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Across America, a number of homeowners are beginning to reduce their household energy usage. But why? It seems like a simple question with an obvious answer: those who conserve energy are probably doing so either to save money or to reduce their impact on the environment. But, as with many issues involving human decision-making, the reality is not that simple. Researcher Robert Cialdini and colleagues wanted to find out the real reasons why homeowners conserved energy. To do so, they conducted a telephone survey in which they asked people to rank how important four different factors were in their decision to conserve. Those who answered the survey ranked the four factors in this order of most to least important: environmental concern; helping society; saving money; and because others do it. Yet when... (click title for more)
Five mass extinctions have nearly wiped out life on earth. The sixth is coming. OVER THE past four years, bee colonies have undergone a disturbing transformation. As helpless beekeepers looked on, the machinelike efficiency of these communal insects devolved into inexplicable disorganization. Worker bees would fly away, never to return; adolescent bees wandered aimlessly in the hive; and the daily jobs in the colony were left undone until honey production stopped and eggs died of neglect. Colony collapse disorder, as it is known, has claimed roughly 30 percent of bee colonies every winter since 2007. If bees go extinct, their loss will trigger an extinction domino effect, because crops from apples to broccoli rely on these insects for pollination. At the same time, over a third of the world’s amphibian species are threatened with extinction, and Harvard evolutionary biologist and conservationist E.O. Wilson estimates that 27,000 species of all kinds go extinct per year... (click title for more)
Tribal groups in Earth's largest rainforest are already being affected by shifts wrought by climate change, reports a paper published last week in the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Tribal groups in Earth's largest rainforest are already being affected by shifts wrought by climate change, reports a paper published last week in the British journalPhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
The paper, which is based on a collection of interviews conducted with indigenous leaders in the Brazilian Amazon, says that native populations are reporting shifts in precipitation patterns, humidity, river levels, temperature, and fire and agricultural cycles. These shifts, measured against celestial timing used by indigenous groups, are affecting traditional ways of life that date back thousands of years.
“Indigenous groups who have lived in the Amazon for centuries, even millennia, are seeing signs that the climate is changing there," said Steve Schwartzman, lead author of the study and director of tropical forest policy at Environmental Defense Fund. “Indigenous people are telling us rainfall and river levels have changed; the fires they’re dealing with are
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In facing the crises of the twenty-first century, we need, more than ever, works such as Jerome Bernstein's remarkable and prophetic Living in the Borderland. This book enables us to believe in the possibility that our disastrous western culture can be healed. For Living in the Borderland is one of those rare texts that is so deeply immersed in a lifetime of clinical practice and research that it transcends boundaries between disciplines, between social groups and even between humans and nature. Bernstein demonstrates that the borderland, of consciousness, of cultures, of so-called 'sanity', of the margins cultivated between nature and human, is a place of potential redemption. In so doing, Living in the Borderland shifts the foundations of western epistemology in favour of restitution to native repressed cultures such as the Navajo. It fosters postcolonial justice, clinical revolution and the glorious possibility of saving the planet from the dominant group's predilection for species suicide... (click title for more)
Via Bonnie Bright
Hózhó. Under a turquoise sky dotted with cotton clouds, Pat, the patchwork mustang I ride feels his tentative way between large boulders and slippery sand. It has rained hard the night before, leaving everything bright and fresh, but the horses are paying for it with the sudden and drastic loss of the topsoil that normally cushions the trail. As we make our way past a final patch of juniper trees and crest a rise in the rich red earth, Canyon de Chelly, the sacred home of the Navajo for hundreds of years, suddenly reveals itself in all its stunning beauty. For the first time, I think perhaps I catch a glimpse of the meaning of the word the Navajo (Diné) use to describe a state of beauty and order, of being in harmony with the universe (Sandner, 1991). The Navajo call themselves “Diné” meaning “The People.” They are cultural and linguistic relatives of the Athapascans who inhabit Canada and the American Northwest, having migrated across the Bering Strait in ancient times and.. (click title for more)
Crisis after crisis, natural and climate change-related disasters such as floods, droughts, and storms have displaced people from their homes in countries around the world. Though a causal link between any weather event and climate change is difficult to prove, climatologists have long believed that climate change will result in an increase in extreme weather events. Floods, droughts, and storms almost always impact the lives of individuals, forcing them to flee their homes as a result of safety or reduced food supply, among other factors. In 2005 for example, Hurricane Katrina left a wake of more than 400,000 displaced residents. In 2010, over 20 million people were affected, and 8 million displaced, by the floods in Pakistan. In addition to these more immediate natural disasters, slow-onset climate change-related disasters such as drought, desertification, salination of groundwater, and the rise of sea levels have contributed to massive displacement worldwide... (click title for more)
Being in nature one becomes aware of the infinite circle of life. There is evidence of decay, destruction and death; there are also examples of rejuvenation, restoration, and renewal. The never-ending cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth can put life and death into perspective and impart a sense of constancy after experiencing a life changing loss or a death.
