Helping Harris

Here is how politics works. If you are afraid of a candidate who is antithetical to everything you hold dear about this country and has already proven his willingness to lie and break the law. If you worry about losing everything you count on like decency, social security and health care, then the only civil way to stop his agenda is to vote for the opposing party, even if you are not thrilled with all of their policies either.

Trump has been very open and obvious about his very conservative Maga takeover of the Republican party. He isn’t undercover about announcing his affection for everything from dictatorships to antisemitism. Knowing this,  a strong counter punch from the Democrats should have been in the works years ago. BUT the Democrats were busy being taken over by their own identity politics and the woke agenda exemplified by their very own overcorrect after the George Floyd tragedy. Instead of fighting racism as we should, now everything must be viewed from this monolithic lens. But that is for another discussion. Suffice it to say this takeover of the Democratic party by its ‘identitarian’ left wing, is partly responsible for fueling the empire that Trump is building with the 2025 project. See https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

Democrats should have been letting go of their old political narratives and restructuring their strategy in order to beat someone who has been making up his own rules since before his first election adjacent to his lies, too numerous to count.

But there is no time for beratement now. The political heat is ticking up alongside the climate change heat here in the summer of 2024, and a successful Harris campaign is what is needed in order to beat Trump, unless there is an unlikely open Democratic convention. Trump’s attempt to be anointed the last president we will ever vote for is motivation for me to write about her Achilles heel so that she can overcome it and slide into victory.

 

Harris has a lot going for her. She is bold and brave. She speaks well and has lots of experience. She comes across on television well, although her popularity ratings have been less than stellar, mostly due to her sidestepping her authentic self in her last bid for the presidency. She was tough on truancy in California and was successful, but due to the far left climate, she had to put that under wraps, something she should talk about now. She needs to get ahead of them defining her and define herself. Take the bull by the horns. Yes, Wall Street is doing great but Wall Street is not the economy. Wall Street mega corporations are keeping their money and squeezing out even more with the lowered taxes handed to them by Trump and are deliberately keeping prices high with eye-popping greed for the average consumer just so their portfolios can grow to infinity and beyond. She may risk some donations for that one, but it is the truth.

 

One of Harris’s often-discussed weaknesses is the immigration issue. Harris is associated with her attempt to solve the border crisis with her “Root causes” proposal, now deemed an expensive failure from both sides of the aisle. Her task to solve a multi-layered long-entrenched problem was full of quicksand before she was ever assigned the worst job in Washington. I want to offer her a way out of this mess.


Now is the time to grab the microphone and change course on this issue and reclaim a better future for Americans under the Democratic party banner. It’s time for the Democratic party to do its own flag waving, and not hide from its duty to protect America threatened by taking on too many at a time when resources are being stressed at every level. Because she must win to prevent Trump from creating his dictatorship fantasy where he is king and immune from all prosecution among other unspeakable evils, she must create a new way forward on immigration which makes her more electable.

 

It is an understatement to say that this is challenging needle to thread, but it is one that is needed and long overdue. She must create a bold, truthful narrative and one that both is full of respectful language while acknowledging the grim reality that our country had been damaged by the immigration policies of the Biden administration. From the failings of sanctuary cities to streams of migrants overflowing our borders, everyone has suffered. We have suffered all across this country because millions of newcomers cannot be easily absorbed by our cities or citizen because our population is not the 190,895,000 it was when Harris was born, (in 1964) it is now bursting at the seams with over 366,000,000. This is a critical moment with an important opportunity to update our story on immigration, first by talking numbers and then by parsing the difference between immigrants and mass immigration.

 

She must address our nation’s voters and say, “Of course we don’t hate immigrants, we are a nation of immigrants, but we are at a different time in our history.” “We are no longer dominated by amber waves of grain, we are full of over 366 million Americans and can no longer fool ourselves that we can accommodate mass immigration, much of it illegal, because of how it will hurt most Americans.” “There are complicated reasons for the fuel behind the desires of migrants to come to our shores. Unsustainable growth in many countries is certainly one of them. Blaming the US history of exploitation of global resources as the only reason for the misery and suffering of those at our borders is no excuse to dissolve the sociological and ecological integrity within our sovereign borders, dashing the hopes and dreams of our own citizens.”

 

Next, she must articulate a new story. Harris must firmly say that our commitment is first to Americans whose tax money cannot go to those who have just arrived, often without invitation or permission, before it goes to the demands of the already marginalized.

 

She must continue to say, “Our commitment must be to our own downtrodden before we open the gates and try to take care of the world’s poor.” “My first commitment is to the over 500,000 people already living on our streets.” Mass immigration will only increase that number.” “The way to combat the injustices suffered by immigrants is not with more injustice doled out to those who are already struggling with housing and health care issues.”

 

Democrats used to have labor in their pockets but no more. To get them back, Harris has to educate the voter that changing her tune on immigration is another way to show her support for the working class. Labor advocates are currently pushing for ‘Proact’, a piece of legislation which will protect worker’s right to organize and demand better health care, wages and other benefits. She can support this and say that it will be easier to accomplish without the competition from immigrants coming in unsustainable numbers and willing to undercut wages in order to work. Trump knows how to promise things to the working class without delivering on his false promises. Some even believe that this man born into riches is a self-made man. Harris has a chance to differentiate herself from his façade and become the true choice for working people.

