Less that one hundredth of one percent of the water on our planet is fresh. Renewed only by rainfall it is what sustains our forests, our farms, our grasslands and all terrestrial life on earth. Our civilization uses it as if it were limitless draining water tables, lakes, rivers and swamps at unsustainable rates, irrigating crops that are 80-90% water and shipping them elsewhere. To make matters worse we are still dumping sewage, garbage and toxic chemicals into our drinking water.

Our climate on this planet is dependent on water as well. We’ve been enjoying, I think, the wettest July in memory and it has kept us much more comfortable than normal. So much so that one might even imagine that “global warming” is a myth. But a friend of mine wrote a book about global warming and climate change years ago which said that it would be marked by disrupted and erratic weather patterns. If you watch the weather channel you can tell we are experiencing that for sure. Over 100 in the northwest and in the 80s in Texas, in July! Our planet’s forests are essential to moderating our climate because of the water they store and process. We are not experiencing water scarcity here in Perry County yet but some places in the world are not so lucky and it might be wise for us to consider some local water conservation measures as we continue toward an uncertain future.

First let me tell you about the Konso people who live high, between 6000 and 13,000 feet, in the mountains of southwestern Ethiopia. Who knew? Anyway, for hundreds of years they have been farming that region utilizing a very sophisticated system of water catchments and irrigation channels all built of earth and stone. These water catchments were specially designed ponds built with the full participation of everyone in the village. If you were away when it was time to work on the dam that created your village pond you came back to help. The men dug out earth to make the pond and used it to build a dam. The women and children would dance and sing, sometimes all night to compact the earth on the dam with their feet. Then the pond was lined with rock to protect the dam and with regular maintenance, also a whole village affair, has supplied their water for hundreds of years. They are surrounded by living thorn bush fences to keep the animals from spoiling the water which instead were watered in troughs nearby filled with the pond’s water. A system of filtering plants, gravel beds and rock spillways also cleaned and aerated the water as it entered the pond. All this knowledge about how to build and maintain this water system was passed along to the children in the songs the women and old folks sang to them. All was going fine until last century when massive deforestation, wars and government policy tore the region up. For a time the UN and various missionaries tried unsuccessfully to build them a water system and most people get their water now from pipes that only work a couple hours per day. The problem was that the many villages in the area had worked out longstanding traditions and agreements on how to care for the water and these have been disrupted and the forest that was once considered sacred that was essential for their having water no longer exists. It is a sad story but now that everyone is aware of the problem the forest can be replanted and the dams rebuilt. It may take some time but the people of Konso know how to do it if they are only allowed to.

Many of us have been watching with dread as our local forest is being cut down, it has been happening everywhere. The great forest of the Amazon is still being cleared. Because of the devastation deforestation has caused some countries have made laws against cutting their forests, New Zealand, China, the Philippines and Thailand are among them. Unfortunately this shifts the deforestation to other countries or drives illegal logging. Still, our having water depends on our having a healthy forest system. The forest can supply medicine, food and shelter as well. Anything we can due to stem the tide of deforestation in our region will help us and future generations survive the future.

There are other things we can do to preserve and protect our water too. Rain barrels are long standing ways of collecting and preserving water for the drier times. For every inch of rain fall a 1000 square foot roof will shed 600 gallons of water. That requires a big rain barrel so often cisterns were built with a much larger capacity. The water coming off of the roofs of our downtown buildings amounts to thousands of gallons every time it rains. The new downtown street plan, as its architects said in the public meeting where they presented the plan, is largely a water management issue. That being the case I was a little disappointed they didn’t address that better. The green spaces they showed could have been rain gardens or small wetlands that helped slow the water down and clean it up before going on into the river. A healthy wetland, by the way, is a mosquito eater not a breeder. The state (TDEC) has a website that describes how tiny wetland shrimp and certain plants keep mosquito populations way down. We can start composting our human wastes too instead of contaminating our water with our flush toilets and then poisoning the pathogens we’ve put into it before dumping it into the river. There are better ways of doing it and people are just beginning to realize how important our water is. I hope we will all soon begin to treat water as the essential ingredient it is for life in Perry County.

