Southern Bookman

Democratic Party lurches toward disaster

It's been a beautiful autumn, heading to the political apocalypse.

The Democratic Party's panicking, scrambling to hold on to formerly safe House districts and governorships as the Republican tide rises, even after Jan. 6. GOP candidates who deny Joe Biden won the presidency aim to seize power over elections.

As time runs out before Tuesday's election, Bernie Sanders and others bemoan the Democrats' muddled messaging on the economy, abortion and climate change. Barack Obama, Sanders and Biden rush to bolster faltering Democratic campaigns after early voting has been going on for weeks.

Why didn't they take action months ago?  As Democrats launch their belated fire drill, the Republicans have convinced voters that the economy is horrible and crime rampant.

New York Times economics columnist Paul Krugman keeps assuring his readers that inflation is under control, employment stable, crime rates falling.

For many voters, reality doesn't match Krugman's ivory tower views.

Krugman has admitted he was wrong on inflation's rise. Further damaging Krugman's credibility, he claimed this week that inflation is under control just a day before the Fed further raised interest rates to cool rising prices.

It's not surprising that conservative Washington Post columnist George Will has turned against  Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, appealing to them this week not to seek re-election in 2024. Will in his column exposed Harris' alarming incoherence, citing several devastating quotes from public events. The Democratic Party needs a new generation of leaders.

Biden has even lost liberal Post columnist Eugene Robinson. In his Friday column, Robinson cited Biden's speech this week in which the president warned that the GOP threatens American democracy. While agreeing with Biden's assessment, Robinson pointed out that voters are more concerned with the economy, and suggested that Biden would have been more effective pushing his economic accomplishments.

As global carbon emissions soar unabated, the climate change-denying GOP surges. They plan to cut Social Security and Medicare, and cause political turmoil. They plan to cut aid for Ukraine, giving Putin the victory he yearns for. They wish to end American democracy.

The days are beautiful in the last days of the republic.

 

 

 

Mississippi River sinking to perilously low water levels

Mark Twain wouldn't recognize the Mississippi these days.

Twain's beloved river has fallen to its lowest water levels in years.

Huck and Jim now couldn't find enough water to float their raft. The river known for the devastating 1927 flood has turned docile.

A severe drought has brought the river's water levels so low that people can walk over dry land to an island in Illinois previously accessible only by boat. In Baton Rouge, a 19th century ship was discovered in the river's dried-up channel.

Shipping is imperiled from Minneapolis to St. Louis, Memphis, Vicksburg, Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Riverboat cruises are being delayed.

The U.S. Corps of Engineers keeps the river flowing to the ports of Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The river wants to cut a new channel to the west, which would abandon the port cities. Now Baton Rouge and New Orleans might see the river disappear anyway.

T.S. Eliot in "The Four Quartets" called the river a fierce brown god. It was serenaded as "Old Man River" by Paul Robeson in "Showboat." Jimmie Rodgers expressed the deep emotional ties to the river in "Miss the Mississippi and You." In the Civil War, the Confederacy's loss of the river signaled the Union's victory. Lewis and Clarke crossing the river opened the way to the American West. It was the backbone of the Louisiana Purchase.

Lake Mead, Salt Lake and western rivers are other essential American waterways that are disappearing. They can''t be replaced.

Returning to Mountain Way

I returned to Mountain Way Wednesday for the longest walk I've taken since undergoing knee surgery in early summer.

On a gorgeous autumn afternoon, my wife and I headed back to one of our favorite walking paths near our home.

Mountain Way, which runs off Wieuca Road, is a quiet street that has registered many changes in Buckhead through the years: housing construction booms and busts, politics, neighborhood preservation and improvements.

Bordered by Little Nancy Creek, Mountain Way passes through a valley between two ridges. When we first moved into the neighborhood, the road as its name suggested was a rustic preserve of trees and wildflowers in the middle of Atlanta. Then after years of neighborhood opposition, Ga. 400 tore through the area, desecrating Mountain Way's beauty with a towering overpass, massive supporting columns and a sloping concrete embankment.

