The Long Road. Part 1.

Sunday Night, the ABC World News ended with a beautiful picture of a grim future. They show us one of the most remote areas of the continental United States, Glacier National Park. I urge you to follow the link and watch this. It gives a visual reference for the impact that global warming is having on our planet, our country, right now and not in some distant future. I was ecstatic over seeing a main stream media presentation that connected my two favorite issues: global warming and water. Don't bother to read the rest until you have those images in mind.

When you are done.. click Read more! To paraphrase Paul Harvey, you will know the rest of the story.



What was not there is are even greater impacts that never make it into the mainstream media.

• Species are dying that we do not even know exist. Consider the fate of beetles that live in the extreme cold of the streams that run off the glaciers. When the glaciers dry, the beetles die.
• The mountain pine bark beetles that live through our less cold winters are capable of doing significant damage. Expect 80% of British Columbia's pine forests to be gone by 2013... that is only 5 years from now. The economic impact is staggering.
  
• California's so-called Green Governor plans to spend $ Billions that we do not have to solve a water problem with a fresh water canal through the ocean. The latest big fiasco water plan from Schwarzenegger / Feinstein plans for a 55 in sea level rise by 2100. This is what a 39 in (1 m) sea level rise will look like. That is the best farm land and fish nursery on the west coast, now under salt water and lost forever. How many $ Billions that we don't have are needed to mitigate a problem that we know is coming?

Sam Smith used the Progressive Review today to republish a segment of James Gustave Speth's piece (Global Warming and Modern Capitalism) originally in The Nation (Sept. 2008). The following can be found in both.

The never-ending drive to grow the economy undermines families, jobs, communities, the environment, a sense of place and continuity, even national security--but we are told that, in the end, we will somehow be better off. . . In affluent countries we have what might be called uneconomic growth, to borrow Herman Daly's phrase, where, if one could total up all the costs of growth, they would outweigh the benefits.

Even Science Dude at the Orange County Register says "global warming is real". We know what is coming. What are we going to do about it?

Trust Washington? A call for a new Green Politics

Two discussions of the subject of trust came to my attention today. The most prominent was that of Alan Greenspan who told Congressional committee of his mistake leading to the current economic fiasco. He trusted the executives of major banks to act to protect their shareholders. They did not. You know the rest of that one, at least as far as the millipede we call the economy has dropped it's shoes.



Then, I found a discussion of the problems the environment where after years of environmental activism, the planet is in worse shape today than ever before and issues a call for a new Green Politics. This time the author, James Gustave Speth, finds a misplaced trust to be contributory to this situation. He cites another.

For example, Mark Dowie in his 1995 book Losing Ground notes that the national environmental organizations crafted an agenda and pursued a strategy based on the civil authority and good faith of the federal government. "Therein," he believes, "lies the inherent weakness and vulnerability of the environmental movement. Civil authority and good faith regarding the environment have proven to be chimeras in Washington." Dowie argues that the national environmental groups also "misread and underestimate[d] the fury of their antagonists."

Speth defines his new politics as confrontational, disobedient but nonviolent. It might just work if we had a new Dr. Martin Luther King.