Sherry Chandler

Deforestation

As I noted on July 25, the Enlightenment thinker Giambattista Vico considered irony to be the death of civilization, that is to say, cities. After the cities fell, the benighted forests would return. The final irony, says Robert Pogue Harrison in Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, is that we were not to be that lucky.

Vico believed that nature and history followed two fundamentally different laws. Civilizations rise according to the “ideal eternal history” of institutional evolution. They eventually fall by virtue of a law of entropy which brings about disorder in the system as a whole. Once the cities fall, the forests return and reclaim the ground on which they were founded. For Vico nature was a closed and stable system of self-regeneration. He never suspected that civilization’s law of entropy could contaminate or compromise the domain of nature as a whole, nor was he in a position, historically speaking, to suspect such a thing.

Some two-and-a-half centuries later, we now know that what Vico says about the reforestation of the civic clearing is not only inaccurate but also ironic. While forests did indeed reclaim part of Rome’s civic space during the early Middle Ages, the same is by no means true for most of the illustrious ancient cities that had their origins in the once densely forested environment of the Mediterranean. It suffices to travel around Asia Minor today and visit such cities — Ephesus, Miletus, Aphrodisias, Priene, Pergamum, Side, Kaunos, Halikarnasos, etc. — to see how nakedly they lie under the open sky. There is little in the vicinity to hide the celestial auspices now. The lucus* long ago lost its limits, and from its wide-open eye one can see today not only the ruins of a great ancient city but also those of an even more ancient forest. One face, one race. So many deserts. [pp. 57-58]

Meanwhile, a correspondent has sent me a link to this story at CNN: Study: Global warming sparked by ancient farming methods. It seems relevant, somehow, to Harrison’s point:

(CNN) — Ancient man may have started global warming through massive deforestation and burning that could have permanently altered the Earth’s climate, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

The study, published in the scientific journal Quaternary Science Reviews and reported on the University of Virginia’s Web site, says over thousands of years, farmers burned down so many forests on such a large scale that huge amounts of carbon dioxide were pumped into the atmosphere. That possibly caused the Earth to warm up and forever changed the climate.

It is perhaps another small irony that the battle that finally wrested the lands of Ohio and Kentucky from the indigenous nations was called the Battle of Fallen Timbers. (Though the timbers were felled by some species of natural disaster.) Today is the anniversary of that battle.

__________
*The lucus was a clearing, an “eye,” in the forest, which was “the original site of our theologies and cosmoloties, our physics and metaphysics . . .” [Harrison, p. 11].

Windmills revisited

I said it wasn’t simple. Here’s the view from Pocahontas County:

Here in West Virginia, we get a good close look at surface coal mines (Imagine calling something “mountain top removal” to improve public relations.), natural gas drilling, and under-inspected fly ash containment ponds, as well as the sort of rural poverty that causes communities to welcome these things for the jobs and money they bring in. I keep files of news clippings on these subjects, but I usually get too depressed by the issues to post them. There’s no energy without cost, and weighing those costs is a series of grim tradeoffs.

Chris [Bolgiano] makes a case for community-scale, rather than industrial-scale, wind power, and I can agree wholeheartedly there. I hope someday to afford my own small windmill, along with some solar panels for our ridge top home. I’m sure most of my neighbors would desire these things too if they were not so pricey. Who wouldn’t want to save on electric bills? She’s also spot-on concerning the marginal nature of wind power on Appalachia’s high ridges–it wouldn’t be profitable to build unsubsidized wind farms here.

Still, most natural resource extraction is government subsidized in some way. Chris observes Industrial wind power has a place, and T. Boone Pickens knows exactly where that is: On the plains, where winds are incessant. Other potentially low impact sites are mid-western crop fields, eastern strip mines, and off-shore waters, much closer to the coastal cities that need the power. Unfortunately, the people that live in those places don’t find the wind farms “low impact.” (Except perhaps on those strip mines where everyone has moved away because there is no more safe drinking water.)

Rebecca includes a number of links to articles on this subject if you’re interested and want to follow up. As always, I suggest following the link and reading the original.

Gone with the windmills

Yesterday I said I live in a state where coal is king and I realize that the issues are not completely simple.

