Hothouse Shrub

[Guest guest]

http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2003/11/we_603_01a.html

 

November 10, 2003 Hothouse Shrub

By Tom Engelhardt

 

Curt Meine, conservation biologist, historian, and author of Aldo Leopold: His

Life and Work, suggests the following, when considering Bush's latest take on

Iraq (this arrived via a friend of mine):

 

" Just think of all the great applications of W's excellent new system of logic:

 

 

" Those budget deficits? They indicate how we're finally learning to live within

our means!

 

" Those fires in California? They show how well we are learning to live within

our ecosystems!

 

" Those 9/11 attacks? They indicate just how we have them terrorists right where

we want them!

 

" Those record temperatures and melting glaciers? They show you the progress

we're making on climate change!

 

" Those lies in high places? They tell you how healthy our democracy is! "

 

 

 

Let me just start with those melting glaciers and record temperatures, or rather

with distant Alaska, now the decomposing poster child for global warming. In my

dreams, I've probably always been a global warming sort of guy. Snow, ice,

winter, cold -- as a child, all of it made me miserable beyond words. Of course,

those were the days before anyone on earth other than the Inuit knew about

layering. Actually, those were the days when, in November, if someone in New

York City told you that the temperature was about to close in on 80 and people

would soon be walking the wintry streets in shorts, halters, and sandals as if

it were Miami Beach, you would have adjusted your muffler and laughed him out of

town. Those were the days before you could check out Glossy Ibises by taking the

subway to Jamaica Bay or catch robins landing in the distant reaches of Northern

Alaska, or for that matter watch them winter over in New Jersey. (I suppose

sooner or later we'll have to find a new marker --

perhaps the cattle egret -- for the start of spring here in what once passed

for the North.)

 

A few years back I used to joke that I was planning to buy a couple of acres out

in Jamaica Bay near Kennedy Airport, wait a decade or two and then open Club

Med-North. Now, having talked a good game but done nothing, it's probably too

late to invest. I'm sure the plans are already on the drawing board, though,

given the progress of global melting in the places where ice still exists, the

new club will probably have to be named -- in honor of what's sure to be the

worst global-warming film ever made -- Waterworld.

 

" See what you have done! " she screamed. " In a minute I shall melt away. " That,

of course, was the reaction of the Wicked Witch of the West after Dorothy threw

that bucket of water over her -- as reported by L. Frank Baum in The Wonderful

Wizard of Oz. It's a line that could easily become a bumper sticker for any

movement to slow down our passage into a globally warmed world. But what follows

would work far less well:

 

" 'Didn't you know water would be the end of me?' asked the Witch, in a wailing,

despairing voice.

 

 

" 'Of course not,' answered Dorothy; 'how should I?' "

 

 

 

Okay, so no one told Dorothy. But we're not Dorothy. For us, the news is at

hand. Yes, the reporting in this country isn't great, but Americans already

know, after some fashion, what Dorothy didn't -- that our " bucket of water, "

greenhouse gasses, will " melt " the world. But denial is a powerful thing when

ways of life are at stake. None of us should be surprised by that, nor perhaps

that at this moment we live with an administration one of whose unbridled

passions is to rip the environment and the movement to protect it to shreds. In

its pure anti-environmental oomph, the Bush administration outdoes anything

we've known in over a century. These are men and women who take pleasure in

spitting, quite literally, in the face of the obvious.

 

A recent " environmental " decision to loose rich hunters and the animal

equivalent of bounty catchers on endangered species outside American borders

captures the essence of this -- as well as the consistency of this

administration across the board, from Iraq to taxes to social services to the

environment. As the Nation's Matt Bivens put it at his blog, The Daily Outrage:

 

" Who knew that we could save endangered animal species by letting rich people

shoot them?

 

 

'Giving Americans access to endangered animals, [White House] officials said,

would both feed the gigantic US demand for live animals, skins, parts and

trophies' -- acres of glassy-eyed stuffed heads is the hallmark of any

intelligent endangered species management policy -- 'and generate profits that

would allow poor nations to pay for conservation of the remaining animals and

their habitats.'

