Twenty Years

How bad will climate change be? Is it irreversible? And if so, how much time do we have before we're all in really big trouble?

For one answer to these questions, turn to the last page of the November, 2008, U.K. "Harper's Bazaar," where British designer Vivienne Westwood, she of the famed corset dress, plugs her "Art Manifesto" (www.activeresistane.co.uk). Click to enter and look to the far right for an interview by Decca Aitkenhead with Jame Lovelock (reprinted from "The Guardian," March 1, 2008). The 'maverick" climate scientist is best-known as the father of the Gaia Hypothesis, the theory that our planet is "a self-regulating super-organism," an idea which, according to the article, "forms the basis of almost all climate science."

What is Lovelock's answer to the questions above? Bad, very bad. By 2020, less than a dozen years from now, he expects extreme weather to become normal. And it's too late to do anything about it.

In a nutshell, Lovelocks thinks we're fucked, pardon my French. When the interviewer asks what he would do if he were her, the octogenarian answers, "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky, it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."

From an individual perspective, his advice makes perfect sense, regardless of global warming. None of us knows how many hours we have left. Most of us plan our lives assuming that we will wake up tomorrow morning and the next and the next for decades to come, but most of us also know that this assumption is just that, an assumption that can be shattered by an earthquake, an aneurysm, a terrorist attack. If nothing else, enjoying life is an antidote to the fear of our individual mortality.

But collective mortality is another matter. As the mother of two adult children who are just beginning to carve their way in the world, who have always talked about the children they someday hope to have, my stomach clenches reading Lovelock's words. How does one plan for a future of mass chaos? And yet this is already the case in much of Africa where climate changes such as desertification and viruses like HIV have combined with human greed and hatred to produce large-scale death and destruction. While the rest of us might prefer to think that Africa's fate is far removed from our own, Hollywood is already busy imagining what might happen when the icecaps melt.

So how do we reconcile the need to live our everyday lives, with their individual dramas of hopes and dreams, loves and losses, with the knowledge that we may all be living in the equivalent of Darfur sooner rather than later, in this life and not in some future circle of hell? Perhaps Lovelock is right and it's already too late, but it seems to me that we have a moral obligation to try to stop the rising tides. It's time to put the environmental crisis, not the credit crisis or the Middle East crisis, front and center on the international agenda. And at the same time, try to enjoy each and every moment.

The Real Rapture

I woke up this morning to Beauty. The beauty of a small pug dog snoring softly beside me, The pleasantly heavy warmth of the down comforter, its red sateen cover glowing in the morning light. The scent of roses on the nearby table. The taste of strong hot tea with milk. The music of Snow Patrol urging me to forget the world outside.

And yet I also woke up to the world outside, remembering a broadcast I’d heard just yesterday. The G7 had met and there was talk that in bailing out their financial institutions, the Europeans had just blown their environmental budget. Each country had its predictable sob story as to why it couldn’t meet its target for lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Poland cried that it was too poor to revamp its Soviet-era coal plants, while Germany wanted to protect its car manufacturers. The Brits proposed paying developing nations to not cut down their rain forests, in lieu of lowering its own carbon footprint. At least they all agree that global warming is a man-made crisis and are committed to some level of action, unlike the powers-that-be in this country who are just getting to the point of admitting that climate change is happening. And while humanity dithers, the polar ice caps and the Greenland Ice Sheet continue to melt, drop by drop into the oceans, causing them to slowly rise, and eventually flood the coastal cities where much of humanity now lives.

There are some who view this as good news. The New Agers hope that collapse will bring on a more sustainable civilization. And if not, they’ll tell you that since “we’re spiritual beings having a human experience,” what happens on this planet doesn’t really matter anyway. And then there are the Christian fundamentalists who are looking forward to the Apocalypse because they’re so convinced that in the “Rapture,” or the Second Coming, Christ will beam them up to the Pearly Gates. It never seems to occur to those who take pleasure in shooting wolves from the air that God might think twice about allowing into Heaven those who managed to turn the Garden of Eden into Hell on Earth, even, or especially, if they did it in Her name.

