...because I really want to be "Granny," someday...

I am writing because I cannot sleep, with things I want to say and share with the world, swirling through my consciousness.  I got up to pee, because I am pregnant... pregnant ladies have to pee 3-5 times every night.  But as I said, this time my passion overtook my exhaustion, not allowing me settle back to sleep.

And the internet is down, I find.  So I've opened up the virtual notepad to get some of these thoughts onto "paper" and, hopefully, out of my head for tonight!

Now I've just heard a sound outside...it sounded like someone moving our metal garden wagon...a quiet clanging of the handle being let back onto the siderail.  If that is being caused by a human, it would indicate a strong likelihood that someone has entered our yard through the unlocked front gate, and penetrated the open door of our twenty-foot yurt-dome tent which we use for a bike shed and storage garage for tools and yard stuff.  We have nice road bikes in there, which we've fixed up to be able to be our primary form of transport here at home.  Trailers, Trailabikes, a whole large-families-worth of bicycle fun with reasonable theft-value, for people who would so pursue resell-able items.
 

I keep hearing noises.  Now in the bathroom.  Are the cats super active right now?! The geese just honked, down in the yard.  Three and a half thousand years ago, geese honking alarm in the middle of the night saved Rome from their enemies sneaking up in the darkness.

But I do not have any personal enemies, and if someone is compelled, on this night, to steal from our dome, I think I'm entirely prepared to accept it.  That means that I'm probably not going to run outside in my t-shirt and panties, screaming like a banshee, pulling up my shirt and yelling "WATCH OUT FOR BOOBIE TRAPS!"  We'll see, I have that plan in reserve, if I change my mind. 

Allow me to speak metaphorically for a while, if you will.

I do have enemies, though, because I am a conscious figment of God.  I know the wonder of God, and I know that I am the wonder of God, as are my children, and the cats and geese, and the thief in the dome.  Even my enemies are broken-off crystal shards, who have been violently separated from their larger sacred crystaline origin.
  

My enemies have taken a position of opposition to humanity, as well as to all of the life forms on our planet.  I, being a whole and passionately inspired human animal, will never abide their agenda.  Like predator and prey, we are natural enemies.  If I stood aside in complacency, tolerating rape and plunder, I would be in basic denial of my natural purpose.  I will fight to the death for beauty and truth, and for the right of my children to live and to love.  I will fight to the death against the fate my enemies have been arranging for my children.

Though it seems logically probable that I will lose the fight, and watch my children, as teenagers perhaps, die from critical lack of water or food.  I will know, in that event, that I have done everything I could think to do to create alternative systems and cultural shifts:  I have undertaken countless personal transformations, rising to meet my own sacred wisdom, and leveling up to new heights of personal power...translating my power into action at every noticed opportunity. Knowing that I did everything I could to preserve their lives and freedoms, I will be prepared to accept their deaths. 

Truly, that is my family's trajectory, and we are heading there fast.  And if you aren't yet aware, I bear to you the unpleasant news that your family is facing the same medium-term future.  As we are the makeup of humanity -- the most conscious and widely capable animals on this planet -- we have these enemies in common.  And I'm wondering if you will help me to resist them. 

The enemies are individuals who have "sold their soul," or who have sacrificed their love and devotion to truth on the altar of greed, and in the pursuit of power.  They have also sold the lives and freedom of countless humans, creating foreign wars and playing our brethren soldiers as pawns.  Bless the poor soldiers' souls, whose lives were sacrificed for the greed of Capitalistic domination! 

I accept that they have become my enemy.  I do not mean them any fundamental harm as individual godlettes, but I will stand over their dead bodies, if necessary, with the clear conscience of a conscious human warrior. 

 

When our enemies sold their souls, or, when they turned to the dark side (choose any analogy that makes sense to you), they, too, were knowingly accepting this relationship with us.  For, they know in their deepest hearts their own origin in the magnificence of love and perfection (as we all do), and so they also know, in that core place within, that they have become traitors to God, to the whole of life.

The enemies have taken over our economic and governmental systems.  That is to say, they are at the heads of the largest corporate entities on our planet, the fossil fuel industry, and they have politicked and maneuvered their dollars, so that they are also "wearing the pants" in our government. 

Their systems are built on exploitation, and they shamelessly scour the earth overturning mountains in search of another virgin pocket of nature to rape.  The sacred people of other lands are accepted by our enemy as having only as much value as their existence can contribute to the profit of the corporations.  Many of the world's people are hungry and desperate, but our incomprehensibly rich enemies do not opt to uplift them.  Rather, they "capitalize".

But, if you ask me, the most sinful thing that our enemy does is that they lie.  They use their god-given endowments of charisma and intelligence, or in many cases, just employ the basic human capacity to build a skill, and they learn how to use words to twist reality to their will.  To defeat our awareness of their nature and the ramifications of their agenda, they design doubt-instilling propaganda and pay for the psychological onslaught of advertisements and media coverage of their brain-washing material.

I do not exaggerate, you must know.  They have literature and private workshops which have helped them to learn effective ways to use language to dupe the masses and for the most part, we are standing, stupefied.  We know something is not right, but we can't quite pin down the source of evil, and we are not able to track the speed of the card tricks.  In many cases, we are head down, contributing our strength and leaning our weight into the mechanism of their evil machinery.

 We are, then, the unknowing "useful idiots" (that is their term, not mine) propelling the thriving of our own enemies, yet convinced that we are doing the best that we can for our own families, bringing home the paycheck.  Many of us have not yet developed the discernment to recognize on sight the difference between the dark side and the light.  And most of us surrender that assessment, sheep that we are, opting to shuffle with the herd, unsure where we are being led, but trusting that it is safer and wiser to stay with the pack. 