Here is one of those complexities explained in Chris Bolgiano’s An Open Letter to President Obama: Gone With The Windmills? A Plea to Save the Appalachian National Forests :

Dear President Obama:

Thanks to you, America is turning green again, nearly forty years after I went �Back to the Land� as part of the first Earth Day generation. You came within twenty miles of my passive-aggressive solar homestead on Cross Mountain last October, when you spoke in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Surely, as you flew into the Shenandoah Valley airport, you noticed to the west the long, sinuous lines of forest-covered mountains, fall colors blazing in faux fire.

A century ago you would have seen smoke billowing from real fires, caused by a rampage of steam-powered logging. Flooding caused by deforestation of the mountains became so costly by 1911 that Congress passed the Weeks Act, authorizing the U.S. Forest Service to buy land from willing sellers and repair environmental damage. Some of the highest ridges you saw when you looked westward are in national forests that were established then, along the spine of the Southern Appalachian Mountains.

These forests now face their greatest threat in a century.

Reflecting a nearly 50% nationwide increase in wind electricity plants in 2007, developers are arriving in what they themselves called �a gold rush� at a recent industry conference. There, a wind map ranked thin red currents along the highest Appalachian ridges as just possibly strong enough to power turbines for massive industrial wind installations.

Glossy ads for wind power always show turbines in open fields, never in forests. That�s because every turbine requires up to five acres of deforestation. Hundreds of turbines are being built here, burgeoning to tens of thousands if the U.S. Department of Energy indiscriminately pursues its �20% Wind Energy By 2030? program. Do the math, and factor in the forest fragmentation that multiplies the loss of habitat, and the super-wide new roads that destroy the last remote, wild ridges.

wind turbine with powerlinesSlender, rocky ridges are blasted and bulldozed to flatten pads for turbines. Each pad requires hundreds of tons of concrete. After the 25 year life span of the huge machines, the pads remain as dead ground but possibly good tennis courts in a summer camp for giants in the future.

Deforestation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions after fossil fuel burning. The rest of the world agreed at the recent U.N. climate summit to protect maturing forests that sequester huge amounts of carbon dioxide � like those now healing from old abuse in the Southern Appalachians. In Transition to Green, the 400 pages of nature tips sent you by a coalition of environmental organizations, the first recommendation for the U.S. Department of Agriculture is to �manage the national forest system to secure climate benefits.�

Industrial wind will blow this opportunity away.

It�s already blowing away a lot of wildlife. Turbine blades reach 450 feet above ridge crests where songbirds migrate, bats feed, and eagles rise on thermals. Just across the state line in West Virginia, thousands of creatures are being killed every year at new wind plants, the highest kills ever documented worldwide from turbines. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service strongly recommends against turbines on nearby Shenandoah Mountain due to the likelihood of killing endangered species, yet several projects are underway.

Some of the people living near turbines suffer from chronic sleeplessness and other symptoms of Wind Turbine Syndrome (including depression over loss of property values).

Death, destruction and insomnia are marketed to urban consumers as �green� electricity, what little there is of it. Turbines produce only about 30% or less of their maximum rated capacity, and some of that is lost along hundreds of miles of transmission lines. When the wind does blow, the aging lines can hardly handle the surge.

What drives this high-cost/low-benefit gold rush is the federal production tax credit. More tax breaks beckon in national forests, where no local property taxes are levied so local communities wouldn�t share in revenues produced by turbines, plus the Forest Service helps pay for building roads. In the three years that the federal tax credit hasn�t been reauthorized since first enacted in 1992, the skyrocketing wind industry plateaued like a mountaintop-removal coalmine.

The coal mining that has ravaged the land and people in part of Appalachia for a century is our major source of electricity, and is obscenely destructive to forests. But destroying more forests in order to stop destroying forests doesn�t make sense. And building industrial wind plants in Appalachia isn�t change. It�s a 21st-century version of the same old pattern of taking value out and leaving costs behind.

These ancient mountains are well-documented as the biologically richest temperate woodlands in the world, one of North America�s greatest natural treasures, rich in globally rare species and communities, including human ones. So you can�t dismiss my aging hippie protest merely as NIMBY, which in any case is simply love of place. It breaks my heart to see these murdered old mountains assaulted again.

