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Our Willow Is Gone
Until yesterday, there was a huge willow tree on Columbia Road between the road and the beach. There was nothing like it from Castle Island to UMass. It shaded and cooled us, and it was a haven for birds. It gave me a jolt of pleasure every morning I ran by it. I marveled at its gracefully twisting trunk and deeply veined bark and at the grace of its boughs festooned with thousands of strands of willow leaves.
Every living thing has its time to die. This hundred year-old tree met its end through a lightening bolt yesterday afternoon. While it is sad to lose such a magnificent tree, what turns this event into a tragedy is to know that there will never be a tree that large on Columbia Road again. The average tree planted today in Boston lives seven to ten years, according to the City of Boston Parks Department. Part of the reason the trees aren’t growing is that pollution from car exhaust and other sources creates ground-level ozone, a pollutant that damages the DNA of trees and causes cancer and asthma in humans.
Some studies have shown that tree growth is reduced by 30-50% in high-ozone years. Even outside urban areas, scientists estimate that ozone pollution has reduced tree trowth in northern and temperate mid-latitudes by 7% already, and we are headed to a 17% reduction by 2100. But a scientist is not needed to see that we are losing our trees here in Boston, including our hundred year-old heritage trees. In the future, our children may not see trees the way we do today. For them, a tree will be a spindly, stick-like plant about twenty feet high. When you tell them that there used to be huge trees that you couldn’t put your arms around, they will smile politely and nod, just as we nodded when our great-grandfathers told us about the herds of buffalo so large that they extended as far as the eye could see.
Six trees are slated for removal in Andrew Square
Although we can’t do anything about the dead willow, there is a tree less than a mile away that we can save if we all work together. It is the largest tree in Andrew Square. This tree has provided shade, cooling, and cleaner air to thousands of passersby over the decades. It is now slated for removal as part of the Andrew Square renewal project. While the project does provide for planting new trees, these trees will simply join the ranks of the hundreds of others that the city has planted that wither, die back, and then die over the next few years. I am not aware of any money provided for maintenance and no money provided for replacement if the trees die.
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If you like this then please subscribe to the Fiddling While Rome Burns
Even if it’s not true that Nero played a lyre while watching the Great Fire of Rome, there are many historical cases of human inaction and apathy in the face of impending doom. I’m not sure if President Obama and BP CEO Tony Hayward have been playing musical instruments as they watch massive quantities of oil gush from the Deepwater Horizon. But this disaster proves that Americans are unable to take even the most basic precautions to protect our planet. I thought that surely we would take this oil spill seriously by declaring a state of National Emergency and by deploying all available resources to stop the gusher and remediate the damage. Instead, we are waiting, lawsuits in hand, for someone else to fix the problem.
President Obama – Please do more!
Dear President Obama,
Everyone I know is sickened by the oil spill. Why does it seem that our government is not doing enough to clean it up?
I don’t care whose responsibility it is! Can’t we step-up the involvement of the armed forces? What about other oil companies?
Instead of arguing about responsibility. we should be uniting to fight this catastrophe.
Sincerely,
Susan Labandibar
“Can I quit now?”
The morning that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, causing a fatal levee breach that claimed the lives of 1,200 people, Federal Emergency Management (FEMA) chief, Michael Brown, wrote an email to his public affairs department joking: “Can I quit now? Can I go home?” Anyone with a real background in emergency management knows that it is critical to react quickly, and with all possible intensity, as soon as the crisis emerges.
I’m afraid that Tony Hayward, CEO of British Petroleum, also felt like burying his head under the pillow, as the oil leak crisis continues to escalate out of control, with 4.2 million gallons of oil already spilled into the Gulf of Mexico.
As for me, after three weeks of waking up at night with anxiety attacks about this blow to our environment, I am ready to hammer Mr. Hayward (and President Obama) with some of the questions I ask as when I manage a crisis in my own business, where we are responsible for keeping our customers’ servers up and running 24/7:
Mr. Hayward:
How many people should develop solutions for stopping the leak? Are other oil companies jumping in to help BP, producing solutions in parallel?
How do we know that all available technologies are being brought to bear, regardless of whether they are proprietary, and all experts in this field have been consulted, regardless of their location or employer?
Is cost a limiting factor in the efforts to stop the leak? Are there solutions, such as using tankers to siphon oil-contaminated water from the spill area for treatment, that are currently not being implemented because of cost?
Is BP working with all possible speed on the relief well? Why only one relief well?
What happens if BP’s efforts to drill another well suffer a setback? Would another company be able to drill a second one, and potentially faster?
President Obama
Who is representing the interests of the public in this matter? Who is verifying BP’s statements?
What else is flowing out of the well besides oil? Are gasses such as SO3 flowing out of the well, contributing to ocean acidification?
Why can’t the government get involved in the efforts to stop the flow? Isn’t this a matter of national security?
Are there solutions available to the government, such as oil dispersal at a low depth with submarines, that are not being implemented?
As concerned citizens, we must not continue to let this crisis unfold. Instead of finger-pointing, we need an all-out effort to resolve this problem. Please contact Mr. Tony Hayward’s office at BP and the White House.
Spill Baby, Spill
There are dueling offshore energy stories in the news this week. The first is about an oil platform exploding and sinking in the Gulf of Mexico. Eleven workers are dead and every day, 5,000 barrels of light sweet crude are pouring into the ocean. The second is the approval of the Cape Wind project, which may start providing 420 megawatts of emissions-free energy as soon as 2012.
These stories come on the heels of a deadly coal mine accident and highlight the contrasting visions of America’s energy future. Opponents of Cape Wind (including the late Senator Kennedy) claim that the view of the 130 proposed windmills could harm tourism and that the project might have unforeseen environmental impacts. Meanwhile, West Virginia and Louisiana struggle with environmental impacts that they know all too well.
Opponents of renewable energy point out that it is not yet as cost effective as other more conventional sources. Where these calculations fall short is in accounting for lasting damage to ecosystems caused by disasters like the recent oil spill. It has been more than twenty years since the Exxon Valdez breached its hull off the coast of Alaska, and fishing there has still not recovered. Unfortunately, modern economics does not yet have an accepted method for valuing ecosystem services (instead we assign value to the impact on industries that rely on those ecosystems). Until we reach an agreement on how to account for our dwindling natural wealth, we are likely to go on treating it as if it has no value.
The opposition to Cape Wind goes beyond not-in-my-back-yard sentiment. There are legitimate concerns about ecological impacts of the project and cultural objections from Native Americans. For them, an unobstructed view of the sunrise is one more part of their culture threatened by our exploitation of natural resources. Still, if given a choice between looking at windmills, looking at a barren mountaintop removal site, or looking at the inferno of an oil slick set ablaze to keep it off their shores, I think I know what most Cape Cod residents would pick.