The resiliency of nature -- expressway edition

Things are very busy for me at the moment. I expect to explain later but -- for now -- it being Earth Day and all, I thought I might recycle this post from September 2010 about humanity's relationship with Nature. It seems sort of appropriate, at least to me.

The three dead pigeons, lying close together on the shoulder of the expressway, didn't faze me, but I was curious. Were they poisoned? They were lying near a railroad overpass. Were they part of a group that was sitting on the tracks? Were these three too slow to move out of the way of an oncoming train?

I had to drive to work this morning and I couldn't help but notice Nature in the least natural of places, to wit, the inbound Kennedy Expressway.

It was the small patch of green in the pavement, no more than a couple of feet long and a few inches wide, erupting through the joint that separates the roadway from the shoulder, that got me thinking along these lines. It wasn't grass, but it was a ground cover of some sort and it was green. Really green.

From then on, I was looking. There were all sorts of spots were plants had taken root -- one plant here or there -- mostly scraggly looking, but alive. I'm no gardener, but these looked like weeds to me. A foot tall or more, some of them, with thin leaves and cone-shaped, purplish flowers on several. Most of these had sprouted underneath the concrete medians, concrete blocks four roughly feet tall that strongly discourage traffic moving one way from drifting into a lane moving in the opposite direction. So there is massive concrete sitting atop a concrete floor -- O wondrous the mighty works of Man -- and, yet, every 100 feet or so, sometimes less, sometimes more, there was another plant pushing through.

Thus, the dead possum on the Ohio feeder ramp, just entering the downtown area, came as no surprise. Why shouldn't there be wild animals (not just rats) anywhere at all? Nature bides her time with us, our human infestation. So many of us think we control her: So many of us believe we can plant mighty cities anywhere we choose, in swamps (like my Chicago) or deserts (Phoenix, Las Vegas). We believe Nature will conform meekly to our desires. Al Gore's disciples are more afraid of Nature, but still they think they -- we humans -- can control her. They think Nature will do our bidding if only we curb CO₂ emissions.

But a trip into the City, through one of the least natural landscapes possible, shows that it's more complicated than that. Nature will do what she wants, when she wants, whether we like it or not. Whether we can survive it or not. We can fight, of course, but -- for the foreseeable future -- we must lose. Nature is far too strong. It's too bad we don't have a space program anymore. By our inaction, we have placed all our hopes, all our futures, at the mercy of an oft-capricious Nature. But anyone who has studied history and geology and paleontology, even casually, knows that Mother Nature can be one tough mother at times.

Of her own choosing.

Green economy? Let's start at the beginning -- with diapers

I took the day off today. As I sit in the den, blogging away, Long Suffering Spouse is in the next room making baby things, blankets and bibs and such.

Now, as you might understand, I haven't been in the market for baby stuff for, oh, 16 years or so.

And, gosh, things have changed.

Younger Daughter is going to go with cloth diapers, just as we did with all our kids. (We weren't zealots. We used paper on occasion -- when traveling, not that we did that often, or when visiting someone else's house. But, by using mostly cloth diapers with our five kids, we must have spared the local landfills from tens of thousands -- maybe a hundred thousand -- paper diapers. Looking back, I think we had days where we must have changed diapers a hundred thousand times.)

There weren't that many cloth diaper users in our time; there appear to be far fewer now.

We used cloth diapers with pins. (Children learn to fear you when you've got pins.)

Pins haven't actually been banned yet (although New York is probably considering it) but they seem to be in great disfavor.

Velcro is in vogue these days as the fastening mode -- but, having changed my share of diapers back in the day, I can't see why. Trying to be delicate here... there's a strong chance that the Velcro fasteners will get, um, icky, on occasion.

And, in our day, when we needed to get a new pair or new size of plastic pants, there were plenty to be had at the grocery.

But not anymore.

Younger Daughter and Long Suffering Spouse have found some browsing online -- but they're pretty darned expensive, I'm told.

People talk a lot these days about climate change and green economies and conservation and all that good stuff -- but they clog landfills with "paper" diapers, which (of course) aren't made of paper at all.

According to this EPA website, "biodegradable diapers" will decompose in a year -- but your standard "disposable" diapers will take 450 years to finally break down. (You'll quickly find other sites online that say that paper diapers will never fully decompose because of the plastic coating.)

If anyone were serious about greening the economy, wouldn't diapers be a good place to start?

Focus... or lack thereof... at Second Effort

I'm like the dog in Pixar's Up these days -- almost anything steals my attention -- Squirrel!

Yesterday, for example, I read with great interest a story about Georgetown students who have pieced together a frightening portrait of tunnels deep underground in China, wherein the Second Artillery Corps of the Peoples' Liberation Army can shuttle nuclear missiles from one location to another. The students (and their professor) have suggested that China may have 3,000 warheads that can be run around these underground tracks, a number nearly four times prior estimates of China's nuclear capability.

And it occurred to me, why would our Chinese masters need all these missiles? If they want to destroy the West, they have only to call their loans. Or stop selling us stuff. Foreclosure seems easier -- and less likely to trigger nuclear winter -- and Squirrel!

