Continuing the Conversation

This week’s posts on water and watersheds brought interesting responses that made me want to continue the conversation this morning: • Oil is irreplaceable, water is replaceable when it rains. That doesn’t change your conclusion on better water management.

This is a good point, but it’s not true. Water is renewable in the sense that it moves through the water cycle (precipitation, infiltration and runoff to oceans, evaporation, precipitation), but there is not one drop more water now than there was when the earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago (or 8,000 years ago for my creationist friends). Moreover, other forms of energy (solar, hydro, gas, coal, nuclear, wind) can replace oil, but without clean fresh water, we all die.

• I'm concerned about "diverse coalitions to protect them” – “diverse” and “coalitions" are two words fraught with well-meaning intentions that don't go unpunished by corruption/incompetence. We are a republic. We elect fools.

I wasn’t thinking so much in political terms as about all the varied users of rivers – from fishermen to boaters to consumers to farmers to artists – who too often see themselves in conflict instead of as having a common interest in protecting the river and its water.

• And when population continues to expand? Perhaps mandatory limits to child bearing? Ebola, Isis, Assad, Putin?

Yes, well, there’s the frightening rub. For while the amount of water hasn’t increased in 4.5 billion (8,000) years, the seven billion people who depend on it have more than doubled since 1960.

It’s all connected.

“Any thoughts on how to share?”

So wrote a reader after Monday’s post. It’s a good question, and the first step is to stop addressing today’s issues with yesterday’s attitudes. Take, for example, water, which we are endlessly told is the oil of the 21^st century. It’s not. We are addicted to oil. We are dependent on water, which is finite and irreplaceable. Here are some ideas for thinking differently about it:

1. Plan in terms of watersheds rather than arbitrary lines on a map, so that water becomes the unifying, rather than the divisive, feature of a community.
2. Stop thinking of water as commodity – and of rivers as pipes to deliver that commodity. They are ecosystems that sustain all life.
3. Question grandiose plans to transfer water from one basin to another, such as China’s $79 billion project to reverse the Yangtze (based on Mao’s 1952 idea!); decades-old proposals to divert the Great Lakes into the Mississippi and send water to the arid West; Sitka, Alaska’s, aim to ship bulk water worldwide.
4. Consider all that rivers provide – drinking water, food, hygiene, transportation, irrigation, hydropower, baptism, recreation, tranquility, beauty – and build diverse coalitions to protect them.
5. Reform the tangle of conflicting rules and customs governing water use so that upstream dams – as we have built on the Colorado and Turkey intends to build on the Tigris and Euphrates – don’t deprive downstream states of water, and downstream dams don’t flood upstream communities.

We aren’t going to do all this tomorrow. We need to start today.

Reclaiming the Commons

One little-noted thread running through many current issues – from the slaughters in the Middle East to the ethnic wars in Africa and Asia to the drought in the American west – is the growing irrelevance of national and state borders for either understanding modern problems or providing a framework for their solution. When European powers began conquering and settling the rest of the world, they divided it up according to their needs and rivalries, ignoring the realities they encountered. One of the most striking examples occurred in the states west of the Mississippi, where the national government imposed a two-dimensional grid on a three-dimensional landscape, without regard for the land’s physical features or native inhabitants.

Over 100 years ago, John Wesley Powell, who made the first recorded passage through the Grand Canyon despite having lost his arm at the Battle of Shiloh, argued that the only effective planning unit for western settlement was the watershed: "that area of land . . . within which all living things are inextricably linked by their common water course and where, as humans settled, simple logic demanded that they become part of a community."

Two months ago, Thomas Friedman wrote of environmentalists’ vision for the eastern Mediterranean as a “region without borders because only by managing it as an integrated river system and water basin . . . can you sustainably manage its resources for the good of all. “

We can no longer afford to carve up the only world we have. We must learn now to share it.

