Month: January 2010

Haiti in the Long Run

Most of us have been glued to the news about the immediate assistance to Haitians following the 7.2 magnitude earthquake and its continuing aftershocks. We all most likely contributed initially to the Red Cross and other humanitarian aid organizations. Aid is finally arriving but much is still in the emergency phase.

What remains is the larger logistical questions about how to rebuild a devastated infrastructure and how to rebuild entirely differently to provide people with the safety and resilient systems many developed countries are not only used to but expect. What does this massive restoration and innovation mean for the world community?

While there have been many preceding natural catastrophe’s to the collapse of Haiti’s infrastructure, this event has to become a kind of flag and marker for humankind about the much greater work we may share as climate change, entwined with nature’s natural furies, makes Haiti one of dozens of catastrophic events. We cannot let that happen.

While humankind cannot control the natural cycles of the Earth’s systems, we can control how we as a species add to the impact of them. As a Gulf coast resident in Florida, I am eying the predictions for an average of 11 Atlantic storms in the 2010 hurricane season. Haiti is right in their path as well. How will the people there, how will all the countries who are going to be there helping to rebuild Haiti, deal with major storms?

An article in Science Daily recently described how climate change could impact poverty, deepening it by virtue of collapsing food systems due to climate change.

I watch my countrymen and women and representatives in Washington and realize how easily distracted we are by seemingly more pressing problems like health care and jobs. But up the road we need to be charting our next moves to prepare for many more natural disasters. Resilience to them can be seen in a country like ours which has such a high standard of living, so much social and economic infrastructure, that we find it hard to imagine a place where there are no options and everything that could go wrong does.

What hurt the Haitian people so much is poverty. How can we get to work to make sure poverty does not deepen but is turned on its head and becomes a solution? All the people without jobs…all the things that need doing…is there a bridge between these two realities that might create a third: better living standards by investing our time, talent, money, and sweat into GOOD WORK, and in quitting our bickering, deal playing and investment in wars.

For now, I plan to set up an affordable monthly withdrawal from my bank for Haiti relief, however small, and keep it there for the time it takes to get the job done.  What we are investing in is not so much clean-up as raising a standard of living so that whatever may come their way, Haitians will have the resources to protect themselves and to build structures with the latest safety standards and materials that we Americans have come to expect.

Every Haitian child is one of ours, our future in an increasingly connected world community.

Avatar and Mountain Top Removal Mining

Appalachian Voices and iLove Mountains.org are primarily battling mountain top removal (MTR) mining in critical watershed areas and communities in states where these mountains are under siege by the coal industry.

While viewing Avatar, I thought I was on their websites as the spaceship spans over a devastated mining area that looks suspiciously like the Appalachians where coal companies decapitated ancient mountains and their communities. See my review of the film on this blog and visit these sites to learn how the basic story of Avatar is happening on a huge scale right in America’s oldest and most diverse mountains. Go to iLoveMountains and put in your zip code to learn whether your power is emanating from coal mined by MTR methods. This is where the battle on Mother Earth is happening! Join in.

Wildlife Migrate North in Pacific

Kevin Schafer Photograph

See this article from TerraDaily Express about the California Sea Lions migrating up the coast to colder waters in Oregon.

As a teenager I remember the population of sea lions on the wharf in San Francisco, that blanketed every flat surface. They provided a lot of entertainment for us visitors.

This article describes a whole population migration to caves off the coast of Oregon where colder waters support the food sources seals typically consume. Other migrations include shorebirds.

The article suggests that the El Nino in the Pacific waters, which was very strong this year (bringing unusually warm waters) may be the reason for this dramatic migration. Climate change, causing the warming of oceans, is most likely a boosting factor to the El Nino effects across the Pacific and the planet.

Florida Gulf Coast and Atlantic Coastline both benefit from the El Nino with wind shear patterns that kept hurricane activity to an all time low for the past season.  Weather experts predict a stronger hurricane system next summer and fall but I wonder if ocean warming might institute a permanent El Nino effect???

The current winter season in the Midwest and Northeast also seems to be dramatic differences in our normal seasonal patterns. Again, we have to observe over time to know whether warming of oceans and melting of ice caps are responsible for these dramatic changes or these are the occasional flukes that happen from time to time with complex reasons we only decipher later (sun  or celestial events.)

As NASA reports on climate change patterns, scientists are convinced that the planet surface is warming even with patterns of cooling and heating which they say are part of the longer term warming.

In Gujrat, India agronomists report mangoes ripening well before the normal seasonal pattern. These dramatic shifts in both plant and animal populations are heralds of large scale changes now affecting human life as well.

What is most dramatic to me is the near lack of news about climate change on our national media networks. Do we have our noses to the ground on health insurance when the greatest threat to our health is happening right in front of our faces?

Brilliant Solutions to Implacable Problems

Frances Moore Lappe’s new book, Liberation Ecology, identifies six dis-empowering ideas and re-frames them with insightful solutions. This book was recently published in a limited first edition with an invitation from the author to write her back with comments, edits, and additional ideas.

1.  To save the planet, our economies have to stop growing.

2.  We’ve hit the limits of a finite Earth.

3. We must overcome selfish human nature to save the planet.

4. To make progress, we have to override people’s innate resistance to the rules.

5.  People are now so far removed from the natural world that they will never feel the connection to nature necesarry for an environmental turn-around.

6.  Given the magnitude and scope of today’s problems, there’s no time for democracy.

Go to the website to read more and to take a short survey of your perceptions before reading the book and how Lappe addresses each of these ideas that are holding us back from a world in sync with nature and on a road to sustainability.