On the Need to Write and Read-- Art's Uselessness

I want to tell you a story:
From The Guardian

Paul Auster, one of America's greatest living novelists, argues that fiction is 'magnificently useless', but the act of creation and the pleasure of reading are incomparable human joys that we should savour

Sunday November 5, 2006
The Observer

I don't know why I do what I do. If I did know, I probably wouldn't feel the need to do it. All I can say, and I say it with utmost certainty, is that I have felt this need since my earliest adolescence. I'm talking about writing, in particular, writing as a vehicle to tell stories, imaginary stories that have never taken place in what we call the real world. Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist - except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.

This need to make, to create, to invent is, no doubt, a fundamental human impulse. But to what end? What purpose does art, in particular the art of fiction, serve in what we call the real world? None that I can think of - at least not in any practical sense. A book has never put food in the stomach of a hungry child. A book has never stopped a bullet from entering a murder victim's body. A book has never prevented a bomb from falling on innocent civilians in the midst of war.

Some like to think that a keen appreciation of art can actually make us better people - more just, more moral, more sensitive, more understanding. Perhaps that is true - in certain rare, isolated cases. But let us not forget that Hitler started out in life as an artist. Tyrants and dictators read novels. Killers in prison read novels. And who is to say they don't derive the same enjoyment from books as everyone else?

In other words, art is useless, at least when compared, say, to the work of a plumber, or a doctor, or a railroad engineer. But is uselessness a bad thing? Does a lack of practical purpose mean that books and paintings and string quartets are simply a waste of our time? Many people think so. But I would argue that it is the very uselessness of art that gives it its value and that the making of art is what distinguishes us from all other creatures who inhabit this planet, that it is, essentially, what defines us as human beings.

To do something for the pure pleasure and beauty of doing it. Think of the effort involved, the long hours of practice and discipline required to become an accomplished pianist or dancer. All the suffering and hard work, all the sacrifices in order to achieve something that is utterly and magnificently ... useless.

Fiction, however, exists in a somewhat different realm from the other arts. Its medium is language, and language is something we share with others, that is common to us all. From the moment we learn to talk, we begin to develop a hunger for stories. Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.

Those of us who are parents will have no trouble conjuring up the rapt attention in the eyes of our children when we read to them. Why this intense desire to listen? Fairy tales are often cruel and violent, featuring beheadings, cannibalism, grotesque transformations and evil enchantments. One would think this material would be too frightening for a young child, but what these stories allow the child to experience is precisely an encounter with his own fears and inner torments in a perfectly safe and protected environment. Such is the magic of stories - they might drag us down to the depths of hell, but in the end they are harmless.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next. For years, in every country of the Western world, article after article has been published bemoaning the fact that fewer and fewer people are reading books, that we have entered what some have called the 'post-literate age'. That may well be true, but at the same time, this has not diminished the universal craving for stories.

Novels are not the only source, after all. Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories. They need them almost as desperately as they need food and however the stories might be presented - whether on a printed page or on a television screen - it would be impossible to imagine life without them.

Still, when it comes to the state of the novel, to the future of the novel, I feel rather optimistic. Numbers don't count where books are concerned, for there is only one reader, each and every time only one reader. That explains the particular power of the novel and why, in my opinion, it will never die as a form. Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.

I have spent my life in conversations with people I have never seen, with people I will never know and I hope to continue until the day I stop breathing.

It's the only job I've ever wanted.

© Paul Auster

· This is Paul Auster's acceptance speech for the Prince of Asturias Prize for Letters, Spain's premier literary honour, which he received last month

The life

Born: 3 February 1947 in Newark, New Jersey.

Education: Attended school in Maplewood, New Jersey, and graduated from Columbia University in 1970 with a master's in comparative literature.

Family: He lives in Brooklyn with his second wife, Siri Hustvedt, author of three novels including What I Loved, and their daughter, Sophie, 18, a singer and actress. He has a son, Daniel, 28, by his first wife, Lydia Davis.

Early career: Auster worked on an oil tanker after university and spent four lean years in France, where he translated French literature for a living and wrote poetry. He returned to America in 1974. The New York Trilogy (City of Glass, The Locked Room and Ghosts) was first published as a single volume in the UK in 1986.

Film: In addition to 11 novels and collections of essays and poetry, Auster has had four of his screenplays filmed. Smoke and Blue in the Face were made with director Wayne Wang, and Auster himself directed Lulu on the Bridge and the forthcoming The Inner Life of Martin Frost.

Aspen Ecosystem in Peril Poster Field Guide

Aspen Community Species List

Common Name: Scientific Name:

Birds:

Northern Goshawk Accipiter gentilis

Flammulated owl Otus flammeolus

Calliope Hummingbird Stellula calliope

Red-naped sapsucker Sphyrapicus nuchalis

Lewis woodpecker Melanerpes lewis

Mountain Bluebird Sialia currcoides

A warbler would be nice?

