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Living within a living, loving planet
Archive for April, 2019
Reminders USA April, 2019
Apr 30th
Reminders USA April, 2019
“The Department of Justice pursues those goals while operating in accordance with the rule of law. The rule of law is the foundation of America. It secures our freedom, allows our citizens to flourish, and enables our nation to serve as a model of liberty and justice for all.”
Rod Rosenstein, the US deputy attorney general (Just resigned)
“– and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Abraham Lincoln November 19, 1863
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.
Declaration of Independence
The first amendment to the Constitution says: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
EPA Decides Not to Regulate Fracking Wastewater
Apr 29th
EPA Decides Not to Regulate Fracking Wastewater as Pennsylvania Study Reveals Recent Spike
By Sharon Kelly Thursday, April 25, 2019
Is there any doubt just who is running the country?
“On April 23, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told two environmental groups that it had decided it was “not necessary” to update the federal standards handling toxic waste from oil and gas wells, including the waste produced by fracking.
State regulators have repeatedly proved unable to prevent the industry’s toxic waste from entering America’s drinking water supplies, including both private wells and the rivers from which public drinking water supplies are drawn, the Environmental Protection Agency concluded in a 2017 national study.
The corrosive salt-laden wastewater from fracked wells has been spread on roads as a de-icer. It’s been sprayed into the air in the hopes of evaporating the water — a practice that spreads its blend of volatile chemicals into the air instead. Oil industry wastewater has even been used to irrigate crops — in California, where state regulators haven’t set rules to keep dangerous chemicals like the carcinogen benzene out of irrigation water.
If equally contaminated waste came from other industries, it would usually be designated hazardous waste and subject to strict tracking and disposal rules designed to keep the public safe from industrial pollution. But in July 1988, after burying clear warnings from its own scientists about the hazards of oilfield waste, the EPA offered the oil and gas industry a broad exemption from hazardous waste handling laws.
The EPA’s decision this week echoes that.”
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.
Hallowed Ground
Apr 28th
Hallowed Ground
by Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
“Yews are the oldest living things in Britain, considered ancient only when they reach the age of nine hundred. Some are believed to be at least five thousand years old.”
“The roots of religious belief and the sacredness of nature were once closely entwined. Traces of this ancient relationship remain today: thousand-year-old yews grow in churchyards; the forest monks of Thailand have long followed the Buddha’s example of revering trees. In this essay, Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder profiles theologian Martin Palmer and his work to engage faith-based communities in recovering stories of love and care for local ecologies.”
“The yew, Taxus baccata of the family Taxaceae, is a conifer native to the United Kingdom. Growing up to twenty meters (sixty-six feet) tall, and sometimes taller, with peeling auburn bark and small, straight needles that grow in two dark-green rows, yews provide habitat for the goldcrest and other small birds. Every part of the yew is poisonous, with the exception of the bright-red, fleshy arils that encase the seeds, food for the blackbird and the mistle thrush. Yews are the oldest living things in Britain, considered ancient only when they reach the age of nine hundred. Some are believed to be at least five thousand years old. Yews carry an air of the secretive, and their age is notoriously difficult to determine because of their ability to withstand extraordinarily long periods of dormancy and then mysteriously decide that the time is right for new growth. Some of Britain’s oldest yews have witnessed Roman expeditions led by Julius Caesar, ancient Celtic ceremonies, Anglo-Saxon conquest, and the Black Death.”
“The National Geographic wrote that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is this high ‘for the first time in 55 years of measurement—and probably more than 3 million years of Earth history.’ The current concentration may be the highest in the last 20 million years.”
“At the beginning of each interglacial period as the ice receded from the land, vast numbers of trees spread north and performed a carbon sequestering service. They also released water vapour which stimulated cloud cover that increased the albedo effectively taking the place, as far as reflectivity is concerned, of the miles and miles of ice that had melted. With that negative feedback firmly in place and the orbital forcing factors favouring cooling, the downward cycle of Gaia’s temperature was assured and triggered the end of the interglacial period.
