Category: Sustainability

Nuclear abolition, climate change, environmental degradation, nature, peace and justice.

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Sustainability

Break In At A Nuclear Weapons Storage Facility

Photo Credit – Pressenza International Press Agency

Last week, a group of peace activists gained access to a site on a German Air Force Base where 20 U.S. nuclear weapons are stored.

“The peace activists cut through razor wire and some other fences and several made it to the runway; three activists walked to a nuclear weapons bunker, and climbed up to the top where they were undetected for an hour,” according to the International Press Agency. “All 18 were eventually found by soldiers, handed over to the civil police, ID checked, and released from the base after 4-½ hours.”

This was personal.

One of the many jobs I had while serving in the Cold War Army was to standby in the event a nearby nuclear weapons storage facility suffered a break in or terrorist attack.

I was there when the Baader-Meinhof Gang, later known as the Red Army Faction, rose to prominence. I was stationed at a kaserne on the Rhine River during the “German Autumn” when Baader Meinhof and others committed murder, kidnapping, hijacking and more. Here’s a taste of what it was like where I lived from Wikipedia:

The German Autumn (German: Deutscher Herbst) was a set of events in late 1977, associated with the kidnapping and murder of industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer, president of the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations (BDA) and the Federation of German Industries (BDI), by the Red Army Faction (RAF) insurgent group, and the hijacking of the Lufthansa airplane Landshut by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). They demanded the release of ten RAF members detained at the Stammheim Prison plus two Palestinian compatriots held in Turkey and $15 million in exchange for the hostages. The assassination of Siegfried Buback, the attorney-general of West Germany on April 7, 1977, and the failed kidnapping and murder of the banker Jürgen Ponto on July 30, 1977, marked the beginning of the German Autumn. It ended on Oct. 18, with the liberation of the Landshut, the death of the leading figures of the first generation of the RAF in their prison cells, and the death of Schleyer.

Those were tense times. I remember German police cars on every corner and at every Autobahn exit during key moments in the drama that fall. Our unit was often on alert for potential response to an incident.

We were never called to secure a terrorist attack site. However, yesterday’s incident raises some questions about our deployment of nuclear weapons in Germany.

Why isn’t the United States working toward fulfilling our agreement in the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) to eliminate nuclear weapons? Not only do we have a legal obligation, there is a moral imperative to do so.

Is Germany permitted to deliver U.S. nuclear weapons with their aircraft as part of NATO? Quoting from the article, “On this air force base, German pilots stand ready to fly Tornado fighter jets with U.S. B-61 nuclear bombs and could even drop them, on orders from U.S. President Donald Trump on targets in or near Europe.” Since Germany is not a nuclear state recognized in the NPT, it may be illegal for them to do so.

The incident at Air Force Base Büchel is not getting much press in the wake of today’s Donald Trump – Vladimir Putin meeting in Helsinki. Maybe it should.

~ First posted at Blog for Iowa

Categories
Environment Living in Society

The Great American Give Away

Coyote Natural Bridge, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah. Photo Credit – Wikimedia Commons

The Trump administration is giving away access to our public lands for discovery and exploitation of minerals and fossil fuel reserves. Conservatives and mining interests are setting a place at the table to get their share.

“Trump signed a pair of proclamations late last year reducing the size of the 1.35-million-acre Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent and the 1.87-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by roughly 50 percent,” according to Huffington Post. “It was the largest reduction of national monuments in history, with more than 2 million acres losing protections. Prohibitions on new hard-rock mining claims in those now-unprotected areas were lifted in early February.”

The administration’s assault on national monuments is upsetting on a number of levels. It is the culmination of an effort by conservatives to divest government control over national parks and monuments, something most of us thought was long settled.

It’s not settled at all.

A Canadian mining firm, Glacier Lake Resources, Inc., has staked a claim on land that was, until recently, part of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah. The Vancouver-based company said in a press release it plans to mine copper, cobalt, zinc, and other minerals from the Colt Mesa deposit about 35 miles southeast of Boulder, Utah.

