Washington Post Editorial: "Maryland’s power play"

I've been covering the Maryland Offshore Wind Energy Act of 2012, a legislative initiative of Maryland's Democratic governor, Martin O'Malley, in my Maryland Offshore Wind Power series. If passed in this year's General Assembly session, it's intended to subsidize an electric-power-producing wind farm 10 nautical miles out into the Atlantic Ocean, off Ocean City. It might look something like this:

A recent editorial in The Washington Post objected to the wind farm, which I whole­heartedly support. The editorial gives me information I hadn't known, though, and for which I'm grateful. Among the items I learned:

• The proposed wind farm would eventually generate perhaps a third of the state’s electricity. I hadn't realized it would account for that much of our electric power.
• Maryland lawmakers have already mandated that the state's utilities derive 20 percent of the state’s electricity from renewable sources by 2022. Renewable sources include wind, solar, and other technologies which don't consume fossil fuels, which we will eventually run out of, and do not contribute greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, to the atmosphere, thereby abetting global warming.
• The state’s renewables mandate already requires that utilities derive 2 percent of the state’s electricity from solar by 2022.

The proposed wind farm legislation apparently (see my earlier posts in this series) requires wholesale electricity suppliers to buy up to 2.5 percent of their megawatts from offshore wind generators. I interpret that to mean that 17.5 percent or more of the required 20 percent for renewables would come from other than offshore wind.

The Post editorial doesn't mind the renewables mandate per se, just the specific requirement of the proposed legislation that a certain-sized chunk of it come from offshore wind. That requirement would keep electricity suppliers from opting for cheaper alternatives.

The Post also wants natural gas to count, at least partially, as "clean energy," even if it is not strictly "renewable." Natural gas has become quite cheap in the last few years. Burning natural gas puts half the carbon in the atmosphere that burning coal does. So why shouldn't electricity suppliers be encouraged to buy from electricity producers who use gas, if that's a lot cheaper than the proposed offshore wind operation?

My answer is that an expensive-to-build offshore wind farm needs an initial ratepayer boost before it can hope to become price competitive with natural gas, with nuclear, or even with solar, sometime down the road.

As I understand it, building the proposed wind farm would start in 2017 and be finished in 2022 — barring delays. Once it was completed, its developer would have to pay off the steep financing for it, over some ensuing period of years. Meanwhile, if Maryland's residential electricity customers' bills are $2.00 higher than they would otherwise be, most of the extra money would get funneled into paying off the loans.

Someday, though, the wind farm's startup costs would have been paid off. At that point, the wind farm would become price competitive with other power plants, and might even be cheaper than a great many of them.

Maryland's Offshore Wind Power Initiative, Part 3

Maryland Governor
Martin O'Malley (D)

The Maryland Offshore Wind Energy Act of 2012: that's the name of the legislation Governor Martin O'Malley will introduce into Maryland's General Assembly this year, that, if it passes, will encourage building a "wind farm" in the Atlantic Ocean, 10 miles off the coast from Ocean City.

A wind farm (also called a "wind park") is a series of wind turbines — up-to-date windmills — that are set a-spin by the passing breezes, thereby producing electric power.

Wind farms are increasingly popular on dry land in the U.S., but apparently there are none yet built off America's shores. Here's a picture of one that sits off Copenhagen, Denmark:

I've already blogged twice about Gov. O'Malley's initiative, which I as a Maryland resident strongly support. Recent news coverage has added to my understanding of the proposal. Herein, I'll refer to the following sources:

1. "O’Malley to try again for offshore wind development," Washington Post, Jan. 22
2. "O'Malley to unveil new approach to wind power," Baltimore Sun, Jan. 23
3. "New O'Malley wind farm proposal still a long shot," Baltimore Sun, Jan. 23
4. "O'Malley Introduces Updated Offshore Wind Bill," Southern Maryland Online, Jan. 24

The governor, a Democrat, wants an as-yet-undetermined private outfit to build and subsequently own and operate the wind farm, the creation of which would be stimulated ultimately by an at-most-$2.00 increase on residential ratepayers' monthly electric bills. The increase for large commercial concerns would be limited to 2.5 percent.

