WhirledView

Drones—and Worms: Part One

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Until a couple of days ago I’d envisioned a hypothetical piece falling under the rubric of “what goes around comes around.”  In short, if we use drones to kill and worms (or viruses) to disrupt, the people we don’t like will be returning the favor, the sooner or later of it depending on the rate of technology transfer.  And whadyaknow!  They have them already—drones anyway. Bashar al Assad’s regime is using reconnaissance drones in what’s gradually being recognized as a very nasty civil war.  So the future is here.  This means that Americans need to do some very clear-headed thinking about drones—and about cyberwarfare, too—and when I say “we” I don’t mean a few guys in a bunker making decisions the rest of us won’t have access to for 50 years or more.

The U.S. deploys drones (pilotless aircraft) for spying and killing in many places.   When activated from a command center, the killer drones fire powerful missiles at selected targets.  The U.S. has thousands of drones in the air or ready for use. 
 
Many questions pop up when it comes to waging war with drones.  (1) Are these gizmos legal under the rules of war?  If so, what rules? (2) Legal or not, is it moral or ethical to use them? (3) Was it smart for the U.S.  to pioneer this sort of war? (4) What do American citizens have a right to know about drones or any other weapons deployed on their behalf?

The Abuse of Words

For starters, however, let’s get rid of the “surgical strike” metaphor.  The idea that bad guys and only really bad guys are taken out by the lethal drone treatment consoles too many who are otherwise squeamish about remotely controlled slaughter.  Every day surgeons make mistakes that are followed by funerals that shouldn’t have been. Drone “mistakes” fill whole cemeteries.

Excessive mortality from bombing and shelling used to be called “collateral damage,” as if dead people mattered as little as shattered windows.  Today’s equally cynical, but more sophisticated verbal coverup works by redefinition.  We’ve been told that any post-pubertal male who’s killed along with the targeted individual is presumed also to have been a terrorist. What a brilliant statistical coup!  Aim for one.  Get ten. Guilt by propinquity. Probably the dead women and girls should be counted, too.  If they didn’t divorce the guy, run away from home or disinherit a son, they probably hated America, too. Guilt by association. Ker-boom!

There have been many attempts to cover up an inconvenient truth about drones, which is: even when guided by up-to-date from-the-air-and-on-the-ground information, drone management does not yield perfect selectivity.  If a well-known bad guy is driving through a desert on a little used road with no turn-offs, those with him probably are collaborators or comrades-in-arms, and probably the missile can find the right man in the right car.  Roll back the tape and consider this: the subject may actually have been at said address, but it takes mere minutes  to say good-bye a trife early, jump in a car and be a mile away, thereby leaving unfingered people behind to take the taking out.  Ker-boom! 

Here are some other ways in which good info turns out to be useless or mistaken and a supposedly pinpointed strike requires apologies and long-winded explanations that are very bad for the American image: the target changes his schedule at the last minute and never gets to the rendezvous, he suspects a trap, his vehicle breaks down en route, the missile was delivered to the wrong address or was a few dozen feet off target, hitherto reliable informants didn’t know or mention that there was going to be some sort of traditional family conclave in the same place at the same time, etc, etc., etc. Ker-boom!

I can hear it now.  Chuckle!  Chuckle! You can’t make an omelet without cracking eggs. Which only brings us back to the prison of inappropriate metaphors.  Give me two eggs.  I can beat them into a superb omelet—or I can take the longer view.  I’ll end up with two laying hens and dozens of eggs—or a pair of doves, for that matter. Diplomacy is getting where you need to go without breaking eggs. 

Smugness is Not a Good Idea

More ominously to the present point, given the inevitable ubiquity of drone availability and the likelihood that drone range can only increase, it might be a good idea for all of us heretofore smug and safe Americans to consider the distance between houses in our own neighborhoods.  Would our families survive if the house next door harbored targeted terrorists?  Is the kids’ school a safe distance from any conceivable target?  And so on. And what about incoming missiles that go off course?  From human error.  From mechanical or electronic malfunction.  Either way, someone dies. 

Have you made your funeral plans?  Your son’s?  Your daughter’s? Americans are pretty safe now, but that won’t be the case in the near future—and the big danger won’t come from cells of amateurs manipulated by FBI agents or from adolescents inflamed by internet propaganda.  If we end up on the receiving end of a drone delivery, you might say, given our own way of waging war, that we asked for it.

Worms That Turn

Space is running out here, and I haven’t even begun to describe what could happen if serious cyberattacks were directed at the United States rather than Iran.  I don’t mean the kind of hacking that annoys large institutions with sloppy security or even, on occasion, the Pentagon, which has also had a few embarrassing encounters with cyber intruders.  I mean a worm or virus that shuts down the whole country in this age of massive interconnection.  Evidently it was a Russian hacking genius who discovered the Flame virus and Stuxnet, too.  What if he were working for a an actively hostile Russian government?  Who’d break his code?

