Book Review: Plastic Ocean

As a discouraged environmentalist (I mean really—when states pass legislation that REQUIRE teaching the “denier” side of climate change, what’s left?), I picked up Plastic Ocean by Charles Moore with a sense of dull fascination.

Plastic Ocean, Charles Moore. Penguin USA, New York. 2011. 358 pg.

But two events suggested a mindful look. First, a few months ago I was involved in a casual conversation in the post office lobby where the opinion was voiced that the “Pacific garbage patch” was a hoax. A friend’s response, “So, you’ve been there and looked?” Hummm…

Then there’s the article that appeared in our local papers this week noting that debris from last March’s tsunami in Japan has begun to arrive on shores in British Columbia. Specifically, Tofino, a beach community and Canadian National Park of spectacular remoteness and beauty. The local article reminds us debris will be coming soon to our own remote and beautiful (although “plastic sanded” at times) Oregon Coastline. (To view NOAA’s tsunami debris trajectory visit: http://marinedebris.noaa.gov/info/japanfaqs.html)

Deep Pacific Ocean Debris courtesy of plasticoceanthebook.com

Plastic Ocean, by Capt. Charles Moore, released October, 2011, includes a discussion of the potential of tsunami debris in the larger context of the Pacific gyre’s concentration of plastics which Moore, who’s been following and sampling since August, 1997, describes, not as a vast contiguous floating patch, but rather as a “plastic soup.” His findings are just plain scary, perhaps especially to those who like me trained as a marine biologists. When he talks of “nurdles”, tiny floating particles of busted-up plastic, I can only envision filter feeders, concentrating toxic chemicals associated with the plastics even as they starve, filled with plastic rather than the smaller organisms which are their food. There is much much more in the book which by turns curls my hair (the findings) and warms my heart (Moore’s continued commitment to making the change from a consumer disposable to a durable conserver society because it is The Right Thing to Do). The book is dedicated, “To the generation, not yet born, that creates a world where plastic pollution is unthinkable.”

More Debris courtesy of plasticoceanthebook.com

He ends on the note that is all most US environmentalists these days can muster: “we have the smarts, the know-how, and the imperative. The ocean planet will thank you if you help end its plastic plague….I am a patient man, and I have learned the art of seeing….I know how a few well-placed nudges can alter a course, the way a slight tug on a ship’s wheel will point you toward an entirely different destination.”

If you can take it, please read Plastic Ocean by Charles Moore. ( www.plasticoceanthebook.com). Then go out and start nudging.

Ghost Net, North Pacific photo courtesy of plasticoceanthebook.com

A postscript: Check out this article from yesterday’s (1/27) LA Times about a plastic trashed resort beach in Mexico: www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-beach-pollution-20120128,0,2261593.story

(Suddenly) Winter

After weeks of unusual mostly dry weather, winter rain finally arrived on the Southern Oregon Coast. Storms began to roll in last week and by Tuesday, a day we had to travel north, rain began to fall in earnest.

Thursday, Port © AME

Wednesday weather’s was a nightmare forecast—slashing rain, storm force winds with gusts to 100 mph (!) at Cape Blanco, worst where we would heading—into a south wind down oceanside US 101. Areas of particular concern? Ours: Bandon, Port Orford and Gold Beach. The national weather service’s computerized robovoice warned: Don’t drive, Watch for road debris, Stay off area beaches (high surf, 25+ foot breakers) and jetties. Oh and BTW, surfing and swimming not recommended. (No joke, the computer said that too.)

Flooded Dunes © AME

Taking a chance, we returned. And yes, there were gale force winds on US 101. At Reedsport, we saw half a trailer house in transit, blown over on its side off the road, plastic sheeting waving, tires in the air. By the Sixes River valley the rain was sheeting toward the car as we headed directly into the wind. Cresting the next hill (at the Cape Blanco turnoff) it wasn’t at all hard to imagine 100 mph gusts just six miles west. Entering Port Orford, the Hazardous Winds Next 27 Miles if Flashing sign’s lights were definitely blinking. Stan couldn’t feel his hands for clutching the steering wheel.

Griffs Sandbagged © AME

We headed directly to the port to see if the parking lot was underwater, another of the worst-case predictions. Nope, but all was dark and quiet. Turns out all the dock businesses had sandbagged and left, literally turning off the lights (the electricity had been disconnected) behind them.

Once home, the County Sheriff’s Wednesday morning robomessage phone alert (a first) underscored the storm’s potential. All told we got close to nine inches of rain, over seven of it Wednesday.

