If even just half of what Lisa-ann Gershwin reports in Stung! is true, then many younger readers may be telling their grandchildren stories about the long ago days when humans caught ocean fish and ate them. Stung! gives the depressing news about how we’ve managed to pollute the oceans probably beyond saving. By beyond saving, Gershwin means a return to Earth’s oceans some 500 million years ago when disgustingly slimy and stingy jellyfish ruled.

Gershwin catalogues overfished areas, red tides, jellyfish blooms, heated and oxygen deprived waters, waters polluted by fertilizer and other human wastes and man-made catastrophes that collectively are killing many fish species and destroying the ocean’s delicate cycle of life.  She gives copious examples of all the problems we have created:

• Over-fishing, which means taking so many fish out of the water that a species is doomed to extinction.  Included in overfishing is the problem of bycatch, which occurs when fishing for one species leads to the capture and destruction of other species.  There is also bottom trawling, which essentially runs a large rake across the water’s floor, picking up delicacies like shrimp but destroying plant and other animal life.
• Eutrophication, which is a type of pollution caused by excessive fertilizer and sewage runoff causing an accelerated growth of algae and other plant life, leading to a disturbance in the balance of underwater life.
• Other kinds of pollution which cause deformities or contaminate fish and other sea creatures.
• The decline in oxygen levels in the oceans, which leads to the death of virtually all higher forms of life.
• The increasing acidification of the ocean, which dissolves shells. Particularly alarming is the fact that ocean acidification destroys diatoms, tiny creatures at the base of the food chain of higher order animals like fish, whales and penguins. Acidification also makes it more conducive for the type of tiny creatures upon which jellyfish love to graze.
• Climate change, which is warming the waters, again upsetting nature’s balance and leading to the imminent extinction of many sea dwellers.

As it turns out, each of these conditions makes the waters more conducive to jellyfish, since jellyfish can live in many environments and adapt well to a lack of oxygen.  Moreover, once jellyfish get a hold on a body of water, they multiply to the point of crowding out other life forms.

Stung! holds out absolutely no hope that we can fix the oceans. Gershwin’s last words in the book are “If you are waiting for me to offer some great insight, some morsel of wisdom, some words of advice…okay then…Adapt.”

But what does adaptation mean? I’m guessing that it means giving up on eating any creature from the ocean and figuring out how to eliminate the pollution from industrial fisheries, which right now contribute to the problem by dumping waste matter from production into the water. We’ll have to limit water sports to pools and other manmade structures, which we can keep clean of pollutants and jellyfish.  We’ll have to figure out how to keep jellyfish from destroying the filters of a variety of operations sited on bodies of water. It might mean developing technologies that actively clean carbon-dioxide out of the ocean water. It certainly will mean ending our dependence on burning fossil fuels, which is both warming the waters and injecting carbon into them.

Another recent book, Countdown by Alan Weisman, tells us what else we have to do: reduce the human population. We currently have about 7 billion people in the world and counting.

Some biologists think we can sustain 1.5 billion people living the kind of life we live in industrialized countries. My own back-of-the-envelope, seat-of-my-pants, pulled-out-of-thin-air estimate of the earth’s carrying capacity for humans is 1.0 billion. I pick that number because it’s the number of people on the earth in 1800.

My own belief—and it is only a belief—is that humans are so smart that we will survive, even if that means a return to living lives that, as Thomas Hobbes once put it, are “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”  I assume that survival of humans will only come at the cost of a great decline in our population. My only question is whether war, epidemics, famine and chemical poisoning—the four horsemen of the Apocalypse—will cause the decline in our numbers or if we will take matters into our own hands and do it through birth control and family planning.

Congratulations to Karl Rove for joining the “reality based community,” which comprises you and me and other lesser mortals who look to empirical reality when analyzing and acting in the world.

Remember it was Rove who, when referring to the war in Iraq, supposedly said that some people were “in what we call the reality based community” and “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality…That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.”

It was Rove, too, who exploded in rage when Fox News declared Obama the winner in Ohio and therefore of the 2012 presidential election. An Obama win went so much against the alternative reality that Rove and other Republicans had constructed that he went into a hissy fit of denial.

