Something Is Killing Life

Something Is Killing Life All Over The Pacific Ocean

By: Michael Snyder

Why is there so much death and disease among sea life living near the west coast of North America right now? Could the hundreds of tons of highly radioactive water that are being released into the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima every single day have anything to do with it?

When I wrote my last article about Fukushima, I got a lot of heat for being “alarmist” and for supposedly “scaring” people unnecessarily.  I didn’t think that an article about Fukushima would touch such a nerve, but apparently there are some people out there that really do not want anyone writing about this stuff.

Right now, massive numbers of fish and sea creatures are dying in the Pacific Ocean. In addition, independent tests have shown that significant levels of cesium-137 are in a very high percentage of the fish that are being caught in the Pacific and sold in North America. Could this have anything to do with the fact that the largest nuclear disaster in the history of mankind has been constantly releasing enormous amounts of radioactive material into the Pacific Ocean for more than two years?  I don’t know about you, but to me this seems to be a question that is worth asking.

Since I wrote my last article, major news outlets have reported that large numbers of sea stars living off of the west coast of North America appear to be “melting“…

    Divers were out in Puget Sound waters Saturday to see if they can help solve a mystery. Scientists are trying to figure out what’s causing one species of starfish to die in parts of Puget Sound and the waters off of Canada.

    Seattle Aquarium biologists Jeff Christiansen and Joel Hollander suited up in scuba gear in their search for answers.  “We’re going to look for both healthy and potentially diseased sea stars,” Christiansen explained. “We’ve got some sea stars that look like they’re melting on the bottom.”

    The same thing is happening in the waters near Canada and nobody’s sure why.

If scientists don’t know why this is happening, perhaps there is an unusual explanation for this phenomenon.

Could it be Fukushima?

The following is what one invertebrate expert quoted by National Geographic says is happening to the starfish…

    [The starfish] seem to waste away, ‘deflate’ a little, and then just … disintegrate. The arms just detach, and the central disc falls apart. It seems to happen rapidly, and not just dead animals undergoing decomposition, as I observed single arms clinging to the rock faces, tube feet still moving, with the skin split, gills flapping in the current. I’ve seen single animals in the past looking like this, and the first dive this morning I thought it might be crabbers chopping them up and tossing them off the rocks. Then we did our second dive in an area closed to fishing, and in absolutely amazing numbers. The bottom from about 20 to 50 feet [6 to 15 meters] was absolutely littered with arms, oral discs, tube feet, gonads and gills … it was kind of creepy.

That certainly does not sound normal to me.

Shouldn’t we be trying to figure out why this is happening?

Something is also causing a huge spike in the death rate for killer whales living off of the coast of British Columbia…

    A Vancouver Aquarium researcher is sounding the alarm over “puzzling” changes he’s observed in the killer whale pods that live off the southern British Columbia coast.

    Dr. Lance Barrett-Lennard says he fears changes in the ocean environment are prompting odd behaviour and an unusually high mortality rate.

    Barrett-Lennard says the southern resident orca pod, which is found in the Salish Sea between Vancouver Island and the B.C. mainland, has lost seven matriarchs over the past two years, and he’s noticed a lack of vocalizations from the normally chatty mammals.

Once again, scientists do not know why this is happening.

Could it be Fukushima?

I am just asking the question.

Clearly something unusual is happening to the Pacific. The following is what one Australian discovered as he journeyed across the Pacific Ocean recently…

    The next leg of the long voyage was from Osaka to San Francisco and for most of that trip the desolation was tinged with nauseous horror and a degree of fear.

    “After we left Japan, it felt as if the ocean itself was dead,” Macfadyen said.

    “We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale, sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head. It was pretty sickening.

    “I’ve done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I’m used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen.”

    In place of the missing life was garbage in astounding volumes.

    “Part of it was the aftermath of the tsunami that hit Japan a couple of years ago. The wave came in over the land, picked up an unbelievable load of stuff and carried it out to sea. And it’s still out there, everywhere you look.”

What would cause the Pacific Ocean to be “dead”?

Could it be Fukushima?

