Category Archives: Politics

Aging, Commentary on the news, Family, Great Work, Politics, Science, Sierra Club

The Grandchildren Project

May 8, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Emergence Moon

A shift in public opinion concerning climate change seems to be accelerating. We may be near a tipping point where acceptance of climate change science corresponds to acceptance of evolution. Yes, there will always be outliers, just like the Texas and Kansas school boards exhibit every once in a while on evolution, but the mass of us will finally hear the very clear science behind many changes impacting us already.

Proof? Jon Huntsman, former governor of Utah and a possible GOP candidate for President in 2016, wrote this remarkable sentence in an op-ed piece for the NYT: “If Republicans can get to a place where science drives our thinking and actions, then we will be able to make progress.” Paul Douglas, local and national meteorologist and a conservative, too, has long observed the conundrum behind conservatives who refuse to conserve.

It may be that the long game for climate politics is about to bear fruit. For those patiently (and not so patiently) working on climate change related issues the era of solution based debates rather than denial and obfuscation might be coming near. This will be an exciting but also frustrating time as those only recently convinced try to digest the difficult realities ahead of us. Those of us who’ve wanted to see forward motion will be in danger of refusing to listen to solutions that don’t fit our already existing paradigms.

It will be important to recall that our solutions have largely been developed among those of us who already agree with each other. Gaining political consensus for policy will require including those who don’t share many of our assumptions. Here’s a clear one. Nuclear energy may well be an important component of a transition to a non-carbon based energy regime. We need critical mass for the generation of electricity while renewable sources begin to catch up and storage technologies improve. We simply may not have time to ignore capable non-emitting nuclear power plants.

I’m excited that this push for solutions may happen in my lifetime and that those of us with grandchildren might help create the change. Call it the grandchildren project.

Health, Politics, US History

Flare For the Obvious

May 6, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Emergence Moon

File under duh:

BOSTON — The death rate in Massachusetts dropped significantly after it adopted mandatory health care coverage in 2006, a study released Monday found, offering evidence that the country’s first experiment with universal coverage — and the model for crucial parts of President Obama’s health care law — has saved lives, health economists say.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics, Science, Sierra Club

Not Hope, Grief and Agency

April 22, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

Wanted to say a bit about Paul Kingsnorth, the environmental activist who has given up on activism. If you want to read the NYT article about him, follow the link.

You might be tempted to dismiss his analysis, or you might not want to hear what he’s saying and deny it. But from what I learned in the climate change course recently completed he’s right in an important sense.

The goal identified at Copenhagen is to limit warming to 2 degrees centigrade or between 3.6 and 4 degrees Fahrenheit.* This amount of warming is baked in already. That is, we’ve already loaded enough CO2 into the atmosphere to ensure it. So, the Copenhagen goal will be exceeded. The question at issue now is by how much. See below for a definition of RCP.**

The year to pay attention to is 2050. That’s the year that the pathways begin to diverge, representing the amount of emissions in that year. RCP2.6 assumes a successful reduction in emissions worldwide of 80% by 2050 and 100% by 2100. This can be done. There are several different pathways that get us there. The problem is the politics of carbon emission control.

Most of the lecturers in the climate change course thought this was not going to happen. That puts us into the range of RCP4.5 to RCP8.5. 4.5C=8F and 8.5C=15.3F. I don’t agree with Kingsnorth’s word ecocide because the plant and animal world will adjust to all of these temperature ranges. Yes, many species will not be able to adapt, but many will.

Still, and I think this is where Kingsnorth is right, the world as we know it is beyond saving. We will have to adapt and adjust to a dramatically changed reality, a new climate reality that may cause the death of billions of people from starvation, dehydration or heat exhaustion.

I also believe he’s right in saying that we need to accept dramatic change as inevitable and that we need to grieve the loss of our familiar world. Only in grieving will we touch the new reality.

Here’s where I think he’s wrong. There is still time and there are workable strategies that can limit the magnitude of the changes we face. With no action, the up ramp of CO2 that continues to pump into the atmosphere will ensure the RCP8.5 scenario. Somehow we must combine working through our grief over a lost world that may seem like paradise in another 100 years with our determination to moderate the degree of change as much as possible.

If we stick to the 2C goal of Copenhagen, the world will see failure and failure cuts the nerve of political agency. We need to accept that goal as simply wrong and work now to do what’s possible. The future demands that we do everything we can, only much later will we know how well we did.

*”Fahrenheit (symbol°F) is a temperature scale based on one proposed in 1724 by the physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686–1736)”… wiki. Just occurred to me that I didn’t know the origin of the word.

** Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) are four greenhouse gasconcentration (not emissions) trajectories adopted by the IPCC for its fifth Assessment Report (AR5).^[1]

The pathways are used for climate modeling and research. They describe four possible climate futures, all of which are considered possible depending on how much greenhouse gases are emitted in the years to come. The four RCPs, RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6, and RCP8.5, are named after a possible range of radiative forcing values in the year 2100 relative to pre-industrial values (+2.6, +4.5, +6.0, and +8.5 W/m², respectively).^[2]

Politics, Sierra Club, US History

The Young Guns

April 18, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

The America Votes meeting was very interesting with lots of good, solid data. With the exception of two gray-haired guys in their late 50’s/early 60’s, I had a good 30 years + on everyone in the room. It’s good to see the young guns at the table. About evenly split between men and women they dressed somewhere between Minnesota casual and hipster. I fit right in.

It felt good to be there, to hear, consider, analyze, to wonder about the upcoming rounds of primaries and conventions, the long summer of positioning and the hard campaigning to come in the fall.

Politics, Sierra Club

Chum In The Water

April 18, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

Today I return, for a couple of hours, to the world of politics and organizing. America Votes is a national coalition aimed at electing a progressive majority throughout the country. This is the Minnesota table, as they call these meetings, and I attend on behalf of the Sierra Club.

[George Caleb Bingham’s The County Election (1852)]

Though the specific nature of the meetings are confidential, they involve the usual material for these sort of groups: polling data, shared strategy, updated relevant news. This once a month meeting is a vestigial connection with my past, a chance to stay in the fray, at least nominally.

When I retreat, I advance was something I learned at the Intensive Journal Workshop and its corollary, of course, is when I advance, I retreat. There is that danger here, I know. The chum in the water draws old sharks just like it does young ones. Self-awareness and the growing season should moderate the risk.

Politics, US History

X

April 15, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

Seeing the play the Mountaintop turned me toward a book I bought a while back, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.” Marable was a Columbia University professor of public affairs and African-American studies until his death in 2011 just days before the book’s publication. He got interested in Malcolm because the book that made him well-known, the Autobiography of Malcolm X, a joint work with Alex Haley, the “Roots” author, seemed to have a lot of lacunae.

It turns out Haley was a liberal Republican and had an agenda, present Malcolm as a critic of racial affairs that his peers could listen to. Malcolm apparently agreed to the limited scope of the book’s treatment because the parts that were left out often made him look bad, or different from his own mythology. Example. His criminal past wasn’t nearly as thuggish as he represented, but merely amateurish. He and Haley also left out much of Malcolm’s community organizing efforts.

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
By Manning Marable
Hardcover, 608 pages
Viking Adult

So Marable spent years going over Malcolm’s life again, re-interviewing and interviewing people in his life, reading his correspondence, much of it lovingly copied and photocopied by the FBI for inclusion in Malcolm’s voluminous file. His writing is clear, his presentation straightforward if a little bloodless. He has so much data that it threatens to and often does overwhelm the flesh and blood man whose story is its focus.

I like it a lot. Malcolm always seemed to have a better analysis of racism and class issues than MLK did. In this book his deep roots in the Marcus Garvey movement, his mother and father were both organizers for Garvey, and his incredible self-education while in prison for a string of burglaries, show a man hungry to understand himself and the world around him. He organized working class blacks, knew the life of the criminal underclass as a participant and appreciated the iron power of white dominance.

Malcolm’s eventual conversion to orthodox Islam comes much further into the book than I am now, but his story has already shown me the cyclical patterns of race relations in this country and that King’s achievements, while notable, were the children of earlier and often more radical movements.

Well worth the time.

Politics, US History

Beware The Ides of April

April 15, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

15 degrees this morning. Woolly Charlie Haislet who lives on Sims Lake near Gordon, Wisconsin reports 1 degree and 8-12 inches of snow on the way. They have 2 feet of ice on the lake.

Beware the ides of April. Libertarians and certain anti-tax right-wingers (we know who you are tea partiers) ventilate today. Can you hear the sighs and moans of U.S. citizens forced to chip in for such things as roads, environmental protection, defense, national criminal justice systems, national science and health programs, healthcare programs, national weather services, Congress (well, o.k., Congress is a tough sell right now, but we can still vote the bums out), regulatory authorities?

Just how a complex citizenry, divided up among 50 states, and working in the world’s largest economy would function without national level efforts puzzles me. But the fevered imagination of those who took the Reagan era’s “starve the beast” rhetoric seriously sees totally free agents doing anything they want personally and economically and being better off for it. At least the anarchists have the underlying idea of co-operation as a value for a functioning community. The libertarian and tea-party folk apparently believe in a Hobbesian “all against all” and yearn for it. Picture me scratching my head.

