22 Sunday Dec 2019
Posted in Human Behavior
We have failed…through our lack of responsible awareness…and thus added to suffering around the world. All of us are cripples—some physically, some mentally, some emotionally. We must, therefore, strive cooperatively to create a new world. There is no time left for destruction, for hatred, for anger. We must build, in hope and joy and celebration.
08 Sunday Dec 2019
Tags
Christmas traditions & festivities, Gift-giving at Christmas, Human consumption, Mother Earth, Santa Claus, Storyteller, UN Climate Change Conference Madrid 2019
Our climate emergency is for real. In his address at the opening of the United Nations Climate Change Conference held on December 2 to 13, 2019, in Madrid, Spain, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said:
The latest, just-released data from the World Meteorological Organization show that levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have reached another new record high. Global average levels of carbon dioxide reached 407.8 parts per million in 2018. And I remember, not long ago, 400 parts per million was seen as an unthinkable tipping point. We are well over it. The last time there was a comparable concentration of CO2 was between 3 and 5 million years ago, when the temperature was between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius warmer than now and sea levels were 10 to 20 metres higher than today.
Yet our collective behavior indicate that we humans are still in denial. Here in the United States, beginning on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, commercial activity has exploded with preparations for the Christmas festivities. Whether we’re Christians or not, Christmas traditions permeate our lives.
Christmas tree lighting ceremonies, organized by our town and city halls, mark the beginning of the season. We decorate our homes. In some neighborhoods, homeowners seem to outdo each other in decorating their front yards. Our children take part in Christmas pageants that enact the birth of Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the cause of joyful celebrations among Christians worldwide. Traditional Christmas carols lift our spirits. Another important part of our Christmas traditions is Santa Claus with his workshop of elves, toiling year-round to make gifts for children for delivery during the wee hours on Christmas Day. Continue reading
18 Sunday Nov 2018
Posted in Guyana, Human Behavior, United States
Tags
Children of Jonestown, Jonestown/Guyana, Mass-murder-suicide, Peoples Temple Agricultural Project/Guyana, Peoples Temple Church, Reverend Jim Jones, Revolutionary Suicide, Youth Climate Activists
As California burns and super-storms ravage our southern and eastern coastal states, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Reverend Jim Jones and the People’s Temple. Today, November 18th, is the fortieth anniversary of the mass murder-suicide of 916 Americans at the People’s Temple Agricultural Project at Jonestown in the northwest forested region of Guyana.
The 276 dead American children had no choice.
Victim of his own megalomania and alternate reality, the Pentecostal leader coerced his followers into ingesting cyanide-laced, grape-flavored Flavor Aid.
“Revolutionary suicide,” the Reverend Jim Jones called his final, defiant act. Continue reading
14 Sunday Oct 2018
Posted in Human Behavior, Social Injustice, United States
Tags
Brett Kavanaugh, Christine Blasey Ford, Creation accounts in the Bible, Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), Equal rights for girls and women, International Day of the Girl Child, Sexual assault, Sexual predators, U.S. Supreme Court
Despite sexual assault allegations, on October 6, 2018, Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in to the U.S. Supreme Court. His contentious nomination process before the male-dominated Senate Committee hammered home the gnawing reality: Women have yet to achieve equal footing with men under our legal system.
To achieve what may have been a lifelong ambition, Kavanaugh exposed his “two spirited daughters” to the public bashing of his integrity. Has he used the sexual allegations – which he has denied with tears and anger – as a teaching moment for his ten- and thirteen-year old daughters? Has he considered the possibility that his daughters could one day suffer the same trauma as his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford?
Ford did not tell her parents what had happened that summer day while she was out with trusted friends. Like so many of us born female, she kept the sexual assault a secret. Continue reading
27 Sunday May 2018
Posted in Human Behavior, Poetry by Rosaliene Bacchus
Tags
Cosmic perspective of life, Einstein's theory of relativity, Jerusalem, Misogyny, Quantum entanglement, Racism, Space-time continuum, The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg, World Peace, Xenophobia
Einstein’s theories of relativity
upending the way we view time.
Past – present – future but an illusion.
Time & space woven together
forming a four-dimensional fabric.
Space-time, Einstein called it.
Quantum entanglement defies physics.
Separate entangled photons
& they remain connected
mimicking the behavior of the other
at the same time.
Spooky action at a distance, Einstein called it.
What of Man made from stardust
of atoms & entangled photons
existing in space-time
mindless of his cosmic entanglement
and shared fate?
Misogyny – racism – xenophobia
expand space-time between photons
disrupting their entanglement.
Same but separate
yearning and friction without end.
