4/5…SOWING CLOVER…Tonya Stiles
‘Gay Marriage Today…Polygamy Tomorrow?’

6/7……THE DOG OF THE MONTH!!!   BELLA & MORE
And THANKS to the Moab valley Humane Society

8/9…..GAINING PERSPECTIVE: Two Years in the Kingdom of Morocco–Charlie Kolb
‘GIVING AZIZ A HAND’  Charlie’s efforts to find a prosthetic hand for a young boy in Morocco…

12/13…’WATER’ WE GONNA DO? Political Deadlock and The West’s Coming Mega-Drought   By Kathleene Parker

14/15…HERB RINGER’S AMERICAN WEST: The D&RGW in the 1950s

16/17….THE CRUSH of STUDENT DEBT: is it Worth it? ….Tonya Stiles
An admission: I don’t know what the purpose of college is supposed to be. Whether higher education is a noble calling—a way of turning slaves into free-thinking men—or merely a path to a career becomes more confusing to me as I see more of my friends, armed with their degree and bright ideas about the future, stunned and shell-shocked to come up against a world with no job to offer them. I used to think I knew.

18/19…LOSING SOLITUDE: Back Home in Jackson Hole…Martin Murie

20/21…MY PERSONAL HISTORY: Life & Times in Southeast Utah…Verona Stocks
Felix G. Murphy died July 11, 1916.  The day Grandpa was buried Mother, Mary and I were looking at the clouds and watching for the sunset, the clouds were fluffy and beautiful, the kind that makes pictures in the sky.  Mother said “Oh no.”  I looked up at the clouds they had changed while I was watching a white dove that lit on a bush close by.

24/25… THE WILDER WEST: The Art & Wit of Dave Wilder
INCLUDING: Rednecks & Cowboys

26/27…THE BULLETIN BOARD of DOOM...including: “The federal government is proposing to grant a first-of-its-kind permit that would allow the developer of a central Oregon wind-power project to legally kill golden eagles, a regulatory move being closely watched by conservationists.” MSNBC

28/29…THE CALM BEFORE THE SWARM #2..Jim Stiles
The ‘Joy of Being Poor’ gets Run over by a Bicycle

30/31… PORTRAITS OF MOAB (1988-1993) part 2… photographs by Jim Stiles

32/33…THE HOME OF TRUTH    Lloyd Pierson
For the Followers of MARIE OGDEN the vortex of the Universe was at Photograph Gap

34/35… A FURTHER COUNTRY: Entering the Sacred Land   Scott Thompson
Hansen calls such a planetary runaway the Venus syndrome, and believes a similar calamitous process is now possible on Earth, thanks to our human-created Frankenstein, global warming.

36/37…THE VIEW FROM ABOVE: The Sand Flats–1981 & 1995

38/39…WELCOME to the DIMFORMATION AGE: Notes from the crawlspace of History
Ned Mudd

40/41… POINT BLANK:  ‘RETURNING to PERFECTO’   Evan Cantor
I cannot, will not, tell you where it is. I can only vouchsafe that it is still there. If a secret spot is something you need, you’ll have to go out and find one yourself.

To see the PDF version of this page, click here.

Recently a quotation from George Clooney made the rounds on facebook. Every Democrat worth his liberal-leaning salt was running this admonition from the popular actor. In part he said:

“I’m disillusioned with the people who are disillusioned with Obama, quite honestly, I am. Democrats eat their own.  Democrats find singular issues and go, ‘Well I didn’t get everything I wanted.’  I’m a firm believer in sticking by and sticking up for, the people whom you’ve elected.”

It sounds a lot like the old right wing slogan, ‘My Country…Love it or leave it.” It implies that to disagree with your own party and to question its commitment to basic ideas and beliefs is not only disloyal and inappropriate but tantamount to treason.
Progressives love to mock Rush Limbaugh’s followers and took special glee, years ago, when Limbaugh was revealed to have a serious addiction to drugs. His followers, who call themselves “dittoheads,” dutifully found forgiveness for their flawed radio guru, a concession they would not have likely been able to bestow on a Democrat.
Conversely, liberals were downright joyous. To them, the blind allegiance to the talk show host exposed a serious flaw in the listeners’ conservative idealism. It revealed a partisan intractability that went far beyond anything resembling an ideological dedication.
Now the tables are turned. President Obama came to the office with a boast to “change the world.” It was his promise, not a declaration that was forced upon him.  Our expectations were grounded in his assurances. Consequently, the disappointment has been profound and the negative commentary entirely justified.
The president’s most faithful followers–those who give new meaning to “blind allegiance”—lashed out at his critics, especially when objections came from the Left.  Some questioned their loyalty to the President or the Democratic Party. At other times, the critics were simply moved to the margins and ignored.
But the fact is, the knee-jerk supporters are the ones who do the president the greatest disservice of all. They’re defending him for all the wrong reasons.
None of us has any idea what kinds of pressures fall upon a president, once he assumes the office. Surely they are staggering and there will always be efforts from other powerful men and women, with agendas of their own, to alter the course a president has set for himself and the country.
I’d like to believe that this is what happened to President Obama–that he assumed the office with every intention of “changing the world,” but hit a wall of opposition from the same old tired men and women, and perennial government agencies, and greedy Wall Street influences that ultimately caused him to back away from the Dream we all thought he would pursue.
So…to everyone who wanted him to chase that Dream, you tell me—is it better to shrug and fall back on the same old excuses that we (and they) always embrace when our leaders disappoint us? Is it better to say:

1) “Well, he’s better than Bush.”
2) “It’s the Republicans’ fault.”
3) “He’s not perfect, but at least he’s a Democrat.”
4) “He IS a good speaker though.”
5) “I like his family.”
6) “He’s still better than Bush (encore).”

How will that kind of equivocation ever inspire President Obama to pursue the courage of his convictions? How will letting him off the hook possibly send the message that we are disappointed and that we want him to take the country in a different direction?  Why isn’t holding his feet to the fire not only preferable but downright imperative?
The office of the president has got to be a lonely place, and very isolated. When you are virtually surrounded by an administration hell-bent on protecting the president from bad news, it’s all the more reason for the country to speak loudly and clearly.

President Obama can take it. I like President Obama. I think he is a decent man. He’s brilliant and witty and surely the guy can imitate Al Green better than anybody I know. I want him to succeed.  And I think deep down, he still sees the Big Picture. I think he’s wise enough to separate hysterical and loathsome attacks from constructive criticism. John Kennedy, during his short 1000 Days in office, was known to seek a different opinion before he made a decision, and he had to make some tough ones.
President Obama deserves to hear from us, no matter how much we disagree with him. As long as he understands that our voices only reflect what we hope is best for the country and for his presidency, we should not be afraid, nor should any of us be stifled, to express those objections.

To read Jim’s other “Take it or Leave it” articles from this issue, follow these links:

The 99% (We Don\’t Like Each Other Very Much…)

Overpopulation…the Windex/Easy Off Solution

Moab U, Tar Sands, and Sustainability

Don’t forget the Zephyr ads! All links are hot!

If you’re like me, you know the whole “gay rights” question isn’t really a question: it’s an eventuality. According to an ABC poll from 2011, 68% of Americans under the age of 30 support gay marriage rights. More strikingly, 65% of those under the age of 40 do as well. Even a slight majority of the population between the ages of 40 and 50 support full marriage rights. The numbers for every age group have risen significantly from only five years ago. And so it’s sort of funny, really, watching evangelical Christians and Republican politicians rail against gay marriage, knowing that, given a few years’ time and the passing of another generation, the argument has already been won.

The only interesting question to ponder, as we sit back and wait for time to solve this particular inequality, is what comes next.

Of course, the staunchest of gay marriage opponents think they know. Rick Santorum seized on his argument a couple months ago at a New Hampshire college. Responding to a question about gay marriage, he asked:

If it makes three people happy to get married, based on what you just said, what makes that wrong?”

---

It’s the same argument we’ve heard since the advent of the gay-rights movement: if you legalize gay marriage, what’s to stop the legalization of polygamy, incest, pedophilia, bestiality, etc.? And the answer, for all but one, at least, is “quite a bit.” Pedophilia and bestiality are of course prohibited by the whole notion of “consent.” A dog cannot express consent in a way that a judge would understand; and a seven year-old is understood to be unable by virtue of a lack of brain development. Incest is a whole other can of worms, dealing with possible damage to the gene pool.  It will probably come up someday, but it effects such a miniscule population, I doubt we’ll see a movement to legalize brother-sister relations anytime soon.

On the matter of polygamy, however, Santorum has a point—though I doubt it’s the point he wanted to make. The student to which he posed his question knew the game. She didn’t react with the level of disgust he might have expected. “That’s irrelevant,” the student answered. And, before moving on, stated, “In my opinion, yeah, go for it.” Polygamy is almost certainly the next marriage-rights debate. And, unless the Santorums of the world are willing to push America back to 1868, and repeal the fourteenth amendment, they will all have to acknowledge that the polygamists’ victory is inevitable.

The mistake Santorum keeps making, and he made it again at that New Hampshire college, is his claim that “marriage is not a right.” Unfortunately for him, the Supreme Court settled that matter in 1967 and they concurred, unanimously, the opposite. The basis for their decision? The Fourteenth Amendment—specifically the “equal protection clause,” which states, in part, that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Now, interpretation of those words has varied widely since their inception. Clearly, at the time when the Amendment was drafted, the writers did not intend to legalize polygamy or gay marriage. They also didn’t intend to legalize interracial marriage—but, according to the Supreme Court, their words made it legal anyway.

In 1967, the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s law banning interracial marriage. In Loving v. Virginia the state argued precisely what Santorum argued to that New Hampshire college student—that marriage was a privilege and not a right. But, as Justice Earl Warren wrote, in the unanimous opinion of the Court: “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” He continued, “Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law.”  Although he was writing in that case about a white man’s ability to marry a black woman, Justice Warren must have known the importance of his words—the first clear definition by the Court of Marriage as a civil right.

