Derek Luke was a member of both 3E-COE and EcoAction at Penn State. He now teaches in Alaska. Derek organized the PowerShift conference in 2009 at Penn State and so many other events. And he is not one to shy from risk...And as someone who is a perfect commodity for the globalized educational economy why not take a kid from Pennsylvania and move him to Alaska?!?
So let's follow him on YouTube! Here is installment #1:
Here is installment #2:
Installment #3:
Installment #4:
...and #5 is at this link.
An adventure for sure.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
The National Wildlife Federation's "Extreme Heat in Summer 2010"
This in from the National Wildlife Federation:
The National Wildlife Federation has released “Extreme Heat in Summer 2010.” This summer is the hottest on record so far and a sign of more to come. The Eastern and Southern United States are especially suffering, with many states having one of their hottest summer months on record. A new analysis from National Wildlife Federation finds that summers like the current one could become the norm by 2050 unless steps are taken to curb global warming. Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are on a list of those cities most vulnerable to heat wave effects as the planet warms. Approximately half of the residents in both cities have relatively high levels of vulnerable populations and low rates of air conditioning.
The analysis comes a few weeks after the U.S. Senate shelved action on comprehensive climate and energy legislation.
The State College community is better equipped than most to deal with extreme heat because most residents have air conditioning. However, many communities are not so fortunate. Our failure to take action on global warming will affect those who can least afford to deal with extreme temperatures. It is the poor, elderly, and those with health problems who will bear the brunt of the expected extreme heat events.
When: August 25, 2010, 10:30am
Where: Schlow Memorial Library, Community Room
Who: Dr. Michael Mann, Director, Earth System Science Center, Penn State University
Prof. Sylvia Neely, Creation Care Coalition, Pennsylvania Interfaith Power and Light.
Arno Vosk, MD, Fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians
Peter Buckland, President of Environment - Ecology - Education, Penn State University
Contacts: Ed Perry, National Wildlife Federation, Phone - 814-880-9593
paglobalwarmingoutreach@gmail.com
The National Wildlife Federation has released “Extreme Heat in Summer 2010.” This summer is the hottest on record so far and a sign of more to come. The Eastern and Southern United States are especially suffering, with many states having one of their hottest summer months on record. A new analysis from National Wildlife Federation finds that summers like the current one could become the norm by 2050 unless steps are taken to curb global warming. Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are on a list of those cities most vulnerable to heat wave effects as the planet warms. Approximately half of the residents in both cities have relatively high levels of vulnerable populations and low rates of air conditioning.
The analysis comes a few weeks after the U.S. Senate shelved action on comprehensive climate and energy legislation.
The State College community is better equipped than most to deal with extreme heat because most residents have air conditioning. However, many communities are not so fortunate. Our failure to take action on global warming will affect those who can least afford to deal with extreme temperatures. It is the poor, elderly, and those with health problems who will bear the brunt of the expected extreme heat events.
When: August 25, 2010, 10:30am
Where: Schlow Memorial Library, Community Room
Who: Dr. Michael Mann, Director, Earth System Science Center, Penn State University
Prof. Sylvia Neely, Creation Care Coalition, Pennsylvania Interfaith Power and Light.
Arno Vosk, MD, Fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians
Peter Buckland, President of Environment - Ecology - Education, Penn State University
Contacts: Ed Perry, National Wildlife Federation, Phone - 814-880-9593
paglobalwarmingoutreach@gmail.com
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Reflections on Dirt! The Movie
In recent years, filmmakers of varying stripes have collectively released a spate of ecologically-minded films, including Food Inc., Fresh, Gasland, Blue Gold, Flow, The 11th Hour, and An Inconvenient Truth, to name only a few. This seeming plethora of films dealing with our looming global ecological crisis and its corollary, sustainability, led a journalist with Time Out: London to ask a rather pointed question: "can eco-films save the planet?"
Putting that question aside, and being the glutton for punishment that I sometimes can be, I sat down
this evening to watch Dirt! The Movie, a film that, as the title suggests, is about soil. Given the tenor of similar films that I have viewed in recent months, I was expecting to once again experience two hours of familiar arguments regarding the industrial systems and institutional relationships that are slowly destroying our planet, one farm field and local economy at a time. I was also preparing for the emotional recovery I would need following said anticipated experience.
