“You can never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change things you have to build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete .” -Buckminster Fuller
BETTER AND BETTER
Part II
by
William Thomas
“Is our situation hopeless? Is pollution so widespread, human population so large, and ecological destruction so advanced that we cannot salvage planet earth?” asks Peter Montague at Rachel's Weekly online. Not at all, insists Barry Commoner. In Making Peace With The Planet, Commoner instead of more grand technological “fixes” that so often spawn more unforeseen problems than they address, this author and biologist calls for an adjustment in our priorities and perceptions.
In the midst of raging cancer and immune-failure epidemics, the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment estimates that by paying off politicians supposedly elected to serve us, corporations are still allowed to dump nearly 400 billion pounds of toxic chemicals into American soil, air and water every year. Of these mutually-amplifying mutagens, 99% are not recaptured or removed. Commoner makes the common sense argument that if pollution is too expensive to control, the only way to avoid its generational DNA damage is to avoid creating it in the first place. As he puts it, "If you don't put something into the environment, it isn't there.”
“Grass-roots environmentalists want pollution avoided, prevented, stopped. They do not want their children slightly poisoned or a little poisoned. They simply do not want their children poisoned, period,” Montague observes. Which is why, "it is the grass-roots organizations that are now at the cutting edge of the public movement to end the environmental crisis."
So one good idea is to nurture your local grass-roots organizations with your personal contributions of time, money and expertise. (Donating to your favorite independent websites is equally effective and appreciated, too.)
Commoner also points out that it is not sheer numbers, but the amplification of human impacts through our technologies that threaten our planet's ability to sustain life. “Ecologically sound alternative technologies already exist in most cases,” Montague paraphrases the author. “Successful, non-chemical agricultural techniques exist; affordable ways to harness solar energy exist; low-pollution transportation systems exist; modern chemical technologies almost all represent substitutes for earlier, less-polluting technologies.”
A new day will dawn when we start choosing appropriate, smaller-scale technologies that further life-enhancing goals ahead of the monetary aspirations of individuals and corporations.
How will we pay for all this?
Easy.
Cut military spending.
In half.
Everywhere.
Now.
LESS BANG FOR OUR BUCKS?
The single glaring flaw in Michael Moore's superlative movie “Sicko” is that filmmaker's failure to point out that every country he points to where comprehensive health care is provided at no charge has a small military in comparison to its GDP. And no aspirations toward world conquest.
Could there be a connection between 50 million Americans with zero health care coverage and three million Americans homeless on the streets - and a U.S. military-industrial-entertainment complex addicted to war and trillions of taxpayer dollars wasted on amassing more destructive weaponry than all other nations combined?
Again and again, Moore asks the smiling citizens of Canada, Cuba, France, Britain and Norway - how can you pay for all this free health care? One big answer he shows is that no advanced nation except the United States has perverted the rights of health care into a for-profit illness industry. The other big answer he neglects to include in his film is that by buying or replacing their oil with other forms of energy, none of these much happier, more confident and compassionate countries is blowing two billion dollars every week blowing up another nation to steal its oil at gunpoint.
Peace profits everyone, while war derails social and environmental progress and benefits only a few. As Peter Montague notes, “The most productive economy in the world is that of Japan, where military expenditures are 1% of gross national product or less; in the U.S., we spend 7% of GNP on the military. Japan uses 30% of its GNP as business investment capital; the U.S. uses only 16% of GNP that way. Reducing the military budget will free up needed capital for the necessary transformation of the U.S. industrial base.”
[Rachel's' Weekly Aug 29/90]Cutting increasingly privatized arms and surveillance budgets is essential to ensure true security in the face of the world's biggest and most imminent threat. As peace-faster Ted Glick points out, the Peace and Climate movements must continue coming together under a “No War, No Warming” banner.
“There's a big tactical question we are facing due to the failure of the Democratic-led Congress to so far do anything of real substance - anything! - to either get US troops out of Iraq or to start the urgently needed shift from an economy dependent on fossil fuels to one all about conservation, efficiency and renewable energy,” Glick writes.
[Truthout Oct 2/07]Again, the message is clear. No matter what their promises, we cannot depend on politicians who take corporate bribes to make legislative changes that threaten the profits of their employers. Which means it's up to us to become “do-it-yourselfers” in the transformation biz.
