Imagine yourself on a mountain ridge between two deep canyons. The city is spread out at your feet, the mountains behind you.
You are surrounded by olive, palm, eucalyptus and pine trees, with an occasional sycamore thrown in.
The vegetation is dry to the bone ,
and when you marvel at the fiery sunrise in the mornings your heart goes out to all those affected by wildfires, enraged by the thought that soon we will have a president and his minions who will make disaster help contingent on political lockstep, as announced by them.
Worse, they will do away with environmental protection and pollute as long and as hard as they can, climate change be damned, its science ridiculed or overruled by the demands for profit.
You feel privileged, up there on that beautiful ridge, to be able to look at the changing sky,
to hike down the small private trail to the city, along the waterline, sandy, steep, surrounded by dead yuccas and a landscape filled with luminous rusty colors. The only official access is a one-lane dirt road crossing the canyon with a small bridge, your car soon anticipating the worst potholes and getting the hang of serpentine curves.
Imagine yourself waking up in the middle of the night to the acrid smell of fire, loud crackling and popping noises, flames already sky high. You don’t know what is burning in your vicinity, one of the other structures, and how far away it is. You grab your meds, your purse, your computer and the car keys, and race down that hill fully aware that once a firetruck comes up you are stuck on the ridge.
This happened to me Tuesday night. I am still processing, rattled to the core.
The first fire-police jeeps came within a minute after I had exited the lane onto the street, where I had stopped the car, shaking too much to drive safely. The firetrucks, later, could not cross the bridge. The fire was extinguished with hoses on site and helicopters dumping their load, onto the vicinity as well, to prevent the spread of fire into the wilderness. One person hospitalized, some non-human life lost.
I went back the next day, still in my nightshirt, to pack up my unharmed stuff, my house completely unscathed as all the others in the neighborhood but that one structure and parked truck that burnt to the ground. I can no longer envision myself up there without fear, forever hyperalert to the smells and sounds. And I cannot help myself but thinking of the symbolism mirroring our current situation, ever aware of potential catastrophes and then, in a flash, they have arrived. Yes, it could have been far worse here, but in many instances it HAS been and WILL be far worse, with so many people affected, around the world for lack of appropriate leadership.
I lost nothing other than a cherished place to spend my time in SoCal, and even that loss is entirely psychologically grounded in my own fear to return to the place. I don’t want to think about how it must feel for people who lost loved ones, or their entire material existence, or a community that will never again cohere, thrown into the winds, and still floating many years later. In fact, I don’t want to think about it much at all, since I still get these waves of flash-backs of that drive down the mountain, the overpowering noises still in my ears.
I had meant to visit the World Forestry Center’s current Exhibition Following Fire once back in Portland. Can’t see myself doing that, either. Subtitled A Resilient Forest/An Uncertain Future it is a photography project by photographer David Paul Bayles and disturbance ecologist Frederick Swanson, documenting the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire that burned 173,000 acres along the forested McKenzie River canyon in the Cascade Range of Oregon. You should, though, if only to get motivated to help protect our world against the dark forces.
Onwards. With the appropriate musical accompaniment.
Nope, not talking about the absurd claims that Haitians are feasting on neighbors’ cats and dogs. That will be discussed in the next round.
I’ll report instead on a walk the morning before the Presidential Debate, trying to shed irritated thoughts. It was actually quite serene in the wetlands, with a hint of fall, cooler temperatures and sparks of coloration pointing towards the blazing beauty to come.
Various pieces of news have combined to trigger thoughts about violence. You will read this after the debate has happened, with no current prediction from my end of what will be or won’t be said.
I still reel from the fact that during the most recent campaign stop, Florida man uttered the words, with glee, that the planned rounding up and deportation of 20 million immigrants “will be a bloody story.” At an earlier rally in Ohio, the former President stated that “there will be a bloodbath” if he does not win the election. It is all couched in terms of righteous violence, including his persecution of political adversaries that are suggested more and more frequently, setting a stage with thinly veiled stochastic terrorism.
With that topic hanging in the air, some data mavens at the Washington Post had nothing better to do than analyzing data from Google searches across two decades about what Americans want to kill. How to kill time, wouldn’t you know it, is a favorite search question on the internet.
As it turns out, searches about how to kill ants score high, closely followed by fleas and flies, with mosquitoes surprisingly low on the list. However, they are shockingly topped by searches about how to kill cats or dogs. Crabgrass, mold, and ivy, amongst other invasive species, are the most frequently searched organisms beyond fauna. Horrifyingly, on top of the pyramid used to be searches for means of suicide, but the search for how to kill another human being has now merged to that level (we are talking peek month of searches in the graph.)
We know, of course, what factors promote violence in a political context and how desensitization contributes to disinhibition towards harming others. Re-summarizing from my many previous musings: when societies are politically divided, particularly with an emphasis on identity, the potential for violence goes up. If we don’t interact with people who are different from us or hold different beliefs, and instead stay in partisan bubbles (aided by geography here), vilifying and dehumanizing the unfamiliar others is easy. That becomes, in turn, a gateway to accepting that they deserve harm, righteously meted out by us. What we are seeing is a call for partisan violence in these rallies, really. This is particularly the case when we fear loss of status, rights, or access to resources (realistically or just imagined, won’t make a difference), while political radicalization is touted by the politicians we align with or by the in-group that surrounds us. Planned or condoned state violence interacts with individual political violence, mutually reinforcing each others’ belief that it is all justified.
