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Water Wars

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In the 1970s, my dad frequently said that the next wars would be fought over water.me hawaiiDSCN2984

He told a story that I think arose from an idea proposed by Georges Mougin, as reported in Phys.org. “Way back in the 70’s Georges Mougin, then an engineering graduate, had a big idea. He suggested that icebergs floating around in the North Atlantic could be tethered and dragged south to places that were experiencing a severe drought, such as the Sahel of West Africa. Mougin received some backing funds from a Saudi prince but most ‘experts’ at the time scoffed at his idea and the whole scheme was eventually shelved.”

Back then, it might have sounded like a good idea, if it could be managed without the ice melting before arrival, for a cost that was reasonable. Today, some scientists think an iceberg could be transported without melting, but the costs would be exorbitant.

More importantly, something critical has happened since Mougin’s idea was first conceived.

Today, the arctic contains considerably less ice.

Arctic sea ice fluctuates in quantity throughout the year. According to NASA, it reaches its minimum each September. Because increased levels of carbon dioxide and other pollutants are leading to a gradual heating of the earth’s atmosphere, the global temperature has risen 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880. As a result, more arctic ice is melting. NASA said that September Arctic sea ice is now declining at a rate of 12.8 percent per decade, relative to the 1981 to 2010 average.

And this heating trend in our atmosphere is accelerating. Nine of the ten warmest years have occurred since 2005. The EU satellite service just reported that June 2019 was the “hottest ever recorded on earth.”

Today, countries like India are running short of groundwater.

clouds mine 22046022_10210249962150346_4908882350092498926_nIndia supports 1.3 billion people who need water to survive. This June, NPR reported that India’s sixth largest city, Chennai, “with a population of almost 10 million, is nearly out of water.” Rains are becoming more unpredictable due to climate change. India’s lakes and groundwater are drying up. NPR said that 21 major cities in India could face water crises by next year (2020) due to water shortages!

Today, the effects of human-induced climate change have become apparent.

Scientifically trained individuals—like those who created the diagnostic systems you rely on to know whether you must act quickly or die soon of cancer—agree that we must act immediately to reduce human produced carbon emissions or the earth will become unsustainable for life as we know it.

Seriously.

This is not the time to listen to a quack doctor or to try a cancer cure of apricot kernels. This is not a time to put politics before good sense. This not a time to be stubborn.

Climate change is a life and death issue for billions—billions—of people, and for the uncountable other species with whom we share this earth. Species that know something is changing, but can do nothing to stop it. Only our species can make a difference.

The Sixth Edition of the Global Environmental Outlook Report, published by the UN in 2019, “calls on decision makers to take immediate action to address pressing environmental issues to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals as well as other Internationally Agreed Environment Goals, such as the Paris Agreement.” At the very least, take a look at this research! Figure 2.20 lists five independent indicators that scientists have studied showing a changing global climate: land surface air temperature, sea surface air temperature, marine air temperature, sea level, and the extent of summer arctic sea-ice.

All indicate that human activity is leading to climate change, and that the change is accelerating.

This is a time to listen and act.

It is a time to vote in people who believe the science and will ADDRESS climate change now, aggressively—pulling out all possible resources.

It is a time to work together with other nations—reentering and leading alongside other countries to fulfill the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.

It is a time to work together for the earth, for our children and our grandchildren—so the children of this world have a planet that can sustain them.

This is a time to listen and act.

As Thomas Moore wrote in The Reenchangment of Everyday Life, “According to the Greek philosopher Thales, everything is water, and water is the basic element in all life… water is not just H2O but also an element of the soul….” Water is at the heart of life, physical and psychological.

This is a time to listen and act.

Or the next wars will be fought over disappearing ground water, drowned cities and islands, dying sea life, failed crops, and global hunger. As my dad reasoned in the 1970s,

Unless we listen and act now,

The next wars will be fought over water.

Star Sightings!

On By pinescentblogIn Uncategorized2 Comments

Hiking by ourselves in the California High Sierras, my husband John and I camped far above timberline, beside a still, pristine lake, surrounded by heavy boulders in lieu of mountain pine. That evening we ate big golden trout, unwary and easily caught, for our dinner.

As my father and I had done when I was a child, John and I slept tent free, open to the night around us. Rain came infrequently in September in the Sierras. We preferred to sleep only in downy sleeping bags, our vision unfettered by a covering of canvas. In this place, far above civilization, out of reach of star-dimming light, on a moonless, clear night, the sky seemed embodied with stars and galaxies.

Wikimedia VISTA's_infrared_view_of_the_Orion_Nebula
Orion Nebula    Credit: ESO/J. Emerson/Vista   

Knowing better, I extended my arm, wanting to touch them, caress them. Thousands of stars—some shining pure light, others shimmering—painted the black sky with gleaming dots of white.

We were on the edge of the world, high above the level places, where the atmosphere thinned and the night was black and the stars were the prime attraction.

