Environmental Talk

There goes the neighborhood…

The Berkeley Daily Planet website features a commentary by Edna Spector. I’ve been a little out of touch recently, so I must have missed the news that humans are no longer going to be at the top of the food chain.

Or part of the food chain at all, for that matter.

I think there’s a term for the result of anyone who buys into this line of reasoning. I think it’s called Darwinism in action.

If you were kind of on the fence about whether the it was proper to combine “wacky” and “global warming” in the same sentence, the following diatribe might help to convince you which way you should be leaning.

Ladies and gentlemen … Edna Spector:

Friends! The hour of judgment is at hand for our planet. Doom is knocking on our door in the form of catastrophic climate change. Global warming not only threatens our so-called way of life, it threatens the very existence of the planet itself! Here in Berkeley, we must do more than our fair share to offset this crisis. Why more than our fair share? Quite simply because other communities cannot be relied on to do even their meager fair share in cutting back on carbon emissions. We must make up for what others fail to do on a global scale through our own heroic self-sacrifice. We cannot afford to wait until 2050 to meet our modest carbon emission reduction goals. Many of us who passed this measure will not even be alive then to implement it. By 2050 it will have been too late for this planet I fear, possibly far too late for all of the extinct species whose blood will be on our hands. This is no time for buying absolution through carbon credits or for half-assed symbolic measures which mostly have a feel good significance.

No, the time for bolder self-sacrifice has arrived. The only real, long term hope for the eco-sphere is a massive human population collapse, hopefully leading to the voluntary extinction of the human race. Already, a new urgency and groundswell of support is building for the idea that humans are a type of super toxin which the planet cannot sustain or support in the longterm. Cogent support for the voluntary extinction of the human race is well-articulated in all its ramifications and implications here : www.vhemt.org.

The city and residents of Berkeley should be on the leading vanguard of the voluntary extinction of the human race. First of all, if China can implement a very sensible one child policy in urban centers, Berkeley voters should approve an advisory No Child policy for residents of our city. It could be our answer to the Bush regime’s No Child Left Behind Act! Next, on the state level we need to rally support for a ballot initiative which allows us to die with dignity when we choose to. When this option is legally enacted, Berkeley should be the first city in California to open a euthanasia clinic. Hopefully, if we are true to our principles, our city’s residents will be lined up for many blocks waiting for their turn to be recycled into the earth!

Even before that time, younger readers of the Planet in particular should refrain from having children. Every person less makes a huge difference; a far bigger difference than using rapid transit, riding your bike or recycling bottles once you are born. Readers of the Planet who are already parents and grandparents should actively discourage further destructive procreation by their relatives. If pets need to be neutered and spayed by law, so should humans for many of the same reasons!

Imagine if Berkeley has the honor of becoming the first human ghost town on earth to revert to a primal state of nature! The oaks old and new will flourish along the streams in which trout and salmon teem! Mountain lions will boldly roam the plains and not confine themselves to Wildcat Road in Tilden Park any longer. Perhaps bears from other regions of the state will finally return to what we call “Grizzly Peak Blvd.” The grasslands will return to the slopes of the hills after forest fires clear them off and the air will blow pure and sweet over the bubbling creeks just as it once did when the ancestors of Running Wolf roamed the Bayshore in peace and harmony with all nature.

Yikes. The last time someone tried this there was a stampede for film permits in Guyana.

To her credit, it’s not like Edna is trying to sneak anything by you. She pretty much advocates the exaltation of wild nature over human life and isn’t too shy about proposing just how to go about it.

She does kind of miss the fact that it wasn’t a grizzly bear who came up with the printing press or the Internet or a thousand other inventions that allow her to spew this kind of nonsense from the comfort of her sustainable living room.

But, then again, it sounds like Edna doesn’t think she would miss any of those things if they were gone.

There’s also the question of who would feel “honored” about Berkeley becoming a ghost town if there were only mountain lions left.

I wasn’t a science major, but I’m pretty sure the only time a mountain lion feels honored about anything is when he’s gnawing the throat out of a rabbit.

You know, as part of that idyllic Thoreau-like future Edna envisions.

California’s new high school science textbook….

Politicians attempting to influence school curriculum is not new. So, it’s no surprise that some politician in California finally got around to submitting a proposal to make it mandatory to teach global warming in schools.

State Senator Joe Simitian wants to make sure that only textbooks that preach climate change be allowed in California public schools.

“You can’t have a science curriculum that is relevant and current if it doesn’t deal with the science behind climate change,” said Simitian. “This is a phenomenon of global importance and our kids ought to understand the science behind that phenomenon.”

Scientists don’t even understand the science behind climate change, but somehow we’re going to teach it to fourth-graders.

If “relevant” and “current” are the standards by which science education is judged, as opposed to … oh, I don’t know, incidental things like “evidence” and “scientific method,” then we might as well start teaching the “science” behind how you can look years younger with “better than Botox” skin care products.

You don’t have to look any further than the last two years’ hurricane predictions to know that we’re still a little fuzzy on the whole cause-and-effect behind climate change.