Dirt! did present arguments regarding how "our butts is in the ringer," to quote a friend of David Orr's, but only for a concise and pointed fifteen minutes. The remaining hour and five minutes of footage addressed human relationships to the soil, how to keep humans and the soil healthy, and what is being done to promote peace and responsible stewardship of our communities, land, and food.
The first half hour of the film is part microbiology lesson and part spiritual awakening, which is a combination of perspectives that I have found increasingly pleasant and enlivening in recent years. The argument presented, in short, is this: we, as humans, come from the soil, and the minerals in the soils came from the stars. Our relationship to the soil, therefore, connects us with ourselves, creation, and the cosmos. Furthermore, there is a proper balance to be struck in this relationship that has ensured, and might still ensure, the flourishing of life on this planet.
The majority of the last half of the film is a panorama of organizations and people who are striking that balance to foster better relationships between humans and the soil. The organizations include The Land Institute, Hearty Roots Community Farm, Cannard Farm, Navdanya Farm, Sustainable South Bronx, Tree People, The Edibile Schoolyard, Kinney Compost, Four Seasons Farm, and even some Harvard biology laboratories. Throughout this exploration of professional and community groups, there is a focused discussion of the principles that enrich the soil upon which life on earth depends. While enriching the soil, however, relationships between humans and the soil are strengthened, as are relationships between individuals and their communities.
I will close this post with an observation presented in the early minutes of Dirt!: in Hebrew, the name Adam means "dirt or clay," and Eve means "life." We are, in the words of a fellow biophile, "earth standing."
Putting that question aside, and being the glutton for punishment that I sometimes can be, I sat down
this evening to watch Dirt! The Movie, a film that, as the title suggests, is about soil. Given the tenor of similar films that I have viewed in recent months, I was expecting to once again experience two hours of familiar arguments regarding the industrial systems and institutional relationships that are slowly destroying our planet, one farm field and local economy at a time. I was also preparing for the emotional recovery I would need following said anticipated experience.Dirt! did present arguments regarding how "our butts is in the ringer," to quote a friend of David Orr's, but only for a concise and pointed fifteen minutes. The remaining hour and five minutes of footage addressed human relationships to the soil, how to keep humans and the soil healthy, and what is being done to promote peace and responsible stewardship of our communities, land, and food.
The first half hour of the film is part microbiology lesson and part spiritual awakening, which is a combination of perspectives that I have found increasingly pleasant and enlivening in recent years. The argument presented, in short, is this: we, as humans, come from the soil, and the minerals in the soils came from the stars. Our relationship to the soil, therefore, connects us with ourselves, creation, and the cosmos. Furthermore, there is a proper balance to be struck in this relationship that has ensured, and might still ensure, the flourishing of life on this planet.
The majority of the last half of the film is a panorama of organizations and people who are striking that balance to foster better relationships between humans and the soil. The organizations include The Land Institute, Hearty Roots Community Farm, Cannard Farm, Navdanya Farm, Sustainable South Bronx, Tree People, The Edibile Schoolyard, Kinney Compost, Four Seasons Farm, and even some Harvard biology laboratories. Throughout this exploration of professional and community groups, there is a focused discussion of the principles that enrich the soil upon which life on earth depends. While enriching the soil, however, relationships between humans and the soil are strengthened, as are relationships between individuals and their communities.
I will close this post with an observation presented in the early minutes of Dirt!: in Hebrew, the name Adam means "dirt or clay," and Eve means "life." We are, in the words of a fellow biophile, "earth standing."
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Letter on Penn State's Coal Plant to the Board of Trustees
Recently, I was alerted that the Board of Trustees removed discussion of the coal plant from their meeting. It prevented public comment. As a concerned person, I wrote them the following letter:
To the Board of Trustees,
It has recently come to my attention that the Board of Trustees were to discuss the energy future of Penn State University at its most recent meeting. Specifically, the coal plant's future was on the agenda. From the reports I have from attendees, it was absent. I do not include myself among the conspirators who think that Penn State and Massey Energy definitely colluded to obstruct and obfuscate the agenda, but it is most unfortunate that the UP coal plant's future was removed from the agenda the morning of the meeting. Given that interested and concerned groups lost their possible voice at that meeting, I would like to ensure that you understand my position.
