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June 27, 2008

The North Pole, Neat

One of those things I didn't learn while I was still a practicing Mormon is that the opposite of "on the rocks" is "neat," as in, "I'll have a shot of herradura, neat."

Pretty soon, the drink (my favorite term, by far, for the sea) in general might just well be neat. As in, all the ice at the north pole just might melt this summer.

It's one kind of neat, but not another. In fact, this kind of neat in this context SUCKS, literally, in that it sucks heat into a dark liquid ocean and warms the planet up even more.

Yeah. That totally sucks.

Posted by Holly at 7:25 AM | Comments (0)

June 6, 2008

Quote of the Day

"Conventional wisdom holds that you can tell a lot about a man by the way he treats his mother, so why should Mother Earth be any exception?"

Judy Berman, a Broadsheet blogger, in Your fuel efficiency is so hot, commenting on research conducted by General Motors concluding that "88 percent of women would rather meet a guy with a fuel-efficient vehicle than a dude with a sports car."

Posted by Holly at 9:13 AM | Comments (3)

May 20, 2008

What I Read This Morning That Made Me Want to Go Back to Bed

So, the first thing that upset me was this article on mountaintop removal. I remember my sister, the hardcore Republican whose favorite channel is Fox News and great idol is Bill O'Reilly, telling me a few years about some tv show she'd seen on mountaintop removal, how horrible it was, how she wept as she watched it.... But did it make any difference at all in the way she shopped, consumed energy, thought about politics, or voted? Not a whit. She just thought it was too, too bad that these lovely mountains she'd never see were being destroyed. But she'd never see them, so why should SHE sacrifice or change anything about her life to save them?

Then there was this story about people facing economic hardship abandoning their pets. It struck me in part because I'd recently written something about the Mormon practice of stockpiling a two-year supply of, ideally, everything you need for two years: food, water, clothing, toilet paper, dog food. Yes, dog food: because, as I wrote, "You can't neglect to feed your dog just because Armageddon comes along." Hard times aren't Armageddon, but people are still throwing their cats out on the side of the road, tossing puppies down garbage chutes. I guess if people really don't have the money to feed their pets or get them veterinary care, they really don't have the money, but until it's truly a matter of feeding the dog or feeding the kid, couldn't they forgo some other luxury and honor the commitment they made in adopting the animal in the first place?

Finally, there was this piece from Salon called Little Girls Gone Wild, featuring an interview with M. Gigi Durham about her new book, The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It.

You have to have a subscription to read Salon, so you might not be able to see the article. But there's some pretty good stuff in it, for instance, this:

Salon: What are some of the distortions that girls learn from magazines and advertising about what girls' sexuality is all about?

MGD: If you've got it, flaunt it. Sex is only about baring the body, and exhibiting the body, and especially girls' bodies. That's a very narrow definition of what sexuality is. At the same time, you can't express yourself, you can't enjoy your body, you can't feel like your body is sexual unless you've got this perfect, sex goddess anatomy, which is something like a Barbie body. That's ridiculous, too. It makes girls end up hating their bodies, and not enjoying their own sensuality and sexuality. That's a real problem.

Then, there's this insistence that younger and younger girls are sexual. There's this huge emphasis on linking youth with sexuality. People mature sexually throughout their lives, and there is a lot of scientific evidence that women who are past menopause really enjoy sex. Children who are 12, 13 years old are not in a position to understand or cope with their sexuality very well. Linking sex to youthfulness is really dangerous.

Girls are always supposed to be changing their bodies and dressing up in order to attract male attention. There is not much emphasis on girls enjoying their own bodies, or even any reciprocity where boys might be thinking about what they could do to please girls. It's not very mutual.

So read all that if you want to feel worse too.... Or maybe I feel better, because at least someone is confronting the problem, getting the word out there. I don't know. MGD also advocates talking to children--even two-year-olds--about what marketing is and how it works, as in this:

I've done it. If they're watching a commercial on TV, and there is a toy, you can just start talking to them: "Do you think that toy is as good when you bring it home as it is on TV? Do you know why they make it look so fun, and like these kids are having so much fun? Because they really want you to spend money on it."

They understand.

Posted by Holly at 9:00 AM | Comments (5)

April 25, 2008

Please Consider the Environment Before Printing This Email

I just got an email from some university staff person who has to send messages to some huge list. I almost didn't read it, but then thought, "What the hell; I can skim it in 15 seconds, and it might be relevant to some aspect of my life." The actual content of the email wasn't anything I need to know, but her signature caught me: it read, "Please consider the environment before printing this email."

I have friends and colleagues who print out all their email. It makes me crazy. It's such a waste--of paper, of toner, of energy, of space, of everything. I realize there are times when you have to print out an email, but 99 times out of 100, you don't.

One of the reasons I still like and use the email organizer Eudora is that it lets you have all sorts of signatures and choose a different one each time you send an email. On my old desktop I had something like 30 signatures. On my laptop I've only entered ten, one being my home address, another being my work address, a third being the url for my blog, and the rest being quotes I like, including this favorite, something US Grant wrote shortly before he died:

I do not sleep though I sometimes doze off a little. If I am up I am talked to and in my efforts to answer cause pain. The fact is I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; to suffer. I signify all three.

I also love this from Plainwater by Anne Carson:

It is an endeavor as old as civilization to set out on a road that is supposed to take you to the very end of things, if you keep going. What do you find there? That is a good question. Who would you be if you knew the answer? There is one way to find out. So a pilgrim sets off. One thing is certain, one item is constant in the set of beliefs with which he travels. It is simply this, that when you reach the place called the end of the world, you fall off into the water. Some pilgrims drown, some do not. Claro.