Unfortunately for all, these natural feedback factors been destroyed by humans. Millions of trees over thousands of years have been chopped to build armadas and commercial shipping, other war implements, and shelter for humans as if the trees’ only function to serve the greed of humans.
“Apart from the profligate burning of fossil fuels and releasing the earth’s long-term carbon and energy storage depot that has taken millions of years to lay down, deforestation has been the main contributor to the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that has resulted in global warming.” Sky McCain, Unpublished
See: http://www.earthenspirituality.com/global-warming/
https://emergencemagazine.org/story/hallowed-ground/
“You take out sacred things at your peril,” Martin says. “You’re changing the map of where you live.”
Compost Human Bodies
Apr 28th
Washington passes bill to become first state to compost human bodies
“We’re making about a cubic yard of soil per person,” the founder of the company Recompose said.
Finished materials from the human-body composting process. (Washington State University)
By Ben Guarino
April 26, 2019
“It may soon be legal for the dead to push daisies, or any other flower, in backyard gardens across Washington state. The state legislature recently passed a bill that, if signed by the governor, allows human bodies to be composted — and used for mulch.”
“I have a few friends at some of the assisted-living facilities here in Seattle,” Spade said, “and these folks are in their mid-80s saying: ‘Look, we want these options. … We care about the last gesture we leave on this earth.’ ”
Corbyn launches bid to declare a national climate emergency
Apr 28th
Corbyn launches bid to declare a national climate emergency
Labour will attempt to force Commons vote as it is revealed that the government has failed to spend anti-pollution cash
Toby Helm Sat 27 Apr 2019
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/27/corbyn-declares-national-climate-emergency
Extremely Positive News
Apr 27th
Extremely Positive News
Ecuador Amazon tribe win first victory against oil companies
AFP•April 27, 2019
https://news.yahoo.com/ecuador-amazon-tribe-win-first-victory-against-oil-023457554.html
Why Protesters Should be Wary
Apr 27th
Why Protesters Should be Wary of ’12 Years to Climate Breakdown’ Rhetoric
By Myles Allen, originally published by The Conversation
April 23, 2019
“So please stop saying something globally bad is going to happen in 2030. Bad stuff is already happening and every half a degree of warming matters, but the IPCC does not draw a “planetary boundary” at 1.5°C beyond which lie climate dragons.”
Get angry, but for the right reasons
“What about the other interpretation of the IPCC’s 12 years: that we have 12 years to act? What our report said was, in scenarios with a one-in-two to two-in-three chance of keeping global warming below 1.5°C, emissions are reduced to around half their present level by 2030. That doesn’t mean we have 12 years to act: it means we have to act now, and even if we do, success is not guaranteed.”
“Climate change is not so much an emergency as a festering injustice. Your ancestors did not end slavery by declaring an emergency and dreaming up artificial boundaries on “tolerable” slave numbers. They called it out for what it was: a spectacularly profitable industry, the basis of much prosperity at the time, founded on a fundamental injustice. It’s time to do the same on climate change.”
Alarming Rate of Forest Loss
Apr 27th
Alarming Rate of Forest Loss Threatens a Crucial Climate Solution
“The global loss of tree cover has continued even as more corporations and countries make commitments to preserve tropical forests.”
BY GEORGINA GUSTIN APR 25, 2019
“The world’s forests continue to disappear at an alarming rate, threatening a resource that scientists say is a crucial “natural solution” for controlling climate change on an urgently short timescale.
Last year, the planet saw its fourth-highest level of tropical tree loss since the early 2000s—about 30 million acres, according to a new analysis published Thursday.
Those losses have continued even as more corporations and countries made commitments to preserve forests, and as scientists emphasized that maintaining forests must be a global priority—as crucial to staving off the worst risks of climate change as cutting fossil fuel use.”
Tata Power to Focus on Clean Energy
Apr 27th
Tata Power to focus on clean energy
Apr 23, 2019
“Private power producer Tata Power will lead the nation’s renewable energy transition with gradual withdrawal from building new coal fired power plants, a report said.”