Here is my manifesto for rewilding the world | George Monbiot. Until modern humans arrived, every continent except Antarctica possessed a megafauna. In the Americas, alongside mastodons, mammoths, four-tusked and spiral-tusked elephants, there was a beaver the size of a black bear: eight feet from nose to tail. There were giant bison weighing two tonnes, which carried horns seven feet across. The short-faced bear stood 13ft in its hind socks. One hypothesis maintains that its astonishing size and shocking armoury of teeth and claws are the hallmarks of a specialist scavenger: it specialised in driving giant lions and sabretooth cats off their prey.
The Argentine roc (Argentavis magnificens) had a wingspan of 26ft. During the previous interglacial period, Britain and Europe contained much of the megafauna we now associate with the tropics: forest elephants, rhinos, hippos, lions and hyenas. Most of the deciduous trees in Europe can resprout wherever the trunk is broken. All this has been forgotten, even by professional ecologists. Here is my manifesto for rewilding the world | George Monbiot | Comment is free.
Jean Gebser: Cartographer of Consciousness : EnlightenNext: The Magazine for Evolutionaries. By Gary Lachman | January 26, 2011 at 12:57pm | 8 comments The German-born cultural philosopher Jean Gebser (1905–1973) was one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. Yet because only some of his work has been translated into English, he is practically unknown outside of German-speaking countries. This is unfortunate. Gebser’s ideas about the “structures of consciousness” and his belief that we are experiencing the rise of a new form of consciousness, which he called the “integral,” offer some of the most fruitful insights into understanding the state of Western consciousness in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Although writers and thinkers such as Ken Wilber, William Irwin Thompson, Georg Feuerstein, Colin Wilson, Daniel Pinchbeck, and myself have discussed Gebser’s ideas in different ways (I write about him at length in A Secret History of Consciousness), Gebser’s name rings few bells among average readers.
Out of the magical comes the mythic. Seal pup just wants to cuddle. [VIDEO] Earth: Game Over? Not even counting Noah’s flood, Earth has “rebooted” a number of times through mass extinctions. But the next one we see may be our last. (Photo: Mykl Roventine / Flickr)Video games usually provide you with multiple lives. If you step on a landmine or get hit by an assassin, you get another chance. Even if such virtual reincarnation is not built into the rules of the game, you can always reboot and start over again. You can try again hundreds of times until you get it right. This formula applies to first-person shooter games as well as simulation exercises like SimEarth.
The real Earth offers a similar kind of reboot. A subset of environmentalists is already preparing for the end game. Survivalism: it’s not just for right-wing wackos any more. Meanwhile, the rest of us are still trying to figure out how to avert disaster. That still leaves an annual bill of more than $450 billion. If you’re planning to remodel your kitchen, you’re supposed to get a couple of different estimates. Its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-and-he-feels-fine. Photo Late one night last August, on the chalk downlands of southern England, Paul Kingsnorth stood in a field beside an old-growth forest, two yurts and a composting toilet.
Kingsnorth is 41, tall, slim and energetic, with sweeping brown hair and a sparse beard. He wears rimless glasses and a silver stud in his ear, and he talks with great ardor, often apologizing for having said too much or for having said it too strongly. On this occasion, Kingsnorth was silent. It was the final night of Uncivilization, an outdoor festival run by the Dark Mountain Project, a loose network of ecologically minded artists and writers, and he was standing with several dozen others waiting for the festival’s midnight ritual to begin. In the clearing, above a pyre, someone had erected a tall wicker sculpture in the shape of a tree, with dense gnarls and hanging hoops. After that came disorder. The Dark Mountain Project was founded in 2009. The facts were indeed increasingly daunting. President of Uruguay Donates 90% of his Salary to Charity. It’s easy to express opinion on the ‘what’s’ and ‘ifs’ of life, but rarely do individuals who feel so strongly about the necessity to share more act upon their strongly formed beliefs.
One inspirational figure who has side-stepped the guilt and ego tied up in arguing over proper societal standards to live by is Jose Mujica, the president of Uruguay who has willingly kept himself in lower societal class to help others. Mujica, 77, was elected in 2009 of the second smallest nation in South America; however, he has no interest in taking on the grand presidential life. Humbly living in a farmhouse off the dirt road with his wife, whom both toil the soil, Mujica has donates 90% of his salary to charity and lives completely satisfied, clear that he does not need more to appreciate life. The austere leader earns approximately $12,500 a month, but only keeps $1,250 for himself, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo reported.
