Spokane is Red, Seattle is a Bubble, Most Americans can't see their own Flashlight Beam through the Fog of Agnotology

Okay, you have to look up that word, agnotology. Here's a good primer into it:

http://www.jstor.org/pss/4598938

**see at the end of the blog more on agnotology, our modern culture's syphillis of the mind, memory, history, facts.


I'm embarking on a move from Spokane to Seattle, and while the economic news is abysmal for a college teacher, journalist, guy with masters in urban planning, in this off-shoring and money grubbing corptocracy, I am going into this move with steel -- a couple of novels to write, articles already assigned -- as in freelancing -- teaching, and a robust search for some of those part-time jobs the US of A is now famous for, and moving into the next evolution of a relationship.

Alas, the blog, is going to keep going strong.

As part of the move, I get to attend the U of British Columbia's Summer Sustainability Institute. I'm working on a long article for Planning Journal -- on greenwashing, as in how US cities might be pushing programs, architecture, building, transportation and other forms of messing with the built environment as a panacea, not the real things: climate change, climate disruption, oil and fossil fuel shortages, heat waves, economic and climate Diasporas, and pollution and economic instability based on a flawed model of consumer empire and war mongering.

The problem as always are the delayers, deniers and climate idiots. Those who think sustainability is some sort of UN plot are not only reckless, but now considered dangers to human and non-human populations. Media do not help, as most mainstream outlets are untrained and superficial, to say the least. Weiner or Palin or any of the rotten Republican contenders for the paid-off high office -- US presidency -- certainly need to be pushed way back into the commode of the news cycle. Rabid dogs are more important news stories than the next ethically-challenged politico.

So, here we go again -- more idiocy coming from the dead-end boys:

http://www.alternet.org/environment/151264/why_the_right_wing%27s_denial_of_science_may_screw_all_of_us/?page=2

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Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum sure doesn’t think so. The other day he told Rush Limbaugh "the idea that man… is somehow responsible for climate change is, I think, just patently absurd." He went on to call it a left-wing conspiracy, "just an excuse for more government control of your life… I’ve never been for any scheme or even accepted the junk science behind the whole narrative."

Better you should listen to Ram Khatri Yadav, a rice farmer in northeastern India, who recently complained to The New York Times, "It will not rain in the rainy season, but it will rain in the nonrainy season. The cold season is also shrinking." He’s experiencing climate change as a life or death reality. In a June 4 article headlined "A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself," the Times reported, “The great agricultural system that feeds the human race is in trouble… Many of the failed harvests of the past decade were a consequence of weather disasters, like floods in the United States, drought in Australia and blistering heat waves in Europe and Russia. Scientists believe some, though not all, of those events were caused or worsened by human-induced global warming.”

For years, scientists believed that the carbon dioxide produced by greenhouse emissions were at least in part beneficial for crops, acting as a fertilizer that helped counterbalance the deleterious effects of climate change. But according to the Times, new research indicates "extra carbon dioxide does act as plant fertilizer, but that the benefits are less than previously believed -- and probably less than needed to avert food shortages."

The World Bank estimates that there may be as many 940 million hungry people this year. The international relief agency Oxfam projects already high food prices more than doubling by 2030 with perhaps half of that spike due to climate change. With those increases could come hoarding, gouging, panic buying and food riots like those that led to the overthrow of the Haitian government in 2008.

Nor is it just our food supply that has climate change breathing hot and heavy down our collective necks. City and state planners also are examining its impact on urban centers and preparing for the worst. A May 22 Times article notes, "Climate scientists have told city planners that based on current trends, Chicago will feel more like Baton Rouge than a Northern metropolis before the end of this century... New York City, which is doing its own adaptation planning, is worried about flooding from the rising ocean."

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The attack against science is the same attack against liberal arts, against critical thinking, and against P/K-12 and public universities and colleges. Teachers who read deeply, research widely and innovate in focused ways, those who are part of the larger body of instructors, lecturers, adjuncts, professors, faculty, what have you, who in turn look to the academy as a large and multi-interdisciplinary body where innovation and collaboration works both at the experimental level and intellectual level -- they are under attack from the tea baggers and right-wing camps.

So how difficult is it to see the writing in the geophysics about climate change?

Maybe these lobbyists' heroes can't read --

http://globalsymposium2011.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/The-Stockholm-Memorandum.pdf

The Stockholm Memorandum

Tipping the Scales towards Sustainability

3rd Nobel Laureate Symposium* on Global
Sustainability, Stockholm, Sweden, 16-19 May 2011

So here's the first section to this recent paper on climate and a species, us, failing to act:

I. Mind-shift for a Great Transformation

The Earth system is complex. There are many aspects that we do not yet understand.
Nevertheless, we are the first generation with the insight of the new global risks facing humanity.

We face the evidence that our progress as the dominant species has come at a very high price. Unsustainable patterns of production, consumption, and population growth are challenging the resilience of the planet to support human activity. At the same time, inequalities between and within societies remain high, leaving behind billions with unmet basic human needs and disproportionate vulnerability to global environmental change.

This situation concerns us deeply. As members of the 3rd Nobel Laureate Symposium we call upon all leaders of the 21st century to exercise a collective responsibility of planetary stewardship. This means laying the foundation for a sustainable and equitable global civilization in which the entire Earth community is secure and prosperous.

Science indicates that we are transgressing planetary boundaries that have kept civilization safe for the past 10,000 years. Evidence is growing that human pressures are starting to overwhelm the Earth’s buffering capacity. Humans are now the most significant driver of global change, propelling the planet into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. We can no longer exclude the possibility that our collective actions will trigger tipping points, risking abrupt and irreversible consequences for human communities and ecological systems.

We cannot continue on our current path. The time for procrastination is over. We cannot afford the luxury of denial. We must respond rationally, equipped with scientific evidence.

Our predicament can only be redressed by reconnecting human development and global sustainability, moving away from the false dichotomy that places them in opposition.

In an interconnected and constrained world, in which we have a symbiotic relationship with the planet, environmental sustainability is a precondition for poverty eradication, economic development, and social justice.

Our call is for fundamental transformation and innovation in all spheres and at all scales in order to stop and reverse global environmental change and move toward fair and lasting prosperity for present and future generations.


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What more do we have to do to convince these haywire politicians and business tyrants like the Koch "brothers" that they are in a whole other century, one broken by superstition, feudalism, and oligarchy?

Here's another great blog, from afar, that deals with rain, storms and disruptions:

News from Down Under, on the stormy climate --

http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/09/12/floods-dice-loading/

from blogger -- Barry Brook

I was asked by the Adelaide Advertiser newspaper to write a short piece last week which addressed the question “Does all the recent rain across the country prove man made climate change is real?“, in less than 500 words. My response, given below, appeared in the print edition on Thursday 9 September 2010:
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Does all the recent rain across the country prove man made climate change is real?

