Harper’s Canada Rips a Hole in the Global Ship of State

Harper’s Canada Rips a Hole in the Global Ship of

State

George M. Woodwell[1]

Woods Hole, Massachusetts

            Sometimes we have to ask just what the purpose of government is.  In the nominally democratic nations we elect our fellow citizens to public office to help define and defend the public welfare. In the normal course that welfare starts with establishing and defending rules under which we live with one another.  Rules provide equity in human affairs, including our dealings with each other,  and in access to essential resources, especially those resources that we take as a human birthright:  air, water, land, food and a place to live in peace.  The rights are embraced in every culture and commonly start with the golden rule: deal with others as you would have them deal with you.  Governments build elaborate laws around that purpose. Courts amplify the laws over decades. And the rules apply in a well-regulated world of thoughtful and responsible nations.

            As human numbers increase and technology expands, so do the interactions and points of friction. Corporate and national and personal interests compete. The frequency of interactions rises much more rapidly than the numbers of people. It rises in fact exponentially and the need for regulations protecting the interests of all soars with it.. Simple arithmetic puts the lie to the common assertions of  Tea Party conservatives in the US and of all others, including Canadians, who  claim that growth in all aspects of human affairs is possible with fewer regulations. Destruction of laws and regulations developed over decades is willful destruction of a nation and puts the nation on a rapid slide toward chaos. Commerce does not regulate itself.  Worse, wise regulation requires detailed insights from science as to how the world works, a continuing flow of insights as to what will work in defending welfare of the public.

            So it is at the moment in Canada as the Harper administration systematically destroys laws, regulations and institutions developed over a century to protect public resources.  Jim MacNeill, a well known Canadian diplomat and former OECD officer in Paris recently suggested to me that Canada is a model of what the Tea Party and the rabid right are trying to bring to the U.S.:

“….(Harper) is now …stripping the statute books of the environmental laws and regulations that we have fought for since 1968. He is eliminating one environmental program after another and reducing the environment department to a shadow of its former self.

“At first… he talked like a disciple of George W. Bush -- environmental protection is a burden on the economy which reduces economic growth and kills jobs…..

                       

“A month ago his Natural Resources Minister, Joe Oliver, on the eve of the environmental hearings into the Gateway pipeline to China, wrote condemning ‘environmental and other radical groups’ …(who were later called) ‘terrorists’”.

            Elizabeth May,  a brilliant and fearless Member of the Canadian Parliament and long-time conservation leader, wrote to me  recently. She could have been writing about our own House of Representatives which stripped our Science Advisor, John Holdren, and his Office of Science and Technology Policy:of funds:                       

“…One of his first decisions was to unburden himself of the Science Advisor to the Prime Minister. Dr. Arthur Carty…...  When his term ended, it was not continued, and the position dissolved.”

            The Harper administration also has been cutting budgets for climate science for more than a year.  March ended funding for the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences. A $110 million program over tend years for research on climate in Canada’s major universities has been eliminated. The entire Adaptation to Climate Change Research Group was disbanded along with the group within Natural Resources Canada  working on Arctic ice cores.  An 80,000 year climate record in ice cores is to be abandoned

            The Canadians have a long and distinguished and widely used record of research in the Arctic. The global scientific community was stunned to learn that the Polar Environmental and Atmospheric Research Laboratory on Ellesmere Island is to close.  At 80 degrees north latitude, PEARL was the closest such lab to the North Pole

            The Canadians also have a unique background of experimental data on aquatic ecosystems largely through the efforts of a single scientist, David Schindler, who had the vision as to what should be done and led the way through his own distinguished career. Now a rich resource, the Experimental Lakes Area in Ontario is to close. Fifty-eight fresh water lakes 250 kilometres east of Winnipeg have been the testing ground for freshwater research since the late 1960s. .In the House a week ago, the Parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Fisheries announced that it will be sold to private interests.

