big holes in the fence btwn tamed and wild

I was prompted to think of the difference between the world we make up with language, and the world that is the earth, by a recent finding that autism is caused by environmental factors.

Clinical Epigenetics, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, published the conclusions of a “macroepigenetic” research study of the links between our factory-farm diets, the industrial toxins we ingest, and the effect that both have upon our neural development and genetic structure. This is the crux:

Neurodevelopment can be adversely impacted when gene expression is altered by dietary transcription factors, such as zinc insufficiency or deficiency, or exposure to toxic substances found in our environment, such as mercury or organophosphate pesticides.

The scientists argue that the cause of autism is a combination of dietary and environmental factors:

• Consumption of High Fructose Corn Syrup [HFCS] is linked to the dietary loss of zinc, which interferes with the elimination of heavy metals from the body. Many heavy metals like mercury, arsenic and cadmium are potent toxins with adverse effects on brain development in the young.
• HFCS consumption can also impact levels of other beneficial minerals, including calcium. Loss of calcium further exacerbates the detrimental effects of exposure to lead on brain development in fetuses and children.
• Inadequate levels of calcium in the body can also impair its ability to expel organophosphates, a class of pesticides long recognized by the EPA and independent scientists as especially toxic to the young developing brain.

The link between what we do to the environment and who we are is clearly seen in these conclusions; we are creatures who poison the environment, and by doing that damage our own genetic structures, and the genetic structures of our future ancestors.

Of course, most people will go on thinking that autism is something parents passed on to their kid, and they will be partially correct. What they will not think is that our economy causes autism, because that is not an idea that their world-built-by-language will allow. For example—

Ayn Rand is the favorite social philosopher of Rep. Paul Ryan (who is the GOP’s top economic “thinker”) and former Wall Street wiz Monroe Trout (who in the 80′s invented computerized short trading that allows traders to make gigantic split second trades, which led to the chronic destabilization of the stock market and our present plutocracy; as described by economist Dean Baker:

Many of the country’s biggest earners run hedge funds that specialize in computer algorithms that allow them to front-run large trades. This means that if a major investor is about to buy a large amount of a company’s stock, these high-speed traders can buy shares ahead of them and then resell the shares, second later, for a profit. In effect, this is a form of insider trading. It is very profitable for those who can do it successfully, but it provides no benefit to society. It actually harms society… )

Ayn Rand wrote:

Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible.

Whether you or I agree with this statement is of no consequence (except to us), b/c it is the keystone of the our national mythology. This giant creature of the USA, and more broadly all nations who have industrial capitalistic economies, has—as we learned above—attained the ability to shape our very genes, to re-make us in the image of its god of money. Our realization that capitalism hasn’t created the highest standard of living ever known on earth (the evidence begins with your local brownfield) will not stop capitalists from redesigning the environment, and our genes, to suit their short-term goals of personal monetary gain.

What will stop industrial capitalism is already occurring: global warming, the collapse of ecosystems and thereby economies on a planetary level, the dwindling of fossil fuel resources, the increasing failure of our armies to take natural resources for corporate profit, the lack of investment in public infrastructure, etc etc.

Until it stops, we’ll be trapped in a cage of language like Rand’s that helps us pretend that we are not caged, and industrial capitalism is not an enormity.

Darwin said that evolution by natural selection does work for the benefit of the “supermen,” who by popular myth are regarded as the prize product of evolution. No. Evolution looks upon the 1% as monstrosities and aberrations, who are the 1% precisely because they do not embody the common virtue of the species. Evolution by natural selection works to secure the survival of species, not exalted individuals. As Joseph Stiglitz put it, in context of our present economic decline:

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

Our survival depends on wild thinking because our language, and the mythologies our language webs us into, has let us imagine that we are not part of the earth—what Aldo Leopold called the “biotic community.” This illusion that we are not physically, existentially and psychologically part of the long body of Gaia is needed by the industrial capitalists, because it allows them (and lots of others) to imagine that they are history’s greatest success stories, not its most complete losers.

I once met the president of a global soft drink corporation, at the exact time he learned that his child was autistic. He was obviously under great pressure at work, but under even greater pressure at home, where he and his wife were scrambling to find out how to heal their child. He told me about all the specialists they were going to, all working at the best research universities in the nation; but none could offer any real hope that his child would live a happy, healthy life.

