“God made death so we’d know when to stop.”

-Steven Stiles

“First, it’s not a matter of if your body will produce greenhouse gases, but when and over what length of time. At one extreme, burning will release all of the greenhouse gasses immediately. At the other extreme, putting your body in a coal-forming wetland might delay the release by many millions of years. Since the problem is anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, the delayed release option would be the best option for addressing your concerns, since presumably anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions won’t be a problem a few million, or even a few thousand years from now. That suggests that your best option would be to tie weights to your body and sink it deep in a cold bog (it would be best to first open up your abdominal and thoracic cavities, and also open your stomach, intestines and heart, so that there are no gas-trapping cavities that could potentially make you float).”

I miss my chats with my friend Joe Skulan. We used to talk a lot more about all manner of things twenty five years ago, before we both started families and moved away from Madison. One day back then, Joe asked me to help him prepare the fossil skeleton of a prehistoric saber-toothed cat that he wanted to mount and display at the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum. I had exactly zero paleontological knowledge or experience, but I agreed to give it a try because I liked hanging around Joe, who was and is endlessly interesting, and because I had enjoyed the introductory geology class I took in college. Joe was a patient and forgiving teacher, and it didn’t take me long to fall in love with the painstaking but exciting hands-on work and the dusty, specimen-filled museum.

The following spring, in 1988, I noticed on my walks to the museum that the grass never turned green. That summer Yellowstone National Park burned up, the Amazon rain forest was ablaze, and a little-known NASA scientist by the name of James Hansen told a Senate panel that the greenhouse effect was “changing our climate now.” The decade had already seen the four hottest years on record. I stayed on as a museum volunteer for a couple of years and got to help dig up, prepare and display the fossilized remains of several other fascinating creatures. I also got to hang out with lots of other bearded and braided folk who enjoyed drinking beer and telling stories almost as much as finding and working on old bones. I remember a conversation or two about global warming, but, like Congress, none of us did much of anything about it.

These days Joe and I don’t often see one another, but we do exchange the occasional email or Facebook message. Now, as back in the ’80s, our exchanges can be a bit lopsided. That’s not because Joe is not a good listener – he is – but because he’s a polymath and generous with his knowledge. I ask lots of questions, Joe answers at length. He has degrees in biology, geology, paleontology and geochemistry and a better-than-working understanding of several other fields, including literature, art and religion. Joe also happens to be one of the most humble and hilarious guys I know. I’ve learned a lot from him, little of it having to do with paleontology.

When I decided to write about the “coolest” or most climate-friendly ways to deal with one’s mortal remains (I’ll try to avoid the term “dispose of”), I decided to contact Joe, who is back at the UW again – this time as a curator and researcher – to see if he could recommend an expert or two who could answer some technical questions for me. I knew Joe would be able to shine some light on the subject himself. What I did not know was that he would be able to answer almost all of my questions.

I had done a little research myself. Not enough to determine what the best choice was but enough to know what the very worst way to go was.

Fossil fuel bath

It would be hard to devise a more climate-unfriendly way to go than the conventional American burial. Figuratively and in many cases literally, we drench our dead in fossil fuels. With respect to the literal, I’m not talking about cremation (I’ll get to that later); I’m talking about embalming and most of what comes before and after. Besides water, just about everything in embalming fluid is derived from fossil fuels. Formaldehyde is still widely used to fix and preserve body tissue short term, despite being implicated in certain types of cancers. Although the fluid morticians use to replace blood in the arterial system contains only around 5 percent formaldehyde, the fluid injected into the body cavity typically consists of 50 percent of that agent. Formaldehyde is ultimately derived from petroleum, natural gas or sometimes even coal. Ethanol, which can make up between 9 to 56 percent of embalming fluid, can be produced as either a petrochemical, through the hydration of ethylene, or via biological processes, depending on the prevailing prices of grain and feed stocks. Petroleum is also the source of hexane, one of several solvents commonly added to embalming fluid.

Of course before bodies even get embalmed (the procedure is not required by law in most places, but open-casket funerals are much more challenging without it), they are usually refrigerated, sometimes for months, and that takes electricity. Sadly, most electricity in the U.S. is still produced by burning fossil fuels — coal or natural gas. Eventually the dead are laid out in wood or steel caskets, which in their manufacture and shipping release large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Roughly 70 percent of the departed in the United States were buried in these types of caskets in 2010.

Many modern cemeteries require the use of a burial vault or liner, usually made from reinforced concrete. Typically, these weigh a little over a ton. Producing 1 ton of Portland cement, the primary ingredient in concrete, releases 1 ton of carbon dioxide. Estimates vary, but cement production accounts for somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Although efforts are underway to develop greener concrete, most of these processes are years if not decades from commercial viability.

Concrete vaults and liners prevent caskets from being crushed by the weight of the earth and grave-digging equipment. They minimize sinkage, making cemeteries easier to mow. All that mowing year after year uses enormous amounts of oil and emits great volumes of greenhouse gas.

Add to this the emissions resulting from the transportation of bodies to and from hospitals, funeral homes and cemeteries (almost all of which are heated, cooled and lit primarily with fossil fuel) in ambulances and hearses. Then take into account the heavy equipment used to dig most graves — usually a backhoe. In colder states like ours where the ground is still frozen several months of the year, earth-thawing heaters (the guys at one of our local cemeteries call their home-made contraption “the cooker”) are employed to facilitate the dig. Fuel of choice for these devises: propane, a by-product of natural gas processing and petroleum refining.

Don’t forget the grave markers; the raw stone from which these are cut and engraved is rarely mined nearby. More oil, more greenhouse gas.

Chances are your mourners will not have the eco-consciousness and emotional wherewithal to carpool to your funeral and burial, or take mass transportation to visit your grave in the future, so they will send some significant CO₂ to join you in the blue beyond.

It’s all enough to make the devil (if you still happen to believe in a literal hell) envious. Such a burial certainly will not earn you a posthumous green halo from any natural or supernatural entity.

18 kilograms, 4 gallons

Like most people, I hadn’t given a lot of thought to my final footprint. I assumed cremation was a fairly green choice.  It’s also a pretty popular one nowadays; about 40 percent of the dead were cremated in America in 2010.

Although choosing cremation does cut out a lot of the emissions given off by the conventional American burial, I discovered that it is far from a saintly option. The retorts (ovens) most funeral homes and crematoriums use require about 2,000 cubic feet of natural gas and 4 kilowatt-hours of electricity per body. According to a 2009 Slate article, that produces the amount of CO2 that the typical American home generates in six days – about 250 pounds. It turns out the recently departed, still being fairly moist, do not burn easily. It’s like trying to light green wood — you are going to have add some lighter fluid or gasoline to get it going.* And it’s not just carbon you’re sending in to the sky, it’s other powerful greenhouse gases like carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides. Along with lots of superheated air. If you haven’t left instructions for their removal, your amalgam fillings will volatilize when burned, too, sending significant amounts of mercury into the atmosphere. That toxic metal will eventually make its way into waterways, into fish and into the still living and yet to be born, where it can wreak neurological havoc, especially in infants and children.

As far as I can determine, that Slate CO₂ figure does not include the amount of carbon given off by the corpse itself during cremation. But according to Joe, the average human body contains about 18 kilograms of carbon, which equals about 24 kg of methane or 60 kg of carbon dioxide. This is equivalent to about 4 gallons of gasoline.

“So whatever you do to reduce your personal posthumous carbon production will mean nothing if you burn more than 4 gallons of gas doing it. So even with the most fuel-efficient car you cannot be transported more than 200 miles from where you died. It also means that no heavy equipment can be used to, say, dig a grave, since transporting a backhoe to the site, having it dig and fill the grave, and transporting it back certainly will burn more than 4 gallons of gas. It seems to me that it also eliminates cremation.”

So what options is the climate-conscious corpse left with, especially since deep burial in a coal-forming wetland isn’t practical for most of us? I’ll address that question, with Joe’s help, in part 2.

*not recommended.

-Ben Franklin

Hope-sprung

I was not raised Roman Catholic, or brought up in a faith tradition of any sort. Nevertheless, one Lenten season about a decade ago I gave up something significant – for good.

What I gave up was hope, but that is not the only irony in this tale, because I hold a Catholic Archbishop responsible for the fact. It was Oscar Romero’s words, printed in the program of a Protestant church I happened to attend one Sunday all those years ago, that lodged themselves in my head and heart:

“…if you need to feel hope you are courting despair, and if you court despair you’ll stop working. So try to wean yourself from this need to have hope. Try to have faith instead, to do what you can, and stop worrying about whether or not you’re effective. Worry about what is possible for you to do, which is always greater than you imagine.”

So it is more accurate to say that I gave up chasing hope or, as that secular saint Ben Franklin would put it, living by it. Granted, the kind of hope Romero was probably talking about may be more potent stuff than the hope in which most of us trade. I gather from a friend who is a member of the clergy (albeit Protestant) that scriptural hope was the assurance of prophesy fulfilled, and elevated to covenant status. In most branches of Christianity hope was, and still is, understood to be one of the fruits of the spirit. (This same friend was quick to point out that the “every-time-I-think-about-what-I-gave-up-I’ll-think-of-what-Jesus-did-for-me-and-be-grateful” conception of Lent does not come close to touching the true depth of the season. That version of Lent, I confess, had infected even my mostly unchurched mind. Lent is not about the individual believer, my friend told me; it’s about meaningful corporate action.)

At some level, however, hope is hope, and it can be a great bulwark against anxiety. As a fretter descended from long lines of worrywarts on both my mother’s and father’s side, I am both predisposed to and well schooled in the ancient art of anxiety. Growing up during the Cold War didn’t exactly help matters. Neither did the combination of poverty and parenthood in early adulthood, or almost two decades in a rocky marriage. Some people turn to alcohol or drugs to relieve anxiety, or they chase women, but I had seen how those strategies had played out in the lives of several relatives and friends. So I turned to chasing hope.

By the time I came across Romero’s words, I had become a veritable hope hound, able to sniff out the faintest whiff of it in the rubble of just about any tragedy. I took pride in my ability to detect the thinnest rays of light in the deepest, gloomiest abyss. Terrorist bombing in the Middle East with dozens maimed and killed? Maybe the news footage of bloodied children screaming for their lost parents would melt the terrorists’ hearts, I would think. Perhaps one of them would seek out the surviving victims of the attack, ask for their forgiveness and work with fellow bombers for reconciliation and healing.

