2020. Earth weeps, a biologist weeps. I am 77 and a long-retired biologist, husband and grandfather of the Seattle 3, three little male rugrats, ages 8 and 6 (twins). I will not live to see how this Earth drama plays out, but my descendants will. We are condemning the Seattle 3, your grandchildren and their grandchildren ad infinitum, to a painful ride with massive casualties and climate refugees moving all over the world, rich and poor alike, unquestionably well into the 22^nd century and quite likely well beyond.  

But, in my opinion, the bigger crime is the loss of millions upon millions of species to extinction, innocent victims of our greed and ignorance. Equally as heinous is the loss of the joys of future generations to be able to experience as I have, these very species in all their beauty and diversity.

After millennia of being spoiled riding this gorgeous blue-green marble, all species are ill-prepared for a future unfit for cockroaches and sewer rats. My favorite climatologist, James Hansen, a world authority on Venus, in his best-selling book, The Storms of My Grandchildren, prophesied the wild possibility of Earth becoming another Venus with surface temperatures in excess of 800 F. with all water and ice boiled away. There is one advantage to this improbable planet Venth(?), the viruses we have for politicians that keep getting re-elected like a recurrent nightmare, would be vaporized.

Why Do I Weep?

In his book, Hansen weeps for his grandchildren and what they are going to miss. As a biologist, what do I weep for besides my own Seattle 3?

• I weep for those millions of existing species that currently give us so much incredible beauty, diversity and evolutionary wonder as they one-by-one pass out of existence.
• I weep for what future generations (including my 2 daughters & The Seattle 3) will miss by not seeing the Earth, a beautiful beast, in its semi-natural state, and what I was fortunate to capture by its tail and hang on, back in the mid-60s (see Conclusion). Global ecosystems like coral reefs, tropical rainforests, glaciers, the Arctic Ocean, Antarctic ice sheets, and coastal mangrove swamps started to radically, and visually, unravel around 2000. Before then, I visited paradises from the Galapagos Islands to Antarctica to he New Zealand Lake Central Otago lake district before ecotourism was all the rage.
• I weep for those species extinct long before they are due for extinction. All species have, or will, become extinct. But, as in the case of some tropical frogs, in one generation? Horseshoe crabs, the gingko tree, and coelacanth fish—living fossils—are examples of evolutionary marvels having already been on Earth essentially unchanged for millions of years. And it’s OK to sentence them to extinction in a handful of years?

The coelacanth was thought to have gone extinct 65 million years ago with the dinosaurs. After surviving the deep ocean environment (2300 ft.) essentially unchanged for 400 million years, they could go extinct due in a few years, in part, to climate change. They are collateral damage in our war against Earth.

• I weep because I and millions of others won’t see a pristine Great Barrier Reef and the Eucalyptus & Gum forests of Australia, replete with koala bears and wombats or the snows of Kilimanjaro.

Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in The Sixth Extinction, in 2014, the five previous extinctions could be considered geologically abrupt, especially 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period, 75% of Earth’s species went extinct including the dinosaurs, most within days after a massive meteor struck north of the Yucatan Peninsula. The strike caused immediate climate change. The difference between then and now is the human factor. Unlike then, now we can control the outcome, and unless you believe, as 41% of goofy Americans apparently do, that Fred Flintstone rode Brontos, a Brontosaurus to work (Peter Moore, YouGov, June 18, 2015). I would like to believe that we can avert an ending such as described in her final chapter entitled “The Thing with Feathers.” That chapter is like reading a global death sentence. I quote Kolbert as writing (p. 267), “………we, too, will eventually be undone by our ‘transformation of the ecological landscape.’”

