.JPG "Earthen Spirituality")
Living within a living, loving planet
Posts tagged species extinction
A Religious Left
Sep 30th
A religious left
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/24/684435743/provoked-by-trump-the-religious-left-is-finding-its-voice
“Activists on the left should welcome the emergence of a religious core in their ranks because when political activity is morally inspired, it becomes more passionate — as conservatives already understand. Liberals are famous for being cerebral. A religious left may bring more energy to the progressive movement.”
“Democrats got a jolt of that passion at their last national convention with an appearance by the Rev. William Barber, an African-American preacher from North Carolina who started the “Moral Monday” movement in that state.
“Jesus, a brown-skinned Palestinian Jew, called us to preach good news to the poor, the broken, the bruised, and all those who are made to feel unaccepted!” Barber thundered, bringing the delegates to their feet.
Describing himself as “an evangelical Biblicist,” Barber said the nation is need of “moral defibrillators” to work on its weak heart.
“We must shock this nation with the power of love. We must shock this nation with power of mercy. We must shock this nation and fight for justice for all!” Barber said, in the most rousing speech of the convention.”
I have no problem with concern for the poor, the broken, the bruised etc. However, to ignore the health of the Earth, to ignore an emphasis on “other than humans” is to invite extinction. We truly have a “climate crisis.” CO2 in the troposphere is increasing at an increasing rate. The increase is non-linear and unpredictable. A tipping point has been reached.
Definition of tipping point: the critical point in a situation, process, or system beyond which a significant and often unstoppable effect or change takes place. The process at work here, and that imperils us, is un-predictable and poorly understood positive feedback. We must remember that with a CO2 reading of 414.7 ppm, in May, from the Mauna Loa Research Station on the big island of Hawaii, we have reached levels never before experienced by humans. Notice the caveat “often.” We don’t understand the Earth behaviour triggered by a “runaway” increase of CO2. We must consider that the “often” is probably a “certainly.”
Greta Thunberg’s Speech
Sep 25th
Greta Thunberg’s Speech
Greta Thunberg’s Speech at the UN Climate Action Summit
By Greta Thunberg, originally published by PBS News Hours
September 24, 2019
“People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing.
We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”
“How dare you pretend that this can be solved with business-as-usual and some technical solutions. With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than eight and a half years.”
“There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today. Because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.
You are failing us. But young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you.
We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.”
It takes courage to tell it as it is. It takes courage to speak out when your neighbours are speaking with their heads in the sand. Our exploitative economic system sucks us into such a subservient system – a “company store” – binding that we are compelled to shut up and put up. The ecosystem is still a misunderstood theory to many, boundless, loving Earth energy is credited to God and disaster is too often credited to God’s will. The environment is understood by many to be something “other” than us that we are at the mercy of. Many pray as if they think that the creator needs our praise and dishes out favours to selected followers. Some, hopefully a growing number realise that we “are” the planet. Thus, as the planet suffers so do we.
“It is not a matter of being “close to nature.” The relationship is more one of identity, in the mathematical sense, than of affinity. The Earth is, in a very real sense, the same as ourself (or selves), and it is this primary point that is made in the fiction and poetry of the Native American writers of the Southwest.” Paula Gunn Allen. Maybe that’s why a homespun, behavioural, saying goes: You must love yourself before you can love others.
As long as we see the Earth as “other” there is very little chance that we will change our behaviour or our destructive lifestyle.
Summer weather becomes more persistent in a 2 °C world
Aug 22nd
Summer weather becomes more persistent in a 2 °C world
- Peter Pfleiderer, peter.pfleiderer@climateanalytics.org
- Carl-Friedrich Schleussner,
- Kai Kornhuber &
- Dim Coumou
Nature Climate Change
Published: 19 August 2019
Abstract
Heat and rainfall extremes have intensified over the past few decades and this trend is projected to continue with future global warming1,2,3. A long persistence of extreme events often leads to societal impacts with warm-and-dry conditions severely affecting agriculture and consecutive days of heavy rainfall leading to flooding. Here we report systematic increases in the persistence of boreal summer weather in a multi-model analysis of a world 2 °C above pre-industrial compared to present-day climate. Averaged over the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitude land area, the probability of warm periods lasting longer than two weeks is projected to increase by 4% (2–6% full uncertainty range) after removing seasonal-mean warming. Compound dry–warm persistence increases at a similar magnitude on average but regionally up to 20% (11–42%) in eastern North America. The probability of at least seven consecutive days of strong precipitation increases by 26% (15–37%) for the mid-latitudes. We present evidence that weakening storm track activity contributes to the projected increase in warm and dry persistence. These changes in persistence are largely avoided when warming is limited to 1.5 °C. In conjunction with the projected intensification of heat and rainfall extremes, an increase in persistence can substantially worsen the effects of future weather extremes.
