from the moon to earth

Last night Kimmie and I watched episode 4 of the 1998 docu-drama series From the Earth to the Moon--about the flight of Apollo 8 in 1968. The series, a high-budget HBO offering produced by Tom Hanks, Ron Howard, and Brian Grazer--the forces behind the 1995 movie Apollo 13--is well made and does capture some of the flavor of the 1960s as I remember it. It was a time of war, rioting, social unrest, assassinations--society in convulsions. I watched it on black-and-white TV at the time: state funerals, soldiers clubbing protesting students, endless machine-gunning and explosions in remote tropical forests--a backdrop of violence and killing against which politicians made stirring, idealistic speeches.

The series shows clips of all that, plus scenes of intense, nerdish men in rooms fogged with cigarette smoke talking earnestly about how to put astronauts on the moon before the Soviets beat them to it. At age nine, it was obvious and natural to me why "we" should be going all-out to fly to the moon: it was neat! What did it matter to me how many billions it cost? I made 25 cents a week in allowance; I had no notion of money. I loved space and its technology maybe even more than other nine-year-old boys.

I see things differently now. I'm still fascinated by space and space science, and I'm sure I'll always be interested in spacecraft. But instead of John F. Kennedy's famous speech of 25 May 1961, in which he committed the United States to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, I think of another speech, given four months earlier, by his predecessor Dwight Eisenhower, which contained these words:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence--economic, political, even spiritual--is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

The makers of the spacecraft that got America to the moon were all leading military contractors: General Dynamics, Rockwell, Boeing. The total cost of the Apollo program was about $20-25 billion, or the equivalent of around $120 billion today. It was ostensibly a peacetime initiative, but we can't ignore that it was done in direct, stated competition with the USSR--the West's Cold War enemy--and that the technologies developed were no doubt helpful for future military applications. Plus the money-stream helped those military contractors keep meeting their very large payrolls.

I remember that Christmas of 1968, hearing the radio broadcast of the astronauts Borman, Anders, and Lovell, in orbit around the moon, reading the opening verses of Genesis. Harvey Burt, our host for that Christmas dinner, said that Mara and I would be able to think back to that day and remember where we were.

Looking back on the Apollo program and on the show last night, I think the most important and memorable thing was the awe of the astronauts when they watched the Earth rise from over the horizon of the moon. As far as I know, all astronauts have felt this awe: the feeling of preciousness of Earth, our island home in the vast, dark, frigid sea of space. What are we doing to the only home we've got?

I felt anxiety and sadness as I watched the show. Looking at the world around me, from the news on TV to the street outside my house, I find it hard to be optimistic. We take our planet for granted, and I think there will be a terrible, terrible price to pay.

sanity-check, global and personal

After taking half a Sleep Aid I slept through most of the night, and feel much better this morning. I felt freshness and enthusiasm in opening up the books from which I'm currently keying notes over my morning coffee (The Roman Conquest of Italy and The Pagan God). As Robert McKee says, knowledge increases a writer's choices, and therefore makes possible an avoidance of cliche. Tappity-tap-tap.

What I'm doing might be insane (laboring over a gigantic and obscure project that may or may not ever see the light of day)--but then, what counts as sane? How do people spend their time, and should I care? And if so, why?

In the evenings Kimmie and I are watching disc 5 of the documentary series Planet Earth. This disc contains three episodes that form an addendum to the main series, which focuses solely on wildlife and is narrated by David Attenborough. The extra episodes have an advocacy mission, and discuss problems with the environment and our global management of it. They feature interviews with various scientists, policy thinkers, and some of the Planet Earth filmmakers, including David Attenborough. Last night's episode was "Into the Wilderness", which examines the human effect on the quantity and quality of wilderness in the world, and the future of wilderness.

One of the experts interviewed (I forget his name) made the crucial point that our high-consuming Western lifestyle does not make us happy. We behave as though heavy consumption were itself how happiness is attained or expressed, but it's quite plain, for anyone who looks at it, that this is not the case. Beyond having a certain level of material security, surrounding ourselves with more and more possessions does nothing to make us happier, and, if anything, appears to make us less happy.

And yet almost all of economics and politics assumes that the goal for humanity is to promote ever more consumption as a sign of increased quality of life. "Consumption" means, ultimately, consumption of energy. The food chain is based on the transfer of energy from one level to another: sunlight and carbon are photosynthesized by plants; plants are eaten by animals; those animals are eaten by bigger animals; and so on, up to us. When we consume products and services, it's the same thing: if I buy, say, a bottle of wine, the grapes derived their existence and quality from the sun, while the harvesting, processing, bottling, labeling, and transportation of the wine consumed (mainly) fossil-fuel energy. Fossil fuels are the geologically transformed remnants of plants and animals that existed millions of years ago. The energy they derived from the sun way back then is still latent in them, and when we extract the fuel and burn it, we are consuming that solar energy. In this way we "eat" the corpses of life that lived long ago.

We make our livings in a busy economy based on relentless consumption. Economists and policy-makers worry about "growth", which means the continuing growth of consumption. The belief is that to prevent poverty, we have to keep consuming more and more. More and more and more, without end.

To me, the obesity epidemic, which is becoming global as developing countries adopt a more Western lifestyle (burgers, pop), is the living image of this mindset. Consumerism is the psychology of obesity.

Everyone wants to be happy. We expect to derive happiness from success. Success we take to mean worldly achievement, as reflected mainly in our material wealth. Material wealth is expressed as consumption. Therefore happiness = consumption.

It seems logical, and yet experience gives it the lie. For anyone who looks at it, it's plain to see that happiness does not equal consumption. Are billionaires happier than millionaires? I doubt it. I strongly suspect that Bill Gates is starting to truly enjoy his money now that he's giving large amounts of it away.

