Tag: environment

The Lights Are Flashing Red

Famed entomologist E. O. Wilson passed into infinity in December, 2021.
He was 92.

I came upon him late in my life, but not too late for him to have left me with a reverence for his boundless intellect, inveterate inquisitiveness, and fervent championing of our fellow creatures, mostly outside human ken, myriad species vital to Man’s survival, yet victims of humanity’s arrogant trespass.

Recently, an extended research project, launched by the World Wildlife Fund, revealed that of the 32,000 species it analyzed, 69% of them are in decline. Shockingly, 2.5% of mammals, fish, reptiles, birds and amphibians have gone extinct just since 1970 (World Wildlife Report).

While species extinction surely is an integral fact of our 4.5 billion old planet’s history, the salient evidence of natural selection favoring those able to adapt to largely inveterate climate distillations, several near-Earth object (NEOs) visitations, volcanic acidification of oceans and acid rain, impacting land chemistry, their repetition has become marginalized by evolution’s new arbiter of destiny, homo sapiens.

“The message is clear and the lights are flashing red,” says WWF International’s Director General Marco Lambertini, one of the report’s authors.

Climate change threatens the next massive die-off, witnessed in every day record breaking temperatures, accelerating violent storms, rising sea levels, droughts, and massive fires.

Meanwhile, we continue to pour heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. All of this affects habitat, destroying the intricate ecological web that sustains us.

It doesn’t make for breaking news headlines, but should, that the Arctic
is warming four times faster than the rest of our planet, threatening the demise of the jet stream, resulting in still more climate instability.

We live our lives addicted to trivia, fingers in our ears, indifferent to the existential challenge that poses our extinction. It seems a human predilection to forfeit the future for indulgence in the ephemeral present. Rome burns while Nero plays his fiddle.

Thus far, efforts to mitigate climate change and restore balance have failed to achieve their targets. We even have a candidate running for the presidency who’s pledged to roll back environmental regulations.

Not to be outdone, we have President Biden’s recent approval of the Willow Project (March 1923), allowing ConocoPhillip’s massive oil drilling rights on Alaska’s North Slope in the National Petroleum Reserve, despite his campaign promise he’d prohibit drilling on public lands (The Willow Project).

We knew where Trump stood, but we trusted Biden, whose administration has also approved the auctioning off of 73 million acres of waters in the Gulf of Mexico to offshore oil and gas drilling interests, encompassing an area twice the size of the Willow Project (Common Dreams).

Universal human-induced loss of forest, wetlands, and ecosystems hastens the trajectory of apocalyptic consequence for future generations.

Meanwhile, beleaguered polar bears attempt to adapt, but aren’t succeeding. Given the melting ice, they cannot access their traditional foods, resulting in their numbers declining 30% since 1980 (Polar bear decline).

Penguins haven’t fared any better, their numbers declining up to 10% (Penguins declining).

Truth be known, we’re approaching a tipping point at which the ecosystem collapses.

E. O. Wilson rightly faulted humans for earth’s crisis: “Deeming ourselves rulers of the biosphere and its supreme achievement, we believe ourselves entitled to do anything to the rest of life we wish. Here on Earth our name is Power” (Half-Earth: our Planet’s Fight for Life).

Each species is its own miracle. By the century’s end, most of today’s faltering species will be gone:

No birdsong to greet the new day,
No crickets rubbing their wings;
An absence of croaking frogs at the pond,
Zinging dragonflies but memory.
Amid parched landscape, a wounding silence.

–rjoly

Antigua’s Chinese Enclave: What it Means

ANTIGUA: TOURIST PARADISE:

A mere 264 miles from US shores lies the sovereign Caribbean island nation of Antigua and Barbuda, a tourist’s paradise blessed with stable, year round temperatures; several hundred pristine beaches; lush lagoons; and hideaway natural harbors. It has mountains, too, offering scenic views of a vast mangrove forest. 80% of Antigua’s GDP derives from tourism.

But Antigua, like other island nations, faces immense challenges in the maelstrom of climate change: increase in hurricane intensity and frequency, rising sea levels, erosion, salt water intrusion, and ground water depletion.

2017 saw Antigua devastated by Category 5 Irma, destroying 97% of
Barbuda’s infrastructure, rendering it nearly uninhabitable.

Often dubbed “the Switzerland of the Caribbean,” Antigua finds itself lacking the financial resources to sustain its economic viability in the context of climate change and yielded to Chinese overtures: a 2 percent interest loan, with a 5-year moratorium on repayment.

Antigua’s prime minister, Gaston Browne, views China as a friend: “I see China, though, as a country that stands on truth, and a country that, you know, at least has some level of empathy for small states, and generally for poor and dispossessed persons globally” (Newsweek. May 5, 2024).

