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| Seeing Green: Corporate oiliness |
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By now you may be tired of hearing about the BP oil spill. I am too, actually, though I confess that doesn’t stop me from searching for and devouring every little scrap of information that emerges. Your fatigue, like mine, probably has crept over you as the crisis drags on, the information wobbles slowly toward the more horrendous and the solution seems ever out of reach. Helplessness breeds weariness, and for us here in the North, a kind of resentful resignation. It shouldn’t be this way, but it is. They should do something. Apparently, “they” are doing all kinds of things but none of them are working. If you’re old enough, you’ve seen this story before. In June of 1989, I arrived in The oil had not entered By the time Sam and I arrived in the small fishing (and large oil-depot) town, it was overrun with spill clean-up workers living in tents, tiny trailers and their vehicles, parked anywhere they could find space for the chance to earn $16 an hour doing unskilled labor for many hours a day. Alaskans must make money when they can. Two and a half weeks later when Sam and I had finished our various adventures, the call was out for still more spill workers. Before I left, in the warm glow of a Sam, being Sam, maneuvered himself into a job on a supply barge, making the same money without having to spend his days on cold, damp beaches scrubbing rocks with paper towels or hosing them down with high pressure hot water. The cleanup effort eventually cost Exxon about $2 billion. Compensatory and punitive damages lawsuits drag on to this day. So do the environmental effects. In the immediate aftermath of the spill, hundreds of thousands of seabirds died, as did many thousands of marine mammals, mostly otters and seals. Twenty-two orcas (killer whales) are known to have died then. Scientists have been amazed at how long the effects have lasted. Some fish populations have never recovered. To this day it is not difficult to find oil under rocks along the coast in Though we are reminded almost constantly about the scale of the Gulf oil spill compared to the Exxon Valdez – it now exceeds the While the Exxon Valdez ground onto a rocky reef, putting no person in great physical danger, the Deep Water Horizon rig exploded and burned in almost apocalyptic violence, killing 11 men and collapsing into the mile-deep sea. The first concerns, remember, were for the men lost and the stunning destruction of the giant drill rig; oil leakage problems were minimized. Despite the geographical remoteness of much of Perhaps the greatest similarities in the situations lie in the corporate behavior that caused both disasters and corporate reaction when they occurred. The Exxon Valdez was a vulnerable and neglected vessel. It had an easily pierced single hull, not unusual then, and unfortunately not completely out of service yet. The radar that could have kept the ship off the reef had been broken for a year. When the ship went aground, the world looked on as Exxon struggled to control the situation, trying one thing after another, minimizing the impact all the while. When it became obvious the spill could not be contained, they plowed money into the clean up effort, but not long after began the legal rear guard action that continues to this day. Recently it emerged in congressional hearings that BP had taken a series of money-saving shortcuts in the final days before this disaster. Among them, their subcontractor Haliburton told BP it needed 21 “centralizers” to keep the well casing in the middle of the hole they had drilled. When an oil well is drilled, the bore hole is bigger than the casing (pipe) that is used to extract the oil. It needs to be exactly in the center of the hole in order that cement pumped in around it will make a tight seal. BP used six centralizers. A BP supervisor thought 21 would take too long. A second BP official, who knew the danger, wrote, “Who cares, it’s done, end of story, will probably be fine.” The released documents also showed that BP made the choice to not use a test called a “cement bond log” that would have shown whether the cement was strong enough because the test would have taken nine to 12 hours. BP’s people also did not perform a 12-hour procedure involving circulating drilling mud, a test that could have detected the natural gas bubbles that burst up through the well and exploded, destroying the rig. Shortcuts were apparently used because the drill rig was costing BP half a million dollars a day and supervisors were under pressure to cut that cost. As I said in an earlier column on a different subject, at the intersection of profit and safety, profit has the right of way until a catastrophe occurs. In the first hours after the Deep Water Horizon explosion, BP’s minions isolated the survivors and tried to coerce them into signing what were in effect blanket releases, absolving BP of liability. In the next few days they had lawyers scouring the coast, trying to persuade fishers to sign away their right to sue for a mere $5,000. From the first the company minimized the scale of the problem. One sympathetic commentator I heard suggested that the only oil leaking was that in the pipe that had connected the wellhead to the drill rig. Below that it had crimped itself off, he said. Shortly after, BP admitted to a 5.000 gallon-per-day spill. BP let slip that it had a remote camera on the spill and it was compelled to release the feed to the Internet. A scientist studying that video decided it must be larger than that, perhaps 15,000 gallons or more. Yesterday the government released its latest estimates; up to 2.52 million gallons a day is leaking, an Exxon Valdez-sized spill every four days. At congressional hearings, BP’s competitors tried to distance themselves from its problems, stating that their companies would never have drilled a well in such a slipshod fashion. One said perhaps more than he meant to. He asserted his company focused on prevention because nobody could really deal with this kind of major spill. Think about that for a moment. We have companies out in the Gulf operating thousands of these wells and they don’t really know how to take care of a problem should one arise. Oil-company shills who also happen to work as members of the United States Congress are demanding the administration drop its six-month moratorium on off-shore drilling. They and others have said what’s the problem? Thousands of these wells and only one major mistake. Pretty good record, no? No. The problem with offshore drilling, especially of the deep-water kind, is the same problem we see with nuclear power. It requires human beings to do everything perfectly forever. That is the problem with all dangerous technology; it works fine until a human mistake screws it