One Hundred Years Ago

I have an old friend, now dead, whose father was a young lieutenant in Britain’s Coldstream Guards 100 years ago. Years later he described flying to North Africa soon after the war had ended; and as his plane crossed low over Belgium and France, he saw that it took only minutes to fly over trenches that had so recently seemed a universe of mud, stench and death. He was stunned by the mindlessness of it all. In early August 1914, the Great War began, as all wars do, with patriotic pomp and the chest pounding of national leaders. This war will be short, they assured their people, and it will end in a decisive victory by the forces of good. Only then will we have peace and prosperity. The virtuous enthusiasm spread to millions of young men, eager for valor. Four years later over 37 million people were dead. A century later no one is quite sure why.

This was “the war to end war,” wrote H.G. Wells, the war, Woodrow Wilson assured us, that would "make the world safe for democracy." Less than three decades later, 80 million people died in the Good War, and across the arc of the 20^th century, writes Milton Leitenberg in Deaths in Wars and Conflicts in the 20^th Century, “231 million people died in wars and human conflict.”

When numbers get so large, they lose all meaning. As we grow numb to them, we choose to forget that each of those who died was not a statistic.

The Big Bang

Worshippers at a small church in coastal Maine will be treated to a science lesson during next Sunday’s sermon: “The Big Bang: God Spoke and ‘Bang’ It Happened”

Even Genesis allowed Him six days.

I’m not sure why that churchyard billboard jumped out at me. I don’t consider other people’s religious beliefs, however ludicrous, to be my business. But in a world in which centuries-old doctrinal differences still cause genocidal massacres and thousands of violent deaths – and where one sect’s holy shrine is another’s military target – religious activity can no longer get a free pass.

In America, 46 percent of the people believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years, while only one in seven accepts evolutionary theory. These numbers haven’t changed in 40 years. What has changed is the context in which those beliefs are practiced. The free exercise of religion has jumped out of the church and into the political arena, where it challenges science as simply another, often blasphemous, set of beliefs, and where religious groups make ever-more muscular demands to insert their private theologies into the public discourse.

I don’t think that’s what the founding fathers had in mind. They had seen, in Europe and America, among Protestants and Catholics, the toxic mixture of religion and government – not to mention the experiences of African slaves and Native Americans, for whom the combination meant permanent bondage and annihilation.

Religious freedom and political democracy depend on the wisdom to keep them separate.

Nor Any Drop to Drink

Water, water, everywhere, And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

This morning I read a story about the New York Triathlon, which starts with 4,000 swimmers jumping into the Hudson River. “It’s strange to do a swim where you’re wearing goggles and you still can’t see your hand in front of you,” said one competitor of a river that has signs warning about the hazards of the untreated sewage.

It’s amazing how many articles are directly or indirectly about water, from the front pages to the sports pages, most of which are not good news. At least three-quarters of the area of Arizona, Kansas, New Mexico and Nevada are suffering from severe drought. In California the figure is 100%, and 10 of its cities are in fast running out of water. In Detroit, the city cut water supplies to thousands of people struggling to pay their bills, while Toledo is under a tap-water ban because of algae blooms in Lake Erie. ISIS is moving to take control of the Mosul dam, “the most dangerous dam in the world,” whose failure could send a 65-foot tidal wave across northern Iraq.

The earth is made up primarily of water – about 332,500,000 cubic miles of it, in fact – but as the ancient mariner lamented, almost none of it is fit to drink. Yet, as we continue to fret about oil, we continue to waste and pollute the source of life.

Dangerously Awesome and Frighteningly Inane

All I hear these days is how depressing American politics has become – relentlessly negative, disagreeably personal and so partisan that actual governing has become impossible. I may have said something like that myself. So imagine my pleasure at receiving this message from Organizing for Action, “the grassroots movement built by millions of Americans to pass the agenda we voted for in 2012:” James –

According to our records, here's what we have down for this exact email address (do some people have inexact email addresses?):

• Supporter: James
• High-powered lobbyist: No.
• Currently a Koch brother: No.
• Level of awesome: Dangerously high.
• Suggested action today: Keep on being awesome.

Of course, there was a small price for keeping on being awesome. In my case it was $9, which didn’t strike me as much of an expectation for someone at my level of awesomeness. I didn’t pony up, so I guess I am slightly less awesome than I used to be. But I just wanted you to know there was a time . . .

