As we neared the winter solstice it stayed sunny and 70. Asters bloomed inappropriately outside my door. Our mountain lake, usually frozen by then, was ice-free. We were also eight inches short of rain.

By New Year’s 2002, streams from North Carolina to New York were at their lowest ebb on record. Reservoirs resembled stony deserts. Wells ran dry. Still the drought hadn’t moved to Page 1 — Osama and Enron saw to that.

In February, the heat wave and drought finally got noticed. The New York Times reported that the winter of 2001-2002 was the warmest on U.S. record. By March, the drought extended from Maine to Georgia, with much of the New York metropolitan area a foot below normal rainfall levels — a winter drought not seen since the 1890s. One meteorologist mused that without exceptional rains soon “we would be in a world of hurt.”

Of course, his was a provincial pessimism. The Northeast and Appalachian Mountains are a tiny part of the world and have seen dry times before, seen empty reservoirs and a seared, tinder-dry landscape.

What is more troublesome is that our exceptional drought fits into a broader pattern. Around the globe, climate trends have been freakish for a decade — enough so to make a thinking weatherman’s grin twist into a worried frown.

The 1990s were the warmest decade on record in the hottest century for 1,000 years. The decade saw record destructive windstorms and floods in Europe, record droughts that scorched Africa, and record droughts and hurricanes that did multibillion-dollar damage in the Americas. The hottest year on record, 1998, was also the costliest ever for weather-related disasters. A one-year price tag on economic losses hit $92.9 billion, compared to the $78.4 billion total for all such losses over the entire decade of the 1980s.

“Hundred year” storms and droughts now come with increasing regularity — in some places every 50 years, in others, even more often. In 1998, a freakish ice storm that hit the northeastern U.S. and Canada was the worst in recorded history; in Europe, a 1997 flood on the Oder River was caused by a 1,000-year storm. In 1999, record downpours in Venezuela killed 30,000 people.

Scientists point to global warming as the likely culprit. With both the atmosphere and the oceans heating up, adding energy to climate systems, altering wind currents and precipitation patterns, extreme weather will become more and more common.

But like TV’s AccuWeather guy, the United States is ignoring the deepening storm that is global warming. Although it has just 4 percent of the planet’s population, the U.S. is responsible for 23 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions — a fact that makes it both practically and morally incumbent on the the U.S. to address the problem. But at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, backstage arm-twisting by the Bush administration kept the world’s greatest looming environmental disaster off the agenda, while the president himself pointedly declined to attend.

America’s refusal to address global warming may be good news for industries that dread possibly expensive reforms and consumers who imagine their lifestyles will be affected. But avoidance will only make the problem worse. And as global climate change makes life harsher for millions worldwide, the fallout for the U.S. in particular could be unforeseen and devastating, in ways that go far beyond water rationing or the loss of beachfront property.

A three-year drought, the worst on earth, now besieges central and south Asia, threatening 60 million people. In Iran last fall, Lake Hamoun, the country’s biggest body of water and one of the largest lakes in the world, turned to desert.

In this poor, strife-ridden region, a deepening drought could be dangerously destabilizing. Imagine this scenario: A disenfranchised group, made desperate by terrible poverty and relentless drought, wields the destructive power of smallpox or nuclear weapons, seeking vengeance on the nation that consumes the most natural resources.

This may sound like fear mongering, but maybe not in light of what the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says. The panel’s more than 2,000 scientists tell us that our recent wildly erratic weather may be the mere prelude to extreme weather borne out of severe global warming in the 21st century. Near future climate change could be greater than anything civilization has ever experienced.

A 2001 National Research Council report says that as humankind pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we may be doing more than making a lot of hot air. We may be “forcing the climate,” putting tension on an exquisitely balanced hair-trigger mechanism that once released, could send us careening into a radically new climate paradigm with new extremes of temperature and precipitation for which governments are unprepared and that would cause the world’s poorest billions to suffer most.

Average global temperatures are up by 1 degree Fahrenheit in the past century, almost certainly as a result of fossil-fuel burning. The result: Drought and deluge are unprecedented; glaciers are melting, seas rising, coral reefs dying and heat-sensitive animals migrating. In Antarctica, icebergs the size of Rhode Island fall into the sea.

What is apparent to those watching the skies or the Weather Channel (and possessing immunity from the deep denial that accompanies U.S. fossil-fuel addiction), is that things are changing far too rapidly. Transformations that are supposed to happen in geological time are taking place in human time, and the consequences can only be guessed at.

Weather has played a huge role in the course of human events, usually unacknowledged. It was weather — a chilly April in 1912 — that allowed icebergs to drift exceptionally far south in the Atlantic, where one sank the Titanic. The briefest respite between gales allowed D-Day to take the Nazis by surprise. And it was the Russian winter that helped topple Napoleon and Hitler.

Weather, or rather its long-term average called climate, has shaped history with broader strokes, birthing and killing cultures. In America, pre-Inca empires rose and fell in sync with wet and dry periods. Vibrant urban societies like the Moche and Tiwanaku civilizations were wrecked by killer droughts that kicked out their agricultural underpinnings. Drought may have also destroyed Mexico’s Maya. A two century-long drought, one theory says, escalated city state strife to horrific levels. Another theory claims the Maya’s godlike leaders, unable to bring rain, were toppled by a disillusioned people.

Drought and deluge have triggered crop failures, starvation, revolts and the downfall of cultures in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Africa, China and the U.S. Southwest. Dry times in particular, the historical record shows, make people thirsty and hungry, turning them eventually desperate and violent.

Despite humanity’s often hostile relationship with weather, we’ve been the big winners in the single largest climate change of recent millennia. The end of the last ice age 12,000 years ago afforded our species the ideal conditions to civilize and enter our halcyon days, maybe better called our Holocene days.

The Holocene, as our current geological period is called by scientists, began when the world warmed drastically, melting away glaciers that covered America as far south as Manhattan. The Holocene has endured minor climatic shocks but it has stayed remarkably stable, allowing us to thrive, invent agriculture and swell our numbers to 6 billion — until now.

If today’s Earth suddenly experienced some of the radical climate changes that wrenched the world in previous ages (global average temperature fluctuations of 10 degrees Fahrenheit in a single decade, for example), it seems unlikely that civilization could prosper.

But as William Stevens notes in his book “The Change in the Weather,” a colossal climate shift isn’t needed to make us miserable. The Little Ice Age, which occurred in Europe after 1300, brought crop failures, starvation and civil strife, all triggered by an average temperature drop of just 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit. We can expect a human-caused shift larger than that in the next 20 to 30 years.

Two reports from Europe in April 2002 show that temperatures are rising fast. Great Britain’s Hadley Center for Climate Prediction put average global temperatures in the decade between 2020 and 2030 at 0.5 to 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than between 1990 and 2000. Switzerland’s University of Bern projects an increase of 0.9 to 1.9 degrees — that’s almost a doubling or tripling of the warming we’ve seen in the past hundred years, occurring in only 30.

By 2100, the United Nation’s IPCC says, average global temperatures could increase up to 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit. The gravity of this worst-case forecast becomes clear when it is compared with the global rise of just 5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit that ended the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago, making all the difference between the Big Apple of today and a Manhattan buried under a half mile-thick mountain of ice.

Unfortunately, worsening scientific projections have made barely a dent on the policies of our current president or the lifestyle of the U.S. populace. And while new, gloomier climate change predictions seem to be issued almost monthly, what remains unknown is how global warming will impact humanity: our food and water supply, our societies and political stability; could it catalyze revolution, civil war, world war, or global terrorism?

Few have heard of the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, but its people may be the first known casualties of our smokestack- and tailpipe-induced heat wave. The country’s 11,000 inhabitants could be the first of thousands, then millions, of climate-change refugees.