up. We tolerate a level of this in normal life. We drive cars because they provide us with convenient transportation, understanding that their drivers are going to make expensive and occasionally fatal mistakes with some regularity. Tough for them and their families, but life goes on for most. Airline travel is the same. The companies strive to do it perfectly because the cost of mistakes is severe, but we know that every so often, someone will blunder and scores or hundreds will die. Regretable, but acceptable, so far. When it comes to the high-stakes gamble of deep water drilling, it might be time to rethink. Mistakes, it appears, may be unaffordable. And mistakes will happen. The oil drill crews can do it right thousands of times in a row, and apparently have, but sooner or later someone cuts corners or overlooks a small problem and suddenly it’s a catastrophe. The lives of millions will be affected for years, perhaps decades. Advocates of drilling have pointed out that oil is much larger part of the Cleanup methods in 1989 were somewhat more primitive than they are today. Much was learned dealing with that earlier mess. For example, while high pressure hot water washed the oil off the rocks and back out to sea very effectively, it also killed organisms that could have biodegraded the oil. In many ways not much has changed. The widespread and controversial use of dispersants has not eliminated the need for simple physical means to stop or remove the oil. But booms are still ineffective much of the time. Skimmers are no doubt better than they used to be, but like burning, skimming can only remove a percentage of the surface oil. You’ve seen the video footage of end loaders scraping oil-soaked sand off the beaches and loading it onto trucks. Good job, guys, but the spill hasn’t been stopped yet. More oil will wash in and this will have to be done again. And again. The unprecedented element in the current Gulf situation is that the oil is being released in huge amounts at great depth. No one really knows how much of it is floating to the surface and how much of it is, under the freaky conditions of extreme water pressure, upwelling gas pressure, frigid cold and deep-water dispersant application, mixing with the water or settling on the bottom. I heard a scientist remark on NPR the other day that he and his colleagues may spend the rest of their careers studying the results of this spill. BP has tried one thing after another to contain this thing. The company claimed when getting their permit that they had a plan to deal with a spill much larger than this one, but it is now clear that was creative writing rather than planning. The plan on file was a ludicrously sketchy adaptation of one written for Arctic drilling. They had forgotten to take out a reference to walruses. Despite all the evidence of BP’s malfeasance, we hear a growing chorus of people who blame President Obama. Some assert that he should have showed more feeling about the situation; maybe they expected a George Bush-style tantrum. Last weekend at an outdoor writers’ conference, I heard one man expounding to a small group of the like-minded that this proved Obama was a weak leader because he didn’t tell BP, “You’ve got two days to stop this thing or else.” Or else what? I’ve seen similar comments on the Yahoo news site. What is happening is that some people are attaching their free-floating Obama hatred to this crisis. He can literally do nothing right in their eyes. If he swam down there and stopped the leak personally, it would be the wrong thing to do because he did it. One of the two legitimate criticisms of the Obama administration that I have seen is that Ken Salazar didn’t move fast enough to clean up the corrupt and incompetent Minerals Management Service (MMS). The problems in that agency were well known, and reforming it would have been a good counterpoint to the President’s retroactively embarrassing endorsement of more offshore drilling. The other is that Obama and his people were too slow to realize that BP was not acting in good faith. It was already trying legal duplicity and lying about the volume of the spill and its chances of cleaning it up. You don’t have to be a psychic or a lawyer to see in BP’s mantra, “We will pay all legitimate claims,” (emphasis mine) as leaving a window to challenge many or most of them. Last night the President disappointed some on the left by not mentioning climate change as part of the reason for a new energy policy. Many on the right were enraged by the president demanding a $20 billion escrow fund from BP to pay claims. “Redistribution of wealth,” screeched Michele Bachman. What Obama did do was lay out the peak-oil case for why we need to seek new energy sources. Remaining oil is going to become more and more scarce and so more and more expensive and risky to extract. This is a much more concrete and easily understandable reason for what he wants to do. Bringing up climate change would have unleashed a clamorous right wing-led brouhaha about his exploiting this disaster to advance his socialist agenda. Yes, we can probably get a few more years oil out of the Gulf, but as the drilling sites move farther into deep water, the risks will increase exponentially. Unexpected hazards will emerge, as they did this time. Repair will be more difficult and take longer. Remember that the companies have admitted they have no good way to clean up these messes, much less restore the lands and waters damaged. The fishery of the Gulf could remain a sustainable food source for centuries if we simply don’t destroy it. The oil age is winding down and with it probably liquid-fueled vehicles. For a while, we can ignore that or cast about for oil substitutes that might fill some of the gap. In the end, even disregarding global warming, we will have a different world to adapt to. We can do it in a sane and orderly though possibly sometimes uncomfortable process, or we can go on as we are until a collapse occurs. The BP Gulf spill is an unalloyed catastrophe; it has no up side, but if it is not a least an alarm bell, its tragedy will echo hollowly far into the future. In a forest far away It didn’t seem the likeliest place for a presentation on illegal logging in maritime Southeast Asia. It is a testament to the complexity of the world we now live in that this event should be held in a dingy union hall in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The audience was an odd mixture of mostly middle-aged blue-collar workers, local environmentalists and college students. The featured speakers were activists from tropical islands on the farthest side of the Earth. The event was presented by the Blue-Green Alliance, a joint project of the United Steel Workers and the Sierra Club (full disclosure: I am a member of that group). Also involved were the Environmental Investigative Agency (an NGO) and the Goldman