            The list goes on. The Yukon Research Lab at Yukon College in Whitehorse is to close.  The $2.7 million facility only opened last fall – October 2011- is to focus on research that is “business-led and industry-relevant”.The Department of Fisheries and Oceans is ending its national         contaminants programme. 75  scientists, many with long careers invested studying marine toxicology across Canada, are being laid off.   According to Dr. Peter Ross “The entire pollution file for the government of Canada, and marine environment in Canada’s three oceans, will be overseen by five junior biologists…” These cuts are being made as huge areas of the Beaufort Sea are being leased for oil drilling.

            The common assumption of such libertarian views is that the market system is adequate to protect essential resources and ration them to all users. But the failures of the market to protect the public welfare are legion and conspicuous around the world. The market system gave us slavery and will again, given the chance.  Management of human affairs and essential resources lies at the very core of governmental function. Harper’s minions and the US far right, including the Tea Party, deny the core purpose of government.      

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G.M. Woodwell is Founder and Director Emeritus of the Woods Hole  Research Center in Woods Hole Massachusetts,  scientist, member of the NAS , author  and lecturer.

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[1] Woodwell  is Founder and Director Emeritus, The Woods Hole Research Center; Member, NAS; conservationist,  author, lecturer.

IPCC 2012 A Reasonable Objective-An Unfortunate Emphasis

IPCC 2012

A Reasonable Objective-An Unfortunate Emphasis

George M. Woodwell

            The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been regularly attacked by critics for representing the scientific community’s experience and data on the global disruption of climate as a global problem. Their treatments of that topic, however, have been scrupulously probing and objective despite the obvious threats to human welfare.  Their objectivity has been guarded by scientists who in my view have weakened interpretations of existing data, sometimes their own,  and limited their presentations unnecessarily to avoid criticism from more conservative scientists and from the political right, ever poised to leap on any sign of opinion. The entire process of publication is open to political review and criticism before publication, further extinguishing any flicker of bias or opinion.  The institution has done well in suppressing judgments and presenting well-defended data. One of the effects of that highly refined  approach has been to limit participants, excluding de facto potential scientific participants. Some scientists of whom I am one, are alarmed by the consequences of changing climates out from under all life. They are impatient and unwilling to concede ignorance of consequences that are known to be real, however unpopular with others.  Eliminating such perspectives introduces a clear bias never discussed.

            A new report appears in its title to abandon that carefully crafted objectivity. “Managing The Risks of Extreme Events and Disaster to Advance Climate Change Adaptation” can be interpreted as accepting the awkward but unfortunately popular conclusion that nations can muddle through by accommodating the climatic disruption…and the scientific community will help tell how. The report itself does little to alter that impression offering as it does a clinical dissection and interpretation of ‘risks’ in  500 page document. It might have been much more effective as well as appropriate to avoid the suggestion of  “adaptation” as a policy and emphasize “mitigation’ of both cause and effects throughout. Otherwise the merchants of poison appear to get all that they want.  Mitigation is in fact the only realistic objective, for the disasters discussed are unacceptably multiplying tragedies, however modulated in the dissection . A journalistic propensity for a balanced treatment might lead to a discussion of what can now be done to stabilize the composition of the atmosphere.  All nations have agreed to do so under the Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992, a very important treaty that was virtually universally ratified and cannot be ignored. Such an analysis might reach even further to what might be done to reverse the trend, however difficult and long-term that process may be. 

            “Adaptation” to accelerating continuous climatic disruption as a policy is optimism run wild. Those advocating it set conditions that make it sound reasonable: ‘we must accept the changes already induced and correct for them”; “we shall continue to work to halt the trend and reverse it, but meanwhile, we must adapt”. Alas, those palliatives are attractive but misleading. This document unfortunately suggests the acceptance of a decision to allow the continued accumulation of the tragedy. Such an acceptance would be a confession to the industrial world that we shall continue on a suicidal course and the scientific community will help. Surely, the IPCC can emerge with a more powerful statement of the most serious disruption of life on earth short of social and political collapse into universal war.

