“The order we impose on nature is always temporary and illusory.“ - Michael Pollan, Botany of Desire

SHORT UN-EASY SOLUTIONS TO CLIMATE CHANGE -

Climate change is one of the most complex scientific problems ever---interconnected with other complex problems like a dysfunctional economic system, a dysfunctional political system, huge public debt, a corporate-financial monkey on our backs and a public with little concept of how science and logic work but looking for short, easy answers.

Well, here they are---short, anyway:

1. If you don’t know science know your scientist. Learn to differentiate independent scientists from industry mouthpieces. Learn at least enough about science to recognize when you are being grossly misinformed. Take a course in formal logic.

2. Get rid of corporate campaign finance and corporate lobbyists. Recognize that politicians beholden to corporate money are the only major candidates we can vote for in America today. Learn what “corporate personhood“ means and end it. Recognize that much of the media also serves mainly as useful idiots for corporate interests.

3. Stop dumping crap into the environment.

4. Have less kids.

5. Don’t be so damned greedy.

6. Figure out how to use all the other forms of energy available in a Universe swirling with energies.

CLARIFICATION -

In part five I did not even remotely imply that our government is being run like a corporation, as one response seemed to indicate. Rather, that our government is being run by corporations for their own benefit. If the US government were actually being run like a corporation we would all be rich stockholders instead of wallowing in public debt. Our votes might even count for something.

HOAX THIS -

How can those who didn’t understand science before now be so sure that the alleged climate-hoax is really a world-wide conspiracy? That they are not simply allowing their ignorance to be flattered because some smarty-pants scientists were humiliated?

In his review of a documentary film (“’Sea Change’ documentary visually beautiful, but intellectually fragile,” 12-12-2009), Mike Dunham of the Anchorage Daily News wonders about the absence of counterarguments to the film’s theme of ocean acidification.

“More important, while global warming is repeatedly mentioned, the movie was in the can before the recent “Climategate” scandal broke. Hence, ‘A Sea Change’ is unable to address the possibility that some of it’s assertions might rely on the meteorological equivalent of Piltdown man, which would make them as fragile as a pteropod.”

Not so fast! The enemies of science have used Climategate to alter public opinion---but there has been no effect on actual climate science data or findings. Furthermore, the Piltdown fossils have been irrelevant in evolution science for over half a century. That does, however, make the Piltdown hoax a pretty good analogy to Climategate.

The Piltdown hoax was a creationist’s wet dream; a public relations nightmare for science; but had no ultimate effect on the actual findings of the science of evolution.

Climategate is a climate denier’s wet dream; a public relations nightmare for science; but has not even rippled the ocean of data that supports climate change science.

The Piltdown hoax was a prank perpetrated in 1913 and belatedly exposed in 1953 by scientists. The real scientific crime was failing to discover the hoax for decades---but only the public image of evolution science suffered.

In Climategate there is absolutely no evidence that any data or conclusions were actually altered. However, the indiscreet statements in scientists’ Emails appeal to climate deniers---just as the scientific blunder of Piltdown still holds eternal fascination for creationists. Unscientific people continue to resurrect the Piltdown hoax as if it had actually disproved evolution science. My guess is that Climategate will also serve a similar function as a beloved icon of unscientific climate deniers.

Aside from the obvious economic interests such as energy companies, climate denial appeals to those common folk who fear their jobs, livelihoods and lifestyles will be threatened if climate change is mitigated. Playing on these fears, those special interests---who have already sent our manufacturing jobs overseas and tanked our economy---are now spreading the propaganda that we can’t afford to be dealing with climate change (and health care) because “it would hurt the economy.”

Clearly there are basic beliefs and illusions at stake as well. Climate science threatens the precepts of unregulated “free market capitalism;” the notion of unlimited consumption; cultural notions of unlimited, “God-given” resources; and the notion of American primacy/exceptionalism.

In science, illusions count for nothing. The beauty of science is that it must consider only repeated patterns of accumulated evidence while ruthlessly discarding false data. The trouble with popular understanding of science is that the general public listens to just about anything else that is constantly repeated. The following news will not change this:

Anchorage Daily News 12-13-09: “AP: Science real, but not pretty. SPIN DOCTORS? Stolen e-mails of scientists don’t prove research was faked.”