 

The brilliant core insight here, of course, is that anything good for the

wealthy leisure class is good for all other forms of life, right down to shower

mold. Call it trickle-down environmentalism. If it benefits the rich to hunt

down furry little creatures, snap their necks and eat them, then it's also

benefits the furry little creatures, even if they are ingrates about it. "

 

 

 

At the www.commondreams.org website, Michael Winship, formerly a writer for Bill

Moyers TV show, recently pointed out that this policy proposal to fund

environmentalism in the Third World from the barrel of a gun, brought to mind

another moment:

 

" Officials maintain that the profits from allegedly limited hunts will allow

impoverished countries to pay for species and habitat protection. Doubtful at

best; logic in the manner of the Vietnam era's, 'We had to destroy the village

to save it.' "

 

 

As policy, this has all the wacky charm of John Poindexter's proposal for

setting up a speculator's " market " for betting on future assassinations,

terrorist attacks and the like. Only that was officially put into cold storage,

while this may become policy. If you want to read more about it, check out

Joanne Mariner's 'Saving Endangered Animals by Killing Them?' on Alternet. She

concludes:

 

" It is worth remembering, in closing, that the recent proposals are part of a

larger attack on the Endangered Species Act. With the administration's support,

Republicans in Congress have been seeking to amend the law in order to weaken

it. To achieve the same goal though other means, the administration has also

consistently underfunded the endangered species program, creating a work backlog

that undermines the Fish and Wildlife Service's ability to enforce the law's

requirements. "

 

 

A lonelier world? Hey, more space for gated communities.

 

I've certainly written about all this before, so consider this an update on our

overheating world. Has anyone noticed, by the way, that if you change a letter

in global warming, you get global warning?

 

Sauna world

 

Okay, I promised you Alaska first, so here goes. In the Christian Science

Monitor, Yereth Rosen recently offered a rare overall vision of how global

warming is affecting one state. Keep in mind that, here in the U.S., global

warming as a media story is almost invariably presented piecemeal, as a series

of small, discrete, scientific studies and notices, usually tucked away on the

inside pages of the newspaper. You wouldn't think that it threatens the very

organization of our world. The piece begins:

 

" Overlooking the snowcapped mountains and tidewater glaciers around Kachemak

Bay, this hamlet of fishermen, artists, and tourists seems the picture of

Alaskan charm. But beneath the scene of plenty is a landscape parched: Three hot

summers have dried local wells and forced the native village of Nanwalek to

shuttle in bottled water and ration it. Swaths of spruce forest around Homer and

the Kenai Peninsula are brown because of an unprecedented beetle infestation,

linked to the warming climate. And snow levels have diminished steadily since

1938.

 

 

While much of the world knows global warming as a phrase, Alaska's warming

climate is far more palpable… "

 

 

 

Pointing out that computer simulations of global warming indicate that its

effects will be experienced most strongly at the poles, Rosen quotes Gunter

Weller, executive director of the University of Alaska's Center for Global

Change and Arctic System Research: " We are the canary in the mine shaft. "

 

The piece then lays out the breadth of the changes in Alaska ( " rivers have

heated five degrees in 20 years, making mid-summer temperatures nearly lethal

for salmon " ) and suggests that the economic toll there should be a wake up call

for the national economy.

 

" Disruptions to oil and fishing industries would damage the nation's economy,

Dr. Weller points out, and the cost of rebuilding roads, airports and entire

towns is staggering. Still, he says, 'it hasn't been enough to convince the

political system that something has to be done.' "

 

 

As yet, however, nothing has been enough to focus American attention.

 

Meanwhile at those poles, recent reports indicate that ice is thinning, glaciers

melting. In the Arctic, according to a recent piece by Mike Toner in the Atlanta

Journal-Constitution:

 

" The ice that covers the Arctic Ocean is shrinking so swiftly that the entire

ocean could someday be ice-free during the summer months -- a transformation

that could alter everything from world shipping routes to the fate of winter

wheat crops in Kansas…. NASA satellite images show that Arctic ice has been

shrinking at the rate of nearly 10 percent a decade. During the past 35 years,

it also has thinned by more than 40 percent… 'Global warming is usually viewed

as something that's 50 or 100 years in the future,' said David Rind, of NASA's

Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. 'But we have evidence that the

climate of the Arctic is changing right now and changing rapidly. "

