.JPG "Earthen Spirituality")
Living within a living, loving planet
Environmental Protection
Time to Speak out
Apr 23rd
Time to Speak Out
“During those same 50 years, populations of vertebrates (animals with backbones) declined by 60 percent on average. It’s been estimated that humans—along with our cattle, pigs, and other domesticates—now make up 96 percent of all terrestrial vertebrate biomass. The other four percent include all the songbirds, deer, foxes, elephants and on and on—all the world’s remaining wild land animals. We inherited a planet of astounding beauty, which we share with millions of amazing creatures—and, one by one, we’re crowding them out.” Richard Heinberg Post Carbon Institute
<newsletter@postcarbon.org> 22 April, 2020
We don’t actually have a resource shortage. We have a population problem. With other living things, when they eat out their environment, many die until balance is achieved. But no, not homo sapiens sapiens. We have become the most voracious and dangerous predator Earth has ever encountered. We maintain our over population by enslaving other animals, penning them up in miserable conditions and chopping them up for Sunday lunch.
Who gave us the right to breed in such an out-of-control manner? I cannot imagine a deity that would condone our actions. Certainly not a God of love such as many of us have been taught.
For those of us who don’t do sky Gods, we realize that we don’t have the wisdom to manage a planet so must watch, study and learn to work in cooperation with Nature. Why?
Because the Earth is not out there; we ARE the Earth. We live in an Earth provided body. It is not OUR body to do as we choose with which goes for every other living body large or small.
Our hubris has dropped us presently into a cultural and economic decline, albiet one of many in our short history on the planet.
Now, every day must be an Earth day for our days are numbered.
We must “ring the bell that still can ring” and look for the “crack in everything.”
Ships fitted with ‘Cheat Devices’ to Divert Poisonous Pollution into Sea
Oct 6th
Ships fitted with ‘cheat devices’ to divert poisonous pollution into sea
Wil Crisp The Independent
“Global shipping companies have spent billions rigging vessels with “cheat devices” that circumvent new environmental legislation by dumping pollution into the sea instead of the air, The Independent can reveal.
More than $12bn (£9.7bn) has been spent on the devices, known as open-loop scrubbers, which extract sulphur from the exhaust fumes of ships that run on heavy fuel oil.”
Is this the result of a mature capitalism? If so, then these kinds of actions reveal a severe mental illness.
Ancient Root
Jun 1st
“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.
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.”
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
Is this too much to ask?
Apr 21st
A toxic crisis in America’s coal country
By Gareth Evans BBC News, Wyoming County, West Virginia 11 February 2019
“The only thing I really care about is getting fresh water the way it was when I was growing up around here,” he says.
“I ain’t worried about the money. I just want clean water.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-47165522
US to clean up toxic Vietnam air base. “The ten-year programme, unveiled more than four decades after the end of the Vietnam War, will cost $183m (£141m).”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-48000185
Imagine how Jack (quoted above) feels about the story above!
Can we Afford the Green New Deal?
Apr 6th
Can we afford the Green New Deal? Can there be a doubt?
How Large Are Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies?
“$5.3 trillion in 2015 (6.5% of global GDP)”
Volume 91, March 2017, Pages 11-27
Author links open overlay panel: DavidCoady, IanParry, LouisSears, BaopingShang
Show more
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2016.10.004
Summary
“This paper estimates fossil fuel subsidies and the economic and environmental benefits from reforming them, focusing mostly on a broad notion of subsidies arising when consumer prices are below supply costs plus environmental costs and general consumption taxes.
Estimated subsidies are $4.9 trillion worldwide in 2013 and $5.3 trillion in 2015 (6.5% of global GDP in both years). Undercharging for global warming accounts for 22% of the subsidy in 2013, air pollution 46%, broader vehicle externalities 13%, supply costs 11%, and general consumer taxes 8%. China was the biggest subsidizer in 2013 ($1.8 trillion), followed by the United States ($0.6 trillion), and Russia, the European Union, and India (each with about $0.3 trillion). Eliminating subsidies would have reduced global carbon emissions in 2013 by 21% and fossil fuel air pollution deaths 55%, while raising revenue of 4%, and social welfare by 2.2%, of global GDP.”
Photo from Pixabay
Fracking in the US
Aug 23rd
Fracking in the US
Daily Kos Staff
Friday August 17, 2018 · 9:23 AM PDT
A new study out of Duke University shows that fracking operations in the United States have boomed in their use of water over the past five years. The researchers found that between 2011 and 2016, the amount of water being used, per well, increased 770 percent. On top of that—during the same time—the amount of “brine-laden” wastewater generated by those wells increased 1,440 percent.
The Truth Sometimes Hurts
Aug 12th
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.
We ARE the Planet
Aug 8th
“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.