Discuss: Snap into Action for the Climate

Perhaps the human community could more effectively snap into action for the climate if so many of our leaders did not abuse human intelligence and ingenuity by choosing to adamantly idolatrize the endless growth of the global political economy.

Science, reasoning and common sense are being twisted and subordinated to conform to whatever thinking serves our leadership’s intentions to promote the politically convenient and the economically expedient, in the course of its worship of soon to become, unsustainable economic growth.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001

I am grateful for those who write the “in your face” books about the realities of climate change because they are telling us what we need to hear said out loud every single day.
My concern is that I am not hearing the solutions spelled out clearly enough to pull our collective heads out of the sand and create the political will to turn things around.  Every time some idealogical or corporate flunkie says global warmng is a hoax it gets reported on the evening news as if it were real science and the people sigh with relief and go out and buy more SUVs and all sorts of other soothing consumer toys.
Every time I hear more equivocation I want to scream. We do not have time for this. No global mogul needs to make more money. Progress is not consumption. It is not big and red and it not a very tall building. Progress is coming up with ways to live on earth together with all the other creatures in health and peace and with intelligence.  We need to stop putting little boys or girls with something to prove to daddy in the seats of power, and start cleaning up the mess TODAY.  We need to make it very clear to our candidates and ourselves that there is not time to waste.  Politics as usual is not going to get it done. 
When I was a child some 50 plus years ago I learned in school that the rain forests were like the lungs of our planet and was totally convinced that no one would tear them down because no one would be so stupid to tear out his or her lungs. I was wrong.

Sandy Olson,

You said it so well.

RE:

“When I was a child some 50 plus years ago I learned in school that the rain forests were like the lungs of our planet and was totally convinced that no one would tear them down because no one would be so stupid to tear out his or her lungs. I was wrong.”

50 years ago Danny Bloom too:
http://bloomsinthenews.blogspot.com

Hi folks,

I’m glad this conversation is still active. I have been keeping track best I can. 

On a good day:

my carbon footprint is next to nil,

I enjoy this beautiful earth,

I do my “good work” in conservation, and

I am able to “process” the increasingly hard news. 

The Hubble photos are very grounding and reassuring.  Humans define life in terms of water based biology.

When I glimpse at the universes, I see all kinds of other ways of defining life and death-- galaxies, nebula, death stars, star births!

Cosmic dust that I am.

On hard days, I cry myself to sleep in earth’s arms.

xoxo, Paca

Hi Paca,

I thought we’d lost you, with your dwindling carbon footprint. I missed your input.

I’m trying to track the archetypal changes that are taking shape in the unconscious, mostly via dreams. I know this is a minority viewpoint, to say the least, but nevertheless I believe that any change on a conscious, human level will be short-lived if it is not supported by the deeper psychic currents within us. It seems to me we’re in the throes of a world-wide shift in fundamental attitudes. This in itself is a major crisis, and amounts to a collapse of the old vision that sustained us for many centuries. At this point, we don’t know what the critical features of the new vision will be, but it is certain that it will be different from the old.

I just picked up a copy of a book by Theodore Roszak, Person/Planet, published in 1978. It has so many pertinent points that are relevant to our situation today, that I would say it was ahead of its time. I’d like to quote from it, if I may. You may appreciate this, if you haven’t already read it:

“Once, so we have been told by science textbooks since our school days, the Earth was barren rock and vapor. Then her lethargic chemicals were somehow touched with life, and, at last, the planet “peopled”—as spontaneously as a tree bears fruit in season. All this, the long natural history of the Earth, is treasured up in us. The salt of ancient seas can still be found in our blood. The rhythm of the moon is echoed in the cycles of the female body. The remembered shapes of our evolutionary ancestry are recapitulated in every human embryo. In some sense that blends science and myth, vision and history, we were mothered out of the substance of this planet. Her elements, her periodicities, her gravitational embrace, her subtle vibrations still mingle in our nature, worked a billion years down into the textures of life and mind. Even our queer, alienating consciousness rises out of some uncanny potentiality of her elemental stuff. Can a few generations of urbanization and a century or two of scientific skepticism really be enough to cut us off forever from the sense of vital reciprocity between ourselves and the planet that was once the universal knowledge of our race? I think none of us who have experienced even a glimmer of that living continuity should find it hard to accept that our destiny is tied to the need and the will of the Earth. Perhaps what we lack is only the courage to speak what we know.

