global warming

I hate to be the one to have to tell you this, but this whole Earth Day thing is really just a front for a cabal of dirt-loving luddites determined to destroy life as we know it in America. Dig down below that crunchy granola surface, that coalition of fruits and nuts (so annoyingly high in moral fiber) and you’ll find a half-baked conspiracy to deprive us of some of our most cherished traditions: lush lawns unblemished by dandelions or dangling laundry; easy-to-heat, awful-to-eat cuisine; four wheel-drive vehicles with single digit gas mileage, and so on.

These terroirists hate our freewheeling ways, and, no, that’s not a typo. It’s a homegrown insurgency inspired by the French notion of “terroir”--the way that a specific region’s soil and climate influence the foods and beverages produced there.

Wikipedia loosely translates terroir as "a sense of place;” locavores, aka food mile fanatics, describe it as “the taste of here.” It’s a foreign concept to most Americans, whose terroir tends to be the suburban supermarket; there’s no “here” there, just overprocessed, overpackaged food that’s traveled thousands of miles by truck, ship or plane.

We’ve been awfully piggy about our oil consumption, as Jad Mouawad noted in the New York Times last Sunday:

Keep in mind that we’re only 4% of the world’s population. A graph accompanying Mouwad’s piece showed that other developed nations have managed to keep their consumption levels in check or even lower them significantly; Sweden and Denmark have reduced their oil use by 32% and 33% respectively.

Our oil consumption, on the other hand, rose 21% as we hitched our wagon to a fantasy of infinite—and cheap—fossil fuels, and went on building bigger houses, buying bigger cars, choosing longer commutes, eating more fossil-fueled fast foods.

Along the way, we glorified wastefulness and gluttony, converted fertile farms to sterile sprawl, stopped building sidewalks, marginalized mass transit, banned backyard clotheslines and front yard food gardens, and sent our soldiers off to die defending what is, at the end of the day, a pretty indefensible way of life.

And now we’ve got an agri-culture war here at home. Rising fuel and food costs, along with concerns about global warming, have given a growing army of “front-yard farmers,” as the Wall Street Journal calls them, plenty of ammunition in their war to replace resource-hogging, planet-polluting lawns with food gardens. Read the objections from grass-addled neighbors who view these minifarms as a blight, and you’ll see why Michael Pollan qualifies growing one’s own food as a “subversive” act.

Pollan’s the most high-profile combatant in the grow-your-own guerrilla campaign, his latest contribution being a piece in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine’s “green” issue that cites planting a vegetable garden as one thing an individual can do to combat climate change and shorten the food chain. But he’s got plenty of company; Rip-Out-Your-Lawn-And-Grow-Veggies is a hot literary genre these days; in addition to Pollan’s best seller, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, there’s Heather Flores’s Food Not Lawns and Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates: Attack On The Front Lawn.

There are websites to inspire the would-be urban homesteader, too, such as Kitchen Gardeners International, whose founder, Roger Doiron, is on a mission to convince the next occupant of the White House to revive the wartime tradition of the victory gardens that provided us with plenty of homegrown produce during World War II. And The Path To Freedom website documents the astounding quantity of food one family produces on a fifth of an acre in Pasadena, California.

But the curb-your-carbon-footprint campaign doesn’t stop at the curb; it’s infiltrated the institutional food sector, too, as an article in Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times noted. Enlightened eaters are encouraging university and corporate campuses to drop the mass-produced glop and start serving “real food,” i.e. meals made with as many fresh, local, organically grown ingredients as possible. Efforts to reduce waste and compost kitchen scraps are becoming more common, too.

At the forefront of this movement is a coalition of students who are launching a national campaign called The Real Food Challenge, whose goal is to “create a food system that truly nourishes people, communities, and the earth.”

In other words, a food system diametrically opposed to the one we have now; you know, the one that nourishes obesity, diabetes, animal abuse, worker abuse, pollution, and global warming. The one that our tax payer dollars have been underwriting even as it undermines us all, as Christopher Cook, author of Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis points out in an op-ed in today’s Christian Science Monitor.

So how do these wild-eyed idealists define “Real Food”?

Aha! You see, they even admit that overthrowing our uber-consumer culture is part of their agenda. So don’t be fooled by the rash of feel-good festivities and token tree hugging that inevitably breaks out around Earth Day. It’s really an all-out assault on your right as an American to plunder the planet. Alert Homeland Security! Code Green! There's an elevated risk of attack by trowel-toting terroirists.

