The multinational climate conference COP27 is meeting in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt this week in an attempt to hammer out new goals and objectives for addressing climate change around the globe. You can follow what's been happening at the conference elsewhere. I post this only to show my support for those who are working toward finding new solutions for the global warming, pollution and scarcity problems that are threatening our future on this planet.
Good luck to them all,
Donna
Nord Stream gas leak--courtesy Danish Defence.
It’s getting
harder every day for science fiction writers to stay ahead of events in the
real world. Predicting the future is a tricky business when climate change, swift
advances in technology, pandemics, constant war and societal upheaval have
become a part of our daily lives.
Right now, for example, our friends in Florida are suffering through a devastating hurricane, the worst to hit the western coast of the state in over a hundred years, while our friends in the western part of the U.S. contend with an epic drought. Both disasters have been exacerbated by climate change, which in turn has been caused by human action over time.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, a different kind of environmental disaster is unfolding, almost certainly caused by direct human action on a much quicker time scale. Four leaks have been discovered in the Russian Nord Stream gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea that carries fuel to Europe. The leaks are spewing natural gas, releasing over half a million metric tons of methane into the ocean. Methane makes up the largest part of natural gas, and though the leaks will likely have minimal effect on local wildlife, the amount of methane released into the atmosphere is equivalent to the annual emissions of two million cars, according to Andrew Baxter, a methane expert at the Environmental Defense Fund.
Experts think the leaks are the result of sabotage of the pipeline, though they have no proof, and as yet can identify no culprit. Certainly Russia would have no motive; Putin and company have every incentive to keep the gas flowing to ensure income to support the war in Ukraine. It’s highly doubtful the Ukrainians would do it, either. They have neither the time nor the resources to mount such a mission. So far, then, it’s a mystery.
But to return to my original point, this story is eerily similar to the plot of a Norwegian science fiction/disaster film I saw a few weeks back on Hulu, titled THE BURNING SEA (2021). In this film, from the creative team behind THE QUAKE (2018) and THE WAVE (2015), and directed by John Andreas Andersen, drilling for oil in the North Sea opens fissures in the seabed, leading to disaster. Oil rigs explode! People are killed and trapped! Oil spreads over the sea, threatening coastlines from Scandinavia to Europe and Britain! The only solution is to set the oil on fire before it fouls the entire North Sea basin.
Since I love a good disaster film, no matter what its country of origin, I enjoyed THE BURNING SEA. The writing was decent, the effects were great, and the acting was more than competent. I thought the plot pretty far-fetched, of course, but now I’m wondering if it really was that far out. Yes, the current Nord Stream disaster is the result of deliberate sabotage, not an uncontrollable cracking of the seabed. And the leaks from the pipeline are of far more manageable natural gas, not oil. Still, you have to think, what if . . .?
On the other hand, we really do have more than enough to worry about. Ian is on the way north as we speak. So, excuse me while I go to batten down the hatches.
Cheers, Donna
*Information for today’s post provided by: “As fourth Nord Stream leak is discovered, here’s what scientists are saying about the environment impact,” by Anviksha Patel, Marketwatch, msn.com, September 29, 2022. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/as-fourth-nord-stream-leak-is-discovered-here-s-what-scientists-are-saying-about-the-environment-impact/ar-AA12niL1?ocid=BHEA000&cvid=08b7cc2bb5d34df7b088fc480efed81a
“Russian Gas Leak Could Be Environmental Disaster,” by Avi Salzman, Barron’s, September 27, 2022. https://www.marketwatch.com/articles/russia-gas-leak-environment-51664314465?mod=article_inline
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| A monarch caterpillar on milkweed in the new meadow. |
The world is an increasingly unfriendly place for butterflies, bees, hummingbirds and other pollinating species. Climate change, the encroachment of humans into previously wild spaces, and the choice of lawns, exotic or invasive species of plants, and pesticides for our gardens means there are fewer wildflowers and native plant sources for them to forage.
I've always tried to use pollinator-friendly practices in my garden. I don't use pesticides; I've planted bee balm, echinacea, mint and other attractive plants in my flower garden; and I've added plenty of white clover to my lawn for the bees.
