Staying Above the Oil Slick

Recently Obama declared that he'd be clearing the way for more domestic oil drilling to help ease our struggles at the gas pump. This should be an opportunity to point out that every time a middle eastern oil supply is endangered, we get pinched for gas prices, and why don't we extract ourselves from oil dependency itself? No, no. Let's not waste our time on renewable energy sources. Instead, let's just drill more inside our own borders. The environmental degradation will be permanent, and the fuel source will be temporary at best. Just because it's not a good trade-off for our future, doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.

Another crappy element to this situation is that "clearing the way" really means giving more (taxpayer) money to oil companies as an incentive to go tearing around the continent, drilling, spilling, polluting and destroying in search of oil profits. In case no one noticed, BP never really paid for the huge mess they made of the Gulf of Mexico, and there's really nothing preventing them or anyone else from doing the exact same thing again.

Let's not forget the fact that our use of fossil fuels is causing global warming. We obviously do forget that one of the most necessary tools for fighting global warming is maintaining and increasing our forests. Meanwhile, Obama has stated plans for increasing logger access to our forest lands. This is depressing. Recently, I drove in the Mt. Hood area, looking for access to Lost Lake (turned out it was still blocked by snow), and in one particularly scenic area happened upon a really revolting, giant chunk of clear-cut land. It was hideous - it looked like a huge splat of death in the forest. Then I noticed a chunk of trees nearby, that were strangely all the same height and clearly the same tree species. This was the effect of earlier replanting, a stand of trees with no biological diversity. The fact that they were in an area where clear-cutting was frequently happening meant that there were most likely no wildlife being supported by this undiverse christmas tree lot.

It's frustrating that humanity is so uncreative and so destructive to everything around us. Next: how using cellphone is killing us and all the bees. Then: Human population overload, redux.

Wolf Rider

I find it criminally inane that one of our representatives in congress, jon tester--a democrat from montana, added a rider to the newest budget bill that strips wolves of their endangered status in montana, idaho, wyoming, washington, and oregon. apparently, no one is opposing it because democrats don't want to lose any of their number and they think this guy will get a free pass in the next election if he makes ignorant ranchers happy by making up a new law that goes completely against the endangered species act and all the reasons that we have that in place. HATE HIM.

Violence Against Life

It is only been in the last century that people have begun to believe that violence against animals could be considered morally and legally wrong. To put that in perspective, it has only been a few hundred years since people began to believe the same about violence against women. Violence is a way for humans (to be specific, it is generally humans who identify as "men") to establish control over other people or animals, it's a way to express anger, and it's a way to punish, which may result in death. The Animal Legal Defense Fund has been working hard to establish a legal precedent for the link between animal cruelty and domestic violence. Many of their cases have been successful because the evidence is so damning.

Not quite domestic violence, but definitely connected, was the recent case of Russell Swigart. He became enraged at his female co-worker, broke into her house while she was out of town, killed her cats, and then texted her to describe the ways in which they had died at his hands. He went to jail and was recently up for parole. 15,000 signatures were gathered to help the victim of his crimes keep him in jail (http://www.aldf.org/article.php?id=1627).

I think in our culture, and many others, we are taught that there is something "natural" or inevitable about cruelty to animals. They are separated from humans by some arbitrary differences, so we don't have to follow the same ideas about preserving life. Not only do we eat them for the pleasure of their taste on a regular basis, but we smack them around when they annoy us, we abandon them to starvation, disease or danger, we use them for our benefit and then toss them away, our children are given BB guns to go out and amuse themselves by shooting at anything that moves, our big manly men (and Sarah Palin) go out and prove themselves by blasting away anything that moves with automatic rifles...the list kind of never ends. We aren't taught to value their lives like we're supposed (at least legally) to value human life. Some people even believe it's better for people to get out their frustrations through violence to animals because at least it keeps them from hurting other people. But that's not the way it works. Cruelty to animals is almost always a precursor to violence against people, if not a direct method of terrorizing the intended human victim (as in the case of this West Virginia man in March of 2011: http://www.wtov9.com/news/27148515/detail.html).

Full disclosure, I saw a dead cat in the street on my way home from work, which always spins my mind out to a really sad and frustrated place. Someone let that cat live outside in a busy neighborhood, someone hit that cat with their car and kept driving, someone else ran over its inert body in the street, and everyone else let its remains sit in the middle of the road for the rest of the day. I myself could not bring myself to go out and bury it, mostly because it will require me crying on the side of a busy street for about an hour. These characteristics of empathy for animals that I have are considered ridiculous and impractical by most people. It is maybe too inconvenient and overwhelming to let oneself think about the suffering of other lives - one can barely let oneself think about the experiences of people who have different skin tones or cultural practices, let alone all the billions of non-human creatures out there.

Throwing Wolves to the Wolves

Oregon's House Committee on Agriculture and Natural Resources heard testimony on March 30 by the Oregon Cattlemen Association that 5 new bills should be passed concerning approximately 24 wolves that live in the state. Most of the bills are to basically to make it legal to kill all the wolves, any wolves anyone ever sees, at any time, with any weapon.

Details:

Bill #1 & #2: Ranchers would be compensated for livestock killed by wolves by either the state Board of Agriculture or the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission.

Note: Organizations such as Defenders of Wildlife have been offering compensation for livestock proven to be killed by wolves since 1987. One detail of these bills is that ranchers want to be able to get the compensation without having to prove the dead animal in question was killed by a wolf. This is suspicious.

Bill #3: Wolves can be killed by ranchers or other people when they attack livestock or people.
Bill #4: Wolves can be killed by anyone for any reason.
Bill #5: Wolf population must be reduced to four breeding pairs.

Note: This is a most likely unsustainable number of breeding pairs. That makes this a bill for the extinction of wolves in Oregon.

Long story short (and fear and extermination of wolves is a long, long story), people who choose to live or work in the dwindling wild lands of this continent are frightened of the dark. They don't want to have to have adult supervision for their children at all times and they don't want to have to pay someone to watch over their cows and sheep all night. Despite the fact that many advancements have been made in inexpensive ways to deter wolves from preying on livestock, the easiest thing still looks like shooting at anything that moves. Education about co-existing with wolves and other "inconvenient" parts of natural ecology hasn't effectively come to these sunburned (how do you get sunburned in Oregon? somehow it happens) ranchers in white cowboy hats.

The world as we know it won't survive many more of these "traditional" solutions to humanity's desire to over-consume. We really can't keep clear-cutting, burning, exterminating, and sport-hunting our natural world away. Something has to stop us.

Hawaiian Water Rights

when america forcibly took over hawaii, it set in motion a whole slew of environmental and social disasters that are continuing to this day. the native hawaiian people were completely disenfranchised, and corporate interests took over the islands' resources. sugar plantations grabbed whatever they wanted, free of charge. water was diverted for use by plantations, then, later, when big plantations gave way to tourism, that water was owned by the corporate "water company" and sold back to the public at the company's discretion. hawaiians have been fighting to regain public water for years.

Restoring Stream Flow in Hawaii