I don’t know how many rockstars spend their free time reading UN reports, but Paul McCartney’s apparently devoured and digested the UN’s study on the meat industry’s contribution to global warming, “Livestock’s Long Shadow.” He cites the report as the clearest evidence yet that a vegetarian diet is the most effective way that we, as individuals, can combat climate change. In a letter to the Press Association, McCartney wrote:

McCartney cites the study’s conclusion that 70% of the Amazon’s forests have been razed for grazing and that livestock now take up 30% of the entire world's land surface, and adds:

Will the beloved ex-Beatle prove to be a more effective advocate than his ex, Heather Mills? Mills, a vociferous vegan, caused a ruckus last month when she asked ‘Why don’t we drink rats’ milk, cats’ milk or dogs’ milk?’ Mills also attempted to make some converts by offering the fifteen contractors who are working on her swanky new Sussex home a holiday feast. They were psyched until they peeked into her freezer and spotted the Tofurkey. One worker complained:

Nonetheless, he added:

“The Story of Stuff” is a sly short that offers a crash course in consumption; it’s like a sermon from Reverend Billy, a lecture from Bill McKibben, and a rant from James Kunstler rolled into one and made fun (well, OK, as fun as an analysis of our crass consumer culture can be.)

Eco-activist Annie Leonard’s breezy presentation is a compelling blend of facts, figures, and animated stick figures that traces the path—and the carbon footprint—of all the crap we buy, from inception to incineration. She charts our rising consumption and a corresponding decline in happiness, and exposes the post-World War II mindset that made us a nation of lemme-have-it lemmings with a 1955 quote from a retail analyst named Victor Lebow:

Lebow’s dream of a consumer-based culture started to look more like a nightmare a couple of decades later—or a horror movie, anyway. “Dawn of the Dead,” George Romero’s classic zombie sequel, was inspired by a 1974 visit to the Monroeville Mall in Pennsylvania, one of America’s first sprawling shopping complexes.

As Romero walked through the mall, he was struck by:

The Story of Stuff has its share of Gore, too. Like An Inconvenient Truth, its goal is to inform and inspire, and it does so beautifully. Yes, it seems like we’re drowning in an ever-rising waste stream, but Annie Leonard shows us that we don’t have to go with this flow. Thanks to those masters of the snappy, socially conscious short at Free Range Studios for tossing us this lifeline.

We’re enjoying an extended growing season here in the Northeast—well, some of us are, anyway. Our farmers are happy to be harvesting tomatoes and peppers this late in the year, but there’s something a bit freakish about the zinnias and nasturtiums blooming away blithely in my own front yard.

This October was the warmest in the Northeast on record, and while that scares some of us, others prefer to focus on the upside of rising temperatures. As White House press secretary Dana “Pollyanna” Perino noted in a press conference last week:

Yeah, and it’s helping the caterpillars who’ve been chowing down on my greens, and the mosquitos, and the grubs that are hatching in my soil, promising a second generation of god-knows-what kind of pesky beetle or borer. Our whole eco system is out of whack.

If you have any connection to the natural world at all, you can see the havoc that climate change is already wreaking. But hand wringing and finger pointing will not move the beltway bureaucrats who’ve dug in their heels to deny the mounting evidence--melting ice caps, shrinking lakes, parched soil, burning brush.

So it’s the perfect time for Step it Up, the sequel—Saturday, November 3rd (tomorrow!) Communities all over the country will be rallying to demand action on climate change. Please, please stand up and be counted. As Majora Carter, Executive Director of Sustainable South Bronx, told Daily Kos diarist Watthead, just showing up is “more than half the battle - there is no battle unless we show our numbers and push.”

Carter, also an advisor to eco-activist Van Jones’ terrific Green For All project, is speaking this weekend at Power Shift 2007, “the first national youth summit to solve the climate crisis.”

Power Shift’s goal is to bring together 5,500 young people dedicated to fighting global warming together to descend on DC for a rally in conjunction with Step it Up, followed by a “weekend of training, action, and movement-building in College Park, Maryland.”

Carter told my fellow Kossack Watthead:

I’m hopeful, too. That’s why I’ll be at the Step It Up rally at Washington Square tomorrow at noon instead of puttering in my garden and grumbling about the grubs. How can you say no to Bill McKibben?

It’s quite a resumé: two Oscars, an Emmy, and now a Nobel Peace Prize. But the prize that might have mattered most eluded Al Gore, even though he won the popular vote back in 2000.

Would we be a nation at peace today if Gore had actually become president? Ralph Nader was so convinced that Bush and Gore were indistinguishable that he felt obliged to offer Americans a genuine alternative.

Thanks, Ralph, but you really shouldn’t have. Gore would not have launched a needless and unjust war, for starters. He also, in all likelihood, would not have implemented the No Incompetent Crony Left Behind Act, or the current administration’s “a fox in every henhouse” policy. In a Gore White House, breaking levees would have been breaking news, not a compilation of clips put together for a highlight reel our commander in chief finally watched nearly a week after Katrina hit.

But when it comes to climate change, well, that’s when the “what if’s” become truly painful. I’m happy that Gore won the Nobel, but it’s a bittersweet victory. His fellow recipients, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are releasing a report next month that reveals the IPCC has underestimated the rate at which greenhouse gases are accumulating. To put it more dramatically, if ungrammatically, the worst case scenario just got worser.

Scientists had thought we’d have a decade or so before we’d pass the ominous milestone of 450 parts per million—the measure of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. That number represents, in essence, the Point of No Return; once you pass that threshold, it may be impossible to halt catastrophic climate change.

Alas, the IPCC’s report will show that we’re already there.