Here’s why Tuvalu is probably doomed: A century of fossil fuel burning by industrialized nations has dramatically increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, causing additional heat from the sun to be trapped, just like inside a hothouse. This heightened greenhouse effect melted glacial ice and also thermally expanded ocean waters (H20 takes up more space when warm), pushing sea levels higher on Tuvalu by about a foot.

Rising tides caused salt intrusion, poisoning the country’s water and crops. Storm surges are making the island nation unlivable (though over-development and overpopulation added to the problem).

But Tuvalu’s plight was ignored. In 1993, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore refused to meet with Tuvalu Prime Minister Bikenibeu Paeniu and hear his plea for U.S. support of the Kyoto Protocol, the U.N. treaty to slow global warming. Since then, the United States hasn’t budged on its refusal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, George W. Bush’s plan for voluntary corporate fossil fuel cutbacks plays a numbers game worthy of Enron or WorldCom, and actually allows increased emissions.

Granted, the U.S isn’t the only contributor to Tuvalu’s demise. Other industrial nations are responsible for 22 percent of all carbon emissions, while all developing countries contribute 41 percent. Still, it seems reasonable for the U.S., as the world’s only superpower and the worst carbon polluter at 23 percent, to lead the race to cut fossil fuel use and promote sustainable energy resources like wind and solar power.

Instead, at the Sustainability Summit the U.S. firmly opposed proposals by the European Union to achieve a 15 percent level of renewable energy use by 2010, as well as Brazil’s plan for a 10 percent renewable energy target of 2012. The summit’s final agreement pleased the U.S., but lacks teeth. It drops Europe’s insistence on firm targets, percentages and dates for the use of renewable energy.

For Tuvalu, all these proposals are too little too late. In summer 2001, the 11,000 islanders surrendered themselves to a gradual full evacuation of their country. Within 50 to 100 years, Tuvalu’s nine Pacific atolls will likely be engulfed by the sea, the first nation to die of global warming.

As Tuvalu acknowledged its fate last summer, government official Paani Laupepa bitterly criticized the United States. “By refusing to ratify the [Kyoto] Protocol, the U.S. has effectively denied future generations of Tuvaluans their fundamental freedom to live where our ancestors have lived for thousands of years.” Gone will be homes, schools, burial grounds and churches. All that will remain is a memory of a lost homeland and of an America that refused to help.

Before long, others may decry the U.S. and its steadfast support of the fossil fuel economy. Already, the Maldives Islands, another Pacific nation and a largely Islamic one, has appealed to the U.N. We are an “endangered nation,” declared Maldives President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. In this century, if IPCC predictions of a one-meter ocean rise are accurate, the Maldives will drown and its 311,000 people will become eco-refugees.

Half the rice land in Bangladesh could also be submerged, compelling mass migrations. In a nation of 134 million, one wonders where the millions of refugees who live in the endangered coastal wetlands will flee to, and what they’ll eat when they get there.

As oceans rise along China’s coasts, up to 70 million people could be vulnerable to a 100-year-storm surge, according to the Earth Policy Institute. Who will offer new homelands to those made homeless by climate change?

As the flood of eco-refugees rises, so could political tension. Developed nations may face demands for reparations or forgiveness of debts from those nations damaged or destroyed by global warming.

We need only look at the plight of the Palestinians to see the violence bred of a people wrenched from hearth and home. A question Americans should be asking now is: What country will bear the brunt of rage expressed by peoples disenfranchised by climate change?

The answer may lie in a statement written just before 9/11, and signed by more than 100 Nobel Prize winners including Mikhail Gorbachev, Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, and Dr. Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the DNA double helix). Here is what they said:

“The most profound danger to world peace in the coming years will stem not from the irrational acts of states or individuals but from the legitimate demands of the world’s dispossessed. Of these poor and disenfranchised, the majority live a marginal existence in equatorial climates. Global warming, not of their making but originating with the wealthy few, will affect their fragile ecologies most. Their situation will be desperate and manifestly unjust. It cannot be expected, therefore, that in all cases they will be content to await the beneficence of the rich. If, then, we permit the devastating power of modern weaponry to spread through this combustible human landscape, we invite a conflagration that can engulf both rich and poor.”

These words barely made a blip in the U.S. media. But they could point to a coming global apocalypse.

Right now, the worst climatic crisis is taking place in the arid swath of South and Central Asia stretching from Iran to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. This area, a volatile soup of despotism, militarism, booming population, poverty, racial and religious rivalries, fragile economies and ecologies, seems about to be fired by the match of global warming.

The International Research Institute for Climate Prediction at Columbia University (IRI) reports that Central and Southwest Asia over the past three years represents the largest region of persistent drought on earth. A three-year drought — the worst in 50 to 100 years — now besieges Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, threatening 60 million people.

In Afghanistan, 12 million are impacted, parched by thirst and starved by crop failures. By autumn 2001, civil unrest and drought caused a million internally displaced persons, plus several million more refugees to leave the country entirely. But those fleeing found little relief in Iran or Pakistan — there’s as little water there as back home.

In Iran, the drought has affected over half the population. In some northwest provinces, there has been no measurable rainfall in 30 months. Orchards yielding almonds, apricots and mangoes have withered. Two hundred thousand nomadic herders have lost their flocks. Nationwide, 800,000 livestock died in 2000 because of the drought. By 2001, some 80 percent of all farm animals had been sold rather than face slow death. The U.N. estimates damages at $2.5 billion last year.

In Pakistan, where the urban population is exploding, outstripping the country’s ability to feed it, the drought has caused soil and seeds to blow away, vegetation to burn brown, and parched livestock to be slaughtered. 349,000 Pakistanis are impacted so far, not counting the influx of thirsty Afghans. At one refugee camp inside Pakistan wells had to be drilled a mile deep to find water. All of this in a volatile nation whose dictatorial Islamist-dominated regime supported the Taliban and possesses nuclear weapons.

Is global warming responsible for the central Asian drought? It is impossible to say for sure, but there is reason to suspect it is. IRI notes that global temperatures rose steadily over the past four years (1999 was the hottest year on record, with 2001 taking second place, and 2002 poised to steal the record). And all this warming may have contributed to the Central Asian drought.

The immediate cause of drought guessed at by IRI is a prolonged “La Niña” effect: unusually warm waters in the western Pacific Ocean colliding with cooler waters in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. La Niña is cousin to El Niño (a warming of central and eastern Pacific waters). El Niño is expected to become stronger under climate change, but the global warming impacts on La Niña are less known.

IRI scientists also note that hotter temperatures make any drought more severe: Hotter air causes greater evaporation rates, drying soils and reducing stream flows. That’s why a summer drought is worse than a winter drought.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that decade-long climate trends from 1990 to 2000 point to a world in which global warming is at work, causing extreme weather events, intensifying droughts and storms. Insurance loss data concurs. In the 1980s, insurers worldwide paid out just $2 billion each year for weather-related disasters. In the ’90s (the hottest decade on record), figures jumped to about $12 billion annually.

In 2001, the U.N.’s Environmental Programs Financial Services Initiative issued a study estimating that climate-change damage will top $304 billion annually by mid-century, potentially bankrupting some developing nations.

According to another U.N. study, crops worldwide will be negatively affected by climate change. It forecasts a 10- to 15-percent decline in grain yields in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia — poor regions with exploding populations that can ill afford the loss. One in eight people could face famine in just 50 years due to global warming.

Still, climatologists have no smoking gun. They’re unable to point to any single climatic occurrence, such as the Central Asian drought, and declare that it is due to climate change. That’s because climate is a weather average taken over many years; therefore, no single event can ever be called a trend. The Bush administration has used this argument to deny climate change and continue burning fossil fuels. But it is a high-stakes gamble. Add U.S. plans to develop new fossil fuel fields and refineries in the region, and the dangers mount still higher.

The Caspian Sea Basin has been called the “new oil El Dorado,” the most promising untapped oil field on earth. In 1997, the U.S. Department of State estimated the oil underground at 200 billion barrels — a third of Persian Gulf reserves. So it is no coincidence that at the height of the Afghan war, George W. Bush rushed to meet with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Since then, U.S.-Russian pipeline agreements have been forged to start tapping the Caspian.