I like this from John Quincy Adamas as well:

America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own...she would involve herself...in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition.... She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.

But my new default signature is definitely going to be "Please consider the environment before printing out this email."

Posted by Holly at 9:38 AM | Comments (3)

April 22, 2008

Watering the Planet on Earth Day

In recognition of Earth Day (I started to write, "In celebration of Earth Day," but it doesn't seem right to "celebrate" Earth Day when we're doing such a shitty job of caring for the planet), I'm providing links to a website where you can check your water footprint, which I learned about thanks to this news story.

No one with a brain will be surprised to be told that the US has the largest water footprint in the world--we use more of all the other resources in the world, so why should water be any different? But what makes me crazy is the amount of water we waste in the most careless and irresponsible of ways.

For instance, the movie Michael Clayton is a case in point. Now, I loved this movie; I thought it was just about perfect in terms of its storytelling, and although I wondered for the first 90 minutes why Tilda Swinton won an Oscar for her performance given how little screen time she had, in the last 15 minutes I totally figured it out. But I was really annoyed at all the water just left running in this movie.

For instance, while Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) is waiting to hear the results of a very unpleasant job she's just ordered done, she sits in a stall in some bathroom, and leaves the water running full blast in a sink.... because? Because it masks the sound of her sweating? It makes no sense. People can sit in bathroom stalls and avoid detection easily enough if they want to; why did she need to run the water? Or when Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkerson) wants to make it seem like he's still in his hotel room, he just leaves the shower running--and I bet the hot as well as cold water was on. But why? He could have just turned on the television.

I don't understand Americans' propensity for letting things we actually need simply run down the drain.

When I went to Matthew's Belgian wedding last April, I initially had trouble figuring out how to work the lights in the various hotel rooms I stayed in. Turns out that the lights don't work unless you put your room key in a slot by the door. In other words, you can't go off and leave all the lights on in your room unless you don't care whether or not you get back in. Seems very sensible to me.

Posted by Holly at 11:17 AM | Comments (2)

February 19, 2008

What Surfaces in My Nightmares Lately

Ever since I read about this huge sargasso sea of plastic debris two weeks ago, it has haunted my nightmares. I find myself surrounded by plastic garbage and unable to clear a path out of it. After awaking from another such dream, I decided to try to exorcise the dream by writing about it too.

I just don't understand our reliance on plastic. Yesterday I went to Wegmans and they were offering samples of apples--in little plastic cups. Why couldn't they just spear them on toothpicks? And the cups weren't being recycled--they were being dumped in a garbage bag full of other trash.

I don't think we should totally give up on plastic; it has its place. I admit I like having plastic rather than glass bottles for things like hair products. I remember once dropping a glass bottle of shampoo in the shower. Not cool! But I don't see why SOAP needs to come in a bottle. What's wrong with bar soap? Why this whole body wash thing?

We have to use less plastic, and we have to be better about recycling what we create. Because turning the ocean into plastic soup is dangerous and gross--in fact, one scientist has called plastic the scourge of sea life.

Posted by Holly at 9:09 AM | Comments (4)

December 27, 2007

One More Way Global Warming Screws Everything Up

Yesterday I tried to go somewhere--Chicago, to be exact. I have this really great trip planned that includes visiting an old friend I haven't seen in years, going to dinner with a few new friends I haven't seen in months, hanging with Saviour Onassis and his new man, hitting some museums, etc.

But I was denied, and the weather was the problem. Oh, it was lovely where I was and it was lovely in Chicago. The problem was Detroit. And Detroit was not, as you might suspect if you don't live in this part of the globe, hit by a blizzard. No, it was hit by warm weather, and that led to fog.

It had snowed recently, you see, and then it warmed way up, and all that snow started to melt, and turned into dense vapor over night, and left a thick fog the next morning. It took forever to burn off, and countless flights in and out of Detroit were canceled.

I don't know if that's the same phenomenon that triggered the dense fogs around London that all caused so many flights to be canceled, but it's something that's going to happen more often. And everyone--almost everyone--can see in their own lives negative consequences of global warming. Even my family full of Mormon Republicans, those exemplars of denial, those trained from birth to make choices with devastating long-term consequences, can see that we've really screwed things up and have to make some changes--or rather, someone else has to make some changes. China, India--what do those people need cars for? They do so well with bikes and rickshaws! Who told them they could desire, manufacture, sell, buy and drive cars? It's THEIR fault.

I realize, of course, there's a little irony in complaining about the effects of global warming on air travel, and one of the few consolations I found was that there were that many fewer airplanes flying around the sky yesterday, that people got squeezed onto already full flights so that every last seat was taken. I don't expect anyone--including me--to stop living their lives in the world that exists and go build a cabin on the bank of some pond, because for one thing, there aren't ponds enough to accommodate all of us. But doing what you can to minimize or offset your production of CO2 and other gross gases on a day-to-day basis; voting (it's almost 2008!) for leaders (as opposed to the spawn of satan currently in the white house) who really will do something about global warming; these are things we MUST do so that we can, from time to time as necessary, get on a plane, and have reasonable expectations that we'll get where we want to go.

I'm headed back to the airport later today, and I am trying to be hopeful that I'll get where I'm going. DTW is open and flights are moving in and out of it, but I use a small regional airport and flights in and out of here are still backed up. So we'll see.

