The Shape of Things to Come?

Over the past few weeks, every news outlet in the country has been covering the devastation wrought by the recent earthquake in Haiti, and without fail, every piece of coverage I've seen has referred to the events as tragic. I'm not so sure about those semantics. The earthquake was many things: terrible, unfortunate, and disturbingly located in a nation seemingly made for heartbreak. But tragic? I tend to think of tragedy as a distinctly human creation, one equal parts hubris, pain, and irony. Shakespearean tragedy, the gold standard by which all tragic elements in the western mind are measured, is centered around the choices made by mankind and the folly of an imperfect race. An earthquake is a cataclysmic event, surely, but it's also a natural act. As much as that jackass Pat Robertson might like to believe the earthquake was brought about as a result of human wickedness, it reality it was the inexorable grinding of an indifferent earth that caused the havoc. It was awful, yes, but unlike true tragedy, it was also somewhat inevitable. The Haitian earthquake was horrific, but it was not tragic.

But what is going to happen to the county will be tragic.

Im talking about the months and years to come, and what I see happening to the people of Haiti. At the moment, aid workers and supplies are flooding into the small island nation, and, despite massive upheavals, some relief is being distributed. But the real question is for how long this foreign aid will go on? Consider the state of the Haitian situation, even before the quake.

The country was gripped by poverty, wracked by political corruption, and subject, for almost it's entire existence, to the whims of foreign powers. Colonialism is a subject in and of itself, but to shorten the tale, Haiti, in the days leading up to the quake, was in a poor and ultimately doomed position. The country lacked infrastructure, both economically and agriculturally, and already relied heavily on foreign largess. As well as having under-supported agricultural institutions (thanks to subsidies, US farmers could undersell local Haitian producers of basic staples), Haiti also bore the scars of a ravaged ecology. Look at the following photo:

To the right are the still partially forested hills of the Dominican Republic, and to the left are the barren slopes of what once was Haitian forest. Years of unregulated cutting for firewood and charcoal have left the countryside a desolate mess in many if not most places. Add on top of this a people largely illiterate, uneducated, and striated by deep and purposely maintained class divides, and all the spirit and determination in the world can do little in the face of disaster.

The true misfortune of the quake was that it's epicenter fell almost on top of the major metropolitan center of Port-au-Prince. In the wake of the earthquake, refugees have been streaming out of the city, returning to already overburdened country towns. As odd as it may seem, cities are actually the most efficient form of human dwelling, under ideal circumstances; resources are both more readily distributed and more effectively dispersed. Yet now, not only are masses of people fleeing the ruins of the city, but those who stay are not able to get access to locally produced supplies at reasonable prices.

Haiti was a powderkeg, and though it was touched off by a natural event, it was made by man, both the colonial powers that pulled the nation's strings and by the Haitian citizens themselves. And now, the fate of Haiti rests almost entirely on the shoulders of the world's industrialized nations. For the moment, people have rallied to the cause, and millions are being spent to get basic food and water to Haiti. But the cynical realist in me wonders how long this can go on.

No nation has any real vested interest in Haiti, save perhaps a sense of guilt, compassion, or a fear of a destabilized western hemisphere nation. None of these reasons can or will hold up in the long term. Haiti has nothing to offer the outside world, save maybe mangos, and the sad truth is, the UN, the US, and the powers of the world will slowly begin to grow weary of constant aid, and turn away. No one would like to admit it, but it will happen. Because Haiti can't be rebuilt; it would need to be built anew, almost entirely from the ground up. Right now, there are governments that seem committed to the effort, but what about in a year, or two, or ten?

Even in the best of circumstances, Haiti would face a difficult path towards any sort of recovery. But when are circumstances ever the best? In reality, Haiti will continue to be subjected to the cruel vagaries of nature. The first serious rainstorm will find hundreds of thousands of people homeless, without even basic protection from the elements. And the next hurricane will bring chaos on a whole new level. Deforestation caused by the Haitians coupled with climactic disturbances caused by global warming, itself a result of the human industry of the global powers, will lead to hurricanes of unprecedented destructive potential in the coming years, as mudslides and sea swells combine to torment an already tormented people.

Haiti is a recipe for what much of the world may someday look like if we continue on our current route. A lack of potable water, few and overburdened agricultural resources, human augmented natural disasters, civil unrest that may lead to civil war or political dissolution...it would all be just so much dystopian fantasy if it weren't happening right now, just a scant hundred miles south of American waters. These are the things of which tragedies are made, these flaws of human nature and choice, and such a tragedy is being writ large on a scale that even Shakespeare's mind would boggle at.

And, I fear, the curtain is only now rising on the first act...

Death of a Decade

I woke up early this morning, and went out to search for a doe I shot yesterday evening. I shot the deer in the last of the day's light, and though we found blood, the deer did not fall before disappearing into the laurel thickets. There was a full moon last night, yet despite that the darkness was too thick, and losing the trail, we gave up for the night and left the doe, dead, dying, or merely grazed, out in the woods. I was bitter about giving up; I'd been hunting with a muzzleloader, but the deer had been close. It should have been a clean kill, on one of the last days of a fruitless hunting season. But instead of a body, I was left with a sense of guilt and a poor night's sleep. Today, waking in the pre-storm, slate gray morning to go search for whatever the coyotes may have left of the doe, I wasn't exactly in a pleasant New Year's mood.

It's one of those auspicious New Years that come every ten years; today is the last day of a decade. It's meaningless, really, an artificial designation on an otherwise uninterrupted timeline. But for us humans, place-markers like decades and years and millennia are vital, and keep us sane. And, as far as decades go, it's been a monumental one.