The debate on health care is being put aside as the Senate takes the month off. Clearly it is an issue they would rather avoid altogether, after all they are covered very well themselves and the industry in control of our health care is so profitable that it is well positioned to defend itself from any reform. This is because, as we all know, the Senator’s depend on industry contributions to their all important campaigns. The stories about how terrible socialized systems of insurance or medicine are again being passed around reflecting the views of those who are insured and able to pay, never mind the growing number of people who are not. The selfish gene, no doubt spawned by fear and ideology, is well established. Some of us are repelled by that notion and think that we all should be taking care of one another individually and through our organizations and our government. Is health care really something we want only a few people to profit from? I’m not talking about people’s jobs, I’m talking about profits taken out of the industry that show up on Wall Street. This leeching of our health care dollars seems to me to be as barbaric as using leeches to treat disease. There is also a lot of wasteful redundancy in the administration of health care and insurance as doctors and hospitals have whole departments just to deal with insurance companies. A single-payer system would nearly eliminate all that and take this cost down from as much as 50% to 3%, the current cost of administering Medicare. We need more care-givers and fewer care-deniers. It is not necessary to have a huge bureaucracy to decide who gets care and who doesn’t when everyone is covered.

However, I think the economy is going to trump any system we currently have or imagine we will get from our centralized government. I expect government will use the crisis to increase its power over us, as usual. State socialism and capitalism are both collapsing because they are both based on resource extraction without any balance with nature’s economy. Both ideologies being fueled by fossil fuels could only sustain growth as long as those resources were prevalent. Oil production has now peaked and will begin to taper off and we are now blowing off whole mountaintops to get at the coal that is left to sate our enormous appetites. Those of us who imagine an economic recovery of this system are simply ignoring that reality.

The truth is there is no economy to recover. The manufacturing base was shipped out years ago replaced by an imaginary economy, what some call the “service economy,” all buoyed on the real estate bubble. Many of those assets have now become liabilities since the bubble’s burst. As unemployment is only going to increase, at least within this system, we will have a hard time paying for anything much less healthcare for everyone. The US government went bankrupt in 1933 and ever since we have been borrowing from, and going deeper in debt to the central bank, private bankers represented by the FED. Its no wonder they called in their notes and got their trillions first as the economy began to sputter and stop. And its no wonder many Americans are irked by the huge pay bonuses being given their executives.

So what can we do? All the great religious teachers have told us to “look within.” Perhaps we should and reconsider who it is that knows what is good for us. I think we have to relearn what should be self-evident truths, that each and everyone of us is endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them being life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And there are many more rights not enumerated in the constitution, for instance, who can be happy without their health issues being cared for etc.? We fought the revolution because we recognized the usurpation of our inalienable rights, primary among which at that moment in history, was to control the issue of our own money instead of being forced to use the crown’s money. We wanted to control our own money so we could control our own leech-free economy, you see.

Mind you, I’m not calling anyone a leech, we are all human’s caught up in a system that knows nothing but how to extract and control populations so it can continue to extract. This system has created a monoculture of humankind that has spread all around the planet, which you can recognize it by the style of clothing, architecture, tools and their corporate labels. We simply have to begin to subscribe to a new more balanced system, one to our liking, one that affirms our best values as humans, as the stewards and gardeners of this beautiful living earth. Many of us know that preventive health should be getting more attention and we need to provide that attention ourselves, individually and collectively as a community. Healthy food and clean water are our first priority and we should work together to assure we will have enough for ourselves and for future generations. We should also use our collective intelligence to create a local economy through production and barter, even issuing and controlling our own money if needed. this needs to happen in every community and in some it already is. Some of you might wonder how we can do this or if anyone cares. I would say that it all has to begin with a conversation, one that builds from person to person into small group meetings until we can have a community meeting to air everyone’s ideas of how we can build a local economy without being dependent on a failing system. We have a beginning, let’s keep talking.

