A letter in this week’s Mountain Xpress reminded me of an essay that was aired on WNCW and in print nationally about 15 years ago (and updated in 2002 to reflect the bee catastrophe then unfolding). (Thanks to Kristen MacLeod for her lovely tribute to the Mourning Cloak.)

On a wing and a prayer
by Cecil Bothwell

Last August we had out-of-state visitors on our mountain. They were impressed with the beauty of the Appalachian Mountains and enjoyed the relative cool above 3000 feet. But the highest praise and loudest exclamations were reserved for the insects.
“So many butterflies!” they exclaimed.
Fair enough. We do enjoy a great diversity of beautiful butterflies. If that were the only comment you might think that we just happen to have more members of the order Lepidoptera here than they do back in flatland. But listen to the next line.
“I haven’t seen so many since I was a child!” said one. “We don’t have butterflies like these anymore,” lamented another.
Do you hear the drumbeat of death in those words? No? Well, you should. There is a slow change moving across the land and it is at minimum profound and disturbing. It may be a catastrophe.
Pollinator populations are collapsing in many places around the world. That is, the insects, birds and mammals that fertilize flowers by transferring pollen from one to the next, are in sharp decline. Last year the disappearance of honey bees in the mid-west and Carolinas made the news, but honeybees are only the most familiar of the pollinator species.
Without pollination we and the rest of the animals on earth would lose our lunches. And our breakfasts and dinners. Most flowering plants need help with fertilization of their seeds, and the animal forms that have co-evolved with them do the job perfectly. There are butterflies and moths with long probosci that can reach deep into tubular flowers, and hummingbirds with a similar long reach. Many varieties of bats pollinate night blooming flowers while they feed on nectar. And thousands of species of bees, from tiny bright colored sweat bees to the huge dark carpenter sort, move pollen grains from anthers to stigmas on weeds and trees and orchids and peas. There are beetles and ants and even mosquitos who each have an important role to play.
In many cases flowers and the critters that fertilize them are very tightly entwined, one-on-one, so that neither can survive without the other. Others depend on just a few species of plants or animals. In every case they are part of the great chain of life which created and maintains the living world we inhabit.
But, back to the butterflies. Why did my guests react so strongly? They live in Ohio in a residential area between a city and surrounding farms. Because of pesticide sprays on lawns and fields, wild insects and flowers have disappeared. Many of the plants that sustain butterflies and moths are considered weeds and are subject to eradication programs.
On top of the chemical assault, habitats are fragmented by cleared fields and lawns that replace native vegetation with imported monocultures. If a butterfly, or a hummingbird or bat for that matter, cannot find a high enough concentration of food in an area, it will move on, or starve to death.
The problem would be merely aesthetic if we lost life forms that we find beautiful and appealing. But our understanding of the web of life is still very rudimentary. We have only a sketchy appreciation of the intricacy of plant and animal interactions that maintain soil fertility, atmospheric oxygen levels, water purity and other chemical systems that are the foundation of life. We know that humans cannot live alone without any other species, but we have no clue which species those might be. Pollination is the crucial juncture for all flowering plants, and the disappearance of pollinator animals will impact our lives in ways we cannot foresee. Yet we continue to abet an extinction spasm that will take hundreds or thousands of critters and plants out of the loop forever.
You can help. Encourage weeds and wildflowers. Let part of your lawn go wild. Learn to live with wasps and bees and beetles and ants and even mosquitos. Repel insects with screens, long sleeves or incense instead of killing them. If you garden choose organic controls. In silviculture avoid herbicides and allow space for mixed stands. Oppose clearcuts. Remind others of the vital services living systems provide us, and the urgent need to protect whole natural communities. Learn more by contacting the Forgotten Pollinator Project. Email .
If you marvel that a fragile Monarch butterfly migrates thousands of miles, or that a delicate swallowtail survives a tornado, remember this: those tissue paper wings very likely carry our own future as well.

(This essay is included in Gorillas in the Myth: A Duck Soup Reader, Brave Ulysses Books, Second edition 2008)

(The title of this post came from David LaMotte who wanted to come up with a more positive aphorism than killing two birds …)

A Swiss company, The Wall AG, has developed a low cost home built of recycled paper that can be quickly deployed to house the homeless. The 390 square foot house costs about $5,000 and weighs less than 2,000 pounds, but is sturdy and can be securely fastened to a foundation block.