That is why I say that we will probably fail to defeat our enemy.  And though am doing everything that I can do to know that I have done my part to rescue my children's world, I will fail without your help.

We may look into each others' eyes as we die together, in twenty or fifty years, from the hyper-extreme temperatures and impossible weather patterns which are just beginning their fast track to overwhelming the ingenuity of man...  Though we may share a final moment of mutual appreciation and gratitude, I wonder if we couldn't just cut to the chase, and reclaim our sense of wonder now. 

It is so clear to me, as it is to many people who are already fully invested in this movement to restore the will of good to our species and salvage some balance in the systems of nature, that we need many thousands more people to join our fight if we are to have any real chance in this.  Geologically, this is the very last split second in which we might choose as a species to alter our behaviors enough to divert our collision course with destruction.

 We have five years in which to make these profound changes and after that time we will know our fate, beyond a doubt.  There is so much man-made carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, and of course, we continue to pump up increasing tons of it every year, that our planet has become covered by a smothering blanket -- excess heat can no longer escape quickly enough. The life forms (including my yet-unborn child) which have, over the course of millions of years, genetically adapted to this world, will no longer be welcome here.  Burned or drowned, homeless, without drinkable water, or without food, we will all die. 

Yes, even our enemies will be dying with us in these yonder days.  Though they may pay worthless pawns to build fancy bubbles for the richest of them to live in for some period, extending their lifespan beyond ours a short distance, the destruction which they have wrought will necessarily take them down too.  Because, that is how insane is is going to get here.

Or, maybe we should stop them? 

 (written by Dana)

Where Is That Hundredth Monkey?

Eleven years ago, when I was a student at the California Institute of Integral Studies, people there were talking avidly about a phenomenon known as the "Hundredth Monkey Effect." Apparently, a group of researchers were observing patterns of transmission of learned behavior amongst monkeys inhabiting an archipelago of remote islands in Indonesia, islands that had no human population.

In the largest group of monkeys, individuals were passing on a skill (I think it was a novel method for breaking open coconuts), one monkey to the next, and the human observers were documenting the rate at which this education propagated through the monkey society on that island. Then, something very interesting happened.

The people were simultaneously monitoring monkey populations on each of the islands in the archipelago, and they documented that monkeys on different islands were not in contact with each other physically. However, when the number of monkeys who had learned this coconut skill crossed a certain threshold (about 100 monkeys), suddenly the rate of transmission of the knowledge increased dramatically. Not only that, but monkeys on other islands picked up the skill spontaneously, and the knowledge of this skill rippled through the new monkey population at the same increased rate as was being found on the first island.

The researchers dubbed it the "Hundredth Monkey Effect," and hypothesized that there was some sort of long-distance behavioral entrainment occuring, and that perhaps  they were witnessing a window into some non-local reality, where, when a certain threshhold if consciousness is reached, events happen simultaneously in all spatial dimensions.

Bear in mind the Hundredth Monkey Effect as you read the rest of this article. Clearly, if we are to succeed in averting the course we're on for changing the climate, we need such a phenomenon to galvanize our awareness of the true information about this situation, and quickly.

Now, Google's analytics tell me that this blog has had some 500 page views since its inception. That breaks down to a little less than 100 views per new post. I don't know who most of you are, because you are lurking, and not saying anything. I am guessing that most of you are navigating to this blog from Facebook, because that is primarily where we've been announcing developments on Pacing the Planet. Most of the people I know on Facebook are progressive -- not liberal, necessarily -- but people I woukd consider educated, critical thinkers, and willing to change your minds based on new, relevant information. I am about to employ the technique that actors call "breaking the fourth wall," and speak directly to you. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy writing, and I know that I am skillful at it, but I'm not trying to mimic a blog for general digestion and consideration, like Slate Magazine. I am trying to start a revolution.

A handful of you have contributed money, attention, and encouragement to Pacing the Planet, and I thank you. We are trying to make a difference, together. I know that some of you are praying for us, and that is deeply valued by me, also.

I am now writing to the rest of you, who are reading here, and not saying anything, not contacting us, just moving on, moving on. I am not here to shame you, but I need to understand what your resistance is to taking part.

When Gandhi, who was a thoroughly unassuming man, by all accounts, initiated an action of social change, the eminent relevance and rightfulness of what he was doing inspired millions of others to follow suit with their own lives. For instance, throngs of people joined in the Salt March to the sea, because they clearly needed salt for their daily lives, and the British government was holding the available salt for ransom.

We are putting the final nails in the coffin of god-forsaken denial of climate change, and it is clear that the scale upon which we must move to address this is vast (as one commentator on MSNBC says, it will require a reworking of society every bit equal to the change wrought by the industrial revolution). Yet I am having trouble even starting an active conversation here, on blogger. Why?

Why are friends, why is my family, even, remaining silent? Do you think we're nuts? Are you thinking: "Global Warming can't possibly be that perilous and imminent?" Are you thinking, "At least my family is safe where we are?"

When we started writing about climate change last month, and when we began to plan our walk, I expected that we would encounter resistance...but from denialists. I didn't expect indifference. I didn't expect that friends who routinely posted to my Facebook profile, and followed up on my life, would not say anything, delicately ignore the obvious, as if I'd wet my pants in public.

Again, this is not shaming, this is bewilderment. I know life is complicated. I had a (naive?) hope that my friends and acquaintances from the last ten years would be joining us in this walk, that we would lay down our jobs, our meetings, our appointments, our vacations, and -- like Francis of Assisi -- give all, when all was required. I thought we would eat leaves from trees and drink from puddles before we would participate in the cut-and-dried outcome of the degree of global warming that the experts are forecasting to arrive soon, the consequences being global suicide and genocide. Perhaps we are too embarrassed to stick our necks out? I can understand that: I have a shy demeanor.