To Slow the Tidal Wave of Earth’s Tears

• Quit thinking climate is the enemy. The real enemy are the charlatans who would have you believe that we are not to blame for climate change, those discussed in #2 and #3. 
• Understand Climate. Climate, as rainfall and sunshine, is a healer and an ally. The media and our ignorance have made it an adversary. We don’t understand climate and why it is changing. Weather, we “feel” because it affects us every second, 24/7, and it can feel radically different in a second, e.g. a cloudburst. Climate is the long-term average of weather, which may change subtly every year, e.g. heat. Extreme weather events may last only minutes or days but often creates historic catastrophes, e.g., Hurricanes Katrina, Superstorms Sandy, and Australian wildfires. Extreme weather events are manifestations of climate change. Media meteorologists should take the time to help us understand the differences between weather, climate, extreme weather events and climate change. They are in front of us every day and have no excuse to not spend a few minutes teaching.
• Beware of economists, Republican politicians, Wall Street , the Koch Brothers and any obstructionists and deniers of the truth of science. They are wolves in sheep’s clothing, perpetrating the myth usually through ignorance or stupidity that economics (“THE ECONOMY”) is a stand-alone science. The environment, ecosystems, raw resources, etc., in their own jargon, are simply externalities. A healthy ecology is not only not an externality, it is the very heart and an essential ingredient of a healthy economy. That complicates their over-simplification of an economic system that is truncated and independent of ecological systems. They sucker us into believing that we, the human race, in reality, are 7+ billion Captain Americas, Batwomen, Black Panthers, and their Superhero allies. In reality, we are Antmen in a giant colony. Simply players.  
• Beware of organized religion. We need to drop the biblical curse that preaches that humans have dominion and domination over Earth. Take your pick. We have neither for the same reasons stated above; we are components. Dominion implies that God made us the stewards, the caretakers of Earth and all life within. Domination implies that God gave us the Earth and the beasts within solely for man’s goals.
• Become knowledgeable and get involved. Adults and children can follow together the life cycle of an endangered species and their status globally. Almost all endangered species have funding possibilities (see World Wildlife Fund) and volunteer support for habitat restoration
• Support a proactive group that advocates a sustainable Earth. Virtually any environmental organization from Sierra Club to Green Peace support a sustainable Earth.
• Modify lifestyles to reduce our overall national ecological foot print. Do anything that helps reduce the use of fossil fuel: fund or use alternative sources of energy, walk, bike, take the train or bus, eat less meat, etc. This helps our morale and our global image.
• Elect politicians who are in touch with reality. Too many Neros fiddling in Washington while the world burns. Pre-election quizzes should be given to all Congressional candidates to determine if their knowledge goes deeper than re-election fund-raising. Republican congressmen and their tycoon base do not understand or ignore the close dependency of their precious investments and healthy ecosystems. They are notorious for not funding and defunding environmental legislation while Democrats are typically the opposite.
• Support common sense legislation that places a price on burning fossil fuels and offers incentives for clean, renewable energy. Currently in Congress, H.R. 763, Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act 2019, enthusiastically supported by Citizens Climate Lobby, is a first step to reducing CO2 levels. Surprisingly, this bill is appealing because it IS bipartisan.
• Prepare for genuine sacrifice (as opposed to not wearing your mask) for the common good. The future will not be a time for narcissistic individualism over community, as we are seeing now in the Proud to be Selfish self-named, phony, “patriots” today (see post, American Pride, date). They wouldn’t know a patriot if it jumped up and took a chunk out of their ass. Their alleged thinking now is that by ignoring the “inconvenience” of observing lockdown procedures, they are tough ‘Merikans and expressing individual rights, never mind how many others you might kill in the process.  In contrast, during WWII we saw major sacrifices of food, gas and coal for the good of the war effort. 12,000 Londoners died after the war because they were burning sulfurous coal instead of good coal which had been sold to pay for war debts.  

Conclusion

2020. Earth weeps, a biologist weeps. And I have been silently and unknowingly weeping, but not tears of sadness but of joy since those days that began in the summer of 1965, 55 years ago when I really began my study of life and the lives of other species.  When I woke up and decided to become a biologist instead of a physician probably because of a few college classes in Oxford, Ohio. The turning point probably happened in August of that summer, two weeks before I was supposed to enter Ohio State Medical School when I walked over to the OSU Zoology Department and took the last teaching assistantship available for that fall. I probably became aware without my awareness, of how beautiful other creatures were besides women and my focus shifted ever so slightly from birds and bees to trees and bees and I started taking botany and entomology classes.  

The next summer,1966, the door of biology, in all its splendor and diversity, opened for me as it could nowhere else in the world, and I found myself on a four-month paleo-ecological expedition to the Galapagos Islands. What place could a biologist better launch their career than the epicenter of evolution? At that time, and in the decade following, I reveled in the splendor of life and what Earth had to offer. The Galapagos Islands is a hard act to follow but I didn’t sit idle. I lived for months to years places that I’d only dreamed about—Antarctica, New Zealand, and Argentina—researching, observing, and journaling.

And now I find myself weeping those same silent tears of joy at having had the opportunity to enjoy experiencing all that I have over the last half-century. Those tears of joy are mixed with tears of mourning for the losses of the millions of species during that period. There are occasional rays of hope that warm me; hope that dramatic actions could leave enough extant, intact biological communities of species, damaged but surviving, to save a faltering biosphere. And maybe those species that have vanished will eventually be replaced in millions of years by new ones as beautiful and diverse as their ancestors.

The human-caused extinction crisis is a tragedy beyond sad, but I, along with millions of others, are trying to slow the runaway extinction train.  The reasons I’ve stated above, but the rationale, As Kim Stanley Robinson, the futurist writer, wrote “There is No Planet B. There is absolutely no alternative to maintaining life on Earth.”

I would add that there is an alternative and that alternative is to send Earth, possibly a sentient super-organism and evolutionary integrated marvel, down a path that condemns it and all its parts, to a very real facsimile of Hell. Of course, we won’t be around to experience that which is unfortunate. because maybe that image would jellify us enough to step up and accept our role and play our final hand differently.

As I said at the beginning, the crime that towers above all the rest, given the horrible suffering we will bring to our own species, is the loss of millions upon millions of species to extinction. They are the innocent victims of our greed and ignorance as are our descendents, who may never know the joys that life brings to those who truly share and love this Earth. Who knows? Weeping doesn’t have to be permanent.

