Skywatch Friday: After the Rain

None of this week's entries are particularly spectacular, but after weeks of mostly dismal weather, and another recent succession of rainy days, this sunset offered a welcome change.

The opening photo is the last of the sequence, showing an interesting cloud pattern. The rest are from the beginning and middle of the progression--which took about seven minutes all together.

Happy Friday, and have a great weekend, fellow Skywatchers!

Photo notes: Taken at around 7 pm, 28 February 2010, with the Nikon D80.

Is Resistance Futile?

As usual, the latest issue of Orion Magazine is chockablock with pithy, thought-provoking material, including another entry from that cranky young upstart, Derrick Jensen. This time he's on us about not sitting on our butts while the rest of the planet's inhabitants (i.e. non-human species) are being lost at the rate of about 120 a day.

And he may be right that if we don't get a whole lot more active about making significant change, we may well end up being one of those species one day. Jensen doesn't happen to think that the answer lies merely in composting or driving less or buying into the green economy, however. He thinks we have to get together and actually force changes in policy and practice, like the Movement for the Emancipaiton of the Niger Delta (MEND) has done in Africa against Big Oil (for some photos of the impact, see this article from National Geographic). Of course, one man's liberator is another man's terrorist, and the tactics used by MEND militants might be described as either, depending on the context. The people of the Niger Delta have indeed been exploited persistently and often brutally over the last fifty years, and their environment has been trashed just so folks in this town can drive whatever behemoth internal combustion-run vehicle they want to (it's a free country, after all), using fuel that costs less than a gallon of milk does.

The conversation about Jensen's article is running rather mildly (so far) compared to those about earlier essays, but I'm somewhat heartened that people generally seem to think that we can both be more active about how we pursue change and continue to make "lifestyle changes" that lessen our own personal impact on the planet. The armed rebellion option probably won't emerge, because Orion's readers tend to be a peaceful lot, and even though that's really the only way revolutions have occurred in the past, most of us don't cotton to violence--even the fairly mild kind exhibited by the more obnoxious tea-party types.

Violence these days brings with it too many complex consequences. We're still reeling from 9/11, and have since begun to realize that our collective response (kill the bastards) has not ended the threat of further violence. While a goal to end abortions might be laudable, killing abortion doctors accomplishes nothing, and seems counter intuitive if killing is what you want to stop. (Yes, I know that the argument pits the "guilty" doctors against the "innocent" unborn, but that's about as simplistic an idea as one can invent.) We are what we do, and if we do violence we invite violence.

So while I think Jensen is right that we need to be much more assertive in our political and social efforts to effect change, I don't really think we should start manning the canons. And in some cases we have to be rather subtle about how we approach problems, because every other guy on the street seems to have a concealed handgun permit. We can vote, we can join community groups, write letters, participate in environmental campaigns, volunteer, and practice what we preach. If you want to resist Big Oil, buy a hybrid vehicle or an electric car the next time you're in the market, and drive it to the nearest public transportation node whenever you can. (I say drive because the nearest DART station is fifteen miles away. Those of you who have one nearer might be able to walk.)

I don't think that the efforts more and more of us are making--composting, growing your own veg organically, buying renewable energy, increasing energy efficiency, consuming less, recycling more, driving fewer miles in less-polluting automobiles, conserving water--are futile acts of spitting in the wind. They may not be enough, but they're better than nothing. If we can, by example, convince more and more people that change can happen this way, perhaps it really can.

But, as Jensen reminds us, another 120 species went extinct today; we may, thus, eventually run out of time.

Image credit: NASA photo of the Niger River Delta from space (north is on the left), via Wikimedia Commons.

Good News and Bad News in the Water Wars

As a once-stolid Republican and still something of a "crunchy con" (with apologies to Rod Dreher), I frequently find myself shaking my head at what is popularly considered a "conservative" viewpoint in this neck of the woods. In my day, conservatives (no capital C, thank you) were those who thought we should act prudently and spend carefully, and preserve values important to at least some of our ancestors: family, thrift, wise land use, pastoral life, kindness and caring, fiscal responsibility--that sort of old-fashioned stuff.