America
rising from the detritus of war
splits the atom
unleashing humanity’s Doomsday Machine
in space-time.
Jerusalem
citadel of the gods
of Christians – Jews – Muslims
trapped in space-time
where past – present – future are one.
In space-time warped by Man
world peace is impossible.
Man of Earth
how do you undo
what can’t be disentangled?
13 Sunday May 2018
Posted in Family Life, Human Behavior, United States
Today on Mother’s Day in America, families are celebrating the day with their mothers and grandmothers. While my sons will mark the day by joining me in activities I enjoy, I see no cause to celebrate motherhood.
Where is the joy of motherhood, I ask myself, when you live in fear of ICE agents separating you from your American-born children? Where is the joy in motherhood when your hours of labor value little to provide food and shelter for your children? Where is the joy in motherhood when intolerance, bullying, and hate put your children’s lives at risk? Where is the joy in motherhood when you watch your child suffer for lack of medical treatment?
Why, I ask myself, do we bring children into a hostile world that no longer fights for their right to life once they leave our womb? Why do we bring children into a world facing ecological collapse, climate disruption, and threat of nuclear war?
Speak to me not of love. Love protects and defends our young. Love nurtures.
I speak not to parents and grandparents who are doing their best, going beyond the possible. Rather, I speak to those among us who support laws and policies that favor corporations and billionaires and punish the families of our nation.
In an overpopulated world, motherhood has lost its meaning. Our uterus is for “baby-hosting.” Just ask Katy Talento on the White House team.
11 Sunday Mar 2018
Posted in Human Behavior, Nature and the Environment
Tags
Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature History and the Crisis of Capitalism Edited by Jason W Moore (2016), Capitalocene, Christian Parenti, Construction of Erie Canal, Environment-making, Political Ecology of the State
The third and final part of my series on the book, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Kairos Books, 2016), edited by Jason W. Moore, is a synopsis of Christian Parenti’s article on “Environment-Making in the Capitalocene Political Ecology of the State.” A sociologist and geographer, Christian Parenti is a professor of Global Liberal Studies at the New York University.
Parenti’s core argument is that “the state is an inherently environmental entity, and as such, it is at the heart of the value form.” Within its territorial borders, the modern state controls the surface of the earth – the biosphere. Continue reading
25 Sunday Feb 2018
Posted in Human Behavior, Nature and the Environment
Tags
Anthropocene, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature History and the Crisis of Capitalism Edited by Jason W Moore (2016), Artist and painter Mike Caimbeul, “Cheap Nature”, Capitalocene, Humans and the web of Life, Jason W Moore, Man and Nature, Rise of Capitalism
Part Two of my series on the book, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Kairos Books, 2016), edited by Jason W. Moore, is a synopsis of Moore’s article on “The Rise of Cheap Nature.” In his article, he refers to two kinds of nature: nature with a common ‘n’ is the web of life; Nature with a capital ‘N’ is environments without humans.
Like Eileen Crist (Part One), Moore argues that we live in the “Age of Capital,” the Capitalocene. Until we understand that “capital and power do not act upon nature, but develop through the web of life,” we cannot formulate solutions for the environmental crises we now face.
Most people (myself included), Moore notes, still think about capitalism in economic terms – markets, prices, money, and the like. He proposes that we think about the rise of capitalism as a new way of organizing nature. We would start to consider capitalism not as world-economy but as world-ecology – the organization of work, re/production of nature, and the conditions of life as an organic whole for the accumulation of capital and pursuit of power. In other words, human activity is environmental-making.
Moore challenges the Anthropocene narrative that capitalism emerged in eighteenth-century England with the Industrial Revolution, powered by coal and steam. The focus on fossil fuels as the ignition for the growth of capital ignores the greatest landscape revolution in human history – in terms of speed, scale, and scope – that occurred in the three centuries after 1450.
The conquest of the Atlantic and appropriation of the New World brought vast expanses of “Cheap Nature” and the labor-power to create wealth. “Cheap” refers to the unpaid work/energy of organic life. Numbered among Cheap Nature – along with trees, soils, and rivers – were indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, nearly all women, and even white-skinned men (Slavs, Jews, Irish) living in semi-colonial regions. These humans, deemed not Human, provided Cheap Labor.
By 1500, Spain alone had colonized an area greater than the whole of Europe and more than 25 million indigenous peoples. Sugar, the modern world’s original cash crop, fed on the work/energy of African slaves. Sugar production devoured forests and exhausted soils. Between 1570 and 1640, Brazilian sugar grew three percent every year. In northeastern Brazil at the height of the sugar boom in the 1650s, twelve thousand hectares of forest were cleared in a single year, as compared with 200 years in twelfth-century Europe.
