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Environmental Protection

Random Thoughts.

Not the most gripping title, I know. But that is what happened during a walk yesterday, a walk that you would have surely enjoyed for the views. The plan had been to go on some more distant photo adventure with my friend Ken. Had to scratch that because I did not want to expose him to my lingering cold during a long car ride.

Mt. St. Helens

Mt. Adams

Mt. Hood

So I went to walk closer to home, looking at the mountains from afar, immediately roped into thoughts about – you guessed it – our assaults on climate commitments. We are in the middle of a snow drought, with abnormally low levels of snow, predicting high dangers for the upcoming fire seasons, and generally poor water conditions which affects fisheries and agriculture.

Spring arrives early, wild currants blooming.

Instead of leaning in to protect the common good and avert the worst climate disasters, we learned that Trump is to repeal the landmark Climate Finding in a huge regulatory rollback. The administration is trying to get rid of the “endangerment finding” — the scientific investigation that led the EPA to conclude that climate change is dangerous to humans, with six greenhouse gases posing a threat to public health and welfare. It could also include the repeal of federal regulations on planet-warming emissions from cars and trucks. The Trump administration is also separately moving toward repealing all climate regulations for power plants, the second highest-emitting sector of the economy. Trump’s press secretary proudly touted this package as the largest deregulatory action in American history.

My thoughts jumped from dismay about the accumulation and maximizing profits (what this is all about) to disgust about the sheer cruelty of it all – the reckless endangerment of communal health. Morbidity and mortality are all going to rise, all affecting the poor, the very young and the very old disproportionately. Had me thinking about kids again and the most upsetting thing I read this week.

ProPublica had an in-depth report about kids in detention camps. Thousands are detained with their families, some close to a year, although a long-standing legal settlement generally limits the time children can be held in detention to 20 days.

Missing out on education? “School” classes allow only 12 students of mixed age groups and last for just one hour. Slots are assigned on a first-come-first-served basis and staff leading the class distribute handouts and worksheets to those who made it inside.

Age appropriate nutrition? Food comes with worms and mold, and repetitive meals with portions too small, so that adults go hungry and often take from kids. Water is unclean, toilet facilities unspeakable. Rooms, with metal cots, are overcrowded, some holding up to 20 people. Extreme cold has them suffer.

The biggest complaint is the lack of appropriate medical care. People are constantly sick, measles are spreading. Legal representatives declared in court that more than 700 complaints since last August noted that children with medical problems frequently experience delays, dismissals, or lack of follow-up. Even after hospitalization, denied for so long that babies develop additional diseases like pneumonia, children returning to the camps are refused follow up medication.

Here are letters written by interned children – I guess your first reaction, like mine originally, is to not want to read, given the sense of sadness and helplessness in general, with no capacity for more. But I beg you, be a witness. It will be coming to somewhere near all of us: Federal records reveal ICE is secretly expanding into 150+ facilities across nearly every state — many near schools, medical offices, and places of worship. DHS asked the General Services Administration to hide lease listings and bypass normal procedures – you wonder why.

Thoughts jumping from greed to cruelty to amazement at the natural beauty around me, still accessible and open to all. That, in turn, led to thinking about National Parks, severely impacted by financial cuts on all levels. On top of it, the Trump administration has ordered the National Park Service (NPS) to remove historical signs at at least 17 national park sites across six states that we know of, including one at the Grand Canyon and another at Glacier National Park. The former referenced the displacement of Native Americans, the latter how climate change is contributing to glacial loss at the park in Montana. A sign was removed at Big Bend National Park in Texas, that referenced geology, fossils, and prehistoric history, some of which were written in both Spanish and English. In Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park, officials also removed a sign referencing Native American history.

The National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) says that the removals are an attempt to erase history. The Sierra Club is suing the administration for refusing to disclose how the sign removals are being carried out. A librarian led organization, Save our Signs, is collecting photographic evidence of the signs out there, so that we remember what they said before removal. Here is their website.

“To all your readers, please go out and collect photos of signs at National Parks before they are removed, to help us all collectively remember our history – the good, the bad, everything.”

SOS hosts an online database archiving photographs of all sign removals. The group also asks NPS visitors to submit photos of empty spots where signs used to be and of creative responses, like protest art, that have been put up where NPS signs were removed.

So if you are traveling farther than I am currently, you know what to do! The only sign I’ve come across the last days was this – I approve this message!

And in honor of the plastic duck I saw yesterday among all the real birds here is TajMahal…

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He is so on target…

I am not quite ready to resume writing during my Thanksgiving break, but thought we all might benefit from someone else’s wisdom. I am, for obvious reasons, quite alert when lung cancer patients reach the end of the road or, as Paul Brown himself put it, disappear into oblivion.

I look up to him as a model of how to apply courage and rationality to his very last appeal – the last column he wrote for the Guardian last week. It was introduced as “I have watched politicians failing yet and yet again: lessons from a life as an environment writer. Paul Brown looks back at his career reporting on the climate crisis, failed summit and nuclear power – and how to do it well.”

There’s a pattern of politicians learning the inconvenient truths of climate change – and then falling short
We, in the climate business, all owe a great deal to Mrs Margaret Thatcher. Her politics were anathema to me and to many Guardian readers. But she prided herself on being a scientist before she was a politician.

It was Thatcher’s inquiring mind that first demanded a scientific briefing about the dangers of the hole in the ozone layer, and subsequently on another even greater potential catastrophe, climate change. She was at the height of her influence on the international stage.

Meanwhile, the Guardian was getting more and more interested in the environment. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace had grown into large, radical campaigning organisations, alongside more established organisations such as the WWF. Their young membership increasingly looked to the Guardian to report their activities and advertise green jobs.

As a general reporter on the paper, first assigned to cover nuclear power when the science editor was ill, I was allowed to sign on as a crew member of various Greenpeace ships. I went on voyages to block the Sellafield pipeline draining plutonium into the Irish Sea, and I took trips round the coast highlighting sewage dumping and all manner of unlicensed chemical waste pipelines.