Foundation. What is the connection between these groups and forestry practices in Southeast Asia? The first speaker, Michael Bolton of the United Steel Workers, made their interest clear. A merger had joined the paper industry union to the steel workers and jobs in the paper industry are in decline, largely because of illegal logging in faraway places. About 240,000 jobs have been lost in the forest products industry and these jobs have continued to disappear at the rate of about two percent a year since 2003. “Free trade has caused more loss to the middle class than any other issue,” Bolton said. I flashed on Ross Perot’s 1992 warning about NAFTA’S vast job suck and my thought at the time that however whacked Ross was on some issues, he was probably right about that one. Free trade has benefited the corporate elite in this and foreign countries and has done little for ordinary working people. “President Clinton,” Bolton said, “has expressed regret about free trade.” Perhaps that’s because free trade isn’t really free. China and Indonesia, for example, subsidize their trade in forest products, even though they know most of them come from illegal sources.
Putting a face on this problem was Khoirul Anam, president of the Indonesian Forestry and Allied Workers’ Union (Kahutindo), which represents 125,000 workers. Rulita Wijayanindya, international secretary of Kahutindo, assisted him. She translated his torrents of passionate Indonesian into succinct bites of English. Anam told us that just out of college he had worked for a company that produced forest products, mainly plywood. He left that company when he realized it was causing environmental and social disaster. At the time he was living on the island of Borneo, which was 80 percent forested and inhabited by many indigenous people who were dependent on the forest that his company was logging illegally. Illegal logging seems as though it would be easy to stop; how do you steal trees? They are large and heavy, require massive amounts of equipment and labor to cut and transport and leave an enormous footprint when they are gone. And it would be easy unless politically powerful people want it to continue. Beginning in the ’70s the timber industry was Indonesia’s largest source of revenue and many government officials were involved. By the late ’70s the government invited foreign investors and all through the ’80s there were virtually no regulations on the timber industry. The government wanted to sell sawn lumber not logs, so the industry was a large employer, but the workers, mostly uneducated rural people, were poorly paid. Under the dictator Suharto, they had little bargaining power because the government controlled the labor movement. Police participation in the industry limited workers’ freedom of association. Loggers harvested Indonesian forests without permits and still today invade even national parks. Lack of posted boundaries on Borneo has allowed them to log across the border into Malaysia. Anam, as president of a forestry workers’ union, is not interested in stopping all logging; he only wants the industry made sustainable. Already so much of the resource is gone that the number of workers has declined from a high of a million with 400 forest products factories to 200,000 workers and 50 factories. He wants to see a moratorium on logging in natural forests and focus on managed forests, what we would call tree farms. In tropical Indonesia, with a year-round growing season, some trees can be harvested in as little as seven years, so a sustainable industry could provide long-term stable employment. It would also stem the flow of cheap illegal wood that undercuts the American industry. Anam pointed out that mills in Green Bay, Appleton and Stevens Point are using cheap imported pulp instead of more sustainably sourced and job-providing American product. The constant in nations with illegal logging is government corruption. So it is in Anne Kajir’s Papua New Guinea. Kajir, 32, is the most heroic environmentalist I have ever personally met, intelligent, articulate and tough. The winner of a 2006 Goldman Prize, often called the Nobel Prize of environmentalism, she is a lawyer who has been fighting the timber companies and their government allies for nine years, most of her adult life. Though she didn’t mention it in her talk, or when I spoke to her afterward, I learned later she has been threatened, physically assaulted a number of times and once thugs forced their way into her house to steal the computer that held all her case files. “Illegal logging continues to be a big problem,” she told her Green Bay audience. “Laws keep changing and are not being enforced.” Papua New Guinea is the eastern half of the Earth’s third largest island, a landmass the size of Texas with a dizzying variety of habitats and cultures. In Papua New Guinea 97 percent of the land is privately owned; the government owns only three percent; therefore, most logging must be done on private land. Eighty percent of the people are tribal and rely on the forest around them. Logging companies are supposed to obtain landowners’ informed consent but often don’t. Landowners were supposed to be able to demarcate areas of their property where no logging should take place, but that provision was taken out of the law. Logging company “representatives” obtain landowner consent with intimidation, beatings and humiliation; some have been forced to sign at gunpoint. Logging companies routinely ask for extensions of their permits to adjacent lands. Extensions were supposed to be smaller than the original concessions; when that proved inconvenient to the loggers, that restriction was eliminated. Provincial forest management committees were supposed to have some local control of logging, but the national board has usurped that. Another piece we should be aware of relating to the climate bill now before Congress: some of these companies have sold carbon credits for land they planned to log. Kajir and her organization, the Environmental Law Center, filed suit in 2006 against a state agency that issued a permit for a timber project without following procedures. After nearly four years, courts have not yet ruled. Meanwhile, Kajir believes 40 percent of Papua New Guinea’s forest has already been logged. All this is possible, I learned later, because of the cronyism and corruption of the government of Prime Minister Michael Somare and his family. They acquiesce in the rape of their country’s forests, mostly by Malaysian logging companies. Government officials who attempt to enforce the law are sacked. Inconvenient laws are changed. Nor do local people gain much from employment: investigation found workers are poorly paid, less than half a dollar an hour and work 12-hour days without helmets or boots. Logging companies use the “company store” method to extract what money the workers do make.