I would say these emails are disgusting rather than “not pretty.” But it’s pretty obvious there is no fake research. Even more obvious---and actually patently apparent---there is no vast conspiracy. However, as with the Piltdown hoax, the enemies of science never will never let this thing die.

Whenever the profits of commercial interests are threatened by climate (or any other) science, Republican apparatchiks are taught to mouth the nonspecific and rather pointless “talking point” of “bad science.“ Now they’ve got two one-word slogans to dazzle the yokels---“hoax” and “Climategate.” No amount of reason, logic or evidence will change unscientific minds. So be it.

THE “DANISH TEXT” LEAK - FOLLOW THE MONEY -

“Those who have the gold make the rules.”

About half the countries in the world have endorsed the 350 parts CO2 per million target for climate change mitigation. Too bad---these are the least economically-endowed countries on the Planet. They have little clout at Copenhagen or anywhere else. But these poor countries do speak for the economically underprivileged of the World.

Five countries create over half of fossil-fuel-related CO2 emissions---the US and China create more than a third. According to activist Bill McKibben, "The average American family uses more energy between the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve and dinner on Jan. 2 than the average Tanzanian family uses all year."

The U.S. has been the World's largest emitter for over a century---but China‘s increased coal use has now put them in first place. Although we are still ahead on a per-capita basis. Obviously, the major, highly industrialized nations need to take the lead in reducing emissions. Bangladesh and many island nations are pleading that the world‘s largest emitters of greenhouse substances do something now to slow down the rising of the seas.

But the wealthy, major-polluting nations have already tried to secretly rig the Copenhagen Conference. According to Guardian/UK: “Copenhagen Climate Summit in Disarray after 'Danish Text' Leak - Developing countries react furiously to leaked draft agreement that would hand more power to rich nations, sideline the UN's negotiating role and abandon the Kyoto protocol (12-8-09)” - John Vidal in Copenhagen.

Apparently, poor countries are incensed at this secret agreement to give even more power to wealthy countries and take the UN out of all future climate change negotiations.

The “Danish Text" also makes certain that per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries will remain unequal---about two to one.

The UK, US and Denmark (a group of individuals known as "the circle of commitment") were involved in cooking up the “Danish Text,“ which was shown only to a few countries after it was recently finalized.

The “Danish Text" agreement was, however, leaked to the Guardian. It goes directly against the Kyoto protocol's basic principle that those nations emitting most CO2 should be the ones to reduce greenhouse gases. The “Danish Text” draft effectively gives control of climate change finance to the World Bank; and ends the Kyoto protocol, which is the only legally binding treaty on greenhouse gas reductions. Worst of all, any climate-related aid to poor nations requires them to submit to a number of action that will put global business more firmly in control of third-world national economies.

Developing nations are said to be “furious” at the secret agreement.

EMISSIONS IS MONEY---KEEP FOLLOWING THE MONEY -

With a complex subject like climate change I am, like most non-scientists, stuck with having to accept what the scientists tell us. That is, I must take it for granted that all those many measurements of earth, ocean and atmospheric temperatures from a variety of sources have not been falsified in some vast conspiracy to create an elaborate hoax that the Planet is warming. Frankly, I have to wonder why scientists would go to the great bother of faking climate warming when they could be making much more money defending corporate polluters. In reality, a number of scientists have been making big money in the manufactured doubt campaign against climate change.

Dr. Frederick Seitz was a physicist who once chaired the National Academy of Sciences. In 1978 he went to work as a paid consultant for R.J. Reynolds tobacco company. According to a new book, Climate Cover-up, written by desmogblog.com co-founder James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore, Seitz distributed $45 million of tobacco company money to researchers who somehow (surprise!) failed to link tobacco to any Human ills or problems. Seitz himself got over $900,000 for his efforts.

Dr. Seitz later became a founder of the George C. Marshall Institute, and used his old National Academy of Sciences credentials to attack global warming science until he died in 2008. He helped institute the "Oregon Petition," with signatures of more than 34,000 scientists saying global warming is probably natural and not a crisis.

But the petition was a scam. It’s parent organization---the "Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine"---is, according to Climate Cover-up, a “farm shed outside Cave Junction, Oregon.” Of seven listed faculty members, two are dead, there is no ongoing research and there are no students. It publishes creationist-friendly homeschooler curriculums books on surviving nuclear war. The petition sent to scientists however, almost exactly resembled the prestigious journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A letter from Seitz, prominently identified as a former National Academy of Sciences president, accompanied the petition and review.