My purpose here isn’t to fear monger or start a panic but to suggest that there are some very powerful reasons why the international community needs to do a little updating of the conventions of war and peace now that technology has complicated our mutual vulnerabilities—and our responsibilities as human actors.  Part Two will address these urgencies by looking more directly at the four questions that introduced this discussion. Given attempts to conceal, minimize, mischaracterize and otherwise mislead the public about the use of drones, it is particularly important to determine just how much secrecy is necessary to protect Americans and to what it extent it serves only to deprive Americans of the open debate about means and ends that is necessary to democracy.  Excessive secrecy does not protect.  It infantalizes the many and empowers the few.

Lobsters in the Pot: Is Privacy Still Possible?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Let’s dispense quickly with the contradictions besetting the Republican notion of privacy during this amazing rundown to the upcoming presidential election.  Privacy à la GOP largely involves business and finance, which means allowing the close-mouthed  denizens of the executive suite to connive exorbitant profit-making opportunities free of interference from regulations designed to protect consumers from confusion, manipulation, deception or outright fraud.  Meanwhile, most Republican presidential candidates want to regulate every aspect of the sex lives of consenting adults.  Surely having government tromping around like an elephant in the bedroom is a gross invasion of privacy.

But my primary interest here involves the ever-increasing, ever more pervasive and intrusive  invasions of privacy made possible by modern technology.  At this point, we can be monitored day and night no matter where we are.  Even our private thoughts are in danger.  There is virtually no escape from the watchfulness of the national security state.

The Naked Ape in the Airport

Personal privacy is a thing of the past for those who wish to board an airplane.  We must be scanned or wanded or patted down, and if we are too sassy, we’ll be interrogated in a frightening little room, like criminals, which means the flight will leave without us.  Although we are assured that no other passengers can see our nakedness, the fact is that we are undressed by the machinery operated by TSA personnel, who can view our underwire bras, the titaniam repairs to broken bones, the depth of our fat layers, the subtle details of our posture, thus totally violating our bodily integrity.  Worse, official assurances not withstanding, we have no way to prove that our images are not stored, like fingerprints, for future purposes beyond our control.

Herded along like cattle, we dare not utter a word of protest.  We cannot make jokes. We can’t protest too vehemently when a pat down is too intimate or a person with a colostomy bag is humiliated.  We must simply put up and shut up, even though we know that this supposedly sophisticated equipment routinely misses dangerous weapons and that the regs about lotions and so on have no basis in science.

Maybe the whole purpose of the exercise is to teach us docility.

The Fear that Shuts Us Up

It’s not only the fear of missing a flight that turns us mute, passive, as abject as captives in a slave market. If we say or do something that leads us to be apprehended as possible terrorists, we could lose every liberty and right supposedly guaranteed to every citizen by our Constitution, which has been more or less amended by various incarnations of the “Patriot” Act as endorsed by compliant courts and judges.  If we end up in legal limbo, we might never be tried.   We would, to all intents and purposes, cease to exist. 

So we toe the line, remembering how proud and happy we were when democracy overcame totalitarianism.  Perhaps we need an Occupy Airports movement to reclaim our privacy and our dignity.


Brain-Reading as Non-Fiction

But personally invasive science is offering even more license to those who would control us by taking away our privacy.  The latest wrinkle is this: those thoughts that we keep rigorously to ourselves in the hope that we may pass unscathed through the TSA inspections system may not be sacrosanct much longer.  I’m not talking of old hat truth sera.   I’m not referring to the familiar misuse of the notoriously unreliable lie detector test that terrifies the unpracticed and unsophisticated.  I’m talking about the evolving ability of brain monitoring devices to evoke reasonable facsimiles of images that we have seen and thought of.  At the moment, this technology seems to be tentative and crude, but the usual trajectory of such technology is refinement toward perfection. Maybe words won’t be recovered from our brain cells anytime soon, but imagine this: no longer being able to retreat into the pleasant privacy of your own thoughts. Talk about self incrimination!

The Surveillance Octopus

Other surveillance technologies have already reached high levels of reliability.  Heat detectors can tell if we are home, even if the car isn’t outside and we aren’t standing in front of a window.  Sound monitors can pick up conversations from considerable distance, and there isn’t a single electronic communications device that can’t be turned against us.  What’s more, anything hacking doesn’t reveal, documents may, and the courts are all too happy to ask IPOs and phone companies to supply them.  To make the invasion of privacy even more pernicious, it may be illegal for those who supply the records to tell us that the documents have been seized. 