If we were not in such a hurry to transcend this world, perhaps we could slow down enough to see its beauty and be moved to protect it-- out of love. There is the immense beauty of the disappearing Amazon Rainforest, the melting Greenland Ice Sheet and the dying Great Barrier Reef, but there is also the everyday beauty that still exists in even the most impoverished or frenetic of lives: the sight of the crescent new moon, the quiet sound of snow falling, the bittersweetness of dark chocolate, the scent of wild fennel growing along the bay, the warmth of a friend’s embrace, the ecstasy of a lover's caress, the heart-opening beauty of a child’s smile. If we could see how each of our lives is shot through with beauty, perhaps we could learn to cherish each moment and each other as well. And that would be real rapture.

Breasts: Toxins :: Personal: Political

One morning, a few months ago, I was awakened by a sharp pain in my right breast, radiating from the nipple. My monkey mind immediately jumped to the obvious, catastrophic conclusion: terminal cancer. My rational mind thought, no, the dog must have stepped on it.

Said dog, a 25 pound pug, is a bed-hog; he likes to sleep with his body pushed against my arm, immobilizing it, while he snores through the night. But as soon as I open my eyes in the morning, he jumps up, pushes his face close to mine, snorts, and starts trying to lick me. If I don’t immediately get up, he jumps from one side of me to the other, sometimes landing his weight on my torso if I haven’t rolled over onto my side fast enough. A couple of times, he has—ouch!—landed on a breast. So I took an Advil and held my breath, hoping the pain would disappear.

The next morning, I awoke to the same pain, called my MD and got an appointment for the following day. Then I googled breast pain and called a couple of close women friends for reassurance. I soon found that most of the women in my circle, aged 30something to 60something, had had a breast scare at one time or another. One friend offered to loan me the “breast shells” that she’d had on her altar when her mammogram came up negative. Another suggested that breast problems are related to mother issues.

Of course, the day of the doctor’s appointment, I woke up pain-free. My physician found no lumps, but she did discover a polyp. She told me to go off hormones, cut out caffeine, check the polyp every day for the next month until my mammogram appointment -- and added that I shouldn’t worry.

Meanwhile, another friend started sending me information about the dangers of mammography and suggested I check out thermography, which uses the infrared rather than the X-ray part of the spectrum to pick up soft tissue abnormalities.

This same environmentalist sent me information about the link between breast disease and environmental toxins. The more I read, the more shocked I was. Like so many of us, I had trusted that the government, in the form of the Food and Drug Administration, and even corporations to have my best interests at heart. I had assumed that body care products were subject to the same degree of scrutiny as other chemicals which could be absorbed through the skin, like nicotine patches or estrogen creams. I was dismayed to learn that in the U.S., body care products and cosmetics are barely regulated at all, that only a handful of toxic ingredients are prohibited, that products can be labeled organic even if they contain only a single organic ingredient. That a commonly-used class of preservatives called parabens, found in everything from eye shadow to shampoo, has also shown up in breast tumors. I was outraged to discover that while the European Union has adopted a precautionary approach, which requires chemicals used in cosmetics and personal care products to be proven safe, the U.S. employs a different standard, which only prevents a few known toxins from being sold. In other words, the EU takes a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach, while the U.S. has an innocent-until-proven-guilty standard for toxins, and the corporations that produce and sell them. The more I learned, the more I came to believe that, if I had contracted breast cancer, the reason would have far less to do with my mother and far more to do with corporate greed.

I had the mammogram, and then waited a week before the doctor called to tell me that I needed to come back for a more X-rays and an ultrasound to check out a possible anomaly. While waiting for the new appointment, I busied myself with researching cosmetic brands. I bought new shampoo, conditioner, eye shadow, lip gloss, sunscreen, and body oil, choosing only those brands that were paraben-free and as close to 100 percent organic as possible. Between the three health food emporiums in my town, doing so was easy, if expensive ($28 for a tube of intensive conditioner, for example). I emailed my adult children the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep website
(www.cosmeticsdatabase.com), which has detailed information on the safety of thousands of products, and offered to reimburse them if they switched to healthier choices. And although I am not yet ready to go grey, I made my next coloring appointment at a beauty salon that uses less toxic dyes.

