'MAYDAY! SOS! MAYDAY! SOS! MAYDAY! SOS!' I'm Trapped In A Psychotic/Psychopathic Civilization Of Serial Killers...

Click on photo to enlarge - photo credit unknown, image courtesy of Erv Nichols

Warning!

Rant Ahead!

~

"Take the rag away from your face, now is the time for your tears"

from 'The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll' © 1964 Bob Dylan

~

It's way past time we took the rags away from our eyes and looked directly into the horrific reality of our petroleum addiction.

Ours is an insidious addiction, mostly hidden from us beneath layers of lifelong denial, which enables us to mindlessly murder our mother, the living earth, with the sick vengeance of a deranged serial killer.

We talk a good line though, like so many addicts in denial do, claiming to care most deeply about our families and the environment, about freedom, democracy and the quality of life. But our actions speak much louder than our words, and those actions prove us to be hopelessly dependent upon the destructive extraction and consumption of the world's ever more scarce resources, a cultural co-dependency created over a dozen or so decades by mixing great quantities of oil with our short-sighted desire for comfort, convenience, self-gratification and security.

Our habitual dependency upon this ever more frenzied oil-driven civilization of reckless consumption has undermined democracy and freedom at home and around the world. It's destroying our environment and ruining the future, not only for our children, but for every species on earth. So we lie to ourselves when we say we care about these things above all, because it's obvious that what we really care about is stuff.

We want a continual fix of stuff; more, bigger, cheaper, labor-saving, convenient, stylish, sexy stuff!

Americans are fond of the term, "Put your money where your mouth is", and we do exactly that. Just look at the billions of dollars you and I have squandered on the destruction of Iraq in our country's futile attempt to monopolize their oil.

Our former president said, "the American way of life is not up for negotiation", and we've forcefully demonstrated that anyone who gets in our way is totally screwed.

As we display increasingly antisocial behavior in our relationships with the other people and species we share the planet with, we reveal that, in fact, we have become a psychotic/psychopathic civilization, a species of sociopathic ecocidal maniacs to put it bluntly.

Yes, I mean all of us! The symptoms of psychosis are clearly defined; a loss of contact with reality, grandiose delusional beliefs, paranoia, defensive aggression, thought disorders, hallucinations and antisocial behavior.

Our disease is systemic throughout society, a classic substance-induced psychosis resulting from our 150 year addiction to petroleum and its associated derivatives.

We can no longer imagine living without our daily fix of oil even though every shot we take further destroys the world which made our lives possible in the first place.

Through our addiction to this cheap abundant (although quite temporary) energy packed substance, we've fooled ourselves into believing we're super-beings, exempt from the laws of nature and the limits to growth. In other words we have lost contact with reality.

Under the influence of the happy-juice we call oil we've experienced a euphoric rush that has kept us obliviously stoned for a century and a half, which by comparison, leaves the high from any other addictive substance paling to utter insignificance.

The manic hyperactivity induced by that rush of oil into the arteries of our society allowed us, in very short order, to transform our primal insecurities, and our creative wet dreams, into a monstrous civilization whose monolithic edifices will stand for centuries as eroding monuments to the ostentatious arrogance of a narcissistic species gone mad with self-absorption, over-consumption, and obsessive compulsive disorders.

We have deluded ourselves into the grandiose belief that this pile-of-crap civilization we've plastered across the planet is a modern miracle, evidence of our manifest destiny as masters of the universe.

We Americans make up only about 4.5% of the world population yet we consume 25% of the world's resources. We are the world's number one trash producers, generating 40% of humanity's trash, and we're number two in climate altering CO2 emissions (just recently displaced from #1 by China), responsible for over 20% of global atmospheric accumulations.

We are---and have been for over a century---the development model for a civilization that has spawned the 6th greatest extinction episode in the 4.5 billion year history of earth and it is estimated that we are now losing around 200 species a day, or 70,000 species a year, through habitat loss and the pollution of ecosystems.

You and I are the ones responsible for this latest round of extinctions; for the climate change happening now; for the melting of the polar caps and glaciers; for the coming rise in sea levels, and the subsequent displacement and homelessness of billions of human beings.

We may also be primarily responsible for the very existence of those unsustainable billions of people because of increases in the world food supply created by our development of an international industrial/agribusiness model.

A model completely dependent upon the petrochemicals used for fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, a model which also requires the production & maintenance of gargantuan fleets of farm equipment and transportation networks to produce those agricultural products and get them to markets around the globe.

All of this has unleashed global-wide opportunities of unprecedented magnitude for greedy profiteering by a select few at the expense of everyone and everything else. So, as a matter of course, the world economy is now managed by a gang of legalized thugs & racketeers, rivaled in greed and ruthlessness only by illegal drug cartels, fundamentalist religious fanatics, and an emerging flotilla of Somalian pirates.

~

"Steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king"

from Sweetheart Like You - © 1983 Bob Dylan

~

Capitalism is a Ponzi/Pyramid Scheme which robs the larger populace of the commons to benefit a handful of elites, where obscene profits perpetuate unlimited growth on a finite planet. One of the results has been the contemporary hallucination that our destruction of the planet somehow makes us wealthy.