How much more naked can we be?  How much privacy is left to lose?

Oh dear!  I forgot about the spies in the sky. And, not only are there geosynchronous satellites that can watch us 24/7, there are spies in our cell phones and rental cars that reveal to those who have the right equipment exactly where were are whenever we’re away from home.  Finally, spy cameras are becoming a commonplace part of the urban landscape.  To foil criminals and terrorists, of course.  But how convenient for other purposes, too.  Talk about 1984! 

You can monitor your baby from afar, too, which may be a good thing.  But that's the trouble with technology.  It's two-faced, and too many people abuse it too frequently.

Lobsters in the Pot

In the era of voluntary self-revelation on Facebook and given the data-mining to which all users of the Internet are willynilly subjected, it may seem silly to worry about privacy.  Furthermore, many Americans would say that a little erosion of freedom is the small price we pay for increased security.  But I’m not sure that everyone has reflected on the extent to which privacy has become all but unattainable.  Nor, I fear, have they thought of the implications for extreme social control in a not so distant future.

It’s said that creatures who are immersed in a stew pot filled with cold water don’t realize that they are being cooked until it’s too late. The process is too slow.  The increase in heat is too gradual.  Just so, our freedom is eroding degree by degree as our opportunities for privacy fade toward zero.  I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the human lobsters who read this piece guffaw and decide I’m over-reacting. 

I guess they haven’t felt the heat yet.  If they don’t wake up soon, we’ll all be cooked.

 

     

       

 

Preoccupied with Occupation: Seeing Cairo in Santa Fe

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The question under discussion, over a pot of New Mexico green chili stew, at the Occupy Santa Fe site at the Railyard Park (see photo) was sustainable agriculture in Northern New Mexico, where local chili farmers, small farmers by any measure, are under pressure.  People who know anything about chile line up to watch the local Chimayo chilis being roasted at the  famers market in late summer and fall.  Then they buy a year's supply (a lot!) to keep in the freezer.  Without seed banks and strong local support these precious heritage chiles will be gone, their genetic material dead-ended by flavorless cheap and easy to grow varieties pushed by commercial interests.  The occupy movement in New Mexico is trying to call attention to this problem.

Because I take some interest in things like this, I was invited, a week or so before Thanksgiving, to a dinner meeting that turned out to be a fund raiser for Russ Baker’s blog WhoWhatWhy.   Grateful as I am for all evidence-based muckraking, the blog’s style is too steeped in conspiracy theory for me to throw money at, but I got into a great conversation with another guest who was deeply involved with the Occupy Santa Fe movement, which, I told her, I support mainly through membership in the local MoveOn group. 

In the course of our conversation, I expressed my gratitude to the occupiers for their brilliant consciousness-raising.  The supremely important issue of economic inequality, with all its consequences, is now a highlighted entry on the political agenda and the stroke-the-rich Republicans are on the defensive.  I also complimented the occupiers for the inspired use of anarchist theory to broaden support for economic reform, while avoiding the wholesale destruction that has marred demonstrations at WTO meetings, where supposed anarchists in black masks have gone on the rampage.  When the concentration of economic power has reached the level we now experience in the U.S., my new acquaintance and I agreed, there’s a lot to be said for a strategy of  leaderless basic democracy. Good government can’t be a spectator sport. 

Occupation, Politics or Both?

My OSF dinner partner loved the positive feedback.  But only the accolades.  She radiated instant hostility when I tacked on a few reservations having to do with scale and institutionalization.  

Small groups can operate as a committee of the whole, I agreed, but you can’t have a town meeting with the entire population of the United States flipping hand signals simultaneously.  At that scale, representative democracy of one sort or another is inevitable.  The solution to bad government isn’t to make common cause with Tea Party types who hate government per se, I said, but to make sure that our representatives represent us, the so-called 99%, not the already rich and powerful, who want only to perpetuate their own privileges.  Similarly, once feelings have been unearthed and expressed, they need to be collated and codified.  Even those prone to demonstrate have only so much time and patience for marching and camping out and brandishing signs.  Sooner or later, demonstration fatigue sets in.  Therefore, while enthusiasm and participation are high, during the peaking and before the decline in momentum accelerates,  it’s crucial to get explicit about what changes are to be demanded, to work out a strategy for achieving those changes, to begin thinking about who would make a good representative or senator to replace those who have sold us out.  As for elections, it’s harder to buy them if turnout is high.  Voting matters, I kept insisting, feeling ever so slightly Pollyannaish in that crowd. 

And so it went.  My dinner companion emphasized alienation; I pushed for using the system to the utmost.  And then it was time for Russ to speak about himself as a journalist and about the blog he was trying to get financial support for.  We arranged cards, but mostly as a matter of ritual, not because a new friendship had sprouted.

