculations than with protecting the public. The war party needed some kind of shibboleth to wave in the face of growing awareness of their short-sighted stupidity, and so now they are confiscating perfume and toothpaste instead of scissors and nail clippers. None of these alleged plotters had even bought an airline ticket yet. We need to pull our attention out of this kind of nonsense and put it back into positive actions to save the planet—like recreating the Mideast’s devasted ecosystem. Vines and fig trees for everyone! Olive trees, too! Pomegranates! Dates! Oranges! Kif! Yes!

This does not directly address tensions between Sunnis and Shi’ites, or between Muslims and Jews; but I think that a greener, wetter, softer, more bountiful environment (notice how feminine those adjectives are!) will enable everyone to relax, share some grapes, figs, olives, a puff of kif or two, and figure out their differences– which are, beneath all the ideological trappings, squabbles over scarce and diminishing resources. Let’s, as Mr. Bush said,” make the pie higher.”

Doesn’t that beat dropping bombs?

Music:  Steve Earle, “Jerusalem”

There’s a lot of psychiatric meds being sold these days, in case you hadn’t noticed. And there’s a lot of cui bono questions around all those prescriptions.

Cui bono—who benefits? There’s all kinds of evidence showing that drug companies make massive profits from psychiatric medications, even while unbiased clinical tests show that many of them are of little or no benefit to most people. There’s a whole mental health industry that needs chronic nut cases in order to keep its stockholders and salaried employees happy. There’s research that’s sent normal people with fake symptoms into that system and discovered that it’s very difficult for people to get out of the mental health system once they’re in it, no matter how normal they are.

But that’s not what I want to talk about right now. I want to talk about the assumptions behind our current mental health system, assumptions prior to even the profit motive: what is the mental health profession trying to accomplish? What is their basic vision? What are the results of that basic vision? Are their other possible “mission statements” for a mental health movement, that might produce very different results from those we are dealing with due to the current model?

I would submit that most members of the psychological/psychiatric world see their mission as “helping people fit in to society.” That’s why so many children are on ritalin, and why so many adults are on everything from anti-anxiety medications to anti-psychotics. Society needs to function smoothly, and it is up to individuals to adjust to society by any means available.

Is something wrong with this picture? No, from the mainstream perspective. Early psychologists had a revolutionary, we-can-change-the-world attitude, but since Freud wrote “Civilization and its Discontents” the mainstream has seen its task as helping people adjust to an imperfect world. Well, hey, it is an imperfect world and we need to get used to it, but not THAT used to it. The world-as-it-is is not some absolute that we cannot change. We are not ants in an anthill, but mainstream psychology tends to see society in that way, and treat individuals accordingly.

In the 1950’s, some psychologists, chief among them Abraham Maslow, made the observation that, once basic human needs of food, shelter, and emotional security are met, a different set of priorities kicks in—a need for what Maslow called “self-actualization.”

Dr. C. George Boree summarized Maslow’s idea in the following words:

“(Self-actualized people are)” reality-centered, which means they (can) differentiate what is fake and dishonest from what is real and genuine.  They (are) problem-centered, meaning they (treat) life’s difficulties as problems demanding solutions, not as personal troubles to be railed at or surrendered to.  And they (have) a different perception of means and ends.  They (feel) that the ends don’t necessarily justify the means, that the means could be ends themselves, and that the means — the journey – (is) often more important than the ends.

“(Self-actualizers) also (have) a different way of relating to others.  First, they (enjoy) solitude, and (are) comfortable being alone.    And they (enjoy) deeper personal relations with a few close friends and family members, rather than more shallow relationships with many people.

“They (enjoy) autonomy, a relative independence from physical and social needs.  And they (resist) enculturation, that is, they (are) not susceptible to social pressure to be “well adjusted” or to “fit in” — they (are), in fact, nonconformists in the best sense. “

(note to readers—I changed the tense of these sentences from past to present)

“Reality-centered,” eh?  Well, we all know about where the reality-based community is at, don’t we?

Right down the list, Maslow’s vision of higher consciousness clashes with anthill psychology’s need for smoothly fitting cogs in the societal mill.

Paying attention to the difference between what is fake and what is genuine? No, no, don’t you dare pay any attention to the man behind the curtain.

Treating life’s difficulties as problems to be overcome rather than caved in to? You’re asking people to make waves, dude.

The journey is more important than the goal? What are you, some kind of hippie?

You enjoy solitude? Without even a TV or radio on? That’s scarey! I wouldn’t wanna hafta listen to what’s goin’ on in my head! Keep me distracted, please!

Deep personal relations with a few friends? You’re askin’ to get hurt, buddy.

Independence from physical and social needs? How ya gonna be a good consumer? I mean, isn’t life about buying things and showing off your ability to buy them?