Where and when have I been happiest? Certainly one time was in 1985, when Kimmie and I were first going out. We did dine out and do some shopping together, but it was not a time that had very much to do with consumption. It was about a relationship.

Other happy times have been when I was involved in Buddhist retreats and programs, such as Seminary in 1994 or when I took temporary ordination at Gampo Abbey in 2002. On all those occasions, part of the happiness lay in the attention we paid to not overconsuming. As a monk I lost 10 or 15 pounds, and I enjoyed doing it. I still had my pleasures: I drank coffee in the morning, and loved it. And after a crammed day, your simple, cozy bunk feels mighty good.

But consumerism has become our spirituality, and it will be replaced only when another inspiration takes its place. The happiness of monasticism is possible only for those who are inspired by its vision. Nietzsche said that "someone who has a why to live can put up with almost any how." This is really the issue. In our materialist society, consumerism is the best that most of us have been able to come with for a why to live. It's not adequate--it fails even on its own terms. We're ripe for change.

Where does this leave me? I mentioned my sanity. Sane means sound, healthy. (Just looking it up in Webster's, I see this interesting note: "able to anticipate and appraise the effect of one's actions".) Sometimes, to be sure, I feel like Captain Ahab, obsessed with Moby-Dick--not exactly a poster-boy for good mental hygiene. People close to me have sometimes commented that I am uncompromising. There is certainly truth to that.

Ahab didn't compromise, and he went down with the whale. But what is a compromise, anyway? You give up something to get something else. It all depends on how much you want that something else.

So far, I suppose I don't see a need to give up anything. A comfortable bourgeois life and "success" do look tempting, but not enough to make me give up. Not yet, anyway. I want that whale.

denial, habit, and the cliff

Last night I finished reading Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, a sketch of our global future in a warmer world. The final chapter, in which he discusses the challenge of preventing the global temperature from rising more than 2°C, I found especially interesting because of his treatment of the major stumbling-block in our path: the psychological defense-mechanism of denial.

There are many different defense mechanisms (Anna Freud made an extensive study of them in the 1930s) that we use to protect ourselves from potential emotional pain. Among them, denial is a key one. According to one explanation, when we experience cognitive dissonance--the conflict in our minds between two strong but irreconcilable beliefs--we feel such discomfort that we deny the truth of one of the beliefs. The classic example is in the behavior around addictions, such as smoking. A person with otherwise healthy self-esteem is confronted with two data: smoking is damaging to the body; and nonetheless, I smoke. Denial in this case usually takes the form of "smoking is not really damaging", or "it won't damage me." But sometimes a smoker might assert, "I"m not really a smoker--I smoke less than a pack a day." Either way, one is spared the pain of confronting one's own self-destructive behavior.

Lynas is saying that this is the dominant mechanism preventing action on the problem of global warming. He says:

One study used random-sample focus groups in Switzerland to investigate attitudes to climate change. Its results showed how the "tragedy of the commons" is reflected in people's belief "in the insignificance of individual action to change the order of things," with the result that perceived "costs to the self are greater than benefits to others." However, the researchers found that the most powerful motivator of denial was more straightforwardly selfish--an unwillingness to abandon personal comforts and consumption patterns. People would complain that public transport is late, dirty and overcrowded, therefore they "need" their cars. Or they might argue that their lives are busy and difficult, so they "need" foreign holidays for a couple of weeks a year.

Lynas goes on to list eight specific expressions of denial catalogued by the Swiss researchers:

• the "metaphor of displaced commitment" ("I protect the environment in other ways, like recycling");


• denial of responsibility ("I am not the main cause of this problem");


• condemning the accuser ("You have no right to challenge me");


• rejection of blame ("I've done nothing wrong");


• ignorance ("I don’t know the consequences of my actions");


• powerlessness ("Nothing I do makes much difference");


• comfort ("It is too difficult for me to change my behavior"); and


• "fabricated constraints" ("There are too many impediments").
  

Quite the list. I recognize pretty much all of them operating in my own psyche (my special favorites are the last three). Together, they form a powerful bulwark against behavioral change.

I had another thought while I was reading the chapter: denial may have a large share of responsibility in preventing change, but let's not forget good old habit. Habits by definition are behaviors that have become automatic, and they have become that way because we find them to be effective in achieving our aims. Most of our behavior is habit, with or without any psychological defense-mechanism running alongside it. William James stresses its powerful, even paramount, role in our mental lives.

But recently I read another interesting take on habit: it was by Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation. He says that it's easy to form new habits. What is difficult is to break old ones.

This is because all of our mental apparatus is programmed precisely to form new habits. We automate our behavior in order to free up attention for the novelties in our experience. When we're learning how to walk, it ties up our attention. We have to concentrate on where to put our feet, how to balance ourselves. Once it's learned, it becomes automatic, so that normally we can walk without giving it even a moment's thought. Only special conditions, such as walking on an ice-rink, or across a stream via stepping-stones, or when we have pain, force our attention back to the task. Otherwise, we can walk, talk, and yes chew gum all at the same time.

What does all this imply about our common future? Will we be able to give up the herd mentality and status-seeking that have us moving ever farther into remote suburbs and commuting to work in ever larger carbon-spewing vehicles? We have to cut through the layer of denial, then through the layer of habit. Will we? Or will the lemmings plunge dutifully off the cliff, secure in the knowledge that we didn't break ranks?

Not to dodge personal responsibility, but much does depend on leadership. Even though we believe in freedom, we follow leaders. After all, one of those lemmings has to be the first one over the cliff.

helping Earth to quit

The air has turned suddenly colder. Rain started to fall just now as I lugged our recycling out to the back lane in the morning dark.

