(Recently I attended a booksigning at Northshire books with local author Amy Seidl. It was a great experience and I was more than impressed with Seidl, I was genuinely moved. I don't always do “moved.” Anyway, I wrote the following largely at the event…)

On March 20th, I was fortunate enough to attend a reading and discussion by the author of the new book, Early Spring: An Ecologist and her Children Wake to a Warming World. Even more fortunate still, I gave the writer, Amy Seidl, a ride to and from the event in Manchester Vermont from her home in Huntington. Being thrust into 4 and half hours of driving with someone you’ve never met is a sketchy proposition at best, but Seidl and I hit it off well, and I was afforded the opportunity to get to know her a bit.

Seidl is described on her website as “a practiced ecologist, activist and mother of two girls… By drawing on her 20 year career studying ecology, evolution, and butterflies across the North American continent, she illuminates the historical significance and the everyday local impacts of global warming upon the 21st century landscape.”

At the event and during the car ride, Seidl speaks comfortably, clearly and with an elegant literacy. Speaking before a crowd of about two dozen, Seidl has a relatively slight voice, but its focus and clarity hold the crowd as well as another with a bullhorn might. Her style does not demand attention so much as it invites it through a distinctive intelligence and a warm, focused passion.

It’s also easy to tell this is her first book. The joy she takes in reading her words before a crowd is infectious, belying a newness to the process and to the text itself.

Fielding questions from the people in attendance, Seidl’s manner and message brings out a degree of honesty from the questioners not usually apparent at gatherings around the topic of global warming. Concerns about the expense involved in changing energy patterns at home. Requests for clarity about the climate and geologic history of the planet that might, to some, be interpreted as a tentative challenge to climate change mechanics, but that Seidl the researcher recognizes as genuine scientific curiosity.

As far as the particulars of her premise go, Seidl starts by saying nothing environmentalists haven’t heard before from others (or from themselves); the reality of climate change, the practical consensus among experts, and its inseverability from human-generated carbon – but her voice is uniquely personal. She is, in a sense, a scientist writing as the un-scientist – not in terms of her content, which is firmly grounded in research and empiricism, but in terms of the method she has chosen to communicate her message. Rather than leading with numbers, figures and data, she plants her message firmly in the personal, using the scientific as a supplement. Her writing is a series of narratives and ruminations around her own experience as an individual, as a member of a community, and as a mother. When her daughter enters the narrative, she moves to its center, contextualized against the changing environment, while the author herself becomes a supporting player.

Still, throughout her writing, the biology Phd wears her scientific foundation and technical training on her sleeve, and her wording is sprinkled with turns-of-phrase belying her academic background.

Seidl is concerned first and foremost with our individual perspective on, and role in, a greater view of life itself. It’s a view nested in a reverential aesthetic one would expect from an ecologist, but is also uniquely interlaced with an informed participant’s perspective on the process of evolution. The result is writing of a special beauty that feels at once subjectively personal and objectively concrete.

Seidl weaves narratives that flow seamlessly from her own perspective to that of members of her community, and to her children. At one point, her prose guides listeners from her perception of a caterpillar, to the caterpillar itself. It is a prose that flows almost organically, and without cleanly defined beginnings and endings. In this way, Seidl engages us in the conversation she has clearly been having with herself for some time, encompassing her role as mother and citizen, yet always placed within a bedrock of hard science. In fact, the real talent to her writing repeatedly shows itself when, just as the elegance of her narrative threatens to carry away listeners along its form at the expense of its message, Seidl picks the perfect moments to reground her listeners in the stark realities at the core of her book.

And it is the starkest reality of all that separates her book from the many others on the topic and makes it fundamentally different. Previous climate change discussions are universally situated against the context of prevention; of avoiding a carbon “tipping point” of no return, after which fundamental change to our environment cannot be avoided. To Seidl, that discussion is now moot. We have tipped and there is no going back. There is, of course, mitigating ongoing damage and minimizing its effects, but Seidl is here to tell us that the change is upon us regardless.