Do you think, if he had a second chance, he would forsake his pursuit of fantastic wealth gained by the selling of High Fructose Corn Syrup drinks, and trade that perfect success story for his own child’s well being?

There’s more going on today than our media or our mythology or our language can, or wants to, handle.

I urge you to step beyond your carbon footprint and think outside. You are first and foremost part of the biotic community that begins right where you live and spreads out to connect with all that lives. You are only secondarily, or thirdly or fourthly, a citizen of a nation, and an actor in a doomed and dooming economy. Return in your mind and heart to the sources that give life, if only in your imagination, to prepare yourself and your loved ones to adapt to the circumstances that are revealing themselves. Learn the trees, and how to grow and forage for food. Learn where your water comes from, and become a steward of that lifesource. Observe the sky, and the birds, and weather patterns—learn to read them.

There are languages already being spoken that issue the truths of Gaia, and there are new languages being uttered, clumsily and somewhat incoherently, that are linking us to the new realities we are, at the end of industrial capitalism, starting to apprehend. Welcome to this struggle out of darkness and into light, out of death and into life. The person who stays in the cage of language and myth perpetuated by industrial capitalism will go the way it is going, in the same way ancient Egyptians went the way of pictographs. The person who figures a way out of that cage will do so with wild thinking, and will head in the better direction of the biocitizen, the citizen of the biotic community.

When we consider how long humans have been evolving, our language is a recent invention (approx. 600 years old). Writing appears only 5000 years ago, a blink in geological time; the most recent ice age ended 15,000 years ago.

We use language to think, and to communicate, our thoughts; it’s what we’re doing right now. What I want you to consider is the extent to which language thinks you—i.e., constructs your identity into pre-formatted categories as proof you either fit, or don’t fit, into those established norms that, added together, make a culture.

And as you do this, consider, too, how we also think without language, via instinct (hunger, fear, pain, pleasure, dreams, sexuality, etc.). The actual abyss between the “world” and the “earth” is mirrored by the abyss between the “you” constructed by our language, and the “you” constructed by the elements.

Let’s consider the “you” constructed by language. Many words we use did not exist ten years ago. Cell phone. Streaming. Scanners. ATMs. Collateral debt obligations. These new words are, more or less, necessary for our survival, here, at the tail end of the fossil-fuel era. We use them to think thoughts that are “marketable” so we can earn $$, and pay for stuff. Unless we actively resist or escape them, we are these words.

As technological industries invent new things, new words are invented to describe them. TV was a new word 60 years ago. Now it is an anachronism. We speak of cable or internet or DVDs, and use the word TV in the same way our forebearers spoke of speakies (movies w/sound).

SO: knowing that when we invent new words and drop old ones, we gain a new self, and lose an old self, here’s the epistemological problem I want you to think about:

“The Industrial Revolution gave birth to an economic growth model rooted in structures, behaviors, and activities that are patently unsustainable,” says Worldwatch Senior Researcher Michael Renner, co-director of State of the World 2012. “Mounting ecosystem stress and resource pressures are accompanied by increased economic volatility, growing inequality, and social vulnerability. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the economy no longer works for either people or the planet.”

We’re at the end of the “world” of fossil fuel; the problem is that our present language constructs this world and our “marketable” identity, both of which are vanishing.

Our present language serves to support our present world, and as long as we attempt to keep the world as it is, words survive (like “take out” & “drive-through” & “rush hour”) that will not survive without oil.

How many of these soon-to-be-jettisoned words make up the thoughts we think, and the “I” you claim as your own?

How does our present language keep us from evolving, from out of the fossil-fuel self and into the biocitizen?

By keeping old words active—by generating the thoughts we use to think about our present—our language blinds us, because words create worlds.

Old words keep old worlds in place. They also blind us to other alternative and much-needed better worlds.

As the car world is clunking to a halt and vanishing, its language—that whole structure of knowledge, ethics and culture—will serve to blind us to what is actually happening. We will be blind because, as a result of 200+ years of fossil-fueled language, our language does not describe the water and rocks, except as lifeless commodities also known as “natural resources.”

The ability to see, and to perceive with your eyes what is actually occurring—i.e, the world of water and stone and you and me not in and of this “world” but instead in and of this “earth”—requires us to evolve our language—to make up new words, and retire old ones. If we don’t, we might not survive—in precisely the way climate-change deniers will not survive.