Nor was it a coincidence that the U.S. sought permission to launch aircraft from Uzbekistan during its Taliban offensive. The stationing of planes in Central Asia escalates a U.S. military buildup begun in 1997, one that was all about oil long before it was ever about terror. Oil also explains why Afghanistan’s Taliban got $43 million in U.S. aid early in 2001. The gift was supposed to smooth the way for a pipeline stretching from the Caspian through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea — a pipeline the Taliban blocked but which the new U.S.-friendly Afghan government now welcomes.

But our energy strategy in Central Asia — whose architect was not the current Bush, but former President Jimmy Carter — may undermine homeland security, not protect it. As we exploit Central Asian oil, we may destabilize the region by backing dictators who repress their citizenry. In the long run, using Caspian oil to fuel our cars and culture may further destabilize the region by adding to global warming. Marginal climates like that of Central Asia are likely to be most affected by climate change.

Imagine the year 2010 and a super-powerful, climate-change-induced Central Asian drought, with crop failures leading to an uprising of the hungry and thirsty Arab populations of Islamabad, of Uzbek dissidents, of the Afghan and Iranian countryside. Such tumult could cut off Caspian oil. In a worst-case scenario, our fossil fuel-dependent nation might decide it had no alternative but to throw its military might into the fray, escalating resentment and violence.

Is there a better formula for fueling global terrorism? From those angry, hungry, thirsty, dispossessed masses, many of them sympathetic to Osama bin Laden, may come the terrorists of tomorrow, bent on revenge against energy-glutted America. And next time it could be accomplished with nuclear weapons seized from Pakistan’s ruling military dictatorship.

Journalist Ross Gelbspan calls the resulting political nightmare “the coming permanent state of emergency.” Gelbspan predicts that “a significant surge in terrorism is the likeliest result of the desperation that is overtaking many people in environmentally disrupted countries.” In his book about global warming, “The Heat Is On,” he offers the following warning from Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr. Henry Kendall:

“The world’s food supply must double within the next 30 years to feed the population, which will double within the next 60 years. Otherwise, before the middle of the next century [the 2000s] — as many countries in the developing world run out of enough water to irrigate their crops — population will outrun food supply, and you will see chaos. All we need is another hit from climate change — a series of droughts or crop-destroying-rains — and we’re looking down the mouth of a gun.”

The darkest, most frightening question concerns the future. There is a basic flaw in current global climate-change computer models: Every model assumes a linear progression of temperature and climate change. But evidence found in ancient ice cores gathered in Antarctica shows that climate rarely shifts in a straight line. Rather, like a car, change progresses linearly, gaining momentum, until at some unknown point, it hits a threshold and abruptly jerks up a gear. Then all bets are off and all hell breaks loose.

The rules that govern that new gear — the extremes of temperature of wind and storm beyond the threshold — are all different from the previous steady state. When will we reach such a threshold? That is anyone’s guess, and quite possibly beyond the limits of our current knowledge of climate science.

Oil-and-coal executives and Texas politicians, members of the so-called “Carbon Club” who are now running the United States, need to recognize the grim Catch-22 in which they’ve placed America and the world. While there is plenty of coal and oil in the ground, enough to power humanity for centuries, every gallon burned has the potential to disrupt global politics. Each car’s exhaust plume adds to the specter of hunger and thirst and terrorism likely to stalk our new century.

But there is a way out. We simply need to reduce our use of oil and coal.

Last autumn, while America focused on the World Trade Center attacks and on attacking Afghanistan, 160 nations met in Marrakesh, Morocco, and finalized mechanisms for reducing greenhouse gases 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. This is a first decisive, though baby, step toward cutting greenhouse emissions by the 50 to 70 percent the IPCC says is needed just to stabilize global warming at current levels. Accepting the treaty, those nations put themselves on a trajectory toward renewable energy — to tap the power of the sun and of hydrogen.

The U.S. was not among them. President Bush and ExxonMobil (a major player in scripting the fossil-fuel feeding frenzy known as the Cheney Energy Plan) made our country’s path clear.

Bush withdrew America from Kyoto against the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences, which warned that climate change is real and getting worse (a verdict seconded by Bush’s own Environmental Protection Agency, which he derisively referred to as “the bureaucracy”).

Meanwhile, America’s carbon dioxide emissions increased in 2001 by 3 percent, well higher than past average rises of 1.3 percent. To blame are Presidents Clinton and Bush (the elder and the younger), congressional Republicans and many Democrats, a coal-and-oil lobby that has used savvy marketing to deny the problem, and an oblivious citizenry that has made the gas-gulping SUV the source of 50 percent of new U.S. car sales and a symbol of American greed.

Much of the rest of the world recognizes climate change as a real danger. Even in the corporate world, BP and Shell have taken first steps to rethink themselves as energy companies, researching sustainable power.

There is no logical reason why ExxonMobil can’t do the same. It is one of the wealthiest corporations on earth, outspending most nation states. It would be a small matter to divert a few billion oil dollars to hydrogen fuel cells, solar, wind, or biofuel power.

They have not done this. Why not? Of course, there are financial reasons. But a deeper reason may be that oil exploration is ultimately about more than money: It is an addictive adventure in empire building. Jeremy Leggett in his book “The Climate War” recounts his oil-exploration exploits before becoming a Greenpeace activist:

“I had discovered a great romance. Looking back, I have a fancy now that it stemmed from something primeval. I remember the hunter’s thrill I felt in Baluchistan, watching smears of oil seeping from the ground … Then there were the hunter’s weapons … The drill rigs and down-hole instrument packages probing for the quarry … pipelines and supertankers carrying the object of the hunt to market … where finally, of course, the prize could be burned: in engines, all kinds of fascinating engines.”

This is the romantic bond that links Bush the Texas oilman with Saudi sheiks and Russia’s Putin. This is the game that holds them rapt in Central Asia. And this is the romance with power that hypnotizes American consumers as they mount their Excursions and Expeditions. It’s the same spirit that lured Marco Polo east and Cortez west. And it is the same industrial spirit that lured us to construct the greatest ocean liner ever, and to sail it too fast through a sea filled with icebergs.

No modern event better evokes the blind overconfidence of industrial society than the sinking of the Titanic. There may also be no better metaphor for America’s resolute denial of climate change.

We’re mesmerized by the Titanic story like children transfixed by fairy tales that end with little boys and girls devoured by wolves: The greatest ship ever built, conceived as unsinkable, opulent beyond imagining, sails with its millionaire and immigrant passengers. The reckless owners demand the captain load on the coal to reach New York in record time, despite repeated iceberg warnings.

The berg finally spotted, the big ship can’t react fast enough, can’t turn its Titanic mass on its too flimsy rudder. As the Titanic sinks, the wealthy still dance in the Grand Ballroom, not believing the news. Lack of preparedness dooms too many. Only half the lifeboats needed are aboard. About 1,500 passengers die. The survivors, rich and poor alike, are torn from comfort and carried in open boats upon a cruel sea. Nature humbles civilization’s rebellious and arrogant angels.

The metaphorical parallels with climate change are too obvious: Just like the Titanic skipper and the captains of industry, our government and corporations pour on the steam, ignoring dire warnings. And we the people are largely complicit.

The most powerful comparison may be the tragic inability of that magnificent ship to get out of its own way. Our fossil-fuel driven juggernaut seems similarly possessed of a weak rudder. Scientists caution that we must reduce fossil-fuel burning now, must curb the current warming trend now, or else our momentum could carry us beyond an unseen climate-change threshold — to a rendezvous with a sea of dark chaos we cannot yet clearly discern.

Back home in the Northeast, the dry spell drags on. A wet spring respite did little to end the long-term drought. Forecasts project below-normal rainfall into October. The West too is gripped by drought and its forests burn.