ENVIRONMENTAL THREATS POSED BY CHINA IN ANTIGUA:

Newsweek’s recent study of leaked documents indicates 1000 acres of forest will be razed to accommodate a Chinese Economic Free Zone juggernaut, ultimately consuming 2000 acres for housing and businesses. It includes an airport, up to seven resorts, a shipping port, and Antigua’s first four lane highway. Construction has begun.

Bearing all the earmarks of a Chinese enclave, the completed project confers independent immigration and customs formalities for the enclave and a license to issue passports. It will not pay income taxes, unlike native Antiguans, sales taxes, or import duties. Anyone investing $400,000 or more will be eligible for Antiguan citizenship

Browne touts his Chinese venture as an investment in the future, creating hundreds of jobs.

Browne sweetens the deal by promising environmentalists a 70 acre mangrove reserve and a 60 acre nursery for growing 100,000 trees.

This hasn’t pacified the island’s environmentalists, however, who contend the free zone transverses the island’s largest marine reserve, under legal protection since 2005, and destroys most of its mangrove forests, a haven for migrating birds.

They point out the area’s “nesting ground for critically endangered sea turtles, the threatened West Indian whistling duck and the Antiguan racer, once dubbed the world’s rarest snake, brought back from the brink of extinction by efforts from local environmentalists” (Newsweek).

Browne angrily brands his critics “ecoterrorists.”

AIR AND WATER POLLUTION:

China has a history of contributing to pollution through industrial production and waste processing. Enforcement of environmental protections is often ignored when it comes to garbage, water, atmospheric, and excrement pollution, undermining economic development and investment.

Opponents insist the Antiguan government adequately address these issues, which could have deleterious effects on soil ecology, agricultural production, and water supply.

Antigua’s first environmental report by the government’s environmental management authority, issued in 1992, proved alarming in terms of pollution, waste disposal, deforestation, and entrepreneurial nonchalance.

As for the accommodation sector, the study noted that the water supply for the bankrupt Grand Royal Hotel was found inadequate, singling out Chinese businesses for dumping.

OVERFISHING AND MARINE ECOSYSTEM DEGRADATION:

Chinese nationals also have a legacy of illegal and unregulated logging of parrotfish in the coral reefs, which are important to the marine environment of Antigua’s Marina Bay. As such, not only are the food chain and the environment in peril as acres of mangroves fall to chainsaws, but its fisheries as well

China’s relentless pursuit of high-quality fish (apex predators in the ocean communities), and the destruction of the ecosystems that consistently produce these creatures, have been implicated as the main culprits in extensive ecosystem degradation when applied at galactic scales to Africa, the American Pacific coast, and now the Eastern Caribbean.

Buying seafood from China, which will be allowed to operate a fish farm, has negative consequences for both the environment and Antiguan fishers. Chinese vessel owners profit greatly from buying or leasing fishing rights from over 60 countries, including Antigua and Barbuda. While this provides a trillion meals per year, it causes damage to the ocean.

HISTORY OF CHINESE CARIBBEAN INVESTMENT:

The major Chinese enterprises in Antigua mainly involve construction, infrastructure, real estate, and hotels. The total value of China’s FDI in the seven countries of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) was estimated at almost 300 million US at the end of 2011. Chinese financing came in the form of concessional loans. In the Eastern Caribbean, it funded the construction of the national stadium, the American University of Antigua, and the Lyndhurst Road Development Project. China has also engaged in a number of technical cooperation projects in capacity building and training and granted subsidies to the Tropical Storm Grant Program.

The bottom line is that China’s growing influence on Antigua’s politics and economy comes at a cost, primarily to the environment and the United States. Air and water pollution in Antigua are predominantly caused by Chinese firms.

The challenges deriving from air pollution and inadequate addressing of such concerns leave open the question of whether a distinction should be made in Antigua between government policies attracting investment contributing to the economy while exacerbating the country’s environmental problems and those policies that mitigate polluting.

Antigua’s economic growth in the last decade has been due to investments and loans from China, which reflect China’s strategic objective in the Caribbean. Smaller island nations have been overly enthusiastic in embracing China’s support since they have been relegated, as well as stigmatized, by powerful global financial institutions in times of crisis. The Chinese have presented their assistance with no condition of policy or regime change, thus undermining the frequent dictates of the Washington Consensus.

China has been exploiting the vulnerability of developing nations. If Beijing can increase its investments in countries that are dependent on tourism and other single export industries, it can anticipate predictable returns. Focusing on countries that rely on imports, not on natural resources, China is now the second largest trading partner with some Caribbean countries.

POTENTIAL FOR ESPIONAGE AND CYBERSECURITY RISK:

Given its proximity to US shores, Antigua obviously has strategic significance.

On August 17th, 2020, former Trump administration Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney warned that China’s post-crisis economic policy, including investment in impoverished Caribbean nations like Antigua and Barbuda, jeopardizes US security.

Historically, the Monroe Doctrine (1823), was strictly enforced to keep foreign interests from interference in the Americas. Among its provisions, further colonizations in the Americas would be viewed as threatening US interests.

