Tears Of The World

Planetary Consciousness And The Tears Of The World

By Gary Corseri

A Review of Carolyn Baker’s 'Collapsing Consciously'

One can open this 173-page book just about anywhere, read a few pages, and have something to contemplate and meditate for the rest of the day, or several days, or a lifetime. The book is divided into 2 parts: “Collapse, Transition, the Great Turning” and “Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times.” The first part, about 2/3 of the book, works as a kind of Zen-slap to wake up the disconnected, mesmerized and unfocussed to the terrible predations we have made on Planet Earth these past 200 years of the Industrial Revolution and 100 years of Corporate-Federal Reserve-Media-Military-Academic State-ism. The last 63 pages consist of pertinent, sometimes glittering, quotes from Ms. Baker’s wide and varied reading in Jung and psychology, the Arts, environment and political matters—and her thoughts in response to those quotes and insights. This is a book with “designs” on the reader: the author intends to warn, inform, and transform.

The book’s author-profile states that Dr. Baker is a “former psychotherapist and professor of psychology and history. She is nationally renowned for her writing and workshops on emotional resilience in challenging times…. Her books include Navigating the Coming Chaos: A Handbook for Inner Transition and “Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse. Her website is SpeakingTruth to Power, at www.carolynbaker.net.”

I confess that I have not read Ms. Baker’s previous books, but I have, in recent years, profitably read her articles appearing at some of the best progressive websites as well as her own site. In spite of her obvious erudition, Ms. Baker has a way of “telling it like it is,” without frills--a wise woman talking frankly to those wise enough to listen.

 “Our inexorable reality in this moment is one of contraction, decline, and demise. Industrial civilization is collapsing.” Thus, with punches un-pulled, she launches us outward, upward and within from the get-go. There, in the intro, we also learn a little about her recent battles: “As I send this book to publication, I have recently confronted a personal collapse in the form of a health challenge. I have been humbled and constrained by a recurrence of breast cancer. And although my treatment is complete and my prognosis very good… I recognize it as yet another spiritual rite of passage….

Rites of passage, of course, are not easy to navigate… and impossible to circumvent. Fact is humankind in 2014, decades after those prophetic masters’—Orwell’s and Huxley’s—dark premonitions… has succeeded in trumping those foreboding visions. With Ms. Baker’s book and the daily headlines, it’s easy to catalogue the innumerable crises we face: Polar Vortex? What the hell is that? Is there a tie-in with Global Climate Change? What about all this methane gas being released from Siberia’s permafrost melting? What about “Peak Oil”? What about the plume of radiation emanating from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plants? Why hasn’t something been done about the hole in the ozone that I first read about some 30 years ago? When will the endless “peace process” end and we simply have Peace in the Middle East and elsewhere? Are we incapable of transcending our warrior past, our reptilian brain, our genetic, social and historical limitations?

These are some of the questions Ms. Baker would have us examine, and, always, she urges us to know ourselves, to understand deeply. With her background in psychology—especially Jungian--, she exhorts us to know our “Shadow” side—to embrace even the darkness. Collapse consciously! That’s the ticket. There’s hell to pay. We’ve messed up our only home and things will get a lot worse… before they… if they ever get better!

But we can conceive the multitude of challenges we face as a spiritual journey, too.

Let me be clear: this is no namby-pamby “New Age” book where everything turns out honky-dory if only we chant “Om” while the Earth gets fracked beneath our rising kundalini’s. More than once, Ms. Baker enjoins the human race to “grow up!” We are forewarned in the intro: “I am drawn to the perennial wisdom of the towering giants of poetry, story, art, music, and literature. They never have and never will offer us happy stories with happy endings. Rather, they offer us life—in all of its angst, beauty, ire, terror, joy, celebration, ecstasy and demise.” And, again, in her first chapter: “Preparing logistically or emotionally for the collapse of life as we have known it since arriving on this planet is not supposed to be fun.” And, in a later chapter: “Unless we include the possibility of death in our presentation, we aren’t really preparing.” Yes, this is also a book about learning how to die, how to face death.