In recent years, civic leaders have sought to heal the wound by developing Mountain Way Common. The not yet completed park offers sidewalks and decorative planters, a walking trail along Little Nancy Creek leading to a pedestrian bridge and a sculptured swing beneath the overpass.

Decorative picnic tables have been set up in a vacant lot across from the park, and Livable Buckhead installed beehives and flowers.

Mountain contains an interesting mix of futuristic homes, 1950s ranches and one remaining rustic cabin from the days when the area was a weekend getaway for wealthy Atlantans. At a huge LA-styled home where construction was halted for years, joyful workers completed a driveway. We wondered if the huge home would at last be finished for someone to live there.

Sitting on the bright red swing designed by artist Robert Proctor, we heard MARTA trains and cars pass by high above us. New beauty rises from the ruins of the past. After a few reflective moments, we headed for home.

 

Pop superstar Carole King calls for Biden to ban logging in national forests

Superstar singer and songwriter Carole King has used her rock and roll fame to fight for environmental action.

In a passionate op-ed article in The New York Times Friday, King called for President Biden to stop logging in the nation's national forests. Dispelling the myth of rock-star self-indulgence, King wrote with the emotive power of her long string of hits.

The Inflation Reduction Act's programs to promote the growth of trees and protect private and public forests include a survey of the country's old-growth forests, to be completed by next April.

King argued that the country can't wait that long, calling for Biden to immediately ban logging on national forests. Decrying the  loss of trees and the environmental damage from logging operations, she pointed out that forests in storing carbon are a natural defense against climate change.

Such an exective order would undoubtedly bring Biden condemnation from the GOP.  But King makes a convincing case that preservation of the national forests is urgent.

King in the article recalls how she fled the hedonistic Los Angeles lifestyle to live in rural Idaho. At age 80, with a deep reverence for the environment, she's fighting to preserve the national forests for future generations. 

 

 

 

 

Republicans' climate change denial threatens humanity

Not one Republican senator voted for the United States' first significant climate change legislation.

If anyone's left to write history, the GOP senators will be remembered like the good Germans who ignored Hitler and the Holocaust.

I thought at least Utah Sen. Mitt Romney would vote for the Democratic bill that seeks to reduce carbon emissions by boosting solar energy and electric vehicles. But Romney joined with Mitch McConnell's Republican goose-steppers.

While liberal pundits and progressives cheer the legislation, which is expected to pass the House this week and go to President Biden, environmentalists are criticizing the bill for concessions to the fossil-fuel industry, such as allowing the completion of a pipeline in Sen. Joe Manchin's West Virginia.

The legislation, two or three decades too late, will do too little to cut emissions and keep temperatures from soaring to unsustainable levels.

While environmentalists have long called for a carbon tax, the legislation instead calls for solar-power and electric vehicle incentives. The fossil fuel industry has reluctantly come to support a carbon tax, which wouldn't cost American families, but it remains political poison, especially to the GOP.

Once, Republicans recognized the threat of climate change. In George W Bush's administration, Lindsay Graham and John McCain were proponents of carbon offset credit swaps. But the GOP succumbed to oil industry money, and now Graham is among the senators who deny climate change.

The United States must take more immediate and extensive climate change action. The planet's future depends on the Democratic Party increasing its control over the House and Senate in the midterm elections.  A Republican Congress will sound the death knell for human civilization.

Monarch Butterfly declared an endangered species

The Monarch Butterfly's disappearance is one of the saddest stories of the "insect apocalypse."

Once a common sight in American yards and byways, the orange and black monarchs have been declining for years.

Moving closer to extinction, the monarchs were declared "endangered" by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Thursday. The organization also placed the monarchs on its "red list" of threatened species, according to the Associated Press.

The Monarch Butterfly population in North America has fallen between 22 percent and 72 percent over the last decade, depending on the measurement method, the group said. The decline has been even more precipitous in recent years, according to some estimates.