I recently published an article on my other blog, the one I write in my own name, and I linked to it from my Facebook page. I got a few nice responses, which I take with a grain of salt. Some people (including me) can't take a punch. But I also have trouble taking a compliment.

A message I received from my sister Betty may explain why. Having reviewed the favorable comments, she wrote, "I don't really understand much about what you write, but I like to see you get acknowledged for it." How Irish of her! An insult dressed up as a compliment: Betty holds bachelor's and master's degrees in English. She teaches English in a suburban high school. If she can't comprehend what I write, it can only be because it's incomprehensible. I'm still smiling as I write this -- a masterful put-down is a thing of beauty. I was still trying to formulate an appropriate response when -- Squirrel!

I read a letter to the editor in the Chicago Sun-Times yesterday from Perry Sainati, of Belden Universal Manufacturing Co. A healthy excerpt (since letters don't last too long online on the Sun-Times website):

For the past two years, manufacturing all over the country is rebounding like it hasn’t in decades. There is a whole new face of manufacturing in 2011. That’s why manufacturing is now leading this country’s economic turnaround.

What’s more, as American manufacturers embrace innovation, automation and the value proposition, they’ve become the most efficient in the world. And that’s why in 2010, despite a 4.4 percent reduction in labor costs, they realized a remarkable 6.7 percent spike in productivity. In other words, these days American manufacturing is growing, and doing so with new demand for highly paid skilled workers. Some 20 percent of all manufactured goods worldwide are made in the U.S.A. This is a market share that has held steady for decades.

If you want to write a trend story, please write one that’s timely. Write about how many good manufacturing jobs continue to go unfilled in this country, even with 9 percent of our workers unemployed, because so few unemployed U.S. men and women are trained to do them. Write about how manufacturers who are producing “offshore” are facing escalating costs, long shipping lead times, detrimental quality and security concerns, are now starting to “re-shore” many facilities back to America. Write about how, thanks in large part to lean, forward-thinking Illinois-based companies like Caterpillar, and the millions they’ve invested in lean state-of-the-art plants, manufacturing is actually stronger in many states, including our own, than it’s been in years.

Gosh, I hope Mr. Sainati is right -- but all I hear on or read in the news these days suggests we are headed for Hell in an increasingly threadbare handbasket. I tried to think about how I could investigate (and hopefully verify) these claims and maybe do a post about it and -- Squirrel!

An article that pushes back the timeline for when humanity came 'out of Africa' caught my eye. And, in reading the article, I was struck by the assertion that Arabia, like the Sahara Desert, was once a lush, green place -- you know, climate change that predates even Al Gore? -- in other words, the world's climate is changing now because it changes always and the question is the extent to which humanity contributes to that change and whether we can hope to influence the changes that must come regardless of what we attempt -- and Squirrel!

That got me thinking about the coming winter. Chicago is bracing for another brutal winter, according to another article I saw. All the forecasts, from The Farmers' Almanac (not your go-to destination for meteorological science) to Accuweather, are lining up to suggest that we may have a colder, snowier winter than we're used to here. (And we're used to a lot, not that it keeps us from grumbling about it....)

Well, that got me to thinking about Jeane Dixon. When JFK was assassinated, everyone remembered her prediction -- and forgot her subsequent prediction that Nixon would win in 1960. Although she might have been right about that later one: If Richard J. Daley hadn't desperately needed Dan Ward to beat Ben Adamowski in the race for Cook County State's Attorney, Kennedy wouldn't have gotten nearly as many votes from Chicago -- LBJ may have stolen Texas, but Daley the First did not steal Illinois for JFK; that was just a happy consequence of straight ticket voting -- the dead hated to ticket-split -- for which Daley was able to take credit. But, on the other hand, if Dixon had been right about Nixon winning in 1960, then no one would have remembered her earlier prediction about the assassination of a Democratic president elected in 1960 -- and that got me back to the grim weather forecast: I wondered, does anyone ever follow up on these dire weather predictions and see how often they come true? Now THAT would be an interesting -- Squirrel!

You know, this Information Age is fascinating. There's so much to know. If only I could pay attention long enough....

Squirrel!

An Unscientific Survey: The eyes have it, or, rather, have had it....

It was not quite four years ago that I asked here about whether I should switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs at the Curmudgeon home.

Well, I did switch. As incandescent bulbs failed, they were replaced by CFL's. I still have a few left, but they're in fixtures that don't seem to support CFL's -- and there are few of these -- the light over the kitchen sink and a decorative bathroom fixture are the only ones that come to mind right now.

I'm wondering how long I have before I have to replace those fixtures. You don't see incandescent bulbs on the store shelves much anymore, do you?

I miss incandescent lights.

I sit under harsh fluorescent lights here in the Undisclosed Location. My desk lamp, which used to provide a warm, comforting incandescent glow in the midst of the cold fluorescent harshness, has long since been replaced by a CFL, too.

And my eyes hurt.

Granted, I'm four years older, since I began switching to CFL's, and eyestrain should become an increasing issue over time. But an association is forming, in my imagination at least, between incandescent light and my eyes not hurting so much.

