Seeing Red

Panatal photo: National Geographic

   Red, Blue, it's up to you.  Here in the U.S., our Presidential election is now only weeks away and polls and predictions are flying around like  plastic bags in a windstorm.  Unfortunately, election tactics and the parties themselves are getting even nastier with fires being set, razor blades being placed in banners, fake drop boxes for ballots, and Zoom meetings being hacked with racial slurs; and while sentiment seems to be that the end result may be a major switch to the Democratic party (blue), one could say that people overall are getting weary of the nastiness and name-calling in this election.*  One could also note this comment from Wikipedia: In politics, a red flag is predominantly a symbol of socialism, communism, Marxism, trade unions, left-wing politics, and historically of anarchism; it has been associated with left-wing politics since the French Revolution (1789–1799).  And while both parties in the U.S. generally don't openly agree with such stances, one does have to note that the GOP (Republican) party is symbolized as the Red party and proudly claims their majority of "red" states.  Red is also the color of blood, a color citizens of war-torn countries are forced to witness in bodily damage as our urge to fight and destroy, and to wound and kill, seems to be without end as arms and legs and lives lost are lost for what seems like little reason, if not to history then to a mother or a brother or a child.  But none of that was what I wanted to talk about here; rather it was about the Pantanal.

    If you guessed Brazil and the Amazon, you're partially correct.  The Pantanal is indeed located in Brazil, and while not as large as the Amazon jungle it IS considered the largest tropical wetland in the world...and it is burning red with fire.  And it's not that it is just on fire, but it is burning at such a furious rate that it is now 4 times the size of what's burned in California and the fires continue on a path of destruction.  Home to what many scientists consider one of the last and yet largest areas of diverse animal species, the Pantanal and its fires have already left behind burnt carcasses of endangered jaguars and even the crocodile-like caimans...and all of it in a wetland (Brazil's president has basically dismissed the fires).  So how can this happen?  How can a swampy, marshy area be burning at such a furious rate?  Part of the answer rests in the unchecked cutting down of trees and vegetation in the area by (often illegal) cattle ranchers; but a larger problem is attributed to the drought...which brings us to the real issue of a changing climate.

   Certainly you've heard it all before (albeit not from scientists but primarily from a steadily diminishing number of climate change "deniers"), that this is all just a natural cycle in the earth's history and that things such as volcanic eruptions and shifts in our temperatures are why these floods and droughts are occurring.  But a quick look at the actual record shows two differing views: 1) the measured temperate heat hitting our planet from the sun --measured since 1880-- has been steadily dropping while our planet's temperature has been exponentially rising; and 2) the emissions that came from the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 (the 2nd largest eruption of this century) matched the scientific models of how such emissions would affect Earth's future temps (the same models are used to measure humanity's effect on climate change).  And now for the bad news...all the effects of what has happened is merely the result of what we've already "done," that is, we've managed to raise the temperature of our planet by one degree Celsius.  How?  As Bill McKibben wrote in reviewing the new book by Mark Lynas: A rise of one degree doesn't sound like an extraordinary change, but it is: each second, the carbon and methane we've emitted trap heat equivalent to the explosion of three Hiroshima-sized bombs.  Yes, you read that correctly...each second.  As a quick math reminder, there are over 31 and a half MILLION seconds in a year (times 3 and that's a lot of heat being trapped).  Added McKibben: The pandemic provides some useful sense of scale—some sense of how much we’re going to have to change to meet the climate challenge.  We ended business as usual for a time this spring, pretty much across the planet—changed our lifestyles far more than we’d imagined possible.  We stopped flying, stopped commuting, stopped many factories.  The bottom line was that emissions fell, but not by as much as you might expect: by many calculations little more than 10 or 15 percent.  What that seems to indicate is that most of the momentum destroying our Earth is hardwired into the systems that run it.  Only by attacking those systems—ripping out the fossil-fueled guts and replacing them with renewable energy, even as we make them far more efficient—can we push emissions down to where we stand a chance.  Not, as Lynas sadly makes clear, a chance at stopping global warming.  A chance at surviving.

    Grim outlook to be sure since banks such as Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, and Bank of America continue to provide loans to the fossil-fuel industry ($196 billion in the past three years).  But now comes the recent film by 93-year old David Attenborough, A Life on Our Planet (in theatres as well as Netflix).  What we once thought of as "time" to solve the problem has dropped from 2050, to 2035, and now to a quick 9 years from now.   In a piece in The New Yorker, McKibben again wrote about not only the problem but how complicated the solution would be.  So for a minute, try and forget all of your small but admirable efforts for a moment --that of switching to LEDs and recycling and electric cars and such-- and try to consider what it would take to even come close to the Paris Agreement in which nearly 200 nations pledged to limit their emissions to avoid a 2-degree Celsius increase in global temps (Trump pulled the U.S. out of the agreement in November of 2019)...using a new interactive climate simulator (developed by En-ROADS and MIT) you can adjust every scenario which you think would make a big, world-wide difference; you can lower or drop coal use, or increase natural gas or nuclear, or add electric transportation to cities, or increase the amount of wind and solar, or change timelines.  Your one goal is to get our "uninhabitable" figure down to that Paris accord of just a 2-degree rise (and remember, we're already one degree hotter so you only have a single degree to play with).  What you may discover is that when it comes to major changes, the task becomes rather difficult (and disappointing).  And as McKibben pointed out in another piece, it was President Obama who began the fracking boom, something he noted in a 2018 speech at Rice University in Texas: “I know we’re in oil country,” he told the cheering crowd.  “You wouldn’t always know it, but [production] went up every year I was president.  That whole, suddenly, America’s, like, the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas…that was me, people,” he said.  “Just say thank you please.”