But this year, my husband and I decided to go a little further. We have a steep slope in front of our house that we'd always left in weeds because it was difficult to mow or weed-eat. Nothing very helpful to wild things was coming up there, though I had scattered wildflower seeds and even deliberately planted some ironweed (which did well). So, with the help of a friend who is a forester from the U.S. Park Service, we killed off all the trash weeds on the slope (not an easy process) and planted a mix of about 15 native wildflower perennials in the spring.
The makeover was not without problems. We had a lot of new and exotic weeds come up first. The straw used to cover the seeds was supposed to be weed-free, but turned out to be full of alfalfa and timothy, which had to be cut down. We had to do some watering, but we were lucky to have a wet summer. So, now we're seeing brown-eyed susan, mist flower, several kinds of milkweed, woodland sunflower, wild senna and other things we planted make an appearance. The ironweed is spreading like crazy (a sign, our friend says, of good soil PH). And, best of all, we found the little guy you see above--a now-rare monarch caterpillar--at home on a milkweed leaf in our new meadow. Success!
After a winter of frosty temperatures, which we're told some seeds require, we should see even more things pop out. I can't wait to see what the coming seasons bring!
Cheers,
Donna
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| Shirley Temple Black, U.S. delegate to the U.N., 1969. |
Fifty years ago this month, a former child star known the world over, her once-golden curls grown dark and tamed into a business-like bun, stepped onto an international stage to address the problem of human pressure on the environment.
Speaking as the U.S. delegate to the first-ever United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, Shirley Temple Black urged her listeners in the final plenary session to unite with empathy and humility to restore the world for future generations. “We are trustees of the earth they will inherit.”
“[Humanity],” she continued, “with the wonderful and terrible powers that science has put in [our] hands, stands in greater need than ever before of an ethic to guide [our] steps,” she said. “The environmental warnings we see around us are warnings not only to our engineering skills, but to our spirits.”
The road to Black’s triumphant performance on that diplomatic stage in 1972 was a bumpy one, despite, or perhaps in part because of, her worldwide fame as a child actor beginning at age three in the 1930s. As she herself put it in an excerpt from an unpublished memoir given to the Smithsonian by her heirs, “The name, Shirley Temple, still opens doors for me. But Shirley Temple Black still has to perform, or the doors will close.”
President Richard Nixon had named her the U.S. delegate to the U.N. in the fall of 1969, just as the organization was gearing up for the big international conference on the environment in Stockholm to take place in 1972. Black threw herself into the planning wholeheartedly, recognizing the importance of the issues. But she quickly found herself sidelined by chauvinist attitudes at all levels—by higher ups at the U.N. who “neglected” to send her crucial data on time and, worse, by members of her own team.
At one planning meeting, Christian Herter, director of the State Department’s Office of Environmental Affairs, whose role was vice chair of the U.S. delegation in Stockholm, made his feelings clear. According to Black’s memoir, “He had ignored me after the introductions, but finally turned and said with a patronizing smile, ‘And now, Madam Deputy, will you kindly take our requests for coffee? You can bring it from the machine down the hall.’”
You younger folks may be shocked, but this was typical for the time, no matter how far a woman had risen in the ranks. Yet Black handled the insult—like all the others—with grace. As she wrote, “Macho attitudes usually fall victim to hard work, timely humor, and an absence of resentment.” Remember, this was 50 years ago. We ladies weren’t allowed to punch our aggressors in the nose.
Black’s approach—and her overwhelming charm—worked. At the conference, she worked the crowd of 1200 attendees from 113 of the U.N’s 132 countries deftly, making particular allies among developing countries. She was skilled at managing press conferences, using her acting skills to maintain calm, even when confronted with difficult questions about the U.S. and Vietnam, and she argued for compromise “midway between passion and timidity,” as she put it, despite the heated rhetoric of the Chinese delegation, which blamed U.S. industry for much of the world’s pollution.
In the end, the Stockholm conference was a success, establishing the first parameters for global environmental cooperation which steered all international diplomacy around the issue leading up to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janerio. That in turn ultimately led to the Paris Agreement, the global treaty on climate change adopted by most countries in 2015. The Stockholm conference also had more concrete results, in establishing the United Nations Environmental Program and proposing an immediate ten-year moratorium on commercial whaling (a moratorium that has since been extended).