The wind farm would create 1,800 jobs in the construction phase and 360 once a wind farm is operating, says the O'Malley administration (Source 2). It would be a way to produce "clean" electric power from a renewable source that does not pollute the atmosphere with carbon and thereby foster climate change.

Financial Details

I find the financial details of the plan a bit obscure, admittedly. Apparently, the wind farm as a "producer" would sell its electric power to "wholesale suppliers," who would in turn supply power to "utilities," who would then transmit it to homes and businesses. The bill would require suppliers, as middlemen, to "get a set amount of their power from wind, as they do now from solar sources" (Source 2).

Proof that the suppliers' requirement is being met would come in the form of "an offshore wind renewable energy credit allowing companies to earn certificates for demonstrating that they are using offshore wind as a certain percentage of their total energy generation" (Source 4).

The electric power from the wind farm would be sold to wholesale suppliers at rates determined on an open market. There would apparently be a secondary market for the renewable energy credits, i.e., the "certificates." "The price of the credits would fluctuate in tandem with market rates to ensure that offshore wind producers can continuously count on a stable profit" (Source 1).

I gather that that means a supplier that more than meets its renewable-energy requirements might wind up with excess credits, which could then be sold on the secondary market to suppliers who are under their quotas. That's how the price of credits would "fluctuate in tandem with market rates" that apply to the wind power itself. The more power the wind farm produces relative to demand, the lower the prices of the power and of the credits would normally be.

The prices for wind power/credits would be passed along, in whole or in part, to the ultimate consumers of the power as higher charges on their monthly bills.

Ostensibly, the prices must never go so low as to deny the wind farm operator — the "producer" — a reasonable profit. And they must not go so high as to exceed $2.00 a month for residential customers or the extra 2.5 percent for larger entities. How will we know in advance that the costs and prices will be so well-behaved?

Source 2 says:

Administration sources said the extra cost would be subject to a strict limit. If the Public Service Commission projects a cost of more than $2 a month — in 2012 dollars over 20 years — the project would be abandoned. ... the PSC would consider the [producer's] wind-power plan to ensure it was feasible and the price reasonable. Once it got the green light from the PSC, the [producer] could sell into a Maryland market with a guaranteed minimum demand built into the law. The PSC also would have to commission an independent study to verify that the program would produce a net benefit for the state.

Both the PSC and the independent commission would presumably have a go/no decision to make at some point down the road, based on (says Source 1) "on a 20-year prediction of future energy prices." That's "a term twice as long as the state’s Public Service Commission typically forecasts," Source 1 says, and it clearly imposes palpable risks.

The wind power would start flowing, Source 1 says, in 2017. The go/no-go decision would have to be made prior to that, and the underlying prediction would cover the 20-year period starting in that year. A big risk is that the 20-year prediction would be off target.

Costs of Building the Wind Farm

That's how the costs of operating the wind farm would be borne. These sources have far less to say about how the costs of building it in the first place would be met.

None of the sources says how much the wind farm would cost to build. Would the state itself subsidize any of the development costs? Seemingly not. Source 1 speaks of a "subsidy" from ratepayers ... but that's the $2-per-month I already mentioned.

Without mentioning any actual dollar amounts for development of the wind farm, Source 3, by Jay Hancock of the Baltimore Sun, gets down to brass tacks on how the building of the project might be financed: with federal "loan guarantees and tax subsidies for wind energy." Sadly, though, says Hancock, "Tax credits deemed crucial for wind development expire this year. Partisan rancor in Congress prompts many to fear they won't be renewed."

Accordingly, I assume the developer of the wind farm would get no up-front state or federal subsidies. It would raise capital the old-fashioned way, based on the supposition that operating the wind farm would produce a steady profit.

If there were any federal subsidies, fine. If not, fine too?

Chances of the Wind Farm Actually Being Built

Source 3 basically deals with Jay Hancock's estimate of the bill's chances of passage and the chances that the wind farm would really get built, assuming the bill does pass. He says the O'Malley bill may get through the legislature, but that doesn't mean the wind farm will actually get built. Why not? Because an offshore wind farm is hugely costly.

