Earth Day 2015

Today is the 45th Anniversary of Earth Day

This week is the 5th Anniversary of the BP Oil Disaster 

This year is the 10th Anniversary of Hurricanes Katrina & Rita

The View from a Mossville Fenceline.  Photo by R Hudson

Right now, There is a great dislocation happening in southwest Louisiana, the exodus of the people of Mossville Louisiana from the village built by their ancestors over 150 years ago. The community of Mossville is disappearing under the greedy footprint of Sasol, the South African Oil and Gas company, abetted by a complicit state government, indifferent to the needs and wishes of its most vulnerable citizens, those in the fenceline communities, near to oil refineries and chemical processors.  These communities, like Mossville, bear the burden of toxic exposures, and their citizens organize to protect their health as well as the air, land and water where they live.  Organizations like Mossville Environmental Action Now seek to protect all of us from predatory extractive industries that realize obscene profits while leaving devastation in their wake.

In the coming weeks this blog will describe the situation in Mossville and suggest multiple approaches to thinking about the dispossession of one of this country's oldest African-American communities from its land by an apartheid- era South African based oil and chemical processing giant.

Many African-American, Indigenous and working poor communities have disappeared through Louisiana state policies that favor industrial expansion over the rights of its citizens. Mossville, because of the decades-long organizing by its residents, provides important lessons for how we, who believe in the possibility of creating a safe and prosperous environment for all beings, can confront the predation of industry and support the important work of local and grassroots organizing, such as that of Mossville Environmental Action Now.

This weekend watch for a post on The Emergence of an American Petro-State.

Fracking Earthquakes and the Deep Ecology of the Planet - NPM #3

Fracking Sludge Tanks, Youngstown OH. Photo by Dan Pompeii

Photograph by Dan Pompili/Warren Tribune-Chronicle/AP PhotoPerhaps you have heard about the recent spate of earthquakes here in northeast Ohio.  Scientists from the US Geological Survey have determined they are caused by high pressure disposal of waste liquid from hydraulic fracturing into wastewater injection wells. Hydraulic fracturing is the process by which a toxic stew of chemicals (the list has not been fully revealed) is injected in the ground to break up shale rock formations that contain natural gas.  The natural gas and fluids come back up to the surface after picking up contaminants from deep in the earth. The wastewater, composed of contain sodium and calcium salts, barium, oil, strontium, iron, numerous heavy metals, soap, radiation and other components. Most of the wastewater that arrives in Ohio originates in Pennsylvania since there are prohibitions against injection wells in the state.  

Tectonic Plate Map

Earthquakes happen.  They are the manifestations of the deep  structures of our planet.  What we call natural gas and crude oil are part of that ecology.  We humans ride the tectonic plates of our planet's continuing evolution, and it seems, increasingly find ways of disrupting it in thoughtless and generally unnecessary ways.  Here's an oil-drilling poem:


Drilling For Oil

flesh colored ghosts
walking through the
oil fields... carrying

mannequin babies
on their shoulders.

draped in American flags,
carrying Bibles, and
pearl handled revolvers.

past rusted out chevrolets,
stepping on books that
were banned....

singing the songs of Jesus
to corpses that cant hear....

past tomblike houses
where strangers lived and
died... pictures of dead presidents...

empty Jim Beam bottles in
the windows, covered with soot!

drilling for oil... 

Eric Cockrell

Great Blue Heron Rookery -- National Poetry Month/Earth Day Installment 2

Bath Road Great Blue Heron Rookery

We have been making regular pilgrimage to the Great Blue Heron Rookery on Bath Road on the edge of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. I think of herons as primarily solitary but they seem to gather together for courtship, egg-laying and raising the young.  There are over 50 active nests in the three or four most populated trees. The males bring offerings of sticks to the woo the females and to demonstrate their homemaking (nestmaking?) abilities. They do a little tug of war over the stick and then she puts it in the nest (you can watch a nesting pair on the Cornell Ornithology Heron-cam).