This bogus petition had no contact information on the signers. In its August 2006 issue, Scientific American described an attempt to verify the petition. It found that the “scientists” who had signed this petition mostly had undergraduate degrees and no record of research and/or climate expertise.

The National Academy stated in April 2008 that it had nothing to do with the petition and clarified its position on global warming as completely the opposite.

No one really knows how much money the fossil fuel industry has pumped into its anti-climate change campaign because the law doesn’t require disclosure. However, the website exxonsecrets.org estimates that ExxonMobil alone spent $20 million between 1998 - 2007 on the effort. An analysis done by Desmogblog's Kevin Grandia done in January 2009 found that skeptical global warming content on the web had doubled over the past year. Someone is paying for all that content.

CAP AND RAPE -

There is only one way to reduce carbon emissions---stop pumping them out. Moving “carbon credits” around the Planet is a money-making scam. Carbon taxes with no exemptions is the only way to go. Simple, direct, quick and easily-understood by the public.

In reality, carbon trading is poised to become the next economic bubble---like the subprime mortgage scandal. Traders don't even know exactly what they are selling---but the creation of a new economic “bubble” is already happening.

In the meantime, while being “reduced” on paper, emissions continue to rise. It’s all about the speculation and letting the market “play.“

Unlike a carbon tax, cap and trade can be easily manipulated by private industry. This new economic bubble resembles the commodities market---it’s another shot at making big profits for firms like Goldman Sachs. It’s business first, Planet last.

Here’s how carbon credits work. Basically, if coal-fired plants, utilities and natural gas outfits exceed their limits for emissions they can buy "allocations" or credits from those that produce fewer emissions. Carbon trading requires facilities to reduce their emissions until they meet a certain level ("declining cap"). But the "trading" part allows those facilities who cannot or will not reduce emissions to buy pollution permits from other facilities that have reduced emissions.

Under current proposed legislation, the Obama Administration estimates around $646 billion worth of carbon credits to be auctioned in the first seven years---although one of his top economic aides thinks the real number could be two or three times that amount.

The plan now being considered is made to order for speculators because, as the carbon "cap" becomes incrementally lower, the carbon credits will become more scarce and the prices will be driven up. This is a brand new commodities market toy where the main “commodity” to be traded is a sure bet to rise in value. The volume of this new market will be over a trillion dollars annually. In comparison, the annual combined revenues of all electricity suppliers in the U.S. totals $320 billion.

Goldman Sachs has been pushing hard for carbon trading because it will be a money-maker for them. The polluting industries don’t mind carbon trading since it will be traded by our intrepid financial system and the government will have a hard time enforcing the rules anyway. It’s all “trade” and no “cap.” In other words, carbon doesn’t get reduced, only moved around. A carbon fee system with rebates would work better.

In the carbon trading system being considered in the US, facilities can meet their obligation not only by buying permits from other facilities, but by buying “carbon offsets.” The bill in Congress authorizes more than two billion tons of offsets per year---enough to cover all required reductions for almost twenty years. The worst polluting companies in America can pollute as long as they can get away with it---then plant a few trees as an “offset” and call it good.

Politicians are hopeless in this situation because they treat climate change like any other political problem where they just split the difference to reduce political pressure for a while. Politically “cutting the baby in half” is the Obama way---same as with health care. Unfortunately, the climate foe is relentless---nothing like any political problem we’ve ever faced before. Now we need to go all out to change the industrial base of the country, put other needs on hold and make sacrifices---good luck with that.

There will be an “agreement” in Copenhagen. Obama is jetting in for the end of the meeting. Some politicians and environmentalists may call it somewhat of a "success." There will be a call for future negotiations. Meanwhile, the physics of climate change will continue to operate, permafrost will continue to thaw, sea ice to melt, drought to spread. And we are facing this with halfway measures---just like any other political problem.

EVIDENT REALITY---THE ONGOING CLIMATE PROBLEM -

The problem with Humans extracting and redistributing masses of noxious material is that they are using Planet Earth as a heat sink and a sewer. Simply stated, because of the sheer mass of ocean, atmosphere and land involved, once things begin warming and once things become poisoned, it is difficult to turn things around. To clean things up.

Climate science is based on the direct observation of Nature---the scientific evidence for Global Warming just keeps pouring in.

“Climate change picking up speed,” says an article in The Anchorage Daily News 11-23-09.

