Why Bother With Trees or........Take a Hike!

It seems that everything has to pay its own way these days. Everybody and everything must be able to state its case for its value, significance and why anybody should pay attention. And, in these days of efficiencies and effectiveness to determine whether there is value in keeping you, it, whatever, around, it’s more important than ever to be able to state your case.

Even if you are plants and trees. Maybe, on the planet where 8 billion people and growing means ever shrinking habitat for every other species (I heard a news blurb this week about how the greatest threat to lions in Africa is not poaching but rather shrinking habitat…..and I thought to myself…..”this is news?” loss of habitat as the key threat to all of the animal life in biodiversity is ecology 101 from the middle part of the 20^th century!) it’s not surprising we need to state the case for plants and trees.

Time (July 25, 2016), in “The Healing Power of Nature,” cites studies indicating the wellness virtues of spending time outside walking the forest floor. Ok, if it takes the telling with significant data how the outdoors increases human serenity and health in order to get us to set policy that will safeguard greenness, bring it on.  If we can’t see the forest’s intrinsic value and therefore work to not to destroy it all but rather need to see it’s extrinsic payoff in order to pay attention, please collect more data and publish more stories like this: spending time outdoors 1) can lower blood pressure 2) increase awe 3) promote cancer-fighting cells 4) help with depression and anxiety 5) help with ADHD symptoms. And then this: even “fake nature has benefits.” If you can’t actually get outdoors, pictures of it or looking through windows helps too!

To me this is another indication of the new look of how stewardship of creation that disciples of Jesus do: we don’t so much take care of creation as it takes care of us. But because we dominate we necessarily do need to take care so that it can continue to take care of us.

Henry M. Paulson Jr.,  a Republican, writes in the Sunday June 22, 2014 Sunday Review (“The Coming Climate Crash”), saying that managing risk is a conservative goal that Republicans should embrace.  He states, “…viewing climate change in terms of risk assessment and risk management makes clear to me that taking a cautiously conservative stance – that is, waiting for more information before acting – is actually taking a very radical risk. We’ll never know enough to resolves all of the uncertainties. But we know enough to recognize that we must act now.”

Paulson, in this article, supports a carbon dioxide emission tax  that would not only reduce the carbon-footprint that is escalating atmospheric warming (the science is definitive on this) but drive the growth of alternative energy development that would not only reduce the rate of growth of carbon emissions but also fuel job growth in other energy sectors.

So, a significant voice of the largely skeptical if not opposing side of the carbon emission debate that is the Republican rank and file, speaks for significant change in our energy policy to reduce our carbon emissions. And he says we cannot wait.

Michael Grunwald in the June 23, 2014 issue of Time, writes of a new global survey by Time that indicates  many Americans still don’t believe climate change is a real issue or a real thing at all. For example, only 40% of Americans “strongly agreed” that the earth is getting warmer when, in fact, the earth is getting warmer.

There are not enough visible and credible voices keeping climate change issues and policies on the front burner.  There are credible voices by the carbon-footprint load, but they are not visible. We need  both: people who get press and are influential as well as credible.

A person like Paulson, from the tribe (Republican) who is largely dismissing the concern as either second-rate or too economically costly (short-term!) to address, on the cover of the Sunday Week in Review is good.

Creating Environmental Edges in my Thoughts and for our Policies and Directions This Week……

“A goal of the collaboration between Dow and the Nature Conservancy is to create software that helps a company assess its natural resources so that they can be compared with man-made assets. What is a swarm of wild bees worth? One way to answer this question is to determine the coast of pollinating a crop with managed honeybees. To assess the value of a clean river to a soda bottler, you could tabulate the price of purifying a gallon of polluted water. The assumption is that if you want companies to care about nature you must put a price tag on it. Otherwise, as one Nature Conservancy economist told me, “it implicitly gets a value of zero.” The idea is not new: for two decades New York City has been buying up land in its watershed or paying property owner to stop polluting, because the cost is lower than building the purification plants that it would otherwise need. But the Dow collaboration extends this principle much further. They key piece of software, still under development is the Ecosystem Services Identification and Inventory program, which will make it easy for engineers – ideally, in the field, with a tablet – to enter data about a company’s natural resources. The Nature Conservancy plans to make the software publicly available.”

