Focus the Nation, Climate Change

Turn on, tune in, stand up: It's time for change

In my opininon | Duceré Useré Cycleré

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 1/30/08

"Turn on. Tune in. Drop out."

I've used this Timothy Leary quote before, to poor effect, but it's appropriate to use today as we face global climate change and have a nationwide one-day opportunity to realize a critical mass of social awareness.

Thursday, Jan. 31 is Focus the Nation, a nationwide "teach-in" that organizers hope will be the '00 environmental equivalent of actions in the '60s and '70s that resulted from the civil rights movement, women's rights movement and protests against the U.S. war in Vietnam. The hope of this "teach-in" is to influence not only how the issue of global climate change plays in society, but also how this issue plays in the selection of each party's presidential nominee.

This organizational pitch of a "teach-in" theme made me think of other ideas that were flowing through college-aged social consciousness, some three or four decades back, that have recognizable parallels to the closing edge of this decade. This is where we need to consider Leary and his impact on the way we remember the "hippie era."

If we're actually going to realize wide-sweeping social, industrial and economic change, in terms of our concern about the climate, we've got to capitalize on the inertia of ideas that are already present in our consciousness.

While many people consider Leary's catch phrase as a call to drop out of college and drop acid, his own account of the idea behind this call to action is much more nuanced, which he explained in his autobiography, "Flashbacks."

Leary advocated that each individual individual should "turn on" by finding ways to "interact harmoniously with the world." Once turned on, the individual could then "tune in" to the significance and presence of her or his personal existence by becoming "sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them." The subsequent "drop out" was in effect little more than "self-reliance" in so much as it was "an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments."

If you set aside Leary's drug use and drug advocacy for a moment and look at this call to action logically and structurally, it is very similar to what many of our politicians, scientists and environmental activists are telling us right now. We need to find ways to cause less impact on our environment and live more harmoniously with the cycles that have sustained our existence up to this point - turn on. We need to become aware of how our individual and collective actions impact the quality and quantity of future human life - tune in. And we need to implement these solutions in our lifestyles and industrial and economic systems - drop out.

These parallels, substituting intellectual thought and creative entrepreneurial acuity for LSD and mushrooms, hold the potential for us to change the world. That's why most of us came to college in the first place, right? So how do we make the next move?

Well, it's you - especially all you University instructors and professors - you need to take your students to the Focus the Nation events tomorrow because the one-time opportunity to academically and seriously address climate change issues far outweighs the 20-or-30-times-a-term opportunity to address coursework.

This is our future that we're dealing with here, and it cannot be dealt with lightly or delayed indefinitely to "another day, sometime." Focus the Nation is that day, and that day is Jan. 31, 2008.

Take the initiative. Use your professional skills to demonstrate how life, academics, learning and simple presence on a university campus are relevant to each individual's contribution to creating a global climate change problem, or realizing a global climate change solution.

If you ignore this call to action, then on Friday, Feb. 1, 2008, and later, on Thursday, Feb. 1, 2018, and even on Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2028, a little voice in your head will whisper, "what if?" What if you had invested one hour of class time, way back in 2008 to spark a little inspiration in the mind of a University of Oregon student? What if?

If you choose to teach class instead of take your students to Focus the Nation, in 20 years you will not remember what you taught that day. You will not even remember what class you were teaching that term. But you will remember that you made a conscious decision to place the importance of one hour of class time over the importance of the chance to initiate positive social and environmental change on a national scale.

Opportunities like this do not come often.

Embrace this moment, when Al Gore's decades of advocacy have given us a hunger to do good, when Barak Obama, in his historic move toward the presidency, implores "everybody to be involved with [Focus the Nation]… the largest campus teach-in, on global warming, in U.S. history," and when even George W. Bush, freshly showered in sweet crude, calls on us in his State of the Union swan song to "complete an international agreement that has the potential to slow, stop, and eventually reverse the growth of greenhouse gases."

Now is not the time to hesitate and think that somebody else will do something. You and your students are those "somebody elses," so go, tune in, and on Monday, Feb. 1, 2038 we will all look back and remember, "Yeah, I was there."

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

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© Copyright 2008 Oregon Daily Emerald

Mission in Afghanistan Dwarfs, Outpaces the US Commitment

Joshua Grenzsund - The Campus Word

Wednesday, 23 January 2008

If one hasn’t been particularly paying much attention to the United States’ first war of the 21st century, perhaps distracted by Iraq (or by the writers’ strike), one might just believe the claims being made by Secretary Gates concerning US operations in Afghanistan.

