“Some of them were dreamers, some of them were fools, and for some of them it was only the moment that mattered.
Some of them were angry
At the way the earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power
And they struggled to protect her from them
Only to be confused
By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour.”
Jackson Brown – Before The Deluge
In 2013, Canadian environmental leader David Suzuki wrote, “Environmentalism has failed”. I chastised him in a post at that time. But now, finally, I agree.
“Many of the battles that we fought 30 or 35 years ago, that we celebrated as enormous successes . . . Thirty-five years later, the same damn battles have started again. That’s where I think we failed,” Suzuki says. “We fundamentally failed to use those battles to get that awareness, to shift the paradigm. And that’s been the failure of environmentalism.”
The loss of this Presidential election and the fall of the Senate and the Supreme Court means a group of far right wing Christian Nationalist politicians are about to enact the playbook of Project 2025. It will kill any chance of reaching international goals for slowing global warming. They plan to pack the courts with right wing ideologues. They are putting anti-science people in charge of our scientific crown jewels. They are planning on defunding or dismantling our federal agencies that protect our water, air and soil. We are heading into uncharted territory with a madman as captain of the ship, icebergs ahead and a crew that is pouring it on while stuffing their pockets with their profits, as we all speed towards disaster. Some are even building spaceships on the side to take them away permanently and leave us to perish here on our own.
The people who voted for him want simple solutions to simple problems they face, the cost of food, gas, electricity and housing. Germans and Italians did too when they voted in Mussolini in the 20s and accepted the Nazi takeover of Germany in ’32. Twenty years later Mussolini was hanging upside down with his throat cut and Hitler committed suicide in the ruins of his capital with tens of millions dead. What fate awaits us and our insane leaders is about to be played out in real time. It’s no time for trying to restore a river, just so the logging industry can clearcut all the forests around it. Restoration work has been an ongoing palliative for those unwilling to continue to fight for protection. Now we will see the price we pay for not getting to the core of the issues facing us.
The hope of fighting for environmental protection is over and by the time we have another opportunity to fix it, only lifeboats will be available.
This blog has attempted to document the local efforts to protect our Peninsula from the greed that drives those who would pillage it for profit. But it’s time to admit defeat, with the national narrative now driven by Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, and the Heritage Foundation. Then there is the local narrative of the businesses this blog has called out for their greenwashing while they destroy our habitat. They filled our local environmental entities while the members sat by and did nothing. They now will be given carte blanche to plunder our shores. It’s clear we need a different set of strategies, tactics and leaders. Our west coast “Blue Wall” will not hold against a sea change in national laws and the packing of our court systems like every dictator does around the world. Make no mistake, the Republicans intend to continue to do just that. We will have nowhere to turn to sue for protection.
I don’t blame the ill informed voters who voted for Trump. The rise of AirBnB and the notion of turning our homes into investments for quick profit has left an entire generation of people unable to afford housing, from Port Townsend to Barcelona. This was allowed by both Democrats and Republicans, socialists and nationalists everywhere and we have sat back and witnessed this happening. Our schools have been gutted by not teaching democracy since the 1970s, a tactic outlined first by Justice Rehnquist when he was working for Nixon. The current fad of attacking any teacher who attempts to teach anything the right or the left find offensive has silenced many. The insanity of the mobs is always about righteousness. What we witnessed in colleges this year with the Gaza protests was more of this insanity. All of this behavior was allowed by Democrats, Republicans and school administrators with no real consequences for anyone.
Our political leaders of both parties raced to offshore industries in the 1990s to the lowest cost country possible, cheered on by the MBA schools. What happened to the people all over this country that watched their jobs vanish? This year, the Democratic leadership and their political consultants failed to convince those voters of the turnaround to the economy that they created since they took office during a pandemic fiasco made worse by Trump’s ignorance. “It is the economy, stupid”, as James Carville & Bill Clinton famously stated. And then there is the raw, unsettling fact that many Americans are racist and or misogynistic at their core.
