Hope

I was amused by some of the responses to the Skywatch Friday post, about how easy it is to be distracted by the sky whilst driving. In fact, I almost had two separate accidents on two different days simply because I was overwhelmed by immensely beautiful goings on above me: big billowy cumulus clouds, wispy cirrus feathers, gorgeous colors and rays of sun highlighting brief bits of prairie. All this was almost enough to take me away from the world. In more ways than one. Of course, then I read the newspaper and my euphoria quite quickly evaporated.

Those of us who aren't prayin' folk are sometimes asked how we can keep going on in tough times if things are as bleak as the news makes them seem.

I mean, only this week the Population Reference Bureau forecast 9 billion inhabitants on this small, endangered planet, by 2050 (7 billion by next year). Couple with this the prospect of there being not nearly enough young people to help take care of the old (the birthrate is falling, despite the projected population increase, so that the old will vastly outnumber the young), and the prognosis is grim.

And then there's the Gulf. After 100 days, the Deepwater Horizon well has been capped, and the "kill" is to begin next week. The font of oil has been stanched, at least for the moment, but stay tuned in China, Michigan, the Red Sea--oh, and Louisiana again: Barataria Bay, where a boat hit an oil well and caused a new leak of oil and gas into an extremely sensitive area already compromised by the BP spill. The New York Times recently ran a good slide show on the Environmental Impact of Oil Spills, in case anybody's been hiding in a cave for the last three months. If that makes you want to get out the checkbook and fund something, try Stop the Drill at Oceana.

The "slow" economy figures in all this, of course, but the whole picture presents such a damned if you do, damned if you don't conundrum that I'm not sure how anybody can get out of bed these days.

I mean, think of the pickle: We stop spending ourselves silly, and the economy stops growing fast enough to create jobs, which adds to the recessional outlook. We stop drilling and killing wildlife, and more jobs are lost. The ultimate quandary in the Gulf is instructive: vast numbers of people along the coast make their living from oil (drilling, refining, exploring, supporting)--but they're all now suffering the consequences of the country's insatiable oil-thirst, which threatens the livelihood of other inhabitants, who depend on fishing, shrimping, and tourism.

Sometimes, homo sapiens sapiens seems an absurd name for our species. We're hardly wise. If we were, we'd think things through, not see constant growth and accumulation of "wealth" as worthy goals, and think far enough ahead that we don't arrive at crises of our own making. All those people shouting about the deficit we're leaving our grandchildren would do well to think about how much they've contributed to the real legacy: a crowded, polluted, hot planet--and the consequences thereof. Forget about the money. Think about the quality of life. Forget about satisfying wants, and think about what it will take simply to satisfy basic needs.

As conscious as I am of all this, however, I do not contemplate throwing myself off a cliff in the Grand Canyon or other colorful and poetic means of ending myself. Instead, I get up every morning, have a good cup of coffee, and go about the work of educating young designers--in hopes that they'll somehow, someday figure it all out.

Family members have asked me how I can possibly exist without having faith that some god (well, actually, a particular one) will somehow take things in hand--if only we can believe enough, or pray hard enough, or trust in his wisdom to sort things out (it's always a he). How can I go about my daily tasks with no sense of ultimate purpose?

The simple answer is hope. I hope that we will become smart enough and generous enough over the next few years to see that constant, unrelenting growth does not provide a path toward a sustainable future for our children. I hope that we will become better assessors of new technologies so that we don't keep feeding greedy corporations that exploit poor workers in third-world countries, who mine dangerous minerals to construct the newest, fastest, sexiest digital machines. I hope we slow down, anchor ourselves in our environments, and begin to really see and experience the world we're poised to lose within a couple of generations. I hope we stop playing with our children's education and start teaching them what they need to know in order to survive in a depleted world.

After Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature, one of the books that helped to raise our consciousness about what we're doing to the planet, he wrote another, less celebrated work: Hope, Human and Wild, in which he describes several communities that live in ways that offer promise for a different kind of future. He tries to "imagine a future vastly different from the present, one where people consume much less and restrain themselves much more. Where 'public' is no longer a curse word, and 'growth' increasingly is" (1). He contrasts hope with mere "wishing" that things will get better on their own. "Real hope," he says, "implies real willingness to change" (3).

I wrote More News From Nowhere as a descriptive act--a speculation about (as William Morris put it) "how we might live." But McKibben's book focuses on actual communities living actual lives: Curibita in Brazil, and Kerala in India, where people are actually doing, rather than just talking.

To this list, one could add Gaviotas in Colombia, although the population is quite small. But check out the Sustainable Cities website for larger efforts. And for an even bigger lift, search Google for "sustainable cities" and more pages on efforts around the world.

If I have any faith at all, it's that the human brain is wired for survival; that the instincts we've developed over the last couple of hundred thousand years will kick in and we'll realize that if we don't ramp down we're out of the game. To me the ultimate act of despair would be to go on as if nothing has happened.