Now Rove writes in the Wall Street Journal that it was probably unwise of Congressional Republicans to start this current fight over the debt ceiling and federal budget. In the Great Karl’s words, “In general, it’s not wise to engage in a battle without having an endgame.”

Entering a battle without an endgame is something about which Karl Rove should know quite a lot. Rove was part of the neo-con faith-based if-wishing-made-it-so brain trust that planned and implemented the Iraq War without considering what would happen after the invasion. They went to war without an end game. We all know how that worked out.

I’m sure all my readers’ hearts are as warmed as mine to learn that Rove has dropped his objection to reality and has decided that maybe it is better to think first and shoot later.

Rove does remain part of the conservative propaganda machine that is trying to sell us on the nonsense that the country blames the President and Democrats as much as they do the Republicans for the government shutdown and imminent default. The latest polls of course contradict that colored view, with 22% more of Americans blaming Republicans than blaming Obama and the Democrats.

The Republican media apparatchiks, including Rove, are also trying to convince us that the Democrats are more to blame for the mess, because they have refused to enter serious discussions about deficit reductions.  Also not a part of reality: As President Obama recently pointed out, House Republicans turned down 19 requests to enter into joint discussions with the Senate. I am not the first to speculate that the House Republicans were probably too busy to meet on the budget because they were taking more than 40 votes to turn back the Affordable Care Act.

What the Tea-Party Republicans really object to is that President Obama, Democrats, many of their fellow Republicans and most of the country see the world as it is and not the world that these right wingers want to bring into existence by denying reality, the Democratic process, and, most tragically, the needs of millions of innocent middle class and poor people across the country.

I’ve been occasionally posting one of the poems from my book, Music from Words. My hope is that some dear readers will buy one or more copies of the book.

The best place to buy Music from Words is either from the publisher, Bellday Books or from Amazon or another online book store. You can also order it at virtually all brick-and-mortar book stores.

Today’s work is an antiwar poem, as Galway Kinnell noted after reading it a few years back. The poem is called “Maya,” which is a woman’s name and a Hindu concept. For Hindis, Maya is the illusion that the physical world is real.  In the poem, the physical world is an adulterous affair that plays out in a motel room between the narrator and a woman whose husband has been severely injured in war. The narrator wonders in despair whether his lover is actually thinking of him or her husband while they make love.

 

MAYA

Afterwards my gloom observes you

gather floor-strewn tumulus of clothes.

The bathroom light reveals a passing wraith,

spectral furnishings and photographs that knit

at once to shaft of light, compress to darkness.

Muffled water arrows pound an unseen slurry.

What lie this time—long lines, wrong turn?

Will he smell me on your body?

Will he lacerate your qualms with blissful chatter

when you push his wheelchair, spoon him soup,

climb inside the chores of cleaning up a war?

I am sieve you comb through sand in search

of tender, vital jinnis. And at that fragile burst,

in that isogloss between conceived and real,

mist of golden pooling in your lap,

swan-dive open wing enflaming overhead,

were you with me or with him

with someone else or by yourself?

The water stops, the door unlocks unsettled light

like a man who’s run away from thoughts.

–   Marc Jampole

 

Originally published in Music from Words (Bellday Books, 2007)

If the topic is the potential impact of not raising the debt ceiling, how do you know whether Senators Richard Burr and Rand Paul and Representatives Justin Amash and Paul Broun are lying? Their lips are moving.

All four of these distinguished legislators are saying that the impact of not raising the debt ceiling will be minimal. And all are engaged in straight-faced lying.

Representative Broun, Georgia Republican, says that Obamacare is the greatest threat to our economy, despite the many studies that show that the new healthcare law will save money because millions of newly insured people will go to doctors with symptoms instead of emergency rooms when very ill.  Obamacare thus adds money to the economy, something that is supposed to be good. By comparison, not paying all our bills will lead to hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs, interest rates going up and foreign investors losing confidence in the dollar as the central financial pillar of the global economy. That’s all bad.

Both Representative Amash, Michigan Republican, and Senator Burr, North Carolina Republican, point out that with tax revenues still coming in, we will still be able to pay the interest on all the various instruments by which the federal government borrows money. But what they don’t say is that other bills won’t get paid—and no one likes that. When you’ve lent a buddy money and he’s paying you back, but you hear he isn’t paying back his sister, don’t you get a little uneasy?

