Get a shopping bag, Rachel

Some one decided a few years back that the conservative movement needed to have some attractive women as spokes persons. Back a bit ago, Noelle Nikpour performed intellectually for everyone to see. Today in the Chicago Tribune and elsewhere, Rachel Marsden displays a similar dim-witted view of science by making several snide suggestions for topics at the upcoming Durban environmental summit. It's actually hard to tell if this column is meant to be serious or sarcastic.
Rachel's gives some advice, "Don't waste time fiddling with the planet's thermostat." Ah, Rachel, if only it were that easy, but even you realize that if a gym can't control the temperature, the Earth is harder, but part of the idea of a gym is to sweat. She seems confused about how heat works, but the problem is not the ceiling height because heat rises, so it's coolest near the floor of the gym, but the Earth works rather differently. It's warmest at the surface because of the atmosphere's insulation. Rachel thinks "nuclear energy is the future." But the reason many of us oppose its expansion is not because we're "worried about a nuclear energy facility going all Chernobyl on [us]", but because no one wants to talk about the camel in the tent which is what do you do with all terribly toxic nuclear waste for the next 25 million years? Rachel say "imposing green alternatives almost always results in dirtier ones", and as an example she says that if she wasn't given plastic bags at the grocery store she'd have her purchases delivered, thus wasting even more energy. Oh, and Rachel sending non-decomposing plastic bags to the dump as garbage bags is not a form of recycling, and little needs to be said about your little snippy remark about "faith-based" pollution except that a George Carlin you ain't.
Rachel thinks "excessive tree-hugging is suffocating the foliage". "Plants need carbon dioxide to live and produce oxygen. Humans need oxygen and need to eat plants." First blame environmentalists for saving forests. Second, sounds like Rachel avoided all that hard sciency stuff because her simplistic views lead her to a huge misunderstanding. OK Rachel, you see the rates of both respiration and photosynthesis increase as temperature increases, but respiration increases fastest and then photosynthesis actually begins to slow down, so plants respire, sort of like "eat" but more sciency, more of their own energy resources leaving less for consumers. At higher temperatures more tropical trees die and all that carbon dioxide stored in their wood gets released by decomposition increasing the amount in the atmosphere and you have a positive feedback system where temperature increased the CO2 and CO2 increases the warming, leading to run away global warming. Data exist that demonstrate this could happen (see link), so it's not just an "abstraction". Lastly, Rachel thinks there is an "ongoing epidemic of ensconcing kids in liberal arts programs to educate them far beyond their intelligence." Wow! It's a terrible thing to be educated beyond you intelligence, but it looks like a career as a conservative columnist and political strategist is possible. But then Rachel says science and technology along with critical thinking should be encouraged and innovation will arise without using any gummit money. Hmm, the Phactor always thought that the key aim of liberal arts programs was to teach kids to think critically, and maybe that's the problem because then they are able to see easily through these comments to their dumb, silly cores. And then one wonders how we are to interest kids in science and technology when the entirety of the conservative movement is waging war on science and higher education. Are we to encourage innovation to solve problems that you deny exist? Hard to know exactly what this woman wants except to criticize and belittle any and all efforts to deal with environmental problems. But as we all know, such changes begin small and locally, so get a shopping bag Rachel to carry your cabbage head home from the grocery.

Green Solutions

A pragmatic approach to solving real environmental problems is something much needed and this online publication may help: Solutions. Looking for pragmatic solutions involves dealing with people as people rather than hoping human nature changes, dealing with politics as politics rather than hoping pols will begin look any further forward than the next election and monied interests, and dealing with nature as nature rather than hoping the Earth loves us. Such a pragmatic approach is the opposite of denialism, a lose-lose strategy, and this more than any other single thing will be the undoing of the GnOPe as they move farther and farther out of touch. And that’s not to suggest that the opposition is doing all that much better. But let us know what you think about this journal. Honestly, the Phactor has been too busy to read more than a hand full of the articles posted, so feedback is welcome.

Business as usual – the Beautiful “purple” Danube

Here’s a real blot on the landscape as seen from space, the toxic sludge spill in Hungary. If you mix enough toxic red sludge with a beautiful blue you must get a purple color, but any way you want to look at it heavy metal pollution is an environmental disaster even before reaching the region’s major river, which it now has done. Top to bottom you can see the red stain several kilometers downstream from the alumina plant sludge reservoir. The terrible thing about this is how impossible it is to clean up. Organisms accumulate heavy metals, so any such pollution will remain in the biosphere for a long, long time. Not only that but heavy metals accumulate up a food chain, a phenomenon called biological magnification. And even without the spill, we may ask what was the alumina plant, and indeed any such industry, going to do with this toxic sludge? The Phactor figures that at some point in the future, when the resources feeding the plant are depleted or the equipment out-dated, the corporation will just waltz away from their lake of toxic sludge with a shrug and an oh well, that’s the cost of doing business. And it’s not just in foreign countries; beneath Kodak Park in Rochester NY a plume of toxic materials is spreading toward the nearby Genesee River that empties into Lake Ontario just a few miles to the north. Business plans and indeed the price of many commodities fail to include the environmental damage and clean up costs, but in the end we all pay. Of course the corporation will have made money by ignoring the fact that their profits came at the expense of the environment and people. And any and all attempts to increase regulations and impose such rules bring out the GnopeP screaming that’s anti-business legislation. So this is a good question to ask aspiring politicians everywhere, “Does being pro-business means being anti-environment, or is the only way to make money by despoiling nature?”

Everyday should be Earth Day

The Phactor remembers the first Earth Day in 1970; he was a senior in college and that does date him even if he was a bit precocious. Unfortunately it did not receive as much attention that year as it should have because there were so many distractions that revolved around anti-war protests (Vietnam), trying to graduate, and thinking seriously about a long-time girl friend.

In trying to think of something profound to say, I find myself simply saddened by the state of the Earth. The whole panoply of environmental issues always ends up being argued from a political perspective, but the ecological perspective is quite clear. Our species has exceeded the carrying capacity of our environment. Humans began the path to the present day when they stopped living as gatherers and hunters and shifted to making a living via agriculture. This is not an indictment, just history.

My own particular role in this has been the simple, but not always easy task of helping students understand how nature works and the place of humans in all of this, so that they may use that knowledge to make wise decisions. Of course the flaw in that is the assumption that knowing something is important to making decisions, which often has not been the case in politics. When ideology trumps knowledge it all goes out the window.

A great deal of the Earth’s natural communities have been altered, damaged, or destroyed, but there still remains a resilience that gives the Phactor some hope if we can abate the rate of destruction. Unfortunately so many people are so estranged from nature, from their food and resources, it creates an ignorance or indifference to the natural order of things. People just don’t know, care, or understand what living their lives is doing, insulated as they are by human technology. In the words of Porky Pine penned for Earth Day by the great Walt Kelly, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Being ethical demands that our actions not harm others, and that principle must be extended to actions that do not unduly harm the ability of our environment to sustain us. So be mindful of the full impact we make, both on our own personal little hummock, and elsewhere, and try to help others know why it’s important to have a "green" ethic, otherwise you become an enemy of people.

PS Many people attribute that quote to Pogo because of an Earth Day poster made by Kelly a year later, but he didn't say it in the original cartoon.