From Earth to Heaven ... by Analogy!

Since I rededicated this blog as "This Sacramental Earth," I've been struggling to come up with a reason why we Catholics in particular, and all Christians in general, ought to think of the natural world as a sacrament: a visible sign of God's invisible grace.

If Mother Nature, through evolution, engendered our material being in the form of species Homo sapiens, then I suppose we can adopt two possible attitudes. One is to think of our material being, and of the material world at large from which it derives, as purely disposable. We can think highly of just the immortal soul which comes to us from God at the time we are individually conceived and returns to God when we die. The rest of our "reality" can be gladly discarded, in this view.

The other possible attitude is to think of our material reality as imbued with God's grace. If we think of it that way, then it would be a desecration, pure and simple, to turn physical Nature into a trash heap as we keep plundering Nature unsustainably in support of our ravenous economic aspirations. If material reality is itself a sacrament, then we ought to be environmentalists instead.

But why should we not visualize our natural, physical being as, ultimately, some sort of waste matter to be tossed onto a figurative slag heap and forgotten after we have gone to our graves?

The reason is simply this: our Nicene Creed says, " ... we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come."

The word "resurrection" implies ongoing, or restored, corporeality — not just a disembodied soul floating eternally in the beatific presence of God in Heaven after we die. So the life we know today as bodily creatures here on Earth can fruitfully be envisioned as analogous to the promised "life of the world to come."

One specific analogy is the evolutionary succession of species here on Earth. Humankind in particular is the product of a long chain of precursor hominid species, all of which are now extinct. They in effect still exist today, though — in "resurrected" form, as us!

Another analogy with the resurrection our creed promises us after death is the return of temperate climes that arrived after the end of the last Ice Age, during which frigid time the prospects looked dim indeed for our early ancestors' continued survival.

The return of the Earth's fecundity each spring, following the death of green things that accompanies each winter, is yet another natural analogy of the personal resurrection our Christian religious belief promises us.

If we but accept the notion that such Earth-Heaven analogies furnish us with a true "optic" through which to view the credal promise of resurrection life in the Kingdom of God, then the natural world as we know it today automatically becomes a sacramental world. It makes no more sense to plunder and despoil Nature than to neglect the upkeep on our own house or burn it to the ground.

Reaping the Wind ... and Solar, Hydropower, Geothermal, Etc.

My December 2011 electric bill was different than any I've ever paid before: all the electric power came from renewable sources. None came from polluting fossil fuels, such as coal, that add enormously to the carbon load in the atmosphere and the resultant global warming that carbon's greenhouse effect produces.

I'm now buying 100% renewable energy. It comes from Stream Energy.

As a Maryland resident who lives in the service area of Baltimore Gas & Electric, I have the option to stay with BGE's Standard Offer Service (SOS) or to choose from a list of alternate suppliers of electric power. This is due to the fact that Maryland deregulated its electricity market a few years ago, seeking to foster competition that would hold prices down.

I have used two non-BGE suppliers other than Stream Energy, but the "6 Month Fixed Rate Plan - Green and Clean!" contract I now have with Stream Energy is the first that promises its power is "100% Renewable." Stream Energy, along with it's marketing affiliate Ignite, is a Texas company that began selling electric power in Maryland earlier in 2011.

What is "Renewable" Energy and How Much Does It Cost?

Stream Energy's renewable energy, the company says, "comes from a combination of the following sources; solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, wind power, low-impact hydropower, geothermal energy, biologically derived methane gas, fuel cells, biomass energy, coal mine methane, large scale hydropower, waste coal, distributed generation systems, demand-side management, municipal solid waste, generation of electricity utilizing by-products of the pulping process and wood, integrated combined coal gasification technology."

Am I paying a lot more for using 100% renewable energy? Not really. Right now, BGE's SOS electricity charge is 9.037 ¢/kWH, while Stream Energy is charging me 9.39 ¢/kWH. That's 0.351 ¢/kWH more. I used 1713 kWH of electric power on my current monthly bill, meaning my "electric supplier charges" to Stream Energy amounted to $160.85. Had I stayed with BGE, they would have amounted to $154.80. So my "100% renewable surcharge" came to just $6.05.

Buying Renewable Power

Stream Energy serves customers in Georgia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, in addition to its home state of Texas. Chances are, though, that you live in a state Stream Energy doesn't serve.

You may nonetheless live in a state that offers you a choice of electric suppliers, as Maryland does. Some of those suppliers may offer plans that use renewable power sources.

Maryland's deregulated electricity market program is called Electric Choice, and you may have a similar deregulation program in the state where you live. Otherwise, you are locked into a single supplier. Even if you are locked into one supplier, though, it may offer you a range of plans to select from. If so, one or more of its plans may offer some percentage (up to 100%) of its electric power from renewable sources — or, even better, from wind alone.

In general, the more power from renewables, the higher the rate per kilowatt-hour (kWH) will be. If all the renewable power comes from harnessing the wind, the rate per kWH can be expected to be yet higher.

If your state is like mine, signing up with an alternate supplier of electric power is pretty much painless. You can expect to find a list of suppliers that is published online by your state public utility commission (mine is actually a "public service commission"). From the list, you can pick one that suits your needs and visit its website. The website will allow you to sign up, but you may have to confirm your intention to do so over the phone.

Once that happens, you will receive various confirmations in the mail. At the start of the next billing period, the actual switchover will occur. Your next bill after the switchover will come, as usual, from your local electric supplier (in my case, BGE) but it will have a special "electric supplier charges" section somewhere on it. In that section you will see the charges per kWH that will be forwarded to the new power supplier (in my case, Stream Energy). The remaining charges on the bill will go to the local company (e.g., BGE) mainly for "electric delivery service" — the transmission of the electric power from the power grid to your home.