The Upper Amazon: February 21, 2012

The Upper Amazon: February 21, 2012

            The following is a brief word from Foster Brown, the WHRC’s staff member and decades-long resident of Rio Branco in the southwestern Brazilian Amazon Basin. He offers a glimpse into the future of climatic disruption’s ramifications. GMW

Here in the southwestern Amazon we are undergoing floods of historic proportions.   Already more than five thousand displaced persons are living in public shelters.  The flooding in the Peruvian border town of Inapari extended more than an kilometer from the normal banks,  a flood exceeding all previous floods in living or recounted memories.   I had the strange experience of cruising up main street in a civil defense boat, watching our wake lap against shopping windows.

We are anticipating that the flood crest of the Acre River should peak today in Rio Branco, which is already at the second highest level in 40 years.    My job has been to help implant a early warning system for flooding; the system  worked but needs improvements.   However, since everyone in the region has been hit with the metaphorical two-by-four to get our attention,  my guess is that we will have a better system working shortly, just in time for the fires of the dry season.

About 200 Haitians in Inapari have suffered a double whammy of being barred from entering Brasil and then flooded out of their temporary refuge in a Catholic church.  I  have met several who manage one meal a day, if they are lucky."

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            It is becoming virtually impossible to write realistically, or to report honestly, the details of  systematic global disruption now underway without appearing to be slipping into hyperbole. The statement below on “Adaptation” for instance  was rejected recently by Bruce Alberts, Editor of Science, as “unbalanced”. One wonders what “balance” might be and just how objective perspectives are even at Science.GMW

ADAPTATION: Adrift in a Cloud of Fantasy

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ADAPTATION: Adrift in a Cloud of Fantasy

January 2012

            There is virtually no aspect of human affairs that is not affected by the cloud of uncertainty enveloping the earth as the climatic disruption proceeds. The density of the cloud varies with the beholder. At one end there is imaginative and vigorous denial based  on financial interests in the commerce of  energy. Among  scientists, too, there is a range of views from skepticism to hyper-objectivity bordering on denial, to deep concern. Many of these latter recognize that changing climate out from under all life, including oceans, forests and agriculture, presents a lethal threat to this civilization in the short term of years to decades. They understand that the current slide can easily become a cascade into a chaos that will reduce the human population to a fraction of its current  seven billion. That slide may be anticipated as the large pools of carbon stored in the Arctic peats and in the trees and soils of the Boreal Forest are mobilized by the warming and cook the planet. The fuse of the potential carbon bomb of high latitudes in the northern hemisphere is now lit.  The only sure cure is stabilizing, and then reducing, the temperature of the earth.

           

            The most common response appears to be exasperated cries for “realism” and for simply adapting to the changes as they occur: business as usual.  “Realism” as envisioned by economists and an increasing number of scientists asserts no chance of success in abandoning fossil fuels. In that view there is the necessity for adaptation, accepting the changes already experienced and anticipating more. That process becomes the policy, sustained by the hope of muddling through.  But the “policy of adaptation” is blind to the lethal feedbacks that take the climatic disruption to new and unacceptable extremes.  A limit on the extent of the warming has already been established in the public eye as a two degree C rise in the average temperature of the earth. That limit was a compromise established as a political and economic convenience, not a scientific consensus. The possibility of allowing the earth to warm to that level and not higher has never been established, only asserted on the basis of dreams supported by wishful thinking. The warming that has already occurred is at least marginally controllable by bold action now.  Would control still be possible after an average change in the temperature of the earth of two degrees and the Arctic warmed by as much as 4-6 degrees?  Almost certainly not.

            Despite the success of the Framework Convention on Climate Change signed in Rio in 1992 and subsequently ratified universally, seventeen Conferences of the Parties have failed to produce progress.  Progress would constitute effective action toward  stabilizing the composition of the atmosphere with respect to the heat trapping gases, especially carbon dioxide.  Over the years immediately following such a success, emissions from fossil fuels would have to be reduced further to maintain the equilibrium and, if the concentration in air were to be lowered further as it should be, fossil fuels would have to be substantially abandoned over several years.

