1000 Years From Now

The Aug. 1 CNN headline read "Judge sentences Cleveland kidnapper Ariel Castro to life, plus 1,000 years". I'm sure many people felt reassured by this, given he had spent the last ten years torturing three women in a boarded up house in a Cleveland neighborhood. You'd think neighbors would have been curious about the house. But, then, you'd think people in general would be curious about what the world will be like in 1000 years, and how our actions now may influence that. All we know thus far is that Ariel Castro will still be in prison.

"Life, plus 1000 years" is a useful mindset for judging our nation's policies. Do they serve not only the living but also all those who will live over the next 1000 years? Otherwise, what are we sentencing future humanity to endure?

In jurisprudence, multiple life sentences are handed out to mere mortals because there's a tendency for convicts to come up for parole early in their sentences. A judge leaves a margin for error, exagerating a sentence, knowing it could shrink. When considering our collective impact on the future, the tendency of many is to conveniently discount it, to minimize or dismiss altogether, to assume everything will work out. This is a perilous path, given that consequences could be far greater and come much sooner than expected.

The future is unprotected by any of civilization's institutions. Future people have no legal standing, (although, interestingly, a landowner's right to future profit does). Financial markets suffer from a severe case of near-sightedness. Government is under siege around the world. We punish criminals as if they will live forever, yet talk, or don't talk, about the future of civilization as if it has none. 

Striving After Sand

Some thoughts on "The Beach Builders", a New Yorker article by John Seabrook that asks the question, "Can the Jersey Shore be saved?"

How many houses were destroyed by Hurricane Sandy? The article, quoting Governor Christie, says 365 (thousand!). 365,000 ?!!

Where sand for beach renourishment comes from: In the documentary "Shored Up", sand is described as a limited resource along the Jersey shore. There's only so much to dig up from deeper waters to replenish what the ocean erodes away. In the article, Seabrook describes how the sand now being used to buttress barrier island development from storm damage comes from a beach from the last ice age, back when vast glaciers covered much of North America and the sea was 60 feet lower. In other words, past solar energy (in the form of fossil fuels) is being used to dig up past beaches in order to prop up present day lifestyles. 

Shifting Perceptions: The article contemplates how people will view the ocean after a couple more storms like Sandy. Will the ocean maintain its appeal, or will people "see only the menace"? 

        We've seen this shift elsewhere. People's views of cigarettes changed, as the romance fell away, revealing the underlying addiction and danger. Planes in the sky after the 9/11 terrorist attacks appeared menacing. I've wondered when we'll start looking at automobiles and other machines differently, once their role in altering climate and sea levels becomes more apparent in coming decades. 

Ocean Avenue, and what's in a name: Oftentimes, developments are named after what is no longer there--some natural feature or animal banished by the development. Ocean Avenue, however, is an example of a name that actually foretold what it would become, at least during Hurricane Sandy. The road was covered by the ocean, requiring snowplows to clear the sand from the pavement.

Christie's quote denying human-caused climate change was worse than originally thought: The governor is, of course, serving as cheer leader for the shore, which is a big part of the Jersey economy. But for someone who brags of taking action when past governors have not, and who speaks of what sort of world our grandchildren will inherit, his dismissive attitude towards climate change is jarring. The full quote in the article is worse than the snippet reported in the news. Asked about climate change and Hurricane Sandy, he said "I haven't been shown any definitive proof yet that that's what caused it. Listen, this is distraction. I've got a place to rebuild here, and people want to talk to me about esoteric theories. We've got plenty of time to do that later on." 

        "Distraction.....esoteric theories.....plenty of time.....later on." These words, like New Jersey's beaches, offer a flimsy defense against the rising tide.

Navigating to Reality in the Misinformation Age

A critique of the news media's abdication of its role in correcting widespread misperceptions (from a 12/12/12 letter to a local newspaper):

Let it be known that on Nov. 28, a new approach to journalism was born, on page 7 of the Town Topics. Though I had been waiting nearly two decades for this breakthrough, it took several readings for the importance of the headline to sink in. "Not Everybody Knows That Hospital Has Moved From Princeton to Plainsboro." I know, it doesn't sound like much, and my first inclination was to pass it by. Only when I re-encountered the headline, in the process of recycling, did the headline's import sink in.