New words are appearing that will survive the death of our automobiles—permaculture, watershed, consubstantial, biocitizen, transgenerational, superorganism. They are outside the mainstream media, and barely even the dictionaries.

Thoreau said “in Wildness is the preservation of the world.” The words we need are there, beyond the barbed wire of present language—

go! listen to the wind speak what you have not heard, and will never hear, on the nightly news; Shakespeare—the language inventor who authored the English Renaissance and by extension ourselves—understood how wildness is the preservation of the world.

Here, in As You Like It, Duke Senior explains how a new language, a new self and a new world appear the moment he leaves the “world” and enters the “earth”:

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile, and say
’This is no flattery. These are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.’
Sweet are the uses of adversity
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

and good in everything is what we want—so … here’s some endosymbiosis for you!!

Think wild long enough—and we’ll find the words we need to evolve.

NAFTA has, of course, proven to be a disaster. Ross Perot was correct when he said it would lead to the exporting of our manufacturing economy, and destroy our middle class. Given that NAFTA did not require Mexico to abide by our labor or environmental laws, that is exactly what happened. When China, with even less labor and environmental laws than Mexico, became regarded as a cheaper place for multinational corporations to make their products, Mexico was abandoned by them. (Now there’s a civil war going on there.)

Has Clinton ever taken responsibility for the failure of NAFTA, and for all the subsequent “free trade” agreements that were modeled on it? See for yourself.

When combined with NAFTA, Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagall created the 1% and the Crash of ’08, which—proved by the EU’s continuing failure to keep the Euro afloat—isn’t over.

Has Clinton ever taken responsibility for the failure of his repeal of Glass-Steagall to produce the results he promised it would? See for yourself.

The apologies of Bill Clinton, who is simply an inside member of global 1%, are really beside the point, aren’t they? The results of his poor leadership are the world we’re living in, and his apology won’t change anything. If he was attempting to act on his apologies, and lead a global reform movement to undo every destructive force he unleashed, that would be a different story. But he is not leading any movement to reverse “free trade” or “financial deregulation.”

Instead, he’s trying to position his personal political-financial industry—the Clinton Foundation—so that it profits enormously from yet another destructive idea, the trading of pollution credits on Wall St, that he is marketing under the “environmentalist” label.

Here: take a look at the London stockjobber corporation that the Clinton Foundation has hired to sell its “carbon credits”:

London Carbon Credit Company (http://www.londonccc.co.uk/) is pleased to announce that it will soon be able to offer its clients carbon credits from Bill Clinton’s Clinton Climate Initiative, part of the Clinton Foundation. This is just one of many fantastic opportunities for clients of London Carbon Credit Company to profit from the exciting world of green investments.

London Carbon Credit Company is currently in advanced negotiations with the world renowned Clinton Foundation to be sole UK provider of carbon credits produced from the Clinton Climate Initiative’s Carbon Capture and Forestry projects. Carbon is set to be the world’s biggest commodity market and, according to James Cameron of Climate Change Capital, could become the biggest market of them all.

Clinton buys forests in “3rd world” nations at bargain-basement prices, and the amount of carbon these forests can absorb is sold to polluters, who can continue polluting b/c they have “offset” their pollution. Being the deceiver he is, Clinton takes credit for saving forests, and gets tons of fake “green investment” $$$$$$$ for it;

you see, he’s not saving the forests b/c he thinks forests have intrinsic value (think of our National Parks); he saves forests b/c they are, under the carbon-trading system, a way of letting dirty multinational-corp industries remain dirty.

Trading pollution credits will not curtail the emission of global-warming gases, because only stopping those emissions will do that. By allowing dirty industries to persist, the next generation of cleaner, greener industries and ways of life do not get funded or developed. Clinton is actually holding back our evolution out of the fossil-fuel economy that is causing global warming in the first place. That’s why Shell loves the Clinton Foundation.

In other words, Clinton is not saving forests; he is using forest-preservation as a greenwash to mask what he is actually doing: keeping the fossil-fuel economy alive as long as possible.