In early 19^th century England, from stage right, the heroine of a children’s fable, Goldilocks enters. Cruising the woods one Sunday afternoon, she discovers a little cottage and enters it. It turns out to be the home of the bear family who had gone on a stroll while their porridge cooled. Goldy found the chair, porridge, and bed were just right, so she rocked, ate, and slept until the 3 bears came home, scared her witless, and she leaped out the window to an uncertain ending. Apparently, there was a moral that Goldilocks wasn’t as innocent as she pretended to be and was violating someone else’s property, i.e., trespassing. Realizing this, riddled with guilt, she leaped. Or was she pushed by Baby Bear in a fit of rage? It’s probably best we’ll never know; trespassing followed by the possible murder of a sweet little girl would be a tough pill for a 3 year old to swallow.

In recent times, Goldilocks has had a much more important role to play than she ever did as a children’s literary heroine. Scientists have been metaphorically naming the conditions that have encircled Earth and existed for billions of years, as Goldilocks because they are just right for life. This life zone is 30 miles thick for microscopic organisms, such as bacteria, but 3 miles (16,732 ft) for humans, based on the highest permanent habitation to exist. Within this life zone, the physical conditions such as the temperature range, moisture, and atmospheric gases are ideal for biological systems, from the virus to the human, to survive. Consequently, we find a relatively solid, stable platform, Earth, plus a healthy Goldilocks is necessary to for life to flourish.

Instead of nurturing her and pampering her, we have been beating the shit out of Goldilocks for several centuries to the extent that she is seriously ill with symptoms that are so obvious, so blatant, and go so ignored as to be laughable. Laughable in the sense that we would find the Grim Reaper a great court jester. For Goldilocks, things are JUST WRONG and getting more wrong with each passing day.

To ignore and not address the causes of her illness 100% with all our scientific and collective wisdom is beyond stupidity. It is to commit globacide. We humans are not only responsible for world destruction, which includes ALL life, but we are hanging ourselves, too, in a delusional mass suicide. We are the cause and could be the solution, and rectify our sins by immediately addressing Goldlilocks’ ills. These mega-symptoms include the two current monsters: Climate Change and Coronavirus.

Climate Change. Everyone can relate to weather because it is what we see and feel 525,600 minutes each year. Weather is changing constantly, sometimes instantaneously and obviously.  For example, a cloudburst, a tornado and a forest fire can change our personal space in a second. Weather for a week or a month is not going to change the vegetation composition from forest to desert but dry, hot conditions extended over months to years will, and this is would be climate.

Climate is not well understood by most people because Earth responds subtly and sometimes unnoticeably over time. Vegetation changes in a specific region are the most visually noticeable and we feel temperature shifts most readily. Examples of climatically changed biomes change seen in our lifetime are the Canadian boreal forest biome northward creep, invading Arctic tundra and the Sahara Desert southward sand creep invading the sub-Saharan Sahel savanna of Africa.

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Extreme weather events are anomalies that are longer, more frequent and more intense (e.g., prolonged drought and record precipitation). Unprecedented floods, hurricanes, tornados, and monster, deadly fires are extreme weather events when they are not the norm for a given region. They are indicative that the long-standing and once-stable climate for any given region is shifting so rapidly that Goldilocks’ stability is threatened. Rising levels of temperature, carbon dioxide, methane, plus distressed ecosystems through deforestation and fire, exotic species introductions, and species extinctions can be manifestations of climate change.

If we wish to get a taste of how devastating and life-altering climate change can be on a large, readily observable scale, we need not look any further that Australia. Australia provides us a continental-sized look at how climate change can impact a very large region, very dramatically. A country of unique biotas, Australia is giving us a very palpable example of a distressed, proud people due to massive devastation of at least two unique ecosystems. Australia has the largest reef and greatest diversity of terrestrial marsupials and reptiles in the world.  Hundreds of marine species are threatened on the Great Barrier Reef due to rising ocean temperatures and acidity and one billion animals have died in apocalyptic fires due to severe drought.

Coronavirus. Climate change, up until this century, had been the only bad boy in town until an explosive pandemic, Coronavirus, paid the world a disastrous, but not unexpected by scientists, visit.  In modern times, the world has experienced other pandemics—HIV, Ebola, and Zika—but nothing, as deadly and globally life-altering as Coronavirus. In modern history more and more of these viral pandemics can be linked to ecosystem disruption, the most obvious being the tropical rain forest destruction and agricultural invasion. The viruses’ tropical habitats are exposed, eliminated and altered, allowing the viruses access to domesticated animals, tropical humans and then, possibly, the world. We see this when exotic species like cheat grass or the English sparrow are introduced intentionally or unintentionally to a new, vulnerable habitat with vacant niches. These aliens could occupy vacant niches vacated by extinct species or simply carving a new one, especially if they will have no natural predators in their new habitat. Even if the spread of the Coronavirus didn’t disperse in this manner, as virus habitats fall, this pattern could easily happen with greater frequency.

Our response to Coronavirus has been shock, as if blind-sided, which we were, despite scientists’ repeated warnings that we can’t continue to disrupt critical ecosystem functioning without devastating consequences. Being caught with our knickers down, has become somewhat norm for Americans. We would rather remain ignorant and suffer the consequences than face adversity head-on, or better yet, a novel idea would be to try PREPARATION! Reality is not real to us; living for the moment with no thought given to the future is our motto. It has everything to do with selfishness, indifference to the common good and an addiction to instant gratification. Probabilities mean nothing to us because we don’t understand statistics.  It only makes matters worse that, in general, we can be a very lazy people. 