The day of the second appointment, a friend met me at the radiology lab. I had two magnified views, then a third because one of the first two X-rays came out fuzzy. In the ultrasound room, I watched as the technician found and photographed a black spot. Was this a mark of death like the black spot in “Treasure Island”? I grabbed my friend from the waiting room and held her hand tightly when the technician came back a few minutes later with the signed diagnosis on a slip of blue paper. A cyst. Come back in one year for another mammogram. In the parking lot, I burst into tears of relief as the tension of the past month’s anxieties broke.

Although I do not seem to be in immediate danger of having my breast cut off, I am no longer capable of being reassured in the same way that I was before. This minor health crisis has left a lasting mark on my psyche, bursting my bubble of innocent trust. I am outraged that my body, my daughter’s body, my son’s body, my friends’ bodies, have been silently soaking up toxins along with moisturizers and sunscreens, blemish creams and shampoos, mascaras and lipsticks-- and that neither those who manufacture these products nor those entrusted to regulate them apparently give a damn.

Plastic Planet

My friend M. is trying to solve the garbage problem single-handedly by not disposing of any item which is potentially useful. He hasn’t bought anything new in years. He tries hard to find homes for old books and magazines, for worn clothes and shoes, for knick-knacks and bric-a-brac. He reuses bags and bottles and jars as many times as possible before putting them in the recycling bin. And he keeps the detritus which can’t be recycled, like plastic straws and bottle caps, rubber bands and wire bag ties, rather than consign them to the landfill. Unfortunately, these small objects take up space and seemingly multiply, like creatures in a sci-fi movie threatening to overpower their host.


Another friend, C., has a more typical consumption pattern. On her way to work, she usually stops for coffee. Some days she brings her own cup, but other days not, so she leaves the coffee shop with a paper cup and a plastic lid, a paper napkin and maybe a plastic straw if her latte is iced. At lunch, she gets a sandwich to go, wrapped in paper or plastic wrap, a bottle of water, another paper napkin, and a soda in an aluminum can for her afternoon pick-me-up, all stuffed into a paper bag. On the way home, she picks up a bag of groceries. Maybe she uses the cloth bag she keeps in the car, but puts the produce in the store’s plastic bags. Her total for the day: one paper cup, one plastic lid, a square of sandwich paper or plastic wrap or aluminum foil, a plastic bottle and cap, two paper napkins, an aluminum can, a paper bag, and several small plastic bags.

Of these dozen or so items, the bottle and the aluminum are recyclable (but not the bottle’s plastic lid), while the bags can be re-used or recycled. That leaves half a dozen non-recyclable, non-reusable items for the landfill. Of course, the problem is not really about her or my or your half-dozen plastic bits; it’s our daily total times 365 days per year multiplied by the 300 million other Americans, plus the billion-plus Chinese and Indians whose societies are headed the same direction.

With a little effort, C. could bring her own cloth napkin and bags, fill a glass bottle at home with water and a ceramic cup with coffee, and bring her own string produce bags to the market, if not every day at least more often than not. But while these small changes are certainly a step in the right direction, as is M.’s sense of responsibility for every item that comes his way, the global trash problem is not so easily resolved.

Take plastic bags. It’s no secret that they suffocate children and sea creatures or that the world’s oceans are awash with them. These bags also collect in our homes, crowding out the junk in the junk drawers of our kitchens. Even when we wash them and reuse them, new ones come into our hands on an almost daily basis. And then there is the over-riding fact that each one will last a very long time, that every human alive today will be earthworm food long before a single plastic bag has decomposed. Interesting how the petroleum that we have extracted to make plastics comes from creatures who crawled or swam long before the first humans came along and the objects we have created from this material may out-last us all.

It’s not just plastic bags. It’s broken hula hoops and torn shower curtains; it’s enough plastic cutlery to give all six billion of us an 12-place setting. It’s disposable objects that can’t be fixed when they break. It’s the case of the computer I’m writing this on and the cables that transmit these words over the Internet. It’s not only the discarded plastic objects that fill our drawers and garages and landfills and seas. It’s the leaching of toxic chemicals from plastic bottles and food containers. It’s the phthalates in our teenagers’ nail polish and our children’s pacifiers, whose molecules cling to their insides like embedded time bombs, potentially causing genetic abnormalities and higher risks of cancer, asthma and other diseases. It’s the hidden cost of a disposable society. It’s the result of an industry, a government, a culture that values convenience and profits over safety or sanity. It’s the world we are leaving to our children and our grandchildren.

