Thanksgiving and Climate Emergency

The US tradition of going home (usually driving) for Thanksgiving Day is being challenged this year by several very strong and large storms that might be called unusual, except strong and large storms aren't unusual any more.  This is but one way that Thanksgiving meets the Climate Crisis.

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Or this year, the Climate Emergency--a term that has emerged from recent protests, and has been proclaimed 2019's Word of the Year by the Oxford Dictionaries, beating out other contenders such as "climate denial" and "eco-anxiety."  The urgency of climate has been both accidentally and deliberately minimized for years by the common nomenclature, from the scientific but overly cuddly "greenhouse effect" and "global warming" to "climate change" sponsored by Republican climate deniers.  It's only been in the past year or two that "climate crisis" has finally become common, only to be largely supplanted now by this better term.  For "climate emergency" it surely is.

But this year as well, "eco-anxiety" is a thing.  For some, the spectre of climate catastrophe sparks the fear that underlies denial, while for others it just promotes despair.  Despair is not usually congruent with gratitude.  So it's hard to accept that a planet's lifeforms on the way to extinction merits much in the way of thanksgiving.

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Reporter Cara Buckley explored her own climate angst in the New York Times.  "But how are we supposed to live in our hearts and souls with such an existential threat that is also, as birds and bees vanish and trees topple and die, so excruciatingly intimate?" she asked.

She sought answers at a Brooklyn workshop titled “Cultivating Active Hope: Living With Joy Amidst the Climate Crisis,”  Denial turns out not to be one of the ways. "Lou Leonard, a founder of One Earth Sangha, a Buddhist group focused on the crisis, told me that living like climate change is real and that we can do something about it are signals to others — and can help shift cultural norms... 
“We need to break the cognitive dissonance in as many ways as we can in order to be more real with what’s happening,” Mr. Leonard said. Making seemingly inconvenient changes now, he said, can also prepare us for what might be to come."

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While all the little things we may individually do to lessen our carbon footprint etc. may not change much in the big picture, doing them may well be important to us and those we know.  Zhiwa Woodbury, an eco-psychologist (a job description that not so long ago didn't exist) suggests that "altering habits like how we eat can make people feel more empowered and less overwhelmed," confronting our own climate trauma while also shifting our relationship to the natural world.

In the Red Hook workshop, which used the pioneering decades-old work of the environmental grief activist Joanna Macy, the facilitator, Jess Serrante, said something that hit me like a thunderclap.

“Our pain for what is happening is the other side of the coin of our love for the world,” she told us. “We feel such depths of despair because we love the planet so much.”

Several psychologists told me they are telling the same thing to patients who are grappling with eco-despair: Feeling depressed about the crisis is actually a sane, healthy response. Yet as a culture, we pathologize depression as a personal failing, and as individuals, we avoid it, partly, Ms. Serrante said, out of the fear that if we dive in we won’t emerge. But that causes us to shut down. By jumping into the pain, it can alchemize into something bigger, Ms. Serrante told us, and reconnect us with our deepest selves."

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Towards the end of her piece, Buckley is paired off with "a man who worked in corporate disaster preparedness" to answer the facilitator's question of "why we were grateful to be alive at this time."  Buckley said because  “people are more aware than ever about what we have wrought? Because this is the logical conclusion to what the industrial revolution set in motion?”

“Wow,” the disaster preparedness guy replied.

He told me he was grateful that he was living at a time when we could see gorgeous animals, plants and sprawling wilderness that might not be around much longer. My breath caught. I hadn’t thought of that. Something shifted." 

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Part of the proper response to the climate emergency, I believe, is to be active in ways appropriate to yourself, in spreading awareness and accelerating political pressure.  Because efforts to address the causes may still work and may still be effective in saving the far future (though few if any of us will be alive long enough to know that.)  And because efforts to address the effects are crucial now, and will be increasingly so next year, the year after, and pretty much forever.

Addressing the effects and addressing the causes--particularly through the complete realignment of transport and the grid to clean energy--will be the work of the 21st century, at least.  Adults in position to do so may consider what occupations and projects they can undertake to do this work, and make that career change.  Younger people can guide their careers in those directions from the start.

But we also can't get lost in abstractions, for in the end they aren't sustaining.  We are here right now, and life is moment to moment.  Consciously being grateful for what natural world we have, and seeking out opportunities to experience the natural world that too often becomes abstraction and background--is also important.

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Joanna Macy was mentioned in this workshop.  She was a pioneer in bringing the insights of Buddhist meditation and ecology together with eco-activism.  She is also the author of the essay on gratitude I quoted here for a number of past Thanksgivings.  So for this Thanksgiving, here are three paragraphs from it:

"We have received an inestimable gift. To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe--to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it--it is a wonder beyond words. It is an extraordinary privilege to be accorded a human life, with self-reflexive consciousness that brings awareness of our own actions and the ability to make choices. It lets us choose to take part in the healing of our world."

"Gratitude for the gift of life is the primary wellspring of all religions, the hallmark of the mystic, the source of all true art. Yet we so easily take this gift for granted. That is why so many spiritual traditions begin with thanksgiving, to remind us that for all our woes and worries, our existence itself is an unearned benefaction, which we could never of ourselves create."

"There are hard things to face in our world today, if we want to be of use. Gratitude, when it is real, offers no blinders. On the contrary, in the face of devastation and tragedy, it can ground us, especially when we're scared. It can hold us steady for the work to be done."

Poetry Monday: Stone Telling

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TO GAHHEYA

By Stone Telling of the Blue Clay of Sinshan

Old stone, hold my soul.
When I am not in this place
face the sunrise for me.
Grow warm slowly.
When I am not alive any more
face the sunrise for me.
Grow warm slowly.
This is my hand on you, warm.
This is my breath on you, warm.
This is my heart in you, warm.
This is my soul in you, warm.
You will be here a long time
facing the sunrise
with the warmth in you.
When you roll down,
when you break apart,
when the earth changes,
when the rockiness of you ends.
we will be shining,
we will be dancing shining,
we will be warmth shining.