On Feb. 2, four members of the Lamoreaux family, which owns a small mineral company called Alpine Gems LLC, staked an 80-acre claim near Butler Valley, southeast of Cannonville. On May 9, Alpine Gems staked three 20-acre claims in that same area.

Last week, Utah Senator Mike Lee introduced the Protecting Utah’s Rural Economy Act in the Congress. He explained in an opinion piece he wrote for the Deseret News. Here are two excerpts that provide the gist of it:

The looming danger for Utah’s rural communities comes from the Antiquities Act of 1906, which was originally intended to protect objects of historic and cultural interest, such as artifacts and religious sites.

Unfortunately, what was once a narrowly targeted tool for preventing looting on federal lands has become a weapon of faraway elites to use against hardworking rural Americans.

That is why I am introducing the Protect Utah’s Rural Economy, or PURE, Act. This bill would protect Utah from future abuses under the Antiquities Act by prohibiting the president from establishing or expanding a national monument in Utah unless the proposed monument has been authorized by an act of Congress and the state Legislature.

Rural Americans want what all Americans want: a dignified, decent-paying job, a family to love and support and a healthy community whose future is determined by local residents — not their self-styled betters thousands of miles away.

Lee’s argument is a genome away from political theorist and the seventh vice president of the United States John C. Calhoun’s arguments in support of slavery and state’s rights. Calhoun is remembered for defending slavery and for advancing the concept of minority rights in politics, which he did in the context of defending white Southern interests from perceived Northern threats, according to Wikipedia.

The Wilderness Society is challenging Trump’s proclamations in court and monitoring the progress of the companies seeking to extract minerals. It may not be enough.

Read more about The Wilderness Society’s efforts to protect our wild areas and fight back against the anti-conservationist movement at wilderness.org. If you are in a position to help financially, here is a link to donate to the Wilderness Society.

~ First posted on Blog for Iowa

Categories
Sustainability

Why Stop Denuclearization at North Korea?

On June 14, 2018 PSR Board member Ira Helfand, MD met with South Korean Prime Minister Lee Nak-yeon in Seoul.

Responding to citizens everywhere who yearn for peace, political leaders in South Korea, North Korea, China and the United States staged a flurry of diplomatic activity this year to avert a Korean crisis.

We are not yet out of the woods. Physicians for Social Responsibility’s health professionals advocated for peace in Korea and will continue to promote diplomacy to denuclearize not only North Korea, but the rest of the world as well.

On June 7, PSR released and delivered to Congressional offices a “Health Professional Open Letter to Congressional Leaders” on Korea with signatures from 16 prominent health professionals including presidents of national physicians’ associations as well as deans and former deans of medical schools and public health schools. PSR members met with staff for their U.S. Representatives and Senators, placed op-eds at CNN.com, the Boston Globe,  the Baltimore Sun, and Quartz (see In the News). Immediately after the June 12 Singapore summit PSR issued a statement welcoming the outcome..

PSR will continue to advocate for careful and deliberate diplomacy toward a genuine peace accord between the Koreas.  The cancellation of joint U.S. – South Korean “Freedom Guardian” military exercises that were scheduled for August will surely help the peace process.

But for now, North Korea retains its nuclear arsenal, and eight other nations cling to their arsenals as well. The harrowing months of provocations, threats and counter-threats between the U.S. and North Korea showed once again that nuclear weapons do not provide security for any nation.  As experts explored the possible military scenarios involving Korea, the world was reminded of the horrific humanitarian impact of modern warfare, especially if nuclear weapons come into play.  To remove this profound public health threat, PSR joins with International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons in prescribing total elimination of all nuclear arsenals with a strategy of “stigmatize, prohibit, eliminate.”

For more on this story, see a list of relevant current Congressional legislation, a PSR report on“Where Do We Go From Here?” and an overview of reactions to the Trump-Kim Singapore summit across the American political spectrum.

If you’d like to stay in touch with Physicians for Social Responsibility’s subscribe to the activist list by clicking here.

~ Cross posted from the Physicians for Social Responsibility blog which can be found here.