Coronavirus is a gift in the sense that it provides a portend of the future, giving us an opportunity to do things differently and to prepare for worse epidemics and even more painful climate change devastation. The Coronavirus invasion and climate change are not natural, but symptoms of a badly wounded, but hopefully not yet defeated, Goldilocks. But based on historical reactions to dramatic and devastating events, like Katrina, more often than not, we return to our old ways, paying lip service to doing things differently this time. History means little more than a series of novel stories if we don’t learn from it.

Coronavirus is a bellwether, and it has forced us to make some modest sacrifices, plus motivated us to rapidly devise some very creative solutions that might be applicable to its runaway freight train cousin, climate change.  

Summary. Our world is a world in grave crisis, unlike anything ever experienced before in the history of civilization, even with all the wars and epidemics combined. I’m sure we don’t fully comprehend that, and if we do, we stay in bed. We would rather ignore that reality and not talk about it. Like death; we have difficulty facing it head-on.

At this juncture, particularly in the U.S., we are responding to these two monster calamities differently. Regarding Coronavirus, our opportunity for a jump-start was delayed by our current administration. When revealed and the potential rate of dispersal understood, we responded swiftly but as a duck hunter not a sharpshooter. Climate change has been creeping into the lives of the American public since the turn of the 21^st century. Knowledgeable individuals who could have sounded the alarm to the general public, like TV weathercasters, didn’t. Thus our response has not been so much shotgun, but lackluster and inadequate.

Everybody loves Australia whether they’ve been there or not.  Australia is big and hurting and really a macrocosm rather than a microcosm to our painful future. It is not a peephole but a picture window into our global future. The view from that window reveals a living hell, a silent world, a world devoid of time for expressions of love because it is a world on survival mode. Thus far, the U.S., the most powerful and gluttonous nation in history, seems resolute to remain sluggish or even immobile. Why? Because in part we are allowing ourselves to be held hostage by a dysfunctional political and leaderless system. Our apathy and slothful response guarantees climate change and pandemics will result in the inevitable destruction of innocent peoples and centuries of human creativity and the extinction of millions of exquisitely evolved species. While it is important to commit to personal lifestyle changes and joining environmental groups, it is paramount to choose real leaders NOW who understand what this lack of inertia means to the future of Earth. We need to dispose into the landfill of history the useless rubbish of politicians we currently have.

But most importantly, we are being incredibly selfish by denying future generations of what we and preceding generations have had: an Earth, thanks to Goldilocks, that has been “just right” as regards natural wonder, beauty and peace. A contented and stable Goldilocks has allowed most humans to experience relatively good lives. Instead we are handing them total global chaos, an Earth spinning rapidly into a black hole, with zero possibility of a return.

Edward Abbey wrote in 1968 in his classic, Desert Solitaire, one of my favorite books of all time, “……what I write about in this book is already gone or going under fast. This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands.” Are we going to commit our descendants to have to write the elegy on that tombstone? It doesn’t have to end that way if we listen and respond to the cries of a cancer-stricken planet; cries that have never before been as loud and as unanimous in voice as now. Can we get off our merry-go-round of ignorance, greed and selfishness and give them some semblance of what we and our ancestors were gifted from Goldilocks: a “just right” Earth? We certainly can but we need to address the ‘real’ in reality and do whatever necessary, regardless the pain it costs us now.  

At present, Goldilocks is not happy to find the rocking chairs busted, the porridge scalding, and the beds lumpy. She has found the Bears’ cabin, JUST WRONG. We need to restore our beloved Just Right Goldilocks, who will treat not only our descendents but all other species as she has treated Earth and all its creatures for billions of years.

 

Bradley and Vicente are two different individuals with two totally different entities of which they are proud. I don’t know Bradley at all, but I did casually know Vicente. So I made some assumptions about both, based on circumstantial evidence, which I admit, is always dangerous. But I’ve been dancing with the Grim Reaper since moving to Idaho 30 years ago as an environmental scientist and liberal Democrat. In Idaho, danger for my kind lurks on every corner, in the Capitol restrooms and behind every potato. In Bradley’s case I used a photograph to make my inferences, and in Vicente’s case, I used his English writing assignment. Bradley is probably a U.S. citizen, while Vicente is a citizen of Mexico wanting to become a U.S. citizen.  

Bradley: Proud of Being Selfish

A few hundred people demonstrated Friday against the coronavirus lockdown in Pennsylvania, an AFP reporter said, with many carrying signs declaring themselves “Selfish and proud”. (Agence France Presse, May 15, 2020)

Even though there have been hundreds of protests around the world since the Covid-19 invasion and the murder of George Floyd, this anti-lockdown rally caught my attention on the evening news because of what Bradley’s sign said. A few days later, around 4 a.m., the hour when brilliancy occasionally comes to me and fetid ideas overflow my brain like a clogged toilet, the low wattage light bulb in my brain lit up. Could Bradley could be expressing the sentiments of too many Americans who believe self-interest is of paramount importance and a desirable trait?

We lived in Alaska from 1981-1983. While there, I became friends with a man who had moved to Alaska just so he could build a runway and hangar for his aircraft, on his own property, without any restrictions. He succeeded. My friend was not a jerk or excessively greedy but simply single-minded; a selfish myopia.

