Here is an article by James Hansen which he published on Thursday, May 10, 2012. It is a vitally important document, so I am attempting to spread this information around a bit more.

Please take a moment to read this article and if you have contacts who would be interested, please pass it along.

Peace,

Ron Rink
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Published on Thursday, May 10, 2012 by The New York Times
Game Over for the Climate
The science of the situation is clear — it’s time for the politics to follow
by James Hansen

Global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.”
If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.

Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.

That is the long-term outlook. But near-term, things will be bad enough. Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.

The science of the situation is clear — it’s time for the politics to follow.

If this sounds apocalyptic, it is. This is why we need to reduce emissions dramatically. President Obama has the power not only to deny tar sands oil additional access to Gulf Coast refining, which Canada desires in part for export markets, but also to encourage economic incentives to leave tar sands and other dirty fuels in the ground.

The global warming signal is now louder than the noise of random weather, as I predicted would happen by now in the journal Science in 1981. Extremely hot summers have increased noticeably. We can say with high confidence that the recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural events — they were caused by human-induced climate change.

We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life. But add too much, as we are doing now, and temperatures will inevitably rise too high. This is not the result of natural variability, as some argue. The earth is currently in the part of its long-term orbit cycle where temperatures would normally be cooling. But they are rising — and it’s because we are forcing them higher with fossil fuel emissions.

President Obama speaks of a “planet in peril,” but he does not provide the leadership needed to change the world’s course.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million to 393 p.p.m. over the last 150 years. The tar sands contain enough carbon — 240 gigatons — to add 120 p.p.m. Tar shale, a close cousin of tar sands found mainly in the United States, contains at least an additional 300 gigatons of carbon. If we turn to these dirtiest of fuels, instead of finding ways to phase out our addiction to fossil fuels, there is no hope of keeping carbon concentrations below 500 p.p.m. — a level that would, as earth’s history shows, leave our children a climate system that is out of their control.

We need to start reducing emissions significantly, not create new ways to increase them. We should impose a gradually rising carbon fee, collected from fossil fuel companies, then distribute 100 percent of the collections to all Americans on a per-capita basis every month. The government would not get a penny. This market-based approach would stimulate innovation, jobs and economic growth, avoid enlarging government or having it pick winners or losers. Most Americans, except the heaviest energy users, would get more back than they paid in increased prices. Not only that, the reduction in oil use resulting from the carbon price would be nearly six times as great as the oil supply from the proposed pipeline from Canada, rendering the pipeline superfluous, according to economic models driven by a slowly rising carbon price.

But instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true costs, leveling the energy playing field, the world’s governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels with hundreds of billions of dollars per year. This encourages a frantic stampede to extract every fossil fuel through mountaintop removal, longwall mining, hydraulic fracturing, tar sands and tar shale extraction, and deep ocean and Arctic drilling.

President Obama speaks of a “planet in peril,” but he does not provide the leadership needed to change the world’s course. Our leaders must speak candidly to the public — which yearns for open, honest discussion — explaining that our continued technological leadership and economic well-being demand a reasoned change of our energy course. History has shown that the American public can rise to the challenge, but leadership is essential.

The science of the situation is clear — it’s time for the politics to follow. This is a plan that can unify conservatives and liberals, environmentalists and business. Every major national science academy in the world has reported that global warming is real, caused mostly by humans, and requires urgent action. The cost of acting goes far higher the longer we wait — we can’t wait any longer to avoid the worst and be judged immoral by coming generations.

© 2012 James Hansen
Dr. James Hansen is director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and adjunct professor in the department of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University. He was the first scientist to warn the US Congress of the dangers of climate change and writes here as a private citizen. Hansen is the author of “Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity.”

I know — it’s rare to see a post at this blog. And this post is one I read this morning on the Huffington Post — the Religion Section. This was written by John Stanley and David Loy. Since I am also a Buddhist — and the fact this blog is focused on Climate Change — I wanted to pass it along to the few readers I have. It’s a great article!

Be well — be in peace,
Ron Rink

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Buddhist Economic Wisdom for Falling Back in Love With Mother Earth

I know — probably no one reads this blog — and it’s my own fault, I don’t write in it often enough.