Via Pamir Kiciman
Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk. (N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain, p. 83) I have thought often about these words from N. Scott Momaday since I read his moving book, The Way to Rainy Mountain, which retells Kiowa myths from his childhood and people. I read this... (click title for more)
PARIS (AFP) - The tsunami that ravaged northeast Japan in March 2011 created the biggest single dumping of rubbish, sweeping some five million tonnes of shattered buildings, cars, household goods and other rubble into the sea. About three-and-a-half million tonnes, according to official Japanese estimates, sank immediately, leaving some 1.5 million tonnes of plastic, timber, fishing nets, shipping containers, industrial scrap and innumerable other objects to float deeper into the ocean. Marine experts poring over the disaster say the floating trash adds significantly to the Pacific's already worrying pollution problem. For many years, and possibly decades, items will be a hazard for shipping, a risk for sea mammals, turtles and birds, a hitchhiking invitation for... (Click title for more)
Hundreds of beached dolphin carcasses, shrimp with no eyes, contaminated fish, ancient corals caked in oil and some seriously unwell people are among the legacies that scientists are still uncovering in the wake of BP's Deepwater Horizon spill. This week it will be three years since the first of 4.9 billion barrels of crude oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico, in what is now considered the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. As the scale of the ecological disaster unfolds, BP is appearing daily in a New Orleans federal court to battle over the extent of compensation it owes to the region. Infant dolphins were found dead at six times average rates in January and February of 2013. More than 650 dolphins have been found beached in the oil spill area since the disaster began, which is more than four times the historical average. Sea turtles were also affected... (Click title for more)
George Monbiot: We have offshored the problem of escalating consumption, and our perceptions of it, by considering only territorial emissions Every society has topics it does not discuss. These are the issues which challenge its comfortable assumptions. They are the ones that remind us of mortality, which threaten the continuity we anticipate, which expose our various beliefs as irreconcilable. Among them are the facts which sink the cosy assertion, that (in David Cameron's words) "there need not be a tension between green and growth". At a reception in London recently I met an extremely rich woman, who lives, as most people with similar levels of wealth do, in an almost comically unsustainable fashion: jetting between various homes and resorts in one long turbo-charged holiday. When I told her what I did, she responded: "Oh I agree, the environment is so important. I'm crazy about recycling." But the real problem, she explained, was "people breeding too much"... (click title for more)
4th April 2013 – Hundreds of Sea Birds wash up dead on Kirkcaldy beach in Scotland. Link 3rd April 2013 – Thousands more Starfish wash ashore dead in Cleethorpes, England. Link 3rd April 2013 – Thousands of Fish wash up dead on Lake Erie shores in Buffalo, America. Link 3rd April 2013 – 17+ Dolphins and several Penguins wash ashore dead in Adelaide, Australia. Link 3rd April 2013 – Hundreds of dead Fish found floating along Rock River in Illinois, America. Link 3rd April 2013 – Tens of thousands of farm animals have died from snowfall in Wales & England. Link 3rd April 2013 – Hundreds of Sea Birds wash up dead on North East coast in England. Link 2nd April 2013 – 60 Turtles found dead in a creek in Sarina, Australia. Link >>Click title for more...