Before moving to Alaska, I had read a book by Joe McGinness, Going to Extremes, about the year he spent in Alaska during the oil boom in the late 70s. He wrote about how so many Alaskans moved there because they wished to be totally free of governmental restrictions and do their own thing, like my friend. That attitude is not so much disrespect for others as it is simply not taking into consideration the possible negative impact of a personal action.

Now, 40 years later, we have come to this protest in Harrisburg where Bradley with his sign is inferring that his life is more important than the lives of others because lockdown procedures, even though proven to save lives, restrict his freedom of choice, whatever that may be. And in this case, his choice is not trivial but potentially deadly. Did Bradley follow the anti-lockdown practice through to a possible lethal ending because of him?  If he did, that still did not stop him.

Vicente: Proud of His Life

This photo of torture was taken somewhere in Latin America.

The Learning Lab (LL), here in Boise, is a literacy education center for low-income adults and families with young children, most of whom are refugees. Until Trump took office with his delightful immigration policies, schools like LL across the country flourished. LL had students represented from 50 countries not that long ago. I volunteered to teach students there, some who had witnessed unspeakable atrocities, not uncommonly to their families and before their very eyes. But, I found, as did other volunteers and staff, that many students talked openly about their horrendous backgrounds, and they never complained. They always came to class with huge smiles and seemed ecstatic to just be alive and in the greatest country on Earth. The class assignment below was written by Vicente, who I don’t believe had a tragic past. What follows is the result of one of Vicente’s writing assignments.

THIS IS MY LIFE.

FROM VICENTE.

Hi, this is Vicente, and I will talk about my life, In my poor opinion in think my life is great family , also I think my family are happy and this is very important for mi and I think for all father of family , My kids they are very good kids they have a good grades ,I love my wife she is a perfect women , mother and partner ,also I have a good job that make me happy because a do a lot of things this is one of the things of my life ,thank you so much for your patience.

Whriting for Vicente…

Conclusions

I know nothing about the backgrounds of any of the protesters at Harrisburg, PA. I can only speculate that all of them have the opportunity, but perhaps not the finances, to buy anything they want, drive anywhere they want, and have no fear of saying anything they want (unless, of course, they are a person of color). I also suspect they aren’t content because they feel the need to flaunt the fact that they are proud of being selfish, which says to me that they expect their wants and needs be fulfilled before those of others even if there’s insufficient for all. Greedy people never seem to be satisfied or happy. Sadly, we are a nation of too many greedy and spoiled people, taking our lives for granted and our every expectation to be met.

Bradley’s perspective on life is quite a contrast to how Vicente sees his new life in the U.S. I would bet Vicente expects very little, takes nothing for granted, demands nothing, and appreciates just about everything. In other words, Vicente is not greedy. He is happy to be alive and in what he believes is the greatest country on Earth. To him, America has opportunities to live a better life than he had in Mexico, but he still loves Mexico. I would never expect him to go to a protest such as the one in Harrisburg.  

So, who better represents the values and ideals for which America stands? Who is proud of America for the right reason(s)? Who would make a better neighbor? Does it matter? I think it does matter because it says a lot about how we see ourselves in an incredibly diverse and complicated nation. I believe that both Bradleys and Vicentes exist abundantly in America, so they both are true in that sense.

Obviously, to me, Vicente represents the ideals and values upon which this country was founded: humbleness, generosity, compassion and freedom from tyranny. Bradley is not only exercising his right to free speech; he is already practicing what he espouses. He would have to know, unless he is totally ignorant, what his myopic and greedy anti-lockdown position could lead to. He could potentially be guilty manslaughter, however unintentional that may be. The writers of the First Amendment certainly didn’t write the amendment with the idea that any action could accompany any speech. Speech alone is harmless, while actions may come with horrible consequences. That’s why we say that, “actions speak louder than words.”

Repeating what I said at the very beginning, Bradley and Vicente are two different individuals with two totally different entities of which they are proud. Bradley’s pride doesn’t extend past his nose. Totally inward – directed. Vicente’s pride is the exact antithesis: totally outward – directed. Extrapolating a little, Vicente is not only proud of his family, he is already proud of his neighborhood and his anticipated new country. When my wife and I lived in Mexico for four years with the Peace Corps, we repeatedly found loving, compassionate and giving Mexicans who would take the shirt off their back for you, even if it was their only shirt. I literally had that happen once when I spilled a bottle of salsa on my favorite Mexican shirt, after a tiny too much tequila. A little old lady ran to her house and returned with her backup T-shirt for me to temporarily wear, taking the dirty one with her to wash. I think all she really wanted was to gawk at my my 6-pak abs and rippling lats.

A nation of Bradleys would be a nation of selfish individualists who place their needs above that of community and country.  Bradley’s perspective only serves to push us further down the road of societal polarization, which is exactly what we don’t need in this time of multiple global crises and exactly what our current president wants to Make America Great Again—MAGA. A monoculture. His is a totally unrealistic and unwanted nightmare, not totally unlike Hitler’s was. A country of robots which is what he “owns” now in his base. How else can one explain it? Lobotomies aren’t cheap on the black market.