When first made public, Gates said that the possible deployment of additional troops to the country was simply to make up for numbers that nations participating in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force Allies were unwilling or unable to provide, which left a gap of about 7,500 troops short.

Sure, we may be able to accept that, but first we’ve got to ask what numbers have already been provided? According to news reports from early 2005, and according to information posted on NATO’s own website, ISAF troop levels in February 2005 topped out at about 8,000 troops, less than 100 of which were American. At that same time, about 17,000 US military personnel were conducting training and counter-terrorism combat operations. Now, three years later, the NATO-led force has expanded its area of responsibility, most notably in the south, and its numbers have grown to about 40,000, of which about 14,000 are US. Additionally, the US still has about 13,000 troops dedicated to hunting Taliban and al-Qaida forces, and when the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit and part of the 7th Marine Regiment arrive, that number will return to about 16,500. When we break down the numbers like this, we see a five-time increase in the number of NATO-led forces and a near-level number of US troops serving as part of Operation Enduring Freedom.

When faced with this sort of analysis, Secretary Gates said that the real reason for the US Marine deployment was that NATO, as a whole, “has not trained for counterinsurgency operations,” implying that the US troops would be able to handle the mission better. But lost behind all the exchanges over which troops and which numbers, there is the actual question of why more than 50,000 troops are unable to do the job or have the apparent effects that about 25,000 had just three years ago when the Pentagon was planning US troop reductions thanks to a growing Afghan Army and increased NATO presence. If there was a moment of opportunity to realize an enduring and democratic freedom in Afghanistan, it was during the 2004 Parliamentary and Presidential elections. But that moment is very much in the past.

The scale of the US mission in Afghanistan, as a whole, is underwhelming, and is justifiably dwarfed by the lofty goals that we have set up for ourselves and for Afghanistan. For more than six years we've claimed success in helping establish a just and sustainable democracy in a region edging to the far end of three decades of continual war, not to mention the century previous to that. But in 2004 we sent just 1,000 extra soldiers from the 82nd Airborne to help stabilize things during the elections, and now we send just 3,200 Marines to fend off the perennial “spring offensive,” when the snow melts in the Afghan mountains and it's easier to pack around a PKM and RPG and set up a roadside bomb or make-shift rocket tube. One could continue to argue that it’s not numbers, but tactics and strategy, but in any case what little has been thrown at Afghanistan over the last three years has not been calculated for a full military, political, economic,or social achievement of our freedom-minded goals. In light of all this, the deployment of these Marine units on an unscheduled tour indicates that the democratic goals of the mission in Afghanistan are not viable, specifically because the strength and tactics of US and Coalition Forces are not able to keep pace with the growing insurgency.

The US and NATO are quickly losing real, political and symbolic ground because they are not adapting to the insurgency; because Afghanistan is not a priority for either the US or its NATO allies; and, increasingly, because the instability in Pakistan is a psychological victory for extremists and a defeat for a US that is cobbled to the increasingly tyrannical Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. At best we can hope, or I should say, those in Afghanistan who have risked their political and physical lives should hope — and all those US and ISAF personnel who are likewise risking their lives should hope — that we arrive at a mix of strength, tactics and strategy that will bring a lasting peace to that nation.

But this hope alone will almost certainly prove futile, as prior to the recent assination of Benazir Bhutto only two of our presidential candidates, Barak Obama and John McCain, were forwarding policies that actively pursue that enduring end. Since then Hillary Clinton has also voiced her concern for specific "success" on the Afghan-Pakistan front in the "War on Terror." But Republican candidates Mitt Romney and Rudolph Giuliani do not see Afghanistan as a foreign policy priority, which resembles Secretary Gates' own position. He is concerned with Afghanistan only as a third priority, after Iraq, and a top priority of maneuvering the US Military into “a sustainable position.” Given that prioritization, it appears that it will only be a position that sustains our lessening influence against the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, but doesn’t end the occupations one way or the other.

2008 www.thecampusword.com

Impacts of Marketing Cloned Meat

Will that cheesburger cost society its soul?

In my opinion | Duceré Useré Cycleré

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 1/23/08

We have taken a small step closer to "the future" and a giant leap away from a "natural" or "traditional" relationship with the animals that we feed upon. If you think that shrink-wrapped supermarket meat already separates you too much from the life, the animal and the death that created your juicy New York strip steak, you won't like this latest dish.

