It’s Thanksgiving
It’s Thanksgiving – the truly American holiday where the focus is on gathering family together and sharing fellowship and food. In many families, it’s time to talk football, or weather, or pretty much anything other than politics. Politics is too volatile; the issues too divisive, for many families to discuss. It ruins turkey digestion.
A couple of weeks ago I went to a birthday celebration for a friend. I knew that my political views weren’t “acceptable” in that company, and I determined that I would not disrupt the festivities by entering the political melee. But there was that one guy, who constantly wanted to stir the pot. From forest fires to immigration, he kept dropping comments to see what kind of local inferno he could ignite. Out of respect for my friends, I didn’t jump into that fire, but it was hard. I ate a lot, and drank little, in order to keep busy.
So it’s Thanksgiving. It’s also the week that Ryan Zinke, the “king” of the Department of the Interior (his flag is raised when he enters, lowered when he’s “left the building”) blamed the forest fires in California on “radical environmentalists.” His argument: if they’d stop suing logging companies, and the forests could be cut, then there wouldn’t be fires.
I have to admit there feels like a small truth inside that statement. Forests don’t burn if you cut them down. But it ignores all of the benefits of forests, from carbon dioxide absorption to mudslide management. And, being Ryan Zinke, it plays directly into the hands of “big lumber” who have spent decades trying to buy passage into the heart of California’s forests. There’s plenty of money to be made there.
Zinke’s statement echoes the right-wing meme on Facebook, blaming the “woodsy owl” for the fires. The woodsy owl was an endangered species whose habitat was threatened by logging, one of the first court cases testing the Endangered Species Act. They didn’t log out that forest, but it wasn’t the one that burned in California. The woodsy owl’s habitat was located on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, far from Paradise or Malibu or the other California fire targets.
Zinke, and President Trump, have both ignored the scientific FACT of human induced global warming. In doing so, they struggle to find reasons for the fires in California, and the increasing levels of hurricane damage in the Southeast, and the growing flood dangers on the coast. And they do so not because they are stupid; they ignore global warming because it is to their “supporters” economic benefit to do so.
Global warming is in large part caused by burning fossil fuels: gas, oil, and coal. In order to deal with global warming, we have to reduce fossil fuel use, it’s really that simple. But, in political terms, that means there is no “clean coal,” there needs to be increased spending on mass transportation to get cars off of the roads, there needs to be less oil and gas production. The US, now the largest petroleum producer in the world (thanks to fracking, whatever that may be doing to local environments) has every vested interest in increasing fossil fuel use, not decreasing it.
So global warming can’t be human fault. It must be a “natural cycle” that we play little part in. And forests don’t need to burn: we can cut them down. No one burns in a desert. And the friends and supporters of Trump and Zinke will make their money, at the cost of untold millions in future generations.
I know my Thanksgiving table. We can have these conversations – and no one will throw a drumstick or a roll. But if you are in a “mixed” setting; find a neutral subject. And find the wishbone to share with your Trumpian relative. It would be a start.