He and the rest of the neo-liberals that surround him, argue that since the GOP will not allow the passing of legislation that will cut the emission of global-warming gases, “carbon trading” is the best approach. Welcome back to Clinton’s 3rd way, his machiavellian strategy of appeasing the 1% by energetically advertising a fake-progressive solution to global warming that will profit $$$$$ him immensely, at the same time he makes it politically impossible to pass laws that will end the dirty economy that gives us global warming. Carbon trading is a bad and hopeless substitute for fighting the good fight, and enacting laws that will stop polluters.

Once upon a time, nations set aside forests because they are intrinsically valuable. The Clinton Foundation sets them aside because they are valuable on Wall Street.

Think about it—will the putting of a price tag on biomes save the biomes?

Or is just the opposite true: will the evolving beyond the putting of a price tag on biomes—and learning the science that reveals how our bodies are consanguineous with them—save the biomes?

And us?

hey who you lookin' at? this is my house, too!

“Environment” is a bad concept because, projecting the “man dominates nature” assumptions of industrial capitalism, it presumes that (somehow) humans operate outside of ecologies; when, in fact, humans are alive only b/c they operate inside ecologies: the earth is our body.

“Nature” is a bad concept too because, loaded with eons of theological disputation about the source of our being, it carries an oppositional relationship with the God of the Biblical tradition. Though this antagonism begins as theology, it continues to manifest itself actually, in forms such as this and this.

“Bios” is a good concept to use to think about how humans fit into ecologies, because it doesn’t presume we (somehow) stand outside of these ecologies, and—since it means “life”—it carries no antagonistic relationship with science (biology) or with the God of the Biblical tradition, for example:

Psalm 84:2
My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord: my heart and my flesh crieth our for the living God.

Matthew 16:16
And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.

I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. Biblical theology maintains that life is the gift of God. The “eternal life” of Biblical theology cannot exist without the bios, this life we are living; for, Biblical theology says it is this life that survives death, and becomes “eternal.” That is why, a most basic tenet of Christian theology is that one’s behavior in this life dictates whether one’s eternal life will be in heaven or hell.

Perhaps I’ve offended some readers; my intention is not to denigrate religious traditions; my intention is that of an environmental philosopher who is trying to offer you concepts—words—that help to clarify, and not muddle, our awareness of how we behave, and how our behavior either enhances or damages our lives. I have found that the words we use to think about how we fit into the bios, our larger life, the earth, are insufficient.

they might not look like us, but lichens make soil, and we would never have been born or lived 'til this moment without them

I want you to think—and offer this to think about. A few years ago, I was flying to Cape Horn so I could help set up what is now the University of North Texas’s Sub-Antarctic Biocultural Conservation Program. I started at JFK, and flew to Atlanta, where I had to make a transfer for the international flight. It turns out that a little snow and ice had precipitated, and there was a short delay as the airstrips and planes were de-iced.

The short delay became a long delay—three days of sitting in Atlanta, due to ice that was nothing out of the ordinary for us New Englanders! Of course I tried to arrange for other flights and, when that failed, to get the free hotel room I believed I deserved. But, after waiting for hours to speak, and finally speaking, to a Delta manager, I was told that Delta was not obliged to do a single thing to help me because the 1/4″ of snow and ice was “an Act of God.”

I asked the manager what proof Delta had that God was responsible for the fact that Delta did not have the proper de-icing equipment. Or what theology had to do with the fact that I was missing a string of flights in Chile, b/c of Delta’s negligence.

I was told that “an Act of God” is a legal definition, and that it absolves Delta of having to get me to Chile, or pay for a hotel room. I was also told that I would be put at the end of the line, behind holders of tickets of more recent flights—the cherry on top!

So, unable to coordinate the resources to sue Delta for being unprepared for a 1/4″ of snow and ice, I waited for 3 days until the weather warmed up. I had plenty of time to consider how ridiculous Delta’s excuse was, and to wonder how often the “Act of God” excuse is used by pollution-spewing corporations to evade responsibility for willful negligence. I was also stunned to realize how deeply entrenched this reason-annihilating form of metaphysics is in our supposedly rational legal system. There’s something really cave-man going on here.

Ok: so that’s how an “Act of God” is a concept our culture uses to think about how we live in ecologies; given their relationship to their ecologies, Southerners looked upon a 1/4″ of snow and ice as a “supernatural” event.