I began to report from international conferences trying to protect the seas and fish stocks, and best of all I spent three months in Antarctica on a Greenpeace boat that tried, and eventually succeeded, to get Antarctica accepted by the international community as a world park. In Antarctica, I got 26 pieces in the paper via satellite – the first journalist to file direct from the icy continent.

As I came back, Thatcher was in New York warning the UN about the dangers of climate change. Shortly afterwards, I found myself reporting from Geneva as Thatcher and other European leaders warned that the world was headed for disaster if it did not cut down on the use of fossil fuels.

Back in London, Peter Preston, the Guardian’s then editor-in-chief, who once encouraged me by saying you could not write about anywhere properly unless you have been there, called me into his office and made me environment correspondent. The Green party had got 16% in the European elections, and Thatcher thought they were a threat.

Sixteen years in the job followed. Most of the time, I sat beside John Vidal, who had an interest in everything. He took to editing the weekly environment pages, and then periodically dropping everything to head off after a maverick idea which generally turned into a brilliant story. More than once he left a note on my desk: “Could you do the pages this week, gone to Africa.”

It was clear from the beginning of my new job that Thatcher’s understanding of the science clashed with her ideology. Curbing the free market was not going to happen. Instead, she did what all politicians do – divert attention by creating something else. In this case, it was the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, to study the subject better. The centre is now one of our world-renowned institutions.

But this pattern of politicians learning the inconvenient truths of climate change and then falling short in the actions required to solve the problem has continued ever since. In fact, with the recent advent of blatant climate deniers, it has got far worse.

In the 1990s, I travelled to a rollercoaster ride of international conferences. At the Earth summit in 1992 in Rio, Brazil, I saw George HW Bush and Fidel Castro walk past each other in the corridor, pretending they could not see each other. Oh, for a camera rather than a notebook!

That summit saw the setup of the climate change convention, the biodiversity convention and much else, although it failed to do enough to protect forests. The agreements set up in Rio de Janeiro sent me globe-trotting to various conferences of the parties (Cops) in capital cities around the world to report on the snail’s pace of progress on climate.
President George HW Bush looks the other way as the Cuban leader Fidel Castro passes in front of him at the Earth summit, 1992. Photograph: Omar Torres/AFP/Getty ImagesBack home in the 1990s, the UK was in recession. The Guardian news desk’s interest in the environment, once the Earth summit was over, was minimal. House repossessions and job losses were rightly more immediate and pressing.

But as the decade progressed, the Conservatives were ousted in 1997 and then, as John Prescott became environment secretary, the environment news kept moving up the agenda. By the time of the second Earth summit in Johannesburg in 2002, it was back at the top of the news list.

By the autumn of 2005, I was run off my feet. After the catastrophic foot and mouth epidemic, every department – home, foreign, city and features – wanted to know each day what story (or stories) I had for them. And every section naturally wanted their story first. Vidal had taught me one good lesson: that it was possible to get away with absences from your desk if you came back with a good story. At the same time, the Guardian Foundation and various UN institutions had adopted me as a tutor on environment matters and began sending me to eastern Europe and Asia to teach other journalists how to cover this subject. By 2005, the pressure of work became too great and I took redundancy. Six months after I left, the Guardian had five people doing my old job.

I have spent the 20 years since writing about climate change and related matters for a huge variety of publications – including hundreds of Weatherwatch and Specieswatch columns for the Guardian. I have attended more conferences, such as the Cops in Paris and Warsaw, and helped train young journalists on how to cover these bewildering events, giving something back to the profession that has given me so much.

But I have also watched in continuing dismay what we might call the Thatcher syndrome: apparently intelligent politicians failing yet and yet again to have the courage to implement the decisions necessary to tackle the ever more imminent danger of climate change. Of course, as at the recent Cop30 in Brazil, they have been beset by more fossil fuel lobbyists than environmentalists, a phenomenon that was first reported by Vidal and I in the 1990s. Do the well-funded fossil fuel lobbyists always have to win?


And there has been another – in my view, very sinister – development, which has put back the cause of action on climate change into very dangerous territory: the latest “nuclear renaissance”. I started covering the nuclear industry in the early 1980s and, like all well-trained journalists, was neutral then. Nuclear power was a success story because it was part of the National Coal Board and its true costs were hidden, not just from consumers but from the government.

The first nuclear renaissance took place in the late 1980s when the Sizewell B nuclear power station was being built. Several more were on the drawing board, but Thatcher demanded to know the cost and the resultant price of electricity to consumers, and was so enraged that she and the government had been lied to about the real cost that she cancelled the rest of the programme. It was one of my more memorable stories.

At least two more “renaissance” moments have come and gone, mostly also on cost grounds, but now Keir Starmer’s government has gone completely gung-ho on nuclear – to the utter dismay of many environmental campaigners.

The government subsidies are simply huge: a nuclear tax is being levied on hard-pressed consumers. What is the government thinking of? The fossil fuel industry, which has thrown its weight behind nuclear power, is of course delighted; all these decades of new construction without any electricity to show for it gives at least another decade or two of unabated burning gas. It is no accident that Centrica invested in Sizewell C – after all, it is primarily a gas company. With Sizewell C likely to take 10 to 15 years to build, that is a lot of extra gas being burned and profits for shareholders.

But the biggest mystery is small modular reactors (SMRs), which are theoretically built in factories and put together on site, making them easier and cheaper to build. SMRs originally were defined as generating less than 300MW, about a third of the size of a traditional nuclear or gas station, but have now been redefined by Rolls-Royce to mean 470MW because even on the drawing board the company could not make the economics work.

Several have been promised, but the problem is that they do not yet exist, except on paper or on a computer. No factory has been built to make their components, no prototype has been built, no licensing process has taken place. All that is known about them is that (also on paper) they produce more hotter waste at the end of their lives.

I know many of my colleagues at the Guardian would disagree, but as I disappear into oblivion after 40 years of covering this industry, I would ask them to keep looking at it closely.

Paul Brown
Former environment correspondent

I have posted about the dangers of SMRs before in the context of a documentary film involved with. Here is a clip that explains the problems, and the opportunities lost, if we pursue the wrong path.

Photomontages were created in the context of that project a few years ago.

Music today is from an album by BlankFor.ms – After the Town was swept away.

