Lowbagger
Letters

I had to stop and stare. The shore on which all those hopeful baby boomers would perch their idyllic retirement digs were barely above sea level.

Just a couple hours before, I'd run across a web summary of an article in the Australian press, apparently reporting evidence that 71,000 oceanside Australian homes were going to be lost as sea levels continue their rise.  And, in America, news of a busy hurricane season sends signals of some plausibly significant hits to real estate in the Southeast quarter of the country.

The to west, US states are being described as set up for heat and drought, with some big 'n nasty forest fires looking scarily plausible for years and maybe decades ahead. Want to build a cabin in the woods of New Mexico or Montana? Do due diligence, and prepare to pay plenty to insure the humble abode for forest fire.

Want to buy land with a sparkling clear trout stream running through it? Do due diligence.  For at least the past half dozen years, the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks has had to put limits on trout fishing, because years of warming waters put strain on cold-water loving things like wild trout. And there are signals that all current streams will be able to keep flowing, hot or cold.
Then there's the report of Lake Superior, in America's northern tier. It seems that the lake has not been getting its historic of cover of ice. With its dark waters now exposed under the sun, the lake is accumulating solar heat.

When Gunnison Energy applied for permits to wreck one of the most beautiful aspen groves - roadless areas- pristine watersheds, on Grand Mesa and the people were unanimously opposed. At public hearings the county commissioners were made aware that if they issued the permits they would be tarred and feathered. They denied the permits but Gunnison Energy (a subsidiary of Oxbow Corp -big coal CEO Bill Koch) took the case to court over in Denver and had the permits issued claiming the arguments for denial were "junk science and voodoo economics".

I pointed out that Gunnison Energy wasn't going up there because they hated aspens and columbines but because we were paying them to.
Since we didn't live in well designed and built energy efficient homes and "needed" gas for heat we were the ultimate cause of the destruction of that aspen grove. We can either fight that battle forest to forest or change the way we use energy. I am pretty sure we cannot wait for the politicians to save us from ourselves but nobody seems to like the "we are the enemy" rap.

At the beginning of the Clinton-Gore administration there was a meeting called by the DOE to float a trial balloon. Business leaders were told that they would need to cut fossil fuel use 70 percent. This was the first time many of these people (big oil, big coal, utilities, auto companies etc)  were confronted with the idea that someone who had political power was taking this treehugger global warming shit seriously. (Who let those green bastards in the club?) I think Monica was a fossil fuel industry plant. Now that I have stepped clear off the edge into the conspiracy theory camp I'll just say one more thing. They will not be complicit in their own demise.

Keep up the good words
Citizen for Clean Energy
Steve Clark

And yes, Al Gore has been awesome in transforming the climate change debate but the game changes when he enters the playing field of American politics. Another Watson from a different hemisphere ( Paul Watson in the essay "Environmental Enlightenment") talked a proper perspective when he wrote:

   The problem is that all of it is folly and trivial. It means
   very little in the larger picture. The history of Humanity is a passing
   and momentary fad set against the mind boggling panoramic chronology of
   natural history. We are merely the period at the end of the current book
   and we will most certainly not last longer than the first word of the
   next chapter.

Which means that the people on the front lines of the good fight for bio-centric perspective have to keep fighting to crush the neo-con powers of evil.  But those of us with a bio-centric ethic will have won anyway with what the future holds for the human race.

Thoreau wrote:

May I gird myself to be a hunter of the beautiful, that naught escape me! May I attain to a youth never attained! I am eager to report the glory of the universe; may I be worthy to do it; to have got through with regarding human values, so as not to be distracted from regarding divine values. It is reasonable that a man should be something worthier at the end of the year than he was at the beginning.
H.D. Thoreau, Journal , Mar. 15, 1852

I just read your column on ELAW.  What do you mean all the lawyers were uptight?!  I was so drunk at Sam Bond’s Garage that I didn't see another lawyer who was right in front of me. (He told me the next day that he thought I was ignoring him, but I told him I was just too drunk to see him.)  At the mellow non-party, I actually drank the entire six pack I bought, even though I had not planned to. So, I demand an exception to the lawyer comment.

Next time you are wandering around downtown Oakland looking for a bar, you should hit Cafe Van Kleef on Telegraph, right in the heart of Oaksterdam. It's a piece of North Beach that somehow jumped the Bay. Right now it's low-key but when all the lofts are built it'll be hipster central. So go now. 

I also wanted to let you know that once again I have used Mike as a role model and am now blogging regularly, for EWG's Enviroblog. My first couple of efforts are on  the hypocrisy of celebrities (including Al Gore) buying carbon credits to offset their jet-setting, and on the backlash to UC Berkeley's bio-fuels deal with Exxon. Check it out if you have a few minutes. 

http://www.enviroblog.org/