Courtesy of Panthera (www.panthera.org). Please make a holiday donation to aid cat conservation efforts.

And now the lowland grove is down, the trees
Fallen that had unearthly power to please
The earthly eye, and gave unearthly solace
To minds grown quiet in that quiet place.
To see them standing was to know a prayer
Prayed to the Holly Spirit in the air
By that same Spirit dwelling in the ground.
The wind in their high branches gave the sound
Of air replying to that prayer. The rayed
Imperial light sang in the leaves it made.

To live as mourner of a human friend
Is but to understand the common end
Told by the steady counting in the wrist.
For though the absent friend is mourned and missed
As every pulse, it is a human loss
In human time made well; our grief will bless
At last the dear lost flesh and breath; it will
Grow quiet as the body in the hill.

To live to mourn an ancient woodland, known
Always, loved with an old love handed down,
That is a grief that will outlast the griever,
Grief as landmark, grief as a wearing river
That in its passing stays, biding in rhyme
Of year with year, time with returning time,
As though beyond the grave the soul will wait
In long unrest the shaping of the light
In branch and bole through centuries that prepare
This ground to pray again its finest prayer.

~ Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir, (The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997, 1987-III)

Coming to the woods' edge
on my Sunday morning walk,
I stand resting a moment beside
a ragged half-dead wild plum
in bloom, its perfume
a moment enclosing me,
and standing side by side
with the old broken blooming tree,
I almost understand,
I almost recognize as a friend
the great impertinence of beauty
that comes even to the dying,
even to the fallen, without reason
sweetening the air.

I walk on,
distracted by a letter accusing me
of distraction, which distracts me
only from the hundred things
that would otherwise distract me
from this whiteness, lightness,
sweetness in the air. The mind
is broken by the thousand
calling voices it is always too late
to answer, and that is why it yearns
for some hard task, life-long, longer
than life, to concentrate it
and make it whole.

But where is the all-welcoming,
all-consecrating Sabbath
that would do the same? Where
the quietness of the heart
and the eyes' clarity
that would be a friend's reply
to the white-blossoming plum tree?


~ Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir

What They Know

White like snow,
Yet they don’t know
We can still see where they hide
And although that may be a fact,
There is no justification
for carrying an innocent seal in a sack
Those seals may only have cries, not voices
However, we all make choices
So why must we kill pups,
And let their blood spread across the ice,
For a coat sold for a large price?
Those pups should be playing, developing bonds,
Discovering the world around them, and learning
For they are unsure of many things,
But if there is one thing they know,
It is fear


~ Gabriella Singh (age 12)

My friend Gabriella attended this year's Humane Society of the United States "Taking Action for Animals" conference in Washington D.C., and with Mikhaela Singh and Julia Worcester, participated in the first HSUS Student Summit. To help Gabriella help the fur seals, please go to the website of Humane Society International.

Photo: Nigel Barker

Estranged by distance, he relearns
The way to quiet not his own,
The light at rest on tree and stone,
The high leaves falling in their turns,

Spiraling through the air made gold
By their slow fall. Bright on the ground
They wait their darkening, commend
To coming light the light they hold.

His own long comedown from the air
Complete, safe home again, absence
Withdrawing from him tense by tense
In presence of the resting year,

Blessing and blessed in this result
Of times not blessed, now he has risen.
He walks in quiet beyond division
In surcease of his own tumult.

~ Wendell Berry, Sabbath Poems

Photo: Larry Gizinski

In memoriam, and in praise of "common" things ~ Sara Stein

A woman with a vision, into the past...

Noah's Garden, Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Backyards

Planting Noah's Garden, Further Adventures in Backyard Ecology

Noah's Children, Restoring the Ecology of Childhood

Conservation and restoration

Now though the season warms
The woods inherits harms
Of human enterprise.
Our making shakes the skies
And taints the atmosphere.
We have ourselves to fear.
We burn the world to live;
Our living blights the leaf.