Today, we hit the beach to view another high surf event, 25-30 foot breakers. Right now it’s sunny. But we’re just between the acts. We’re supposed to get rain for the next seven days.

It’s beginning to look like winter in Oregon.

Thursday Mists at the Port © AME

2011: A Naturalist’s Year in Port Orford

2011 was a banner year for the Southern Oregon Coast natural history lovers. We had rain (naturally), snow, a tsunami, a threat to one of our most treasured natural areas (stopped by citizen action!), a profusion of wildflowers beginning in March with trillium and skunk cabbage, followed by iris and  tangles of sweet peas and ending in fall in a burst of asters, a brilliant Fourth of July, blue skies and wind throughout summer, a delightful fall and a dry start to winter. We ended the year 21 inches behind in rainfall!

Take a look at our glorious coast as it looked across the seasons. Happy New Year!

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A Lost World: Southern California Dreaming—Part 5

Things of Memory

Think for a moment about a treasured photo of you as a child. Of the surroundings, of your smile or the frown. Maybe your childhood home is in the background of the frame, maybe you are playing on a swing at the park with friends. You get the idea.

Hide and Seek © SR Euston

In viewing even the most forlorn snapshot, tantalizing memories and strong emotions can be illuminated instantaneously. The dark cover of unconsciousness momentarily lifts. Certain parts of the brain become stimulated in strange and largely unknown ways. The result can be conscious memories that startle with their impact.

******

That two dimensional memory-evoking photo you imagined above captured maybe 1/100 of a second of your life. In middle retirement age, this equals about two trillionths (10¹²) of one’s life so far lived. Seemingly even more impossible, those memories dancing on such ephemeral waves continually widen, like ripples from a stone tossed into deep azure waters. The waves move rapidly in mysterious ways.

******

Sometimes the flashing memories break on one another, so to speak. A peaceful but undramatic black and white picture of sycamores somewhere in Southern California miraculously leads me to the Sunday drive along Los Feliz Boulevard near the Hollywood Hills to meet my Aunt, Uncle and cousins at Griffith Park in Los Angeles. I’m imagining we are going to have a picnic of potato salad and sandwiches. Are my grandparents going to be there? I’ll be playing softball catch with Uncle Vern.

******

What about the photo of my brother playing “hide and seek” behind the tree? Was it only a pose? Or was my brother captured peering from behind the sycamore, my father yelling, “freeze — I got your picture, son” ? (Was there a call of “ollie ollie oxen free free free?”) I’m sure it’s summer. I can smell the lawn, the leaves, the air. And I wasn’t even there.

I know the other picture of Dick in the park was carefully composed — my father’s romantic 1930s photographic eye is in full play here.

Brother Dick, 1936 © SR Euston

******

More than simple memory suffuses such mental wanderings. I can only explain it to myself–very poorly– as a complex of full body sensations, a sort of rapid fire full mind and body transformation of the past. How otherwise can these park photos next lead me to a change of seasons, scenes of October brown sycamore leaves. I see them under the mottled whitish bark of spreading sycamore limbs; I hear the sound of my crumbling the big tinder-dry palm-like leaves between my hands;  I smell the slightly acrid but wonderfully evocative autumnal scent; I see muted, subtle autumnal tints of a southern California October. The mental waves are dancing now. The time is late afternoon, and we are driving home from the park. It’s near Christmas. The San Gabriels are bathed in a mauve purple light. Our 7′ Douglas fir ornament-filled Christmas tree will be glistening in the low winter’s light that glances through the window.

What’s next in this cascading alter-world? I will watch the lights on Christmas tree lane out my bedroom window tonight. I love to look at them through a blurry rain-distorted window pain. Not tonight though, but sometimes it does rain around Christmas, even in Glendale.

******

In writing the above few paragraphs, about 1900 seconds elapsed. This means my memory wanderings in a lost world of Los Angeles have lingered about 180,000 times longer than the time it took my father’s Kodak, with its folding bellows and strangely dimensioned

2 1/2″x 4 3/4″ negatives, to capture several 1930s pictures, the visual cue that seemingly started the above cascade of thoughts and reveries and sensations.

First Christmas Tree 1930 © SR Euston

******

Photography is remarkable. The memory is more than remarkable. I’m glad it’s unexplained.   SRE

Was Thornton Wilder an Original Magical Realist? Part 2

So I obtained a copy of The Bridge at San Luis Rey. And read it in two sittings.