It was inevitable, then, that once Justice Warren wrote his majority opinion enshrining the “right to marriage,” that such a right would extend beyond his original intent, to homosexual unions. And now it is inevitable that other marginalized groups—like the polygamists—will test the legal waters to determine whether that right extends to them as well.  I don’t think it will happen as quickly as Rick Santorum might predict, but the beauty of the constitution is that it always seems to be expanding rights, adding to the rolls of the enfranchised, as awareness expands.

Though the story hasn’t garnered much attention yet—as anything other than an entertainment tidbit—one polygamous

TLC's Sister Wives.

family has recognized the direction of the changing winds. Stars of the TV reality show Sister Wives are currently suing the state of Utah in Federal Court over its anti-bigamy law. Though they aren’t suing for equal marriage rights, they want the legal ability to live together in “spiritual” marriages. The current state law forbids a married person from professing to be married to multiple people or from cohabiting with those people. And so, given the precedence of Lawrence V. Texas, and its landmark decision on the right to privacy in sexual matters, the family sees an opportunity to move the law in their favor.

It’s hard to imagine the gay community and the fundamentalist Mormon community agreeing on anything, but the Sister Wives are smart to look to gay rights achievements for their inspiration. I can’t imagine how any judge would rule against them—a group of consenting adults who have lived responsibly with each other for years—but it’s possible that they will have a long fight ahead of them. It’s possible that it will be a still longer fight until they receive the right to legally marry. And then who knows what battle will come next—which other groups will follow, rising up to claim the same rights as their neighbors. All I know is that more are coming. And I wish all the best to them.

Tonya Stiles is Co-Publisher of the Canyon Country Zephyr.

To read the PDF version of this article, click here.

Don’t forget our loyal Backbone members!

BELLA!

Andy and Marcee Nettell have been fostering this beautiful pooch,
Bella, while she waits for a permanent home.
If you can’t resist those beautiful, soulful brown eyes,
contact the Moab Valley Humane Society immediately.

GOOD NEWS!
AT PRESS TIME WE
LEARNED THAT BELLA
HAS BEEN ADOPTED!
but….

…These wonderful animals are also standing by and ready to be adopted by a loving home…

Pandora
13359114
Cat
Female/Spayed
Domestic Shorthair/Mix
9 months

Miko
15068107
Female/Spayed
Himalayan/Mix
2 years

Luna
13962503
Female/Spayed
Retriever, Labrador/Mix
7 years 4 months

Brody
14555127
Male/Neutered
Chow Chow/Mix
4 years 2 months

Jenna
14413885
Female
Retriever, Labrador/Mix
3 years 2 months

Sandy
14895457
Male/Neutered
Poodle, Toy/Mix
10 years 1 month

GIVE THESE PETS

THE HOME

THEY DESERVE…

956 Sand Flats Road     Moab, UT 84532-2827

http://www.moabpets.org/

Animal care in the Moab area has come a long way since 1999, when 45% of all dogs and 88% of all cats picked up or brought in to Animal Control were euthanized.  A small group of concerned and compassionate citizen got together and formed the Humane Society of Moab Valley (HSMV).

HSMV is a non-profit organization, started in 1999, and is not affiliated with any government entity or other humane organization.  Funding comes from donations, membership fees, grants and fundraising events.  All money sustains the day-to-day costs of saving the lives of animals needing forever homes.

HSMV is run primarily by volunteers, with limited staff, and operates a no-kill foster program where every adoptable animal finds a new, loving home.  Volunteer foster families support, train and foster dogs and cats until a suitable permanent home can be found.

Other programs offered by HSMV include low-cost spay and neuter clinics several times each year, free or discounted spay and neuter programs year-round for low-income families, public education on the humane treatment and training of animals, assistance to those who need dog or cat food, help to families who can no longer care for their animals, and the feral cat program.

DOES YOUR DOG…OR CAT…OR TURTLE
OR HAMSTER…OR…HAVE WHAT IT TAKES
TO BE:
‘DOG OF THE MONTH?’

Send us your pictures and your stories
to: cczephyr@gmail.com

To read the PDF version of this article click here.

Don’t forget the Zephyr Ads! All links are hot!

Aziz

Rain falls softly from a slate grey sky, and drips slowly from the drooping tips of the palm leaves that dominate the view from my hotel window here in Rabat. Birds sing unseen, sheltering from the rain, and people rush across the courtyard beneath my window. The rain today is a slow, gentle fall, almost a mist, and smells of the nearby sea. It’s quiet, for the city, though the call to prayer drifts in on the breeze every few hours. It’s a good day to just sit and write; a good day to read and think. This I do, for a time, but my thoughts seem to turn where they have tended to over the past few months; they turn to a 17 year old boy in my village named Aziz Atmani.

~

Aziz, Said and me in the Auberge in Merzouga

I met Aziz in the early spring of last year while I was on a walk from the nearby lake, accompanying Molly’s dad and stepmom back to the village. I remember the day very well, it was clear and cool, and from the top of the volcanic sill above Lake Tislit, we watched as a pale gold of the spring sunlight painted a startling array of swirling colors across the flatlands between the two lakes. Mark and Molly had gone back another way and I agreed to take the parents back; following the road below a neighboring village, and crossing the fields back to my house.

It was late in the day by then, and the slanting light cast long shadows on Tissekt Tamda, the mountain that looms over my village. The children were walking home from school in clusters of three or four and greeted me loudly and raucously, laughing at my accent when I replied. All save one.

I didn’t see the boy until he was at my side, he said nothing and looked at the ground. He was small and thin, dwarfed by a massive wool coat that was several sizes too big for him; still looking at the ground, he greeted me in a whisper. When I replied, he finally looked up at me. He had the look of the Amazigh that live in the deep mountains; slanting almond eyes, high cheekbones, and brown hair. He said his name was Aziz. I was at a loss as to why he had approached me, most kids just greet me and run off howling with laughter; and yet he lingered. I asked what he wanted, and the resulting string of Tam was even more confusing. One word kept popping up, however; afous, or hand. I looked over at him, belatedly noticing that one sleeve of his overcoat hung dark and empty. He had no left hand, and he was asking me what I could do about it.

I flushed and said I didn’t know anything about prosthetics, that I was an environment volunteer and that wasn’t my area of expertise. He looked unsurprised, and slowly walked away. By this time, Molly’s family had walked off ahead and I was left alone in the fading light, watching Aziz’ back retreat down the road, every movement giving off an air of defeat. “Blati!” (wait), I said as I trotted to catch him. I put a hand on his shoulder and looked at him again before saying “I don’t know anything about what you’re asking, but I will research it; that’s all I can promise.” For the first time, he smiled.

Aziz posing by the dunes.

A few weeks later, I had him into my house to take a couple pictures of him and what was left of his hand; as well as getting a clear view of what had happened that had caused him to lose it. He told me slowly and haltingly, and I had to ask him to repeat much of it before I got an idea of the story:

There had been an accident, two years before, when Aziz was just fifteen. Like any fifteen year old boy, he loved playing with fire, regardless of the consequences. I flushed, recalling several close calls I had had with bottle rockets around the same time in my life. Aziz, it transpired, was an avid watcher of NBC action, a channel where they play old, American action movies over and over, without ever once saying that they are fictional (this is important). One day, after watching a movie, Aziz decided to make a pipe-bomb. He took a length of metal tubing and stuffed it with industrial-grade fertilizer (widely available and loosely regulated in a country whose primary natural resource is phosphates). The only problem now, was a fuse… for which he used a match.

You can all guess, as I did, what happened next. The makeshift explosive detonated before he could throw it, leaving his hand a charred ruin. What little remained was amputated at the hospital in Er-Rachidia. I could only imagine the pain and horror of that four hour ambulance ride; the smell of burned flesh, the screaming. Yet he told it to me so matter-of-factly, he had had two years to come to terms with what had happened; what had shattered his life forever. He had gone from whole and normal, to broken and outcast in a matter of seconds. A few snapshots and he stood up, we had gone quiet after his story, but he broke the silence and said “shukran” (thank you). Then he took my hand, kissed it once, and ran out the door into the darkness of the street.

    Four months later, after several meetings and innumerable emails and phone calls, Aziz and I waited side by side for a midday transit. It was mid-July by then, and the leaves of the poplars shivered in the warm breeze. The mountains were lit up by the flat, hot light of the summer afternoon, and people hid from the sun in cafés; beneath awnings or sometimes even an umbrella. A month or so before, Hakim, my contact in Rabat, had put me in touch with a prosthetics specialist who lived and practiced in the Spanish enclave-city of Melilla, on the northern coast. He had taken an interest in Aziz’ case, and was on vacation in our area. Our destination was Merzouga, where we would meet the doctor on the fringe of the Saharan Erg, a dune sea. But first we would spend the night in Er-Rachidia, which Aziz had not returned to since the accident.

Aziz in my friend's village of Tafelghalt.

The transit arrived in short order and we watched as the miles of silent mountainsides and deep canyons slid by our window. A taxi from Er-Rich completed this leg of the journey, and soon we were sitting together at my favorite café, drinking sweet coffee and enjoying the shade provided by the towering eucalyptus trees in the back garden. My friends, Driss and Said, both joined us and Aziz looked back and forth between us as we spoke in English. I explained to him that one of them would be our translator tomorrow, to enable me to speak with the Doctor, who spoke Spanish, French, and Moroccan Arabic—no Tamazight. The entire process hung on what he would tell us the next day, and it would be then when he would tell us whether or not Aziz was even eligible for a new hand.

Said agreed to join us the next day and the rest of the evening was spent introducing Aziz to other volunteers who were in the area. He also had the opportunity to try his first pizza, which he thoroughly enjoyed. We went to bed exhausted, and met Said the next morning at the taxi stand. The morning sunlight was already hot on my back as we crammed into the taxi bound for the city of Erfoud, considered by some to be the gateway to the northern Sahara. I ended up buying out the additional seats in another taxi who said he knew where the Auberge was that the doctor had referred us to. Before long we were powering across the Saharan Hamada, rock-plain, and watching as the heat roiled off the scorched landscape of blackened rock in shimmering, viscous waves. Soon, the sparkling sea of dunes rose from the rippling horizon, their gigantic reality seeming a fevered mirage in the midday heat.

