We're screwed

Yep, that's what the headline reads in the New York Post. Well, the edition published by the Yes Men, that is. From the press release:

Early this morning, nearly a million New Yorkers were stunned by the appearance of a "special edition" New York Post blaring headlines that their city could face deadly heat waves, extreme flooding, and other lethal effects of global warming within the next few decades. The most alarming thing about it: the news came from an official City report. [74-page PDF]

Distributed by over 2000 volunteers throughout New York City, the paper has been created by The Yes Men and a coalition of activists as a wake-up call to action on climate change. It appears one day before a UN summit where Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon will push 100 world leaders to make serious commitments to reduce carbon emissions in the lead-up to the Copenhagen climate conference in December. Ban has said that the world has "less than 10 years to halt (the) global rise in greenhouse gas emissions if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences for people and the planet," adding that Copenhagen is a "once-in-a-generation opportunity."

Although the 32-page New York Post is a fake, everything in it is 100% true, with all facts carefully checked by a team of editors and climate change experts.

Climate change is no joke, folks, and it's stunts like these that are attempting to get through the massive cultural denial we have about it. Humor is often effective at reaching people so they can bear to think about a horrible thing—and maybe do something about it.

Alaska, like the city of New York, is actually looking at the effects of climate change, rather than pretending it's not happening. Alaska, of course, is already feeling the effects—the Scenarios Network for Alaska Planning at UAF has produced several reports and projections on climate and how things like hydropower projects, water availability, growing season length, and permafrost will be affected by it.

The Threat Level is Orange

Hans is driving down from Fairbanks to fetch me; he called this morning from Cantwell, where there was an extraordinary amount of background noise. Normally when we go through Cantwell on our way to and from the Alaska Press Club conference, we gas up at Cantwell, and it's dead quiet. (There was one exception, when a blizzard had created near-whiteout conditions. That was the time we got mooned by some impatient immortals.) This year, however, there's apparently some sort of snowmachine happening, and the place that Hans called from had all kinds of laughter and conversation and bustle in the background.

There's a peek of sunshine coming through, which dovetails with the weather prediction last night, that the wind would shift for a while in the late morning and then come back straight from the volcano to Anchorage. However, my flight isn't scheduled until something like 1 pm, by which time who knows what will happen. I still haven't been able to get through to the airport to take a flight credit/change, whathaveyou. I've been using my boarding pass from yesterday as a bookmark. Keeps it functional.

Had a great but extremely pricey dinner at the Corsair restaurant last night, in the basement of this building. It was odd, eating alone, just sitting there listening to the background music, being annoyed by a loud-voiced woman at a nearby table who kept up a stream of incredibly vacuous commentary on her dogs. The dogs sounded ill-trained, and the woman hardly let anybody else get a word in edgewise. It made me think about the kinds of conversations I have at dinner or in public places. I can see trading entertaining dog stories, but really, how long can one carry on a monologue about the dog running around the neighbors' yard and getting the dogcatcher called on them? Not really very witty anecdotes, and more repetition and just plain dullness than I thought was possible in real life. It was like a long, drawn-out,not very funny low-budget sitcom performed by a very bad actress off stage.

The conversations I hear in the Eagle there's all sorts of interesting topics and thoughtful discussion, witty jokes, anecdotes of reasonable complexity or pertinence. Politics, religion, science, construction, music, poetry, books, dance, body language, social interaction....I mean, even when the people I know talk about dogs, they at least have something sensible to say. This was just DULL. Still, I probably missed parts of the conversation, because the people who were with her seemed to have quieter voices, but still. For those of us forced to eavesdrop because of the sheer volume of a voice in a restaurant, it would be nice to listen to something intelligent. If somebody was talking like this in the Eagle, everyone would get up and move away from the speaker, or they'd be cut off because they would obviously have descended past the point of higher brain functionality and be unable to drive themselves home.

Ah, yes. Orange. The color of interminable waiting, of dull conversation, of travelers' disappointment and annoyance, of excruiciatingly stupid television programming. Of petty security bureaucracy.