Mammals:

Mule Deer Odocoileus hemionus

Elk Cervus canadensis

Beaver Castor canadensis

Spotted Skunk Spilogale putorius

Little Brown Bat Myotis lucifugus

Butterfly:

Weidemeyer’s Admiral Limenitis weidemeyerii

Dreamy Duskywing Erynnis icelus

Plants:

Aspen Populus tremuloides

Wild rose Rosa woodsii (L)

Snowberry Symphoricarpos sp. (L)

Corn lily Veratrum californicum (L)

Ranger’s Buttons Sphenosciadium capitellatum (L)

Sierra Tiger lily Lilium parvum (M)

Monkshood Aconitum columbianum(M)

Columbine Aquilegia formosa(M)

Geranium Geranium richardsonii(M)

Bog/Reid Orchid Platanthera leucostachys(M)

Golden Pea Thermopsis rhombifolia(M)

Bog Mallow Sidalcea oregana(M)

(M)=Medium. (L)=Low

Plane Speaking: Tax Plane trips dramatically

London's Mayor Livingstone is interviewed about Carbon Dieting -- including the taxation of plane trips enough to reduce traffic-- can Boeing react in time with a greener energy path for our planes here in Seattle?

Read on:

Plane Speaking


Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, is on a mission to tackle climate change - and that includes challenging the aviation industry head on, he tells John Vidal

Wednesday November 1, 2006
The Guardian


The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, holds an energy saving lightbulb in his office at City Hall. Photograph: Martin Argles


Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, is these days possessed of one great idea. Climate change, and how to avert it, consumes him. It now informs all his decisions on transport. It is top of his agenda for social housing and new building developments. He reads about it in his spare time. He talks about it to anyone who will bend an ear and he will travel to the ends of the earth if necessary to cut deals with other politicians, to steal the best ideas from other cities and to communicate with anyone the urgency and scale of the problem.

Last week, Sir David Attenborough went to City Hall to talk to staff about the acceleration of change. When former US vice-president Al Gore's film on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, was released, Livingstone hired a cinema and invited staff to watch it. He bought 20 copies of Jared Diamond's book on the ecological collapse of civilisation and gave them to colleagues; yesterday, the day after the Stern review warned of economic mayhem unless climate change is tackled, Livingstone signed up to Friends of the Earth's lobby for a law to reduce national emissions annually.
"In a practical sense, you can see climate change is now top of the London agenda and is being personally driven," says one of his colleagues, impressed at how Livingstone has linked the social and environmental agendas. "People used to see the congestion charge and public transport from the point of view of social inequality and the functioning of the city. They are all still core issues but they are not separate to climate change, they are integral to it now. He had to focus on things such as the public-private partnership [for the London Underground] in his first term. Now he has more time, the emphasis has changed. It helps having a strong Green contingent in the assembly, because there is very little disagreement."

Livingstone admits his position has changed, is changing, as information emerges. "I think what is happening is absolutely terrifying. When I first ran for mayor in 2000, the scientific consensus was that we would reach the climate change tipping point around the second half of the century. Depending on which scientific evidence you look at, it's down to between two and 10 years. There's no time for more studies or surveys.

"I just do not think that politicians understand the implications, which at the very extreme is the end of most large life forms. If we slip into irreversible climate change, it means hundreds of millions of people migrating and deaths. It means the poorest being hit the hardest."

As mayor, he has one arm tied behind his back, he says. If it were up to him, he says he would legislate against almost anything that adds to the problem. He would ban inefficient light bulbs, bang on carbon taxes, and massively increase the cost of air fares. "I think that every city is doing something quite well," he says. "We should take the best from around the world. We could take the plastic bag tax from Ireland, the packaging laws of Germany. We should put them together.

"But the one big thing that no one is tackling is aviation. Emissions are completely undermining the reductions achieved elsewhere," Livingstone says.

But there have been serious contradictions in his positions. His proposals for the London Plan, which will determine development in the city from 2008 onwards, says major airport expansion will be needed in the south-east "to meet London's economic needs". Is that not arguing that Londoners should be able to travel by air more? "I am no longer sanguine about that," he replies. "When we drafted the London Plan in 2002, we were nowhere near getting the alarming information that we are today. We have to address it. We are now preparing amendments to the plan against any further runway capacity in the south-east."

While Livingstone has no direct power over future developments at Gatwick or Stansted, observers say the significance of his withdrawal of support for the growth of these two airports - he has always been against the expansion of Heathrow - is that he is now challenging the aviation industry head on, as no other major politician has been prepared to do. His target is not business travellers, he says, who would need tickets to be massively more expensive to reduce the number of flights they take, but the frequent leisure fliers. "All tickets should reflect the impact of carbon emissions of that journey," he insists. "Instead of £12 or £15 for a ticket, it should be five or six times that. A lot of Labour party people say that the dramatic growth in air traffic is the poor getting on the plane for the first time, but it's not that at all. Half the population never gets on a plane. What's happening is that relatively few people, instead of going away once a year on holiday, are going three or four times a year to Barcelona or Prague or wherever. That's all very nice, but not at the cost of the continuation of life on planet Earth."

Targeting carbon polluters

What he can do, and intends to do more, is make it harder for carbon polluters in London and easier for people to cut back. Over the next year, Londoners will get a blizzard of new initiatives aimed at decentralising and reducing energy consumption. The city's new climate change agency has begun a commercial partnership with French energy giant EDF to roll out combined heat and power units across London; all new social housing developments will soon have to be nearly 60% more efficient than they are now; in 2008, he will introduce Britain's first low emission zone, which will ban heavy goods vehicles and cut emissions by 4% across much of central London. A new organisation will advise and oversee the greening of people's homes and lives. It will be easier for householders to install wind and photovoltaic energy systems; new congestion charges will be shortly announced that will pile more cost on to polluting cars. He is said to be delighted that Richmond council, in west London, is planning to increase parking charges for cars that are heavy polluters.

