Earth Matters: Uninformed

I tried really hard, but I couldn’t get my mind out of the political gutter. I tried to conjure wonder; instead I couldn’t free myself of the mire that must be the stock and trade of punditry. I looked up “pundit” to make sure my obsession is an occupational hazard and not a personal problem. I discovered there is such a thing as a punditocracy: gods forbid.

Surrounded as we are by a natural world chock-full of wonder, I figured to distance myself—escape—our collective and disturbing social and economic context. I revel in the quickening smell of pine and Douglas fir, and make a point of appreciating terrain features as gravity draws me down the ski hill. I remarked on the first robin to light in the aspen trees outside my window…just before the blizzard hit. That’s about it, though; I failed my escape attempt.

I blame much of my failure on television. I can’t resist paying attention to pundits inside that box, men and women paid considerably more than me. I don’t begrudge that differential because although my deadlines are just as sharp and my responsibilities as well-defined, I don’t have to wear a necktie.

Before I used television, I formed independent, albeit sometimes uninformed opinions. Independent opinions are good because they require original thinking. Unfortunately, uninformed original thinking is only exercise and can actually be injurious. I work pretty hard to keep my foot out of my mouth and generally only make stuff up when I am sure either the muse or my editorial voice is active. Otherwise, it’s just the facts, ma’am.

But then the facts get filtered, and that’s where the television pundits have their say. True to my calling, I try to balance perspectives. That is, I try to listen to both liberal and conservative pundits, or at least get the gist of what they are saying. I admit to finding it difficult to listen to a Rush Limbaugh diatribe or sympathize in any way with Bill O’Reilly or Glen Beck. I honestly hope my antipathy isn’t as much for what they are saying as it is for how they say it.

Predictably, I enjoy listening to Daniel Schorr, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and—it figures—HBO’s Bill Maher. Maher’s commentary is often over the top, usually raunchy and sometimes not even funny. Maher had me at George W. Bush, though, and while he tries to give equal time to drilling Obama, I can tell his heart isn’t in it. Bush was easy pickin’s for all of us.

So I wonder whether punditry informs me. Do I actually learn anything by listening to talking heads? Perhaps it just entertains me because I either agree with what they say or it outrages me. Maybe commentary simply deludes me and I need to chase down something akin to fact, not opinion.

Fact is often elusive. It is naïve to take the maunderings of politicians and economists at face value. Trying to pin Bill Clinton down about the fact of his matter, for example, came down to what the definition of “is” is.

In our current economic malaise, politicians—even the smart ones—have no idea how to make things right because disaster has never quite looked like this before. It is ironic, sad and scary that economics falls into the bailiwick of politicians whose job description is kissing babies, cutting deals, and conducting—or not—diplomacy between nations. In our case, we exported economic collapse to the rest of the world.

Nor can economists, even those who invented the complex schemes that got us into the mess, provide a fix. They can only surmise what went wrong but have no clue where to go from here…wherever here is. Slogging through all the source smoke, mirrors and muddy water, pundits like me get to take their shot at it.

Bottom line: What our Great Recession says to me is that free-market capitalism doesn’t work. Ah, but that’s not exactly true. Unregulated free-market capitalism doesn’t work. But if a market is regulated at all then it isn’t free, right? Creeping socialism. Commie rat. Pinko freak.

Here is more blasphemy: Credit—debt—is a slippery slope off which average folks have a difficult time climbing. Debt generated by the federal government sums at such a grand scale we mere mortals can’t visualize or comprehend, much less pay it back. That is a slippery slope, too.

While I don’t presume to diagnose and propose solutions to world economic collapse, I can’t help wondering how borrowing more money to throw at the same miscreants who got us into trouble in the first place will fix anything. I’m pretty sure that is not original thinking and on practically every level must be uninformed. It seems only common sense.

Earth Matters: Changing horses

I ought to be getting used to it. Having ended ski season fifty times, it is sweet sorrow around which I am always conflicted. I anticipate spring and summer unreservedly, but I will miss skiing. We actually never stopped skiing last year; a pact fulfilled, a bit psycho—obsessive, compulsive—healthy and all kinds of fun.

Yet undeniably, living at a ski area, the yearly end of lift-served skiing is a major demarcation across all sectors of my life. Ours is a seasonal lifestyle, perhaps more so than most. We enjoy four distinct seasons each with its own pleasures; even mud season carries with it a certain, uh…cachet. It is the nature of the place though, and as the years pass, I know as soon as one ski season is behind me another approaches.

