The Sixth Grade Earth Day Doomer Contest

This is the annual re-post, originally published in 2010:

I did not realize this before, but every year the upscale supermarket King's, in Bernardsville, sponsors a competition.

In honor of Earth Day, members of the local 6th grade class decorate brown paper grocery bags with pictures around a theme they select, about which they also write an essay, which is stapled to the back of the bag.

There were too many entries to look at each of them, they lined the produce and dairy sections.

I was shocked at the gloominess of the images and essays.

These kids seem to be even more pessimistic than me!

I think you can see what they say especially if you click on the photograph.

Sentiments like "We were Given One Chance: Our Earth, And Now We Are About to Ruin It" and "We started this mess, We have to fix it" seem like a terrible burden on a child,

and I suspect once these kids get old enough to understand that it was not them, but rather their parents and grandparents

who started this mess and, for the most part, are refusing to sacrifice in the least to fix it

they are going to be quite justifiably furious that it is their elders who have ruined it for them.

I wonder how much of this permeates discussion around the dinner table at home.

The children obviously understand how dire our predicament is.

But do their parents? Maybe they don't have dinner at the table; maybe they're all watching the teevee.

At any rate, I don't see anything like this level of engagement reflected in the adult community.

There are no seminars, book group discussions, library displays...no debate in town governments about the enormity of our collapsing ecosystem and what we should be doing about it. I wrote to every single elected official and department of my township that had anything remotely to do with parks, trees, public health etc., and received not a single reply.

Considering the urgent need to convert to clean, renewable energy, there are almost no articles or editorials or letters in the local papers about climate change from CO2 emissions, - let alone the toxic greenhouse gases that cause ozone and kill trees. In fact, I wrote a letter to the Editor of the Bernardsville News and they refused to print it. Even more astounding, local conservation groups - URWA, NJ Conservation Society, the Willowwood Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation - assiduously ignore and downplay the gravity of climate change impacts on the environment, even though enhancing and protecting the environment is the ostensible purpose of their existence.

Of course this last depiction of vanishing trees had my vote.

The essays were even more startling. They should be legible when enlarged and I highly recommend them.

I wish I had got more, but I could only read these few that I photographed and posted here.

They are too bleak and plaintive...heartbreaking.

Were any of the shoppers snapping up gourmet items imported across oceans cognizant of the irony?

Magical Thinking and the Draconian Experiment

Yesterday on Ira Flatow's NPR radio program, Science Friday, I heard an interview with James Cameron, the movie director who has just returned from a deep-sea expedition.  He answered questions about the status of ocean health, along with Sylvia Earle, Oceanographer, and John McCosker, Chair of Aquatic Biology Studies at the California Academy of Sciences.  You can listen to it from the link above - or read some excerpts below.  I transcribed the parts that really made me fume...what else can a girl do?

Speaking of depths, the absurdity of delusion apparent in this lengthy, mournful discussion was almost burlesque.  As more factual information emerged during the exchange, it became increasingly clear despite their best efforts that the oceans are pretty well ruined, especially if we continue in our current path of overfishing, pollution and globalization, which we most certainly will.  The panel made valiant attempts to gloss over their dismal diagnosis by simultaneously calling for more money so we can "understand" the unexplored regions, before we demolish the food chain past any chance of recovery.  Talk about anthropomorphism!  Some variant of "understand" was repeated well over a dozen times, I lost track.  Because if we humans "understand" the oceans, and what we're doing to them, then somehow that is expected to inspire us to stop.

Here's the critical missing element.  The oceans don't need us to understand anything more about them.  We already know plenty about acidification, coral bleaching, collapsing food chains, the plastic garbage patches, the ravages of international shipping, military operations, and coastal eutrophication from nitrogen over-fertilization.  What Earth's tormented oceans need is for humans to stop our megalomaniacal crusade to fill them with the abominable excrement of our industrialized civilization...like the emissions from Cameron's next air flight  - for which he was excused early, after the first segment.

But it's ever so much more rewarding to research and lament this scourge than to actually address our culpability, never mind elucidate the drastic, painful sacrifices required from developed nations to even approach a meaningful solution - like reducing our consumption, travel, and population to a fraction of its current festering number.  So predictably this forum, held before a live audience in California, amounted to quite a spectacle of fawning over the fabulous celebrity among them - an obsequious chorus that assiduously avoided any hint referencing the chasm between Cameron's ostensible green credentials and his personal proclivity to make an outsize contribution to the biomassacre.

In his fancy toy ship, he ventured down to the Mariana Trench, the deepest place on Earth.  He seemed disappointed he found so little life.  "We accomplished our goals and I got to lay my eyes on the deepest spot in the ocean and kind of bear witness..but we didn't achieve all of our science goals," which he was hoping would shed light on what "astrobiologists call extremophile life".  Does anyone get the sense that Cameron is investing in technowizardry to save his ass from the imminent scourges the rest of humanity will find inescapable?

credit

Asked by Flatow if she was "jealous" of his achievement, Earle replied with breathless infatuation "I'm just in awe.  I think the success is not just going there..it was building the system and not relying on a big federal grant of some sort.  He made it happen from start to finish, including funding it by and large...National Geographic was involved, and Rolex, but that came later...but the vision and then actually doing what it takes to build the vehicle, and then fly the vehicle, then successfully make the trip...I mean, astronauts have somebody else build their spacecraft."

Even more bizarre than that Flatow would so crudely ask if she were jealous is the fact that yes, she is!

He followed up with a question about why ocean research receives so little federal funding compared to space exploration, obviously a sore point that rankles oceanographic types.

Earle chuckled ruefully and said of the ocean:  "It is our life support system.  This planet is blue and we know so little about it and we've allowed terrible things to happen to it.  The ocean is in trouble, that means we're in trouble.  And we're blissfully continuing to do dastardly things to the ocean and we don't even - we haven't made the investment in understanding what's there.  Only about 5% has been seen, let alone explored."