In what follows, I speak as the founder and serving president of Environment-Ecology-Education in the College of Education, the co-host of a WKPS The Lion radio show called Sustainability Now, last year's Assistant to the Director of the Pennsylvania Environmental Resource Consortium, and the emcee for Penn State's first Student Sustainability Summit. I speak for none the organizations nor the show but as someone steeped in the sustainability movement who is concerned about his own impact on his own community and his sad involvement with the mandated ecocide and pollution that our university's cost of doing business does.
Silence and remove the coal plant as soon as possible. Coal, from its extraction, to its byproducts via extraction, to its combustion, to its scrubbing, and to its scrubber cleaning destroys life. It is a powerfull anti-biotic - a destroyer of life - that serves to enrich few people lavishly, support an unsustainable and ecologically crippling way of life for many more, and poisons poor people and their water systems. The cascading effects spread. One need only look at the economic, social, and ecological corrosion of the Tennessee Valley Authority disaster or the decades-long legacy of mountain top removal in Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, or Kentucky. How fortunate and easy it has been that we at the lavishly equipped Pennsylvania State University have been able to define those people, their traditions and customs and ways of being, their watersheds, and the habitat that depends on those waterways as economic externalities. And I have said nothing of climate change, the study of which our university stands as a shining beacon.
Perhaps now, with all of the attention on the Gulf oil disaster, the methane gas disaster at the Upper Big Branch Mine, and the continued small disasters regarding drilling in the Marcellus Shale, Penn State will begin moving more ethically and responsibly regarding human welfare and the environment regarding its energy "needs." I understand that Penn State has been able to negotiate an environmental assessment of its coal purchasing. This is a noble first step and a good intention. Forgive me if I remain skeptical of its impact and am niggled by the statement, "The road to hell is laid with good intentions." Were we to be extracting coal from the Purdue Mountain to the west, Mount Nittany, the Tussey Ridge, and the Seven Mountains, I don't think we would have Penn State here and our good intentions would be too little to late.
I apologize for the polemic tone of this letter but have found that our turtle's pace could be quicker and that we could do more to reduce our energy use. The Campus Sustainability Office is doing marvelous things with behavior, curriculum is changing, and perhaps more than anything, facilities and operations under Steve Maruszewski and Al Matyasovsky have been doing amazing things. Now is the time to pony up and recognize that coal can't be clean and that we need to move away from it immediately. Too much of our collective health from the newt to the walrus to me need it.
Peter Buckland
To the Board of Trustees,
It has recently come to my attention that the Board of Trustees were to discuss the energy future of Penn State University at its most recent meeting. Specifically, the coal plant's future was on the agenda. From the reports I have from attendees, it was absent. I do not include myself among the conspirators who think that Penn State and Massey Energy definitely colluded to obstruct and obfuscate the agenda, but it is most unfortunate that the UP coal plant's future was removed from the agenda the morning of the meeting. Given that interested and concerned groups lost their possible voice at that meeting, I would like to ensure that you understand my position.
In what follows, I speak as the founder and serving president of Environment-Ecology-Education in the College of Education, the co-host of a WKPS The Lion radio show called Sustainability Now, last year's Assistant to the Director of the Pennsylvania Environmental Resource Consortium, and the emcee for Penn State's first Student Sustainability Summit. I speak for none the organizations nor the show but as someone steeped in the sustainability movement who is concerned about his own impact on his own community and his sad involvement with the mandated ecocide and pollution that our university's cost of doing business does.
Silence and remove the coal plant as soon as possible. Coal, from its extraction, to its byproducts via extraction, to its combustion, to its scrubbing, and to its scrubber cleaning destroys life. It is a powerfull anti-biotic - a destroyer of life - that serves to enrich few people lavishly, support an unsustainable and ecologically crippling way of life for many more, and poisons poor people and their water systems. The cascading effects spread. One need only look at the economic, social, and ecological corrosion of the Tennessee Valley Authority disaster or the decades-long legacy of mountain top removal in Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, or Kentucky. How fortunate and easy it has been that we at the lavishly equipped Pennsylvania State University have been able to define those people, their traditions and customs and ways of being, their watersheds, and the habitat that depends on those waterways as economic externalities. And I have said nothing of climate change, the study of which our university stands as a shining beacon.
