"GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL!"
The planet Earth, though
not threatened with destruction by man-made global warming, is by no means
indestructible. There are many unpredictable events within our solar system,
and still, more outside it that could make Earth uninhabitable by humans.
Paul Johnson, English historian
To prepare adequately for the challenge of global warming, we must
acknowledge both the good and the bad that it will bring. If our starting point
is to prove that Armageddon is on its way, we will not consider all of the
evidence, and will not identify the smartest policy choices.
Bjorn Lomborg, Danish political scientist, and environmentalist
Is global warming creeping upon us in the West? If it is, there are legions of
doubters as well as advocates. The doubters claim it is suspect science, and
even has the taint of the absolutes of religion, while the advocates point to
the shrinking coastlines, melting glaciers of the Arctic Region, and the
hurricanes and tsunamis that periodically punctuate the calm.
There was the ten-day Chicago heatwave a few years ago with the temperature
never dipping below 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It took the lives of 750 people,
mainly people without adequate temperature control in their homes with air conditioning
or the homeless on the street, then, of course, there were the elderly that
best should have stayed indoors and others who didn’t reduce the level of their
exercise routine. Deaths were among all of these groups.
Years ago, when I was a boy in the 1950s, spending a summer at my uncle
Leonard’s, who was a professor at the University of Detroit, I was there during
a similar heatwave of days over one hundred. There was no clamor for
restrictions on the use of fossil fuel or gas emissions from automobiles; no
environmentalist raging about Armageddon as hot weather was taken more or less
in stride.
That said heat waves in Paris, London, Calcutta, and Melbourne have over the
past several years taken the lives of tens of thousands of citizens. We as a species
seem to always be a day late and a dollar short when it comes to behaving
sensibly when it comes to the fragile nature of the planet we inhabit.
Many are skeptical of global warming even though they acknowledge the carbon
dioxide levels of pollutants are on the rise, but they say, “So what? What’s
the big deal?”
Scientists have come to sound a lot like the authority once heard from the
church, temple, or mosque pulpit. They claim irrefutable evidence of a causal
correlation between carbon dioxide emissions and temperature increases. For
example, in the Arctic Region, they point out there are only 20 major glaciers
compared to 500 in 1855. Moreover, the temperature has risen more than 3
degrees over the testing period of the last three-quarters of a century with a
severe effect on the animals inhabiting the region.
Does this make an impression on doubters? Not that you could tell. Does it move
citizens in general to change their behavior? Again, not that you could tell.
Whatever advocates or doubters believe, there is little doubt that the
Louisiana Coastal Marshlands and Wetlands are experiencing drastic changes. It
has become the breeding ground for new species of birds, animals, and insects.
The rise of the water level of these marshlands has also reduced the Louisiana
coastline by more than 25 square miles as this land has disappeared into the
Gulf of Mexico.
Where once stood majestic giant oaks on the delta nourished by freshwater now
stand naked stumps as weeping sculptures in saltwater. This visual disparity
developed long before Hurricane Katrina of 2005, but little attention was paid
then, or now.
So, what are we to make of this? Glaciers are melting, sea levels rising,
periodic heat waves are suffocating, and coastlines are disappearing as are the
species that once inhabited these unchanging sanctuaries. Even scientists can’t
agree on what we should do. No wonder everyman is confused.
The escape hatch, especially for Americans, has always been optimism: something
will be worked out in the end. But in truth, man’s ingenuity is being tested.
Can he have his cake and eat it, too, or does he have to change his diet? Thus
far he shows little inclination to either reduce his sugar intact or reduce his
carbon emissions. Instead, he dabbles in solutions in search of the problem:
from harnessing wind power to solar panels on the roof. Solar energy is the
way!
As has been shown, this is a risky business at the moment with many such
companies going quickly under. For one, it is expensive to install, and for
another, few can afford the initial investment, plus the technology is in its
infancy.
It is not a bad idea. The power of the sun is what makes life on earth
possible. Efforts to harness solar energy have long been a human pursuit.