I had to laugh when I read “Climate Change is a bigger issue than cow burps,” but thought it was a little misleading to speak of it in terms of grass fed cattle.  This is because 80% of the beef consumed in the US comes from factory feed lots where cows are crowded together standing knee deep in manure with not a blade of grass to be seen.  I saw some aerial photos of one of these operations and the pens stretched for miles toward the horizon, a giant Guantanamo Bay for cows.  Because of the crowded environment the cows get sick so they are fed antibiotics regularly. Factory farm cows are fed corn and soy protein to fatten them up at record rates which also causes serious health issues for the cows, gastro-intestinal issues. As Petus Read pointed out, the cow has four stomachs to process woody and grassy material but grains play havoc with the cow’s system producing lots of methane.  Methane is a greenhouse gas 30 times more powerful than C02.  Thus flatulence may play a larger roll than burps. Our food and energy systems have made a significant un-natural contribution to the acceleration of the natural process of climate change. 

All this represents a health disaster not just for the cows but for us as well.  If you are eating grass fed beef then you are lucky, it’s much better for you.  If the cow was well treated all the way from birth to death then it is even better for you.  Industry propaganda would have us believe that the factory farm is needed to feed the world’s hungry people but factory farms are about making money, not food, as now more than 1 billion of us go hungry with 5000 a day dying for lack of access to clean water.  Most the world’s grain goes to feed animals to produce the industrial world’s meat as only 20% of the world’s population consumes 80% of the planet’s resources. People are going hungry not because there isn’t enough food but because it is not fairly distributed.  But why do we need to distribute food?  The normal human mode would be hunting, gathering and growing food near by. That is sustainable and sensible, isn’t it?  Most of us do not control the production of our food and it is shipped in from elsewhere.  In the industrial economy there are countries exporting grain for feed while much of their population starves.

The industrial economy controls the production and distribution of most of our food, fuel and just about everything else they can make a buck off of, even our healthcare.  Climate change is a major health threat but it appears our leaders will use the issue to create another bubble that they can pump up and burst, accumulating more money while destroying the earth’s living systems.  That is what “cap and trade” is all about, “make a law, make a business” as the saying goes.  It is a delaying tactic designed to allow them to continue to pollute and make more money when instead the issue should be viewed as a threatening situation calling for smart and timely action.  Our economic and monetary systems are controlled by irrational people who believe in a growth economy with no limits.  But we have limits, there is only so much biomass and water on the planet.

It’s for this reason that maverick economist E.F. Schumacher drew a hard distinction between primary goods and secondary goods. Secondary goods are the goods and services provided by human labor, mining, farming, manufacturing, the ordinary subject of economic theory. Primary goods are the goods and services provided by nature, the non-human world, and they make the production of secondary goods possible. In order to grow anything you need to have arable soil, water, and an adequate growing season, as well as more specialized natural services such as pollination. These are nonnegotiable requirements. The same is true of everything else in the human economy: nature’s contribution comes first, and determines how much the human economy can produce. The cycles of nature produce three-quarters of all economic value in today’s world and only around a quarter is produced by human labor. Even that quarter is made directly or indirectly from natural goods, and cannot be made at all without the necessary natural goods. Conventional economics assumes that these things are just there for us to use up and that there is no limit. This is disastrous misconception of the situation.

One in four mammals is threatened with extinction, as are one in eight birds, one in three amphibians. Species are dying 1000 times faster than the natural rate, ¾ of the fishing grounds are exhausted or in dangerous decline as we continue to drive the 6^th major extinction on our planet.  The average temperature of the last 15 years is the highest ever recorded and the ice caps have thinned 40% in 40 years.  98% of the world’s forests, our planet’s lungs, have been cut down. We know it’s true as we see southern species moving north.  Oh yes, climate change is a bigger issue than cow’s burps alright.