Perhaps, you are hopeful that there are things we can do to change this situation without a mass movement. Honestly, I've been combing the research and tracking down the remediation ideas, and I don't think we can make enough difference if we just act from within the scope of our own lives. Consider, for example, the effect that the U.S. is having on Chinese carbon pollution, when we import goods that are made with coal electricity. I wrote about this in the last article. Every day that people pour into Walmarts across this land, we are giving responsibility for the future of our planet to the wisdom (or folly) of the Chinese leaders.

Perhaps, it is just too scary. After all, if you leave your job and your home, how will you take care of yourself. We're so oriented toward thinking that we need to solve that problem ourselves, individually, that if I say to you, "If we join together in this action, the Universe will provide for us," you may think that trust is hopelessly mystical, impractical, and unwarranted. But it's true, nonetheless.

Maybe you already were aware of the deadly serious implications contained in the papers and presentations on our links page. If you weren't, if I happen to be the first person to tell you that this is how it really, really stands, then you have just graduated into a very small world of people who know that, for example, the U.S. has to cut carbon emissions not just by 17% by 2020, but by 40%. You are in possession of detailed information about where the climate is going in the next 50 years, barring human mitigation of our previous impact. It is like knowing that the atomic bomb is going to drop over Hiroshima, before it happens. Except, there is no enemy that makes catastrophe worth it. We are in the Enola Gay, and we are folding 1000 paper cranes. There is only ourselves.

A Visit to 8 Percent in the Midst of Emergency

It has been one month since Bill McKibben's article, “Global Warming's Terrifying New Math” was published in Rolling Stone, and we became activated to do something about this emergency of climate change that life on Earth faces... Something, that is, other than what we'd already been doing, which was to make an example of our home and our lives, showing how to live joyfully, simply, and harmoniously, to have low impact.

As you know, we've decided to walk. What else can we do? We can't go on living our daily lives and pretending that some unseen butler is going to sweep away the mess when we naughty children are done playing with our coal and our petrol engines.

We are in good spirits, for the most part. We are eager to see the beautiful, steel-tired 38” Amish-made wagon wheels that we ordered for our covered Chuck Wagon of Doom, which we will pull like a rickshaw as we walk along. There is some support and encouragement coming from you who read these articles, and the good folks at the Possibility Alliance are hosting the second delivery of our presentation this Wednesday, August 22. They will also be helping us find our way on our journey, introducing us to their far-flung network of friends and contacts throughout the U.S.

Still, there are many paradoxes in this life, now. We close up the projects around our house half-finished, we gift away our waterfowl/foodsources, we consider that the maps show this area will be a desert within our lifetime -- within a decade, maybe, unless we (and others) are successful. Perhaps we were foolish to station here? We hoped we had time to offer an alternative lifestyle example to others. You don't know until you know. And, the end of summer whimpers itself away, the leaves on the trees half-fallen already, the temperatures so fine now, but a missing quotient of life is obvious if you look closely.

Then there are the many people we meet who are disbelieving, who laugh at us, who read bogus science, who think that climate change is a conspiracy amongst climatologists to somehow squeeze money out of carbon taxes that the Republican leadership in this country would make you cross their dead bodies to see.

Yet, there is some good news concerning U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide being reported this week, though you hafta kinda make a picture frame with your fingers to see it. Domestic CO₂ emissions fell by almost 8% in the first quarter of 2012.

That is really neat. In fact, U.S. emissions have generally decreased since 2006, and the period from 2006-2012 has seen about an 8% decrease over our peak emissions level in 2005. The EPA (should Obama be re-elected) is scheduled to begin fully enforcing reductions by 2015, and we are on track to meet the Obama administration's pledge of reducing CO₂ by 17% by 2020.

If only that were the end of the story. It's not. The context does dim the glow.

First, lest anyone is confused, global emissions of CO₂ have risen every year – and the amount by which they have risen has increased every year. In other words, global CO₂ emissions are increasing exponentially.

It is true that the U.S. has reduced its carbon emissions more than any other nation, in recent years. However, at the same time, the portion of China's emissions that are directly due to the manufacture of products for U.S. import has increased every year. So, our economy is effectively sending our dirty work offshore to China. China is not manufacturing these things for its own people. If those carbon emissions were added to our domestic total, U.S. emissions would be increasing, not decreasing.

Second, the decrease in domestic emissions is due to market forces: the cost of currently abundant natural gas has dropped from $8 to $3 per unit, making it a cheaper energy source than coal, wind, solar, and perhaps even hydro-power.

 Natural gas is still a fossil fuel, albeit cleaner than coal, in terms of emissions. However , in the “fracking” process to liberate natural gas, water and sand are forced at very high pressure into the same shale-rock formations where CO₂ is being sequestered underground, capped by the rock that may or may not be fractured. Whether this is a stable arrangement in the long-term is an open question. For now, though, it is encouraging that electric companies are moving en masse away from coal to natural gas, even if natural gas is driving wind farms out of business.

The most troubling context for the U.S. decrease in CO₂ emissions comes, once again, from Professors Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, of the University of Manchester. They have done an analysis of necessary reductions to worldwide carbon emission pathways, backcasting from a cumulative carbon budget that the world must stick to, if we have any hope of avoiding catastrophic temperatures.

By their reckoning, starting no later than 2015, the U.S. has to decrease its emissions by 8% a year, as do other developed, high-emissions countries, like Canada and Australia. This has to be done in tight coordination with countries that are developing their industry, like China and India, who have to make a similar decrease by 2020.