The wealth of America is now nothing but an imaginary bubble kept aloft by the printing of money, which becomes ever more worthless by the moment. Before long that debt bubble is going to burst into flames like the Hindenburg Blimp, as we might gather from the precedents unfolding in Iceland, Greece, Portugal, and Spain (not to mention California---the 5th largest economy in the world---which is essentially bankrupt).

The perpetual wars we're now waging have deepened not only our national debt, but our national paranoia as well, resulting in over 6,700 military installations--- bases, warehouses, or support facilities in nearly 150 countries (under the guise of defending freedom & democracy)---all to enforce our world dominance and gain control of dwindling resources in the interest of "national security", or what I call our assumed national supremacy.

Meanwhile, here in the "land of the free, the home of the brave", we have the highest per-capita imprisonment rate in the world, 25% of the incarcerated human beings on planet earth are behind bars right here in the good ol' USA.

Is this the definition of Democracy and Freedom?

Is this what the Statue of Liberty stands for?

We all know better...

True freedom lies in the unspoiled bounty of nature where all species are created equal, where those who can't, or won't, adapt to the limits of their environment eventually perish.

We're so deep in denial of our collective addiction that we've kept shooting petroleum into the bloodstream of our lives without facing those limits until we have, quite suddenly, found ourselves up against a wall, with the limits of our ecosystems staring us in the face, point blank.

Perhaps this will wake us up, most addicts need to bottom out before they can face reality and attempt some sort of recovery, but sometimes it's too late for that, when the damage is beyond repair.

So, go ahead my fellow addicts...

Drill Baby Drill!

Buy Baby Buy!

Drive Baby Drive!

Kill Baby Kill!

...but beware, our chickens are coming home to roost.

~

My name is Jim, I'm in recovery from the Petroleum Age*

*Thank you, Chellis Glendinning, for the societal recovery concept.

Quote Of The Day, from Copenhagen...

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

To the United States Congress:

"You Approve billions of dollars in defense budgets. Can't you approve $200 billion to save the world?"

Lumumba D-Aping, Copenhagen Climate Summit negotiator for the G-77.

Say it like it is brother, there's no money for Peace, Love, or Health Care, but there's plenty for war and corporate bailouts!

And here's a quote from me:

"Halliburton, Leading The World In War Profiteering".

Dick Cheney's Halliburton is now a Dubai corporation, they moved there to avoid paying taxes in the U.S., the country that made them filthy stinking rich...

WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?

That question comes to mind because we are so close to Christmas, a day of reverence and worship for the world's Christians, and Capitalists (ohhh, the irony).

And, I know what he would do, he'd be crucified for his advocacy of throwing the money-changers out of the temple.

Another quote from me:

"The Earth Is Our Temple, and Today, We Are The Money-Changers".

~PEACE~

Twelve Years Car Free

Click on image to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

Today, Peggy and I celebrate 12 years of automobile non-ownership.

12 years of reducing our personal carbon footprints by almost 13,000 pounds of CO2 each year, for a total of over 150,000 pounds.

12 years of not blowing the putrid stench of our exhaust into the faces and lungs of pedestrians and bicyclists.

12 years of not buying expensive gasoline refined from oil which innocent people are killed over.

12 years of not paying gasoline taxes for habitat destroying road construction.

12 years of not wasting money on tires and car maintenance

12 years of not paying for car insurance.

12 years of not contributing to gridlock.

12 years of healthful exercise derived from walking and bicycling instead of sitting in cars.

12 years of withholding financial support for the destructive biosphere-polluting automobile and oil industries.

12 years of a greatly reduced responsibility for the substantial numbers of living creatures being sacrificed along our highways as roadkill; squirrels, rabbits, deer, birds, honeybees, butterflies, and all the rest.

12 years of conserving what's left of our dwindling oil supplies as the world reaches peak-oil production and economic decline.

12 years of practical experience getting ourselves around on foot, and, with bicycles fitted with utility trailers.

The above are only twelve of countless reasons we celebrate our decision to live without an automobile. To read more about our commitment to being car-free, read our 10th Anniversary post here.

The Chevrolet pictured above appears to be a 1941 Special DeLuxe Sport Sedan fitted with a 1940 Master Deluxe hood that has no way of ever closing properly because of the '41 grille re-design. This was a "wildly popular" best selling car in America in 1941. I especially like the improvised 2x4 wood bumper brackets on this one, with plumbers tape holding the bumper on. The car is a prop out in front of a roadside-Americana auto-themed restaurant in old-town Victorville, along a ragged stretch of what's left of the fabled Route 66, The Mother Road.

I know a lot about cars, the older ones that is. Like most boys of my era, I grew up infatuated with them, totally immersed in the stylish, sexy, hot-rod auto-culture of the 1950s. I could name just about every make, year, and model up through the 1960s. I rebuilt my own engines, repaired transmissions, did my own brake jobs, carburetor rebuilds, and tune-ups. I did auto-body work, and, for awhile, made my living taking apart wrecks and putting them back together, but that was a long time ago. My love affair with automobiles, except as post-industrial artifacts, has been over for many years.

That old Chevy is the style of car that populated the world I was born into. A giddy post-war world of about 2.25 billion people. A world full of promise with a bright shiny future being created for us by the folks at GM ("See The USA, In Your Chevrolet"), General Electric ("Live Better, Electrically"), and DuPont ("Better Living Through Chemistry").

