Ah, the Bluebirds are Back - Time for an Environmental Disaster!

black + blue bird

T.S. Eliot wrote "April is the cruelest month."  Perhaps he was an environmentalist.

• April 5, 2009 - 29 die in the worst coal mine disaster in decades
• Earth Day, April 20, 2009 - 11 die and minor ocean ruined in the worst oil spill in decades
• March 10, 2011 - 4 American-designed nuclear plants in Fukushima, Japan destroyed by Tsunami, requiring evacuation within 20 mile radius, contaminating water and food. 
• April 19, Almost Earth Day, 2011 - Hydrofracking explosion contaminates Pennsylvania countryside. 
• March 2003 Bush starts war in Iraq for oil
• March 2010 Obama's Afghanistan surge of 30,000 troops in place
• March 2011 Obama starts war in Libya over oil currency, political control of oil

  What is it about energy-related disasters and wars all happening in March and April? You try and enjoy springtime, and it breaks your heart.  Can we all at least finally agree that coal, oil, nuclear and natural gas are bad, dirty energy sources with no future?
  Air pollution continues to cause 40,000 deaths in  every advanced country annually, including 13,000 in the US from coal fired power plants alone. Global warming due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions is making existing air pollution more deadly.  Global warming itself poses serious threats to humanity.
  Don't let them calm you down about this shit.  When energy corporations that build power plants, like General Electric, are allowed to own media companies, like NBC, the news reports about these disasters become useless propaganda. Private equity firms now own the major media companies, creating a conflict of interest: the firms own and manage huge amounts of corporate stock and do not wish for the media to report honestly on industrial environmental damage. Whereas the people need to know.
   When those same corporations and private firms are allowed to bribe politicians and rewrite regulatory legislation, the government we depend on to keep us safe from pollution cannot act.
  It is up to us to save ourselves.  Stop accepting TV news as truth. Don't look to Obama, Gore, Warren Buffet or anyone else.  Conserve.  Insulate. Move to a smaller place. Stop buying dirty power. Stop buying gas. Invest in solar. Stop eating meat.

  And above all else, work to make environmental issues key election issues in the 2012 cycle. Don't lose hope. There are never reports of deaths or pollution from wind farms, hydroelectric facilities or solar plants. Even in April. There are clean ways to convert hydrocarbons into electricity that we are not using yet. Electric cars are here and they're great. Big houses in the suburbs are a thing of the past because of the mortgage bubble crisis. People will start doubling and tripling up in them. Higher energy prices, including gasoline prices, will force conservation because of the recession. Every cloud has a silver lining.
  And people are busy inventing amazing shit like solar cells built into your windows. The accelerated rate of scientific change will bring us game-changing technologies, each beta-tested by the porn industry. . .
  Of course, the microbes we clone to eat radiation will start a war with the algae we engineer to harvest biodiesel and that will set off chain reactions with the sea water we seed the atmosphere with to stop global warming resulting in everybody getting rectal hallucinations.
  And it will all happen in April.

"April is the cruelest month, breeding 

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

T S Eliot, soul ninja

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. 

And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's,

My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,

And I was frightened.  He said, Marie,

Marie, hold on tight.  And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. 

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish?  Son of man, 

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A  heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter,  the cricket no relief, 

And the dry stone no sound of water."  

- from The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot (1922)