The actual changeover from ski season to après-ski mud season can be jarring. Accustomed to appropriately frantic end-days behavior, suddenly we transition to significantly more restrained pursuits…or not. The change is not subtle: ski season ends and I get my life back. Maybe it’s just me.

This year that transition has teeth sharpened on economic malaise practically unknown to an entire generation. Not in over twenty years has economic debacle so permeated our culture that it trickled down to places like Crested Butte. While I remain convinced that resorts are sustainable and people will always visit, no question: national economic woes will affect our traffic.

It is the rule not the exception that most ski resort businesses close up shop when skiing ends. Off-season is a good, authentic time of year when we relax after hosting visitors. This year, in the economic toilet, it is both blessing and curse to close the doors. One way or the other, there is relief.

Off-season means broadening my perspectives. I will lead a life less circumscribed by fifteen-minute bus-schedule increments. I will bother my horses instead of the ski patrol. If I want to ski, I will earn my turns in the time-honored manner of walking up hills in order to ski down them. I will frequent high ridges where ravens alone ride the thermals, and when I’m done I will sit in front of this machine and try to describe what I saw there.

“What?” asked my boss. “No more politics?”

Oh, there will be politics. How could there not be? If Earth really matters, then everything I see while out stomping around the mountains is worthy of respect. And the only effective path toward its preservation is political.

The converse is also true. When I spent my time writing about rodents in the backyard and saving the Uncompahgre fritillary butterfly, I found myself fighting an uphill political battle that ended at the Oval Office. And George W. Bush paid me no mind.

Furthermore, if I belabor economic disaster I get depressed and lose sleep. While the world should never forget how we got into this mess and who put us here, I have flogged that dead horse mercilessly. That is not to say I won’t flog him again, but it is time to get back to basics, to my fundamentalist and radical roots. I want to convey some sense of wonder.

Don’t be surprised then, to read about skiing in Earth Matters, because to me the fact that gravity works is a wondrous phenomenon. Don’t get freaked out next summer when I start going off about trolls or high-alpine sirens. And if the muse starts dictating, you can be sure I am paying attention and trying to get it all behind the cursor. Radical fundamentalism is often at its best when it is fanciful and nonsensical; just ask any radical fundamentalist.

John Muir wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” That is no news to an ecologist, and probably confusing to everyone else. Who knew the Uncompahgre fritillary butterfly would land on Bush’s desk? Who knew obscure derivative financial instruments could lay waste a world economy?

My job is to pick out something by itself and demonstrate what it is hitched to, how it is hitched, and why any of it matters. Politics is part of that, but politics can’t exist all by itself. It is connected to the other stuff, even seemingly frivolous pastimes like skiing, hiking and annoying my horses.

My horses don’t know about all that connected stuff; they know only that they are hitched to the post. It is probably better they don’t know about the big picture, because if they did know they’d be so full of themselves they’d be almost impossible to deal with. And I want things a little easier than that.

Earth Matters: Social networking for dummies

It is deceptively easy: Walk into one of Crested Butte’s many fine watering holes and plop down on a barstool. Make sure stools on either side are vacant and inviting to other networkers who might share your thirst. Signal the bartender and order a beer; when you pay, leave a generous tip. Now simply wait for someone to follow your lead, buy them a drink and strike up a conversation. Welcome to social networking.

Such intercourse is deceptive because its consequences can be anything but easy. Social networking facilitated by PBR or Jack Daniels often leads to circumstances that quickly become complicated. Sometimes, for example, you get tangled in a network from which tomorrow morning you want to extricate yourself as quickly as possible. If you drive your car, it can lead to social networking in the Graybar Hotel.

While I practiced this thirst-quenching method of social networking for years, its inherent complications finally took their toll and forced me to seek other means of social interaction. Not surprisingly, even in a socially inbred place like Crested Butte, that proved a challenge. Luckily, and just short of becoming a cynical recluse, enter the internet.

It probably started with email, instantaneous communication that doesn’t generate writer’s cramp or require a trip to the post office. You can use shorthand, and misspellings are easily forgiven. Furthermore, if you don’t want to communicate right now, wait until tomorrow. If you don’t want to communicate at all, hit delete.