President Barak Obama has been an enthusiastic supporter of solar energy, but
the concept has existed since the 19th century and has received substantial
federal government support since at least the 1970s. Yet, today, solar power
comprises less than 1 percent of the electrical power generated in the United
States. Perhaps a breakthrough in the future will make this energy source more
accessible.
The larger problem is that in this postmodern age of the “global village,” the
rest of the world, especially Third World countries are hungry to acquire the
wealth, luxury, and freedom that the United States enjoys. To catch up they see
no other way than to consume masses of fossil fuels, fuels that made the United
States rich and dominant.
China, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, and many other rising
countries in Africa, read of climate change, water scarcity, land degradation,
and depletion of natural resources, and insist that they will control their
emissions when they reach parity with the United States. Justifying this stand,
The United Nations Report on Global Warming reports the last place likely to
feel global warming to any appreciable extend is North America. Imagine what
this does to the incentive of these nations to comply with emission standards.
Two enormous bodies of water the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean protect the
United States and Canada, so while the rest of the world is choking in carbon
gases or dying from periodic heat waves from the excessive use of fossil fuels,
it is difficult to get the attention of Americans.
Mother Nature is out-of-balance, but not yet doomed. The planet can reverse the
trend with sensible restrain in the use of fossil fuels, and Americans can show
the way, but are they willing? Are they interested?
Whatever the reader thinks, and the reader has a right to think whatever, the
subject of global warming is not going to go away. Nearly 1500 scientists from
95 countries compiled a report claiming that two-thirds of the natural
machinery that supports life (sun, water, soil, plants, climate, and diverse
species) is being compromised or degraded by human folly.
People need food, freshwater, timber, fruits and vegetables, and fuel to live.
The pressure on the environment of the world's seven billion souls is putting
serious strain on these resources. Complicating the picture further, since half
of the world’s population now lives in cities, there is little concern or
appreciation of the problems of the natural world.
It is not political rhetoric or ecclesiastical pontification that sustains life
but ordinary working people. Every child who has had the opportunity to grow up
in a rural area knows this. Anyone who has ever hunted knows that white-tailed
deer require a certain amount of land to thrive, any less and they perish. If the
deer population increases, malnutrition, and disease thin out the herd. A pond
that can sustain the waste of 30 ducks with the fish flourishing will die from
the lack of oxygen if 1,000 ducks come to inhabit the pond.
ECOLOGY OF THE MIND – GLOBAL WARMING OF THE PERSONAL KIND
The American population is expected to reach 420 million or 100 million more
than today by 2066. This will put increased pressure on the economy and the
individual’s sense of space and place. Imagine what will happen if the population
reaches 470 - 500 million in fifty years. It could happen.
Experimental psychologists have observed laboratory rats in terms of spatial
comfort and discomfort. When the rat population reaches a certain level, rats
attack and kill each other. We have observed this phenomenon in our
metropolitan areas, as they can become killing zones when the population
reaches a certain level.
Chicago, Illinois grew from a collection of integrated and mutually supportive
ethnic neighborhoods into a metropolitan city of 3 million. It has never lost
its small-town ambiance, not even during the infamous days of Al Capone and
prohibition in the 1920s. But in the late 1960s, Chicago experienced a spike in
violent crime, a shadow that has never lifted.
Murders in the city first peaked in 1974 with 970 when the city population was
three million, a murder rate of 29 per 100,000. It peaked again in 1992 with
943 murders when the city had fewer than three million residences, resulting in
a murder rate of 34 murders per 100,000 citizens. After 1992, the murder count
decreased to 641 murders with a population of 2,799,000 in 1999. In 2002,
Chicago had fewer murders but a significantly higher murder rate than New York
City and Los Angeles, two much larger cities.
The experimental psychology laboratory rat experiment doesn’t compute with
Chicago, as it is a problem indigenous to its subculture of ethnic gangs, a
lack of inner-city jobs for young people, and other related metropolitan social
problems.
As vital resources dwindle for food, freshwater, timber, and fuel, competition
for limited supplies could lead to war. This has already happened in Africa.