The solution is simple enough, just stop doing it and help nature get back in balance.  Oil is the primary fuel of this economy and world oil production is on a shaky plateau since it peaked in 2005. Our monetary system is intimately tied to oil which is why the economy is faltering and will continue to fall. We need to relearn how to grow food, fuel, clothes and building materials without oil. We are fortunate to have local examples of how to do it, producing food, shelter and transportation while living a much simpler less consumptive lifestyle.  Climate change will throw human kind into crisis mode so better to go voluntarily and creatively than to be forced by necessity for survival but this does not mean we can’t have a good time doing it.  Civilizations come and go but humans have been here much longer than any of them because we have been able to adapt. 

Climate change is a subject that most people don’t want to think about because it sounds too scary or complex and it is.  That’s okay, one doesn’t have to think about it, just think about all the things we need to do in order to be more self-reliant and create a self-sufficient community. Localizing our economy does not mean allowing extractive big box stores to come in.  The big box in Hohenwald takes 18 million dollars a year out of our area just in low quality food sales alone.  If we can learn to take care of our natural economy and produce life’s essentials with our local human economy we will be better off even if the worst never happens. 

Back on January 13 th, 2009, my wife and partner Katey had come up with an idea for the theme of an art program, The Forest that Feeds Us.  Since I often write topical songs she asked me to write one for the forest.  So that evening I did and here it is, well, at least the lyric to it:

The Forest Feeds Us

Eden is a forest, covering the land

It’s where we all come from, still it’s near at hand

Look around and you will see, a generous abundance

All it asks us in return, enjoy the lovely fragrance

            The forest feeds us, body, mind and soul

            And the forest heals us, the forest makes us whole

            There is nothing like it, something we all know

The forest feeds us, watch the wonder grow

The forest is so much more, than just all the trees

The trees are not alone, they need a lot of these

Flowers, bushes, fungi, the deer, birds and bees

All parts of the forest, 40,000 different species.

The forest feeds us, body, mind and soul

            And the forest heals us, the forest makes us whole

            There is nothing like it, something we all know

The forest feeds us, watch the wonder grow

Bridge:

It cleans and stores our water, a very high percent

Of all of the rain that falls, conserving heavens scent

First we get oxygen, then soil from the leaves

How could we get along without, amazing benefits like these

The forest gives us timber, vines we can weave,

Fresh meat for the freezer, medicinal roots and leaves

Clean water for the fishes, and tourist destinations

We take care of the forest, for future generations

The forest feeds us, body, mind and soul

            And the forest heals us, the forest makes us whole

            There is nothing like it, something we all know

The forest feeds us, watch the wonder grow

© Jan. 13, 2009 Howard M. Switzer

 The First Hundred Days:  A Precedent for the Next Hundred Years

 The first thing Greens would do in office is continue leveling with Americans and resonating with their common sense.  We would clarify for all that the Wall Street obsession with economic growth - increasing production and consumption of goods and services - threatens to break our collective back, and has already caused extensive damage.  Instead of more and more of the “stuff” of growth, we need high-quality economic development.  We need an economy that meets all citizens’ needs and provides financial security and health for our communities, kids, and grandkids.  We need an economy that nurtures rather than plunders our environment.  We need a steady state economy, and we would start working toward it on day one.

 After an unprecedented effort to gather input from citizens, communities, and businesses, our ecological economists and other experts would begin the task of prioritizing policies to make the transition to a steady state economy.  We would not make drastic changes overnight, but take a gradual approach to revamp the economy.  The first hundred days would be a start, and the end result would be an economy of sustainable size, fair distribution of wealth, and efficient allocation of resources.

