Dangerous Years Get More Dangerous

 

With my sloppy record keeping I estimate that I have read somewhat over 200 nonfiction books since I retired. That’s a drop in the proverbial ocean of those published since Guttenberg days. I read nonfiction for no other reason than some genetic craving to understand my world better than I do. And ideally then to make choices that better align with my emergent sense of what is called of me as a member of the fraternity of humans and nonhumans alike. It’s an endless process.

Every once in a while, maybe once or sometimes twice a year, I read something that just knocks my socks off. Either the ideas presented, or the splendor of the writing, or the depth of research, and sometimes  all of the above, drive me to want to share that experience with others who might resonate with the qualities I found in the work. Such is my experience with a book I had overlooked, but recently decided to borrow from the library. After the first chapter I was enthralled enough to say, I want to own this one, in part to easily share with others.

Before I disclose the book, I want to tell how I came to find it. The search was triggered by a message from David Orr in response to something I had written in one of my mass emails. In his short message David attached a preliminary piece he has written for the publication in a new book. When I read that piece, I was reminded of how David’s work for decades has been of that triple-crown quality. When I first met David in the late 90s, I learned that he wrote a frequent column in the scientific journal Conservation Biology. I would check the library shelves for new issues frequently to see if he had published anything in the new issue. Some of these essays found their way into some of his early works, most of which I read.

In fact, I thought I had read every book he had written but found that I had missed a couple. One that I missed was Dangerous Years: Climate Change, the Long  Emergency and The Way Forward (2016, Yale University Press). I’ll confess that I’m just past the halfway mark in this book. But even if I didn’t read another page, I would recommend it. I’ll potentially update this post after I finish it within the next week, for a fear his use of “The Way” in the title might have better been edited to “A Way” forward. He well might prove my suspicion wrong. David’s writing is crisp but with a cadence in which I hear him speaking, as I have many times over the years. The testament to his writing and wordsmith skills is that you can open the book and read any two facing pages and find both the ideas, the writing, and the research blended into a compelling and highly digestible dessert. He has 50 pages of references to back up his 238 pages of text. And many of those reference include further insights. There are so many more books he refers to that I am hungry now to read.

But the content is what is most consuming. Perhaps it’s ironic that I started reading this just a couple of days before the IPCC released its 6^th Synthesis Assessment Report less than 48 hours before I am writing this. Read only the Summary for Policymakers(38 pages) or listen to Secretary Guterres statement upon its release and you should be truly terrified for your children and grandchildren. The IPCC is the best example of solid science we have, with representation from scientists around the world and from every major discipline. It is a CONSENSUS report. If anything, it tamps down the threats. The bottom line is a call for 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in less than seven years and then to continue to cut to stave off the potential end of civilization as we know it.

The IPCC report says we need 3-6 times the amount of investment in reducing the greenhouse gas emissions than we are spending currently. And wealthy developed nations who are responsible for the bulk of the emissions need to invest more.  But, as we recognize the 20^th anniversary of our failed and illegal invasion of Iraq, the same alliance of war hawks is ratcheting up calls for even more military spending, as if we haven’t learned anything during those 20 years. On March 9^th, President Biden released his budget proposal for 2023-24 with a whopping $886 billion for defense spending. This number includes funding for the Department of Defense, nuclear weapons programs at the Department of Energy, and other defense matters. This proposal represents a 9% ($73 billion) increase from President Biden’s FY2023 proposal for defense.

We go through this circus every year, and every year Congress which holds the purse strings, decides its not enough. How much will our bipartisan hawks inflate the threats of the various current evil empire so they can bring home even more bacon for their districts and states to show they are “tough”? Last year they drained our treasury and treasures by an additional $45 billion beyond the budget requested by President Biden and the Pentagon. When it comes to military spending, there is never enough in these eyes. And just so you recognize it, more than half of that spending goes directly to military contractors, not the soldiers and employees of the government. As Lindsay Koshgarian, Program Director for the National Priorities Project reports, that translates into military contractors receiving 25 percent of the entire discretionary budget!! Ironic that our legislators don’t see the threats of climate change, pandemics, growing inequality, increasing desperate refugee numbers, etc. through the same lens.

Neither of our liberal senators nor the Lansing area’s Congresswoman will likely vote in favor of Representative Barbara  Lee and Rep. Mark Pocan’s “People Over Pentagon Act” that would cut military spending by $100 billion, a figure a recent Congressional Budget Office study deemed would not harm our national security. Veteran military analyst and Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute Bill Hartung recently wrote about the glut and potential savings if Congress would only perform its oversight responsibilities with our money. These are desperately needed funds that the IPCC has said are essential to slow climate change and stave off disaster.

While scientists have been sounding this alarm for decades we have been slow to act. Even the commitments in the Paris Agreement have failed to reverse the release of greenhouse gases. They rose globally again last year. This morning Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow with the Post Carbon Institute,  writes to explain our failure to curb carbon emissions pretty succinctly. It’s an answer that fits well what David was writing about more deeply in Dangerous Years. Now seven years later, as the IPCC report makes clear, the danger is closer and accelerating.

I was hoping to try and summarize David’s book for you, but I feel totally incapable of doing so. It would clearly be a disservice to all to try to reduce it to bullet points as so much good writing, research, and complexity would be lost. Perhaps that’s part of our culture. We can’t bother to sit with anything complex and really dwell on what it might mean. Dangerous Years is one of the wisest books I’ve ever read. If after completing the last third of the book I feel otherwise, I will let you all know. But I feel the urgency for sharing this now. Time is running out for us, in more ways than one. Read the book. Give it to others and contact your elected officials. There is no time to waste.