Stream Energy, like most electric power suppliers, offers plans such as the one I am on that impose a fee for early cancellation. I have a six-month plan, so if I were to cancel prior to the end of six months, I'd owe Stream Energy an extra $150. For a slightly higher monthly rate, I could have selected a "month to month" Stream Energy plan instead: 9.9 ¢/kWH for 100% renewable power. Doing so would allow me to switch suppliers at virtually any time, with no penalty.

100% Wind Power

Right at the moment, I have the option to buy "100% Wind" power from BGE Home for 10.2 ¢/kWH. Not to be confused with BGE, BGE Home is a local subsidiary of Constellation Electric, its national parent company. "100% Wind" means all the power comes from wind turbine "farms" like this one:

There are other suppliers presently selling "100% Wind" plans for as low as 9.7 ¢/kWH (the rate quoted by Ambit Northeast right now).

Wind power is, of course, fully renewable. The wind is always blowing somewhere. Wind farms are located where it pretty much blows all the time.

Just 21 months ago, before I began shopping around for a non-BGE electric supplier, I was paying BGE 11.97 ¢/kWH for electric power. Since then, rates have come down a lot for non-renewable and renewable power, but still ... for 2.27 ¢/kWH less than I was paying then, I could be getting electric power that reaps nothing but the wind.

In fact, when my current six-month contract with Stream Energy ends, I expect to go with one of the "100% Wind" suppliers. It will be a nice feeling to know that every time my heating/air conditioning starts blowing air through my house, it will derive from nothing but the winds that blow across America.

Deep Climate Skepticism in Tidewater Virginia

Recently published in The Washington Post, Virginia residents oppose preparations for climate-related sea-level rise details the deep-seated hostility some Virginians have to widespread predictions of global warming that would, scientists say, inevitably cause sea levels to rise, thereby inundating low-lying areas many of them live in:

Located on the Chesapeake Bay between the Rappahannock and York rivers, Virginia's Middle Peninsula seemingly needs to fear rising sea levels not only due to global warming but also due to "post-glacial rebound" — an after-effect of the last Ice Age — and an ancient meteoric impact crater that continues to affect the area nearby.

If global warming is real it will melt the polar ice caps and arctic ice sheets, scientists say, putting more water in the oceans. That's why sea levels can be expected to rise. In fact, global ice melting has already begun — see Study: Ice sheets melting, sea level rising faster than previously thought. But if the surface temperatures of the earth continue to rise due to further global warming, the problem will just get worse.

Yet some Virginians vociferously reject that scenario.

Planners and politicians have been talking up the issue at public meetings, the Post article says, in hopes of generating support for changes such as rezoning local land for use as a dike against rising water. Opponents of the changes have organized themselves and come to meetings intent on shouting down and otherwise resisting the planners.

One of the opposition organizers is Donna Holt, leader of the Virginia Campaign for Liberty, a Tea Party affiliate with 7,000 members. She says a United Nations initiative called "Agenda 21" is behind a global drive for "sustainable development," which she believes is internationalist code-speak for the demise of local governments and individual liberty. The local planners and politicians who want zoning changes for purposes of protecting the counties of Virginia's Middle Peninsula against sea-level rise are, she wold have it, dupes of the international Agenda 21 crowd.

Agenda 21 is "a United Nations environmental action plan adopted in 1992," says the article. Wikipedia says about "Agenda 21"(see this article) that it is ...

... an action plan of the United Nations (UN) related to sustainable development and was an outcome of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. It is a comprehensive blueprint of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the UN, governments, and major groups in every area in which humans directly affect the environment.

Donna Holt believes, says The Post, that it's just a "shadowy global conspiracy" to take away our liberties. If property owners or local governments don't comply with its mandate for "sustainable development," they'll be in line for international sanctions of some sort.

That's just not so, says Patty Glick, senior climate-change specialist for the National Wildlife Federation, according to The Post. Agenda 21 "has no legal or policy implication for local governments in the United States," she says.

I believe Donna Holt and her fellow climate skeptics are wrong, and that manmade climate change is real. See Global Warming Real After All, Says Former Scientific Skeptic for some of the reasons why I think global warming is a real concern for all of us.

* * * * *

But I also think that the reflexive hostility to environmental issues that exists on America's political right is a real concern for the rest of us.

Obviously, there will have to be federal (and international) responses to threats of climate change. Regions, states, and local governments, too, will have to get involved. And private industry, as well. And I can't imagine not imposing some sort of carbon tax, someday in the hopefully not-too-distant future.

Why a carbon tax? When we burn fossil fuels such as coal, oil, gasoline, and natural gas, byproducts of the combustion include carbon dioxide and other compounds that likewise contain carbon. They are given off as gases, and they hang around in the atmosphere for decades, providing a thermal insulating blanket to trap the sun's warmth. This is the "greenhouse effect." Carbon dioxide and the other long-lasting gaseous byproducts of fossil fuel combustion are "greenhouse gases."

Taxing the creation of greenhouse gases that contain carbon would stimulate producers of electric power and refiners of petroleum products to invest in alternative, sustainable technologies of energy production.

A carbon tax (or, alternatively, a cap-and-trade system that would likewise impose an extra cost on fossil fuel use) would impose a temporary burden on the economy, though. Down the road, after "green energy" technologies have become the norm, we'd probably have cheaper energy than we have now, but in the meantime, energy costs would go up.

Hence it would make little sense to tax carbon emissions if there were not even greater costs associated with the deleterious effects of global warming — such as much of Virginia's Middle Peninsula going under water.

So I definitely urge my fellow voters to take the threat of climate change seriously and not see it as a Trojan horse for internationalist conspiracies and scientific hubris.

Encounters with the Archdruid #1

Today in 2011 we are struggling to see how we can live in better harmony with the earth.

John McPhee

Back in 1972, when John McPhee published his seventh book, Encounters with the Archdruid, we were already struggling with the question, and the book explores the topic by pitting three knowledgeable experts who favored economic development, rather than wilderness preservation, against one whose priorities were exactly the opposite.

