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Talking Story  by Polo

From The Asian Reporter, V17, #17 (April 24, 2007), page 7.

It was a Saturday morning, still early. It was an Oregon April, also early. Our grand River Willamette, matriarch of this verdant valley’s corn fields and exploding cherry orchards, her grazing sheep and cattle, was still cold and still thick from Cascade and Coastal Range rushing creeks and muddy streams.

One hundred miles from her rural Creswell beginnings — with 100 miles to go until together with River Columbia she flows perpetually into our Pacific Sea — Eban Goodstein was taking a plunge. He took an April morning dip. He walked straight into our chilly, chocolate Willamette.

"What on earth’s he doing?" I thought. And not only me. Any other self-respecting, self-preserving, rice-picking islandboy standing on our generous river’s sandy shore would’ve wondered the same.

So I asked him.

Well, not exactly at that nippy moment. I waited till that shivering professor got out. Got dry. Got dressed.

"Adduuh! — Doktor. You nuts?"

"It’s not so bad," he said, beaming ear to ear. Standing next to him, next to Lewis & Clark College economics professor Eban S. Goodstein, was an eight-foot furry-white bear. Also grinning. Next to that polar bear, a pack of college kids were likewise shuddering. And smiling.

"We stand in a unique moment in human history," Dr. Goodstein said. "Right here, in Portland, Oregon." His students nodded. Their big bear nodded.

"Decisions are going to be made in the next couple of years," he went on to say, "decisions to stabilize global warming pollution, that will have profound impact on our planet, not only for our lives or our children’s lives, but for all human beings who’ll ever walk, until the end of Time."

According to Eban Goodstein, a nationally recognized environmental economist, lecturer, and prodigious author on the effects of global climate change: The IPCC (U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) predicts, even if we do the very best we can, holding global warming to an increase of just three to four degrees Fahrenheit, 20 percent of our precious planet’s species may still face extinction in our lifetime. His fuzzy polar bear bud will be among the first to go. Finished.

"Under business as usual, 50 percent of Creation is threatened with extinction." And that’s no joke.

Monster typhoons, monsoon rains in duration and intensity never known in our elders’ long-long memories, are no joke either. A million poor families’ homes washed away by an angry Mekong River, two thousand sleeping Leyte villagers suffocated in their sleep by a sudden sliding mountainside, are not funny.

Decisions need to be made. Serious ones. Bigger than the ones our President or Congress have debated, bigger ones than Oregon’s governor and legislature have believed necessary. All of those, only a bit better than "business as usual."

By "doing the very best we can," Dr. Goodstein means: making major changes in our everyday consumption of fossil-fuel-produced goodies, like driving efficient Hondas and Toyotas, like shopping local organic farmers’ markets where beef and bok choi are not raised on fertilizers dependent on intense petro-chemical processes, on food not trucked an average of 1,200 miles from farm to grocery store coolers.

But doing the best we can also means: us Americans, new and old, get responsible right now for electing political leaders who’ve studied our global climate crisis and prepared public policies that will get us away from our frightening dependence on oil. Oil dependence. Oil extortion. Oil wars.

It is the extraction of fossil fuels, the transport, refinement, marketing, and burning of petroleum products that’s whacking our world.

"The polar bear ecosystem is disappearing," said Lewis & Clark sophomore Cass Osterweil, also just drying from her morning river plunge. She is an Economics and Public Policy major. "One-hundred percent of their habitat — the arctic ice sheets where they den their young, where they feed — can disappear in the next few years. All of it because of global warming."

Ms. Osterweil credits her family for her intense sense of social responsibility. "I was raised in an environmentally thoughtful household. I learned you can’t go around in life without thinking of later generations."

"I don’t want to be fifty," she said, gazing at the swollen Willamette, "wishing I would’ve helped make a difference by taking action. What I could’ve done by educating others."

When asked what she had to say about Saturday morning’s swim, Ms. Osterweil replied, "Well, it was definitely colder and rockier than we thought."

A chilly river in the middle of April, a big polar bear leaning on a committed educator, surrounded by conscientious students. All of them on the west shore of a grand river half of her way to our big blue sea. These are, of course, the most critical of times. Our times. But they are, just as surely, our most hopeful. Our most thoughtful.

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