#MinnesotaClimateWeek is this week. SO WHAT?

We're going to suggest, rather strongly, that conventional wisdom isn't. Three headlines from today's Star Tribune are examples of our supporting evidence:

• 'We're all in big trouble': Climate panel sees a dire future


• Average cost of family health plans pushes above $20,000 for first time


• Memo detailing Trump Ukraine call adds fuel to impeachment clash

Image Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

We haven't reached conclusions how much of the problems indicated by those stories are attributable to globalism, capitalism, neoliberalism, other, and / or all of the above. There's no doubt more than enough guilt to go around. We have concluded that very little of these issues should come as a surprise to any of us. Here's why:

• Silent Spring -- published 1962


• Design With Nature -- published 1969


• The Limits to Growth -- published 1972


• Bioneers -- founded 1990


• Limits to Growth, 30 Year Update


• Earth Overshoot Day 2019 -- July 29th

It's probably a good think that the Walz Administration has proclaimed this week as Climate Week. Unfortunately, the proclamation commits the state to no more than continued talking about what we should do. The World has been celebrating Earth Day since 1970. Perhaps we've slowed the rate of degradation of the life systems on which we depend, but we haven't achieved a restorative balance.

[UPDATE: Walz says Minnesota will adopt higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks. (me: Progress comes in frustratingly small increments)]

It's time to focus on real solutions that work for the 99% of the people on Earth who aren't billionaires. Henry Ford had the basics of a viable approach when he paid his workers enough that they could afford to purchase the product they made. One of the United States' earliest real patriots covered the problems we face rather nicely with this brief statement:

We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.
Benjamin Franklin

Science

By Alison Hawthorne Deming

Then it was the future, though what’s arrived   

isn’t what we had in mind, all chrome and   

cybernetics, when we set up exhibits

in the cafeteria for the judges

to review what we’d made of our hypotheses.

The class skeptic (he later refused to sign   

anyone’s yearbook, calling it a sentimental   

degradation of language) chloroformed mice,   

weighing the bodies before and after

to catch the weight of the soul,

wanting to prove the invisible

real as a bagful of nails. A girl

who knew it all made cookies from euglena,

a one-celled compromise between animal and plant,   

she had cultured in a flask.

We’re smart enough, she concluded,

to survive our mistakes, showing photos of farmland,   

poisoned, gouged, eroded. No one believed

he really had built it when a kid no one knew   

showed up with an atom smasher, confirming that

the tiniest particles could be changed   

into something even harder to break.

And one whose mother had cancer (hard to admit now,   

it was me) distilled the tar of cigarettes   

to paint it on the backs of shaven mice.

She wanted to know what it took,

a little vial of sure malignancy,

to prove a daily intake smaller

than a single aspirin could finish

something as large as a life. I thought of this

because, today, the dusky seaside sparrow

became extinct. It may never be as famous

as the pterodactyl or the dodo,

but the last one died today, a resident

of Walt Disney World where now its tissue samples

lie frozen, in case someday we learn to clone

one from a few cells. Like those instant dinosaurs

that come in a gelatin capsule—just add water   

and they inflate. One other thing this

brings to mind. The euglena girl won first prize

both for science and, I think, in retrospect, for hope. 

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