However, I do feel this video of my friend Bill McKibben needs to be seen by however many people I can find. Here’s the link to it.

http://www.commondreams.org/video/2012/03/16

Peace,

Ron Rink

Producing the world’s dirtiest oil requires the world’s biggest trucks, the largest toxic waste pits in human history, and more water than any other industrial project in history.

This video is a refresher and a reminder – the oil companies have to fight back so hard because they are peddling some of the worst stuff on earth.

Let’s not give an inch to this disaster.

Take a look at this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84zIj_EdQdM

Peace,

Ron Rink

This bit of information really made me perk up my ears about where we are in the climate change process. Here’s what I’m talking about:

WASHINGTON: Massive amounts of greenhouse gases trapped below thawing permafrost will likely seep into the air over the next several decades, accelerating and amplifying global warming, scientists warn.

What the scientists are saying is that the heat-trapping gases under the frozen Arctic ground may be an even bigger factor in our climate change problem than cutting down forests. This is a scenario the scientists hadn’t been including in a lot of their forecasts. The release of these gases won’t be as polluting as the crap coming out of the power plants, cars, trucks and planes – but still polluting!

Melting Permafrost

I first heard about this in a little play about climate change that some friends of mine at the church I attend did this year. (We did a video of it – It was called, “Mother Earth vs. World’s People” – you can see it here: Mother Earth vs. World’s People ) One of the characters represented this melting of the permafrost.

What this all means is that over the next two or three decades a total of about 45 billion metric tons of carbon from methane and carbon dioxide will seep into the atmosphere when permafrost thaws during summers. That is about the same amount of global warming gas we spew out every five years by burning coal, gas and other fossil fuels.

This all comes down to the fact we will speed up the warming process by 20 to 30 percent than we would from fossil fuel emissions alone.

It’s not unusual for the first few inches of permafrost to thaw every summer. What’s different now is it’s a heck of a lot warmer so the scientists are now thinking it will be more like 10 feet of thawing permafrost. The gases come from all the decaying plants which have been frozen below ground for millennia. One of these leaking gases is methane which is 25 times stronger than carbon dioxide in trapping heat. There was a professor at the University of Fairbanks Alaska, Katey Walter Anthony, who set leaking methane gas on fire and had flames shooting far above her head. She said, “Places like this are all around. We’re tapping into old carbon that has been locked up in the ground for 30,000 or 40,000 years.” This triggers what Anthony and other scientists call a feedback cycle. The world warms, mostly because of human-made greenhouse gases. That thaws permafrost, releasing more natural greenhouse has, augmenting the warming problem. The scientist s do all agree there is some guesswork here because of the limited data from this relatively new issue. 

The World Meteorological Organization this week said the worst of the warming in 2011 was in the northern areas – where there is permafrost – and especially Russia. Since 1970, the Arctic has warmed at a rate twice as fast as the rest of the globe. 

The thawing permafrost also causes trees to lean – scientists call them “drunken trees” – and roads to buckle. Scientist, F. Stuart Chapin III said when he first moved to Fairbanks the road from his house to the University of Alaska had to be resurfaced once a decade. 

“Now it gets resurfaced every year due to thawing permafrost,” Chapin said.

Peace,

Ron Rink

Alberta Oil Sands Project

When Will We Get It?

How many times do we have to be warned before we get the message? For more than 25 years scientists have been warning us about the dangers we are creating for our climate. This is a distinct danger, not only to us as human beings, but to all forms of life on our planet.

We’re not “getting it” because we aren’t seeing enough evidence yet. Sure, we see all the severe weather that is happening around the globe, but that only affects a few thousand people. Most of us are unscathed by these storms. We feel for those who are affected – we send them money or other forms of aid, but then we go right back to our usual ways of living, hoping the next storm doesn’t affect us.

Some researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology looked at how Earth’s plant life is likely to react over the next 20 or 30 years in response to our ways of life which are producing greenhouse gases. These scientists are predicting that wherever Earth is not covered by ice or desert, the plants will undergo major changes as some species will overrun other species to the extent that better than 30% of our plant cover will change in some way. These changes will be so drastic that humans and animals will have to figure out ways to adapt to the changes or relocate — if they can find a place to go. One question we should be asking is how much adaptation can we manage? Are there limits?

