A celebration of the genius of nature and human ingenuity, Bioneers connects people with solutions and each other. From the Bioneers Website.

Michele and I went to the Bioneers Conference last weekend at the Marin Civic Center. It is held here every year not just because, in many ways, Marin County is the epicenter of the kind of ethos that Bioneers is based on, but also because the Civic Center and its attached Conference Center is such a great location. The Civic Center was one of the last designs designed by Frank Llyod Wright and it is stunning.

As an aside, when I was in my early twenties, my dad and I toured the Civic Center twice, once when it was under construction and once when it was finished but not fully occupied. I was not very impressed and looking at the buildings now, I’m not sure why. As I recall, both tours were by Warren Calister, a local architect who was terrific in his own right and part of the conversation was about details that were eliminated or changed because of cost, a much easier task because Wright had died before the start of construction. Wright was a Victorian architect, he started his career in the late 1880s, and he was a master of fussy little special details based on some local idiosyncrasy but he was also a master of space. One space I particularly liked was the then-new County Library. It is under the dome that connects the two wings and is a gentle dome; I can still remember the surprise of wonder when we first walked in. Today, the details do not seem as important and the flow of the facade and play of space are enough to wow me. End aside.

“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people, but it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.” David Orr

Michele has been going to Bioneers for years but this was the first time she has brought me along so everything was new to me. And, I think, a little new for Michele also because this year, everything was about Climate Change. Roughly, the Conference is organized around a series of morning inspirational talks in the main auditorium – again by Wright – and small discussion groups in the afternoon. I enjoyed the discussion groups much more than the larger morning sessions. The morning sessions were entertaining and inspirational but I was a little disappointed. I think it is because I’ve been watching the Democratic Debates and they are filled with “I will do XXXX when I’m president” and these speakers, who have no aspiration to be President and will never be in a position to set policy, spent their time talking about the problem, the urgency of the problem. Some in very inspirational ways, one woman, who had just gone through the pain of childbirth, suggesting “What if the darkness in our world right now is not the darkness of the tomb but the darkness of the womb. What if American is not dead but a country waiting to be born?”, and another woman, currently battling cancer, compared Trump to chemo in cancer treatment, toxic but needed to cure the body politic. It did not surprise me that this was an anti-Trump crowd, but what did surprise me is that every speaker, referred to the government as an oligarchy. Here the government is an oligarchy is a given and that is a little worrying.

The afternoon sessions were more about solutions than problems, or, more accurately, what various people are doing in response to Global Climate Change. One afternoon I listened to a round table that included several farmers, I expected to hear different ideas for dealing with Climate Change but the farmers are pragmatic, they are reacting to reality. One was a citrus farmer from the Los Angeles basin and she said that, as someone who wanted to keep farming, she was mulling over the choice of changing her plants to the kind of crops that used to be grown in Syria and Eygpt or move a couple of hundred miles north. She figured that she had about a decade to make the change. Another farmer said that, in twenty years, the Napa Valley will only be good for Madeira and Tequila, if you want to grow Pinot Noir grapes, you’ll have to move to Oregon or Washington.

As an aside, the pragmatism of the farmer reminded me of the pragmatism of Exxon in the late 1970s. When Exxon senior scientist James Black confirmed that the science of Global Climate Change is real and burning fossil fuels causes it, Exxon did two things. The first is that they started a massive disinformation campaign to hide their scientific information while trying to debunk other evidence that verified the science. The second is that they started raising their offshore oil-drilling platforms to compensate for the expected rise in sea level.

By far, the most feel-good, optimistic and hopeful, program I saw at Bioneers was a session on The California Education and the Environment Initiative. It turns out that, in 2016, the same year Donald Trump was elected President, California passed a law requiring schools to teach the curriculum through the prism of what they call the deep relationship between humans and the natural world. Apparently, in 2016 I wasn’t paying attention to much of anything other than Trump and missed this completely. Bioneers had a panel of a guidance counselor from Rialto, a chemistry teacher from Cupertino – both exuding a sense of deep service, for lack of a better way to say it – and a senior from a nearby school tell us how they changed and are changing their curriculum and it was inspiring. Rialto and Cupertino are at the extreme ends of the California educational spectrum, as well as the extremes of the financial and cultural spectrums and Marin is, well, Marin.

