Moneydick

This just in from the Vatican:

Humanity has created the Anthropocene era and must live with it. This requires a new awareness of the risks human actions are having on the Earth and its systems, including the mountain glaciers discussed here. It imposes a new duty to reduce these risks. Failure to mitigate climate change will violate our duty to the vulnerable of the Earth, including those dependent on the water supply of mountain glaciers, and those facing rising sea level and stronger storm surges. Our duty includes the duty to help vulnerable communities adapt to changes that cannot be mitigated. All nations must ensure that their actions are strong enough and prompt enough to address the increasing impacts and growing risk of climate change and to avoid catastrophic irreversible consequences.
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Stewart Brand is pro nuclear power and that's ok.

…Because this is what’s happening. With climate change, we’re looking at a situation where us environmentalists, instead of protecting natural systems from civilization, we’re now trying to protect civilization from a natural system, which is climate responding to our apparently excess greenhouse gases. And if they go ahead as we are today, then we won’t get a stable climate until maybe five degrees Celsius warmer, which is exactly what it was 55 million years ago, in the Eocene-Paleocene Thermal Maximum. There’s no rainforests in that world. There’s carrying(?) capacity for maybe 1.5 billion of us in that world, and it would be tough getting from the seven billion we have now to the 1.5 billion.

What we want is, somehow, to keep the civilization-friendly climate we’ve had for the last 10,000 years going for another 10,000 years. That would be nice. And then we’d get to keep having a civilization. So, in light of that, some different things are green than they used to be, back when the modern environmental movement took shape in the 1970s. Some of our ideas and methods from then don’t really apply now….

…We are now in an era called the Anthropocene, an era in which humans are running way too much of the atmosphere and everything else badly. We’re in this situation where we don’t have a choice of stopping terraforming. We only have a choice of terraforming well. That’s the green project for this century.

Stewart Brand

Contributing to our failure to protect the Earth is the idea–promoted by countless marketing campaigns–that buying something made in a certain way or with certain materials helps save the planet. It’s is a simple fact that production produces waste. End of story. A trillion times a day we buy into the fact that the properties of some manufactured good make it less harmful to the environment.

We are all guilty (I included) of releasing our hold of environmental realities on behalf of some plastic green sticker. The sticker (usually a leaf / clear drop of water motif) touts the product’s adherance to one vein of environmental responsiblity. “Made with 10% renewable energy” or “Made of post-consumer recycled materials.” Whether it be related to what it’s made of, what was recycled to become a part of it, or what type of power contributed to it’s construction–it’s still a waste. As a culture, our eco-awareness takes flight whenever we make one of these “responsible” purchases. Only by reusing or doing without can we we ever be honest with ourselves when we say “I’m helping the environment.” No amount of buying newly-produced manufactured goods ever helped the planet. Of course there may be exceptions, but there aren’t many.

Passing on a purchase should provide us with a far greater eco-snobbery than a greenwashed purchase.

Producing things takes enormous amounts of energy. Products made of bamboo–like a rug or a sheet–may be built with renewable resources. But the fact that they were cut by steel, powered by coal, and then shipped on a freighter thousands of miles in green packaging should give us pause. Instead, the intrinsic value of the product grows far higher. We would pay a premium for that sticker. Time to pat ourselves on the back for leaving the store.

[blackbirdpie id="4004817844305920"]

Check out 12 minimalist ways to reduce your carbon footprint.

I’m taking advantage of the author of  mnmlst’s ‘uncopyrighted’ policy and posting the whole durn thing below:

1. Eat less. Wrote about this recently. Less food consumed means less resources used up and pollution used to create the food and get it to you.

2. Eat less meat. Worldwide, beef production contributes more to climate change than the entire transportation sector. Pork and chicken are also big contributors to pollution and carbon emissions, compared to plants.

3. Eat locally. Transporting food from where it’s grown or raised to where it’s processed and packaged, to your supermarket, has a high environmental cost. Eating locally not only greatly reduces that transportation cost but it supports local farmers instead of corporations. Look for local foods, in season, at farmer’s markets near you, or at your supermarket or local health food store, or get involved with a CSA.

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Huntington succulents plants symposium Sept. 4 | L.A. at Home | Los Angeles Times.

Have you taken permaculture seriously today?

I really hope it doesn’t rain this Sunday, but even if it does, I plan on joining my friend Matt for the 1st annual Flashwalk from Brooklyn to Staten Island. It’ll be a 40 hour, slow-food style walk during which time I hope to see for the first time–with no sense of haste or pressure–a great deal of the fine city of New York (on the longest day of the year).

Personally, I don’t feel I make much use of my daily travels around the city. Within the ‘look at your feet’ social ambiance to and from work, I see beautiful things: the Brooklyn Bridge, Statue of Liberty, parts of Chinatown, ritzy SOHO, and a few blocks of Park Slope, Brooklyn. But do I really see it? Could I remember 3 things I saw on my way from my office to the Subway? Probably not. When I’m going somewhere on the weekends or evenings, I’m more focused on the destination than the incredible history of the city I’m passing right by. In short, the long summer weekends in this Northern latitude demand we make the most of our time out of the cold:

The essentials are this: As the inaugural of an organization that will sponsor exploration-oriented walks, with no guides and no agenda, at locations in the city selected by chance, I’m getting a group of people together to walk from Brooklyn to Staten Island. This is no small feat, as the only way to get there on foot is a 40-mile, two-state walk via Manhattan, to the George Washington Bridge, through 20 miles of Jersey, to the Bayonne bridge. To up the ante, it will be a five-borough walk. And it’ll be taking place on the longest day of the year, just so we can get the most out of it. It’s totally not-for-profit, free, and aimed at simply getting people to slow down their lives for one day and take a serious look at their cit(ies) — and as a side effect raising awareness of flashwalk as organizer of such strangeness.

Here’s the details:

Questions? See ya there.

FB event

Check out Alastair Clark’s portfolio. The above images are from the ‘Skylight’ series, a sort of ‘found image’ series of weather sat images and meditation on cyclone destruction as seen from space.

via Data Mining

If politics is built by language, there are words in the right policies, and a vacant silence in the tongue of the opposing policies.
An excerpt from:
Stuck on Coal, and Stuck for Words in a High-Tech World – {NYTimes
}
by | By Andrew C. Revkin, 12.4.2007

It’s no wonder that scientists immersed for decades in this problem are running out of metaphors in pressing the public to act — whether the choice is a surge of research on nonpolluting energy technologies, a rising “tipping fee” for continued greenhouse-gas emissions, or a combination of these and other steps.

Here’s a metaphor we can understand, remember, rehearse, and repeat:

{image from frederic.tacer.free.fr}