I have to say, however, that the Era Aviation people have been pretty helpful through all this repeated attempts to get out of town. And the coffee cafe ladies were great.

Cold snap breaks

I don't want to do much of anything during a cold snap, and we FINALLY had a proper one these last couple of weeks. It was hilarious, listening to the radio telling us every couple of days, "Oh, the weather is supposed to get warmer tomorrow, the ice fog should lift by this afternoon...." and then the weather would get even colder, growling at us from its frozen lair. People forget what a cold snap is. It's not this two- or three-day dip into hot-coffee-evaporating bitterness that we've been subject to for the last several winters. That is not a proper Interior cold snap. That's a chilly blink.

A cold snap lasts for weeks, and gets deeper and colder and nastier as it goes along. Floods and fires start wiping out people's houses. We've had at least two friends with frozen houses and our pipes almost froze, and of course there's been the two major house fires in the village. Another person (with a dry cabin) is out of town right now, but he's going to come home to a lot of frozen-and-then-thawed beer and canned goods...messy.

The breeze on my face as I got out of the car this morning felt warm and chinook-like. T-shirt weather! I felt hot and sweaty in my parka....

Running in the snow

Well, the last library fundraiser of the year is OVER. The Readers on the Run 5-k footrace through Ester took place on Sunday, in the thick white snowfall and cold breezy weather we had that morning, and I'm pooped. It was pretty exciting watching the runners come tearing around the corner of Old Nenana and Village Road, though. That and the start (and the arrival of Stanley, Red Lantern Award winner) was about all I saw of it--after that, I was too busy copying down the participants' magnetic poetry.

It was fun, though, even if I was half-frozen by the time it was over. We had twenty racers, and a dog or three, and a ton of poems and t-shirts. And the gazebo got used for the first time. Lots o' fun!

Now the only official event left for me this year is the ECA meeting on the 19th!

That's Trouble with a capital T, my friends

That's Grumpy with a capital G and that's G and that rhymes with T and that spells TROUBLE, my friends, and why? I'll tell you why. Because that Gray Gray sky keeps throwing water at us! It's soggy and wet and miserable out there, and the berries are getting knocked off the bushes or are rotting right on them, and the sun is a barely remembered memory from a long-ago childhood dream. Salcha is washing away (well, it would, it's RIGHT NEXT to the river) and the only reason Fairbanks isn't is because of the Chena Flood Control Project. (We'll just see how much water that puppy can hold, won't we?)

So, to cheer ourselves up, my husband is reading that enthralling and oh-so-upbeat book, The Dark Side, by Jane Mayer. He reads bits to me. It's horrible. Not the book--that's excellent--but what she's written about. Here's a few reviews: From Tim Rutten, of the Los Angeles Times:

[I]f you intend to vote in November and read only one book between now and then, this should be it. ...[W]hat Mayer makes abundantly clear is how much more perilous the domestic situation might have become had there not been the modest degree of push back the White House has received from Congress and other rather courageous members of the executive branch. Former Sen. Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), for example, tells Mayer how George W. Bush's then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales sought a last-minute congressional resolution that "would give President Bush the authority to round up American citizens as enemy combatants, potentially stripping them of their civil liberties."

From Alan Brinkley, the New York Times:

There is no happy ending to this sordid and shameful story. Despite growing political pressure, despite Supreme Court decisions challenging the detainment policy, despite increasing revelations of the once-hidden program that have shocked the conscience of the world, there is little evidence that the secret camps and the torture programs have been abandoned or even much diminished. New heads of the Defense and Justice Departments have resisted addressing the torture issue, aware that dozens of their colleagues would face legal jeopardy should they do so. And the presidential candidates of both parties have so far shown little interest in confronting the use of torture or recommitting the country to the Geneva Conventions and to America’s own laws and traditions.

Interesting, isn't it? Our leaders just don't care. Why not? And why is this not screaming from the top of every newspaper, every radio station, every presidential campaign stop? I mean, I know that this isn't all one can talk about, being a newspaper publisher myself, but I do come back to this theme again and again. But not enough.

