Boundaries 2

I'm still thinking about boundaries -- about where they exist and don't.

The Oil Drum reported,
Today, someone in the NYMEX pit session paid $100 a barrel for front month crude oil.

That just means the price didn't stay there, but it got there. Big Deal (as in it is -- as in, it's no.)
The article on Bloomberg said:

``This is the culmination of everything that we talked about last year,'' said John Kilduff, vice president of risk management at MF Global Ltd. in New York. ``Various geopolitical problems have deteriorated overnight, in particular Nigeria and Pakistan. Commodities, and in particular oil, have become safe havens in a dangerous world.''
Nigeria, The Middle East, Venezuela... And: Prices rose 2.9 percent last week partly because of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan's former prime minister. Pakistan borders Iran, which holds the world's second- biggest oil reserves, and is located along the Arabian Sea, where tankers travel before entering the Persian Gulf.

These things between us -- between here and there, you and me, up and down -- I'm much more interested in the way we travel over, and yet these markers seem to hold some undeniable psychological weight. It's not at all unlike New Year's day itself, really -- here we are, it's all the same as it was yesterday...

Passage over Water

by Robert Duncan

We have gone out in boats upon the sea at night,

lost, and the vast waters close traps of fear about us.

The boats are driven apart, and we are alone at last

under the incalculable sky, listless, diseased with stars.

Let the oars be idle, my love, and forget at this time

our love like a knife between us

defining the boundaries that we can never cross

nor destroy as we drift into the heart of our dream,

cutting the silence, slyly, the bitter rain in our mouths

and the dark wound closed in behind us.

Forget depth-bombs, death and promises we made,

gardens laid waste, and, over the wastelands westward,

the rooms where we had come together bombd.

But even as we leave, your love turns back. I feel

your absence like the ringing of bells silenced. And salt

over your eyes and the scales of salt between us. Now,

you pass with ease into the destructive world.

There is a dry crash of cement. The light fails,

falls into the ruins of cities upon the distant shore

and within the indestructible night I am alone.

link to the Poetry Foundation Archive
Robert Duncan, “Passage over Water” from Selected Poems. Copyright 1950 by Robert Duncan. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Bodies of Power

Five years ago a group of women in Nigeria shut down an oil refinery by threatening to take off their clothes.

"Our weapon is our nakedness," Helen Odeworitse, a leader of 600 women who peacefully seized control of an oil terminal in Escravos, Nigeria, told the Associated Press. Odeworitse and other women held 700 western oil workers hostage and shut down a facility that exports half a million barrels of oil a day. link
(also, the search originated from a roundup in the oil drum)

Their complaint was simple -- the villagers were extremely poor, the oil companies were very rich -- people working for the oil refineries were treated better than everyone else. The women demanded that ChevronTexaco employ some of their sons and invest in the community.

There, women taking off their clothes is a traditional shaming gesture. Can you imagine? Here there is certainly some power in that action, but it's a little different... though maybe there is a sameness in that the subject of women's bodies is always political if men are in charge.

Triumphs like this, learned years later, are subject more to history and less to the beauty of the moment. Five years later Nigeria is in great upheaval -- and much protest is not non-violent -- as I'm sure is not the reaction from the oil companies. In May an American-owned Chevron plant was shut down by protesters -- armed with sticks and machetes.

I'm picturing all of this -- sticks and machetes and naked breasts. Oil giants. Arms v. arms.

Old news. What we are taking and from whom...
So I think, this morning, as I turn on the lights, turn on the stove, get ready to warm up the car -- about women in Nigeria.

My oil, my country, my children's lives.
Their sons, their bodies, their lack of power.

Corn Dump Hours

When I was between the ages of 8-11 or so, I lived in Maine, on 17 acres of land. I have been thinking about that time a lot lately -- about the ghost in the woods, the small old family cemetery near the brook, and the snakes that lived in the wood pile.