 

A third benefit of curbing immigration is that it is a nod in the direction of helping climate change. America is experiencing wildfires and strong storms which is the fallout of our contribution to carbon. When a person comes from an underdeveloped country to the US their carbon footprint expands four-fold. Taking a new stance on immigration could help her strengthen her commitment to mitigating climate change.

 

The good news is that according to a new Gallup poll, https://news.gallup.com/poll/647123/sharply-americans-curb-immigration.aspx a majority of adult Americans say that they want to curb immigration. If Harris crafts a new and may I say more sustainable way forward, she has a better chance of winning in the fall, which would be a win for all Americans, whether they know it now or not.

 

 

For the Love of Chocolate We Must Take Care of Pollinators

For the taste of mangos for the delightfulness of cherries for the crunchiness of apples for the health packed into carrots we must take care of pollinators.

We owe a debt to tiny often annoying biting midges and stinging bees for the delightful treats of everything from chocolate ice cream and blueberry pie to almond butter and mango sticky rice. Because alfalfa is a pollinated crop and is fed to cows, even your next bite of pizza is connected to those flying things we like to spray with all kinds of nasty chemicals.

Pollinators are not doing well in our world and yet they are the bedrock of our food supply. I am not sure which statistic would wake us up to the crisis we are facing, that one in three bites of food is dependent on these tiny, maligned creatures or that 35 % of our most coveted fruits and vegetables would disappear without them leaving us only wind pollinated crops and much smaller grocery stores. So yes, we could still have our cereal crops but with no alfalfa good luck pouring milk on your Cheerios and don’t even think about substituting almond milk for almond trees relies on bees.

Each year pollinators struggle to fight off the ills of the growing human enterprise which fuels the bulldozing of habitat and pollutes the air and water with pesticides meant to keep food crops pest free. How ironic, sad and self-defeating to hurt the ones that give us so much joy and health.

“Eat your fruits and vegetables” parents and doctors advise and they are right, they are packed with nutrition but only when grown in healthy soils and not sprayed with carcinogenic chemicals. Now we have to worry about them no longer existing because we are ignoring what they need most, room to live in a pollution free, climate stable world.

Cement is an often-ignored enemy of pollinators for it covers up the soil where plants grow. In 2021 the US used 109 million metric tons of cement to construct expanded housing, bridges, freeways, dams runways all in the name of growth. One metric ton weighs over 2200 pounds, that’s a lot of cement in a world which needs to make a connection between growth and the next time you want to indulge in a cone of double chocolate cherry ice cream.

The more people, the more cement. The more cement the less pollinators, the less pollinators the less almond butter sandwiches. Going the store and seeing empty shelves of my favorite fruits is enough for me to ask, why do we keep growing when it is obviously not sustainable. Why do we worship growth when it will literally kill us or make life less pleasurable? Have pleas to have small families worked? Turns out that we have had some success in achieving smaller average size families, but this is being undermined by growing our population with those from other countries.

In the name of maintaining our bloated economy and jobs that need filling we are adding to the cement load. We are building up and out to accommodate growth of those who will need a growing food supply while we are busy killing off the creatures who give us our food. It is the very definition of insanity to keep doing something detrimental in light of new information. To serve the unsustainable stream of people coming in to seek a better life in the US, we have built 1 million apartment units in 3 years with another million to be built by 2025. All of those people will expect to be greeted by produce in the grocery stores and one issue is whether or not will even be there.

Next week is Pollinator week. There will be the usual calls to take actions to protect our bees, flies, bats and butterflies. But if I were a betting person, I would bet the farm that stopping growth in the US will not be on the list of calls to action. Most environmental groups would rather stay out of the controversy of reducing growth, which is happening mainly due to immigration, then to give out the whole message of how to help them.

Want your chocolate cake and eat it too? Then attach our growth and how it is happening to the well-being of pollinators and the success of your next birthday party.



 

What’s Happening in Vegas Needs to STOP! Room for Growth is an Optical Illusion

 

I am a fan of filmmaker John Waters and his humor. I hope he was only joking, however, when he claimed recently as a guest on Bill Maher’s Real Time show, that he had driven around the US and there is plenty of room! “Come one come all we can handle it”, he jested. What an unfortunate statement for many will ingest this notion and save it for arguing to promote for keeping our gates open and our population growing.

 

That seems to be the philosophy of the constant development going on in and around Las Vegas. There is room, after all, so why not just keep adding buildings and homes? The Las Vegas Nevada area is on track to add 30-35,000 homes this year, never mind that it is being built in a desert with its major dwindling water resource, Lake Mead, which is already suffering from too much demand. Added to this unsustainable story is the way the climate is warming, destabilizing the amount of mountain snow melt from the Upper Colorado River Basin Lake Mead. 90% of Las Vegas depends on this water resource making the push for more development somewhat of a suicide mission.

 

The downtown Vegas strip is growing taller and the outside suburbs are growing wider in this city where anything goes. This leads me to assume that the city planners a) never took an ecology class b) don’t plan on trying to live there in the bleak future that is in store for this city of fountains in the desert.

