I heart Earth

This image of E-a-a-r-th (spelled like McKibben’s endangered planet) is shaped like a romanticized heart. Cardiologists have long debunked the notion that the seat of human emotions is in the palpitating organ but no matter. “Hearting” has not lost its punch if all the red heart-shaped symbols in t-shirts professing affection for someone, something, or someplace are any indication.

It is Earth Day again in the planet. This past year, Gaia had not been in a particularly tranquil mood. Drought hit where it used to be an effort to keep the water contained; floods swept through terrain that used to cough out dust even after the rain. There had been longer periods of blizzards at unexpected times; tornadoes had been fierce and frequent, while tsunamis terrified shorelines as tectonic plates seem to demonstrate a quicker propensity to quake-and-shake than ever before.

The gloom-and-doom crowd had not been short of all kinds of messages, ranging from the pseudo-scientific projections to the mystic ancient lore fantastic. The religious fanatic, coasting along Western civilization’s salvation theology line—a mental architecture built and ideologically perfected in medieval times—perversely delights in the image of a catastrophic Armageddon so that the much-awaited “rapture” will finally occur. That one makes December 2012 a fear-filled time.

Meanwhile, climate change is consigned to the concerns of eccentric tree huggers, while Monday morning Washington, D.C. quarterbacks pick on their preference for the next regime change in the world. We call it satanic when someone like Charles Manson and followers try to induce a final reckoning to trigger a civilizational collapse. When we translate the same, like squeezing the life-blood out of the Japanese economy in the blockade of the Straits of Malacca and Nippon’s access to oil prior to WWII, we called it foreign policy. A not-so-surprising version is afoot with the China Containment Policy and the let-us-rile-the-arirang out of Pyongyang that the Obama-Clinton-Panetta triumvirate and their Pentagon think tanks have been mouthing in the Far East of late.

Additional armed presence is planned on a naval base in Jeju Do, the island between South Korea and Japan. Okinawa grunts will only relocate rather than move out of their station in the Ryukyus (sorry Guam). The Philippines is showing off its refurbished warship to scare off Chinese fishers off the islands of Huangyan in South China Sea, now renamed West Philippine Sea in RP-US diplomatic traffic. Serious negotiations are allegedly gabbed for the re-opening of the naval facilities at RP’s Subic and Vietnam’s Cam Ranh Bay.

Obama’s promised 2,500-member U.S. Marine battalion finally landed in Darwin down under. One would think Hollywood was just setting up a film shoot on the Japanese invasion of Oz save the ammo is live and the props are of high incendiary quality. The deja vu is alarmingly too real. Fully armed GI Joe is back.

We’ve only covered the Pacific Far West (Asia Far East of old). At least the border conflict in Kashmir between India and Pakistan cooled off, especially after Mother Nature’s avalanche buried a hundred-some lowlanders posted at the 6,000-meter elevated highest battleground in the world. The parties are now talking of turning the place into a Peace Mountain of the World, a rare bright spot in Shi Jie as it turns.

From Afghanistan comes news that the Taliban/al-Qaida have been creatures of counter-intelligence all along. It is rumored that Western interest are in the region to keep “peace and order,” serving the interests of those who will explore, exploit, and explode the rich lodes of carbon and rare earth mineral resources abundant in the region. Ditto for fossil fuel access in the Middle East and in the various-stans of Central Asia. Maybe, military intelligence is not an oxymoron after all!

Africa is the new battleground for the hearts and minds of local folks in the conflicts over existing oil deposits, straining domestic tranquility in Sudan and the regions by the Niger. Uncle Sam aligns market security to the saber rattlers across the Potomac.

Zhongguo keeps to the middle way, keeping its own prosperity moving in measured cadence. The jerks and bounces abounding in international economics and trade, not to mention Gaia’s frayed business frontiers, benefited from Sino intentionality.

Following in the footsteps of the West’s banking institutions, China now faces the harsh realities behind its seeming prosperity. It wants to rebalance the tilted state of the distributive system on earned benefits, its leaders wants to expand economic activity into the significant realm of Zhong’s treasures of the mind, and its Congress encourages everyone to be inclusive and innovative in an expanding though still guided lifestyle of democracy and freedom.

Beijing keeps its own facades. Overbuilt and underutilized commercial and residential structures tower over urban centers, and one wonders if a bubble burst is in the horizon. Rivers and lakes are showing signs of abuse, the air hovers thick with coal, its access to oil and natural gas limited, and Uncle Sam is playing at the edges with containment. Not a nice formula to keep Earth’s Day in a smiley mood.

Nevertheless, this is the Earth we have. We can heart this day, or cast it away. This is the Earth we have.