We can all push for changes at all levels of government. “That's where the greatest strides are needed the most and where changes can have the greatest global effect,” O'Hanlon observes. “Already many towns, cities, counties and states across the U.S. are taking matters into their own hands and tackling initiatives on which they feel the federal government has been too slow to act.”
Otherwise, Kennedy said, we can “do what they've been urging us to do on Capitol Hill which is to treat the planet as if it were a business in liquidation, convert our natural resources to cash as quickly as possible, have a few years of pollution based prosperity, we can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy.
“But our children are going to pay for our joyride with denuded landscapes, with poor health, with huge cleanup costs and with climate chaos, which is going to amplify over time and that they will never be able to pay,” he warned. “Climate change is upon us. Its impacts are going to be catastrophic and we are causing it. The good news is, we have the scientific and technological capacity to avert its most catastrophic impacts. We only need the political will.”
[BradBlog.com July 8/07]The antidote?
"Stay politically active and aware of the issues," urges climate researcher Gavin Schmidt of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York. "Encourage your local energy producers to use more renewables."
Here are some more ideas:
EAT EASY
Our biggest single personal contribution to carbon emissions is our diet. As O'Hanlon helpfully reminds us, “The carbon emission difference between an all vegetable-based diet vs. a typical American diet - which includes ample meat and dairy products - is about the same as the difference between driving an SUV vs. a small sedan.”
Since it takes 10-times more energy to grow a pound of beef than to grow a pound of corn, it's much more carbon- efficient to eat local veggies directly, he advises. “It's not necessary to become a vegetarian to make a difference. Just reducing the amount of meat or animal products eaten every week can chip away at your personal carbon emissions.”
"If you scale it up, it's actually a big thing," concurs climate researcher David Battisti at the University of Washington. Tens of millions of people making dietary changes can overnight reduce the burdens on our groaning bodies - and planet.
[discovery.com]
Jeremy Rifkin has a beef with beef. Calling an industry that grazes 1.3 billion cows on a quarter of this planet's landmass, “cold evil,” this prolific watchdog barks that for each Central American hamburger we consume, “they have to raze fifty-five square feet of tropical rain forest, and they burn it, and carbon goes into the heavens: 500 pounds of carbon for every quarter-pounder. And when they burn the trees, for that cow to graze, the rich diversity of biological life, of eons of history, are destroyed. And so that's why we're losing a species every sixty seconds. And when the beautiful songbirds of North America come down for the winter life on the tree canopies, there's no trees, and they die. That's why you don't hear the Baltimore Oriole anymore. And when you don't hear the Baltimore Oriole, you've got another problem: all the pests that it checked, they proliferate, we've got to use more pesticides, we contaminate the drinking water.”
For what?
“We're raising cattle primarily so Europeans and Americans can live high up on a protein chain and literally consume the Earth into our bodies,” Rifkin raps. “Cattle, and other livestock, now consume 70% of all the grain produced in America, and one third of all the grain in the world.”
By not eating cows and sharply reducing our dairy consumption, we can save our own lives as well as the planet.[Read “An Afternoon With Jeremy Rifkin” here]
SKIP SEAFOOD
As populations of seabirds, salmon, sharks, swordfish, tuna, cod and rockfish fall to record lows, the disappearing plankton that anchor the ocean's entire food web and scrub more CO2 from the atmosphere than all the forests ashore have scientists more than worried.
Named Time magazine's first "Hero for the Planet" in 1998, deep-diving oceanographer Sylvia Earle urges everyone to avoid eating shark, tuna and swordfish. Though a seafood lover herself, the former chief scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration no longer eats any fish at all.
Since she began diving more than 50 years ago, Earle says, the ocean covering seven-tenths of this planet's surface “has really declined more perhaps than during all preceding human history as our capacity to enter the sea, to do things to the ocean that are unprecedented in terms of finding, capturing and marketing wildlife from the ocean. In 50 years, through our actions we have seen a decline on the order of 90% of the large predatory fish in the ocean. That means not just sharks, although sharks are in that category, but also tuna species, cod, swordfish, marlin.”
Another big problem is that pollutants “bio-accumulate” in ever-increasing concentrations as smaller creatures are eaten by bigger ones - and eventually by us.
“Especially as you move up the food chain, you get concentrations on the order of 50,000 times of the very things you don't want in you,” Sylvia Earle warns. “Things such as mercury and the PCBs, the materials that are in pesticides and herbicides that get concentrated through the food chain, and certainly one of the concerns is with mercury, that it's not easily expelled. It does concentrate in creatures such as sharks and tuna and swordfish.”