The expert who wanted to save more of nature's unspoiled beauty from economic exploitation was David Brower, a.k.a. the "Archdruid." Brower had been named the first executive director of the Sierra Club in 1952. In 1969 he'd resigned from that position and founded Friends of the Earth. McPhee made him the focus of a series of articles in The New Yorker which were later collected as Encounters with the Archdruid.

Glacier Peak

The first of the articles (Part One of the book) features the confrontation of Brower with a legendary geologist and mining engineer, Charles Park. McPhee, Brower, and Park trek, with two other men, through the Glacier Peak Wilderness area toward an exquisitely lovely area where there's a lode of mineable copper underneath their feet. Park wants to extract it for human use. Brower wants to leave it untouched.

Park's view corresponds to what most of us intuitively feel, even today: if there are mineral deposits or potential oil wells, we ought to dig for them or drill into them.

Brower says to McPhee at one point, early on, "I’m trying to save some forests, some wilderness. I’m trying to do anything I can to get man back into balance with the environment. He’s way out—way out of balance. The land won’t last, and we won’t."

Park says:

“My idea of conservation is maximum use. I think preserving wilderness as wilderness is a terrible mistake. This area is one of the few places in the country where copper exists now in commercial quantities, and we just have to have copper. The way things are set up, we can’t do without it. To lock this place up as wilderness could imperil the whole park system, because in ten years or so, when copper becomes really short, people will start yelling and revisions will have to be made. Any act of Congress can be repealed.”

He's talking about the very wilderness area they are walking through, which had recently been set aside and protected from development by an act of Congress — except that the law allowed mining interests to dig for ore under certain pre-existing circumstances. Apparently, those circumstances did not permit a copper-mining claim such as that which Park thought desirable in the Glacier Peak Wilderness area.

Park goes on:

“I’m in favor of multiple use of land ... With proper housekeeping, you can have a mine and a sawmill and a primitive area all close together.”

Soon comes this extended exchange, as McPhee introduces and records it:

Near the southern base of Plummer Mountain and in the deep valley between Plummer Mountain and Glacier Peak — that is, in the central foreground of the view that we were looking at from Cloudy Pass — was the lode of copper that Kennecott would mine, and to do so the company would make an open pit at least two thousand four hundred feet from rim to rim.

Park said, “A hole in the ground will not materially hurt this scenery.”

Brower stood up. “None of the experts on scenic resources will agree with you,” he said. “This is one of the few remaining great wildernesses in the lower forty-eight. Copper is not a transcendent value here.”

“Without copper, we’d be in a pretty sorry situation.”

“If that deposit didn’t exist, we’d get by without it.”

“I would prefer the mountain as it is, but the copper is there.”

“If we’re down to where we have to take copper from places this beautiful, we’re down pretty far.”

“Minerals are where you find them. The quantities are finite. It’s criminal to waste minerals when the standard of living of your people depends upon them. A mine cannot move. It is fixed by nature. So it has to take precedence over any other use. If there were a copper deposit in Yellowstone Park, I’d recommend mining it. Proper use of minerals is essential. You have to go get them where they are. Our standard of living is based on this.”

“For a fifty-year cycle, yes. But for the long term, no. We have to drop our standard of living, so that people a thousand years from now can have any standard of living at all.”

Someone brought up the abandoned Holden mine, which the party of trekkers had encountered earlier in their trip. It is a place where, says McPhee:

The Howe Sound Mining Company [had] established an underground copper mine there in 1938, [building] a village and [calling] it Holden. The Holden mine was abandoned in 1957. We had hiked past its remains on our way to the wilderness area. Against a backdrop of snowy peaks, two flat-topped hills of earth detritus broke the landscape. One was the dump where all the rock had been put that was removed before the miners reached the ore body. The other consisted of tailings — crushed rock that had been through the Holden mill and had yielded copper. What remained of the mill itself was a macabre skeleton of bent, twisted, rusted beams. Wooden buildings and sheds were rotting and gradually collapsing. The area was bestrewn with huge flakes of corrugated iron, rusted rails, rusted ore carts, old barrels. Although there was no way for an automobile to get to Holden except by barge up Lake Chelan and then on a dirt road to the village, we saw there a high pile of gutted and rusted automobiles, which themselves had originally been rock in the earth and, in the end, in Holden, were crumbling slowly back into the ground.

Park believed such desecration could be eliminated if mining outfits used proper "housekeeping":

“Holden is the sort of place that gave mining a bad name. This has been happening in the West for the past hundred years, but it doesn’t have to happen. Poor housekeeping is poor housekeeping wherever you find it. I don’t care if it’s a mine or a kitchen. Traditionally, when mining companies finished in a place they just walked off. Responsible groups are not going to do that anymore. They’re not going to leave trash; they’re not going to deface the countryside. Think of that junk! If I had enough money, I’d come up here and clean it up.”

My thought as I read this is that it may not be economically feasible or even possible to guarantee proper housekeeping and cleanup. We know from recent history that oil wells, pipelines, and petroleum transport ships are apt to explode or leak or run aground, despite our best efforts. Coal mines in Appalachia leave huge scars when they are created by blowing the tops off mountains, and although it's possible to force mining companies to clean up after themselves, the result is never a pretty one. The ecological damage remains immense.

Yet that's a side issue, in a way, because the value of what's extracted is so high. Our whole standard of living depends on things like copper, oil, and coal. When Brower says, "We have to drop our standard of living," he hits an important nail on the head. Will "people a thousand years from now ... have any standard of living at all," unless we cut back in a big way today?

Global warming and climate change activists say we'll lose our standard of living a lot sooner than a thousand years from today, if we don't stop pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere now. When John McPhee wrote Encounters with the Archdruid, global warming wasn't even on the radar screen. Now it is. And I don't think our politicians are taking it seriously enough. Why not? Because they instinctively know that we need to lower our standard of living ... and they don't have the guts to say so.

