Category Archives: Politics

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Myth and Story, Politics, US History

Leave It Alone

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Samhain                                      Waning Thanksgiving Moon

Coming home tonight from the city I encountered a traffic slow down.  It allowed me to get close to an older model GM car with a bumper sticker in letters too small for me to read from a distance.  The bumper sticker read:  Leave the Constitution and the Bible Alone.

The world of such a person, that is a person who would both buy and display such a message, must have a lot of fear leaking into it.  Not surprising.  Job losses.  Uncertain economics at the national level.  A black President.  The furor stoked by the Tea Party folks.

Think of it though.  A whole world bounded by two written documents, documents written by men, interpreted by men and now some women, too, but documents of humans nonetheless.  A world with absolute faith in those two written documents, a faith so necessary, so critical that if others tamper with them…  Well.  They’d better not.  Leave’em Alone.  This feels like such a lonely and fettered existence, cramped, perhaps like a one room apartment or a small economy car.

Any conversation with such a person must not start with the constitution and the bible, it must start with the aspects of their life they believe protected by them.  Their sense of identity.  Security.  Safety.  Morality.  Only as people feel safe can they begin to question, until then, too much is at stake.

So, for God’s sake, leave them alone.

Cooking, Great Work, Health, permaculture, Politics, Weather +Climate

Working At It

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Samhain                                                Waning Thanksgiving Moon

All day today at the Sierra Club finishing up the first round of interviews for the new policy position.  A bit much for me in terms of people interaction, though very interesting in terms of the people I met.

Afterward, I had to eat dinner in the city because we ended at 4:3o, the gut of rush hour.  I knew I needed a good hour and a half, so I chose the Red Stag, a full sit-down meal with dessert.  The Red Stag serves local beef, lamb, vegetables and I imagine, fish, though I don’t know that for sure.  The food is excellent.  I had the grilled lamb on chopped leeks with carrots and kale.  Following through on my decision to eat more vegetables and fruit, I have also chosen to eat only half of what I would have normally of the entree.  That means I have a small box of lamb and leeks with one whole carrot of the six on the plate in the fridge.

This time I made it up the driveway with no problem thanks to the quarry derived granite grit I put on the slope yesterday.  The night has turned colder, heading down perhaps below 10 degrees by tonight.  9 degrees Acuweather describes as extreme cold; 4 degrees, predicted for tomorrow night is extremely cold.  These folks are not from here.

Commentary on the news, Great Work, Politics, US History

Teaching Pigs to Sing

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Samhain                                           Waning Thanksgiving Moon

“Trying to get people to reason in a way that is not natural for them is like trying to teach a pig to sing. You don’t accomplish anything and you annoy the pig.” – E. Jeffrey Conklin and William Weil

This seemed like a useful thought as we approach the opening of the 2011 legislative session.  We need to change our message so that those in charge of the legislator can hear it and realize that safeguarding our environmental heritage is a non-partisan responsibility to our kids, our grandkids and their grandkids.

More interviews today, more with talented people who want to work with the Sierra Club.

Little new snow today so I don’t anticipate the crush this morning that I experienced yesterday.  And more Big History on the drive.

Aging, Great Work, Health, Politics, Weather +Climate

Bad to the Bone

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Samhain                                            Full Thanksgiving Moon

Losing my wisdom impacted my jaw bone.  Bad.  It still hurts.  Very distracting and annoying.

Sierra Club tonight working on a hiring committee and then the Legcom, still trying to suss out what the elections meant.

In a strange way I think the challenge of a Republican legislature and a Democratic governor will make us think again about the whole political process and how we can make things happen.

Very nasty weather headed our way for the day tomorrow, a day when many people travel by car.  Glad I don’t have to go out and Kate only has to go to work and back.

Great Work, Politics

The Man

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Samhain                                         Full Thanksgiving Moon

Y-chromosome work this am.  First, the Celica in for oil change, look over.  Then, Tundra in for bulb replacements on the left headlight and the fog light.  Tried to do Latin but my concentrater failed me:  TV’s, noise, residue of Vicodin and lack of sleep.

Why is it that the TV has invaded all sorts of spaces?  Is it that no one reads anymore?  No one can sit quietly with their own thoughts?  Don’t know about you, but it irritates me.

Later on today working on a hiring committee for a policy person for the Sierra Club.  58 applicants and many very talented folks. After that the Legcom meets to take stock of the elections and our priorities in light of them.

Right now, I’m sleepy.

Aging, Health, Politics

Getting Over the Pain

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Samhain                                             Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Well.  A good night’s sleep, little swelling this morning and no discernible pain.  So far this recovery has had no bite other than fatigue and disorientation, some of which continues this morning.  Still taking the ibuprofen but I only used one of the vicodin.

The new political reality has us all shuffling from meeting to meeting, trying to figure out what comes next.  Tomorrow afternoon I’ll attend a meeting of Minnesota progressives (leftists) to discuss the impact on a wider progressive agenda.  It’s not good, at least not in the short run.  If we can use the next two years to define and energize those who would benefit, we could find ourselves stronger in 2012 than we were 2010.  That’s a big if and it will take considerable work to make it happen.

Aging, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Work, Humanities, Myth and Story, Politics

In The Right Spot After All

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Samhain                                      Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

“To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult.” – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Goethe captures the crux of a dis-ease I felt at the dam conference, a dis-ease that probably explains more of why I didn’t end up in academia than other explanations I often give myself.  In short there was more talking than acting and even the references to acting were talking and more it was talking about talking to partners and allies in their language.

