Introduction. Visualizing the Accumulation of Human-Made Mass on Earth. Today’s chart is best viewed full-screen.
Explore the high resolution version by clicking here. Sailors have been circumnavigating the high seas for centuries now, but what could be found beneath the sunlit surface of the ocean remained a mystery until far more recently. In fact, it wasn’t until 1875, during the Challenger expedition, that humanity got it’s first concrete idea of how deep the ocean actually was. Yes, the Climate Crisis May Wipe out Six Billion People. “Carbon emissions may continue to rise, the polar ice caps may continue to melt, crop yields may continue to decline, the world’s forests may continue to burn, coastal cities may continue to sink under rising seas and droughts may continue to wipe out fertile farmlands, but the messiahs of hope assure us that all will be right in the end.
Only it won’t.” — Chris Hedges One thing the climate crisis underscores is that Homo sapiens are not primarily a rational species. When forced to make important decisions, particularly decisions affecting our economic security or socio-political status, primitive instinct and raw emotion tend to take the upper hand. COLLAPSE : THE ONLY REALISTIC SCENARIO ? (A. Keller) [NEXT] S02 E04. Tasting the Pickle: Ten flavours of meta-crisis and the appetite for a new civilisation - [ Perspectiva ]
Jonathan Rowson Feb 9th, 2021 ‘There is a process of reckoning going on around the world, heightened by the conditions of the pandemic and the palpability of our fragility, inequality and interdependence.
![Tasting the Pickle: Ten flavours of meta-crisis and the appetite for a new civilisation - [ Perspectiva ]](http://cdn.pearltrees.com/s/pic/th/civilisation-perspectiva-247920735)
There is a climate emergency that requires urgent action, but the precise nature, cost, location and responsibility of that action is moot. There is a broader crisis of civilisational purpose that appears to necessitate political and economic transformation, and there are deeper socio-emotional, educational, epistemic and spiritual features of our predicament that manifest as many flavours of meta-crisis: the lack of a meaningful global ‘We’, widespread learning needs, self-subverting political logics and disenchanted worldviews.
The Democracy of Suffering: Todd Dufresne. Should we fight the system or be the change? Paul Kingsnorth: Hope in the Age of Collapse. Sometimes – rarely – online debate can be useful.
This was one example. This email debate with American journalist Wen Stephenson, about the current state of the world and what can be done about it, was prompted by his scepticism about my essay Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist. It’s a rare example of an online exchange leading to an interesting and grown-up discussion, rather than a bad-tempered slanging match. You can read the debate, complete with Wen’s personal introduction, on his Thoreau Farm website.
Dear Paul, Thanks so much for engaging in this exchange. Paul Kingsnorth: Confessions of a recovering environmentalist. It’s Not Climate Change — It’s Everything Change — Matter. Not that the lobster can do anything about it, once in the pot.
But we might. We’re supposed to be smarter than lobsters. We’ve committed some very stupid acts over the course of our history, but our stupidity isn’t inevitable. Here are three smart things we’ve managed to do: First, despite all those fallout shelters built in suburban backyards during the Cold War, we haven’t yet blown ourselves up with nuclear bombs. “For everything to stay the same, everything has to change,” says a character in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s 1963 novel, The Leopard. There are many smart people applying themselves to these problems, and many new technologies emerging. Meanwhile, courage: homo sapiens sapiens sometimes deserves his double plus for intelligence.
An earlier version of this article appeared in the Norwegian magazine Samtiden.
Scandinavia. Inspiration. Overviews of the year. Supportive Sites. Particular Campaigns. Politics. Economics. Food. Climate Change. Are you a solutionist or a zero-growth economist? The pope v the UN: who will save the world first? Everyone, it seems, recognises that Pope Francis’s encyclical is a striking document.
Join Us! - The Peterborough Dialogues. The Future Must Be Green, Red, Black and Female. (Photo: James Cridland / Flickr) The human species must acknowledge that any future that allows us to retain our humanity will jettison capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy - and be based on an ecological worldview, says Jensen.
(These remarks were prepared for a private conference on sustainability, where the participants critiqued corporate farming, "big ag," and "big pharma" and industrialized medicine. There was agreement about the need for fundamental change in economic/political/social systems, but no consensus on the appropriate analysis of those systems and their interaction.) The future of the human species - if there is to be a future - must be radically green, red, black and female. The Anthropocene: It’s Not All About Us. Anthropocene artifacts.