And something else, she adds. “When people are hungry because we've used up the productive capacity of the ocean, that will lead, and is leading in many areas to poverty, which leads to problems relating to security.” [World Today, Australia Oct 25/05]
REDUCE DEFORESTATION TO ZERO
If one less fishburger means more fish and more plankton, one less cowburger means many more trees. And since burning down forests for cash crops and pasture accounts for 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions, a proposal put forward before 10,000 policymakers and scientists at the UN Climate talks in Bali, Indonesia in December 2007 hold out tremendous hope for saving the remaining Amazon and other rainforests.
Put together by scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center, the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazania, and the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, this far-reaching program proposes that placing a price of $3 per ton of carbon retained in standing forests would mean that protecting the Amazon for its carbon value could outweigh the opportunity costs of forgoing logging, cattle ranching, and soy expansion in the region.
During the 10 years it took to complete this proposal, planet Earth lost 125 million hectares of forest, resulting in a release of more than 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The good news is that certified emission-reduction credits for carbon currently trade at more than $90 per ton of trees - or $25 per ton of sequestered CO2. Brazil's remaining forests contain 38-56 billion tons of carbon in the Amazon alone. Paying $25 per ton in annual increments would bring in far more revenues than $18 billion brought in over 30 years for the one-time razing of those forests and their replacement with cash crops like soybeans and palm oil.
The numbers are truly Amazonian. Reducing deforestation there over a 10 year period from a current average of 20,000 square kilometers logged per year to zero is achievable at low cost. Some of the country's poorest forest dwellers would see their income double, while the end of respiratory illness, deaths and agricultural and forestry damages from the end of massive fires would net as much as $80 million extra per year - while protecting the already disrupted rainfall system on which Brazil's grain belt and hydroelectric generation depend, and conserving Amazonia's unmatched biodiversity. Oh and by the way, carbon emissions would fall by 6 billion tons immediately - and 13 billion tons below projected levels.
[mongabay.com Dec 4/07]
How cool is that?
Reporting in Grist, Glenn Hurowitz reminds us, “Indonesia is the world's third largest global warming polluter, behind the United States and China, and just ahead of Brazil. But in Indonesia, like Brazil and the rest of the tropical world, pollution isn't coming from factories, power plants, or cars like it is in the industrialized world. Instead, almost all of it is coming from the rapid burning of the world's vast tropical forests to make room for timber, agriculture, and especially palm oil plantations. Palm oil, like other biofuels, produces two to nine times more greenhouse gases than regular old crude oil because of the forests and grasslands destroyed for its production.”
You can help turn this around by boycotting Starbucks, Procter & Gamble, Cargill and Seattle's Imperium Renewables until these companies stop paying “top dollar to turn palm oil into food, cosmetics and biodiesel,” as Hurowitz discovered. Global demand, he continues, has already driven the value of a hectare of palms above $1000 in some cases - providing a powerful financial incentive to corporations, investors, and farmers to raze the forests, regardless of the consequences to the climate or to the endangered orangutans, tigers, and rhinoceroses - and indigenous people - who need them to survive.”
The Bali conference could end such lopsided corporate computations by placing more financial value on forests and other wild lands for the carbon they store than their limited potential in providing timber or industrial-agricultural land.
The downside to “carbon ranching” is that major polluters can pay as little as 75 cents per ton of sequestered CO2 to keep trees standing, instead of paying much bigger sums immediately to clean up their industrial pollution. But proponents say those clean-ups are being legally and morally mandated, anyway. And that loggers, ranchers, and agribusiness everywhere “will for the first time have to include environmental costs in their bottom line calculations.”
Protecting standing forests invites other spin-offs. “Based on current carbon prices on European markets, a hectare of rainforest would be worth more than $10,000 purely for the carbon it stores. Applying just 1/10 of that amount towards enforcement will provide more resources than have ever before been available for forest conservation. In Indonesia, for instance, it could support more than 300,000 well-paying jobs in forest conservation, while still leaving plenty of money for high-tech satellite monitoring,” Hurowitz reports. “That would help ensure conservation provides permanent benefits and provides a major boost to the local economy.”