Yeah, the old slogans still echo fresh in my mind, 60 years later, as our gridlocked auto-infrastructure devours more & more tax dollars while it crumbles into disrepair, as our antiquated overburdened coal-fired, gas-powered, uranium fed, hydro-electric charged (as in dammed rivers, or should I say ruined rivers?) electricity grid crashes on a regular basis, leaving millions without power for weeks on end, and our water, air, and food become evermore contaminated with the wonders of modern chemistry.

But, not to worry, the same folks are bringing us new technologies to remedy the incredible destruction caused by the previous ones, and some of them are already on the market, if we'll only start buying into them.

Soon, much of America's remaining open land will be slathered over with whirring aluminum & plastic windmills generating "clean" electricity, while killing birds along their migratory flyways, and destroying expansive scenic vistas (been to Palm Springs lately?).

We'll have mile upon mile of photovoltaic panels glaring in the sun from the surface of former Southwest desert wildlife habitat, all fenced in by chain-link and barbed wire to protect the crap from vandals and terrorists, all of it strip-mined & manufactured from the dwindling resources the world is now at war over, so we humans can continue to power our empire of destruction.

Yes, clean energy is coming folks, and zero emissions electric cars, so we can all have a clear conscience as we sit in the midst of our oppressive mind-numbing gridlocked bureaucratic crime-ridden war-ravaged nightmarish consumer-driven industrial civilization steeped in bankrupt ideology, failed technologies, and moral irresponsibility.

I've been listening to the salesmen of Capitalism and growth for 63 years now and the only thing that changes is the label on the cure-all snake oil bottle.

It's too late to patch all the monstrous holes in this Titanic and there's 5 billion too many of us to fit in the lifeboats.

It's way past time that we face the gravity of our predicament with the appropriate humility and show compassion for one another as the world we know disintegrates around us. We're all in this together, there's no one to blame but ourselves.

It's not the Muslims, the Jews, or the Palestinians, not the Christians, or the Pagans, the Gays, Lesbians, or Homophobes, and it's not the Democrats, Republicans, Commies, or Anarchists.

It's not even God, or Satan!

It's Us

And, it's just the way things happened, we're the victims of our own success.

We achieved too much too fast without soon enough gaining sufficient insight into the destructive consequences of our extraordinary power to alter and overpopulate the natural world we depend upon.

A world of 6.5 billion people, all scrambling for precious resources, is now reaching Peak Everything and we're not at all prepared for the downside of the curve.

So, hang on friends, and hold each other close in your hearts, because our great super-highway is fast becoming a very difficult and bumpy little trail to an extremely different future.

I played with my photo of the '41 Chevy in Photoshop, feathering the image with an oval mask, adding poster edge effects from the Artistic menu in the filters tools, and then slightly increasing the color saturation with the Image, Adjustments tool.

Ecological Food For Thought...

The Progress Of Destruction

The Heart Of The Matter

Click on image to enlarge - © 2008 jim otterstrom

A friend once sent me a link to a composite photo of the nighttime lights of North America as seen from space.

She found the photo to be very comforting in the fact that she could see the lights of all the places in America where she had friends.

But I found the photo to have a somewhat opposite effect on my emotions.

It caused a discomforting knot in my gut!

I saw the lights as countless gaping holes in the biotic communities of the continent I call home.

The more numerous, and brighter the lights, the bigger the holes in the living diversity of the natural world.

To most people, I suppose, these lights represent progress in the development of humankind.

But, to me, they dramatically illustrate the destructive imbalance between human organisms and our environments.

Where there are lights, there are buildings, shopping malls, sprawling suburbs, monstrous cities, millions of acres of roads slathered in asphalt & concrete, factories, plastic, landfills & waste management facilities, power generation plants, sewage treatment plants, schools, hospitals, prisons, machinery, automobiles, internal combustion engines, wrecking yards, toxic chemicals, pollution, oil fields, corporate headquarters & the seats of governments, police stations, courthouses, military bases and nuclear weapons facilities.

Every second of every day the exponential growth of our human creation lays waste to more of the biosphere as our species races forward in its relentless destruction of the planet.

What we're doing to planet Earth literally mirrors what insects did to the ravaged leaf above. We are eating away large bits of our habitat, but, we have no other leaf, or, in our case, planet, to migrate to when this one is stripped bare.

The results upon the victim are similar to those of a plague of locusts or a rampantly malignant cancerous growth. And, unfortunately, our victim is this magnificent place we call home, the sole source of our sustenance.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Our imaginations are simply boxed-in, blinded by the overwhelming monolithic hierarchical structure of the civilization we were born into.

But things may be changing as more and more people seem to be realizing that the way we live just doesn’t work, and doesn’t feel good either.

Life on Earth is a vast assemblage of complex organisms, but we're all evolved from one single-celled common ancestor.

We are one family,

The Family Of Earth.

And, our species lays claim to sentience, consciousness, and self-awareness.

So, as I daily witness the continuing degradation and destruction of the biosphere, the loss of diversity, of natural habitat, and the species who live here, I can’t help but sense that these holes in our biotic communities are also metaphors for holes in our hearts. For the longing in our souls and our spirit. A longing to be whole, to be complete, to be home.

