What are effective ways of engaging people in conversation about the gathering climate crisis and the need for an emergency response? Let's start with some key content:
1. Urgency and courage
The Earth is already too hot: we are in danger now, not just in the future. Warming will accelerate, and 1.5°C is only a decade away, yet annual emissions are still growing and the current, post-Paris emissions trajectory will result in catastrophic warming.
The Great Barrier Reef and other coral systems are dying. We are greatly exceeding Earth’s limits, and food and water shortages are contributing to conflicts and forced migration.
On current trends, following the Paris Agreement, we may face catastrophic warming within our children’s lifetimes, with large parts of the world uninhabitable and major food growing regions ruined by drought (such as Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin, south-western USA) or rising seas (such as Vietnam, Bangladesh, Egypt).
In past periods when greenhouse levels were similar to the current level, temperatures were 3–6°C higher and sea levels around 25–40 metres higher than in 1900.
Climate warming is an existential risk to human civilisation, and on the current warming path we are heading towards outright chaos.
The failure of community and political leaders to talk about such concerns leaves unspoken fears lurking just below the surface of public life, sapping our strength. Fear and alarm should be welcomed as healthy reactions that show we’ve noticed something dangerous is going on.
Our response to the climate crisis is the courage to match actions to the size of the problem.
2. Emergency response
Many people realise we are heading for a social and planetary crisis. Three-quarters of Australians consider climate change a “global catastrophic risk”.
Many people have experienced emergencies such as fires, floods or cyclones. In these times, we move into emergency mode. In emergency mode we stop “business-as-usual” because nothing else matters as much as the crisis.
We don't rush thoughtlessly in, but focus on a plan of action, which we implement with thought, and all possible care and speed, to protect others and get to safety. Everyone chips in, with all hands on deck.
Climate warming is now a planetary crisis or emergency, requiring courageous leadership and a coordinated society-wide response of a scale and speed never before seen in peacetime.
It is now too late for gradual, incremental steps to protect what we care about. The Titanic didn’t just need to slow its pace, but needed to turn at emergency speed. It’s the same for climate warming. When you are about to go off a cliff, you need to reverse out of the danger zone fast, not just slow your speed.
3. Peoples’ mobilisation
A failure to properly recognise and communicate the full extent of the climate crisis has produced a dangerous complacency.
The danger we face didn’t just happen. It’s the result of decisions taken by people with vested interests who run the world’s biggest corporations and too much of the media, and their political colleagues.
People made this problem, not nature, and people can fix it. We have the capacity to solve this problem, and live in a safe climate.
Successful social movements are energised by the strength of purpose that comes with working together for a just cause. Popular movements have stopped tyrannical governments, won civil rights and better working conditions and better health services. They have closed down dirty coal and gas mining.
Change is already happening: new wind and solar are cheaper than new coal power. A transition disrupting the old energy industries is well under way. We have the economic and technological capacity to succeed, but a failed politics is preventing the fast change that is now essential.
4. Fast solutions
The planet is already too hot, so we must stopping emitting climate-warming gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, as fast as humanly possible. At emergency speed.
We are already in the climate danger zone, so we need to reduce or “draw down” some of the climate-warming gases in the air. Restoring degraded forests is a great starting point.
Achieving these goals fast is essential if we are to stop further ”tipping points” in the climate system that would lead to many metres of sea-level rise, drowning cities and rich coastal lands.
We have the knowhow to make change fast, and plans to support communities most directly affected by change.
And change can happen fast when we really apply our effort: from fighting natural emergencies and rebuilding cities, to going to the moon or building a digital economy.
The steps to a safe climate will also build a better and more livable world: clean energy, better-designed cities, comfortable homes, healthier food, less waste, regenerative farming and the recovery of the natural world.
Telling the story
The story may be told in the following manner:
Framing. Research on public health promotion campaigns shows that the messages that work best combine a personally relevant description of the threat (fear), a clear exposition of the solution with a clear path of achievable actions to address it (hope).
Counterposing “fear” and “hope” narratives is a false dichotomy, because both are needed. Just reading a climate message that forthrightly describes the seriousness of our situation can increase commitment to taking action. Strong fear messages have been found to be more effective than weak fear messages.
In their hearts, most people value the same things: good relationships with friends and family, providing for and supporting their families, and making a positive social contribution. The “health, wellbeing and livelihood” frame presents climate change in ways that connect to core values and issues familiar to people and decision makers.
It can activate and reinforce values of empathy, responsibility, protection, community, fairness and opportunity, These world views are commonly held by both conservatives and progressives .
The “health, wellbeing and livelihood” frame is an opportunity to spell out not just the centrality of the climate change threat, but how it impacts and threatens each and every part of our lives, including where we live, jobs, transport, energy infrastructure, the economy and even where we holiday.
Sample story. Here is an example:
Our climate is already too hot, with more dangerous heatwaves and bushfires, droughts and crop failures, and coastal flooding.
Accelerating climate warming could bring on social breakdown and global economic crisis.
But Australia’s government, held back by vested interests, is failing to protect us and the things we care about.
Like other emergencies, together we need to throw everything we’ve got at this to restore a safe, healthy climate.
We have the resources and knowledge to succeed.
Success means governments making climate the primary target of policy, and a whole-hearted community effort, to make big changes within a decade.
You can almost feel the planet writhing. This summer brought some of the biggest, most destructive storms in recorded history: Harvey laid waste to huge swathes of Texas; Irma left Barbuda virtually uninhabitable; Maria ravaged Dominica and plunged Puerto Rico into darkness.
The images we see in the media are almost too violent to comprehend. And these are the storms that made the news; many others did not.
Monsoon flooding in India, Bangladesh and Nepal killed 1,200 people and left millions homeless, but Western media paid little attention: it’s too much suffering to take in at once.
What’s most disturbing about this litany of pain is that it’s only going to get worse.
A recent paper in the journal Nature estimates that our chances of keeping global warming below the danger threshold of 2 degrees is now vanishingly small: only about 5 per cent. It’s more likely that we’re headed for around 3.2 degrees of warming, and possibly as much as 4.9 degrees.
If scientists are clear about anything, it’s that this level of climate change will be nothing short of catastrophic. Indeed, there’s a good chance that it would render large-scale civilization impossible.
Why are our prospects so bleak? According to the paper’s authors, it’s because the cuts we’re making to greenhouse gas emissions are being more than cancelled out by economic growth. In the coming decades, we’ll be able to reduce the carbon intensity (CO2 per unit of GDP) of the global economy by about 1.9 per cent per year, they say, if we make heavy investments in clean energy and efficient technology.
That’s a lot.
But as long as the economy keeps growing by more than that, total emissions are still going to rise. Right now we’re ratcheting up global GDP by 3 per cent per year. At that rate, the maths is not in our favour; on the contrary, it’s slapping us in the face.
In fact, according to new models published last year, with a background rate of 3 per cent GDP growth it’s not possible to achieve any level of emissions reductions at all, even under best-case-scenario conditions. Study after study shows the same thing: keeping global warming below 2 degrees is simply not compatible with continued economic growth.
This is a tough pill to swallow. After all, right now GDP growth is the primary policy objective of virtually every government on Earth.
Over in Silicon Valley, tech-optimists are hoping that a miracle of artificial intelligence might allow us to decarbonise the economy by 3 per cent or more per year, so we can continue growing the GDP while reducing emissions. It sounds wonderful.
But remember, the goal is not just to reduce carbon emissions – the goal is to reduce them dramatically, and fast.
How fast, exactly?
Climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows say that if we want to have even a mere 50 per cent chance of staying under 2 degrees, rich nations are going to have to cut emissions by 8-10 per cent per year, beginning in 2015. Keep in mind we’re already two years in, and so far our emissions reductions have been zero.
Here’s the hard bit. It’s just not possible to achieve emissions reductions of 8-10 per cent per year by decarbonising the economy. In fact, there is a strong scientific consensus that emissions reductions of this rate are only feasible if we stop our mad pursuit of economic growth and do something totally unprecedented: begin to scale down our annual production and consumption. This is what ecologists call ‘planned de-growth’
It sounds horrible, at first glance. It sounds like austerity, or voluntary poverty. After all, for decades we’ve been told that GDP growth is good, that it’s essential to progress, and that if we want to eradicate poverty around the world, we need more of it.
The only reason we’re all chasing GDP growth is because we’ve been made to believe that it’s the only way to improve the incomes and lives of ordinary people. But it’s not.
Politicians and economists rally around GDP growth because they see it as preferable to redistribution. They would rather grow the pie than go about the messy business of sharing what we already have more equally, since the latter tends to upset rich people.
Henry Wallich, a former member of the US Federal Reserve Board, made this clear when he pointed out that ‘Growth is a substitute for equality’.
But we can flip Wallich’s greedy little quip on its head: if growth is a substitute for equality, then equality can be a substitute for growth. By sharing what we already have more fairly, we can render additional economic growth unnecessary.
