Notes on the ecowar

[Political Waves]

In my weekly piece*, I always go long -- then tighten up in order to meet the word requirements and further, go through an editing process. That means throwing out, often, important bits. The bit I had to throw out this week, in order to shape the whole of the piece, was our stunning disconnect from the Mother. We still consider Her mere property, ignoring our physical, emotional and spiritual ties to that which is infinitely more than a backdrop for our frenetic activity.

I hear about jobs lost, about fishing grounds no longer productive, about vacation areas spoilt -- but I never hear that what we were given to dwell upon and carefully steward has sustained egregious attacks by those given "dominion," changing her forever and altering our human future. We need to start talking about our survival as a species. Without us where would the world be? Pristine, I imagine. The planet is not merely "resources," and unless we begin to understand that, our days are numbered. It is said that humans are the only ones capable of sentience; up to now, we've acted as if God/dess enabled the wrong mammal.

I've been waiting to hear from the blogosphere on this topic, with limited expectation that we'll hear anything so hippy-dippy from MSM. We have, at least, coined a new and dreadful word -- ecocide. The acknowledgement of ecowar ... which is what we're involved in on a daily basis ... cannot be far behind.

As we face the continuing disaster in the Gulf -- the Cheney legacy, short and sweet -- we seem to s-l-o-w-l-y be getting it. These reads, of course, come from the Left. Leadership on the Right still wants to Drill, Baby, Drill because they're power-maddened, maniacal ecoterrorists, their Neanderthal DNA running their reptile brains. Well, Hell -- plain speech is all that's left in defense of that position. The Republican mainstream is too busy counting their losses and blowing off steam in illogical bursts of paranoia to notice that how we lived the 20th century can NO LONGER be the way we live in this one. They want more drilling so they can see gas prices come down, but, in terms they would understand, that dog don't hunt no more. THAT conversation will be coming soon, even to MSM -- and the sooner, the better.

Meanwhile, NONE of us, Right or Left, want to look at the pictures or think about the horror in the Gulf -- it hurts our heart. But if we DON'T, we will not bring our heart to bear on this opportunity to awaken, together. If there's one thing we definitely need right now, it's an infusion of genuine, opened heart! Yours, mine, ours ... leading the conversation back toward what is sensible, honorable and harmless.

Here are a short collection of reads on this topic -- I hope to see more like them in the coming weeks reflecting the shift in consciousness this dread spill is producing, for which we continue to pay a ... yet ... unimaginable price. These last months punctuate the notion that we need to trust ourselves when it comes to what we're seeing; we know how to connect dots, now, after a decade of practice. Our initial concern about the dispersants, for instance, and BP's secrecy in their regard, was justified. The dispersant used is, of itself, carcinogenic and promotes absorption through the skin -- we might as well have filled the Gulf with DMSO. This does not bode well for the breeding cycles or even the longevity of the sea life that is exposed through the plumes.

As well, here's an article we should all study. Each of us will be called upon, one day, to make politics local and personal, perhaps in such a manner.

Energy Company's Shocking Plan to Spray Clouds with Toxic Chemical to Increase Rainfall -- and Make Hydropower Profits
The practice known as 'cloud seeding' has been done in California for decades. But the environmental costs are high and the regulations for corporations nonexistent.
Jeff Conant, AlterNet

Peaceful, restful weekend to each of you,

Jude

 

* By the way, the last word in my weekly article was "night" not "hight," and please DO open the Rolling Stones link that indicates that Obama's calculation to appease the Drill, Baby, Drill flag-wavers was considered imperative to get the votes for the Clean Energy bill -- typically, the Republican co-sponsor, duplicitous little Lindsey Graham, pulled out at the last minute with "concerns" that global warming science is flawed. As astounding as it seems, the bill is still in trouble, even as we're up to our asses in spilled crude and eco-disaster. That's because energy is a cash cow. But importantly, I don't think it's productive to overlook Obama's motive in continuing shallow-water drilling -- nor is it useful to split the Left any further as we navigate these troubled waters. I can breathe fire with the best of them and I don't mind crisping the skin of the moderate's with my criticism, including the Administration, but a scorched earth policy will leave the Left with only the bitter taste of ashes in its mouth.

 

As the Gulf is an awareness point to awakening our connection to the Earth, the debate about the President's effectiveness is a wakeup call in regard to our disheveled political system, asking us to focus very carefully on the actual issues. The American system of governance wasn't foisted upon us unawares; we voted and dithered and frittered away our anger for decades to create this system. We can blame Obama for not moving quickly enough to correct it, go after him for being too Establishment to break the stranglehold of corporate elitism and for too easily trusting the untrustworthy, but if we make HIM the problem, we shoot ourselves in our own foot -- I think we've done that enough for one millennium, don't you?