Global Warming Real After All, Says Former Scientific Skeptic

Global warming is a contentious issue these days. Is it real?

Richard A. Muller

Richard A. Muller is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, who chaired the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project over the last two years. The BEST Project's results are now in, and Muller recently reported on them in The Wall Street Journal, in "The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism: There were good reasons for doubt, until now."

Muller was a climate skeptic going into the project, for reasons he elaborates in the article. After the careful study made by his team, he's changed his mind:

We discovered that about one-third of the world's [land-based surface] temperature stations have recorded cooling temperatures, and about two-thirds have recorded warming. The two-to-one ratio reflects global warming ... Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate.

How much warming has taken place?

The changes at the locations that showed warming were typically between 1-2ºC [Celsius], much greater than the IPCC's average of 0.64ºC.

(A 1° Celsius rise is equal to 1.8° Fahrenheit. A 2° Celsius rise is equal to 3.6° Fahrenheit. A 0.64° Celsius rise is equal to 1.152° Fahrenheit.)

The IPCC is the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Muller says it ...

... estimates an average global 0.64ºC temperature rise in the past 50 years, "most" of which the IPCC says is due to humans.

How much of the rise is manmade? Muller does not commit:

How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.

A well-stated, liberal reaction to Muller's article comes from op-ed columnist Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post. In "The scientific finding that settles the climate-change debate," Robinson writes:

Muller’s plain-spoken admonition that “you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer” has reduced many [climate-change] deniers to incoherent grumbling or stunned silence.

As for the is-it-manmade issue, Robinson says:

... the Berkeley group’s work should help lead all but the dimmest policymakers to the overwhelmingly probable answer. We know that the rise in temperatures over the past five decades is abrupt and very large. We know it is consistent with models developed by other climate researchers that posit greenhouse gas emissions — the burning of fossil fuels by humans — as the cause. And now we know, thanks to Muller, that those other scientists have been both careful and honorable in their work.

My opinion: we need to get serious about addressing global warming now!

Kill the TransCanada Keystone XL Pipeline!

I find strange, even as I cheer, the street protests against the proposed TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline expansion ...

Ashok Chandwaney of St. Mary’s College and others opposed
to the TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline
march in Washington, D.C., on Friday, Oct. 7, 2011.

... which Juliet Eilperin, the lead environmental reporter for The Washington Post, writes in today's paper is becoming "a political headache for White House."

Strange, because "more than 1,250 [protesters] were arrested in demonstrations outside the White House in late August and early September." How long has it been since the environment was at the heart of 1,250 street protest arrests? Has it ever happened?

I cheer the protests because I am vastly disappointed in the Obama administration's general lack of environmental oomph. It recently delayed strengthening national anti-smog standards, kicking that can down the road for at least a few more years.

True, the president has done well recently in negotiating higher fuel-mileage standards with automakers.

But Obama (joined by Senate Democratic leaders) has totally fizzled with respect to the cap-and-trade legislation that passed the House in 2009. When was the last time you heard anybody even mention trying to get it passed?

All that said, I have not been wholly sure about whether blocking the Keystone XL expansion is worth all the struggle and all the protests. I have wondered: is it not possible that it is, in fact, in the national interest to build it? Would not the thousands of jobs created in expanding the pipeline alone outweigh the environmental damage the pipeline might cause?

But I Now Say "No" to the TransCanada Keystone XL Pipeline Expansion

After a little research, I think the answer is no. It's a close call, but I now have to say the pipeline should not be built.

The pipeline is meant to transport oil extracted from tar sands in the boreal forests of Alberta, Canada. My research indicates that "the production process [for tar sands oil extraction and upgrading] alone generates three times as much global warming pollution as [that for] conventional crude."

"The emissions created from producing the tar sands oil piped through Keystone XL will increase carbon pollution by 27 million metric tons above emissions from the equivalent amount of conventional oil, according to the Environmental Protection Agency," says this discussion.

It's simply harder to extract useable petroleum from tar sands than from conventional oil wells. Energy has to be expended in doing so. That expenditure of energy which must be done to extract the oil and upgrade its low initial quality puts extra carbon into the atmosphere.

And there are further objections:

This discussion says the proposed pipeline expansion threatens Alberta's boreal forests, saying "the entire boreal forest [of the earth] ...

... stores almost twice as much carbon as tropical forests and nearly three times as much as temperate forests." And since "roughly 25 percent of global emissions" are absorbed by the planet's forests in general, any economic development that shrinks the earth's boreal forest delivers a body blow to the global climate.

What about the pipeline itself?

The route of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline expansion is shown as a dashed yellow line on this map:

(The orange line is the existing Keystone pipeline.)

Any leaks or spills from the central section of the pipeline expansion threaten to pollute the Ogallala aquifer ...

Ogallala Aquifer

... which Wikipedia says is "is a vast yet shallow underground water table aquifer located beneath the Great Plains in the United States." The new pipeline would intersect the aquifer mainly in Nebraska.

An aquifer is a water table just under the surface of the ground into which wells are sunk to provide drinking water. An aquifer also provides water for farmland irrigation. The Ogallala aquifer, says Wikipedia, "yields about 30 percent of the nation's ground water used for irrigation. In addition, the aquifer system provides drinking water to 82 percent of the people who live within the aquifer boundary."

In the wake of the recent Yellowstone oil spill, I for one do not place much confidence, if any at all, in the assurances of TransCanada that the proposed pipeline's threat to the aquifer is minimal.

Moreover, this discussion says the petroleum from the tar sands in Canada will, after flowing through the proposed U.S. pipeline, wind up (after being refined) being largely exported to markets abroad. It won't actually, as proponents claim, serve to increase our domestic supply of oil and gasoline.

