Mort Rosenblum: As we look inward, greed threatens our closed ecosystem

SAN FRANCISCO — Jane Kay's timeless Victorian flat in San Francisco's Mission District explains why my flight from Paris to Tucson seemed light-years longer than usual. The country we've known for 162 years between us is off in a galaxy all its own.

Jane, my sister, is also a lifelong reporter with wide-ranging interests. She narrows in on environmental reporting, a field she pioneered at the Star a half century ago. Her multiple awards are lost among books, photos and memorabilia from far-flung places.

Countless first editions and offprints fill shelves sturdy enough to withstand an earthquake: M.F.K. Fisher's "How to Cook a Wolf" and volumes of Virginia Woolf; Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" and Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring."

But there is no "Brave New World" where Aldous Huxley should be. For the same reason I call Mort Reports "non-prophet" journalism, Jane avoids dystopian fiction. Instead, she burrows down to ground truth, observable fact and hard science.

The lodestone is her matched set of a dozen Sinclair Lewis books, pre-war reportage thinly masked as novels, from "Main Street" and "Babbitt" to "It Can't Happen Here." 

Lewis's books, far more than "muckraking," define a human condition that has not changed since Aristotle defined it. Most people are basically good but are caught up in their own disparate interests. Bad ones know what they want and how to get it.

MOCA just honored Jane on the 40th anniversary of her deeply researched exposé of carcinogenic pollutants in Tucson groundwater from Hughes Aircraft, now Raytheon. It should have been an alarm bell heard round the world.

When it appeared, I was bouncing around between wars and famines, picking up PTSD while looking hard at humanity's uglier sides. And I saw a pattern emerge. History not only repeats itself, but it also gets steadily worse. Now we are out of time for that.

Jane has a copy of Stanley Karnow's "Paris in the Fifties," and so do I back in Provence. But I also have his "Vietnam: A History" and "Mao and China." Stan is a much-missed old hand from a different era of reporting.

Back then, reporting was mostly "local" or "national." The rest was mostly distant echoes of other people's problems. With nuclear "MAD," mutually assured destruction, a USA and a USSR blunted the risk of High Noon. China and India were still backwaters.

Today, a single story transcends all borders, involving eight billion-plus hapless humans: Who gets to survive into the future, at what cost, and for how long before Earth sloughs off all Homo sapiens? And what can be done to protect sustainability.

My sister and I approach this story from different angles. Ever the optimist, she believes human nature's better side will prevail, beginning with November elections in America. A wiser Congress might help begin steering the world back towards sanity.

She may well be right, and I hope she is. But if so, an awful lot more people need to wake up fast.

My breed studied foreign languages. Also, multiple versions of "Don't shoot, I'm a journalist" — no longer of much use. To cover governments, we learned Doublespeak from Orwell's "1984." Now everyone needs a new lingua franca: Corporate Sleaze.

An authoritative annual study of 28 countries found 70 percent of respondents thought companies twisted facts to increase their profits. Regrettable, if hardly a surprise. But these days, that has a crippling impact on free people and an endangered planet.

We have no more leeway for more avoidable environmental calamity. And authoritarians seldom restore democratic institutions once they cripple them.

Preparing for the Paris-Los Angeles flight was like heading to Moscow in the Evil Empire days. Even U.S. citizens now face official spot checks to reap contacts, files and "social" media data from their computers. In fact, I breezed through Global Entry.

A camera face scan flashed all-clear. Convenient, except if something deep in Big-Brother software makes you need a lawyer on speed dial. By now, we Americans are corpuscles in a bloodstream surveilled by ill-trained, partisan public servants.

Upon finally reaching the friendly scaled-up airport I left in 1962 on my first flight abroad, a large sign welcomed me. It was erected by my new self-proclaimed friendly neighbors who, it said, would be making Tucson great: Hudbay Minerals of Toronto.

A publicity blitz touts its Copper World: 400 jobs and some wherewithal for people who suffer dust and disruption from a constant parade of heavy trucks. Vast open pits will be left behind, permanently evaporating, and likely polluting, already scarce water.

Profits would be banked in Canada until the mines play out, leaving Arizona with devastated mountain splendor that belongs to future generations. It is worth immeasurably more in recreational income left as it is.

Proponents say we need copper for "national security." If so, reserves should stay in the ground until needed. There is plenty in countries that are eager for jobs and the income. But it is easier and cheaper for outsiders to plunder for profit in the United States.

Hudbay's stock shot up by 189 percent in the last 12 months, three times Alphabet's and close to 18 times Apple's. Copper nears $6 a pound, twice its previous stable level, as the Trump administration mines as it there were no tomorrow.

I am singing an old song. Tony Davis and other reporters, Pima County authorities, Indian tribes that revere the land, environmentalists and others, have been at it since well before I began chiming in two decades ago. Today, the lyrics are beyond urgent.

The courts blocked Hudbay's Rosemont Mine on public land. But under a government hellbent on deregulation, Copper World plans to start up soon on land the company owns. Clearing is underway. There could be last-minute hitches. But once bulldozers move, natural splendor is lost forever.

Stepping back, it is hard to confront professional hype and gross distortions. America is increasingly run by greed-obsessed billionaires and coopted politicians with no thought to the generations whose future they are dimming and eventually dooming.

I'll head back soon for a hard look at what is left of old trails and campgrounds. Many of "400 jobs" are sentries who seal off backroads. For now, what matters is why runaway mining in Arizona is a small sidelight of a global scourge.

Donald Trump has an insatiable lust for wealth and an illusion of omnipotence. He grasps at any shiny or sensual thing that catches his eye. He needs to be stopped now.

Jane's books explain what went wrong and why. Now a new breed of reporters needs to reflect reality to people who look inwards, confusing themselves with preposterous AI summaries and limiting "silos" of the like-minded.

One vignette sums it up.

Eager not to offend San Francisco's no-smoking jihadis, I perched on a backstreet fire hydrant to light a pipe. I peeled the label off a mini-lighter, rolled it into a tiny ball and distractedly let it drop into a gutter of filth about to be sluiced away.

A scolding voice echoed among leafy trees: "You dropped something!"  It was a pleasant-looking young woman. "Thank you for helping protect the world," I replied, with mild sarcasm. "Well, it's my block, she said, "So ..."

Actually, it isn't. She just lives there, as all of us live in a single closed ecosystem. Sooner than most of us think, it will no longer be able to support the bulk of us. No time is left to obsess over our own little patches and not look up to see the rest.