It’s a dark message, and yet Seidl accomplishes an amazing thing. She manages to deliver it in a way that is serious, but not fatalistic. Urgent, but not despairing. She reminds us that humankind has faced other, natural shifts in climate – and that some cultures have survived such transitions, and others have simply disappeared into extinction. Seidl the evolutionary biologist calls on us to recognize the empirical reality we face, and to learn from both types of cultures. Doing so highlights both the need and the approach to adapt our agriculture, energy use and lifestyle.

At the same time, Seidl the mother and storyteller calls on us to not simply accept the nature of our changing existence, but to internalize it. To define ourselves as individuals, as well as a species, that are in a period of evolution. Only by, as she says, “owning the meaning of this time” can we truly be prepared to survive the transition and make our destructive impact as minimal as possible.

Early Spring presents the urgent need for us to evolve or perish, and calls upon us to do so with a very human, personal – and reassuringly hopeful voice.

Crossposted at Air America Radio.

March 24, 2009 marks the 20th memorial of North America’s worst ever oil spill. Approximately 11 to 38 million gallons of crude oil from the Exxon Valdez oil tanker spilled into the pristine waters of Prince William Sound destroying a wide range of wildlife habitat and sea life. What we never hear is how the oil spill impacted Alaskan communities within Prince William Sound.

Riki Ott, author of “Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oi Spill” tells the story of Cordova, Alaska, a fishing village trying to recover from one of America’s worst environmental catastrophes. Ott, a resident of Cordova, chronicles the trials experienced by Cordova residents as they cope with the oil spill and one of the longest-running legal battles in the nation’s history. Ott argues that unless we can reinvigorate our democracy and reform a legal system that currently holds corporations above citizens, then America will remain vulnerable to outside corporate influence.

Ott is currently on a nationwide speaking tour and I recently interviewed her about the 20th memorial of the oil spill, Cordova, AK, and how communities can empower themselves from environmental catastrophes.

More below the fold.

“Sound Truth & Corporate Myth$” was the first book you wrote on the Exxon Valdez oil spill and “Not One Drop” is the second to cover what happened. Why did you write a second one and what are some of the things you cover this time around that you didn’t in “Sound Truth & Corporate Myth$?”

Riki Ott: “Sound Truth & Corporate Myth$” is about hard science and how oil is more toxic to people and the planet and hard times. “Not One Drop” is about the soft spots and the paradigm shift that these man-made disasters cause a whole different psycho-trauma to community and what happens when a community falls apart [from an environmental disaster.] How do you mitigate that? There were no models to mitigate man made disaster trauma because up until Bhopal, Chernobyl, Exxon Valdez disasters, everybody was trying to use mitigation models that weren’t working. We became the first case study (Cordova) and we’re the longest ongoing case study on man-made disaster trauma. “Not One Drop” is about what broke, how you deal with it, and more fundamentally, how do we keep our society from breaking. It’s not just oil spills that can cause this.

Today marks the 20th memorial of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. What new information is out there in terms of how this oil spill impacted wildlife habitat, the fishing economy, and family life in fishing communities? What do you know now that we didn’t know 5, 10 or 15 years ago?

We didn’t know oil causes long-term loss. The science had emerged by 2004. But it’s one thing to have scientific papers published and it’s another thing to have public policy to acknowledge an act on the science. We’re still not there. Scientists are still in shock that we never expected the oil to still be liquid, to still be toxic, and to still be seeping into the ecosystem 20 years later.

The federal government and the state of Alaska did ask for the civil settlement for natural resources damage to be re-opened. This is the first time in the history of our country that we had a Clean Water Act settlement re-opened and it was done for technology, not for the oil on the beaches, which was still causing problems. $92 million was asked for and I thought if the government acts, then Exxon had to pay. That’s not true. Exxon had the option to pay and the only other choices were the state and federal governments can drop the issue or the state and federal government can take Exxon to court.

We’re arguing that ‘Yes, there is a problem’ and ‘Yes, it can be mitigated.’ That’s a critical thing because if you can’t prove you can do something about it, then there’s no point in paying $92 million. There’s a mushroom project that’s proven to be much more effective than chemical products, it’s called bio-mediation bacterial mitigation. So what we’re trying to say is ‘Look this is something that could work. So let’s get out there and let’s pay out this money and start figure out how we’re going to get rid of this oil.’

