Down goes the peloton: American politics and the faltering economy

(Published at Counterpunch.com)  A small percentage of Americans ever heard of the peloton; the tight-knit pack of riders leading a bicycle race. But Americans generally are clueless about so much of what the rest of our trading partners understand: the United States has dropped to the back of the world economic peloton.

Slumbering giant awakens on global warming

On global warming, the American public is slowly rising to attention. Congress and the White House cannot be far behind.

The occasion for optimism is a first-of-its-kind collaboration between evangelical and scientific leaders who met in December to find common ground in the greatest threat to humanity: global warming and climate change.

These are no longer unlikely allies. On Wednesday, the nation’s leading scientists and evangelicals joined in Washington, D.C., to urge action to reverse rapidly escalating environmental problems, including global warming and species extinction.

Florida environment: A wish list for 2007

To greet the new year, there are so many wish lists it is hard to know what to want. So let’s give it up for the environment, in no particular order, that:

Florida’s agencies charged with protecting public health and the environment shall abandon predetermined outcomes based on political expediency.

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.

50 years from now, Florida’s environment

What about environmental issues in 50 years? It is a question recently asked by a friend who will soon be discussing the subject with a group of Florida’s newest lawyers.

Here is the good news:

Florida, on the leading edge of effects from global warming, will lead the nation in changing energy consumption from fossil fuels.

Florida, with unexplained concentrations of mercury pollution threatening public health, will eliminate toxics contributing to the rise in cognitive learning disabilities and chronic disease.

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.

Toxics more valuable than democracy?

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Really? It is worth revisiting these cornerstones of our democracy.

Recently, three farm-worker families in a neighborhood of Immokalee gave birth to severely deformed children—one without arms or legs, one without the capacity to keep his tongue from sliding back into his throat, and one without a nose, an ear and with no visible sexual organs. The story was reported in the Palm Beach Post, “Why was Carlitos born this way?”

Global warming: A tale of 2 nations

The United States and Great Britain share a common language, a passion for football and, when it comes to government response to global warming, nothing much else.

On Wednesday, when the Kyoto Protocol becomes international law, only one will be sulking loutishly on the sidelines: the United States.

While the Bush administration unrolls phrases like “climate variability” to test the drape of its message on the foreshortened frame of American public opinion, the original Red Coats do not mince words.

Britain’s chief science adviser, David King, calls global warming a more serious threat than terror.

Call of the wild: Who will answer?

A normal wrap up of the year’s environment would include a list of acres purchased or not, wetlands protected or not, initiatives started or not. The year 2004 deserves a closer look.
“We can’t even describe what we’re seeing,” said Sheila Watt-Cloutier to Reuters recently because her constituents, Inuit natives, have no words in their language for the impacts of global warming they are directly witnessing.

In the majority party—those leaders who believe that self-interest expressed through the marketplace protects the air, water and natural resources better than rules and regulations—a significant subset also believes failure to protect the environment is good news, signaling the long-awaited Second Coming.

Sex change and salvation

Endocrine disrupters are man-made chemicals that affect our hormonal systems by mimicking or blocking hormones that regulate essential functions of the thyroid, pancreas, ovaries and testes glands.

They are pervasive in the environment, in the water we drink and food we eat and it is time to call them for what they are: sex change agents.

Sex change agents turn normal sperm on a mission from God into sluggish swimmers with deformed heads, tails or midsections, a microscopic analog to fish deformed by endocrine disrupters in our estuaries and bays.