But over the last three centuries, the occupants of this part of north America, and in particular this part of north Texas, seem to have lost sight of the common good, preferring to spend with abandon on huge cars, big roads, enormous houses, and to treat water as if it was ours by right, no matter where we had to get it, and no matter from whom we took it. And as valuable as drinking water seems to be, Big Bidness and Big Agriculture in Texas seem to think it's also their divine right to dump anything they want to in the waterways.

According to the U. S. Drought Monitor, Texas is now drought-free for the first time in three years, and you just know that, come summer, the sprinkler systems will be drenching lawns all over the area until somebody points out to over-users that the situation is not exactly stable, and that "global weirding" (I will be forever grateful to Thomas Friedman for that one) has been known to offer up everything from tinder-dry amber waves of grain to gushing flood waters to Katrina-sized hurricanes--all within a very few years. So getting happy and frolicking in the sprinkler is probably not a very prudent way to proceed.

My own innate, old-fashioned (antique?) conservatism thus causes me to be grateful to the Texas Supreme Court's ruling that no, Dallas cannot flood 25,000 acres of land in east Texas to build yet another reservoir just so neighbors can let water run off their over-fertilized overly-verdant lawns into the streets all summer. Instead, the area will become a wildlife preserve--one I can't wait to visit once the planners get the land bought and the titles secured. It's good to know that Texas can exhibit the same kind of sense that California did in regard to the Lower Owens River Project, which has resulted in reviving the Owens River where I was born. (Well, not in the river itself, although the bulrushes in the opening photo might be a good place to look for baby Hebrew prophets.)

After having sat through I don't know how many commercials during the Olympics, urging us to drill and suck and grind and process more and more fossil fuels, it was deliciously pleasant to find out that there is some real conserving going on after all.

Most news these days is crammed with justifiable ire over the fiscal debt we're leaving our grandchildren, but the loudest voices say little about the environmental debt we're handing down to them. It might be possible for future generations to co-operate and grow food and co-exist if they run out of money, but if we pollute the air so badly that they can't breath it, disturb the climate so severely that weather patterns are seriously altered, or use up so much water that they can't sustain crops, we will hardly be remembered fondly.

While looking for photos to illustrate this post, I ran across a notice about Texas Water Day--held on February 9-10 in Washington, D. C. (somehow I missed it). The announcement was enough to cause a hefty smirk to emerge on my naturally skeptical face. It thanks prospective attendees for supporting Water For Texas, because "Clean, adequate, and affordable water protects public health, supports economic prosperity, and ensures a robust environment. Texas’ stewardship of this precious resource is unparalleled. Help us celebrate our successes and plan for the challenges ahead." Stewardship is hard to demonstrate if the answer to Texas's water problems is to mess with the environment and just build another damned dam. Pardon me if I smell a lobbyist. These folks stayed at the Liaison Hotel for $269 a night and spent part of their stay meeting with the Texas Congressional delegation. Hmmm.

I do wonder how much of that conversation centered on the prospects of a big new reservoir, but I suppose that next year's Texas Water Day might include some discussion, at least, about the necessity for expressing some of our vaunted conservative values through water thrift. I am somewhat reassured by the Texas Water Matters website, which seems to be taking a sane approach to the whole matter. Were we to manage our consumption better, we would prevent the necessity for future reservoirs in the area, according to the data presented on the TWM page for Region C, in which the Dallas/Fort Worth area lies.

Stock tip of the day: companies that make affordable rain barrels seem like a good investment.

But just as I was beginning to relax a bit about the water wars, today's New York Times includes a story about rulings that restrict the reach of the Clean Water Act and have thus resulted in pollution without prosecution in numerous cases over the last four years.

The problem seems to be with the Act's inclusion only of "navigable waters," which is open to a wide range of interpretation--even though, as the Times article points out, 117 million Americans obtain their drinking water from vulnerable sources.

This kind of short-brained thinking is going to cost our descendants far more than the various dollar amounts being tossed around in deficit discussions. The potential for future water deficits and/or polluted water sources seems to be far more threatening from where I sit, even with rain pouring down outside my window for the umteenth time this winter.

It's enough to make a person grateful for not having grandchildren.

Photo notes: I took this picture near the junction of US 395 and the road to the old Reward mine north of Lone Pine, California, in December of 2003.