The Sparks of Rebellion. Occupy Wall Street rally, March 16, 2012.
(Photo: Michael Fleshman / Flickr) I am reading and rereading the debates among some of the great radical thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries about the mechanisms of social change. These debates were not academic. Why It’s Still Kicking Off Everywhere. This article is an edited and abridged version of Paul Mason’s 2013 Amiel Trust lecture.
It is from Issue 53 of Soundings and is available online exclusively at New Left Project. Two years on from the Arab Spring, I’m clearer about what it was that it inaugurated: it is a revolution. In some ways it parallels the revolutions of before – 1848, 1830, 1789 – and there are also echoes of the Prague spring, the US civil rights movement, the Russian ‘mad summer of 1874’ … but in other ways it is unique. Above all, the relationship between the physical and the mental, the political and the cultural, seems to be inverted. Agamben: From the State of Control to a Praxis of Destituent Power. Faced with absolute state control and the rapid eradication of political society, only a theory and praxis of destituent power can reclaim democracy.
This is the transcript of a public lecture by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben delivered to a packed auditorium in Athens on November 16, 2013 and recently published by Chronos. A reflection on the destiny of democracy today here in Athens is in some way disturbing, because it obliges us to think the end of democracy in the very place where it was born. As a matter of fact, the hypothesis I would like to suggest is that the prevailing governmental paradigm in Europe today is not only non-democratic, but that it cannot either be considered as political.
I will try therefore to show that European society today is no longer a political society; it is something entirely new, for which we lack a proper terminology and we have therefore to invent a new strategy. Michael Shermer on morality. NASA-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'... A new study partly-sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution. Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history. " Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common.
" The independent research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary 'Human And Nature DYnamical' (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the US National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists. Managing disorder: towards a global state of control? Refusing to tackle the causes of our troubles and allow public space for dissent, the neoliberal state is sliding inexorably towards authoritarianism.
Image: Brazilian police demonstrated its new riot gear last month. When an Egyptian judge condemned 529 Muslim Brotherhood supporters to death this week, he underlined in one fell swoop the terrifying reality in which the world finds itself today. The revolutionary euphoria and constituent impulse that shook the global order back in 2011 have long since given way to a re-established state of control. Watch a Jaw-Dropping Visualization of Every Protest Since 1979. Bureaucracy, Autocracy and Neoliberal Canada. (Photo: Fibonacci Blue / Flickr)We must not only intervene, resist and oppose neoliberal governments and corporate capitalist hegemony; we must finally put an end to these death-dealing institutions. One cannot reflect upon the notion of human adaptability without experiencing both a sense of awe and a feeling of increasing uneasiness.
We are awed when science tells us that one of the most powerful evolutionary intellectual capacities we possess is the ability to adapt to challenging and unforeseen situations and environments. We adjust to extremities of weather, the loss of loved ones, constantly changing technologies and shifting social, economic and political circumstances - not always quickly or faultlessly, but inevitably, given time. Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (The Real Reason For The Forty-Hour ... By David Cain / raptitude.com/ Oct 23, 2013 Well I’m in the working world again.
The Human Age » Naomi Wolf: When Protest is Effective and When it is Not. My Talk at TEDxBoulder: Civil Resistance and the “3.5% Rule” I gave a talk at TEDxBoulder on September 21st. Noam Chomsky & Howard Zinn "Is There Hope in This Desperate Time?" Radical Paganism. The Evolution of Consciousness. What Shade of Green are You? How Will the 99% Deal with 70 Million Psychopaths? Did you know that roughly one person in a hundred is clinically a psychopath?
These individuals are either born with an emotional deficiency that keeps them from feeling bad about hurting others or they are traumatized early in life in a manner that causes them to become this way. How to Occupy the Noosphere – TedX. IAN’S NOTE: This talk represents my own personal synthesis from artists, activists, Occupiers, rabble rousers, revolutionaries and evolutionaries that I’ve had the privilege to meet during my short time on this planet. Jared Cohen on the future of the digital world. Internet addiction is just the next evolutionary step. Having trouble shutting down your computer? Can’t stop refreshing your Facebook and Twitter streams? Did you close Reddit in your browser window … only to open Reddit right back up again? Human Intervention as a Competitive Advantage. Governing the Web (and everything else) Why the internet of things could destroy the welfare state. An online Magna Carta: Berners-Lee calls for bill of rights for web.