No.

As Dorothea Mackellar wrote over a century ago, Australia is naturally “A land… Of droughts and flooding rains”.

Putting the impossible issue of ‘proof’ aside, scientists certainly do expect climate change to lead to an increase the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. After all, a warmer planet holds extra energy, making today’s climate system more dynamic than when Mackellar penned her poem.

In short, as the Earth’s atmosphere traps more heat due to an increase in greenhouse gases, it triggers more evaporation of water from the oceans. Average global humidity and precipitation rise in response.

As such, climate scientists predict increasingly energetic storms, heavier bursts of rain, and more intense flooding. In many parts of the world, deeper droughts and longer, hotter heat waves are also forecast.

So, while it is impossible to attribute any one event solely to human-caused warming, a useful analogy is that “weather throws the punches, but climate trains the boxer”. Another way to look at it is that human impacts are “loading the climate dice” towards more unfavourable (and previously unlikely) outcomes.

We have probably witnessed this in the unprecedented heat wave in Russia and record floods in Pakistan. These impacts cause great human misery and severe economic and environmental damage.

Earlier this year in Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology released a Special Climate Statement on the recent exceptional rain and flooding events in central Australia and Queensland. February 28th 2010 was the wettest day on record for the Northern Territory, and March 2nd set a new record for Queensland. Over the 10-day period ending March 3rd, an estimated 403 cubic kilometres (403,000 gigalitres) of rainfall fell across the NT and QLD. Extreme, indeed.

It’s clear that if such ‘unusual’ climatic events are visited upon us ever more regularly, then there will be practical limits to adaptation, or at least exponentially rising costs involved in coping.

The need for action on eliminating our dependence on fossil fuels is urgent and our window of opportunity for avoiding severe impacts of climate change is rapidly closing. Yet the obstacles to change are not principally technical or economic, they are political and social. But that’s another story.

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This story is dead on arrival, when it comes to the sad humans -- mostly in this country -- who are running around thinking a few moments with Rush Limbaugh or Ted Nugent make them experts in the fields they couldn't even pass as introductory courses in biochemistry, geophysics, meteorology, anthropology, marine sciences, physics, chemistry, what have you.

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Okay, the answer to, What is agnotology?

"Agnotology: Ways of Producing, Preserving, and Dealing with Ignorance," Bielefeld University, May 30-June 1, 2011.


Within the last 10 years historians of science such as Robert Proctor, Londa Schiebinger, Peter Galison, and Naomi Oreskes, have been promoting a new area of enquiry—Proctor calls it agnotology, the study of ignorance—which they suggest is of as much relevance to philosophers and social scientists and others as it is to historians. Indeed, the suggestion is that agnotology offers a new approach to the study of knowledge, an approach at least as complex and important as its more established sister, epistemology. The aim of this workshop is to map out this new ignorance-centered terrain in an effort to determine just what and where it might add to knowledge-centered terrains such as epistemology and philosophy of science and how valuable the additions might be. Topics will range over the naturalness and even inevitability of certain kinds of ignorance and the unnaturalness or deliberate production of other kinds—for example, on ignorance created through government secrecy and censorship, cultural prejudice, industry influence on scientific research, and so on—and the epistemological and societal implications of such ignorance. The ultimate goal is to make a significant contribution to this new kind of enquiry.

Speakers will include historians Norton Wise (UCLA), Naomi Oreskes (San Diego), Peter Galison (Harvard), and Robert Proctor (Stanford); sociologists Peter Weingart (Bielefeld) and Stefan Böschen (Augsburg); neurobiologist Stuart Firestein (Columbia); mathematician/philosopher of science Daniel Andler (Sorbonne); and philosophers Nancy Cartwright (LSE and San Diego), Philip Kitcher (Columbia), Pat Kitcher (Columbia), Hugh Lacey (Swarthmore and São Paulo), Kevin Elliott (South Carolina), Torsten Wilholt (Bielefeld), Martin Carrier (Bielefeld), and Janet Kourany (Notre Dame). The program will also feature a screening of Peter Galison and Robb Moss’s documentary film “Secrecy.”

Longtime activists throwing in the towel

Will human greed finally trump interest in global health?

Paul K. Haeder

(This is a conclusion of a series about the possible death, or at least the lack of relevance, of the environmental movement. Read past stories, here, below.)


What is an environmentalist in this day and age, when writers like Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus write essays like “Death of Environmentalism” which basically throw in the towel on the environmental “movement”?

“The three-part strategic framework for environmental policy-making hasn’t changed in 40 years: first, define a problem (e.g. global warming) as ‘environmental.’ Second, craft a technical remedy (e.g. cap-and-trade). Third, sell the technical proposal to legislators through a variety of tactics, such as lobbying, third-party allies, research reports, advertising, and public relations.”

Do the activists in Pennsylvania fighting coordinated pigeon shoots get laurels for being environmental activists by both lobbying the lawmakers in that state and disrupting the bizarre shoots?

Is that 75 percent for and 25 percent against rule for Spokane we talked about in Part 3 apply to these shooting events where one bird is confined to a small box about 25–30 yards in front of the firing line. Then, the birds are released from five separate spring-loaded boxes known as “traps.”

Is it blood sport – like the bear kill of 1994 – since the shooter then gets to fire at five released birds in five separate rounds? In most other states this is prohibited, but in Pennsylvania each shooter tries to kill a total of 25 birds, attempting to get each one to fall within a designated circle, for a “perfect score.”

Here’s the macho factor that has to get stuck in the craw of guys like my teacher friend’s hunter dad: the birds are often dazed and confused due to no feeding and crowded confinement. As many as three-fourths of all birds, according to investigators from the Humane Society of the United States, are not killed instantly, but are wounded, usually to die slow and painful deaths.

It gets worse — wounded and dead birds are picked up by trapper boys and girls. The heads are sheared off, or other trappers wring their necks, hours after they are wounded.

The carcasses are thrown into garbage bins. Protestors have “outed” the claims of the shooters that they are ridding the state of “vermin” or “winged rats”: most of the birds have been raised to be shot, some trucked from out of state.

So these hunters hone their skills in these shoots, where illegal side bets are placed and drinking occurs.

Each generation on this planet, which will reach 7 billion people on Halloween 2011, must confront the old paradigms, whether they are late 19th century internal combustion technologies we use to move automobiles and Walmart container ships, or coal- burning energy generation that goes back 400 years to fire up your computer.

Delisting wolves from the Edangered Species Act, or shooting black bears for trophies or for gall bladders to feed the Chinese medicine racket, these issues confront our species.

