The most popular post ever on this blog -- mobilizing for national emergency

Google very helpfully provides me with data about hits on this lovely blog. I can find out all sorts of information on who comes here, from which city in the world, to read which particular post, for how long, from what service provider. I can even tell which particular key words were typed into a search engine to find this here blog. Keywords that readers used to find this blog in the last few days include "termite farts," "Roman moat," and "Picard personal army."

The post on this blog that is most often read by readers is "Mobilization for national emergency: lessons of World War II for the age of eco-collapse," posted by me on April 15, 2011. This post has received 37.5% more hits than its next nearest competitor. It receives at least a few hits every week, sometimes even more than whatever posts have gone up that particular week. 

I try to attach cosmic significance to the relative popularity of that particular essay compared to other entries on this blog. I'm not justified in finding such significance, of course. This blog doesn't get a lot of hits, despite my periodic hopes that it might break through to some sort of significant readership. I haven't done enough promotional work for that to happen, mainly because I have too many other things to do. 

Still, I end up thinking about why some patchwork thoughts about economic production in World War II seem to be so interesting to the few readers who find their way here. In that essay, I tried to argue that industrial societies undergoing extreme disruption can continue to maintain basic government and business functions, even in desperate circumstances. Since national institutions and infrastructure did not rapidly, totally collapse under the extreme physical disruption of World War II, I contended that they would not do so under the extreme climate and resource disruption likely to emerge in the next 50 years or so (after that is another story).  

I may nor may not be correct in my argument. Whether I am or not, I still think that national mobilizations for World War II provides one of the most relevant real-life examples of what a viable large-scale response to climate change and resource depletion would look like. Such a response, currently, is not politically feasible. I believe this will change, sometime between now and 2050, as the physical consequences of planet wide ecological collapse become ever more direct and undeniable to national governments. And even to avid readers of the mainstream media. 

We can see tantalizing early hints of a sea change already. The United States and Russia are making plans for the industrialization of the Arctic, for example. The two governments, we can infer, see where the planetary ecology is headed and what will be necessary -- in their view -- to prosper in a changed world. U.S. and Russian efforts are underway to establish oil and gas drilling around the Arctic Ocean on a massive scale, with planned military and naval deployments to support economic development efforts. These plans suggest the eventual establishment of frontier towns and ports along the Arctic Ocean, as conditions there become increasingly temperate, the ice retreats, and the tundra thaws. Eventually, there will be cities -- communities of tens of thousands of people or more. In and around them we will see the coming and going of tankers, freighters, submarines, aircraft carriers, helicopters, strike aircraft, and troop formations. 

To me, as someone who cares about the future of the Earth's biosphere and the creation of social systems based on something other than predation, this is all horrifying. Mainstream media and policy wonks, once they awaken from their current zombified stupor of ecological ignorance, will see the Arctic industrialization and arms race -- of course -- as a complex series of trade offs among ecological, economic, and geopolitical realities. In the reality that exists outside of such ideological blather, the development of the Arctic will help ensure that human civilization burns. 

The rest of us will be left to pursue more local solutions, carving out a tolerable existence at the neighborhood, town, and city level as best we can -- within the constraints of larger systems of power and force. Those systems, increasingly, will be operating under emergency conditions, seeking to maintain order and prioritize the flow of remaining resources to corporate and military assets vital to the enrichment of nation-states and their ruling elites. 

My own part in all of that will consist of finding ways to put my 2014 law degree (fingers crossed) to good use, helping to prevent the worst local abuses (e.g. natural gas fracking, abusive behavior by leaders of military facilities) or lay the local foundation, ever so tentative and fragile, of a potential post-carbon, post-corporate future (through, for example, changes in rules for land use and economic exploitation). 

It will not be boring. 

The smoke of burning dreams

Sunset through the smoke, Albuquerque, June 7, 2011

From http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Wallow_fire_smoke_in_ABQ.jpg

The massive forest fire in eastern Arizona continues to burn. It is known as the Wallow fire, after the wilderness area where it began on May 29.  Winds in the area subsided somewhat yesterday, but sustained gusts are predicted to resume tomorrow. Hundreds of fire fighters are working frantically to construct containment lines before the winds return. The flames are expected to cross the state line into New Mexico sometime this weekend. Currently, the wildfire ranks as the second worst in Arizona history. It has now burned over 600 square miles -- about half the land area of Rhode Island, according to a news report.

The same report notes the ferocity of the force burning its way east:

Alex Hoon, a National Weather Service meteorologist, told ABC News that this fire is actually creating its own weather, forming a pyrocumulus cloud, or fire cloud, that is dynamically similar to a firestorm.

"The fire is so intense has so much heat that it actually forms its own thunderstorm at the top of the smoke plume," Hoon said. 

These storms spur the fire on by creating winds that start new fires by hurling burning debris as far as five miles through the air. 

