I know I haven’t written anything here in a very long time.  I am sorry for my absence.

At some point in the last few months, I got uninspired.  Everyday I would search for articles that were worth re-printing, linking to, and discussing.  At some point, all the stories became the same and I wasn’t finding anything original.

Journalists and scientist weren’t reporting on anything positive.  Not to say, that there isn’t a necessity in saying what is truth about climate change.  And the truth about climate change is it takes a keen eye to find the glimmer of hope. We have a serious problem on this planet.

The powers that be have relegated that to CO2 levels.  But what I have learned since starting the site is that it is so much more than that.  “CO2” is not just something that you address by changing your car, or a lightbulb, or solar paneling.  Changing this planet has to be a complete shift in lifestyle.  This planet needs a reset button.  But, people don’t want to hear that because they are comfortable in being able to get a hamburger and fries.  They want to go to the mall and get the latest fashion.  They want the privacy of their cars, instead of the invasion of actually interacting with another human being.

In other words, when it comes to climate change, global warming, global destabilization or any other phrase you associate with what is going on, I have become negative, as well.  And, it isn’t fun to live in a space and energy that is negative.

So, I had a lot of thinking to do.  I had to look into figuring out what made me excited, passionate about something again, the thing that had the hope of the positive, and if I were lucky… that could also maybe help people start caring, or doing something, to help the planet.

I have found it.  But, I’m not going to share with you what it is until, hopefully, this weekend.

This site still gets a lot of activity and comments.  I will always maintain it.  If I feel so inspired an article or two or three may be posted.  We’ll see.  I will for sure be maintaining my twitter account, so please keep following me (or start, hee hee).  When there are interesting things out there, I will be sure to let you all know!

Thank you for your support over the last year.  I look forward to your readership in the future… either in the new endeavor or with Golden Spiral.

The story, however, starts on my morning walk. Monday Oct 5th, to be exact.

Just to give you a little peak into my brain… I enjoy walking over this bridge. It crosses the LA “River”. This particular section has a lot of birds; ducks, egrets, small birds (the type unidentifiable to me), and the occasional hawk. I think it is because this section has a patch of “land” (the cement on one side is exposed). I sometimes stop to look at the birds. I always look down to see what’s around. It makes me happy.

This particular Monday morning, I looked down and I spotted something that wasn’t supposed to be there. A squirrel.

After walking over the bridge a few times that day, doing normal errands, and noticing he was still there… I realized he was trapped. I watched him to try get out by climbing the wall, to no avail.

Hesitantly, I called animal services. For one, because I am sensitive to that fact that our public services are crunched due to budget constraints and secondly, because it seemed a bit ridiculous to call over a squirrel. An animal, I was reminded, was no different than a rat… just a bushier tail.

Everyone I talked to at animal services was amazing and assured me that it was good that I had called. Monday was a “closed because of budget issues day”, except for large animals. The officer asked me to “see if he is still there in the morning and if so, call us back. We’ll go get him.”

Lo and behold, he was there. I called.

After an exchange of calls, I was informed that this happens all the time and an officer will go out to inspect. If they felt that the squirrel could safely get out, they would leave it be, otherwise, they would send out SmART… the Small Animal Rescue Team.

I never heard back from Animal Services. Fretted for a while. But then I decided, the officers knew their job and could assess the situation and determine what needed to be done.

Then on Thursday, I was on my walk again. I looked over the bridge. And, yep…. there he was. Again, I didn’t want to think about it, because I knew the officers knew what was best for how to handle it. But, that afternoon I got a call.

A different officer was calling to see if I had noticed if the squirrel were still there, to which I said “yes”. He informed me that he was with the SmART and that they would go by the next morning and get him out.

So, now we are at Friday. The squirrel is still trapped in the river. I am on my morning walk and as I approach the bridge, I see the team is setting up the “rescue”.

After introducing myself, I learn that they are going to repel into the river from the bridge, trap the squirrel, determine if he is healthy to be released and if not rehabilitate and treat before releasing.