You see how far gone I was: if there was a Pollyanna Association, I could have been its national director, or at least the president of the Wisconsin chapter of Wishful Thinkers Anonymous.

This sort of hope hunting lessened my anxiety in the short run but did not do much to address the sources of my fear, as you will have discovered if you have been similarly afflicted. If exposure to media is not limited, those sources are ever present. And like any medicine taken for too long or in too large a dose, hope can become a poison, leaving a body and a mind much more vulnerable to real threats. Chasing hope, as Romero says, is courting despair. Not to mention cardiovascular disease, cancer and depression.

Is there a point at which hope becomes a form of denial, too? It is easy to become so focused on the positive that you become blind to the negatives. Negatives that can kill. As we’ve seen with how Congress and many state legislatures have reacted to the climate crisis, denial can become a cancer on the body politic, too.

Chase pie in the sky and you just might die.

But there is denial and then there is denial. The denial that has sprung from the seeds of doubt that the oil and gas industry has sown in the halls of power (and fertilized with torrents of campaign cash) has grown like kudzu. This has made it nearly impossible to get meaningful climate or clean-energy legislation passed, or international agreements inked and ratified.

And then there is the kind of denial that infects ordinary and otherwise enlightened, caring people – the kind of denial that comes from chasing hope. People waiting around for hope to fill them up are people who are not pressuring the political leaders who are being brainwashed, badgered and bribed by the dirty-energy lobby. This kind of denial may be an even bigger drag on the movement to slow climate change than the denial spread by the oil, coal and gas profiteers.

Sink or swim

Like hope, the climate crisis is not as simple as it sometimes seems. The greenhouse gases we spew into the atmosphere through our smokestacks and tailpipes get most of the attention, but scientists have been telling us all along that emissions are only part of the story. Just as important is how human activity has altered the oceans, forests and grasslands which have, for millions of years before the Industrial Revolution, pulled carbon from the atmosphere in sufficient amounts to keep our climate moderate, enabling humanity to evolve, flourish and, well, alter that climate. In short, it’s about sinks as well as spigots. In a forest, most of the carbon is sequestered above the ground in trees. Increasingly in our warming world, those trees burn and rapidly release their carbon stores back into the atmosphere. But in grasslands, most carbon is pumped by grasses and forbs back into the ground where fire can’t touch it. There it tends to stay, in the roots, rhizomes and soil… unless the land is tilled up…

…or the herds of grazing ruminants, which have stimulated, fertilized and kept grasslands open since time immemorial, are removed.

Stay with me, because here’s where hope comes back into the picture. A couple of weeks ago I saw a presentation by my old friend, TED. I have learned many things from TED. Extremely intelligent, provocative and concise, TED has never failed to edify me. A bit two-dimensional, but a solid friend nonetheless. The subject of TED’s talk that day? Greening the desert and reversing climate change — naturally.

Despite my love and respect for TED, I didn’t expect much. Remember, I’d stopped chasing the hope train years ago. Not only that, but I had spent the last four years studying climate change – staring climatological Armageddon in the face. That, let me tell you, is enough to drain the hope out of the stoutest of hearts. But by the time the talk was over, I was, well, almost giddy with hope.

Allan Savory’s TED talk is well worth watching here, but to keep things rolling I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest condensed version:

Grasslands cover about two-thirds of the landmass of the planet. Taking large herds of grazing animals (and thus their predators) off these grasslands, and subsequent tillage, has led to widespread desertification on every continent except Antarctica. Desertification turns efficient carbon sinks into carbon bombs because desiccated vegetation burns, and exposed soils easily blow away. In African national parks and other places where grazing animals have been brought back to grasslands, however, desertification has been reversed with astonishing speed. Therefore there is good reason to believe that restoring grasslands through the management of large herds of grazing animals – together with steep emission reductions – will cause CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere to begin to fall, reversing the dramatic upward trend of the last century or so. For those of you more technically minded, this other talk from TED breaks down the math, and some of the forces that drive the numbers, quite well.

Partly because I long ago traded my shiny Pollyanna pin for the tattered knapsack of an activist, and partly because I was brought up to believe that a thing that sounds too good to be true probably is not, I checked with several friends who have spent their adult lives in the field of conservation to see if my hope in the work that Allan Savory and others are doing is merited. These are careful, skeptical people steeped in the scientific method and the rigors of academic research. There are a few caveats, I was told, but they agreed that there is real reason to hope that grassland preservation could turn the tide in the climate crisis.

That shook me. I wondered: Did this spring’s relatively late (er, more normal) arrival have me jonesing for a hit of hope like some long-sober alcoholic who feels a mighty thirst coming on when annoying in-laws overstay their welcome? Or does humanity really stand a reasonable chance of reversing climate change and avoiding many of its catastrophic consequences without resorting to risky and exorbitantly expensive technical fixes?

Looking south over the Badger lands from the Baraboo Hills. Photo by Steven S. Meyer.

But here is where this story gets really interesting, because a rare opportunity now exists to restore a large chunk of former grassland right in my own backyard. Almost 7,500 acres of once-pristine prairie and oak savannah just a few miles from my home await a decision by the Wisconsin Natural Resources Board on whether or not conservation will be given top priority in its future, or whether other values will take precedence. As some regular readers know, the site was once part of the great Sauk Prairie before European settlers arrived on the scene. Most of the land was tilled up for row crops, but farm animals were pastured on some of it, too. Then in 1942 the U.S. Government removed the farmers and built the sprawling Badger Army Ammunition Plant. Plowshares were turned into swords, but the country emerged victorious from World War II. The plant continued to churn out rocket propellant and gunpowder on and off for five more decades, finally closing for good in 1997. Although much work remains to be done, the Army has removed over 1,400 buildings, and much of the chemical contamination has been cleaned up or stabilized. Just as important, a broad coalition of private, tribal and government groups with a stake in the future of the property began a painstaking process at that time to work out, through consensus, a vision for the future of the Badger lands. That process culminated, in 2001, in the Badger Reuse Plan, a document calling for holistic management of the property and stressing conservation, low-impact recreational uses, education and sustainable agriculture.

The ecological significance of the property cannot be overstated, lying as it does at the terminus of the last glacial advance, between the Wisconsin River and the Baraboo Hills. The Baraboo Hills hold the largest remaining stand of mature hardwood forest in the state. Badger bumps up against Devil’s Lake State Park, and contains remnants of nine natural plant communities including dry prairie and oak savanna. Less than 1 percent of pre-settlement prairie remains in Wisconsin; even less oak savanna survives.

Now add to that the potential climate significance of the Badger lands.

It is easy to hyperbolize, but I do not think it an exaggeration to say that the Badger lands and other grasslands like it are of at least the same magnitude of importance to the struggle to reverse global warming as the Badger Army Ammunition Plant was to defeating Hitler and the Axis powers in the 1940s. One thing is for sure: there is far more at stake today. In order to pass on a habitable planet to future generations, we are going to need to learn, quickly, how to sequester as much carbon as we can so that CO₂ in the atmosphere drops back below the 350 parts per million that our best climate scientists say is the safe upper limit. Conservation, agriculture and science will have to synergize like they’ve never synergized before, and places where that can happen are going to be of the utmost importance. In the Badger lands, all those components already exist.

The Ho-Chunk Nation was one of the parties that helped craft the reuse plan, and the tribe agreed to assume ownership of about a third of the land inside the fence. Although the formal transfer of acreage has been delayed for legal reasons, the Ho-Chunk early on announced their intention to bring bison back to their portion of the property. Bison and other ruminants like elk were once native to the area and could again help to restore the grasslands at Badger (several prairie remnants discovered on the property are being coaxed back to life by volunteers trained and organized by the Sauk Prairie Conservation Alliance). The USDA Dairy Forage Research Center has had custody of almost 2,000 acres of the Badger property since 2004, so grazing cows are likely to remain a common sight on parts of that parcel for a long time. Meanwhile, other researchers have been experimenting with another ruminant animal, goats, to control invasive plants and shrubs.

Bison could someday return to help restore the Sauk Prairie

Many of the people who worked to craft the Badger Reuse Plan have long been excited about the potential for the former Badger lands to serve, at minimum, as a research and demonstration site for integrating ecological restoration and agriculture. Thanks to their work, an amazing opportunity exists to transform a property upon which the tools of war were manufactured and tested into a proving ground of a much different sort.

But all the potential of the Badger lands, including its climate calming potential, will not be realized if the Badger Reuse Plan is not honored by the DNR. Restoration of a large part of the former Sauk Prairie to something resembling its former glory will not happen if the Badger Reuse Plan is not honored. Powerful interest groups based far from Sauk County have recently been advocating for recreational uses on the property that run counter to the Badger Reuse Plan: shooting and rocket ranges, ATV trails, paintball parks and the like. To the alarm of many who worked tirelessly for years to craft the reuse plan, key DNR officials have been publicly promoting such higher-impact uses, despite the fact that DNR funds, and the DNR secretary at the time, helped to craft the reuse plan.

Even if the values of the reuse plan are honored, rebuilding the soils of that grassland will be more difficult than busting the thick virgin sod was for the first European settlers in the area. But much of the most grueling work has already been done. A comprehensive plan exists, demolition of the wartime infrastructure is nearly complete, 175 acres of prairie have been planted and cleanup continues. If we harmonize with the forces of nature, the rest is doable. But all of it depends on a conservation future for the property.

Grounds for Hope

I began this post talking about hope and some of the pitfalls inherent in chasing after it. But of course hope in itself is not a bad thing, just as greenhouse gases are not in themselves malignant or benign. Without those gases Earth would almost certainly be a lifeless frozen planet resembling one of the moons of Saturn. Likewise without any hope we would all be frozen, too, with little ability to live and nurture life. But like carbon, hope cycles. To sequester it in ourselves and to keep it in balance we need to focus at least as much on the sinks as the spigots. Our hope needs to be grounded, sometimes quite literally.

As Oscar Romero’s words imply, engagement is the way to stop the hope-despair-denial feedback cycle. Or, if you prefer in this Easter season, faithfulness is. Do what you can where you can and stop worrying about whether you will be successful. Plant the seeds you have regardless of whether you think they are likely to germinate and bear fruit that will then feed you and give you hope. If you do, you may just find yourself nourished in ways you could never dream of. “What is possible for you to do is always greater than you imagine.”