The companies not only devastate the forest, they dump waste, such as fuel and other chemicals, in the rivers, which are already muddied due to the loss of cover. People who protest or complain are threatened and beaten. Where this ties back in to the steelworkers’ union is that most of this illegally harvested wood is shipped to Malaysia, Indonesia and China, where it is turned into products for export. The cheaply harvested illegal timber products are then subsidized by those governments, making it impossible for American companies to compete. In 2008, in response to this obvious injustice, Congress amended the Lacey Act, originally written to protect endangered animal species, to include illegally harvested wood products. Enforcement has been phased in, beginning with sawn lumber products such as flooring. Importers must specify origin of the wood and the scientific name of the tree species it comes from. Everyone along the supply chain is liable for knowing the origin of the wood. The problem, according to Anne Middleton of the Environmental Investigative Agency, who spoke last, is that enforcement has been generally underfunded, and that on pulp and paper products has been pushed back into some indefinite future. A guitar maker in Nashville was raided on suspicion of possessing illegal rosewood from Madagascar, but huge amounts of paper and pulp flow freely in. The tropical forests and American jobs disappear in tandem. So what can we do? Immediately, we can call Senator Kohl 202-224-5633 and ask him to support full funding and enforcement of the Lacey Act. Don’t worry, whoever answers the phone in his office will know what you’re talking about. You won’t have been their first call. It’s important to remember they keep count of how many call on each side of an issue. Long term, we can recognize that what we do every day matters. Thinking globally and acting locally are two ends of the same tangled thread. Look to see where things are made. The 10-for-a-dollar notebooks you buy at Wal-mart may save you some money on your kids’ school supplies, but they may be costing some species their habitats or an indigenous people the forest that’s supported them for millennia. They may also be costing your neighbor his job. If our Earth suffers major environmental collapse or simply grinding, gradual degradation, the direct cause will not be that too many of us live here. It will be that some who live here cannot or will not restrain their greed. Face it, true greed is evil. We used to know that, but for decades now we’ve let it be the engine of our economy. True greed, I’d say, is when a person seeks his own gain, disregarding the consequences to anyone or anything else. A year and a half ago, as the banking system crumbled, I wrote that I sensed people felt as if they were waking after a binge. Perhaps the recession has not been long or deep enough for that lesson to soak in. Certainly, the very rich seem to be saying, “Whew, we dodged a bullet. Never mind, party on!” Many of us out here in average-land are saying, “Not so fast. This may not be over, and if changes aren’t made, the problems will return and worse.” Part of the change is that we must learn to live within the carrying capacity of the Earth, its ability to provide us with resources and absorb our wastes. At this moment we are overstretching those limits in many ways. Those seemingly distant forests are providing you with materials and their exploiters with obscene wealth. Perhaps they might better be providing for their human and non-human inhabitants and soaking up your carbon dioxide. Today, on this Earth, nothing is really far away. *** May 2010: Earth Week Updates
So, have they recanted, all those right-wing blowhards who crowed that the great Eastern snowstorms disproved global warming, now that spring has arrived more than a month early in the upper Midwest? No, I didn’t think so. The most recent stir about the lakes has been the approach of the Asian carp, which have worked their way up the Illinois and Des Plaines Rivers to within a few miles of the lake. They have been kept out by a feeble electric barrier that creates a field in the water the fish find uncomfortable. It doesn’t seem to have worked; DNA from the fish has been found in Lake Michigan and in the Calumet River southeast of Chicago that empties into Lake Michigan directly. So far no fish have been found, but they are likely there. These findings led to calls by states surrounding the Great Lakes to close the Chicago lock, the easiest way for the fish to reach the lake. Unfortunately for the lakes, this lock provides water transport for bulk materials such as coal, oil, cement, salt and grain into the greater Chicago area. It would cost certain people a great deal of money to interrupt that flow of goods and so Illinois has refused to do it. The Supreme Court refused to order it to be done. Thus the lakes remain quite vulnerable to an invasion by these huge pestilential fish that will not only eat up much of the bottom of the food chain but also be a hazard to recreational boaters. The silver carp are up to four feet long, weigh up to 40 pounds and are provoked by the sound of motors to leap high into the air. Good luck wake boarders and jet skiers! Just this week another nasty invasive, VHS (viral hemorrhagic septicemia), a disease of game fish, was found in Lake Superior near the Apostle Islands. Not only is that a concern for the big lake, it is another vector for the virus to enter Wisconsin’s inland waters. It is already in the Lake Winnebago pool and so far VHS has not lived up to its most catastrophic forecasts, at least around here. Massive fish kills have been reported in the eastern lakes, and biologists have said it could seem dormant for a time and then suddenly run rampant. This finding does emphasize the need for strict regulations of ship ballast water and movement of bilge water from place to place in private pleasure boats. Since water only runs out of Lake Superior toward the previously infested Michigan-Huron pool, VHS could likely only have reached Lake Superior by humans hauling it. In other news, Wisconsin continues to be the focus of the application of the