Straddling Two Worlds at the Gas Station

Compartmentalization was a trick of the mind that pundits would attribute to Bill Clinton, when he was having to attend to his presidential duties while fending off the endless attacks launched by the Republican Congress.

But it's something we all do to sustain our view of ourselves as basically good people while we contribute daily to the unraveling of planetary functions. We still have little practical choice as individuals but to unintentionally hasten civilization and the planet towards apocalypse. For that ethical bind, we can point to those cowardly, reckless and opportunistic politicians who deny the existence of and solutions for climate change. Through their failure to act, through their refusal to acknowledge that freedom must be accompanied by responsibility, we still have little choice but to harm our children's future by continuing to seed the atmosphere with CO2 just to get through the day.

Pause now to consider, with a sense of awe, how adept we are at compartmentalization. Even though most people acknowledge the grave risk posed by a radically altered climate, sanity requires an insulatory mechanism that keeps thoughts of climate change at a distance, much like the unconscious effort we constantly expend to shut out background noise, which as it happens is mostly generated by those same climate changing machines.

If you've ever been somewhere outdoors away from the machine sounds of cars and planes, you may have noticed your body and mind relaxing in a new way. That is how it feels to me when my mind no longer has to work at blocking out background noise. You don't even realize what a mental burden you've been under until that burden is removed. Imagine the feeling of freedom and relief we would feel, a deep inner release of tension, if we were no longer trapped in the role of hastening climate change as we drive our cars and heat our homes.

I began driving before warnings were sounded about climate change, and even though I think daily about the dangers of using carbon energy from underground, I can still pull into a gas station without giving a thought to the greater meaning of the transaction at hand.

Filling the tank seems like just one more thing to do, along with buying groceries. Unlike cigarette packaging, there's no warning on the gas pump. In New Jersey, we sit passively in our cars while the gas is pumped for us. The experience is completely sanitized. Then, on the highway, we're insulated from the noise of the engine. The exhaust pipe is hidden behind us, and the CO2 is invisible. We look ahead as we drive, intent on where we need to go, but where we're headed collectively is being determined by what's pouring out of the back of the car. And it's all perfectly legal. In a safety obsessed culture, it is (im)perfectly legal to contribute to future apocalypse. In fact, this behavior is our most visible public activity, a massive ethical lapse on full display for our children to wonder at, although they too will become expert over time at insulating their awareness.

Growing up with gasoline--the almost pleasant sting of its smell, the play of light as it flowed into the tank of the lawnmower--I remember feeling reassured that the main products of its combustion are carbon dioxide and water. Harmless, I thought, and how I wish now it were so, that the world's good and bad hadn't turned upside down. How I wish that my most lasting daily legacy, what the earth will still remember of me centuries and millennia from now, would be something other than the sequestered carbon I knowingly summoned from the pump and scattered to the winds, so that I could live a normal life in this abnormal age.

Jaw-Dropping Film on Hemp

Though the crowd was relatively sparse for a noontime showing Friday of the film "Bringing It Home" at the Princeton Environmental Film Festival, that just left more floorspace for my jaw to occupy. The title refers to the extended exile from the U.S. of a farm crop that puts all our current ones to shame.

If hemp were a character in a movie, it would be a superhero, with talents beyond all others. In fact, it would be a whole family of "supers", like the multi-talented bunch in the 2004 movie The Incredibles. Want to get your omega 3s from vegetables rather than the overfished oceans? Hemp swoops in with the healthy oil made from its seeds. Want a "carbon negative" building material and home insulation that's less noxious to work with than fiberglass? Hemp is there for you, with "hempcrete", batten insulation and fiberboard. Clothing? Hemp's got it covered, needing less water and fertilizer to grow than cotton. Want to fight against pesticide use? Hemp again comes up super, naturally deterring pests and growing so tall and dense in the field that weeds don't have a chance. And of course, any super plant worth the name will leave the soil healthier than when it was planted. Hemp's deep root system does the job.

So, if hemp is so super, where is it? Why don't we see it growing in the farmers' fields? Why are its products limited to health food stores? Well, like the Incredibles, even though it was working miracles, long supplying fiber for paper and sails, and then coming through big time with rope and military uniforms during World War II, people complained about some collateral damage. The federal government forced it into exile, to live a quiet domestic life in Europe, Britain and Canada. It's illegal to grow in the U.S. without a permit, which turns out to be nearly impossible to get.

Hemp's banishment, one could say, was one big misunderstanding. People said it had a drug problem, but it wasn't hemp that had the problem, it was its equally brilliant but troubled sibling, marijuana. Okay, they're the same species, but hemp has essentially no THC, while marijuana is loaded. There are about a dozen grown varieties of industrial hemp, readily identifiable by inspectors. Hemp looks similar enough to marijuana, however, that a decision was made to banish both. The result of this criminalization of a super plant has been the huge cost of the failed drug war--prisons bulging, budgets draining, lives losing, developing countries destabilizing--and a loss to the public of tax revenue and the countless benefits of hemp's long and able service to mankind.

