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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us November 11, 2005 I'll Shut Up — Right After This The future doesn't look so bright A three-day blow has set in, long enough for people to wonder and comment on how unusual it is. Fires are set in the fireplace, music put on, mulled wine quaffed, this after the daily hike up the Loop and down the ridge, stopping to sit on our little stumps overlooking the watershed. The falling water sounds to the ear as it looks to the eye, a rustling gray curtain. We sit there till we lose all our judgments about it — nasty day, foul weather, hope it ends soon. John Darling But it’s not ending. And one is put in mind of the comments of Angus Duncan, chief of Bonneville Environmental Foundation, at one of the university’s fascinating series on the environment, sustainability, global warming and the impact on society. It’s going to get a lot wetter, with a lot more falling as rain, not snow, so there won’t be as much water from snowpack in summer and farmers will be competing even more with salmon, who need it to spawn at that time. He apologizes for standing up there delivering “a list of dismal trends” whose solutions are like forcing down high-fiber cereal that’s good for you but so boring you soon give it up. Everyone laughs. They used to be in the future, all these dismal trends, but now they’re starting to be in our face, like Katrina. Ah, but she’s in the Gulf, not here. That’s another piece of human nature, he says, the belief that the bad stuff happens somewhere else, to poorer people, like in Pakistan with 73,000 dead, the equivalent of 24 Trade Tower attacks, or the tsunami with a quarter million killed, which is like 9/11 times 83. With global warming, Duncan says, there’ll be bigger Pacific storms with surges going into our coastal cities, right here in Oregon. In fact, he adds, “global warming will overwhelm every problem we have and threaten the livability of the planet.” This Duncan is not the bearded guy from your local environmental group with a forest name, like River, who blocks bulldozers in wilderness areas. This is the suit-wearing man from Bonneville, you know, the power people, the ones who dammed the Columbia and make our lights turn on in Ashland. So I ask him, look, I’m tired of listening to excitable, angry local Chicken Littles who guarantee me the sky is falling and we’re running out of oil and will be out there like Scarlett O’Hara digging that last miserable carrot out of the ground and swearing, “As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again!” So, Angus, will we go hungry? Is the oil running out? Yes, but what no one wants to hear is that we have immense gobs of easily gasified or liquefied coal, you know, that dirty black stuff you get by strip-mining and which spews sulphur dioxide in the air, causing acid rain, birth defects and dead rivers. Well, we wouldn’t use that, would we? Yes, he says, it’d be a lot more expensive than oil, but we will use it. Within days, I see full page magazine ads of lovely meadows dappled by a setting sun, suggesting coal is the energy of the future. Well, gee, as long as it comes with nice sunsets and you cover the strip mining with wildflowers. But at least we don’t have that dirty, carbon-based stuff here in the Northwest, do we? We run on clean hydro, right? Well, we used to, a half century ago. Now, he says, Medford runs 85 percent on coal. You have got to be kidding. Where are the smokestacks? In Montana. They just send the energy here, on wires. But enough of this high-fiber list of things that will overwhelm the world. We stroll First Friday artwalk, this huge cocktail party without cocktails, schmoozing old friends, tippling red in paper cups, enjoying the dusk over this perpetual Best Place (CNN, Money Magazine, again), stopping to see Craig Honeycutt’s amazing pencil art of our town, done Medieval style. It’s still the place where dreams come true — and a lot faster than you may want them to, so be careful what you dream for. I mean really, here’s Neale Donald Walsch, now having a feature movie made of himself as he was years ago, homeless, with a broken neck, cadging a meal and writing the first lines of his “Conversations With God.” How many homeless people end up eating popcorn in a theater watching a handsome Hollywood leading man play themselves in our onetime poverty and despair? Does it only happen here? Every movie has to have a message, or at least they used to. I find myself asking Walsch, “OK, what’s the message of your movie?” Samuel Goldwyn used to say if you want a message, go to Western Union. That was a telegraph company. Telegrams were like the first e-mails, and you’d send one on very important occasions, for a lot of money. Anyway, the message, says Walsch, is that God is saying to us, “Hey, you have no idea who you are.” I pause. “OK, who are we?” “One with everything” — and no, that’s not what you say when you order at Burger King. It’s us — we are one with everything, and once we start applying that to everything, he says, the world will take care of every problem we have. Better see the movie. The book’s probably better. You have longer to think, so you participate. So, she’s raining a big one, starting to snow. I surf around to all the region’s webcams — gad, looks like a foot of snow at Lava Beds (www.nps.gov/labe/content/webcam.htm), highways getting covered near Crater Lake (www.tripcheck.com/ RoadCams/cams/ORE138-ORE230_pid646.jpg), still just rainy in Dunsmuir (www.trainorders.com/ cameras/dunsmuir), Kingsley Field in Klamath (swo.odf.state.or.us/~kl) seems snowed under, but, yay, looks like there’s a parking spot in front of Bloomsbury Books (www.oregoncams.com/ frame.cfm?bilbo=194). Hope it’s still there when I come for my latte. John Darling, M.S., is an Ashland writer and counselor. 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