When you consider the evidence presented above along with all of the other things that we have learned in recent months, it becomes more than just a little bit alarming.

The following are some more examples of sea life dying off in the Pacific from my recent article entitled “28 Signs That The West Coast Is Being Absolutely Fried With Nuclear Radiation From Fukushima“…

-Polar bears, seals and walruses along the Alaska coastline are suffering from fur loss and open sores…

    Wildlife experts are studying whether fur loss and open sores detected in nine polar bears in recent weeks is widespread and related to similar incidents among seals and walruses.

    The bears were among 33 spotted near Barrow, Alaska, during routine survey work along the Arctic coastline. Tests showed they had “alopecia, or loss of fur, and other skin lesions,” the U.S. Geological Survey said in a statement.

-There is an epidemic of sea lion deaths along the California coastline…

    At island rookeries off the Southern California coast, 45 percent of the pups born in June have died, said Sharon Melin, a wildlife biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service based in Seattle. Normally, less than one-third of the pups would die.  It’s gotten so bad in the past two weeks that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared an “unusual mortality event.”

-Along the Pacific coast of Canada and the Alaska coastline, the population of sockeye salmon is at a historic low.  Many are blaming Fukushima.

-Something is causing fish all along the west coast of Canada to bleed from their gills, bellies and eyeballs.

-Experts have found very high levels of cesium-137 in plankton living in the waters of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and the west coast.

-One test in California found that 15 out of 15 bluefin tuna were contaminated with radiation from Fukushima.

-Back in 2012, the Vancouver Sun reported that cesium-137 was being found in a very high percentage of the fish that Japan was selling to Canada…

• 73 percent of mackerel tested

• 91 percent of the halibut

• 92 percent of the sardines

• 93 percent of the tuna and eel

• 94 percent of the cod and anchovies

• 100 percent of the carp, seaweed, shark and monkfish

Is it really so unreasonable to wonder if Fukushima could be causing all of this?

And the total amount of nuclear material in the Pacific Ocean is constantly increasing.  According to the New York Times, the latest releases from Fukushima contain “much more contaminated water than before”, and the flow of contaminated water will not stop until 2015 at the earliest…

    The latest releases appear to be carrying much more contaminated water than before into the Pacific. And that flow may not slow until at least 2015, when an ice wall around the damaged reactors is supposed to be completed.

And that same article explained that cesium-137 is entering the Pacific at a rate that is “about three times as high” as last year…

    The magnitude of the recent spike in radiation, and the amounts of groundwater involved, have led Michio Aoyama, an oceanographer at a government research institute who is considered an authority on radiation in the sea, to conclude that radioactive cesium 137 may now be leaking into the Pacific at a rate of about 30 billion becquerels per year, or about three times as high as last year. He estimates that strontium 90 may be entering the Pacific at a similar rate.

Right now, approximately 300 tons of contaminated water is pouring into the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima every 24 hours.

But apparently we are not supposed to ask any questions about this and we are just supposed to blindly accept that this is not having any significant impact on our environment even though sea life in the Pacific appears to be dying in unprecedented numbers.

I don’t know about you, but I really think that the people of the world deserve to know the truth about what is happening out there.

Credits:

About the author: Michael T. Snyder is a former Washington D.C. attorney who now publishes The Truth. His new thriller entitled “The Beginning Of The End” is now available on Amazon.com.

trueactivist.com

End Ecocide

Ecology Is the Meaning of Life

By Dr. Glen Barry

Naturally evolved ecosystems are marvels that make Earth habitable, yet sadly they and all life are threatened

Ultimately, all humanity and all life have is the biosphere, the thin layer of life just above and below Earth’s surface, composed of ancient, miraculously evolved natural ecosystems. The natural Earth is a marvel – a complex coupling of species within ecosystems, whereby life begets life.

Ecology is far more than the study of life and its environment. The word is used here as a synonym for ecosystems – the vibrant connections that emerge between species across scales, which cumulatively make life on Earth possible.