So what to do, now? We can give up, or we can Step it Up. As peak oil prophet Albert Bates noted at the talk I attended last week, we have only two choices at this point: sustainability, or extinction. Kind of a no-brainer, dontcha think?

The average American commute is growing ever longer, according to a study released last week:

Longer commutes eat into mealtime, too; with more of us leaving the house at the crack of dawn and coming home later in the evening, we’re too rushed, even, for a bowl of cereal in the morning, much less a home-cooked meal in the evening.

And those obliged to drive to work miss out on the opportunity to incorporate a bit of physical activity into their workday, unlike folks who are lucky enough to live within walking or biking distance of their jobs.

Do we really need to read another study to figure out that all this eating on the run and endless driving is eroding our quality of life? The automobile has not lived up to its promise; it doesn’t provide us with true autonomy or mobility. It’s enslaved us to fossil fuels from foreign countries while depriving most Americans of any alternative means of transport. And all this commuting is a driving force behind climate change, too.

Mass transit, regarded as a common good that merits serious investment in most developed nations, is considered by many American planners and politicians to be as quaint and outmoded as, say, the Geneva Convention.

Plenty of people still consider proximity to public transportation a selling point, judging by the property values of older suburban enclaves that offer the convenience of commuter trains. But somewhere along the line, we started to put all our eggs in one combustible basket, and now we’ve hatched a whole flock of problems.

Many people would dearly love to live closer to their jobs, but can’t afford the high cost of housing near their workplace. Parents who might prefer to raise their kids in a more densely populated, culturally diverse, mixed-use kind of neighborhood find themselves forced to move to the ‘burbs because the public schools are better, the streets are safer, or the property taxes are lower.

But there’s a sizable percentage of folks who’d rather live in a bigger house on a larger lot no matter how far from their place of work, for whom the long daily drive seems a reasonable trade-off—or even a pleasure. Their commute gives them precious “alone” time, or a chance to listen to their favorite author’s latest book, or an opportunity to multitask on their cell phones (hands free, we hope.)

So if these so-called extreme commuters are happy with their way of life, why should anyone else frown upon it?

It depends on whether you regard global warming as a problem. If you don’t, well, then, there’s not much I can say to persuade you that the exurbs are inherently unsustainable. But as U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon just told a roomful of world leaders at today’s Climate Summit, "the time for doubt has passed…inaction now will prove the costliest action of all in the long term."

And another report issued last week, from the Urban Land Institute, points out that choosing to live closer to work is, in fact, a more effective way to fight climate change than switching to a hybrid car.

Unfortunately, our land use policies historically have encouraged exactly the opposite phenomenon, with federal, state and local policies that actively encourage sprawl and make it seem inevitable. And there are plenty of people willing to defend our ever expanding exurbs. As James Burling, the litigation director for the Pacific Legal Fund, a conservative group that dismisses environmentalists’ concerns over sprawl and global warming, told the Los Angeles Times:

Ah, the proverbial bit of lawn, that precious American birthright. Who cares about greenhouse gases, as long as we can have our own bit of green? When it turns brown from drought, will the suburbs lose their luster, or will extreme commuters even notice, since they leave their homes before dawn and return after dark?

In the meantime, I’m off to hear Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig, head of the Climate Impacts Group at NASA’s Goddard Institute, give a lecture on the impact of climate change on agriculture and food in the Hudson Valley.

Lucky for me, the venue hosting the event is within walking distance, because Manhattan is going to suffer from major gridlock today, thanks to the UN’s Climate Summit. Featured speakers include Al Gore, Arnold Schwarzenegger, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Bush couldn’t make it, but he condescended to send Condi. Guess he’s busy prepping for his own two-day climate summit on Thursday and Friday, which will call for the usual voluntary measures and other pie-in-the-sky solutions. Brace yourselves for more hot air.

Fasting is in the zeitgeist, or, rather, “dietgeist,” as those witty Ethicureans like to say. In the past two weeks I’ve heard about several fasts that activists are encouraging people to participate in as an exercise in consciousness raising—one’s own, and others. I was so intrigued, I actually signed on to two of them. After ten and a half days of a liquid fast, I can tell you one thing with absolute certainty. I am really, really looking forward to eating solid food again. Food for thought is all well and good, but not very filling.

Giving your body an occasional break from food is a common practice in many cultures, whether for religious purposes or simply to give your digestive system a rest. Fasting in America, though, tends to consist of trendy crash diet/detox strategies like the Master Cleanse, which requires subsisting on nothing but fresh-squeezed lemon juice mixed with cayenne pepper, maple syrup and water for ten days. This regime is popular with women who are in a hurry to get back into their “skinny” jeans, and it seems to work pretty well, until you start eating again.

Starving yourself for fashion’s sake doesn’t really interest me, but the notion of foregoing food to make a social statement has a long and noble history, so I was intrigued when I heard about the Globesity Festival, a 7 day event coming to NYC in October to draw attention to all the havoc overconsumption is wreaking on our bodies and the planet.

