Strange bedfellows

Love it.

Earth Hour

Tonight.

Shrinkage, for sure

Well, I didn't go quite this far.

Glacial Recession V

I'm starting to channel the Friday the 13th franchise with my serial glaciering, but this one's the last.

The final day we hiked a bit along the Highline Trail, looking at excellent examples of the U-shaped valleys carved by glaciation and generally just winding down from the day before. Jeff will likely offer the seminar again next summer, and I'll probably go again, as he plans to hike to other glaciers in the park next time.

The entire seminar was just great. I learned a great deal, not just about glaciation and the effects of climate change on the park, but about geology in general. Mr. T was a geologist before he became a bidnessman, but I had always glazed over during discussions of faults and synclines and formations, until I was standing in front of the real thing with someone explaining it to me. I can be a stickler for technicalities, particularly when dealing with terminology (imagine that!), and that was tripping me up a bit. Or rather, I tended to approach geological terminology with an overly literal mindset.

But really, I have to plug the Glacier Institute now. I mentioned to Jeff during class that I thought there was a good chance I'd become an Institute junkie. Just look at all the classes and seminars they offer. I could spend ten months just taking class after class, and I'd never get bored. The neat thing is that many classes allow kids as young as six to attend. So I think The Kid and I might take some seminars together in the coming years.

Finally, there are a slew of crevasse photos in my photostream here. (There are a few mountain goat shots in there, but the bulk of it is the Grinnell Glacier.) Perhaps you'll be able to get a sense from those images how unnerving it is to be hiking around them.

And sometimes, unnerving is good.

Glacial Recession, Part IV

A few months ago I wrote this post but never published it, as it just seemed entirely too navel-gazish:

I think it may be time for new boots. I've had these for almost nine years. I bought them at a small outdoor store in Greensboro, North Carolina just before my first backpacking trip, on the Long Trail in Vermont. I was in my last year of school, and I didn't have the money for them until two days before I left. There was no time for a breaking-in period, but the boots never left a single mark or blister.

These boots have squelched through the mid-summer mud in the Adirondacks. They've taken me on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia and Georgia, along Lake Superior and the rest of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, atop ridges in the Olympic range and to the edge of cold lakes at the base of Mt. Rainier. Last summer they helped me peel off a section of the Pacific Crest Trail in Oregon.

These boots groaned under my pregnant weight while I was photographing prairie dogs and antelopes in the Badlands in South Dakota. They've hugged my feet while I hiked hesitantly around blind corners in Glacier National Park yelling "hey bear!"

They've been a part of most of the deeply gratifying moments I've had in the last ten years that didn't involve parenting -- and some that did. Not to be too maudlin, but giving them up feels too much like the end of an era I'm not ready to close out yet.

Maybe they'll make it another year.

Turns out they didn't.

We hiked about twenty miles over the three days of the seminar, or perhaps a hair less. The second day's hike to Grinnell Glacier constituted the bulk of the hiking, at 12 miles. It was hot, and I worked hard. The first day we hiked to the Hidden Lake Overlook off Logan Pass. On the way back, I felt a sort of odd flapping near my toes. The sole had separated from the boot. It was annoying, but I bought some rubber cement that night and applied it liberally to the detached sole. Then, for good measure, I wrapped the hell out of the boots with copious quantities of duct tape that Jeff had obtained from one of his innumerable park friends.

So we got up to the glacier on the second day, and I saw this standing between me and my glacial experience:


(This person, as you have no doubt astutely surmised, is not me.)

Welp, there was no way I was going through that with my compromised boots. Yeah, 33 degree water and sharp rocks -- just the thing to undo the duct tape and glue. Fortunately, though, I'd brought these along:



But let me tell you something. Until you've had to painstakingly navigate a slippery rock bridge in water just above the freezing point, on feet that are all but completely bare -- well, then you can't possibly understand why I was such a big whiny baby about it. The moment I stepped in, I could literally feel the warmth draining from my feet. (Yes, there was actually a draining feeling.) There were three of these bridges to cross, and I did each one coming and going. By the time I was finished each time, it felt like a thousand needles were pricking my feet.

It hurt. Waaaaah.

Once the pins and needles subsided, it took me about ten minutes to get the feeling back in my feet. Anyone who was completely immersed in that water would die quickly.