The great irony, of course, is that hope often comes when you stop hunting it and start acting as if you already have it. That is not to say it is always easy, or risk free; Romero himself was assassinated while walking his talk, and the same fate has met several high-profile leaders like him, from Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr. More than a few of their followers suffered terribly, too. But look what they accomplished, without resorting to violence, by remaining faithful to their visions and exercising a little faith.

Jumping off the hamster wheel of hope does open a person up to the possibility of heartbreak, and heartbreak can sometimes lead to despair. But that is not necessarily a bad thing. Not if you remember that heartbreak, too, is part of a natural cycle, one with immense power to change things for the better.

This paradoxical dynamic has played out in my own life. Since I gave up chasing pie-in-the-sky hope and started focusing more on engaging on the ground where I can and how I can, I have found myself getting involved with the good people of the Sauk Prairie Conservation Alliance. They put me much more closely in touch with the Badger lands. I have also since deepened my relationships with other conservationists and activists, all of whom have accelerated my learning exponentially. Through my social networks I’ve been exposed to a plethora of resources (yes, including TED talks), which have enhanced what those folks and my time on the land have taught me. Some of what I have learned has caused me to despair, at times, but I have been able to keep that despair from paralyzing me by remaining engaged and grounded.

Here is one concrete thing you can do right now to ground your own hope: Sign this petition calling on the Wisconsin Natural Resources Board to develop a management plan for the Badger lands that coheres with the values of the Badger Reuse Plan. If you live in southern Wisconsin, you might also want to get involved with the Sauk Prairie Conservation Alliance. They can put you to work on this amazing property this very spring. They will also be more than happy to take your money. Rest assured they will put it to good use.

I can’t guarantee any of this will make you feel more hopeful – that might take much more grounding – but I would not be surprised if it did.

Happy spring. Happy Easter.

Looking north toward the Baraboo Hills from the Badger lands. Photo by Steve S. Meyer

A blog reader named Ray contacted me a while back to say that he shares a deep concern about climate change. In fact, he’s publishing a novel about it on his website. In his book the Arctic polar ice cap melts quickly (as we can already see) and causes more abrupt global warming than we expect. The rapid climate change leads to a collapse in agriculture, there is a surge of terrorism, and right-wing extremists stage a coup against the US government.

He was curious what I might think about his book.

I had to confess my discontent. I don’t enjoy dystopian fiction. And that’s putting it mildly. I usually don’t subject myself to it. These days, it’s getting hard to avoid, since dystopian visions always surge in popularity during a time of crisis. People sense that the world as they know it is dying, and they are frightened beyond belief—and I mean this quite literally. Climate-change denial of the extent that we have witnessed in recent years has to be fueled in part by a fear so big there is no name for it. And writers of dystopias are rising to the challenge, trying to portray our worst fears, to place them directly in our line of vision.

But here’s why I don’t enjoy dystopian stories. They tend to be well acquainted with horror. They often parade cruelty, showing people acting toward one another and other beings in the worst possible ways. And they may be celebrated as “manly” or “courageous,” as if staring at the worst possible version of ourselves takes a special kind of bravery. I understand the fascination with horror. I get the value of experimenting with doom and gloom. I just don’t need to hang out there.

And furthermore, as I told Ray, instead of being too hard, dystopia is too easy. Given our bedrock belief about human nature—that it is warped toward selfishness, greed, and cruelty—we find it easy to imagine ourselves acting badly. It is a whole lot harder to imagine a future where people behave with generosity and kindness, which may be why fewer stories explore these options. And why, when they do, they are labeled utopian, which means, literally, “no place,” an impossible ideal.

So I emailed Ray:

We tend to expect the worst of ourselves—one of the main themes in my book, and a pessimistic cultural attitude that I try to demystify by showing some of the history of it. But stories of coping and courage and resiliency? They seem harder to imagine.

Why show the worst in people instead of the best? I asked.

Ray responded with the excellent point that stories showing the best in people tend to conform to the hero storyline (quoting with his permission):

Tales of heroes saving the day tend to counsel complacency—somebody else, some extraordinary being, will take care of it. These tales say, (1) there, there, it’ll be all right or (2) if you’re not extraordinary, don’t bother. Dystopian fiction says, we can’t let this happen.

Point well taken. Dystopian visions can be wake-up calls—this is the road we’re on, and we’ll come to a nasty end if we don’t change course.

But I have to repeat: dystopia is not hard to imagine. With our assumptions about ourselves, tales of cruelty and deprivation and chaos are easy to dream up (if not easy to craft; they take a storyteller’s skill as much as any other kind of fiction). They are easy to imagine because we are more likely to be surprised when people are generous or kind than when they are not. I spent a good share of my new book exploring why this is true and showing how mistrusting our own human nature goes along with a jaundiced view of the rest of nature as well.

Our cynical view of ourselves no doubt contributes to a lack of imagination for addressing the climate crisis. Bogged down by pessimism, we find creative solutions immeasurably hard to fathom—in spite of the fact that we already have the technology and the know-how. We seem unable to imagine people working smoothly together over time to restructure their lives and communities, to dream up new ways of living.

And so we fall back, as Ray suggested, on the hero’s tale, where one or two or three resourceful people outwit, outplay, and outshoot the opposition. It’s as if our imaginations can handle only a few people at a time being brave or resourceful or wise.

Writer David Sobel points out in the current issue of Orion magazine that dystopian fiction rules in teen culture. He finds a great deal of hope in it, especially when, as in The Hunger Games, young people act heroically, challenging the status quo. He lauds the genre precisely for celebrating teen heroines and heroes because in a culture like ours, where adolescents do not undergo formal initiation rituals, they need to be able to picture themselves in the big roles, tackling the big problems and changing the world for the better. He writes,

If we want to avoid the environmental catastrophes and repressive central governments pictured in current dystopian fiction, we’re going to need more adolescents willing to be heroic. . . . If Katniss and these other heroines compel us to be heroic, then perhaps these books are part of the solution.

He may be right. But we need a new storyline as well—something beyond the tale of the isolated heroine or hero.

We need a new storyline about us. All of us. About how we can work together. About how we can share—because sharing is common, not rare, in nature. About the empathy embedded in our DNA as deeply as the greed.

It will take nothing less than a new story of nature. And for this we need big imaginations, bigger than we’ve exercised so far. Big enough to imagine solving the climate crisis, not just suffering from it. Because only with imaginations that spacious will we have the energy and courage to tackle the problem itself.

Can we imagine a better future? For a change? Literally.

Priscilla Stuckey’s most recent book is Kissed by a Fox: And Other Stories of Friendship in Nature.

But sometimes you just gotta laugh.

Mike Mossman and Lisa Hartman have long shared a passion for laughter, nature, music and each other — not necessarily in that order. The couple was recently driving to a friend’s birthday party when they started talking about the unseasonably warm weather. As musicians, Lisa and Mike are usually adapting Celtic tunes or composing new ones in that tradition for their family band, Wrannock Celtic Trio (son Angus holds down the third corner). As experienced naturalists, they have a better idea than most people what we stand to lose as climate change continues to play out in Wisconsin and the world, and they worry about that. But the holiday spirit (or maybe it was the ghost of Christmas future) gripped them that day as they drove through dairyland, and soon they found themselves mixing a generous measure of levity into their lament. Before long they had written brand new lyrics to a holiday classic.

Angus, Lisa and Mike in the land of the wrannock

I was fortunate enough to be in attendance when the two debuted their hilarious if sobering climate carol at the Baraboo Range Preservation Association‘s annual holiday party on December 14th in Baraboo, WI. I hope to have some video or audio to add soon; meanwhile, enjoy the lyrics below and feel free to share them (with credit to Mike and Lisa, of course) with your friends and family.

Wrannock takes its name from a species of wren native to the British Isles. Mike is an authority on the birds of Wisconsin and shared this with me about the wrannock’s American cousin:

Wisconsin Winter Wrens are migratory, wintering in the southern US and breeding during the summer mostly in our northwoods. Here they occur especially among the complex structures of mature and old-growth hemlock and cedar forest, living among large fallen trees, stilt-roots, rocks, pools and moss.They also breed in isolated populations in certain heavily forested sites in the Driftless Area, especially in the Baraboo Hills, where their long, gorgeous songs characterize certain stream gorges and the talus slopes around Devils Lake. The Winter Wren is one of the species whose breeding ranges we expect to retract northward with climate change; although its winter range may also shift, making it somewhat more common during its non-breeding season, when it tends to stay hidden and rarely sings.

A winter wren

Like its namesake, Wrannock Celtic Trio shares its gay and haunting music with the residents of Wisconsin and the world.

The great essayist and novelist G. K. Chesterton, who hailed from the land of the wrannock, once wrote that angels can fly because of their levity but devils fall because of their gravity. So go ahead and cry about the changing face of winter, but don’t forget to laugh, too. By doing both, we humans may just manage to retain our place between the angels and the devils. Besides, it looks like we’re all going to need a sense of humor more than ever in the years ahead.

I wish you all the coldest and snowiest holiday season possible.