Posted by Holly at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)

December 24, 2007

One More Way Our Current Approach to Living Is Killing Biodiversity

Ethanol sucks. I don't know who came up with this idea but it sucks. Something that is added to fossil fuel but doesn't really wean us from it sucks. It requires all this fuel in the first place to produce it, and it makes everything else more expensive, particularly feed for livestock, which is one more reason to be a vegetarian (which I'm still not) or at least eat less meat (which I do). The answer is not a replacement for fossil fuel in the things we already use, but completely different forms of energy. That's all old information.

But here's a bit real news: the rush to grow corn for ethanol is raising beer prices in the US, because farmers are no longer growing hops, an ingredient used in brewing beer, while our crappy dollar (one more reason the Bush administration is the WORST leadership this country has EVER seen) makes importing hops prohibitively expensive.

As it happens I don't like hops, which is quite bitter. I HATE hoppy beers. Took me a long time to figure out what it was in certain beers that made them unpalatable to me: turns out it's lots of hops. But it's used in most beers; in some, the taste isn't pronounced, and those are the beers I like. I really like dark beers and brewed beverages--I like something that tastes like you're drinking a glass of heavy bread, Guinness being my favorite, what I usually drink when someplace has it on tap. But I almost never buy it in bottles to put in my fridge--for that, I prefer to pick up a six pack of some specialty beer from a microbrewery.

I don't drink a lot of beer, so it's not like I'm worrying about the effect this development will have on my wallet. But I don't want microbreweries to go out of business. And this whole thing just sucks. There's no reason to grow so much corn, most of it roundup ready and genetically modified.

Posted by Holly at 10:04 AM | Comments (1)

December 7, 2007

The Best Time to Call a Do-Over

I’ve been trying to figure out why I was so very upset by JGW's story about his friend’s threatened suicide--not that I think I had the wrong response; quite the contrary. I was just a bit surprised by the intensity of my reaction. It’s true that I’m often a big cry baby and that religious despair in particular upsets me, but I’m not always so tender-hearted that I can’t stop weeping over the suffering of some unnamed stranger. (Though I admit it has happened before. And something else that made me cry today is this, on MohoHawaii.) I know part of it is that I’m deeply worried about my friend R and her husband (as I mentioned yesterday, a tree fell on him while he was working in the woods around their house), who has been sedated into oblivion since Saturday (and will be for weeks to come), and who had spinal surgery yesterday so doctors could determine the extent of and hopefully repair his injuries. But I’ve also just been feeling more theologically and apocalyptically vulnerable lately, because I recently witnessed one of the signs of the end of days: my father acknowledged the reality of global warming.

When I was home for Thanksgiving we were talking about how ridiculously hot it was in Mesa this past year, where one of my sisters lives--it was 90 F on Halloween, and 80 as the end of November neared. “Well, it’s just gonna get hotter,” Dad said. “What with global warming, plus all those air conditioners running night and day, even in winter, and all that asphalt and concrete to soak up the heat and keep it hot all night.”

I stared at him. He’s right, of course, but it’s precisely the kind of statement he dismissed when I made it seven or eight years ago.

I have always hated the story of Noah and the Ark--really, really hated it. I was very young--three or four or so--when I first heard it via flannel board in junior Sunday school, and the pictures of all these normal looking people lying around dead everywhere while Noah rode off in his ark absolutely horrified me. God had KILLED them? Killed ALL of them? Because they’d done something BAD? What on earth could they have done that was so awful that god, who supposedly loved everyone, would kill everyone? Did they bonk their baby sister on the head with a wiffle ball bat? Wet their best frilly panties just before Church? Spill a whole bowl of Count Chocula on the living room rug?

I wasn’t one of those little kids who was crazy about animals and wanted to be a veterinarian. Animals were just fine, sort of, as long as they didn’t eat you or bite you or charge you or jump on you or knock you down or lick you or give you ringworm or fleas or any sort of parasite or cooties or germs. (I was one of those kids who liked being clean.) But at some point in adulthood I started to like animals, and I started to feel really AWFUL about the ways we hurt and hunt and kill them. In particular I started to feel bad about the way we treat monkeys. I am really bothered by the fact that so few monkeys and great apes exist today, that we’ve hunted them and destroyed their habitats and done experiments on them or made them into pets until they’re on the brink of extinction. I don’t want to hang out with them, but I want them to live unmolested and happy in their own corner of the world.

In particular, I want orangutans to be just fine. As I now like animals, I support a lot of organizations that work to protect them, and these organizations are always sending me calendars featuring twelve glossy photos of animals either looking majestic and wild or else doing something cute. One of my favorites shows a baby orangutan crouching on the ground, looking really unhappy and holding a piece of wood over his head to keep the rain off his face--it’s unbelievably adorable! I showed it to a friend, who said, “He thinks he’s people.”

“No,” I said. “He just thinks it’s better not to get pelted in the face with cold rain if at all possible.”

Now, you’re probably wondering what all these things have to do with each other, so I’ll tell you, though it will take a while to explain it all.

Monday I read this article about the discovery of a previously undocumented colony of 800 orangutans in Borneo. People who lived by the orangutans knew they were there, but conservationists and scientists didn’t. It’s a big deal. But the peat swamp where these apes live is already slated for destruction so that palm kernel oil plantations can be created, so even if no one just goes out and slaughters the orangutans, they’re probably going to die. Plus turning a peat swamp into farmland releases tons of CO2 into the air, because peat swamps are carbon sinks. It’s all really, really bad.