Ursula LeGuin
Always Coming Home

The Strength of Kindness

The viciousness, vitriol, blatant hatred, unlimited personal attacks, the disdain for the common ground of fact, the our side is always right, fight to the death mentality; the aggressive selfishness and psychotic self-righteousness, that are thrust upon us through all forms of media, sometimes seem to fill the world.  A melancholy plea in the form of a bumper sticker: Make America Kind Again.

One of those feeling overwhelmed was journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner, who referred to our reality as one in which "politeness and civility and manners were facing an extinction event in this country."  She used that phrase at the beginning of her recent profile of actor Tom Hanks in the New York Times.

Hanks is starring in the forthcoming film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, playing the famed Mr. Rogers.  According to accounts, the story is about a troubled journalist who is transformed for the better by encounters with Fred Rogers when he is assigned to write about him.  This Times article is not too subtly also the story of how an assignment to write about Tom Hanks influenced its writer for the better.

Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers

This journalist struggles with problem of writing about a nice guy playing the paradigmatic nice guy of our times: how can she keep the reader's attention without exposing the subject's malevolence, or at least tragedies?

" So Tom Hanks is as nice as you think he is and exactly what you hope him to be, which is great unless you are someone trying to tell a good story about him, with elements like an arc and narrative tension. “Saintly Actor Playing Saintly Public Television Children’s Host Mister Rogers Is Saintly” is not a great story. But what am I supposed to do?"

This of course is one key to why we read and see so much about awful people: the media rules assume we'll be interested only in them.  They demand attention.  Now certain people have learned to benefit from this.  It's the attention reality, and they are gaming the system--and seemingly winning.  (That stuff about "arc" and "narrative tension" are also part of the problem; if malevolence was the only way to tell successful stories, Tom Hanks' movies would not have done so spectacularly well, and he would not be among the most admired actors in the world.)

The journalist in the Mr. Rogers movie is based on a real journalist, and something like this story actually happened.  Rogers gave this journalist his own principles of journalism:  "1. Journalists are human beings not stenographers, human beings not automatons. 2. Point out injustice when you have to. 3. Point out beauty when you can. 4. Be aware of celebrating the wonders of creation."

Brodesser-Akner's article proceeds for awhile as many magazine pieces do, that is as an objective account with a personal edge.  But at a certain point (perhaps given permission by Mr. Rogers to not just be a stenographer) she offers more first person observations about her own life, as her interviews with Hanks become dialogues.  At one point she expresses distress over parenting issues, and Hanks engages with her so directly that she ends up in tears.

When Hanks describes the kinds of roles and stories that attract him (he especially likes playing real people with real motivations, who are complicated in realistic ways) and apparently professes a "belief in humankind, that we can’t all be that bad."

"I laughed out loud. He looked at me again and waited. It’s just all been so dark lately, I told him. It feels like the world has been engulfed in a chronic-seeming grimness, and it was beginning to feel like it was no longer an aberration but the new reality. I told him I remembered that in 2015 we’d make jokes on social media about what a cursed year it was. But it got worse and so on until now, here we were, a journalist crying in a conference room in Santa Fe."

Hanks quotes novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, to the effect that "history is a record of humanity trying to get a grip.”  He recalls "this level of vitriol and excitement" in the 1990s in the "Monica Lewinsky era."   "And we thought, oh, that’s about as big and as insane as it’s going to get. And then along comes something equally big and insane."

Then Hanks tells her about a trip he took with his youngest son on the Los Angeles light rail (obscure even in Los Angeles), how efficient it was, and how pleasant.  Not everything is awful.

In trying to profile Hanks, she spoke with many people who had worked with him, and they all related stories of his kindness, curiosity and decency.  She then quotes the actual author of the Fred Rogers profile that inspired the movie."...he went into the Mister Rogers story looking for who Fred was but came out knowing only what he did. He stared at all his reporting for a long time before he realized that the doing is actually the thing we should be paying attention to. “I don’t know if Fred was the mask or the mask was Fred,” he said. “But in the end does it even matter?”

Life is what you do, especially what you do everyday.  It is the expression of the world you believe in.

Towards the end of her piece, she writes: "I am too old for Mister Rogers. My children are too old for Mister Rogers, too. So instead I showed them “Splash,” then “Forrest Gump,” then “Big,” then “A League of Their Own.” I showed them “That Thing You Do!” and parts of “Cast Away.” I told them about the man who heard I wasn’t feeling well and adjusted his schedule for me [Hanks]. I told them that it doesn’t matter why you do nice things; all that matters is that you do them. And one day, something changed..."

A recent article by BBC News about the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute quotes President Obama in his eulogy for Civil Rights leader and veteran Member of Congress Elijah Cummings: "Being a strong man includes being kind. There's nothing weak about kindness and compassion," he said. "There's nothing weak about looking out for others. You're not a sucker to have integrity and to treat others with respect."

Though it is often reflexive and "normal," kindness in the end takes strength.  It requires at least some effort, and the stubborn commitment to it, in the face of everything that fosters despair.

(The article also mentions talk show host Ellen DeGeneres telling her audience to be kind to each other.  If she does this regularly on her show, she won't be the first. I remember as a child in the 1950s watching the Garry Moore show every afternoon, and I knew his sign-off by heart:"Be kind to each other, will you?  And goodbye out there!"  That was a powerful thing for a kid to see.)