As I watch the blue sky, I worry my well may go dry. And I’m starting to feel a kinship with the Afghan farmer who looks into his arid heaven and slaughters a parched cow, or the Tuvalu islander who gauges a slowly rising sea.

While none of us can point to our situation and claim that the dark hand of climate change is responsible, in our hearts we may begin to guess that something has gone terribly wrong and that the time to act is now. While none of us has proof certain of the danger we are in, neither did Captain Smith who, holding a telegram in his hand telling him to slow down, sailed at full speed into an ocean full of ice.

Nevermind that Craig is actually just fine, according to the town’s mayor. “Nobody’s been laying people off or anything like that,” Terry Carwile, a retired coal miner, told CBS. “As a matter a fact, they’ve been hiring.” Indeed, coal production was up in the third quarter of 2011 in Colorado and Utah, as it has been elsewhere under Obama.

But Romney was not always so pro-coal. In 2006, after he pulled out of a regional greenhouse gas emission agreement, Romney released an alternative plan that called for coal-burning power plants to “pay to plant a forest in Brazil if those trees absorb the amount of carbon dioxide the plant must reduce from its smokestacks,” according to a Boston Globe article from September.

“This regulation provides real and vital environmental benefits, with a flexibility that is essential in this new and volatile energy market,” Romney said at the time.

Further back, in 2003, Romney made a big show of taking on a polluting coal-fired power plant. He held a press conference in front of the PG&E facility and yelled, “I will not create jobs or hold jobs that kill people, and that plant kills people.”

While environmentalists didn’t think Romney’s 2006 rule went far enough, it was certainly more than Romney would support today.

In this troubling spring, Wisconsin’s prairies and farmland fanned out to undulating hills that cradled the land and its people. Within their embrace, the rackety calls of geese echoed from ice-free ponds, bald eagles wheeled in the sky, and deer leaped in the brush. And for the first time in my life, I heard the thrilling warble of sandhill cranes.

Yet this peaceful rural landscape is swiftly becoming part of a vast assembly line in the corporate race for the last fossil fuels on the planet. The target: the sand in the land of the cranes.

Five hundred million years ago, an ocean surged here, shaping a unique wealth of hills and bluffs that, under mantles of greenery and trees, are sandstone. That sandstone contains a particularly pure form of crystalline silica.  Its grains, perfectly rounded, are strong enough to resist the extreme pressures of the technology called hydraulic fracturing, which pumps vast quantities of that sand, as well as water and chemicals, into ancient shale formations to force out methane and other forms of “natural gas.”

That sand, which props open fractures in the shale, has to come from somewhere.  Without it, the fracking industry would grind to a halt. So big multinational corporations are descending on this bucolic region to cart off its prehistoric sand, which will later be forcefully injected into the earth elsewhere across the country to produce more natural gas.  Geology that has taken millions of years to form is now being transformed into part of a system, a machine, helping to drive global climate change.

“The valleys will be filled… the mountains and hills made level”

Boom times for hydraulic fracturing began in 2008 when new horizontal-drilling methods transformed an industry formerly dependent on strictly vertical boring. Frac-sand mining took off in tandem with this development.

“It’s huge,” said a U.S. Geological Survey mineral commodity specialist in 2009. “I’ve never seen anything like it, the growth. It makes my head spin.” That year, from all U.S. sources, frac-sand producers used or sold over 6.5 million metric tons of sand — about what the Great Pyramid of Giza weighs.  Last month, Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Senior Manager and Special Projects Coordinator Tom Woletz said corporations were hauling at least 15 million metric tons a year from the state’s hills.

By July 2011, between 22 and 36 frac-sand facilities in Wisconsin were either operating or approved. Seven months later, said Woletz, there were over 60 mines and 45 processing (refinement) plants in operation. “By the time your article appears, these figures will be obsolete,” claims Pat Popple, who in 2008 founded the first group to oppose frac-sand mining, Concerned Chippewa Citizens (now part of The Save the Hills Alliance).

Jerry Lausted, a retired teacher and also a farmer, showed me the tawny ridges of sand that delineated a strip mine near the town of Menomonie where he lives. “If we were looking from the air,” he added, “you’d see ponds in the bottom of the mine where they dump the industrial waste water. If you scan to the left, you’ll see the hills that are going to disappear.”

Those hills are gigantic sponges, absorbing water, filtering it, and providing the region’s aquifer with the purest water imaginable. According to Lausted, sand mining takes its toll on “air quality, water quality and quantity. Recreational aspects of the community are damaged. Property values [are lowered.] But the big thing is, you’re removing the hills that you can’t replace.  They’re a huge water manufacturing factory that Mother Nature gave us, and they’re gone.”

It’s impossible to grasp the scope of the devastation from the road, but aerial videos and photographs reveal vast, bleak sandy wastelands punctuated with waste ponds and industrial installations where Wisconsin hills once stood.

When corporations apply to counties for mining permits, they must file “reclamation” plans. But Larry Schneider, a retired metallurgist and industrial consultant with a specialized knowledge of mining, calls the reclamation process “an absolute farce.”

Reclamation projects by mining corporations since the 1970s may have made mined areas “look a little less than an absolute wasteland,” he observes. “But did they reintroduce the biodiversity? Did they reintroduce the beauty and the ecology? No.”

Studies bear out his verdict. “Every year,” wrote Mrinal Ghose in the Journal of Scientific and Industrial Research, “large areas are continually becoming unfertile in spite of efforts to grow vegetation on the degraded mined land.”

Awash in promises of corporate jobs and easy money, those who lease and sell their land just shrug. “The landscape is gonna change when it’s all said and done,” says dairy farmer Bobby Schindler, who in 2008 leased his land in Chippewa County to a frac-sand company called Canadian Sand and Proppant. (EOG, the former Enron, has since taken over the lease.) “Instead of being a hill it’s gonna be a valley, but all seeded down, and you’d never know there’s a mine there unless you were familiar with the area.”

Of the mining he adds, “It’s really put a boost to the area. It’s impressive the amount of money that’s exchanging hands.” Eighty-four-year-old Letha Webster, who sold her land 100 miles south of Schindler’s to another mining corporation, Unimin, says that leaving her home of 56 years is “just the price of progress.”

Jamie and Kevin Gregar — both 30-something native Wisconsinites and military veterans — lived in a trailer and saved their money so that they could settle down in a pastoral paradise once Kevin returned from Iraq. In January 2011, they found a dream home near tiny Tunnel City. (The village takes its name from a nearby rail tunnel). “It’s just gorgeous — the hills, the trees, the woodland, the animals,” says Jamie. “It’s perfect.”

Five months after they moved in, she learned that neighbors had leased their land to “a sand mine” company. “What’s a sand mine?” she asked.

Less than a year later, they know all too well.  The Gregars’ land is now surrounded on three sides by an unsightly panorama of mining preparations. Unimin is uprooting trees, gouging out topsoil, and tearing down the nearby hills. “It looks like a disaster zone, like a bomb went off,” Jamie tells me.

When I mention her service to her country, her voice breaks. “I am devastated. We’ve done everything right. We’ve done everything we were supposed to. We just wanted to raise our family in a good location and have good neighbors and to have it taken away from us for something we don’t support…” Her voice trails off in tears.

For Unimin, the village of Tunnel City in Greenfield township was a perfect target. Not only did the land contain the coveted crystalline silica; it was close to a rail spur. No need for the hundreds of diesel trucks that other corporations use to haul sand from mine sites to processing plants. No need, either, for transport from processing plants to rail junctions where hundreds of trains haul frac-sand by the millions of tons each year to fracture other once-rural landscapes. Here, instead, the entire assembly line operates in one industrial zone.

There was also no need for jumping the hurdles zoning laws sometimes erect. Like many Wisconsin towns where a culture of diehard individualism sees zoning as an assault on personal freedom, Greenfield and all its municipalities, including Tunnel City, are unzoned. This allowed the corporation to make deals with individual landowners. For the 8.5 acres where Letha Webster and her husband Gene lived for 56 years, assessed in 2010 at $147,500, Unimin paid $330,000. Overall, between late May and July 2011, it paid $5.3 million for 436 acres with a market value of about $1.1 million.