I again lay awake for long stretches this morning after 3:00. Pushing its way to the top of my list of nighttime worries is global warming, fueled by my reading of Six Degrees by Mark Lynas. Based on his survey of all the scientific literature, he reckons that in order to have a 75% chance of keeping the average heating of Earth below 2° C, net carbon emissions have to peak by 2015, after which they must continuously and quickly decline. If we fail to hold the average heating below 2°, there is a strong likelihood that positive-feedback mechanisms will kick in, causing a cascade of further upward surges in temperature to 6° and beyond, rendering planet Earth unrecognizable--and mostly uninhabitable--to those now living on it. Much of it will be arid, baking waste: like the Sahara Desert or Death Valley, or the naked rock of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. The shrunken circumpolar temperate zone will be buffeted by ferocious storms, as well as unpredictable droughts and heatwaves.

Those are just the openers; the real problems are much worse.

When I was a boy, I, like many others of my age, loved dinosaurs. I had a set of plastic dinosaurs to play with. I knew their names (triceratops, ankylosaurus, etc.), and soon I knew which geological period each came from, whether Jurassic or Cretaceous (with the odd Triassic specimen thrown in). I knew that these were different times in Earth's ancient prehistory, but I didn't know what they signified, why the periods were separated and given different names. I assumed that time was continuous, and that things just gradually changed so that one set of creatures turned slowly into another. The names were just arbitrary labels for sections of time, like the hours of the clock.

I was wrong. I didn't know that the different geological periods were separated from each other by distinct and obvious transitions. They're called geological because they show up as layers in underground rock. A thick, homogeneous layer represents a long period of time when things were more or less the same. A thin, very different layer shows a time of sudden transition. This gives way again to another thick, homogeneous (though different) layer.

Those transitions are not smooth and continuous; they are more like changing television channels: an quick disruption, followed by something completely different. The disruptions--those thin layers--are relatively sudden, catastrophic geological and climatic events that shake the Earth (figuratively and often literally) and everything living on it or in it. In the past they have been due to asteroid collisions with Earth, or massive outpourings of magma from the interior--or sometimes more than one event happening at nearly the same time. This is what is believed to have happened at the boundary between the Permian and Triassic periods, 251 million years ago. The catastrophes of that time destroyed 95% of the species living on Earth, from the depths of the sea to the highest mountaintop. The survivors were very few.

Imagine what it would take to have such a result, what kinds of cataclysm could produce such vast and total die-offs. Even if we detonated every existing nuclear warhead right now we could not produce such devastation, even after allowing for all the radioactive fallout. Indeed, if humanity were wiped out, plant and animal life might recover in the radioactive world. This is what has happened at Chernobyl in Ukraine, now a place of thriving forest and animal life, precisely because it is still a no-go zone for humans.

Greenhouse gases are a much more powerful and pervasive force than nuclear weapons for stressing the globe. For my part, I need no further convincing that we are already well on the way to the next major die-off and geological-climatic change on planet Earth. The current droughts in Atlanta, California, Portugal, Turkey, Greece, and Australia are some of the early symptoms of a regime-change that will continue to get much stronger even if we stop carbonating the atmosphere today.

And of course we won't stop today. The question is whether we can start cutting down by 2015. Due to human agency, Earth has become a smoker. Hydrocarbons are her nicotine. The voices in the halls of power have been saying that smoking is not hazardous to our health. Now, with increasing evidence that it is hazardous, they're saying that we can't quit--maybe can't even cut down. The habit is too strong. We'll keep puffing and hope for the best.

I have about seven years in which I can choose to help my species and my planet. How should I spend them?

That's what kept me awake this morning.

the next stepping-stone

After yesterday's rather dark post, I more energetic and purposeful again, and had a new idea for how to press forward with The Mission. Yes, of course it's just more studying, shifting and arranging notes, but that's the nature of this beast. What I had was a sense of direction.

I liken it to crossing a wide stream via stepping-stones: you stand on a stone, unable to see which one to try next. But then you choose one, and take a step. You move toward the far bank. There is a (small, temporary) sense of exhilaration in the feeling of moving forward, of doing something. This next stone might be your last: this one might be the dead end from which you cannot find any more stones to step on. But for now, at this moment, you're getting closer to your goal, and that's all you can do.

In short , it felt good.

In the afternoon, when Kimmie got home from work at around 4:30 p.m., we went for a walk through the neighborhood. It was not a full-on power-walk, as we had been doing, since these sometimes cause her pain, but it was vigorous. Since we have just changed back to Standard Time, the sun was setting. Some trees were still clad with leaves, fiery orange in the horizontal rays of the sun. Other leaves lay in crisp heaps like corn flakes on the sidewalks. The air was chilly, and the masses of white cloud high above gave a sense of depth and vastness to the vault of mild clear blue. I felt a sense of peace and even joy.

The Earth is still beautiful. We can still act.

While Kimmie chatted excitedly about the big organizational change in her department at work, I looked at the silhouettes of the trees, and at the beauty of the city across the water, lights flaring in a smoky sun-tinged haze.

Enjoy this.

How good to be out in the fresh air--yes, even city air. How good to be walking, not one of those stressed people zooming by in their cars, their SUVs and pickup trucks, feeling anger and hatred for those who impede them. How foolish to take our world for granted.

The sixth great extinction on Earth, brought about not by volcanic eruption or asteroid impact, but by the ingenuity of one of its species, one that likes to congratulate itself on its own cleverness. What is the meaning of this? I wondered. Is it a cosmic tragedy, or a comedy?