Great Lakes Compact. New Berlin was the first community to be given a permit to take water out of the Great Lakes basin for its own use. It had a claim in part because its corporate limits straddle the divide between the Great Lakes and Mississippi basins. Recently, the DNR criticized New Berlin’s compliance with its permit’s reporting requirements. Great Lakes advocates are watching this closely because Waukesha, New Berlin’s westerly neighbor, is next in line for Lake Michigan water. They want to be sure New Berlin is held to high standards so Waukesha and other future applicants will have to follow that precedent. GROUND WATER As the session ends, the legislature has taken up a couple of important bills dealing with ground water. One concerns regulating high-capacity wells that pump water for private purposes. A few years ago we had a major stir when Perrier wanted to open a bottled water plant that some feared would deplete the ground water supply to the Mecan River, a renowned trout and canoe stream. Receiving less statewide attention is the desiccation of lakes and streams in the Wisconsin sand counties by the high volume wells used to irrigate crops. New legislation would tighten rules on these wells, making their location less based on distance from springs and lakes and more based on the science of the water’s origin. Given that we have lakes and streams drying up in this central part of the state, this seems like only common sense. If these wells are lowering the level of lakes and reducing the flow of streams, it is clear they are not sustainable. The other piece of legislation concerns the ground water in regions of karst topography, landscapes of shallow soils underlain by fractured limestone that allows whatever is spread on the surface to quickly penetrate to the ground water. Mainly this is focused on manure spreading by large farms. Though karst topography underlies much of Wisconsin, the bill begins by considering the impact on the counties in the eastern part of the Scene circulation area – Brown, Kewaunee, Calumet, Manitowoc and Door. When other counties bring scientific evidence that they have the same issues, they will be able to be protected under the provisions of this bill. This may seem remote to many of you, but it certainly isn’t to people who have turned on their taps to find water running brown and smelling of manure. By the time this paper is on the street, the legislative session will be over, but be aware that ground water issues will not be going away any time soon. While Wisconsin has inherited rich water resources, we must not assume they are infinite. Groundwater is especially vulnerable, once over-depleted or contaminated, it is very difficult to restore. CAFOs Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) continue to proliferate in Wisconsin with the implicit approval of the political powers in the state. The Rosendale Dairy received its permit to expand to 8,000 milk cows from 4,000. Though the DNR agreed to a late public hearing, and many objections were raised, the result seemed foregone. No legal grounds existed for a serious challenge to the permit. In the long view, perhaps, this overreach may backfire. The controversy over this expansion raised the consciousness of the public as to what is happening to agriculture in this state. Just the phrase “8,000 cows” seems to trigger a shudder in most people I’ve talked to. Industrial agriculture has literally bet the farm on the idea that people don’t care where their food comes from, and while some may not, a growing number do care and very much. The state is currently reviewing the Livestock Siting law that controls where such farms may be placed and considering whether to go to a system of general permitting which would save the DNR from having to write a new permit from scratch for each farm. Though the DNR maintains it needs this change to free up personnel for enforcement, their track record in this area is not encouraging. It is unclear where the money would come from for this increased vigilance. Mindful of rising public awareness, the proudly pro-CAFO Dairy Business Association supports increasing initial permitting and annual fees on their member farms. They state their increased contributions would pay for two more DNR field personnel. Two. Give us enforcement, they seem to say, but not too much. They don’t mention their fees would still be tiny compared to equivalently sized waste dischargers that happen to be municipalities or manufacturers. New phosphorus standards are in the works too. Watch for a hearing near you. Wisconsin has long been proud of its dairy farmers, but the industry is, largely away from public notice, changing from the traditional independent family farm to industrial-scale operations that reduce farmers to corporate employees and animals to production units. Their enormous output drives down commodity prices and increases the pressure on the family farmer in a vicious spiral that shows no sign of ending. Support local sustainable agriculture! COAL It’s been a bad year for the poor billionaires of the coal industry. The most recent black eye was the disaster that killed 29 miners in West Virginia. In the surrounding publicity, it became apparent that the Massey Coal management was largely indifferent to the safety of their workers as well as hostile to environmental protection. At almost the same time, the Obama administration was finally fulfilling a campaign promise to shut down most mountaintop removal mining, arguably one of the most destructive mining practices in recent history. It’s way cheaper to blow the top off a mountain with huge quantities of explosive and scrape the coal away with giant machines than it is to tunnel in with human workers. It also destroys jobs, ravages the landscape and ruins streams and their valleys. Beyond the black eyes received by the mining end of the coal industry, many proposed coal-fired power plant projects have been shut down, including one here in Wisconsin, at Cassville on the Mississippi River. Governor Doyle has committed the state to shutting down the remaining state-owned coal plants long used to heat and power prisons and universities. Coal