Since 1911, the Forest Service has salvaged the land and regenerated trees in watersheds that, today, supply drinking water to millions of people (not to mention clean air). Tens of millions of people depend on these national forests for access to the outdoors, spending in local economies as they go. Timber from regulated harvests supports local companies.

National forests are the last vestige of the rural commons, where, as you noted in a recent speech, �the proud tradition of hunting is passed on through the generations.� Deer eat my flowers and I eat the deer in an Appalachian adaptation of flower power.

No flowers bloom now; the mountain forests you saw in autumn glory are bark naked and blue with winter cold. Warmed by firewood from my hundred acres of oaks, I�m writing you on a computer plugged into nine solar panels that power my house. I believe in green energy so much that I�ve started a new savings fund to buy one of those million plug-in hybrid cars that you�ve promised to get on the road by 2015.

Industrial wind power has a place, and T. Boone Pickens knows exactly where that is: On the plains, where winds are incessant. Other potentially low impact sites are mid-western cropfields, eastern strip mines, and off-shore waters, much closer to the coastal cities that need the power.

But in forested rural areas like Appalachia, community-scale rather than industrial-scale would better contribute to your goal of 10% of our electricity from renewable sources by 2012. Solar panels and small wind turbines have enormous potential for on-site, small-scale power generation, with hardly a ripple on the grid.

Consider how much stronger our nation would be against disasters both natural and criminal if schools, hospitals, community centers, businesses, nursing homes, farms, houses and apartment buildings across the country made enough electricity to pump drinking water and refrigerate food.

Americans haven�t enjoyed that kind of independence since they drank from dippers and packed pond ice in sawdust for the summer icebox. The decentralization of electricity represents a new perspective on the old rallying cry of democracy, �Power to the People!�

Can�t we make some of that $150 billion you want to invest in �building a clean energy future� available to ordinary people, small businesses and neighborhoods, as well as distant corporations? And can�t we keep our national forests intact for future generations?

My hope for change is that you will answer, �Yes We Can!�

Yours in the Red, White, and Blue Ridge,

Chris Bolgiano

Via Via Negativa, who offers a bibliography of supporting documents you might want to check out.

As I read in Kentucky’s history, I am driven to the conclusion that the entire history of the United States of America is one of exploitation and waste.

The Appalachians seem to be caught between coal and wind in the service of big industry.

Civil disobedience

Join Wendell Berry and Bill McKibben in Civil Disobedience Against Coal-Fired Power Plants :

There are moments in a nation�s � and a planet�s � history when it may be necessary for some to break the law in order to bear witness to an evil, bring it to wider attention, and push for its correction. We think such a time has arrived, and we are writing to say that we hope some of you will join us in Washington D.C. on Monday March 2 in order to take part in a civil act of civil disobedience outside a coal-fired power plant near Capitol Hill.

Follow the link for details.

Via

Read als Blowing away King Coal at Salon.

I live in a state where coal is king and I realize that the issues are not completely simple. However, even if coal is to remain king, mountaintop removal is a stupid way to get at the coal:

After witnessing 470 mountains in central Appalachia get blown to bits by strip mining, the Coal River wind proponents were drawing a line in the sand. The verdict was in on mountaintop removal, which had been launched in 1970 as a quick and dirty option to cheaply procure coal. Thirty-eight years and a million and a half acres of destroyed hardwood forests later, mountaintop removal had run its course in the region with appalling effects. It had not only destroyed the natural heritage, it had ripped out the roots of the Appalachian culture and depopulated the historic mountain communities in the process.

Over 1,200 miles of waterways had been sullied and jammed with mining fill. Blasting and coal dust had made life unbearable for anyone in the strip-mined areas. Wells had been busted and polluted with toxic waste. Given the mechanization of aboveground mountaintop removal, and its shakedown of a diversified economy, coal mining jobs had plummeted as poverty rates rose in strip-mining areas.

In December, West Virginians saw what happened at a Tennessee power plant. A restraining wall burst and a billion gallons of coal ash poured out of a pond and deluged 400 acres of land in 6 feet of sludge. The proposed mountaintop removal site on Coal River Mountain rested beside a 6 billion-gallon toxic coal waste sludge dam above underground mines. If the proposed blasting took place, a fracture along the sludge lake could be catastrophic for the communities downstream.