So I put the issue to all and sundry who might happen upon this post: Have you noticed any increased eyestrain since switching to fluorescent lighting at home and away? Is there scientific evidence that backs up or refutes the association that I've made between increased eyestrain and constant fluorescent lighting?

I'm a lousy supervisor.... and how this relates to the oil tragedy in the Gulf

When I practiced with a firm, assignments came largely from the senior partners. This was true for junior partners and the greenest associates alike. We juniors had supervisory responsibilities for new hires. We were to shepherd the youngsters through their tasks and, of course, make sure they hit their billing targets. We were evaluated by the senior partners on how well the new kids performed. The new hires were also evaluated by the senior partners; we juniors lacked the authority to hire, fire or even discipline.

I always felt that an employee should approach his (or her) job as if he (or she) were the owner, not a mere wage slave. To me, that meant agonizing over typos in letters and pleadings -- sending unacceptable work back as needed, and, if necessary, for reasons of time sensitivity or otherwise, doing it oneself. (That's how we got computers in my office. But that's another story.)

I thought associates should consider why an assignment should be done and question whether there were other ways of accomplishing the purpose. Should we really answer the complaint -- or was there a basis on which to move to strike or dismiss? Would that merely educate the other side or might it result in a quick disposition? Associates, though, were quite literal: The senior partner said prepare an answer and deny everything. Why are you asking me to do something different?

Yes, there were form interrogatories even then -- though not yet prescribed by the Illinois Supreme Court -- but that didn't mean form interrogatories should be served in every case. What are we looking for here? What do we expect to get? What does the investigation suggest in terms of customized questions? I wanted each of my new charges to go through this analysis in every case. Each new charge, in turn, realized that there was only so much time that could be billed to the task regardless of the thought process -- so that should be eliminated.

I had associates tell me, with a straight face, that they wanted to "have a life" -- to be able to go home at the end of the day and enjoy the world beyond the office walls.

And I didn't?

Yet, I was doing my work during the day and re-doing their work at night and becoming increasingly angry and frustrated. And I was "eating" a lot of time: I couldn't bill for doing what was already "done" and I couldn't cut the youngsters' time too savagely even though I'd shredded their output. And, no matter what I did, I was a lousy supervisor -- the kid wasn't productive enough -- I was doing too much myself -- I couldn't "delegate" -- or (my favorite) I was "too hard" on the youngster.

Now, I'll tell you what this diffused management system was really all about: The senior partners did not want to be burdened with looking at rookie work product -- but they didn't want to give up control over the kids either.

Everyone knows the old cliche about lawyers being control freaks. I know I am. But the senior partners at my old firm took control issues to ridiculous lengths: They wouldn't allow anyone else to open the morning mail. Seriously.

These unhappy memories are not something I wallow in on a regular basis. (Not any more, anyway. It did take a few years....)

But they came back to me as I read about the disastrous BP oil spill. Unlike their competitors, BP liked to hire their exploration work out -- thus Transocean and Halliburton were running the Deepwater Horizon when it blew up.

Or were they?

The Wall Street Journal, reported on May 27 that:

[B]y mid-April, the well seemed a qualified success. BP was convinced it had found a lot of oil. Until engineers in Houston could make plans to start pumping it out, the workers on the nearly complete well, in a standard practice, would plug it and temporarily abandon it.

One of the final tasks was to cement in place the steel pipe that ran into the oil reservoir. The cement would fill the space between the outside of the pipe and the rock, preventing any gas from flowing up the sides.

Halliburton, the cementing contractor, advised BP to install numerous devices to make sure the pipe was centered in the well before pumping cement, according to Halliburton documents, provided to congressional investigators and seen by the Journal. Otherwise, the cement might develop small channels that gas could squeeze through.

In an April 18 report to BP, Halliburton warned that if BP didn't use more centering devices, the well would likely have "a SEVERE gas flow problem." Still, BP decided to install fewer of the devices than Halliburton recommended—six instead of 21.

Congressional investigators have apparently found a paper trail that backs up how BP failed to let Halliburton do its job. From an AP report, quoted in USA Today:

BP rejected Halliburton's recommendation to use 21 "centralizers" to make sure the casing ran down the center of the well bore. Instead, BP used six centralizers.

In an e-mail on April 16, a BP official involved in the decision explained: "It will take 10 hours to install them. I do not like this." Later that day, another official recognized the risks of proceeding with insufficient centralizers but commented: "Who cares, it's done, end of story, will probably be fine."

The lawmakers also said BP also decided against a nine- to 12-hour procedure known as a "cement bond log" that would have tested the integrity of the cement. A team from Schlumberger, an oil services firm, was on board the rig, but BP sent the team home on a regularly scheduled helicopter flight the morning of April 20.

Less than 12 hours later, the rig exploded.

You know BP has to be awful when Halliburton comes off as sympathetic by comparison....

Anyway, the problem here is not unlike that in my old firm -- if you put people in charge of something, you have to let them be in charge and do it their way. If you merely pretend to put people in charge, but undermine or overrule them at every decision point, bad things will happen.

