LA Weekly

July 18, 2007 — Britain is an island thanks to a megaflood that dug out the English Channel, according to a study released on Wednesday by the journal Nature.

The catastrophic flood, one of the mightiest in recorded history, occurred between 450,000 and 200,000 years ago and created a barrier to human migration to Britain that probably lasted for tens of thousands of years.

That's Discovery magazine for you, via Metafilter -- where there's an interesting and sometimes even funny discussion of England's flooding and its political implications going on.

To wit:

I don't think avoiding a twice-per-century natural disaster does matter to most people. The cost of the occasional catastrophic flooding is more than paid for by the benefit of living next to a beautiful river for most of your life. posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 5:37 AM on July 23

Hoverboards: Writing from New Orleans, may I respectfully suggest that anyone who feels this way is an idiot.
posted by localroger at 5:53 AM on July 23

Last night, I decided to give up the terms "global warming" and "climate change" because neither describes accurately what's going on. I now prefer "climate chaos." (Got that from Simone.)

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A thunder and lightning storm moved quickly through the Eastern Sierra Friday afternoon, July 6, 2007, igniting approximately 10 fires. As of Thursday,evening the two remaining fires being managed as the Inyo Complex include the Sage Fire in Big Pine Canyon and the Seven/Oak Fires west and north of Independence, on both sides of US 395. These fires are now 80% contained.

Inciweb is back up for all your fire-obsessing needs, and the Inyo Fire has settled down (the human-caused Zaca Fire in the Los Padres, however, is only 37 percent contained).

Bruce Willey took some astonishing photographs while the fire raged through his neighborhood near Owens Valley, which he's given me permission to post.

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Sensing a lack of enthusiasm from legislators on the state Senate's local governments' committee, Assemblymember Lloyd Levine withdrew his mandatory spay-neuter bill this morning. But read this:

In a last-ditch attempt to keep his bill alive Wednesday, Levine said he would be willing to narrow its scope to remove its statewide mandate.

The proposed compromise would have required spaying or neutering only after a dog or cat were brought to the attention of animal control officers for being vicious, improperly kept or some other offense.

That's exactly what both Levine and bill-sponsor Judie Mancuso told me over the phone would be the most common use of AB 1634 -- "it's a tool for law enforcement," both said. Now the whole idea is scrapped for the time being.

The story from Sacramento is here in the Bee.

Meanwhile, my dog Molly the Pit Bull's arthritis is really acting up -- probably because her humans got so stressed about all those hate letters and blog comments. She's very sensitive.

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"We need to declare a war in this country, but the war has to be on oil, and the war has to be on coal."

That's venture capitalist Vinod Khosla for you. Who's Vinod Khosla, you ask?

Perhaps more than any one venture capitalist, Vinod Khosla is leading the clean tech revolution by personally investing over $100 million in companies that could dramatically reduce the world's carbon footprint.

Steve Westly sent me this. Khosla spoke at a dinner held to honor green business leaders (including Westly, Phil Angelides and Khosla) put on by the California League of Conservation Voters.

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The fire has now burned into the San Rafael wilderness, with the north flank of the fire currently burning in heavy, 40 year old fuels with a high dead to live ratio. Fuel moisture levels are extremely low and at a point which is usually not seen until late in the summer.

I know, I know, it's the natural fire cycle and all, but I feel like every wilderness I've ever hiked or camped is going up in fire. In the San Rafael Wilderness I spent a whole spring week hiking high on precipitous trails bordering rushing creeks, terrified (I hate heights), but thrilled at the solitude so close to the big city of Santa Barbara; Tahoe, the Onion Valley in the Eastern Sierra -- where I was once caught in a blizzard on June 28 (must've been 1996, or '95), shivered all night in the tent with my pit/lab mix Buster and my friend Lisa, and awoke the classic crystalline blue skies and virgin snow ... on June 28 ...