On Jan. 15 the US Food and Drug Administration announced "meat and milk from clones of cattle, swine, and goats, and the offspring of clones from any species traditionally consumed as food, are as safe to eat as food from conventionally bred animals." Though it still encourages companies to keep the products that come directly from the body of a cloned animal, they are fully endorsing the sale of products from any "traditionally" conceived animals that the clone may have parented.

And the US is not alone in this move. On Jan. 11 the European Food Safety Authority released a draft opinion on cloning that reads "food products obtained from healthy cattle and pig clones and their offspring" are similar to products from "conventionally bred animals" and can be marketed to consumers.

Livestock owners who applaud this move liken cloning to just a different sort of selective breeding. Instead of breeding an animal with desirable qualities and hoping you can keep the bloodline going and thus grow flocks and herds of plump, fast-growing, disease-resistant flesh, you can simply make exact genetic copies of the best breeding stock, using somatic cell nuclei transfer, and be almost guaranteed copious high-quality results.

What this means for your shopping basket is that you will be able to buy cheese, milk, steaks and processed meaty treats that are of the highest quality and best value because the consumption-bound animals are the "natural" offspring of a multitude of blue-blood clone breeders who have passed on their tastiest traits.

But this FDA decision will also certainly re-invigorate conspiracy theorists' claims that somewhere some companies already have Matrix-like factories of chicken breasts growing in vats of synthetic amniotic fluid, plucked off when they reach 14 ounces and packaged for sale.

While that may seem unrealistic, the theory probably has its origins in the 1995 feat of University of Massachusetts' Dr. Charles Vacanti. The Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine published a tribute to Dr. Vacanti in 2006, recalling the groundbreaking experiment when he manipulated cells to "produce tissue-engineered cartilage in the shape of a human ear on the back of an immuno-compromised nude mouse." So sure, terrible/terrific things are possible.

And if we have or do develop processes to the point that we can grow cloned parts without the help of the non-desirable excess - a whole animal - we'll have a new conundrum. On the one hand, there will logically no longer be the issue of animal cruelty in growing meat-for-food-and-skin, as a piece of flesh with no central nervous system to process stimuli can't be considered a conscious being. But on the other hand, we will also have dismembered the system of what we understand to be the "natural" order for living creatures, whether you keep chickens as pets or like to munch on their tender flesh.

However, cloned meat, in any fashion, should not be allowed into our marketplaces because it is a move that helps shift the center-mass of our social and consumer inhibitions further away from a world in which the realities of death as part of life and killing as part of eating are visible and understood. Not only does it disrupt the utopian idea of the "golden age" of how we imagine life used to be, it also sets the stage for some new socio-political crossbreeding that could produce some strange offspring.

It just happens that also last week, here on campus, animal rights activist group PETA had some representatives go near naked in front of the EMU in protest of fur, and by extension, meat products and the supposed exploitation of animals. So, if we could grow just the finest cloned fur, would people still be able to protest that it is unethical treatment of an animal - no brain, no pain? But if PETA would protest cloned parts, or cloning at all, as a cruel disruption of "natural" animal lives, then they may have an ally in environmental activists or local-natural-foodists who advocate against genetic modification, cloning and other developments that may threaten more "natural" species or "traditional" relationships with food.

However, PETA President Ingrid Newkirk's plans, which, according to her will, include having her own body dismembered and parts of it cooked or sent to those with whom she particularly disagrees, may be too extreme for "local food" people.

So while such a nexus may be unrealistic or unsustainable, other developments may create collaborations that are more long lasting. One of these, which have been gaining a lot of momentum in our area, is the work among forestry conservation advocates and climate change activists. As a product of the focus on climate issues, this cooperation seems to have staying power that a PETA-local food collaborative may not.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

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© Copyright 2008 Oregon Daily Emerald

Rogue tree-huggers, board room suits join forces

Rogue tree-huggers, board room suits join forces

In my opinion | Duceré Useré Cycleré

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 1/16/08

In the late 1990s and early 2000s Eugene gained a reputation as the center of a radical, active, and sometimes destructive environmental movement. This extreme breed of environmental activist defied establishment authority and challenged business development in a series of direct actions, from tree-sits in town and in regional forests, to a 1999 riot during “rush-hour” traffic and eventually a string of arsons.

Now many of those trendsetters are in prison, some as convicted “terrorists,” the FBI has reestablished its authority, and Eugene’s activists are finding it necessary, even beneficial, to take a different approach in a radically changed social environment.