Like honeybees and fireflies, the monarchs have all but vanished from our yards. The appearance of one or two brings a moment of melancholy wonder.

In North America, millions of the creatures participate in the longest migration of any insect species, from the mountains of central Mexico to Canada and back again, breeding new generations along the way.

The insects lay their eggs on milkweed, which has been devastated by American agriculture's increased use of pesticides and herbicides. Climate change has also hastened the insects’ demise.

Concerned homeowners can plant milkweed in their back yards to attract the butterfly, but a more massive campaign is required.

While the Mexican government set up a refuge for the butterflies, they won't be saved unless American agriculture makes significant changes.

So far, the insects have not been placed on the endangered species list under the American Endangered Species Act. That's a necessary next step in the campaign to preserve the beautiful flashes of color.

The monarchs are among thousands of species threatened by extinction as humans seize control of more and more of the Earth. Soon, humans will be alone, also an endangered species.

 

 

 

 

52nd anniversary of Earth Day raises urgency of climate change action

Bursting with spring beauty, LSU celebrated the first Earth Day in 1970.

Like Vietnam Moratorium Day six months before, also held on the Ole War Skule's Parade Grounds, Earth Day changed my worldview.

A freshman carrying out a misguided passive-aggressive protest against my ROTC class and close to losing my student draft deferment, I wandered through the Earth Day exhibits, instantly turning into an environmentalist.

Millions across the globe marked the event, protesting air pollution, species extinction and the destruction of the ozone layer. Climate change was an unknown concept, outside of a few academic research offices.

The Vietnam War still raged, dividing the country. But the environmental movement received nearly universal support, even in the Republican Party. The Environmental Protection Agency was created during the Nixon Administration, and action was taken to preserve the ozone layer.

That momentum waned in succeeding years, and the fossil fuel industry criminally impeded efforts to fight climate change. The world recently has begun action to reduce carbon emissions that should have been taken years ago.

The Biden administration, ambushed by rising gas prices and the Ukrainian invasion, recently retreated from its promises to move toward solar and wind energy. The climate change-denying Republican Party's culture war appears on course to retake the Congress and presidency.

On Earth Day's 52nd anniversary, the Earth is in greater peril than ever.

 

Apocalypse arriving soon if carbon emissions not slashed, U.N. panel warns

Cassandra keeps on singing.

In its latest apocalyptic alarm, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that the Earth will reach the point of no return in eight years.

As emissions soar higher and higher, the world is rapidly burning through its "carbon budget" for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees celsius over pre-industrial temperatures, according to a Washington Post article.

The world can release just 500 more megatons of carbon to have any hope of meeting that threshold set at the Paris Climate Summit. At the present rate, the budget will be blown in less than a decade.

Failure to slash emissions will result in the earth heating to 3.2 degrees Celsius, or 5.8 degrees Farenheit, by the end of this century.

That'll make most of the world uninhabitable.

Monday's report was the third warning issued recently by the panel.  The New York Times ran a page-one article on the report, but the panel's in-depth assessments  by scientists from across the globe have yet to generate urgency among world leaders, especially developed countries.

Russia's massacre of Ukraine has led to a renewed commitment to oil and gas drilling more than a green economy. Opposition from Joe Manchin, the senator from coal, killed President Biden's climate-change plan. With gas prices rising, Biden abandoned reducing emissions by announcing  the release of oil from strategic reserves.

The Ukranian disaster is horrifying. Climate change is more so.

Discovering Antonio Carlos Jobim's "The Waters of March"

The red and white azaleas bloom as another March hastens away.

Those ancient colors of war and love arrive earlier now, waning in early April, once their triumphant moment.

This March, I discovered a new song that expresses the month's jumble of sunshine, wind, rain and flowers.

Melancholy at the end of the haunting, if flawed, Norwegian film "The Worst Person in the World," I was lifted out of my reverie by a Bossa Nova melody and lyrics charged with imagery. The song riveted me as the closing credits rolled across the screen.