Walking in a Withered Wonderland

(Wisconsin version. Sung to the tune of Walking in a Winter Wonderland,
with new words by Lisa Hartman and Mike Mossman © 2012)

Sleigh bells ring, but are you draggin’?
Don’t you wish you’d brought the wagon?
The world’s rearranged
The climate has changed
Walking in a withered wonderland

Gone away is the new bird
Here to stay is the bluebird
He sings a lament
As our lakes ferment
Walking in a withered wonderland

In the meadow we can build a mud man
And pretend that he is Parson Brown
He’ll ask “Are you married?”
We’ll say “No man,
Cuz we don’t know why we should stick around”

Later on we’ll perspire
And we won’t need a fire
Our passions are high
Or is it July?
Walking in a withered wonderland

We’ll just go out and get some mo’ booze
We won’t need our skis or snowshoes
Rubber boots, a light coat
Maybe a boat
Walking in a withered wonderland

In the meadow we can build a mud man
And pretend that he’s a circus clown
We’ll have lots of fun with Mr. Mud Man
Wondering if he’ll bake or if he’ll drown

Makin’ way for new diseases
Cuz our world never freezes
Trading hemlocks and trout
For termites and drought
Walking in a withered wonderland

With all the driving and the fracking
And the polar ice cracking
Our pact with the devil
Means a rising sea level
Walking in a withered wonderland

In the meadow we can build a big camp
With all our extra money we can host
Oklahoma people who get thirsty
And refugees escaping from the coast

When it’s drizzlin’, it’s distressin’
It should teach us a lesson
Not to live in defiance
Of nature and science
Walking in a withered wonderland

Though the weather may seem crappy
Just adjust and be happy
Swim in November
Boil sap in December
Walking in a withered wonderland

So frolic and play
Our children can pay
Walking in a withered wonderland
Walking in a withered wonderland

We’re singing our song
Dressed just in a thong
Walking in a withered wonderland

But the average Jane or Joe American would be more than happy to use energy that came from solar panels, wind turbines or other clean energy sources instead of filthy, planet wrecking oil and gas. Millions of us have invested big money in energy conservation in our homes and are driving more fuel efficient cars than we were 5 years ago. Your run-of-the-mill CEO of a fossil fuel company, on the other hand, is doing everything in his power, up to and including lining the pockets of legislators and feeding those so-called leaders “model” legislation, to make sure we use as much of his company’s death-dealing product as possible. (Can something that drives species extinction at a rate unseen since prehistoric times, and ultimately breaks the systems that have cultivated and sustained life on this planet for the last 100,000 years really be called energy?

Most of us would be happy if our energy came from the sun and wind.

Would it not be more accurate to call fossil fuels anti-energy?) Big Oil and Big Gas have rigged the political, economic and infrastructural systems of our country to ensure that their product is the cheapest and most widespread fuel available (when you don’t count the ecological and societal costs, which now rise exponentially by the year). Even if we all drove Cadillac Escalades everywhere we went and owned as many homes as Mitt Romney, the industry would still be exponentially more responsible for climate change than the rest of us.

Now, however, the climate movement is taking the fight directly to those most responsible for the crisis. And it’s hitting them where it will hurt them the most: in the wallet. Let’s face it, though: those wallets are about as padded as it is possible to be. Fighting money with money is just not a winning strategy. The movement to slow climate change cannot raise that kind of cash. If it is going to bring this monster down, it is going to have to go after what allows the beast to stuff its wallet, and that, friends, is moral legitimacy.

The Exxons, Enbridges, BPs and Koch Industries of the world would not be raking in so much dough if it was not for the veneer of respectability and moral legitimacy they wear. There may have been a time when that legitimacy was, well, legitimate. Before we knew just how much damage could be done by them, fossil fuels and the companies that dug them out of the ground seemed like pretty good things. Fossil fuels were incredibly labor saving. Especially in the early days, the environmental damage caused by getting them out of the ground hardly seemed significant compared to their utility. To many they were godsends.

But that time is long gone. We’ve known better for decades.

The Do the Math Tour is all about three simple numbers that expose the fossil fuel industry for what it has been for most of its existence: a gargantuan many-tentacled monster that deals death for profit.

The first number is 2 and it stands for 2 degrees Celsius. The nations of the world have agreed that global climate catastrophe can only be prevented if we manage to keep average global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees. Most climate scientists believe that number is too high, since a one degree rise has already led to the loss of most of the Arctic ice cap and a dramatic increase in the frequency and intensity of severe weather events around the world. Nevertheless, it is the one number the world has agreed on when it comes to climate change.

The second number is 565. That’s how many more gigatons of carbon climate scientists say we can spill into the atmosphere before raising the Earth’s temperature two degrees.

The final number is 2,795 and it stands for the gigatons of carbon the fossil fuel industry has in its reserves.

It is not so important to remember these three numbers, which Bill McKibben brought to light in an article for Rolling Stone that went oddly viral last summer. What is absolutely vital to understand is that the fossil fuel industry has five times more carbon in its reserves than is necessary to destroy life as we know it and they plan to do everything they can to get us to burn all that carbon up — and make as much money as they can in the process.

350.org’s recently launched divestment campaign has already resulted in one college agreeing to divest all of its fossil fuel holdings. The investment boards of hundreds of other colleges, universities and churches are facing stiff challenges from students, alumni and members to do the same. This morning, as the temperature climbed yet again into record setting territory and the headlines blared out the news that the world emitted 3 percent more CO2 in 2011 than it did in 2010, I marched to the offices of the University of Wisconsin Foundation with about fifty other Wisconsinites to present a divestment petition containing thousands of signatures to President Knetter. This divestment campaign is the start of a groundswell. While that’s encouraging, even the divestment of every institution of higher learning in the country would not be enough to stop the rapacious monster the fossil fuel industry has become. Unlike the anti-apartheid divestment campaign of the 1980s and 90s, the financial impact of divestment would be significant but not crippling to the fossil fuel industry.

Marching to the UW Foundation offices to present our petition to President Knetter.

The real power of this divestment campaign is not economic, it is organizational and moral.

The campaign has already attracted thousands of students and faculty members who were not previously engaged in this fight in a big way. That is a massive shot of adrenaline for this young (though growing) movement. For it to reach a tipping point sufficient to the task of pulling the planet back from the ecological tipping points it is teetering on, it is going to need millions of bodies pushing for great change.

Second and perhaps more importantly, the moral legitimacy of fossil fuel companies is being challenged and undermined. More and more people are starting to understand that the industry is not the jolly green job creation giant peddling wholesome necessities that it makes itself out to be but is in reality a filthy and violent troll blocking the path to a clean energy economy and the tens of thousands of family supporting careers that come with it. It is not your friendly neighborhood pharmacist, it is the drug cartel. It is not God’s army, it is the terrorist network. It is not the honorable cop on the beat, it is the armed and deranged criminal loose upon the streets. The world is beginning to see Big Oil and Gas as the moral equivalents of Big Tobacco and the apartheid regime in South Africa only with far more terrible consequences to the health and well-being of poor people of every color everywhere.

Only when people see the true face of the monster and not the benevolent mask it wears will they stand up by the millions and billions to stop it from destroying their future.

Yes, we have seen the enemy and it is the fossil fuel industry.

Is the sun setting on our chance to keep climate change from becoming irreversible, or are we witnessing the dawn of a new day in the movement to slow it?

-Blaise Pascal

“Home is where the heart is.”

-traditional proverb

Two weeks ago today, I went home. Not really, but it felt like it. I spent two full days at the Aldo Leopold Foundation (ALF) in northern Sauk County, about a mile from the one-time home away from home of the great conservationist and his family, and the birthplace of the modern land ethic. I was there with about two dozen other individuals from around the country to take part in the Land Ethic Leader program. It was two days of observation, reflection and action designed to enable “community leaders across the country to create opportunities for rich and productive dialogue about humanity’s relationships to land, making room to meet people where they stand and building upon our common ground in conversation rather than in argument.”

It is impossible to say whether the people, the place or the program contributed more to the feeling of homecoming I felt, and it does not really matter. It was one of many feelings my time there elicited from me.

It is feelings that I find myself thinking about most as the memories and lessons of those two days percolate. But then, I went there in part to test my hypothesis that the environmental movement is sorely lacking more tears.

Sure, some of us weep when oil poisons the ocean and fouls beaches, when another mountain gets decapitated for coal, or a favorite grove of trees is cut down to make way for yet another strip mall or cluster of McMansions. It is my strong belief, however, that not enough of us “let it out” when we receive such news.

Sandhill cranes near Spring Green, WI

Old Aldo can hardly be blamed for that. In fact, the book for which he is best known, A Sand County Almanac, is shot through with his feelings. One of the essays from that book that we read and discussed at length at the ALF was “Axe-in-Hand,” a delightful ramble in which Leopold muses about trees on his property and the feelings they engendered in him one brisk autumn day. Leopold’s emotions match the diversity and color of the foliage on the trees he names. And they’re not all “positive” emotions.

“The pine will live for a century, the birch for half of that; do I fear my signature will fade? My neighbors have planted no pines but all have many birches; am I snobbish about having a woodlot of distinction? The pine stays green all winter, the birch punches the clock in October; do I favor the tree that, like myself, braves the winter wind? The pine will shelter a grouse but the birch will feed him; do I consider bed more important than board? The pine will ultimately bring ten dollars a thousand, the birch two dollars; have I an eye on the bank? All of these possible reasons for my bias seem to carry some weight, but none of them carries very much.”

How many emotions can you find represented in that paragraph? I count at least seven. Few of the feelings Leopold expresses here flatter him, but most of us know that we harbor similar feelings for or about parts of the natural world with which we are familiar. Pride, greed, fear, selfishness, jealousy…

Later on in the essay, Leopold admits that his spirit soars with the tamaracks because they grow so lustily. He confesses that nostalgia makes him more disposed to like bittersweet than he might otherwise (his father favored the plant). But this is all denouement following Leopold’s climax, delivered with all the feeling of a teenager in the throes of a crush.

“The only conclusion I have ever reached is that I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.”

It is not the only place in Leopold’s work where he gets all emo. His writing is rife with love. With compassion, with humility, with hope. But most of all with love. “Thinking Like a Mountain” springs to mind, where Leopold’s empathy and remorse saturate the prose.

The full-throated endorsement, even celebration of, the full and vibrant aurora of human emotion is one of the things I find so refreshing about Leopold’s writing. In part, that is because it is so unexpected from a man of science (and reason, presumably). Or from a man of his era—his was the age of pragmatism and progress, after all. Or from a man of his age. Heck, just a man, period.

Even today, many men are uncomfortable expressing emotion, believing such outpourings a hallmark of weakness. Unless of course anger is the emotion in question; that emotion serves as a sort of catch-all for many of us men, and one that is still socially acceptable. The emotion that anger most often seems to mask is fear. But even glee is sometimes given an angry cast; think of the celebratory violence that sometimes follows major sporting events. Most other emotions are seen as wishy-washy, touchy-feely, hard to quantify and unpredictable. Okay to express in a song, perhaps, but not to your buddies or girlfriend unless you want to be thought to reside somewhere south of the masculine-feminine line.

Although women seem more comfortable in the realm of emotion, there are few who have not been made to feel ashamed of their feelings, or who have tried to make their emotions subservient to reason while navigating the corporate and academic worlds so long dominated by men.

Perhaps Leopold’s life-long passion for hunting headed off some of the criticism he might otherwise have received for his explicit references to feelings. One might naturally hesitate to call a man holding a gun a sissy.