Like most things internet, technology quickly outpaced the normal progress of human communication. Social networking came into its own with virtual innovations like MySpace and YouTube, networks now so-last-year with evolution of Facebook, Twitter and Qik. Instantaneous news became fodder for wannabe pundits to blog and comment, to toss their two cents into any old hat, to vent vitriol, and express opinions informed or otherwise.

One decidedly informed writer is Joshua-Michèle Ross of O’Reilly Media writing at Forbes.com. Ross describes, “The Rise of the Social Nervous System,” the internet as transformative communications network and foundation of society, business and government. Which he demonstrates, is exactly where we’re at: 1.6 billion people connect with computers, 3 billion use internet mobile devices…cell phones and the rest.

Ross works in the rarified atmosphere of something called Web 2.0, a next generation internet only hinted at by today’s innovations. According to Ross, all that connectedness is a “social nervous system that makes us aware of a broader context of relationship with humanity…Even a kid with a mobile phone can capture a revolution.”

Importantly, Ross credits the social nervous system with helping coordinate action from human input; for example, posting current events on Twitter. “Using a social nervous system,” writes Ross, “we are finding solutions to some big problems such as controlling disease or responding to emergencies. Most important, we are creating a feedback mechanism that exposes the actions of a powerful few to the many—and the trivial day-to-day life of the many to the whole of humanity.”

Ross suggests the social nervous system promotes a healthier balance of power, adding that assumed inalienable rights to privacy are forfeit. “Those who do not connect share and collaborate will have a hard time in business and in social life…Given the complexity and precarious position of the modern world, getting people to genuinely reach out and touch their neighbors is a good thing but it will come at the price of reshaping our identities as part of a larger, interconnected whole.”

Early on, my first thought was: Who on earth wants to be jacked into the “trivial day-to-day life” of the interconnected whole anyway? Isn’t life complicated enough? So not without certain irony did I get my comeuppance in the social network of Facebook; one friend calls it “FaceButte.” The irony is that a multitude of real-life, brick-and-mortar Crested Butte friends uses internet social networking to communicate, wish each other happy birthday and discuss what time to go skiing. And hell, it isn’t trivial at all.

Right about here, I can sense your eyes glazing over; computer stuff does that. Perhaps it’s time to go sit on the bench in the sun, or maybe you should go get that beer.

Earth Matters: Good money after bad

“What the hell do you know about economics?” questioned my friend. “You can’t even balance a checkbook.”

Well, yeah. “Not much, really,” I answered lamely. “You’re right. I’m terrible with money. It has taken all these years, but I’m changing my spending habits.”

“So what you’re saying is that it took a worldwide economic meltdown for you to turn into mister thrifty?”

“That might be over-simplifying,” I suggested. Usually, when I get frustrated or upset, I either go skiing or go shopping. I’ve always thought it a shame that shopping costs so much money; it would be such good therapy otherwise. And I can shop summer or winter.

“So now when the economy needs you out there shopping,” continued my friend, “you’re cutting back. You’re part of the vicious cycle.”

Presumably, to stimulate the national economy, everyone should go out and spend money. The problem is that no one has money to spend right now. So since we’re all trying to hang onto our shekels, fewer of us are buying new cars and yachts and trophy homes. Because no one is spending money, no one is making money, credit sources dry up…a vicious cycle.

And it’s the American way. If something is screwed up, throw money at it to make it better. If we run out of money print more. We can always borrow the big bucks since we are a productive nation, able to drag itself up by its bootstraps to pay back the debt. Oh, we do love our credit.

Continually throwing money at our ever-deepening economic collapse, though, may not be the silver bullet. Tossing good money after bad perhaps only lines the pockets of those who facilitated the collapse in the first place.

I may not know jack about economics, but I watched what happened after congress and the previous administration approved the tax payer-funded $750 billion bailout in September 2008. Eighty-five billion dollars went to American International Group (AIG), which company immediately sent its executives on a $440,000 retreat at a California spa resort. Give me a break!

Taxpayers also ponied up $14 billion for the auto industry, reasoning correctly that car manufacturing is vital to our national interest. Were we outraged when executives of the Big Three automakers flew private, luxury jets to Washington to request an additional $25 billion in bailout money? Hell, yes, we were outraged. What were they thinking? Do they feel so transparently entitled?

Knowing nothing about economics, I can’t help wondering if our premise isn’t skewed. We keep throwing money at the problem and the problem isn’t getting fixed. Albert Einstein said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

We’ve been doing bailouts since the poop first hit the fan in 2008. It took us a few months to realize—admit—that we were in the teeth of an unprecedented economic disaster. By then it was too late. A perfect storm of sub-prime loans, unfathomable derivative financial instruments, over-arching profligacy and outright greed took us to the bottom. Think bottom-feeders; think Bernie Madoff and his $50 billion ponzi scheme.