Just as US mayors and state governors have led federal government in setting targets and timetables for emission cuts, Livingstone sees one of his roles to pummel and lobby central government, and other authorities, to act. The governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger was heading for defeat, Livingstone says, before he grabbed the climate change agenda. Now he is leading the polls again.

London is the first city in Britain to set itself statutory carbon dioxide emission reduction targets. They are roughly on a par with the government's - 20% cuts by 2015, 60% by 2050. They are not as much as Livingstone would like, or thinks possible, but they are as far as he thinks they can be pushed for the time being. London's particular problem is that, unlike most local authorities, aviation represents 30% of the city's emissions. To get them down means he absolutely must tackle flying as well as transport and housing.

To do so, he has linked with leading green campaigners. Charles Secrett, former head of Friends of the Earth, advises him, and Greenpeace has worked with him on devising a plan to decentralise energy. "Livingstone understands the increased threats that climate change poses and the incredible opportunities it presents if we act fast enough," Secrett says. "He sees London's future being shaped by our response to climate change threats, and that if we decentralise energy and have non-polluting transport systems we can create jobs, have a better standard of living and show others a way forward in a climate-changed future."

Other EU cities are far ahead of London, Livingstone says, but he's chuffed at what's been done in just a few years. London is the only large city in the world, he says, that has achieved a major shift in transport from car to bus. All the predictions were that car use would increase, but traffic levels have been held for six years. Four years ago, 38% of people used their cars daily in London, it's now 19%; there has been a 72% increase in cycling over four years and there will be a 70% decrease in bus emissions as 500 buses are converted to run on hybrid electric-diesel motors; renewable targets for buildings are to be doubled; there are 20% more pedestrian crossings and 48% fewer people died on the roads last year compared with 2000; in a year the low-emission zone comes in, curtailing heavy lorries and coaches.

Meanwhile, Livingstone has been to the US to link with other world cities to share knowledge on reducing emissions, and to China to see the beginning of the world's first major eco-city. London will not get a Dongtang - a carbon neutral city for 800,000 people, powered by wind and sun - but a minuscule version of 200 carbon-neutral homes in Docklands. Every bit helps.

"That's the future," he says. "That's the way the market is going. London is going to grow by 100,000 people over the next 10 years and we don't want anything built that will add to the problem. My vision is of a city with a lot less carbon emissions, a lot more walking, more public transport, more bicycles. If you look around London, it's not a very attractive place to walk round."

But he is criticised, too. His backing of a controversial £450m motorway-scale bridge over the Thames in east London will increase traffic and emissions and - say Friends of the Earth, the Greens and locals - increase environmental injustice for some of the poorest communities.

Restraint on development

Livingstone fiercely defends the scheme, saying the green campaigners are "dangerously close" to proposing that poor people should be restrained from developing. "They have at present no option about where they cross. It's not unreasonable that they should have one bridge," he says.

The locals of Beckton, contemplating 20,000 cars an hour passing through their community, are not impressed. "He's talking rubbish," says one of the local organisers of the opposition to the bridge. "It's only for car drivers and just 25% of us near the bridge have cars."

Livingstone is on far safer ground with climate change. "I do not think there's the slightest doubt that we can get the emissions down," he insists. "In the areas I have power, a lot is being done. Individuals are already making decisions not to have that extra weekend in Barcelona or Prague. Nothing we are doing means that anyone's quality of life needs to change. It's not a massive change. It's just doing things differently."

Photo credit: from NASA off Google Images

Rapid Climate Change Economic Disaster

From The Guardian:

Tackle climate change or face deep recession, world's leaders warned



· Economic review turns cost argument on head
· Technologies investment 'could stimulate growth'

James Randerson, science correspondent
Thursday October 26, 2006
The Guardian

Climate change could tilt the world's economy into the worst global recession in recent history, a report will warn next week.
Sir Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist with the World Bank, will warn that governments need to tackle the problem head-on by cutting emissions or face economic ruin. The findings, due to be released on Monday, will turn economic argument about global warming on its head by insisting that fighting global warming will save industrial nations money. The US refused to join the Kyoto protocol, the international agreement on greenhouse gas emissions, because George Bush said it would harm the economy.


Article continues

The contents of the Stern review into the economics of climate change - commissioned by the Treasury - have been kept secret since the nature of the work was revealed to the world's environment ministers in Mexico this month. But Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser, yesterday gave the Guardian a preview of its main findings.
Speaking at a climate change conference in Birmingham, he said: "All of [Stern's] detailed modelling out to the year 2100 is going to indicate first of all that if we don't take global action we are going to see a massive downturn in global economies." He added: "If no action is taken we will be faced with the kind of downturn that has not been seen since the great depression and the two world wars." Sir David called the review "the most detailed economic analysis that I think has yet been conducted".

The review will highlight the threat of sea level rise. Sir David said: "If you look at sea level rises alone and the impact that will have on global economies where cities are becoming inundated by flooding ... this will cause the displacement of ... hundreds of millions of people."

Sir David's comments mirror those of the foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, on Tuesday. "This is not just an environmental problem," she said. "It is a defence problem. It is a problem for those who deal with economics and development, conflict prevention, agriculture, finance, housing, transport, innovation, trade and health." Sir Nicholas will argue that tackling the problem may not prove as economically painful as some experts predict. Investment in low-carbon technologies could stimulate the global economy. Sir David said: "[Stern's] analysis, I think, will also surprise many people in terms of the relatively small cost of action."