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Reshuffling the Natural World.

· Vögel, höret die Signale! ·

I don’t know about you, but when I go to aquariums or zoos there are a lot of conflicted feelings – from what it means to deprive animals of their freedom and often put them in torturously narrow cages deprived of stimulation, to what it means to have this way of keeping species alive when they are no longer safe in their natural environments. I sometimes wonder if the decorations we find in various tanks and cages are an expression of humor to distract from the zoo keepers’ own conflicted feelings, or if there are yet another sign that we have to put our “civilization” stamp on everything…..

Cue Zed Nelson’s new photo book  “The Anthropocene Illusion.” I read a captivating review of it in the New Yorker, a magazine that I avoided to subscribe to for 44 years, long story. Clearly my loss, now that I discover the power of Elizabeth Kolbert’s writing – but I digress. Again.

(Link here to Nelson’s spectacular photography – all the captions below the photographs are provided in his book.)

Polar bear. Dalian Forest Zoo. China.
Polar bears are the largest land carnivore in the world, weighing up to 800kg and growing up to 3 metres in length.
The typical zoo enclosure for a polar bear is one-millionth the size of its range in the wild, which can reach 31,000 square miles (80,290 km²).
Polar bears live in Arctic regions in Canada, Alaska, Russia, Greenland and Norway, in temperatures as low as -46°C (-50.8°F)


–

The book displays photographs taken across the world of settings containing or pointing to animals, settings that try to reproduce the natural world they would inhabit if free. The attempts at providing verisimilitude are, of course, futile, and the photographer very much hones in on the artificiality of the backdrops. In addition, there is magnificent photography capturing civilization encroaching on habitat, or humans making encounters with nature into a distraction, at best.

Railway bridge. Nairobi National Park.Kenya Nairobi National Park, established in 1946, is the only national park in the world bordering a major capital city. Home to lions, rhinos, giraffe and the remnants of a once-thriving wildebeest migration, the park has faced increasing pressure from urban expansion and infrastructure projects. The Chinese-built Nairobi-Mombasa railway now cuts through the park on an elevated bridge, prioritising cost-saving over conservation. Further developments, including proposed hotels and fencing plans, threaten to sever the park from critical wildlife corridors, turning a once-open ecosystem into an enclosed and managed space.

–

Kolbert summarizes Nelson’s main message:

“But Nelson’s point seems to be that all efforts to reproduce the natural world, whether motivated by crassly commercial interests or ones that are, ostensibly, more edifying, are much alike in the end. The Anthropocene illusion is that we can somehow connect with the natural world at the same time that we have, as Nelson puts it, “turned our back” on it.”

Niagara Falls. Ontario, Canada.

Established in 1885, Niagara Falls is the oldest state park in America. Over 8 million visitors visit annually. More than 5,000 bodies, mostly suicides, have been found at the foot of Niagara Falls.

–

Or as Nelson himself phrases it:

“While we destroy the natural world around us, we have become masters of a stage-managed, artificial ‘experience’ of nature – a reassuring spectacle, an illusion.”

Kolbert again:

“From the mountains to the savanna, it’s alienation all the way down. The volume’s power lies in its relentless impulse toward disenchantment. Wonder isn’t really an option.“

Polar bear tours. Hudson Bay, Canada.

On the southern edge of the Arctic, Hudson Bay is known as the ‘polar bear capital of the world’. Bears come ashore here in the summer when the sea ice melts, to wait for the ice to return in November.
Tour companies cater to an annual influx of tourists eager to see polar bears during the six-week ‘bear season’, when the bears roam the shoreline, waiting for the sea ice freeze over.

–

I see that somewhat differently, having just taken a beloved 2.5 year-old to the zoo, including their fish tank. There is still wonder galore, even if it is somewhat restricted to the short set. And there is something unsettlingly privileged about the claim that connection to nature is lost if it is presented in artificial environments. For inner city kids and poor families in general, the only access to seeing a live animal and not just something on a screen, might very well be the zoo or a cage in a city park. That experience, in turn, might make them more interested and engaged in thinking about habitats or what we do to species other than our own.

Restaurant with live penguin display. Penguin Hotel. Guangdong, China.

At the Chimelong Penguin Hotel in China, visitors can dine alongside captive penguins in a 1,600-seat, glacier-themed restaurant. While guests enjoy a curated spectacle of nature, wild emperor penguins face an uncertain future. The slow-evolving birds have survived for millions of years, yet nearly 70% of their colonies could vanish by 2050 as a result of climate change.
The hotel also offers close-up penguin encounters at the Penguin Pavilion and a Penguins on Parade show at the Penguin Ice Palace Theatre.

–

I am the first to mourn our devastation of nature, as my blog’s writing over and over demonstrates.

Here, for example, is the latest compilation of all the assaults on the environment committed by the current administration. Read it and weep.

But experience with something alive, even if corseted in artificial settings, might teach future generations that there is something worth rescuing.

***

The relationship between nature and human interference has been one of the main topics of art, through the ages, but is particularly prominent in contemporary art informed by climate action. Regular readers might remember that I offered a somewhat whimsical series some years back, focussed on the way habitat is encroached by cities, and animals, in turn, intruding closer into our spaces, a destructive development in both direction, but heavily weighted against them. For Guardians of the Towers (Turmwächter) my photographs of cityscapes were combined with the wild life I captured elsewhere.

There are many more serious approaches, with strong work presented in Germany by, among others, Dennis Siering. His 2022 exhibition Unnatural territories, speculative landscapes was enthusiastically reviewed at the time.

He has turned to a different version of reshuffling nature this year. Together with experts in ornithology, bioacoustics (Andre Siering), audio design (Aleksei Maier), and artificial intelligence (Bastian Kämmer), he has developed sound installations – Radical Climate Action Birds – that translate melodies composed by humans into artificial bird calls.

The synthetic bird songs are broadcasted with solar power for about three hours a day in a public park in Karlsruhe (Supported by the UNESCO City of Media Arts Karlsruhe Project Funding Program for Media Arts), potentially leading to uptake by the birds: mimicking the melodies and gradually importing them into their repertoire. I have no clue if this is actually happening, or if the claims that black bird were the fastest learners, is verified as more than wishful thinking.

