Be Thankful For What You’ve Got 28 November 2006

“Three small children were thrown into flaming huts and burned alive.”

I know you already know about what is happening in Sudan and Chad, but don’t forget to REMIND YOURSELF EVERY DAY as it’s too easy to forget about it in the rush and the push of our lives.

TODAY’S CHICAGO TRIBUNE ARTICLE ON DARFUR/CHAD CURRENT SITUATION

This isn’t the past. This is the now. As you read this, unimaginable horrors are happening. These horrors can and will get worse - despite millions of Westerners who watched “Hotel Rwanda” and naively vowed to themselves ‘never again!’

Ideally, our combined efforts to create a sustainable world economy will reduce the likelihood of such bloodshed, as resource scarcity will be lessened, but it’s going to take some time to get there. In the meantime, in between time, these people need our help. This isn’t an emotional or righteous lecture–there are many sources for both–just my small reminder to anyone who reads this: Be very, very, very thankful for what you’ve got.

100,000 CALLS TO NANCY PELOSI! 13 November 2006

Something the “green” blogosphere has been somewhat quiet about, so far, is the elevation of Democrat Nancy Pelosi to House Leader. Lost among the joyous cries of “WE WON!” is the vital question of “What next?”

I urge you to immediately contact Pelosi at her D.C. office and relay your concerns that among her post-victory speeches, outlines and promises, environmental issues have barely registered. In her “Six for ‘06″ platform, the only mention of the environment comes with a vague promise to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil. A quick perusal of Pelosi’s HouseDemocrats.gov website shows only a very topical treatment of environmental issues - this should be startling to those of you who expect the Democrats to push for significantly more action on climate change. Remember, Clinton/Gore kept the U.S. out of the Kyoto Treaty - their constituency never pushed them hard enough to do anything else. That was then, this is now. Let us do better this time!

To her credit, Pelosi does seem to be educated and aware of the need for the rapid enactment of legislation that will bolster pro-environment and climate change progress. However, her recently polled constituency does not rate either of these items among their top ten pressing issues. We can change this by being very vocal, by making sure everyone we know contacts Pelosi in short order. If we can drive WorldChanging’s book to the top slot at Amazon, can we not deliver a strong message to Nancy Pelosi? I understand the need to better educate the choir, but should we not be pushing as well on our legislative agenda? We can start with tax shifting as outlined by Lester Brown and Geoffrey Sachs (click me), perhaps the most important and fundamental step. From there, the rest will be rather apparent.

Let’s get 100,000 ‘contacts’ to Nancy Pelosi’s office by the end of December.
It’s even easier than shopping at Whole Foods - just call the number below or copy and paste the email address. Thirty seconds of your time, at most. And DO NOT FORGET TO PASS IT ON! If you have connections to a wide mailing list/popular website and can turn this thing into a grassroots wildfire, please do!

Nancy Pelosi can be reached at (202) 225-4965. Email = americanvoices@mail.house.gov

On Being a Dad: Part One 9 November 2006

For a change of pace, I’m going to steer away from eco-talk. This is a good thing, as doing so typically gets my blood boiling. Believe me, I bite my tongue, watching as I do a significant portion of the environmental movement calcify and fragment before my very eyes. I still hope for strong, visionary unifying leadership, but as it has yet to manifest I wonder how much longer the world can hold out.

Instead, I’ll talk to my small but growing readership (thanks to you who are spreading the word!) about something that has been on my mind of late. Namely, the fact that my friends seem to include me in their revelry less and less as time goes by. Certainly, some of you know what I’m talking about? The whole “friends w/out kids have a hard time relating to friends w/kids” situation. Most of my friends, for various reasons, never reproduced and/or have no plans to breed. I salute and respect this adherence to the ZPG-agenda. However, I’m finally realizing that it could well be that, as young Justice Masaru North Brilliant (pictured) develops into an independent entity (we celebrated his fourth birthday on 25. October), presenting unique and consuming parental challenges (as opposed to the simple feed and wipe duties of his earlier years), my friends are increasingly less regular with their profferings of routine social invitations.

Granted, it could be that they tire of my “Justice and I are in for the night. Why don’t you come over … we can hang out and talk” line, as they typically prefer to hang out at venues where talking is nigh impossible either due to volume or distraction (but, to be fair, the food is usually amazing). Fair enough, I suppose. But how many years must one advance before one’s peer group is content with more subdued associations? Is it such a struggle to engage in genuine discourse with a four-year-old’s unceasing stream of questions and toys in ear and under foot?
I’m old enough to understand that the world, due to genetic imperatives, revolves around fucking and fighting (i.e. the local bar). But wouldn’t it be nice to soften this double helix choke hold by spending more time remembering who we were? I maintain the best way to do this is by spending more time with our replacements, the next generation. Some people may not feel entirely comfortable spending time with children, but I think that in denying themselves this pleasure they’re missing out on more than they realize.

Any other parents out there relate?

