Wolf Cascade
The last wolf in Yellowstone National Park was killed in 1926. Two young wolves stepped simultaneously into nearby traps. Wolves were killed to protect elk.
The elk enjoyed the wolves being gone. They soon increased in number.
Coyotes also increased and ate lots of mice, voles and rabbits. They also killed many foxes and skunks and learned to kill newborn antelope. Fewer foxes and skunks meant more ground nesting birds.
Elk eat grass but they also browse twigs of aspen and willow, especially in winter. With wolves gone they spent more time browsing near streams. Soon no tender young trees were left.
Beaver had dams along the streams. Fat trout ate tadpoles in their ponds. Green-winged teal dabbled for insect larvae and small plants. Birds sang from the trees.
As fewer and fewer young trees grew and only big old trees were left, beaver had less and less to eat. Slowly, they starved to death or left. Their dams washed out.
The elk missed the young trees too and looked for them. They found every one. Elk numbers had increased until they were eating all the available food. In hard winters, many elk died.
The females were in poor condition in spring when they bore their fawns. During a hard winter the females absorbed the embryonic fawns into their bodies. But when the weather relented elk numbers would increase once again.
Without beaver ponds and young trees to hold their banks, the streams straightened out and cut deeper into their beds. Water tables near the streams fell.
Fewer birds returned to the old aspens on the streamside. Trout were smaller and fewer mink and otters came to hunt them.
In 1960, after 34 years of no wolves, some scientists had the bright idea that fierce predatory animals, by keeping animals like elk from eating up all the grass and trees, kept the world green. This may have not been a new idea but as a general principle it was revolutionary. Ecosystem control was from the top down, through predators, rather than from the bottom up, through photosynthesizers. (Actually both processes are key.)
By the 1990s the idea had taken hold and the National Park Service decided to reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone. Wolves were trapped in northern Alberta in the winter of 1994-95 and kept in cages in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley for a few months to acclimatize them to their surroundings.
When the wolves were released it didn’t take them long to figure out what to do with the elk. (These wolves were used to eating moose.) The elk had forgotten about wolves over the last 70 years (many many elk generations).
Soon things were back to normal. When pursued, healthy elk, generally slightly faster than wolves, would tell the wolves to get lost.
Unhealthy or old slow elk did less well. Wolves ate unhealthy, sick and old elk.
Wolves also ate young elk. By eating elk calves, wolves kept numbers of elk somewhat below the carrying capacity of their range, though overall, weather still had the greatest influence on the elk population. Fewer elk starved to death in bad winters and the animals were in better condition.
Wolves also made elk cautious. Elk realized certain places were dangerous because of ambush by wolves. Many of these places were near streams.
As elk spent less time near streams, the streamside forest started to recover. As it got thicker, it provided more cover for the wolves and became more dangerous.
Soon willows and aspen, shrubs and wildflowers were again growing along the streams.
As the trees recovered, beaver started to move back in. Wolves patrolled the valleys too, hoping to surprise a beaver on land. Beaver is a common food of wolves. Soon only very hungry elk would venture near the tasty willows and aspen of the streambanks.
As the beaver dams grew in number, water tables near the streams rose, benefiting the trees and the grasses that grew under them. Downcutting ceased and stream bottoms filled in. Trout grew more plentiful and plump. Mink hunted the trout and the frogs that lived in the ponds.
The wolves killed half the coyotes in the Lamar valley, their competition (as foxes and skunks were for the coyotes), which meant more foxes and skunks, and a recovering population of pronghorn antelope, whose numbers had been decimated by the coyotes. Ground nesting birds probably didn’t enjoy greater numbers of foxes and skunks but neither did they enjoy coyotes.
The wolves left behind a windfall of carrion for foxes, crows, grizzly bears, magpies, golden eagles and early returning mountain bluebirds, who ate the flies hatching out of the carcasses.
Along the streams, the birds returned and sang from the trees.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Biology Comix
Anyone want to illustrate "Biology Comix"? Line drawings or watercolors give one more scope but photoshopped photos would do.
Cloud Story
The sea surface is full of micro-organisms—single celled bacteria, fungi, animals, plants, viruses. One dives through them into the sea. The photosynthesizing plankton, the algae and cyanobacteria, are the grasses of the sea.
The turning earth generates winds.
The winds blow up waves and generate currents.
The photosynthesizing micro-organisms of the planckton, the basis of the ocean’s food chain, are fed by nutrients coming from below, pushed up by storms, transported by currents.
Bubbles slide up the surface of the waves, concentrating the plankton and a chemical they secrete, dimethyl sulfide (DMS).
As the waves break, the bubbles burst and the plankton and DMS escape the water’s grip and are swept up into the atmosphere.
The wind carries them further and further aloft.
High in the atmosphere, water starts to condense about the molecules of DMS.
Clouds form.
The airborne plankton live in the clouds, on organic acids and alcohols and on sulfur and nitrogen compounds. Some of this material comes from the smokestacks of power plants and the tailpipes of cars, and some from passing ships, but much of it is natural.