Merzouga itself was not much of a town, the center being a cluster of one-room shops and small hotels, half-swallowed by the eternally encroaching sands. Sun-darkened men in indigo jelaba robes and a few tired looking camels watched as we drove around trying to find our destination The auberges were scattered along the edge of the erg itself, and the shining red-gold dunes loomed over everything as we searched. After a time, we pulled up to a low, earthen building half-buried by the shifting sands. My throat was dry, and sweat rolled down my back as I stepped out into the sunlight and knocked on the front door.

I was greeted by a rather suspicious Moroccan man, who turned out to be the owner, demanding what my business was asking after one of his guests. I looked sideways at Said and asked him to translate for me. “Tell the Spanish doctor that the American is here to see him, and be fast about it.” Shooting me a glare, the proprietor vanished into the dark interior leaving us to stand in the heat, which had climbed to nearly 115°F. After a while, a tall gray-haired man came striding up the hall toward us, with the proprietor trailing behind him sullenly. I had never been more relieved to see anybody in my life.

Aziz being fitted for his hand by the Doctor's aide.

Aziz was measured and evaluated in the doctor’s sweltering hotel room, and a cast was made of his damaged wrist and forearm. Speaking with the doctor through Said, I was told that Aziz was the ideal candidate for a prosthetic hand. There were a variety of options, but all were expensive; even with the doctor being willing to work for free, this would require a grant of some kind. Though the doctor said he was willing to start work right away, I asked him to hold off while I researched the funding possibilities.

Aziz was ecstatic on the ride back to Er-Rachidia, but I was more subdued; I knew how much work I had ahead of me, and I knew how easily everything could come crashing down around my ears, sliding away like sand through my fingers. That night, I sat on the front steps of the apartment building where we were staying with my friends Marcus and Dipesh, looking up at the stars. I thought of the impossible responsibility and fragility of the task ahead, and how much was riding on it. I remembered what Aziz’ father had said to me a few weeks before as we sat at a café table back in the village “I know that this may not happen. But if you do this for my son, the whole valley will be happy.” The door opened behind me and Aziz sat down on the steps as well. “Hassan, I know this may not work out, but I want you to know that either way, we’ll still have a party in my village to celebrate.” I sat there in silence, not knowing what to say.

~

    Peace Corps grants are tricky. They come in a variety of forms, but all are clear that they should be used only for a “sustainable” project, that benefits the community rather than the individual. What I was trying to do for Aziz, was not a Peace Corps project by the standard definition. It would change only one life, rather than many. In my estimation, this was still entirely worthwhile; I came here with the hope that if I could change one life, help even just one person, my time here in North Africa would have been worth it. But how was I going to do it?

Aziz' first look at the Mediterranean with my friend Socorra.

I researched on my own for awhile, making phone calls to various Peace Corps staff members trying to work things out. Finally, we found what we were looking for, a much needed loophole; one that could make many small scale projects that don’t fit Peace Corps guidelines a reality. It was so simple, I was at first wary of its legality. Although I wasn’t allowed to raise the money on my own, privately or through grants, there was no reason that an association could not do it on Aziz’ behalf. In essence: If I never touched the money, I wasn’t raising it. I racked my brain, trying to think of a Moroccan association willing to accept donations for a project like this. When I put the question to the Peace Corps staff on the other end of the phone, they replied slowly:

“You misunderstood; when I said ‘any association’ I meant any association.”

“So, means any non-profit back in the states?”

“Yes!”

“How about a church?”

“Sounds fine to me.”

I immediately sent an email to Christ the King Lutheran Church, back home in Durango, Colorado. I told Aziz’ story, and what I had been able to do so far. Their reply was brief, and very positive. The tagline of the email? “Let’s give the boy a hand”

~

    Summer crept by, and I watched as my friends back home, faculty from my college (Fort Lewis), and colleagues from my work with the parks donated to Aziz’ cause. Ramadan came and went in a blaze of dehydration and delirium and I soon found my hands full with the Wedding Festival in Imilchil in mid-September. The nights lengthened and grew colder; the days began to be filled with the crisp, golden light of another Atlas Autumn. Finally, I got an email. We had reached, and overshot, our original goal on 9/11, the 10^th anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York which planted the bitter seed of distrust and hatred of Muslims in many Americans. Aziz is muslim, and this fact had been emphasized passionately by my old friend, Kip Stransky, during that service. He explained that on that day, of all days, we should remember to love those who are different from us and to extend our love and goodwill even to those that society tells us we should despise. After all, isn’t that what Jesus would do?

~

Group shot of (left to right) Me, the Doctor, Aziz, and Socorra.

The leaves had been swept from the poplars by the river by the bitter winter wind, by the time the doctor informed me he had finished. We set a date for mid-December, and again I found myself sitting with Aziz as we waited for the transit. The morning was pale with frost and the people followed the weak sunlight from café to café as it slowly moved from one side of the street to the other. The first snow of the year glistened on the mountains high above and I was just beginning to warm up when the transit arrived.

In the days that followed, Aziz and I made our way to the Northeast corner of Morocco. We stayed with friends of mine the whole way; they were very generous to take us in, and I thank them for it. Errachidia was the first stop, then ten hours by bus across the Saharan plain to Oujda, a rest in the beautifully forested village of Tafelghalt, and finally to Nador, a city perched on the shores of the Mediterranean. It was a journey of firsts for Aziz, and he marveled at things that I too often take for granted. Here are a few highlights: Stoplights exist to regulate traffic, ice can be used to cool drinks, occasionally the water that comes out of the tap is hot, just because the nice man tried to sell you something doesn’t make it legal, and so on and so forth. It was quite an experience for him, and for me as well, as I got a fresh look at my own life (which I long considered to be mundane and rather normal) through the Aziz’ eyes. We stayed in a hotel, for which the doctor had kindly paid the bill, and walked along the seashore for awhile which was another first for Aziz.

My friend Socorra, who had been in Morocco as long as I, joined us in Tafelghalt and accompanied us to Nador to help out with translation. She was proving an invaluable source of support to both Aziz and me, as Aziz was not always on his best behavior, so two pairs of eyes were better than one. He started calling us ‘Mom and Dad’ which I found rather appropriate as we always seemed to be hollering at him about various things. In the space of two minutes I had informed him, much to his chagrin, that, no, he couldn’t ride the pony that we passed and Socorra then had to pull him out of traffic. So yes, ‘Mom and Dad’.

Aziz in the bus on the ride home.

After our walk, we took him to McDonalds, (yes, there’s one here too) a place I avoided like the plague in the states but rather enjoyed in the Moroccan setting. To Aziz it was a veritable ‘cave of wonders’, with well dressed people forming orderly lines to place their orders, music playing quietly from invisible speakers, and a non-fluctuating room temperature. I can empathize with him of course, as central heating now makes me patently uncomfortable (do people really need their houses so warm!?). Socorra and I chatted in English, blessed English, as Aziz tried to figure out what to do with his cheeseburger and McFlurry. He enjoyed it of course, but not nearly as much as the two rounds of bumper cars I paid for at a traveling carnival on the way back to the hotel.

By the time the doctor arrived the next morning, I had few remaining fingernails after biting most of them to the quick. We exchanged our greetings in the hotel lobby and proceeded up to the room. The new hand was a wonder, a delicate sheath of life-like plastic skin fitting over a carbon-fiber frame. Aziz was dumbstruck by how real it looked. He told me he had never seen anything like this; to be honest, neither had I and I told him so. The hand was adjusted to fit right there in the room and, after an hour or so, it was on Aziz wrist and he was running around giving everyone high fives. The doctor was grinning ear to ear, as was Socorra who had been an amazing translator. I smiled cautiously, not believing it was done. But as I looked at Aziz’ face, I saw ecstasy; so different was he from the tired and downcast boy I had met on the road nearly a year before, that I could scarcely believe them the same person. We had done it, he and I, a little project that could have died at anytime was kept alive by a veritable chain of friends and advisors. This wasn’t my doing, as the doctor insisted to Aziz, I just had the pleasure of being the facilitator—a catalyst for change. But after all, isn’t that what Peace Corps is all about?

~

Aziz and me in Tafelghalt.

As the rain slowly dies down and daylight begins to fade from the hotel courtyard, I shut off my computer and sit in the dark quiet, listening to the drops of water falling from the drooping leaves of the palms. I think of all that I have seen in the past 22 months here. I think of the four months I have remaining in Morocco, and wonder what challenges and opportunities they hold for me. But most of all, I think of Aziz and smile.

To read the PDF version of this article, click here and here.

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Since the Occupy Movement began last September, I’ve watched with bated breath. I love a good revolution and have spent most of my adult life hoping to see one, but in this day and age, especially here in the United States, I view these kinds of uprisings with a wary eye. I’d love to see this movement grow (if only we were in Egypt, it would be a sure thing) and become powerful and change forever the way Washington and Wall Street do business. But we’ve all been down these roads before. Where was the Great American Protest Movement during the Iraq War?
As I’ve said before, it takes more than signs and extended camp-outs to change the world. It might be a good start but it has to appeal to a much broader base. It’s supposed to be about US—the 99%. But so far, I see very little to suggest the Masses are bonding.

It’s been interesting to follow the Occupy Movement on facebook. I’ve saved many of these “un-groups” to my page favorites so I can monitor their progress. I love rhetoric as much as the next guy and can get pretty rhetorical myself under the right climatic conditions, but some of it has been incomprehensible. For example, in January, in anticipation of the planned Occupy Congress march, the occupycongress.info group declared:

“Tens of thousands of people chanting outside the Capitol would be hard to ignore, and it doesn’t matter what we chant, because WE are our demands! If Congress started working for the 99%, reckless corporations would be restrained, not bailed out. Come to Washington on January 17th, 2012 .”

I could not understand what that meant—“it doesn’t matter what we chant, because WE are our demands?” It’s not exactly a focused message. Or, I believe, the right one.
On the anadora.org/freepresspage, they announced that, “Protesters say they hope to set up 1 million tents in front of the Capitol.”  Sad to say, less than a thousand turned out.

