Tim DeChristopher posed as a bidder at a Bureau of Land Management auction, "purchasing" 22,000 acres of beautiful Utah land to protect it from oil and gas companies. He now faces a stiff prison sentence. You'll find his story here, including his discussion with Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow (plus statement by Robert Redford).
There is much talk of "sustainability" these days, but I don't think very many people have considered what that truly means. "Sustainable" has become synonymous with "green", which in our hyper-consumerist American society has transformed into "buy something". Understandable, perhaps, but it's deadly wrong. The World English dictionary defines "sustainable" as "2. (of economic development, energy sources, etc) capable of being maintained at a steady level without exhausting natural resources or causing severe ecological damage", which seems to me to be a pretty good definition of what the word really means, as opposed to what people think it means.
Mark Hertsgaard at The Nation is offering some reasons for stepping up and confronting climate denialists:
"You want specifics? By the time she is my age, [my daughter] Chiara may well not have enough water to drink here in California, because much of the Sierra Nevada snowpack will have melted. Children in today's Washington, DC, are likely to witness in the course of their lifetimes sea level rise combine with stronger storm surges to regularly ring the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials with moats and submerge half of the National Mall. By 2050 the record heat that made the summer of 2010 so wicked will become the new normal in New York City and much of the East Coast. Overseas, the impacts will be punishing as well, especially for the poor. In Bangladesh, sea level rise is already making the soil and water in southern coastal regions too salty to produce decent yields of rice, the staple crop for hundreds of years. Meanwhile, the inexorability of sea level rise ensures that many such low-lying areas worldwide will have to be evacuated, unleashing vast streams of climate change refugees. Military experts warn that this will pose not only humanitarian challenges but recurring threats to peace if the refugees attempt to cross national borders."An important step in the process is to avoid referring to climate cranks as "skeptics."
Don't rely on our media to rise to the occasion. The protocol of mainstream news coverage leads Washington journalists to refer to these people as climate skeptics. They're not skeptics. They're cranks. True skepticism is invaluable to the scientific method, but an honest skeptic can be persuaded by facts, if they are sound. The cranks are impervious to facts, at least facts that contradict their wacky worldview. When virtually every national science academy in the developed world, including our own, and every major scientific organization (e.g., the American Geophysical Union, the American Physics Society) has affirmed that climate change is real and extremely dangerous, only a crank continues to insist that it's all a left-wing plot.
I just don't get it. Just look at the damage being done by allowing free plastic bags and ask yourself why we can't motivate ourselves to ban free plastic bags. If we, as a country, can't make this obviously necessary move, are we capable of anything at all? If some Middle Eastern terrorist dumped this amount of crap all over our country (and world), we'd declare war to seek revenge. But we're doing this to ourselves, so it's OK. And what about bottled water? The ends simply don't justify the means. We are being poisoned by free market fundamentalism.
There was recently a big winter storm across the Central and North Eastern U.S. In my local town, it had the potential of exceeding the record one-day snowfall set 29 years ago. All the local news stations talked about the major storm approaching. Thunder snow, a rare occurrence here, was predicted. Stores were stripped of snow shovels, salt, water softener (salt), milk and bread.The governor called in the National Guard, and all the utility and road crews were on high alert.
When the freezing rain started on Monday, the media warned people to stay home for the next day or two as the storm passed over. I grew excited. The little kid in me was hoping for a big snow. But our town was right on the freezing line. Just south of us, there is rain. North of us, snow. The band from rain through freezing rain, sleet, snow, up to full blizzard is only a hundred miles wide. As Tuesday dawned, we had a glaze of ice, and sleet was falling. I woke early and spent a couple of hours learning how to hack my new super-zoom camera to force it to take a time lapse picture series. I hoped to make a nice video of the yard disappearing under a foot or more of snow.
So I set up my camera and started it early in the morning, when there was still just a glaze of ice on the path and plants. The day wore on. At noon I it was still just sleeting. I changed the batteries in the camera. By sunset, there was just a couple of inches of sleet. It was fun to walk on top of what looks like snow. But the yard is still visible. Had the freeze line been a couple of dozen miles farther south, that thin layer of sleet would have been about a foot of snow. What a gyp! So I let the camera run overnight, in hopes that we'd get some snow on the few inches of ice.
But as Wednesday dawned, Groundhog Day, there was only a little more snow. Sure, the roads are all iced over, and icicles hang from everything. But this is a far cry from what the hue and cry of the media had us expecting. Granted, the next county over (and half the state) is snowed in. Interstate 70 is closed between the Saint Louis metro area and Kansas. And the temperature will drop below zero (-18°C) tonight.
But how did we get Left Behind from the transcendental fairyland, a heaven of deep snow? Obviously we hadn't prayed hard enough to the God of the clean white snowy world above to deliver us from mundane weather. Or we didn't believe sincerely enough in the snowy salvation offered by his half-breed son, Jack Frost. Maybe some around us are heretical worshipers of the Daily Commute, and counteracted our prayers.
So we beseech those who were called up to the snowy realm to share with us their good fortune. Show us unworthy shovelers of sleet what the True Light of real snow is like. Maybe it's not too late.