Perhaps now, with all of the attention on the Gulf oil disaster, the methane gas disaster at the Upper Big Branch Mine, and the continued small disasters regarding drilling in the Marcellus Shale, Penn State will begin moving more ethically and responsibly regarding human welfare and the environment regarding its energy "needs." I understand that Penn State has been able to negotiate an environmental assessment of its coal purchasing. This is a noble first step and a good intention. Forgive me if I remain skeptical of its impact and am niggled by the statement, "The road to hell is laid with good intentions." Were we to be extracting coal from the Purdue Mountain to the west, Mount Nittany, the Tussey Ridge, and the Seven Mountains, I don't think we would have Penn State here and our good intentions would be too little to late.
I apologize for the polemic tone of this letter but have found that our turtle's pace could be quicker and that we could do more to reduce our energy use. The Campus Sustainability Office is doing marvelous things with behavior, curriculum is changing, and perhaps more than anything, facilities and operations under Steve Maruszewski and Al Matyasovsky have been doing amazing things. Now is the time to pony up and recognize that coal can't be clean and that we need to move away from it immediately. Too much of our collective health from the newt to the walrus to me need it.
Peter Buckland
Monday, June 28, 2010
HOME
I want to share this movie, Home, with all of you. In all of our work for sustainability education and the flourishing of all life on Earth, it pays to watch something as humbling as this documentary (if you can even call it that). Home took my breath away on several levels and I think it might yours too. Best of all, it's a feature length film that the producers and directors decided needed to be free because its message was too important.
The brief showing on American agriculture placed in the context of human and natural history is particularly startling given the film's emphasis on balance. To paraphrase, the U.S. grows enough grain to feed 2 billion people but most of that grain goes to feeding livestock and increasingly into biofuels (that substitute for the fossil fuels the film has been discussing). This seriously calls into question the idea that the American farmer feeds the world.
Some people dislike words like "balance" or "harmony." What do you think? Does this film oversell those points? Or are we as out of balance as it portrays?
The brief showing on American agriculture placed in the context of human and natural history is particularly startling given the film's emphasis on balance. To paraphrase, the U.S. grows enough grain to feed 2 billion people but most of that grain goes to feeding livestock and increasingly into biofuels (that substitute for the fossil fuels the film has been discussing). This seriously calls into question the idea that the American farmer feeds the world.
Some people dislike words like "balance" or "harmony." What do you think? Does this film oversell those points? Or are we as out of balance as it portrays?
Monday, June 21, 2010
Plastic greenhouse redux on 6.21.2010...the longest day of the year
In case you were wondering about what is happening with the plastic bottle greenhouse, here is an update. We have a roof frame with bottles on the outer edge...
...and they look really cool with the sun behind them...
...and now it also has some of the roof complete...
...and soon it will be up on the frame with the whole shebang in order.
See you soon.
...and they look really cool with the sun behind them...
...and now it also has some of the roof complete...
...and soon it will be up on the frame with the whole shebang in order.
See you soon.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Tragedy of the Commons explained by dinosaurs
I love Dinosaur Comics and I love "The Tragedy of the Commons" by Garrett Hardin. Now they are both in one place! "Tragedy" is an exploration of what happens if people overuse common resources and stands as one of the most influential essays in the history of sustainability.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Plastic bottle greenhouse update - Two walls up! Door on next wall that's nearly ready for mounting!
In the continuing saga of the Corl Street Elementary School plastic bottle greenhouse...we have some more progress. Over Memorial Day weekend, Becky and her husband Vilmos finished a wall that I got to put up yesterday and tie the bottles together for support.
Today, another wall frame was finished and the door put on with Zach (in the picture with the door).
So this thing is coming along. For me, the coolest thing has been talking to people about why I came up with this hair-brained idea and why we started doing it. We live with these bottles and really wish we could get rid of them. Barring that at this point, maybe we can exapt them for an educational, social, and ecological good. Why not use them to try to help grow food and increase awareness about the waste cycle and show how to reduce-reuse-recycle. Every teacher and parent that has talked to Becky or me about this is really into it. All of them want to make something that is both "cool" and instructive for sustainability.
In a few more installments of work, we'll have all the walls up and then we'll get to work on the roof. Enjoy the pictures.
Today, another wall frame was finished and the door put on with Zach (in the picture with the door).