Their claims are so outrageous that even the U. S. Chamber of  Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, as free-market and anti-government as organizations can get, are telling Congress to raise the debt ceiling.

Broun, Burr, Amash, Paul and other Republicans suggesting that default ain’t so bad all reflect a “good old boy underbelly” business culture that no one likes to talk about in the big slick business publications like Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Forbes. It’s the culture of living right at the edge of financial ruin, one step ahead of your creditors, but still in the game. Multiple bankruptcies, dragging out payments, trying to keep afloat with another loan, selling suspect goods, using slightly suspicious selling practices, maybe puffing up inventory a little or pledging the same equipment on two personal loans—these actions characterize this entrepreneurial culture, and it’s surprising how large it is.  The good old boy underbelly business culture serves as the real underlying cause of the real estate bubble that wrecked our economy: liar loans, sub-primes, bundling bad loans with good—all qualify as underbelly business behavior.

In popular entertainment—“Cadillac Man,” “The Goods,” “Fargo,” “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Tin Men”—this business culture is associated with selling automobiles, real estate and siding, but in fact it’s not the business but the way the owner runs it that defines the good old boy underbelly culture.

Again, I ask you to personalize: Do you like doing business with these sharks? Why should banks, large multinational corporations and foreign companies be any different? They aren’t. They’ll do what any reasonable business person does when the risk of nonpayment is great—charge more.

Let’s also not forget about the millions of people whose life will suddenly become much more challenging because they have been laid off or aren’t getting paid. It’s not just a matter of financial consequences. There are painful human consequences to refusing to raise the debt ceiling.

In detailing the good old boy underbelly business culture I forgot to mention one thing: These business owners are all liars who lie frequently. Which brings us full circle to the Republicans who claim that defaulting on our bills won’t be so bad.

Stephen D. King, chief economist at HSBC and author of the recent When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence, painted a horror story as gruesome as any of his namesake in his New York Times Op/Ed article titled “When Wealth Disappears.”

King reviews the no-growth economy that Europe and Japan already have and is about to reign in the United States. King takes it as a fact that no-growth has to lead to a decline in the economy—that an economy that is not growing is weak and bad. He takes it for granted that because growth will no longer bring extra wealth each year, college costs will keep going up and we will continue to fray our safety net.

Common sense should tell you that this idea is nonsense. If we have already achieved great wealth, why should no more increases prevent us from performing the functions of an economy—to provide a reasonable living standard for everyone? We have so much wealth right now that we could feed, educate and care for everyone in our country—if we only redistributed it.  All a growing economy does is enable people to live a higher standard of living without having to seriously consider wealth redistribution.

The standard of living in the mature industrialized countries is already quite high.  Who says it ever has to get any higher?  Certainly we have to improve the lives of our poorest and most disadvantaged residents, plus there are billions of people living at or below subsistence in the developing world. But in general the middle and upper classes of the industrialized nations are living on easy street.

Of course if there is no economic growth, the improved position of the poor has to be funded from existing pots of money—and that means redistribution of the wealth. And that’s just not part of the agenda for the people who created the field of economics, most practicing economists, those who fund economic research and those who look to economic theory to guide their business operations—otherwise known as rich folk.

The idea that a healthy economy requires growth is nothing more than a first premise, similar to the premise that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, upon which all of traditional geometry is based. The difference is that the shortest distance between two points really is a straight line (except to a few brilliant scientists and mathematicians), whereas an economy can thrive without growth. No ruling elite ever wants to try it though, because it takes planning and a commitment to the community that our wealthiest citizens don’t seem to have.

King’s own plan, outlined in broad brushes after his plea that we be honest about the end of abundance, will certainly benefit his employer without inconveniencing much, if at all.  Here it is:

“That means a higher retirement age, more immigration to increase the working-age population, less borrowing from abroad, less reliance on monetary policy that creates unsustainable financial bubbles, a new social compact that doesn’t cannibalize the young to feed the boomers, a tougher stance toward banks, a further opening of world trade and, over the medium term, a commitment to sustained deficit reduction.”