I also learned the most important thing: they do all of this on their own dime. They pay for all of their equipment, supplies and training out of their pocket. Because of the river and the ocean, they have all taken swift water rescue training, which came in handy when they had to rescue a deer from the ocean! Can you imagine!

These are a great group of men and women who kept assuring me that THERE IS NO ANIMAL TOO SMALL.

The whole thing gathered a crowd. I have to say, I was so disappointed in talking to the people that came by. Each and every one of them lived in our neighborhood and had seen him since Monday. Not one person called. One woman threw him granola. But that was it. It left me sad. It’s funny to think about how ridiculous I felt having called animal services, but in my book it was the only option. I couldn’t walk by everyday looking at him, doing nothing, and essentially waiting for him to die. Maybe it is an overreaction, but it seems if you chose to do nothing and let him die, that is animal cruelty. Even if it is just a squirrel.

Unfortunately, on this Friday, the squirrel got away.

They don’t know how he got down, but he indeed did not have a way out. All of the storm drains were clogged. However, one was clogged in such place that he could hide up there, out of reach of the rescuers. After a while, they had to give up.

I had left before all of this had happened. In fact, I was going to call on Monday to find out how the story ended. But, I didn’t need to… I walked by the bridge on my way to the Farmer’s Market on Sunday… almost a week later… and the team was there, getting ready to repel and save him again.

I really wish I had thought of taking pictures sooner…. using a rope, they sent down what looked like a trap to block the storm drain that he hid in the last time. We could all see him in another storm drain, poking his head out looking at us. They went into the river and blocked that storm drain he was in with a net. Through the net, they poked at him with a rod of sorts and that got him to run out, into the net, and they GOT HIM!

He was healthy! According to the law he had to be released within a mile of where he was rescued because of territory and displacement of other squirrels. (I will admit, I offered my yard.)

One reason I am sharing this with you is because it was a week long experience that made an impact on me. Most notably because of the three volunteers who go out and rescue these animals, of all sizes: cats, dogs, deer, raccoons, and even squirrels… paying for all of their equipment and training by themselves. This group needs to continue.

I would like to ask of all you to help me in sending a donation to this group. For one thing, they have a hard time getting donations.. when someone makes a donation to Animal Services, who gets the money is determined by the administration. The team doesn’t need cash… they need gift cards to Home Depot, Sports Chalet, OSH.. those kinds of places.

I was thinking if I could get people to contribute a little, we could get a gift card for a nice large amount and help them out.

I will collect the donations through my paypal account… log onto paypal just send to my email address listed which is cshells@sbcglobal.net. If you want to contribute, but don’t want to use paypal, please contact me and we can arrange something.

Thanks for reading this story. Thank you even more if you choose to contribute a donation!

How do we change people’s behaviors?

In Seattle, a ballot measure was recently defeated to impose a 20-cent fee on paper and plastic bags from grocery stores. People from Seattle are generally considered to be fairly progressive, environmentally-minded folk. More people already use reusable shopping bags in Seattle than most other places in the country (though it’s still only 20-30%). It’s easy to imagine that they know exactly why this fee is being proposed, and the good that it could accomplish.

Originally, the City Council simply voted to impose the fee. But the American Chemistry Council decided to put up a fight (and more than $1 million) to get the measure first put on the ballot for a public vote, and then to make sure that vote was “No.”

Given the choice between doing the right thing and the easy thing, the people of Seattle chose the easy thing. They chose to make it easier for themselves to forget their reusable bags in the car or at home, because who cares? The bags at the grocery store are free. Maybe next time.

If the people are unwilling to give themselves the incentives to change, how will anything get done? It’s clear that people aren’t simply making the right choices on their own. If that were the case, Seattle wouldn’t have needed a fee in the first place.

But perhaps that’s a bit too hopeless (and drastic) of a viewpoint. Despite the outcome, perhaps some good was done simply by getting the information out there and making people at least consider the consequences of their actions. Perhaps this vote won’t mandate change, but a few more citizens will voluntarily take up the reusable bags now than would have otherwise.