A clamor high above
Entered the shadowed grove,
Withdrew, was still, and then
The water thrush began
The song that is a prayer,
A form made in the air,
That all who live here pray,
The Sabbath of our day.

May our kind live to breathe
Air worthy of the breath
Of all singers that sing
In joy of their making,
Light of the risen year,
Songs worthy of the ear
Of breathers worth their air,
Of workers worth their hire.

~ Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir

Photo: Chuck Tague

These photos, taken by Cathy Milani of the HSUS, show a flock of Canada geese, unable to fly because they are molting, being rounded up on the lawn of a condo, and then taken to a gas chamber in the back of a van.

Photos: Cathy Milani, The Humane Society of the United States

New York City Massacres Canada Geese... Who will Weep?

In what Quakers would surely call wrong relationship with the earth and fellow species, the city of New York, with the active involvement and assistance of the federal government including the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, plans to round up and kill every Canada goose living within seven miles of New York City's JFK and LaGuardia airports. See recent New York Times article about the disappearance of beloved geese from Brooklyn's Prospect Park.

Every morning and evening this summer, geese flew low over the Hudson river outside my windows to and from their favorite watery locations in the neighborhood. I haven't heard their quiet honkings and murmurings in weeks now, nor seen their little family groups, with goslings, along the riverbank below.

The capture of the geese in Prospect Park was timed to their molting, when they cannot fly.

The assault on tens of thousands of geese in the region began after a few Canadas were sucked into the engines of US Airways Flight 1549 in January 2009, forcing the plane to land on the Hudson River, fortunately with no loss of (human) life. The geese that collided with the airliner were migrating geese, not resident geese who remain in the city year-round.

Did you know that the now-prolific Canada goose was nearly extinct in the 1900s? They were brought to New York from the midwest in an effort to rebuild the population.

The NY Audubon Society has appalled supporters in its tepid endorsement of the "euthanasia" program. Wayne Pacelle of the Humane Society of the United States has been an outspoken critic.

For further HSUS information about the killing of Canada geese, and suggestions for making your voice heard, please see:

http://www.humanesociety.org/news/press_releases/2010/hsus_urges_halt_to_goose_killing_071410.html

http://www.humanesociety.org/animals/geese/qa/goose_roundup_faq.html

For a sense of what is lost, read Bernd Heinrich's The Geese of Beaver Bog... "Heinrich's lyric writing and attentive observations make the goose world come alive... A pure joy." Los Angeles Times

Photo: Mark Moran

Nature finds a way... welcome Canis latrans

Here is one of my more recent columns for Cub magazine, the Indian environmental magazine for kids published by my good friends at Sanctuary Asia in Mumbai:

Dear Cub kids,

My neighborhood is going to the dogs. Coyotes, to be precise. In the last few months, there have been many reports of coyote sightings in my leafy green neighborhood. What is a little amazing is that I live in New York City! We have predators again, and things feel just a little bit wilder… perhaps not quite so wild, though, as the Mumbaikers among you enjoy, with your leopards in Sanjay Gandhi National Park!

What is a coyote, you ask? I think the closest creature in your animal kingdom is the jackal. In fact, the coyote (Canis latrans) is also known as the American jackal or the prairie wolf. It is a species of canid (dog) ranging throughout North and Central America. Its cousin, the gray wolf, originated in Eurasia, but the coyote evolved in North America during the Pleistocene epoch 1.8 million years ago. Though coyotes continue to be persecuted as vermin, unlike the wolf, the coyote’s range has expanded despite human hostility. These adaptable dogs are moving into suburban and even urban areas with ease.

I wonder when a predatory species last lived in the area now occupied by bustling New York City? There have been occasional visits by wandering coyotes, but nothing like the recent influx of what may amount to a substantial pack. It’s so interesting to learn about the natural history of the area you live in, particularly if it’s an urban area that has changed drastically over time. A scientist named Eric Sanderson has researched what the island of Manhattan was like in 1609, in the days before the first ship bearing Europeans sailed into what is now New York harbor, and up the Hudson river west of Manhattan.