The International Energy Agency predicts that $15 trillion (£8 trillion) of investment in new energy sources will be required over the next 15 years. "The massive investment programme that's ahead of us is an opportunity for us to move towards a zero carbon energy system. The investment process is going to act quite possibly in the opposite direction to an economic downturn," Sir David said.

He told the Rapid Climate Change conference, organised by the Natural Environment Research Council in Birmingham, that achieving global political consensus would be extremely difficult. "In my view this is the biggest challenge our global political system has ever been faced with. We've never been faced with a decision where collective decision making is required by all major countries." The timescale too is unprecedented. "Actions being asked of the political system today are only going to play through into mid-century and beyond. So for the first time we are asking a global political system to make decisions around risks to their populations that are well outside the time period of any election process."

He drew parallels between scientific advice on global warming and advice from seismologists ahead of the Boxing Day tsunami. A month before the disaster a delegation warned governments around the Indian ocean about the extreme danger posed by tectonic activity under the sea. No government chose to act on the advice. "$30m as the cost to install some kind of early warning system presumably looked like a lot of money." But such a system could have saved 150,000 lives.

FAQ The Stern review
What is the Stern review?
Gordon Brown asked Sir Nicholas Stern last July to analyse the financial implications of climate change.
What will it say?
Climate change poses a threat to the world economy and it will be cheaper to address the problem than to deal with the consequences.
Why does it matter?
The global warming argument seemed a straight fight between the scientific case to act and the economic case not to. Now, economists are urging action.
What next?
International action beyond 2012 is debated in Nairobi next month.
What about the US?
The great sticking point. Some believe only a change of president will bring serious action.

Tres Cool Lunar Planting Calendar 2007

2007 Planting Calendar -- Plant your crops with the Lunar phases!

Kyota Accords No Enough

From Google News search "climate crisis" comes this story from Australia' Green Left Magazine

Global warming: looking beyond Kyoto

Zoe Kenny

Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth has helped focus attention on the threat posed by fossil-fuel driven climate change. Gore’s film was met with a predictable barrage of criticism by right-wing pundits. For example Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt wrote in a September 13 article that the “former US vice-president's ludicrous scaremongering contains exaggerations, half-truths and falsehoods”.

However Bolt and his ilk are increasingly isolated. Over the last decade, the framework of the debate on climate change has shifted, with so-called “greenhouse sceptics” increasingly rare.

A GlobeScan opinion poll of people in 30 countries conducted between October 2005 and January 2006 found that a large majority believe that global warming is a serious problem. A Lowy Institute poll released on October 4 found that climate change is seen as one of the top three threats to Australia's vital interests in the next 10 years.

In 1997, PM John Howard said, “There is ... quite a bit of debate about the science, so far as greenhouse effects are concerned, and it’s not all one way. It is not all — how should one put it — the apocalyptic view of the world and of life.” But on the October 15 60 Minutes Howard talked about living in “an age where we’re worried about global warming” (of course he was arguing that climate change is a case for Australia developing nuclear power “because it’s clean and it doesn’t emit greenhouse gases”).

Although it’s good news that the terrain of the “debate” has decisively shifted from whether global warming is happening and is a problem to the question of solutions (even if in Howard’s case it’s a non-solution like nuclear power), the bad news is that in the meantime more evidence has emerged that paints a terrifying picture of the scope, speed and impact of climate change.

Of major concern to climate scientists are findings that the Arctic ice cap is melting faster than expected. According to a September 26 Bulletin article by Tim Flannery, although the Arctic ice cap has been melting at a rate of 8% per decade since the 1970s, resulting in thinning of the sheet and a loss of one quarter of its surface, during the summer of 2005 the melting accelerated, resulting in the loss of 300,000 square kilometres of ice.

The results of the monitoring of winter ice are no more heartening. According to Gretchen-Cook Anderson of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Arctic winter ice has been retreating at a rate of 1.5% per decade since 1979. However, over the last two years the ice has retreated by 6% each winter — 40 times faster than in previous years. Flannery speculated that this could be as a result of the Arctic Ocean passing “an important thermal point and ... retaining the warmth it gains from the 24-hour summer sun”, which could trigger the collapse of the Arctic food chain and destabilise the Earth's heat balance.

Possibly the gravest warning so far about global warming’s speed was given by NASA scientist James Hansen at the Climate Change Research Conference in California on September 13. Hansen said that the world has “at the most” a decade in which to stem climate change, warning that a “business as usual” approach would raise global temperatures by 2-3°C, producing a “different planet”.

Melting icecaps will raise sea levels by between 10 and 25 metres forcing millions to seek refuge, increasingly violent weather patterns will cause major destruction and as the land dries up bushfires will be more frequent.

A 2°C rise in temperature will raise sea levels, inundating low-lying countries in the Asia Pacific region and create up to 150 million refugees by 2070, a CSIRO report released in October predicted.

But the challenge posed by global warming has been met primarily with criminal inaction from the governments of the two highest per capita greenhouse gas polluters — Australia and the US. Both countries have refused to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol, citing as “unfair” the fact that Third World nations are not bound to reduce greenhouse emissions and possible economic damage caused by the agreement.

Instead of promoting green technologies like solar, wind and hydro power, the Howard government is pushing “clean coal” — an attempt to rehabilitate a polluting industry on the basis of unproven technology — and nuclear power — low in greenhouse efficiency and high in environmental and human impact (though with wonderful profit margins thanks to the massive government subsidies needed to make it viable) — as solutions to climate change.

Forcing climate renegades like the Howard and Bush governments to sign on to Kyoto has been a natural and useful focus of these movements. However the severity of the threat posed by climate change means that on its own Kyoto isn’t enough.