We are, therefore, generally off-target by a factor of 7. Our emissions reductions, while impressive to some degree, are not nearly enough. This is not surprising, because, although industry may be changing to a cleaner fuel, we as consumers are not really making different life choices about how we heat our homes, how and where and when we drive, what plane trips we take, what we expect to have delivered to us.

But then, there is this news about the first quarter of 2012. If that plays out the rest of this year in a similar trend, that would be a 8% reduction in one year. Well... remember that this past winter and spring were unseasonably mild, with very little snowfall. Part of the reduction accomplishment is due to the unusually small amount of fuel consumed in maintaining our internal environments. The figures aren't in for summer 2012, but it is hard to imagine that we stayed on track for an 8% reduction in 2012 as we endured the hottest temperatures on record, and the electrical demand to power indoor climate control was such that New York City, for instance, had to shut down its grid on at least one occasion, so it wouldn't be damaged by excessive draw.

We see that we can do it, though. (Sort of. There is that Chinese import issue.) We can, in fact, put a muzzle on our carbon pollution in this country, so that – even if only for a few months – we were able to point our ship of state toward the only (somewhat) safe port that's left it, on the wild coast of dangerous climate change. 

Twilight of Our Despair

"And I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair, with a love so vast and shattered, it will reach you everywhere." - L. Cohen

An interesting pattern is developing in the responses we're receiving from people, as we go out into the world to talk with strangers and acquaintances alike about the upcoming hazards of global climate change. A few, like us, are already following the developments with dismay and bravery, preparing to act when the ripe moment reveals itself. Others are tuned out, vaguely familiar with the concern, where it flits on the periphery in the company of remote possibilities like the explosion of the Yellowstone super-caldera, or the fissure of the Canary Islands leading to a massive tsunami that flattens the cities of the Atlantic Rim.

A surprisingly -- no, unconscionably -- large number of people seem to be in a state of flat-out denial about the freight-train of global warming that is riding the rails on a collision course with our way of life, while we play chicken on the tracks. A fair number of these people are so-called progressive thinkers, individuals who in virtually every other case stand for social justice, honoring the environment, championing the way of social collectivism over competition, and highlighting the forgotten, the broken, the ruined people and places, as we charge toward development and "greater" wealth.

However, when it comes to climate change, they retreat to alternative explanations for the evidence that were maybe plausible ten or 15 years ago, but have been soundly eliminated from consideration as major causes of the surge in the Greenhouse Effect. They continue to pounce on the wildly overblown controversy of "Climategate," as if that teapot tempest ever represented a legitimate reason to doubt the great volume of evidence illustrating climate change. Melting glaciers and ice-sheets get a ho-hum, as if we were beset by a kind of fatigue and will just deal with it later, deal with later.

Some of us continue to fly to the outrageous lie that climate scientists are in a vast conspiracy to earn vast amounts of grant money by hyping a bogus theory of global warming, or by setting the stage for the widespread promotion of alternative energy. Proponents cling to obscure data to support this -- for instance, that Al Gore was, in 2009, reportedly set to become the world's first "carbon billionaire," thanks to his investments in green energy companies -- despite that Occam's Razor suggests the much greater likelihood is that already-made carbon billionaires such as William Koch are orchestrating a deliberate plan of misinformation on climate change.

 Leave alone that men (and women) like William Koch seek, at every turn, to deny the truth of global warming. The Global Humanitarian Forum, founded by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, calculates that 300,000 people currently lose their lives every year due to climate change, and that number will climb to 500,000 or more by 2030. More people killed by global warming than by the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, yet we change nothing -- nothing -- about our daily routines. Why?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17218-climate-change-could-kill-500000-a-year-by-2030.html

There are some straight-forward reasons why people are not treating climate change as the unequivocal disaster that it is. The first reason is that, as a matter of public policy, the whole affair has been handled terribly. I do not say that as a discredit to the scientists that have obviously worked long and hard to refine their experiments and scenarios, and glean ever-more certain projections from the data. But, let's hope that if the World Health Organization ever has to deal with a pandemic on the scale of global warming, they act with a lot more certainty than the International Panel on Climate Change has done.

Most people's information about climate change is about twelve years out-of-date (aside from hearing warnings, out-of-context, that the arctic ice has melted more than ever before this summer, or that polar bears will die out soon, and a few items of that nature). Twelve years ago, the approach that the IPCC took to modeling climate change was much more open-ended. Several future scenarios were plotted out for what our future carbon gas emissions might be like, depending on what way society evolves in the 21st century, and a target of 2º C total rise in average temperature was chosen, largely for political reasons. It would be yet far in the future, according to the scenarios, when the Earth would be approaching that temperature, and the date by which we would necessarily have cut our emissions significantly was comfortably far out – 2050. Even still, it took until 2009 to get all major countries (including the U.S.) to agree to those reductions by 2050...and those are non-binding.

Twelve years ago, and even in 2007, the publicly reported debate around the IPCC's summary reports centered on whether to officially declare climate change as “unlikely” or “likely” caused by human actions, and whether it was “extremely unlikely,” or merely  “unlikely” to take us into dangerous temperatures, if we delayed our mitigation efforts until much closer to 2050. No wonder people tuned out.

Scientists being scientists, the IPCC members were very reluctant to declare that any weather extremes we are experiencing currently are connected to climate change, and they spent a good deal of time trying to demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that our civilization's CO₂ emissions are contributing to rising temperatures. They also worked meticulously to show that temperatures are rising, that they are closely correlated to CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere.