In this sense, de-growth is nothing at all like austerity. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite. Austerity means cutting social spending and slashing taxes on the rich in order to – supposedly – keep the economy growing. This has crushing consequences for ordinary people’s lives.
De-growth, by contrast, calls for cutting the excesses of the richest while redistributing existing resources and investing in social goods – universal healthcare, education, affordable housing etc.
The whole point is to sustain and even improve human wellbeing without the need for endless economic expansion. De-growth is a philosophy that insists that our economy is already more than abundant enough for all of us – if only we learn how to share it.
One easy way to do this would be to roll out a universal basic income and fund it through new progressive taxes – taxes on carbon, on land, on resource use, on financial transactions, and so on.
This is the most sensible and elegant way to share our abundance, and it comes with an added benefit: if the basic income is high enough, it will free people to walk away from unnecessary jobs that produce unnecessary stuff, releasing some of the pressure on our planet.
Crucially, de-growth does not mean we have to get rid of the stock of stuff that we already have, as a nation: houses, furniture, shoes, museums, railways, whatever. In fact, it doesn’t even mean that we have to stop producing and consuming new stuff.
It just means we have to reduce the amount of new stuff that we produce and consume each year.
When you see it this way, it’s really not so threatening.
If we degrow by 5 per cent per year (which is what scientists say is necessary), that means we have to cut our consumption of new stuff by 5 per cent. It’s easy to make up for that by just repairing and reusing stuff we already have. And we can encourage this more creative approach to stuff by curbing advertising, like Sao Paulo, Chennai and other cities have done.
Of course, there are deeper, more structural dimensions of our economy that we will have to change.
One of the reasons we need growth is to pay off all the debt that’s sloshing around in our economy. In fact, our entire money system is based on debt: more than 90 per cent of the currency circulating in our economy is loans created out of thin air by commercial banks.
The problem with debt is that it comes with interest, and to pay off interest at a compound rate we have to work, earn, and sell more and more each year. In this sense, every dollar of new money we create heats up the planet.
But cancel the debt and shift to a debt-free currency, and suddenly we don’t have to labour under this relentless pressure. There are already plenty of ideas out there for how to do this.
Still, we have to be honest with ourselves: : the Stern Review projects that climate change is set to cost us 5-20 per cent of global GDP per year, which is going to violently change our economy beyond all recognition, and cause enormous human suffering in the process.
The storms that churned across the Atlantic this summer are only a small taste of what is to come.
The choice is clear: either we evolve into a future beyond capitalism, or we won’t have a future at all.
Dr Jason Hickel: An anthropologist who works on political economy and global justice. He is the author of a number of books, including most recently The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions(Penguin 2017). .
Image above: Joanna Macy, deep ecologist, systems theorist, Buddhist scholar, author, speaker, teacher, communing with the Earth at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, January 2017. Photo by Lois Canright. From original article.
It's 3:23 in the morning and I'm awake because my great great grandchildren won't let me sleep my great great grandchildren ask me in dreams what did you do while the planet was plundered? what did you do when the earth was unraveling? —Drew Dellinger
Humans have changed the chemistry of the oceans and altered the very atmosphere of Earth. The planet's largest ecosystems are in free-fall collapse as ACD proceeds apace. Racism, sexism, xenophobia and myriad other structural forms of hate are amplifying around the globe as a fascist authoritarian has ascended to the US presidency, the most powerful office in the world. This reality-television star, failed businessman, sexual predator, and hate-and-fear monger is clearly aiming for the fast track toward totalitarian rule.
"[The totalitarian leaders'] careers reproduce the features of earlier mob leaders: failure in professional and social life, perversion and disaster in private life," Hannah Arendt, author of the essential The Origins of Totalitarianism, wrote. "The fact that their lives prior to their political careers had been failures, naïvely held against them by the more respectable leaders of the old parties, was the strongest factor in their mass appeal."
Sound familiar?
Origins, published in 1951, should be mandatory reading for anyone concerned about what is happening in the US right now, and what may be to come. Arendt, a world-renowned and respected philosopher during her time, could have also been called a prophet.
"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist," Arendt also wrote. "But people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists."
Many believe that Trump's chief strategist and senior counsel, Steve Bannon -- the racist, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, misogynist former chief executive of Breitbart -- is essentially the puppeteer pulling the strings. Bannon's goal? "I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today's establishment," he told the Daily Beast in 2013.
More recently, just after Trump won the election, Bannon was quoted by The Hollywood Reporter as saying, "Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That's power."
The news on all fronts is truly horrific. Yet as these malevolent forces charge ahead, equal and opposite reactions of resistance, awakening and love for humanity and the planet are emerging. Not even one month into the presidency, the Trump administration has spawned global demonstrations the likes of which are comparable to those that occurred in February 2003 in opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq.
Clearly an awakening is well underway.
Hannah Arendt begins Originswith an epigram from her teacher Karl Jaspers that seems apt: "Give in neither to the past nor the future. What matters is to be entirely present."
That statement parallels what I was told by one of the great teachers of our time, Joanna Macy.
"The most radical thing any of us can do at this time is to be fully present to what is happening in the world," she told me in 2006.
Macy, an eco-philosopher and a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory and deep ecology, cofounded with her husband Fran Macy a method of grieving, healing and empowerment that evolved into what is now called the Work That Reconnects.
I attended one of her workshops in 2006 in order to deal with the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder I was struggling with as a result of my reporting from the front lines in Iraq, and wrote about that experience here.
Yet now, in 2017, a new darkness is enveloping the world.
After taking some time to herself in the wake of Trump's ascendency to power, Macy emerged with an offering of a retreat in Abiqui, New Mexico, aptly titled, "In the Dark, the Eye Learns to See."
The title, borrowed and melded from poet Theodore Roethke's "In a Dark Time," as well as Martin Luther King Jr.'s quote, "Only when it's dark enough can you see the stars," could not have been more appropriate.
The moment I was aware of the opportunity to engage deeply in the work again with Macy, who is now 87 years old, I enrolled.
Like so many, I have felt utterly overwhelmed by the viciousness and rapidity with which what Macy refers to as "The Great Unraveling" is now occurring. Like a mountain climber beginning to slip down an icy slope, I needed to find a way to check my fall, hold fast and resume the climb, even if it meant climbing up into a storm.
Simultaneous to "The Great Unraveling," Macy coined the phrase "The Great Turning" to describe "the essential adventure of our time": the shift from what she calls the "industrial growth society" that is consuming the planet to a life-sustaining civilization.
Whether that shift will occur or not is an open question, now more than ever before as we move into the darkness of this ominous storm. But it is this very storm that could very well bring about "The Great Turning."
"We need an opposing wind to fly," Macy said to the group the morning before our interview. "It's the hardship that catalyzes our awakening."
Dahr Jamail: Since our last interview, which was published in June 2014, we are in exponentially worse shape: Donald Trump is president, the catastrophic impacts of climate disruption only continue to worsen and make themselves all the more evident and chronic war is not even paid attention to any longer … among countless other ailments. Given how things were when we spoke in the summer of 2014, it's difficult to believe it is this much worse in such a short time, yet here we are. From your perspective, how has this not caused more people to wake up and take a stand?
Joanna Macy: I think the two answers to that, as I see it, are as follows. One is that, as Bill Moyers has said the morning after the election in that piece he wrote, "Farewell America," he laid it at the doorstep of the media: the failure of mainstream media to grow up and report what was actually happening. They let themselves be bought and cowed and distracted, and disrespected the intelligence of the American people by feeding them pap and amusement. They featured Trump up down and sideways. I think that's part of it.
Let's not omit Fox News, which has been a force for the distraction and dumbing-down of the United States of America for quite awhile now. [As] one whose spiritual roots are in Protestant Christianity, it makes me quite sick to my stomach to see what the evangelicals' role … has been in the mauling of the public attention and intelligence.
So there's that, but then there is something else.
For the last 36 years, since the advent into power of Ronald Reagan, public education and the public school system has been gutted. It's criminal that we've seen how two whole generations have grown up with shamefully limited understanding of the world, history and geography. People in this country now have great difficulty in critical thinking and being able to express themselves.
The public mind has been shattered, fragmented.
In the Vietnam War, for example, 50 years ago, all the protests were visible on television, and people knew where Vietnam was. So to me, one of the great tragedies has been the disintegration of the American capacity to think and pay attention.
In addition to that, there has been a [diminishment] of our capacity to absorb news that might upset the psyche.
And this is actually what brought me into the work I do, which is … group interactive work, and I have a bunch of books, using certain methods drawn from systems theory and spiritual teachings -- from most traditions, but primarily from Indigenous and Buddhist -- to overcome the fragmenting of our culture through the hyper-individualism … that has produced, first unwittingly but then wittingly, a sense of isolation.
Number one in your pursuits is the nurture and feeding of the separate ego, separate individual. That leaves you very little to fall back on if you have to confront something unpleasant, like the criminal activities of your own government.
