Southern Bookman

Harper's Kevin Baker finds Green New Deal the best hope for American future

The Green New Deal offers the best chance for surviving climate change, Kevin Baker argues in a persuasive article in the May Harper's magazine.

Rather than the impractical, quixotic, absurd chimera painted by critics on the left and right, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's plan for a non-carbon economy outlines the most realistic course for the country's future, Baker says. While critics believe that half-measures can be taken, the Green New Deal expresses the truth that a total economic makeover is required. 

Baker turns to the Roosevelt New Deal for models of the full-scale action needed. Along with Depression-era Soil Conservation Service programs to restore dust bowl land ravaged by disastrous agricultural practices, Baker gives an extensive history of the Tennessee Valley Authority's transformation of poverty-stricken rural areas of Alabama and Tennessee.

Acknowledging that the TVA's damming of the Tennessee River looks environmentally destructive now, Baker makes a convincing case for a full-scale mobilization to end carbon emissions. Whether the TVA's massive electrification projects give the best model is debatable. Perhaps a proliferation of smaller projects would prove more effective.

While Baker ignores that World War II brought the biggest changes to the U.S. economy, his look back at Roosevelt's new deal illustrates that the United States once had the political will and social commitment to make major changes. While flawed, the Green New Deal offers a workable blueprint for that same level of unified action.

 

 

 

Widespread species extinctions threaten human existence, report warns

The dinosaurs were killed off by a meteor. Now, we are the meteor rapidly destroying life on Earth.

Human activity at its present rate will bring the extinction of a million plant and animal species, according to a U.N. report.

The extinctions are the largest in human history, the report found. Human life depends on the threatened ecosystems, the report warned.

While climate change exacerbates the loss of life, the primary causes come from human activity like deforestation, poaching, and overfishing.

Natural habitat is being lost at accelerating rates. In Thailand, rain forests are being turned into palm-oil plantations, devastating wildlife habitats. The death of coral reefs threatens marine diversity.

The report had a ray of hope. "Through transformative change, nature can still be conserved, restored and used sustainably," concluded Sir Robert Wilson, who led the research for the Intergovernmental Seience-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

Such a transformative change will also be required to reduce carbon emissions and lessen the devastation of global warming.

Those sounding the alarm about climate change and widespread species extinctions keep saying that humanity has time to take action. Instead, the world accelerates faster and faster toward disaster.

 

Good Friday, 2019, Heading Westward

On a stormy good Friday morning in Atlanta, I read John Donne's "Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward," as has been my custom for many years.

Wonderful to reopen the Norton Anthology of English Literature and rediscover Britain's literary treasures.

We're headed westward ourselves for a mini-family reunion and history-steeped weekend in Montgomery, Ala.

Other family members are on their way to Fort Worth to cheer the LSU gymnastics team on as they seek a national championship.

As we depart, here is an Easter message from George Hebert's "Easter Wings."

O let me rise

            As larks, harmoniously,

Black hole mission a model for effort required to fight climate change

That black hole image was great.

Now, scientists need to get busy to find a solution to global warming.

As the Event Horizon mission revealed the dark orb's photo from 55 million light years away,  the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that Alaska's March temperatures averaged 20 degrees higher than normal.

A high of 42 degees Farenheit, 30 degrees above the usual, was recorded on March 30 in Kotzebue, according to The New York Times.

Alaska's spring heat wave was the result of the Bering Sea losing its ice and the jet stream shifting to the south, the Times said, adding that the Arctic is experiencing more extreme temperature increases than any other region. That will bring more melting, and an escalating chain of climate change reactions.

If urgent action is not taken soon, climate change will reach its own event horizon, or point of no return.

The black hole image from the Messier 87 galaxy in the Virgo constellation emerged from a global network of telescopes, according to media reports. A young graduate student, Katie Bouman,  played a leading role in a team developing an algorithm to link the telescope data.

Such a concentrated global effort will be required to prevent the worst devastation from climate change.

But the Trump administration's climate change denial, support of fossil fuel industries and budget cuts to agencies like NOAA threaten humanity's future.

A sustained political, economic and scientific mobilization against climate change is needed or else our world will turn as desolate as a black hole swirling in space.

 

 

Elizabeth Kolbert investigates disappearance of Louisiana's coast

Louisiana loses a staggering amount of land to the Gulf of Mexico each hour. The disappearance of the state's coast is one of the world's most alarming environmental disasters.

