Author Archives: Website Editor

Can renewable energy turn Australia into a global superpower?
An emerging plan for wind, solar and hydrogen

From 60 Minutes Australia — May 1, 2022

India’s Water Revolution — Article by Cathy Holt

Filming a permaculture water harvesting project

FEBRUARY 20, 2022

India has major problems with drought, which have only intensified with global warming. Many areas have as little as 8–12 inches of rainfall a year, all of it falling during three months of monsoon rains. Often, farmers have only been able to grow crops for a handful of months, having to work in cities during most of the year just to survive. In a remarkable series of short films by Andrew Millison, India’s recent successes with permaculture-inspired water conservation are revealed. It is beautiful to see barren lands become verdant, and smiles on the faces of the residents.

The Water Cup

The Paani Foundation held the “Water Cup,” a 45-day competition among villages in the state of Maharashtra to store the most water and recharge the most groundwater possible. The result: far from having just one “winner,” 1,000 villages have now defeated drought completely!

In a second competition by the Paani Foundation, the “Prosperous Village Competition,” the design criteria included: soil and water conservation, soil health, planting of trees and healthy grasslands, and providing a basis for income and prosperity for all residents. Just imagine how much cooperation is necessary to create a project that can provide a basis for income and prosperity for ALL residents of a village! And yet, it was accomplished. The dream was that if people united and worked as one, Maharashtra would become drought-free. In 2016, there were 116 villages working to become water-abundant. By 2019, over 4,700 villages joined the movement. People worked relentlessly and shattered barriers of gender, politics, class, religion and caste. Over the course of four years, in participating villages an estimated 550 billion gallons of water storage were built, and 51,000 people were trained in water conservation. Incomes rose as crops flourished and villagers became water- and food-secure.

In Garavada, with typically just 8–12 inches of rain a year, farmers usually run out of water and tanker trucks have to bring water to drink. This area now has food and water security. They created unlined ponds high in the landscape to replenish the aquifer, and gravity flows fed crops. As a result of “continuous contour trenches” (or swales) dug into hillsides, a spring appeared where there had been none. Water is also pumped from ponds to irrigate crops.

From Poverty to Permaculture

Ardhendru Chattergee is the much-respected founder of the Development Research Communication Service Center, or DRCSC. He and his organization have worked tirelessly for 40 years to end poverty, hunger and environmental degradation. This means working with the most marginalized people, who live on the poorest lands, such as in the indigenous tribal villages of Purulia. Using an innovative DRCSC design, a hand-dug pond features terraced banks which are planted as the water level drops; each week a lower area from which water has receded, can be planted. Even rice can be grown.

DRCSC’s “30–40 model”

An area of 30 formerly barren acres in Gholkund was divided into rectangles, 30 feet by 40 feet, by mounding up soil, with a “soakage pit” in each. This way, none of the rain leaves this slightly sloped area. Diverse, drought tolerant, useful plants are fed by seepage from the soakage pit. These include neem, tamarind, silk cotton tree, Indian rosewood, oiltree, and teak, among others.

The Deccan Plateau, hot and dry, was once considered a wasteland. Sitting on bedrock, it’s hard for water to sink in. But it is now home to the well-established and successful Aranya Permaculture Farm. Started in 1999, it has gradually become a food forest. Key elements were plentiful mulching to retain moisture at the root level, and composting to build soil depth. On slopes, crescent berms were created perpendicular to water flow, on contour. (Berms are mounded up soil below a depression dug for water to soak in.) On top of these berms, trees were planted: moringa, papaya, custard apple, and tamarind.

Andhra Pradesh receives only 300–600 mm of rain per year and is one of the driest parts of India; of the last 20 years, 16 have been drought years. The formerly landless poor received land here. Using excavators, they built 65 ponds. As a result, 165,000 households now have water security. Where once it was common practice to burn crop residues, now every bit is composted and used to build soil. Biofertilizers are made from Neem seeds and pesticide use has declined sharply.

“The Urban Mega-Drought Solution”

In Tamil Nadu, on India’s south coast, there is typically 55 inches of rain a year from the monsoons. One square meter of roof can capture 1400 liters of rain. Trees and soil can act like a sponge. One woman who harvested rainwater on her property was proud to report that her formerly dry well had been recharged.

Auroville: 50 years of permaculture

Founded in 1968, this eco-city was formerly a barren plateau. Now it’s a lush forest. The massive reforestation project involved the whole community planting diverse species to re-create a tropical dry forest. On slopes, they created swales 35 inches apart; now there is zero runoff. Percolation ponds were dug. Thirty check-dams stop runoff, collect silt, and hold water, and these are prime areas for vegetation.

Wastewater is treated using “Living Machines” (tanks containing plants, algae, snails, fish, and other organisms — first designed by John Todd in the US). The first tank, or cell, has only the most hardy, pollution tolerant organisms, the second tank has different organisms, and the third tank still different. Both greywater and blackwater are purified in this way and then run through “flowforms” to help oxygenate the water. This water is then used for irrigation.

Watch this series of youtubes for yourself, and get inspired!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8nqnOcoLqE

Cathy Holt is a member of the Earth Regenerators Network. She’s passionate about regenerating landscapes with water retention, agro-forestry, and biogas digestors. You can find more of her articles at https://cathyholt.medium.com.

A Game-Changing Vision for Geothermal Energy

From POWERMAG.COM
https://www.powermag.com/a-game-changing-vision-for-geothermal-energy/
June 24, 2021

A new possibility: Drilling miles down for geothermal energy by using a focused beam of microwave energy rather than a mechanical drill bit

According to a report released in 2019 by the U.S. Department of Energy, geothermal electricity generation could increase more than 26-fold by 2050—reaching 60 GW of installed capacity. That may seem like a pipe dream to some power observers, but if new well-drilling techniques allow enhanced geothermal systems to become economical, the reality could be much greater. In fact, Quaise Energy, a company working to develop enabling technologies needed to expand geothermal on a global scale, claims as much as 30 TW of geothermal energy could be added around the world by 2050.
…
“That’s where the drilling technology that we’re proposing comes into play. We’re basically trying to do directed-energy drilling with millimeter waves,” Araque said. “Imagine a microwave source on the surface, it’s called a gyrotron. We beam this energy through a pipe into the hole. Together with this energy, we push a gas—could be nitrogen, could be air, could be argon, if necessary—and at the bottom of that pipe, this energy comes out, evaporates the rock, and the gas picks up the vapor of that rock and pulls it back out. What comes out of the hole looks like volcanic ash, and the hole actually burns its way down, you know, five, six, 10, 15, 20 kilometers, as needed, to get to the temperatures we’re looking at.”

The fundamental physics behind the technology has been proven, now Quaise Energy is moving from the lab to installing a prototype in the field. “Over the next three years, we’re going to be working with key people in the oil and gas industry—one of them is one of the largest drilling contractors in the oil and gas industry—and hand in hand working with them to actually show that this is not only a good idea, but it’s actually a viable idea. We’re going to be doing this in the western United States,” said Araque.