In the meantime, they were terribly circumspect about it. The oil, coal, and gas industries used the lack of decisive statements from the IPCC, the fractured Kyoto Protocol, and the dearth of political leadership, as opportunity to push back with denial of climate change, and misinformation in the form of false graphs and cherry-picked data-sets that give the impression that global temperature is stable, or even falling.

Later, as the collected evidence grew that global warming is most definitely real and dangerous, these industries employed scientists to engage in the creation and promotion of spurious theories to explain rising temperatures, including sunspots, decreased aerosols in the atmosphere, or that temperature naturally varies more than the IPCC allows for; they focus on such events as the medieval “Little Ice Age,” or the warm spell during Roman times.

If you are confused, that is exactly the point. These scientist-lobbyists were hired to muddy the waters, many of them are not experts in climatology. Unfortunately, their wrong information, as well as misleading charts and graphs, are still widely available on the internet.

It took the IPCC seven years to declare that people do indeed make global warming happen.

The carbon-fuel industries should not be forgiven. They tricked lay-people into a complicit negligence of the issue, on a par with the willful ignorance by ordinary Germans (not to mention Americans) of Nazi atrocities, as they were happening. Sadly, in this case, the scale of the consequences will be far larger.

However, confusion and doubt are not enough to explain our current ostrich behavior. For at least the last four years, we have known that the IPCC's future scenarios are way off the mark in terms of how hot things are going to get, how bad the consequences will be. What is more, we have pretty specific information available now on what we must do if we want to manage a survivable outcome to this emergency, and how little time we have to do it. Our politicians (at least in the U.S.) don't mention it, take no action on this information, and they get away with it because...why? Because nobody cares? Because we are, in the final analysis, really unwilling to go without our SUVs and jet planes, and abundant electricity in our “climate-controlled” buildings? Are we really unwilling to move our truck shipping industry to rail, or scale it back, and have local economies?

People say that we have not the backbone of the generation that endured World War II, which, in addition to all-out fighting and the largest relocation of refugees in history, also engendered rationing of food and basic supplies. However, in talking with people about climate change recently, I see, in our defense of our homes and our cars and our lifestyles, not greed and mere convenient rationalization so much as compartmentalization, the walling-off of some basic, natural response to the situation.

My guess is that we are, in the heart of our natural selves, aware of the Earth still, and, like prodigal children, we are ashamed to return to the bedside of our dying parent. Our grief is too great to listen to what intimate words she would whisper to us. She might even forgive us. It is possible that we are not paying attention to global warming because we feel that we deserve to be punished somehow, and we invite the end of our species with a kind of gleeful abandon.

Many of the people alive now to confront this most pressing issue have grown up steeped in the knowledge of our transgressions against the planet. The litany is torture for the soul: deforestation, the extinction of many creatures that were cute and fuzzy or fantastically wonderful, and the extinction of many more whose names and features we barely knew, variations on the theme of beetle or fish or bird. We have lately become aware of the great raft of plastic debris that has gathered in the middle of each ocean, almost too big to fathom how it ever got there. Did we really do that? We have devastated mountains, manhandled waterways the world over, drawn the fresh water down to the bone, in many places. We have synthesized thousands upon thousands of chemical compounds, and used them heavily, their by-products and residues landing in the water, the air, and the soil of the Earth.

The same period that has seen us increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has also seen us dramatically degrade the beauty, intricacy, and wholeness of the environment that holds us. It seems that we, most of us, must carry a great, largely unspoken, grief for such ruination. At best, we channel our sorrow into tenderness for our gardens, a favorite tree, a fondness for natural materials, a hike in the wild spaces now and then.

Some transform their lives so that they can return to the fold of nature, it is true. But, we don't have a cultural forum for sharing our feelings of horror and sadness for the genocide and vandalism we have done. We are left with an undercurrent sense of something wrong, that accumulates in the morass of sadness about the state of the Earth.

We read in the news as people in more powerful positions make strange bargains about what matters and what doesn't matter, what is precious and what is not, on a very big scale. Every day, they have the effect of millions upon the environment. Try to understand why, and all that you or I have for comparison are small awkward moments where we exert the fiat of our whims upon our personal environment: pouring a toxic chemical down the drain, driving when we could have walked, spraying the walk with herbicide and hoping it fades into the environment before the children or pets encounter it. We know we all make compromises. Our hearts hurt when corporate industry makes big ones on our behalf. But,  big and small, all the kinds of sins we have committed against nature leave perpetrators and witnesses alike feeling dirty and broken. It adds up. We are so tempted to hide.

We need venues where we can take an honest accounting of what we've done to the environment, without conspiracy theories and without trying to shift the responsibility. We need to support each other when the tidal wave of that collective realization comes to the surface.

The irony is that, if we're going to do something meaningful to contain climate change, we don't actually have time to linger in grief. When we share our sorrow, and it seems that we must do, we need to move, as quickly as we can, to a place where we remember that we rightfully belong in the infinite fragility of this planet, devoting our power and love to it, rather than spinning out the story of our fall from grace, in the shadows. 

-by Gavain U'Prichard

What Do We Do?

We face a moment of change that puts to shame, in sheer scale, all the other changes of our 10,000 year civil history. By the best available models, in three years time from now our burning of carbon-based greenhouse gas (at least in already industrialized countries) will have needed to peak out, and start on a dramatic downswing (4% per year reduction in use of fuels like gasoline, 9% per year reduction in carbon-based electrical energy generation). If we could do that, there is a chance that we could limit the eventual total concentration of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere to 450 parts per million. (What that means, basically, is that, out of every one million molecules of air, oxygen, nitrogen, methane, ozone etc.,  450 of those would be carbon-dioxide).

