Friday, September 26, 2003

Acts of Hope Orion Magazine -- Twenty-one years ago this June, a million people gathered in Central Park to demand a nuclear freeze. They didn't get it. The movement was full of people who believed they'd realize their goal in a few years and then go home. Many went home disappointed or burned out. But in less than a decade, major nuclear arms reductions were negotiated, helped along by European antinuclear movements and the impetus they gave Gorbachev. Since then, the issue has fallen off the map and we have lost much of what was gained. The US never ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the Bush administration is planning to resume the full-fledged nuclear testing halted in 1991, to resume manufacture, to expand the arsenal, and perhaps even to use it in once-proscribed ways. It's always too soon to go home. And it's always too soon to calculate effect. I once read an anecdote by someone in Women Strike for Peace, the first great antinuclear movement in the United States, the one that did contribute to a major victory: the 1963 end of aboveground nuclear testing with its radioactive fallout that was showing up in mother's milk and baby teeth. She told of how foolish and futile she felt standing in the rain one morning protesting at the Kennedy White House. Years later she heard Dr. Benjamin Spock -- one of the most high-profile activists on the issue then -- say that the turning point for him was seeing a small group of women standing in the rain, protesting at the White House. If they were so passionately committed, he thought, he should give the issue more consideration himself. A lot of activists expect that for every action there is an equal and opposite and punctual reaction, and regard the lack of one as failure. After all, activism is often a reaction: Bush decides to invade Iraq, we create a global peace movement in which 10 to 30 million people march on seven continents on the same weekend. But history is shaped by the groundswells and common dreams that single acts and moments only represent. It's a landscape more complicated than commensurate cause and effect. Politics is a surface in which transformation comes about as much because of pervasive changes in the depths of the collective imagination as because of visible acts, though both are necessary. And though huge causes sometimes have little effect, tiny ones occasionally have huge consequences. (09/26/03) The New Apollo Project Yes! Magazine -- Too often we are told to think small—that we must choose between jobs and environmental quality, and that we cannot break the crippling dependence on foreign oil that threatens the security of our nation. But we can do better. Working families should not have to choose between putting food on the table for our children today and protecting the health of our children tomorrow. Labor leaders and environmentalists, once pitted against each other, have united around a jobs plan that is also an energy plan and a national security plan: a new Apollo Project to move our country toward energy independence, create long-term family-wage jobs, and improve the efficiency and performance of our energy system. The Apollo Project, named after President Kennedy’s famous challenge to put a man on the moon, will increase the diversity of our energy resources, using the best available technology to reduce environ-mental impacts and create good jobs and reliable and affordable energy. America is neglecting the industries of the future while other nations invest. Wind is the fastest growing energy source, but European producers dominate turbine production.  Fuel cells are poised to revolutionize energy technology, but most come from non-union plants in Canada. In 2000, the Japanese government spent $500 million on photovoltaic cells, seven times U.S. investment. ... The Apollo Project for energy independence will be bold, to match the scale of the problem. We propose spending $300 billion over 10 years, creating or retaining 3 million jobs that are more sustainable and more likely to be union, while making the economy more competitive and more productive. It will break the myth that the environment and the economy are locked in perpetual conflict and bring Americans together around a progressive and hopeful agenda of reinvestment. This plan has already been supported by 12 labor unions, representing 5.5 million members, including the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the Steelworkers, the UAW, and others.  The project has been praised by the heads of the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and we continue to build alliances with labor, environmental, community, and faith groups, and progressive policy advocates of all stripes. (09/26/03) Taking a Break! Yes! Magazine -- In our hectic, overstressed society, taking time can seem like a luxury we can't afford. But an ancient tradition insists that time out is a necessity that can feed our sold and sustain our culture. Several years ago, I went to a folk song festival in Philadelphia. Many of the singers sang labor songs of the 1930s, civil rights songs of the 1960s, and peace songs of many decades. The audience sang along, nostalgia strong in the air. Then Charlie King began singing a song with the refrain, “What ever happened to the eight-hour day? When did they take it away? . . . When did we give it away? Then the audience roared with passion, not nostalgia. This was about our own lives, not something from the past. I was startled. Suddenly I saw that my own sense of hyper-overwork, of teetering on the edge of burnout, was not mine alone. ... There are deep human needs for rest and reflection, for family time and community time. But economic and cultural pressures are grinding those deep human needs underfoot. ... In the last century, all traditional communities on Planet Earth have been living through an analogous crisis. The great leap in economic efficiency and military mastery that came with modernity played the same role in shattering Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism that Sumerian efficiency and power played in the Western Semitic communities. Thus it is not surprising that just as we realize we are being swamped by the new Global Gobble of human communities and the Earth itself, just as the Nazi Holocaust, the H-Bomb, sweatshops, and the burning of the Amazon basin, the privatization of water supplies, and global warming come to pass, the need for rest, reflection, calm, comes back into our consciousness. (09/26/03) Congress Blocks Total Surveillance Common Dreams -- Privacy and civil-rights groups have hailed Congress' decision to effectively kill a controversial Pentagon program to construct a powerful computerized surveillance system that critics feared would lead to unprecedented spying into the private lives of U.S. citizens. The program, whose name was changed from "Total Information Awareness" to "Terrorist Information Awareness after an initial outcry late last year, was the brainchild of ret. Admiral John Poindexter, former President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser who was convicted of five felony counts of lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair in the mid-1980s. In a bid to save the program, Poindexter resigned his position in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) last month, but a conference committee of House and Senate members agreed to delete funding for TIA when it met earlier this week to finish reconciling the two houses' versions of the 2004 defense appropriations bill. The conference committee said it was "concerned about the activities of the Information Awareness Office (that had been headed by Poindexter) and directed that the office be terminated immediately." The final bill also banned the government from using the technology envisioned by TIA in any other program. (09/26/03) Oceans Turning to Soda Pop BBC Nature -- The world's oceans are slowly getting more acidic, say scientists. The researchers from California say the change is taking place in response to higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The lowering of the waters' pH value is not great at the moment but could pose a serious threat to current marine life if it continues, they warn. Ken Caldeira and Michael Wickett, from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, report their concerns in the journal Nature. Increasing use of fossil fuels means more carbon dioxide is going into the air, and most of it will eventually be absorbed by seawater. Once in the water, it reacts to form carbonic acid. ... It is not absolutely clear what that means for marine life, however. Most organisms live near the surface, where the greatest pH change would be expected to occur, but deep-ocean lifeforms may be more sensitive to pH changes. Coral reefs and other organisms whose skeletons or shells contain calcium carbonate may be particularly affected, the team speculate. They could find it much more difficult to build these structures in water with a lower pH. In recent years some people have suggested deliberately storing carbon dioxide from power stations in the deep ocean as a way of curbing global warming. But Dr Caldeira said that such a strategy should now be re-considered. "Previously, most experts had looked at ocean absorption of carbon dioxide as a good thing - because in releasing CO2 into the atmosphere we warm the planet; and when CO2 is absorbed by the ocean, it reduces the amount of greenhouse warming. Now, we're understanding that ocean uptake of CO2 may at best be a mixed blessing."(09/26/03) 8:49:26 AM

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