Tigger-up-a-tree cowards vs. tree huggers
Sharon writes on Casaubon’s Book about “Our Tails Get In the Way: The Problems and Principles of Energy Descent”
Item 5 of her ‘problems blocking change’ list bothers me. “The sheer cowardice of most of us. ”
This perspective seems overly prejudicial, an attitude that has caused the term ‘tree hugger’ to become a derogatory catch-all phrase to label those concerned about the environment.
Change or growth is measured in pain. People tend not to change because change is a ‘little death’, a clearing away of the life that went before to make way for a new life. Since we can’t know what a changed life will be, in terms of comfort and security, or in terms of what we treasure in our current life, we have less trust in change than in working to preserve our current life.
Volcanoes happen, and earthquakes and floods and tornadoes. Much of the real devastation is to the survivors. They have to rebuild their lives, to persist from hour to hour until their lives settle into a pattern, and they learn to trust and treasure their new life.
What is being demanded to stabilize the environment is no less traumatic than asking people to step in front of a drunk driver. Only the suicidal is willing. For the rest of us the demands for change sound like encouraging suicide – to throw our old way of life away without understanding what lays on ‘the other side’ for us.
Cowardice is fear of facing danger. Calling fear of suicide ‘cowardice’ makes you sound weird, and untrustworthy. And to achieve real change you need to be trusted, your facts need to be trusted, and your solutions need to be trusted. Using the word ‘Cowardice’ throws all what you are concerned about into doubt.
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I have reservations about the whole greenhouse gas problem, and whether it is affected by what we do as a community of mankind.
That is, either carbon emissions are bad, or only bad for those that poor nations can thumb their noses at. If it is accepted that we need to accomplish something in the next 5-20 years, then trees make a really good way to capture carbon, short term. But the thousand square miles of rain forest Brazil (the ethanol-fueled tree-hugger hero) proudly reports burning last year, or the expected denuding of the Asian Continent in the next few years for China’s construction boom and charcoal for basic home heat and cooking are all A-OK. I guess poor-people carbon doesn’t count as much as non-poor people carbon.
The have been reports that cows belch methane as they digest their food, mainly grasses and some grains, depending on how they are raised and fed. What I haven’t seen is whether the land they grazed, or the crops that produced the grain, would have produced more or less carbon and greenhouse gases, averaged over the years, with cow grazing or without. That short-sightedness is akin to the Ethanol Blunder. That is, it takes more energy (read: Greenhouse Gas Emissions) to produce and consume ethanol than the energy ethanol provides. Yes, burning ethanol actually increases the amount of greenhouse gas, when you account for all the transportation and processing. Doesn’t that make Brazil look like real paragons?! Shouldn’t we be that great!
Only – ethanol does accomplish one goal. It keeps fuel on hand for war machines. We are seeing food riots around the world. That cannot get better before the next crops are harvested – which will be a while. Increase oil a bit more, or keep the prices this high much longer, and the urge to conquer and blow away the bad guys raising the price so high will become irresistible. Wars have always been fought over money. The amount of money at stake keeps going up – and support for war to secure energy resources will grow. We could be at war again before the next election.
Last year NASA reported an increase in global temperature, not a big surprise hear on Earth – or is it? The report claimed an increase on every planet in the solar system. Whether the increase is due to a change in the Sun’s energy or gravitational tides (if there are tides to gravity) or other energy transfer mechanism, what we do with our carbon emissions is not affecting Mars. But gravitational effects could well be triggering the recent major earthquakes and volcano eruptions. But the Kyoto Protocol doesn’t address changes that affect the whole solar system – only enhances careers of activists and ‘underdeveloped’ country developers.
Speaking of volcanoes. Notice how many thousands of times the total industrial pollution of the world gets dumped into the atmosphere by one good volcano eruption? Cubic miles of dust, thousands and thousands of tons of ozone-depleting compounds similar to Freon, radioactives, etc. And all outside the careful ‘tax the rich guy’ policy of the Kyoto Protocol.
So I have my doubts about global warming, or whether we are beginning the next ice age (global temps over the last 12 months average lower than the last 100 years – wiping out the increase the Global Warming crowd are so unhappy about).
I do know that there is less seed available, and less variety, for farm use in the US. Seed companies got their ‘genetic patent’ to outlaw planting harvested seed. Now the only seed available in a given season is what the seed companies deign to produce (if they under-supply seed, they get to raise their prices, see?).
I do know that current prices for fuel and metals are raising costs for equipment and operations to the point that farms and businesses are failing, or postponing a crop for a year (won’t that make us look good while people are rioting for food?). Farming is a skill, and agribusiness is equipment-intensive. It takes years to replace each farm operation that shuts down – and when neighbors expand to farm the affected ground, it makes the cost in ability to produce that much more susceptible to individual farmers getting hurt or ill. Or going broke.
I kind of resent the ‘cowardice’ label, when the story for change hasn’t convinced me that the coward-callers aren’t mistaken.
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