A higher retirement age and more immigration will keep the number of workers high and thereby lower wage rates, which is good for any employer. The “new social compact” assumes that taxes on corporate profits and wealthy shareholders will not go up; unspoken here is the obvious—that we could keep the current social compact if we taxed the wealthy at the rates we taxed them in 1950, or even 1980.  King does mention a tougher stance towards banks and less government manipulation of money, but what does he really mean? He has very concrete ideas when it comes to increasing the pain of working stiffs, but only vague strategic thoughts about modifying banking.

It’s not just what King says, but what he doesn’t say. Immigration is a great way to funnel people from poor countries to rich countries with shrinking populations, but only if we have immigration across the board, not just for the wealthy and educated. There is nothing wrong with further opening world trade, but only if trading partners meet the high environmental, wage and work safety standards of the West. Otherwise free trade exploits both the poorly paid workers in developing countries and the middle class workers in wealthy countries who lose their jobs.

King’s horror story also doesn’t tell us how we got into this mess: by straining the world’s resources. We can’t grow anymore, because we don’t have the raw materials of growth.  Instead of bemoaning the shrinking population, King should embrace it and advocate efforts to bring down the population even faster.

And make no mistake about it. If we as a species don’t voluntarily bring down our population and learn to live well while using less energy and resource than Americans currently do, then we will see a true horror story—one in which the world descends into a hell of major wars, famines, epidemics and human-induced weather and chemical disasters.

Instead of fearing the end of growth, King should understand that it is a good thing and then set his mind of an economist to making sure that the end of growth does not also mean the end of wealth.

Of course, that’s not King’s job. His job is to help his company make more money.

A group of rich industrialists are not happy with the direction in which the country is going, so they give money to support and develop a radical party to push their agenda for smaller government and lower taxes and regulation. But the fringe party they support gets into a position to subvert the democratic process and the economy. At the end, even the industrialists who funded them are worried about the actions taken by the suddenly powerful if still small party.

Sounds familiar?

What am I describing? Is it the United States in 2010-2013? Or could it be Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s?

The structural parallels between what has happened in the United States and what happened almost a century ago in Germany are uncanny. Now I’m not comparing the current state of our country to Nazi Germany, nor am I predicting that we are moving in Germany’s genocidal direction. Nor am I comparing the Tea Party Congressional representatives and Senators to Hitler, although there are many similarities between the philosophies behind the two movements:

• Stress on traditional values.
• Hate of the current government.
• Nativism and distrust of foreigners.
• An underlying racism, which the Tea Party denies, but which can be detected in code language, occasional slip-ups and irrational abhorrence of our mixed-race President.
• Willingness to subvert democratic processes.

The big difference, of course, is that the Tea Party wants to shrink government to almost nothing, whereas Hitler wanted to increase government and have government aggressively direct the economy.

Make no mistake about it. The Tea Party would be a minor force in American politics if not for two things: 1) the money that big business threw into their campaigns in the wake of the Supreme Court’s weird but unfortunate Citizens United decision; and 2) the mainstream news media—owned by large corporations—which lavished Tea Party candidates with coverage while ignoring the many progressive and liberal candidates across the country.

But the Tea Partiers could not by themselves have been able to close down much of the government and put us on the precipice of a debt crisis that could plunge the world into economic free-fall. It has taken the craven and self-serving actions of Speaker of the House John Boehner, who has refused to release Republicans to vote their consciences on the budget and debt issues.  Does that sound like a decrepit and ineffectual Paul von Hindenberg turning over the German government to a former house painter named Adolf?

When I learned that the Republicans want to cut some $40 billion from food stamps I was befuddled and sickened at how little empathy this relatively small group of mostly privileged people had for the challenges facing the poor and near poor. I had the same feeling when I learned that 26 Republican-led states decided not to extend Medicaid coverage to millions of people who are without health insurance. Don’t they understand how much sicker people get when they don’t go to the doctor because they can’t afford it or take half their dosage of medicine to make it last longer?

And I have the same feeling now. Why don’t these people feel the pain of the many federal workers who have already been ordered to stay home or the businesses that serve them? Why don’t they feel the fear of the many federal workers whose jobs have been declared essential, which means they’ll have to keep working even when the government won’t be able to pay them, starting in about two weeks? What about the people waiting for Social Security disability forms to be processed? Or people who work for government vendors and will be laid off? Don’t the Republicans care one little bit about the collective pain and economic loss already inflicted on American individuals and families?