We returned home. I took in our recycling box and bags, which our neighbor Allison had thoughtfully brought to our basement door, and got back to my reading. Kimmie went upstairs to her sewing-room, her favorite place in the universe. My zest for reading had returned. Keep on learning, I thought. Don't question this, just keeping moving forward. Do it.

conflicts of artistic duty

Yesterday Kimmie and Robin headed off to attend a baby shower in Coquitlam for a family member. I stayed at home, restlessly moving between activities (spent some time with my new laptop, tentatively exploring the strange world of Second Life). By reading-time I felt scattered and unsure of myself--unpleasant feelings that reminded me of times when I've been far out of my element, such as at industry cocktail parties or on certain kinds of aimless holiday when there's nothing particular to do but "have fun".

I need purpose, and my purpose must feel serious and meaningful. Yesterday I felt myself being stretched, by focus being split, tugged in different directions.

If I had to name a specific spark for these feelings, I would say it is reading Six Degrees by Mark Lynas: a description of Earth under the effects of global warming. It's already happening, of course, put in train when the Industrial Revolution started converting coal into energy for textile mills. At that moment, the human race unwittingly put a hotter planet into the mail; now we're starting to take delivery.

A warmer future, as Lynas points out, is not a cozier future. Even without global warming, the proliferation of human beings on Earth has led us into what is being called the sixth mass extinction of life--the fifth being the die-off of the dinosaurs at the transition from the Cretaceous to the Tertiary period 65 million years ago. Due to human causes--other than climate change--species are becoming extinct at 100-1,000 times the normal rate. Global warming will drastically increase that rate. In the next century, a large fraction of life-forms on Earth will disappear.

The Earth has been warmer than it is now. In the Pliocene epoch, 5-2 million years ago, the planet was 3° C warmer than it is today. The warming, it has been determined, was due to atmospheric carbon dioxide, which ranged from 360-400 parts per million (ppm) during that epoch. But wait: today's level is 382 ppm, and rising at 2 ppm a year. The inescapable inference is that we are already on track to heat to the Pliocene temperature. In the Pliocene, there were no glaciers (source of much of Earth's drinking-water for humans), and very little polar ice-cover.

Rainfall in many places may increase, but in the form of frequent and powerful storms; areas of desiccated ground will expand into what are now temperate zones. We shouldn't take comfort from the fact that Earth was this warm before, because in the Pliocene there was a greater abundance of life, unstressed by human depradations, able to manage the environment; and the sun was not as hot as it is today (it grows steadily hotter as it ages).

Another problem is that this episode of warming, unlike that of the Pliocene, is happening with catastrophic suddenness in terms of geological time. The migration rates of many species are too low for them to be able to outrun the spread of hotter temperatures; they'll die off with the disappearance of their food sources or as their metabolism is pushed past its operating envelope.

All right. So what's this got to do with me? Of course it concerns me deeply as a human being; I want to do whatever I can to help prevent or mitigate the worst of these effects.

But it affects me as an artist too. Even though global warming is high on the agendas of many organizations, media outlets, and even governments (at the level of talk, anyway), it has not really sunk in as an issue with many of us. This is partly due to ignorance. But I think a bigger part has to do with imagination: by and large, people find it hard to imagine this stressed world in our imminent future.

Well, imagination is something that I can do. Contrary to my grade 1 teacher Miss Warden, I do have an imagination--a good one. I can look into that crystal ball and imagine what lies ahead. I can imagine lots of graphic, gory details. I can imagine surprises.

Is this, then, what I should be doing? Should I be helping my fellow humans face the future properly by imagining it for them? Is that not my duty?

The clock is ticking, and I feel the nagging anxiety of conflict.

the sleeping dunes

More rain after a rainy weekend. Today is the last day of Kimmie's vacation. She's cheerful about it, although admits forthrightly, "I'd rather it weren't the last day."

Yesterday afternoon we spent doing errands, driving our 2001 Toyota Corolla on the wet, overcrowded streets, experiencing the selfishness and aggression that increasingly characterize our roads, and our civilization as it sinks, led by deep ruts of habit, into the tar-pit of its doom.

Strong words? I believe them.

Yesterday, on the errand mission, while Kimmie was struggling to get 5 meters of fabric at half-price in the primitive retail environment of Fabricland at Park Royal, I strayed to the Chapters-Indigo bookstore, and, browsing, actually found four books I wanted to buy. I bought two: Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt (a key inspiration to my mother as she wrestles with writing a memoir of her own), and Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, a British science writer. At reading-time I started both, and enjoyed them both very much--although my enjoyment of Six Degrees was of a different sort. The subtitle of this book is Our Future on a Hotter Planet, and in it Lynas has prepared a forecast of Earth's climate in the coming century, arranged in six chapters that explain likely events as the average global temperature notches up 1 Celsius degree at a time. I'm only in chapter 1--1° C warmer--and it's already, well, I was going to say chilling.

He chose six degrees as his range because this is the range forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as probable over the next century. His method was to survey the scientific literature over the past few years on both climatology and paleoclimatology, in which researchers have made forecasts based on computer models about future climatic events, or have described ancient climatic events from warmer periods in Earth's prehistory from study of fossils and other evidence. Lynas sorted thousands of articles according to whether their scenarios represented a warming of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 degrees. He then synthesized the scenarios and drafted his book.

As he emphasizes in his introduction, Lynas based his scenarios only on peer-reviewed scientific papers, not on the works of journalists, popularizers, or advocacy groups. It's not Hollywood, it's sober, level-headed science.