Fortunately, a few men today are bravely calling for more emotion to catalyze the kind of action we need to meet the environmental crises of our time. Paul Kingsnorth, the author of another essay our group of budding Land Ethic leaders read and discussed, argues in “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist” that he became an environmentalist because of a strong emotional reaction to the “other-than-human world.” Those feelings, he writes, became a series of thoughts which matured into a conviction to do what he could to speak for those wild places and the creatures that lived in them.

Notice the progression: experience –> feeling –> thought –> conviction –> action.

My own experience was similar to Kingsnorth’s. Paraphrasing Leopold, the conclusion I drew as a child was that I loved all lakes, but I was in love with Lake Superior. It was through a literal and figurative immersion in that body of water, and in the lands against which she lapped, that my love grew and spread to other natural wonders and creatures. Because I loved Lake Superior, I grieved for the ways pollution had defiled her and development had disfigured her. Today I grieve bitterly for the damage done to her by human caused climate change. From my fear and grief, my jealousy and depression has sprung a fierce desire to understand, protect and defend her.

Kingsnorth reached the conclusion that this emotional path to enlightenment—the feelings that set a person on this journey of understanding and preservation—are hard to come by today.

“Today’s environmentalism is as much a victim of the contemporary cult of utility as every other aspect of our lives, from science to education. We are not environmentalists now because we have an emotional reaction to the wild world…We are environmentalists now in order to promote something called ‘sustainability’.”

Environmentalism has lost its soul, Kingsnorth flatly states, just before resolving to walk away from the movement to which he once belonged.

But where does he go? Back to the jungles and coastlines that sparked the feelings that seem to have dimmed in him.

“I will follow the songlines and see what they sing to me and maybe, one day, I might even come back. And if I’m very lucky I might bring with me a harvest of fresh tales, which I can scatter like apple seeds across this tired and angry land.”

In other words, he is going on walkabout in search of the emotional connection he once had with the world.

Our small group at the ALF had a lively debate about Kingsnorth’s essay. It seems it was the men who were most uncomfortable with the emotions expressed in it, especially the sense of disappointment, disillusionment and hopelessness that seems to infuse the piece. Some thought Kingsnorth was ignoring all the progress that has been made since the modern environmental movement was born. I had already spoken up for emotion in another group that discussed Kingsnorth’s essay, and like most writers was afraid of sounding repetitive, so I kept quiet except to ask some clarifying questions.

But Kingsnorth’s story resonated deeply with me, and together with “Axe-in-Hand” strengthened my conviction that we depend on emotion—even “negative” emotions—to refresh and renew us. Not only that, but grief, hopelessness, cynicism, and even despair are vital to the work we do. We cannot save the world—or ourselves—without such emotions. These feelings can drive us deeper into ourselves or, as with Leopold and Kingsnorth, back out into the wild places we fell in love with years before. I believe those are the places from which we will draw the strength to continue our conservation work.

Sunrise over Wisconsin River

But many of us are terrified, especially of the darker side of the palette of human emotion. Dip your brush in too many of those colors, some say, and you risk falling into the bleak picture you have painted—a Munchian canvas of terror, depression, despair, breakdown and inaction. Yet even that fear must be faced and expressed lest it come out later with destructive rather than constructive consequences.

Leopold, as we have already seen, was not shy about expressing the feelings that his time in wild places—or the damage done to those places at the hands of humans—elicited in him. Ever the naturalist, Leopold examined each feeling carefully and tried to understand more about it, and about the organism (him) from which they sprang. But perhaps even Leopold was not immune to the temptation to suppress some of his darker feelings. In a forward to the 1947 manuscript that would become A Sand County Almanac, Leopold admitted that sorrow, anger and confusion filled him when he contemplated “the inability of conservation to halt the juggernaut of land abuse.” It was not this forward that was published, however, but one which, although eloquent and profound, contains far fewer explicit references to his personal feelings (he does give a shout-out to the idea that land is to be loved and respected).

Popular opinion (especially among men, if my own experience is any indication) has long held that emotion, generally speaking, is bad. Cool reason, on the other hand, is good and is often a preferred tool for keeping our emotions “in check.”

But it is the reasonable scientists of our time who are discovering that the very opposite is true.

As David Brooks points out in his recent book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement, a total lack of emotion results in self-destructive and dangerous behavior. Sociopath is the term we use to label people who cannot feel emotional pain (and thus empathy). Such individuals often do horrendous things. Brooks writes about researcher Antonio R. Damasio who, after studying people who have lost the ability to feel (but retain the ability to reason), developed a hypothesis whose key point is that reason and emotion are not separate and opposed but intertwined and complementary.

“Reason is nestled upon emotion and dependent upon it,” Brooks writes. “Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations. The human mind can be pragmatic because deep down it is romantic.”

Brooks tells the story of Elliot, one of Damasio’s subjects. The frontal lobes of Elliot’s brain had been damaged by a tumor. An intelligent man, Elliot began to experience trouble managing his life after recovering from the surgery to remove the mass. He would ignore the most important parts of a task and get sidelined by trivial things. It would take him hours to decide where to eat lunch; in fact, he could not reach a decision. Damasio also found that Elliot never showed any emotion, even when recounting the most tragic events in his life. The reasoning parts of his brain worked well, but he had lost the ability to feel. This disability turned his ability to reason from a blessing into a curse.

Brooks uses the term Emotional Positioning System (EPS) to describe how the reasoning and feeling parts of our brain work together to coat each possibility in our lives with emotional meaning. This meaning influences our decisions, most often unconsciously. Emotion does sometimes lead us to make poor choices, but it is often very accurate. Researchers Alexander Todorov and Janine Willis of Princeton have found, for example, that snap judgments based on first glimpses of other people are astonishingly accurate in predicting how people will feel about each other months later.

So what does all this talk of emotion have to do with climate change? you might reasonably wonder.

Only everything, in my opinion.

As I have written elsewhere on this blog, an effective response to the climate crisis demands action born of deep reflection—on the science and the physical impacts, yes, but also on our own experience, on the effects on our psyches. The land ethic—both the essay of that name and the unwritten ethic Leopold rekindled in so many people with his writing—was born out of Leopold’s clear-eyed and courageous observation of, and deep personal reflection about, how the juggernaut of human land abuse was affecting the wild things he cared about—and thus how it was affecting him emotionally. It was born, in short, out of heartbreak.

We defend what we love, not what we grasp intellectually. Near the end of his impeccably reasoned essay “The Land Ethic,” after extolling the virtues of critical thinking, Leopold writes, “The evolution of a land ethic is an intellectual as well as emotional process.” (emphasis mine). By using myth (Odysseus by Homer) and poetry (Tristram by E.A. Robinson) in that essay, Leopold spoke to readers’ hearts as well their heads.

It seems to me that we must follow Leopold’s example. Insisting that our leaders in Congress and elsewhere base their decisions on science and reason will only be heard to the extent that those leaders’ brains are opened by their hearts. After all, it is a feeling—fear—that motivates too many of them to listen more to the fossil fuel lobby than to ordinary citizens and scientists when it comes to energy policy and climate change. They fear losing the campaign cash those deep pocketed lobbyists dangle in front of their noses. They fear losing their jobs, their income, their status. (I’m not so sure about power, since so many leaders seem to have gladly given most of that away to special interests long ago.)

Instead of trying to make those leaders fear the loss of other things they value (say their homes or families to any number of natural disasters made more frequent and intense by climate change) more than they fear the loss of their jobs, perhaps we would do better to help them remember what they love. Although it’s important to connect the dots between climate change and natural disasters, research has shown that scaring people can actually be counterproductive with some groups. Rather, think Citizen Kane and Rosebud. How can we engage our leaders in a conversation about what places or experiences in the outdoors most shaped or enriched their lives? Did they grow up on  farms? Did they fish? Hunt? Climb trees? Sail? Climb mountains?

But let us not forget to look into our own hearts, too. If we avoid the emotions that the climate crisis triggers in us altogether and focus instead (if it is even possible to do so) solely on the facts and figures, we may be as useless to the movement to stabilize the climate as those who genuinely believe climate change is not happening and/or is not caused by human activity. We may be a movement full of Elliots, with all the information and reason in the world but little ability to get anything accomplished.

* * *

Last week at the ALF, near the one-time home away from home of a man unafraid to wear his heart on his sleeve, I felt as if I’d come home.

This week, my thoughts are still on home, and another late great American who had the courage to do as Leopold did. A brave and combat-seasoned World War II veteran, George McGovern understood the awesome power of emotion, even heartbreak, to fuel right action. In his last book he wrote about how it felt to be labeled a bleeding-heart liberal, making it clear that he embraced the term. We ought to be stirred, the elder statesman wrote, “even to tears,” by what was wrong in the world. “Sympathy is the first step toward action.”

Cranes homeward bound

In his acceptance speech at the 1972 Democratic convention, McGovern called this nation home from many things, including secrecy and deception in high places, wasteful military spending, entrenchment of special privilege and tax favoritism, prejudice, and the neglect of the sick. He called us home to the affirmation that we have a common dream and that we can move our country forward.

Is is not the work of all leaders to call our sisters and brothers home—to work with them to make it home?  Is it not the responsibility of a leader to remind those who look to us for direction that all our homes depend on our home planet operating pretty much the way it did when it gave rise to humanity? We won’t do that if we cringe from emotion or make it take a back seat to reason. We will only make it home if we have the courage to express the homesickness we feel when we see our home threatened or wounded. That is what draws others into the fold, and keeps them there. That is what moves people to take bold, thoughtful action.

Adaptation to atmospheric conditions occurs at different time scales. For example, one may watch television before one retires at night to learn the weather forecast for the following day—so that one can plan how one will adapt to the atmospheric conditions expected for the next day:  What weight of clothing to wear, whether one will need to wear a jacket (and, if so, what weight), whether one will need to carry an umbrella, etc.

What I have just referred to is a very short time scale. A longer time scale would involve purchasing or renting housing—not just as a locale for certain of one’s activities, but for protection from precipitation and temperature conditions (if, i.e., the housing is supplied with a furnace and/or air conditioning).

Climate is a concept that is losing its referent.

