Sustainability

The uncaring way we treat the place, do we humans even really belong here, on this Earth?

I recall another good point Ray Anderson made in his book, Mid-Course Correction. He cited the case of the Fraser firs of eastern Tennessee, heritage forests from the last ice age, ravaged and reduced to almost nothing now by a species of insect accidentally introduced from Europe, against which the trees have no defense.

Anderson’s chilling point quotes the Forest Service report that as an exotic species, the parasite has no natural balance developed for its new ecological niche, and thus will kill its own host, and then die.

To me this sounds a lot like us, here.

Maybe those theories are correct: we ARE descended from aliens after all. If so, they were probably fleeing a ruined home planet.

{ 0 comments }

If your own research persuades you that the Earth truly is warming, then watch a sadly beautiful and terrifying thing: time-lapse photography recording glaciers melting around the world.

This is a film presented at TED by photographer James Balog with the Extreme Ice Survey, a network of time-lapse cameras aimed at vast bodies of ice, all now receding at a fearsome pace.

{ 0 comments }

BBC News upset a good many people on Friday by claiming that the oceans are cooling and that global warming has stopped happening – this during the hottest decade in recorded history. The story, What happened to global warming?, was completely discredited yesterday by no less an expert than Joe Romm at Climate Progress.

Paul Hudson, a weather presenter writing under the byline of climate correspondent for BBC News, claimed that “for the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.” He cited Britain’s Met Office for this claim.

The problem is that even Met Office data show that the planet has continued to accumulate heat. See their own report: Global temperature slowdown – not an end to climate change.

And the oceans? They “have continued to warm, as the peer-reviewed literature makes clear.”

{ 1 comment }

Obama at Notre Dame on May 17th talked a lot about climate change. Ezra Klein wrote about it, and I’m just copying him verbatim here. You should click through to his post – which is short and to the point – if only to see the maps he included: they show graphically which parts of the world have primarily caused climate change, versus which parts of the world will suffer most from its effects. Very sad. And Obama seems to get this.

{ 0 comments }

Nobody in the financial discussion seems to have grasped the urgency of the planet’s message to us. We’re thinking that we just need to get back to the same consumerism we’ve built into our culture as a way of life, and I have the feeling that something will happen to interrupt this thinking. Some event on a planetary scale will occur, and change the game forever, and redirect attention permanently to the key fundamental of our broken economy, which is this: based as it is on the destruction and non-replacement of finite materials, this economy could never last, and always had to end, probably in pain.

Our economy is in the meltdown it is precisely because there are no cheap ways to re-energize it. We are out of resources to take from the planet. The economy of plunder is running into its most obvious limit: there’s nothing left to take for free. See how Ray Anderson explains to us the economy of plunder.

{ 2 comments }

Recent data suggest that the oceans have cooled slightly in recent years. But this doesn’t necessarily imply that the planet is not warming. Instead, it illustrates how poorly we understand the deep oceanic thermal environment – we don’t know where the heat that should be there is going.

For a long time Antarctica has been thought to be cooling over time, and this has confounded some of the science of global warming, as well as providing easy ammunition to those who require declaratory yes/no answers to the questions of climate change.

Now, it becomes clear that Antarctica has been warming all along. Around the world the ice is melting faster than our models can account for.

{ 0 comments }

The Economist has a special report on the state of the world’s oceans. Their condition is perilous, and so perhaps is ours.

Surface acidification caused by carbon dioxide interaction is rapidly killing the coral reefs, which may be gone within a few short decades. This, says the publication’s Leader summarizing the report, “would be the end of the rainforests of the seas.”

There are plenty of other ills besetting the oceans. There’s the melting ice. And the continent-sized mass of discarded plastic swirling in the Pacific. And where have all the fish gone?

{ 0 comments }

The argument for agribusiness is that larger operations can produce food more efficiently, but what if part of the goodness of our food comes from the goodness of the people who grow it? What if bringing the efficiencies of modern corporate methods has poisoned the land and made the crops not worth eating?

The singer Dave Matthews spoke at Farm Aid 2008 last month, and gave a beautifully warm yet penetratingly logical description – in 3 minutes – of how the corporate approach to farming has been destroying the nutritive quality of our food as well as our ecological habitat. And he explained why this happens.

Take a listen:

{ 1 comment }

One of the frustrating things about changing to a sustainable practice model is finding ways to measure the total impact of your actions. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development, after two years of work, has just launched a framework for measuring this very thing.

{ 0 comments }