Nature is far, far more than pretty plants and animals. Ecosystems make Earth habitable, providing water, food, air, shelter, and more – everything that we need and desire to live well. In naturally evolved ecosystems, from genes to individual organisms and species, to ecosystems and everything else in between, each living being present fulfills a niche which sustains itself, its neighbors, and the whole.

All species uniquely express evolutionary brilliance and have a purpose, a reason for being, a right to exist, and are necessary to maintain life’s full potential. From the lowly worm to soaring eagles, to the human race – all naturally evolved life has value and relies upon all the rest. Even seemingly noxious disease organisms and man-eating predators have a role to play in maintaining ecological balance.

The Earth as a whole is a living organism, similar biologically to a cell, plant, animal, or ecosystem. Without large intact ecosystems, Earth becomes uninhabitable. Yet sadly, she is being murdered by industrial human growth at the expense of ecosystems. Past certain planetary boundary conditions, like any life, Earth can die.

The vibrant mélange of life found in natural ecosystems is godlike in its all-embracing nurturing. Ecology is the meaning of life.

Ecosystem Collapse

Humankind’s demand for resources and growth overwhelms nature, our steady diminishment of ecosystems abruptly changes climate, and this is collapsing the

biosphere. Global ecosystems – water, air, food, forests, oceans, wetlands, and more – are collapsing and dying under the burden of human industrial and population growth.

Human destruction of natural ecosystems and disintegrating climatic integrity are already past critical thresholds. Humanity (meaning each of us) can’t dump filth into air, defecate into water, kill and diminish natural vegetation, plunder oceans, and expect a habitable Earth and decent lives. Abrupt climate change is indicative of much broader decline, both ecological and social – habitat loss, water shortages, inequitable overconsumption, dead oceans, nationalistic injustice, and industrial agriculture – that threatens life itself.

Comforts of modern life for some come at the expense of utterly decimating natural ecosystems required to sustain life; such comforts cannot last. Mass chaos and death are sure to ensue. No one will survive abrupt climate change, ecosystem loss, and biosphere collapse.

Ecosystems are being wantonly liquidated based upon the myth that we can grow forever. Yet we know perpetual exponential economic growth is impossible on a finite planet. Humanity is systematically dismantling Earth’s environmental life support systems, and at most a few more decades of industrial growth will be inevitably followed by ecosystem and biosphere collapse.

The human family is epically failing to protect and restore ecosystems and reduce greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to avert global ecosystem collapse, achieve ecological sustainability, and enjoy universal well-being forever. The brutal manner in which humankind treats Earth, other species, and each other makes a mockery of claims of being civilized. At our worst, we have become out-of-control vermin destroying our own habitat for momentary pleasure.

The human family is in ecological overshoot, having exceeded Earth’s carrying capacity, and is pulling down all species and the biosphere with us, as Earth’s life collapses into nothingness. There is no easy way out, as together we face an end to ecology, and thus life itself.

Sustainability Solutions Exist

Workable solutions to climate change and broad-based environmental decline exist; they include ending fossil fuels, protecting and restoring ecosystems, agro-ecological food production, reducing population and inequity, and establishing a steady state economy. Plainly, however, such a transition is not going to be easy. Solutions to avert global ecosystem collapse will be disruptive. Yet there is no alternative if together humanity is to survive and enjoy well-being within Earth’s ecological boundaries.

Industrial growth at the expense of ecosystems and climate must end as soon as possible. For human and all life’s survival and well-being, intact ecosystems must remain the context for human endeavors. Huge potential exists to further develop organic, permaculture based agro-ecological systems for growing our food. Ultimately, we are all challenged to create something of worth from our hands and minds working on the land, based upon regenerating and nurturing ecosystems, for our daily sustenance.

We each must nurture a sense of enoughness, realizing more isn’t always better, particularly if it undermines our natural habitat, and thus our ability to persist.

It is not too late to embrace an ecology ethic. But the longer we wait, the more limited our options. Despite pernicious trends in ecological decline – and allowing for the possibility of a deep resiliency to the Earth System of which we are unaware – out of love of life, we owe it to Earth, kindred species, and kids everywhere to try everything possible to save being.