For one, it is now totally cool, and increasingly profitable, for the same governments and businesses who stirred up such ire a decade ago with their policies of expansion and development to tag their operations with leafy green logos and buzzwords like “organic,” “sustainable,” and “eco-friendly.” This is a sure sign that the message of the 90s has at least been at least partially assimilated, but Eugene’s new breed of environmentally conscious activists dare not leave it at that. Instead, they are following this eco-image on its descent straight into the deepest bureaucratic and industrial reaches.

Near the core of this effort on the UO campus is the ASUO organization known as the Survival Center. The name may conjure visions of grizzled men and women snaring bunnies with their fists and trekking through the wilderness, but the center was actually formed in the 1970s and has a mission that is “geared towards the education of the campus community around issues of social justice and environmentalism.”

Housed in Suite One of the Erb Memorial Union, the Survival Center shares a tightly-packed space with The Student Insurgent, a self-proclaimed “radical newspaper,” and the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group. The place exudes an energy that will likely raise your hackles the first time you step through the door, as though the fury of ’99 or ’01 still breathes from the walls. It does.

Some of the posters plastering the wall date back at least a decade and the racks upon racks of zines and radical newspapers form a density of independent thought and determination that is unequalled on campus, and likely unparalleled anywhere in Eugene. Even some organizers who see the Survival Center as a second home admit that a first visit can be over-stimulating, or even intimidating. But that impression is not lasting.

If you can make it past the gauntlet of literature and pamphlets, the next thing you are sure to find is a smiling face, and for good reason. Suite One is an authentic safe space, with comfortable couches, computers to use, and an all-inclusive, open-access policy centered around the ideals of social and environmental justice. But the individuals and groups who operate out of this room are far from satisfied in keeping these ideals confined to four walls and a low-slung ceiling.

Last week I met with two of these smiling faces, two individuals who are, dare I say, hell bent on marking every mind they meet with mental graffiti that spells out a simple message – think about your actions, and the reactions of those actions.

Tara Burke and Jesse Hough are both involved in two relatively new movements whose UO activities are based out of the Survival Center – the Cascade Climate Network and the Sustainability Coalition. The CCN was created this past October by 20 student representatives from 10 colleges in Oregon and Washington when they met and drafted a four-page Cascade Climate Declaration. The Declaration identifies the “window of opportunity” that is available to affect the outcome of a climate crisis and outlines several principles which we need to follow to reach a “sustainable, just, and prosperous future.” Those 20 students are currently soliciting signatories to the Declaration and will present it to their states’ governors concurrent with Focus the Nation on January 31.

While the CCN is a regional movement to help focus on climate change, Burke and Hough also recognize the need to reduce redundant efforts and create synergy among the dozen or so campus organizations involved in social and environmental justice movements. The next Sustainability Coalition meeting, this Friday at 4 PM in EMU’s Rogue River Room, will bring together groups with seemingly disparate philosophies – some leaning towards radicalism and direct action while others advocate much more mainstream approaches.

In their own activism, Burke and Hough epitomize this new ideal of conjoined extremes, with Burke acknowledging her radical inclinations and Hough showing his administrative bent with his button-up shirt and clean-shaven face. But rather than being an anomaly, this dynamic is now the norm, and a beneficial one at that. Each extreme learns from the other and we are all learning that everyone, in a real sense, is a direct activist. We all have to make conscious choices about our lifestyles because our lifestyles already have direct repercussions on our environment and the future of human existence. Your action already is direct action – direct towards precipitating climate crisis, or direct towards averting it.

Where the argument used to be one concerned with saving “nature,” we now understand that the challenge is in fact one of saving ourselves. So turn off your computer at night, reuse your water bottles, and become an instant activist because, as Burke and Hough agree, “peak oil” is inevitable and “the revolution is here.”

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

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© Copyright 2008 Oregon Daily Emerald

Don't look for heroes in Afghanistan (not the old kind, at least)

Tuesday, 15 January 2008

Joshua Grenzsund - The Campus Word

The US needs to lose its self-image as a gallant hero to make real progress in Afghanistan and the rest of Central Asia.

A soldier—US Army Special Forces—rides on horseback under the Afghan sun amidst gunfire, explosions and falling enemy fighters. If you think back about six years you’ll remember those images from the news in late October of 2001. The US, attacked and threatened, was overtly sending troops, our country’s rugged Western heroes, to a ravaged and dangerous land to fight the “evil doers.”

