Holding Out in the Background - Can we Divorce from Fetishes tied with Crude Oil?

In isolation (momentary) someone says : am I the only person in this whole room/station/store, etc. who cares what's happening? though it seems of no consequence to care.

Yet awareness of the unstable climate that's challenging all our prospects can only be increasing. In the seasonal patterns, what are we about to start seeing? (Could the forecasts of climate catastrophe still end up mistaken?) What I've lately most noticed are the long autumns that linger into traditionally winter months, in particular 2011/2012, the winter that barely took hold at all. That January near Ely, Minnesota-- whose winters have the reputation of the frigid sub-polar kind with a higher and higher snowpack-- exhibited the merest bare ground with cold glitter on it as I worked in or out of the parked car, laying in the multi-toned canopy of spruce that would shelter my favorite bird of recent times, the strutting spruce cock, whose illustration is still in stages of finishing two years after I started it; the work awaits the reappearance of bare forest floor these weeks with our persistent fields of drifts this year. 

Yes, winter conditions fluctuate naturally from year to year. In April 2012 a visit to the Canadian shores of Lake Superior further evidenced the winter that had never been, with forest duff as dry as the lining of a scarecrow's pocket in a sun-withered corn patch, the ferns of the 2011 growing season standing brown like cornstalks under the firs and cedars. However Lake Superior itself oftener and oftener reveals boulders and rock ledges that used to stay covered in water; this is attributed to faster evaporation following from markedly shorter seasons of ice cover. But yes, last fall the water stood a bit higher.

The winter of 2012/2013 was closer to the old norms, with recurrent snows and a generous snow pack, sub-freezing weeks and snowfalls showing up even into May, so that teens and young adults exclaimed at what a cold winter this was but the older ones said no, this was actually typical of what once was, this hasn't been such a brutal winter.

Now we have this long defiant snow season, when the influence of the North Pole is skewed way down over North America, and temperatures this far north in late March demand a parka hood or knitwear for a person's head if you're walking some mornings or evenings. This was my first winter when I've ached deep inside my back for several days running; it was almost certainly my lungs, after heavy breathing from skiing along the open road when the temps never even neared 0 Fahrenheit and northwesterly winds skated over field after field. Eastern Europeans and Alaskans meanwhile utterly lacked any of the protracted freezing that would keep up their Olympic ski runs or sled trekking. Here in northern Minnesota between the snow-shrouded meadows as we peel off our coats we're asking each other what June this year might look like or whether there might not be much growing season, though we're not really worrying since summer has always come back in due force.

Feeling that a recent popular advisory, the Rolling Stone piece titled "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math" will soon have been widely shared and digested, I was fascinated to attend a hearing in Duluth on March 20th for a proposed expansion of an oil pipeline, Enbridge Energy's Alberta Clipper which would cross this state's northern third. The line is taking heavy crude oil down from what once was pristine taiga forest in northern Alberta, into the Upper Midwestern states where Superior, Wisconsin will be a hub for distribution to refineries eastward and south. At the same time the scientists studying the dilemma for its carbon implications point to the requirement for our survival's sake that we leave all possible petroleum reserves in the ground or else push earth's climate into a regime of tumult and extremes that will take down civilization.

I read after the hearing that opinions had been about half for, half against the plan to increase the existing pipeline's shipping capacity from 570,000 to 800,000 barrels of oil a day. While I sat in the hotel ballroom among the 300 or so who were there to listen or testify I heard four or five testimonies opposing the project on the basis either of hazard to water from leaks or spills (they occur with every pipeline, sooner or later) or to the climate. Most emphatic were the president and CEO of a local solar energy company who called the Alberta tar sands project 'a lethal carbon bomb' and the young lady who spoke after him who, in her thin high voice, avowed that 'a barrel shipped is a barrel burned.' Each of these testifiers asked the reps for Enbridge in separate wording: how do you react to knowing that?

For any veterans of civil disobedience, all that I witnessed at this hearing probably seemed unremarkable. But, as if I were listening to the soundtrack of a drama without video, I noticed how each of these two testimonies led straight to a dumbstruck silence on the part of Enbridge's panel of engineers and attorneys. Everyone present must have been thinking: so what are they gonna say to that? What do the energy-sector jobs and sports and music sponsorship which Enbridge had funded matter against a carbon outflow that, sector by sector, causes the whole gross economy to tatter and come undone? And that helps drive whole regions into mega-drought and food insecurity or outright famine? Then, just as many of us were beginning to formulate our versions of the answer, the attorney in tones of pained patience, probably reading from a prepared rejoinder, said that the people of America have said that they want an increasing domestic supply of oil and gasoline to assure the supply of...whatever, name anything you can think of. And so that determination measured entirely in dollars settles it; of course pipeline expansion is what we will do.

Petroleum pipelines and mining ventures, high-rises and new sports arenas, water diversion schemes and highway interconnections will continue burying and polluting soils that have given root to ourselves and more than ourselves as long as resources remain to do these things because too few of us know how to quit at our investments, whatever these might be. Our prehistoric ancestral societies' expansion schemes appear to have brought on die-offs and dispersals in so many cases where limits to growth were reached, in food-growing terms especially. Weather that stunts and kills food crops is a direct threat to those of us living now. 

Our communications network wraps around the world, but our interconnectedness does not protect localities from localized or regional disaster. Local and regional crises reverberate into international burdens. The Bible of my Christian forebears tells of the Tower of Babel, a legend borne out of Hebrew and Mesopotamian traditions in which people built a temple or ziggurat aimed into the heavens, based upon the assurance of a common language. But God somehow, exerting divine will through the nature of the peoples, decreed that the attainment of heaven was not to be. In The Greater Trumps, first published in 1932, the British theological novelist Charles Williams revealed, through a character's vision, a conception of the Tower of Babel as a linkage of hands:

"Somewhere, very vaguely, he would think that he saw in front of him, fashioned of the mist...the great Tower which reached almost out of sight, so loftily it grew up and then always--just as his dimmed eyes strained to see the rising walls--tottered and swayed and began in a horrible silence to fall apart, but never quite apart. It was raised by hands which, from within the rising walls, came climbing over, building themselves into a tower, thrusting those below them into place, fists hammering them down, so that the whole Tower was made up of layers of hands. But as it grew upward they changed; masonry below, thinner levels of masonry above, and, still above, masonry changing into hands, a few levels of moving hands, and (topmost of all) the busy working fists and fingers. And then a sudden spark of sunlight would fall on it from above and the fists would fall back out of sight, and the hands would disjoin, swiftly but reluctantly, holding on to each other till the ruin tore them apart, and the apparent masonry, as it was rent by some invisible force, would again change back into clutching and separating hands. They clung together fantastically; they shivered and writhed to avoid some principle of destruction that lurked within them,..."