Dr. Sanderson learned that on the day the European explorers arrived (they were looking for a water route to China), Manhattan’s luxurious forests were home to many predators, including humans, coyotes, wolves, gray and red foxes, bobcats, lynxes, mountain lions, otters, minks, fishers, wolverines, short- and long-tailed weasels, martens, and black bears.

Of all this wealth of predatory creatures, only humans remain in New York City… humans, and now, coyotes.

Nearly every day, I go for a long walk around my neighborhood. It’s no accident that coyotes are being seen with increasing regularity. There are large wooded areas here, including swathes of not-too-disturbed forest right along the river. A few weeks ago, while walking my dog, I encountered a man who said he’d seen four coyotes together the previous morning. (My dog Sadie is a collie-shepherd mutt who looks quite a bit like a coyote herself… these days, she causes my fellow woods-walkers to stop dead in their tracks!) And a couple of days ago, as I was driving home along a quiet road bordering a stretch of forest, I saw a coyote dash just a few meters in front of my car. It ran into the forest through an opening in a fence. When I reached the opening I brought my car to a stop, hoping for a glimpse. Sure enough, there was the coyote – brown eyes, long, pointy nose, pointed ears, shaggy brown and cream coat, and bushy tail hanging down. I made clucking sounds and it turned and gazed at me for a moment. Contact.

Coyotes typically live in packs of six adults, yearlings and young, but tend to hunt in pairs. They eat small mammals, including voles, prairie dogs, rabbits, ground squirrels and mice, and ground-nesting birds. They prefer fresh meat but will eat carrion, and consume lots of fruits and vegetables in the fall and winter months. Part of their success is due to their ability to eat nearly anything available, including human rubbish and domestic pets. Their calls consist of high-pitched howls, yips, yelps and barks. A few years ago, I heard a small pack of coyotes howling near my sister’s farm in northern Vermont, and was struck by the wolf-like beauty of the sound.

Coyotes have moved into areas where wolves have been killed or forced out by humans, much the way leopards in India move into areas where tigers are absent. Like all predators, coyotes have played an important role in the stories and particularly the creation mythology of native peoples… sometimes appearing as wily “tricksters,” sometimes as soulful heroes.

There have been only two recorded fatalities in North America from coyote attacks. And yet, the coyote continues to be viewed by ranchers, the government, and many wary urban- and suburbanites, with disdain and suspicion. (The U.S. government routinely shoots, traps, and poisons 90,000 coyotes each year to “protect” livestock). In the mountainous region of Vermont where my sister lives, anyone can shoot a coyote, any time.

I can already sense a great deal of unease among my friends and neighbors about the presence of coyotes in our remote corner of the city.

I wish them well.

Your friend,

Jen

Sometimes... things just work out

Adopt an older dog today!

Light, leaf, foot, hand, and wing,
Such order as we know,
One household high and low,
And all the earth shall sing.

~ Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir

Famous Gulf of Mexico Walrus (Walrus Petroleumis)

If it weren't so sad, it'd be funny.

Photos & Quotes

"... If home is my destination on this pilgrimage, then hope is essential survival equipment--not the kind of hope that requires certain results, but a hope that can keep its shoulder to the wheel no matter what happens... No one can say for certain what the future will bring, regardless of how discouraging the current trends. That means there is always room for surprise and always room for hope. We have no idea yet what we are capable of achieving once we turn toward these challenges with our full hearts engaged. That story has yet to be written."

~ Kurt Hoelting, The Circumference of Home

"Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart... It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."

~ Vaclav Havel

Recommended reading

The Circumference of Home, One Man's Yearlong Quest
for a Radically Local Life
by Kurt Hoelting
Da Capo Press, 2010

"... climate change, arguably the biggest challenge ever to face the human family, will never be far from my thoughts and meditations throughout this coming year in circumference, even when the contexts of my adventures are deeply personal and local. If there is a hidden gift embedded in this crisis, it is this potent new motivation to reexamine our lives, to make changes in the direction of more balanced and sustainable living -- changes that we have resisted for too long. That our overall quality of life may actually benefit from this effort is a prospect often lost in the public rhetoric about anticipated hardship and self-sacrifice that we've long associated with such changes.