According to New Scientist, the treaty's range of loopholes and scams will mean that even if the industrialised countries achieve Kyoto's reduction of 5.2% below 1990 levels by 2012 on paper, the real-world reduction will be more likely to be 1.5%.

A September 21 British Guardian article by George Monbiot argued that atmospheric carbon concentrations need to be stabilised at the current level in order to avoid a 2°C temperature rise that will send the Earth's climate spiralling out of control. This would mean that the industrialised nations would need to cut emissions by 90% by 2030.

Not only does Kyoto not go anywhere near mandating the kind of greenhouse emission cutbacks that are needed, it also relies upon carbon-trading schemes that have proven ineffective in curbing emissions.

One of the first major tests of Kyoto’s carbon trading has been the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme, which has been an almost total failure. The ETS is a carbon-trading market that includes all 25 EU member-states. Earlier this year the ETS market crashed as a result of member EU governments setting lax national emission targets, meaning that high-polluting industries could continue with business as usual and had no need to buy carbon credits.

By May 2006 the market price of permits had dropped to 10 euros per tonne, down 20 euros from April. In another indication of the ease with which corporate interests undermine “market mechanisms”, on June 28 Germany announced that it would exempt its coal industry from any Kyoto requirements.

Some of the harshest criticisms of Kyoto are of its “Clean Development Mechanism”. CDM allows First World countries to avoid reducing their emissions by investing in projects in the Third World that reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). The amount of GHGs that are theoretically reduced by the projects are transferred into credits that First World countries can buy to allow their companies to continue a pollution-as-usual approach.

Participants at the first anti-carbon-trading conference, held in South Africa in October 2004, issued a statement declaring: “As representatives of people’s movements and independent organisations, we reject the claim that carbon trading will halt the climate crisis. This crisis has been caused more than anything else by the mining of fossil fuels and the release of their carbon to the oceans, air, soil and living things. This excessive burning of fossil fuels is now jeopardising Earth’s ability to maintain a liveable climate ...

“Carbon trading will not contribute to achieving this protection of the Earth’s climate. It is a false solution which entrenches and magnifies social inequalities ... ‘giving carbon a price’ will not prove to be any more effective, democratic, or conducive to human welfare, than giving genes, forests, biodiversity or clean rivers a price. We reaffirm that drastic reductions in emissions from fossil fuel use are a pre-requisite if we are to avert the climate crisis.”

However the kind of “drastic reductions” in fossil-fuel emissions that are required have barely even registered on the policy agendas of governments like Australia’s.

The degree to which the Howard government and the Bush regime in the US have shifted rhetoric on climate change reflects the cracks in the political and corporate elite over climate change. Those who now see global warming as a threat to the stability of capitalist economies, and, therefore, a threat to corporate profit, reflect an increasing body of elite opinion (as, indeed, is reflected by Gore).

But the kind of changes that are urgently needed — severe restrictions on greenhouse emissions, massive investment in public transport and renewable energy sources, access to clean technology for poor nations, and the eradication of the First World/Third World divide — will mean cutting into the “right” of corporations to profit at the expense of the environment. Governments that rule on behalf of the corporate rich, like Howard’s, will only take these steps — which are needed now — under pressure from a strong, grassroots environment movements.

However the global warming crisis also raises questions about the sustainability of the capitalist economic system. The economic competition that is so fundamental to capitalism drives corporations to maximise their profits no matter what damage is done to the environment or face ruination at the hands of competitors, and the anarchy of the so-called “free market” renders impossible a rational allocation of resources on the basis of social need.

Renowned socialist environmentalist John Bellamy Foster explained in the October 2005 Monthly Review: “The main response of the ruling capitalist class when confronted with the growing environmental challenge is to 'fiddle while Rome burns.’ To the extent that it has a strategy, it is to rely on revolutionizing the forces of production, i.e., on technical change, while keeping the existing system of social relations intact ...

“In stark contrast, many environmentalists now believe that technological revolution alone will be insufficient to solve the problem and that a more far-reaching social revolution aimed at transforming the present mode of production is required.”

Foster argued that environmental sustainability was achievable only through radical social change: “The creation of an ecological civilization requires a social revolution ... It must put the provision of basic human needs — clean air, unpolluted water, safe food, adequate sanitation, social transport, and universal health care and education, all of which require a sustainable relation to the earth — ahead of all other needs and wants.”

“Such a revolutionary turn in human affairs may seem improbable But the continuation of the present capitalist system for any length of time will prove impossible — if human civilization and the web of life as we know it are to be sustained.”

From Green Left Weekly, October 25, 2006.

Ancient Forest Birds: Pileated Woodpecker & Marbled Murrelet 6" x 9" postcards $1.99 ea

Here is a preview of two beautiful bird families coming soon as a 6" x 9" portrait on card stock for your enjoyment.

See Coming Soon at Good Nature

Marbled Murrelet and Pileated Woodpeckers are $1.99 ea

Fine solo mountain climber story

From New York Times.

I post this story for friends in Colorado who like to hike and don't subscribe to the NYT.

But I leave it up for you as a fine example of clear, crisp writing in a short format.

Oakley Brooks sets up his protagonist quickly, someone with a wild hair, perfect Northwest weather and nuts enough to climb steep Cascade peaks in the Pickets by himself. Read on:



Lone Climber Attacks Rocky Proving Ground


By OAKLEY BROOKS
Published: October 21, 2006
In the heart of North Cascades National Park in north-central Washington is a saw-toothed line of 8,000-foot volcanic rock known as the Picket Range. The sheer faces and the bruising, off-trail slogs required to get to the Pickets make the mountains some of toughest climbs in the lower 48.

