Subject: [big campaign] New Huff Post from Creamer-No Longer the Republican Party of Mount Rushmore
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked], [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2010 09:41:55 EDT
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No  longer the Republican Party of Mount Rushmore – Now the Party of Easter 
Island 

I'm a pilot. So last  week, as our Thirtieth Anniversary present to each 
other, my wife Jan Schakowsky  and I packed up our two golden retrievers in a 
rented Cessna 182 and headed off  to spend a week in the mountains of 
Montana. 
Our destination was  the Hawley Mountain Guest Ranch -- a small facility 
located in the Gallatin National Forest just adjacent to a million  acres of 
federally protected Wilderness Area.  Our plan was to base ourselves there 
and  explore trails in the Wilderness Area on horseback. 
On the way we stopped  for the night in Rapid City, South Dakota, where we 
took a side trip to Mount Rushmore.  If you've only seen pictures, you 
really can't fully appreciate the  extraordinary achievement the monument 
represents -- carved over 14 years into  the side of a mountain. Nor can you really 
experience the power of its testament  to American values. 
Of course there is  George Washington -- the Revolutionary War General and 
first President who made  America possible.  There is Thomas Jefferson, the 
founder  of the Democratic Party, and author of the Declaration of 
Independence.  There are two Republicans. Abraham  Lincoln symbolizes America's 
commitment to equal  opportunity and liberty for all.  And there is Theodore 
Roosevelt -- the Republican President who more than  any other embodied our 
commitment to conserve and protect our natural  environment and prevent its 
destruction for short-term commercial  profit. 
Roosevelt not only  championed setting aside National Parks and other 
protected areas similar to the  one we were about to visit.  He also  took on - 
and broke up - the "Trusts" -- the giant corporate semi-monopolies  that 
dominated America's economy as it entered the  20th Century.  
It is really  pretty remarkable to ponder how far the modern Republican 
Party has strayed from  the vision of Lincoln, the Great Emancipator -- and 
Teddy Roosevelt, the  Conservationist and Trust Buster. 
For decades now, the  Party of Lincoln has transformed itself into the 
Party of Strom Thurmond and Jim  DeMint.   The party that once  authored the 
14th Amendment to the Constitution that guaranteed that any child  born in 
America was guaranteed full rights of  citizenship, has become the party that 
campaigns to eliminate that right for no  purpose other than rounding up some 
mid-term votes by pandering to fear.  It has become the party that has  
attempted to transform a planned Muslim  Community Center two city blocks away  
from New  York's Ground Zero into a "desecration of sacred ground"  -- all 
in the service of short-term political gain.  
But the  Republican abandonment of the values of Theodore Roosevelt is just 
as  remarkable. The gulf between the vision of Teddy Roosevelt and the 
Party of  "drill baby drill" is as vast as the Grand  Canyon.   
Our trip to a  Wilderness Area in Montana last week has  reminded me just 
how important Roosevelt's vision was to the future of  America -- and for 
that matter to the  well-being of the planet.  
We spent the week  riding trails through pristine forests. No gum wrappers 
or soda cans scattered  along the way.  Just Lodge Poll pine  trees, wild 
flowers, streams with cool crystal clear water, and vast mountaintop  meadows. 
 The thing that is most  striking to urban dwellers is the silence.  When 
the wind is still, and the horses stop, the silence is  palpable. 
Throughout my life I  have found that reconnecting with the natural world 
does more to nourish your  spirit than just about anything you can do. 
Federally protected  wilderness areas are one of a number of different 
categories of land that has  been set aside and is not available for commercial 
development.   These include the eighty-four  million acres of National 
Parks and Monuments that were visited over 285 million  times last year. For 
millions of kids, the National Parks provide the most  immediate and memorial 
lessons in understanding science, wildlife and the  natural world. 
The National Forests  set aside millions of acres of trees and forest 
environment from unregulated  commercial exploitation. They are intended to 
preserve and protect the forest  resources that – after all – belong to all of 
us. 
But wilderness areas go  further.  Almost all mechanical  presence is 
excluded from wilderness areas. Most have few roads.  You don't hear the sounds 
of chain  saws.  You can go there on foot or  horseback, but the idea is to 
allow some areas of our country to exist in their  unspoiled state -- 
allowing the natural eco-system to function without  substantial human 
intervention. 
But rather than pursue  the vision of Theodore Roosevelt, the modern 
Republican Party has made an  alliance with the energy companies and others who 
demand that public lands be  sold off or leased commercial development.  Those 
forces want to exploit every morsel of land and natural resource  for their 
own short-term individual gain. They favor drilling in the Alaskan  Natural 
Wildlife Refuge.  They  oppose creating protected areas like national 
parks, forests and wilderness  areas.  And those positions are more  than simply 
an affront to the beauty of nature.  
Roosevelt's vision – his commitment to setting aside land  to protect and 
nurture our fellow species and especially to protect our forests  is critical 
to the success -- and even the survival -- of human beings on our  small 
interdependent planet.  
Pulitzer Prize-winning  physiologist and ethno-geographer Jared Diamond's 
book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed documents the causes 
of the  collapse of human societies. 
The story he tells of Easter Island is  particularly compelling. 
We are all familiar with Easter Island  because of the hundreds of large, 
stylized statues that had been erected there  by people who had no large 
domesticated animal power.  They had nothing but  their own muscle to transport 
and mount stone statues weighing many tons.    
Easter Island was occupied about a  thousand years ago as part of the great 
eastward expansion of Polynesian peoples  into the Pacific.  It is, 
