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Post by Admin on Jul 11, 2021 18:12:16 GMT
What It Means If 'Ecocide' Becomes an International Crime 'Our understanding of our place in, and responsibility towards, the natural world is in dire need of a reality check' www.commondreams.org/views/2021/07/11/what-it-means-if-ecocide-becomes-international-crimeEcocide means to destroy the environment, but when considered etymologically, from the Greek and Latin, it signifies to kill one’s home. When we were first able to view, and photograph, the Earth from space, our planetary perspective changed. Suddenly “home” had a whole new meaning. Nowhere, as far as our technology has been able to discern, is there evidence of any planet like Earth — anywhere else that can sustain life as we know it. In its recent 11,700-year period of climatic stability, that is what our planetary home has done, facilitating the spread and technological advance of human civilization. While benefiting many in terms of material comfort, life expectancy and societal support structures, this advance has increasingly taken place within a framework of thought that perceives nature as “other” — a resource to be exploited, or a foe to be conquered. The Oxford English Dictionary even defines nature as “opposed to humans.” With this perspective, ever since the industrial revolution, we have been — at first unwittingly, now recklessly and even knowingly — disrupting the biological, chemical and atmospheric systems on whose stable interaction we intimately and profoundly depend. Greenhouse gas emissions are just one part of this story. Bit by bit, with each felled forest, polluted river system, species extinction, oil spill, toxic waste leak, nuclear or mining disaster, we are committing ecocide. Relentlessly, and with startling rapidity, we are killing our home — while exacerbating social injustice, racial inequality and resource conflict along the way. And because our legal system doesn’t treat environmental destruction with the seriousness we are now beginning to understand it warrants, we are doing this with impunity. The word “ecocide” was first used on the international stage by Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme at the UN environment conference in Stockholm (1972), when he stated that “destruction brought about... by large scale use of bulldozers and pesticides is an outrage sometimes described as ecocide, which requires urgent international attention.” Nearly 50 years later, the world is at last beginning to pay that attention. Last month an expert panel of top international criminal and environmental lawyers, convened by the Stop Ecocide Foundation, proposed a legal definition of the term, suitable for adoption into the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) as a fifth crime alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. Responding to the explicit call of climate-vulnerable island nations Vanuatu and the Maldives, directly impacted by rising sea levels and heavy tropical storms, such a move would criminalize, “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.” The warmth of response to this legal definition has been remarkable. Sparking articles in over 100 global publications in the first week, from the Financial Times to Der Spiegel and from Bloomberg to Le Monde, it has also prompted political action. From Bangladesh to the Caribbean to the UK (where an amendment to the government’s Environment Bill includes the newly released definition in full), diplomats and politicians are joining a conversation which already includes EU states such as France and Belgium and has the support of public figures as influential and diverse as Pope Francis and Greta Thunberg. Since the International Criminal Court’s mandate is the prosecution of individuals, the addition of ecocide to the list of crimes considered “of most serious concern to the international community as a whole” would make key corporate and political actors personally liable to criminal prosecution in any ratifying state, should their decisions threaten severe and either widespread or long-term environmental damage — thus creating an enforceable deterrent to help prevent finance from flowing to projects that could destroy ecosystems. Nothing concentrates the mind like having one’s personal freedom on the line. Moreover, ecocide law may prove to be not just a stick but also a carrot. Setting a criminal parameter will not only steer activity away from hazards — acting as a kind of health and safety law for the planet – but is likely to stimulate innovation and development in a healthy direction in a wide range of economic sectors. Many of the solutions we need to transition to sustainability are already available — renewable energy, regenerative agriculture, circular economy — but aren’t being supported or developed at scale while finance continues to flow towards the same old destructive approaches, leaving those who would do the right thing at a disadvantage. Criminalizing ecosystem destruction at the highest level could also shore up and strengthen the whole edifice of environmental law, supporting all those working to improve regulation and best practice, from frontline activists to academics, scientists, NGOs and policymakers.While it would be naive to believe that establishing this crime would be a silver bullet for all of our environmental woes, or even prevent all ecocides, it is difficult to see how our planet’s life-support systems can be adequately protected — or indeed Paris targets and UN Sustainable Development Goals realistically approached — without a “hard stop” intervention of this kind. This year’s NDC synthesis report from the UNFCCC certainly suggests that we’re not doing well without it. Goodwill agreements and raised ambitions are clearly not up to the task. But perhaps the most powerful effect of defining and criminalizing ecocide as an international crime may be that of beginning to shift cultural and moral assumptions. Our understanding of our place in, and responsibility towards, the natural world is in dire need of a reality check. Calling out and condemning ecocide for what it is may be exactly what is required if we are to begin to transform our relationship with the Earth from one of harm to one of harmony. That may be the best way to ensure our children, and our children’s children, will still be able to call this beautiful planet “home.”