Flatow:  "Jim would you welcome some larger program to do this - give you a hand, or expand it?"

Cameron:  "Absolutely I think in general there's such a dearth of funds for understanding the oceans...we need to put big networks of real-time sensors out on the seafloor and lying through the water column so that we can have a sense of what's happening in the ocean in closer to real time.  I mean we get little bits of data from here and there and we try to piece it together and understand it, but you know you could take a picture of the whole earth from orbit and the meteorologist can figure out what's happening in the atmosphere - we don't have anything like that for the ocean.  If we're going to understand the impacts of climate change, we're going to understand the pollution and overfishing and all the things that are threatening the ocean, we need to dump money into this issue...look, I have a foot in both communities the space camp and in the ocean camp."

"But, if I had to choose between the two I agree completely the ocean is our life support system and we're impacting it very, very deeply.  I'm just afraid that we won't understand it before we've destroyed it.  So we need research and we need improvements in technology and not just in the offshore oil and gas business but in research and predictive modeling."

Okay seriously, he thinks he understands that the oceans are threatened but somehow espouses the fantasy that "...improvements in technology...in the offshore oil and gas business..." are part of the solution??

McCosker cannot resist jumping on the Cameron love-train and chimes in with praise:  "It is so remarkable what Jim has accomplished - not only the getting to the bottom but in coming back," (laughter) - and then gets to the heart of the matter, the reason for unfair favoritism for space funding over the oceans (he really needn't worry - our bankrupt economy isn't going to be giving much to NASA and NOAA anymore either):

"Unfortunate luck...and very good PR on behalf of the space missions.  However tourists are getting beneath in submersibles and understanding how complicated and how incredible this zone is and how little we know about it.  So I'm hoping that the tide will turn - pardon me - and we will have enough public interest in the oceans particularly as we're running out of what used to live in the ocean, and we begin to understand that certain system services, that all those creatures provide us."

Tourists in submersibles...that's a hopeful sign?  This reminds me of ski resort owners moaning that climate change is reducing snow pack so they are losing patrons.  I doubt the skiers are bicycling up the mountains.  Here's another tone-deaf example:

Flatow to Cameron:  "I know you have to go and catch a flight but before you go, do you have any advice for people who'd like to stimulate more interest in the oceans?  Young people or what they might do...or how?"

Cameron:  "I would say if people are really interested in the oceans, step one is create a personal relationship with the ocean whether that's going to study or just say, learning to scuba dive.  There's no stronger or more passionate guardians of the ocean than a scuba diver who's gotten to see the wonders and diversity of ocean life and the interaction and come to an appreciation of it so I would say to people don't think about it...it's not necessarily the most remunerative thing you could possibly do with your life but it will be the most rewarding, to go and act on your dream and get to become a guardian of the ocean."

Why didn't he just tell all those resentful Occupiers with no job and thousands of dollars in student loan debt to become a Hollywood blockbuster movie director, commission a submarine, fly it to port, and then puttputt it across the Pacific?

Wouldn't you know then first thing this morning, HuffPo featured an article about Cameron and some other entrepreneurial buddies who are in a joint venture to explore outer space.

"Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt and billionaire co-founder Larry Page have teamed up with "Avatar" director James Cameron and other investors to back an ambitious space exploration and natural resources venture, details of which will be unveiled next week."

"The fledgling company, called Planetary Resources, will be unveiled at a Tuesday news conference at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, according to a press release issued this week."

"Aside from naming some of the company's high-profile backers, the press release disclosed tantalizingly few details, saying only that the company will combine the sectors of 'space exploration and natural resources' in a venture that could add 'trillions of dollars to the global GDP.' The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Planetary Resources will explore the feasibility of mining natural resources from asteroids, a decades-old concept."

"This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of 'natural resources,'" according to the press release.

"Planetary Resource was co-founded by Eric Anderson, a former NASA Mars mission manager, and Peter Diamandis, the commercial space entrepreneur behind the X-Prize, a competition that offered $10 million to a group that launched a reusable manned spacecraft. Other notable investors include Charles Simonyi, a former top executive at Microsoft, and K. Ram Shriram, a Google director.'"

The Wall Street Journal version has more, which can only be disappointing to Drs. Earle and McCoster, because although Cameron claimed to have a foot each in the space and ocean camps, it looks like there's a lot more backing - and potential profit perhaps? - in space exploration:

"In recent years, as NASA has pulled back on space exploration, wealthy entrepreneurs such as Amazon Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla Motors Inc. creator Elon Musk and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen have tried to fill the void with their personal money. Mr. Musk has pursued commercial rockets and spacecraft to transport cargo and astronauts into orbit, while Messrs. Allen and Bezos have looked to launch tourists to the edge of space and possibly beyond."

But getting back to our Science Friday interview, after Cameron took his leave, Earle described how she was awarded a wish, as part of winning a TED prize in 2009.  Her idea was to get "some brainy people together and brainstorm about what we could do about the oceans"...and the mission?  To go to the Galapagos Islands!  In seeming surprise, she added  "...just after getting back what happened?  April 20th, the big blowout in the Gulf of Mexico - which was a wakeup call for those of us who care about the ocean, that in such a short period of time we can change the nature of a big body of water like the Gulf of Mexico."

Well, unless this group of brainiacs sailed to the Galapagos in the same sort of conveyance as Darwin in 1835, then some of that sort of deep sea drilling is what powered their junket.

A member of the audience asked, what can an ordinary person do?  With touching sentimentality, Earle recommended using whatever talent you possess - singing, or math - while McCoster suggested wistfully that kids can be a great force:

"Like Sylvia, I travel around the world talking to kids...talk to fishery laboratories, and they're feeling a lot of pressure now from young kids who aren't going to put up with what we are turning over to them so I'm hopeful...I'm not extremely optimistic about the future but I'm hopeful..because the kids are going to turn this around, and now with social media we can't let anything slip by."

I gather then it's up to the kids to hold their elders to task...the ones that are flying around the world.