 

Room for growth is an optical illusion. It looks like you can build because the space is there. But when you do not have a reliable source of water, building up or out is a recipe for disaster with a capital D which also stands for DRY and a future ‘D”eserted city with over the top luxury buildings and plumbing that is there just for decoration.

 

 

The latest edition of Outdoor America, Isaac Walton League’s (IWL) national magazine, claims that  says at current rates of consumption and pollution we will run out of water by 2040. That sobering news should be no surprise to those who read similar issues in the past. Concerns over water pollution was why IWL was founded. The type of pollution has changed but not the threat. It has gone from sewage issues to microplastics and nitrates, but the danger remains the same if not worse. We who get it can only shake our heads at the flippant attitude toward our precious water supply which is exemplified by seeing sprinklers watering lawns in the middle of a rainstorm.

 

Water is precious, life-giving and we are both using too much of it and wasting so much of it. Yet no article on water that I can find even mentions human population increases and what that does to our limited water supplies. IWL started in 1922 when anglers and hunters became concerned about water pollution and knew that in order to be enjoy their recreational pursuits they had to have a healthy and viable outdoors.

 

The number that these articles in Outdoor America should be focused on is 110,049,000, for that was the population of the US when these IWL founders started fighting to protect the great outdoors. The fight for fresh clean water is deeply attached to the fact that the US now has over 336 million water consumers and growing every year. You wouldn’t know it by these articles who say they are concerned about the future of water in the US. The headline of this article should have read, “Because we have tripled our population since the beginning of IWL we are going to run out of water in the near future.” Even if we could prevent industry from dumping pollutants in our rivers, lakes and oceans, fresh water cannot recharge as quickly as we are using it.


We are now primarily growing by adding people to our country from other countries. They go from needing water in their country of origin to needing to use the fragile and limited water supply in the US. Water is local and comes from either rivers, aquifers or mountain snowmelt, all of it in limited supply especially with our climate succumbing to our current atmospheric composition of 427 parts per million of carbon. When it doesn’t rain, rivers run dry. When not enough snow falls in the mountain reservoirs run empty.

 

Adding consumers to the desert cities in our country when they are already experiencing persistent threats to both clean and plentiful water doesn’t make any sense. It ignores the limits we need to be putting on our growth at the most critical place, our increase in population from immigration.


It's great that next year Las Vegas will ban lawns for residential areas even though commercial and municipal areas will still be allowed this water wasting landscaping choice. But it is the growth of population which needs to ring the alarm bell. In 2024 Vegas is projected to add a whopping 30-35,000 residents. No matter where they are coming from, they will not be bringing their own water with them.

 

There is much displacement going on in the country. Population pressure, some of it from immigration, displaces local residents. Others come from other states. Residents of Los Angeles whose population is made up of 33% immigrants, have started to migrate to places like western Colorado and Las Vegas.

 

Energy is also being used as if it is endless.

Las Vegas is a city that never sleeps demonstrating its enormous appetite for electronic signs, shows and fireworks. Arrays of solar panels have plenty of room to be built but have their own set of problems. This includes the destruction of wildlife habitat as well as the organic problem of needing fossil fuel to build them and the waste they cause when they are at the end of their lifespan.

 

Driving all of this unsustainable growth is a demand for housing from the newcomers seeking a better life or drier climate for their

health. These newcomers must be fairly well off for the median home price is now 450k. Another downside of growth is that high demand and low supply results in higher prices.

 

What is driving all of this growth? Demand to live where the air is dry, the jobs from the tourist industry are solid and overcrowding in other cities makes driving in Las Vegas seem like a breeze, it’s not LA ( not yet) with its crippling all day 7 lane traffic jams. And then there are all of the shows where you can drop a good chunk of change to be entertained while the city marches towards a world where faucets become artifacts of the past.

 

Immigration is certainly a part of this story which is a national story, driven by national policy. Ironically there are tools in place to slow growth from the border, but they clash with our American story of being a country built on immigrants. Bill Maher wisely critiqued our policy in a recent Real Time show that we never seem to ask the question, “How many is too many? And when the answer isn’t ‘Infinity’ you are labeled a racist. But at the heart of growth from immigration is sustainability and in the center of that is water.

 

We must anchor our policies in the ecological reality of water. All the conservation practices in the world cannot make up for the demand of more and more consumers of water. Everything we do must spell an end to growth and encourage lowering our numbers with every tool available. Scaling down is a life saving strategy and it needs far more attention from the media and our political leaders. Adding more people to help with one problem will just create more.

 

When land developers see open space they salivate at the prospect of making money. They can count on taking home six figures to carve up the desert landscape with brick, mortar and plumbing all to cash in on the growth boom that is this gambling metropolis.

 

Even National Geographic blames human population growth for the threat it spells for delicate desert habitats. They point out that demand for land removes areas where desert creature try to survive, among them the desert tortoise and the Amargosa vole. But no resident of Vegas is going to hold up protest signs demanding a future for the Kangaroo rat, they should however look at their own future of water and get busy setting limits to growth. How about a sign which says, Save Las Vegas, Stop Growth. Could Las Vegas lead the way? That is doubtful, there is too much money involved. Growth needs to be taken off its pedestal for it for all the room in the world and all the fancy casinos and money cannot make up for running out of life’s most precious liquid. Perhaps a better sign would be

“Stop Growth because you can’t drink money.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am a fan of filmmaker John Waters and his humor. I hope he was only joking, however, when he claimed recently as a guest on Bill Maher’s Real Time show, that he had driven around the US and there is plenty of room! “Come one come all we can handle it”, he jested. What an unfortunate statement for many will ingest this notion and save it for arguing to promote for keeping our gates open and our population growing.