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Post by Admin on Jul 12, 2021 18:49:17 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jul 15, 2021 6:29:52 GMT
Quote: "According to Chomsky, the Doomsday Clock setting at 100 seconds to midnight is based upon: (1) global warming (2) nuclear war and (3) disinformation, or the collapse of any kind of rational discourse. As such, number three makes it impossible to deal with the first two major problems. Along those lines, within the Republican Party there’s virtually a disappearance of any pretense of rational discourse. Twenty-five (25%) percent of Republicans believe the government is run by an elite satanic group of pedophiles. Seventy percent (70%) of Republicans believe that the election was stolen. Only fifteen percent (15%) of Republicans believe that global warming is a serious problem. Therein lies an insurmountable problem to solving the main issues that continually tick the clock ever closer to a disaster scenario that will likely be unprecedented in the annals of warfare and environmental degradation." JULY 12, 2021 A World of Total Illusion and Fantasy: Noam Chomsky on the Future of the Planet BY ROBERT HUNZIKER www.counterpunch.org/2021/07/12/a-world-of-total-illusion-and-fantasy-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky/
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Post by Admin on Jul 15, 2021 12:55:06 GMT
New study confirms we're right on time for a complete societal collapse By AJ Dellinger July 14, 2021 www.mic.com/p/new-study-confirms-were-right-on-time-for-a-complete-societal-collapse-82484524In 1972, scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology made a bold prediction. By developing a scientific model that considered the way that humans and the planet interact with each other, the researchers determined that society was heading toward collapse by the mid-21st century, driven largely by the forces of growing population and capital over-exploiting limited planetary resources. Nearly 50 years later, a researcher at one of the largest accounting firms in the world checked in on the infamous study to see how the model has compared with reality. Turns out, we're right on schedule for our predicted demise — which is great, because there's nothing worse than a fashionably late doomsday event. The new study, spotted by Vice, was conducted by Gaya Herrington, the sustainability and dynamic system analysis lead at accounting giant KPMG. It serves as an update to the classic research, which was published under the title The Limits to Growth. As part of her masters' thesis at Harvard University, Herrington analyzed the model using 10 variables to check in on how predictive it has been: population, fertility rates, mortality rates, industrial output, food production, services, non-renewable resources, persistent pollution, human welfare, and ecological footprint. By taking the model's projections of these indicators and comparing them to empirical data, she was able to determine how closely the scientists were able to predict our reality, as well as figure out what trajectory we are currently on. As it turns out, we're chugging along in line with two scenarios, and neither are particularly good. There's the comprehensive technology (CT) scenario, in which economic decline starts at about (checks watch) now, actually. It suggests a number of negative outcomes, including a short-term dip in food production and wild swings across a number of categories, including industrial output, as population levels out. The good news, if you want to call it that, is that society doesn't collapse under these circumstances. Our habit of draining resources comes to an end as new technology develops, and food production eventually recovers. Things aren't so rosy along the second track that we can take, known as the business-as-usual scenario. This one assumes that we make basically no changes to our current behavior. Much like the CT scenario, this track projects that economic growth will start sputtering out soon, hitting a wall around 2030. But instead of a brief blip or stagnation, the business-as-usual trajectory sees things starting to collapse. Population, food production, industrial output, and other categories all take a steep decline around 2040, with pollution skyrocketing as we rapidly exploit and burn the planet's remaining available resources with complete disregard for the consequences. “Both scenarios thus indicate that continuing business as usual, that is, pursuing continuous growth, is not possible," Harrington concludes in her research. "Even when paired with unprecedented technological development and adoption, business as usual as modelled by [Limits to Growth] would inevitably lead to declines in industrial capital, agricultural output, and welfare levels within this century.” The one scenario in which we aren't plagued by some sort of major global disruption, the "stabilized world" scenario, is technically not out of reach — but the new study warns that the window for getting on that track is closing quickly. And it would take real effort to get there. First, we'd have to acknowledge that economic growth cannot happen at an exponential rate forever. Eventually, things have to level off — and we need to preemptively align ourselves with that. At the World Economic Forum in 2020, Harrington suggested pursuing an economic theory known as "agrowth," which prioritizes alternate markers for economic success, such as sustainability, over traditional indicators like GDP. If there is optimism to be found in a study that confirms we're hurtling toward economic disaster and societal collapse, it's that we've got some time to figure things out. The next 10 years are likely to be the bellwether for our fate, and we can still beat the buzzer. Pledges to dramatically cut down on fossil fuels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions will go a long way toward making sure we don't exhaust natural resources. Ideas like universal basic income and growing labor movements can help to reshape how we imagine work and economic growth. Models aren't fate. We can actively choose to jump off the doomsday track. But we have to do it soon.