Another less obvious contributor is one of ethnic and national pride.
In this era of smartphones and 24/7 media surveillance and coverage, there is
another kind of global warming. It is personal. People are jealous of what they
have and are afraid to lose, while people envy what they don’t have that others
have but they want.
It is this murky world between jealousy and envy, love and hate, rigidity and
arrogance, pride and vengeance that often fuels the motivation to violence. Is
this the rationale of terrorists? Possibly. What I do know is that emotional as
well as material resources have to be in some kind of balance for the actions
of people to be under some control.
If the world relies on force rather than cooperation, fear rather than
goodwill, our children and grandchildren can expect arbitrary violence as a
means to redress real or imagined wrongs. That was the policy in the last
century, the bloodiest in man’s history.
We cannot experience a sensible ecology of our environment if we don’t have an
equal sense of an ecology of the mind. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s Steps
to an Ecology of the Mind (1972) covers this subject in a conversation with his
daughter.
Here Bateson develops a way of defining thinking in terms of the nature of
order and organization in living systems, providing a unified theory
encompassing the study of biology and behavior. He doesn’t see man apart from
nature but very much a part of nature, subject to the same laws and
punishments. Bateson provides this caution:
It appears that the man-environment system has certainly been progressively
unstable since the introduction of metals, the wheel, and script. The
deforestation of Europe and the man-made deserts of the Middle East and North
Africa are evidence for that statement.
Civilizations have risen and fallen. New technology for the exploitation of
nature or a new technique for the exploitation of other men permits the rise of
civilization. But each civilization, as it reaches the limits of what can be
exploited in that particular way, must eventually fall. The new invention gives
elbow room or flexibility, but they use up that flexibility is death.
TECHNOLOGY FORGIVES US OUR SINS CREATING NEW ONES!
Science is in the business of unlocking the mysteries of nature, which is an
end in itself. Technology translates these discoveries into products that have
no designated end other than to saturate the market with tools and “Toys
of the Mind.”
The world of technology is not Camelot or utopia; nor is it the Merlin of
panaceas for solving our pesky problems. Technologists may wave Merlin’s magic
wand and dissolve certain annoyances, but too often it creates new ones. That
innocent period of preteens has devolved with smartphones to the troubling
discovery that eleven-year-olds, for instance, are surfacing pornographic
channels.
While not the intention, the wild promulgation of technology can be retrogressive
as well as progressive. On the other hand, science can sometimes prove
miraculous in its detective work. As mentioned earlier, physical health, as
well as medical science, was advanced when a 19th-century physician discovered
that cholera was a problem of public sanitation. Likewise, public health and
social education may prove a better route to curing AIDS than a miraculous
drug.
The behavior that leads to AIDS, sexual promiscuity, and the exchange of
contaminated needles of drug addicts, is not likely to change because the
medical profession says the lifestyle can be fatal.
But there is the possibility of reason triumphing if those with AIDS become
their therapists by promoting more responsible behavior among the most
vulnerable to the disease. With such attention, it ceases to be a moral issue
and becomes a public health concern.
In the postmodern world, lifestyle is the key to such persistent diseases as
diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and strokes, lung and throat cancer.
Sanitation was key to eliminating cholera. Malnutrition and unavailable potable
drinking water remain chronic problems in many Third World countries. These are
external factors; lifestyle is an internal problem.
The difficulty with lifestyle is that few want to change. They want a pill to
reduce hunger pangs so they won’t be obese; if they are obese, they want a pill
to reduce their weight without exercise. If addicted to cigarettes, they want a
cigarette that gives them a buzz but won’t harm their health. Of course, the medical
profession and pharmaceutical industry are heavily committed to doing just that
as this is a multi-billion dollar business.
The sophistication of science and ingenuity of technology “cut and control”
through the established norms of society to create new needs and wants while
ignoring the possible consequences of such disruptions. Not surprisingly, the
problems high on our agenda to solve are the problems we create with our “cut
and control” philosophy.