If you’re going to insist that your science curriculum presents climate change science as established fact you might as well use Parade Magazine for your text book.

Last time I checked, the U.S. was just above Mexico and solidly behind Poland in the world science rankings. Substituting junk science for fundamentals isn’t going to help improve that ranking anytime soon.

global warming, climate change, junk science, better than Botox, Parade Magazine

Somewhere in Holland, Johannes Vermeer rolled over in his grave….

I am a big believer in the idea that everyone is entitled to their opinion.

I’m also a big believer in the idea that if your opinion is wacky, the rest of us are entitled to laugh at it. Not with it, at it.

While they may not be quite as funny as skateboarding dudes taking a nutshot on a railing or chimps dressed as people, “artists” who try to preach through their art are right up there.

If you suspect an article about artists who’ve “banded together” to respond to climate change would prove fertile ground when trolling for things to poke fun at, you can be pretty sure you won’t be disappointed.

Why is it that artists are always “banding together?” They don’t form groups, congregate or incorporate. They band together like Boy Scouts who got lost on a camping trip. The results are about the same, too. They just kind of stumble around until someone with more experience comes to rescue them.

If we’re all concerned about an obesity epidemic in this country, I think we should be at least as concerned about an irony outbreak as long as artists continue to pontificate about global warming while painting pictures with oil-based paints.

Almost as much fun as seeing wacky artists in the wild is to listen to the explanations of their projects. As the Boston Globe describes it, “Clara Wainwright walked along Harvard Avenue near her art studio while wearing cotton robes displaying endangered species, including the brown bear and African elephant. The Brookline artist hopes to generate conversations about climate change through her “Eco-Shaman Walkabout Project,” by drawing people to her workshops. There, she asks visitors to try on her robes and ponder the declining number of endangered species across the planet.”

Walking around in endangered species robes is more likely to generate conversations about the status of mental health care in this country. Among the endangered species Clara might want to ponder are people who wear suits and pay taxes so the Boston Center for the Arts can put on goofy exhibitions like this.

Also among the exhibitors at “Greed, Guilt and Grappling: Six Artists Respond to Climate Change” is Jay Critchley, who traveled up and down the East Coast filming people yawning and, presumably, planting trees to offset the carbon footprint of traveling up and down the East Coast.

Critchley was fascinated “when he discovered research indicating that yawning helps to cool the brain, and was inspired to draw an artistic connection between cooling one’s body and cooling the planet.” If we could just get the whole planet to go to this exhibit, we might have enough yawns to knock us back into an Ice Age.

The exhibition is running now through March 30, 2008 at the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts.

It’s a good reason to take the family to New York.

global warming, climate change, wacky artists, eco-shamans, and bears, oh my, Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the “Arts”

Another day, another project….

The Greek philosopher Plato once said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

Or maybe it was Clint Eastwood.

Either way, it’s sound advice I almost never follow. I have, perhaps the worst combination of personality traits possible for being a homeowner on the cusp of a green revolution.

I am enamored with almost every project I read about or see on television. I have an over-abundance of curiosity about new things, a totally unjustified optimism about my ability to do what looks so easy when I see it on HGTV and enough of an ego to believe if a guy with a high school education can build a new porch, well, so can I.

I should also add that the last time I took an aptitude test, I graded out in the lower two percentile of the country in mechanical ability and spatial reasoning.

Basically, if there’s a contest to build a piece of Ikea furniture between me and a dude with cerebral palsy, you should put your money on the guy wearing the protective helmet.

Which is why the whole trend toward natural and sustainable living scares the daylights out of me.

I’m accustomed to relying on the service economy to take out my garbage, pack my groceries and heat my house. The thought that I might be forced to have to rely on primitive survival skills that vanished with the Cro-Magnon Jabos is very disconcerting.

Which is why, when I come across an article entitled THE AMAZING $500 WOOD-BURNING STOVE…THAT YOU CAN BUILD FOR $35 (OR LESS!), I figure I better read up and learn how to construct a stove out of a discarded water heater that is not only functional but also will “look classy enough to put on display right in the living room.”

There were two things that struck me right off about the article. First, it was (as of this writing) the most popular article on the Mother Earth News website. Secondly, it was written in January 1978.

Talk about a magazine committed to turning back the clock and recycling!

In 1978, people were still eating beef jerky for dinner and I’m pretty sure Colorado wasn’t even a state yet.

Hot stove league …

Not to bore you with the details, but after reading the three page article about how to build the stove, the only thing I came away with was that I would have to spend at least one afternoon trolling through a junkyard.

The dude in the article built his stove from materials he scavenged from a variety of places and suggested that all his stove cost him was a day’s worth of labor.

By my conservative estimates, that means I would complete the project when the next Clinton got elected. I’m talking about Chelsea, of course.

So, for now, I’ll continue to read and, perchance to dream about building my own stove. And hope that nuclear power is the next workable energy-saving technology.

That way my symbiotic relationship with the service economy will remain intact.

global warming, climate change, Mother Earth, wood stove, nuclear power, beef jerky, Colorado