And it's pretty darned frightening. Even at 1-degree warming there is a substantial likelihood that the Western U.S. may return to conditions that have existed during great droughts of prehistory. The terrain from New Mexico to Saskatchewan consists largely of a great dune-field overlain by a thin layer of soil held in place by plants. When conditions get too dry, the plants die and the soil blows away. On a small scale, this is what happened during the Dust Bowl years of 1934-40. Yes: I said on a small scale. At that time, 85% of Oklahoma's entire population vacated the state in desperation. If warming and drying cause the topsoil east of the Rockies to lose its plant cover, a mighty sea of sand-dunes will reemerge, turning the Great West into something resembling today's Sahara Desert.

This area is not densely populated--but it is populated. Like the Okies of the 1930s, those people would likely have to migrate. Where? And that area is also now a key food-producing region for the U.S. and for planet Earth. There goes one breadbasket. Who's to pick up the slack?

In the introduction Lynas talks about giving a presentation in Britain, and overhearing one of the attendees apologizing to another one for bringing him to such a "depressing" event. Lynas was shocked, because although he too finds these images alarming, he does not see them as inevitable--it is at least partly or mostly still avoidable, he thinks. If we act now.

At this moment, I feel more like his depressed attendee. As Clive Ponting describes in his A Green History of the World, Easter Island was covered with forest and populated with wildlife when humans first made landfall there in the 5th century AD. When the Dutch Admiral Roggeveen arrived there on Easter Sunday, 1722, he found a treeless rock with "about 3,000 people living in squalid reed huts or caves, engaged in almost perpetual warfare and resorting to cannibalism in a desperate attempt to supplement the meagre food supplies available on the island." Time and again, human beings have passed environmental points of no return, felling the last tree, killing the last animal.

Heading off such a course requires vision and leadership. Where are these today? The world's most powerful people seem preoccupied with thoughts like, when it comes time to fell that last tree, they want to be the ones felling it--not someone else.

I hear the dunes waking.

garbage

Monday morning. Rain falls from the sodden, dim sky. I've been out back to the lane for my weekly duty of unlocking the large wooden box that our building uses to store its weekly garbage in. Soon the diesel-powered garbage truck will rumble in reverse up the dead-end lane, then creep forward as the swampers dump this week's refuse into the back. When they're done I will return outside to snap the padlock back on the hasp, preventing unauthorized personnel from making either deposits or withdrawals from the box--both of which have been problems in the past.

I'm interested by garbage. I'm not exactly sure why. Partly it is my interest in economy and good stewardship, and the fact that I dislike waste. Also, the way people, and society in general, handle garbage is very revealing, I think. Just as my mother last week said that she thinks that you can learn a lot about a person by the way he or she handles money (and I agree), I believe that the garbage picture would round out the portrait to near completion.

Certainly garbage is connected with death. Something becomes garbage when its useful life is over and it is sent away for destruction or oblivion. There is a sense of randomness and chaos: heterogeneous things are mixed together promiscuously, almost obscenely: pantyhose piled in with shellfish scraps, broken chair-castors, and used dental-floss. As garbage, things converge that we would never allow contact with each other in life. This early stage of decomposition is the most unsettling, most horrifying, just as a recently living corpse is more disturbing than a clean old skeleton. It reminds us of the relatively subtle phase-change that separates us from that inert state, the dissolution of our precious bodies, when we become mere meat for species we'd rather not spend time with or even think about.

Twenty-odd years ago, when I was a hospital janitor, I liked the garbage-collection part of my detail. As part of the evening crew I wasn't usually involved with ward garbage. I picked it up from the cafeteria, or from pathology and the ICU, as well as the offices off the Heather Pavilion tunnels underground. We threw the bags into large, four-wheeled wagons of galvanized steel (we called them "trucks") and rolled these to the "physical plant"--the place where the hospital's hot water and other utilities came from. The tunnel floors were not level, so you might see us blue-uniformed guys bent like draft animals, sweating in the tropical heat of the tunnel, pulling a heavily loaded truck up a grade.

If there was a shortage of trucks, usually due to problems with staffing or equipment at the physical plant, we would have to dump our own trucks. I liked that job. It meant riding a large freight elevator, an ancient steel cage with a battered wooden floor, up to a higher floor of the plant. You would take your truck to a great door, onto something like an open elevator shaft leading down to a compactor, open the front doors of your garbage truck, and use a broom handle to shove the bags into the abyss. It was always deserted there at night, so there was a strange sense of industrial solitude and decay--a steamy warmth and the smell of vegetables, sweet medicine, and excrement. Then back down, alone in the cool of the elevator, to the infernal realm of the tunnels.

Occasionally too one would have so-called isolation garbage to dispose of: bags marked with crosses of red tape, indicating that they contained infectious waste. These also went to the physical plant, but to a different floor, where the incinerator was. There you opened a steel hatch to the incinerator and poked the bag, again with a broom handle, through the short passage into the roaring amber-white flames, hot on your face. There was something satisfying about this too.

So yes: a lifelong connection with garbage. I'm interested.

the warm glow of togetherness

It's Remembrance Day here in North Vancouver: gray, chilly, rainy. Kim was home from work, providing us with our fourth straight day of sleeping in. It's a relative thing, since both of us are awake a fair amount in the night (between about 4:00 and 6:00 this morning in my case), but when you can lie in till after 7:00, it's still excellent.

I seem to be reading these days rather than writing. This morning, over coffee, I pressed further with James Lovelock's The Revenge of Gaia, his plea for the world to wake up to the severity of global warming, and his suggestions for how best to preserve civilization. His prescription is that while we develop sustainable sources of energy for the future, we must immediately press forward with nuclear energy--as much as we can build, as fast as we can build it. He deplores the bad name that nuclear power has got, and the destruction of its reputation by environmentalists. In one chapter of his book he does his best to rehabilitate it.

