Thoughts?

           Living in Glasgow close to the Cop-Out-26 Carnival of Illusions it seems more phoney, the hypocrisy seems to scream louder, the waffle and the phoney platitudes much more brazen. If it was a comedy on TV we could laugh, but it was for real, the illusions were meant mesmerise you, instead they angered and baffled you. Now that is all over, the ballerinas will go home and carry on as before. So what are my simple thoughts on this bizarre extravaganza. Apart from the anger, which has increased, and a feeling of "I told you so", and a desire to shout louder, not much. Of course the planet will not dye just most of the life on it, including us weird and stupid humans.

 

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

New Life?

You my friend will you be the one to pluck the last flower
perhaps you’ll be the one to chop down that last tree
or maybe you will be the lonely one to eat the last fish
as you gaze in disbelief across a parched earth
though not a barren one
the planet will continue spinning on its journey
alive with millions of microbes and tiny insects
evolution will continue to develop
a new cycle of varied vibrant life
this time without it fiercest predator
the human species. 

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk   

Losing Battle.

     We have all sorts of theories on this pandemic, but we can be sure that human activity is causing dramatic changes in our planets ecosystem, the results of which we don't fully understand and can't possible predict accurately. What we can be sure of is that we are, by human greed and blind ideology, creating a world vastly different from the one we inhabit at present. Habitats and species disappear, new forms of bacteria and viruses emerge and we have no idea how they will affect us as a species.

      By the illusion of ever increasing growth, we are opening a Pandora's box of complexities, and few are in our favour. Covid19 could be just another new pattern emerging in natures fight for survival against human plundering and destruction of its delicate balance. What we can be very sure of is, in any battle of humans against nature, nature will prevail and the human species will fall. We work with nature as part of it, or we fall as a damaging parasite, sadly we may take millions of innocent species with us.  

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk 

Last Chance.

 

     We as a species have accepted a system that has bombed countries into oblivion, resulting in millions of deaths, millions fleeing their homes, and an army of maimed and injured. We have eliminated thousands of other species, probably millions, altered the climate to our own disadvantage, and screwed the entire planet. We have taken ourselves the the edge of a precipice and stand looking over the edge. Will we blindly carry on with our journey of self destruction and eliminate our own species, or will we halt and look at what we have done. This disastrous pandemic has offered us an opportunity to take stock of what we have done, where we are and where we could go. This is probably the last real opportunity that we will have to smash the rule book of the old destructive greed driven system and to write a new set of rules. Rules that unsure that we look after our home, the planet, we see to the needs of all our people and respect all life. We must write our past into the dustbin of history and label it as "Our Darkest Hour", and swear never to repeat these disasters.
       Should we return to that destructive greed driven normal of yesterday, we will have missed what is probably our last opportunity to try to put things right with our planet and the life it supports. Our history makes for dreadful reading, our future doesn't have to follow the same script. We would do well to remember, spaceship Earth has no escape capsule.

Grand Plans

In this world where we serve oblivion
with a blind pride and sure conviction
creating plans to land a man on Mars
grandiose schemes to conquer the stars
eyes on horizons ever further afield
believing, to us the universe will yield.
Yet here on Earth we fail to see
a chaotic world of human debris,
our magnificent results thus far
a planet dying from a human scar,
oblivious that our plans sublime
are mere litter scattered in space and time.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

Spaceship Earth Has No Escape Capsule!!

      While reputable scientists tell us we have a very short limited time to get free from fossil fuels, or face human disaster on an unprecedented scale, the UK government makes noises of approval while voicing vacuous promises. Then goes on to grant fracking licenses to greedy corporate bodies who don't give a shit about the planet, and only have eyes for profit.
       The planet is not dying, it is being murdered, by corporate greed, and by our inaction, we are complicit. A fine gift for our grandchildren.

      As usual, quiet voice of reason from that excellent site, Not Buying Anything. 