The article was about people still making the drive to the old hospital site in search of medical care. But on a broader scale, consider how many people labor under the burden of misinformation, and spend their lives driving their fevered thoughts to the wrong conclusions time and time again. Though this is considered the Information Age, it is equally the Misinformation Age, when lies go viral, replicating exponentially in nutrient-rich environments of resentment and fear. People are lost not only because they aren't paying attention, but because they are being actively misled.

Fortunately, as the hospital article described, there is someone waiting at the old hospital site to redirect those who are lost. Additional signs directing people to the new hospital are now in place.

These steps make obvious sense, but ask yourself if the same steps have been taken to help people arrive at reality-based destinations in their thinking. Where, for instance, will people encounter, in an adequately redundant way, the basic facts about the human-caused transformations now underway that will change life on earth forever? Princeton probably contributes to the global problem of rising oceans and radicalized climate as much per capita as any other town, and yet there is precious little "signage" in news media--local or otherwise--directing us towards an understanding of the gravity of the situation.

An article in the pioneering style of "Not Everybody Knows...." would give the basics about how human activity is warming the earth and acidifying the oceans, and that the many consequences--more destructive storms and droughts, coastal flooding, undermining of marine ecosystems, melting of ice caps, temperature rise-- are playing out faster than scientists' models had projected. It would say that sea level rise is accelerating, with three feet likely this century, and 220 additional feet of rise still locked up in the ice fields of Greenland and Antarctica. It would say that the impacts of pouring climate-changing gases into the atmosphere, unlike many other forms of pollution, are essentially permanent, and continued dependency on fossil fuels will only destabilize climate and marine systems further.

That's the sort of "signage" we need, posted like hospital signs in well-traveled places where people are sure to see them again and again, until the message gets through. The lack of it, the fact that one almost never encounters this information in daily living, reading, and listening without considerable search, is sending a very clear message: that it doesn't really matter where we're headed.

First appeared in the Town Topics, 12/12/12

Beijing, 2013 -- Gary, Indiana 1960s

News of the apocalyptic air pollution in and around Beijing, China took me back to family road trips around the south side of Lake Michigan in the 1960s. As we approached the steel mills in Gary, Indiana, we kids in the back seat would ready the Kleenex, and then hold it over our noses as the acrid, sulphurous gases penetrated through our station wagon's doors. It was like driving through a sunset at midday, with clouds of purple and orange pollution drifting over the freeway. For fifteen minutes we'd endure that torture, wondering all the while how people could possibly live in the houses we passed.

In China, fifteen minutes would not be enough to escape the noxious air. One radio report described China's off-the-charts pollution as being twice the width of Texas.

Flight From Empowerment

One of the less productive responses to the reality of human-caused climate change is the effort people expend not to think about it. A different and, I would argue, more satisfying approach is to embrace its reality and focus on the positive things one can do to lessen its impact.

Climate change is like another phenomenon people avoid thinking about, aging, in that both are driven by an incremental accumulation, whether of greenhouse gases or time.

But unlike with aging, rapid changes in climate are something humanity has imposed upon itself. There are many things we can do both as individuals and collectively to slow or eventually even reverse the radicalization of climate.

That most people have not responded to this rallying cry, so common in the books and documentaries on the subject, suggests a need to avoid empowerment and maintain a sense of victimhood. Standard news media have long catered to this need by avoiding any implication in daily reporting that human activity contributes to making forest fires, floods and storms more destructive. The overwhelming desire is to perceive threats as coming from the outside, rather than being generated cumulatively from the inside.

Jared Diamond, in a recent essay in the NY Times entitled "That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer", describes one aspect of the flight from empowerment this way:

"It turns out that we exaggerate the risks of events that are beyond our control, that cause many deaths at once or that kill in spectacular ways — crazy gunmen, terrorists, plane crashes, nuclear radiation, genetically modified crops. At the same time, we underestimate the risks of events that we can control (“That would never happen to me — I’m careful”) and of events that kill just one person in a mundane way."

Action sells, but it's the accumulation of mundane daily choices that is most likely to determine our individual and collective fates. Acknowledging the real threats that one actually has a hand in, and accepting that small but measurable power to change prospects for the better, involves seeing the profundity and cumulative meaning in day to day living.

Democracy is built on such a notion. Each vote, small but measurable, counts towards the final result.

The relative lack of individual or collective response to climate change suggests that people are stuck on the first line of the Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

Courage, people, courage!

