From the french passager which means "to pass by"

I have been reading about the passenger pigeon, which reportedly roosted by the hundreds of thousands over areas of hundreds of miles in Wisconsin at one point. Martha, the last captive passenger pigeon and the last known of them all, died in the Cincinnati Zoo on Sept. 1, 1914. I always think about her on my birthday.

I have been reading Wikipedia and even Wikipedia is enough to break the heart:

"One method of killing was to blind a single bird by sewing its eyes shut using a needle and thread. This bird's feet would be attached to a circular stool at the end of a stick that could be raised five or six feet in the air, then dropped back to the ground. As the bird attempted to land, it would flutter its wings, thus attracting the attention of other birds flying overhead. When the flock landed near this decoy bird, nets would trap the birds and the hunters would crush their heads between their thumb and forefinger."

I think Wisconsin, my birthplace birthright and motherland, ought to be filled with dark clouds of pigeons.

Lately I have stopped really reading about global warming. The Cancun talks. Ocean acidification. Ice melt. The Republicans' plan to hold Scopes-esque hearings on climate change next year. It grinds at my kidneys to think about. There's too much else on my to-do list. Poems and plans and projects.

Plans abound to dive back into the world of bad news in 2011. Flippers & oxygen tank at the ready.

If the world is really ending in 2012

More people should read books with science fiction and fantasy and any other word for "alternative version of life as we know it" involved. The world is a strange place, and the likely future seems in many ways sadder and more wilted, but it is stranger and harder to cope with if you've never mentally visited the "what ifs."

I think, if we are parachuting into a new universe, and it is in one way or another dystopian, at least those who have read The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx&Crake, Pastwatch, The Player Piano, etc etc etc, will not be shocked that such things can exist. We have visited that country in our minds. It's grim country, but we will not be flattened by shock. Maybe we'll get our sleeves rolled up and get started on whatever meager repairs we can that much sooner. I like to think, anyway.

I also have this theory about zombies. Because we've incorporated them so smoothly into our pop culture mythos, we're more likely to survive them because we already know what they are and have a set of possible survival strategies to start out with. They may be completely wrong, but at least we won't be paralyzed. I like to think, anyway.

With a big "I am an atheist" disclaimer

So! U.S. Rep John Shimkus, who is vying to lead the House Energy and Commerce Committee next term, is a bible-thumping climate change denier of the first order.

Look! A link to a video! I apologize for the expletives in the subtitles. If you are too lazy, basically he reads a passage or two about the Flood, to the gist of, "After the Flood, God promised there would be no other catastrophes," and says that some religious theorists think the earth is actually carbon-starved, there is no surfeit of carbon.

I don't understand religious people who think that if God has promised them something, it means we as human beings have to do nothing to fulfill that promise.

I realize there is a lot about faith that I was never exposed to. But I also have read enough to know that there are plenty of people who think that even if they've been promised something, they have to WORK for it. And that shall-we-say-God might not say verbatim what will happen, but rather the gist of what will happen. Riddles might be involved. Nothing looks like what it turns out to be. Etc.

And if shall-we-say-God has assured there will be no world-destroying events, perhaps really what shall-we-say-God has said is that human beings are going to pull through with the skin of their teeth because they worked their asses off to keep climate change from getting as terrible as we have heard, over and over again, it has a high likelihood of getting. It seems ridiculous, even if you live in a universe with a conscious, benevolant Creator, to assume that if they have promised you safe passage, you should just go ahead and keep punching holes in your rowboat.

Also, in the passages Shimkus quotes in that video, there's really nothing that says, "Global warming won't seriously screw with the human race." Instead - "Man will not destroy this earth." The big worry about climate change is that we will change the earth so much that it destroys us, and other life. The earth itself will be fine, honeybee.

This week has been like a dream, crawling from one bizarre task to the next. Today I am in a strange city with no time to really explore it, after a long night wandering a hospital, befriending nurses, breathing in time with the beeping of a thousand different machines, trying not to gawk at the neurosurgical patients with wires and tubes streaming from their skulls like futuristic hair.