The Egyptian Example

Still, in following weeks, I found myself mulling over the dynamics of demonstration vs. the demands of organization as I watched the enthusiasm for the Arab spring congealing into fears of a very long Arab winter in the form of a counter revolution, such as that which seems to be happening in Egypt.  The Army, hailed as a friend to the revolution for not firing on the crowd in Tahrir Square, was enjoying its monopoly on institutional power entirely too much.  I couldn't help thinking that supplanting a tired old dictator with a shiny bright new general had been the prime item on the Army’s agenda all along. What’s more, if the Army weren’t certain of its path to power, it was hard to believe they’d be so brutally beating and torturing those its soldiers had seemed to make common cause with only a few months ago.    

Still, there was hope.  The upcoming election might prevent the army from realizing its most extreme ambitions.  Whoever won might refuse to embed the Army’s supremacy in the new Constitution.  For that to happen, however, the Constitution-writing assembly would need a very strong mandate.  Voter turnout would have to be impressively high.  The Muslim Brotherhood had been working hard to maximize its vote count, but televised interviews indicated that some or many demonstrators appeared to be ambivalent about participating in the election.  Some had even made up their minds not to vote.  On principle, evidently. 

Now, standing on principle feels almost as exhilarating as good sex.  But the no-compromise-with-imperfection approach, as applied to elections, often brings an absolutely-no-influence-on-what-happens-next result. That’s not so good, if you really do want political and economic transformation. 

Those Who Organize Win

In Egypt, while too many secularists in Tahrir Square were basking the light of their clever use of social media, the Brotherhood and even the Salafists were focused on taking advantage of the triumphal deposing of Mubarak by winning the pending elections.  Secularists, meanwhile, had a terrible handicap. During the Mubarak era Islamists had been able to use the mosques for keeping their organizations alive. Lacking that institutional advantage, no secular party lasted very long under Mubarak.  Result: even if they had worked at nothing but forming an election-ready party from day one of the Tahrir Square phenomenon, secularists would have entered the elections at a disadvantage.  So gaining anything close to a majority was unlikely.  But every seat they won would have give them that much more voice in the writing of a new Constitution. Would it be more or less secular?  Would it be more or less Sharia-based.  Would the Army be given a veto on legislation or would the government be whollly under civilian control?  By not maximizing their vote, the secularists would not only cede the future to Islamists, but the smaller vote total would make it easier for the generals to sweep civilians of all convictions aside.

Baghdad: Another Cautionary Tale

Going off in a snit is never a good idea when elections are in the offing.  Consider what happened in Iraq.  Sunni Muslims, a minority that had been disproportionately favored under the Saddam Hussain regime, decided not to participate in elections which would, at best, give them a minority bloc of seats in the new parliament.  This would be the first post-Saddam Iraqi government, and they opted out of the process.  Result of their boycott?  Total powerlessness, politically, for which they compensated by a horrendous outburst of violence.  Quelling the subsequent  Sunni uprising required a surge in American troop levels an d a change of tactics by the U.S. military, too. 

By the time the next elections came around, the Sunnis had learned their lesson.  They participated.  The result is far from perfect governance, but stalemate is better than slaughter.

Occupiers Evolve

Though the cops in some American cities were unnecessarily brutal in breaking up the occupy encampments in their cities, other city authorities, like those in Santa Fe, see no need to do so, and the amazing thing is that people continue to camp outside, even this week, in snow and sub-freezing temperatures.  These are not sunshine soldiers.  Meanwhile, others who sympathize with the occupy movement, an awakening whose goals have never been indecipherable to those who cared to listen, have begun to put particulars in writing.  There's no excuse anymore for not understanding demands whose fulfillment will be good for all of us (even the 1%), if only we can create the politics to make them possible.

As for Egypt, the increasingly trigger-happy Generals should look toward Syria. Whether or not they wish to give way to civilian rule, the wiggle room for distators isn’t want it used to be.

Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Cook-Romero.

Who’s Responsible for Feeding Africans?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

When I left the U.S. for some elephant and lion watching in Tanzania with my grandson—that was the last week in July—the top news story on BBC and PBS was the drought in East Africa.  These channels and others had turned themselves into ardent fund raisers for public and private charities seeking to alleviate the suffering and limit the deaths due to nature’s indifference to human welfare.  The tactic: trying to shame non-African individuals and governments into giving much much more.

At the time, I found myself thinking that for every five minutes devoted to scenes of suffering five minutes, equally emotional, should have been devoted to exposing and re-exposing the human agents of human misery.  Such thoughts were only partly prompted by Al Shebab’s callous refusal to allow aid workers access to starving refugees and others in territories under their control. 