“Righteous” violence is, alas, not exclusive for the political arena. The Pacific Northwest is now on route to killing close to half a million barred owls across the next 3 decades. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has approved that plan in order to protect spotted owls, threatened by territorial take-over from their larger cousins.
“The shooting will be conducted in forest habitats spanning 24 million acres, including six national parks, 17 national forests, and thousands of pockets of private lands. It will, as planned, be the largest massacre of birds of prey ever attempted by any government.” (Ref.)
Scores of wildlife protection groups are protesting the decision, claiming that the plan makes no sense. For one, barred owls are being punished for human actions (climate change, deforestation, urbanization etc.) that pushed them, as well as the spotted owls, into new territories. Expanding their range, as a species native to North America, is a normal survival strategy, and will not be stopped by culling. The surviving owls will just return to the territories that sustain them under new climate conditions, with the competing spotted owls ultimately having little chance. That is what ecological systems are all about, with our interference perhaps just changing the allotted time for a single species (a species that we put into harm’s way in the first place….) Barred owls are also notoriously difficult to hunt and easily mistaken for other species that could be hurt.
Here is the detailed list of complaints and suggestions by the wildlife organizations.
The government argues that the cull, by licensed hunters only, ” will remove less than 1% of barred owls’ predicted U.S. population during the proposed time frame, resulting in fewer casualties than other, more aggressive management options proposed by the FWS, which suggested culling almost twice as many of the birds. The cull will also be limited to around half the areas where barred and spotted owls overlap, and intends to safeguard California spotted owls as well.”
“It’s not about one owl versus another,” Kessina Lee, an FWS state supervisor in Oregon, said in a statement.
It sure is about a lot of dead birds, if you ask me, killed with the righteous justification of protection of an endangered species. Now where have we heard that argument before? They shall not replace us?
Yes, I am sarcastic and you don’t have to tell me that these are two very different cases. Just soooo much violence in the air. Locally, nationally, world wide. How can we take a step back?
A German author and an investigative journalist teamed up in 1973 to publish their experiences after prolonged interactions with the very rich and with members of the working class, respectively. Bernt Engelmann and Günter Wallraff wanted to shed some light on the sizable discrepancy of accumulation of riches and power on one side, and the dependency and exploitation of workers on the other side. It was called You Up There – We Down Here, and the title came back to me when thinking through today’s blog observation, half a century later when that discrepancy has reached unimaginable proportions
(Wallraff went on to write one of the most famous and all-time translated non-fiction books in Germany a few years later, in 1985. Lowest of the Low (link leads to free English translation) describes his years of working disguised as a Turkish guest worker and the racism and unequal treatment he experienced, like for example not being provided with safety gear while working in a nuclear plant, even when his German colleagues did. He provided shelter for Salman Rushdie when the novelist was threatened, and is still actively doing undercover investigations, now in his eighties.)
“Up” and “Down” were prominent when I chanced at a perfectly beautiful spot at the North Umpqua River recently, looking for a break off I 5 on my drive to Southern California. A dam created a rushing waterfall, with a smooth lake on top and the entrance to a fish ladder on the bottom, presumably helping fish to get to their spawning grounds upstream.
You could watch the fish and read about fish counts, with some educational bits around you to inform about the life cycle of the salmon, should you have forgotten your 5th grade curriculum. 80.000 visitors a year pass through here. One wonders how many of them hear about the real story. As always, it pays to look a bit closer.
Winchester Dam was built in 1890 as a hydropower dam to provide hydroelectricity to the city of Roseburg. Fish and tribal nations be damned. The dam changes hands among various power companies, with a fish ladder being built in 1945. In 1969 the dam is sold for $1 (!) to the Winchester Water Control District (WWCD) owned by private citizen and offering no transparency for their decisions and meetings despite being required by law. Condemned in 1976, the dam provides no hydropower, irrigation, or flood control. Its sole purpose is to create a private water ski lake for the 99 members of Winchester Water Control District (WWCD), some of the state’s wealthiest citizens and owners of the condemned Winchester Dam.
DEQ inspects over and over and finds multiple hazards, leveling fines for millions of dollars and insists on an emergency plan. After 34 years of stonewalling, WWCD comes up with one three years ago. The dam is now rated “high hazard, a rating based on downstream hazard to people and property, not just on the condition of the dam.