NOWHERE LAND OF EDUCATION
Take education. Ever since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in the late 1950s,
educators have been renovating education to be more science-centered at the
expense of rather than the complement of liberal arts education and cultural
tradition. Not everyone wants to be a scientist or engineer.
If education is made interesting, the interests of students will flow to
education. That has not happened. While the United States funds public school
education more than any other nation on the planet, it lags considerably with
the performance of students of many nations that pay a lot less per student for
education: e.g., Finland, China, Japan, and Indonesia.
Since the de-emphasis of traditional education has drifted away from the
student’s spiritual side, religious institutions have seemingly lost their way.
They once were the center of the community keeping ideas alive for being caring
as well as competent.
Education has become job training to create a society of technicians and
technocrats who robotically run feverishly helter-skelter here and there
chasing the position, promotion, or next raise with little time to enjoy the
moment, or to pursue what truly interests them.
We have created this social animal, and now we cannot put him back into
Aladdin’s Lamp. Nor can educators turn failed students into scholars or failing
schools into character-building factories by acting like storm troopers
dispensing tough love.
Education reformer Michelle Rhee stormed into the dysfunctional public school
system of Washington, D.C. in 2007 as Chancellor with the promise to turn
everything around. She hired thousands of new teachers while firing hundreds of
others including principals. Then she closed scores of schools against a
bevy of protests capturing national headlines. Three years later, in 2007, she
left with the failed school system still failing in her wake. She was a
lightning rod that failed to throw sustaining light.
THE NOWHERE LAND OF
EDUCATION
As competent as Ms. Rhee may be believed to be in her profession, the problem
was never about her, but she allowed herself to be in the limelight, advocating
test-based verifiable education, schools that mirrored high achievement
institutions, and teachers and administrators who marched to the same drummer
with equal cadence and competence as if a metronomic army.
The problem was beyond the limits of a systemic issue. The problem was about
children that often lived in uninspiring homes were making it to school every
day was the definitive challenge. You cannot ignore the pathology of a community,
as the Washington, D.C. public school system has been for at least the past
fifty years, and expect a ramrod approach to change the situation overnight. It
will not happen; it did not happen. And Ms. Rhee was unwittingly put in the
center of this impossible situation with the faulty hubris she could perform a
miracle. Predictably, she couldn't.
This intervention does point out, however, that there are no quick cures to
chronic problems, problems that focus on obvious symptoms (poor student
performance in the classroom) without a clear definition of why this is so.
Systemic chronic issues of a social and societal nature (family home life,
outside activities, community assimilation) need addressing before renovating
the educational system. Look into the home environments of the students and the
challenges they face, then take baby steps towards amelioration.
The public school system is a community problem of organizational development
before educational solutions can be entertained. Once again, the cart was put
in front of the horse, and everyone wondered why not an inch of progress was
made.
Expediency is a national American pastime of a solution-driven culture.
We are intimidated by complex problems too difficult to define much less solve,
problems that engineer William L. Livingston, IV carefully addresses in "Design
for Prevent"(2010) metaphorically putting the horse in front of the
cart. There are no shortcuts, no rendering of pesky problems without
doing the heavy lifting. Livingston writes:
In the context of
institutional ideology, prevention is held as something to be aggressively
avoided. And, so it is.
We want students to behave as students should behave. If they aren’t behaving,
aren’t learning, we’re going to commit a ton of money to the problem, bring in
a guru to recruit an army of new teachers, close down all failed schools close
to the students’ homes as punishment, and play the fear card for all it is
worth.
It wouldn’t be so bad if we learned from this and started to look at our problems
differently. But when you’re on a technological high, it is pretty difficult to
see the entrance ramp from the exit ramp, and so collisions are inevitable.
We can go from the micro (Washington, D. C. Public School System) to the macro
(the environment) and see if we are willing to look as to how we might have
prevented them in the first place.