Three weeks later, it seems, these supposedly pious militants still prefer controlling lives  to saving lives.  But things aren’t much better in Mogadishu, apparently, where profiteers are selling sacks of grain intended for free distribution to the hungry and destitute. This blatant misappropriation could happen only with the collusion of at least  some figures in the UN-backed Somali government, such as it is.  Hardly the best way to keep the global charity pipeline flowing generously.

We have long known that the infamous Bengal famine during World War II didn’t have to happen.  Winston Churchill, no lover of the “jewel in the crown,” refused to release the food stocks that would have saved millions of Indian lives.  Studies of previous famines in East Africa and elsewhere have also shown that surplus food is usually available, somewhere, for a price. The real problem is that the poor are poor.  Amartya Sen, the Indian economist, won a Nobel Prize for his studies of these dynamics.

Meanwhile, since today’s hungry do lack the money that’s needed to buy life-sustaining food, they starve to death.  This is where global charities come in.  Better yet, this is what good governments are prepared to deal with, especially in areas where drought occurs more or less frequently.  Unfortunately good governance has been in fairly short supply in Africa.

July 4, 2011: Fireworks and Wildfires

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

    Emits showers of sparks!

            Shoots flaming balls!

I’m driving North on Route 285 to check out the pueblos that usually offer fireworks for sale at this time of year.   The question: are they, this year?

At the moment New Mexico is suffering a record-breaking drought.  We are trapped in a tinder box, and it is igniting.  Hundreds of wildfires dot the state, some very close to home, my home.  Meanwhile, I’m heading North.

To the right of me, just across the Rio Grande, the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s history is only now coming under control. Over one hundred thousand acres has gone from green to black.  This fire threatened the city of Los Alamos, whose population was evacuated, and caused the closure of the National Laboratory, where the Atomic Age was born.  Airborne disaster would have resulted, I'm told, had the conflagration reached some dumps where “low level” nuclear waste is stored.  (It shouldn’t still be there, but the hazardous waste clean up process is an evasion of responsibility game that ignores possibilities like wildfire invasions.)   The fire intruded onto Santa Clara pueblo land and damaged some ancient dwellings at Puye.  It burnt apple orchards in Dixon.  It raged onto the federally protected meadows and forest lands of the  Valles Caldera, a huge collapsed volcano in the Jemez range.

To the left of me are the still-burning remnants of the Pacheco Canyon fire which caused the closure of some of the best hiking trails in Northern New Mexico and prompted Santa Fe authorities to bar its addicted hikers from all the mountain trails within its precincts.  For the most part, the Pacheco fire confined itself to forested national and state parks or wilderness areas.  Still, thousands of acres of stately ponderosa, nut-bearing piñon and delicate aspen went up in smoke.  

As I drive, I’m listening to KSFR, our listener-supported local radio station, which is broadcasting interviews with local officials, whose annually-recurring 4th of July headaches have turned into migraines this year.  Not only is there an official city fireworks display to be conducted responsibly, there’s the perennial craving for hands-on experience with  fireworks.  Sometimes the worry is only about kids who mishandle bottle rockets.  Often, as with this year, the  hazard is that and more: setting off a fire that surges all but instantly out of control. 

Still listening as I drive by the Santa Fe Opera, I learn that the grounds of the Santa Fe High School stadium are even now being fire-proofed for the official celebration.  If only the same could be said for neighborhoods where I've heard poppety-pop-pops over the past week.  But those naughty fire(cracker)bugs had better be watching out. Coppers,  it seems, are cruising the city with fire officials riding shotgun. If anyone is reported (or observed) to be sending rockets into the air, the fire department rep will cite chapter and verse, and the policeman will write a citation.  The penalty will be a well-deserved big fine.

I drive through Tesuque pueblo.  No fireworks.  I pass through Nambe pueblo.  No fireworks.  A few miles on, I reach Pojaque pueblo—and there it is, parked right out in the open by the side of the road, a big white truck. Painted on its side: a bold fireworks logo.   Behind the truck is a huge white tent I've never seen before, but it's purpose is clear: to push incendiary toys.  Toys for real kids.  Toys for immature adults. 

Native Americans pride themselves on being sensitive to the beauty and sacredness of their natural surroundings, but Pojaque pueblo may be badly in need of some extra money.  Pueblo leaders borrowed heavily to build an upscale resort—golf and gambling—under a Hilton franchise, but I've read recently of crime-level charges of financial mismanagement and difficulties in meeting bond interest payments.  Admittedly, these past few years have not been ideal for opening a major tourist destination.

