Morning Cup 'O' Joe

Strangely, I have been silent the last few days on matters of importance beside my countdown from the 120th greatest movie you should watch to the first...why? There have certainly been stories to address: the Senate health care vote for debate; the stretching of the truth in Palin's new book; the impending decision on Afghanistan; the fact that Allen Iverson's 3,000 useless Grizzlies jerseys are being sent to Tanzania to be distributed amongst the people (instantly making AI the biggest basketball star in Tanzania); and the recent stink made by the Catholic bishops about preventing Catholic politicians from taking communion if they are pro-choice.

But today, I would like to consider Global Warming, because I just finished reading a nonsensical article about how scientists have been 'cooking the books' (no pun intended) to make it seem as if there will be a rapid increase in temperature near the end of the 20th century. I am not sure whether he is right or wrong, or whether the hacked emails expressing doubt or discussing ways to fudge the data are genuine or not, but this is besides the point. It does not take a scientist to recognize things are out of whack and that humans leave massive ecological footprints, some of which can be slowed down to prevent massive harm.

Case in point: hunters and gatherers, some 13,000+ years ago, routinely exhausted the food supply in their area to the point where the foods lowest on their list of preferences (and yes, they could list what they liked and yes the best foods were typically the sweetest and fattiest available...like, savanna McDonald's) were all that remained. At that point they would pick up and move to the next spot on their seasonal/migrational rotation. Now, humans then were probably in the order of 1 to 4 million total spread out of the entire Earth. Fast forward 13,000 years and there are almost 7 billion. I had McDonald's the other day, and it always strikes me when I eat fast food just how bad things really are: for every egg mcmuffin sold, and how many do you think are sold daily, one egg must be consumed. If there are ten people eating, two or three chickens can suffice; if there are ten people ordering a mcmuffin every ten minutes at one McDonalds aggregated over 4 to 5,000 nationwide, you get my drift. We are living beyond the Earth's means, and while genetic engineering of food to increase its output seems plausible, I am not sure if I am ready to be the guinea pig for a science experiment (e.g., think about how the use of fluorocarbons, Styrofoam, and thalidomide worked out!).

Ok, this was just about the absurd need to eat food. How about waste? If 10 people eat an animal and throw its carcass out, scavengers finish off some of it and then it decomposes. If 350 million people are eating McDonalds which likely slaughters 100s of cattle every day, where do they go? And, when you concentrate thousands of cows, pigs, or chickens in a small, dense environment, the shit is condensed, so is the methane, and the water tables below are screwed. Just look at any early urban environment in Egypt, China, or Mesopotamia before sanitation was invented...Every item you buy comes with an inordinate amount of packaging that you toss away, right? That shit does not decompose. Every time you start your car and drive it, fossil fuels are gone and carbon monoxide is let out into the air.

How can anyone begin to assume, just with this anecdotal evidence, that humans are not impacting their environment in adverse ways? The evidence is overwhelming. In Los Angeles, and its neighboring counties Riverside and San Bernardino where three or four of the top ten most smoggy cities are, asthma rates are through the roof for children; this data is correlated to other polluted cities like Houston and their children's asthma rates. When I look up and cannot see the stars, buildings from 1000 feet, or the moon my common sense kicks in a says, wow this must have some effect on our ecological system because everything is connected. But, I suppose some don't use common sense. How about the fact that the polar ice caps will be completely melted within 30 years, only being frozen during certain months of the year? Well, it could be a natural warming cycle you might argue...but, we do now, with no fancy statistical techniques needed, that since fossil fuels first started being used for railroads, temperatures have gone up in relation to the amount of fossil fuels being burned. Not iron clad by any means, but certainly enough to tell me we should do something.

The age old historical question my students always ask is: why do people only respond during crises to their environment when foresight could have saved them? I tell them the famous Easter Island story to try and analogize to the US. There were competing chiefdoms on the Easter Islands who had decided that their prestige battle could no longer be fought by throwing bigger and bigger feasts -- (in the Pacific Northwest, Native American chiefs, like Polynesian chiefs, would collect food from their subjects all year just so they could give more stuff away at pot-latches than their rivals could...this brought them prestige, even if it brougt them 'poverty'). A drought set in that was puzzling to the chiefs, and the duel solution meant to please the gods and bring them prestige was to build those famous statues that still sit on the beaches and edges of the island. A veritable 'arms race' ensued to build the biggest statues and accrue the most prestige. Unfortunately, this simple decision sealed their fate. The stone to build the statues existed in the center of the island. Having no cranes or trucks, they faced the dilemma of moving them from the middle to the periphery. The solution came from cutting trees and rolling these massive stones to the edges. Unintentionally, they cut down the entire forest, killed their food source whose resource niche was lost in the deforestation of the island, and extinguished their own existence after a brief bout of cannibalism. No, I like to think we have learned from societies like theirs mistakes. But, my students are correct in assuming we haven't. Because ideological notions of what is and isn't happening, and beliefs in evidence vary, and interests are vested to oppose something like environmental engineering (most notably by those destroying the Earth), people only act when they are truly forced to. Unfortunately, those opposed to action are never around when things reach their worst.