Photo: Eric Wagner

What if rising sea levels are yet another measure of inequality? What if the degradation of our planet’s life-support systems — its atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere — goes hand in hand with the accumulation of wealth, power, and control by that corrupt and greedy 1% we are hearing about from Zuccotti Park? What if the assault on America’s middle class and the assault on the environment are one and the same?

Money rules

It’s not hard for me to understand how environmental quality and economic inequality came to be joined at the hip. In all my years as a grassroots organizer dealing with the tragic impact of degraded environments on public health, it was always the same: Someone got rich and someone got sick.

In the struggles that I was involved in to curb polluters and safeguard public health, those who wanted curbs, accountability, and precautions were always outspent several times over by those who wanted no restrictions on their effluents. We dug into our own pockets for postage money, they had expense accounts. We made flyers to slip under the windshield wipers of parked cars, they bought ads on television. We took time off from jobs to visit legislators, only to discover that they had gone to lunch with full-time lobbyists.

Naturally, the barons of the chemical and nuclear industries don’t live next to the radioactive or toxic-waste dumps that their corporations create; on the other hand, impoverished black and brown people often do live near such ecological sacrifice zones because they can’t afford better. Similarly, the gated communities of the hyper-wealthy are not built next to cesspool rivers or skylines filled with fuming smokestacks, but the slums of the planet are. Don’t think, though, that it’s just a matter of property values or scenery. It’s about health, about whether your kids have lead or dioxins running through their veins. It’s a simple formula, in fact: wealth disparities become health disparities.

And here’s another formula: When there’s money to be made, both workers and the environment are expendable. Just as jobs migrate if labor can be had cheaper overseas, I know workers who were tossed aside when they became ill from the foul air or poisonous chemicals they encountered on the job.

The fact is: We won’t free ourselves from a dysfunctional and unfair economic order until we begin to see ourselves as communities, not commodities. That is one clear message from Zuccotti Park.

Polluters routinely walk away from the ground they poison and expect taxpayers to clean up after them. By “externalizing” such costs, profits are increased. Examples of land abuse and abandonment are too legion to list, but most of us can refer to a familiar “Superfund site” in our own backyard. Clearly, Mother Nature is among the disenfranchised, exploited, and struggling.

Democracy 101

The 99% pay for wealth disparity with lost jobs, foreclosed homes, weakening pensions, and slashed services, but Nature pays, too. In the world the 1%-ers have created, the needs of whole ecosystems are as easy to disregard as, say, the need the young have for debt-free educations and meaningful jobs.

Extreme disparity and deep inequality generate a double standard with profound consequences. If you are a CEO who skims millions of dollars off other people’s labor, it’s called a “bonus.” If you are a flood victim who breaks into a sporting goods store to grab a lifejacket, it’s called looting. If you lose your job and fall behind on your mortgage, you get evicted. If you are a banker-broker who designed flawed mortgages that caused a million people to lose their homes, you get a second-home vacation-mansion near a golf course.

If you drag heavy fishnets across the ocean floor and pulverize an entire ecosystem, ending thousands of years of dynamic evolution and depriving future generations of a healthy ocean, it’s called free enterprise. But if, like Tim DeChristopher, you disrupt an auction of public land to oil and gas companies, it’s called a crime and you get two years in jail.

In campaigns to make polluting corporations accountable, my Utah neighbors and I learned this simple truth: Decisions about what to allow into the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat are soon enough translated into flesh and blood, bone and nerve, and daily experience. So it’s crucial that those decisions, involving environmental quality and public health, are made openly, inclusively, and accountably. That’s Democracy 101.

The corporations that shred habitat and contaminate your air and water are anything but democratic. Stand in line to get your 30 seconds in front of a microphone at a public hearing about the siting of a nuclear power plant, the effluent from a factory farm, or the removal of a mountaintop and you’ll get the picture quickly enough: The corporations that profit from such ecological destruction are distant, arrogant, secretive, and unresponsive. The 1% are willing to spend billions impeding democratic initiatives, which is why every so-called environmental issue is also about building a democratic culture.

First kill the EPA, then Social Security

Beyond all the rhetoric about freedom from the new stars of the Republican Party, the strategy is simple enough: obstruct and misinform, then blame the resulting dysfunction on “government.” It’s a great scam. Tell the voters that government doesn’t work and then, when elected, prove it. And first on the list of government outfits they want to sideline or kill is the Environmental Protection Agency, so they can do away with the already flimsy wall of regulation that stands between their toxins and your bloodstream.

Poll after poll shows that citizens understand the need for environmental rules and safeguards. Mercury is never put into the bloodstreams of nursing mothers by consensus, nor are watersheds fracked until they are flammable by popular demand. But the free market ideologues of the Republican Party are united in opposition to any rule or standard that impedes the “magic” of the marketplace and unchecked capital.

The same bottom-line quarterly-report fixation on profitability that accepts oil spills as inevitable also accepts unemployment as inevitable. Tearing apart wildlife habitat to make a profit and doing the same at a workplace are just considered the price of doing business. Clear-cutting a forest and clear-cutting a labor force are two sides of the same coin.

Beware of growth

Getting the economy growing has been the refrain of the Obama administration and the justification for every bad deal, budget cut, and unbalanced compromise it’s made. The desperate effort to grow the economy to solve our economic woes is what keeps Timothy Geithner at the helm of the Treasury and is what stalls the regulation of greenhouse gases. It’s why we are told we must sacrifice environmental quality for pipelines and why young men and women are sacrificed to protect access to oil, the lubricant for an acquisitive economic engine. The financial empire of the 1%-ers and the political order it has shaped are predicated on easy and relentless growth. How, we are asked, will there be enough for everyone if we don’t keep growing?

The fundamental contradiction of our time is this: We have built an all-encompassing economic engine that requires unending growth. A contraction of even a percent or two is a crisis, and yet we are embedded in ecosystems that are reaching or have reached their limits. This isn’t complicated: There’s only so much fertile soil or fresh water available, only so many fish in the ocean, only so much CO2 the planet can absorb and remain habitable.

Yes, you can get around this contradiction for a while by exploiting your neighbor’s habitat, using technological advances to extend your natural resources, and stealing from the future — that is, using up soil, minerals, and water your grandchildren (someday to be part of that same 99%) will need. But the limits to those familiar and, in the past, largely successful strategies are becoming more evident all the time.

At some point, we’ll discover that you can’t exist for long beyond the boundaries of the natural world, that (as with every other species) if you overload the carrying capacity of your habitat, you crash. Warming temperatures, chaotic weather patterns, extreme storms, monster wildfires, epic droughts, Biblical floods, an avalanche of species extinction … that collapse is upon us now. In the human realm, it translates into hunger and violence, mass migrations and civil strife, failed states and resource wars.

Like so much else these days, the crash, as it happens, will not be suffered in equal measure by all of us. The 1%-ers will be atop the hill, while the 99% will be in the flood lands below swimming for their lives, clinging to debris, or drowning. The Great Recession has previewed just how that will work.

An unsustainable economy is inherently unfair, and worse is to come. After all, the car is heading for the cliff’s edge, the grandkids are in the backseat, and all we’re arguing about is who can best put the pedal to the metal.

Occupy Earth

Give credit where it’s due: It’s been the genius of the protesters in Zuccotti Park to shift public discourse to whether the distribution of economic burdens and rewards is just and whether the economic system makes us whole or reduces and divides us. It’s hard to imagine how we’ll address our converging ecological crises without first addressing the way accumulating wealth and power has captured the political system. As long as Washington is dominated and intimidated by giant oil companies, Wall Street speculators, and corporations that can buy influence and even write the rules that make buying influence possible, there’s no meaningful way to deal with our economy’s addiction to fossil fuels and its dire consequences.

