Winona La Duke joined by Sally Field and Jane Fonda to support norther Minnesota native tribes in their struggle against Enbridge Line 3.
Pipeline’s last stand? Winona LaDuke lays out the Line 3 struggle
If you want to understand what native tribes and their allies are fighting about in Northern Minnesota, spend 20 minutes listening to White Earth leader Winona LaDuke lay out the struggle over Enbridge Line 3 for Bill McKibben. It may be the last of the new tar sands pipelines. If the native peoples win, it probably will be.
Honoring “Uncle Billy,” Northwest native fishing rights defender, with a statue in the U.S. Capitol
First they arrest you and toss you in jail. Later they honor you for what you did.
Nisqually tribal member Billy Frank was arrested for fishing the first time at age 14, and went on to be arrested over 50 more times fighting for native fishing rights. Seen as a radical criminal in those times, he has now drawn one of the highest honors a state can bestow, one the two statues each state is allowed to display in the U.S. Capitol.
By an across-the-aisles vote of 44-5, the Washington State Senate voted April 5 to replace the statue of Marcus Whitman, an early settler and Christian missionary who was killed by natives, with one of “Uncle Billy,” as the native peoples of the Northwest still affectionately call him. Frank’s fish-ins during the 1960s and ‘70s led to Judge George Boldt’s 1974 federal court decision that native tribes share equal rights with state government in managing salmon runs, and are entitled to half the harvest. Frank’s civil disobedience led to a decision which made Northwest tribes one of the most politically powerful native communities in the U.S. Frank died in 2014. Barack Obama a year later posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Maybe Minnesota one day will vote to replace the statue of Henry Mower Rice, a fur trader who negotiated one of the original treaties with native peoples, with Winona LaDuke, who as Billy Frank did is now fighting to defend treaty rights.
Main driver of Capitol riot? Fear of declining whiteness
The best way to predict someone would show up at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was coming from a county where non-white populations are growing most rapidly.
University of Chicago political science professor Robert A. Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, shared his findings of a survey covering 377 rioters in the April 6, Washington Post. Here are his key findings. (For those who can’t get behind the WaPo paywall, there’s another report of the study here.)
“Those involved are, by and large, older and more professional than right-wing protesters we have surveyed in the past. They typically have no ties to existing right-wing groups. But like earlier protesters, they are 95 percent White and 85 percent male . . . Some 52 percent are from blue counties that Biden comfortably won. Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic White population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists who now face charges . . . the counties that had the greatest decline in White population had an 18 percent chance of sending an insurrectionist to D.C., while the counties that saw the least decline in the White population had only a 3 percent chance. This finding holds even when controlling for population size, distance to D.C., unemployment rate and urban/rural location. It also would occur by chance less than once in 1,000 times . . . Put another way, the people alleged by authorities to have taken the law into their hands on Jan. 6 typically hail from places where non-White populations are growing fastest.”
Other surveys conducted by the Chicago project found “the roots of this rage. One driver overwhelmingly stood out.” That is the “Great Replacement,” the fear that white populations are being displaced by people of color due because of immigration and low white birthrates. “Replacement theory might help explain why such a high percentage of the rioters hail from counties with fast-rising, non-White populations.”
“We cannot presume it will blow over,” Pape concludes. “The ingredients exist for future waves of political violence, from lone-wolf attacks to all-out assaults on democracy, surrounding the 2022 midterm elections.”
For first time, fewer than half in U.S. are church members
Another way U.S. culture is changing is the decline of organized religion.
Gallup reported, “Americans' membership in houses of worship continued to decline last year, dropping below 50% for the first time in Gallup's eight-decade trend. In 2020, 47% of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque, down from 50% in 2018 and 70% in 1999.”
The decline has taken place since the turn of the century. Church membership held steady from 1937, when Gallup found 73% membership, to 1999. It’s a generational shift.
“Church membership is strongly correlated with age, as 66% of traditionalists - U.S. adults born before 1946 - belong to a church, compared with 58% of baby boomers, 50% of those in Generation X and 36% of millennials. The limited data Gallup has on church membership among the portion of Generation Z that has reached adulthood are so far showing church membership rates similar to those for millennials.”
“Still, population replacement doesn't fully explain the decline in church membership, as adults in the older generations have shown roughly double-digit decreases from two decades ago. Church membership is down even more, 15 points, in the past decade among millennials.”
I’ve worked on political causes with church members. Even been arrested with them at civil disobedience actions! But there are churches and there are churches. It is not hard to see why churches resistant to women’s and LGBQT rights, while remaining bastions of white supremacy, reactionary politics and sexual repression, are finding less attraction for young people as well as the rest of us. Hope we can eventually turn them into community centers and low-income housing. That might be a better way to fulfill the words of the guy they claim to follow.