Categories
Environment Work Life

Working in the Heat

Image of Earth 7-6-15 from DSCOVR (Deep Space Climate Observatory)

Independence Day at the home, farm and auto supply store was a time to catch-up with organizing the warehouse, process expired pet food, reposition tall pallets of wood shavings, and generally clean up. The usual receiving activities slowed down as delivery drivers had the day off.

The store was pretty busy and comme d’habitude, management tried to feed us lunch: fried chicken with sides from a chain restaurant headquartered in Orange City.

I resisted. I also didn’t criticize because they were trying to be nice on the holiday we all had to work. We all should be nice when we can.

A couple of projects involved being outside in the blazing heat and humidity. I persisted and got the work done.

When working outside at home I get done early in the day to avoid mid day heat. I’ll work outside all day when the heat index is up to 90 degrees, but that’s the upper limit. With the heat and humidity we’ve been having that meant days indoors even though the sky was clear. It was weird.

According to this morning’s newspaper heat records are being set all over the world. In the Northern Hemisphere we’ve had the hottest weather ever recorded during the past week as a massive and intensive “heat dome” settled over the eastern United States.

In addition, the northeastern Atlantic Ocean is cooler than normal. Partly this means there may be less hurricane-strength storms this season. My worry is it’s being caused by melting of the Greenland ice sheet. If Greenland goes completely, the historical record shows the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) will slow down significantly or stop. That could mean disruption of the growing season in Europe and of their food supply. According to Scientific American, AMOC is the weakest it’s been in 1,600 years.

“The grand northward progression of water along North America that moves heat from the tropics toward the Arctic has been sluggish,” wrote Andrea Thompson. “If that languidness continues and deepens, it could usher in drastic changes in sea level and weather around the ocean basin.”

I think of the blue marble and how all of us on earth are connected.

“No single record, in isolation, can be attributed to global warming,” wrote Jason Samenow in the Washington Post. “But collectively, these heat records are consistent with the kind of extremes we expect to see increase in a warming world.”

There are so many signals and indicators of climate disruption in the global environment that such disclaimers may serve some editorial purpose but are immediately useless. The world is warming and there are consequences.

It’s about more than working outside on a humid and hot day at the home, farm and auto supply store.

Categories
Environment Home Life Writing

Under a Rainbow

Rainbow Framing the Garden

Clouds broke while I watched it rain through the west-facing garage door. It was a slow, steady, gentle and soaking rain of the kind remembered from childhood.

Realizing there might be a rainbow I rushed upstairs and looked out an east-facing window. I saw a double rainbow framing the garden plots and our back yard.

The colors were as intense as I remember ever seeing. A sign the shit-storm of American politics would eventually end and our lives might heal.

Earlier I’d been on the roof cleaning gutters. A tree branch had blocked one of them, collecting leaves and impeding water flow. The view of the nearby lake was obscured by trees and vegetation that had grown up since we moved here. In the beginning there had been a clear view of the lake from the roof peak. We, people and plants, are older now.

Refraction of light through rain is simple and powerful physics. Outside quotidian affairs of which lives are mostly made, a rainbow brings hope. For a few fleeting moments we marvel at the colors and reflect upon the role rain and recovery can play in our lives. We notice.

Rain clears the air and washes away dust created by simple lives. On days like that, a better life seems possible. We weathered the storm and that may be enough.

A rainbow reminds us of that.

Categories
Sustainability Writing

Patriotism

Still in Service

Patriotism does not belong to a political party. Veterans pay attention to where the country is going, engage in public discourse, and believe it is our responsibility to do so.

Patriotism, concerns itself with ethics, law, and devotion to the common good. As a young Army officer, I understood the meaning of patriotism in three words, “duty, honor, country.”

There is a new form of patriotism that is unacceptable: patriotism that proclaims “country first.” New patriotism concerns itself with moral responsibilities toward members of “our” group and by definition diminishes responsibilities toward non-members. New patriotism manifests itself in English only legislation, poor treatment of battlefield casualties, and blindness to the effects of war on foreign populations. New patriotism can accept extreme poverty, famine and the genocides in Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia and Myanmar. New patriotism asks, “what’s in it for me?” without regard for the impacts on the rest of society.