In 1861, France attempted creating an empire in Mexico, encountering protest.

In 1962, Russian missile intrusion in Cuba nearly launched WWIII.

In 1983, President Reagan committed troops to expel Cuban military from pro-Soviet Union Granada.

Will Antigua become an espionage base like Cuba?

While the U.S. military’s Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) has issued concerns about China’s growing presence in Antigua and the Caribbean region, the Biden administration has been silent.

–rj

Jane Goodall’s “Reason For Hope: A Spiritual Journey”

Finished reading Jane Goodall’s Reason For Hope: A Spiritual Journey, minutes ago, a compelling, yet difficult read, as Goodall bares not only triumphs, but personal tragedies in her long life.

Renowned for championing chimpanzees, our closest relative and, now, an endangered species, at 89 she travels widely, raising funds and informing audiences of the myriad challenges of entrenched poverty, species loss, and climate change. In 1950, 2 million chimpanzees roamed Africa’s then teeming wilderness. That’s dwindled to just 150,000 currently.

A compassionate woman who empathizes keenly with all who suffer, whether humans or animals, she’s not without hope that the human capacity for good as well as evil will ultimately triumph, saving not only mankind, but a beleagured Mother Earth. Above all, abides Jane’s vigorous faith in a greater Consciousness that pervades our universe and seeks our good.

Salient passages:

“But I have tried to write my story honestly—else why write the book at all?”

“It is probably the case that inappropriate or morally wrong behaviors are more often changed by the influence of outsiders, looking with different eyes, from different backgrounds.”

“In particular I became intensely aware of the being-ness of trees. The feel of rough sun-warmed bark of an ancient forest giant, or the cool, smooth skin of a young and eager sapling, gave me a strange, intuitive sense of the sap as it was sucked up by unseen roots and drawn up to the very tips of the branches, high overhead.”

“I saw chimps use and modify other objects as tools, such as crumpled leaves to sop rainwater from a hollow in a tree. Stones could be missiles; some of the males threw with good aim—as I sat there, keeping vigil, I thought, as I have thought so often since, what an amazing privilegeit was—to be utterly accepted thus by a wild, freeanimal. It is a privilege I shall never take for granted.”

“I found that my whole attitude to eating flesh abruptly changed. When I looked at a piece of meat on my plate I saw it as part of a once living creature, killed for me, and it seemed to symbolize fear, pain, and death—not exactly appetizing. So I stopped eating meat. For me, one of the delightful side effects of becoming a vegetarian was the change in my own health.”

“And people are beginning to suffer; in some places women must dig up the roots of trees long since cut down to get the firewood they need for cooking. And all this change is because the numbers of people have increased dramatically—mainly due to the explosive population growth, but also due to repeated influxes of refugees from troubled Burundi in the north, and more recently from eastern Congo. And this scenario is repeated again and again across the African continent and other developing countries: increased population growth, diminishing resources, and the destruction of nature, resulting in poverty and human suffering. Yes, we are destroying our planet. The forests are going, the soil is eroding, the water tables are drying, the deserts are increasing. There is famine, disease, poverty, and ignorance. There is human cruelty, greed, jealousy, vindictiveness, and corruption.“

“Each one of us matters, has a role to play, and makes a difference. Each one of us must take responsibility for our own lives, and above all, show respect and love for living things around us, especially each other. Together we must reestablish our connections with the natural world and with the Spiritual Power that is around us. And then we can move, triumphantly, joyously, into the final stage of human evolution—spiritual evolution.”

—rj

We Are Losing Earth on Our Watch: The Unfolding Crisis of a Warming Planet


I wanted to walk my two miles this morning, but stepping outside, blasted by the double whammy of humidity and a temperature already at 83 F and rising fast, I thought better of it.

It’s like this virtually everywhere these days. Our children, vacationing in Palm Desert, CA, relayed it reached 118 F there yesterday.

2016 was the hottest year on record. This year is likely to be hotter still.

Some suffer grievously. There’s Phoenix, AZ, with its 27 straight days of 110 F plus temperatures, its denizens reliant on air conditioning to get them through. I ponder the city’s fate were the electric grid to give way. Fifteen percent of Phoenix’s population lives in poverty, many on the streets, exacerbating the heat’s impact. Last year’s heat waves killed 425 residents of Maricopa County, 56 percent of them homeless.

Duluth, MN, looks better everyday. It doesn’t surprise me that a growing number of families, sensing what’s likely to get a lot worse, are moving to this Lake Superior city known for its cool days even as the Twin Cities, to the South, bake. North Dakota, anyone?

Along with record-breaking heat, come the inevitable forest fires. Everyone’s holding their breath in California, despite its recent heavy downpours and filling of depleted reservoirs, as soaring temperatures eclipse records.

Canada has fared badly, many fires still burning as plumes of toxic fumes drift southward to the US. 4200 fires, a record number, have occurred this year in Canada.