Anyhoo, it did the trick. I kept my boots dry, and they didn't blow out completely till there were only three miles left on the hike down. The sharp rocks of the glaciated landscape made perfect striations on the duct tape, and the soles completely detached. But I donned my sandals again, which have a lovely rugged tread on the soles, and continued on.

It was an odd day of temperature extremes, but delightful all the same.


Part V to come -- Wherein I finally shut my trap about this trip, put in a plug for the Glacier Institute, and post miscellaneous pictures.

Glacial Recession -- Part III

The thermometer back at the campground says 95 degrees, but the temperature near the edge of the glacier is at least twenty degrees cooler. In front of me is a massive, grinding river of ice streaked with deep crevasses and powerful enough to chew up mountains.

I’m a little apprehensive about stepping onto this beast, but our workshop instructor, Jeff, is exuberant. He’s already testing the strength of the glacier with his ice axe, listening for hollow, weak ice that won’t support our weight. “Stay to the left of that crevasse,” he advises as he builds a cairn, or pile of rocks, to mark our way. “Oh, and avoid that gray ice over there,” he adds as he moves ahead. Uh, okay. I follow his steps exactly.

Jeff leads us a short way onto the glacier. It’s not safe to go any farther, he says, as the tips of the crevasses extend only a few feet beyond where we’re standing. I look down. The ice beneath my feet seems almost iridescent. Rocks of varying sizes are liberally strewn on and embedded in the ice, accounting for its slightly dirty appearance from afar.

I stay rooted to my spot. Even with the cairns, I’d have an incredibly difficult time finding my way back across the ice safely. Two or three years ago, a day hiker ventured alone onto the glacier while his friends waited, and fell 35 feet into a crevasse. After much grueling work, the Park Service managed to extricate him from the crevasse, but he died shortly afterward.

Jeff talks about glacial formations and characteristics. He points out a moulin, which is a vertical shaft that runs down into the glacier. He reminds us of the discussion in An Inconvenient Truth about lakes forming beneath glaciers, and tells us that moulins like this facilitate the flow of water beneath the ice sheet.

This place is not quiet; different noises punctuate Jeff’s speech. You can hear the loud rush of water somewhere below, and once or twice a thunderous sound interrupted our discussion. Cracking ice.

Even though this glacier is a fraction of the size it was 150 years ago, it still seems just massive. I try to imagine this entire cirque covered in glacial ice, but it seems incomprehensible. But later on, when Jeff shows us how much of the glacier has disappeared just since last summer, the ice appears a good deal smaller.

My son may be lucky enough to see the park’s glaciers before they disappear entirely, but it’s unlikely his children will. The drop dead date for these glaciers is 2030; after that, like the snows of Kilimanjaro, they will be gone.


Part IV, coming soon: Wherein a tragic hiking boot blowout requires me to place my feet, for extended periods of time, into water that only a short time before had been ice.

Glacial Recession -- Part II

Now that I’ve offered an ominous opener, let me throw out this confusing fact: The glaciers in northwest Montana began to recede in the 1850’s. I know that all of you – astute observers of human history that you are -- will recognize that decade as preceding significant human-generated carbon emissions.

So what gives? This was the question the instructor, Jeff, posed during his introductory slide show. Is the recession of the park’s glaciers caused by humans or is it merely the result of a naturally occurring warming period?

It’s both, of course; the question poses a false dichotomy. Geologic history is peppered with alternating periods of glacial advance and retreat, and the earth had already entered a period of glacial retreat when we started energetically pumping carbon into the atmosphere. So while human activities may not have caused the glaciers to begin melting initially, it’s a safe bet that those activities have dramatically increased the rate, in recent times, at which the glaciers are melting.

Take a look at the picture below.



Where Jeff is standing marks the point to which the glacier extended just last year, and it will recede even further yet this year. And this is on the side of the glacier and not the “toe” – in laymen’s terms, the tip – of the glacier, where melting occurs most rapidly.

It’s also worth noting that this is the kind of thing you hear the wishful thinkers say all the time: “But the glaciers started melting long before the petroleum era, so it can’t be global warming! We’re just in a naturally occurring warming period!” The foundational facts are correct, to be sure -- the glaciers did begin to recede awhile ago, and we are in a natural warming period (or, as I understand it, the end of a much cooler period, which may not be exactly the same thing.) It’s the conclusion they reach that’s faulty. The era of human-generated carbon is coinciding with that period and elevating the planet’s temperature to the point of grim consequences.