Glorious stars like those we saw that night bear witness to their Creator. I had learned this on an earlier star sighting. On a dry, clear night, perfect for looking at a brilliantly lit, star-studded sky, as my father and I stopped our car on the verge of Interstate 10 and stepped through a row of eucalyptus trees to view the sky, I first encountered the stars capacity to inspire awe.

As I described in another post, that night glowing stars peppered the heavens to the borders of my vision. The Milky Way blazed in transcendent glory. As I looked at that brilliantly lit night sky I sensed a living presence, bigger than myself, or my father, or even the expanse of stars that filled the sky. It was a pressing presence, a voice of a different kind, so clear that I have never forgotten it. I never want to.

We often looked for stars when I was a child. Through a telescope, set up on our asphalt driveway, we picked out one constellations after the other. Camping high on Mount Baldy in the San Bernardino Mountains, we watched stars traverse the sky with our naked eyes.

These experiences tell me that stars are more than the sum of the luminous gasses of which they are composed. They are more than beautiful glowing dots in the sky. They have a voice of their own and they cry out in praise of their Creator.

“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1).

Scientists say that at least a third of all the people in the world cannot see the stars at night now, because of light pollution. Many more people—as many as two thirds of all who live in the United States–see only a few stars, indistinctly.

Most of us forget even to look up. We have successfully blinded ourselves to the grandeur of the night sky that boundlessly bears witness to its Creator.

Light pollution hurts other creatures as well as ourselves. Bright city lights can confuse migrating birds, causing them to fly over cities until they die of exhaustion. Light from developments on beaches and nearby cities can scare sea turtles off from nesting.

We can do something about light pollution, if we make it a priority. Bending lights downward, rather than upward on city roads would be a start. It would cost us something. But I believe removing light pollution, like other environmental measures, will be worth the cost.

Instead of maximizing profit, those placed here to tend the earth should be minimizing the harmful impact we have on the planet, ridding ourselves of human pride, and letting the earth serve the needs of all its inhabitants, plants and animals. The land, water, air, and even the atmosphere above us are all affected by human activity. We have far to go to tend this planet as we should. I want those stars to speak as loudly to future generations as they have done to me through star sightings

By doing so, we may remove an impediment that we have created between ourselves and the voices of incalculable galaxies declaring the glory of God.

Full photo credit: Wikimedia. Taken 10 February, 2010. ESO/J. Emerson/Vista  http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1006a/

 

“Man, a Planetary Disease”

On By pinescentblogIn Uncategorized3 Comments

DadOur garage—my dad’s domain—was a black widow spider haven with its dingy, dust-filled corners, crammed spaces, and caved in boxes, piled awkwardly one inside another, empty, like promises unfulfilled.

This space was an odd reflection of both my father’s strengths and his disappointments.

His big workbench filled one end of the square garage, while a long chest of drawers heavy with nails, screws, bolts, old metal bits, wires, tools, sandpaper–the odd assemblage of a WWII aeronautic mechanic—filled another: treasured opportunity to my dad, the son of a ranch hand and farmer, an airplane mechanic by profession, and a scientific inventor at heart; and interesting to me, a scruffy child in need of new discoveries.

As messy as it was, my dad’s garage fostered learning. It was there he constructed a rock polishing machine where I discovered that hidden beauty glistened in ordinary chunks of the earth’s crust.

wikimedia.org hatching tortoise download
Wikimedia.org

My dad constructed a vice for me there on a small workbench, and I learned to use a hammer and saw. We built a wooden airplane; I sanded a wood block into a cross; we constructed a go-cart.

 

It was there he built an incubator where we hatched desert tortoise eggs. (Later, we learned that they did better nestled in a box under our water heater.)

As I wandered through the garage one day, my dad handed me a booklet. “Here, you should read this,” he said in his gruff-hiding-love type voice.

I took the booklet and read the title: “Man, a Planetary Disease.” Wow. Not a comforting title to an emerging young adult. I was still trying to figure out who I was, whether I had anything to offer the world, whether I was likable, how to clear up my pimples. I looked the booklet over, imprinting its title in my brain, but at the time, I did not read it.

I have read it since, though, and I have come to believe that my dad and the booklet’s author, Ian L. McHarg, understood something important.

In the B. Y. Morrison Memorial Lecture in 1971, McHarg argued:

Man is an epidemic, multiplying at a super-exponential rate, destroying the environment upon which he depends, and threatening his own extinction.

He treats the world as a storehouse existing for his delectation; he plunders, rapes, poisons, and kills this living system, the biosphere, in ignorance of its workings and its fundamental value.

The real battle in the world is not between communists and capitalists, black and white, rich and poor, green and purple, heliotrope or gamboge. The real fundamental division in the world is between the people who are not planetary diseases and those who are ….

You may find those words a bit harsh. Obviously, I found it off-putting when I first read McHarg’s title. But McHarg spoke at a time when the world was threatened by nuclear war, DDT, and chemical pollutants inexcusably spewed by irresponsible corporations.