On top of the changing plant communities, their studies predict that the ecological balance between interdependent and often endangered plants and animals will be so altered that it will affect our biodiversity and further create havoc with our water, energy, carbon and other vital elements. These elements won’t be able to follow the cycles they’ve always been on. Ever think about what it would be like to try to live without as much water as we have available right now? Or how about our energy sources?

I say, “Think about it?”

Our greed and disregard for the future has caused us to have activities in our agricultural practices and our urbanization so that we are destroying our natural habitats – not only for humans, but also for plants and animals. When we change the climate on Earth, the plants and animals have to migrate to other places in order to survive. However, with the changes happening so rapidly now, we’ve begun to effectively block the successful process of migration. The plants and animals are running low on their adaptability – at least they aren’t able to adapt fast enough to keep up with our rate of destruction.

Again, this is something which isn’t so obvious that it has received our undivided attention, so when we read about another species becoming endangered or no longer existing, we don’t get too bothered by it.

The latest scientific reports coming out of the United Nations indicate we will have a warmer and wetter Earth, with global temperatures increasing 2 to 4 degrees Celsius by 2100. This is the same warming that occurred almost 20,000 years ago,during the Last Glacial Maximum — except this time it’s happening about 100 times faster. These changes will cause some areas of Earth to become much wetter than usual, while others will become much drier. I feel we got a glimpse of that over this past year.

These reports predict that during this century the most affected areas for dramatic change will be in the Northern Hemisphere high altitudes particularly along the northern and southern boundaries of the boreal forests.

But then , those amazing boreal forests in Canada are being demolished to satisfy our greed and grasping for oil which is being developing out of the tar sands there. They have to destroy the boreal forest to get at the tar sands. (See the photo above — that used to be boreal forest!!)

Of course, our even greedier politicians are pulling every trick in the book to get those tar sands sent via pipe lines to Texas. Look at how they tacked the pipeline approval on top of the bill to renew the Payroll Tax Cut.

When will we ever get it?

Peace,

Ron Rink

One of the reasons why I started this blog was to talk about Climate Change and to express some of my own concerns about why I feel it is such an important topic.

In my opinion, there is no other topic deserving more attention!

Oh, sure, there are many other things on the popular political agenda today — and there are many day-to-day frustrations we all have to deal with in our own lives — but Climate Change, if you believe it is actually happening, means so much more. Because, if Climate Change is real — and I believe it is — then all the other worries we have today won’t really matter in the long run.

Song Bird

What is happening with the latest meeting of world leaders about the Kyoto Protocol is just plain sad. There’s no other word to express how greed and politics are causing poor decisions to be made in this regard.

You have probably heard the old tale told about how people determined if a place was safe for humans, right? That’s the one where they send in a canary first. If the canary makes it out alive, then it was alright for the humans to enter. If the canary didn’t return, then it wasn’t safe.

Well, this morning, I was introduced to a video which talks about saving songbirds. It is a long video, but I do hope you will set aside the time to watch it. It’s beautiful to see so many of the songbirds up close and personal, but it also brings up an important point. If something is happening to the birds, then there is something we humans should be paying attention to!!

Here’s a link to the video — please take time to watch it.

Saving Songbirds

Have a great weekend.

Be well — be in peace,

Ron Rink

I feel bad about posting another article I haven’t written, but time has been my enemy lately. I do hope to do a better job in the near future.

Peace,

Ron Rink

Published on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 by TruthDig

The United Nations’ annual climate summit descended on Durban, South Africa, this week, but not in time to prevent the tragic death of Qodeni Ximba. The 17-year-old was one of 10 people killed in Durban on Sunday, the night before the U.N. conference opened. Torrential rains pummeled the seaside city of 3.5 million. Seven hundred homes were destroyed by the floods.

Ximba was sleeping when the concrete wall next to her collapsed. One woman tried to save a flailing 1-year-old baby whose parents had been crushed by their home. She failed, and the baby died along with both parents. All this, as more than 20,000 politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, scientists and activists made their way to what may be the last chance for the Kyoto Protocol.