So the weakening of the mind, through the reasons I've given, and the culture bred on competition, command and control, power over -- which we inherit from the patriarchy -- these also have bled people of the nerve to challenge the absurdity or criminality of the larger systems. This makes it very easy for people to allow themselves to be lied to and to be bought.
There is the fright induced by finding yourself essentially alone. And that is much the story of the American culture.
One more reason, and I think about this all the time, is that we have, in the mid-20th century, the release from breaking open the nucleus of the atom. What we did in doing that was to release the strongest binding power in the universe. It's the glue of the universe. And you can't do that. If it ever were to happen, we'd need to be highly integrated, wise beings, who knew just what they were doing.
The tragedy is that we managed to do that when we were still very vulnerable to greed and hatred and this isolated ego needing to subdue everyone else for the sake of the ego. That that happened is perhaps the greatest tragedy of planet Earth. And for the sake of our poor ancestors. I've become convinced that people feel unglued, that there is a basic shakiness.
People used to be able to rely on certain things. Reliance on the Earth being there. Relying on the teachings you had. Relying on some values that mattered to you. Relying on your relationships with people. But this [relationships] is the strongest power of the universe that holds it together, that we would shatter that. I think about this a lot.
As an activist on nuclear issues, I notice how all efforts in environmental activism, peace and justice activism, were [hampered] by this difficulty people have in sustaining the gaze. This is an unfortunate development.
Back then we were trying to scare people to pay attention. You don't [know] how bad it is with climate change, you don't know how many nuclear warheads are on high alert. Get roused. And it wasn't working. People thought the public was apathetic.
But I realized the etymology of the word was a reflection of what was so. [early 17th century: from French apathie, via Latin from Greek apatheia, from apathēs "without feeling," from a- "without" plus pathos "suffering."] It was not that people didn't care or didn't know, but that people were afraid to suffer. It was the refusal or the incapacity to suffer.
So this has been a lot of my work. To help people open to and become enamored of the idea that they'd really like to see what was going on. And to open the eyes and open the heart to discover, again and again, universally in the work, that acceptance of that discomfort and pain actually reflected the depths of your caring and commitment to life.
And people became positively charged with determination and caring and creativity, and community. We were re-weaving. But without that people are lost, isolated, scared. And that became conscious certainly under George W. Bush. They were consciously using the plan of Joseph Goebbels, who served Hitler, who said you have to scare people, give them an enemy. And also divide them against each other. So to me, this was a logical unfolding [after] what happened on 9/11….
My concern with Hillary winning was that, while it would have been easier to see her crowned, and I mean that literally, we would have stayed asleep. So this is a very painful waking up.
During the end of 2016 you held several one-week intensives where you spoke of seeing people wanting, more than anything, to simply be able to be present and feel this time, despite how painful and heartbreaking that is to do now. You said that instead of doing so, particularly at this time when so much is vanishing before our eyes, and the planet is screaming at us at the top of what is left of its lungs, people are choosing to put their heads in the bucket of manure that is our corporate press, and infinite other distractions. Please talk more about all of these.
When people find that they can, and want to, feel and know and tell what is happening to our world, that is so much sweeter and [more] liberating than the opposite. When people get integrated and find how good it feels, then they really want that more than the narcotic of ignorance and delusion, as painful as it is.
And you can't do it alone. The dangers coming down on us now are so humongous that it is really beyond an individual mind all by her/him/itself to take it in. We need to sit together, grab each other and be together as we even take in what is happening, let alone how we respond.
Because alone you get overwhelmed, and it becomes traumatizing. But once people have tasted that they can, with each other, speak about what they see and feel is happening to our world, a number of things happen, in addition to the fact that they fall in love with each other.
There is a trust and realization of, "Oh my god, I'm not alone." There is a return to your own self-respect. I think self-respect has not been realized as such a source of strength in the individual psyche. I think people would rather see themselves facing an overwhelming foe with conviction of their purpose, than to be comfortable.
So that was the release. And the release would come, and as people began to break through their reluctance to suffer with our world, once they took that on and spoke to it, then they found their unity with our world.
Often, not only did a sense of bondedness come, but a lot of hilarity. There is laughter and joking, and a shaking off of a kind of spell or curse. A feeling comes, of, "I can be here." And that feels more liberating and true to you and brings you into the moment when you are less dependent on someone giving you a failsafe method to make everything fine, because no one can do that.
People dare to be comfortable with uncertainty if they are in solidarity with each other.
What are some of the things you see that are posing the biggest challenges to people?
When I began this work, someone asked me, Joanna why are you doing this? I thought I was doing it to make us more effective, working for global peace and justice, that we were doing the work to be better agents of change.
But when I was asked that, the answer came right from my solar plexus: I'm doing this work so that when things fall apart, we will not turn on each other.
So I think that's the biggest challenge now. The powers that momentarily have gained ascendance in our culture know how to manipulate our fears very well. They know how to try to turn us against each other. So a big challenge is to not buy into that, and to be able to look at each other with trust, saying, "Here is a brother or sister, brought by the intelligence of Earth, to be alive at this moment, then this person can also deep within them have a care that life can go on."
So there you have something in common right away. Instead of contempt and judgment of them, and we practiced this recently in our work…moving that contempt into curiosity, which is very helpful.
We've got to use our wits, and by grace re-knit and find our way into some solidarity with one another. Facing the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced, with climate change and the threat of nuclear war, which I think is very real.
We will come together when we die, but I would love for us to come together before that. [Laughs] I would love for it to be before it's too late. Or at least long enough so that we can look into each others' eyes with love.
When people come to your intensives, or even just your lectures, what are they seeking? What are you seeing happen to them, from when they come to you, to what happens to them as they do the work that reconnects?
Since the ascendency to power of Trump, the Work that Reconnects is being turned to by many more people than ever before, and many who have already experienced it are actually taking it out to more people. I think people are coming so that they can openly speak of their distress, pain, despair, fury.
They love that about the work. They come for that, because this is a place where these dark emotions are not pathologized, but taken as wholesome and realistic.
Another reason people don't wake up is because the culture and psychotherapy are both so reductionist, focused on making happy isolated individuals. And that has been very good for the pharmaceutical industry too, let alone other forms of addiction.
So it's like waking from a kind of addiction. It is a noble thing. It is a choosing.
So our breaking free, in order to see clearly, takes many forms, doesn't it?
What is called of us now, from the planet? What are we being called to do at this time?
To wake up together. That is actually the name of the movement in Sri Lanka that I went over to do field work with. Sarvodaya. Taking the Gandhian term, but using it in a slightly different way, but the same Sanskrit, which is "everybody wakes up together."
It's hard to wake up alone now. It's scary to see even what is going on. But there is almost no limit, I've come to believe, to what we can do with the love and support of each other.
There is almost no limit to what we can do for the sake of each other. This taps into the Bodhisattva heart. That's that hero figure of Mahayana Buddhism, "the one with the boundless heart." The one who realizes there is no private salvation.
If you are going to wake up, you have to wake up together. Never has that been more true than now, at this stage of late stage corporate capitalism.
There is a huge force, through the media, through the banking system, through these people and corporations that are locked in runaway system that is very hard for them to stop now.
Because once you create something, an economic system or being or contraption that has to keep making more money, it is forced to do that. It is forced into these extractive industries, and the mining.
Even the nicest people are caught up in this. These are super-human forces and principalities, and so many are trapped in it. Those who appear to be our enemies, they are just flesh and blood who are also trapped by this economic system.
And it's good for that system to keep making nuclear bombs. It had President Barack Obama over a barrel. He was caught in that system before he walked into the White House as president. And his first act had to do with more permission being given to Wall Street.
So that can give us compassion for each other. And we don't have to waste time being scared of each other. We can see each other as captives of a force that's got us all by the throat. But we can stop it.
We have to help each other wake up to how we are destroying everything we love, before we are turned into robotic instruments of these inhuman systems. Just by their own logic, it is pretty simple to see.
It's going to be beautiful to see what we dare to do. Facing our fears, and letting go of and getting over our knee-jerk reactions to what we think we don't like, or are afraid of. To see our capacity to walk into the fire. To discover how much we really love being alive. To give ourselves a taste of what that passion is. To let us fall really in love with our planet, and its beauty, and to see that in ourselves, as well as in each other.
The inhuman economic machine does not love us back. It makes us into robots. It sucks us into the destruction of all that is.
And even if we can't turn it around now, at least we can wake up, so that in the time that is left we can discover who we are, just looking into each other's eyes. Just looking into the face of the moon at night, or the trees, or the faces of our children and free ourselves. I think we want that.
We can do that, we are capable of that, and that is what I see happening. I know that is possible, because I see it. Because it's happened to me, and countless of my brothers and sisters. They don't have to do the Work That Reconnects, they just have to fall in love with life, and there are many ways that people are doing that.