Add to that vile mix, Biden’s inability to see his own failings after promising to be a one term President, like many elderly men in power, created a fire drill at the last moment, rather than an orderly attempt to find the candidate whom the people wanted. Maybe it would have been Kamala. Maybe not. Kamala did her best, but look towards those political consultants who told her to avoid discussions of the issues like the border and directly confronting the pocketbook issues of the lower middle classes, instead of some future “pie in the sky by and by” dream of tax breaks or home loans. As stated by numerous “man in the street” interviews this year, people are living paycheck to paycheck in most of the places that shifted from Trump to Biden and back to Trump. They are looking for help. They will abandon any politician who doesn’t give it to them.
We now head into a world where there will be no protection or FEMA for the vulnerable from the increasingly powerful weather patterns that have created hurricanes like we have witnessed in the Southeast US, the massive fires in the west, or the heat waves that grow stronger every year. They will be kept in ignorance of the science until it literally falls on their heads. With America’s leadership and legal system gone, and China, Russia and India plunging ahead with no guardrails towards unprecedented global warming, I just don’t see a way forward that makes sense.
An example is fossil fuels. While so many of us have called for the move to get us off of fossil fuels to save the planet, the ugly reality is that under Biden, we have continued to ramp up fossil fuel drilling and use. The right wing media said Harris would end fracking, especially in Pennsylvania. But she and Biden had accelerated it. Trump plans to open the drilling even further and transfer our public lands to the plunderers.
My job here is done. The news is bad, going to get worse and I don’t want to simply be another news outlet reporting on the vultures picking over the corpse of the planet. I think the time has come to fight for saving whatever it is we are going to save of this Democracy, if it is even possible to save it. I sincerely hope it is, but I think the next four years will be the moment of truth. If I find anything of a positive nature, I’ll post here for you, but I don’t expect to be doing much of that going forward. I’ll leave the blog up for historical purposes. Something to remind future generations, that we did really try, but failed.
The thing to remember is the planet really doesn’t care about us. It was functioning fine for billions of years before we showed up, and will continue long after we have gone and our legacy of destruction is just a vein of rock wedged between two other layers. Our job was simply to understand the environment and work with it to protect ourselves from the worst of its power. We have failed. In the meantime, gather the tools needed to survive what’s ahead, take care of your friends and loved ones, and resist the fascists who are about to take over, or leave the country. I really can’t blame one for abandoning this very unUnited States to its fate. Hopefully we will avoid ending like Rome, thrown into a dark age of religious fanaticism. But the Barbarians are at the gates and they are our own people. Unfortunately, this time, there is no place on the planet left to hide. To those who are about to undertake the final destruction of our environment to benefit “the economy”, let me remind you, “The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment. No environment, no economy.”
Lastly, as Douglas Adams so eloquently said, “Thanks for the fish.”
Over and out.
Filed under: Climate Change, Global Warming, Olympic Peninsula |
Al, I share your grief and join in the the collective loss and mourning of this election. But grief also needs to be a catharsis, here a realization of the power of your long advocacy. In this political crash, there is opportunity for new growth like all ecosystem resilience. Here, on the Olympics, on the Skagit, on all the “ish” rivers and the Salish Sea, local actions continue and are vital pockets that renew by example now and in a political future. No doubt PFPS ideals have been pushed underground but mycelium-like will again send up fruiting bodies to inspire and renew, overwhelming temporary disturbance.
Pat
Thanks, Pat appreciate your input. I hopefully will be back to reporting on environmental news once we’ve dealt with the impending national crisis of having Trump president.
Very well expressed and your final paragraph about the earth is spot on. George Carlin once made fun of all the calls to “save the earth,” observing that the planet would be just fine, its humans who need saving. Sadly, I can find little wrong with your [sad, but accurate] analysis.
One minor correction: Biden and Harris did not accelerate “fracking”, by which I presume you mean oil & gas development, they simply did nothing to slow or stop it. And, yes, the Republicans are talking out of their behinds when they claim the current administration has seriously harmed our energy security. As your graph correctly illustrates, we are producing oil at an all time high.
Thanks, Matt. I think your comments are right on the money. Our disagreement on the minor correction is more a matter of semantics.