Humankind scrambles to grow food, save water; to understand the true effects of climate change on twisters hitting Alabama, or cyclones in the Indian Sea flooding homes along the Bangladeshi coast; to stave off corporations who would have us all give up the last free man/woman for a few crumbs.

Sometimes activism starts with a short letter to the editor. Sometimes activism dies because of the surmounting evidence of wildlife and environmental losses.

For my teacher friend who was inspired by the bear killing discussion more than a decade ago, she talks of throwing in the towel daily. She repeats how humanity has screwed the planet for good and has retreated into a state of pessimisms and cynicisms. The glimmer of pugnacity she showed in those 15-year-old letters and columns is gone.

In 1989 Bill McKibben wrote the first climate change book – “The End of Nature.” He’s famous now for his Step it Up and 350.org campaigns. The subtext of the book is that for us to survive, we must make major philosophical shifts in how we relate to nature.

The ending then, and now, 20 years later, is bleak: Human beings value themselves and their interests primarily and these values will likely win out. We are so much closer to a state of managed climate, genetics and ecology. De facto, environmentalism is dead on arrival.

Barak and JP Morgan, and Rockefeller

An email to me, today, June 2, 2011 -- for money donation to political campaign!

Friend --

Someone is about to tap you on the shoulder.

It's someone who's already made a donation to the 2012 campaign, and who's willing to give again if you'll step up and take ownership of it, too.

They've made a promise to match your first donation to this campaign, effectively making your $5 donation a gift of $10. If you give now, you'll double your impact.

Will you?

https://donate.barackobama.com/2011-Grassroots-Match

We're not just gathering donations here. We're gathering people.

We didn't get this far by doing things the usual way. Our campaign doesn't take money from Washington lobbyists or special-interest PACs.

We're doing this the right way -- with a whole lot of people like you taking the lead.

One of our earliest supporters is prepared to make a second donation in order to persuade you to make your first. It's that kind of commitment that creates a grassroots campaign capable of changing the outcome of an election -- and capable of changing the course of this country.

That's the spirit that drives us. And it starts with a tap on the shoulder.

Now all you have to do is take them up on the offer. Give it a go:

https://donate.barackobama.com/2011-Grassroots-Match

Thank you,

Barack

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You have got to be kidding. Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan -- all facilitators in what is now a crumbling empire of 8 percent of USA population raking in 90 percent of wealth, power, political influence. I just talked with a realtor in Spokane, who sold me the house I have now (2006) on the market to head out of this town for the Westside. Banks are screwing home sellers and buyers -- won't loan to low or middle income families, buyers. When a house gets close to closing, the too-big-to-jail banks won't loan the money for the house's selling price?

I think I will pass on trying to buy off Obama with my $5. Politics, my friend, are as corrupt as they can ever get. My realtor has a bead on Spokane, this economy. Talk about schools, and she has soon-to-be Costa Rica bound administrators saying how the system in this town's district is corrupt. They are bailing. Teachers who can't take dumb and dumber administrators forcing bad curriculum down their throats -- they too are on the retreat.

That's a whole other column, speaking to power, challenging them daily, not letting their nonsense be the only message youth and workers hear.

The bottom line, though, is what issue should I send to the re-elect team of Obama to point out why I'd not waste a wooden nickel on his or any of his competitions' campaign? Climate change? Stopping big energy from killing economies, communities? Corporations' big sucking of our communities' hopes and dreams and ability to function with high prostitution-level inside dealing and payoffs?

Well, let's just get back to the housing crisis -- Democracy Now. Is this enough for Obama and the other politicos to understand why some of us will never support political campaigns of the big-league kind.

Check out the Uncut movement --

http://www.usuncut.org/
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DEMOCRACY NOW -- www.democracynow.org

JUAN GONZALEZ: A prominent Wall Street analyst predicted this week that not a single top executive at Goldman Sachs will face criminal prosecution for the company’s role in causing the financial meltdown of 2008. The analyst, Brad Hintz, said the U.S. government still views Goldman Sachs as "too big to fail."

So far, the Securities and Exchange Commission has filed suit against only one Goldman Sachs employee: a young mid-level trader named Fabrice Tourre who was part of an effort at the bank to essentially place bets that the housing market would collapse. The prosecution of Tourre was the subject of a front-page article in the New York Times this week, written by one of our next guests, Gretchen Morgenson.

AMY GOODMAN: Gretchen Morgenson is the Pulitzer Prizer-winning business reporter at the New York Times who has written extensively on how the U.S. government has failed to prosecute any of the top figures who played a role in the economic crash. She is co-author of a new book called Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon. Her co-author, Joshua Rosner, is an expert on housing finance and a partner at the independent research consultancy firm of Graham Fisher & Co.

In the book, they argue that the root of the financial crisis lies in President Clinton’s decision to heavily promote home ownership in the ’90s and the lowering of lending standards by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner, thanks so much for being with us.

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Let us start with Gretchen Morgenson. Just lay out the thesis of this book.

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: Well, the thesis really is that Fannie Mae, which of course was created in 1938 to, you know, help homeowners have access to credit to borrow to get a home, really sort of expanded in a way that was designed very much to benefit the insiders at the company. Remember, this is a company that was both public and private, had a lot of government perquisites, and received those perquisites and used them to its own advantage. So, it’s a story, I think, of how sort of good and noble ideas can go awry and really a lesson in how not to allow that to happen again.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Joshua, how exactly did Fannie Mae go from being a government-created agency to basically a private corporation backed by the government?

JOSHUA ROSNER: Yeah. So, the government, in the late 1960s, decided that they needed a competitor for Fannie Mae, so they created Freddie Mac. They ended up privatizing both of those a decade later. And in privatizing, they retained a line of credit to the Treasury, which wasn’t really large enough to matter, fundamentally, but it told the markets, it implied to the markets, along with other benefits that they had, such as not having to file financial statements with the SEC as all other companies did, that these were special companies, these were companies that retained some government support. And so, publicly, they would say, and they would put on all of their debt issuances, that these are not obligations guaranteed by the government. But privately and quietly, there would always be a "wink wink, nudge nudge" that went along with that comment, to the point where foreign central banks became more and more and more comfortable buying government-sponsored enterprise debt, Fannie and Freddie debt, as a proxy for U.S. Treasury debt, because they’d get the extra yield, and they believed that it was government-guaranteed.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, if there’s a—if I can say, if there’s a key villain in your story, it’s James Johnson, who was, for a long period of time, the chief executive of Fannie Mae. You quote at one point that, "Under Johnson, Fannie Mae led the way in encouraging loose lending practices among the banks whose loans the company bought. A Pied Piper of the financial sector, Johnson led both the private and public sectors down a path that led directly to the credit crisis of 2008." But now, some people, though, have questioned whether you’re not sort of echoing the criticism that’s been raised by some of the Republican Tea Partiers, Sarah Palin herself, saying Freddie and Fannie were behind the whole crisis. This whole issue of the reduction of lending standards by the government and by Fannie Mae and how that affected the crisis, could you talk about that?