Part III: Wherein I attempt to avoid becoming a permanent part of the glacier, as glacial recession, though occurring rapidly, will not happen quickly enough to free me from a crevasse should I be so unlucky as to fall into one.

Glacial Recession, Part I

This is Upper Grinnell Lake in Glacier National Park.

As late as 1969, there was no Upper Grinnell Lake. That's because what is now the lake used to be part of the Grinnell Glacier.

The lake gets bigger every year.

Fear fatigue, the maternal anxiety level and the climate crisis

My son is four years and eight or so months old. He's a platinum blonde blur, dashing here and there to see this or that, and always dragging the dog along with him. He has my strong, stubborn will and his dad's sense of action. He has a talent for drawing and painting that took me completely by surprise, and a facility with language that didn't.

Although really, he's been surprising me all along, starting with the discovery of his existence in the first place. As I've stumbled along in the last five years, screwing up regularly alongside getting a few things right, one thing has become clear: the result of attaching so fiercely to another human being has come to animate everything I do. He is the axis on which so much of me turns. He has strengthened parts of my worldview, and totally retrenched others.

I've never been remotely comfortable with vulnerability, and the realization that a significant part of my emotional fate was in hands other than my own introduced me to an anxiety that never completely leaves. It's always there, lurking just close enough to the surface that I must constantly ask myself whether any action or inaction is an attempt to protect myself, at his expense, from the possibility of pain. (And sometimes, I'm pretty sure I either forget to ask the question or I don't answer it honestly.) I wrote a little bit about that here.

This isn't all bad, of course. While certain things terrify me more now, this probably makes me a better citizen. Before him, my environmental concerns were mostly about wilderness and open space -- the issues that bore directly on me and my next backpacking trip.* Now they revolve more intensely around climate change, which will directly affect his future and thus looms large in my thoughts. This is why I write about the issue, attend rallies, participate in an environmental reading group, and badger friends and family to watch An Inconvenient Truth.

But you know, sometimes I just need to get the hell away from that godawful drumbeat of doom. And yet sometimes it seems there's no end to it. We have ten years till we're irrevocably screwed. Meanwhile, the United States has rejected the overarching emissions goals of the European Union, saying that we prefer to focus on "specific sectors." Mmm-hmm. Then there's the University of Alaska economist who estimates that global warming damage could cost Alaska up to ten billion dollars over the next few decades.

And on and on and on.

It's a perilous line to walk, between sticking your fingers in your ears and saying "la la la la la!" and knowing what the score is and just needing an occasional break from the worry. But for the near future, here's my line: If we don't change dramatically in the next ten or so years, the next generation is going to live in a very different world, and it'll probably be pretty grim. Period. But for awhile, I'm going to try and talk about the good news instead of offering up a relentless parade of horrors about which Antarctic ice shelf cracked up and which species is on the verge of extinction. My mental health requires it just now.

But, uh, if you haven't seen it, you really should watch An Inconvenient Truth.





*One non-commenting reader of this blog may remember a discussion over burritos one day, six or seven years ago, in which I casually dismissed the issue of fuel economy. I hope she's kind enough not to abuse me for such a silly position -- she has been so far.

Climate activism

Yesterday morning we participated in one of the actions sponsored by Step it Up 2007. We all met up at a church here in town, and marched to the Willamette River, where Focus the Nation was doing a polar bear plunge (to call attention to the plight of both polar bears and the Willamette River.) We all carried signs that read "Step it Up Congress! Cut carbon 80% by 2050." We got many supportive horn honks on our march, and only one thumbs-down. (Can you believe someone actually gave us a thumbs down? Yeah, I know, me too.)

There was a good crowd when we reached the park above the river.





Time for the plunge. Little chilly there?



Here goes:







Getting the hell out:



I didn't plunge, in part because I was kind of confused who was sponsoring what, and I signed up late. I probably would have if I'd had more notice, and time to psych myself up.

