Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Bill Gates made news last week by challenging climate advocates to accept the ‘hard truth’ that temperature rises will not cause enough deaths to justify the priority placed on them. Perhaps the real story is Gates’ use of a very old tactic to dismiss new targets – Gates implied that the grave concerns of even global institutions and science are doomsday fantasies.
But what phytomining could do is produce some metal while also remediating degraded land, sequestering carbon, and serving as the fuel for energy production or the raw material for biochar fertilizer, syngas, and other chemical creations.
Hopes are high. Expectations are low. Change is happening, it is just painfully slow. We need this to be the ‘delivery COP’. One thing is for sure, COP30 will be make or break for people, our precious flora and fauna, and our planet as a whole.
Recovering the meaning the white pines, and other trees had for past generations, and—like Mayer’s project with Charles Johnson’s oak—finding imaginative ways to add new meaning and propagate it forward can play a significant role in helping us to reorient the trajectory of the history we make going forward in a more respectful and sustainable direction for all.
The question, then, is: when will we collectively become comparably dismissive of proposals for humans in space?
Frog and Toad Are Friends, at least according to a venerable children’s book. And so are Jason (Crazy Town’s resident biology nerd) and conservationist brothers, Kyle and Trevor Ritland, authors of The Golden Toad: An Ecological Mystery and the Search for a Lost Species.
With universities being highly enmeshed with corporate money that comes from fossil fuel industries, does it even make sense to have universities? And how exactly do we move from profit-seeking science research that advances weapon technology to liberation?
As the Trump administration deletes climate data and shutters resources that track the impacts of a warming world, nonprofits, state-level governments, and independent scientists are rushing to preserve the information. Last week, Climate Central resurrected one of the most prominent of those lost records: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s billion-dollar disaster database.
What unfolds today across Ukrainian land is not just warfare; it is environmental devastation that will leave Europe’s biodiversity scarred for generations.
As we uncover the colors and complexity of life beyond our planet, may we also remember how incredibly fortunate we are to live in a world that already flourishes with life.
In the case of biosphere replicas, how could any artificial environment possibly compete with the infinitely-superior and time-tested home we already enjoy on the planet to which we are both adapted and permanently grounded?
In Hamlet, the prince ultimately acts—but only after much hesitation, after much suffering. Let us not wait until we are beyond saving to make our choice. To plastic, or not to plastic? That is not just a question. It is one of the defining moral decisions of our time.