And as you do, you find that you are not alone here. We not only have each other, but we have the ancestors. And we have the future ones. And that is the truth. The ancestors are with us because their blood flows in our veins. They made us.
We wouldn't be here without them. Every single one of them, back through time, carried us like a seed. They are here. And they are worried sick about us.
And the future ones -- we carry the future in us. And the future ones and the ancestors, I feel they surround us at times, as witnesses. And if we open our heart-minds to them, they can give us guidance and strength and strength in our hearts. Because it helps us realize how big we are.
We are bigger than the balance sheets of the mega-corporations. But the mega-corporations are not real. We are real!
People are starting to take radical actions -- the resistance at Standing Rock, people chaining themselves to railroad tracks to block coal trains, etc. -- valiant acts of resistance -- yet much of mainstream society still has not joined with these movements. Talk about that disparity, and that phenomenon.
There again is the betrayal from the media. Fox News and all the others are made to do what they do, skewering the truth as they do.
These people who take these valiant actions to help the Earth, they call to me at the center of my soul.
They are the cutting edge of human evolution. They have broken free from being captives of the hyper-individualism of our culture. They are no longer held captive by their lonely ego winning out over other people. They are no longer held captive by a shrunken ego.
And to me, there is nothing more beautiful. I see beauty in them. Such great moral beauty. They are aflame with meaning. They are like beacons. They are saying, "Don't let it get the best of you. This is just hardware! This is just cement and steel! Don't let this cow you. See, watch! I'm not afraid. I'm going to do it. I'm going to lock myself down…. But see! See how it is to be free!"
That's what I hear them saying to the psyche. I think there is nothing more beautiful. They are showing us what we can be. That we can spring free, and walk out of the prison cell of the separate ego and find our true nature in our inter-woven-ness in the web of life.
Oh, that just blows my mind it is so beautiful! It makes me so glad to be alive!
What does it look like today for someone, as yourself, who is living with eyes and heart wide open? Describe the world you see right now?
[Long pause.] I'm so glad to be alive now. [Long pause.] I'm so glad that if this had to happen, that I hadn't checked out 10 days or centuries earlier. I'm so glad to be able to, even in the smallest way, to take part in this "Great Turning." To give it a chance for a life-sustaining society. Otherwise we are just right down the tube. We are just flushing everything right down the toilet.
But it's not over yet. And I'm here with my brothers and sisters, and even if we go under, and I have to admit looks more likely today than yesterday, we're going to discover how big is our strength, and how big is our love for life.
We can do that, and see how much we care. And we can be scared. I can see myself now in a situation where I can forget these words. Because the global corporate economy has developed such tools for destroying the mind through different ways of breaking the mind.
But I'm not broken yet. And I'll forgive myself ahead of time if under the pressures that the system has developed and used on plenty of other people, my mind breaks. I'll forgive myself ahead of time if my mind breaks.
But right now, I see the people that are working, that I work alongside, I see people like the scientists how they are saving the information about climate chaos. People are being called forth to do some beautiful things. It makes me so glad to see this.
And even if in the future, from some cosmic place, they say, "That little third planet out in that little old solar system over there, boy they blew it" -- even so, there were some beautiful efforts made, some beautiful music. Strong hearts, and a lot of loving.
What should we each, individually, be doing? What is the most important thing for us to do, right here, right now?
To find our strength and our reason, in connection with each other. So that will be different with everybody. Each one will have a different path. People will find different ways.
So, if you're a clergyman or woman, you'll find yourself saying new and stronger things from the pulpit. And if you're working in a corporation, you'll find ways to sabotage. There is plenty of that already going on. Do you think we're alive now just by chance that we haven't blown ourselves up yet? There have been Bodhisattvas at work, gumming up the works.
The most important thing to do is find your gratitude for life. Take stock of your strengths and give thanks for what you have, and for the joys you've been given. Because that is the fuel. That love for life can act like grace for you to defend life.
So don't get too solemn. Don't just spend all your time gritting your teeth. Laugh out loud. Enjoy a kind of wild joy. Ah! Now I have time, to break free from what had stopped me before. Now I've time. This time. To realize my inter-being with all life.
So it'll be different for different individuals. But I think we should not make a move to do things alone. Find others. Even if it's one other person to begin with. Then others will come. Because everybody is lonely. And everybody is ready to find what they most want. And if it means that we have to be in such danger for us to find out how much we need each other, then let it be that.
So little study groups, and book groups, make a garden together. Keep your ear to the ground. Inform each other. We have to develop the skill of finding that it is more fun to be waking up together, Sarvodaya [Sanskrit term meaning "universal uplift" or "progress of all"], than a single lone star on the stage.
At the conclusion of the interview, thanks were shared, then Macy smiled and said, "I'm going to go walk in the sun now."
About Joanna Macy:
Eco-philosopher Joanna Macy, Ph.D., is a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory and deep ecology. A respected voice in the movements for peace, justice and ecology, she interweaves her scholarship with five decades of activism. As the root teacher of the Work That Reconnects, she has created a ground-breaking theoretical framework for personal and social change, as well as a powerful workshop methodology for its application.
Her wide-ranging work addresses psychological and spiritual issues of the nuclear age, the cultivation of ecological awareness, and the fruitful resonance between Buddhist thought and contemporary science.
The many dimensions of this work are explored in her books Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age (New Society Publishers, 1983); Dharma and Development (Kumarian Press, 198); Thinking Like a Mountain (with John Seed, Pat Fleming, and Arne Naess; New Society Publishers, 1988; New Society/ New Catalyst, 2007); Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory (SUNY Press, 1991); Rilke's Book of Hours (1996, 2005) and In Praise of Mortality (2004) (with Anita Barrows, Riverhead); Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World (with Molly Young Brown, New Society Publishers, 1998); Macy's memoir entitled Widening Circles (New Society, 2000); World as Lover, World as Self (Parallax Press, 2007), A Year With Rilke, (with Anita Barrows, Harper One, 2009); and Pass It On: Five Stories That Can Change the World (with Norbert Gahbler, Parallax Press, 2010).
Many thousands of people around the world have participated in Macy's workshops and trainings. Her group methods, known as the Work That Reconnects, have been adopted and adapted yet more widely in classrooms, churches and grassroots organizing. Her work helps people transform despair and apathy, in the face of overwhelming social and ecological crises, into constructive, collaborative action. It brings a new way of seeing the world, as our larger living body, freeing us from the assumptions and attitudes that now threaten the continuity of life on Earth. Macy travels widely giving lectures, workshops and trainings in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia. She lives in Berkeley, California, near her children and grandchildren.
Image above: A series of enduring droughts in East Africa has already caused widespread deaths, malnutrition, and fueled the migration of refugees to Europe. As the planet warms, more extreme conditions are imminent. Photo by Save the Children. From original article.
Our window of time to act on climate may be shrinking even faster than previously thought.
We may only have one year remaining before we lock in 1.5ºC of warming—the ideal goal outlined in the Paris climate agreement—after which we’ll see catastrophic and irreversible climate shifts, many experts have warned.
That’s according to the ticking carbon budget clock created by the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC). The clock’s countdown now shows that only one year is left in the world’s carbon budget before the planet heats up more than 1.5º over pre-industrial temperatures.
That's under the most pessimistic calculations. According to the most optimistic prediction, we have four years to kick our carbon habit and avert 1.5º of warming.
And to limit warming to 2ºC—the limit agreed upon in the Paris climate accord—we have nine years to act under the most pessimistic scenario, and 23 years to act under the most optimistic.
"So far, there is no track record for reducing emissions globally," explained Fabian Löhe, spokesperson for MCC, in an email to Common Dreams. "Instead, greenhouse gas emissions have been rising at a faster pace during the last decade than previously—despite growing awareness and political action across the globe.
Once we have exhausted the carbon budget, every ton of CO2 that is released by cars, buildings, or industrial plants would need to be compensated for during the 21st century by removing the CO2 from the atmosphere again.
Generating such 'negative emissions' is even more challenging and we do not know today at which scale we might be able to do that."
(Climate activists and environmentalists have also long warned of the potential negative consequences of geoengineering and other carbon capture schemes, as Common Dreams has reported.)
"Hence, the clock shows that time is running out: it is not enough to act sometime in the future, but it is necessary to implement more ambitious climate policies already in the very short-term," Löhe added.
"Take all of the most difficult features of individual pathways to 2ºC—like fast and ambitious climate action in all countries of the world, the full availability of all required emissions reduction and carbon removal technologies, as well as aggressive energy demand reductions across the globe—the feasibility of which were so heatedly debated prior to Paris," Löhe said. "This gives you an idea of the challenge associated with the more ambitious 1.5°C goal."
While watching the recently released film "Deepwater Horizon" about the catastrophic well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico that caused the largest oil spill in U.S. history, I remembered the term "fail-dangerous," a term I first encountered in correspondence with a risk consultant for the oil and gas industry.