Is holding heating at 1.5°C hopeless?
The Australian Academy of Sciences recently raised a ruckus when it said holding global heating within the 1.5°C Paris Accord limit needed to avoid the worst effects of climate disruption has become “virtually impossible.”
If anything, the report sought to underscore the urgency of action, projecting an Australia in a plus 3°C world as a land where nature would be vastly altered and food production threatened while people struggle to live under searing heatwaves. But the “virtually impossible” assertion generated strong pushback
“I don’t think it is a scientific view, and it’s possibly based on a feeling it’s got too close for comfort,” Bill Hare, chief executive and senior scientist with Climate Analytics, told The Guardian. “If you look at this in a very systematic way, we are still able to pull this off. The right conclusion is the 1.5C limit is really hanging in the balance, and I think everyone knows that, and that’s why we need to get on with really rapid action.”
Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann cited scientific conclusions that holding the line is “entirely doable” if we cut heat-trapping pollution in half by 2030. This is “simply a matter of political willpower.” The Guardian paraphrased Mann that “getting off at the 1.5C ‘exit ramp’ that doesn’t mean it should not aim for the ramp at 1.6C. ‘And if we miss that, the 1.7C exit ramp,’ he says. ‘Every tonne of carbon we don’t burn makes things better, reduces the harm and the risk.’”
Lesley Hughes, one of the scientists who wrote the report, said there is common agreement on one point. “The new mantra is that every fraction of a degree, every year and every choice matters.”
Global heating stabilizes quickly after we hit zero
All too many reports of recent climate science findings echo the theme – worse than previously expected. So it was heartening to read of new research showing that temperatures will moderate a couple of decades after zeroing out climate pollution.
The report is a little older. But I was drawn back to it covering geoengineering controversies the last couple of weeks here and here. Geoengineering advocates have maintained that even if we cut climate pollution to the bone today, a lag effect will keep temperatures rising for decades. So, they assert, we must prepare now by developing technologies we may need later to counter the effects.
But new research shows that the planet’s natural capacities to absorb carbon will stabilize temperature increases around 20 years after climate pollution is cut to zero. Geoengineering has been criticized precisely because it may provide excuses to avoid such cuts.
While global zero may seem daunting, net zero pledges have been made by more than 100 countries including some of the largest polluters. Of course, the “net” part has aroused skepticism about whether the zero goal will really be met. Nonetheless, if all nations join and it really is zero, “surface temperatures stop warming and warming stabilizes within a couple decades,” Michael Mann said. (That guy gets around!)
Even if we don’t go fully to zero, this new finding says pollution cuts will have relatively rapid effects.
“What this really means is that our actions have a direct and immediate impact on surface warming,” Mann says. “It grants us agency, which is part of why it is so important to communicate this current best scientific understanding.”
How climate cool is your zip code? Find out here
Came across this great map-based web tool which shows household carbon footprint by zip code. It seems to load up a bit slowly, which just could be my connection. And you need to play a bit to learn how to click on specific geographies and zip codes. But once you get the hang, it’s worth it. I took a look at my Seattle metro area.
No surprise. Urban zip codes were the least polluting. Mine on the east side of Lake Union is rated at 32 tCO2e/yr. That’s 32 metric tonnes, at 2,200 pounds each, of carbon dioxide and their equivalent in other heat-trapping gases each year. A lot of apartments, bicyclists and bus riders here. The closer to downtown, the lower. Seattle’s lowest carbon footprint was downtown at 21 tCO2e/yr. People there pretty much all live in apartments, many without cars. (At least the ones who can live indoors. Escalating rents have escalated exploded the numbers of houseless in Seattle. 3rd worst absolute numbers in U.S.) Suburban zip codes were higher, and rich suburban neighborhoods highest of all.
And which zip had the highest household carbon footprint in the entire Seattle metro? The one shared by Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, 98039, Medina, at 77.3 tCO2e/yr. Seattle’s gold coast, with its enormous houses occupied by owners of car collections, helicopters and private jets. Nobody’s zip code has a light carbon footprint. But it’s clear whose zip codes stomp most heavily.
Climate chaos shaved farm productivity one-fifth since 1960
Climate disruption will batter people with drenching storms and scorch them with searing heat this coming century. But no one climate impact will likely have more widespread effects on human populations than food scarcity. Even as growing populations demand more food, temperature extremes, droughts and storms will ravage crops and reduce their productivity.
Unfortunately that’s not a projection but a current fact. While agricultural productivity has been increasing, the world is producing one-fifth less food than it might have if climate stresses were not increasing. A Cornell team has published a new study showing that global heating reduced productivity 21% since 1960.