How might the conference have prevented the deaths? A better question is, how might the massive deluge, which fell on the heels of other deadly storms this month, be linked to human-induced climate change, and what is the gathering in Durban doing about it? Durban has received twice the normal amount of rain for November. The trends suggest that extreme weather is going to get worse.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a group with thousands of scientists who volunteer their time “to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in climate change.” The group won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Last week, the IPCC released a summary of its findings, clearly linking changing climate to extreme weather events such as drought, flash floods, hurricanes, heat waves and rising sea levels. The World Meteorological Organization released a summary of its latest findings, noting, to date, that 2011 is the 10th-warmest year on record, that the Arctic sea ice is at its all-time low volume this year, and that 13 of the warmest years on record have occurred in the past 15 years.

Which brings us to Durban. This is the 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or, simply, COP17. One of the signal achievements of the U.N. process to date is the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty with enforceable provisions designed to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. In 1997, when Kyoto was adopted, China was considered a poor, developing country, and, as such, had far fewer obligations under Kyoto. Now, the U.S. and others say that China must join the wealthy, developed nations and comply with that set of rules. China refuses. That is one of the major, but by no means the only, stumbling blocks to renewing the Kyoto Protocol (another major problem is that the world’s historically largest polluter, the United States, signed Kyoto but did not ratify it in Congress).

In Copenhagen in late 2009 (at COP15), President Barack Obama swept in, organized back-door, invite-only meetings and crafted a voluntary—i.e., unenforceable—alternative to Kyoto, angering many. COP16 in Cancun, Mexico, in 2010 heightened the distance from the Kyoto Protocol. The prevailing wisdom in Durban is that this is make-or-break time for the U.N climate process.

Exacerbating Obama’s failures is the Republican majority in the House of Representatives that largely holds human-made climate change as being either a hoax or simply nonexistent, as do eight of nine Republican presidential candidates. Oil and gas corporations spend tens of millions of dollars annually to promote junk science and climate-change deniers. Their investment has paid off, with an increasing percentage of Americans believing that climate change is not a problem.

Coincident with the disappointing U.N. proceedings has been a growing movement for climate justice in the streets. Protests against fossil-fuel dependence, which accelerates global warming, range from the nonviolent direct action against mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia to the arrest of more than 1,200 people at the White House opposing the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline.

Which is why Durban, South Africa, is such a fitting place for civil society to challenge the United Nations process. The continent of Africa is projected to experience the impact of climate change more severely than many other locales, and most populations here are less well-equipped to deal with climate disasters, without proper infrastructure or a reserve of wealth to deploy. Yet these are the people who threw off the oppressive yoke of apartheid.

South African novelist Alan Paton wrote of apartheid in 1948, the system’s first year, anticipating a long fight to overturn it, “Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end.” The same determination is growing in the streets of Durban, providing the leadership so lacking in the guarded, air-conditioned enclave of COP17.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

© 2011 Amy Goodman
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 900 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the “Alternative Nobel” prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.

more Amy Goodman
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Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
Source URL: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/30-1

There has been so much going on in the world of Climate Change, the economy, the political circus, Occupy Wall Street and many other Occupy events, the 350.org circling of the White House on Sunday, the fact that another portion of the Jobs Bill was turned away by the Senate Republicans, and so much more.

One of those things is the new Annie Leonard movie, “The Story of Broke” was released.

(You may remember the other movie she produced called, “The Story of Stuff”.)

The United States isn’t broke; we’re the richest country on the planet and a country in which the richest among us are doing exceptionally well. But the truth is, our economy is broken, producing more pollution, greenhouse gasses and garbage than any other country. In these and so many other ways, it just isn’t working. But rather than invest in something better, we continue to keep this ‘dinosaur economy’ on life support with hundreds of billions of dollars of our tax money. The Story of Broke calls for a shift in government spending toward investments in clean, green solutions—renewable energy, safer chemicals and materials, zero waste and more—that can deliver jobs AND a healthier environment. It’s time to rebuild the American Dream; but this time, let’s build it better.