You’ve heard about the raging heat and accompanying fires in Italy, Greece, Algeria, and Crete fueled by spiraling heat waves, with many killed, thousands displaced, livelihoods gone, and animal habitats decimated.

It’s so much worse among developing countries, climate change not only bringing higher temperatures, but change in rainfall patterns, resulting in widespread famine and malnutrition as crops wilt in parched fields and cattle perish for lack of feed and water. This is especially true of Africa’s Central Sahel (Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger), where temperatures are rising 1.5 faster than in the rest of the world. Privileged Western nations in their addiction to fossil fuels bear heavy responsibility for their plight. Unless we mend our ways, their desperation may be tomorrow’s world for our children, our spiraling heat waves and droughts the preface of things to come.


All of this isn’t unanticipated, as our sophisticated attribution science has consistently confirmed the likelihood of a warming world. It’s just that it’s happening sooner and with greater intensity than projected.

But let’s not simply blame this year’s El Niño, which does make for hotter weather. We humans have been engaged in a reckless plundering of our planet’s resources since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the late 18th century, accompanied by increasing reliance on fossil fuels, the consequence that we’re now 1.2 C warmer than in pre-industrial times.

75 percent of global greenhouse gases and 90 percent of carbon dioxide emissions come from burning fossil fuels. They trap heat and with their exponential increase now pose humanity’s greatest challenge in their dire consequences for life on earth.

Under the 2015, Paris Agreement, we’ve pledged a concerted effort to hold at 1.5 C.

That’s unlikely. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) forecasts its breach as early as 2027, despite climatologists’ warning that any rise above that level would unleash irreversible catastrophic consequences.

Meanwhile, the fossil industry yesterday released its 2022 earnings report, announcing $200b in profits, surely an obscenity, given their primary contribution to the existential crisis that confronts us.

Shell says it will issue $3b to stock investors over the next three years through stock buybacks.

ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell not only boasted record profits, but gleefully announced they’ll be rolling back earlier plans to invest in low emissions ventures. It’s follow-the-money.

Concurrently, GOP congressional members lie-in-wait to ambush existing climate change mitigation efforts, should Trump—God help us—be reelected.

It’s urgent that Biden declare a climate emergency, joining the UK, New Zealand, and Japan. There’s much we could do under such a declaration to halt the fossil industry tycoons who prioritize profit over the welfare of the human community and our beleaguered earth, but don’t bet on it.

Unfortunately, he’s initiated policies contrary to his campaign pledge to fight fossil fuel emissions, pushing new pipelines, lifting taxes on gasoline and half-emptying the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to cushion consumers at the pump, removed sanctions on American involvement in Venezuelan oil, obsequiously begged the Saudis to increase oil production, opened northern Alaska wilderness to massive oil drilling, sold oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico. All of this from a candidate pursuing the presidency, pledging to young people, “no more drilling on federal lands, period, period!”

Climate expert Peter Kalmus sums up our dilemma bluntly: “Mark my words: it’s all still just getting started. So long as we burn fossil fuels, far, far worse is on the way; and I take zero satisfaction in knowing that this will be proven right, too, with a certainty as non-negotiable and merciless as the physics behind fossil-fueled global heating. Instead, I only feel fury at those in power, and bottomless grief for all that I love. We are losing Earth on our watch. The Amazon rainforest may already be past its tipping point. Coral reefs as we know them will be gone from our planet by mid-century, and possibly much earlier given this surge in sea-surface temperatures. These are cosmic losses. And as a father, I grieve for my children.”

And I, along with many of you, grieve with him.

—rj

Mining the Ocean: The New Gold Rush

Mankind’s invasive footprint appears deplete of boundary, whether of earth, sky, or ocean depth, and not without consequences for an already shrinking biodiversity and a burning planet and, therefore, for ourselves.

Today, July 9, 2023, marks an incipient crisis for our oceans, already menaced by rising temperatures, accelerating acidity and melting glaciers, all of it human induced. Applications to mine the sea can now begin.

It all goes back to 1982 when the United Nations negotiated The Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos), mandating a vast area of the ocean, a designated 53m sq. mile coastal economic zone, be excluded from seabed mining until the adoption of a code safeguarding the environment. Meanwhile, it approved an area of 1,700,000 sq. miles (half the size of Canada) known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, for seabed mining.

To this end, the International Seabed Authority was founded in 1994, with a current 167 subscribing members along with the European Union. After 28 years of negotiating, it has been unable to agree upon a code. It administers the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.

A clause in Unclos, however, provided an escape mechanism allowing any application for seabed mining be allowed should no code be adopted. Today, that moratorium ends.

We are caught in a catch 22 dilemma, compounded by both need and greed.

We rely upon nickel, cobalt and manganese, along with lithium from land resources, to propel our wind farms and electric vehicles. Potentially, the ocean seabeds offer us tons of needed minerals.