Calls for removal are ignored, even though the dam poisons the drinking water for Roseburg and impedes migratory native fish, the fish ladder being rated one of the worst in the country. One of the owners of WWCD was paid $ 3.000.000 to do the repairs for the leaking structure required by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife last year. He made grievous mistakes when draining the lake for the repairs (Ref.), with ODFW watching and not interfering (the agency director was forced to resign due to his mismanagement this April). Water was released way too quickly from the lake, killing 550,000 Pacific lamprey. There is speculation that the faulty drainage was undertaken to remove evidence of illegal application of herbicides to the lake, toxic to fish and the humans (!) downstream, to kill plants that obstruct waterskiing. The repair disaster resulted in an unprecedented $27.5 million fine brought by the Oregon Department of Justice (DOJ) on October 7, 2023, against the Winchester Water Control District and their contractors. Since this is now a lawsuit, ALL discussions of the future of the dam, including possible removal, are tabled.
If anyone of us from below tries to contact the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Oregon Water Resource Department, or the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, with concerns about the Winchester Dam, agency officials respond by explaining that, because of the DOJ’s $27.5 million lawsuit, they cannot questions pertaining to the condemned dam or discussing the matter.
Those above have years of waterskiing safely ahead of them.
Roseburg is located in Douglas County, considered to the right of Attilah the Hun, when it comes to politics. Further South is Josephine County, competing for the description. You might not have heard of Josephine Country, but you have heard, I presume, of Grants Pass, the city that has been given green light by last week’s decision of the Supreme Court, to criminalize public sleeping by those who are houseless, even if no shelter or other options available. Talk about the lowest of the low. And yes, it is ambiguous if I am referring to the houseless or the radical majority of the Supreme Court.
“In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court ruled that cities enforcing anti-camping bans, even if homeless people have no other place to go, does not violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Gorsuch was joined by the rest of the court’s conservatives, including Chief Justice John Roberts.”
For the history of how we got here and the future implications, read here.
Grants Pass has a larger than life cave man statute. I assume those were permitted to sleep outside without being condemned to life in a hole….
Three things stand out for me: By criminalizing people now, people who have nowhere to sleep other than the park or the street, you will make it harder for this population to land housing at any point in the future, given their criminal record. So the claim that it is about decreasing homeless populations is logically fallible.
Secondly, if you have the option to crack down punitively, you will likely ignore more structural remedies, since they would cost you more money. Building housing, the ONLY way out of the catastrophe we are experiencing here on the West Coast, will take a backseat. So will upping universal rental assistance, repairs to public housing, and funds for eviction prevention.
And last but not least: this is about the ability to make our city centers attractive for business and commerce again, with people feeling free to spend and consume without the – however irrational – fears for their safety, and with pleasant views that don’t disturb their curbside dining.
Music today is a song from the Three Penny Opera, sung by Brecht himself. Text translated into English on the video, not the best translation, but you get the gist.
I just bought a screen print at Just Seeds about one of Brecht’s lines I have cherished my whole life: In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. Aboutthedarktimes.” (Two PDX artists I have reviewed before, Roger Peet and Thea Gahr, are members of this cherished artist cooperative as well.)
A good daily reminder of practicing hope. If we sing together, we are not alone in this. And France has just shown us that coalitions can still hold the bad guys at bay. At least for now!
Walk with me. A sedate stroll on Sauvie Island, easing us into a week where I will be working on a longer writing project and thus not posting across the 4th of July holiday.
Nature put on a show. Then again, when does it not?
Bloom and setting of fruit happening simultaneously for the black berries.
Oregon grapes already basically ripe,
while Hawthorne berries showed only a hint of the red that will later attract birds and squirrels alike when reaching full saturation.
Oak galls galore, a consequence of chemical injections by wasps who benefit from these growths.
Flowers in the meadows competing for my breathless mutterings – Oh, beauty!
Rufus Towhee hopping around, distracting me away from their nest, while ground squirrels watched with amusement.
Water levels high at the lake, serene at the canals, and small clouds lightening the grey skies.
The ospreys reliably resettled their nest that I visit every year.
If you stand close by, quietly, long enough, there will be coming and going, with lunch provided for those who wait long enough and screech loud enough.
Nature, relying on us to preserve it, since we have stressed it already so close to the limits. Preservation that will be made infinitely harder with the abominal Supreme Court Chevron decision last week which, as Zoe Schlanger at The Atlantic put it, shoved American environmentalism into legal purgatory. Read it and weep. The kneecapping of federal regulators will, of course, not just harm the environment, but also have huge implications for consumer protection.
This implies not just safety for what you eat and drink, or cars and planes, or warnings about chemical agents that might be harmful. It fully embraces the issue of pharmacological treatments, their safety and access granted to them, including the long sought prohibition of oral abortifacients. It also implies that a judge or a panel of judges can make decisions on the availability or necessity of vaccines. Think of another pandemic rolling around, and the judiciary, filled with anti-vaxxers, decides that vaccination is illegal. It will affect labor regulations, from workplace safety to pay requirements to the sales of goods no longer considered fairly made.
We cannot even conceive of the extent of the consequences this decision will have for the American people. Protection blown to the winds like grass seeds.
“A rule of judicial humility, gives way to a rule of judicial hubris. In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden—involving the meaning of regulatory law. As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar.”