I decided to see if I could handle the 10 day juice fast they’re asking participants to undertake. So I stopped eating solid food and consumed nothing but smoothies, juices, and plant-based brothy soup concoctions I whipped up in my trusty vintage Vita-Mix, a pulverizing machine that can make sawdust out of two-by-fours, though that’s not recommended.

OK, I did cheat once or twice, eating a few of our own cherry tomatoes and grapes that were just hanging there waiting to be picked—they were only going to wait so long, after all. And I had a few bites of a meal I made for a guest, just to check that the feta hadn’t gone fetid and the chili was sufficiently spicy. Oh, and a teeny bit of homemade corn ice cream—does that count as solid food?

Other than that, though, it has been all liquid, all the time, while Matt surreptitiously savored all kinds of yummy-looking and highly aromatic foods. It took enormous will power, and I was, obviously, counting the days till I could eat again. Yesterday was the 10th day, so I would have resumed eating solid food today, until the Climate Emergency Fast came along, asking Americans to “Give up food for one day now to draw attention to the fact that others may have no food tomorrow unless we halt global warming.” That one day happens to be today, September 4th, the day Congress returns from recess.

The U.S. Climate Emergency Council, a DC-based non-profit dedicated to fighting global warming at the grassroots level, was looking for a thousand Americans willing to give up food on September 4th to draw attention to the threat posed to food supplies all over the world by climate change. Drought, floods, and plagues of pests and diseases threaten crops all over the world, but the poorest countries are sure to be the hardest hit.

As of today, they’ve exceeded their goal, with 1102 folks signing on to the Climate Emergency Fast, myself included. But to what end?

All worthy goals, but skeptics abound--including my friend Steve, who noted that I totally trashed “Don’t Buy Gas Day.” How is not eating for a day any different than not buying gas?

Well, for one thing, Bill McKibben, Vandana Shiva, Van Jones, and other highly respected activists have thrown their weight behind the Climate Emergency Fast, and they’re organizing a press conference on Capitol Hill this afternoon. Will it generate the response they’re aiming for?

So far, the only places I’ve read about the Climate Emergency Fast are Grist and Daily Kos. It doesn’t seem likely to become frontpage news in an era when calling on Americans to make even the most modest sacrifice is viewed with suspicion. But I’m happy to participate, because, after all, I’m hungry for change. Really hungry.

Today is one of the three most popular days of the year to have a barbeque, according to CNN, with millions of Americans firing up their grills and engaging in the obligatory Labor Day meatfest (the other big barbeque holidays are, of course, the fourth of July and Memorial Day.)

Ah, but how does this animal flesh-eating frenzy mesh with your newly raised consciousness about meat-eating’s contribution to climate change? Won’t a charcoal-charred burger leave a smudge on your carbon footprint?

You don’t have to set up a solar cooker and fry yourself a veggie burger to make your holiday barbeque more eco-friendly. CNN says there are simpler ways to ”turn your backyard barbeque green”:

Hey, I’m all in favor of conserving electricity, and it’s entirely possible a grill is more energy efficient than an electric stove. But Gulledge’s advice conveniently skirts around the inconvenient truth about skirt steaks, or whatever cut of meat you care to cook: meat production generates more greenhouse gases than cars do.

Let’s say you’re one of those climate change naysayers who thinks this whole global warming thing is just a lot of hot air. Oh, and you really don’t care about animal welfare, either. Why can’t I back off, already, and stop trying to rain on your barbeque?

Well, because even though you don’t care about rising sea levels and institutionalized animal abuse, you’d probably rather not get cancer. Go ahead and savor that flame-broiled burger, but bear in mind that it may be dripping with carcinogens and toxins. Just ask health guru Dr. Andrew Weil, as one concerned lover of barbeque lovers did:

There you have it, further proof that a plant-based diet is the way to go! And what better way, on Labor Day, to celebrate the legacy of labor leader Cesar Chavez, than to go veggie? Chavez was as passionate about animal rights as he was about workers’ rights:

"I feel very deeply about vegetarianism and the animal kingdom. It was my dog Boycott who led me to question the right of humans to eat other sentient beings.”

Chavez believed that "kindness and compassion towards all living beings is a mark of a civilized society. Racism, economic deprival, dog fighting and cock fighting, bullfighting and rodeos are all cut from the same defective fabric: violence. Only when we have become nonviolent towards all life will we have learned to live well ourselves."

So I’m offering a Labor Day menu that honors the memory of a man who fought for fair treatment for all--the two-footed and four-footed alike:

CESAR CHAVEZ SALAD (serves four)

The foundation for a great Caesar salad is, of course, a nice fresh (i.e., local) head of Romaine lettuce, which, unlike pale, watery iceberg lettuce, actually contains a decent amount of nutrients such as folate, iron, and potassium. Like other darker colored lettuces, Romaine is also higher in beta carotenes, too. This vegetarian variation on the classic Caesar salad omits the anchovies:

First, make the croutons (feel free to use store bought, but try to find a whole grain crouton that’s free of partially hydrogenated oils—good luck!):

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Take 2 slices whole grain bread, brush (or spray) with olive oil, and, if you like, add a little garlic. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes, or until lightly browned and crisp.