On a day-to-day basis it may be difficult to determine how one will adapt to weather conditions the next day—which is why one watches, or listens to, weather reports.  On an annual basis, however, there has been more predictability in the seasons—which fact has made the concept “climate” a meaningful one. In recent years, however (2012 being an excellent example), “climate change” has become noticeable—and notable. In fact, what research regarding “climate change” suggests is that “climate,” as a concept is losing its referent (i.e., that to which it refers). That is, the referent (in this case a complex of atmospheric conditions) is changing in a way that is making the very concept “climate” ever more meaningless.

Why claim that? What “global warming” involves is not just a trend, from a global standpoint, in an increase in the global mean temperature, but weather conditions that are increasingly abnormal:  Erratic, and therefore more and more unpredictable. That fact is my basis for saying that “climate” is fading away as a meaningful concept—so that “climate change” itself is a misleading term (which is why, in an earlier essay, I suggested “trendular atmospheric depatternization”—TAD—as a substitute).

With TAD we have a still different—a longer—time scale, from an adaptation standpoint, and if we are thinking about how we will adapt to TAD, we may have in mind a period of time down the road 20 years or more, and would need to ask ourselves:

• Can I adapt on an in situ basis (i.e., one not requiring that I move), and if so, specifically what do I need to do to adapt to the atmospheric situation that I anticipate at that future period of time?
• If I will need to move (because, e.g., I live near the coast, and the ocean will be rising), where should I move, and what sorts of adaptive activities will I need to engage in at that new location?

As I have addressed these matters in earlier essays, I will focus on a different matter relative to adaptation in this essay. In doing so, let me begin by noting that there are two different approaches to TAD:

• Efforts at mitigation—activities having the purpose of trying to stop, or at least slow, further warming by, e.g., (a) reducing the emission of “greenhouse” gases, (b) reducing the flow of insolation to earth, (c) sequestration of carbon, and (d) developing “carbon sinks.”
• Adaptation—engaging in activities that will allow one (one hopes!) to survive the atmospheric changes that will be occurring, there being no attempt to affect those atmospheric changes.

The problem with mitigation efforts is that we may be very close to a “tipping point”—so near, quite possibly, that the “inertia” present in TAD will cause that tipping point to be reached, and passed, within a few years. Given this very real possibility, it appears that our only real option is that of adaptation. In earlier essays I discussed the matter of what one might do to adapt. In this essay, however, I address a very different matter related to adaptation—the possibility that efforts at adaptation might actually contribute to the problem of TAD!

Will we be able to adapt to atmospheric changes?

Several articles have appeared recently concerning this matter, including Will R. Turner, et al., “Climate Change:  Helping Nature Survive the Human Response,” Bryan Walsh, “Climate Change:  How Adapting to Warming Could Make it Worse.” (an article that draws heavily from the Turner article), and Michael Oppenheimer, “Climate Change Impacts:  Accounting for the Human Response.” Using Walsh’s article as my basic source, the following adaptive efforts can be identified as possibly presenting problems. (I should note that the focus of these articles is on how adaptation efforts affect biodiversity, and that the adaptation efforts referred to tend to be ones directed by governmental units rather than private individuals/organizations.)

1. The use of corn to produce ethanol (for use as a fuel) has resulted “losses of grassland habitats in the Conservation Reserve program, while some of the fertilizer used to grow that corn eventually washes out in the Gulf of Mexico, feeding dangerous dead zones.” Besides, “there’s growing doubt that first-generation biofuels [such as ethanol] cut carbon [emissions] significantly.”
2. Although hydroelectric power is a “very low-carbon renewable energy, . . . massive dams can cause ecological problems of their own.”—China’s “massive Three Gorges Dam” being an example.
3. Las Vegas, Nevada, has proposed “a massive series of pipelines that would bring groundwater from the valleys of   the booming desert city.” This project, if implemented, “will likely damage species and ecosystems in the area.”
4. Stressed regions such as southern Africa “may experience substantial declines in crop productivity in just a few decades.” And as “existing farmlands dry up, refugees will seek to colonize wild territories—seriously impacting biodiversity as protected areas are converted into cropland.” Unfortunately, “much of that new land—like high-elevation areas of East Africa and parts of western Russia—are biodiversity hotspots.
5. As sea levels rise, people living in coastal areas will be forced to move inland. Unfortunately, when “people migrate away from the coasts to escape the rising seas, expect them to use those forests [in the areas into which they are likely to move] for fuel and clear them for farming.  That could be devastating for biodiversity—nearly half of the Alliance for Zero Extinction hotspots exist within this zone.”
6. With the melting of Arctic sea ice, new shipping lanes will be opened, and this will “increase the possibility of expanded offshore oil and gas exploration. The far North has been largely untouched by human beings—the presence of heavy shipping and energy infrastructure could wreak havoc on wildlife that will already be coming under threat directly from warmer temperatures. And that’s without a devastating oil spill.””Plans for adaptation should be looking down the road to a period 20 years or more into the future.”

Walsh concludes his discussion by stating:  “The lesson here isn’t that human beings can’t adapt to climate change without adding to the destruction created by . . . climate change. It’s that adaptation will only work if it’s well-planned for the long-term, and if it takes into account impacts on wildlife and nature as well as on human beings . . . .” Walsh then quotes from the Turner et al. article:  “Increased research focus on the indirect effects of climate change, coupled with expanded support for biodiversity conservation, will ultimately lead to better policies and programs dealing with global climate change.”

Some comments:

1. As I suggested earlier, use of the term “climate change” suggests that what will be happening is that there will still be climates, but that climatologists will need to re-make their maps periodically to show how the positions of climate regions have shifted. Such a suggestion ignores the fact that one of the more important features of what will be occurring is increased variability in atmospheric conditions for any given location—so that a point will be reached where no areas will even have a “climate”! This will present severe problems for anyone trying to adapt to changing conditions, for crop failures will become not only increasingly routine, but increasingly severe. Because of this, starvation and disease are likely to become major “cullers” of the human population. (As I have noted in previous essays, British climate scientist Kevin Anderson projects that by 2060 about 90% of the earth’s population will be culled by “global warming.”) There is a real urgency associated with adaptation, and simply engaging in “further research” rather than adaptive actions amounts to “fiddling while Rome burns.”
2. Note in the sentence quoted from the Turner et al. article the use of the word “ultimately” and the phrase “policies and programs.” The word ultimately suggests that we can approach “global warming” in a leisurely fashion, as if we had “all the time in the world.”  Use of that term ignores the very real possibility of a “tipping point” being reached within a matter of years (or decades, at most), after which change will become rapid—as the process of change begins to “feed upon itself” (i.e., positive feedback mechanisms kick in).

Also, the reference to “policies and programs” assumes that adaptive efforts will—must?—be initiated and directed by (national) governments.  My response to this assumption is that it is unbelievably naïve and foolish, because most politicians seem to be “in the pockets” of energy company executives—whose interest is in more drilling and mining, rather than adapting to “global warming.” Given that governments are not likely to provide the necessary leadership, we as individuals and as leaders of private organizations (such as religious ones, foundations, etc.) need to engage in activities designed to “save” ourselves from the ravages of “global warming.”

1. Following the quote from the article by Turner et al. Walsh states that “the only problem [with waiting for “better policies and programs”] is that it’s our inability to plan well for the long-term that has led us to the climate crisis—and there’s no evidence that has changed, even as the impacts of warming become harder and harder to deny.” To assert that our current “climate crisis” has resulted from an inability to plan for the long term is to assume that the economic and other developments that have occurred in a society have been done under governmental leadership. Such might be true in some countries, but certainly has not been true in the United States—where economic interests are the dog that wags the government tail, and the concern of those interests has been with short-term profits, Earth be damned.
2. Walsh’s statement:  “Human influence on the planet will shift as we adapt to warming—and we may end up doing even more damage to the Earth than climate change itself.” The implication of this statement—it would seem—is that we should make no effort to adapt because in doing so we will be damaging Earth—more than it has already been. He can’t be serious in making this statement!  Unless we want our species to go the way of the dinosaurs, it is incumbent upon us to try to adapt to the changes that will be inevitably occurring. Of course, in doing so we should strive to minimize our impact on biodiversity. But given that (per Kevin Anderson) most of the world’s population is likely to be culled by “global warming” within the next few decades, that drastic reduction in the earth’s population will in itself result in a diminishment in the impact that humans have on biodiversity.
3. Most of the six points listed above concern activities being engaged in either at present or in the near-term future.  Given that—as I suggested earlier—plans for adaptation should be looking “down the road” to a period 20 years or more into the future, I find most of those points to have little or no relevance for the time period of most importance.
4. Nothing in those comments is helpful for those private citizens (as individuals or leaders of private organizations) desiring to engage in adaptive behaviors. One gets the impression that the authors are neither aware of how serious a threat—and how soon—is posed by “global warming,” nor are aware that they will be affected by atmospheric changes just as much as the rest of us are. They give the impression that their interest is in providing a basis for further research by themselves—as if the situation in a few years won’t be so chaotic that they will be forced to think about how they are going to survive rather than engaging in research! Where are their brains?!
5. It is perhaps understandable why the scholars associated with the Turner article, for example, have a focus on biodiversity—that’s where their research interest lies. What’s curious, however, is how they can have such concern when their own professions—even their lives!—are being threatened by “global warming.” One would think that they would realize how odd their views are, given the situation that we humans find ourselves in today.

The cast of characters taking the stage in Wisconsin’s great sand rush today would have been all-too familiar to Aldo Leopold. Besides the hubristic, front and center stand the head buriers, who ignore both the lessons of history and the laws and limits of nature. Less culpable, perhaps, are those imaginatively challenged individuals who look at all that sand and see only… sand. Or perhaps their ability to think abstractly extends only as far as dollar signs. Regardless, each of these characters (make no mistake, we all play some part in this drama) seems oblivious to the ways its actions are further unbalancing the grand equation upon which human life and civilization depends.

This ensemble acts out an age-old drama, as old as Greek myth, as old as the Bible.

Leopold’s 1941 essay “Odyssey” makes it clear that he was well schooled in the former. But the man knew his scripture, too. Although he never subscribed to the tenets of any church, Leopold had studied the Bible as a young forest ranger and believed the following passage from Ezekiel epitomized the moral question with respect to humanity’s relationship with the land:

Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture, but must you tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture? When you drink of clear water, must you foul the rest with your feet?