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Post by Admin on Jul 18, 2021 21:46:40 GMT
"The four planetary boundaries that had previously been crossed were land-system change, biosphere integrity, biogeochemical flows, and climate change. Now they have added ocean acidification and freshwater use. The relevant passage from the interview is this: “The two additional boundaries that probably have been transgressed are ocean acidification and freshwater use. In the 2015 assessment of the PBs, ocean acidification was virtually on the boundary itself. Since then, emissions of CO2 have continued to increase, with the oceans absorbing about 25% of these emissions, thus causing ocean acidification to increase, most likely beyond its boundary value. The other PB that is likely to have been transgressed now is freshwater use. It continues to increase and, along with that issue, we are re-examining where that boundary should be set based on new analyses in the peer-reviewed literature. That is a work-in-progress and we hope to have an update later in the year.” What I want to stress here is that this framework is meant to measure planetary health as being “Holocene-like” conditions. The last 11,000 years have been a geologic era called the Holocene -- with a warm, stable climate that made possible the birth of agriculture and the rise of civilizations. There is no evidence that humans have lived in cities or had agriculture outside of the Holocene. This has profound implications because we have now left the Holocene behind and are venturing into new territory as a planet. If even one planetary boundary is crossed, the Earth System as a whole will jump trajectories and find a new dynamic arrangement for governing itself. Runaway cultural evolution in the human lineage has given rise to very disruptive forces that destabilized the Holocene and caused us to cross these six planetary boundaries." earth-regenerators.mn.co/feed
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Post by Admin on Jul 28, 2021 18:58:07 GMT
JULY 28, 2021 The Apocalypse is Now BY ROBERT HUNZIKER www.counterpunch.org/2021/07/28/apocalypse/Apocalypse is complete destruction of the world as described in some detail in the biblical book of Revelation. Nothing worse can happen to humanity. Interestingly, it has been a recurring aspect of civilization for over two thousand years but every prediction of “End Times” has failed. Yet, modern day society is proving that apocalypse has multiple possible outcomes. In fact, a case can be made that it’s never been closer to reality because it’s already happening here and there. At the turn of the new century Frontline aired a two-hour PBS Special, APOCALYPSE! The program traced the evolution of apocalyptic belief from its origin within the Jewish experience after Babylonian exile, to modern times. Historians and biblical scholars were interviewed to discuss the concept of End Times and doomsday in order to elucidate the ideas of mass destruction and how those ideas shape the cultural world. Indeed, the concept of apocalypse has influenced civilization in a multitude of ways for over 2,000 years. The Book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament, is central to Western consciousness of apocalyptic belief, and a considerable portion of Revelation originated in the six hundred year period of Jewish political history involving wars and defeat by foreign invaders, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans. As a result, visions of heaven and hell and the eternal battle between good and evil arose, shaping culture for 200 years before the birth of Jesus. Ever since, apocalypse has been on people’s minds as a final reckoning. The concept of apocalypse remains a very powerful force to this day, especially amongst true believers. Not only that but recently apocalypse has transitioned a new variety known as “Climate Apocalypse,” a term that interestingly enough generates 7,610,000 Google hits in all of 0.58 seconds. Truly, Climate Apocalypse has an audience as well as strong adherents and strong detractors, like Forbes magazine and several mainstream publications. As for those editors, apocalypse is only for doom-and-gloom Cassandra’s that should be discounted and maybe ridiculed. Yet, some of the Google searches turn up the darnedest doom-and-gloom sources, for example: “Leaked UN Climate Report: The Apocalypse Is Almost Here… The Worst Is Yet To Come….” references the recently “leaked draft” climate report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that allegedly proclaims: “A dire warning that we are on the cusp of planetary destruction thanks to the myriad dangers of worsening climate change.” This references the 4,000-page UN report leaked to Agence France-Presse. (Source: The Byte/Climate Report, June 23, 2021), which isn’t due for publication for some months. What if the IPCC “doom-and-gloom report,” as alleged, is on target, dead-on but similar to all past IPCC reports, it ends up as way too conservative? In point of fact, it is not all that difficult to make a case for Climate Apocalypse by simply observing what’s happening today. What are the signs? By definition, normalized climate behavior is not an apocalyptic signpost. It doesn’t count if it’s normal regular ole climate behavior that humans have seen over the centuries. To be apocalyptic, a climate event must be damaging “beyond human experience, and then some.” Unfortunately, the list of actual apocalyptic events is a very long one. A few recent real events make the point, to wit: The Guardian newspaper recently (July) interviewed Diana Six, an entomologist for 30 years who teaches at the University of Montana. She took her students to Glacier National Park on a field trip and reported the following: “Life doesn’t just deal with this. When I went up Glacier with my students a few weeks ago, the flowers were curling up. At some of the lower elevations, glacier lilies were shriveled, lupins didn’t even open. The flowers should extend for another three weeks and they’re already gone. Any insects or birds that depend upon them, like bees or hummingbirds, are in trouble, their food is gone. Bird populations have just baked… People seem to think of extinctions as some silent, painless statistic. It’s not. You look at birds that