“The Story of Broke” couldn’t come at a more relevant time. Before Thanksgiving, the Congressional Supercommittee will propose a plan on how to bridge a $1.2 trillion budget gap – and if they don’t, the country will face a series of draconian, across-the-board budget cuts.

With sky-high unemployment and our social safety net in tatters, it’s no wonder many of us feel a collective sense of desperation. But as Annie points out, we aren’t broke: “Spending billions on fighter planes we don’t need or wars with no end, and then saying we’re broke, just isn’t honest.”

So, at no cost to you, here is the movie. You will love it.

The Story of Broke/

Today is also election day, and here in Ohio it is a vitally important one. We have some serious “Issues” to deal with on our ballot. Issue 2 is the one getting the most attention. It’s a chance for voters here to repeal a law (SB 5) enacted by our mostly Republican Legislature which would put all our families’ safety at risk. It makes it harder for emergency responders, police and firefighters to negotiate for critical safety equipment and training that protects us all.

Issue 2 will make our nursing shortage worse. It makes it illegal for nurses, hospital and clinic workers to demand reasonable and safe staffing levels — so nurses will juggle more patients while their salaries and benefits are cut.

Instead of creating jobs to fix our economy, politicians like Gov. Kasich gave away hundreds of millions in corporate tax breaks — draining our state budget without creating jobs — and passed flawed laws like SB 5 to pay back their campaign donors.

Teachers, nurses, firefighters are not the reason Ohio’s budget is in trouble. Big corporations, their high-paid lobbyists and the politicians they fund are blaming middle class Ohioans for a problem they caused.

This one needs a strong NO vote.

There are also a couple more issues on our ballot which are designed to make changes to our Constitution. Ohio tea partiers will finally get their big moment at the ballot box today, November 8. That’s when Ohioans vote on Issue 3, a referendum spearheaded by tea party groups that would amend the state constitution to ban any law or rule requiring that citizens buy health insurance. The intent is obvious: to rebuke President Obama by blocking the individual mandate — the part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that requires Americans to buy health insurance or pay a fine.

This Issue is bad news any way you look at it. Not only won’t it block the ACA’s individual mandate, but it’s so vague, legal experts say, that it could have the damaging, unintended effect of undermining key public services and regulations in Ohio, including blocking the state’s ability to collect crucial data on infectious diseases. If passed, it could also spark a wave of costly lawsuits, with taxpayers likely footing the bill.

This one also needs a strong No vote.

And we also have Issue 1. This is a Constitutional Amendment to raise the age of judges. We need a lot of things here in Ohio, but more and older judges isn’t one of them. Because judicial terms in Ohio are for 6 years, the current law allows a judge to run for a new term as long as he will be one day younger than 76 on the day that term would end. Under the amendment, a judge could run for a new term that wouldn’t end until he or she was 82 years old.

I have to ask why? We have enough judges. Since this has to do with our Constitution, I feel caution is the better rule and
I’m voting No on this one too.

So, that’s it for this time.

Be well — be in peace,

Ron Rink

I know — it’s too long between posts here. I agree — and I hope to improve on it soon. In the meantime, here’s another guest article I would like to share with you.

Be well, be in peace,

Ron Rink
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Published on Thursday, October 27, 2011 by TomDispatch.com

Occupy Earth: Nature Is the 99%, Too

Someone Got Rich and Someone Got Sick

by Chip Ward

What if rising sea levels are yet another measure of inequality? What if the degradation of our planet’s life-support systems — its atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere — goes hand in hand with the accumulation of wealth, power, and control by that corrupt and greedy 1% we are hearing about from Zuccotti Park? What if the assault on America’s middle class and the assault on the environment are one and the same?

Money Rules: It’s not hard for me to understand how environmental quality and economic inequality came to be joined at the hip. In all my years as a grassroots organizer dealing with the tragic impact of degraded environments on public health, it was always the same: someone got rich and someone got sick.

In the struggles that I was involved in to curb polluters and safeguard public health, those who wanted curbs, accountability, and precautions were always outspent several times over by those who wanted no restrictions on their effluents. We dug into our own pockets for postage money, they had expense accounts. We made flyers to slip under the windshield wipers of parked cars, they bought ads on television. We took time off from jobs to visit legislators, only to discover that they had gone to lunch with fulltime lobbyists.