Then I read another article about how global warming is causing expansion of the tropics, which is changing weather patterns in ways that are going to fuck things up for billions of people, plants and animals. Things are looking especially grim for Australia, where shifts in wind currents are beginning to push storms further south, which means that rain will fall on the open sea where it’s not so necessary, rather than on Australia, which is a pretty dry continent to begin with.

And as I was driving home from having my teeth cleaned that afternoon, I thought, OK, the story of Noah and the ark is A) utterly impossible and B) didn’t happen because it’s C) a myth, but if it WERE possible, would several thousand years ago really have been the best time to call a do-over? Wouldn’t NOW be a better time to pick a few carriers of really good genes for every species and send them off to safety while killing everyone else? (Actually I’d advocate saving all the animals, not just one reproducing set. They'd need a head start before the next go-round of humanity vs. everything else.) Wouldn't the time to do it be right now, before we kill off most of the animals the mythical Noah would have wanted to save? Right now, before we fuck up the climate so badly that all but a few areas of the planet are uninhabitable?

But then I remembered that I don’t really like theologies or world views that treat most of humanity as either A) expendable or B) a mistake, so I decided the whole “flood the earth and kill almost everyone” thing is never really a good idea.

To be continued.

Posted by Holly at 9:39 AM | Comments (1)

November 13, 2007

Concretizing Our Abstract Ideas of Real Garbage, Real Toxins and Real Polluters

Thanks to the friend who sent me a link to the work of Chris Jordan, an artist whose photography uses garbage, toxins, pollutants and major sources of all the above so that we can see how much of this stuff there is mucking up our planet. I suggest you click on the links to Intolerable Beauty, which is photos of things like crushed cars, discarded cell phones and obsolete circuit boards, as well as the raw materials we need to build our homes and pave our streets, etc; and Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait (love that title!), which includes statistics to help the viewer understand just how much we throw away, how many children don't have health care, how many people die of smoking-related illnesses each year, etc.

It's very disturbing, the fact that we are able to think of garbage in terms of the few plastic bags we take home from the grocery store every few days and don't recycle, or the single broken dvd player we throw out and replace after a few years, because we don't think about how many other people are doing the exact same thing at the exact same intervals. Jordan's work makes it much harder to think in those narrow terms. After seeing these photographs, I will do my best from here on out to never again drink a beverage sold in a plastic bottle.

On Bill Moyer's Journal you can also watch a video (it's actually a series of stills with accompanying narration, but we call that a video, don't we?) about the photographs Jordan took after the waters receded from New Orleans, which have been collected in the book In Katrina's Wake.

Posted by Holly at 10:07 AM | Comments (2)

October 4, 2007

It's the End of the Ice Caps as We Know Them, and I Don't Really Feel All That Good

Here's a little story that put me off my coffee yesterday, detailing a heat wave in the Canadian high Arctic, such that permafrost--stuff that has been frozen solid for millennia--is melting rapidly. Temperatures have reached 22 C (that's 71 F, for those of you still used to what used to be called Royal weights and measures), far above normal temperatures of 5 C (41 F).

Even the worst-case scenarios suggested by computers and models aren't equal to the devastating results that are actually occurring. I can't believe we're not taking more action on this. I can't believe it. I'm thinking about all the air travel I've got slated for the next few months and trying to figure out how to balance out the impact of all those flights on the environment--what energy consumption I can cut out, what resources I can save.

I mean, I am currently enjoying a breath-takingly beautiful autumn day: there's just a hint of red to the leaves of the sugar maples in the area, and my chrysanthemums are beginning to bloom--the deep red ones are especially pretty and autumnal. It's clear, calm and 71 F (22 C), decently above the seasonal average of a high of 61 F (16 C). It's frankly impossible not to enjoy the weather today, but I do have to recognize that it's the result of really fucking up the weather systems of our entire planets. It doesn't seem worth the price.

p.s. I found this story in a British newspaper. Haven't read anything quite so dire in an American news source, but maybe I'm just not reading the right papers.

Posted by Holly at 1:37 PM | Comments (2)

September 12, 2007

Hormone-Mimickers Produce More Girl Babies

Here's a very upsetting story announcing that "Man-made chemicals blamed as many more girls than boys are born in Arctic" because high-levels of gross toxins (particularly those in flame retardants) in the food supply "can change sex of child during pregnancy," and here's another saying the same thing, but with slightly different details.

It's horrifying, how nasty and icky we've let our food supply get, and there are definite challenges to be faced in the village in Greenland where only girls have been born. But I can't help thinking that if the chemicals worked the other way--if they changed the sex of the baby from a girl to a boy--walrus carcasses absolutely laden with this gross stuff would be sold in certain countries as a way to avoid having to abort unwanted female babies--just turn them into boys during the first three weeks of gestation!

The only comfort is that the world so loves its baby boys that there will probably be swift action now to clean this nasty stuff up.

Posted by Holly at 9:18 AM | Comments (2)

August 10, 2007

The Scourge of the Plastic Bag

I've already written about how much I HATE those flimsy plastic bags you get at the grocery store or wherever, and my efforts to avoid using them. But there's a piece today in Salon about how truly harmful and awful those plastic bags are. Entitled "Plastic bags are killing us," the article states

The plastic bag is an icon of convenience culture, by some estimates the single most ubiquitous consumer item on Earth, numbering in the trillions. They're made from petroleum or natural gas with all the attendant environmental impacts of harvesting fossil fuels. One recent study found that the inks and colorants used on some bags contain lead, a toxin. Every year, Americans throw away some 100 billion plastic bags after they've been used to transport a prescription home from the drugstore or a quart of milk from the grocery store. It's equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil.