            While an honest judgment may require skepticism as to the possibility of political action in abandoning fossil fuels, this skepticism should not be confused with skepticism  towards the evolving facts of climate science.  Basing policy on political or corporate opposition and the myth of adaptation amounts to an abandonment of hope and is a commitment to runaway climatic disruption. The response to such an assertion is, of course, denial: “we shall take every opportunity to reduce emissions and deflect the course of the warming”. Meanwhile, that policy accedes to the skeptics’ position and reduces substantially to zero any possibility of success in deflection. It assures the economic, social and political chaos of environmental collapse.

            The only viable stance for scientists and politicians is persistent, relentless optimism supported by imaginative and equally relentless efforts in research  and public affairs: insistence that the remaining primary forests globally be conserved as is, that 1-2 million square kilometers of  normally naturally forested land  be reforested with natural forests, and that fossil fuels be systematically abandoned within the decade before 2020. The transition can be to a new world, one our children can, and will want to live in. It will not be the analog of Haiti and Somalia of this moment, but  a variant of  new “green cities” and “transitional towns” set in an environment  wherein forests and fertile soils and all other life are as protected as in a park. We must envision, design and start building them now. There is no other way.

                                                                                    George M. Woodwell

                                                                                    Woods Hole, Massachusetts

                                                                                    January 2012

             

Durban: Disaster # 17

Durban:  Disaster # 17

George M. Woodwell and Richard A. Houghton[1]

          There are many ways to destroy nations and spread human misery in this world, already crowded and struggling with seven billion human occupants. One of the most effective is by simply moving the climate out from under all of them, in all latitudes and corners of a wide, wide world. Recognizing that possibility in the latter decades of the 20^th century scientists managed to persuade governments to meet under auspices of the UN in Rio in 1992 and to sign, and ultimately universally to ratify, the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC).  All the governments agreed to collaborate in “stabilizing” the atmospheric burden of heat-trapping gases at levels that would protect human interests and nature. As treaties go in the international realm, it was a highly successful initiative.

          Seventeen Conferences of the Parties to the FCCC have utterly failed in meeting the clear goal set forth in the treaty despite mighty efforts and various schemes designed to protect specific national interests. The most recent discussions in Durban have focused on accommodating with financial aid crises of nations that see themselves especially vulnerable to, for instance, the flooding and storms now clearly a problem.  Negotiators and others have assumed, first, that the world can tolerate a two-degree C rise in the average temperature and, second, that stability can be achieved at that level.  Neither assumption has any basis in science or in fact. The assumption is a dream advanced, not from science or any sure knowledge, but from wishful thinking from political and economic interests. Stabilizing at two degrees is almost certainly impossible. The world has already warmed by nearly one degree. Feedbacks are already conspicuously engaged and contributing to the acceleration of warming that may quickly proceed beyond human control.

          The potential for political, economic, and environmental chaos and misery is almost unimaginable.  The time scale is not a century. It is now, as we experience spreading continental droughts that devastate agriculture, violent storms that destroy dwellings including cities, and floods such as those in Pakistan over the past two years and those of the eastern US of 2011and elsewhere. And heat alone kills, as it has done annually with greater and greater frequency over the last decade.

          What is clear is that there is no plan and no action possible at the moment as long as economic and political issues float to the top of all agendas. Venality rules much of the corporate world.  Politicians are cowed…or purchased.

          The FCCC was a direct product of scientific research and insights followed by public initiatives. It is time for a new set of insights and initiatives quite beyond what has become the agenda of governments. “Adaptation”, now popular, is absurd as a conclusion and totally unacceptable as a solution. There is no possibility of “muddling through”. There is only disintegration and chaos, the seeds of which we see germinating now. The objective set forth in 1992 was sound and is achievable now, substantially immediately.

          The net annual accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is currently about 4 billion tons of carbon, the residual of a total release from burning fossil fuels and from deforestation globally of about 10 billion tons. Reducing emissions globally by 4 billion tons would, for the moment, achieve the stabilization needed as the first step. It is necessary and important and possible. Deforestation, a change in land use from forest to non-forest,  produces about 1 billion of the 4 we seek.  Preserving all primary forests remaining globally would be a great blessing in any context and should be done if only to preserve water supplies.