Next, make the dressing:

6 ounces firm silken tofu (ideally, organic, non-GMO if you can get it)
1/3 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/2 cup water
1 teaspoon minced garlic
2 tablespoons drained capers
1/4 cup nutritional (or brewer’s) yeast
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
salt and pepper to taste

Puree ingredients in a blender or food processor till smooth.

Tear one large head of Romaine lettuce into bite-sized pieces and top with dressing, freshly grated Parmesan, and the croutons.

(I adapted this recipe from the Canyon Ranch Cooks book, and as an anchovy lover myself, I was skeptical about whether you could really make a true Caesar salad without these tasty little fish. But I am always amazed at the way this dressing mimics that delicious and distinctive anchovy tang.)

WORKING CLASS HERO

The definition of a hero is pretty elastic these days, and that goes double for hero sandwiches, which have historically consisted of anything you feel like putting on a roll, from cold cuts and cheese to pickled peppers or grilled vegetables. As Craig Claiborne wrote in the New York Times on August 27, 1963:

So stock up on freshly baked whole wheat or multigrain rolls, slice ‘em up and slather on your favorite cheeses and grilled vegetables—onions and bell peppers are the classic choices, but mushrooms, summer squash and eggplant work great, too.

And if you can’t handle going cold turkey on the cold cuts, consider some of the better veggie sausages and deli slices from Yves, Tofurkey, Lightlife, and others who make surprisingly satisfying soy-based meat substitutes. They may be fake, but they’re a real option for those of us who want to reduce our meat intake.

If a meat-free Labor Day is a no-can-do for you, then at the very least try to go grass-fed. Even CNN’s catching on to the grassroots groundswell for grass-fed meats:

A barbeque featuring tofu dogs or veggie burgers would be enough to start a riot in some American backyards, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the grass-fed burgers and hot dogs we buy from Hawthorne Valley and Fleisher’s. Hey, I even ate a non-grass-fed burger (and a dog) at the Teamsters Cookout at Yearly Kos. I’m not a purist (for the record, Marion Nestle had a hot dog, too—it’s all about moderation.) I just think we’d all be better off eating a lot less meat, and avoiding any meat (or dairy, or eggs) from factory farms. Note to Teamsters: pasture-raised meats contain brain-boosting omega 3’s, and you need all the brainpower you can get to cope with globalization and grow the grassroots labor movement!

I give President Bush an “A” for his new global warming initiative—an “A” for apathy. Admittedly, this is progress over the “A” he earned in his first term for being Adversarial-with-a-capital “A” when it comes to climate change. He’s a chip off the old blockhead; remember how Bush Sr. derisively nicknamed Al Gore “Ozone Man”? Junior picked up where Poppy left off on the campaign trail in 2000, gleefully mocking Gore’s proposed tax breaks for solar panels, or, as he drawled out contemptuously in his faux-hayseed twang, “Foe-toe-vole-TAY-ICK panels.”

As students go, Duh-bya’s not what you’d call a quick study; in fact, he’s fond of boasting about being a “C” student in college, and as Commander in Chief he’s up to his neck in “C’s”: a “C” for cronyism, a “C” for corruption, a “C” for craven indifference to the Constitution, Katrina victims, and all us ink-stained wretches whose names don’t end in “Inc.” To be fair, the Blunderkind-in-a-Bubble has earned a “B” or two as well, most notably for belligerence and blind faith.

And yet, over the weekend, the beltway pundits gave Bush a pass on his bald, I mean, bold new proposal to meet with the rest of the world’s greatest greenhouse gas emitters to advance his agenda of establishing voluntary, or “aspirational,” goals to tackle the problems of greenhouse gas emissions, without imposing the stifling constraints of actual commitments.

Give me a “B” for baffled. The bar gets set ever lower while the sea levels rise. This administration’s moved at a glacial pace when it comes to coping with climate change, to employ a slightly anachronistic adjective that now suggests rapidly melting ice caps more than slow moving bureaucrats.

"The world is on the verge of great breakthroughs that will help us become better stewards of the environment," President Bush announced as he unveiled his proposal-to-hold-meetings-to-craft-a-plan-to-formulate-an-agenda-to-set-goals-to…hey! It’s getting really hot in here, could we, like, open a window or crank up the AC, or something?

Actually, we already have the tools we need to tackle this urgent problem NOW, according to Bill McKibben, who must be hoarse after hollering about our ever hotter planet for nearly twenty years, from his chilling, prophetic 1989 warning about global warming, The End of Nature, to his newest shout-out to sustainability, Deep Economy (note to Oprah—how about a plug for this book and a plug-in hybrid giveaway?)

What we haven’t got, as McKibben noted in an article earlier this year for the Sierra Club, is a leader willing to call for serious conservation and a radical rethinking of our willfully wasteful way of life. Because that would require asking Americans to sacrifice, and that’s just such a buzzkill. Much better to hitch our Hummers to a star in the far-off galaxy of Mañana:

How many Bushies does it take to change to fluorescent light bulbs, anyway? No one knows, because they’re hellbent on wringing every last dirty drop of oil out of the soil before they’ll be dragged kicking and screaming into a greener, cleaner future.