Seeing

In his book, “A Language Older Than Words,” Derrick Jensen writes of the relationship between the abuse he endured as a child at the hands of his father and the abuse civilization perpetuates upon humans-- especially indigenous peoples, women and children-- and non-humans. In other words, the violent family is a microcosm to the macrocosm of a violent civilization.


A friend loaned me Jensen’s book as I was going through my own process of recovering from an abusive childhood. It took me more than half a year to read it, not because of its length, but because so much of this beautifully-written book is full of pain: the pain of a lost childhood, the pain of the devastation of forest and salmon, the pain of animal testing, the pain of enslavement, the pain of debilitating disease. And yet Jensen is also dogged if not in his hope then in his determination to survive, to persevere in the face of forces driven to annihilate us all.

As I have worked through the shock, rage, sadness and loss of my own childhood, as I have let go of the myth that the family I grew up in was a-little-dysfunctional-but-basically-loving, I have begun to see past the myth of our culture, our nation as a-little-unequal-but-still-basically-good. I am starting to see how we, the upper, middle and even the working classes of the U.S., have been anesthetized, while our government and the transnational corporations have operated with impunity, wreaking havoc on humans and the environment in the name of greed. We live in a system that forces us to work longer hours than virtually any other industrialized nation (400 hours more per year than the French) and assaults us with the most sophisticated advertising ever produced to convince us that we must have the products touted to be whole human beings, to be valuable, to be loveable, so that we spend our scant leisure time shopping on-line or at the mall or zoning out in front of the television set, absorbing more advertising.

This systemic anesthetizing process goes hand-in-hand with our individual needs to cope with the long-term effects of domestic violence. In a country where one out of every three to four women and one out of every five to seven men have been sexually abused as children, where spanking is still condoned and beatings are common, where emotional and verbal abuse are rife, is it any wonder that we try to numb the pain with everything from substance abuse to work to shopping to sports to on-line porn? All while clinging to our belief that it-really-wasn’t-all-that-bad, our parents were only trying to teach us discipline when they took off their belt, only trying to show their love for us when they reached into our pants, only trying to teach us self-control when they screamed at us at the top of their lungs, just as their parents had done to them.

Meanwhile, our lifestyle, comfortable beyond our great-grandparents’ imagination, with central heating, automobiles, digital gadgets, hot showers, convenience meals, clothes in every color, etc, etc, etc, is based on extracting natural resources in ways and amounts which are so completely unsustainable as to be rapacious. Rape, literal and metaphorical, along with murder, torture, and institutionalized poverty are tools used to control those who resist the destruction of the land and her creatures. These atrocities, committed overseas or in our own poorest ghettos and reservations, happen out of sight, even of the TV cameras. If the people of a wealthy U.S. suburb like Plano, Texas or Palo Alto, California were to riot because their water was supplied by a foreign company which was raising rates to one-quarter of the average person’s monthly salary, that would be news. But when the same thing happens in a poor city on another continent, CNN and Fox News are nowhere in sight. The dumping of toxic chemicals into rivers, the employment of children in sweat-shops, the clear-cutting of forests, the birth defects resulting from radiation poisoning, these do not make the evening news, not least because their very prevalence, their “normality,” the very fact that they are not new, keeps them from being considered newsworthy.

If we can take off our blinders, unplug ourselves from the mass media, and remove the layers of denial, perhaps we can gather the courage to confront the reality of our lives and of our world, to see the damage done to us and the damage done by us, directly and indirectly. Perhaps we can see reach out to heal each other and together change direction from violence to peace, or at least from destruction to survival.

Beautiful Things

I love beautiful things, especially clothes, and I enjoy shopping for them. I like the process of perusing the racks for my favorite colors and running my hands over the fabric, a process that seems like a modern-day version of hunting and gathering.