This article also assumes that it must defensively justify covering something called a Kindness Institute, as the researchers at the Institute must justify themselves.  The article focuses on the health benefits of kindness, so suddenly we can justify being kind for a selfish reason.  Perhaps someday they'll find that kind people actually make more money, and the Institute will really justify itself.

Why is it such a secret that kindness is its own reward?  Media and everyone else assume that winning makes you feel good, even if you destroy others in the process.  But committing an act of kindness also makes you feel good, as does anything on the continuum from love to courtesy and civility (which are versions of institutionalized kindness.)  As does experiencing beauty, which in human exchange is often related.

I've recently returned from a two-week trip 3,000 miles East and back. In airports and on airplanes, on city streets and towns (including in the real Mr. Roger's neighborhood where he grew up in Latrobe, PA),  I experienced kindness and courtesy all along the way, as well as friendship and familial love.  These things still exist.  They may exist in the same proportion they always did, or perhaps even to a greater degree.  It may be that only that the malevolence is louder and less restrained.  It is probably more obviously powerful in high places than ever before in American history, but certainly not in world history, or even in the world today.

This will be part of the fundamental test of the future.  Will decency prevail? Human society cannot thrive or even survive unless it does.  But even this perhaps misses the point.  These behaviors are essential to a cooperative, peaceful and productive society, but they are first of all personal commitments.  We are each responsible for our own actions. Kindness, courtesy, civility, generosity are expressed in action. This is how we communicate what we believe in, what we care about.  It's how we live.

Poetry Monday: The Way It Is

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The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

William Stafford

No single poem is definitive.  But for me, this one comes closest.  It's the one I would leave behind. BK

The Daily Lear

words and image
by Edward Lear

Black to Not

Another day of confusion, but at least here, with a happy ending.

Our power was supposed to go off again at 4 a.m., in a black to black blackout.  It didn't.  Around 8 a.m. people started noticing but there was no official word on it.  An argument broke out among relevant organizations because one of them said the outage had been postponed to 9 p.m., if it was going to happen at all.  Other organizations called them rumor mongers, or the social media equivalent.

But hours later that became the semi-official word.  Then PG&E said the blackout would start at 7 p.m.  It was starting to make less and less sense, since the winds were supposed to diminish.  Humboldt's Emergency Management got snippy in their announcement, complaining of PG&E's unhelpfulness.   Among other things, it turns out that the utility has a different definition of "Humboldt" than the rest of us.  To them it is a district that includes parts of H County and parts of others.  But for awhile they said northern Humboldt County would lose power at 7 p., and they continued to say that Southern Humboldt had lost power at 7 a.m. Which they hadn't.

Then around 5 p.m., PG&E announced it was calling the whole thing off.  Nobody who had power was going to lose it, because the wind velocity was below that deemed dangerous.  Also the short and long range forecasts suggest a respite from high winds and hence intentional blackouts.

I know that this narrative of the latest episode of Humboldt County and PG&E makes for less than timeless reading.  However, this is a record of what happened, commensurate with how we experienced it.  For example, I spent a lot of time today frantically trying to prioritize and get things done before they became massively inconvenient in the dark, not to mention the cold.  Well, it's still cold outside, but we've got light and heat inside after all.  As an experience, I'd suggest that the mental effort and manipulation of anxiety and adrenalin prompted not only by the blackouts themselves but all the uncertainty and crazy turns of information made it all especially exhausting.

Perhaps that will leave an impression, and these communities will take seriously the fragility of the grid and the associated problems of the climate crisis, or more precisely now, the climate emergency.

Meanwhile, other parts of the state suffered real blackouts, and fires raged.  People outside this massive and varied state tend to lump it all together, or distinguish only Los Angeles (southern CA) from San Francisco (northern CA), in conjunction with their respective cliches.  But there are many differences--and probably more micro-climates than any other state.  That isn't stopping the nonsense being written about what all this means, at least in terms of devising responses.  They will need to be different, according to local circumstances.

It's true however that we have in common that it's pretty much all driven by the climate emergency. The climate emergency is becoming the default reality.  That doesn't make it less of an emergency.  It makes it more of one.

Black to Black

The power is back on--temporarily. It came on here around 2:30 p., and is scheduled to go off again around 4 a.m.
Black to black blackouts.

 Winds are due to pick up again to the east and south around 6 a.m. This next "weather event" has winds predicted in a larger area, but the winds and gusts themselves are predicted to be less intense that yesterday's.  But they are not expected to diminish until Wednesday, so power will likely be off even longer.

Of course things are much worse in areas with fire and smoke.  The Sonoma fire has expanded; some 200,000 people evacuated.  LA has its own horrific fast moving fires, which I learned about from the BBC radio news.  Otherwise only people with Internet access through their smartphones are allowed to see the local news, and the Lost Coast empire still doesn't have the decency to schedule regular updates on its radio station.  Would it kill you to pick a time and summarize the relevant information at that time, after letting everyone know what that time is?  A buzz kill maybe.

So while we have a few hours to recharge stuff, get the fridge cold and the house warm, a problem that wasn't so pressing the last time is the night time temperatures.  There was frost this morning, and it's getting down near freezing for the next few nights.  Moving around in darkness or semi-darkness, holding a flashlight at all times, it gets old quick.  It gets to feel a bit like insanity.

The forecast after Wednesday is better, though, at least through the weekend.  But as we're beginning to realize, this can keep happening until the rains start, or until the powers that be find a more effective way of limiting fire dangers.  Because I'm seeing some doubts expressed that this is even working.

But as of today we have a battery backup which will help with some things, maybe even an electric blanket.  The planes are flying so they say, so I'm still scheduled to take off Wednesday morning.   I may post from PA if I actually get there. I got back on here to find that the automated post didn't work, possibly because the power loss affected this computer's clock.  So there may or may not be those Monday poems you're waiting for.  Stay tuned.