Even if the fee had been enacted, it’s not as though that would make the kind of change we need. Plastic bags are, on the whole, a tiny piece of the pollution problem.

On the other hand, it’s a tiny piece that is easily accessible. Everybody knows about grocery store bags, and it’s easy to see that they are wasteful. If we could get everybody to make just one change, then the next would be easier.

But that’s not how this country works. We were founded on principles of freedom, including the freedom to be wrong.

So how do we change people’s behaviors?

Not one behavior at a time, but one person at a time.

It’s good that people love the country in which they live. In America, nationalism has always been fundamental. And for good reason. This country was founded on strong democratic principles, revolutionary for their time. Even in its infancy, there was something unquestionable about people in America believing that they lived in the greatest country in the world. It was an idea only reinforced by America’s massive influence in WWII. And then the Space Race. We are a Superpower.

America has a long history of seeing itself as the best. So it’s only natural that its citizens make that claim somewhat without thought. But accepting something without examination is dangerous. So let me take a second to ask…

Is America the greatest nation in the world? How do we judge?

Unfortunately, there is plenty of evidence that suggests that we, the people of America, are not the best. We are not the smartest (That’s South Korea). We are not the healthiest (Iceland). We do not live the longest (Canada). For all our boasting, we’re not even the happiest (Denmark). Heck, we don’t even crack the top ten in the list of most democratic countries (Sweden’s #1). We pay more for most things (except those that are government-subsidized). We’re not the greenest either.

If you have questions about where I got this information from, that’s good. Do some research to satisfy yourself about the statistics. Don’t accept it without examination.

I often hear that America is the ‘richest’ country. But I’m not rich. Are you rich? I would imagine that citizens of the richest country in the world never have to worry about money. But we’re all in debt. And can we really consider ourselves to be rich when everything we buy and all the money our government spends both come from China?

There are people going to well-reported ‘town hall’ meetings and screaming at their representatives about the terrible danger posed by the government trying to give its people health care reform. They cower in terror from the slightest whiff of socialism (even though the police, fire and public school systems have been socialized for years).

Is this how civilized debate works in the world’s greatest country? What are we really trying to protect?

Claims that America is the best without any evidence to back it up isn’t nationalism, it’s delusion. What if America wasn’t the best? Would that let us be more objective about our problems? Would that give us more freedom to accept that when we try to fix things, there’s always a chance it might not work?

I grew up in New York, watching the Knicks with my dad. The Knicks haven’t won an NBA Championship since 1972. Sometimes, the team is great, sometimes (the last decade or so) the team isn’t so great. But that’s just how it goes. At the end of the day, I root for them not because they’re the best (they’re not), but because the Knicks are my team.

America’s pretty great. But it’s not the best, and that’s okay. Not being the best gives us not only something to strive for, it also means there are other countries that we can learn from. It takes strength to be humble.

In my first article on this site, I wrote about the confusion landfills have always caused in me. Today I’d like to write about another source of confusion – graveyards.

Graveyards have always seemed to me like an incredible waste of space. Acres of land kept practically barren in an eternal tribute to death. Bodies preserved unnaturally using chemicals, buried in expensive, pointlessly comfortable boxes. We are ‘returned to the Earth’ in the most contradictory way imaginable.

The only other option seemed to be cremation. Have your body burned to ashes, to be stored forever in an urn or spread somewhere.

It is an interesting indication of this mentality humanity seems to hold about everything having a finite period of usefulness, and of our not really knowing what to do with anything once that use has been fulfilled. When we’ve eaten our fast food, we throw away the wrapper. When our TV stops working, we toss it and get a new one. We always need new clothes or shoes, because we’ve been taught that these things are less a practical means of keeping ourselves warm or protected, and more about expressing how we feel at any given moment.

Getting rid of these objects is easy. We set them out at the curb and someone comes to take them away to t he landfill. We need never consider them again.

We seem to be following the same impulse when we die. Get rid of the ‘trash.’ But because this waste used to be a person, it’s not so simple. We must be honored. So we each get our own mini-landfill.