Regarding stare decisis, the respect for previously made decisions:
“It barely tries to advance the usual factors this Court invokes for overruling precedent. Its justification comes down, in the end, to this: courts must have more say over regulation—over the provision of health care, the protection of the environment, the safety of consumer products, the efficacy of transportation systems, and so on. A longstanding precedent at the crux of administrative governance thus falls victim to a bald assertion of judicial authority. The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power.“
Mullein has the symbolism attached that it opens channels of communication with a higher power. Man, do we need that…..anybody out there????
Well, so much for sending you off to a holiday week. Enjoy your fireworks while they are still safely regulated in defiance of profiteering at all cost.
Music today is the Prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite # 2 in D-Minor. You can read darkness into it, or, as I do, a moment of hope. Preludes are beginnings – and we can always begin anew, putting things right. Eventually. Hopefully.
Driving east on Highway 14, you are surrounded by a desert landscape with lots of transmission towers and electricity lines. The view brings to mind the problems with our electric grids. Here are just some of the issues we’re facing:
Grids do collapse, leading to black-outs both during intolerable heat or cold spells when demand exceeds supply, like the December blackout in Texas in 2021.
Grids are threatened in their security, open to physical attacks as well as hacking. North Carolina, Nevada, Oregon and Washington state have experienced almost 1000 physical attacks against the electric grid in the last decade, for example.
Grids have caused wildfires, leading to enormous human, infrastructure and economic loss.
Grids in many states lack federal oversight, and can also set their own price range dependent on demand – prices have been as low as $20-$50 a megawatt-hour versus more than $4,000 during periods of stress, and the grid operators pull every trick in the book to keep these pricing structures intact.
Grids will be affected by the increasing demand from electric vehicles and heat pumps. Increased demand meets less supply during decarbonization efforts trying to shut down nuclear- and fossil-fuel plants. The grids do not yet have sufficient capacity to take in renewable sources of energy and deliver them reliably when needed.
As so often, many of these problems are caused by one simple thing: greed. Take wildfires, for example. Grids in California, Texas and Hawaii are operated by private companies. There is very little oversight as to how they maintain their grids. The money necessary for modernization is spent elsewhere.
As U.S. District Judge William Alsup, in charge of PG&E’s criminal probation for utility-caused wildfires in 2010, stated: “Pacific Gas & Electric Company, though the single largest privately-owned utility in America, cannot safely deliver power to California. This failure is upon us because for years, in order to enlarge dividends, bonuses, and political contributions, PG&E cheated on maintenance of its grid — to the point that the grid became unsafe to operate during our annual high winds, so unsafe that the grid itself failed and ignited many catastrophic wildfires.” (Ref.)
The same accusation is now raised with the Maui fires. Hawaiian Electric is charged with gross negligence, accused of consciously delaying grid repair and maintenance, updating efforts that would have avoided the deadly fires. (Ref.)
One of the ways that could reduce wildfire risk is putting the power lines underground, but that is wildly expensive. It also leads to further divisions among the rich and the poor: low-income communities have an increased wildfire safety deficit, because longstanding policies require communities to pay a huge share of putting power lines underground, and they simply cannot afford that.(Ref.) PGE for decades refused to do this for its own hesitancy to spend money, but has come around since the California Camp and Dixie fires, the Mosquito fire possibly as well, but estimates a cost of $ 20 billion, which will be turned over to consumers. A frightening but informative book on the entire debacle, by the way, is Katherine Blunt’s California Burning.
Wires could be better maintained, with regular crews cutting branches that could touch wires and ignite, or fall on them and down the wires which then spark dry grass into fire. There is also the possibility of public safety power shut-offs, when wind and heat make the situation particularly dangerous. But those black-outs have consequences, not just for productivity reasons, but medical reasons as well, with people dependent on electricity for lifesaving appliances.
Privately owned utilities make money on large capital investments that boost the overall value of their systems. They do not make money on day-to-day operations and maintenance expenses like inspections and tiny replacements here and there. Under pressure to cut expenses, they ultimately cut expenses to the point where they aren’t doing enough to evaluate the risks throughout the system. For the very same reason, they do not add changes to the grid that could improve transmission by up to 30% and lower prices at the same time.
To reach our climate goals, we need to expand grid capacity by 43% in 2035, according to Princeton University’s Repeat Project. Yet we are looking at years and years of wait time to get renewable power sources connected to the transmission lines. In the meantime we could use a new technology: laser sensors that can send the companies real time data about the status of the power lines, to make decisions about sending juice down the line. They are part of a package of transmission enhancing technologies that can tie us over until enough new lines are in place. They include wires that can carry more transmissions, software that helps to avoid congestions, and laser sensors, that tell us about exact wind, heat and wire sag conditions, allowing to determine what is safe in terms of power line load. (Ref.) The “dynamic line rating” tells the utility when a wire is cool enough to be able to handle more electricity flow.
The problem, here again, is that the incentives to use these relatively cheap measures are counteracted by the fact that electricity company get rewarded for building new and more infrastructure, rather than updating what is already there.
“That means big expensive projects like new transmission towers are enticing for a utility’s balance sheet– and its shareholders. Lower cost technologies – like sensors or rewiring an existing line – don’t seem as appealing in comparison, says Marissa Gillett, chair of Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority.” (Ref.)
