Dear Al Gore, are we 20 percent alongthat ten-year path you challenged us with two years ago (see my blog "Al GoreRhythm," 20 July 2008)? You said that was our only chance. When I hearstatistics like "in 2025, there will be 17 percent less of this or that," Iknow it's too late. Insects will multiply to replace all those extinct bees. Dowe need that? I think Washington, DC, is the only place with a stable climatethese days, though a few tornadoes teased a few months ago when opposite frontscollided in mid-winter.
Where do they get those jars of honeystill on sale in the supermarket? Someplace far from here, nodoubt. Now let us list the rapidly diminishing species of the world:many varieties of fish, bees, polar bears, coral reefs, and the Amazon Jungle,that great tangle of flora that has been such a source of oxygen to the worldalong with its aboriginal tribes, who will no doubt perish or assimilate intothe cities, that is, culturally perish, another sort of tragedy.
According to another website,there are 4,000 active drilling platforms in the Gulf. That probably doesn'tinclude the new drilling permits issued by our administration after thehealth-care bill was passed. "Lef-tright-left"--that's the way it's gotta be.
The U.S. consumes 40 percent of the earth's oil supply--stimulating the oil-richNiger Delta "drill, baby, drill."
According to http://agonist.org/firstnigeria" Michael Collins,June 18, 2010:
Since the early 1960s, oil spilled fromShell pipelines has fouled their region. Food andfresh water sources vanished.Their economy collapsed. While Shell and theNigerian elite reap their rewards,the people [the Ogoni, whose life expectancy as aresult is 40] in the polluted oil regions live with steadilydeclining jobs, incomes, and living standards.
The amount of oil spilled in just this regionduring the 1970s far exceeds that of the 1989Exxon Valdez disaster. The problem hasbeen continuous since then. Most of it is stillsitting there.
In some critical ways, oil exploration, pollution,and the reaction of Shell and the Nigerian governmentparallel the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe.
There is virtually no regulation of oil explorationand operations in Nigeria. Similarly, new deep-waterdrilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico were grantedwithout environmental impact studies.
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Quick Segue
Speaking of endangered worlds: IfSwitzerland can be Switzerland, France France, New Zealand New Zealand, whycan't America be America? we ask ourselves again andagain since Langston Hughes first gave voice to this dilemma decades ago.Because America the abstraction,the embracing Lady Liberty who just turned 125, the greatest democracy ever, isriddled with ideological holes, bullets in the heart of the dreams broadcastedglobally, to which thousands of people risk their lives to immigrate everyyear.
"There are both black and whitesnakes," Tony Award-winning actor Laurence Fishburne as Thurgood Marshall toldus today at the Eisenhower Theater at Kennedy Center. In a performance of theBroadway hit introduced by the playwrightGeorge Stevens Jr., Fishburne solosfor 90 minutes reminiscing about Marshall's remarkable life story, the firstAfrican American to be appointed to the Supreme Court who first attracted theworld's attention with his fight to help America become America, arguing Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, alandmark case which led to the end of institutionalized segregation.
Black and white snakes?
No ethnic group or race is flawless. Todayan African American woman tried to bully me out of my back-row seat when therewere at least two empty ones to my left. I had some sense of what Rosa Parksmust have felt back in the early fifties, though I am not schooled innonviolence the way she was. I just said no.
She doesn't own Thurgood Marshallanymore than the Jews own Albert Einstein, I later thought. People of the worldclass belong to us all.
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