Growth in industry, population, consumption, and inequity cannot be maintained. Together we must reach a steady state economy whereby natural capital is replenished, not diminished. Through measures like educating all girls and providing birth control to all, we must urgently pursue reductions in human population, the most basic human impact upon the climate and ecosystems, or the biosphere collapses.

Ignorance and superstition must be banished through education and promoting a love of truth, justice, knowledge, wisdom, and fairness.

For capitalism to have any future and avoid social, ecological, and economic collapse on a dead planet, it must learn to price external costs and environmental risk now, while

rejecting its obsession with growth as the ultimate measure of well-being. Otherwise industrial capitalism will have to be replaced soon just so most may survive, let alone thrive.

Alternatives exist that are fair and reward hard work, but sadly we find it easier to consider the end of life on Earth, rather than embrace essential social change.

For human survival and well-being, committing acts of ecocide that destroy ecosystems must somehow be made unacceptable, and this must be enforced. The environment movement must make more of an effort to communicate the complexity of ecological crises, their profound risk, and these and other sufficient solutions – while resolutely rejecting and outing greenwash that legitimates ecocidal activities.

The green movement must also move beyond awareness-raising stunts and build a broad-based movement to seize power and to implement the ecological policies necessary to sustain being.

Only total societal reorganization away from destroying ecosystems and burning fossil fuels can save Earth and humanity. Either humanity finds a way together to implement difficult ecological policies to end fossil fuels, protect ecosystems, and achieve a steady-state economy – or it is the end. No measures except indiscriminate terrorism targeting innocents can be off the table in efforts to together protect ecology.

Hope in Ecosystems

Today free your mind and senses to see ecology everywhere, in everything you do, and the myriad ways it suffers from human hubris, indifference, ignorance, and overuse. As long as together we still breathe, there is hope we can sustain Earth, but realistically the state of ecosystems and the biosphere is grim and worsening. We must start in haste, today, to build the world that is possible and needed.

Love of other peoples and species, nature, truth, justice, and equity are the only lasting basis of global ecological sustainability and show the only effective way forward to avoid final ecosystem collapse. For a sustainable, decent future we must go back to the land, stop burning fossil fuels, and nurture ecosystems and one another.

We are one human family with inalienable rights and duties to freedom, work, equity, peace, justice, and sustained ecology. Profound inequity, ecological collapse, persistent injustice, nationalistic perma-war, superstition, and ignorance when faced with truth – all are sicknesses that mar human potential and will prove fatal.

Together the human family either learns to live well together within intact ecosystems and without fossil fuels or faces a period of profound suffering, followed by biosphere collapse and the end of being. Together we could end the current system’s elite rule, inequity, injustice, and gross ecological negligence at any time. Either we act together soon, courageously, on the basis of truthful ecological knowledge, or else each of us alone faces misery and a final apocalyptic global ecological collapse.

Ecology is the meaning of life. Truth, justice, equity, and sustainability are the ideals whereby ecology can be maintained. Let’s make it so.

ecoearth.info

Citizens Assembly

  From Occupy Movement to a Permanent Political Force

“In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try

and change the problematic model.

You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.”

Buckminster Fuller

We well know that our systems of governance are problematic to put it mildly and if we follow Fuller’s advice then we ought to create another model to make our existing system obsolete.

I am not sure how much more Fuller had to say about the matter or what he was referring to specifically when he said or wrote that statement. But in this article I will apply it in relation our plight with a thoroughly corrupt political system.

The Occupy Movement is still a minority movement, despite its growing popularity. Though it seems to be composed of people who are thinking and dreaming big. Occupy participants are brimming with hope in action and they have placed that hope not in some man or woman, but in themselves as a collective with a just and common cause.

They seem determined to change not only their own broken institutions, but they are also looking to band with Occupy Movements from other countries in the hope of creating a better world for all concerned.

But how do we go about changing our monolithic and seemingly all powerful institutions? They have mountains of money, they make the laws to suit their aims and they command military-police forces.  We are learning that we, the 99 percent, are still much bigger and even more powerful than the Establishment.

