Yesterday I saw Werner Herzog’s new film Cave of Forgotten Dreams. In a Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross Herzog described his lifelong obsession with cave paintings dating back to his childhood days, when he passed a bookshop displaying a book on cave painting in the window. He stared at the book in the shop window for a long time, taking in the cover illustration, imagining what was inside the book. He saved up his pocket money for weeks until he was able to buy the book and devour its contents.

This is not a Discovery Channel kind of movie, but rather an artful, deeply felt document of Herzog’s chance-of-a-lifetime to enter the cave at Chauvet, in southern France, with a small film crew. The cave was discovered in December 1994 by three explorers who detected small movements of air escaping from a crevice on a wooded hillside overlooking the Pont d’arc natural bridge which spans the Ardeche River. They carefully removed enough rubble from the rockslide that had buried the cave’s entrance some twenty thousand years ago to gain entrance.

Inside the hill, the explorers found a beautiful cave with sparkling stalactites and stalagmites. But it was in the deeper reaches of the cavern that they found a unique treasure: passageways and rooms whose walls were filled with exquisite paintings of now-extinct animals. The first explorer spying them cried, “They have been here!” The paintings appeared so fresh that early researchers wondered if they were fakes; only after discovering the layer of calcium deposits over some of the paintings did it become clear that they were painted some 30,000 years ago. The rockslide that sealed the cave had protected its contents for twenty millennia.

And the paintings! Executed in shades of black, brown, and rusty red, the animals painted on the undulating cave walls appear alive, as if the unknown painters captured them in a frame of a movie. Herzog’s film technique, panning over the images as they are lit by flickering light approximating the torchlight by which they were painted, makes the animals appear to breathe and move.

We will never know exactly what this cave and its paintings meant to the people who created and first viewed the images. While there are no paintings of cave bears on the walls, numerous skulls of the bears remain in the cave, including one that appears to be strategically placed on a large altar-like block of stone. Bones of many other animals also lie in the cave. In the rear of the cave is the footprint of an eight-year-old child; and next to it is the paw print of a wolf. Were they contemporaneous, or separated by thousands of years of time, Herzog wonders, in his narration. Most enigmatic to me is the singular image of a human hand outlined in red, like the spray-painted signature of a graffiti artist.

Herzog’s reverent vision of the cave at Chauvet lavishes its gaze on the images of the animals. They crowd together on the irregular walls of the cave, heads lifted as if surprised by a National Geographic photographer at an African waterhole. Each animal is different, lovingly rendered in perspective with dark charcoal outlines, chiaroscuro shading, and etching. The paintings make effective use of the bumps and hollows on the cave wall to add surprising vitality and a sense of movement.

The animals represented on the cave walls are mostly all now extinct, or survive in greatly limited range. The paintings portray great bison, with powerful shoulders and shaggy coats; aurochs, the enormous ancestors of modern cattle; early ibex with curving horns; stags, horses, and lions. I didn’t realize until I checked Wikipedia that lions once ranged widely across Europe, until 10,000 years ago.

By the end of the film, Herzog has so hypnotically captivated this viewer that the images painted on the walls of this lost cave seem to have come to life. The creatures breathe and stamp as they gather themselves to feed or run or fight. These ancient mammals seem healthy, vibrant, and powerful, thriving in the (mostly) unpopulated Eden of early modern Europe. Their bright eyes reach over the millennia and remind me of the 1200 generations of unwritten human history since these images were created.

My favorite paintings are the group portrait of four early horses whose shaggy coats and smallish heads and ears reveal both their relation to modern horses and their wild differentness. They seem alert, relaxed, calm. Their delicately rendered eyes convey a pristine animal intelligence and a zest for life. The lowest horse, last drawn, is the most developed of the images.

In a fascinating New Yorker article, author Judith Thurman describes this animal:

“This fourth horse was produced using a complex technique: the main lines were drawn with charcoal; the infill, colored sepia and brown, is a mixture of charcoal and clay spread with the finger. A series of fine engravings perfectly follow the profile. With energetic and precise movements, the significant details are indicated (nostril, open mouth). A final charcoal line, dark black, was placed just at the corner of the lips and gives this head an expression of astonishment or surprise.”