Good news from the Gulf! Walruses spared!

I saw a reference to the happy news for walruses in the June 7 issue of Newsweek. In the feature, "Black Water Rising," Evan Thomas and Daniel Stone wrote that, when the Deepwater Horizon went down and the oil started coming up, BP was asked to pull out its disaster plan:

The company did have a plan, titled "BP Regional Oil Spill Response Plan -- Gulf of Mexico," approved by the federal government. But on closer inspection, it was a pretty flimsy document. Rick Steiner, a marine biologist and former University of Alaska professor who has worked on numerous oil spills... points out that the plan discusses the need to protect walruses, seals and sea lions, animals that do not exist in the gulf, which strongly suggests a cut-and-paste-job. A Web address given for a response contractor's equipment list goes instead to a Japanese shopping site. The good ol' boys at the MMS [Minerals Management Service of the U.S. Department of the Interior] may not have been closely reading this plan when they signed off, suggests Steiner.

The AP has since expanded on the glaring deficiencies of the 582-page BP "plan." In an analysis published June 9 on the Christian Science Monitor website, the AP's Holbrook Mohr, Justin Pritchard, and Tamara Lush write:

Professor Peter Lutz is listed in BP's 2009 response plan for a Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a national wildlife expert. He died in 2005.

Under the heading "sensitive biological resources," the plan lists marine mammals including walruses, sea otters, sea lions and seals. None lives anywhere near the Gulf.

The names and phone numbers of several Texas A&M University marine life specialists are wrong. So are the numbers for marine mammal stranding network offices in Louisiana and Florida, which are no longer in service.

Read the entire article; it's enough to make anyone sick.

President Obama was quoted in the Newsweek article as decrying the "cozy relationship" between oil companies and Interior's MMS. In view of the government's "oversight" of the BP disaster plan, approved just last year, that seems a huge understatement.

Are we hiring poli sci majors to regulate petroleum engineers? Where are our in-house experts? When we speak of the revolving door between industry and government, are we taking only lobbyists in? Don't scientists ever come over as well?

Like all the oil companies, BP has made billions -- billions -- just in the past couple of years as gasoline prices soared to new heights. Weren't any of those profits reinvested in serious assessment of the responsibilities that BP and the other oil companies have taken on? -- have begged to take on?

We already have one prominent British businessman in the federal pen -- Conrad Black, or, if you must, Baron Black of Crossharbour. Can't we make room for Tony Hayward too? (And, yes, can we also cashier and, hopefully, prosecute the government bureaucrats responsible for approving Hayward's fraudulent disaster plan?)

But blogging should not be all negative. That's the mainstream media's angle. The Blogosphere should be a happier place. So let's close with the same positive where we started, shall we?

The walruses are safe! Koo koo kachoo.

----------------------------------------------------
BP graphic taken from this site. Walrus picture taken from linked Christian Science Monitor post.

As my mother used to say, "Man proposes, God disposes"

(From the webcomic Basketcase Comix by Kelly Ferguson.)

I wish the disciples of Al Gore would sometimes suspend their arrogant presumption long enough to realize that planning doesn't always make it so.

Curmudgeon hung up on clothesline controversy

At left we see a Pennsylvania lady, Carin Froehlich, hanging her clothes out to dry.

The local authorities in Froelich's hometown of Perkasie, PA would rather she didn't. There's no law against hanging up the laundry in Perkasie -- yet -- but, according to this Reuters story, by Jon Hurdle, that I saw today on Yahoo! News, "a town official called Froehlich to ask her to stop drying clothes in the sun. And she received two anonymous notes from neighbors saying they did not want to see her underwear flapping about."

(For the record, Froelich says she dries her bloomers indoors.)

You'd think that, particularly in this environmentally-conscious age, people would be encouraged to use wind and solar energy to dry the laundry. But, apparently, such is not the case. I guess folks riding by in their SUVs, heading to Blockbuster to return their copy of "An Inconvenient Truth," find it offensive to see the neighbors' flannels flapping in the breeze.

And it isn't just in this one Pennsylvania hamlet that frowns on drying one's socks in the sunshine: According to Hurdle's article, local bluenoses have gotten into such a snit about possibly seeing their neighbors' frillies al fresco that "Florida, Utah, Maine, Vermont, Colorado, and Hawaii" have been moved to pass "laws restricting the rights of local authorities to stop residents using clotheslines."

According to Hurdle's article, one of the persons trying to move legislators toward this common sense (and energy-saving) position is Alexander Lee, 35, a recovering lawyer who now serves as the executive director of Project Laundry List. The front page of the Project Laundry List website claims that clothes dryers "use 10 to 15% of domestic energy in the United States." I'm not entirely certain what "domestic energy" is but I do know that clothes smell better when they're hung out to dry and they don't wear out as quickly. Yes, in season, the Curmudgeon family laundry is hung out for public viewing. If you don't like it... look elsewhere.

Caveat: Folks who move into condo or townhome developments with homeowner association prohibitions against hanging out their clothes must and should abide by these restrictions. Or work to change them. (I can't help putting stuff like that in. Unlike Lee, I'm not a recovering lawyer.)