I share McKibben’s conviction that we’ve got to tap into people power to curb our collective carbon footprint. Bush’s free market free-for-all is just a way to stall, a perfect display of White house window dressing. Sunday’s Independent offered a helpful translation of Bush’s transparent attempt to head critics off at the impasse that’s sure to come at this week’s G8 summit in Germany:

Well, that’s the Decider for you, taking decisive inaction.

Factory farms are incredibly efficient powerhouses of pollution; they simultaneously sully our air, soil and water.

I always assumed the CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) could get away with dumping so much toxic waste and generating all those greenhouse gases because enforcement of environmental regulations is so lax.

But in Michigan, the factory farms are free to spew all the noxious sludge and fumes they create. Call it the No Particle Left Unpolluted Act. From the Muskegon Chronicle:

Ah, but there’s a new sheriff in town; on Wednesday, Michigan Democrats introduced legislation intended to halt the CAFOs’ unrelenting assault on their surroundings. One bill would impose a moratorium on construction of CAFOs. Another would give the Department of Environmental Quality more clout.

The pro-CAFO contingent claims that if it can’t pollute, it can’t compete. The Farm Bureau immediately cried foul, claiming that the right to foul our land, air and water is essential in a global economy:

It all makes sense when you think about it. Our demand for cheap food compels us to ship more and more of the foods we eat from China, where pollution is just the cost of doing business.

If we hold Michigan’s farmers to a higher standard, they’ll have to pass the cost of compliance on to the consumer. Currently, they’re passing the costs off to the environment and the next generation. Talk about “unfair.”

This week’s cavalcade of catastrophe and carnage lent credence to T.S. Eliot’s adage that April is the cruelest month. It started with some biblically bad flooding, followed by massacres at home and in Iraq, a Supreme setback for women, a cornered Wolfie snarling at the World Bank, and an addled Attorney General bravely facing his critics despite a crippling case of amnesia. Or is it Alzheimer’s?

Oh, how we longed for just one story with a happy ending. But even the saga of Sludgie, the baby whale who wandered into Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, turned into a tragic fish-out-of-water tale.

So, in the spirit of the classic kitten-on-a-limb “Hang in There!” poster, after such an unrelentingly grim week, I’m thinking this might be a felicitous time for some feline fooling around.

Here, for your amusement, I offer a series of shots of our resident Libertarian, the laissez-faire Zuzu, with one of her favorite toys, a catnip-enhanced Newt Gingrich. She never tires of biting him and batting him around, but she wasn’t the only one taking swats at the former Speaker of the House this week.

Gringrich is trying to persuade his fellow conservatives that global warming is real, but all he’s managed to do is inflame the red-staters, as my fellow Kossack greendem hilariously documented in a diary on Daily Kos yesterday. Greendem ventured over to the far right corner of the blogosphere to harvest some howlers from the climate change naysayers, and wished Gingrich well in his thankless task of trying to counter years of disinformation from fossil fueled don’t-think tanks:

Jason Jones interviewed one such “end-of-times” wacko for a segment on last night’s Daily Show entitled “Apocalypse How?” Oh, how I love the smell of wingnuts roasting in the evening.

Back to cat-tales, I offer for your viewing pleasure “Kittens and Bacon,” an amusing allegory of kittens, mittens, lobbyists and larded legislation. Thanks to our friend Andrew for sharing it. We need all the laughs we can get right now.

It’s official. Those of us who watch Comedy Central’s fake anchors are better informed about current events than viewers of Fox news. What a topsy turvy world we live in when satirical shows intended to entertain us are more edifying than “straight” news broadcasts. Now that network news divisions and cable news channels are all about the profits, a well-informed populace is a luxury our culture apparently can’t afford.

So it’s entirely fitting that the Reverend Billy, a fake preacher, offers us true redemption through his Church of Stop Shopping. If you’re not familiar with Reverend Billy, you will be soon, when Morgan Spurlock’s What Would Jesus Buy? hits the theaters. Reverend Billy’s companion book by the same name warns of the impending “Shopacolypse:”

Kurt Vonnegut was less forgiving of our wasteful ways, telling Jon Stewart back in 2005, “I think we are terrible animals, and I think our planet’s immune system is trying to get rid of us, and should.”

But Reverend Billy’s message to Stop Shopping and Start Loving lifted vinegary ol’ Vonnegut out of his Thinking Man’s Andy Rooney routine just long enough to bless the front cover of Reverend Billy’s book with this beyond-the-grave blurb:

We were amongst the enraptured on April 14th, when Reverend Billy brought his greenhouse gasp gospel to Manhattan’s Battery Park to ignite the Step It Up 2007 Sea of People rally against global warming.

After Reverend Billy got the crowd all hot and bothered about our compulsive buying, Step It Up founder Bill McKibben took the stage to make his own pitch for more mindful living.