In the film, Herzog here interrupts the sequence of images within the cave to show his interview with a scientist who demonstrated a spear-throwing apparatus used by early man to aid in his hunting. The throwing stick adds torque to the thrower’s arm, increasing the power and accuracy of his throw. The scientist threw a long bone-tipped spear some fifty yards, straight as the proverbial arrow, between two rows in a vineyard.

That’s when it came home to me: the magnificent and beautiful portraits of the animals in the cave were created by the people who hunted and killed them, ultimately driving them to extinction. Tim Flannery, in his excellent book The Eternal Frontier, makes a convincing case that all the large fauna who went extinct in the Paleolithic era did so as the result of human hunting, rather than climate change or some other variable.

It’s easy to see from the cave paintings that the artists felt reverence, perhaps even love, for the creatures whose flesh, bones and hides sustained them. There is a sense of awe in the naturalistic rendering on the cave walls of these animals who were the successful end products of millions of years of evolution.

And isn’t this so profoundly our human dilemma — that we seem to kill what we love, and depend upon? We love the Earth, our home – and we are busily killing its wildlife, poisoning its atmosphere, and depleting its resources.

We speak of endangered species and place certain animals on the Endangered Species list, but isn’t it now the case that ALL species are endangered? Including our own?

During the film, I couldn’t put my finger on the strong emotion I felt as the images of the animals on the walls of the Chauvet cave flickered before me. At the end, it came to me: sadness.

Perhaps in another post I’ll offer a more optimistic view of where we stand on our task of Saving The Earth. But for now, the images of these beautiful lost animals are still lingering inside my cranium.

See the movie…

The national conversation on alternative energy sourcing is started and underway. If this conversation were a car, it would be sputtering along, backfiring occasionally, the engine running…but barely.

Still, it’s started! Al Gore did his country a tremendous service by moving this discussion towards the mainstream of political dialogue. I just heard part of a great discussion this morning on Tom Ashbrook’s NPR radio show, On Point. He interviewed several folks across the political spectrum, from rather more liberal, to conservative, to Tea Party, re what do we do now, since cap and trade is dead and unlikely to be revived anytime soon.

The liberal and conservative panelists were in basic agreement that what the U.S. needs to do is invest in basic energy research, to the tune of something like $25 billion per year. They pointed out that China already has underway a similar program which is funded at $75 billion annually. The Tea Party panelist, predictably, said that in this time of deficit we need to be cutting out spending, rather than funding another government boondoggle opportunity.

Nobody wants to throw money away, the other panelists replied: what we need is a de-politicized agency to run this program, something like the National Institutes of Health, or the National Science Foundation – or even the Defense Department’s research arm, DARPA. These agencies have been very successful in funding basic research that has ultimately been deployed in the private sector, to much profit and benefit to the country as a whole.

A caller to the show wanted to know where the benefit was from the $12 billion PER MONTH we’ve been spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. An excellent point! To me, this seems like insanity.

I feel heartened this morning after listening to this conversation on NPR. Maybe the car is only sputtering at this point, but there are a lot of very smart and concerned people who are working to get it running more smoothly. (Perhaps it’s like there are fifty mechanics shouting at each other over how to get it fixed – but hopefully cooler heads will prevail!)

Listen to the show when you have a minute. Here’s a link to On Point. It’s the show that aired on Monday, October 18, 2010.

Oh, and send NPR a little contribution. They are a national treasure.

“We Have No Energy Strategy.”

Economist and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman outdid himself yesterday morning in his Times editorial Dumb as We Wanna Be. He criticizes presidential candidates McCain and Clinton for proposing a “vacation” from the federal excise tax (18.4 cents per gallon) on gasoline for the summer.

We have no energy strategy. If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage — gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars — and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage — new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite.

This is just the latest blundering misstep in our (lack of) national energy policy. The reason we need a national energy policy is NOT because gasoline is approaching $4.00 a gallon (and it’s the summer driving season) — but because the United States pours out almost one-fourth of the total carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that enter the Earth’s atmosphere each year.