Storm Relief and the Republican Paradox

As Congress passed $9.7 billion in storm relief for victims of Hurricane Sandy today, 67 Republicans in the House voted against the measure. Those opposed objected to the lack of offsetting cuts in other spending. But the 67, characterized as "anti-spending", have to ask to what extent they themselves played a role in creating the problem. Vast federal expenditures of this sort on storm relief, which could soon total $60 billion in extra debt spending for superstorm Sandy, were predicted long ago as a consequence of human-caused climate change. We heat the planet, oceans rise, storms become more violent, and government has bigger disaster bills. Did the 67 spend the last thirty years trying to reduce our economy's radicalizing impact on climate, or instead working to obstruct not only national efforts but a coordinated global response as well?

If anyone should be upset, it should be those, equally and perhaps more genuinely and consistently opposed to government waste, who have long decried the lack of action to wean the economy of dependence on climate-changing fossil fuels.

Now, because we're still stuck with that dependence, communities damaged by the storm will have little choice but to rebuild with the same problematic infrastructure, in areas increasingly endangered by the very climate change that many politicians have shown little interest in preventing.

Behind the facade of "anti-spending" in Washington, then, are policies that will insure increased spending now and in the future.

Government's Legitimate Role--A Sports Analogy

One seemingly bottomless source of national pessimism today is the notion that government can't do anything right and that regulators are by nature the enemy of freedom and commerce. It's enough to make one head to the sports section, where a much healthier relationship with governance is on display.

Sports in general provides a fine analogy for what government's role should ideally be. The athletes and their teams, motivated to beat the competition, bring to their game the same energy and creativity that entrepreneurs and businesses bring to the marketplace. But though the players and coaches may dispute a call now and then, they don't make the mistake of perceiving regulation as the enemy. Rather, a good game requires clear rules and regulations that are fairly applied.

Boundaries in sports do not constrict action so much as channel it, challenging the players to refine their skills to make the most of the freedom and opportunities the game's framework provides. Without a net and clear boundaries, tennis would never have produced the likes of a Roger Federer. Similarly, manufacturers have responded to the combination of a competitive marketplace and rigorous government standards by greatly increasing the efficiency of appliances like refrigerators, while also lowering costs. Environmental regulations, then, are falsely maligned when in fact they can motivate manufacturers to dramatically improve their products and save consumers money.

There must be many football fans who believe that the nation's economy would thrive if only government regulations were slashed, and yet the game itself is a celebration of rules and regulations. All the while underregulated financial institutions were precipitating a financial meltdown in the fall of 2007, football fans were scrutinizing instant replays for the slightest infraction.

Earlier this fall, professional football provided a definitive demonstration of what happens when governance is given short shrift. When the NFL replaced its union referees with high school and college refs used to slower-paced play, their incompetence damaged the game. The NFL essentially replicated an experiment conducted by George W. Bush. By putting incompetent appointees in charge of FEMA, President Bush set the stage for the botched government response to the devastation in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.

Sports, too, clearly demonstrates the flaw in the assertion that regulations would better be determined by states rather than by the federal government. Imagine if teams in different states could make up their own rules and field dimensions. The result would be chaos, which is why industry so often lobbies for uniform standards at the federal level.

Ideologies that equate regulation with tyranny, common in political discourse, sound bizarre when applied to the realm of sports. You don't hear athletes quoting Ayn Rand and calling for the elimination of referees and boundaries in the name of freedom. Nor is there any illusion that professional athletes will nobly police their own behavior. As football has increased in speed and complexity, the NFL has increased the number of referees from 3 to 7. Contrast this with calls by many politicians to get government out of the way of financial markets, even as the financial sector has exploded in size, complexity and speed.

But the importance of regulation and its consistent enforcement goes beyond insuring an exciting, fair, well-paced competition, whether in sports or the marketplace. Particularly in football, good regulation also protects players from mutual destruction. It is understood that each player is potentially a lethal weapon, capable of harming self and others.

In some ways, chronic traumatic encephalopathy--the longterm consequence of repeated concussion--is to football what climate change is to a fossil fuel-based economy. Both maladies are slow to manifest, eventually making normal life impossible. How does one save football, when the violence it is based on puts players' brains at risk? And how to save our economy, when the fuels it is based on put the nation at ever-increasing risk of catastrophic changes in weather patterns? Here, again, the sports world has proven more mature and reality-based than the political realm. As scientific evidence of the long-term impact of concussions has accumulated, denial has given way to regulatory efforts to grapple with the problem.

