No More Bananas In Our Republic?

At some time or another in this country, nearly everyone, it seems, has heard, or said, something funny about a banana.  At the same time, we are reliably informed, Americans eat a lot of bananas: 7.6 billion pounds in 2008. That fact, plus our own actions past and present, seem to make us the banana republic, not others.

Mike Peed’s article in The New Yorker’s January 10, 2011 issue  explains that there’s a blight on the horizon: Tropical Root Four, a blight that is taking down whole banana plantations all over the world.  (Alas, this article is viewable in its entirety only to subscribers, and if you’re not one, this particular issue of the magazine is worth going out and getting, at the newsstand or using your iPad app.)  That means, if a solution is not found — at least one attempt is underway — there may be no more bananas on the table or in the supermarkets in the relatively near future.

The situation is made worse in that only one variety of banana, the familiar Cavendish, the variety of banana you see sitting out at your nearby supermarket, is grown almost exclusively the world around.  The danger attending monocultural cultivation — allowing a single variety of any plant to be grown nearly everywhere —  is precisely the danger facing bananas now: a disease can run rampant over the entire population of a single variety and, possibly, wipe it out before anything can be done to stop it. Other varieties may be disease-resistant, but those (if they can be discovered) are not widely present in the currently-cultivated population. And they may not be as appetizing or as durable for shipping as the Cavendish. The blight has already devastated East Asian banana plantations, and is now in Australia — which is where Peed’s article picks up the story.

I again urge both my readers to make the extra effort to find and buy the print edition at a bookstore, or puchase it using the New Yorker’s iPad app. The iPad price is the same as the newsstand price for the issue: $5.99.

A Good Companion’s Friendship…

… is worth a thousand words; any thousand words you care to name; more than any words at all, sometimes.  As proof, I suggest you look at The Orangutan and the Hound.

Go ahead, bookmark it on your browser; watch it again as often as you like.  I feel good every time I see it.

A Brief History of Worry in Post-War America

I was born during the darkest year of World War II, 1943 — but fortunately, at that time, I was too young to worry about it.  My parents were plenty worried in my place, but doing their best for the war effort.

When I was a kid, I worried that the Russians would fly over (I lived just outside NYC) and bomb us — or later, just send their missiles to do the job.  I didn’t know whether to be more worried that I would die right away (living close to what even then was called ground zero) or that I would be condemned to a lingering death from radiation poisoning.

After Kennedy was elected, the cultural and political world changed.  Yes, the Cuban missile crisis was very scary, but at last all the gray men talking in monotones and with frozen faces and no humor who had seemed to populate the government and who had talked constantly about the missile gap and the Red Menace weren’t there any more, at least not up front and not nearly so much.  At least for a little while.  

Then, during the early days of ramping up the Vietnam war, I had faith that the government would not do anything that wasn’t right.  Would they?  Eventually, I found out more and more about what was going on there, less from mainstream media than from activist groups and alternative publications. As we got deeper in, I worried about  the draft that threatened my young husband and myself.  He had first a college deferment, then we went into the Peace Corps, and, six months after our tour of service was over, his next birthday took him out of the most active pool of potential draftees. 

By this time, I had noticed a pattern: I was waiting for the world (at least as I knew it) to end, one way or another. As soon as one world-ending threat went past, there was sure to be another.  I was right to have been worried: the work of the worrier never ceases.  And sure enough: first the book The Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, then the first Earth Day, and a new term, ecology. The Earth itself was under threat!  Lots of worries.  

But look: we did get a law passed against the use of DDT. So maybe, our government wouldn’t permit people to do such destructive things; polluters would be made to stop polluting and to clean up the mess they had made — wouldn’t they?  

Then people began warning us that the supply of petroleum, while still large at that time, was finite, and a huge source of pollution — check out the ‘smog’ in LA. They said if we kept on increasing its use instead of looking for alternatives, we would run out, and sooner than we thought.  Some good worry there.  

Somehow, the alternatives never appeared, and more and more cars on more and more roads just used more and more of it. More worry.  But smog seemed to be something that happened in Los Angeles, where they had all the cars and freeways, and ‘inversions.’  Can it spread elsewhere?  Worry.  

By the early 1950s, England had gone off soft coal for household heating and eliminated their deadly ‘London particulars.’ But could we find ways to solve our own problem?  Lots of good worry.  

A little later: a hole in the ozone layer.  But look, we’ve banned CFC’s.  Will that be enough?  No. Lots of worry.