Global Climate Change: Don't just act -- THINK!

Today is Blog Action Day 2009 and I registered for the event this time because this year's topic is near and dear to my heart... Global Climate Change.

Note we don't call it "global warming" any more because, whatever may the case in some localities, and particularly at the poles, the Earth isn't warming uniformly. Today marks the 18th day in a row of below average temperatures in Chicago -- following one of the coolest summers on record.

Now, don't get excited: I'm not one of those skeptics come to scoff. Climate change has been happening on Earth for billions of years. Climate change will continue on Earth for billions of years more, regardless of the fate of our own species, until Sol swells to a red giant and Earth is either swallowed whole or the last remnants of our atmosphere are scattered to the cosmos and only a floating cinder remains.

At least at one point, according to some scientists, Earth was frozen almost solid (the "Snowball Earth" hypothesis). At other points, scientists believe, Earth has apparently had tropical climates at its poles. Now that's climate change.

But how like humans, having finally figured out that Earth's climate is not static, to forget about the rhythms of Nature and believe instead that they -- we! -- are the cause of Earth's changing. Industry is to be blamed! Carbon dioxide!

Yet, livestock were grazed in Greenland -- never as verdant a land as the Vikings' sales brochures suggested, but far more hospitable then than of late. Then the ice returned... and the European colony died out. Climate change.

The Sahara Desert was -- not long ago on a planetary time scale -- a lush green paradise, with exotic animals. Australia, now entering a dry cycle, was also once far more lush. Climate change. Nobody believed the Aborigines when the Aborigines said so -- but their cultural memory, going back tens of thousands of years, is being confirmed with each new scientific discovery. Climate change again.

And in none of these incidents were humans to blame.

The Mayas of Mexico and Central America may have lost their empire due to climate change. Or to political upheaval caused by climate change, which is much the same thing. The Cahokia Mound Builders, here in the American Midwest, were masters of water and wood and nature... until they were wiped out. Was it climate change there too? Or ecological disaster directly attributable to human construction? Was it some combination of factors? The American Southwest may be entering an entirely predictable dry cycle. Climate change, surely -- but has it been prompted or retarded by our building up of Las Vegas and Phoenix, or by our draining of the Colorado? Or is all of our activity irrelevant to Nature's pattern?

In my lifetime, the science of meteorology has grown by leaps and bounds. Satellites getting a truly global picture of weather patterns have enabled scientists to see dust clouds crossing from the Americas to Africa... and give us a better than even chance of knowing whether it will rain at this weekend's picnic.

But the science is young, and the predictive models are incomplete. If we can't tell, on Thursday, whether it will be sunny by kickoff on Sunday, how can we accept, as gospel, dire predictions that all coastal cities will be inundated in 50 years' time? Ocean levels have risen and fallen before -- climate change -- and they will rise and fall again. But when? Why?

All the greenhouse gases produced in mankind's industrial present can be dwarfed in an instant by the release of carbon dioxide buried in Siberia... or released in the next (and largely unpredictable) volcanic eruption.

Does all this sound too much like resignation? That I advocate sitting idly by and drowning, if that be our fate?

No. That's not what I think.

I think that the climatologists and meteorologists should join hands with paleontologists and archeologists and anthropologists and historians and start to figure things out together... using all the evidence... and not just that unique to their disciplines. We must keep studying... and learning... and evaluating the evidence with open minds.

Let's seriously explore alternatives to fossil fuels -- but not because this will Save The World. Eliminating the need for gasoline may not -- when all the evidence is in -- have any measurable effect on climate change. It is, however, the right thing to do from the standpoint of responsible stewardship of the planet -- and it will enhance western security by taking the Petrodollars from the Wahhabis' pockets, thereby stifling the growth of Islamic extremism.

In the meantime, don't talk to me about carbon credits. Recycle your paper. Recycle aluminum. Use CFL's instead of incandescent bulbs. If you live in a water-poor area, redouble your conservation efforts. Stop using so many plastic bottles. These small actions, multiplied over a multitude, will make a positive difference. Just maybe not to climate change.

And that's OK.

The road to... well, it's paved with good intentions

Here's some bad news for those of us who think we're doing out bit for the environment: That link will take you to an June 7 AFP posted on Yahoo! News which reports on a study that claims, among other things, that driving an SUV into the city may be no more harmful to the environment than riding in on a largely empty bus or train:

In some circumstances, for instance, it could be more eco-friendly to drive into a city -- even in an SUV, the bete noire of green groups -- rather than take a suburban train. It depends on seat occupancy and the underlying carbon cost of the mode of transport.

Is there no one I can feel smug about and superior to?

We're all sadly used to inconsistent food peril stories: "Coffee is bad for you!" -- "Coffee is OK, but tea is terrible!" -- "No, wait, scientists were right the first time... coffee's bad" -- "Scientists prove that coffee better for you than oxygen."

My wife reads them all. And I have allowed my diet to be modified, here and there, now and then, according to all of this well-meaning advice. (But not coffee. Nobody is touching my morning joe.)