According to Lovelock, the so-called green energies, such as wind power, solar, and tidal, are decades away from being able to produce power on the scale needed to maintain our way of life. He is dismissive of biofuels, since these can be produced only through still more extensive agriculture, and the conversion of so much of the planet to agriculture already is one of the key contributors to Earth's current environmental crisis. He dismisses hydrogen as well since it, like electricity, is not properly a source of energy at all, only a carrier of it. Hydrogen must be produced, and this process requires energy from some other source.

He is enthusiastic about nuclear energy (fusion energy, in particular, although this is not yet available) because it represents a genuine source of energy (fusion is the same energy that powers the sun and other stars), the technology to produce fission energy already exists, and, watt for watt, nuclear power is safer than any other major source of power generation, including coal, natural gas, and hydro. Watt for watt, fewer people have been killed by nuclear-power generation than by any other form of energy production, and that by a large margin.

Hydro power, in the period 1970-1992, had the worst record, at 883 deaths per terawatt-year (a measure of power output over a year). All these deaths were "public"--that is, people not involved in the hydro industry itself. No doubt they were due to one or more dam-bursts. In comparison, nuclear power resulted in 8 deaths per twy over the same period, and all those were workers in the industry itself.

(Coal and natural gas resulted in 342 and 85 deaths per twy respectively.)

Lovelock points out that our fears about radiation-induced cancer are vastly overblown. Approximately one in three of us dies of cancer in any case, due mostly to our lifelong exposure to the most powerful carcinogen of all: oxygen. Against this, even serious nuclear accidents, such as that at Chernobyl in 1986, contribute relatively little extra risk. The people who have died of Chernobyl cancers have been the workers who put out the fire and who cleaned up the site.

I must say, he has infected me with his sense of urgency about this. Although I have long regarded global warming as an important issue, he has persuaded me that it has actually more the nature of a crisis--one that humanity as a whole must deal with immediately. There is no reason at all to doubt that the Earth can return to a climate regime such as it had at he dawn of the Eocene epoch 55 million years ago, when it was 5 degrees Celsius hotter than it is today. And there is ever less reason to doubt that that is exactly what it is doing right now, while we watch.

Will humanity wake up and work together on this? Or will we take comfort, like lemmings, in behaving just like our neighbors, enjoying a feeling of solace and togetherness as we plunge of the cliff together? "It's not my fault--I just did what everyone else did..."

thoughts on a warm autumn day

Southwestern B.C. is recovering from flooding after torrential rainfall over the past few days, but now, here, on steeply sloping and therefore mostly floodproof North Vancouver, it is sunny and balmy, with great cumulus clouds tumbling slowly and silently over one another in a pristine blue sky. I'm just in from a short run, which I did in shorts. I could even have left my sweatshirt at home, it was so warm.

It all looks different, now that I'm reading The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock. Since it's a library book, I've been reading it here at the PC in the early morning over coffee, typing notes while I read. (It's not the most enjoyable way to read a book, but it is efficient if one is to take notes that are to make their way to the computer eventually.)

This morning I read chapter 3, "The Life History of Gaia", in which Lovelock sketches the history of Earth as a self-regulating system, which, he believes, it became shortly after the first life appeared on it over 3 billion years ago. Since then, Gaia has, like an organism, maintained itself in a state of dynamic equilibrium, with its constituent life-forms metabolizing and evolving in such a way that the overall environment is conducive to continued life. When there are perturbations to that equilibrium, Gaia has feedback mechanisms that push conditions back to life-optimal.

Lovelock says that textbooks are incorrect when they claim that Earth simply happens to be at a distance from the sun that makes it hospitable for life. There was a time, he says, about 2 billion years ago, when Gaia was in a "Goldilocks" period and no special mechanisms were required either to heat or cool the planet, but at the time life first appeared the sun was about 25% cooler than it is now. Since then it has grown steadily hotter, and will continue to do so until it finally explodes many billions of years from now.

He believes that Gaia has more than one equilibrium temperature. In this it is like the camel, which has two. By day, the camel maintains a body temperature of about 40 degrees Celsius, close to the ambient temperature of the desert air. But at night, the camel's temperature regulator is reset to about 34 degrees, so it can function without having to burn so much energy.

Depending on conditions in space and the life-forms on it, Gaia may have several of these equilibrium points. But Lovelock says that for the past several million years, as the sun has grown so hot, Gaia has shown a preference for ice ages, when the temperature was kept cooler, and the total amount of life may have been greater, due to the much larger land area around the tropics (exposed by dropped sea-level) and the much greater productivity of the cooler oceans (the great majority of open ocean is desert of life).

He believes that the long warming trend since the last ice age 12,000 years ago is a sign of Gaia's cooling mechanisms' being stretched beyond their capacity. Add to this our flaming-off of all the hydrocarbons stored beneath the surface of the Earth, creating a heating blanket around us, and we have the conditions for all-but-inevitable environmental catastrophe. Lovelock thinks it is probably already too late to stop this. We may be in the early stage of a sudden global heating such as has not been experienced since the onset of the Eocene epoch 55 million years ago, when temperatures shot up by 5 degrees Celsius in the tropics and 8 degrees elsewhere, turning Earth into a desert planet. The event was marked by mass extinctions.

The event can be sudden, in geological terms. Lovelock observes that all the heat-control mechanisms that we know of are in positive-feedback mode toward increasing temperature: shrinking ice-caps, shrinking forest cover, increasing greenhouse gases. The rate of heating will speed up until the next equilibrium point is reached (I'm assuming there is one--haven't finished the book!).