Now, let’s compare the application of this concept to a similar application of the concept of “Mother Nature.” Last night, we experienced an apple bud destroying frost, and this is what an understandably distraught orchardist said:

At Mann Orchards in Methuen, the warm weather saw the apple buds grow into what Fitzgerald called “a tight cluster,’’ the stage just before the blossom shows. Temperatures in the high 20s will mean a relatively minimal loss, but a drop to 21 degrees could devastate his apples, and there’s nothing he can do but hope.

“Mother Nature’s got us,’’ he said. “She’s got us, and if she wants to take us, she will, and if she wants to spare us, she will.’’

Gov. Mitch Daniel of Indiana applied the same concept to convey his understanding of the tornadoes that swept through that state at the beginning of the month:

Daniels said that “Mother Nature has dealt harshly with Indiana” in a statement Friday. He says humans “are no match for Mother Nature at her worst” despite advances in disaster preparedness, warning systems and responder communications.

Now, my questions for you to think about:

Why didn’t these people use an “Act of God” to understand the apple bud killing frost and tornadoes?

Will they apply for insurance payments under the “Act of God” clause; and if they do will the insurance companies claim they’re not obliged to pay b/c the frost and tornadoes were an “Act of God”?

Can you see how difficult it is to understand and address the actual cause of the frost and tornadoes (anthropogenic global warming) when you apply “Act of God” or “Mother Nature” to the event?

By using insufficient concepts to understand how we fit into ecologies, we can not—as an organized culture—understand that the frost and tornadoes are a result, not of acts of God or Mother Nature, but of our fossil fuel economy.

I am submitting these comments to you concerning the EPA’s permitting of the Pioneer Valley Energy Center.

Because the air of the Pioneer Valley is very close to being over the allowable amount of ozone, I am displeased that the EPA is deferring to MA DEP’s permitting of the Energy Center. EPA says the Center will “be a major new source of air pollution.” EPA also says that “the Westfield area meets all of the EPA’s health-based standards except for ozone.” For this reason, I think that the EPA’s deference to MA DEP is a failure of leadership and ethics; EPA is by law the leading, not the following, agency. In this case, the EPA’s ozone standards have been compromised.

I would like a discussion in the statement of issuance of the permit that assesses the contribution of the Center’s emissions, alone and along with existing and proposed power plants and manufacturing entities, to the overall air pollution load of the Pioneer Valley in terms of long-term and cumulative impacts.

At the hearing in Westfield, the EPA stated that it is not in charge of designing or implementing a regional energy plan for the Pioneer Valley; this is the task allotted to citizens and politicians. As a resident of Westhampton who runs a business in Northampton, I would like the EPA to confirm this, so that this news is brought to the attention of citizens and elected officials, with the idea of getting funding for the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission to do a study of the region’s existing and proposed energy sources. The facts this report presents will provide a valuable foundation for municipal and regional discussions of and planning for our energy future—in the context described above: the air of the Pioneer Valley is very close to being over the allowable amount of ozone.

thank you,
Kurt Heidinger

speak up!

the places we know are always remembered along with the people we know.

think of your favorite place

a face’ll soon appear

to remind you of what happened, what you did there that made it the best

made it a place where something worth remembering occurred, something transformational

the first kiss

the leap of faith

the fire, its dancing and hunger

the peak attained

the accident

the flower that glowed with the sounds of children—

find that place, and you’re nourished: happiness is the full plate, in tragedy fasting feeds enough:

think of the mountains & you’ll see a great friend.

We’ll look at PM 2.5: particulate matter of 2.5 microns or less. This stuff is bad for us to incorporate (ie, breathe)! If you have asthma, bronchitis, or heart problems, it brings on attacks.

The EPA sets an annual limit of 15 ug/m3 (averaged over 3 yrs) and daily limit of 35 ug/m3 (calculated by taking the 98th% highest daily average). These measurements are not, for the average person, user-friendly; which is why we have professional regulators, right?

In 2010, Springfield (@ Liberty St.) had a annual average of 9.24 ug/m3, 2nd highest in the state. Its 98th% highest daily average was 25.8 ug/m3.

In 2009, Springfield had a annual average of 9.4 ug/m3, 2nd highest in the state. Its 98th% highest daily average was 26.8 ug/m3.

In 2008, Springfield had a annual average of 10.78 ug/m3. Its 98th% highest daily average was 28.4 ug/m3, highest in the state.

