Too Big to Fail: Ecological Ignorance and Economic Collapse

Too Big to Fail: Ecological Ignorance and Collapse

The era of faster/bigger/cheaper/more is coming to an end as we have overloaded the earth's carrying capacity and are now experiencing the consequences. If we are going to find ways of living sustainably and surviving our own self-destructive behaviors, we will have to become ecologically literate and then practice what we learn. Our fixation on growth has to go. In this essay, I offer a perspective on growth that is unconventional but undeniable - all complex adaptive systems go through phases, from growth to consolidation to collapse and then regeneration. So, as Tom Englehardt says in his introduction, let's not recover from the collapse of the economy, let's regenerate. Not more of the same, but more sane.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175061

After the Green Economy, Green Security: How to Build Resilient Communities in a Chaotic World

After the Green Economy, Green Security: How to Build Resilient Communities in a Chaotic World

A friend who has advocated green jobs and a green economy for several years said he felt a bit disoriented when President Obama endorsed his vision in his own agenda for the nation's future. The greening of the economy was the cutting edge, he said, so where do we go next? This essay is my answer.

As the recent swine flu outbreak hinted, global commerce could be shut down in a global pandemic and, if so, we will quickly learn that our food and energy come from far away. Pandemics are just one possible disruption on a planet troubled by climate chaos and ecological collapse. Security in the face of those inevitable challenges and the chaos that will follow will be redefined as a matter of local resilience. This theme is a continuation of the emphasis on resilience found in an earlier essay, "Diesel-Driven Bee Slums and Impotent Turkeys," found below.

This essay became a chapter in the book How the West Was Warmed: Responding to Climate Change in the Rockies edited by Beth Conover who assisted John Hickenlooper (mayor of Denver, governor of Colorado) on environmental issues. The link is to the piece as it first appeared at tomdispatch.com that also includes my introduction to the essay.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175039/chip_ward_the_department_of_homegrown_security

The Evolution of John McCain: Why He Picked Sarah Palin, Carbon Queen

Although Sarah Palin is the specific subject of this essay, written in the heat of the presidential campaign, the broader topic is the deep anti-environmental bias of fundamentalist Christian zealots like Ms. Palin. It can be read as a companion to an earlier essay on Bush's "Holy War" on nature (see below). Again, does man have "dominion" over nature or are we embedded in the natural/physical world as that world is also embedded within us? Context matters.

The essay went far and wide across the Internet. The essay appeared first at tomdispatch.com. The link below is to a site called "AfterDowning Street" that frequently reprints my work.

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/36166

Diesel-Driven Bee Slums and Impotent Turkeys: The Case for Resilience

What if the organizing principle of Western Civilization - efficiency -- is a big misunderstanding? Short-term efficiency - maximizing output and minimizing input over the next quarter - may bring us faster, bigger, and more for awhile, but is ultimately unsustainable and leads too often to catastrophe. Why not think about long-term resilience instead?

This essay began when I noticed how few bees appeared in the spring and talked to friends across the country who noticed the same alarming absence. As I looked into what happened to the bees, I discovered that bee-keeping had become an industry, that we humans have seized a key ecological service - pollination - and reshaped it to be more convenient and profitable. The consequences have been dire.

Michael Pollan, a writer I greatly admire, read this and I almost got a book deal because of his interest. I pulled the plug on that project when it became clear I couldn't do it my way. The link to the essay is from a version that appeared originally at Tomdispatch.com.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174826/chip_ward_how_efficiency_maximizes_catastrophe

What They Didn't Teach Us in Library School: The Public Library as an Asylum for the Homeless

This essay made more of an impact than any other I have written. A shorter version appeared in the L A Times when the full version appeared at tomdispatch.com. From there it was re-published widely across the World Wide Web, reprinted in paper format here and there (including in Germany), and is widely cited and debated. I often do radio interviews after my essays are published - this one got me on "Talk of the Nation" on NPR. Martin Sheen quoted it in a speech and his son, actor-director Emilio Estevez, bought film rights and is working on a script for a movie based on the essay and related journal entires I gave him. I was offered book deals to write more on this and turned them down.