Then, more recently, our retirement accounts were changed into investment accounts with tax incentives for employees (401k et al.) and accounting benefits for our employers, and thus we were turned loose to ‘manage’ our retirement investments ourselves, usually by picking one or another mutual fund or combination — with someone getting a commission for brokerage or financial services all along the way.  What did we know about choosing funds?  Most of us, not much. Were the rosy predictions of investment counselors correct? I worried, while I hoped for the best.  

After all, our government wouldn’t let companies really put our retirements at risk, or mislead us about these things, would they? Lots of room for worry.

And, all along, my mother had been telling me that some moneygrubbers had been trying to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, practically from the day it was passed.  That was the legislation set up during the Great Depression to keep separate banking, investment, and insurance functions, the mixing of which had set up the conditions for the Great Depression itself. Glass-Steagall’s purpose was to save us from ourselves, or rather from the groups of ourselves trying to play faster and looser with money.  She died before the act was repealed, but she had told me they would keep after it until they finally tore it down (they did).  At which point, she assured me, all the bad stuff she had already lived through — she had been born in 1919 — would happen again.  Lots to worry about there. 

Our government wouldn’t really let that happen again, despite rescinding Glass-Steagall — would they?

Ahem.  Just clearing my throat.

The past is prologue, as they say. This week, I’m worried about the possibility of an entire meltdown of the world financial, banking and money situation. (Nothing small-time about my worrying.) Will our President get it right, find a way to get through this without entirely uprooting our entire society, rule of law, nationhood and all? People are telling other people to buy gold. (That assumes you have a certain amount of money right now to buy it with, of course.) 

Perhaps they are right — I wouldn’t know — but think about the realities of that for a minute.  Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t know how or where to go about buying gold, what form it would take (coins? bars? dust?), where I would keep it if I had it (home, and hold ‘em off with a shotgun? dont think so.  In a vault somewhere with someone else holding ‘em off? don’t think so.  And how would I get in to get at mine if I needed some? Piece of paper?  sounds to me like we’re on our way back to paper money in a different form). Electronic money, like paper money, has some key advantages: lightweight portability. How would I carry gold around, so as to buy (say) a gallon of milk? Star Trek’s Ferenghis may have seen it coming: that’ll be two bars of gold-pressed latinum. Break out the gold-weighing scales. Yikes.

Before you just laugh this whole thing off as the nervous cogitations of a lifelong worrywort, consider this: at no time have my worries been totally unrealistic. Nor have the situations causing me to worry ever really disappeared; they have just been piled on top of each other. Check it out:

Those Russian planes or missiles might actually have come over, back then. It was considered likely by many, to the extent of calling for first strikes (all the characters in the movie Dr. Strangelove were recognizable at the time, if not as individuals, then as frequently seen types:  a very scary thought.   They are still recognizable, floating around among the ‘powers that be’ today:  an even scarier thought).  Nuclear weapons have proliferated over the years and the threat has not gone away — aren’t we fighting a war in Iraq over Weapons of Mass Destruction that aren’t even there?  and we’re still mired it it — but as we saw, hijacked commercial airliners loaded with jet fuel and momentum did amazing amounts of damage on 9/11, and would have done more except for Flight 93′s brave passengers.

And the earth really is in terrible imminent danger — more danger than ever before — of being destroyed by the carelessness and greed of humans, and all life with it.  

You may say that worry is pointless, but the situations are very real.

And the short term greed and the pursuit of money to the exclusion of all else by some few really has threatened the lives and well-being of the rest of us, who are just trying to get along peacefully and support ourselves and our families, and the crunch they’ve brought us has made our daily lives difficult or (in some cases) impossible, through unavailable jobs and health care, and through closing businesses and home foreclosures, and much else.  Worried?  Oh, I think so.

And now, it’s being pointed out that one possible outcome of failing to find a solution to the financial crisis those greedy people brought on could mean the end of civilization itself, including of our nation.  Dissolution and separation, regionalism or even full chaos at every level, from the local to the national to the international, the result of a total meltdown and freezing of the world financial system…  Barter?  Gold?  Having to defend your vegetable garden, even your house, against all comers? Yikes. Talk about worried.

The government wouldn’t let that happen — would it? 

Maybe President Obama is going to end up being our next Lincoln after all: a tall slim smart man coming out of Illinois whose main job is going to be finding a way to keep the United States just that: united. One nation.  Still here.  Continuing to exist. Part of a world community of nations.  On an Earth that we may (but only may) be able to pull back from the brink of climaticide if we act quickly, deftly, and seriously enough.  Nation and world wounded, in critical condition, but recovering, gaining strength all the time.

I can only hope so.  

And excuse me while I continue to worry.