This line of reasoning leads to the kicker. The kicker is that money we keep throwing at the problem is all on credit. Even recognizing easy credit as the problem that got us into this feedback loop mess in the first place, we continue to spend money as if we had it. We’re borrowing from Peter—future taxpayers, China, whoever—to pay Paul—bottom-feeders. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so harsh.

“Go ahead,” encouraged my friend. “Tell us what you really think. Your credibility is in the toilet anyway. Be harsh.”

Economic malaise is like a force of nature except we, not nature, caused it. There is nothing natural about it except the consequences. We’re in a pickle because our hardwired predilection for immediate gratification and our pervasive predisposition toward greed put us there. Yet although we got our own selves into this mess, we have no idea how to get out of it. Keynesian economics, the old models that pulled our fat from the fire before, aren’t working. We don’t know what to do, so we just keep doing the same old thing.

“You see?” asked my friend when I’d finished my rant. “You really don’t know a thing about economics.”

Hell, yes.

Earth Matters: Hiatus

It is typical: The economy didn’t collapse when I was young and could ignore or otherwise deal with it. Karma, Murphy’s Law and Keynesian economics being what they are, it had to happen when I’m an old dude, unable to move off the grid and live in the woods with a stone ax. Perhaps that is too cynical a point of view.

Instead, I should be looking for that glass half-full. Economic advisors tell me, for example, that our economic meltdown is prime-time for bargains. If you have money, they say, current depressed prices present an excellent opportunity to invest in stocks or buy real estate, diamonds, yachts, automobiles, airline tickets, flat-screen televisions, appliances and other big-ticket items. The question of who the hell has money goes begging.

The glass is half-full with other silver linings…or molybdenum linings as the case may be. Economic malaise has sent recently bullish commodity prices into a bearish tailspin that might otherwise have me dancing in the streets. I say otherwise, because when the price of molybdenum crashed in the early 1980s and AMAX withdrew its proposal to mine Mt. Emmons and Red Lady Bowl, we did dance in the streets.

Those were heady days. The difference is that back then molybdenum prices crashed in a more isolated way. Prices didn’t reflect devaluation of our world economy as they do now. That is a significant difference. Now we are all in the toilet and molybdenum prices are merely collateral damage. Molybdenum prices have fallen more than seventy percent in the past six months.

The glass half-full tells me tanked molybdenum prices work to my advantage. Thompson Creek Metals’ proposal to mine Mt. Emmons would find a tough row to hoe if the company were to seek financing to mine in this economic maelstrom.

According to Mining News, the global economic slowdown has “cast a pall over the mining industry…” Mining executives expect a significant reduction in exploration activity and at least thirty percent of exploration companies to go out of business.

Commodities analyst VM Group says $50 billion less will be injected into the mining industry in 2009 and 2010 than expected before the recession. The group projects impacts to future production efficiencies and metal supply, and crippling of early stage production. This would presumably lead to another metal price boom when the recession is over because demand would outstrip supply. Katie, bar the door.

For its part, Thompson Creek Metals is cutting cash injections while sitting on $270 million in cash and a $35 million untapped credit line. CEO Kevin Loughrey plans to preserve capital until market conditions improve. Thompson Creek Metals will reduce molybdenum production from a previously estimated 34 million pounds to 24 million pounds.

The company recently closed its Smithers, British Columbia—Davidson Project—office as a cost saving measure. The Davidson Project, a proposed underground molybdenum mine, is completely off the books with no budget at all for 2009. The company’s other mines, Idaho’s Thompson Creek Mine and British Columbia’s Endako Mine, will reduce output considerably.

But Kevin Loughrey is betting on the come that molybdenum prices will recover as government economic stimulus packages take effect. He expects molybdenum demand to rise as emerging-market economies build new energy infrastructure and as developed countries replace worn pipelines, retool aging oil refineries and gear up for nuclear power production. “Long term,” said Loughrey, “we still feel very comfortable with where moly is headed.”

What does all this cost-cutting mean for Crested Butte and the Mt. Emmons Project? Probably not much. Thompson Creek Metals must still pay property owner U.S. Energy $1 million a year to maintain Thompson Creek’s seventy-five percent option to mine ore from under Red Lady Bowl. The company will undoubtedly continue its evaluation and permitting process, an undertaking that will consume at least a decade. The price of molybdenum could yo-yo several times during that period.