These greenhouse gas emissions are primarily due to the use of carbon-based fossil fuels — petroleum, coal and natural gas — and directly contribute to the problem of global warming. Friedman continues:

When Congress passed the 2007 energy bill last December, it failed to extend any stimulus for wind and solar energy production. Oil and gas kept all their credits, but those for wind and solar have been left to expire this December.

Germany has a 20-year solar incentive program; Japan 12 years. Ours, at best, run two years.

The scientific consensus is that Earth’s climate is gradually warming and that this change is attributable to human activities — greenhouse gas emissions.

We can change this! — by making significant changes in how we run our economy, design our cars, build our buildings.

The United States should provide leadership in the global economy, showing that it is possible to provide growth and jobs without degrading the environment.

What should we be doing?

The United States has in the past mobilized its vast material and creative resources to accomplish many enormous projects: digging itself out of the Depression with back-to-work programs and social support programs; fighting and winning two World Wars; helping to rebuild Europe with the post-war Marshall Plan; putting a man on the moon and exploring the solar system.

We need a coordinated National Energy Strategy, led from the White House and supported by the Congress — a peacetime Manhattan Project with two primary goals:

1. To greatly reduce the consumption of fossil fuels; and

2. To stimulate research and development of clean, renewable energy sources and delivery systems.

Milly, my 8-month-old granddaughter, deserves to grow up in a world that can sustainably provide ample energy and food and water for its inhabitants.

Everybody else on the planet deserves this too.

I grew up in Longview, Texas – a small northeast Texas town on the Sabine River. It was a sleepy place in the 1950′s – brick streets, a few stoplights, no McDonald’s. People left their homes unlocked and their cars running at the curb while they ran into the store. Gas was 19 cents per gallon.

My parents built their home in 1947, on a lot given them by my grandparents. It was on the “back 40″ of what had been my great-grandparents’ farm. Following World War II, the farm was subdivided into large suburban lots for small tract houses.

Since our house was the first in the “neighborhood”, it was an uncrowded place. I spent long hours roaming the fields, exploring the woods, playing in the creek. The street was unpaved. There was no sewer, no “city water.” The mailbox was on the main road, a block away.

I remember the pride we felt when it was clear that our town was growing. The editor of the local newspaper was a booster for the area, and worked hard to attract industry and businesses and jobs. The herringbone-patterned red brick streets downtown were paved over with asphalt. More houses were built in my neighborhood. We watched as the city fathers extended the city limits further and further, finally encompassing my little neighborhood. It was a big day when excavators and workmen dug up our street to lay the pipes for City Water.

All this has been on my mind lately. This so-called progress has been unrelenting, gobbling up farmland and filling empty spaces with cookie-cutter homes, subdivisions, strip malls, big box retailers, apartment complexes and freeways.

I’ve lived in Nashville the past thirty years and the pattern of sprawling growth continues here too. This is how post-World War II expansion has played out all over this country.

So what’s been on my mind is this: the world is a more crowded place today. This is a commonplace – we all know about population growth. But in so many ways, I feel crowded by the press of people, buildings everywhere. Places near my home where one once enjoyed a pleasant vista of forested hills are now views of upscale subdivisions, with McMansions poking up among the trees.

I read once that adding more capacity to freeways doesn’t solve the traffic problem – the extra lanes attract more traffic, so the net result is about the same.

This sounds a bit like an old-guy rant, and maybe it is. I was struck yesterday as I read Philip Fradkin’s interesting biography of Wallace Stegner that people have been saying these things in America for a long time. Stegner helped to found an organization to combat sprawl in what was then rural California – in 1962! It was a lost cause. He was battling unchecked growth in what we now refer to as Silicon Valley.

As I was preparing the introduction to the recommended books on population growth for my website SavingtheEarth.net, I found this graph that charted world population from 7000 BC to the present. It is a stark and compelling picture of where we are today. The world’s population quadrupled in the last century – from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6.5+ billion today.

This graphic makes it starkly real to me. How is it possible for the Earth to sustain this kind of increase in human population? The reality of human population growth underlies all the environmental challenges we are facing. Read my longer essay on the challenges of population growth.