But just like with regular landfills, this tradition is ultimately unsustainable. This practice of coddling our dead is, in more ways than one, hurting us.

Besides the space issue, there is another practical concern. A large number of people die every year because of a lack of donated organs. Our strange obsession with preserving ourselves after we die is now literally costing people their lives.

But as it is with many of the facets of the Green Revolution, we are starting to reexamine death. We are starting to come around. Already, many of us have marked on our driver’s licenses that we wish for our organs to be donated after we’ve died, so that our passing may give life to someone else who needs it.

Others are going even further. The Centre for Natural Burial is an organization promoting a way of reintroducing our lifeless bodies back into the Earth’s cycle, wherein the body is prepared for burial without using chemicals and buried in a way that encourages decomposition. A grave may be marked with a tree or a shrub that does not intrude on the natural landscape.

Or, for the green extreme, you can have yourself composted. It’s not quite legal yet, but in some parts of the world it may be catching on. Think of it. Your body will be used to fertilize and grow the food for the next generation.

Doesn’t that sound more interesting that spending eternity in a box?

Up until about a week ago, my kitchen was infested with fruit flies. They pop up every summer, seemingly from out of nowhere, makes annoyances of themselves and, eventually, go away. Usually I try not to pay them any mind. I let them go about their business and they let me go about mine. But my kitchen was apparently a bit too fruitful for the flies, and their numbers started to grow beyond annoying into simply gross.

So I took a day, rolled up my sleeves and cleaned the kitchen thoroughly. Then I used the hose attachment on my vacuum to commit a little fruit fly genocide.

And silly though it may sound, I felt a little bad. I understand that they’re not intelligent creatures and that they don’t live long lives anyway, but I still try to hold as much as I can to the principle that living things generally have the right to go on living.

In my mind I began musing on the subject of niches. When we as humans started to become ‘civilized,’ living in houses with walls and roofs, we didn’t really reserve a place for the rest of nature’s creatures. Our homes are for us, and nothing else. And we have accepted this as natural, despite the fact that our dwellings take up significantly more space than we do as individuals.

Obviously we do not wish for the whole world to be standardized in this way. Even in our own neighborhoods we value parks and green spaces. National wildlife reserves protect species that might otherwise be endangered. But we have become addicted to control, drawing very thick lines between what parts of nature we are prepared to allow and which ones we are not. Hence pesticides and weed killers and immaculate lawns, to say nothing of the spaces inside our homes. Hard, flat surfaces and straight lines everywhere, so very unlike nature. They are designed for the comfort of humans, to the detriment of everything else. To those creatures that would dare to try and make themselves at home in our space we have given the name pests.

Of course, recently we have begun to see the benefits of the natural system. Over the centuries, the world has developed processes that keep things balanced. We are not yet so mature.

But we are starting to learn. We can now replace sewage systems with living, breathing mini-ecosystems that use our waste as food. We can build natural pools that utilize the inherent balances in nature, instead of harsh chemicals, to keep them clean and beautiful.

By slowly learning to reintegrate nature with our cold, selfish society, we not only benefit ourselves by cutting out those dangerous materials we used to keep the rest of the world at bay, we allow the rest of nature to do what it does best – allow every creature to perform its function to everyone’s benefit.

That what Gerod Rody’s gay/green organization, OUT for Sustainability, named its Earth Day events, when it built a garden and did some habitat restoration in Seattle, where the organization is located.

Gerod Rody was looking for a way to combine what he sees as the two defining facets of his life; trying to maintain an environmentally-aware, sustainable existence, and being gay. He did some research trying to find a group that filled that niche and when he couldn’t find one, he started one.

Judging by the website, the group’s focus tends more towards being green. It simply advertises itself to the LGBTQ community as a way of getting people to pay attention and giving them a reason to come out and join the group. It’s great if you can change the world, but if you can change the world while finding a date, even better!

Similarly, there’s been press over the past few months about different churches beginning to preach the benefits of a green lifestyle. They argue that God gave the Earth to humans so we could watch over it, not so we could exploit it into oblivion. There’s a Bill Moyer’s PBS Special called ‘Is God Green?’ that examines the subject.

