Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
This month we’re going to talk about the current pace of anthropogenic climate change. That’s perhaps the most massive story of our time; it’s happening a good deal faster than I expected — though in all fairness, a great many climate scientists have been caught flatfooted by the pace of change as well.
A new resistance camp, called L’eau Est La Vie (Water Is Life), opened over the weekend, on June 24. Based in southern Louisiana, the camp is against the 163-mile long Bayou Bridge Pipeline. The camp, according to a press release emailed to Colorlines, is made up of indigenous and environmental justice communities. Described as a “floating camp,” it sits among Louisiana’s wetlands and contains numerous indigenous art structures that are on rafts.
The idea of conferring of a “legal personality” on a river and explicitly guaranteeing its “health and well-being” is a major departure for Western law, needless to say. We westerners have no legal categories for recognizing the intrinsic nature of nonhuman living systems and how we relate to them ontologically.
I’m digging through reports and punditry to make sense of health care reform when I realize that while we’ve been debating single-payer systems and high-risk pools, no one’s talking about the most serious health threat: climate change. I know what global warming is doing to our ecosystems. My Twitter feed is a stream of climate disaster revelations. Given the serious implications droughts, floods, and fires pose to our health, shouldn’t climate change be part of the health care discussions?
Candidate Trump had promised the auto industry and his supporters that he would get Detroit working again by deregulating the industry. On the Ides of March 2017, The Donald started to make good on that promise. In an executive order, The Donald directed EPA and the Department of Transportation/National Highway Transportation and Safety Agency to re-open the Midterm Evaluation (MTE) completed just prior to President Obama’s leaving office.
Sand-dredging is big business, especially in Asia, where demand has sky-rocketed thanks to the booming construction industry. Rod Harbinson reports from Cambodia on an extractive industry that is mired in corruption and scandal, and meets some of those on the frontline of the fight against it.
With the decision by the Trump administration to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement on climate change and reverse many of the prior administration’s climate change policies, it seems that federal action on climate change will be unlikely in the next few years. However, the US system of government gives individual states broad powers to regulate CO2 emissions within their borders, with many states actively moving forward with their own mitigation strategies in absence of federal action.
The first responsibility of a government is to safeguard the people and their future wellbeing. The ability to do so is increasingly threatened by human-induced climate change, the accelerating impacts of which are driving political instability and conflict globally. Climate change poses an existential risk to humanity which, unless addressed as an emergency, will have catastrophic consequences.
The Ecosystem Restoration Camps allow us act together and let us learn to respect, collaborate and co-create the world we want. We need to work on this and we also need to play and to practice perhaps more than work on it … so that we can experiment and find the answers to many perplexing problems.
The paper “Mitigation implications of an ice-free summer in the Arctic Ocean”[4] provides estimates for the effect of an ice-free Arctic in the month of September in 2050 and 2040. As the paper comments, the possibility of an early loss in arctic sea ice has not been included in any of the Integrated Assessment Models used to assess the societal impacts of climate change.
In her new book, “No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need”, Klein reminds us to pay attention not only to the style in which Trump governs (a multi-ring circus so routinely corrupt and corrosive that anti-democratic practices seem normal) but in whose interests he governs (the wealthy, those he believes to be the rightful winners in the capitalist cage match)…
His erasing the nation’s signature from the Paris Accord was nothing more than pandering to his core supporters on the back of an issue The Donald considers inconsequential to his legacy. It was intended to offset growing criticism of his performance to-date.