Poetry Monday: The Waking

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THE WAKING

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell me how?
The lowly worm climbs up the winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Theodore Roethke

A Purposeful Life

President Barack Obama reminds us of what is important, in his eulogy of the Honorable Elijah Cummings.  "Kindness and compassion are not weak."

Blackout Preview

Update Sat. 6:30 p. Latest is: shutoff at 9 p. or later, and weather all-clear tomorrow afternoon, with restoration time uncertain but sounds like no later than Monday.  Though what changes, could change back.

Update Sat. 10/26 5 p.: The hour when the power is cut off has been pushed back to 8 p. Saturday.  The wind here has picked up but this coastal wind is minor compared to the gusts expected in higher elevations in southeast Humboldt, southern Trinity county and interior Mendicino, beginning at 10 p. tonight.  This is being called potentially an "historic" wind event.  This makes the fire potential especially dangerous.
The total number of California "customers" without power could eventually approach 3 million.

Meanwhile, fires already underway are still growing.

Right now the potential is that these winds remain a danger into Monday, though I've seen no estimate on when they are expected to diminish, nor how long it will take for PG&E to inspect lines and restore power.

My impressions yesterday remain today that (1) things seem better organized and (2) there is no sense of crisis and lots of events etc. are going on as scheduled.  But it still remains to be seen how things go on the second and third day (and night) of blackout.

late Friday:
This much seems certain: early Saturday afternoon, the power goes off, and Saturday night will be dark.  Because there is some relationship to ongoing weather not far to our southeast, power is unlikely to be restored before Monday.  The blackout may well extend longer than that.

The forecast is for the potential of major wind gusts, definitely Saturday evening, and probably into Sunday.  Those winds are forecast to move south by Monday.

Around Arcata on Friday there was little sense of an oncoming crisis. Ice sold out quickly, but people were calm, if not oblivious.  Either people are sanguine in the way that Minnesotans are about winter and snow, or they are more prepared this time, or they were lulled into a false sense of security by the relative ease of getting through 25 hours without electricity.

There's no sense inflating it.  Other Californians have it far worse.  We are hundreds of miles away from any ongoing fire, with little risk of fire getting very close even if one erupts in the danger zone.  Our weather is likely to be pleasant--we aren't even forecast to experience more than a little wind tomorrow.  The night temperatures going into the 30s is something of a challenge without heat, but not true hardship.

This time community resources seem to be better organized, and those in the media in position to inform us say they have learned to organize information better.  We'll see.

We may well see how different a blackout looks on the third or fourth day than it does on the first.  I don't take this as casually as some.

I am also due to be on a plane east on Wednesday morning, and that seems even more iffy than it did before (we always face the consequences of fog at the airport here--the foggiest in the country--or in San Francisco).  Planes flew in and out during the first blackout, but after several days, who knows?

So posting here will be rare, not only this weekend but probably for the next couple of weeks.  I'm giving fair warning because I wouldn't want my legions of readers to get too anxious.  But I've set several Poetry Monday posts to appear automatically, so thou thirst for verse may be assuaged.

Blackout Redux? Or Worse

Update: As of noontime Friday, PG&E informs us that we will lose power tomorrow (Saturday) afternoon, probably for "four days."  Apparently that's because high winds are predicted to continue into Monday. 

Once again the day (Thursday) began with news that the latest round of weather-related blackouts would not include us.  Then in the afternoon, PG&E announced that a small but very precise number of Humboldt customers--2,188 to be exact--might get their power shut off on Saturday evening, and it would last at least 48 hours.

The utility promised a map of affected areas.  When it came out (without explanation) in late afternoon,  the affected area turned out to be where nearly the entire population of Humboldt County is living.

 By evening we were getting the robocalls from Arcata Police (there will be a blackout) and PG&E (there may be a blackout, and including a comically long code to enter on some web page for further information.)  So it looks like the whole county is going to go to black, sometime on Saturday.  But no general information yet on when it may start and when it may end, though it seems likely it will not be a mere 25 hours as last time.

Reassembling pieces of several stories, I'm guessing what happened was this: there are two kinds of power lines involved: the big transmission lines that transmit the power to a big area, and the thinner distribution lines that direct the power to specific places.  Maybe distribution lines were involved in the first announced outage, enabling them to be so precise.  But now it seems to be transmission lines that will be "de-energized," a much blunter instrument.

Why?  I'm guessing it has something to do with the Kincade Fire in Sonoma, which exploded Thursday, after a live transmission line--a jumper from a transmission tower--broke.  They'd shut down the distribution lines, but transmission lines were supposed to be thick enough to withstand the winds that had been forecast for that area.  PG&E may once again be liable for a huge fire, and to prevent further liability, they are cutting off all our power up here.

I don't mean to deny the danger.  Southern California and the central coast are dry and hot, and now very windy.  Winds are forecast for far northern California, and though we've had rain recently, there's none in the forecast.  A lot of people in this state are without power or going to be, and thousands are being evacuated, including whole towns.

So there are fires, and there is fire danger, though (thankfully) not for us.  In a sense we will be sacrificing in order to lessen the danger for others.  That is uncomfortable but acceptable in a decent society--but of course that's not all that this represents.

We're paying for a company's greed in the recent past, and it is leaving us with a chaotic situation involving one of the essentials of civilized life: electric power.  I don't see how PG& E survives this, but what's the alternative?

Meanwhile, a longer blackout than last time will test the vulnerabilities it suggested, and reveal suspected and unsuspected new ones.  Once again, it appears that it will be a massive blackout, so resources will again be stretched thin until they are nonexistent.

And we've got a whole day to think about this, do what we can to prepare, and await the latest "information."

Return of Duluwat

   Cheryl Seidner, former Wiyot Tribal Chair who began the effort to reclaim     Tuluwat, at today's ceremonies.  Lost Coast Outpost photo.