Rialto is in Southern California, in the subset known as the Inland Empire, it is about 60 miles east of Los Angeles and 60 miles west of Palm Springs and qualifies as drive-through, if not flyover, country. The guidance counselor, Juanita Chan – what a great California name BTW- said that the school district is heavily Hispanic and black. And poor, the area never really recovered from the shuttering of the nearby Kaiser steel mill and most of the other heavy manufacturing facilities in the area. About 96% of the students are considered minorities, over 80% qualify for the free breakfast and lunch program and only about 7.7% go on to graduate from a four-year college (as opposed to about 20% statewide). Ms. Chan is in charge of STEM and college prep programs and she talked about how running the STEM courses through the lens of the environment has made the students more interested in college prep as well as science.

Kavita Gupta, a National Geographic Grosvenor Teacher Fellow, is the chemistry teacher from Cupertino, in Silicon Valley, and she said that she had the exact opposite problem from Rialto, her students spend too much time on schoolwork and not enough on life (over 77% graduate from a four year college and less than 2% qualify for the free lunch program). Cupertino is also a minority-majority city but, in this case, it is about 67% Asian and 26% white. Gupta, who is from India and speaks with a slight Indian accent, says that a trip to the Galapagos changed her life and she wants to pass that on to her students. She does that through the framework of the environment and our deep connection to nature.

Strangely enough, sort of, this new way of organizing everything from Chemistry to History was developed by CalRecycle’s Office of Education and the Environment (and who even knew there is such a thing as a CalRecycle, let alone that they have an Office of Education and The Environment?). They start with five basic principals like People Depend on Natural Systems and detail those principals with concepts like Methods used to extract, harvest, transport, and consume natural resources influence the geographic extent, composition, biological diversity, and viability of natural systems. The Principles and Concepts are then interwoven with the curriculum. The Dollars and Sense of Food Production is a suggested book for Second Grade and a highschool senior recommendation is Agricultural and Industrial Development in the United States (1877-1914).

The last speaker was Caleb Jordan-McDaniels, a senior at Redwood High School. He looked and talked like he had been sent over by Central Casting and I mean that in the best possible way. Caleb told us about his senior project that was exploring ways to generate electricity through tidal action. He thinks that the most efficient solution seems to be an underwater kite with the kite itself based on the wings that an African tree grows to disburse seed pods.

Just sitting there, listening to him, made me feel more hopeful about the world.

All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world, but they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi referring to the Squad

There is a battle for control of the Democratic Party – or its soul – between the old leadership, Nancy Pelosi (77), Steny Hoyer (78), and Jim Clyburn (77) among others, and a combination of young progressives that includes The Squad. I should probably start with a disclaimer, I am on the side of the young progressives and, especially, the four women of The Squad (in the picture above starting from the left, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez known as AOC, and Rashida Tlaib). They are young, strong, loud, and damned smart; and I think they are the best thing that has happened to the Democrats in years. They are also minorities, Puerto Rician, Black, Muslim; women who have traditionally lived on the margins, with a long history of being powerless, coming from areas that are chronically underserved. As an aside, I think that the incubator of being minority women and marginalized is somehow important to their superpowers. The same goes for Emma González and Greta Thunberg. These young women – and there are others – are staggeringly self-aware and self-confident. End aside.

I’m always happy to see a complementary Editorial on them (especially in the NYT, who has not been especially complementary to them). This Editorial, by Barbara Ransby, postulates that “The Squad” Is the Future of the Democratic Party and she starts her argument with:

Representative Ayanna Pressley broke with traditional diversity politics last month when she said at a conference in Philadelphia, “we don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.” Instead, “we need you to represent that voice.”

The members of the so-called squad who were also on the panel nodded in agreement. They are the defiant and unapologetic voices of the communities that produced them. Since being elected last fall, these four progressive Democratic congresswomen have pushed the limits of what most liberals mean by the contested term “diversity. ”

When Nancy Pelosi made the statement quoted at the top, the house had just had a vote in which the majority of the House voted yes as told, and these four women, along with a few others, voted no. But the Speaker is wrong and out of touch, these four women are speaking for their constituents and that is their strength. AOC’s Tweet: I’m not running from the left. I’m running from the bottom. says it all. Somewhat surprisingly to me, those issues are almost the same as mine. When asked what was the highest thing on their list, the biggest problem, the answer all four gave was “Global Climate Change”. Of course! They are young, they are probably not going to skate through the apocalypse like Nancy Pelosi and I most likely will, they will live their life in a changing world that is deteriorating in many ways. But, even more germane, they think Climate Change is the biggest issue because their constituents are worried, they are already being hit. Not surprisingly, their issues are closer to the average Democrat than Pelosi. Contrary to the Speaker’s statement they are much louder than four votes. I recommend that you give the Editorial a quick read.