What about the movie? Had it captured the book? Oh yes. And even more so.

Cover of Original 1927 Edition

The book is a remarkably compact (less than 50,000 words) literary fable. Its style is flat and direct, although, in fact, the story is quite complex and nuanced. It examines what love is and (mostly) isn’t. It ruminates on literature as a “notation of the heart” and has characters who are scribes (semi-mute twins who have developed their own abbreviated language), letter writers (we’re told the Marquesa’s posthumous collection is a Spanish bestseller), book writers (the compiling of Friar Juniper’s gets him into the Ultimate World of Hurt), and a mysterious “I”  who in Part 1, “Perhaps an Accident”,  wonders if he knows things Juniper doesn’t and then goes silent. All this is carried on against the philosophical backdrop of God’s will and action in the world.

In retrospect, I’m glad in high school I was confronted only with “comparing and contrasting” the small town characters in Our Town.

But really. How could Thornton Wilder have morphed into a Latin American writer? That chronicler of Our Town’s everytown (at least in New England)—how could this be? Was I the first to “discover” Thornton Wilder, magical realist?

In my own mind I wavered. I wanted so much for magical realism to remain in its original purity, essentially a literary style a priori unavailable to any non Latin-American writer. I don’t want magical realism to go toward this—a definition I found in Serendipity, an online magazine devoted to magical realism: “So what’s the difference between magical realism and fantasy? Definitions of what magical realism is and isn’t abound, but for the sake of brevity, let’s say it should incorporate the following: a reality similar to our own, in which the impossible can occur without comment; and a self-aware narrator, prepared to embark on a relationship with the reader outside the one afforded by the story.” Later a passing nod is given to the Latin aspect, quoting another critic who considers magical realism “ fantasy in Spanish.”

No, oh no. To me magical realism isn’t fantasy at all. It’s life, magnified. There are no unicorns or elves or parallel universes. All that happens happens right here on Planet Earth to earthly creatures. To me magical realism just adds another layer of reality to our modern pragmatic, ostensibly empirically-based, one.

And, after a while thinking about it, to me it can only be Latin. The rest of us have darknesses too, but of other cultural types. The setting needs to include the overlay of a not-totally-eradicated native culture clashing with Catholicism, overtly or covertly. So I can (almost) accept Bless Me Ultima, good New Mexican that Rudolpho Anaya is, because the two issues meet. (And besides, New Mexico is only one step away from Latin America.)  But I can’t accept The Time Traveler’s Wife by  Audrey Niffenegger. For many more reasons than just wrong locale, wrong culture. Still, it appears on the goodreads list of popular magical realist novels and has been shelved over 50 times in the magical realism section of bookstores.

So what about The Bridge at San Luis Rey?

Wilder doesn’t come up on a Google search of magical realist authors. At least on compiled lists (Wikipedia and others), or up to Google search’s page 10 (about the first 200 entries.) Even in places where people cast their nets wide enough to include everybody short of J.R. Rowling and J.R.R. Tolkien.

In fact I had to query both his name and MR (as it’s known affectionately by its aficionados, myself included) to find anyone at all who’d seen the link. There are a few. Still, I seem to stand alone in my awe of the scene in which the Marquesa de Montemayor steps into a Velasquez painting to steal a necklace her daughter covets. The Marquesa, drunken ruin that she is, does it quite convincingly in the movie, conversing with the painter and his subjects. In the book she even ruminates about climbing into a Titian one day. And then the story moves on. To me, this scene is the very essence of what magical realism means.

So does Mr. Wilder, good humanist New Englander that he is, make the grade? Let’s see. Setting. Check. Native/Catholic. Check. Events outside mainstream reality. Check. Time altering. Check. Even Self Aware Author. There is that mysterious “I” in Chapter 1. So check.

In the end, that scene with the painting is enough for me. But it doesn’t hurt that it’s the Inquisition, the bridge is heading toward Cuzco, everybody wears black. And there are the llamas. What more could I ask for?

“Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”  from  The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Was Thornton Wilder an Original Magical Realist?

In this season where, even to our Western sensibilities, magic intersects reality (at least for a moment), here is my extended reflection on The Bridge at San Luis Rey. AME

“But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them.” from The Bridge of San Luis Rey

A few weeks ago Stan brought home a DVD, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a 2004 adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s 1928 Pulitzer Prize winner.