“Since the 1997 international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated---beyond some of the grimmest of warnings made back then.”

It’s not just the “frozen parts of the world” but the rising levels of oceans, the droughts, the wildfires, the decline of species, the rise in temperatures.

“’The latest science is telling us we are in more trouble than we thought,’ said Janos Pasztor, climate advisor to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.”

HUMAN CAUSES -

Taking into account every variable of minimum and maximum warming and cooling periods in the past, every glacial and inter-glacial period, everything we know about climate---even then, the current “hockey stick” shaped rise in modern global temperature is unprecedented. Factoring in all the known natural causes into climate models does not explain the current rise of temperatures---only when recent increases in Human levels of emissions are factored in do the climate models reflect the unprecedented rise in warming.

Uncertainty among scientists is not disagreement. Climate scientists don’t know exactly how much or how fast the Planet is warming but they agree it is happening.

MELTING ICE AND OTHER SIGNS -

The clearest indicator of a warming Planet is melting ice and rising sea levels (“Hawaii‘s beaches shrinking, Anchorage Daily News, 11-15-09).

Certainly climate change cannot be blamed for every freak act of weather. But for me the factor most indicative of climate warming is the consistent melting of arctic ice. It forms later and melts earlier than in the past---and it is the absence of ice along the shores that allows winter storms to erode coastlines and flood Alaska villages.

Anchorage Daily News, 11-12-09: “The blizzards hit coastal communities as sea ice is only beginning to form, leaving village buildings without a natural buffer against waves and hunks of ice, according to the Weather Service.”

In Stebbins, an Alaska coastal village resident comments on storm flooding of his village: “In the past, in November, our ocean ice was frozen. Now it’s not,” he said, blaming climate change for the late-forming of ice.

CARIBOU, MOUNTAIN ROCK PTARMIGAN AND BOREAL FORESTS -

Until late in October this year I noticed Rock Mountain Ptarmigan here in South Central Alaska standing out against dark mountains where the early snows had melted away. The mountain ptarmigan had turned white too soon in the season and had became vulnerable to predators for about a month.

According to “Caribou crash,” Anchorage Daily News, 10-11-09:

“Unusual freezing rains in autumn are locking lichen, the caribou’s winter forage, under impenetrable ice sheets.”

Also: “…pregnant migrating cows may now be arriving too late” to catch the “earlier greening” when shrubs on calving grounds are at their most nutritious.

These things have occasionally happened before---I can’t say these events are all caused by climate change but now such occurrences are a trend.

Another area of great concern is the clearing of boreal forests in northern areas across the Planet. According to a column in The Boston Globe, “Under the Icy North Lurks a ‘Carbon Bomb’ - Tropical deforestation is a climate change crisis, but scientists fear for boreal wilderness, too” - Beth Daley

“Carbon that those forests absorbed from the air over thousands of years is stored in the peat and suspended in waterlogged bogs or permafrost. When it is disturbed or drained - as is happening in some areas - the peat can start to decompose and dry out, unleashing greenhouse gases. In North America alone, the peat and the trees growing in it hold as much carbon as would be emitted worldwide by 26 years of burning fossil fuels at current rates.

"‘It's like a great big stew of carbon percolating away for centuries,‘ said Janet Sumner, executive director of the Wildlands League in Ontario, a conservation group pushing to preserve the northern, or boreal, forests from development. "If we don't protect the boreal, it will mean more emissions and climate change.''

“The pace of boreal deforestation from mining, dams, oil and gas drilling, and road building is glacial compared with the destruction of tropical forests. Still, scientists say development is beginning to accelerate and it needs protection before warming temperatures lure even more industries north.”

WHAT TO DO -

Obviously, the solution to climate change---and to our declining fossil fuels---is some combination of so-called “alternative energy.” This is a new field with new challenges. For instance, I have learned that wind-speed averages are far more difficult to determine than temperature averages---and records of prevailing wind speeds have only recently been kept. Large cities apparently affect wind currents in their areas in unpredictable ways.

I leave it to others---or myself in the future---to address the forms and implementation of alternative energy solutions. Whoever leads climate change technology will lead (and profit) in the future. Here in Alaska we have an active group: Renewable Energy Alaska Project, 308 G Street, Suite 207, Anchorage, AK 9501 - info@realaska.org / http://www.realaska.org.

