Life Inside the Beltway

Route 495 surrounds the District of Columbia, and is a fairly hellish yet entertaining road on which to drive. It curves in interesting ways, has too many lanes in places, and, of course, is chock full of excellent (har har) Washington drivers. Folks call it the beltway. Baltimore has one too, but District residents don't call it "the Washington beltway." Just the beltway.

I should mention that I have a car problem - that is to say, my car, given the rest of me, is problematic. I was raised to feel very sentimental about great big American clunkers, specifically Cadillac sedans. So I have a '96 STS that my father fixed up for me. The way I drive it, it gets about 20 MPG. It is a miserable attachment for an environmentalist, but I love that car.

In any case: they ("they" being, in this case, Eric Roston at Grist) say that "inside the beltway" is a metal state, not a geographic one. I understand what that means now. One who lives "inside the beltway" follows Capitol Hill beyond the nightly news. Here, in this mindscape of our nation's capital, people understand that a few ordinary human beings in expensive clothes wield immense power over the world's future. We follow their movements. Most of all, we follow the composition and rearrangement of the future under the fingertips of their staffs. We wait to see if the bill is sufficient, if it is plausible - and these two things spin into and out of each other's paths, clattering off course, causing the collective heart of the District to shutter and tense.

Before I got here, I knew only that climate change legislation needed to get through Congress before December, before Copenhagen, and to get through Congress as strong as possible, so whatever occurs at Copenhagen will be as good as it can be. "Waxman-Markey" was not in my vocabulary. Now, I'm hardly well-versed on the bill, but I understand the challenges it's facing - and I understand that the some of those challenges are not, themselves, unreasonable.

But let me tell you, I went to the House Agriculture Committee's hearing on the bill, and that was . . . new. It did not surprise me, exactly. To use a favorite illustrative device of environmentalists - although, as a commenter pointed out, a very unscientific one - the great figurative frog is not surprised to be boiled alive in slowly-warming water. It just dies at some point, and perhaps its froggy soul, somewhere, goes "huh. How'd that happen?"

I sat on the floor of the first overflow room. The hearing was long - three and a half hours on the first panel alone - and the Congresspeople ran back and forth to the House floor, voting, so a few central questions were asked a great many times. Especially "how much will this actually drive costs up for farmers?" Secretary Vilsack did not have an answer, but he did have extraordinary patience.

And I, sitting there, felt a little boiled. So this is what it's like. So this is my country, after all.

By the time I read the news the next day, further negotiations between particularly important ag committee members and Speaker Pelosi had already happened, and the landscape was already changing. Life inside the beltway is fast-paced. I'm not certain I'm cut out for it, on the one hand, but on the other, if I can get used to it, I know it's the right place to be.

Briefly, from work:

"From work" means "from the office of the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Washington, D.C." It's easy to forget how exciting it is to be here, though that sounds strange - here, on the third floor of an innocuous office building near Dupont Circle, so much passes, so much thinking is done. And I am here, passing, thinking.

A lot happened to me, environmentally speaking, over this past year. My focus widened, my frameworks grew feedbacks. I'm still on about ag, especially in America, and all those other sustainability issues that are so American in their high-income focus, but there is quite a lot more to all this. There is a world of hurt and a world of potential.

You'll hear about that in time. For now: thanks for being here. I hope you're keeping up on Waxman-Markey. I know we all are.