Sustainable Development My Arse! 6 November 2006

This article set me off a bit: GAIA HOTEL IN NAPA VALLEY GETS LEED CERTIFICATION. The eco-community seems to be celebrating an unnecessary luxury hotel built in the center of Napa Valley (more or less where I live). Replete with LCD flat screen TVs in every room, plush lawns and koi ponds (water waste, maybe?), this new hotel is about as much a boon to Gaia as a brand new oil rig. Why are we celebrating “sustainable” development? If a building is LEED certified, the eco-blogosphere goes gaga - there is little questioning of the need for the new building in the first place. In fact, in some ways the LEED system merely empowers developers to develop virgin lands as they know environmentalists are going to go easy on proposed LEED buildings.

In short, it can be argued that there is no such thing as sustainable development. As James Lovelock puts it in The Revenge of Gaia, “Two hundred years ago, when change was slow or non-existent, we might have had time to establish sustainable development . . . but now is much too late; the damage has already been done. To expect sustainable development to be a viable policy is like expecting a lung cancer victim to be cured by stopping smoking and to deny the existence of the Earth’s disease, the fever brought on by a plague of people.”

Sustainable redevelopment is our only hope. The shrinking of cities, the rebuilding in denser, more compact fashions of our living spaces, the adoption not of more efficient (some of you are familiar with what William McDonough has to say about efficiency) automobiles, but of cities that do not require cars in the first place - this is what must happen. I know, it sounds radical, but to think that anything less than radical measures are going to save our species and the globe is to deny all reports of the coming calamities. For more on sustainable redevelopment, check out Richard Register’s Ecocities. It’s not rocket science, nor difficult - we can transition our cities in no time, really.

We aren’t going to get out of this by buying clothes at the Gap or phones from Motorola. Nor are we going to escape our fate by patting each other on the back for our booming eco-friendly business model. The Earth’s ice caps could give a penguin’s ass about how many hits a given “sustainable” website is getting or how that is driving ad revenue through the roof. Or haven’t you heard? The Earth is still heating up despite the LEED-certified hotels, the green arm bands, the organic mac & cheese and the hybrid Honda Accord. Go figure! Real solutions? I don’t see them talked about nearly often enough. Individuals like Monbiot and Lovelock are immediately cast out, even in the green community, as alarmist and shrill. Well guess what folks? The sky really is falling.

On a positive note, I did see THIS ARTICLE today on Treehugger (the best of the online ecosphere, hands down) in which Lester Brown outlines what we need to do, but it passed by nearly without comment. Lester Brown knows what needs to be done and urges us to act at wartime speed. I hope we start listening to him. We can’t wait any longer.

Technorati Tags: gaia hotel, george monbiot, james lovelock, leed, lester brown, sustainable development, treehugger, william mcdonough, richard register

DOW CHEMICAL = SUPER GREEN! 2 November 2006

If you aren’t familiar with Dow Chemicals’ history of environmental and human catastrophe, perhaps this may not resonate with you. Personally, I find the following Time Magazine interview with Dow’s CEO, Andrew “Darth” Liveris (pictured), absolutely incredible. Bravo to Time’s Wendy Cole for setting this bastard up so neatly. My favorite excerpts:

TIME: You’re eager to shed Dow’s longtime image as an environmental pillager. How can you reclaim credibility?

ATTILA: A vocal minority believes that we’re bad guys and all we do is pollute. That’s totally inaccurate. Dow Chemical in the last two decades has been a leader in sustainability. I make the case that if Dow weren’t around, clean water would be an impossibility.

TIME: Yet isn’t Dow still dealing with litigation related to its use of dioxin?

POL POT: The legacy issue of dioxin is 80 years old. Eighty years ago, standards were very different than those today. There were no notions of pollution. Smokestacks were everywhere. Look at the steel industry, the car industry. We had to be there to get to here–all of us as a society. There’s a framework under which this can be remediated and repaired. We don’t need anyone’s involvement other than the people who’ve been trespassed on.

TIME: Dow is an enormous energy user. Why hasn’t the development of alternative sources become a priority?

NERO: There’s a lot of noise about wind, solar and ethanol. We’re working on these too, but they won’t be ready to meet escalating global demands. Eighty percent of what we use today is fossil fuels; 80% of what we’ll use 20 years from now is fossil fuels. The carbon molecule and combusting it is the only way we’ve figured out to economically move people and generate power. Diversity of supply is the answer. That means nuclear energy and investing in clean coal technology.

TIME: Have you personally sought out ways to conserve energy?

CALIGULA: We’ve built a new home with what I call space management, so we don’t heat or cool all the house at once. I want to buy a hybrid, but a U.S. company doesn’t make one I want. I’m driving a GM car, so I’ve got lots of pressure on Mr. [Rick] Wagoner [GM’s CEO] to develop a hybrid for me. For now, I’m driving a fuel-efficient Caddy.

Chief Seattle Speech 1 November 2006

Every now and again, I very much enjoy revisiting Chief Seattle’s extraordinary speech given in 1854. I’ve excerpted a small portion - if you’d like to read the speech in its entirety (rather brief), THIS LINK will take you to it.

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Your dead cease to love you and the land of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb and wander away beyond the stars. They are soon forgotten and never return. Our dead never forget this beautiful world that gave them being. They still love its verdant valleys, its murmuring rivers, its magnificent mountains, sequestered vales and verdant lined lakes and bays, and ever yearn in tender fond affection over the lonely hearted living, and often return from the happy hunting ground to visit, guide, console, and comfort them.

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