Do You Scratch and Claw to Stay Tuned to the World?

Busy lives. The world turns. Staying up to date on a daily basis is a chore, even with the newly anointed Scott Pelley on CBS. A full dose of Wolf still takes some screen time.


Are we really, though, getting the stories that matter to the future of 4th graders?? 


We are sort of on the cusp of seeing mainstream media reporting on uncomfortable issues of our future - beyond the economy. (Choose an economy; how about Greece...) In general, the themes of water, peak oil, climate change, cultural conflicts (read wars) and the needs of citizens in coming decades are neglected miserably.

Many blogsites compile pertinent daily articles and send them out as a bundle to subscribers. (Sometimes there is a small subscription fee.) Articles are culled from many sources and cover everything from breaking news to opinion. 


Such as:
Speaking Truth to Power Daily News Digest from Carolyn Baker
Common Dreams
Energy Bulletin


Here are some examples of articles brought to light on subscription bundles in only the past two weeks or so (of many more!). Take a glance at the variety of content, which is generally neglected in reports from other media. I have highlighted key words. Scan the variety of articles. Get a feel for how this may impact your own perceptions.


6/3/11 Wangari Maathai: Spiritual Environmentalism—Healing Ourselves by Replenishing the Earth
6/13/11 Oil company's lawsuit against Greenpeace backfires
6/2/11 Why Our Most Urgent Climate Struggles May Be Winnable by Bill McKibben
6/1/11 Population Footprints: Rights and Responsibilities — Behind the Numbers: The PRB blog on population, health, and the environment
6/1/11 Chris Hedges: The Sky Really Is Falling - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig
6/15/11 Lawn Care Goes to the Sheep in a Pennsylvania School District - Planet Green
5/29/11 The Reality of Global Climate Change is Upon Us - Newsweek
6/3/11 Shortages of Fresh Water Seen as Emerging Threat - ABC News
6/13/11 USGS: Global Warming Drives Rockies Snowpack Loss Unrivaled in 800 Years, Threatens Western Water Supply
6/16/11 Summer Reading Suggestions | Center for Ecoliteracy
6/14/11 The Truth About The Economy In 2 Minutes | MoveOn.Org
6/16/11 Small farms may be better for food security and biodiversity | Science Matters | David Suzuki Foundation
5/2/11 In U.S., Optimism About Future for Youth Reaches All-Time Low
6/17/11 Humane Connection: 7 Resources for Finding Out About the Secret Lives of Your Stuff
6/14/11 Children Pay Ultimate Price of Iraq's Poisonous Wartime Legacy | Common Dreams
6/5/11 Josh Golin: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Commerce... and Other Scholastic Satires
6/1/11 The New Geopolitics of Food - By Lester R. Brown | Foreign Policy
6/10/11 Humanitarian crisis as world's largest refugee camp declared full | World news | guardian.co.uk
6/1/11 An End to Growth: The Environment’s Impact on our Economic Decline | Oil Price.com
2/16/11 Two seminal Nature papers join growing body of evidence that human emissions fuel extreme weather, flooding that harm humans and the environment | ThinkProgress
6/7/11 BBC News - Tropical forests 'better managed'
6/17/11 Will Alternative Energy Save Us From Peak Oil | Oil Price.com
6/13/11 Oil-giant Venezuela tries to limit energy use - Yahoo! News
6/3/11 Video: 15 Years of Saying YES!
5/26/11 The geology of the planet: Welcome to the Anthropocene | The Economist
6/15/11 Ten Charts That Embody Everything That's Wrong With The U.S. Economy
6/12/11 Field Notes from the Future- Children and Nature.Org
6/1/11 The Oil Drum | Oil prices and recession
6/7/11 Yemen Facing Humanitarian Catastrophe: UNICEF | Common Dreams
6/1/11 In The World After Abundance | Energy Bulletin
6/15/11 Sewing and Clothing Repair | Preparedness Advice Blog
6/16/11 Nebraska Nuclear Reactor Flooded

We do sifting and winnowing in class each day. I hope this creates resources for sifting the challenges of resilience to come.

Which Is It? Sustainability Or Resiliency?

I'm having a semantics conflict.

Is “sustainability” going down the same path as “green” and “eco-friendly?”  

On the one hand, cultural buzzwords come and go. They start as enlightened concepts, become overused, then tedious, then meaningless. If product marketing gets ahold of them, they become twisted and their meanings gutted. Even George Zens, publisher of the Sustainability Times in the Madison area, brought this up recently in an article under his Sustainability 101. Regarding sustainability:

“...there is a real danger that its significance is in the process of being diluted to the point where it is nothing more than an empty shell...”

On the other hand, I am not convinced that we use sustainability correctly to begin with. This concept implies a level of continued living standard and stability even though energy resource availability and distribution may (will) diminish.