Poster for The Bridge at San Luis Rey (2004)

When I was in high school my class read Wilder’s Our Town. Like many adolescents, I found Our Town sufficiently odd in subject and presentation to grant myself a pass on his other works.

So I was totally unprepared for The Bridge of San Luis Rey. From the beginning the movie was overwhelming: lush, difficult to hear, to follow, to figure out, to keep up with. Mostly I was lost, yet completely captivated.

Heading toward the Bridge

Here’s what I could glean: There are five semi-central characters who together step onto a footbridge at San Luis Rey just as it snaps, plunging them to their deaths in the river chasm below. We learn about their loosely interwoven lives through a convoluted, wandering series of flashbacks provided by a Franciscan monk who has obsessively collected data on their lives in a futile attempt to discover God’s will in their deaths.

But there are so many others to keep track of too: a faraway daughter and her royal husband, an archbishop, a viceroy, a sea captain, an abbess, an actress, the other twin, and the friar who ends up burned at the stake, copies of his blasphemous books acting as tinder. Why? He thought he had proved God worked in the world. Didn’t he?

By the end of the film, we finally located ourselves in Peru (with a little Spain thrown in), the broken bridge on the road between Lima and Cuzco. This was thanks mostly to the overwrought cathedrals, the heavy silks, the unbearably dark furniture, the sense of fatalism, the snowcapped mountains at the scene of the tragedy, the llamas. And judging by the long rustling dresses, the donkey carts, and the wigs and foppish attire of the members of court we were pretty sure it was long long ago. The Inquisition gave us some centuries: 16th? 17th? possibly early 18th? But there was still the problem of the Inquisition itself, to which we kept returning as the story flashed forward then back.  What was that all about?

The Marquesa de Montemayor and Friends

But no matter. I was swept away, entranced. My very lack of understanding, my willing suspension of the need for linearity, for placement, the uncertainty about time, the elaborate costumes (who could forget the pallbearers in their grotesquely tall pointed black hats?) the confusing meaning(s) (although I knew in some abstracted subconscious way the meanings were there and terribly important), the darkness, the fatalism, the South American setting. The murmuring. The llamas. It was all there. The filmmaker had created a complete magical realism experience.

But was that the book? (to be continued)

Olana, Frederic Church and Landscape Painting

(Part 2 of 2, Part 1 text and pictures below).

The pictures in the slide show below sum up my autumnal photographic impressions of the great landscape painter Frederic Church’s exotic mansion and estate Olana, overlooking the Hudson River. The grounds, plantings and  and ponds on the estate are the works of landscape architecture, not wild nature as usually painted by Church. The water effects that October day were magical. Rippling wavelets of mutating colors were combining and recombining in startling ways. A bit like my mental impressions of Olana’s slightly surreal Persian inspired mansion.

The question again is why Frederic Church -  one of our most celebrated landscape painters – apparently conceived of Olana as his greatest work of art, when estate and home are so unnatural, so exotic, so influenced by the non-indigenous.

To me, Church in his most famous paintings captured landscape as a drama, sometimes stupendous drama like his Niagara painting. In viewing them I can easily interpret nature as the stage for that drama, even when humans are absent or seemingly insignificant in the painting. Drama implicitly anthropomorphizes the landscape. It’s like Shakespeare’s world stage, and we humans are the players all. In the service of creating excitement and tension and moods, in effect dramatizing nature, whether in art or writing, the human can so easily take center stage.

Of course, the late 18th century and first half of 19th century were the high tide of the romantic movement in art and literature, of the fascination with the “sublime” in art and landscape, of finding spiritual solace and lessons in nature. Nature was also emblematic of personal storm and strife, and of emotional exultation. At about the same time,  Transcendentalists, especially Emerson and Thoreau, read nature in deeper moods, and their writing at times evinces a near immersion in nature’s medium, a pantheism, a nearing to what some of us today call deep ecology.

Clearly Church painted in a time when a new found appreciation of wild nature was in play. The question is whether Church was merely a very skillful painter of effect, or did he sense in nature something deeper, something beyond the human, beyond the emotional impact of the spectacular. His high estimation of startling, exotic Olana would seem to favor the former, but then artists can be notoriously silly about the inspiration for their own work.

Lake Tahoe, Albert Bierstadt

Whatever the role that artful effect had on the works of Church in painting and dramatizing nature back east, Albert Bierstadt out west had it all over him. Mark Twain, for one, thought Bierstadt’s monumental paintings pompously faked nature, which he noted could hold her own. Bierstadt’s “Lake Tahoe” is singularly contemptuous of reality. Here, nature is nothing. Effect is everything.

