Happy Holiday Hope: The Slow but Steady Return of The American Chestnut

The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire) - Nat King Cole
Its one of the best Christmas songs you have to admit.. some of em feel like a brain tumor (yup.. Jingle Bells, sung by Simon and The Chipmunks   click this link at your peril.. it's a special level of hell made for your Aunt Thelma), but when this one, Nat King Cole, gets stuck in your head, it's not bad, it does make you feel warm.. you feel the fire, smell the smell of roasting sugars, and it feels cozy... pre-global warming cozy... nothing to worry about cozy... it's a damn good song. But what the hell was Nat King Cole talking about?
It's a rare American city where the festive cheer leads to roasted chestnuts, but you can find em sometimes, at Christmas markets and state fairs. My first time seeing them of all places was in Europe where the crop is more steady. It was a lonely Christmas in Munich, and I wandered their famous Christmas Market, complete with Glockenspiel ( A favorite joke German word of a college buddy of mine, and how relieved I was to find out it was just a clock..) and some guy was roasting these little round things over coal and it turns out they were little salty morsels of goodness, Chestnuts in English.

The Cutest Things on Earth: The Recovery of the Eastern Pacific Sea Otter

There are times where nature astounds with it's power, with it's grandeur, with it's scale and intricacy. Think storms, sweeping vistas, the size of the Pacific or so many impressive landscapes, and the beauty of a butterfly wing or a banana leaf if you stare close enough. Now you might not expect Grumpy to think this way, but sometimes it astounds in it's cuteness! If Walt Disney or Walter Lantz had tried to come up with the cutest damn thing they could dream up, I am not sure it could come close to a few of Natures more compelling creations, passing perhaps the puppy, kitten, Shamu, Cambodians, baby pandas and seals in the fuzzy whiskery big eyed charmer category, and to make it funnier, what if perhaps the cutest creature ever had the personality of a grumpy drunk or combative crack head, something Dave Chappelle would love to take on...and that personality only made it all the more Daffy Duck lovable. Now throw on an environmental survival story that is really one for the books, a story with bad guys, exotic intrigues and a final surprise so fascinating that you are surprised more people don't know about it...

The Electric Scooters of Shenzhen

http://www.alibaba.com/showroom/import-electric-scooters-from-china.html

Post Soundtrack (click here and keep reading)

Every once in a while you stumble upon something, and you are surprised at the change. I travel so much, I know what to look for when it comes to change, and I know how slowly change usually happens. If the change is environmental in nature, in this case the application of a technology to reduce air pollution, and you see a complete turnaround in 4 or 5 years, you get a bolt of Hope in a hurry, especially if it happened in the heart of the world's new global warming bette noir, The Peoples Republic of China, and to be exact, it manufacturing powerhouses in the areas around Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, the old Canton. What am I talking about.. it's gunna seem small, it is small, but I hope I can find statistics to explain to you just how large it really is. I am talking about 2 stroke scooters, or the apparent lack of them, in Shenzhen. I used to have to imagine Asia without the whine of these ubiquitous little motors, now I can experience it. Every scooter in Shenzhen that I saw during a long days night of pacing the streets was electric. It was a complete change out of inventory in a way that could only occur under the type of authority extant in the wold's largest Capitalist Dictatorship, the PRC, which just passed These Here United States of America for Overall Atmospheric Carbon Emissions a few years back. Let's not talk per capita just yet, that's embarrassing for the west. But in this blog, I wouldn't be pointing such a hairy finger of blame, in part an accident of demographics, if it wasn't somehow involved in displaying something good.

The Restoration of the Mesopotamian Marshes: Twice the size of the Everglades, but being in Iraq makes it..umm.. complicated..

Here's something I never expected to see coming out of Iraq. It looks more like Moab, it just seems too normal, the anal tepid CNN anchor and all:
http://cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/international/2013/04/03/inside-middle-east-iraq-babylon-e.cnn.html