And I believe that some of us are beginning to understand this, and that many more feel it subconsciously.

Yes, the future may still hold a place for humanity, for the surviving descendants of the Agricultural, Industrial, and Petroleum Ages.

The Ages of Empire and World Domination.

Once the heavy burden of this all-consuming civilization is lifted off our backs, perhaps the collective memories of our DNA, our native intuition, will help us remember that there are many ways to live.

And certainly, among those ways, there are some which are sustainable, which would allow our species to continue living, in much more realistic numbers, through ages to come.

Are the lessons we're beginning to learn about our dysfunctional relationship with our environment guiding us toward imagining and desiring a Biocentric Age?

If so, then an Age Of Biocentrism could one day become reality, a sort of natural succession, as impellingly adopted as have been the aforementioned Ages of human history which have paralleled our ever-evolving consciousness.

A definition from Wikipedia

Biocentrism (from Greek: βίος, bio, "life"; and κέντρον, kentron, "center") is a term that has several meanings but is commonly defined as the belief that all forms of life are equally valuable and humanity is not the center of existence. Biocentric positions generally advocate a focus on the well-being of all life in the consideration of ecological, political, and economic issues. Biocentrism in this sense has been contrasted to anthropocentrism, which is the belief that human beings and human society are, or should be, the central focus of existence.

~

Nighttime Lights of North America

Click on image to enlarge - courtesy of NOAA

This is not the photo my friend sent several years ago. That one had an all black background.

But you get the idea...

~

Post Script

The leaf in the image at top is from a Hollyhock that's growing near a faucet in the garden.

It caught my eye, and my imagination, for several days before I realized what it reminded me of.

I decided to scan it and was then moved to write this post.

Nature, speaking through me, I guess you might say.

I chose today for this post to participate with Sonia in her Ecological Day at her blog, Leaves Of Grass.

We Made The Front Page!

Click on article to enlarge - © 2008 Big Bear Grizzly & Kathy Portie

Our local newspaper, the Big Bear Grizzly, has been doing some recent stories on the high cost of gasoline and how people might cut back on their fuel expenses.

The paper got word of our car-free lifestyle and called us over the weekend to arrange an interview about our experiences.

So we knew this was coming out today but were surprised to see our mugs on the front page.

Peggy and I think the article is nicely written, simple and to the point, and we feel honored to be featured in our local paper.

There is one slight error in the story that I will correct here. It says that we retired from the Postal Service in 1997, but I retired in 2001, and Peggy retired in 2004.

Through A Different Lens....................... 10 Years Car-Free

Click on photo to enlarge - image © jim otterstrom 2007
headlight lens © Ford Motor Company 1937

Today marks our 10th Anniversary of living car-free.

By "car-free", I mean that Peggy and I haven't owned a car since January 31st of 1997.

But, we have found it necessary to rent cars on several occasions, particularly during the time our son was hospitalized and recuperating after his near fatal car-wreck in 2005.

Still, cars haven't been part of our daily lives for those 10 years.

When we owned a car, we drove somewhere around the national average of 12,000 miles per year. So, according to this 'An Inconvenient Truth' CO2 calculator, our personal carbon dioxide output has been reduced by nearly 6.5 tons per year.

That's 130,000 pounds of CO2 over the 10 year period!

But, we must also factor in the approximately 6 thousand miles we have driven during that time, which means we need to subtract 6,500 pounds from that 130,000, bringing our net infernal combustion pollution reduction down to 123,500 pounds for the decade. This means we reduced our personal CO2 output by nearly 87%!

123,500 POUNDS!!!

Talk about a diet, now, to me, that's something to celebrate!

Yet, in a world of 6 1/2 billion people, does it make any difference?

Not really. Not to anyone but Peggy and I, and a small minority of eco-centric types whom, according to the status quo, would be defined as part of the lunatic fringe.

To a planet that's been around for some 4 1/2 billion years, and seen millions of species come and go, does it make a difference?

None whatsoever, unless you happen to be one of those species who have come, but not yet gone.

In a vast Universe of countless galaxies, stars, and planets, does it make any difference?

Nope...

...unless, by some miracle of chance, you have the good fortune to be currently alive and breathing oxygen upon the beautiful blue planet, Earth.

No, a few individual members of an entire culture which is addicted to conspicuous consumption and material gratification aren't going to make much of a difference, so why bother?

Well, that's a good question, and one I've asked myself many times.

Once you know that smoking cigarettes causes cancer do you continue smoking?

Many people do, and continue doing so, even when they're hooked up to an oxygen tank or permanently bedridden. I've seen people, whose vocal chords had been removed because of smoking related cancer, suck on cigarettes through a trachea valve.

That's what I call addiction, mental, emotional, and physical addiction.

Yet, this is supposedly a free country, and I would say that's their business, as long as I don't have to pay the associated medical bills.

So, what is the difference between a person who, through denial, apathy, illness, or self-loathing, commits suicide by ignoring their addictions, and someone who hastens the destruction of a planetary life support system through denial of their addiction and its consequences?