Here is the fun part of this installation, though: the melodies are all from anti-fascist protest songs. Bella Ciao, whistled by a black bird, might be quite the wake up call! The idea is, of course, that the resurgence of nationalist and neo-fascist ideas, generally inclined to extract rather than protect natural resources, should be of concern to all of us, with direct reminders from nature itself as brilliant a messenger medium as is conceivable. Instead of illusions of nature transplanted into human environments, it is illusions of culture transplanted into nature itself then, in theory. Would be a riot if it worked….

(For non-German readers: my subtitle “Vögel, höret die Signale! plays on a line in the German version of the International, which says Völker, höret die Signale! Birds (people) listen to the call!

Völker, hört die Signale!
Auf, zum letzten Gefecht!
Die Internationale
Erkämpft das Menschenrecht!

In the English text, the refrain begins with:

So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.

The original French refrain: (the anthem was written by Eugène Pottier, in Paris, June 1871; he was a refugee from the Paris Commune, who wrote the poem while in hiding in the aftermath of the massacre of the Communards. It was set to music 2 years after his death by Pierre Degeyter in 1889.)

C’est la lutte finale
Groupons-nous et demain
L’Internationale
Sera le genre humain.

Here is the anthem sung in German for today’s music. And here is Bella Ciao.

Let’s hope the birds are fast learners!

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Evaporation.

Walk with me through a landscape touched by frost, a layer of glistening, crystalline beauty sheathing every blade of grass, leaf and branches. Something delicate, fragile, lasting just hours before the rising temperatures make the sublime views disappear, melting the hoar frost and then evaporating the water.

Rising temperatures, across the span of seasons, not just during a 24 hour cycle, are the main culprit globally, it turns out, for our ever increasing droughts. It is not the lack of rainfall, but evaporation of water due to heat that account for over 60% of the exceptional drought in the American West. And so we face dry wells, dwindling reservoirs, parched ground, forest fires. 

Some, of course, believe that all you have to do is turn on “a valve” and let the water run, providing needed help to farmers and fire fighters alike. The current President of the United States among them. And so he did, ordering his Army Corps of Engineers to release a maximum amount of water in California’s San Joaquin Valley, with an unheard-of one-hour notice to local authorities.

“Consistent with the direction in the Executive Order on Emergency Measures to Provide Water Resources in California, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is releasing water from Terminus Dam at Lake Kaweah and Schafer Dam at Success Lake to ensure California has water available to respond to the wildfires.”

All hell broke loose, with local authorities, farmers, Republican State Senators all trying to persuade Trump’s minions to stop the planned volume of release, for fear of flooding the down stream communities, since the river channels could not hold the masses of water. Local water management officials called on members of Congress to intervene, including Democratic Rep. Jim Costa and Republican Reps. David Valadao and Vince Fong. None responded to requests for comment. Farmers needed to move equipment, migrant workers needed to flee from their riverbed camps near harvesting locations, Potterville fields needed to be protected. It was reckless endangerment of a community that had voted this President in, even after the authorities managed to curb the outflow somewhat from what had been initially intended.

It was also an act in the President’s renewed California water wars that was based on completely wrong assumptions about the potential uses of this water for firefighting in L.A., one big mountain chain to the South blocking the natural dispersion of water. Just one assumption in a series of spurious claims about the state’s water policies.

The release of billions of gallons of water will have long-term hurtful consequences in the valley region. The water, now running off into the Pacific Ocean, was stored for farmers’ irrigation needs in the dry season. Agricultural business has already been hurt on multiple fronts with water scarcity, the rounding up of undocumented agricultural workers, and now the tariffs. Depleting the reservoir of water at this time will increase the vulnerability of agricultural communities in the summer, already struggling with ground water pumping restrictions.

Under California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which tries to compensate for the fact that farming has for decades used twice the amount of groundwater than is replenished by nature. This has caused the land to sink, causing enormous infra- structure damage that the state is now trying to staunch. The restrictions led to plummeting values of farms, endangering many smaller agricultural operations who cannot pay their loans. “The Public Policy Institute of California estimates that about 500,000 acres – one-fifth of the San Joaquin Valley’s farmland – may need to be taken out of cultivation by 2040 to stabilize aquifers. Small and medium-scale farmers appear most vulnerable.” (Ref.)

Value evaporating.

Common sense evaporating.

Water evaporating, flowing useless at this time of year for communities falsely claimed to be helped.

Our protections from unscientific, vengeance-, ideology- or greed-driven decisions, evaporating.

As of this writing, we have a non-elected civilian with unidentified, potentially non-American minions downloading on his personal servers every single data point of every American’s existence he found while forcing access to the US Treasury. Our social security numbers: no longer protected. Data about our taxes, our income, our health status, you name it: an open book to be read by potentially hostile powers. The U.S.Treasury holds the nation’s money. Its dispersement (or withholding) is now under the control of someone who is unaccountable and was not able to receive top security clearance and is under investigation for flouting security clearance rules.

We are talking all of our tax money, the social security money we earned and paid in, the money for clean air, safe food and water, safe air travel and highway management, medical research, and so on. A system responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds now at the whims of unaccountable individuals. As our own Senator Wyden warned, this creates potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities, given Musk’s significant business ties to China. It also creates potential havoc for upcoming debt ceiling negotiations, given the assurances needed for ongoing payment flow.

A private citizen taking control of established government offices, seizing physical control of government payment systems, now able to shut down federal funding to any recipient he personally chooses. Closing entire departments (USAID) and locking out thousands of government employees. An unvetted, congressionally un-appointed individual illegally usurping Congress’s most important authority, the power of the purse, shredding the constitutional protection guaranteed by the separation of powers. Some call it a constitutional crisis. Others fear that It is no less than a coup.

Democracy evaporating.

We are advised to make our voices heard, seemingly the only thing we can do right now.