Will humanity survive? Sure. An adaptable species. But how many humans will that be? And will there be any memory of the world civilization we now take for granted? Or are we living in our own legend, like citizens in the last days of Atlantis?

blood and oil

Yesterday, for me, a small cause for feeling accomplished: I finished reading a book. Usually the books in my stack of 10-15 on the coffee-table get rotated out without being finished. I realize that I haven't read a book for two months or so, pull out the paper slip I use as a bookmark (with words and definitions written on it), and shelve the book.

But sometimes I do finish books. Either they are short enough for me to make it through before the wind of my interest shifts direction, or they are of particularly hot interest so I read them straight through, or they are unfinished books that I have pulled from a shelf, my interest in them rekindled, and have picked up where I left off and read them through to the end.

This book was Blood and Oil by Michael T. Klare, director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, Amherst. I bought it last month from Amazon.com, along with an earlier book of his, Resource Wars.

Blood and Oil, while it has its flaws--Klare's writing style is flat and prosaic; it reads like a corporate report or a briefing document--is very good and deserves to be read by a wide audience. Indeed, his dry factuality helps his case in the sense that, although he is strongly critical of the American administration and its energy policies, he does not waste time denouncing them; instead he assembles facts, presents them in a neutral tone, and lets them do the talking. (In the afterword, written a year after the book's initial publication in 2004, he lets fly with more stinging direct criticism of Bush administration's dogged insistence on maintaining an attitude of dependency on foreign oil.)

The thesis of the book can be summed up simply. Since 1945, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt met secretly with King Ibn Saud of Arabia aboard a U.S. warship in the Suez Canal and, it is thought, promised security for the king's new and still poor country from outside attackers, plus protection for the king's regime from internal assault, the U.S. has pursued a policy of increasing reliance on foreign oil, and has been paying for this by arming and protecting autocratic and repressive regimes. This has resulted in an ever-escalating conflict with the people at odds with these regimes, such as many of their own citizens, and an ever-increasing flow of American blood on foreign soil.

This morning when I opened up Google News one of the lead stories was about a missile-test by Iran in the Persian Gulf, apparently in response to U.S. military "exercises" in the area. This eventuality--that Iran may disrupt the flow of oil shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, through which 43% of the world's petroleum exports pass--is raised by Klare in his book. One of the top priorities of Centcom, the U.S. Central Command established on 1 January 1983 with the Middle East as its area of operation, is to maintain the flow of Gulf oil. It was (and is) Centcom forces that have fought the two Iraq wars and the Afghan war. Its mission was set out in the Carter Doctrine, enunciated by President Carter in January 1980, designating the flow of Persian Gulf oil as a "vital interest" of the United States.

One big problem is that more and more countries are gulping more and more oil, and oil is not being found fast enough to slake this thirst. There will be an ever-increasing competition for an ever-shrinking supply. As this goes on, Klare maintains, persistent and escalating violence is inevitable. There is only one solution: stop relying on foreign oil. To do this will mean to drastically reduce oil consumption, which will require vast efforts at improving efficiency and finding alternative sources of energy.

Yes, environmentalists (such as me) have been saying this for decades. Now, roused by impending disaster (such as global warming), more people are growing alarmed. Still, there is a remarkable complacency in the halls of power, and a weird fixation on continuing with the same policy that was sketched out by Roosevelt: keep that foreign oil coming at any price.

I think of a quote I read in The Great Reckoning by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, about the collapse of Spain as the world's leading power 300 years ago. Finding themselves sinking in debt while spending on costly military ventures, some in government urged that cost-cutting measures be taken. But those with the most power overruled these promptings, causing one despairing Spaniard to write, "those who can will not and those who will cannot."

It sounds awfully familiar.

ecogeddon

Still not much in the way of direct (or indirect) work on my book.

For the past couple of days I have been sunk in gloom over global warming and the environment. It was triggered by reading a news piece mentioning James Lovelock's book The Revenge of Gaia, a work in which the famous maverick geophysicist states flatly that it is too late to avoid environmental catastrophe in the coming century. The best that humanity can do is try to mitigate the worst of the effects. He apparently states that there will be a massive die-off of humanity (no doubt among many other species), leaving survivors numbering in the hundreds of millions--no more. Even if our most radical efforts at curtailing carbon emissions were to be implemented immediately, it would be to no avail; and of course, they will not be implemented.

In my heart I've been an environmentalist since at least 1971, when the U.S. conducted a nuclear-bomb test on Amchitka Island, as I mentioned in an earlier post. I felt frustrated and angry that pollution was being poured into the world's air and water. I remember mentioning it to Dad once while we were driving over the Lions Gate Bridge.

"All these cars are just sending pollution into the air," I said. "They've got to stop people driving so much."

"A car like this is not a problem," said Dad. (He was driving a red 1971 Triumph sedan.) "Four cylinders, very little pollution."

I felt a little better, but we were still putting out some pollution.

I worried about it, just as I worried about nuclear war. (In fact the second film I made in high school was a short, apocalyptic drama about two teenagers being killed in a nuclear blast.) I thought that the oil embargo of 1973-74 was a good thing in that it got people thinking about how to conserve gasoline and not drive so much. I remember too feeling good about attending a presentation in my high-school social studies class in 1975 given by a passionate, curly-haired Brit, connected with the upcoming Habitat conference in Vancouver, about the importance of sharing the world's wealth with its starving inhabitants. I hoped that Habitat would help make a difference, and I was glad there were people who felt as strongly about it as this man did.

As the years wore on I mainly joined the inertia and indifference of society. I was always environmentally aware, but I did not make major personal efforts to effect social change. I was naturally thrifty in any case, and believed in getting the most use out of resources; I never liked waste.