Now, I guess, as the linked story portends, we are going to be showered with inconsistent statements about what's best for the environment.

The problem is that I can measure my actual footprint with a ruler. Measuring my true carbon footprint, though, necessarily requires some interpretation.

Here's my suggestion: According to the newspapers, whatever you eat will surely kill you. On the other hand, eating nothing will also kill you. So... eat what you want. If it make you feel bad, don't eat it anymore.

Let's take the same approach with these "green" stories: Use a little common sense. You don't have to swear eternal fealty to Al Gore to accept that compact fluorescent bulbs are worthwhile because they cost less over time. You don't have to be a raving enviromaniac to know that landfills are icky -- so recycle whatever you can and slow the landfills' growth. Don't water your lawn when it's raining. And always, always make faces from the window of your train at every passing SUV.

You have to have some fun.

Getting red in the face while trying to be green

I arrived here at the Undisclosed Location about an hour ago, ready to immerse myself in the muck of my law practice. I had a reasonably good attitude... until....

* flashback alert * flashback alert * flashback alert *

I remember when we computer users were sternly enjoined never to turn off our computers. The hard drive would fail eventually, we were told, and frequent restarting of the machine would only hasten that unhappy day.

Then Windows 98 came along and we were obliged to restart our computers six or seven times a day. Usually when we could least afford it.

Lately we are told that we should turn off our machines every night. Leaving the machine on wastes power and contributes to (*cue scary music*) Global Warming!

Al Gore forgive me... but I don't do this.

The darn thing takes way too long to start up again. A young man who works for one of the other lawyers in our suite cleaned out my start menu... after he stopped laughing at me... and that sped things up... but only a little.

Still, I want to be ecologically responsible. Last Friday afternoon I thought, since a three day weekend was at hand, it would be appropriate to turn everything off.

And I did.

And this morning... I tried to turn it all back on again.

I had an almost immediate message from the most paranoid corporation in America: Mr. Gates was apparently concerned that, over the long weekend, I might have offloaded my legal copy of Windows and installed some bootleg bought in a back alley.

As if the real stuff isn't unreliable enough.

But one messes with Mr. Gates at one's peril... so even though I well knew that the promises of the 'genuine advantages' sure to flow from 'validating' my copy of Windows were pure bovine excrement, I clicked on the option to download and install.

And then I began waiting.

And waiting.

Another program apparently tried to start up before Mr. Gates had finished inspecting all of the nooks and crannies of my hard drive. That program got locked in a fatal duel with Mr. Gates' validation program... and both crashed. My computer was left in start-up limbo, neither up and running nor shut down. And, unfortunately, I depend on this stupid machine to do just about everything... including this.

A couple of reboots later... we're up and hobbling. But my attitude is as bad as ever....

Magnetic field failures and mass extinctions

You were probably feeling too jolly about now anyway. Let's grim things up a little with this article from Discovery News which posits a link between a weakening of the Earth's magnetic field and the Permian-Triassic mass extinction 250 million years ago, when 90 percent of life on the planet was wiped out.

I don't like the odds.

Yukio Isozaki of the University of Tokyo suggests that a weakening magnetic field allowed increasing amounts of cosmic radiation to reach the Earth, breaking nitrogen atoms into ions that formed seeds to create huge cloud masses and massive global cooling. This catastrophe was put in motion by "a plume of super-hot material" that began rising from the Earth's core. It was the movement of this plume toward the surface weakened the Earth's magnetic field, according to the article.

When the plume reached the surface, it became three supervolcanoes. From the article:

On their own they were too small to do much harm, but together Isozaki thinks they cooled the climate even further, launching an extinction as bad as the one that would kill the dinosaurs 185 million years later.

This didn't happen overnight: The sequence so far took around five million years to complete. The really massive die-off came 10 million years later. Isozaki thinks this, too, was a consequence of the plume.

Other scientists disagree. According to the Discover News article, Gregory Retallack of the University of Oregon agrees that the first extinction event was bad -- killing as many as two-thirds of all species -- but thinks there was a recovery before the really massive die-off. The apparent recovery between the two events apparently diminishes the likelihood that the extinction events are causally linked.

I'm not at all sure that's comforting.

Anyway, the deterioration of the Earth's magnetic field was not a one-time-only event. Wikipedia's article on geomagnetic reversal suggests that the field is deteriorating right now, and the rate of deterioration has accelerated in recent years. On the other hand, "The rate of decrease and the current strength are within the normal range of variation, as shown by the record of past magnetic fields recorded in rocks." Also, the Earth's magnetic field "has gone up and down in the past with no apparent rhyme or reason."

Ah, well. The point is, Al Gore can make us curb all our hydrocarbon emissions but if the Earth's magnetic field flips on us, we all might die anyway. It's flipped before and will flip again.

Life on Earth has only a precarious hold. As large as our home planet is, it is still a speck in the cosmic order of things. And our planet changes over time -- always has, always will. Who are we smug humans to think we can arrest the planet's natural course? Why our we so arrogant to assume that our pollution will cause more than a blip in the natural course of the planet?