Points to Ponder

What I want to know is why, when we have a system that has locked us into a pattern that is difficult and expensive to change, and highly destructive, why would we want to replicate that pattern with a different flavor of the same old thing?

Let’s try to understand the basic pattern under discussion: we have oil companies with an entrenched and well-developed and very wide system of distribution of gasoline (and the occasional diesel) fuel for cars and trucks, and we have auto makers who make cars, very familiar and well-understood cars, that use that fuel, and only that fuel.

As we have recently begun to notice, this means it is very difficult to substitute any other fuel in a hurry or at low cost that requires a series of distribution points like the gasoline stations we now have.  

Automakers who would like to build cars that can use other fuels are balked by the lack of distribution points for fuel for those cars, adding up to no reasonable market for them (they may be great cars, but where do you, the driver, get fuel?  and how much does it cost?) and by unfamiliarity with how they work and what might need to be fixed or maintained now and then. 

It’s way too early to choose just one way to go.  Let’s be wary of locking ourselves into the same pattern, only with a different fuel, the way some are pouncing on hydrogen-cell cars.  Nothing wrong with hydrogen fuel-cell cars as an idea, and I hope they are one way cars will be developed in future — they’re not here yet, nor will there be 2009 production models for sale to consumers, it doesn’t seem.  Nor maybe in 2010 either.  They have zero emissions, by design — but they depend on a fuel network which does not exist yet of hydrogen-cell refueling stations.  

We are going to have to go through a certain amount of dislocation to free ourselves from a single-fuel-based auto (gasoline).  Let’s not go through all that only to lock ourselves into another single fuel-type auto (hydrogen fuel cells).  It leaves the way open for another future brouhaha… and it leaves the way open for single-fuel providers (and the carmakers that manufacture cars that use only their fuel) to monopolize things the way the oil companies do now.

We’ve got a tremendous opportunity right now to get a lot of good alternative types of cars out there.  Electric vehicles, running on batteries which are charged at home or at work from the grid,  with non-toxic and longlasting, powerful batteries; plug-in hybrids, that work off the battery but carry an auxiliary gas (or diesel) combustion engine that will charge the battery if it starts to run down — and can also be charged from the grid, while the car is in your garage or at plug-in places.

And there are many more options for powering cars, including biofuels of various types, some designed to be usable in today’s cars.

Why shouldn’t service stations, which now provide gasoline, diesel (sometimes), and air for tires,  also be able to fuel hydrogen cars, and electrics and plug-in hybrids with grid outlets, and biodiesel, and whatever else at least as frequently as they now provide diesel as well as gasoline?  The infrastructure is in place –i.e., the stations already exist.  

Let’s not lock ourselves in again to one solution.  It’s early days yet.  Let’s let innovation and sensible maneuvers like “cap and trade” regulations, with some assistance for alternative fuel/car development help us find which solutions are going to work.  Let’s not try to pick the “one” solution when we don’t know yet what the best “one” will be — or perhaps we will discover that lots of different possibilities are the best.

I don’t like to be locked into anything, ever.  And I really don’t like it when oil companies (will they be monopolizing hydrogen production?) and carmakers building to a single type of fuel hold the keys to the inflexible and imprisoning situation, while taking all they can out of my pocketbook, and telling me all the time that I like it just fine the way it is, and don’t want anything else, and why can’t we go out and drill for more of this lovel profitable — for them — oil?

I merely ask.

A Few Pet Peeves

O My

No more “My” this and that!  please! – an idea whose time never should have come in the first place, and has long gone by!  My[organization name], MyMedicare, MyDocuments, MyHardDrive, MyThis, MyThat, MyOtherthing.  It was a bad idea when it was first thought of, and it’s way worse now that we’re all so tired of it. 

Get over yourselves, and get rid of the idea that this makes your organization seem somehow friendly or your service personalized.  No, it just makes the rest of us suspicious.  This is a country too well-educated in the ways of corporations and bureaucracies to take you at your own valuation, ever.  Or should be, by now.  So here’s a last instruction for you: osculate MyA–!!!

Styrofoam

Stop with the styrofoam — slabs, peanuts, chunks, whatever.  Or else get better or more ways to recycle and reuse it.  Even with that, there’s already enough styrofoam around right now so that more never needs to be made.

Can’t somebody devise a ‘styrofoam magnet’ that will extract the styrofoam from all the rugs, furniture, land fills, dumps, and wherever else it’s lodged so it can be cleaned up and reused?  Otherwise it’ll just lie there forever, polluting land, air and water.

Can’t some clever person find something delicious and nutritious to make out of it?  or at least fashionably wearable?  and nicely biodegradable and harmless?