There are two potential things that could be done to improve the grid security situation. For one, we could have a federal agency that had authority over the entire electric grid – right now there is none in place whatsoever. It could ask for and enforce a potential law, a Grid Security Act that shifts the burden of risk – now on all of us – to the utilities and providers. That law could be modeled on what Congress enacted to address widespread corporate fraud in another self-regulatory environment (Wall Street) after the Enron debacle. Sections 302 and 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act require that the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of publicly traded companies certify annually (under civil and criminal penalties) that the company has adequate internal controls for disclosure and financial reporting.
Secondly, we should pass a bi-partisan whistleblower protection provision proposed by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) in 2020 (which was derailed by COVID-19 and never brought to a vote.) It would provide protections to employees of the electric grid – right now it is completely legal under federal law for an electric grid utility to fire an employee who reports violations of, for example, reliability or critical infrastructure protection standards.
Photomontages today are some examples of a new series that evolved out of my work on Jan Haaken’s documentary film explaining the false promises of a nuclear renaissance. My recent blog about the film Atomic Bamboozle and the danger of small modular reactors can be found here. The images represent these SMRs, but I thought for today’s musing they might as well stand in for all the balls we dropped by not reining in private ownership of the electric grid and making sure public interest and safety comes first.
Music today by one of my favorite composers, Leos Janáček. In the opera Káťa Kabanová a couple worries about an approaching storm. She starts to tell him about the new invention of lightning rods. He angrily refutes the idea that storms could carry electricity and insists they are a punishment from God. You know how that will end, right? Aria starts around 1.18.01
Easing back in after a lovely break, some of it spent sitting near the butterfly bush (Buddleja) in the garden, watching hummingbirds, contemplating practical advice from the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Muta Maathai: Do the best you can!
Recognized for her persistent struggle for democracy, human rights and environmental conservation, the Kenyan scientist who died in 2011, urged relentless involvement in protecting our planet. As a founder of the Green Belt Movement she empowered communities to improve their lives and make the world a greener place.
Here is her allegory that has become kind of a mantra for me:
“The story of the hummingbird is about this huge forest being consumed by a fire. All the animals in the forest come out and they are transfixed as they watch the forest burning and they feel very overwhelmed, very powerless, except this little hummingbird. It says, ‘I’m going to do something about the fire!’ So it flies to the nearest stream and takes a drop of water. It puts it on the fire, and goes up and down, up and down, up and down, as fast as it can.
In the meantime all the other animals, much bigger animals like the elephant with a big trunk that could bring much more water, they are standing there helpless. And they are saying to the hummingbird, ‘What do you think you can do? You are too little. This fire is too big. Your wings are too little and your beak is so small that you can only bring a small drop of water at a time.’
But as they continue to discourage it, it turns to them without wasting any time and it tells them, ‘I am doing the best I can.’
And that to me is what all of us should do. We should always be like a hummingbird. I may be insignificant, but I certainly don’t want to be like the animals watching the planet goes down the drain. I will be a hummingbird, I will do the best I can.”
***
My ongoing resolution:
SMALL DROPLET – BLOGS against the fires around us: I’ll do the best I can.
Almost out of the door, I grabbed the small point&shoot camera despite knowing better. It had been a bad week of painful lymphedema in chest and arm around the incisions, and I really should not lift my arm too much. Oh well. Was I ever glad I had at least this camera with me when doing the familiar round at Oaks Bottom. Come join me!
They were out, my cherished crows, in masses, hanging in the trees squawking, strutting through the meadow. Which should be much less straw colored in February, reminding me that we’ve now had four years in a row where rainfall was way below average.
Entering the wooded path, the beauty – Japanese print-like – of the duckweed on reflecting water was inspiring, even with the knowledge that it is found growing in water associated with cropping and fertilizer washout, or down stream from human activities, particularly from sewage works, housed animal production systems and to some extent industrial plants.
Given the color, I was not sure if it was common duckweed or more likely azolla, red water fern. The ducks didn’t care, and neither should we. Both are fascinating plants, providing nutrients and helping ecosystems.
Gadwalls, I learn. They live in the Great Plains but migrate through here.
The herons were unperturbed, out for lunch, ignoring me walking but a few meters away from them. I guess the loudly singing tree frogs at the pond’s rim were on the menu.
Beaver activity was visible everywhere,
but I think this fellow was a muskrat.
I can never tell. A kilometer further down I spotted this guy, and given his lunch, a fish, the likelihood was otter. As I said, cheap camera, not the resolution one would have wished for with this sight. I mean how often do you see an otter eating fish 15 minutes downtown from city center?
When I got to the viewpoint, the extent of the drought became more visible. This should be a lake, folks, not a dry hole in the ground.
If you are like me, it gives you the creeps. If you are like many of our compatriots, it instills fear, sometimes to the point of a condition that the the American Psychological Association (APA) defined as eco-anxiety, ”a chronic fear of environmental doom.” It is not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5,) but clinicians all over report attempts to treat it.
