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POPSHaiti: Deforestation and Slavery Nothing better symbolized the vicious cycle of poverty in Haiti than the process of deforestation. Most people imagine that slavery died in the 19th century. Yet today there are more slaves than at any time in human history. This article was triggered by a clip from amgumen , a real interesting read: Matt Ridley on Inconvenient Truths About 'Renewable' Energy | Mind & Matter - WSJ.com Haiti has felled 98% of its tree cover and counting; it's an ecological disaster compared with its fossil-fuel burning neighbor, the Dominican Republic, whose forest cover is 41% and stable. Haitians are now burning tree roots to make charcoal.
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POPSBe of service to Earth - From despair to impassioned inspiration [11Jul10] Industrial civilisation breeds the scourge of human selfishness which is overwhelming the planet. Yet, virtually all wisdom traditions say that selfless action is the way to happiness and enlightenment. It's about giving to the land, giving back as much as possible of what we have taken that was never ours to take. This kind of selfless action is of the highest value in the Survivance Game. If people to not reach this level of accomplishment, they will leave very little behind for the future, and the Game (which is real) will be lost forever.
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POPSI've seen the enemy ... - Oil Shocks [31May10] It's us. The best, most sacred and meaningful thing to be done is to stop using the oil now. Cut driving to a minimum, stop flying, use P2P rather than Cloud computing, practice radical thrift. It is a simple decision about prioritising what is most important, whether it is personal convenience and instant gratification, or survival of life on the planet. The time to make this decision is always now.
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POPSOverwhelming horror - Oil spill disaster is now 'out of control' [2May10] Although BP and TransOcean may be culpable in a legal sense, all of us who use oil must share the blame for the catastrophy. The oil companies are simply trying to me our demand. If people accepted their responsibility, they would do everything in their power not to use the filthy stuff, so that the hideous deaths and extinctions of so many fellow creatures would not be in vain. They would give up flying and driving, eating too much meat and consuming plastic. They would put the needs of the earth before their own selfish desires.
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POPSReview - Requiem for a Species
"It's too late to avert catastrophic change. Our politics and institutions are too dysfunctional to make elegant adaptations. We'd better prepare ourselves for surviving as best we can". Clive Hamilton's new book Requiem for a Species is not for the faint-hearted - but my first reaction was to think: "So? what am I supposed to do with this information?". There is an element of fire-and-brimstone in the early part of the book - Hamilton lambasts our "greed, materialism and alienation from Nature" before advising us to "abandon the accustomed view of the future as an improving version of the past." But Hamilton's larger purpose is more pragmatic than moralisitic: he wants to help us prepare psychologically and practically for the the reality of what climate weirdness will bring. In particular, we need abandon the traditional idea of orderly 'adaptation' to climate change, and move instead a strategy of continuous transformation that can account for big and sometimes unexpected impac
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POPSJust say no (or shoot 'em) - A toothless West watches as Japan guts fish stocks Why allow it? It is not as if Japan has a very powerful Navy to protect its ecocidal fishing fleets. The tradition is a shot a across the bows, followed by sinking for non-compliance. Behaviour and culinary tastes would change very quickly. The problem with the human devastation of the oceans and its creatures is that it is literally a result of the "out of sight, out of mind syndrome."
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POPSRunning away - CLIMATE CHANGE: Arctic Shelf Leaking Potent Greenhouse Gas The tar sands oil mining and giant hydro dams in Canada are making what is obviously a very dangerous situation for the whole world very, very much worse. The process is being aided and abetted by the US federal government which is keen to import oil from the tar sands, although some State governments want to ban it.
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POPSPushed beyond the limits: Earth's Nine Lives (2) Biodiversity decrease is said to be far, far over the limits already. Mass extinction is forever. In the utilitarian, homo-centric view of science evidently the only thing that matters about threatened species is that they provide 'ecosystem services'. Surely all creatures have intrinsic value and a right to exist apart from their being of use to humans.
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