One official who is in the know is quoted by Hancock as saying, "We are not obligating our ratepayers to a single dime unless and until someone can figure out how to finance and build one of these things" under Maryland's ground rules. "If they don't figure it out, no harm, no foul."

Hancock continues:

But the ground rules are likely to prove too daunting for developers. Building pylons and turbines in corrosive water miles offshore is a risky and developing art. Delays and cost overruns are common. The more electricity customers are protected from that risk, the more wind farm developers have to assume it. And wind farm developers aren't looking especially daring these days.

And:

Even with federal support, there's no guarantee O'Malley's project works. Unlike last year's proposal, this one wouldn't have Baltimore Gas and Electric and other utilities buy offshore wind power directly. Instead, the [Maryland] Public Service Commission could require wholesale electricity suppliers to buy up to 2.5 percent of their megawatts from offshore wind generators. That's supposed to assure developers of long-term demand.

To clarify that once again: Baltimore Gas and Electric is a "utility" that transmits electric power to many Maryland customers. Since it does not itself produce electric power, it has to purchase the electric power it transmits to its residential and business customers. From whom does it purchase the power? From "wholesale electricity suppliers."

One of the "suppliers" I have dealt with in the past is Dominion Retail. I am now dealing with Stream Energy. There are several other electricity "suppliers" available in the deregulated Maryland market.

The "supplier," in turn, buys electricity from the likes of "offshore wind generators," among numerous other energy "producers" that may derive electric power from wind, solar, natural gas, coal, etc. It is the "suppliers" that would be mandated to buy "up to 2.5 percent of their megawatts from offshore wind generators," according to the O'Malley proposal.

If the offshore wind farm is hugely costly to build, and it would be, then once it is actually built and in operation, as an electric power "producer" it would begin passing along as much as it can of its large financing and construction costs to the wholesale "suppliers" — who would pass them along to the power transmission "utilities," who would pass them along to you as a customer. That is supposed to cause no more than a $2.00 increase in the monthly bills that "utilities" charge their residential customers, and at most a 2.5 percent increase for commercial ones.

But would those dollar or percentage limits actually work to let the the wind farm turn a profit, given the huge fixed costs of its initial investment in facilities and equipment which would have had to be initially financed by means of borrowing money at some perhaps high rate of interest? Hancock thinks not. Just as home buyers have to be pre-approved for their mortgages based on their incomes, the wind farm developer would have to be pre-approved by the PSC based on the likelihood that it could turn a profit under the ground rules of the legislation.

So the bill might pass and be signed by the governor ... and yet the PSC might be forced to nix the project sometime down the road, before the wind farm is actually committed to and built.

More on Maryland's Offshore Wind Power Initiative

As I reported in Is an Offshore Wind Farm in Maryland's Future?, Martin O'Malley, Maryland's Democratic governor, is moving ahead with a legislative proposal to subsidize a "wind farm" off the coast of our state. A cluster of wind turbines like these ...

... would be built off Ocean City, eleven miles out into the Atlantic, if the governor gets his way.

When the wind blows, the blades of wind turbines spin, generating electric power. But the offshore version of this relatively new technology is expensive and remains unproven to an extent that even many of O'Malley's fellow Democrats in Maryland's General Assembly remain unconvinced.

In The Washington Post of January 23, 2012, the article O’Malley to try again for offshore wind development, by Aaron C. Davis, talks about the governor's latest proposal.

I personally think the costs and risks are worth taking, because wind technology is clean and green. Wind power is solar power at one remove, in that the warmth from the sun is what makes the winds blow. No fossil fuels are used, no carbon is expelled into the atmosphere, and global warming is thus not facilitated.

* * *

According to Wikipedia's article on wind power, the United States already has (as of 2010) 40,180 megawatts of generating capacity from the wind, putting us in second place behind China, with 44,733 MW. "Offshore wind power can harness the better wind speeds," the article says, that exist out away from the land.