Freedom, by itself, is pointless. Yes, I said that. Freedom alone only allows room to act. It does not, in itself, guide action unless, of course, it is freedom itself that is denied. Given the paradox that absolute, unfettered freedom would produce its enemies: totalitarianism, constant criminality, or a forever war; then, we have to consider the limited freedom that makes modern civilization possible. Even within the limits on freedom represented by taxes, speed limits, criminal law and regulation, the opportunity to develop yourself and your family as rapidly and as thoroughly as you wish, exists.

Politics, Third Phase, US History

Mountaintop

April 12, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

Back from the Guthrie and the Penumbra presentation of Mountaintop, a play focused on Martin Luther King’s last night alive in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. As it neared the end, it picked up emotional punch using a clever device that I won’t reveal. The pathos of a man about to die because he stood up for love, for justice, can sound wooden on the page, but to see a real man struggling with acceptance, to hear a real woman empathize with him, that’s different. That’s the power of theatre.

There’s a good metaphor used in it, one you may have heard before, but which was new to me. The civil rights movement, the movement for the poor is not a sprint, but a relay race, with one generation handing on the baton to the next.

When we discussed this play briefly at Christos on Monday, I made the observation that when our generation dies out, the generation who experienced King, Malcom and that whole era will die out, too. That means these characters will pass into history, become captive to interpretation and canonization. A certain amount of that has happened already.

That will be a shame because those years, the 60’s and early 70’s, were so alive and vital. The air crackled with change, with big questions, with thoughts of matters far beyond the vocational worth of a college diploma. And we lived it. It is our direct heritage and I like very much the notion of the baton.

I’m in that part of the race now where the baton is stretched out ahead of me, ready to lay in the hands of another, but my race is not yet run. I’m accelerating, to keep the team ahead.

Commentary on the news, Memories, Minnesota, Politics, Third Phase

20-20-20

April 5, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

Continuing the city theme from the post below. I live in the exurbs now, just two or three miles or so north of us corn fields begin and our development is a small cul de sac of homes that jut out into a working truck garden. The MUSA line, the intended sprawl container of the Met Council, runs a mile south of us. Beyond it a city cannot extend sewer connections. That’s why we have a septic system and our own well.

But before I lived in the city. First Minneapolis, then St. Paul. In fact, over dinner with Kate, I realized I spent roughly 20 years in a small town, 20 years in the city and now have spent 20 years in the exurbs. Those 20 years in the city were where I found my milieux. The mix it up, bare knuckle politics of neighborhood economic development, labor organizing and straight political work appealed to my middle adult need for agency.

The varieties of problems, the mix of people, the different communities, the history rushing into the present all exhilarated me. In the city years I wanted, needed to make change, get things done, improve life. And through fortunate relationships with many active folks I had a chance to participate in some interesting and worthwhile projects.

In the exurban years I’ve retreated, pulled back into my own work, writing, learning, gardening, sharing life with Kate and the dogs. It was time to do that, to pull back. That’s even more clear these days.

Here’s an example. A number of young activists, the age of my city years, especially environmentally focused activists lobby for urban density. They want to tear down parts of old neighborhoods and build apartment buildings. These are the same folks who advocate for bicyclists, mass transit and against urban sprawl. They look at the city and say the way to stop sprawl is to keep people in the center city. How do you do that? Build up.

In my years in the city we stopped apartment buildings, advocated neighborhood level decision making and tried to make communities stronger through increasing economic development. These are different times and I understand the arguments of those who want denser urban areas. Not only do I understand them, but I agree with them. But fulfilling those policies often means riding over the protests of folks in the neighborhood.

This is one of those instances where momentum and the needs of the time have shifted thinking. I can approve from afar, but I wouldn’t be able to wade into the politics. I’d be too conflicted. In that situation it’s best I’m removed from the scene. Out here tending our garden.

Politics, Travel

Tucson. Hot.

March 21, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Hare Moon

Tucson. 86 and sunny with a chance of elderly.

Yes, I felt like the northern cliche while toddling along on Highway 10. The folks back home tell me about wintry mix and plowable snow; I’ve got sun glasses and shorts. What would you think about a gray haired guy driving a car with Minnesota plates down here?

In the businesses I’ve been in there are a lot of frail elderly, folks bent and slow, using carts or walkers. Not surprising, but sobering anyhow. I wondered at one point if there’s an assumption here that if an older person is involved in an accident, that it’s their fault. Don’t know, but it seems possible.

The American flag is prominent. This is a redder state than the El Dorado flavored plains state red. Both here and in Texas I get the sense these are people who want to be left alone, able to try whatever they want to make money. Able to engage in whatever recreational pursuits they want. With no body looking over their shoulder.

My inclination? Let’s let’em be.