VISIONARY THINKING

Title shot: a film essay

Grant Slater (grant-slater.com) and I share an alma mater, Northwestern University.  More accurately he shares Ivan Doig’s alma mater, since he is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism, as was Doig.  I was in what was then called the “School of Speech,” now called “Communication Studies” and quite different than it was.

Slater calls himself a “moving image maker” and that’s exactly right.  Behind his photography is always a story that is moving, not because it is video, but because it is so deeply emotional, down in the gut where we used to try to reach as actors.  So this blog post will “quote” a lot by giving you links.  It will be what we used to try to define as a “vook,” meaning a book that moved across media to include image, interview, music, and thought.  Some are meant to be marketing persuasion, which is somewhat stigmatized, so I’ll start there.  Here’s a nice piece for VISA.

https://vimeo.com/144914189  You see how appealing it is?  

Here’s the second Slater vid I saw — I only found him this morning — and this one is marketing FEAR.  It’s about Trump, but more than that.  The title is SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS.  The epigram is “Tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy […] the greatest and most savage slavery out of the extreme of freedom.” From Plato’s The Republic.”  

https://vimeo.com/175888789?from=outro-embed  

I’m reluctant to post the link because I’m AFRAID some people are going to love this and repeat it a lot.  They will not see it as an advertisement meant to make it easier to drive us into obedience to tyrants, but rather as an advertisement for BECOMING a tyrant, even if only in drinking establishments among “friends.”  Or at home with women and children one can tyrannize.  Maybe it’s safer to provide this link now that Trump has proven what a lying fantasist he is.  But this is almost Leni Resinthenthal, famous as Hitler’s cinematographer who made Olympic Competitors into soaring supermen.

My other fear is that good people will be so afraid of these images that they will try to suppress them so they don’t have to think about them.  We’ve got to have the guts to really look.

Now here’s the link to Slater’s antidote, which is how I came to his work today because Aeon.com picked it up for the day’s set of essays.  I skip a lot of the print essays, but I always watch the short vids.  They never disappoint.  This one is relevant to prairie life, far to the north, where Bob and I once went moose hunting and where my father’s family pioneered for a while.

https://aeon.co/videos/bring-back-the-mammoth-to-fight-global-warming-its-not-as-crazy-as-it-sounds?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=9c4d3e603e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_03_27&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-9c4d3e603e-68600437

It’s about global warming, the thawing of the permafrost, in this case in Siberia, but the same phenomenon is happening here in Canadian territory.  The scientist who wants to bring back the woolly mammoth is a visionary.  We are more likely to send out elephants in sweaters, but at Harvard they’re working on reverse engineering elephant genes.  Since there are mammoth carcasses that were flash-frozen with browsed buttercups still in their mouths, the genes of mammoths are at hand.  But this man and his son are not waiting — they’re putting the original beasts: wild horses, musk oxen, caribou, back on the land.  Since these beasts are being crowded out of their habitat in North America, it’s only a transportation problem.  So far no grizzlies, but if we’re sending them to zoos, this might be an excellent alternative.

At a long ago conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (https:asle.org) in Banff, there was a woman called “Barney” whose proper name has escaped my aging brain.  The premise of her talk was that sustainable prairie requires a balance between something like an elephant to knock down trees and something bovine to graze back brush.  The men in the permafrost project are imitating the elephant by smashing trees back mechanically, which is why they want mammoths back.  

They say that when the cities have been bombed to radioactive rubble by the Tyrants, since the glamour and power of humans have been conveniently gathered into targets, what will be left will be grass.  They say that the land around the Hanford Reactor in Washington State is radioactive but that the small animals — the squirrels and foxes — have adapted much better than they did to human doings.  Same in Russia and Japan where radioactivity accidents cleared out the people.

Now I’m going to shut up with the print chatter so there is time left for you to explore Slater’s work.  This long sequence he calls “longtelegram.   http://longtelegram.com

You can also find his work at https://vimeo.com/grantslater

DUST THOU ART

“Global warming” is just a newspaper tag for headline writers.  The real story is almost too complex to grasp.  I’ve pulled together a little link sequence that might help.