RightsLink permission License #4654090907532
I still cannot understand how such detailed probability figures can emerge from a model when the increase of CO2 in the troposphere is increasing at an increasing rate and this rate is not constant. Please see: http://www.earthenspirituality.com/tippingpoints/tippingpoints.pdf
The Next Downturn
Jul 8th
Only 6 minutes and twenty four seconds “Human Population Through Time”
“It took 200,000 years for our population to reach 1 Billion and only 200 years to reach 7 Billion!!!! As our population has grown, so has our use of Earth’s resources. Choices we make today affect the future of our species and all life on Earth.”
If you don’t look at anything else today, please take the six minutes to view this video produced by the American Museum of Natural History. It doesn’t say who funded it!.
Next Downturn
Why The Next Downturn Will Be The Most Destructive In Modern History — And The
Why You Must Act Now In Order To Preserve Your Wealth (and the Planet!)
by Adam Taggart
Tuesday, May 7, 2019, 2:37 PM
Peak Prosperity
“Our society’s pursuit of endless economic growth is unsustainable.
We’re at the point where we’ve sabotaged our future by taking on too much debt, while at the same moment, we’ve started to run dangerously low on the resources necessary to run our modern way of living, straining key ecosystems in the process.
But rather than change our behavior, we’re doubling down on our faith in growth, creating dangerous financial bubbles that threaten to ruin our economy when they burst.
And worse than that, we’re depleting our remaining precious resources — such as energy deposits, rich topsoils, underground aquifers, ocean fisheries, key commercial minerals — at rates that can never recover in our lifetime.
At this stage, it’s unrealistic to expect our government to ride the rescue in time, if at all — even if it weren’t dysfunctionally focused on protecting the very status quo that’s killing us.
Instead, we need to become our own heroes.”
Ancient Root
Apr 28th
Ancient Root
“I don’t know what kind of person steals a life for money, prestige, or status, what kind of animal that may be, but these people make a statement about all of us as a species, as varied as we are, as if to say we are cold of eye, colder of heart, and frozen in spirit. Then there are those of us who are filled with compassionate heartbreak and awe at the magnificence of all the lives around us, and these people grieve the many losses.”
Emergence Magazine Ancient Root Linda Hogan
https://emergencemagazine.org/story/ancient-root/
Linda Hogan is a Chickasaw novelist, essayist, poet, and environmentalist. She is author of Mean Spirit, winner of the Oklahoma Book Award and the Mountains and Plains Book Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is currently finishing a book of essays entitled The Radiant Life of Animals.
Society as Ecosystem in a Time of Collapse, Part I
Aug 1st
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…
Too many businesses are treating the Earth like a huge candy store
Jul 29th
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.”
An Ozymandian Nightmare Part 12
Jun 18th
What’s with Ozymandias?
Roman-era historian Diodorus Siculus, who described a statue of Ozymandias, more commonly known as Rameses II (possibly the pharaoh referred to in the Book of Exodus). Diodorus reports the inscription on the statue, which he claims was the largest in Egypt, as follows: “King of Kings Ozymandias am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work.” (The statue and its inscription do not survive, and were not seen by Shelley; his inspiration for [the sonnet] “Ozymandias” was verbal rather than visual.) http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/238972 View Shelley’s sonnet here.
This paper is a commentary on the book; Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth
The book is Edited by George Wuerthner, Eileen Crist, and Tom Butler. Published by the Foundation for Deep Ecology in collaboration with Island Press, 2014, Washington D.C.
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This entry is an editorial, ‘The New Conservation”
published on-line in the Society for Conservation Biology, 19 September, 2013.
Herein, Soule speaks out in response to a postmodernist approach to conservation. He points out that ninety eight percent of charitable contributions in the US target humans and human issues “that may seem more tangible to the average citizen than Earth’s unravelling ecological fabric.” If the “new Conservationists” can be taken seriously, it appears that humanitarianism should take prominence over Nature and the other-than-human beings that have become before us and to whom we owe our very existence and continuance as a species. Soule speaks of how this new movement seeks to “replace the biodiversity-based model of traditional conservation with campaigns emphasising human economic progress.” Under the new regime, humans will makeover the so-called “failed” efforts of conservation measures and manage the Earth as a garden for human use and welfare. Perhaps Erle Ellis puts it succinctly: “Nature is gone.”