The United States seems to be mired in American exceptionalism these days, comfortable in our cocoon of assumptions about who we are and what we're entitled to. I'm not sure how many oil spills or other disasters it'll take before we wake up and notice what we're doing to ourselves--let alone what we're doing to the rest of the world by exporting our excesses.

Still, I hope. I do what I think I can, although certainly not all that I probably could. As long as efforts go on somewhere to address the problems, I'll keep hoping and keep doing--even if, at this point in my life "doing" has more to do with driving a fuel-efficient car and going without air conditioning than with real political action. And if y'all who pray want to go on doing so, I'm pretty sure it's not going to hurt.

Image credit: this today's Wikimedia Commons's "photograph of the day," Hazy Blue Hour in Grand Canyon, by Michael Gäbler (take a look at some of his other contributions at the link). I went to the Commons to find an evocative photo of our home planet, and this came up. I thought it provided a good reason to hope that we manage not to screw it all up.

Saving the World, One Dandelion at a Time

I'm really trying not to get all discouraged and pessimistic about the news coming out of the southern Gulf coast, even as things get worse and the images look more and more like blood oozing from Mother Earth herself. I spend as much time as I can enjoying the peculiar mix of nature and culture that defines my half-acre of suburbia, and few things are more smile-provoking than "puppies" lounging amidst the stand of wild gladiolus I'm naturalizing near the vegetables.

My original intention today was to offer an annotated list of things we can do to wean ourselves from dependence on petroleum products, so I was encouraged when the Daily Poop ran a back-page story in the Points section on letting nature have her way with the front yard. Of course, it was too good to be true to think I'd found a fellow local supporter of laissez-faire gardening; the article is a reprint from today's New York Times: The Dandelion King, by Robert Wright.

What the folks who walk by my house and scowl at my sort-of-tidy, but unorthodox, front lawn don't realize is that they benefit personally from my refusal to use chemicals on my lawn to kill perfectly legitimate plants that don't have societies devoted to them. I do have roses and irises and the like, but I also have what most people regard as weeds. Just the other day, when the Beloved Spouse was preparing to mow (with our electric lawn mower, 150 ft. cord and all), he asked me to show him what to leave: the morning primroses, blue-eyed grass, and yellow something-or-others that I intend to transplant to a particular portion of the front spread that I'm planning to de-grass.

Actually, there's not much grass anyway. A few stray strands of Bermuda grass cling to their very lives (leftover from the previous owner's attempt to deal with the one really sunny patch at the front of the house; most of it's shaded for most of the day), but the variegated Artemesia and Greek oregano I planted in the border last year are about to do them in.

I'm also trying not to be smug about my efforts to reduce my own dependence on stinky black goo. My environmental science-teacher colleague laughed last week when I told her I'd bought a Honda Insight, and told me that there'd been an entire South Park episode devoted to the quality shared by many of us who drive hybrid vehicles: our sense of moral superiority over lesser mortals.

Alas, I don't watch South Park (or much else besides baseball), so I missed it, but I get her point--although I'm still not going to take the "I support clean energy" magnet off my bumper.

In my neck of the woods tree-hugging in any form has not usually been seen as an admirable activity. If, however, the publication of the Robert Wright article (and the brief bit that ran below it, by Scott McElwain on organic lawn care) is a harbinger of things to come, things may be looking up.

Home landscaping, in the end, offers us the quickest and easiest way to initiate change. Chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides and other garden products are completely unnecessary. Organic gardening is neither difficult, nor expensive--although it can be time-consuming if you make all of your products yourself. But compost is easy to make, worm bins are easy to maintain, pest deterrents are simple and cheap to concoct, and none of this is rocket science.

If your yard is small enough, a push-reel lawn mower can do the job and provide you with exercise. For larger spaces, electric mowers (battery-powered ones omit the need for the long cord) are quiet and efficient and (considering the price of gasoline) relatively inexpensive to buy and maintain. There is no earthly reason to use gas-powered tools at all, since trimmers and chain saws come in electric models and nobody needs a leaf blower for any reason (even though they come in electric varieties as well).

If everybody who is physically capable of doing so were to pick up a rake, a broom, a dandelion puller-outer (if you simply cannot abide those pretty yellow blossoms and seed-heads that children love so much, and the leaves that taste so good in salads), we'd all breathe easier and weigh less.

One man's weed, as they say, is another man's bouquet. If I had pulled up that single wild gladiolus ten years ago and pitched it in the compost bin, I wouldn't be blessed each year with a growing field of them, taller and taller every season. Nor would I have generated a mullein farm, or mounds of Virginia creeper and honeysuckle that cover ugly bits of old fence. The scented garden I'm blessed with each spring and summer wouldn't be nearly as sweet. Of course, I also wouldn't be plagued by poopy Cedar Waxwings either, but those I can live with.

Letting unidentified plants grow has led to some magical moments in the Accidental Garden, including the basketflower that pops up every other year or so near the woodpile. Or the blue-eyed grass that makes its way around the property, year by year. Or the occasional wild flower that finds a happy home amidst the leaf-mold in heavily treed spots.

