LA Weekly

Studies have shown that methamphetamine is hard on the brain. You do it once, twice -- soon, you can't remember where you were when you did it, or who you were with; you can't even remember where you got the stuff. For some people it's even worse -- for some people, even thinking about methamphetamine wipes the memory card clean. For them, just planning a whole day devoted to the awareness of the meth scourge makes it impossible to recall the long stretches of time before and after.

From this morning's interrogation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales by Senator Jeff Sessions (Republican from Alabama, lest you think this is a partisan issue):

Sessions: [Y]ou said I don't recall being involved in deliberations regarding whether a United States Attorney should or should not be asked to resign . . . Mr. Sampson had testified that there was a meeting where this was discussed in some detail and that you were present. Do you recall that meeting and where it took place?

Gonzales: Senator, I have searched my memory. I have no recollection of the meeting. My schedule shows that meeting for nine o'clock on November 27, but I have no recollection of that meeting....

Sessions: Well, do you recall who Mr. Sampson said was present along with you?

Gonzales: Senator, I recall looking at the documentation on the calendar who would be there. . . . I have no memory of this, but I think the calendar shows that the invitees were the deputy attorney general, the principal associate attorney general Mr. Will Moschella, Kyle Sampson chief of staff, Mike Battle the executive director of executive office of the attorney general, Monica Goodling and myself.
...

Sessions: Mr. Sampson seemed to indicate that he understood it was a momentous decision and there would probably be political backlash. . . . You don't recall any of that?

Gonzales: Believe me, I have searched my mind for what I remember about this meeting... At some point Mr. Sampson presented to me the recommendations. At some point I understood what the implementation plan was. But I don't recall the contents of this meeting, Senator.

Sessions: I'm worried about it. Mr. Battle who was there thought you were there, and he thought you were there most of the time. Do you dispute Mr. Battle?

Gonzales: Sometimes people's recollections are different. I have no reason to doubt Mr. Battle's testimony.

Sessions: I have concerns about your recollection, really. It was not that long ago, it was an important issue, and that's troubling to me, I gotta tell you . . .

Gonzales: I went back and looked at my calendar for that week, I traveled to Mexico for the inauguration of the new president. We had National Meth Awareness Day . . . there were a lot of other weighty issues and matters that we were dealing with that week.

Yeah, that's right. National Meth Awareness Day, November 30 -- three days after the meeting about which Gonzales has searched his memory and come up empty. Firing U.S. Attorneys for not performing the president's frog march, that's all in a forgettable day's work. But National Meth Awareness Day? That's big. Memorable, even.

Did you know that " A fairly common hallucination experienced by meth users is the so-called crank bug"? I didn't. That's what I got from the page Gonzales and crew evidently worked so hard on that he totally forgot he'd participated in a detailed meeting about which U.S. Attorneys would be losing their jobs.

I know, it's Earth Day and all. But I thought that maybe what I heard this morning explains why the attorney general allowed the Justice Department's former top environmental prosecutor to sign soggy Superfund cleanup deals with ConocoPhillips after she's just bought a million-dollar home with the company's top lobbyist; why he targeted plain-old saboteurs as "terrorists" on the grounds that they were acting in the name of the environment; and why federal prosecutions of environmental crimes have fallen to a new all-time low. The AG had meth on the brain.

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Under Saturday's dramatically blustery skies, 98 people hiked up to a peak above the Observatory in Griffith Park to commemorate StepItUp '07, the day author and environmentalist Bill McKibben set aside for a countrywide day of actions in defense of the climate (the day's slogan: "Cut carbon 80 percent by 2050!").

Wait -- make that 98 people, four "be-stilted clowns" (as organizer David Newsom called them), former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Francis DellaVecchia, and his press corps -- me.

Clowns from left to right: Jesster (getting fueled up), Noah Veil (with the toy gas tank and nozzle), Mondo and a guy named John Pedone. Francis is holding down the right-hand side of the banner, and that's me holding down the left-hand corner with my recently rescued Cairn Terrier.

As I had driven all the way from Santa Monica, where a whole carnival of climate-defenders was holding forth on the promenade, I missed the official departure of the hikers. So did Francis, who drove up in his cornflower-blue Prius at the very moment I was parking my biodiesel bug. While the two of us walked up the trail together in the hopes of catching the whole crew, I took the opportunity to bitch about everything that was bugging me about the day (see earlier post). I had heard, for instance, that somebody had planned to melt a 100-pound block of ice on Hollywood Boulevard. How much refrigeration, water and gas would that stunt take?