Meanwhile…
“Other agribusinesses financed by George Soros, Goldman Sachs, and others are destroying the wildlife mecca of the Cerrado at a rate of seven million acres a year. In the Congo, charcoal cartels are turning the living forest into fuel - threatening to push mountain gorillas and other wildlife into extinction. A decision at Bali to immediately give financial value to intact forests (and not wait until 2012, as some are proposing), would end this destruction almost overnight.” [Grist Dec 3/07]
RESURGENCE
While the United States and other nations struggle to find feasible means to bury carbon emissions underground or in already carbon-saturated seas, planting trees and wild grasses is much more cost-effective - and supports life.
Regenerating Europe's decimated forests from 1990 to 2005 has seen new trees absorbing more than 130 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This is equivalent to 11% of all European Union emissions from human activities.
A U.N. target to plant another billion trees - mainly in Africa - has also been surpassed. Other reforestation projects involving nearly another billion new trees are also well underway in Ethiopia, Mexico, Guatemala, China, Spain and Indonesia.
Pekka Kauppi led a University of Helsinki study published in the November 2007 edition of the British journal Energy Policy. "Forests reduced carbon dioxide more than twice the amount of Europe's renewable energy programmes," Kauppi says.
The forest surge is continuing in Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Finland. The resulting "surprisingly high carbon dioxide removal," Kauppi says, may be why Europe is on track to achieving 20% reductions in its greenhouse gases by 2020.
"On a global scale, there is hope for the future if we stop deforestation and expand forests," he adds. Especially if carbon credits are given for standing forests. [Inter Press Service Dec 3/07]
DOWN AND DIRTY
Before we get too carried away with tree planting, embodied Wisconsin ecologist Steven Apfelbaum and Nebraska National Soils Laboratory scientist John Kimble warn that planting trees “can actually be quite harmful, even dangerous.” If seedlings are introduced into soils created by more productive plants, the reduced decaying organic litter produced by trees can cause the soil to deteriorate.
“Planted trees can dewater the soil,” the two soil scientists further note. “They can also release nitrogen and phosphorous in runoff that enters rivers, lakes, and estuaries and hurts water quality. Some forested areas are becoming more vulnerable to wildfires, because changing precipitation patterns and the associated drying effects are creating a tinderbox.”
Ecological Lesson No. 1: Plant trees only where the soils will benefit from it.
Eco Lesson No. 2: Do not plant trees in former wetlands and grasslands where native, deep-rooted plants enrich the soil with more carbon, among other nutrients, more quickly.
Eco Lesson No. 3: depending on location, with quickening climate change bringing more drought and wildfires, “rebuilding soils is often a safer strategy for storing carbon” than planting trees.
Soils can be replenished by not dumping chemical-warfare derived fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides on the earth. Instead, farmers can grow lucrative natural crops using "no-till" methods in which crop seeds are inserted into slits cut into the soil.
Tillage farming employing massive petroleum-powered plows disrupts the soil, releasing more carbon. In sharp contrast,
Apfelbaum and Kimble have found that “no-till” agricultural practices “delivered savings in just two to three years and increased crop yields by 10%. It also reduced fossil-fuel use for farm machinery by 90%.”
And by leaving leftover plant matter to compost the land, “no-till agriculture could add 1.3 inches of soil materials and organic matter per acre over the next 50 years. The many feet of new soil would be a sponge to hold back runoff and nutrients from entering rivers and lakes and hurting potable water supplies. It would also help reduce costly, damaging floods.”
Does this sound like win-win to you?
The soil scientists further suggest planting “deep-rooted grassland or wetland plants, which sequester carbon more effectively than trees do.” These grasses can yield bioenergy and fiber to augment locally-grown food - further reducing “distribution costs and their associated carbon emissions.”
Following nature's lead and putting carbon “where the earth has securely stored it for millions of years - in the soils… will cleanse the atmosphere, taking a big bite out of the existing greenhouse-gas loads,” Kimble and Apfelbaum conclude.
[Christian Science Monitor Nov 29/07]
RIGHT ACTION FOR LIGHT BEINGS
Onboard a sun-orbiting space colony all Trekkies recognize the imperative to protect and replant forests for their ability to clean and store water, generate oxygen, cool cities and provide the habitat and biodiversity on which so many interrelated lives depend.
It's crucial to remember, however, that Earth is not a technological-type spaceship with eco “systems” that can be managed and jiggered. She is a living ship who sings with the harmonious chorus of life. And it is up to each of us to synchronize our own song with our homeworld's harmonics. In a universe that began with a single word, all is vibration. And we are embodied beings of immortal light.