Not sure if this was the doe or one of her fawns that I regularly saw last summer
Last April, an article in the Scientific American described in depth what therapists are facing and how they have to make decisions about how to treat the massively increased numbers of patients who present fear if not panic in the face of climate catastrophe. A 2020 poll by the American Psychiatric Association showed that “more than two-thirds of Americans (67%) are somewhat or extremely anxious about the impact of climate change on the planet, and more than half (55%*) are somewhat or extremely anxious about the impact of climate change on their own mental health.”
Red-tailed hawk
The NYT joined the topic with an article last week, describing the treatment approach by one of the earliest proponents of a necessary treatment approach to eco-anxiety.
Here is the dilemma: there is a tension between eco-anxiety’s role as a rational response to an existing threat, on the one hand, but also a potentially debilitating response, on the other hand.
There’s no clear, standard definition as to when eco-anxiety is unhealthy. It is rational to be fearful in view of a threat, and the threat is real. It is, however, unhealthy if it paralyzes your daily function, as it now does for scores of people. There is also the question of therapists’ own (political) beliefs. If they think your analysis of the threat is exaggerated or delusional (they don’t believe in climate change or its imminence) they will pathologize your response, which will have an impact on your therapeutic relationship.
Scrub Jay
Therapists themselves also feel unable to cope with their own feelings about environmental destruction. “When a therapist hasn’t begun to come to terms with their own emotions around climate change, it can add to the emotional turmoil of clients coping with overwhelming grief and anxiety, said Tree Staunton, a climate psychotherapist in Bath, England. For example, a therapist’s own grief, anxiety or guilt might come off as defensiveness or withdrawal.“ (Ref.)
Then there are the cases of people, in particular children, who have been personally impacted by traumatic events like fires, flood and tornados or hurricanes caused or aggravated by climate change, who are living with actual PTSD that needs to be treated while the threat of these events is ongoing.
Willamette River bank bordering Oaks Bottom on the Westside
The trolls were out, en masse, in the comment section for the NYT article. But so were thoughtful letters to the editor (2 examples below,) that highlighted important facts found both in and beyond the article.
“… the corporate construct that cleverly shifts the responsibility of a carbon footprint onto each individual. This is similar to the way the petrochemical and plastics industries have shifted all responsibility for recycling, particularly of the packaging they create, onto the individual, although the responsibility for recycling plastics should lie with the manufacturers.” (Mary Englert, Portland, Ore. The writer is a retired licensed professional counselor.)
“youth distress is directly related to the experience of governmental dismissal of and inaction on climate change. Young people are essentially reporting that their governments are gaslighting them by dismissing and devaluing their concerns, and by falsely stating that they are taking necessary action.This has significant political implications. Multiple reviews of the mental health effects of climate change (this is not a new topic in academia) all predict civil unrest and conflict as the long-term outcome. Politicians have a chance to correct course, honor their young constituents’ fears and act decisively. While therapy matters, preventing climate catastrophe matters more.” Mary G. Burke, San Francisco. The writer is a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco and a member of the university’s Climate Change and Mental Health Task Force.
Baldies
It is easy to feel helpless and anxious when thinking what we can do about the destruction of our world, when really a few large corporations—and complicit politicians—call the shots. But there ARE things one can do, and in the doing alleviate some of the anxiety.
There are some political moves that can help activists. Science is contributing tools to fight collective helplessness.
There is important information that you can read, outlining possible next steps. Earthtrack, for example, offers tons of information about governmental subsidies that harm the environment. Environmentally harmful subsidies (EHS) are government actions that by design or effect accelerate the production or consumption of natural resources or undermine broader ecosystems supporting planetary health. The data show at least $1.9 Trillion a year (2% of global GDP) being dished out to Energy, Mining(non-energy), Fisheries, Forestry, Water, Construction, and Transportation industries. The organization informs about both the beneficiaries of such subsidies, worldwide, and reports on possible actions against them.
Anna’s Hummingbird
And then there is art. The hole in the ground where the Oaks Bottom Lake should be reminded me of this project from L.A. last year.
Cara Levine and associated artists provided their week-long participatory event as a communal reaction to and lifting of grief over the losses incurred during the pandemic – including the land, where the dig took place, of The Shalom Institute campus – which was devastated by the Woolsey Fire of 2018. Might as well throw our eco – fear into the mix, or the hole as the case may be, being strengthened by knowing we are not alone.
Or we could be digging ourselves OUT of a hole by collective action. You know where you find me doing just that.
Scrub Jay
Music today is one of my picks when I try to deal with surges of anxiety.
Conifers are a group of ancient plants that include cedars, firs, cypresses, junipers, kauri, larches, pines, hemlocks, redwoods, spruces and yews. I notice them most during the fall season, perhaps because the surrounding hues of yellow in the gardens intensify the blue shades of the trees and the mist in the air gives them a silvery sheen. The structure of their branches, the various arrangements and patterns of their needles start to stand out, garnering attention when surrounding competing flowers are gone.