Elizabeth Kolbert in a pessimistic article in the current New Yorker finds that control of the Mississippi River is the main cause of the state's rapid land loss.

Flood control and the need to keep the Mississippi from abandoning New Orleans and Baton Rouge mean that the river no longer spreads sediment to build up the state's delta, as it did for thousands of years. The oil industry's cutting of canals through swamps and marshland worsened the crisis.

Kolbert reports on likely futile attempts to counter the land loss through engineering efforts to artificially boost sediment in places like Plaquemines Parish, where seawater now covers large areas where homes and businesses once stood.

Along with Kolbert's reporting, two maps shock with the realization that much of southern Louisiana is gone forever, and that New Orleans, already sinking, will be threatened by the gulf in not too many years. One map shows the old familiar boot-shaped Louisiana. The other shows the state today, with shredded slivers of land remaining in places like Plaquemines and Terrebonne Parish.

Kolbert's Louisiana reporting updates that done by legendary New Yorker writer John McPhee, who in a 1987 article examined control of the Mississippi. In homage to McPhee, Kolbert visits a central focus of his writing, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Old River Control Structure 80 miles north of Baton Rouge.

The corps keeps 70 percent of the Mississippi's water flowing toward New Orleans and Baton Rouge. As Kolbert details, following McPhee, the Mississippi, seeking a shorter distance to the gulf, wants to shift west into the Atchafalya River's channel. If the Mississippi made its break, Louisiana's two major ports would be left dry.

While two engineering projects are under way to restore land in Plaquemines, the states' relentless loss of land won't stop unless river control is ended. New Orleans' economy would be devastated, but the city already seems doomed to sink into the sea.

Kolbert stands among the most pessimistic environmental writers, seeing human's alteration of nature as irreversible. She takes a broad view, citing the term "global change," rather than just changes in the climate.

With overpopulation, humans now outstrip the body weight of other vertebrates combined, she says. Along with rising species extinctions, she cites threats from humans' dominance of the globe: atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication (the spread of chemicals to waterways, causing algae blooms, etc.). "These are just some of the byproducts of our species' success," she says.

So much for the joys of baseball's opening day.

While GOP loons like Sen. Mike Lee mock the Green New Deal with claims such as that it would remove airplanes, that's the kind of decisive action needed if humans are to escape the worst of "global change." We might not be able to afford air transportation any longer.

Alas, Kolbert takes a dark view of humanity's prospects.

"At this point, it might be prudent to scale back our commitments and reduce our impacts. But there are so many of us - nearly eight billion - and we are stepped in so far, return seems impracticable."

Impracticable or nor, it's time for massive action.

 

 

A round of applause for Denis Diderot

Denis Diderot is having a moment in the literary world.

The 18th century theorist of the French Enlightenment is the subject of two new biographies, "Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely," by Andrew S. Curran (Other Press), and "Catherine & Diderot: The Empress, the Philosopher and the Fate of the Enlightenment," by Robert Zaretsky (Harvard University Press).

In recent weeks, positive reviews of the books have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, the New York Times Sunday Book Review, the New Republic and the New Yorker.

Diderot, a free-thinker, pornographer, journalist, sexual libertine and encyclopedia editor, enjoyed chatting about ideas with his longtime friend Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Paris coffee houses. The hero of rational thought suffered for his ideas; his writings against religion and the Catholic church landed him in prison. Another leading figure of the French Enlightenment, Voltaire, wrote letters that led to Diderot's release. He continued speaking out against the state and church's repression.

Not as much of an original thinker as Rousseau and Voltaire, Diderot was a synthesizer of ideas.  Diderot was famous for co-editing the mammoth Encyclopédie, a compendium of the era's knowledge. The work ran to 24 volumes, 72,000 articles and 3,000 illustrations. The best-seller allowed Diderot to escape his fraught freelance existence. Curran in his book looks at Diderot's influence in the development of scientific thought.

As an author, Diderot is mainly remembered for his philosophical treatise "Rambeau's Nephew," a dialogue about ideas, the freedom of thought, and human relationships. He also wrote a pornographic work narrated by women's sexual organs.