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: We’re certainly not saying that Fannie and Freddie were the, you know, key movers in this. They were—Fannie was a lead mover, a prime mover, first mover. And Jim Johnson really was a person who really taught the entire financial services industry how to co-opt their regulator, how to co-opt Congress, so that they could achieve what they wanted. And in many ways, this was personal enrichment, made a lot of money, the top executives of Fannie Mae. This, you know, is not our idea of what a government-sponsored enterprise should do. But so they were a primary mover, not the only movers. We had Wall Street very involved after Fannie Mae led the way. So, it really isn’t that simple.

JOSHUA ROSNER: Including the fact that you have to remember there was a symbiotic relationship between Fannie and Freddie and the private firms. Fannie Mae’s largest customer was Countrywide. Countrywide sold more of their volume to Fannie Mae than any other lender. And that relationship is really part of the ebb and flow of the private versus the government-sponsored. So, even as early as 2001, I had written a paper called "Housing in the New Millennium: A Home Without Equity is Just a Rental with Debt," in which I warned that we would end up where we ended up. Fannie and Freddie were really the only players. There wasn’t very much of a private market. The private market was where banks would make loans and hold them on their balance sheet. But the private-label securitization market, the mortgage-backed securities market, really was innovated after that. And so, Fannie and Freddie were part of the drivers of the creation of that private-label market and supported it, buying a lot of the private-label mortgages, mortgage-backed securities, that these other firms, Countrywide and Deutsche Bank and others, would end up issuing, Goldman Sachs.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the revelations in your book has made headlines in Massachusetts. In 1991, Fannie Mae hired Frank’s partner Herb Moses out of graduate school.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Barney Frank’s.

AMY GOODMAN: Barney Frank, congressman. Frank called up a VP at Fannie to praise Moses’ qualifications at the time. Congressman Frank was a member and later became chair of the House Financial Services Committee. Gretchen?

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: You know, we spoke with Barney about this as we were preparing the book and really wanted to ask him. You know, ’91 was a crucial moment in time, because after the S&L crisis, Congress was concerned that there would be losses at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that the taxpayer might have to bear, and so they were putting in place some new regulation to keep those losses from happening. And so, this was a crucial moment for the company.

And yet, Barney Frank spoke with people at Fannie Mae about hiring his partner. His partner was then hired. There was a red carpet rolled out for him by the company, because of course they were eager to provide this kind of a favor for a person who was in a position of power. We asked Frank if he felt that this conflicted him at all. He said, "Absolutely not." But if you look at the record, you see tremendous pushback from Frank in congressional hearings against the very idea of being careful about safety and soundness at Fannie Mae.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Joshua?

JOSHUA ROSNER: Yeah, no, I was just going to say, I think that that example, which has made headlines because it’s a little bit salacious, is really one example—and it’s not just Barney Frank, it’s both sides of the aisle, it’s Republicans and Dems—of the way the financial service industry really captured Congress with favors, with relationships, hiring senators’ sons to run their partnership offices.

Barney Frank—you know, there’s one that I don’t think had ever been reported at all that we include, which I think is even more sort of interesting, which is that the Fannie Mae Foundation, which provided annual awards and grants to folks who helped housing the most, awarded a charity that was founded by Barney Frank’s mother, annual awards on at least—

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: Two occasions.

JOSHUA ROSNER:—two occasions. And that type of relationship really does bind elected officials to corporate interests in a way that we feel is important to discuss, not necessarily in the public interest.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I want to get back to this issue of the lowering of lending standards, because one of the—I’d say the first half of the book is really sort of dedicated to how this process unraveled. And you say at one point that when the Boston Fed—I think it was in the '90s, early ’90s—comes up with a report showing that there had in fact been discrimination in the lending industry toward minority groups, that there was—that one of the few publications that raised issues about this report was Forbes magazine. And I think you quote some of the staff members—Peter Brimelow, who I remember in particular—challenging this whole notion that there had been racial discrimination in lending practices. Now, I happen to know a little bit about Brimelow, because later on, a few years later, he wrote a book, Alien Nation, that became widely criticized because the theory was that the United States was being brought down by massive Third World immigration. So I don't expect that Peter Brimelow would be the kind of person who would, like, stand up against racial discrimination. But the question of the impact—how central was the lowering of standards by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in lending standards? How much was that a part of it? And how much was actual fraud by the industry, by the brokers, by the appraisers, by the Mazilos of the world, who actually engineered fraudulent loans?

JOSHUA ROSNER: Right. So, on the most simple level, if you were to think about it today, we have about 40 percent of American homeowners have, or are close to having, negative equity. OK? If we had retained the lending standards that existed prior to 1995, where you really had to have 20 percent down payment, it would be a fraction of that that would have negative equity. We would not be sitting here having this conversation about a national housing crisis. That is a major part of this, was we went from 20 percent down, other than through explicit and direct government subsidy programs, right? The VA programs, right? Certain Ginnie programs, the farm credit programs. We went from that to Fannie and Freddie driving from a 20 percent down, down to a five percent down, down to a three percent down, to starting to play with, as early as 2001, zero percent down programs, which, by the way, if you put zero down, closing costs are about five percent, so really you’ve got negative equity day one. That is a setup for a disaster if home prices start falling. And so, if you start talking to congressmen and senators about, you know, at some point if home prices fall, the people who you loved the ribbon-cutting ceremonies that you got for putting them in homes are going to start accusing you of trapping them in homes that they couldn’t afford, becomes a reality.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But what percentage of it was new buyers, poor folks buying their first home, and what percentage was well-to-do people trying to refinance, constantly refinance, or interest-only loans—

JOSHUA ROSNER: Absolutely.

JUAN GONZALEZ:—to be able to get equity out of their house, on the theory that the house was going to continue to increase in value?

JOSHUA ROSNER: That’s a really important and great point. So, homeownership rates, which had been stagnant in the early 1990s at between—at about 63 percent, started rising to 64, 64.5 percent. Out comes this initiative to increase homeownership to record levels by the end of the decade. We get to 69.5 percent by the end of 2000. And we end up peaking in homeownership late 2003, early 2004. So that’s really—homeownership rates did peak long before the real estate market peaked. So, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 were a combination, as I think you’re pointing out, of refinancing activity, which was stripping equity—and it wasn’t just the well-to-do, it was anyone who had equity, was given incentives to take mortgages that allowed them to strip the equity out of their home to remodel their bathroom, to buy that other—you know, the riding lawn mower or whatever it was, and it was second home and investment property purchases on speculation.