Once again, here is the easiest way to find out how to contact your state representatives, your governor, your senators, whoever you wish to address with questions about what they intend to do to protect you, your entitlements and the privacy of your data. A question as simple as that.

https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials

For those of us in Oregon:

Senator Jeff Merkley: (202) 224-3753

Senator Ron Wyden: (202) 224-5244

Congresswoman Janelle Bynum: (202) 225-5711

OR Governor Tina Kotek : (503) 378-4582

OR State Attorney General Dan Rayfield: (503) 378-6002

Call. PLEASE. Drip is not enough. Needs to be a flood, slowing down evaporation of our rights. Blue state calls matter, too.

And now for the good news: Rebecca Solnit has started her own occasional newsletter – you can sign up for free here. Probably the most encouraging and empathetic writer out there next to Heather Cox Richardson.

Let’s end with a defiant smile: here is a body of water not likely to evaporate soon. He/she/it/they even have their own social media announcements now.

Music today about cold times, followed by something better….

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Uninvited Symbolism.

Imagine yourself on a mountain ridge between two deep canyons. The city is spread out at your feet, the mountains behind you.

You are surrounded by olive, palm, eucalyptus and pine trees, with an occasional sycamore thrown in.

The vegetation is dry to the bone ,

and when you marvel at the fiery sunrise in the mornings your heart goes out to all those affected by wildfires, enraged by the thought that soon we will have a president and his minions who will make disaster help contingent on political lockstep, as announced by them.

Worse, they will do away with environmental protection and pollute as long and as hard as they can, climate change be damned, its science ridiculed or overruled by the demands for profit.

You feel privileged, up there on that beautiful ridge, to be able to look at the changing sky,

to hike down the small private trail to the city, along the waterline, sandy, steep, surrounded by dead yuccas and a landscape filled with luminous rusty colors. The only official access is a one-lane dirt road crossing the canyon with a small bridge, your car soon anticipating the worst potholes and getting the hang of serpentine curves.

Imagine yourself waking up in the middle of the night to the acrid smell of fire, loud crackling and popping noises, flames already sky high. You don’t know what is burning in your vicinity, one of the other structures, and how far away it is. You grab your meds, your purse, your computer and the car keys, and race down that hill fully aware that once a firetruck comes up you are stuck on the ridge.

This happened to me Tuesday night. I am still processing, rattled to the core.

The first fire-police jeeps came within a minute after I had exited the lane onto the street, where I had stopped the car, shaking too much to drive safely. The firetrucks, later, could not cross the bridge. The fire was extinguished with hoses on site and helicopters dumping their load, onto the vicinity as well, to prevent the spread of fire into the wilderness. One person hospitalized, some non-human life lost.

I went back the next day, still in my nightshirt, to pack up my unharmed stuff, my house completely unscathed as all the others in the neighborhood but that one structure and parked truck that burnt to the ground. I can no longer envision myself up there without fear, forever hyperalert to the smells and sounds. And I cannot help myself but thinking of the symbolism mirroring our current situation, ever aware of potential catastrophes and then, in a flash, they have arrived. Yes, it could have been far worse here, but in many instances it HAS been and WILL be far worse, with so many people affected, around the world for lack of appropriate leadership.

I lost nothing other than a cherished place to spend my time in SoCal, and even that loss is entirely psychologically grounded in my own fear to return to the place. I don’t want to think about how it must feel for people who lost loved ones, or their entire material existence, or a community that will never again cohere, thrown into the winds, and still floating many years later. In fact, I don’t want to think about it much at all, since I still get these waves of flash-backs of that drive down the mountain, the overpowering noises still in my ears.

I had meant to visit the World Forestry Center’s current Exhibition Following Fire once back in Portland. Can’t see myself doing that, either. Subtitled A Resilient Forest/An Uncertain Future it is a photography project by photographer David Paul Bayles and disturbance ecologist Frederick Swanson, documenting the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire that burned 173,000 acres along the forested McKenzie River canyon in the Cascade Range of Oregon. You should, though, if only to get motivated to help protect our world against the dark forces.

Onwards. With the appropriate musical accompaniment.

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Killer instincts

Nope, not talking about the absurd claims that Haitians are feasting on neighbors’ cats and dogs. That will be discussed in the next round.

I’ll report instead on a walk the morning before the Presidential Debate, trying to shed irritated thoughts. It was actually quite serene in the wetlands, with a hint of fall, cooler temperatures and sparks of coloration pointing towards the blazing beauty to come.

Various pieces of news have combined to trigger thoughts about violence. You will read this after the debate has happened, with no current prediction from my end of what will be or won’t be said.

I still reel from the fact that during the most recent campaign stop, Florida man uttered the words, with glee, that the planned rounding up and deportation of 20 million immigrants “will be a bloody story.” At an earlier rally in Ohio, the former President stated that “there will be a bloodbath” if he does not win the election. It is all couched in terms of righteous violence, including his persecution of political adversaries that are suggested more and more frequently, setting a stage with thinly veiled stochastic terrorism.

With that topic hanging in the air, some data mavens at the Washington Post had nothing better to do than analyzing data from Google searches across two decades about what Americans want to kill. How to kill time, wouldn’t you know it, is a favorite search question on the internet.

As it turns out, searches about how to kill ants score high, closely followed by fleas and flies, with mosquitoes surprisingly low on the list. However, they are shockingly topped by searches about how to kill cats or dogs. Crabgrass, mold, and ivy, amongst other invasive species, are the most frequently searched organisms beyond fauna. Horrifyingly, on top of the pyramid used to be searches for means of suicide, but the search for how to kill another human being has now merged to that level (we are talking peek month of searches in the graph.)

We know, of course, what factors promote violence in a political context and how desensitization contributes to disinhibition towards harming others. Re-summarizing from my many previous musings: when societies are politically divided, particularly with an emphasis on identity, the potential for violence goes up. If we don’t interact with people who are different from us or hold different beliefs, and instead stay in partisan bubbles (aided by geography here), vilifying and dehumanizing the unfamiliar others is easy. That becomes, in turn, a gateway to accepting that they deserve harm, righteously meted out by us. What we are seeing is a call for partisan violence in these rallies, really. This is particularly the case when we fear loss of status, rights, or access to resources (realistically or just imagined, won’t make a difference), while political radicalization is touted by the politicians we align with or by the in-group that surrounds us. Planned or condoned state violence interacts with individual political violence, mutually reinforcing each others’ belief that it is all justified.