Considering the history of American landscape painting, and landscape photography for that matter, I have the uneasy impression that really seeing the land in its multitudinous of guises, seeing in nature’s forms the artistic equivalent of “deep ecology, is rare, maybe nearly impossible.

Photographer Ansel Adams’s iconic western landscapes ooze romantic drama. They dwarf the human scale, but they are carefully composed and printed to achieve striking effects calling up human emotions. Adam’s fellow Californian Edward Weston tried to move beyond what he called interpretation, to record nature as nature, the thingness of the object. I’m not sure what that means exactly.  But at times for me he records a rock as though the rock were thinking rock thoughts. Both Adam’s and Weston are great photographers. But maybe Weston looked deeper.

The Tetons and the Snake River, Ansel Adams

But back to the ramparts of the Hudson River. Olana on a crisp Fall day is a great outing. Olana is impressive historically and the view is a knockout, or at least it was that October day. The trouble is, I ask too many questions.     SRE

Questioning Olana

Last month on a family trip “back east” we visited Olana, the fabulous fantasy mansion built by famous Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church (1826 – 1900). Now a New York State Historic Site, Olana is an elaborate Persian-inspired home perched at the top of its surrounding immaculately planned and landscaped rolling 250 acres. It was on this hilltop that 18-year-old Church came to study and paint the spectacular views across the Hudson west toward the Catskills in the company of his mentor Thomas Cole, generally considered the father of the first uniquely American style of painting, the Hudson River School. In 1867 Church purchased the first of several pieces of Olana’s land and spent until the completion of his large studio in 1890, altering and “perfecting” both the building and its original natural surroundings.

Heart of the Andes

Church’s first successes however did not come from his luminous Hudson River landscapes, but rather from the startlingly giant paintings of the wonders of nature he had viewed in his world travels. They include the famous paintings: Niagara (1857, 3 1/2  by 7 1/2 feet), The Heart of the Andes (1859, 5 by 10 feet),  and Aurora Borealis (1865, 4 1/2  x 7 feet).

Niagara Falls

But what we encountered on Olana’s tour was an artist’s home with so little light. The dining room, filled with obvious copies of European paintings, was only missing the heraldic flags to qualify as a version of the Hearst castle.

And yet, Church considered Olana—this ornately painted and corniced building (to me really not a very homey home) with its totally human-manipulated grounds—his greatest artistic achievement. Church, the landscape painter? The painter of nature? This filled me with a vague sense of dis-ease, of cognitive dissonance. That the tour focused on two issues: this house and how much money Church made off his paintings, rather than on the art Church created (and the viewscape he purchased to preserve it undisturbed for himself as the subject for his painting) just added to the sense of puzzlement.

My brief experience at Olana—with its ornate, decidedly inorganic forms, its lordly positioning on the highest hill and its potpourri of old world architecture—raised  a lot of questions. Why would an artist considered to be one of our greatest landscape painters, one who helped define the American sensibility of nature, why would he consider Olana (in one sense an egotistical blot on a still inspiring landscape) to be his greatest work?  (to be continued…)

AN OLANA SLIDESHOW (All photos © SR Euston)

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Editorial: Occupy Wall Street/Gathering Hope

Gathering Hope Tree © SR Euston

It’s nearing the end of day 48 of Occupy Wall Street. Yesterday (remarkably to me) 10,000 Occupy Oaklanders managed to bring the Port of Oakland to a standstill. Although there have been clashes  and arrests there, as well as in other locales around the nation and the globe, overall this massive public demonstration has proved peaceful. It’s obvious that at its core this a nonviolent movement of passive civic resistance and, if necessary, disobedience.

At first the condescending voices of the self-appointed pundits and prophets, those “grown-up” plutocrats, tried in order to: dismiss, brush off, smirk at, marginalize, and demonize these “99%ers” as they have come to be called. (In our little town a letter writer to the local paper fell back on that old 50s’ saw—socialist/marxist/communist. Good grief.) Now the “wise men” are demanding “a plan” and, in the absence of a piece of paper (what no PowerPoint?), expect this (currently) loose cloth of fellow citizens to unravel in short order.

I would suggest the opposite: that the fabric of resistance is growing stronger, the stitches knitting together closer and closer. As we watch the debacle which calls itself our Congress continue to do nothing to ease national and international economic distress, it seems logical that more, rather than fewer, Americans will demand action. We will expect a new civic engagement toward positive action.