Troy Gardens near dusk, Madison, WI

It is an almost universal spiritual principle, mirrored in (among other places) Jesus’ message to his followers as recorded Matthew’s gospel: our own salvation is inextricably related to how we treat “the least of these,” the smallest, most common members, which are in fact indivisible from the whole. When we fail in this regard ecologically, we inherit a hell of our own making. In Leopold’s war-eve essays, “Odyssey” and “Yet Come June,” we catch glimpses of just such a place.

Leopold the bridge

Whereas John Muir (who almost died after being overcome by carbon dioxide and other gases while digging a well  through 80 feet of Jordan sandstone for his Calvinist father a few miles east of where the Leopold shack still stands) worked to preserve wild land so that all of us might better appreciate and enjoy it, Leopold went further by seeking to resurrect a moral framework for our relationship to all land. Every environmental problem, he famously wrote, stems from the tendency to view land as a commodity instead of as a community to which humans belong. Only a land ethic, he believed, could provide a solid enough foundation upon which to rebuild our relationship with the land and thereby ensure its – and our own – salvation.

Having a land ethic means you sometimes must draw lines in the sand – say in the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, the Sand Hills of Nebraska, or the sand counties of Wisconsin. Such lines will be temporary, however, susceptible to the incessant and shifting winds of commerce and competition, if we do not also draw clear lines in our own heads and hearts. Leopold understood that the more we all drew lines there – ethical lines we would not cross ourselves – the fewer lines we would have to draw in the sand to keep out others who would, for profit, unbalance the give-and-take relationship upon which most species, including our own, depend. “An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence,” Leopold wrote in the capstone essay of A Sand County Almanac, “The Land Ethic.” “An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing.”

When looked at circumspectly, it must be concluded that sand mining as currently practiced in Wisconsin is anti-social conduct.

Although some conservationists have been hard at work sowing a land ethic in hearts and minds ever since Leopold’s day, it is time to acknowledge that too many of us in the environmental movement have neglected this harder work. Instead we have chosen to put too much of our time and energy into defending lines we have scratched in the literal sand. Perhaps it is time we turned this ratio on its head and devoted the better share of our resources (limited as they are) to ethic building, so that we can prevent more environmental disasters from ever happening.

In addition to his study of the Bible and other spiritual literature, Leopold’s own sense of ethics was informed and enriched by the example of his father Carl, a well-respected Iowa furniture maker and avid outdoorsman who held himself to a strict hunting code. Carl Leopold’s field scruples, particularly, made him an anomaly in an era of rugged individualism, few game laws and rampant market hunting.

The elder Leopold’s example was reinforced and enriched for Aldo by the writings of luminaries like Whittier, Tennyson and Emerson, who, even if they didn’t hunt much, celebrated the nobler virtues. Leopold’s education, both formal and informal, constantly reinforced personal morality and character. As biographer Curt Meine writes in his meticulous biography, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work, individual responsibility was a cornerstone of Aldo’s philosophical construction.

Sunset over Sauk Prairie

Although not explicitly articulated in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold’s strong faith in the Jeffersonian ideal of small, limited government was expressed in his other published work and personal correspondence. Few individuals were more willing to defend public lands against the short-sighted efforts of private interests. Leopold was outspoken in his opposition to a 1947 scheme concocted by corporate leaders to transfer federal lands to the states for easier pickings.

But it may surprise some fans of Leopold, as it did me, to learn that Leopold was just as adamant in his opposition to government subsidies that, in his view, condoned the ecological ignorance of many landowners and led, as he somewhat hyperbolically put it, “straight into government ownership.” His core point: The purchase of federal land was no substitute for private conservation practice.

Politically homeless since the death of Teddy Roosevelt, Leopold believed so strongly in bottom-up conservation that he even angrily criticized Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes’s plan to create a federal department of conservation. “The real substance of conservation,” Leopold wrote to a friend at the time, “lies not in the physical projects of government, but in the mental processes of citizens… All the acts of government… are of slight importance to conservation except as they affect the acts and thoughts of citizens.”

Aldo Leopold spent most of his career in the employ of government institutions but his faith in those institutions was not without limits. Government was not a cure-all for the nation’s environmental woes. Because he was as familiar with the rural mindset as he was with the flora and fauna of the sand counties, Leopold understood that the benevolent hand of the state was at least as likely to foster resentment and dependency as gratitude and independence. He had met many farmers in Wisconsin who only employed conservation practices that were financially profitable.

Government could play a vital role with research and education, and by modeling good stewardship of public lands, Leopold wrote, but government could only go so far. It would not go very far at all, he believed, without acknowledgement of humanity’s moral obligation to the land. “The land” was Leopold’s shorthand for the entire biotic community.

Our choice

Today more than ever, we need to bring Leopold and his full legacy into sharper focus. I can think of no figure, living or dead, who stands a better chance at bridging the two main, fiercely competing political worldviews dominating our state and nation. In Leopold, conservatives and progressives can both find a lot to love. On the one hand you have a lifelong hunter who revered a Republican president, believed in small, limited government and individual responsibility. On the other hand you have a holistic thinker who understood that life on planet Earth is a dance of interdependent species and systems, a man who hated war and devoted the better part of his life to educating others through his lecturing and writing.

Progressives and conservatives both ignore the man in full at great peril. Choosing to highlight only the parts of Leopold’s legacy that best serve our personal ideologies would be a false choice, leading to even more damage to the planet — and body politic.

The more important, nay critical, choice we must face, and soon, screams at us from between every line of “Odyssey.” For as in that winter seven decades ago when Aldo Leopold sat down to pen the essay that would become his favorite, humanity once again finds itself in a dark place. Like Odysseus at Aeaea, home of the seductive and wicked Circe, we stand at a terrible crossroads.

Down one road – let us call it Y – the future of our state and our planet looks not unlike the Cambrian past in which all that Wisconsin sand was created: iceless and devoid of most terrestrial life. Wisconsin’s latitude has not changed on planet Y, it just feels like it because atmospheric CO2 concentrations have skyrocketed. Average temperatures in Wisconsin have met or exceeded the 4-9 degree rise by mid century projected our own university scientists. As our take has continued to exceed our give, we’ve also lost our spiritual equilibrium. The poisoning of our bodies has followed the continued poisoning of our land and water, and the scars on our landscape, whether inflicted directly by extractive and exploitive  industry or indirectly by climate change, have left deep gouges in our psyches.

Things look a lot less scary down the other road – call it X. Although life is hotter and more difficult on planet X, and diversity and beauty have been eroded considerably, slashing our fossil fuel use and preserving and expanding our forests, prairies, taiga and tundra has allowed us to pull back from the ecological tipping points upon which we have been teetering. Greenhouse gas emissions have fallen sharply, temperatures have begun to moderate, and our weather has gradually  become less volatile. With luck, sea ice has stopped declining, subarctic and marine methane releases have tapered off, as have the number of extinctions. On planet X, humans have learned to live more with natural systems than against them, to give at least as much as we take, and to treat the smallest and most common members of the biotic community as we would wish to be treated. Because ultimately what we do to them we do to ourselves.

It will not be easy getting to planet X; indeed, it will probably be the hardest thing we’ve ever done. But we are not alone, and we are not starting from scratch. Leopold and his land ethic point the way forward. Only a moral relationship to the land will enable humanity to pull its collective head out of the sand and instead engage deeply with it. When we do, we just may see, as Leopold did, the worlds contained in it. No doubt we will also see that we share far more in common with each other than seems apparent to us today.

As direct inheritors and trustees of Leopold’s full legacy, responsibility for sharing the land ethic weighs heaviest on those of us who, geographically or in spirit, count ourselves residents of the sand counties. Will we do everything we can to ensure that Wisconsin becomes a model of conservation and clean, home-grown renewable energy production? Will we see to it that the land ethic blows, like sand or the seeds of the prairie smoke plant, into every home, school, business and organization in the state – and then into the country as a whole?

 * * *

Bee on sunflower

Will we choose to throw in our lot with Leopold, who early on chose the path of x over y, and whose personal and professional odyssey was a journey to better understand the world in which we live — as well as protect that world? Will we choose to embrace a vision of a future in which mining, refining and sharing the nuggets of wisdom Aldo Leopold deposited in A Sand County Almanac and other works is valued above the extraction, commoditizing and destruction of the very earth beneath our feet? Will we strive toward a future in which our sand counties are left unmolested so they can continue to safeguard and purify our water, support the unique life that has sprung up on them over the millennia, sequester carbon and teach future generations how best to live in harmony with the rest of creation?

Will your odyssey be that of x or of y? Make no mistake: one path leads to survival and the other to eventual destruction. Humanity’s odyssey – making it home – depends on your choice.

Read part 1 here.

Read part 2 here.

-Marcel Proust

I had planned to give you the third and final installment of my series on the war-eve essays of Aldo Leopold and the important lessons I think those writings hold for us as we deal with the great cart-off of Wisconsin’s sand counties–a dismemberment that is only exacerbating the climate crisis.

But after reading Bill McKibben‘s latest in the August 2 issue of Rolling Stone, I have decided to pone that post. The somewhat reluctant but undisputed leader of the international climate movement, who will be speaking at Fighting Bob Fest in Madison in September, thinks “Global Warming’s Terrible New Math” may be the most important thing he’s written since his book, The End of Nature, almost a quarter century ago. I’d have to agree, although I think “Multiplication Saves the Day,” which appeared in Orion Magazine in 2008, is a close runner up.

Like that earlier piece, McKibben’s latest is prescriptive. The disease is the same, of course: anthropogenic climate change. What the good doctor stresses here is that the patient–only the planet we live on–is rapidly going from serious to critical condition. Put-your-affairs-in-order condition.

Rick Chamberlin

Once in a while patients beat the overwhelming odds and survive such a diagnosis, but it rarely happens without bold, swift intervention. The treatment McKibben strongly advises is the same one he recommended before: multiplication–massive, collective action of both the direct and representative kind. But this time he gets specific about the regimen necessary to give the patient a fighting chance. It’s essentially a two-pronged strategy: a great divestment push modeled on the one that helped the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, and a price on carbon in the form of carbon fee & dividend legislation.

Next of kin–and that’s all of us–would be wise to read the doctor’s full report. It minces no words, which is what you want from your health care provider when you or a loved one is up against it. Denial can get you through the night, but it’s worse than counterproductive in the long run.

And so here, at the foot of the bed, is the chart. There is very little I can think to add except: you may as well act–and I hope it will spur you to act like you’ve never acted before–as if it’s your chart, because the quality of your own life and of your children’s and grandchildren’s lives, depends to a large degree on what you–on what we all–do now.