“Righteous” violence is, alas, not exclusive for the political arena. The Pacific Northwest is now on route to killing close to half a million barred owls across the next 3 decades. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has approved that plan in order to protect spotted owls, threatened by territorial take-over from their larger cousins.

“The shooting will be conducted in forest habitats spanning 24 million acres, including six national parks, 17 national forests, and thousands of pockets of private lands. It will, as planned, be the largest massacre of birds of prey ever attempted by any government.” (Ref.)

Scores of wildlife protection groups are protesting the decision, claiming that the plan makes no sense. For one, barred owls are being punished for human actions (climate change, deforestation, urbanization etc.) that pushed them, as well as the spotted owls, into new territories. Expanding their range, as a species native to North America, is a normal survival strategy, and will not be stopped by culling. The surviving owls will just return to the territories that sustain them under new climate conditions, with the competing spotted owls ultimately having little chance. That is what ecological systems are all about, with our interference perhaps just changing the allotted time for a single species (a species that we put into harm’s way in the first place….) Barred owls are also notoriously difficult to hunt and easily mistaken for other species that could be hurt.

Here is the detailed list of complaints and suggestions by the wildlife organizations.

The government argues that the cull, by licensed hunters only, ” will remove less than 1% of barred owls’ predicted U.S. population during the proposed time frame, resulting in fewer casualties than other, more aggressive management options proposed by the FWS, which suggested culling almost twice as many of the birds. The cull will also be limited to around half the areas where barred and spotted owls overlap, and intends to safeguard California spotted owls as well.”

“It’s not about one owl versus another,” Kessina Lee, an FWS state supervisor in Oregon, said in a statement.

It sure is about a lot of dead birds, if you ask me, killed with the righteous justification of protection of an endangered species. Now where have we heard that argument before? They shall not replace us?

Yes, I am sarcastic and you don’t have to tell me that these are two very different cases. Just soooo much violence in the air. Locally, nationally, world wide. How can we take a step back?

Music today a beauty by Elgar, considering owls…

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You up there – We down here.

A German author and an investigative journalist teamed up in 1973 to publish their experiences after prolonged interactions with the very rich and with members of the working class, respectively. Bernt Engelmann and Günter Wallraff wanted to shed some light on the sizable discrepancy of accumulation of riches and power on one side, and the dependency and exploitation of workers on the other side. It was called You Up There – We Down Here, and the title came back to me when thinking through today’s blog observation, half a century later when that discrepancy has reached unimaginable proportions

(Wallraff went on to write one of the most famous and all-time translated non-fiction books in Germany a few years later, in 1985. Lowest of the Low (link leads to free English translation) describes his years of working disguised as a Turkish guest worker and the racism and unequal treatment he experienced, like for example not being provided with safety gear while working in a nuclear plant, even when his German colleagues did. He provided shelter for Salman Rushdie when the novelist was threatened, and is still actively doing undercover investigations, now in his eighties.)

“Up” and “Down” were prominent when I chanced at a perfectly beautiful spot at the North Umpqua River recently, looking for a break off I 5 on my drive to Southern California. A dam created a rushing waterfall, with a smooth lake on top and the entrance to a fish ladder on the bottom, presumably helping fish to get to their spawning grounds upstream.

You could watch the fish and read about fish counts, with some educational bits around you to inform about the life cycle of the salmon, should you have forgotten your 5th grade curriculum. 80.000 visitors a year pass through here. One wonders how many of them hear about the real story. As always, it pays to look a bit closer.

Winchester Dam was built in 1890 as a hydropower dam to provide hydroelectricity to the city of Roseburg. Fish and tribal nations be damned. The dam changes hands among various power companies, with a fish ladder being built in 1945. In 1969 the dam is sold for $1 (!) to the Winchester Water Control District (WWCD) owned by private citizen and offering no transparency for their decisions and meetings despite being required by law. Condemned in 1976, the dam provides no hydropower, irrigation, or flood control. Its sole purpose is to create a private water ski lake for the 99 members of Winchester Water Control District (WWCD), some of the state’s wealthiest citizens and owners of the condemned Winchester Dam.

DEQ inspects over and over and finds multiple hazards, leveling fines for millions of dollars and insists on an emergency plan. After 34 years of stonewalling, WWCD comes up with one three years ago. The dam is now rated “high hazard, a rating based on downstream hazard to people and property, not just on the condition of the dam. 

Calls for removal are ignored, even though the dam poisons the drinking water for Roseburg and impedes migratory native fish, the fish ladder being rated one of the worst in the country. One of the owners of WWCD was paid $ 3.000.000 to do the repairs for the leaking structure required by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife last year. He made grievous mistakes when draining the lake for the repairs (Ref.), with ODFW watching and not interfering (the agency director was forced to resign due to his mismanagement this April). Water was released way too quickly from the lake, killing 550,000 Pacific lamprey. There is speculation that the faulty drainage was undertaken to remove evidence of illegal application of herbicides to the lake, toxic to fish and the humans (!) downstream, to kill plants that obstruct waterskiing. The repair disaster resulted in an unprecedented $27.5 million fine brought by the Oregon Department of Justice (DOJ) on October 7, 2023, against the Winchester Water Control District and their contractors. Since this is now a lawsuit, ALL discussions of the future of the dam, including possible removal, are tabled.

If anyone of us from below tries to contact the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Oregon Water Resource Department, or the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, with concerns about the Winchester Dam, agency officials respond by explaining that, because of the DOJ’s $27.5 million lawsuit, they cannot questions pertaining to the condemned dam or discussing the matter.

Those above have years of waterskiing safely ahead of them.

Roseburg is located in Douglas County, considered to the right of Attilah the Hun, when it comes to politics. Further South is Josephine County, competing for the description. You might not have heard of Josephine Country, but you have heard, I presume, of Grants Pass, the city that has been given green light by last week’s decision of the Supreme Court, to criminalize public sleeping by those who are houseless, even if no shelter or other options available. Talk about the lowest of the low. And yes, it is ambiguous if I am referring to the houseless or the radical majority of the Supreme Court.