Like Chris Hedges in Empire of Illusion, Ms. Baker has no patience with our cult of “positive thinking.” I think that cult is a legitimate target of real thinkers (who acknowledge the Shadow), but, occasionally, Ms. Baker over-shoots her mark, conflating all New Agers with Dale Carnegie-type positivists. Of course, “New Age” goes back some 40 years, and is feeling its knees. But much of it was about much more than positive thinking and Ms. Baker knows that in her bones every time she relates a bit of Eastern wisdom, or quotes Lao Tzu or Buddha.

This is a book about becoming whole again; reaching deep within, not to overcome the Shadow, but to integrate and join forces with it. It’s a book about developing a planetary consciousness to confront the global muck we’ve created. It’s a book about making connections—within ourselves, and with others. Ms. Baker quotes Francis Weller, author of Entering the Healing Ground: Grief, Ritual, and the Soul of the World:

 “Our sorrow eases the hardened places within us, allowing them to open again and freeing us to once more feel our kinship with the living presence around us. This is deep activism, soul activism that actually encourages us to connect with the tears of the world.”

Gary Corseri has taught in US public schools and prisons, and at US and Japanese universities. His dramas have been produced on Atlanta-PBS; he has performed his work at the Carter Presidential Library; and his prose and poems have appeared at hundreds of publications/websites worldwide, including, The Greanville Post, Redbook, OpEdNews, Village Voice, The New York Times, Smirking Chimp, L.A./Hollywood Progressive, Countercurrents, BraveNewWorld.in. Contact: Gary_Corseri@comcast.net

countercurrents.org

Considering Extinction

Considering Extinction: Are We Falling Off The Climate Precipice?

By Dahr Jamail, www.commondreams.org

I grew up planning for my future, wondering which college I would attend, what to study, and later on, where to work, which articles to write, what my next book might be, how to pay a mortgage, and which mountaineering trip I might like to take next.

Now, I wonder about the future of our planet. During a recent visit with my eight-year-old niece and 10- and 12-year-old nephews, I stopped myself from asking them what they wanted to do when they grew up, or any of the future-oriented questions I used to ask myself. I did so because the reality of their generation may be that questions like where they will work could be replaced by: Where will they get their fresh water? What food will be available? And what parts of their country and the rest of the world will still be habitable?

 “We’ve never been here as a species and the implications are truly dire and profound for our species and the rest of the living planet.” –Prof. Guy McPherson, University of Arizona

The reason, of course, is climate change — and just how bad it might be came home to me in the summer of 2010.  I was climbing Mount Rainier in Washington State, taking the same route I had used in a 1994 ascent.  Instead of experiencing the metal tips of the crampons attached to my boots crunching into the ice of a glacier, I was aware that, at high altitudes, they were still scraping against exposed volcanic rock. In the pre-dawn night, sparks shot from my steps.

The route had changed dramatically enough to stun me. I paused at one point to glance down the steep cliffs at a glacier bathed in soft moonlight 100 meters below. It took my breath away when I realized that I was looking at what was left of the enormous glacier I’d climbed in 1994, the one that — right at this spot — had left those crampons crunching on ice. I stopped in my tracks, breathing the rarefied air of such altitudes, my mind working hard to grasp the climate-change-induced drama that had unfolded since I was last at that spot.

I haven’t returned to Mount Rainier to see just how much further that glacier has receded in the last few years, but recently I went on a search to find out just how bad it might turn out to be. I discovered a set of perfectly serious scientists — not the majority of all climate scientists by any means, but thoughtful outliers — who suggest that it isn’t just really, really bad; it’s catastrophic.  Some of them even think that, if the record ongoing releases of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels, are aided and abetted by massive releases of methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas, life as we humans have known it might be at an end on this planet. They fear that we may be at — and over — a climate change precipice hair-raisingly quickly.

Mind you, the more conservative climate science types, represented by the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), paint scenarios that are only modestly less hair-raising, but let’s spend a little time, as I’ve done, with what might be called scientists at the edge and hear just what they have to say.

 “We’ve Never Been Here as a Species”

 “We as a species have never experienced 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” Guy McPherson, professor emeritus of evolutionary biology, natural resources, and ecology at the University of Arizona and a climate change expert of 25 years, told me. “We’ve never been on a planet with no Arctic ice, and we will hit the average of 400 ppm… within the next couple of years. At that time, we’ll also see the loss of Arctic ice in the summers… This planet has not experienced an ice-free Arctic for at least the last three million years.”

