On Being Amber Instead of Green

Crossposted with TheGreenGrok.com.

Is poetic license about vegetation OK in a political campaign?

The presidential campaign season is upon us and so we'd better be prepared for some political hyperbole and truth-bending. Many folks of the green political persuasion have no doubt been put off by the broad swipes that some of the candidates have taken at climate science and the workings of the Environmental Protection Agency. (See here and here.)

And now a new environmental brouhaha is brewing.

Poetic Controversy on the Campaign Trail

In recent days we have seen a growing debate over one candidate's appropriation of "America the Beautiful" in his stump speech. Some critics claim the candidate has misinterpreted the song as extolling a vision of the United States that is at odds with the song's author's intentions. No comment here on that subject -- I'll leave that issue to the folks in the fine arts departments to suss out.

But there's also an environmental slant to this musical brouhaha.

Corn versus wheat - topic for next presidential debate? (Warren Gretz/NREL)

Dust-Up on Crops

It seems that while on the campaign trail in Iowa, where corn is king, the candidate in question asserted that the song's "amber waves of grain" could be an allusion to corn. To which critics have called foul; one op-ed in the New York Times accused the candidate of "pandering" to the corn-entrenched (some, but not me, might say corny) Iowans. After all, it's an environmentally verifiable fact that corn is green as it grows (at least on the outside). Wheat, on the other hand, does have an amber hue in the fields. This would presumably lead most environmentally informed scholars of "America the Beautiful" to conclude that the "amber waves" were surely meant to be fields of wheat blowing in the winds o'er America's breadbasket.

A Politicized Maize

Is this but another example of a presidential candidate's anti-environmentalism -- a sort of green-washing of corn?

Or is there a more innocent but nevertheless disturbing explanation? To wit: One of the leading contenders for the White House is confused about the difference between corn and wheat. I frankly find this latter possibility strains credulity. I mean, all you have to do is compare a corn tortilla to a flour tortilla to appreciate the difference -- I prefer flour myself, although those on new-year-resolution diets might want to reach for the lower-in-calories corn tortillas (and even that can stir debate as corn may start out lower but since it's usually fried ... you can see where I'm going but I digress). Back to the campaign. Surely, given the rising importance of the Hispanic vote, all the presidential candidates have been thoroughly schooled in the ins and outs of tortillas. But again I digress.

So what's the appropriate environmental response to this flagrant bit of crop-color disinformation? I vote that we give the poor (not) candidate a pass on this one. In a campaign season that promises to be as ugly and counter-factual as any in recent memory, a little poetic license when it comes to agriculture is probably acceptable. But I give fair warning: There is only so much I can take. If anyone starts talking about wheat and elephant's eyes, the gloves are coming off.

 

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Comments

[Michael D Ballantine]

10:31 PM on 01/08/2012

Another reasonable question is if a Green candidate could be elected or would he/she have to be aquamarine? The trouble this year is that so many of the public have been indoctrinated by the FAUX News that climate change is nothing to worry about. It's certainly easier to worry about something you can see or that you might have some bit of control over but how can someone get worked up over exhaling or the fizzy bubbles coming off their Coca-Cola? The problem is that as environmentalists, we bungled the messaging by assuming that people would respect intellectual endeavors. Despite 150 years of fighting the creationists we should have had a clue that this approach might not work. CO2 emissions are so pervasive that this problem may not have a solution and any proposed solution will be too expensive say the naysayers. The dounting Thomas moves to skeptical mode and it is easier to believe that God will protect us because we know that Jesus is coming back and there will be a 1,000 years of peace. After all, God promised us there would never be another flood. Trying to sell the whole rising waters bit to that crowd was never going to work.

The administration's mercury rules are a good start. Then we need to focus on how bad coal miners have it, working conditions, safety violations, air pollution from soot and ash in the older power plants.