But if you browse through your local video store or NetFlicks you’ll remember it was actually 13 years earlier, in May of 1988, that Sylvester Stalone acted out these same scenes in "Rambo III," fighting Soviet troops with his US muscles.

After the 1991 Soviet collapse, many in the US saw Afghanistan as the battle that ended the Cold War. Though US involvement was officially covert, there was a feeling that the US won the war. That embellishment prepared us to accept, or even cheer, the 2001 images of our soldiers on horseback. The imagined invincible Special Forces hero, John Rambo, who fought alongside the Mujahideen in 1988, had become the actual Special Forces fighting alongside the Northern Alliance in 2001. However this realization of cowboy bravado in Afghanistan has given way to another change.

Through the 1980s the US was interested in prolonging the guerrilla war with the Soviet military as part of its general Cold War strategy (and incidentally recently chronicled in the much-hyped film “Charlie Wilson’s War” starring Tom Hanks), but now the US military, along with the Afghan National Army and their NATO and ISAF partners, are on the receiving end of a similar guerrilla strategy on the same battlefields. Six years after the country of Afghanistan was “liberated” and “stabilized” there are increasing signs that the US has started playing the same imperial role the Soviets did in the '80s. They don’t ride horseback any more, but they try the same balance of infrastructure rebuilding and large scale human hunting that failed the Soviets.

The pressure and trials of the extended conflict neared their climax in the seventh year of Soviet Union occupation and ultimately forced their withdrawal. Though Soviet tactics were admittedly more brutal, there are many similarities in the detentions and raids of the ‘80s and the ‘00s that arguably create more resistance to an occupying force than they resolve. No one can say for sure, at this point, that the US and its Western allies will fail to achieve the stated goal of fostering a stable democracy in Afghanistan, but given history, the outlook is less than encouraging.

One major factor that leads to this assessment is the Afghan peoples’ defiance of foreign influence. Among the Afghan population the Pashtun, those who traditionally live along the Afghan-Pakistan border, have a reputation of being defiant and proud fighters, and this reputation is well supported by anecdotal evidence. While I was in Afghanistan in 2004 I met several Pashtun men who had faced detention and interrogation not only by the Soviets in the 1980s, but also now, by US forces. These men were often unfazed, emboldened, and bragged of their ability to defeat transient superpowers.

But an even more ominous aspect of the situation is that the US now occupies Soviet-built airfields as its main bases in Afghanistan. In a Hollywood sense, we know the heroes of the Afghan-Soviet war were the ones who attacked these bases, not maneuvered from within them. And in a political sense, one only need imagine the challenge the US would feel if Russia occupied similar positions not too far from our borders. From 2001 until late 2005 the US also used a former Soviet airfield at Karshi-Khanabad in Uzbekistan. However, after Uzbek President Islam Karimov refused to allow a full investigation of the May 2005 massacre in Andijan and faced US criticism, Karimov demonstrated a shift away from ties with the West by ordering the US to vacate the airfield.

Karimov is a holdover from Soviet leadership who shows no signs of letting go of his 16 year “democratic” rule and his continued control is evidence of a longing for Soviet-style government and influence. Russia, with President Vladimir Putin at its helm, certainly welcomes this sort of hold-over cohesion within former Soviet territories.

While the US exudes ambivalence about its desires of influence in Central Asia while claiming to support Afghanistan’s sovereignty, Russia is more open about its intentions. While it is now the world’s tenth largest economy, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) reported in December on Russia’s intentions to “be among the world's top five most-developed countries” by 2020. Such a move will not come through bashfulness or allowing US influence into former Soviet territories. It will be accomplished by a consolidation of power in Russia and within its former spheres of influence, focused greatly on fossil fuel resources.

A marked recent development that underlines the willingness to follow through on this is the parallel between Putin’s choice for Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, and the newly appointed Kyrgyz Prime Minister, Igor Chudinov. Medvedev ,42, served as chairman of Gazprom, and First Deputy Prime Minister before becoming Putin’s candidate. Chudinov, 46, is an ethnic Russian who does not speak Kyrgyz and was a former director-general of Kyrgyzgaz.

Though Putin’s announcement about Medvedev has received world-wide press coverage and RFE/RL and several Russian language news outlets have reported on Chudinov, there has been little mention, so far, of how Chudinov may play into Russia’s attempts at a wider economic reconsolidation. The placement of these young men with experience in the petrol sector is not a coincidence when viewed with Russia’s goals by 2020 and beyond.

