Thursday, December 20, 2007

The Perfect Winter Storm

Our local daily newspaper, the Bangor Daily News, is very good, and its editorial and op ed pages, in particular, are the best kind of this genre: a source of never ending conversation and infuriation.

Last week, in the midst of our second major snow and ice storm of the not-quite-here-yet winter, columnist Kent Ward from up in the County decided to use some newsprint inches by pooh-poohing, alongside a few seemingly “sacred cows,” global warming. He did so from a very particular, traditional Maine viewpoint, one which greatly informs our Down East island fishing culture and is therefore worth further consideration.

This viewpoint has several predominant characteristics, all of which Ward ably illustrated. The first and most obvious here in our own community is a pragmatic “what you see is what you’ve got” approach to the world. Ward’s expression of this characteristic sounds like this: we’ve had more major snowstorms, ice, and cold in the first days of December than at any other time in recent memory; therefore, there is no such thing as global warming.

The second and related characteristic of our rural Maine communities which Ward exemplified in this column is a separation of the human world of cause and effect from the natural world. Snowstorms and cold weather are forces that effect human beings, creating inconvenience and pain; yet their causes are disconnected from any human action.

The third and most important characteristic of Maine communities illustrated in Ward’s column is a natural resources-based fatalism. If “what you see is what you’ve got,” and the natural world is a force of its own, separate from human causation, then there isn’t a damn thing you can do about global warming. Just like the past ballyhoo about a potential “nuclear winter,” Ward writes, concerns about the negative effects global warming are just another creation of the “professional doom-and-gloomers of the world” (the polar opposites, if you will, of the cheery, optimistic, traditional folk in northern Maine).

Our local version of these characteristics sounds like this: the fish aren’t here this year; this has happened before; we don’t know why and we can’t control it; maybe they will be back when they’re ready. Or perhaps an angle like this: property values are increasing; we can’t afford our homes or taxes; “the economy" is a large, natural phenomenon and there is nothing we can do about it.

There is a lot of wisdom in this type of fatalism, which has its deep and understandable roots in rural experience and traditions that for centuries had no way of measuring human impact on our own environment; and in problems that seem so much bigger than we are that they are unsolvable. Fish DO come and go in natural, often unpredictable cycles—just like the weather. Fish and weather are natural elements of our world, with lives and spirit and meaning of their own; they are rightfully mysterious to us.

This traditional Maine viewpoint, however, also helps us to avoid taking responsibility for ourselves and our actions. It’s one thing to believe in god, or to recognize that the world is a bigger and more powerful spirit than our own individual self; it’s another thing to use this knowledge and respect to abrogate our individual responsibilities, as part and parcel of this world.

Luckily for our fisheries, most of our local fishermen are, in their own words, “waking up” to the fact that the demise of ground fish, and potentially lobster, are the direct result of fishermen’s own management of the resources; and they’re working to turn that management around.

What are our similar responsibilities for global warming or escalating property valuations? The tragic aspect of both phenomenon is that they are NOT “natural” or inevitable. They are a direct result of how we, in the richest and most developed country in the world, consume resources.

Our fierce ice and snow storms are a part of, not separate from, global warming. Our high property taxes are a direct reflection of how little we choose to involve ourselves with core community issues via land use ordinances and economic development initiatives.

It’s true, each of these is a very complex ecosystem, in and of itself; and, as individuals, we are small in the face of these much larger issues. But together we are powerful. The earth has born witness to both glacial and tropical ages throughout the millennia and, with our help, is quickly entering another tropical age. Our oil-and-consumption based economy is quickly entering a recession. If we’re unwilling to take both small and large actions to stem the effects of these very human phenomenon—rising tides, droughts, the loss of farms and fish and jobs and the polar ice caps—then at the very least, in another good Maine tradition, we need to be willing to let them go without complaining.

Saturday, December 8, 2007

There's No House like the Opera House

Just in time for the holidays, and travelling with a snow and ice storm since Ohama, we've arrived home to our island and Opera House. From my office window at dusk on Saturday afternoon, I can watch the Island Fisherman's Wives in the parking lot on the commericial fish pier, pouring punch and welcoming Santa Claus and excited families. Behind them, the tiny Isle au Haut ferry, green port lights glowing in the near dark, makes its last trip in to shore.

Tonight we will host a benefit for the Island Food Pantry: 15 to 20 musicians from Northern Maine playing old time country classics, right after a bean supper hosted at a nearby church. Today's melt is turning the roads icy: it is supposed to be bitterly cold tonight and tomorrow. The musicians from Northern Maine are a group of folks who simply like to play music in their houses. We have dubbed them "North Country Country," and this is their second appearance with us. They embody a long tradition on the island: regular folks who love to make music. With luck, some people will brave the icy roads and join us so we can help support the Island Food Pantry. Tomorrow night we present a single showing of Penobscot Theatre's hysterical "Santaland Diaries" -- a more modern and cynical take on the holiday season.