The only difference I see is that people who commit suicide through substance abuse are just hurting themselves, and those who care about them, where people who would poison an entire planet because they refuse to face their own addictions, are not only suicidal, but homicidal, genocidal, and biocidal as well.

Are we that oblivious to reality, and to our own responsibilities?

Do we just not give a damn, or do we feel too hopelessly addicted to our old habits? Or, are we just in denial that there is a real problem, and that each one of us is a big part of it?

Of the thousands of cars which drive past us every week, blowing exhaust in our faces as we walk around Big Bear, how many of the drivers ever think about what they're doing, or about our health, or the stench they're spewing into rarefied mountain air belonging to everybody?

Why is something like that legal?

Should it be legal for me to shit all over everyone and everything?

What's the difference?

Legal or not, it's most certainly immoral!

Todays' infernal combustion automobile is probably the worst of our addictions, because of the magnitude of its destructiveness, but our disease goes much deeper than that.

How often have you heard the term "for the benefit of mankind"?

Humankind, blinded by its own cleverness, and imagined self-importance, values each technology primarily for the benefits to mankind.

Wouldn't a species with the slightest bit of common sense, and some desire for long-term survival, assess technologies primarily on their benefits to all life on Earth and the long-term health of their ecosystem?

Isn't survival considered a benefit to mankind?

We have grossly overpopulated the planet through the invention and use of technologies which supposedly benefit mankind. Yet it is becoming clearer every day that those very technologies may soon render our planet uninhabitable for those who would breathe oxygen, including the mankind they allegedly benefit.

And, once again, we turn to the technologies of an obsolete social & economic model---to the proponents of a failing civilization---for so-called clean car technology, alternative fuels, and renewable energy sources, so the worlds 6 1/2 billion people can, by 2041, become 9 billion (see chart here).

Contemporary wisdom as seen through the dominant lens:

For the good of mankind, all 6 1/2 billion of us, we will find solutions.

The global economy will not fail because our technology will find ways around nature's limits.

I wonder what percentage of the world population ever considers the consequences we face if this ever-expanding global economy of 6 1/2 billion people doesn't fail until our ecosystem does?

Can we even imagine the collapse of our entire civilization, the complete die-off of the human species, a total extinction of life on the planet, or an Earth that more resembles Mars?

Are we aware that the entire world is now embroiled in resource wars over oil, water, minerals, fish & game stocks, and arable land?

Have we paid attention to the fact that huge tracts of land recently used for growing food, or sustaining wildlife, are now being converted to growing crops for ethanol based fuels, or, that more than 50% of the pollution an automobile generates during its lifetime is produced during the manufacturing processes, or that we are in the midst of the 6th great extinction period in the history of our planet, and that habitat loss due to human expansion, industrialism, climate change, pollution, and resource extraction is causing those extinctions (I recently read that 13% of Americans have never heard of Global Warming)? READ THE LATEST CLIMATE CHANGE NEWS HERE (added 2/2/2007).

As the diversity of life on our planet diminishes, as the atmosphere deteriorates, and the pollution of our air, water, and soil increases exponentially, as world fisheries are depleted, and soil erosion claims more & more acres of farmland, how do we respond?

For the good of mankind---to provide jobs, housing, schools, and to accommodate more resource extraction in support of the teeming hoards---we build ever more subdivisions, shopping centers, and freeways.

WE'RE ON THE TITANIC!

We've bumped up against something and the ship seems to be listing a bit. But this is the "unsinkable" Titanic, a marvel of modern technology, and besides, the band is still playing, many of the passengers are still dancing, and the crew in charge says there's really nothing to worry about.

FANTASIA REVISITED!

Anyone who has seen Walt Disney's Fantasia will remember the Sorcerer's Apprentice, whose ineptness with technological wizardry, and Mickey Mouse tomfoolery, backfired when his creations ran amok, swarming uncontrollably with their own single-minded purpose.

WE ARE MICKEY MOUSE!

And unfortunately, like Mickey, we're desperately hoping that the wizard wakes up soon to save our sorry butts.

Only this is no cartoon, unless you believe what you see on television.

Much like the prism design of the headlight lens above, from a 1937 Ford---which aims light in a prescribed direction, for a relatively short distance---our vision today of what lies ahead is mostly defined for us by the corporate media propaganda machine of the dominant culture, and designed to focus our attention on economically specific, anthropocentric, elitist solutions. READ HERE HOW A CONSERVATIVE AMERICAN THINK-TANK IS WORKING TO PUT THIER OWN SPIN ON TODAY'S BEST CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE (added 2/2/2007).

I try to contemplate the future through a different lens than the one offered by those who would rule the world solely for the benefit of mankind.

Through this alternate lens (I might call it a full-spectrum lens), which is focused upon the Laws Of Nature and the needs of all living things, it becomes more obvious that there will very likely be zero automobiles in the not too distant future of planet Earth---bio-fueled, hybrid, hydrogen or otherwise.

But the clarity of Nature's lens is where I also find reasons to hope that life itself---with or without Homo-sapiens---might continue to evolve and flourish on Earth, regardless of the arrogant selfishness of todays' dominant species! (HERE'S AN ARTICLE ABOUT THE PROSPECTS OF LIFE ON EARTH (updated 2/2/2007).

