Wednesday, July 25, 2012
The West in Flames
By William deBuys
[…]
Fire is only one cause of forest death. Heat alone can also
do in a stand of trees.According
to the Texas Forest Service, between 2% and 10% of all the trees in
Texas, perhaps half-a-billion or so, died in last year’s heat wave, primarily
from heat and desiccation. Whether you know it or not, those are staggering
figures.
Insects, too, stand ready to play an ever-greater role in
this onrushing disaster. Warm temperatures lengthen the growing season, and
with extra weeks to reproduce, a population of bark beetles may spawn
additional generations over the course of a hot summer, boosting the number of
their kin that that make it to winter. Then, if the winter is warm, more larvae
survive to spring, releasing ever-larger swarms to reproduce again. For as long
as winters remain mild, summers long, and trees vulnerable, the beetles’
numbers will continue to grow, ultimately overwhelming the defenses of even
healthy trees.
We now see this throughout the Rockies. A mountain pine
beetle epidemic has decimated lodgepole pine stands from Colorado to Canada.
About five million acres of Colorado’s best scenery has turned red with dead
needles, a blow to tourism as well as the environment. The losses are far
greater in British Columbia, where beetles have laid waste to more than 33
million forest acres, killing a volume of trees three times greater than
Canada’s annual timber harvest.
Foresters there call the beetle irruption “the largest known
insect infestation in North American history,” and they point to even more
chilling possibilities. Until recently, the frigid climate of the Canadian
Rockies prevented beetles from crossing the Continental Divide to the interior
where they were, until recently, unknown. Unfortunately, warming temperatures
have enabled the beetles to top the passes of the Peace River country and penetrate northern
Alberta. Now a continent of jack pines lies before them, a boreal smorgasbord
3,000 miles long. If the beetles adapt effectively to their new hosts, the path
is clear for them to chew their way eastward virtually to the Atlantic and to
generate transformative ecological effects on a gigantic scale.
The mainstream media, prodded by recent drought declarations
and other news, seem finally to be awakening to the severity of these
prospects. Certainly, we should be grateful. Nevertheless, it seems a tad
anticlimactic when Sam Champion, ABC News weather editor, says with this-just-in urgency to anchor
Diane Sawyer, “If you want my opinion, Diane, now’s the time we start limiting
manmade greenhouse gases.”
One might ask, “Why now, Sam?” Why not last year, or a
decade ago, or several decades back? The news now overwhelming the West is, in
truth, old news. We saw the changes coming. There should be no surprise that
they have arrived.
It’s never too late to take action, but now, even if all
greenhouse gas emissions were halted immediately, Earth’s climate would
continue warming for at least another generation. Even if we surprise ourselves
and do all the right things, the forest fires, the insect outbreaks, the
heat-driven die-offs, and other sweeping transformations of the American West
and the planet will continue.
[…]
In the meantime, forget about any sylvan dreams you might
have had: this is no time to build your house in the trees.
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Loading the Climate Dice
By PAUL KRUGMAN
A couple of weeks ago the Northeast was in the grip of a
severe heat wave. As I write this, however, it’s a fairly cool day in New
Jersey, considering that it’s late July. Weather is like that; it fluctuates.
And this banal observation may be what dooms us to climate
catastrophe, in two ways. On one side, the variability of temperatures from day
to day and year to year makes it easy to miss, ignore or obscure the
longer-term upward trend. On the other, even a fairly modest rise in average
temperatures translates into a much higher frequency of extreme events — like
the devastating drought now gripping America’s heartland — that do vast damage.
On the first point: Even with the best will in the world, it
would be hard for most people to stay focused on the big picture in the face of
short-run fluctuations. When the mercury is high and the crops are withering,
everyone talks about it, and some make the connection to global warming. But
let the days grow a bit cooler and the rains fall, and inevitably people’s
attention turns to other matters.
Making things much worse, of course, is the role of players
who don’t have the best will in the world.
Climate change denial is a major
industry, lavishly financed by Exxon, the Koch brothers and others with a
financial stake in the continued burning of fossil fuels. And exploiting
variability is one of the key tricks of that industry’s trade. Applications
range from the Fox News perennial — “It’s cold outside! Al Gore was wrong!” —
to the constant claims that we’re experiencing global cooling, not warming,
because it’s not as hot right now as it was a few years back.
How should we think about the relationship between climate
change and day-to-day experience? Almost a quarter of a century ago James
Hansen, the NASA scientist who did more than anyone to put climate change on
the agenda, suggested the analogy of loaded dice. Imagine, he and his
associates suggested, representing the probabilities of a hot, average or cold
summer by historical standards as a die with two faces painted red, two white
and two blue. By the early 21st century, they predicted, it would be as if four
of the faces were red, one white and one blue. Hot summers would become much
more frequent, but there would still be cold summers now and then.
