Climate Emergency
- Brian Tokar – _The Green Alternative_
- Murray Bookchin – “Listen, Marxist!”
- Murray Bookchin – “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought”
- _Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary_
Vox has an excellent story on annual global food waste. The climate specific stats are eye watering. 8 to 10% of carbon emissions are related to food waste and if it were a country, it would be 3rd in emissions, behind only the US and China.
Such waste takes a significant toll on the environment. The process of producing food — the raising of animals, the land and water use, and the subsequent pollution that goes with it — is horribly intensive on the planet. Food waste squanders those efforts, and then makes it worse: as it rots in landfills, it creates methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
Mass die-offs and constant crisis will define the brutality of our future as we attempt and fail to adapt to a completely destabilized climate.
Mass fish die-off in Vietnam as heat wave roasts Southeast Asia
Hundreds of thousands of fish have died in a reservoir in southern Vietnam’s Dong Nai province, with locals and media reports suggesting a brutal heat wave and the lake’s management are to blame.
Like much of Southeast Asia—where schools have recently been forced to close early and electricity usage has surged—southern and central Vietnam have been scorched by devastating heat.
And yet cities in the Southwest are still growing. The delusional thinking about the future is off the charts.
Megadrought forces end to sugarcane farming in parched Texas borderland | The Guardian
In February, the cooperative announced that it would close its 50-year-old sugarcane processing mill, the last remaining in the state, by the end of this spring. It didn’t even make it to the end of the season, with most workers employed until 29 April. Ongoing megadrought meant there wasn’t enough water to irrigate co-op members’ 34,000 acres of sugarcane, and that effectively puts an end to sugarcane farming in the south Texas borderlands.
…Increasingly dry farms find themselves vying with other farms, cities, industries and mining operations for dwindling resources. In 2022, drought decimated Texas cotton and forced California growers to idle half their rice fields. Water disputes are also on the rise as decreased flows in the Colorado River and other vital waterways pit state against state, states against native nations and farmers against municipalities.
And it will get much, much worse. We are in the earliest days food systems disruption.
Rest assured, we’ll continue to do nothing to solve the problem.
Worst wine harvest in 62 years blamed on ‘extreme’ weather and climate change | Euronews
The International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV) says the drink hit its lowest level since 1962. This intergovernmental organisation has 50 member states, representing 75 per cent of the world’s vineyard area.
Experts blame “extreme environmental conditions” including droughts and fires that have been driving the downward trend in production.
I first watched Koyaanisqatsi sometime around 1990 and I was left speechless. I cried while I watched it and after.
Without words it tells the story of modern industrial human societies, particularly those of the Global North. A story of alienation, cruelty and destruction that was well underway at the time it was filmed and which we’ve seen continue at increased pace in the 40 years since. And, in 2024, it would seem that it is a story we will not deviate from.
Five translations of the Hopi word koyaanisqatsi:
“crazy life"“life in turmoil"“life out of balance"“life disintegrating"“a state of life that calls for another way of living”
In the years since I’ve watched it again several times as a kind of ongoing acknowledgement meditation. We are racing into oblivion.
“These films have never been about the effect of technology, of industry on people. It’s been that everyone: politics, education, things of the financial structure, the nation state structure, language, the culture, religion, all of that exists within the host of technology. So it’s not the effect of, it’s that everything exists within [technology]. It’s not that we use technology, we live technology. Technology has become as ubiquitous as the air we breathe …”
The trailer.
The inquiry was instigated by Colombia and Chile, which together asked the court to set out what legal responsibilities states have to tackle climate change and to stop it breaching people’s human rights.
Earth’s record hot streak might be a sign of a new climate era - The Washington Post
The heat fell upon Mali’s capital like a thick, smothering blanket — chasing people from the streets, stifling them inside their homes. For nearly a week at the beginning of April, the temperature in Bamako hovered above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The cost of ice spiked to ten times its normal price, an overtaxed electrical grid sputtered and shut down.
With much of the majority-Muslim country fasting for the holy month of Ramadan, dehydration and heat stroke became epidemic. As their body temperatures climbed, people’s blood pressure lowered. Their vision went fuzzy, their kidneys and livers malfunctioned, their brains began to swell. At the city’s main hospital, doctors recorded a month’s worth of deaths in just four days. Local cemeteries were overwhelmed.
Arctic permafrost is now a net source of major greenhouse gases | New Scientist
Areas of permanently frozen ground in northern regions are now emitting more carbon into the atmosphere than they absorb, causing the planet to heat even further, according to the first Arctic-wide estimate of all three major greenhouse gases.
Frozen ground, or permafrost, which underlies 15 per cent of the northern hemisphere and contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere, has shrunk in area by an estimated 7 per cent in 50 years as it thaws.
It was 85°F here yesterday (mid-Missouri). Forecast to be 83° today and 82° tomorrow. According to the Apple weather app this is 13° above average. Summer is going to be fun. 🥵
Our rapidly heating planet is regularly shattering records these days. December through February was so warm — in fact, the hottest winter on record in the U.S. — it’s been described by some climate experts as a “lost winter.” Last year also set new records for global surface temperature, hottest summer and ocean heat content. Perhaps most ominously, the world averaged temperatures 1.4º C higher than pre-industrial levels during those 12 months.
As technology develops, sound has become an increasingly important way of measuring the health and biodiversity of ecosystems: our forests, soils and oceans all produce their own acoustic signatures. Scientists who use ecoacoustics to measure habitats and species say that quiet is falling across thousands of habitats, as the planet witnesses extraordinary losses in the density and variety of species.