Green is Good: The Nature Conservancy wants to persuade big business to save the environment,” by D.T. Max, The New Yorker, May 12, 2014. 

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 “Bolstered by Tercek (ed.: The Nature Conservancy’s (T.N.C.) CEO) support, Kareiva (ed.: N.T.C.’s Chief Scientist) promoted his views by giving talks, writing blog posts, and publishing magazine articles. The new science of conservation would be data-based, corporate-friendly, and anti-elitist. It would not fetishize biodiversity. It accepted a world more like, say, the Meadowlands, in New Jersey – where MetLife Stadium shares space with twenty thousand acres of wetlands – than Yellowstone National Park. In ‘Conservation in the Anthropocene,’ an article published in February, 2012, Kareiva and two co-authors, Michell Marvier and Robert Lalasz, wrote, ‘By its own measure, conservation is failing. Biodiversity on Earth continues its rapid decline.’”

Green is Good: The Nature Conservancy wants to persuade big business to save the environment,” by D.T. Max, The New Yorker, May 12, 2014.

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 “And the disasters aren’t just projections for the future. ‘The single most important bottom line is that climate change is not a distant threat,’ said White House science adviser John Holdren. ‘It is happening now.’”

Lighting a Fire: President Obamas campaigns to spread new climate-change warnings,” by Bryan Walsh, Time, May 19, 2014.

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 “Kleeb had spent the last 15 years looking for dramatic, visual stores to advance political agendas, working on the principle that the best way to convert people wa to show them others who were affected by an issue. Here was one of the best stories she’d ever seen: Conservative American farmers rise up to protect their land. She could use the image of the family farm to reframe the way Nebraskans thought about environmentalism. It wasn’t going to be Save the Sandhill Cranes. It was going to be Save the Neighbors.”

This Land is Our Land: Jane Kleeb has organized an unlikely group to protest the Keystone pipeline: Nebraska ranchers and farmers. Is it classic Nimby-ism or the birth of a new environmental movement?” by Saul Elbein, The New York Times Magazine, May 18 2014.

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“One of Kleeb’s tenets of organizing is that if you want to reach a specific group of people, you have to use someone from that group to help you make your case. ‘One thing the climate organizations don’t get is that the scientific numbers don’t move people,’ she said. ‘People here care about their neighbors. So we are looking for a face.”

 This Land is Our Land: Jane Kleeb has organized an unlikely group to protest the Keystone pipeline: Nebraska ranchers and farmers. Is it classic Nimby-ism or the birth of a new environmental movement?” by Saul Elbein, The New York Times Magazine, May 18 2014.

I believe facts are our friends. I believe it’s important to know where you are in order to best configure where you are going. Because of this on this Earth Day 2014 I am dedicating time to review and read deeper into the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently published report. I invite you to do the same. Follow this link: http://www.ipcc.ch/ “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading international body for the assessment of climate change. It was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic impacts. In the same year, the UN General Assembly endorsed the action by WMO and UNEP in jointly establishing the IPCC”

Happy Earth Day 2014

It turns out much of the key research on climate change was completed in the 1970’s. The first major report on the subject was requested by President Jimmy Carter. So reports and writes Elizabeth Kolbert in a good piece entitled “Rough Forecasts” in the April 14th issue of The New Yorker. Yes, we’ve been looking at the data for at least that long. At a meeting in Yokohama the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released just shortly ago it’s latest update on the crisis. It’s not pretty. We don’t seem to have the political will and moral power to do anything about the one thing that impacts every aspect of life. As one person in an NPR story Morning Edition story today on the lawsuits pending in Louisiana regarding oil and gas companies having liability in the steady and significant loss of land mass along the coast, most the significantly New Orleans area, stated: We are not talking about paying attention to the pretty little birdies or worrying about how what once was nice and pretty but isn’t nice to look at anymore, we’re talking about survival. Back in 1970, at the first Earth Day, we weren’t just talking about the pretty little birdies either. We were talking about survival. But things are now 44 years later. All attention on earth-keeping is necessary. Not faddish attention. Not stylish attention. Not 9-5 attention. All attention. Elect leaders who get this. Appoint leaders who get this. If you are a leader now, get this. Happy Earth Day 2014.

