The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

Editor’s Note:

Sometimes you just have to stop staring at the dancing monkey.

That’s what Trump is – a dancing monkey.

It’s not because he’s dumb or stupid. He’s not nearly as dumb or stupid as Democrats seem to think.

According to some academic research, Trump is simply a bandit.

THE IDIOTS AMONG US: The five universal laws of human stupidity

It’s because — and he knows this full well — that he’s a walking, talking psychodrama. He’s an established expert at saying the crazy thing that scares people, setting off a political news version of the fight or flight response.

The media and the press are addicted to such things. They depend on them financially. They simply can’t resist. They can’t afford to look away from the dancing monkey, or so they think.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is also an expert at this, if nothing else other than writing code.

The people who produce cable news shows know all about this. They know how to keep that cycle going, keeping people glued to the screen, even though they are mostly all saying the same things over and over again and showing the same video footage loop all day long every day.

The is ample evidence that this can be hazardous to your physical and mental health. And this could surely be amplified to include public health.

Today’s not the day to dwell any more on that. It just needed to be said up front. Here’s a story from experience of what can happen when you stop staring at the dancing monkey, get outside and interact with real people working on important problems.

Saving the Planet for Homo Sapiens

MOBILE, Ala. — The days are growing hot and the nights warm here too. But there are a few more things to accomplish before we set out from the Gulf Coast this year to head back to DC and the national political fray.

We got wind that a couple of environmental activists from the Dogwood Alliance were in town speaking at a Mobile Bay Sierra Club meeting, so we drove east on the old Mobile Bay causeway to the Five Rivers Delta Resource Center to get the news in person, not from an email or a social media post.

From a presentation by Emily Zucchino and Lucia Ibarra, we found out the wood pellet company Enviva wants to build the largest wood pellet facility in the world in Lucedale, Mississippi, with plans to produce 1.4 million tons of wood pellets a year.

A plant of this size could mean the cutting of 130,000 acres of forest, an area roughly the size of Chicago, every year, they say. Read more about it here.

How Southern American Forests Are Being Clear-Cut, Shipped Overseas and Burned as ‘Green’ Energy

Of course there’s also this. Apparently many humans don’t even know they are Homo sapiens.

As I was looking into the details of the wood pellet story online, I found out my old friend Lloyd Clayton passed away earlier this year. He had been instrumental in funding the startup of the Dogwood Alliance, along with Wild South and other environmental causes and non-profits from the Locust Fork of the Black Warrior River to California and the Amazon region in South America.

I met and got to know “Doc Lloyd,” as many called him, about that time in the late ’80s when we were fighting a winning battle to stop a dam on the free-flowing Locust Fork. He was close friends with the photographer Spider Martin, and his mother lived in the Highland Avenue neighborhood just around the corner from my book store, newsstand and coffee bar NewsBreak at 30th Street and Highland, where a Joe Muggs coffee shop is located now.

Doc Lloyd used to hang out all the time on the tables out in front of my shop, always with a fully stocked bar in his car trunk – and plenty of good weed.

Rest in peace my friend. There is a memorial service scheduled in his honor on May 25 in Tellico Plains, Tennessee, and it looks like I may be there to speak on my way to Marion, North Carolina and then DC. I may have more to say about him after the service if I can find a campground with enough cell phone service to get online and write.

I know for a fact he would have been interested in this story just out from the United Nations.

‘Ominous’ UN Report Warns Human Activity Has Pushed One Million Plant and Animal Species to Brink of Extinction

While digging around on the web and Facebook, this led me back to another old friend, Cielo Sand, who founded the Dogwood Alliance along with Danna Smith.

I met Cielo and her husband Leaf Myczack not long after they traveled to the Gulf Coast in the late 1980s on an environmental quest in a sailboat they built from scrap wood salvaged out of the Tennessee River.

Today they are still at it, trying to save the planet, with an organic farm in Virginia. Here’s one news clip I found about them.

Rockwood farmer catches water for irrigation

Back in the day when newspapers paid real money for environmental journalism, in the 1990s, I went along on an aerial flight with Cielo to view the forests in East Tennessee under pressure from clear cutting for chip mills. The local alternative weekly MetroPulse commissioned a cover story, which you can still find online through the alternative weekly wire (see below).

Not So Clear-Cut: Logging companies say the milling of Tennessee’s forests is good for the economy and the environment. Critics challenge them on both counts.

The paper itself was later bought out by the Scripps publishing group that also owned the only daily there, The Knoxville News-Sentinal. I think they still publish it as a local entertainment guide, but it was one of the coolest alternative weeklies on the web back then in the early, heady days of the internet — before blogs and social media came along.

We will be packing up the media camper van for the MoJo Road in a few days, but there may be time for one more bit of rebel rousing before we go back to get in Trump’s face and chase the dancing monkey for ourselves.

If the people along the Gulf Coast were smart, and wanted to engage in some activism, they might be able to kill this idea for a new monstrosity of a bridge crossing Mobile Bay — if they would take this story viral.

Mobile River Bridge May Be Dead in the Water

But it seems like everyone, everywhere these days, they can’t take their eyes off the dancing monkey, even though the Mueller report has dropped with a whimper.

All that activist steam built up after the BP Gulf oil disaster in 2010 seems to have gone up in pink smoke.

But, hey, at least the Alabama Legislature is debating a medical marijuana bill. Maybe there is some hope for “my people” yet.

Nick Saban wink

Meanwhile, I am going to end this column here, because I just had an idea for writing a letter to Alabama football coach Nick Saban. The people of Alabama and the University of Alabama have a golden opportunity right now to be a major player in the world in something other than football.

But I can’t seem to get enough of the right people interested in funding the new app I want to build, yet. Maybe I can get some publicity to break through the news of the dancing monkey if I write an open letter to Saban about this and get it going around on the web. Stay tuned.