Even if there were a code, I seriously doubt it would be meaningfully implemented and mitigate environmental degradation to sea life.

The ISA has always been poorly funded and many of its negotiators have fishery interests. It has yet to deny any application for exploration, granting 31 of them. Five of them are by China. It lacks empowerment and resources to mandate candid environmental impact appraisals, leaving that up to the corporate sector.

We need to be doubly painstaking in assessing opening up our last earthly frontier for exploitation.

As environmental writer, Guy Standing (The Blue Commons: Rescuing the Economy of the Sea), cautions, “All of us should be deeply alarmed. The environmental impact of deep-sea mining could be catastrophic. Massive machines will scour the ocean bed to pick up polymetallic nodules, destroying everything in their path and creating sediment plumes that can suffocate coral reefs and other organisms hundreds of miles from the mining site. Mining will damage the ocean’s ability to act as a carbon sink, accelerating global warming. And new research suggests the polymetallic nodules could contain radioactive substances, endangering human health cautions.”

And what about noise, vibration and light pollution, or fuel leaks and chemical spills? The list is long and the unplanned for has a way of happening.

In June, the European Academies Science Advisory Council spoke of the dismal impacting on marine ecosystems and denounced “the misleading narrative” that deep-sea mining is necessary to harvesting the metals vital to a green economy. Lithium, not a pervasive ocean element, and other minerals vital to EV technology, are presently land-based. Further, technology constantly changes.

Our oceans comprise a vast cornucopia of biodiversity yet to be discovered. Consider the recent finding of 5,000 new species living on the seabed of the Clarion-Clipperton zone, open to deep-sea mining firms.

I fear where we’re about to tread.

I fear for ourselves.

And for our oceans, from whence we come.

–rj

Electric Vehicles Aren’t the Answer

Tesla Model 3

I’ve been doing a lot of research on electric cars, now being pushed by the government to mitigate carbon discharge. As I see it, it’s a technology not ready for prime time.

Initially, you pay several thousand dollars extra to own one, pay higher car insurance, and face a limited mileage range.

Charge stations? If you can find one, a long wait, not only to recharge, but maybe just to access.

As for the environment, I think EV’s make things worse: Let me count the ways:

Ok, EV’s don’t emit carbon when they’re moving. But not so in their manufacture. It takes a lot of fossil fuel to make them and even when you’re charging them, there’s the fossil fuel powering that electric grid.

I’ll be more specific: Before you even drive off the lot, your EV has emitted 10-20 tons of carbon in its manufacture.

How ironic! A technology hyped as a breakthrough in reducing climate change acceleration actually contributes to its continuance.

Your EV battery was likely mined in a third world country, exploiting laborers paid a minuscule wage, using heavy machinery powered by fossil fuels. Then comes the shipping of materials—trucks, ships, planes. Still more trucks on arrival to get to the manufacturing plant!

Battery plants are sprouting up in GA, KS, KY, NC, OH and TN. But these plants consume acreage, much of it forest and farmland, impacting biodiversity loss or causing degradation. Inevitably, more housing development for an influx of new workers, more roads, more traffic, more strip malls and, yes, more CO2 emission.

Mind you, this isn’t happening just in the USA. American entrepreneur Elon Musk’s new gigafactory in Germany is now open for business, designed to produce Teslas and batteries in mind-boggling numbers. Presently employing 3,000 workers, that number will swell to 12,000 workers at full production. Built in the heart of a dense forest, it comes at an enormous cost to the environment, particularly for wildlife with 365 acres/160 hectares already cleared and a water conservation area confronted by potential industrial waste contamination.

This epitomizes the slip-shod attention state and local governments often give to environment impact studies, fast-tracking as in the German scenario what salivates public approval and political longevity.

But there’s a sweet spot in all of this with the incipient promise of transportation powered by hydrogen. It’s decades away for full implementation, but it’s already begun with Toyota’s 2023 Mirai that generates power by combining hydrogen with oxygen from the outside air.

You never have to charge the car. That means you don’t have to fret about accessing a charging station in that long distance trip and time lost in lengthy recharging.

It takes five minutes to fill your tank at a local gas station offering hydrogen.

They also have better driving ranges, generally around 300-400 miles to a tank of hydrogen.

Hydrogen cars are lighter and faster.

If I were an investor, I’d place my bet on hydrogen powered transportation as a viable solution to the carbon discharging menace that EV technology cannot resolve.

For sure, it’s currently prohibitively expensive, with 98% of hydrogen produced through steam methane reforming technology with its obvious carbon dioxide consequence.

But scientists are working on cutting costs and achieving versatility, not just cars, but trains and planes. As I write, news comes of the first hydrogen train in North America—Canada’s French Alstom train running from Montmorency Falls in Quebec City to Baie-Saint-Paul. Experimental, it features two railcars, carrying up to 120 passengers and uses 50 kilograms of hydrogen daily, replacing 500 liters of diesel fuel that would have otherwise been used for the two-hour route.