Now, that's both good and bad. Good, because the money from selling the oil abroad will wind up mainly in U.S. pockets, particularly the pockets of workers in domestic refineries.

But also bad, because if the rationale for the pipeline is to decrease America's reliance on foreign oil, it won't really do that.

The Symbolism

It seems to me personally that the above arguments should be enough to kill the pipeline. Your mileage may vary ...

However, the true clincher for me is none of those rational arguments. Rather, it's symbolism. The protests ...

Woman being arrested during tar sands action
on Aug. 29, 2011, in front of the White House.

... have themselves changed the equation.

I don't think the Obama administration will retain much environmental credibility if it approves the pipeline now.

Don't get me wrong. I'm going to vote for Obama next year, as I did in 2008. If you think he isn't doing enough on the environment, you're right. But if a Republican gets into the White House in 2013, imagine the rollbacks of whatever meager environmental victories we've had under Obama!

Even so, we're now past the point where rational cost-benefits analyses can decide pro or con about the pipeline. The sheer symbolism of the protests and the associated pressure has tipped the debate irrevocably against the pipeline.

As I've been saying in this blog, more and more it's not just the economy, "It's the ecology, stupid!"

Yet there are times — and this is one of them — when it's the symbolism, stupid!

Mr. President, kill this pipeline!

Saving the Anacostia

The cover of The Washington Post Sunday Magazine, wp, for today, October 2, 2011 ...

... bears a lovely photo by Linda Davidson that highlights a series of articles inside. The lead article is Neely Tucker's "Anacostia River: From then till now". The Anacostia River ...

(The top of this map points northwest.)

... runs through my home town, Washington, D.C.:

It's fed by branches and creeks in Prince George's and Montgomery counties, in Maryland, and the Anacostia in turn feeds the Potomac River, on its way to the Chesapeake Bay.

Ms. Tucker reminds us that when white Europeans first saw the Anacostia in the early 1600s, it was still fully 40 feet deep, and in 1608 the famous Capt. John Smith could marvel at its clarity. The Nacotchtank Indians had long considered the Anacostia their river of life:

“The river was seen as a vein of Mother Earth; it was salty, like blood, and it tasted like blood,” says Gabrielle Tayac, a Piscataway Indian (the closest descendants the Nacotchtanks have left) and historian at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. “It was part of the living system.”

Back then, the native peoples "moved on the river and its dozen or so tributaries — clear and abundant with shad, pike, bass and oysters — on small canoes."

Since the coming of white men and women, what's happened to the river ...

Blue, gooey substance collecting on silt
at low tide.

Trash and debris along the river
near where the Washington Nationals play.

More trash and debris.

... has been a study in how to despoil our living Earth, step by step by deplorable step. That's one upshot of Ms. Tucker's article.

The early white settlers included wealthy planters who wanted to grow tobacco near the Anacostia, using black slave labor. They cleared the aboriginal forests and drained the wetlands. Since they didn't replenish the soil with manure, it kept declining in fertility ... so they just cleared more land and started over. The result was that much of the cleared soil wound up in the river.

After the American Revolution, the European market for tobacco declined, and the planters switched to wheat. That made things worse, since they now had to plow up land that was formerly cultivated with hoes. At the outset of the nineteenth century, after Maryland ceded territory to build the new Nation's Capital:

Within a generation, the Anacostia was so clogged with silt and debris that deep-water boats could no longer make it to Bladensburg. In 1873, Washington began using underground sewers to dump raw waste into the river.

Then came the depredations of the Army Corps of Engineers, who, in the early twentieth century ...

... began a campaign to create usable land around the Anacostia. Tributaries were strangled with heavy culverts. Great swaths of bog and marsh were converted into dry land with landfill.

The Anacostia riverbed is now so overlain with centuries of agricultural runoff, sewage buildup, and other debris that Ms. Tucker is forced to write, "Today, you can walk across almost any part of the 8.5-mile Anacostia, as most of it is five feet deep or less, choked by silt and pollution."

Now, though, we paradoxically find that the only way we can restore the Anacostia to its former health and glory is to apply governmental and institutional tools that only a European-derived democracy can muster.

We also need environmental advocacy groups — especially local ones like the Anacostia Watershed Society — to continue to put pressure on various components of federal, state, and local governments, including the U.S. military, to do the right thing. Again, that's something Ms. Tucker's article is telling us.

It's as though a culture that has long revolved around contention and conquest, rather than cooperation, came to these shores and contended with the native tribes, wiping many of them out. Meanwhile, they conquered the supposed chaos of nature. Result: a continuing cascade of environmental catastrophes. Now that same culture resorts to a litany of adversarial episodes — court cases, congressional hearings, political campaigns, etc. — as the only way to bring itself to heel.

How ironic. Yet there's a positive lesson here. The worst features of a culture can turn into its best characteristics.

There's no way America can ever go back to a lost, uncivilized past where humans live in complete harmony with nature, Indian-style.

So, to get back in harmony and balance, we have to find our own way. It has to be a process that does not undo the marvels of civilization. It has to respect the spirit of this photo from the wp article:

It's the Anacostia in one of its remaining clean, green settings ... crossed by a bridge for golf carts!

The Royal Road to Harmony, Post 11

Prince Charles, who will one day sit on the throne of the United Kingdom, is the author of the book I am investigating in this ongoing series of posts. Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World is the book's title, and its theme is that we, all of us, must quickly recover humankind's lost feeling of connectedness to nature. If we don't restore our erstwhile harmony with nature, environmental disaster looms. We need to get back in balance.

Harmony and balance, yes — but how did we ever get out of harmony with nature in the first place? Isn't it quite unnatural for us to have done so? Charles writes:

There are many factors that have shaped the modern Western attitude to Nature, but if I were to put my finger on the biggest ones, I would point to three: the fascinating changes in human perception caused by the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, the impact on our outlook of the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century and the deliberate demolition job carried out on traditional culture by what became known as ‘Modernism’ in the twentieth century.