As a species, we really should be thinking about Plan B, don't you think? We need to start boldly going: In nature, dispersal is recognized as a really good survival strategy.

Curmudgeon smuggling garbage to the suburbs

A few months ago Chicago finally admitted that it's "Blue Bag" recycling program was a failure.

We had always thought it was a fraud. Homeowners were requested to separately bag their paper, plastic or metal recycling. Blue plastic bags were sold in supermarkets and hardware stores for this purpose, which is how the program got its name. Although separately bagged, the blue-bagged recycling was put out with the rest of the trash, collected in the same truck at the same time as everything else, and all smashed together in the back of the truck as the load was periodically compressed.

The bags themselves were nothing special. Although we had to pay a premium for them, the blue bags were more flimsy than most plastic garbage bags. Frequently they'd rip when we'd put them in the garbage bins -- before they were picked up by the garbage truck. Yet somehow, supposedly, people were able to sort the collected garbage and pull out therefrom recyclables, unsullied by their journey in the back of the garbage truck.

I shed no tears when the program was discontinued. Meanwhile, the City promises us that we will someday receive blue recycling carts into which our recyclables may be put. These will be picked up by a separate truck. Golly! Now there's a thought! But we don't have the blue carts in our part of the City just yet. Presumably the division of spoils from the contracts for said blue carts has not been completed. This is understandable, since there are all sorts of federal corruption investigations now pending in the City That Works and people must be cautious.

In the meantime, says the City, go ahead an use your old blue bags. Our contractors continue to sort through it, they say.

But there is a limit, even to my own gullibility.

So we hatched upon another plan, and one that provides an extra benefit.

My mother-in-law lives in an adjacent suburb. They have blue recycling carts there. So we bring her our recycling. (Well, not the newspapers or the aluminum cans I'm now collecting at the office... these will go to the church... but the plastics and so forth.)

And the extra benefit?

Youngest Son has to accumulate 50 hours of parent-supervised driving in order to qualify for his driver's license next year. Some of these hours must be at night. Long-time readers of this blog may recall that my Long Suffering Spouse has interpreted this to mean that I alone must supervise. Riding with a student driver probably never qualified as 'joy riding' -- and especially so at today's gas prices (even with their recent, and probably momentary, decline). So we try and have a purpose when we go out to practice driving.

And now we have a new purpose every Sunday night. Youngest Son fires up the family jalopy whilst I get the bag of recyclables. I sit with it in my lap as we navigate to the nearby suburb... where I jump out and dump our recycling in my mother-in-law's curbside recycling cart.

Saying to myself, "Dignity. Always dignity."

Think globally, act locally -- but act how? Green bulb news makes Curmudgeon blue

The U.S. EPA's "Energy Star" website is high on "compact fluorescent light bulbs":

If every American home replaced just one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR, we would save enough energy to light more than 2.5 million homes for a year and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of nearly 800,000 cars.

That's pretty impressive. If you'll follow the link, you'll see that the government boasts that CFLs "use at least 2/3 less energy than standard incandescent bulbs to provide the same amount of light, and last up to 10 times longer" and (near and dear to my heart) "save $30 or more in energy costs over each bulb’s lifetime."

If you've seen a television at all lately, you know major corporations are jumping on the CFL bandwagon: I've seen a Wal-Mart ad for these new bulbs on several programs recently.

I'd been starting to think this might be a good and useful thing to do -- especially in my house where teenagers can turn lights on but seem to find it impossible to turn them off.

This morning, however, I saw this item in Zay N. Smith's Quick Takes column in this morning's Chicago Sun-Times:

News Headline: "Going green . . . a simple light bulb will help."

News Headline: "Lights out for old, inefficient bulbs."

News Headline: "By changing from incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescents, you can save money, energy and the world."

If you switch to compact fluorescent bulbs for the good of the environment, you will need to know a few things in case you break one.

Hazardous waste experts recommend:

1. Do not use a vacuum cleaner, as it will spread the fluorescent bulb's mercury neurotoxin into the air and contaminate the machine.

2. Ventilate the area and reduce the room temperature.

3. Collect the material into an airtight container while wearing coveralls, goggles and an air mask.

4. Pat the areas with the sticky side of tape and wipe with a damp cloth, putting these, also, in the airtight container.

5. Call local authorities to see where the container should be taken for safe disposal.

Congratulations on going green!

Is this the incandescent light bulb industry's attempt to maintain market share against a new and profit-threatening innovation? Or is there a real problem?

The EPA Fact Sheet largely confirms the news item -- albeit with an obviously different slant:

Because there is such a small amount of mercury in CFLs, your greatest risk if a bulb breaks is getting cut from glass shards. Research indicates that there is no immediate health risk to you or your family should a bulb break and it’s cleaned up properly. You can minimize any risks by following these proper clean-up and disposal guidelines:

• Sweep up—don’t vacuum—all of the glass fragments and fine particles.

• Place broken pieces in a sealed plastic bag and wipe the area with a damp paper towel to pick up any stray shards of glass or fine particles. Put the used towel in the plastic bag as well.

• If weather permits, open windows to allow the room to ventilate.

Nothing's ever clear cut, is it?

