3/13/10: Leaving Berkeley

3/13/10: Leaving Berkeley

Forty years ago Seymour Melman pointed out again and again in The New York Times that the cost of the Vietnam War was approaching the value of the built American landscape. From the 1960s through 2000 the United States lost the opportunity to create a new world: a more egalitarian society, living comfortably within its natural limits. But this was a time without limits, when the United States dominated the world, much of which was developing at an unprecedented pace. In 1960, carbon dioxide levels were rising but not unreasonable; human populations low enough that much natural landscape, with its fierce large animals, was left (fierce wild animals, through their predatory behavior, are thought through a trophic cascade of effects on herbivores and smaller predators to keep the world green; in 1960 in developed countries like the United States the land was now largely empty of such animals, which were replaced by human hunters); songbird populations collapsing but still relatively high; chemical use low (DDT new and popular), if growing; medical care largely affordable; the country relatively rich. Berkeley was creeping out into San Francisco Bay; the Mississippi being hemmed in by dikes, the Everglades drained off to the sea. The sea still had fish, the sky hawks. During full moon at nighttime high tide, millions of silvery grunion spawned on the beaches of southern California.

From its founding amidst the unfolding of capitalist economies in the West, the United States has been ruled by its economic interests; most often, the economic interests of wealthy individuals and corporations (which largely replaced wealthy individuals; the 1930s were an apparent exception). So from the sixties on, corporations like ExxonMobil, General Motors and United States Sugar, with their financial connections to politicians (who needed money for reelection, to put their children through college, to entertain their mistresses, impress their colleagues, or for a comfortable retirement) determined the country’s priorities. The result is that our prosperity, in a much less egalitarian society than in 1960, depends on our producing chemicals that cause developmental anomalies in children (ambiguous sexuality, autism, low IQ) and cancer in adults (perhaps partly as a result of depressed immune systems, with similar effects in fish, marine mammals, birds and the other creatures with which we share the planet); on our eating cheap industrial foods that produce life-shortening diseases (obesity, diabetes, atherosclerosis); on world trade that haphazardly introduces strange plants and animals to new places; on processes that produce carbon dioxide, methane and other gases that are changing the climate. While all this is known, little changes: a recent plan by the State of Florida to buy land to add to the Everglades turns out to be a plan to prop up United States Sugar, a company which survives through the use of cheap Haitian labor, through import duties on sugar (which raises its price to us and harms poor farmers worldwide), which is a major polluter of the Everglades with its releases of phosphorus, and which was only able to farm at all because of public works projects that drained its land. The Everglades will not survive anyway: a two foot rise in sea level will turn the fresh water marsh with its alligators and shorebirds (already reduced 90% from the 1930s) into a salt water one with crocodiles and manatees. Sea level is predicted to rise three feet by 2100 (though ten feet is more likely). A changing climate will make all plans to save habitats, plants and animals moot, as the creatures move and their habitats change and disappear. The forests of the western cordilleras of North America from Arizona to Alaska are collapsing from insects and fire, partly as a result of drought, partly from 100 years of human mismanagement. Boreal forests across the northern hemisphere may soon join them. Tropical forests continue to be logged and cleared for agriculture. Methane bubbles up from the warming Arctic Sea (or perhaps it always has). Blister rust, a fungus disease of pines (it inspired a program of hand eradication of native gooseberries, an alternate host in the eastern United States in the 1920s-1930s) has reached the white bark pines of high altitudes in the Rocky Mountains, whose seeds, robbed from rodent nests, are a major autumn food of grizzly bears. The bears survive because they live high up in the backcountry. If they descend to lower altitudes to feed they will be shot. Eastern forests change as the climate warms, heavy cutting continues, cloud ceilings (the boundary between deciduous and evergreen forests) rise, and as several of its species (green and white ash, eastern hemlock, beech) join chestnut, red spruce and the elms in decline from imported insects, air pollution and diseases. Coyotes however, have moved into habitats abandoned a century ago by gray wolves and, growing ever larger as they adopt white tailed deer, along with rabbits and mice, as a prey animal, are doing well. What a changing climate will do to people (a species as opportunistic as coyotes) is uncertain. Rich populations may survive without too much difficulty. But if I were to buy land, I would do it at least 200 feet above sea level, out of river flood plains, and north, perhaps in walking distance of water with fish. Much may depend on how much the chemical soup in which we live, and the industrial food we eat, costs us (and of course in the case of the United States, the costs of our pointless foreign wars): modern life may not be cost-effective or survivable.

What all this implies for conserving the landscape is uncertain. Habitat for individual animals (grizzly bears, tigers, shorebirds) may not be worth saving: habitats are changing too fast. Land in large quantities is worth saving, especially lands near large rivers and coasts (and inland of coasts) and any extensive, connected pieces of open land. Lands in continental interiors are probably going to get drier (deserts will expand, land for photo-voltaic panels become a dime a dozen) and northern lands warmer. Northern lands may remain well watered and so desirable for agriculture, despite their relatively poor soils. Coastal regions (the lands east of the Appalachians, the coast of California) may become too stormy to be easily habitable by people. An orderly retreat from the effects of a changing climate, demolishing or moving buildings as we go, leaving much open land for nature, would be the best strategy; but we won’t do it. The cities of older civilizations slid under the sea and were adopted by sponges and fish but our more toxic buildings may be less friendly to wildlife and us. In 10,000 years bacteria will have broken down or sequestered the toxins, the sea diluted the radioactivity in the storage ponds of nuclear power plants, buried the asbestos insulation, oxidized the iron, the action of the waves turned the concrete to sand.

* * *

The day we left Berkeley dawned clear and cool, the air washed clean by the previous day’s rain. There was an invisible skim of frost on the car’s windshield, momentarily confusing the locals. The sun was going to be hot, the air cool, with a slightly sour smell of damp and redwoods. The plane banked over the bay, revealing pale green hills, with darker oaks and firs in the hollows, the blue sky, a pale blue or muddy green sea. Large areas of the southern parts of the bay are still used for the evaporation of salt, diked rippled flats red with salt tolerant micro organisms, and more areas of natural wetland are left, if with no natural flow from the San Joaquin River, all of whose water is allocated to people and agriculture. I missed California already. Who would want to leave on such a day, such a beautiful and ruined landscape?

We were returning to our black and white late winter world. When we landed in Albany, parked on the side of the airport tarmac were several huge planes, diverted from New York City airports because of tremendous winds earlier that day. Global warming gives us a more energetic atmosphere, of which this may or may not be an example. But perhaps more difficult and unreliable air travel will be another part of our warming world.