Google research revealed the song was "Aguas de Marco,"  or "Waters of March," written by the Brazilian songwriter Antonio Carlos Jobim, who wrote one of my all-time favorite songs, "The Girl From Ipanema."

Art Garfunkel performed "The Worst Person in the World" version, one of the songs on a solo album Garfunkel recorded after the breakup of Simon and Garfunkel. His lilting voice and bemused/bewildered air summed up the season's confused mellowness.

Later, I discovered a more introspective version by Susannah McCorkle, the jazz singer who ended her own life.

For years, I've listened each March to Ella Fitzgerald's definitive recording of "These Foolish Things Remind Me of You," with its lines "The winds of March that make my heart a dancer."

"Aquas de Marco" will enrich that tradition.

"The Waters of March"

 

A stick, a stone, it's the end of the road
It's the rest of a stump, it's a little alone
It's a sliver of glass, it is life, it's the sun
It is night, it is death, it's a trap, it's a gun

The oak when it blooms, a fox in the brush
A knot in the wood, the song of a thrush
The wood of the wind, a cliff, a fall
A scratch, a lump, it is nothing at all

It's the wind blowing free, it's the end of the slope
It's a beam, it's a void, it's a hunch, it's a hope
And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It's the end of the strain, it's the joy in your heart

The foot, the ground, the flesh and the bone
The beat of the road, a slingshot's stone
A fish, a flash, a silvery glow
A fight, a bet, the flange of a bow
The bed of the well, the end of the line
The dismay in the face, it's a loss, it's a find

A spear, a spike, a point, a nail
A drip, a drop, the end of the tale
A truckload of bricks in the soft morning light
The sound of a gun in the dead of the night

A mile, a must, a thrust, a bump,
It's a girl, it's a rhyme, it's a cold, it's the mumps
The plan of the house, the body in bed
And the car that got stuck, it's the mud, it's the mud

A float, a drift, a flight, a wing
A hank, a quail, the promise of spring
And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It's the promise of life, it's the joy in your heart

A snake, a stick, it is John, it is Joe
It's a thorn on your hand and a cut in your toe
A point, a grain, a bee, a bite
A blink, a buzzard, a sudden stroke of night

A pin, a needle, a sting, a pain
A snail, a riddle, a wasp or a stain
A pass in the mountains, a horse and a mule
In the distance the shelves rode three shadows of blue
And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It's the promise of life in your heart, in your heart

A stick, a stone, the end of the road
The rest of a stump, a lonesome road
A sliver of glass, a life, the sun
A knife, a death, the end of the run
And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It's the end of all strain, it's the joy in your heart

Amazon Rainforest headed for extinction, according to report

The news articles all agree that the Amazon Rainforest is near a "tipping point."

That's when the world's lungs will hit code red. Tipping point seems a droll term to describe the impending death of the rainforest.

The Amazon’s demise is one of the many threats to humanity caused by climate change. Some enterprising journalist should compile a summation of all of them.

A recent avalanche of doomsday climate-change alarms agree that emissions must be radically reduced if humankind has any hope of avoiding extreme devastation.

When the Amazon’s point of no return arrives in the next few decades, the rainforest's disappearance into savannah will be irreversible, according to a new study.

Instead of absorbing carbon, the changing rainforest will release tons of greenhouse gases  into the atmosphere. The grasslands replacing the forest will no longer act as a carbon "sink."

Based on monthly satellite observations from 1991 to 2016, 75 percent of the rainforest has lost the ability to recover from drought, fire, deforestation and climate change, according to the study published in Nature Climate Change. The research was carried out by the University of Exeter, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Technical University of Munich, according to a BBC report.

The Amazon’s loss of resilience is higher near areas of deforestation for agriculture, encouraged by the Brazilian dictator Jair Bolsonaro.

Poet Joyce Kilmer in a much ridiculed poem said that only God can make a tree.

Only God, or nature, can make a rainforest. Once it's gone, it's lost forever. And the world will shuffle closer to doom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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