The protesters claimed they were being ignored by the mainstream media and they were probably right. But there really wasn’t all that much there to ignore. I followed the LiveStream on several channels on the web and there was nothing there to rally around. I watched protesters taunt and yell obscenities at the cops and most of the comments flowing in from citizens who watched the live show complained that they couldn’t let their kids watch because the language was too raunchy. If that sounds prudish, or conservative to some, you need to remember that the point of this global protest is to unite the 99%, not fragment it. What is the point in unnecessarily alienating those who might otherwise share our views?
In Moab, Utah, the Occupy Moab group took a resolution condemning the Supreme Court’s decision that gave “personhood” to corporations to the City Council. The Council agreed to create a draft of its own but wouldn’t allow the petition gatherers the chance to speak. Apparently only a relative handful of citizens showed up for the meeting and one of the Occupy Moab facebook administrators expressed bitter disappointment at the small turnout, only to have the post removed a short while later. He/she could not understand WHY there wasn’t stronger support for the Movement.

It’s actually very easy to understand why the Occupy Movement stays so fragmented—

WITHIN THE 99%, NOBODY LIKES EACH OTHER VERY MUCH.

We keep claiming unity within this new all-encompassing brand, but there’s no unity at all. Within the 99% we despise each other to a great degree, or at least much of what many of the 99% stand for. Let me offer some exhibits:
I went back to the social media, to see what Republicans and Democrats were saying about each other on facebook this afternoon. In the 15 minutes I devoted to this task, these are some of the epithets and insults that were being hurled back and forth, via the comments, through the fiery rhetorical ethereal glow of cyberspace. They called each other…

“…thugs, trolls, outlaws, liars, criminals, shills, thieves, sheeple, mindless, pukes, crazy, RePUKElicans, decayed, DEMONcrats, racists, dumbasses, dicks, Socialists, Fascists, Commies, brain-dead, stupid, Obamatons, spoon-fed morons, haters, ignorant, ignnoramuses, un-American, SOBs, a joke, loon, delusional, deceitful, BS, mean-spirited, forked-tongue, Obumma, jack ass,  asshole, lazy pieces of crap, and big fat turds.”

After a while I gave up. Clearly, there’s not much love being lost within this portion of the 99%. Republicans hate Democrats. Democrats hate Republicans. Conservatives hate Liberals and Liberals hate Conservatives. There are the Obama Haters. The Gingrich Haters. The Romney Haters.
And we can get more specific, out in the Rural West…

Americans who:
—are Christians hate non-Christians. And vice versa.
—are Pro-Life hate the Pro-Choice people. And vice versa.
—are for closing the borders to immigrants and deporting the illegals despise the Americans who want a more liberal immigration policy. And vice versa.
—support gun control hate those who oppose gun control. And vice versa.
—support the military hate those that do not. And vice versa.
—want a national health care policy despise those that do not want one. And vice versa.
—support the oil and gas industry don’t like Americans who oppose it. And vice versa
—support coal hate Americans who oppose it. And vice versa.
—oppose ATVs on public lands hate people who DO drive their ATVs on public lands. And vice versa.
—support Wilderness hate people who don’t…and vice versa.

And so on. And so on. Ad nauseum.
In short, it’s a war out there in America and the idea that 99% of our citizens are somehow mystically bound in a righteous war for Truth and Justice and Equality against the Forces of Evil strikes me as a bit absurd. You may think I’m just being cynical or counter-productive, that’s fine.
In these insanely, embarrassingly politically correct times, if the point is to make the Occupy Movement successful, then its strongest adherents should want to hear all viewpoints from all directions, no matter how uncomfortable it might make us feel. After all, no matter how contradictory the criticisms, they’re still coming from our fellow 99%ers. The secret to success here is not avoiding scrutiny but standing up to it. And maybe, by some miracle, learning from it.

If the ‘99%/Occupy Movement’ wants to succeed, it has to find a way to reach out to the vast majority of that 99% who they are otherwise, and in so many ways, at odds with, or this nationwide protest will sputter and fail.
For starters, the movement might think about the notion that while it’s easy to lump all of us into one basket and declare OUR ‘demands,’ it might be far more effective to stand on behalf of the millions of Americans who are really suffering.
I have never made more than $25,000 in a year, I drive a 13 year old car, and my wife and I get most of our clothes at thrift shops, but we own our home and have very few debts. We are comfortable. Part of it has been luck and part of it has been timing and another part has been avoiding dangerous financial traps that have befallen so many Americans.
Before I start worrying about others like myself within the 99%, instead of offering lists of “demands” for US, I’d rather devote my energies and righteous indignation for THEM–the Americans that are homeless, hungry, and without any visible means of support…the citizens who worked hard and, through no fault of their own, lost their jobs because their companies found it more profitable to take their operations to China.  I want to find ways for US to help the abused and forgotten children in this country, the ones who don’t even get a decent breakfast in the morning.  I want US to reach out to the veterans who can’t find jobs and are still paying a price for their service, years and decades after they came ‘home.’ I want to help young people find a way to get a decent education without burdening themselves and their families with a lifetime of debt.

In short, I want to help the people who long to have SOMETHING good in their lives before I start worrying about so many of us who just want MORE.  This movement should be, first and foremost, about helping those Americans who have so very little.
As for all the hot rhetoric and denigrating language that flies non-stop, day after day, across the multi-media fruited plain, the divisiveness that keeps the 99% divided and fractionalized, I don’t know how you stop it. Clearly, I appreciate a good argument, based upon the facts and an earnest desire to express oneself. But sooner later, somebody has to make the first move and lay down the stones. Who’s it going to be?

To read Jim’s other “Take it or Leave it” articles from this issue, follow these links:

Moab U, Tar Sands, and Sustainability

Overpopulation…the Windex/Easy Off Solution

George Clooney, President Obama, and the Loyal Voice of Dissent

To read the PDF version of this article, click here.

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“I’d hoped that my intuitions were wrong, but they weren’t.” – Jim Stiles, 2007

It’s late Monday morning at Starbucks, on the day after New Year’s. The snow outside is beginning to whip up; several inches are forecast for later in the day. As I write President Obama has less than sixty days, thanks to a deadline imposed by Congress, to decide whether to approve the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. It would transport crude petroleum from massively destructive tar sand excavations in the boreal forests of Alberta, Canada, to refineries along the Gulf coast of Texas, that heartland of the American oil business.

According to a news story I found on “The Hill,” dated early this morning, President Obama is likely to reject the pipeline on technical grounds, claiming that the Congressional deadline has in effect barred needed federal environmental review of proposed alternative routes around the ecologically sensitive Sand Hills region of Nebraska. But what is notable about this news story, as is so often the case in the mainstream virtual reality, is what it does not say: that Keystone XL is a fiendishly dangerous project that cogent humans should be terrified of.

Here’s why. Early in his career the eminent climate scientist James Hansen studied the greenhouse effect on the planet Venus. Due to amplifying feedbacks that occurred there, the plentiful water vapor was entirely lost to space. The atmosphere is now 97% CO2 and the surface of the planet has a temperature of 850 degrees Fahrenheit. Hansen calls such a planetary runaway the Venus syndrome, and believes a similar calamitous process is now possible on Earth, thanks to our human-created Frankenstein, global warming.

Here are several factors among others which he feels could make Earth vulnerable to a such a runaway: (1) levels of atmospheric CO2 here may have been lower in the distant past than we once thought, making our relatively high level at present even more of a concern; (2) climate “sensitivity” is apparently greater the warmer Earth gets, meaning that warming tends to beget quicker warming; and (3) greenhouse gases are increasing in the atmosphere so fast that the climate system may not have time to use its natural processes to cool it down. More specifically, Hansen said: “If we burn all reserves of oil, gas, and coal, there is a substantial chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sand and tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty.” (See Hansen’s 2009 book, Storms of my Grandchildren, pp. 224-226, 236, and chapter 10 generally.)

Hansen is arguably our greatest climate scientist. He may be wrong about the risk that we humans could destroy all life on Earth, but: what if he isn’t? Try to imagine the suffering of our descendants, knowing that their own ancestors, namely us, have willfully brought about the ultimate catastrophe.

That’s what the news story from “The Hill” didn’t happen to mention. It did, however, include the following comments from Matt Letourneau, spokesperson for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: “Right now, the issue in front of the President is whether the pipeline is in the national interest or not, and that’s where we think the discussion should be. Using some other issue as a reason to avoid making that decision, to us, is not sound policy.”

I read Letourneau’s last sentence three times, wondering if he thinks that preserving life on our planet is “some other issue.”

My hope, probably forlorn, is that President Obama will rise up and smite that pipeline with his holy tongue.

***

I got that much written before the first snow squall, which swept in at half past noon, blanketing the roads and parking lots, fast. I fled to a nearby Chinese restaurant, ordering Moo Goo Gai Pan for Gail and me before nimbly threading my way home along white tire tracks in the snow. I focus pretty well driving in the snow.

Nearly fell on my ass outside the Chinese restaurant.

***

Tuesday morning. Gail and I awoke to six inches of snow outside; now it’s coming down in pouring flakes. All the area schools are closed; since I’m a counselor in a school wellness center on Tuesdays, I have the day off too. Slipping out of bed, I put on a partial pot of decaffeinated coffee and sit in the big chair to write.

Back to Keystone XL. It’s stunning. Our political leaders, along with the lobbyists who push their buttons, are flirting with a pathway toward annihilating life on Earth. In spite of the apocalyptic stakes, they’ve refused even to foster a public debate about Hansen’s warning. What is leading them to such a bizarre perspective?

Maybe there is something about the structure of large, hierarchical societies that makes them weirdly obtuse to emerging environmental catastrophes. Here are the poet Gary Snyder’s observations, vintage 1977: “For a long time I thought it was only capitalism that went wrong. Then I got into American Indian studies and at school majored predominantly in anthropology and got close to some American Indian elders. I began to perceive that maybe it was all of Western culture that was off the track and not just capitalism – that there were certain self-destructive tendencies in our cultural tradition.” (The Real Work, 1980, p.94.) And maybe that self-destructiveness is a tendency that lies not just within Western cultures, but is endemic to the structure of hierarchical societies as a whole. Maybe that tendency goes all the way back to the first cities to arise out of the agricultural plain.

