Water quality is a serious, and growing, problem.  We've always known that there was more in our "water" than just water molecules.  We expect to find a host of other ingredients, including harmless or beneficial items such as compounds of magnesium, calcium, sodium and fluorine, and maybe a few more alarming items such as lead, arsenic, chlorine and a variety of bacteria.  However, most of these are reasonably under control (at least in the U.S.) and their effects are well known.

But lately there have been increasing reports of much more complicated and hazardous chemicals in the water, including the following, among others:

• Pesticides: we can't apply a billion pounds of conventional pesticides each year (in the U.S alone) and not expect some of it to turn up in the water.

• MTBE: a gasoline additive and carcinogen.

• Perchlorate: from rocket fuel (thanks Lockheed!)--a widespread pollutant that shows up in the water and milk we drink and in the produce we eat, especially lettuce.

• Prescription Drugs: Including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones.

• Sunscreen: An ingredient that washes off vacationing swimmers and kills the coral reefs they came to look at, reefs that are also dying due to the acidification and increased ocean temperatures caused by global climate change, and to widespread pollution and over-fishing.

Water is the most basic requirement for survival and we pollute it at our peril.  It is important, therefore, to be mindful of where our water comes from and that everything we do has consequences for the air, land and water around us.  As the Chinese aphorism goes, "When you drink the water, remember the spring."

An article in Science today gives us a map of the devastation we're wreaking on the oceans.  Human activity, it seems, has severly compromised ecosystems in 40% of the world's oceans.  An alarming result, if not a surprising one.

Hard to believe that even Cuba is considering same-sex marriage.  That's the same Cuba that has become notorious for (among other things) its historical persecution of gays and lesbians, as depicted in the film Before Night Falls.  If Cuban politicians were to support full marriage equality--and I'm not really holding my breath--their country would join Belgium, Spain, South Africa and The Netherlands, in addition to the countries who provide equivalent rights through civil unions.  It is remarkable that the U.S. is allowing countries like South Africa (and maybe Cuba) to set the pace on human rights issues.  How times have changed.

Again with the global climate change?  Yes, I'm afraid. Here in San Francisco the American Geophysical Union is meeting this week, and today warns us that the astonishing loss of arctic sea ice last summer might portend the passage of a tipping point, after which the worsening conditions in the arctic will accelerate beyond the predictions of even the worst of our current climate models.  Also today, a report that the acidification of the seas (also due to our dumping of carbon dioxide) is worse than predicted and may lead to the destruction of all coral reefs by 2100.

Unfortunately, however, we are again officially ignoring the warnings.  As I write, US and Japanese negotiators at the climate talks in Bali are sabotaging the process by insisting on purely voluntary reductions that don't include any real numbers.  And FOX News, with characteristic deception, implies that the loss of arctic sea ice is really just due to "extra sunshine."  Meanwhile the Pope, struggling to stay relevant, has waded into the debate to warn us against taking any hasty action that could affect "sustainable development" because "human beings, obviously, are of supreme worth vis-à-vis creation as a whole."  Besides, he says in the same message, we have to remember that it's really the gays who are threatening peace on earth.  Well, I'm afraid this planet is truly headed for a Dies Irae, but I don't think it's the gays who will take us there.  More likely it will be gluttony, greed, sloth, pride and the rest.  Unless we change course.

Three aqueous news items this week reminded me of a few things we can do to help the environment:

1. Stop going to water parks in the desert. Developers in Mesa, Arizona have dreamed up the Waveyard, "[a] massive new water park that would offer surf-sized waves, snorkeling, scuba diving and kayaking - all in a bone-dry region that gets just 8 inches of rain a year." The very idea of putting a water park in the middle of a desert is laughable, and these developers should have been laughed out of the room.  But they were not; the park will go forward.  It's a good thing there isn't a looming water crisis in the West.  Oh, wait . . . .

2. Boycott Japan until they stop whaling.  This week, Japan dispatched a whaling fleet to kill 1,000 whales, including 50 humpbacks, a threatened species.  Why?  To conduct "scientific research," of course.  Other nations are content to study living whales, but Japan prefers to kill their subjects first.  And where do the carcasses of these gentle singing mammals end up when the "science" is finished?  In Japanese fish markets.  Some science.