• Meanwhile, across the aisle the theater of the absurd reached new levels of inanity. On Wednesday House Republicans voted to sue President Obama for shredding the Constitution – our first black president has become a "king". On Thursday the same bunch couldn’t even agree on their own legislation to “ensure the security of our borders.” So they demanded that Obama – whom they had just sued for acting unilaterally – do something “without the need for congressional action.”

In Praise of Scalia

Amid all my copious research on Associate Justice of the United States Antonin Scalia, his remarkable decision in Texas v. Johnson (1989) stands out. For here, he was part of a 5-4 majority who upheld the right of every American to burn the American flag. This decision split the Supreme Court in unprecedented ways, with conservatives, liberals and moderates on both sides. When Congress hurriedly passed a law making it a federal crime to desecrate the flag, the same slim majority declared that unconstitutional as well. This was not a popular decision. It takes courage both to burn the flag in Texas and to declare it a fundamental right in Washington. Moreover, Scalia was upholding an activity he found repugnant: “Yes, if I were king, I would not allow people to go about burning the American flag. However, we have a First Amendment, which says that the right of free speech shall not be abridged. And it is addressed, in particular, to speech critical of the government. I mean, that was the main kind of speech that tyrants would seek to suppress. Burning the flag is a form of expression. . . . And burning [it] is a symbol that expresses an idea – I hate the government, the government is unjust, whatever.”

This is how the law should work. In Mosul the self-declared government crucified a man for eating before sunset during Ramadan and published videos of massacring “infidels.” Here the Supreme Court upholds our right to burn the flag. Glad I'm here.

The Scalia Rule

Question: To which have humans, in our finite wisdom, granted more protection: nature or corporations? To answer I must invoke the Scalia Rule, which posits that a nation with a Justice named Scalia protects the rights of corporations far more vigorously than the rights of nature.

In Scalia countries, corporations are persons with rights of speech and religion. They even have special privileges – such as the right to buy entire politicians – unavailable to ordinary people. As for nature, the Book of Genesis, which some believe the foundation of our Constitution, gives people “dominion . . . over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

This is increasingly not true in other countries – and even some U.S. communities – where the idea of “ecosystem rights” is taking root. The first was Ecuador, which incorporated the rights of nature – including its “right to be restored” – in its 2008 constitution. Lest you think this is some mystical-preindustrial-voodoo-noble savage hocus pocus, the section was written by Thomas Linzey, a central Pennsylvania lawyer.

And listen to William O. Douglas’ stirring dissent in Sierra Club v. Morton (1972): “The voice of the inanimate object, therefore, should not be stilled . . . [and] before these priceless bits of Americana (such as a valley, an alpine meadow, a river, or a lake) are forever lost or are so transformed as to be reduced to the eventual rubble of our urban environment, the voice of the existing beneficiaries of these environmental wonders should be heard.”

The Lake District

It’s hard to picture Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud as I drive along Lake Windermere in northwestern England, past billboards marketing water sports and hourly cruises, the slightly nauseating smell of fish and chips, and casually dressed tourists whose crimson necks and ruddy faces reflect temperatures in excess of 85 degrees. Yet the next morning, as I stand on a hill above the lake, looking across to shadowy peaks beneath the pale blue sky, I am struck by the beauty of the place. Beside me is a slab of stone, set in memory of Gordon Stables, who died July 4, 1978, age 55 years: “By his endeavors he prevented electricity pylons being placed on this landscape” – followed by lines from Wordsworth’s The Recluse: ‘Tis, but I cannot name it, ‘tis the sense

Of majesty, and beauty, and repose,

A blended holiness of earth and sky,

Something that makes this individual spot,

This small abiding-place of many men,

A termination, and a last retreat,

A centre, come from wheresoe'er you will,

A whole without dependence or defect,

Made for itself, and happy in itself,

Perfect contentment, Unity entire.

This is not the grandeur of the Rockies or even the Highlands to the north. Its beauty is more civilized, the kind of pastoral landscape the Romantics loved. Today I long more for wild places, perhaps because the wilderness is disappearing so fast, perhaps because my own life seems sedentary and tame.