isn’t going to go away anytime soon, but it is good to see it recognized for what it is: a destructive and dirty business that kills its workers, damages the land and contaminates air and water. The less of it we use, the better. OIL Whatever happened to peak oil? Only when the history of these times is written will we know for sure, but we may be at it or on it. World oil production’s so-far peak was about 86.6 million barrels a day in July 2008, the summer of the dizzying price spike, but it has been hovering in the mid-80 millions of barrels for about five years now. Prices are edging up again, and as the recession winds down, prices will rise again. One of the scenarios suggested for how peak oil might occur is that it could be a long plateau, followed by a slow decline. Certainly production seems to have leveled off; even wildly high prices didn’t kick it up much. A slow decline would be much less disruptive than a sudden one, but we need to be preparing for it in any case. The oil economy has bought a reprieve in the form of oil from the massive tar sands deposits in Canada, but the costs have included large-scale environmental destruction in northern Alberta and huge emissions of greenhouse gases as the gooey tar is cooked down into usable oil. President Obama has disappointed many in the environmental community with his proposal to increase drilling in the Arctic and on the Continental Shelf, and I wonder if he knows something he’s not saying about world oil supply. Even if those sources turn out to be even more productive than the most optimistic projections, it will be years before they come on line and major fields on which we have relied, such as in Mexico and the North Sea, will be in steep decline. All these new sources will be able to do is replace some of the oil no longer coming from those places. Hang onto your shorts, folks; I think we may be living in interesting times. NUCLEAR POWER Nukes are enjoying one of their recurrent bursts of enthusiasm. President Obama’s recent support for new nuclear power plants has put the issue on public view again. In his campaign pledges Obama never ruled out nukes, but he stipulated some conditions that made it seem highly unlikely he would promote them. Now he’s president and we’re in a recession and nuclear boosters can claim their plants will produce electricity without greenhouse gases. This isn’t strictly true, but it’s true enough to sell on that basis. The Wisconsin Clean Energy Jobs Act now before the legislature also makes allowances for new nuclear plants, though it maintains some conditions that make them fairly unlikely, such as all the power be used in the state, ratepayers must be protected and better waste storage must exist. It is possible some new nuclear megawatts may be produced, but I’m skeptical, not only on environmental and safety grounds but also economic viability. Nukes are fantastically complicated, expensive and time-consuming projects, which always turn out to cost more and take longer than even the high-end projections. Beyond those formidable obstacles, public objection, though not universal, will be widespread and loud. CLEAN ENERGY Attending a legislative hearing for the Wisconsin Clean Energy Jobs Act (CEJA), I was amazed at the range of opinion on this issue, from enthusiasm for it to bitter opposition. Support tended to come from representatives of environmental groups and green industries such as producers of wind power and energy-efficiency devices. Opposition came from traditional energy-using industries who fear their costs will go up and hard-core Republicans who also fear their costs will go up and besides global warming is a bunch of commie propaganda and Al Gore is a stupid, fat commie. By the time you read this, the bill’s fate will be known. It should pass unless Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce lobbyists get to enough Dems to sink it, as they did with the independent DNR secretary. After treading water through the Bush years, the environmental movement is finally seeing its issues addressed. We’ve wasted most of the last three decades pretending everything would continue as it had, despite clear warnings that the Earth has built-in limits to the amount of growth it can support and the amount of waste in can absorb. Many have not even yet accepted those limits and they are fighting to keep the party going. April 2010: The roots of the problem By Will Stahl I finally saw Avatar, James Cameron’s trippy eco-fable, in full glowing 3-D. In terms of plot, you’ve seen this film before, maybe more than once: think Dances with Wolves on another planet. If you don’t know how it’s going to end by the time the exposition is established, you haven’t seen many movies. In terms of filmmaking, it’s rather deliberately derivative, too, featuring the helicopter assault from Apocalypse Now, the giant looming spaceship of Independence Day and the jungle gymnastics of the Disney version of Tarzan, to name just a few. By Act III the novelty of the 3-D effects has faded, perhaps because this is how we see the real world. What finally enticed me to see this film that even Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club, called “naïve and weirdly misanthropic” was hearing James Cameron interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR. I had heard enough to know this was not going to be a subtle shades-of-gray representation of the conflict between corporate profit and conservation, but Cameron didn’t try to pretend that it was. He said the native Na’vi and the earthly company men represented two different sides of human nature. Taken as metaphor or allegory of the relationship between gain for the corporation and pain for the natural and human worlds, it is idealized but not exaggerated.  Of course human beings have always exploited the Earth to meet their own needs and they’ve not always been scrupulously careful about it. Rainforest dwellers practiced slash-and-burn agriculture without regard to what species lived in the selected block of forest. When Native Americans drove a herd of bison into a deep ravine, it’s unlikely they used every scrap and morsel of the heaped carcasses.