And so it has proved. As documented in a new paper by Dr.
Hansen and others, cold summers by historical standards still happen, but
rarely, while hot summers have in fact become roughly twice as prevalent. And 9
of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000.
But that’s not all: really extreme high temperatures, the
kind of thing that used to happen very rarely in the past, have now become
fairly common. Think of it as rolling two sixes, which happens less than 3
percent of the time with fair dice, but more often when the dice are loaded.
And this rising incidence of extreme events, reflecting the same variability of
weather that can obscure the reality of climate change, means that the costs of
climate change aren’t a distant prospect, decades in the future. On the
contrary, they’re already here, even though so far global temperatures are only
about 1 degree Fahrenheit above their historical norms, a small fraction of
their eventual rise if we don’t act.
The great Midwestern drought is a case in point. This
drought has already sent corn prices to their highest level ever. If it
continues, it could cause a global food crisis, because the U.S. heartland is
still the world’s breadbasket. And yes, the drought is linked to climate
change: such events have happened before, but they’re much more likely now than
they used to be.
Now, maybe this drought will break in time to avoid the
worst. But there will be more events like this.
Joseph Romm, the influential
climate blogger, has coined the term “Dust-Bowlification” for the prospect of
extended periods of extreme drought in formerly productive agricultural areas.
He has been arguing for some time that this phenomenon, with its disastrous
effects on food security, is likely to be the leading edge of damage from
climate change, taking place over the next few decades; the drowning of Florida
by rising sea levels and all that will come later.
And here it comes.
Will the current drought finally lead to serious climate
action? History isn’t encouraging. The deniers will surely keep on denying,
especially because conceding at this point that the science they’ve trashed was
right all along would be to admit their own culpability for the looming
disaster. And the public is all too likely to lose interest again the next time
the die comes up white or blue.
But let’s hope that this time is different. For large-scale
damage from climate change is no longer a disaster waiting to happen. It’s
happening now.
The creeping conquest of Palestine
Israel's illegal settlements in occupied territory--and the
U.S. government's tolerance for them--are shining examples of the
might-makes-right principle of colonialism.
July 19, 2012
ISRAEL'S PROJECT of colonial expansion has been thrust back
onto the international stage by a report from a committee headed by a former
Israeli Supreme Court justice recommending the legalization of Jewish-only
settlements in the West Bank.
In asserting that Israel is not an occupying force in the
West Bank, the Levy report--as it's become known, after the head of the
three-member committee, Edmund Levy--flies in the face of decades of Israeli
court rulings and a substantial body of international law and United Nations
resolutions. The practical consequence of this claim is that Israel would not
face any legal hurdle to annexing the settlements to Israel or constructing
further settlements.
The Levy report's dismissal of decades of legal precedent
caused a ripple of alarm among politicians in Israel and the U.S.--not because
they oppose Israel's continuation of its colonial project, of course, but
because of the embarrassing attention it draws to the denial of basic rights to
some 2.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank.
"We do not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli
settlement activity, and we oppose any effort to legalize settlement
outposts," said a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, days before
a trip to Israel by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The U.S. government has been officially opposed to Israel's
settlements throughout the so-called peace process that began nearly 20 years
ago--but Washington continued to give billions in aid annually to Israel, even
as the settlement enterprise expanded massively.
Within Israel, opposition to the Levy report is also
widespread, but it has a more explicitly racist character. "Israeli
settlements located in populated Arab areas, as a response to their attacks on
us, might bring a threatening demographic shift, meaning, jeopardize the Jewish
majority in Israel," said Israeli President Shimon Peres. "[W]ithout
a Jewish majority, there is a doubt the Jewish state will remain Jewish."
So while the consensus within both the U.S. and Israeli political
establishments is to oppose the Levy report, Israel's strategy remains the same
one that the report seeks to justify: extend its colonial grip over more and
more land, while denying basic rights to the indigenous inhabitants of that
land.
This is the crux of Israel's apartheid system and a critical
part of the motivation for the growing global campaign of boycott, divestment
and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. Despite the enthusiasm of those who hoped
his administration would herald a new era for U.S. policy in the Middle East,
Barack Obama has shown the same dedication to support for Zionism as his
predecessors. This makes the growth of the BDS movement all the more essential
to achieving a free Palestine.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE PROBLEM with the Levy report among supporters of Israel
is not the goal it sets--the further expansion of Jewish-only settlements in
the West Bank--but the strategy for achieving it. By jettisoning established
legal precedent, the report's recommendations enmesh Israel in a mess of
inconsistencies.
