The Natural Patriot

[Editor’s note: A millennium before Charles Frazier, before Jude Law and Nicole Kidman, there was the original “Cold Mountain”, a modest group of poems thought to have been authored by the mysterious hermit Han-shan, who scribbled them on rocks and trees around his humble abode and left them. The story goes that they were collected by an official who wished to be enlightened. And that, fittingly, is how the most influential Zen poetry in history has come down to us. Or at least, that’s how the story goes. The poems cover a lot of ground, but the following one hits home at the moment (although I would switch groundhogs for mountain monkeys). This poem, seventh in a series, is from Burton Watson’s translation.]

From: Cold Mountain
Han-shan
My house is at the foot of the green cliff,
My garden, a jumble of weeds I no longer bother to mow.
New vines dangle in twisted strands
Over old rocks rising steep and high.
Monkeys make off with mountain fruits,
The white heron crams his bill with fish from the pond,
While I, with a book or two of the immortals,
Read under the trees — mumble, mumble.

It’s familiar dilemma: after you’ve changed out your old incandescent light bulbs, got serious about recycling, started eating local farm produce, switched to reusable shopping bags, maybe even bought a Prius, one comes to the uncomfortable question: How are we going to make a real dent in the voracious global carbon appetite? How, in other words, can we make more than symbolic progress towards getting global climate change in check?

The question is urgent, possibly the most urgent of our time. And there are many parts to its answer, but they all inevitably boil down to decisive action at the highest levels of state, national, and international government. And as we look forward, in matter of a few hundred days, the long-overdue departure of the current administration in Washington may at last provide a chance for progress.

But how to proceed? What can an ordinary citizen do? If it all seems mind-numbingly wonkish and impossible to grasp (Cap and trade? carbon credits? What the . . ?), do not despair. There is hope. And it comes in the form of an extremely concise and clear little book called Climate Solutions, by Peter Barnes (Chelsea Green Publishing). This is undoubtedly the best summary I have seen of the complex, byzantine economic and geopolitical context of the problem of climate change and how we as citizens — as the stewards of our various governments — might approach it. I highly recommend the book.

Most proposed legislation to reduce global warming calls for a cap-and-trade system, in which a “cap” (limit) is set on the total amount of carbon that can be released to the atmosphere, the cap declines over time, and tradable permits for emitting this carbon are issued to allow the market to determine how the reductions take place. The crucial issues are how the permits are issued (whether simply given free to big utility companies, or auctioned off), who gets the money from sales of the permits (the government or the citizenry, as administered through a trust fund), and whether there is a “safety valve” that basically allows the whole thing to be jettisoned if it gets too inconvenient.

Barnes argues cogently for a “cap-and-dividend” system, in which permits are auctioned off, the proceeds go to a “sky trust” that pays dividends to citizens (rather than the government or utility company shareholders) and/or is used for projects that are clearly in the public interest, no carbon offsets are allowed to serve as fudge factors, and there are no safety valves.

In a strikingly unusual and altruistic move, the author and publisher claim that they are actually making a FREE PDF copy of the book available to maximize its practical impact. That is supposed to be at www.onthecommons.org. I couldn’t find the free PDF of the book there, but there is other interesting stuff which gets at the sam material, including free citizen’s guides to the “cap and dividend” model that Barnes advocates. If you can afford the modest price of this book, I encourage you to buy it, read it, loan it to as many friends as possible to support the effort that went into it, and then act on it by voting and organizing. If you can’t afford it, download the free stuff. We will all need to be on our toes about this as the issue actually comes to serious discussion — and a vote — in the fresh air of the next administration.

Some key quotes:

“When people don’t pay the full cost of what they’re doing, but instead transfer costs to others, economists call this a ‘market failure’. Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, has said that climate change is ‘the biggest market failure the world has ever seen.’”

“The big question in climate policy is whether polluters should pay pollutees, or vice versa. If carbon permits are given free to historical polluters, energy prices will rise and we’ll all pay more to whoever gets the permits. That wealth transfer — which over time could exceed a trillion dollars — will flow straight from our pockets to the shareholders of private companies. It will be less visible than tax-funded transfers, but a huge shift of wealth nonetheless.”