Naturally, the barons of the chemical and nuclear industries don’t live next to the radioactive or toxic-waste dumps that their corporations create; on the other hand, impoverished black and brown people often do live near such ecological sacrifice zones because they can’t afford better. Similarly, the gated communities of the hyper-wealthy are not built next to cesspool rivers or skylines filled with fuming smokestacks, but the slums of the planet are. Don’t think, though, that it’s just a matter of property values or scenery. It’s about health, about whether your kids have lead or dioxins running through their veins. It’s a simple formula, in fact: wealth disparities become health disparities.

And here’s another formula: when there’s money to be made, both workers and the environment are expendable. Just as jobs migrate if labor can be had cheaper overseas, I know workers who were tossed aside when they became ill from the foul air or poisonous chemicals they encountered on the job.

The fact is: we won’t free ourselves from a dysfunctional and unfair economic order until we begin to see ourselves as communities, not commodities. That is one clear message from Zuccotti Park.

Polluters routinely walk away from the ground they poison and expect taxpayers to clean up after them. By “externalizing” such costs, profits are increased. Examples of land abuse and abandonment are too legion to list, but most of us can refer to a familiar “superfund site” in our own backyard. Clearly, Mother Nature is among the disenfranchised, exploited, and struggling.

Democracy 101: The 99% pay for wealth disparity with lost jobs, foreclosed homes, weakening pensions, and slashed services, but Nature pays, too. In the world the one-percenters have created, the needs of whole ecosystems are as easy to disregard as, say, the need the young have for debt-free educations and meaningful jobs.

Extreme disparity and deep inequality generate a double standard with profound consequences. If you are a CEO who skims millions of dollars off other people’s labor, it’s called a “bonus.” If you are a flood victim who breaks into a sporting goods store to grab a lifejacket, it’s called looting. If you lose your job and fall behind on your mortgage, you get evicted. If you are a banker-broker who designed flawed mortgages that caused a million people to lose their homes, you get a second-home vacation-mansion near a golf course.

If you drag heavy fishnets across the ocean floor and pulverize an entire ecosystem, ending thousands of years of dynamic evolution and depriving future generations of a healthy ocean, it’s called free enterprise. But if, like Tim DeChristopher, you disrupt an auction of public land to oil and gas companies, it’s called a crime and you get two years in jail.

In campaigns to make polluting corporations accountable, my Utah neighbors and I learned this simple truth: decisions about what to allow into the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat are soon enough translated into flesh and blood, bone and nerve, and daily experience. So it’s crucial that those decisions, involving environmental quality and public health, are made openly, inclusively, and accountably. That’s Democracy 101.

The corporations that shred habitat and contaminate your air and water are anything but democratic. Stand in line to get your 30 seconds in front of a microphone at a public hearing about the siting of a nuclear power plant, the effluent from a factory farm, or the removal of a mountaintop and you’ll get the picture quickly enough: the corporations that profit from such ecological destruction are distant, arrogant, secretive, and unresponsive. The 1% are willing to spend billions impeding democratic initiatives, which is why every so-called environmental issue is also about building a democratic culture.

First Kill the EPA, Then Social Security: Beyond all the rhetoric about freedom from the new stars of the Republican Party, the strategy is simple enough: obstruct and misinform, then blame the resulting dysfunction on “government.” It’s a great scam. Tell the voters that government doesn’t work and then, when elected, prove it. And first on the list of government outfits they want to sideline or kill is the Environmental Protection Agency, so they can do away with the already flimsy wall of regulation that stands between their toxins and your bloodstream.

Poll after poll shows that citizens understand the need for environmental rules and safeguards. Mercury is never put into the bloodstreams of nursing mothers by consensus, nor are watersheds fracked until they are flammable by popular demand. But the free market ideologues of the Republican Party are united in opposition to any rule or standard that impedes the “magic” of the marketplace and unchecked capital.

