VIDEO: Coastal GasLink & Wet'suwet'en

My beloved (Dr. Peter Carter) has done a lot of research and discovered some frightening things about why our provincial and federal governments (here in Canada) are intransigent in their defense of fracking and support for new fossil fuel infrastructure (to the tune of billions of our tax dollars). 

This stands in stark contrast to their irrational criminalization of anyone standing in the way of pipelines — especially the Wet'suwet'en Hereditary Chiefs and the Unist'ot'en land and water protectors. 

These people — politicians, corporate kleptocrats and, increasingly, the police and judiciary — are rigorously (and vigorously) collaborating to hasten the end of our species and the end of most living beings in the biosphere of Earth. (If you think I'm exaggerating, you're not keeping up with the research on the climate emergency and biodiversity loss.) 

HERE IS THE PLAN of the .01% FOR THE WORLD: These destroyers (the seekers of more, more, more — and their sycophants) have 19 more fossil fuel pipelines up their sleeve just for Canada, with 13 of them in British Columbia!

And are these pipelines being built to ship food and create "a community of love where all have enough to eat because you share what you have" (an idea planted in my head by a friend, Judith Rees-Thomas, and her book, Soul Talk)? NO! They are simply to make the uber-rich richer while they foreclose on the future — which doesn't both them because they subscribe to the puerile belief that the guy with the most money at the end wins.

Here is Peter's video, Coastal GasLink & Wet'suwet'en. I found it astonishing. It shows why, as Exinction Rebellion's Roger Hallam has put it, we need to keep up the mass disruption, get even braver about mass sacrifice for the common good (thousands of us getting arrested), and maintain respectfulness throughout it all.

https://youtu.be/QQvwOB8Lf6M

We Are Witnessing the Great Unravelling

In 2004, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman authored a book called The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century, which chronicled "how the boom economy unraveled." As an economist, Krugman writes about economics. 

Today, we are witnessing an even greater unravelling. This time it's all about that other "eco" word: ecology. Even as the climate change deniers, skeptics, ignorers and delayers are still out in full whacko force (just check the comments under any movie about the climate crisis), the Sixth Mass Extinction is playing out all around us. 

Timeframes (for things such as predator / prey relationships) that we've come to depend on and take for granted are getting all screwed up. For example, our local pods of resident orca whales have hardly been seen around here this summer because their food source — chinook salmon — has all but disappeared.

Seasonal weather and temperatures that we've relied on for our agriculture are no longer dependable: unprecedented heat waves, major wildfires, severe droughts, biblical floods, crop-damaging rainfalls ....

Homes and homelands that we thought were safe are collapsing, flooding or being swallowed up by the sea.*

What we have known is coming undone and becoming unknowable. We are bearing witness to (and many people and many other living beings are already experiencing) catastrophic climate disruption and deadly climate chaos. 

It is time for deniers — and anyone else who isn't willing to help hold the fraying edges of this delicate biosphere together — to be called out as the pariahs that they are.

* My heart goes out to the 41 million people affected by devastating monsoon rains and flooding in South Asia, and to those in Texas and Louisiana impacted by Hurricane Harvey. There but for the grace of ....

Climate Change — and Baseball — Deniers are Just Afraid of Their Feelings

from Slate.com

Remember I talked last week about being called names for wanting to safeguard the future? Well, the latest epithet thrown at me was "drama queen" because, don't you know, humans are resilient and adaptable — to increasing temperatures and heat waves and droughts and floods and storms and pests and crop losses and water shortages? Yeah, sure.

But this little episode of name calling helped me realize something. These so-called deniers must actually be scared witless about the climate change emergency, mustn't they? Otherwise why would they be spending so much of their time reading and responding to articles and social media posts about climate change? If they weren't somehow almost pruriently attracted to slagging climate change activists, they would be doing what normal climate change ignorers do. You know, gardening and jogging and reading novels and parenting and working for a living. 