So this thing is coming along. For me, the coolest thing has been talking to people about why I came up with this hair-brained idea and why we started doing it. We live with these bottles and really wish we could get rid of them. Barring that at this point, maybe we can exapt them for an educational, social, and ecological good. Why not use them to try to help grow food and increase awareness about the waste cycle and show how to reduce-reuse-recycle. Every teacher and parent that has talked to Becky or me about this is really into it. All of them want to make something that is both "cool" and instructive for sustainability.
In a few more installments of work, we'll have all the walls up and then we'll get to work on the roof. Enjoy the pictures.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
A small taste of Cuban urban agriculture
Cuba is at the forefront of urban agriculture. Watch and learn. "If we could bring this same attitude to our millions of back gardens back at home, our millions of back gardens and allotments, producing wonderful vegetables just think of what that could do to change the whole structure of our approach to food."
Spill. Plume. Geyser. Wound.
Once again this morning on NPR, I heard about the “biggest oil spill in U.S. history.” I don't know about you, but the word "spill" just seems so inadequate, so insultingly paltry, to describe what's happened since the TransOcean/British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico six weeks ago. "Spill" is what I do when I accidentally dump juice, coffee, or water on the table when I'm eating. It's what happens when something pours out of something else because of gravity. "Spills" are usually little things that we might swear about and apologize for at dinner. They are worth an "Oh crap" followed by "I'm sorry."
Somehow, I think that what's unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico is
hardly a "spill." Tar balls are on their way to the Florida panhandle hundreds of miles away from this “spill.” Pelicans are being covered in oil (image from Associated Press). Sea turtles are dying. British Petroleum has used thousands of gallons of ultra-toxic Corexit to disperse oil. Corexit contains arsenic, chromium, and copper and the EPA has advised BP to stop using it. It's likely to worsen the oil "spill."
Words like "plume" or "geyser" come a little closer. When they are coupled with “disaster” or “catastrophe” they start to make sense. This “disastrous plume” of oil or “catastrophic geyser” words might work for us.
Starting with plume, let's consult the Oxford English Dictonary for some guidance:
If you go to Alexander Higgins' blog you can watch lots of video footage at how ineffectively an "oil spill robot" tries to deal with a "massive plume." But I don't really like this word "plume" much either because in its best associations we think of plumes as linked to plumage, the beautiful mating displays of birds. There is nothing beautiful about this. This is pure ugliness threatening so many lives, human and non-human. Let’s face it, the already deteriorating and atrophied shrimp populations of the Gulf of Mexico are in for more devastation. As Zach noted in an earlier entry, this will compound the problems caused by chemical fertilizer, pesticide, and organic run-off that brought about the enormous Gulf dead zone. Put this plume on the dead zone Gulf and we have a peacock plucked of a third of its feathers and fanning a tail bathed in oil. Nice.
So what about "geyser"? Once again, the OED.
this inundation...
this deluge...
this thing that shows us how small we are even with our awesome tools and how criminal we are in our acceptance of ugliness and collateral damage in the name of technocratic progress that wants to believe it should not and must not be limited. No matter how greedy, how negligent, nor how ill-informed this whole process is, it continues.
I am reminded of the children behind the Spirit of Christmas Present's robes in Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
Ignorance and Want. If you know anything about Dickens’s London, you know that it was a smoggy soot-coated city. It was the seat of British might. It was ugly and toxic. It killed the countryside. It was addicted to coal. Are we so different? A little. But not enough.
I think that in our hubristic belief in the "progress" of our industrial economy, our "enlightened" political systems, and our concomitant educational system(s) we have bred ourselves into being wanting and dependent creatures endlessly filled with "needs." This needy person (as the philosopher Ivan Illich called us) has educated himself into believing that his own "needs" are rights owed to itself and that the pursuit of those needs is the path to enlightenment. The enlightened person consumes their way to happiness through the acquisition of material wealth and the extraction, movement, and transformation of "resources" through "advanced" technology. The human product of this globalized state's market's school is, perhaps, the most parasitic organism on the planet. It wants as much as it can get, calls those wants needs, declares that those needs are owed to it by alleged rights and the person who understands that they have these rights is educated, enlightened, and progressed.