Pricing for food, shelter and transport may start the undoing of the world economy, analogous to the tower, in our near future. If excessive hot sun, precipitation and ever-less petroleum fuel to grow the gigantic grain crops a humanity of billions needs in order to eat are our foreordained destiny, why are we still building everyday cars so they will go above 80 miles per hour, and why are we still advertising gasoline toys bought in at least half of cases by thrill riders? Because desperation was the only condition that ever cured people of their most spendthrift excesses. And yes, many people are over-booked with work and speed out of habit to try to save on travel time. And even though the industry-based drive for conformity, ease and time-saving has herded the peoples of the earth into a tower of babble or a culture of interconnected mega-cities, many, many cherished differences and aching disparities have seen to it that we keep falling loose, disconnecting, as well. Desperation due to an overburden of people may somehow, in some drastic ways help thin the ranks.

A thing I wonder each day is whether earth's loneliest, remotest, least-peopled places will in these times of difficulty retain their status as middle of nowhere. Will the most built-over lands on earth keep on being centers of everywhere, hospitable to survivors of the future, because of amenities that linger there, or will a great many of them turn into wastelands? I wonder this because I live in a depopulated region, a farming area that still supports wolves, pine martens and fishers, and am there by my choice, which gives rise to the art I do. It's about the living things that always took care of themselves, that I regret in so many cases are being crowded out of a homeland surpassingly beautiful in the eyes of city and country folk alike. Climate catastrophe threatens these plants and animals with extinction, ultimately, yet a collapse of our affairs may also mean salvation for some of the birds, beasts and wild herbs. I love the North with its icy breath as a consequence of my own history, but also because of the body efficiency it promotes for a robust type like myself--I burn up what I eat better than ever before. I adore the austerity shown by the frizzy, velvety and leathery low plants best adapted to these rocks and sands and peat bogs. I love the hidden adaptations in northern plants and animals to cold, poor soil, beset by frigid black nights, from the food-finding strategies of the carnivores to the capacity to grow only in slight increments, like a 50-year old swamp spruce that looks hardly bigger than a long-handled mop with handle stuck in the ground.

Austerity is found among plants and creatures of hot deserts as well, and they have their champions as they should. A citizen of cold deserts might, on immersion in southerly deserts of cacti and sage, learn to feel his or her inner kit fox and make a home there, but so far I want to speak for the little half-forsaken things that stand and quiver before a northerly wind a thousand or two miles closer to the Arctic. What will be our fate?

Boreal and Black-capped Chickadees of Canadian/U.S. Border Region and Northward

https://www.etsy.com/listing/80321335/bird-note-card-watercolor-chickadees?

In the Mind: Southern Fiction has Brushed against Snow-Country Art

In literature most widely cherished as art--whether novels, short stories or plays--a theme of actions and discovery is painstakingly woven through still portraits constructed of the most perfect word imagery for the people, indoor or outdoor space being presented. The portraits would never mean so much as they do after the actions have culminated in that exact, truthfully-wrought, exquisitely-constructed scene. Two works enlivening these late winter days for me were written by Carson McCullers, a 20th-century writer of the southern U.S.-- just this morning I finished her short novel The Member of the Wedding. The unnamed little southern town in the years of World War II reaches out to me like a setting I may have ridden or stepped into at some hour in my past.

The concluding scene reports on the death of a child character whose lingering image, in the mind of the main character Frances, is 'solemn, hovering, and ghost-gray.' He was a little boy of six years, revealed all during the story as inward-looking, with his own secret fascinations that help to set him over on the edge of society more than an average boy. We see him attracted to the girlish belongings of his older cousin Frances--a doll given her as a gift, which he names Lily Belle in the shadow of Frances' disinterest, and her plumed hat and high-heeled shoes. More than once in her characterizations Carson McCullers revealed the frustrations of non-heterosexual people in a time when being gay was treated much more than in our century as a form of emotional disturbance. The little boy John Henry West for all his childish manners and unfolding personality comes across as a package of complex inclinations never to be defined, his probable bisexuality a trait here-again but gone again escaping any mortal notice outside the narrative.

On this March Sunday with the clocks set ahead for the summer season and a melt commencing in trickles and drips from all the trees after this showcase boreal winter, I felt as if time had come unmeasured a little and we were free to push not just forward on the calendar but in all directions, any period we chose to visit or revisit. That closing scene of The Member of the Wedding was full of a sense of flight out of desperation, between regrets, into the hope of a new and broadening era in the lives of both leading female characters, the white teen-ager and the black matron who has done her best to set the girl examples learned through her own striving. Stories, like our solitary and shared conversations, move backward and forward and sideways in time.

In a vision of the deep South, here's a passage from the third- and second-to-last page of my library copy:
     "It was the time of the Fair and a big banner arched the main street and for six days and nights the Fair went on down at the fairground. Frances went twice, both times with Mary, and they rode on nearly everything, but did not enter the Freak Pavilion, as Mrs. Littlejohn said it was morbid to gaze at Freaks. Frances bought John Henry a walking stick and sent him the rug she had won at Lotto. But Berenice remarked that he was beyond all this, and the words were eerie and unreal. As the bright days followed one upon the other, the words of Berenice became so terrible that she would listen in a spell of horror, but a part of her could not believe. John Henry had been screaming for three days and his eyeballs were walled up in a corner stuck and blind. He lay there finally with his head drawn back in a buckled way, and he had lost the strength to scream. He died the Tuesday after the Fair was gone, a golden morning of the most butterflies, the clearest sky.
     'Meanwhile Berenice had got a lawyer and had seen Honey at the jail. "I don't know what I've done," she kept saying. "Honey in this fix and now John Henry." Still there was some part of Frances that did not even yet believe. ... He came to her twice in nightmare dreams, like an escaped child dummy from the window of a department store, the wax legs moving stiffly only at joints, and the wax face wizened and faintly painted, coming toward her until terror snatched her awake."