can no longer find fish because they’ve moved too far off shore. They’re emaciated; they’re starving to death. We are at the point that there’s nothing untouched.” (Source: Top US Scientist on Melting Glaciers: ‘I’ve Gone From Being an Ecologists to a Coroner’, The Guardian, July 21, 2021) It is instructive, as well as extremely troublesome, to note that her experience took place in a “protected national park.” Referencing how climate change impacts life, Diana said: “Somewhere along the way, I had gone from being an ecologist to a coroner. I am no longer documenting life. I’m describing loss, decline, death.” That describes an apocalyptic event on a very personal level. On a larger scale, Krefeld Entomological Society (est. 1905) issued a report of more than a 75% decline over only 27 years in total flying insect biomass in several protected European nature reserves. (Source: PLOS ONE -Public Library of Science – October 18, 2017) And, on a larger scale, last year the World Wildlife Foundation in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London issued an eye-popping report that over-exploitation of ecological resources by humanity from 1970 to 2016 caused a 68% plunge in wild vertebrates. Numbers of that magnitude border on the onset of apocalypse, especially considering it happened within one human lifetime. According to the Report, tropical sub-regions were clobbered, hit hard with 94% loss of wild vertebrate life, which is apocalypse in spades. Throughout the planet, apocalypse is hitting, but on a regional basis, especially where few, if any, people live to see it happening. That is, until it did started hitting where lots of people live. In China in July 2021, “apocalyptic flooding” trapped passengers in subway trains standing in neck-deep water in the provincial capital Zhengzhou, a metropolis of 12 million where chaos descended as entire neighborhoods were covered in waist-deep water, and a massive unrelenting inordinate rainfall caused a 60-foot crevasse in the structure of the major dam of the region, which could collapse at any time, possibly drowning thousands. (Source: Unprecedented Floods in Central China, Passengers Trapped in Subway Train With Neck-Deep Water, Outlook, July 21, 2021) According to Reuters in China, several people have died as a result of massive rains and dozens more cities have flooded in the country. Zhengzhou evacuated 100,000. Over three days, two feet of rainfall devastated parts of central China, smashing homes apart. That describes a severely damaging climate system that is not normal, not even close to normal. It’s one more signpost of apocalyptic behavior. According to Reuters: “Like recent heat waves in the United States and Canada and extreme flooding seen in Western Europe, the rainfall in China was almost certainly linked to global warming, scientists told Reuters.” (Source: At Least 25 Dead as Rains Deluge Central China’s Henan Province, Reuters, July 21, 2021) According to a recent CNN article: “Scientists have warned for decades that climate change will make heat waves more frequent and more intense. That is a reality now playing out in Canada, but also in many other parts of the Northern Hemisphere that are increasingly becoming uninhabitable.” (Source: Unprecedented Heat, Hundreds Dead and a Town Destroyed, Climate Change is Frying the Northern Hemisphere, CNN, July 4, 2021) Apocalyptic is the most apt description of formerly inhabitable regions turning uninhabitable. It’s the onset of apocalypse, as hundreds of people died of too much heat, which also triggered 240 wildfires across British Columbia, with global warming turning verdant forests into tinder. According to the implications within a recent article in Scientific American, the Pacific Northwest just experienced early stage apocalypse: “ Hundreds of people died in the recent Pacific Northwest heat wave, according to estimates; there were at least 486 deaths in British Columbia, 116 in Oregon, 78 in Washington… there were more than 3,500 emergency department visits for heat-related illness this past May and June in a region that includes Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Washington State.” (Source: Why Extreme Heat Is So Deadly, Scientific American, July 22, 2021) According to Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists who was interviewed about the heat wave, the climate models did not come close to predicting the level of heat in the Northwest. She added: “But then to realize that I am seeing it in my lifetime, and living it right now, is really terrifying,” Ibid. Early stage apocalyptic events are hitting terrestrial regions of the planet, region by region over time, but it’s much more universal or across the board in the oceans. According to the documentary film Seaspriacy (Netflix, March 2021), which focuses on whether the planet’s fish stock survives and for how long, five million fish are killed per minute. Global fish populations are plummeting and already at apocalyptic levels, to wit: (1) halibut -99% (2) cod -86% (3) Bluefin tuna -97% (4) haddock -99% (5) thresher shark -80% (6) bull shark -86% (7) hammerhead shark -86% (8) total shark mass decimation of 80%-to-99%. Shark deaths (100,000,000 annually) at the top of the food chain bring in their wake the death of almost all other ocean species down the marine food chain. The oceans used to contain 80% of all life. Nobody knows that number now with killings too rapid to keep count of what remains. By all accounts, apocalypse is already rampant in the world’s oceans. Above all else, the results of a new research discovery must be broadcasts as wide as possible: “Planet Earth is now trapping twice as much heat as it did 14 years ago.” (Source: Norman G. Loeb, et al, Satellite and Ocean Data Reveal Marked Increase in Earth’s Heating Rate, Geophysical Research Letter, June 15, 2021) The nations of the planet must get their act together and do something extremely big, very, very major very soon to tame the climate monster, as well as put a halt to the insanity of stripping natural resources like the ocean’s fish stock down to the bone or suffer unfathomable adversity, meaning some advanced stage of apocalypse which unfortunately has already started to strut its stuff. Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.