And now, thanks to Robert Wright, I can smile smugly every time I save the life of a dandelion.

Why Are We Still Talking About This?

Actually, the title ought to read, "Why are we still talking about this?" Rather than doing something about it? Because we're getting stupider and stupider; that's why. Stupider (I know my grammar's off, but that's the result of getting stupider) in the sense that we aren't ignorant (the answers are out there and we know about them), but we collectively, and willfully, seem to be making really uninformed, unwise choices about very important problems.

For the last couple of weeks the news from the Gulf of Mexico has gone from horrific to potentially disastrous. The economies of all Gulf coast states--not to mention the economies of nations to the south, west, and east of the spill--are at risk of collapse as the mess inches toward vital fisheries, oyster beds, wetlands, and beaches. The coverage from the New York Times alone demonstrates the seriousness of the situation, and the potential for environmental apocalypse.

Back in March, President Obama caved into Big Oil in a compromise effort to convince bidness-folk that he isn't a tree-hugger, and so they should come on board with his pragmatic energy policy that will use oil, natural gas, and nukes to wean ourselves from foreign oil dependence and give us a chance to build alternative energy sources.

Trouble is, what makes the compromise necessary at all is that the United States is so mired in fossil fuel dependence we're like oil junkies who can't bring themselves to go into treatment. Withdrawal is too scary, and we're afraid to even try.

The oil industry is, as Joe Romm points out on his Climate Progress blog, one of those "too big to fail" operations--and BP is rather like the Goldman Sachs of fossil fuel production.

The reason we need to wean ourselves from this who approach to energy now is precisely because it's too big to manage, it's too destructive to the environment, and it's completely unsustainable.

People who scream at anti-Obama rallies that we're leaving our grandchildren trillions of dollars of debt don't seem to mind that we're also leaving them a substantially damaged planet and atmosphere, and we're failing to educate our kids well enough for them to be able to solve the problems we're bequeathing them.

Just this morning I read in the Daily Poop about Neil Armstrong's claim that President Obama's new space policy will remove us from our position as the leader in space exploration, and we'll end up taking a back seat to foreign countries' efforts in the development of big space-related projects. But as much as I love the space program, I don't particularly see why we have to be the biggest players. If the Russians, the Chinese, the European Space Agency, or private investors can do the job, I don't have a problem with that. We're not exactly preparing our own kids to go mine asteroids or visit Mars, anyway, so why not let somebody who can steer take the helm.

Where we should be striving to be first and best is in the area of energy policy, innovation, and transformation. We use huge amounts of energy (take a look at the World Bank's data to see how we compare to others, using several indicators), and we emit pollutants of all varieties at an alarming rate, so we should be the ones who focus our remaining big brains on this issue. If this country can't properly manage offshore oil wells, I'm not really all that confident that we won't screw up something in space.

Alternative energy sources already exist, and the technological means to design, manufacture, and distribute non-petroleum-based power is available. There are still smart scientists and engineers out there perfectly capable of coming up with ways to fix things. But we, as a voting populace, lack the political will to loosen the hold oil companies and related businesses have on the national economy.

Perhaps the gulf spill will open some eyes. The oil execs sitting in their posh office towers and lounging by the pristine pools in their mansions aren't really the ones being hurt here. BP will end up shelling out a huge chunk of change to help mitigate what it's unleashed, but the fisherman, the tourist industry, the retirement communities, the beach lovers, the shrimpers, the oystermen, the brown pelicans, the wetlands, the estuaries, and the cities all along the perimeter of the Gulf will suffer the impact of this mess for years.

Forty years ago, Earth Day was born in part as a result of an oil spill near Santa Barbara. We should have really learned our lesson after the Exxon Valdez disaster, and after several decades of fighting oil-related wars in the Middle East. We know what oil dependence costs. But in spite of all this, the word out today is that the problems in the Gulf notwithstanding, gasoline prices will be going down over the summer, encouraging more and more people to drive their Hummers around town.

Even if going cold turkey isn't an option, we should now be doing everything we can to wean ourselves not only from oil itself, but from an economy that is clearly doing more harm than good. If alternatives did not exist, the situation would be different; but they do, and investors need to start pulling their money out of petroleum and using it to build a home-grown, future-conscious alternative to messy gobs of crud, toxic fumes, dead birds, ruined lives, and environmental degradation.

One doesn't have to be a Peak Oil "believer" to see that we're in trouble. I'm not naive enough to think that choosing a 100% wind-based source of electricity is going to change the world. But the more subscribers sign up companies like Green Mountain, or with "green plans" through other local distributors, the faster distributors and politicians get the idea that we want out of the oil business.

What really saddens me about the whole situation is that it takes an actual or potential disaster to make us change our ways. We should be altering our way of life significantly because it's the right thing to do, and because it makes moral and practical sense--not just because the economy collapses or because the oil slick is lapping at our front door.

Image sources: Both shots are from NASA; go to the Image Gallery page on the oil spill for more.