Pathos followed me into the spruce, fir and cedar forest this afternoon, scooping heavy liquefying snow on the front ends of my snowshoes while I broke a pathway, then found a spot to sit on below a cedar with lots of  spiky dead lower branches. They'd be one model for my painting of the spruce grouse. There isn't much more work to do on it by now--just a whole lot more bristling deadwood under the darkness of tree canopy. I sat sinking ever lower as the snow melted under me and my spread-out parka behind the snowshoes, which I kept strapped on as I detailed my art piece and looked out through the nearly still shadows all beset with dead and living wood at all angles, at lichens formed like hair or encrustations, snow slumping off of boughs where it had held on all these past frigid weeks in great globules, hearing the wind like a vocalization of thaw and coming leafburst.

Pathos is frequently connected with the onset of fall but I felt it for the approach of spring with all its layers of busyness. The spruce grouse painting still sends me walking a few more footpaths in search of certain rocks and latticed fallen branches without being satisfied yet, since the painting is for me an ultimate showing of all the many-textured scraggliness seen under the tree tops near the U.S.-Canadian border and increasingly north of it, down to the grey-green ground level. Here is one precious occasionally-seen grouse, also called partridge, relative of the ptarmigan that lives to the north of the tree line. This I've come to visualize and cherish, with a sense that it won't stay with us forever, long though the time has seemed.

 

http://www.saatchiart.com/TBeyer

We Encounter What We are, and Transform

Don't a few more people than in former eras wonder sometimes at the priority we each still put on a venture--artistic endeavor, marketing, haute cuisine, just as examples--especially when reminded that by thirty or so more years living on earth may just be all about mere survival?  Who might afford the money and time for such products, mundane or exquisite, among the desperate generations to come?

But since life demands we carry on with the things that bring us a living or inspiration, we figure we might just upgrade what we offer in accord with trends that surface. The tallest and bleakest trend in more and more people's perspective is the emerging volcanic mountain range of symptoms that indicate our own over-extension-- too many humans, too much ongoing, extractive, polluting overgrowth.  The earth's become like a human body overwhelmed by metastasis in one of its own organs. We are that organ, something that thrives at earth's skin-level.

A few years ago it sounded as if I was stating a religious belief whenever I said to anyone that I believe we're already experiencing global warming. I knew--and who didn't know?--lots of other folks who were dismissive, saying things like 'the earth is very old and has coped with many, many changes in climate through the millennia' or 'it's all a liberal hoax.' And those people are still around, caught up in their own comforts. But more and more people on their own appear to accept that the news documentaries scattered through the years introducing a changing global weather regime were correct and bode frighteningly ill for future generations.

Speaking as I am like some movement's disciple, I respectfully cite as this outlook's prophet Bill McKibben, the author and organizer who has publicly and in print described the climate crisis, mustering Americans to events crying out the need for, as nearly as possible, abolishing our mass reliance on fossil fuels. He's one of the best-known leaders of the movement to deinvest in fossil fuels. It was Bill McKibben, interviewed recently on Democracy Now, who said that before the end of the 21st century, with average global temperatures risen by seven or eight degrees F per the computer models, all of civilized life on earth will consist of emergency response measures. In the same interview he alluded, most meaningfully to me, to an earth where winter will be gone, winter as so many of us cherish it with all its majestic gliding sports and immaculate frozen scenery.

In this exhilarating winter of 2013-2014 I can't help feeling a rush of sentiment to create memorials to the snowed-in forests all around me.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/180400950/snow-landscape-surreal-watercolor-boreal?


Or I reach around me for literary parallels that help explain the behaviors of all of us who've pushed the problem to the stage we are in now. A most classic parable that could have been about the climate crisis is in Grimms' Fairy Tales: 'The Fisherman and his Wife.'

The solitary fisherman and his wife start out the story living on the sea coast in 'a miserable little hovel.' A magical fish, the flounder which the man luckily reels in one day but releases, grants wishes whose  fulfillment the wife demands from their home which she never leaves, each time sending him to call back the flounder to approve her latest.  First she wants a pretty cottage with several rooms, a larder and well-appointed kitchen. In another week or so, tired of that, the wife calls for a big stone castle in its place. Promptly the next day she finds herself disappointed to have a castle when she can't be king, so she sends the husband back to call the flounder to declare her the king. Then it's for her to be emperor, pope and finally lord of the universe. Each time the husband in his trepidation returns to the shore he finds both sea and sky uglier with turbulence and foul coloration.

By the time the woman announces she can never be satisfied unless she's made lord of the universe the man can only call back the flounder out of fear of his wife's rage. Quoting the last paragraph of the story:
     "Then he pulled on his trousers and tore away like a madman. Such a storm was raging that he could hardly keep his feet. Houses and trees quivered and swayed, and mountains trembled, and the rocks rolled into the sea. The sky was pitchy black. It thundered and lightened, and the sea ran in black waves mountains high, crested with white foam. He shrieked out, but could hardly make himself heard:
                "Flounder, flounder in the sea, 
                Prythee hearken unto me:
                My wife, Ilsebil, must have her own will,
                And sends me to beg a boon of thee."
     "Now what does she want?" asked the flounder.
     "Alas," he said, "she wants to be Lord of the Universe."
     "Now she must go back to her old hovel," said the flounder, "and there she is!"

In the event of modern-day overreach, we might justly expect there will be punishment, complete with tragic deaths of countless people. I see that this old parable is touching not just on narcissism to the extreme of wanting to be God but also hinting at a hunger to be bigger and bigger in our consequences on the face of the earth. The waves, the houses and trees react the way they do in the mega-storms repeatedly in news coverage today. Dreams in recent centuries of super-cities, climate-regulated and self-serving and mutually supportive covering the landscape, may be cast away just as some super-cities find themselves outposts of human survival, each making do with life strategies that fit the place, time and conditions. Admittedly no one really knows what the worst we can do to ourselves on the whole will look like.

'Hell on earth' comes mind, as in the last days of the Biblical Revelation, or in the notion that people are so stupidly evil and greedy that all but a few souls may be wiped from off the earth. Don't most of us agree that we will have to change course, by force or in advance, and still won't live through the worst of what's to come?

