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Talking Story  by Polo

From The Asian Reporter, V17, #27 (July 3, 2007), page 7.

America’s pretty cool. All kidding aside.

A half million dreamers risked everything and everyone to sneak out at night in creaky sampan, all along Viet Nam’s 1,000-mile porous coastline. Mother Mexico’s children walk under white-hot sky, over a scorching moonscape. To get here.

When someone cracks open those Chinese stowaways’ iron cargo containers, they desperately expect to breathe cool, vigorous, free air. And while the air isn’t exactly free, all us new Americans can’t be all wrong. A lot about America is going well. Real well. Take Popeye’s chicken. Take Costco’s shopping carts. You can’t beat leafy suburban Beaverton. You can’t sit taller than in an Armada, Sequoia, or Expedition. Yeow.

Moreover, Americans have choices. Lots of choices. Dizzying choices, all day long.

New Americans have to make them too. And that’s precisely the point of this column. Choices. Big Ones. The biggest. Ever.

Last week, I sipped Mojitos at the top of downtown Portland’s Big Pink. The U.S. Bancorp Tower. It was happy hour, it was loud. They serve tall-tall drinks way up there.

I sat smack in the middle of all those handsome guys, all those hot girls — all that America, feeling pretty doggone good. That is, until I turned east and saw majestic Mt. Hood reaching into June’s azure sky. Some icy patches, but no snow. She’s never been like that. So naked. Something is wrong. Very wrong.

If I would’ve looked west, if I could’ve looked west far enough to see our big blue Pacific, it would’ve been just as plain that our precious corner of our grand continent is changing in frightening ways. There’s a dead zone out in our ocean.

Just off Cape Perpetua, an area that used to be thick with king salmon, black rockfish, and red snapper, packed with anenomes and sea stars — is now about 70 miles of lifeless ocean. Our lively kelp forest is gone. Disappeared.

Last summer, an Oregon State University research ship returned with dark videos of thousands and thousands of crab carcasses and belly-up ocean worms. "It’s just a wasteland down there," said OSU marine ecologist Dr. Francis Chan. "I didn’t expect to see anything quite like this."

There’s really no reason for anyone drinking and laughing and talking too loud in that lovely lounge on top of Portland’s Big Pink, not to know about our diminishing snow pack, about our shrinking glaciers, about our warming oceans, about our vanishing ocean life. The rest of our civilized world, all developed nations except ours, have been hustling to manage our aching earth’s ecological crisis for ten years. The Kyoto Protocol.

The Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is an agreement that our delicate planet is heating fast, that us humans made this mess, and that we better fix it. Fast.

In those ten years, particularly our last three years, disastrous global climate changes have caused Asian weather calamities worse than any in any grand elder’s memory. Monsoon rains of unprecedented intensity and duration washed away 800,000 family homes all along hungry River Mekong. A million and a half gone in India and Nepal. Another 3.5 million homeless in China.

Former Vice President Al Gore has been crisscrossing America, dashing state to state, campus to campus, playing his Inconvenient Truth to anyone who’ll listen. And what he’s been saying, what aaall those U.N. scientists have been saying, is that it’s us — you and me are responsible for this mess. Our greed, our insatiable consumption, is causing all that sorrow back home.

Okay-okay, Costco-size steaks and Cokes and paper towel rolls, are a bit hard to give up. And yes, a family car as big as an army truck is pretty cool. Hard to quit. But what us eager new Americans need to do, what we need to do now is actually easier than giving up those excesses.

We need to vote. We need to make political choices. It’s time we make serious public policy change.

What’s best about America is the good old 1-Person/1-Vote Rule. It is the bomb. It’s what makes possible all those things we only dream about back home.

Rich man or poor man, city chic or country girl — all the same. In America you get only one vote.

In America those guys wanting to be your boss, need your single vote. In America, we rule.

Ask Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon President Thach Nguyen what happens when APANO organizes an Asian and Islander voter forum and invites candidates for city and county, for state and national office to talk to us. These elections are won by a hundred votes, by a thousand votes, by our votes. Ask Al Gore how many votes shy of the United States Presidency he was eight years ago.

Let’s talk about your Navigator later; let’s talk about shopping local farmer’s markets instead of Safeway after November elections. Right now, let’s ask our vote-shopping politicians a few questions about global warming, about our Asian homelands’ suffering, about what public policies they promise you and me.

Specifically, we need to know:

Car makers, electricity generators, truckers and airliners must make commitments to cap climate-warming emissions. Trade them or tax them, but industries and municipalities must limit their carbon output. The City of Portland meets Kyoto accord standards; others can too.

Without the kind of commitment to developing solar, wind, and wave energy resources that government currently plows into securing foreign oil and subsidizing gas guzzling, alternative sources cannot become competitive in the marketplace.

Government must set alternative energy goals. Take electricity. Although Oregon makes plentiful hydroelectric energy from our dams, most states burn coal or oil to make electricity. A modest goal of 75 percent energy generation from these carbon-based sources and a 25 percent dependency on solar and wind energy by 2025, is practical and possible.