The ancestral island of the Wiyot tribe, the center of the Wiyot world where the annual World Renewal Ceremony was held for untold centuries, was today returned legally to the Wiyot by the City of Eureka.

By some accounts, the ceremonial site and one of the Wiyot village sites on the island is called Tuluwat, while the island as a whole is Duluwat Island.  It has been known as Indian Island since 1860, when some of Eureka's leading citizens massacred women and children on the island during the ceremonies, as part of a coordinated attack on Wiyot wherever they were, that devastated the small tribe.  I wrote about this incident and the Wiyot activities to commemorate the dead and to buy back the land in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2004.

Last vigil held in February 2008.  BK photo.

Since 1992, tribal chair Cheryl Seidner had organized vigils open to all on the anniversary of the massacre, and spearheaded a fund raising campaign to buy back 1.5 acres so that the World Renewal Ceremony could once again be performed there.  She and her sister Leona are direct descendants of an infant survivor of the massacre.

Shortly after the article appeared, the Eureka City Council donated 40 acres of the land on the island it owned.  Today's ceremony marked the official transfer of the remaining 200 acres to the Wiyot tribe.  Both the initial gift and this final return appear to be unprecedented and unique.

But as worthy as these gestures are, the Tribe has basically been left to pay for and accomplish the clean-up of debris and toxic waste that pollutes the island, all left there by now defunct industries.  It took a decade of clean-up and construction--until 2014--until it was safe to hold a single World Renewal Ceremony.  That work continues.  Current tribal chair Ted Hernandez hopes to hold another World Renewal Ceremony in 2020.

Cheryl at the last vigil.  In foreground the candle in a paper cup
that many participants held.  I still have mine from this last vigil.
BK photo.

From the beginning, Cheryl Seidner insisted that commemorating the massacre was the healing of "two communities"--Native and non-Native.  Beginning with a few non-Native participants, the candlelight vigils grew to become a community event, and it was this emphasis on a common humanity that probably made today's event possible.  Congratulations to all.

Your Daily Lear

words and image by
Edward Lear

"Woodhenge" in Wiltshire UK

What It's All About

Impeachment seems all but certain now.  But for all the juiced headlines and heavy bylines, the question remains: does it matter?

Impeachment in and of itself as a constitutional process the equivalent of capital punishment was ruined by the partisan impeachment of Bill Clinton.  It was sound and fury that ended up signifying nothing but that there would be no limits to party politics.

But impeachment is a process, and if the case is made carefully and dramatically in public hearings, everything could change.

As of now, however, it is part of a larger picture, not a result in itself.  What it's still all about is the 2020 election.

There's the theory that he is self-impeaching, that he's bored with being president.  But while that may be true on some level, it's not the operational one: he desperately needs to remain president as long as possible, because once he leaves, he'll be making headlines only for the many crimes he'll be charged with.

Once again he is said to be out of control, which also may be true on some level, but not the operational one:  he is doing what has worked for him, which is to manufacture attention on himself every day, and create very clear confrontations that allows him to identify very clear enemies.

He is doing this with exactly one aim in mind: to be reelected.  It's all about the election of 2020.

He may or may not fear impeachment, but he is confident that he will not be convicted by the Senate and removed from office, so while he bullies GOPers to keep them in line (and is likely to succeed, despite the headlines made by a few dissenters), he pursues his main strategy of creating an absolute and extreme us vs. them dynamic.

His instincts are to be a blustering bully, and that serves him in these endeavors.  He will keep the pressure on Republican Senators to be totally loyal, and at least as long as he seems to influence elections, he will likely continue to intimidate them.  He will bully them, and everyone and everything else, including the Constitution.  He bullied his way into office by being outrageous, and he's betting it will work again.

Though he moans and complains, that's why he doesn't really much care that he's alienated the entire Washington establishment with his caving to Turkey's dictator, betrayal of the Kurds and help to Putin in Syria.  He needs Putin to repeat Russian help in 2020, and his voters don't much care about foreign affairs anymore, but they love to see him stick it to Washington.  It touches that aimless anger, and what frightens some people entertains others.  A wannabe dictator supported by nihilists is not that surprising. What we may also be seeing is an authoritarian supported by anarchists.

His stance is called nationalism, which has too many meanings and resonances to be all that useful as a description.  But what translates to his voters is anti-globalism.  They identify globalist economics as the cause of their economic problems, and they aren't entirely wrong.  The chattering classes still don't understand the damage done economically, culturally and psychologically when America stopped making things, especially the things that Americans buy. Maybe our crap was just as bad--overall I don't think it was--but at the modest price range, it's pretty much all crap now, produced by foreign slave labor.

 And people resent it, and are hurt by it.  It is in all those categories--making a living, culture, self-worth--feeding the feelings of helplessness.   Yes, there are racist and xenophobic aspects to it, but it is the visible source of "income inequality," that is the enriching of a few at the expense of the many.

He is pursuing the same strategy that got him just enough votes in the right places to win in 2016--by basically thumbing his nose at all established media including debates (he won't participate) and TV ads, and concentrating on the one-line zinger messaging of social media, helped not only by visible echo chambers like Fox News but the thousands of local phony sites that his Russian friends will put up--faster than they can be taken down.

The only difference is that he'll have a lot more money to do it.  See this New York Times story, as one example.  The polls say he will lose.  But the polls said the same thing in 2016.  The NYT gave him a 90% chance of losing, on election night.  There were many things that made the difference--but the Internet was likely the biggest factor.

Remember that the crimes of Nixon were all about getting him reelected in 1972, after a very close election in 1968.  It's the same today.  He's all about 2020.