We've all heard the term "fail-safe" before. Fail-safe systems are designed to shut down benignly in case of failure. Fail-dangerous systems include airliners which don't merely halt in place benignly when their engines fail, but crash on the ground in a ball of fire.
For fail-dangerous systems, we believe that failure is either unlikely or that the redundancy that we've build into the system will be sufficient to avert failure or at least minimize damage. Hence, the large amount of money spent on airline safety. This all seems very rational.
But in a highly complex technical society made up of highly complex subsystems such as the Deepwater Horizon offshore rig, we should not be so sanguine about our ability to judge risk. On the day the offshore rig blew up, executives from both oil giant BP and Transocean (which owned and operated the rig on behalf of BP) were aboard to celebrate seven years without a lost time incident, an exemplary record. They assumed that this record was the product of vigilance rather than luck.
And, contrary to what the film portrays, the Deepwater Horizon disaster was years in the making as BP and Transocean created a culture that normalized behaviors and decision-making which brought about not an unavoidable tragedy, but rather what is now termed a "normal accident"--a product of normal decisions by people who were following accepted procedures and routines.
Today, we live in a society full of "normal accidents" waiting to happen that will be far more catastrophic than the Deepwater Horizon tragedy. One of those "accidents" is already in progress, and it's called climate change.
People in societies around the globe are doing what they are supposed to be doing, what they routinely do, to stay alive, produce and enjoy what they produce. They do not think of themselves as doing something which is bringing about the biggest "accident" of our time, climate change. No one set out to change the climate. And yet, this is the result of our normalized behavior.
Climate change still appears to many to be building slowly. This summer was hotter than last summer and the one before that. But we've coped. We stay inside in air-conditioning on especially hot days--ironically so, as the fossil fuels making the electricity for the air-conditioner are adding to the warming itself.
It is as if we are all on the Deepwater Horizon just doing our jobs. We notice there are a few things wrong. But, we've dealt with them before, and we can deal with them again. The failures and the breakdowns are accepted as just part of how we do business. And we've managed to avoid anything truly bad up to now. So, we conclude, we must be doing things safely.
Part of the normalization of our response to climate change is the spread of renewable power sources. I have long supported the rapid deployment of renewable power, suggesting that we need the equivalent of a warlike footing to deploy enough to bring about serious declines in fossil fuel use. And, while renewable energy is growing by leaps and bounds, it is not growing nearly fast enough to meet the challenges of climate change.
And yet, society at large has relaxed into the idea--promoted by the industry--that renewable energy is well on its way to creating a renewable energy society despite the fact that more than 80 percent of our energy still comes from fossil fuels.
We have normalized this response as adequate in the public mind. There remains no generalized alarm about climate change.
Certainly, there are scientists, activists and others who are genuinely alarmed and believe we are not moving nearly fast enough. But this alarm has not translated into aggressive policy responses.
The argument that things have worked just fine in the past so there is no reason to believe they won't work out in the future is a well-worn one. And, it seems to be valid because so many people say it is. (Steven Colbert might even say that this assertion has a certain "truthiness" to it.)
But there is a reason that financial prospectuses say that past performance is no guarantee of future results. Likewise, no bad accidents in the past are not a guarantee of no bad accidents in the future. It is in the structure of how we behave that the risks build. The tipping point finally reveals that we have been doing risky things all along.
If you play Russian roulette with a gun having 100 chambers, you won't think that skill had anything to do with the fact that you aren't dead after five pulls. But if you don't know you are playing Russian roulette (hidden dangers with hidden connections), then the fact that you aren't dead after 50 pulls (50 repetitions of the hidden dangerous conduct) won't seem like luck, but simply the result of sound procedure.
Climate change, of course, isn't the only place where we have normalized procedures which appear to be reducing risk, when, in fact, we are increasing it. Our monocrop farms and the small variety of major crops grown on them using modern industrial farming methods are supposed to reduce the risk of major crop losses and thus of famine.
In fact, these methods are depleting the soil and undermining its fertility in ways that will ultimately lower farm productivity. And monocrop farming is an invitation to widespread crop loss. Polyculture tends to prevent the spread of devastating plant diseases while monoculture tends to promote that spread.
We can talk about the normalization of industrial fishing as well. It is designed to increase our harvest of food to feed growing human populations thereby reducing our risk of food shortages and giving us another source of nutrition. In fact, industrial fishing practices are threatening the viability of practically every fishery around the world.
In addition, temporarily cheap oil and natural gas are lulling us into a complacency about our energy supplies. Energy depletion that just two years ago seemed to be indicated by high prices is rarely discussed now. We are projecting the current moment into the future and believing that the rising energy price trend of the last 15 years is meaningless.
Practically everything we do to reduce risks to human populations now creates broader, longer term risks that could turn catastrophic. The Slate article linked above references the "high-reliability organization." Such organizations which seek to avoid catastrophic failures share certain common characteristics:
1) Preoccupation with failure: To avoid failure we must look for it and be sensitive to early signs of failure.
2) Reluctance to simplify: Labels and clichés can stop one from looking further into the events.
3) Sensitivity to operations: Systems are not static and linear but rather dynamic and nonlinear in nature. As a result it becomes difficult to know how one area of the organization’s operations will act compared to another part.
For our global system as a whole to act like a high-reliability organization, we would have to turn away from technopian narratives that tell us we will always come up with a new technology that will solve our problems including climate change--while forcing us to change our lives very little.
Instead, we would anticipate and scan for possible failure, no matter how small, to give us warning about perils to our survival. There are plenty of signs flashing warnings to us, but we have not fully comprehended their gravity.
When it comes to energy supplies, we are often faced with the simplifying assertions as mentioned above that are designed to prevent us from examining the topic.
People in the oil industry like to say that the "resource is huge." They don't tell you that "resource" simply refers to what is thought--on sketchy evidence--to be in the ground. What is actually available to us is a tiny fraction of the resource at today's prices and level of technology.
If we had run our society as a high-reliability organization, we would have heeded warnings made decades ago. I like to tell people that the American public first learned that oil was a finite resource when Clark Gable told them so near the end of the 1940 film "Boom Town," a remarkable speech for the time.
American leadership found out that we would have to make a transition to a non-fossil fuel economy way back in 1954 in Harrison Brown's widely read The Challenge of Man's Future--and, that such a transition would be fraught with peril if not begun early enough.
Other warnings included Limits to Growth in 1972, a book widely misunderstood as predicting rather than modeling our predicament. More recently there was Jared Diamond's Collapse.
In general, what we as a society have chosen to do is to create narratives of invincibility, rather than heed these warnings. We are, in effect, normalizing highly risky behavior.
Perhaps our biggest failure is noted in item three above. We think of the world we live in as static and linear rather than dynamic and nonlinear. That has given us a false sense that things move gradually and predictably in our world, the same false sense that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
• Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He is a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.
With phenomenal ingenuity and extreme folly, technically-advanced humanity has managed to conceive and implement a technology that has done much harm to life, and will do much greater harm to life, and that even threatens our extinction.
Whether suddenly through nuclear war, or through a pernicious slow motion assault on life's wondrous, intricate, amazing inner workings and accurate reproductive capabilities, nuclear technology is inherently, inescapably, anti-life. Given that the rest of the marvels of creation – that which has so far survived us – is also along for the ride, it's not just about us.
One might wonder, if the rest of creation were capable of hope, if it would be clinging to the fading hope that humanity at this late hour would transform itself into a species characterized by a decisively dominant strain of sane, careful, sensible behavior, or, if it would be hoping for our demise, the sooner the better, come what may. If we are to extricate ourselves from the trap into which we have placed ourselves, it will take much more ingenuity, and much reduced folly.
This piece is an incomplete overview of our situation, intended to boost general understanding of these subjects. Some reflections on essential reforms close out the piece.
“[In 1936] ... [Fatu Hiva's ocean pools and shorelines] literally teemed with life.”
From the book Fatu-Hiva, By Thor Heyerdahl. (He lived on the Polynesian Island of Fatu-Hiva in 1936)
“[In 2015] … everything [flora and fauna] is missing!” [along the shorelines and in the tidal pools of British Columbia]
Dana Durnford's words, after his 15000 mile odyssey along the west coast of Canada in 2014 and 2015
The unprecedented mass mortality of much life in the North Pacific Ocean in recent years has been given inadequate coverage by corporate mass media, and has not gained widespread public awareness.
In local media close to the 'situation', there have been many reports of unusual numbers of deaths, of strange diseases, of mass disappearances of life forms. And sometimes these reports appear in national and international media. But such reports are typically brief, sporadic, disconnected from each other, and often narrowly focused.
Poorly represented has been the scale and breadth of the devastation: But then, no one knows just how many whales and sea lions and walrus and sardines and sea stars and mussels and sea urchins and sea birds, and countless other creatures large and small, have in recent years died, starved, disappeared, ‘melted away’ in the water, rotted on the shores. And we mustn't forget humans' industrial scale ocean 'harvest'.