“This is a matter of freedom,” he told BBC News. Source | TrueActivist. What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire (2007. A middle class white guy comes to grips with Peak Oil, Climate Change, Mass Extinction, Population Overshoot and the demise of the American Lifestyle. Featuring interviews with Daniel Quinn, Derrick Jensen, Jerry Mander, Chellis Glendinning, Richard Heinberg, Thomas Berry, William Catton, Ran Prieur and Richard Manning.
Produced by Sally Erickson. Written, Directed, and Edited by Tim Bennett. More about the film… Support the film-makers. Buy the DVD Here “Hundreds of my readers have told me that my novel Ishmael should be read in every high school classroom in the world. Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael A Message from the Film Makers (2011): Contrary to popular lore, independent filmmakers are rarely affluent. We’ve decided to release the movie for free Internet viewing with the intention of being of service. If you value what you see here, please show your appreciation by purchasing a DVD or Bonus footage discs, downloading the movie through Filmbaby, or making a donation. Unveiled & Lifted (2013.
Unveiled and Lifted, a new documentary experience from Lifting the Veil, fuses music, art and insight to create an engaging assessment of the current problems facing humanity along with potential solutions for pro-active alleviation. Focusing on self empowerment, self rule, individualism and 'being the change', Unveiled and Lifted offers thoughts from an eclectic array of authors, filmmakers, artists and freethinkers on government, schooling, parenting and the non aggression principle, religion and spirituality, agorism, voluntaryism, and other relevant topics and concepts that need to be addressed and expressed during these changing times. Featuring special guests: Kathy Fontecchio Jason Gregory Derrick J Freeman rob in the page family Elina St-Onge Vinny Eastwood.
The Cynic and the Boatbuilder. A few days ago in Stockholm I was walking by the water and was accosted by a youngish man from Ireland who shouted out my name. This is not something that happens to me often apparently he is among that small subset of humanity that has read my book so I took this coincidence as a sign to stop and have a conversation. It turned out he was in Sweden on a two-year program for boat-building, learning traditional techniques to build small boats by hand. His story inspired me in several ways. First, here was an intelligent young person is committed to work that offers no possibility of high social status or wealth. Second, he was deeply in service not only to his craft, but to a vision of bringing it to more young people in Ireland as well through an organization he co-founded: The Association for Traditional Nordic-Irish Boats.
I walked away fifteen minutes later feeling really positive and optimistic about the state of humanity. What reason had I to feel positive? Metanoia: A New Vision of Nature (2008. Employing a healthy blend of science, art and metaphysics, author Simon G. Powell presents a radical new perspective on the meaning and significance of life in this innovative and highly unorthodox documentary. Central to the film is the concept of natural intelligence. The underlying premise is that our current definitions of what life is, and what evolution represents, fall short of the mark and do Nature a major disservice.
Rather than seeing the evolution of life as a dumb and mindless process, Powell proposes that evolution is a naturally smart process in which naturally smart systems of bio-logic are gradually woven into existence. Indeed, the film provides compelling evidence that Nature, as a whole, is best understood as a system of self-organising intelligence. It becomes clear from this paradigm that Nature only sustains and preserves sensible behaviour. NOTE: The concept of natural intelligence outlined in Metanoia is not to be confused with intelligent design creationism. Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure. Republished from ishmael.org By Daniel Quinn Closing In on the Problem I heard this, naturally, from my grandfather, he from his grandfather, he from his own grandfather, and so on, back many hundreds of years.
That means this tale is very old. But it won't disappear, because I offer it to my children, and my children will tell it to their children, and so on. A fable to start with Once upon a time life evolved on a certain planet, bringing forth many different social organizations—packs, pods, flocks, troops, herds, and so on. "This isn't working," the masses said.
"If we can't go back," the masses said, "then let's go forward—on to something different. " "That can't be done," the ruler said, "because nothing different is possible. "But no invention is ever unsurpassable. "I don't know why it's different," the ruler said, "It just is. " But the masses didn't believe this—and neither do I. Buy the Book here or at your local book store. A Manual of Change I might have said, "Isn't it obvious? "