Nature’s 99% is an amazingly diverse community of species. They feed and share and recycle within a web of relationships so dynamic and complex that we have yet to fathom how it all fits together. What we have excelled at so far is breaking things down into their parts and then reassembling them; that, after all, is how a barrel of crude oil becomes rocket fuel or a lawn chair.

When it comes to the more chaotic, less linear features of life like climate, ecosystems, immune systems, or fetal development, we are only beginning to understand thresholds and feedback loops, the way the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. But we at least know that the parts matter deeply and that, before we even fully understand them, we’re losing them at an accelerating rate. Forests are dying, fisheries are going, extinction is on steroids.

Degrading the planet’s operating systems to bolster the bottom line is foolish and reckless. It hurts us all. No less important, it’s unfair. The 1% profit, while the rest of us cough and cope.

After Occupy Wall Street, isn’t it time for Occupy Earth?

Arizona burns in the distance.Photo: Caroline Sanstead

Arizona is burning. Texas, too. New Mexico is next. If you need a grim reminder that an already arid West is burning up and blowing away, here it is. As I write this, more than 700 square miles of Arizona and more than 4,300 square miles of Texas have been swept by monster wildfires. Consider those massive columns of acrid smoke drifting eastward as a kind of smoke signal warning us that a globally warming world is not a matter of some future worst-case scenario. It’s happening right here, right now.

Air tankers have been dropping fire retardant on what is being called the Wallow fire in Arizona and firefighting crews have been mobilized from across the West, but the fire remained “zero contained” for most of last week and only 18 percent so early in the new week, too big to touch with mere human tools like hoses, shovels, saws, and bulldozers. Walls of flame 100 feet high rolled over the land like a tsunami from Hades. The heat from such a fire is so intense and immense that it can create small tornadoes of red embers that cannot be knocked down and smothered by water or chemicals. These are not your grandfather’s forest fires.

Because the burn area in eastern Arizona is sparsely populated, damage to property so far has been minimal compared to, say, wildfire destruction in California, where the interface of civilization and wilderness is growing ever more crowded. However, the devastation to life in the fire zone, from microbiotic communities that hold soil and crucial nutrients in place to more popular species like deer, elk, bear, fish, and birds — already hard-pressed to cope with the rapidity of climate change — will be catastrophic.

The vastness of the American West holds rainforests, deserts, and everything in between, so weather patterns and moisture vary. Nonetheless, we have been experiencing a historic drought for about a decade in significant parts of the region. As topsoil dries out, microbial dynamics change and native plants either die or move uphill toward cooler temperatures and more moisture. Wildlife that depends on the seeds, nuts, leaves, shade, and shelter follows the plants — if it can.

Plants and animals are usually able to adapt to slow and steady changes in their habitat, but rapid and uncertain seasonal transformations in weather patterns mean that the timing for such basic ecological processes as seed germination, pollination, migration, and hibernation is also disrupted. The challenge of adapting to such fundamental changes can be overwhelming.

And if evolving at warp speed (while Mother Nature experiences hot flashes) isn’t enough, plants, animals, and birds are struggling within previously reduced and fragmented habitats. In other words, wildlife already thrown off the mothership now finds the lifeboats, those remnants of their former habitats, on fire. Sometimes extinction happens with a whimper, sometimes with a crackle and a blast.

As for the humans in this drama, I can tell you from personal experience that thousands of people in Arizona and New Mexico are living in fear. A forest fire is a monster you can see. It looks over your shoulder 24 hours a day for days on end. You pack your most precious possessions, gather necessary documents, and point your car or truck toward the road for a quick get-away. If you have a trailer, you load and hitch it. If you have pets or large animals like a horse, cattle, or sheep, you think of how you’re going to get them to safety. If you have elderly neighbors or family in the area, you check on them.

And as you wait, watch, and worry, you choke on smoke, rub itching eyes, and sneeze fitfully. After a couple of days of that omnipresent smoke, almost everyone you meet has a headache. You know that when it is over, even if you’re among the lucky ones whose homes still stand, you will witness and share in the suffering of neighbors and mourn the loss of cherished places, of shaded streams and flowered meadows, grand vistas, and the lost aroma of the deep woods.

Cue the inferno

These past few years, megafires in the West have become ever more routine. Though their estimates and measurements may vary, the experts who study these phenomena all agree that wildfires today are bigger, last longer, and are more frequent. A big fire used to burn perhaps 30 square miles. Today, wildfires regularly scorch 150-square-mile areas.

Global warming, global weirding, climate change — whatever you prefer to call it — is not just happening in some distant, melting Arctic land out of a storybook. It is not just burning up far-away Russia. It’s here now.

The seas have warmed, ice caps are melting, and the old reliable ocean currents and atmospheric jet streams are jumping their tracks. The harbingers of a warming planet and the abruptly shifting weather patterns that result vary across the American landscape. Along the vast Mississippi River drainage in the heartland of America, epic floods, like our wildfires in the West, are becoming more frequent. In the Gulf states, it’s monster hurricanes and in the Midwest, swarms of killer tornadoes signal that things have changed. In the East, it’s those killer heat waves and record-breaking blizzards.

But in the West, we just burn.

Although Western politicians like to blame the dire situation on tree-hugging environmentalists who bring suit to keep loggers from thinning and harvesting the crowded forests, the big picture is far more complicated. According to Wally Covington of Northern Arizona University, a renowned forest ecologist, the problem has been building towards a catastrophe for decades.

Historically, Western forests were relatively thin, and grasses, light shrubs, and wildflowers thrived under their canopies. Fires would move through every few years, clearing the accumulated undergrowth and resetting the successional clock. Fire, that is, was an ecological process. Then, in the 1880s, cattle were brought in to graze the native grasses under the forest canopy. As the grass disappeared, fires were limited and smaller trees were able to mature until the land became overcrowded. Invasive species like highly flammable cheat grass also moved in, carried there and distributed in cow dung. Then, foresters began suppressing fires to
protect the overstocked timber that generated revenues and profits.

All this set the stage for catastrophe. Next, a decade of drought weakened millions of trees, making them susceptible to voracious beetles that gnaw them to death. Warmer air carries more moisture, so winters, while wetter than normal, are not as cold. Typical temperatures, in fact, have become mild enough that the beetles, once killed by wintry deep freezes, are now often able to survive until spring, which means that their range is expanding dramatically. Now, thanks to them, whole mountainsides across the west have turned from green to brown.

Finally, spring runoff that used to happen over three months now sometimes comes down torrentially in a single month, which means that the forests are dry longer. Even our lovely iconic stands of aspen trees are dying on parched south-facing slopes. Cuine the inferno.

If you live in the West, you can’t help wonder what will burn next. Eastern Colorado, Oklahoma, and the Dakotas are, at present, deep in drought and likely candidates. Montana’s Lodgepole Pine forests are dying and ready to ignite. Colorado’s Grand Mesa is another drying forest area that could go up in flames anytime. Wally Covington estimates that a total of about half-a-million square miles of Western forests, an area three times the size of California, is now at risk of catastrophic fires. As ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger observed in 2008 when it was California’s turn to burn, the fire season is now 365 days long.

Trees killed by pine beetles in Colorado.Photo: V SmootheThe fire next time

That may explain why “smoke season” began so early this year, overlapping the spring flood season. Texas and other Western states may be drying up and readying themselves to blow dust your way, but in Utah, where I live, it was an extremely wet winter. Watersheds here are at 200 percent to 700 percent of the normal snowpack (“normal” being an ever more problematic concept out here). Spring weather has become increasingly weird and unpredictable. Last year, we had record-breaking heat and early monsoons in May. This year it was unusually cold and damp. The mountains held on to all that accumulating snow, which is now melting quickly and heading downhill all at once.