I am better aware than most that the US went to War with Iraq the second time under some pretty attenuated public reasoning.. trust me... I might have heard some of the guys who trumped the whole thing up, in person and privately, in a different phase of my life, scheming about it, but that aside, and with all due respect to Sean Penn, Saddam was a pretty bad dude, and no friend to the environment...
We sometimes make a very Muslim mistake when we get frustrated with a political situation in our country, and we declare the enemy of our enemy to be our friend... and almost no one likes War, and well, if you are going to win a war, you need to so called 'Win the Peace', but no such luck in this case... However, Rummy, W and the boys, they did know a bit more than the average Tom, Dick, and Mustafah about Iraq, and even as they sharpened their knives and pens to `help Iraq rebuild it´s oil and national infrastructure', in that order, they were aware of one or two little things that they didn´t necessarily think would sell as well as the 'Goebbels perfect' WMD fiasco. You see, in addition to Saddam´s mal-treatment of the Kurds, with Chemical Weapons at times, and the Shiites, and the Iranians.. and, well, the Kuwaitis...and any Environmentalist who remembers the burning wells after the Mother of All Battles, which burned 1.5 billion barrels, perhaps only 17 days use at current rates for the world, but straight into the atmosphere which caused perhaps a sharper than usual high in the saw tooth patterns of world atmospheric Carbon charts, should be as pissed as I was.. (that was pure Saddam), he had also destroyed one of the world's distinct Ecosystems, the Mesopotamian Marshes.

The Expansion of Wind's Power

Somehow Windmills have become the poster child of the Green Revolution..

they are, well, pretty in the abstract, and in person, kind of impressive, form follows function, and they are somehow calming, and like a wind chime, cooling, and they are popping up in large installations it seems just about everywhere (except for the coast of California, but for once I will try not to be grumpy)..the biggest onshore I can find is 5 Gigawatts of potential in north west China, and another in the North Sea might hit 9 Gigawatts.
I can name a few spots I have seen them in my travels. The old famous Farms were the highways east of San Francisco and LA, on 580 and I-10, Altamont and San Gorgonio Pass respectively (the latter also the home of the giant dinosaurs at the truck stop in Pee Wee's Big Adventure, which I know is more important to you than anything that follows). These installations are somehow a vestige of the first Obama administration, known to many as the Carter Administration (or maybe the third Wilson Administration perhaps..), since it was the environmental movement of the 70's that laid the seeds of today's progress, but they lay dormant in some ways for years as we kind of cleaned up many a mess from our wild industrial times before we could step it up to move forward as we are now.

California Condor: 400 and counting..

Never seen one, but I know how important they are. I think they are the biggest bird in North America, and what I guess I would describe as the Apex Scavenger of the American West. Debates continue as to how far East and North they might have ventured,but from Oregon to Texas and all along California and down into Baja and perhaps even Sonora and beyond they soared.
They are huge, 9 foot wingspan. I have seen an Andean Condor, the biggest bird in the world with up to 10.5 ft wingspan, and all I could think to compare it to was a C-5 transport plane as it flew towards me, impossibly large... They are basically huge buzzards, the things look like something out of Spielberg's Dark Crystal, or like an animal caricature of the long lean faces of the old Indian groups from the same areas, like an old man from the Tarahumara in Mexico.
This tells the story better than I could. DDT was the problem, and they are susceptible to lead poisoning as well, which is a second major human cause of premature fatalities, since they often feast on carrion that has bullets or lead shotgun pellets embedded in it..They scooped up every remaining one in the wild they could about 25 years ago, the 20 or so remaining pairs, and started breeding. Their mating got all the attention of European Royalties for a while.
http://shadowofthecondor.com/facts.html
http://www.ventanaws.org/species_condors/
The Plan, with players like the USFWS, NPS; San Diego Zoo, Ventana Wildlife Society, and now the Mexican National Commission for Natural Protected Areas (CONANP) and SEMARNAT, the Mexican equivalent of an EPA, was to breed the remaining ones and try to increase numbers, then release them into the wild again as it became possible

Panama Canal Expansion Project

Due to be done in a few years, and for a while ahead of schedule (no longer at last check), this promises to save a bunch of carbon, and the new gates are more efficient water-wise than the old ones, allowing for less impact on the ecosystem of the Canal Zone, well less than would have happened with the same gate system as the old gates (100 years and ticking!).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal_expansion_project
the one knock against this, unless you get anarchistic, is that it could have been done with a railroad system, but that might have been even more destructive, as panama would have had to build a huge port on it's pacific side, plus a huge container yard, which might have been more of an eyesore and an environmental catastrophe than just this big construction project.

Introduction

The news about Global Warming is depressing, worse than people realize, and sadly true. I have a friend who is a Government glaciologist, and he once, after a beer or two, decided to tell me how much time was left for a few major ice caps we knew.. it's a bit sad.. add to this the 150 years of environmental degradation from industrialization and population growth we are healing from, like a post party house cleanup, so I needed uppers, and I found a few good projects around the world to give me hope,which I sometimes check like expats check the sports scores back home... Like the cheesy line that Robert Plant somehow could pull off in introducing Stairway to Heaven on The Song Remains the Same: This is a Song of Hope...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q7Vr3yQYWQ