A CEO, a Tea Partier and a Union Member...

It's the "joke" that's making the rounds today:

"A public union employee, a tea party activist, and a CEO are sitting at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies in the middle of it. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, turns to the tea partier and says, 'Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.'"

It's been a hard day, a hard week, a hard couple of years. I'm finding I may have to say goodbye to a number of people with whom I've worked for years. For all I know, my own job was on the chopping block; many others at our school didn't think this would happen to them, and yet it did. We are lopping off entire programs: engineering, architecture, mass media and others. Deep cuts in others. The math is frightening; the state doesn't take in enough to pay for the education it is committed to provide. So the cuts come.

We can take steps; there is talk of offering a voluntary pay cut to save jobs and programs. There are other alternatives being suggested. But all of them represent a retreat from education.

I don't blame our local administrators; they've been dealt the cards they have. Many of them are new at their jobs, having been hired only in the last year or two. We will see how they deal with these hard issues. Today's cuts are the opening move and much is to be negotiated.

I do blame the politicians. I think that the people of our state might be willing to sacrifice a little longer to maintain the education of their children, their spouses, their parents. But there is a group, a political party, that is resisting letting the population even vote to continue a bit longer the taxes and fees that were instituted in the last year or two and are expiring. They should get out of the way and at least let us try to convince the population that education is worth saving.

And there is the bigger issue, the subject of the joke of the day. There is a yawning economic chasm between the rich and the rest of our society. More wealth is concentrated with the highest two percent of the population than at any time in the last century. And no one seems to ask, or even suggest that they could help in this time of dire need, by paying taxes at a rate equal to what they paid only a decade ago, before the Bush tax cuts and others decimated federal and state budgets. Instead we argue among ourselves over the crumbs.

The economists tell us the recession is over. But all I see happening around my community is more store closings, more employees being laid off, more houses being foreclosed. We are living in a depression, and I don't see the end of it. Maybe there is some economist who can explain to me how things are better right now.

A message to the ultra-rich: laid-off workers don't buy your products, invest in your hedge funds, or buy houses. Neither do people who are still working but are worried for their jobs and seeing their salaries cut. I paint with broad brush strokes and I know that there are many well-off people who understand this basic economic truth, but there are obviously many who don't. This society allowed you to become rich; to paraphrase the Bible, from those who are given much, much is expected. It's time for everyone in our society to step up to the plate and work together to get out of this horrific economic mess.

Education made this country and my state great. I knew many of the "greatest generation" who came home from the second world war, got an education, and proceeded to build the greatest economy ever seen on this planet. They went to the moon and the planets, they invented computers that transformed society, they built a society that took care of the aged, the sick, and disabled. They made unbelievable advances in medicine. They built the best cars and transportation systems in the world. I saw these things happen in my lifetime. Our children have that potential, if we can only guide them and inspire them.

But instead we are now in retreat; education is devalued and teachers and professors are demonized by politicians. We are made to do more, far more, with less. I despair and grieve at what our society has come to. We have huge challenges ahead as a society; the end of the oil economy, global climate change, resource depletion, water shortages, food production disruptions and many others in the earth sciences alone. Every other academic field can point to other big problems. And our response is to cut the pool of talented individuals by making education inaccessible to more and more members of our society.

The California Prairie: A final journey for 2010

I started 2010 talking about California's prairies (here and here), and with a nice sunny afternoon (another few storms are bearing down on the state at the moment) it seemed appropriate to make one last journey to see how the prairie in my backyard was faring. We took off to follow Crabtree and Willm Roads in the Sierra foothills and enjoy some sunshine (while it lasted). Not too surprisingly, water was everywhere; the recent bout of storms has left the soils saturated.

Our first intention was to check on the Tuolumne River where it flows through my little town. The Tuolumne starts in the Yosemite National Park high country near Tioga Pass, and has a larger drainage than the more famous Merced River that flows through Yosemite Valley. The river was very high...the flow was at 5,600 cubic feet per second (flood stage is 9,000 cfs). A check of the stats revealed that nearly 16,000 cfs of water was flowing into Don Pedro Reservoir upstream. Sometimes flood control dams work the way they are supposed to...

The prairies of California are bounty and famine. We've seen times of plenty in the spring (and even in the depths of winter like today; look at the greenery!), and we've seen plagues of grasshoppers (only a few months ago). In summer, the prairie bakes under the unforgiving sun and fires can sweep across the landscape.

It's been that kind of year for my family and friends. It's been a tough year for so many, with unemployment and foreclosures touching way too close to home. The economists are fond of telling us that the Great Recession is over and has been for months. I guess it is for the bank executives and stockbrokers and the cocktail party pundits on TV. I'm sure glad they aren't suffering anymore. The economists should visit central California sometime instead of studying their spreadsheets and statistics. It's painful to watch so many people who are ready to work and ready to contribute, and yet are not given the opportunity. It's frustrating to work in an educational system that can no longer provide enough seats and resources to our students. My prayer is that the coming year holds blessings and good things for all of my friends, family and readers, and that we will find our way out of this morass. Wishing you a happy 2011. May the road ahead beckon and lead to tremendous places!

