Dawn of a World Economy not so Far Beyond Belief

Last week I was part of an audience to the best, most complete-sounding plan imaginable for steering the global economy freer and freer from those toxic fundamentals, oil, gas and coal. I thank my good friend DyAnn, member of the Izaak Walton League, for inviting me there. As a person who goes back and forth across the middle of North America by gasoline car I mostly draw a blank on what a reduced reliance on my own time-tested car would look like. Eric Enberg of Citizens Climate Lobby, who spoke to the Duluth, MN chapter of the Izaak Walton League on January 6th, may not have furnished a specific plan to those of us long-distance drivers wondering how we'd get around between all our jobs and pilgrimages without gasoline power. But he certainly, with a brisk and smiling verve, delivered a proposal that even a non-logical mind could track, a sweeping win/win that would serve everybody but people stubbornly profiteering from fossil fuels. (And even those people, in ways they may refuse to ever admit!) 

The Carbon Fee and Dividend proposal is explained here at Citizens Climate Lobby's website. Essays about large-scale risk to the atmosphere and our survival have used the term externalities for the ever-more-obvious environmental costs of business that conventional economies have failed to account for. The Carbon Fee and Dividend would build those costs in, as the central principle fostering a whole subsequent economic order that would work for everyone.

The carbon fee would apply to all sources of atmospheric carbon at the source--oil wellhead, coal mine, shipping port--would increase over time, and would be subject to adjustment at international borders so industry would be discouraged from dodging it by moving abroad. As a fee, not a tax, its revenues would be distributed to households directly, a subsidy and stimulus that would compound the benefits of state and federal tax refunds. According to Mr. Enberg, the greatest personal impact each of us has on the climate comes about not through what we drive, considerable though that may be, but through what we buy--all kinds of goods and services. Adopting a fee and dividends would recognize that. The carbon fee would force business, both manufacturing and service, to review and overhaul all their processes, including raw materials, in a way that would trim out more and more fossil-fuel-related costs, since prices in all sectors would rise in consequence of the fee assessed early on for anything brought to us by gasoline, petroleum derivative or coal. Renewable energies and non-petroleum principle materials would be phased in as affordable substitutes with the passage of time, steadily lowering carbon emissions while easing countries into the parameters endorsed by the Paris Agreement last fall.

Gaps between how economic policy is written, how it's administered under differing bodies of law and how it's put into practice by all the relevant businesses never-the-less are all too likely if we implement rules, from one national or regional governing body to the next, based on this paradigm. There have always been self-serving bodies as well as desperate planners with talents for bending rules, supplying under-the-table markets and using diversionary tactics. Cynical schemes of fee avoidance and manipulation will doubtless come to our attention, as well as price wars plus out-and-out physical competition for superior raw materials, whatever they might be, known to be in limited supply, and for water and for real estate. Conflicts and mismanagement must increasingly remind societies that everything we need proves finite if we insist on perpetually growing consumer demand, out of a fanciful belief in ever-expanding prosperity for a customer base as vast as the expanding universe.

In a trust that enough of us know we have to make way for future generations in another age, innovating as we go, I recall this 1999 watercolor that shows a coexistence briefly traced on a brown, distantly-peopled beach, with snow flurries like a kind of yearly omen of the coldest, shortest day of the year. The connection here is the prospect of winter, to those of us who thrive in cold climates with a reliably returning snowpack, being lost to the heat waves borne year-round in the advance of global warming.

                        Snow Buntings on a Wintry Beach   - original watercolor 12 x 8.25" unframed,  $95.00

I had seen the snow buntings, whose arrival from the Arctic seems to demarcate early winter from late fall, and remembered episodes of biking in wide-open air. Whose might be the wheels that made the tire marks, and what blends of musculature, mechanics--even electronics--might drive them out through a habitat for brown bird survivors? I think there always deserve to be earthly enchantments and the soft wheel marks of our passage following where the other creatures go.

I Met a Legend in the Dark

Skiing for exercise in the late, last low glow of a fair Saturday, river running open on my left, firs and oaks and ashes and aspen interwoven not so awfully high overhead, I heard a snap, not a dry wood crack but one elastic live sapling scraping against another, so I stared to my right in search of the animal. Remembering that moment, it in fact took me some weeks to refresh my memory back to the fullest possible detail. Yet I knew without a doubt, as soon as I saw what I saw, what animal had just left the scene. That faint woody click was different from the panic of a deer when spooked. Something on padded paws, with some bulk was plunging southward, opposite my own bearing. I knew that the lingering sunset gloom would give me one chance at an ID. Wolf maybe, I guessed at first, because no, it couldn't be a deer, common as they are. I knew to watch for a defining tail, since all that I'd be able to get would be a quick silhouette.  I knew, though for a few days forgot, that I had seen the tail midair, ropelike, in the shape of C, though continually recalled the front parts, the low-slung body with legs thick as the arms of an ape. The impression left was both those things, the tail, a moment's wink of silhouette, shaped like a C up above the rump, and those short stocky legs the length and thickness of a man's heavy forearms, or an ape's. Cat! I think I said, "oh!" before veering off the trace of path in a degree of shock.

Having cougar in the back of my mind since seeing a housemate's photos on Facebook of cougar tracks the day before, I still forgot to think I could meet the same animal on a skiing hike in dark nearby woods.  Yet what other kind of animal could that shape have been in unfenced private forest in the middle of North America, given those tracks he'd lately found and the momentary springing outline I saw, an animal probably bigger and longer than either of us, scared off as I flapped by on cross-country skis? As I had only seen that silhouette, I'd for better or worse just missed a fully fleshed-out sighting of another American wild animal I had never met anywhere before in the wild. Earlier that same afternoon I had, alongside Lake Superior, viewed a new species of gull from so close up I thought I recognized expression in its face--what are you all staring at??--and beheld it from angle after different angle in full flattering sun. The bird, a rare ivory gull, looked like a marble bust or an art-quality color photo brought to life. Then I had headed over to Pineapple Art Center to unveil and talk about an art proposal making use of pencil silhouettes. This continuum of images--from live and moving to flat monochromatic, to live but silhouetted black against a night-dark forest--seems artistically significant only later.

For the first couple of nights as I lay awake after that startling encounter--in the urgings of many people, dangerous owing to the nature of that kind of beast--I troubled myself with the question: did I really see a long thin tail, held up like a C or uncurling into another shape--or did the power of suggestion, the desire for this spectre to really prove to be a cougar, add an imagined tail to the back end of the bounding-away form? Looking hard, I think, was probably its own reward: I really saw, however fleetingly, what there was to see. The stumpy cat legs, the low-slung long belly. But the other part of the conviction I had had in those seconds as I stood on my skis came back to me--no bobbing white rump and tail of a deer, nor any other obvious tail of the bushy sort belonging to a wolf. The animal sprang away like a cat, or panther, or mountain lion, all of these, because it was one of these, of magnificent size. A legend of the old American wilderness.

What is a silhouette when compared with a fully-formed image? I think it takes its place as the image of all of its kind, while a three-dimensional photo or illustration is of one specimen. Just below is decorative, contemplative artwork I have taken on as an assignment, hinting of types of human, suggestions of personality, categories of motion. I plan on doing another sheet not of human figures but our four-legged, hands-free relatives like the cougar or deer on the run. If I should be so lucky as to glimpse or even gaze upon another mountain lion, or panther, or cougar in broad-enough daylight I wonder what I'll have to report beyond color pattern or perfectly supple, enviable powers of motion--attitude, say, of an animal in the way that we each saw the other and drew our conclusions. A different type of story and artwork to be sure!