Please understand that I have no issues with pueblos or other Indian nations running casinos or selling any quantity of hooch or coffin nails to non-natives who want to ruin their own lives.  That’s a fair enough exchange for Whites having introduced firewater to the Red Faces in past centuries.  But selling fireworks is not a simple matter of indulging individual vice, because fire is no respecter of boundaries.  One stray spark and a whole county goes up in flames!  In addition, burnt forests can ruin watersheds.  Not good at all in this high desert land where the water supply is never in excess of need. 

Fireworks sales must be penny ante stuff for Pojaque high flyers.  So why are they inviting the scorn and opprobrium of the neighbors, including the nearby pueblos whose members have resisted the temptation.  It’s puzzling. But there it rises: a tent as big as three or more tennis courts—and it’s full of fun ways to set our world on fire.   

There’s some good news, though.  Very few cars are parked outside.  And when I enter, I find I’m the only “customer,” except for one young couple, who  seem unable to load up the carton the man is carrying.  For some reason, they leave empty-handed.  An attack of conscience, perhaps? Or maybe the really exciting items were too expensive.  I saw price tages of $25 and $50 and more.  No wonder the row of six cash registers by the exit looks so deliciously forlorn.

Meanwhile, as the only target in sight, I am beset by underemployed salesmen. “Can I help you?”  “Are you finding what you want?”  I play along,  inspecting the flash/bang potential of the Chinese imports heaped, stacked and piled on tables that go on forever.  When addressed, I smile sweetly and reply that I need to see what’s available before I make any decisions. “It won’t be easy,” I murmur.  They take that as a compliment and smile back.  “Take your time.”

Actually I want to make notes and take a picture or two.  But these salesmen have a distinctly thuggish look: muscular men in tight black tee shirts with tattoos running up and down their arms.  They loom, and they won’t leave me in peace long enough to slide out my camera and get it into focus.  Plus, since I am indeed guilty of bad intentions, I project accordingly.  They’ll grab me and throw me out—or worse, if I transgress. So—sigh!—I confine myself to memorizing choice bits from a couple of packages.

            Emits showers of sparks!

            Shoots flaming balls!

The prosecution rests.

 

Fire Season Hiking : Second Best Can Be Pretty Good

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

A little over a week ago I made my first this-season, on-foot circuit of the Nordic track, where the altitude makes the air refreshingly cool even in June, which is Santa Fe’s truly hellish month. Dappled sunny spots excepted,  the path was bordered with tiny wild strawberry plants in bloom—minute white flowers that would soon give way to equally minute berries, each offering a taste stab of super-concentrated strawberry perfection.  Gathering a meager handful of these mini berries would take ages, but popping just a few in the picking process would make it impossible to buy any more California pretenders.  This year, at least.

California strawberries!  I’d actually bought some only a week ago. How could I have fallen so low?  If you must buy commercial strawberries, look for the smaller, redder ones from the Northeast, which don’t need sugaring to be edible.  Alas, northern berries are as seasonal in stores as wild berries in the woods. 

Anyway, I’d planned to return to the Nordic track, first,  with my camera, to take flower photos for a WhirledView post, and then, a little later, with a bowl for collecting berries.   I’d also planned to capture, digitally, some of the many varieties of tiny yellow, blue and pink flowers now in bloom at 10,000 feet.  They’d have been offered to you readers for identification, because (shame! shame!) I can’t name them.

No luck.  The Pacheco Canyon fire got in the way. It  began a week ago, the day after my Nordic trail excursion, and its present smoke plume (Saturday afternoon, June 24) looks pretty dramatic (see above) from my back garden, which is about 20 miles away. The distance from the Nordic trail and the Santa Fe ski basin is much less.  Only a couple of miles, which is why I couldn’t get back to the strawberry patches.   The road was and is closed. 

This fire was not caused by lightening; it’s man-made, and the forest service is seeking information about anyone who may have been in the vicinity when it burst out.  In short, someone  left a camp fire untended or threw away an unquashed cigarette butt or tootled around on a spark-spitting ATV, all inconceivable behaviors when the entire state is tinder-dry.  And now there's a big debate over whether to ban fireworks this year.  Much as I love to watch the darkness fill with starbursts of color, it's hard to see how anyone can do anything but keep the kids from shooting off bottle rockets, too.  But some people hate the idea of restraint, self-imposed or otherwise.

The fire has now consumed about 8500 acres of mixed conifer forest, and firefighters are having a hard time containing it.  The land is high, steep-sloped and roadless—and all too often the winds have been too strong to allow helicopters to drop water or fire-retardants (about the use of which there’s well-founded controversy.)  As for the road that leads to the ski basin,  its closure rules out most trekking at high altitudes in the Santa Fe National Forest and the Pecos Wilderness.  The prohibitions are painful. No Windsor trail.  No Borrego trail.  No waterfall-watching along the Rio en Medio.  No climbs to Nambe Lake.  No peak-bagging along Skyline trail.  No overnight camping at Lake Katherine.