Human beings have long exploited each other also. Slavery was widespread in the ancient world – the Old Testament takes it for granted – and it’s probably one of mankind’s oldest economic relationships. Smaller numbers and muscle-powered technology minimized the possible damage to the Earth’s environment, pollution being limited to sewage and land degradation limited by the capabilities of human and animal labor. Money, as coined metal, had long been important, but its mass accumulation was restricted by the means of production, which were all labor-intensive, requiring the control of human beings, always tenuous before the invention of efficient firearms. Beginning in the mid-18th century with the first machines of the Industrial Revolution, production of goods became separated from the hand labor and craft of the people. Rather suddenly, what mattered was capital: the machinery and fuel that turned the worker into an interchangeable part. Fuel had always been wood or wood charcoal, mostly, the product of contemporary organic processes, things living in the same era they were burned. Though coal had long been known, steam-powered machines made its large-scale mining and burning an economic necessity. This time in history is sometimes called the “Age of Reason” or “The Enlightenment.” These sound like progressive positive qualities to ascribe to an era, and it was when some humans decided they could learn from their own observations, i.e. “science,” and did not need to rely on the received wisdom of the church and the classical writers of Greece and Rome. This made the modern industrial age possible, but it had a dark overside. It was also a period of rather extreme (from our 21st century viewpoint) political and social conservatism. A fundamental premise of conservative thought is that some people are better than others, born that way, nothing to be done about it. One of several corollaries of that premise is that the “better” people can use the “lesser” people to their ends. This idea reaches far back into history where the better people were those of “royal” or “noble” blood. When accumulated money became the criterion that bestowed power, rather than bloodline or inherited land, the rising owners of industry took on the mantle of the “better.” Reason seemed to dictate that the better people could use their inferiors in whatever manner benefited them, as the powerful had always used their subjects, serfs or slaves. The same was true of the Earth; if it held a resource that could be extracted to make money for the better class, then extract they would with the labor of their underlings. Obviously, coal and metal ores existed for their use. The “reasonable” philosophy of the time justified industrialists driving workers of all ages to labor 10 or 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week in dimly lit, dirty and dangerous conditions for wages that kept them in perpetual hopeless poverty. If a mine owner found he had thin seams of coal running from his mineshaft, it made perfect sense to send in seven year old children to dig them; the little ones fit better, you see. If an industrial machine required only simple tasks to tend it, hire children who could be paid even less than their parents who needed any money they could get. And the waste products from these industrial processes? Dump them wherever handiest, into the air, water or on the land. No problem, all was for their use. This is the short version of the economic, social and environmental history of the last 250 years – a mere yawn in the long story of the human tribe, not even an eye blink in geologic time. The use of labor and raw materials in this brief interval has led to great material prosperity for a certain part of humankind, incredible kingly wealth for a very few and great misery for the uncountable many. The ancient institution of human slavery persisted into this industrial era. In the United States it was the cause of friction from before the founding of the republic. It is impossible to imagine that the slave dealers and owners never saw the humanity in their property and always failed to see the suffering they caused. It was, in their view, economic necessity, so they must have, as the Bible says of pharaoh, “hardened” their hearts.
Recall that slavery in the United States was on the ropes when the Industrial Revolution arrived, and might have in time died out. It was too slow and, hence, too expensive to use slave labor to clean the seeds out of cotton. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin made that process profitably efficient and so slave owners re-hardened their hearts and slavery persisted until washed away by blood. Europeans did not start over when they arrived in America; they brought along their beliefs and attitudes. Settlement began here before the Industrial Revolution, but it followed soon after to root itself in fertile soil. From those roots grew the embedded belief that those who prospered and commanded the money power were the betters and they were entitled to do whatever necessary to maintain that power. This supposedly new nation, this “shining city on the hill,” this “last, best hope of humanity” perpetuated and intensified the Old World’s most destructive premises. American capitalists bow to no one in their exploitation of people and the Earth and not in isolated instances. Consider: The industrialists who in their factories worked men, women and children for long hours of stultifying labor in unhealthy and often dangerous conditions, for wages which kept them poor and dumped them without compensation should they be injured. The railroad barons who monopolized the shipping needed by the farmers and then reduced them to near serfdom. The meat processors who slaughtered diseased cattle under unsanitary and dangerous conditions and sold the products to the public. The mining and metal processing owners who devastated the land and the streams that ran from it with sulphurous and metallic poisons. The chemical companies that carelessly buried their waste or released it into air and water. The textile industries that made their workers labor long, poorly paid hours in air filled with cotton dust that eventually sickened them. The garment industries that locked their workers into sweat shops, working long hours in poor conditions for little money. The paper companies that let their toxic byproducts flow into the rivers and escape into the air until paper mill towns were identified with their stench. The coal companies, who condemned their workers to quick death from unsafe conditions or slow death from lung disease, contaminated or tore up the land without regard to it or its inhabitants, present or future. The asbestos producers and users who