INUIT AND THE GRASSHOPPER EFFECT
The Arctic Region is not only melting but turning into a toxic sink according
to research scientists. All the chemicals that Rachel Carson complained about
in Silent Spring (1962) more than fifty years ago – DDT, PCB,
dioxin, and mercury – have found their way into this region and are now killing
fish, fowl, and other animals common to this refuge.
Toxicity spreads through the food chain. First, the fish are poisoned, then the
marine mammals that feed on the fish, then the animals such as polar bears that
feed on the seals then even other animals such as the caribou. How do these
chemicals kill the caribou?
Scientists call this the grasshopper effect. Chemical
pollutants are released into the environment and carried thousands of miles
south, then evaporate in the warmer climate, ride the winds back to the frigid
Arctic Region where they eventually fall to earth in the acid or poisoned rain.
The caribou feed upon the tainted moss and grass of the tundra, fish feed upon
the tainted plankton, which then is eaten by the seals who are then eaten by
polar bears. Polar bears are showing such high levels of pollutants in their system that they qualify for burial in hazardous waste dumps.
Consider the Inuit, the indigenous people of the Arctic Region who came here
from the orient more than 4,000 years ago. Seals provide 65 percent of their
protein diet. The seal and the sea are the greatest sources of sustenance, and
integral to Inuit culture, spiritually and emotionally as well as biologically.
The Inuit, more than the Eskimo, have adapted to the extreme climatic
conditions of the Arctic and maintain to this day remnants of the hunting and
trapping lifestyle of prehistoric man.
Agriculture was never a possibility in the millions of square miles of the icy
tundra. Therefore, hunting became the core of the Inuit cultural history. Thus
the everyday life in modern Inuit settlements, perhaps only established a
decade ago, resembles that which existed 5,000 years ago in their long history
as skilled hunters dependent on the integrity of that environment.
The extreme cold did not deter this most remarkable human accomplishment, but
pollution may. Inuit are dying at an early age, and infant mortality rates and
birth defect levels are close to the highest in the world. Why?
The Inuit life expectancy in 2012 was about 67.7 compared to 79.5 for the rest
of Canadians while it is 81.3 for Americans. In 1900 it was 48 to 51 for
Americans to 26 to 29 for the Inuit. Canadian life expectancy in 1900 was 48.
We have already supplied the answer. Industrial, scientific, and technological
progress has taken the natural out of the equation of Mother Nature. Nothing
grows today without the aid of a complex of fertilizers and growth additives to
increase crop yields. Now hybrids supplant what was once considered corn,
wheat, sugarcane, peas, barley, soy, and the list goes on, as these gifts of
nature are now on steroids. Small wonder that children who eat these vital food
groups are often taller, stronger, faster, and more hyperactive.
Earlier, we discussed the case of toxic metals in the potable water supply of
Flint, Michigan. Is it any wonder that industrial pollutants from the United
States, Central, and South America, and China find their way into our diet from
the Arctic Circle to our dinner table?
The food chain of possible pollutants is only a major problem where due
diligence is not maintained. Periodically, restaurant chains are forced to shut
down temporarily because of people getting sick or even dying due to food
poisoning.
The Inuit don’t have this restaurant problem, but Inuit mothers are forced to
breastfeed their babies as they don’t have ready access to formula milk. The
high mortality rate for Inuit infants can be traced to breast milk that is full
of pollutants as these babies show the highest level of toxins on the planet.
As environmentalists have shown, the Arctic Region is the early warning system
for the rest of the planet. Inuit, while contributing little to contaminating
their environment, are the innocent victims of industrial pollution that
carries the name of “progress.” The only hope is that industrial nations to the
south, east, and west find the will as well as the way to halt the production
of these pollutants. Not an easy task.
It isn’t that the human community is not trying. We have had a plethora of summits
over the past 40 plus years trying to get this global pollution problem under
control: United Nations Conference on the Human Environment,
1972; Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro, 1992; Rio + 10, 2002; Rio
+ 20, 2012; and Earth Summit 2015, “Eye on Earth.”
It is not that there is not a will to get this problem under control; there
simply hasn’t been found a way that the heaviest polluting nations can agree to
follow.