But when one puts together the many reports, the scale of the disaster over recent years is pretty mind-boggling. Kelly Ann Thomas has compiled one such list. [1]
A few examples from my own notes:
From National Geographic online, 2015: “...a die off of sea stars...largest marine disease outbreak ever recorded....”; “... no one is sure what is causing it ….” “... we think there's [also] a wasting event going on with [sea] urchins.” [2]
California Senator Mike McGuire in 2015: “We are facing a fishery disaster ….” “... historic crisis [in] the salmon and crab fisheries.” [3]
On March 15, 2015, New Mexico State U. Online, asked what was killing Baja's marine animals, and reported decomposing gray whales, sea lions, dolphins, turtles, and birds on the beaches of Baja. [4]
Feb. 26, 2016 “Sardines off the West Coast [are forecast to be in 2016] 93% lower than in 2007.” [5]
National Geographic from Jan. 24, 2015 offers the headline: “Mass Death of Seabirds in Western U.S. is Unprecedented” [6]
From Alaska Dispatch news, January 29, 2016: “Scientists Think Gulf of Alaska's seabird die- off is biggest ever recorded”; “...staggering die-off … something is awry in the Gulf of Alaska ....” [7]
In August of 2014 large numbers of whales and common murres [ seabirds] were reported as dying along the Alaska coast. [8]
Alaska Dispatch News published an article on August 20, 2015, about the unusual number of dead whales being encountered. [9]
From the Toronto Globe and Mail, Aug. 12, 2013: “...sockeye salmon returns [to British Columbia] plunge to historic lows.” “... scientists don't know why the return numbers are so low.” [10]
From ENE news, citing a document from the Alaska Marine Science Symposium of Jan. 20-24, 2014: “During summer of 2011 it became evident to [Alaskan] coastal communities and wildlife management agencies that there was a novel disease outbreak occurring in several species of Arctic ice-associated seals. Gross symptoms included lethargy, no new hair growth, and skin lesions....”
The paper mentioned concerns that the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in March of 2011 might be implicated. The pdf document that ENE cited appears to be no longer available on line. [11]
National Geographic in 2013 reported that the quantity of dead stuff on the Pacific Ocean floor had 'mysteriously exploded' recently in many locations. [12]
California Fish and Wildlife Director Chuck Bonham in 2015: “Something's going on in the oceans [that] doesn't fit our historical understandings .... numerous anomalies ….” [13]
From a May 24, 2015 Talk Radio Europe interview with experienced small-boat sailor Ivan Macfadyen, commenting on his voyage across the Pacific from Australia to Japan in 2013: “Ten years ago [on an identical route and at the same time of year]
I could catch fish every day.” Macfadyen noted that in 2003 there were lots of birds, dolphins, turtles, whales, sharks; [But in 2013] “The ocean is broken.” “... quite literally there isn't any fish. … [fish and other lifeforms] are just all gone.” [14]
And Macfadyen again, commenting on his 2013 voyage: “We [saw] a whale, … 1000 miles south of Japan … with like a big tumor on the side of its head ….” [15]
Japanese scientists in 2013 reported finding radioactive cesium, from the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, in plankton [a basic part of the food chain of the ocean] at all ten places tested in the Pacific. [16]
Nature.com on Feb. 4, 2016, published a report by Japanese scientists that they had found on the Pacific coast of Japan a “decline in inter-tidal biota after … the Fukushima nuclear disaster.” “... the number of species and population densities in the inter-tidal zones were much lower at sites near … Fukushima.” [17]
The most revealing description of the situation on the Pacific coast of North America has been compiled by intrepid Canadian sailor and former diver Dana Durnford. In 2014 and 2015 he journeyed over 15000 miles by small boat to document the decimation of life in the tidal pools and along the shorelines of British Columbia.
Durnford took many thousands of photographs and filmed underwater, proving, in his own words, “just about everything [flora and fauna] is missing.”
Durnford also noted a very great decline in bird numbers, and in insects. Until recent years, the tidal pools and shorelines were home to diverse abundance: thousands of species of flora and fauna. [18]
Note that it has been two experienced sailors, Durnford and Macfadyen, independent human beings who love the ocean and who have witnessed the disaster in the Pacific at close quarters, who have given us especially compelling descriptions of the situation.
One might think that Durnford would have been lauded, especially in Canada, for his amazing determination to document, and to tell the world about, the situation along the Pacific shores. He has been largely ignored, when he isn't being vilified.
Latterly, he has had criminal charges brought against him in Canada, for criminal harassment. Here is one journalist's defense of Durnford. [19]
Marine scientists have seemed stumped to explain unprecedented mass mortality and disease in and around the North Pacific. The scientists typically vary from distraught perplexity to stabs in the dark: musings range from we don't know what's going on, to climate change, fungi, bacteria, viruses, over fishing, cyclical ups and downs, acidic water, domoic acid, warm water and cold water.
In fumbling for explanations for unprecedented recent death in the Pacific, there has been an obvious reluctance by scientists to assign significant suspicion to the unprecedented industrial/technological catastrophe which began in Japan at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactor complex on the shores of the Pacific on March 11th of 2011.
Four large nuclear reactors were destroyed, melting down and blowing up, and have for over five years released massive amounts of dangerous radioactive elements into the biosphere.
A typical example of the marginal status given to Fukushima radiation: The Journal of Environmental Radioactivity, Feb. 2016: “... Fukushima-derived radionuclides [have been detected] in a variety of marine products harvested off the western coast of North America....” The abstract opined that the level of radioactivity found was not a health problem. [20]
Significant for what is happening now in the Pacific,a study published in 1971, authored by E. J. Sternglass, titled 'Fallout and Reproduction of Ocean Fish Populations', showed the huge impact that nuclear fallout from atomic bomb testing had on life in the oceans.
From the study's summary statement: “...very large declines of fish-populations after low-altitude nuclear tests … have been observed in the Atlantic and Pacific, strongly suggesting that the eggs of fish and the developing young are far more sensitive to internal radiation … than had been anticipated, very much as is the case of the human-embryo and fetus.” [21]
So what about Fukushima?
There have been various attempts to quantify the amount and types of radioactive elements that have been released from Fukushima into the biosphere, but these are all guesswork handicapped by an official and corporate policy dedicated to lying and censoring. [22]
Three reactors were destroyed by powerful explosions. [23]
The Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear site contained in total over 4000 tons of highly radioactive nuclear fuel. [24] Reactor 3 at Fukushima Dai-ichi contained especially dangerous fuel rods, combining plutonium with uranium. Much material from the exploding reactors, including reactor 3, was ejected into the biosphere, some circling the planet. [25]
The total amount of radioactive cesium-137 alone, contained in the spent fuel assemblies at Fukushima, is estimated by Robert Alvarez, former Senior Policy Adviser at the US Department of Energy, in an extraordinary letter to the author of Allegedly Apparent Blog, Michael Van Broekhoven, to be roughly 85 times the amount released by Chernobyl. [26]
In desperation, a large amount of sea water was sprayed onto the wrecked reactors. It is questionable whether this did more harm than good. The creation of durable spherical radioactive clusters of materials – buckeyballs – has been reported to be among the fruits of this labor. Some highly radioactive water has been collected in many hundreds of steel tanks of dubious quality. Much water sprayed went wherever water was able to go.
But there is also a large natural flow of water under the destroyed reactors. Extremely radioactive material from the reactors has likely burned its way into the ground below the reactors, to a depth which is either unknown or if known we are not being told, adding to the radioactive contamination of guesstimated hundreds of tonnes of water daily discharging into the Pacific Ocean for near five years now. [26]
In Nov. 2014, for example, TEPCO admitted that 400 tons of radioactivity-contaminated water was reaching the Pacific daily, and that measures to prevent the discharge had been unsuccessful. [28]
It should be emphasized that TEPCO has earned a reputation for hiding and minimizing and distorting the actual situation. And the Japanese government has attempted quite successfully to suppress honest reporting of the situation at Fukushima.
The destroyed reactors continue, and will continue, far into the future, to contaminate the environment with dangerous radionuclides. There remain unapproachable areas, and horrific problems defying solution.
Desperately, millions of large plastic bags of questionable durability have been filled with radioactive material, and this massive effort has managed to temporarily confine a tiny fraction of the radioactive contamination emitted over the five-plus years since the catastrophe.
Robots sent in to inspect areas of high radioactivity have been destroyed by the radioactivity. The Japanese, five years into the catastrophe, are still trying to determine how to proceed. [29]
Arnie Gundersen in 2012 collected 5 random soil samples from Tokyo and all five were radioactive enough to be classified as nuclear waste, under United States standards. [30]
“... 70 percent of [Japan is contaminated by Fukushima radioactivity] … 20 percent [of Japan] including Tokyo, is contaminated with highly toxic radiation.” [31] [32]
But the worst may yet be to come. A German study has predicted that Strontium-90 levels would rise and remain at high levels for many years after a meltdown such as Fukushima, And there is evidence for ongoing out of control fission at the destroyed reactors: long after the initial melt down and explosions, short-lived radioactive iodine-131 has been found both in Japan and on the other side of the planet. [33]
Over the last months of 2015 and in 2016, Michael van Broekhoven's Allegedly Apparent Blog has shone a near solitary public light on evidence indicating that some globally significant nuclear catastrophe has occurred recently.