How Small is $13 Billion?

How small is $13 billion? Rana Foroohar, in her Curious Capitalist column recently (Time, Nov 4, 2013) writes of the $13 billion settlement JPMorgan Chase will pay the U.S. government over alleged misdeeds in selling mortgage-backed securities….those wonder things that were a root cause of the 2008 financial deal. The trouble with that $13 billion is that it’s not only nothing to JPMorgan (they earned that same amount in profit in the first 2 quarters of 2013) but Foroohar argues, and I have heard others say the same in the last year, the financial system today is not safer than it was before the great collapse. Today, for example, 5 years after the crisis, only 40% of the so-called big reform law (Dodd-Frank) rules have been established. What’s troubling to me is that these financial problems are both systemic (bank and financial infrastructure of policies and procedures and laws) and personal (JBMorgan has a person as the CEO, Jamie Dimon, not a “system”), and although the “system” hides behind its complexity to do its damaging, not to say also evil, bidding and although the person hides behind the “system” to do the same, both are fundamentally human constructions that can be understood, addressed and changed. Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda writes in her compelling new book, Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation (2013), “while structural evil may be beyond the power of individuals to counter, it is composed of power arrangements and other factors that are humanly constructed and therefore may be dismantled by other human decisions and collective actions.” I may not be able to go out today as one person with dismay and anger and change the way JPMorgan Chase pays its fines or does its business, but we together can. We set up the laws (and let’s be thankful we live in a nation of laws even as skewed as they can many times be) and we can take them down and change them. Moreover, we are the stakeholders in the companies that are justifying their actions that are devastating the economic and environmental landscape with being bound by fiduciary responsibility to provide a monetary profit for us. It’s not them. It’s us. We are either doing all this damage or we are allowing it to happen. We need people in business and finance that have the brains for all the complexity to also have the heart to make it right. We need government officials with the wherewithal to listen well and act with courage. We need a people who can smell a rat, stop their own complicity in the mess, stop buying products and investing in companies that have exploitative and unsustainable practices and start electing officials willing to govern (and pay the price of non-election in the next cycle if need be) instead of grandstand.

"The loss of honeybees would leave the planet poorer and hungrier, but what's really scary is the fear that bees may be a sign of what's to come, a symbol that something is deeply wrong with the world around us. 'If we don't make some changes soon, we're going to see a disaster,' says Tom Theobald, a beekeeper in Colorado. The bees are just the beginning.'" (Time, Bryan Walsh, August 10, 2013) These are ominous words. "....something is deeply wrong with the world around us." What to do? Well, don't simply carry on thinking you can't do anything. Find a care niche. That one thing you care alot about....and do something with it. In yesterday's (Aug 11) NY Times we see the news about how western U.S. cities have been taking action to build incentives to get folks to get rid of their lawns and install xeriscape landscaping: "This is how officials here (LA) feel about grass these days: since 2009 the city has paid $1.4 million to homeowners willing to rip out their front lawns and plant less thirsty landscaping." Where I live (Central Florida) we have been talking about our drawing down on the Florida Aquifer for years now, but the regulations and the penalties for not abiding by them are way too weak. We should be banning lawns here. A few years ago I removed about 1000 sq. ft. of my back lawn and replaced it with drought resistant plants....Mexican petunias, red grass, vibernum, palm. I need to do more. I really don't need any lawn. That being said, I also don't actually water much. Because of our rainy season this year I don't think I've turned on the sprinklers since May. But there are plenty of folks who seemingly run their sprinkler systems year round without regard for the weather conditions. We can do better. I know that the bees and the draw down on water are not directly related. The point here: find your care niche and do something. For me, right in front of my eyes and what I can directly impact: my water usage.