“The manifesto of the new conservation movement is “Conservation in the Anthropocene: Beyond Solitude and Fragility” (Lalasz et al. 2011; see also Kareiva 2012). In the latter document, the authors assert that the mission of conservation ought to be primarily humanitarian, not nature (or biological diversity) protection: “Instead of pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake, a new conservation should seek to enhance those natural systems that benefit the widest number of people, especially the poor” (emphasis added). In light of its humanitarian agenda and in conformity with Foreman’s (2012) distinction between environmentalism (a movement that historically aims to improve human well-being, mostly by reducing air and water pollution and ensuring food safety) and conservation, both the terms new and conservation are inappropriate.
Proponents declare that their new conservation will measure its achievement in large part by its relevance to people, including city dwellers. Underlying this radically humanitarian vision is the belief that nature protection for its own sake is a dysfunctional, antihuman anachronism. To emphasize its radical departure from conservation, the characters of older conservation icons, such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Edward Abbey, are defamed as hypocrites and misanthropes and contemporary conservation leaders and writers are ignored entirely (Lalasz et al. 2011).”
“(1) The new conservationists assume biological diversity conservation is out of touch with the economic realities of ordinary people, even though this is manifestly false. Since its inception, the Society for Conservation Biology has included scores of progressive social scientists among its editors and authors (see also letters in BioScience, April 2012, volume 63, number 4: 242–243).
(2) The new conservationists also assert that national parks and protected areas serve only the elite, but a poll conducted by the nonpartisan National Parks Conservation Association and the National Park Hospitality Association estimates that 95% of voters in America want continued government support for parks (National Parks Conservation Association 2012).
(3) Furthermore, Lalasz et al. (2011) argue that it should be a goal of conservation to spur economic growth in habitat-eradicating sectors, such as forestry, fossil-fuel exploration and extraction, and agriculture.
(4) The key assertion of the new conservation is that affection for nature will grow in step with income growth. The problem is that evidence for this theory is lacking. In fact, the evidence points in the opposite direction, in part because increasing incomes affect growth in per capita ecological footprint (Soulé 1995; Oates 1999).”
© 2013 Society for Conservation Biology
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cobi.12147/full Contains full article
An Ozymandian Nightmare Part 11
Jun 15th
An Ozymandian Nightmare Part 11
What’s with Ozymandias?
Roman-era historian Diodorus Siculus, who described a statue of Ozymandias, more commonly known as Rameses II (possibly the pharaoh referred to in the Book of Exodus). Diodorus reports the inscription on the statue, which he claims was the largest in Egypt, as follows: “King of Kings Ozymandias am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work.” (The statue and its inscription do not survive, and were not seen by Shelley; his inspiration for [the sonnet] “Ozymandias” was verbal rather than visual.) http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/238972 View Shelley’s sonnet here.
This paper is a commentary on the book; Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth
The book is Edited by George Wuerthner, Eileen Crist, and Tom Butler. Published by the Foundation for Deep Ecology in collaboration with Island Press, 2014, Washington D.C.
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Conservation in No-Man’s-Land
Claudio Campagna and Daniel Guevara provide a well prepared rebuttal of the claims of the HCCs. [Human Centred Conservationists]
Claudio Campagna is a Senior Research Zoologist affiliated with the Wildlife Conservation Society.
Daniel Guevara is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
They pose that the “deepest issue – the real crisis – is that we do not have the concepts or language for expressing, or explicitly understanding, the intrinsic value of Nature; nor, therefore, for articulating its violation.”
I fully agree and add that the reason for this is primarily that we do not realise that we are the Earth. We are Nature. We use tools designed to measure “things”, mechanical objects and use the results to pronounce about the hows and whys of a living being. Further, Earth is an immense and intelligent living being. We treat Earth the way we do because we do not love the Earth, our higher self. Unfortunately for Earth, including all life therein, we speak of the planet as “it” and consider “it” as out there.
Our religious traditions were formed by people utterly devoid of scientific knowledge, steeped in hubris, and dedicated totally toward establishing principles approved by their personal God. Next they set up a hierarchy of special men who were imbued with the authority to speak “for” God. Following was a kicker message devised to frighten the masses into submission by pronouncing that their God would punish them for disobeying the opinions of their God’s spokespersons on Earth. Even into modern times, we have millions who live in fear of damnation and disapproval of their God.