In a previous article, I wrote about another PBS show, Building Green, which chronicled one man’s journey to build the most environmentally-friendly house he can. The website for that show, buildinggreentv.com, has grown into a community of members sharing information about sustainable building practices.

The point is that there are a number of ways to approach bringing the Green Revolution to your community. Part one is, naturally, finding out what ‘your’ community is. Outside of work, where do you spend the majority of your time?

If we each do our part to raise the consciousness of those around us, pretty soon all of us will be thinking a little more about these issues. Then they might not seem so intimidating to those unfamiliar with what the Green Revolution means. It might also help us convince those in power that we, their constituents, are ready to see them make the laws that lead to real change.

And if you can do all that while finding a date, even better.

It was the culmination of a long fought battle between the United States and Russia, answering the question “who would get there first?”

I have spent parts of the day listening to the radio commemorating the historic event.  I will be the first to admit that if this happened a year ago, I would not have given the coverage the time nor day.  Like many Americans, this day would hold absolutely no significance.

I am completely unqualified to go into details, but I have had the privilege of conversations, with someone who knows, that has led me to understand the magnanimous feat it was to get to the moon.  This truly was no small thing.  Just to give you a starting point, we went to the moon using a slide rule as a calculator.  The margin for error was more probable than it would be today using one of our mega-computers.  But we did it!

Sadly, as is with many things for America, that is where the story ends.

During the aforementioned conversation, there was also a discussion of how disheartening it was that we have so much knowledge and ability, but instead of using it to do things to advance the human species, we use it to engineer mini-malls and super highways.  For all of the potential that landing on the moon could have advanced us, we abandoned it like it were a lost cause.

What I realized today, though, is that this is the American psychology.  The only reason we even entered the space race was because we were in competition with Russia during the Cold War.  I contend that is why we Americans do anything; to win.  The question is to what end are we winning?  Is it winning if what we win at today, is what kills us tomorrow?

We have advanced technology only in that it serves us to go to war and “win” over another culture.  We have gotten the “next, better, best” in our cell phones, cars, homes, and clothing, only for the purpose of being the winner between ourselves and our next door neighbor.  We have used our skills to create chemicals that are injected to prevent wrinkles or make bigger breasts, in this perverse attempt at being alluring to the opposite sex.  We have created an agriculture system where we have dominated the planet so much, we are conquering it and killing it off.

Again, I am totally bastardizing this, but Carl Sagan once stated that in order for a civilization to participate in interstellar space travel (travel between stars), it would have to evolve beyond war and become globally peaceful.  Therefore, if we were visited by aliens, it would be safe to assume that they were more advanced then us by the sheer nature that they would have to be non-violent having evolved to a level where they can travel between stars.

I have come to fully understand what he meant by this.  I think, he has been proven correct.  Because of our insatiable need to compete and win, we abandoned the possibility that we could have human travel beyond the Moon.  That, to me, is sad.

However, in all of this, I had a thought that might be a glimmer of hope.  Our need for competition is what might be killing us, when you apply it to climate change; the need for stuff in order to outshine a friend, a neighbor, or even a country.  But what if we use competition to save us?

Who is the first to reduce their CO2 emissions for 100ppm?  Who is the first to come up with a sustainable way to get its citizens water?  Imagine the first country to be “off the grid”?  What if we made saving the planet a race to see who can get us all to the finish line first?

According to economists, one ingredient crucial to a stable, capitalistic society is a strong set of property laws.  If consumers don’t feel confident that they own what they buy, they won’t bother buying at all.

This was somewhat interestingly demonstrated recently when Amazon started messing with its customers’ Kindle e-book readers without their knowledge or permission.  When a publisher decided to pull a couple of books off the virtual shelves (George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, appropriately enough), Amazon deleted the books even from customers who had already bought them, refundin g the money that had been paid.