Having lived in a 400 square foot home myself (with a companion) for several years in the 1980s, I can attest that it is ample space to carry on a life.

This is also a solution to the glut of recycled paper that is piling up as China cuts its import of paper waste. Win. Win. This could easily become part of the plan to provide affordable housing in the U.S. and fits right in with the plan to end homelessness in 10 years (we’re getting close to 7 years left on that one.)

For more info: click here.

This thoughtful piece came my way and I thought it worth sharing in light of the Israeli invasion of Gaza.

Opening Statement
by Andrew Silver

(For panel on the Middle East at the 3rd Annual Social Justice conference, Charlotte, NC 4/7/02)

I am a Jew. I am an Israeli, and for most of my life I have been a Zionist. I believe that the Jews are entitled – by history, by tradition, even our own myths – to a Jewish state. To desire one’s own state is not racist per se. I think that the Kurds, the Ibo and Ogoni tribespeople of Nigeria, the Mayan Indians of Chiapas and Guatemala, the Indians of the Amazon rainforest, and the Montagnards of the central highlands of Vietnam ought to have their own states, or at least autonomy and guarantees against incursions from alien peoples. They have had autonomy and freedom in the recent past, and it ought never to have been taken away from them. So with Israel, I thought . . .when I emigrated there in 1966 with a little encouragement from my draft board in Nashville, Tennessee.

During 14 years in Israel, however, I became persuaded that Israel is, indeed, a racist state, that the racism of Jews toward Arabs is psychologically much the same as the racism of whites toward blacks amid which I grew up in Tennessee. The model for Israel is not that of a just democratic state not bothering and not being bothered by its neighbors. Rather Israel has chosen the South African Model of Apartheid – imposing its domination on millions of indigenous non-Jewish people.

When Israel suddenly gained possession of the remaining 22% of Palestinian lands in 1967, it seemed to me that the obvious deal, land for peace, would be made within months. The Palestinians, oppressed and embittered during 20 years of domination by Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, could now have their own state. Israel, being technologically and economically so far advanced over neighboring countries could help a new Palestinian state get established with a mini-Marshall plan, helping the Palestinians to enjoy a con-dominium of progress mutual cultural enrichment, and prosperity, while maintaining their own national identity and the Jews theirs. Thus, I believed, a just peaceful and democratic Jewish state could exist, sharing resources and national aspirations, with a neighborly Palestinian state – proving to be a better friend to the Palestinians than the backward Arab states.

But movements suddenly arose in Israel with ideas and goals which seemed totally alien to me as a Jew. Masses of people followed the calls of primitive religious fanatics, claiming that God had given the whole land of Israel to the Jews, and that they must keep it forever. There was always a debate about needing to keep the territories for security – but it was always nonsense, and not the real reason. The real reason why the majority of the Jewish people insisted on keeping the West Bank and Gaza was their primitive messianic Chauvinism, as barbaric as the Nazis’ dream of a thirty year Reich with Deutschland uber alles, and their visceral racist contempt for the Palestinian people.

In fact the situation that Israel has put itself in over the past 35 years has a striking parallel with the subjective situation that Nazi Germany was in. (Any of you who heard my previous talk may think that I am obsessed with Naziism – well, I am). Forty years ago I wrote an undergraduate thesis on the psychology of totalitarianism, and in most of the history I have lived through since then, I have seen the same themes of irrational collective desire to dominate and destroy other people played out over and over again. “Never again,” is a grand lie – the truth is “Ever again.”

The Nazis had a problem – they wanted to have a reborn and expanded German nation – but large numbers of non-German people were living in their lands. They needed to get rid of the Jews, Gypsies, and other inferior races, and they did. they found a logical solution. The Israelis wish to have a reborn and expanded Jewish nation. But 5 million Jews are living in the territory with 4 million others, mostly Palestinians. Issrael, Sharon in particular, wishes to keep the land but not have the Palestinians there. What are they to do? For 35 years they have tried to make life unbearable, at least for the 3 1/2 million Palestinians in the territories. In recent years in particular, they have denied the Palestinians the most elemental human rights.