Governor O'Malley's immediate problem is that Maryland would have to subsidize the offshore wind farm, as it would be too expensive for private developers to build without financial incentives. Money, tax breaks, and/or loan guarantees would likewise need to come from the federal government. Maryland's monetary contribution would ultimately wind up being paid for by higher electric bills charged to residential households and large commercial accounts.

Legislation the governor introduced in the last General Assembly session, in 2011, would have charged residential households a flat $2.00 per month on their electric bills in the form of an explicit line item. That bill failed to pass. This year's version does not include a flat line item for customers. It assumes the costs of wind generation will be folded into the base electric rates customers pay.

It's still supposed to top out at $2.00 extra per month, but the Post article says there's a catch:

If solar [power] is any example, that means it could be nearly impossible for residents to calculate the cost of the subsidy. 

Although O’Malley’s bill would mandate that the cost be no more than $2 per month, that per-household price would have to be estimated up front on a 20-year prediction of future energy prices — a term twice as long as the state’s Public Service Commission typically forecasts. 

If the commission’s estimate is wrong, the subsidy for wind could be much higher or lower. 

“We could look like geniuses, or people could experience the price more” than $2, said one administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss the governor’s proposal.

How would the financial details work?

To make the bill more palatable to [Sen. Thomas M. Middleton, (D-Charles County), who chairs the Finance Committee, and his counterpart in the House, Del. Dereck E. Davis (D-Prince George's County)] O’Malley’s office also did away with a mandate in last year’s version that required utilities to buy wind power at a set price high above current market rates.

Rather, to ensure that developers can turn a profit, the state’s Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities, would set up a kind of commodities market. The electricity created from offshore wind would be sold at competitive prices. But the energy would also come with renewable-energy credits. The credits are needed by the state’s power generators to meet Maryland guidelines requiring them to obtain a growing share of their power from wind, solar and other renewable sources. The price of the credits would fluctuate in tandem with market rates to ensure that offshore wind producers can continuously count on a stable profit.

By "sold at competitive prices" I assume the Post means that an open market would determine the price of the wind power generated off Maryland's shore; there would not be a preset price. I further assume the the "renewable-energy credits" that "the state’s power generators" need to amass — according to what mandate I don't claim to know — would be bought and sold on a secondary market whose prices would "fluctuate in tandem" with those for the power itself.

I admit to having doubts, by the way, as to whether market-determined prices would indeed "ensure that offshore wind producers can continuously count on a stable profit." Just as agricultural farmers aren't always guaranteed profits each year, why is it thought that tomorrow's "wind farmers" would be able to count on profits?




Clearly, the mandate that "the state’s power generators" — i.e., existing power plants that use coal, natural gas, or nuclear power — amass credits that derive from wind power generation is key. The operator(s) of the wind farm would receive the proceeds of selling the credits, which would amplify the proceeds of selling the wind power itself.

But existing electric-power generators would surely pass the cost of the credits on to their customers, in whole or in part. Ideally, as I say, the governor anticipates that the passed-on cost would top out at $2.00 per residential customer per month, and at "2.5 percent for the state’s largest commercial and industrial businesses."

* * *

Two key questions, then, are (1) Will the legislature pass O'Malley's complex proposal? and (2) Would it work out the way the governor hopes, if it becomes law? My guesses are "yes" and "yes" — but don't bet the farm on it.

Is an Offshore Wind Farm in Maryland's Future?

Here's a picture of what may one day soon arrive off our Maryland coast, 11 miles out from the beaches of Ocean City:

It's an offshore wind farm. The propeller-like things are wind turbines. When the wind blows, the blades turn, generating electricity.

Electric power from the wind sends no carbon into the atmosphere and so does not contribute to global warming. It's a renewable, indeed eternal, source of electricity. But it's not presently as cheap as, say, burning coal to power our light bulbs, heating, air conditioning, and the like.

One reason wind power is relatively expensive is that technologies to harness it are new. They have not yet moved "down the cost curve" to the degree experts expect over time.

So building an offshore wind farm today is costly ... and also risky, in that the market for wind power may fail to develop the way experts hope. Yet the only way to move wind power down the cost curve is to invest in it. Building wind farms will, over time, lower the costs of building more wind farms.