          Restoring natural forests to  2-4 million square kilometers would store an additional billion tons of carbon annually on land.

          The remainder, 2-3 billion tons of carbon must come from a reduction in the global use of fossil fuels, now 8-8.5 billion tons of carbon annually.  It is not a trivial change, but it is not at all impossible immediately simply on the basis of conservation and improved efficiency. A 25-30% reduction in use of oil and coal and gas is possible almost immediately, given the will and the means.  The industrial nations are already shifting electrical loads from fossil fuels to renewable sources rapidly, largely on the basis of costs.

           This immediate effort must be followed by further reductions in emissions but immediate success will bring insights and energy and time for the future steps.

          It is time for the scientific community again to rise to the challenge and enable governments and other public agencies to rise above the present morass of subsidiary problems and demands and purposes by showing how to bring the core purpose of the 1992 treaty into effect and the consequences and extraordinary costs of failure to do so. 

          John M. Broder, writing in the December 11 New York Times (p11), quotes  the  redoubtable Mary D. Nichols of the California Air Resources Board as asserting, correctly, that effective action must come now from the bottom up.

          Again.

Immediately.

December 11, 2011

         

         

         

         

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[1] Woodwell is Director Emeritus and Houghton is Senior Scientist, The Woods Hole Research Center, Woods Hole, MA.

Life Under a Turbine (Wind)

            Much has been said recently in my town about the miseries of living a thousand feet or more south-southwest of a large municipal wind turbine which is accused of producing through intolerable sounds, pulsating pressures and subtle unmeasured factors, a variety of serious illnesses among its neighbors. The complaints are numerous enough and the complainants persistent enough that there can be no denial that there is a problem for some, despite the distance between them and the turbine. The solution, according to these critics, is to shut down the turbines (the second has not yet been operated) or move them somewhere far away.  The cost to the town of either would be significant, perhaps as much as ten to twenty million dollars, assuming a place that is sufficiently remote is available somewhere within the town. (It is not.) For the moment they are both shut down. 

            I , too, live near a large turbine and have, with several colleagues experience over three years with all the vagaries of such a machine.  To be sure, the Woods Hole Research Center’s 100 kw turbine is substantially smaller than the 1.6  megawatt machine of the Town of Falmouth, but it is still a large turbine, much closer to dwellings than the Town’s. The  municipal turbine was quite reasonably placed on town-owned land  at what was thought then to be a comfortable distance from any residence.

            While I think it fair to say that my experience reflects that of colleagues, I report only my own.  I live very comfortably under the wind turbine, often quite literally under it, for we have held major public gatherings on the grass in front of our main building,  without even a hint of difficulty with sound from the turbine directly overhead. Even in a high wind when the turbine is turning at its maximum speed (held deliberately at about 60 rpm ) and making the most power,  the dominant sounds are the wind in the trees and the traffic on the highway, two hundred feet or more beyond the turbine below our building. On the SEA Campus 500 feet away the sound of the turbine can be distinguished from other sounds but it never dominates or intrudes. The general attitude there, amply reported to me from diverse sources, some very enthusiastic,  is to take encouragement from the churning turbine, recognizing that each watt it produces displaces a watt from the coal-fired plant on Brayton Point  near  Fall River  that showers  us all with mercury and soot brought on the south-westerly winds directly from the plant.  The mercury is measurable in soils by intricare techniques, but the soot appears as a black film to be scrubbed off the white decks and cabin of my boat weekly and power-washed off twice annually. It comes perpetually in the rain. If it were not for the boat I would have hard time proving its presence unless I were hanging out wash regularly and watching it gray over time. Meanwhile, that soot accumulates in our lungs with every breath.  The rustle of wind in the trees has always been reassuring and refreshing; now there is a reason to look at the turbine and take courage that the air is that much cleaner and….with more such innovations, will be cleaner yet. Except that…..