While Trump thrives on a polarized country because he believes that “to divide is to conquer” and he desperately wants to be the conqueror. In contrast, Abraham Lincoln was worried about a national schism when he delivered his famous 1858 House Divided Speech where he said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” More Bradleys and fewer Vicentes would mean exactly that: a strengthened inequality. One would think that a mix of both types would be good, but I don’t think so. That assumes that the deck would not be stacked, when, in fact, it is. The Bradleys would come to the table with money and power and with a desire to win even if it means lying and cheating. The Vicentes would come with only their humble selves. Isn’t that what we have now? An entire field of migrant workers, invisible against the shadow of one Republican Texan billionaire, and aspiring against overwhelming odds. Currently, America is a faltering democracy. I like to believe it isn’t a 737-Max on final descent. Hope springs eternal. The protests today are good, regardless the flavor, only if they lead to real change. And that change won’t happen if all we do is reshuffle the stacked deck and continue, business-as-usual (BAU). When the dust has settled from both Covid-19 and our racism, if we return to BAU, we should update the definition of insanity and reconsider our dreams of ever becoming a true democracy. Maybe we never were one but that makes our goal all the more desirable; it will be a new experience.

I published Going to México in 2017 after returning from serving almost 4 years (2007-2011) with my in the Peace Corps Mexico program. The book contains ten short stories about experiences we had during those years, mostly humorous, some poignant. The story in the previous post, Papá Ricardo, was taken from the book.

I believe the book evokes reasons why so many people love México and why living there changed our lives forever. In the introduction I wrote, “I remember very vividly one night walking to downtown Querétaro and my wife, Sonya, saying, ‘We probably will never have life this good again.’ And even though I had been working all day in a small village and was beat, I could only agree with her. And I still do.”

Going to México can be purchased as a paperback ($14.99), or Kindle version ($6.99) through Amazon books.

(November 16, 1942 – April 27, 2010)

“Si, Mi Vida, Lo Que Tu Digas”

Since I’m not going to be here on Fathers Day,tomorrow, and I really have nothing written about my biological father, I am going to include one of the stories from my book, “Going to Mexico,” about our Peace Corps host family “father.” In the Peace Corps, all volunteers need to stay with a host family for 3 months. The Lepe-Zepeda family, in Queretaro where we did our service, was our host family and we came to love them as kin.

Papá Ricardo and Me

After a few tequilas, with a straight face, he asked me who I thought had the last word in a Mexican matrimonial argument: the husband or the wife. Knowing that most Mexican families are strongly matriarchal, I answered that most likely it was the wife. “No,” said Ricardo, “the Mexican husband ALWAYS has the final word.” “And what is that?” I asked. “Si, mi vida, lo que tu digas,” he said with a rumbling chuckle. “Yes, my love, whatever you say.”

In what remains of this short portrait, I want to continue to share some aspects of Ricardo Lepe’s personality, which was dominated by humor. Having said that, I find it extremely difficult to sketch a funny human being with words and photos; humor has everything to do with nuances which can only be captured live or on video. Regardless the short comings of this portrayal, Ricardo left a huge impression on me. Ricardo celebrated his 67^th birthday on November 16, 2009, in true Mexican fashion: a small fiesta with family, friends, a trio of guitar players and a very local famous singer—his lifetime companion, Maria Zepeda. Maria’s singing began as passable, but improved with each caballito of tequila, the traditional super shot. A caballito of tequila is frequently drunk the macho way by both men and women—neat and quick.

Even though Ricardo was only three months my senior, he was “Papá” to me. This stemmed largely from the fact that as part of the first three months of Peace Corps training, the Lepe Zepedas became our Mexican family. We lived with them, and Maria and Ricardo became our Mexican mamá and papá, their adult children, our siblings.

Ricardo was a great teacher of Mexican culture over the 2 1/2 years we knew him. He especially taught us about Mexican humor, all by example. He was a virtuoso in a culture that placed a very high premium on comic relief. Mexicans seem addicted to fun, and humor is a huge component of that. Everyone knew, remembered and told jokes of all types. The most painful to listen to for non-Spanish speakers were the shaggy dog stories that went on FOREVER, and were rarely, if ever, funny—at least to us English speakers. When the punch line was mercifully delivered, you would be the only person standing, mouth agape, usually because you didn’t know that it was the punch line while everyone else would be doubled over in convulsions of laughter.

Ricardo’s humor may, in part, have been due to his hangdog, Rodney Dangerfield deadpan expression. He was modestly overweight and even looked somewhat like Dangerfield. This tended to give me a warm, confident feeling when I was around him. It made me wish at times he’d pull me in and smother me in his bear-like embrace.

Prior to our arrival in México, the Peace Corps had arranged for all volunteers to live with a host family for three months. We were all nervous about where and with whom we would be living. We met our hosts, Papá Ricardo and Mamá Maria with some anxiety, on our second day in México, in the lobby of the Peace Corps office. Host families were there to meet their volunteers and escort them to their new homes. Ricardo grabbed our bags and began lugging them to his little car. Somewhere in that process, they both gave us huge welcoming hugs. Maria almost immediately told Sonya in the back seat during the short drive to their and our new home, “We love you.” Sonya was a little taken aback, but she instinctually knew that Maria meant it. Their home was on Alcatraz Street. Alcatraz, of course, is a famous prison in the United States, but in Spanish, paradoxically, it is a flower, a calla lily.

