If They Hold A Rally, And There's Nobody To Report It, Did It Really Happen?

Thousands of us showed up for Portland's Climate Action rally downtown, but, buried as I was in the middle of it, I couldn't get a feel for the size of the throng. Fifty years ago, when all my peers were busy having a growth spurt, I was still working on my coloring book and missed the whole thing. Consequently, when I'm in a crowd, it's all tits and armpits to me. I let my husband report to me like my own personal periscope and raised my camera as high as I could to get a better angle on the congregation.

Those of us in attendance are united in believing we need to keep what remains of our fossil fuel supply in the ground, or risk catastrophic climate change; and that the time to switch over to a sustainable economy was probably about thirty years ago, but now would be immeasurably better than later. Brutal arithmetic informs us. And in our little corner of the nation, we are among the custodians of the spigot, and we want it cranked shut. It is our hope that if we refuse to let the coal terminals get built, and refuse the passage of oil trains, and shut down pipelines, and otherwise turn off the spigots, we can help shut this monstrous folly down. It's naive as hell, but movements start somewhere. Thirty years ago, I never thought I'd see people hiding their cigarettes or walking around with baggies of dog shit, either.

The local newspaper thinks we're adorable to have such concerns, but Daddy's got everything under control, and although there might be a few problems down the line, there will be plenty of time to work on them after he's run through all the oil. And in the meantime, we should turn up the AC and watch TV, and let Daddy read the paper in peace.

If he does read the paper, and it's the Oregonian, and he gets all the way to page nine, he'll see a small captioned photo of the 400,000 (or, as they put it, 100,000) marchers in the People's Climate March in New York City. He won't see anything at all about our march, even though it stretched for blocks, and the governor showed up to speak. Our paper's editors are solidly on the side of the grownups, and they patiently explain, as often as they can, that transitioning from fossil fuels will cause a severe economic disruption.

Which it will. There's a disruption coming any way you look at it.

Look, they say. Yes, there's a wildfire approaching the house, but it might just blow the other way--you never know--and we got you a sandbox, so play in that and put the hose down before you ruin the carpeting.

It's those who consider themselves grown up who say we need to let the free market work. And that might well be a functional system, as long as all the costs are figured in. But they never are; not even close. The price of a two-by-four does not include the cost to the atmosphere of the loss of a carbon sink, or the irreversible loss of the topsoil, or even the cost to the taxpayers of bulldozing the landslide off the highway. You sell gasoline for a piddly four bucks a gallon, you're making someone else pay the real price. Not only those in the sacrifice zones, in Alberta, in Appalachia, in the Amazon, whose lands have been skinned and blown up and tossed aside, whose water has been poisoned; and not only our grandchildren (of course, our grandchildren), but our own children, a decade or two from now, who will say you knew about this--how could you? Disease and contagion are on the rise, we're engineering a major extinction event, we're squandering our fresh water, and we're all paying for it, and will pay much, much more later. And we're fine with that as long as we don't have to shell out for it at the pump right now.

All across this country are people who are flailing in the sandbox with their tiny buckets, people who believe that squiggly light bulbs are an assault on their personal freedom, and that their worst problem is the price of a tank of gas. They've been laid low by a paper economy whose rules were written by people much more powerful than they are. They're squashed so flat they can't see over their own scrawny wallets. There's no view at all down there. It's all tits and armpits.

I Hate To Keep Bringing This Shit Up

The International Court Of Justice has looked at Japan's whale harvest and ruled it illegal. Japan had been taking whales for research only, hundreds of them, and studying them hard. With chopsticks. Anyway, they're done with it now. This is a big victory for Greenpeace, and just goes to show that a few people willing to sacrifice themselves can indeed make a difference; can, in fact, with great effort and courage, and thirty years, cause a great wrong to be righted that should have been righted thirty years earlier.

It always seemed like having more whales around was a laudable thing in itself, them being fabulous and all, but as usual, it's even more complicated than that. And we're still finding out new stuff. Stuff we might like to take into account before we start messing around. The thing about our species is we like to tinker with things as though we're polishing the good china with a backhoe. It's possible we could have kept things in balance by just killing and eating as many whales as we could manage to bag from a canoe using our biceps and a stout spear. But instead we just sort of methodically removed them in huge quantities. Entire species of whales have gone extinct, and almost half have been critically endangered.

But that should be good news for the penguins, who are in trouble now. We'd thought it was because of human-caused climate change and the melting of the sea ice, but also because the mean old whales were eating up all their krill. Never mind that much larger populations of whales had been coexisting with penguins for an awfully long time.

So here's an oddity. There are a lot of krill in the ocean--they're herds of miniature lobsters, basically. They're an essential part of the whole ocean food chain. You know, the food chain that's in the process of collapsing. And you'd think that if the whale numbers were to pick up, now that Japan isn't studying them on their plates, they'd hoover up most of the krill, because that's what they like to eat. But instead, it turns out the krill population tanked when the whales were nearly polished off in the 1960s. Their fortunes wax and wane with the whales'. And nobody knew why, until recently.

Krill need iron to grow and reproduce. But most of the iron is at the bottom of the ocean. And the krill

are at the top. There's no getting the iron to the top unless a whale dives way down and gets it for them, by eating something iron-rich like squid. There's too much pressure at the bottom of the ocean to allow whales to poop, so they have to hold it until they come up for air, and then they let fly, and do so abundantly. Now there's a crapload of iron at the surface. And the krill go nuts. It's krill enough for everybody. Without whale poop, they're screwed. Everybody's screwed. So we're back to just the climate change problem with the penguins.

Here's another oddity. There used to be plenty of free iron in the ocean. But when the first photosynthetic plants devised themselves, way back when, they pooped out oxygen. The oxygen attached itself to all the iron in the ocean and the resulting rust sank to the bottom until the iron was all used up. Pretty much all the iron we ever mine today comes from that original band of iron oxide on the ocean floor, from that first photosynthesis event. And when the rust settled, the free oxygen had no place to go but the atmosphere. That was called the Great Oxygenation Catastrophe because almost all the nascent life that had burgeoned in the absence of oxygen failed in its presence. It was a major extinction event--wiped out almost everything. That's what happens when something causes conditions to change drastically.

Here's another oddity. We're right in the middle of another major extinction event right now. Damn the luck, huh?

Thanks to Joan Campbell for pointing me in this direction.