This suggests a comparison with hunter-gatherer cultures, the original environment of our evolutionary adaptation, which were more geographically fluid, egalitarian, sparsely populated, and better adapted to and more knowledgeable about the landscape and wild creatures surrounding them. In this vein let me share the following from the psychiatrist Carl Jung, which he recounted to his English speaking students in 1928: “[Knud] Rasmussen obtained from an Eskimo (the son of an Eskimo woman and a Dane, who had lived with him in Greenland) a marvelous story about an old medicine man who, guided by a dream, led his tribe from Greenland across Baffin’s Bay to North America. The tribe was increasing rapidly and there was a great scarcity of food, and he dreamt about a further country with an abundance of seals, whales, walruses, etc., a land of plenty. The whole tribe believed him and they started out over the ice. Halfway over, certain old men began to doubt, as is always the case: is the vision right or wrong? So half the tribe turned back, only to perish, while he went on with the other half and reached the North American shore.” (C. G. Jung, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-30, pp. 5-6.)

The story rings true, doesn’t it? It’s probably one of the ways conflicts sorted themselves out in the world of hunter-gatherers: the visionary versus “the old men.” I expect that they were evenly matched.

Now let’s imagine another story, this one taking place just as small settlements began to have some hierarchical features. We could call this story “At the Dawn of Hierarchy.” Our tribe is larger than in the previous story, almost a village, dating back 8,000 years ago in the Middle East. They grew wheat and barley in fields near their homes, hunting small animals within range of their settlement, and gathering wild foods such as nuts, berries, medicinal plants, and so on. When the crops wilted they relied on hunting and gathering; when the game animals fled they depended on gathering and their crops; and so on. It was a cycle they had learned to trust.

The medicine man – it was too early at this stage for priests – had a dream that the rain spirits had led him to a new land of plenty far to the northwest and told him that everyone in the settlement must migrate there with him or starve. Unlike the last story, however, when the medicine man reported his dream the “old men” angrily refused to leave the settlement, publicly upbraiding the medicine man as a fraud and a troublemaker. That same evening the old men solemnly gathered everyone together and with great earnestness assured them that they had lived in this good place since they were infants and knew that the rain spirits would never leave.

What the old men didn’t tell the others is that their detailed knowledge of growing crops was restricted to a hundred mile radius and that they had no idea what would grow somewhere entirely different. They also didn’t explain that moving away would have felt like the end of the world to them. What they didn’t need to explain was that because of their primary rights to the fields around the settlement they were both wealthy and influential in conferring status on younger people.

After the gathering a bitter conflict ensued between a ragtag group that still believed in the chastened medicine man and the rest of the people, who felt dependent on the “old men” and were fearful of life without their approval, guidance, and lifelong knowledge of growing food. Finally the medicine man slipped away with his tiny band of believers, eventually reaching the further country of his dream, where they flourished. The next growing season an unrelenting series of mega-droughts lasting fourteen years struck the old settlement, bringing starvation.

Pause. It’s mid-afternoon now. The snow has tapered off into tiny bits, blowing at sharp angles in the gusts of wind; sometimes softly fluttering; no longer hiding the torn gray clouds.

***

Thursday afternoon. I’m at Starbucks again. All day long the sky has been a clear blue dome with wisps of Cirrus up high. After dawn the sunlight shone gold on the tree limbs and threw pole-like shadows across the U.S. highway as I drove to my morning job as a drug and alcohol counselor at an outpatient correctional facility.

Here is an educated guess about the kind of people the “old men” are, at least a significant percentage of them, then and now: (1) outwardly directed, perceiving primarily through the five senses, keenly aware of how the rules of society work;(2) who relish the enjoyments of the material world and are usually competent and successful; tending in our time toward orthodox careers in business; (3) who are out of touch with the unconscious mind, distrusting intuitively derived insights;(4) who as a result have great difficulty imagining a future that is not a continuation of the way of life they know and enjoy.

As a group they excel at preserving a society’s traditions and keeping its institutions humming efficiently, therefore putting them in a position to acquire positions of influence. But when in a stratified society they’re exerting a critical mass of influence at a time when drastic change – a paradigm shift – is essential, tragedy will be the likely outcome. This is because a necessary but different vision of the future will seem alien and dangerous to them, and they will fight it with all their resources, steering their society straight into the rocks.

The “medicine men,” or inner-directed intuitives, could hardly be more different. While they eagerly draw insights and inspiration from the unconscious, they find conventional thinking and routines tedious and confining. They do not fit in, nor do they want to. And there aren’t very many of them. The “old men” outnumber them at least 9:1.

Gary Snyder once gave a brief but useful description of their orientation: “Some people’s sensibilities, as well as maybe their lifestyles, are out at the very edge of the unraveling cause-and-effect network of a society in time…they are like an early warning system that hears the trees and the air and the clouds and the watersheds beginning to groan and complain a little bit. And so they try to send a little bit of a warning back, although they themselves may not know what it is they’re hearing. They can also hear the stresses and the fault block slippage creaking in the social batholith and also begin to give out warnings.” (The Real Work, p.71.)

The inner-directed intuitives have a remarkable gift for spotting problem patterns just as they begin to emerge from the mist of the future. They also have the gift of envisioning far-reaching geographic, spiritual, or social changes in order to help their cultures cope. This made them invaluable within the relatively fluid hunter-gatherer cultures and they had significant roles within them. But within stratified societies they tend to scrape by as outsiders. Even where they gain prominence within the professional fields they favor, such as art and science, and are read, heard, and praised for their work, their warnings are ignored by people at the core of the political and economic system. Or suppressed, if those warnings hit a nerve. (On the foregoing paragraphs see Isabel Briggs Meyers, Gifts Differing, 1980, chapters 4 & 5.)

***

Saturday morning. It’s much warmer and the snow cover is almost gone. Scudding gray clouds; a predicted high in the fifties. Record high temperatures are proliferating all across the country. Must be the jet stream, a guy on the news said.

So: where is the further country? I’ve never read a better description than in Jim Stiles’ lovely book Brave New West, published in 2007. A key reason he wrote it is this. Although environmental groups have targeted huge areas in Utah for federal wilderness designation, which sounds good, he realized that these same groups were increasingly unwilling to treat the land itself as sacred. Specifically, they were silent in the face of alarming impacts from the mushrooming amenities industry near and upon “protected lands.” And guess what? He also noted a growing pattern of donations to these environmental groups from people and organizations with little interest in the spirit of wilderness.

Jim Stiles was watching professional environmentalists become “old men.”

He said, “Wilderness is anywhere we find things wild and free and solitude that is long and unbroken. All these places deserve our respect, our reverence, and our concern, or they will not survive…All land is sacred.” (p. 154.) I think that’s exactly where the further country is and how a person will know she or he has found it.

When and if a culture can find it is more difficult, but if ours does, if all the land within it becomes sacred, it will finally be safe from destruction, along with the creatures then surviving on it, as well as those of our own species who remain.

Assuming we’re thoughtful enough not to wipe out all life forms on the planet.

Note – the term “old men” denotes persons of recognized status with a certain outlook. They are often but not necessarily male or ripe in years.

Scott Thompson is a regular contributor to the Zephyr. He lives in West Virginia.

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Desi and I tried to picture the country in 50 years, as a kind of parlor game. “Oh! Mushroom cloud! It’s going to be a disaster!” he said. “It’s so overwhelming there’s nothing in particular to be worried about.” We both laughed, because it’s true.

 – Noreen Malone, “The Kids Are Actually Sort of Alright: My screwed, coddled, self-absorbed, mocked, surprisingly resilient generation.” New York Magazine.

I think it was the 8^th grade when I first became conscious of the Grand Plan. Throughout elementary school and middle school, I had ignored the whisperings and vague illusions from teachers that, one day, we would reach a year when our grades would begin to “count.” In the 8^th grade, my Algebra teacher flat-out said it. “Next year, you’ll be in high school. From the moment you step into the 9^th grade, all of your test scores and homework assignments will be for real. Get bad grades, you won’t be going to college. You think you don’t want to go to college? Try getting a job in 10 years without a college degree.” Kids around me murmured and laughed. A few, who clearly had already developed high hopes for their futures, went pale and quiet at the thought. At the age of 13, I was only a few years beyond wanting to be a ballerina when I grew up, but suddenly the outline of my future appeared before me. High School, College, a job, a marriage, a house. All of these were in a state of constant jeopardy, depending on my performance. Never before had the future seemed like a tangible object. It had never seemed like something I could shape and alter with my own hands. It had never seemed like something I could break.

A couple months ago, I emailed an article to my friend Clint. From New York Magazine, it was the latest in a string of pieces I’d read intended to explain the angst of my generation. Noreen Malone described what she called “two long-term social experiments conducted by our parents,” the over-attentive, minivan-driving baby boomers:

 The first sought to create little hyperachievers encouraged to explore our interests and talents, so long as that could be spun for maximum effect on a college application. (I would like to take this forum to at last admit that my co-secretaryship of the math club had nothing to do with any passion for numbers and much to do with the extra-credit points.) In the second experiment, which was a reaction to their own distant moms and dads, our parents tried to see how much self-confidence they could pack into us, like so many overstuffed microfiber love seats, and accordingly we were awarded clip-art Certificates of Participation just for showing up.

And then she interviewed her friends and acquaintances to describe the ill effects of those experiments, all grown up and exposed to a world in which praise is no longer forthcoming and even the highest-achieving students are unemployed. Clint replied to me a couple hours later, “My first impression after reading this is ‘Holy crud, the examples are me!’ (And probably half the people I know, come to think of it…)” Four minutes passed and he added an addendum to his comments, “This is quite possibly an ironic statement, considering the article’s stance on our generation’s self-centeredness.” As I read the article, I considered whether Clint, half the people he knows, and I had all been done a great disservice by those who told us that a college degree was the ultimate goal, the achievement to which all our adolescent endeavors should be directed. If we had been told, instead, that college was one option among many—an option which may or may not lead to a job and a better salary once completed—maybe fewer would have taken out tens of thousands of dollars in loans in order to attend the “best” school. Maybe we wouldn’t have been surprised when the “best” school didn’t bring us any closer to success or happiness than any other option would have.

Christopher.