Now, it seems, hemp's black sheep sibling, after living a long, covert life on the street, somehow got into medical school and is making a comeback as a legit medication for chronic pain relief. Dr. Marijuana is now practicing in twenty states, filling medical needs while providing states with revenue and the chance to regulate rather than criminalize its use.

Could marijuana and its reformed image be the gateway not for harder drugs but for the return of its decidedly straight-laced sibling hemp? If so, hemp will return to a country in dire need of its heroic services. Carbon dioxide is seeping out of every pesticide and concrete plant, out of every pump keeping the cotton fields watered. Our diets are begging for its nutrition. Our farmers need its productivity.

I mean, come on, how many plants out there provide medicine, nutrition, clothing, housing, and the paper to sing its praises? Drafts of the Declaration of Independence, singing freedom's praises, were written on hemp paper. Let's free this "super" from legislative tyranny, so it can finally come home.

Climate Theater: A Playwriting Debut

Having written a lot about climate change, and not seeing any substantive action to address this deepening global tragedy, I started imagining theatrical scenes a couple years ago. January 18 marked the first performance by professional actors of two of these scripts. Thanks to the One-Minute Play Festival and Passage Theatre for this opportunity.

The plays can be found in an online video  at minute 58:00 (Stronger Than the Storm?) and 40:40 (When Time Went On Forever).

Here's some background:
Last month, Passage Theatre in Trenton hosted New Jersey's 4th annual One-Minute Play Festival, "showcasing 50 Brand New one-minute plays by New Jersey's best playwrights." They were nice enough to include me in that group. An email mysteriously but gratifyingly appeared in my inbox one day this past fall, inviting me to submit exactly two plays, each of which was not to exceed one minute in length.

I used it as motivation to squeeze the theme of climate change into the one minute format. No problem!

According to the 1MPF's website, "The One-­Minute Play Festival (#1MPF) is a NYC-­‐based theatre company, founded by producing artistic director Dominic D’Andrea, and is America’s largest and longest running short form theatre company. #1MPF is a barometer project, which investigates the zeitgeist of different communities through dialogue and consensus building sessions and a performance of many moments."

Twenty cities now have One-Minute play festivals, with each one drawing from its own region's playwrights, directors and actors. This year's material in NJ was heavily influenced by Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath. Five directors and five groups of actors each performed ten pieces, with no breaks inbetween. Very exciting.

The online video documents the January 19 performance. The show's intro starts at minute 12:10 on the video. My two plays are at 40:40 (When Time Went On Forever) with actors Steve Caputi and Susan Gaissert, directed by Steve Gaissert, and at 58:00 (Stronger Than the Storm?) with actors Amy Crossman and Scott Brieden, directed by Artem Yatsunov. Other plays before and after the "Stronger than the storm?" also explore NJ's response to Hurricane Sandy, including a piece by Clare Drobot that asks the question, "How can you be stronger than an inanimate force of nature?"

After the Ice Storm

Most people have an argument with the weather. It should be more this and less that. The audacity of water in whatever form to precipitate upon us precipitates in turn as much complaint as taxes and the deluge of leaves in fall. My argument is instead with houses, which go into a feint the moment an ice storm comes along, but I have to admit,

freezing rain is a lousy tree trimmer. There are no two ways about it. This is shoddy work. I'm no expert, but you don't trim a town's trees by applying weight to every branch in town to cull the weak from the strong, and just let it all fall helter skelter. I did appreciate, though, that the branch that fell on our car was dropped in such a way as to do no visible damage. There are many stories like this after a storm, of branches or whole trees falling in an uncanny way as to do no damage.

The upshot for our neighborhood was an unexpectedly modest two hours without power, and an unusually peaceful Harrison Street. Despite the major repair job underway at the intersection of Harrison and Hamilton Ave, life seemed normal enough by evening to set out by foot across town for a talk on "Legendary Locals of Princeton" at the Historic Society of Princeton's annual meeting. The premise of the walk was that most any tree branch that was going to fall had already fallen. The bartender at the Nassau Club asked how my trip there in a car had gone. He was surprised to hear I had walked. I had worn my dressiest pair of hiking boots, and actually found it very pleasant to walk the length of Nassau Street when there were so few cars out. I ran into friends I hadn't seen in years, and got to appreciate the (mostly) well-cleared sidewalks and the fresh wintry air. None of this seemed worth telling the bartender, who was probably expecting some cathartic complaints about parking.