... the climate crisis may be our last, best chance for a broad-based realignment of values that can finally extend our ethical regard into the deepest heart of the living world."

review: "Kurt Hoelting--fisherman, carpenter, mountain climber, storyteller, and Zen adept--is well-equipped for this adventure. He emerges from his low-carbon year feeling more fit spiritually as well as physically, and more hopeful about the human future. Readers will also come away feeling hopeful about our capacity for living more deeply in place and more conservingly on the planet."

~ Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Conservationist Manifesto

"Conservation is not a goal but a never-ending process, one in which everyone has to be involved... By using all our wisdom, knowledge, passion, perseverance, dedication, and ever-lasting commitment, we can retain the beauty and health of our planet. After all, it is the only home we shall ever have."

~ George Schaller

The least bittern, Lxobrychus exilis, is a small, secretive wading bird, the smallest heron in the Americas.

"No peace which is not peace for all, no rest until all has been fulfilled."

~ Dag Hammarskjold

Pelecanus occidentalis (the brown pelican) in happier times (2006)

Top Photo: Tom Grey

For Julia

The starlings are singing!
You could call it singing.
At any rate, they are starlings.

~ James Schuyler

Photo: J.R. Compton

How is it that grief, rage, and a broken heart find comfort in poetry?

Salute

Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-
ing of one of each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field.

~James Schuyler, 1951

Photo: Mark Carlson

What will we do, if we destroy the grace of the world?

Light from Canada

A wonderful freshness, air
that billows like bedsheets
on a clothesline and the clouds
hang in a traffic jam: summer
heads home. Evangeline,
our light is scoured and Nova
Scotian and of a clarity that
opens up the huddled masses
of the stolid spruce so you
see them in their bristling
individuality. The other
day, walking among them, I
cast my gaze upon the ground
in hope of orchids and,
pendant, dead, a sharp shadow
in the shade, a branch gouged
and left me "scarred forever
'neath the eye." Not quite. Not
the cut, but the surprise, and
how, when her dress caught fire,
Longfellow's wife spun
into his arms and in the dying
of its flaring, died. The
irreparable, which changes
nothing that went before
though it ends it. Above the wash
and bark of rumpled water, a gull
falls down the wind to dine
on fish that swim up to do the same.

~James Schuyler, The Crystal Lithium, 1972

President Obama, put BP in receivership

Article on BP by Robert Reich

On November 11 2009, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced that the Brown Pelican, a species almost brought to extinction by the pesticide DDT, was removed from the list of threatened and endangered species under the Endangered Species Act because its populations had rebounded.

Dry but fascinating reading: The delisting under “Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; Removal of the Brown Pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis) from the Federal List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife”.

Obscenity

As bad as BP's spill in the Gulf of Mexico is, it is dwarfed by the daily invisible spill of carbon into the atmosphere, which has led to dangerous, increasing acidification of the oceans.

When will ordinary citizens demand an end?

Panthera New York Times Billboard from Panthera Cats on Vimeo.

On Friday, I observed a class of third graders learning about freshwater ecology at Greenwich Audubon. Is there anything more soothing than frogs and kids?

"We're trying to save the tigers..."

I wrote the following op-ed, in the form of a letter to President Obama, after an Earth Day revelation by Mrs. Obama...


Dear Mr. President:

At an Earth Day celebration at the White House on April 22nd, Mrs. Obama was asked whether there is an environmental issue of particular concern to the Obama family. This was her response:

You know, we’re big tiger-savers, because Malia’s one issue for her father is saving the tigers. So we talk about the tigers at least once a week and what he’s doing to save the tigers. He tells her he’s working on it and there are a lot of people who are thinking about it. He hasn’t come up with a sufficient answer yet, but he’s got a couple more years or so to fix this problem. But I think the Obama household, we’re trying to save the tigers.

