63 Days - When Will Our Carbon Emissions Become Embarrassing?

I was reading my alumni newsletter yesterday when I stumbled upon a small note explaining that one of the professors had spent a lovely summer vacation in Paris and then cruising around the Mediterranean with her family.

I'm now at the point where my first reaction was not "Wow, how lovely." My first thought was, "They shouldn't be printing that here — advertising it as though it's something benign." (I live in Canada so it's no small feat to get to France.)

I had the same sort of reaction when a colleague told me that her toddler daughter was happy to go to a doctor who had the same name as her favourite character in her favourite movie: Cars. "Yikes," I thought to myself. "I wouldn't even allow my kids to watch a movie called Cars in this day and age."

And when, a few weeks ago, I was having to drive back and forth to the hospital each day due to complications with my broken ankle, I was embarrassed to be seen driving our son's (automatic) car because it's an SUV. But then I realized that no one else was looking at me with sanctioning eyes.

So, when are our carbon emissions going to start being frowned upon? Considered socially unacceptable? Gone the way of smoking? Looked upon with scorn? A source of embarrassment? Against social norms? Necessitating a good excuse?

We need to get to zero carbon emissions. The age of burning is over. When are we going to get over it?

64 Days - Five Things Everyone Ought to Know

According to British author, David Edwards (as explained by Derrick Jensen, "leading voice of uncompromising dissent" in How Shall I Live My Life? On Liberating the Earth from Civilization), there are five things that everyone ought to know. I hope that Jensen and Edwards won't mind me listing them here. I've only just started reading the book, but so far it's delicious.

Here are the five things that everyone ought to know:

1. "The planet is dying." Coral reefs doomed. Sea mammals and sea birds going extinct. Global warming dooming other ecosystems.
2. "Huge numbers of intelligent, motivated people are working all out to obstruct action to save the planet." Here, Edwards quotes a mining company executive who admits, "We think we have raised enough questions among the American public to prevent any numbers, targets or timetables to achieve reductions in gas emissions being agreed here... What we are doing, and we think successfully, is buying time for our industries by holding up these talks."
3. "The death of the planet is symptomatic of a deeper, institutionalized subordination of all life — including human life — to profit." And people aren't talking about this crucial question of valuing profits over life.
4. "The same economic and political forces that profit from these atrocities also profit from the suppression of truth." And Edwards believes that the role of corporate mass media and politicians is to keep us from digging up the truth. "It only takes a moment of honest reflection to realize that when a world is being ravaged by corporations, a corporate media system is the last place to look for truth."

And then he gets so busy explaining these four that he forgets to give the fifth! But I've chosen one from the rest of this brilliant interview:

5. "It's a great kindness to be honest." In other words, telling the truth, when the money powers want to control what we know and believe, is a gift.

I would add that sometimes it's an unwelcome gift. Many people are so ensnared in the propaganda that they don't want to hear the truth, because it makes them uncomfortable. Therefore you make them uncomfortable when you speak the truth. So truth telling can be a lonely place. Edwards suggests that there is "a certain bliss that comes from telling the truth," but it's an inner bliss, an I-can-sleep-at-night-and-look-myself-in-the-mirror sort of bliss.

65 Days - The Problem is Another Kind of NIMBYism

You know what NIMBY means, right? It stands for Not In My BackYard. And it is still quite common, for example, amongst people fighting the installation of wind farms. (Have you seen "The Age of Heartbreak, er, Stupid" yet?)

It struck me the other day that the reason the climate change emergency has not garnered the attention it deserves is another form of NIMBYism. Because it's not in my backyard, I can't see it (don't see it; won't see it) and therefore I don't care about it.

I've started getting angry with people who talk like that. As though the children dying from drought in Africa are not our children. As though the people losing their homelands in the Pacific are not our brothers and sisters. As though the Inuit in the Arctic who are losing their homes and their ancient way of life are not our relations.

Even Mr. Compassion himself, the Dalai Lama, didn't talk about climate change until he realized that the glaciers in Tibet were melting. (It seems a little attachment is a good thing these days.)

Don't people realize that what's happening to the children in Africa now will very soon be happening to our own children, here in our own backyards?

It's still amazing how many people refuse to see what is not right in front of their noses. Maybe we need to give everyone a nose that reaches to Africa and the Maldives and the Arctic!

Damn it, where is Pinocchio when we need him?

(With thanks to André Koehne for the art.)

66 Days - Wanna Do Something About Climate Change FAST?

Go veg. It's that simple. Give up meat, and as much dairy as possible. Do it as quickly as possible. The meat/livestock industry is responsible for so much methane greenhouse gas that cutting our meat intake as rapidly as possible could give us a fighting chance to save the planet.

The livestock sector directly or indirectly:

• uses 1/3 of the world's land area
• uses up to 70% of our clean water
• pollutes most of the water bodies
• deforests the lungs of the Earth (animal agriculture is connected to 80% of the annual removal of trees around the world; the "hamburgerization" of our forests is responsible for the felling of 50% of the world's original rainforests)
• uses up to 43% of the world's cereal
• uses up to 85% of the world's soy
• causes world hunger and wars (Did you know that 80% of all grain produced in America is used to feed animals but could feed 2 billion people?)
• causes a large percentage of global warming

Besides methane, a potent greenhouse gas (livestock produces almost 40% of the world's methane), animal agriculture also adds nitrous oxide (296 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas) and hydrogen sulphide to the atmosphere.

For three wonderful slide presentations (in pdf format), as well as a vegan/vegetarian cookbook, visit http://sites.google.com/site/compassionateearth/downloads. And please pass them on!