And, like I've said before, hope is more powerful than despair.

My hope might actually evolve into optimism if I saw the faintest hint that individual human beings, in huge numbers, were willing to address their own addictions to destructive technology.

I still have plenty of addictions of my own, like hot-running water, indoor plumbing, electricity, refrigeration, music, photography, the internet, beer, wine, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

And I'll be working on some of those...

...but I'm already way over the automobile, and the stupid-ass television, which is nothing more than a brainwashing advertising platform for this whole conspicuously consumptive life-threatening mess.

An 86.7% reduction in our fossil-fuel burning?

123,500 fewer pounds of CO2?

Insignificant, maybe...

...but it's our small contribution to the future, to your future.

It's one simple thing we can do, and it feels good.

It feels right!

Love & Peace

Ward Valley Nuclear Waste Protest - 1998

Click on article and fully enlarge to view picture & read text

Click on letter to enlarge

In the Mojave Desert, some 180 miles east of here, is a place known as Ward Valley, sacred land (isn’t all land sacred?) to the five tribes of American Indians that formed the Colorado River Native Nations Alliance. In the early 1990s Ward Valley (Silyaye Aheace) was chosen by the Bureau Of Land Management as the site for a low-level nuclear waste dump to be operated by U.S. Ecology, a waste management company. Because of Ward Valley’s close proximity to the Colorado River, a source of drinking water and irrigation for millions of people, and U.S. Ecology’s already poor track record at another waste facility, in Beatty, Nevada, that was leaking tritium into the ground, this was obviously a very bad idea.

Determined to stop the project, members of the Colorado River Native Nations Alliance set up an encampment at the site in late 1995, and had a presence of 50 to 200 activists there for the next 3 years. In 1998 the BLM attempted to close the land to the public and remove the activists. Through the efforts of the CRNNA, and the ‘Save Ward Valley Committee’, based in Needles, hundreds of environmental activists from all over the country, including our family, showed up to give their support in forming a human blockade to stop the BLM.

Peggy and I were still working for the Post Office but we rented a car for the weekend (deciding this was urgent enough to justify using a vehicle for a couple of days) and headed for Ward Valley. We had all stayed up late the night before making the 4 signs you see us holding in the newspaper photo from a 1998 issue of the 'Earth First! Journal' pictured above. Peggy, on the left, is holding the stop-sign shaped ‘STOP THE DUMP’ sign, Jamie is holding the sign with the heart-shaped cracked-earth, reading ‘BREAK MY EARTH, BREAK MY HEART’, and I don’t know who the gentleman is that borrowed Jimmy’s skull & crossbones ‘NUKE DUMPS SUCK’ sign, but Jimmy is standing directly behind him, and yes, that’s a thinner me on the right with the blood-dripping earth that reads ‘WOULD YOU RAPE YOUR MOTHER??’.

The people on the ground in front of us are Earth First! members, chained together, and blocking the driveway that the BLM would have to use to storm the encampment, and, in my mind, they are truly heroic putting their bodies so vulnerably in harms way like that.

Sometime later, when the above issue of the 'Earth First! Journal' came out, I was greatly surprised, proud, and humbled, to see a photograph of my entire family on the front lines at Ward Valley, on the opposite page of an extensive article about Julia Butterfly Hill, who was in the midst of her incredible 2-year tree-sit atop the ancient redwood, 'Luna', in The Headwaters Forest of Northern California. Our daughter Jamie, then 13, would soon write to Julia, and, as you can see above, we still have her warm, gently instructive thank you note, scribbled on recycled scrap paper from Julia's tiny platform at the top of Luna.

Although you could feel the tension building, there was no confrontation at Ward Valley that weekend, and we couldn’t stay longer because we had to go back to work, and the kids had school, so we drove back to Big Bear.

But I couldn’t get those folks in the middle of the desert, and the confrontation they faced, off my mind. So, on Monday morning, I talked with my Postmaster, who is Native American (Nez Perce), and he gave me the week off to go back and lend my support. In the absence of a car, I hitch-hiked the 45 miles to Victorville, where I caught a Greyhound Bus to Needles, and walked over to the ‘Save Ward Valley’ office, where I then caught a ride to Ward Valley in a beat up van with a bunch of jovial hispanic ‘United Farm Workers’ members whom had also come to lend their support. Many of these guys had demonstrated alongside Cesar Chavez before his death and our 22 mile ride together was a celebration of brotherhood with much camaraderie, goodwill and singing along the way.

The next week was just incredible as droves of people poured in from all over.

I was given a two-way radio, and, with another guy, assigned to overnight guard duty at the front gate half a mile from the encampment. Suddenly, there I was, midnight to sunup, on the front lines, ready to face off with the United States Government (my employers), whose lit-up fenced-in portable compound of motor homes, government cars, police cars, and tractor-trailers---full of who knows what---could be plainly seen just across the highway.

While, back in camp, so much was going on all the time. There was group training in non-violence and passive resistance, we met attorneys to contact (free of charge) if we were arrested, attended talking circles conducted by Native Elders, and participated in Native drumming, dancing, and singing.

The snake dance of the final night was my favorite, where everyone held hands and formed a long line of people who snaked randomly through the crowd to the hypnotic pulse of drums and chanting.