“For a mountaineer, it’s probably the best venue in the lower 48 because there are a lot of appealing climbs that haven’t been done yet,” said Peter Potterfield, editor of Greatoutdoors.com and author of a Cascades climbing guide.

In 1980, John Roper, a Bellevue, Wash., physician who grew up climbing the mountains in the national park, went on a three-peak expedition that included 8,291-foot Mount Fury in the Pickets. Walking around the south side of Fury, he passed a jagged, 4,000-foot ridgeline leading up toward the summit. The last spike in the ridge jutted out and cast a finger-like shadow against the mountain. Roper later theorized that, given the difficulty of the Pickets, the spike on the ridge of Fury was probably the hardest place to get to in Washington State. Roper named the line Mongo Ridge and the last tower The Pole of Remoteness.

This summer, the Seattle climber Wayne Wallace decided to ascend the ridge and reach the Pole. Nobody else had done it. Few had even considered it.

“It never occurred to me to climb it,” said Roper, now 62 and one of the old guard of Cascades climbers. But when the two talked about going up Mongo, Roper encouraged Wallace, a sinewy, 5-foot-11 carpenter foreman with a thick grip who had in recent years completed tough climbs in the Pickets.

In late August, Wallace had three weeks free because of a strike, and he tried to rally some climbing friends for an attempt at the ridge.

“I only know three people that really qualify for that trip, but everybody had commitments to other climbs or family,” said Wallace, who is 43 and single. “I had the line on this, I had the approach, I had the weather, but I didn’t have partners.”

On Aug. 23, Wallace attended a slide show in Seattle of a first ascent in Alaska. He returned home, packed his gear and left at 4 a.m., charged up by the idea of tackling his own new route — alone.

“In the daily world, we have so much padding around us,” Wallace said. “When that’s gone and it’s just you hanging there in control of your life, that’s when life is at its clearest.”

Wallace’s planned route was a grueling four-and-half-day trek, including a crossing of the eastern summit of Fury before he even got to Mongo Ridge. On his first day, he hiked 28 miles, the last 14 off-trail, through thick forest and clumps of devil’s club, a thorny plant. The next morning, he crossed Fury’s glacier en route to the mountain’s eastern peak. He reached the summit and stretched out to watch a molten red sunset — a good sign for the next day’s attempt on Mongo Ridge.

“When you don’t have any excuses, that’s when it’s scary,” said Wallace, who took a few sleeping pills, as he usually does during climbs.

Upon reaching the base of Mongo the next morning, he looked at the ridge’s first three major pinnacles using his digital camera. “It was a weapon throughout the trip,” he said of the camera.

After going up some steep rock leading to the bottom of the first pinnacle, he began a moderately difficult climb up the 400-foot first tower. Wallace kept his 45-pound pack on and stayed unroped — which saved him the time of looping back down to retrieve rope holds. At the top of the tower, he set a rope and rappelled some 200 feet over to the base of Tower 2, an up-and-down pattern he would repeat throughout the day.

He climbed the next tower unroped and rappelled to the base of Tower 3, where Wallace photographed one of the more intimidating spots on Mongo: a sheer granite pinnacle that soared into a deep blue sky. A gaggle of other towers lay in waiting behind it. Wallace roped up. The climbing ahead looked more technical.

His calves were feeling the effects of carrying his pack. “You’re working against time and energy,” he said.

As he climbed across the face of Tower 3, he looked down on a thousand-foot drop. He repeated a mantra that every mountain has a way up, and another saying: if you live through this, seek help.

Wallace’s hands began to cramp as he traversed the fourth tower. Reaching the top, he had to move across a sharp ridge to get the base of the Pole. He recalled it as one of the dicier points — “like climbing on loose teeth.”

Wallace had been climbing for nearly 12 hours. He sensed that his concentration was blurring from fatigue. Looking up at the Pole and its sheer headwall, he thought it might be the most difficult climb of the day. But he found a notched path up the right edge that allowed him to keep his pack on and ease his way up.

Once atop the tower, he let out a bellowing yell and captured a vertigo-inspiring image: the shadow of the Pole projected against the rest of Fury, with Wallace’s tiny likeness perched on the pinhead top.

He was not finished, however. In his final rappel that day, Wallace triggered a rock fall that sliced into one of his ropes. He said he had a sense something bad would happen on the Pole. It had been named before he had reached it, something mountain climbers are wary of.

But Wallace safely reached the backside of the Pole and had stamped the ridge with a new identity: his own.

Roper ranked the climb among the most challenging first ascents in the North Cascades in the past several years. “It’s impressive,” he said. “And brazen.”

That night, Wallace found a crack in the rocks with a pillow of snow to sleep on. He filled his water bottles with melted snow, and the next day, he climbed to the top of West Fury, traversed across to East Fury and began the long walk to Ross Lake. He celebrated with a dinner at a small resort at the south end of the lake, then hustled back to Seattle.

The strike had ended, and work was starting up again.

In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

~ Mary Oliver ~

(American Primitive)

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Plant Ancestors

Unraveling Plant Ancestry Through Modern Technology

by Jessica M. Scully

Baldwin at work in Carson Ridge, Marin County. In addition to his research using plant DNA, Baldwin is editing a new edition of the Jepson Manual, an extensive guide to California's native and naturalized plants. (Photo by Bridget Wessa)

Since Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus created the modern biological classification system in the mid 18th century, botanists have determined a plant's place among the wild diversity of life on the planet primarily based on its morphology, or form.