But to achieve our goals we need more than greater numbers and raw power—-we need organization. Every complex agency has an organizational system that enables it to accomplish its goals. The Occupy Movement will need to evolve from rag tag protest movement to a permanent political force in order to achieve its goals. The Occupy Movement could very well be the seedling of the exo-establishment structure (Citizens Assembly) we need to replace our pathetic government. Let us please come together to make it so. Any bright future for all concerned will depend on it. Make no mistake about it our generation will decide either the legacy or the tragedy of humankind.

Indeed our future lies with the principles embodied by the emerging good will organizations.

They hold the vision of a just and equitable society striving to maintain an ecological balance between its own members and between those it shares the planet with–the plants and animals.

These organizations represent the hope of humanity and it is also where the rubber meets the road—principles in motion.

Collective action is the key which will unlock the creative life-affirming and progressive potential inherent in the human spirit.

The lock is a system of inherited political-commercial powers structures that are unwilling to change despite the undeniable evidence that the dominant economic-political model is a dead end street.It is up to us to oblige The System to reform. The System is bound by design to perpetuate itself. Its democratic gestures big-fish-scary are illusions. Its strategy is to pacify its subjects while it goes about business as usual.

The collective action I speak of must be greater than the forces that keep emerging cultural movements at bay, locked down and largely ineffectual.

Deforestation, resources depletion, pollution, social decay, human rights abuse and militarism are still running rampant despite the fact that the social and environmental justice movements are now over 40 years old.

It could be a case of too little and too late.

Please bear in mind that the political power structures we are dealing with have honed their conquer and domination skills over the last 5000 years.

The ideas of egalitarianism and ecology as socio-cultural ordering principles are by comparison embryonic and therefore easily contained and suppressed by the 5000 year old prevailing culture of brute force.

They have well fortified positions and all the power one can dream of. We, however, outnumber them by at least 100,000 to one and we are armed with the principles of justice and 21st century communication technologies.

Big-fish-scary-no-more.. The Pen and now the keyboard are mightier than the sword. The various political uprisings around the world are testament to a new wave of effective political dissent and reform tactics.

We have the rightful cause, we have the willingness and we finally have the tools with which to course correct from the perilous path the world is currently being led down.

What we lack is the organizational superstructure to sufficiently amplify the will of the people through the multitude of existing organizations.

In other words, in order to achieve the kinds of reforms now demanded by the socio-ecological condition of the planet we need to pool our resources together.

The many good will movements of the world are by themselves insufficient to oblige governments to make the necessary reforms.

But a collective of movements would carry the necessary clout to get the attention of governments.  It is not difficult to imagine a collaborative effort between the many good will organizations of the world.

emergent-culture

What Did You Do?

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

After Creation

This old hippie is a newbie blogger and my little blog is only three weeks old so do bear with me.. Yes, a very new blog indeed so if you are reading this post and if you have any advice, tips or criticisms do let me know.

After the first week most of my posts have been externally sourced so I felt it was time for another bit of personal input. With this in mind I intend to update my personal profile in the near future. My intention from the start was to create a sort of gallery for my artwork, digital and paintings, so I’ll head this post with a painting, “The Weeks After Creation”. Where possible I couple my art with my main theme which is the 2012era ‘period of transition’…

I firmly believe that the subjects of ancient and pre-deluvian history and even pre-history, paganism, religion, ecology, peace, economics, new physics, earth mysteries and counter political movements are all gelling into the current matrix of the 2012 transition.

I like combining artwork and wording as a medium for the transmission of information and ideas, and as such it might be seen as a method of advertising or propagation but I prefer to consider this as my own inalienable right to push my own agenda. And so I intend to continue as I began by posting whatever I can about this subject and I hope I can elaborate further on the various aspects as time passes. I believe that the human race is at a very major crossroads, but with the internet as the most useful tool in our hands, I think we can turn things around and take the road that leads to evolution and not destruction.

Thanks goes to my favorite authors, bloggers and websites which I rely on for their knowledge and wisdom. Síochána.