So the hungry bears, seriously under stress from the prolonged severe drought which has tortured New Mexico since early winter, can have the strawberries.  Already, it seems, they’re breaking into cabins and kitchens in the Taos area, looking for food.  What's more, here in Santa Fe the birds are also in trouble.  Water evaporates so quickly its hard to keep the bird baths full.  Meanwhile, the fire burns merrily, and the public discourse over the benefits of regular controlled burns intensifies.

Under these conditions, what’s  a serious, heat-hating hiker to do?  Santa Fe is a wonderland for people who enjoy walking, but it’s hard to enjoy the loveliest low elevation offering when the temperature is over ninety fahrenheit, and the trailhead closes at dusk, just as termperatures are falling to bearable.  However, there is a resort.  It’s a trail I’ve sneered at for years.  Too low.  Elevation only 8000 feet.   Too easy.   A three mile loop with no particularly challenging inclines.

It’s the Black Canyon trail, lying just south of the nine mile no-go barrier.  Now that I’ve walked it a couple of times, I’m happy to report that it’s not bad at all, not only as second choice, but as a very pleasant hike you can do when you don’t have time to drive to a distant trailhead or to embark on a more arduous undertaking. For allowing me to discover this option, I thank the Pacheco fire.

The most annoying part of the Black Canyon trail is that the  first (and last) half mile  involves walking past one camp site after another.  As I was plodding on nicely maintained asphalt toward forest proper that first day, my nose alerted me to meat cooking, which had me wondering indignantly: “Who’s playing around with fire?  Are these people crazy?”  When I came to the scene of the possible crime, I tried to phrase my query as innocuously as possible.  “Gee!  What a bummer!  You can’t light a charcoal fire.”  The answer: “That’s why we have propane.”  Ok.  No legal offense.  But it's hard to believe that bottled gas is 100% safe under the dry conditions that currently obtain in the forest.

So I kept walking past camp sites. Some were occupied by people satisfied with compact cars and two-person tents.  Others had been reserved by the occupants of enormous mobile mansions.  Except for the picnicers I've mentioned, people were nowhere to be seen. Hiking, I supposed.  Or shopping for supplies.  Or hiding in the air-conditioned comfort of an RV.

I kept walking.  Eventually all vestiges of civilization (except the rough path I was following) were behind me, and I was in forest so thick and beautiful, I could have been lost in an officially designated wilderness area. Mixed conifers.  A few aspen.  Wildflowers on the forest floor.  Look at the last two photos.  The Black Canyon trail may be second best, but it’s not bad at all.

That doesn’t mean I don’t want the Pacheco fire to be extinguished as soon as possible.  Nor does I mean I wouldn't rejoice were the negligent persons or persons responsible for its ignition apprehended.  To that effect, I pass on this notice:  The Santa Fe National Forest is requesting that anyone having knowledge of or having been in the vicinity of the Pacheco Fire (north of Aspen Ranch by the Borrego Trail) between June 17 and June 18 please contact the Santa Fe National Forest at (505) 438-5372.

Smoke, fire, and Ponderosas

By Patricia H. Kushlis

In early April 2010, I drove from Phoenix to Albuquerque via Route 60 through the area where Arizona’s now largest fire on record blazes.  I remember Springerville as a small green oasis with a river running through it in the middle of high arid desert - mile after mile of dry lands dotted only with sage bush.  I don’t remember much forest after leaving Show Lo 42 miles to the west – at least until I got to the New Mexico side - but clearly the Apache Forest with its stands of thick Ponderosa were there. (Photo left:  Route 60 signs east of Springerville by PHKushlis, April 2010)   

Once the smoke and flames are extinguished – and hopefully the human culprits who apparently started the inferno by leaving a camp fire unattended are found and brought to justice – we’ll hear the all too familiar litany from forest industry organizations – claiming that the fire could have been prevented – or at least its damage lessened – had the forests been opened to the axes and saws of the timber companies.

We’ll be told yet again that “virgin” forests burn hotter and are more damaging to the environment than if lumber companies had been given free rein to remove the “offending” combustible materials – aka the best quality timber available on the land.  In fact, the hues and cries of their acolytes have already begun.  If only, we’re told, that these companies had been allowed to cut everything worth selling in sight, thereby helping the economy by putting lumber jacks and saw mill operators back to work and letting pigs, cows and horses graze in the former forest land.  Then all would be right with the world. (Photo left McCloud Lumberjack Fiesta, Ponderosa on logging truck in parade, JE Hogin).