These activists, like Bill McKibben, embrace civility and nonviolence. Protesters in Washington last March were enjoined to arrive "in their Sunday best."

"If we are going to use civil disobedience we need to reclaim it from people who enjoy taunting the police and showing off," said Bill McKibben.

If the Human Race doesn’t blow itself off the face of the Earth---and if the Human Race doesn’t destroy the viability of the Planet for Human Life---then we will no doubt see new technologies that do not spew harmful emissions into the environment.

If, however, we fight like drug gangs over the last remnants of fossil fuels, we will probably destroy ourselves.

Perhaps the right-field factor will save us. On
Charlie Rose, Al Gore stated that the Christian coalition is starting to support climate mitigation. Maybe Christ doesn’t really want us to destroy the Planet in order to make him come back. Maybe some scientist who happens to be acceptably Christian will catch on with religion and champion the cause for mitigating global warming.

MASCOT WITH SLOGAN -

How about a cute little lizard with an Aussie accent?

“Antipollution Pig.”

“Clarabelle the Climate Control Caribou.”

COST OF MITIGATION

We have pissed away so much money in the useless destruction of war; the gross accumulation and concentration of wealth; the bailout of big money interests; and the wasteful consumption of valuable resources with dirty consequences that we are now effectively broke.

The “fiscal conservatives” never realistically considered the costs of those destructive, disruptive, and morally-draining resource-wars in the Middle East. To this day there is no meaningful discussion about the cost of sending more troops to Afghanistan (about a million bucks a year per soldier---plus the uncounted costs of about an eventual 100,000 “contractors“). And yet, spending for the security of the Planet brings terrible complaints that we can’t afford to do anything about the global climate breakdown that we undoubtedly helped to bring about in the first place. “It would hurt the economy.” Not as much as the neoconservative warlords or banksters have already “hurt the economy.”

Disregarding the cost of the Human slaughter, the cost of mitigating global climate breakdown would be about the cost of a few resource wars like the one we just took eight years to temporarily tamp down in Iraq. Climate mitigation certainly wouldn’t cost as much as it did to bail out our “free market” financial system. You know, the one where the money boys are “free” to control the “markets” and make all the money they can grab while knowing that, if they screw up, the government will bail them out.

“Cash for clunkers” was an expensive exercise in stimulating the automobile industry. What it did for the environment I am not sure. Vehicles getting a typical 15.8 mpg were destroyed in exchange for vehicles with a typical 24.9 mpg. So, for a measly ten miles per gallon we crushed perfectly good vehicles---and they haven’t all been crushed yet, either. Some, I hear, are being exported to foreign countries where they will sell as luxury rides. Hell, I wouldn’t mind having one of those “clunkers“ myself---my truck was too old to qualify for the program. So, vehicles better than what I’m driving are being crushed and paid for by the government. That’s stupid climate policy! Better just to tax carbon outright and be done with it. Then let those precious “market forces” rule.

SUSTAINABLE -

The new paradigm for ceasing to dump great amounts of concentrated crap into the environment and living within our means is called “a sustainable future.” See the November 2009 Scientific American for “A Plan for a Sustainable Future. How to get all energy from wind, water and solar power by 2030.” It describes new electrical storage devices and hydroponics greenhouses that could be built in stacked layers in skyscrapers with great savings of arable lands and greater efficiency of production. Also, carbon can be sequestered in agricultural fields making them more productive.

The US is ahead in research and development---but behind in manufacturing. Right now, most renewable energy components are being made and utilized overseas.

Denmark is going all out to convert to electric cars---with a complete system for exchanging batteries when they are drained. The consumers buy the cars but the batteries are owned by a consortium which services and recharges them. There is a heavy tax on gas and gaseous vehicles---of course it costs money.

The largest oil fields are declining three times faster than predicted because nations are not being honest (see PEAK OIL AND EMPIRES OF ILLUSION in part five this series). At some point the price of oil will overcome renewable energy if we sincerely start the shift now.

China and India have even greater alternative energy opportunities because they are still creating infrastructure.

SUN -

Each day, the sun bombards our planet with 9,000 times more power than we need to run every car, warm every home, and power every electrical appliance on earth. There is actual weight to the sun’s rays---about a quarter-pound per square mile. If we can grab just a percentage of one per cent we can get off fossil fuels. The technology exists.

