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.

A Refreshing Admission of Wrongdoing

A surprise to look at the June 26 Trenton Times and see a sheriff admit to taking bribes "from people seeking positions or promotions" in his office. The sentence is 9 years, with a minimum of 2 years before probation, and loss of pension. He had been sheriff for nearly 30 years.

The surprise was in such a clear admission of wrongdoing, particularly after a Frontline documentary, called Rape in the Fields, on PBS the night before, about widespread sexual exploitation of young, undocumented immigrant women by foremen at large agricultural businesses--orchards and poultry plants-- out west. No convictions, no admissions of wrongdoing. The images are of vast industrial enterprises--almond orchards that extend to the horizon, massive buildings for egg production and animal slaughter--dwarfing the human cogs in the profit wheel. The repetitive patterns of the tree rows and the cold facades of the buildings reinforce the message of repeated patterns of abuse.

Trading Innocence for Empowerment--Journalistic Narratives Old and New

One reason climate change does not get mentioned in day to day reporting of events such as droughts and floods is the persistence of the stereotypical portrayal of people as victims of a whimsical and often cruel nature. By suggesting that human activity is influencing weather patterns, climate change muddies the story line and blurs the distinction between victim and perpetrator.

A June 9 front page article in the New York Times, After Drought, Rains Plaguing Midwest Farms, is a good example. It describes how last year's drought segued into this year's deluge. One farmer called it “the worst spring I can remember in my 30 years farming." Farmers were "pleading for rain" last year, and now "are praying for the rain to stop." Helpless victims they are, "trying to divine if and how their pocketbooks can survive another curveball from nature."

The article ends with a reprise about nature's power: "the whim that brought moisture could just as cruelly take it back." Who's the hero in this storyline? The farmer who, though victimized, perseveres in the face of nature's extremes, and the government, which provides crop insurance.

Though it be an article bearing bad news (crops and farmer income imperiled, more government payouts), the narrative is comforting. There is nothing to be done other than to admire the farmer's resilience and send some aid.

But that storyline increasingly loses validity as human activity melts the arctic ice cap, warms the earth and raises sea levels. We are not spectators but active participants. Nature is no longer fully natural, its whims not entirely inexplicable but instead influenced by forces we have set in motion. It's harder to be the helpless victim praying to God for help, when in fact we are intruding into God's domain by radically changing the composition of the atmosphere.

While journalistic convention perpetuates storylines like the one in the New York Times, other approaches to reporting accept the human role in climate and explain the mechanisms that are contributing to making extreme weather more frequent and destructive. There's a tradeoff here. By abandoning the old storyline, the reader loses a sense of innocence, but gains a new sense of empowerment. Being a part of the problem, we can be part of the solution.

The articles below describe the string of causes and effects, abetted by human-caused global warming, that can lead to prolonged droughts one year, prolonged rain the next.

Arctic Warming Favors Extreme, Prolonged Weather Events ‘Such As Drought, Flooding, Cold Spells And Heat Waves’

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/05/30/2064511/the-jet-stream-how-its-response-to-enhanced-arctic-warming-is-driving-more-extreme-weather/

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!

Should Presidents Be Allowed a Third Term?

Views on the 22nd Amendment's ban on presidents seeking a third term, like views on Senate filibuster rules, will vary according to who is in power at any given time. But given the nation's perilous trajectory in the 21st century, it's worth questioning the status quo. Offered not as as advocacy but as an exploration of the issue, here are some reasons to reconsider the 22nd Amendment:

1. A president's longer learning curve: Government is far bigger and more complex than it was in the past. It takes longer for a president to gain a working understanding of the government he or she presides over. Eight years may be just enough to finally get a handle on how to be most effective. 
2. The voters' long learning curve: For some reason, it takes a long time for people to see through their ideological filters and beyond whatever news bubble they occupy, and figure out whether a president is competent or not. By the time George W. Bush had served eight years, there was general agreement on both right and left that he had been a poor president. By the time Bill Clinton had served eight years, and despite resentment of him on both left and right, a strong majority had finally come to agree that he was doing a good job. By the third election, then, people will finally have a clear sense of whether a president is worth voting for. It takes that long for a polarized nation to look beyond party and see the quality of the individual's leadership. In the 2012 election, there was considerable debate about whether to blame Obama for the state of the economy. After eight years, a president can be more clearly given credit or blame for the country's overall trajectory.
3. The rareness of gifted leaders: Seared into memory is the contrast, at the end of Clinton's second term, between Clinton's clearly articulated vision of integrating market forces with governmental stewardship, and Al Gore's awkwardly run campaign that emphasized the vilification of corporations. Ninety two years earlier, the popular and effective Teddy Roosevelt could have run again in 1908, but chose not to, much to his later regret. The comparatively poor political skills of the two men they chose to carry on their legacy led, in the case of William Howard Taft, to a traumatic rift in the Republican Party, and in the case of Al Gore, to the election of the disastrous George W. Bush. Can the nation afford to lose gifted, energetic leaders, given how rare they turn out to be?
4. Rallying support for self-sacrifice: One reason the nation is facing the twin "disasters waiting to happen" of climate change and staggering debt is that voters have been unwilling to sacrifice for the common good. They want it all: government services but low taxes, the freedom and convenience of a fossil fuel-subsidized life, but none of the responsibility for the longterm consequences. No leader has dared speak out against this grand indulgence. One can ask if Americans would have rallied and sacrificed the way they did in WWII, if they had not already learned to trust FDR through two previous terms, and whether a president newer to the job would have been able to pull off the sweeping transformations of the economy necessary to put the nation on a war footing.

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.