Charles Williams, the British theological novelist, poet and critic of the mid-twentieth century, ended his novel Descent into Hell with a man's death by stages down in a pit, dropping ever lower beneath the moon which the character, Wentworth, confuses with a clock-face in a tower and at the same time with his own watch, over-wound and left broken at home. A silver, million-miles-long rope has just shot from his hand upward into the moon, disconnecting him from time in which he'd remain able to act for the better or the worse.

Charles Williams' talent allowed him to narrate from within a dimension that included the metaphysical and physical interwoven. He relates the most subtle gradations of difference between one moving force and another, "percipient  and impercipient," conscious and unaware. The fictional Wentworth had allowed obsession with a woman he only knew casually to turn her into a phantasm who went with him, agreeing to all his own lustful wants, wishes and notions, till her image dwindled into something that disgusted him and collapsed altogether. He is full of hate for everyone else, rivals to his own self-importance. In the concluding few lines:

     "He had now no consciousness of himself as such, for the magical mirrors of Gomorrah had been broken, and the city itself had been blasted, and he was out beyond it in the blankness of a living oblivion, tormented by oblivion. The shapes stretched out beyond him, all half turned away, all rigid and silent. He was sitting at the end, looking up an avenue of nothingness, and the little flames licked his soul, but they did not now come from without, for they were the power, and the only power, his dead past had on him; the life, and the only life, of his soul. There was, at the end of the grand avenue, a bobbing shape of black and white that hovered there and closed it. As he saw it there came on him a suspense; he waited for something to happen. The silence lasted; nothing happened. In that pause expectancy faded. Presently then the shape went out and he was drawn, steadily, everlastingly, inward and down through the bottomless circles of the void."

What is personal among each of our motives will remain, I think, till it is burned or corroded out of each of us. Fabulous landscapes ever veering into winter will for a long time I think be mine. But in sorrowful recognition that Bill McKibben is likely right about a future earth with the phenomena of winter cooked away from its sub-polar regions, I titled the above painting Repercussions. Interpret it how you will. In dream likeness the gull is dashed to smithereens that are one with the snow flakes as it crashes against the strange edifice of combined origins, manmade hotel and cliff face.

Forewarnings: Poison and Atrophy (does it have to be this way?)

Last night my friend and I went to the hearing in Duluth, a first of three around the state of Minnesota, about the proposal to let a big mining conglomerate, Polymet, leak sulfuric acid and a mess of other toxic overflow into the Lake Superior watershed in order to get at the copper, nickel, platinum and other mineral wealth that underlies this area our hearts draw sustenance from. She said we were witnessing a piece of history. It's left me with the same feeling I think I remember from when I first heard on TV that people are warming up earth's climate, or when as a girl I first heard my dad say the builders were coming sooner or later to put apartments in the pasture. Selfish, said one of the men who testified at the hearing last night, critiquing the motive of everybody taking a stand on whichever side of the debate, but I mostly disagree; I think everyone who takes a stand in a public controversy feels like a representative for some group of others who aren't vocal or privileged enough to be there. The others naturally are people but, as importantly, are also the manifold living things with whom we don't share a language.

The non-profit organization WaterLegacy in a brief emailed review of the hearing pointed out that about two thirds of the testimony given was from opponents of the mine, and that while many opponents cited specific flaws or gaps in Polymet's supplemental draft environmental impact statement, the supporters just called on their faith or intuition that the review, the future mining technology or the industry in its great professionalism could be trusted to guard the watershed. I was glad of the evidence that somebody else had been keeping track of opinions for and against the project, since I had been keeping my own tally on paper during the testimonies my friend and I heard from about 7 p.m. till nearly 10:00. For most of the evening I found that the opponents led by nearly two to one, but as the room emptied it seemed more and more the boosters for local mining were the people remaining.

At the crux of the proposed mining scheme is that the various ores termed sulfides, including copper, gold, nickel and platinum become toxic, turning to sulfuric acid, when exposed to air and water after being dug from the open pit mines. I say mines because Polymet's proposed mine located near the Embarrass and Partridge Rivers, which would wash the pollution into the St. Louis River and thence Lake Superior, is not the only proposed sulfide mine. Twin Metals is a joint venture between a Canadian and a Chilean company that wants to dig another mine barely three miles from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area near Ely, Minnesota. Yet-to-be-named venture capitalists are and will be watching. To them, sulfuric acid is a risk factor, an abstract liability in a bright-eyed betting game.

Not vinyl, not clay, not metal set in the ground to hold the drainage in storage ponds or divert run-off from towering piles of dug-up rock, wood rubble and dried-out peat will keep the acid waste water from where we don't want it to go. The soils are largely sand and peat, boulder and gravel. The questions are when, how soon and how much effluent will make its way where-all and how far. No company, whatever formal arrangements it puts on record, will retain squadrons of river guardians or pit watch personnel past its own dissolution, or past all caring once the blue coldwater lakes of legend or the fishing streams are discolored or pretty well devoid of healthy aquatic life.

Arguments made by citizens in favor of mining are that we need Minnesota's copper, that no other mining region of the world has the robust environmental oversight found among this state's natural resource agencies and that we have to at least let Polymet give it a first try, ostensibly to see how well they do protecting water and air. Most persuasively, there is the loudly proclaimed and very real need for high-paying jobs in northern Minnesota. The first point is moot; copper mines crowd the southern two thirds of Arizona, and are also found in New Mexico, Utah, Montana and Michigan. As for oversight, in any area of the world, whatever underlies a mine pit is more or less permeable by water, and no matter what is practiced in the westerly copper mining districts, a place like Minnesota, girded underneath by sands and the soft stuff making up peat bogs, and abundantly snowed-on many winters, creating vast movements of water, is hugely vulnerable to the transfer and pooling up of chemical toxins.

Where resources, whether renewable or finite, material or abstract are concerned, most of us probably base our hopes and expectations on some version of the best conditions we have ever known. Fantasy of course governs a lot of our private projections. In any case, conditions surrounding the whole planet Earth are perceptibly changing, with cataclysmic potential for systemic failures in our world according to strict scientific modeling of the basis for climate. The outcome, translated as flood-related, heat-related and drought-related shock and privations, sooner rather than later will overwhelm ever larger sectors of our agriculture, manufacturing and other industry.