If we wait until, say, 2020, to make those changes, the eventual concentration will rise to 550-650 ppm, or more. Let it be known, though, that the carbon cuts described above are so severe, given the ultra-short time-frame, that no government is seriously considering making them, at this point. These kind of reductions are far removed from the tepid negotiations being eked out at the international climate summits in the past few years. Effectively, the human species has made no advancement in reining ourselves in, so that we may meet this austere carbon budget.

However, the result of even 450 ppm concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere is not mild. It will yield a global average temperature change somewhere in the range of 3-4º centigrade, which leads to big sea-level changes, the creation of massive deserts, and the probable extinction of 50% or more of species of life on Earth. Climatologists have now revised the “climate disaster” scale, if you will, so that a 3-4º rise is firmly in the realm of “beyond dangerous” global warming. An eventual concentration of 550ppm would likely lead to a 6º change in global temperature, and 660pm – that much more so.

So, folks: by some of the newest studies (2008, 2011), we've got three to five years left to put our oar in, steer the global industrial juggernaut in the opposite direction from which it is currently headed, which is the exponential increase in the release of CO₂ as a by-product of its labors. It also means that we've got a mere handful of years to radically alter our lives.

On the political plane, it is clear that we need to signal our willingness, as the citizens-at-large, to support the governmental decisions that will bring about abrupt changes to our way of life, no matter how austere the circumstances become...if we want a future. The most powerful way to signal this willingness, other than through electoral politics, is by bringing our own lifestyle choices to bear, en masse, on the commercial-corporate world that has engineered our wants, the products that amplify those wants, and, indeed, encroached on our definitions of life-worth-living.

When I was about nine years old, my parents and I watched the sci-fi camp-horror movie, “The Stuff.” It is a dry commentary on our mindless consumption: deep underground, in a mine, a delicious substance is discovered. It is quickly made into a commercial dessert product, and, soon, millions of Americans are hooked on it. Problem is, it turns out that “The Stuff” is a parasitic goo, which corrodes the inside of its would-be consumers, and leaves their bodies as hollow shells.

The scene that stands out particularly in my mind is one where a young boy, who learns that the Stuff is a threat to everyone who consumes it, is standing in a supermarket, at the head of an aisle whose shelves are lined with the product. After taking a deep breath, he pulls out a stick, and charges down the aisle, knocking every bottle of the Stuff to the floor. Of course, the managers of the store, not to mention the customers, are outraged, and attempt to apprehend the boy so that he may face justice.

People who call attention to the knife's edge condition of our climate are subjected to a similar degree of consternation as well, even though the thanklessness of what they are doing should be evidence enough that their motivations are altruistic, that they are acting for the good of all. Like those addicted to the Stuff, we partake of our pleasures even though we know that we have no right to them, so long as we can pretend that the consequences are invisible. In this way, extreme consumption is normalized, and we are all fooling ourselves. In France, there is reportedly a delicacy which consists of a rare songbird, eaten whole; it is customary for the gourmand to hide beneath his napkin while he devours this creature, to hide his sin from God. In the case of our carbon pollution, we are all hiding under the napkin together.

If the consequences of driving a car for frivolous reasons – say, to go down the block to the convenience store – were obvious, we would have the moral compunction not to do it. If a nuclear bomb exploded somewhere in the world every time we turned the ignition key, a lot of cars would sit silent. But, the truth is that we are inviting a future every bit as dire as the feared “nuclear winter” that went along with Mutually Assured Destruction during the Cold War, and that future is coming as a promised guest. We are, every day, mutually assuring each other of our destruction, of widespread hunger, exile, death, but we pretend that this is normal.

Until recently, cigarette smoking was also normal, it was accepted as a right to smoke socially, and smoking was cool, while being concerned about it was decidedly not. That has now changed. We need a similar change about our obsession with new things, with comfort, with convenience, about the easy way we justify all of our personal decisions, no matter how outlandish the cost to others. We need to stop living in isolation, not knowing our neighbors, not having real conversations with each other, because isolation leads to the twin false perceptions, a) that I really am alone (so how can my contribution impact anything?), and b) that I am the center of my own universe, and what I think is important is important.

We don't have the time-frame that we had to change public opinion about smoking. We don't have enough people charging down the aisles, shattering our illusions of normality when we're dancing on the brink.

Vote Romney, Vote Death

Now, I know that the title of this post probably sounds to some of you like rank partisan hyperbole. However, I mean it quite literally. And it's not because Mitt is evil. (Though, it is because he is Republican.)

Here's the reason. Mitt says this 2012 presidential election is about the economy. Actually, he says it is only about the economy. Most Republicans, and many Democrats, are right in sync with him on that opinion. Unfortunately, they are wrong.

The economy sags like a poorly whipped meringue, and millions of people fear for the loss of their livelihoods, yet in the wings of this presidential election, hardly mentioned, sits the issue that will stomp the meringue to mush, and bankrupt our entire future on this planet, not to mention half (or more) of all the other species with whom we share it.

New calculations show us we have a bare 5-10 years to make any closing argument we care to, in the great narrative of how we dramatically -- stupefyingly -- affected the climate in the 20th, and early 21st, century. Natural amplifications of our human contributions to the planet's Greenhouse Effect are about to kick in. As it stands, we will send the planet's average temperature soaring to 6-12º C above pre-industrial temperatures – a climatic situation Earth last recreated 30 million years ago. We may even see a condition of irreversible global warming, which will take us into the climatic end-game that the planet Venus has demonstrated for us.

In these next 5-10 years, the world has to not only reach the zenith of its fossil fuel burning, but severely reduce it as well...and that's just to keep temperatures within a very uncomfortable, but perhaps endurable, 3-4º C above pre-industry averages.