Maryland governor
Martin O'Malley

Maryland's Democratic governor, Martin O'Malley, thinks the costs and risks of building wind farms are tolerable even now, with governmental help. He'll be introducing legislation in this state's upcoming General Assembly session that, according to this recent article in The Washington Post, would increase the monthly electric bills of "ratepayers to help cover the cost of making offshore wind energy competitive."

A similar "measure to subsidize development of a multibillion-dollar offshore wind farm" which Gov. O'Malley introduced last year, says the article, "would have added a couple of extra dollars to every Marylander’s monthly electric bill for 20 years and thousands onto those of the state’s largest businesses."

The details of this year's modified proposal have not yet been released, but it appears to embrace a different mechanism for generating the intended financial subsidies. Accordingly:

The new plan would increase ratepayers’ bills, perhaps by an amount nearly equal to what last year’s plan would have, but in a way that would obfuscate such costs, experts said. The credits would not appear as a line-item charge but would be factored into the overall price of electricity sold in the state, raising base electric rates charged to Maryland customers.

I am a strong supporter of Gov. O'Malley in this. I feel that there is no better time for "green-energy" initiatives than now. My reasons:

1. They'll help wean us off fossil fuels in general.
2. They'll help end reliance on foreign oil in particular.
3. They'll help forestall global warming.
4. They'll pollute less in general, creating less acid rain and other harmful effects.
5. They'll use 100% renewable resources, and thus be sustainable into the far future.
6. They'll create a new industry, with permanent new jobs.

It is the creating of new jobs that is the biggest political selling point today, given the sluggish economy and the number of years it would take to get the wind farm up and running. From the point of view of Maryland, these jobs could be a hugely attractive plus for the state. And I imagine another plus factor for Maryland would be that the electric power from the wind farm could, some of it, be sold outside the Free State, thus enriching Maryland's coffers.

Yet the forthcoming O'Malley proposal will be a hard sell to even the governor's fellow Democrats in the state's Senate and House of Delegates. One reason is that the subsidies offered by the state to the wind farm's prospective developers would have to be amplified by sizable federal subsidies to those same developers, mainly in the form of tax credits and loan guarantees.

And those would be harder to come by than they might have been even last year. The general belt-tightening that we saw at the federal level in 2011 in response to the national debt crisis has made Washington largesse much harder to come by now. Add to that today's inflated skepticism about green-energy subsidies in the wake of the Obama administration's much-scorned Solyndra mistake, and you have reason to doubt the necessary federal subsidies would materialize.

I'll be keeping my eye on Gov. O'Malley's wind farm initiative as details become available and as the Maryland General Assembly comes to terms with it.

Environmentalism and Subsidiarity

Fair warning: this blog post is about a concept ... and a nuanced one at that. It's called "subsidiarity." I ran across mention of it in a recent column by Washington Post op-ed writer Michael Gerson, "Rick Santorum and the return of compassionate conservatism."

The column lovingly caresses the candidacy and ideology of GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator. I want to make clear at the outset that I do not endorse Santorum. Repeat, do not. For one thing, I despise his opposition to same-sex marriage, to a woman's right to a safe abortion, and to the use of contraceptives to forestall pregnancy.

I am a liberal Democrat. I could not in good conscience vote for any of the Republican hopefuls. But that's not what this post is about. Rather, what interests me is this passage in Gerson's column:

The Catholic (and increasingly Protestant) approach to social ethics asserts that liberty is made possible by strong social institutions — families, communities, congregations — that prepare human beings for the exercise of liberty by teaching self-restraint, compassion and concern for the public good. Oppressive, overreaching government undermines these value-shaping institutions. Responsible government can empower them — say, with a child tax credit or a deduction for charitable giving — as well as defend them against the aggressions of extreme poverty or against “free markets” in drugs or obscenity.


This is not statism; it is called subsidiarity. In this view, needs are best served by institutions closest to individuals. But when those institutions require help or protection, higher-order institutions should intervene. So when state governments imposed Jim Crow laws, the federal government had a duty to overturn them. When a community is caught in endless economic depression and drained of social capital, government should find creative ways to empower individuals and charities — maybe even prison ministries that change lives from the inside out.