In these years, the EPA found no violation of the PM 2.5 levels in Springfield. However, as yesterday’s post showed, PM 2.5 levels often soar on any given day, and if you’re breathing deeply when they do, the averages mean nothing. One day in 2008, a level of 200 ug/m3 was measured!!

Consider, though, that the EPA is reviewing permits for the proposed Pioneer Valley Energy Center in Westfield, and biomass-burning electrical generators in Russell, Springfield and Greenfield all at once. I will consider this situation soon; but tomorrow we will look at how the EPA regulates ozone, and how ozoney Amherst is.

Look @ this chart, that graphs the amount of smog (also known as “PM 2.5″) Springfield enjoyed last year:

Visualize a horizontal line @ 15 “um/g 3 LC”; b/c that’s where the blue line should be. Here’s the EPA’s legal definition of how much “PM 2.5″ is allowed in our air:

You’ll notice the EPA averages the “PM 2.5″ over 3 years, so let’s look at how much “PM 2.5″ Springfield enjoyed in 2010 & 2009:

In tomorrow’s post, I will present and contemplate the #s found in these MA DEP reports.

Before I go, though, I read this last night in the latest “amcoutdoors,” the magazine of the Appalachian Mountain Club:

“AMC is moving forward with legal action regarding the EPA’s 2008 Federal Ozone Air Quality Standards. AMC and others are reactivating the original 2008 lawsuit against the EPA for its issuance of an unacceptable standard at 75 parts per billion (ppb), when health science supports a standard in the 60 to 70 ppb range. In addition, the suit will address the inaction on adopting a meaningful secondary ozone standard to protect plants and forest, as supported by EPA’s own science staff. The filing is part of a joint action with AMC, EarthJustice, the American Lung Association, and others.”

Read more about the AMC’s legal action—which interests me, b/c it 1) is by activist standards, a very conservative organization, and 2) is working with the Lung Association, whose “F” grade for our air quality prompted me to investigate it.

“WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration is banning new hard rock mining on more than a million acres near the Grand Canyon, an area known to be rich in high-grade uranium ore reserves.

The decision, announced Monday by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, hands a victory to environmental groups and some Democratic lawmakers who had worked for years to limit mining near the national park, one of the nation’s most popular tourist destinations.

“When families travel to see the Grand Canyon, they have a right to expect that the only glow they will see will come from the sun setting over the rim of this natural wonder, and not from the radioactive contamination that comes from uranium mining,” said Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, the senior Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee. [Yay Massachusetts!!] …

But congressional Republicans and industry groups opposed it, arguing that Salazar was eliminating hundreds of jobs and depriving the country of a critically important energy source. The area near the Grand Canyon contains as much as 40 percent of the nation’s known uranium resources, worth tens of billions of dollars.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called the ban a “devastating blow to job creation in northern Arizona.”….

During a speech at the National Geographic Society, Salazar said he was “at peace” with the decision, one of the most high-profile actions of his three-year tenure at Interior. Salazar twice had imposed temporary bans on mining claims.

“A withdrawal is the right approach for this priceless American landscape,” Salazar said. “People from all over the country and around the world come to visit the Grand Canyon. Numerous American Indian tribes regard this magnificent icon as a sacred place, and millions of people in the Colorado River Basin depend on the river for drinking water (and) irrigation.”Numerous American Indian tribes regard this magnificent icon as a sacred place, and millions of people in the Colorado River Basin depend on the river for drinking water (and) irrigation.”

Why?

Why doesn’t “our” culture understand, or value, land as sacred?

We do have a few a places that “our” culture understands as sacred: Gettysburg & the World Trade Center prime among them. But these places are considered sacred not because of the land itself, but b/c lots of people bled into them, and were turned by politicians into martyrs whose lives were not, politicians promise, sacrificed in vain.

Native Americans deserve to be honored for the way they understand, and value, land as sacred. But so do non-Native Americans.

I wish Salazar had added non-Native people to his group of animists. By not doing so, he ineluctably revived the colonial mythology of the noble savage, the Natty Bumppo story that “technology-less” people have a “primitive” religion that perceives God as nature. Most do. But inherent in this myth is the colonial prejudgement that “historical progress” or “social darwinism” has condemned the Native, and animism, to extinction—and if not that irrelevance. If Salazar thought Native religion was relevant, he’d have unhesitatingly embraced its values as his own, and expressed the perspective of a native culture he is part of, that is not—as his rhetoric expressed it—an “other” one.