Mr. President, knowing how devoted you are to your daughters, and to children all over the world, many of whom share Malia’s passion for tigers, I’d like to provide you with a few compelling reasons for sharing their concern, and some policy recommendations for tigers’ protection.

Why add tigers to the pressing issues on your plate? Malia is correct that they are in urgent need of “saving.” She also may know intuitively that the tiger is a metaphor for all of nature. The survival of its forest habitats across Asia is critical to efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

Experts believe there were approximately 100,000 wild tigers in 1900; as of this date, tiger numbers have dropped 95 percent. India, with the largest tiger population, may have no more than 1,000 cats. The animals are caught in the crosshairs of poaching, habitat loss, and human-animal conflict. Many experts believe that at the present rate of loss, tigers in the wild will be extinct within our lifetimes.

Our planet is in the midst of a crisis of biodiversity loss so significant that scientists call it the “Sixth Extinction Event,” with the important distinction that this spasm of species loss is the first to be instigated by human beings. Tigers are just one of many species at risk, but the IUCN (World Conservation Union) gives them its “most endangered” ranking. Why focus on saving tigers, when so many species are at risk? Not only because we have less time to save them than some species, but because we get more bang for the buck in protecting them. Tigers are an umbrella species, an apex predator in need of large territories for its survival. This means that in protecting the tiger, we protect vast numbers of plant and animal species within its domain.

What’s good for the planet is good for Homo sapiens. Put another way, it has become clear that human security and ecological security are synonomous. Tigers are a case in point: they need forests, clean water, and abundance of prey to survive. Human beings, too, cannot survive without a thriving natural environment. As the world gets smaller and we see that deforestation in India, or enormous carbon footprints in the United States adversely impact populations all over the globe, we see that protecting tiger forests benefits not only tigers and the ecosystems in which they reside, but ensures clean water sources on which human populations depend, and carbon-sequestering forests our planet needs.

Finally, the tiger, as Malia knows, is one of earth’s most magnificent and iconic species. It has played a role in human cultures since Homo sapiens and Panthera tigris began their long history together. The world and we humans would be the poorer without this remarkable creature. Though the U.S. is not a tiger-range state, the tiger should not just be the concern of those countries in which it resides. The tiger is a global citizen, beloved by people all over the world. As an “indicator” species whose decline signals ecological trends dangerous to humans, the tiger deserves concerted attention.

Mr. President, there is a great deal that you can do to help bring tigers back from the brink. First, you can use your office as a “bully pulpit” from which to educate and encourage citizens and leaders. During your upcoming trip to India, I would urge you, as President Clinton did, to visit a protected area inhabited by tigers, and discuss with India’s leaders, (including Minister of Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh, who is eager to halt the slide toward oblivion of India’s national animal), ways in which the United States can assist in protecting the species.

Second, your domestic and international leadership on climate change are urgently needed and will significantly improve the tiger’s (and our own) chances of survival. Tigers and a stable climate share a common need: healthy forests. The Sundarbans forest, an enormous tidal region shared by India and Bangladesh, contains the world’s highest-density tiger population, and is vulnerable to rising seas. Your active support for the U.N.’s Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD) will aid the tiger and target carbon emissions in one fell swoop. Economists estimate that with financial assistance from the United States and other developed countries, tens of millions of people in India alone could be put to work conserving the carbon-sequestering forests in which tigers roam.

Third, most of the poaching pressure on tigers stems from the illegal wildlife trade, third in line behind international crime networks that traffic in weapons and narcotics. You can use the power of your office to encourage strict compliance with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

Finally, the World Bank, through its “Global Tiger Initiative,” has taken a recent interest in promoting tiger conservation. The Bank and other international development agencies, however, have done vast harm to tiger habitats with their funding of coal mines, dams, monocultures and other ecologically destructive projects. Your leadership could be critical in helping to create a new vision of human development and security that entails protection rather than heedless exploitation of natural resources.