The Scientific Revolution and Its Legacy

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). who
figured out how the planets
travel around the sun. 

The seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution still has us in its thrall. That transformation, Prince Charles writes,
'established the authority of a mechanistic approach to thinking'.

Nature, previously understood as something alive and possessed of an inner spontaneity, was now a machine. After the discoveries of Johannes Kepler (left), we knew the planets revolved around the sun in paths that we could now compute. We would one day use similar computations to send a man to the moon.

How powerful we were becoming ... and it all began with a new mode of thinking that reduced all things, planetary or otherwise, to systems in which every whole exactly equals the sum of its parts.

Once we decided the world was such a reducible system, all we had to do was analyze everything down to its tiniest parts and then discover the laws by which those infinitesimal parts behave.

Fast forward to the early twentieth century. Albert Einstein discovers the Laws of Relativity which mean that nothing whatsoever can travel faster than light.

Fast forward again to the very week in which this blog post is being written. Scientists in Europe have reported that their experiments with tiny particles called neutrinos seem to have revealed that these particles can in fact exceed light speed.

Science is marvelous ... but there is a greater depth to reality than science can yet plumb.

Yet, per Prince Charles, the ongoing legacy of the Scientific Revolution, with its insistence on reductionism, 'persuades us now to see the whole of the world as one of cold and separated utility'.

Aquinas's 'Eternal Law' and Dylan Thomas's 'Green Fuse That Drives the Flower'

In the thirteenth century, Prince Charles points out, Thomas Aquinas had a completely different point of view. Aquinas taught that

... the Creator was not separate from His creation. Instead, divinity was considered to be innate in the world and in us. The natural world itself was an expression of this sacred presence and in such a created unity, humanity had an active role as participant ... religion and science, mind and matter [were] all part of one living, conscious whole.

That Aquinan point of view, Charles says, is echoed in the Qu'ran of Islam, in Taoism in China, in the Vedic tradition of India, and in Stoic philosophy in ancient Greece. All have said that the natural world cannot be turned into a mere thing to be manipulated for Man's own advancement. To do so separates Man from Nature, and in so doing separates Man from God.

In this statue that adorns the Charles Bridge in Prague, Czech Republic,
the Virgin Mary with Christ Child in the center receives the
book of 'natural theology' from St. Thomas Aquinas at the right. Aquinas was
a Dominican whose order was founded by St. Dominic,
depicted on the other side of the Madonna.

Aquinas spoke of his core principle as that of Eternal Law. We've now mostly forgotten it.

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

Yet the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (left) called the divine principle at the heart of the unfolding universe ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower' — so writes the Prince of Wales. The 'green fuse' has not been wholly forgotten, thank goodness.

The thought of Aquinas emphasized Creation's unity, putting mankind in a position of humility and recoverable harmony with nature. Yet that notion began to come apart in the very century in which Aquinas (1225 - 1274) lived and died. Charles writes:

At the heart of things, within a very short space of time, that all-important, timeless principle of participation in the ‘being’ of things was eliminated from mainstream Western thinking.

By the seventeenth century, seeds of thought planted in Aquinas's time four centuries before had sprouted into a mechanistic worldview that treated the material universe as inert, purposeless, manipulable raw material. Once the Scientific Revolution was in place we could, as instruments of God's will separable from the natural world, begin to master the universe.

In the eighteenth century in Britain came the inevitable result: the Industrial Revolution. (Our Industrial Revolution in the U.S. followed in the nineteenth century.)

Today, during the Great Recession, we are desperately trying to figure out why the various industries that produce stuff for us to buy, thus driving economic growth, aren't generating enough jobs. They used to, but no more. Those without jobs and wages cannot buy stuff. That's bad. Our economy is out of balance.

Yet few if any voices are raised to assert that the imbalance in the ecology of how we treat Mother Nature must be fixed if we are ever to get our economy back in balance and our people back to work.

Eating the Seed Corn, Post 2

My core belief (see Eating the Seed Corn, Post 1) is that our lack of environmental sensitivity, awareness, and concern is causing much of the dysfunction we see in our world. It's not just ecological dysfunction, but economic as well ... and also social, cultural, religious, spiritual, and psychological.

We're greedy to improve our standard of living. We have a lust for material wealth. We insist on moving up the economic ladder. If we're already rich, we want to get richer. If we're not yet rich, we expect to get there someday.

Meanwhile, we inhale consumer goods by the boatload, even though we don't really need most of the stuff we buy.

Sometimes we justify our lust for wealth and material comforts as wanting to give our children and grandchildren the chance to have more, economically, than we ever had. If we today can afford those flat-screen TVs and all those iPads galore, imagine how wealthy our descendants can be ...

Except: we can have all this stuff only if we plunder the Earth. If we cut down rainforests; overfish oceans; pollute rivers and streams, lakes and bays; pour carbon into the atmosphere to produce the electricity to run those flat-screen TV and charge those iPads; and burn the gasoline that lets us run down to Best Buy whenever we want to check out the newest gadgets ... only then can the feeding frenzy continue.

I'm just as bad as anyone else, by the way. This is definitely a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

It all leads to what I call "Masters of the Universe" syndrome. If we have an itch, we believe we have the power to scratch it. If we have a desire, we have the power to gratify it. If we have an urge, we can, at any and every moment, pleasure ourselves in its satisfaction. This is our birthright, and no one can take it away from us.

Scratch that itch. Gratify that desire. Put ourselves in a never-ending urge-satisfaction-pleasure loop. It sounds like the justification for looking at porn on the Internet ... but let's not go there!

Rather, let's ask the question, is all this dysfunctionality ipso facto 'unnatural'?

We tend to imagine that anything that is 'natural' isn't dysfunctional.

It's natural to want to feather our own nests and pass our nest eggs along intact to our heirs. So how can it be dysfunctional?