There was no time for public education about the potential negative possibilities of frac-sand mining: the destruction of the hills, the decline in property values, the danger of silicosis (once considered a strictly occupational lung disease) from blowing silica dust, contamination of ground water from the chemicals used in the processing plants, the blaze of lights all night long, noise from hundreds of train cars, houses shaken by blasting. Ron Koshoshek, a leading environmentalist who works with Wisconsin’s powerful Towns Association to educate townships about the industry, says that “frac-sand mining will virtually end all residential development in rural townships.” The result will be “a large-scale net loss of tax dollars to towns, increasing taxes for those who remain.”

Town-Busting Tactics

Frac-sand corporations count on a combination of naïveté, trust, and incomprehension in rural hamlets that previously dealt with companies no larger than Wisconsin’s local sand and gravel industries. Before 2008, town boards had never handled anything beyond road maintenance and other basic municipal issues.  Today, multinational corporations use their considerable resources to steamroll local councils and win sweetheart deals.  That’s how the residents of Tunnel City got taken to the cleaners.

On July 6, 2011, a Unimin representative ran the first public forum about frac-sand mining in the village.  Other heavily attended and often heated community meetings followed, but given the cascades of cash, the town board chairman’s failure to take a stand against the mining corporation, and Unimin’s aggressiveness, tiny Tunnel City was a David without a slingshot.

Local citizens did manage to get the corporation to agree to give the town $250,000 for the first two million tons mined annually, $50,000 more than its original offer. In exchange, the township agreed that any ordinance it might pass in the future to restrict mining wouldn’t apply to Unimin. Multiply the two million tons of frac-sand tonnage Unimin expects to mine annually starting in 2013 by the $300 a ton the industry makes and you’ll find that the township only gets .0004% of what the company will gross.

For the Gregars, it’s been a nightmare.  Unimin has refused five times to buy their land and no one else wants to live near a sand mine. What weighs most heavily on the couple is the possibility that their children will get silicosis from long-term exposure to dust from the mine sites. “We don’t want our kids to be lab rats for frac-sand mining companies,” says Jamie.

Drew Bradley, Unimin’s senior vice president of operations, waves such fears aside. “I think [citizens] are blowing it out of proportion,” he told a local publication. “There are plenty of silica mines sited close to communities. There have been no concerns exposed there.”

That’s cold comfort to the Gregars. Crystalline silica is a known carcinogen and the cause of silicosis, an irreversible, incurable disease. None of the very few rules applied to sand mining by the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) limit how much silica gets into the air outside of mines. That’s the main concern of those living near the facilities.

So in November 2011, Jamie Gregar and ten other citizens sent a 35-page petition to the DNR. The petitioners asked the agency to declare respirable crystalline silica a hazardous substance and to monitor it, using a public health protection level set by California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. The petition relies on studies, including one by the DNR itself, which acknowledge the risk of airborne silica from frac-sand mines for those who live nearby.

The DNR denied the petition, claiming among other things that — contrary to its own study’s findings — current standards are adequate. One of the petition’s signatories, Ron Koshoshek, wasn’t surprised. For 16 years he was a member of, and for nine years chaired, Wisconsin’s Public Intervenor Citizens Advisory Committee.  Created in 1967, its role was to intercede on behalf of the environment, should tensions grow between the DNR’s two roles: environmental protector and corporate licensor. “The DNR,” he says, “is now a permitting agency for development and exploitation of resources.”

In 2010, Cathy Stepp, a confirmed anti-environmentalist who had previously railed against the DNR, belittling it as “anti-development, anti-transportation, and pro-garter snakes,” was appointed to head the agency by now-embattled Governor Scott Walker who explained: “I wanted someone with a chamber-of-commerce mentality.”

As for Jamie Gregar, her dreams have been dashed and she’s determined to leave her home. “At this point,” she says, “I don’t think there’s a price we wouldn’t accept.”

Frac-Sand vs. Food

Brian Norberg and his family in Prairie Farm, 137 miles northwest of Tunnel City, paid the ultimate price: he died while trying to mobilize the community against Procore, a subsidiary of the multinational oil and gas corporation Sanjel. The American flag that flies in front of the Norbergs’ house flanks a placard with a large, golden NORBERG, over which pheasants fly against a blue sky.  It’s meant to represent the 1,500 acres the family has farmed for a century.

“When you start talking about industrial mining, to us, you’re violating the land,” Brian’s widow, Lisa, told me one March afternoon over lunch.  She and other members of the family, as well as a friend, had gathered to describe Prairie Farm’s battle with the frac-sanders. “The family has had a really hard time accepting the fact that what we consider a beautiful way to live could be destroyed by big industry.”

Their fight against Procore started in April 2011: Sandy, a lifelong friend and neighbor, arrived with sand samples drillers had excavated from her land, and began enthusiastically describing the benefits of frac-sand mining. “Brian listened for a few minutes,” Lisa recalls. “Then he told her [that]… she and her sand vials could get the heck — that’s a much nicer word than what he used  – off the farm.  Sandy was hoping we would also be excited about jumping on the bandwagon. Brian informed her that our land would be used for the purpose God intended, farming.”

Brian quickly enlisted family and neighbors in an organizing effort against the company. In June 2011, Procore filed a reclamation plan — the first step in the permitting process — with the county’s land and water conservation department. Brian rushed to the county office to request a public hearing, but returned dejected and depressed. “He felt completely defeated that he could not protect the community from them moving in and destroying our lives,” recalls Lisa.

He died of a heart attack less than a day later at the age of 52. The family is convinced his death was a result of the stress caused by the conflict. That stress is certainly all too real.  The frac-sand companies, says family friend Donna Goodlaxson, echoing many others I interviewed for this story, “go from community to community. And one of the things they try to do is pit people in the community against each other.”

Instead of backing off, the Norbergs and other Prairie Farm residents continued Brian’s efforts. At an August 2011 public hearing, the town’s residents directly addressed Procore’s representatives. “What people had to say there was so powerful,” Goodlaxson remembers. “Those guys were blown out of their chairs. They weren’t prepared for us.”

“I think people insinuate that we’re little farmers in a little community and everyone’s an ignorant buffoon,” added Sue Glaser, domestic partner of Brian’s brother Wayne. “They found out in a real short time there was a lot of education behind this.”

“About 80% of the neighborhood was not happy about the potential change to our area,” Lisa adds. “But very few of us knew anything about this industry at [that] time.” To that end, Wisconsin’s Farmers’ Union and its Towns Association organized a day-long conference in December 2011 to help people “deal with this new industry.”

Meanwhile, other towns, alarmed by the explosion of frac-sand mining, were beginning to pass licensing ordinances to regulate the industry. In Wisconsin, counties can challenge zoning but not licensing ordinances, which fall under town police powers.  These, according to Wisconsin law, cannot be overruled by counties or the state. Becky Glass, a Prairie Farm resident and an organizer with Labor Network for Sustainability, calls Wisconsin’s town police powers “the strongest tools towns have to fight or regulate frac-sand mining.” Consider them so many slingshots employed against the corporate Goliaths.

In April 2012, Prairie Farm’s three-man board voted 2 to 1 to pass such an ordinance to regulate any future mining effort in the town. No, such moves won’t stop frac-sand mining in Wisconsin, but they may at least mitigate its harm. Procore finally pulled out because of the resistance, says Glass, adding that the company has since returned with different personnel to try opening a mine near where she lives.

“It takes 1.2 acres per person per year to feed every person in this country,” says Lisa Norberg. “And the little township that I live in, we have 9,000 acres that are for farm use. So if we just close our eyes and bend over and let the mining companies come in, we’ll have thousands of people we can’t feed.”