The residents asked: Why should Coal River Mountain be the last mountain to die for a mistake?

All I know is what I read in the papers

But I’ll start with Glenn Greenwald’s blog:

Chris Dodd went to the Senate floor last night to speak against the FISA bill and delivered one of the most compelling and inspired speeches by a prominent politician that I’ve heard in quite some time. He tied the core corruption of the FISA bill’s telecom amnesty and warranltess eavesdropping provisions into the whole litany of the Bush administration’s lawless and destructive behavior over the last seven years — from torture and rendition to the abuse of secrecy instruments and Guantanamo mock trials — with a focus on the way in which telecom amnesty further demolishes the rule of law among our political class.

That speech signals that the small minority in the Senate devoted to stopping this bill have made this a priority. Small, vocal, passionate minorities in the Senate — backed up by vocal, passionate and engaged citizens — can do much to prevent a bill’s quick and painless passage. Dodd’s speech can be seen and/or read here. I highly recommend it, and if I had one wish this week, it would be that any journalist who will ever write or utter the words “FISA,” “telecom immunity” or “Terrorism” would be forced to watch this speech from start to finish without distraction.

…

Beyond the FISA bill’s evisceration of the rule of law, the Fourth Amendment and surveillance safeguards, what has always been so striking with this controversy has been how transparently sleazy and corrupt it reveals the Congress to be. Right out in the open, telecoms have just led Congressional supporters of telecom immunity around like little puppets. It’s just amazing — though extremely common — that while negotiations over the bill occurred in total secrecy, with civil liberties groups and the public at large being completely excluded, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer “negotiated” directly with the telecoms over how the telecoms’ amnesty bill should be written.

Telecoms broke our surveillance laws, and then our Democratic Congressional leaders ran to them to take instructions on how to write the special law to protect them, and they didn’t even really bother to hide that.

White House Refused to Open Pollutants E-Mail :

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency�s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.�s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.

This week, more than six months later, the E.P.A. is set to respond to that order by releasing a watered-down version of the original proposal that offers no conclusion. Instead, the document reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant.

Over the past five days, the officials said, the White House successfully put pressure on the E.P.A. to eliminate large sections of the original analysis that supported regulation, including a finding that tough regulation of motor vehicle emissions could produce $500 billion to $2 trillion in economic benefits over the next 32 years

Ideology-Based Hiring at Justice Broke Laws, Investigation Finds

Senior Justice Department officials broke civil service laws by rejecting scores of young applicants who had links to Democrats or liberal organizations, according to a biting report issued yesterday.
…
Former Justice Department officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations said the study underscores the challenge for the next president.

“The Honors Program at DOJ has always been the ‘A-list,’ ” said Nicholas M. Gess, a Justice official under President Bill Clinton. “The next attorney general will be stuck with many from the ‘B-list.”

High Medicare Costs, Courtesy of Congress

On Wal-Mart�s Web site, you can buy a walker for $59.92. It is called the Carex Explorer, and it�s a typical walker: a few feet high, with four metal poles extending to the ground. The Explorer is one of the walkers covered by Medicare.

But Medicare and its beneficiaries aren�t paying $59.92 for the Explorer or any similar walker. In fact, they�re not paying anything close to it. They are paying about $110.

For years, Congress has set the price for walkers and various medical equipment, and it has consistently set them well above the market rate, effectively handing out a few hundred million dollars of corporate welfare every year to the equipment makers.

But as of July 1, this system is set to change. Companies will instead have to submit bids � to compete with one another, just as Wal-Mart competes with Target � if they want to continue selling products to Medicare. Based on a pilot program, the price of walkers, delivery and setup included, will fall to about $80.

Now, would you like to guess how the equipment makers feel about this?

Right.

With the changeover looming, they have increased their contributions to Congress. They have also started publicly claiming that competitive bidding will, among other things, deprive some patients of oxygen equipment they need.

Hillary Clinton returns to the Senate:

But as she returned in defeat to her old home in the Senate yesterday, she was received as if in triumph. And, in a sense, her stature had increased during the failed primary battle: She left as a legislator but returned as the leader of an 18 million-strong movement of women and working-class voters — a group whose support Clinton’s Democratic colleagues fervently desire.