One of the things we learned is that oil companies can get away and not have to acknowledge the long-term harm to the ecosystem or the community. What we’ve had with Exxon is if $5 billion, the original settlement amount in 1994, had been sufficient to punish Exxon and deter future behavior, then Exxon should have been the first rather than the last company to double hull its tankers. What we have operating now in Prince William Sound are tankers without double hulls.

Is there any way to get ExxonMobil to switch them to double hulls?

No, they have them until 2015 and they’re running out the time clock on them. But if $5 billion was enough to get their attention, they would’ve done what Conoco-Phillips did. In 1994, Conoco-Phillips went to double-hull tankers. They made a company decision to go sooner rather than later. What is it going to take for Exxon? That’s a whole different question to hold them accountable because the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decision in our Exxon Valdez case, not only came down against us, but set a precedent that there can be a cap on punitive damages as low as a one-to-one ratio with a compensatory. The problem with that is the jury does the best they can but they never get to see all the damages.

There is long term harm on herring. The industry collapsed and fishermen are still incurring harm from the oil spill. We were short changed on the compensation package. So to have the SCOTUS limit one-to-one for us. It didn’t really cut it. The bigger issue for everyone else is the decision took away the public threat of large unlimited liability. Half of the big corporations out there are voluntary accountable to consumer product laws, public safety laws, public health laws, environmental laws, and the reason I say they’re voluntarily is because these companies are too big for any country. If we can’t hold Exxon accountable to people and communities than how can any other countries going to do it if we can’t?

The problem is we have to start looking upstream and say ‘How did they get created and how did they get so big, is it right or do we have to do something about it?’ In “Not One Drop” I  say ‘Look, we started our country and framed it with the Bill of Rights.’ The word ‘corporation’ is not in any of those documents’ and people were property then. There were popular movements that sprang up and said ‘This isn’t right’ and drove in amendments to fix those shortcomings. Now we’ve swung completely in the different direction where property is people through judge-made law, not through people-made law.

We’ve only amended the Constitution 27 times. What I’m trying to do is start a movement of the separation of corporation and state. The language [I’ve developed] is only two sentences and it affirms the Constitution and Bill of Rights protections were intended for human people and corporations cannot have them.

Does it come as a shock to most people when you tell them about how this one corporation, its actions, and its efforts have destroyed the family life and other various social aspects of life in Cordova?

It’s new information to everyone. Everybody thought everything was paid off, cleaned up, and back to business as usual. Then I show the sociology data of what’s contributed to the Cordova community: untreated trauma, loss of trust, and litigation. I think Cordova is a mirror for the rest of our nation. Who trusts Wall Street right now? Who trusts the federal government that they’re going to fix this when they’re bailing out the wrong group of people?  

Here’s the problem. We need to come together as a people and speak out and identify what our shared values, our common vision, and our common steps [we need to go in]. If you can’t do those things as a community or as a nation, you are vulnerable to other groups who will come in and say ‘I have a plan for you.’ That’s how we got in trouble with the oil and gas companies and those are not things we necessarily wanted.

What are the most important issues that people need to know about the Exxon Valdez oil spill?

The biggies are that oil causes long term harm. The same oil on our beaches are still causing problems not only to wildlife is also making people sick when they go to do oil spill clean-up. People have respiratory and central nervous system problems and chromosome damage.

The other is the Supreme Court took away our tools to defend ourselves. What the SCOTUS did was make every community vulnerable to corporate greed. We have to go back to Congress and say ‘Sorry, this isn’t going to work.’ The SCOTUS overstepped this issue. They’re not supposed to legislating punitive and we need to have Congress take up the issue to hold corporations accountable.

The third is why do we have these big corporations? Why are we even playing this game? We need to change the rules of the game and strip corporations of human rights that were never intended for them to have. I’m not talking about rights from a group that’s bonafide and supposed to have rights. I’m talking about a group that has stolen our rights and we need to say ‘no!’

The fourth is that we changed when people in communities act (and work) together. I think was our biggest lesson. People can make a difference [and tend to when they are in a survivor mode.] We have to get into a survivor mode as a nation and start pulling ourselves together.  