Here's an interview on Democracy Now! with the author, too.

Another review, from Salon, by Louis Bayard:

But who exactly was being interrogated? Mayer's big find is a classified CIA report from the summer of 2002, in which a senior analyst concludes that one-third of the camp's 600 prisoners have no connection to terrorism whatsoever. That figure was later amended by an FBI counterterrorism expert, who argued that no more than 50 of the detainees were worth holding. These findings directly contradicted administration assertions that Guantánamo harbored only "the worst of the worst." Not surprisingly, the administration refused to review the detainees' cases, with the result that many of them are still there, years after their initial incarceration -- and still without legal recourse because they have never been charged with a crime.

Yet, this could have been us. And our Congresspeople ALL voted to support the administration on these kinds of horrors.

So yeah, we're feeling cheery and sunny and optimistic and Happy!

Not.

Smoke, rain, and the garden

Rained again last night. It looks a bit drab outside, although there's a touch of blue fringe at the ridgeline, so perhaps we'll get some more sun again today. I woke up (POING!) at 3:30 this morning, and, not being able to go back to sleep, updated the website, fixing a bunch of bad links on my link pages and adding an article to the February contents page (I had inexplicably left out the "Fairbanks Spring Hysteria" article by my dad). It was a bit chilly, so I lit the fire and burned a bunch of junk mail and cardboard boxes to heat up the house a little bit. Big billows of white smoke are now drifting through the woods; I can see it through the bedroom windows.

Since we are using the outhouse (it being summer, and the septic line not yet being unfrozen), I had to make the morning trip outside, and checked out the sprout status of the garden. The lettuces I got from the EMCE planting day on Sunday have quintupled in size, except for one, which has only tripled (!). The dinosaur kale (apparently a variety rediscovered/redeveloped by Frank Morton of Wild Garden Seed) has straightened up and is thinking about getting bigger, possibly.

And then there's the seeds I planted in flats in the atrium: five zucchinis, with what looks like three more throwing the dirt around enough to show life underground, at least twenty sunflowers (Evening Suns and Jerusalem Lemon Yellows), and a whole lot of nasturtiums (Alaska variegated, although I can't see any variegation yet, and some sort of trailing mix nasturtium). No sign of the catnip or sweet marjoram or gem marigolds yet, though. Nor of my purple Columbian fava beans—but they like it really warm, so it's no wonder they're not up yet.

I'm pretty excited by the zucchinis: although the germination seems slow, they are from saved seed, and I haven't done that for a long, long time. I'm hoping to grow enough to can or freeze a bunch for winter--and to keep saving seed. These zucchinis are pretty tasty, and they stay solid and good even up to double-softball size. They aren't the giant zucchinis that you'll see attempting to squash the Tanana Valley every summer, but they get big enough!

Rain, sun, and hot chocolate

There's this stuff they have at the Golden Eagle, insta-mix hot chocolate, that is actually palatable when a bit of half and half is added along with the hot water. I'm not sure what sort it is and I don't think I really want to know.

Yesterday, after work, Hans and I quickly gobbled dinner and went down to the gazebo to sand the posts (him) and paint the boards (me). We stopped at Sami's place because we saw Denise there (gave her the form for the gazebo windows), and met baby Amaru for the first time. Incredibly cute fat baby cheeks on that cheerful little kid. Turns out that Chris had some leftover cedar sealer, according to Denise, so we went over to his and Dell's shop and got the ol' handpump w/leftover. So, of course, by the time we got to the gazebo it looked rather gray and cloudy. I get everything set up and begin painting, and sure enough, it starts, just barely, to rain. I hurried it up and used up all the sealer, and the rain steadily increased in strength from a faint sprinkle to a decent shower. So I went up to the saloon for some hot chocolate while Hans continued sanding (under that gazebo roof it stays nice and dry).