Natural, Yet Dysfunctional

There are lots of things that are natural, yet dysfunctional. For example, as most bird lovers know, birds will 'foolishly' fly into a plate glass window/door to fight with their own reflection. When they hit the glass, which they can't see, they will often die.

This is completely natural, since birds have evolved to protect their territories and their mating relationships by attacking interlopers. But they have not evolved in environments where vertical reflectors such as glass windows and doors exist, so they are helpless to interpret that seeming interloper as their own reflection.

Yet, clearly, this behavior is dysfunctional. It leads to unnecessary deaths.

The source of the dysfunctionality, meanwhile, is not the birds. It is us. We developed glass and put huge panes of it in our homes and office buildings.

Another example is that of a fox whose leg gets caught in a steel trap chewing off its leg to get free. The fox's need for freedom is absolutely natural. But chewing off its own leg is dysfunctional. Again, the source of the dysfunctionality is us, the inventors of steel traps.

Raccoons raiding bird feeders and garbage containers is yet another example of things that are natural, yet dysfunctional. Raccoons have evolved as opportunists who will feed on whatever they can find. But we humans have given them extra opportunities that Mother Nature never dreamed of.

Examples of the natural-yet-dysfunctional aren't limited to the world of animals. Among plants, kudzu is one of the most opportunistic and reviled in the U.S.

In and of itself, kudzu (left) is a lovely plant with attractive blossoms, a member of the pea family.

Introduced into this country from Japan at the Japanese pavilion in the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, it has been spreading here at the rate of 150,000 acres annually. It has overgrown roadside trees to the point of smothering them, and it has been nicknamed 'the vine that ate the South'.

Known as 'kuzu' in Japan, it was introduced into that country, and also into Korea, from China. In those parts of the world it has been no nuisance, since the kuzu vine dies back each cold winter season.

In the American South, that doesn't happen.

The lesson here is that natural behavior can be dysfunctional when a thing gets transplanted into soil that it did not evolve for.

We humans are such a transplanted thing.

For example, we evolved in the savannas of Africa, where not many sweet things grow. But sweet taste is what sugars produce in ripe fruit, and it is a sure sign that eating the fruit will give us much-needed energy. We adapted to our primeval situation by developing an inborn craving for sweets.

Fast forward to today. Today, we face an obesity pandemic because we have learned to grow and manufacture foodstuffs galore that pander to our sweet tooth. For similar reasons, we consume too much salt and fat.

But here's the odd thing. We transplanted ourselves into the economic and cultural soil we now find ourselves in.

A lot of that had to do with the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. We discovered a lot of stuff then ... including the idea that discovery was power. From those times forward, scientists teased out the laws of nature and then applied those laws to such things as agriculture and manufacturing. We subdued and mastered the Earth in service to a vision of unlimited economic growth. We learned to produce and sell the things consumers most wanted to buy.

What we could not subdue was our sweet tooth. We wanted to consume things in vast quantities that weren't good for us.

It was entirely natural that we would want to do so.

Yet, at the same time, it was vastly dysfunctional.

Now we have arrived at a point in time when our natural-yet-dysfunctional appetites are causing us to nibble away at our own sweet seed corn. We can't seem to restrain ourselves from plundering the natural world from which all good things — including our own species and all that nourishes it — flow.

The Royal Road to Harmony, Post 10

To Charles, Prince of Wales and heir to the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, beauty and harmony are the same thing.

He says so in his recent book Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World. This is a book all budding environmentalists need to read, since it tells how we can fit our human strivings legitimately into a mindset that keeps Mother Nature — the environment — front and center. I've been musing over Charles's wisdom in this ongoing "The Royal Road to Harmony" series.

I'd now like to investigate what His Royal Highness means when he equates harmony and beauty.

I'll be talking about his views on architecture: specifically, how adherence to the 'way of patterns' renders buildings (and all other things) beautiful. I'll add to that a recent experience of mine which I think confirms Charles's insights when extended outward from architecture into the realm of public spaces. I'll take a look at an 'everything fits' harmony of lovely old houses, green spaces, and public gardens as they serve to make up the community of Guilford in Baltimore, Maryland.

Bradford in West Yorkshire, England

First, though, HRH's own thoughts. The Prince of Wales talks in his book about a project he underwrote in 'a fairly depressed part of Bradford in West Yorkshire'. Teens in Bradford were asked to identify and photograph the local buildings they most liked or disliked. Charles writes:

To my fascination, all the buildings they most disliked were built in the 1960s and 1970s of concrete, steel and glass and all the ones they liked were the few remaining, older buildings, like the town hall, church and library, together with the small area which had a pond and trees. When I talked with them about this they were unaware of their reasons why, but it seemed to me they were responding subconsciously to that inner, natural language of patterning I have been describing here that is so clearly reflected in the older buildings.

Here is Bradford Town City Hall, a building they liked:

Here is a car park in Gateshead, England, in the 'Brutalist' style which the teens hated:

The difference is clear.

Guilford in Baltimore, Maryland

Tulips in Sherwood Gardens,
Guilford, Baltimore

Guilford is an anything-but-depressed residential neighborhood in Baltimore, MD, whose crown jewel, shown at left, is Sherwood Gardens. Guilford was designed by the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and his brother John Charles Olmsted, who inherited the nation's first landscape architecture business from their father Frederick Law Olmsted. It was under the immediate direction of Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., that the Guilford community was laid out and planned.

Just before I read Prince Charles's discussion of beauty and harmony in architecture, I happened to be walking in Guilford with an old college friend. We were talking about the 'everything fits' harmony of the neighborhood, viewed on  foot. As we walked we found that we couldn't wait to find out what the next house looked like, and the next, and the next. There were no disappointments.

'Everything fits' means 'in accordance with patterns to which we respond subconsciously, thus to know beauty'. There is accordingly an 'inner, natural language of patterning' which tells us when not only a building, but also a garden or a neighborhood, is beautiful.