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Post by Admin on Aug 7, 2021 10:14:12 GMT
Humankind’s History of Betraying Animals Thalia Field's poems collage scientific, historical, and philosophical sources to explore speciesism. hyperallergic.com/659575/humankind-history-of-betraying-animals-personhood-thalia-field/While “personhood” can be reduced to its dictionary definition, “the quality or condition of being an individual person,” the word has gained increasing significance in recent times, whether we’re talking about abortion, animal rights, or corporations. The 10 experimental texts in Thalia Field’s new book Personhood (New Directions) come at the concept from a variety of angles, with a special focus on the plight of captive animals, in particular parrots and elephants. Field draws from a variety of sources — scientific, historical, philosophical — to create a kind of text collage that nonetheless moves from point to point. She’s au courant on all the latest personhood issues. It’s a good idea to have a search engine handy as you read the text — there’s plenty to look up. The book opens with “Hi Adam!,” a long-form riff on cruelty to animals, in this case parrots and their kin. At times the commentary has a PETA-exposé edge as Field highlights our cruel and grotesque treatment of these human-mimicking creatures. Describing the self-harm of parrots, she asks, “What creatures but those associated with humans ever do such things?” More than just mistreating the animals, humans betray them. “Then [the cockatoo] Adam is exiled when the moving van pulls away. Or stuffed in a cabinet out on a porch. Maybe with a note. Usually without water.” Field’s sense of humor is witty and snarky. “A stolen egg or a stolen bird, which came first?” she asks at one point in “Hi Adam!” Or, satirizing the Book of Genesis, she writes, “And the big guy said, Let there be a living room. And then the guy separated the living room from the kitchen. And he saw that this was good.” Interjections of scientific research move the arguments along, as in: Scientists explain that how guilty we feel about what we as humans might owe other beings should depend on a species’ “encephalization quotient” (EQ). The non-linear regression formula proposes to reveal intelligence, and then equate intelligence with consciousness. A raven is 2.49, an elephant 2.36, a dog 1.2, a squirrel 1.1. Humans are 7.6. Field frequently comments on the culture of images and social media. As the parrots laugh, chatter, and greet their captors, “Someone reaches for a camera and broadcasts the infectious pleasure to YouTube; a million views! Everyone wants a clever bird like that!” At the same time, she is brilliant at penning suggestive aperçus: “The weird thing about the energy of sunshine: fruit must make itself open.” In “Happy/That You Have the Body (The Mirror Test),” Field revisits the case of Happy, the elephant held for 40 years in a cage at the Bronx Zoo “not larger than a few times her body length.” She gets into law here, habeas corpus, legal standing, agency, and the like, and recounts how the actual lawyers in the case make their arguments. Mr. Wise sets out to prove Happy deserves all the benefits of personhood while the defense, led by Mr. Manning, claims the elephant is happy where she is. If you Google Happy the elephant, you’ll find a lot about this case, which is currently in court and has attracted animal advocacy groups. Field is up on all the latest pachyderm news: “A few months ago, an elephant in a South African game park killed a poacher hunting for black rhinos. The elephant took the poacher’s body to a place where it could be eaten by lions.” Most of us grinned at that news story. Field lands many a critical body blow to speciesism. For instance: In our dying empire of predatory face data, a monkey who takes his own picture cannot own the right to his image because we look to law to diagnose selfhood, confirm our brand, crown us CEO of all species—and monkeys and elephants who may clearly express something, only do so as human by-products, as kitsch. Personhood is the companion to Field’s equally inventive and wide-ranging 2010 collection, Bird Lovers, Backyard. As was the case with the earlier book, she employs a wide range of hybrid genres. For example, “Turns Before the Curtain” takes the form of a script for a play in which invasive plants and man-made materials fill the theater, starting with a cavorting tumbleweed and ending with plastic, which Field calls “little nurdles on the move.” The voice in this text is generally sarcastic and all-caps loud. One stage direction reads: “The loudspeaker crackles with a recording of the Nonindigenous Aquatic Nuisance Prevention and Control Act WAH WAH WAH WAH.” In “True Crimes/Nature Fakes,” Field deploys a bracket device that calls for the reader to fill in the blanks. It can be at once clever, annoying, and virtuosic: “Even under social pressure, our bleached out [definition: ‘imagination’] does not break or bend, as if it were made of [6 eternal ideas] or [5 indestructible materials].” Mad Libs come to mind except Field isn’t creating absurd or surreal narratives, just textual options. “Liberty/Trees” opens with an epigraph from Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (1911): “The distinction between freedom and liberty is not accurately known; naturalists have never been able to find a living specimen of either.” Field