Read article:
https://www.powermag.com/a-game-changing-vision-for-geothermal-energy/

Visit Quase Energy website (developers of new technology)

Listen to full interview:

The POWER Podcast · 91. A Game-Changing Vision for Geothermal Energy

Superhot Rock Geothermal
An Energy Revolution in the Making

from https://www.catf.us/work/superhot-rock/

Superhot rock geothermal energy is a visionary technology deserving of investment, and yet almost entirely unrecognized in the decarbonization debate. It has the potential to meet long-term demands for zero-carbon, always-on power, and can generate hydrogen for transportation fuel and other applications. Unlocking the potential of this energy source could expand our options and potentially carve a path forward to replace fossil fuels.

Superhot rock energy could support rapid global decarbonization

Click to download report (PDF file).

Killer Drones Song — By Don Michael Sampson

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KILLER DRONES

Fear the Dark Star, Fear the Reaper
The soul of mankind’s sinking deeper and deeper
Unseen enemies up in the sky
Death coming at you in the blink of an eye
Killer drones buzzing everywhere
Pay dose attention, Be aware
Starting from the US to the Middle East
Pretty soon they’ll be up above your hometown street

Looking through your window into your bed
Spying on you or maybe killing you dead
It’s just like another video game
Evil and Death now have a new name
Call them drones, call them unmanned ?ights
Up above you soon in the day and the night
Buzzing overhead like a summer lawn mower
A new way to control, a new way of war

They hit so fast, no time to pray
Push of a button 8,000 miles away
They don’t know what hit them in that desert sand
Everything’s clean here, no blood on no hands
On the green screen a big blinding ?ash
When you get a clear kill, just kick bad< and relax
Then shut down the computer, go pick up the kids
Don’t tell them though, what daddy just did

It’s the government, the military, your local police
Excited about these drones and the possibilities
Don’t kid yourself my friends, better start to think
They’ll be up above your driveway quidcer than you can blink
Technology gone crazy, technology gone mad
Everybody’s plugged in now, everyone’s been had
We’re doomed when technology outstrips humanity
Mr. Einstein handed down those words for you and me

These new wings of death are flying low and high
Across every border in every sky
Now everywhere can be a killing zcwe
Like the eagle and the wild hawk this predator drone
Except the eagle and the wild hawk are just looking to survive
Predator and Reaper make sure no one gets out alive
Eagle and hawk just kill what they can eat
The Predator drone kills where politics and big business meet

Wings of death hovering all over the world
Threatening every man and woman, every boy and girl
Another tool of evil like the nuclear bomb
Dark star ending lives, bringing funeral songs
Stand up together, we are not alone
Fight the death dealers and the killer drones
Stop the madness, it’s out of control
Fight like warriors now for the human heart and soul
Fight like vgarriors now for the human heart and soul
Fight like waarriors now for the human heart and soul

Words and Music by Don Michael Sampson
© Wind in the Trees Music BMI 2012

http://www.donmichaelsampson.com

SOLAR TRIBUNE features solar power news and
and comparison shopping for residential solar

Wave Power Could Be Energy’s Next Big Leap

From: Bloomberg Quicktake — March 3, 2021

Searching for ways to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, engineers and entrepreneurs are looking to a largely untapped potential source of renewable energy: wave power.

A song and posters for a time of pandemic

We interrupt our usual info providing
to bring you this special public health alert:
A song and posters for a time of pandemic and crisis:

Gretchen’s gift to a world in crisis: an inspiring song, placed in the Creative Commons for all to enjoy, sing, and pass on to others. You can hear and learn each of the harmony parts at https://songsforthegreatturning.net/honoring-our-pain-for-the-world/may-this-be-an-opening/
The music and lyrics are copyable, adaptable, and shareable, under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Many thanks to Ajith Samuel for the Creative Commons video of the opening flower. Video production by Dennis Rivers.

“I Can’t Breathe!”

June 2020: Experiencing the murderous violence of America’s broken promises:

Image from news report in Guardian.com newspaper

George Floyd Memorial Poster (click to download)

Continuing Radical Innovation in Wind, Solar and Tidal
Electric Power Generation (2020)

Geothermal energy is poised for a big breakout

From Vox.com By David Roberts — Oct 21, 2020

Geothermal power is the perpetual also-ran of renewable energy, chugging along in the background for decades, never quite breaking out of its little niche, forever causing energy experts to say, “Oh, yeah, geothermal … what’s up with that?”

Well, after approximately 15 years of reporting on energy, I finally took the time to do a deep dive into geothermal and I am here to report: This is a great time to start paying attention!

After many years of failure to launch, new companies and technologies have brought geothermal out of its doldrums, to the point that it may finally be ready to scale up and become a major player in clean energy. In fact, if its more enthusiastic backers are correct, geothermal may hold the key to making 100 percent clean electricity available to everyone in the world. And as a bonus, it’s an opportunity for the struggling oil and gas industry to put its capital and skills to work on something that won’t degrade the planet.

Vik Rao, former chief technology officer at Halliburton, the oil field service giant, recently told the geothermal blog Heat Beat, “geothermal is no longer a niche play. It’s scalable, potentially in a highly material way. Scalability gets the attention of the [oil services] industry.”

In this post, I’m going to cover technologies meant to mine heat deep from the Earth, which can then be used as direct heat for communities, to generate electricity, or to do both through “cogeneration” of heat and electricity. (Note that ground-source heat pumps, which take advantage of steady shallow-earth temperatures to heat buildings or groups of buildings, are sometimes included among geothermal technologies, but I’m going to leave them aside for a separate post.)

Before we get to the technologies, though, let’s take a quick look at geothermal energy itself.

Nebraska retiree uses Earths’ heat to grow oranges in snow

Winter temperatures in Alliance, Nebraska can drop to -20°F (the record low is -40°F/C), but retired mailman Russ Finch grows oranges in his backyard greenhouse without paying for heat. Instead, he draws on the earth’s stable temperature (around 52 degrees in his region) to grow warm weather produce- citrus, figs, pomegranates – in the snow.

Finch first discovered geothermal heating in 1979 when he and his wife built it into their 4400-square-foot dream home to cut energy costs. Eighteen years later they decided to add a 16’x80′ greenhouse in the backyard. The greenhouse resembles a pit greenhouse (walipini) in that the floor is dug down 4 feet below the surface and the roof is slanted to catch the southern sun.

To avoid using heaters for the cold Nebraska winter nights, Finch relies on the warm underground air fed into the greenhouse via plastic tubing under the yard and one fan. Finch sells a “Citrus in the Snow” report detailing his work with his “geo-air” greenhouses and says anyone can build a market-producing greenhouse for about $25,000 or “less than the cost of a heat system on a traditional greenhouse”. https://greenhouseinthesnow.com/

Could we ever pull enough carbon out of the atmosphere
to stop climate change?

https://www.livescience.com/can-carbon-removal-slow-climate-change.html — Donavyn Coffey — November 2020

Nature has equipped Earth with several giant “sponges,” or carbon sinks, that can help humans battle climate change. These natural sponges, as well as human-made ones, can sop up carbon, effectively removing it from the atmosphere.

Photo by Alex Indigo — Creative Commons

But what does this sci-fi-like act really entail? And how much will it actually take — and cost — to make a difference and slow climate change?

Sabine Fuss has been looking for these answers for the last two years. An economist in Berlin, Fuss leads a research group at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change and was part of the original Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — established by the United Nations to assess the science, risks and impacts of global warming. After the panel’s 2018 report and the new Paris Agreement goal to keep global warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) or less, Fuss was tasked with finding out which carbon removal strategies were most promising and feasible.