I don't need to go into the details of the past ten years to conjure up a sense of the changes we've seen. The rise of technology and terrorism, the fall of the glaciers and the ice-caps, the vindication of greed and the loss of privacy...I'm sure it's my mindset today that makes the last ten years seem so gloomy.

But, if nothing else, at least this will be one New Years when nostalgia gives way to hope for the future. It isn't easy, of course; the trends of global warming, fundamentalist violence, and environmental catastrophe will only increase in the coming years. Even so, looking back offers no solace. You simply have to hope that things will improve.

For my part, I'm putting my head down and keeping my fingers crossed. I find my joy in the small world around me, and maybe that's enough. The cows are happy, and so are the pigs, and maybe their own small happiness can be enough to sustain my own. Before venturing out to look for that wounded deer, I fed the animals, my morning, depressing as it was, begun in a cacophony of squeals and moos and braying. My day will end the same way. That's something.

We couldn't find the doe. The trail vanished, hoof-prints running together and disappearing in the leaf litter. Maybe even now her bones lay down out on the forest floor. But even then, the coyotes and the crows will have eaten. I feel bad about it, as I should, but there's nothing to be done but learn from my mistakes. Even now, as I write, the sun's come out, gleaming off the snow that fell all morning. It's a bright afternoon, filled with potential.

And tonight, the first decade of the new millennium ends. Good riddance. Let's start thinking about tomorrow.

Earth Hour

Tonight we celebrate Earth Hour, perhaps the most important thing that nobody seems to know nor care about.  A WWF initiative, Earth Hour's premise is simple: turn out your lights (and everything else that runs on electricity) for a whole hour, starting at 8:30 pm whatever time zone you're in.  It's a gesture more than anything, a sign that we at least acknowledge global warming and the effects of rampant energy consumption.  But few people know about it, and fewer still will actually go dark.  Some of us will forget, some of us will not be able to live without TV's warming glow for so much as an hour, and some of us will be nervous about giving to much power to the dreaded candlewax consortium.  But, at least, it's an effort.  You've gotta start somewhere.  Right?

Middlebury College: Sporting Wood

Middlebury College, home of my beloved Bread Loaf School of English, recently took a giant step towards carbon neutrality by opening an advanced wood-burning power plant, one of the first of it's kind in the US.  The plant is a fairly progressive innovation, yet one so fittingly New England in its basic concept, that Middlebury seems to be the perfect candidate for the development.  The college is at once the epitome of traditional Northeast liberal arts quaintness, yet also a leader in ecological thinking and conservation; who better to try this oddly retro concept?

Advanced wood-burning plants, which have already begun to take hold in Northern Europe, combust wood chips at extreme temperatures to convert all the carbon in the wood to flammable gas, which in turn fuels the continued ignition, leaving little smoke or residue.  While traditional wood fires, whose smoking chimneys are a Vermont winter staple, are in actuality horribly polluting, this advanced combustion method greatly reduces both CO2 and ash.  Because the CO2 released is effectively offset by the CO2 the trees soak up during their lives, the carbon foot print for the process is fairly small, depending on how the wood was harvested and transported.  It's not a perfect power sources, but it certainly seems to have its upsides. 

I admit to a healthy level of skepticism over the process, and can see several problems immediately.  It's difficult to find clear data on an amount of wood burned to power produced ratio, but this issue is key to the method's viability: do you have to denude an entire hillside to get a week's worth of power?  New England was once almost entirely clear cut, and few people, I hope, would like to see the region returned to that condition.  For that matter, I would hate to see all that land, particularly in Maine, that is so close to being surrendered to permanent preservation suddenly looked again but the hungry and destructive timber barons. I worry that advanced wood combustion might be the next corn ethanol, a idea that looks good initially but soon proves to be an environmental paper tiger.    

But, I also must admit, if handled properly, advanced wood combustion might be a handy solution to several problems.  First and foremost, it would reduce our carbon foot print, which is an absolute and immediate necessity that we're nowhere near dealing with effectively.  To that end, the process would begin to get us off foreign oil, hopefully allowing some of our more egregious political sins to be forgiven.  Finally, the method could foster job growth in otherwise poverty stricken areas.  The backwoods of the North East are rough areas, and a revitalized timber industry could provide sorely needed employment and livelihood.  Of course, I support the movement only if handled correctly.  The wood must all be fairly local, and farmed in a sustainable way.  We need no further causes to tear down the old growth forests of the world, and shipping lumber from Canada or further afield largely defeats the purpose.  It's also important to handle timber management in an ecologically sound way.  the rain-forests of Indonesia are swiftly being torched and leveled to make room for oil palm plantations, largely in service of the bio-fuels industry.  We must not be so blinded by greed that we raze our environment in the same way.

But, if scientifically guided, locally produced, and ethically managed, a revitalized timber industry could prove a boon, at least for a region such as the Northeast.  Certainly, I'd much rather have the Great North Woods returned to their pristine and untrammeled original state, but, more and more, the cause of conservation is an issue of triage.  If the forest must be developed to some extent in the pursuit of reducing global warming, so be it.  It's all a game of attrition like it or not, and we move not so much towards any sort of victory as simply further away from defeat.  So I applaud Middlebury for taking this important measure, and I can't wait to get back there this summer, and hopefully take a tour of the plant if I can.  I absolutely love the smell of wood smoke, I admit, but hopefully, the smell of no smoke at all will be even sweeter.