“Fossil fuels are unique. There’s no other source of energy that’s as concentrated and convenient as fossil fuels. This means that we can’t simply replace fossil fuels with something else. We also have to use less energy, and use it smarter.”

“The big problem with a carbon tax is that it has to be very high to decrease pollution sufficiently. When people are addicted to a substance or a source of energy, they’re willing to pay a lot more before they stop using it . . . A carbon tax is an economist’s dream but a politician’s nightmare. The economist imagines that politicians will keep raising the tax until it reduces pollution sufficiently to solve the climate crisis. That assumes heroic behavior by a majority of Congress members for several decades, an assumption not grounded in reality.”

“In cap-and-dividend, permits are also sold, not given away free. However, the revenue doesn’t go to the government — it comes back in the form of equal dividends to all of us who pay it. This revenue recycling system is sometimes referred to as a sky trust.”

“Several bills pending in Congress address the market failure that causes climate change. However, most of them replicate errors of the European trading system: They give free permits to historic polluters, cap carbon downstream rather than as it enters the economy, allow offsets and safety valves, and offer little protection to consumers and businesses.”

And finally, in a nutshell:

“KEY LESSONS
* Auction, don’t give away, permits.
* Cap all carbon entering the economy.
* Protect consumers and manufacturers.
* Don’t count offsets against permits.”

The devil is in the details, of course, but a surprising depth of the details are in this little book and it is written for regular people, rather than hard-core policy wonks. Power to the people!

A few months ago I happened to pick up a copy of Jacques Cousteau’s classic first book, The Silent World, less from a burning desire to read it than for the mysterious and evocative cover photo, and out of a sense of comradely solidarity with this pioneer submariner. It gathered dust on my bedside table for a while, as books often do, before the opportunity arose to read it, in this case during a week on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a place, appropriately enough, dominated by the edge of the Ocean.

What a book. I would be the first to admit that Cousteau is not the most talented writer — the prose is often pedestrian and the organization a bit clunky. But this is not a novel to be read for the art of its language. This is the real McCoy. It is a tale of exploration of a fabulous new world hitherto almost completely unknown. After reading The Silent World, I’m left with the powerful sense that Cousteau was an explorer in the classical mold, in the company of Columbus, Lewis and Clark, and the early astronauts.

It’s fashionable in some professional circles to dismiss Cousteau with a condescending wave. He was not a “real oceanographer”, they might say, and this is true enough. He had no formal training in marine biology, though he did have the naval Captain’s years of practical knowledge of the Sea. And he had some engineering background. Many passages in the book describe activities that the team undertook in the name of research to learn about animal behavior and diving physiology and so on, which seem quaintly sophomoric to us in the modern world where we’re accustomed to seeing the wonders of the universe in high-definition while we loaf on the living room sofa.

But that is part of the point. Cousteau was not an egghead product of the universities as many of us are know. There was essentially noone to teach him the skills and understanding that we take for granted today, either as marine biologists or sport divers. He was, to use the old cliche, a student in the school of hard knocks. He and his buddy Emil Gagnon invented underwater breathing, something that humans had been trying to figure out for literally thousands of years. That alone is enough to qualify him for heroic status.

But there’s more. The human stories behind the Cousteau saga are fascinating. The aqua-lung, as they called their creation, was cobbled together from scrounged parts while Cousteau and his homies were laying low in Nazi-annexed France during the war. They tested the thing out in a hidden cove to escape the attention of Italian occupation troops. They fed themselves in those lean times by spearing fish. Everything was trial and error, including terrifying dives to great depths, in caves, and such places where divers not infrequently passed out or lost their bearing from nitrogen narcosis. Some never came back.

After the war, as a naval officer, Cousteau was detailed to Marseilles to run “a collecting center for returning sailors in a commandeered castle.” He convinced his superiors that the aqua-lung had promise in a variety of naval applications and wheedled their permission to conduct a series of explorations. His buddy Taillez quit his job as a forest ranger, and a motley crew was assembled as the “Undersea Research Group.” Their activities included location and salvaging of wrecks, which led them eventually to the wrecks of cargo ships from classical times, the merchant marine of Greece, Phoenicia, Carthage, and Rome. The treasures they found had been sitting on the bottom of the Mediterranean since they sank two millennia ago, and offered unprecedented insights into the life of those times. Cousteau was, without a doubt, larger than life.