 

First, Do No Harm
Robert C. Koehler
Thursday, June 10, 2010
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/06/10-3

As Planet Earth continues to hemorrhage crude oil from its wound — with a worst-case estimate of as much as 100,000 barrels a day — we grope, beyond our anger and guilt, simply to imagine what damage we have done in the pursuit of human empowerment.
This is bigger than BP, blameworthy though the company may be. This is bigger than any sort of “us vs. them” scenario we can think of. It’s a crisis of civilization, which means all of us.

If we drive, use energy, buy products wrapped in absurd, throwaway plastic — if we live at all — it cuts across our lives. The roots of this disaster, and, God help us, the ones to come, are political and corporate and governmental, and they are also intensely personal. We all collude in society’s “addiction” to oil, or what I would call its sense of entitlement: This is our planet. We’re the boss.

What we’re truly addicted to, or at least inextricably caught up in, is what my friend Jim Oberg calls “doomsday capitalism” and its need for reckless, unlimited economic growth. With this system operative, we trend toward war, empire and exploitation.

Maybe, as we look at the graphics of this disaster — pelicans, for instance, covered in black goo — we begin to grasp our immaturity as a species. Let’s say we do survive ourselves and create a sustainable, eco-harmonious way to live and prosper: What we’re presently churning up in our clumsiness and techno-entitlement is a warning to the future of how not to be. We’re scaring up a whole new mythology, and new definitions of sacrilege.

I know nowhere to start except here. And I know of nothing less to reach for than . . . salvation.

I use this language not to promote existing religions, which far too often collude in the problem, but to reach deep into the human core, into the raw material of existence, to find new commonality with one another and to discover new — or perhaps I mean to rediscover ancient, uncompromised and uncorrupted — principles to live by.

The rebuilding of human society cannot be superficial. It must begin with a realization that those in power mostly have no idea what they’re doing; they operate with crippling short-sightedness, in a context of eerily limited self-interest. (“History, we don't know,” George Bush said to Bob Woodward, regarding future assessments of the Iraq war. “We’ll all be dead.”) We’re, like, on our own here.

Knowledge that this is the case leads either to despair and cynicism or translates into a deeper, more profound sense of personal responsibility. I opt for the latter, understanding that present-day U.S. democracy is comfortable with a spectator citizenry: entertained, isolated and disengaged. We don’t pursue the sort of awareness that would propel us into troubled discontent, and we’re not supposed to. But it’s our only choice. And while this sort of awareness doesn’t translate into easy or obvious action, maybe that’s OK.

First, do no harm.

What if that phrase, which is the byword of many professions, became a sort of operating principle with which to proceed, individually and collectively, into the future? Even if it’s an impossible standard, wouldn’t we be far better off attempting to live by its implications, or at least reflecting on them and debating them, than by mockingly dismissing them?

Our most destructive enterprises all depend on moral relativism and a suspension of this value, allegedly in service to a greater good, which generally fails to materialize. I submit that the “greater good” argument is a convenient scam, pulled out of a hat time and again by those intent on gaming the system for limited, self-serving ends.

Yet it springs eternal — certainly as the ultimate argument for war, but also for anything that might generate a profit.

Harvey Wasserman, for instance, writing about the resurgence of the nuclear power industry and its backing by the Obama administration, notes that, “Like BP, their builders would enjoy financial liability limits dwarfed by damage they could do.”

Nuclear power has been able to recast itself as a green alternative to coal and oil only by minimizing or dismissing the problem of radioactive waste and the dangers of meltdown. “If the White House has a reliable plan for deploying and funding a credible response to a disaster at a reactor that’s superior to the one we’ve seen at the Deepwater Horizon, we’d sure like to see it,” Wasserman writes.

As I read this, my thought is that the forces that ultimately determine the future of this industry will be responding to something more short-sighted and “pragmatic” than my proposed operating principle: First, do no harm.

The United States is both an aggressive empire and a throwaway society. We wage open-ended wars that are mostly for the sake of resource control, and we package our groceries in “disposable” plastic bags, given away by the billions, which are made from the primary resource we seek to control.

The crisis is upon us. Our paradoxes have come home to roost, and they’re covered with oil. ++


Cousteau: U.S. oil spill response reflects 'soul of this country'
Andrew Seidman, McClatchy Newspapers
June 10, 2010
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/09/95632/cousteau-us-oil-spill-response.html

WASHINGTON — Nearly 18 months ago, Philippe Cousteau, the grandson of the ecologist Jacques Cousteau and himself a renowned student of the seas, warned a congressional committee that the U.S. wasn't prepared to respond to potentially devastating oil spills.