“How, then, could we now pass into an era of acute ecological emergency, as terrible an emergency as the planetary biosphere has ever known, and not feel the tug of that reciprocity upon us—a deep organic remembrance, a warning, an instruction? But how would we expect the Earth to issue such an instruction? Would we expect it to roll down from the skies—or be proclaimed to us by a goddess who rose from the sea? Surely, we know that the web of nature is spun more subtly than that. The instruction would come to us in the one language most capable of transforming our conduct: not as a command from above or beyond, but as a moral idea realized from within. Just at the planet thinks through us, so we, in our thinking, may draw upon themes and images as ancient as the planet’s own star-burst birth.”

Roszak wrote that passage just over thirty years ago, and, I am convinced, it will still be relevant many years from now.

I just inaugurated a new blog, a week or so ago, in the hopes that I could engage a few hardy souls in exploring the deeper processes that underlie our conscious efforts. I invite you to visit it, Paca, just in case you might find something that speaks to you. The biggest problem I find with blogs, by the way, is that they start at the end, with the latest post, instead of the beginning. I suppose it’s part of the new paradigm. I belong to the generation characterized by what Neil Postman (Technopoly) calls the “typographical mind.” I think in terms of books, where you start at the beginning. Call me old-fashioned, if you will.

Hope to hear from you again.

Your “tocayo,”

Paco Mitchell

My new blog:

http://heronnotebook.blogspot.com

Paco

Tidwell, you should be ashamed of writing such rubbish.  For all our sakes please do your homework, and limit yourself to actual facts rather than populist rant.  The climate is changing, slowly, as it doees naturally, and we need to adapt to such changes not try to stop a planetary change which is primarily natural.  Monumentally stupid ideas like seeding clouds with sulphur or dumping tons of iron filings into the sea will have unintended effects and are most likely to fail at what they are intended for and create new probl;ems not foreseen by their idiot inventors.  Please, people, do your home work and find out the actual facts, not this speculative rubbish.

To Paco, Post 63, among others.

I appreciate that I’m late to respond, and that I haven’t had the time to follow your later posts, nor to follow up at your blog, as you’ve noted you’re posting.

Perhaps the best I can do is to acknowledge and respond to the tone, as much as to the substance, of your post. Which is that I ‘agree’ or perhaps better said, also carry in me, the yearning you express to understand our own natures, and to discover the path to right action. You point towards a mystical search, if I might say it, through dreams and imaging.

My message here may not ‘wash’ with this audience. Indeed it may be fruitless to propose it, as I have, and would continue to do. But what it comes down to is this: as deep as one may go into the unconscious, into the refreshing and re-creative depths of the mind and our intuitive resonances with the worlds around us (plural intended), we also, if there is indeed a difference, have little choice but to mind pragmatics, quantitative and material actualities.

Who crosses a busy street on whim or instinct alone, but also checks to see what’s coming his way, first?

My earlier point had to do with my worry that dialogue based on vague, inaccurate ‘imagery’ of science and technology serve no one. Hence my correction to lines in an earlier post of yours.

I see it again in another message, Post 71, where MikeF writes, ‘...do your homework, and limit yourself to actual facts… The climate is changing, slowly, as it doees naturally...’

Limit ourselves to the facts? Perhaps ‘limit’ is too ‘restrictive’ but by all means we need to be educated to the facts, to know them and be able to work from them towards both practical solutions and spiritual, informed inner positions.

MikeF also has stretched the facts by the way. The ‘facts’ are, based on the Greenland ice core measurements, that the climate has at times warmed, and cooled, VERY rapidly, not ‘slowly’ as his lines state. We are presently in a warming phase. AND the level of CO2, AND the actual, observed rates of climatic warming suggest, if they do not prove, that the contemporary situation IS different from passages of time previously seen.

And of course it IS that present collision of actual events that triggers the ‘panic’ counseled in this article. And which rouses me to remind one and all: panic is not the answer, while considered, informed decision-making IS.

It’s quite popular to dismiss an issue as ‘easy’ by saying ‘It’s not rocket science, you know.’ Well, maybe it IS rocket science, or something close to it. I watched the JPL scientists and engineers husbanding Phoenis to its successful Mars landing the other day and enjoyed immensely their pleasure at a job done well. Deserved pleasure.

As a former middle-school science teacher - and as a practicing fine artist - I am frightened much by the scientific-technical illiteracy of our whole culture. AND by our artistic-humanities illiteracy. Both.

We need to understand rocket science, and we need to know our history and our literatures, if we are to use what we understand for our own good.

That’s what I ‘dream’.