Imagine a train that emits only water vapor!


And hats off to Toyota again for resisting the EV wave. Its hydrogen fueled Mirai XL gets 71 mpg and sells at a starting $49,500 (within the average price ballpark for a new car). Fully fueled with hydrogen, it has a 402 mile driving range.

But like EV vehicles, it’s not ready for prime time either, a fill-up costing you $80.00 for your 5.5 kg tank.

Unfortunately, US government involvement hasn’t been there, unlike Canada and Europe.

As for ourselves, our RAV lease is up in another year and we intend to purchase it, since it’s been so reliable and has low miles. If we were opting for a new car purchase, we’d choose a hybrid plug-in as the most sensible option until the non-polluting hydrogen car becomes more cost efficient.

Long term, I’m optimistic.

–rj

John Muir: Nature’s Gifted Scribe

Sierra Club founder John Muir was extraordinary, not only for his devotion to preserving nature’s wilderness, but for his eloquence in articulating its grandeur. An example:

Wonderful how completely everything in wild nature fits into us, as if truly part and parent of us. The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love. The Song of God, sounding on forever (from John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir).

All told, he would publish 300 articles and 10 major books, not bad for someone who nearly lost his sight in a work accident.

One of his closest friends was President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1903, they would hike wilderness terrain together for two months. Inspired by Muir, Roosevelt designated 230 million acres of public land, including Yosemite and four other national parks and 18 national monuments, for preservation.

Earlier, in 1867, at age 29, Muir walked 1000 miles from Indiana to Florida, taking along only sugar and bread, buttressed by wild berries. (Muir never weighed more than 148 pounds. ) You can read an account of his journey: A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916). Excerpt:

Though alligators and snakes naturally repel us, they are no mysterious evils. They dwell happily in these flowery wilds, are part of God’s family, unfallen, un-depraved and cared for with the same species of tenderness and love as is bestowed on angels in heaven or saints on earth.

John Muir was one of those rare people that cross our pathway in life’s journey, keenly sentient of life’s best values and eager to share. Of all the nature writers I’ve imbibed, I’ve not found his equal for rendering nature’s transcendent allure with lyrical cadence that informs, moves, and underscores its mystery and  moods, culminating in an elixir for healing both body and soul.

All good nature writing may well begin with Muir.

—rj

 

 

Under Threat: Kentucky’s Bernheim Forest

I’m saddened to learn this morning that Kentucky’s privately owned and managed Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest is under threat from the Louisville Power Gas and Electric utility (LPGE) and Kentucky Utilities (KU), which want to route a gas pipeline through its largely intact woodland of 16,137 acres/6530 hectares. They argue their need to meet the growing energy demands of Bullitt County residents and are claiming eminent domain.

Like many self-interested utilities across the national landscape, they haven’t gotten the message. We don’t need more fossil fuel extraction and pipelines. What we do urgently need are renewable fuels. Unfortunately, Kentucky’s a red state, where environmentalists might as well come from Mars.

Home to 2100 species, some found nowhere else, the impact on the Bernheim Forest would menace habitat, migration routes, and streams that have enjoyed protection from its inception, bequeathed as a gift in 1929 by grateful German immigrant Isaac W. Bernheim.

The pipeline would transverse a corridor purchased in 2018 from funds provided by the Kentucky Heritage Land Conservation Fund and the US Fish and 
Wildlife Service’s Imperiled Bat Conservation Fund, with the stipulation it be preserved in perpetuity.

Located about sixty miles from our house, I’ve visited it several times in my younger years, relishing several of its more than forty miles of hiking and biking trails. I remember well its designated groves of native Kentucky flora.

Stop off at the friendly Visitor Center for maps or download them from its site: bernheim.org. I recommend the 1.5 miles as Arboretum Loop as your introduction to Bernheim, a place you can visit repeatedly, yet find something new.

For experienced hikers up to the challenge, there’s the 13.75 Millennium Trail that will you take you 6-7 hours to navigate. It’s rough, true wilderness terrain.
I had lost touch with the paradisiacal landscape, moving to New Mexico. Now I’m back, and I’ve joined its several hundred mentors in preserving its legacy.


Each day, it seems I learn of new challenges in the continuing assaults of fossil fuel and industrial interests on the environment. In Germany, despite its touted environmental safe-guards, billionaire Elon Musk has prevailed in a court decision, allowing the destruction of a remaining 205 acre forest near Berlin to build a giant Tesla factory employing 10,000 workers, despite concerns of conservationists and local residents. This comes in addition to a previous 75 acres/30 hectares of forest already cut.

Here at home, the Interior Department has singled its likely approval of the Alaska Willow Project, a ConocoPhillips endeavor to produce up to 629 million total barrels of oil over the next thirty years, equivalent to 278,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide over the project’s lifespan. (Biden had promised he’d be an environment president.) The consequences in an area warming four times faster than elsewhere will be devastating for already vanishing polar bears, caribou, walruses and an indigenous way of life.