Professor Anthony Patt has calculated that all of Europe’s energy needs could be provided by lining 0.3 per cent of the Sahara desert (an area about the size of Belgium) with solar power technology. Some of Germany's leading corporations are ready to do the job. All they need is the money. Up front costs are about $50 billion---that’s just a fraction of what the US is now blowing on it’s hopeless military quest to gain control over the last drops of oil in the farthest reaches of the Planet.

The US could meet all it’s energy needs by covering 200 square kilometers of deserts with solar plants at a cost of about 10 years' worth of oil---less the immoral wars, the tyrannical governments we support in oil-bearing lands, or the blowback Islamism we seem to fear so much. Face it: terrorist movements invariably begin in oil-bearing regions where we have been mucking around for decades and propping up despotic governments with money and arms to beat down their own populations.

We beat the Nazis and sent men to the Moon. Are we going to be the Great Generation that pulled the Planet back from the Great Meltdown? Will we leave a sustainable system that will operate for millennia? Or will we become toast?

The research and development is happening now---but we have lost the ability to make things. But what we also need to develop are new variations or refinements of the psychological, social, economic, political and cultural systems that foster the wasteful use of resources.

VANDALS INSIDE THE GATES ARE SQUEEZING OUT A FEW MORE YEARS -

Humanity is at one of those crossroads of history---one of those moments of decision. It’s not only about climate change---it’s about the nature and fate of the Human condition.

I believe most people can sense a momentous feeling but don’t quite know what to make of it. Powerful economic, political and cultural forces---the ones that already dictate our lives---just want to keep on barreling down that same highway. Those corporate globalists just love the concept of redistribution of wealth---as long as it keeps flowing inexorably their way---and they will do just about anything to keep the money train running.

Here in the U.S. I sense that many ordinary folks are also just hoping to squeeze a few more years of relatively easy living out of the Planet and at the expense of other people living on it. They still haven‘t figured out that all this cheap junk from China and cheap food from other countries has been brought to them as a profitable but barely token courtesy by the predatory global corporatists. The future of the short-sighted leads only to next week.

There are ominous tremors emanating from the economy---felt by even the most desensitized of souls. There are pounding sounds of heavy munitions exploding in the Middle East. But the patter of partisan pandering purrs from our politicians. Soon there will be more people in the streets of America---both forced to live there as well as protesting there.

The vandals are not the protesters in Copenhagen---the vandals are inside Bella Center. Where street protestors smash a few shop windows, corporate violence smashes the environment in which we all live. Corporate violence destroys countries---by force of arms, economic hit-men and force of climate change unleashed.

The net result of the Copenhagen Climate Conference will be a gain in greenhouse gas emissions---the polluting-industry lobbyists and their political stooges in the major-polluting nations have already seen to that. Their violence is corporate violence---the violence of the State. Their political violence is cousin to their military violence---stand-off violence using the latest in modern killing technology so the blood spatter doesn’t land where it would show on the good citizens of the Empire.

The decision now is not between neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism---these are already politically indistinguishable from each other---but between those who would trash the World and those who wish to continue until every last drop of oil, every last lump of coal, every last whiff of natural gas and every last stick of wood has been burned.

Physically, intellectually and spiritually softened by easy living, the developed World now faces a primal test. This is a matter of survival. We cannot continue to disregard Nature without suffering the consequences. We have the fantasies of bold pioneers but have become a race of button-pushers. We claim to have the souls of saints but lead lives of exploitation. It’s easier to be compassionate when the economy is going well---but now comes the real test.

The top exploiters know the game is up---their only wish is to prolong the ecstasy of exploitation. They strike out wildly at all who would dare speak the unmentionable: The Game is over---we need to change our ways! The delegates at Copenhagen will most likely double-cross us all by speaking of new frontiers but will whimper like whipped dogs before their corporate masters.

The roller coaster has already topped the rise and is now headed downhill. The crossroads coming up is more like a road ending at a cliff. A Smooth descent and a gentle landing is our only best choice now.

THE WAY WE LOOK AT LIFE -

We humans are inextricably intertwined with the natural world---Nature. And yet, most modern, civilized humans expend a good deal of physical, intellectual and spiritual energy to deny that inherent fact. This is famously incorporated in the various sayings about “controlling” or “dominating” Nature. Establishing “dominion” over Nature. Walter Hickel‘s infamous “We can’t let Nature run wild.”