The current hiatus in activity—cutbacks, cost saving, whatever—is misleading. Thompson Creek Metals is using the time to insidiously insert itself into our community. Confident that the recession will end and metal prices will rebound, Thompson Creek believes time is on its side.

We could hope the company would close its Gunnison and Crested Butte offices like it did in Smithers, BC. We could hope that Thompson Creek would see the light and not plan a molybdenum mine smack in the middle of Crested Butte’s watershed and our tourist and emerging amenities-based economies. We could hope that pigs grow wings. Katie, keep that door barred.

Earth Matters: Fat chance

I am no war monger. A child of the Summer of Love, my pacifist leanings were honed by experts in the art of social revolution. Coming of age in the Vietnam Era galvanized my opinions and beliefs even if I didn’t fully understand how they would affect my life and what I would become. It’s not all bad; there are more destructive world views.

My world view assumes there are no good wars. Since war is apparently hardwired into human behavior, however, I must acknowledge some wars are less bad than others. One—maybe the only—criteria is justifiability. Is there a damned good reason to engage in martial conflict?

I have been told to stay away from the politics—reasons—for going to war. At some remove from the halls of power, I undoubtedly do not have a comprehensive understanding of geopolitical peregrinations and international conflict. Okay: I’ll buy that. But with due respect to those with differing opinions, like the critic says: I know what I like.

That is not to say I like the war in Afghanistan. But on grounds of justifiability, it’s better than any other war we’ve got. If we are to wage war, and apparently we must, we should be fighting the real enemy, the religious extremism, ignorance and grinding poverty imposed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. No question: the Taliban seriously frosts my lilies.

Afghanistan is fertile soil for the likes of the Taliban. Conquering armies have stomped the Afghan mountains for centuries en route to rape and pillage in India. Scythians, Persians, Greeks, Seljuks, Tartars, Mongols, Durani, Russians and Americans have all colored Afghan soil. Afghans, people who live among the Hindu Kush Mountains, go with the flow. Separated into fiercely independent rival fiefdoms, the country’s isolation defines some kind of sovereignty that sustains today.

Writing in 1925, journalist Lowell Thomas wrote, “Afghanistan dislikes the foreigner…Those of the wilder tribes of Afghanistan…are prone to give token of their enmity to the foreigner in the shape of whining bullets that oftener than not reach their mark.” Of Asia in general and Afghanistan in particular, Rudyard Kipling wrote, “Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.”

The Taliban is a nasty bunch of Sunni Pashtun Islamic terrorists that ruled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001. Not entirely homegrown, the Taliban are religious extremists, many educated in Madrasahs, fundamentalist Islamic schools in Pakistan. The Taliban enforces the strictest interpretation of fundamental Islamic Sharia Law ever seen in the Muslim world. Believing, “the face of a woman is a source of corruption,” education for girls and women is forbidden. Women are not allowed to work and face public flogging and execution for violations of Taliban and Sharia laws.

The Taliban finds refuge in Afghanistan because of geographic isolation and the non-centralized nature of Afghan sovereignty. Taliban strongholds proliferate in mountainous border terrain between Pakistan and Afghanistan, where al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is thought to be holed up. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in 2001 the United States invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and bring bin Laden to justice. We met with mixed results.

We should have known—history informs—that no one ever really wins fighting a war in Afghanistan. Yet Afghanistan was the obvious place to join conflict because that is where bin Laden was hanging out in the Tora Bora caves. Although United States and NATO forces ran the Taliban out of town, we were singularly inept in finding and holding bin Laden to account. Presumably, he is still in residence.

We kicked the Taliban out of Kabul, but they didn’t go away. According to Radio Free Europe, NATO’s top intelligence officer in Afghanistan said the tribal nature of the dominant Pashtun population makes the Taliban insurgency difficult to contain. Because Afghan society is complex and hermetic, no one knows who, how many or why the Taliban insurgency is increasing in strength and activity. We should not be surprised that we know nothing about it.

Riding the crest of American public opinion that the United States should withdraw from Iraq, it makes a certain amount of sense to redeploy troops to neighboring Afghanistan. There, we hope a “surge” of American military might will forever banish the Taliban, establish peace and security in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and generally make everything nice. Fat chance.