 

That seems to be the philosophy of the constant development going on in and around Las Vegas. There is room, after all, so why not just keep adding buildings and homes? The Las Vegas Nevada area is on track to add 30-35,000 homes this year, never mind that it is being built in a desert with its major dwindling water resource, Lake Mead, which is already suffering from too much demand. Added to this unsustainable story is the way the climate is warming, destabilizing the amount of mountain snow melt from the Upper Colorado River Basin Lake Mead. 90% of Las Vegas depends on this water resource making the push for more development somewhat of a suicide mission.

 

The downtown Vegas strip is growing taller and the outside suburbs are growing wider in this city where anything goes. This leads me to assume that the city planners a) never took an ecology class b) don’t plan on trying to live there in the bleak future that is in store for this city of fountains in the desert.

 

Room for growth is an optical illusion. It looks like you can build because the space is there. But when you do not have a reliable source of water, building up or out is a recipe for disaster with a capital D which also stands for DRY and a future ‘D”eserted city with over the top luxury buildings and plumbing that is there just for decoration.

 

 

The latest edition of Outdoor America, Isaac Walton League’s (IWL) national magazine, claims that  says at current rates of consumption and pollution we will run out of water by 2040. That sobering news should be no surprise to those who read similar issues in the past. Concerns over water pollution was why IWL was founded. The type of pollution has changed but not the threat. It has gone from sewage issues to microplastics and nitrates, but the danger remains the same if not worse. We who get it can only shake our heads at the flippant attitude toward our precious water supply which is exemplified by seeing sprinklers watering lawns in the middle of a rainstorm.

 

Water is precious, life-giving and we are both using too much of it and wasting so much of it. Yet no article on water that I can find even mentions human population increases and what that does to our limited water supplies. IWL started in 1922 when anglers and hunters became concerned about water pollution and knew that in order to be enjoy their recreational pursuits they had to have a healthy and viable outdoors.

 

The number that these articles in Outdoor America should be focused on is 110,049,000, for that was the population of the US when these IWL founders started fighting to protect the great outdoors. The fight for fresh clean water is deeply attached to the fact that the US now has over 336 million water consumers and growing every year. You wouldn’t know it by these articles who say they are concerned about the future of water in the US. The headline of this article should have read, “Because we have tripled our population since the beginning of IWL we are going to run out of water in the near future.” Even if we could prevent industry from dumping pollutants in our rivers, lakes and oceans, fresh water cannot recharge as quickly as we are using it.


We are now primarily growing by adding people to our country from other countries. They go from needing water in their country of origin to needing to use the fragile and limited water supply in the US. Water is local and comes from either rivers, aquifers or mountain snowmelt, all of it in limited supply especially with our climate succumbing to our current atmospheric composition of 427 parts per million of carbon. When it doesn’t rain, rivers run dry. When not enough snow falls in the mountain reservoirs run empty.

 

Adding consumers to the desert cities in our country when they are already experiencing persistent threats to both clean and plentiful water doesn’t make any sense. It ignores the limits we need to be putting on our growth at the most critical place, our increase in population from immigration.


It's great that next year Las Vegas will ban lawns for residential areas even though commercial and municipal areas will still be allowed this water wasting landscaping choice. But it is the growth of population which needs to ring the alarm bell. In 2024 Vegas is projected to add a whopping 30-35,000 residents. No matter where they are coming from, they will not be bringing their own water with them.

 

There is much displacement going on in the country. Population pressure, some of it from immigration, displaces local residents. Others come from other states. Residents of Los Angeles whose population is made up of 33% immigrants, have started to migrate to places like western Colorado and Las Vegas.

 

Energy is also being used as if it is endless.

Las Vegas is a city that never sleeps demonstrating its enormous appetite for electronic signs, shows and fireworks. Arrays of solar panels have plenty of room to be built but have their own set of problems. This includes the destruction of wildlife habitat as well as the organic problem of needing fossil fuel to build them and the waste they cause when they are at the end of their lifespan.

 

Driving all of this unsustainable growth is a demand for housing from the newcomers seeking a better life or drier climate for their

health. These newcomers must be fairly well off for the median home price is now 450k. Another downside of growth is that high demand and low supply results in higher prices.

 

What is driving all of this growth? Demand to live where the air is dry, the jobs from the tourist industry are solid and overcrowding in other cities makes driving in Las Vegas seem like a breeze, it’s not LA ( not yet) with its crippling all day 7 lane traffic jams. And then there are all of the shows where you can drop a good chunk of change to be entertained while the city marches towards a world where faucets become artifacts of the past.

 

Immigration is certainly a part of this story which is a national story, driven by national policy. Ironically there are tools in place to slow growth from the border, but they clash with our American story of being a country built on immigrants. Bill Maher wisely critiqued our policy in a recent Real Time show that we never seem to ask the question, “How many is too many? And when the answer isn’t ‘Infinity’ you are labeled a racist. But at the heart of growth from immigration is sustainability and in the center of that is water.