A recent news item in the New York Times says that global carbon emissions, at a record high in 2011, are predicted to jump once measured for 2012 and 2013 since coal is still such a heavily relied upon fuel at too many electric power plants around the world. As carbon emissions escalate and we fail to meet the international goal in which global warming stops at 3.6 degrees F, disruptions in our living, our commerce, our food production and the whole economy are liable to make everything we do on a grand scale falter. Corporate enterprises like mining, smelting, shipping and manufacturing in their own due time will become haphazard or stop. What if closures due to major market slowdown happened within the lifetime of Polymet and/or Twin Metals? Polymet's own estimate for their mine's lifetime has been 20 years, with the capacity to employ 300 people.  Meantime, during and after the inevitable bust cycle that follows in the northland, as inhabitants in their degrees of hunger and desperation forage fish, hunt and fruit and salad crops from the land, what if the few fish left are full of mercury, another  pollutant released by sulfide mining--or arsenic, or both?

And what about carbon emissions from the heavy equipment and land disturbances normal to mining? One source, an Anishinaabe native people's on line tract titled Protect Our Manoomin (wild rice,) says sulfide mining will have an annual carbon footprint of 767,648 metric tons annually. Credit for the facts and figures is given to sources including WaterLegacy, Friends of the BWCA, and Lake Superior Mining News.

Indications along with carbon-induced climate change--the drawdown of water tables on all six inhabited continents, the ever more rapid rate of extinctions, the depletion of arable soils where farming has been longest and most intensive--are that the earth is weary of our self-justified domination. Excuses that we need to grow all our industry for the good of everyone will hold up less and less, except as the bases for ecological havoc. What would sustain us in a bid for survival, even prosperity, along the ages to come would be containment of our growth and of our urge to modify more and more of what's under our feet or over our heads to our use. A hopeful thought in my mind is that a goodly majority of my fellow human beings don't want to rob the earth and infest it with more, always more synthetic structures inhospitable to all but ourselves, they just tolerate it or resent it happening around them.

I'm afraid that society as I know it in the wider world will refuse the chance remaining to leave the raw material in the ground that it's a part of, because our technocratic culture just doesn't agree to leave things well enough alone where financial wealth is at stake. The ones who can will amplify their rationale for extracting everything possible, and they'll persuade enough of the others that life will be better for them too as a result. This is how one more territory blooming with virgin thickets and swamps, rivers and lakes, still with their historic complement of fishes and frogs, birds and wild fur- bearers risks becoming another piece of everywhere else, with tired water and particulate-blown air.

If I could, I would like to shout the mystique of the snow country in all of its seasons so as to chase away all planning to tear it open and bleed out its byproducts in how ever controlled or uncontrolled a series of processes. I would like to show the industrialists the little plants that would die into even greater obscurity, in the awareness of industry tycoons and those they've brainwashed, when streamlets and springs carry sulfuric acid through the adjacent soils. If hand-drawn visual art of our wild heritage could help to reverse the schemes for destroying the haunts of wolves, pine martens and spruce grouse, I would give all my time to it and barter my work for all I need to live on.

  Butterwort, a carnivorous plant, on Lake Superior Cliff, watered by surf spray

https://www.etsy.com/listing/100466348/watercolor-flower-on-cliff-background?ref=shop_home_active_18


Go here to officially comment on the Polymet mine.

O My Darlings...Lost and Formed Anew

A piece in Audubon magazine's last issue of 2013, titled "Climate Change is Causing Some Mixed-up Wildlife" by writer Katherine Bagley, left me feeling especially lucky to have added thirteen bird species to my life list this year, plus the wolf to my list of mammals. The article is about animals including birds, butterflies, whales and bears cross-breeding in our times, engendering hybrid creatures better adapted to habitats that are shrinking or blending together. The animals are adapting to loss of habitat and seasonal patterns brought about by climate change, probably the most sweeping symptom of people-pressure on the earth.

Small fliers like birds and butterflies might likelier interbreed, in theory, since most at the mercy of the winds, they can blow into each others' nesting range. Habitats blending and becoming more generic through our heavy use of the land generate new incentives for birds or insects of species whose numbers are declining to settle for what they can get, including mates from species other than their own.

But some of the news was startling: grizzly bears in the Arctic are breeding with polar bears? In the midst of all the other documented hybrids in Ms. Bagley's article--assorted kinds of whales, seals and porpoises less than familiar to landlocked natural history buffs like me--the bears especially stood out. I have heard of  North American timber wolves interbreeding with coyotes. But a white female polar bear getting bred by a hump-backed brown grizzly early out of his den. Custom and part of the bedrock of my imagination are being eroded here, even if I accept the evolutionary process known as speciation and reject fundamentalist religion's creationism in which everything is sacrosanct with fixed name, form, repute and coloration.

Studying the wild plants and animals over time we realize that their taxonomy, or very identity as species, is loosely set and fluid. Extinctions occur, traditionally over long reaches of time, and new species come of cross-fertilization and of local populations, isolated from others, morphing into new sub-species and eventually, cut off from the habitat of distant cousins, becoming recognized as separate species. As per the article, when animals hybridize, results can vary from sterility in the hybrid offspring to a hastened rate of extinction in an ancestral species that's faring poorly in its ability to compete so it can eat and reproduce. The author grants that speciation has gone on as long as the  animal kingdom itself existed. The article stresses that hybridization in the wild animal kingdom today, like the escalating rate of extinctions, is driven by the take-over of earth by ourselves and by our chemical overflow into air, freshwater and oceans.

We're of course each of us free to consider the issue of cross-breeding, as well as the disappearance of species, however we like. People who are emotionally removed from wild parts of earth where they might encounter uncommon animals will ask what is the loss if one kind of creature goes away to be replaced by another that's faster, bulkier, hardier, etc.

Lately I was introduced by good friends to a fictional work, The Place of the Lion, by the British theologian, poet and novelist Charles Williams. Animal archetypes figure into that narrative in ways that must have so many parallels in the New and Old Testaments and other Judeo-Christian writing that I could search and list for weeks if I wanted examples to cite. Archetypes are defined as symbols, images of our human nature and the experiences that we share universally as human beings, in the sense of a 'collective unconsciousness.' The Place of the Lion in Biblical and pre-Biblical tradition uses animals like the lion, the serpent and the unicorn to express lofty principles and virtues.