Inciweb -- typically the best place to keep track of fire progress -- seems to be down, but if you want to watch what's burning in the Western U.S. I recommend the fire viewer maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration. Click here. A bit kludgy, but you can play around with it, zooming in on the smoke plume that stretches from California to the southern tip of the Minnesota border; from the southern edge of Montana to the Mexican border; you can also look survey the whole U.S. map of hotspots, including a number in the Midwest and South.

For California fires only (at the moment the Zaca fire in the Los Padres and the Big Pine Sage Fire in the Eastern Sierras), there's up-to-date information available from the California Department of Forestry here.

The good news is that the Sierra fires were caused by lightning. The bad news is that the Zaca fire was not.

Bruce Willey of the Mountain Project has some amazing photos of the now-quieted Big Pine fire here. (I have asked permission to post one or two here.)

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On Thursday I was accused of being a libertarian because I wrote too sympathetically about dog breeders; today I find myself agreeing with a "scholar" from the oil-industry funded Cato Institute, the libertarian think-tank that has since time immemorial denied the existence of climate change. O what's become of me!:

"The legacy of Live Earth will be one of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide and decreasing wealth," says Cato's Patrick Michaels, "wealth that could be saved and used to invest in the technologies of the future, rather than being frittered away in a futile attempt to change the earth's temperature today."

I guess official denial of the warming planet no longer squares with current events -- droughts, weather patterns, melting ice caps and such -- so the Cato folks have decided to apply their petroleum and pollution industry-donated dollars to less hoary arguments, such as suggesting that Live Earth [link: cool Australian blog] really has no point.

Well, it's an easy target, and yeah, they're kind of right. I mean, even the unassailable Bob Geldorf is a little nonplussed about the the seven-continent concerts Al Gore has organized for 7-7-7:

"I hope they're a success," De Volkskrant newspaper quoted Geldof as saying in an interview.

"But why is (Gore) actually organizing them? To make us aware of the greenhouse effect? Everybody's known about that problem for years. We are all (expletive) conscious of global warming," he said.

Still and all, there are some good things happening this weekend. For instance, you can participate in Environment California's "Phone Jam" by calling your congressperson and demanding the U.S. adhere to a 20 percent renewable energy standard by 2020, which would "reduce global warming by 40 percent." (How do they arrive at these statistics?). Click here to let them know you're calling.

You can also bike or take public transporation, please, to local events in your neighborhood, where people will be gathering around television sets and the like to watch the shows on MSNBC, or just having parties.

Up in the Hollywood Hills, there's a party at the top of Glen Green St. called "Little Hot!", featuring a lineup of bands and films from 4 p.m. to 11 p.m., all to benefit the local civic-environmental group TreePeople. Organizer Angela Gygi was rushing off to set up the porta-potties when I spoke to her this morning, so you know it's gonna be a good one. You can see the lineup here.

In Lincoln Heights, the Green Acres Medicinal Urban Farm will host the opening celebration of a "new aesthetic medicinal urban farm named after the famous Eddy Albert's GREEN ACRES TV show." So, they can't spell the guy's name, but they do have land donated by Eddie's friends, Ralph and Shirley Fierro, and it does seem like it could be interesting. You know, different.

In Santa Monica, "a community of environmental activists, social rights defenders, yoga practitioners, spiritual aware individuals and artists" will host a Live Earth concert viewing at Bonsorte Studios beginning at 7 p.m. Bring food; it's potluck. Details, details.

And here's the Wikipedia page for the lone band, Nunatak, playing Antarctica.

Plus, there's Seam's "Earth day" party, a bash at J's house and thousands of MoveOn House Parties associated with Live Earth, where people will no doubt be talking about unplugging their cell phone chargers while not in use and switching to fluorescent lightbulbs. That's all good, but it doesn't obviate the desperate need for an immediate, global, political solution to the carbon problem, including but not limited to mandatory caps on carbon dioxide emissions.

