You Don't Know What You've Got Till It's Gone

Appreciating things like our natural systems, friends, family, and perhaps most important, our health isn't a talent I (we?) often exercise. I had an episode last weekend where I damaged a leg muscle, I think by lifting a log, but I also climbed on two different roofs the same day. I normally have such good health, that I fail to count my lucky stars. This week has been a different experience. I woke last Sunday with a painful leg and back and it hurt to walk. I'm on the mend and everyday I have become more mobile and agile, but it put me on this train of thought that we need to practice more gratitude for all our gifts and good fortune...big and small. So today let's appreciate our situation and look for some good.

Big Yellow Taxi
by Joni Mitchell

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel *, a boutique
And a swinging hot spot

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

They took all the trees
Put 'em in a tree museum *
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see 'em

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

Hey farmer farmer
Put away that DDT * now
Give me spots on my apples
But leave me the birds and the bees
Please!

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

Late last night
I heard the screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi
Took away my old man

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

© January 7, 1970; Siquomb Publishing Corp

Pink Hotel: Although Joni's own words suggest she wrote this on Maui, the Pink Hotel in this song is most likely the Royal Hawaiian in Honolulu. The romantic and legendary Pink Palace, built in 1927 is the landmark hotel on Waikiki Beach. Here, amidst serene gardens behind the coral-colored facade, you can still find the special ambiance of old Hawaii and its gracious island hospitality. The Royal Hawaiian has 526 beautifully appointed rooms, located in either the elegant Historic Building or the modern Tower Wing.
Tree Museum: Dave Donelly, reporter for Honolulu's Star-Bulletin, informs us that: "'Big Yellow Taxi', by the way, was written about Hawaii and the "tree museum" she sang about where they charged you to see the trees was Foster Botanical Garden"
https://jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=13
“I wrote Big Yellow Taxi on my first trip to Hawaii. I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart…this blight on paradise. That’s when I sat down and wrote the song. When it first came out, it was a regional hit in Hawaii because people there realised their paradise was being chewed up. It took 20 years for that song to sink in to people most other places. That is a powerful little song because there have been cases in a couple of cities of parking lots being torn up and turned into parks because of it.”

I took a backwards approach this week...literally and physically. Wednesday I decided to load up the smoker with chicken for a few friends coming by on Thursday. I use one of those charcoal cones/cylinders that uses newspaper to get the charcoal lit. Once it got the charcoal going, I dumped the red hot coals into the smoker. As you can imagine, when the coals are poured they go everywhere, which made me back up, trip on the bag of charcoal, and fall on my ass. I was back up in a jiffy, but now sore and back to hobbling. I finished getting the smoker stoked and set up, and managed to put on the chicken. As I walked back inside holding the empty chicken tray, I turned to kick the door shut. For some reason I used my good leg to shut the door and stood on my once improving but now weakened leg. Adding insult to injury, my leg didn't support me and down I went again within 20 minutes of the last time right on my ass. Well now that sure set me back. I'm on the mend and have recovered to where I was about this time last week. That episode inspired the essay... Because I for one take my good health for granted.

However, JtC's piece on Friday about the draft stirred some memories and made me realize several things we've lost over our lives. So I thought it might be fun to see what other C99ers though we have lost...things we didn't even recognize till they were gone.

This week I've been listening to several pieces about Julian:
Chris Hedges talks to documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist John Pilger about the upcoming appeals hearing in London for the Julian Assange case. (25 min)

On Sept. 26, Yahoo! News published “Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA’s secret war plans against WikiLeaks.” The article detailed discussions within the CIA to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange. The revelations came a month before a hearing in Britain’s High Court that will see the U.S. government appeal a decision that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange cannot be sent to the United States to face espionage charges. These revelations also coincided with the arrest of an Icelandic man who played a major role in the FBI’s case against Assange and who has now admitted he lied in his testimony about Assange to U.S. federal investigators. The most recent revelations, coupled with the numerous legal anomalies of the Assange case, including leaks that show that the Spanish security firm at the Ecuadoran Embassy in London where Assange sought refuge for seven years, turned over recordings of his meetings with his lawyers to the CIA, amply illustrate that the judicial pantomime carried out against Assange is a political persecution led by the U.S. government and the CIA because of embarrassing and damaging revelations about the inner workings of the US military, intelligence agencies and the political class repeatedly exposed by Assange and WikiLeaks. The goal of the U.S. government is to shut down WikiLeaks, and organizations like WikiLeaks, and to make an example of Assange, who if he is extradited to the United States faces 175 years in prison, to dissuade others who might consider replicating his courageous reporting. The upcoming appeals hearing is on October 27 and 28 at Britain’s High Court, London.