In 1995, at the beginning of the Gingrich congressional era, Gathering Hope, summing up nearly two years of citizen dialog about the state of the nation and the power of envisioning the future, stated the following:

America is entering an extraordinary time of uncertainty and challenge. Our democratic institutions are failing in multiple ways to ensure our own security, our children’s future, and the future of the planet itself.  

Understanding the role of power is essential to understanding our current situation. Large, complex, interlocking institutions of power (including corporations, international financial systems, and government) operate within a dehumanizing value system summed up as “modern market individualism” that is inimical to economic and environmental justice. 

A just and sustainable economy in balance with earth ecosystems demands transformation of all institutions toward a responsible democracy. A reformed, legitimized government must restore trust and pursue energetically its role as protector of the commons, guarantor of justice, and trustee for the future. 

The path to a sustainable future requires a renewed citizenship of responsibility. Intense individualism must  give way to care for the commonweal, for the future. We must envision a new social compact which affirms the claims of community and posterity on all our actions.

To this might be added today:

Unless we do, the future—our children’s future—will trail into narrowing corridors of no return.  

Here are the closing words of Gathering Hope. Perhaps it will serve as one of many jumping off points for the movement to come.   Ann

This Citizens Call ends where it began, with a reaffirmation of a civic democracy in which we as citizens proclaim a rendezvous with a new destiny, that of a just and sustainable future. We further affirm our confidence in the power of citizen deliberation, in the need to question power and the necessity of searching for truth in public life. In these affirmations, we accept the challenge of a participatory citizenship that demands that the boundaries of the possible widen, so that we today can say to the future that we have done all we could do.

Editorial: A Time of Optimism, A Time of Danger

In the early 1990s, with the environment in rapid decline, the idea of sustainability emerged. The term implied this question: How does society pass on to future generations a reasonably whole environment and a reasonably stable and fair economy, all within the framework of social justice?

Gathering Hope © SR Euston

In 1993, Ann and I with several others founded an organization with a presumptuous mission: to understand what it meant to be a “sustainable society”. Pretty quickly, it became apparent that sustainability meant lots of things to lots of people. Almost everyone agreed that “sustainability” or “sustainable development” was a good thing, which only reinforced the need for better understanding of this significant but amorphous idea.

Happily, The Sustainability Project (TSP) attracted the involvement of some leading lights in the nascent sustainability movement.

At the time, the high-minded idea of “civic discourse” was in the air. Talking through public decisions, listening carefully, paying attention to facts. Initiatives aimed at local sustainability were active. TSP set out to get a better handle on just what a sustainable society might look like. We applied the model of “civic discourse” as our means of engaging citizens.

The Sustainability Project received a handful of grants. We sponsored a series of two day workshops across the country, with abundant participation by grass roots activists, writers, academics, and folks from the private sector. The question posed at each workshop was both simple and profound: “What is sustainability and how do we as a society achieve it?”

A couple of years into the dialog project, we published a document summarizing the findings of these workshops, Gathering Hope. It represented a big dose of civic optimism in the  face of vast countervailing forces.

Today, sustainability is not much more than a commercial “branding” for products of dubious value. Nonetheless, society is more and more experiencing the inexorable effects of non-sustainability, the reaching of tipping points over which institutions have no control. It’s indeed frightening. The world economy and the earth’s atmosphere are in fact near such tipping points, and many are finally waking up to this fact, politicians and most economists the giant exceptions.

We are now in a time of extreme uncivil discourse. Current political talk about the future is surreal, adolescent and selfish.

This situation was dire in 1995. But the darkness of the shadow hanging over public life, the blackness of its intent, is now truly threatening the legitimacy of our political system, to say nothing about our earthly environment.

Those camping out on Wall Street are engaged in what the document Gathering Hope called “spontaneous politics”. It’s the hope that lies just beyond the fading hopes of my generation.

It will, of course, take more than spontaneous politics to move forces that have captured our political and economic systems. The next steps are critical. From protests and confronting power in the street, to dialog among ourselves, to coalescing around simple but profound demands for new kinds of political organization and power.

It’s all so profound, and yet politics and the media are making a full court press to discredit any and all who question the systems that are hurtling us all into a future without hope for most people or for a sustaining environment.

Let’s hope for the best, do our best, and keep faith in the ability of American “democracy” to redeem itself. If this be revolutionary, so be it.  Stan Euston