Small steps

The signing last week of the latest US/Russia version of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which had expired in December 2009, brings to mind the short, vivid life of Samantha Smith. In the summer of 1983, the 11-year-old from Manchester, Maine was the center of the world. Terrified by the prospect of nuclear war, she had written a letter the previous December to Yuri Andropov, new leader of the USSR, asking him to work for world peace. It wasn't long before the media in both countries had their proverbial field days with Samantha: Today show, Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, visit to the USSR, etc, etc.

One wonders why Samantha didn't write to Ronald Reagan first, or at least to George H.W. Bush, the Vice-President who summered just down I-95 in Kennebunkport. Her letter tells why, in part reading, "I would like to know why you want to conquer the world or at least our country." Clearly, Reagan's PR machine had done its job on Samantha, even before the Great Communicator really got going. March of that year 1983 saw both his first use of the phrase "evil empire" and the launching of the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Interestingly, it was in April that Andropov responded to Samantha. Perhaps he thought he had found his own Princess Leia in the new age of Star Wars.

Unfortunately, the age of Samantha didn't last. She herself was killed in a plane crash in Lewiston just two years later in 1985, returning from filming a show in London. Her Foundation, promoting student exchange and peace, lasted only 10 years. The low-brow TV series Lime Street, in which she starred (I guess the media was very successful in getting her to give up on peace with the USSR) and which indirectly caused her death, lasted 8 episodes.

I doubt there's a direct relationship between Samantha and START, but you never know. After all, President Bush signed START I, maybe inspired by a Maine youngster. Small steps work in diplomacy, if not in life.

The news of START II was pretty much buried by the healthcare triumph. But it is vitally important. Each side will be allowed "only" 1,500 or so weapons, down from over 2,000 each - still plenty to kill everyone many times over. And the treaty can say nothing about all the other nuclear powers, presumably covered by the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty signed by most of the world's nations, yet mostly toothless. So the danger is always present. No one seems to care, except Obama.

Ominously, the Senate has yet to ratify the CTBT, after almost 20 years. The Senate also must ratify START II. Both require a two-thirds majority. Will the party of "No" take yet another small step towards its final "nucular" implosion?

Profligacy

I've just finished reading Bernd Heinrich's A Year in the Maine Woods again. Among its many pleasures is his description of the immense effort a tree makes to reproduce itself, how it produces millions of seeds in hopes of one or two successes. Rachel Carson describes the same thing - and even more so - among littoral creatures in The Edge of the Sea. Both authors point not only to this profligacy of seed, but also to the incredible variety of nature even as one climbs higher up the food chain. Heinrich is amazed every spring at the scores of different warblers, each of whose calls, and nest-building techniques, is unique. Carson glories in the 2,000 species of barnacle. Their examples are legion; their calculations are so great as to approach meaninglessness; their passions are boundless.

The profligacy of humans is of a sort different from our fellow creatures. Our capacity for ideas, conjecture, stimulation, forethought seems as extravagant as the plankton of the sea - we match nature's intensity in the creations of our minds, spending without limit. But we must also be the only species whose waste is reckless, not recyclable. Our ideas have the mean habit of hardening into radioactivity, garbage dumps, ideologies, impervious surfaces, willful ignorance, rocky chasms. Fitting our bodies into the world seems more and more difficult.

At least someone - the poetical biologist - seems to be thinking about our place here, leading in moral and spiritual philosophy, in fact. Maybe also in religion, where the immensity and infinity of nature is God. Outside of poetry and nature writing and the joys of good fiction, I don't find much hope in the rest of our intellectual discourse.

Or maybe I should just stop reading the profligate idiocy of online comments on healthcare, and go outside to look at a profusion of crocuses.

Ice out

Many Maine lakes are showing ice out at the earliest dates ever recorded, Megunticook, for example, on March 19, the earliest in more than 100 years. You can now paddle your canoe its entire length again, if you were inclined to get wet and cold on another truly awful day in the Northeast (another sign of spring). I've often wondered: was last week's beautiful weather a payback for the downpours that preceded it, or are today's downpours a payback for the beautiful weather? We might have to go back all the way to the Garden of Eden to answer it. Or maybe it depends if you're a Democrat or Republican.

The ice also went out in Washington on Sunday night, at long last. Cold and unfeeling gave way to warm and understanding. The President, curiously, went the opposite, from warm and fuzzy ("let's try working together on healthcare") to cold and efficient("damn it, the majority of people elected us, and we have the majority in both houses of Congress, so let's just do what they elected us for"). The solution is not perfect, but it's worth rejoicing. Perhaps now people won't have to wait, suffering, until they're 65 to fix their knees and backs and arteries and kidneys, a common occurrence in Maine even though the State has one of the lowest rates of uninsured thanks to Dirigo. Good weather ahead.

Stewart Udall

The news of the death of Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior under Kennedy and Johnson, casts today's unseemly partisan political dysfunction into sharp relief. It seems there is no cause that can unite Washington like the great environmental movement of the 60s and 70s did, not even the health of our nation.

Udall oversaw a tremendous increase in national parks (including Cape Cod National Seashore for those of us marooned in Massachusetts); helped pass path-breaking legislation like the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966; and - here the bipartisanship comes in - set the stage for the even stronger environmental legislation signed by Richard Nixon in the early 70s. It was a time of unified national will. I remember thinking of Udall as a savior.

Forty years later, we have gone backwards. On a day when an historic vote is being taken on health care, partisanship reigns, fanatics spit on congressmen, tea-partiers abuse Barney Frank and John Lewis as they walk into Congress (guess what was shouted), and I just want to run for the clean air and pure water and wilderness of another time and space.