Here is a quote from page 53: "that this world is created, and all men and women are created, by the entrance of certain great principles into aboriginal matter. We call them by cold names; wisdom and courage and beauty and strength and so on, but actually they are very great and mighty Powers. It may be they are the angels and archangels of which the Christian Church talks... And when That which is behind them intends to put a new soul into matter it disposes them as it will, and by a peculiar mingling of them a child is born; and this is their concern with us, but what is their concern and business among themselves we cannot know.... In the animals they are less mingled, for there each is shown to us in his own becoming shape; those Powers are the archetypes of the beasts, and very much more..."

That each creature stands for a principle or virtue, while each new person represents a commingled recipe of these same powers, deserves pondering. I think there will always be room in my imagination for angels in winged or other guise, personalized or vague and faceless. But if, in ancient human collective consciousness, the lion stands for strength, the lamb for innocence, the serpent for subtlety, or even if not, I'd still like to recognize the animals according to species as I've confronted them from my own beginnings with the help of the books that named and differentiated them. The books or today the apps are known to all of us who have referred to them. Each species stands for a place whose conditions gave rise to it, and the place was also recognizable as a realm of certain principles or virtues re-characterized in each animal, also in each plant. In that sense they are nature's works of art, which we can stand in front of to admire or emulate.

These distinctive creatures crossbreeding will cause varying reactions in each of us according to our values. For me any species diminished by the expedience of blending its identity with a neighboring species will represent a loss of something sacred. It was sanctified by the place it came from, that place itself likely in danger of transformation to something less. For someone else, the new hybrid form is the new species. For some other people species doesn't matter, it's all an illusion, and what matters is the energy, divine if they allow for divinity, that drives the creature across the field of vision in the dramas that figure in all our lives.

This all adds up to a myriad of creatures for the artist to conceive and work with. For me, the time I have lived within has its huge spread of fauna, named and classified, which we all ought not to dare diminishing by our actions. In my home region there are coyotes, foxes and wolves, who follow their own paths of advantage. In the spring when warblers come back to the woods maybe at long last I'll get more than a glimpse at the Connecticut, out in one of the swamps, in spring dress on nesting territory true to its kind. But any other human being may prefer, ultimately, to skip over the losses implicit in die-offs of scientifically, historically documented species, and entertain oneself with fabulous cross-bred beasts much newer conceived than the unicorn, the manticore and griffon of Europe's Middle Ages, and then, as in another dimension, chosen beasts of fantasy will come to populate a page or a screen--or a note card: 

https://www.etsy.com/listing/122474637/whimsical-bird-art-quail-mixed-media?

Echoes, Glimpsed Faces, and a Rising Wind of Transformation

Since my oldest memory, dating from maybe as far back as 1962, I have loved winter fields especially with the quiet low light of evening or of a cloudy day. The reasons connect with the secure country home my parents kept for us, and my good health all those years, a robust build of body that resisted cold, and the abundant snows of those winters when I was just starting school, having the countryside to come home to. It was cheery there, indoors and out, so the frozen lands never symbolized the dreary to me but the wondrously forsaken, where noise was stifled and drama had been erased into the crisp framework of dead and living plants, cushioned and unified by snow. Their colors were varied and subtly reminiscent, bleached versions of what had been and what in just really a few weeks would be. The shadows were blue; the highlights were now and again the hot tints found in fires. Nowhere else felt so safe or, at the same time, so invigorating. All of our small family at some time or other went enthusiastically into these places.

Now that I'm graying and stiffening a little with the years I look to the loss of these places with many questions as to what in fact was or may have been. It might have been around 1970 when I first heard, on a National Geographic TV show, about the greenhouse effect and how it would steal more and more from the experience of winter. I've never gotten over my dismay about that, though there have been many honest-to-goodness winters north of where I grew up, spectacular on ski trails, with snowdrifts, whiteouts and early blue dark. Inevitably I've broadened my view on climate change to include it as one in a cluster of symptoms that we are, in our numbers and demands on the earth, getting to be too much for it and will be forced to change the ways we do a lot of things.

While the news brings us an ever-lengthening list of weather and ocean cataclysms like ice floes as big as Singapore breaking away from the Antarctic, typhoon Haiyan, the most powerful sea storm ever recorded, smashing the Philippines and once in a lifetime November mega-tornadoes or June downpours besetting the central U.S., local and unscientific observers like me compare past seasons to more recent ones and notice tree hardihood and winter rain versus ice versus snow. Those of us living in the northern countryside still drive into whiteouts, freeze our fingertips and worry about our our engines starting on frigid mornings. But our winters trend shorter at both ends. A long cold winter now is what an average winter used to be to the generation older than us. Today's real temperatures tend to be warmer than the ones we heard in yesterday's forecast for today. Warm spells last a lot longer than the cold snaps. One of the personal questions that looms especially large for me is: if I live to be close to a hundred, what will I see of change to the places I cherish along the U.S.-Canadian border as climate change escalates? Likely I will see fires burn away huge stretches of the resinous boreal forest after it's been too hot and dry for too long. Projections are that oak savanna and grassland will grow up in its place.

An interview one recent morning on Democracy Now, with guests Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows-Larkin, climate scientists from England's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, affiliated with the University of Manchester, stressed the need of "radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the United States, EU and other wealthy nations." I was electrified to hear this report because the meltdown of our four-season climate and disappearance of its hallmark trees and creatures has so long been a sadness, like a known-of disease in someone I love. Just two examples given of de-growth strategies were sizing down the refrigerators used in the United States, where evidently fridges are manufactured and sold bigger than in the rest of the world, and abandoning the habit of a daily shower, or even a twice-daily shower, that requires so much hot water, using tons of fossil fuel in affluent countries. Such adaptations are called for because, per Mr. Anderson, the developed countries of the world have ill-advisedly forsaken opportunities to shift their reliance to full-scale renewable energies and the impending changeover will take place too slowly to safeguard the climate we accept as normal for purposes of keeping sea levels below coastal city street levels and harvesting food crops every year.