The sheer lack of empathy for their fellow women and men, their willingness to plunge so many into suffering—their hard hearts—frightens me as much as the Tea Partiers attack on democracy and our democratic system.

The logic of House Republicans should ring familiar to those old-timers who lived through the Viet Nam War. What they want to do is “Destroy the town to save it.”

The original quote was attributed to an unnamed U.S. officer by reporter Peter Arnett about the U.S. bombing of the city of Ben Tre: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

The Republicans are using this logic in refusing to fund the federal government unless Congress votes to postpone the implementation of the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare.  The Republicans believe the new law is a disaster for the country, so they are willing to shut down the government in their continued efforts to dismantle it.

But a government shutdown will be more of a disaster than letting go into effect a law passed by Congress, signed by the President and endorsed by the American people in the last presidential election.  Most of the government will grind to a halt. About 800,000 federal workers will lose their jobs for the duration. About 1.4 million active-duty military personnel must remain on duty unpaid. We’ll see delays in processing passport and visa applications, issuing gun permits, continuing U.S. bankruptcy court. All national parks and federal wildlife refuges would be closed for the duration of the shutdown. Think of the loss of status we will suffer in world markets and in other countries.

That sure sounds like destroying the town to save it to me.

Except for one thing: Just as U.S. carpet bombing was unable to stop the rise of the Viet Cong nationalists, defunding our federal government won’t affect the timetable for starting exchanges or other major elements of the new healthcare law. The Internal Revenue Service will still collect the new taxes mandated by the Affordable Care Act.

The “destroy the town to save it” logic is merely stupid. But the other piece of Republican House strategy reeks of venality and cynicism.  I’m referring to the idea—supported by recent polls—that the American people will blame both Democrats and Republicans equally for a government shutdown.  In other words, instead of treating the funding of the government and the lifting of the debt ceiling as a matter of public interest, the Republicans (and perhaps Democrats, too) see it as a political football to be tossed around.

This strategy is likely to backfire. No matter what the polls show, history suggests that once the government is shut down, the American people will blame Republicans.  It’s similar to war situations. After we declare or invade a country, the American public always rallies around the President, no matter how many people opposed the war ahead of time.

I think government shutdowns are similar. Moreover, based on the views expressed on the opinion pages so far, it’s likely that virtually the entire mainstream media and significant parts of the right-wing media will blame Republicans.  Of course, Americans might blame President Obama if the current House bill passes and the President vetoes it, but rest assured, Senate Democrats won’t let that happen.

If we want to blame one person for this mess, it’s John Boehner, who is all too willing to resort to the most irresponsible of actions to placate radical Tea-partiers and keep his job as Speaker of the House. All Boehner has to do to serve his country is release Congressional Republicans to vote their conscious (or the will of their constituents) and thereby let enough Republicans in blue states vote with Democrats to keep the government running.

Mr. Boehner, sir, it’s time to stand up and show a profile in courage.

 

 

 

What could be healthier than starting dinner with a seaweed salad, then moving on to brown rice and black beans with a side of kale? What a rich balance of delicious tastes and colorful foods, and how healthy. Lots of cancer fighters, cholesterol reducers, plus no salt, sugar or chemical additives. Perfect for a vegan, and even good for a meat-eater who might add a small piece of chicken, fish, beef or lamb and still have a healthy meal.

But what a lot of work. It might take as much as a half hour to dress the seaweed, boil the rice, heat the chickpeas, sauté the kale and broil the meat.

How much easier to open a few bags and munch brown rice crackers, dried kale leaves, black bean chips and roasted seaweed snacks.  All meat-eaters have to do is add some beef jerky.

Yes, there are now chip versions of all these foods and others, too—cabbage, chickpeas, peas. In fact, American food processors have created snack chip versions of virtually every hot “super food” fad of the last few decades. For example, manufacturers have introduced 16 new versions of seaweed chips this year alone.

As readers may have already suspected, all of these chips are loaded with salt and many have sugar and chemical additives. All involve processing the life out of the original fruit or vegetable. An ounce of all these snacks delivers many more calories than an adult serving of the unprocessed food.