Our American founding fathers led a fight against British tyranny. But that tyranny was far less severe than the Israeli tyranny in Palestine. The American colonists at least could build houses without having them torn down by the king’s soldiers. They were free to exploit the land and its resources. The king’s agents did not systematically assassinate rebel colonists. The Palestinians are deprived of most of the meager resources of their land, most now are acutely impoverished because of Israeli closures and oppression, and dozens have been murdered by Israeli state terrorism.

Given the logic of the situation created by Israel, it now must either find a final solution with the kind of unrelenting logic that impelled the Nazis, or it must live in constant conflict with the people it is oppressing. Following the latter course Israel can never find security, as an oppressed people can not be expected to cease fighting for its freedom. The situation in Israel/Palestine now resembles a classic colonial war of liberation, with unspeakable atrocities on both sides, as occurred during the French-Algerian war and the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. Restoration of colonial peace and order is inconceivable. The struggle can only continue until Israel abandons its colonial dreams, or is vanquished.

When I left Israel in 1980, I saw the Israeli government, in its pursuit of colonial policies, as the greatest enemy of the spiritual integrity and of the physical security of the Jewish people. Its policies logically can lead only to catastrophe after catastrophe. But it continues these policies because it is assured of US support, and that US support is assured by the blind, ignorant support of Israel right or wrong that most American Jews insist on. This support for a Fascist state is a catastrophe to all Jewish people as great as the holocaust. The latter wreaked the near physical destruction of the Jewish people. The support of Jews for Israel is wreaking the total moral and spiritual destruction of the Jewish people.

Here’s the link to the original.

From today’s NYT:
(Why was the plan blocked? An e-mail message circulated among Senate Republicans declared that denying the auto industry a loan was an opportunity for Republicans to “take their first shot against organized labor.”)

to read the whole thing, click here

Latest research indicates that a class of protein acts to direct reproductive change.
Amazing stuff (click here).

The global financial crisis will see the US falter in the same way the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. The era of American dominance is over
by John Gray (writing for The Guardian)

Our gaze might be on the markets melting down, but the upheaval we are experiencing is more than a financial crisis, however large. Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably. The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over. (To read the rest, click here.)
***
I commend Gray’s article to you and post below my own observation:

During my run for Buncombe County Commission last spring, I frequently observed that “Reaganomics has run its course and failed. The Reagan Revolution is over. Privatization and deregulation have not worked for the benefit of the American people.” I can’t claim any special insight, I simply follow the news. But, I caught some noisy flack from critics who said I had no idea what I was talking about.

I feel no complacency in being proved right. We need to pay close attention and get to work. As Thomas Friedman has been telling anyone who will listen during his current book tour for Hot, Flat and Crowded, there has never been a revolution in which someone didn’t get hurt. Whether the coming American revolution is orderly and civil or violent and bloody, there will be pain. There will be tears.

It’s clear that the bail-out being proposed in Washington is a sop to the rich. At minimum, we should demand that universal health care be wrapped into the deal. If we can’t afford universal health care, we can’t afford to bail out a bunch of greed-heads who gambled. Better still, let’s enact Dennis Kucinich’s plan.

***

Kucinich’s Main Street Recovery Plan

1. Health Care for All: Insurance companies make money not providing health care.  As the co-author of HR 676, a universal, single-payer, not-for-profit health care system, Medicare for All, I understand millions of Americans want health care that is accessible and affordable.

Medicare for All will help businesses large and small, create jobs as well as save the jobs of thousands of people including those of doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers who are currently leaving medicine because it is run by the insurance companies. $1 in every 3 dollars of the $2.4 trillion spent annually in America for health care goes to the insurance companies. If we take that money ($800 billion in unproductive wasteful spending) and put it directly into care, we will have enough money to cover everyone. We are already paying for Medicare for all, but not receiving it. HR 676 changes that!

2. Prescription Drug Benefit for Seniors: HR 6800 is the MEDS Act, which provides a fully paid prescription drug benefit, under Medicare, for all seniors. I wrote this bill to help alleviate the economic pressure that comes from the high cost of prescription drugs. We can pay for it by letting the government negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical companies as well as by permitting re-importation.

3. Stop the Oil Companies’ Price Gouging: As you know, I was the first one to step up to challenge of the corrupt price gouging and market speculation of the oil companies by proposing  a windfall profits tax, on oil and natural gas companies, with revenues put into tax credits for the purchase of fuel-efficient American-made cars. However, it may be that nationalization is the only way to put an end to the oil companies’ sharp practices.