Kimmie and I became environmentally conscious shoppers in the 1980s, and participated in recycling programs before these were brought to residential curbsides. I never wanted to own a large or inefficient car. In the 1990s we became members of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, and more recently regular donors to the David Suzuki Foundation. I've even voted for the Green Party.

But behind it all there has been a sense of a great wave or tide, human behavior in the mass, to which each of us contributes very little but in which we are all carried. This mass behavior arises out of the values we hold, the collective sum of our values--our mythology. Our relationship to the Earth, to our environment, is dictated by our mythology. Whatever catastrophes we face are the direct result of holding the myths we live by. There is nothing that forces humans to consume or to grasp for wealth; many people do not and most cannot. It is our beliefs about the universe and our place in it that governs our acts.

Lovelock's eco-catastrophe of the 21st century is already in progress, he says. We are fish swimming in the sea of our daily lives, unaware of the tsunami we ourselves have created. I think of the great tsunami that hit the coast of the Pacific Northwest on 26 January 1700 (timed exactly because of the meticulousness of Japanese record-keeping at that date), product of the most recent subduction earthquake in these parts. It was so violent that whales were thrown onto hillsides, where their skeletons were found centuries later. There was a catastrophic die-off of sea creatures, abruptly and unexpectedly flung from their element to their deaths.

Is this us?

quiet rainy Victoria Day

It's Victoria Day here in Canada: a national holiday. Yes, we still celebrate a monarch who died in 1901, presumably because she was on the throne when Canada was confederated in 1867--but that's just a guess.

Heavy, gray, wet clouds had rolled in when I woke this morning, and a warm, damp wind was blowing. I came down to key notes from Wake Up to Your Life and Galilee from Alexander the Great to Hadrian. We discovered that Robin had contracted food poisoning at yesterday's bridal shower, and since early in the morning had been making trips to her bathroom. "But we ate the same things," said Kimmie. "Oh--except for the cake! And the cake had custard in it..."

Kim and I went walking along the seawall at Ambleside in West Van. The wind was strong and blustery there, and, I thought, smelled unfresh--a tropical-smelling air that seemed to be polluted with the scent of pulp-mill or something. I found this depressing: what if there were no more fresh air to be found on Earth? Even when a strong wind blows in from the sea, it is still just a mixture of industrial exhaust. I remembered an article I'd read, I think in The Economist, several years ago, about a scientist who had inventoried all the flotsam on the beach of a tiny remote island in the South Pacific, thousands of kilometers from New Zealand or somewhere. It was a depressing list of garbage: beer-cans, plastic bags, furniture, and a surprising and dispiriting number of disposable diapers. Might as well have been in an inner-city park.

But we walked by the gray shore as the waves combed in. Very few people were at Ambleside, mainly just the dog-walkers and a couple of large Asian families who had decided to have barbecues regardless. Kimmie, ever alert to bird life, had us pause to watch a gull and a crow try to steal each other's food on the rocky shore, and again to watch a crow bathe itself in a puddle in the parking lot (a surprisingly long and thorough wash), and again to watch a mother duck paddle from the little mouth of the Capilano River with her clutch of about seven ducklings tightly in tow, paddling furiously to form what looked like a snaking tail behind her, staying in formation as they rode diagonally through the swell.

All in all, a quiet day. I hope to start my reading period earlier than I have the past couple of days, so I can get more reading in. The stack of books teeters on the corner of the coffee-table. Thence do I go now.

angles on the Iron Age

The weather has turned chillier. The sky is a mass of low-level, gray-tinged cotton batting. Tiny flakes of snow started drifting down while I was at Lynn Valley Centre picking up a DVD at the library (Tender Mercies), milk and eggs at Save-On Foods, and a 6/49 lottery ticket for Kimmie. (She had picked the numbers using a system I invented that involves rolling three dice a number of times.) Kimmie stayed home cleaning bathrooms and doing some laundry. A quiet suburban day.

In the morning, over coffee, I keyed notes from: The Ghost in the Machine, The Self-Aware Universe, an article on the ancient Philistine city of Ekron in the November-December issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, and The Long Summer by Brian Fagan, an excellent book on the effects of climatic change on the history of civilizations. Evidently the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age occurred right around 1200 BC, when an El Nino event triggered droughts in Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean. Governments toppled and cities were deserted as people fled to the countryside in search of food. This was also the event that launched the so-called Sea Peoples on their migrations from the Aegean and from Turkey by sea and by land in search of new, more fertile country in which to live. They came into conflict with, among others, the Canaanites living on the coast of Palestine and the Egyptians. A number of Canaanite cities were destroyed and rebuilt as settlements for the invaders, who came to be known as the Philistines. (The Canaanites lived on in more northern coastal cities of Palestine, and came to be known as the Phoenicians.)

I enjoy finding different angles on a subject. The BAR article on Ekron (which contains cool drawings of the ancient city, a temple, and an olive-oil factory) spurred me to check David Rohl's From Eden to Exile, in which he also discusses the invasion of the Sea Peoples, and Fagan's book as well, which goes into more detail on the exact climatic mechanisms involved.

The Bronze Age was an era of high civilization: Mycenae, the Hittite empire, and Egypt were all in full bloom. The succeeding Iron Age has long been known to be a much harsher world, occupied by smaller, more parochial and warlike little states. The new climatic viewpoint suggests that starvation wiped out the civilizations of the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age was an era of tough, warlike people who emerged from the harsh winnowing of hunger. While iron is much more plentiful than copper or tin (the ingredients of bronze), it is much more difficult to smelt and work, so the Iron Age was also an age of technologists, and most especially, no doubt, weapons technologists.

The afternoon draws on. Time to do some more reading.