On Wednesday, he returned to Capitol Hill for a post-BP spill briefing with his worst nightmares realized.

"The echoes of that testimony are haunting me today," Cousteau said. Now, he said, how the nation responds to the millions of gallons of crude fouling the Gulf of Mexico "is a question, I think, of the soul of this country. Will we continue to exploit and develop resources that are toxic?"

While Cousteau, who grew up around oceans, may be the man most emotionally tied to the disaster in the Gulf, he wasn't the only witness at Wednesday's briefing who's troubled by the remembrance of things past and the missed opportunities to protect the environment.

It was Cousteau, however, who brought moral persuasion and a close-up perspective on the spill. In late May, he donned diving gear and entered Gulf waters already poisoned by a mix of oil and gas and chemical dispersants after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon. Cousteau said he emerged covered in a toxic orange mess but emboldened with a plan for the future.

"This is an issue not just about engineering, not just about what roles, what laws went wrong," he said in an interview with McClatchy. "This is an issue about our heritage, what we're passing on to our kids."

An environmental purist but self-proclaimed pragmatist, Cousteau called for a three-pronged approach to amend the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.

_ First, give a stronger role to natural resource agencies that conduct environmental analyses.

_ Second, establish specific standards to ensure adequate infrastructure and development, and to prohibit oil and gas activity in ecologically vulnerable areas.

_ Third, with use the revenue generated by risky activities to establish an investment fund to restore ocean health.

Although his opposition to the expansion of oil exploration may have only been stiffened by the catastrophe on the Gulf, Cousteau understands that the United States won't shut off all of its offshore oil production tomorrow.

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, senior Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said the U.S. couldn't afford to stop drilling in that area of the Gulf because it's capable of producing large quantities of oil and natural gas.

Later, Cousteau told McClatchy: "You don't get off an addiction by continuing to exploit the product you're addicted to. You get off an addiction by saying, 'Enough is enough.' We stop now, chart a different course for the future."

He proposed planting the seeds for alternative renewable energy during the Obama administration's six-month moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf.
Others echoed his views.

"We've been here before," said Thomas M. Leschine, the director of the School of Marine Affairs at the University of Washington, reflecting on the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.

Leschine emphasized the need for better risk assessment, which he said is currently dismal.

He echoed Cousteau's plea for better anticipation of possible environmental catastrophes, citing a 2001 Minerals Management Service (MMS) assessment of deepwater oil production in the Gulf that placed the risk of a loss of well control at zero.

Leschine attributed what he called such "myopic thinking" to a lack of transparency and a reliance on proprietary data from the oil industry.
Leschine invoked a term coined by sociologist Charles Perrow, "normal accident" to say that the disaster in the Gulf came about from "the system, not just from the failure of technology."

Dr. Tad W. Patzek, the chair of the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas, Austin, agreed.

"Horrible things happen when complex technologies and procedures overtake humans," he said.
As scientists worry that the spill will damage the fragile creatures populating the Gulf, experts estimate that as many as 100,000 barrels of crude oil a day are spewing from the runaway well. If accurate, BP's worst-case scenario may be a reality.

"As Mark Twain reminded us, a man's first duty is to his conscience and his honor," Cousteau said. "There is no honor in this catastrophe, and its consequences are unconscionable . . . . History will not only judge us by our mistakes, but by what we to do fix them. So far, I fear that history will judge us harshly." ++
   

The BP Disaster Marks the End of the Age of Arrogance About the Environment ... Can We Change?
This spill will mark the time we started to learn about ecocide; as a turning point in our realization that our industrial, carbon-dependent way of life is ruinous and cannot last. Chip Ward, AlterNet
June 10, 2010  |  
http://www.alternet.org/story/147146/the_bp_disaster_marks_the_end_of_the_age_of_arrogance_about_the_environment_..._can_we_change?page=entire

 
We dreamed we were living in a fabulous mansion but are waking up in a greasy gutter.  The ecological and economic catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico makes our most infamous oil spill, the Exxon Valdez, look miniscule by comparison.  This time we have fouled our nest on an epic scale.  

The busted BP pipeline is a watershed event like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the collapse of the Ponzi economy.  It is not as dramatic as exploding towers, as poignant as those survivors huddled on rooftops awaiting rescue, or as personal for most of us as the loss of a job or home or even a 401K.   The devastation to earth’s life-support system, the killing of a whole ocean ecosystem across the Gulf, will resonate slowly -- this disaster will be a marathon, not a dash.  But make no mistake, we will mark these days as the time we started to learn about ecocide, as a turning point in our realization that our industrial, carbon-dependent way of life is ruinous and cannot last.  How many more of these wrenching experiences must we endure before we finally get it and change?  