embraces Bierce’s misanthropic spirit in her extended look at the use of trees as symbols of various causes in United States history, such as the Boston Liberty Tree, an elm that the Redcoats mocked and chopped down. At times Field’s account read like an outtake from Hamilton: Across the ocean—A tree? To cross an ocean? people whisper: Revolution! They lost their heads! Was Tom Paine the vector? or Lafayette, who stood on the stump at Essex and Washington for a good half-hour? “The Health of My Stream or the (Most) Pathetic Fallacy” is the most lyrical piece in the collection. Finding fish in a stream on her property, the narrator sets out to ensure that they remain there by altering the environment. “Impetuously,” she recounts, I decide to clear and cut the length of the riverbank, especially the prolific nettle and bramble. Save the healthy poplar, oak, a few wild box, and one small expanse of blackberry, minding its splurge of August fruit. Despite her improvements, the fish disappear after storms change the stream’s flow. Becoming ever more despondent in her fishless existence, she attempts various fixes, raking gravel, shoveling silt, setting up rock barriers, “inventing channels.” She also studies the ecology of streams. “One expert suggests having a ‘stream vision’ that you share with your family and neighbors. They say that streams can heal themselves, given time and no interference.” The text ends with a discussion of India granting the right of personhood to flowing water and includes an excerpt from a petition to the High Court of Uttarakhand at Nainital on behalf of the Ganges and the Yamuna rivers. It brought to mind Alberto Rey’s 2016 video Bagmati, which looks at life along Nepal’s most sacred and most polluted river. Other pieces in the book deal with dying (“Patients”) and mathematics (“Irrational/Situation”) in equally inventive fashion. Field also offers two short poems, “Unseen” and “Glancing Backward,” the latter a final j’accuse directed at the dominating human race, “whatever self-proclaimed God’s fat fist.” Field’s writing fits into an impressive and expanding universe of new-form approaches to exploring cultural, environmental, and social issues. Some recent examples include Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Megan Grumbling’s Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, and Stefano Mancuso’s The Nation of Plants. These and other writers are mixing it up in ways that engage, provoke, and challenge readers. After reading Personhood, I found myself wincing at innocuous animal send-ups. On NPR’s quiz show Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me the other day, one of the questions involved the Brood X cicadas this spring, which appear in large numbers in the mid-Atlantic region once every 17 years. The ensuing banter revolved around how an insect orgy was in the offing, with no mention that the species provides food for large animal populations or that its existence is now threatened by climate change. Just lots of laughs at the expense of the periodical bug. Personhood by Thalia Field is published by New Directions and is available online and in bookstores.
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Post by Admin on Sept 16, 2021 17:24:54 GMT
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Post by Admin on Sept 19, 2021 16:36:01 GMT
Deep Adaptation Deep adaptation is a concept and social movement based on the view that humanity needs to prepare for the possibility of societal collapse, as environmental change increasingly disrupts social, economic, and political systems. Unlike climate change adaptation, which aims to adapt societies gradually to the effects of climate change, Deep Adaptation is premised on acceptance of impending abrupt transformations of the environment. The concept was originally shared in a paper released by the University of Cumbria in July 2018, from sustainability leadership professor Jem Bendell. This paper had been previously rejected by the peer review process of the Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal. Responses to the paper are split among academics and popular audiences. Some reviewers dismiss deep adaptation as a poorly substantiated, doomist framing that threatens to hamper true efforts to address climate change adaptation. Others contend that Bendell successfully provides an alternative framework through which impacts of climate change may be approached. The paper has achieved popularity, having been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and providing the nucleus for online communities with thousands of members. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Adaptation
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Post by Admin on Sept 25, 2021 9:08:40 GMT
The Collapse Of Complex Societies Renegade Inc. medium.com/@renegadeinc/the-collapse-of-complex-societies-e8ad2921e063What can we learn from the rise and fall of empires throughout history? Hubris in the West today means we think that we’re so advanced we can escape the collapse of complex societies. Our recent history has cemented an air of invincibility. But if you look closely, all the signs are present that the empire is far more vulnerable than we think. So is our societal decline preordained or will we be the first civilisation to cheat the inevitable? Host, Ross Ashcroft met up with Anthropologist and Historian, Joseph Tainter, to discuss.