Micro-organisms are abundant in clouds. They divide and reproduce and live happily there.
The clouds float over the earth, reflecting the sun during the day (and cooling the earth), keeping the warmth in at night (making the earth warmer). No one knows the overall effect of clouds but it is thought they cool the earth. Without clouds, temperatures would be more extreme.
When the micro-organisms are tired of living in the clouds, they secrete proteins that make ice form around them.
Then they fall from the clouds as pellets of ice, perhaps melting as they pass through a warmer layer of air, and falling to earth as rain; or refreezing to fall as snow, on the sea, a lake, or the land below.
Then they begin life in their new environment. Thus these micro-organisms constantly recolonize the earth.
Cloud Story
The sea surface is full of micro-organisms—single celled bacteria, fungi, animals, plants, viruses. One dives through them into the sea. The photosynthesizing plankton, the algae and cyanobacteria, are the grasses of the sea.
The turning earth generates winds.
The winds blow up waves and generate currents.
The photosynthesizing micro-organisms of the planckton, the basis of the ocean’s food chain, are fed by nutrients coming from below, pushed up by storms, transported by currents.
Bubbles slide up the surface of the waves, concentrating the plankton and a chemical they secrete, dimethyl sulfide (DMS).
As the waves break, the bubbles burst and the plankton and DMS escape the water’s grip and are swept up into the atmosphere.
The wind carries them further and further aloft.
High in the atmosphere, water starts to condense about the molecules of DMS.
Clouds form.
The airborne plankton live in the clouds, on organic acids and alcohols and on sulfur and nitrogen compounds. Some of this material comes from the smokestacks of power plants and the tailpipes of cars, and some from passing ships, but much of it is natural.
Micro-organisms are abundant in clouds. They divide and reproduce and live happily there.
The clouds float over the earth, reflecting the sun during the day (and cooling the earth), keeping the warmth in at night (making the earth warmer). No one knows the overall effect of clouds but it is thought they cool the earth. Without clouds, temperatures would be more extreme.
When the micro-organisms are tired of living in the clouds, they secrete proteins that make ice form around them.
Then they fall from the clouds as pellets of ice, perhaps melting as they pass through a warmer layer of air, and falling to earth as rain; or refreezing to fall as snow, on the sea, a lake, or the land below.
Then they begin life in their new environment. Thus these micro-organisms constantly recolonize the earth.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, March 1, 2010
3/1/10 Berkeley
We went down this morning to visit Daui's grandnephew at Santa Clara University. Santa Clara is at the foot of the Bay, near San Jose. The Santa Clara River once flowed freely and contributed major amounts of sand to the beaches of southern California. The land around the lower Bay is flat and completely developed, perhaps once sea bottom, or high marsh: strip malls, warehouses, several story apartment buildings and hotels, single family houses. I suppose the flats were originally wooded with Douglas fir and redwood, with some pine, cypress and coastal scrub near the water, some oak and bay along the brooks, serpentine meadows. The campus consisted of tall yellow stucco buildings, on wide lawns decorated with dying redwoods. Against the mission church was a walled rose garden. A black phoebe flitted from shrub to shrub in an alley. We took the kid to lunch at a "pedestrian mall" set down with its own parking garage off a major road, a totally fake urban scene: America as Disneyland.
We drove there from Berkeley, also totally built up, with its tiny yards, scattered redwoods amd palms, unkempt old gardens, a totally mixed and wild vegetation, redwoods growing up against house walls, wild orange bushes, palms two feet thick and sixty feet tall growing out of three square feet of soil, with stone steps laid around the fibrous trunk to a front door; Berkeley with its parks, organic amaranth, sustainably fished salmon, fresh greens, mushrooms smelling of the woods, round topped trees pruned by the wind, happy eggs, bottles of fresh squeezed blood orange juice, affordable apartments set among million dollar houses, round soft green hills fading away to the east from Inspiration Point, the swirl of plastic bottles amidst swimming ducks where Strawberry Creek enters the Bay. A few days later, in early morning we drove Daui's niece and her husband to the airport, through flat gray light, eight lanes of traffic, rain washed buildings visible above the elevated highway, water from the streets running into the Bay. Real life in our capitalist world was along the walled interstates leading down to San Jose.