For the uninitiated, in the simplest terms, here’s what an ice-free Arctic would mean when it comes to heating the planet: minus the reflective ice cover on Arctic waters, solar radiation would be absorbed, not reflected, by the Arctic Ocean.  That would heat those waters, and hence the planet, further. This effect has the potential to change global weather patterns, vary the flow of winds, and even someday possibly alter the position of the jet stream. Polar jet streams are fast flowing rivers of wind positioned high in the Earth’s atmosphere that push cold and warm air masses around, playing a critical role in determining the weather of our planet.

McPherson, who maintains the blog Nature Bats Last, added, “We’ve never been here as a species and the implications are truly dire and profound for our species and the rest of the living planet.”

While his perspective is more extreme than that of the mainstream scientific community, which sees true disaster many decades into our future, he’s far from the only scientist expressing such concerns. Professor Peter Wadhams, a leading Arctic expert at Cambridge University, has been measuring Arctic ice for 40 years, and his findings underscore McPherson’s fears.  “The fall-off in ice volume is so fast it is going to bring us to zero very quickly,” Wadhams told a reporter. According to current data, he estimates “with 95% confidence” that the Arctic will have completely ice-free summers by 2018.  (U.S. Navy researchers have predicted an ice-free Arctic even earlier — by 2016.)

British scientist John Nissen, chairman of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group (of which Wadhams is a member), suggests that if the summer sea ice loss passes “the point of no return,” and “catastrophic Arctic methane feedbacks” kick in, we’ll be in an “instant planetary emergency.”

 “Economic growth is the biggest destroyer of the ecology… Those people who think you can have a growing economy and a healthy environment are wrong. If we don’t reduce our numbers, nature will do it for us.” –Neil Dawe, biologist

McPherson, Wadham, and Nissen represent just the tip of a melting iceberg of scientists who are now warning us about looming disaster, especially involving Arctic methane releases. In the atmosphere, methane is a greenhouse gas that, on a relatively short-term time scale, is far more destructive than carbon dioxide (CO2).  It is 23 times as powerful as CO2 per molecule on a 100-year timescale, 105 times more potent when it comes to heating the planet on a 20-year timescale — and the Arctic permafrost, onshore and off, is packed with the stuff.  “The seabed,” says Wadham, “is offshore permafrost, but is now warming and melting. We are now seeing great plumes of methane bubbling up in the Siberian Sea… millions of square miles where methane cover is being released.”

According to a study just published in Nature Geoscience, twice as much methane as previously thought is being released from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, a two million square kilometer area off the coast of Northern Siberia. Its researchers found that at least 17 teragrams (one million tons) of methane are being released into the atmosphere each year, whereas a 2010 study had found only seven teragrams heading into the atmosphere.

The day after Nature Geoscience released its study, a group of scientists from Harvard and other leading academic institutions published a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that the amount of methane being emitted in the U.S. both from oil and agricultural operations could be 50% greater than previous estimates and 1.5 times higher than estimates of the Environmental Protection Agency.

How serious is the potential global methane build-up? Not all scientists think it’s an immediate threat or even the major threat we face, but Ira Leifer, an atmospheric and marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and one of the authors of the recent Arctic Methane study pointed out to me that “the Permian mass extinction that occurred 250 million years ago is related to methane and thought to be the key to what caused the extinction of most species on the planet.” In that extinction episode, it is estimated that 95% of all species were wiped out.

Also known as “The Great Dying,” it was triggered by a massive lava flow in an area of Siberia that led to an increase in global temperatures of six degrees Celsius. That, in turn, caused the melting of frozen methane deposits under the seas.  Released into the atmosphere, it caused temperatures to skyrocket further. All of this occurred over a period of approximately 80,000 years.

We are currently in the midst of what scientists consider the sixth mass extinction in planetary history, with between 150 and 200 species going extinct daily, a pace 1,000 times greater than the “natural” or “background” extinction rate. This event may already be comparable to, or even exceed, both the speed and intensity of the Permian mass extinction. The difference being that ours is human caused, isn’t going to take 80,000 years, has so far lasted just a few centuries, and is now gaining speed in a non-linear fashion.