Food or frac-sand: it’s a decision of vital importance across the country, but one most Americans don’t even realize is being made — largely by multinational corporations and dwindling numbers of yeoman farmers in what some in this country would call “the real America.”  Most of us know nothing about these choices, but if the mining corporations have their way, we will soon enough — when we check out prices at the supermarket or grocery store. We’ll know it too, as global climate change continues to turn Wisconsin winters balmy and supercharge wild weather across the country.

While bucolic landscapes disappear, aquifers are fouled, and countless farms across rural Wisconsin morph into industrial wastelands, Lisa’s sons continue to work the Norberg’s land, just as their father once did. So does Brian’s nephew, 32-year-old Matthew, who took me on a jolting ride across his fields. The next time I’m in town, he assured me, we’ll visit places in the hills where water feeds into springs. Yes, you can drink the water there. It’s still the purest imaginable. Under the circumstances, though, no one knows for how long.

Ellen Cantarow’s work on Israel/Palestine has been widely published for over 30 years. Her long-time concern with climate change has led her to investigate the global depredations of oil and gas corporations at TomDispatch. Many thanks to Wisconsin filmmaker Jim Tittle, whose documentary, “The Price of Sand,” will appear in August 2012, and who shared both his interviewees and his time for this article.

But while the incentives to drastically scale up Western-mined, Asia-bound coal exports exist, the infrastructure to do so does not — at least, not yet. Coal mining companies are hoping to change that by building up to six coal export terminals in the Pacific Northwest — three apiece in Washington and Oregon — with the combined capacity to ship around 150 million short tons of coal to Asia each year. These new plans would more than double 107 million short tons of coal the U.S. exported in 2011.

But good news for the coal industry is bad news for the climate, and whether Powder Basin coal is burned here or abroad, it’ll add the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions to an already-warming atmosphere. In 2007, Powder Basin coal alone was responsible for an estimated 877 tons of carbon, around 13 percent of the U.S. total; Eric de Place at the Sightline Institute crunched the numbers and found that the coal shipped by just two of the proposed terminals would be responsible for more annual emissions than the tar sands oil carried by the Keystone pipeline. As Bryan Walsh points out, many industrialized countries have cut their own carbon footprint by exporting carbon-intensive fuels to be burned elsewhere, essentially employing an accounting trick rather than actually reducing global emissions. But climate activists aren’t going to let us get away with it if they can help it: Having largely succeeded in stopping Americans from burning coal, activists are trying to make sure no one else burns it either. And, as with Keystone, they’re seeking to accomplish their climate goals by blocking fossil fuel infrastructure from being built.

Climate change is notoriously difficult to organize around, but climate activists have won one small victory after another by allying with local communities who are worried about the more immediate and tangible impacts of fossil fuels on health and quality of life. Shipping coal overseas instead of using it at home may cut down on pollution from coal-fired power plants, but the health impacts of coal could simply be shifted to the communities along the transportation route and near the proposed port sites: accordingly people in Montana, Washington and Oregon have raised concerns about coal dust, diesel pollution, increased railway traffic and use of waterfront space.

In Washington, new ports have to pass a review under the State Environmental Policy Act, and in late 2010, the state temporarily blocked one proposed coal terminal at the Port of Longview, citing increased greenhouse gas emissions.  Other terminals, like the Gateway Pacific Terminal, are similarly contentious: Though past campaigns have sought to build connections between Washington’s labor and environmental constituencies, local communities are divided along those familiar lines over whether the project should go forward. In Oregon, the proposed terminals aren’t subject to statewide review, yet Gov. John Kitzhaber has joined protesters in voicing concerns about the environmental and health impacts of increased coal traffic, calling for a “full national debate” on the matter. While the EPA has also weighed in with concerns, the federal government has no formal role in the review process, so whether coal exports actually become the focus of a national conversation will probably depend on how successful activists are at stopping them.

Matt Yglesias thinks they have a decent shot, explaining that “the fact that the vast coal reserves of the American heartland need to pass through the relatively narrow bottleneck of the generally progressive Pacific Northwest gives environmentalists one of their best available opportunities to curb carbon dioxide emissions in the absence of any meaningful progress toward a national or global framework.” But if the coal industry starts to get worried, it’s hard to imagine Republicans and coal state Democrats won’t gleefully seize the opportunity to denounce the protesters as tree-hugging job killers. In fact, the Obama administration’s so-called war on coal is already shaping up to be a campaign issue in states like Kentucky and West Virginia, which together employ nearly half the coal mining industry’s 83,000 workers. But employment in renewable energy industries is rapidly outstripping coal mining jobs, and coal isn’t likely to ever produce another great jobs boom: Even if Western coal mining ramps up, it’s over twice as productive as Appalachian mining, which means more profits but fewer jobs, and the coal export terminals themselves won’t create many jobs either.

Still, it’s common to hear the argument that if China’s going to get its coal somewhere, we might as well be the ones who sell it to them. And sure, Indonesia and Australia will continue to supply China with coal regardless of what the U.S. does. But there’s evidence to suggest that the loss of U.S. coal exports could still make a difference in China’s energy habits. In a recent paper, former University of Montana economics chairman Thomas Powers argues that stopping coal exports could actually result in enough of a price hike to decrease coal use in China, saying that “decisions the Northwest makes now will impact Chinese energy habits for the next half-century.”

Of course, all the usual caveats still apply: The coal being exported still represents a small fraction of global carbon emissions; coal may be replaced with other carbon-intensive fossil fuels; dealing with climate change requires system-wide changes rather than a patchwork of stopgap local measures. While the battle continues in the Northwest, coal may find other routes out of the country: Coal producers have made deals with ports in British Columbia and along the Gulf Coast, where environmental scientists are concerned that the runoff from expanding coal-exporting facilities in Plaquemines Parish could undermine Louisiana’s attempts to restore its rapidly disappearing wetlands. On the other hand, coal investments are riskier than they seem: If Mongolia starts selling more coal to China, or if China itself starts mining and using more coal, the bottom could fall out of the market, leaving Oregon and Washington with worthless coal terminals.

At the same time, the argument for why coal exports matter actually is pretty simple: as Grist’s David Roberts sums up, “to prevent the climate from spiraling forever out of control, we’re going to have to leave most of the remaining fossil fuels in the ground … we desperately need to keep coal in the ground anywhere and everywhere it’s possible.” American activists can’t stop Australia or Indonesia from selling China coal, but if they can manage to stop American coal from leaving the country or being used within its borders, a huge amount of coal — and the carbon it contains — will stay put. So while it’s a big if, it’s a battle many feel they have no choice but to fight.

Yes, of course, in the intervening years I’ve had the chance to drive an automatic transmission. But that has always felt a bit like playing a post-Konami Code game of Contra — a bit too easy, a bit too idiot proof, a bit too, shall we say, inauthentic. On top of that, the automatic always seemed like a wasteful luxury because it always was more expensive and less fuel-efficient. That difference consequently added an ascetic populism to the inherent machismo of the engine-revving manual transmission.

No doubt, for stick shift enthusiasts, these factors have all conspired to create an alluring mystique around the manual transmission — one that, according to new data, is on the rise.

Last week, USA Today reported that while “the percentage of new vehicles with stick-shift gearboxes remains a small slice of the new vehicle market,” the “the first quarter this year manuals were in 6.5 percent of new vehicles sold, and that’s getting close to double each of the past five years.” The stick shift is back in a big way — but is that really such a good thing?

Upon hearing the news, my initial thought — for aforementioned reasons — was that, yes, of course it’s a good thing. In an ocean of bad drivers and wasteful vehicles, the news seemed like a distant island of hope. I thought that perhaps more motorists are being converted to the automobile religion (cult?) I first was exposed to in Dad’s Datsun 280 ZX. And maybe, just maybe, that’s a sign that American drivers are wising up, both stylistically and efficiency-wise.

Then I did a bit more investigation, and realized the news might not be so good, and that my quasi-religious fervor for the gearbox may have blinded me to my catechism’s new downsides.