Earle can't resist one last accolade for Cameron, in absentia, even though he was probably in a limo his helicopter on the way from his 8000 sf mansion to his private jet:

"Speaking for Jim Cameron, who said that he lamented that his direct dive was not more focused on taking care of the place, if you will...and yet I think his approach to explore, to peel back the layers of the unknown, is one of the most important things that we can do.  Ignorance is killing us - Knowing is the key...".

What if anything his vainglorious, self-aggrandizing jaunt contributed to scientific knowledge, particularly considering the expenditure in terms of money, energy and resources, has yet to be elaborated upon, but oh well.

A member of the audience said she wanted to "inject a little hope" and asked what the major NGO's are doing.

Earle of course cannot be accused of negativity (never mind that worse sin, alarmism), so she said reassuringly:  "Well there is plenty of reason for hope and I think it starts with knowing that the ocean is in trouble, and knowing that it matters that the ocean is in trouble...that the ocean governs the way the world works.  If you like to breathe you will care about the ocean.  If you like water that magically falls out of the sky you will care about the ocean.  You don't have to touch the ocean yourself for the ocean to touch you."

After an almost audible gulp, she continued more slowly, "Knowing that, it is perplexing that it's taking us so long to take action.  Our perception that the ocean is so big, so vast we don't have to worry about it, it'll take care of itself, persists.  It's there in the way that we treat the ocean, what we put in, what we take out..."

I think she intended for her mention - that all of one percent of the ocean has been designated "protected areas" - to be encouraging, but it is hard to spin it that way, especially because even those protected areas are not exactly completely immune from influence, despite their status.  Her forlorn "...it is perplexing" is the same astonished disbelief that climate scientists have been expressing as well.  If you make it excruciatingly evident that much of the world is going to become uninhabitable, wouldn't you think the governments would respond with appropriate policies?

When asked about whether she eats seafood, she said she "...stopped long ago.  I know too much."  She advised to eat "low on the food chain" - plants, because even farmed fish are "like a funnel"...so much goes into it compared to what you get out.

McCosker bumbled through a feeble justification for continuing to eat "sustainable" fish (even though Earle had just made it clear there is no such thing) while zealously ignoring even his own unequivocal statement, that when life is removed from the sea it is not only significant because of the reduction in absolute numbers available for human food, but also because it disrupts an essential balance in the ecosystem.  By way of example he mentioned almost in passing that sharks are gone.

Flatow interjected, incredulous:  "Sharks are GONE?"

McCosker: "...there's less than 10%..."

Flatow, a bit shrilly:  "NINETY percent are GONE??"

Bob, affirmatively:  "In my lifetime....now, it's because of the increasing wealth of the Chinese economy and sharkfin soup....It's amazing how few sharks remain in the world's oceans...as many as 73 million are killed every year so their fins can be chopped off."

 

The sensational cognitive dissonance between the research community's agenda is well illustrated in the following passages from Michael Donnelly's article, "When Environmentalists Collaborate" published in Counter Punch, in which he described the proceedings at last month's 30th annual "Public Interest Environmental Law Conference" (E-LAW):

"Disconnect

Obviously, one of the issues with huge Climate Change impact that is never addressed by this nor any other eco-confab is the huge Eco-cost of Jet Flying in this age of Skype. Assembling a large face-to-face gathering such as this with people from all over the country and planet, cannot be done (at least not the way it is done) without there being huge transportation-related environmental costs. And, E-LAW is but one of dozens of such annual eco-gatherings. Boards and staffs of groups like the Sierra Club, TWS, CBD, et al., jet to one fabulous destination after another for multi-meetings per year, when they aren’t flying to and from DC. Paid enviros likely rack up more frequent flyer miles than any profession other than politicians."

"Jet flying contributes some 3.5% of all greenhouse gasses to the air. That’s a low-ball estimate and its Global Warming impact has to be multiplied by a factor of at least 155% as the damage is greater when the carbon is released high in the atmosphere. It may “only” be 3.5%, but it is the fastest growing contributor to Climate Change. And, it is THE single top personal, unnecessary contribution to Climate Change; killing the planet more in a few hours than all one could save in a year of recycling, bicycling, driving a Pius, E-LAW refusing to serve imported java in throw-away cups, etc. combined!  One trip across the country and back spews as much carbon per person as driving an SUV for two years. Every one of the E-LAW panelists, as do most Americans, consumes more carbon in a year than the average human will in her lifetime. Talk about your 1%!"

"I’ll predict right now that in ten years E-LAW will feature panels on Abolition of Jet Flying to save the planet. The sad fact is; not even self-declared Greens will give up Darth Cheney’s “Non-negotiable American Way of Life.” As a fellow activist recently noted; “That those who claim to care about fossil fuel abuse and climate will not give flying up, tells you all you need to know about why the other side doesn’t believe us and why we will never win. The right does what they want without shame; we do what we want with shame, and then kick dirt on it like a kitty that just went in its own backyard. It stinks and is destroying the world either way.”

I kind of think it's highly unlikely there will be any E-LAW ten years from now.  I suspect by then it will be quite clear that the planet is well past saving, and plus so few people, if anyone, will have the option of flying on jets that it certainly won't be the topic of a panel discussion.  But to address his main point, abbreviated as:  those environmentalists who will not give up flying tells you all you need to know about why we will never win.  I cannot deny the veracity of that.  Of course I do realize that we all make compromises, so singling out the scientists, radio personalities, and wealthy media darlings for condemnation of their outsized carbon footprint can be construed as tossing rocks while living in a glass house.  And I'm the first to admit that my house possesses an even larger proportion of glass than most.

However, I'm not a leader, a public figure, or a scientist - I haven't got a radio show, I command no attention, Barack Obama doesn't answer my phone calls.  Aren't we supposed to expect a little more from people who hold themselves up as role models and/or want public tax money to fund their studies?  Compare the frivolity and futility of the prescriptions from Ira, Jim, Sylvia and Bob with the words of young Tim DeChristopher, from an interview by Terry Williams in Orion Magazine titled "What Love Looks Like".  Tim is still in jail for disrupting a US Bureau of Land Management auction of drilling rights on public land - which was later declared illegal.