Climate Crisis

 

Typhoon Haiyan Roars Through Warsaw Climate Crisis Summit

By Countercurrents.org

Typhoon Haiyan’s trail of devastation in the Philippines prompts three groups of developing countries to call for climate compensation scheme to be rolled out. The call came at the 12-day UN Climate Change Convention’s 19th Conference of the Parties (CoP) that began on November 11, 2013 in Poland's capital Warsaw.

The typhoon devastated Philippines dominated the first day of the Warsaw climate crisis meeting as the country started to count the human cost of one of the most destructive typhoons on record.

Though no major decisions are expected at the conference, the level of progress could be an indicator of the world's chances of reaching a deal in 2015, which is the new landmark year in the UN-led process after a 2009 summit in Copenhagen ended in discord.

In an emotional speech the lead climate change envoy of the Philippines Yeb Sano said he would fast until he saw a sign of real ambition at the negotiations.

He said the violence of the tropical storm demonstrated the need for a climate compensation mechanism, which could help countries affected by extreme weather events.

 “Developed country emissions reductions targets are dangerously low and must be raised immediately, but even if they were in line with the demand of reducing 40-50% below 1990 levels, we would still have locked-in climate change and would still need to address the issue of loss and damage,” he said.

Yeb Sano said:    “We can stop this madness. Right here in Warsaw.

    “It is not natural when people continue to struggle to eradicate poverty and pursue development and gets battered by the onslaught of a monster storm now considered as the strongest storm ever to hit land. It is not natural when science already tells us that global warming will induce more intense

storms. It is not natural when the human species has already profoundly changed the climate.

    “Disasters are never natural. They are the intersection of factors other than physical. They are the accumulation of the constant breach of economic, social, and environmental thresholds. Most of the time disasters is a result of inequity and the poorest people of the world are at greatest risk because of their vulnerability and decades of maldevelopment, which I must assert is connected to the kind of pursuit of economic growth that dominates the world; the same kind of pursuit of so-called economic growth and unsustainable consumption that has altered the climate system.

    “This process under the UNFCCC has been called many names. It has been called a farce. It has been called an annual carbon-intensive gathering of useless frequent flyers. It has been called many names. But it has also been called the Project to save the planet. It has been called “saving tomorrow today”. We can fix this. We can stop this madness. Right now. Right here, in the middle of this football field.

    “Can humanity rise to the occasion? I still believe we can.”

Sano’s words were echoed throughout the opening ceremony.

Following Sano’s intervention, three groups representing just over half of the countries involved in the CoP issued a call for immediate talks on the development of a loss and damage mechanism.

The G77 + China, Least Developed Countries and Alliance of Small Island States said this was now a priority for their members in the wake of the Philippines disaster.

 “It’s unacceptable that some continue to sideline this issue, or fob it off as a ‘research agenda’ item,” said G77 lead negotiator Juan Hoffmaister.

Negotiators will face a host of recurring stumbling blocks, including money to help poor countries convert to cleaner energy sources and adapt to a shifting climate that may lead to disruptions of agriculture and drinking water, and the spread of diseases.

Developed nations, who fear being landed with bills running into hundreds of billions, indicated they were willing to discuss a ‘mechanism’, but would not be drawn on what its powers could be.

The USA’s deputy climate negotiator Trigg Talley told a press conference there were “technical and political” challenges to accepting any form of compensation scheme, suggesting they would consider a process that “takes advantage of current institutional infrastructure and allows countries to understand how to minimize risks linked to loss and damage.”

There are fears among some parties that a heavy focus on climate compensation in Warsaw could come at the expense of other aims, notably agreeing financial targets and a roadmap for a 2015 climate deal.

UN climate chief Christiana Figueres urged countries to clarify the levels of finance available to drive low carbon development.

Japan and Sweden are set to reveal new climate finance pledges this week, but there remains a substantial gap between what developing countries say they need to adapt to climate change and what has been delivered.

Addressing loss and damage, and progressing with a mechanism to make such payments operational, has potential to be one of the “lasting legacies” of the Warsaw conference, said the delegate from Nepal, representing the Least Developed Countries group, who face some of the worst impacts of climate change. He adds that there is still the opportunity to halt global warming at 1.5C, although this opportunity is fading fast.