Last weekend, Richard and Tracy invited us to join them, Tracy’s brother and Tracy’s parents on a tour of a Nike Hercules missile site on in Marin Headlands followed by pizza in Mill Valley. It was great fun and more than a little disconcerting. To explain let me give a little background, the Nike missile family was a Cold War-era family of SAMs – Surface to Air Missles – designed to protect what we are now calling The American Homeland. The last iteration of the Nike family was the Nike Hercules and there were 274 Nike-Hercules batteries and 10,000 missiles spread across the Homeland and more overseas. In the Bay Area, alone, there were 23 Nike Herc sites. All this I knew or sort of knew, because, for a short while, I was the driver for the General in charge of all the Nike Herc sites from Hawaii to Salt Lake City.

What I didn’t know – or remember, anyway – was that these missile sites were equipped with thermonuclear warheads. At least that is what we were told during the tour and the Internet seems to confirm it. The site we toured, Nike Missile launch site SF-88 in the Marin Headlands, was a typical Nike Missile site with seven of the nine missiles equipped with thermonuclear warheads, each warhead was hundreds of times more powerful than the bombs we used to kill about 225,000 Japanese. Theoretically, the thermonuclear weapons were required to take out massed groups of Russian Badger bombers, presumably loaded with their own nuclear weapons. As an aside, why the planners thought the Russians would be attacking in a mass is unfathomable to me, other than as a theory used as a way to sell weapons and make more money. When we destroyed both Hiroshima and Nagasaki we only used one plane each and one nuclear bomb each. If I were ordering the alleged attack, if anybody would order the attack, I/they would space the planes out. End aside. Actually, I just don’t want to believe that we had 161 thermonuclear warheads, each warhead hundreds of times more powerful than the primitive weapons we used on the Japanese, spread around the Bay Area. But we did, I guess.

In 2014, I visited the now-defunct Nike Hercules radar site on Hawk Hill, overlooking San Francisco and it brought back memories of being stationed there. I’ve reprinted part of that post (with some modifications).

Standing there, looking at the view of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco, I remembered one warm summer morning in 1965, when I drove a general up to this site. I was a Sergeant – a buck sergeant, E5 – teaching Germans Continues Wave radar at Orogrande, New Mexico, when I met General Lolli. He had recently taken over the 28th NORAD Region – NORAD stands for North American Aerospace Defense Command – and, because I was from the Bay Area, I was Lolli’s guide at Orogrande while he was on a tour of the various missile training facilities. At the end of the tour, Lolli asked me if I wanted to be transferred to Hamilton Air Base in California to be his driver. Duh! of course I did.

While we were stationed at Hamilton Air Force Base, neither of us lived there because neither one of us was in the Air Force. Lolli was an Army general – the only Army commander of a NORAD region – and I was his Army driver so I had to live at an Army facility. Fort Baker was the closest Army barracks and I had a private room near the entry (General Lolli lived at the Fontana West in San Francisco). Almost every morning, he would drive across the Golden Gate bridge and pick me up at Fort Baker, I would salute him and then drive him to Hamilton. On this particular morning, Lolli told me to drive him up the hill to the Nike Hercules Radar and Command Site overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.

As an aside, this was the height of the Cold War and the country was in full, paranoic, war hysteria. Schoolkids would practice hiding under our desks when the air raid sirens went off outside; F 101 Voodoo fighters, would take off out of Hamilton Air Base, looking for nuclear-armed Russian TU-16 Badger heavy bombers; and our final defense was a series of twenty-three Nike Hercules Surface to Air Missile – SAMs to the cognoscenti – sites around the Bay Area. At the time, I knew the system was designed for nukes but I don’t remember if this battery had missiles armed with nuclear weapons. End aside.