Afforestation and reforestation — planting or replanting of forests, respectively — are well known natural carbon sinks. Vast numbers of trees can sequester the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere for photosynthesis, a chemical reaction that uses the sun’s energy to turn carbon dioxide and water into sugar and oxygen. According to a 2019 study in the journal Science, planting 1 trillion trees could store about 225 billion tons (205 billion metric tons) of carbon, or about two-thirds of the carbon released by humans into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution began.

Agriculture land management is another natural carbon removal approach that’s relatively low risk and already being tested out, according to Jane Zelikova, terrestrial ecologist and chief scientist at Carbon180, a nonprofit that advocates for carbon removal strategies in the U.S. Practices such as rotational grazing, reduced tilling and crop rotation increase carbon intake by photosynthesis, and that carbon is eventually stored in root tissues that decompose in the soil. The National Academy of Sciences found that carbon storage in soil was enough to offset as much as 10% of U.S. annual net emissions — or about 632 million tons (574 million metric tons) of CO2 — at a low cost.

But nature-based carbon removal, like planting and replanting forests, can conflict with other policy goals, like food production, Fuss said. Scaled up, these strategies require a lot of land, oftentimes land that’s already in use.

read more

2020 Overview of Geothermal Energy
One promising element in a strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

From: Just Have a Think on YouTube

Science tells us there’s enough energy in the first 10 kilometres below our planet’s surface to provide all our energy needs for millions of years. The Romans tapped into it for their hot water spas. Today, we all know it as Geothermal Energy. There’s no carbon dioxide emissions and no air pollution with geothermal, and it’s literally right there beneath our feet. So why isn’t our entire planet powered by it? Help support this YouTube channel’s leading edge reporting at http://www.patreon.com/justhaveathink and please visit http://www.justhaveathink.com

David Hartsough interview on TheWorldIsMyCountry.com
September 2020

David Hartsough is a Co-Founder of World BEYOND War, a global movement to end war – making it as illegal to kill people outside countries as it is inside! He has been Waging Peace since meeting Martin Luther King at age 15 – from civil-rights sit-ins to blocking nuclear weapons plants at LIvermore Laboratory. He’s blocked trains carrying munitions to fuel Central American wars — enforcing international law as laid out at Nuremberg. He’s Waged Peace in some of the most dangerous and war-torn places on the planet — including the Philippines, Iran, Kosovo and even the Soviet Union. Arthur met him in the early 60’s when David, a fellow Quaker, led the San Francisco to Moscow peace march — to end the cold war before it ended all of us!

At a time when the US and the World are teetering on the bring of tyranny, ecocide and nuclear extinction, we’ll talk to David about how we can inspire the frustrated and angry to gain real power by renouncing violence and waging peace!

David recommended these books: “From Dictatorship to Democracy”, “Waging Nonviolent Struggle”, “Global Security System: An Alternative to War” Also the film “A Force More Powerful” and these websites: ChooseDemocracy.us, WorldBeyondWar.org, Nonviolentpeaceforce.org, ThePoorPeoplesCampaign.org and Divestfromwarmachine.org

David invites you to buy his book “Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist”! You can read free chapters in PDF format here.

2004: Michael McDonald sings a comforting hymn to a troubled world

Michael McDonald sang this song with his band
on the Oct. 23, 2004 show of Austin City Limits.

MICHAEL McDONALD– “Peace”—lyrics:

I have come from so far away
Down the road of my own mistakes
In the hope you could hear me pray
Oh lord, keep me in your reach

How I’ve longed through these wasted years
To outrun all the pain and fear
Turned to stone from my uncried tears
And now it’s your grace I seek

Love won’t compromise
It’s a gift, it’s a sacrifice
My soul renewed, and my heart released
In you I’ll find my peace

Wondrous child of whom the angels sing
You know my joy, you feel my suffering
Shining star, make this love you bring
So bright that I may believe

That my way will not be lost
From now on, ’til that river’s crossed
My soul renewed, and my spirit free
In you …… I’ll find my peace

The audacious effort to reforest the planet

Washington Post — January 22, 2020 –By Ben Guarino
Photographs by Hannah Reyes Morales

At age 9, Felix Finkbeiner planted his first tree.

He had just learned about Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize for leading an effort to plant 30 million trees in Africa. The boy was struck by her message — that trees are powerful allies in the fight to curb global warming.

Some of the more sophisticated details went over his head, Finkbeiner recalled. But, he said, he “understood the tree-planting part.” So, in 2007, he dug a hole in front of his school near Munich and inserted a crab-apple sapling. “I thought that we kids should be planting some trees, as well,” he said.

Finkbeiner’s fourth-grade awakening blossomed into a personal crusade and eventually birthed a tree-planting foundation, Plant for the Planet. The organization, which is responsible for planting millions of new trees around the world, is part of a growing constellation of campaigns that seek to reforest every continent except Antarctica.

Driven by the recognition that trees suck Earth-warming carbon out of the atmosphere far more efficiently than any machine, the effort has attracted millions of dollars in support — and inspired hope that trees could become an even more potent weapon in the battle against climate change.

“We’ve been astonished to find that it is up there with all the best climate change solutions,” said ETH Zurich ecologist Thomas Crowther, thesis adviser to Finkbeiner, now a 22-year-old PhD student in environmental science. Plant for the Planet inherited a massive tree-planting program, renamed the Trillion Tree Campaign, from the United Nations in 2011; Crowther is its chief scientific adviser.

Read more at Washington Post website

There MUST be a Better Way
Thoughts as the USA Stumbles Blindly Toward War with Iran

An editorial addressed to his fellow U.S. citizens by Dennis Rivers
January 6, 2020

In the name of Jesus, who said “love your enemies,” and from the Inner Light of my own heart, I mourn the death of every person killed in war, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani of Iran included. May his children find consolation on the loss of their father.

To all those American politicians and commentators who have just said loudly, “No American will mourn the death of this man,” I ask this question: Is this the best that America can do? Is this all that America can do? How can we ask God to bless America if all America can do is kill people, assassinate leaders of other countries, and then threaten to kill even more people after that?

There MUST be a better way. We cannot possibly be so smart that we can put rovers on Mars, and then be so dumb that we can’t work out our disagreements with other countries. Even our high-tech military equipment silently accuses us: If we are smart enough to build fiendishly complex nuclear weapons, can we really be so stupid that we can’t talk to people in other countries? Something is deeply out of whack in our current psychology. (You can see my online library of conflict resolution resources at www.NewConversations.net )

Here are some more of my reflections on the current plague of violence and irrationality:

War is full of painful contradictions that burden and diminish all of us, participant and bystander alike: We Americans tend to celebrate our snipers, bomber pilots and stealthy special forces as noble and heroic warriors, while at the same time we denigrate as beastly assassins and terrorists the snipers, bombers and stealthy special forces of particular other countries.

To embrace such a double standard is to retreat into a form of socially approved irrationality edging on madness, a madness that can turn us into monsters, both on the stage of the world and in our everyday lives. We have seen this split-mindedness before in recent history, and it is at work today in ethnic cleansing campaigns around the world. How would people in the United States feel if some natural disaster caused U.S. citizens to flee to Mexico, and the Mexican government responded by separating children and babies from parents and put the children and babies in cages?

Jesus counsels us to treat others as we would like to be treated. The sounds of endless military marching bands can never bang loud enough to drown out this quiet teaching. Somewhere in our hearts we know that it is true.