My uniform doesn’t fit, but I keep it in a trunk with my fatigues, compass and decorations. From time to time I get out my compass and am reassured that patriots will never lose their way in this complex and changing society. It is up to us to speak out and watch over the country, just as we did on diverse and distant borders long ago.

Our country needs us now as much as ever.

~ From a letter to the editor submitted to the Daily Iowan on Sept. 29, 2008.

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Sustainability

My Lai 50 Years Later

Coralville Public Library, June 15, 2018

After a shift at the farm I drove to the Coralville Public Library to see the exhibit about the My Lai massacre on March 16, 1968.

Created by Mac MacDevitt, and sponsored by the Chicago chapter of Veterans for Peace, the exhibit consisted of a couple dozen tall panels with text, photographs and analysis related what happened over several hours during the Vietnam War.

My Lai, and Nixon’s pardon of William Calley, led to my personal participation in the anti-war movement while I was in high school and college, and then to my enlistment in the U.S. Army in October 1975.

Like any reasonable person I found the military action which killed men, women and children to be morally reprehensible and believed as a society we could do better than the soldiers of Charlie Company. My response was to make changes in the military through my participation.

Calley was the only person convicted of murder during the operation, although it is clear other crimes were committed. Nixon’s pardon reinforced what was commonly believed among service members — that Calley was “just following orders.” While I was in officer training school at Fort Benning, Georgia we debated the efficacy of Charlie Company’s actions that day. My peers sided with Calley.

“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness,” wrote Italian philosopher George Santayana.  “When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

As I stood in my dirt covered jeans, T-shirt and farm shoes looking at the pastel panels I remembered My Lai. Society hasn’t forgotten about My Lai, its context in the Vietnam War, and the cover up afterward. The next generations never learned about it.

One role for veterans is to help us remember what happens in war. My Lai was the military at its worst. We can and should be better than that.

Categories
Environment Kitchen Garden

Gardening Before the Rain

Weather Radar June 2, 4:46 a.m.

In the end it didn’t rain.

The forecast had been rain for a couple of days. The weather radar looked ominous Saturday at 4 a.m. It was heading our way.

At sunrise I went to the garden to beat the rain.

Our garden is big enough to engage a person for hours — weeding, harvesting, planting, mulching, fence mending and the like. It never ends. I think there, mostly about our relationship with the environment and toward a food ecology, the dreams of gardeners.

The work was to mulch tomatoes, weed carrots and beets, clean up kale leaves bitten by intense heat, replant seedlings where they failed and organize for the next planting session. The mulch collected this week is about half used. Before I plant, it must all be relocated to a final destination to clear space for peppers and beans. There is another day’s work waiting today.

Garlic Scape

The garlic crop has been exciting. Scapes began to appear and as soon as they twist back around on themselves I’ll cut them off, to enable the bulbs to benefit from the plant’s energy, and to use them in the kitchen. The seeds were planted seven months ago so it’s great to see we’re getting closer to harvest.

The cloud formation I saw on radar broke up before it got to us. Where I expected rain, there were blue skies. I got out the hose and watered.

Like it or not, I must deal with my physical capabilities. I’ve been blessed with good health most of my life. When I had to give up running a couple years ago things began going downhill. What I mean is there was a perceptible decrease in flexibility and energy coupled with selected aches and pains in my shoulders, feet and hands. The foot pain is likely related to running although I’ve been spared the joint pain runners experience in their knees and hips. My shoulders? One of the transient doctors at the nearby clinic diagnosed arthritis, but I doubt it. I’ve learned to be careful not to injure myself with lifting. My back is sound. I get along.

Kale Harvest

The main thing is dealing with energy levels. Instead of staying in the same place to finish a job I’ll take a break and go walking… to the garage, to my desk, to the kitchen. Sometimes I sit in the recliner for a while. I get back up and return to the garden. It’s a hodge-podgey way of doing things, however, I believe variation in work routine staves off further bodily ailments. It’s likely good for my mind as well.