That first evening, we sat in their living room, and Ricardo and Maria introduced us to themselves as well as to ponche. Ponche is a traditional, homemade Mexican Christmas punch made with brandy and various fruits, including apples, oranges, guavas, and tejocotes (apple-pear combo), and brown sugar or pilloncillo, and cinnamon. But Ricardo also made his own special pomegranate and tequila concoction, which we liberally sampled. It was then that we became acutely aware of Ricardo’s excellent sense of humor.

After a few glasses of ponche and Ricardo’s home brew, we were feeling like we’d known each other for years despite the language barrier. We wandered downtown for an introduction to Querétaro’s night life. Even though it has been a decade since that first day with the Lepe Zepeda family, my recollection of it is crystal clear and not lacking considerable emotion.

With our three months of training completed, we needed to move out of the Lepe Zepeda’s home into more permanent quarters. It would have been a very sad day indeed had it not been for the fact that we moved just around the corner to Magnolias Street, only five minutes walk away. We got to see our adopted family regularly. Ricardo continued to be my favorite and most colorful Mexican friend.

Jokes, particularly doble sentidos (two interpretations), are a Mexican obsession. You cannot really appreciate the Mexican office environment or a fiesta without being able to tell and enjoy jokes, especially doble sentidos. When I attempted to retell a Mexican joke or the rare one of our own that I remembered or at least remembered everything except the most important part, the punchline, Mexicans were always polite and pretended to enjoy it, usually with a soft chuckle. Most of the time they were clueless as to the meaning, which was more likely due to my weak joke-telling and language skills. Sonya was better at both, so I functioned best as her laugh track, especially if her joke looked like it was going to flop.

Of all the jokes Ricardo told me, two stand out in my mind, and I actually remember their most critical details. Most likely due to Ricardo’s skill, these two jokes never failed to make us laugh each time we begged him to retell them. Both are about abused—or allegedly abused—husbands, a common theme in Mexican jokes. One is the story of a baseball catcher, Carlos, who habitually returned home drunk after games and continually got smacked across the head by his wife, Margarita, who kept a bat by the door for just such occasions. Carlos never got through the door if he was drunk—regardless whether the team had won or lost. Finally after one night when he had taken an exceptionally bad beating, one of his teammates recommended, “Carlos, why don’t you go back to the locker room and get your catcher’s mask and wear it home for protection tonight?” Carlos thought that was a great idea, so he did just that. When his wife came to the door, she looked at him weaving around on the stoop with his mask on and screamed, “Foul ball!” Up flew Carlos’s mask and “smack” went Margarita’s bat.

The second joke is about José, a jobless guy whose wife, Lupita, wants a divorce because José doesn’t do anything around the house except sit, watch TV and drink beer, with the family cat and dog snoozing on either side of his feet. He realizes he needs to see his priest to avert the divorce. After hearing his story, the priest says, “Well, José, why don’t you do some jobs around the house if you really want to save your marriage? You don’t work and your wife does.” José responds, “I can’t. I can’t even get up from my Lazy Boy recliner.” “What do you mean?” says the priest, “you’re not an invalid.” José counters, “Well, let me explain. In my left hand I have the remote, in my right hand the beer bottle, with my left foot I’m scratching the cat, and with my right foot the dog.” Apparently, neither man in either story tried, “Si, mi vida, lo que tu digas.”

Ricardo had a fascination for Sponge Bob, the bizarre children’s cartoon character, watching it with his grandchildren or even alone. I never saw it, but he did talk about Bob frequently. His pronunciation of “Spongay Boob” brings a smile to my face even now. I can still hear him, in his gravelly bass voice, telling me about Bob’s latest absurd antics.

Five months following his birthday fiesta, Papá Ricardo was dead of cancer. Maria invited us to visit Ricardo a week before his death, and he was still telling jokes, albeit in a more subdued voice, from his bottomless fountain of humor. I will always miss him, not just for his comedic nature, but for the truly wonderful, loving and generous person he was. He and Maria, and their eldest son, Beto, who lived with his parents at the time, Beto’s brothers and sons, accepted Sonya and me as members of their family from that very first moment we left the Peace Corps headquarters and drove home in their car.

At his wake, Sonya and I were surprised not only that it was held the very same day of his death, but to discover that very few people, if any, appeared to be grieving. In fact, most were even laughing and telling Ricardo stories, virtually none of which I understood. Consistent withthe Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration and Mexican philosophy, the wake revealed the striking difference between the way we Americans and the Mexicans view death. To Mexicans—predominantly Catholic—death is intended to be a celebration of life on earth, but perhaps more importantly, a better life ahead in heaven. That isn’t to say there wasn’t sadness and grieving; there definitely was at the somber mass held later for Ricardo, but even then the music theme was rock.

In consideration of death, of all the holidays and fiestas that Mexicans celebrate, the one that impresses me the most is Dia de los Muertos, held the two days following Halloween, November 1-2. I doubt we will ever celebrate in our country the demise of our loved ones by dancing, eating and drinking on their graves—and telling jokes. It is in no way macabre, but rather a very healthy way to keep deceased loved ones still in the minds and discussions of the living. As far as Ricardo is concerned, I will continue to celebrate his life by telling his story, and, however poorly, frequently trying to tell his jokes—if I don’t forget the punch lines.