 We would reform the economy by incrementally shifting tax, monetary, and trade policies.  The purpose of the shift would be to harness America’s entrepreneurial spirit and institutional creativity for the enrichment of the whole society.  We would deploy ecological taxes on pollution, resource extraction, and use of natural capital.  We would begin to increase the reserve requirements of banks to transfer control of the money supply from private bankers to the elected government.  We would replace outdated measures of economic output with measures of true economic progress.  Above all else, we would protect the environment, reminding citizens that the environment is the base of the grandkids’ economy.  With a Green Party Administration, a hundred days will help for a hundred years.

Gaza is being bombed by Israel. Frightened children, their hungry mothers and the rest of their poor families are being bombed.  Schools, hospitals, mosques, markets and other public places are being bombed.  The cover for this, the terrible excuse, is that they are attacking terrorists.  But what could be more terrifying that to take your children to school only to see it bombed and your children crushed to death under a pile of rubble? Israel says they are retaliating for the occasional angry rocket fired from Gaza, all puny fireworks compared to the awful might of the Israeli military’s 100 pound bombs. As is so often the case, the term ‘terrorism’ is but a rhetorical smokescreen behind which the strong crush the weak. People of conscience everywhere are protesting. 

President elect Obama, spending the holidays with his family in Hawaii, has yet to acknowledge the demonstrators along the road he travels to and from his physical workouts.  Like many Americans, most of them voted for him filled with hope that at last we would have a strong peacemaker for a President. Is the President elect afraid to offend the Israeli lobby who were so generous to his campaign?  Is he afraid that if the continuous flow of arms from the US to Israel were to stop the economy would take yet another hit?  Was the illusion that he was a peacemaker a mere campaign trick?  There is an election campaign now in Israel too, each candidate trying to prove they are tougher and more strident than the other in their condemnation and support for the bombing of Gaza, playing on the toxic hatred too many Jews have for Palestinians.  We have elected the first black man to office and he has turned his back on the peace movement.  Will he also turn his back on the poor, on the homeless and on ordinary Americans who are in danger of losing their family homes?  He’s filled his cabinet with staunch supporters of the corporate status quo, the military industrial complex. 

We missed an opportunity to elect the first black person as President of the United States who was the embodiment of all the ideals in the mythology built around Obama for his election campaign, who was also a woman.  Cynthia McKinney, the Green Party candidate for President, despite having no press following her around or the support of the US government is using all her meager connections in the region and risking her life to get humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.  Israeli gun ships rammed the small yacht carrying her along with a doctor, other medical workers and 3 tons of medical supplies warning them to stay away.  The boat, damaged and taking on water, thankfully made it to Lebanon. We missed that grand opportunity but we cannot afford to miss any more such opportunities.  Despite the hopeful and confidant demeanor of Obama his silence is much more than cowardice.  No, any silence in the face of such sustained atrocities is a vicious silence.

Howard Switzer is a columnist, an ecological architect who helps people with buildings of earth and straw and was the 2006 Green Party candidate for governor of Tennessee.

It’s being called a huge environmental disaster but, unlike Katrina, the TVA coal ash pond dam collapse disaster was not caused by the environment.  Rather, this disaster was caused by the continued use of a dirty, poisonous fuel used in an outdated and inefficient mode of energy production, coal. Earthen dams holding the toxic materials from burning coal fail all the time, it’s what they do in time.  The reason you may not have heard about it could be the fact that the media tends to down play such disasters and the real disaster of coal is seldom mentioned. 

Coal kills, it has a long history of doing so.  It is estimated that over 64 million Americans breathe air that has so much particle pollution that it puts their health at risk.  Coal is estimated to cause 25,000 thousand deaths in the US every year from diseases caused by breathing particles and soot from coal emissions. Besides the microscopic particles linked to asthma and heart disease there are other health affects as well, not to mention the forest killing acid rain.  Coal-fired power plants are the largest single man-made source of mercury pollution in the U.S., the largest contributor of hazardous air pollutants overall. Startling new research shows that one out of every six women of childbearing age in the United States may have blood mercury concentrations high enough to damage a developing fetus putting 630,000 babies at risk.  