While 71% of all U.S. snack foods now make health claims, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, no one really believes that eating this stuff is healthy. It certainly is not as healthy as eating a serving of brown rice or kale.

People prefer the chips because of convenience and flexibility. It’s much easier to carry a bag of spiced dried chickpeas around than a plastic tub of chickpeas. And many people prefer the taste of salt and sugar to the bitterness of kale or the tang of cabbage. (Yes, there are also cabbage chips!).  They’re used to processed food.

There is no doubt that chips bear a major part of the responsibility for the epidemic of obesity and obesity-related disease we face. But beyond health, the proliferation of faux-healthy chips represents another example of the homogenization of reality that we see everywhere. Instead of authentic Italian or Mexican food, Americans go to themed versions that use a few stylistic elements from the authentic cuisine to dress up American fare. These ethnic-themed restaurants tend to load down healthy traditional recipes with unnecessary frying and extra sauces laden with so much sugar and salt that they taste more like some standard muck than like Italian or Mexican. Check out how many chain restaurants serve the very same menu: hamburgers, fajitas, chicken strips, blackened meat.  And doesn’t it seem as if pizza dough and bagels now share the same consistency and overly sweet taste in most chain restaurants and packaged versions?

And it’s not just food. National chains for auto supplies, clothing, movie theatres, fabrics, toys, sporting goods, furniture, jewelry, hair stylists, urgent care facilities, drug stores, convenience stores, fitness clubs, massage studios and consumer electronic stores make every mall in every suburb and most smaller cities look virtually the same. Many of us prefer taking a phony riverboat at a Disney resort to a real one in New Orleans or viewing the faux Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty in a Las Vegas casino to the real deals in Paris and New York.  One theme—a landmark—associated with New York or Paris is placed in a homogenized environment, like a vegetable dehydrated and encased in salt, chemical additives and binders.

On another level, the concentration of media has led to homogenization of the information we receive, too, as more media run the same stories with the same point of view.

One could make the case that this homogenization is a good thing, because it turns the disparate cultures and nationalities of the United States into a unified whole—the melting pot that produces the cookie-cutter suburbs.  I prefer a vision of the United States as a rainbow of beliefs, practices, customs and cuisines, each retaining its own authenticity while also contributing its own richness to a glorious American mosaic.

A few news stories don’t make a trend, but it seems as if the mass media are misreading some short term trends to present a more optimistic view of our future on earth than we really face.

Much of the news media has covered the news that the average global temperature has failed to rise over the past 15 years, despite the soaring levels of greenhouse gases we have been pumping into the atmosphere.  While no reporter has quoted Desi Arnaz yet, the tone of the articles could clearly be captured by his stock phrase, “Lucy, you have some ‘splaining to do.”

The argument that treading water for 15 years disproves or calls into question the theory of human-induced climate change is absurd for several reasons. First of all, the earth is still much hotter than it was 150 years ago, much of the icecaps have already melted and we still have dangerously high levels of carbon dioxide in our oceans.  And while the average temperature on earth may have remained the same over the past 15 years, some parts of the earth have grown warmer, including the United States and most of Europe and China.

Secondly, those who only look at the last 15 years make the mistake of trend localization: They are judging changes that take centuries on the basis of a few years. The earth goes through natural cycles of warming and cooling. Most phenomena act that way—the stock market doesn’t go up every day even during a raging bull market and children don’t grow the same amount every month or even every year, but grow by spurts. The important question is whether the average temperature on earth would be lower during the current cycle without the impact of all that additional carbon we are generating. I’m betting the answer is yes.

There is also the issue of the complexity of life on earth—our ecosystem comprises a number of cycles and smaller interlocking ecosystems. It’s possible that the earth has made a partial adjustment, but if we keep burning fossil fuels at the current rate, sooner or later, the earth will become less flexibility. The increase in drought areas, the thriving of jellyfish in the oceans, the extinction or threatened extinction of so many species—so much is happening that tells us we have to change our ways or risk destroying our planet. By all means, scientists should continue to study the models that predict global warming. But we shouldn’t use a misinterpretation of short-term facts as an excuse for keeping our heads in the sand about climate change.