The snow in Greenland is black this year.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/09/16/jason_box_s_research_into_greenland_s_dark_snow_raises_more_concerns_about.html?utm_content=buffer5d490&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

black (sooty) snow

The Polar Vortex is a phenomenon of the the polar cyclonic air stream (jet stream) that is evidently generated by open seas near Russia. 

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/09/03/new_study_links_polar_vortex_to_climate_change.html

and

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/09/15/polar_vortex_deep_meanders_in_vortex_linked_to_global_warming.html

Polar Vortex with Southern Excursion

If, like my cousin, you are busy remodeling your bathroom and don’t have time to read links, the bottom line is that the small changes in air temp over ice masses darkened by volcanic ash and soot from huge arctic forest fires (black ice) plus the energy made active by the loss of ice cover on Russian seas are the cause of our thirty-six degrees below zero winter last year and probably this year.  Maybe from now on.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/02/21/polar_vortex_weather_climate_and_meandering_jet_streams.html

But the air is not all that’s writhing.  Just as African countries keep changing their names, and groups of atypical people keep finding their old name pejorative so they have to invent a new one (“gay” is now “men who have sex with men” or MSM  and handicapped people are now "differently abled") what we’ve been calling a “polar vortex” is actually a "southern excursion" of the vortex.  As we learn more, the terms become more “granular.”   So “autism” turns into “autism spectrum” and then we all learn to say “Asperger.” 

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/study-links-polar-vortex-chills-melting-sea-ice

Jin-Ho Yoon

“Normally, sea ice keeps heat energy from escaping the ocean and entering the atmosphere. When there's less ice, more energy gets into the atmosphere and weakens the jet stream, the high-altitude river of air that usually keeps Arctic air from wandering south, said study co-author Jin-Ho Yoon of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington. So the cold air escapes instead.”

Bottom line:  my cousin had better think about more insulation in his bathroom or all his work may be undone by frozen pipes.

But here’s a line of thought and particles that is opposite in direction, a flow of air farther south that moves from Africa to the Caribbean and the Amazon.  “Dust in the atmosphere is associated with dry air. Obviously, dry air prevents moisture from gathering ultimately leading to a significantly lesser opportunity for convection, or vertical development of clouds. This dry, sinking air can sometimes cover a large area of the Atlantic Ocean, and sometimes, even more of the Atlantic Hurricane Basin.

“When that dry, Saharan dust is present, its sinking air would prevent a storm from developing. If a tropical storm or hurricane moves into an area of Saharan Dust then that dry air could get wrapped into the storm and eventually fall apart.”

Saharan dust

They say that soil analysis shows that the fertility of the Amazon forests is dependent on the nutrients stored in Saharan dust.  Smaller than a butterfly and not more powerful than the ax and fire.  Is this a new idea?  No, Darwin noted it!

“Ever since Charles Darwin noted "the falling of impalpably fine dust" while crossing the Atlantic during his famous scientific voyage aboard the Beagle, seafarers and researchers have observed African particulates far out to sea.”  and, worse, “Researchers have since found a variety of live bacteria and fungus in dust hitting the Caribbean, defying conventional wisdom among microbiologists that microbes could not survive a five-day trip three miles up in the atmosphere.  Disease travels in dust.

The Windward Islands in the Caribbean

"Swarms of live locusts made it all the way across alive in 1988 and landed in the Windward Islands," Shinn says. "If one-inch grasshoppers can make it, I imagine almost anything can make it." A 2001 study by USGS researchers found that the number of viable fungus and bacteria in Caribbean air is two to three times higher during dust events than during normal weather conditions.”  Bugs are disease vectors.  Climate changes mean new territories for bugs.

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/514

I’m beginning to reconsider my tolerant attitude about dust, esp. since it’s probably carrying industrial poisons from the surrounding fields.  Everything is now so "Roundup Ready" that the farmers are turning to paraquat, much more poisonous to humans.  If they treat it as though it was Roundup, people will die.

Fukushima fallout

Some worried a lot about radioactive Japanese fallout from Fukushima, since people in Oregon know that everything from Japan finally reaches the Pacific shore on the ocean current gyres, but maybe we should be more worried about “China haze” from the industrial explosion there.  I remember my aunt, who was a WWII army nurse stationed in Oxford, talking about smog there (from coal smoke particles plus moisture) so thick that at Harrod’s one could not see the counter tops clearly.  What did that do to the children born in those years?