Here is a fine Great Blue Heron poem by Carolyn Kizer:
The Great Blue Heron
BY CAROLYN KIZER

M.A.K. September, 1880-September, 1955

As I wandered on the beach

I saw the heron standing   

Sunk in the tattered wings

He wore as a hunchback’s coat.   

Shadow without a shadow,   

Hung on invisible wires   

From the top of a canvas day,   

What scissors cut him out?   

Superimposed on a poster   

Of summer by the strand   

Of a long-decayed resort,   

Poised in the dusty light   

Some fifteen summers ago;   

I wondered, an empty child,   

“Heron, whose ghost are you?”

I stood on the beach alone,

In the sudden chill of the burned.

My thought raced up the path.   

Pursuing it, I ran

To my mother in the house

And led her to the scene.

The spectral bird was gone.

But her quick eye saw him drifting   

Over the highest pines

On vast, unmoving wings.

Could they be those ashen things,   

So grounded, unwieldy, ragged,   

A pair of broken arms

That were not made for flight?   

In the middle of my loss

I realized she knew:

My mother knew what he was.

O great blue heron, now

That the summer house has burned   

So many rockets ago,

So many smokes and fires

And beach-lights and water-glow   

Reflecting pinwheel and flare:   

The old logs hauled away,   

The pines and driftwood cleared   

From that bare strip of shore   

Where dozens of children play;   

Now there is only you

Heavy upon my eye.

Why have you followed me here,   

Heavy and far away?

You have stood there patiently   

For fifteen summers and snows,   

Denser than my repose,

Bleaker than any dream,

Waiting upon the day

When, like grey smoke, a vapor   

Floating into the sky,

A handful of paper ashes,

My mother would drift away.

Carolyn Kizer, “The Great Blue Heron” from Cool, Calm, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000. Copyright © 2001 by Carolyn Kizer. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P. O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Source: Poetry (April 1958).

Zodiacal Light

Earthsky.org April 8, 2012 The Zodiacal Light

Easter Sunday Evening, 2012

I went looking for the zodiacal light tonight. I got an announcement from Earth and Sky through my Facebook account that early in April it might be possible to see it. Did you (or do you still) watch dust play in the sunlight? The zodiacal light is interplanetary dust in our solar system playing in the light of the sun.  As stated in Earth and Sky , "The ecliptic is actually Earth’s orbital plane projected onto the stellar sphere. Roughly speaking, we can also call the ecliptic the plane of the solar system, for the sun, moon and planets are always found on or the near the ecliptic." I thought having a little astronomical fun would be the perfect activity after spending the afternoon bird watching in the Akron end of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. 

I went looking for a very dark place to see the zodiacal light since it is elusive and easily masked by the ambient illumination that seems to surround us.  I headed west of Akron, through Copley.  There used to be corn fields out there and vast tracts of unlit land.  I moved away from Summit county 36 years ago but moved back 10 months ago.  I'm still catching up on all the changes.  It turns out that where there once were corn fields there are McMansions, each one with it's gaudy facade lit up by flood lights. 

Light pollution may not seem like a major problem compared to fracking, the devastating effect of the BP Oil Disaster on the people, land, flora and fauna of the Gulf coast region, and the deterioration of the oceans.  But our fear of the dark has caused whole flocks of migrating birds to crash to the ground and nocturnal animals suffer the biological disruption of light at the wrong time of day.  Just as important, we have lost the stars, now made invisible in most cities by poorly focused and excessive illumination.  While this problem certainly can be remedied, it reminds me that we change our environment, the ecosystems that we inhabit in irreparable ways.

I have been a very amateur sky watcher since my days as a camp director, wandering the grounds after all my campers (and presumably their counselors) had gone to sleep.  I could watch the wheeling worlds within worlds in the privacy of an empty ceremonial fire circle.  It is there I first saw the zodiacal light.  But that was over 30 years ago and those blessed dark places of my youth are now hemmed in by sub-divisions and strip malls full of fast food restaurants and gas stations.