To learn more visit the following links:

Dr. Riki Ott, Not One Drop

http://www.chelseagreen.com/tv…

Live Locally: Dr. Riki Ott Urges Us to be Green by Staying Local

http://www.chelseagreen.com/tv…

Black Wave: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez Trailer

http://www.chelseagreen.com/tv…

Separation of Corporation and State: The 28th Amendment

http://www.chelseagreen.com/tv…

1989 Exxon Meeting in Cordova, AK

http://www.chelseagreen.com/tv…

The Oil Polluting Alaska Twenty Years after Exxon Valdez

http://www.chelseagreen.com/tv…

Ken Silverstein is reporting that Senator Sanders (and one other unknown/unnamed Senator) has placed a hold on the nomination of Gary Gensler to chair the Commodities Futures Trading Commission.

From Sanders’ website:

Market Regulation Sanders has raised objections to the nomination of a former Treasury Department official, Gary Gensler, the chair the Commodities Futures Trading Commission.  “While Mr. Gensler clearly is an intelligent and knowledgeable person, I cannot support his nomination,” Sanders said.  “Mr. Gensler worked with Senators Phil Gramm and Alan Greenspan to exempt credit default swaps from regulation, which led to the collapse of A.I.G. and has resulted in the largest taxpayer bailout in U.S. history.  He supported Gramm-Leach-Bliley, which allowed banks like Citigroup to become ‘too big to fail.’ He worked to deregulate electronic energy trading, which led to the downfall of Enron and the spike in energy prices.  At this moment in our history, we need an independent leader who will help create a new culture in the financial marketplace and move us away from the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior which has caused so much harm to our economy.”

Sanders’ act of defiance is the latest sign that the post-AIG-bonus world may be a dicier one for the Obama administration as its economic repair strategy continues. Along with Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and former Fed Chief Alan Greenspan, Gensler was a key figure in stymieing the efforts of the Commission he’s now been tapped to head to regulate then-new “exotic” financial instruments such as hedge funds. His nomination is as clear an example as you’ll find of one of the architects of our economic meltdown being offered the reins of financial power in its wake. Measured against the basic ethics of natural consequences so promoted by we parents, it is nakedly outrageous.

And it underscores the Obama approach to the economic crisis. First off, you can forget accountability, despite his populist rhetoric on venues such as the Tonight Show (rhetoric that is starting to feel patronizing).

In simple terms, there are two schools of thought on the matter.  

The one most commonly held by economists at this point is that much of what has become the basic machinery of our financial system since the deregulation era is broken. That we need to scrap parts, rebuild others and create some bypasses.

In the eyes of Obama/Geithner/Summers, the problem is that the machinery is all stopped up. That if we put enough Drano in, we can bust up the clogs and get things moving under the current machinery. Likely, then, there will be some adjustment of the regulations to keep clogs from reoccurring.

It’s easy to see the risk. Smart people have smart suggestions for rejiggering and simplifying the machinery in ways that pretty clearly will work more efficiently and with greater confidence than previous iterations. Now is the time to do that, with the government and the public prepared to put major resources into fixing things (and to not continue to reward those that designed the crappy machinery to begin with).

The Obama approach, on the other hand, is doomed to failure if the machinery truly is trashed – and even if it’s not, if its only mostly trashed, and Obama can successfully jump start it and tweak the settings enough to keep it from stalling out, its likely just to limp and sputter along in a sickly, inefficient manner. Hence the concerns that the best we can hope for under the Obama model can be a more or less freeze on the status quo, a stop of the slide, and a decade of flat, non-growth, non-recovery to look forward to.

I suspect Obama and company hope for the latter scenario, but also then hope that the perky investor set will go back to their high-rolling, gaming ways – like video game junkies who cant help themselves – and dive back into the economic jumble backing all kinds of creative new funds, widgets and investments heretofore unguessed at, replacing the old bubble with a new bubble.

Maybe. It could happen. But its a big gamble (and obviously one with no long term vision for a better global economy). A somewhat faith-based recovery plan, as opposed to the more concrete structural strategies being recommended by wiser minds, and most nauseatingly, it further cements the notion and status of an elite financial class that, by all rights, should be run out of Wall Street (and Washington) on a rail after the greed-driven chaos they’ve called down upon us all.