Cycling Anniversaries

It's 40 years since the Summer of Love; 30 years since a small band of us started the Michigan Mafia softball team, which in turn led to the creation of BAMSL -- the Bay Area Media Softball League. It is also 30 years ago that Rolling Stone left San Francisco for New York; consequently, a group of three of us opened the Center for Investigative Reporting (in Oakland) precisely 30 years ago this fall.

It's 2 years ago that Hurricane Katrina, the worst storm in U.S. history, smashed into Mississippi's coast, dislocating a generation of poor people from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans all the way to Pascagoula.

Societies and families celebrate all sorts of things good and bad in this way, but we ignore plenty of others, including: The first known case of AIDS, the arrival of the first slave ship in North America, the invention of the modern cigarette, the date the first misguided U.S. dollar was placed by the CIA into the pocket of a Jihadist, gasoline poured onto a fire that threatens to engulf the planet.

We fail to observe anniversaries such as the start of the manufacture of cloroflorocarbons, initiating the Greenhouse Effect; the initial tear in our atmosphere known as the Hole in the Ozone; the conversion of DDT from a military powder used against fleas and bedbugs to an organochlorine pesticide broadcast over the fields and jungles and forests of the planet before anyone beyond a small group of scientists suspected the devastating consequences to our common ecosystem that would ensue.

Running throughout my 40 year career in journalism has been a deep concern about environmental issues, particularly the way they transcend man-made structures such as "nations," "races," and "classes." It really won't matter ultimately who you are when it comes to Global Warming, although for the entire opening phase of this slow-moving catastrophe, those who feel the primary brunt of the pain will be, of course, the poor.

That, of course, is the reality of Katrina, or the deadly Christmas Tsunami in Southeast Asia the winter before. It is the underlying story of every "natural" disaster in history -- those who suffer most have always been the poor. They are, in fact, used by the rich as human shields against the dangers that surround us all.

But the planet aims to change all that. Not even wealth and privilege, political power or fearsome weaponry can protect rich people from Global Warming and the unraveling of the exquisitely interconnected sets of factors that hold our world's ecosystem together.

We do not celebrate any of this; nor will those who survive into our troubled future. These massive failures and errors of judgment by humanity -- or, more precisely by a slender self-appointed elite of humanity -- will be celebrated only by those that inherit the earth...the insects, the worms, and the rats.

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