TERRY: In personal terms, your life has been in limbo for the last two years. And that’s my word, not yours. But is it fair to say you haven’t known what your future is going to be? Because you didn’t know when you were going to go to trial, or whether you’d be convicted. How has that felt?

TIM: I think part of what empowered me to take that leap and have that insecurity was that I already felt that insecurity. I didn’t know what my future was going to be. My future was already lost.

TERRY: Coming out of college?

TIM: No. Realizing how fucked we are in our future.

TERRY: In terms of climate change.

TIM: Yeah. I met Terry Root, one of the lead authors of the IPCC report, at the Stegner Symposium at the University of Utah. She presented all the IPCC data, and I went up to her afterwards and said, “That graph that you showed, with the possible emission scenarios in the twenty-first century? It looked like the best case was that carbon peaked around 2030 and started coming back down.” She said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said, “But didn’t the report that you guys just put out say that if we didn’t peak by 2015 and then start coming back down that we were pretty much all screwed, and we wouldn’t even recognize the planet?” And she said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said: “So, what am I missing? It seems like you guys are saying there’s no way we can make it.” And she said, “You’re not missing anything. There are things we could have done in the ’80s, there are some things we could have done in the ’90s—but it’s probably too late to avoid any of the worst-case scenarios that we’re talking about.” And she literally put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m sorry my generation failed yours.” That was shattering to me.

TERRY: When was this?

TIM: This was in March of 2008. And I said, “You just gave a speech to four hundred people and you didn’t say anything like that. Why aren’t you telling people this?” And she said, “Oh, I don’t want to scare people into paralysis. I feel like if I told people the truth, people would just give up.” And I talked to her a couple years later, and she’s still not telling people the truth. But with me, it did the exact opposite. Once I realized that there was no hope in any sort of normal future, there’s no hope for me to have anything my parents or grandparents would have considered a normal future—of a career and a retirement and all that stuff—I realized that I have absolutely nothing to lose by fighting back. Because it was all going to be lost anyway."

In a surfeit of ironic blasphemy, President Obama yesterday signed tomorrow's Earth Day Proclamation, grandly declaring:

"Today, our air and water are cleaner, pollution has been greatly reduced, and Americans everywhere are living in a healthier environment."

"As we reflect on that historic day of activism and stewardship, let us embrace our commitment to the generations yet to come by leaving them a safe, clean world on which to make their mark."

Unfortunately, that is far from true.  Would it be too much to say it is a lie?  Here's the blurb for a book published in May 2010:

"Philip Shabecoff was the chief environmental correspondent for The New York Times for fourteen of the thirty-two years he worked there as a reporter.  Poisoned for Profit, based on more than five years of investigative research and reporting, reveals the cumulative scientific evidence connecting the massive increase in environmental poisons to the epidemic of disability, disease, and dysfunction among our nation´s children."

And how's that Gulf Oil Spill cleanup going two years on?  The rest is an article about that - the very last quote will no doubt be reassuring.  Enjoy the weekend and wear green for Earth Day tomorrow!

Seafood Deformities Alarm Scientists [note: it the FOOD part that's alarming - OUR food!]

Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP's 2010 oil disaster. 

Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp - and interviewees' fingers point towards BP's oil pollution disaster as being the cause.

…On Apr. 20, 2010, the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon oilrig exploded, triggering the release of at least 4.9 million barrels of oil. BP then used at least 1.9 million gallons of toxic Corexit dispersants to sink the oil. 

Keath Ladner, a third-generation seafood processor in Hancock County, Mississippi, is also disturbed by what he is seeing. 

"I've seen the brown shrimp catch drop by two-thirds, and so far the white shrimp have been wiped out," Ladner told Al Jazeera. "The shrimp are immune-compromised. We are finding shrimp with tumours on their heads, and are seeing this everyday." 

While on a shrimp boat in Mobile Bay with Sidney Schwartz, the fourth-generation fisherman said that he had seen shrimp with defects on their gills, and "their shells missing around their gills and head." 

"We've fished here all our lives and have never seen anything like this," he added. 

Ladner has also seen crates of blue crabs, all of which were lacking at least one of their claws. 

Darla Rooks from Port Sulphur, Louisiana told Al Jazeera she is finding crabs "with holes in their shells, shells with all the points burned off so all the spikes on their shells and claws are gone, misshapen shells, and crabs that are dying from within … they are still alive, but you open them up and they smell like they've been dead for a week". 

Rooks is also finding eyeless shrimp, shrimp with abnormal growths, female shrimp with their babies still attached to them, and shrimp with oiled gills. 

"We also seeing eyeless fish, and fish lacking even eye-sockets, and fish with lesions, fish without covers over their gills, and others with large pink masses hanging off their eyes and gills." 

Rooks, who grew up fishing with her parents, said she had never seen such things in these waters, and her seafood catch last year was "ten per cent what it normally is." 

"I've never seen this," she said, a statement Al Jazeera heard from every scientist, fisherperson, and seafood processor consulted about the seafood deformities. 

The Gulf of Mexico provides more than 40 per cent of all the seafood caught in the continental United States. 

BP's chemicals? 

"The dispersants used in BP's draconian experiment contain solvents, such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol. Solvents dissolve oil, grease and rubber," Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist and Exxon Valdez survivor, told Al Jazeera. "It should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known." 

The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP's disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome. 

Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are inhalation, ingestion, skin, and eye contact. Health impacts can include headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitisation, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, cardiac arrhythmia and cardiovascular damage. They are also teratogenic - able to disturb the growth and development of an embryo or foetus - and carcinogenic. 