There I was informed that chocolate, cocoa, is GOOD for you. Now if that isn't welcome news, I don't know what is. Dark chocolate is full of antioxidants, can lower blood pressure, and will certainly produce that infamous mild euphoria that relaxes. Alas, the milk is not so good.

Nothing like hot cocoa on a rainy evening. Unless it's hot cocoa on a snowy one.

More gazebo

Okay, so we've only got one month left to get the gazebo finished. I realized this early this morning (I woke up at 3:30 and couldn't go back to sleep; this is when I think about things like this) and had a little panicky moment or two. So I wrote up a little list of things that people could do to help speed the process along; I made up a little poster to put up at the post office and the gazebo, but I'll list the tasks here, too:

• Hand the carpenter cash so he can buy supplies as he needs them. A few people have done this already, which enabled Hans to get the siding for the roof, but there are other odds and ends that need to be purchased.

• Sand the posts and rafters. Hans will be doing the rough sanding tonight on the posts, but the finish sanding will need to be done before we can varnish them.

• Peel those really big aspen logs lying in the woods. Frank brought these down, and they can be made into some nice benches. But first we've got to get that bark off. Don't cut yourself!

• Paint the roofing material. Most of the boards have one coat on them already; I'll be finishing up the first coat tonight. However, they will need a second coat on the smooth side and a coat on the wide edge of each board, too. The sooner this is done, the sooner they can go on the roof! There's a big bucket of stain and a roller and tray near one of the board drying racks in the woods.

• Buy or donate materials and leave them at the site. We'll need: 48 feet of drip edge flashing to go around the roof perimeter; 100-grit sandpaper; dustmasks; a nice flexible varnish to paint the posts, rafters, and benches with; 1x1s; corks for the bulletin board; water-resistant wood glue (lots of it!).

I think that covers it. There will probably be other things, but if you leave a check to JTEL or cash with the carpenter, then he can pick up what he needs when he thinks of it. And, of course, we need all this as soon as possible, so we can get as much done before the weather turns wet--or the deadline comes (July 6).

Planting day, gazeboed, and sunny sunny summer

WHEEEEEE! Oh, man, it is sunny and warm and feels GREAT! I just LOVE this time of year: not too many bugs, the butterflies are out (saw my first one, an Alaska blue, down by the post office a few days ago--here's another nice photo), no smoke, hardly any rain, very few tourists, and it's not too hot! Well, the frost the other night was a bit chilly, but still!

A whole bunch of people turned up (late, of course, most of them--no need to hurry) for planting flowers around the village on Sunday. (This was the first EMCE event.) Mayor Hannah and Monique went off to Plant Kingdom to buy a bunch of flowers for the Eagle and the village, so at first it was just me and my nasturtiums and sunflowers and Scott Allen. Then Kate showed up, and then Maggie, and then the ball got rolling. Richard Gumm brought a bunch of vegetable-rated municipal compost. George Gianakopoulos showed up in straw hat and with a humongous amount of nasturtiums, marigolds, lettuces, sunflowers, and mysterious mixed whatnots from Calypso Farm, donated to the village! Dwight Deely brought petunias. Then Hannah and Monique came back with a whole flat of lobelias and some other goodies. (I took a bunch of photos, but now of course I can't find my camera so you'll all have to wait until later to see the festivities.)

So we were mixing dirt and sand and compost and peat and putting it in buckets and pots and old oil drums and boxes and who knows whatall and then planting a dizzying selection of flowering greeneries. Hannah and I planted stuff in the buckets around the old post office/library annex (that's officially the Old Post Office Espresso Library Annex, or OPOELA for those of you who like acronyms). Scott drove Kate and I down Village Road, stopping every twenty feet or so so that we could unload yet another basket or bucket and place it by the roadside. It was a blast, and I forgot clean about going over to Molly's at 3 to review the paperwork for our ECA nonprofit status. I was planting until after 6 pm!

Kate and I went down to the park and planted a couple of the planters. One of them we stuffed full of sunflowers. Somebody, Ruth, I think, had prepared the soil (but there was no sign of the perennials we'd planted last year, so they may have gotten dug up by accident, alas). She'd planted a park planter before the big frost, but everything looked pretty good, actually.