Great fun, especially for me, because a big Native American woman I had befriended (who spent most of her days preparing & serving food to the throngs from the hot kitchen tent) came running out of the kitchen grinning and yelling "where is that guy with the long white beard? I've been waiting all week to dance the snake dance with him". Spotting me, she grabbed my hand and pulled me into the snaking chain of people weaving wildly through the camp, it made my day!

Through blind luck, or providence perhaps, my tent was pitched right next to the tent of 1998 Green Party candidate for California Governor, Dan Hamburg, who spent a good part of his time at Ward Valley washing dishes (and not one minute of it campaigning), while his wife, Carrie, helped out in the kitchen (I never would've known he was running for Governor if someone else hadn't told me). Dan is a former U.S. Congressman from California’s 1st District. After being elected in 1992 he authored the Headwaters Forest Act (an old-growth Redwood Forest protection initiative), which was overwhelmingly approved by the House of Representatives (because of backlash from the logging community, he lost his re-election bid in 1994). Dan and I had a mutual friend, photographer Doug Thron, whose powerful 'Headwaters Forest' slideshow presentation was an inspiration for Dan's 'Headwaters Forest Act'. Doug had tirelessly presented his slideshow in dozens of cities across America, and, I met him during one of those presentations at a bookstore in Santa Monica, where an old friend of mine, the late Randy California, of the '60s band, 'Spirit', opened the evening for Doug with a solo acoustic performance of his classic hit song, 'Nature's Way'. Doug's slideshow was a devastating indictment of the Pacific Lumber Company's destructive practices, and I asked Doug if he'd be interested in bringing it to a Sierra Club meeting in Big Bear, which he generously did just a few weeks later. So, Dan and I shared some good stories & conversation, and I came to believe that, if Washington was populated with leaders of his caliber, America would truly be a country to be proud of. However, as a politically aware recent insider, Dan didn’t see much hope for any real governmental reform under our present two-party system. At Ward Valley he simply set a great example in humility & volunteerism, and I was soon washing dishes right alongside him.

On my second day at Ward Valley, I had an adrenalin-charged little adventure when a group of Earth Firsters!, who I was assisting in the dismantling of a large canvas tent, enlisted me to drive their decrepit old flatbed truck full of subversive activist equipment---chains, pipes, bolt-cutters, lock-down devices (and all sorts of other associated paraphernalia of Monkeywrenching), back to their "safe house" in Needles (the Native Council had requested that no man-made devices be used in our blockade, so the Earth Firsters! respectully dismantled that part of their action). I suspected that their regular driver may have had warrants for his arrest because of previous actions he'd been involved in, or maybe they were just testing me as a possible recruit.

So, off I went, bouncing across the desert with my newfound EF brothers & sisters, wanting to raise my fist in the air and shout "NO COMPROMISE IN THE DEFENSE OF MOTHER EARTH"! To my surprise (and my relief), a few relatively uneventful hours later, we were back at camp, and not in the Needles City Jail.

By the time my weeklong stay was over, the BLM had backed off its threats, and the immediate crisis was averted. I caught a bus back to Victorville, and hitch-hiked home to Big Bear.

I was deeply moved by the instant community of caring and involved activists I had been part of. In a matter of days we had become family and I went home with one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. But, the battle was not over, so I kept in close contact with the Save Ward Valley Committee, donating a little money and offering my services if they were needed again, until, on April 2, 1999, victory was declared. The Ward Valley Waste Dump project was defeated.

If you haven’t been involved in something like this, you don’t know what you’re missing. The entire week I felt completely whole in knowing I was in exactly the right place.

Does It Seem A Bit Warm?

Several people at the blogs we are linked to have commented on the unusually warm winter they are experiencing in their parts of the world, and there's been some discussion on whether or not the steeper slope of global warming is now upon us.

For about 15 years I've been saving articles and charts related to global warming and climate change so I thought I'd share some of these with you, so you can digest the information and arrive at your own conclusions, or speculations.

The graph below is from a newspaper article this past December and shows annual average temperatures since 1880.

Temperatures started their steepest climb in 1975, but if you study the graph you'll see they started gradually climbing back around 1910, just about the time the automobile was becoming popular and everyone was getting their own personal infernal combustion engine.

It's interesting that the heading reads "Slowly warming", because when I look at the rest of the charts, it appears to me that, historically speaking, this is actually a quite rapid and alarming change.

















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The following graph shows the correlation between atmospheric CO2 and temperature change over the past 2,000 years. I think this graph includes data through 2003.














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The next graph very clearly shows the relationship between CO2 and temperature during the past 20,000 year period. As you can see, the longer the timeline for the CO2/Temperature comparison, the more extreme the recent increases seem to be.












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Below, another CO2/Temperature correlation spread out over 160,000 years, really looks scary to me. It includes the projected increase in the very near future to over 600 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. The is an X on the upward line marking 380 ppm which is the current level of of CO2. If you notice how closely the temperature aligns itself with CO2 levels it looks to me like we're in for some really big changes very, very soon.

To the left a graph shows the increase in our human population since about 950 A.D. and not surprisingly the steepest increase starts at just about the same time as that CO2 begins its climb.