The urgency of the climate crisis is described among researchers like the two from the Tyndall Centre in degrees of warming. Two degrees Celsius or 3.6 degrees F. are in our time thought to be the limits of further survivable global warming for civilization. But according to Alice Bows-Larkin the rate of emissions for carbon and other heat-trapping gases puts us on track for something more like four degrees Celsius; a listener/reader easily senses that she discreetly refrains from hinting that it could be even more than that. Two degrees Celsius was also the cap agreed upon by the Copenhagen Accord in 2012, and earlier, among the Group of Eight summit meeting of largest nations, in 2009. But as indicators of inhospitable climate, these measures have no real coordinates in the realm of what it would take to force civilization into some mode of living in which we release so little carbon or other heat-trapping gases that offsets come into play for what we do emit, and we become neutral in how we affect the atmosphere. What drives people to change their ways is pain, not readily measurable, which can be sub-classified into grief, bodily misery (hunger, thirst, illness, agony) and economic loss. For many people, impending pain in one or more of these categories will breed change--and by impending pain I naturally mean confronting painful conditions in a state of honest fear. Degrees of planetary heating can't be uniformly matched with degrees of the different forms of pain or fear brought to bear on people in stressful times for the purpose of broad policy-making, but segment by segment of civilization we will have to try our best.

To read any of today's spokespeople for the movement to curb climate change, such as Bill McKibben, is to see an implication of the extractive industries, chiefly the fossil fuels oil, gas and coal, and of the other industries that ally themselves around oil, gas and coal, like automotive manufacturers. The comfort-filled, fast-paced ways of life that are established courtesy of industries enabled by gasoline and diesel-powered transport are so taken for granted that any public statement that these modes of living could be the death of civilization is dismissed as doom and gloom but is most of all kept out of the mainstream news. The internet, if you google articles on climate change is full of written pieces which soothe the glancing reader that fears about global warming are overblown. The fossil fuel and auto industries have been notorious for funding coalitions that dismiss the urgency and/or the reality of what our heat-trapping gases are doing ever faster to our one and only home planet earth.

Doom and gloom scenarios have often filled and taken over people's imaginations. I've taste-tested a bit of literary doom and gloom in recent months, significantly when I read Margaret Atwood's novels Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, and most lately as I finished Stephen King's novella The Langoliers. Margaret Atwood's two late novels are futurist, revealing to her readers a world where genetic engineering is in its heyday, cloned and hybridized animals, wild or feral, forage in open country and corporations rule a world in which nations get no mention. The most secure of the citizens are the corporate work force, protected inside gigantic company-owned dorms. North America is hot year-round and tornado-prone daily, with a cool breeze perceptible as far north as, she suggests, Moose Factory in what was Canada in the remote past, no dates given.

The Stephen King story, like others of his, features time travel. The Langoliers, as it progresses, switches scenes from the cabin of a 767 passenger jet cut off from all sight and signals of life on the ground to a deserted Bangor International Airport in Maine. King's tale challenged my imagination by segregating the notion of time eroding backward from a duly consequential reversal of history on the ground. If time were to peel backward then the techno-industrial landscape should sink and crumble, the forests should flourish and shrink back under ice caps, land and sea rise, fall and intermix. In the story however the land below the jet, forced on pain of the travelers' death to take off anew from Bangor and return west, is scorched away by runaway balls of searing red and black which have no explanation, in their wake leaving nothing but a breathtaking abyss. It worked well in the story as a nightmare vision of doom. But it's not the doom that we in our materialist mania for ever more growth are likeliest to spread in a series of spin-off reactions, one health and environmental crisis or several at a time, across the breadth of the continents still holding above sea level.

Crossing St. Louis County, Minnesota daily in the little old Toyota I recognize that it's bound to be the car itself that's my number-one source of carbon output, even though it's a hybrid. It still burns gasoline and emits carbon. To the extent that we all share in the responsibility--to our offspring and to our wild warm-blooded and cold-blooded and plant kin--to stop dumping carbon into the air, won't at least some of us try to reduce the worst that we're putting out, on our commutes, errands and longer trips? And that is the question I have trouble imagining an awful lot of people asking themselves, skeptics that so many still are about the idea of winter ever being conquered (cold weather is their enemy) and earth's whole climate flip-flopped by our very selves. What will it take, leaving out some of the most agape-filled, civic-minded, devoutly spiritual ones like those who buy carbon offsets or especially those who demonstrate and go to jail, for a majority to say:  I'm tired of knowing I help upset the water cycle and the mountain glaciers, ruin the summers and the cool green forests, escalate the rash of extinctions, and endanger the very weather that feeds our food crops? Somehow, it would have to be a loss of all other choices. And it's been said that whole nations at some stage have rushed to co-ordinate schemes for wholesale safety from a crisis when leaders and public alike finally become overwhelmed by a sense of urgency.

From the 20th-century author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who lived in and wrote about interior Florida in pioneer times and the Depression era (before it was discovered by second-home developers) my sense of what we have lost in America has been heightened, as I equated her 1930s' springs and summers to my corresponding seasons experienced thirty years later, with their clamor of crickets, whippoorwills and tree toads. Here is her passage from Cross Creek, in a chapter titled 'Toady-frogs, lizards, antses and varmints;' "I have lain through a long moonlit night, with the scent of orange blossoms palpable as spilled perfume on the air. and listened to the murmur of minor chords until, just as I have wept over the Brahms waltz in A flat on a master's violin, I thought my heart would break with the beauty of it. If there is not a finished tune, there are phrases, and there is assuredly a motif, articulated, reiterated." I've never been in Florida, but reading in my own time about hordes of amphibians lost to rain-borne toxins and abrupt seasonal change, I wonder if modern people in Marjorie's Florida still get to hear frog symphonies as lavishly poured forth.

Everything wild that I can remember may be dwindling sooner or later like frogs, toads and salamanders on so many continents, or the bobwhite quail our family would hear in my youth across most of the months in a year. It's another reason to draw and paint the places just in the ways they have haunted me, because as memories they are precious as the most revered ancestors and infants all rolled in one, tender and self-renewing, strange yet still fabric of our thoughts and emotions, our muscle and nerve fibres.  Here's bait, if you like, or a friendly invitation: if you relish and buy this art or  this organic fair-trade chocolate you are helping us, in our depleted and depopulated locale, to stay there and do our work without having to start our cars to work somewhere miles off that requires day to day gasoline burning to get there.