Cowan believes chemicals named polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), released from BP's submerged oil, are likely to blame for what he is finding, due to the fact that the fish with lesions are from "a wide spatial distribution that is spatially coordinated with oil from the Deepwater Horizon, both surface oil and subsurface oil. A lot of the oil that impacted Louisiana was also in subsurface plumes, and we think there is a lot of it remaining on the seafloor." 

Marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia published results of her submarine dives around the source area of BP's oil disaster in the Nature Geoscience journal. 

Her evidence showed massive swathes of oil covering the seafloor, including photos of oil-covered bottom dwelling sea creatures. 

While showing slides at an American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington, Joye said: "This is Macondo oil on the bottom. These are dead organisms because of oil being deposited on their heads." Macondo is the well that ruptured in the BP accident. 

Wilma Subra, a chemist and Macarthur Fellow, has conducted tests on seafood and sediment samples along the Gulf for chemicals present in BP's crude oil and toxic dispersants. 

"Tests have shown significant levels of oil pollution in oysters and crabs along the Louisiana coastline," Subra told Al Jazeera. "We have also found high levels of hydrocarbons in the soil and vegetation." 

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), PAHs "are a group of semi-volatile organic compounds that are present in crude oil that has spent time in the ocean and eventually reaches shore, and can be formed when oil is burned." 

Cowan explained: "The fish are being exposed to PAHs, and I was able to find several references that list the same symptoms in fish after the Exxon Valdez spill, as well as in lab experiments. There was also a paper published by some LSU scientists that PAH exposure has effects on the genome." 

The University of South Florida released the results of a survey whose findings corresponded with Cowan's: a two to five per cent infection rate in the same oil impact areas, and not just with red snapper, but with more than 20 species of fish with lesions. In many locations, 20 per cent of the fish had lesions, and later sampling expeditions found areas where, alarmingly, 50 per cent of the fish had them. 

"I asked a NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) sampler what percentage of fish they find with sores prior to 2010, and it's one-tenth of one percent," Cowan said. "Which is what we found prior to 2010 as well. But nothing like we've seen with these secondary infections and at this high of rate since the spill. 

"What we think is that it's attributable to chronic exposure to PAHs released in the process of weathering of oil on the seafloor," Cowan said. "There's no other thing we can use to explain this phenomenon. We've never seen anything like this before." 

Official response 

Questions raised by Al Jazeera's investigation remain largely unanswered. 

Al Jazeera contacted the office of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who provided a statement that said the state continues to test its waters for oil and dispersants, and that it is testing for PAHs. 

"Gulf seafood has consistently tested lower than the safety thresholds established by the FDA for the levels of oil and dispersant contamination that would pose a risk to human health," the statement reads. "Louisiana seafood continues to go through extensive testing to ensure that seafood is safe for human consumption. More than 3,000 composite samples of seafood, sediment and water have been tested in Louisiana since the start of the spill." 

At the federal government level, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the EPA - both federal agencies which have powers in this area - insisted Al Jazeera talk with the NOAA. 

But the NOAA won't comment to the media because of its involvement in collecting information for an ongoing lawsuit against BP. 

BP refused Al Jazeera's request to comment on this issue for a television interview, but provided a statement that read: 

"Seafood from the Gulf of Mexico is among the most tested in the world, and, according to the FDA and NOAA, it is as safe now as it was before the accident." 

Pillage, Plunder & Pollute, LLC

My "treetise", which has been accepted for publication in the new magazine from the Coming Crisis website that will debut next month, can be downloaded today(!) from DropBox as a pdf.  The subtitle is:  A Global Glut of Invisible Trace Gases is Destroying Life on Earth.  [Update:  for people who are having trouble downloading the pdf or just want a paperback copy, it is available now too(!) and can be ordered by clicking here.  NO guarantees as to quality of printing, I have only seen an online proof.  But it looks okay.]

The painting on the cover is Bruegel's "Fall of Icarus".  It seems like such a simple depiction of the myth, and I was surprised to learn that its most minor attribute is infused with fulsome meaning.  In Peasant Imagery and Bruegel's “Fall of Icarus” (link) Robert Baldwin elucidates a richly textured and erudite analysis.  The entire essay is a delight to read - following are some excerpts that I particularly liked (no quote marks - everything that follows is from Baldwin's work)

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Bruegel's paintings of the Seasons and his Fall of Icarus celebrate peasant life for an industrious harmony with nature. This view of peasants is particularly clear in the Icarus where the sweeping panorama is anchored around the heroic figure of the plowman.

To date, no scholar has explored the Good Plowman theme and its importance in sixteenth-century Northern art. To do so will allow a more balanced understanding of Bruegel's peasants and a richer sense of the Icarus as a mythological image phrased in vernacular terms.

The husbandman was a familiar paragon of industry, moderation, and moral integrity...

Virgil's account offers intriguing parallels to Bruegel with its extensive description of the peaceful, moderate plowman ignorant of the bellicose, avaricious ambitions of

city dwellers seeking “kingdoms doomed to fall”.7 Horace, Columella, and Pliny also contrasted a past, moral country life to the present immorality of cities.

Virtuous plowing found its most common expression in sixteenth-century Netherlandish art in allegories of Peace, Diligence, and Hope. The peaceful plowman, of course, developed from the prophecized beating of “swords into plowshares” and the fulfillment of this prophecy in the Prince of Peace. Interwoven with this was a classical tradition of agricultural abundance and pastoral harmony as images of peace.

If diligence, good works, and obedience were qualities associated with plowing, hope was equally important, drawing of I Cor. 9-10: “he that ploweth should plow with hope”.

Beyond peace, diligence, and hope, plowing could also be used to symbolize prudence, as in the rear of Bruegel's engraving of that virtue.

Seen from this perspective, the plowman in Bruegel's Fall of Icarus takes on a richer, sharper contrast to Icarus than has previously been noted. If Icarus' flight towards the heavens results in a fatal plunge to the earth, the plowman's earthbound labors lead him to eternal life in heaven.