The purpose of writing the essay was to get closure by bearing witness to what I had experienced and learned. I wrote it while staying at the Mesa Refuge in Pt. Reyes as a guest of Peter Barnes. I didn't allow it to get published until I retired from my library career because I didn't want my colleagues to deal with any more controversy than I already created as an environmental advocate/activist. The names of homeless library users were changed to protect privacy.

The genesis of this one was very personal. As Asst. Director of the Salt Lake City Public Library, I dealt with chronically homeless people on a daily basis for six years. I learned a lot about the plight of the homeless and was frustrated that so many compassionate and well-informed friends knew so little about homelessness, namely that there are working poor people who become temporarily homeless and then there are chronically homeless people who live more or less permanently on the street. In my experience, most of those people are untreated mentally ill. Casting them out and onto the street is not only immoral, it is excedingly expensive and ineffective public policy.

The original title was "Outcasts Inside." It was often published as "How the Library Became the Heartbreak Hotel," Tom's over-title in the link below. I have linked it to the tomdispatch.com version where it originally appeared. My thanks to Tom Englehardt, legendary editor and personal mentor, for his help on making this one happen.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174799/ward_how_the_public_library_became_heartbreak_hotel

Faux Nuke Test - Divine Strake

Pentagon Fireworks Deferred: Divine Strake, Hellish Repercussions

Adding insult to injury, the Pentagon planned to blow up at the Nevada Test Site enough explosives to imitate a small nuclear weapon and send a huge mushroom cloud of unknown chemicals and possibly radioactive dirt upwind from American citizens who have lived downwind before. In the 50's and 60's, more than a hundred open air tests of atomic/nuclear weapons were conducted in Nevada and the whole nation got dosed with radioactive fallout. Subsequent "underground" tests leaked plenty more radioactive fallout. People in Utah got the worst of it and many also got sick and died. I described this in my first book, Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West. The latest test, designed to imitate a new class of "bunker-buster" nuke weapons the military wanted to create, was called off after considerable protest. The essay is still relevant even though the military seems to have surrendered its plan to make mini-nukes because it reveals a mindset that still exists and an infrastructure that still exists.

This one, as usual, appeared at topmdispatch.com and then went wide and far. This link is to a web site that republishes most of my essays.

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/27480.html

Uranium Frenzy

Big Bad Boom: Radioactive Deja Vu in the American West

This one is actually fairly recent but I chose to group it with others about the nuclear industry. Uranium, like oil, is a finite resource and as the nuclear industry expands, it becomes more precious. The American West has seen a rush of oil and gas development and uranium may be next. Even if the market for our uranium stalls, the exploration process alone is ecologically damaging as explained in this essay. The link is to the original tomdispatch.com version.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174946/chip_ward_uranium_frenzy_in_the_west

The Holy War on Nature

Left Behind: Bush's Holy War on Nature

This essay may seem dated as the first part describes the awful, even hostile, environmental record of the Bush adminsitration, but it is also about the theological/cultural underpinnings of those policies. The Republican base today still shares those fundamental beliefs, and so it is still current in that way. It found a wide-ranging audience on the Internet and obviously struck a nerve.

I have often said that environmental issues are really about democracy, and that the health and vitality of one's physical/natural environment are directly related to the health and vitality of one's civic environment. That's true. To be effective, environmental advocates must build a democratic culture so that the decisions we make about what we allow into our air, water, and soil - decisions that get translated into flesh, blood, bone, and experience - are made in ways that are open, inclusive, informed, and accountable. But in a deeper sense, these issues are also cultural. Do you believe we humans were given dominion over creation to use as we please, or do you see humans embedded in nature as nature is embedded in us?