Who are you looking at?

Who Sacrifices?

I'm off geological topics today, but I am talking about education, my other life concern...

I heard stories from my grandparents about life in the Great Depression and World War II, and I have heard and read plenty of accounts about how the country came together to try and deal with threats and the intractable problems of those times. My grandparents still had some of the ration stamps that they used during the war. It was an astounding time in the country's history that we came through a horrific war and terrible depression all the stronger for our collective pain.

This week, a number of my friends and fellow earth science teachers got some of the 23,000 pink slips that were handed out in California because of the pathetic budget situation in our state. I know that similar things are happening elsewhere across the country, and I share their fears and uncertainties. I'm one of the lucky teachers that continues to have a job, but the budget cuts have cut close to home, and I am concerned for the future of education in this state, and in the nation.

Shared sacrifice...it's how our society is going to survive and thrive.

For the last few years, the sacrifice has fallen disproportionately on different groups of people.

We have been and still are fighting two of the longest wars in our nation's history. Who is paying the price? Mostly our military personnel and the reservists who have been trapped in a de facto draft. They fight the wars of wizened old men in Washington, and 5,000 have paid the ultimate price. Tens of thousands more are maimed and scarred for life. Who has benefited? As far as I can tell, it is the companies and corporations that build the weapons, and oil companies who are securing future petroleum resources.

How many people have followed the rules and followed their dreams to buy their own home? Because of the greed and stupidity of the banks and insurance companies and their financial shenanigans, we are sacrificing in a big way now. Foreclosures and lost equity have devastated millions of families and destroyed the budgets of states all over the country. Those responsible for the financial meltdown sit in their Wall Street offices and continue to collect billions in bonuses.

How many people have followed the rules and purchased or tried to purchase health insurance, only to have their coverage denied or canceled because they had the bad form to actually get sick? The so-called "death panels" are with us now, and have been for a long time. They're called health insurance companies. People are sick and dying, and the company executives collect record salaries and bonuses.

So here we are in the worst recession since the 1930's, and where I live, some counties have unemployment rates comparable to the Great Depression. So who is sacrificing now? It is the unemployed, a massive group of people who want to work, are ready to work, but who cannot find work. It is the homeowners, who were buying into a dream, but were being sold a bill of goods by con men. It is the teachers, who have given over their lives to make the lives of children better, and the students, who will be all the more ignorant and ill-prepared for life.

Of course, there is a resource that we could draw on to help in these terrible times. Those in the uppermost tax brackets had their taxes cut a decade ago, and they have seen their incomes double, triple, quadruple and more while the wages of the middle class have lost ground to inflation. These people are the bank presidents, the executives of the weapons companies, the health insurance CEOs. Why haven't they been asked to sacrifice in these difficult times? We haven't asked them to sacrifice because our elected politicians who should be doing this are no longer elected, they are bought and paid for by the people who sit in those executive offices. Heaven forbid that we ask them to pay a price, in the form of slightly higher taxes, equal to what they would have paid a decade ago....

A simplistic stream of consciousness today, I know. But I recall a certain uncomfortable Bible passage, Luke 12:48: "And to whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required: and to whom they commit much, of him will they ask the more."

Losing Field Studies: Budget Crisis Continues in California

The continuing recession (and here in the Central Valley of California it is a depression) and the California state budget crisis is hitting our school hard. Got word today that our summer field studies program, a two-week field studies program that takes our students all over the American west and to international destinations, has been eliminated for 2010 and probably for 2011 as well. It is a truly unfortunate development, because aside from the instructor's salary, the program was funded by the students. It didn't really cost the school much, but the college has decided to focus on the core classes for each discipline, and running the field studies would mean one less math or English class on the schedule.

I'm not complaining exactly, because I still have a job, and a great many people have it far, far worse (although I did lose one teaching job this year already). I am simply saddened that our program is losing one of the best tools we have for training geology and teaching majors the core principles of the geosciences. It's one thing to describle rock types on a chalk board or in a box in the lab, and quite another to pick up rocks and minerals in the context of where they are found in nature. Teachers who have seen the things they talk about, whether volcanoes, faults, fossils, glaciers or whatever, will be better teachers. Geologists without field experiences are at a severe disadvantage in academic and employment settings.

For the time being, some of our more local field studies will go on in the fall and spring semesters, but I fear what is coming in the next year. Even if the economy improves it may be years before the state budget improves to an extent that will help the community college system. That somehow seems wrong, because it is the community colleges that are at the forefront of retraining workers during times of economic upheaval. But we are closing our doors to new students these days.