Earth Matters: Upside

Between the time I write this and the time you read it, we will have inaugurated a new President of the United States. My most significant challenge will be a grammatical one: not knowing whether to write in the future or past tense. My challenge isn’t in the same league as that of President Obama who by every metric will have his hands full.

They tell me to experience great joy we must have experienced great sorrow. To experience great knowledge, we must have experienced great ignorance. To enjoy the good, we have to taste the bad. Presumably, it is education: to appreciate something, we have to know its antithesis. For every upside, we require a downside to compare it to.

It is easy to distill a downside from the last eight years of bumbling, malfeasance and self-serving misdirection. The upside is more difficult to define in a distillation of hope and speculation. Furthermore, my present is the emotional maelstrom of pre-inauguration frenzy. Yours is the hard reality of a man three days at his desk and facing daunting tasks. He wanted the job; I hope we are indulgent with the honeymoon.

My first concrete glimpse of the horrible downside was called “rollback.” Previously, I didn’t know what a rollback was or that it could be so easily implemented. I didn’t realize the man at the top could wield so much power or be so evil…so vindictive.

I was busy hugging trees and basking in the relative environmental enlightenment of the Clinton Administration. Having worked for over a decade, I felt we were making progress on the enviro front, although we didn’t yet understand global climate change as the thousand pound gorilla. Many of my environmental bogeymen appeared to evaporate in the heat of climate change, but regardless, I thought we had advanced on a number of levels.

Then came the rollbacks. The Bush Administration decided it didn’t like any science that didn’t support political and business agendas. Administration delegates refused to sign the Kyoto Protocols, for example, and join with other world leaders in studying climate change. No science was good science unless it made money.

Within hours of assuming office, Bush rolled back proposed protections under Bill Clinton’s Roadless Area Conservation Rule. I had worked hard for roadless area protection in Colorado, figuring it wasn’t too crazy to preserve as much roadless public land as we could identify. Bush immediately cancelled implementation of the rule.

Roadless preservation was a forgotten pipe dream in the face of energy development roads which threaded western public lands like some kind of disease. Thumpers and drill rigs threatened Wyoming wilderness and Utah national parks. Even Western conservatives were shocked as dozer blades scraped their favorite places to bedrock. Roadless? Yeah, right.

Sorry: I’m raving. This is my own personal grievance. As it turns out, my other grievances feel personal too, but I’ll try not to rave.

So far, I have not been personally scarred by either the justifiable Afghanistan War, or by the totally unjustifiable Iraq War. Yet American men and women remain in harm’s way on distant shores. The upside in Iraq is that fewer Americans die there now. Yet I wonder if families of the million Iraqis killed see any upside at all?

Afghanistan, justifiable or not, has been a downside for hundreds of years. Rudyard Kipling wrote: “When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains, And go to your Gawd like a soldier.” Cool place to have a war, eh?

In Afghanistan we are trying to facilitate peace between factions we don’t understand, and whose only commonality is their hatred of the United States. Osama bin Laden still finds sanctuary. Afghan opium producers quickly identified an upside in a burgeoning heroin trade, but then they have known about that for millennia.

On our domestic front, the war on what was once a healthy economy can only be called successful. That may be an upside for some folks, but for the rest of us, finding an upside will be a long row to hoe. Unemployment claims rose over 30% in the last five weeks; almost a million Americans lost their jobs last week alone. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, job losses are large and widespread across most major industry sectors.

Economic analyst John Mauldin writes, “We are in completely uncharted territory in terms of the economic landscape.” Mauldin predicts unemployment headed above nine percent, consumer spending off by at least three percent in 2009 and 2010, and Gross Domestic Product down as much as five percent. He predicts the longest recession since the Great Depression. I keep trying to find the upside, but I’m having trouble with that.

The upside lies in our choice of new leadership and a new worldview. Although it is difficult to overcome skepticism honed over the last eight years, maybe—just maybe—we can shame the greed mongers into doing the right thing. Perhaps that is too much to ask.

We can only hope President Obama is equal to a job whose difficulty and complexity are unprecedented in American history. We are optimistic he can bring about health care and entitlement reform. We hope he can strike a balance between environmental stewardship and energy independence. We pray he can stimulate production to generate jobs and invent new models to resurrect our economy. We hope Obama can create partisan inclusion to forever eliminate historic gridlock. Post-partisan politics: what a concept.

While I’m writing this, I’m still living on the downside and it is difficult to see beyond the disaster that has been the last eight years of American governance. You reading this, on the other hand, are living under enlightened leadership that offers hope and the promise of change in a new day. You are reading this on the upside. Be proud of the choice we made…and enjoy.