In the past, the stick shift was an all-but-guaranteed fuel saver. But not anymore. As AOL Autos notes, computer technology has advanced to the point where “automatics have become so efficient that most of the time their fuel economy is on par with manuals — and in some cases even better.” USA Today notes that such a trend may eventually erase the long-term price differential between manual and automatic transmissions, meaning the manual will lose its frugal-chic appeal. Meanwhile, according to AOL, new technology also boosts automatics’ overall performance (read: speed), meaning many driving aficionados have come to prefer the automatic over the manual.

Thanks to all this, on the days I don’t bike to work and instead fire up my 11-year-old Saturn and shift it into first gear, I no longer feel so righteous or populist. I feel like part of the problem — not just because I’m driving a fossil fuel-dependent vehicle, but also because the manual transmission seems like a silly relic. Likewise, word that manual transmissions may be coming back no longer seems like such great news; it seems like more proof that when it comes to transportation, we’re still prone to making shortsighted decisions.

And yet, I can’t let go of my love for the stick — or maybe “can’t” isn’t the right word. Perhaps “don’t want to” is more appropriate. If the automobile is still one of the key chronological markers in a typical American’s life (and, unfortunately, it still is), the stick shift is a special symbol of our general heritage, and my specific family traditions.

That’s why I was happy to see that there remains one significant reason to still love the manual transmission — a reason that’s substantive, rather than just aesthetic or experiential. In the age of distracted driving, many believe the stick shift might encourage kids to stay focused on operating their vehicles, rather than operating their smartphones. The idea is that because a manual transmission requires special attention to operate, it doesn’t allow for as much multitasking as an automatic.

While there’s no science (yet) to prove the manual-transmission-as-deterrent-to-distracted-driving hypothesis, the memory of those first harrowing stick-shift lessons — with my dad imploring me to “really focus, goddammit!” — suggests to me that there’s something to the theory.

At least, that’s what I’m going to tell myself to justify my stick-shift fetish — that is, until the automatic fully surpasses the manual in every other way.

How will those who survive manage it? What can we teach our friends, our children, our communities? Although we may not be capable of changing history, how can we equip ourselves to survive it?

I contemplate these questions in the full consciousness of my own mortality. Being offered an actual number of likely months to live, even though the estimate is uncertain, mightily focuses the mind. On personal things, of course, on loved ones and even loved things, but also on the Big Picture.

But let us begin with last things first, for a change. The analysis will come later, for those who wish it.

Hope. Children exude hope, even under the most terrible conditions, and that must inspire us as our conditions get worse. Hopeful patients recover better. Hopeful test candidates score better. Hopeful builders construct better buildings. Hopeful parents produce secure and resilient children. In groups, an atmosphere of hope is essential to shared successful effort: “Yes, we can!” is not an empty slogan, but a mantra for people who intend to do something together — whether it is rescuing victims of hurricanes, rebuilding flood-damaged buildings on higher ground, helping wounded people through first aid, or inventing new social structures (perhaps one in which only people are “persons,” not corporations). We cannot know what threats we will face. But ingenuity against adversity is one of our species’ built-in resources. We cope, and faith in our coping capacity is perhaps our biggest resource of all.

Mutual support. The people who do best at basic survival tasks (we know this experimentally, as well as intuitively) are cooperative, good at teamwork, often altruistic, mindful of the common good. In drastic emergencies like hurricanes or earthquakes, people surprise us by their sacrifices — of food, of shelter, even sometimes of life itself. Those who survive social or economic collapse, or wars, or pandemics, or starvation, will be those who manage scarce resources fairly; hoarders and dominators win only in the short run, and end up dead, exiled, or friendless. So, in every way we can we need to help each other, and our children, learn to be cooperative rather than competitive; to be helpful rather than hurtful; to look out for the communities of which we are a part, and on which we ultimately depend.

Practical skills. With the movement into cities of the U.S. population, and much of the rest of the world’s people, we have had a massive de-skilling in how to do practical tasks. When I was a boy in the country, all of us knew how to build a tree house, or construct a small hut, or raise chickens, or grow beans, or screw pipes together to deliver water. It was a sexist world, of course, so when some of my chums in eighth grade said we wanted to learn girls’ “home ec” skills like making bread or boiling eggs, the teachers were shocked, but we got to do it. There was widespread competence in fixing things — impossible with most modern contrivances, of course, but still reasonable for the basic tools of survival: pots and pans, bicycles, quilts, tents, storage boxes.

We all need to learn, or relearn, how we would keep the rudiments of life going if there were no paid specialists around, or means to pay them. Every child should learn elementary carpentry, from layout and sawing to driving nails. Everybody should know how to chop wood safely, and build a fire. Everybody should know what to do if dangers appear from fire, flood, electric wires down, and the like. Taking care of each other is one practical step at a time, most of them requiring help from at least one other person; survival is a team sport.

Organize. Much of the American ideology, our shared and usually unspoken assumptions, is hyper-individualistic. We like to imagine that heroes are solitary, have super powers, and glory in violence, and that if our work lives and business lives seem tamer, underneath they are still struggles red in blood and claw. We have sought solitude on the prairies, as cowboys on the range, in our dependence on media (rather than real people), and even in our cars, armored cabins of solitude. We have an uneasy and doubting attitude about government, as if we all reserve the right to be outlaws. But of course human society, like ecological webs, is a complex dance of mutual support and restraint, and if we are lucky it operates by laws openly arrived at and approved by the populace.

If the teetering structure of corporate domination, with its monetary control of Congress and our other institutions, should collapse of its own greed, and the government be unable to rescue it, we will have to reorganize a government that suits the people. We will have to know how to organize groups, how to compromise with other groups, how to argue in public for our positions. It turns out that “brainstorming,” a totally noncritical process in which people just throw out ideas wildly, doesn’t produce workable ideas. In particular, it doesn’t work as well as groups in which ideas are proposed, critiqued, improved, debated. But like any group process, this must be protected from domination by powerful people and also over-talkative people. When the group recognizes its group power, it can limit these distortions. Thinking together is enormously creative; it has huge survival value.

Learn to live with contradictions. These are dark times, these are bright times. We are implacably making the planet less habitable. Every time a new oil field is discovered, the press cheers: “Hooray, there is more fuel for the self-destroying machines!” We are turning more land into deserts and parking lots. We are wiping out innumerable species that are not only wondrous and beautiful, but might be useful to us. We are multiplying to the point where our needs and our wastes outweigh the capacities of the biosphere to produce and absorb them. And yet, despite the bloody headlines and the rocketing military budgets, we are also, unbelievably, killing fewer of each other proportionately than in earlier centuries. We have mobilized enormous global intelligence and mutual curiosity, through the Internet and outside it. We have even evolved, spottily, a global understanding that democracy is better than tyranny, that love and tolerance are better than hate, that hope is better than rage and despair, that we are prone, especially in catastrophes, to be astonishingly helpful and cooperative.

We may even have begun to share an understanding that while the dark times may continue for generations, in time new growth and regeneration will begin. In the biological process called “succession,” a desolate, disturbed area is gradually, by a predictable sequence of returning plants, restored to ecological continuity and durability. When old institutions and habits break down or consume themselves, new experimental shoots begin to appear, and people explore and test and share new and better ways to survive together.

It is never easy or simple. But already we see, under the crumbling surface of the conventional world, promising developments: new ways of organizing economic activity (cooperatives, worker-owned companies, nonprofits, trusts), new ways of using low-impact technology to capture solar energy, to sequester carbon dioxide, new ways of building compact, congenial cities that are low (or even self-sufficient) in energy use, low in waste production, high in recycling of almost everything. A vision of sustainability that sometimes shockingly resembles “Ecotopia” is tremulously coming into existence at the hands of people who never heard of the book.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Now in principle, the Big Picture seems simple enough, though devilishly complex in the details. We live in the declining years of what is still the biggest economy in the world, where a looter elite has fastened itself upon the decaying carcass of the empire. It is intent on speedily and relentlessly extracting the maximum wealth from that carcass, impoverishing our former working middle class. But this maggot class does not invest its profits here. By law and by stock-market pressures, corporations must seek their highest possible profits, no matter the social or national consequences — which means moving capital and resources abroad, wherever profit potential is larger. As Karl Marx darkly remarked, “Capital has no country,” and in the conditions of globalization his meaning has come clear.