Shirley Temple Black was one of few women delegates to that first environmental conference. Now notable women like Patricia Espinosa of Mexico and Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica have made their mark on the international environmental scene. At the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow last year, one third of all party representatives were women. Not yet representative of the world’s population, but better than it was in 1972, when Shirley Temple Black overcame all odds to perform on a new and much bigger stage.
Cheers, Donna
Information for this post provided by: “Shirley Temple Black's Remarkable Second Act as a Diplomat,” by Claudia Kalb, Smithsonian Magazine, June, 2022. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/shirley-temple-black-second-act-diplomat-180980038/
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| Sienna watched the reeds for movement. |
Sienna watched the reeds for movement. She could see for miles in this drowned land. Much of what had once stood here—homes, stores, office buildings, gas stations—had been swept away by storm and flood. Over and over again, until the wetlands had come to reclaim the mud and rubble. Now only the wild things lived here. The things she hunted. The things that hunted her.
On the raised causeway that led past what remained of the city, the big shots reclined in their vehicles and let the comps guide them to their destinations. Holograms assaulted their senses from the very air around them, exhorting them to do their duty to God and Nation, to be fruitful and multiply, to buy and spend. Sienna could see the holos from here, even though she was a long way from the causeway. She ignored them. The people in those cars might as well live on another planet for all she had in common with them.
She certainly wouldn’t be multiplying. She had vowed to die before she would allow herself to be taken by the slavers coming up from the South to steal fertile women off the streets. So she had taken a year’s worth of pelts and scavenging treasures to pay for the illegal operation upstate that ensured she could never get pregnant. Now she would never be burdened with a child she couldn’t feed. And she was safe from bio-slavery.
The air around her already shimmered with heat, though the sun was barely above the horizon. The hazy sky told her it would be a scorcher today, a day to seek the shade in her home in one of the few concrete structures that still stood on higher ground. But first she had to find meat—a deer or a pig, if she was lucky, a groundhog or a muskrat if she wasn’t. She had learned the hard way that the shellfish that thrived in the swamp weren’t safe to eat. They were rotten, contaminated by poisons in the soil and water. She let them be.
The AR-50 rested easily in her hands, a weapon she was used to carrying. It wasn’t ideal for hunting—it often made a mess of a smaller target—but there were other reasons to pack the cheap automatic. Armed gangs and the police roamed the streets; feral pigs ran in herds in the swamp. Guns, unlike food or shelter or other basics, were easy to get. And though she lived with others, she hunted alone.
A splash off to her right caused her to whip around. But she saw nothing. No deer, no birds. A prickle of awareness raised the hair on the back of her neck. There were other things in the swamp that sometimes needed killing, wilder, more dangerous things.
When she heard the first coyote yip, she knew she might be in trouble. It was close, and on the right side, where she’d heard the splash. She eased silently to the left and back toward a raised tuft of grass. But an answering call came from even closer; the pack was circling. Then she heard the unmistakable sounds of something running through the knee-high water, splashing and grunting. The pack was after its prey now, yipping and warbling in the high, feverish calls that meant breakfast would soon be served. Coyotes never hunted strong, healthy individuals. Whatever they were after was wounded or sick or too young to survive. Not worth fighting them for it.
The chase ended almost before it began, with a high-pitched scream cut short and the triumphant coyote-party howls that always followed a kill. A feral human then. Sienna could tell from the scream. One of the many young ones that scraped out a life in the wetlands after those that were forced to bear them dumped them here. The series of foster homes where Sienna had grown up had been a horror show, but at least she hadn’t had to fight off coyotes. Just predatory males.
She cursed. The hunting in this part of the wetland would be ruined for the rest of the morning. All the prey would have gone to ground in the commotion. She decided to head back. Better to be hungry another day than dead.
She took the time to scan the marsh again as she slogged
through the mud. Over on the causeway, the cars drove on, oblivious to the
life-and-death struggle below them. In the sky, the holos filled the air with
color and sound. “Only You can Save this Nation! Do your Duty Now!”
This mini-short story is a work of fiction in the long tradition of science fiction that places the issues of the present in the context of the future. Everything in it is directly extrapolated from the headlines of today. If the world I describe is not one you wish to live in, well, I don’t blame you. Me neither. Check the last line.
In hopes of change,
Donna