“In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court ruled that cities enforcing anti-camping bans, even if homeless people have no other place to go, does not violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Gorsuch was joined by the rest of the court’s conservatives, including Chief Justice John Roberts.”

For the history of how we got here and the future implications, read here.

Grants Pass has a larger than life cave man statute. I assume those were permitted to sleep outside without being condemned to life in a hole….

Three things stand out for me: By criminalizing people now, people who have nowhere to sleep other than the park or the street, you will make it harder for this population to land housing at any point in the future, given their criminal record. So the claim that it is about decreasing homeless populations is logically fallible.

Secondly, if you have the option to crack down punitively, you will likely ignore more structural remedies, since they would cost you more money. Building housing, the ONLY way out of the catastrophe we are experiencing here on the West Coast, will take a backseat. So will upping universal rental assistance, repairs to public housing, and funds for eviction prevention.

And last but not least: this is about the ability to make our city centers attractive for business and commerce again, with people feeling free to spend and consume without the – however irrational – fears for their safety, and with pleasant views that don’t disturb their curbside dining.

Here is the website of the National Homeless Law Center where you can find more details.

Music today is a song from the Three Penny Opera, sung by Brecht himself. Text translated into English on the video, not the best translation, but you get the gist.

I just bought a screen print at Just Seeds about one of Brecht’s lines I have cherished my whole life: In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” (Two PDX artists I have reviewed before, Roger Peet and Thea Gahr, are members of this cherished artist cooperative as well.)

A good daily reminder of practicing hope. If we sing together, we are not alone in this. And France has just shown us that coalitions can still hold the bad guys at bay. At least for now!

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Late June (Dis)Pleasures.

Walk with me. A sedate stroll on Sauvie Island, easing us into a week where I will be working on a longer writing project and thus not posting across the 4th of July holiday.

Nature put on a show. Then again, when does it not?

Bloom and setting of fruit happening simultaneously for the black berries.

Oregon grapes already basically ripe,

while Hawthorne berries showed only a hint of the red that will later attract birds and squirrels alike when reaching full saturation.

Oak galls galore, a consequence of chemical injections by wasps who benefit from these growths.

Flowers in the meadows competing for my breathless mutterings – Oh, beauty!

Rufus Towhee hopping around, distracting me away from their nest, while ground squirrels watched with amusement.

Water levels high at the lake, serene at the canals, and small clouds lightening the grey skies.

The ospreys reliably resettled their nest that I visit every year.

If you stand close by, quietly, long enough, there will be coming and going, with lunch provided for those who wait long enough and screech loud enough.

Nature, relying on us to preserve it, since we have stressed it already so close to the limits. Preservation that will be made infinitely harder with the abominal Supreme Court Chevron decision last week which, as Zoe Schlanger at The Atlantic put it, shoved American environmentalism into legal purgatory. Read it and weep. The kneecapping of federal regulators will, of course, not just harm the environment, but also have huge implications for consumer protection.

This implies not just safety for what you eat and drink, or cars and planes, or warnings about chemical agents that might be harmful. It fully embraces the issue of pharmacological treatments, their safety and access granted to them, including the long sought prohibition of oral abortifacients. It also implies that a judge or a panel of judges can make decisions on the availability or necessity of vaccines. Think of another pandemic rolling around, and the judiciary, filled with anti-vaxxers, decides that vaccination is illegal. It will affect labor regulations, from workplace safety to pay requirements to the sales of goods no longer considered fairly made.

We cannot even conceive of the extent of the consequences this decision will have for the American people. Protection blown to the winds like grass seeds.

Justice Kagan’s dissent in Loper Bright Enterprises vs Raimondo is worth contemplating.

“A rule of judicial humility, gives way to a rule of judicial hubris. In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden—involving the meaning of regulatory law. As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar.”

Regarding stare decisis, the respect for previously made decisions:

“It barely tries to advance the usual factors this Court invokes for overruling precedent. Its justification comes down, in the end, to this: courts must have more say over regulation—over the provision of health care, the protection of the environment, the safety of consumer products, the efficacy of transportation systems, and so on. A longstanding precedent at the crux of administrative governance thus falls victim to a bald assertion of judicial authority. The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power.“

Mullein has the symbolism attached that it opens channels of communication with a higher power. Man, do we need that…..anybody out there????

Well, so much for sending you off to a holiday week. Enjoy your fireworks while they are still safely regulated in defiance of profiteering at all cost.

Music today is the Prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite # 2 in D-Minor. You can read darkness into it, or, as I do, a moment of hope. Preludes are beginnings – and we can always begin anew, putting things right. Eventually. Hopefully.

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Dropping the Ball

Driving east on Highway 14, you are surrounded by a desert landscape with lots of transmission towers and electricity lines. The view brings to mind the problems with our electric grids. Here are just some of the issues we’re facing:

  • Grids do collapse, leading to black-outs both during intolerable heat or cold spells when demand exceeds supply, like the December blackout in Texas in 2021.
  • Grids are threatened in their security, open to physical attacks as well as hacking. North Carolina, Nevada, Oregon and Washington state have experienced almost 1000 physical attacks against the electric grid in the last decade, for example.
  • Grids have caused wildfires, leading to enormous human, infrastructure and economic loss.
  • Grids in many states lack federal oversight, and can also set their own price range dependent on demand –  prices have been as low as $20-$50 a megawatt-hour versus more than $4,000 during periods of stress, and the grid operators pull every trick in the book to keep these pricing structures intact.
  • Grids will be affected by the increasing demand from electric vehicles and heat pumps. Increased demand meets less supply during decarbonization efforts trying to shut down nuclear- and fossil-fuel plants. The grids do not yet have sufficient capacity to take in renewable sources of energy and deliver them reliably when needed.

As so often, many of these problems are caused by one simple thing: greed. Take wildfires, for example. Grids in California, Texas and Hawaii are operated by private companies. There is very little oversight as to how they maintain their grids. The money necessary for modernization is spent elsewhere.