Coal companies are ruthless too, as one can see by the way they mine the last remnants of the stuff.  They’ve blown more than 500 mountain tops off filling in valleys with more “engineered” fills that compared to the geological forces that created the landscape in the first place are quite puny despite their massive scale.  Coal companies pay no mind to the effects on surrounding communities either beyond PR campaigns such as the current one claiming ‘clean coal technology.’ Coal may even cause the demise of human life on Earth as it is the single largest contributor to global warming.  While 8 homes were swept off of their foundations by the recent coal disaster no injuries were reported but one can bet the toxic mix of arsenic, thallium, uranium, thorium, mercury and cobalt, at more than 10 times the concentration of coal, will have a lasting affect on the health of those living downstream.

If you do live in a small town downstream it was likely days later before it turned up in the local paper and then perhaps on the 6^th or 7^th page.  Outside of Tennessee, if you missed its brief mention on national TV, you may not learn anything about it at all from the newspapers.  If this were just another glum warning from intelligence central about the possibility of a terrorist attack sometime in the next 5 years, however, it would likely be on the front page in all the papers.  But coal kills.  It has killed many more Americans than any terrorist and yet we tend to turn our heads or at best briefly note the event before we move on apparently unable to face the inconvenient truth.  King coal is powerful and has been whispering in our ears all our lives just so that we do ignore its crimes.  Its time people awoke and insisted on clean energy, really clean energy.  It’s also time we reduced our appetite for electricity and fossil fuels.  No, nuclear energy is not a solution either as it has the same problems, a horrifically toxic waste we do not know what to do with or how to store safely for the eons it will take for it to be rendered harmless.  It is especially nasty in that its poison is not so easily detected by human senses.

The population explosion and expansion of our civilization on planet Earth, more than 6 billion and counting, was made possible by the broad use of fossil fuels and many scientists worry that since they are finite resources  that there may need to be a population contraction once they’ve been used up.  America has been in a position to lead the world toward a greener future for some time now but leaders have ignored the writing on the wall if their policies tell us anything.  In a conversation early in the last century, Thomas Edison once said to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, “I’d put my money on solar energy …I hope we don’t have to wait till the oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

The time has come to tackle solar energy in a big way and the economic forces that have been arrayed against all good sense solutions are showing themselves now to be corrupt and wrong about almost everything they have insisted on and got for the last 100 years.  We know we can’t just stop it all overnight but we have no more time to waste.  The scientists can continue to study how to make electricity from the sun ever more efficiently etc. but there is much more to do that does not require a scientist to figure out because they’ve already done it and it’s stuff we as communities can do. 

A truly sustainable solution leaving fossil fuels behind will require a considerable redesign in the way we do things and we must if we are to avoid the potential catastrophe of famine. We know that we may be facing climate change and the critical factor for us regarding that is water. So every community should be making sure they are collecting, retaining, slowing and cleaning whatever flow of water they may be blessed with. Then we must address the fact 1/3 the fuel used in the US is used just to get our food to the table, 1400 miles on average. If the trucks stopped rolling we would be hungry very soon as most cities and towns only have about 3-5 days worth of food on the shelves.  The problem: we don’t grow our food locally as humans have for the 4 million years or so before we got to this place.  That relatively simple transformation would take us a long way toward better health and security as well. 

By building greenhouses a diverse diet can be grown pretty much anywhere year around.  This can also allow a more horticultural and intensive organic food production system.  We can also clean our waterways and the water used for transporting our human waste utilizing water cleaning plants that turn out to be the very best fuel crops.  We already have the underutilized technologies required for producing liquid and gas fuels from plant, animal and human wastes, methane and ethanol, simply and economically. An important part of what makes such a system sustainable is that it is done at the community scale. By hooking up the waste loops between our animal and plant food production systems with our clean water and fuel production systems we can create sustainable symbiotic relationships that can provide for our future generations and be done with the disaster that is coal.

Visit coalspill.com for the latest news on the coal ash spill in Tennessee and Alabama.