On the other hand, I hike without fear of being attacked by sheep.

The British Health Bureaucracy

“Just remember,” the oncologist told my friend Lee, “you are in charge of your own health. We work for you.” As Obamacare continues to be assailed in the courts and Congress, amid dark visions of rationed care, death panels and bureaucratic doctors – and along dishearteningly partisan lines – one physician’s words remind us that the issue, in the end, is not about politics but about human health and human dignity.

It’s perhaps worth noting that the doctor practices in Scotland, where as part of Britain’s national health system, he is a government employee. He also makes house calls and has given Lee his cell-phone number and told him to use it any time, night or day.

I have come to Glasgow to visit Lee, who has been my friend for 55 years. He has esophageal cancer, which is not a diagnosis you want anywhere, but better in Britain than many places I can think of – particularly if, like Lee, you are poor and live alone. The system isn’t perfect – when Lee had a stent inserted in his chest, he recovered in a hospital ward reminiscent of World War I movies – but it seems a far cry from the rants of American radio hosts. Those with cancer even receive a government stipend, public recognition that the disease carries enough indignities without piling poverty on top.

It’s hard to believe, I know, that this bureaucratic system treats Lee, not as a patient, but as a person. But it does.

“All they will call you will be deportees”

“In this country immigrants are still treated like victims. . . .If you can help them tell their stories, you will have done a lot.” I am reading Swedish novelist Henning Mankell’s The Shadow Girls, recommended by a friend, about the thousands of people – from Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere – who wash up daily on Europe’s southern shores. It is a reminder that America isn’t the only country with an immigrant issue, that all those children at our southern border are not just problems but people, and that most of them are not so much coming for America’s freebies as fleeing for their lives. Don’t misunderstand me, this is a huge problem, but it is a human one and it is global in scope. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees reports that the world’s refugee population now exceeds 50 million for the first time since World War II.

Last Friday, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria ordered every Christian still living in the city of Mosul to leave, convert or be killed. In images chillingly reminiscent of the Holocaust, ISIS appropriated the gold, confiscated the houses and destroyed the icons of the Chaldean Christian community that had lived in Mosul for 1,700 years. Many “expressed a sense of utter abandonment and isolation,” The New York Times reported. They fled with nothing but the clothes they wore, bringing the number of Iraq’s internal refugees to 1.2 million.

Seventeen hundred years of history. Gone forever. “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Metamorphosis

Only Antonin Scalia knows for sure, of course, but I believe the original intent of the nation’s Founders was to make impeachment a rare event for a serious cause. In fact, only three presidents have ever been impeached: Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Both Johnson, who was a dreadful president, and Clinton, who has ironically become the Republicans’ favorite Democrat, were acquitted of trumped-up charges; when Nixon understood that he would be impeached and convicted, he resigned. So Barack Obama must have done some pretty bad things because Republicans want to impeach and sue him. While the lunatic fringe – from Sarah Palin to the South Dakota Republican Party – is demanding impeachment for a ragbag of offenses – our unsecure borders, Bowe Bergdahl’s release, Obamacare’s lies – John Boehner is suing the president for delaying implementation of Obamacare’s employer mandate, a law he opposes.

Kafka could not have written this script. Israel is invading Gaza; Russian-backed Ukrainian rebels just shot down a Malaysian passenger jet; ISIS has declared a bloody caliphate in Mesopotamia; Iraq and Afghanistan are falling apart. Here at home, we have a crisis on our southern border; our inner cities are crumbling victims of apartheid; most of the West is battling a drought of Biblical proportions.

And the Speaker of the House, to avoid the political disaster of impeachment and yet cover his right flank, is preparing to sue the president for not implementing a law that his caucus has voted 54 times to repeal. 

Gasoline Prices Are Dropping Now (Hurrah! Hurrah!)

24/7 Wall Street recently reported a nationwide fall in gas prices – always good news for the sluggish U.S. economy, which depends on low energy costs and on subsidizing the American consumer and his automobile. And it’s particularly good news for the poor and middle class whose stagnant real income is most sensitive to gas prices. Right?

