Party Like It's 1899

So you Republicans had your little ideological keg party this weekend - where you former frat boys and your ilk got drunk on your looney "philosophy" and congratulated each other for a single victory of any import, as if that were some kind of crushing blow to an administration scarcely more than a year old that came in on the heels of an economic apocalypse. You did your song and dance about this allegedly new and allegedly populist movement, that is really just a loose confederation of the same old fringe crazies - anti-tax anarchists (one of whom crashed his plane into a federal office building to demonstrate the clear-headed reasonable nature of his compatriots), anti-reality Christian evangelists (who believe they'll be rich like the guys who run the GOP if they can just insert "Jesus" into every phrase of the Constitution), and of course the rich guys who run the GOP (who think successful marketing is somehow equivalent to successful policies but should know you can't really make a Gucci bag out of polyeurethane) - only even louder and more shrill.
Hello? We had eight years of your laughable-if-it-wasn't-so-catastrophic leadership. Eight years of you running this place, running us right into the ground. And now you're going to make this about Obama? You think progressivism is the cancer? You think high quality health care for all, equal opportunity, clean air and clean water, the right to control your body and express your mind with impunity, and an end to an expensive and illegitimate war that involved torturing people, is a cancer? Who are you people?
I say you are the terrorists. You have been trying to blow up our civil institutions and our culture for years now because you don't like people of color, animals or trees, women in the workplace, and sex. And I will tell you this - we, the real Americans - will not be cowed by you any longer.  Enjoy your tea party and take lots of pictures, because in a few years all that's going to be left of you is a dried pool of Earl Grey and some  crumbs from an orange cranberry scone (or coke and cheetos as the case may be), you wankers.

Global Population Speakout

There are 6.8 BILLION humans and counting.  We are projected to hit 9.2 billion by 2050.  There are 300 million of us in the United States and if everyone else on the planet lived the way the average American does, we would need several more planets to accommodate our consumption.  Even if we restrict our consumption, reduced pollution, and improved the efficiency of production, we would still need to feed and house 450 million people by mid-century. Population pressure in critical third world ecosystems has led to a high rate of deforestation and species extinction, without relieving the dire poverty in which these large populations live.  Without some miracle technological cure that will turn human consumption and pollution into something useful to the planet, we need to reduce our numbers to sustain our species.  How do we do this?  According the Center for Biological Diversity:

Through the empowerment of women, education of all people, universal access to birth control, and a societal commitment to ensuring that all species are given a chance to live and thrive, we can reduce our own population to an ecologically sustainable level. This will decrease human poverty and crowding, increase our standard of living, and sustain the lives of plants, animals, and ecosystems everywhere.

The human population crisis may not be a favorite topic for environmentalists, but it's an essential one, since our growth is fueling the planet's, and therefore our, undoing.  So let's talk about how we can serve the fundamental human drive of creating the next generation without undermining its very survival.

Coal Ash Blues

I live in Manhattan so I don't have the same uncomfortably intimate relationship with coal ash that say Roane County or Widows Creeks residents do.  But what I know about the environment is that we all share in it, both its bounty and its ruination.  We are connected - and not in an ephemeral or mythical Avatarian way but in an actual physics-chemisty-biology way - mostly by air and climate, but also by soil, water and contiguous ecosystems.  We need to regulate coal ash and New York representatives share no less responsibility in this fight than do those representatives near coal ash disasters.  We must find a path to living sustainably in harmony with nature or we are not going to survive.  One world, one way.

Send a message to your representative about coal ash regulation today.

It's a Little Fishy

Just say no to fish oil supplements.  According to A Fish Oil Story in the New York Times today, fish oil is made from menhaden which are crucial to Atlantic coastal ecosystems - they keep water clean by filtering out tons of algae and are the base of the food chain for hundreds of other species.  Support the Atlantic coast - get your Omega-3's from food sources or flax seed oil!

Windy City

Humans are going to keep demanding more and more energy - that is a fact of modern life that is not going to change.  How we get that energy is changing and right now one of our best options for clean, renewable energy is wind.  Especially in a place like the Cape, which experiences powerful winter storms and gusts for much of the year, wind turbines like those from the proposed Cape Wind project can supply a large amount of energy with no emissions and minimal environmental impact.

I was initially concerned about the impact on wildlife that the turbines and cabling of this project would have.  After reviewing the commentary by Save Our Sound and some local groups who are all supported by wealthy beach property owners (NIMBY types), I feel that the benefits to wildlife overall outweigh the harm that will come to some, even with mitigation.  The opponents to the wind farm appear to be self-interested (and in some cases, hypocritical) while the proponents of Cape Wind, like the UCS, Greenpeace, and Sierra Club, have serious environmental advocacy credentials and care deeply for wildlife and ecosystem preservation.

Our needs for energy are not diminishing.  We have to seize on solutions that are clean and renewable.  Right now and for the foreseeable future, the answer is blowin' in the wind (and the sun and the sea).