The US presence in Afghanistan and its desire to spread western-style and western-friendly governments in Central Asia run counter to Russia’s interests and will meet with increasingly strong overt and covert resistance. The US has to come to terms that they are no longer the dashing heroic liberators on horseback in Afghanistan, but rather occupiers in the shadow of a strengthening Russia, facing mountain fighters who have driven out every occupying force in history.

2007 www.thecampusword.com

Out of the ashes, a new kind of environmentalist

Out of the ashes, a new kind of environmentalist

In my opinion | Duceré Useré Cycleré

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 1/9/08

I grew up burning things. It was never malicious, unlike my friend who started a fire under his neighbor's outdoor propane tank because he thought it might blow up their house.

No, my fires were much more innocent - the occasional ant pile and the weekly barrel of trash, filling my wagon with water and leaded gas then lighting it afire, throwing a dozen lit matches over my shoulder then turning to see how much of the dry July grasses in the mountain meadow had burned and hoping I could stomp out the flames before they got carried too far by the afternoon breeze. Summer was a favorite season specifically because things were dry and more likely to burn, and if it was a wet summer they could still be generally induced to burn with a little 87 octane encouragement.

Once I was out of grade school I turned my attention more to bonfires and eventually "redneck Christmas trees" - that being when one douses a 15-20 foot tall fir with three gallons of gas, at night of course, and throws a match. In its day I thought it was a truly beautiful sight. But those days are over.

I hope you're wondering just why someone with such a background would now be enlisting himself in the ranks of those who may call yourselves "environmentalists," and helping call attention to the need to reach a sustainable and "eco-friendly" lifestyle and economy. The answer is simple: You can't reach your goals without me.

Sure, I used to toss aerosol cans into the trash fire just to see them explode and floor the accelerator of my 1966 Ford Galaxy up a mountain pass just to watch the gas needle sink at six miles to the gallon, but since the '90s I've become more aware of the collective impacts of individual behavior. That's why the "sustainable" and "eco-friendly" environmental movements need me and others like me to become active voices in the current dialogue on what to do about climate change and other environmental issues such as pollution, genetic modification of plants and livestock, and watershed and forest health.



Environmental purists need those with a little more petroleum flowing in their veins because we, the formerly conspicuous consumers and recreational destroyers, can speak the language of those who would resist changes to sustainability and maneuver within the "it's always worked before, so don't be alarmed" logic that is used by many who would like to see the status quo maintained.

Though climate change is being addressed on a global scale, we still have to engage in dialogue with some of the renewed movements that continue to claim that human-caused climate change is an exaggeration or even a myth. Two of these recent nationwide efforts are headed by The Heartland Institute (at globalwarmingheartland.org), founded in 1986, and The Science and Public Policy Institute (at scienceandpublicpolicy.org), founded in 1994, which argue that climate change is "not a crisis" and "evidently a natural process," respectively.

The challenge to convince the mass of people and their governments and businesses that their individual actions and choice of what they buy and eat, and how they travel, commute and recreate actually impact Earth's climate. Organizations like The Heartland Institute and SPPI currently have the advantage over environmental conservation organizations because the former offer a utopia of stasis and continued convenience without responsibility for repercussions, while the latter too often come across as offering only restrictions and economic hardship.

Because the debate has been framed in terms of environmental concerns and conservation being equated with these concepts, it is up to those of us who are familiar with establishment rhetoric to rephrase key terms in this dialogue so that concepts such as environmental and economic sustainability are embraced across class lines and not resisted on the basis of what often comes down to class identities.

We have to speak plain language and present unpretentious logic so that those of us, like me, who would burn trees with gas for thrills and buy genetically modified and processed foods for convenience will seriously consider the non-destructive and local alternatives.

There are many different ways in which students, faculty and staff at the University are channeling energy into these endeavors. Over the following weeks I will examine several of them, including the Cascade Climate Network, the University's Environmental Issues Committee, the Environmental and Natural Resource Law Program, the Environmental Studies Program, sustainability efforts at University Housing, the Campus Recycling Program, and Eugene '08.

My angle will be one to question if these efforts themselves can be sustainable and effective, keeping in mind not only the overwhelming economic dependence upon fossil fuels to meet our basic needs of food and shelter, but also the strong influence of organizations such as Monsanto and Weyerhaeuser, who not only use genetic modification to feed and house us more conveniently and cheaply, but also help fund our public institutions, such as the Tree Biosafety and Genomics Research Cooperative at Oregon State University.

I welcome your comments and critiques and look forward to the dialogue.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

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© Copyright 2008 Oregon Daily Emerald