Years ago, I decided to avoid polyesters in favor of all natural fabrics like cotton, thinking that I was making a more sustainable, healthier choice, as well as one that was more aesthetically pleasing. But I recently learned that cotton garments are neither sustainable nor healthy; a single garment can require up to a third of a pound of pesticide to produce. Appalled, I decided to take action—the only new clothes that I would allow myself would be those made from sustainable fibers, such as organic cotton, bamboo, soy and flax. Everything else would be vintage or gently used.

An on-line search revealed that there are a number of designers in the eco-fashion niche, with clothes that are hip, if a tad expensive (for example, a $125 T-shirt). But ordering on-line has it own costs, such as the carbon released in the delivery process, so I decided to look closer to home. After seeing the press attention to eco-fashion designers and noticing that both my local natural foods stores have a small selection of eco-clothes, I took my quest to the next level and headed for the closest mall.

I started at Lucy’s. I asked the clerk if any of the clothes were made from organic cotton, bamboo, or other sustainable fibers. She didn’t know, but asked her co-worker, who said they didn’t have anything with organic cotton, but led me to the black Tonga skirt, a long, knit garment that was made from bamboo. Fun but I have enough black in my closet. At the neighboring retailer, Lucky Brand Dungarees, the clerk answered my question by saying that most of the items were made from cotton. But he didn’t know about organic cotton. I went on to Eileen Fisher, which had two styles of dresses and two styles of tops in three different colors, six or so choices in total, made from organic cotton. None of them were my style, but I was pleased to find something nonetheless. Maybe there was hope. I went on to TSE, MaxMara, and United Colors of Bennetton, but no luck. Feeling rather discouraged, I headed for Bloomingdales. In the juniors department, the clerk I asked turned to her co-worker and asked if she knew anything about organic cotton. Her answer was “Yes, but not here.” However, as I was walking out of the department store, I sped a selection of socks in several different styles and earth colors. Each had a sustainable fiber—soy, bamboo, organic cotton, flax (a.k.a. linen)-- prominently labeled, while the other fibers (such as nylon) were listed in tiny print on the back.

My informal survey was hardly comprehensive. I know that Sephora carries a couple of lines of organic skin care products, including the locally-produecd Juicy Beauty. It is entirely possible that I missed a handful of other garments made from sustainable fibers. It is even possible that in another year or two there will be a Linda Loudermilk boutique or an eco-fashion emporium at this upscale shopping center. Although I applaud retailers who offer eco-chic clothes, solving the environmental problems generated by the garment industry is not as easy as replacing all current merchandise with garments made from organic cotton, silk, bamboo, soy, or seaweed. In other words, we can’t shop our way out.

Remember the three ecological R’s: reduce, re-use, recycle?. Most people I’ve met in the socially-progressive Bay Area are dutiful to the point of being religious about recycling. Every week they rinse out their wine bottles, soda cans, and plastic containers and put them, along with newspapers, junk mail, and used office paper, into big blue bins and haul them down to the curb. Some of them also re-use items, such as bringing their own bags to the grocery store or writing down their shopping list on an old envelope rather than a new sheet of paper.

But what about reduction? How many of us are reducing our consumption? Of course, if you’ve been laid-off or are retired or home on maternity leave, you might reduce your consumption to save money. Or you might just switch to shopping at less-expensive retailer, say, Ross instead of Nordstrom. If you were aware of the cost, not just in dollars and cents, but in natural resources extracted, in child labor and other inhumane practices, in toxic chemicals inhaled by farmers and added to the global total, and in increased landfill volume when the garment is no longer trendy or its looks have faded, would you shop differently?

Of course, there are times when you need a new garment due to changing circumstances and you might not be able to find a suitable used one. In this situation, we can turn for inspiration to those arbiters of chic, the French, who think of shopping in terms of coup de couer, to fall madly in love, with a piece of clothing. If you can let the cacophony fade, tune out those voices created by advertisers and marketers which insist that your life will not be complete without this product, and listen closely to your own heart’s desire, buying only those garments that speak to you, then you will have a closet filled not with false or fair-weather acquaintances, but with steadfast friends who, in exchange for a little care at laundry time and the occasional trip to the tailor for updating, will provide you with years of comfort and beauty.