Technically, sustainability is defined by phrases like: to hold up, to endure, to keep it going, to keep from giving way, to bear up from below. To be sure, it is a most positive sentiment of strength. But I am not sure it's the best definition for the future dynamics of life on Earth.

A level of maintained stability is not possible for world cultures in the coming decades. This is especially so for our country and our “developed” buddies. You know the culprits: population overshoot, peak oil, climate changes, economic crises, political conflicts over resources, etc. Collectively, there is no rational way we can overcome these global elephants in the room without simplifying and living with much less. 

So, then, at which level do we strive to sustain? Is it the business-as-usual level per our present year? Do we, then, have the option to reset the stability dial backward during 2020, if necessary? When the cultural lifestyle levels of 2020 cannot be maintained, do we recalibrate? Stepping down the rungs of a cultural contraction ladder is not sustainability. Sustainability implies staying at the same rung from...well, now. Today. And, that can’t happen. Can one recalibrate sustainability?  

A more promising concept?  Resiliency. 

[This term will really, really, really be the best one!]

As Americans acculturate to the requirements of less carbon emissions, less oil and tighter community dependence they will need a positive sense of retooling as the life standards change. We can’t dig in our heels and refuse to relinquish. We may not be able to sustain, but we will be able to adjust, rebound, and recover: Resiliency.

The resilience component does not imply that we don’t work hard nor work together for the best and fairest of living situations. It is certainly not a weakness. It does imply a feel of flow, a buoyancy. It is meeting the stability level of the moment in a fluid manner. Riding the surface of events, not simply “treading water.”  It is a positive preparedness; a fishing bobber.

       Enough water metaphors.

Resiliency in our lives gives us the permission to adjust to realities and to work with others to do the same. The Transition Culture movement, begun in the UK, is a leading citizen-based proponent of resiliency. It focuses on one’s immediate community, the lessening of transportation needs, use of local food, and reskilling. It underscores positive and flexible behavior habits of change: Resiliency.

Stay Informed, Not Numbed

24/7 news. You need to keep up with the minute-by-minute happenings of the world! Now! Anytime! You know that news availability 24/7 will bring issues of the globe into clarity and unbiased completeness. 

Well, I’ve found that simply ingesting 24-hour news cycles doesn’t get you all the insights you really need to hear.  Much as I have come to respect some reporters and their “shows” on TV news networks, they are still hamstrung by corporate offices one floor above the studios. The hamstringing may come from a political persuasion or taboos laid down by advertisers. Result? A lack of completeness.

I may have missed it, but in 100 days of reporting on the Gulf Oil Spill there was no serious discussion about Peak Oil and the reasons this particular incident was so indicative of the future. Nor about the critical fuel consumption addiction that causes such risky exploitation..., er, I mean exploration. 

But we sure know what leaking oil and methane looks like via that leak-cam! This play-by-play; day-after-day live scenario, created a public numbness to the oil disaster, not unlike the Haiti earthquake. That’s the irony of 24/7 networks. Even though the incident de jour may be justifiable news, the continual cycling of distressing images encourages us turn away and blot it out.

This numbness inhibits civic interest and, often, important societal habit changes. With so many potentially negative news issues on our plates each day, we can work up a pretty strong barrier to life outside our household. That’s a shame. 

If there was ever a time to be clear about global health issues and personal futures, it’s now. Why can’t there be frank reporting about oil and gas facts that spell out the adverse affects awaiting all of us??  It’s been upstaged by the 24/7 leak-cam.

So, I generally limit my time with the boob tube media. By choosing a select variety of daily informational websites to peruse online (including BBC), I can receive a more clear and accurate and complete content on issues. Personally, some of the sites listed along the sidebar of this blog have become my choice for daily informed time. Choose your own. Don’t get numbed. Our informed collective insight about Earth is crucial.

Moving On, Like A Waxing Moon

The President told us tonight that focus on the oil gusher deep in the Gulf of Mexico will not fade; that those responsible will pay; that renewable energy is now really officially on the table.  It was a fair speech, but my blood pressure began to rise.

It makes me crazy that nowhere in the frenzied media (including tonight’s complete cast of the “best journalists in the business” crammed behind a desk in the CNN newsroom), nor in Congress is there talk of serious oil conservation, peak oil realities and greenhouse gas calamities on the horizon. Nowhere is there talk of the ethics of oil usage in this country. 

I will be attending the Midwest Renewable Energy Fair in central Wisconsin this coming weekend.  Such topics will be spread throughout the presentations and discussions. I assume my nerves and stomach are in similar states to those thousands who will be there; including Bill McKibbon of 350.org.


So, as the TV pundits pundicized, I took my churning frustration out to the darkening backyard. Right on cue, the waxing crescent moon loomed over our dark roof and next to the silhouetted spruce tree out front.  The evening sliver was slowly descending in the darkening western sky.  Venus sparkled a few degrees to the north at the same elevation.  

