Discuss: Activism’s Paradox Mountain

Humanity is in clear & present danger of losing the exquisite value to be found in one of God’s gifts to humanity: the carefully and skillfully developed science on climate change.

Is it possible that the standards for determining what is real and true in our culture today are these: whatsoever is widely shared, consensually validated and judged to be ecomonically expedient, politically convenient, socially agreeable and religiously tolerated is true and real…........ the biophysical conditions of the natural world notwithstanding?

At least to me, it seems that good science is ignored, countless distractions presented or else silence allowed to prevail whenever reasonable and sensible evidence comes into conflict with what culture prescribes as real and true. Perhaps science does present culture with evidence of inconvenient truths.

Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A. AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001

We have passed the line of no return. I have been an activist for many years. I remember when Ralph Tory, around 1986, came back to canada from a conference in washington, where there was a discussion on what to do about the environmental degradation. According to his reporting, people made the suggestion that business would have to cap growth. The members of the business communities were all against it. Nothing got done, in the mean time lots of environmental groups became co-opted. Lots of activists are paid to be activists. Poverty, wars and environmental degradation has achieved an all time high. Academic types took over the environmental movement completely.  The token non-whites are rare and far in between (in North America). Voices are silenced, by death (Corbin Harney - Shundahai Network) or by disillusion (my own).
Actions are pathetically stupid (write letters of protest or fly to Bali to demonstrate about an agreement that will not be implemented (remember Kyoto?, Remeber the Waste Trade agreement done in Basel? ask Jim Vallette what happened to the Basel agreement?)
The environment news of record is the Rachel’s weekly has records of all the above.
So we can be saddened by the loss of opportunities, or we can try to re-bild community, but the main stuff is not touched with a ten or 1000 foot pole: consumption and corruption.
Now that the dollar is loosing its value sooner than we all might think, everyone slumbering will have to get up and do something that they never prepared themselves for: face reality and think up solutions for :
1 - water shortages - e.g. Tennessee, Georgia and California (invading canada for it or using NAFTA chapter 11 will not do);
2 - Storms, fires, floods, earthquakes;
3 - a huge population of uneducated by design; violence fed, by design; marginalized by design and exploited by design; not knowing or having experience in how to deal with lack of their favourite junk food joint (the only place where s/he can find a meal they can afford to pay for, with the meager wage they make.
4 - the backlash from all the lies that will be uncovered and how frustrations will be dealt with.

Do I need to go on?
So all of you that are writing in this discussion are having a 1980’s conversation, while the tanks are at the door, the drought is at the doors, the concentration camps inside of the us have been built, the floods and weather storms are at the door (World Watch predicted long time ago). Your conversation should not be intellectually driven. All of the above done in your name.  Who cares about Rick Bass? Great he wrote. Well what have you all done with what he wrote? How his writing get us all off the shithole we find ourselves in?
Not happy to make a disaster of the us and north america, american military is making a mess out of other parts of the globe and destroying our home - the earth-.
What are you doing about stopping the obliteration of Gaia?
There are more than a million scientists, intellectuals, writers, philosophers, university educated people in the us alone; you all know about the problems. What keep you from working together in getting this mess clean up?
Pretty soon we will not have time for compassionate and productive living: survival will be the big stake.
My suggestion:
Call on citizens to design a plan of action to deal with the major issues in your community. Call it adhoc commission on surviving the crunch.
Place in the agenda all the problems.
Prioritize the ones that are most important e.g.
a- drink water (where does it comes from. Is it secure for the population.
2 - Food - where it comes from? Is it secure for the population? If it is not how do we make it secure? What actions do we need to put into place to secure food, water and heat for the winters. Who has the heirloom seeds, where are the orchards and the gardens?
3 - Community building: What are our assets?  How inclusive? How much of the population is marginalized and how to change that? People that are included don’t steal from you.

So you get the drift.

If we don’t get back to basics and start building the future now, there will not be any time left for the organizing that is needed for the transition to be smooth.
If this is not done soon, it will be bloody.
Harris

Bass is correct. there are no alternatives for an almost 50 year old fart, except to pick himself up and try again. The mountain “bleibs Stehen”. However, because it waits does not mean that the dynamics does not change.
See Y’all in Hell.

Have a good day, Tschuss.
Zack Xsi
Berlin

A RUNAWAY TRAIN AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL?