 

 

Despite the remoteness of the Arctic, scientists claim that warmer temperatures

there will have serious consequences for all of us. " Computer models show that

Kansas would be 10 degrees warmer during the winter -- and get 40 percent less

snow, which could make it very difficult to grow winter wheat there. "

 

The Arctic meltdown has by now formed a kind of feedback loop. The larger areas

of open water absorb yet more heat, melting ever more ice. " If the warming

continues, the scientists say, the thawing of Arctic soils could accelerate

global warming by releasing huge quantities of trapped carbon dioxide and other

greenhouse gases… "

 

In the meantime, glaciers worldwide are retreating. In gorgeous Glacier National

Park in Montana, only 26 of its 150 glaciers are left and all of them are

shrinking. According to Los Angeles Times reporter Usha Lee McFarling, Glacier's

glaciers aren't the only ones melting away:

 

" A new survey of glaciers in the Sierra Nevada shows the thick slabs of ice that

have frosted many of the state's high peaks for the last thousand years are

dramatically shrinking and, in some cases, disappearing altogether… Seven Sierra

Nevada glaciers that were surveyed and rephotographed over the summer are all

smaller than they were a century ago, said Hassan Basagic, a graduate student at

Portland State University who initiated the survey. " [Only on Mt. Shasta, for

unknown reasons, are glaciers still growing.]

 

 

In the Antarctic's southern seas, events no less startling are underway,

according to a recent piece by Tim Radford of The Guardian:

 

" A giant ice shelf the size of Scotland is melting rapidly in the Antarctic,

scientists have warned today. Two sections of the Larsen ice shelf collapsed in

1995 and 2002. Now satellite measurements have confirmed that it has thinned by

as much as 18 metres more than usual in the past decade, because of a warmer

ocean. The report comes a day after a University College London report in the

journal Nature confirmed a 40% thinning of the ice in the Arctic Ocean in the

past 30 years. "

 

 

Need I say more? And all this before the developing world even gets fully hooked

up to the process. (If you want to check out what's on its way, just look at a

recent New York Times piece by Keith Bradsher, 'China's Boom Adds to Global

Warming Problem'. If only the Times wrote full-scale pieces like this about the

U.S. and global warming.)

 

We're a down-and-dirty Dorothy who knows the score, even if our planet is no

Wicked Witch of the West. All I can say is that the Bush administration had

better direct those rich hunters northwards soon. All reports indicate that

polar bears in Alaska are ever thinner and the polar bears, walruses and seals

of the north, for all of whom ice floes and ice expanses are crucial to living

and breeding, may be in trouble.

 

Fires in California:

 

It's been all too warm in Southern California lately and, as it turns out, it's

the fault of environmentalists -- as no doubt is global warming, just as sooner

or later the already endless war in Iraq will be pinned on the antiwar movement.

As for the southern California fires, everyone knows that environmentalists

never want to trim a tree, no matter how flammable. As Paul Rogers as the San

Jose Mercury News puts it:

 

" For the past week, while Southern California has burned, environmental groups

have been pilloried on talk radio. They have received streams of angry e-mail.

Columnists have blasted them. As the story goes, tree-huggers blocked logging

projects to thin the very forests that are burning. Had they not been so

obstructionist, the fire danger would have been reduced, critics say. "

 

 

Forget that a significant part of the fuel feeding Southern California's fires

seems to have been chaparral brush (perhaps environmentalists should be renamed

" brush huggers " ) or that the Bush administration used the moment, as it so

effectively has used other crises, to get its own agenda through -- this time

via the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, which frees its logging industry

buddies to hack and hew away. Rogers reports:

 

" The reality, however, is not so straightforward. Environmental groups have

indeed appealed and sued to block forest-thinning projects on public land in the

Sierra Nevada and other fire-prone areas in the West in recent years. But U.S.