Our Mayor Lempert introduced the speaker, using the opportunity to inform us that Princeton got hit harder by the storm than most other NJ towns. Winds were in store overnight, and another storm Sunday. In an example of community collaboration, one of the soccer associations was supplying lights for the street repair crews. The speaker and author, Richard D. Smith, credited the Lenni Lenape's trails as much as the university in positioning Princeton to become a "legendary locale". Indian trails tended to run along ridges, which in this case later grew into Nassau Street and the Lincoln Highway. The Lenape village was apparently down along the Stonybrook in that rich bottomland near where the society's Updike Farm and future home base is located. In a couple years, they plan to complete the move from the university-owned Bainbridge House out to the farmstead, which they envision as becoming a Princeton Historical Center with enough room to put Einstein's furniture on display.

The legendary locals turned out to be a refreshing mix, with the standard greats like Einstein, Robeson, and Woodrow Wilson mingling with notable merchants, Olive McKee (John McPhee's high school english teacher), and a couple of the guys whose names I didn't catch, who over the years have been highly visible riding their electric carts around town.

It's the guys chugging around town on electric vehicles that I take my inspiration from, in that I see their mode of transportation as being part of the solution to the tendency of houses to feint. One of the historical society's staff had lost power at 8am, prompting her family to move in with friends for the duration. This shouldn't need to happen, and there needs to be a better option than investing in a generator that will rarely be used.

When I was college aged, my argument with houses was that they were too square, too boxey. Given that in the intervening years they have steadfastly refused to lose their boxiness, I have shifted my concern to how they get energy. Houses essentially make no sense whether they're getting energy or not. When the grid is up, it feeds houses the kind of energy that is destabilizing the climate. When the grid is down, houses are helpless to feed themselves. Either the future or the present suffers. What a lousy choice we're given. When the power goes out in our house, I want to have a low-energy mode it can go into, in which the frig, furnace and internet continue functioning, fed by dual purpose batteries that can drive the electric car day to day and the house during power outages. At those times, the house would automatically shut itself off from the grid, so that none of the electricity would head out to the street where lines are being repaired. A few solar panels would offer some energy to recharge the batteries or to replace some of the grid energy. My research staff--that would be a neighbor and myself--are exploring these sorts of plug and play options.

Walking home from the talk, I saw a bicyclist pedaling up the hill on Linden Lane. On the night following a freezing rain, few, including me, would think to ride their bikes, yet there he was, well dressed, getting where he needed to go, apparently unaware that this wintry world is a terribly harsh and dangerous place. When I was a kid, I'd ride my bike to school in the snow, impressed by the imprint my bicycle tires made in the snow and mud. No need for big machines. Tread was my power. One winter, a freezing rain coated the whole landscape with ice. It was the one and only time I was able to skate to school. That was the best, especially skating downhill.

I arrived home to find the dog needed a walk, and so we headed out while the workmen continued their work down the street. The latest form of precipitation was not coming from the sky, but instead took the form of ice cubes that a feint breeze was causing to fall in earnest from the ice-coated trees. They made shimmering sounds on the pavement when a tree released many shards at a time, but felt cold and mischievous when one fell down the back of my neck. Leo was not going to settle for a perfunctory walk. When I headed left to circle around the block, he stayed behind at the curb, resolute, looking hard at me like a major league pitcher shaking off a signal from the catcher. Why settle for a fastball when he was game for a slider all the way down Clearview. Not that he was going to find much of interest. Snow in a dog's world must be like giving an Etch a Sketch a good shake. All past communications are erased. He was undeterred, however, and immediately set about beginning anew what seems like a meaningful correspondence with the neighborhood canine penpals.

The new layer of ice fragments landing on the snow glistened in the street light. If it were all broken crystal, it would be a great tragedy. But nature creates crystalline beauty, then dismantles it with complete nonchalance, ever restless to make something new, sure of her bottomless talent to combine and recombine, never making anything quite the same way twice.

Riding Climate Through Princeton on a Saturday

An environmentally themed Saturday should ideally begin big, with, for instance, the idea of recycling a house. The house in question, brimming with well preserved 2X4s and long spans of 2X8s, is being taken down piece by piece in my neighborhood, which of course I probably wouldn't have noticed if I wasn't the designated dog walker. I introduced myself and asked if they could set aside the wood so that the Friends of Herrontown Woods could use it for refurbishing the historic Veblen house and cottage. Yes, said the contractor. A small cheer rose from my heart. It will take some followup, though, to make sure the workers don't cut all those beautiful old floor joists and rafter braces up into short lengths.

Saturday being the last electronics recycling day of the year, I asked a neighbor if I could take his television along. He had put it out on the curb a couple weeks prior, hoping someone would take it home and use it. I had taken that opportunity to knock on his door, introduce myself as a neighbor, and let him know that it's "illegal" (that's the New Jersey spelling of illegal) to landfill TVs and computers. I doubted anyone would take the TV home to use. More likely, a scavenger would come along, break the back panel and make off with the copper coil--good for a couple dollars at the local scrap yard. By the time electronics recycling day arrived, he had a matching pair of behemoths ready to go, making the pickup truck look like an ark for electronics.