So although skiers are still riding the mountain slopes of northern Utah, river-rafting guides in the south, famous for their hunger for whitewater excitement, are cancelling trips on the Colorado and Green Rivers because they are flowing so hard and high that navigating them is too risky to try. In our more sedate settings, suburbs and such, sandbags are now ubiquitous. Basement pumps are humming across the state. Reservoirs were emptied ahead of the floods so that they could be refilled with excess runoff, but there is enough snowmelt in our mountains this year to fill them seven times over. Utah Gov. Gary Herbert (R) went on television to urge parents to keep children away from fast-moving streams that might sweep them away. Seven children have nonetheless drowned in the past two weeks.

The old gospel got it mostly right when God told Noah, “No more water, the fire next time.” In the West we know that it is not actually a question of either/or, because they go together. First, floods fuel growth, then growth fuels fires, then fires fuel floods. So all that unexpected, unpredicted moisture we got this winter will translate into a fresh layer of lush undergrowth in forests that until very recently were drying up, ravaged by beetles, and dying. You may visit us this summer and see all that new green vegetation as so much beautiful scenery, but we know it is also a ticking tinderbox. If Mother Nature flips her fickle toggle switch back to hot and dry, as she surely will, fire will follow.

When fire removes trees, brush, and grasses that absorb spring runoff and slow the flow, the next round of floods is accelerated. If the fire is intense enough to bake soils into a water-resistant crust, the next floods will start landslides and muddy rivers. The silt from all that erosion will clog reservoirs, reducing their capacity both to store water and to mitigate floods. That’s how a self-reinforcing feedback loop works. Back in the days when our weather was far more benign and predictable, this dynamic relationship between fire and flood was predictable and manageable. Today, it is not.

It may be hard to draw a direct line of cause and effect between global warming (or weirding) and a chain of tornadoes sawing through Joplin, while the record-breaking blizzards of 2011 may seem to contradict the very notion that the planet is getting hotter. But the droughts, pestilence, and fires we are experiencing in the West are logical and obvious signs that the planet is overheating. We would be wise and prudent to pay attention and act boldly.

Biological diversity, ecological services like pollination and water filtration, and the powerful global currents of wind and water are the operating systems of all life on Earth, including humans. For thousands of years, we have depended on benign and predictable weather patterns that generally vary modestly from year to year. The agricultural system that has fed us since the dawn of history was based on a climate and seasonal swings that were familiar and expectable.

Ask any farmer if he can grow grain without rain or plant seeds in a flooded field. Signs that life’s operating systems are swinging chaotically from one extreme to another should be a wake-up call to make real plans to kick our carbon-based energy addictions while conserving and restoring ecosystems under stress.

In the process, we’ll need a new vision of who we are and what we are about. For many generations we believed that developing westward, one frontier after the next, was the nation’s Manifest Destiny. We eliminated the Indians and the bison in our way, broke the prairies with our plows, dammed raging rivers, piped the captured water to make the desert bloom, and eventually filled the valleys with cities, suburbs, and roads.

The Wild West was tamed. In fact, we didn’t hesitate to overload its carrying capacity by over-allocating precious water for such dubious purposes as growing rice in Arizona or building spectacular fountains and golf courses in Las Vegas. We used the deserts near my Utah home as a dumping ground for toxic and radioactive wastes from far-away industrial operations. The sacrifice zones in the Great Basin Desert where we tested bombs and missiles helped our military project the power that underpinned an empire. The iconic landscapes of the West even inspired us to think that we were exceptional and brave in ways not common to humanity, and so were not subject to the limitations of other peoples — or even of nature itself.

But whatever we preferred to think, the limits
have always been there. Nature has only so much fresh water, fertile soil, timber, and oil. The atmosphere can only absorb so much carbon dioxide and stay benign and predictable. When you overload the carrying capacity of your environment, there is hell to pay, which means that monster fires are here to stay.

After the American West was conquered, tamed, used, and abused, the frontier of our civilizing ambitions moved abroad, was subsumed by a Cold War, was assigned to outer space, and now drives a Humvee through places like Iraq and Afghanistan. On an overheating planet, if the West is still our place of desire and exception, then fire is our modern manifest destiny — and the West is ours to lose.

Photo: Charles Leung

When nuclear reactors blow, the first thing that melts down is the truth. Just as in the Chernobyl catastrophe almost 25 years ago when Soviet authorities denied the extent of radiation and downplayed the dire situation that was spiraling out of control, Japanese authorities spent the first week of the Fukushima crisis issuing conflicting and confusing reports. We were told that radiation levels were up, then down, then up, but nobody aside from those Japanese bureaucrats could verify the levels and few trusted their accuracy. The situation is under control, they told us, but workers are being evacuated. There is no danger of contamination, but stay inside and seal your doors.

The first atomic snow job

The bureaucratization of horror into bland and reassuring pronouncements was to be expected, especially from an industry where misinformation is the rule. Although you might suppose that the nuclear industry’s outstanding characteristic would be its expertise, since it’s loaded with junior Einsteins who grasp the math and physics required to master the most awesomely sophisticated technology humans have ever created, think again. Based on the record, its most outstanding characteristic is a fundamental dishonesty. I learned that the hard way as a grassroots activist organizing opposition to a scheme hatched by a consortium of nuclear utilities to park thousands of tons of highly radioactive fuel rods, like the ones now burning at Fukushima, in my Utah backyard.

Here’s what I took away from that experience: The nuclear industry is a snake-oil culture of habitual misrepresentation, pervasive wishful thinking, deep denial, and occasional outright deception. For more than 50 years, it has habitually lied about risks and costs while covering up every violation and failure it could. Whether or not its proponents and spokespeople are dishonest or merely deluded can be debated, but the outcome — dangerous misinformation and the meltdown of honest civic discourse — remains the same, as we once again see at Fukushima.

Established at the dawn of the nuclear age, the pattern of dissemblance had become a well-worn rut long before the Japanese reactors spun out of control. In the early 1950s, the disciples of nuclear power, or the “peaceful atom” as it was then called, insisted that nuclear power would soon become so cheap and efficient that it would be offered to consumers for free. Visionaries that they were, they suggested that cities would be constructed with building materials impregnated with uranium so that snow removal would be unnecessary. Atomic bombs, they urged, should be used to carve out new coastal harbors for ships. In low doses, they swore, radiation was actually beneficial to one’s health.

Such notions and outright fantasies, as well as propaganda for a new industry and a new way of war — even if laughable today — had tragic results back then. Thousands of American GIs, for instance, were marched into ground zero just after above-ground nuclear tests had been set off to observe their responses to what military planners assumed would be the atomic battlefield of the future. Ignorance, it turns out, is not bliss, and thousands of those soldiers later became ill. Many died young.

Unwary civilians who lived downwind of America’s western testing grounds were also exposed to nuclear fallout and they, too, suffered horribly from a variety of cancers and other illnesses. Uranium miners exposed to radiation in the tunnels where they wrestled from the earth the raw materials for the nuclear age also became ill and died too soon, as did workers processing that uranium into weapons and fuel. Many of those miners were poor Navajos from my backyard in Utah where a new uranium boom, part of the so-called nuclear renaissance, was — before Fukushima — set to take shape.

How unlikely risks become inevitable

In the future, today’s low-risk claims from industry advocates will undoubtedly seem as tragically naïve as yesterday’s false claims. Yes, the likelihood that any specific nuclear power plant reactor will melt down may be slim indeed — which hardly means inconceivable — but to act as though nuclear risks are limited to the operation of power plants is misleading in the extreme. “Spent fuel“ from reactors (the kind burning in Japan as I write) is produced as a plant operates, and that fuel remains super hot and dangerous for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. As we are learning to our sorrow at the Fukushima complex, such used fuel is hardly “spent.” In fact, it can be even more radioactive and dangerous than reactor cores.

Spent fuel continues to pile up in a nuclear waste stream that will have to be closely managed and monitored for eons, so long that those designing nuclear-waste repositories struggle with the problem of signage that might be intelligible in a future so distant today’s languages may not be understood. You might think that a danger virulent enough to outlast human languages would be a danger to avoid, but the hubris of the nuclear establishment is equal to its willingness to deceive.