Rolling in amid a Pack of Wolves - (They Scattered)

Timber wolves still prosper within stretches of the U.S./Canadian border region, mostly with great reluctance to show themselves to human eyes. Coming and going now daily from Duluth, Minnesota in my spry little old hybrid car I look for wolves whenever there's daylight to expose any, just as I peer before me in the night lest anything four-legged, or a rogue car with dark headlights catching the shine of my lights, cross my path or come at me. In years past, only two wolves, to my knowledge, had crossed a road ahead of my car.

On a recent Friday morning with an overcast deepening all the November drabness, I could see ahead of me two or three or more animal forms, tails flowing out behind them, brownish altogether on the grey monotone of the roadsides. Beasts the size of big dogs crossed playfully to and fro, north or south in both blank lanes. The boreal bog land spread uninterruptedly back to each side.

I braked and braked as I quickened inside with exhilaration. These canines looked at least the size of German shepherds, though some wolves stand as high in the rump and shoulders as deer. Their response to the car seemed semi-practiced, as though they had an action plan--in case of a car coming the As go north and the Bs head south--yet at the same time they looked nonchalant like teens making way for a car in a game of street hockey. I slowed to a stop. Probably the wolves could hear the electric hum of the hybrid car system.

However that was, one animal remained in sight, shoulder-high in grass and seedlings on my right. It had a picture-perfect wolf face, with blunt muzzle, head and shoulders gold-tinted on white with black tips, a bit of pink tongue forward, ears much neater to the head than a coyote's. The exchange of glances was real yet ultra-brief, a reward from out of the wild, something I had hoped for over all my remembered years. I gathered from that glimpse a fellow-animal's cautious curiosity, mixed with the same ambivalence as that of the pack-mates crossing and re-crossing the road within the past half-minute. The wolf was crouched, viewing me at a distance of twenty feet or so for one second, gone like a magician's handkerchief in the next. My foot quivered on the pedal as I got back in motion beyond that scene of deeply reactive and clannish movement.

There is a hunting season in Minnesota on wolves now, with a quota or 'target harvest' of 220 kills for the months included. Recently I heard or read an official with state government talking about wolves with what may be the stock Department of Natural Resources middle point-of-view, that yes, wolves are intelligent, sensitive creatures but that no, they don't merit the bleeding heart defense coming from people who say there should be no wolf hunts. That's just romanticism. They are legitimate game animals. But, making a stretch from out of the wild into human affairs, if you were to ask me I'd say that the point of view that abortion of human fetuses should be made illegal is romanticism of human fetuses--babies, of course, since babies is always going to be the word of choice. Comparing the meager level of sensory development of most aborted babies with the same in a full-grown adult wolf shot and killed calls into question whether the elective abortion or the wolf kill is the act of greater cruelty to the victim.

I take this viewpoint not out of hatred for babies of my own kind but out of a desperate love for the other creatures whom our endless expansion is crowding out their own territory since we always need to clear more land, dig it, farm it and build over it. We seem not to be able to shake the notion that people should multiply till the whole earth and every possible other place is taken up by our civilization, as if nature could be managed to become nothing but a grand human life support system, or as if we would really want to live in a universe completely of our own construction, with maybe a little relic forest, brush or desert like a decorative border. Taking the religious perspective about either matter will not convert me to your religious view, I have my own.

I would prefer a world that holds the values belonging mainly still, I suspect, to aboriginal peoples: that human beings have no greater importance than any other species we neighbor with, and that we live peaceably in motley forms and adaptations, sometimes learning and modelling each others' magnificent expertise to each others' greater glorification. I believe the creator God of the universe would approve. The wolf in its solo resourcefulness and social graces, with its muscular power and embrace of landscapes just as those places evolved, makes a fascinating model for creative and nurturing human interactions with our common earth.

I'm a great fan of Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf, in which the author worked as a biologist for the Canadian Wildlife Service and lived alongside a pack of Arctic wolves in the Keewatin District north of Churchill, Manitoba. His wolf neighbors gained his admiration on a whole series of levels: first of all, their resourcefulness in eating oftenest what was near at hand, especially mice, when their reputation among the white hunter constituency of Canada was that of voracious deer-slaughterers, helping denude the tundra of caribou. But also the wolves had a sense of fair play among themselves and extending to the lone researcher living at the edge of their territory in a tent. An unmated male wolf baby-sat for the mother whose litter of pups had exhausted her with their rambunctious bouncing and biting, letting them bounce all over him. The alpha male, father of the pups, immediately respected the scent boundaries that the man had made, wolf-fashion with squirts of his own urine, along a line of shrubs. The adult wolves lined up along a ridge to gape, in apparent amusement, at the man as he tumbled down the slope of crumbling sand and dislodging rock, overloaded by his own gear; they never made a move to pile onto him. He learned that the native Eskimo people had no wolf prejudices like those of European humankind, and knew each of these wolves as individuals from long acquaintance. He learned to relax and drop the idea that he'd better have his rifle or revolver at the ready when the wolves were near.

Wolves are clever, retiring and seldom seen, by comparison with many of the other creatures that share their realm and their exuberance in the atmosphere that sustains them. We all, it seems proven by people's observations time and again, have emotions of joy, curiosity, respect for others who pass by and do us no harm, bereavement, fear, foreboding, anger and vengefulness when hatred was levied against us. The northern lands that are hold-outs of today's remaining wolves have their smaller life forms that sing, whirl with unfathomed mixes of passion and enliven the people, probably the hawks and other birds, the foxes, the deer and other four-legged community members who witness them.

Along with the occasionally heard and seldom-seen wolves, I savor the sight of birds everywhere. The gaiety of birds is confused again and again with their evasiveness, a drive to save their own lives from airborne predators. In the northern U.S. and Canada one intensively social bird, full of bounding travel-zest and pale wintery tints of white, dawn-pink and dark, is the redpoll, which sorts into at least two distinct species, the common and the hoary. The animus of wolves romping, galloping, lurking and howling is echoed by the redpolls foraging along the paths we travel and swirling into flight, diverging and converging as they leave the scene to re-group somewhere else.

Here is a link to the redpoll note card, a frameable item at 5x7 inches or 12.7 x 17.7 cm. Like most of my others, the card is blank inside with a little descriptive text on the outer back flap. A Redpoll Explosion on a Winter's Morn