What I’d like Salazar to know is that our non-Native culture has a proud and lively tradition of animism that is epitomized by Whitman in NYC, Thoreau at Walden, & Lincoln at Gettysburg. (Here, read more about this part of “our” culture.)

A native is a person who recognizes they are born from nature, and that recognition is the basis of their animism, their recognition that their own life is not individually-packaged; it is shared. They recognize the life they live is connected umbilically to the earth (thru water, food, shelter, etc.). Since one’s own life is sacred, this life we’re living the very presence and proof of “spirit” and God within us, one’s own sacredness is extends to the earth, which makes life possible, and is itself incomprehensibly alive.

Nativeness for “our” culture, comes/starts/appears when colonization ends; the colonist recognizes that their life is consubstantial with the land, and looks upon and treats the land as an extension, and source, of their own body. With that recognition comes the awareness that commodification is a delusion & pathology, a delusion because money is an illusion (you can’t drink pennies), a pathology b/c living an illusion leads to dashed hopes and illness (think of Detroit).

You see this kind of end-of-colonization nativeness, for example, in Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings of the high desert badlands.

Pedernal -- From the Ranch #1, Georgia O'Keeffe

You see it, too, at the farmer’s market (& not @ hole fudes). Every organic farmer knows their life is shared with the land, and many non-organic farmers, too.

You feel it on the beach during summer vacation, in those striking moments of shiver and goosebump as you loll in the sun. Looking out at the Atlantic, you know you can’t swim to England, the ocean’s too vast and will gobble you up as soon as you let it. The sun in your skincells feels like butter on hot popcorn, and your brain turns off for a moment as you exult in the most basic lizard feeling of warmth, still and quiet. Then, you think about skin cancer, alert to the fact that the warmth is radiation, subatomic particles hitting you like rain on a sponge: your skin soaking it in is the feeling of it damaging your the cells. You save your life by retreating to the shade or the sunscreen; and in retreat express your awareness that your dust-to-dust body is connected to the sun. You are more than you have ever been taught; that’s why it’s important to think outside.

If only Salazar knew our life is the earth, for without it, we’d have no body for our spirit to live as…and if he does know, if he had mentioned how non-Native Americans understand, and value, land—the earth—as sacred. Then he wouldn’t have uttered the sentence that, in a few words, revives the entire colonial myth of “our” culture: the tree-hugging Natives who value land as sacred versus the materialistic colonists who value that land as a commodity.

Again:

“Numerous American Indian tribes regard this magnificent icon as a sacred place, and millions of people in the Colorado River Basin depend on the river for drinking water (and) irrigation.”

“Salazar’s” culture does not value land as sacred. If the land was, to them, sacred would it not be for him a grave sin to commodify it, the same thing as commodifying God? To poison land, to destroy land, would be to poison and destroy God? Could it be that the act of not valuing of land as sacred—of viewing it as “natural resources”—might be essential to relieving its commodifiers of these sins?

Notwithstanding this, I applaud Salazar for prohibiting uranium mining in the Grand Canyon National Park; but we must realize the land is not saved. In 20 years another administration can permit uranium mining there; and it’s possible that it could be mined before then under another president.

Could it be that the only way to permanently save Grand Canyon National Park is to understand and value it as sacred? And by extension, is it possible that the only way to permanently save the biomes our bodies are connected to is to understand and value those biomes as sacred: sacred because our own sacred lives are consubstantial (water, food, shelter) with our biome?

Is it possible that the only way to save “America” is for its citizens to become native?

Nativeness for “our” culture, comes when colonization ends: if this is true, then in “our” colonial history, the Natives were always the “advanced” people, and the colonists always the “primitive.”

___
Ah that was fun, feeding the tail end of the myth of the noble savage back into the mouth of its professor.

I wish I could tell Salazar the Grand Canyon has been deemed sacred by former Department of Homeland Security Security Tom Ridge and former Governor of Pennsylvania Edward Rendell.

When they defined the value the Grand Canyon has for Americans, their theology was—for a flashbulb moment—”native”:

“America’s national parks preserve our most sacred natural spaces, such as Yosemite and the Grand Canyon, as well as important pieces of our national history such as the battlefields at Gettysburg.”