Only 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled worldwide -- about 2 percent in the U.S. -- and the rest, when discarded, can persist for centuries. They can spend eternity in landfills, but that's not always the case. "They're so aerodynamic that even when they're properly disposed of in a trash can they can still blow away and become litter," says Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste. It's as litter that plastic bags have the most baleful effect. And we're not talking about your everyday eyesore.

The article includes a video shot at a recycling plant, discussing how plastic bags screw up all other recycling efforts. They gum up the works and generally create a nuisance. They're really, really bad.

But there's hope--not that we'll get rid of the plastic bags that already exist; they're most likely going to last longer than the human race. But there's hope that we can stop producing, using and discarding so many of them. There's a Campaign Against the Plastic Bag and some countries are either banning the bags outright or creating a surcharge than encourages people to bring their own bags.

If you don't already shop this way, go get a couple of canvas bags and use them every time you shop.

Posted by Holly at 9:02 AM | Comments (3)

June 25, 2007

We Have Lingered in the Chambers of the Sea

I don't really like swimming in natural bodies of water--they too often contain creatures that can eat or sting me, and it's too hard to see said creatures through the murky water. If I do end up at some beach, I prefer not to go in over my head--the only reason I ever do is to water ski, which is something you really can't do in a swimming pool. I've never had any sort of large-water-body accident--short of tumbling off the skis and landing on my face or ass--but still, deep water creeps me out, and I remember that each and every boat trip, I was anxious the first few times I jumped off the boat so I could bob along on my butt before being dragged out of the water by a rope.

Beaches often pose another problem you don't face at a swimming pool, namely, a lack of dedicated places to pee. So what's the best solution, environmentally speaking, when you're at the beach with a bladder that must be emptied? Mercifully there's a website that will answer that question for you.

Posted by Holly at 5:45 PM | Comments (1)

June 19, 2007

The One Negative Thought I Still Intend to Think

The other night, as part of an attempt to understand and control my life, I considered the question, "What do I spend most of my time thinking about and wishing for?" I first approached this question by making two lists: one of the positive thoughts I typically think ("what can I sew or knit next?" was on that list) and one of the negative thoughts I typically think.

As you might expect, the negative list was much longer. Well, maybe you wouldn't expect that.... Maybe you are one of the people who is happy, and who thinks a lot about how happy you are. And actually lately I'm fairly happy.... But happy to me doesn't require all that much thought. Happiness, when you're feeling it, is not a problem to be solved. But unhappiness IS a problem, requiring a solution, which must be found.

So I have tended to think a lot about things that make me unhappy, and not always in terms of finding a solution--sometimes just in terms of how much a particular situation sucks. And I resolved to work to curb that impulse. As I wrote in my journal, it's quite true that certain dreadful things have happened or are slated to happen, "but is reminding myself that really what I want to focus my energy on? Well, no, except maybe for the 'global warming is BAD' part."

Yesterday I had coffee with a friend and we talked about some of the measures we take to reduce our carbon footsteps and how people find them ridiculous. There are, of course, additional things she and I can do--the next car I buy will be much more efficient than the one I'm driving now, for instance--but still, after reading an article about how much energy common household appliances use, I started doing things like unplugging my vcr when it's not in use and uplugging my microwave when I leave town so that the "energy bleed" is gone (because things like tvs and vcrs can use as much energy in "stand-by" as when they're operating). And some people think I'm nuts. How can one person make that much difference? Well, one person can't. But one person trying to make a difference times six billion--that can have a big impact.

Whereas, when I meet someone who isn't so concerned about global warming that it occasionally keeps them up at night, I think, "WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?"

I admit it: I've ended friendships with people because their attitude to the environment was intolerable to me. I can hardly bear to visit one of my sisters, even though I enjoy her company very much, because her household uses as much energy as some third world countries. And I have friends I email regularly who never respond to my statements about how upset I am about global warming, and I just think, "What planet do YOU think you live on?"

But I am finally starting to figure out that people hate rants, so I've refrained from writing about certain things--like this news story (which you won't be able to read unless you have that "Times select service, because it's way old) about how very beautiful and exceptional parts of Arizona--the "sky islands," fragile and wonderful ecosystems at high altitudes--are being destroyed by global warming. Or this story about how much energy is consumed by meat production. (And no, I am not a vegan, but reading this story did persuade me to persist in my efforts to reduce the amount of meat I eat.) Or this article about the droughts facing large portions of the US.

But this morning I read this story discussing a paper by half a dozen prominent scientists (including James Hansen, director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the first scientist to warn the US Congress about global warming) announcing that the earth stands in "imminent peril." The situation is absolutely dire with regards to global warming--we have only a few years to prevent massive and devastating climate change, change so severe that the civilization we have built will not survive, because our infrastructure is designed for THIS climate, which is going away.

How can people not think about this, most of the time, as the basis for other thoughts?

And then there's this whole computer business.... turns out that personal computing devices, including not just computers but cell phones and blackberries (not to mention flat-screen tvs, which use TONS of energy), produce as much CO2 as the aviation industry. Not only that, but the average life for most computers is a mere three years. Makes me glad that I used my first computer for seven years before upgrading, and used my second one for six before upgrading. See? When I want software and such that's compatible with my old computers so I can still use them (because after all, they do still work), I'm not just being a luddite; I'm being a conservationist. And that's not an excuse created after the fact; I have kept my first computer for 13 years because I couldn't see the point in throwing it away when it still works.