3.  Buy fewer plastic products; buy products with less plastic packaging.  We discard a terrifying amount of plastic (on average, a couple hundred pounds per person per year) and a good deal of it ends up in the ocean.  As a result, the Pacific Gyre has become a floating dumpster twice the size of Texas, and is now known as the Eastern Garbage Patch.  Not surprisingly, the plastic breaks down into toxic little "nurdles" that end up in the fish we eat and, therefore, in us.

I've been reading the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report Summary for Policymakers and it's pretty bleak.  Bleaker still is the global yawn generated by the report so far.  The Summary reiterates that the evidence for global climate change is unequivocal and that humans are largely responsible.  That's old news, although it bears repeating.  What's new is the strong language used to describe the likely effects of global warming.  The IPCC concludes that continuing on our current path (dumping billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere annually) will likely result in more extreme weather and may cause "abrupt and irreversible" changes, including rising sea levels and further loss of polar ice.  Given the filter inherent in a consensus report, that's pretty strong language.  Still, it seems the message isn't being heard.  Policymakers, particularly in the U.S. and China, either don't understand or don't care that we are running a madcap experiment on the earth's climate that will likely result in devastating social upheaval and a global environmental catastrophe.

Sadly, there are detractors who can't help but quibble with the report.  Yes, the IPCC has problems.  Is that surprising?  After all, hundreds of authors in teams from all over the world pore over thousands of pages of research about highly complex global phenomena and try to distill a coherent message for policymakers and the lay public.  I'm shocked that they're able to produce a report at all!  Many attack the IPCC as politically driven.  Well, of course there's political influence on the panel, but how is the core message affected, if at all?  Some charge that the panel overstates the danger and many more say it understates the danger.  My guess is that the extremes get muffled and a solid middle ground emerges.  But this bickering is a distraction from the central issue.  The correct response to a fire alarm is not to squabble about how shrill and out-of-tune it is.  Put out the fire, people!

We desperately need responsible leaders who are not beholden to industrial polluters.  We also need a bottom-up effort by individuals and groups to apply pressure on the leaders we already have.  And time is running out.

Today is the six-score-and-fourteenth anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.  In the space of two minutes, Lincoln gave a ten-sentence speech to a crowd of fifteen thousand who had just endured a two-hour oration by Edward Everett.  Given all that, and Lincoln's reportedly high-pitched squeaky voice, his prediction that the "world will little note, nor long remember" his words should have been a safe bet.  But it was a remarkable speech:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.   Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.   But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

My favorite aspect of the Gettysburg Address is the way Lincoln's masterful revision of history steered us toward the country we needed, instead of the country we had.  By saying that our nation had been "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," for example, he helped set the stage for the Fourteenth Amendment, even though our country had actually been founded on the principle that some men are decidedly unequal, and even though the very battle Lincoln was commemorating was fought, in large part, over the issue of slavery.  Similarly, by saying that the dead soldiers had given their lives for government "of the people, by the people, [and] for the people," even though the Union soldiers were actually fighting against a government of, by and for the people of the South, Lincoln helped create a vision of a unified country, of, by and for a single group of people. 

Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg to dedicate a blood-soaked battlefield; he went there to show people his vision of a new, unified country and to make them think it was the country they had been fighting for all along.  Creating that new country was the unfinished work he was there to motivate us all to finish.  And we've come a long way, but there's still considerable work to do.

P.s. For a good laugh, see Peter Norvig's imaginative view of how Lincoln might present the Gettysburg Address today.

Somehow, the 68,000-ton container ship, the Cosco Busan, managed to bash into the Bay Bridge (technically, the James "Sunny Jim" Rolph Bridge) yesterday.  Last night's report, from the ship's owners, was that 140 gallons of oil had spilled out of the ship.  That would have been bad enough.  Today, however, we woke up to a 58,000-gallon oil slick in the Bay, oozing onto local beaches and fouling local fowl.  I'm not sure how they underestimated the spill by 57,860 gallons, or who's responsible for the spill, but it won't make much difference to the birds, or the fish, or the people.  Sad.  Pitiful, really.