Before I present them, though, allow me to reminisce about how, in the summer of ’04, I was relaxing on a beach in Truro, reading a murder-mystery book about a homicide committed in the same town, when I beheld this scary passage:

Truro has the worst air pollution in Massachusetts. A scientist at the federal Environmental Protection Agency calls Truro “the tailpipe of the nation” because it takes a direct hit from the prevailing western winds that spew smog and ozone sources far inland. Sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and fine particulate matter created by industries and power plants in the Midwest, augmented by pollution from the heavily populated Northeast Corridor, from D.C. to New York, are funneled over the Outer Cape. Charles Kleecamp of Cape Clean Air said that the EPA issues warnings when ozone levels reach one hundred, but the monitoring station in Truro records ground-level ozone at two hundred. People can drop dead.

I remember little else from this beach-read, because I couldn’t believe my family was vacationing in one of the most polluted places in New England. I had no clue, until then, that places that look so clean can be so dirty.

I was also struck by the fact while Truro creates very little air pollution, it inherits the pollution from places far away, in many cases from states that have anti-environmental political leadership. It bothered me to think that people in, say, Kentucky were profiting handsomely off the pollution they pumped into the sky, and that my little girls splashing in the waves were getting 0% benefit from those Kentucky profits. All they were getting was poisoned.

Westhampton never seemed the same to me after read that, not that I liked it any less; no, what was different was me, the way I looked at blue skies with the knowledge they weren’t as blue as they once seemed. I vowed that, someday, I’d take the time to learn what we’re breathing—and when I received the note last week from Concerned Citizens of Westfield about the oil & natural burning electrical generation plant proposal being reviewed by the EPA, I realized I’d procrastinated for too long. My goal is to amass credible data so I can write a reasonable letter of concern about the proposal, and send it to the EPA by 1/20 so that it will be read and considered by that agency as it ponders what it will and won’t permit.

My initial concern arises from the conclusion of the Lung Association which gives our air an “F” grade; here is its most recent report for Hampshire and Hampden counties.

The ozone issue is a big one, b/c in 2004 Hampshire and Hampden counties were “designated nonattainment for EPA’s health-based standards for ground-level ozone pollution.” As far as my research tells me so far, there’s been no improvement in our “F” grade ozone situation. If this proves to be the case, I have a factual basis for my concerns.

The EPA is also concerned: “EPA-New England determined the new facility proposed by Pioneer would result in significant emission increases of particulate matter less than 10 microns and 2.5 microns in diameter, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, sulfuric acid mist, and greenhouse gases.”

Let’s look closer a the issue of fine particulate matter, or soot. Mass DEP says that “the primary standards for PM2.5 are 15 ug/m_ averaged over an entire year and 35 ug/m_ averaged over a 24-hour period.” Fine soot is bad for us: “Because of their miniscule size, these particles can penetrate deeply into the lungs and accumulate in the respiratory system.”

Look at this graph tracking fine soot levels @ the Springfield Public Library I generated here:

I see 2 things in regards to fine soot pollution: winter months seem to be the worse, and the yearly average looks like it’s close to the 15 ug/m threshold.

In this permitting process, the EPA and DEP will have to add the extra fine soot generated by the oil & natural gas burning plant to the sum load that’s generated everywhere else, and calculate if the 15 ug/m annual-average threshold is going to be broken. Natural gas burning yields less fine soot; petroleum more—so, to get a sound estimate, we’ll have to figure out how much of either is burned, and for how long.

Welcome to regulatory lalaland! How am I, or any average citizen, supposed to get those figures? And without those figures, how are we expected to write useful comments?

A commenter on the biocitizen facebook page wrote about this difficulty in trying to get good #s:

“My husband raised some important questions about the oil “backup” when natural gas demand is high (which is going to be more than the 2 month winter season they stipulate– 2 mos. winter season, where do they think we live?!?). Do the emissions projections include oil burning?”

I don’t know! I will continue to research—maybe the #s are available but I need to dig deeper. This, and allied questions, can be asked at the public hearing in Westfield on Thursday night, and then a letter be drafted & sent afterwards:

The purpose of a hearing is to offer a forum where questions can be raised and answered. I’ll have one post on this subject before the hearing, and hope to offer readers a list of hearing questions.