McKibben’s been trying to tell us for, like, 18 years—since the publication in 1989 of his watershed book, The End of Nature—that we’re irrevocably altering our environment (and not for the better.) But his Methodist madness is just too mild mannered to hammer the message home with the efficacy of a fictitious firebrand like the Reverend Billy.

That’s why, as my regular readers know, I’ve been trying to harness the power of The Secret to get McKibben his place in the sun, aka Oprah’s sofa. Evidently I need to wish even harder, though, because so far, I’ve only managed to get him booked on last Friday’s Newshour With Jim Lehrer, where he told Ray Suarez:

And they’ve had plenty of help from Rush Limbaugh, “Global warming's most popular denialist,” as James Wolcott notes in his brilliant, must-read lambasting of Limbaugh in the current Vanity Fair. With all the brouhaha over Don Imus’s ho-paux, I wish people could work up a fraction of that outrage over the way Rush Limbaugh has brainwashed millions of listeners into believing that global warming is a liberal elite hoax. As Wolcott notes:

But there’s a ray of hope on the horizon. I saw it on Saturday, when Tiffany Cordero, a preternaturally self-possessed 12 year-old New Yorker, took the Step It Up stage to declare “A lot of people are thinking just of now. But we won't have a 'now' if we don't focus on the future.”

Why is it that a 12 year old can connect the dots, while doddering Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, can’t? Stevens admitted to NPR’s Steve Inskeep on April 10th that climate change is altering Alaska’s environment, but Stevens blew a gasket when Inskeep asked him if one of his pet proposals, drilling in ANWAR, might exacerbate the problem:

The question is, how could you not? But then we’re talking about a guy who thinks that the Internet is “a series of tubes.” And Senator Stevens was the driving force behind the $315 million dollar Bridge to Nowhere. Which is exactly where his kind of “leadership” will take us. I think I’d rather cast my lot with Reverend Billy’s carbon-curbing congregation.

Oh, how the blue bears begged us to let them join the “Sea of People” who flooded lower Manhattan on Saturday to rally Congress to “Step It Up” and cut carbon emissions 80% by 2050. A thousand-plus blue-clad activists united in an undulating human chain more than a mile long to mark how our waterlines could rise if the world keeps heating up.

Coincidentally—or not?—today finds the tri-state area in a state of emergency thanks to the Nor’easter that’s dumped a record-breaking 8 inches of rain on our region. It’s wreaking havoc all over, the AP reports, with residents from Long Island to New Hampshire being evacuated and several hundred thousand households in New York and New England losing power.

"There's something ironic about the fact that we were down on the Battery yesterday, forming a line to show where the new tide line will be in New York with rising sea levels," Step It Up 2007’s founder, Bill McKibben, told the New York Sun on Sunday. "Today, Bloomberg is issuing emergency flood warnings for Lower Manhattan."

Clearly, polar bears aren’t the only ones imperiled by global warming. As the Sea of People demonstrated on Saturday, rising sea levels could leave lower Manhattan submerged under 10 feet of water. That would make for a mighty soggy stock exchange.

Can you see Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe wearing wellies to work? On the bright side, we wouldn’t need to rename Canal Street; we’d just have to get used to hailing a gondola instead of a cab.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to take action now, rather than be forced to adapt to rising floodwaters? We think so, and that’s why we joined the Sea of People to try to persuade Congress that we need to seriously step up our efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

And, in the end, even the blue bears got to attend the rally; after all, a little ursine urgency can make a big splash, as Knut, the world’s cutest polar bear cub, demonstrates on the cover of Vanity Fair’s green issue, on the newsstands now. After Annie Leibovitz shot Leonardo diCaprio posed pensively on an Icelandic glacier, Vanity Fair dispatched her to the Berlin zoo to snap a portrait of Knut, who was then Photoshopped into the picture to share the cover with Leo.

And if we don’t Step It Up now, we face a future where Photoshop will be the only way to get a photograph of a polar bear on an ice cap. Chilling, isn’t it?

The failure to see what lies ahead can have awful consequences, as I learned last Friday while walking down 9th Avenue. I was looking down (contemplating my carbon footprint, no doubt) when I collided with a fire alarm call box that I didn’t notice until it was embossing my forehead. Thanks to the decidedly unspringlike weather, I was wearing a fuzzy wool hat that cushioned the blow somewhat, but still—the pain was excruciating.

Matt tried to comfort me, noting helpfully, “That will teach you to look where you’re going!”

Yeah, well, lesson learned. If only it were so easy to knock some sense into the Capitol Hillbillies who refuse to grasp the enormity of the global warming crisis.

Who would have guessed that putting a couple of Texas oilmen in charge of things was not such a hot idea in this era of fossil fueled climate change? I mean, aside from myself and the majority of Americans who actually voted for Al Gore, aka “Ozone Man,” as Bush Sr. derisively nicknamed him.