4. Protecting the American Homestead: As Chairman of the Domestic Policy Oversight Subcommittee, I am working to protect your basic right to have a roof over your head, whether as an owner or renter. I have investigated and helped to expose the manipulation of mortgage markets, and I am crafting a new federal policy so that neighborhoods with the highest number of foreclosures get the most help.

5. Jobs for All: Congressman LaTourette and I have co-authored the bi-partisan New Deal-type jobs program, HR 3400, “Rebuilding America’s Infrastructure.” It will create millions of good-paying new jobs rebuilding our roads, bridges, water systems and sewer systems.

6. American Manufacturing Policy: I am drafting the American Manufacturing Policy Act, which for the first time, will state that the maintenance of U.S. steel, automotive, and aerospace industries are vital to our national economic security and must be maintained through  integrated public-private cooperation, new trade policies, and investment.

7. Works Green Administration: I am also drafting plans for a green New Deal  jobs program, in which the government creates millions of jobs by incentivizing the design, engineering, manufacturing, distribution and maintenance of millions of wind and solar micro-technologies for millions of homes and businesses, dramatically lowering energy costs and reducing our dependence on oil.

8. Fair Trade: The U.S. has lost millions of good-paying jobs, and more jobs have been out-sourced. As you know, I have helped to lead the way in opposition to trade giveaways. I strongly urge repeal of NAFTA.  We must include workers’ rights, human rights and environmental quality principles in all trade pacts. We must also protect the Great Lakes’ water resources from the reach of multi-national corporations.

9. Education for All: I know families need help with the rising cost of day care. That is why I introduced HR 4060, a universal pre-kindergarten program to ensure that all children ages 3-5 have access to full-day, quality day care.

10. Protecting Pensions:  I am working to change bankruptcy laws so pensioners’ claims will be first, ahead of banks, and that corporate executives who misuse workers’ pension funds are subject to criminal penalties. I want to fully fund the Pension Benefit Guarantee Board.

11. Social Security: From my first moments in Congress, I have exposed Wall Street’s efforts to privatize Social Security and attacked it in the Democratic Caucus when it was being proposed. Can you imagine where seniors would be today if Social Security had been turned over to the stock market? Social Security is solid through 2032 without any changes.

12.  Protect Bank Deposits: I will work to make sure the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has sufficient funds to provide for insurance of deposits up to $200,000 at all banks and savings and loans. This is an urgent matter since so many banks are said to be vulnerable.

13. Protect Investors: Bring back strong regulation to Wall Street. As Chairman of the Domestic Policy Subcommittee, I challenged the Wall Street hedge fund speculators as a threat to small investors. I intend to keep active watch over the machinations on Wall Street.

14. Strength through Peace: You’ll remember when I led the effort against the ill-conceived Iraq war, which has now cost more than 4,100 US soldiers’ lives, cost U.S. taxpayers between $3 trillion and $5 trillion, and resulted in the deaths of more than a million Iraqis.  We must bring our troops home and end the war. We must engage in diplomacy. We must reduce the military budget, and we must stop outrageous cost overruns by the likes of Halliburton.

15. Safety in America: I am proud of my work for peace. In July 2001, I introduced a bill, which today is HR 808, that for the first time creates a comprehensive plan to deal with the issues of violence in American society, particularly domestic violence, spousal abuse, child abuse, gang violence, gun violence, racial violence, and violence against gays by establishing a Cabinet-level Department of Peace and Restorative Justice. This proposal has sparked a national movement and when implemented will save tax payers millions of dollars.

16. Monetary Policy: It is long past the time that we looked at the implications of our debt based monetary system, the privatization of money created by the 1913 Federal Reserve Act, the banks fractional reserve system and our debt-based economic system. Unless we have dramatic reform of monetary policy, the entire economic system will continue to accelerate wealth upwards. I am currently working on drafting legislation for an ‘American Monetary Act’ to address these and other issues in order to protect the economic wellbeing of America.

It would be sort of funny to use the tired old joke, “Their lips move,” but the truth of the matter is that they occasionally tell the truth. For instance, John McCain really doesn’t know how to send an e-mail, and Sarah Palin’s state really is pretty near Russia.

Just wanted to give credit where credit is due.