Violence is often excused with the idea the “I had no other choice.” This is often put forth to blame external circumstances for our violent actions. But the question remains, in the ten years before the moment of violence, how much effort did we put into finding and practicing alternatives. In the short run, a person may be overwhelmed by circumstances. But in the long run, I believe that we will get what we put a lot of energy into preparing for. (Our trillions of dollars invested over decades in creating machines of death shows every other country what we have come to believe in.) What seeds are we sowing? What are we preparing to reap?

Right now it seems like there is no way out of the growing spiral of violence. But I am convinced this is exactly the moment when we most need to keep looking for a better way, to keep believing in a better way, to say, in loving defiance, they may blow me up, but I will never accept that this was the best that we could do.

Forgiveness and the Sorrow of War
(my personal name for a sculpture by Josefina de
Vasconcellos at Coventry Cathedral)

David Attenborough, Greta Thunberg and Jane Goodall
want to talk to you about climate change

Greta Thunberg and George Monbiot on the Climate Crisis
September 2019

Greta Thunberg and George Monbiot on the Climate Crisis

Team Human: The role of community connectedness
in responding to climate chaos

TEAM HUMAN: Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff and UK journalist George Monbiot
discuss the world we are making TOGETHER and how we could make it differently!

Message from the indigenous Brazilian Kayapó people
as fires rage across the Amazon in 2019

Excerpts from Guardian article

“We call on you to stop what you are doing, to stop the destruction, to stop your attack on the spirits of the Earth. When you cut down the trees you assault the spirits of our ancestors. When you dig for minerals you impale the heart of the Earth. And when you pour poisons on the land and into the rivers – chemicals from agriculture and mercury from gold mines – you weaken the spirits, the plants, the animals and the land itself. When you weaken the land like that, it starts to die. If the land dies, if our Earth dies, then none of us will be able to live, and we too will all die.”

***

“So why do you do this? We can see that it is so that some of you can get a great deal of money. In the Kayapó language we call your money piu caprim, ‘sad leaves’, because it is a dead and useless thing, and it brings only harm and sadness.”

***

“You have to change the way you live because you are lost, you have lost your way. Where you are going is only the way of destruction and of death. To live you must respect the world, the trees, the plants, the animals, the rivers and even the very earth itself. Because all of these things have spirits, all of these things are spirits, and without the spirits the Earth will die, the rain will stop and the food plants will wither and die too.”

–Raoni Metuktire, chief of the indigenous Brazilian Kayapó people

Read more from The Guardian

Why bother about a planet that seems bent on self-destruction?
A response to Ty Cashman’s “Nature, Activism and the Middle Way”

By Dennis Rivers (2019 version)

In the face of the runaway industrialization that is now poisoning planet Earth, many people find themselves wrestling with deep issues about both the survival of life and the meaning of life. Confronted with pictures of Chernobyl victims and stories of frogs dying around the world, I find myself searching for ways to combat the downward trend. And one of those ways is by argument. How can I (or we) persuade the powers that be to change course. A few years ago Time magazine featured a cover story on tigers. Tigers are facing extinction in all their natural habitats. One person quoted in the Time story, a man from India, summed up the implications of the tiger survival issue by saying that if we can’t save the tigers from extinction, we probably won’t be able to save ourselves.

Well, as Samuel Johnson once said, “Nothing concentrates the mind like the thought of the gallows in the morning.” So here are some thoughts at the edge of the abyss.

One possible approach to our predicament is to look to nature herself for some hints as to how to extricate ourselves from our current predicament. This is the approach taken by my philosopher friend Ty Cashman in his article, “Nature, Activism and the Middle Way.” I refer to this as the ‘outside’ view, because it attempts to make sense of our situation by backing up and trying to present the big picture about human and ecosystem survival.

One problem that I see with looking to nature in this way, is that in nature everything passes away, without exception. Species come and go. Solar systems come and go. We can try to learn the wisdom of survival by observing organisms and ecosystems, but this view-from-the-outside will not tell us why we should struggle to survive. And since we are creatures of intention and relationship, we need some compelling reasons and goals to get us moving, and we need someone to relate to.

Ty says “It [nature] does need to be protected from the overwhelming human assault on it.” While I find this to be deeply true, this also seems to me to be way too distant a perspective. Viewed from the outside, the Universe (nature) is not in danger. It was here before we got here, features a lot of giant explosions, and will be here after we’re gone. It’s human beings who are in danger of killing themselves off by killing off their sister and brother creatures in a spasm of greed and ignorance. My contention is that the outside view will not move people to save themselves and the Earth, because from the outside view it’s all gonna dry up and blow away anyhow, and/or I probably won’t be around when the bills come due. And there is nothing in nature, viewed from the outside, to suggest that humans are more important or worthy of survival than the trilobites that roamed the ancient seas.

What I’m calling the inside view is the view from inside my own life, from inside of being a person. Now while that might sound a little narrow, don’t write it off. From inside of our own lives we have access to resources that the outside view can’t touch. First of all, I have experienced my own sexuality, my urge to create. As Erik Erikson observes, sexuality is not just the energy to make new life, it is also the energy to build a world in which that life can flourish. So our much-maligned sex drive could actually be a positive force for helping the world, by helping us to feel involved with and connected to the natural world. Identifying more with the children who have come out of our bodies and our lovemaking could stir up powerful energies for nurturing the natural world as the world we give to them.

Closely related to sexuality is one’s sense of beauty. From the outside point of view, whether or not I experience beauty would hardly seem to matter. But if we look more deeply into the subject, we find that pleasure (that primordial form of beauty) has played a large role in the evolution of life. Color in plants and the eyes of insects co-evolved. The fragrance of flowers and the sweetness of fruit evolved to draw animals into a creative partnership with plants. (And those plants are still working on us. Just ask any rose gardener.) The experience of beauty and our yearning for beauty are actually powerful resources for human survival. The slaughter of dolphins is ugly. Chernobyl and the Bhopal chemical plant are ugly! A forest in balance is beautiful. One of the reasons we are in our current predicament is that industrial societies disconnect people’s sense of beauty in order to make them obedient cogs in the great (ugly) machine. Let us honor and encourage people’s capacity for beauty and delight. Such people will work to make the world a more beautiful place.

Finally, there is the issue of relationship. Human beings are literally made to relate. Our most powerful energies come from connecting our lives to the lives of other people and the lives of animals and plants. While religious people might question the above assertions and emphasize relating to God (or the Buddhamind, in the case of Buddhism), a close look at most religions shows that they emphasize a lot of compassionate person-to-person relating. So one powerful reason for working to save the world from ecological catastrophe is that I am here with you. It’s not just me alone contemplating a world gone haywire. (It is interesting to note, in this regard, that it is now an often repeated principle concerning soldiers in war, that they do not fight so much to serve their country as they fight to save their comrades.) All this implies that friendship could play crucial role in the future of eco-politics. We will do with and for one another and for all our children things we might never do for an abstract principle. And perhaps we could associate our abstract ecological principles with the people, such as Rachel Carson and Wangari Maathai, who have embodied them in a particularly radiant way.

Will humans survive? I don’t know. But I imagine that if we do it will be because we mobilized energies inside of ourselves and between us that were sexy, nurturing, delightful and deeply friendly. Lets survive together so that we and our children can experience the beauty of the Earth, and of all Her creatures, and of being fully alive.