CIA Plans To Kill Julian Assange 'UNFATHOMABLE' (Jeremy Corbyn, Richard Burgon, Kristinn Hrafnsson) (15 min)

Jeremy Corbyn MP, Wikileaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson and Richard Burgon MP at the Belmarsh Tribunal, which featured some of the biggest names in international politics and journalism speaking in solidarity with Julian Assange, who faces 175 years in a super-max prison in the United States should British courts decide that he should indeed be extradited.

The case against the journalist Assange is clearly the CIA versus free speech. But Julian's story is paralleled by a corporate persecution of a lawyer, Steven Donziger, by Exxon against whom he won a settlement...

https://www.nationofchange.org/2021/10/22/the-persecution-of-steven-donz...

After winning its case against Donziger which will deny him and his clients the right to collect on their successful suit in the United States, Chevron was also awarded $3.4 million in lawyer’s fees in 2014. With additional court fees and fines, Donziger is liable to the tune of about $10 million.

As Donziger recently said, “I, with other lawyers, helped Indigenous peoples in Ecuador win a historic $9.5bn pollution judgement against Chevron for the deliberate dumping of billions of gallons of cancer-causing waste into the Amazon. That’s a historical fact. That case has been affirmed on appeal by 28 appellate judges, including the highest courts of Ecuador and Canada for enforcement purposes. So why am I the one being locked up? I helped hold them accountable.”

In a case that began in 1993 and dragged through the courts until 2011, the plaintiffs Donziger represented won just over $18 billion in damages (later reduced to $9.5 billion by Ecuador’s highest court) from Texaco, a liability transferred to Chevron, who appealed the decision, at times claiming because they had never had operations in the country themselves they shouldn’t be liable for the actions of a company they purchased after the damage was already done.
...
The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention had this to say about the treatment of Steven Donziger in U.S. courts, “The charges against and detention of Mr. Donziger appears to be retaliation for his work as a legal representative of indigenous communities as he refused to disclose confidential correspondence with his clients in a very high profile case against a multi-national business enterprise.”

Chevron’s case heavily relied on the testimony of the Ecuadorian judge accused of taking the bribe, Alberto Guerra, who later publicly recanted the testimony that Chevron’s case against Donziger hinged on. Nonetheless, Judge Kaplan’s initial 2014 judgement hasn’t been overturned. It’s been reported Guerra received at least $326,000 and a car from the oil and gas giant and was provided the services of an immigration lawyer after being relocated to the United States by the company.

“I have been attacked and demonized for years by Chevron in retaliation for helping Indigenous peoples in Ecuador try to do something to save their cultures, their lives, and our planet in the face of massive oil pollution. That’s the context for why we are here today,” Donziger told the court after his sentencing this month.
...
The influence Chevron has been able to wield over U.S. courts in their scorched earth campaign against Donziger is a worrying sign on many fronts. In terms of climate change, it begs the question: If a fossil fuel company can’t be held to account for the very obvious harms they’ve deliberately caused in the past, what chance does the environmental movement and civil society generally have to rein them in and prevent even greater, globalized catastrophes in the future?

Working hand in hand to control global outcomes and maximize profits ... the mafia branch of government (CIA) and the corporations that pull all the levers of power.
So what is new? Awareness (I hope). What is gone? Innocence. This is not the America I was brainwashed to support. When you really look at it, it never has been...from the genocide of our first nations peoples to the enslavement of anyone we managed to capture and convince owed us their labor. As I look at the genocide of the Palestinians by our supposed allies to the destruction of the Amazon and its indigenous peoples, I wonder what has really changed?

Time it was
And what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence
A time of confidences

Long ago it must be
I have a photograph
Preserve your memories
They're all that's left you

The CIA has been doing horrid things my entire life, but I only clued in 20-30 years ago. The CIA engineered the Korean and Vietnam conflict, did their best to create a Cuban war, and tortured many with their McCarthy ploy and anti-communist rhetoric, including stars like Paul Robeson I go so far as to think H.A. Wallace was ditched and H.S. Truman installed to insure the creation of the CIA and the dropping of the A-bomb.