I hope that Malia will maintain her thoughtful pressure on behalf of tigers. Like so many wise young people around the world, she understands that environmentalism and species protection are human and planetary requirements, not “special interests.” Each day, many children like Malia are joined by adults around the world in the fight to protect the tiger and its habitat. Because of their commitment, and with your help, the tiger will continue to roam forests from Siberia to Sumatra to India, long into our children’s children’s future.

by Jennifer Scarlott, Director of International Conservation Initiatives for Sanctuary Asia, an environment and wildlife magazine and NGO based in Mumbai, India. Sanctuary runs an India-wide education and advocacy program called “Kids for Tigers.”

To Julia

The pasture, bleached and cold two weeks ago
Begins to grow in the spring light and rain;
The new grass trembles under the wind's flow.
The flock, barn-weary, comes to it again,
New to the lambs, a place their mothers know,
Welcoming, bright, and savory in its green,
So fully does the time recover it.
Nibbles of pleasure go all over it.

~ Wendell Berry, (Poem III, 1982), A Timbered Choir

May 4, 1970 - May 4, 2010

On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on Kent State University students protesting the war in Vietnam, and the expansion of the war into Cambodia, killing four students, Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder, and wounding nine. Ten days later, on May 14, two students, James Earl Green and Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, were murdered and twelve wounded by police at Jackson State College in Mississippi, under similar circumstances.

There have never been any criminal convictions in the Kent State murders.

Ronald Reagan, governor of California, regarding student protests against the war in Vietnam, several weeks before May 4, 1970: "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with."

Ohio Governor James Rhodes, in reference to student protesters, at a press conference at Kent State, May 3, 1970: "They're worse than the brownshirts and the communist element and also the night riders and vigilantes. They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America. I think that we're up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America."

After the massacre at Kent State, President Nixon asked H. R. Haldeman to consider implementing the Huston Plan, which would have used illegal procedures to gather information on the leaders of the anti-war movement. Named for White House aide Tom Charles Huston, the Plan, requested by Nixon in his desire for more coordination of domestic intelligence regarding "left-wing radicals" and the anti-war movement in general, called for domestic burglary, illegal electronic surveillance, and opening of mail of domestic "radicals." At one time it also called for the creation of camps in Western states where anti-war protesters would be detained. Details of the 43-page report and outline of proposed security operations came to light during the 1973 Senate Watergate hearings.

Dean Kahler was a freshman at Kent State in May 1970. During the May 4 demonstration, he lay on the ground when he heard firing, but was shot in the back. He has been paralyzed since that time. "The first card that I opened up in the intensive care unit was a very nice-looking card," recalls Dean Kahler, a high school history teacher. "But the note in it said, 'Dear communist hippie radical, I hope by the time you read this, you are dead.' "

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Ohio Kent State project records for 1978 retrial of Krause vs. Rhodes

Provenance: The ACLU of Ohio Kent State Project records appear to have been promised to Yale just after the 1979 settlement. The attorneys and the families were concerned that if the materials were deposited with a quasi-governmental organization such as the Ohio Historical Society, they might be mishandled or manipulated, thus endangering the historical record -- so great was the distrust of government officials after the protracted legal battle for justice.

Photos & Quotes

Trees are earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven..

~ Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies, 1928

Thanks to Public Employees for Environmental Reponsibility (PEER) for their courageous work on behalf of the environment, and against cynicism in public service.

Fed up

The following is a post to my Sanctuary Asia blog, 5/4/10.

For the thirteenth straight day, BP's blown-out oil well in the Gulf of Mexico spews out a heartbreaking 200,000 gallons of oil PER DAY. As if this stark fact weren't bad enough, the oil slick, which is a prominent feature in photographs taken by satellites in space, is spreading at peak bird migration and sea turtle nesting time in the Gulf.

There are times when it is difficult not to think of our species as a planetary scourge, as evolution gone horribly awry.