A natural disaster, accident, or terrorist attack that might be statistically unlikely in any year or decade becomes ever more likely at the half-century, century, or half-millennium mark. Given enough time, in fact, the unlikely becomes almost inevitable. Even if you and I are not the victims of some future apocalyptic disturbance of that lethal residue, to consign our children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren to such peril is plainly and profoundly immoral.

Nuclear proponents have long wanted to limit the discussion of risk to plant operation alone, not to the storage of dangerous wastes, and they remain eager to ignore altogether the risks inherent in transporting nuclear waste (often called “mobile Chernobyl” by nuclear critics). Moving those spent fuel rods to future repositories represents a rarely acknowledged category of potential catastrophe. Just imagine a trainload of hot nuclear waste derailing catastrophically along a major urban corridor with the ensuing evacuations of nearby inhabitants. It means, in essence, that one of those Fukushima “pools” of out-of-control waste could “go nuclear” anywhere in our landscape.

Risk is about more than likelihood; it’s also about impact. If I tell you that your chances of being bitten by a mosquito as you cross my yard are one in a hundred, you’ll think of that risk differently than if I give you the same odds on a deadly pit viper. As events unfold in Japan, it’s ever clearer that we’re talking pit viper, not mosquito. You wouldn’t know it though if you were to debate nuclear industry representatives, who consistently downplay both odds and impact, and dismiss those who claim otherwise as hysterical doomsayers. Fukushima will assumedly make their task somewhat more difficult.

Hidden costs and wasted subsidies

The true costs of nu
clear power are another subject carefully fudged and obscured by nuclear power advocates. From its inception in federally funded labs, nuclear power has been highly subsidized. A recent report by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that “more than 30 subsidies have supported every stage of the nuclear fuel cycle from uranium mining to long-term waste storage. Added together, these subsidies have often exceeded the average market price for the power produced.” When it comes to producing electricity, these subsidies are so extensive, the report concludes, that “in some cases it would have cost taxpayers less to simply buy the kilowatts on the open market and give them away.”

If the nuclear club in Congress, led by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, gets its way, billions more in subsidies will be forthcoming, including massive federal loan guarantees to build the next generation of nuclear plants. These are particularly important to the industry, since bankers won’t otherwise touch projects that are notorious for mammoth cost overruns, lengthy delays, and abrupt cancellations.

The Obama administration has already proposed an additional $36 billion in such guarantees to underwrite new plant construction. That includes $4 billion for the construction of two new nuclear reactors on the Gulf Coast that are to be operated in partnership with Tokyo Electric Power Company — that’s right, the very outfit that runs the Fukushima complex. Yet when I debate nuclear advocates, they always claim that, in cost terms, nuclear power outcompetes alternative sources of energy like wind and solar.

That government gravy train doesn’t just stop at new power plants either. The feds have long assumed the epic costs of waste management and storage. If another multi-billion dollar project like the now-abandoned Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada is built, it will be with dollars from taxpayers and captive ratepayers (the free market be damned). Industry spokesmen insist that subsidizing such projects will be well worth it, since they will create thousands of new jobs. Unfortunately for them, a definitive 2009 University of Massachusetts study that analyzed various infrastructure investments including wind, solar, and retrofitting buildings to conserve energy placed nuclear dead last in job creation.

The recently renewed Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act limits the liability of nuclear utilities should a catastrophe like the one in Japan happen here in the United States. The costs of recovery from the Fukushima catastrophe will be astronomical. In the U.S., nuclear utilities would be off the hook for any of those costs and you, the citizen, would foot the bill. Despite their assurances that nothing can go wrong here, nuclear industry officials have made sure that in their business risk and reward are carefully separated. It’s a scenario we should all know well: Private corporations take away profits when things go well, and taxpayers assume responsibility when shit happens.

Finally, nuclear power boosters like to proclaim themselves “green” and to claim that their industry is the ideal antidote to global warming since it produces no greenhouse gas emissions. In doing so, they hide the real environmental footprint of nuclear energy.

It’s quite true that no carbon dioxide comes out of power-plant smokestacks. However, maintaining any future infrastructure to handle the industry’s toxic waste is guaranteed to produce lots of carbon dioxide. So does mining uranium and processing it into fuel rods, building massive reactors from concrete and steel, and then behemoth repositories capable of holding waste for 1,000 years. Radiation from the Fukushima meltdown is now entering the Japanese food chain. How green is that?

The watchdogs play dead

Over the course of nuclear power’s history, there have been scores of mishaps, accidents, violations, and problems that, chances are, you’ve never heard about. Beyond the unavoidable bad PR over the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, and now the Japanese catastrophe, the industry has an excellent record — of covering up its failures.

The co-dependent relationship between the nuclear corporations and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the federal agency charged with licensing and monitoring them, resembles the cozy relationship between the Securities Exchange Commission and Wall Street before the global economic meltdown of 2008. The NRC relies heavily on the industry’s own reports since only a small fraction of its activities can be inspected yearly.

A report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, “The NRC and Nuclear Power Plant Safety in 2010,” which highlights the NRC’s haphazard record of inspection and enforcement, makes clear just why the honor system that assumes utilities will honestly report problems has never worked. It describes 14 recent serious “near miss” violations that initially went unreported. At the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant, only 38 miles north of the New York metropolitan area, for instance, NRC inspectors ignored a leaking water containment system for 15 years.

After a leaking roof forced the shutdown of two reactors at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear facility in Maryland, plant managers admitted that it had been leaking for eight years. When Honeywell hired temporary workers to replace striking union members at its uranium refinery in Illinois, they were slipped the correct answers to a test required for those allowed to work at nuclear plants, because otherwise they had neither the knowledge nor experience to pass.

The regulation of Japan’s nuclear industry mirrors the American model. Japan’s legacy of regulatory scandals, falsified safety records, underestimated risks, and cover-ups includes an incident in 1999 when workers mixed uranium in open buckets and exposed hundreds of coworkers to radiation. Two later died. Other scandals involved hiding cracks in steam pipes from regulators in 1989, lying about a fire and explosion at a plant near Tokyo in 1997, and covering up damage to a plant from an earthquake in 2007.

In the wake of the Fukushima catastrophe, we will no doubt discover how there, too, so-called watchdogs rolled over and played dead. In recent years, in fact, the Fukushima complex had the highest accident rate of any of the big Japanese nuclear plants. We’ve already learned that an engineer who helped design and supervise the construction of the steel pressure vessel that holds the melting fuel rods in Reactor No. 4 warned that it was damaged during productio
n. He had himself initially orchestrated a cover-up of this fact, but revealed it a decade later — only to be ignored. During the complex’s construction by General Electric some 35 years ago, Dale Bridenbaugh, a GE employee, resigned after becoming convinced that the reactors being built were seriously flawed. He, too, was ignored. The Vermont Yankee reactor in Vermont and 23 others around the U.S. replicate that design.

Stay tuned, since more examples of reckless management will surely come to light …

Risk is not a math problem

That culture of secrecy is a logical fit for an industry that is authoritarian by nature. Unlike solar or wind power, nuclear power requires massive investments of capital, highly specialized expertise, robust security, and centralized control. Any local citizen facing the impact of a uranium mine, a power plant, or a proposed waste depository will attest that the owners, operators, and regulators of the industry are remote, unresponsive, and inaccessible. They misinform because they have the power to get away with it. The absence of meaningful checks and balances enables them.

Risk, antinuclear advocates quickly learn, is not simply some complicated math problem to be resolved by experts. Risk is, above all, a question of who is put at risk for whose benefit, of how the rewards, costs, and liabilities of an activity are distributed and whether that distribution is fair. Those are political questions that citizens directly affected should be answering for themselves. When it comes to nuclear power, that doesn’t happen because the industry is undemocratic to its core. Corporate officers treat downwind stakeholders with the same contempt they reserve for honest accountings of the industry’s costs and dangers.