Does how “I feel” or how “we feel” or how anybody else “feels” about the predicament involving the human-induced global challenges that are already visible on the far horizon have any meaning or value? So what?

There is a light in the offing at the end of a tunnel covering the “primrose path” we have set out for our children to march along to reach their future. I think magically and also remain somehow wishful for the children’s long-term wellbeing, for environmental protection and preserving Earth’s body; however, please understand that deep within me is a keen sense of foreboding for the children because the light at the end of the tunnel, at this very moment, appears to be moving toward all of us….........fast.

Dear Friends,

Are we fiddling while ‘Rome is burning’ and Earth is overheating?

Are we communicating as if we are living in a modern day Tower of Babel? Is our spectacular failure to communicate reasonably and sensibly about whatsoever is somehow real, and to widely share adequate understandings regarding both the family of humanity within the natural order of living things and the limitations of the planet we inhabit, in evidence here and now.

Perhaps the human community is indeed in a serious predicament, but only in part because of the objective biological and physical circumstances defining our distinctly human-driven predicament. The global challenges in the offing are further complicated by our incredible failure to communicate effectively about the potentially pernicious results derived from having recklessly grown a soon to become patently unsustainable, colossal global economy, one that we have artificially designed, conveniently constructed, and unrealistically expanded without regard for the requirements of biophysical reality.

Could it be that the current gigantic scale and unchecked growth rate of the global economy is unsustainably driving both per human over-consumption and unrestrained human population growth toward the collapse of Earth’s ecology?

Sincerely,

Steve

Very best for 2008 to all in the Orion Community,

Thanks for faithfully distinguishing scientific facts from the specious ideological factoids which are foisted upon us by a noticeably small group of shrill vendors of conflation, manufactured controversy and confusion.

Much of the world as we know it could be irretrievably gone and irreversibly damaged by what my elder generation is self-righteously counseling and, perhaps, selfishly doing. 

According to some of our leaders, the world is on track to have its first trillionaire before long and, yes, a tiny minority of the projected and fully anticipated 9+ billion people on the planet by 2050 will be “richer,” much richer.  Yesterday’s millionaires have been replaced by today’s billionaires and today’s billonaires will be overtaken by tomorrow’s trillionaires, I suppose. 

According to some of our leaders, there is no end to the globalization of economic activity, to increases in per capita consumption of resources, or to the number of people who can live on a planet with the relatively small size, frangible ecosystem services and limited resources of Earth.

Please know that what all of you report in many places is clear, coherent and reality-oriented.  Thanks especially are due Scott Walker for his support of many expressions of fidelity to science and his willingness to eschew ideology.

Let us consider how daunting global challenges could be posed to humanity by the unregulated consumption, production and propagation activities of my rapacious, not-so-great generation of elders.

Although an unwelcome one, perhaps the time is right to deliver a message that is effectively transmitted to the human community’s richest, most powerful and famous leaders—the ones directing the talking heads in the mass media, organizing public opinion, formulating government policy and implementing action plans—so the word goes out and is widely shared that the time for ubiquitous, self-limiting behavior change is at hand. Consider that now is the time for human beings to acknowledge and accept human limits and Earth’s limitations, and to act accordingly.

Unrestricted consumption, unbridled production and unrestrained propagation activities of the human species, now occurring on a gigantic, soon-to-become patently unsustainable scale worldwide (the very human activities that appear in the main to be giving rise to ominous, potentially pernicious changes in Earth’s ecology) can be reasonably and sensibly managed, modified or otherwise changed, as necessary….. the ill-advised and relentless expansion of economic globalization activities notwithstanding.

The human community can choose different behavioral repertoires: for example, capping per human consumption, reducing large-scale industrialization activities, and approving humane and voluntary reproduction limits.

Hopefully, too much time has not been foolishly wasted, too much of the environment degraded, too many species extirpated, many too many resources rampantly dissipated and too much of the world we inhabit utterly compromised, in large part, because leaders are willfully denying the causes and the consequences of our ravenous consumption, reckless production and feckless propagation activities in these early years of Century XXI.

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population

Excellent piece. Live life responsibly and deliberately. Don’t be resigned to martyrdom.

I thought the article was very honest, and it really covered alot of territories, in the life of the activist. The earth and everything on it, is sacred, living things.
We should never lose hope, in thinking we can not save the planet. Nature has a right to survive on the planet, and I love the trees, I hope we are careful how we chop them down, which we have not. PEACE!