I presume we Humanoids became cocky when we first began walking upright and developed the ability to think symbolically, to use our minds to adapt to harsh conditions, and to kill off animals bigger than we are. Today more than ever we tend to believe that our unique intellect and awareness makes us fundamentally different from all other sentient creatures. What we have really lost is our awareness of the ways that Humans are similar to all other living things in our mutual dependence on a healthy environment.

FUTURE AWARENESS LOST -

“Lose the present---lose the future.”

Not all Humans lost track of where they had come from (see “…rise of agriculture and the city-states” in part one this series). Modern, “civilized” cultures have overwhelmed those indigenous cultures who had retained continuous, conscious awareness of Human connections to the natural world.

For some cultures, thinking ahead is still considered the highest development of a civilization. The Great Law of the Iroquois League imposes a duty upon leaders to "have always in view not only the present, but also the coming generations…the unborn of the future Nation." Signers of the U.S. Constitution such as Ben Franklin are thought to have borrowed a number of ideas from the Iroquois League. George Washington and many others knew the tribes of the Iroquois League well. These indigenous nations are still around, by the way.

The Iroquois tradition is to consider the impact of decisions on the next seven generations. Today we tend to think ahead only to the next quarterly report…the next election. The financial industry that has caused our economic breakdown uses algorithms that barely think seven business seconds ahead as they program computers to scavenge fractions of pennies from overnight transactions instead of taking long range impacts into account. While Iroquois tribal decisions were made with the wellbeing of seven future generations in mind, computers today calculate interest on money that changed hands just seconds ago. Immediate and instant profit drives our culture. The stakeholders and shareholders must be paid off---but even they get screwed by the top executives who are paid even if they fail.

INDIGENOUS---A NEW WAY OF SEEING

Some civilizations live more gracefully than others. My wonderful Hopi friends of Northern Arizona believed that those great strip-mining coal operations in the Black Mesa area of Northern Arizona were akin to ripping open the belly of our Mother---not just their Mother but our Mother.

How quaint. How colorful these Native Americans and their idea that the Earth responds to our gross activities as if we were part of a functioning system---that the entire Earth is an ecosystem in the full meaning of the term. That’s what the GAIA theory is all about---organisms giving off gases and living on a Planet that responds as if we were part of a larger organism. The Earth responds to us---perhaps not consciously like some personality but most certainly in scientific terms of cause and effect.

Four-hundred years ago the fabulous Kogi Indians of Columbia, South America successfully fled the Spanish and isolated themselves from all civilization in a true mountain fastness. Occasionally they would slip down to the sea to make their pilgrimages. As these “Elder Brothers” of the human race observed the antics of civilization they concluded that the “Younger Brothers“ would soon destroy the balance of life on Earth. When their life-giving mountain snows began to dwindle, the Kogis’ worst fears were realized. They tried to warn us, as shown in decades old documentaries. Obviously their warnings went unheeded---what in blazes could a bunch of Indians know about the consequences to the Planet of our “advanced” civilization? Apparently a great deal.

But the tribes of the “Younger Brothers” learned nothing from indigenous peoples. Their ways of thinking were too “primitive” to us. For instance, the Kogi strung droplets of gold from trees so they could be seen sparkling in the sun as the people went up and down mountain pathways to their gardens. Obviously, they have no “sense of value.“

We of the civilized races cruelly abuse the land itself, the Planet, the Earth, the Air, the Sky, the Water and all that live here. That’s what this global climate breakdown-warming thing is all about. We are now living in the period of the sixth greatest mass extinction in the history of this Planet. And now the hot breath of planetary warming is touching the hairs on the backs of our necks.

[Of course I am aware of the cruelties of the Chinese in their use of imprisoned and starved Tibetans as slave labor---and the harsh exploitation of their own people.] But read Bill Sherwonit‘s archived “The Horrors of Chinese Fur Farms, Crush Videos, Factory Farming, and Aerial Wolf Kills“ (Alaska Voices blog - 10-9-2009). Few others even dare talk about our casual cruelties and the fact that all of us who use or profit from cheap Chinese goods have the blood of those quivering, skinned-alive fox pups on our hands and the hopeless look of their dying eyes in our dreams.

Metaphorically-speaking, the Earth may also be looking up with it’s tortured eyes---but the Earth is no helpless fox pup being skinned alive to make the hide come off easier and more cleanly for the fur trade. The Earth is the back of the Beast upon which we all live, and when she quivers and goes into spasms we all get tossed around.

THE END