"We find that climate change has basically wiped out about seven years of improvements in agricultural productivity over the past 60 years," said lead researcher Ariel Ortiz-Bobea. "It is equivalent to pressing the pause button on productivity growth back in 2013 and experiencing no improvements since then. Anthropogenic climate change is already slowing us down."
Researchers “developed an all-encompassing econometric model linking year-to-year changes in weather and productivity measures with output from the latest climate models,” Science reports. As with so many other aspects of climate chaos, they found productivity losses are hitting the poorest hardest. It is no accident that some of the worst impacts are showing up in areas from which refugees are now streaming, Central America and the Sahel of Africa. This is happening with a 1°C increase. The world is on track to increases of 2-4°C and higher.
"Most people perceive climate change as a distant problem," Ortiz-Bobea said. "But this is something that is already having an effect. We have to address climate change now so that we can avoid further damage for future generations."
Stop hogging the land - A call from farm country
An astonishing editorial recently appeared in Iowa, where crops are grown not to feed people, but animals. In a March 26 editorial entitled “Reaching Our Limits,” the Storm Lake Times challenged basic assumptions of industrialized agriculture in its heartland.
“Iowa has 25 million hogs, best we know, producing enough sewage akin to a human population of 125 million. To feed those hogs, we cultivate 92% of the state’s acres to grow corn and soybeans, the most of any state. Along with Illinois, we are contributing the most to the slow death of the Gulf of Mexico from suffocation by excess nitrogen fertilizer. We kill the weeds with cancer-causing chemicals to grow the corn that feeds the hogs that pollute the rivers, and it is an article of faith that there is nothing we can do about it . . . We cannot handle this load”
“This was all foreseen more than 70 years ago by native Iowan Aldo Leopold, who predicted that all our chemicals and engineering would destroy us as we destroyed the land. He suggested in a key 1949 essay, The Land Ethic, while at the University of Wisconsin that we develop conservation agriculture as our ethos. Everything he suggested came true: the rivers have lost their former lives, the soil is washing down them, and in dominating the landscape we diminish ourselves. He suggested that we live as citizens of the land rather than over it . . .”
“Fortunately, we have an opportunity to return to an ethos that can sustain us. The conversation is changing to how we can live with the land.” The paper said more lands should be taken out of production and held as carbon-storing conservation reserves. With Biden climate plans focusing farm soil carbon, “That conversation is taking shape in Washington right now as the world comes to grips with climate emergency and agricultural resiliency. Leopold’s Land Ethic has a chance, and it could bring back so much that has died from an anti-life system built for the profit of a few, taken from the many.”
Small farming is beautiful
A new study in Nature Sustainability affirms what has been known for some time. Agricultural gigantism does not improve productivity. In fact, it diminishes it. The article is behind a paywall, but a discussion by one of the lead researchers is not. Navin Ramankutty, a University of British Columbia food security researcher, says his team did an extensive literature survey of farm performance.
“So, what did we find? 79% of studies reviewed reported that smaller farms have higher yields . . . Our study also found that non-crop biodiversity increases with decreasing farm size, with 77% of studies finding that smaller farms have greater biodiversity at both farm and landscape scales.”
Smaller farms tend to employ less pesticides and use more organic management. Field sizes are smaller and landscapes more diverse, leaving more room for other species.
“Our study found no statistical evidence for farm-size relationships with resource-use efficiency, greenhouse gas emissions, or profitability.”
In a world where climate chaos is already stressing agricultural productivity, and will increasingly over coming decades, it is time for a return to the small in farming.
And a bonus 11 - Watch out for ravens!
I wrote in my essay introducing this web journal, “The raven is regarded as one of the smartest of birds, maybe even the smartest. It is an awesome creature, capable of replicating human speech like a parrot and sailing to the heights like an eagle. It learns and adapts to many circumstances, often fooling us so-called smart humans.”
They’re proving that in Alaska.
“A Costco on Dimond Boulevard in Anchorage, Alaska, is being terrorized by meat-loving ravens that have been stealing items from shoppers' carts in the parking lot . ,” Food and Wine reported. “Marnie Jones told the paper she suspects one of the birds swiped a filet mignon from their four-pack after her husband ‘saw a raven in the parking lot with a steak in his mouth.’ And Olani Saunoa said that while she was getting her baby into her car, a raven ‘picked up [an] entire package of short ribs’ and flew away with it.
"‘They know what they're doing; it's not their first time,’ Matt Lewallen, who also had a rib stolen out of his cart, explained. "They're very fat so I think they've got a whole system there." Other shoppers seem to agree. In a Facebook post from earlier this month, one commenter described the birds as ‘calculating.’ ‘Had 1 trying to distract me while the other went for my mini watermelons,’ Tamara Josey wrote. ‘They are very dedicated to their mission,’ she later added when reached for an interview.”