Conifers flourished in the region in and around Berlin, where this photo of my maternal grandmother, my aunt and my mother (in front) was taken in 1929. And here’s your’s truly with my mom, in front of yet another pine forest around 1955.
Berlin has one of the highest percentages of remaining forests within the city limits, almost 20% compared to say Hamburg or Munich which range in the 5% league. The forests are currently under extreme duress because of drought, heat and unmanageable pests like pine bark beetles. The city government is now planting 329.000 (!) trees, mostly elms and oak trees which are displacing the fragile pines.
Pines and in particular junipers are also an essential part of the Lüneburger Heide, a large area of heath, geest, and woodland in the northeastern part of the state of Lower Saxony in northern Germany close to where my paternal grand parents lived. One of the perennial highlights of our visits was a hike with my Opa to the Ahlftener Flatt, a large pond created by constant winds scooping the sandy loam. It was surrounded by various types of conifers, which we had to identify dutifully in order to make it to the water, the real magnet: time to hunt for frogs and grasshoppers! Or skating in the winter. Only in retrospect have I realized, how much I owe to these nature walks, including my love for birds, whose calls and songs my Opa was whistling to perfection, ever the musician even without his stand-up bass.
My Opa Eduard as a young man and below, me in center between him and Oma Dora Some years later, with my sister.
The heath has been a National Park since 1909, one of, if not the oldest in Germany. The sandy loam makes it ideal for junipers to grow. They dot the landscape, their dark green offsetting the purple of their surround, when the heather is in bloom. Large flocks of sheep are grazing year round to keep the heather plants in check. You can watch it here.
Considered beauty there yet a curse here, in Oregon, Idaho and Nevada. Juniper used to grow only on rocky surfaces and steep slopes, where they were protected from fires, since little fire fuel grew around them. When settlers started to graze their cattle in the 1870s, native grasses, food for fire, disappeared from the plains as well and so the junipers took root everywhere. The problem? They outcompete grasses and shrubs, killing habitat for wildlife that needs those. They also serve as hiding places for mountain lions, allowing them to stalk pronghorn sheep and antelopes more easily. They use a lot of water, which in turn dries out nearby streams and springs – all of which then affects cattle farmers who have not enough grazing and watering resources left.
Most threatened by junipers, though, are the sage-grouse. Not only do junipers wipe out the sage grass on which the grouse depend. The birds also give anything over four feet tall a wide birth, since a taller tree could host predator birds. The places, then, where they met and mated are now feeling unsafe due to stands of large juniper trees and so they abandon the region without finding suitable replacement. The Bureau of Land Management has undertaken juniper control projects spanning tens of thousands of acres in Oregon alone, and millions of acres across the West, trying to eradicate them by pile burning.
“Several federal and state agencies offer grants to help ranchers tackle invasive juniper on private land. And the BLM coordinates juniper eradication on the vast swaths of public land it manages. One recently completed project in southeastern Oregon spanned 70,000 acres, and another, in the Burns area, aims to clear about 50,000 acres. Past monitoring has shown that the growth and productivity of herbaceous plants like grasses do in fact rebound after juniper is removed, and ranchers have reported increased flow in springs and streams.” (I’ve summarized a longer, beautifully photographed essay on this problem, found here.)
Don’t try it yourself, though: the old trees are protected, they might live for more than a thousand years—some known to be dated at 1,600 years. These trees are irreplaceable, and cutting one down on public land is punishable by a fine of $100,000 and up to a year behind bars.
It is such a complex issue in interdependent eco systems where the arrival of non-native species, or human interference with the natural-set up of a region can bring looming catastrophe.
Let’s revel in the beauty of the various conifer species I photographed last week, though, thoughtfully planted in a garden where they do no harm to larger expanses of wilderness.
Music has to be The Juniper Tree from the bitter Grimm Fairy Tale.
21 years ago two environmental organizations, Columbia River United and Clean Water Columbia, joined hands to form the Columbia Riverkeeper. The organization’s goal is to protect clean water, defeat fossil fuel terminals, and engage those living along the Columbia River, with the help of rural and urban communities, tribal nations, local businesses, strong coalitions, and its members.
During this time they have been amazingly successful in accomplishing many of their goals. Their organizing, protesting and legal actions contributed to (and in some cases singularly generated) important outcomes benefitting the environment and our region’s people.
In 2011 Riverkeeper, with the leadership of Umatilla and other tribes, pushed Oregon to adopt the nation’s most protective limits on toxic pollution in fish.
In 2014 they helped to stop coal export when Oregon rejected a dock-building permit. Their law suit had the Army Corps agree to reduce toxic oil discharges from large dams.
In 2015 their actions led to a landmark Fossil Fuel Resolution being passed in PDX, the oil refinery plans in Longview, WA were exposed, and the Columbia estuary remained LNG-free.
Six years of engagement finally led to a defeat of the Millennium coal terminal in Longview, Washington in 2017.
And in a major victory after the derailment and subsequent fire of a crude oil-carrying train along the river in 2016, the Port of Vancouver voted to end Tesoro’s oil-by rail terminal lease and Washington Governor Jay Inslee rejected the proposal in 2018 (Tesoro sought to ship over 131 million barrels of oil per year down the Columbia River.)