          Humans are killing the planet, and we seem unable to stop. But hey, nobody's perfect. A recent report shows that since the 1970s our actions have caused the deaths of 60% of invertebrates. And the news is not good for insects, either.
         Humanity is facing the most extreme challenges in 200,000 years, and no one seems worried enough to take any kind of meaningful and collective evasive action.
        “We have known for many, many years that we are driving the planet to the very brink. This is not a doom and gloom story; it is reality. Our day-to-day life, health and livelihoods depend on a healthy planet. There cannot be a healthy, happy and prosperous future for people on a planet with a destabilized climate, depleted oceans and rivers, degraded land and empty forests, all stripped of biodiversity, the web of life.” - Marco Lambertini, director general of the WWF

       The majority reaction is that "nobody's perfect", and that we will just have to ride this thing out and see what happens. Too bad about all the extinctions.
That is the all-too convenient truth, and it overrides all the inconvenient truths confronting us.
       We are far from perfect, but approaching perfection is a goal we should continually strive toward. If we did, we could tackle all our challenges with creative, life-enhancing solutions. For a dumb species, we can be pretty smart when we want to, or when faced with imminent death.
     We CAN do better, and we will have to. If we fail to act, and soon, before long it will be human populations crashing.
There is nothing convenient about that.

Visit ann arky's home at radicalglasgow.me.uk

The Only Home We Have.

        Regarding the previous post and the comment made by Loam, I have to answer it this way, as at the moment I don't seem to be able to comment or reply to comments on my own blog, Ah the wonders of the internet. 

      Thanks for the comment Loam,  I agree wholeheartedly, the title was more of trying to grab attention, to the fact that we all need to play our part to save where we live, for our sake. (I suppose I could have put it better.) There is no doubt that this little rock will continue to spin, the sun will continue to rise and set, many, many centuries after we have decimated its ecology and disappeared from history. We all need to play our part in trying to preserve the only home we have. We should do well to remember, "Spaceship Earth has no escape capsule".

     Now two wee poems that I hope, put my position more clearly.

Tomorrow’s World!

See the fat cat’s grinning smile

as Corporate Capitalism runs amok,

Chasing profit as it goes

firing millions of ordinary folk.

Raping and polluting land after land,

starting bloody wars.

Toxic waste, sweat shop wages

and oil covered sea shores.

Where have all the flowers gone

beneath this ozone free sky?

To join the birds, to join the fox

on yonder plutonium field to die.

Mercury fish, strontium lamb

trees that never show a leaf,

radio active beaches, toxic streams

good lean BSE-antibiotic beef.

In a world of epidemic, plague and famine

it’s bottled water and chemical food.

Of course, it’s all tested on rats and mice

so you know its got to be good.

Beneath a sky that’s always black,

hurricane winds and endless drought,

its oxygen masks for the toxic air,

corporate profit’s what its all about.

Grand Plans

In this world where we serve oblivion

with a blind pride and sure conviction

creating plans to land a man on Mars

grandiose schemes to conquer the stars

eyes on horizons ever further afield

believing, to us the universe will yield.

Yet here on Earth we fail to see

a chaotic world of human debris,

our magnificent results thus far

a planet dying from a human scar,

oblivious that our plans sublime

are mere litter scattered in space and time.

Visit ann arky's home at radicalglasgow.me.uk

"---The Madness Of Men."

         The following is an article from The Tyee, thanks Loam for the link. I print the article in full, as don't think there is a more pressing problem than the survival of our species. We live in an infinitely varied and precarious environment that depends on balance for its survival, we ride roughshod over that finely balanced structure at our peril. The situation described in detail in the article is an indictment of the economic system under which we live. We have developed a system of perpetual economic growth, aimed at profit, with no thought to sustainability or the needs of our people. As humans we seem to have virtually unlimited capacity for self-delusion, and a cavalier attitude to self destruction. The rapid depletion of the planet's finite resources, both living and material, is having, and will continue to have, a disastrous effect on that delicate balance of the ecosystems of our planet, that is all the life that depends on that planet. Sadly, I believe that we will not address these problems as long as we cling to the economic system that is responsible for this impending disaster, namely capitalism. Until we understand that problem, the other problems will only be exacerbated by that greed driven exploitative economic system of capitalism. We would do well to remember, spaceship Earth has no escape capsule.