Christopher, from Colorado, has $100,000 in debt. He got his Bachelor’s in philosophy in-state at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He went to graduate school for Public Administration at the University of Colorado-Denver. He had a lot of options—even a full-ride scholarship to a Law School in New York City—but, given the cost of living expenses, staying in Colorado was actually the least expensive route. I asked him how long he thinks it will take to pay off his loans. “I have no idea,” he replied. “Which is perhaps why it is so scary. In theory, my repayment period is 25 years or so.” Assuming that’s correct, he’ll be paying off his loans well into his mid 50’s. So far, he says it hasn’t affected him much. “But that is also because I have been in the grace period,” he said. “I have to start paying my loans this month and I am already thinking about putting off a move. So I foresee it being a problem.”

When I asked him whether college had been worth it, he replied, “It is hard to say. I am grateful to have received it. I think in an intrinsic sense, then yes. But I am not sure if it will necessarily be a good return on investment from a purely financial perspective.” I could tell from his answers that this was a conflict for him, as it was for most people I talked to. He liked college, but what he liked wasn’t necessarily what the college-pushers have made it about. “I definitely think more critically about the world and world issues,” he said. “I don’t think I got many hard skills that would be useful for employment,” he admitted, “though I don’t think that should be the point of college anyway.”

My buddy Clint, a tall Nordic-looking park ranger with a degree in Speech Communication and English, said pretty much the same thing. “I can say that, regardless of the career I end up with in the long run (or lack thereof,) my education has most certainly been worth the cost… I went into college with the vague assumption it was where you were supposed to go to start up a career. I picked out fields that interested me, barely stopping to consider if it would net me a high wage or a cushy retirement package in the future.” He agreed that college had become too focused on job-attainment. “A quality education is not about building good employees or good consumers or even good citizens,” he said, clearly getting a little fired up. “It is about building good humans.”

Clint.

Clint and I went to the same college, up in South Dakota. The school wasn’t very expensive and both of us managed to get by on part-time salaries and a little help from our parents. So Clint doesn’t have a monthly student loan payment like most of our friends do. Instead, thanks to his lifelong diabetes, he has a health insurance payment. “I realize now that most of my unhappiness can probably be traced to the $600 a month I need to pay for health care costs,” he wrote to me. “One thing that makes me feel enormously bitter towards pharmaceuticals and health insurance companies is the realization, were it not for that $600 a month, I could genuinely live the life I want to live. I really could work as a park ranger half of the year and spend the other half traveling. I mean, blimey, that $600 may not sound like much, but it means the world to someone who lives like me.”

Everyone I talked to said something to that effect. No one is expecting to join the upper classes. My friends like Clint don’t even care to join the middle class. He just wants enough money to live the simple, meaningful life he imagines for himself. And an extra $600 a month is all it would take. “Anyone who has such high costs,” Clint wrote, “is forced to sell out their desires for freedom, for self-improvement and exploration, for the sake of paying the bills and clinging on to a job that, while not what was desired, is the best they were capable of finding immediately after school.” Despite what you’ve heard, the piece of societal pie to which my generation feels “entitled,” (a word bandied about quite a bit when talking about the Occupy Wall Streeters and anyone else complaining about their student loan debt,) is nowhere near as large as our parents might imagine.

From that same article by Noreen Malone:

there’s evidence to suggest other members of our cohort believe they’ll live a more fulfilled life, have better relationships, even if they don’t live in larger houses or drive fancier cars than their parents. Jean Twenge, author of Generation Me, says the most prominent shift she has seen so far among young people in this economy is an apparent decrease in materialism.

Without debt, a college graduate has a million options from which to choose the life he finds most dignifying. With very little money, he can find places to sleep and the occasional meal while exploring the world. Growing up, I heard all the time from my parents and their friends about the joys of being young and free—hitchhiking in Europe, setting out cross-country with only a few dollars in their pocket. This was supposed to be the promise of young adulthood—a time of liberation before the onset of marriages, kids, and responsibilities. But add a few thousand dollars in student loan debt to that equation and a college graduate has one option: find a well-paying job and quick.

Sarah.

Sarah, from California, is a senior at the University of Colorado-Boulder. She has $80,000 in student loan debt.  When I asked her how long she expects to be paying it off, all she said was, “I anticipate [I’ll be] paying off debt until I’m very old.” Soon she’ll have a degree in International Affairs and Peace and Conflict Studies, and she told me, “I have always imagined traveling for a few years after graduation or working abroad.” She also mentioned wanting to make documentaries or start a non-profit, but as graduation approaches, she realized all these goals “will most likely have to be put on hold…depending on how I can make enough money to pay off my debt post college.”

She described herself as “a very optimistic person,” but it was clear the stress of money worries was already taking a toll. “I am still excited about graduating and what I’ll be doing,” she said, “but my main worry is that I’ll get stuck in a job that I hate because I have to pay bills.” Like Clint, she said, “Having a lot of money (and maybe it’s just because I am a broke college student and don’t have any) isn’t a huge priority for me.” But, she acknowledged, “it will have to be once I am paying back my loans.” And there, with a sigh, goes the promise of freedom.

An admission: I don’t know what the purpose of college is supposed to be. Whether higher education is a noble calling—a way of turning slaves into free-thinking men—or merely a path to a career becomes more confusing to me as I see more of my friends, armed with their degree and bright ideas about the future, stunned and shell-shocked to come up against a world with no job to offer them. I used to think I knew. When I was in college, like my friend Clint, I was very much caught up in the mind-expanding promise of a liberal education. I grew resentful of anyone who asked me what I was going to “do” with my English degree.  “Waitressing,” I often answered.

Everyone I asked pretty much agreed with that mentality. All humanities or social science majors, we believed in the ability of education to create powerful thinkers and voices of opposition. As Christopher said, “I only went back [to college] when I decided I wanted to grow more intellectually. So I don’t think college ought to be a prerequisite for life (or a good job), but a chance to pursue intellectual topics if one should desire it.” But, the fact remains, when I was a naïve 18 year-old filling out applications, everyone was saying, “This is how you get your career.” Billboards for colleges around town promised “93% career-placement after graduation.” Six months after my college graduation, when I was balancing four plates of pumpkin risotto in two hands and winding my way to another table, I reflected that I hadn’t really meant that I wanted to use my English degree for a life of waitressing.

And so, the question to which I come back again and again: is college worth it?

Brent, a young comedian living in Brooklyn, left college after one semester. He said to me, “I regularly use the Mark Twain quote that’s along the lines of, “Never let school get in the way of a good education.” I think dropping out after one semester may have been the best thing I have ever done. I would have graduated last spring, been in debt, and still have no chance at getting a job.”

Brent. Photo AP/Mary Altaffer

Brent has been spending a lot of his time lately in Zuccotti Park with the Occupy Wall Street protests. He has heard the stories of too many people with college degrees and nothing to show for it. As for the “worth” of college, he said, “I think it is a bullshit concept that perpetuates itself to keep the business that is college going. I know a lot of brilliant people that can’t get a job because they don’t have a piece of paper that a less apt/intelligent person does.” And, when he considered whether he had hurt his chances of making money, he said, “Regardless of school, most jobs you still have to learn from doing.” He summed up his argument with a flourish: “I say fuck college. It’s not original. Make your own trail through the jungle of life. Walking on the well worn path is boring.” And I had to wonder if he wasn’t right.

At least one person in Noreen Malone’s article had found his way to the same conclusion:

 I have a lot of regret about going to college,” Sam, the person in my high-school class who’d been most obsessed with getting into a good college, now says. “If I could go back again, I think I’d try … not going to college”—our generation’s ultimate blasphemy.

And it raises an interesting question: could we ever sever that tie between college and career? In previous generations, a kid went to work at his Dad’s business after school. At 18, he took a low-ranking position schlepping coffee or making copies. Over the years, he worked his way up. The experience of working formed the basis of his credentials for each advancement. To become an electrician, he worked underneath an electrician for years. To become a secretary, he took a typing class. College was for teachers, lawyers, doctors and ministers—and, for many of those people, it was free.

It’s a strange sort of revolutionary idea—to step back 50 years in the “progress” of our country. And not an idea without drawbacks. One of the biggest problem now is the ratio of graduates to jobs. Too many people fighting for too few positions. And how we solve that, I have no idea. Not to mention, without the pressure for everyone to attend college, fewer young people will encounter Hemingway and Aristotle—and that prospect, I must admit, breaks my English-major’s heart. But if we can hinder the “business” that is higher education in America, then any change is worth it. If the millions of blinkered young people ready to sign away their future incomes for the chance at a college degree were to suddenly disappear, the companies that prey on them would as well. And maybe then colleges could shrink down to a reasonable size, resigning their role as the key-holders to every child’s future.

I have to admit, I was one of the lucky ones. With no debt to my name, I could move across the country after graduation, and a few more times after that—to Connecticut, to California, to Utah. I could leave my waitressing job to attend a literature conference halfway across the country, where I met my future husband and found my future career at his online newspaper.  But, for everyone I know, the problems are only growing worse. College tuitions rose again this year, and outstanding student loan debt is predicted to top $1 Trillion this year. More of my former classmates are moving back in with their parents. Depression rates rise by the year. Without a massive program of debt forgiveness, my generation will likely be weighed down for the rest of our lives.

Time passes and, despite our problems, most of us are getting married, having children. Every time I check Facebook someone else is engaged. Some are finding jobs. Some are testing the patience of their unemployment benefits. And life is moving on.

What, I can’t help but wonder, will the future bring for us? A part of me imagines an entire generation of depressed, disillusioned adults, retreating further into virtual entertainments and pharmaceuticals. But, to be honest, I think most of us are more resilient than that. We will likely still make some happiness for ourselves. We will find meaning the same way our ancestors have—in the people around us.

The next question that arises, then, is, what will we tell our children? Will we make the same mistakes as the generation that raised us—feeding their self-esteem and ambition, pushing them up the staircase to success even as the boards beneath their feet disintegrate? When it is time for the ballerinas, and firefighters, and future presidents to start considering their “grand plan” for the future, where will we point them?  The future remains so overwhelmingly vague. We don’t know yet—maybe we will never know—how to keep them from sinking beneath the cost of their dreams.

Tonya Stiles is Co-Publisher of the Canyon Country Zephyr.

To read the PDF version of this article, click here.