Last fall, the U.S. National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA is the nation's lead ocean resource agency) warned the U.S. Department of Interior, which regulates offshore oil drilling, that it was dramatically underestimating the frequency of offshore oil spills, and dangerously understating the risk and impacts of a major spill. The warnings were in response to a draft of the Obama administration's offshore drilling plans, and were published online by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a whistle-blowing group.

Brushing aside his own agency's warnings, the President announced on March 31, 2010 that he would open vast areas of American coastal waters to offshore drilling. His announcement was vintage Obama: he discussed the importance of moving away from fossil-fuel dependence and toward clean energy, at the same time scolding "environmentalists" for their anti-oil extremism.

"Ultimately, we need to move beyond the tired debates of the left and the right, between business leaders and environmentalists, between those who would claim drilling is a cure all and those who would claim it has no place. "

This equally tiring argument is a favored refrain of this President. On issue after issue, and invariably where the environment is concerned, Mr. Obama proclaims the value of steering a middle path, a value he seems to cherish above taking strong policy stands that will steer the country in the right direction. But the moment after he urges a measured middle course, he sides with business interests and/or the GOP, purportedly in the interest of placating the right so as to make gains for the left, while never fighting a single battle for progressive interests.

A few days after his announcement, the President asserted that offshore drilling poses little environmental risk: "Oil rigs today generally don't cause spills. They are technologically very advanced."

I'd like to believe he regrets those words today.

Meanwhile, during the campaign, he declared:

“Now believe me, if I thought there was any evidence at all that drilling could save people money to fill up their gas tanks by this summer or next year or even the next few years, I would consider it. But it won’t. And John McCain knows that. The fact is that Senator McCain’s decision to team up with George Bush on offshore drilling violates the bipartisan concensus that we’ve had for decades that has protected Florida’s pristine coastline from drilling. This is a proposal that would only worsen our addiction to oil and put off needed investments in clean, renewable energy."

On the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, before the cataclysm in the Gulf, Mrs. Obama declared her daughter Malia's concern for wild tigers to a reporter who asked about the Obama family's interest in the environment. Somewhere else at the White House, the President was having the following exchange with Phil Radford, executive director of Greenpeace, about the Administration's declaration of support for lifting the 35-year moratorium on commercial whaling:

The President walked person to person, saying hello, as advocate after advocate threw him softball questions. I shook the President’s hand, and said: “Mr. President, I am Phil Radford from Greenpeace. We are concerned that your administration is overturning the ban on whaling.”

“I know” he replied. “I’ve seen your ads in the papers.”

“Great,” I replied. “What is your plan to change your administration’s position?

“Look,” said the president, sounding like his Saturday Night Live doppelganger, “I love whales. I will do what I can to protect them.”

“Will you reverse your administration’s position?” I asked.

The President responded, “Oh come on, don’t lobby me here right now…”

I’d made our point. There was no point in lobbying the President more. After all, Earth Day should remind us that lobbying played a minor role in securing the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and ban on commercial whaling. People taking action made the difference. The 200 million people in the streets on the first Earth Day are who brought about the change. We’ll be in the streets again until President Obama lives up to his written promise to end commercial whaling.

Here's the thing: President Obama is living in the past, when environmentalism was considered a "special interest," a pesky set of issues presidents and Congress were "lobbied" about, just as they are lobbied to support National Peach Day. I've got news for you, Mr. President: "environmentalism" is survival. Not just for whales, which we're glad to hear you love. For Homo sapiens, and the planet as a whole. Radford is right. People in every country must turn up the heat, and make politicians so uncomfortable that they finally see the light.

Unspeakable

350.org -- "One million strong against offshore drilling" Facebook page

350.org -- Letter to President Obama
requesting permanent ban on offshore drilling

National Wildlife Federation -- Letter to Obama requesting protection for Louisiana wetlands

Natural Resources Defense Council -- Background information on offshore drilling, but NRDC is only calling for a "time-out" on drilling, rather than 350.org's permanent ban

Greenpeace -- Information for volunteers and much more

Center for Biological Diversity -- Letter to Obama to ban Arctic drilling