For example, if Israel is not an occupying force, then all
the land in the West Bank seized on the grounds of "military
necessity" under the Fourth Geneva Convention was seized improperly. But
according to David Kretzmer, an Israeli professor of international law and
author of The Occupation of Justice: The Supreme Court of Israel and the
Occupied Territories, this
is only one aspect of the problem [2]:
The Levy report complains about inequality between
Palestinians and Israelis. It cites Israel's Basic Law. But the real inequality
on the West Bank is that the Israeli settlers have political rights in the state
that controls their lives and the Palestinians do not. That is one of the
grounds for the claim that the system there has elements of apartheid. If it
accepts the Levy approach, the government will no longer be able to answer this
claim by arguing that the territory is subject to a temporary regime of
belligerent occupation. Either Israel's government will have to acknowledge
that apartheid is living and kicking, or it will have to extend political
rights to all Palestinian residents of the West Bank.
Extending political rights to all Palestinians is precisely
the "demographic threat" that the Zionist establishment can't
tolerate. In
a debate with pro-Israel hack Jonathan Tobin on Democracy Now! [3],
Palestinian author and activist Ali Abunimah illustrated this point:
[Shimon Peres'] statement calling Palestinian babies a
so-called demographic threat really reveals the Jim Crow-like racism at the core
of this Zionist ideology that views the mere existence of Palestinian babies in
their own native land as a threat to Israel. How can Palestinians ever possibly
recognize or give legitimacy to an entity which views their mere reproduction
as human beings as a mortal threat?
It's time for Mr. Tobin and all the fans of this apartheid,
racist, Jim Crow tyranny to make good on their claimed liberal and progressive
values and oppose Israeli apartheid and accept the inevitable, which is
that--just like in the Jim Crow South, just like in apartheid South Africa--one
day there is going to be equal rights for everyone between the river and the
sea.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE GROWTH of Israeli settlements has been incredible. In
1972, there were nearly 10,000 Jewish settlers living in the West Bank,
including East Jerusalem. In 2012, there were more than 500,000. All this is
despite the fact that the Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly forbids an
occupying power to "transfer parts of its own civilian population into the
territory it occupies."
Throughout that entire period, Israel has been the largest
recipient of U.S. foreign aid. The Obama administration continued this
trend--something to remember the next time you hear a right winger denounce
Obama as "anti-Israel."
In 2010, the Obama administration requested that Israel extend
its 2010 moratorium on settlement construction for two months [4] in
exchange for upgraded weapons systems, even more military and financial aid,
and a pledge to veto any UN Security Council resolution on the Israel-Palestine
conflict for a full year. Prime Minister Netanyahu rejected this
offer.
In other words, the U.S. offered Israel a slew of financial
and political favors to stop violating international law for two months--and
Israel said no thanks. Obama then quietly dropped all of his demands.
So it should come as no surprise that Israel has become even
more brazen in its drive to colonize the West Bank. A few of its most recent
atrocities include the confiscation
of water tanks that dozens of families depend upon for drinking and irrigation [5], the establishment
of the first Israeli university in a settlement [6] and the continuing construction
of the apartheid wall [7], despite the 2004
ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) [8] that it must be
dismantled. According to the ICJ ruling:
The Court considers that the construction of the wall and
its associate regime creates a 'fait accompli' on the ground that could well
become permanent, in which case, and notwithstanding the formal
characterization by Israel, it would be tantamount to de facto
annexation...That construction, along with measures previously taken, thus
severely impeded the exercise by the Palestinian people of its right to
self-determination.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE ARAB uprisings that began more than a year ago upended
longstanding dictators backed by the U.S. in Tunisia and Egypt. But during
Hillary Clinton's recent trip to Egypt, she said she received a
pledge from newly elected President Mohamed Morsi to continue the siege of Gaza [9]--imposed
by Israel and the U.S., but made possible by the complicity of Egypt, which
borders Gaza to the south. If the blockade continues, so will the humanitarian
crisis that grips the densely populated strip of land.
Morsi's refusal to represent the overwhelming majority of
opinion in Egypt to end the siege shows why progress in winning equal rights
for Palestinians depends on the continued growth of the global BDS movement.
The most recent success was the Presbyterian Church's passage this month of a
resolution calling on all nations to "prohibit the import of products made
by enterprises in Israeli settlements on Palestinian land."