Or else just quit it as a bad job, you guys, and go do something else less harmful to the environment!

Windows in envelopes

Lots of curbside recycling programs won’t take the windows of window envelopes.  I’m tired of tearing the windows out of your #$%^%$#!! envelopes and putting them in actual trash when they arrive in the mail, since I can’t recycle them.  A lot of the window envelopes I get aren’t for things I asked for or would ever want, so I’m doubly irked.

Either start up a big window-envelope recycling service, or use something else besides window envelopes.  I understand they’ve got something called sticky labels nowadays — and also that computers can drive printers to address letter-size envelopes without a label or a window or anything.  Maybe you’ve heard of it?

There, I feel a lot better.  Just watch this space; I’m sure there’ll be more pet peeves to come, real soon now…

There Are Worse things

Those pesky “assume your guilt” questions — famous example: have you stopped beating your wife? — are invidious whether you say Yes or No.  But if you’re not restricted to Yes or No, then there’s another answer: there are worse things.

Have you stopped beating your wife?  

–There are worse things: doing it in the first place.

Do you want to see oil at $4 a gallon?  

–There are worse things: use that as one excuse to justify a war that kills and wounds (ours and theirs), impoverishes two nations (ours and theirs), whose costs come from our and our children’s indebtedness, and yields profits to war profiteers (various mercenaries, contractors, oil companies, and others), becoming an internationally detested nation for our depredations…

Are you still pretending there’s such a thing as global warming?

–There are worse things: pretending there isn’t, doing nothing about it, being part of the problem, not part of the solution, failing to enact ‘cap and trade’  legislation to give the market a chance to help solve the problem, failing to fund and underwrite alternative energy startups on a large enough scale and right now to get the process started until the cap and trade can be passed…

Get the idea?

Maybe nobody will be convinced, but it will certainly make you feel better to say it: there are worse things.

Safety in Numbers, Strength in Numbers

Why is the number 350 so important?  350 ppm of CO2 is the highest level that can be tolerated to avoid run-away climate change, according to Sir David King and other leading climate scientists — and better if the number is lower, and falling  all the time.  

Alas, we’re at 387 and rising.  A web site dedicated to uniting the world around this number in this issue has a web site explaining what they are trying to do and why — and no, their number 1 request is NOT for money.

Let them speak for themselves:

Here’s our goal: We want to take this number, 350, and spread it all over the world. We want every human, if they know nothing else about global warming, to know that 350 represents safety. 

We want to use protest and music and art and video and the net to make that number inescapable, ubiquitous. Everywhere.

If we do, it will help move the international negotiations in that direction—our target is the international community, which is spending the next 18 months negotiating a follow-up to Kyoto. We may not get another shot at this, so let’s get to work on spreading 350.

Go ahead, read their site and find out what they hope you’ll do.  And I hope you’ll do it, too.

Operation Climate Vote: Now or Never

The Senate will begin debate on the Climate Security Act next week.  Now or never: help Environmental Defense Action Fund (EDAF) in their efforts to pass this bill.

Find out about the bill and EDAF’s actions to help pass it here.

Donate here.

Take note: there’s a matching grant on the table through June 1.  Please donate now, all you can, whether that’s a little or a lot.  If you’ve given before to this effort, consider giving again.

This bill is our best, and possibly last, chance to get meaningful Congressional action; regardless of who wins the election, another bill like this won’t come up for some time, possibly years, and will perhaps be too late to make enough of a difference.  EDAF is in my opinion the organization that can help most to get the bill passed.

Normally, as one on an extremely modest pension, I’m never in a position to ‘throw money’ at anything.  However, if you believe as I do that this is a huge step and possibly our best chance to change the trend of global warming, and you haven’t already given to this necessary effort, please give as much as you can.

Now Is The Time, Not Later

In a recent email, Environmental Defense Action Fund (EDAF)’s David Yarnold says, of the upcoming Senate vote on the Climate:

….Big Coal and the National Association of Manufacturers are spending tens of millions of dollars to sabotage the bill. Their misinformation campaign claims the bill would cost American jobs and wreck the economy.

At a time when the American economy is struggling with $4-a-gallon gas, we must confront this misleading propaganda head on. In fact, passing global warming legislation will create jobs and build the clean energy economy of the 21st century.

We’re also fighting “decoy” global warming proposals, like the one recently offered by Senator George Voinovich (R-OH). His plan is pure smokescreen with subsidies and loopholes that will allow global warming pollution to increase for decades.

