Blue Olives

Of all the stories I've read about the effects of global warming, Jane Kay's article for the San Francisco Chronicle on polar bears near Barter Island in the Beaufort Sea is the most moving and devastating (see "Polar Warning a World Warming: The Difference a Degree Makes" ). I was literally brought to tears as I read this piece. I hope you will be too. There are 22,000 of these amazing, noble beasts worldwide and 1900 reside in the southern Beaufort Sea. They live almost their entire lives on the ice. But that ice is breaking up more and more during the summer due to "Arctic melt," and forming later and later in the season. Polar bears live 95% of their lives on floating ice bergs. But with the ice breaking up, bears are forced sometimes to swim to the mainland where they effectively fast or wait for handouts of whale blubber until the ice builds up again. At one point in her article, Ms. Kay writes: "In aerial surveys to count bowhead whales, the fed...

In his always wonderfully informative Salon.com column, "How the World Works," Andrew Leonard reported today on Sweden's new Ministry of Sustainable Development. So few have commented on Part V of "The Green Emperor Gets Naked" that I thought I might be off the mark or just too bufoonish for words. However, on the day GetUnderground.com posted my essay, Sweden was announcing the formation of its new ministry, proving that I may indeed have written something folks should be paying attention to. I'll give you a few choice tidbits in a moment, but let me just say that what I wrote in Part V is extremely important. We are not going to get off the dime with creating a new economy, weaning ourselves from fossil fuels, and limiting the damage we've done to the global climate system unless sustainable development and environmental justice are merged into a new movement that is separate from--although, obviously, linked to--the environmental movement. As usual, ...

Perhaps the environmental movement has just bitten off more than it can chew. Perhaps The Green Emperor is a bit overtaxed confronting all the "externalities" created by the American way of life. Perhaps. Perhaps, as my latest essay at GetUnderground.com discusses , the sustainable development and environmental justice components of the environmental "mission" should be set free. If you take sustainability and environmental justice and mix them with the organizing principle of the need to attack global warming and greenhouse gas reductions, you might well see a bit more movement on all fronts. Environmentalism can return to doing what it does best--protecting nature and fighting pollution; and the more social and economic issues of sustainability and environmental justice can be used to address the social change requirements for combatting global warming. I would like to note here that I am highly aware of the fact that in my essay at GetUnderground, I do not off...