Lesson one: We do not stand above and beyond the boundaries of a finite natural realm that runs through our veins as surely as rivers run down canyons to the sea. The “environment” is not something out there -- we breathe it, we drink it, we eat it.  We embody it.  Kill it and you sentence your children and grandchildren to the toil and suffering of living and dieing on a scorched, contaminated planet of slums.  

Lesson two: The term unsustainable tells you the end of the story.  What cannot be sustained fails, collapses in on itself.  The real apocalypse, not the one imagined by religious zealots but the one happening all around us right now, will be a global phenomenon that plays out locally, especially for those in the direct path of monster storms, ecocidal accidents, war, famine, pandemics, droughts, and all the other nasty surprises yet to come as we keep crossing one environmental threshold after another. Collapse ain’t pretty.  It is sickening.

The catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico will generate passionate debate.  We will critique BP’s profit-saving shortcuts and poor safety record, the Bush-era regulators who were literally in bed with oil corporations, and we’ll debate any number of other issues, laws, policies, and practices related to the catastrophe.  But at the heart of the matter is something much deeper that we must get to.  If we want to stop our culture’s self-destructive habits and learn sustainable behaviors, if we want to survive our mistakes and thrive tomorrow, then we must shed our hubris and learn to be humble and wise.

The age of hubris, a time when all things are knowable, all problems can be fixed, and all limits surpassed is crashing all around us.  We granted ourselves an exemption from the limits of a natural realm where there is only so much fertile soil, so much fresh water, so many fish in the ocean.  The atmosphere can only absorb so much CO2 and stay benign.  You can shred just so much biodiversity and expect nature to be resilient and recover from the wounds we recklessly inflict. 

Yes, we put a man on the moon and every man in a car, at least here in America where we are so privileged.  My great-grandfather could not have imagined the middle-class wealth I take for granted and the extent to which we have harnessed carbon to run our world. But, drunk on pride, we are crashing hard now -- oil-stained beaches and marshes are just one more clear signal that we humans may not be as smart as we assumed.  The Crown of Creation is turning out to be a dunce cap.   

Our kind of intelligence is undeniable. Humans are very sharp when it comes to all those aspects of the world that are fixed, measurable, happen in a linear progression, and are predictable.  That is how, after all, we put a man on the moon.  So when dealing with the mechanical realm of physics, our airplanes, dams, computers, chemical finesse, and nuclear machines are wonders to behold.

What we are not good at are all those phenomena that are nonlinear and have emergent behaviors, where, in other words, the whole tends to be greater than the sum of its parts but not predictably so -- things like the climate, ecosystems, fetal development, immune systems, brain function, and swarm behavior. We are only beginning to understand the dynamics of a deeply nonlinear world like feedback loops, thresholds, and basins of attraction.  We have a rather myopic view of scales, seeing well what is happening now and predicting what’s right around the corner but missing the slow variables that can be more important in the long-run.  This is why we deplete soils, turn grasslands into deserts, and use up ancient aquifers and oil deposits in a geological instant.   

Our intelligence is also tempered by the human condition.  Although we can boast about the scientific prowess we express through our technology and medicine, we are easily distracted by emotional needs for validation, approval, and identity.  We compete as much as we compute, greed still drives us, and we can rationalize any destructive behavior.  We are easily addicted and not easily satiated.  We have been thoroughly indoctrinated by an all-encompassing economic order that is driven by a blind quest for power and profit.   There is reason to believe we have been traumatized by our recent history of serial warfare, genocide, and environmental dislocation.  

Because we have short memories and a tendency towards denial, collectively we act like amnesiacs, as if every other past civilization or previous empire didn’t also think it was smarter than all the others that had preceded it and, unlike them, was immune to failure. Consider that almost everything an intellectual in the sixteenth-century knew for certain has since been proved wrong and almost everything we know for sure today will be radically revised a hundred years hence. 

How far back in history do we have to go to find evidence of such wrong-headed hubris?  In the 1950s, our knowledge of how the world works was so advanced that we even harnessed the atom, the building block of matter.  Confidently and with authority, uranium miners, citizens living downwind from nuclear testing, “atomic GIs,” and nuclear weapon workers were told that the low doses of radiation they received were harmless, maybe even beneficial.  In the meanwhile, forest fires were suppressed, keystone predators were hunted and eliminated from the land, and DDT was applied without protest to the crops we ate and the front lawns where children played.  Lead was added to gasoline.  We built so many nuclear weapons that we could destroy life on earth many times over.  Ships loaded with old rusty chemical weapons were scuttled and sent to the ocean floor.  Engineers were busy draining the Everglades and re-routing its flow through canals.  Emotionally distressed patients were lobotomized.  That was just fifty years ago, a mere blink of history’s eye.  Today’s genius is tomorrow’s fool.  Simply put, the world is not only more complex than we thought, it is more complex than we can think.  