But it was a good day anyway, and it was Trailhead Kid's first real activist event. I remember when I was six years old, I had decided that Jimmy Carter was my candidate. So my dad took me and my brother down to a park in Indianapolis where he was speaking. He lifted me onto his shoulders and I hoisted my "Jimmy Carter for President" sign into the air. So I'm merely continuing a family tradition of early activism.

Cryptic snippet of the day: TerraPass edition

up on the airplane nearer my god to thee i start making a deal inspired by gravity if i did wrong i won't do it again i can be sweet and good and nice and if i had enemies they're friends i hold onto my life with the grip of a vice...

--Indigo Girls, Airplane

I'm leaving Tuesday morning for a trip back to the flatlands to attend to work, see family and friends, and eat at favorite restaurants. I may do a bit of hiking, which will be nice because very few people do much of that in March back there.

In case you're wondering, I purchased carbon offsets this morning for 9,500 pounds of carbon dioxide from TerraPass. (The offset I purchased covered 7,500 lbs., but I got an extra 2,000 lbs. for foregoing the cute little luggage tag.) The flight back east releases a little less than 3,000 lbs. for both me and my son. So I have a little leeway there.

(I might do a post on carbon offsets soon, but I can't imagine it would be any better than the one at Real Climate that I discussed in this post.)

Facts? We don't need no stinkin' facts

Good grief, but this is annoying. Apparently the new fad is to excoriate Al Gore for how much power his Nashville residence uses. So, you see, we should not listen to anything Gore says because he's a hypocrite. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!!

Except, not. Think Progress summarizes the Vice President's response:

Gore’s family has taken numerous steps to reduce the carbon footprint of their private residence, including signing up for 100 percent green power through Green Power Switch, installing solar panels, and using compact fluorescent bulbs and other energy saving technology.

Having thus reduced his footprint, Gore also purchases carbon offsets to reduce that footprint to zero. Here is my favorite explanation of the concept of carbon offsets, from Real Climate. In relevant part:

The idea behind carbon offsets is built upon the foundation of carbon emissions trading established by the Kyoto Protocol, a scheme called cap and trade. Carbon emissions for industries are capped at some level by regulatory permits to emit CO₂. If a company is able to cut its emissions below that level, it can sell its emission permits to another company. The cuts in emissions are thereby steered, by the invisible hand of the market, to the cheapest and most efficient means. Cap-and-trade has worked well for reduction of sulfur emissions in the U.S., that are responsible for acid rain. CO₂ emission is intrinsically even better suited for cap-and-trade, because it is a truly global pollutant, so it matters not where the CO₂ is emitted.

The carbon emissions market requires a certification process to verify any reduction in carbon emissions. Carbonfund.org and the other similar operations take donations from people like me and use the money to pay for renewable energy sources like solar cells or wind farms, that would not have been built otherwise. For these efforts, they receive credits for reduction in carbon emissions that are certified as valid, and therefore eligible for trade in the emissions market. Instead of trading that emission credit, carbonfund.org “retires” it, so that it isn’t used to balance higher carbon emission from another source. The certification process from the emissions market has an unintended benefit of providing an independent way to verify the carbon impact from sending money to organizations like carbonfund.org. It's a nifty idea.

I can think of little else that better exemplifies the intellectual bankruptcy of this sort of gotcha! bullshittery than this manufactured controversy. It could not be clearer that these howler monkeys have made no effort to understand carbon offsets.

And the traditional media is falling for it, of course. Jake Tapper's article covers three pages online, buries Gore's response several paragraphs in and contains no explanation of carbon offsets and little acknowledgment that Gore's actual carbon footprint is zero.

And I don't expect much from Fox News, but this is Grade A idiocy:

Al Gore's posh home in the Nashville suburbs might be "carbon neutral," but it still uses a lot of power.

Yeah. In other words, Al Gore's household contributes less to global warming than any one of his detractors, but so what?

Why let the facts get in the way of a good smear?

Not too shabby

For his work bringing attention to the climate crisis, Al Gore has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. It's not a secret that I think global warming is the most critical issue the world faces, and I don't think I've concealed my admiration for Mr. Gore. I'm delighted with this nomination.

And I enthusiastically concur with this sentiment from Shakespeare's Sister:

Cool. And now think about how he was supposed to be our president and try not to collapse into a wailing heap with a great gnashing of teeth and dramatic fist-clenching.