Then there is the Kyoto Protocol, which is an international treaty
extending the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC), as global warming was then called, that committed
State Parties to reduce greenhouse gases emissions based on these premises:
that global warming exists and that manmade CO2 emissions were the
cause.
These protocols were adopted in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997, and were first
enforced in 2005. There are currently 192 parties to the protocols as Canada
withdrew effective December 2012.
* * *
A few million years ago, there were tsunamis,
hurricanes, and mudslides due to torrential rainfall. Craggy mountains split
off giant boulders that crashed into the valley, glaciers cracked off icy
sculptures and thundered into the sea, and snowcapped mountains produced
roaring avalanches. There were earthquakes as the earth’s plates shifted often
attended by volcanoes that spewed molten lava into the valley to form rivers of
heat. Long periods of drought interrupted by lighting showers led to forest
fires that torched millions of acres whilst periodically tornadoes cut through
the land as if a menacing knife. Spring floods swelled the banks of massive
rivers creating temporary lakes changing the landscape and redefining
continents with tectonic shifts.
Then man entered the equation, and over tens of hundreds of years in
existential progression, first experiencing these phenomena and then resolving
to become Mother Nature's master.
In the process, man settled where nature could do him the most harm: along
coastlines, in the shadow of awesome mountains and menacing volcanoes, on the
banks of giant rivers to sporadically feel the full wrath of nature. His quest
satisfied, he came to poison his adopted home as self-indulgent Nowhere Man
turning Paradise into Nowhere Land.
TIJUANA TOXICITY LEGACY
In Tijuana, Mexico, not far from the border of the United States, there is a
tariff-free trade zone. More than 300 companies from several nations operate in
this zone. It provides jobs for 140,000 people from Tijuana and the surrounding
area. The paradox is that these workers are producing pollutants that are threatening
their health and that of their children.
In 2006, twelve years after one industrial site was abandoned, cracked battery
cases remained piled haphazardly in stacks, baking in the semi-tropical sun.
The labels are quite revealing: Sears, Diehard, Delco Freedom II, Wrought Lead
Carbon Construction, 60-month limited warranty.
Nothing is uplifting to an abandoned factory. Its crumbling buildings in a
landscape of discarded corroding machines and tools not only poisons the
environment but creates a visage of man's failure. This is the case with Metales
y Derivado, a lead-smelting company, located in Mesa de Otay
Industrial Park. It was ordered to clean up its industrial waste at a cost
of more than $6 million decades ago. It has not happened.
The history of the region is a narrative of the border’s lawlessness, a tale of
the invisible line between Mexico and the United States where toxicity has the
face of commerce.
“Metales,” as the firm was called, decided to abandon the plant without securing
the waste. Left behind were 40 million pounds of toxic wastes in drums rusting
from rainfall, baking in the sun, and leaking into streams, and seeping into
the soil and the artesian wells. The winds swirl and stir up clouds of dust
along with fumes that pollute the air for miles around.
Colonia Chilpancingo, a community below this towering hillside, largely
a shantytown of 10,000 workers and their families worries about the remaining
contamination to this day. Rains bring rancid runoff down the hill, and breezes
stir anew the toxic dust.
Every time it rains a nearby stream overflows into a creek that provides water
for washing and bathing. It is full of lead oxide, sulfites, sulfuric acid, and
arsenic. As this highly contaminated waterway weaves its way through the
shantytown, everyone and everything in its path are in peril.
Over 90 percent of the children have tested for elevated levels of lead in
their blood, which can affect the development of children’s central nervous
system. An inordinate number of children have suffered birth defects. For a
score of years or more, this small community has petitioned the government to
clean up the site, and each time the petitioners have been turned down (re: Rob
Davis, Voice Staff Writer, “Taming Tijuana’s Toxic Legacy,” June
12, 2006).
These children are innocent victims. Less than a mile from the United States,
these petitioners have no law on their side, as this free trade zone is not
subject to compliance with environmental laws of the United States. The parents
laboring in these factories for $15 for a ten-hour day have become reluctant
accomplices to this tragedy with no sense of communal power.