REDUCE OUR CARBON FOOTPRINT
“OK, we're all worried about global warming,” says Larry O'Hanlon at discovery.com. “But what can a lone, concerned citizen do?”
Plenty.
Stephen Tindale, Executive Director of Greenpeace, says, “The most important lifestyle choice I made was deciding not to fly on holiday any more. I couldn't reconcile it with my concerns over climate change.”
Comedian Rory Bremner is not joking when he says, “I try to use public transport when I can over a car whenever possible… It was interesting during the last petrol crisis; people were sharing transport and even talking to one another. I think we are definitely addicted to our cars as a society. My green failings: I probably use too much energy. I'm not nearly as conscientious enough.”
Like Moore, O'Hanlon calls for a Shift from our me-centered North American perspective to the we-oriented ethic this writer has experienced worldwide.
“Everyone has to understand and accept that whatever we do today is an investment in the future - we will probably not make a noticeable difference to global warming in our lifetimes. That's because global warming is like a freight train that's been building momentum for about 150 years. It can't stop on a dime. Rather, it will take many decades, if not centuries, to slow or reverse the trend,” O'Hanlon writes. “Taking action means adopting a much longer view than most people, corporations and governments are in the habit of doing. It also means being aware of the different forms of energy we use and where it comes from.”
At the University of Chicago, climate researcher and avid bicycle commuter Gidon Eshel is a firm believer in the power of the individual to make a difference. "I'm very interested in the planetary effects of everything I do," he says "Governments are shying away from taking bold action, which means it's really up to the people to do what is necessary for future generations.”
How green is your lifestyle?
O'Hanlon points out that right now - today - “riding a bicycle, walking, carpooling, combining trips, telecommuting or buying a more efficient car remain some of the most direct ways almost anyone can cut their fossil fuel use and greenhouse emissions.” The Environmental Protection Agency agrees. By leaving their car at home just two days each week, a single commuter can keep nearly 1,600 pounds of carbon out of the air every year. Now try multiplying that 800 tons of prevented CO2 release by tens of millions of drivers - and four or five days a week. Switching from a gas guzzler to a car that gets 32 miles per gallon can also reduce carbon emissions by 5,600 pounds per year - for each car.
“If we raise fuel economy standards in our automobiles by one mile-we generate twice the amount of oil that is in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. If we raise fuel economy standards by 7.6 miles per gallon we yield more oil than we now import from the Persian Gulf. We can eliminate 100% of Persian Gulf oil,” Kennedy continued.
“Think about what that would do for our economy, for our foreign policy, for our global leadership, it would dramatically improve our balance of payments, reduce our national debt and make all of us more prosperous and more independent and spare us from wars in the Mid-East that are costing us, already, a trillion dollars and from entanglements with Mid-Eastern dictators who despise democracy and are hated by their own people.”
[BradBlog.com July 8/07]
Talk about acting locally to affect change globally!
THE CARBON REDUCTION GAME
The EPA has also developed tools to help individuals and households reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and take action. Use their online Personal Emissions Calculator here to estimate of you and your family's greenhouse gas emissions - then move on to explore actions you can take to lower your emissions, while keeping cash in your pocket from reduced energy and waste disposal costs. In this engrossing game, for each action you and your family choose to take, the calculator displays the amount of emissions you avoid and how that amount reduces your total emissions. Trying to drive-and-coast in ways that smoothly increase your mileage for each tank of gas can turn essential car trips into intriguing contests that benefit you and Mom. Similarly, reducing energy use and waste at home and at work can be just as absorbing and fun. Every way you can imagine and enact to live smarter will also put cash back in your jeans - and a future in front of everyone's children.
Of course, bicycling or walking also improve health, and dramatically reduce the risk of heart attacks. Not buying so much gasoline, and less frequent car repairs will save thousands of dollars - or pay for an electric-assist bicycle conversion in just months. When auto insurers finally start charging coverage only for miles driven, the dollar savings from leaving the family flivver parked will jump dramatically. So why not start pushing for such state or provincial legislation now?
Save those gym fees, too, O'Hanlon advises, by melding your workout with your commute. “Most cities have designated routes for bikers and walkers. If they don't, there's nothing stopping any citizen from starting the process. A good place to begin is with local bicycle shop owners, who have a financial incentive to have designated bike routes,” he suggests. “Burgeoning Park & Ride systems in exurban areas, trains and buses get more bang for their carbon emissions than a person driving alone in a car.” [discovery.com]
