Polar bears had it hard enough before John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate in the Republican campaign for the White House. Polar bears are suffering the record melt of the polar ice on the Arctic Ocean. The bears depend upon that ice in order to hunt seals, their main prey. Now that significant amounts of ice are gone in the summertime, the bears are finding it difficult to find enough food to eat.
So, after years of illegal delays by George W. Bush, the polar bears were finally given Endangered Species Act protection this year. Almost immediately, however, that victory for the polar bears was itself endangered. As Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin filed a frivolous lawsuit on behalf of the big oil companies in order to try to force the federal government to reverse the decision to protect polar bears.
Science was on the side of the polar bears. It’s clear that they’re a threatened species. Yet, Sarah Palin argued that polar bears ought to be allowed to die off because profits for oil corporations are more important.
America has suffered under that kind of anti-environment, anti-science attitude for eight long years. If Sarah Palin is elected Vice President… well, the plain fact is that John McCain is elderly, and he’s not in good health. McCain has had cancer four times, and has other serious health conditions. Sarah Palin would likely become President if John McCain were elected.
That’s why polar bears, and the people who care about their survival, are against Palin. These lapel stickers can be worn by those who want to spread the word, and speak for the bears (for the bears have silent tongues, and I’m telling you Palin, at the top of my lungs…)
(They’re available as campaign buttons there too, but given that the theme of this blog is progressive bumper stickers, I thought I’d stick with that.)
Over at Democrats.org, they’ve put together a sweet little website, Exxon-McCain 2008, a parody site that reveals the connections between John McCain and the oil industry. Did you know, for instance, that John McCain has put together a little $4 Billion legislative gift to the oil companies while he runs around telling the rest of us little people that he can’t afford to do anything that would help us out of this energy crisis? For shame, John McCain!
Here is an Exxon-McCain 2008 bumper sticker to help spread the meme, using the style of the George W. Bush 2004 bumper sticker to help reinforce the idea that John McCain is just four more years of George W. Bush.
Apologists for a filthy Earth think that they’re being clever when they call environmentalists tree huggers. They believe that they’re making fun of ecologically aware people, but the truth is that the tree huggers term only sounds like an insult to someone who has some serious psychological damage.
What kind of sick mind would prevent someone from loving trees? Trees are one of the most basic, primal objects of adoration for humankind. Trees have been at the heart of human mythology and human subsistence for as long as there have been humans.
So yes, I’m a tree hugger, but I don’t just hug trees. I kiss them too.
Children take special delight in trees. So, Irregular Times offers the following video, featuring, in the middle, a boy climbing a tree and singing about it in delight. Isn’t that the very picture of happiness?
One of the interesting things about the Barack Obama campaign is that it is bringing people together around more than just their support for Barack Obama, but around their personal interests too. For example, one of the groups at the official Barack Obama web site is Gardeners for Peace and Obama. This group is focused on environmental issues, and does more than just talk.
Consider the blog entry created by PonyGirl, a member of the group. She talks about a recent Obama campaign activity which did more than just hold a rally for Obama. In Minneapolis, Obama supporters came together to clean up the riverfront part. “You would be hard pressed to find narry a cigarette butt,” she writes.
That tells you a lot about gardeners, and about supporters for Barack Obama. These aren’t the kind of people who sit and think about how things might be. They get up out of their chairs and work to match what is to what things could be. They plan ahead. They care about the world around them.
It’s a good sign for the Barack Obama presidential campaign that it has grabbed the support of gardeners.
To try to see the other side, I searched Google for any groups of gardeners who might support McCain. I only got the following message in response, “No results found for “gardeners for mccain”.
That tells me what I need to know about the John McCain for President campaign. I’ll join Gardeners for Obama.
I was a but surprised at the idea of this bumper sticker, Icthyologists for Clinton, until I thought about it for a little bit.
We don’t think about the profession of Icthyology very much, but icthyologists are actually at the center of one of the most important, and most neglected, issues of our time: The ecological destruction of the Earth’s oceans. Put together overfishing with pollution and climate change, and you get an environmental disaster - it’s taking place right now, though we have trouble recognizing it, given that we live on the land.