The Alliance of Small Island States representative also pushed for an ambitious approach to the negotiations.

Panama, speaking on behalf of the System for Central America Integration group, said that although their region is one of the most vulnerable, they are already using their “scanty resources” to make a difference.

Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, speaking on behalf of the Arab Group, steered its presentation away from talk of legally binding targets, focusing on the need for voluntary commitments from developing countries, which should be supported by developed countries.

Despite being the second largest oil producer in the world, Saudi Arabia is still counted as a developing country by the UN’s climate body. It has a history of trying to block ambitious action on climate change, intervening in discussions taking place last May to say that tough mitigation targets would be “highly political” and leave a “bad taste.

Climate deal must be “tailored” to fit USA and China

Mat Hope writes in Carbon Brief:

Sixteen years ago in 1997, 192 countries signed an agreement to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, but the Kyoto Protocol was hamstrung from the start, because it failed to get the backing of the world’s current top emitters: the US and China.

The Kyoto Protocol expires in 2020, and the latest round of negotiations to replace it kicks off in Warsaw today.

It’s clear that this time round the negotiations will need to be tailored towards the demands of the US and China if a deal is to be struck.

Former lead climate negotiator for the Netherlands Maas Groote told news website Responding to Climate Change: “… without [the US and China] you will not have an effective instrument on your hands … So you have to tailor an instrument that will fit their political context … At the end of the day you want an agreement, some kind of an outcome, that China and the US can

embrace”.

Mat Hope adds: The United States’ failure to commit to the Kyoto Protocol has been a source of tension in the international negotiations for over a decade.

While President Obama has indicated that he wants the US to re-engage with the process – a stance he backed up by attending the 2009 negotiations in person – eight years of obstruction by the George W. Bush administration made participants wary of US motives.

China has been the most notable critic, arguing that it can’t be expected to commit to emissions reductions until the US shows it is willing to lead.

One of the main sticking points between the two countries is how much responsibility more and less economically developed countries take for cutting emissions.

Hæge Fjellheim, Senior Analyst at consultancy Thomson Reuters Point Carbon, says finding a way to bridge “the crucial divide” between the more and less wealthy nations will need to be at the centre of the Warsaw agenda, if there is to be any progress towards a new deal.

China has indicated it will accept some emissions curbs, but thinks the traditional economic powerhouses that have historically been responsible for more emissions – including the US – should take the lead.

The US isn’t happy with this, arguing that China is now economically developed enough to take responsibility for its emissions.

That could mean changes to the way any new deal is structured. Currently, the Kyoto protocol requires the most economically developed countries – known as Annex I countries – to make the most severe emissions reductions and provide most of the money to help less economically developed countries reduce theirs.

China is currently not considered an Annex I country, however – a source of chagrin for the US negotiators, who see China as shirking their international obligations.

The US’ special envoy to the negotiations, Todd Stern, told a meeting at Chatham House last week that the US would only accept a new deal if it was “applicable to all”, including China.

China maintains that the Annex I countries are yet to meet their own commitments, however. Some countries, including Japan and Australia, look set to miss their Kyoto Protocol emissions reduction targets, and some, like Canada, have abandoned the treaty altogether.

China is also unimpressed that a fund setup in 2009 to transfer resources from developed to developing economies remains empty.

Read the full text here:

countercurrents.org

Visioning the Future

 Visioning the future in a full earth

For some years it has been clear that environmental doom-saying, because it is a poor motivator, is a dead end. However true the prediction of global overheating, climate chaos, resource wars, pollution and disease (with consequent mass death or displacement), it leads most people to despair and denial rather than hope and resilience. Only a spiritual and emotional grounding (a transformation) gives humans the power to change our ways. This not only moral teaching, but sound neuroscience.

The "full earth" invalidates all previous human experience. No longer can we migrate or innovate our way out of the dilemma posed by infinite economic growth on a finite planet. A number of the planetary boundaries have already been breached. The "developed" world of our generation is eating its way through the equivalent of 3 1/2 earths. If pond scum doubles every hour, at the last hour (when we could intervene) the pond still seems half clear. Apparently, not a problem.