This is not “big government” conservatism. It is a form of limited government less radical and simplistic than the libertarian account. A compassionate-conservative approach to governing would result in a different and smaller federal role — using free-market ideas to strengthen families and communities, rather than constructing centralized bureaucracies. It rejects, however, a utopian belief in unfettered markets that would dramatically increase the sum of suffering.

The kernel of the subsidiarity idea is: " ... needs are best served by institutions closest to individuals. But when those institutions require help or protection, higher-order institutions should intervene." And so there should be: " ...  a different and smaller federal role — using free-market ideas to strengthen families and communities, rather than constructing centralized bureaucracies."

Subsidiarity, by the way, is an established principle of Catholic teaching which says "that human affairs are best handled at the lowest possible level, closest to the affected pesons."

Subsidiarity and the Environment

Dealing with environmental problems today seems to me to require an approach that honors and respects subsidiarity. By that I mean that we need to build our responses to environmental threats from the ground up, not from the top down.

Inner Harbor, Baltimore, Maryland

Here's a case in point. In a recent opinion piece in The Baltimore Sun, "A swimmable, fishable harbor by 2020: Why not?", Michael D. Hankin, who is chairman of the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore, writes about what it will take to clean up Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

Baltimore is one of America's oldest port cities, with access to the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean via the Patapsco River. Nestled right at its heart is an array of harbors, the inmost being the Inner Harbor, site of the tourist-attracting HarborPlace. But, beautiful as the scene may be, the water itself is polluted by sewage and storm runoff after every heavy rain. Just as the Chesapeake itself is in sore need of cleaning up, so too are the Inner Harbor and the Patapsco River.

But how can that happen?

Answer: there needs to be an active partnership of like-minded entities: "a coalition of businesses, nonprofit organizations, city agencies, and citizens," as the Healthy Harbor website puts it. Healthy Harbor is the name of an initiative undertaken by Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore. Only by virtue of such a coalition do we have a chance to address the city's sewage/runoff problem in all of its causes and effects.

This is the bottommost layer of the subsidiarity cake. But as I wrote in Dead Zone in Our Chesapeake Bay, there have to be other layers as well. The city's problem with water pollution slots into that of the entire Chesapeake region, which is killing the bay. The region is made up of six states and the District of Columbia, and all of those mid-sized governmental entities have to be on board with a "pollution diet" that fairly distributes the burden of cleanup costs among them.

The pollution diet itself was the work of the Environmental Protection Agency, at the federal level. Recent history has shown that the states themselves were unable to negotiate an effective response to the dying bay on their own. The EPA had to step in as the top layer of the subsidiarity layer cake.

But this is not the nuanced approach to environmental issues that we hear from our loudest political voices. Instead we hear, at one extreme, "kill the EPA," and at the other (that of President Obama) a lot of tacking this way and that, with no clear sense of direction.

The Things That Really Trouble Me Most ...

Sadly, not a picture of me ...

Anyone who scans the recent posts in this blog can see that I am a beginner as an environmentalist. Since mid-2011 I've been blogging about how we need to come to cherish the earth. In the last seven months I think I've made some strides toward becoming an earth-cherishing environmentalist, personally speaking. Yet I've found it hard to turn myself into a total tree hugger.

One thing that thankfully has changed for me is that I now pay attention to the environmental news. I hadn't used to. I'm now in the habit of turning the pages of each day's Washington Post in search of articles about the environment. There often are none ... which is just one of the things that trouble me greatly.

There ought to be more news coverage about the environment. There ought to be a regular op-ed column about all things ecological. But there aren't.

Another thing that troubles me is that none of the Republican candidates for president has a clue about the environment.

Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, is supposedly the most liberal of the lot. Here's a paragraph from "Mitt Romney comes under attack after win in Iowa" in a recent edition of the Post:

Former New Hampshire governor John Sununu took the stage here [in Manchester, New Hampshire] with Romney and repeatedly called him a “true conservative.” He highlighted Romney’s Massachusetts record of cutting spending and taxes, standing “shoulder to shoulder” with antiabortion groups, fighting same-sex marriage and opposing his state’s involvement in a regional effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

I've italicized the anti-environment part.