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: Don’t forget that incomes were stagnant throughout this period. And so, for many people, it wasn’t taking equity out to go to Europe, to spend on some frivolous item. It was to maintain a lifestyle—

JOSHUA ROSNER: Absolutely.

GRETCHEN MORGENSON:—or keep, you know, their income at a level that they could actually live. So, there was a lot of equity extraction that was not based upon buying or consumerism or something that was frivolous. You know, I think that one of the most poisonous paradoxes that we found in our reporting for the book was that the very people that the government was claiming to want to help—first-time home buyers, minorities, immigrants—were the people who were hurt the most by this crisis. If you look at foreclosure rates among minorities, far higher. If you look at delinquency rates and problem mortgages and bankruptcy filings, it’s really so much worse among these very people.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve also written extensively about how the government has failed to prosecute. We started this segment talking about a prominent Wall Street analyst predicting this week not a single top executive at Goldman Sachs will face criminal prosecution for the company’s role in the financial meltdown. Talk about that.

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: Well, of course, not being a prosecutor, it’s very difficult for me to really understand what goes through their minds when they bring cases or investigate. But I think that there is a genuine sense out there that there are two sets of rules, one for big and powerful institutions that are deemed to be too politically interconnected or powerful to fail, and the rest of us, Main Street. And I think that feeds a—that’s a very pernicious view. And unfortunately, if you don’t have investigations and if you don’t have cases being brought, that view will continue. In the S&L crisis, for example, many, many people went to jail. High-level executives went to jail. CEOs went to jail. And to have a crisis that was this much larger than that one and to have no one go to jail is very troubling to a lot of people.

JOSHUA ROSNER: And part of that really is—you know, to reiterate what Gretchen said—this view that if we really investigate, if we really find wrongdoing by senior executives at these firms who now are too big to fail, we’re going to risk destabilizing the system. That’s really the psyche.

AMY GOODMAN: And how much of it is—well, for example, President Obama will be raising—hopes to raise more than a billion dollars for the 2012 election cycle to become president again. And the people he surrounds himself by, the very people involved in 2008 in the financial meltdown.

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: Exactly. And this brings us back to the original point we were talking about, about this public-private partnership with homeownership and how Fannie Mae co-opted Congress. It’s again that story. And so, I think it’s quite disturbing to many people.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’m curious about your sense of the role of the news media as this crisis unfolded, because it seems to me that throughout the '90s many of the newspapers—and, of course, you had the growth of business networks and cable—the business sections of the newspapers grew, but they grew basically as cheerleaders for the industry, rewriting the press releases of the analysts, not really doing independent reporting and analysis or investigations of what was going on in the business world. Now, after the whole thing collapses, now there's lots of reporters saying, “Hey, the government should have done this.” But where were those reporters when the crisis was developing?

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: Excellent, excellent point. I have, myself, taken on a lot of these individuals and institutions well before others. And believe me, it’s not easy. They are very powerful. They come at you with guns blazing. And I totally get that. That’s fine. But I think there was a sense among a lot of my colleagues in the press that—of a collegiality with people, almost that you wanted to be invited to the parties, instead of being outside with your nose pressed up against the glass, which is where I’d rather be. You wanted to be in the mix with the CEOs. There’s this sense of adulation. There’s a sense that if the CEO takes your call, that you’re, you know, sort of increasing in your own power. I think that’s a very hypnotic effect that happens in the media.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about how all of this affects average Americans. In the face of the massive budget shortfalls, calls are mounting across the country for wealthy individuals and corporations to pay a greater share of taxes. Here in New York City, hundreds rallied at City Hall yesterday demanding officials close tax loopholes and regulate financial practices, instead of targeting the public sector with layoffs and budget cuts. Protesters cut a symbolic Social Security net to represent the effects of cuts to vital services. This is a Brooklyn resident, Bobby Talbert. bq.

BOBBY TALBERT: Major corporations and the big banks are getting tremendous tax breaks. They’re getting bailed out, and they have a tremendous amount of loopholes, as far as financial is concerned. Meanwhile, services are being cut for marginalized families and even for the working class in New York City.

AMY GOODMAN: Gretchen Morgenson?

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: He’s absolutely right. And again, this is this feeling that the bailouts benefited Wall Street, they benefited corporate America, and did not benefit Main Street. I think, from the very outset of this crisis and the government’s reaction to it, we have had that feeling. And Main Street has been left out in the cold. The foreclosure programs are abysmal. The banks are not responding in a way that everyone had hoped they would. So I completely agree.
AMY GOODMAN: Lloyd Blankfein told you he felt waterboarded?

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: That was, yes, the word.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain the conversation, what was happening at the time. And then I want to ask you about Fabrice Tourre.

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: I think that what Mr. Blankfein meant was that he just felt, you know, overwhelmed by the public attention. I think that they felt at Goldman Sachs—and he had said this at one point—that they were doing the Lord’s work, or God’s work. And I’m going to take him at his word, if he really believes that. And, you know, I think that financial institutions are important. They are an intermediary. We need to have banks. I’m not saying, “Let’s get rid of them.” But I think that that tells you a little bit about his mindset. And, you know, many, many CEOs live in a bubble. They’re not used to having people speak truth to them. And so, I think that was his reaction. But I don’t know. I’m not in his brain.

AMY GOODMAN: And Tourre?

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: This is a—was a 28-year-old individual, seemed pretty junior in the organization.

AMY GOODMAN: He’s the only guy being brought up on charges. GRETCHEN MORGENSON: He’s the only—

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds.

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: Yes, he’s the only guy being brought up on charges. And so, you just once again wonder why are there no—why aren’t more people further up the ladder being singled out or focused upon?

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, your solution, what you think needs to happen?

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: Well, I think we need to address the foreclosure problem immediately. We need to have the banks, I think, face the music about what kinds of assets they own that they are not accurately reporting on their value. And I think that we have to try to balance it out between Main Street and Wall Street. Josh?

JOSHUA ROSNER: Yeah, I also think we need to turn the society from being geared for debt to equity. So, instead of a mortgage interest deduction, which incents borrowers to become indebted, maybe we should have principal equity tax credits so that they have incentives to save.

AMY GOODMAN: On that note, I want to thank you both for being with us, Joshua Rosner and Gretchen Morgenson, authors of Reckless Endangerment.

Bear killing, Vietnam, the end of environmentalism as we know it

How do environmental advocates fit into a world that may not want them?

This is the third in a series of columns discussing the decline of environmentalism and environmental movement or at least a disconnect from larger social justice concerns. Read previous stories here and here.

I intended to start off this series on “environmentalism or environmental justice making” with a look at an exchange between hunter and non-hunter that took place more than 16 years ago in the pages of The Spokesman Review.

The exchange, which I read later, was typical of the pro-hunting and anti-hunting newspaper exchanges in my early years in Arizona and later in New Mexico and West Texas.

