Earth thoughts 222 to 228

222-- It is easy to make fun of eco-uptightness. You know, the person whose face, when she hears you don't compost, must hide the frisson of shock. Nobody's going to die if you throw out that banana peel. But underneath the peel-recycling neurotic is the impotence of the single actor inside the larger disorder. She can't possibly do enough, because the system is unsustainable. Overly-conscious, she tries to make us acquire something basic, like a bird learning to fly by crashing into windows. We don't yet know what it is to be sustainable.

223 - A water harvester 1. A machine that harvests lake weeds, rather than killing them with chemicals. It rotates slowly across the water near the shore - and later loads its harvest onto a truck that takes the weeds to nearby farms to use as they may. 2. A person sitting in a boat, catching evening wind and sun.

224 (revised later in the day) - The governmental news is that the Gulf Oil spill is dissipating, being absorbed, and being remediated to a great extent. In turn, the long range effects on Gulf ecosystems and the social ecology of humans -so the suggestion goes- appear to be bearable, much less severe than expected, or maybe not severe at all. If this were true, it would be good news! Yet in the New York Times's Dot Earth Blog, many esteemed ocean scientists expressed two things: 1. That we are largely ignorant of what the long-range effects might be, especially since chemical dispersal agents are being used to get the oil off the water's surface, where they filter down into more invisible parts of the ecosystem. 2. That the long term effects of past massive spills -e.g. the Exxon Valdez spill- have themselves been extensive, much greater than expected, and to both non-human ecology and human economy. Moreover, as Breena Holland reminded me, the U.S. government has a bad record of environmental reporting: for instance, they said D.D.T. was all right. How would they know now about the spill, when so little time has passed, no study of dispersal agents has ever been thoroughly done for the public eye, and no external experts have had a chance to vet their evidence? Arthur Evenchik called this a recipe for bad reporting, citing the New York Times as irresponsible in taking the government at its word without using independent sources with scientific authority. I worried over the past months about the spill's vast effects (cf. 177, 167, 156), based on reports from credible sources about the threat of the spill to the future of Gulf life both human and non-human. Was I over-reacting? Where do we turn to sort out this mess, when the government appears eager to calm people's fears and the needed sums of money have not been set up to create the systematic scientific study over years and decades that these questions need and merit?

225 -- "[A]ll that's certain is that "the form of the oil has shifted. Dispersed oil is still oil. It's just in a different form."" (Michael J. Blum, Tulane University, quoted in David Fahrenthold, "Scientists Question Government Team's Report of Shrinking Oil Spill", Washington Post, August 5th, 2010) This is a good comment. What B.P. has done is to push the oil away from the shore -good!- and from the public eye -intended?- where even science has no clue what will happen. B.P. did right in saving the shore as much as possible using what they had, but they -and my government- do no good if what they suggest is that the problem is thereby solved for the Gulf's ecosystems. No one knows that -the effects are invisible and largely unknown even to science. We are up against a swirling mystery like deep sea waters. So the environment often is -and the right stance is humility and caution, exactly what B.P. did not have.

Earth thought 226 of 365 - New York is an ecological city by default, in comparison to almost all U.S. towns. Its density makes it the winner. Sharing infrastructure, concentrating transportation, and covering less land, it does better than lawn on lawn, than development on development of sprawling suburban America. All the home recycling goes to naught compared to the first decision -the choice of density.

Earth thought 227 of 365 : Graciousness is a quality expressed by some acts, and it is a virtue of character. The gracious person welcomes others in, and gives way to others so that cooperative living may ensue. There are many motives behind graciousness -e.g., humility, gratitude, practicality, obligation, .... What matters is the quality. And what would city living be if we as a people were for the most part gracious to Earth others, if, when we ate, we made room for them cooperatively? Across the street, a migration corridor, and on the roof, a garden where birds nest for the night, cooing from time to time half asleep while you eat your burger (one where the cow lived a good life and died a painless death)?

Earth thought 228 of 365 : There are many different things to be said for relationships and their depth. I am talking of relationships between people. Part of what goes into the sense that we are self-centered with respect to the environment is a result, I think, of how much meaning we plunge into when we plunge into the inter-human. There is here neither self-absorption nor selfishness, but an effect of refocused attention.