But at least there is an effort to get computer manufacturers to go green, to produce machines that use less energy and to build the machines to accept upgrades rather than being replaced.

And then there is this effort in my home state, to make college campuses greener. This heartens and encourages me. But it ain't enough.

Why don't we all think about this, all the time? And not just global warming, but our impact on the entire world. As this editorial from the NY Times on the dramatic disappearance of many bird species in the US states, " The Audubon Society portrait of common bird species in decline is really a report on who humans are.... We look around us, expecting the rest of the world’s occupants to adapt to the changes that we have caused, when, in fact, we have the right to expect adaptation only from ourselves."

Posted by Holly at 8:51 AM | Comments (15)

July 6, 2006

A Slew of Inconvenient Truths

Much to my surprise, the theater in the rancid backwater I call home actually booked a few showings of An Inconvenient Truth--the movie arrived on Friday. Convinced it won't stay in town for long, I went to see it yesterday.

It didn't tell me much I hadn't heard before, and I was just so thrilled that the movie might be seen by people who might otherwise not think about this stuff, that it really cheered me up. But then I started thinking about how different the world might be if Bush had not stolen the White House, and I got really depressed.

I don't know how Al Gore would have handled the 9/11 attacks but I am convinced he'd be a better president than Bush--and even in 2000, when I had little affection or admiration for Gore, I still knew he'd be better than Bush--I KNEW Bush would be a disaster; I knew he was simply a bad, bad man. It was very painful for me to listen to my friends in the Green party insist that there was no difference between the two major parties' candidates, because there was so little difference between the two major parties.

One reason I suffer so from insomnia is that I have always been a worrier. I sometimes wake up out of a deep sleep, my heart racing and my mouth dry with panic over melting polar ice caps and destruction of wetlands. My primary obsession is the environment and I admit that I have long felt it should be everyone's because if our world is uninhabitable, what does the rest of it matter?

I became concerned with the environment because I started paying attention to it, after a couple of decades of being trained to think of the earth as a combination self-replenishing piggy bank and bottomless toilet: anything you want, take from it, because there will always be more; anything you don't want, just dump it someplace where you can neither see nor smell it and that's it, it's gone. Realizing how thoroughly fucked up that approach is was a big deal for me, and one that caused as much conflict in my family as my departure from the Mormon church. One of the ways my Mormon Republican father earned a living was suing the likes of the Sierra Club whenever they did anything that would inhibit the right of farmers to suck as much water as they wanted out of the local river, or inhibit the right of timber companies to cut down trees on our mountain, or inhibit the right of ranchers to kill any and all wildlife they didn't like. He was not happy when I joined the ACLU, but he said, "Just so long as you never join the Sierra Club."

I've lost track of how many environmental organizations I belong to (including the Sierra Club) but I feel it's a losing battle. I will continue to try to minimize and compensate for the amount of CO2 I produce, but we've just fucked so many things up--and so many people don't want to change. My neighbors, for instance, leave their porch light on all night and sometimes forget to turn it off in the morning--it drives me NUTS to see it burning there all day, giving off heat (because that's what incandescent bulbs do) and CO2.

Here's the thing: WE SUCK at our primary job as human beings, which is to take care of one another and the world we live in. I'm not much one for volunteering or activism any more--my mission kind of killed that impulse--but perhaps I must force myself to do it anyway. But what should I do?

It's not like simply knowing about shit really helps much: In early 2003, when it became clear that we were going to war no matter what, I became a news junkie. I began spending two to three hours every day reading half a dozen online newspapers, trying to understand what was happening in our world, as if understanding it could somehow mitigate its destructiveness. And then, after the elections in 2004, I forced myself to cut back. I got rid of my online subscription to the Washington Post and a few other newspapers. I even canceled my subscription to my local paper, which had endorsed George Bush for president. I felt so impotent and enraged and hopeless that I just couldn't bear it. Which is pretty much how I feel right now.

Posted by Holly at 12:40 PM | Comments (9)

June 17, 2006

The Entire Earth Is One Big Toy--Let's Play with It!

I should acknowledge what some of you are no doubt thinking: OK, cruises might be fun, but they're not the most environmentally responsible way to vacation. Cruise ships used to routinely dump crap into the ocean (they're supposed to follow rules about it now) but they also used to do things even stupider and more wantonly destructive, all in the name of entertaining tourists.

One day we visited Hubbard Glacier in Yakutak (pronounced "Yak Attack") Bay. As we approached, we were allowed to go up to the front of the bow so we could lean over the railings and stare right at this massive chunk of ice. It's a damn impressive sight: 76 miles long and six miles wide at the point where it meets the ocean, and every so often it will calve off icebergs the size of a ten-story building. If you saw the chunk fall off, you'd shout, "Oh! Look!" as you pointed; if you didn't, you'd look where someone was pointing and say, "Oh, crap." You actually had to WATCH the glacier and WAIT if you wanted to see it DO anything.

And apparently that patience which is now necessary used to be considered an avoidable inconvenience. While hanging out on the bow, I talked to a guy who was on his third Alaskan cruise. He said that the first two times he went, someone would bombard whatever glacier they were visiting with sonar so that it would calve more often and more dramatically. But then someone else pointed out that since 95% of the world's glaciers are receding on their own, it probably wasn't wise to help them, and the practice was abandoned.

A few days ago, Chris posted an entry about the fact that being crappy residents of this planet should motivate us to STOP being crappy residents instead of rushing about space looking for a new home to move to after we've completely trashed this one. (Not that he's opposed to space exploration--he says that about a dozen times and people still seemed to miss it.) But he went so far as to compare humanity to a cockroach infestation, and both his basic point and that comparison pissed a lot of people off. Personally I thought the post was both funny and apt, and the fact that we would speed up the dissolution of the polar ice caps just because its cool to watch, is one more reason I think that.

Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (8)

June 2, 2006

Two Stories from the West

Tuesday when I picked up my accumulated mail from the post office, there was a postcard from a friend with a stunning photo of the aptly named Delicate Arch in Arches National Monument near Moab, Utah, foregrounded against a glorious sunset on the front. On the back was a message informing me that some guy had recently climbed said arch. He did it not once but several times during a two-hour period.

It pissed me off, you know? The guy claims he did nothing wrong in climbing the arch, because he didn't use any protective equipment, and the regulation prohibiting climbing was loosely worded enough that he didn't technically break any laws. That has been changed: now it is officially illegal to climb any of the named formations in the park.

A couple of years ago I went with my family to Kartchner Caverns in southern Arizona near where I grew up. The park rangers kept stressing that the cave was delicate and asking that no one touch anything. My family was all annoyed about this: "What's the big deal if we decide to feel a rock? It's just a rock," someone said. "It's hardly worth it to go, if all you can do is look at the formations and listen to someone tell you not to touch anything," someone else said.

I was as annoyed with their grousing as they were with the regulations. "I don't see what the big deal is," I said. "They don't let you go up and feel the texture on 'Starry Night' or run your hands along the biceps of Michelangelo's David. If something is precious and fragile, it's precious and fragile, even if it exists in nature rather than art."

I hate people who think the entire world is their playground/ pantry/ toilet, and that they should be able to do whatever they want wherever they want because it will amuse them, and take whatever they want from wherever they want because they desire it, and dump whatever they want wherever they want because they find its presence offensive and/or unnecessary, all regardless of the effects of such actions on other people or even the earth itself. Yes, we must feed, clothe, warm and wash ourselves, but we don't necessarily have to destroy beautiful or unique places in the process.

I also hate people who think the prime reason for the existence of anything is an opportunity for them to make money, as seems to be the attitude of various companies discussed in this story about the horrible results of privatization of water in California. That should be a tagline for a commercial: "How expensive is your water?"

Posted by Holly at 12:17 PM | Comments (3)

February 28, 2006

Good Grief, You Call That NEWS?

Here's what I found in the British press today: articles on the fact that water is our most precious commodity, and there are likely to be wars over it, especially as the world starts dealing with climate change.

What, have these dudes never read Mark Twain, who pointed out that in the American west, "Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over"?

Sheesh.

When I was in the Missionary Training Center, that bastion of moral and intellectual vapidness forsaken by god but not his minions, someone said to me, one night as all the sister missionaries prepared for bed, "I can tell you're from Arizona, because you turn the water off while you brush your teeth."

As the daughter of a Mormon Arizona lawyer who made his living representing clients like irrigation districts against legal opponents like any and all environmental groups, I've always known that A) water was incredible precious and scarce and B) people would fight over it like nobody's business--or rather, like big business. Because water isn't really nobody's business: it's something that can be commidified by those in power and sold, even down the who owns the right to take water out of a particular river on a particular day.

I guess I'm just glad that the rest of the world is waking up to something I've known my whole life. If there is ANYTHING in the world that causes me despair, it's the way the average person wastes water. I think everyone in the world should be required to read Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner, about the utter unsustainability of both agriculture and population in the entire Western half of the US.

And, for good measure, while you're surveying the news, check out this brief piece about rape victims in Lybia who are detained in protective homes for women and girls "vulnerable to engaging in moral misconduct," because God knows being raped is more of a crime than committing one.

Posted by Holly at 4:07 AM | Comments (3)

January 17, 2006

A Bad Case of the Crankies

You know you've got a bad case of the crankies when you find you'd rather tackle filthy, foul, anti-social tasks like cleaning the cat box and scrubbing your toilets than attend to intellectually stimulating, socially rewarding pursuits like writing a few blog entries, posting some comments on blogs you like reading, and answering your email.

Which is how I felt yesterday.

What can I say. It was a holiday and I didn't have to go anywhere or see anyone, and the litter box was starting to smell up my entire basement and the toilets looked so grubby I could hardly bear to pee in them.

And I was very cranky. One reason was the stuff I posted yesterday about how climate change is going to speed up and render parts of the world uninhabitable--I did the math, and if Lovelock is right, by the end of the century Phoenix will regularly have high temperatures of 135 F--and another was that when I mentioned global warming to my mother the other night, she did that standard, stupid, Pro-Bush anti-planet thing of telling me it was a hoax.

There are other reasons why I'm cranky, at least one of which I plan to tell you about soon.... I've been mulling over this unpleasant occurrence and its implications for a good 24 hours--I even woke up in the middle of the night and spent some time brooding over it.

But the holiday is passed, my toilets are clean and now I've got work to do that requires me to deal with other people, so I'll get busy doing it.

Posted by Holly at 9:29 AM

November 2, 2005

Paper or Plastic

I have written elsewhere about the fact that I can become emotionally attached to sturdy plastic bags from cool places like the British Library, but I have not yet said much about my efforts to prevent people from putting any and everything I purchase into those flimsy plastic bags that have THANK YOU stamped on them multiple times, and get thanklessly and endlessly caught in the branches of trees. "I don't need another bag; I'll just put that spool of thread in my backpack," I say to the cashier, which seems to me a perfectly reasonable decision on my part, but sometimes they look at me as if I had revealed myself as a marsupial intent on transporting my purchases in a pouch designed to accommodate my very young offspring.