Another meaning is 'organic'. To the traveler on foot, Guilford feels organic, in the sense that there is never a feeling that anything is forced into a pre-existing mold.

Houses in the area around Sherwood Gardens are quite beautiful, and each is unique:

As you walk about in Guilford, as I said before, you can't wait to see what the next house looks like. The community feels 'organic' because there are no cookie-cutter houses.

Here's Sherwood Gardens itself:

Below is a Google Maps satellite view of the neighborhood around the gardens (you can click on it to enlarge it):

All the open space in the diamond-shaped area containing the red drop pin at the leftmost corner is Sherwood Gardens.

Notice that the streets that make the diamond-shaped area are not straight and do not meet at right angles. This, again, adds to the 'organic' feel of the neighborhood.

The blue drop pin in the Google Maps overhead view sits on the famed Sherwood Mansion:

The above rendition shows how it looks from the gardens themselves.

Organic Beauty

It's tough to get a planned community to look like it has grown organically. Prince Charles lauds the city of Florence, Italy, for having done so:

Florence, Italy. A city that grew organically. There is no zoning. It is an integrated complex of streets, alleyways and piazzas where work is done, lives are lived and children play, learning from being amid the work being done by their parents. It is a system of patterns, interdependent at many levels.

Florence did grow organically, over time, but Guilford was planned. According to the website of the Guilford Association:

The community reflects Olmstedian landscape design principles in its curvilinear streets and respect for existing topography and vegetation. Installation of utilities, streets, drains and other infrastructure were estimated by the Company's engineers to require an investment of the then [in 1911] tremendous sum of one million dollars.

Moral: it costs money to make an 'organic' community on purpose! Beauty and harmony don't come cheap when they're done by design.

My overarching point, though, is there is such a thing as 'organic' beauty. Nature produces it ... well, naturally. Humans produce it, too. Sometimes they do it by accident, as with Florence. Sometimes they do it by plan, as with Guilford, or as with any of the buildings which the Bradford teens extolled.

If we are to get back into harmony with nature, we are going to have to learn once more how to design things — buildings, neighborhoods, domains of regulation and governance — that have organic beauty. In order to do that, as I tried to indicate in earlier posts in this series, we can learn much from the ancient arts of 'sacred geometry'.

The Royal Road to Harmony, Post 9

Here is the ninth in my "The Royal Road to Harmony" Series, in which I've been exploring the environmental wisdom of His Royal Highness Prince Charles, author of Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World. At left is the cover of the 32-page children's edition of the book. (We adults have the much more daunting task of wading through 336 pages of the print edition. I'm relying on an Amazon Kindle edition of the book!)

HRH is, in my opinion, a sage and a prophet. He's managed to show how we can fit our human strivings into a conceptual scheme that keeps Mother Nature — the environment — front and center. This is the right way to look at our world because we ourselves are Mother Nature's children.

The Prince's secret lies in understanding the 'way of patterns'.

In his chapter on 'The Golden Thread', Charles shows how patterns imbue all of nature with order. The very same patterns that underpin nature underpin our most glorious architecture. Yet to detect that, you have to know something about 'sacred geometry', which is what the last several posts in this series have attempted to introduce.

For example, a geometric shape made by overlapping two circles so each touches the other's center is called a vesica. The vesica governs much of the magnificent Gothic cathedral at Chartres, France: its floor-plan dimensions and much of its decorative art. This simple shape symbolized harmony in the eyes of the early Greek philosophers. When the early Christians wanted to devise what we would today call a logo, they chose a vesica with its two arcs extended to form a fish with a tail:

The overlapping circles from which the vesica arises can be replicated geometrically into a 'flower of life' and then into a 'fruit of life'. From those two figures may be derived all five of the 'Platonic solids'. Those perfect three-dimensional forms and the two dimensional patterns that beget them exist, often hidden, throughout the natural world. They can be like Easter eggs. If you know how to look for them, they'll pop out at you.

From Geometry to Harmony

Sacred geometry and the numbers underlying its shapes and dimensions are tough subjects to wrap the mind around. Fortunately, the very patterns which sacred geometry extols just so happen to be graven into our souls. We recognize and respond to them subconsciously wherever we encounter hints of them in our world. They secretly inhabit all things we call beautiful.

Labyrinth in
Chartres Cathedral

Chartres is transcendently beautiful, as all who have seen it will testify. When you go to Chartres, you don't have to know about vesicas and Platonic solids to know you are being enfolded in beauty.

At left is a photo of the labyrinth laid into the floor at Chartres. It fits within a circle, which in sacred geometry represents the primal geometric shape symbolizing unity. The 'flower of life' and 'fruit of life' are figures made entirely of circles.

The Chartres labyrinth has four quadrants. The number 4 represents 'earth' in the way that 3 represents 'heaven'. Walking the labyrinth symbolizes the twists and turns of this earthly life.

Our reward comes when we arrive at the rosette in the center of such a labyrinth, a six-petaled rose-shaped area:

The rose is a sign of beauty and love that dates as far back as the Egyptian myth of Isis. A rosette is akin to the 'seed of life' figure:

The 'seed of life' is a close cousin to the 'flower of life' and 'fruit of life' figures, likewise extolled in sacred geometry.

If you count the rosette at the center as one of the concentric circles, the Chartres labyrinth has 12 circles. 12 is the product of 4, representing 'earth', and 3, representing 'heaven'. In the language of the sacred arts, a figure with twelve concentric circles represents 'creation'.

The rosette and 'seed of life' remind us of how hexagons and six-pointed stars relate to a circle:

The point of looking into all this numerical/geometrical mumbo-jumbo is that not only cathedral architects but also Mother Nature herself reveres such figures as the hexagon, the rosette, and the six-pointed star:

Accordingly, the affinity we have for beauty in architecture is precisely the same as the inborn resonance we have with beauty in nature.