2021 was a successful year for the Riverkeeper as well – they helped to ensure that the Millennium coal export terminal proposed in Longview, Washington, lost its rights to build along the Columbia. And their lobbying contributed to the Washington Department of Ecology’s denial of permits for a proposal to build the world’s largest fracked gas-to-methanol refinery, citing significant negative impacts on our climate and the Columbia River. (Northwest Innovation Works, the project backers, may appeal the decision.)
“Columbia Riverkeeper, our members, and our allies have together defeated more than a dozen fossil fuel export proposals targeting the Columbia River. Collectively, we have prevented the fossil fuel industry from turning the Lower Columbia into a fossil fuel highway. In the process, we have helped fight climate change and forged lasting bonds of friendship, solidarity, and political will. ” (Ref.)
What makes an organization so effective? I decided to look at a single project – the fight for cleanup of a toxic site near the Bonneville Dam, Bradford Island, to see if I could find some answers. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dumped toxic pollution in and along the Columbia River at Bradford Island for over 40 years, and resisted until now to be put on the Superfund List of the EPA that releases critical funds for waste removal. The resident fish show the highest pollution in the PCN.
Statistics from the Columbia Riverkeeper Website
After years of pushing from concerned citizens, tribal governments, activists, non-profit organizations and a few politicians, the EPA announced plans to list the site and a large adjacent section of the river to the nation’s toxic cleanup program in September 2021. That started a 60 day process of public comment collection which closed last week. Over 1600 people and seven organizations submitted comments in support for the Superfund listing.
The key to success lies in forming alliances, which the Riverkeeper has focussed on for 20 years of its existence. Below are just some who signed the letters pleading with politicians.
Among the most important allies are the tribal nations of the regions who bring knowledge and leadership to the protection of the land and river. In this particular case the Yakama Nation has led this fight for over a decade.
It helps to have smart legal council that pushed politicians and administrations and that communicates in clear and direct language so that complex issues can be grasped. In a region that counts many Spanish speaking folks it is also great to have bi-lingual messaging happen in both English and Spanish, distributed on youtube or soundcloud, mediums easily available to all.
Bonneville Dam
Having a website that makes every action transparent, delivers details and references (my source, certainly, of a lot of what I list) is a huge help. The site also links to other forms of education, in this case, for example, a webinar on Bradford Island issues. A good website provides overview over the history of the organization, step by step achievements for various projects, naming of all involved, calls to action with helpful details, anything that encourages readers to feel they are welcome and potentially of use in working for the shared goal of environmental projection. https://www.columbiariverkeeper.org delivers on all of those fronts.
Involvement that goes deep into communities providing all kinds of solidarity and support in both directions. Interviews with tribal representatives and community organizers, or community forums allow all to speak and ask questions help to spread the word and increase involvement.
Fundraising, from artists who donate part of their sales to local coffee shop owners who provide freebies keeps the target in view.
And speaking of which, this Thursday, 11/18/2021, Columbia Riverkeeper is hosting a virtual screening and panel discussion fundraiser regarding a documentary film that, as my regular readers know, I’ve been involved with as production photographer: “Necessity Part II: Rails, Rivers & the Thin Green Line,” a film by Jan Haaken and Samantha Praus. I have reported previously on the documentary which depicts the regional struggle for environmental protection in Oregon Arts Watch here and my own blog here. Proceeds from the fundraiser go to the Columbia Riverkeeper and the documentary project.
Panelists include:
Jan Haaken, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Portland State University and documentary filmmaker
Cathy Sampson-Kruse, Waluulapum Band, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Associate Producer, and champion of the Thin Green Line movement.
Direlle Calica, Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Director, Institute for Tribal Government, Portland State University
Lauren Regan, Executive Director and Senior Staff Attorney with Civil Liberties Defense Center
Jan Zuckerman, Local activist, retired teacher, and a founder of the Environmental School
Here is the direct link that allows you to sign up, or just check it out, if only by watching the trailer. I photographed the agricultural efforts along the river once again last week. Maybe the images of orchards and vineyards encourage you to support, if you can, those who are fighting the good fight to have the region protected for future generations, a region for which a healthy Columbia is essential.
Fish in the river, fruit and grapes on land can flourish if we protect and fairly distribute water resources. Unfortunately that is often under dispute. Here is the latest conflict: a week ago the city council of The Dalles on the Columbia River, approved an agreement to deliver an undisclosed amount of groundwater to Google, which plans to build new data centers in the city. With the council’s unanimous vote, the tech giant has pushed through another key piece of its plan to expand its operation in the Columbia River Gorge. The residents were NOT happy, particularly since the amount of water to be secured has never been revealed, and is actively kept secret (including a threatened law suit about disclosure requirements.) The levels of water in people’s wells is already sinking, and no one knows what provisions were included in the contract to ameliorate the effects of further droughts. This is only a month after a huge package of tax breaks was voted upon in favor of Google. Dams, potential pollution and climate disasters, and now the sale of water to tech companies – protection of the river is more urgent than ever.