And a peculiar limit of the human mind makes it harder to develop an overall vision of future, than to recall an (often imaginary) past Eden. Hard, but not impossible. Some of the worlds' best scientists, eco-activists, ethical thinkers and artists have been doing just that. This is a rough guide to their work.

One slogan should be discarded: "sustainable development", still a staple of United Nations and business thinking. But its elements are self-contradictory. A necessary compromise in the UN's Our Common Future, the 1992 Rio and subsequent Kyoto treaty, it is now outdated. Infinite growth is not sustainable. Quality of life, climate justice and right sharing are. The much-touted "green economy" of Rio+20 failed because it proposed to build the future on commodifying the Earth's commons; in fact it would finance climate action, and better life for the world's poor, by selling licenses to pollute.

The new watchword is "resilience", the ability of biodiversity to repair the web of life. In time it may become overused and shopworn, but at this point it is a helpful guide.

Eco-economics was invented by Herman Daly (and others) emphasizing that production should serve social need, and human society within the planet. This blog has reported the astonishing variety of eco-economic thought (tagged EE) that has developed in event decades. Much was simply a critique of standard economics -- a critique of which Adbusters and Occupy have now made a protest movement. But some has been positive and transformatory.

Action

   

 It is Man's intelligence that sets the species apart from the other animals and gives him power to change the environment, yet many of Man's actions are prompted by short-term desires, selfishness, superstition or emotion rather than clear-thinking and intelligence; sadly, this is greatly to the detriment of the planet.

 Our mega-cities are not compatible with a declining supply of petroleum. Transporting food and other materials from where they are produced into cities, and transporting wastes out, requires a lot of fuel. As the loss of petroleum makes our present form of mechanised agriculture less viable and as food prices rise due to shortages, more labour will be required to maximise food production; that labour is living in the wrong place at present. Modern cities and suburbs have been developed to suit the private car.

    The private car, as it is, is incompatible with declining petroleum supplies and the need to reduce greenhouse gas production; its use must be greatly reduced if societies are to become sustainable, but there is no indication of reduction as of now. Changing to electric vehicles of similar power to current petroleum-fuelled models will not much help, but going to much lower-powered and lighter vehicles might be viable.

   
We are travelling too quickly. The speeds that we travel at present in cars, aeroplanes, and probably even high-speed trains is unsustainable because we are approaching the end of oil and producing too much of several greenhouse gasses. Energy is about to become much more expensive, both in financial and environmental terms, and we are going to have to learn to use it more economically and rationally.

    The gap between rich and poor is widening. Even in the great democracies, the wealthy are gathering to themselves a steadily increasing share of political power (by controlling who gets into government and then controlling what those in power do – consider the lack of government action on climate change while the great majority of informed voters want action), leaving a declining amount of power to the less well-off. As in the past, a point will be reached at which those near the bottom of the heap will demand a more balanced spread of wealth and power.

Of critical importance is the fact that humanity has not reacted rationally and appropriately to these problems. In response to climate change governments are doing as little as possible and the great majority of individuals are not changing their lifestyles; governments refuse to see that growth cannot continue for ever and seem to not want to know about the declining petroleum supply. People live as if most of the above problems did not exist and we can continue to live the next fifty years with as little care for the environment as in the past fifty.

We have become reliant on a globally integrated economy. Given the above problems, this cannot continue.

Imagine

Where have we got to at the end of the day? Where are we going? What vision do we have of the destiny we share so closely with nature?

Those concerned about the dangerous drift of global development are asking these questions with increasing urgency. Dominant institutions have proved too timorous or too venal for meeting the environmental and social challenges of our time. Instead, an adequate response requires us to imagine the awakening of a new social actor: a coordinated global citizens movement (GCM) struggling on all fronts toward a just and sustainable planetary civilization. Existing civil society campaigns remain fragmented and therefore powerless to leverage holistic transformation. To create an alternative vision and effective strategy for realizing it, consciousness and action must rise to the level of a GCM. We propose a new organizing campaign with the explicit aim of catalyzing this historic agency. This effort would expand and diversify in a “widening circle”, adapting to changing circumstances as it evolves. From the onset, such a project must foster a politics of trust, committed to balancing unity and pluralism on the road to our common future.