[The cleanup of the abandoned Tijuana lead smelter plant, Metales y
Derivado, was completed in 2008, but to this day the after-effects of
years of delay remain with many families in Colonia Chilpancingo. Of one thing
you can be certain when it comes to the fallout of toxicity, it is axiomatic
that the powerless will suffer its indiscriminate wrath.]
SAN DIEGO’S BARRIO LOGAN
Barrio Logan is a small ethnic community on the coast of San Diego.
For forty years, this community saw the region turned into a smorgasbord of
industrial factories and then a regional dump and junkyard. The residence
complained but nothing happened.
The City Fathers instead cut Barrio Logan off from the rest of San Diego by
choosing to build a bridge and an elaborate highway system across its
boundaries.
Once again the neighborhood was under attack. Each day hundreds of diesel trucks
and tens of thousands of automobiles filled their breathing air with toxic
exhaust emissions. Next, scores of industrial plants sprung up around their
perimeter further shrinking their breathing space and assaulting the air, land,
and water with toxins.
In a minor protest, Barrio Logan community leaders asked the City Fathers to
build a park under the bridge for their recreation. The City Fathers promised
the park but reneged on the promise citing other more pressing contingencies.
The citizens rebelled. They formed a human chain around the perimeter of the
would-be site for the park and drew media attention. The city gave them their
park. Chicano Park became a rallying cry for the people of
Barrio Logan. Local artists painted the pylons of the bridge with ethnic art in
the celebration of their culture.
Studies have shown that communities of color or ethnic groups at the lower end
of the economic food chain are more likely than affluent neighborhoods to be
exploited with little chance to remedy the situation even when 20 percent of
the Barrio Logan residents have asthma or asthmatic symptoms or related medical
conditions.
After the success of establishing Chicano Park, the community took on Master
Plating, a factory in the heart of Barrio Logan that dumped hexavalent
chromium into the ground. This chemical is known as a cancer-causing toxin.
Local television got involved and the plant was shut down.
The levels of hexavalent chromium were reduced by 75 percent, another small
community victory (see Doug Porter, “Toxic Contaminant Releases in
Barrio Logan Confirmed,” San Diego Free Press, April 23, 2014). The
bane of exploiters is the forgotten going public with their grievances.
SALTON SEA ND THE COLORADO RIVER
Palm Springs, California is a sparkling clean upwardly mobile society of nearly
50,000. Not far away, however, is a harbinger of possible things to come in the
Salton Sea. This is the largest internal body of water in California and a
sanctuary for half the species of birds in the United States as they migrate
with the seasons in this part of the country. One hundred years ago this was
all desert. But in 1905, a violent winter storm caused the Colorado River to go
on a rampage. The river jumped its banks and surged into the basin, forming the
Salton Sea.
The Colorado River breached a dike and began flooding a basin that today is 35
miles wide and 50 feet deep. The sea was a bustling tourist attraction in the
1950s and 1960s attracting half a million visitors a year. Stars such as The
Beach Boys and Sonny Bono drove speedboats there,
while yacht clubs sprang up and water skiers delighted in this oasis. The water
was clean with children wading or swimming in the Salton Sea.
By the 1970s, overused and under cared for, the Salton Sea became an ecological
nightmare. Surrounded by half a million acres of farmland, water containing
salt, fertilizers, and pesticides were constantly running into the sea.
Telltale evidence of this corruption was the shoreline being littered with
carpets of dead fish. These carcasses when combined with the algae bloom made
the sea smell so bad that few wanted to be anywhere near this once flourishing
Paradise.
During the hottest four months of the year, the Salton Sea loses six feet of
its water level due to evaporation with temperatures above 100 degrees
Fahrenheit. Today, given these challenges, it still manages to provide 500,000
acres of irrigated farmland producing 85 percent of the winter vegetable crops
for the entire United States. Now, we come to the mixed blessing.