Thinking of the caliber in this dam conference is, however, not easy; in fact, it is hard and many of the people who spoke were clever, insightful, giving a new spin to old ideas, my favorite example the delta subsidence problem. People who can take a long held belief and shake it inside out until it reveals it’s underpinnings have my utmost respect.  I hope sometimes I can reach that level in my own thinking; it’s the way change can get started, the reframing of the old in terms of something new.

Who would think, for instance, that sea level rise inundation of coastal delta areas might be alleviated by removing dams upstream?  So, first you have to have the new idea, the problem and its source carefully linked before action can target a plausible solution.

Still, I find myself impatient with just this kind of thinking, that is, root and branch thinking that stops without corollary action.  In the end I’m more of an action guy, much as I love the abstract, the analytical, the historical, the exegetical and the hermeneutical.  I want to change the way dams impact rivers and streams, whether it be by better design or by removal or by prevention.  I want to leverage the way dams have become visible issues into victories for the planet, victories that turn us toward a benign human presence on the face of the earth.

In the end I would have been unhappy as an academic, I see that now.  I would have strained against the confines of the classroom and publish or perish.  As it happens, I’ve been able to continue my learning on my own while engaging pretty consistently as a change agent.  Probably led the life I was meant to lead after all.  Good to know.

Aging, Friends, Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Politics, Weather +Climate

Losing a Friend, More on Dams

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Samhain                                   Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

“In the view of conservationists, there is something special about dams, something…metaphysically sinister….the absolute epicenter of Hell on earth, where stands a dam.”

John McPhee Encounters with the Archdruid (1971)

We lost half a cedar tree in our backyard to heavy snow and wind.  We nurtured this tree from a small cedar bush into a two trunk tree that shaded our small patch of grass just beyond the deck.  These early heavy snows can be hard on evergreens since they retain needles throughout the winter, making them vulnerable to the wet and often large snow falls of late fall.  We’ll have a chance to do something new out there come spring.  Kate wants a lilac tree.

Here’s another thing about dams.  They generate, in addition to hydroelectric power, strong feelings.  People love’em or hate’m.  After they are built, they often become so much a part of the local ecology that people defend them from destruction with much the same fervor that folks oppose their construction in the first place.

There are a multitude of problems created by dams:  river flow is often altered and in turn alters the ecology both upstream and downstream, sediment pools at the base of dams robbing downstream deltas of needed material, archaeological sites can be destroyed or rendered extremely difficult to discover, populations are often displaced and, often, are denied access to the power produced by the dams which relocated them.

Equity questions abound as in the case of waters diverted to Los Angeles and Las Vegas from the arid Western states of Colorado, Utah, Nevada and Arizona and as in the case of a dam on the Zambezi river, built by Mozambique but because it needs military protection from rebel forces, forced to sell its electricity to South Africa at 1/7th of the world price.  Dams concentrate capital and political power in often unhealthy ways, especially in third world countries and especially when used as elements of a geopolitical strategy by such bureaucracies as the US Bureau of Reclamation.

More as the week goes on.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

By A Dam Site

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Samhain                                     Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Once in a while it’s bracing to throw yourself in the deep end and I did that today.  I went to a conference titled  Experiments on Rivers:  the Consequences of Dams.  I realized how little consideration I’d given to dams by the end of the day.  I’ll just give you one example and it came in the first three minutes of the conference in a presentation from Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, Director of the National Center for Earth-Surface Dynamics, headquartered at the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, location of the conference.  After four slides and a technical explanation, Efi told us that of the 40 large river deltas in the world surveyed in a recent scientific study, 27 of them had much less sediment than the same deltas had before the construction of dams begun largely in the 1950’s.

What’s the big deal?  Well, it turns out that all deltas are subsiding, that is, sinking.  The thing that keeps the deltas and the land forms dependent on or within them from getting inundated is the build up of sediment; sediment now significantly blocked in 27 cases by upstream dams.  Think global sea level rise, then put the two together.  Efi’s crowd predicts that without solving the sediment deposit drought New Orleans (why does everything focus on the Big Easy?) will be gone by 2100.  Whoa.

I’ll drop other information in throughout the week so I don’t overload ancientrails with dam related topics.

The St. Anthony Falls Laboratory*, created in 1938, has run continuously since then, churning out (ha, ha) hydraulic studies for dams, transportation studies and much, much more.  The tour of the wind tunnel (also a from of hydraulics), delta modeling and stream and river bed modeling was worth the time to attend the conference.  This is real science done with made up tools, including a pipe cleaner forest and a wooden and plexiglass model of downtown Minneapolis.

*SAFL is the world’s only fluid-mechanics laboratory that uses a natural waterfall as its prime water source. For over 70 years researchers from around the world have been visiting our unique location on an island in the Mississippi River to conduct research for developing innovative and sustainable engineering solutions to major environmental, water resources, and energy-related problems. We would like to extend our warmest invitation to visit our facilities and talk with our research staff and students.

Asia, Great Work, Politics

Dams

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Samhain                                               Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Headed out early today to a UofM Institute for Advanced Studies conference on dams.  The focus is on dams as an area of study, but the sub rosa agenda covers the problems dams pose, not only ecologically I learned yesterday at the keynote lecture, but also politically and “extra-scientifically.”  Extra-scientific refers to the ways good science gets bent by political objectives into motivation for or rationale for something motivated by other factors, often geopolitical in nature.

Gotta write here about my tour yesterday for the Rochester Friends.  I kept losing folks as the tour went on and I didn’t feel I connected with them.  Left me in a down place, but determined to do a better job on my next Thaw tour.

A winter storm watch posted for Andover, 6″ of wet snow.  About time.