The world’s human population passed seven billion souls last October with little fanfare. There were a few ripples of concern but, incredibly, others thought it was a moment for celebration. You’d think we’d won a prize for procreation or something. While progressives worry about the long-term effects of overpopulation, they offer few if any solutions. Conservative thought suggests there is nothing to worry about—that technology and the free market of ideas will solve any and all problems caused by an expanding global population. That ‘growth’ in all its incarnations is a good thing.
Demographers predict that around mid-century, the global population will stabilize somewhere between nine and eleven billion, as if that’s a manageable number.  Why they think population growth will finally grind to a halt is bewildering to me.
I suppose there is an assumption that, as the world becomes more educated, affluence will follow and populations will decline. What it really means is that, as families become more connected to the developed world, they will prefer to spend their available incomes on stuff instead of kids. That alone is a mixed bag and a troubling possibility: the very future of the planet depends upon a less consumptive, more sustainable population and it cannot survive if all seven, or nine, or eleven billions choose to live like Americans. The American Dream is not sustainable.
We’ve heard the numbers again and again. The United States represents about 4% of the world’s human population but consumes almost 30% of its resources. If even half of the world’s 2050 population consumes at the same rate as us, they’d be gobbling up seven and a half times MORE resources than exist! The math just doesn’t work.

But what can we do? Even the most cheerfully optimistic (delusional) mainstream environmentalists agree there’s no easy way to accomplish negative population growth. It’s an absurdity to think voluntary population reduction is a viable notion.  Governments are not, in the main, going to take draconian measures (The China Solution for example) to reduce population.  Any government in this country that tried to take even the mildest of steps, like eliminating tax exemptions for families that bore more than two children, would be driven from office and out of the country. On a rail.
Pundits and social scientists may promote their Nine Point Plans for Population Reduction and talk about an ideal world where the human race takes a hard magnanimous look at itself and says meekly, ‘Damn, there are WAY too many of us…we better stop having kids for a century or two.’
But it’s not going to happen.

What other options do we have? Ed Abbey used to insist, “Our only hope is Catastrophe!”  In 1986, Abbey scribbled in his journal, “…oh God when will your vengeance descend upon these mean ugly people?  I long for the day of the coming collapse.”  He died three years later, his prayer unanswered.
And certainly many others, struggling with a solution to overpopulation and carefully avoiding the personal image of the human suffering such an apocalypse would cause, share his view.
And maybe it’s the way it will happen, but I doubt it. So far, science seems to keep outwitting the germs, and, no matter how insane and murderous we may act as a species, no matter how frequently or intensely we make war on each other, we eventually emerge more fertile and productive than ever. World War II cost 50 million lives and the destruction of trillions of dollars in destruction. Yet, the war eventually generated the greatest population and building boom in the history of the world.
Those who prefer the Apocalypse Solution may pray for earthquakes and famines and asteroids all they want. But it doesn’t seem like a viable option to me.

There is another possibility. The Hope of Severe Infertility. It’s hardly a new idea and it gets talked about more frequently these days. Scientists have already noted a decline in male fertility world-wide. Studies show that about 1.5% of all men were functionally sterile in 1938. Now it’s up to 8-12%.
Still, the threat, or the hope (choose one,) remains.
Here, the ‘solution’ comes in conflict with both mainstream progressive and conservative thinking. The contradictions could easily cause them to develop a terrific headache and split in two. Bear with me a moment.
If the world’s population should experience a precipitous decline due to wide-spread infertility, it has to be caused by something. It won’t ‘just happen.’ For those who hope God might point a wrathful finger at the earth and render us all barren, keep praying. It might work. But there are other human-made processes that may have the same effect.
Years ago, I stumbled upon a fascinating fact—one of those stories that makes for great party conversation (if I ever went to a party).  An article in Newsweek magazine featured the findings of Dr. Irwin Goldstein, an impotency expert from Boston University. Goldstein issued a grave warning to men who regularly ride bicycles.  His studies showed that when a man rides a bike with a standard seat, the kind that looks like a mutated black banana, his body weight flattens his main penile artery. This artery is essential for an erection and, from a man’s perspective, what could be more essential than that?

Goldstein believed that, over time, riding a bike and putting that kind of long-term pressure on the penile artery can irreversibly damage the vessel (“All hands abandon ship!”).  The worried doctor was seeing several new patients a week. Among them was Ed Pavelka of “Bicycling Magazine.” Pavelka complained that his years of intense marathon bike riding had left him “as soft as an over-cooked rigatoni.”  Not exactly a macho biker pick-up line.
But what are the odds that enough of us will take to the bicycle to cause this kind of impotency on a grand scale? Not likely.
Recently a story published in “Fertility & Sterility” magazine suggested that “wi-fi radiation may also be giving us more infertility by decreasing sperm motility and damaging DNA in sperm.” A story at NaturalNews.com said, “Researchers in Argentina took semen samples from 29 healthy men, and they measured sperm motility after four hours of exposure to wi-fi radiation from a laptop wirelessly connected to the internet. Sperm in the control group was kept at the same temperature for the same amount of time, but was not exposed to wi-fi radiation….Of the sperm exposed to the wi-fi radiation, 25 percent stopped swimming. Only 14 percent of unexposed sperm ceased to swim after four hours. Wi-fi sperm also showed 9 percent DNA fragmentation, or irreversible damage in the genetic code, while sperm in the control group only showed 3 percent.”
But the study pointed out that the infertility effect is only noticeable when the laptop user sets it directly on his lap, for hours at a time.  The odds of drastic population declines based on excessive laptop use are remote.
So what is the answer?  How can infertility save the world? It’s the solution that will confound and dismay everyone, from the most ardent ‘progressive’ to the most strident ‘conservative,’ for precisely the opposite reason.
What are the most potent causes of infertility? They’re all around us—men who smoke have sperm counts that are 13 to 17% lower than non-smokers. Men exposed to agricultural pesticides were 10 times more likely to experience infertility problems. A chemical called chlordane has been found in 75% of all homes and is believed to contribute to infertility. Then there’s the car exhaust, specifically benzopyrene, which has a profound negative effect on women’s ovaries. Chemical solvents like xylene, acetone, trichlorethylene, and other petroleum distillates have caused spontaneous abortions in women.  Monosodium Glutanate (MSG) has been shown to reduce the success of pregnancies. Chemicals used to make silicon chips have caused a dramatically increased miscarriage rates in women who worked with these solvents.
And then there are the products that are around us every day—laundry detergents, air-freshening products, fabric softeners, glass cleaners, carpet cleaners, hard-surface cleaners, and oven cleaners,
Are we risking infertility each time we reach for the Windex Aerosol, Formula 409, Lemon Fresh Pine-Sol or Simple Green All Purpose Cleaner?
The answer may be a resounding YES.

And there’s the irony…Progressives worry about overpopulation and seek ways to bring it under control and even reduce it. But they have also historically believed in the strict regulation and often the total elimination of chemicals that might cause harm to the general public. Consequently they have a real dilemma. They can oppose the massive use of toxins and fight for their removal, but by so doing, they may also eliminate the one option that might slowly bring our global population down to a reasonable level.
Conservatives support and encourage an ever-expanding population and an economy that grows with it, based on the idea that all growth is good. They believe that a declining population would be a disaster. But they also oppose the regulation of toxic chemicals. They believe agencies like the FDA and the EP are harassing business and stalling growth.  But by encouraging their continued wide-spread use, they may eventually contribute to a dramatic population collapse.

In the end, obviously, neither of these options is very appealing. The idea of choosing between slowly killing our species by destroying our ability to reproduce versus waiting for a comet to hit the planet is not something to cheer about. But it does say something about the way we’ve allowed our future and our destiny to get away from us. We no longer have any real control over our fate. Or maybe that’s the point…
We never did.

To read Jim’s other “Take it or Leave it” articles from this issue, follow these links:

George Clooney, President Obama, and the Loyal Voice of Dissent

Moab U, Tar Sands, and Sustainability

The 99% (We Don\’t Like Each Other Very Much…)

To read the PDF version of this article, click here.

Don’t forget the Zephyr Ads! All links are hot!

I was going to write about population, water and the Southwest, largely where I’m still headed.  But then came headlines about the Occupy Movement; an essay on the Cassandra dilemma, and my ongoing frustration that a nation founded on the core concept of majority rule today has none, why—although the fact is little recognized—we are paralyzed on critical issues.

The founders fought the Revolutionary War to end “the tyranny of the few over the many,” sadly, pretty much the system we have devolved into.  We no longer have the “few” of English royalty, but we have the few of powerful lobbyists and campaign contributors.

Elected officials were, once upon a time, obligated to vote in a way that represented the wishes of the majority of those they, well, represented—that in a time when an angry constituency might happily resort to tarring and feathering.

Our minority-rule system today is predicated on:

• elected officials’ seemingly unbreakable ties to campaign-finance sources (the few)
• their exclusive focus on critical voting blocs (the few), rather than the majority
• a preoccupation with the next “election cycle,” rather than the long-term good of the nation
• catering to the overly powerful “elites” (the few) that the Occupy Movement rightly condemn
• as CBS News revealed on “60 Minutes,” outright Congressional corruption.

The news program showed how the only people who can do insider trading legally are members of Congress.  Curiously, after “60 Minutes” broke the story, a bill to correct the problem, which had languished for lack of sponsors, was suddenly awash in them, as an outraged Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner could do little more than bluster during “60 Minutes” interviews about their possible enrichment as a result of insider trading.

I recently read “The Quiet Coup,” (The Atlantic, May 2009) by a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund stating that if the United States needed a loan from that organization—often a last resort for developing nations—it would be denied for the same reason that many developing nations are:  corruption!  The problem, from author Simon Johnson’s view, is that the finance industry has “effectively captured our government,” with him defining how recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that blocks reform.

Congress focuses solely on economic issues even as it ignores environmental, education, health-care, infrastructure, and other critical crises—without realizing that those are all the very foundations of long-term economic well-being and, certainly, the ability of all systems to evolve and adapt to a changing world.