As scholars have noted, the Icarus borrowed its plowman, fisherman, shepherd, and partridge from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Lucian, whose works were well known to the Renaissance, cited Icarus twice as an example of foolish ambition and pride.  He was the only classical author to describe an Icarus “falling head first into deep waters”.  Perhaps then he was the source for Bruegel's unprecedented choice of a drowning rather than falling Icarus, his head submerged beneath the sea.

In the Oedipus, similar nautical metaphors for moderation introduce the Icarian example.

"Were it mine to shape fate at my will, I would trim my sails to gentle winds... May soft breezes, gently blowing, unvarying, carry my untroubled barque along; my life bear me on safely, running in middle course. While, in fear of the Cretan king, madly the lad sought the stars, in strange devices trusting, and strove to vanquish true birds in flight…"

From Ovid, Dio, Lucian, and Seneca, the Icarian myth became a Medieval and

Renaissance moral topos, showing the dangers of excess, political or philosophical ambition, pride, self-deception, and ignorance of natural orders in general.

…the self-deception of Icarus is remedied only by self-knowledge, by a sense of one's true limitations and proper place in the wider orders of society and nature. Moderation, in short, is inseparable from self-knowledge.

In Bruegel's painted as well as engraved Icarus, death and damnation are the price for ambition and self-deception.

Presumably this is why he abandoned iconographic tradition by painting Icarus drowning rather than falling. If the print used a cross to imply deliverance from the whale, the painting chose another familiar metaphor of salvation, the harbor-bound ship, also seen in Bruegel's Hope.

Bruegel's ship, for example, sails past the watery grave of Icarus, its sailors as absorbed in their mission of reaching the harbor as is the plowman in his earthly work. While serving as a metaphor for salvation and Senecan moderation, the boat presents a simpler visual contrast to Icarus. For sailors utilize air and water in a sensible manner to get on with the business of life.

Icarus' unnatural flying, already remarked by Ovid and Dio Chrysostom, is followed by an equally unnatural and iconographically unusual thrashing in the water where he proves no better as a fish. Bruegel developed further watery contrasts with Icarus through the nearby fisherman who also makes good use of the sea.

With respect to the element of air, Icarus' head was submerged beneath the waves, shut off from the breath of life.

More importantly, Bruegel juxtaposed Icarus' falling feathers with the ship's wind-filled sails.  This prudent use of air was strengthened by the sail trimming needed as the ship nears the dangerous rocky shore. This contrast between unnatural and natural air technology, feathers, and sails, acquired greater irony in the context of Pliny's statement that Icarus invented sails and sailing.

If various activities relating to earth, air, and water were stressed visually in Bruegel's Icarus, the importance of fire emerged in the iconographically unusual setting sun.

"…the hot sun in Bruegel's Icarus brings fertile crops and life to the farmer, but death to Icarus. The introduction of a setting sun may also suggest the timeless cycles of a golden age and a natural order indifferent to folly. See thus, the whole picture emerges as a cosmological panorama which goes on with its elemental rhythms, its husbandry and commerce, its life and death, its labor and folly, until the final day when those who have “plowed diligently” enter the harbor of God's kingdom.

In the Praise of Folly, Folly celebrated Phythagoras who “came to the conclusion that no creature is more miserable than man; for all the others are satisfied with their natural limitations, but man alone strives to go beyond the bounds proper to his station”.  In the early days of history, before folly reigned, mankind had too much piety to search out, with a profane curiosity, the secrets of nature; to investigate the dimensions, motions, and influences of the stars, or the hidden causes of things; deeming it a sacrilege for mortal man to try to know more than is proper to his station. This madness of inquiring what may lie beyond the sky never entered their heads.

We have seen this Icarian violation of nature's laws Ovid where wings were a rash attempt to “change man's very nature”. Perhaps inspired by this phrase, Bruegel combined his own landscape talents and humanistic interests to develop an unprecedented cosmological Icarus, an Icarus exploring the nature of human nature.

A Cascade of Consequences

For two weeks now I have been so immersed in writing what my editor at the Coming Crisis calls my "treetise" (heh) I haven't been anywhere, not even to the post office.  At last I finished "Pillage, Plunder & Pollute, LLC" yesterday - yay! - so I was able to finally collect the mail (we don't get delivery here, it's too rural.)  I had actually forgotten that I ordered a used copy of "An Appalachian Tragedy", until I removed it from the envelope.

In my essay I had quoted extensively from other published work by several of the contributors, but reading a description of it while researching made me think I had better get my hands on a copy of the real thing, because for one thing in a review it was said - and it's true - that it is full of magnificent photographs by Jenny Hager, a few of which are scattered in this post.

Since the minute I opened it up, I've felt as stunned as if I stumbled upon the holy grail.  It's a large book, bursting with lush pictures of exactly the sort of damaged leaves and trees that this blog is all about.  And the text is utterly mesmerizing.

"Ozone, the uninvited intruder, does not need to reach levels harmful to humans to have a disastrous impact on forest plants and trees, and therefore wildlife.  Over a long enough period of time, even modest levels of ozone can decisively alter the delicate interconnections of highly adapted species and their food base in the Appalachian forests."

"Although air pollution is rarely the primary cause of death of forest trees in the Appalachians, its weakening effect makes various species vulnerable to all manner of creatures and environmental conditions that can cause their demise.  All too often, US foresters, reflecting the political and economic interests of those who sign their paychecks, wish to minimize the importance of air pollution's impacts on the eastern forest, asserting that the proximate cause of tree death and forest decline is the only cause.  According to this view, the fatal webworm and adelgid damage, the beech scale, the gypsy moth defoliation shown on these pages is the whole story, having nothing to do with air pollution."

 "The idea that the death of so many different species of trees along the Appalachian chain is simply happenstance - a coincidental aggregation of isolated, anomalous events - seriously challenges ordinary logic. Today even the most cautious forest scientists now confirm that the death and decline of Appalachian trees and forests is from a cascade of consequences whose point of origin, at least in part, is the debilitating effect, year after year, of air pollution from distant cities, factories, and highways."