Nor are you supposed to throw CFLs in the garbage when -- after hopefully saving you all this money and energy -- they eventually burn out. This from the EPA Fact Sheet again:

Like paint, batteries, thermostats, and other hazardous household items, CFLs should be disposed of properly. Do not throw CFLs away in your household garbage if better disposal options exist. To find out what to do first check the following website: www.earth911.org where you can find disposal options by using your zip code... or by calling 1-877 EARTH911 for local disposal options. Another option is to check directly with your local waste management agency for recycling options and disposal guidelines in your community. Additional information is available at www.lamprecycle.org. Finally, IKEA stores take back used CFLs, and other retailers are currently exploring take-back programs.

So: If I use CFLs am I being a 'good steward' of the Earth -- or am I just getting in on the ground floor of a new environmental crisis? I'm leaning toward trying them out... depending on the price.... Have any of you used CFLs? What are your observations?

Somebody should tell Al Gore about this

I've just finished reading 1491 by Charles C. Mann. I recommend it to anyone who is concerned about the environment. That should mean everyone.

Mann is not a scientist; he is a journalist reporting about scientific findings. The scientific findings he writes about are not widely known -- indeed, they contradict many of the things we were taught in school.

The basic, overarching theme of Mr. Mann's book is that American Indians did not 'live in harmony' with nature, they engineered it -- and often in ways we (for all our technical sophistication) can only dream of doing.

If Mann is right, Indians were far more numerous, and were in the Americas far longer, than we were taught in school. There may well have been settlers who came across a land bridge in what is now the Bering Strait, but they may have been only one of several waves of immigrants to these shores.

Mann cites the accounts of early explorers who report huge populations in many places in the Americas -- in Mexico, along the Amazon, along the California coast, and in what is now New England. But 130 years after Columbus, when the Pilgrims land at Plymouth Rock, the landscape has changed. It is largely deserted. The native population had already crashed, victims of diseases spread by the earliest explorers for which the natives had no immunities. (Diseases that may have been spread not just by explorers but by the livestock they brought with to support their expeditions.)

What later colonists saw as a pristine wilderness was, in effect, an untended garden. The gardeners were mostly dead. Mann quotes historian Stephen Pyne, "The virgin forest was not encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries... it was invented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries."

The passenger pigeon, famous symbol of American abundance, whose incredibly large populations were remarked upon by Audobon and so many others, may really have been a sign of severe ecological disruption: It's numbers soared unchecked because of the collapse of a keystone species in the ecology -- homo sapiens.

Mann writes about scientific research which shows that Indians genetically engineered maize (corn) and spread the cultivation of the crop throughout the Americas; that Indians supported huge populations with terrace farming in the Andes; and that Indians created a new soil, terra preta, to replace the naturally poor soils of the Amazon jungle. (The 'slash and burn' agricultural tactics now favored by indigenous peoples in Amazonia may be the product of the introduction of Western steel axes, not a survival of an ancient practice at all.)

It is not that the Indians changed their environments, so much as they improved them -- and improvement in this sense means that the Indians made the environment more useful for themselves. As Mann puts it, "Faced with an ecological problem, the Indians fixed it. Rather than adapt to Nature, they created it." Thus, early American settlers in Ohio were amazed to find forests in which they could drive their carriages -- but, if Mann is right, these were managed forests and the undergrowth had been kept at bay by the original inhabitants. The Amazon jungle was also a managed forest. The Plains Indians managed the Plains -- using deliberately set fires, among other things.

Actually, fire is essential to the life cycle of many prairie plants. Maybe it's because of the Indians' encouragement of these species; maybe it's not. But when the local forest preserve district here in Chicago proposes a controlled burn in a forest preserve to encourage the growth of native plants and eliminate the invasive species that have escaped our gardens and threaten to take over the woods -- the local environmentalists howl.

Not every feat of American Indian engineering was a resounding success.

The Cahokia Mounds in Southern Illinois may be proof of a spectacular environmental failure -- a cautionary tale for those who would bend Nature too far.

And Mann warns against the 'dialog of the deaf.' Writing about the Amazon basin, Mann says, "European and U.S. environmentalists insist that the forest should never be cut down or used -- it should remain, as far as possible, a land without people. In an ecological version of therapeutic nihilism, they want to leave the river basin to its own devices." Mann finds, however, that Brazilians seem less than enthused by this plan: Summarizing the Brazilian position, Mann writes, "To develop your economy, you leveled your forests and carpeted the land with strip malls. Why can't we do the same?" When the Brazilians talk of the need to help their own poor, environmentalists respond by insisting that cutting down the trees will not create wealth but will "only destroy the soil. Turning Amazonia into a wasteland will help no one."

Maybe both sides should be quiet and listen for the voices of the past. If the Amazon basin really supported teeming millions in the past, how was it done? The forest was there; if people were there, too, doesn't that offer us hope that both people and forest can survive there today as well? And what fate befell the Maya? Did they collapse because they overstretched their environment -- or were they victims of climate change? Getting answers to these questions may be critical to our own futures.

Consider adding 1491 to your reading list.