Maslow’s line of thinking was not picked up by university psychology departments—there was no drug research money in it–and now his “third stream psychology” is the province of a dying breed of twinkly old men and women who still work wonders for the lucky few who find them. They send their patients out with solutions, not prescriptions. All the drugs that facilitated third stream psychology—MDMA, psilocybin, LSD and similar mind-manifesters, have been expressly forbidden by the US government, with greater penalties attached to their use and distribution than for many violent crimes. Can’t be disrupting the anthill, now.

It’s not just about wanting to feed the drug companies. The third stream—call it evolutionary psychology—has been purged from America’s consciousness because it is evolutionary, and sometimes messy. Beings who are on their way beyond being ants do not fit into ant colony life very well. Having it be OK to get a little crazy at times (an essential part of the evolutionary process) is not conducive to orderly life in the anthill.

But anthill psychology assumes a steady-state society, and that is where it falls down. We are running out of the resources that have fueled our current trajectory, and need to change course so we don’t hit the climate change/peak oil wall that is looming up fast. We need to evolve past being ants. So don’t reach for that pill bottle, folks. If you haven’t changed your mind lately, are you sure you still have one?

music  Greg Brown, “One Cool Remove“

They’re having a tourist problem at Igazu Falls, down on the border between Brazil and Parguay. The falls is usually bigger than Niagra, but this summer it is flowing at about a fifth of its usual rate. Can you imagine the Cumberland River flowing at a fifth its usual rate? It’s not just bad news for the tourists—it means the whole southern part of Amazonian Brazil is drying out, along with much of the Amazon basin proper. Equatorial South America is in its second year of drought; biologists have discovered that two dry years is about all the shallow-rooted rain forest can take before it dies, leaving savannah in its place. If the Autumn rains don’t come, that’s what’s likely to happen.

Apparently, two factors are combining to dry the climate. One is the global warming trend, which is diminishing snowpack in the Andes, a major source of the Amazon’s year-round water supply. With less snow and more rain falling on the Andes, the seasonal highs and lows of the rivers are getting both higher and lower. The other factor is rain forest removal, which the Brazilian government, even with the best of declared intentions, does not have the political will or military strength to stop. Apparently, enough of the rainforest has been removed to cut into the forest’s self-generated rain cycle. When there were enough trees, the moisture they gave off in the course of a day would coalesce into rainclouds and fall back down on the forest; with fewer trees, the moisture just evaporates and blows away.

The Amazon rain cycle has strong, complex effects on the whole hemisphere’s weather. A dry Amazon will change our climate in ways that are hard to predict, except to say that we probably won’t like them. No wonder the Venezuelans are planning to plant millions of trees with some of their oil money. They’re going to need all the buffering they can get.

Now—from the equator to the poles—in Greenland, the pace of meltdown is picking up, as is the pace of earthquakes. With less ice weighing on it, the ground is rebounding, pushing the ice into the sea even faster. Last year, 2005, Greenland lost about 50 cubic miles of ice—this year, it looks like it’s losing about a hundred cubic miles of ice. In Antarctica, there are 5200 square miles less sea ice than there were just ten years ago, and the volume of icebergs that break off the West Antarctic shelf has doubled in the last ten years. It is expected to double again in the next ten years.

The sea ice once served to dam up subglacial rivers in Antarctica; now that it is diminished, many of these subglacial rivers are flowing into the sea, eroding the Antarctic’s mainland ice and raising sea level further.

sourcelink

Ice melts in a mathematical, rather than an arithmetical progression. That is, the melt rate is not 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7—it’s 1-2-4-8-16-32-64. It snowballs, you could say. With both Greenland and the West Antarctic getting fragile, we have set ourselves up for a 40-foot sea level rise, with most of it potentially happening in just a year or two; and in a world that much warmer and more water-covered, the East Antarctic ice shelf is likely to start deteriorating, and that will raise sea level about another hundred and sixty feet. The good news is, there’ll be plenty of water in the Amazon basin again; the bad news is, it’ll be sea water.

A forty-to two-hundred foot rise in sea level is a real threat to our national security. Mr. Cheney has declared that “the American way of life is not negotiable”; we can see clearly now that his greed will result in the deaths of millions, possibly billions of people, and an end to “the American way of life” that the Bush junta is allegedly so intent on defending. America’s greed steals not just food but freedom from billions of people. Terrorists are just a symptom of this global disorder. As long as Mr. Cheney’s insatiable greed stalks the world, there will be terrorists, and there will be no intelligence agency in the world invasive enough to prevent desperate, angry people from expressing their frustration any way they can.

music:  Jackson Browne, “Before the Deluge”

p.s.

i’d like to find a map of what a 200-foot sealevel rise would look like, but
a couple of places to find maps of what a 40-foot sealevel rise would do can be found at

http://www.geo.arizona.edu/dgesl/research/other/climate_change_and_sea_level/sea_level_rise/sea_level_rise.htm

http://flood.firetree.net/