Barack Obama greets nine-month-old Josephine Gronniger
(Public Domain photo by Pete Souza)

PIDM: Profit Induced Destructive Mania
A proposed category of mental illness

Dennis Rivers, November 2016

Photo credit: EricWalberg.com

This week I’ve been thinking about the struggles going on to protect water supplies on the Standing Rock Reservation, and about the Alberta tar sands projects only a few hundred miles to the north. For native peoples around the world, the Earth Herself is sacred, and Her waters as well. So poisoning the Earth, or building industrial projects that create an ongoing unknown risk of poisoning the land and water, are not just material or political issues. They are spiritual and religious issues as well. This is not a theoretical risk at all. Large amounts of Dine (Navajo) land and water have been permanently poisoned with radioactive waste from uranium mining, causing a giant spike in cancer rates. And the Alberta Tar Sands photos speak for themselves. So native peoples have little reason to trust the assurances that they, their land, and their water, are not in danger from the white man’s projects.

Reflecting on the corporations willing to endanger someone else’s water supply in order to get rich building oil pipelines, I think it is time that we gave a proper name to the psychological illness that has been haunting us for several centuries: PIDM: profit-induced-destructive-mania. I intend to rally my friends within the counseling profession to have PIDM added to the DSM-5 as a recognized mental illness.

There are many strands of PIDM at work in U.S. culture. The long term effects of tobacco and greasy hamburgers kill hundreds of thousands of people a year, yet most of us prefer to look away from the spectacle of corporations enriching themselves by selling slow death behind smiling advertisements. We accept this as fairly normal, without really working through the implication that some forms of mental illness may be fairly common. The late psychoanalyst Arno Gruen explored this at length in his book, The Insanity of Normality (which I helped to republish after it was withdrawn from publication by its bought-out publisher).

People suffering from PIDM, a syndrome I see as a spiraling disorientation of both thinking and feeling, experience a chronic narrowing of the attention until they no longer recognize the people, animals, plants, oceans, forests and waters essential to their own survival here on Planet Earth, and begin a autism-like repetitive pattern of screaming, “Drill, Baby, Drill!”. PIDM is the economic parallel to Lord Acton’s observation that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, namely, that profits tend to disorient, and enormous profits disorient enormously. The contemplation of giant wins appears to disable people’s normal survival instincts. The same processes of disoriented thought appear to be associated with nuclear power as well, where the hope of generating mind-boggling amounts of cheap electricity causes otherwise sensible people to abandon their critical faculties, leading to catastrophes such as Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Just as anorexics cannot bear to face that fact that they are killing themselves, PIDM sufferers cannot bear to face the fact that they are killing their own planet, and the life-support system for their own children and grandchildren. Because of this self-injury component, some elements of self-hatred and suicidal ideation cannot be ruled out.

PIDM is like a Zika virus of the heart (it causes people’s hearts to get smaller). We need new clinical intervention strategies to reconnect EVERYONE on the planet with their own life energies (approaches such as Joanna Macy’s “Work That Reconnects”) and slow the lethal spread of PIDM and poisoned aquifers.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/military-force-criticized-dakota-access-pipeline-protests/

Burning Down the House
By Alan Weisman — Article in New York Review of Books — Aug. 15, 2019

A review of

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells — Tim Duggan, 310 pp., $27.00

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
by Bill McKibben — Henry Holt, 291 pp., $28.00

Climate scientists’ worst-case scenarios back in 2007, the first year the Northwest Passage became navigable without an icebreaker (today, you can book a cruise through it), have all been overtaken by the unforeseen acceleration of events. No one imagined that twelve years later the United Nations would report that we have just twelve years left to avert global catastrophe, which would involve cutting fossil-fuel use nearly by half. Since 2007, the UN now says, we’ve done everything wrong. New coal plants built since the 2015 Paris climate agreement have already doubled the equivalent coal-energy output of Russia and Japan, and 260 more are underway.

Environmental writers today have a twofold problem. First, how to overcome readers’ resistance to ever-worsening truths, especially when climate-change denial has turned into a political credo and a highly profitable industry with its own television network (in this country, at least; state-controlled networks in autocracies elsewhere, such as Cuba, Singapore, Iran, or Russia, amount to the same thing). Second, in view of the breathless pace of new discoveries, publishing can barely keep up. Refined models continually revise earlier predictions of how quickly ice will melt, how fast and high CO2 levels and seas will rise, how much methane will be belched from thawing permafrost, how fiercely storms will blow and fires will burn, how long imperiled species can hang on, and how soon fresh water will run out (even as they try to forecast flooding from excessive rainfall). There’s a real chance that an environmental book will be obsolete by its publication date.

read more (and please support The New York Review of Books) …

Protesting the Incarceration of Infants and Children at the U.S. Border

How do you feel about the mistreatment of children and infants at the U.S. border?

In the finest constitutional tradition, please join us in expressing citizen concerns to elected representatives. Also, you can use these postcards to share your concerns with your friends, and invite your friends to join the process of remembering the best that is in us, and confronting injustice.

This send-to-friend PDF packet contains templates for printing your own protest postcards and window posters.

Signers of the Invitation

Dennis Rivers, Writer    Maia, Poet         Vijali, Artist
Santa Barbara, CA        Isla Vista, CA     Santa Fe, NM

Angela Dawn Parker      Rev. John Stoner    Kiki Corbin
Community Activist      Akron, PA           Naturopathic Healer
San Rafael, CA

Rev. John Mabry         Jeanne Northsinger     David Richo, Psychotherapist
Oakland, CA             Mother and Community   and Writer, Santa Barbara
                        Activist, Santa Barbara 
Rev. Molly Young Brown
Writer and Ecology Activist
Mount Shasta, CA

Invitation to Participate

These are times that try people’s souls.

An America that kidnaps and mistreats infants and children, no matter where they were born, is not the America I signed up for. And it is probably not the America you signed up for, either. Please print the included postcards and use them to tell your Senators and Representative that America can do better. Also, communicate with as many Senators and Representatives as you possibly can, not just those of your State, and discuss the crisis of government-implemented child abuse with your friends and neighbors.

Image from Democracy Now video

What are WE going to do about this? One problem with living in a democracy is that we are responsible for what the government does on our behalf, and with our tax dollars. How comfortable are you with the U.S. Government mistreating children on your behalf? Really…

Scholars disagree about who might have said (approximately), “All that is needed for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing.” But whether it was Edmund Burke or John Stuart Mill or somebody else, they are talking to us right now.

We take two painful lessons from history. The first is that tyranny, by slow degrees, implicates everyone as passive accomplices in its cruelties. The second is that whatever is done to the powerless, will eventually be done to everyone. If we allow prison camps for children to grow in America, it may well be our own children and grandchildren who will be the future prisoners.

Beyond sending protest postcards, please visit your representatives in person and insist that they find a better way of sheltering immigrant families. If we can put a bunch of people on the moon, we can certainly put a desperate family in a safe and sheltering space. That’s what we sing about when we sing, “Oh beautiful, for spacious skies…”, our capacity to do the right thing.

As a community activist in Santa Barbara recently said: “They are all our children. No. Wait a minute. That’s not enough! They are all my children.”

Thank you for taking these deep concerns to heart.

TED Radio Hour on Climate Crisis — June 7, 2019

Click image above to listen to show on NPR website.