It may be difficult for the average citizen to unpack the technicalities of nuclear power, or understand the complex physics and engineering involved in splitting atoms to make steam to produce electricity. But most of us are good at detecting bullshit. We know when something like the nuclear industry doesn’t pass the smell test.

There is a growing realization that our carbon-based energy system is warming and endangering this planet, but replacing coal and oil with nuclear power is like trading heroin for crack — different addictions, but no less unhealthy or risky. The “nuclear renaissance,” like the “peaceful atom” before it, is the energy equivalent of a three-card monte game, involving the same capitalist crooks who gave us oil spills, bank bailouts, and so many of the other rip-offs and scams that have plagued our lives in this new century.

They are serial killers. Stop them before they kill again. Credibility counts and you don’t need a PhD or a Geiger counter to detect it.

Pink snow is turning red in Colorado. Here on the Great American Desert — specifically Utah’s slickrock portion of it where I live — hot ‘n’ dry means dust. When frequent high winds sweep across our increasingly arid landscape, redrock powder is lifted up and carried hundreds of miles eastward until it settles on the broad shoulders of Colorado’s majestic mountains, giving the snowpack there a pink hue.

Some call it watermelon snow. Friends who ski into the backcountry of the San Juan and La Plata mountain ranges in western Colorado tell me that the pink-snow phenomenon has lately been giving way to redder hues, so thick and frequent are the dust storms that roll in these days. A cross-section of a typical Colorado snowbank last winter revealed alternating dirt and snow layers that looked like a weird wilderness version of our flag, red and white stripes alternating against the sky’s blue field.

The Forecast: Dust Followed by Mud

Here in the lowlands, we, too, are experiencing the drying of the West in new dusty ways. Our landscapes are often covered with what we jokingly refer to as “adobe rain” — when rain falls through dust, spattering windows or laundry hung out to dry with brown stains. After a dust “event” this past spring, I wandered through the lot of a car dealership in Grand Junction, Colorado, where the only color seemingly available was light tan. All those previously shiny, brightly painted cars had turned drab. I had to squint to read price stickers under opaque windows.

All of this is more than a mere smudge on our postcard-pretty scenery: Colorado’s red snow is a warning that the climatological dynamic in the arid West is changing dramatically. Think of it as a harbinger — and of more than simply a continuing version of the epic drought we’ve been experiencing these past several years.

The West is as dry as the East is wet, a vast and arid landscape of high plains and deserts broken by abrupt mountain ranges and deep canyons. Unlike eastern and midwestern America, where there are myriad rivers, streams, lakes, and giant underground lakes, or aquifers, to draw on, we depend on snowpack for about 90 percent of our fresh water. The Colorado River, running from its headwaters in the snow-loaded mountains of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, is the principal water source for those states, and downstream for Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and southern California as well.

While being developed into a crucial water resource, the Colorado became the most dammed, piped, legislated, and litigated river in America. Its development spawned a major federal bureaucracy, the Bureau of Reclamation, as well as a hundred state agencies, water districts, and private contractors to keep it plumbed and distributed. Taken altogether, this complex infrastructure of dams, pipelines, and reservoirs proved to be the most expensive and ambitious public works project in the nation’s history, but it enabled the Southwest states and southern California to boom and bloom.

The downside is that we are now dangerously close to the limits of what the Colorado River can provide, even in the very best of weather scenarios, and the weather is being neither so friendly nor cooperative these days. If Portland soon becomes as warm as Los Angeles and Seattle as warm as Sacramento, as some forecasters now predict, expect Las Vegas and Phoenix to be more like Death Valley.

If the Colorado River shut down tomorrow, there might be two, at most three, years of stored water in its massive reservoirs to keep Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and dozens of other cities that depend on it alive. That margin for survival gets thinner with each passing year and with each rise in the average temperature. Imagine a day in the not so distant future when the water finally runs out in one of those cities — a kind of slow-motion Katrina in reverse, a city not flooded but parched, baked, blistered, and abandoned. If the Colorado River system failed to deliver, the impact on the nation’s agriculture and economy would be comparable to an asteroid strike.

Too Much Too Soon, Then Too Little Too Late

Hot and dry is bad enough; chaotic weather only adds to our problems. As we practice it today, agriculture depends on cheap energy, a stable climate, and abundant water. Those last two are intimately mixed. Water has to be not just abundant, but predictable and reliable in its flow. And the words “predictable,” “reliable,” and “water” go together ever less comfortably in our neck of the woods.

Here’s the problem. Despite the existence of the Colorado River’s famous monster-dams like Hoover in Nevada and Glen Canyon in Utah and the mega-reservoirs — Lake Mead and Lake Powell — that gather behind them, we really count on the vast snowfields that store fresh water in our mountains to melt and trickle down to us slowly enough that our water lasts from the first spring runoff until the end of the fall growing season. Dust-covered snowpack, however, absorbs more heat, melts sooner, and often runs down into streams and rivers before our farmers can use it. In addition, as the temperature rises, spring storms that once brought storable snow are now more likely to come to us as rain, which only makes the situation worse.

This shift in the way our water reaches us is crucial in the West. Not only is snowpack shrinking as much as 25 percent in the Cascades of the Northwest and 15 percent in the snowfields of the Rocky Mountains, but it’s arriving in the lowlands as much as a month earlier than usual. Farmers can’t just tell their crops to adjust to the new pattern. Even California’s rich food basket, the Central Valley, fed by one of the most complex and effective irrigation infrastructures in the country, is ultimately dependent on Sierra snowpack and predictable runoff.

We need a new term for what’s happening — perhaps “perturbulence” would describe the new helter-skelter weather pattern. In my Utah backyard, for example, this past May was unusually hot and unusually cold. At one point, we went from freezing to 80 degrees and back again in three short days. Not so long ago, seasonal changes came on here as if controlled by a dimmer switch, the shift from one season to the next being gradual. Now it’s more like a toggle switch being abruptly shut on and off.

To add to the confusion, our summer monsoon season arrived six weeks early this year. A surprisingly wet spring seemed like good news amid the bigger picture of drought, but it turned out to mean that farmers had a hard time getting into their muddy fields to plant. Then when spring showers were so quickly followed by summer storms, some crops were actually suppressed, according to local gardeners and farmers.

The West at Your Doorstep?

Our soggy spring and summer, however, masked an epic drought that has touched almost every corner of the nation west of the Mississippi at one time or another over the past decade. Southern Texas right now is blazingly bone-dry. Seattle had a turn with record-breaking temperatures earlier this summer. In New Mexico, the drought has been less dramatic — more like a steady drumbeat year after year.

A trip to the edge of Lake Powell in the canyon country of southern Utah in June revealed the bigger picture. A ten-story-high “bathtub ring” — the band of white mineral deposits left behind on the reservoir’s walls as the waterline dropped — stretches the almost 200-mile length of the reservoir.

Recreational boat users, hoping against hope that the reservoir will refill, have regularly been issuing predictions about a return to “normal” levels, but it just hasn’t happened. Side canyons, once submerged under 100 feet of water, have now been under the sun long enough to have turned into lush, mature habitats filled with willows and brush, birds and pack rats. A view from a cliff high above the once bustling, now ghostlike Hite Marina on the receding eastern side of Lake Powell shows the futility of chasing the retreating shoreline with cement: the water’s edge and a much-extended boat-launching ramp now have 100 acres of dried mud, grass, and fresh shrubs between them.

After decades of frantic urban development and suburban sprawl across the states that draw water from the Colorado, demand has simply outstripped supply and it’s only getting worse as the heat builds. Not surprisingly, a debate is building over what to do if there isn’t enough water to fill both Lakes Powell and Mead, the principal reservoirs along the Colorado. Should the seven states that depend on the river live with two half-full reservoirs or a single full one, and if only one, which one? River managers have now realized that both massive “lakes” were always giant evaporation ponds in the middle of a desert and only more so as average temperatures climb. There is no sense in having twice as much water surface as necessary, which means twice as much evaporation, too.