Whoever is president for the next 4-8 years will wield the executive clout to make that final argument. They will likely command Western Civilization's best hope at curbing our excesses. At the end of their term, the die will more or less be cast.

Now, consider Mitt Romney in this role. Mitt Romney is a dyed-in-the-wool business man. Even longtime close associates of his family admit that, whereas his father, Governor George Romney, was a natural leader, Mitt Romney is more of a manager – and maybe a middle manager at that. Then there's this: his election campaign is being bankrolled by the likes of billionaire carbon magnate William Koch (the third Koch brother), who considers the EPA “hyperaggressive” in going after carbon pollution. In return for securing him the presidency, Koch expects Romney to follow through with a personal promise to cripple agency regulation of greenhouse gases, if not to mortally wound it. How much access to a Romney presidency would these guys feel entitled to? Another billionaire funding Romney's campaign put it this way: “I would expect Mitt Romney to speak to me occasionally.”

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/right-wing-billionaires-behind-mitt-romney-20120524

Finally, there is Romney's stated stance on climate change: one of skepticism or denial. Oren Cass, Romney's domestic policy advisor, said, “[Romney] doesn't know the extent to which climate change is occurring or that human activity is causing it." The incredible thing about this is that, as governor, Mitt Romney was a leader in executive activism on climate change, and several of his advisors on the subject are now part of Obama's adminstration, trying to do something about global warming.

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/13/nation/la-na-romney-energy-20120613

Mitt Romney as president would use our last years to officially doubt the existence of climate change, even though he is fully aware of its reality. Unless his true, liberal self is hiding inside the trojan horse of his new-found conservatism, Romney will not be our captain through the very difficult waters we have to navigate these next 5-10 years, if we are to stand a chance in the future. Unfortunately, Romney really does seem to believe that the economy – and, particularly, securing the freedom of every enterprising and somewhat unscrupulous businessman to get as much money as possible while he can – is the most important game at play on planet Earth at this moment.

Now consider a continued presidency of Obama. He is not Al Gore, when it comes to climate change. On the other hand, he was a community worker; he does have some firsthand experience of struggling uphill for a thankless cause. He, also, would be a second-term president, having “flexibility,” as he notoriously put it to Vladimir Putin, to “[make] something happen.” It is possible – especially if he really is the raving nutter radical that Republican pundits make him out to be – that he would have the gumption to do something really unprecedented, like declare martial law and issue an executive order allowing the seizure of assets from the carbon fuel companies.

So far, he, too, has been promising to proceed full-tilt into as many domestic drilling, fracking, mining opportunities as the under-budgeted EPA will allow. But it is (slightly) more plausible that Obama is pulling our leg, hiding in plain sight, and when push comes to shove, he will remember his message of hope, or at least the future of his daughters' generation, and do what needs to be done. 


 

The Moment We've Been Waiting For

Here we go! There are certain moments when the direction of human history reaches a crossroads, and even people at the time know it is happening. There has never really been a moment where human history and planetary history reached a crossroads at the same time — until now. The climate is changing.

 

In its long history, our planet has gone through many eras that were starkly different from what life on Earth is like now. There have been times when the Earth was mostly a searing desert, times when water covered much more of the planet than it does now, times when most of the world was a jungle, and yet other times when great portions of the globe were under an ice sheet two miles thick.

The vast differences in these environments, and the length of time that the planet featured any particular climate, boggle our human imaginations. Human history seems like a long time to us, but it is merely the smallest mark at the very end of an immensely long ruler that represents the time-line of Earth’s history. Take Wyoming, for instance — Wyoming has variously been a desert, lush forest, a sea, and an ice block. Our presumption that we “know” Wyoming, and how to live for generations upon that land (including into the future), is like the arrogance of meeting a person and concluding after thirty seconds that you can speak with certainty about how the rest of their life will unfold.

For ages upon ages, far longer than humans have walked the Earth, conditions on the ground were such that our life and civilization as we know it would have been impossible to carry out. We may now be inaugurating the next great era of Earth’s history, with its own climate — one that may well be inhospitable to us (and many of the animals and plants we’ve grown to love). And perhaps the most astonishing thing about this is that we are the ones creating the change. In fact, there’s good reason to believe that we have only a handful of remaining years to decide whether we, the human species, are going to throw our collective weight of technology and personal habits into continuing the present era of relatively benign, even life-friendly conditions, that we have enjoyed for the last 12,000 years…or whether we are going to continue engaging in behaviors that dramatically change life on Earth, for thousands, maybe millions, of years to come.

For the last 150 years or so, we’ve been having a very noticeable effect on our planet’s atmosphere. We are now nearing the culmination of that unintended process. If we act now, the average temperature on Earth may — with luck — top out at a 2° Centigrade (3.6° F) rise over its pre-industrial temperature. This, of course, does not mean that most locations will only experience a rise of 2° or so. Global average temperature is held steady by consistently low temperatures at the poles, at least so far. Regionally, temperature fluctuations will get very wild, as we have seen.

The global average temperature has already risen 0.8° C (1.4° F) since the dawn of the internal combustion engine. As I write this, we are experiencing the longest run of steady rising in seasonal temperatures in recorded history, vast areas of drought, other areas of flooding, a 30% increase in the acidification of world’s oceans, an increase in violent, landscape-changing storms. The reordering of the Earth’s surface into a very different network of environments from what we’re used to, the changing of the so-familiar global wind and water currents: these things are well under way already. A further rise of 1.8° C (3.24° F) will make much of the familiar landscape and weather patterns unrecognizable, perhaps uninhabitable.