Nuclear Waste: What to do with it? (From FRANCE24.COM)

3/11/2017

France has found a €25 billion solution to the unanswerable question of what to do with its high-level nuclear waste – bury it deep underground.

While nuclear energy has a small carbon footprint, its waste still produces a puzzling problem for the industry. For the moment, it is treated and held in temporary sites but the plan is to store it 500 metres below the Earth’s surface.

Our team from Down to Earth went to the most radioactive waste site in Europe where the spent fuel is waiting to be buried, before visiting the underground tunnels that may be the final resting place for this indestructible toxic trash.

Nuclear weapons: experts alarmed by new Pentagon ‘war-fighting’ doctrine

From The Guardian — Jun 19, 2019

The Pentagon believes using nuclear weapons could “create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability”, according to a new nuclear doctrine adopted by the US joint chiefs of staff last week.

The document, entitled Nuclear Operations, was published on 11 June, and was the first such doctrine paper for 14 years. Arms control experts say it marks a shift in US military thinking towards the idea of fighting and winning a nuclear war – which they believe is a highly dangerous mindset.

“Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability,” the joint chiefs’ document says. “Specifically, the use of a nuclear weapon will fundamentally change the scope of a battle and create conditions that affect how commanders will prevail in conflict.”

At the start of a chapter on nuclear planning and targeting, the document quotes a cold war theorist, Herman Kahn, as saying: “My guess is that nuclear weapons will be used sometime in the next hundred years, but that their use is much more likely to be small and limited than widespread and unconstrained.”

Kahn was a controversial figure. He argued that a nuclear war could be “winnable” and is reported to have provided part of the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove.

The Nuclear Operations document was taken down from the Pentagon online site after a week, and is now only available through a restricted access electronic library. But before it was withdrawn it was downloaded by Steven Aftergood, who directs the project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists.

Scientists shocked by Arctic permafrost
thawing 70 years sooner than predicted

From The Guardian — June 18, 2019

Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, an expedition has discovered, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared.

A team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks said they were astounded by how quickly a succession of unusually hot summers had destabilised the upper layers of giant subterranean ice blocks that had been frozen solid for millennia.

“What we saw was amazing,” Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics at the university, told Reuters. “It’s an indication that the climate is now warmer than at any time in the last 5,000 or more years.“

With governments meeting in Bonn this week to try to ratchet up ambitions in United Nations climate negotiations, the team’s findings, published on 10 June in Geophysical Research Letters, offered a further sign of a growing climate emergency.

The paper was based on data Romanovsky and his colleagues had been analysing since their last expedition to the area in 2016. The team used a modified propeller plane to visit exceptionally remote sites, including an abandoned cold war-era radar base more than 300km from the nearest human settlement.

Diving through a lucky break in the clouds, Romanovsky and his colleagues said they were confronted with a landscape that was unrecognisable from the pristine Arctic terrain they had encountered during initial visits a decade or so earlier.

read more…

A Texas town leads the country in using solar and wind energy

A town in the middle of Texas is leading the country in the use of renewable energy. Steve Inskeep, co-host of NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “Up First,” joins CBSN to talk about his visit to the town and how the push for renewable energy has affected the local economy.

The Way We Get Power Is About to Change Forever

9/19/2017 — Bloomberg News — The age of batteries is just getting started. In the latest episode of our animated series, Sooner Than You Think, Bloomberg’s Tom Randall does the math on when solar plus batteries might start wiping fossil fuels off the grid.

[Editor’s note: I imagine that this same development will be the end of nuclear power as well.]

Climate Change – Britain Under Threat
BBC Documentary narrated by Sir David Attenborough

This 2007 BBC video was prophetic about coming heat waves. On Thursday 25 July, 2019, twelve years after the video was made, the Cambridge University Botanic Garden registered the highest temperature ever recorded in the UK: 38.7 °C (101.7° F).

A few weeks earlier, France recorded its all-time highest temperature amid a blistering heat wave that baked most of Europe for a week. The temperature rose to 45.1 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) in the southern village of Villevieille, state weather forecaster Meteo France said in a statement (Jun 28, 2019)

Michael Mann:
We Are Even Closer To Climate Disaster Than IPCC Predicts

A new report from the world’s leading body on climate change says we could see catastrophic global warming by 2030, and climate scientist Michael Mann says their predictions are too conservative

Visit https://therealnews.com for more stories and help support our work by donating at https://therealnews.com/donate

What Deadly Disaster Is the Criminal, Bankrupt PG&E
So Desperately Hiding at Its Diablo Canyon Nukes

By Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
(Suggested by Guest Editor Diana Young)

03 March 19

Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant on the Calif. coast. Creative Commons Photo by Mike Baird

s the bankrupt federal felon Pacific Gas & Electric desperately hiding something very deadly at its Diablo Canyon Power Plant? Will we know by March 7, when the company wants to restart Unit One, which is currently shut for refueling? Will YOU sign our petition asking Governor Gavin Newsom and other officials to inspect that reactor before it can restart?

In 2010, PG&E blew up a neighborhood in San Bruno, killing eight people.

In 2018, it helped burn down much of northern California, killing more than eighty people. The company has now admitted its culpability in starting that infamous Camp Fire and has questioned its own ability to continue to operate.

On February 6, it incinerated five buildings in San Francisco.

The company is bankrupt. It has been convicted of numerous federal felonies. It actually has a probation officer.

But the real terror comes at its Diablo Canyon nuclear reactors, nine miles west of San Luis Obispo on the central California coast.

The reactors are embrittled. They may be cracked. As with the gas pipes in San Bruno and the power poles in northern California, PG&E’s maintenance at these huge reactors has been systematically neglected.

But the company does NOT want the public to inspect them. WHY?

The Uninhabitable Earth — Article by David Wallace-Wells

New York Magazine — July 2017

We published “The Uninhabitable Earth” on Sunday night, and the response since has been extraordinary — both in volume (it is already the most-read article in New York Magazine’s history) and in kind. Within hours, the article spawned a fleet of commentary across newspapers, magazines, blogs, and Twitter, much of which came from climate scientists and the journalists who cover them.

Some of this conversation has been about the factual basis for various claims that appear in the article. To address those questions, and to give all readers more context for how the article was reported and what further reading is available, we are publishing here a version of the article filled with research annotations. They include quotations from scientists I spoke with throughout the reporting process; citations to scientific papers, articles, and books I drew from; additional research provided by my colleague Julia Mead; and context surrounding some of the more contested claims. Since the article was published, we have made four corrections and adjustments, which are noted in the annotations (as well as at the end of the original version). They are all minor, and none affects the central project of the story: to apply the best science we have today to the median and high-end “business-as-usual” warming projections produced by the U.N.’s “gold standard” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But the debate this article has kicked up is less about specific facts than the article’s overarching conceit. Is it helpful, or journalistically ethical, to explore the worst-case scenarios of climate change, however unlikely they are? How much should a writer contextualize scary possibilities with information about how probable those outcomes are, however speculative those probabilities may be? What are the risks of terrifying or depressing readers so much they disengage from the issue, and what should a journalist make of those risks?