For his part, President Obama hasn't been a whole lot better. He's dithering about the Keystone XL pipeline. He declined to promulgate tougher anti-smog standards. He hasn't put his foot down against oil exploration in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska's north coast. He hasn't stood foursquare for a cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax that would tilt our future energy usage away from fossil fuels. He hasn't developed a total energy plan for America's future that these other choices would slot into.

But maybe, one can argue, Obama is just being a realist, given the direction the political winds are blowing from. Accordingly, another thing that troubles me is that the leading environmental advocacy groups unfailingly adopt positions that are adversarial rather than realistic. Quite understandably, they see their function as pulling as hard as they can in the opposite direction from the general numb-to-the environment choices America might otherwise make.

In so doing, leading environmentalists turn themselves into unmitigated radicals. In the short run, that maximizes their (albeit too limited) influence. In the long run, I'm not so sure.

In the long run, what matters is getting as many Americans as possible, of whatever political stripe, on board with the need for us to adopt a revised stance with respect to Mother Nature. We need to stop seeing nature as a bank with an infinite credit line which we can keep drawing on at will to bankroll our economic growth. We need to repeal the supposed wisdom that says we can forever conceal nature's primary role in offering up sustenance to human aspiration.

Right now, nature to us is a pinball machine. For centuries, we expected technological advancement to obviate the tilt switch, so we could rack up any score we wanted. Now the tilt switch is coming back into play. Whether it's the inevitable price of global warming or the cost of widespread deforestation, rampant pollution, lost wetlands, lost biodiversity, we see "Game Over" on the horizon ... and we studiously look the other way.

And, truth to tell, I really no different. I understand with my intellect that we desperately need to change. With my gut, not so much.

Keystone XL pipeline: a
jobs creator?

My intellect tells me, every time I hear the economy is "getting better," that it's a false improvement because it's predicated, as always, on numbers that ignore the costs of environmental damage ... indeed, whenever there's an environmental disaster, the money spent on cleanup is folded into gross domestic product, in the plus column. One main argument in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline is that it will create jobs. Opponents say the jobs will be temporary. But what troubles me is that both arguments sidestep the real issue,  which is how can we wean ourselves off oil?

I keep telling myself that, but it puts me on the sidelines of politics-as-we-know-it to insist on it.

And that's another thing that really troubles me ...

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.

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!

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.

The Royal Road to Harmony, Post 8

In my "The Royal Road to Harmony" Series, of which this is the eighth installment, I've been exploring the environmental wisdom of Prince Charles, author of Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World. His Royal Highness has written a book to clue all of us in to why we should care about nature and about all matters ecological.

One reason we should care is that our economies depend on ecological matters more than we know.

Honey bee colonies in Europe
and America, in so-called
'colony collapse disorder',
have been mysteriously vanishing

For example, the pollination of flowers by European honey bees (photo from the book at left) gives humankind many of our harvestable edibles. European honey bees are a species we imported from Europe. We did so on purpose. These bees are responsible for pollination of approximately one third of the United States' crop species, including such species as almonds, peaches, soybeans, apples, pears, cherries, raspberries, blackberries, cranberries, watermelons, cantaloupes, cucumbers and strawberries. Apiculture — beekeeping — is likewise vital to agriculture in Europe and Asia.

'One recent study suggests that the retail value of agricultural products produced in the UK with the help of honey bees pollinating flowers is about £1 billion per year,' Charles writes. But these super-valuable honeybee colonies are in mysterious decline in the UK and also here in the U.S.

'It is not clear yet why such a catastrophic decline is occurring,' writes Prince Charles, 'but, alongside disease epidemics, it seems that chemical pollution and intensive farming have possibly played an important role.'

'Colony collapse disorder' (CCD) is what has most devastated commercial beekeeping in recent years. Worker bees from a beehive or European honey bee colony abruptly, mysteriously, just disappear. It is the worker bees that collect nectar from flowers and pollinate the flowers as a side benefit.