National Poetry Month
 Poster

April has the happy circumstance of hosting Earth Day and being Poetry Month.  To celebrate I will post some poetry about our wildly changing world, its creatures, landscapes, and our (uncomfortable?) place in it. Most of the poems will be by some of my favorite authors but I want to start with one I wrote.  It is an occasional celebrating the discovery of the first extra-solar system planet, 51-Pegasi.

51 Pegasi

What holds us in this orbit

Star Chart for 51 Pegasi

us, this earth, around our greening sun?

and together, our star and all the planets,

hurtling, hanging to the outward

limb of this spiraling galaxy.

And our Milky Way

joining other brilliant spans, spinning

riding some great wave together

to where?

Is this too much to consider?

come back home, then

think of all that we are,

focus on our atoms, so tenacious

resisting those whirling forces flung

by our feeble science

will not be dislodged one member from another

Can you feel all these subtle parts?

vibrating invisible chimera

trickster children

changing place when we are not looking

finding weight where there is none

each time we drop our guard

we are caught in some eternal thrall

Yes, this gravity, deep well in the consciousness

of our universe, caresses all that is familiar

as in the cupped hands of countless

silent supplicants

raised in praise to an unknown god.

Watering Random Earth Week Thoughts

Before leaving New Orleans last week Pat and I went to the Earth Day Celebration at Bayou Bienvenue.   The Bayou Bienvenue Restoration  is an effort to restore the southernmost end of the Great Cypress Swamp. The most serious assault on this valuable natural coastal protection mechanism and resource has been the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO) popularly referred to as Mr. Go by locals.  There is a plan for closing Mr. Go but like all things Louisiana it is not moving at a constructive (pun intended) pace.

Bayou Bienvenue is located in the Lower 9th Ward, the neighborhood most devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and arguably, with Holy Cross, the neighborhood that would have benefited most from an intact Cypress Swamp.

We managed to missed the actual event as I was late getting back from Baton Rouge but we went to see if anything was still going on, and indeed there was.  Damselflies were hovering around the local flora, fish were jumping, and of course, there were fishermen.  Well, in the tradition of mentoring, there was a young guy fishing and an older man sitting on the steps pontificating.  The young fella had baited a 3 hook line with shrimp but was having little success until a smallish, perhaps female, alligator showed up. We shouted encouragement and caution as the fisherman repeatedly cast and rebaited his hooks, the older man clambered precariously along the rocks, prepared to net the 'gator, and the knobby head reptile dined on shrimp and played with the aspirations of his erstwhile captors.

After four tries, and a broken fishing line, the alligator moved on, having given us a sense of what a restored bayou might bring -- protection to the city of New Orleans, abundant flora, and a bit of the thrill of the wild.

What Does The Earth Remember?

Cotton, post defoliant.  Kids in the south used to be kept out of school during picking season (this picture was taken September 2008).  Today the crop is relieved of all its greenness so a machine can pick it.  The defoliant stays in the soil, stays on the cotton bolls, stays in us.

The Dirt has memory.

This muddy canal is just down the road from the cotton field pictured above.  A lynching happened in 1937, off the old bridge, over this drainage ditch.  I wonder if the water remembers too?

Happy Earth Day.

Tomorrow is Earth Day

Tomorrow is Earth Day, be kind to your dirt, that is fortify the soil in your immediate surroundings.  Where do you think food comes from?  At least the stuff that grows, consisting wholly of itself (thank you Michael Pollan), the magical metamorphosis of the stuff of dirt and sun into spinach, peas, yam.

Compost your yard waste (if you have one) or table scraps (not meat! not milk! not cheese!) or steal off to the closest cemetery and dig up the leafy masses moldering at its forested edges. Take a garbage bag or three, fill them and then high tail it to some abandoned place near your home.  You urban dwellers know what I'm talking about.  Scrape away the shattered glass, the invasive knotweed, the remains of the murder memorial.  Take a long handled hoe and loosen up the poor neglected dirt.  Add your offering -- leaf mold, some peat moss, a bit compost from your very own bin -- and go away.  Leave it to the seeds on the wind, or tucked in a squirrelly cheek.  Leave it to world.  Something is bound to grow.