Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We need to come together and pool our wisdom, strength and resources to build a whole new system, a world where all are privileged, to live in bounty, beauty on this wonderful Earth we’ve been given.
Reading the media reporting of a new scientific paper released on 22 July, it was easy to get the impression that some “worse-case” climate warming possibilities are now off the agenda. “So this is good news?” a friend emailed. “No” was my answer.
Long promised, the Trump administration has now issued its final revisions to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA or Act). The changes are among the most aggressive and widespread deregulatory actions taken to date by an administration that has already moved to rescind or substantially revise 100 environmental regulations.
After four years of labour and detailed discussions by an international team of scientists, we are able to quantify better than ever before how the world’s surface temperature responds to increasing CO2 levels.
There are practical reasons to believe that Normal is a fairyland to which we can never return. The virus has not gone away, and is likely to keep recurring in waves. But let’s focus on another question: if such a land existed, would we want to live there?
Appeals to self-interest will not, of themselves, stem the Amazon’s hemorrhage. We must also invoke our love of life and the purpose of service that it points to.
The wilful jeopardising of indigenous peoples’ lives is particularly grave when you consider that the death of each elder represents the “burning of a library“.
The rush by Donald Trump to dismantle the administrative state is producing an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) strangely complicit in its own destruction. Bit by bit, the EPA will have less to enforce.
Long imagined as a bulwark against ecological destruction, players in the mainstream conservation movement—think big NGOs like The Nature Conservancy and their corporate partners—have actually been complicit in that destruction by propping up a fundamentally unsustainable capitalist system and the nature-culture dichotomy it’s built upon.
Should Joe Biden win in November, he will be returning to reign over a federal government he may not recognize. A government that could be hard-pressed to put his climate policies and programs into operation. For that–he’ll have Donald Trump to thank.
Winning the election may be the easiest task Joe Biden and the Democratic Party have to accomplish over the next several years. Governing, however, is another matter. In both cases, climate policy has a prominent role to play. Will a President Biden be able to do what Obama didn’t—put the nation on a path to sustainability?
I apologise for my part in a civilization that made Apocalypse Never a bestseller. I hope that you will have both the capacity inherited from my generation and a fortitude of your own to learn from my failings, and to build a better civilization over the ashes of mine.