 

We must anchor our policies in the ecological reality of water. All the conservation practices in the world cannot make up for the demand of more and more consumers of water. Everything we do must spell an end to growth and encourage lowering our numbers with every tool available. Scaling down is a life saving strategy and it needs far more attention from the media and our political leaders. Adding more people to help with one problem will just create more.

 

When land developers see open space they salivate at the prospect of making money. They can count on taking home six figures to carve up the desert landscape with brick, mortar and plumbing all to cash in on the growth boom that is this gambling metropolis.

 

Even National Geographic blames human population growth for the threat it spells for delicate desert habitats. They point out that demand for land removes areas where desert creature try to survive, among them the desert tortoise and the Amargosa vole. But no resident of Vegas is going to hold up protest signs demanding a future for the Kangaroo rat, they should however look at their own future of water and get busy setting limits to growth. How about a sign which says, Save Las Vegas, Stop Growth. Could Las Vegas lead the way? That is doubtful, there is too much money involved. Growth needs to be taken off its pedestal for it for all the room in the world and all the fancy casinos and money cannot make up for running out of life’s most precious liquid. Perhaps a better sign would be

“Stop Growth because you can’t drink money.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SWOLLEN EARTH- Revisiting Earth Day’s Message

Another Earth Day has just passed us by and we still struggle to make our peace with her well-being. Why is this? With all the clean ups and tree plantings, with all of the plans to get rid of plastic bags and single use items over the decades since the first Earth Day, why are we still fighting these same battles with 54 Earth Days under our belt?

 

Is it because corporations with a money mindset have so much unregulated power they can keep polluting and creating single use products ad nauseum? That is absolutely a key part of the problem. But we also have too many consumers. Too many consumers to try to convince NOT to buy the products dangled in front of them with billions of dollars in advertising.

 

What can we do about the problem of too many consumers, who can’t really stop consuming water, shelter, food and energy? We first must come to a collective agreement that overpopulation is the major force behind biodiversity and climate destruction. We then have to incentivize putting the brakes on the entire human enterprise, knowing that we do so in order to survive.

 

Over the years Earth Day has become a day for corporations to sell us reusable bottles and bags and for groups to organize park clean ups. It is of course both arrogant and silly to think that the problems of the earth can be solved in one day’s commemoration. It is ridiculous to think our efforts will matter much when our world keeps on growing. Earth Day should be a day to refocus on the right problem, our growth.

 

Stabilized populations with plans to reduce human numbers humanely, have a better future in a world of exhilarating carbon and resources which will only become scarcer and more expensive. Yet cultural expectations for family size seems to be more powerful than daily reports about how our earth is struggling to support those here already with the basics of life.

 

It is progress to see that it is now more politically correct to promote having smaller families but it is still not being promoted by those who are in charge of Earth Day celebrations. Advocating for smaller families is the direction of the developed world but it is being overwhelmed by newcomers. Another topic Earth Day organizers won’t touch. Yet newcomers to countries with stable populations destabilize them. They bring them further and further from sustainability. No country has unlimited resources, least of all those who have the highest standards of living.

 

In the US, business loves cheap labor. But money driven decisions are not in sync with providing us with a sustainable country or planet. Need more workers? How about paying to train your own people and pay them a living wage? Want to help the marginalized? There are plenty of U.S. communities in need beginning with those living in poverty on many Indian reservations. Want to help people in other countries? Begin real dialogues with both government and non-government agencies to see how best to help them. By ignoring how unsustainable the US population is already at 336 million, we cannot keep allowing immigration policies to contribute to even greater problems as we grow even more unsustainable.

It won’t take much investigation to see that overpopulation is at the center of their problems too. But being their release valve, solves little in the big scheme of things and makes matters worse for the developed countries who had been on a more sustainable course.

 

I hope everyone tries to treat each day as if it were Earth Day. By all means, plant a tree and pick up trash. It is critical, however, that each of us insist that organizations who say they care about the environment also call for palatable ways for reducing the planet’s number one predator before the earth fixes the problem of too many humans herself.

 

 

 

 

 

Sleepwalking into Autocracy: The Democratic Party Elite’s Complicity

Note: This essay was inspired and co-written with John S. Armstrong, my husband, who has been very focused on our current political landscape which demands a more critical look.

Written by John S. Armstrong and Karen I. Shragg

 

The Democratic party elite has unilaterally decided who is going to be at the top of their ticket. That act in and of itself is not a democratic one. The fact is that 70% of Democratic voters since 2022 have consistently said they did not want him to run for a second term. Even though they liked and supported President Biden they wanted someone else. We agree, it was not a question he was the right candidate for the job last time around. But that was then, and this is now. By preventing any viable democratic candidates for getting on state primary ballots they avoided the due process voters deserve.

On the side of the aisle marked with a ‘D’, we the people have lost our right to choose our own candidates. It is becoming clear that they are being chosen for us by a self-anointed power structure in the form of the Democratic National Committee and their ilk. There is nothing democratic about deliberately avoiding primaries to select a candidate. Minnesota Representative Dean Phillips articulated our concern when he tried to fight the entrenched system by making a bid for president, stating that his reason for running was that, “people deserve not a coronation but… a choice.”