I also ask the person bagging my groceries to refrain from giving me any bags that contain only one thing. I really do hate that, when they put the eggs in a bag by themselves. And when I object, they get all defensive: "But I don't want your eggs to get smashed!" they say.

"The eggs won't get smashed if all you put on top of them is three bananas and a loaf of bread," I say. I also bring in these capacious fishnet shopping bags my mother gave me years ago; when asked "Paper or plastic?" I say, "Uh, actually, I'd like you to get as many of my groceries as you can in these," and some people actually ROLL THEIR EYES at me, like there's something objectionable about passing up an opportunity to consume and discard cheap plastic goods.

Excessive and instantly disposable packaging: one of the great evils of the world. It wastes resources and clogs already overflowing landfills. I'm waging a personal war against it, but I don't see much success.

Posted by Holly at 5:16 AM | Comments (2)

October 19, 2005

China Crisis

OK, so I didn't come up with that title myself: It's the title of an article in today's Independent UK, about China's environmental problems. (And for those of you who don't remember or don't care to remember, China Crisis is also the name of an 80s British pop band who achieved modest success with a single called "Arizona Sky," which, now that I read the lyrics, is kind of lame, but I always liked the lines praising the vast, brilliant blue sky of Arizona.)

Anyway, this article makes some truly dire predictions, which I have no problem believing are very, very likely. For instance:

deforestation is only one of the threats to the planet posed by an economy of 1.3 billion people that has now overtaken the United States as the world's leading consumer of four out of the five basic food, energy and industrial commodities - grain, meat, oil, coal and steel. China now lags behind the US only in consumption of oil - and it is rapidly catching up.

Because of their increasing reliance on coal-fired power stations to provide their energy, the Chinese are firmly on course to overtake the Americans as the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, and thus become the biggest contributors to global warming and the destabilisation of the climate. If they remain uncontrolled, the growth of China's carbon dioxide emissions over the next 20 years will dwarf any cuts in CO2 that the rest of the world can make.

The article then discusses population growth in China and other parts of Asia, and quotes an expert who offers this opinion:

The bottom line of this analysis is that we're going to have to develop a new economic model. Instead of a fossil-fuel based, automobile-centred, throw-away economy we will have to have a renewable-energy based, diversified transport system, and comprehensive reuse and recycle economies. If we want civilisation to survive, we will have to have that. Otherwise civilisation will collapse.

I lived in Shanghai for several months in 1991. It was the most polluted place I had ever been, though Kaohsiung, a filthy port city in southern Taiwan, ran a close second. I can only imagine how much worse it it is now, with more cars and more people and even more people who can actually afford to heat their homes in the winter. (It was also very poor.) And supposedly Shanghai isn't nearly as bad as Beijing, which becomes particularly polluted each winter.

In Taiwan, we had actual washing machines (though they were little and strange and hard on clothes and had to be monitored, with all these steps where you turned the water on and turned it off and set the cycle to spin or agitate or whatever) but in Shanghai, we just put our clothes in the bathtub and stomped on them to get them clean. Then we'd hang them on the balcony to dry. I never got used to wearing clothes that smelled like car exhaust even before I put them on. I never got used to the horrible black stuff that came from my nose whenever I blew it. I never got used to how filthy my face was at the end of the day. I never got used to the dismal sky or the smell. And it's worse now, apparently--much worse.

This morning it is quite cold in my house. I am all bundled up in thermal underwear, socks, slippers and an extra heavy bathrobe, because I refuse to turn on my heat until it's really truly WINTER, not just AUTUMN, and even then I never set the thermostat above 65 because I am A) cheap and B) anxious to reduce the amount of fossil fuel I use. I paid my gas company almost $1200 last year; I'm not looking forward to the coming year, with heating costs that will be even higher because of the various hurricanes.

I admit my hands get quite cold no matter how many layers are on the rest of me, and I guess I will deal with that by acquiring some of those gloves that have no fingertips, so you can still do things like type. But overall I don't mind this business of coping with the cold by wearing lots and lots of clothes. That was what my Chinese roommates always said to me when I complained about being cold on my mission: "Chwan dwo yifu!" or "put on more clothes! " That was about all you could do in Taiwan, because most homes did not have heat since it was only needed two or three months out of the year--that and close the windows when it was 40 degrees outside, which a couple of my roommates refused to do. (They had this idea that freshly polluted cold air wafting through our apartment was healthier than warm air that had been in our apartment for a while.)

But piling on layers of padded clothing (there is evidence that the Chinese invented quilting--quilted clothing is remarkably efficient in preserving body heat) seems to be going out of fashion in Asia, where the growing population aspires to use as much gas and oil as we do. I wish, that instead of prompting us to eat all our food by admonishing us to think of starving peasants in China, adults had admonished us to use less whatever so that there would be more whatever left over for others in the world: use less fuel, less timber, less water, less food so there will be more fuel, more timber, more water, more food for everyone else. I wish we'd really truly been taught to share.

p.s. Just for the heck of it, here's an article on Mao.

Posted by Holly at 9:26 AM | Comments (0)

Bone-Eating Snot Flower

Um, so, British scientists have discovered a new worm, which they have cleverly named Osedax mucofloris, Latin for "bone-eating snot flower." Remarkably enough, the bone-eating snot flower is not related to some zombie worms living off the coast of California, the name of which was not provided in the article I read. In any event, you can read all about the BESF here.

Posted by Holly at 9:21 AM | Comments (0)