I want more than anything else to be home in Wisconsin, stirring up the strange brew that our politics have become. I am trying not to be scared about the future, but I am feeling particularly fiercely in love with/loyal to the concept of "a Wisconsin" now that its fate is in the hands of people whose values are not mine. This is probably normal for political losers. I just feel like there's more to hash out, and I feel personally responsible for fixing it all, somehow. This is narcissism, truely, but I'm not alone.

November

I spent my election night at the victory party for the guy whose victory I feared most. Some thoughts on Dane101 today.

Then I went home and said goodbye to an old friend.



I'm a one-cat cat lady now. This was also my first non-goldfish pet death, so I'm wallowing in it a bit. I think burial feels especially grim when you walk away from it with a shovel in one hand and a lantern in the other.

There are good things ahead, though.

There's a really flabbergasting slideshow on the NYT website of photos from nuclear weapons testing between 1945 and 1962.

If you have 3 minutes for an audio voiceover, photographer George Yoshitake, who himself lost family at Hiroshima, has good things to say.

Dear Empire

"These are your dead. They are buried above ground, so it is hard to say they are buried. Often, they are among us: a parasol on a sunny day, a partnerless shoe.

The lupine shudder with every gust. Their purple buds thread up like kitchen brushes from the graves. There are many gardens here. There are many feet wearing uneven treads on the soil.

If you took a photo negative of me right now, you would see the heat outlines of ghosts. The upright caskets are violent with their exhaust. This is me placing flowers on a stone. This is me besides the wisteria, twisted around the gate's trellis. These are your solar flares."

- Oliver de la Paz

Oil boil toil trouble

Hey, so you know how the Gulf of Mexico is slowly turning into a wasteland, ja? Well, there have been a couple really good stories lately about the fact that spills like this have been happening in Nigeria's oil-producing regions for more than 50 years.

From the New York Times last week:

(By some estimates) The Niger Delta, where the wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years...

That's as much as 546 million gallons of oil. Shell, one of the companies which operates there, blames sabotage and theft. But:

Richard Steiner, a consultant on oil spills, concluded in a 2008 report that historically “the pipeline failure rate in Nigeria is many times that found elsewhere in the world,” and he noted that even Shell acknowledged “almost every year” a spill due to a corroded pipeline.

So it's not just BP (and for the last time, please stop calling it British Petroleum), and it's not just here. That doesn't make it less of a tragedy. But it's a reminder that rather than boycott BP (whose gasoline is actually sold everywhere, and who does not own most individual BP stations), the most important thing we can do is find ways to stop giving any oil companies our money. None of them is prepared to deal with major safety risks like deep-water drilling, and at least a few have proven themselves unwilling to deal with easily-fixed safety risks like a corroding pipe in an impoverished West African nation.

A good summary of Nigeria's oil issues:

Anup Shah, Nigeria and Oil, Global Issues, Updated: July 03, 2004

The Redemption of Christopher Columbus

From Pastwatch, a most excellent science fiction work by Orson Scott Card, 1996

Some people called it "the time of undoing"; some, wishing to be more positive, spoke of it as "the replanting" or "the restoring" or even "the resurrection" of the Earth. All these names were accurate. Something had been done, and now it was being undone. Much had died or been broken or killed, and now it was coming back to life.

This was the work of the world in those days: Nutrients were put back in the soil of the great rain forests of the world, so the trees could grow tall again. Grazing was banished from the edges of the great deserts of Africa and Asia, and grass was planted so that steppe and then savanna could slowly reconquer territory they had lost to the stone and sand...In great preserves the surviving animals learned how to live again in the wild. All the nations of the world had an equal claim on food, and no one feared hunger anymore...

It should have been a happy time, with humanity pressing forward into a future in which the world would be healed, in which a comfortable life could be lived without the shame of knowing that it came at someone else's expense. And for many...it was. But many others could not turn their faces from the shadows of the past. Too many creatures were missing, never to be restored. Too many people, too many nations now lay buried in the soil of the past. Once the world had teemed with seven billion human lives. Now a tenth that number tended the gardens of Earth. The survivors could not easily forget the century of war and plaque, of drought and flood and famine, of desperate fury leading to despair. Every step of every living man and woman trod on someone's grave, or so it seemed.