It is easy to view the world as a top-down system, directed by governments, armies and corporations.  But without great power (read, great wealth), most of us will be disappointed by our inability to sway the top-level players into changing policy.  Fortunately, society can also be profoundly influenced from the bottom up, through our personal actions and interactions.  I'm thinking now of a line by William James:

I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.

Collectively, we can exert great pressure, emergent pressure, that is more than a match for any government, army or corporation.  Emergence is a large-scale behavior or characteristic of a group of individual, connected actors that is beyond the control of any single actor but, rather, "emerges" from the collective effect of all the individual actions.  Think termite mounds and flocks of birds, or my personal favorite example, John Conway's "Game of Life."  In complex systems, there can even be a  hierarchical cascade of emergent behavior from the smallest constituent actor to ever larger groups of actors, each of which produces emergent effects at the next level.  It's humbling to view ourselves as cellular automata, but human society is such a system.  Sometimes I look past the human trees long enough to see the societal forest and wonder how it ever got in this condition.  Who voted for this?  Maybe no one.  And maybe everyone.

With an awakening at the level of the individual to our collective ability to exert emergent pressure, I believe we can effect positive change in the world.  Making it happen is a question of synchronization.  Each person is analogous to a wave.  If we are out of phase we cancel each other out and have no effect.  But if we are in phase we can create a resultant wave of enormous magnitude.

How to be in phase?  Technology.  In the past, each person could communicate only with those who were physically close at hand.  As technology advances--particularly the Internet and social networking software--each person's sphere of influence has ballooned.  If human society is a network we are rapidly approaching a time when every node can communicate with every other node.  Indra's net, if you will.  For the first time, individuals from every part of human society can synchronize. 

Now that we can all communicate with each other in real time, and in phase, what are we doing?  What should we be doing?  I think the key is to identify and promote ideas and actions at the level of the individual that will lead to desirable collective effects, and to use technology to synchronize those ideas and actions.  To some extent, this goes against classical emergence because, for example, the bird is presumably indifferent to the direction of the flock and the individual termite does not follow a blueprint for construction of the mound.  That's the whole point of emergence.  But I'm not talking about lock-step behavior--obviously, we're never all going to agree on anything, nor should we.  Instead, what if some of the birds, termites, or humans changed their behavior with a view to a larger design?  I believe a few well-placed intelligent actors could have a dramatic influence because chaotic systems, like human society, can often be tipped relatively easily into a dramatically different state (a characteristic mathematicians call "strong dependence on initial conditions").  In other words, we don't all have to change, but if a core group changes, the overall system will change.  A human Butterfly Effect, if you will. 

The hard part, of course, is figuring out which of the myriad inputs will cause the desired output.  More on that later.

A couple of weeks ago I walked our Norfolk Terrier, Honeybear, along Ocean Beach here in San Francisco.  It was her first time on the beach (any beach) and she went crazy: digging, chasing birds, digging, barking at surfers, digging . . .  Apparently, however, she didn't dig deep enough.  A week later, at the very spot where we walked, a 19th century clipper ship, the King Philip, emerged from the sand.  Or nearly emerged, anyway.

The King Philip apparently drifted off its anchor and washed ashore in 1878, where it was promptly abandoned and forgotten about until the 1980s, when it first surfaced, to the surprise of beach-goers and their dogs.  The beach swallowed the ship again and kept it hidden until last Monday. 

Half of San Francisco, it turns out, is built on the wrecks of abandoned ships, and there are lots of clues, if you know where to look.  My former law office, for example, was in the Hobart Building, which is owned by the Niantic Corporation, named after the clipper ship Niantic, which was abandoned right where it sank into the mud in 1849, somewhere near what is now the site of the Transamerica Pyramid.  A fire in the City burned the shipwreck on May 3, 1851, but enough of it apparently remained to use in the foundation of the Niantic Hotel, which itself lasted until 1872.  Unlike the King Philip, however, the Niantic has not reappeared; there is only a meager plaque to remind us where it used to be.  A better memorial to wrecked ships, in my view, is to build a bar over them, as they have done with the Old Ship Saloon at Pacific and Battery, built on the wreck of the Arkansas.  Cheers!