 

 

          A curious thing about H. sapiens is that we are clever enough to document — in exquisite detail — various trends that portend the collapse of modern civilization, yet not nearly smart enough to extricate ourselves from our self-induced predicament.
       This was underscored once again in October when scientists reported that flying insect populations in Germany have declined by an alarming 75 per cent in the past three decades accompanied, in the past dozen years, by a 15 per cent drop in bird populations. Trends are similar in other parts of Europe where data are available. Even in Canada, everything from casual windshield “surveys” to formal scientific assessments show a drop in insect numbers. Meanwhile, domestic populations of many insect-eating birds are in freefall. Ontario has lost half its whip-poor-wills in the past 20 years; across the nation, such species as nighthawks, swallows, martins and fly-catchers are down by up to 75 per cent; Greater Vancouver’s barn and bank swallows have plummeted by 98 per cent since 1970. Heard much about these things in the mainstream news?
       Too bad. Biodiversity loss may turn out to be the sleeper issue of the century. It is caused by many individual but interacting factors — habitat loss, climate change, intensive pesticide use and various forms of industrial pollution, for example, suppress both insect and bird populations. But the overall driver is what an ecologist might call the “competitive displacement” of non-human life by the inexorable growth of the human enterprise.
        On a finite planet where millions of species share the same space and depend on the same finite products of photosynthesis, the continuous expansion of one species necessarily drives the contraction and extinction of others. (Politicians take note — there is always a conflict between human population/economic expansion and “protection of the environment.”)
       Remember the 40 to 60 million bison that used to roam the great plains of North America? They — along with the millions of deer, pronghorns, wolves and lesser beasts that once animated prairie ecosystems — have been “competitively displaced,” their habitats taken over by a much greater biomass of humans, cattle, pigs and sheep. And not just North Americans — Great Plains sunshine also supports millions of other people-with-livestock around world who depend, in part on North American grain, oil-seed, pulse and meat exports.
       Competitive displacement has been going on for a long time. Scientists estimate that at the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago, H. sapiens comprised less than one per cent of the total weight of mammals on the planet. (There were probably only two to four million people on Earth at the time.) Since then, humans have grown to represent 35 per cent of a much larger total biomass; toss in domestic pets and livestock, and human domination of the world’s mammalian biomass rises to 98.5 per cent!
      One needs look no further to explain why wildlife populations globally have plunged by nearly 60 per cent in the past half century. Wild tigers have been driven from 93 per cent of their historic range and are down to fewer than 4,000 individuals globally; the population of African elephants has imploded by as much as 95 per cent to only 500,000 today; poaching drove black rhino numbers from an already much reduced 70,000 in 1960 to only 2,500 individuals in the early 1990s. (With intense conservation effort, they have since rebounded to about 5,000). And those who still think Canada is still a mostly pristine and under-populated wilderness should think again — half the wildlife species regularly monitored in this country are in decline, with an average population drop of 83 per cent since 1970. Did I mention that B.C.’s southern resident killer whale population is down to only 76 animals? That’s in part because human fishers have displaced the orcas from their favoured food, Chinook salmon, even as we simultaneously displace the salmon from their spawning streams through hydro dams, pollution and urbanization.
        The story is similar for familiar species everywhere and likely worse for non-charismatic fauna. Scientists estimate that the “modern” species extinction rate is 1,000 to as much as 10,000 times the natural background rate. The global economy is busily converting living nature into human bodies and domestic livestock largely unnoticed by our increasingly urban populations. Urbanization distances people psychologically as well as spatially from the ecosystems that support them.
        The human band-wagon may really have started rolling 10 millennia ago but the past two centuries of exponential growth greatly have accelerated the pace of change. It took all of human history — let’s say 200,000 years — for our population to reach one billion in the early 1800s, but only 200 years, 1/1000th as much time, to hit today’s 7.6 billion! Meanwhile, material demand on the planet has ballooned even more — global GDP has increased by over 100-fold since 1800; average per capita incomes by a factor of 13. (rising to 25-fold in the richest countries). Consumption has exploded accordingly — half the fossil fuels and many other resources ever used by humans have been consumed in just the past 40 years. (See graphs in: Steffen, W et al. 2015. The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration. The Anthropocene Review, Volume: 2 Issue: 1, page(s): 81-98.)