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) welcomed
the development [10]:
The strongly worded resolution also calls upon all countries
to ban the import of such products until Palestinians are able to realize their
rights and achieve independence. This decision marks an important milestone in
the march of mainline churches in the U.S. towards holding Israel accountable
for its occupation, violations of international law and denial of the
Palestinian right to self-determination.
A few weeks earlier, the campaign spearheaded by
Jewish Voice for Peace [11] to encourage pension giant TIAA-CREF to
divest funds from companies profiting from Israel's illegal occupation won a
major victory when the
company sold more than $72 million of Caterpillar shares from its social choice
funds [12]. Caterpillar supplies the Israeli military with specially
equipped bulldozers used in the demolition of Palestinian homes in the West Bank.
The Arab Spring has weakened a string of authoritarian
regimes in the Middle East allied with the U.S.--making Washington even more
reliant on Israel as its chief ally in an oil-rich and strategically critical
part of the world. With the growing crisis in Syria and ongoing Israeli-U.S.
bullying of Iran, the U.S. seems poised to continue its support for Israel
whatever the cost.
But in seven years, the BDS movement has won an incredible number of
victories [13], especially when compared to the accomplishments of two
decades of the U.S.-brokered "peace process." The continuing growth
of this movement is thus essential--not only for justice for Palestinians, but
as part of the larger struggle to challenge U.S. domination of the Middle East.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Published by the International Socialist Organization.
Material on this Web site is licensed by SocialistWorker.org, under a Creative Commons (by-nc-nd 3.0) [14] license, except for articles that are republished with permission. Readers are welcome to share and use material belonging to this site for non-commercial purposes, as long as they are attributed to the author and SocialistWorker.org.
Material on this Web site is licensed by SocialistWorker.org, under a Creative Commons (by-nc-nd 3.0) [14] license, except for articles that are republished with permission. Readers are welcome to share and use material belonging to this site for non-commercial purposes, as long as they are attributed to the author and SocialistWorker.org.
ŽIŽEK ON TOILETS
[…]
Žižek talks about the connection between objects and
ideology using, as examples, the different types of toilets he encountered
while traveling through Europe. He reflects on three types: the French, the
German and the British toilet. For the uninitiated, I shall briefly describe
each. In France, the toilet is designed with the hole at the back of the bowl
so the waste falls immediately into water and can disappear unseen and unacknowledged
by its maker. The German model is the exact opposite. The Germans place the
hole in the front of the bowl with a raised shelf behind. When you use the
toilet, the waste collects on the dry shelf below you, affording the
opportunity to inspect it for disease before you flush it off the shelf and
into the hole in the front. The English design is a compromise that places the
hole in the center of the bowl with a larger amount of water. This lets the
user decide whether they wish to confront their waste or not.
Noticing these things, Žižek wanted to know how these
different designs had come about. Architect friends supplied him with technical
books on the subject and he describes how each designer tries to prove their
design is the best in a purely functional sense. Since they are all ultimately
variations on a theme, Žižek says this argumentation merely reflects the
cultural ideology behind the features of each design. While there may be
technical arguments for one design feature or another, the best combination is
ultimately a matter of cultural taste. To those who would argue we live in a
post-ideological world, Žižek says you only need to go to the toilet to find
you are literally sitting on ideology, so to speak.
While it may seem ridiculous (and perhaps a bit gross) to
spend too much time pondering toilet design, I find his argument compelling on
a number of levels. Every man-made object is, in varying proportions, both
utilitarian and symbolic. We have items that are almost entirely symbolic which,
like a king’s scepter, have almost no utilitarian purpose whatsoever. At the
other extreme are things like the humble toilet, which are so banal and
commonplace that we can forget they carry any symbolic baggage at all. The
toilet is an especially extreme example since the act of using the toilet is
considered by most cultures to be a vulgar necessity, to be done in private and
not to be discussed, further negating any potential symbolic value. A designer
wanting to make their mark on the world is not likely to choose the toilet as
their medium. But there it is: holes in different places, shelves, different
water flows, and we haven’t even left Europe.
These small differences can have lasting social impacts. To
this day, most German men urinate sitting down, precisely because any attempt
to pee directly on the German shelf from a height results in urine being
splashed all over the room. Although the German-style toilet is disappearing
(perhaps understandably) from German homes and public places, the culture of
seated urination for men is alive and well. Foreign men living in the country
for any length of time are likely to encounter signs urging them to sit down
and it is not uncommon for a German host to ask for this directly, even if they
have an English-style bowl. It makes me wonder how many habits I carry around
from objects now gone or completely different from their antecedent
[…]
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)