This is obviously a seriously complex issue – which is often not faced head-on in discussions of global warming, environmental degradation, etc. The notion of limiting population growth – though public policy in China and elsewhere – is fraught with all sorts of ethical/moral considerations.

I don’t know the answer – but I’ve found a number of excellent resources that address the population growth dilemma thoughtfully. Below are the ones I like the best:

Nine years ago oil was at $10/barrel. Now it’s $118+. What gives?

Paul Krugman, economist and New York Times columnist, addressed this in his column on April 21. He went to the edge of fully acknowledging the resource crisis we face, then stepped back:

The global surge in commodity prices is reviving a question we haven’t heard much since the 1970s: Will limited supplies of natural resources pose an obstacle to future world economic growth?

How you answer this question depends largely on what you believe is driving the rise in resource prices. Broadly speaking, there are three competing views.

The first is that it’s mainly speculation — that investors, looking for high returns at a time of low interest rates, have piled into commodity futures, driving up prices. On this view, someday soon the bubble will burst and high resource prices will go the way of Pets.com.

The second view is that soaring resource prices do, in fact, have a basis in fundamentals — especially rapidly growing demand from newly meat-eating, car-driving Chinese — but that given time we’ll drill more wells, plant more acres, and increased supply will push prices right back down again.

The third view is that the era of cheap resources is over for good — that we’re running out of oil, running out of land to expand food production and generally running out of planet to exploit.

I find myself somewhere between the second and third views.

This is strong language for a mainstream economist. While he doesn’t go as far as I would like in acknowledging the finitude of the Earth’s resources and the absolute necessity for transitioning to a sustainable economy – I am somewhat heartened to hear this discussion in the Times.

This reminds me of the (appropriate) analogy of what it takes to turn a supertanker around in the middle of the ocean. It doesn’t turn on a dime, but takes MILES to execute a turn because of its huge bulk and great momentum.

That’s what we’re dealing with. As eager as many of us are for fundamental change – it isn’t going to happen overnight.

Patience is a virtue.

Read more about fossil fuels, renewable energy and creating a sustainable economy at SavingTheEarth.net – your resource for the best environmental books.

Two great books on the realities of fossil fuels and the need for renewable energy:

Welcome to Earth Orbit: Reflections on Nature and the Environment!

In this blog I want to share my experience of nature, my deep concerns for the state of the Earth’s environment – and resources for those who wish to learn more.

Earth Orbit is part of a larger site I have developed over the last few months: SavingTheEarth.net. This site is a compendium of the best books and resources on all things pertaining to nature and the environment – from stunning Earth photography to books on global warming, biodiversity, conservation, water resources, renewable energy, population growth, ecology, the environmental movement, ecopsychology, nature spirituality, and more.

Along with nature photography I’ve also included an extensive section on Nature writing – from the earliest writings about the flora and fauna of the North American continent to the latest, award-winning books on Nature.

The art and nature photography and nature writing, as well as sections on Ecopsychology and Nature Spirituality address the heart and soul of our deep, primal connection with Nature.

The more technical aspects of preserving the Earth’s environment and addressing various issues such as population growth, renewable energy, sustainable design, ecological economics are covered in their own dedicated sections of SavingTheEarth.net.

As a practicing psychologist, I’m always alert to the balance between head and heart. Feeling and emotion without cognition is ungrounded, diffuse; thought without feeling is dry and lacks passion.

In our struggle to save this planet, we need heart and soul and the best technical expertise we can muster. When we get discouraged from reading grim statistics and projections about the state of the environment, it’s heartening to look out the window to see spring leaves bursting forth, white clouds drifting across the blue sky. The nurturing embrace of the natural environment is a welcome reminder that Life intends to persist.

Beth Nielson Chapman has a song, Life Holds On, in which the refrain echoes again and again: “Life holds on, given the slightest chance.”

Despite the almost overwhelming nature of the environmental challenge facing us — we can do this! There are millions of concerned Earth citizens working to bring about change. We have the tools, the science, the know-how and the resources to effect substantive change in the health of our environment. We lack only the will.

Saving the Earth – let’s do it together!