The essay first appeared at tomdispatch.com but the link is to the essay as it appeared at The Nation. http://www.thenation.com/article/left-behind-bushs-holy-war-nature

Rewilding America

Rewilding America: The Froggy Love-Tunnel Vision Quest

As Tom writes in his introduction, included in the link below, this essay could be the Cliff Notes to my book Hope's Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land. The book tells the story of the development of a new scientific school of thought called conservation biology, and of the visionary thinkers who are trying to translate its ecological insights and principles into real world projects by planning continental scale conservation projects over a hundred year time span. Tom asked me to envision America a hundred years hence if their efforts succeed, then write about where we are today and how far we have to go. The link is to the original version as it appeared at tomdispatch.com

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/1435/ward_on_froggy_love_tunnels_and_rewilding_a_continent

"It's Not Just Eskimos in Bikinis"

"It's Not Just Eskimos in Bikinis: Climate Helter-Skeltor in the Lower 48"

This early essay was published at Tomdispatch.com after Tom Englehardt asked me to look at climate chaos outside the Arctic areas where it gets the most attention. It is about how timing in ecological relationships is so important. Hibernators have to wake up when the food is ready for them to eat, pollinators need to be there when the flower blooms, and migrators have to get where they are going when their food is also there on time. Many species are moving north or moving up in altitude as their traditional habitats grow warmer. These kinds of shifts in nature happen all the time but in much longer time frames in the past than today. Whether speices can adapt new behaviors and adjust so quickly is the key question. Let's hope extinction is not the answer.

This is the version that appears at Common Dreams. http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0606-34.htm

"From Charismatic Carnivores to Slithery Serpents"

And RECOMMENDED BOOKS AND ESSAYS

"From Charismatic Carnivores to Slithery Serpents: How Predation Keeps Nature Whole"

This is another early essay published at Tomdispatch.com. It touches hard on a subject I wrote about in my book Hope's Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land - the key role that large predators like wolves and lions and bears play in regulating food webs and keeping the ecosystems they serve healthy.

Again, it was published widely across the Internet as well as in Utah's Catalyst Magazine. The version posted here is from Alternet.org, a favorite place of mine for finding provocative stories and perspectives.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/20639?page=entire

BOOKS AND ESSAYS I RECOMMEND:

"The mental habit of the West is one in which being is posited as a being and called God; in which process is arrested in substyance and called material reality; and in which mind is the made into an organism without and environment and called the self." William Irwin Thompson

One of the primary reasons we damage the very ecosystems that sustain our lives is that we tend to think of the world as a storehouse of commodities rather than a web of communities that is complex and dynamic. Learning how systems behave is a key to changing our destructive, ultimately self-destructive, behaviors. Donella Meadows "Places to Intervene in a System" is a good summary of a "systems thinking" approach to the world (Google the title and you can find summaries on the web). Here is a link to her classic essay"Dancing with Systems" that is easier to read and assimilate. http://www. sustainer.org/pubs/Dancing/html. Roger Lewin's Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos is a good introduction to "complexity science." Try also James Gleick's book Chaos: Making a New Science.

Books and essays on deep ecology can also be useful for challenging assumptions and seeing the world through a biocentric rather than a contemporary anthropocentric perspective (Google and explore).

Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World by Brian Walker and David Salt is a good introduction to resilience thinking, another new perspective on how the world works. It is easier than most books on the subject but not that easy. Unfortunately, I do not know of a good book on the topic for lay readers.

Two books that helped me escape my culturally inherited mechanistic/linear worldview were Fritjof Capra's The Turning Point and Morris Berman's The Re-Enchantment of the World. Both seem rather dated to me now and both authors have written newer books, especially Capra, to explain a way of seeing the world that incorporates systems thinking, complexity science, chaos theory, and ecology. But both books are a good place to begin if you sense that the way life unfolds on our planet is not only more complex than we thought, but perhaps more complex than we can think. The complexity/biocentric way of seeing and being in the world is also a humbling and awesome experience. Hubris has always been an underlying drive of industrial civilization - consider the books I am suggesting as at least an healthy antidote to that.

A book that profoundly changed my way of seeing the world is Overshoot by William Catton. An excellent summary is at a web site I highly recommend even though it has been discontinued, Rachel's Democracy & Health News at http://www.rachel.org . The archives are still very valuable. Type in 998 in the search box and you'll get the summary of Catton's main point, that we have drastically overshot the carrying capacities of the earth and are stealing from the future. According to Catton's thesis, living in unsustainable relationship to the planet is not only self-destructive and foolish, it is immoral since we are condemning future generations to dire struggle for the basics (*water, soil, energy) that we will not leave them.