A former newspaper journalist who I’ve taught with at SFCC brought me photocopies of letters to the editor and a couple of columns all related to the same hunting “incident.”

It started as a story on a female hunter who killed her first bear, detailing her sweaty palms as she held her compound bow and sighted in a 7-foot-tall black bear. There were the descriptors of the stalk, the kill, and the jubilation.

It then described how this bear stalker/killer was worried about finding a taxidermist to denature the animal into a towering family room accompaniment and finding space in her home to display her trophy.

As with many Spokane issues, the 75/25 Rule quickly played out: a few letter writers (25 percent) were outraged by what for most (75 percent) then, and now, was just another story about a good ol’ girl killing a giant, hairy pest. A few attacking those anti-hunting animal lover letters got published.

One writer (of the 25 percent group) framed it this way – “It’s sad and scary to know there are people out there who don’t see the difference between a bear and a slug, since both, to them, are pests: who think ‘hunting plays an important role in our burgeoning society,’ who decorate their homes with carcasses of their prey; who claim to respect the animals they stalk and kill for fun.”

The bear killing story prompted my fellow community college teacher to deny the full hunter’s glory with a short piece decrying the trophy hunter mentality.

Back and forth the letters and columns went – one column defended hunting and brought out allusions to eating burgers as the same sort of “blood on the hands” decision as killing a bear for sport. Then vegetarians were attacked for liking salads and slug-killing poisons, too.

The other column – by the woman I’ve worked with for a decade since moving here from El Paso – first ramified her point in a short letter to the editor that won the Golden Pen award. She grew up with a hunter father who killed every sort of fish, bird and terrestrial mammal in order to supply the family with meat. No antlers or posed heads of those kills graced her family’s house in Alaska.

She wasn’t against hunting for survival, just against the blood sport trophy-seeking angle. We’ll get back to that particular reportage and journalist pugilism in a minute.

I was in Vietnam when this newspaper exchange took place — July 1994. My job was logistics support and team member for a British-sponsored biodiversity survey group from the UK, Canada and the US (just me). We went to Hanoi for two weeks of intensive medical and biological training, then off to Pu Mat, along the Laotian border.

We were living it rough, with no radio contact to the outside world. No gas stoves. Plenty of rice. No tents – we bivouacked with bamboo, palm fronds and drainage ditches. We took Russian-made enduro motorcycles through 26 treacherous river crossings to get to the nearest outback town some 20 kilometers away from camp for resupplying.

We live-trapped (and released) dozens of species of bats in some of the most surreal scapes on earth. Think zither music, barking dogs, valleys protected by limestone ramparts, boom box music from China, and a thick green jungle. We conducted transects of trees, insect life and birds in triple-canopy jungle. We were deep in primary forest away from everyone except the toughest rattan cutters and tiger hunters.

King cobras, foot-long centipedes, flocks of hornbills, along with gibbons, were part of our daily jungle life.

In that jungle (I’d been to others in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize), I encountered some of the most memorable significant emotional events of my life. At age 37 — the age my warrant officer father was (1967) as a member of a logistics communications team in the Army’s Big Red One fighting America’s longest war, 1960-75 — I was in a country we wanted to bomb back to the Stone Age. Richard Nixon wished he could have dropped nukes on the Vietnamese.

Poverty and acceptance. Mile upon mile of metallic-smelling bomb craters filled with mosquitoes and rusty decayed jungle and delta mud. Thirty-two colors and shades of green amongst the checkerboard of rice paddies and tea groves. A country that had been at war for 1,000 years, invaded continually by interlopers, from the Chinese, Japanese, French, and Americans. Almost everyone opened their hearts to us, me in particular.

After the survey, report, and bundles of photographs, I traveled along Highway One, from the China border, through the DMZ, into Ho Chi Min City (Saigon) on a beat-up Italian motorcycle. All I got was clamoring crowds and loads of questions.

People hunted in city parks and others logged and trapped huge animals in the national sanctuaries. Our job, unfortunately in our Western context, was to assist the university and state biologists to convince their communist government to hold off on huge logging and land exploitation in an area scientists have said has been climatically and geologically stable for a million years.

The year before, one of the volunteer team members – young science graduate students from Scotland and England who paid to get there — didn’t make it out of camp and through those river crossings alive as her brain swelled from black water fever, a type of malaria.

It was a four-prong assault for me in Vietnam: biological diversity studies; photographing the entire six-month trip; writing articles for the El Paso newspaper I worked with; and returning to my father’s war-scape.

While the environmental activism and follow-up environmental justice work were clear for me, there was the catharsis of being with my father’s former enemies – these former Viet Cong sought me out when I ended up in small villages with my friend and translator, Dr. Trang Viet.

Working class celebrates May Day

Has environmental movement lost its connections with other social struggles?

It was a hell of a May Day in Seattle. More than 4,000 of us marched: teachers, social justice advocates, labor unionists, churchgoers and atheists, young and old, physically challenged and robust athletic types.

The same theme resounded here and around the world, in Istanbul, where 250,000 protested, or in Germany, where more than 430,000 came out to bring lawmakers a clear, resounding message: keep teachers and social workers, keep workers alive and happy.

Maybe environmentalists were participating elsewhere, but in Spokane – with no May Day rally – and in Seattle, they were few and far between. The message was clear – environmentalists have lost the last 30 years with their ‘greenie weenie’ tactics and overemphasis on wonky messaging while allowing the working class and poor to struggle with everything from refineries redefining compact, sustainable neighborhoods as cancer alleys.

Low wages, poor working conditions, classism and racism, exploitation, food deserts and swamps throughout urban communities are the bane of the environmental movement. When people are facing the Walmartization of their lives, coughing up the particulates of diesel engines and factories, and no rights to health care, they become the pawns of a rich class ready to divide and conquer us all.

Worrying about a gray wolf in the sights of an Idaho pick-up hunter or saving salmon runs just can’t fit into these people’s lives when their struggle has been forgotten by the environmental movement.

Many I talked with here said the environment was high on their list, since gas pipelines run through their ‘hoods and freeways bisect their lives. They also emphasized that this moment in time is a flashpoint where not only environmental justice might pass them by, but the whole concept of participatory and community-based governance could be sunk.

Teachers, health care, libraries, and union participation were high on lists of topics needed to keep the struggle going.

Plenty know the value of clean water, why kids are struggling with obesity and inattentiveness, why closing a neighborhood library is like killing memory. They see connections between asthma and plastics and the constant tailpipe respiration of our auto nation.

“If we end up with no schools – or for-profit schools – we will end democracy as we know it and envision it,” said Fred Hyde as he staffed a table with various militant and workers’ rights literature. “I want smart democrats, smart socialists and smart anarchists in my neighborhood, and schools are one place that can happen.”