Poetry Monday: Morris Graves's Blind Bird

"Blind Bird" by Morris Graves 1940

Morris Graves’s Blind Bird

This is the only way we can understand each other now
this is the only way I can listen to you
with our feet tangled in the white yarn bushes
known as the world

this is the way the holders of the blinding pins
came to be unable ever to hear
Hardy told me he had seen an ancestor of yours
long ago when I was in the dark before I was born here

and I learned later that those with the pins
became unable to hear you when you kept singing
to yourself and your clear voice kept rising
out of the chords and the great chorus of your ancestors

now as I listen to you I hear in your voice
the forgotten freedom leaping over the rocks
and flying again and the rocks are singing
under you out of the unending silence
where the world goes on beginning

W.S. Merwin
 Garden Time

Blackout Assessed

We've gotten probably the only reporting we're going to get on our blackout locally in a story by the North Coast Journal staff.  Fortunately (and surprisingly for the NCJ of recent years) it is well-reported, nicely structured and not badly written.

It sets up the narrative through Humboldt County's emergency management director Dorie Lanni, and adds to previous Lost Coast Outpost reporting (that up to the morning of the blackout Humboldt County wasn't included, that the county wasn't officially told until a few hours before the lights went out) her significant assertion that in two years of talking about planned power shutoffs, "at no time" did PG&E "ever suggest in any way that we might lose power to the entire county."

So most of the response was improvised, mostly though not wholly by necessity. The story shows that few businesses were prepared, especially for such a large-scale blackout. For example, with a blackout to a more limited area, food could be preserved by renting refrigerated trucks, but there were too many places and too few available trucks.

A significant bottleneck was exposed--that all the diesel fuel that powers emergency generators in the county ultimately came from one place, a Chevron facility, but it couldn't pump out the fuel it had on hand--because it had no electricity, and no backup (the excuse being that regulations prevented using diesel fuel to power backup generators.  Work out that irony.)

There were some heroes, including a Chevron gas station in Arcata, which stayed open even though it couldn't pump gas, and distributed gallons of free ice cream before it melted.  But two facilities really stand out, for slightly different reasons.

The first is Mad River Hospital, usually the forgotten stepchild of county hospitals in Arcata.  Their significant move was to assume from the day before the blackout that Humboldt would lose its power, and they went ahead with emergency planning.  With generators, they kept the power on and the hospital open, not only serving patients but community members who came by, with meals and other services.

Blue Lake Rancheria and microgrid

The other institution was the Blue Lake Rancheria and casino hotel, which has put together its own microgrid with solar power, large scale batteries augmented by diesel generators.  They had sufficient power for their hotel (which quickly filled, including room for the most vulnerable patients as assessed by the county), and could also supply to the community the two resources (besides electricity) most needed: gasoline and ice.  In all three of these cases (and others), the generosity and sense of community stands out.

The story ends with Lanni's warning that while a one-day blackout caused stresses, each additional day would multiply effects exponentially.  I suspect the likely loss of cell phone signal alone would cause a major mental health crisis.  But as usual the most significant failures would hurt the most vulnerable, as in fact they did in other parts of the state where power was out longer.

The Blue Lake Rancheria example also dramatizes the general failure to follow up on idealistic rhetoric with the hard work of infrastructure changes, especially here in Arcata.  Twenty years ago, Arcata had a majority Green Party city council, and signed on to a commitment to fight global heating.  Fifteen or so years ago I attended a seminar on solar power that attracted local movers and shakers, including the then president of Humboldt State University.

But the ongoing blitzkrieg of new housing construction in Arcata--most of it here in the Sunset neighborhoods--not only ignores known infrastructure and safety problems, but solar power is conspicuously absent.  Not even a white roof.  It's been largely talk, and even the talk has disappeared as local government has become more entangled with business in recent years.  It's all about real estate and construction money.  Arcata doesn't even pretend to be a leader anymore, and its future is just that much dimmer.

Who Really Said It? (If Anyone)

This story, repeated most recently in a New York Times profile of recently deceased writer Harold Bloom, famous for (among other things) his productivity, appeared earlier in a book by Jay Parini:

"The story circulates in academe that a graduate student once telephoned Bloom at home in New Haven.  His wife answered, "I'm sorry, he's writing a book."  "That's all right," the student replied.  "I'll wait."

This story, in which the caller is Alfred Hitchcock to prolific novelist Georges Simenon, is told in a recent profile of Simenon by Ian Tompson:

Simenon demanded silence as he set out to write one Maigret adventure a week. When Alfred Hitchcock telephoned one day, he was told: ‘Sorry, he’s just started a novel.’ ‘That’s all right, I’ll wait,’ came the reply.

Poetry Monday: Mother of Exiles

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Emma Lazurus
poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty
1883

Columbus Days

monument to Italian immigrants in New Orleans, from the New York Times story referenced below.

Brent Staples has an interesting story in the New York Times Magazine that asserts there was a reason for the first Columbus Day beyond the assumed homage to the Italian mariner working for Spain.  It emerged from a violent history of prejudice against Italians in America.

My mother was born in Italy, so I have been aware of prejudice against Italians in America, including against Italian-Americans.  I experienced some low level prejudice in my own childhood, and that was at the height of the Italian-American ascendancy (Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, and Italian language songs on top forty radio, etc.)  I've also been aware that for generations in America, Italians were not considered white--they were black.  Even in my time, members of certain ethnic groups and upper classes considered us "not quite white."

(The comments to Staples' story testify to many more overt and even violent acts of anti-Italian bigotry, including some more recent than the 1950s.)

But I did not know the extent of either the prejudice or of the identifying of Italians as black, until I read the Staples piece.  In the 19th century it seems, it was not only blacks who were lynched in the South, but Italians as well. This happened particularly in New Orleans, where there was a large Italian community. Moreover, such lynchings were approved of in the North, by among others, the New York Times.