And so, as Clinton entered a private luncheon in the Capitol, these colleagues greeted her with cheers, hugs and high-fives. “It’s great to be here among my colleagues,” Clinton teased, “just another regular, plain old superdelegate.”

On politicians, leaders, and radicals

Contemplating this year’s three candidates for president, I see John McCain who promises four more years of governing just like George W. Bush. Such promises violate the rule of holes. Barack Obama seems to offer voters an empty slate on which they can write the transformational dream of their choice. He was careful to run before he had any substantial record that would prevent him from running such a campaign of inspiration and high ideals. Hillary Clinton offers a long history of substantial accomplishments and substantial losses, mistakes and self-reinventions. It is this very history that infuriates some voters.

What I don’t see, among the three candidates, is much in the way of innovation or leadership. Certainly I see no radical leaders, not even Jeremiah Wright. (He, I think, is flogging a book.) Why is that so in a year when the country is so eager to be taken in a new direction? Because the candidates are politicians, and politicians deal and compromise. They legislate and govern. They have to be elected, a process that tends to smooth away any radical edges. They hide behind “the will of the people.” They have tremendous egos necessary to believing they should be the elected one. But they rarely lead.

We need politicians. They can accomplish great things.

Even Abraham Lincoln was a consummate politician. So was FDR.

George W. Bush is not much of a politician and look where he got us.

But great leaders don’t come from the government, they rise from the people. I was reminded of that when Rosalie sent me this article on climate change by Michael Pollan, Why Bother?

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we�re living our lives suggests we�re not really serious about changing � something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking � passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists � that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It�s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s � an era innocent of climate change; what we would give to have back that environmental crisis! � was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were. He was impatient with people who wrote checks to environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives � the 1970s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing was likely to change until we healed the �split between what we think and what we do.� For Berry, the �why bother� question came down to a moral imperative: �Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.�

Wendell Berry is a man of truly radical ideas. He’s a libertarian and a hard-nosed moralist. But I think he’s right when he says it is we, the people, who have to do these things. Does that mean Dick Cheney was right when he sneered that ecology is a choice of personal morality? Yes, I think he was, though the sneer is his problem, not ours.

I don’t mean this post to be about climate change in particular but about change in general, taking the country in a better direction. Cheney is living proof of at least one of Jeremiah Wright’s preachings: governments fail. Politicians, even Barack Obama, do what politicians do. It’s up to the people to hold them accountable. Where is the outcry about torture? Where is the outcry against war crimes done in our names? Where is the outcry about our huge military expenditures? About our huge prison population? About mountaintop removal? About our staggering national debt? We all seem to want some one to change these things for us, but not if they have to raise our taxes. Not if it means we can’t have TiVo and iPod.

If George W. Bush had been a leader, he could have used the fall of our topless towers to strengthen our moral fiber. Instead, being a coward himself, he chose to play on our fears in order to keep his own power.

So it looks like we’re going to have to grow our courage from the grassroots if we want to survive. We are, after all, a democracy.

Or, as Anglachel put it:

It�s easy to denounce the entire corrupt US government, or to declare you are not a part of the great unwashed, but belong to an archipelago. It does not require courage. One needs nothing but an ego, a distorted view of your own self-importance, and an internet connection for that form of radicalism. It is not very radical, nor does it really make you part of Left politics.

True radicalism is the courage to say �No, I�m sitting here,� on a bus ride, not knowing if this might mean your death. And that courage is the heart and soul of Left politics.

Equality has always been the most radical thought in politics.

Pollan, by the way, doesn’t even ask you to do something this dangerous. Just give up meat or take a sabbath from consumption or plant a garden in your yard:

Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it�s one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren�t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can�t prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would simply conduct their lives �as if� they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc.

Hope, Al Gore style

This video is widely available throughout the intertubes. I provided a link to one spot myself earlier. But iit’s important so I thought I would post it too:

I love the black shirt.

Thanks to Have Coffee, Will Write for help with the code. Jeff has a great new look, so if you haven’t been over there for a while you should give him a visit. He’s doing great work on Myanmar and Darfur and he’s fighting the good fight against Wal-Mart.

Green pathways out of poverty. Via

Cranky Environmentalists