I first read this book when I was 14-15-16ish and think of it often. In that story, though, the world is saved from catastrophic climate change (you know, the one everyone's still afraid of) because some people go back in time and divert the mission of Christopher Columbus just enough to save the indigenous Americans and alter the course of the United States dramatically.

Hey, have I been talking about all of the same things lately? Yes, it is true. I'm chewing my way toward finding something productive to do with my "desperate fury leading to despair." Apologies, maybe, for dragging you through the process with me.

June is national ass-kicking month.

Please remember we tried. We rolled ourselves in Saran wrap and spermicides, we sacrificed eleven trillion virgins. One fatted calf. The cracks we filled with golf balls and Rubics cubes, wedding rings, erasers. Remember you were born like us. A disaster stamped on each earlobe like a prayer.

Excellent books about the end of the world:
Pastwatch, Orson Scott Card
Earth Abides, George R. Stewart
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick
Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula LeGuin
The Giver, Lois Lowry

Any other suggestions?

The Gulf of Mexico disaster as BP would like you to see it

It's very hard not to look at pictures from the Gulf of Mexico and feel like some flavor of "the end of the world as we know it" is approaching. The red muck on the open sea, the smoke and flames. The diagrams of enormous potential "plumes" suspended deep underwater, and all the maps of surface oil, like Rorschach blobs or tea leaves spelling out, at this point, a dismal but still unknowable future. The wetlands, already browning. The expected but haunting oiled birds, who are, for all their charismatic woe, still luckier than everything we can't scrub off one at a time because it is either too small, too fragile, or still an unknown problem.

If you go to BP's spill response website, though, it's easier to be cheerful!


Wow, look at all that scrubbing! I don't know what that white thing is or why it needs to be cleaned off, but those workers in their hazmat suits definitely look effective.

And look! BP is crunching a lot of data in a fancy war room! Surely they must know exactly what to do to fix everything, after crunching all of that data with their multiple flat-screened computer monitors.

BP doesn't tell us what is in those bags, but there are so many of them. And they look so clean and white! If they're full of oil, then surely that oil can't be so bad, either, because otherwise the bags would be all saggy and hydrocarbon-colored.


All this picture needs is a rainbow where that caution tape is. Look how blue that sky is. And we can't see much of the ocean, so it must be fine. There's some brown mucky stuff in the lower right, but those workers (again looking very efficient in their clean biohazard suits) who are probably actually displaced shrimp fishermen being paid far too little per day, will have that right-hand corner cleaned up in no time. There are so many of them, so just chill, everyone.

And if you read the short version of what they have to say about Operation Top Kill, you still have to wait until the very last clause of the very last sentence to understand that the operation failed. A very good use of inverted syntax, first taking you past all of the very good things they did in attempting this failed operation. The Columbia Journalism Review has a damning list of their other informational sins re: this disaster.

I'm just saying, thank thank thank thank somebody for journalists.

Slew of links

Charming & thrilling: Genderfork.com
Hilarious & scathing: The latest Thursday Lost Roundtable at Feministe. (spoilers)
Amazing: Times Online interview with Lady Gaga.
Adjective adjective adjective: Raw video of the collapse of BP & TransOcean & Halliburton's Deepwater Horizon rig.

this is all one big @carrie

I learned the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is red, "rust-colored." It's like the ocean floor woke up one morning and decided to be a portent or a plague. Also, what the hell kind of name is "Deepwater Horizon"? It sounds like a spaceship. It definitely sounds like a rig that would explode in a Ben Affleck movie. I hope there's a heart-warming speech at the end.

Don't worry, though, it's not half as bad as Exxon-Valdez, if all you look at is millions of gallons of crude oil.

"The snow spread-eagled on the ground
muffles the sound of falling bodies.
It seems people are leaping from buildings again
like white petals falling from large trees."

- Matthew Rohrer, "to a croatian poet"