Toward the end of his eventful life, he served as an adviser to Russia's Catherine the Great.  Zaretsky examines how Diderot in the end failed to get Catherine to accept his ideas of enlightened rule. While keeping her iron control over the vast country, Catherine purchased Diderot's library and gave him a generous financial endowment.

The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik points out in his review that the Enlightenment's beneficial reputation has been tarnished. Revisionist historians now blame the movement for leading to totalitarianism and social control. In France, the Enlightenment was followed by the French Revolution and Napoleon's rule.

Diderot in the recent reviews is seen as a charming, colorful figure and a pioneer of social freedom. He was apparently an amorous adventurer rivaling Don Juan, and a tireless foe of oppression.

As the Western alliance fractures and truth is disparaged, it's heartening that Diderot's free-spirited life still receives homage.

 

 

Spring arrives on Valentine's day

On Valentine's morning, birds flocked outside my window.

English poets Geoffrey Chaucer, Michael Drayton and William Shakespeare wrote in their love poems that birds began mating on Valentine's Day. Even in that colder time, when winter seemed to last forever, birds arrived in mid-February, chirping songs of spring.

Now, with climate change, trees bloom several weeks earlier than 20 or 30 years ago. Trees in flower already line Atlanta's streets. Buds have broken out on our tulip tree that once bloomed the first week of March.

Covering the Georgia Legislature a few years ago, I never heard climate change mentioned. The legislators were busy killing a tax exemption for electric cars.

Nor is any climate change action being taken this session. Climate change denial prevails at the gold-plated Georgia Capitol. Savannah and Georgia's barrier islands will sink as seas rise, but not even a study committee has been formed.

Valentine's Day used to give relief from winter. Now, it marks the arrival of spring.

 

 

 

Green New Deal stirs conservative opposition

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey's "Green New Deal" has kicked over the conversatives' hornet nest.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial page Tuesday morning took aim at the Democratic progressives' plan, claiming that it is a pretext for governmental control of the economy. That echoed the loathsome columnist Ross Douthat, whose hold on New York Times op-ed space is a mystery.

New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait was correct in criticizing the plan as too expansive. It was a mistake to tie climate change policy to broader economic aims like universal Medicare. The Democratic Party needs a more targeted plan to battle climate change.

But the conservatives seem to believe that the country and world's carbon dependency can continue. Recent studies have concluded that the world has about 10 years to take action to prevent climate change's worst outcomes. To stop a catastrophic rise in temperatures, the world must make fundamental economic changes, shifting to renewable energy.

Economists like The New York Times' Paul Krugman say that the shift can be done without major economic disruptions, which sounds too optimistic. But the Wall Street Journal and Douthat want the world to keep speeding toward disaster.

Watching the lunar eclipse

Standing on my driveway in the cold, I watched the full moon disappear into the earth's shadow late Sunday night.

Nature's show gave a welcome respite from NFL exhaustion and the drumbeat of the news.

A few months before, I'd witnessed the solar eclipse on a hot afternoon from the nearby patio. The lunar event was much quieter, a lyric poem to the sun's grand opera.

Imperceptibly, the darkness spread across the moon's surface until a bright sliver remained along the edge, and I felt a sense of silent majesty, if not quite wonder.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Perhaps the Apocalypse will be televised

It's good to know we'll have plenty of "content" for the looming end of the world.

Upsetting fans who remember when Netflix was a cute little low-cost startup, the corporation announced a huge price increase for money to develop more original shows and movies. The NetFlix stock price also leaped.

The media monolith that began as a mail-order video service raised its monthly rates to fight off burgeoning competition in the streaming universe. Apple, Disney, Xfinity and others are now also developing original content.

It's already nearly impossible to keep up with all of the shows, movies, documentaries, podcasts and so on constantly flowing in the giant computer cloud.

Soon, people will have devices implanted into their brains for 24-hour streaming, even while sleeping. Virtual dreams, Paypal accepted.

The new world of self-driving cars will be equipped with constant content. Video images will flit across our refrigerators, ovens, computer screens.

As the hunger for content increases, incomes for writers, musicians and video makers plunge. Book and magazine reading declines. Newspapers disappear. Science and education sink. Climate news worsens. Democracy deterioriates, and migrants flee horrible crime and violence.

 Don't worry. We'll be streaming, if we can afford it after robots take our jobs. Each of us will get vouchers for Big Macs and Whoppers.