Ho ho ho and see you at the Opera House!

Power to the People

Here is Inushkuk, sitting atop the binocular stand, viewing Niagara Falls on a cold December day. I had not been to Niagara Falls since I was a kid, on a family trip that included both grandmothers; and the only others there with us this past week were a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks, smoking and taking pictures.

The power of the Niagara River is stunning, as is the geological history that created them. Perhaps most interesting is that the falls started considerably further down river than they presently are; and "walked" back to their present location as they eroded the underlying ledge, creating a giant whirlpool, gorge, and more.



The power is stunning and apparent, and it didn't take long for European settlers to begin harnessing this power. The falls' power has been channeled into the first A/C power distribution network since the late 19th century, when Nicola Tesla won the support of George Westinghouse; faced off with Thomas Edison, the famous inventor of D/C electrical appliances; and created a distributed power system for Buffalo. To this day, the hydroelectric generating capacity of the Falls is magnificent and sets an underutilized example for other places in the country.

Our trip through the plains took us through multiple horizons of wind farms; Niagara, a gateway back east, boasts hydropower. The residents of California, Idaho, Wyoming are proud of their wind farms, as, historically, are those of Niagara. As they should be. The production and use of alternative forms of energy should be, as one of our OHA board members said in viewing the wind farm atop Mars Hill in Northern Maine, a point of national pride. It's too bad we don't see more such innovation in New England; which is small enough that almost every such opportunity devolves into a Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) battle.

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Reading Neruda en route to Detroit

It’s cold and blustery, but thankfully not snowing, and we are zipping past the steaming steel mills of Gary, Indiana on route to Detroit—and ultimately, tonight, to Niagara Falls. The madness of steam and wires, tracks and trucks that envelopes the south end of Lake Michigan, is somehow very cheery: we’re still manufacturing steel here! This place is still a working, industrial zone! The mess of a Calumet River slides beneath us, turgid with the greasy output of this manufacturing, and still I cheer it on. A recession is coming, the radio has been warning as we struggle east and homeward, and as the gas burns beneath our tires we feel the weight of this pronouncement begin to bear down on us. Thus the steaming factories and mills of Gary are a cheerful sight . . .

Reading Neruda on route to Detroit—thanks to the sweet roadtrip-gift of his Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair from our friend Jennifer—is amusing in its ironies. “Let your deep eyes close,” Judith reads as I struggle to stay awake, mile after monotonous mile of American fast food culture blurring by us. “There the night flutters./Ah your body, a frightened statue, naked.” Michigan appears to have a greater saturation of Adult Video / XXX Superstores / Exotic (insert Asian-sounding name here) Health-Massage Clubs than any state through which we have yet traveled.

Dearborn. Flint. Motor City! How did this quintessentially American industry—the birth of the assembly line, the manufacture of the automobile—end up just across the border from Canada? Was Henry Ford from Dearborn?? The vaguely rolling terrain is dotted with a crust of snow that seems to have endured since last year; the strawberry and cherry orchards almost invisible against the leaden gray sky and this brownish-white crust. Why is Michigan known for fruit and cars, and not corn and cattle, the way Iowa is? It’s too simple to say “geography” since it is hardly ever the only lever of American economics. Why fruit, why Ford; and is Kellogg Michigan’s Neruda? Inquiring minds on the road--especially when the highway is closed down due to another snow storm!--want to know. We are making our way slowly, slowly back to New England.

Chi Town

“It’s a done deal,” my former college roommate, Melissa, pronounces just before dinner. The 25th anniversary of our graduation from Bowdoin is approaching in Spring 2008, and we are discussing how to insert—for old times’ sake—a political demonstration into the celebrations. Otherwise we’re not much interested in attending.

“The Arctic caps saw so much loss this last year, there’s no real reversing the damage.”

Traveling U.S. interstate highways, it’s pretty clear we’re a people very busy hammering nails into our own coffins and not thinking about it a whole lot. If it were ONLY that the national debt—a kind of abstract reality that works like an invisible hand on each of our lives—has tripled under the G.W. Bush administration, we might be OK. But the number of tractor trailer trucks hauling ton after ton of stuff to consumer over mile after mile after mile of road; the number of cars, including our own big van, driving and parking and spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere: what are we thinking?

The forests of Borneo are said to be shrinking at the rate of three football fields an hour, according to the CBC later that night, as we sit for two hours on a dark Canadian highway in a snowstorm. Another tractor trailer, jack-knifed. It is bitterly cold and windy. As some of my neighbors in Maine might say: what global warming?

As if each of our own experiences, day by day, defines for us the globe.

We give Chanukah and birthday presents to Jordan, who will turn nine in a few days. She is reading a series of illustrated chapter books called Babymouse, which feature quite the feminine, middle-school-age mouse in strong, self-esteeming building narratives. Jordan is an amazing soccer player and does karate as well.

While some things stay the same, some things do change.