But there was one difference in their ability to respond.  African Americans were cut off from their countries of origin from which they had been forcibly removed, which in any case were often colonies of European powers that condoned slavery.  But Italian Americans, usually more recent immigrants, had a European country that had an army and European allies.

When news spread of particularly blatant lynchings of Italians in New Orleans, the government of Italy protested, to the point of breaking off diplomatic relations and threatening war against the United States.

President Benjamin Harrison wound up paying reparations, but he also tried a p.r. tactic to associate Italian immigrants with American origins by declaring the first Columbus Day in 1892.

It was supposed to be a one-time thing, but Italian Americans embraced the idea, and made Columbus their signature hero.  Columbus Day parades became larger, and the legend of Columbus became inflated well beyond the historical facts.

Native American activist Michael Haney appearing on Oprah in
a 1992 show on racism in America. Also on that show was
activist and poet Suzan Harjo, who received the Presidential
Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2014.

Fast forward a century, to 1992.  What was supposed to be the 500th anniversary of Columbus "discovering America" as we all learned in school in the 50s, and the centennial of the first Columbus Day, instead evoked a new awareness of the reality of 1492--the presence of millions of Indigenous people in hundreds of thriving cultures almost everywhere in this hemisphere--and their eradication by European diseases and genocide.

This awareness was led by Native American activists and writers, and began a revolution in attitudes.  Knowledge is still weak and there are cases of prominent racism surviving,  notably in the names of major sports teams, but that revolution is ongoing.

So Columbus Day in a fairly odd way has been instrumental in exposing and even reducing prejudice against two groups: Italians and Native peoples.   There's much more to all these stories, but this part of them is rife with the oddities and ironies, as well as the pain, of the American experience.

After the Blackout

Update: Though our blackout is over, many more Californians are blacked out today--nearly two million--as power is off in areas of southern California as well as northern.  High winds and some fires in the San Francisco Bay area prompted this action, and there may be more to come.   

Our power came back on almost exactly 25 hours after it went off.  Nobody yet knows why, which is just a small part of what nobody seems to know about this incident.

Here's what I do know: I've been warning for years about the climate crisis interacting with our interdependent but vulnerable and non-redundant grid (and other systems) and the chaos that could result.  We got a very small taste of it here.

It was enough for us to begin to understand the consequences of these interactions: of years and years of ignoring consequences of climate crisis effects while also neglecting infrastructure to an extent that should have been shocking.

We learned that PG&E doesn't seem to know how its own systems operate, nor do they have adequate maps.  We learned that while the local power plant had more than enough power to keep the electricity flowing in Humboldt County, nobody knew how to do that.  And this is before we consider the updating that should have happened, to use computer systems and so on to create a smarter grid where outages could be better localized.

Let me explain again: we had no particular fire danger here.  It was a sunny, windy day, but the wind was cold, and we've had rain this month.  The fire danger was hundreds of miles to the south, but because of how PG&E manages our electrical grid, we were among the first to be blacked out.

While school children and high school students got some novelty, and college students got the day off  (all of them saved from madness because their smartphones mostly still worked), older adults got a taste of what this means.

Caught unawares and unable to quickly get into the mindset that tells them what things are going to be like without power, there was a rush for resources in the hours before the scheduled shutoff, and in places on the day.  It will be interesting to learn--if we ever do--what businesses etc. had plans in place, and which were improvising. Here in Arcata, gas stations and banks were closed (mostly), bank machines didn't work.  CVS, Arcata's major drug store and pharmacy, was closed, with a sign on the door that said the nearest CVS still open was in Crescent City, 90 miles to our north. There was a shoe store open, with a few browsers in the sunlight through the open door, and a few other shops.

Most of the places to buy food were closed: Safeway, Wildberries, restaurants and cafes.  Only the North Coast Coop was open.  I followed the trail of paper coffee cups in pedestrian hands to learn this at lunchtime on Wednesday.  It was a surreal scene--many more people than usual, milling around in the semi-darkness, almost silently.  They could have been zombies.  I didn't see any panic or anger, and also no particular camaraderie or recognition of the situation.  People were polite and insular.  Some of them were just there to have lunch, others bought groceries.  The dairy cases (including ice cream) had a half-off sign, but few if any people I saw opened them.

According to the radio, the most in demand items were ice and gasoline, and places to recharge phones and especially battery-operated medical machines, such as breathing machines.  The few authentically local radio stations were on the air--although I didn't hear that either of the NPR stations were.  The ones that were operating are part of the same structure as Lost Coast Outpost on the Internet, the prime resource for information related to the blackout.  However, nobody had wifi, so the only Internet access was through cellphones, at the risk of using power needed for emergency calls.

Which left radio (most easily accessible, even--as in my case--with an old battery-powered radio), and now I go into an old radio rant.  The great advantage of this network was that it combined the efforts of some fine local reporters with information volunteered by people who called in, so what resources were available could be made known.

But there are also major disadvantages in how this all works, especially when you want news without the necessity of listening all the time to the music programs randomly interspersed with news, most of which I can hardly bear.  First of all, the reliability of the information is untested.  Anybody can call in, and the reporters I heard seldom identified the sources of their info.  Everything was part of the usually insipid dj chatter.

The KHSU lockout

Second and most infuriating, there seem to be absolutely no regularly scheduled news broadcasts anymore, outside of NPR.  (The only public stations I heard however broadcast only the BCC, continuously.) Most conspicuous was the absence of local news from KHSU, the Humboldt University NPR station that earlier this year committed KHSUicide, or more accurately, it was murder by HSU, which fired almost the entire staff and turned away volunteers, to become little more than a national NPR conduit with operations elsewhere.

 Most of the commercial stations seem to be robo stations, with local commercials but content controlled in some remote location, or in any case, uninterested in local news.  But even the Lost Coast Communications local stations also do not have regularly scheduled news, as far as I know, and if they do, they do not promote it.