And last, but not least, the chart below shows the radical increase in species extinctions since about 1910.

I'm no scientist but good old-fashioned common sense tells me there's something very disturbing in this information. I don't think it takes a genius to conclude that what is happening is the result of human activity, and that we are in real deep trouble if we don't change our ways soon.

Click on graph to enlarge

I've posted this incomplete as I'll be adding some links to it if any of you would like do some more research.

A Toast To Norene's Five Percent!

A new blog in the sidebar, Norene's Five Percent, has re-focused my attention on the efforts we've been making here at Earth Home Garden for the past 10 years or so toward reducing our waste and consumption.

During that period of time we swore off owning an automobile (January 31st, 1997) which we were driving about 12,000 miles per year. A modern vehicle that gets 20mpg spews about a pound of carbon dioxide per mile, so, by my reckoning, we've personally eliminated close to 100,000 pounds from the atmosphere in the past 9 years (This isn't something everyone can do, but in our situation it was feasible to try it, and we're very happy with our decision). You'll notice that driving 12,000 miles per year for 9 years should add up to 108,000 pounds of CO2, but I think we have driven maybe a total 6,000 to 8,000 miles since 1997 in rented or borrowed cars.
I know we drove about 3,000 miles, this past few months alone, going to the hospital to visit our son and taking him to doctor appointments. We rented a car for that purpose until our neighbor Cheri said we could use hers whenever we needed. But that's mostly behind us at this point.

About 1993 we made a list of all the electric appliances we could do without, the micro-wave, the food processor, the blender, the coffee maker etc., and then when our refrigerator, washer & dryer died we replaced them with the most energy efficient ones we could afford, and about that time we changed every light bulb in the house to a compact flourescent (an article I read recently cited a study which concluded that if everyone in California switched all their bulbs to flourescent our population could double before we'd need to build another power plant---I sure don't want to see the population double---but that was a revelation).

In 2002 we heavily insulated the roof (about R39 total) and the floor of our cabin, installed dual-pane low-e glass windows & doors, and a couple of years earlier we had replaced our water guzzling lawn with drought-tolerant plants & flowers native to this area.

In any given year none of these projects required 5% of our energy (well maybe the roof did, a friend & I spent two solid weeks up there, and the cost was about $3,500 total) but the resulting savings in resource consumption and utility costs are compounding quite rapidly. The State of California also gave us about a 25% rebate on the cost of the doors, windows and insulation.

But there is always more to be done and I see that we've slacked off a bit in our focus & commitment (it was a tough year for us), so here's to Norene for the wake-up call. I wonder how much could be accomplished if I were just 5% more thoughtful each day.

Here are some comparisons of our historical use of gas, water and electricity with our current usage.

Natural Gas

Below you will see two graphs scanned from previous gas bills, at the left is the December 1998 bill, and, on the right, December 2005. Don't go by the height of the columns, because the scale is adjusted to ones usage, look at the actual numbers on the left for therms used. This December we used just over 40 therms of gas as compared to about 75 last December, a 47% reduction, and we used over 180 therms for the same month of 1997, which means a reduction of 78% from 8 years ago (Not bad considering our elevation of 6,750 ft. in heavy snow country, and we're still improving).









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Electricity

Our most recent electric bill shows that we used 528 KWH for the 2 month period of October & November, or 8 KWH per day, a 31% increase over the previous year, which means we've been backsliding on our conservation efforts this year (too much blogging maybe), but I dug out an old electricity bill to compare with our current bill and found that for the same 2 month period in 1996 we used 929 KWH or 14.3 KWH per day, so even if we slipped a bit we're still conserving 44% more electricity than in 1996. And we're 71% below the national average of 28 KWH per day, but we can do better.











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Water

We don't have an older water bill to compare our current usage with but I called the Community Services District and asked if they kept historical records of usage and they told me that our record usage was 59 units for 2 summer months back in the days when we had lawn here instead of the native plant garden. Because we grow vegetables our usage still increases in summer, but our rain barrel storage and careful monitoring have this past summer resulted in a peak usage of about 20 units, a 66% reduction from our highest consumption rate several years ago.








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Rustle the Leaf Environmental Comics

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ATTENTION!

All you earth friendly home-schoolers out there, here's a fun way to enhance your curriculum, if you haven't discovered it already!

I've linked a refreshing weekly environmental comic strip Rustle the Leaf to our blog, but I haven't got the graphic link working yet, so to read the latest strip or check out their well researched monthly lesson plans in Environmental Science & Political Economics, click on the green highlighted text above or just below the Rustle the Leaf graphic in the LINKS sidebar.

This months lesson is The Global Warming Coverup for grades 9-12, and lessons are archived back to November 2004 which was on Acid Rain for grade 3-6.

Each weeks comic is also supplemented with a data sheet on the topic, and links to further information & resources.

A Crumbling Message

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I visit our deteriorating park bench during a morning bike ride around Big Bear Lake.
We purchased this bench as a donation to help fund the creation of Pine Knot Park about 12 years ago with the promise that our bench would last at least 100 years.
I doubt the bench or the message is going to last quite that long.

In the post above this one you'll find a feature in a newer park, with a different kind of message, one that may be more in tune with the politics of power and the growing fascism that defines America today!