Category Archives: Nature and the Environment

On giving this Christmas

08 Sunday Dec 2019

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, Festivals, Human Behavior, Nature and the Environment

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Christmas Cactus – Gift of Mother Earth – My succulent garden
Photo taken November 23, 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 →

Lessons from Nature: Adapting to Change

03 Sunday Nov 2019

Posted by in Nature and the Environment

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Section of my succulent garden

 

The succulent plants in my garden brighten my life. During humanity’s mad dash towards the abyss, their quiet dynamic presence calm my troubled mind. Under California’s scorching sunshine that set dry brush ablaze, my succulent plants have found a way to survive the extreme heat. Some change color; others become more compact in form.

“Flap Jack” or Paddle Plant – Parent plant under heat stress

“Flap Jack” or Paddle Plant – Area of little direct sunlight
Grown from cuttings from parent plant

 

Given their amazing ability to propagate from cuttings, I’ve planted succulents in several garden plots of our apartment complex. I marvel at their adaptation to different soil quality and amount of sunlight.

Aeonium “Mint Saucer” – Area with full sunlight

Aeonium “Mint Saucer” – Little sunlight during early morning

 

The adverse effects of our climate and ecological crises will intensify in the years ahead. It’s already happening here in California. People who have lost their homes in areas ravaged by wildfires must now question the viability of staying and rebuilding. This is also the case for areas facing prolonged drought and frequent flooding.

My birthplace in Georgetown, Guyana, is also under threat. The Guyanese Online Blog recently posted a video (duration 2:04 minutes) demonstrating the gravity of the situation.

Source: Guyanese Online Blog

 

A time is coming—perhaps, sooner than we envisage—when people everywhere across our country and planet will be on the move. Pulling up our roots and resettling in different lands is nothing new for our species. But the climate and ecological changes already underway will demand much more of us.

Like the succulents, will our species adapt to surviving on less water, on less food? How will we adapt to living on a hotter planet?

Earth Day 2019: Protect Our Species

21 Sunday Apr 2019

Posted by in Nature and the Environment

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Photo Credit: Bees – Earth Day Network

 

April 22nd is Earth Day 2019. The theme this year – Protect Our Species – aims to “educate and raise awareness about the accelerating rate of extinction of millions of species and the causes and consequences of this phenomenon.” Other goals include achieving major policies to protect these species, building a global movement that embraces nature, and encouraging individual actions to adopt a plant-based diet and stop pesticide and herbicide use.

Since the loss of the dinosaurs more than 60 million years ago, our planet now faces the greatest rate of extinction due to human impact on their habitats. Learn more about What is driving this process of extinction?

Earth Day Network (EDN) sums up the scope of this threat with the following 10 facts for global species decline. It’s a shameful report card of our deficiency in stewardship.

Fact #1 – Our planet is losing species at an estimated 1,000 to 10,000 times their normal rate.

Fact #2 – A new study of insect populations in Germany suggests a decline of more than 75% over the last 28 years.

Fact #3 – Habitat destruction, exploitation, and climate change are driving the loss of half of our planet’s wild animal population.

Fact #4 – Among our planet’s 504 primate species, 60% are threatened with extinction and 75% are in severe population decline.

Fact #5 – Across our planet each year, more than 650,000 marine mammals are caught or seriously injured by fishing gear.

Fact #6 – In the past 20 years, global fishing operations have adversely affected 75% of all toothed whale species, 65% of baleen whale species, and 65% of pinniped species.

Fact #7 – Forty percent (40%) of our planet’s bird species are in decline and 1 in 8 is threatened with extinction.

Fact #8 – Earth’s big cats, including tigers, leopards, and cheetahs, are in critical decline and many will become extinct in the next decade.

Fact #9 – If the current decline in lizard populations continues, 40% of all lizard species will be extinct by 2080.

Fact #10 – The American Bison, once numbered in the millions, now occupy less than one percent of their original habitat.

Learn more at EDN’s Protect our Species Primer and Action Toolkit. 

All is not yet lost. We can slow the rate of extinctions by working together to build a united global movement of consumers, educators, religious leaders, and scientists to demand immediate action. 

For too long, we humans have placed ourselves above and apart from our planetary web of life, ignoring the interconnectivity of all life forms. To drive national and global economic growth, our species continue to mistreat, exploit, and destroy non-human life. Do our cities have to burn like the Notre Dame Cathedral for humankind to finance and take swift, decisive action to do what needs to be done?

 

Earth Day 2018: End Plastic Pollution

22 Sunday Apr 2018

Posted by in Nature and the Environment, United States

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Great Pacific Garbage Patch - NOAA

Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Photo Credit: Marine Debris NOAA

 

Today is Earth Day 2018. The theme this year is End Plastic Pollution in response to the exponential growth of plastic waste that now poses a threat to human survival owing to its un-biodegradable nature. When exposed to water, sun, or other elements, our plastic waste breaks down into tiny particles invisible to the naked eye. These particles – called microplastics – now contaminate our drinking water, seafood, or even the salt we add to our meals.

Earth Day Network (EDN) sums up the scope of this threat with the following 10 facts of plastic in our oceans.