The Salton Sea is shrinking. If nothing is done, it is expected to be smaller
by a third in the next decade. California drought is only adding to the problem
as the sea must compete for water. There have been plans to save the sea at a
cost in the billions of dollars, but to date, little has been done. Meanwhile,
the clock is ticking.
The Imperial Valley produces a million-acre feed that runs into the Salton Sea,
and there is no way for the water to run off. This keeps it from drying up, but
it also feeds the Salton Sea with killing salt and chemicals. To give you a
sense of the severity, the Salton Sea is now 25 percent saltier than the
Pacific Ocean.
In the 1980s, the contribution of botulism and algae bloom here killed millions
of fish. The Salton Sea is a habitat for hundreds of species of birds and has
long supported them in their 5,000-mile Pacific migration. These birds began to
die from the grasshopper effect as they rested in this
sanctuary after their long flight. In three months, conservationists counted
150,000 waterfowl dead from eating tainted fish. This frightened the public.
Fear won out.
Once thriving motels, restaurants, resorts, and recreational parks in the area
since the 1960s have been abandoned. The rusting, fraying, and naked sculptures
of the past now pencil the landscape with dangling illegible signs, boarded
windows, empty playgrounds, potholed streets, and stripped bare hotels naked in
the sun.
Farmers have agreed to sell off millions of gallons of water originally
directed to the Salton Sea to San Diego at the expense of the Salton Sea.
Scientists warn that if the Salton Sea gets any saltier or loses any more
volume everything will die. Farmers value developers in the city over saving
this vital reservoir.
In the age of Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land the self-interests of the
shortsighted take precedence over preserving ecological wonders.
NOWHERE MAN TOO LATE SMART
Some forty years ago Samarkand in Uzbekistan was a thriving
ancient city, the silk route 2,500 years ago from the orient to Rome, where an
exchange of ideas and culture accompanied its products.
Today, Samarkand still has the cultural architecture and scholarship of its
illustrious past preserved in its medieval sections. A few miles to the west,
the once bountiful lower end of Uzbekistan’s greatest river, the Amu
Darya, has been sucked dry. It is no longer connected to the Aural
Sea, the world’s fourth-largest internal body of water.
The river basin is littered with abandoned irrigation pump stations and lines,
the skeletal hulls of abandoned boats, dried-up ponds, and ghost towns. The
Aural Sea has shrunk to half its size in the last half-century for its failure
to connect with this river. This is all the result of a misguided Soviet Union
agricultural policy.
In the 1960s, Russia made Uzbekistan a cotton-producing country, the second
largest in the world, by restructuring 100,000 square miles of desert into
irrigated farmland. It did this by redirecting water from the lower Amu Darya
River into canals, then into irrigating ditches filled with pesticides and
fertilizers to cotton-producing fields along its flanks.
To give you a sense of this disaster, the Amu Darya River in this area was once
so wide that it took Alexander the Great and his army five
days to cross it. Over the past half-century, the Amu Darya River no longer
connects with its source, the Aural Sea, ninety miles away, and has been
reduced to a dry wasteland and a veritable dust bowl.
Some observers have called this the greatest ecological disaster on the planet.
It could happen to the Salton Sea as its fragile ecosystem is at the mercy of
the farmers and the city developers who would prefer to use the Colorado River
for irrigation and drinking water for San Diego.
It is an old cliché, but true, there are no easy answers. While hundreds of
species of birds and fish are disappearing, people, plants and animals are
dying as well. No matter the country, the community, no matter the expediency
of the politics, or the social and cultural issues, this small planet is dying
and man is snuffing out its life. Alas, the question that must be asked: can planet earth survive self-indulgent man?
NOTE:
Selected ecological statistics: Marilyn Weiner, Hal Weiner “Journey to
Planet Earth,” 2005; Al Gore, “Earth in the Balance: Ecology
and the Human Spirit,” 1993; USGS,
Emerging Contaminants in the Environment, 2006; Nation Water & Climate Survey, 2010.
NEXT -- PART FIVE -- NOWHERE MAN’S “CUT & CONTROL” JOURNEY THROUGH TIME
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