I hope, in the annotations and commentary below, I have added some context. But I also believe very firmly in the set of propositions that animated the project from the start: that the public does not appreciate the scale of climate risk; that this is in part because we have not spent enough time contemplating the scarier half of the distribution curve of possibilities, especially its brutal long tail, or the risks beyond sea-level rise; that there is journalistic and public-interest value in spreading the news from the scientific community, no matter how unnerving it may be; and that, when it comes to the challenge of climate change, public complacency is a far, far bigger problem than widespread fatalism — that many, many more people are not scared enough than are already “too scared.” In fact, I don’t even understand what “too scared” would mean. The science says climate change threatens nearly every aspect of human life on this planet, and that inaction will hasten the problems. In that context, I don’t think it’s a slur to call an article, or its writer, alarmist. I’ll accept that characterization. We should be alarmed.

read more

Forest Garden Video

A forest garden with 500 edible plants could lead to a sustainable future.
Video from National Geographic.

Instead of neat rows of monoculture, forest gardens combine fruit and nut trees, shrubs, herbs, vines and perennial vegetables together in one seemingly wild setting. This type of agroforestry mimics natural ecosystems and uses the space available in a sustainable way. UK-based Martin Crawford is one of the pioneers of forest gardening. Starting out with a flat field in 1994, his land has been transformed into a woodland and serves as an educational resource for others interested in forest gardening. This short film by Thomas Regnault focuses on Crawford’s forest garden, which is abundant, diverse, edible, and might be one answer to the future of food systems.

Michael Henderson’s
Forgiveness: Breaking the Chain of Hate

Book Review by Gene Knudsen Hoffman — Summer 2002

There is a way the world can change from war to peace, from hatred to love. It requires a lot of effort, a lot of understanding, and it begins at home.

For centuries we’ve been told to practice it, that it’s healing for ourselves and the other, that it’s a way to manifest love and courage. It brings peace to the participants. It is a brave and noble thing to do, and — it can be very costly, costly to pride, to arrogance, to fear, to hate.

Michael Henderson has written the definitive book on it and it’s called: Forgiveness. Of it Desmond Tutu wrote, “A deeply moving and eloquent testimony to the power of forgiveness in the life of individuals, of communities, and between and within nations. It effects change — a powerful book.”

This entry was posted in Uncategorized on January 9, 2019 by Website Editor.

Katharine Hayhoe on Climate Change:
‘A thermometer is not liberal or conservative’

from The Guardian, Jan. 6, 2019

The award-winning atmospheric scientist on the urgency of the climate crisis and why people are her biggest hope.

Katharine Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. She has contributed to more than 125 scientific papers and won numerous prizes for her science communication work. In 2018 she was a contributor to the US National Climate Assessment and was awarded the Stephen H Schneider award for outstanding climate science communication.

In 2018, we have seen forest fires in the Arctic circle; record high temperatures in parts of Australia, Africa and the US; floods in India; and devastating droughts in South Africa and Argentina. Is this a turning point?
This year has hit home how climate change loads the dice against us by taking naturally occurring weather events and amplifying them. We now have attribution studies that show how much more likely or stronger extreme weather events have become as a result of human emissions. For example, wildfires in the western US now burn nearly twice the area they would without climate change, and almost 40% more rain fell during Hurricane Harvey than would have otherwise. So we are really feeling the impacts and know how much humanity is responsible.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its 1.5C report in October. A month later, the US federal government’s climate assessment – to which you contributed – came out. How did these two massive studies move our understanding along?
These assessments are important because there is a Schrödinger’s Cat element to studying climate impacts. The act of observing affects the outcome. If people aren’t aware of what is happening, why would anyone change? Assessments like these provide us with a vision of the future if we continue on our current pathway, and by doing so they address the most widespread and dangerous myth that the largest number of us have bought into: not that the science isn’t real, but rather that climate change doesn’t matter to me personally.

Read more at The Guardian

Ecology, Spirituality, and the Sixth Great Extinction

From the Editor, Dennis Rivers:

It feels time for a great awakening of reverence for life. One thing that amazes and terrifies me about the Sixth Mass Extinction now underway is the suicidal element in runaway industrialism: as we kill the living land and sea with our pesticides, herbicides and industrial wastes, we and everyone we love will also die. It seems to me that the blindness of greed can turn into a kind of suicidal mania.

In the face of this madness, I find myself practicing what feels like a new meditation mantra for our time:

“May every heart
be filled with infinite kindness,
including your heart and mine,
and reaching out in widening circles.”

In this and similar practices may we find the strength to change our ways and nurture (rather than destroy) the web of life.

Here is a CNN documentary on the topic:

Masses Around Globe Demand Action on Climate Crisis
September 2018

By Juan Cole — truthdig.com — Sept 9, 2018

Environmental activists protested Saturday in 90 countries and 800 cities across the globe and the United States against inaction on the climate crisis in the runup to a major climate conference in San Francisco. Wednesday’s conference was organized by California Gov. Jerry Brown in the wake of President Trump’s violation of the Paris Climate Accord. The events were organized by 350.org and allies among non-governmental organizations.

Many of the rallies or demonstrations explicitly rejected the president’s high-carbon policies.

Global carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise since the Paris accord, to 32.5 gigatons last year, though the rate of growth has slowed because of all the wind farms and solar panels people have installed around the world. Humans burning coal, gas and petroleum release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, a potent greenhouse gas that is heating the earth but also having other dire effects.

Click here to read more.

Shock Waves : Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty

Free PDF Book from World Bank — 2016

SUMMARY: Ending poverty and stabilizing climate change will be two unprecedented global achievements and two major steps toward sustainable development. But the two objectives cannot be considered in isolation: they need to be jointly tackled through an integrated strategy. This report brings together those two objectives and explores how they can more easily be achieved if considered together. It examines the potential impact of climate change and climate policies on poverty reduction.
It also provides guidance on how to create a “win-win” situation so that climate change policies contribute to poverty reduction and poverty-reduction policies contribute to climate change mitigation and resilience building. The key finding of the report is that climate change represents a significant obstacle to the sustained eradication of poverty, but future impacts on poverty are determined by policy choices: rapid, inclusive, and climate-informed development can prevent most short-term impacts whereas immediate pro-poor, emissions-reduction policies can drastically limit long-term ones.

Download PDF book (225 pages)

Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene

Article from the US National Academy of Sciences — August 6, 2018

Will Steffen, Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson, Timothy M. Lenton, Carl Folke, Diana Liverman, Colin P. Summerhayes, Anthony D. Barnosky, Sarah E. Cornell, Michel Crucifix, Jonathan F. Donges, Ingo Fetzer, Steven J. Lade, Marten Scheffer, Ricarda Winkelmann, and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber.

PNAS August 14, 2018 115 (33) 8252-8259; published ahead of print August 6, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1810141115
Edited by William C. Clark, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and approved July 6, 2018.

ABSTRACT — We explore the risk that self-reinforcing feedbacks could push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a “Hothouse Earth” pathway even as human emissions are reduced. Crossing the threshold would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years and to sea levels significantly higher than at any time in the Holocene. We examine the evidence that such a threshold might exist and where it might be. If the threshold is crossed, the resulting trajectory would likely cause serious disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies. Collective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable interglacial-like state. Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System—biosphere, climate, and societies—and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values.

Read full article in PDF format.

A Resource Book for Permaculture in Tropical Climates
An Inspiration for Sustainable Living

A beautiful illustrated overview of of Permaculture from Indonesia and East Timor.

Click here to download FREE PDF — 48MB may take a few minutes to download.