The firestorm is far distant from my house in Albuquerque, but it comes to the city each night. At sunset, the winds above the American Southwest shift with the changing currents of atmospheric heat. The result is a gigantic wall of smoke that rolls over Albuquerque every day at the setting of the sun. The dirty haze of smog burns the eyes and completely enshrouds the city, coating it in fine dusty layers of ash. Last night we had some relief, with the settling of the wind. It will be back tomorrow. No one knows when the fire will stop.    

A friend of a friend snapped this picture from the top of the Sandia Mountains, five thousand feet above the city of Albuquerque, as the silent billows of smoke came in from the west:

The smoke arrives at sunset: Albuquerque, June 3, 2011

Seen from Sandia peak, elevation 10,000 feet above sea level

Yesterday, a co-worker of mine slumped in despair at the thought of spending another evening huddled inside her house, smothered in heat with the air conditioning off, trying to avoid the burning abrasion of smoke in her lungs. In Albuquerque, most of us use "evaporative coolers" for air conditioning; these devices suck air from the outside, pass it over flowing water to cool it off, and blow it into the house. Using these coolers sucks the smoke directly into your house. So you have to turn them off. Without air conditioning, Albuquerque houses can become almost unlivable at the height of summer. Even now, in late spring, the daytime sun forces heat into the 90s. Working and middle class homes in Albuquerque were never built to withstand that searing desert heat, the way the desert Indians of this region did when they built their stone pueblos to retain cool night air during the day. Today's fake stucco and cheap prefab domiciles broil in the sun and retain the heat long into the night. Without air conditioning, you have to leave every door and window wide open to get even a semblance of relief.

This is what my co-worker is having to deal with, as the summer heat in our city begins to mount and the clouds of particulate ash descend almost every night. Besides the physical discomfort, my co-worker told me yesterday, the smoke simply makes her afraid. It's alien, unearthly. Not right. Her adopted children and the kids in her neighborhood ask her: aunty, when is this stuff going to stop? She doesn't know what to tell them. One kid keeps hacking and sputtering, every night, trying to cough the soot out of her chest.

My co-worker related this with something like panic growing on her face. She asked me: what in God's name is happening to us? She's a Christian, who has always believed that one day the end times will come. Now her home is smothered in smoke every night, and the television brings new images each day of a country being laid waste. Fires in the west, the bloated Mississippi miles wide, drowning the homes along its banks, tornadoes roaring out of the sky in city after city. It looks like the end times to me, my co-worker said.

It is, I replied. This is climate change. This is what all the scientists have been talking about for so many years. It's here. Fires like this are just the beginning. This is what it's going to be like for the rest of our lives. We can't change it. All we can do is try to help each other. My co-worker looked doubtful. No one cares, she said. People aren't like that any more. Nobody looks out for neighbors or feels any connection to anything, the way they used to. Then maybe we have to re-learn it, said I. We don't really have a choice.

I've spoken many times with this co-worker about climate change and what it will mean, for ourselves, our country, and our people. She would always nod without really listening. Politely, but without comprehension. Yesterday, for the first time, I think she listened, as we both anticipated the onset of smoke with the fall of night.

Climate change, and other sweeping global issues, are not real until they become real in the here and now. In the ashes settling onto your flesh. This is a basic, inescapable truth, unfortunate though it may be. Now the ashes have come. More people will be willing to listen. It takes a jolt. Not from dry numbers and policy statements or political ads. What makes people listen is the sudden hammer blow to the psyche of a soul comprehending its own extinction. People listen to the dark angel of the end made real, animal instincts gushing adrenalin into the blood, a flood of neurotransmitters lighting up the brain in the ancient tidal onset of fear.

We have more to fear than fear itself. But we have no choice except to face it, and live with it, try to leave something to build on for those who come after. Try to give them the start of a new way of life on an alien world, where the forests have become memory.

It has to start now, because we're out of time. The new world is here, heralded by flame. Words of a prophet: let us not talk falsely now, for the hour is getting late.  

The Wallow Fire, Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, Arizona, June 5, 2011

Photo by U.S. Forest Service,  http://www.flickr.com/photos/apachesitgreavesnf/5812927104/in/set-72157626903801010

Sitting In the Frying Pan, Preparing for the Fire

Note: The following is a review that I wrote as an assignment for a creative nonfiction class that I'm currently taking. This is the first draft. I may replace this posting in a couple of weeks, depending on how much I decide to revise it prior to submission of the final version for the class.


Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.

By Mark Hertsgaard.

(2011; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 339 pages; $25)


In the final chapter of this book, Hertsgaard describes the emotional reaction experienced by someone recognizing the magnitude of the global warming problem for the first time. He calls it the “oh, shit” moment, “when the pieces all fall into place, the full implications of the science at last become clear, and you are left staring in horror at the monstrous situation humanity has created for itself.” Having experienced my own such bitter epiphany a few years back, and having pushed my wife to hers (she has since forgiven me for doing so on our fourth wedding anniversary) this description resonates perfectly.