I grieve that, deeply. But I haven't given up yet.

That's a topic for a whole other post, of course.

Green is the new black

Via Redneck Mother, I find a fascinating little nugget: Wal-Mart, not an entity ordinarily associated with environmental or social progress, has instituted a push to get compact flourescent bulbs to 100 million homes (by selling them, of course, at Wal-Mart.)

“The environment,” [Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee] Scott said, “is begging for the Wal-Mart business model.”

Ahem. Not exactly. The truth is closer to my long-held suspicion about the new business paradigm of the 21st century: That the Wal-Mart business model (and others) is begging for the environment.

My dirty little secret is that I know more than a little about Wal-Mart's business and marketing tactics, as someone very close to me has endured the horrors of working for a Wal-Mart vendor. Survival in the hostile environment of marketing generally requires that one constantly be tiptoeing along one cutting edge or another. One of those edges is green, and is only going to get greener with every passing day. It may not be greening as quickly as we like, or, arguably, as quickly as we need, but it's greening all the same.

I was reading a blog the other day, and happened upon one of those concise knots of truth you sometimes find in an otherwise unremarkable comment section. (I'm sorry to say I can't remember at which blog I found it.) The commenter was addressing the recent discovery that the ginormous, 41-square mile Ayles ice-shelf had unceremoniously plopped into the ocean on the morning of August 13, 2005 (my eleventh wedding anniversary, incidentally.) Said ice shelf, come the spring thaw, will likely be menacing the shipping lanes in the Arctic Ocean, which involves, for fans of irony, significant petroleum traffic.

The really serious push against global warming, observed the astute commenter, would not arrive until Big Money starts to feel the heat. Wal-Mart's new love affair with the compact flourescent light bulb illustrates the related principle that significant progress will also not be achieved until our corporatocracy realizes there is Big Money to made from an environmental business paradigm.* Wal-Mart has ingeniously discovered a niche that matches its business model.

I'm deeply alarmed by our increasingly plutocratic form of governance in this country and the concomitant influence of corporations over every aspect of our lives. But I'm not unsympathetic to Paul Hawken's view that business is uniquely positioned to effect the societal transformation required to address the climate and other environmental crises. I suspect this would be even more true in a world in which corporations were not mollycoddled with government handouts of every stripe, and protected from the true cost of their practices.

But it's hard not to perk up at this latest development, especially because it's happened in such an inhospitable environment, and is fueled by increasing awareness among the general public. After all, if Wal-Mart didn't think it could sell those bulbs, it wouldn't be expending the resources to try.




*Caveat: I'm not foolish enough to think that Big Money won't continue degrading the environment with one hand while it pursues this new niche with another.

An Truthful house party

Saturday night Mr. T and I had twelve people over to our house to view An Inconvenient Truth. There were almost 2,000 of these house parties all over the country tonight. Our parties on the West Coast began with a conference call with Mr. Gore, and proceeded to a viewing of the film.

I have a post percolating about the dynamics of individual action in the face of seemingly overwhelming obstacles, but that will probably get written in front of the fireplace in Montana over the Christmas holiday. But for now, let me assure you that there are concrete actions you can take, right now, to alleviate this problem.

First, if you haven't already, watch An Inconvenient Truth. Pop over to the video store and grab a copy, come home, put some popcorn on, and kick your feet up. Despite Mr. Gore's (unmerited, in my opinion) reputation for woodenness, this is an interesting film. The directors weave a good bit of biographical detail into the global warming narrative, to good effect.

Second -- and you can do this right now -- go here and sign a postcard that Mr. Gore will personally deliver it to Congress next year. It bears repeating that Congresscritters won't get on this issue until they start hearing from their constituents. Add your name now.

Third, peruse the list of links to the right under the caption "Era of Consequences." There is a wealth of information there. Global Warming: Early Warning Signs has a map plotted with clickable spots all over the globe that represent localized effects of global warming. It's fascinating, but sobering. Slate's Green Challenge is an eight-week plan to reduce your carbon footprint. There's something unique at each site, and I encourage you to visit them all.

Wondering what real, live climate scientists thought of An Inconvenient Truth? Go here for a review by one. From the same site, read this excellent discussion of carbon offset programs.