Given the stakes, the debate over what to do if there isn’t enough water is playing out like the preview to the all-out water war to come when the reality actually hits. Westerners are well aware that, as always, there will be winners and losers. The constituency for Lake Mead will no doubt prevail because of its proximity to Las Vegas and Phoenix, two cities that grew bloated on cheap but, as it has turned out, temporary water from the dammed Colorado. Already desperate to make up for their lost liquid, they will surely muster all their power and influence to keep the water flowing.

Las Vegas is now aiming to tap into an aquifer under the Snake Valley that straddles eastern Nevada and western Utah. Recently, a rancher friend who ekes out a precarious living there mentioned the obvious to me: the dusty surface of that arid high desert is barely held in place by a thin covering of brush, sage, and grass. Drop the water table even a few more inches and it all dies. The dust storms that would be generated by a future parched landscape like that might make it all the way to the Midwest or even farther. After decades in which Easterners ritualistically visited the American West, the West may be traveling east.

Those we pay to look ahead are now jockeying like mad for position in a future water-short West. A new era of ever more pipelines, wells, and dams is being dreamed up by the private contractors and bureaucrats swelling up like so many ticks on the construction and maintenance budgets of the West’s heavily subsidized water-delivery infrastructure. It is unlikely, however, that their dreams will be fully realized. The low-hanging fruit — the river canyons that could easily be dammed — were picked decades ago and, unlike in the good ol’ days when water simply ran towards money, citizens of our western states are now far more aware of the ecological costs of big dams and ever more awake to the unfolding consequences of dependence on unreliable water sources.

Making more water available never led to prudent use. Instead, cheap and easy water led to such foolishness as putting a golf course with expanses of irrigated green in every desert community, not to speak of rice and cotton farming in the Arizona desert.

Rip Your Strip

All of this is now changing. Fast. The airways across the Southwest are loaded these days with public service announcements urging us to conserve our water. “Rip your strip” may be a phrase unknown in much of the country, but everyone here knows exactly what it means: tear out the lawn between your front yard and the street and put in drought-resistant native plants instead.

Everyone is increasingly expected to do their part. In my little town of Torrey, Utah, we voluntarily ration our domestic water on weekends when the tourists are in town, taking long showers and spraying the dust and mud off their tires. Xeriscaping — landscaping with drought-resistant native plants instead of thirsty grasses and ornamental shrubs — is now fashionable as well as necessary, even required, in some western towns, a clear sign that at long last we get it. Yes, we live in a desert.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that this sort of thing, useful as it is, will be nearly enough. Our challenge is only marginally to take shorter showers. After all, 80 percent of Utah’s water goes into agriculture, mostly to grow alfalfa to feed beef cows raised by ranchers heavily subsidized by federal grants and tax write-offs. They graze their cows almost for free on public lands and have successfully resisted even modest increases in fees to cover the costs of maintaining the allotments they use.

Utah legislators passed a law last session that gives agriculture precedence when there’s not enough water to go around. Consider that a clear signal that the agricultural interests in the state don’t have any intention of changing their water-profligate ways without a fight.

Sure, everyone agrees that we have to change, but we in the West are fond of focusing blame on personal bad habits that waste water — and they couldn’t be more real — rather than corporate habits that waste so much more. The fact is that we Westerners have never paid anything like what our water truly costs and we lack disincentives to waste water and incentives to conserve it. Behind all that fuss you hear from us about the damn government and how independent-minded we Westerners are, is a long history of massive dam and pipeline projects financed by the American taxpayer, featuring artificially low prices and not a few crony-run boondoggles. Call it welfare water.

The Ruins in Our Future

A visit this summer to the most famous ruins in the West, the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park and hollowed out palaces at Chaco Culture National Historic Park, proved a striking, if grim, reminder that we weren’t the first to pass this way — or to face possibly civilization-challenging aridity problems. The pre-Colombian Anasazi culture flourished between 900 and 1150 A.D., culminating in a city in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, that until the nineteenth century contained the largest buildings in the Americas, now uncovered from centuries of drifting sands. Mesa Verde with its “skyscraper” cliffside dwellings, also flourished in the twelfth century and was similarly abandoned and forgotten for hundreds of years.

The mysteries of these deserted cities — their purpose and the reasons they were abandoned — may never be fully plumbed. This much is undeniable though, as one walks through cobbled plazas and toppled towers, and past sun-blasted walls: cities, dazzling in their day, arose suddenly in the desert, prospered, and then collapsed. Tree-ring data confirm that an epic drought, one lasting at least 50 years, coincided with their demise. Broken and battle-scarred bones unearthed in the charred ruins indicate that warfare followed drought. What the Anasazi experienced — scarcity, the need to leave homes, and a struggle for whatever remained — is getting easier to imagine in a water-short West. Only this time at stake will be Las Vegas and Phoenix.

Archaeologists at Chaco recently uncovered a sophisticated cistern system under the city. Anasazi builders, they now believe, learned how to harvest the runoff from the summer rains that poured down and spilled over the sandstone cliffs behind the ruins. Think of these as the Lake Meads and Powells of their time, capturing the torrential monsoon rains just as those reservoirs do the Colorado River’s flash floods.

The cistern system provided temporary water security, but eventually it clearly proved inadequate. In the long run, Chaco couldn’t be sustained because turbulent, unreliable flows of water are hard to tame. The descendants of those who left it behind settled the mesa-top villages of the Hopis in Arizona and of the Pueblo tribes of New Mexico. They learned to live on a smaller scale, with scant rain, and after many hundreds of years, they (unlike their once living and magnificent cities) remain. There is hope in that. It is no less possible now to understand limits, to practice precaution, and to build resilient communities.

Smoke Season

When it comes to the perturbed weather regime we are now entering, it’s not just our agriculture and our sprawling cities that are having trouble adapting. The vitality of whole ecosystems is at stake. Native vegetation suffers, too. When critical moisture arrives before temperatures are warm enough for seeds to germinate, they don’t. The native grasses on my land didn’t thrive despite our cold, wet spring. Invasive cheat grass, however, blooms early, grows quickly, then dies and dries. It ignites easily and burns hot.

When higher temperatures evaporate the moisture in soils, they become drier in late summer and fall. Plants wither and are vulnerable to insect infestations. The vast expanse of mountains I can see out my window may seem like a classic alpine vista to the tourists who flock here every summer. A closer look, however, reveals expanding patches of gray and brown as beetle infestations kill off entire dried-out mountainsides. More than 2.5 million acres of Rocky Mountain woodlands have been destroyed by bark beetles so far. The once deep-green top of Grand Mesa in western Colorado is becoming a gray, grim dead zone, a ghostly forest waiting for lightning or some careless human to ignite it.

Dead forests, of course, are fuel for the dramatic, massive wildfires you now see so regularly on the TV news. We had quite a few of those wildfires this summer in Utah, but — what with southern California burning — they didn’t make the evening news anywhere but here. That statement can be made all over the West. Both the frequency and size of fires are on the rise in our region. Early in the summer of 2008, while more than 2,000 separate wildfires raged across his state, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made a point that many Western governors might soon be making. He claimed that California’s fire season is now 365 days long. The infernos that licked the edges of the Los Angeles basin this August were at once catastrophic and routine.

Smoke is dust’s inevitable twin in a West beset by climate chaos, and the lousy air quality we suffer when fires are raging is part of the new normal. A few years ago we could check the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website to see when winds might shift and bring relief. This summer, like last, there were so many fires and they were so widely distributed that it hardly mattered which way the wind blew: smoke was in our lungs and eyes one way or the other.

All of this adds up to a kind of habitat holocaust for wild species, from the tiniest micro-organisms in the soil to the largest mammals at the top of the food chain like elk and bears. Nobody makes it in a dead zone, whether it’s a dust bowl or a desiccated forest.

