Where Have I Been All This Time? A Recap

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2019: Folks, I've kind of disappeared again for a while, but not up in the mountains. Sorry about that. Over the past couple of weeks, I've gotten sort of fixated on designing teeshirts for Halloween, primarily for the Teespring and Spreadshirt platforms. My original designs include one that says, "Send Trump to Azkaban." Sounds like a good plan, considering how far removed from reality he's gotten in the past few months. When I called up my brother in Texas for his birthday a few days ago, we had a good laugh about Trump and his proposed gator-filled moat lining the southern U.S. border (though my bro figures it would be more cost-effective to simply stock the Rio Grande with piranhas). However, while I was fixated on Halloween teeshirts, more climate strikes were taking place, including this large one in Iowa City, IA just yesterday, featuring one Greta Thunberg as guest speaker. Anyway, let me just recap a few stories that have been circulating widely over the past few weeks...

1) WHAT'S WITH ALL THE HATING ON GRETA?? There's a well-known quote out there that people constantly (and wrongly, I'm afraid) attribute to Mahatma Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Politicians of both the left and right are quite fond of this quote, even though there's no evidence that Gandhi ever said it (as a 2016 Snopes article points out). It may actually be a paraphrase of part of a speech given in 1914 by a Cincinatti attorney and union leader named Nicholas Klein: "First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you." But whoever came up with this quote, it seems that climate strike leader Greta Thunberg has come practically full circle in the dynamic that the quote sets out. Nobody noticed her at first when she started appearing outside the Swedish Parliament building in August of last year. Now that she's become known, and has inspired climate actions worldwide, in the space of one year, corporate leaders, the conservative media, and neocon politicians are trying to shut her down, and rip her and her movement to shreds. She's mentally ill! She's mentally disabled! She's being exploited by her parents! She's scaring other kids to death! She's a pawn of the global left-wing elite, the poor confused child! All of which is probably news to Greta. Actually, I'm sure she's quite capable of thinking and speaking for herself, which is why she's got whole governments and fossil fuel industries running scared. And hopefully she'll keep on keeping on, though she may well need bodyguards in some places by now, unfortunately.

2) WHAT IS REWILDING? There's a relatively new term going around in environmentalist circles these days, usually in the same conversations as regenerative agriculture and permaculture. The term "rewilding" was apparently coined circa 1990 by Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman, referring to a conservation strategy that focuses on returning large wilderness areas to a natural, undeveloped state, and includes protecting or reintroducing apex predators and so-called keystone species, and establishing connecting corridors between smaller wilderness areas to facilitate restoration of biodiversity among them. This process requires, among other things, abolishing clear-cutting activities (especially near large bodies of water), demolishing dams across rivers and floodplains; and in some cases, reintroducing nearly-extinct and threatened species such as beavers, wolves, and bison. There have even been proposals to restore large wilderness areas with the inclusion of predators such as lions, elephants, wild dogs and other species that have not occupied these areas since Pleistocene times (which sounds a bit off the wall, but some folks are talking about it). Rewilding projects currently underway include the European Green Belt, conservation areas in southern Africa, and the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative in North America. In other words, rewilding is basically the exact opposite of what pro-business leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro are up to in their respective countries.

3) IS OCEAN CLEANUP FINALLY TAKING OFF? The much-derided Ocean Cleanup Project may finally be getting off the ground and actually collecting ocean plastic in the Pacific, according to international media articles published in the past few days. This is another creative project that everybody said would never work; but it sounds like it just took a bit of determination, design-tweaking and shrinking in size for the huge cleanup device to begin collecting plastic debris (including microplastics) without breaking apart or trapping marine wildlife among the plastic. Prior to this, the usual "conventional wisdom" was telling us the only way to handle ocean plastic was to keep it from entering the ocean in the first place; and to tell various Asian countries to quit dumping plastic garbage into their rivers. But a handful of European activists, entrepreneurs and inventors decided that they weren't going to take "impossible" or "blame Asians" for an answer, and set to work in 2013 to design a mechanism that would work with ocean gyres (circulating ocean currents) to gather plastic debris and collect it for onshore recycling. They had a rocky start and multiple design disasters; but now, with a parachute-like attachment and mechanisms to prevent wildlife entrapment, the 1-2 km. barrier system seems to be working as intended, with the help of support vessels to retrieve the plastic debris that the system collects. Many more of these collection mechanisms will soon be built and deployed in the next several years.

ANYWAY...Well, climate strikers all, I'm still collecting stories, and compiling some ideas of my own, including a notion or two for opening up animal farming building designs; and satellite or LiDar monitoring of ocean acidity. Meanwhile, I'm planning to get some mini-reportbacks from Climate Strikes in various parts of the world, and publish them here at the blog very soon. Keep striking, and keeping your eyes on your elected officials who dutifully assured you on September 20 that they're doing everything they can regarding climate policy!