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Post by Admin on Sept 29, 2021 10:33:56 GMT
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Post by Admin on Sept 30, 2021 10:19:46 GMT
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Post by Admin on Oct 22, 2021 19:04:49 GMT
Approaching Collapse video FORUM RECORDING: Approaching Collapse – some do’s and don’ts [edited] For those who attended, or couldn’t make it, please continue the forum discussion in the comments here. Infinite growth on a finite planet has pushed us into crisis, and this forum tackles the difficult questions and taboo topics: Bursting the fantasy of sustainability based on clean energy transition and arguing for equitable approaches to global population. Pathways forward include a deliberate contraction of the human enterprise and a planned collapse. 0:00 Dr Kate Booth (University of Tasmania); 0:12 Megan Seibert (The REAL Green New Deal Project); 41:10 Tristan Sykes (Just Collapse); 57:46 Q&A (inc. Prof Bill Rees). This forum took place at the University of Tasmania, as part of Global Climate Change Week 2021. #JustCollapse justcollapse.org/2021/10/21/approaching-collapse-video/
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Post by Admin on Oct 24, 2021 7:02:22 GMT
‘World conflict and chaos’ could be the result of a summit failure Top climate official issues strong warning on effect of unchecked greenhouse gases ahead of summit www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/24/world-conflict-and-chaos-could-be-the-result-of-a-summit-failureGlobal security and stability could break down, with migration crises and food shortages bringing conflict and chaos, if countries fail to tackle greenhouse gas emissions, the UN’s top climate official has warned ahead of the Cop26 climate summit. Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said: “We’re really talking about preserving the stability of countries, preserving the institutions that we have built over so many years, preserving the best goals that our countries have put together. The catastrophic scenario would indicate that we would have massive flows of displaced people.” The impact would cascade, she said, adding: “It would mean less food, so probably a crisis in food security. It would leave a lot more people vulnerable to terrible situations, terrorist groups and violent groups. It would mean a lot of sources of instability.” She told the Observer in an interview: “It doesn’t only speak to the environmental side. It is also about the whole system we have built. We know what migration crises have provoked in the past. If we were to see that in even higher numbers – not only international migration, but also internal migration – [it would] provoke very serious problems.” The unusually strong warnings from the normally reserved Espinosa comes as world leaders make their final preparations for the Cop26 talks in Glasgow. The leaders of the G20 nations of the world’s largest developed and developing economies will gather in Rome next weekend for two days of preliminary talks, then fly to Glasgow, to join about 100 other heads of government for the Cop26 climate talks on 1 November. Espinosa, a former minister in the Mexican government took on the UN climate role in 2016. She shares primary responsibility for the talks with Alok Sharma, the UK cabinet minister who will act as president. Over two weeks, they will try to bring nearly 200 countries together to implement the goals of the landmark 2015 Paris climate agreement, by agreeing stiff cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade. Some key leaders – including Xi Jinping, president of China, now the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin – are unlikely to attend. Espinosa said these absences would not prevent a successful outcome, adding: “Not all countries are going to be represented at head of state level. I don’t have any information about President Xi’s presence but I continue to engage with the Chinese delegation, and there is very important engagement by China in the process.” So far, the commitments countries have made to reduce emissions fall short of the 45% cut, based on 2010 levels, that scientists say is needed by 2030 to limit global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the tougher and safer of the two goals in the Paris accord. Espinosa said: “What we need to get at Glasgow are messages from leaders that they are determined to drive this transformation, to make these changes, to look at ways of increasing their ambition.” She also held out the possibility that if a shortfall remains at Glasgow, as is likely, between necessary and offered cuts, nations could be asked to revise their plans soon after – though that is likely to be unpopular with many. Under the Paris agreement, revisions are supposed to take place every five years – it is six this time as Cop26 was delayed by a year because of Covid – but experts believe this is too long, as emissions are still rising and the 1.5C target will slip out of reach unless sharp cuts are made this decade. “It is probably not the most attractive idea to government representatives – when you have finished the plan, come back and tell all those involved, ‘OK, now you have to continue revising your plan’’,” she said. “But this is the biggest challenge humanity is facing, so we really don’t have an option. And we know that situations change, technologies change, processes change, so there’s always room for improvement.” Another key concern is the volume of administration and technical details countries must wade through. Six years after it was signed, some aspects of the Paris agreement have yet to come into force, because of disagreements over details. These include a system of carbon trading, and the rules by which countries should account for the emissions they produce. There are 136 such agenda items to be discussed at Cop26, many of them carried over from previous inconclusive talks, and, although virtual negotiations took place online for three weeks this spring, no formal decisions can be made until countries meet in-person in Glasgow. “The huge challenge is that because of the lack of possibility of meeting in person, formal negotiations have not started. So we have a lot of work to do, and very little time,” she said.
