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The fastest way to put the brakes on global heating (it's not George Monbiot's) |
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Written by Jan Lundberg
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Culture Change Letter #196, August 26, 2008
The fastest way to put the brakes on global heating is to embrace the peaking of world oil extraction and the implications of petrocollapse. As long as we deny there's a terminal outcome for our petroleum-based infrastructure -- and therefore society as we know it -- we will keep dancing around the crisis of climate change. Precious time is being lost while feedback loops strengthen greenhouse gas output. Embracing collapse sounds crazy and, as we all would prefer, hopefully unnecessary. But what if that's your only ticket out of the burning theater and the rafters are about to come down?
Let's get our priorities straight. Is the economy a sacred cow? Is maintaining it along with its institutions of government and corporations the only way greenhouse gases will be slashed, and quickly enough to stave off climate hell? Writer George Monbiot is so certain that the answer is "yes" that he may have forgotten that direct action steps on certain toes.
I think the answer to those questions is emphatically "No!" Trusting the continuation of the economy and its self-serving components of Earth's destruction includes their assuring first their own self-preservation -- as if they were divine creations of Mother Nature to be loaded onto a Noah's Ark to save the world. No, thank you. There's another way, but many of us of a conventional bent are loathe to make the leap -- even if it would be off a burning precipice to safety within reach. When will we do it, when our neck of the woods becomes uncomfortable?
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I'd rather be among wild animals than weird humans |
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Written by Jan Lundberg
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Culture Change Letter #195, Aug. 24, 2008
To live in a near wild state of nature or very rural area is not a route for many urban dwellers today. But if they have no sustenance in the city someday, what happens to them? This is a question swept so far under the rug that we forget it's there at all.
Personally speaking, I feel that a beast that could be watching me or about to mess with my stuff is not so much a worry as the human one that one is all too likely to encounter. There's some bad ones out there, but they are in the cities for the most part, and not, in my experience, out in healthy nature. It's not that there aren't plenty of healthy and wonderful people in the cities -- and their more creative and selfless work may determine our survival as a species. However, a neglected aspect of survival is pristine nature and living the country life.
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Ending Poverty: A Great Idea Whose Time Will Never Come |
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Written by Lorna Salzman
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The past three weeks I and my husband Eric spent in Peru, birding in cloud and rainforest, primarily in the high Andes east of Cuzco, along the Madre de Dios River, and at lodges just outside the boundaries of the Manu Biosphere Preserve, a million acres of lowland rainforest that has been set aside for strict ecosystem preservation.
It was a tough slog - up at 4 am, breakfast at 5, on the trail by 5:30, birding for three to six hours morning and afternoon on muddy trails and seeking out not just the colorful "poster birds" like macaws and toucans and motmots and hummingbirds (which are most numerous in the higher cloud forest, though we saw many of these among the nearly five hundred species we logged), but Little Brown Jobs (LBJs) and Little Grey Jobs (LGJ) called antbirds, antwrens, antthrushes, antshrikes, which follow army ants and eat the bugs that flee from the ants. The antbirds, as well as larger brown Furnarids which prefer trees, creep silently along the forest floor, vines and shrubs. They are devilishly hard to detect. You usually have to hang around for half an hour before they can be glimpsed for a split second as they dart between the vegetation.
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