kept their workers on the job and their products on the market long after they were known to cause cancer and other disease. The tobacco companies who sold a product they knew caused addiction, disease and death, and lied about it for decades. The automobile companies that sold unsafe vehicles that caused uncountable deaths and resisted changing them as long as they could. The electric utilities that streamed coal smoke into the atmosphere until they’d changed its very composition and resisted every change they were asked to make. The petroleum companies that have degraded and polluted every place they have worked, without exception. The industrial farms that raise their animals in miserable confinement and produce huge amounts of waste that foul the air and threaten the water around them. The financial companies who gambled with the monies of their clients and when they lost them, disdained responsibility. Need I go on? Is there any question why we have difficulty solving the environmental and social problems of our time? Somewhere in our cultural DNA is a piece accepting that whatever makes money is good and whatever interferes with making money is bad. Most important is the money made by the “betters,” those who already command the financial power. How they make their money does not seem to be in any meaningful way subject to the judgment of ethics. They will stay within those boundaries only when forced to by rule of law and they will lie in wait for decades for their chance to take back lost ground. Our present economic and political life is controlled by a small group of people who, like their predecessors, have shut off any connection between money making and morality. Whenever asked to do the “right” thing, to stop polluting the environment or start treating their workers decently, they have grumbled, ranted and fought back, with the implicit or explicit threat to take the industry elsewhere, canceling out the livelihood of the community. Often they have done that anyway for no better reason than they could make more money with cheaper labor and less regulation in another state or nation. Now we can’t pretend that you and I, as average workers and consumers, are not complicit in this system to some degree. My only excuse is that I did not decide to do business this way. If I am offered the choice between an item made in conditions that probably degrade the environment and the workers and some more expensive equivalent that I know was made responsibly, I’ll pay a little more or do without. Rarely am I offered that choice. Why do we tolerate this situation? Why do we accept any business model that is built on environmental destruction or human suffering? How can any human beings believe they deserve wealth no matter what the cost to the Earth or to others of their own kind? In that belief are the roots of the problem. Perhaps some of the answer lies in our ancient Western conception of the world and its creation. Christianity posited a God who was a person, separate from and above his creation. He created Man to be the ruler and keeper of the creation, and Man was the only animal made in the image of God, distinct from the Earth and the other creatures. In this view Man is not an integral part of creation, he is its earthly master and it is for his use. This is balm for our fragile egos, but it also separates us from our total environment, puts it outside ourselves. It isn’t. Avatar has been (accurately) condemned by the Catholic church as “pantheistic,” meaning its premise posits a god(ess) that includes all and is present in all. The planet Pandora (an odd choice of names) exists in a web of that includes all beings and all things. This is a reprise of the New Age spirituality that is so often lampooned. You don’t have to accept that New Age theology to understand that the environment is not something “out there.” Every molecule of your body has come from that environment. As you read this, you are exchanging matter from within “yourself” with matter from “without” yourself. You take in gases from the atmosphere, absorb some into your blood where they will permeate your tissues and breathe out the byproducts of the processes within them. You take in water from the environment, saturate your tissues with it and eventually pass it out, carrying what your blood must discard. You eat food that is made from the air, water and soil, digest it, taking what your body needs (maybe more than it needs) and incorporating some, burning some as energy, storing some as fat and discarding the unused part back to environment. Since the air, water and land are full of them, you have hundreds of man-made chemicals in your tissues, some benign, some less so. Many have never been tested. Your body is the habitat for uncountable microorganisms, some of which can cause you harm, that live in your guts and on your skin. They die and you shed them along with hair and millions of flakes of skin that flutter unseen on the spaces you live and pass through. Seen under a microscope, your skin isn’t at all smooth, no matter what products you use on it. It is so ridged and grooved that it is unclear where “you” leave off and the “environment” begins. It is artificial and arbitrary to see yourself as in any way separate from the environment. You don’t have to believe in any mother goddess or mystical tree of souls to understand that you are in the environment and it is in you. No real separation, no real distinction. If you understand that, you understand whatever is put into the environment is put into your body, chemicals released into air and water, pesticides and herbicides sprayed on the fields, the by-products of fuel burning, all absorbed by you and your children. Avatar can be read as a metaphor for this relationship; that in the most literal, material way, you are a right now a piece of the Earth and all the molecules that make up your physical self will always be here, circulating through sky and land and water. Our contemporary corporations have perpetrated genuine outrages on the Earth and its people every bit as egregious as Avatar’s cinematic ones. We live in a world every bit as wondrous as the fictional Pandora. Those who would contaminate and destroy it to enrich themselves are simply blind.
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And the environmental piece of this? For one thing illegal logging is destroying the habitat of many creatures, some of them, such as the orangutan, rhinoceros and tiger, are highly endangered mega-fauna. For another, uncontrolled logging devastates the watersheds and forest resources needed by the local people. And finally, illegal logging is responsible for a large percentage of greenhouse gas emissions, perhaps as much as 20 percent.