It also summarizes the first of two major purposes of this book: to impel the reader towards just such an “oh, shit” moment. And for a naïve reader with an open mind, the book should have no trouble in doing so. The authority of the sources, the meticulous attention paid to details and the carefully analytical manner employed by the author inspire confidence in the veracity of his conclusions; the contents of those conclusions inspire horror, outrage and grief by turns. Fortunately for the suicidally disposed, the doom and gloom is presented in easily digestible doses and is tempered with plenty of the second major purpose: to ignite hope in spite of the chaos – a hope, bolstered by science and real-world examples, that something worth doing can still be done.

Make no mistake: Hertsgaard does not, for one moment, gloss over the big ugly truths that global warming is here to stay and that the extremes of weather that we have seen over the past decade are only the early hints of the disasters in store. He clearly states that global warming is already locked in. Even if all emissions of greenhouse gases were to miraculously stop today, their levels have exceeded critical thresholds and processes have begun that will take decades to mature and possibly centuries (or longer) to reverse. Hertsgaard employs many helpful analogies throughout the book, one of which he uses to illustrate this irrevocability of climate change: “…imagine that our civilization is traveling in a train, heading downhill, picking up speed, and approaching a landscape obscured by storm clouds. We can hit the brakes by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and we must. But the train’s momentum ensures that it will be a long time before we actually come to a halt, and before we do, we will cross a great deal of unknown territory.”

This “unknown territory” is where the book spends much of its time. As Hertsgaard explores the various threats likely to be faced by the world of the next several decades, although each of them is a frustratingly complex Gordian knot of intersecting social, political, economic and physical powers, he roughly categorizes them into two categories: unavoidable and (potentially) manageable. The book’s mantra is “avoid the unmanageable, manage the unavoidable” and responses to the threats are framed in terms of mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation denotes long range efforts to halt and reverse global warming before conditions on the planet become physically incompatible with life (avoiding the unmanageable), while adaptation refers to development and implementation of strategies and technologies that promote survival of environmental stresses to which we’re already committed (managing the unavoidable).

With this framework in mind, Hertsgaard embarks on a globe-trotting exploration of the science, history, politics and implications of global warming and climate change. Through a series of interviews and case studies in places as geographically disparate as Seattle, Beijing, Bangladesh, New Orleans, rural China, the Netherlands, Sacramento and Burkina Faso, he examines three epic classes of calamity that are expected to increase in both frequency and severity as a result of global warming induced climate change: flood, drought and famine. In each real-life situation studied, Hertsgaard describes how one of these problems has impacted a community, identifies its sources, introduces the people affected (often through representative individuals) and analyzes the responses.

Some of the stories are victorious, such as the burgeoning of crop yields and the restoration of water tables experienced by farmers of the African Sahel. By allowing native tree species to grow, unhindered alongside their crops, these farmers harness a powerful arboreal water-trapping capacity that is lost when the land is systematically cleared for farming. Other stories are of sad failures, missed opportunities, misguided attempts, tragic ineptitude or sheer pigheaded greed.

This last category is rampant in regions where the climate change deniers hold sway. These “idealogues” are vilified as a whole throughout the book, and while the majority are portrayed charitably as the misguided masses, several groups and individuals are singled out for special recognition as criminals against humanity’s future. Hertsgaard has no qualms about assigning blame where he sees it to be it due, and one might argue that this is, a weakness of the book. By painting the actions of various corporate players, media sources and political figures so starkly, he probably alienates many readers, and undermines his own credibility, in their eyes, by appearing to be excessively biased. However, he backs all of his claims with substantial evidence in the form of hard science, public records, policy documents and expert testimony. Besides, it doesn’t seem that Hertsgaard is out to make friends; he’s trying to recruit allies. The book has an agenda, no question, and that agenda is driven by the author’s passion, but it is also driven by rational arguments and undeniable facts.

The foundation of Hertsgaard’s passion is divulged early in the book and is revisited frequently throughout. He has a young daughter, Chiara, and it is for her that he writes. She and all of her generation are destined to inherit a planet that is already broken and is poised on the brink destruction. In keeping with this consciousness of the grim fate that has been meted out to Earth’s children is Hertsgaard’s use of yet another overarching theme: fairy tales. Invoking imagery of dragons, heroes, epic battles and games of wit he eloquently illustrates both the staggering magnitude of the ordeal before us and the height of the stakes that leave us only two options: a committed, concerted response or annihilation. Although he never claims the role, through the love, dedication and perseverance that he manifests in the creation of this book, Hertsgaard himself emerges as a kind of fairy-tale hero. The man who knows from the start that his quest is impossible and that he lacks the strength and power to accomplish it alone, but who is willing to die trying… and who clings ever so desperately to the hope that maybe, just maybe, he isn’t alone – that enough likeminded would-be heroes will join him, and that together they will avert some of the chaos and misery in store.