Scientific advances made it possible to put the whole of nature to work for capital. “Science” revealed nature’s secrets for capital accumulation. “Economy” channeled the labor-power of the landless proletariat into the cash nexus of the labor market. The “state” enforced the cash nexus.
To maintain expanding commodity production required cheap, productive labor; cheap food to control the price of labor-power; cheap raw materials; and cheap energy for diverse industries. Fossil fuels, seemingly unlimited supplies of Cheap Nature, were put to work for the rapid expansion of capitalism.
Though rising costs of fossil fuel production and labor costs have shrunk sources of Cheap Nature and Cheap Labor, capitalism has managed to keep ahead with Cheap Nature strategies within reach of its power. (I think of low cost labor of America’s private prison population and the expanding gig economy.)
Moore concludes that financialization and extreme inequality are predictable results of the end of Cheap Nature. The web of life can no longer sustain capitalism’s world-ecology. Our strategies for liberation must not only determine how to redistribute wealth, but also “how to remake our place in nature in a way that promises emancipation for all life.”
18 Sunday Feb 2018
Posted in Human Behavior, Nature and the Environment
Tags
Anthropocene, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature History and the Crisis of Capitalism Edited by Jason W Moore, Capitalocene, Eileen Crist, Humans and the web of Life, Jason W Moore, Man and Nature, Sixth Mass Extinction
According to the tenets of Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – Man is the crown of God’s creation, with dominion over all living species on the Earth (Genesis 1: 26-31). Thus empowered, Man has transformed Earth’s ecosystems with devastating effects on forests, rivers, lakes, seas, oceans, and all the non-humans that live therein. With our factories belching carbon into the atmosphere, global warming has become our new reality. The course is set for an unknown state in human experience.
In 2000, the atmospheric chemist and Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen conceived the concept “Anthropocene” to denote a new geological time in which Man is a major geological force. But several geologists and environmentalists disagree with his word choice. Others believe we live in the age of capital, the “Capitalocene.”
Jason W. Moore, an environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University, is one such social scientist. In his book, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Kairos Books, 2016), he and six other contributors argue that Capitalocene is a much more appropriate alternative. Concepts matter, he reiterates in his “Introduction,” since we use them to make sense of our world.
“The kind of thinking that created today’s global turbulence is unlikely to help us solve it,” Moore notes.
In this article, the first of a series, I share the contribution “On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature” by Eileen Crist, a sociologist and professor at Virginia Tech.
Crist argues that the concept of the Anthropocene reinforces human dominion over Nature, “corralling the human mind into viewing our master identity as manifestly destined, quasi-natural, and sort of awesome.” We arrogantly perceive ourselves on par with the tremendous forces of Nature. Such mentality empowers “the human enterprise” to manage the planet for production of resources and, through technological engineering, to contain the risks and ecological disasters.
She observes that Man’s historical records do not record the non-human others who don’t speak and have no control over their destinies. The sixth mass extinction, resulting from destruction of their habitats for human expansion, becomes just a casualty of history. We accept as normal the humanization of Earth, at the expense of its non-human inhabitants.
“Where is the freedom of humanity to choose a different way of inhabiting Earth, to change our historical discourse,” Crist asks.
Crist calls for humankind to end our species-supremacist civilization and become integrated with the biosphere. This would require an end to viewing our planet as an assortment of “resources” or “natural capital,” “ecosystem services,” “working landscapes,” and the like. While she does not envisage an end to human technological innovation, the sociologist has no idea what such a world would look like. In deindustrializing our relationship with land, seas, and domestic animals, we-humans would have a better chance of reversing the takeover of Nature for our own needs and appetites.
“In making ourselves integral, and opening into our deepest gift of safeguarding the breadth of Life, the divine spirit of the human surfaces into the Light,” Crist concludes.
30 Saturday Sep 2017
Posted in Human Behavior, United States
We live in challenging times, bombarded with information from all sides. Our reality can conflict with the “truth” disseminated by our leaders: government, scientific, business, religious, and familial. Fellow blogger Katharine Otto grapples with this dilemma, opening up pathways for our own meanderings in discerning the truth.
Information. Misinformation. Disinformation. News. Fake News. Opinion. Generalization. Prediction. Propaganda. Lies. Advertising. Gossip. Second guesses. Stereotypes. Assumptions. I feel overwhelmed by the glut of demands on attention and allegiance. What to believe? What not to believe? To believe everything and nothing at the same time? To trust my own judgment or to doubt? I long […]