Francis made the point that McKibben had begun the movement with just six college students, and they never imagined it would grow into 1,400-some separate actions around the country. They couldn't control the message in every single one. I argued that hardly anyone beyond the participants even knew the events were happening. My New York friends, not environmentalists but not unenlightened, either, had heard nothing about the sea of blue-clad people gathering at Battery Park to show how high the sea would rise if the Arctic ice continues to melt. Francis insisted that it was enough for people to get together and seed an event that will only get bigger next year.

And maybe he's right.

We never caught the crowd. We took a few wrong turns and missed their shortcuts. But I think we did pretty well by ourselves stumbling upon the clowns, who were also late and falling behind -- it's a challenge to cover the rocky terrain of the eastern Santa Monica Mountains in stilts, even if, like Jesster, you've been walking on stilts for 10 years (I first met her, on stilts, at Burning Man in the year 2000).

Francis talked about how the stuff we'd all been talking about five years ago was finally moving out of the talking stage; we discussed the possibility of a sustainably powered nightclub. We mulled over options the city of Los Angeles has for dealing with its stormwater runoff. ("Is it really a choice between backed up sewers and polluting the ocean?" Francis wanted to know.) Jesster and I talked about where to get better environmental news (I should have mentioned TreeHugger and Grist). People saw us and asked what was going on. We told them. Never underestimate the power of four stiltwalkers where you don't expect to see stiltwalkers. Especially stiltwalkers wearing cars (with bumperstickers: "Don't Fry Our Planet in Oil!")

Francis even helped carry John's truck (I tried, but I was too short).

We did eventually make it to the top of the peak (Dante's View) where the first photo here was taken some time after the crowd had left. In the end, Francis said he could "pretty much guarantee that we've had the best Step It Up experience of just about anyone in the country," and I couldn't dismiss that as just more of Francis' tenacious optimism. I agreed. A bunch of people with ideas got out and talked, bickered, laughed and basically reaffirmed our intentions. A small thing, maybe, but not a trivial one.

I hope that's what went on in other places, too (click on that link and look at the photos -- it'll make you giddy). I think it did. So I withdraw at least some of my niggling criticism of the day (I do hope that block of ice thing was just a rumor, though). We did something fun, and it happened to be something that mattered. Now that's the way to change the world.

(Photo credits: David Newsom, first and last; Francis with the car -- me.)

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Last Wednesday I went to see Tom Curwen (formerly the LA Times Outdoor section editor, now an "editor at large") interview Bill McKibben (author, activist, teacher, etc.) about the latter's new book Deep Economy. I was reminded of that bumpersticker saw once that I've always wanted: "Use it up, Wear it out, Make it do or Do without," and I was deeply moved by McKibben's story of how he started so small with StepItUp, the anti-global warming campaign that has now spawned all the protest marches, events and stunts happening this Saturday. And I got to thinking about climate change.

It's fast become true that climate change is the only environmental story worth reporting. It takes over every debate; it crops up in every political platform. The naysayers have quieted down, the entrepreneurs and corporate bigshots are taking over to solve the problem. And I worry -- especially after hearing Schwarzenegger defend his Hummers in his Georgetown University speech yesterday ("Make it sexy," he says. Yeah, yeah, I said that months ago), that the conversation has shifted away from examining the way we live to figuring out how to live exactly as we do, only with less carbon.

Richard Branson offers $25 million to the inventor who can eat carbon out of the atmosphere (don't burn less, just eat it up!). California's governor claims he'll run his Hummers on hydrogen (fat chance). Bush says he'll save the world with ethanol (hardly makes a dent in the carbon load, but okay . . . ) We're looking at ways to maintain the status quo and still stop the planet from warming.

But I submit it can't be done, and not just because the nanorobots to chew up our atmospheric CO2 Branson imagines are too far off to solve the problem, and not just because we have many miles to travel before we find the entrance ramp to that "Hydrogen Highway." We can't save the planet without changing our way of living because climate change is not the problem. Climate change is a symptom of the problem. Climate change is air pollution, and our pollution troubles don't begin and end with carbon.

That said, by all means go out and join some event on Saturday. There's so much cool stuff I can't begin to list it all, but my favorites include the sea of blue people that will ring New York City (to demonstrate sea-level rise), the hundred-pound block of ice that's supposed to melt on Hollywood Boulevard and a monster hike in Griffith Park called the "LA Global Warming Smack Down." (More stuff is listed on the StepItUp07 Web site.)

But I still hope the discussion moves from climate to, you know, the whole Koyaanisquatsi ball of wax (forgive the mispelling -- if I get hung up on it, I will never blog again).

In the meantime, if anyone knows where I can get that bumpersticker, let me know.

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