Sadly, when so many people believe that humans are especially fabricated in God’s image and then thrust upon the Earth to, as written in Genesis 1:28 “…Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
Actually, the domestication of the Earth underpins the religious foundation of both Christianity and Judaism.
How could we ever expect a population from Christian and Jewish religious Sunday schools to love and cherish the Earth when they have been taught that their God has given the Earth to humans to subdue?
An Ozymandian Nightmare Part 10
Jun 13th
What’s with Ozymandias?
Roman-era historian Diodorus Siculus, who described a statue of Ozymandias, more commonly known as Rameses II (possibly the pharaoh referred to in the Book of Exodus). Diodorus reports the inscription on the statue, which he claims was the largest in Egypt, as follows: “King of Kings Ozymandias am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work.” (The statue and its inscription do not survive, and were not seen by Shelley; his inspiration for [the sonnet] “Ozymandias” was verbal rather than visual.) http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/238972 View Shelley’s sonnet here.
This paper is a commentary on the book; Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth
The book is Edited by George Wuerthner, Eileen Crist, and Tom Butler. Published by the Foundation for Deep Ecology in collaboration with Island Press, 2014, Washington D.C.
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What’s So New about the “New Conservation”?
Curt Meine
Curt Meine, Ph.D., is a conservation biologist, historian, and writer.
Let us schedule that Funeral
In this essay Meine begins with a story, somewhat of a parody concerning the new Conservationists. As I’ve posted, I choose to refer to them as Human Centred Conservationists as opposed to the established and sensible effort to protect the biodiversity and integrity of all life on Earth. Life on Earth is NOT all about people. We emerged only yesterday in the chronology of Earth’s development and our frontal lobe growth may at the end of the day cause us to be a failed experiment or failed evolutionary development.
Meine continues on the theme of disagreeing that the “old” conservationists agreed and promoted the idea that wilderness must be “pristine” and excluded humans. There is valid evidence that this is absolutely false. This falseness is exposed here and in several essays to follow. “Old” conservationists did acknowledge the rights of humans to co-exist with other-than-human beings. “Old” conservationists did not blindly adhere to the mythical “balance of a static Nature. “Old” conservationists disagree that modern science has pronounced that the Earth is actually tough and resilient. Looking at Earth as a living being must remind us that humans, for instance, can look resilient yet suffer and sustain life threatening illness. Destroying diversity is dangerous to the maintenance of Earth’s Health. A healthy human population requires a healthy Earth. “Old” conservationists failed according to HCCs. One look at the Wildlands Network: http://www.wildlandsnetwork.org/our-network reflects the unfairness of this statement. Anyway, whatever the limitations to conservationists goal achievement such would not justify giving up the attempt. Children still smoke, but who would use this as an excuse to give up trying to prevent the exploitation of the young by selling them tobacco?
Meine concludes with this quote from Aldo Leopold, the honoured prophet and mentor of the conservation movement:
“I have no illusions about the speed or accuracy with which an ecological conscience can become functional. It has required 19 centuries to define decent man-to-man conduct and the process is only half done; it may take as long to evolve a code of decency for man-to-land conduct.
[Sky: Sorry, but we just don’t have that long to wait. Aldo couldn’t have known this. Who knows what he would have said could he have had access to the climate change scientific evidence we have now?]
In such matters we should not worry too much about anything except the direction in which we travel.
[Sky: We know now that speed is important]
The direction is clear, and the first step is to throw your weight around on matters of right and wrong in land-use. Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits,
[Sky: Avoiding air travel whenever possible falls into this category. It is just not true that “the plane will fly anyway even if you don’t”. Every 50 or so people that quit flying along a particular connection means too many empty seats and the cancellation of that flight. When these individual actions add up to significant drops in passenger miles, new aircraft builds will be cancelled and flight frequencies lowered. The law of supply and demand still rules.]
or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.
[Sky: This is the pragmatist outlook which I despise now and the moment I first read about it in 1958]
That philosophy is dead in human relations, and its funeral in land-relations is overdue.”
[Sky: well, it has been resurrected by the HCCs – Human Centred Conservationists]
Yes, it is long overdue and Conservation Biologists worldwide and lay-people like myself can work tirelessly to schedule that funeral.