Now, to the Cassandra dilemma.  I receive daily—and, to me, critical—emails from Population Media.  Much of their work targets women in developing nations.  These include family-planning messages and progressive role models featured in radio and television soap operas.  Their emails, available upon request at www.populationmedia.org/who/subscribe-to-pmc / , are gathered from news sources and professionals around the world and are about population, global warming, species extinctions, agriculture, biodiversity, water and women’s issues, such as the recent, “The men behind the war on women,” about the influence of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (the few) on Congress.

The nation’s nearly 70 million Catholics—nearly one-in-four Americans—deserve representation, but the essay indicates that even Catholics go unrepresented.  One 2008 poll showed that 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women use birth control, 83 percent of those who attend mass weekly.  A Pew poll showed that only 21 percent believe abortion should be illegal, while 59,000 nuns sent a letter to Congress in 2010 urging the passage of healthcare reform, despite the bishops’ opposition because the bill would allow federal subsidy of abortions.  We got another example of this recently when a right-to-life effort in Mississippi was turned down resoundingly by voters, illustrating, if nothing else, that far-right religious voters might not be as many or as extreme as depicted in the media.   Yet, this is an example of how the few hold sway over the many.

Another recent Population Media transmission was an essay by Kurt Dahl about the Cassandra dilemma.  Cassandra was the beautiful daughter of royalty from ancient Troy.  The god, Apollo, fell in love with her and bestowed upon her the ability to know the future.  But when she refused him, he cursed her by making it so that no one would believe her predictions, as Dahl wrote, “a frustrating curse in the extreme,” as she tried, in vain, to warn of the danger of the Trojan horse.

Dahl then says this is where we are today.  Many see the looming dangers of climate disruption, peak oil, water depletion, soil degradation, species extinction, and human population growth and fear a disaster, as Dahl writes, “of unimaginable proportions.”  Yet, we get no action to address those problems even though there could be only a small window of opportunity.

Dahl attributes this to apathy, denial and false hope, certainly true.  But I think it also harkens back to “the tyranny of the few over the many.”  Even if most Americans are concerned about climate disruption, (I believe most are), we have nowhere to go for representation—certainly not elected officials whose purse strings are held by powerful energy lobbies, who see not an opportunity in fighting climate disruption but an obstacle.  That is tragic, since China sees that opportunity and has captured the market in solar technologies, with fog-bound Germany close behind.  As clearly defined in Tom Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded, a nation that grew based on innovation is no longer innovative nor willing to change outdated utility regulations—the few again.

Now to water and the American Southwest.  It is telling that the first online comment about a January 2012 Scientific American article about an impending water crisis in the Southwest—of perhaps catastrophic proportions—read, “…those who follow U.S. politics will immediately recognize that nothing will happen until a crisis is undeniable, and probably not even then.”  That’s cynical, but accurate because water is another issue where we have no representation, although another hurdle is that 99 percent of the people have no clue where their water comes from or how vulnerable the supply.

Scientists have long cautioned that the Southwest would be hit first, worst and hardest by climate disruption, but more troubling is what could happen if the Southwest simply returns to the usual far drier norms.

Key is that our “leaders” (a term I always use now with quotes) are moving forward on growth on the assumption that precipitation levels from 1960 to 1995 were the norm, but tree-ring and other research refute that.

Stark reality lost on just about everyone in the Southwest is that the region has been drier—often much, much, much drier—with a number of catastrophic, sometimes civilization-breaking droughts dotting its history, such as one that turned the prehistoric Hohokum’s amazing irrigation system at today’s Phoenix to dust, triggering famine.

Recent years, 2000, 2002 and 2011 brought droughts to the Southwest, each triggering massive tree die offs and wildfires of biblical proportions, such as this year’s Wallow Fire in Arizona and the Las Conchas Fire—visible at night as an eerie ghost fire smoldering across miles of mountain side after its first catastrophic blowup.  The Wallow burned over 800 square miles (half-a-million acres) and the Las Conchas burned over 150,000 acres.  For perspective, the 1996 Dome Fire, at the time the largest wildfire in state history, burned a mere 16,600 acres!

Yet, these “droughts,” including the infamous 1930s drought or the “Fifties drought,” when placed in the context of Southwestern history, barely show as droughts!

Key is that the 20^th century was the wettest century in nearly 2,000 years.

A 40-year drought in the mid-1500s hit much of the continent, but most especially the Southwest.  As one climatologist commented, “There’s no way that large human populations would be able to live (in the Southwest) in that.  It was not a good time.”

And, severe droughts occurred in the late 1300s, contributing to the abandonment of cities in the Four Corners area. Drought dominated much of the 1400s and the mid-1700s.  A 1680s drought was worse than the 1950s drought and helped trigger the successful uprising against Spaniards by the Pueblos in New Mexico who had been forced to turn over most of their harvests to their captors.

Such mega-droughts were likely triggered by routine temperature changes in the Atlantic and Pacific, part of normal Southwest weather trends—trends likely to grow more extreme with global warming.

On other side of the coin—the one we humans have control over—is that the region is the fastest growing region of this the world’s third most populated nation, behind only China and India.

As I argued in a recent paper for the Center for Immigration Studies (http://www.cis.org/southwest-water-population-growth) , there is insufficient water for the current population, as “leaders” operate on the assumption that the astronomically high growth of the past century must (apparently, solely for economic reasons) continue, even as Phoenix is larger in physical size that Paris, San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, D.C., combined with the greater Salt River Valley at over 4 million people, up from a paltry 5,554 citizens in 1900.   Las Vegas is over 2 million, up from 2,000 in 1920, a thousand-fold increase in less than 100 years, a story common or exceeded in every major Southwestern city.  Denver, at over 2.5 million, up from 130,000 in 1900, is on the Atlantic watershed—where the Colorado’s waters were never meant to flow—but dependent upon Colorado River water diverted under or over the Rocky Mountains, an illustration of the adage that in the West, “Water flows uphill towards money.”

Such growth, common in the West, reflects rates, matched only by population-explosion nations in Africa of 2 and 3 percent per-annum, or doubling times of 35 to a mere 23 years, a stark reality absolutely lost (or dodged) on “leaders” and the media.

The Colorado is the only major river in the region, since, as 20^th Century humorist Will Rogers summed up, the only other “big” river, the Rio Grande, is the only river he had seen that “looked like it needed to be irrigated,”  plus it too is over-allocated, improperly used and increasingly challenged by drought.

In the 1920s, the Colorado was legally apportioned, or divided, to the upper-basin states (Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico) and the lower-basin states (Arizona, Nevada, California) on the assumption the river carried 16.4 million acre-feet a year, with 7.5 million acre feet allocated to each basin and the “excess” promised to Mexico.

But then, grim reality dawned as it was discovered the allocation was based on measurements on the river during the wettest period in 400 years. It was clear that 1.3 million acre feet more water was apportioned than would exist most years.

After tree-ring studies in the late 20^th century, an even grimmer reality dawned:  the flow will likely be 3 million acre feet less than allocated, something of not-great concern in 1950 when fewer than 15 million people lived in the Southwest, but a serious problem today as the population stands at 60 million on its way to a projected—land-development interests would argue a “hoped-for”—doubling late century.  Stream-gage readings have averaged only 14.2 million acre feet per year since 1950, despite it being the dampest period in discernible history.

The Colorado could well average only about 13.5 million acre-feet a year, a stark reality become clearer in the mid-1990s as drier norms returned and reservoir levels plummeted—even as the region’s already booming population really began to explode, part of national demographics linked to births (40 percent of growth) and immigration (60 percent), with the high birth-rate among first-generation immigrants also part of the “birth” number.  Key is that, while few things influence outcomes more than our sheer numbers, “leaders” are continuing policies influencing demographics—such as the highest immigration in our nation’s history by a factor of five, higher even than during the Frontier Era “Great Wave”—with no acknowledgement or discussion of the implications to problems like the water shortfalls in the now highly populated Southwest.

Scientific and other voices warn that that shortfall is dangerous, even if global warming is not taken into account, since population increases make the entire water system more “brittle” and likely to respond more quickly and more negatively to drought.  At the least, water shortfalls will increase political instability.  Nevada recently threatened, for example, to break the very core of all water management in the Southwest, the Colorado River Compact, based on shortfalls linked to its mushrooming population and drought and what it saw as an unwillingness of other interests to hear its concerns.

The Scripps Institute of Oceanography has warned—based on a study that bent over backwards to err on the side of caution—that Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the nation, by the 2020s could run dry.  Others have raised concerns about the second largest reservoir, Lake Powell, with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation conceding, partly due to water-management changes implemented to try to ameliorate the crisis on the Colorado, that Lake Powell will likely never reach the full-line again.

Critical is that these massive reservoirs are the water core upon which the economy and civilization of the Southwest is built.

Other agencies—the National Academy of Sciences, the Pacific Institute, the University of Colorado’s Western Water Assessment—have similarly raised concerns.  A National Academy’s statement, after a 2007 study, said, “It became clear that a broad understanding of the Colorado River management issues is not possible unless both water supply and water demand issues are adequately studied.  Our report presents population growth data for much of the western United States that is served by Colorado River water.  The cities in the region are collectively the fastest growing in the nation.  Of further concern is that growth seems to be occurring with little regard to long-term availability of future water supplies. (Emphasis added.)

Yet, virtually every approach by “leaders” to the crisis—those who even acknowledge it—is only on the “supply side,” or how to find more water, stretch available supplies, or to turn to “techno fixes,” like de-salting, that will only marginally increase supplies or are energy intensive at a time when energy is also an increasing problem, as defined in a recent Sandia National Laboratory study.

Meanwhile, they focus exclusively, to total preoccupation, on attracting more growth to our already fast-growing region—this as they serve “the few,” powerful economic forces dependent upon continued high population growth, especially developers.

That type of “tyranny of the few over the many” is particularly dangerous if it means a potentially dangerous water crisis is not addressed in a common-sense, all-inclusive—demand side and supply side—way, or if national policies affecting growth are never discussed or their demographic implications considered.

(Parker, who lives near Albuquerque, is a fifth-generation native of the American Southwest, and has worked as a journalist covering Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Jemez Mountain region for the Santa Fe New Mexican.  She has also worked and written about water issues, forestry issues and population, regionally and nationally.)

To read the PDF version of this article, click here. and here.

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