Well, we need more than cars to drive; we also need things to drive on, like roads and bridges, which are in deplorable disrepair across the country. And perhaps, instead of subsidizing consumption with cheaper fuel, we should encourage conservation by bringing gas prices into line with social and environmental costs. But such changes require two very bad things: public works and higher taxes.

Right now, the highway trust fund is fast going broke, jeopardizing hundreds of thousands of both projects and jobs, because House Republicans won’t touch anything that might be perceived as a tax and don’t think the government should be responsible for anything except their pensions and health care. Never mind that only Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have lower gas taxes than America, and that almost half our states haven’t raised the gas tax in ten years.

Still, we continue to crush high-speed rail and any other innovations that might be more efficient and might leave in the ground some of the fossil fuels damaging our climate.

What if instead we rebuilt our crumbling infrastructure, tripled the price of gasoline, and subsidized the transition for those hit hardest by the changes?

R.I.P.

Charity Hicks, a Detroit social activist and policy director of the East Michigan Environmental Action Council, died on Tuesday in a New York hospital. Early on May 31^st, Charity was waiting for a bus to take her to a panel discussion when a car veered off 10^th Avenue, slammed into a hydrant and the bus stop sign, which fell on Charity’s head. She never awakened from her coma. Despite having his car, eyewitness descriptions and a first name, the police have not yet arrested the driver who fled the scene.

I met Charity several years ago at the Center for Whole Communities in Vermont. She was wearing, as she always did, African clothes of bright colors and speaking in rhetorical cascades about the world’s injustices. Heir more to the Black Power than the Civil Rights movement,  she fought for dignity for all people. She devoted her life to Detroit’s oppressed, focusing on food and water security, supporting her extended family on a part-time university stipend. In May, while demonstrating against the city shutting off water to the poor, she was jailed. “The conditions,” she said, “are meant to shame you, demoralize you, criminalize you and break you down.”

She was a fighter with a very human heart, filled at times with self-doubt, subject to depression, yearning for peace in places she would never visit. “My work is in the city,” she once said. “But my heart is in the wild.”

Charity was my friend. I will miss her big heart. 

We Are Not Immune

Some years ago, in a sparsely populated part of Costa Rica, I listened to the sounds of rustling and murmurs throughout the dark night. At first I envisioned large animals out hunting, which was frightening enough, but I soon realized the sounds were people moving in endless procession, and my imagination turned to guerillas, drug runners, kidnappers. In the morning I learned the travelers were Nicaraguans on a perilous journey to a better life. Some of them undoubtedly ended up at the U.S.-Mexican border, where they became part of the crisis of illegal immigration, the subject these days of so much heated talk and so little proposed action – particularly around the 4^th of July when patriots blabber on about “American exceptionalism” under siege from porous borders.

I don’t know the ultimate solution, but it seems clear that the old ways of thinking do not work. You cannot build a fence high enough or dig a moat deep enough to keep desperate people out. More importantly, what the new nativists don’t grasp is that this issue signifies, not America’s specialness, but how much a part of the world we have become.

For as more and more people gather at our borders and in our detention centers, what we face is not an immigrant problem, but a refugee problem – with a profile much like the rest of the world, where 45 million refugees, 80 percent of them women and children, live impoverished lives in squalid camps, breeding anger and discontent.

Going Backward

I do not write to flog Hobby Lobby, the company behind the latest legal challenge to Obamacare. I admire companies that are mission-driven and espouse values other than just the bottom line. What distresses me is that contraception, an issue I thought settled long ago, is again under assault. This is a form of guerilla warfare, with no fixed lines, in which women are forever forced to retake old ground. How can abortions be safe, in any sense of the word, if contraception is continually under attack? This is a women’s issue, and I’m not sure many men actually get that. The Supreme Court’s three female justices don’t just dissent on contraception cases. They seem personally affronted, as was the elderly woman who asked me 18 years ago when I was running for Congress: “Are you pro-choice or anti-woman?” When Rick Santorum attacked birth control as well as abortion in the 2012 Republican presidential primary debates, it just seemed more proof of how firmly rooted in the Inquisition his political beliefs are. Santorum is running again in 2016; his views have not changed.