We brought eight hanging baskets down to the gazebo to hang up once we get hooks (and the rafters have been varnished). The old partially collapsed 55-gallon oil drum that was there and filling up with leaves we cleaned up a bit and filled up with dirt, and planted with a selection of mystery plants. Plus a nasturtium. Or two.

Hans has been working like mad on the gazebo, and now all the copper is on the cupola and the edge of roof, and a lot of the siding has been given its first coat of stain (I did a bunch of it yesterday afternoon and will finish it up tonight). He finished up the bracing yesterday (it looks so COOL!) and is going to work on the rough sanding tonight. Kate gave him some iced tea from the planting day; we drank some that day and then took the rest home. I took home the leftover pots and flats and a few flowers that didn't get planted, and then yesterday planted the remainder. Hannah and I brought the last few pots over to the OPOELA.

And I finally planted my garden, such as it is, with some of the leftover lettuce starts. My sunflowers and nasturtiums are finally coming up--I've got flats and flats of them. I'm going to be in real trouble once they start needing permanent homes. The squash seeds I saved from last year, French ronde de Nice that I got originally from Seeds of Change, FINALLY started to sprout. I was afraid that they'd maybe not ripened enough and were infertile, but nope, it looks like I'm going to be zucchiniing the neighborhood later this summer...

Back in the Frozen North

35 below. Ish. Warming up to 10 below. Ish.

Ick.

But boy, is it good to be home, cats and house and our own back-breaking bed once again. Hans is sick, knocked off his feet by some ghastly cold. I've been working like mad on catch-up work, making a brochure for Mired, finding a distributor, arranging a book signing (speaking of which, I'll be going to Jo & Josie's book signing for Like a Tree to the Soil this weekend!), and so on.

I'm also working on the layout for Jorgy. Got the text design ("very masculine," says Jean) but need to come up with a cover, get the graphics arranged, etc. Fun!

Pay attention, Don: We're melting!

We're in deep, deep trouble, and all those idiots who think that there is no such thing as global warming ought to be the first ones thrown into the rising meltwater. Seth Borenstein of the AP has an article on it, "Ominous Actic Melt Worries Experts:"

Just last year, two top scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040.

This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions."

All these limp action plans by presidential candidates like Barack Obama, who talk about getting 80% carbon emissions down by 2050, are stupidly ineffective (even though Obama's is one of the more agressive!). We're going to be in a pressure cooker by 2050. We've got to do something NOW.

Even Australia's figured it out. Here's a quote from their new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, at the Bali Climate Change Conference:

In my first act as Prime Minister, I signed the formal instrument for Australia to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. And just a few moments ago I handed, personally, that instrument of ratification to the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

I did so, and my Government has done so, because we believe that climate change represents one of the greatest moral, economic and environmental challenges of our age.

Australia now stands ready to assume its responsibility in responding to this challenge – both at home and in the complex negotiations which lie ahead across the community of nations.

For Australians, climate change is no longer a distant threat. It is no longer a scientific theory. It is an emerging reality. In fact, what we see today is a portent of things to come.

But Alaska, and the United States, is represented by boobs who don't have a clue that yes, they too will be affected by this, and they'd better get off their keisters and work on all those environmental issues that us Greens have been yelling about for years. Mostly, what we need to do is USE LESS ENERGY.

Going to greener energy sources, traveling less and traveling lightly are other ways to help. There's a solar power initiative starting up here in the Fairbanks area, to produce electricity to feed into the GVEA grid. The aim is to create a large solar power plant, rather than the smaller setups so far producing electricity for the SNAP program. More on this later.

Solstice

It has been blazingly hot. I don't like this weather. I transplanted tomatoes and cardoon today, walked down to the office and delivered mail, but spent most of my time in the library, putting away books, where it was cool and comfortable. It says it's 64 degrees Farenheit on my quickie websearch, but it feels hotter.