One environmental challenge—and I see it as the main one—is the sheer number of human beings walking the planet, about seven billion right now. It’s very convenient to ignore population control. The religious issues aside, most economist and politicians love an increasing population because it’s an easy way to grow the economy and they are addicted to growth. Any campaign to stabilize or reduce the population requires a plan to address how an economy may thrive without growth—in a solid state or even shrinking. My idea of thriving clearly doesn’t mean “growing bigger” but rather producing a high quality of life and economic opportunities for all its members.

Like the end of easy oil, reaching a population level that in unsustainable is the unspoken fear. It’s the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.  Many people, then, must have breathed a sigh of relief to learn the news that the standard forecast for population growth may be too high.

But like the report of a stable temperature over 15 years, “not as bad as” still doesn’t mean “good.” Instead of predicting that the world’s population will reach 10.9 billion by 2100, the latest statistical model says our population will peak at 8.7 billion by around 2055 and then decline to 8 billion by the turn of the next century. The models are based on the theory that as nations develop their citizens have fewer children. It’s a corollary of the idea that animals follow one of two reproductive strategies—have a lot of offspring and pay them no attention, or have a few and put a lot of energy into helping them, to survive. In human terms, when people get wealthier, they tend to have fewer children.  The experience of Europe, the United States (except our immigrants) and Japan seems to support this idea.

The only problem is that even our current population of seven billion is too high. Half that amount is too high. The earth cannot carry so many humans on a long-term basis. We use too many of the earth’s non-renewable resources and leave too many messes in our wake. And imagine if most of the world raised its standard of living to the levels of Japan or Western Europe—they might produce fewer offspring but each person would be using a lot more resources!

I doubt that we will be able to formulate an adequate response to global warming and resource shortages without lowering the population on earth substantially.

Historically there have been three ways that human populations have decreased: war, famine or epidemics.  Let’s hope that instead of riding these three horses of the Apocalypse, most countries will instead decide to pursue aggressive policies to reduce our population in a more peaceful way: birth control. More people must make the decision to have one child in their lifetime, be it by following a new social norm or a draconian law.

So don’t believe that there’s good news about global warming and populations trends. These recent optimistic news reports are the equivalent of learning that you won’t die in six weeks, but in eight weeks—if the trends stay lucky.

I’ve been occasionally posting one of the poems from my book, Music from Words. My hope is that some dear readers will buy one or more copies of the book. The best place to buy Music from Words is either from the publisher, Bellday Books or from Amazon or another online book store. You can also order it at virtually all brick-and-mortar book stores.

Today’s poem, “Dot and Sylvia,” was originally published a few years back in Mississippi Review.  It’s about two housewives of the 1950’s and early 1960’s who suffered from the malaise that Bette Friedan called the feminine mystique. One of the women is the poet Sylvia Plath.

DOT AND SYLVIA

Both plunged beads of boiling fudge through frigid water

at the perfect point, without thermometer,

beat egg and air with effortless wrist spins,

created endless games with plastic dinosaurs

and pieces of paper on rainy afternoons,

peeled fruit for all children and adults she loved,

fell to knees in mock anger and pointed index finger

to emphasize a discrepancy in height,

played Stravinsky and Carmen with Leontyne Price,

taught children funny words to the Toreador Song,

listened tenderly as others told their lives,

loved to talk about books she read,

to feel big wet drops fall on her hair and face in an open field,

to close eyes and imagine making love

to the warm flat stone on which she was sunning,

wanted a strong and brilliant male to obliterate her

then hated him for doing so,

spoke often of what others thought of her

of what they thought she thought they thought,

stewed about public snubs that no one else could see,

said nasty things when she couldn’t hold her liquor,

would suddenly turn on others, then seek forgiveness,

requested permission to loathe her mother,

mouthed troubling phrases:

stasis in darkness

the brown arc

the dew that flies

she never loved me

he touched me in that spot,

fluctuated between loving every stranger

and abhorring her own flesh,

savored jolt after jolt of current

piercing her body like a lover gone wild,

stayed in bed by day, paced halls by night,

found it easier to remember

moments of gloom than moments of radiance,

examined several forms of suicide

until selecting one, and here they differed:

Sylvia stuck her head in an oven.

Dot swallowed pills.

–          Marc Jampole

 

Originally published in The Mississippi Review Vol. 31 #1-2 (Spring 2003) and Music from Words (Bellday Books, 2007)