But there is more than politics involved. My friend Bayard Storey spent his long career studying reproduction, for which he received scientific honors and a philosophical awakening: “A woman provides 99.999 percent of the metabolic input to development of the offspring; the male’s contribution to the process is miniscule. It’s the woman who has to do all the work and carry the burden. No legislator has the right to regulate that.”

The Corporations’ 4th of July Party

Disclaimer: Many of you were shocked by Wednesday’s report on Justice Scalia’s speech to NICE! and wanted to know more about the organization. Unfortunately there is no NICE!. While Wednesday’s post was satire, today’s story is entirely factual. The second in my series to humanize corporations takes us to a cookout and fireworks display hosted by the Corporations. Despite having been declared persons with ever-expanding constitutional rights (cf, fetuses, illegal immigrants) by the Supreme Court, the Corporations remain among the most misunderstood of Americans. Apparently, while their money is “speech,” it doesn’t talk to everyone.

The Corporations throw their annual July 4^th party in their awesome house with the glass ceilings. ("They keep the ladies on their toes," joked Mr. Corporation.) Unlike some of the phonies I could mention on our block, the Corporations are real persons, whose history in America traces, not just to Citizens United in 2010, but all the way back to 1819 and the Dartmouth College case. Almost two centuries later they have extra reason to celebrate, as they have just gained freedom of worship as well as of speech

There are no more loyal Americans than the Corporations, who celebrate the Fourth of July as the day the colonists declared "no taxation without representation". "And we are working hard to bring those days back to America," they said, "so we can bring back the millions of jobs and billions of dollars we have had to keep overseas because, until this Supreme Court, we haven’t had a voice."

NICE!

In a speech last night to the National Institute for Corporate Entities (NICE!), Justice Antonin Scalia urged corporations to pursue their rights under the Second Amendment. “We have now secured for you two of the three most important constitutional rights – free speech and freedom of religion,” he told the audience. “It’s time to go for the trifecta.” Asserting that corporations have the same right “as any other person” to protect themselves from harm, Scalia suggested the Court would be open to an expansion of the Second Amendment, and he counseled corporations against waiting too long. “Women are ‘feminizing’ the law,” he said, making quotation marks with his fingers, “and on this Court, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan – like women everywhere – almost always vote as a bloc against the manly virtues. If Hillary is elected in 2016 and packs the court with women, you can kiss District of Columbia v Heller goodbye and my famous line that ‘it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct’. As for gay marriage, don’t get me started.”

Scalia concluded by looking wistfully into a future in which corporations enjoy all the protections of the Bill of Rights. “I dream of an America in which you are secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, cannot be compelled to testify against yourself, and ‘excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed.’

“Each of you is a NICE! person, and don't let the liberals try to tell you otherwise.”

“Warre of every one against every one”

Amid the western world’s preparations to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of World War I, maybe it’s a good time to think about World War III. Maybe not. It’s a depressing subject, and most of us prefer to live our lives removed from both the threat and the reality of war. But that’s not so easy in a world where war seems to be everywhere, including places where we spent many years, thousands of lives and trillions of dollars to avert it. “You break it, you own it,” Colin Powell famously told George Bush before the Iraq war, and we certainly broke it. But what does it mean to own it? Clearly, we don’t control it, and it seems foolish and dangerous to think we can. Moreover, whenever we concentrate on one war, others break out elsewhere. What’s a great power to do?

We can no more disengage from the world than control it, much as Americans might like to, and, as the big business of tourism demonstrates, the world beyond our borders is not just a dangerous place. It’s also an interesting place. Perhaps for us armchair policy makers, that’s a start. We can’t change the world, but we can engage it differently. Just as the movement to reclaim city parks considered too dangerous to enter began when people refused to cede them to muggers, so, instead of pulling up the drawbridge, we can go out into the world with curiosity and an open mind. Just be careful.