.JPG "Earthen Spirituality")
Living within a living, loving planet
The Truth Sometimes Hurts
3 days
The Truth Sometimes Hurts
We scientists need help to communicate in a post-truth world
By Kate Marvel on August 8, 2018
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/hot-planet/the-truth-sometimes-hurts/
“More seriously, every time I talk about the uncertainties inherent in climate projections, I feel attacked from all sides of the climate mitigation debate. I admit that in the current landscape, any expression of uncertainty is immediately weaponized by those who want to delay climate action.”
Stop and think a minute. Many of our professionals work in an atmosphere of uncertainty. Take, for instance, our medical profession. Despite their utmost efforts to “get it right” all the time, the human body doesn’t react to medicine in the same way every day. Why? We are a complex, living organism, not a machine. Earth is a complex, living organism also. As a living organism, our usual measuring instruments miss the mark because they were designed to deal with a machine-like inanimate “things.” Thus there has to be some uncertainty with climate change predictions. Consider weather. The weather forecasts are full of uncertainty and often off centre. So, we live with that. Climate is just weather over a long period of time.
Consider our dedicated and compassionate medical workers do their best with the tools they have available yet they work daily with uncertainty and we accept that.
Climate scientists are often in the best position to analyse and make responsible moral judgements re: climate change. Who knows better? When it comes to risk, I’d sooner believe a few climate change researchers than a spokesperson for an industry that takes profits from CO2 emitting activities.
RNAi Corn
5 days
RNAi Corn
Posted on: Monday, July 10th 2017 at 9:45 am
Written By: Sayer Ji, Founder
“Without much more than a whisper from the mainstream media, Monsanto’s newest Frankenfood has received full EPA approval and will be arriving on dinner plates by the end of the decade. The implications of this are harrowing, to say the least.”
Spirit-Based Change
7 days
by sky
in Gaia Consciousness
From Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change
Sherri Mitchell
“Our goal is to become a tuning fork for an elevated consciousness and a more equitable reality.
We do this by investing in higher emotional currency: supporting one another’s gifts offered to us by the Earth.”
https://nativenewsonline.net/currents/from-sacred-instructions-the-cultivation-of-warriors/
I’m in the process of reviewing this book. I’ll post it on here in the near future.
We ARE the Planet
1 week
“Professor Johan Rockström, a co-author of the new paper from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, told BBC News. ‘What we are saying is that when we reach 2C of warming, we may be at a point where we hand over the control mechanism to Planet Earth herself.’”
Carbon Brief Daily | 07/08/2018
I don’t seem to be on the same page here. When did anyone ever dare to think that (1) That we were ever “in control” of Earth’s survival mechanisms and (2) That we have anything to “hand over” to “Planet Earth.” We and all our brethren are first and foremost “Earthlings.” We are not “on” this planet, we ARE the planet – inseparable.
We have not “lost” our connection. That’s impossible. We have either lost consciousness of it or perhaps never were conscious of being part of the, so to speak, eyes, ears, nose and throat of our greater beingness, the marvellous planet Earth.
Society as Ecosystem in a Time of Collapse, Part I
2 weeks
Society as Ecosystem in a Time of Collapse, Part I
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-07-30/human-predators-human-prey/
By Richard Heinberg, July 30, 2018
First of three parts
Richard Heinberg is the author of thirteen books including: – Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy, co-authored with David Fridley (2016) – Afterburn (2015) – Snake Oil (July 2013) – The End of Growth (August 2011) – The Post Carbon Reader (2010) (editor) – Blackout: Coal, Climate, and the Last…
America spends over $20bn per year on fossil fuel subsidies
2 weeks
America spends over $20bn per year on fossil fuel subsidies. Abolish them
While we need to leave fossil fuels in the ground, America is giving the fossil fuel industry billions to extract more
Dana Nuccitelli
Mon 30 Jul 2018
“The OCI report noted that the Obama administration actually proposed to eliminate 60% of federal fossil fuel industry subsidies, but that proposal went nowhere for one obvious reason:
In the 2015-2016 election cycle oil, gas, and coal companies spent $354 million in campaign contributions and lobbying and received $29.4 billion in federal subsidies in total over those same years – an 8,200% return on investment.”
Congress Gives Sacred Apache Land to Foreign Mining Company
2 weeks
Congress Gives Sacred Apache Land to Foreign Mining Company
San Carlos Apache Leader Seeks Senate Defeat of Copper Mine on Sacred Land
http://www.whitewolfpack.com/2014/12/congress-gives-sacred-apache-land-to.html
“Congress is poised to give a foreign mining company 2,400 acres of national forest in Arizona that is cherished ancestral homeland to Apache natives. Controversially, the measure is attached to annual legislation that funds the US Defense Department.”
The Climate Change Denial Industry
2 weeks
The Climate Change Denial Industry
“ExxonMobil gave more than $2.3m to members of Congress and a corporate lobbying group that deny climate change and block efforts to fight climate change – eight years after pledging to stop its funding of climate denial, the Guardian has learned.”
“Last week Ted Nordhaus of The Breakthrough Institute wrote that the Earth’s carrying capacity for humanity is not fixed. Apparently, we’re living in a magical world that is immune to ecological laws.
As you might imagine, I disagree.
My response to his article was published today in Undark Magazine.
https://undark.org/article/ted-nordhaus-carrying-capacity-ecology/
What warning signs would you expect to see if we humans were pressing at the limits of global carrying capacity? Resource depletion? Check. Pollution? Check. Dying oceans? Check.” Richard Heinberg
Sky: Further – The Breakthrough Institute’s Inconvenient History with Al Gore
April 14, 2014, by Paul D. Thacker
“While sometimes functioning as shadow universities, think tanks have been exposed as quasi lobbying organizations, with little funding transparency. Recent research has also pointed out that think tanks suffer from a lack of intellectual rigor. A case in point is the Breakthrough Institute run by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, which describes itself as a “progressive think tank.”
https://ethics.harvard.edu/blog/breakthrough-institutes-inconvenient-history-al-gore
Too many businesses are treating the Earth like a huge candy store
3 weeks
Too many businesses are treating the Earth like a huge candy store
“We’re dealing with ‘a highly degraded ecosystem of forests that just get continuously logged over and over again.’”
Danna Smith of the Dogwood Alliance, a nonprofit organization.
“…trees cut down in the Southeast are usually replanted. But it can take a sapling decades to grow large enough to absorb and store as much carbon as the tree it replaced.”
Ten percent Sahara expansion
3 weeks
Ten percent Sahara expansion
“The desert (Sahara) has expanded southward during summer by about ten percent, so it’s a fairly significant increase in the desert expanse over this 93-year period that we analyzed. Most people in the region depend on the food they grow on small family farms. So losing farmland could have grave consequences, especially as populations continue to grow.”
“Nigam is a professor at the University of Maryland. He says decreasing rainfall is likely a result of both natural cycles and human-caused global warming.”
So there we have the kernel of the problem. Decreasing small farmland and increasing population.