To be sure, the shadow of the blades produces a potentially troublesome flicker when the sun is just right. No one enjoys the flicker and my office and our two buildings are the major recipients. The flicker is greater, of  course when the sun is low in  the morning and throughout the winter. But in any particular place the flicker, however distracting, is short-lived, for the sun moves rapidly. I find that we either ignore the flicker or shut it out with window shades. It is no longer a problem for anyone in our buildings that I am aware of. And in a short time, the sun has moved. A neighbor with a glass wall in their house finds the flicker troublesome, quite understandably. The turbine has been programmed to shut down for the times the problem exists throughout the year.  Trees growing nearby will ameliorate even that problem in time.

            The sound is enough that when the  turbine is not operating, I notice and wonder and look for a reason. But there is no time when the sound interferes with any function or exceeds the sound of Woods Hole Road  about 200 feet to  the eastward or the wind in the trees. People often gather for lunch on the porch of the main building, substantially under the blades of the turbine, and have no trouble with normal conversation. No one has reported to me any sub-sonic or otherwise subtle effects on health or disposition over the many months of operation, although I know that some far more distant neighbors object, quite possibly to its presence as opposed to its operation. And to be sure, our well insulated institutional buildings exclude substantially all outside sounds, the noise of heavy trucks and the howling winds of storms. Houses, too, can exclude sounds.

            Looking up at the turning blades as the sun settles into the horizon shows them gleaming as the rest of the landscape shrinks into darkness.  All enjoy those moments  and most find the turbine an object of beauty and welcome it into the neighborhood as clear evidence that we are headed into a renewable world  that is cleaner and much healthier and agree that the turbines are objects of beauty,  to be admired and celebrated, not scorned. 

            G.M.Woodwell  
            November 15, 2011

            Woods Hole, Massachusetts

Ozone, Oil and The Drift of Governmental Purpose

Two decisions by the Obama administration have left me and many others profoundly disturbed. The most recent advice to the EPA to delay further limits on ozone, long in process and widely anticipated, is a clear abandonment of governmental leadership in restoring the integrity of the human environment. Worse, the support the administration appears to be giving the Canadian Tar Sands oil development is a clear sign that no progress in deflecting the climatic disruption can be expected any time soon. What’s to be done?

 Ozone is trouble.  On earth ozone is toxic to just about everything.  It is a serious cause of respiratory problems and a contributing cause of various other ills. Experience is extensive and data define human morbidity and mortality from  exposures common from industrial sources.  But virtually all life is vulnerable and ozone exposures are to be avoided categorically. 

Ozone occurs in the high atmosphere, well outside the normal limits of life, and there absorbs incident radiation from the sun that would otherwise be a problem on earth.  So it has been for a very long time and life is dependent on that circumstance.

Industrial activities have changed the chemistry of the atmosphere and the more or less stable layer of ozone in the high atmosphere is being destroyed largely but not exclusively by fluorocarbons used mainly as refrigerants. In the lower atmosphere where we and all the rest of life occur, ozone is being generated in toxic quantities by burning fossil fuels at high temperatures.   Both processes are serious matters but the generation of new sources on earth is exposing all life to a serious toxin with especially threatening direct effects on people. Serious efforts have been made over years to avoid the problem. But that simple objective turns out to be more complicated by far than it should be. 

Governments, that is, all legitimate governments beyond the ABOTIP  (A Bunch O Thugs In Power)  stage, are established to define and defend the public interest. The public interest is commonly defined, first, as civil rights: rules establishing fairness in dealing with one another and in managing common property for the advantage of all. Those interests are variously defined, of course, but they have been set out explicitly enough recently in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948. The statement constitutes a broad vision as to the core purpose of government. It seems a reasonable extension of those expectations and responsibilities of governments to say that rules are established to protect each from all and all from each. I am not allowed to poison my neighbor’s well nor is he allowed to poison mine. And if he has a business, the business is not allowed to poison mine or anyone else’s.  Such rights are commonly established not only in legislation, but also in case law, as legal rights systematically defined by court trials.