Let's get practical - what do we do about our destructive habits? If you go to the same web site above, http://www.rachel.org , you can also find "What We Must Do" by Peter Montague. Peter has been at the forefront of the precautionary principle and Rachel's (named after famous environmentalist Rachel Carson) is his web site. His final essay is a great summary of the principles and criteria for ecologically sustainable policies and law.

When I wrote Canaries on the Rim, I hoped it would be an introduction to more thorough books on the subject of how the closestr link we have with the natural/physical realm is our own flesh and blood. Sandra Steingraber helped me understand the ways that the chemicals our industrial world produces cross biological boundaries and make us sick and vulnerable. Her books are Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment and Having Faith: An Ecologists Journey to Motherhood. Other authors who write well on pollution/health issues are Joe Thornton, Mary O'Brien, and Carolyn Raffensperger.

Of course, our dependenc on thousands of synthetic chemicals and our production of toxic wastes can't be separated from our constant and ever-accelerating drive for more stuff. A recent book that makes an excellent case for why we must move from the prevailing philosophy of "more is better" and the assumption that unlimited growth is possible is Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben. An author who also makes a compelling case for being a member of a community rather than a mere consumer is Wendell Berry. Google his essays or go to Amazon.com to get summaries of his books.

Food, of course is central to how environment and body mix. Eating, says Michael Pollan is an ecological act. His two books, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto are highly readable and enlightening. My friend Claire Hope Cummings has written an excellent book, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds.

Some folks who have concluded that our economy is unworkable and will be brought down by unrelenting greed, materialism, the end of cheap oil, and the disturbances of rapid and unpredictable climate change. Civilization as we know it will collapse and that's inevitable. the goal, they say, is a "long descent" (Google John Michael Greer) or "transition" to a new way of living in the world. Two recent articles describing this movement are "The End is Near! (Yay!)" by Jon Mooallem in a recent New York Times essay at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19town-t.html . Another essay "The Transition Initiative" by Jay Griffiths describes the same movement and can be found in the July/August, 2009, issue of Orion Magazine at http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4792

Another hopeful slant on the crises we are enduring, is Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest: How the Larget Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming. Hawken's recent commencement address, "Healing or Stealing?" is also worth reading and can be found at http://www.up.edu/commencement/default.aspx?cid=9456

Rebecca Solnit is a friend and mentor. When I was writing Hope's Horizon, she was writing Hope in the Dark: Untold Stories, Wild Possibilities, a book I often recommend to those who feel overwhelmed by all the bad news. Rebecca and I referred to ourselves as the "hope posse." Her most recent book is A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, another glimmer of hope in a darkening landscape.

Back to a more philosophical slant, two books I liked for an inspirational understanding of my place in the cosmos are The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World by David Abram and The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature by David Suzuki.

Other favoritre authors and formative authors in my mind are William Irwin Thompson, Wendell Berry, Fritjof Capra, Theodore Roszak, Morris Berman, Susan Griffin, Paul Shepard, Jerry Mander, and Chellis Glendinning.

More recently, I read anything by Bill McKibben, Mike Davis, Rebecca Solnit, Tom Englehardt, Tim Flannery, Jonathan Rowe, Peter Barnes, Derek Jensen, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Steve Trimble, Terry Tempest Williams, Amy Irvine, and Jared Diamond to name just a few of the great writers now helping us through the maze of disconnection, dysfunction, and misunderstanding.

Home, Home on the (Radioactive) Range

"Home, Home on the (Radioactive) Range"

Shortly after my book Hope's Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land was published, Tom Englehardt published this essay, "Home, Home on the (Radioactive) Range," at his web site, Tomdispatch.com. Tom is a friend and mentor, a well-respected editor, and a incisive commentator on all things political. I met Tom through Jonathan Cobb of Island Press who edited Hope's Horizon. In fact, Tom is largely responsible for coming up with the title that went through many changes. Tom and Jonathan are close friends.

The essay can be read as a kind of update on struggles and campaigns to keep Utah from becoming a radioactive waste dump that I described in Hope's Horizon and in my earlier book Canaries on the Rim. I think this essay was my first foray into the World Wide Web.

The essay was republished at many web sites, including Common Dreams. The link to that iteration of the essay is at http://www.commondreams.org/scriptfiles/views03/1215-07.htm