About eight years ago, Glenn Albrecht began receiving frantic calls from residents of the Upper Hunter Valley, a 6,000-square-mile region in southeastern Australia. For generations the Upper Hunter was known as the “Tuscany of the South” — an oasis of alfalfa fields, dairy farms and lush English-style shires on a notoriously hot, parched continent. “The calls were like desperate pleas,” Albrecht, a philosopher and professor of sustainability at Murdoch University in Perth, recalled in June. “They said: ‘Can you help us? We’ve tried everyone else. Is there anything you can do about this?’ “There’s a scholar who talks about ‘heart’s ease,’ ” Albrecht told me as we sat in his car on a cliff above the Newcastle shore, overlooking the Pacific. In the distance, just before the earth curved out of sight, 40 coal tankers were lined up single file. “People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country. If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.” Australian aborigines, Navajos and any number of indigenous peoples have reported this...(click title for more)
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Today, we are all unwitting subjects in the largest set of drug trials ever. A hidden epidemic is poisoning America. The toxins are in the air we breathe and the water we drink, in the walls of our homes and the furniture within them. We can’t escape it in our cars. It’s in cities and suburbs. It afflicts rich and poor, young and old. And there’s a reason why you’ve never read about it in the newspaper or seen a report on the nightly news: It has no name — and no antidote. The culprit behind this silent killer is lead. And vinyl. And formaldehyde. And asbestos. And Bisphenol A. And polychlorinated biphenyls. And thousands more innovations brought to us by the industries that once promised “better living through chemistry,” but instead produced a toxic stew that has made every American a guinea pig and has turned the United States into one grand unnatural experiment...(click title for more)
There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit. The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and 249 withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were now lifeless. Anglers no longer Rachel Carson visited them, for all the fish had died.
In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams. No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves... (click title for more)
A new perspective emanating from archaeology and ecology suggests that humanity has spent thousands of years making widespread and profound changes to the "natural" world Wherever you go on this blue, green and white globe of ours, odds are some person has been there before you—and left a mark. That's because the hunting, farming or burning practices of our most distant ancestors have shaped most land areas on the planet, argues an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists and ecologists inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If we are indeed living in the Anthropocene—a new geologic epoch brought on by the outsized environmental effects of the human species—then this new interval isn't just a few hundred years old, it is older than the industrial revolution.
The researchers set out to investigate just how long human being have been profoundly changing the environment on land. "This is a super important question for the identity of humanity," argues... (click title for more)
There are hundreds of components in each of these gadgets, using dozens of metals and minerals. The path each component takes from the Earth to be extracted, smelted and processed criss-crosses the planet through complex routes that companies fail – or refuse – to track. A new report from the Gaia Foundation and allies exposes how the accelerating consumption and wasteful disposal of our electronic gadgets is leading to growing ecological and materials crises. “Short Circuit: the Lifecycle of our Electronic Gadgets and the True Cost to Earth” was launched last week in the Houses of Parliament, alongside the London Mining Network, Friends of the Earth and the Great Recovery project. The report has been produced in collaboration with the African Biodiversity Network and others. With the number of mobile-connected devices projected to exceed the number of humans on Earth by the end of 2013, the report draws attention to the vast and accelerating amount of metals and minerals that are being mined from the Earth for these gadgets, only to quickly return as wasted and toxic landfill.... (click title for more)
Raymond Ladouceur remembers when he could dip a cup into the Athabasca River for a drink. He remembers when the trout and muskrats were plentiful -- and when his community was healthy. But times have changed, said Ladouceur, an elder with the Métis Canadian aboriginal people. "Now, you can't drink water from the river. It's too dangerous," Ladouceur told The Huffington Post, taking a break from chopping wood. "We're seeing deformed fish, which I'd never seen in my whole entire years. And something in that water is killing the muskrats." Ladouceur lives some 100 miles downstream from the heart of Alberta's oil sands development. The sands underlie about 140,000 square kilometers (54,000 square miles) of Canadian boreal forest and peat bogs -- an area about the size of Florida -- and hold around 170 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Since mining began in 1967, at least two-thirds of the land has been leased for extraction... (click title for more)
Nafeez Ahmed: South-east Asian country's untapped natural wealth is being opened up, regardless of the environmental and human costs New evidence has emerged that the systematic violence against ethnic Rohingya in Burma - "described as genocidal by some experts" - is being actively supported by state agencies. But the violence's links to the country's ambitions to rapidly expand fossil fuel production, at massive cost to local populations and to the environment, have been largely overlooked. Over 125,000 ethnic Rohingya have been forcibly displaced since waves of violence swept across Burma's Arakan state last year, continuing until now, according to the New York-based Human Rights Watch's (HRW) latest sobering report. The "ethnic cleansing" campaign against Arakan's Muslim minority, although instigated largely by... (click title for more)
"My purpose tonight in speaking is to suggest that the re-inclusion of the ancient world view expressed in the American Indian statement "all my relations" is precisely our greatest hope for the future, ecologically and psychologically. I'll say a little bit about the situation we are in. I would describe it as nothing less than imminent global catastrophe. Ecocide if you will. As a species we are destroying our life support systems. The air is becoming increasingly unbreathable. The hole in the ozone grows larger. Water becomes undrinkable, the oceans are dying, the soil is eroded and turning non-arable. Toxic nuclear waste is leaking into all three elements just mentioned from unthinking, short sighted attempts to harness the fourth element, fire.