My mother designed the house we lived in and built it together with a carpenter whose name I can't remember, but he had a great laugh. The house was heated by a Russian fireplace, fueled with trees cleared for the building. We used water from a well in the front yard.

My mother also gardened. Down by the road, about a quarter mile from the house, she had a whole acre garden. I hated it -- though there's nothing like the taste of corn picked, then eaten immediately, raw for breakfast. Corn is hard on the earth though, and you have to rotate where you plant it each year because it sucks all the nutrients out of the earth.

The sugar in corn is what makes it such a good fuel.


Lynn L. Walters for The New York Times

Today I strayed a bit, to begin to learn about ethanol. Ethanol is not oil. Ethanol is seen as the leading replacement contender to oil. Ethanol production -- energy made primarily from corn -- is on the rise. It's so on the rise that there's been a bit of a glut on the market this fall.

The Times reported in September:

About 1,000 pumps at the nation’s 179,000 gasoline stations offer gasoline blended with ethanol...Congress essentially legislated the industry’s expansion by requiring steadily higher quantities of ethanol as a gasoline blend, a kick-start that was further spurred by the proliferation of bans on a competing fuel additive used to help curb air pollution.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/business/30ethanol.html?_r=1&oref=slogin


Nate Hagens, a PhD student at the UVM Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, reported on The Oil Drum this morning:

Recent increases in oil prices in conjunction with subsidy policies have led to a dramatic expansion in corn ethanol production and high interest in further expansion over the next decade. President Bush has called for production of 35 billion gallons of ethanol annually by 2017, which, if achieved, would comprise about 15 percent of U.S. liquid transportation fuels. This goal is almost certain to result in a major increase in corn production, at least until marketable future alternatives are developed.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3285#comments

Recently, a book was published by the National Academy of Sciences about the implications on the environment of the growth of these programs. It's not good. Both water use and degradation will be huge -- fertilizer and pesticide use. The taxing of the land.
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12039

I think it's time to invest in a tandem bike for commuting with the kids.

My Emissions

http://cartoonbox.slate.com/hottopic/?image=0&topicid=161

Today a very simple sentence came to me via a very convoluted route.
In college, taking a break from the candlelight dinners of Smith College, I lived for a few months with 3 brilliant scientists, all getting their PhDs from Harvard.
Yesterday I heard one of them on NPR talking about ... it all.
Dr. Andrew Dessler -- I loved when he first put that title on his answering machine - it was new then, bold, and all he had worked for -- I still think it sounds sexy.
He's from Texas -- works in climate. He's back there now, with his beautiful family and said when I reported
"it's a warm fall here,"
"get used to it."
I wrote him -- "where should I look?" He sent me a tip. A website it will take me some time to get the hang of.
http://www.theoildrum.com/
But this morning, their first post was by an actuary who was recently solicited by the American Petroleum Institute to spend some time on an oil rig. She's written extensively on oil and consumption -- one article I saw was for the Wall Street Journal -- a pillar of reporting not known for it's liberal nature.

Gail the Actuary has this to say of solutions in her handout, "Another Inconvenient Truth:"

Is there an easy solution?
-- No, not really.
-- Conservation is a partial solution.
-- Alternative fuels (solar, wind, biofuels, geothermal) are likely to provide some help.
-- New technology like battery-operated cars are likely to be too little, too late.
-- We may need to unwind globalization; go back to simpler life styles, technologies that worked before.

It made me think -- it's so easy to get caught up in what we don't like about what's going on -- overwhelmed by an oil spill a day.
But there are things I simply can't imagine life without...
I would mourn my kids not meeting their grandfather.
I would mourn saffron.
I just loved hearing Andy's voice, sounding exactly the same 20 years later.
I would mourn beaches I've felt on my skin -- Elat, Big Sur, Capri.
My beaches.
Cixous says, when we own a thing we begin to kill it off... if this is true, is there power there, too? My oil spill, my emissions, my hole in the ozone.




http://cartoonbox.slate.com/hottopic/?image=0&topicid=161