Schreiner’s Media Landscape

It’s tragically but tantalizingly ironic that the once-mighty Republican Party is cowering in the shadows of an approaching storm, not terrorists, oil companies or even the Chinese. Bush and Cheney have canceled their last chance to say something good about their horrendous nightmare of an administration. The GOPhers are talking about cutting the convention short: more worried about being seen partying during a national disaster (isn’t that what they’ve been doing the last seven years?) than actually doing anything to help.

What the Republicans fear most is America watching John McCain give his acceptance speech in split screen with live video of bodies floating in the streets of New Orleans. Especially after Obama’s triumphant Denver address that was more like the Jacksons’ Victory tour. But that’s the Republicans’ karma. They created the PR nightmare that is approaching our southern coast, not Nature. And hopefully, many of them are thinking what Robert Preston’s character Big Ed Bookman, faced with divine retribution for his corruption, confessed so eloquently in “Semi-Tough”: “Lord, I’m a sinner and now you’re gonna f**k me.”

Keeping up appearances is a 24/7 gig when all you’ve got is the APPEARANCE OF CARING OR ACCOMPLISHMENT, not any kind of record of it. But after seven years of monumental gaffes and dismal failures- 9/11, Iraq, energy prices, the federal deficit, Social Security, the housing crisis, one ill-fated debacle after another- it is Hurricane Gustav and Nature that frighten our pillars of strength and integrity more than Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama, protesters- even Janet Jackson. You think the GOP considered curtailing its little bash in the face of threats of violence, $4/gallon gasoline, and crippling recession?

Bush, Cheney and the Republicans have led an all-out assault on Nature during their reign of error. Now, their endless, senseless campaigns of destruction make any hurricane, wildfire, even a bear attack or other act of Nature seem like justifiable revenge against an evil overlord. I feel for the people of New Orleans and hope Gustav and his younger sister Hanna who’s yet to come are not as bad as everyone fears. But I also hope that Bush and his partying party finally get the message:

YOU MESS WITH NATURE- NATURE MESSES WITH YOU. Party on, fellas. Don’t bother cleaning up when you leave. We’ll pick up. Just go.

It was as if Salt Lake City had suddenly become the capital of Mars. I watched the front ooze into the valley from behind the Oquirrhs last night. With it came high winds, clouds and the distinctive smell of wood burning. It was smoke from Yosemite where the fires there burn on and the tourists keep coming anyway.

Ironically, and perhaps superfluously, I puffed on my cigar as the sky and eventually everything turned a grimy shade of pinkish-red (or is pink reddish?). I hadn’t seen sky like that since the Great Inversion of January 2007. This too demanded pictures for posterity.

At the same time, I found out on the 10 p.m. news, wildfires were burning near our own airport and up City Creek Canyon to our north. As the the aromas and plumes converged along the Wasatch, I felt an eerie oneness: a sense that a fire just up the road and another hundreds of miles away affect us all. Nature is so big, vast and powerful that it overwhelms us when it wills so without having to think, plan, choose or execute anything. No matter how we try we are incapable of taming or totally destroying it. We are only capable of destroying ourselves while Nature continues disinterested.

It’s sad to see Yosemite in California, one of America’s premier national parks, threatened by fire. It was sad in 1988 when Yellowstone, our largest and most popular park, was similarly devastated. No matter that it was a human (shooting a gun) that touched off this blaze. It could’ve been lightning or a number of causes. The dry conditions due to persistent drought in the southwestern U.S., people building luxury cabins and towns too close to and actually in Yosemite, and too many people driving into and around the park have turned Yosemite into a massive tragedy no longer waiting to happen.

We should take this time to recognize humanity’s role in not only starting the fire but creating the conditions that led to it causing so much damage and threatening so much more. Forests burned millions of years before humans walked the Earth. It was part of the natural process forests need to replenish themselves and stay healthy. But because humans demand consistency and predictability from Nature, the natural processes of our planet including floods, storms, fires, earthquakes, eruptions, droughts, etc. become DISASTERS. The ultimate disaster is that without an awakening to the devastation we have caused and a reversal of our destruction, there will only be more disasters- with no one to blame but ourselves.

It was only a matter of time before the federal government’s new  policy of fighting forest fires wherever and whenever they broke out would break down. That’s what’s happened in California where there are too many fires to fight, not enough people, money or time to fight them all. But the redirection of nearly the entire national park management budget into fighting fires to protect the zillion-dollar luxury homes ill-advisedly built right next to our national parks now appears a clearly expensive, unsustainable and destructive policy. But we can’t blame Bush for it. We can just blame him for not doing anything about it when he had the chance.

What we need is a federal law that says if you build your fantasy home next to a national park, YOU’RE RESPONSIBLE for protecting your home, not Uncle Sam. Why did the US Forest Service become the national fire department?