If the workers vanish from the hive or colony, the result is disastrous. If they stop bringing home the sweet nectar which furnishes nutrition to the hive, the hive or colony winds up being abandoned by the remaining bees.

According to an important study, published in the year 2000:

For all of United States agriculture, the  ... value of the increased yield and quality achieved through pollination by honey bees alone ... was $9.3 billion in 1989 and is $14.6 billion today [in 2000, in non-inflation-adjusted dollars].

CCD started to destroy bee colonies in 2006. Colonies are generally transported by beekeepers from one food-growing location to another, a service paid for by farmers and agricultural interests. If the colonies disappear, it hits beekeepers, farmers, agribusiness, and food consumers right in the wallet.

Though commercial honey bee colonies are maintained by man, not nature, they are nonetheless subject to 'environmental stressors' such as mites, pathogens and pesticides. Possibly a contributory stressor is the fact that the colonies are forced by their keepers to migrate continuously to do their jobs.

So here is just one seemingly 'little' way in which we depend economically on other species. Yet — and this is a crucial point which Prince Charles features heavily in his book — when farmers have to charge more for the food they produce, owing to increased pollination expenses, it's counted as an increase in our Gross Domestic Product.

Meanwhile, the reduction in value of the honey bee colonies does not get figured into GDP.

There are innumerable examples like this, Charles says, in which the value of 'ecosystem services' in creating GDP is underrepresented, if it is counted at all.

Accordingly, when we damage the environment's ability to sustainably supply us with valuable ecosystem services — say, by indulging in overfishing in various nations' coastal waters or the deep ocean — the costs of the harm we are doing won't show up as offsets to GDP. If we take so many tuna from the ocean that tuna populations are condemned to a steep decline, we will at some point have to pay a lot more for the tuna we eat. But the resulting increase in commercial tuna prices will, one day down the road, be counted as an increase in Gross Domestic Product.

If manmade climate change gives us more and more natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods, the rising cleanup expenses serve to amplify GDP ... someone, after all, is getting paid to do the cleanup. But that's a perverse way to compute economic output, Charles says. We need another measure of economic productivity, one that adequately takes ecological costs into account.

It's the Ecology, Stupid (Part 1)

Fritjof Capra's The Web of Life is fine reading for someone like me who is interested in Deep Ecology and Ecofeminism.

What, really, is ecology? At its deepest level, Capra suggests, it's all about relatedness. If you look at an ecosystem, first you just see the individual animals and plants in it. They, along with the nonliving items such as rivers and rocks that surround them, would seem to compose the ecosystem.

In other words, at first glance an ecosystem would seem to be a collection of things, some living and some not.

But that misses something important. Those supposed "things" interrelate. Birds build nests on inanimate cliff outcroppings. Trees provide shelter for squirrels and insects. Birds eat insects. Trees produce seeds and nuts. Birds and squirrels eat seeds. Foxes eat nuts. And so on and on and on ...

Capra (right) shows that the relationships matter more than the "things" that have these relationships.

Many of the so-called "things" — foxes, squirrels, birds, insects, trees, etc. — are, within themselves, again ecosystems. So, too, are our bodies. In our gut we host a plethora of "good" bacteria, for instance; they help us digest food.

If, as the foxes, squirrels, birds, insects, trees, etc. are, we are living organisms, our cells interrelate as well, making up tissues that make up organs than make up our internal organ systems. For example, our circulatory system includes the heart, the arteries, the veins, the capillaries, etc. At each level of organization, all the supposed "things" are interactive and interdependent.

Another example: our brains are organs made up of cells that are highly interactive and interdependent. That's why we are conscious and have subjective awareness.

The foxes, squirrels, birds, insects, etc. have brains. We usually assume, though, that they have no consciousness, no subjective awareness.

But if consciousness is an emergent property of interrelatedness — which in Capra's view is what it seems to be — who are we to say it's limited to human brains?

Could an ecosystem, with its complex, multi-tiered webs of relationships, be conscious? How would we know if it is? How would we know if it isn't?