Plastic waste floating in the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Honduras

Plastic waste floating in the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Honduras
Photo Credit: U.K. Daily Mail

 

Fact #1 – About 8 million metric tons of plastic enter our oceans every year.

Fact #2 – Five massive patches of plastics are growing in the oceans worldwide. The one between California and Hawaii is the size of the state of Texas.

Fact #3 – Every minute, one garbage truck of plastic is dumped into our oceans.

Fact #4 – The amount of plastic in the ocean is set to increase tenfold by 2020.

Fact #5 – By 2050 plastic in the oceans will outweigh the fish.

Fact #6 – Plastic is contaminating remote depths of the ocean.

Fact #7 – Marine organisms and animals are starving to death with undigested plastic in their stomachs.

Fact #8 – Contact with marine plastic increases disease in coral reefs, home to more than 25 percent of marine life.

Fact #9 – The Great Pacific Garbage Patch contains more plastic than natural prey upon which fish feed.

Fact #10 – Many fish humans consume have ingested plastic microfibers. Continue reading →

The state as ultimate “landlord” of nonhuman nature

11 Sunday Mar 2018

Posted by in Human Behavior, Nature and the Environment

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Athabasca Tar Sands - Alberta - Canada - Before and after arrival of oil companies

Athabasca Tar Sands – Alberta – Canada
Before and after arrival of oil companies

 

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 →

How the web of life became Cheap Nature

25 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by in Human Behavior, Nature and the Environment

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The Web of Life Reshaped - Painting by Mike Caimbeul

The Web of Life Reshaped – Painting by Mike Caimbeul
Photo Credit: Bongdoogle.com

 

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.”

How do humans fit into the web of Life?

18 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by in Human Behavior, Nature and the Environment

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Web of Life Quote from Chief Seattle

 

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.

Planet Earth: Our Home & Resting Place

28 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by in Nature and the Environment, Poetry by Rosaliene Bacchus

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View of Earth from Space - NASA

View of Earth by the Apollo 17 Crew while traveling to the Moon on December 7, 1972
Photo Credit: NASA

 

Planet Earth
Mother Gaia to the Ancient Greeks
goddess and primordial power
to emerge after Chaos

Spinning and hurtling through space
at about 66,600 miles per hour
always in motion
trapped in orbit around the Sun

Earth your home and mine
no escape
gravity holds us all hostage
except for

Astronauts and cosmonauts
in their rocket ships
a privileged few
to view Earth from space
a tiny, fragile, blue ball of life
with a paper-thin shield
hanging in the void
exposed & vulnerable to

Solar flares and radiation
reflected and absorbed by a 300-mile-thick atmosphere
holding the life-giving air we breathe
a ticking time-bomb with rising carbon dioxide levels
as of January 25, 2018
the Doomsday Clock moved to two minutes to midnight
a notch closer to the end of humanity
from looming threats of climate change and nuclear war

Doomsday Clock updated to two minutes to midnight - 25 January 2018

Doomsday Clock updated to two minutes to midnight – January 25, 2018
Updated yearly by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since its creation in 1947
Photo Credit: Science Magazine

 

Spaceship Earth
one living, breathing organism
with one destiny
the “overview effect” causes
a cognitive shift of self-awareness
as part of the larger whole 

Mother Earth Gaia
our home and final resting place
if we the people of Earth don’t take care of her
if we don’t set aside our differences
and work together
who else will

Watch the Video: The Overview Effect

Working together to sustain life on Planet Earth

27 Sunday Aug 2017

Posted by in Nature and the Environment

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I’m always heartened to come in contact with young people who are pro-active in changing humanity’s path towards a sustainable future for life on our planet. Here’s one such young woman, an undergraduate in Mississippi, who realizes that our success in achieving this aim depends upon collective action and connection with like-minded individuals.

As y’all know, I was selected as an Eco Rep Leader at my university. Yesterday was our official training for the year. We had our training at Strawberry Plains Audubon Center. I had only been there once and it was for their well-known Hummingbird Festival. The center is one of Mississippi’s finest yet lesser known treasures. With […]

via The Importance of Connecting with Like-Minded Individuals — Erdling mit Fernweh

Earth Day 2017: Environmental & Climate Science Literacy

22 Saturday Apr 2017

Posted by in Nature and the Environment, United States

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Earth Day 2017 - Adopt the Planet - NASA

Saturday, April 22nd, is Earth Day 2017. The theme is: Environmental & Climate Science Literacy. The three-year campaign begins with a March for Science rally on the National Mall in Washington D.C. It will bring together scientists and supporters to demand that our leaders recognize the scientific truths across all disciplines, including climate change and other environmental issues.

“We need to build a global citizenry fluent in the concepts of climate change and aware of its unprecedented threat to our planet,” says Kathleen Rogers, President of Earth Day Network. “Environmental and climate literacy is the engine not only for creating green voters and advancing environmental and climate laws and policies but also for accelerating green technologies and jobs.”

Earth Day Network is publishing Earth Day and Teach-In toolkits online that lay out steps for holding a successful event. To learn more about Earth Day Network and March for Science go to www.earthday.org.