But to Bruce Baldwin, a professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley, what a plant looks like isn't always the best indicator of its species or closest relatives. "When morphological similarity has been the sole line of evidence, it's often been misleading about evolutionary relationships," he says.

Baldwin, whose specialty is native plants of California and the Hawaiian plants that evolved from them, uses DNA testing to resolve plants' ancestry and evolution. The evidence he has unearthed shows that plant evolution can occur more rapidly than once thought, and that plants evolve with remarkable precision to fit sometimes extremely local environments. While botanists have long known that California is rich in native species, Baldwin and his students' work proves that the state's plant life is even more varied and diverse than his predecessors imagined.

Baldwin's most extensive studies have focused on Madiinae, a group of plants in the sunflower family commonly known as tarweeds. The group includes plants that look dramatically different from one another, from the more than 6-feet tall, yucca-like Hawaiian silversword to the tiny California tarweed, Hemizonella minima, often less than an inch in height. "The group has undergone tremendous change for having such a short evolutionary history," says Baldwin.

Baldwin, who is also the curator of the Jepson Herbarium at UC Berkeley, has recently used experimental and genetic methods to explore theories about the evolution of different tarweed species proposed by earlier researchers, including Jens Clausen, David Keck, and William Hiesey, a Bay Area team well known worldwide in botanical circles. The three were pioneers at their time, from the 1930s to 1950s, for incorporating genetics, ecology, and physiology into plant classification. But they lacked the tools necessary to resolve relationships with modern levels of precision.

A rare, yellow variety of Layia glandulosa. The yellow variety is more closely related to L. discoidea than it is to the white plants of its own species. (Photo by Br. Alfred Brousseau, Saint Mary's College)

"There wasn't at that time a way to reconstruct genealogies rigorously, and there certainly wasn't any means of getting at the actual timing of when one species separated from another," says Baldwin.

To determine relationships between different plant species or populations, Baldwin extracts their DNA, then sequences non-coding regions that evolve rapidly enough to provide evidence of recent evolutionary change. Instead of looking for overall genetic similarity between species as in the past, which can be misleading, Baldwin reconstructs relationships based on the fewest mutational steps, or a more explicit model of DNA sequence evolution.

Through these and other techniques, he's been able to resolve questions left unanswered by earlier botanists. One of these questions is the evolutionary history of Layia discoidea ("Discoidea"), also known as rayless layia, a small annual herb.

Unlike other layias, Discoidea has a yellow bloom without rays, or showy petal-like flowers. It lives in serpentine soils, with a mineral composition toxic to many plants, in a small area of San Benito and Fresno counties, and looks so different from other tarweeds that some botanists once thought it wasn't even a member of the tribe.

Layia discoidea, a plant whose evolutionary history had long baffled botanists. (Photo credit: James R. Griffin/California Native Plant Society)

Clausen's team discovered it was a tarweed and related to Layia glandulosa ("Glandulosa"), or white layia, a ray-bearing plant found in sandy soils throughout the western United States. But the researchers weren't sure which plant came first, and thought that the rayless plant could be an evolutionary relict.

Through genetic testing, Baldwin found that Discoidea split from Glandulosa less than a million years ago. And he discovered an interesting fact about both species. Glandulosa's common name – white layia – is something of a misnomer. While most of the plants have white rays, a rare variety has yellow rays. Baldwin discovered that the rare, yellow-rayed version is more closely related to Discoidea, a separate species, than it is to the white-rayed plants in its own species. That means Discoidea underwent such rapid change that its close relationship to yellow Glandulosa was obscured, except with the aid of molecular data, Baldwin explains. Discoidea even retains a gene coding for yellow ray color, although it no longer has rays, he says.

This example "shows that evolution can proceed at very different rates and in very different ways, depending on ecological circumstances," Baldwin says. California, with its many microclimates and soils, offers a multitude of distinct environments that have shaped plant evolution here, Baldwin says. That means the state likely has many new species yet to be discovered, he adds.

But Baldwin knows if species lose their habitats, they could disappear before being discovered. "If a (species) disappears, we're losing something irreplaceable," he says. "We still aren't knowledgeable enough to say whether these plants have special ecological properties or special medicinal properties," he adds. "But we do know once they're gone, they're gone forever."

Story in Science Matters

Tallest Tree almost 400 feet --

World's tallest tree

Researchers have confirmed that a redwood named Hyperion in a remote Northern California forest is the world's tallest tree.

Steve Sillett, a forestry professor at Humboldt State University, recently climbed Hyperion and measured it at 379.1 feet, one foot taller than previously thought.

Hyperion, which grows in Redwood National Park, edged aside the previous record holder, a 370.5-foot redwood called Stratosphere Giant in nearby Humboldt State Park.

Researchers had to wait until the end of the endangered marbled murrelet's nesting season to measure Hyperion and confirm its status as the world's tallest living thing.

If it weren't for damage caused by woodpeckers at its top, Hyperion could have reached 380 feet, researchers said.

Michael Taylor and Chris Atkins, the naturalists who initially found Hyperion, said the chances of finding a taller living organism are slim because they have already searched about 95 percent of the prime habitat for big redwoods.

Officials would not pinpoint the exact location of Hyperion because they are worried that too many visitors could damage the tree's delicate ecosystem.