This needy person ignores and relabels the rights of the non-progressed people of the world. It pretends that they don’t exist as externalities to the economy or it calls them ignorant and in need of education. It forces them out one way or another: by climate change if your are an Inuit; by poisoning if you live on or near natural resources like coal or natural gas; by coercion if you are Filipino rice farmer, Jamaican banana farmer, or Indian farmer who refused the Green Revolution; or by military force if you refuse compliance. People are pushed and pulled from their historically evolved niches and places and moved into slums where they are neglected in high concentrations. Those historically evolved niches are transformed into places for resource development, into dumps, or into the homes for our waste. Of course the slums are polluted. At least in the slums they are within the bounds of civilization where they can be taken care of. Because people who do not work within the cash economy and have lived within the economy of nature cannot be trusted to take care of themselves because they don’t have access to things that they “need.” No. They are too ignorant. They must be hurting themselves.
Not only has our “progress” shunted people into slums, but it has ghettoized nature. Those niches and places fall to our ignorance and serve our want. The Gulf now falls rapidly to them. There has been no large lesson learned from the Exxon Valdez and comparable disasters. Chernobyl meant nothing. We are addicted to power, will, and appetite as Ulysses speaks in Shakespeare’s Troillus and Cressida:
We are those children and, as the Spirit of Christmas Present says, on our brows is written Doom. Can we call ourselves fine children? I would choke on the lie if I were to try. We eat ourselves as we eat that oil, both literally and figuratively. We are the ignorant universal wolf so needy and wanting we have made ourselves and every thing around us a universal prey. We bite and bite and bite. We wound.
There is the word. “Wound.” The Gulf rupture is a wound that we have punctured into the Earth.
Once again, the OED:
wound, n.
1. a. A hurt caused by the laceration or separation of the tissues of the body by a hard or sharp instrument, a bullet, etc.; an external injury.
2. transf. a. An incision, abrasion, or other injury due to external violence, in any part of a tree or plant.
5. (= L. plaga.) a. A blow, a stroke. (Cf. PLAGUE n. 1.) Obs.
b. A plague. Obs.
As Earth is a body of tissues, much of it living and all of it involved in the great processes of life and living. The sea and the seabed support life. This Gulf wound is a great laceration and separation of those tissues due to external violence. That violence came from a series of blow from our own plague for power.
I believe our hour has struck twelve. The night now deepens. Perhaps we will move into a new day, a day of sunlight, that greatest of disinfectants and the universal wolf will temper itself and stopping it up itself and find a more sustainable way of being. But right now it is very dark, and the wolf’s stomach is rumbling.
Somehow, I think that what's unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico is
hardly a "spill." Tar balls are on their way to the Florida panhandle hundreds of miles away from this “spill.” Pelicans are being covered in oil (image from Associated Press). Sea turtles are dying. British Petroleum has used thousands of gallons of ultra-toxic Corexit to disperse oil. Corexit contains arsenic, chromium, and copper and the EPA has advised BP to stop using it. It's likely to worsen the oil "spill."
Words like "plume" or "geyser" come a little closer. When they are coupled with “disaster” or “catastrophe” they start to make sense. This “disastrous plume” of oil or “catastrophic geyser” words might work for us.
Starting with plume, let's consult the Oxford English Dictonary for some guidance:
plume, n 7. a. A trail or cloud of smoke, vapour, etc., issuing from a localized source and spreading or billowing out as it travels.That's a bit more like it. I think that more or less describes this now (tragically) standard footage.
If you go to Alexander Higgins' blog you can watch lots of video footage at how ineffectively an "oil spill robot" tries to deal with a "massive plume." But I don't really like this word "plume" much either because in its best associations we think of plumes as linked to plumage, the beautiful mating displays of birds. There is nothing beautiful about this. This is pure ugliness threatening so many lives, human and non-human. Let’s face it, the already deteriorating and atrophied shrimp populations of the Gulf of Mexico are in for more devastation. As Zach noted in an earlier entry, this will compound the problems caused by chemical fertilizer, pesticide, and organic run-off that brought about the enormous Gulf dead zone. Put this plume on the dead zone Gulf and we have a peacock plucked of a third of its feathers and fanning a tail bathed in oil. Nice.
So what about "geyser"? Once again, the OED.
geyser, n. 1. An intermittent hot spring, throwing up water, etc. in a fountain-like column.This thing is hardly intermittent. At about 70,000 barrels a day, we are approaching 2,1000,000 gallons of oil in the Gulf. It is a column. It is a fountain. But it lacks the majesty of Old Faithful in Yellowstone. Like "plume," “geyser” and “fountain” hardly express this rupture...