The oceans used to team with life, and now, life is being bleached out of the oceans. Marine ecosystems are going topsy-turvy. Icthyologists, who study fish for a living, can see what’s happening to our oceans with their own eyes. In places like BlogFish, icthyologists are documenting the extent of the threat piece by piece. It makes sense that icthyologists would support a presidential candidate who seeks to end the years of environmental neglect under George W. Bush.
The new Progressive Buttons Blog writes of the precarious position of our post-agricultural civilization, “At about the same time that the Space Program took off and rocketed to the Moon, we forgot how to tend the earth. We lived in our new homes as if they were spaceships, drinking Tang as if we were cut off from all ability to make our own food any more.”
As America teeters on the verge of recession, it worries me that most Americans wouldn’t even know how or when to plant a bean to feed themselves, much less how to harvest, store and prepare it.
We couldn’t grow victory gardens now if we tried. With global warming escalating, the difficulty is only increasing.
Mohandas K. Gandhi had a warning about this development, which he saw beginning in his own lifetime:
There’s something kind of sexy about a tree hugger. It’s not for nothing that people talk about getting a “woody”, or that the ancient Greeks imagined that sexually attractive spirits lived within trees. Trees are phallic, penetrating the sky and earth alike.
Right wingers are out of touch with this natural symbolism of sexuality. They’re so much into dirty, stinking oil wells that I don’t think that they really have much fun in the bedroom. They mock environmentalists as “tree huggers”, and don’t realize that this very phrase reveals how much they’re missing the boat.
This t-shirt (made here in the USA, free of sweatshop child labor) takes the right wing insult and embraces it, much as environmentalists embrace trees: I don’t just hug trees - I kiss them too.
Too many of the environmentalist critiques of sport utility vehicles, however well-intentioned, fail to speak the language of the people they seek to convince. Most SUV drivers are not concerned with doing the right thing. They don’t care much about the social responsibility of their vehicles. They just like the bigness, and the vroom.
There’s an old Buddhist slogan: Be where you already are. We Americans would do well to take that advice, in a modified form, when it comes to our treatment of the environment: Let where you are be where you are.
If you live in the Northeast, don’t maintain a lawn in the pretense that you live on the prairie. Let the trees and bushes grow some more.
If you live in the South, don’t use northern grasses and water them like crazy to try to get them to grow.
Above all else, if you live in the desert Southwest, don’t pretend that your yard is an oasis. Xeriscape, for goodness sake! Most of New Mexico is not at all suited for lawns. Tucson is not Cornwall. There are no sheep grazing in verdant pastures. The California soil is suited for scrub and for jericho trees, not bluegrass.
What other bumper sticker allows you to be sexy and socially conscious at the same time? You can be cool green on the inside, but red hot on the outside with this double entendre that is as alarming as gobal warming itself.
It’s important, with the issue of climate change, to break through people’s desire to forget about the problem. Global warming, after all, is a big problem, and lots of people feel so trapped by the demands of day to day living in civilization that they just don’t feel powerful enough to make a change.
Sure, this slogan is a little bit sexually charged, but then again, so are the cars that are out there on the highway, spewing carbon dioxide into the air. Better to emit some body heat than to let the Earth heat up beyond our control.
Help those around you get turned on to the defense of nature. Empower them with this provocative message so that they’ll stand erect against pollution, and in favor of an agenda of more efficient energy.
So, after years of illegal delays by George W. Bush, the polar bears were finally given Endangered Species Act protection this year. Almost immediately, however, that victory for the polar bears was itself endangered. As Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin filed a frivolous lawsuit on behalf of the big oil companies in order to try to force the federal government to reverse the decision to protect polar bears.
America has suffered under that kind of anti-environment, anti-science attitude for eight long years. If Sarah Palin is elected Vice President… well, the plain fact is that John McCain is elderly, and he’s not in good health. McCain has had cancer four times, and has other serious health conditions. Sarah Palin would likely become President if John McCain were elected.