Which brings us back to Bob: ""I would only organize [Live Earth] if I could go on stage and announce concrete environmental measures from the American presidential candidates, Congress or major corporations," he said.

In other words, said MoveOn's Eli Pariser, “For us, it’s not just about new light bulbs, it’s about new leadership.”

(For the record, I am a vegetarian, not a libertarian, except on the matters of reproductive choice and marijuana, which I sadly can't tolerate but believe should be legal, if only for simplicity's sake. But I believe the guys and gals who sign my paycheck these days have a libertarian bent, so maybe they're taking over my brain.)

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So, I'm, like, getting a lot of mail today. Most of it's hate mail, and nearly all of it in response to my news piece this week about the “California Healthy Pets Act,” a mandatory spay-neuter bill on its way to the state Senate business committee on Monday local governments committee on Wednesday.

Many of the letters contain long lines of capital letters (as in "THIS IS A SICK JOKE!!!" and "YOU SUCK YOU NAZI!"). Many others contain pictures: sad dog eyes staring through kennel bars and lovely little pit bull terriers covered with sores and poodle-mixes with clotted fur.

A favorite in this genre is the skinny Chihuahua, for whom I, now, am personally responsible, having dared to write about the people who oppose the only possible means by which someone might save this poor little Chihuahua’s life.

The letter writers want me to see these pictures and recant. They want me to go back and say the Earthdoggers were wrong, and their terriers should all be altered at knifepoint.

Instead, they have made me ever more certain that while the intent of AB 1634 may be right -- no one wants more dogs and cats killed in shelters -- the approach is deeply flawed. The bill may have been crafted to reduce the population of unwanted pets in our shelters, but it may end up making it worse.

Many of the people who write in seem to suggest that my story – now known among my colleagues as “the dog-balls story” – proves that I have never been to a pound or shelter, have never seen a stray dog and deny the pet overpopulation problem in California. But the pit bull terrier mix currently snoring in her bed in the middle of the floor, nearly drowning out the radio, attests otherwise. (Molly, is my second. My first pound pit, Buster, was immortalized in the pages of the LA Weekly 10 years ago after he was killed by a rattlesnake.)

If Molly isn't enough, there is also Thomas the Terrier, whom I adopted from a rescue organization (the wonderful Pet Haven in Murrieta, California – you can see his ad still up here). And then there's the two cats, Bean and Flower, to whom a friend and I devoted an entire month bringing to life after they were born in my backyard and abandoned by their feral mother the morning of their first day on earth. They now stay very busy indoors with such important collaborative ventures as dragging the dogs’ water dish across the kitchen.

I have been to the shelters and pounds and seen the stray dogs and cats on the street. I do not dispute that Los Angeles has a problem with unwanted animals, and that the official policy of killing them is horrible. But I also defend the right of the responsible breeder to, as one letter writer, Jane, put it, to “embark upon an unending quest for perfection in their breed of choice.”

Jane, however, does not defend this right. Jane, who wrote me only the least hysterical and most respectful of the self-described animal-lover letters, finds responsible breeders in pursuit of a breed standard “to be scarily reminiscent of supporters of the eugenics movement,” and adds, “thankfully, those are in a minority.”

Thankfully? In other words, Jane implies, thankfully, most breeders don’t give a damn whether their dogs are bred so small they have collapsing tracheas, or so big their hips degenerate, or from such limited gene pools they pass on genetic skin, eye, joint and bowel problems. Thankfully, says Jane, most breeders aren’t a “quest for perfection,” they’re just randomly breeding whichever cute bitch comes in with whatever stud dog they can get of the same breed, just so they can crank out a big litter of puppies to sell.

Thankfully, then, the pet stores with their huge political lobby behind them have plenty of dogs and cats with which to stock their sorry shelves, because most breeders can’t be bothered working diligently for a decade to breed dogs to an agreed-upon standard for health and temperament.