however, the most remote piece of real estate out  there and for that reason, there 
is no archeological evidence that its people  had contact with the 
inhabitants of any other island – or any other human period  – after it was first 
settled, until Europeans made contact there in the early  1700s.   
At its peak, there  were apparently about 15,000 people living on an island 
about nine miles in  diameter.  When they arrived, the  archeological 
evidence indicates that the colonists found an island loaded with  tall trees 
that were suitable to make large ocean-going canoes, for  construction, and to 
make rope and cloth.  The trees also provided various  edible fruits, 
prevented soil erosion from brisk winds, and provided habitat for  various land 
birds. They also found at least 25  nesting seabird species, making it 
formerly the richest breeding site in all of  Polynesia.  It was a great place for 
the  seabirds because its isolation kept them free of predators – at least 
until the  humans arrived.   
For centuries, as their population grew, Easter Islanders received much  of 
their protein from porpoises that they speared in deep water from the  
ocean-going canoes.  Most fish came from deep-sea fishing, since Easter Island 
is too far from the equator to support coral  reefs that would allow 
shallow-water fishing.    
The Easter Islanders developed agriculture based on many of the crops  
common to other Polynesian societies.  They also brought chickens and  developed 
intensive chicken production. Their agricultural production  allowed 
Eastern Island society to produce  adequate food surpluses to feed the large 
numbers of laborers who were required  to transport and erect the statues for 
which the island is famous.  The  island itself was divided into 12 pie-shaped 
zones, each run by a tribe with a  chief.  These groups apparently engaged 
in peaceful competition over who  could build the largest, most elaborate 
carvings. Those were placed on even  larger platforms and apparently used for 
religious (ancestor worship) and other  communal events.   
The Easter Islanders began gradually clearing the forests – both for  
agriculture and to harvest wood – shortly after they arrived.  According to  the 
archeological record, deforestation reached its peak around 1400 and was  
virtually complete between the 1400s and 1600.    
According to Diamond, “The overall picture of Easter  Island is the most 
extreme example of forest destruction in the  Pacific and among the most 
extreme in the world: the whole forest is gone and  all of its tree species 
extinct.  Immediate consequences for the islanders  were losses of raw materials, 
losses of wild-caught foods, and decreased crop  yields.”   
Probably most  important, without the large tree trunks, they could no 
longer make large  ocean-going canoes.  As a result, large ocean-going porpoise 
and other  deep-sea fish disappeared from their diet.  The islanders had to 
depend  more on birds for protein and on smaller, shallow-water fish.  The 
birds  quickly disappeared.  Land birds disappeared completely, and sea birds 
were  reduced to relic populations.  Wild fruits from trees were dropped 
from  their diet.  Deforestation led to soil erosion and decreased crop  
yields.  Wood, the major source of fuel, disappeared.  Easter  inhabitants were 
reduced to burning herbs, grasses and sugarcane scraps.   Funeral practices 
changed.  Easter Islanders were among the only Polynesian  societies to 
cremate their dead, but this had consumed huge quantities of  wood.  When the 
wood was gone, they turned to mummification and bone  burial.   
The consequences of deforestation and these other human impacts were  
starvation, population crash, and a descent to cannibalism—the last major  
remaining source of animal protein besides chickens.  The crisis caused the  
masses to lose faith in the chiefs and priests, and around 1680 they were  
overthrown by military leaders. Easter Island’s  formerly complex, integrated 
society collapsed into an epidemic of civil  war.   
In the years before the collapse of the old order, the environmental  
crisis had been exacerbated by attempts to build bigger and bigger statues in an  
ever more urgent attempt to appeal to ancestors for help.  But, of course,  
the production of bigger statues also consumed huge quantities of wood and 
bark  to construct the wooden “ladders” used to transport the statues 
across the  ground and rope to pull them.   
Like many other societies, Easter’s collapse swiftly followed the society  
reaching its peak population, monument construction and environmental 
impact.   
By the time of the first recorded European visit to the Island, in 1722 by 
Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, most of  the great statues had been “thrown 
down” and broken by competing clans.   The Europeans were greeted by tiny 
canoes that were not ocean-going and a  population that had shrunk to between 
6,000 and 8,000.  The landscape that  Roggeveen saw was a wasteland, without 
a single tree or bush over 10 feet  tall.   
The contacts between the Europeans and the Easter Islanders resulted in  
further disaster.  Europeans brought smallpox that killed thousands of  
Islanders who, of course, had no immunity.  In 1862-63, two Peruvian ships  
abducted 1,500 of the remaining Easter Islanders to work as slaves in  Peru’s 
guano mines.     
By the time Catholic missionaries took up residence on Easter Island in 
1872, there were 111 islanders  remaining.  The society had collapsed.  It 
collapsed as a result of  deforestation, the destruction of the bird population 
and the political and  social factors that led to the decisions that made 
these things happen.   This was complicated by the fact that there was no 
possibility of emigration  from the Island—an escape valve that did not  present 
itself because of its isolation.    
Collapse was not inevitable, since other island societies faced with  
potential deforestation developed communal forest management programs that  
protected their most valuable asset for future generations.    
Diamond raises the question: “What did the Easter Islander who cut down  
the last palm tree say while he was doing it?  ‘We don’t have proof that  
there aren’t more palms somewhere else on Easter?  We need more  research?  Or 
your proposed ban on logging is premature and driven by  fear-mongering?’”  
 