The same bottom-line quarterly-report fixation on profitability that accepts oil spills as inevitable also accepts unemployment as inevitable. Tearing apart wildlife habitat to make a profit and doing the same at a workplace are just considered the price of doing business. Clearcutting a forest and clearcutting a labor force are two sides of the same coin.

Beware of Growth: Getting the economy growing has been the refrain of the Obama administration and the justification for every bad deal, budget cut, and unbalanced compromise it’s made. The desperate effort to grow the economy to solve our economic woes is what keeps Timothy Geithner at the helm of the Treasury and is what stalls the regulation of greenhouse gasses. It’s why we are told we must sacrifice environmental quality for pipelines and why young men and women are sacrificed to protect access to oil, the lubricant for an acquisitive economic engine. The financial empire of the one percenters and the political order it has shaped are predicated on easy and relentless growth. How, we are asked, will there be enough for everyone if we don’t keep growing?

The fundamental contradiction of our time is this: we have built an all-encompassing economic engine that requires unending growth. A contraction of even a percent or two is a crisis, and yet we are embedded in ecosystems that are reaching or have reached their limits. This isn’t complicated: There’s only so much fertile soil or fresh water available, only so many fish in the ocean, only so much CO2 the planet can absorb and remain habitable.

Yes, you can get around this contradiction for a while by exploiting your neighbor’s habitat, using technological advances to extend your natural resources, and stealing from the future — that is, using up soil, minerals, and water your grandchildren (someday to be part of that same 99%) will need. But the limits to those familiar and, in the past, largely successful strategies are becoming more evident all the time.

At some point, we’ll discover that you can’t exist for long beyond the boundaries of the natural world, that (as with every other species) if you overload the carrying capacity of your habitat, you crash. Warming temperatures, chaotic weather patterns, extreme storms, monster wildfires, epic droughts, Biblical floods, an avalanche of species extinction… that collapse is upon us now. In the human realm, it translates into hunger and violence, mass migrations and civil strife, failed states and resource wars.

Like so much else these days, the crash, as it happens, will not be suffered in equal measure by all of us. The one percenters will be atop the hill, while the 99% will be in the flood lands below swimming for their lives, clinging to debris, or drowning. The Great Recession has previewed just how that will work.

An unsustainable economy is inherently unfair, and worse is to come. After all, the car is heading for the cliff’s edge, the grandkids are in the backseat, and all we’re arguing about is who can best put the pedal to the metal.

Occupy Earth: Give credit where it’s due: it’s been the genius of the protesters in Zuccotti Park to shift public discourse to whether the distribution of economic burdens and rewards is just and whether the economic system makes us whole or reduces and divides us. It’s hard to imagine how we’ll address our converging ecological crises without first addressing the way accumulating wealth and power has captured the political system. As long as Washington is dominated and intimidated by giant oil companies, Wall Street speculators, and corporations that can buy influence and even write the rules that make buying influence possible, there’s no meaningful way to deal with our economy’s addiction to fossil fuels and its dire consequences.

Nature’s 99% is an amazingly diverse community of species. They feed and share and recycle within a web of relationships so dynamic and complex that we have yet to fathom how it all fits together. What we have excelled at so far is breaking things down into their parts and then reassembling them; that, after all, is how a barrel of crude oil becomes rocket fuel or a lawn chair.

When it comes to the more chaotic, less linear features of life like climate, ecosystems, immune systems, or fetal development, we are only beginning to understand thresholds and feedback loops, the way the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. But we at least know that the parts matter deeply and that, before we even fully understand them, we’re losing them at an accelerating rate. Forests are dying, fisheries are going, extinction is on steroids.

Degrading the planet’s operating systems to bolster the bottom line is foolish and reckless. It hurts us all. No less important, it’s unfair. The 1% profit, while the rest of us cough and cope.

After Occupy Wall Street, isn’t it time for Occupy Earth?

Copyright 2011 Chip Ward

Chip Ward is a former grassroots organizer/activist who has led several successful campaigns to hold polluters accountable. He co-founded and led Families Against Incinerator Risk and HEAL Utah. He described his political adventures in Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West and Hope’s Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land. Today he works to protect the spectacular redrock wildlands of Utah. His essays can be found by clicking here. http://www.chipwardessays.blogspot.com/