Community gardeners were at this May Day march. So were socialists, communists and fusion voters. Campaigning for clean elections and for legalization of marijuana, folks with petitions peppered the march. Drumming, Spanish chants of liberation, and brass bands egged on same-sex couples who skipped with families and hordes of young people.

Teachers set up boxes and bullhorn speakers outside Chase Bank, rallying us all to make the bankers pay what they owe. Hotel workers outside the downtown Marriot demanded fair pay and decent conditions. One woman said she worked with three broken toes or risked losing her crappy job.

I doubt those $300,000/year wonders of the environmental movement were there. Or celebrity authors making a killing off of climate change.

Teachers were there, but not highly-compensated college presidents and coaches.

Environmentalists today are peddling an old white male’s game of top-down dictates from conservative-looking organizations like the Sierra Club or World Wildlife Fund.

Thousands rallied for this 2.9-mile march, surrounded by a city that’s been dubbed as one of the whitest urban places in the U.S. We were corralled in by a battalion of motorcycle cops and police bicyclists.

On May Day 2008, thousands of dockworkers in Tacoma staged a protest against our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Three years later, vets and homeless were gathering signatures to keep Nickelsville going.

Nickelsville, named after a former Seattle mayor, is a self-managed community of homeless and formerly homeless men, women, children and pets. It’s moved 16 times, and now some are advocating expanding Nickelsville to hold 1,000 homeless people.

One politician who marched with us was from Ohio. Democrat Dennis Kucinich wrangled me at Memorial Stadium to help with some phrases for the Spanish-speaking throng.

He was famished from a heavy speaking and town meeting schedule, but still gracious (and calm) to pose for photos. He was handed a plate of Guatemalan food and his second word after “thanks” was “vegan.”

I didn’t see Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn there, nor Seattle City Council President Richard Conlin – but he says he’s “into” studying and protracting the homeless Eco-Village plans while pain, suffering, violence and murder still plague street people.

The march was full of energy from the Latinos/-as, field workers. I was thinking of a righteous environmentalist, 29-year-old Tim DeChristopher, a climate activist and founder of Peaceful Uprising, who faces a decade in prison after being convicted for his direct action to protect the environment.

Tim had just finished his graduate degree at the University of Utah, in economics. He then registered for a U.S. Bureau of Land Management auction in Salt Lake City with the plan of peacefully derailing the Bush administration decision to open public lands to oil and gas drilling.

He drove up the price in order to make it difficult for others to bid on this country’s most beautiful arid landscape. He was arrested and charged with two felonies.

An environmentalist facing jail time should be given an award. Take note that not one hedge fund liar, corrupt banker, or Wall Street cheat has been convicted or imprisoned for this current economic tsunami, yet this active, smart student faces 10 years in federal prison.

He spoke at the April 22, 2011, Earth Day Powershift event, with 10,000 people, and his words sting the complacent and what I call the weenies in the green community.

“Mountaintop removal, climate change and other injustices we are experiencing are not being driven solely by the coal industry, lobbyists, or failure of our politicians. They’re also happening because of the cowardice of the environmental movement. We hold the power right here to create our vision of a healthy, just world, if we are willing to make the sacrifices to make it happen.

Where is the point where our movement is going to say that stopping this injustice is more important than my career plans, or my comfort and convenience? Now is our time to take a stand. We’re done making statements. Let this be the last time that we come together to make statements. Our movement needs to take a stand.”

His words relate to the underpinning of May Day in Seattle and in other cities. This activist should be invited to every pompous school board hearing and every pedantic administrative council. His words strike fear in the upper echelon as they covet hyper-salaries while they cut faculty and staff. They could even penetrate those under-imaginative chancellors and presidents.

Is environmentalism dying?

Drastic cuts in school funding may seriously deter interest in bettering world

I’m thinking about beavers, as in Martinez, Calif., where John Muir ended up living, and where community activists have been fighting for these aquatic rodents and advocating for kids to learn about beavers’ positive impacts.

Muir, father of the park system, writer, environmentalist, Sierra Club founder, settled in Martinez, as did the Shell Oil Company – both have diametrically opposed roots here, about 30 miles northwest of San Francisco.

Once there were 90 million beavers on Turtle Island, before First Contact. Maybe there’s 10 percent of that total now.

Beavers are being run over, poisoned and trapped and killed. People don’t want car trips interrupted by beavers on their roadways. They want channeled rivers, streams and creeks to stay impounded. They want every square inch of property left for the domain of the Homo Sapiens’ grid logic.

What does all that history of killing, skinning, trapping give us? Screwed-up rivers, vanished wetlands, lack of groundwater, gutted diversity of fish, flora, insects, other animals.

Beavers are a bioweb, ecosystems, bionet wonder. They actually fix things.

So the beaver story has come and gone in DTE (see here) and in the Spokane Living Magazine (here.) My radio show, Tipping Points: Voices from the Edge, April 27, 2011, included a conversation with a child psychologist working on beavers and director of a program, Worth a Dam (see www.martinezbeavers.org).

I also got in a special hour before my regular Wed. 3-4 slot with Mike Lydon, activist, planner, bicycle advocate and the Next Generation innovator for the Congress of the New Urbanism and this thing called Tactical Urbanism. He was in Allentown, Penn., about to present some innovative bicycle corridor stuff focusing toward low-income folk. He’ll be featured in a DTE article or two coming up.

I’ve talked with so many great people over the past three years on KYRS, and 3.5 decades as a journalist and writer. I’ve had Tim Flannery, Winona LaDuke, James Howard Kunstler, and countless others in the small, cramped KYRS broadcast booth.

I’ve had Amy Goodman on the phone, and David Suzuki. Richard Heinberg was a fresh interview, not as wonky as I thought. Scientists working on ocean acidification let loose, even joked. Naomi Wolf tackled fascism’s rise in the U.S. in the 21st century. Reporters like Jeremy Scahill who broke into investigative journalism with his book on Blackwater predicted a lot of backsliding by a newly-elected Obama.

One of the coolest interviews was with John Francis, Planet Walker, who was in San Francisco Jan. 19, 1971, when the Standard Oil crude tankers collided near the Golden Gate Bridge.

He transformed himself almost instantly after witnessing that environmental crime, changing his operating system and spiritual core into the ultimate activist, educator, and deep ecologist: someone who took vows to understand this mess of humanity.

He was born in Philadelphia, the son of a West Indian immigrant, and as a young man moved to Marin County. Witnessing that oil spill, John stood up and proclaimed he would stop riding in motorized vehicles, a vow which lasted 22 years.

Then he went to work walking and educating himself. A bachelor’s degree from Southern Oregon University, then a master’s at the University of Montana, and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. He was studying when the Exxon Valdez spill occurred.