‘The doom sits on your shoulders’: Farmers share how weeks of wet weather have hit them hard
Rainfall was above average in most parts of Ireland last month. The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service’s latest monthly report also identified that March was wetter than average across western Europe more broadly. It was also the 10th month in-a-row to see record-breaking average global temperatures as climate change escalates.
How do you define self?
Back around 1991 I co-organized and participated in a Council of all beings, a gathering created to help humans connect and empathize with the world around them. In our case the council was based upon the book Thinking Like a Mountain.
Whether it was the book or the gathering, what I took to be the foundation of both, remains with me 30+ years later: I am not just an individual human with a name. In fact, this human is trillions of bacteria, millions to billions of fungi, hundreds of trillions of viruses. We all contain multitudes. We are all an ecosystem. But we then also exist within the larger planetary ecosystem. Billions of humans sharing a planet with every other non-human species. And our “individual” wellbeing is connected to the wellbeing of the larger ecosystems in which we exist.
Those of us in the global north have focused on our individual selves and the nuclear family if we have one. Certainly this is true for those of us in the US. The cultures of the global north encourage us to focus on living a particular kind of (high energy, high consumption) life which ignores the fundamental importance and reality of our larger selves. The result of this disconnection is that humans are actively destroying the larger whole of which we are a part. Simply put, without healthy, balanced Earth ecosystems humans will cease to exist. This is an obvious truth and yet we ignore it every day. We pretend that we can exist without the rest.
From the Invocation written by John Seed:
We call upon the spirit of evolution, the miraculous force that inspires rocks and dust to weave themselves into biology. You have stood by us for millions and billions of years — do not forsake us now. Empower us and awaken in us pure and dazzling creativity. You that can turn scales into feathers, seawater to blood, caterpillars to butterflies, metamorphose our species, awaken in us the powers that we need to survive the present crisis and evolve into more aeons of our solar journey.
Awaken in us a sense of who we truly are: tiny ephemeral blossoms on the Tree of Life. Make the purposes and destiny of that tree our own purpose and destiny.
Fill each of us with love for our true Self, which includes all of the creatures and plants and landscapes of the world. Fill us with a powerful urge for the well-being and continual unfolding of this Self.
It may well be that the survival of our species will require such a shift of understanding and, following from that, a shift on our way of being in the world with our fellow species. And, for that matter, perhaps equally important, a shift in how humans relate to fellow humans. As it stands in 2024 we continue to waste energy a resources in war and competition with one another. We would do far better in cooperation. One human species working together with no loss of resources to conflict.
It would be a very different kind of world for all species on the planet.
An excellent episode of Solarpunk Now! podcast:
Episode 18 – Ecology is Radical: A People’s History of Environmentalism
This Earth Month, we’re looking back on the history of environmental radicalism. Brian Tokar is a teacher, activist, and writer who’s been involved in the movements he writes and teaches about since the 70s. We discuss how leftism and environmentalism came together, why ecology matters for the left, and what lessons we can learn from these traditions and put into practice today.
References:
Just another day in the climate emergency as the reservoir that supplies most of the water to Colombian capital city Bogotá hits a record low of 16%. A city that usually receives twice as much rainfall as London, is now rationing water.
Another result of the drought, some neighborhoods are choking in smoke as wildfires burn in the forests surrounding the city.
Meanwhile Mexico City is also rationing water and Guatemala declared a wildfire emergency on Wednesday.
The climate emergency is the long emergency that will have no end in our lifetimes, each future year worse than the last.
Canada risks more ‘catastrophic’ wildfires with hot weather forecast | The Guardian
Last year, Canada endured its worst-ever fire season, with more than 6,600 blazes burning 15m hectares (37m acres), an area roughly seven times the annual average. Eight firefighters died and 230,000 people were evacuated from their homes.
This winter the country experienced warmer-than-normal temperatures and widespread drought, setting the stage for another punishing summer.
Impact of climate change on marine life shown to be much bigger than previously known
Alter and her colleagues calculated the consequences of three projected scenarios of carbon dioxide increase, and thus of ocean warming and ocean acidification: extreme increase, moderate increase at the current speed and—due to possible measures—mitigated increase.
Alter says, “Our new approach suggests that if ocean warming and acidification continue on the current trajectory, up to 100% of the biological processes in fish and invertebrate species will be affected, while previous research methods found changes in only about 20 and 25% of all processes, respectively.”
Record-breaking rain in recent months has drastically reduced the amount of food produced in the UK, farming groups have said.
Livestock and crops have been affected as fields have been submerged since last autumn.
It has been an exceptionally wet 18 months. According to the Met Office, 1,695.9mm of rain fell from October 2022 to March 2024, the highest amount for any 18-month period in England in recorded history. The Met Office started collecting data in 1836.
The UK will be reliant on imports for wheat in the coming year and potentially beyond because of the drastic reduction in yields.
Schools close and crops wither as ‘historic’ heatwave hits south-east Asia | The Guardian
Thousands of schools in the Philippines have stopped in-person classes due to unbearable heat. In Indonesia, prolonged dry weather has caused rice prices to soar. In Thailand’s waters, temperatures are so high that scientists fear coral could be destroyed.
A “historic heatwave” is being experienced across south-east Asia, according to Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist and weather historian.
The case for paying ranchers to raise trees instead of cattle | The Guardian
There is a simple, cost-effective and scientifically sound way to turn back the clock on global warming and reverse the catastrophic collapse of biodiversity: pay ranchers to raise trees instead of cattle.
By mass, the world’s 1.7 billion cows are the dominant animal species on Earth, far outweighing the human population, and outweighing all the wild terrestrial mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians left on Earth by more than 15-fold. More than a third of Earth’s land is used to feed livestock.