I’ll conclude this story with Diamond’s summary of why the story of  
Easter Island is so compelling.   
The Easter Islanders’ isolation probably also explains  why I have found 
that their collapse, more than the collapse of any other  pre-industrial 
society, haunts my readers and students.  The parallels  between Easter Island 
and the whole modern  world are chillingly obvious.  Thanks to globalization, 
international  trade, jet planes, and the Internet, all countries on Earth 
today share  resources and affect each other, just as did Easter’s dozen 
clans.   Polynesian Easter Island was as isolated in the Pacific  Ocean as the 
Earth is today in space.  When Easter Islanders  got into difficulties, there 
was nowhere to which they could flee, nor to which  they could turn for 
help; nor shall we modern Earthlings have recourse elsewhere  if our troubles 
increase._[i]_ (aoldb://mail/write/template.htm#_edn1)    
The Easter Islanders  destroyed their environment and society with stone 
tools and their own muscle  power.  One of the great challenges of the 21st 
century is to  assure that billions of people with metal tools, machines, 
nuclear energy and  exploding technology do not destroy ours.    
The key to the Easter Island story is not just what can happen to a  
society, but the human decisions that created the  disaster. 
The Republican  President Theodore Roosevelt instinctively understood this. 
 The modern Republican Party – despite  the benefit of an additional 
century of scientific research -- does not.   
One question before us  in this falls election is whether the monument that 
embodies American values  will be the bold carvings on the side of a 
verdant Mount Rushmore or the statues  on a barren, windswept Easter Island. 
Robert Creamer is a long-time  political organizer and strategist, and 
author of the recent book: Stand Up  Straight: How Progressives Can Win, 
available on _Amazon.com._ 
(http://www.amazon.com/Listen-Your-Mother-Straight-Progressives/dp/0979585295/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213241439&sr=8-1) 

 
____________________________________

_[i]_ (aoldb://mail/write/template.htm#_ednref1)  Diamond, Collapse, p. 119 

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