We have sixteen years, at most. Three cycles of the United States presidency. Even that is a startlingly short amount of time in which to leverage such a colossal choice. However, that sixteen year estimate is wildly generous, and doesn’t factor in that we have not yet seen the total rise in Earth’s temperature resulting from the greenhouse gases we’ve added in the last 30 years or so. (People have, in fact, been increasing our carbon gas emissions exponentially.) Given that we haven’t fully reaped what we’ve already sown as of yet, it is highly likely that the time-frame we have to alter our planet’s future is even shorter than 16 years — very, very short. One of the leading climatologists for the International Panel on Climate Change recently figured that we have maybe five to ten years to do something, if that. This is why we are calling it a crossroads that dwarfs all other singular events in human history up until now. For, the consequences of that choice will be felt all over this blue-green planet, and will set the tone for a longer period of time than we can really even imagine.

If, during the next sixteen years (at most), we are still pouring greenhouse gases into the air, it is likely that we will set into motion further cascading releases of naturally stored greenhouse gases (in the frozen tundra, for instance), and we won’t be able to stop that. The Earth’s climate is regulated by a very complex system of variables, many that loop back into the system to affect other variables. The result is that the climate tends to settle out at different stable points, but not the points in between. Some of the warmer stable points next up the thermometer from where we are now are big intervals. In other words, if we can’t stop at 2° C warmer, the next time that the climate settles down might be at 6° C warmer. There are times in Earth’s remote past when the world was that hot…and the storms that ravaged the Earth, the rising seas, the droughts that happened then would make todays climate seem like a petting zoo by comparison.

So what do we do? Well, on a personal level, the logical answer would be: if you like your lifestyle the way it is now, stop participating in the continued release of greenhouse gases (primarily by halting your use of carbon fossil fuels). But therein lies the tricky part. For most of us, stopping our use of gasoline and diesel for our cars, trucks, lawnmowers, ATVs, boats, tractors, ceasing our dependence on coal-fired electricity, heating oil, boycotting the internet trade industry that relies on shipping goods in diesel trucks, not using the thousands of products that require burning massive amounts of carbon fuels in their manufacture, all of that would entail and end to our way of life as it is now. So, either way, we are facing the end of our familiar, well-constructed habits and enjoyments, the end of an American Dream that things just get easier and more convenient, generation after generation.

There are, though, advantages, to choosing to change your lifestyle rather than have Nature thrust the necessity upon you, and/or kill you in the process. You get to pilot your life into new territory now, with as much grace and joy and freedom as you can create, rather than have the floor pulled out from under you.

Are there alternatives? Well, you might be tempted to hope that some scientists and engineers somewhere are devising a method of mitigating the greenhouse effect (and there are, indeed, people working on that).  However, there are large issues to be solved.  Technical aspects of implementing any of these fixes have to be tried out and improved. The U.N. or some other body needs to establish who has jurisdiction to combat rising temperatures. Not to mention, we may well have to deal with the unintended consequences of any cure put into action. We have scant time to work out these details.

That also doesn’t take into account the other issue.

Unfortunately, there are people right now, people in the highest positions of corporations that are the point-source of carbon pollution into the atmosphere, who are unwilling to change their behavior in the next sixteen years. They’re not willing to change their companies’ purposes or business models because they hold, in asset, more than five times the amount of carbon we can put into the atmosphere and still hope to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2° C. In fact, they have already borrowed money against those future profits (and those promised profits are, of course, what is driving their stock prices). The lifestyle that money buys for these barons of fossil fuels features indoor climate control, lavish beauty, and mindless ignorance of — or stunning callousness toward — the plight of those affected by global warming, which already includes millions of Saharan Africans who are fleeing the aggressive sprawl of that desert, islanders who know with certainty that rising oceans will make their very homes disappear beneath the waves, farmers in the U.S. midwest who are watching the worst drought in 70 years unfold as week after week of dry, sunny, 104° F days play out in an unending chain this summer. That does not mention all the people who will be affected by climate change in the future, which — if these millionaires get their way — will be just about everyone.

So, the millionaires (and many Billionaires) are actively organizing and pulling the strings of the American political/business power system to dismantle the few regulations that might hold them in check. It is, therefore, not enough to hope that some engineers will create a program of climate remediation in the mext 16 years. It is not enough, even, to make the changes to our personal lives (deeply altering though they may be).The only thing, it seems, that will really give us the power to choose whether or not we unleash a new climatic era upon the Earth, is powerful activism. I don’t mean just sign holding, chanting in solidarity, or occupying symbolic locations (although those all are important tools). This campaign must have teeth, must be able to get a grip on the status quo and rip it to shreds. It needs parallel streams of  action. First, we need people who are able to engage the companies that extract more and more fossil carbon for the purpose of burning it,  challenging them, with expertise, at every turn. We need a stream of people pledging their support for a government intervention in this industry, by means of martial law and executive order, if necessary. Finally, we need to work together to make the radical changes to our individual lives so that we can personally divest ourselves of our carbon burning regime.

Consider the other crossroads in history we have experienced. Although they are far smaller in scale than the one we come to now, they offer us the only lessons by example that we can study. Suppose, for instance, the passengers on flight 93, the fourth plane to be hijacked on September 11, 2001, had not summoned the courage to do whatever necessary to wrest control of that plane from the suicidal martyrs in control of it. Having learned that the other three planes were flown into buildings, to catastrophic effect, and determining that their aircraft was headed for the District of Columbia, the passengers looked outside of their own plight, set aside their regret, called upon each other for strength, and took that airplane into the ground before it could do greater damage.The terrorists were meaning to strike at our finances and the symbols of our way of life. The threat we now face is much, much more immense, and it is not symbolic; it is visceral. We must step away with grace from our attachments and our venality, and remember what is truly important, or we shall all lose much that is precious.