As we pushed them up onto the truck with a dolly (no back-breaking heroics, thank you), I noticed he had an old Mustang in his garage. He bought it in 1965, and it still serves as a backup for his bicycle. He said he bicycles more miles in a month than he drives in a year. Now there's something to aspire to.

The guys at Princeton's Shrredtemberfest (closer than the county's parallel event) were good sports about unloading.

Found two more TVs out on the curb on the way to the bank,

so it was back to Shrrrrrrredtemberrrrrfest so the rejected TVs could join the rest of the old and bloated on a journey to productive deconstruction.

With 300 pounds of TVs delivered for recycling, it was time to repair a folding ping pong table. With the quick tempo of life, and factories glutting the marketplace with merchandise, the art of repair has generally fallen into disrepair. Many people give up on an item at the first sign of defect. Though the ping pong table had been abandoned, it was still in good shape, and needed only a couple screws and some tightening up of the metal frame to be functional again. That's another 250 pounds diverted from the landfill, and a $500 item that can now have a new life.

Later, I was taking my family to the train station when we started seeing bicyclists funneling into Princeton on Washington Rd, like monarch butterflies making a fall migration. They turned out to be 175 strong, part of the annual Climate Ride from New York to Washington, D.C. Back in colonial times, it took two days to ride a horse the 100 miles between New York and Philadelphia. Princeton was conveniently located midway for a stopover. Remnants of the historic inn may still exist in the Gulick House, out towards Kingston.

The Climate Riders (shall we call them the Earth's Angels, with strong hearts instead of leather jackets?) use Princeton the same way, for their first night's stopover. They pitch their tents on the lawn at the YM/WCA, then head to campus for some inspiring lectures. With each speaker receiving cheers, it was one of the more spirited gatherings to talk about climate change, starting with a showing of the short video, The Man Who Lived On His Bike. The leader of the student group Surge made brief remarks, followed by the ride's top fundraiser, who works at the World Bank. She described the projected impact of a 4 degree centigrade rise in temperature this century. "Small number, big problem," was the memorable phrase. She was followed by Deborah Goldberg of EarthJustice, who gave a primer on the many downsides of fracking, lest we think that natural gas is a clean alternative to other fossil fuels.

On the way out, one of the cofounders encouraged me to join the ride next year--flattering, though as a veteran puddle jumper I look upon touring bicyclists as somehow inhabiting another plane of reality, beyond anything I could aspire to. Heading home, with Nassau Street alive with people on a mild fall Saturday evening, I heard a roar coming from the stadium area of campus. It was a bigger roar than the 175 climate riders could muster, with the focus not on carrying civilization and nature safely into the next century, but rather carrying a ball across the goal line.

Have to say, Princeton's offence is impressive. They kept Lehigh on their heals with varied plays, no huddle, and a quarterback who can both throw and run. Princeton scored easily on the series that I watched before departing as the first raindrops began to fall. It was ultimately a losing effort, 28 to 29, but they showed up, played hard, and their skill and spirit made for a thrilling contest. The articles in the paper will tell of the tough loss, the lessons learned, the need to bounce back. In a day, a week, a season, what mattered so much at that moment when the game was won or lost will be forgotten.

Meanwhile, the biggest game of all, the one whose consequences will never be forgotten, is being played every day. It's the fourth quarter, and all the players (that would be all of us, the Climate Tigers?) are still arguing about whether to show up, whether the opponent is really, really real, who will carry the ball, whether victory is even possible. The recyclers made a nice end run around the landfill with all of those TVs. Reusing the wood from the house could be a breakthrough right down the middle, if the contractor agrees to play. The Climate Riders are leading the cheer right down the eastern seaboard.

My now, two days later, the Not So Easy Riders are halfway to D.C., riding 50 to 75 miles a day along country roads. Monarchs, also headed south, can do 30 to 50 miles a day, gliding on favorable winds.

On one level, it's all a game, in the exhilarating sense that there is a goal, an obstruction, victory and defeat. There's the sport of recycling a house, or a TV, of moving a ball down the field or a bike down the road, or of reaching 2100 with a hospitable planet still in our keeping. It's just that the stakes are radically different. Lose a football game, life goes on. Lose a stable climate, life is forever diminished. And yet the loudest cheers are for what matters least. All that passion being spilled on ephemera, day after day. Yes, let's revel in the thrill of a goal line stand. But don't forget that we're players, too, whether we admit it or not, in the highest stakes game any of us will ever play.

I savored the cheers rising from the crowd of Climate Riders, and can only hope they grow.