He also offers evidence that radiation monitors around the world are routinely used to hide, not reveal, high radiation readings, as well as evidence that the situation at, and radiation from, the nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima, far from winding down, may be worsening. His work deserves serious attention. [34]
The Fukushima catastrophe obviously merited, and now perhaps more than ever, merits extreme political, scientific, engineering, mass media and public attention, reflection, and concern, and our utmost intelligence in brainstorming; and, to what extent possible, an all out mitigation response.
But this has not happened. So, not surprisingly, countless people are not even aware of the Fukushima disaster. And of those who do know about it, many think that the problem has been resolved, or is not all that serious.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
It has not been easy, from the very beginning of the nuclear age, to find out what's actually going on with nuclear mishaps, generally, because dishonesty and censorship have been the default position for the nuclear military and nuclear industry since its inception.
So, for example, the World Health Organization, which cheerfully announced immediately after the beginning of the Fukushima catastrophe that no increased cancer risk was to be expected, made a secret agreement in 1959 with the nuclear lobby and promoter IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) to give the IAEA control over WHO pronouncements pertaining to radioactivity and human health. [35] Since the beginning of the atomic age, humanity has been the victim of both nuclear-related deception and radioactive contamination.
And what about the health impact from Fukushima on the Japanese people? In Sept. of 2015, the Asia-Pacific Journal published a study by Eiichiro Ochiai titled 'The Human Consequences of the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plants Accidents'. [36]
Ochiai's document includes the important point that damage from chronic exposure to radioactivity is strongly related to whether that exposure is through internal contamination. This critical difference between internal and external exposure to radioactivity has been largely ignored by 'official' bodies and pronouncements and standards regarding the health impact of radiation.
Another key defect in the conventional depiction of the dangers of chronic radiation exposure is that genetic damage, reproductive problems, mutations, chromosomal abnormalities and the like – the entire spectrum of DNA damage, which may endure for generations – is largely ignored. [37]
Cancer risk is highlighted, then minimized. Little mention is made of the hundreds of other serious ailments which increased exposure to artificial radionuclides is implicated as contributing to.
From Ochiai's document: [“... as a result of the Fukushima accident”] “All indications are that incidence of many diseases is increasing not only in Fukushima but also all over Japan.” Ochiai shows charts based on data from Japanese hospitals for incidents of various diseases for the years 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013.
At the Fukushima Prefectural Medical School, data is for the years 2010 to 2012. Here are the figures for 2010 (before Fukushima) compared to 2012 (two years after Fukushima) : cataracts up 227%; angina up 157%; bleeding in brain up 300%; lung cancer up 163%; esophagus cancer up 122%; stomach cancer up 129%; cancer in small intestine up 400%; colon cancer up 297%; prostate cancer up 300%.
Ochiai included data from fifteen Prefectures re thyroid cancer. Rates went up in all areas, with Japan as a whole having a 148% increase from 2010 to 2013. Incidents of myocardial infarction increased in all 13 prefectures listed; Japan as a whole 151%. Acute leukemia increased 142% overall. The author comments that his data represents only the “tip of the iceberg”.
On Oct. 15, 2015, Japanese Professor Toshihide Tsuda announced the results of an epidemiological study of thyroid cancer in Fukushima prefecture since the catastrophe, and described the increase as “drastic”. The increase was 20 to 50 times 'normal', depending on the specific area and amount of contamination, and this increase was far beyond what the WHO had predicted.
And based on the Chernobyl experience, cited below, an estimated 1000 additional thyroid problems can be expected for every cancer, as a result of heavy radioactive contamination. Tsuda pointed out that preventative iodine had not been given to vulnerable people after the Fukushima disaster, which might have prevented many of the subsequent thyroid problems. [38]
In an interview published Mar. 18, 2016 Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds has disclosed that there has been “a huge spike in the death rates within Fukushima Prefecture for young children....” This information has been suppressed. [39]
One chronological retrospective on Fukushima is found at Modern Survival Blog. [40]
For extraordinary pertinent musical poetry from Japan, attend this video. [41]
Leaving Fukushima for the moment, what can we learn about the health repercussions from massive releases of artificial radioisotopes from the global nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl in 1986?
An extremely disturbing and illuminating work on the effects of serious and chronic human-created radiation exposure is the detailed examination of the impact of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the book: 'Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment'. [42]
The book has been largely ignored by corporate mass media, and when mentioned, attempts have been made to denigrate it, belittling its competence, methods, and conclusions. This denigration is due to the threat that the document poses to the nuclear delusion: The Chernobyl study is not a good news story.
The Chernobyl book above was based on approximately 5000 studies, but the authors point out that these were only a fraction of those available. Many of the studies were in the Russian language, and some have still not been translated.
The document notes that Chernobyl radiation harmed all life forms studied. And the authors assert that at the time of writing the document, the problems were increasing on the whole, not decreasing.
Here are a few examples of what was found:
Thirteen European countries had over half of their area contaminated, and some European countries have areas that remain contaminated, nearly thirty years later. For example, 10,000 farms in the United Kingdom were contaminated. [43] Four hundred million people live within significantly contaminated areas, and 5 million still live in areas of high contamination in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.
The quantity of deposition of dangerous radioactive material varied greatly from place to place, over the entire northern hemisphere. Many different types of conglomerations of radioactive elements were emitted.
Marked increases in a myriad of non-malignant and malignant health problems, including damage to reproductive health and the immune system, have been observed and recorded in the populations exposed to Chernobyl contamination. Over vast areas and in diverse populations and in all age groups that experienced contamination, there has been greatly increased morbidity. In many instances this increase has worsened steadily over time.
Prior to Chernobyl, healthy children were the norm in all countries in question. After Chernobyl, especially in places of heavy contamination, healthy children became fewer, with some areas now reporting virtually no healthy children.
Contaminated areas of Belarus, Ukraine, and European Russia have seen the percentage of ‘practically healthy’ children reduced from 80 or 90% of the child population prior to Chernobyl, to less than 20% more recently.
Markedly higher death rates, reproductive disabilities, low birth weights, and a wide range of illnesses and diseases, and greatly increased numbers of invalid children, were documented in areas of serious contamination. There was a continuing deterioration in the health of children exposed to serious radiation, even from the late 1990s into the new millennium.
There were increases in stillbirths, miscarriages, infant mortality and congenital malformations in many countries following the Chernobyl disaster.
The hundreds of thousands of people – the ‘liquidators’ - who worked in close proximity to the reactor site in the attempt to mitigate the disaster; have experienced extreme decline of well being and greatly increased morbidity. For example, for the Ukraine among liquidators about one in twenty remained reasonably healthy by 2004, and those suffering chronic illness increased 600%.
Russian men, young and healthy prior to Chernobyl, and who participated in cleanup and mitigation efforts, suffered a severe decline in health, leaving only 2% healthy by 1992. By 2004 nearly two thirds of Russian liquidators were disabled.
Accelerated aging was documented in both children and adults living in heavily contaminated areas. Diseases of the blood, circulatory and lymphatic systems increased markedly in populations living in areas of radioactive contamination, as did increases of chromosomal aberrations, mutations, and Down syndrome.
Thyroid problems increased greatly, with 1000 thyroid problems for every thyroid cancer. The damage by Chernobyl radiation to the endocrine system was far greater than previously expected, with millions seriously affected. Immune system impairment strongly correlated with exposure to radiation.
Marked increases in respiratory system problems were documented. A wide range of reproductive system disorders increased greatly in heavily contaminated areas. Serious radiation exposure was strongly associated with impaired brain function and mental health problems.
There have been many surprises: for example, Cesium-137 has been far more persistent than predicted; hot particles are breaking down quickly into a surprising melange of radioactivity; Highly soluble Strontium-90 and Americium-241 are moving through the food chain much more rapidly than had been predicted.
Levels of contamination in plants vary widely, even within species. There was increased and widespread genetic damage, tumour-like growth, and mutation in many plant species in areas of high contamination as compared to areas of low contamination.
Since Chernobyl, in heavily contaminated areas, all resident animal species studied have exhibited increased genetic abnormalities and increased mortality, and generally, the same damage that humans have suffered. This will continue far into future.
In less than half a year after Chernobyl, in heavily contaminated areas, marine species had decreased by up to four fifths of their pre-catastrophe numbers. Bird populations in heavily contaminated areas were greatly reduced.