Quite Bleak but sadly accurate the selfish denials by the new coalition relishes the casting off of regulations so they can more easily make profit by squeezing every last drop and none have to pay for the clean up or true cost it is the time for them to rip off and run off maybe hitch a ride from the child “ genius “ Elon while searching for new gardens to plunder.
I love what you say about restoration work! For 30 years I’ve said it’s been a way to throw a bone to a few biologists & heavy equipment operators as a distraction to keep folks from addressing ongoing destruction. No one can cite a single river restoration project that restored a fish run.
Well Steve, I wouldn’t go that far. I have seen great work done on the Dungeness and the Elwha. Fish runs are being restored. It’s good work. Nature has a way of healing itself if you remove the man made barriers and let it heal. But too often many of these efforts are in lieu of standing up for actual confrontation to protect the environment before it’s destroyed. I’ve seen it happen all too often
What wild runs have been restored on the Dungeness or the Elwha? Yes we can remove barriers, but it is hubris to think we can engineer better systems than nature has refined since the Pleistocene. We should be devoting efforts towards protecting what is intact instead of deluding folks into thinking we can go on destroying habitat because we know how to engineer ecosystems better than nature does. We use taxpayer dollars in a dubious attempt to show we can resurrect what we destroy, instead of stopping the destruction.
I’m not going to get into a case by case debate on what runs have been restored, etc. you can go do some Google searches to find out yourself. Yes, we should do everything possible to protect habitats from destruction. Nature can and has restored itself after destruction and by doing things to reverse issues like the wholesale straightening of the Dungeness in the 40s and 50s we can aide getting habitat back to something that can actually help the fish return. The straightened banks of the Dungeness never would support returning salmon spawning. They created a sluice effect that simply washed all the silt and sand away, turning it into a dead zone. Fixing this by adding logjams and carving out meanders actually works.
You’ve been important to me. I’m sorry you are pulling your blog but I get it. I hope you reconsider, but take care of yourself. Still, like there are cycles in the natural world there can be political and public opinion cycles. I don’t know what they will be 4 years from now. Yes, socioeconomic equity and the environment have plunged under Democrats too. But now I’ll worry even more about my kid’s future, even more about a rising despotic racist culture, and even more about the earth. But for what it’s worth I’m going to keep fighting, resisting, but I get how bleak it looks.
Steve, you should worry more about your kids future, because it is all on the line right now. And yes, I’m going to keep fighting but the environmental battles are going to be lost in Congress and the Supreme Court. There will be other more important issues in the next four years. We have lost on this for the near term, and that likely means the long term.
Thank you for your amazing service that I hope those of us continuing to try to help some stars of encouragement shine on in the darkness will enable you to know your work can’t help but be a lifeline for our environment. We are fortunate to be surrounded by caring people in a caring community and state with connections we must believe will endure.
You have earned some rest and time to express your powerful sentiments. Know they do and will continue to make a difference — somehow.
When I become impatient, I think of our indigenous neighbors and how long they have waited for such signs of caring as the removal of the Elwha dams and what Friends of Ennis Creek, which my husband, Jim Mantooth, and I founded are trying to do.
Holy shit, Al! I thought I was depressed but after reading your truisms, I’m definitely down in the dumps! I agree with you to a point, but I believe that for any of us to give up totally is a mistake. Where would we be if all the Allies would’ve totally given in to Hitler during WWII? During the past 60 years there have been numerous times where fascists attempted to overthrow our government and failed. Well, ok, so now they have won – but should we simply lay down and take it?
I don’t have any concrete answers at the moment, but I believe that if we, collectively, attempt to stay sane, clear, and not depressed we can come up with many ways to not let such fascists, such criminals, to totally take over every facet of our lives. Call me naive, but I don’t want to walk away and let the bastards win it all. I also believe that their castle will tumble down sooner than they expect – at their own making.
As for our environment, if we totally give up as individuals in trying to do every little thing we can to protect it – no matter how small – it will forever be a shameful act on our part.
Thx Connie. My point was it is exactly the time to”fight” the fascists, but the battle over the environment takes a backseat to the needog stopping this coup d’etat. Why? Because we cannot win in the courts or Congress anymore.
Morbidly Great… I have my paper bag ready…Joel