We drove there from Berkeley, also totally built up, with its tiny yards, scattered redwoods amd palms, unkempt old gardens, a totally mixed and wild vegetation, redwoods growing up against house walls, wild orange bushes, palms two feet thick and sixty feet tall growing out of three square feet of soil, with stone steps laid around the fibrous trunk to a front door; Berkeley with its parks, organic amaranth, sustainably fished salmon, fresh greens, mushrooms smelling of the woods, round topped trees pruned by the wind, happy eggs, bottles of fresh squeezed blood orange juice, affordable apartments set among million dollar houses, round soft green hills fading away to the east from Inspiration Point, the swirl of plastic bottles amidst swimming ducks where Strawberry Creek enters the Bay. A few days later, in early morning we drove Daui's niece and her husband to the airport, through flat gray light, eight lanes of traffic, rain washed buildings visible above the elevated highway, water from the streets running into the Bay. Real life in our capitalist world was along the walled interstates leading down to San Jose.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
1/30/10
1/30/10
For the past month I’ve been cutting up a load of logs for firewood. They came from Schroon Lake, maybe thirty miles away. Most of them are sugar maple, tall slim trees, each yielding three or four sixteen foot logs, knotty, with a small core of rot. The bark on some of them flows like a river around the lopped off branches, covered with frilly pale green lichens and bright clumps of moss. Logs from the deep woods. For good measure the logger threw in a couple of hemlock logs – maybe he thought I wouldn’t know the difference. Hemlock and sugar maple often grow together. Crushed against one log was a long strand of princes pine, a club moss of the forest floor, kept bright by the cold. If it isn’t too cold, I can smell the sweetness of the blocks as I split them. The wood inside the logs is slightly pink. I feel slightly guilty at using these offerings from the forest – at least I should pay attention to them. One tree is a species I don’t recognize – perhaps red elm.
* * *
Now everyone is moaning about the deficit. Okay! How about paying for our current wars? (Bush and the Republicans never thought this necessary.) I think a universal draft is the best way to keep American foreign policy honest, and the U.S. a republic rather than an empire, but if we must have wars, we should pay for them. Everyone’s wars – everyone should pay. Perhaps a 1% surcharge on income taxes to start, the percent rising as incomes rise, to a maximum of - what? 100% on incomes over $2 million? 200%? Those poor bankers will need even larger bonuses….
For the past month I’ve been cutting up a load of logs for firewood. They came from Schroon Lake, maybe thirty miles away. Most of them are sugar maple, tall slim trees, each yielding three or four sixteen foot logs, knotty, with a small core of rot. The bark on some of them flows like a river around the lopped off branches, covered with frilly pale green lichens and bright clumps of moss. Logs from the deep woods. For good measure the logger threw in a couple of hemlock logs – maybe he thought I wouldn’t know the difference. Hemlock and sugar maple often grow together. Crushed against one log was a long strand of princes pine, a club moss of the forest floor, kept bright by the cold. If it isn’t too cold, I can smell the sweetness of the blocks as I split them. The wood inside the logs is slightly pink. I feel slightly guilty at using these offerings from the forest – at least I should pay attention to them. One tree is a species I don’t recognize – perhaps red elm.
* * *
Now everyone is moaning about the deficit. Okay! How about paying for our current wars? (Bush and the Republicans never thought this necessary.) I think a universal draft is the best way to keep American foreign policy honest, and the U.S. a republic rather than an empire, but if we must have wars, we should pay for them. Everyone’s wars – everyone should pay. Perhaps a 1% surcharge on income taxes to start, the percent rising as incomes rise, to a maximum of - what? 100% on incomes over $2 million? 200%? Those poor bankers will need even larger bonuses….
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
1/27/10
1/27/10
The Democrats are losing their nerve again. Goodbye health care! Goodbye cap-and-trade! Hello Afghanistan!
It’s too bad no one can figure out that a carbon tax can also be a jobs program. Half the money collected goes back to those who can least afford the increased cost of goods and fuel (say those families earning less than $80,000 a year), half goes to reducing our dependence on carbon – wind and solar power, new transmission lines, electric cars, better electric motors, more home insulation.
If we don’t steer capitalism in a new direction, it will continue with its frontier mentality, swallowing up resources, as though the whole world were still out there, unspoiled.
The Democrats are losing their nerve again. Goodbye health care! Goodbye cap-and-trade! Hello Afghanistan!
It’s too bad no one can figure out that a carbon tax can also be a jobs program. Half the money collected goes back to those who can least afford the increased cost of goods and fuel (say those families earning less than $80,000 a year), half goes to reducing our dependence on carbon – wind and solar power, new transmission lines, electric cars, better electric motors, more home insulation.
If we don’t steer capitalism in a new direction, it will continue with its frontier mentality, swallowing up resources, as though the whole world were still out there, unspoiled.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
1/19/10
10/19/10
We don’t do anything about carbon emissions because we have no real motivation to do so. What’s wrong with Jim Hansen’s plan of a carbon tax whose money goes back to the people? We could also put it toward universal medical care. (It amounts to the same thing.)
Say, $100 a ton, from oil and coal companies directly into our pockets.
Climate change isn’t going to be an apocalyptic event out of a film but a slow moving catastrophe.
But we may regret every wrong move we make from now on.
We don’t do anything about carbon emissions because we have no real motivation to do so. What’s wrong with Jim Hansen’s plan of a carbon tax whose money goes back to the people? We could also put it toward universal medical care. (It amounts to the same thing.)
Say, $100 a ton, from oil and coal companies directly into our pockets.
Climate change isn’t going to be an apocalyptic event out of a film but a slow moving catastrophe.
But we may regret every wrong move we make from now on.
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