    Before it starts to seem too bleak there is hope on the horizon.  As noted in the above article, five of the six major banks have pledged not to fund further fossil-fuel development in the Arctic Refuge (Bank of America remains a holdout).  And the University of California removed $126 billion of its fund from fossil-fuel investment, a small piece of the pie that only adds to "a mammoth divestment campaign [which] has persuaded endowments and portfolios worth $12 trillion to sell their stocks in coal, oil, or gas companies, and now that effort is expanding to include the financial institutions (mostly banks, asset managers, and insurance companies) that provide the money that keeps those companies growing," wrote McKibben in an earlier piece in The New York Review of Books.  There is hope, and there is a chance to calm the waters; there is time to avoid that unexpected boiling over of emotions that leads us to suddenly erupt into rage (aptly described in an episode of Hidden Brain, if you're wondering where that unexpected rage comes from).

   The other day, we invited our distant neighbor over for a glass of wine; he's the polar opposite of us politically and often vocal about his views but in a friendly manner.  We didn't see many others doing anything different than us when we chatted with him, giving a friendly wave or a quick hello; but the more we talked with him (generally while walking the dog in the evening) the more interesting we found him.  For one thing, he was happy to openly walk around the block with a glass of red wine in his hand, a relatively daring maneuver in our fairly conservative neighborhood.  So we invited him over.  Rule number one, we told him (in fact, it was our only rule) was there could be no heated talk of politics.  The conversations ended up being both weighty and educational, topped off with a few tall tales** thrown in for good measure (wine will do that to you but it should be noted that I was drinking scotch so the wine was between only him and my wife) and by the end of the night (and the bottle), we all parted with the satisfaction of having enjoyed a good evening (and yes, we'd gladly have him over again).

    The late philosopher, Alan Watts, wrote: In any foreseeable future there are going to be thousands and thousands of people who detest and abominate...These hatreds are not going to be healed, but only inflamed, by insulting those who feel them, and the abusive labels with which we plaster them...may well become the proud badges and symbols around which they will rally and consolidate themselves.  Nor will it do to confront the opposition in public with polite and non-violent sit-in and demonstrations, while boosting our collective ego by insulting them in private,  If we want justice for minorities and cooled wars with our natural enemies, whether human or nonhuman, we must first come to terms with the minority and the enemy in ourselves and in our own hearts, for the rascal is there as much as anywhere in the "external" world -- especially when you realize that the world outside your skin is as much yourself as the world inside.  Echoed memoirist Vivian Gornick: ...we are, every last one of us, divided against ourselves.  We both want to grow up and don't want to grow up; we hunger for sexual pleasure, we dread sexual pleasure; we hate our own agressions --anger, cruelty, the need to humiliate-- yet they derive from the grievances we are least willing to part with.

Cover of TIME -- Artist: JR (this work was removed just days later)

    TIME magazine devoted an entire issue to the subject of hope, even hiring an artist to try to display the average person's timidity at reaching for hope.  But there is also the story of Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia who (he's 84) continues his quest to save large portions of the planet, along with the couple Kris Tompkins and her late husband Doug (both were featured in National Geographic).  It's not too late to save the planet, Chouinard told Fast Company.  It all reminded me of the song that seemed to talk about this strange yet engaging cycle of life, The Waters of March: The wood of the wind, a cliff, a fall, a scratch, a lump, it is nothing at all.  It's the wind blowing free, it's the end of the slope, it's a beam, it's a void, it's a hunch, it's a hope.  And the river bank talks of the waters of March.  It's the promise of life; it's the joy in your heart.  The joy in your heart...keep that spark alive.  There is hope...

*Nastiness is nothing new in U.S. Presidential elections, even when it comes to those comparing Trump's actions to that of Adolph Hitler (indeed, such comparisons had been placed on Presidents Bush and Obama, as well as Democratic contender Hillary Clinton); but the rural countryside is now experiencing a bit more "violent" behavior which is turning physical...all of which again serves to show the divide in our country, a tactic (remember that phrase "divide and conquer") often used throughout history by authoritarian figures (professor Elaine Pagels posited that the early Romans used this tactic to turn the population away from the large and popular Gnostic movement and to focus instead on the new and upcoming religion being headed by a single figure...Christianity).   On a side note, Eugene V. Debs ran as a Presidential candidate from his jail cell in 1920...he receive over a million votes!

**Born in Martinez, California, he told the story of  man ordering a Manhattan to which the bartender, apologizing for being out of whiskey, said that he would make him another drink using vermouth, mixing together dry vermouth and gin and capping it with an olive; when asked by the customer what the bartender called that drink, he scrambled around for an answer, spotted his city sign of Martinez hanging in the window, and told him that it was "the martini."  Hmm, but it turned out that urban myths are many regarding that concoction and true to his story, Martinez actually is one of those, said Wikipedia.

--A quick note about certain "comments" appearing on earlier posts...please do NOT click on any of the links at the end of an apparently "nice" comment.  This is yet another avenue that scammers use to try and place a malware or other type of virus in your computer.  Now before you get all panicky, there haven't been many such comments and most of them have been on posts from several years ago so there shouldn't be much to worry about (and I do try to delete such comments/links as soon as they appear).  Consider this just a heads up that scammers are trying any and all angles, one large phone ring using a Los Angeles area code (213) but actually calling from India.  Watch your accounts, freeze your credit, put anti-virus protection on your phones and computers...all the stuff you've heard before (many such programs are available for free, but it never hurts to check online reviews first).  Scammers today are much like the coronavirus...they don't care about your age or situation or political views or personal hardship; they only want your info and your money.