Just because something doesn’t happen doesn’t mean it will never happen. Just listen to critics of human-induced climate change, the oil crisis and challengers to American primacy who still somehow believe that the USA is the best nation on the planet and George Bush is not a loser. The unthinkable is now happening in Cedar Rapids, Iowa: floods due to heavy rain and human intervention on numerous levels. Too many levees, too much agricultural land, too many people living where they shouldn’t. It’s fairly self-explanatory. Yet people in Cedar Rapids are surprised.

It’s events like this that knock the delusions right out of our skulls: the only way that appears to work. Take 9/11, California’s wildfires, the southern drought. Our so-called leaders and the ”experts” who enable their myopia somehow did not see these things coming or, if they did, they certainly did nothing to stop them. Can’t stop fires, floods and droughts? Sure you can. Live in the right place, don’t recklessly destroy Nature and live sustainably and you’ll be fine. Get arrogant, think you own the planet and can do whatever you want whenever you want? You get this. 

I’ve driven through Baraboo and the Wisconsin Dells many times in my life: while visiting relatives and vacationing in northern Wisconsin as a kid and living in Minnesota in the 1990s. To think of the Tommy Bartlett Show having its stage drained from underneath it is unthinkable. But it’s a strong indicator of how tenuous the works of humans are and how easy it is for Nature to simply wipe them all away whenever she does what comes- well, naturally.

We’ve seen it happen time and again with Hurricane Katrina, wildfires and other “disasters” and we will see it more as human-induced climate change accelerates. Nature goes where it will, not where we tell it to go. When we mess with Nature, we pay for it. And our God of goodness and compassion will not stop it because- even according to His unflappable followers- He created it. Would you want someone messing with your creation?

A new report shows how wildlife refuges are in just about as bad a shape as our national parks and other preserves due to lack of money and lack of accountability. It’s no accident that this has happened. More federal money goes to fighting fires to protect the luxury cottages built right up to the borders of our federally-protected areas and less money goes toward actually protecting the parks and the wildlife. How did this happen? Well, I think we all know the answer to that one. Counting the days…

I finally started watering my lawn this weekend, nearly a month later than everybody else but when experts say it’s right to save both your grass and the water supply. But my efforts appear to be a drop in the bucket because, despite the past winter’s heavy snowfall, we are already facing a long, hot, dry summer here along the Wasatch. The snowpack is melting slowly because of the cool spring and now that temperatures are hovering around 90, it’s going to come rushing down to create more flooding problems while producing fewer benefits.

The hot, dry conditions also mean wildfires. And with our US Forest Service budgets already ravaged by last year’s firefighting efforts, incompetent money and land management in Washington emphasizing battling fires rather than preventing them, it’s not looking good. But at least we can expect either Bush or Cheney to make some last few swings through the west before they mercifully exit from power: to look at the smouldering remains from a helicopter at 2,000 feet.

Here out west, all weather is good- rain, snow, wind, even drought sometimes, are good. Even though population areas in the west are actually denser than they are in other parts of the country (more people living in cities than rural or suburban areas), and more prone to flash floods, wildfires and other calamities caused by too much humanity, we can still sustain a good pounding like yesterday’s snowstorm and not be angry, suicidal or ready to move somewhere else. Utah is somewhere else. The ten inches or so we received has left our state with a sense that- despite threats of global warming, overpopulation and resource depletion- Nature keeps showing up for work, ill or not. She doesn’t care about our environmental theories, studies, doubts or fears. She doesn’t read the newspaper, watch TV or even read Nature books (biographies?). She’ll do what she wants. And what she does helps us- until we go too far as we have and build cities that are too big and complex, destroy valuable plant and animal habitat and alter our atmosphere to the point where it poisons ourselves and everything around us. This storm and the one hitting the midwest and east right now remind us: what Nature is doing is not evil, wrong, unusual, vengeful or bad. The negative impacts of Nature’s “wrath” are the results of human greed, ignorance and over-indulgence. Just once- ONCE- I’d like to hear THAT on the Weather Channel.

For the record: I like Mormons and don’t think their religion is any weirder than others. But the fact, according to LDS stats, that Utah is now only 60.7% Mormon- less than ever- is significant on a number of levels including environmentally. It shows a demographic shift in Utah and the West based on an influx of outsiders (like me) as well as a high birth rate producing a population explosion similar to the Sun Belt migration of the 1970-1980s. Forget cultural and political impact for a moment. The more significant question is: how can we prevent the disasters that plague the over-populated Sun Belt states: overdevelopment resulting in wildfires and wildlife destruction, “drought” (more accurately, lack of water due to over-population), vehicle and industrial-based pollution, poverty and crime? Answer: controlled development, fewer highways, more green spaces, more incentives for renewable energy in a distributive power system. We can do it now when it’s easier and less expensive. Or later, when it’s harder and our people are choking on the bi-product of our ignorance.