A decade ago the Earth Charter sounded a clarion call to “join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace.” In the years since, the drumbeat of crises that has rippled across the global field – and reports warning of still greater dangers ahead – has underscored this historic imperative to “join together.” The burning question is no longer if or when, but how? What bold actions can forge a world polity for our interdependent world and common future?

The historic underpinning of potential unity lies in the entanglement of people, nature, and generations by long webs of economic, cultural, and environmental connectivity, binding us into one all-embracing social-ecological system. In the Planetary Phase of Civilization, humanity and Earth have become a single community of fate. We are in the midst of a turbulent transition from the world that was to some form of global society, with no exit and no separate solutions for individuals, communities, or countries. The shift is generating a host of ominous transnational problems – climate change and ecosystem degradation, economic instability and geopolitical conflict, oppression and mass migration – that left unattended might well pull us toward a bleak tomorrow.

Nonetheless, we still have time to bypass the future on offer, though it will not be easy. Charting passage to a happier outcome demands rapid emergence of ways of thinking and acting matched to the profound challenge posed by global transition. Our concern and accountability, indeed, our very sense of self, must expand across the barriers of space and time to embrace the whole human family, the ecosphere, and the unborn. We stand at an inflection point of history full of peril, but also promise, if we can come together in a joint venture: creating a culture of solidarity and politics of trust within a movement to build democratic institutions for peace, justice, and sustainability.

world-governance

Perfect Storm

Evolution equipped us to deal with threats from dependably loathsome enemies and fearsome creatures, but not with the opaque and cumulative long-term consequences of our own technological and demographic success. As cartoonist Walt Kelly once put it, “We’ve met the enemy, and he is us.”

Deforestation, agriculture, and the combustion of fossil fuels have committed the world to a substantial and possibly rapid warming that will last for hundreds or thousands of years. Rising temperatures, whether gradual or sudden, will progressively destabilize the global climate system, causing massive droughts, more frequent storms, rising sea level, loss of many species, and shifting ecologies, but in ways that are difficult to predict with precision in a nonlinear system. These changes will likely result in scarcities of food, energy, and resources, undermining political, social, and economic stability and amplifying the effects of terrorism and conflicts between and within nations, failed states, and regions.

Action to head off the worst of what could occur is difficult because of the complexity of nonlinear systems, with large delays between cause and effect, and because of the political and economic power of fossil fuel industries to prevent corrective action that would jeopardize their profitability. Political leadership has been absent in large part because no government is presently organized to deal with the permanent emergency of climate destabilization. The effects of procrastination will fall with increasing weight on coming generations, making our role as the primary cause of worsening climate destabilization the largest moral lapse in history.

Climate destabilization is not just an issue of technology and policy, but a symptom of deeper problems rooted in our paradigms, philosophies, and popular delusions. In particular, a great deal of the conventional economic wisdom—including “neoliberalism,” and the prevailing faith in infinite economic growth—has been proved wrong in many ways and tragically so for the poorest.

The “perfect storm” ahead, in short, is caused by the convergence of steadily worsening climate change; spreading ecological disorder (e.g., deforestation, soil loss, water shortages, species loss, ocean acidification); population growth; unfair distribution of costs, risks, and benefits of economic growth; national and ethnic tensions; and political incapacity.

Nonetheless, we might still head off the worst of a future that Cambridge University scientist Martin Rees describes as possibly “our final hour.” We have good reason to believe that this will be the closest of close calls, but we must hope that humankind will emerge someday from “the bottleneck” chastened but improved.

From the other side of that bottleneck, the components of a transition strategy, presently hotly disputed, will appear as merely obvious and necessary. The journey to a more resilient and durable future for humanity will require, first, a strategy to overcome the political gridlock that variously afflicts all developed countries and to build an informed, energetic constituency to launch the essential steps during the transition. Early warnings about climate change began in the 1960s, but neither the international community nor any developed country has yet adopted policies adequate to the situation. In the years of lassitude and drift, we exhausted whatever margin of safety we might otherwise have had.