The looter elite systematically exports jobs, skills, knowledge, technology, retaining at home chiefly financial manipulation expertise: highly profitable, but not of actual productive value. Through “productivity gains” and speedups, it extracts maximum profit from domestic employees; then, firing the surplus, it claims surprise that the great mass of people lack purchasing power to buy up what the economy can still produce (or import).

Here again Marx had a telling phrase: “Crisis of under-consumption.” When you maximize unemployment and depress wages, people have to cut back. When they cut back, businesses they formerly supported have to shrink or fail, adding their own employees to the ranks of the jobless, and depressing wages still further. End result: something like Mexico, where a small, filthy rich plutocracy rules over an impoverished mass of desperate, uneducated, and hopeless people.

Barring unprecedented revolutionary pressures, this is the actual future we face in the United States, too. As we know from history, such societies can stand a long time, supported by police and military control, manipulation of media, surveillance and dirty tricks of all kinds. It seems likely that a few parts of the world (Germany, with its worker-council variant of capitalism, New Zealand with its relative equality, Japan with its social solidarity, and some others) will remain fairly democratic.

The U.S., which has a long history of violent plutocratic rule unknown to the textbook-fed, will stand out as the best-armed Third World country, its population ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-educated, ill-cared for in health, and increasingly poverty-stricken: even Social Security may be whittled down, impoverishing tens of millions of the elderly.

As empires decline, their leaders become increasingly incompetent — petulant, ignorant, gifted only with PR skills of posturing and spinning, and prone to the appointment of loyal idiots to important government positions. Comedy thrives; indeed writers are hardly needed to invent outrageous events.

We live, then, in a dark time here on our tiny precious planet. Ecological devastation, political and economic collapse, irreconcilable ideological and religious conflict, poverty, famine: the end of the overshoot of cheap-oil-based consumer capitalist expansionism.

If you don’t know where you’ve been, you have small chance of understanding where you might be headed. So let me offer a capsule history for those who, like most of us, got little help from textbook history.

At 82, my life has included a surprisingly substantial slice of American history. In the century or so up until my boyhood in Appalachian central Pennsylvania, the vast majority of Americans subsisted as farmers on the land. Most, like people elsewhere in the world, were poor, barely literate, ill-informed, short-lived. Millions had been slaves. Meanwhile in the cities, vast immigrant armies were mobilized by ruthless and often violent “robber baron” capitalists to build vast industries that made things: steel, railroads, ships, cars, skyscrapers.

Then, when I was in grade school, came World War II. America built the greatest armaments industry the world had ever seen, and when the war ended with most other industrial countries in ruins, we had a run of unprecedented productivity and prosperity. Thanks to strong unions and a sympathetic government, this prosperity was widely shared: a huge working middle class evolved — tens of millions of people could afford (on one wage) a modest house, a car, perhaps sending a child to college. This era peaked around 1973, when wages stagnated, the Vietnam War took a terrible toll in blood and money, and the country began sliding rightward.

In the next epoch, which we are still in and which may be our last as a great nation, capitalists who grew rich and powerful by making things gave way to a new breed: financiers who grasped that you could make even more money by manipulating money. (And by persuading Congress to subsidize them — the system should have been called Subsidism, not Capitalism.) They had no concern for the productivity of the nation or the welfare of its people; with religious fervor, they believed in maximizing profit as the absolute economic goal. They recognized that, by capturing the government through the election finance system and removing government regulation, they could turn the financial system into a giant casino.

Little by little, they hollowed the country out, until it was helplessly dependent on other nations for almost all its necessities. We had to import significant steel components from China or Japan. We came to pay for our oil imports by exporting food (i.e., our soil). Our media and our educational system withered. Our wars became chronic and endless and stupefyingly expensive. Our diets became suicidal, and our medical system faltered; life expectancies began to fall.

And so we have returned, in a sort of terrible circle, to something like my boyhood years, when President Roosevelt spoke in anger of “one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-fed, ill-clothed.” A large and militant contingent of white, mostly elderly, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant right wingers, mortally threatened by their impending minority status and pretending to be liberty-lovers, desperately seek to return us still further back.

Americans like to think of ours as an exceptional country, immune through geographical isolation and some kind of special virtue to the tides of history. Through the distorted lens of our corporate media, we possess only a distorted view of what the country is really like now. In the next decades, we shall see whether we indeed possess the intelligence, the strength, and the mutual courage to break through to another positive era.

No futurist can foresee the possibilities. As empires decay, their civilian leaderships become increasingly crazed, corrupt, and incompetent, and often the military (which is after all a parasite of the whole nation, and has no independent financial base like the looter class) takes over. Another possible scenario is that if the theocratic red center of the country prevails in Washington, the relatively progressive and prosperous coastal areas will secede in self-defense.

“Ecotopia” is a novel, and secession was its dominant metaphor: how would a relatively rational part of the country save itself ecologically if it was on its own? As “Ecotopia Emerging” puts it, Ecotopia aspired to be a beacon for the rest of the world. And so it may prove, in the very, very long run, because the general outlines of Ecotopia are those of any possible future sustainable society.

The “ecology in one country” argument was an echo of an actual early Soviet argument, as to whether “socialism in one country” was possible. In both cases, it now seems to me, the answer must be no. We are now fatally interconnected, in climate change, ocean impoverishment, agricultural soil loss, etc., etc., etc. International consumer capitalism is a self-destroying machine, and as long as it remains the dominant social form, we are headed for catastrophe; indeed, like rafters first entering the “tongue” of a great rapid, we are already embarked on it.

When disasters strike and institutions falter, as at the end of empires, it does not mean that the buildings all fall down and everybody dies. Life goes on, and in particular, the remaining people fashion new institutions that they hope will better ensure their survival.

So I look to a long-term process of “succession,” as the biological concept has it, where “disturbances” kill off an ecosystem, but little by little new plants colonize the devastated area, prepare the soil for larger and more complex plants (and the other beings who depend on them), and finally the process achieves a flourishing, resilient, complex state — not necessarily what was there before, but durable and richly productive. In a similar way, experiments under way now, all over the world, are exploring how sustainability can in fact be achieved locally. Technically, socially, economically — since it is quite true, as ecologists know, that everything is connected to everything else, and you can never just do one thing by itself.

Since I wrote “Ecotopia,” I have become less confident of humans’ political ability to act on commonsense, shared values. Our era has become one of spectacular polarization, with folly multiplying on every hand. That is the way empires crumble: they are taken over by looter elites, who sooner or later cause collapse. But then new games become possible, and with luck Ecotopia might be among them.

Humans tend to try to manage things: land, structures, even rivers. We spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and treasure in imposing our will on nature, on preexisting or inherited structures, dreaming of permanent solutions, monuments to our ambitions and dreams. But in periods of slack, decline, or collapse, our abilities no longer suffice for all this management. We have to let things go.

All things “go” somewhere: they evolve, with or without us, into new forms. So as the decades pass, we should try not always to futilely fight these transformations. As the Japanese know, there is much unnoticed beauty in wabi-sabi — the old, the worn, the tumble-down, those things beginning their transformation into something else. We can embrace this process of devolution: embellish it when strength avails, learn to love it.

There is beauty in weathered and unpainted wood, in orchards overgrown, even in abandoned cars being incorporated into the earth. Let us learn, like the Forest Service sometimes does, to put unwise or unneeded roads “to bed,” help a little in the healing of the natural contours, the re-vegetation by native plants. Let us embrace decay, for it is the source of all new life and growth.