A current poster child for the insects that foresters love to blame for killing trees because it is invasive is the woolly adelgid, which is decimating hemlocks.  But look at this:

"An import from Asia, the adelgid has been around for nearly a half-century in eastern forests without causing undue destruction until recently.  Today hemlock death is so widespread that some fear the species will become locally extinct in the wild.  The reason for the sudden virulence may well be that the insect thrives on nitrogen, an excess of which results from deposition of pollutants.  Experiments have shown that when nitrogen is applied to adelgid-infested hemlocks, the population densities of the pest increase fivefold compared with infested trees not subject to abnormal amounts of nitrogen."

The same increase in virulence applies to fungus such as anthracnose, which is killing dogwood and sycamore - a notion the typically, deliberately obtuse Forest Service, as described in this story from NPR, continues to utterly fail to appreciate:

"How Climate Change Makes Trees Sick"

"Forest diseases like Sudden Oak Death, which has infected trees in 14 counties in the state, stand to benefit from the effects of climate change, to the detriment, obviously, of the trees."

"Trees are big and long-lived. Tree pathogens, mostly fungi and bacteria, are the opposite. They’re mobile, able to blow around on the wind. And they reproduce and evolve rapidly. That’s the crux of the problem, according to Susan Frankel, a plant pathologist with the Forest Service."

“When you look at forest health and the balance between forest trees and the pathogens that attack them, it does seem, given climate change, pathogens get the better end of the deal,” she told me."

"Frankel is working with a group of ecologists, funded by the Forest Service’s Western Wildland Environmental threat Assessment Center, to better understand how climate change will affect tree diseases."

"Frankel is especially interested in Sudden Oak Death, which has killed more than a million trees in California. It needs moisture to spread and reproduce, and it thrives in warmer temperatures. 'The pathogen blows in wind-blown rain,' Frankel explained. 'It loves the weather we’re having right now.'”

It's the moisture!  Right?  Oh, wait...

Jim Robbins in the NY Times says of dying trees: "The common factor has been hotter, drier weather."  ...What???

In “Why Trees Matter” he inveighs against the usual insects, and drought.  Then, to emphasize how wonderful trees are, he wrote something that I see often - and never know whether it should make me laugh or cry:

“Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of cleaning up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phytoremediation. Tree leaves also filter air pollution. A 2008 study by researchers at Columbia University found that more trees in urban neighborhoods correlate with a lower incidence of asthma.”

This sort of sentiment is so nakedly anthropocentric it enrages me, frankly.  If somebody knows enough to understand that trees are cleaning up our pollution, wouldn’t it cross their mind, just for a tiny second, to wonder what that does to the tree??

Tragedy has a huge bibliography of scientific research on air pollution and forests, a veritable treasure trove. It also has pages listing organizations and foundations that are working on the problem except you know what?  Either they are defunct, or you go to their website and fine NO mention of air pollution, ozone, or acid rain, NADA, ZIP.

Published in 1998 by Sierra Club Books, Tragedy was then, apparently, promptly forgotten.  In the Foreward a declaration optimistically asserts that the book will be the foundation of an ongoing research project and "major public education campaign" about the effects of air pollution on forests, under the auspices of the Sierra Club's Southern App. Eco-region Program.  Here's their current website.  If anyone can locate a reference to pollution, please let me know!  Because I've looked and looked, and I can't find a single one.

Another group still extant is American Forests, described as being deeply involved in efforts to investigate the damage to forests by air pollution.  Following is all I can find on their website about pollution - nothing about what it does to trees, just the same garbage about how they clean the air that we just saw from Tim Robbins in the Times:

"Clean air and clean water are products of forests."

"The role of trees and forests in our ecosystems is absolutely critical. Forests renew our air supply by absorbing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. Trees also clean our atmosphere by intercepting airborne particles, and by absorbing ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and other greenhouse gases. A single tree can absorb 10 pounds of air pollutants a year, and produce nearly 260 pounds of oxygen- enough to support two people."

"Urban trees can do even more for clean air. Depending on location, species, size, and condition, shade from trees can reduce utility bills for air conditioning in residential and commercial buildings by 15 to 50%. Through shade and the evaporation of water from their leaves, trees also provide natural, low-tech cooling that reduces energy use and the need to build power plants."

I haven't had time to do anything but skim Tragedy, so I don't know whether the authors anticipated that the tragedy they perceived was going to intensify, exponentially increase in speed, and spread around the entire globe, which is what has since occurred.  I don't know if they predicted that the constant, persistent background levels would ever become so high from Asian pollution traveling across the ocean, or that even young trees would start dying off just as rapidly as older trees that had many years of cumulative exposure.  I may never find out either, because none of them has ever responded to my repeated attempts to contact them.

Why?

The book is dedicated to John Flynn, a "top science writer with a national reputation, [who] unflinchingly chronicled the widespread impacts of acid rain on the Eastern forest..but during the 1980s as the frontal assault on environmental reform gained power he was hounded out of jobs on metropolitan dailies from Detroit, Michigan to Jackson, Mississippi, by managements fearful of losing advertising revenue from polluting industries.  He spent the last 6 years of his life..in virtual poverty."

"Denial has likewise been frequent among certain elements of the scientific community.  The pioneering researchers mentioned above have endured a barrage of criticism from the old-line forest-science establishment, which tends to operate in lockstep with the Forest Service and those political and economic entities whose interests this government agency has traditionally supported.  While Loucks, Likens, Bruck and others are well aware that proof of air pollution's role cannot be shown in absolute terms (in the same sense that smoking cannot be absolutely proven as the cause of lung cancer ), they have been unafraid to assert that air pollution is fundamentally implicated in the unprecedented levels of tree death and decline in eastern forests over the past quarter-century.  However, no good deed goes unpunished.  For their honesty, they have had to pay the price in attacks on their credibility and in lost federal funding.  Instead, they should be recognized for the scientific heros they truly are."