China haze, industrial progress

  

Before she enlisted, my aunt was the head surgical nurse in one of the Great Falls hospitals and said the ice was often an inch thick at the base of the operating room windows. These are not new issues.   But now we wonder whether the dust of outer space, the dust of meteorites and comets, might not be carrying bacteria.

“Life is thought to have arisen in the Archaean aeon, some 4 billion years ago, when Earth was blanketed by a thick noxious atmosphere tinged orange with hydrocarbon smog. The seas and the land were both barren then, and the raw materials of life – water, air, rocks – were bathed in lethal ultraviolet radiation. The planet’s surface was marred by a steady stream of violent volcanic eruptions, asteroid bombardments and icy comet impacts. How could that alien, volcanic, comet-battered globe produce living molecules? The story is that minerals – quartz, pyrite, clays, and the like – must have provided the safe, shielded environments that spawned life.” 

. . .most minerals (two out of three, in fact) arise as a result of biological processes.” . . .

iron in sediments -- the reason blood is red

“The earliest microbes were ‘chemolithoautotrophs’ – a fancy name for cells that get their chemical energy from minerals, in order to make their own biomolecules from scratch.” . . .

“ . . .the Great Oxidation Event (GOE), [was] the single most dramatic event in Earth’s mineral evolution.”  Oxygen in the atmosphere went from 2% to 20% and that changed everything.

“Life arose from minerals; then minerals arose from life. The geosphere and biosphere have become complexly intertwined, with numerous feedback loops driving myriad critical natural processes in ways that are only now coming into focus.” . . .

“Microbial weathering greatly enhances clay mineral production, and enhanced production of slippery clays has ‘lubricated’ down-going plates of rock and accelerated tectonic events – at least, that’s how the story goes.” . . .

So it comes down to gumbo!  Caleche!  The stuff that is so slippery that the builders of the Pyramids used it slide those huge blocks of stone up ramps.  The stuff that makes my house change shape.  The stuff that traps all wheels and makes progress impossible.

What a metaphor for our slippery, shape-changing, clogging cultural beliefs!  Everything is connected.  Everything is significant.  Everything signifies.

PROM NIGHT AND THE WATER IS RISING

Front yard  4/26

Back yard  4/26

This morning the cats and I rose to discover that the white stretch limousine parked across the street as part of preparations for prom night in Valier was covered with snow and the trees and bushes everywhere were bowed over with their snow load.  I knew the forecast, had seen the building cloud snow-shelf behind the Rockies, and have lived through many of these Spring monsoon snows, but I was still startled.  It’s not cold and the snow is already melting enough to chute off the trees and roofs.  Soon it will be only ermine trim, like that on the theatrical homemade crowns for the prom King and Queen.  

People who haven’t lived here long will joke about global warming (bring it on!) and the farmers will smile about the moisture.  When I drove to Cut Bank a few days ago in a howling, pounding high wind, there was one section where a newly plowed field was so dry that it was blowing so much dirt across the road that the road was hard to see.  The topsoil of that field is now in Minneapolis.

On the environmental listserv for the organization called the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, a professor has posted a question both ethical and strategic.  She wants to know how to handle the teaching of research and empirically-based thought in general writing courses when the topic is climate change.  Because her community adamantly and sometimes angrily opposes the idea.  

The list, for all its sophistication, calls it “global warming” but it is far more than that when one gets into research about what many people now call "global climate change".  It’s even more than that.  Heat=energy and it is the retention and driving convection of that energy that interacts with geology to create the mammoth planetary currents of air and water through the oceans and across the continents.  You've heard of the Japanese current?

Bangladesh

Coping with the rise in sea level caused by melting of ice at the poles will be major, because humans have always built along waterways and some countries (Bangladesh) will disappear underwater.  Already villages in Alaska have had to move.  Loss of permafrost, the depletion of the glaciers that feed major rivers, general shifting of tornado "alleys" and increased intensity of droughts and hurricanes, deaths of forests, expanding territories for disease and their vectors, extinction of species like polar bears and penguin, loss of fish due to the failure of water column turnover -- it’s enough, as one of the respondents said, “to make semi-grown men cry.”  And that happens.  I’ve seen it.  Of course, grown men and women often fly into a rage when they realize the real nature and dimension of the problem.