Click here for low-cost paperback: 348 pages, only $15.00 plus shipping/postage

The aim of this book is to offer knowledge and practical techniques for environmental rehabilitation and sustainability, strengthening community resilience and local economies. The contents of the book are based on concepts of deep ecology, the interconnectedness of our environment and culture, and the principles and ethics of sustainable community development.

Combining traditional techniques for providing natural resources, food, shelter, and energy with modern sustainable practices, the techniques outlined in this book provide integrated, practical solutions for challenges being faced by community members and farmers throughout Indonesia today.

This Resource Book for Permaculture has been developed using simple language and many detailed illustrations to ensure that the information contained is accessible to all those interested.

This book is made available by kind permissions of the IDEP Foundation.

By Lachlan McKenzie with Ego Lemos.

VIDEO: Thriving 23-Year-Old Permaculture Food Forest
An Invitation for Wildness

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In the small town of Riverton at the bottom of New Zealand’s South Island is Robert and Robyn Guyton’s amazing 23-year-old food forest. The 2-acre property has been transformed from a neglected piece of land into a thriving ecosystem of native and exotic trees where birds and insects live in abundance. Robert and Robyn are a huge inspiration to us, not only for their beautiful approach to healing the land and saving heritage trees and seeds, but for the way they’ve impacted on their local community.

They’ve operated an environment centre in their town for over 20 years, where the community comes together to learn and discuss, buy produce and sit by the warm fire over a cuppa. We’ve even heard of folk who’ve up and moved to Riverton because they’re so inspired by the Guytons!

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VIDEO: Pathways From Disconnection to Connection:
Kristen Neff, Sharon Salzberg, Brother David Steindl-Rast

A Dialogue at the Wisdom 2.0 Conference

[youtube]VjxKemXvzX8[/youtube]

A new era dawns and it won’t be human-friendly

March 31, 2017, by Kieran Cooke
from Climate News Network

A new book suggests that, as a result of our actions,
we are contemplating our own extinction.
Image: Alessandro Pautasso via Flickr

Human mistreatment of the planet is ushering in another era and it is not going to be pleasant, according to Clive Hamilton’s latest book.

LONDON, 31 March, 2017 – Clive Hamilton’s book Defiant Earth – the fate of humans in the Anthropocene is not for the faint-hearted. Basically, its thesis is that the Earth – and us along with it – is going down the tubes.

Our rampant, irrational use of the planet and its resources, including our exploitation of climate-changing fossil fuels, means we are interfering and upsetting the functioning of the Earth system that sustains us.

“This bizarre situation, in which we have become potent enough to change the course of the Earth yet seem unable to regulate ourselves contradicts every modern belief about the kind of creature a human being is,” says Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Australia.

read rest of article on Climate Change News Network…

Ecological Civilization and the New Enlightenment

Article by David Korten in Tikkun Magazine — January 2018
Read article in PDF format…

During the past century, we humans have become a truly global species with both the ability and the imperative to choose our common future by conscious collective choice. Growth in our numbers and the destructive power of our economic and military weapons of mass destruction creates the necessity. Advances in communication technology that link us into a seamless web of global communications and in biological and ecological sciences that deepen our understanding of what life is and how it organizes give us the means.

A Species in Terminal Crisis
The unfolding collapse of three critical systems puts our common future at serious risk.

Environmental Systems. Lead indicators include climate change, loss of fertile soil, diminishing supplies of clean freshwater, disappearing forests, and collapsing fisheries. All are a result of an increasing human burden that human numbers and consumption place on a finite planet. Per the Global Footprint Network, we humans are consuming globally at a rate 1.6 times what Earth can sustain. Everything above 1.0 comes at the cost of diminishing Earth’s ability to sustain life and in turn drives a violent competition for what remains and a growing flow of desperate refugees.

Social Systems. In 2010, the combined wealth of the world’s richest 388 billionaires equaled the combined wealth of the poorest half of humanity—3.5 billion people. Now, just 7 years later, it takes the combined wealth of only the 8 richest billionaires to equal the combined wealth of the world’s poorest 3.6 billion people. The combination of extreme inequality and environmental displacement undermines human well-being, institutional legitimacy, and the social fabric of families and communities. The violence driving massive numbers of refugees from the Middle East is a direct consequence.

Governance Systems. The legitimacy of political and economic institutions that demonstrate their inability to address the above environmental and social crises is disintegrating. This gives rise to political demagogues who exploit the resulting fear and uncertainty.

These three system failures are interlinked, self-imposed, and threaten our species viability. All are a direct consequence of a takeover of our access to the essential means of living by global corporations that value life only for its market price, promote the idolatry of money, and sponsor those politicians who equate the corporate interest with the human interest. Awareness that something is going badly wrong is sweeping global society, but with limited understanding of the nature of and reasons for the cultural and institutional system failure now playing out. Lacking such understanding, we look for solutions that tinker at the margins of a failed system grounded in false assumptions and values in the hope of making it slightly less destructive.

Our hope for a viable human future depends on a deep system transformation supportive of an Ecological Civilization that brings people and planet into balance, nurtures innovation and creative expression, and provides all people an opportunity for material sufficiency and spiritual abundance.

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Interfaith Organizations Protest the President’s Executive Order on Coal and Environmental Rollbacks

SAN FRANCISCO and CHICAGO (March 30, 2017) — President Donald Trump’s actions this week to reverse the steady progress being made in confronting the challenge of climate change are not only alarming and dangerous; these actions are immoral.

“Religious and spiritual communities and people of conscience across the earth must commit themselves to work together to stand against the President’s irresponsible and unethical actions…actions that threaten human beings everywhere, that endanger living beings across the globe, that put the earth at peril,” argues Dr. Larry Greenfield, Executive Director of the Parliament of the World’s Religions.

Interfaith Power & Light and The Parliament of the World’s Religions have joined together to express deep concern over the Trump Administration’s deceptively-titled Executive Order on “Energy Independence and Economic Growth,” and join with people of faith and conscience within the United States and across the world to protest the President’s actions.

Based on a flawed understanding of both economics and science, the President’s action compromises Americans’ health and safety, damages our economy in both the short and long term, and undermines our children’s future wellbeing and security.

The Executive Order blatantly and callously plays on real fears and economic pain while it puts the benefit of a few of the richest Americans ahead of the needs and rights of the vast majority and offers no real solutions or help to those in economic distress. Its purported “benefits” are ephemeral, exaggerated or nonexistent.

New EPA documents reveal even deeperproposed cuts to staff and programs

By Juliet Eilperin, Chris Mooney and Steven Mufson — March 31, 2017 — Washington Post

The Environmental Protection Agency has issued a new, more detailed plan for laying off 25 percent of its employees and scrapping 56 programs including pesticide safety, water runoff control, and environmental cooperation with Mexico and Canada under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

At a time when the agency is considering a controversial rollback in fuel efficiency standards adopted under President Obama, the plan would cut by more than half the number of people in EPA’s division for testing the accuracy of fuel efficiency claims by automakers.

It would transfer funding for the program to fees paid by the automakers themselves.

The spending plan, obtained by The Washington Post, offers the most detailed vision to date of how the 31 percent budget cut to the EPA ordered up by President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget would diminish the agency.

The March 21 plan calls for even deeper reductions in staffing than earlier drafts. It maintains funding given to states to administer waste treatment and drinking water. But as a result, the budget for the rest of EPA is slashed 43 percent.

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