Changes start at the bottom, as is usually true in ecosystems. When soil dries and the microbial dynamic changes, native plants either die or move uphill towards cooler temperatures and more moisture. The creatures that depend on their seeds, nuts, leaves, shade, and shelter follow the plants — if they can. Animals normally adapt to slow change, but an avalanche of challenges is another matter. When species begin living at the precarious edge of their ability to tolerate the stress of it all, you have to expect wildlife populations to shift and dwindle. Then invasive species move in and a far different and diminished landscape emerges.

Human populations in the West will also shift and dwindle, with jarring consequences for all of America, if we do not learn quickly that watersheds have limits, especially within arid and unpredictable climates. The land also needs water. And such problems aren’t just “Western.” Dust storms and smoke won’t just stay here.

There are, of course, enlightened and engaged citizens who are doing their best to address the growing challenge of a heated-up, chaotic climate. Conservation groups like the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance are working hard to protect critical habitat for stressed species and urging government land management agencies to include global warming in their plans and projections. The Glen Canyon Institute has raised the specter of a diminished Colorado River and is challenging water managers to get innovative and adopt policies that reward water conservation and punish waste. Across the West, people are waking up and learning about their own watersheds — where their water comes from and where it goes. This, too, is hopeful. Time, unfortunately, is not on their side.

So, come see the beautiful West, our shining mountains, blue skies, and fabled canyons. It’s all still here right now. Take pictures. Enjoy. But hurry…

Now that we’ve decided to “green” the economy, why not green homeland security, too? I’m not talking about interrogators questioning suspects under the glow of compact fluorescent light bulbs, or cops wearing recycled Kevlar recharging their Tasers via solar panels. What I mean is: Shouldn’t we finally start rethinking the very notion of homeland security on a sinking planet?

Now that Dennis Blair, the new Director of National Intelligence, claims that global insecurity is more of a danger to us than terrorism, isn’t it time to release the idea of “security” from its top-down, business-as-usual, terrorism-oriented shackles? Isn’t it, in fact, time for the Obama administration to begin building security we can believe in; that is, a bottom-up movement that will start us down the road to the kind of resilient American communities that could effectively recover from the disasters — manmade or natural (if there’s still a difference) — that will surely characterize this emerging age of financial and climate chaos? In the long run, if we don’t start pursuing security that actually focuses on the foremost challenges of our moment, that emphasizes recovery rather than what passes for “defense,” that builds communities rather than just more SWAT teams, we’re in trouble.

Today, “homeland security” and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), that unwieldy amalgam of 13 agencies created by the Bush administration in 2002, continue to express the potent, all-encompassing fears and assumptions of our last president’s Global War on Terror. Foreign enemies may indeed be plotting to attack us, but, believe it or not (and increasing numbers of people, watching their homes, money, and jobs melt away are coming to believe it), that’s probably neither the worst, nor the most dangerous thing in store for us.

Outsized fear of terrorism and what it can accomplish, stoked by the apocalyptic look of the attacks of 9/11, masked the agenda of officials who were all too ready to suppress challenges by shredding our civil liberties. That agenda has been driven by a legion of privateers, selling everything from gas masks to biometric ID systems, who would loot the public treasury in the name of patriotism. Like so many bad trips of the Bush years, homeland security was run down the wrong tracks from the beginning — as the arrival of that distinctly un-American word “homeland” so clearly signaled — and it has, not surprisingly, carried us in the wrong direction ever since.

In that context, it’s worth remembering that after 9/11 came Hurricane Katrina, epic droughts and wildfires, Biblical-level floods, and then, of course, economic meltdown. Despite widespread fears here, the likelihood that most of us will experience a terrorist attack is slim indeed; on the other hand, it’s a sure bet that disruptions to our far-flung supply lines for food, water, and energy will affect us all in the decades ahead. Nature, after all, is loaded with disturbances like droughts (growing ever more intense thanks to global climate change) that resonate through the human realm as famines, migrations, civil wars, failed states, and eventually warlords and pirates.

Even if these seem to you like nature’s version of terrorism, you can’t prevent a monster storm or a killer drought by arresting it at the border or caging it before it strikes. That’s why a new green version of security should concentrate our energies and resources on recovery from disasters at least as much as defense against them — and not recovery as delivered by distant, fumbling Federal Emergency Management Agency officials either. The fact is that pre-organized, homegrown (rather than homeland) networks of citizens who have planned and prepared together to meet basic needs and to aid one another in times of trouble will be better able to bounce back from the sorts of disasters that might actually hit us than a nation of helpless individuals waiting to be rescued or protected.

Imagine redubbing the DHS the Department of Homegrown Security and at least you have a place to begin.

Homegrown security for a cantankerous future

Homeland security, post-9/11, has been highly militarized and focused primarily on single-event disasters like attacks or accidents, not on, say, the infection of critical grain crops by some newly evolved disease or, as is actually happening, the serial collapse of ocean fisheries. Unlike a terrorist attack, such disasters could strike everywhere at once, rendering single-point plans useless. If Miami goes down in a hurricane, FEMA can (we hope) feed people via trucks and airlifts. If some part of the global food trade were to shut down, hundreds of thousands of community gardens and networks of backyard farmers ready to share their harvests, not warehouses full of emergency provisions, could prove the difference between crisis and catastrophe. Systemic challenges, after all, require systemic responses.

Food and security may not be a twosome that comes quickly to mind, but experts know that our food supply is particularly vulnerable. We’re familiar with the hardships that follow spikes in the price of gas or the freezing of credit lines, but few of us in the U.S. have experienced the panic and privation of a broken food chain — so far. That’s going to change in the decades ahead. Count on it, even if it seems as unlikely today as, for most of us, an economic meltdown did just one short year ago.

Our industrialized and globalized food production and distribution system is a wonder, bringing us exotic eats from distant places at mostly affordable prices. Those mangos from Mexico and kiwis from New Zealand are certainly a treat, but the understandable pleasure we take in them hides a great risk. If you’re thinking about what the greening of homeland security might actually mean, look no further than our food supply.

The typical American meal travels, on average, 1,000 miles to get to your plate. The wheat in your burger bun may be from Canada, the beef from Argentina, and the tomato from Chile. Food shipped from that far away is vulnerable to all sorts of disruptions — a calamitous storm that hits a food-growing center; spikes in the price of fuel for fertilizer, farm machinery, and trucking; internecine strife or regional wars that shut down harvests or block trade routes; national policies to hoard food as prices spike or scarcities set in; not to speak of the usual droughts, floods, and crop failures that have always plagued humankind and are intensifying in a globally warming world.

An interruption of food supplies from afar is only tolerable if we’ve planned ahead and so can fill in with locally grown food. Sadly, for those of us who live outside of California and Florida, local food remains seasonal, limited, and anything but diverse. And don’t forget, local food has been weakened in this country by the reasonably thorough job we’ve done of wiping out all those less-than-superprofitable family farms. U.S. agriculture is now strikingly consolidated into massive, industrial-style operations. So chickens come from vast chicken farms in Arkansas, hogs from humongous hog outfits in Georgia, corn from the mono-crop Midwestern “cornbelt,” and so on.

Such monolithic enterprises may be profitable for Big Ag, but they’re not going to do us much good, given the cantankerous future al
ready inching its way toward us. When a severe drought in Australia led to plummeting rice production in the Murray River Basin last year, the price of rice across the planet suddenly doubled. The spike in rice prices, like the sudden leap in the cost of wheat, soy, and other staples, was primarily due to the then-soaring price of oil for farm machinery, fertilizer, and transport, though rampant market speculation contributed as well. At that moment, the collapse of Australian rice farming pushed a worsening situation across a threshold into crisis territory. Because the world agricultural trade system is so thoroughly interconnected and interdependent, a shock on one part of the planet can resonate far and wide — just as (we’ve learned to our dismay) can happen in financial markets.