And that’s how we get the sick dogs, the biting dogs and the endlessly whining, overbred creatures who end up in our shelters, along with all the millions of poodle mixes that seemed like such a good idea and yet, when their new owners realize the dogs are sick, aggressive, compulsively itchy or crazy, end up in the pound.

No doubt, Jane doesn’t like the word “eugenics” (from the Greek word for “well born”) because it reminds her of Nazis. But the Nazis also believed in forced sterilization. The anti-AB 1634 side, equally rabid and playing fast with the facts, alludes to Nazis, too. So you see how far that gets you. We're talking dogs here, folks. They can't make decisions about how they're bred. Eugenics doesn't apply.

Many of the aggrieved breeders indeed fail to acknowledge that Assemblymember Lloyd Levine's proposed state spay-neuter bill makes allowances for purebred and mixed breed working dogs. But the proposed law also leans in favor of large, professional breeders, not the small, breed-club aficionado. Many of the people fighting so hard to get it passed have no interest in responsible breeders, and their misguided message is creating confusion in miscommunication among animal lovers that can do nothing to help our shared cause – to reduce the number of suffering pets that end up in our shelters, public or private.

We will not get anywhere controlling the unwanted pet population if we deny all of humanity the beauty of a good hunting dog, or a tenacious rat-catcher, or a herder or a heeler or a sled-pulling Huskie or a Newfoundland who rescues little children from the water. To suggest that the woman who runs the training group I belong to and raises Keeshonden, the Brodericks of Duffy's Cavern and their Cairn Terriers and my friend who raises Rottweilers as therapy dogs are populating shelters is to obdurately ignore the truth. These people are not the enemies of animal lovers. We should have them on our side.

But we don't. Because the message that's getting out is one in which the breeders who consciously work to breed good dogs are evil people who ought to be confined to little cages munching uncooked tempeh for dinner. And that will only keep the pet stores in oats, with all those democratically bred dogs.

(Oh, and by the way, the Chihuahua above is available at Perfect Pet Rescue. The American Staffordshire "Pit" Bull Terrier with the burned back, I'm told, is at the South Los Angeles Shelter. Please somebody go get them, or I might have to.)

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Over at China Dialogue, where -- coolest of cool things -- your comments will be posted in both English and Chinese, Sam Geall, smartly asks the question that's been nagging all of us Live Earth cynics (i.e., those of us who don't live in one of those cities where the concerts are): What's the point? I mean, is staging seven hugely consumptive rock concerts on seven continents, complete with stars too big-name to fly on regularly scheduled Virgin Airways flights, and instead waft in on private jets? Think of the lights, the (bottled) water, the meals, the staff, the trucking in of equipment, staging, massage therapists, duct tape, swag, promotional t-shirts (made in China)! Live Earth isn't raising money for a cause; it's not a shining example of a new, carb0n-lean model of production aesthetics (although its producers do promise a "sustainable" show -- whatever that means). It's just a bunch of rock concerts staged to get attention. Leaving aside attention-getters like the world's weird weather, the melting of Greenland ice sheets and drowning polar bears, can a rock concert really be that green?

 Here's how Geall gripes about it:

[C]an you really raise awareness with a lavish global event that is itself a massive act of consumption, and when all the people who are leading it have a personal carbon footprint many times that of the average citizen, let alone the poorest?

According to an estimate commissioned by the BBC, Madonna emits more carbon each year than 100 average Britons – or more than 300 average Chinese. Add to that what the rock-stars’ fans emit travelling around to follow their idols (a US blogger picked up on one dedicated follower of antipodean soft-rockers Crowded House, who announced, without irony, that he is “travelling all the way around the world from Scotland to Sydney to see Crowded House.”)

It's worth reading the whole piece, including the little nugget about Alive Earth, the counter-concert to be held exclusively online (all those computers, though, running on coal . . . there's no way to win). It's especially worth reading so you can write a comment that will be shared with all those readers in China. To me, that's even better than watching Madonna (love her though I do), rock against carbon.

(More about that bottled water -- the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people -- to come).

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