The EDAF is working all-out to pass this legislation this time.  They need the money to make this possible: major media and public attention and interest, action from all sectors of the community, making sure the bill is not watered down and persuading swing senators to vote for it.  These are exactly the actions needed right now.

There’s a dollar-for-dollar matching gift on the table now through June 1.  The money is urgently needed.

Give now through the EDAF secure site.

Don’t wait.  Do whatever you can.  Even a little will help.  Give your kids and grandkids, nephews and nieces, the chance to ask you: What did you do to help us through the climate crisis?

Happy Pi Day

It’s a day to celebrate the fascinating number pi.  It’s also Albert Einstein’s birthday.  Read all about it here.

Sun, Sun, Sun

Today is a beautiful brightly sunny cloudless day, ambient temperature 18 F. We’ve just had a series of winter storms, and the days have mostly been below freezing, with snow, freezing rain, or rain that later freezes, blustery winds, and superbly frosty temperatures — with wind chills that I don’t even like to think of.

 

While it’s still cold, the air is relatively still and the sun is out.  Hooray!  At this point, and from inside letting the sun shine into the house everywhere possible, it seems relatively warm (although it’s not; hat scarf and gloves are called for as well as a ski coat, and don’t stay out in it too long).  

 

I did notice one excellent thing this morning: since we’re starting to approach the equinox (OK, it’s a good month away, but we’re closer to it than to the solstice we just passed in December) the sun’s rising point has now moved eastward enough to start shining directly into my studio windows, which face ESE.  Around the winter solstice, the arc of the sun’s path is very much in the south: rises in the SSE, sets in the SSW.  Slowly that opens out closer to E and W and, near the summer solstice, well beyond, so that the sun seems to sweep out an arc that includes most of the sky. Now it has reached far enough around to shine into my windows at an angle, at least; still a very acute angle from very much toward the South, but it does actually shine in and with every prospect of shining in ever more directly.

 

Hooray!  Although we’re still icebound, at the moment, spring is on its way — sometime.

Earth Impact Factor

 

I think what would be really helpful would be an Earth Impact Factor.  

 

We already have a wind-chill factor, routinely provided along with temperature, humidity and other weather information, which takes into account the effect of the wind on how cold we are likely to feel outdoors, and therefore alerts us as to what we should wear if we go out in the weather. 

 

We have energy-saver information on appliances such as refrigerators and water heaters, rating how energy-efficient they are in terms of power costs.

 

We have mandated labels on food products, indicating ingredients and serving size, and enumerating weights and percentages of nutritional elements along with their percentage of a standard daily caloric intake.  That makes it possible for a careful consumer to understand better just what is being consumed, and estimate its impact on one’s diet.

 

An Earth Impact Factor would alert us to the environmental impact/recovery cost of using a particular product.  What are we to make of the contradictory claims about the new lower-power bulbs?  Using the bulbs takes less power than the older tungsten type to produce the same or nearly the same brightness.  The new bulbs are more expensive than the old, but last longer than ordinary tungsten ones.  The new bulbs contain mercury, and there is some question about how to dispose of them safely; they also contain many more parts than the older ones, and some claim they are more difficult to recycle.  When a new-type bulb burns out, how should one dispose of it? And what happens if one is smashed accidentally?  Is it safe to handle the shards?  To use a vacuum cleaner to pick them up?  (For a discussion of these and other points, see the article “Low Energy Bulb Disposal Warning.”)  Knowing the true cost of all this, and having it expressed as a number or a range or a series of numbers (e.g., 5 on consumer price, 7 on longevity, 2 on disposability and recovery of parts, or some such) and being able to compare to a similar set of figures for the older type would be really helpful.

  

Why bother?  Because right now, everyone is carrying on pretty much as usual, with only minor changes from what has become our usual practices over the years.  We’re now starting to recycle as well as dump (at least, we hope all that stuff that goes out in the ‘recycle’ bin is really recycled).  We’re starting to see (at last!) more fuel-efficient cars.  But does all this mean more than just making ourselves feel better by arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? We’ll never know till we start getting better facts about how we live and what it’s costing us: the Earth.

 

We have no real way of telling on a daily basis what the actual impact is, on the environment, on resource use, etc., of the things we use and the things we do.  Without some kind of standard being set up and applied to things we buy, we will likely never know until too late.

 

So I address this to some smart people out there, whoever you are, sitting around wondering what can or should be done to help us dig out of the mess we’re putting ourselves into every day:  information can leverage power.  Figure out what costs and impacts to include in such a factor, and how to calculate it for specific types of products, and how to get the info to consumers (labeling? web sites using Java? create an Institute for standard Earth Impact Factor assignments)?  What about it?  Who’s up for the task?