So where are we? Even without Chernobyl and Fukushima, we were not doing well, us talented, foolish, war-making humans. Neither to ourselves or the rest of life on the planet. The oceans would have been in trouble without Fukushima.
And on land all the creatures that compete in any way with us, or whose death profits us – the lions and tigers and bears and elephants and giraffes and gorillas, etc – would have been in trouble at our hands had we never gone down the cursed nuclear path.
The more fragile creatures, the butterflies and birds and bees and the rest, would be in trouble given a human globe-spanning culture that combines dirty technology and 'living better with chemistry' with a chronic inclination for war, greed, and a too general insensitivity to nature; even if we were without one nuclear bomb or reactor.
But the atomic bomb and the nuclear reactor have introduced a new deadly circumstance. We have been teetering on the edge of nuclear weapons being used in a cataclysmic war since shortly after the second world war.
And nuclear technology, which creates, and spread around the planet, countless new alien atoms that are inherently inimical to life, is also a pernicious step too far, even if nuclear war were to be averted permanently.
As adjuncts to the bomb, many hundreds of nuclear power plants, civilian and military, have been built. There have been catastrophic accidents, with many accidents larger and smaller covered up, and lied about.
Whether from sabotage, from negligence, from stupidity, from natural disasters, from engineering faults, from war, from major coronal ejections that periodically strike earth, more reactors will go badly wrong. And at the best of times, and chronically, as part of normal operating procedure, nuclear reactors contribute to increasing levels of artificial, inimical-to-life radionuclides in the biosphere. [44]
At the dawn of the possibility of a new benign-energy age, at that moment in history when we have created the basis of a transition to a relationship with the natural world that is predominantly respectful and careful, some countries are building new nuclear reactors.
Those hundreds of nuclear power plants already built are aging, deteriorating, often leaking unannounced radioactivity, becoming more and more susceptible to breakdown, and are ever-present terrorist targets; and some are being re-licensed for financial gain in rickety old age, when it had been previously announced they would be 'decommissioned'. [45]
And we still don't really know what to safely do with the highly radioactive results of running nuclear reactors. Fukushima and Chernobyl have been and remain and will continue to be catastrophic problems. But apart from those two majorly lethal conundrums, massive amounts of highly radioactive waste in thousands of locations remain a permanent disposal problem and danger.
Future generations has been given the unwelcome and unasked for task of guarding, paying for, dealing with, being injured by, and having their lives and prospects and social options lessened by this most hellish means by which water is boiled to make electricity for us, and by which nuclear weapons' essential needs are met.
So, wherein does our best chance lie of reducing the harm and risk of our nuclear folly? How do we provide the basis by which we could begin to dismantle our folly and reconstruct cultures that are viable.
Those iconic personages Albert Einstein and Dwight Eisenhower are among the many concerned people who have located hope for policy sanity in an informed public:
Einstein found our “only hope” [regarding nuclear technology] in “an informed citizenry” [that] “will act for life and not for death.”
Eisenhower offered that
“only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Note well: they did not base their hope on experts or oligarchs or generals or silly people who are enthralled by the illusion of their own extraordinary intelligence. They based hope on a well informed us.
Implied in Einstein and Eisenhower's hope is that the broad public, well informed, has a far greater potential repository of creativity and common sense and decency and such – beneficent functionality - than any cult, tribe, institution or faction thereof.
If indeed an informed public is essential, then modern mass media is largely a hope destroyer: the current use of mass media is largely as a 'public perception management' tool on behalf of demented control freaks and oligarchic wannabees; most mass media is used to brainwash, sell, propagandize, censor, mislead, confuse.
Much of so-called journalism is a real-journalism-free zone. This is lethally dysfunctional and must be overcome. Significant steps in the right direction can be taken via intelligent political initiative, mandating and giving financial and legal aid to priority-sensitive free and full discourse and unfettered information in media.
The real world is challenging enough at the best of times. It requires all the realism and intelligence and heart we can muster. We cannot attain a cultural predominance of sensible public policy via lies and censorship.
If we are to salvage any kind of reasonably benign and propitious human prospect, we must achieve a dominant public discourse which is integrity and forthrightness based. Such honesty is the nemesis of criminals and tyrants, but the indispensable basis for sound public and personal decisions. Again, a fully well informed public is our best chance.
And we might use direct democracy mechanisms – that is to say – a fully politically empowered public - to override the pernicious dysfunctions and corruptions of so many institutions. From Paul Craig Roberts' discerning perspective, every public and most private institutions in the United States are corrupt. [46] The same problem is commonplace in most other countries.
Often the basic source of dysfunction in institutions lies at the executive and managerial level, with political and corporate appointees serving agendas other than the broad public interest.
Direct democracy procedures can be used to set primary policies, select real good leaders to executive positions, and to monitor them, and to replace the inadequate or corrupt people that have been appointed or have wormed their way into so many positions of power.
Local and national direct democracy, informed by honest and free and full public discourse, offers the possibility of achieving genuine public-interest and planetary-interest cultural reform.
We might also begin what has become a more and more desperate journey towards cultural sanity by recognizing the artificiality of all financial barriers for undertaking a full effort to fix deadly problems, especially the nuclear one: unlimited credit is just sane policy away. If trillions can be handed to criminal and dysfunctional banks, trillions can be endowed for beneficent and necessary public and earthly purposes.
The current global financial system is in effect and in fact a criminal system which predominantly serves narrow private interests, and oligarchic agendas and enterprises; and is parasitic upon the people of the planet, and egregiously, tragically disabling of the human prospect. To transform the current global private-interest-enabling financial system into forms that function as in effect public utilities, serving broad human and earthly interests, is necessary and possible. [47]
Another essential reform is to place corporations under, not over, the public and earthly interest. It is self-destructive madness to allow the narrow interests of corporations to trump essential human needs, and the well being of the biosphere. And those individuals who guide corporations and may reap great financial gain and social and political influence through corporate power, are largely immune from paying an appropriate personal penalty for corporate crimes committed and harm done. This too can and must be corrected.
The over-riding need is to transition to a global diversity of cultures that have in common the attempt to function in harmony with each other and the biosphere: Good people, clean air, good nourishment, good water, respecting and caring about all life on the planet. [48]
If we can't achieve essential basic improvements, but cling to a culture of deception, criminality, brutality and dysfunction, then the horrors of the last generations, such as the first and second world wars, the horrors of the war of aggression inflicted upon the innocents of IndoChina, the 2011 destruction of beautiful Libya, Chernobyl's disabled children, the Fukushima catastrophe, a terribly harmed North Pacific, and many more already achieved large crimes and big sorrows, are prelude to even greater horror.
“The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” JFK, in his inaugural address.
Video above: A drone buzzes Fukushima temporary a seemingly endless storage facility for bags of nuclear waste shown on Russia Times. From (https://youtu.be/UCP7PFT9coU).
[23] It has been repeatedly reported that all the explosions at Fukushima were hydrogen explosions. But this is at best extremely dubious: In the cases of reactors 3 and 4, especially, the explosions were powerful enough to cause massive structural damage, including to heavily reinforced concrete walls. Here are photographs of the results: http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-npp/daiichi-photos.htm ; here is a link to a video of the explosion of reactor 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7naSc81WSqA Note the yellow flash near midpoint of video, and the enormous detonation force. Among many who consider the hydrogen explosion theory dubious, Japanese reactor designer Setsuo Fujiwara has been quoted as offering that the explosion at reactor 3 gives clear evidence of being a nuclear explosion: http://enenews.com/reactor-designer-it-was-a-nuclear-explosion-at-fukushima-unit-3-plutonium-was-scattered-after-blast-abc-theres-willful-denial-and-lying-going-on-here-even-at-the-highest-levels How Reactor 4, which was not running at the time, was destroyed by a massive explosion also remains unclear. So much has not been explained; so many lies told: The melt down of reactor cores has been blamed on the failure of back up generators, but that doesn't explain the failure of the emergency systems for circulating cooling water, which were steam driven and not dependent on electricity.
[35] http://agreenroad.blogspot.ca/2014/05/who-is-iaea-what-does-iaea-do-who-funds.html For a lucid interview on WHO corruption re radioactive dangers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftU9BIclJrM To compound the difficulties of making sense of things nuclear, sudden high radioactivity readings around the planet often coincide with monitors being turned off and gaps in data, as independent sleuth Michael Van Broekhoven has repeatedly reported. https://allegedlyapparent.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/peculiar-radiation-spikes-in-europe-early-march-2016-suggest-mystery-radiological-emergency-is-ongoing/
[36] Eiichiro Ochiai also noted the consistent turning off of monitors in Japan to coincide with spikes in radioactivity. http://apjjf.org/-Eiichiro-Ochiai/4382
[44] Dr. Dr. Gofman Professor Emeritus, and pioneer in nuclear physics, at the University of California, Berkley: "Licensing a nuclear power plant is in my view, licensing random premeditated murder.” http://www.ratical.org/radiation/inetSeries/nwJWG.html
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