As we drove up to the site, Lolli called in a mock attack and, when we got there, the klaxon was going off and everybody was running to their battle stations. The missile site had probably been at DEFCON 5, but Lolli had now called it up to a simulated DEFCON 1, Air Defense Warning RED. I don’t know if targets had been assigned, but, at the nearby launch sites, the blast doors were opened and the missiles were brought up on their elevators, ready to launch.

When the All Clear finally did come and General Lolli got back in the car, he was furious. It had taken about fifteen minutes too long to come up to DEFCON 1 and Lolli has just relieved a full-bird-Colonel of his command. As we drove down the hill, the General said, “If this had been real, I would have lost San Francisco.“

Now, almost 49 years later, we are in a warm spell, the only fog is across The Bridge, the Nike Hercules Missile Site is no longer operational, and San Francisco is still there, sparkling in the sun. I watch a freighter go under The Bridge and a Raven joins me. Maybe she wants me to give her – and I am saying her with no idea if it is a him or a her – some food, maybe he is just enjoying the view like me, maybe she wants to chastise me for all the harm my race has done to the planet. I tell her,  “Hey, it could be worse, we could have fired off those missiles, we could have destroyed everything in a flash, more than 10,000 flashes, actually. But since you are here, just stay still and look over here, let me get your picture.”

“I will say that the politics may or may not work out in the right way, but we’re a country of laws. You have to enforce the laws.” Andrew Yang

It seems to me that the Democrats are a little like the dog that caught the school bus; now what do they do? Putting aside, for a second, all the good reasons for Impeachment, there are lots of good reasons not to Impeach. Trump is, by reputation, an excellent street fighter, willing to escalate a disagreement to a wild Twitter attack that most politicians are not equipped to handle, the whole affair is too “inside the beltway” and too technical to be compelling to many, if not most, Americans are a couple. Pelosi’s assessment has been that the people are not really interested, they want the time spent on lawmaking – lawmaking which, in an increasingly toxic Washington, even without Impeachment, is almost impossible under Pelosi, Trump, and McConnel – and the Impeachment hearings, a Democratic action, will be blamed as a distraction. Perhaps, most importantly, Impeachment is a political act, a very Divisive Act. This impeachment is not going to be good for the country. Maybe it will be better than no impeachment, but it will not be good, it will not be healing.

I share those concerns. I was never a big fan of the Russian collusion story line. Yeah, Trump wanted the Russians to tap the Democrats’ computers and even asked for their help on National Television. And, sure, the Russians probably did help Trump – or tried to – but, so what? Don’t get me wrong, I do think that Trump may be a crook and he is surely a con-man but I don’t think the help he received rises to the level of an indictable crime. The problem with Trump is not just one thing, one crime he committed, it’s that he has committed hundreds of almost crimes, or sort of crimes, or should be crimes. He has slimed the Presidency more than criminalized it. He is, by nature, an autocrat who puts himself above the Government, and, in doing so, he is attacking us, us being Western Liberal Democracy. Our Courts, our liberal Constitution with its separation of powers, our liberal laws, and conventions, our professed ideals, are all under attack.

Trump was only a candidate when the Russian thing happened and, as much as I thought it was, at best, a worthless snipe hunt, the rules are and should be different for a sitting President. Even by the White House summary of the conversation, Trump seems to have strong-armed the Ukraine President. He refused to act in a way mandated by Congress, holding back the shipment of a much needed defensive weapons system to leverage a personal favor (or partisan political favor, if you prefer). And that’s according to the White House version which is undoubtedly a whitewashed version. The Administration knew this was illegal; they locked down the phone conversation records in as secret a file as they could, hiding it as deep as possible.  

By doing so, President Trump has given Congress no option other than Impeachment; the whole purpose of the House, the People’s Chamber, is to control or, at least, restrain the Executive’s actions. That is why the House is given the power of the purse, they control the money. I keep reading that the Impeachment Claus – The President…of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors – is unclear, but it’s unclear on purpose, to allow a broad interpretation. At the time the Constitution was written, the new United States were surrounded by tyrants. The Founders knew tyrants and they didn’t trust them; tyrannical rule is what they were revolting against and they wrote the Impeachment Clause as wide as possible; if the Executive became a Tyrant, acting in a way the people didn’t approve, the Founders said The President…of the United States, shall be removed.