And then, in its erratic egocentric dance routine, the first firefly of the season darted around blinking, “Look at me! Look at me!” Cute, but not quite Venus, fella.  I sighed. Three very different "little" natural lights had combined to settle me down.

Down-came-the-blood-pressure.

The newest of the waxing crescent moon has always been my favorite phase.  I wrote this poem almost a decade ago to gather thoughts of this little sliver.


RENEW

The new crescent succeeds
the dark void of new moon nights.
It defers to greater luminescence
in the low west at day’s end
and patiently awaits the sun’s departure.

Emerging like the mirage of a clean white thread,
the moon becomes its own elusive twilight show.

Sun and Earth and Moon 
will continue to blend movement 
so this infant moon
develops its presence
into brighter nights.


Sometimes it appears suddenly. 
I feel an ephemeral tug, like a twenty-nine day tide.
Beauty so powerfully delicate.
Spiritually so symbolic of growth. 
A reminder to revitalize.

Refocus on mindfulness.
Reaffirm love for self.
Recommit to compassion. 
Regenerate the soul with wisdom.
Renew.


Short minutes. 
The crescent succumbs to the horizon.
Higher and fuller tomorrow.


This is the way I need to deal with my frustrations of the present and fears of the future.  Regroup, take a deep breath, and smile at the moon.   

Finite Oil: Fossil Fuel Reality

An astronaut once said that the view of Earth from space made Earth seem so precious and, yet, at the same time so insignificant.  At both ends of this paradox is finiteness.  Right there is the whole unit.  Right there is the boundary between planet and space.  Earth and infinity.  “Finity” vs. infinity, as it were.

Non-renewable resources, especially oil and coal, are quickly re-enforcing  this notion of what you see is what you get.  Maybe more quickly than most of us know.  Climate Change, even on a slow day, gets more attention than other pieces of the healthy Earth puzzle. This ailing patient has, I’m afraid, more than one malady to overcome.  

Picture yourself holding up a globe at the front of the classroom, patting it affectionately, and saying to the class, 

“Everything we have is right here. Everything we need is right here.”  

But do we really fathom the implications of these comments? 

You set down the blue and green globe and pick up a clear plastic globe with a hole in the top.  Into this hole you pour sloshing greasy liquid from a one liter measuring container.  Exactly one liter.  

“Pretend this is all of the oil within Earth as of 200 years ago...every single bit of oil that is in cracks and pools under the land and oceans, or seeped deeply into rock.”

Now, turn the plastic globe and empty out enough to fill the measuring container back up to the one-half liter mark.

“In the past couple hundred years, people on Earth have used oil for all sorts of things, like plastic and gasoline and fuel to heat houses.  Guess how much people have used?  Yup.  One-half.  We have used up one half of all the oil we know to exist on Earth.”

The concept is Peak Oil. Since extraction of oil began (history of oil production: here and here) for its myriad purposes, more has been produced each year than the year before. Globally, always more than the year before. Peak Oil is the term for the point in time where more oil cannot be extracted in a certain year(s) than the year before. The extraction rate has peaked. Of course because oil is unevenly distributed within the Earth, this varies from nation to nation. (The US peaked in 1970.) But, globally, it means that only one-half the original resource remains under ground. 

We still retain this one-half. But the first half was “easy” and “cheap” oil. Drill and flow. Of the balance, the expenses will rise until it is uneconomical to extract. It will take more energy to extract a barrel than that barrel is worth. Much of the second half of oil will remain untapped for this reason.

It is now estimated by many that the Earth reached peak oil in our current decade, specifically within the last couple of years.  Other estimates give us another decade, and so on.  Regardless of the exact year, Peak Oil is upon us.  M.King Hubbert, a geophysicist, calculated in the 1950‘s the peak year of United States' oil with his bell curve.  He was very close in his prediction.  Oil peak charts now refer to him as one of the first to outline upcoming oil data.

Our difficulty arises, of course, when consumption outpaces a declining availability of oil.  When will oil become too expensive for common use?  The Earth’s population is seven billion. Will conservation offset population growth?  Will technology intercede to offset lack of oil? Will there be government restrictions on oil and natural gas usage?  Will the United States take a lead in dealing with oil reduction?  Will "developed" countries find themselves in need of cultural behavior changes?  Will there be another misguided cry of, "What's our oil doing under your sands?"


Plain old statistics to ponder: Current

• 1 oil barrel = 42 gallons  
• World oil extraction ~ 85.47 million barrels/day
• World oil consumption ~ 85.53 million barrels/day
• United States extraction ~4.95 million barrels/day
• United State importations ~9.78 million barrels/day
• US gasoline use only ~ 8.9 million barrels/day

“A Crude Awakening” is a compelling and sometimes entertaining documentary on 20th century usage of oil.  It would be worth everyone’s time to set aside an hour to watch this 2006 film.