The spring share at the CSA finished on Monday. The ice box is filled with fresh greens and rhubarb. On deck is rhubarb something, a vegetable broth for canning, and spinach daily until the kale avalanche arrives. I did not barter for a summer share at either CSA in order to survive mostly from our garden. Each year I become a better grower. It enables us to sustain ourselves with fresh produce while the season continues.

What more could we want in a turbulent world?

Categories
Environment Kitchen Garden

Bringing Food Home

Farmers Market Food

A relationship with food in American society is complicated.

Some don’t have enough. Others are awash in calories. We each have a human need for nourishment and the ways we go about meeting it are as different as the families which engendered us.

A favorite childhood memory is when Mother went to work in the school cafeteria after the Catholic Church built a new grade school near our home. With other women like her, she took a list of ingredients based partly on government programs (including lots of cheese) and partly on a limited budget, and made meals that included such dishes as porcupine meatballs (hamburger and rice) and grilled cheese sandwiches with tomato soup. Father worked at the meat packing plant which had an employee butcher shop where he could buy beef, pork and meat products at a discount, and did. The idea of stretching hamburger by mixing it with cooked rice was a novelty in our household and eventually we implored Mother to make porcupine meatballs for us at home, just like the ones at school. She did.

This story of external culinary practices coming into our home is essential to understanding the rise of a diverse diet in American society. We see things out there, they look good, and we want them. Most people, including low-wage workers, have or find the means to get them.

Many books, careers and lives have been based on food in society. We are an individualized rather than generalized culture with regard to food acquisition, preparation and consumption. To a large extent, the rise of the modern mega grocery store has shaped our eating habits in ways no one would have expected. Much ink has been spilled about that and I’m less interested in regurgitating my slice of it.

What I do know is local food farmers work hard for the sparse income they garner. All farmers do. The local food movement of which they are a part is based on the hope more people will bring locally produced, raw ingredients produced in a sustainable manner into their kitchens, ice boxes and pantries. Enough people do for a small group of farmers to make a living.

In many ways the increased interest in local food is the same type of behavior that took place in our home in the 1960s. We experience surprise when our CSA share includes Broccoli Raab, Koji or Bok Choy. We learn how to eat and cook them and want more. It’s not that our home nourishment plan is boring. We want and enjoy the experience of creation as it relates to cooking and eating. We want that experience to be personal and shared with family. That is very American.

I concede promotion of local food is a form of consumerism no different from a tomato catsup purveyor who spends dollars on an advertising campaign to enhance sales. The same behavioral forces are at work. I’m okay with that.

Just so you know, I’m not bewitched by the allure of eating a kale salad, at least not yet. Suffice it to say the diversity and behavior regarding food in our household with its kitchen garden, farm sourcing and grocery shopping has some unique qualities that may not be of interest to the authors of the Michelin Guide, but make our lives a little better. That too is very American. That’s part of who I am, who we Americans all are.

Categories
Environment Writing

Earth Day Weekend 2018

Earthrise Dec. 24, 1968

Earth Day is and will always be about this photo taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts on the first manned mission to the moon.

“The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth,” command module pilot Jim Lovell said from lunar orbit.

With a perspective six inches from our noses, we often forget who we are and how we fit into the vast reaches of the universe. We are a speck in a place larger than we can imagine.

When I participated in the first Earth Day as a senior in high school, the idea we should work together for peace, reduce pollution, and care for the environment seemed obvious. Even much reviled President Richard Nixon got it — society had to do something to address clean air, clean water and endangered species.

Earth Day is a chance to revisit this iconic photograph. When we consider a broader perspective, as the photograph encourages us to do, little has changed on Earth since it was taken. Our troubles seem petty compared to the overriding fact Earth is our only home. We are all in this together.

As much as societies seek to delineate metes and bounds, there are no borders on the globe. There is only one society of which we are all a part.

This Earth Day I’ll be working at home in my garden. A late spring created pent up demand for outdoors work. For the last four weeks, one excuse after another delayed needed work, yet now I’m ready to release the floodgates.

Not before I consider this photo one more time.