One of the individuals thanked in the forward is Philip Shabecoff, who was an environmental reporter for the NYT for 30 years and recently published this a book "Poisoned for Profit, How Toxins are making Our Children Chronically Ill" which also of course nobody has paid any attention too.

A few more excerpts from the book, and then I'm going to stop and read the whole thing, cover to cover.

"How much abuse can forest trees take from airborne pollution?"

"The answers have to do with acid deposition, excess nitrogen enrichment, damage from tropospheric ozone and from burning ultraviolet-B rays streaming through a thinning stratospheric ozone layer, all of which so weaken the trees that they cannot withstand the normal stresses they re subjected to as a matter of course:  insects, fungi, bitter cold, and drought."

"In fact the word moribund in no hyperbole, for the very soils that support the forest are sick too, depleted of their life-giving nutrients after decades of pollution-caused leaching.   The same pollution transports the molecules of heavy metals into the forest, and frees a lightweight one - aluminum.  Ordinarily aluminum is safely locked away in silicate compounds in the soils but when acid deposition breaks down the compounds the poisonous aluminum is freed to be taken up by the trees."

"Where is this happening?  The answer is:  everywhere."

"But be careful whom you talk to about it.  For there are those in government and industry who do not want this story known who for the last 15 years have suppressed the details of the Appalachian tragedy, even dissembled about it in their testimony before the Congress of the United States."

"Do you not believe this?  People who have a political or economic reason for suppressing the truth can manipulate statistics until they are blue in the face, but nothing can refute the commonsense evidence that any ordinary American can discover just by walking in  the woods and looking."

How many times have I said that?  Go outside and look.

the "Blinding Obsession with Carbon"

I read an article today that was something of a revelation.  In a way it presented mostly things I already know, but with much greater clarity.

As soon as I noticed that trees are dying, I assumed that it was from climate change.  It took about a year for me to realize that in fact, it is pollution.  Even so, because the pollution - the precursors to ozone - largely result from the same industrial civilization that produces such copious emissions of CO2, they seemed obviously connected.  But over the years any such linkage has been rebuffed by almost every environmental activist and climate scientist I have ever contacted.  Sometimes quite rudely rejected.

The explanation for what initially seemed paradoxical eventually became clear.  The CO2 adherents didn't want to include ozone even as a topic of discussion, because it is what has been described an "intractable" problem, for the simple reason that the ONLY conceivable way to fix it is to drastically curtail our level of consumption not only of fuel but also, of absolutely everything else - including food, which would require a decrease in population.

And I've understood that deep down inside, these activists and scientists harbor the hope that we will find magic technological fixes for our energy use, so that we can maintain the contemporary life-style of a developed country by replacing fuels that create CO2 with so-called "cleaner" sources like natural gas, biofuels and the rest of the solar, wind, and wave array...and if necessary geo-engineering can offset temperature increases.

Even assuming climate change can be mitigated by such efforts - a big stretch - it won't do a thing to slow the acidification of the ocean, or the collapse of forests.  And since most reactive nitrogen comes from fertilizer, and methane is a major ozone precursor, these facts have all conspired to make ozone about as taboo a conversation in climate and environmental circles as incest - they won't even entertain the topic.

This is just a long way of introducing the article written by co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project, an effort I've always wished was a lot closer than Britain, Paul Kingsnorth. "Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist", which in addition to being evocatively written, has crystalized my thoughts on the above in a way that is simultaneously exhilarating, humbling and, not too surprisingly, really sad.  What follows is a little bit, but not nearly all - better to follow the link and read the whole thing because he has much more to say.  Naturally I liked the painting too:

"Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist" ~ by Paul Kingsnorth

Today’s environmentalism is as much a victim of the contemporary cult of utility as every other aspect of our lives, from science to education. We are not environmentalists now because we have an emotional reaction to the wild world. Most of us wouldn’t even know where to find it. We are environmentalists now in order to promote something called “sustainability.” What does this curious, plastic word mean? It does not mean defending the nonhuman world from the ever-expanding empire of Homo sapiens sapiens, though some of its adherents like to pretend it does, even to themselves. It means sustaining human civilization at the comfort level that the world’s rich people—us—feel is their right, without destroying the “natural capital” or the “resource base” that is needed to do so.

It is, in other words, an entirely human-centered piece of politicking, disguised as concern for “the planet.” In a very short time—just over a decade—this worldview has become all-pervasive. It is voiced by the president of the USA and the president of Anglo-Dutch Shell and many people in between. The success of environmentalism has been total—at the price of its soul.

Let me offer up just one example of how this pact has worked. If “sustainability” is about anything, it is about carbon. Carbon and climate change. To listen to most environmentalists today, you would think that these were the only things in the world worth talking about. The business of “sustainability” is the business of preventing carbon emissions. Carbon emissions threaten a potentially massive downgrading of our prospects for material advancement as a species. They threaten to unacceptably erode our resource base and put at risk our vital hoards of natural capital. If we cannot sort this out quickly, we are going to end up darning our socks again and growing our own carrots and other such unthinkable things. All of the horrors our grandparents left behind will return like deathless legends. Carbon emissions must be “tackled” like a drunk with a broken bottle—quickly, and with maximum force.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t doubt the potency of climate change to undermine the human machine. It looks to me as if it is already beginning to do so, and that it is too late to do anything but attempt to mitigate the worst effects. But what I am also convinced of is that the fear of losing both the comfort and the meaning that our civilization gifts us has gone to the heads of environmentalists to such a degree that they have forgotten everything else. The carbon must be stopped, like the Umayyad at Tours, or all will be lost.

This reductive approach to the human-environmental challenge leads to an obvious conclusion: if carbon is the problem, then “zero-carbon” is the solution. Society needs to go about its business without spewing the stuff out. It needs to do this quickly, and by any means necessary. Build enough of the right kind of energy technologies, quickly enough, to generate the power we “need” without producing greenhouse gases, and there will be no need to ever turn the lights off; no need to ever slow down.