He got those degrees, and even taught as a teaching assistant, while not talking. He vowed to listen and stop arguing, taking a vow of silence from 1973 until 1990. That’s 17 years voiceless, and he taught, communicated, and lived with sign language and his banjo. Seventeen years listening, and earning a doctorate in land management.

While silent, he walked 26,000 miles across the United States and to South America.

I was thinking about Francis when I interviewed Heidi Perryman, child psychologist for 20 years, 10 years as a day care teacher, and five years as a beaver activist. She has spent her entire life in Martinez, dedicated to the environment and beavers, and helping communities and schools become part of that dynamic.

Unfortunately, while talking about education with Perryman, I referenced the lunacy of Washington’s Gov. Gregoire, Olympia politicians, tea baggers, Obama, the country as a whole. They are gutting education, gutting community colleges and universities, and K-12 institutions – and we’re not doing much about it.

The environmental movement has been mute about wages, health care, and education as it negotiates pollution allowances and witnesses the death of environmental protection measures.

I admit that I was multitasking while talking with Perryman. I was on the beaver website, on the Lands Council’s beaver page, and on my college’s Outlook mail account.

All three windows were open when I saw yet another attack on education.

We just received a letter from Spokane Falls Community College’s president, vis-à-vis the Chancellor containing an offer for tenured faculty with at least seven years teaching to voluntarily end teaching for a one-time $25,000 payout.

Even elementary school students would scoff at this offer. But this is the sort of absurd, ethically-challenged, and backward thinking from administrators we have allowed to run this country’s schools into the ground.

Where is the next generation of environmentalists going to be incubated when classrooms are swelling and sweltering with overcrowded class sizes? Schools with fewer offerings, now that’s a grand business model. Cutting innovative courses tied to sustainability and environmental and social justice, now that is a dunce’s move.

Humanities and liberal arts chopped in half or altogether in favor of some administrator’s/chancellor’s/governor’s myopic vision of our young people’s futures? All wrong-headed moves, and spineless.

While beavers symbolize interconnectedness, dedication and stick-to-it-ness, our leaders are myopic thinkers, the same sort of limited scope that would decimate buffalo, dodos, beaver, or bees in favor of maximizing profits and maximizing human carrying capacity.

Colony Collapse Disorder is the term for billions of bees dying off. With Bill Gates, Christine Gregoires, and education honchos running the show, we are now undergoing our own CCD – Community Collapse Disorder.

Without this attack on community, this environmental movement as we know it is dead.

Maybe the lesson for environmentalists comes from the beaver – mate for life, and learn each year to make better dams, spillways, and routes to the den. Beavers harmonize life, and as vegetarians, they unwittingly become the stewards of biodiversity — as fishes, insects, birds and other mammals come out of the wilderness and into the wonderful world of a beaver’s wetland.

(This is the first part of a series exploring some of the challenges facing the traditional environmental movement.)

Food, Food, Food -- Climate Change, Mega-Corporations, and Fuel

Thanks to my colleague at Down to Earth NW for this blog news flash --

Paul Dillion, gracias.
************

“Oxfam prophesises that food prices will double by 2030.”

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/603974/report%3A_over_next_two_decades%2C_world_food_prices_will_double/#paragraph6

Of course, it's doubtful world incomes will double in the next twenty years. Welcome to the world food crisis. Lang comments it's the result of many problems, including environmental issues, wealth disparity, and misguided solutions:

The 20th century squandered scientific possibilities. It created the fiction that ever more food can be produced by tapping oil, throwing fertiliser at seeds, spraying endless water and treating the soil as blotting paper, a neutral medium. We now know how fragile that mix is, and how fragile the Earth's crust and biology are too. Slowly, some of the institutions created over the last 60 years are recognising that political leadership and redirection are needed. The FAO, WHO, Unicef and Unep all collate the food story. Ministers meet, but in silos. The big picture eludes them. Inaction triumphs.

Sarah Jaffe is responding to a report from Oxfam, called a “Growing a Better Future” which you can read HERE.

http://www.oxfam.org/en/grow/reports/growing-better-future


The report says “staple foods, already at its highest ever, will more than double in the next 20 years—at least half of that increase due to climate change.”

Obviously, this will hit the world's poorest the most.

Jaffe writes:

Oxfam's GROW campaign is targeting the corporations and governments who prop up a broken food system, but Lang notes that it may be an uphill battle getting action from politicians.

And yet there's little time for hesitation. “The food system is pretty well bust in the world,” Oxfam Chief Executive Barbara Stocking told reporters.

Oxfam maintains that the current food system only works for some, so it's launched the GROW campaign in 43 countries.

The campaign will urge world leaders to make food more affordable and available by investing in small-scale food production, stopping subsidies for the corn-ethanol industry, updating food aid and ending agricultural commodity speculation that drives up prices. Help make sure people throughout the world have enough to eat. Support GROW by spreading the word or signing a global petition. Oxfam is also accepting donations through the Impact links.

http://www.oxfam.org/en/grow/

**************
Ahh -- food is in the news again and again.

Chris Hedges interviews Bill McKibben, on climate change, delusions, this odd adaptation mentality of Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama. Food comes up in his piece --

http://www.truthout.org/sky-really-falling/1306847032

The Earth has already begun to react to our hubris. Freak weather unleashed deadly tornados in Joplin, Mo., and Tuscaloosa, Ala. It has triggered wildfires that have engulfed large tracts in California, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas. It has brought severe droughts to the Southwest, parts of China and the Amazon. It has caused massive flooding along the Mississippi as well as in Australia, New Zealand, China and Pakistan. It is killing off the fish stocks in the oceans and obliterating the polar ice caps. Steadily rising sea levels will eventually submerge coastal cities, islands and some countries. These disturbing weather patterns presage a world where it will be harder and harder to sustain human life.

Massive human migrations, which have already begun, will create chaos and violence. India is building a4,000-kilometer fencealong its border with Bangladesh to, in part, hold back the refugees who will flee if Bangladesh is submerged.

There are mounting food shortages and sharp price increases in basic staples such as wheat as weather patterns disrupt crop production. The failed grain harvests in Russia, China and Australia, along with the death of the winter wheat crop in Texas, have, as McKibben points out, been exacerbated by the inability of Midwestern farmers to plant corn in water-logged fields. These portents of an angry Gaia are nothing compared to what will follow if we do not swiftly act.



Notice walls being built, fear of environmental refugees, and the like. So, as a blogger, I have been busy writing stories, planning others for APA's Planning Magazine's Nov. 2011 issue --

http://www.planning.org/planning/

Greenwashing, death of environmentalism, the failure of our political system, and the juggernaut of the big oil-big financial giants holding true progress back. Sorry for the delay in getting something posted. More to come.

Paul