The Bernheim Forest, in sum, is another chapter in our inveterate struggle for a green planet. Utilities need to respect wilderness preserves, not see them as green spaces to be exploited. A local court decision is anticipated by March. The case, now four years in litigation, will likely move to a higher jurisdiction regardless of the decision.

—rj

Heroes do Exist: Environment Champion, Bob Brown

Australian Bob Brown is a humble man who’s accomplished extraordinary things, not for himself, but for his fellow earthlings. His goodness makes the heart glad, inspires, and assures: that each of us, where we are, doing what we’re able, can foster needed change.

Brown had been a physician for twelve years, moving from the Sydney area to Tasmania out of love for wilderness. There, he would become active in the state’s environmental movement, subsequently founding The Wilderness Society and serving as its director for five years, a commitment leading to his giving up his medical practice.

Such dedication characterizes Brown, unstinting in his endeavors to promote a global democracy and green economy, single payer healthcare, human rights, and environmental welfare.

In 1982-3, The Wilderness Society helped organize resistance to the construction of a hydroelectric dam on the Franklin River in a large area of wilderness. 1500 showed up to blockade bulldozers. 600 were arrested, including Brown. He would spend nineteen days in prison. The good part: the day after his release, he was elected into Tasmania’s parliament.

Parliament, however, proved an unfriendly place, with only two other members voting to halt dam construction, despite 20,000 protestors on the streets of Hobart, the capital. In 1983, the issue moved to the Australian High Court, which ruled to halt the construction in a 4-3 vote.

Today, the wild river area attracts 200,000 visitors annually and has created thousands of jobs. The assertive protest efforts confirmed Brown’s belief that small, individual efforts at reform aren’t sufficient. Mass, collective protest is necessary to ward off powerful pecuniary interests.

In 1986, Brown was shot at and assaulted for protesting logging at Tasmania’s Farm House Creek.

In 1995, he was imprisoned twice for protesting logging in Tasmania’s Tarkine Wilderness.

In 2006, as a member of Tasmania’s Parliament, he initiated legal action to protect Tasmania’s Wielangta forest.

Additionally, he has authored bills advocating Death with Dignity, a nuclear free Tasmania, gay law reform, and lowering parliamentary salaries.

With the help of fellow Green members of Parliament (he was one of the Australia Green Party founders), the size of Tasmania’s Wilderness World Heritage Area has doubled to 1.4 million hectares.

In 2011, as the elected leader of the Greens, first in the world legislation was passed, mandating the reduction of greenhouse gas emission and the adoption of renewable energy resources.

In June 2912, Brown resigned from the Senate to found the Bob Brown Organization, a non-profit fund to assist Australian environmental campaigns and activists (bobbrown.org.au).

Now approaching 79, Brown is sanguine about his mortality: “I am an optimist. I’m also an opsimath. I learn as I get older. And I have never been happier in my life. Hurtling to death, I am alive and loving being Green.”

May Brown’s successful efforts kindle a fire in all of us to vehemently contest, whenever and wherever, those egocentric forces of greed that impede social equity, poverty’s elimination, a peaceful earth, and an abiding wilderness in which species achieve their destiny.

–rj

All Things are Full of God: Robinson Jeffers, Environment Poet

I’ve long revered Robinson Jeffers’ poetry, ahead of its time in addressing humanity’s pillaging of nature and its consequence.

Formerly one of our most esteemed poets, even making the cover of Time Magazine (1932), Jeffers fell out of favor with the entrance of America into WW Il. Another outplay of human interests gone amuck, he wanted no part in it. It violated his concept of “inhumanism,” the subordinating of anthropocentric interests to nature’s primacy. By 1965, much of his work was out of print.

That is no shame. Other American poets, like Dickinson and Whitman, out of joint with their times, have suffered banishment to benign forgetfulness.

As he later explained in his 1948 preface to the Double-Axe and Other Poems, “Inhumanism is the devaluation of human-centered illusions, the turning outward from man to what is boundlessly greater. The attitude is neither misanthropic nor pessimistic, nor irreligious.”

I’m not unaware that his poetry has aroused controversy with its misanthropic tenor, long narrative poems replete with violence and latent pessimism about humanity’s future.

With the 2022 UN supported IPCC study just out, conducted by more than 500 scientists from 40 countries, and running 8,000 pages, documenting climate change acceleration and biodiversity loss, Jeffers deserves the reappraisal of his poetry now underway.