As U.S. District Judge William Alsup, in charge of PG&E’s criminal probation for utility-caused wildfires in 2010, stated: “Pacific Gas & Electric Company, though the single largest privately-owned utility in America, cannot safely deliver power to California. This failure is upon us because for years, in order to enlarge dividends, bonuses, and political contributions, PG&E cheated on maintenance of its grid — to the point that the grid became unsafe to operate during our annual high winds, so unsafe that the grid itself failed and ignited many catastrophic wildfires.” (Ref.)

The same accusation is now raised with the Maui fires. Hawaiian Electric is charged with gross negligence, accused of consciously delaying grid repair and maintenance, updating efforts that would have avoided the deadly fires. (Ref.)

One of the ways that could reduce wildfire risk is putting the power lines underground, but that is wildly expensive. It also leads to further divisions among the rich and the poor: low-income communities have an increased wildfire safety deficit, because longstanding policies require communities to pay a huge share of putting power lines underground, and they simply cannot afford that.(Ref.) PGE for decades refused to do this for its own hesitancy to spend money, but has come around since the California Camp and Dixie fires, the Mosquito fire possibly as well, but estimates a cost of $ 20 billion, which will be turned over to consumers. A frightening but informative book on the entire debacle, by the way, is Katherine Blunt’s California Burning.

Wires could be better maintained, with regular crews cutting branches that could touch wires and ignite, or fall on them and down the wires which then spark dry grass into fire. There is also the possibility of public safety power shut-offs, when wind and heat make the situation particularly dangerous. But those black-outs have consequences, not just for productivity reasons, but medical reasons as well, with people dependent on electricity for lifesaving appliances.

Privately owned utilities make money on large capital investments that boost the overall value of their systems. They do not make money on day-to-day operations and maintenance expenses like inspections and tiny replacements here and there. Under pressure to cut expenses, they ultimately cut expenses to the point where they aren’t doing enough to evaluate the risks throughout the system. For the very same reason, they do not add changes to the grid that could improve transmission by up to 30% and lower prices at the same time.

To reach our climate goals, we need to expand grid capacity by 43% in 2035, according to Princeton University’s Repeat Project. Yet we are looking at years and years of wait time to get renewable power sources connected to the transmission lines. In the meantime we could use a new technology: laser sensors that can send the companies real time data about the status of the power lines, to make decisions about sending juice down the line. They are part of a package of transmission enhancing technologies that can tie us over until enough new lines are in place. They include wires that can carry more transmissions, software that helps to avoid congestions, and laser sensors, that tell us about exact wind, heat and wire sag conditions, allowing to determine what is safe in terms of power line load. (Ref.) The “dynamic line rating” tells the utility when a wire is cool enough to be able to handle more electricity flow.

The problem, here again, is that the incentives to use these relatively cheap measures are counteracted by the fact that electricity company get rewarded for building new and more infrastructure, rather than updating what is already there.

“That means big expensive projects like new transmission towers are enticing for a utility’s balance sheet– and its shareholders. Lower cost technologies – like sensors or rewiring an existing line – don’t seem as appealing in comparison, says Marissa Gillett, chair of Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority.” (Ref.)

There are two potential things that could be done to improve the grid security situation. For one, we could have a federal agency that had authority over the entire electric grid – right now there is none in place whatsoever. It could ask for and enforce a potential law, a Grid Security Act that shifts the burden of risk – now on all of us – to the utilities and providers. That law could be modeled on what Congress enacted to address widespread corporate fraud in another self-regulatory environment (Wall Street) after the Enron debacle. Sections 302 and 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act require that the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of publicly traded companies certify annually (under civil and criminal penalties) that the company has adequate internal controls for disclosure and financial reporting.

Secondly, we should pass a bi-partisan whistleblower protection provision proposed by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) in 2020 (which was derailed by COVID-19 and never brought to a vote.) It would provide protections to employees of the electric grid – right now it is completely legal under federal law for an electric grid utility to fire an employee who reports violations of, for example, reliability or critical infrastructure protection standards.

Photomontages today are some examples of a new series that evolved out of my work on Jan Haaken’s documentary film explaining the false promises of a nuclear renaissance. My recent blog about the film Atomic Bamboozle and the danger of small modular reactors can be found here. The images represent these SMRs, but I thought for today’s musing they might as well stand in for all the balls we dropped by not reining in private ownership of the electric grid and making sure public interest and safety comes first.

Music today by one of my favorite composers, Leos Janáček. In the opera Káťa Kabanová a couple worries about an approaching storm. She starts to tell him about the new invention of lightning rods. He angrily refutes the idea that storms could carry electricity and insists they are a punishment from God. You know how that will end, right? Aria starts around 1.18.01

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Doing the Best I Can

Easing back in after a lovely break, some of it spent sitting near the butterfly bush (Buddleja) in the garden, watching hummingbirds, contemplating practical advice from the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Muta Maathai: Do the best you can!

Recognized for her persistent struggle for democracy, human rights and environmental conservation, the Kenyan scientist who died in 2011, urged relentless involvement in protecting our planet. As a founder of the Green Belt Movement she empowered communities to improve their lives and make the world a greener place.

Here is her allegory that has become kind of a mantra for me:

“The story of the hummingbird is about this huge forest being consumed by a fire. All the animals in the forest come out and they are transfixed as they watch the forest burning and they feel very overwhelmed, very powerless, except this little hummingbird. It says, ‘I’m going to do something about the fire!’ So it flies to the nearest stream and takes a drop of water. It puts it on the fire, and goes up and down, up and down, up and down, as fast as it can.

In the meantime all the other animals, much bigger animals like the elephant with a big trunk that could bring much more water, they are standing there helpless. And they are saying to the hummingbird, ‘What do you think you can do? You are too little. This fire is too big. Your wings are too little and your beak is so small that you can only bring a small drop of water at a time.’

But as they continue to discourage it, it turns to them without wasting any time and it tells them, ‘I am doing the best I can.’ 

And that to me is what all of us should do. We should always be like a hummingbird. I may be insignificant, but I certainly don’t want to be like the animals watching the planet goes down the drain. I will be a hummingbird, I will do the best I can.”

***

My ongoing resolution:

SMALL DROPLET – BLOGS against the fires around us: I’ll do the best I can.

And here is what I have been listening to.

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