Meanwhile, businesses have grown very large over time and become corporations that hire many people and accumulate much wealth and influence. Profits of the businesses are greater if the costs of doing business can be ignored.  The costs often, perhaps regularly, include wastes that are difficult, or even expensive, to make innocuous and can most conveniently be discharged into the environment nearby and ignored.  My well is poisoned after all and when I object, the business denies responsibilities and asserts that even if true, the jobs and money brought into the community are more important. Government, pressed to support the “economy,” agrees.  Governmental purpose has suddenly shifted from civil rights to economic interests. Morbidity and mortality of citizens is now secondary to corporate financial security.   

Just as we realize that fossil-fueled corporate industrialization has inverted the global distribution of ozone to human disadvantage we also discover that the flows of money have corrupted governmental purpose and potential. Suddenly, for whatever reason there is pressure on governments to produce jobs at any cost. Neo-conservatives argue that environmental regulations that protect people from ozone are expensive and force industries to close down or reduce activities as profits decline. In the interest of protecting profits and, presumably, jobs, environmental regulations should be voided.  The President of the United States has recently agreed, at least with respect to ozone. He and the neo-conservative right are saying that public suffering from poison, enhanced morbidity and mortality, are acceptable in the off-hand chance that corporations will gain profits and hire more people and improve the economy.  In the longer run, he asserts, the objective has to be to clean up the air and protect the public welfare. But for the moment, economic interests are more important. Such demanding moments never pass.

So, too, strangely enough, with the climatic disruption. The heavy reliance on fossil fuels is poisoning the world,  changing climates globally and generating toxins such as ozone. Here the economic costs as well as the human costs are conspicuous. One of the many long-recognized effects of the climatic disruption includes an increased frequency of large, severe storms.  Katrina, fed with energy from a super-heated Gulf, cost us New Orleans, a city whose economic and human costs continue to accumulate and whose salvation is at best doubtful. Irene left a trail of destruction along the East Coast from Florida through the Carolinas, New Jersey and New York into Canada. The damage tallies in billions of dollars. A third tropical storm, Lee, is right now flooding southern Louisiana and Mississippi once again. Flood damage in Vermont from Irene remains today at unprecedented levels and costs that will probably never be tallied or recovered.  In such cases the largest costs are diffuse and accrue to the public at large. The causes, however, are industrial activities whose profits are well focused and are supported by the cheap fossil fuels that are in fact poisoning all of the earth.  Again, governmental purpose has drifted and the public welfare has been redefined as corporate economic welfare. So we have, apparently, imminent presidential approval of a pipeline connecting the Athabasca Tar Sands of  Alberta to our Gulf Coast refineries. That oil is the dirtiest and most expensive in the world in that its mining destroys large areas of the northern forest, dumps that carbon into the atmosphere, and requires a large further direct expenditure of energy in extracting the oil and refining it. Such a decision by the US president would commit the nation to support of production and use of the dirtiest oil on the planet for the foreseeable future and be a clear statement that the US has no plan for mitigating the already raging climatic disruption!

There is nothing right about these decisions. Nominally, they support the public welfare by encouraging economic development. Actually, they both degrade the resource base, corrupt the air, water, land, and health of all. They poison my well, and the wells of all others, now and for the everlasting future. They produce systematic, incremental impoverishment, universal biotic impoverishment, corruption of the human birthright so clearly affirmed in the

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and they scorn the very purpose of government.

            What’s wrong here? What is wrong is a fundamental intellectual and political failure, a failure to recognize that civilization requires not only a functional government and a working economic system, but also a functionally intact environmental system.  It is that last that is the mystery, not sufficiently defined in our culture and not put forth by our intellectual and political leaders as a compelling model of what must be if we are to continue to occupy the earth in peace and comfort for the century to come. The insight and the shift in emphasis may come now, if it comes at all, from the scientific community expressed in powerful, demanding terms that reach far beyond economics and greed as motivating factors and call on all to acknowledge and respect the core requirements of life as a moral responsibility in protecting the human birthright. This new vision will deal with how to preserve life on earth, not as a casual objective after all profits have been assured, but as the first objective, everywhere.

 So far in science and conservation we have only begun the job, just scratched the surface, and our government is still actively poisoning my well and everyone else’s.

                                                                        Woods Hole

                                                                        September 4, 2011