Now, of course, he’s “the Goracle,” but it’s cold comfort that Gore’s dire warnings about global warming have been validated by the 2,500 scientists who form the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC’s latest report predicts man-made mayhem on a massive scale: drought, floods, pests, severe food and water shortages.

Poor nations, predictably, will suffer the brunt of this upheaval; the wealthier nations whose petroleum-based prosperity set this sorry chain of events in motion are in a better position to weather the unprecedented change in the weather.

But one thing seems pretty clear; the way we live is going to change dramatically, whether we want it to or not. We can radically rethink the way we allocate our resources, starting now, or we can wait till we’ve passed the proverbial tipping point, when floods and famine will force us to face the fact that we’ve irrevocably altered our entire ecosystem.

President Bush, reacting to the Supreme Court ruling that the federal government has the authority to regulate heat-trapping gases, said he thought that the measures he had taken so far were sufficient. And besides, he noted, like a petulant pre-adolescent, if China’s not going to curb its carbon footprint, why should we?

Nevermind that Bush vowed during the 2000 presidential campaign that if elected, he would regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Was he lying, or did he just forget? Once he took office, his administration did everything it could to obstruct any efforts to address the threat of global warming.

And now, leaked documents show that after claiming to support the addition of the polar bear to the list of endangered species, Bush and his carbon-crazed cronies are quietly working to weaken the Endangered Species Act and discourage any discussion of how global warming threatens polar bears with extinction.

So our government fiddles with the findings while the ice caps melt. But you can help us light a fire under their petroleum-soaked posteriors; fire up your laptop and fire off a missive to ask the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to save the polar bear. The deadline is today, April 9th.

Please, take a minute to help the polar bears fight extinction; after all, it’s their planet, too. Do they really have to die for our sins?

While No Impact Man runs around air-drying his ass for posterity, less flamboyant folks are leading lives of quiet inspiration. Like my brother Bruce, a founding member of a co-housing community on Central California’s coast dedicated to “creating an old-fashioned neighborhood in a new way.”

Bruce likes to think big when it comes to making your carbon footprint smaller. A few years back, he took me and Matt to a patch of land on a creek in Paso Robles to show us the future site of Oak Creek Commons. He laid out his idealistic vision for a neighborhood of homes designed to foster cooperative living, and it sounded like a dream—that is, a pipe dream.

But my eternally energetic and upbeat brother is blessed with a sunny disposition that generates its own kind of solar power. His project proceeded in fits and starts; building began in 2003 and was completed in 2005. Today, Oak Creek Commons is a thriving community of independent homes clustered around a Common House whose energy comes from a brand new batch of solar panels mounted to the roof of the parking shed.

Bruce sent a jubilant e-mail yesterday to announce that “As of 10:45 AM this morning March 28, 2007, the Oak Creek Commons solar system officially started "turning the meter backwards", producing 14kw of sun power! The solar system is now on line!!!”

I’m so proud of my brother for being such a trailblazing tree-hugger. Most Americans have never even heard of co-housing, and it’s about as radical a departure from the standard suburban lifestyle as you can get. Not coincidentally, it’s an awful lot lighter on the land.

But co-housing communities, of which there are only a handful in the U.S., are about much more than sharing resources and the occasional meal. As Bill McKibben notes in Deep Economy, they “represent a powerful idea: that the desire for more community might begin to radically alter the ways we imagine our lives.”

McKibben writes about his visit, in 1996, to one of America’s largest co-housing communities, EcoVillage in Ithaca, New York, where the residents relied on every eco-trick under the sun to reduce their carbon footprint, situating their superinsulated homes to take advantage of the sun, carpooling, composting, and so on. As a result, the EcoVillagers used roughly 40 percent of the energy of a typical Northeasterner.

But co-housing doesn’t just lighten your carbon footprint; it can lighten your spiritual load, as well, forging the kinds of bonds that were once commonplace among neighbors but have largely disintegrated in this era of what McKibben decries as hyper-individualism. McKibben notes the unquantifiable value this sense of connection offers: “The knowledge that you matter to others is a kind of security that no money can purchase.”

Oak Creek Commons’ vision, according to its website, is to be “a community that fosters enriching relationships with one another, nature and the larger community.” The website lists the community’s shared values:

Oak Creek Commons sits on 14 acres surrounded by a hillside of oaks and more than 40 acres of open space, and yet you can live there without a car, because there are shops and schools within walking distance, and public transportation. It’s the very antithesis of—and antidote for--sprawl.

As James Kunstler predicted in The Long Emergency, the housing market is collapsing under the weight of all those sub-prime mortgage foreclosures. Whether it will drag our whole economy down is uncertain, unless you’re Kunstler, who’s convinced our fuelish culture’s going to collapse, causing a mass exodus from the exurbs.

Will co-housing become more commonplace as people realize there’s an upside to downsizing? My brother’s always been ahead of his time; he was a member of a food coop about thirty years ago. And now he’s on the cutting edge of cooperative living. Together with his neighbors at Oak Creek Commons, he’s providing a viable template for sustainable living, unlike No Impact Man. In this era of global warming, it takes an EcoVillage, not a faux eco-egomaniac.