Today’s environmentalists speak amidst other troubles: the threat of nuclear war, biological war, chemical war, everyday war, household pollutants, agricultural pollutants, corporate pollutants, habitat degradation, a killer wildlife trade, plastic islands in our oceans, climate change, and people eager to plunder and rape the world for short-term profit.

Wikimedia.org August_2010_CME_SDO_Multi-Wavelength.jpgHarsh, yes. But true also. The disease is dangerously out of control. Still, we can fight it. We weren’t meant to be a plague on this beautiful blue and green planet.

My dad was an environmentalist before the word became popular. He passed his love of the earth, seas, land, rocks, and trees on to me. Later, God stamped this concern deep in my soul. People were not made to conquer the earth; we are to care for it as beings who are interdependent with its other creatures and with its complex systems.

We must stop our greedy practices, restore and extend systems designed to let the whole earth flourish, and cherish this beautiful planet. We can do this, but it will take personal and political will if we are to do so.

If we do not, and if we do not see the need to do so as urgent, then we will destroy the planet we call home—we truly will be a planetary disease of epidemic proportions.

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The Pine Trees of My Childhood

The pure scent of pine trees and the terrible stench of smog—these opposites planted the first small seeds of love for the environment in my heart.

I grew up in California east of Los Angeles in the 1950s. At that time, the fading rim of the LA megalopolis encroached like a consuming alien on the hot desert edge where I lived. As Los Angeles grew, it ate into the orange groves that were once ubiquitous in the valleys, and it devoured the surrounding hillsides and deserts.

Finally, it ate into the air, as well.

As the heat rose in late spring and summer in the 1950s, Southern California smog became a problem of London-before-coal-laws proportions. I remember deep aches in my chest after playing outside in the smog. Frequent smog alerts shortened school days at my elementary school and held us children captive, inside.

Old people died from the pollutants in the air.

LA’s smog descended upon our stucco houses, smothering their soft yellows, whites, or pastel blues. The haze depressed me as I grew, with its dullness, its irritants, and its poisons: reminders of dimmed colors, lost orientation, and smog smothered dreams.

Whole mountain ranges disappeared behind smog’s poisonous veil.

In winter Mount Baldy, part of the San Bernardino mountain range located due north of Ontario, my hometown, was the glory of the region. In late spring and summer, though, Mount Baldy vanished for days, even weeks on end. If I was an early riser I might catch a mystic glimpse of it, before smog once again obliterated it from sight.

 

                                 Wikimedia.org

The camp grounds on Mount Baldy were at a sufficiently high altitude, though, that even in the 1950s, we could camp above the heavy smog. My father and I did this on occasion, rising into fresh mountain air, into the crisp California night, into the stars, where the Milky Way felt like a touchable entity, the stars were bears and seven sisters, and they could be located by a small girl and her father equipped with a star-gazer map.

My favorite memories with my father are of us camping there, snuggled side-by-side in our sleeping bags—tent free, so we could study the stars.

In this private world, pine trees hovered over us like friendly, sheltering giants. As my father and I lay beneath the stars, we talked about astronomy, watched meteoroids flash across our view as they entered the atmosphere, discussed the misery of smog and its destructive effect on the natural world, and talked of how nice it was to camp high in the mountains, until I fell asleep, knowing that I would awake to the familiar scent of my father fixing bacon and eggs, and of the pure mountain scent of pine sap.

The pines where we camped had not yet succumbed to the effects of the smog. This toxin would soon rise from the valleys below, though. Like creeping tendrils of wild vines entangle, bend, and break structures, slowly turning them to ruins, smog would soon rise and poison the trees even at these high elevations, turning them brown and making them die.

All this destruction happened in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, before humankind regained its sense and acted to stop the devastation.

By the 1960s, the frightening effects of smog on California’s trees, and particularly its pines, were becoming understood. By that time, smog had killed 46,000 acres of pine trees in our San Bernardino forest. Many died—but not all.

By the 1990s, environmental guidelines had begun to heal our sickened air. Some people resented these rules, imposed on home incinerators, industries, and cars. (Most disliked? The catalytic converter.) Despite their outcries, though, the regulations saved our mountain pines, at least for the time being.

I am truly indebted to the scientists, environmentalists, and activists of the mid-20th century who combined their efforts to save human lives and the remaining pines by enacting effective anti-smog regulations.

The smog of my childhood was visible and stank. The grey death stench of climate change is invisible, but it is just as real. Its shadow shows in the bleaching of our coral reefs and in the melting of our polar ice caps.

To make a difference today, we need to cooperate with our international neighbors on climate change strategies. We need to work together to resist efforts to undo climate change policies and regulations.

Although today I still struggle to know how to have an impact as an environmentalist, my concern for the natural world began when I was a child living with the terrible effects of people-made smog, on me and on the pine trees.

I struggle to know what I can do, and one way I’m seeking to grapple with the problems faced by our earth is by writing this blog.

A great deal has already been lost, but not all. We have worked together before and we have been successful. We can still heed the warning of the pine trees of my childhood, and protect this precious planet—if we will.

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