Jeffers’ antipathy towards humanity is expressed in his poem, “Original Sin”:

As for me, I would rather be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man.
But we are what we are; and we might remember
Not to hate any person, for all are vicious;
And not to be astonished at any evil, all are deserved;
And not fear death: it is the only way to be cleansed

Much of his verse is rooted in Darwinian cataclysm. No Wordsworth, Jeffers wasn’t myopic about nature. He accepted its relentless tooth and claw interchange. Man, however, is the ultimate predator, which explains his hostility: “I’d sooner, except for the penalties, kill a man than a hawk” (“Hurt Hawks”).

Jeffers will not lament mankind’s ultimate passing:

I’m never sorry to think that here’s a planet
Will go on like this glen, perfectly whole and content, after mankind is
Scummed from the kettle.

Nature deserves reverence. In his poem, “Nova,” he writes,

…we know that the enormous invulnerable beauty of things
Is the face of God, to live gladly in its presence, and die without
grief or fear knowing it survives us”

In “The Answer,” he pens that

Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of
the universe. Love that, not man

Man has violated that wholeness. In “Animals,” one of my favorites, Jeffers movingly nuances man’s estrangement from his fellow creatures:

At dawn a knot of sea-lions lies off the shore In the slow swell between the rock and the cliff,
Sharp flippers lifted, or great-eyed heads, as they roll
in the sea, Bigger than draft-horses, and barking like dogs Their all-night song. It makes me wonder a little
That life near kin to human, intelligent, hot blooded, idle
and singing, can float at ease
In the ice-cold midwinter water.

Jeffers’ poetry isn’t always easy to understand. Immensely learned, he can be deeply philosophic, much of his verse influenced by his wide reading in Lucretius, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Spengler, Vico, myth and anthropology.

Gifted, Jeffers read classical Greek and Latin at age 5, and as a teen, was fluent in French, German and Italian. Along with his brother, he had been educated in private schools in Geneva, Lausanne, Zurich, and Leipzig,

Recognized for his intellectual brilliance, he was admitted to Occidental College with junior standing, though only sixteen, graduating two years later. He went on to medical and forestry schools,dropping out to pursue his love for literature.

He settled with his beloved wife, Una, in Big Sur’s rugged landscape where the Santa Lucia mountains in Monterey County rise suddenly, adjacent to the Pacific ocean and not far from Carmel, a lush landscape of small farms and virgin redwood forest. I think of it as one of the most beautiful landscapes on earth. Jeffers described it as “the noblest thing I have ever seen.”

Big Sur

Relishing its beauty and isolation, he built his own house, now open to visitors, out of stone wrestled up with his own hands from the beach below, and called it Tor House. It includes Hawk Tower, where he wrote his poems each morning by a window offering mountain vistas. From it, absent of mist, visitors can glimpse many of the 2,000 cypress and eucalyptus trees he planted and hand-watered. The grounds include a well-maintained cottage garden.

Tor House merits visiting. The docent quality may vary, but here Jeffers is rekindled, few places so associated with a writer as Tor House. George Gershwin, Martha Graham, and Langston Hughes would be among those paying homage. It’s in the dining room, laid out like an English pub, that he slipped into eternity.

Jeffers settled in Big Sur in 1914. Nearby Carmel had only 350 inhabitants.

In his forward to Selected Poetry, he relished the afforded isolation, “purged of its ephemeral accretions. Men were riding after cattle, or plowing the headland, hovered by white sea-gulls, as they have done for thousands of years, and will do for thousands of years to come.”

Jeffers inspired novelist Henry Miller to settle nearby, where he would remain until Jeffers’ death in 1962. Others, like Ken Kesey and Hunter Thompson, would follow. Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums has its partial setting in Big Sur.

Jeffers wasn’t a rabid romantic. He knew intrusion would prove inevitable, expressing his resentment in his acclaimed pastoral lyric, “Carmel Point.”

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads—
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

Poet Robert Hass deems Jeffers “the first American poet to grasp the devastating extent of the changes human technologies and populations were wreaking on the rest of the earth’s biological life” (“Introduction,” Rock and HawkA Selection of Shorter Poems by Robinson Jeffers).

Renowned physicist Freeman Dyson exclaims in The New York Review of Books that “Robinson Jeffers was no scientist, but he expressed better than any other poet the scientist’s vision. Ironic, detached, contemptuous like Einstein of national pride and cultural taboos, he stood in awe of nature alone. He stood alone in uncompromising opposition to the follies of the Second World War. His poems during those years of patriotic frenzy were unpublishable….I discovered Jeffers thirty years later, when the sadness and the passion of the war had become a distant memory. Fortunately, his works are now in print and you can read them for yourselves” (May 25, 1995).

Can I ever forget his magisterial “De Rerum Virtute,” alluding to Lucretius “De rerum natura”?

All things are full of God
Winter and summer, day and
night, war and peace are God …

One light is left us, the beauty of things
The immense beauty of the world, not the human world

Jeffers’ reputation may have suffered time’s undulations—a change in taste, or political rebuttal, or rebellion against his insistent passion and human dislike, but for environmentalists, he remains its patron saint, and I know that I, for one, adore him.

rj