        Why does any of this matter, even to those who don’t really give a damn about nature per se? Apart from the moral stain associated with extinguishing thousands of other life-forms, there are purely selfish reasons to be concerned. For example, depending on climate zone, 78 per cent to 94 per cent of flowering plants, including many human food species, are pollinated by insects, birds and even bats. (Bats — also in trouble in many places — are the major or exclusive pollinators of 500 species in at least 67 families of plants.) As much as 35 per cent of the world’s crop production is more or less dependent on animal pollination, which ensures or increases the production of 87 leading food crops worldwide.
       But there is a deeper reason to fear the depletion and depopulation of nature. Absent life, planet earth is just an inconsequential wet rock with a poisonous atmosphere revolving pointlessly around an ordinary star on the outer fringes of an undistinguished galaxy. It is life itself, beginning with countless species of microbes, that gradually created the “environment” suitable for life on Earth as we know it. Biological processes are responsible for the life-friendly chemical balance of the oceans; photosynthetic bacteria and green plants have stocked and maintain Earth’s atmosphere with the oxygen necessary for the evolution of animals; the same photosynthesis gradually extracted billions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere, storing it in chalk, limestone and fossil fuel deposits, so that Earth’s average temperature (currently about 15 C) has remained for geological ages in the narrow range that makes water-based life possible, even as the sun has been warming (i.e. stable climate is partially a biological phenomenon.); countless species of bacteria, fungi and a veritable menagerie of micro-fauna continuously regenerate the soils that grow our food. (Unfortunately, depletion-by-agriculture is even faster — by some accounts we have only just over a half-century’s worth of arable soils left).
       In short, H. sapiens depends utterly on a rich diversity of life-forms to provide various life-support functions essential to the existence and continued survival of human civilization. With an unprecedented human-induced great global die-off well under way, what are the chances the functional integrity of the ecosphere will survive the next doubling of material consumption that everyone expects before mid-century?
       Here’s the thing: climate change is not the only shadow darkening humanity’s doorstep. While you wouldn’t know it from the mainstream media, biodiversity loss arguably poses an equivalent existential threat to civilized existence. While we’re at it, let’s toss soil/landscape degradation, potential food or energy shortages and other resource limits into the mix. And if you think we’ll probably be able to “handle” four out of five such environmental problems, it doesn’t matter. The relevant version of Liebig’s Law states that any complex system dependent on several essential inputs can be taken down by that single factor in least supply (and we haven’t yet touched upon the additional risks posed by the geopolitical turmoil that would inevitably follow ecological destabilization). read more
       Which raises questions of more than mere academic interest. Why are we not collectively terrified or at least alarmed? If our best science suggests we are en route to systems collapse, why are collapse — and collapse avoidance — not the primary subjects of international political discourse? Why is the world community not engaged in vigorous debate of available initiatives and trans-national institutional mechanisms that could help restore equilibrium to the relationship between humans and the rest of nature?
      There are many policy options, from simple full-cost pricing and consumption taxes; through population initiatives and comprehensive planning for a steady-state economy; to general education for voluntary (and beneficial) lifestyle changes, all of which would enhance global society’s prospects for long-term survival. Unique human qualities, from high intelligence (e.g., reasoning from the evidence), through the capacity to plan ahead to moral consciousness, may well be equal to the task but lie dormant — there is little hint of political willingness to acknowledge the problem let alone elaborate genuine solutions (which the Paris climate accord is not).
         Bottom line? The world seems in denial of looming disaster; the “C” word remains unvoiced. Governments everywhere dismissed the 1992 scientists’ Warning to Humanity that “...a great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided” and will similarly ignore the scientists’ “second notice." (Published on Nov. 13, this warning states that most negative trends identified 25 years earlier “are getting far worse.”) Despite cascading evidence and detailed analysis to the contrary, the world community trumpets “growth-is-us” as its contemporary holy grail. Even the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals are fixed on economic expansion as the only hammer for every problematic nail. Meanwhile, greenhouse gases reach to at an all-time high, marine dead-zones proliferate, tropical forests fall and extinctions accelerate.
        Just what is going on here? The full explanation of this potentially fatal human enigma is no doubt complicated, but Herman Melville summed it up well enough in Moby Dick: “There is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”