While this is clearly an example of a corporation overstepping its bounds, it does provide a somewhat stumbling segue into how the Green Revolution must make us re-evaluate the concept of what we ‘own.’  Just because we’re paying for the water that comes out of our kitchen faucet, that doesn’t make it okay to leave the faucet on all night, regardless of whether or not we can afford it.  We are, at best, renting or borrowing much from the Earth, and we will have to reorient our thinking to reflect that.

This goes double for large corporations, who seem to be in the habit of assuming they own pretty much everything except the waste that they dump into your backyard.  That’s your problem.

But even that may be changing.  Wal-Mart, that paragon of consumerism, has been making small but significant strides towards becoming a more responsible company, at least insofar as its carbon footprint is concerned.  It looks like it is getting ready to take a much bigger stride.  Starting soon, products on Wal-Mart’s shelves will begin appearing with ‘sustainability scores,’ which will take into account all parts of a product’s manufacturing, transportation, etc.  This will give customers more information on which to base their shopping decisions.  It’s a great, bold move, and we can only hope other retailers follow Wal-Mart’s lead.

See?  Corporate power can be used for good.

Today I have a couple of humble suggestions for relatively simple ways to make a couple of changes we might all like to see.

My first suggestion relates to guns.  There seems to be an ever-raging debate between those who believe people have an inalienable right to own guns and those who feel that guns are made only to kill and should therefore be taken out of people’s hands.  While it may be true that people kill people, they often use guns to do it.  And while we can’t get rid of the people, we can in theory get rid of the guns.

But there are plenty of enthusiasts out there who are very respectful of their guns, who just want to use them to hunt or, in an emergency, for self defense.  They practice strict gun safety and would never consider using their weapons for any illegal actions.

There may be no easy way to reconcile the two camps.  As long as the NRA has some lobbying power and the Constitution is interpreted as it has been for decades, people who want guns will be able to buy and keep them.  But many guns find their way into the hands of criminals.  Accidents kill children and gang violence affects innocent bystanders.

While the debate may not be new, perhaps some new technology can help ease the tension.  These days GPS chips are finding their way into many different forms of consumer electroni cs.  Mobile phones, cars and even laptops are being fitted with the location devices.  Why don’t we use this same technology in something a little more old school?

Putting GPS chips in guns would mean that those who simply wish to own their guns in peace could do so, because at any time it could be confirmed that those guns were where they are supposed to be.  But those who use guns to commit crimes would find that they are suddenly unable to hide.  The gun might be thrown away, but it couldn’t disappear.

I imagine there would still be an uproar from those who wish not only to own their guns, but to own them in secret, stockpiling and getting concealed weapons permits.  But they’ll have a hard time garnering sympathy when this change could have a major impact on gun use in violent crimes.

So anyway, that’s one suggestion.

The other one is a little more dear to the Green Revolution.  It relates to oil.  Besides its harmful environmental effects, there is also the oft-referenced political problem associated with our dependence on foreign oil.  Importing so much oil requires us to do business with dangerous regimes and governments that don’t much care for us.

But we love our oil.  We love it so much we don’t care who we get it from.  Right?  Perhaps that’s not fair.  Perhaps the true issue is that we don’t think about it much.  We don’t have to.  It’s not as though w e as consumers are ever given the choice between buying gasoline made from foreign or domestic sources.

What if that were not the case?  What if gas stations had to label their sources?

When you walk into a Target or a Wal-Mart and pick up a product, almost always there will be a label indicating from whence the product came.  For many products, that label says, ‘Made In China.’

What if, when you pulled up to a gas station, there was a big label on the pump that said, ‘Made In Iran?’  Would you feel so comfortable shelling out your money if you knew where it was going?

I imagine that there has already been a debate about this, that it took place a long time ago and the powerful oil lobby was able to quash the issue.  But perhaps the time is right, now that we have admitted more than once that we are addicted to oil.  Maybe now we are ready to start giving people reasons to acknowledge the consequences of paying for foreign oil, when we could be using plug-in hybrids, natural gas, or maybe even plain old domestic oil.

Just something to think about.  Enjoy your day.