Coral Reef Meltdown

(Published at Counterpunch.com)  The past few days I’ve been thinking about Dr. James Speth’s call for “civic unreasonableness” and NASA’s Dr. James Hansen’s appeal for scientists to drop “objectivity” from muting their involvement, communicating to the public the impacts of global warming.

What happens if Virgin Islands’ coral reefs disappear? Imagine climate fundamentally at odds with world economy.

In many of his plays, William Shakespeare used natural disturbances to mirror the transformations of human character. I wonder what he would have made of global warming, a scalable threat to humanity as the Black Death was at that time.

Snorkeling in the Virgin Islands last week, I marveled how the decline of shallow-water reefs is funneling more boats into spots where, by virtue of proximity to cool currents, reef patches still appear functional.

Floating on the surface, swimmers are always transfixed by clouds of blue tangs, lurking barracuda, jacks and yellowtail snapper, seemingly oblivious to how, on the three-dimensional plane of time and space, tens of thousands of years of evolution are breaking apart.

What happens if the coral reefs completely disappear?

People go to places because of the attributes of climate. They get on planes in cold Ohio to cruise ships in Florida to sail to pellucid waters of the Caribbean. On ski lifts in Colorado, for deep and untracked powder snow. Beaches, from Captiva to India.

If the reason people travel to a particular destination dissolves, will local economies survive? Then, climate change may force residents away, too.

It is happening to Inuit villages in the Arctic north, which have been forced to relocate because of rising tides and erosion, and on some South Pacific Islands.

Shakespeare never wrote, “Nature bats last,” nor did he anticipate how the inventions of the Industrial Revolution would turn hostile. (That would wait for William Blake.) Certainly, Shakespeare would not be surprised.

“I personally have done a bunch of ice climbs around the world that no longer exist,” Yvon Chouinard told The Associated Press recently.

Chouinard, a renowned climber and surfer and founder of Patagonia Inc., an outdoor clothing and gear company that champions the environment, added, “I mean, I was aghast at the change.”

We are all aghast, but we are also funneling into airports, departure gates and airplanes, seamlessly contributing to a world economy that is fundamentally at odds with the climate.

The tables are turning: The subtext of the second report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is that in the not-so-distant future the climate will be fundamentally at odds with the world economy.

We are getting signals of this, already. They are buried in rapidly escalating insurance rates in Florida. There is inflationary price pressure on food crops like corn. Part of the reason is the rising demand from Asia, and part, from governmental plans to use corn to fuel solutions to our energy crisis.

But the biggest part of inflationary price pressure will be climate.

If corn can’t be planted reliably because of extreme weather in early spring, or extreme drought in summer, Americans may have enough trouble feeding ourselves — never mind supplying ethanol plants.

Perhaps European Alpine regions can convert to non-winter economies at scale — leaving multibillion-dollar industries like skiing to wither on the vine. There was grass growing in Davos, Switzerland, in mid-December.

But what happens in a place like the Virgin Islands?

In Brussels, over the global climate change report one of the points of disagreement among the world’s diplomats and scientists was whether to state an 80 percent as opposed to a 90 percent certainty that global warming is due to man-made impacts.

But a similar debate whether 80 percent or 90 percent of St. Thomas’ economic activities are threatened by global warming is immaterial.

We already know the answer: Already in the Virgin Islands, every necessity is imported from the mainland.

It is easy enough to say that the risk of global warming is catastrophic. And for those who don’t believe it, to attribute doom and gloom instead of facing up to the opportunities for adaptation.

The seamless operation of the world economy is absolutely dependent on a stable climate. Our reward for taking the risk to drastically reduce carbon-dioxide emissions is, simply, a stable economic environment in which mankind will soldier on.

World markets do seem to be adjusting to the need for a new energy future — but what the glaciers and the coral reefs are telling us, and what the scientists are reinforcing with hard data — is that we need a warp-speed response and not an incremental one.

Much depends on being able to see clearly, and we may take from this exactly the words of the poet and clergyman John Donne, Shakespeare’s contemporary, writing in response to a terrible scourge of illness in England, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”

On Sunday, my yoga teacher’s T-shirt read, “Love THIS life.” For an Easter meditation as I thought about global warming, it needed no further explanation.

Cathedrals in sea decline: Reef should show how creation is knit together

I am asked, often, “I know what you are opposed to, but what are you for?”

How is this for an answer? I am for a sustainable creation. I am for Jerusalem.

Oh, I know: Who is against Jerusalem? Who is for chaos?

Yet the question moves with the questioner, toward a familiar direction: compromise, the magnetic north of politics.

In 15 years of watching Florida’s environment — and intensely now, global warming and climate change — even when land purchases, global assurances and hard lines drawn on a map are held as signs of progress, compromise is no match to the threats.

For a new state capital

Church is a good place for Sunday worship, but to contemplate the miracle of Creation, sometimes all you need to do is take a good walk.

The point of a good walk is obvious to anyone who has taken one. You start in one place and end up in another, even though you return where you started.

Which brings me to Tallahassee, a state capital so full of lobbyists you can’t do business without one handing you a towel when you finish.

Seeing red in the Legislature

The Florida Legislature has a lot in common with red tides. It is easier to see when sunshine makes the toxins light up.

Today the Legislature is aiming to pass a bill to make it much more difficult for citizens to change the Florida Constitution by petition drive.

Scripps, the 30-year Treasury bond and global warming

Managing risk is the job of mothers and fathers, who hope their children will learn well and move forward productively into a challenging world. It is also the job of financial managers responsible for investments and depreciation schedules that measure asset value in decades. Risk is the connecting point between Scripps, the 30-year Treasury bond and global warming.

In the cool Bush world, turmoil beneath the surface

The resignation of Florida’s top environmental officer, David Struhs—who left to take a big corporate job with International Paper—provoked commentary across the state in various tones and decibels.

Struhs, a loyalist if there ever were one, departed on a wave of Jeb Bush’s good will. Unlike his brother’s former Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, whose frank testimony peeled the facade from the George W. Bush White House, Struhs maintained a poker face to the very end.

His letter to Florida Department of Environmental Protection staff, announcing his resignation, reads like a hymn—touting great accomplishments on the way to a better environmental future for Florida—but resonates more as a sermon than a truthful dialogue.

Struhs, like his boss the governor, never tolerated two-way conversations very well. Nor did criticism, however well-founded, ever deter a decision-making process that bears the unmistakable imprint of pre-determined outcomes.