Why didn't people notice? There was great social change afoot, as people gladly became suburbanites and tied themselves to automobiles and so much more that goes with that lifestyle. Watch just a few minutes of these two clips to remind yourself of that social turning...

The Suburban Wasteland: How the 'Burbs Kill Us, Fast and Slow

...the epidemic of car fatalities and the ever-growing rate of a wide range of chronic illnesses among Americans. While other factors are important, our nation's dispersal into car-dependent suburbia is a bigger factor than many realize.

I think most of you are somewhere near my age and remember the time in our youth when everything appeared rosy, but really wasn't. The slow degradation of unions and labor rights began in those days and despite a few labor protests has accelerated till today. Moms weren't forced to work, but most began a career to help the family get ahead. Divorce became ever more prevalent. In retrospect, the suburbs are one of the factors helping the dissolution of family. We became a society stuck in little boxes in large complexes of people we hardly knew....a far cry from our tribal origins and sense of belonging.

But I digress, For that tendency isn't gone but continues to flourish.

As I began this process of thinking of things I appreciate I thought after the last couple of odd years we've had, that having a partner has been a gift. It has been a weird situation to navigate in these times, and having someone to help parse the puzzle has been a gift. We've discussed various approaches if one or the other dies. I'm hopeful for another 20 years, but that's kinda pushing it. Who knows what we'll see in the next couple of decades (if we make it).

I'm grateful to live in a forest. We are in a sea of green in a satellite photo. We're only a quarter mile from NPS Little River Canyon Preserve. So we have pretty good bird activity. However, we've had to stop feeding the birds as the bears keyed in on the feeders and kept tearing them down. Despite this little oasis of forest, our forests are being consumed. We've got two saw mills in town, one specializing in furniture quality wood and the other using white oak to make barrel staves. Thirty or more miles away along the Coosa River is a paper mill which we can sometimes smell. It consumes vast quantities of wood. A study of SE forests suggested over the next 50 years:

• Forested land will continue to dwindle.
• The region will get hotter, and probably drier.
• Wildfire season will be longer, and more dangerous.
• Shrinking forest land and changing climate will stress many animal and plant species.

As go the forest, so go the insects and birds.

Some studies have documented insect declines. Others have documented bird declines. But scientists hadn’t connected the two — until recently.

In a study published in Ornithological Applications, researchers found that declines in native plants — and the resulting drop in insects — may be causing the number of terrestrial, insectivorous birds to fall.

“Invasive species have penetrated ecosystems and replaced native plants just about everywhere. Human-dominated landscapes make up a huge area,” said Doug Tallamy, a professor of entomology and wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware who conducted the study with his University of Delaware co-author Greg Shriver. “When we allow that to happen, it decreases the insect populations our birds need.”

Others suggest this species decline is related to pesticide use.

Ongoing declines in bird population and diversity are being accelerated by the use of neonicotinoid insecticides, according to research published in Nature Sustainability earlier this month. The paper comes on the heels of a groundbreaking study released last year, finding that the United States has lost 3 billion birds since 1970, a roughly 30% decrease from that time. This new research adds further detail to losses that have occurred within the last decade, as farming patterns have shifted increasingly to the use of pesticide-coated seeds.

Like Joni sang to start this rambling conversation,
"Leave me the birds and the bees...please!"

I don't want to wait till it is gone to understand I'm grateful for it. There are many studies into the benefits of gratitude. Here's one popular press example.

When we practice gratitude we are actually training our minds to be more positive.
There are actually some fascinating physical associations that can occur.
When we practice gratitude and positive thinking, there is a direct effect on brain chemistry.
When we focus on gratitude and happiness we get to control the release of chemicals and neurotransmitters in the brain.

So yes, I'm still a bit sore and having to limit my activities, but this too will pass. Besides it could have been much worst, breaking a bone, tearing a ligament or tendon and so on. This time next week I suspect the injury will be relegated to a memory.

I hope you'll share some of your insights into those things we've watched disappear, and explain why you're glad for your experiences. Have a wonderful Sunday!