Picture Credit Treehugger

Democrats missing opportunity with suspected terrorist arrest

The Bush war PR flak machine was out talking down Ned Lamont as you'd expect. Dick Cheney was on cue -- telling any reporter who still listens to him that capitalist millionaire Democrats like Lamont are just what terrorists want. Right.

But I think the Republican attacks since Joe Lieberman lost are really a cover up of Bush Cheney's (and Lieberman) support for unilateral invasion, military force, and no diplomacy.

Think about it. No matter what you say about the timing- the arrests of suspected terrorists on Tuesday are how we want to fight small bands of criminals. It is a police story. (Note to London: I would say the line "suspected terrorists" means you don't blast name and address of suspects all over the world until they have been found guilty. If some official calls you suspect, they can shoot you without consequence in Iraq, but we used to have a different definition of suspect. Today suspect appears to equal guilty which appears to be a synonym for "dead".)

The story that Bush and Cheney want to cover up is complicated -- but less about Lamont's huge win. What if it gets out that the English intelligence service is how we win the fight against small groups who want to scare the bejezus out of all of us blowing up planes.

But let's see if the democrats do anything different.

The story of arrests in England is a story democrats should be trumpeting -- it is at its heart a story about investigation, research, puzzling through evidence -- police work.

And the investigators in England are what democrats should be for -- the path not chosen by the Bush Bombs Away & chuck diplomacy team.

No bombs were dropped, thousands of people didn't get killed in a unilateral invasion by our country -- the kind of results you see in England can't happen with the Bush team -- and that is why they have to go. Lieberman is the first of many who will get the boot if Democrats make it clear they are for the type of smart intelligence gathering that secured peace we saw in England.

Joe Lieberman and the Republicans are trying to bomb their way out of a police investigation.

No sign of Osama bin Laden, yet.

Tim Colman

Dust -- a poem by Dorianne Laux

DUST

Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Now, I remember only the flavor--
not like food, sweet or sharp.
More like a fine powder, like dust.
And I wasn't elated or frightened,
but simply rapt, aware.
That's how it is sometimes--
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you're just too tired to open it.

—from What We Carry by Dorianne Laux

What would Martin say?

Courage me.

''Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' But conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but because conscience tells one it is right.''

-- quote left by American soldier who fought in Iraq-- and refuses to go back.

Story on NYT via AP

Army War Objector Plans to Go to Base

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: August 11, 2006
Filed at 9:39 a.m. ET

SEATTLE (AP) -- Shortly after returning from Iraq last year, Army Sgt. Ricky Clousing gathered a few belongings and sneaked out of Fort Bragg, leaving only a note quoting Martin Luther King.

After six months spent seeing the ''daily physical, psychological and emotional harassment of civilians,'' he was confused and disenchanted with the United States' role in the war, the 24-year-old said.

''My experience in Iraq really made me second-guess my ability to perform as a soldier and also forced me to question my beliefs in associating myself'' with the Army, he told The Associated Press on Thursday, a day before he planned to turn himself in to Fort Lewis authorities.

Officials in Fort Bragg, N.C., did not return an AP call for comment on the case. Fort Lewis officials said they did not know about Clousing's case and could not comment.

Speaking from a friend's home in Seattle, Clousing said he won't participate in what he considers to be a ''war of aggression'' that has ''no legal basis to be fought.''

Clousing sneaked out of Fort Bragg in June 2005. Beginning last fall, his lawyers said, they contacted Fort Bragg and later Fort Lewis to try to negotiate a discharge. But neither installation claims responsibility for him, said attorney Lawrence Hildes. Finally, Clousing decided to just show up at Fort Lewis.

His planned return comes just ahead of a hearing is scheduled next week at Fort Lewis for an officer charged last month with conduct unbecoming an officer and missing troop movement after he refused to deploy to Iraq. First Lt. Ehren Watada, 28, has said that his research convinced him that the war was illegal.

Watada could face nearly eight years in prison and a dishonorable discharge if convicted, his attorney has said.

Clousing, who was trained as an interrogator with the 82nd Airborne Division, deployed to Baghdad in December 2004 and was in Mosul when he said he witnessed the killing of a young Iraqi man.

His convoy had stopped to help another unit when the man came up in a vehicle, Clousing said.

''He slowed his car down, took his hands off the steering wheel and braked immediately,'' Clousing recalled. As the man started turning the vehicle around, another soldier ''fired off four to five rounds into the side of the vehicle.''

Clousing rested his head in his hands as he described helping a medic pull the injured man from the vehicle, then watching as soldiers tried to stanch his bleeding.

''The boy, looking up at me, was literally dying in front of my eyes as I looked down at him,'' he said.

Clousing said he approached unit leaders about the shooting but was treated as an inexperienced soldier who ''needed to shut up.''

Upon returning to Fort Bragg in April 2005, Clousing said he talked with military chaplains and counselors, stressing that although he did not want to be discharged from the service, he felt he could no longer support the Iraq war.

Clousing said he's not opposed to all war and because of that chose not to apply as a conscientious objector.

''My intent was solely to learn how to come to grips with what I was a part of and what had happened and what is happening,'' he said.

He sneaked out of Fort Bragg in the middle of the night, taking books, clothes and a surfboard.

He left a note on his door, with King's quote: ''Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' But conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but because conscience tells one it is right.''

What The World Needs Now Clean Green Economic Justice

Lester Brown's new book - an excerpt from Earth Policy News