It used to be that EVERY radio station had a news summary of some kind at the top of the hour, and most had another at the bottom of the hour, or some other regularly scheduled time.  Now NONE of them do.  This is at best cynical money-grubbing, forcing listeners to endure hours of commercials for a few tidbits of news that is often indistinguishable from rumor or prank.

In any case, today businesses are picking up the pieces and things are not back to normal.  The supply chain, especially for perishables like eggs and milk, has likely been interrupted, and stuff like gasoline and perhaps even ice that ran out has to be replaced.  Regular deliveries were probably postponed when this was supposed to go on for more days.  The university will resume classes, but some students left town.  Some businesses today lacked employees who also left the area, because this was supposed to last three to five days.

Of course we're very happy it didn't.  But for others in California, the blackout goes on.  Apparently the majority of people whose power was cut off on Wednesday are still without it, and others have been added.

Here we had little more than a strange holiday.  Apart from dangers and inconveniences, we got enforced experiences in conversation substituting for television, and the night sky without light pollution.

But it would be the second day and beyond that really tested all sorts of things.  We'll see if individuals and institutions learn from this slice of experience, or simply go back to denial as usual.  And I'll be watching for what happens elsewhere, where the blackout goes on.

Powerless...in the State of Confusion

Update 7 p.m.: It's now definite.  Lost Coast Outpost reports the plan to use local power has failed, and we got a robocall from the Arcata police announcing that Arcata will be without power, possibly for several days. 

The outages will hit the Central Valley, leaving them without air conditioning while it leaves northern areas without heat at night.  The economic costs could be substantial, although bypassing San Francisco and Silicon Valley may mitigate those.  Now the power companies for southern CA are suggesting they may cut power as well, although affecting hundreds of thousands fewer.

Update 10 p.m.  Just two hours away from our scheduled plunge back to the 18th century, and I worry about all the medical devices and breathing machines that aren't going to be working tonight or for some nights to come.  This is the price for the corporate malfeasance of PG&E that all parts of our government allowed to come to this.  Are we to believe that this danger from power equipment is not avoidable, not subject to better maintenance and technology?  Must it take lost lives and certainly a large economic loss to bring those questions into the light?  By the way, the PG&E site you're supposed to go to for information now crashes immediately.

Well, time to get out the quills and parchment.

Earlier today (Tuesday Oct. 8), our sole power company PG&E sent out via phone and text the warning that power in Humboldt County (or parts of it) "may" be cut off, beginning at around midnight tonight.  If it does go off, we could be powerless for up to five days.  That's days, not hours.

For out-of-staters, the background briefly is that PGE was found responsible by the courts for a big fire last year, due to sparks from a transformer or something.  The company is already in bankruptcy.  So this year, they planned to shut off power when weather conditions made a new forest fire more likely.  Right now there are big winds building in much of northern California, though the actual danger zone for fire is considerably south of us.

But location doesn't matter, because of the Grid.  When power is shut off in one place, it can affect far-flung places like Humboldt County, which is just one of more than 30 counties that may be affected, and something like 800,000 people.

 A good deal of the Bay Area will lose power, but mostly the more rural and poorer areas it looks like. San Francisco is to be spared, and farther south, Silicon Valley.

As of this afternoon, it seems more likely than not that power is going to be shut off here.  What we don't know--and apparently won't know until it happens--is who is going to be without power, and who might still have it.

The interesting thing is that Humboldt County generates enough power to take care of its own needs.  But the power generated here gets fed into the grid, and nobody seems to know how to keep that power local.

Nor does PG&E know what will happen in Humboldt when they shut down a couple of lines that come up here.  They have already shut off power for some Humboldt customers, as early as 10 this morning.

This is an unprecedented situation here, and it's hard for people to wrap their heads around it.  We lose power sometimes during winter storms, for a few hours up to a few days.  But five days--possibly some people in rural areas have experienced that, but I doubt that anybody in Arcata or even Eurkea has experienced it.

Electricity is like air to a modern society--it's necessary for almost everything, and it's always there.  It's hard to imagine it not being there for almost a week.  It probably would be easier to think about it if there were a visible local emergency.  But there's not.

I remember when electric power was a public utility.  I remember when localities had power over their power.

The only news I've seen is that there are blocks-long lines at the gas pumps at Costco in Eureka.  I expect that all the grocery stores are crowded.  Public schools have announced that they will be open tomorrow regardless, but the Humboldt State University web site information is confusing at best, stating that school buildings will be closed and students should stay in their dorms, which will be "locked down."  What does that mean?

So we've done the inventory check, and we seem good on the essentials.  The devices are recharging.  I did a load of laundry, took a shower.  If natural gas is not affected, we will have stovetop cooking and hot water from the gas water heater.  Water has never been affected in past outages.  My flashlight fetish may also pay off--we have many, and lots of batteries.  Also long-burning candles in glass.

But the truth is we don't know what to expect.  Past power outages have been pretty local.  A lot of normal infrastructure could be affected.  Refrigeration seems like it's going to be a big problem, beyond the home.

This is also a moment when the stark lack of local news reporting becomes important.  The Eureka Times-Standard, the last remaining daily, has cut back to almost no local staff.  There is little local television news.  Radio no longer does news regularly, and we'll see what they can generate in an emergency.  There's the Lost Coast Outpost web site, and a few blogs.  That's it.

But then we won't have wifi, and maybe nobody will.  They may not be able to post, and very likely I won't be able to receive.  Or to send.  So I guess, over and out.

Poetry Monday: What Thou Lovest Well Remains

“What thou lovest well remains
the rest is dross
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs
                                      or is it of none?

First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee

Ezra Pound
excerpt Canto 81