As in the marketplace, the goal in football is not to rid the game of regulations, but to find the right balance. Too much regulation stifles creativity and slows the action. Too little breeds chaos and puts the players and the game itself at risk. When well-targeted regulations are consistently applied, governance disappears into the background and all attention can be focused on the game.

It is this aspect of the anti-government movement in our national political discourse that is most corrosive of the nation's functioning and spirit. The constant questioning of government's legitimate role in regulating society has the paradoxical effect of keeping government in the foreground, a bleeding sore that will not heal. We need to get past this constant berating of government, acknowledge its vital role, and work to refine its implementation so that it can hum along smoothly in the background.

Referees and regulators will never be loved. But there can be no doubt they are vital to the game. It's time such an understanding spreads to our political discourse.

A version of this piece appeared in the NJ Star-Ledger, coincidentally published the morning before Hurricane Sandy devastated the eastern U.S. It was later reposted at ClimateProgress.org.

Learning From the Titanic

The Titanic sank 100 years ago today. The following was first published on the April 12 Trenton Times opinion page under the title, "Earth's passengers should learn from the Titanic."

The good ship America is steaming full speed ahead towards the 100th anniversary of the Titanic’s demise--the biggest symbol of avoidable disaster ever to sail the seas of human discourse. Given concerns about where we are headed, as a nation and as a planet, it’s worth asking what were the ingredients for disaster as the Titanic approached ice fields on a moonless night.

As chance would have it, the anniversary falls on April 15, usually a rallying point for discontent with government and taxes. But the elements feeding the Titanic’s demise, and other disasters in more recent decades, suggest that the reflexive anti-government thinking so dominant today misses the boat when it comes to identifying the dangers we face in the 21st century.

Technological Hubris: Most people associate the Titanic with a delusional belief in infallibility. The Titanic’s Captain Smith said he could not “imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder." Worst-case scenarios tend to get short shrift in an atmosphere of overconfidence.
Inadequate Regulation: Lack of regulation primed the Titanic for disaster. Ships were not required to have sufficient lifeboats. Lax standards contributed to critical breakdowns in wireless communication between the Titanic and other ships.
Ignored Warnings: Warnings came from various ships in the vicinity that were encountering ice fields that night, but the Titanic made only minor adjustments, and continued at nearly full speed.
Don’t Rock The Boat: The Titanic pressed forward despite risky conditions in part because of high expectations that it stay on schedule.
Poor Information Flow: Safeguarding the ship was not the wireless operators’ top priority. After forwarding to the captain several warnings of icebergs from other ships, they went back to their primary role--relaying the passengers’ personal messages--and dismissed additional warnings as an annoyance.
Delayed Feedback: Having ignored warnings, the Titanic was dependent upon its lookouts to spot icebergs in its path. But visibility was limited on a moonless night, and icebergs show little of their true size looming underwater.
Momentum: When the iceberg finally came into view, the ship’s momentum--its sheer mass and high speed--made a last minute change of course impossible.

This list can be applied to most any disaster of recent decades. Warnings from engineers, scientists and other specialists with critical knowledge went unheeded prior to the two space shuttle disasters, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the financial collapse. Pressure to stay on schedule caused NASA to launch the space shuttle Challenger despite weather concerns. Inadequate regulation facilitated the financial meltdown.

But the list is most relevant to a calamity just now unfolding. The assumption is that Earth is infinitely resilient, “unsinkable”. Though warnings are repeatedly sounded that we are taking a very risky path, we feel compelled to move forward, to stoke the engines of the economy, even if it’s an economy based on fatally flawed fuels. Advertisements bathe us in celebratory images of gleaming automobiles that, for all their appeal and utility, speed the destabilization of climate.

Our leaders might be more emboldened to take strategic action if voters were better informed about the tremendous risks embedded in the status quo. But the news media are focused on the day to day political drama rather than relaying the scientists’ increasingly urgent warnings. Consensus for action becomes even more problematic when people feel they have a right to their own facts. Worst-case scenarios dare not be mentioned.