Think of the shortages and ensuing food riots in 30 countries across the planet in 2008 as grim coming attractions for life on a planet with unpredictable extreme weather, booming populations, overloaded ecosystems, and distorted food economies. The spike in prices that put food staples out of reach of rioting masses of people was soon enough mitigated by the collapse of energy prices when the global economy tanked. Make no mistake, though: food shortages and the social unrest that goes with them will eventually return.

And here’s something else to take into consideration: Nations that suffer food shortages may, when their hungry citizens demand food sovereignty, protect their agricultural sectors by erecting trade barriers — just as is beginning to happen in other areas of production under the pressure of the global economic meltdown. The era of globalized food production, whose fruits (and vegetables) we Americans have come to consider little short of our supermarket birthright, may contract significantly in the relatively near future. We should be prepared. And that’s where a Department of Homegrown Security could make some real sense.

Most American cities, after all, have less than a week’s worth of food in their pipeline and most of us don’t stockpile, which makes city dwellers especially vulnerable to disruptions of the food supply. Skip your next three meals and you’ll grasp the panic likely to arise if the American food chain is ever broken in a significant way. The question is: How can we address rather than ignore this vital, if underappreciated, aspect of homeland security?

Vertical farms and victory gardens

Because cities are so dependent on daily food shipments, local food security in urban areas might well mean storing more food for emergencies; this would certainly be the old-school approach to disaster planning, and it has worked well enough over the short run. Over the long run, however, what makes real sense is to encourage urban and suburban community gardens and farmers markets, and not just on a scale that ensures a summer supply of arugula and fresh tomatoes, but on one that might actually help mitigate prolonged food disruptions. There are enough vacant lots, backyards, and rooftops to host many thousands of gardens, either created by voluntary groups or by small-scale entrepreneurs. Urban farming could even go big. Columbia University professor Dickson Despommier recently unveiled his vision of a “vertical farm,” a 30-story tower right in the middle of an urban landscape, that could grow enough food to feed 50,000 people in the surrounding neighborhood.

Cultural historian and visionary critic Mike Davis has already wondered why our approach to homeland security doesn’t draw from the example of “victory gardens” during World War II. In 1943, just two years into the war, 20 million victory gardens were producing a staggering 30-40 percent of the nation’s vegetables. Thousands of abandoned urban lots were being cleared and planted by tenement neighbors working together. The Office of Civilian Defense encouraged and empowered such projects, but the phenomenon was also self-organizing because citizens on the home front wanted to participate, and home gardening was, after all, a delicious way to be patriotic.

Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark, reports that, within the de-industrialized ruins of Detroit, a landscape she describes as “not quite post-apocalyptic but … post-American,” people are homesteading abandoned lots, growing their own produce, raising farm animals, and planting orchards. In that depopulated city, some have been clawing (or perhaps hoeing) their way back to a semblance of food security. They have done so because they had to, and their reward has been harvests that would be the envy of any organic farmer. The catastrophe that is Detroit didn’t happen with a Hurricane Katrina-style bang, but as a slow, grinding bust — and a possibly haunting preview of what many American municipalities may experience, post-crash. Solnit claims, however, that the greening of Detroit under the pressure of economic adversity is not just a strategy for survival, but a possible path to renewal. It’s also a living guidebook to possibilities for our new Department of Homegrown Security when it considers where it might most advantageously put some of its financial muscle while creating a more secure — and resilient — America.

As chef and author Alice Waters has demonstrated so practically, schools can start “edible schoolyard” gardens that cut lunch-program costs, provide healthy foods for students, and teach the principles of ecology. The food-growing skills and knowledge that many of our great-grandparents took for granted growing up in a more rural America have long since been lost in our migration into cities and suburbs. Relearning those lost arts could be a key to survival if the trucks stop arriving at the Big Box down the street.

The present Department of Homeland Security has produced reams of literature on detecting and handling chemical weapons and managing casualties after terrorist attacks. Fine, we needed to know that. Now, how about some instructive materials on composting soil, rotating crops to control pests and restore soil nutrients, and canning and drying all that seasonal bounty so it can be eaten next winter?

It’s not just about increasing the local food supply, of course. Community gardens provide a safe place for neighbors to cooperate, socialize, bond, share, celebrate, and learn from one another. The self-reliant networks that are created when citizens engage in such projects can be activated in an emergency. The capacity of a community to self-organize can be critically important when a crisis is confronted. Such collective efforts have been called “community greening” or “civic ecology,” but the traditional name “grassroots democracy” fits no less well.

Ideally, the greening of homeland security would mean more than pamphlets on planting, but would provide actual seed money — and not just for seeds either, but for building greenhouses, distributing tools, and starting farmers’ markets where growers and consumers can connect. How about raiding the Department of Homeland Security’s gluttonous budget for “homegrown” grants to communities that want to get started?

Here’s the interesting thing: Without federal aid or direction, the first glimmer of a green approach to homeland security is already appearing. It goes by the moniker “relocalization,” and if that’s a bit of an awkward mouthful for you, it really m
eans that your most basic security is in the hands not of distant officials in Washington but of neighbors who believe that self-reliance is safer than dependence. In this emerging age of chaos, pooled resources and coordinated responses will, this new movement believes, be more effective than thousands of individuals breaking out their survival kits alone, or waiting for the helicopters to land.

Actually, relocalization is an international movement and, as usual when it comes to the greening of modern society, the Europeans are way ahead of us. There are now hundreds of local groups in at least a dozen countries that are convening local meetings as part of the Relocalization Network to “make other arrangements for the post-carbon future” of their communities. In Great Britain, an allied “Transition Towns” movement has sprung up in an effort to spark ideas about, and focus energies on, how to wean whole communities off imported energy, food, and material goods. With a rising sea at its front door, the Netherlands has taken a further step. Its national security plan actually makes sustainability and environmental recovery key priorities.

In the U.S., “post-carbon” working groups are beginning to sprout across the country. In my backyard, right in the heart of red-state Utah, a diverse group of citizens calling themselves the Canyonlands Sustainable Solutions have come together to generate practical plans for insulating the remote town of Moab, 200 miles from the trade and transport hub of Salt Lake City, from future food and energy price shocks and supply interruptions. Such local groups are often loosely allied with one another, especially regionally, through websites and blogs that report on the progress of diverse projects, trade ideas as well as information, and offer lots of feedback.

The citizens engaged in relocalization projects have largely given up on federal aid and are going it alone. Still, think how much farther they could go if only a fraction of the $27 billion directed at state and local governments to enhance “emergency preparedness” in the 2009 Department of Homeland Security budget were given in grants to their projects. If we can afford to hand rural Craighead County in Arkansas $600,000 for hazmat suits and other anti-terror paraphernalia to defend cotton and soybean farmers from attack, surely we could provide grants for urban homesteaders in Detroit.

Food security, of course, is just one aspect of a green vision of homegrown (instead of homeland) security. Other obvious elements like energy and water security could also be re-imagined, if only official Washington weren’t so stuck in the obvious. No doubt, somewhere out there on the Titanic this planet is becoming, the go-it-aloners, with no Department of Homegrown Security to back them, are already doing so — and helping prepare us all as best they can for the realization that, right now, there are not enough lifeboats to carry us to safety.

Perhaps it’s not so unrealistic to expect that someday, as a homegrown security movement builds and matures, it can capture a share of the federal funds that now go to such dubious measures as closed-circuit TVs and crash-proof barriers at sports stadiums, including $345,000 for Razorback Stadium in Arkansas.

In the meanwhile, let’s encourage projects that are building resilience in communities as small as Moab and as large as New York City, while revitalizing local culture with a dose of grassroots engagement. Seed it, and feed it, and it will bloom. Along the way we will learn that when it comes to home, or land, or security, living in an open, inclusive, and robust democracy is not an impediment to defense but a deep advantage. Democracy, if only we nurture it, is the very soil of our resilience.