 It is clear that both sides are avoiding the democratic process. Trump refused to participate in the Republican primary debates and Democrats refused to even have them. Neither side is indicating they will participate in presidential debates.

 No incumbent president Republican or Democrat has been reelected in the history of electoral politics with approval ratings as low as Joe Biden’s, which has ranged from 38-44% in the last six months.

 Both former presidents Clinton and Obama still went through the primary process in order to become the nominees of their party. Now here we are in 2024 and President Joe Biden is the Democrat running to ‘save democracy’ from the grips of another four years of an untethered Donald Trump. Being that the voters have not been allowed to make any other choice, we find it ironic that to fight the ‘loss of our democracy’ we are not being allowed to follow its basic principle of letting the people choose.

 According to recent reports, Biden is losing support from four key constituencies who helped to secure his election last time. Each of them is feeling that they have been underserved during Biden’s administration. Biden is losing support in the Black and Latino communities as well as with voters under thirty. He still needs to win over Independents who now represent over 40% of the electorate.

As of this writing, polling in the 7-8 swing states, which will again determine who wins the electoral college, has Biden losing to Trump. Under these circumstances, not having primaries that reflect the voter’s wishes is not only short cutting democracy, it is a sure fire way to lose because of Biden’s current unpopularity.

Longtime Democratic strategists James Carville and David Axelrod, warned from their insider positions that Biden is the wrong man to beat Trump this time around. Al Sharpton is also raising a red flag saying that people who call into his program from outside the beltway are less than enthusiastic about voting for Biden. When the warning is coming from within the party, the party needs to listen.

The DNC and their allies have secured the nomination for Biden by discouraging any viable candidate from running in the primary process. The power elite are now focusing their energy and resources on trying to prevent any third-party candidates from getting on state ballots across the country.

Democrats keep emphasizing that a Trump win is an existential threat to Democracy. But the DNC has demonstrated their animus towards democratic fairness. Author and commentator Fareed Zacharia has said that the way you defend liberal democracy (i.e. freedom of speech and upholding democratic institutions), is not by illiberal means of cutting corners or having double standards.

 Author and Pulitzer Prize winner David Remnick has said if you look at recent world history it is clear that when you pit institutions against authoritarianism, authoritarianism wins every time because the institutions are often not trusted.

If Biden loses to Trump, we cannot allow the Democratic power elite to say it was because “we didn’t get our message out” or blaming a third-party run. They have to look in the mirror and realize they put up the wrong candidate, one not chosen by the people and one that could not compete with someone as charismatic and dangerous as Trump.

We know what happened when Trump lost by a small margin. Imagine if Biden does pull out a win by a thin margin, what would happen this time? To fight Trump’s powerful grip on the Republican party we needed someone younger, vibrant and who could articulate Democratic accomplishments as well as a clear vision for the future.

Admittedly, it is a sad state of affairs that even an unpopular incumbent president cannot beat the likes of Donald Trump who is facing 91 criminal indictments. But politics isn’t logical and Democrats need to demonstrate how they can emotionally connect with voters. They must be better at selling their ideas. Their current strategy is to point out how bad their opponent is for the country, while failing to articulate why they are the better choice.

The bottom line is we can’t achieve the protection of our democracy by eliminating the democratic process. It is not a winning strategy and it’s time we take back democracy from the Democratic power structure who are sleepwalking us into autocracy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Banking on Water

 

World Water Day is March 22nd and it’s a great opportunity to connect the dots between overpopulation and water scarcity. Here is a not so fun fact, there are approximately 2 billion people world-wide who do not have access to potable water according to a United Nations report out just last year. It shouldn’t be rocket science to figure out that adding millions more people to our watersheds is just going to make matters worse. When you have a bank account there is a limit to the amount of cash you can withdraw before it is empty. Water is no different. When you take out more that can be replaced, the taps, wells, hoses and faucets will run dry.

 

In my late father’s lifetime, we added 6 billion people to the planet and the water did not and could not keep up. Our population growth would be impressive with innovations in disease and accident prevention if our planet were an unlimited place. But it is a closed system infused with slow-moving cycles evolved to accommodate only so much demand. Conservation technology can stretch some of those resources, but the demand for fresh water is just too great. Water is a renewable resource but only if demand doesn’t exceed the ability of a water resource to recharge or replenish. For example, the Ogallala aquifer which ranges from Texas to Kansas recharges slowly ranging from .024 to 6 inches a year, even less when droughts occur.  Since the 1920’s, the US population increased by a whopping 221 million people. Water may be a global cycle, but it is experienced on a local level and must be managed as such by controlling demand as much as possible.

 

The United Nations should be sounding the alarm on the water crisis. Instead, in its not so infinite wisdom, the UN is taking this opportunity to announce its WATER FOR PEACE campaign. Scan their website:

https://www.un.org/en/observances/water-day for insights into overpopulation’s impact on water scarcity and you will come up as empty as the wells in Mexico City. This megalopolis has a scary 22.5 million people in it up from 3.3 million in 1950, so it should be no surprise that its authorities have just announced it is running out of water. But as usual, they are blaming everything but the elephant in the room which keeps stomping all over our lives. The UN is supposed to be a source of leadership in our bedraggled world and yet they completely ignore that as we grow by over 80 million net gain each year on an already overpopulated planet, there will be anything but peace. There will be water wars and people are already investing in water rights ownership so that they will be the ones to profit from a lowered water supply. LIMITS TO WATER DAY is a much better name and will help to educate people about how water is a precious resource which must be protected. It is far more precious than the money we hoard.