No one escapes the daily recitation of the facts of planetary destruction in the media. They are voluminous. But whether it is the loss of a hundred species to our ecosystem a day or the destruction of old growth forests equal to the area of Pennsylvania each year or even the information that due to pesticides sperm counts of American males today are 50% that of their grandfathers, we seem to respondto these facts with...(Click title for more)
In nature, it is concretely evident how everything is interrelated. We can look at any aspect of the environment and see and name hundreds or even thousands of relationships with other facets of the environment. No man is a silo, yet the individual of Descartes’ vision required a strong, self-directing ego as the optimum situation for success and well-being.
Rather than continuing to propagate and strengthen the illusion of the “individual,” it is critical to reconceptualize it, embracing instead an image of an ecology of the psyche, a system that encompasses all, traversing human-conceived boundaries of time, culture, and species. In truth, we each carry various elements of “other” within us: spirits of ancestors long since gone, traditions and ritual from distant peoples we know nothing about, and energetic archetypes from the natural world... (click title for more)
Millions of people could become destitute in Africa and Asia as staple foods more than double in price by 2050 as a result of extreme temperatures, floods and droughts that will transform the way the world farms. As food experts gather at two major conferences to discuss how to feed the nine billion people expected to be alive in 2050, leading scientists have told the Observer that food insecurity risks turning parts of Africa into permanent disaster areas. Rising temperatures will also have a drastic effect on access to basic foodstuffs, with potentially dire consequences for the poor. Frank Rijsberman, head of the world's 15 international CGIAR crop research centres, which study food insecurity, said: "Food production will have to rise 60% by 2050 just to keep pace with expected global population increase and changing demand. Climate change comes on top of that. The annual production gains we have come to expect … will be taken away by climate change...(Click title for more)
What happened to our innocent "wide open" connection with the natural world -- that unedited desire to plunge into the falls? Many people are beginning to ask this question, and the answers, that some are arriving at, point to an exciting new understanding of psychological healing. The psychological pain experienced by many may be due to a perceived, and profoundly felt, alienation from the natural world. If so, healing may come about from a reunion of psyche and nature. In 1992 two books came out that began to unsettle the community of modern psychotherapy practitioners and their clients: James Hillman and Michael Ventura's We've Had 100 Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse and Theodore Roszak's The Voice of the Earth. Both of these books called into question the modern practice of psychotherapy in the face of the continued decline of the natural world. Both authors assert that the suffering an individual experiences is linked to more than their personal story, it is connected to the suffering of the earth and the nurturing systems that sustain us. This extends the realm of human experience to include the world around us and brings the possibilities for... (click title for more)
Honeybees have long excited the interest of philosophers and natural historians. In ancient times tracts on them were written by Aristotle, Aristomachus, Cato, Varro, Pliny, Palladius and Virgil, and in the early modern period scientific studies began with Jan Swammerdam, who combined scientific method with piety in his Bible of Nature (1737), Réaumur who devoted a volume to honeybees in his Notes to Serve for a History of Insects and François Huber, who did not allow his own physiological blindness to hamper his New Observations of Bees (1789) (Maeterlinck). For ardour, however, no one could surpass Maurice Maeterlinck, whose Life of the Bee (1901), probably the most famous of all treatises on the honeybee, suffuses the idea of the bee with nostalgia for Edenic vistas of fruit- and flower-laden domestic abundance and tranquillity. Let us pause with Maeterlinck for a moment and savour the way, for him, the image of the beehive conjures orderliness, virtue, peacefulness and a pervasive honeyed sweetness that perhaps reflects.... (click title for more)
If the current actions contributing to a multifaceted degradation of the world's oceans aren't curbed, a mass extinction unlike anything human history has ever seen is coming, an expert panel of scientists warns in an alarming new report. The preliminary report from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) is the result of the first-ever interdisciplinary international workshop examining the combined impact of all of the stressors currently affecting the oceans, including pollution, warming, acidification, overfishing and hypoxia. “The findings are shocking," Dr. Alex Rogers, IPSO's scientific director, said in a statement released by the group. "This is a very serious situation demanding unequivocal action at every level. We are looking at consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime, and worse, our children's and generations beyond that." The scientific panel concluded that degeneration in the oceans is happening much faster than has been predicted, and that the combination of factors currently distressing the marine environment is contributing to the... (click title for more)
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