I went to see my dentist the other day, a devout Mormon and normally a very funny guy and I took the opportunity to ask him how Mormons feel about Trump. He pulled back his mask and got too close to my face and shouted, “I really don’t know about the majority of other Mormons, but do you want to hear what I think, Dave?” “Sure,” I said, knowing that I had made a terrible mistake. “I love the guy. And do you know why, Dave? I don’t like his tweets, but HE TELLS IT LIKE IT IS!!” He practically screamed the last part. He went on to add, “He is beholden to no one but himself, his supporters and the America he loves. Unlike all the other cowardly political robots, from Romney to Obama, he is his own man.” Fortunately, at that point, they called him from another cubicle, so I grabbed my free soft toothbrush and dental floss and fled.

If you have heard this once from a Trump diehard, you have heard it a million times. That perspective is so obviously contradictory, mindless, fallacious and defenseless, it is pathetic. The Washington Post (1/20/2020) found that within his first 3 years, Trump told 16,241 lies, while the New York Times (12/14/2017) found that in 8 years, Obama told 18, most unintentional and later corrected. In any given work hour, Trump told 2.6 lies while Obama told .001. Trump told 2,600 times as many lies as Obama. Trump supporters will scream that both the Times and the Post are liberal newspapers but I seriously doubt that either world class newspapers would jeopardize their reputations by printing front page lies about lies. Many of Trump’s alleged accomplishments are documented falsehoods perpetrated by himself, his kennel of lapdogs, and Sean Hannity. If your boss told 21 major lies every day about the financial and physical state of the company, wouldn’t you be a little queasy about job security? Would he make a good leader of the free world? In reality, Trump is telling it like it isn’t, rather than like it is.

It is true that I am very proud of a small mountain named in my honor in Antarctica. Trust me, I did not do anything heroic such as saving a group of Emperor penguin mountaineers who had fallen into a crevasse to earn the honor. One major purpose of this blog is way more than a story of an unimpressive black pimple currently sitting amidst a sea of ice, at 1,800 ft. (550 m.) above sea level, and not much above the surrounding ice sheet. The fact of the matter is that it’s still there and will always be there long after the surrounding ice field is gone. I joke that as it becomes more prominent, an old Antarctic friend’s glacier is disappearing. Greegor Peak is a deeply personal testament to climate change and all the global and personal changes that are going to occur over the coming years.

The little mountain is in the Ford Ranges of Marie Byrd Land in West Antarctica. Marie Byrd Land was named after Marie Byrd, the wife of the great Antarctic explorer, Admiral Richard Byrd. It is west of McMurdo Station 711 mi, the main U.S. Antarctic Research Program (USARP) base of operations. Direct from Boise, Idaho, where I live, to Greegor Peak, is 8,241 mi. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is of tremendous concern due to its abnormally high rate of melting, especially the Thwaites Glacier, also called Doomsday Glacier because of its potential to raise sea level. It is not far from Greegor Peak.

Thwaites Glacier

Following is the description of Greegor Peak from the internet:

Greegor Peak (76°53′S 145°14′WCoordinates: 76°53′S 145°14′W) is a peak 550 metres (1,800 ft) high 3 nautical miles (6 km) west-southwest of the summit of Mount Passel in the Denfeld Mountains of the Ford Ranges, in Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica. It was mapped by the United States Antarctic Service (1939–41) and by the United States Geological Survey from surveys and U.S. Navy air photos (1959–65). It was named by the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names for David H. Greegor, a biologist with the United States Antarctic Research Program Marie Byrd Land Survey II, 1967–68.^[1]

I had been in Antarctica during the Antarctic summer, from December 17, 1967 to February 22, 1968.  I was there as a graduate student from Ohio State University, helping a botanist from OSU, Dr.Derry Koob, collect non-vascular plants (mosses, lichens, algae). I had just finished an MS in paleoecology from OSU as a graduate student of Dr. Paul Colinvaux, renown paleoecologist, and I was free before going to University of Arizona in the fall of 1968 for my doctorate.

Over three years later, I received the following letter from the National Science Foundation dated April 30, 1971, making the name, Greegor Peak, official.

NSF Letter of Confirmation

The story of Antarctica and Greegor Peak is an example in a long list of experiences of my life, from one amazing adventure to the next, many of those serendipitous or coincidental, or “right place, right time,” literally almost from birth to the present. During those 77 years, I came close to death twice that I can remember. From these personal stories, some already written eventually will be collated into an short autobiography which I’ve been working on since January 24, 1943. It will be published as a book, similar to “Going to Mexico,” the number 1 bestseller somewhere, still flying of the shelves and swan diving into the trash, is still available for a limited time only on Amazon. Meanwhile, as I write them, I will post excerpts from the stories on Greegor sPeak.

The next Greegor sPeak entry will explain why and how this honor came about in 1971, and a couple of my more memorable stories, mostly humorous stories, from those 2 months on the ice. 

USARP Official Seal and Antarctic Service Medal