It's like if I spent all my free time on baseball websites and baseball fan listserves and baseball FB groups calling people who like baseball nasty names and denying that baseball is an actual sport. In order to do that, I'd have to secretly have some attraction to baseball, wouldn't I? Otherwise I wouldn't throw my time at it, would I? I'd be sticking to macramé or gourmet cooking, wouldn't I? 

Baseball deniers probably love the sport but simply don't know how to express their feelings about it. They were perhaps always chosen last to play on a team. Or maybe they're embarrassed that they don't actually understand the rules of the game. It's possible that they dreamed for years of playing in the major leagues but they just weren't good enough. For whatever reason, baseball deniers just can't let baseball go, so they hang out with baseball lovers all the while slagging them and the sport.

So when that climate change denier called me a drama queen for wanting to protect the future for the children of all species, I suspect he was actually asking ... we're resilient and adaptable, right? I don't have to be scared, right? Everything's going to be okay ... right?

Sadly, wrong. We are witnessing the great unravelling of the web of life. If you're not skilled enough, educated enough or courageous enough to face it and to help, that's okay. But please, go play some baseball or do some gardening so that those of us with our fingers in the dike trying to stave off the sixth mass extinction can at least do it in peace.

The Hero of Haarlem

 

It's Not Just About Us ...

Chris Weston

I'll admit that as a Canadian, I've struggled from time to time with some anti-American sentiment. You can imagine how I'm having to talk to myself these days, eh? That's because this president-elect isn't just going to destroy the US, he's going to destroy the rest of the world. I've written about that before, here. And when I say "the rest" I mean everything else.

Here's the thing. We all know (well, everyone who isn't American knows) that Americans are rather (and I'm generalizing here, for which I'll apologize now), um, insular. Their geographic ignorance is legendary and world-renowned! (Do they know that? I wonder.)

But it's their ecological ignorance that is so dangerous right now. Another study just revealed that "climate-related local extinctions are already widespread among plant and animal species."

Yet, Mr. I-Can't-Bring-Myself-to-Utter-His-Name-on-My-Blog-Anymore is going after the names of anyone in the US Department of Energy who has worked on climate change. Talk about trying to chill US progress on climate change mitigation. [Update: The questionnaire was "not authorized" and has therefore been withdrawn. Nice play, transition team. Way to accidentally on purpose ensure the chill and then get away with it with a simple "oops." Watch for a lot more of this kind of slime.] 

So as the world actually experiences worse and worse impacts of climate disruption, "that man" and his cronies are going deeper and deeper into pignorant (pretend ignorant) denial. 

It's as if he doesn't (I'm sure he does, but he pretends he doesn't — greed can do that to you) understand that we are completely reliant on the Earth, the earth, the biodiversity of this precious planet, and all of Nature's gifts. He acts as though he is a man unto himself, as though he's never breathed a molecule of air he didn't make, never eaten a calorie of food he didn't grow, never drunk a drop of water he didn't magically bring into existence. 

So while he's going about business-as-worse-than-usual, his plan is to make the biosphere uninhabitable. And not just for humanity, but for MOST OTHER SPECIES, too. 

If they could, I think all the other species would revolt in a stampede that would trample a certain red-headed president-elect.

*******

A friend wrote to say that she couldn't get her comment to publish, so I thought I would post it here: 

"Even though you apologize, you discount many, many Americans who are very aware of climate change, want to make changes, but simply can’t with the political voting structure in place, just as we have our problems with our voting system, and we had problems with [Prime Minister] Harper. So, you end up alienating some of the very people who might agree with you and are fighting for change. It just seems strange to see it in writing from you on your blog. Yes, I agree that Trump is going to wreck the world for us, including many, many Americans who didn’t vote for him, and the Americans who did vote for him. We are all in trouble."




To my friend: The last bit of your comment explains why I don't care about the first bit (except that I don't see that I'm discounting anyone). The Americans (and some of them are my friends) who are working on climate change and trying to create change in the US know that ecological ignorance is killing us. And they — and I — know that we have no time left to worry about hurt feelings. Those who know me well will now know how serious the threat is if I'm not worried about being nice anymore.