Finally, let me know if I'm missing any links. I'm still collecting links and information about global warming, and if you have one I'm missing, drop me a line or a comment and let me know.

Is individual action enough? Absolutely not. But it's absolutely necessary to get anything done beyond that. So I cannot stress enough the importance of these small yet concrete steps to get a handle on this issue.

O Fir tree dark

Back in the early part of November, the family and I were exploring in the Cascades, and we came upon a Christmas tree farm. That happens a lot. Oregon is the largest Christmas tree producing state in the union, along with North Carolina, where I also used to live. But as we approached the neat lines of trees, we saw a helicopter zinging back and forth over the grove. It had a magnet attached, and would pick up a tree, zip back to a large truck, drop it, and repeat the process. Harvest time! It was riveting in its way. I shot a few frames, and the husband, kid and I stood gazing at it for a long while. Mr. T even shot some video, with permission of the folks onsite:



I doubt many people pause to consider Christmas tree production as a form of agriculture. Likely, even fewer consider the environmental impacts of our societal fixation with parking cultivated evergreens in our houses and adorning them with lights and ornaments (which were probably manufactured in China and shipped here on container ships). I'm quite fond of Christmas trees myself. And Americans are not about to give up those trees anytime soon. But what are the impacts, and what are the alternatives?

Christmas tree farming isn’t totally devoid of environmental benefits. Like any other trees, they’re carbon sinks. But – you knew that was coming – an Ohio State University study found that pine plantations are not as effective at retaining carbon as hardwood or natural pine forests. That same study estimated that an area the size of Los Angeles is converted to pine plantations each year. So, replacing hardwoods and natural pine with pine plantations is a net negative, carbonwise.

And that’s not all.

Christmas trees farms also rely significantly on pesticides. (Though it appears there is some debate about how much.) There are, naturally, human and environmental costs to this. Aside from the degree to which properly applied pesticides endanger environmental and public health, which also appears to be a matter of debate*, it’s important to note that not all pesticides are applied properly.

This article observes that many (often Spanish-speaking) farmworkers often receive little training in pesticide use. What’s more, the instructions on the containers are written in English, a language many don't understand. In addition, many of these seasonal farmworkers live very near the fields on which those pesticides have been sprayed, further ratcheting up their exposure.

And yet, while some Christmas tree growers are moving toward pesticide-free practices, they are still few and far between. That the organic Christmas tree market is still so small suggests to me that most folks buy organic to avoid ingesting harmful substances, and that concerns for putting pesticides into the environment and worker pesticide exposure are less a part of the collective consciousness.

You may have a hard time finding an organic tree. Even living in Oregon, I have yet to find an outlet for organic trees. Go here to determine if you can get one in your area.

2007 Update: There are quite a few folks googling their way onto this post. If you find a source for organic trees and/or greenery, would you kindly let us know in a comment on this post? Lots of people are looking, and it would be lovely if they could find something.

*The Agricultural Health Study, a long-term study of farm families and commercial pesticide applicators in Iowa and North Carolina, has found that farmers generally have a lower cancer risk than the general public, but:

“Other findings include the suggestion of an association between exposure to specific pesticides and higher risk of specific cancers. The suggested associations include: prostate cancer and methyl bromide, immune/blood cancers and alachlor, lung cancer and chlorpyrifos, and some evidence of increased breast cancer associated with exposure to several pesticides."

The future has arrived early

Global warming is already causing extinctions.

A new study from Camille Parmesan, a biologist at the University of Texas - Austin concludes that populations of frogs, butterflies, ocean corals, and polar birds have already gone extinct because of climate disruption. It's the species occupying narrow climate ranges such as the polar regions or mountaintops that are taking the first hits. Polar bears, ring seals, certain varieties of penguins and cloud forest frogs are "showing massive extinctions."

"What surprised me most," Parmesan says, "is that it happened so soon."

Don't give a damn about frogs? You should.

Bill Fraser, a wildlife ecologist with the Polar Oceans Research Group in Sheridan, Montana, observes:

"The planet has warmed and cooled in the past, but never have we seen the type of warming that is occurring now, accompanied by the presence of 6.5 billion people who depend on these ecosystems," he said.

"Whether we want to admit it or not, we are completely and totally dependent on them."

We need national leadership on this issue immediately. We won't get it until at least 2008, if then.