The Forest Products Commissions – the lumber companies’ representatives - have been tremendously successful at packaging and promulgating this questionable tale.  Just look at their websites if you’re the least bit skeptical.  They may claim they support managed and controlled logging of our forests but at the same time they rail against any and all regulation in favor of letting the lumber companies do whatever they want.  I’ve seen that happen – it’s simply code for clear cutting – thereby denuding the land of all harvestable trees. 

Kolkata: Jams, Cancun and the Little Clay Cup

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

   
Jams.  Not blackberry or strawberry or peach.  Traffic jams.  If a Kolkata cabbie can’t handle any other word of English, he can spit out, “Jam!!!” At which point he’ll switch  off the ignition as he waits.  And waits.  Fender to fender, bumper to bumper, with other canary-yellow taxis, cars driven only slightly less aggressively and hulking buses pocked with the evidence of daily scrapes and collisions. And motorcycles.  And put-puts. And man-powered, old fashioned rickshaws.

Imagine Kolkata traffic as one of those brain-teasing games consisting of 16 or more tiles,  just one of which is missing.  Using that bit of action space, the tiles must be shifted into a different pattern, with extra points for speed. Vroom! In Kolkata the cabbies make for the empty spaces as soon as they see them, and God help the pedestrian who gets in the way. I haven’t seen any fatalities yet, but close calls are frequent and harrowing.

Still, this is Kolkata, and protest marchers must be tolerated. This is true to a lesser extent elsewhere in India, too.  If you have a grievance, you can vent it by taking out a procession.  Plus you can throw the rascals out, legally, via regular elections. The need for political earthquakes is mightily minimized by democracy.  Meanwhile, here’s The Telegraph’s advice for “roads to avoid today: RR Avenue for a rally; Metro Channel for
 an All West Bengal Municipal Health Workers' Union meeting; Dorina Crossing for a students’ demonstration.

Kolkata sidewalks are as jam-packed as the streets, and the protocol for non-marching pedestrians mirrors the discourtesy among drivers on the road: me first.  The best defense, on foot or behind the wheel, is learning the game, fast.  And laughing.  Lots of laughing.  The Government College art students who created this mural for the hotel I’m staying at had the right idea. Humor. Not anger. (Blow it up.  It includes all the Kolkata stereotypes and clichés.)

These end-to-end traffic jams that frequently turn into gridlock waste pricy gasoline and increase emissions of carbon dioxide, the worst culprit in the global warming scenario.  Indian planners foresee agricultural disaster from a combination of drought and flooding, a non-paradox I won’t take time to explain.  An early casualty, they predict: basmati rice.  It may lose its fragrance,  which would be a gastronomic tragedy of historic proportions.  Other food crops will also suffer. Indian agronomists are working furiously to develop heat tolerant varieties of essential crops. 

Meanwhile, here and now, on the streets of Kolkata, breathing involves exhaust fumes, not fragrance. Very bad for people with asthma!  Kolkata’s mortality rate from respiratory problems must be horrendous. A huge park in the center of the city is often called “the lung of Kolkata.” From the neglected look of it, the city’s health is anything but good.

I went for an early morning walk on this maidan today, hoping for some relatively clean air.  The good news: very little traffic.  The bad news: another source of pollution. Trash fires. Little piles of dry leaves and damp litter smoking away.  No wonder planes landing in Kolkata descend through an ominous orangy gray wafer.

A similar smog wafer hovers over Delhi, where the winter air is also less than salubrious, although it used to be even worse—trucks, buses, even cars, trailing foul black plumes of exhaust.  No more, in Delhi or Kolkata.  Only unseen poisons creeping out to throw a dismal gray veil over every surface.   

Reform is possible, even in this beguiling land of pay-to-play and hyper red-tapism.

Buses fueled by natural gas or not (mostly not, of course), India tends to take a fairly hard line during international environmental negotiations.  The intellectual argument is attractive.  The West got to pollute for 150 years.  Expecting India to meet new, more exacting standards so much earlier in the push for industrialization isn’t fair.  In a way, it isn’t. But the Victorians hadn’t the foggiest notion about the dangers of global warming either.  We do. 

While Indian diplomats representing their country in Kyoto or Cancun stand on principal and resist the imposition of more rigorous limits on green house gas emissions, especially carbon dioxide, people in the big cities of India are gasping for breath, and Indian planners are trying to figure out how on earth an already stressed country will cope with rising temperatures. Like the U.S., unfortunately, India has a pollution lobby.  In the short term there are profits to be made for a few. 

So the people on the street—cough! cough!—will continue to suffer.  And they will stop every so often for a spot of tea served up in simple little hand-shaped clay cups.  Use and toss. Dust to dust.  Which is a theological way of saying sustainable.