When Is Enough, Enough?

 

 

 

The addiction to weapons is killing us. If everything looks like a nail, then the hammer looks like the correct tool. But what if that’s a misdiagnosis? The response to threats of violence in our culture is predisposed to applying weapons to address any threat. We even use weapon-related language when addressing disease, climate change or inequality, i.e., “target”, “war on”, “attack”. But nowhere is this so dramatically visible than with both our militaristic mindset and our addiction to guns for personal security.

We’ve been chasing this tail without success for way too long. There is plenty of data to suggest that this addiction is making things worse, both in international relations and in our neighborhoods. To challenge the addiction publicly is to be labeled “soft on communism”, “a patsy”, “unpatriotic”, a “freedom-hating liberal” or a “Second Amendment denier.”

We have manufactured and distributed so many weapons that now other nations and individuals look to their arsenals when they find themselves in a conflict. Sometimes they only brandish their weapons to demonstrate how tough, manly, or strong they are. But with so many weapons now in so many hands, we see increasing eruptions of deadly violence everywhere, across borders and within them, and in our schools, shopping malls and leisure places. How is it that to even suggest constraints on weapons is anathema to our sick culture? Congress has shown only tepid solutions, like child locks on guns, which they can’t even agree on. Spending on weapons of war has no limit in the eyes of the vast majority of members of Congress, only on how much to increase this theft of the common wealth. This is what in systems thinking is known as a negative reinforcing loop: More weapons in more hands equals more deadly violence, requiring more weapons.

Having students murdered this week in the building I used to teach in certainly has sparked my attempt to look at the larger system of weapons mania and the unintended consequences of our failed solutions to violence at home and abroad. It brought back vividly my own experience with gun violence 50 years ago as a student at Wayne State in Detroit.

It was a chilly November morning and I had been drinking coffee in the student union before heading across the mall in advance of my next class. There were few people on the mall between class times when I heard gunshots near the library. I saw a victim fall and the shooter run away. Without thinking, at least I don’t recall giving it any thought, I ran to the victim, a young African American student lying on his back, blood gurgling from his mouth and his eyes wide open in shock. I can see them now as clearly as I did that day. I quickly took off my coat and put over him and held his head up trying to keep him from choking until police arrived and medics came and moved me away. I walked around for a couple of weeks trying to find some balance in the world. I had been involved in numerous anti-war demonstrations and was leading a Free University course on the idea of "nonviolence". Experiencing gun violence first hand just put me in shock, as I assume all who witness murder must. I learned later that the young man died, the shooter was caught and I assume, eventually convicted.

As I was then,  I’ve been wading in the mud (or is it quicksand?) of the spiraling decline of our common wealth via increasing military spending for the better part of the last decade. What is crystal clear from my studies  over that time, as clear as the eyes of that gun victim are to me today, that  despite this growing arsenal of weapons, we feel no safer either on the global stage or on our city streets.

It was while reading a book on systems thinking the morning after the recent MSU shooting that I reflected on how our elected leaders, and too much of the public, are simply addicted to guns and weapons as the answer to insecurity. It’s not surprising, given how our culture is obsessed with violence (been to a movie theatre recently?). No doubt there is great financial profit in the violence industries. Selling security via weapons is indeed lucrative--even during the pandemic those merchants of death outperformed the market. And in the systems thinking analysis we see the reinforcing loops abound. Congress gets oodles of campaign financing from these industries, which pour billions into professional lobbying, often by lobbyists who used to work in Congress or in the military (these are gold-plated revolving doors). More weapons mean more profits means more… and so it goes.

Addiction, as noted by system thinkers, is an outcome of depending more and more on what seems a quick fix over time and investing less and less on core solutions. This is the treadmill members of Congress are on, bringing home the military bacon to their district or state regardless of the harm those highly saturated fats are for the human family. If you want to get re-elected, conventional wisdom is to bring home the pork. And the greasy pork is often on the menu via the military budget in every congressional district. As President Eisenhower warned us, the military-industrial-congressional complex has cooked the system. To vote against the failed and troubled F-35 boondoggle, which has components of it manufactured in over 400 of the 435 districts, is to court a litany of catcalls underwritten by the industry.

Breaking away from this weapons addiction will require a long-term commitment to redirect our attention and energies towards the real tidal wave of security threats that will affect all of us which come not from autocrats in Russia or China but from the co-mingled crises of climate chaos, gross inequality, injustice, and ecological unraveling. That polycrisis is picking up steam much quicker than most had charted. They are driving millions from their homes, seeking respite from the trauma of insecurity. As President/General Eisenhower said,

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.”

Lasting solutions require building trust, which simply can’t be constructed overnight. Trust needs to be nurtured, worked at, and encouraged. Transparency is essential, as is verification. Third parties are often helpful, perhaps even necessary, to transition to a trusting relationship.It simply takes courage to build trust, to be vulnerable, especially with those we see as enemies.

There is certainly a role for oversight, whether through an international body such as the UN, or at a local unit of government or citizen commission. If we redirected even 10 percent of the weapons budget towards these efforts our long-term possibilities for peace and security at home and abroad would improve. If the waste and fraud rampant in the military procurement mess were eliminated it would make this transition easily affordable and us more truly secure.

Einstein observed that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is a definition of insanity. Guns don’t protect us. They are an addiction that must be cured if we are to achieve real human security. Let’s work to build a world of true human security for all in communion with the web of life that we share. We need the courage to tackle our addiction to weapons and build the trust that can allow us all to live secure and fruitful lives. Time is running out.