ASLE conference panel

The inquiring professor wanted to know how she could keep from being shifted from classification as a dependable teacher to being considered a trouble-making activist and therefore losing her job, as well as short-changing the education of the students.  Those latter may not give up the pursuit of money and refocus on saving the world, but they will be a different kind of voter.  That will make some politicians very angry.

Therefore, I will shield the identity of the professor who said, “If institutional priorities . . . can [make] top-down changes in curriculum occur which would make GW education more than optional, and I don't know what to do about this, particularly in regions where a) the majority culture is skeptical of or indifferent to GW and b) where the institution wants/needs as many enrollees as possible to generate funds, and therefore seeks to exclude all Negativity.

“Your questions bring up lots of other thorny issues, e.g., what channels of future activism can the teacher actually offer the motivated student?  What psychological effect will a continual focus, however realistic, on a problem generating hopelessness have on the person "just starting out" in adulthood (I assume here the "traditional" student)?  As we sing 'roun here, "Everybody wants to go to heaven/But nobody wants to die."  For this innerness of global warming awareness I strongly recommend the new book by Steven Pavlos Holmes, exploring personal responses to gw.”   

Steven Pavlos Holmes, Independent Scholar

“Facing the Change: Personal Encounters with Global Warming” by Steven Pavlos Holmes.  On Amazon for about ten bucks or Kindle.  I ordered a used paperback, my usual standard.  I had thought that this climate change was moving slowly enough that at 75 years old, I would be gone.  I don’t have children.  Now it appears that the beginning has already begun.  Just not this snowstorm, not even this dust storm, and the snowpack on the Rockies is “normal”-and-above for the time period in which we’ve been keeping records.  But there are other things to consider.

An Australian fire whirl

If something drowns Bangladesh, if something forces an Alaskan fishing village to move, if something caves off the sides of mountains and changes the intensity of cyclones in Kansas and turns Australia into a holocaust -- it changes me, too, because everything is connected.  This is grain country and we know that the profit of our grain depends on the world climate -- not just in terms of rain and sun, but also in terms of politics.  What happens to the Ukraine happens to our wheat elevators.   The markets are the same. 

One of the first responses is to compensate by evading expensive regulations, particularly when owners are faraway (not in physical danger) and workers are local (in danger), which is the case with many of the services in our area.

“A Minnesota-based agriculture company was fined $211,000 by federal safety regulators who said Wednesday it had repeatedly failed to ensure workers weren't exposed to grain-dust hazards in Montana.

“CHS Inc. was cited by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for 19 workplace safety violations at grain elevators in Cut Bank, Glendive, Denton and Valier. A company spokeswoman said CHS will challenge the violations.

“Three were repeat violations, including failing to test the air quality in work spaces for potentially explosive grain dust, hazardous gases or lack of oxygen, regulators said.

“Dust from grain in elevators is considered highly combustible and can be more explosive than coal dust, Funke said.

“Fourteen of the violations alleged against CHS were classified as serious, meaning there was a substantial probability of a worker death or injury.”

Another consequence is a deepening wedge between two demographics in a state where liberal populations are concentrated in the scenic and university towns and conservative people are spread across the rural landscape.  So there are climate rallies to support clean-energy in 13 communities today: Bigfork, Billings, Bozeman, Columbia Falls, Great Falls, Hamilton, Helena, Kalispell, Lame Deer, Missoula, Pablo, Red Lodge and Whitefish.  NOT Cut Bank, Glendive, Denton and Valier.  (The rumor that a coal company arranged for this snowfall is only a bitter joke.)  

From my point of view it's a very interesting development that the Native American people, who have been scorned in small town settings but championed by universities and environmentalists, are now arriving at a position where they can provide payback politically.  Consider the impact on negotiations over irrigation water rights to Birch Creek, which divides Valier from the Blackfeet Reservation.  Consider frakking.  Consider wind farms.

Prom tonight -- then what?

As is often remarked, the only real constant is constant change and as grain farmers know, life is always a trade-off between givens and surprises.  Culture can foster collaborative changes in attitude or it can ignite wars.  Both are happening.  This is not a simple squabble over where to set the planetary thermostat.