 It is not just what we need to drink and wash our clothes with it is the element needed to process everything from lettuce to gasoline and its cycle is being broken by overdemand and human caused climate change. Of course, the more humans, the more climate change.

Water is a great opportunity to shed some light on how water supply is local even though the earth’s water cycle is global. The US is not immune from the perils of our looming water crisis. There are currently 2.2 million people in the US who live in homes without running water.  Yes, we could, at great expense, install low flow shower heads and any number of water-saving devices but it cannot make up for the mess of being in such deep overshoot. Depending on where you live in the US, your water source is either from a nearby river, and underground aquifer or mountain run off. None of these sources gets stellar marks in the supply department. Mountains must have snow if they are to provide water so that is nothing to bank on either. To this we keep adding more people gambling that somehow water will be coming out of our taps years from now.

 

Across the US, aquifers are being over-pumped and rivers are running dry because they cannot keep up with a demand of 336+ million Americans using an average of 82 gallons per person per day. The US is currently growing mostly by mass immigration. We must realize that there are answers to decreasing demand, perhaps ones we do not want to hear, but we are doing a great injustice to those already living within our borders. Keeping our borders open to more thirsty people will just use up our dwindling water supplies more rapidly. Real leadership would demand that we have the challenging discussion of keeping our demand in line with this life-giving resource.

 We know what happened when bankers loaned subprime mortgages to people who did not have the resources to pay them back. It is no different when we are not firm about limiting population growth to the best of our ability in a country suffering from low supplies of water exacerbated by the unstable weather events of climate change.

It’s hard not to loan people money who want to live in home and it’s also very difficult to turn people away at our borders even if they have the proper paperwork because it will just mean we are just going to run out of water in a shorter period of time. But it is the right thing to do if we want to be able to drink water, wash our clothes and cook our food in the future. You can take that to the bank.

 

 

“I am the Lorax and I speak for the trees “* How we must celebrate the International Day of Forests

Dr. Suess aka Theodor Suess Geisel, wrote his famous children’s book “The Lorax” in response to fighting development in his neighborhood. It’s a story we are still living 50 years later, when forests are more needed than ever and more threatened.

To truly speak for the trees, because the trees have no tongues, we have to honor their right to be here in the numbers required to provide habitat for forest wildlife and absorb carbon. Globally there are 10 million hectares (24,2710,541 acres)  lost to deforestation every year, with 70 million hectares(172,973,785 acres)  lost due to fires, evidence that trees need a lot more Loraxes to advocate for them.

The United Nations has announced that theme for the International Day of Forests this year is, “Forests and Innovation: New Solutions for a Better World,” to be celebrated the 21st of March. This means that according to the organizers, energy will be put toward early fire warning systems, sustainable commodity production for wood products as well as the empowerment of Indigenous Peoples. They also address ecosystem restoration.

These are not bad ideas, but they are woefully incomplete as human overpopulation and population growth is being overlooked once again as a driver of deforestation. Forests are cut down to make room for housing, freeways, agricultural production, shopping centers, airport runways, train tracks, and cul de sacs to name just some of the development pressure which turns forests into lumber and sends wildlife packing. The more people added to a given country, the more the bulldozers are called in to clear the lungs of the earth.

We desperately need to stop deforestation for many critical reasons. We need trees to hold in the soil, make it rain, provide wildlife habitat, produce oxygen, absorb carbon, provide wood products, make shade and provide an aesthetic that makes our neighborhoods more beautiful. Stopping deforestation simply cannot happen when we allow our population to keep growing either through high birth rates or high immigration rates. Deforestation, like all environmental actions, must be addressed where our political power is, within each country. In the US, just since the Lorax was published we have grown from 207,372,00 to a still growing 336 million.

In a perfect world, the UN would encourage each and every one of their member states to address their population in an effort to prevent deforestation, although clearly, they do not have to power to enforce actions within each political entity. Unfortunately, the UN is not taking on overpopulation as the upstream issue it is, which will undermine their success. They need to adopt the theme that population growth drives sprawl and it is the enemy of forests. Statistics prove that population inspired sprawl erases any benefit of conservation efforts of denser living and better planning. ( see www. Sprawlusa.com.)

Until we tell the big truth about how to really stop deforestation, we will not be doing a service to our planet or ourselves. We must speak up and be unafraid to address overpopulation however it manifests. Let’s be inspired by the Once-ler who tells us in the Lorax, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”

*From the book The Lorax by Dr.Suess ( 1971)

 

 

 

It’s Still About the Numbers: Why we Should Have Listened to Al, In Commemoration of Al Bartlett’s Birthday

I was lucky to meet the amazing Al Bartlett, physicist, professor and outspoken on an issue we continue to collectively ignore. He brought a gentle but firm intellectual and scientific perspective to the issue of overpopulation and the unsustainability of adding more growth to an already overpopulated US and world. He was born, ironically enough, in Shanghai China, back when China was still under 1 billion citizens.