Global Warming’s Terrible New Math

In part one, I examined some of the themes evident in “Odyssey,” an essay Aldo Leopold drafted on the eve of World War II and that was eventually included in the posthumously published book for which he is best known, A Sand County Almanac: Sketches Here and There. In this post I look at another of Leopold’s war-eve essays and a lecture he delivered in early 1941, in light of current conflicts unfolding upon the Wisconsin landscape.

Only a few days after penning “Odyssey,” Leopold began a very short essay he would eventually title “Yet Come June.” Whereas the former story might be said to shine a bright light on humanity’s war against the environment, in the latter Leopold also addressed humanity’s war against itself. It is a dark, even dystopian, vision in which empires spread over continents, “teaching the good life with tank and bomb.” Leopold never finished editing the story, and (understandably) it was not included in A Sand County Almanac. 

Richard E. Chamberlin

In March of 1941, Leopold perplexed some of his new Wildlife Ecology 118 students, many of whom were preoccupied with the troubling events in Europe, with what came to be known as his war ecology lecture. “Every living thing represents an equation of give and take,” he told his class. But human technology, Leopold elaborated, ensured that our “take” exceeded our “give.” Moreover, it assumed that this imbalance could continue indefinitely. On a finite planet, he implied, this state of things could not endure forever.

War, Leopold suggested, was the ultimate taker.

Nations fight over who shall take charge of increasing the take and to whom the better life shall accrue… From president to parlor-pink, from economist to stevedore, all are preoccupied with dividing the means rather than building the end. As for ethics, each seems to write his code to fit his material needs, rather than vice versa.

Legacy squandered?

Almost three quarters of a century later, it is perhaps too easy to speculate about all that Leopold intended when he wrote “Odyssey” and “Yet Come June,” just as the United States was girding for war on a scale never before seen. By choosing atoms as his main characters in “Odyssey,” for example, was the scientist presaging the nuclear age and its attendant horrors?

Probably not. But I can assert with some confidence that both essays are in many ways better parables for our time than Leopold’s. The tragic events I enumerated in part one make it clear that we humans failed to learn many of the lessons history (natural or otherwise), might have taught us. Despite the groundbreaking work Leopold and others did to show us how dependent we are on our planet remaining as whole and diverse as possible, we continue to divide, conquer and commoditize the Earth even as we take intra-species warfare to new heights – or depths. Leopold, it seems clear, viewed the two kinds of warfare as sides of a single coin.

Rick Chamberlin

Our military wars today are waged far overseas, with most  U.S. citizens engaged only passively and indirectly in them. Unlike during World War II, there is no draft, no recycling drives for rubber and metal, no rationing (unless you count the disparities resulting from the gross wealth inequalities in our nation). The other side of the coin may be just as invisible to us because of its conspicuousness. Especially in the Midwest, no other enterprise has radically transformed more square miles of land than agriculture. Our modern system of food production and distribution relies on ever-larger inputs of fossil fuels, genetic engineering, mono-cropping and mechanization. It suffers a continual infatuation with bigness, and likely accounts for more than 30 percent of human-caused global warming. Although organic farming, farmers markets and CSAs are booming, such enlightened practices still represent only a small fraction of the ag sector. Had Leopold set “Odyssey” in our time, the part of the sole farmer in Y’s story might have been played by a massive confined animal feeding operation (CAFO), owned by a corporation, relying on unprecedented inputs of oil, natural gas and coal-fired electricity, and producing more solid and liquid waste than a small city.

Despite the way agriculture has altered the state in which Leopold spent the latter half of his life and fleshed out many of his most important ideas, Wisconsin has proven itself a leader in conservation and wildlife management. Today the badger state has some of the strongest environmental laws of any state in the nation. It has protected millions of acres from development and played a crucial role in saving species like the bald eagle, timber wolf, and sandhill crane. But the fact remains: we still take from the biosphere far more than we give back.

Lately, a new enterprise in Wisconsin is threatening to rival large-scale agriculture in its destructiveness. This enterprise jeopardizes the conservation reputation Wisconsinites have worked so hard to earn, and the legacies Leopold and other great home-grown conservationists like John Muir and Gaylord Nelson left us. This new industry has not only opened up a new chapter in humanity’s war on nature, it has left large chunks of our state looking like war zones.

In many parts of Wisconsin, frac-sand mining is gouging up the sand from which “Odyssey” and many of Leopold’s deepest ecological insights sprang, then shipping it out of the state by the train- and barge-load. Like Y in “Odyssey,” most of these particles will end their journeys imprisoned in a hydrocarbon sludge–somewhere deep beneath Ohio, Pennsylvania or Texas. What’s left behind is a leveled and cratered landscape. From the air, these places are often indistinguishable from battlefields. A few trees usually survive in even the most bombarded battlefields; not so where surface frac-sand mining occurs.

Recent discoveries of natural gas deposits in the Marcellus Shale of the eastern United States and the exploitation of that gas through fracting (short for hydraulic fracturing) have sent demand for Wisconsin sand skyrocketing. Fracking is a process whereby sand and a mixture of water and toxic chemicals are injected into the shale at very high pressure, creating cracks through which the gas can escape. The sand in this slurry, known in the industry as proppant (more commonly, frac sand), holds all those tiny fissures open, maximizing the amount of gas extracted. Unfortunately, ground and surface water is often poisoned in the process.

The fine, hard and round silica (quartz) sand that comprises more than a third of Wisconsin’s surface area and makes such excellent proppant was formed around 500 million years ago during the Cambrian Period when the land now known as Wisconsin was at a tropical latitude, part of a mother continent scientists call Laurasia. Cambrian sea levels were much higher then than they are today, in part because the planet was too warm for polar ice.

Rick Chamberlin

Over the eons, much of that Cambrian sand was cemented into stone. This relatively soft, semi-porous rock that geologists call the Jordan Sandstone Formation underlies a good portion of western Wisconsin and smaller parts of Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota. Encompassing over 16,000 square miles, this region of sedimentary bluffs, coulees and spring creeks is known more commonly as the Driftless Area because it remained un-scoured by the last three glacial advances. Outside the Driftless Area, much of Wisconsin’s sand lies loose at or just below the surface, where erosive waters and winds have deposited it.

Historically, Wisconsin sand has been mined for construction and glassmaking, but these operations were small in scale and widely scattered, resulting in few environmental or health problems. Today, however, there are 60 active sand mines in Wisconsin, and 32 processing plants where sand is cleaned and prepared for shipment out of state. To meet the demand created by the shale-gas boom, speculators and investors scour the countryside for mineable land. Twenty new mines have recently been proposed, some almost a square mile in size, and the boom is still in its infancy. The land grab precipitated by the fracking boom is of a magnitude not seen in Wisconsin since 19^th century lumber barons leveled the north woods. If that was a shearing, this is deep disfigurement.

From scenic bluffs to industrial parks

Recent investigations have revealed how ill-prepared the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and local governments are for the sand-mining boom. Current regulation of such mining is patchwork. Permits are issued county by county and contain language that is often ambiguous at best. In many cases, mining companies are only required to leave the area in a “useful state” when operations cease. High-capacity wells are sometimes drilled near the mines to supply water to wash the sand before it is shipped. The wastewater, which often contains harmful chemicals used to wash the sand, is held on site in open retention ponds vulnerable to breaching when rainstorms, increasingly frequent and more intense in recent decades, occur. Just such an overflow occurred in May, fouling the St. Croix River, a federally designated Wild & Scenic River in its upper reaches.

Most of the range of the endangered Karner blue butterfly overlaps the coveted sand deposits. Because sand mining often involves removing the soil and everything in it, other rare and threatened species like the long-lived Blanding’s turtle, the polygamous eastern meadowlark and the legless western slender glass lizard may also be at greater risk.

Although the human health risks associated with sand mining are starting to draw more newspaper ink – many existing mines and processing facilities release silica dust, a byproduct proven to cause several lung diseases, including cancer, when inhaled – relatively little attention has been paid to just how radically sand mining is altering the look and character of Wisconsin. In some areas the damage rivals what is occurring in states where the actual fracking takes place. Indeed, for its aesthetic impact alone, some have likened frac-sand mining to the coal strip mining that has denuded and leveled hundreds of lush peaks in Appalachia. Describing what could be thought of as a best-case scenario, one sand-mining executive told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune last year, “The end would be a flat farm field that could be used for an industrial park 25 or 30 years down the road.”

The bigger picture

As damaging as frac-sand mining can be, the devastation wrought by climate change might someday make us nostalgic for such “simple” environmental problems. Hydraulic fracturing, and the burning of natural gas, exacerbates global warming; the only question is how much. Burning natural gas produces only about half the carbon dioxide emitted by coal combustion. Yet recent studies indicate that the climate impacts resulting from releases of methane during fracking could far outweigh the climate benefits of replacing coal with cleaner-burning gas. Methane is 22 times more effective than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

A little context: Scientists with the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts last year projected a 4-9 degree average temperature increase for the dairy state by 2050. The 1.1 degree rise our state has experienced since 1950 has already resulted in a rate of ice loss on our lakes of one week per decade, and a 100 percent increase in the frequency of heavy rainfall events. It does not take a climate scientist to deduce that Wisconsin is in for some jarring changes in the coming years, regardless of actions world leaders take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

By aiding the extraction and burning of more fossil fuels by mining and exporting sand for fracking, Wisconsin is helping to increase the rate at which this already rapid change is occurring. Even if the climate impacts of natural gas extraction and burning do not turn out to surpass those of coal, destroying the carbon-sequestering capacity of our sand counties by stripping off their trees and other organic matter is foolhardy at best. Would not a far saner course of action include maximizing energy efficiency, aggressively developing Wisconsin’s renewable resources (there is enough wind capacity in the state to meet our electrical demand five times over) and investing in research and development to bring other clean energy sources to the fore?

I’m no Leopold scholar, but I would bet my copy of A Sand County Almanac that Leopold, were he still alive, would much prefer that his war-eve essays be read as cautionary tales instead of as self-fulfilling prophecies.

In the third and final installment of this series, I will explore some of the moral underpinnings of Leopold’s land ethic–an ethic we must soon revive if we are to avoid a future that looks more like the Cambrian deep past in which Wisconsin’s sand was created.