“I have recounted how the first goggles led us underwater in simple and irresistible curiosity, and how that impulse entangled us in diving physiology and engineering, which produced the compressed-air lung. Our dives are now animated by the challenge of oceanography. We have tried to find the entrance to the great hydrosphere because we feel that the sea age is soon to come.” 

Reading these tales of high adventure half a century or more later inevitably brings the wistful sense, all too familiar nowadays, of what has been lost from the oceans, which were still comparatively virgin in the 1940s and 1950s when Cousteau first penetrated them. The descriptions of schools of gigantic fishes moving placidly among colorful reefs, which Cousteau and company were the first humans to see in their natural habitat, are almost nowhere to be found in the world oceans of today. But I am willing to bet that the situation would be far worse had the mysteries and beauty of the Ocean world not been brought to such wide popular attention by Cousteau’s lifelong passion.

What “professional” ocean scientist today can claim that kind of victory?

Egad, it’s been a month again. Just thought I’d drop a note to let concerned readers know that I am indeed still alive. For the last two weeks, I’ve been pedal-to-the-metal doing field research in the Caribbean, around the island of Curacao in the Netherlands Antilles to be specific (the previous three weeks, and for that matter the last several months, require a more prosaic excuse, with which I will not bore you). For some reason, it’s always very difficult to convince people that I have been working my you-know-what off on a tropical island. They invariably jump to the conclusion that we’re sitting around drinking fruity drinks with little umbrellas in them. Which is not true at all — we never use those little umbrellas. I do realize that this does not qualify me for hardship pay. Hence the title of this post.

Don’t misunderstand me — I’m not complaining. If you’re going to be working somewhere, a tropical island is a favorable place to do it. Our team was on Curacao as part of a research project, supported by the National Geographic Society, studying the ecology and biogeography of symbiotic Caribbean shrimp, which I have alluded to before. This may sound a bit obscure (OK, it is obscure) but we argue that the high diversity and clearly definable habitats of these shrimp, which inhabit living coral-reef sponges, makes them an ideal group for studying general questions about the origin and maintenance of coral-reef biodiversity. And, since the Carmabi Research Station where we set up shop is surrounded by hotel beaches and tiki bars, we got a lot of practice honing this argument for the constant stream of mildly amused random passers-by who were wondering what on earth we were doing so intently while they lay all day in a state of sun-and umbrella-drink-induced torpor. I hope I don’t sound like an ingrate.

So (as the old explorers’ tales go): there we were. Very interesting place, Curacao. Quite different than anywhere else I’ve been in the Caribbean. Looks more like Texas. I’m told that the name Curacao derives from a Portugese term that translates roughly as “wasteland”. And it surely must have seemed so to exhausted 16th century sailors looking for decent food, water, and precious metals. The island is very arid, with a negligible layer of debris that passes for soil covering the limestone rock and supporting a burnt-looking vegetation of vicious thorn scrub (Acacia of some sort) and saguaro-like cacti. Not much good for anything other than goats. And lizards of several sorts, which are ubiquitous. Those enterprising colonialists did manage to find a use for the place as a hub of the slave trade, which they would no doubt be happy to forget. Nowadays, however, it’s a bustling place with a population of 150,000 people supported mainly by the massive oil refinery that processes the fruits of Venezuela’s wells a few miles away on the South American mainland.

For our specific purposes it was an equally interesting place. Great diving: clear water, and lots of the magic coral rubble that produces shrimp, in relatively shallow water. Indeed, the reef at Eastpunt, at the windward eastern end of the island removed from much human influence, had without a doubt the highest coral cover and diversity of any place I’ve seen in the Caribbean in the last few decades. Easily 80-90% cover of live coral. And small but healthy thickets of the formerly dominant shallow-water Caribbean corals Acropora cervicornis and Acropora palmata, which have long since succumbed to disease and various other stresses elsewhere. Very strange — like a visit several decades back in time. A rare and much valued ray of hope in a bleak outlook for Caribbean reefs. It is a tremendous relief to know that these reefs exist at least somewhere. Hope springs eternal.

To be continued . . .