2. The name given to an apparatus for rapidly heating water attached to a bath. Also for the heating of water for use in wash-basins, sinks, etc.
this inundation...
this deluge...
this thing that shows us how small we are even with our awesome tools and how criminal we are in our acceptance of ugliness and collateral damage in the name of technocratic progress that wants to believe it should not and must not be limited. No matter how greedy, how negligent, nor how ill-informed this whole process is, it continues.
I am reminded of the children behind the Spirit of Christmas Present's robes in Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.
"Oh, Man, look here! Look, look, down here!" exclaimed the Ghost.
They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
"Spirit, are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more.
"They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them. "And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. "Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end."
"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.
"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"
The bell struck twelve.
Ignorance and Want. If you know anything about Dickens’s London, you know that it was a smoggy soot-coated city. It was the seat of British might. It was ugly and toxic. It killed the countryside. It was addicted to coal. Are we so different? A little. But not enough.
I think that in our hubristic belief in the "progress" of our industrial economy, our "enlightened" political systems, and our concomitant educational system(s) we have bred ourselves into being wanting and dependent creatures endlessly filled with "needs." This needy person (as the philosopher Ivan Illich called us) has educated himself into believing that his own "needs" are rights owed to itself and that the pursuit of those needs is the path to enlightenment. The enlightened person consumes their way to happiness through the acquisition of material wealth and the extraction, movement, and transformation of "resources" through "advanced" technology. The human product of this globalized state's market's school is, perhaps, the most parasitic organism on the planet. It wants as much as it can get, calls those wants needs, declares that those needs are owed to it by alleged rights and the person who understands that they have these rights is educated, enlightened, and progressed.
This needy person ignores and relabels the rights of the non-progressed people of the world. It pretends that they don’t exist as externalities to the economy or it calls them ignorant and in need of education. It forces them out one way or another: by climate change if your are an Inuit; by poisoning if you live on or near natural resources like coal or natural gas; by coercion if you are Filipino rice farmer, Jamaican banana farmer, or Indian farmer who refused the Green Revolution; or by military force if you refuse compliance. People are pushed and pulled from their historically evolved niches and places and moved into slums where they are neglected in high concentrations. Those historically evolved niches are transformed into places for resource development, into dumps, or into the homes for our waste. Of course the slums are polluted. At least in the slums they are within the bounds of civilization where they can be taken care of. Because people who do not work within the cash economy and have lived within the economy of nature cannot be trusted to take care of themselves because they don’t have access to things that they “need.” No. They are too ignorant. They must be hurting themselves.
Not only has our “progress” shunted people into slums, but it has ghettoized nature. Those niches and places fall to our ignorance and serve our want. The Gulf now falls rapidly to them. There has been no large lesson learned from the Exxon Valdez and comparable disasters. Chernobyl meant nothing. We are addicted to power, will, and appetite as Ulysses speaks in Shakespeare’s Troillus and Cressida:
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.
We are those children and, as the Spirit of Christmas Present says, on our brows is written Doom. Can we call ourselves fine children? I would choke on the lie if I were to try. We eat ourselves as we eat that oil, both literally and figuratively. We are the ignorant universal wolf so needy and wanting we have made ourselves and every thing around us a universal prey. We bite and bite and bite. We wound.
There is the word. “Wound.” The Gulf rupture is a wound that we have punctured into the Earth.
Once again, the OED:
wound, n.
1. a. A hurt caused by the laceration or separation of the tissues of the body by a hard or sharp instrument, a bullet, etc.; an external injury.
2. transf. a. An incision, abrasion, or other injury due to external violence, in any part of a tree or plant.
5. (= L. plaga.) a. A blow, a stroke. (Cf. PLAGUE n. 1.) Obs.
b. A plague. Obs.
As Earth is a body of tissues, much of it living and all of it involved in the great processes of life and living. The sea and the seabed support life. This Gulf wound is a great laceration and separation of those tissues due to external violence. That violence came from a series of blow from our own plague for power.
I believe our hour has struck twelve. The night now deepens. Perhaps we will move into a new day, a day of sunlight, that greatest of disinfectants and the universal wolf will temper itself and stopping it up itself and find a more sustainable way of being. But right now it is very dark, and the wolf’s stomach is rumbling.
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