 

The US in the 1920’s, had 112 million people living within its borders and when he died the US had grown to the unsustainable number of 316 million. Since his death, the US has added another 20 million people. Al knew the numbers and did the math. The US cannot continue to feed, clothe, house and provide water, health care, and transportation to limitless numbers of people. No country can take that on.

 

Al would be disappointed that we did not follow his advice so well laid out in his NPG article.

https://www.albartlett.org/articles/bartlett_thoughts_on_immigration_2007dec.html.

He based his statements solely on the issue of sustainability. We are not sustainable now so more growth only exacerbates the

problem of growing exponentially when resources can only grow

arithmetically. On the ever-controversial topic of mass immigration, he took the mathematical approach when he said, “Immigration, legal plus illegal, is the main driver of population growth in the United States in 2007; therefore, any discussion of sustainability in the U.S. must address the need to reduce or eliminate immigration, both legal and illegal, into the U.S.”

Indeed we should’ve listened to Al. The delusion that the US can keep growing in numbers without accounting for their impact on our dwindling resources is a fools’ game. It is also pretentious to think we are being kind by sharing what we no longer have with those who will always be in need.  Currently there are 700 million people living in extreme poverty in the world. I am sure each and every one of them would want to come to the US where all they have to worry about is racism, classism, homelessness, joblessness, gun violence and our very own rising poverty. Al was a kind soul. He would advise us that helping others is important, but it must be done in other ways since it cannot be done sustainably, and it hasn’t been sustainable for a very long time.

 

To honor Dr. Bartlett on what would’ve been his 101st birthday, we need to realize that we don’t need a degree in physics to understand this issue, we just need listen to Al.

 

 

 

Changing Names or Making Change

As a bird lover, I have grown to hate certain sayings that demean birds. “Killing two birds with one stone,” is top on my list “Bird brain,” vies for second place and “Eat like a bird” is annoying for the way it is so inaccurate. Yes,I do tend to eat like a bird, for birds eat a lot and all day long. I would love to rid our language of these, but the best I can do is not use them myself. Language does matter, but my point in this essay is that it does not matter as much as appropriate action.

 

Recently there is much being made out of changing bird names to rid ourselves of those named after historically tainted characters. Fine, let’s do that, but let’s do that for two reasons. First because it is a correction that is needed because time has given us the gift of ethical perspective and secondly because bird names would just be better if they were descriptive. Proper names tell us nothing about what the bird sounds or looks like.

 

Birds should never be named after people because their records will never stand the test of time, nor is it helpful to the beginning birdwatcher. Birds aptly named include: the red winged blackbird, the red headed woodpecker and black capped chickadee which has the extra bonus of being named for its call as well as its looks.

 

What we need to remember is that this is not a self-righteous act but a self-correcting one. Too many are jumping on the bandwagon of changing bird names to reflect their own wokeness and that is what I find so distasteful. Let’s do it because it will make bird watching easier and it will stop honoring those who need to be forgotten. Let’s keep in mind that it won’t help the birds one iota. We cannot lose sight of the fact that their numbers are plummeting in mind-numbing ways. Devoting our energies to stopping the human enterprise from polluting their air and bulldozing their habitat is a much better way to spend our time.

We can’t for a moment allow ourselves to think that any name changes will help them survive our obsession with growth. Our time will be much better spent wrestling with the massive force of 8 billion non-feathered primates who seem to love distraction more than action.

 

Name changes are fine and needed but they often don’t get at the core of a problem or help it much to any degree.

In my community a lake once named for a slave-owning secretary of the military is now renamed a Dakota name. The indignities suffered by native peoples are many and shameful, but few new the story behind who the lake was originally named for and so erasing that painful history is really not accomplished in any meaningful way especially when there are so many more important ways we could help native peoples regain their land and dignity.

 

There have been many protests against referring to people streaming across our southern border as “illegal aliens”. So it became more respectful to say, ‘”undocumented worker”. The problem is that this correction never touched on the real issue that the US cannot keep absorbing more people without draining our resources and damaging our remaining open spaces beyond repair. It also gives the impression that we have a blatant disregard for rules of entry to the US which creates all sort of problems from sustainability issues to crime.

 

Some now want to call “homeless people”, the “unhoused”, but once again this does not deal with the systemic issues behind the over ½ million who must scrounge for shelter and food each day in the US.  It makes some feel as if they have done something to bring dignity to people when time would be better spent addressing how homelessness is related to both our tax structure and mass immigration.

 

George Carlin was fascinated by how we like to hide behind language while never really solving the problem. My favorite reference of his was how we went from “shell-shocked” to “post-traumatic stress disorder.” It’s the same problem, less clear and certainly we haven’t addressed sending young people to war as the reason people keep suffering from it.

 

Let’s focus on the organic issues behind the desire for all of these name changes and quit pretending that when we change names of our birds or people or syndromes our actions are complete. In a foolish contest to gain meaningless points of self-righteous wokeness we are ignoring the underlying issues of worshiping growth and promulgating war in the US and why that is bringing so much pain to our citizenry and to our birds.