According to one profound view of climatology, Gaia, the earth, is one body, a living and vast self-regulating organism, whose system is now so out of whack that Gaia has a fever. We call it global warming. In a time when the environment is deteriorating, we need to use personal carbon calculators to estimate and lower individual carbon footprints.

Gaia has a fever and it is too late to help her. She is sick and she soon will be even sicker. She will be desperately ill. She is headed for a period of misery and it will take 200,000 years for her to return to normal.

Dr. James Lovelock, ninety years old, a grand fatherly and kind acting man, has a horrifying message: In order to get well, Gaia is ejecting the source of its sickness and in this century it will see that billions of people will die.

There are now almost seven billion people in the world and the projection is that before mid-century there will be nine billion. Dr. Lovelock predicts that by the year 2100, there will be fewer than 500 million people on the planet.

He says it is foolish to focus on developing alternative energy sources and useless to attempt to bring Gaia to health. Gaia has caught a fever, and just like our human body, when we realize we are sick, it’s going to be a bad weekend. Our body will work it out, but we will be miserable in the meantime. For Gaia, the misery will be 200,000 years.

Lovelock says that in the last one million years, this fever has happened seven times when huge doses of carbon dioxide has made Gaia sick. Now it is happening again.  In the big picture Gaia will eventually be OK — when she succeeds in ejecting billions of humans and has a chance for some rest.

Citizens in the Dayton area who want to impact how the state should be divided into congressional districts can attend a meeting organized by The Ohio Apportionment Board on Thursday, August 25, at the old NCR building at 1700 South Patterson Rd.  The meeting starts at 10:00 AM and is scheduled to dismiss at 12:00 noon.

Jennifer Brunner’s web-site, Courage Pac, is urging voters to become “citizen legislators” and attend these regional meetings — eleven are scheduled this week (Aug. 22 – 26) across the state.  The web-site is urging:

Act now and push for these things for a fair process in redrawing the state’s district lines:

* Advance publishing of maps.  The Apportionment Board (and the Legislature when they consider congressional maps) should publish proposed maps on the Internet at least two weeks before they are voted on, to allow for public input, taking the process out of political seclusion.
* Take out the politics.  Maps can and should be drawn based on nonpartisan criteria such as preserving county boundaries and creating compact districts that are politically balanced avoiding favoring one party over another when balanced districts can be created.
* Competitive districts require legislators to be accountable to the public.  Nearly 2/3 of Ohio’s current house, senate, and congressional districts favor one political party or another by over 15%, thus practically ensuring who will be elected long before the election.
* Let the voters decide who will be elected.  61 of Ohio’s 99 state house districts favor Republicans, largely because Republican elected officials drew the districts.  When Democrats drew the districts, they also distorted the lines so that a majority of districts favored the Democrats. How about creating districts not designed with bias toward one party or the other, or if it can’t be avoided, creating as equal numbers of opposing political leaning districts as possible?
* Stop gridlock.  An artificially high number of one sided districts promotes far left or far right leaning legislators and that can promote gridlock with a battle of extreme views getting nowhere.
* Adopt a map generated from the public competition. Draw the Line Ohio is the only place where the public can draw maps that will be scored based on objective, nonpartisan criteria. Winners for the state legislative districts will be announced this week. Drawing can also be done at ReshapeOhio.org with no scoring.

Harvard professor of history, Alexander Keyssar, writes in the Washington Post, “The real grand bargain, coming undone,” that the agenda of today’s conservatives “looks like a bizarre effort to return to the Gilded Age, an era with little regulation of business, no social insurance and no legal protections for workers.”

He says the conservative agenda are calls for the “destruction or weakening of institutions without acknowledging (or perhaps understanding) why they came into being.”

Keyssar says that this agenda forgets that over 100 years ago, in response to the excess of the Gilded Age, America made a grand bargain  — “a balance between private interests and public welfare, workers and employers, the wealthy and the poor” — and that conservatives efforts to destroy this grand bargain is a big mistake.

A century ago, Keyssar explains,“most, Americans were convinced that capitalism had to be replaced with some form of cooperative commonwealth … In the presidential election of 1912, 75 percent of the vote went to candidates who called themselves ‘progressive’ or ‘socialist.’ … The political pressure from anti-capitalists, anti-monopolists, populists, progressives, working-class activists and socialists led, over time, to a truly grand bargain.”

1. First came the regulation of business and banking to protect consumers, limit the power of individual corporations and prevent anti-competitive practices. The principle underlying measures such as the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) and the Glass-Steagall Act (1933) — which insured bank deposits and separated investment from commercial banking — was that government was responsible for protecting society against the shortcomings of a market economy. The profit motive could not always be counted on to serve the public’s welfare.
2. The second prong of reform was guaranteeing workers’ right to form unions and engage in collective bargaining. The core premise of the 1914 Clayton Act and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 — born of decades of experience — was that individual workers lacked the power to protect their interests when dealing with large employers. For the most poorly paid, the federal government mandated a minimum wage and maximum hours.
3. The third ingredient was social insurance. Unemployment insurance (1935), Social Security (1935), and, later, Medicaid and Medicare (1965) were grounded in the recognition that citizens could not always be self-sufficient and that it was the role of government to aid those unable to fend for themselves.

Keyssar says that this “grand bargain” is coming undone

• Regulatory laws (including antitrust laws) are weakly enforced or vitiated
• Private-sector employers’ fierce attacks on unions since the 1970s
• The social safety net has frayed … The real value of the minimum wage is lower than it was in the 1970s.