What is particularly important to note here is that the Titanic was just one ship. Other ships eventually arrived to pick up the survivors. Laws were passed requiring more lifeboats and better wireless communication. Despite the tragic loss, civilization could continue, safer for the lessons learned. But with spaceship Earth, there are no lifeboats, no other planets to come to our rescue, no second chances. The momentum of both the human economy and human-caused climate change is huge and will require an immense and prolonged effort to counter.

Before the passengers on the Titanic lost their lives, they lost the comfort of their assumptions. Everything deemed important up to the moment of the fateful collision was suddenly rendered trivial. Maximizing one’s wealth, status and entertainment, staying on schedule--all these urgent priorities dissolved into nothing.

We, too, are steaming at full speed towards a rude awakening, in which the priorities we cling to so strongly now will prove in retrospect to have mattered little. A way of life is not guarded by vilifying government, branding scientific knowledge as elitist, and stripping a society of its regulatory protections. “Every man for himself” are the words of a ship captain who realizes all is lost, not a slogan for progress.

The lessons of the Titanic and more recent disasters are there to be learned from. Take warnings seriously, consider worst-case scenarios, and when there’s trouble ahead, shift course before it’s too late.

Rethinking News Coverage of Wildfires

The traditional coverage of western wildfires offers a prime example of how consumers of the news are not informed about the underlying forces that drive tragedy. If kept unaware of the underlying forces, people will be unlikely to support changes in policy that would help reduce those tragedies, and so we are destined to have a perpetual stream of articles detailing the latest tragedy caused by wildfires.

Sunday's Trenton Times, 11.20.11, offers a typical Associated Press story about a wildfire in Reno Nevada destroying 32 homes. The article answers the usual questions of what, where, when and who. Victims and damage are tallied, and heroes cheered. The warlike imagery describes a territorial battle between people and nature. "Firefighters made large advances against the blaze that sent nearly 10,000 people from their homes in the middle of the night and sent flames licking the edges of the region's mountain roads."

Where these articles leave readers uninformed is in answering the question "why?". This particular article offers possible causes: a downed power line or a homeless encampment. But though one of these may have actually started the fire, it doesn't explain why so much damage was done.

Most people are unaware that fire is a natural and often beneficial force in nature. Many types of trees, grasses and herbs are adapted to survive periodic fire and even depend upon it. American Indians used fire to create more open, productive landscapes that attracted wildlife with their nutrient-rich regrowth.

Where periodic fire is a natural component of the landscape, home building is a risky proposition, in much the same way that building in a floodplain courts disaster. People compound the risk by building homes with wooden shingles, or allowing highly combustible vegetation to grow close to their homes. In woodlands where natural, low-level fires used to sweep through periodically, consuming dead wood and pine needles, the presence of homes requires suppression of those beneficial fires. Dead plant matter in the woods then accumulates to dangerous levels, eventually fueling the sort of massive, uncontrollable, destructive wildfires we end up reading about.

In the past, one or another news organization would run an article explaining these deeper ecological realities. This was particularly true in 1988, when the summer-long fires in Yellowstone National Park led journalists to dig beneath the default storyline. But, particularly as news budgets have diminished, news coverage has narrowed back to the default storyline, presenting wildland fire as a destructive force victimizing innocent homeowners. It is the repetition of that storyline that powers people's misperceptions, and wastes countless teachable moments.

Back in the 1990's, I sent letters to the Associated Press, alerting them to the misleading storyline that drove their coverage of wildfires. Though one editor responded, there was no change in the approach to coverage. Now, with news budgets greatly diminished, and competition creating ever more pressure to generate dramatic copy, there is even less likelihood of reform.

Reality undermines the simple storyline of evil fire and innocent victims. The failure to convey that underlying reality about some distant fire may seem of little note, but understanding the role people play in magnifying nature's destructiveness is fundamental to understanding the even greater tragedy of climate change.
Traditional coverage of wildfires, then, leaves people unaware of underlying causes and thereby increases the nation's vulnerability to future disasters.

Note: Another A.P. article termed the Reno fire--more typical of August than a cold November night--the "largest 'urban' wild land fire in Reno's history." As freak weather events become increasingly common in the U.S. and elsewhere, the governor offered what is becoming a cliche, "I don't think anybody ever anticipated we'd have an incident like this at this point in the year." The governor and others might not be taken so much by surprise if the drivers of disaster--home construction in flammable landscapes combined with climate destabilization--were more frequently mentioned in news coverage.