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Post by Admin on Oct 25, 2021 9:14:25 GMT
Borrowed Time: on death, dying & change October 31 – November 2, 2021 Postgraduate Forum, November 3 and at other times too All events at Borrowed Time are ONLINE borrowed-time.info/We’re all of us living on borrowed time: the brevity of our personal span of existence now mirrored by a biosphere under intolerable pressure, its every life system beginning to fray and unravel under civilisation’s weight. We witness its collapse every day now, in new stories of cataclysmic weather events, of lives lost, of flora and fauna weirded, disrupted, gone. However incipiently or unconsciously, we live at a time of collective grieving – no life exempt from the consequences of this relentless devastation and what it has set loose. Borrowed Time, on death dying & change is nevertheless a celebration: a gathering of disparate voices from across the globe coming together online from October 31 to November 3. These voices use many registers and tones to delve into the depths of living with and dealing with death and dying with joy as well as with sadness. Borrowed Time is a space to explore questions pertaining to death, dying and change, and to ask what dying has to teach us about living well, and living sustainably. Join us as we engage with musicians and composers, historians, doctors, carers, artists, poets and writers, dreamers, priests, philosophers, animal researchers, ecologists and more. Our keynote presenters include the international speaker and activist Bayo Akomolafe, choreographer Paul Michael Henry (who presents a new Butoh-inspired dance on film, and Canadian film Director Jennifer Abbott whose latest film The Magnitude of All Things is receiving accolades and awards with screenings at film festivals across the globe. Above all, then, Borrowed Time is a celebration of life, one that sets out to embrace and welcome all of its messy joys and travails. There are numerous ways to access Borrowed Time from registering as a full delegate to attending a single event. The platform is online so can be accessed from wherever you happen to be. General booking is open now until tickets run out at www.borrowed-time.info. Borrowed Time is produced by the acclaimed arts organisation art.earth and is supported by the newly-emergent Dartington Arts School and the re-vivified Schumacher College. We look forward to joining you there. ____________________________________________________ What constitutes ‘a good death’? How do we know death, personally? What room do we make for the dead –– within our relationships, our ways of speaking, our shared geographies? And how might the insights of end-of-life care and death practices help us to navigate the fundamental unsustainability of the dominant culture, and to better imagine what comes after it? From now until the end of November 2021 art.earth is opening a space to explore these and other questions pertaining to death, dying and change, and to ask what dying has to teach us about living well, and living sustainably. This space will include and culminate in a series of happenings and events throughout November 2021 with a special closing event in collaboration with our friends at Onca as they mark the 10th anniversary of their renowned Remembrance Day for Lost Species. [See the call for artists for this year’s Remembrance Day.] We proposed our theme before the world was gripped by a global pandemic. Whilst still overshadowed by civilisation’s ongoing extermination of the natural world, Borrowed Time’s parallel, human thread – our relationship with and understanding of personal dying – has most certainly been sharpened by the more than a million lives lost so far to Covid 19. While many experience death as sudden or violent, dying more often comes to us gradually. That there is a deep resource of hope, wisdom and resilience to be found in confronting and preparing for death’s arrival is something long understood, across all cultures. What, then, might such preparation entail in the context of anthropogenic mass-extinction? One way or another, this greater dying now presses upon us – whether we are experiencing ecological loss and displacement first-hand or negotiating the uneasy, grief-laden sense of borrowed time that has become an insistent background noise for many. How might those whose lives are as yet relatively sheltered by structural or geographic privilege learn to listen better to the obscure, too-big-to-hear keening of mass extinction? Might art and shared testimony prove better equipped to hold and integrate such unimaginable loss than the spreadsheet, the relentless graph? In the face of these interlocked dilemmas we’ll come together to re-align our time here together by turning to meet death – through story and song, personal witness and critical discussion, feasting and silence. Whilst we welcome academic papers and expect focussed panels to form a valued element of this gathering, we’re also specifically inviting people to bring other and perhaps less tried-and-tested ways of speaking to death, dying and change. These might include experiments with embodied knowing, deep listening, or movement. Proposals of performative and other artwork are invited, as are ideas for ritual and ceremony. Workshops whose durations may run an hour, half a day, or even all night are most welcome, as well as equivalent opportunities for smaller group work that allow for a more intimate sharing of experience. The programme of activity will, amongst virtual and real gatherings, speak to the inherent vulnerability invoked by its theme, providing opportunities to travel in company, gathering regularly over a period of time as smaller peer groups for thematically-linked sessions which invite participants to question their frames and understandings, learn more from one another’s knowledge and experience, and together risk the uncertainties, heartbreaks, and resurrections that death offers us. Because we all face uncertainty in 2021 we are opening up the proposal process to your own invention and imagination, so that you can help us shape, share, and disseminate this coming-together of minds and souls. We invite you to a coming together and a sharing of tales, practices and ideas where an end-of-life carer may find themselves sharing a conversation with a poet, a dancer and a climate scientist, and where the nature of our theme may steer such conversations towards the urgency, honesty and radical hospitality called for by a time of accelerating change.
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