As a result, in the United States and elsewhere, grassroots organizations are mobilizing communities around transition strategies that address energy, food, and economic issues without assistance from central governments. Similarly, mayors, cities, regional organizations, and states are engaging with the public, colleges and universities, corporations, and faith communities in a broad effort to lower carbon emissions and build economic and social resilience. These efforts coincide with a growing recognition that security, in the full sense of the word, must be broadened to include access to food, clean water, energy, employment, health, shelter, safety, ecological health, and climate stability.

. The combination of bottom-up organizing with a larger grand strategy suggests the possibility for new political coalitions that cross worn-out national, political, ethnic, and class divisions, and for new opportunities to create an engaged and ecologically competent citizenry networked across the planet.

postcarbon.org

Shake the Earth

Climate change will shake the Earth

By Bill McGuire

The idea that a changing climate can persuade the ground to shake, volcanoes to rumble and tsunamis to crash on to unsuspecting coastlines seems, at first, to be bordering on the insane. How can what happens in the thin envelope of gas that shrouds and protects our world possibly influence the potentially Earth-shattering processes that operate deep beneath the surface? The fact that it does reflects a failure of our imagination and a limited understanding of the manner in which the different physical components of our planet – the atmosphere, the oceans, and the solid Earth, or geosphere – intertwine and interact.

If we think about climate change at all, most of us do so in a very simplistic way: so, the weather might get a bit warmer; floods and droughts may become more of a problem and sea levels will slowly creep upwards. Evidence reveals, however, that our planet is an almost unimaginably complicated beast, which reacts to a dramatically changing climate in all manner of different ways; a few – like the aforementioned – straightforward and predictable; some surprising and others downright implausible. Into the latter category fall the manifold responses of the geosphere.

The world we inhabit has an outer rind that is extraordinarily sensitive to change. While the Earth's crust may seem safe and secure, the geological calamities that happen with alarming regularity confirm that this is not the case.

Climate Change

The 500 richest families in the world now own more wealth than the poorest 500 million!  The most powerful 20 economies are not just countries, but huge multinational corporations. The growing gulf  between the richest and poorest hinders human solidarity. The gap between rich and poor countries includes a huge historic debt to the poorest in the world, whose commons have been grabbed. Even in the rich countries there are too many poor, and the gap is widening.

And it is not just poverty -- vulnerability is added to poverty. The impacts of climate change on the world's poor get worse every day. Within 8 months of the failure of the Copenhagen negotiations, we saw climate chaos hit people in Russia, Pakistan, Central America, South America just to name a few. Each tragedy increases the numbers of the poor and vulnerable. This is a simple fact.

These floods, fires, droughts and storms warn us that the risks we now face are worse than 10 years ago. Climate impacts will severely affect the Millenium Development Goals unless rich developed countries  substantially reduce their greenhouse emissions, honor their climate debt by transferring substantial financial support and clean technologies to the developing countries, and give the ¨space” for the planet to breathe again.

 mecteam.blogspot

Walkies!

One of the most compelling -- and enduring -- mysteries in archaeology concerns the rise of early humans and the decline of Neanderthals. For about 250,000 years, Neanderthals lived and evolved, quite successfully, in the area that is now Europe. Somewhere between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago, early humans came along.

They proliferated in their new environment, their population increasing tenfold in the 10,000 years after they arrived; Neanderthals declined and finally died away.

What happened? What went so wrong for the Neanderthals -- and what went so right for us humans?

The cause, some theories go, may have been environmental, with Neanderthals' decline a byproduct of -- yikes -- climate change. It may have been social as humans developed the ability to cooperate and avail themselves of the evolutionary benefits of social cohesion. It may have been technological, with humans simply developing more advanced tools and hunting weapons that allowed them to snare food while their less-skilled counterparts starved away.

The Cambridge researchers Paul Mellars and Jennifer French have another theory, though. In a paper in the journal Science, they concluded that "numerical supremacy alone may have been a critical factor" in human dominance -- with humans simply crowding out the Neanderthals. Now, with an analysis in American Scientist, the anthropologist Pat Shipman is building on their work. After analyzing the Mellars and French paper and comparing it with the extant literature, Shipman has come to an intriguing conclusion: that humans' comparative evolutionary fitness owes itself to the domestication of dogs.

Yep. Man's best friend, Shipman suggests, might also be humanity's best friend. Dogs might have been the technology that allowed early humans to flourish.