As Iraq War architect Donald Rumsfeld ironically explained, there’s what you know you know, what you know you don’t know, and what you don’t know you don’t know.  So, for example, I know my own finances and how to be a librarian.  I know I don’t know how to run a bank or how to be a surgeon.  It is much harder to say what is out there that I haven’t even a clue about.  But it is how I deal with that question about what I don’t know I don’t know that determines how much risk I am willing to take, whether I see a need for precaution, and whether I seek alternative options.  

The risk assessments that justified BP’s deep-water drilling in the Gulf were more than inadequate and dishonest, they were inherently flawed because the uncertainties of the project could not be known and the consequences of failure could not be measured.  Formal risk assessments are too often a rubber stamp process designed to give the public unwarranted confidence that industry and regulators understand and can control the complex variables they are considering.  Politically, those risk assessments were also inherently flawed because they let BP and its facilitating regulators decide who was put at risk for BP’s benefit.  Ask a Louisiana shrimper if the distribution of risk, reward, and liability in the Gulf was fair, or if he had a place at the table when those decisions were made. 

The so-called precautionary principle, also called the “better safe than sorry” principle, says that we should err on the side of caution when the potential impacts of a mistake cannot be completely understood but could be serious, widespread, and irreversible.  Under a precautionary paradigm, we don’t wait until injury and accident happen and then wait even more for incontrovertible conclusions about causes.  Instead, the burden of proof is shifted from the potential downwind/downstream victims of a project to the proponents of whatever technology or practice is being proposed.  The precautionary path requires alternatives whenever the consequences of a technological project are potentially dire and irreversible.   

Capitalists who are accustomed to getting their way no matter what the risks are will squawk that such requirements are radical, time-consuming, and too expensive.  But in light of what is happening in the Gulf today, the precautionary paradigm can no longer be dismissed as some whacko notion for clog-wearing Europeans and San Francisco liberals.  Precaution is plain common sense. As my grandma liked to say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. 

The need for precaution increases apace with technological prowess.  It wasn’t enough, for example, that we altered the very DNA of seeds, like splicing fish genes into strawberries, or that we gave plants characteristics nature would never allow, like herbicide resistant corn.  At this very moment, artificial cells, stripped of their natural genetic codes in favor of computerized DNA, are growing in labs.  We will make new life forms and set them loose.  Will we be shocked if that goes awry and takes down whole species, crops, soils?  When the mistake that was never supposed to happen happens and cannot be recalled?  

For individuals, the collapse of the Age of Hubris is experienced as a profound and disturbing lack of confidence.  You don’t know who to trust, what to believe, and what will happen next.  You suspect that everything you thought you knew is wrong.  The serial shocks our culture has been enduring from 9/11 through the financial turmoil of the last years and now this wholesale destruction of habitat generate doubt and fear that the media echo back to us.  All that paranoid ranting, conspiracy thinking, demonizing, noise, and distortion that dominate our civic dialogues these days may be more symptomatic of our era than its cause, but such feedback also reinforces doubt and fear in a vicious feedback loop.  

The collapse of confidence isn’t necessarily bad even if it feels that way. Humility can lead to sustainable paths the way hubris led us over the cliff.  Precaution is as wise as it is humble.  It can spur us to find better outcomes for the earth and all its creatures.  And since a humble heart is also a compassionate one, perhaps we can heal the human realm as well.  We will discover that our best bet to make it through the turmoil ahead is one another because mutual aid is and has always been the key to our resilience. To say that we must learn to live within limits is not to say our lives will be diminished but that they will acquire new meaning, insight, purpose, and values.

Starting over is tough.  We will drag a lot of baggage down the road -- attitudes and assumptions, habits and desires, history, contracts, alliances, and obligations. The first step is the hardest; admitting that what we thought we knew was wrong and that there is so much more we don’t know than we assumed.  Until now, pride easily trumped precaution.  The sickening images of ecocide we are experiencing today may change that.

Who knows, we may even start treating the planet like our lives depended on it. ++


Putting the "i" in the environment
David Sirota, Oregon Live
Friday, June 11, 2010
http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2010/06/putting_the_i_in_the_environme.html

 

 

 

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