Forest Service records show that in the four national forests in Southern

California affected by this week's catastrophic fires, environmentalists have

not filed a single appeal to stop Forest Service tree-thinning projects to

reduce fire risk since 1997 -- the time period for which records are immediately

available. "

 

 

In the meantime, in addition to the brush, what burned furiously in recent weeks

were the masses of trees that had been killed by an infestation of bark beetles

not native to California, which generally only get a foothold in forests already

badly hit, as these had been, by drought. And here's the curious thing, as an

Associated Press piece in the Sacramento Bee reported:

 

" In a quiet announcement made late last week as the Southern California

wildfires had only just begun, the Bush administration turned down a

six-month-old request by Gov. Gray Davis for help in removing dead and dying

trees in the same forests now being consumed by flame.

 

 

Davis made the plea in April for a federal emergency declaration in three

counties where the bark beetle infestation had left thousands of acres of dense

woodland vulnerable to fire. If approved, the presidential proclamation would

have paved the way for millions of dollars in federal support for clearing dead

trees in San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. "

 

 

 

To bring all this back to the topic du jour, Nancy Oreskes and James Fleming,

two professors of science, write in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, 'An Ill

Wind Blows Toward an Even More Inhospitable Climate':

 

" There's more bad news for those watching the fires raging uncontrollably

through Southern California: the prediction that in the years ahead, global

warming will intensify our weather patterns, leading to an increase in the

droughts and floods to which California is naturally prone. More droughts, in

turn, will almost certainly mean more fires; more floods will mean more

mudslides. "

 

 

And in a country where environmental protection, like so much else, has fallen

out of the hands of the federal government and into the hands of states,

California's new governor is himself something like a poster boy for global

warming. After all, John Sutherland of The Guardian reports, Arnold is the man

who claims to have...

 

" ... invented the Hummer - the civilian version of the US army's Humvee armoured

personnel carrier. Or, at least, so he has claimed. 'I created that industry,'

Arnold Schwarzenegger boasts. 'I went to the Hummer factory and said we should

make this Hummer not only a military car but a civilian car.' This was during

Desert Storm. The manufacturer did what it was told. The result was the H1-SUV;

a huge success. Its successor, the H2, hit the dealerships (along with Operation

Iraqi Freedom) earlier this year. In California, 'gotta-have' purchasers stumped

up thousands of dollars to get on waiting lists. Schwarzenegger figureheaded the

H2 publicity. It was his kind of car - big, ugly, guttural. The Hulkwagen. "

 

 

I'll also recommend two longer pieces. The first, " Road to Ruin " by Matthew

Engel, also of The Guardian, is a coast to coast look at why global warming

hasn't gained greater traction as an issue here -- something frustrating to

governments in much of the rest of the world. As Engel puts it: " [T]he US is in

denial about what is, beyond any question, potentially its most dangerous enemy.

While millions of words have been written every day for the past two years about

the threat from vengeful Islamic terrorists, the threat from a vengeful Nature

has been almost wholly ignored. Yet the likelihood of multiple attacks in the

future is far more certain. " He writes of the " alarming… intellectual atmosphere

in Washington. You can attend seminars debunking scientific eco-orthodoxy almost

every week. "

 

It's a superb report on resistance to reality in our country. But no less

striking to me is the fact that the Guardian (which has also just launched a

multipart series on poverty in the United States on which more another day)

would think to send a correspondent on such a journey around the greenhouse-gas

capital of the planet and into the heart of global-warming denial and

environmental destructiveness. I doubt a major newspaper in America has run such

a sweeping piece on the subject in the last year, if ever. Certainly I haven't

seen it.

 

Secondly, I point you to 'Unified Field Theory,' a piece by journalist Mark

Hertsgaard for Grist magazine on what the Bush administration has done for the

environmental movement -- the answer: gone a long way toward unifying it. It's

well worth remembering - without being Pollyanna-ish about it - that the Bush

administration is responsible for creating a global antiwar movement and a far

more unified and driven environmental movement, just as it has created

Tomdispatch and so many other oppositional websites. It has, in a sense, called

us into being or given us a new or renewed sense of purpose - and little wonder.

It's hardly a fair trade, but there's no point in simply being gloomy about all

this. We are here.

 

Additional dispatches from Tom Engelhardt can be found throughout the week at

TomDispatch, a web log of The Nation Institute.

 

 

 

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