Today’s Topic: There’s More Than Just Hope For The Everglades
Today, Saturday, November 10, 2007, the New York Times offered up some praise, faint that it may be, for the advancement of the inclusion of the Florida Everglades project, which has fallen behind to the point of being ignored by President Bush.
The problem isn’t JUST that the Everglades need to be restored to the tune of $4 Billion plus, but the fact that we are not thinking big enough. Not by a long shot.
Seems people have forgotten of the 100 year floods that happened both in 1993 and 1995. I talked about Chaos Theory in my last blog, but here we have two incomprehensible events happening in a short time. One in a hundred? Well, Chaos Theory doesn’t talk about that. Probability answers that question.
What was the probability that 4 hurricanes would ride their way through Florida in 1992?
Well, again I digress, and the answers to the above questions beg one to look a global warming as one of the culprits on raising the ante to something greater than one in one hundred.
What I’d really like to talk about is that Congress has over-ridden a Bush veto and the important thing is that our Congress is finally thinking about something that has already been affecting our farmers and marine industry, but involves the most important fact of infrastructure.
America has lots of problems with infrastructure, and I don’t think I’m letting out any State secrets when I say this. And yet, no matter how much political noise is made by any administration the viewpoint is "why fix it if it ain’t broke?".
My question is why let any circumstance get so bad that it needs to be broken before it gets fixed?
One of our prevailing problems has been the fact that America thought it could actually "TAME" America, and we went into major destructive mode in order to do so. What do we have for all the effort?
We have Las Vegas squandering water on displays that are, indeed, impressive, but just as obvious, hugely wasteful of our unsustainable supply. In ten years Lake Mead stands at ½ full and it has the bathtub rings to prove the point.
We have an entire ecosystem in the delta of the Mississippi river that has been killed by up-water obstruction of the Mississippi’s floodplain, and as such, has killed nature’s ability to re-supply the outer islands with slow moving silt which, in turn, kills vast amounts of a hurricane’s power.
And we have the effort to "control" the water flow through the Everglades by canals and opening up dredged and drained areas to the poisoning affects of industrial farming. I don’t believe that anyone has done a study on the changing of fresh water into the Caribbean, although studies have been done that show a main detriment to our coral reefs is a nutrient rich environment that wasn’t there a century ago.
Truthfully it’s no wonder that those in the Northwest argue about water allotments that either favor cattle farmers or ones that favor the spawning grounds of Pacific Salmon.
It is also no wonder that people question why a one in a hundred year flood adversely affects them because they live on the riverbank.
ALL RIVERS FLOOD. ALL COASTLINES ARE POTENTIAL DISASTER AREAS. ALL CITIES BUILT ON FAULT LINES ARE LIVING ON BORROWED TIME. CHAOS THEORY SAYS THAT YOUR BEST ESTIMATE IS TOTALLY OFF, EVEN WITH THE BEST DATA.
However all of this is only a symptom of the problem, not a plan to alleviate the problem.
As painful as it will be to our treasury, America needs to re-establish what the native Americans already knew. As hard as it is to imagine, we are talking about not only fixing the Everglades, but also going around the country and fixing the natural state of our environment.
America only has three hundred million inhabitants and yet we’ve found a way to screw with all the ecosystems that supplied this enormous nation with plenty of natural resources. In fact, without our greed, 90% of the world wouldn’t have to worry about global warming. If you lead by example you cannot complain that others followed.
The suggestion here is that Americans have the ability to put many thousands of people back to work on fixing the problems rather than letting them languish in a pool of self-loathing because they aren’t productive members of society. The 4.7% unemployment rater continually espoused by the Bush administration is only those who have recently lost their jobs and have ended up getting new jobs. Those hundreds of thousands who didn’t get a new job after one year of their job loss are off the books. We have no actual idea of how many people in America are out of work.
I propose that any work under the Water Act specify that companies under any investigation by the US Government be exempt from getting no-bid contracts, and that includes companies such as Halliburton, KBR, and Bechtel. No contract administrator should accept a bid from the above and any others who currently or have previously had governmental investigations.
The Army Corps of Engineers should hire local people to whatever capacity they have to add to the project, and no exemptions should be allowed under "specialized knowledge" unless such knowledge has been demonstrated in the uncontested fulfillment of a number of prior government contracts.
Locals should mean people local to the job and not require anything more than some proof of local inhabitation (utility bill or tax statement). Emigrants should not be penalized for a negative emigrant status. After all, the Constitution supported slavery during/after the Civil War and our Chinese immigrants were abused and placed into somewhat of an indentured servitude. Our current residents of American should have an equal opportunity to help save our waterways. Without such a level of help nothing will be achieved. If our illegal immigrants will work to help replace our waterway infrastructure, then we ought to rethink our ideas about immigrants, illegal or not.
But it is not just global warming that is the problem or even a people problem. One of the most prevalent problems is Russia has already declared that their claims on resources extend to the North Pole simply because they accept global warming. Assuming that this precedence holds up, America only has the entire coastline of Alaska to claim in the event that global warming opens up the north, and American corporations have taken advantage of the possibility of an open North Passage in purchasing otherwise useless property.
On the other hand, when Americans can no longer grow crops or hold jobs in America, they will start immigrating to Canada. The likelihood, however, is that when global warming requires paying personal attention to, such as moving 1000 miles north to plant crops, the act itself will be too late to save anyone.
We have severely pressing scenarios for consideration right now.
People still live on or near threatening volcanoes and major fault lines. People flock to flood plains for agriculture. Disaster prone areas are like magnets to large corporate resort construction, ruining eons long natural protections such as barrier islands. These islands themselves reduce the storm surge of a hurricane by as much as a foot per mile.
When a natural disaster like Katrina shuts down our shipping port of New Orleans, hundreds of millions of dollars are lost to farm products, which depend on that port. The storm surge, as Katrina moved slightly east of New Orleans, was the worst place the hurricane could have hit. Almost 2,000 people died from a natural disaster, which could have been anticipated and relief put into place PRIOR to the storm’s landing.
The massive agricultural effluents of the Florida peninsula are killing the fragile coral reefs and giving us an idea of just how bad our idiocy can be.
Again, not all of the above is necessarily global warming indicators, but I really had to bring these things up because nothing is being done about them and we have enough data for a warning. Part of that warning has become human beings, meaning Americans, shouldn’t be screwing with the natural flow of our water systems. Nor should we become so dependant upon a single port that our ability to ship product is hampered.
However, let us not forget that our actions in changing massive waterways to suit our own needs have a direct impact on our ecology. For instance, not only are our coral reefs dying off, but also had we known earlier they would have been an excellent indication of our ecological health. So we have not only screwed ourselves by losing all the silt which would normally be deposited as barrier islands in the Mississippi delta, but we have screwed ourselves by not paying enough attention to the indicators that told us we were on the wrong path.
So this is why I propose that we stop the Haliburtons and KRBs from having any access to contracts designed to help re-establish our waterway infrastructure.
And since we’re talking about putting good hardworking Americans back to work, why not start thinking about that old dilapidated electrical grid that George W. Bush himself promised would be upgraded? NASA got more money to go to Mars and yet our electrical infrastructure is 40 years old and susceptible to failure or attack.
In fact, if one thinks about it, virtually all of our infrastructure is old and susceptible to failure or attack.
3:47:53 PM 
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